Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    

The results.
  

    

From topic 15:


Sometimes a book comes along at exactly the right moment for a young
reactionary to learn something about how the world REALLY works.
Interpersonal struggles are part of the ecology here in the virtual village;
evolutionary changes can become revolutionary ones through the proper
consensualization of worldviews and perceptual examination of the navel,
under the supervision of a licensed physician in anything-goes kind of
atmosphere that gives rise to the sort of survivalist response, replete with
cammies, half a ton of tinned food, and demeanor unbecoming the sort of young
lady who shops at this embalming parlor, desperately recreating a mise en
scene that she totally misinterpreted, believing as she did that the dead
*needed* silk to define the lower bound of tastelessness in a society already
deeply defecated on the rug--if any of my Pekinese do that again, into the
recycling bin they go!  A dog is a dog, but my imported rugs are very
immobile, unlike the dogs running and yapping all over, smelling like man-
eater.  Watch out, here she comes!  Nothing compared to the gigabyte download
I just started from alt.binaries.picospan.  What a long strange picture that
one has been.  Meanwhile, arugula and rocket are doing their soliloquy from
Hamlet Veggie Style, a retractable solid aluminum product sold by
enthusiastic teleprompter jockeys who enjoy messing up the anchorpeople's
lines in the mid-morning lag when they're totally zoo'd out.  Later that same
day, footsoldiers marched across my living room carpet, but my cat just
regurgitated a hairball and went back to watching the wall.  Hard to
implement house rules when pets start throwing their weight around.  I began
life as a wee Scottish bairn, but as I grew older, I discarded my horny
carapace and emerged as a BEAUTIFUL BUTTERFLY!  Sometimes a butterfly is a
Papillon.  And sometimes a Papillon is a dog, and excitable, dashing around
thrilled with everything, checking the door for complaints about his lunatic
followups in the rec.arts.sf.* usenet hierarchy, seeking solace in the
nonexistent arms of a virtual lover.  A useless pursuit, as it turned out.
Papillons are happier with real-life inverted pyramid structures, but
occasionally when the material merits, exculpatory ASCII hieroglyphs are an
acceptable substitute for the complete disavowal of one's words, in print and
otherwise.  You can scribble and you can babble, but you're still trapped in
that bright motionless Jello of eternity, the refrigerator light of time
shining only for me Me MEEEEEEEEEE, because yea verily I am the ONE TRUE
AHAB, call me Captain.  I search for the white whale with the aid of my
comanche warrior, reform rabbi and a computer programmer walk into a bar.
"What the -- ?  Ouch! they cried, wondering aloud who left an iron rod in the
middle of the dictionary, while WABC Twist, that blot on Chubby Checker's
eskimo pie, which was melting unnoticed in the fading sunlight from the
wingnut fastened sunroof of his 1968 Bentley.  God!  That car sure was a
pigeon-baiting piece of junk!  Its hood was spattered with white splats of
shiite Moslem religious tracts the Rabbi had shredded when the Comanche
defenestrated the followers of the Cosmic Circle, plunging all of fandom
indeterminitely to -- what?  Well, that was the question, wasn't it?  Since
affection of that kind cannot be bought, it must be calculated with obscene
numbers of cycles, wearing out whole platoons of hamsters, undead, dying in
the fire of the sun.  Strike another stake go start anew, andrew; your
seasick sailors are rowing home.
  

    
g hinging
  

    
At first it reminded me of Djuna Barnes, but by halfway through I decided 
that our collective consciousness was being controlled by Rudy Wurlitzer. 
  

    

I keep forgetting:  Who is RUdy Wurlitzer?
  

    
He wrote the semi-stream of consciousness novel Nog. Then he wrote Quake. 
Then he started writing screenplays, including, off the top of my head, 
Two-Lane Blacktop, Walker, maybe Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid and a 
bunch of other stuff. 
  

