dreadcrumbs

And Fuzzy Stuffed Plants for the Vegan Child

As is the case with most children, my toddler son is fond of animals. Dogs, ducks, pigs, cows, monkeys, and so on. He likes them in person, on tv, and in abstract representation. There is even an irregularity in the grain of the wood in one of our cabinets that he often points to excitedly, because he believes it houses the dog spirit Chaputo looks like a dog.

Anyway, none of this is altogether odd, but yesterday evening as we sat, as a family, mooing and oinking at one another, I was struck with how odd it was that his favorite animals are the ones we eat. I mean, I guess, it's hard to really say what his favorites are, but he's only given voices (which is to say, he actually responds with a unique noise when we say "What does a X say, Max?") to the beasts we often put between pieces of bread.

Strictly speaking, I guess we can eat all animals, but the tastier ones currently being mass-produced for our tummies (chicken, pig, cow, turkey) are the ones he seems to have bonded with. I'm not sure if this is because he eats them, or despite it. I hope it isn't because he's created a "love-eat" relationship with the creatures in question. He might start thinking we, as a people, tend eat the things we are fond of.

Which is of course ridiculous.

I mean, he seems to be fond of me, too. I just don't want to wake up in the middle of the night to find tiny blunt teeth gnawing on my (admittedly scrumptious) foot.

The Clandestine Narrator

For my own entertainment, I make a habit of narrating the scenes outside my car windows, often with high-pitched or moronic voices. Usually I do this alone and while the car is moving. So, usually, there's no risk of anyone hearing me.

The problem (and I'm sure you can sense the potential for disaster here) is that I get comfortable in my little bubble universe and forget that sound waves can indeed pass through the not-hermetically-sealed environment of my car.

Case in point: I'm sitting in my workplace parking lot (Which is already a scene of past embarrassment. You'd think I'd learn.) finishing up a Blimpie's Best, when I see a guy hop (or fall, really) out of his pickup truck and start to strut toward the building entrance. And when I say strut, I mean it. You all know the type of walk I'm talking about. The sort of "please-think-I'm-cool" speed-saunter which I think is intended to project importance. Or bigness, or something. I'm not sure. I can't help but think of threatened blowfishes who've gone all puffy when I see such spectacles.

Anyway, this guy is sashaying across the parking lot, and I naturally provide some acapella circus music as background. Which makes the whole thing even more funny, at least to me. About the time he passes in front of my car, he draws his phone from its holster to answer it. As he puts it to his ear, I call out in a high-pitched Doubtfire-esque voice: "Helllooooo! Why, Martha! So good to hear from you!"

He stopped walking, but kept talking on the phone, so I did, too:
"Oh, nooooo! Tea would be wonnnnderful! And bring your hat! Yes, yes, the fuzzy one!"

And when he hangs up:
"Ta-Ta, Mumsie! Love to your dogs!"

Except now, he doesn't keep walking to the building, he turns to look at me in the car, favoring me with his best sneer of disgust.

So, he heard me. Oh well. I tried to remain reactionless, and just stare at him from behind sunglassed-eyes, doing my best "dangerous skinhead" imitation, hoping he might second guess himself. You know, maybe believe it was more likely such a voice came from his own "inner Julia," rather than from the large bald man in the parking lot.

Microstory Monday

Baby Back Nibs

"What's that in your teeth?" She said.
"I don't know." I said, picking it out.
"Well?" She asked.
"Looks like a fingernail." I said.
"A fingernail." She said.
"A small one," I say. "Child-sized."
"Where did it come from?" she asked.
"A child, probably. Or a midget." I said.
"I'm serious." She said.
"The licorice bits at the movie, maybe?" I said.
"Weird." She said.
"Tasty, though." I said.

Revenge Is A Dish Best Served With Potatoes

For those of you unacquainted (or otherwise on bad terms with) US holidays, yesterday was Thanksgiving. The day is  ostensibly dedicated to the acknowledgment of all one is undeservedly blessed with (hair, shoes, elbow room), but has for many become an excuse for guilt-free gluttony. Not that I have a problem with that, since neither I nor anyone I know is currently suffering from obesity-induced heart problems. Not yet.

The main food theme for Thanksgiving is turkey, of course. Often pig meat is involved, but mostly turkey. Lots of turkey. Now, I'm not a vegetarian, but that doesn't exempt me from feeling a bit of pity for the beasts we massacre for our tables. Sure, they're stupid creatures, and they're likely not contributing in any substantive way to the betterment of the earth. But then, we all know people like that. And we're not eating them.

Or most of us aren't anyway.

And yet I feel okay about eating beast meat. Birds in particular.

