Kiss Your Friends

There's a helicopter floating above the ground
attached to a rope that has a person hanging on
for his dear life and to the contraption that is causing our ill fate
which if enacted will cause the ill fate of many of us who,
mere onlookers, consider ourselves as entrenched in this man's
dear life as if it were our own because of course we're watching a movie.

It's called Die Hard II or III or whatever.

I love those movies and all of their brothers.

YippeeKaiAYE Happy New Year.

~contributer

Friend Victoria Ruan was making cranberry short bread for her christmas party and I figured that was a lot of effort.  I like a good buttery cookie just as much as the next guy, but I wanted to know if it were worth  the effort.  So I googled it.



Whoever made that cookie, and made it come alive is a genius.  I heard about this stuff on CNN or whatever, but this is real.  The recipe was under the video, and it said, as you would guess : ginger, bread, baby, deli meat, dale's pale ale, christmas curveball.  If we could all figure out how to hold our fingers for the curveball, maybe more of our cookies would come alive.


Ginger Baby was even useful in the last moments as he trotted gleefully to a car stuck in the snow.  We can only imagine that at his touch the car itself became a ginger car pulled by ginger horses, because a christmas curveball, when enacted is passed by ginger touch.  Like Midas the King, except this gold brings laughter.   The many people touched passed along the curveball in their own ginger way, like having a party and everyone there wasn't actually invited.

On how to spread ginger cheer widely consult this video:

 

 

Now I am interested in how to hold my fingers for the christmas curveball.  I know if I could make a cookie come alive somehow or any kind of bakery product, I would tell everyone I knew so we could all be throwing christmas curveballs all over our respective towns.  If anyone has an idea please let me know.  I spent a lot of time googling it and this is what I found:


fingersntoes does fingers from fingersntoes on Vimeo.



I think I'm missing some instructions.


~contributer

FORIT

I'm not a speaker.
I'm not so bright.

I'm not what you chose for me.
I'm not your plight.

I'll have for me my own of course.
And mine I will have.

But I won't fight for you
the things you couldn't fight.

When you said to me
It's not of you I was made

When you said to me
it'll never be us be made.

When you said to me
find your own.

I said.

I'm looking
I'm looking.

~contributer

Jonathan

It's always nice to get a recommendation from a friend.
"You have to hear this!" --- "Read this immediately." --- "Get in your car and drive to the theatre TONIGHT." --- "This is the best thing since the reverse Oreo." --- et cetera --- et cetera
A good recommendation is simply a friend saying to you the best thing that a friend can say: This is good. You are good. You will see that this is good.
And so the devastatingly sad thing is that the only "recommendations" I get these days are really just lists of stuff, which lists are culled from the occasional scan of twitter-feeds, facebook updates, g-chat statuses, and the rare and treasured personal text-message.
And yes, this means that I am an embarrassment. And yes, you do the same thing, and I know it. It is shameful, and we need to start talking to one another again, and we should all probably have a barbecue or a bonfire and sing the actual songs and tell the actual stories, but for now I'm just going to finish writing this blog entry, if you don't mind, thank you very much.
At some point during the day, I slink away to the bathroom and, while seated, begin scanning the pantheon of digital avatars of various friends, family members, and other characters whose personal tastes and interests satisfy my need for recommendations of a certain standard.
Friend Jonathan is almost always included in that initial sweep: both because of his exceedingly flinty taste and his unparalleled commitment to updating his g-chat status. So, that particular day, when Jonathan's status read "[Jonathan] . . . thinks IGEL is the enemy," I knew that I would think IGEL was the enemy too, goddamn them, and I needed to know what we were fighting against.

So I googled it.

This is a composite graphic of the first five images that appeared that afternoon, and yes, they are shocking. My spirit broke when I saw that center photograph (obviously taken by an undercover journalist or squirrel). Yes, the hedgehogs are the enemy, and if they developed advanced gas masks, then they must be testing biological weapons of some kind, and if the hedgehogs are testing biological weapons, then you know they're going to use them, and so I find myself pummeled with one question over and over again:

Do I really want to live in a world where hedgehogs are the enemy?

I mean, my God, they're so cute. Can the concept of evil be so pliant as to include among its legions the single most adorable animal ever? Can a hedgehog be the enemy?

At the end of the whole thing, I needed someone to tell me what to do. I couldn't come up with the next step on my own, I needed . . . a recommendation. So I called my brother and told him the whole thing.

"What should I do?"

"Did you say reverse Oreos?"

"Yeah, I think I did."

"Are you sure that's what they were called, because I can picture the packaging and I'm pretty sure that they had a different name. Golden Oreos? I think that might be a different product altogether. Are you sure it was Reverse Oreos? Do you really know what you're talking about here?"

