Despite the wonders that are delivered by digital music today, sometimes I really miss lying on my back on a shag carpet, eyes closed, two huge stack speakers aimed at my head, listening to a quality vinyl record played over excellent analog equipment.
One day I wish to retire to a dictionary.
Sometimes I come untethered.
Two dogs stuck together after coupling is an excellent metaphor for something.
“Destiny caresses the few, but molests the many.”
40-odd years learning this damn language and yet there always seem to be new words to learn.
I’m not sure how much longer I can submit to responsibility and keep putting off the urge to drop everything for a long, unplanned roadtrip.
Today I loved the Internet because I saw the Rocky & Bullwinkle show used as a reference on how to properly title a show that uses the word or preceding the show’s subtitle.
My dog always sleeps in late on Saturday mornings, but of course, he does start every day off by saying, “What? I can’t believe it’s Saturday again.”
The coffee beans looked just like cashews, I had, once again, a head full of long sun-bleached blond hair, and some man sitting at the bar was listening to a portable radio bearing the name Scrine in gleaming chrome letters across its speaker grill.
“Why are [goats] such sensitive animals, and yet simultaneously so boundlessly stupid, like poets and artists?”
Why is it that all the best food and drink—scotch, espresso, durian, good aged cheeses, Chinese stinky tofu, huitlacoche, etc.—can all be accurately described as “like and angel pissing (or shitting) on your tongue?”
When Juan found that his phone knew all about his work-computer-based searches about Australian serial killers and even wanted to help him find more information, he realized he was going to have to unplug and wrap anything important in tin foil if he wished to retain any privacy at all in this brave new world.
Walking the streets of New York, hungry and not knowing where you’re going to sleep, probably a park bench or someone’s stoop, is such a character-building exercise that I now understand Mao’s motivation for the Cultural Revolution and I’m seriously considering throwing my kids out on the street instead of helping them apply and pay for college.
Sex and drugs and rock’n'roll ain’t what they used to be.
In the dream I ran like the wind but couldn’t do a single pushup, and now this morning I have this queasy, unshakable feeling that one of those things has come true, and, truth be told, I’m more than a little nervous about being able to run so fast.
One night, anxiety free, ready to take on the world (sleeps, and I shake it, call its name, but in reply receive not a word.
This is the year I read Proust and eat more gelato.
And on the eighth day God said, “Psych.”
Stella was bangs, big eyes and hungry with general ambition.
On the second day, a couple of thoughts occurred to him, the first, and by far the most frightful, was that he’d perhaps lost his ability to think more than a couple of thoughts at a time.
Nothing says “professional” like an egg timer, a collection of horror movie posters on the wall, and tiny plastic velociraptors scattered across the desk.
I find I have two kinds of friends with kids, those with grown kids and those with groan, kids.
My year begins with a big plan, which just happens to not involve exercise, which turns it into a great plan.
“Just show me one real-life example of global warming, and then maybe I’ll listen to your pinko liberal crap,” shouted John into the phone as he paced and looked distractedly out the window at the trees which were beginning to drop their fall leaves… January 23, 2013.
It is a tree deeply rooted in my back yard.
The check didn’t arrive yesterday because there was no mail, but I don’t blame Mr. King; I’m pretty sure that wasn’t one of his dreams.
Unfortunately, there was no such thing as hard-boiled bananas on his home planet.
Each flu season Tammy pondered if human hibernation was possible and whether, if successful, the skill would constitute Darwinian evolution.
“Daddy, why did he need a guitar to be a juice box hero?”
The pitch to PBS seemed foolproof at the time, a telethon called ‘Handjobs for Hobos’, with the most generous donor guaranteed two minutes with a vat of mulligan stew and a large wooden spoon, but for reasons still unspecified, they passed and decided to spend their time and effort on some ridiculous period drama about servants and gentry in early twentieth century England, BOOOOOOOOORIIIIIING.
The book I am reading quotes a wise old Spanish saying that a man’s troubles can almost always be traced to his clacker, his rumbler or his dangler.
I have to go to the DMV today to renew my driver’s license and instead of just getting up and going, I’m sitting here typing words underneath a bird’s beak because, although airports and refugee camps are bad, the DMV is truly where all hope goes to die.
I feel guilty that the authors don’t receive compensation for all the wonderful books I borrow from the library.
