Choose Your Own Adventure

page 36

after devouring your remains,

the dragon gives you 2 stars (bad service)

on Yelp!

page 1

life has begun

with a hint of mint

and a farmboy past

If you go to Central High, turn to page 24

If you get your GED with Obi-Wan, turn to

page 20

three months

a pizza-box apartment

Married (With Children)

a bewitched Magnavox

page 35

ms. right

met johnny hot pockets

and they rode off into the sunset

on a cum-loudly (collegiate quality!) vibrator

page 38

happily every after

(litigation)

Designed in California/Made in China

Designed in California
Herbert Wood was not an exceedingly good or bad man. When he got up after hitting the “Snooze” button once, he ate a breakfast that was neither too large or too small, overly wholesome or immoderately unhealthy. His toothpaste was of a cinnamon variety; the translucent red gel pleased him because it was the same color as the strawberry syrup he ate with pancakes. His apartment walls did not ring with the sounds of children or pets. Wood had none, and, if he did, the rooms would not ring. His apartment was rendered anti-echoic with clutter: half-read books, pieces of projects yet to be finished, and a broken yellow umbrella that Wood had picked up last winter with the sincere intention of fixing it. In the corner of his living room was a desk with a laptop. On the underside of the computer, beneath the manufacturer’s name, were the words “Designed in California,” and, in nearly illegible print, “Made in China.”

At 7:55 he was out of the building. One of his neighbors, an elderly Chinese woman who was easily irritated by all noise aside from the babble of her seven cockatiels, was startled awake by the door slamming shut. Her curses in incomprehensible Mandarin trailed Wood as he jogged two blocks to the corner bus stop, where someone tried to sell him a newspaper outside the liquor store. Avoiding eye-contact, Wood boarded the limited-stop bus that would teleport him to work and back. At stoplights, Wood admired the other bus-riders looking out the grand picture windows, sitting placidly in their private Victorian living rooms. Hands were crossed, books were read, coffee was sipped from cardboard cups; it was all very civilized.

After long negotiation with the transit gods on his way back from work, Wood arrived home at 6:00 PM. His body, wilted from eight hours under buzzing incandescents, was little rejuvenated by the thought of more activity, but at 6:45, after eating a baked potato covered in chili, he approached the laptop in the corner of the living room. The chair, as was its custom, squeaked in protest when he sat down and reclined, waiting for the operating system to load. Illuminated by blue glow, the room’s silence was only punctuated by the staccato clicks of the mouse, a lulling white-noise of activity. With the word processor open, Wood created a new file. Wood adored beginnings. Beginnings implied endings, the possibilities of ingenuity and the satisfaction of work well done. He could smell an office supply store from a block away, the manila scent of fresh notebooks and printer paper beckoning him towards the inevitable purchase of a new journal or sketchbook. He couldn’t resist the odor of 25% post-consumer recycled paper and 75% South American wood-pulp, old cardboard mixed with Amazonia, a celebration of America the newfound land.

Wood spent twenty minutes scratching skin flakes from his scalp as he wrote, then stopped. Unconsciously flicking his fingers [ctrl-s] he saved the file. Two hours of watching sitcoms, forty years of excellent service to the firm, and one life-time later, Wood’s file was still in the laptop’s hard drive when it was disassembled by an elderly Chinese woman. Her curses at a stripped screw, subdued by fatigue and factory cacophony, lacked the spirit of garbled vehemence that Wood’s neighbor had so carefully cultivated through years of bat-shit insanity. Having worked at parsing through e-waste since she left the village, her skin was covered with continent-shaped spots, Rorschach blots that would have been birthmarks had she been born with them. Like her skin, her eyes too had degraded with exposure to age. Thus she made no attempt to read the blurred Latinate-lettering on the drive’s underside.
Made in China

A Punk's Tale

Once upon a time there was a punk. He was renowned amongst his friends for having staged a relatively successful strike against the local franchise of a notorious large coffee chain, a boycott only broken by an ambush of nature's call far from any public restroom which forced the purchase of one raspberry scone and a pass to the facilities. Young and energetic with a personality not totally uniformed or lacking in intelligence, he nonetheless deserved the derisive connotations that the title "punk" endued. For, in addition to his minor lack of cleanliness, he was fatally impulsive.

