my soul's on cruise control
Mr Pibb position statement.
Really, really, really not safe for work. Not safe for anyone, really, if you value your Children’s Television Workshop memories.
The Food Timeline. Does it seem weird to you that cows were domesticated before chickens? I would have started smaller.
ANOTHER LIE THAT I TOLD TODAY FOR NO REASON (WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME?)
I happened to step into the mini-mailroom collection point on my office floor, to throw my Kwanzaa-stamped (go Kwanzaa!) electric bill into the bin, just as the young and rather strapping Mailroom Boy was emptying the bins. It was one of those awkward step-around-you encounters, best documented in The Mezzanine, where I was entering and he was leaving, and he said “I'll take that,” meaning he would stick my envelope with his other recently collected mail. “Ulp, ah sure, okay,” I said like the biggest dork around and handed it to him, and then on the way out I even more awkwardly banged into the doorway—because I am kind of clumsy sometimes, or maybe because I had been surreptitiously sneaking bourbon into my Starbucks latte all during that morning's Senior Management meeting (there may be no “I” in TEAM, but there sure is an “I” in JIM BEAM!)* The elbow-banging made a kind of clunking noise, but it did not hurt.
“Oh man, are you okay?” asks Mailroom Guy.
“Yeah,” I say, still trying to make my awkward escape from the room. “Good thing I have a titanium elbow, ha ha!”
“Really? How did that happen?”
I look at him and see that he totally believes me, and because of the bourbon and caffeine and because there is some CRUCIAL SYNAPSE PROBLEM in my brain that prevents me from occasionally lying to strangers, I spin a brief yarn about a long-ago bike accident that shattered my elbow, and he is all surfer dude, “That sucks!” and then we make some jokes about setting off metal detectors, and then I flee. And spend the next few hours kicking myself. The Girl Who Cried Titanium Elbow.
*Spot all the lies in this sentence! I don't ever go to Starbucks! I don't really drink coffee! I am not Senior Management! Bourbon is not my hard liquor of choice! Those honors belong to gin and tequila (not together!) And work has not yet been so excruciatingly awful that I have been driven to drink on the job, although they certainly are working on it!
TWENTY-FOUR HOURS' WORTH OF REFERRALS THAT LED PEOPLE TO MY PAGE
I have a hole in my underwear
the naked image of sultan of Brunei
leave the dildo in all night
tied up by babysitters
wine hangover
stupid questionnaire skinny dipping
waking up with your ex
string of snot
how long to masturbate
advantages of hermaphroditic reproduction
pirate vernacular
AND THE BEST SUBJECT LINE EVER IN THE REALM OF PENIS-ENLARGMENT SPAM
“Use your dick to hit people!”
LESSER-KNOWN MIRACLES AND PARANORMAL EVENTS
Sixteen-year-old Michelle Wood of Delaware is reading Persuasion by Jane Austen and drinking tea. When she turns the page, she finds that the heroine, Anne Elliot, is also drinking tea.
Mrs. Bingham of Kentucky finds a Jelly Belly (bubble-gum flavor) shaped exactly like the Virgin Mary. Unfortunately, before the miracle can be substantiated, her dog Chompers eats it. On Thursday the dog, previously housebroken, pees on the floor for seven days and seven nights, and it is reported that the liquid “probably” has healing powers. This is difficult to substantiate as well, as Mrs. Bingham's friends and neighbors are reluctant to be anointed with dog urine.
Jesus Christ turns wine into vomit on His 21st birthday.
IF I MAY REMAIN FORMERLY CATHOLIC FOR A MOMENT MORE
Tomorrow is the Feast Day of Saint Agatha. Please celebrate! Her symbol is breasts on a dish. (No, seriously. Check the link.) I suggest we drink (duh) and eat breast-shaped food, like grapefruit halves with maraschino cherries in the center.
This guy, and his book, sound kind of annoying. I will try to keep an open mind. But blah blah rebellion drugs tattoo thinly fictionalized memoir of addiction blah. And this anti-marketing “I am not part of the literati” stance is really just a different sort of marketing stance, don't you think? You can't win over Mimi Smartypants by being a Tough Guy in an interview. I will still read his book though, because I read everything. (Except: Bridget Jones clones; big-breasted-alien fantasy novels; self-help; mountain-climbing books [if I see any more books about the “heroic” adventures of one more wealthy fuckhead who almost gets himself killed on Everest, I will set myself on fire like a goddamned Buddhist monk); celebrity memoirs [it's so hard to be famous! Oh my gosh it's, like, so hard!]; southern-fried grit-lit excruciatingly written in dialect; or sweeping family sagas that take place during any war. Okay, I don't read everything. You win. That will teach me to make the big statements. From now on all will be small! And excessively qualified with multiple disclaimers!)
Although, to be fair, Frey does not say the following, my above ambivalence about the Writer As Marketed Product leads me to another cranky thing: I am sick of this I DON'T DO THIS FOR ANYBODY ELSE, I CREATE FOR MYSELF stuff. Come on. Get off it. The people who say this are usually the neediest people of all.
Take the Very, Very Special Case Of Me. I have straddled the fence with this for over three years now. Obviously, I don't write here only for myself. I like you guys. I like e-mail. I like the fact that through this web page I have met hyper-smart people who get my jokes, and with whom I can rap about bukkake and Scrabble and postmodern narrative strategy. On the other hand, this thing here? This thing that you are reading? You may have noticed that it is a bit, well, off the cuff. Not finely crafted. Not sublime writing of literary merit. Not even consistently and inspiredly humorous. I am just writing a long (overly long) letter to the Internet, and to my future self. I read a lot of journals that have one gorgeous, brilliant, knock-you-over-with-their-diamond-sharp-prose, entry every few weeks, and hooray for that, but (from me at least) an even bigger hooray for those journals who spend their words on sharing the mundane in an interesting way. The hugest, hugest hooray, a hooray forty thousand feet tall, for the diarists and webloggers who see their publicly documented life as a process, and NOT as a well-written commercial product that they wait for some audience to approve or disapprove of. And a hooray the size of the known and unknown universe for those who bring intellectual discipline and expansive imagination to the documentation of their own personal inventories.
(Dude. If I had known I was going to get all heavy like that, I probably would have picked a better inappropriate interjection-as-noun to get all parallel with than “hooray.” In fact I probably would have skipped over interjections entirely and gone for something more sensible.)
—mimi smartypants dreamed she was dry-humped by Ezra Pound.