And why am I happier to eat chickens and turkeys? Because current scientific thinking places birds as more closely related to dinosaurs than any other beast. Dinosaurs who used to dominate the planet, terrorizing and eating our ancestors.

That's right. So I view Thanksgiving dinner as a table of vengeance. A place where I can give Great-GrandUncle Grog, who was torn limb from limb by velociraptors, the rest he deserves. Each bite a blow against the ancestral tyranny of the tyrannosaur. When I look at my plate full of shanks of bird meat, I don't mourn the pathetic life of a caged turkey. I exult in the role I play as karmic equalizer.

Though I do get funny looks from the relatives when they hear me muttering "Who rules the Earth now, Beotch?" between mouthfuls of turkey.

A Drafty Housewarming

Change can be terrifying for most of us. A new job, a new house, getting out of prison, hair in strange places. You know. Sometimes just putting on clean clothes in the morning is too much to ask, I know. Believe me, I know.

Anyway, this pervasive change-fear being what it is, I wanted to reassure my visitors that, despite the web address change, this blog is still the same itchy pit that it has always been. I know that the Anonymice that visit might be having difficulty getting up the guts to comment, but it really is okay. All you have to do is LIE. Make a false identity up, if you have to. The computer won't know your soul is rotten with the stench of deceit. I'll know, but nobody cares about what I know except the NSA.

And now I need to bite the bullet and put on fresh underwear. Turning it inside out only works once, and I want to feel fresh for tomorrow's Bird Feast.

Goat Laureate

Our printer here at work automatically prints a page identifying who sent the print job before the actual prints are generated. The person is identified by their user name, which is usually their first initial and their last name, up to six letters. When I pick up items I've printed, I am greeted with a company-branded sheet of paper with the letters "dhale" largely and boldly printed.

I can see why they do this. For one, it's actually quite easy to determine from the stack of papers in the print tray which ones are or aren't mine. Also, if you make a habit of printing pictures of offensive objects (Lederhosen) and people (Madame Ruth Dreifuss), you can easily be identified.   

Because so many prints go through our printer, everyone has made a habit of putting the printouts that aren't theirs on the table neighboring the printer. There is almost always something waiting on the table to be picked up, and today, as I passed the table, there were five. They were stagger-stacked on one another, with the "identifier sheet" on top for each of them. Together they provided a very witch-trial-esque message by saying "uwillo bburns harlot, uwillo bburns."  And yes, we have a man working here named "Henry Arlot." I think he's french or something. I'm not sure who "uwillo" is, but Brad Burns works in product management, I think. Regardless, I think the "message" may have been for someone else. (This means you, Tiffany in accounting! No more fishnets!)

Anyway, now I'm trying to concoct a way to get people to print in a certain order, creating "serendipitous" messages to frighten the paranoid. I'll be sending out a message later today to Bruce Ware, Udell Willoughby, Bob Eaton, Thomas Morrow, Bahati Uya (she's Nigerian, I believe), Andrew Wilde, Peter Ackoff, and Gordon Oates.  I'll attach a document titled something like "Layoff Prevention Contract" that they'll want to print out.

If I time it right, I might get this:

"bware. uwillo beaton tmorro buya awilde packof goates."

That ought to freak the goat-fearing hordes right out.

Microstory Monday

Asthma

I struggle to inhale as I tie some string tightly to the little hole in the center of the razor blade.
When I place the steel on the back of my tongue, I am aware of a vague machine-oil favor, and in tasting it, I actually swallow the blade a bit earlier than I had planned. I feel a little twinge, but it goes down easily. No harm done.
Taking hold of the end of the string dangling between my lips, I try to take another breath, and find that I can't.
Oh well, I think. This should open things right up.

And then I pull the string.

Tongue Tatoos for the Fashionably Agape

I worry about the slack-jawed among us. I worry that within the vast community of mouth breathers there might be a few geniuses.

Yes, yes, it seems ridiculous, I know, but you went along with me when I said that my wife and her sisters spent a weekend eating lemur guts, so give me the benefit of the doubt.

I mean, mouth breathing bothers me as much as anyone, but I don't want to relegate an entire subset of humanity to troglodyte status. Because maybe, you know, they have a sinus problem or something. I wake up sometimes with a dry mouth in the mornings, and since I don't believe in those startlingly detailed stories about saliva vampires, I know that I've been mouth breathing. So my dream self, at least, can sympathize.

We don't want these hidden geniuses to convince themselves, by virtue of a simple ear-nose-throat issue, that they're stupid. We all know that if you tell a kid every day that he's stupid, he'll begin to believe it. People will believe anything, if you tell them often enough. My mom told me I wasn't stupid, and I went out into the world thinking I could ace a self-directed Advanced Calculus class in college. Yikes.

