beans they took from the cabinet
IN WHICH I PONTIFICATE (HA!) ABOUT SEX, WORDS, WRITING, AND CATHOLIC OBJECTS
Dear smut writers: I do not want to police your language, but just know that I’m always going to hate “intimate folds.” The vulva is not origami. (With caps and maybe a little creative punctuation, you might have one of those full-sentence post-rock bands going on there, in the spirit of This Will Destroy You or Godspeed You! Black Emperor. The Vulva Is Not? Origami.)
I also hate all synonyms for “hair,” like “tresses” and “mane” and “strands.” I guess we can allow “curls” if it is indeed curls but you might want to think about why you are describing hair so very much. Like maybe quit it with mentioning hair.
As long as I am heading to the underwear region to complain about word choice, I am also going to say No to “mound.” Fun fact, or anecdote, or maybe not even fun but I’ll type about it anyway: I have a friend who once confessed to me (late, at a bar, drunkenly swapping origin stories) that as a kid he was very aroused by this word (and its plural). It was that weird tween/teen edge of when one finds oneself getting aroused by odd things like certain types of cartoon situations, or mild-peril/heroic-rescue fantasies. He said it was not just the suggestion of body parts that he liked about “mound”—he claimed to not even be entirely clear on what was being suggested by the singular use, and mostly thought about it in the plural (as in breasts)—but that he even found the sound of mound (a very moan-able word) erotic. He even found looking at the word itself to be erotic. All those rounded forms. He could imagine himself sliding along those letters like one of those cascade slides at a carnival, making the leap over the space between the o and the u, landing on the d (oh HO!) that stops you so sweetly with its firm upright ascender. Of course I had to ask him about the candy bar, which not only says MOUNDS in very firm, rounded, one might say burstingly ripe letters, but also shows its outline of two, well, mounds through the wrapper like boobs in a bra and he said that was also hard to deal with, especially around Halloween.
More fun with words: I am reading The Heart in Winter and this book is one of the best I have read all year (I do realize that it is March). Pick this up if you like doomed romance, Cormac McCarthy-ish turns of phrase without the coldness, opium terms,* and maybe a light Gus Van Sant/Drugstore Cowboy vibe but set in 1890s Montana.
*I learned chaudul, which seems to be a corruption/variation of chandu, a term for prepared opium. Look at all the gear! I love a complex drug setup.
There are other good words in this book, like thurible. Although raised Catholic I did not know this word so I looked it up and in CCD we were taught this item was called a “censer.” This is technically not untrue but it is also not wholly correct (a censer is a generic term for any incense-burning receptacle, whereas a thurible is the whole deal, with the chain that allows you to swing it around) (in super-specific ways for super-specific reasons! Look that up if you want a lesson in Catholic There Is No Detail Too Small For Us to Make A Rule About.) I did learn other cool words in Catholic education class, like MONSTRANCE and CIBORIUM.)
I am no longer involved with Catholicism or indeed any organized program of spirituality, but sometimes you feel the aftereffects in ways you might not expect. As a young adult I was (1) still feeling the Catholic hangover, (2) an enthusiastic marijuana user, and (3) into goth music and fashion. These things combined meant that when I started having sex, I had The Most Dramatic Sex Ever. There is certainly nothing wrong with candles and accoutrements and Bauhaus Volume 1 on repeat, but it honestly took me a while to understand that there were other ways to get busy.
LET US TURN OUR ATTENTION BACK TO LITERATURE AND WEED
I do not like films or the internet when I am high but prefer reading or maybe music videos. One of my go-to StonedReads is George Saunders, because even when he gets a little bit too depressingly close to the real horrors of life/the internet it is still beautiful and funny. Here is a paragraph from the short story “Brad Carrigan, American” (which by the way has an absolutely beautiful ending and you will stop dead on the fourth-to-last line, go read it).
Just then from the TV comes the brash martial music that indicates an UrgentUpdate NewsMinute.
Americans are eating more quail. Special quail farms capable of producing ten thousand quail a day are being built along the Brazos River. The bad news is, Americans are eating less pig. The upside is, the excess pigs are being slaughtered for feed for the quail. The additional upside is, ground-up quail beaks make excellent filler for the new national trend of butt implants, far superior to the traditional butt-implant filler of ground-up dog spines. Also, there has been a shocking upturn in the number of African AIDS babies. Fifteen hundred are now dying each day. Previously, only four hundred a day were dying. An emaciated baby covered with flies is shown, lying in a kind of trough.
How can you not love this! Such dexterity, such economy. Sorry if you weren’t planning on reading the phrase “ground-up dog spines” today but that is the consequence of you giving me a few minutes of your time. One of these days I’ll try to do something nice for you.
—mimi smartypants never said nothing.