So, I drank some whiskey, drew up a bath, found a pen, brewed some tea - let us see if I can’t get you now, you elusive sons of bitches.
It was the toaster in the server room with the extension cord.
I keep reading descriptions of how fear turns people to stone, but in my experience, fear turns one into more of a blancmange.
Bulimia for those too lazy to barf.
Turns out, I know some stuff.
At the rate of 2-5 pages a night before I go to sleep I ought to be reading Anna Karenina for approximately the rest of my life.
Tammy knew she had her work cut out for her when Jim brought by his latest scavenged roadside fare and requested sweet pickled beaver for dinner.
The highlight of the heroin den roundup had to be when the son, before being shuffled off to the backseat of his own police car, delivered, in a very servant-like manner, his father’s dentures on the back of a plastic butter tub lid to the other police car, which made the Chief think that maybe he’d been watching too much television when he found himself thinking that he’d just witnessed some sort of modern American version of Downton Abbey.
“I told you, didn’t I tell you?” said Hank as he counted the hundreds of excess recently-hatched chickens pecking their way around the kitchen.
In 1910, Australian Minister of Home Affairs, King O’Malley, shepherded new prohibition laws through parliament after a harrowing encounter he’d had with some rather unruly kittens whom he’d caught lapping up whiskey in the alley behind his house.
Rumors of my disappearance have not been greatly exaggerated.
Puss found that if he substituted whiskey for his usual bowl of milk he could out-dare any kitten in the litter in their never-ending game of “truth or dare.”.
If the Chief had known that tomorrow morning before six he and the police would be rounding up culprits from the mobile heroin den, he never would have told to his dog, “I’ll go to the store first thing in the morning,” when he discovered he was out of coffee.
As Henry watched the ducks swim up and down the creek on such a cold day, he found himself growing increasingly irritated by their nonchalant attitude.
I’ve gotten old enough to start questioning my own nonsense.
On January 2nd, Henry began to realize he wouldn’t be able to live up to his New Year’s resolution to stop thinking that his dog took so many naps in order to dream about something so devious that it would take a second New Year’s resolution to try and forget about it if he ever did happen to discover what it was his dog was dreaming about.
Although Henry and his dog both looked good in party hats, they’d eased their way into the new year at home on the couch, trading unbelievable but utterly fantastic stories about the adventures awaiting them around every corner.
One cat, one man, two pigeons, no ducks, a cup of coffee, a dash of weirdness, and a variety of baked goods.
Kittens, while not known for their incredible acts of daring do, remain, nonetheless, the masters of understated chaos and destruction.
I find myself, at this age, both pollyanna and curmudgeon, and somewhat the peculiar old biddy.
Nothing says Christmas Miracle like the return of the rusty metal bird.
Nothing filled Tammy with the same level of foreboding and abject terror, or the threat of decompensation quite like her Achilles heel: the sore throat.
The first pomegranate I ever ate, back in the fall of 1987, will live forever—specifically, on the copy of Dead Souls I was reading at the same time.
If you are hatching a nefarious, underhanded, and fiendishly clever plot, then it can not only consist of three spoons and a kitten.
Vern was surprised to learn that “social lubricant” generally referred to alcohol consumption, but it did explain the strange reaction he’d gotten when shaking hands after conditioning his palms with a liberal squirt of Astroglide.
I had to look at the song title to confirm she was singing “my baby does the hanky panky” and not “my baby does the happy puppy.”
Lois was never sure if conversation could actually be considered a hobby, but it sure beat that scrapbook nonsense.
New vocabulary words for the month include “wow,” “nah,” “meh,” and one particularly vociferous “WHAAAT?!”
Lois wasn’t foolish enough to believe romance was hiding in a sack of potatoes, but she kept peeling, just in case.
More like, smooth as my dog’s armpits, Henry thought.
Keith got in line to see the new baby eloquent.
Has anyone noticed that a blueberry muffin from Costco has 612 calories, or that a chocolate one has 692!?!
I think I’ve already confessed this anonymously, but I’ll own up to it: Before I eat a banana I always answer it, “Hello?” and sometimes in a foreign language, “Wei? Wei?”
I am, however, very fond of boxcars heading west and the smell of hot coffee on quiet, cool mornings.