Having read an assortment of polemics, our punk fashioned himself something of a Luddite, lashing out against technology due to the evils which it distributed upon nature. Reader and author both should view this particular cause as noble. Those that have perused National Geographic or chanced upon a Planet Earth documentary know the plight of our natural environs to be great, a weighty addition to the already hefty load of sins that humanity has managed to shoulder upon itself. However, while sympathy for fuzzy dieing things is transitory in most, our subject's brash predisposition led him to a degree of self-flagellation that became a permanent part of his character.

He stopped at nothing in his crusade to rectify the injustices he now saw all around himself. Showering was baptismal, in that it occurred just as rarely as that seminal religious event. He converted first to vegetarianism, then to veganism, then to a diet which forbade eating anything that cast a shadow or stood on an even number of legs, then back to veganism when he tired of gardening in the dark. The heater was first set to 60 degrees Fahrenheit, then to 50, then was broken off the wall with a pick-axe (which was recycled after use). Nothing could satiate his demand for the reduction of consumption.

One day, reading in the library (by this point he had eschewed private ownership of books, lights and furniture, and was well on his way to swearing off large public libraries), he noticed the several computers in the corner for patron use. At first pass, he merely turned off their screens. Later, noticing that hardly anyone used the machines anyway, he switched off their power supplies. Finally, considering that it was his obligation to make sure these inefficient power-wells were permanently dried, he stuffed rubber cement in the electric strip's plug to prevent the connection from being made. A warm smug smile of anarchistic rebellion filling every nook of his being, the victorious rogue strode out from the library, feeling so expansive that he even considered purchasing an all-organic free-trade humanely-roasted bag of coffee beans.

Several days later on his way into the library (he required the library for heat, having by this time ceased in renting an apartment, partially for financial reasons due to an earlier pledge to abstain from gainful employment, but mostly for the moral reward) he was content to see "Out of Order" signs posted on the rows of computers. Whispering a faint prayer to Gaea in memory of the trees which supplied the paper for the signs, he passed by to continue his readings.

The following day he was again allowed a brief smile. Little rectangles of dust were all that remained of the old computers. Making sure that the "Out of Order" signs had been recycled, he continued on to check out a book titled "For Shits and Giggles: Composting Feces for Fun and Profit."

The third day began with little pomp. Walking into the entrance level of the library, he marveled at the marble flooring, considering how great an expenditure the Beaus Arts style building must have been. As his mind's eye was consumed with horrific dreams of the scars Mother Earth must have endured under the cruel engineering machine that had constructed this library, he failed to notice the delivery men carting several heavily-laden dollies past him. When he managed to break his extended revery and progress deeper into the library, he was met with a scene tantamount to genocide. Splayed out before him were piles of computer mice, cords writhing on the cold patterned marble. Keyboards, monitors, and computer upon computer lay strewn across the floor as they were slowly assembled into individual workstations. Over in the right corner, two elderly librarians had completed one of the computers. Punching her finger at the "Power" button, the taller of the two librarians spoke with concern to her partner.

"Is it on, Margaret?"

"I don't think so Denice. The lights just aren't flashing anywhere, not here on the back at least."

"Try blowing on the power cable a bit. My grandson always does that with his video games."

The shorter one, pulling daintly at the power cord as if disarming a bomb, managed to pull it out and gave it a heartfelt blow.

"Still not working? Well...shoot. That's the third set of computers that they've sent us that doesn't work! We'll just have to get another bunch. Maybe this time they'll send a technician with them."

As the two librarians continued to talk about the world these days and the confusing labyrinth of technology, our erstwhile protagonist dropped to the floor and promptly died of a sudden brain aneurysm.

The moral of the story? If at first you don't succeed...try, try, and fall dead of an aneurysm.

