Lesson Not Learned

I don't know about you guys, but I always shave my palms in the shower. It saves time because I don't have to feel my way over to the sink and grope around for the shaving gel to lather them up. Plus, the sink is close to the window. On more than one occasion the LORD has aimed well enough to (CRACK!) a sulphurous-smelling tree branch through that window. He likes to do that on sunny days when I'm not expecting it. Of course I can't really tell when it's sunny anymore.

I should have listened to my Sunday School teacher. She was hot.

Mr. Scruff goes outside

Mr. Scruff, the chipmunk, popped out of his hole. He was thirsty and scampered across the sunny field to the shady bush, whose big leaves often held droplets of skunky tasting water. He reached up with his paws and pulled a leaf toward his mouth. The water went up his nose. He sneezed, then licked the water off the ground.

He lay down under the shady bush. His head throbbed, and he felt the first tender vines of shame creep into his chest. It was not a good idea to have eaten the entire rotten grape yesterday, or better put, to have eaten it in public. And to have run around the Picnic Site in his own mad glory, chattering whatever chirps popped into his head. And to have bit Lars Mouse. And to have tried to mount that strange rabbit, Petr's cousin. Edyta was her name. And she only had half a front leg from the Feral Cat attack. Jesus...that was sexy.

And then what? Someone must have dropped him back into his hole before dusk so he wouldn't become an owl's breakfast. Petr most likely.

A leaf caressed his head.

"This would all be terribly funny if it weren't me," he thought.

Up next: Mr. Scruff smells a predator

Mr. Scruff wakes up

Mr. Scruff, the chipmunk, popped out of his hole. The sunlight seared his little black eyes, and the roar of the wind hurt his tiny little ears. He ducked back in and made himself a cracked acorn for breakfast.

"Kind of dry," he squeaked to himself, "I wish I had some dew."

But Mr. Scruff did not wake up early enough to gather the dew, owing to a rotten grape he found yesterday near the Picnic Site.

His mother, Ms. Munk-Scruff, had always told him to stay away from rotten fruit. "If you eat it, your belly will swell up like a walnut, and then one day ten tiny mewling aliens will pop out and suck you dry."

Mr. Scruff believed this for a long time before discovering that his mother was crazy -- after she slumped over in the corner and told him that he was one of the aliens that popped out of her belly. This was after eating an entire rotten apricot. An entire rotten apricot!

Up next: Mr. Scruff goes outside

What comes next?

I approach the bar. There is a woman there. I may have met her before. She looks at me.

"Hello," I say.

"Hello," she says.

What comes next? I always forget what comes after "Hello." My mind has gone blank and now it's thinking of raw carrots. Why am I thinking of raw carrots when I need to be saying something? And what is that something?

It's not "How are you?" -- which is a telephone question to my parents. When used in person, "How are you?" implies that a traumatic event has taken place. I could say, "How are you today?" but that strikes me as a question a nurse might ask. God knows why a nurse would ask it, unless she took pleasure from negative answers.

The woman at the bar stares at me, a bit bleary-eyed, but not in a drunk way. A strand of black hair falls across her face, and she does not push it away. Perhaps she's heavily medicated. That buys me some time. There are no awkward silences in prescription-induced haze (to be more accurate, the whole haze is one awkward silence in the scope of a life, so momentary ones have no meaning).

Damn! What comes next? It's not "How's it going?" or "What's up?" -- which are only male-to-male phrases, the former referring to amount of sex and the latter referring to the penis. No, neither of those will work.

She pushes the hair off of her face and turns slightly toward the bar.

Goddamn, I must know what comes next! I must have said it before. I'm not a hermit. I interact with people.

Oh! It might be, "Nice day today," but it's cloudy, neither hot nor cold.
Oh! It might be, "Have we met, or..." but a man ought to be decisive and ellipsis-free.
Oh! It might be, "Give me an example of a panagram." But what if she said, "Stoned purple boxes float high above any queer junk-man's yellow-coated maze." What would be next then?

Where is the bartender? I am a total social failure.

The woman turns back toward me. "What comes next?" she asks.

"I don't know," I say.
---

A Warning

I'm pretty sure that Kasia's brand beef pierogies are filled with tongue, which is technically beef, but the sort of beef that is an acquired taste. To recap: tongue is an acquired taste; Kasia seeks to put her tongue in your mouth and down your throat.

About a Tori Amos Song

I think we can all agree that Tori Amos is a goddess at the piano. But this lyric from the song "Big Wheel" bothers me because it contains a grammatical imperfection:

I-I-I am a M-I-L-F,
Don't you forget,
M-I-L-F,
Don't you forget.

May I parse it out?

I-I-I am a Mother I'd like to fuck,
Don't you forget,
Mother I'd like to fuck,
Don't you forget.

She'd like to fuck herself, which is fine, if that's what she intended to imply.

Now I will take this moment to address the issue of grammar snobbery, which, to me, ranks somewhere between male rollerblading and inadvertent racism on the distasteful scale. I do not wish to be a grammar snob, but since my posts usually rate an above-average on the distasteful scale (between recumbent bicycling and cunning linguists), I feel obligated.

And then there are people who say that Tori uses "MILF" as a noun meaning a desirable woman who has raised a child or children. In addition, they argue that she has taken a word which heretofore has been used to objectify women and turned it into an statement of empowerment, and that it's not about the spelling. I don't want to argue about this because I'm pretty sure I'd lose.

So, Tori, I propose this for your future shows:

I-I-I am a M-Y-L-F,
Don't you forget,
M-Y-L-F,
Don't you forget.

There. Mylf. Sounds better, doesn't it?

Mr. White

The night seeps through the window in a steamy charcoal soup. Mr. White sits in a black easy chair and strokes his mustache while the television flickers things gone wrong. A lot has gone wrong, so there is a lot of flickering. He turns off the television, revealing floating ghosts with names like Gracie, Blue, and Dingo, each draped in red satin to conceal canine teeth.

"God," he says, "at least send a woman to haunt me."

But God is busy with His iPod, singing "When you call My Name, it's like a little prayer, I'm down on My Knees, I want to take you there," recalling the time He and Madonna hung out and considering jacking off and deciding not to because that causes a hurricane. At best.

So there will be no lady ghost for Mr. White. This fits. The only people he's ever loved have been dogs.

Mr. White gently rocks in the overstuffed chair, lacking the energy to pound the bed pillows into submission for the years of anguish, the lost beauty (he was beautiful once), and most of all the words upon words, the files upon files, the folders upon folders in his computer -- unshared.

For Mr. White, there have been brighter days, days of genius, days of sunny weather and cotton ball skies. Days spent on the roof, doing a joint, doing another joint, and watching the college girls pass by and almost talking to them, but giggling instead, then gratifying himself through physical and emotional voyeurism on the Internet.

Now there are just dog-ghosts and tremors, the distant shadows of heartache.

Two reasons

Poop in the elevator causes laughter.
Poop in the elevator removes tension.
Poop in the elevator.