Why is that all eaten apples are depicted as having most of the middle eaten, leaving the top and bottom untouched, when, in reality, all of my apples look pleasingly oval shaped once devoured.
I keep forgetting that I want to start making notes as soon as I think of an idea.
The simplest of things are sometimes the toughest things to recreate.
As the wind snapped at her, it felt as though a memory were being torn from her grip.
“To my credit, I haven’t shown up drunk for work in over twenty five years,” Oscar liked to tell people, conveniently leaving out the bit that that was exactly how long it’d been since he’d actually had a job.
“A destination gives people purpose,” Henry told the town’s tourism committee, “while an oddity fills them with a sense of wonder, and by combining those two simple elements, we can create an almost uncontrollable desire for our visitors to buy t-shirts, hilarious gag caps, and refrigerator magnets, so it is with great pride and enthusiasm that I present to you our new town slogan, “Home of the World’s Smallest Memory.”
I want something to do with my hands. I do not fidget. I make no motion unprovoked. Nothing taken, or lost or left without reason, thought. I write nothing. Doodle nothing. No idle brush of surface, or stroke in thought. The action, these words, possess me to do. And I oblige. Exorcize ghosts of statement. Trap them on page. In slide of hand on back, cupping of face, hands in hair. Tugging, pulling, leaving scratches on things that are mine when they leave. Scratches in pen. Scratches that draw blood on inanimate objects.
I want to do something with my hands in times of weakness, or lack of productivity. Light addiction to fiddling with purpose compels me when all else has been taken or lost or left with reason. I need to remember passion who conspires movement., but no haunty specters take over, and I am useless. I feel myself coming unstitched at edges. Tiny fingers fiddling with strings of tendons. With time, all will dangle. No poetry written in a walk up your spine, or while thumbing circles in forgotten spots of skin.
I don’t remember how to write good.
Music soothes the savage mailman.
Small wonder the US Post Office is failing; I am tracking my package - China, San Francisco, San Diego(!), San Jose - God only knows if it will turn around and visit Ohio before they get around to delivering it to my San Jose office.
When you find yourself losing faith in law, justice, representative democracy, chocolate, interval training, and sunny days, that’s when you know that the Existentialism Virus is making the rounds again.
Limitless opportunities await those who study the art of flim flam.
Liver: If the choice is between Tylenol and alcohol, I choose alcohol.
When I met ‘mrs. ‘mouse, I was shocked to discover that she ate pears all wrong - biting off the stem and then working down from the top - but lately I’ve begun doing the same (when no one is looking).
Some online hobo courses were either built by Keith or, at the very least, for Keith.
Cletis returned from vacation and was horrified to discover that his so-called friends had failed to feed his pet toaster all week, and from the complete lack of fingerprints, hadn’t even bothered to pet him one single time.
I’ve reached that point in this round of dieting where you begin to look like food to me.
A lifelong bibliophile, I now prefer reading ebooks to paper.
The great thing about the beach in California is that even when it’s cloudy and rainy at the beach, it’s still The Beach in California, yo.
I blew off most of the work day reading a novel.
The head of my firm is a pain in the ass who keeps sending me on long, fruitless errands, so I’m going to tell her off and quit my job.
If you like your electronics you’ll keep me away from them.
As if dogs could be any worse drivers than their human overlords.
Now I know how Rincewind does it.
Never underestimate the power of the iron fist or the velvet glove.
Romney clearly won the presidential debate last night since he promised me both a puppy and a unicorn.
It seems that the only way to cure these heavy blues - 24 hours and counting - is to go buy a much more expensive, more powerful laptop.
It’s a coldhearted soul food shack that posts pictures of its perfect fried chicken and waffles on the internet on a Monday morning, when said soul food shack a) is closed on Mondays and b)only serves fried chicken and waffles on weekends.
The problem with using neuro-toxins on the bugs around your house is that people too have neuros, Juan observed, noting the bitter metallic taste in his mouth and the residual dizziness the next day
Some things start off innocently enough, but then Imagination gets involved and it drags you kicking and screaming down corridors that you definitely do not wish to investigate.
It’s one thing to blithely state that the static on your old TV is caused by cosmic microwave background, but if you give this a moment’s thought, it’s quite possibly grander than anything ever invented in even the most far-fetched science fiction stories.
It’s damnably hard to write and listen to (oh, luck, be a) music at the same (a lady, tonight) time.