Posts tagged ‘color’
“In one or more parallel universes, there is a a plastic trash can version of myself in a suburban granola crunching enclave of Maryland. I receive messages from it daily, but I don’t fully understand what it’s trying to tell me. Every message starts with, ‘Tomorrow is the day.” And then after that, it repeats a whole string of numbers, starting with 63 and ending in 2,351.”
Admiral Ving Ving
The Spaceship Diaries of Admiral Ving Ving
‘A couple nights ago I met up with Lenny at Mark’s Diner. He’s an old friend from high school, and I hadn’t seen him since then. That was over twenty years ago, like when Pearl Jam came out with Ten.
He had called me out of the blue. I don’t know how he got my cellphone but nowadays everything is online. He said something like, “Hey man, I saw you were in town. You want to meet up for dinner and catch up?”
So we’re at the diner and he’s eating the bi bim bop with his hands. There’s beef juice and egg yolk running down his hands and onto his forearms. He says that’s how they really do it in Korea. I’ve never been to Korea so I say, “Is that so?” And then he talks about how he went to Korea after high school, started teaching English, and then married a “nice Korean woman with good values.”
“How does she like the U.S.?” I ask.
“She hates it,” he says.
There’s an awkward silence, and I stab at my udon soup with my wooden chopsticks. I wonder how long it would take for the chopstick to absorb some of the broth.’
The Dog Man Journals by GM Drogba
“As my Uncle Bobby used to say, “Everybody has earwax!” It took me until the early 2000’s to fully appreciate and understand his advice.
Everybody has earwax.
It couldn’t be any simpler. But that maxim has been distorted. People everywhere are trying to get earwax out of their ear, but only when no one is looking. They use a Q-tip, their finger, or a pen cap to remove the wax. This kind of behavior, while seemingly satisfying, is short-lived, unproductive, and a little vegetarian. Maybe, with a little bit of luck, a person can get something out of their ear with a fingernail or a Q-tip. But when that stuff is really analyzed by scientists in North America, it’s been shown time and time again that most of that’s just dirt or bread crust, but not the magical fairy holy supreme inner earwax that ear pickers seek day in and day out for the rest of their lives. This wax is dark orange or black and when extracted, looks a bit like a crushed up and flattened raisin, and tastes like old wet cardboard. That’s the stuff that makes an ear itch.”
-Chris Tuckbee, “My life on the inside,” Page 32, Reprinted with permission from the National Podiatry Chronicles of Luther Valley, MD.
“Every man needs his own chair. His chair is not connected to any other chair, and has armrests and a retractable footrest, either electronic or manual. A man’s chair needs to be separated by at least eight feet of space from all sides. No one other than the man, except for the dog or the cat, can sit in the man’s chair. This rule applies even when the man is not in the room. The man’s chair is not required to match with the other furniture as a precondition for its existence. . .”
Hon. Craig Litbee, during the opening submission of the Progression of Situations Act of the Umb Congress of the Republic West. 1973.
There are different kinds of scary. And if I had to choose what kind of scary I like to be, it would definitely be raccoon scary. I know some of you might think that if I had to be scary, why would I waste it on raccoon scary as opposed to something more popular, like zombie scary or rabid bear scary or mountain lion scary. Don’t get me wrong, I did think about those possibilities. But I felt that aiming for raccoon scary was a little more attainable, with the right attitude and frame of mind of course.
It was a lot easier to be raccoon scary than I was led to believe. I show up in other people’s kitchens after midnight and ruffle through all their shit. I love going through canned goods, searching for crisp apples in the refrigerator, and it’s always a treat to find those rare, sweet figs that are like nine dollars each at the food co-op. The other day I went into a kitchen and broke open the flour and threw rice and dry pasta all over the ground. I don’t know why I did it. It varies from night to night.
The one thing that does give me a hang up from time to time is if I’m confronted and questioned about my presence in “their” kitchen. It doesn’t often end well. I give my, “This is my place!” speech but that often fails. I’m asked to leave, I’m yelled at, I approach slowly, they threaten to call the police, and then I jump at them out of nowhere and ruffle my hands through their hair and clothes while they flail and scream. That’s the part I could do without.
Did last year bring you down? Well, you’re not the only one.
I get these thoughts that the years have not been kind to me at all.
Was I there by the grace of chance or was she?
What I find interesting is that the most vitriolic of critics against Taylor Swift are the same ones who love the acoustic youtube covers of her songs. You can spot them pretty easily on youtube. They’ll say things like:
“This song would be so AWESOME if you sang this . . .”
“I don’t know how Taylor Swift is famous and you’re not . . .”
“I first heard this song before I heard the Taylor Swift version of it . . .”
“You sing it the way this song is supposed to be sang . . .”
But before you think I’m defending Taylor Swift and her perfect makeup and carved out of plastic look, I should make it clear that I like her in the same way that I like a road cactus or the Flying J on I-90 . . . they’re just there and part of America. You can make your own value judgments on what that says about our shared culture.
The thing is, even when you acousticize her songs with a creative cover on youtube, they’re still fucking Taylor Swift songs, no matter how good they sound.
When I was in high school, getting a car of my own was like a temporary pass to adulthood. As long as I was in the car, I was free of the nagging and all the other host of real and imagined teenage obligations and expectations. But as I got older, the car was a means to an end, a necessary bill so that I could get groceries from Costco, avoid the rain and snow on the walk to the metro, or to avoid Delta Airlines so that I could drive eight hours to see family. But sometimes all that noise goes to the wayside when I’m not driving, just sitting in the back, looking out the window, with neither obligation or duty to talk to anyone. That’s my temporary pass to childhood.
e v e r y d a y aperture 