Selections from the Container

I keep a big black plastic container next to my computer. It houses the contents of an old Marshall Fields box into which I tossed pages and pages of printouts that I don't want to throw away, but for which I don't have any immediate use. From time to time, I like to share excerpts with you all. This is one of those times.

From a journal entry dated 12/30/98:

Meditations on a Lamp

What's with lamps? I don't understand why when you're drunk you have to act like one. And why is it called a lamp? It's not like you're plugging in a baby sheep. I think that the baby sheep would object to being plugged in, especially if the connection was rammed up its ass.

Not ass in the donkey sense, but rather The Colon's Cave, as I like to call it. And why is there a punctuation mark named after part of my lower intestine? Instead of two dots, it should be represented by a brown smear. That might be tough to convey on a typewriter though.

Typewriters remind me of my grandma's dentures. They both make the same sound, especially when my grandma coughs, and her dentures go skating across the floor. Usually she coughs because I've punched her in the stomach.

Note: I've since ceased making abuse of the elderly jokes, because, well, it's kind of real.
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A day in the life of a vague writer

Her mind's eye flickers as she shifts his lazy eye from left to center in the split second before she perceives him through the door, hat in hand. She interprets this corrective electrical impulse as evidence of his emotional depth and of the divine connection between them. She often thinks of this during prayer.

He is a vague writer. She fills in the holes in his prose with her own emotion and oxytocin. His generalities become specific to her. She marvels at his skill to speak to her heart. When she's alone, she reads his secret poems. She likes the first drafts better. They are worse.

Today to satisfy his vanity, his fantasy of a thousand swooning women at his book signing, he gets corrective laser surgery. Now he will have such penetrating eyes, no wavering of the pupil on the path to intimacy. No thought of her, no, no thought of her.

When he gets home and takes off his sunglasses, something is different. Something is flat. By dinner, he's doomed. He deserves it.

An Encounter in Business Correspondence

She seals her letters with a shiny red heart peeled from a sheet of shiny red hearts. Maybe there are blue hearts also. No, there are never blue hearts. You can't buy those. My name and address float in bubble letters. In autumn, leaves fall across the back of the envelope and in winter, snowflakes, all similar but none the same.

In discussing Law, she spells perjury as if a cat lied under oath. Perhaps it denied walking on the kitchen counter or spitting up a hairball in the back of the closet or sitting on your face while you sleep. There is no honesty in those yellow eyes.

I imagine she smiles so simply. Girlish. I wonder how she survives in this mean city, in what corners of life her personality flourishes.
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Three Links

Happy New Year folks. It seems like it's going to be a good one, but who really knows? Did you make any resolutions? I did: to post at least one Three Links.

These are interesting bits, in no particular order, brought to you by my infinite resolve:

1) Public Urination Invariably Leads to Self-Inflicted Choking

2) Causes and the Gifford Assassination Attempt

3) (title unknown)

Hey, only about six weeks until we have weather that's not physically painful. Go Bears!
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Problem/Solution/Com- plication

Problem: Post-holiday letdown

Solution: Invent a new holiday. January 6th is now International Frostbite Day!

Complication: I miss my toes and the top half of my left pinky. I'll have to sleep in socks for the rest of my life unless I find someone with a very particular fetish. Well, toes are gross anyway, and I'll just put a cocktail weiner on my left pinky. Midnight snack available.
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