you're my number one baby for gravy
Goddamn it. A nice person sent me this link to YET ANOTHER SEVERED HEAD STORY. I appreciate the gesture and the effort to keep me in the loop w/r/t severed heads, but it still just makes me want to stomp my feet like Veruca Salt and say, “I want a severed head, Daddy!” Sometimes I feel like the whole world is a big treasure box full of severed heads and I am the only one who did not get a copy of the map. If you really loved me, you would hide a severed head somewhere for me to find.* But you have to be subtle. You cannot, for instance, wait until I go to the bathroom at the bar and then stick a head-containing garbage bag under my barstool and say, “Hey, what's that? Mimi, why don't you look inside?” I will totally catch on, I am not that stupid. You need to shadow me for a few days, scope out my habits and movements, and then hide the head in some out-of-the-way place. You also have to act surprised when I call up all excited to tell you about the severed head. Finding a severed head is important to me, and I need to believe that I did this on my own. Thanks.
*Hopefully none of the readers of this Thing are extrasupercrazy, or I may find myself someday trying to explain concepts like “humor” and “hyperbole” to a pair of thick-necked policemen.
I had to go to a work meeting today, led by someone who is a Large Cheese in the company. I was very impressed with the high-quality bullshit that was relayed. I did not take notes but there was much said about “vision” and “strategy.” Employees were inevitably referred to with one of two metaphors:
1. “Backbone.” We are the backbone of the organization. You know what? I am tired of “backbone,” it's childish. Let's call a spine a spine. Do this with me: every time you see “backbone” in print, think “spine.” The Spine Of America.
2. “Fuel.” Several times employees were called the “fuel that keeps this engine [of the company] going” or something like that. This is rather frightening because FUEL gets CONSUMED. I hope at least I am a clean-burning fuel, that does not emit toxic fumes and contribute to the greenhouse effect.
So, to summarize: Go team! I am a spine, ready to be shoveled into a furnace! Let's keep this engine going! With spines!
Here is a depressing paragraph, from Hendrik Hertzberg in the Talk of the Town section of The New Yorker:
It's tempting to suggest that the Bush Administration is failing to provide Iraq with functioning, efficient, reliable public services because it doesn’t believe in functioning, efficient, reliable public services—doesn't believe that they should exist, and doesn't really believe that they can exist. The reigning ideologues in Washington—not only in the White House but also in the Republican congressional leadership, in the faction that dominates the Supreme Court, and in the conservative press and think tanks—believe in free markets, individual initiative, and private schools and private charity as substitutes for public provision. They believe that the armed individual citizen is the ultimate guarantor of public safety. They do not, at bottom, believe that society, through the mechanisms of democratic government, has a moral obligation to provide care for the sick, food for the hungry, shelter for the homeless, and education for all; and to the extent that they tolerate such activities they do so grudgingly, out of political necessity. They believe that the private sector is sovereign, and that taxes are a species of theft. To paraphrase Proudhon, les impots, c'est le vol.
(That would be Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, if you are not familiar. How typically New Yorker, to get all cute like that for no reason, since the same thing was said in English in the previous sentence. Ah well.)
More political stuff (sort of): Yee haw. Calm down, Ms. Clinton!
When thrift-store shopping the other day, I found something that looks like an old-timey version of Penthouse Forum. Or at least I am going to pretend like I did.
Dear Sirs:
It has never been my custom to correspond with publications such as your own. Although I appreciate the diversion to the male mind that is provided by Professor Rittenhouse's Pictorial Compendium Of Saucy Trollops (Miss November had a particularly pleasing form, and the depiction of hair escaping from her bun was delightfully scandalous), I must admit I find the contents of these sorts of news-papers somewhat base.
However, I feel I must transmit the tale of a most extra-ordinary occurrence, of a sort that I never expected to take place in the life of a gentleman such as myself. One evening I had dined at my club, and had just settled down by the fire with a fine cigar. My dining-companions and I were discussing various affairs of business, when I did have occasion to notice the manner in which the serving-girl would take up her skirts whilst descending the back stair-case. Of course she was only a young servant girl, but her ankles were as smooth and finely turned as any I have seen at debut balls, or indeed, in the Pictorial Compendium! I struggled to follow the thread of my companions' conversation, but those ankles, which were so casually, enticingly, and repeatedly exposed during her frequent to-and-fro, were certainly making my situation difficult. At one point, she paused, gazed in my direction, and beckoned me up the stairs with a crook of her little finger, which had not yet been coarsened by the rough work befitting her station. As if guided by an unseen Hand, I followed.
Oh what a bounty of ankle delights awaited me up-stairs! For you see, the young woman had two, which she revealed to me in turn. I was transported! My head swam as if with brandy! My trousers were uncomfortably tight! With maddening slowness, she began to lift the hem of her gown even higher, revealing her calves and yes, even knees, in all their feminine heavenly radiance. This proved overwhelming, and all went dark.
When I came to my senses, the lamps had all gone out, the club had closed, the servant girl had gone, and my wallet was nowhere to be found. Nonetheless, the very memory of those—I blush to write it—uncovered knees can, to this day, cause such a pounding in my blood that I must needs walk the heath for hours at a time. I hope that the Pictorial Compendium sees fit to print this tale, of something that I never expected would occur.
I remain, pseudonymously,
“M. Smartypants.”