Let me just say that awakening into my own stupidity was unpleasant, confusing, and altogether shudderworthy. I think I would have preferred not to know. So if you get a chance, Choose Ignorance.

But enough about me and my insanely entertaining life. We were talking about mouth breathers. I think society brands them as idiots because we assume smart folk would close their mouths, thereby avoiding dangerous itinerant disease-clouds and migrating insects. There's no way for those oral respirators to communicate that they know their mouths are open, and they choose to keep them open for medical or lifestyle reasons.

And thus, as the title of this entry suggests, I advocate tongue tattoos. Let those pinched-mouth conservatives know that your tongue is exposed for a reason other than to collect dust! Arise, my brothers sisters cousins, and ink a pithy slogan on that face tentacle! Let The Man know! Your mouth, your choice!

And if you're short on pithy slogans, you could just do a picture of a duck or something. Duck pictures are cool.

The Fury of the Translucent Hobo

Because of today's site-jumping, I am consumed with thoughts of bums.

No, not hind-quarters, naughty-head. Vagrants. Or transients, to be more specific.

I mean, are they really transient? Do they jump from city to city in funky gypsy style? Or is transient meant to suggest that they only exist for a short period of time? Perhaps they slowly transform into Something Else? I'm not sure. I, like many socially ignorant white males of Middle America, am not acquainted with any bums, and cannot say I am familiar with the ins and outs of the bum lifestyle. For all I now, there could be a new batch on the streets every 4 weeks, pressed into molds and cranked out for our benefit by The Government's Ministry of Guilt.

The only guy I was ever aware of, and he might not even have been a true vagrant, was a guy that I knew in Junior High that we called Worm, because of the cape he wore with the acronym W.O.R.M. on the back. And no, he wasn't in junior high with me. He was an adult. That's just the period of time in my life that I knew him. He hung out at the downtown bus station that I had to pass through to get from school to home, and he greased his bangs in such a way as to look like devil horns. I thought he was pretty cool, though I don't know that he was ever particularly articulate, because I can't remember what it was that he was always shouting at everyone about. Something about rugs or carpet, I think.

He's gone now, though I guess that happens to all transients. I don't frequent the downtown bus station much anymore, but I've been there several times both on foot and wheel in the intervening 18-some-odd years, and I've never seen him. I talked to a junior high era friend of mine about 10 years ago who said he saw Worm working at Dairy Queen, but I have my doubts.

I think he's become something that is more comfortable living beneath the streets, spending the last decade hatching a nefarious plan in his underground lair to cover the streets of "the surface world" with plush shag carpet.

I hope that's the case. I've always longed for roadways that were more comfortable to lounge on.

The Sight Eater

My vision is fading. My physical vision, I mean. My vision of a future where man and beast work side by side under the steady hand of a benevolent insect overlord is as clear as crystal.

The human race's glorius destiny aside, I've been able to increase the acuity of my eyesight with glasses ever since I was about 17. I hesitate to say "I've worn glasses since I was 17" because, well, I really haven't regularly worn them until the last five years or so. Up until about age 28, I could get away with having bare eyeballs without any noticeable life-enjoyment penalty. I now wear them much more often, usually when driving or seeing a movie. Or if I care to see people's faces with any clarity. It hasn't really been a problem. I take them off (I have them off right now, for example) when doing "close" work.

But in the last several months, alas, I have noticed the characters on my computer screen begin to get blurry. At first I ignored it, explaining it away to my imagination or the sudden appearance of a strange ambient fog inside my office building. But the blurriness persisted, so I started doing experiments. I put on my glasses. Still blurry. I moved my head closer to the screen. Maybe clearer, but probably only because everything was subjectively huge. The edges were still blurry.

So I was confused as to what exactly was happening to my eyeballs, and was about to go back to the imagination/ambient fog theory when I suddenly sneezed. And everything became perfectly clear. And I still mean physically. No epiphanies, just clear vision. Every character on the screen was clearer than I think I had ever seen. I blinked. Still clear. I rubbed my eyes. Blurry again. And it stayed that way, no matter how much blinking or rubbing I did, until I sneezed again. After which, I enjoyed another oh-so-brief moment of clarity.

If anyone out there is a doctor or an ophthalmologist, I am soliciting theories as to why a nose explosion would clear up my vision. I'm thinking maybe a ghost lives in the vitreous fluids of my eye, and the sneeze scares it away for a while. Of course we all know that's ridiculous, since a ghost would live in our brain or sinus cavity, if it was going to live anywhere. Hence the theory solicitation. Because I just don't get it.