"Maybe they had a different name, I don't know, it's just this hedgehog is wearing this . . ."

"Uh-Oh Oreos."

"What?"

"That's it. Uh-Oh, Oreos. There was a plot line, something about a mix-up at the Oreo factory. Probably the Keebler elves screwed stuff up or something. Uh-Oh Oreos. God those were good, I haven't seen them in years, do they still have them? Were they limited time only? Did they fix the mistake at the factory? Oh, I want one. I really wish I could have one right now; I mean my lips are just aching as we're talking I want one so badly. I would literally break a man's arm right now for an Uh-Oh Oreo. I'd break it. Just for one. I can't even imagine, and I mean I literally probably couldn't imagine, the things that I would do for an entire package."

"Yeah, they were pretty good."

"So are they still around?"

"You know what, I have no idea."

And I didn't know.

So I googled it.

Pork Chops Tonight

There's a pork chop in my mind
that looks just like you.
Lightly salted, genuinely dry,
Shaped like a moon.

I'm sorry to cut you up
I'm sorry to fork you down
But you're a pork chop
no longer you
and it's dinner time.

Pass the apple sauce.

~contributer

Not So Much a Lover of Light

It became eventually impossible to distinguish his Splendor from his Menace, and I couldn't take it for another second.  Pure and simple, I had to know the score.  He was beautiful to behold, and terrifying to think of at night.  I wanted to follow him everywhere he went, and yet I was afraid he would eat me alive and serve me to his future followers with Brunellos.

What if - no, I hate to even ask.  I can't.  But yes, I have to.  What if he is right now, as we speak, feeding me the remains of the former me?  The color of red wine is from the skins, I tell myself, as I sip but try not to swallow.  I cannot wait to get home.

And so but at last, finally, just to be sure, to get to the very, absolute, no doubt "Bottom of Things" . . . I googled it.

First, with “Splendor” in quotation marks:

Amazing, Miraculous, Astonishing.  Wunderbar.  Beautiful.  Yes, no doubt.  But look now, for a second, at the state of that trailer: the flimsy door, the covered window, her legs – My God, the legs on this Wonder Woman.  Horrific, hot dog water,  elephant-dick legs.

Something terrible lurking there, to be sure, but then I can't stop looking at the picture.  I have to look.  Somehow it is beautiful.  Somehow, I want to be the one making that laugh hop out from behind her open mouth.  She pitches her body forward delicately, angling her head to dial up affection and understanding.  I imagine it is me holding the door of the trailer, it is me looking at my watch - somewhere to be, and a super hero to entertain.

And so what if I google again with “Menace” in the field?  A consolation, perhaps?  The beauty alone?  I googled it.

 

 

Sweet Jesus, I’m going to be fed to Cerberus with Kibbles & Bits while this man drinks Metamucil with the devil and weaves a belt out of my skin.  Fuzzy menace, relaxed-fit jeans, terrorizing tread of new trainers on the trail.  Get out, get out, get out.  Run like hell.

You know what to do.  Look it up.  Look it way up.

~contributer

From the Mud

Would you leave it to the
sun scrapes on my painted face
to gauge the depths of my twisted fall?
Or would you ask for the lies
Of a sick-born, bottom-bred malice-maker,
a true follower of his own might.

I’d tell of a tree
with helium-filled balloons
floating with no roots.

And beneath it
the girl prayerful
with a giant tear
drooping from her ear lobe
like a pearl in a clam shell
or a diamond in a bed of rock.

Don’t ask of me the bright stories
Told nicely by firewood a’flicker
When the chat turns to the oft told
And we all smile with our teeth a’glitter.

With Ali Baba I put twelve dwarves
whistling while they work,
And in Michael the archangel’s stead
A Muppet of fur and plaster
Chinese make/American model,
taking on the Devil in a graphic novel
about the triumph over sin
by the white horse that is our Uncle Sam.

Because don’t you see? We’ve
All lived longer than literature
And in literature’s light we still breed.
But we bear what we beat,
it's history we beat,
And we consume and consume
til we tweet.

(Anon.)

The girl in the mud
Beneath the floating tree
Cries out.
She cries out
The tinny note
Of a tone deaf
Blind man
Munching on his last
Meal:

Apple sauce and pork chow mein.

(He’s never been to China
Nor will he
But he knows of the gentle swoop
the wall takes on the northeast curve
of China, right before Russia becomes Russia,
And the rice fields turn to steppes. Beautiful.
He saw it in a movie starring Tom the Cruise
and swears now, forgetful, he saw it in person.)


~contributer