Digital Scribes

If I don't grab your interest in the next three seconds, you'll stop reading this. Which is good, because if I can't grab my own interest in the next sentence, I'll probably stop writing this, so we'll all be saved quite a lot of grief.

Where do stories begin? Oral tradition, passed from one mouth to another mouth, both mouths smelling strongly of whatever root manna it is that feeds this tribe of brave storytelling/root-eating aborigines? Do tales spring from the coats of professors like Goodwill mothballs?

The first man that told a story was summarily kneed in the testicles. They tried to do the same to the first woman, but failed, somewhat prophetically forecasting the rise of the female literati. People that tell a bad story are just annoying, so storytellers must be geniuses (or eunuchs). It's either swim or swift kick to the nards in the brave world of fiction.

That's why writing here, on the most ephemeral medium known to man, is better than the most padded of athletic cups. You can bitch about your boss, talk dirt about your enemies, and bring curses down upon your best of friends and worst of enemies, all of who may or may not exist in reality.

I wonder if anyone talks this much about their notebooks or typewriters (the answer is yes; old dead people do/did).

Crank the Tunes

So I went to a party this last weekend. It wasn't a huge congregation, just a medium-sized get together with about 30 people in a small-ish apartment, but overall well executed. Except for one thing: speakers.

Ladies and gentlemen, if you are going to have a party, make sure you have ridiculously large speakers, big enough to get even the most timid of wallflowers dancing or at least involuntarily shaking with the bass vibrations. In normal life, I'm the first person to get pissed off at people playing their music too loud. My evil eye is staring right at you, car audio aficionados. But under the circumstances of a party, you are given a mandate to rock, and you'd better fulfill the damn thing.

Which made me think: maybe that could be my job. I could bike around with a pair of speakers and receiver set, finding all the parties that needed a little volume boost. When the neighbors threaten to call the cops, my job would be done and I would go on my way to find other poor hosts in need. I think there's demand.

Yo La

Out of all the pretentious, semi-obscure indie-bands that are out there, probably one of my favorites (and, incidentally, least obscure) is Yo La Tengo. I can listen to their album "I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One" without wanting to skip a track, which is an accomplishment for the ADD channel-flipper in my soul. From the entrancing bass line of "Moby Octopad" to the shambling organ of "Autumn Sweater", this album is the kind of solid gold that you'd never build a toilet out of, even if you were a ridiculously rich rapper. Hell, even their cover of the Beach Boys' (or the Hondells', depending on how you look at it) hit "Little Honda" manages to be sort of a pastiche and still rock harder than, uh... a piece of granite (creativity waning).

But wait, there's more! For some reason, I believe this album has occult powers of association. Pretty much every song on this album evokes a particular memory for me, whether it be of seasons and loves past, family and friends, or just staring out the window on bus trips.

Ok, to be fair, I should counter the hype so any unfortunate soul that has not had the opportunity to listen to this gem gets a fair chance at enjoying it on its own merits. Some of the songs are certainly alienating to people who aren't into more droning, shoegazer-type electronic jams. Several of the songs are instrumental tracks, which might turnoff some listeners. Personally, I think they're well placed in the continuous whole of the album, something like the interludes on "Pet Sounds", but others are allowed to have differing opinions.

That said, give it a chance. Please. For the good of humanity.

A New Morning?

Ok, I've decided to attempt actually blogging. By blogging, I mean not putting up random jewels of shit that I wrote in a fleeting hour when I was drunk with inspiration, but occasional updates on my mundane life. We'll try to fend off the pretentious rambling this time, in favor of...I don't know, narcissistic insights on the world? Agreed hypothetical reader? Sounds good.

So yesterday I went and saw Into the Wild . It's a good little flick (ok, two and half hours is probably a bit more than "little") that manages to not completely screw the proverbial pooch by staying near to the spirit, if not the exact text, of the book. However, if you have even the slightest inkling of wanderlust in your soul, I recommend to steer clear. It made me want to go grab my backpack and hit the road so I could fight grizzly bear.