    


It ain't no use to sit and wonder who I am, babe; I've spent a lifetime
workin' on that and still ain't expanded to fit the space available, but I'm
worried that Flo. Sup. Roy has already reached his full height, beside
himself with spleen and yet somehow still under the weather, under a
pseudonym, and under the gun.  For unbeknownst to anyone but herbaceous
borders, sometimes even bitches lift their legs, which may explain why
violets shrink, but what about cows and flat rocks? What reflex makes that
rooster crow at dawn?  At any rate, look out your winky's up for grabs,
you've fallen among the freaks and losers of biodegradable humanity.  There
is comfort in knowing you're good for the event, should it befall you.  But
this constant bumping does some investing in the bull market but only if the
bulls are recidivist cattle whose owner will prattle of sleep supply, while
clowns decimate non-laughing customers, while mimes unrelentingly toboggan
down the hilly streets of San Francisco, doing their best to upset the
tourists.  Who needs that kind of traffic, anywhere other than in Alaska,
where pedestrians collide for warmth, in an atrium of the new State Capitol,
with ice sculptures of PALM TREES.  A sense of hunters captured by the game
disturbs the bats in the atrium, while fishwives holler for customers at the
top of their lungs, slinging their salmonella-laced meat into the air and
catching it in their aprons until ponies become available for the rest of the
ride.  At which, hordes of anteaters will demonstrate the correct care of
silverware sadomasochism hardware.  A crew from 60 Minutes arrived, to
retract the foreskin and film the area beneath while grilling them about
whenever they attempt to wriggle away from the flames beneath, sincere in
their writhing, their shimmying, their shaking of the tailor's mice, hi-
diddle lumpkin Freno.  But there ain't no use in calligraphy while the world
types away, making claims of great presence on the Internet, but it's been
months since anyone updated the paperclip in Microsoft Word, that irritating
little fastener with an attachment to the Superdog character in Office
(notice that you never see them totalling up the spreadsheets in Excel, which
they leave for the anticipated hordes to surrender at the gate, disappointed,
unless the re-remembering to remember bill gates with a pie in his face,
mssux@perjuor.net, the Retirus pouts, while Gate@times declares there are no
truths buttressing the fabric of the electronic universe, only those
declarations of Quasimodo's manicurist were entered into the archives of the
navel gazers, but left again when he discovered that all the hispanic voters
had seen through his bullshit posturing and voted for the optician down by
where Carol Merrill was standing.  The final price turned out to be more than
the Congress was willing to pay, but for a few motormouths who talk talk talk
and say nothing worthwhile, the sons of nonconformists who have rebelled by
conforming so strictly to each other accountants that they are actually
*dating* them.  Have you ever heard anybody succeed in refuting the
unbelievably acrid and false charges prolonging the huge engorgement that
black-market Viagra would metabolize quicker than Bob Dole could pour it down
his gullet.  Liddy exchanged his blunted pencils for knitting needles so his
PalmPilot could bedevil Bob's enemies everywhere he went -- Click! Click!
Click!  Dole engorged his peepee just for the ad man, who wanted to see if
the Viagra perchance reduce the federal deficit by invigorating the American
economic inversion.  Which it did.  Dollars became rubles, frogs became pigs,
and everywhere wagon trains started rolling east.  The Apache guides
investigating these phenomena came back to the village with fantastic
stoicism, considering they'd been captured and subjected to Chinese water
tortolini without any sauce whatever!  But repeated protests with the Italian
Lesbians for the Protection of Sauce (ITLPS) got him a dram of marigold
essence, which he thought was morning glory essence, so wasn't he surly when
he got it home and tasted it.  "I'll just have to make do," he depreciated at
a rate of 5% annum, all the while wondering how <swipe> changed the sentence
from them to him and how his dog Hyphen-noodlus wanted to gnaw on some old
bones, so he looked around and foraged on Methuselah's leg for a while until
he broke his tooth on a magnifying glass, "after the bloody mutt Watson!",
cried Shergold.  "He stole my get-well cards!"
  

    

I love that.  I could read it again and again.  It is oft like a Bob Dylan
song.
  

    

"If you can't live without me," she asked, "Why aren't you dunking donuts or
frying chicken wings in Nome, Alaska?  Because throughout the process of
investigating the president, Republican locales roughly corresponded to stops
along the Iditarod trail, resolving all ambiguities as harshly as possible.
Or, as the lobbyist said to Representative Livingston, "Get your tongue out
out of my mouth, I'm king of the World!", a lie which was quickly disproven
by Larry Fly-Paper, whose anticline yielded not only a bounty of fossil-rich
shales but also an improbable cache of fossilized and unredeemed WELL paper
blowjobs, increasing in value even as controversy and recrimination surround
the enterprise district created by the politicians to make sure their
brothers-in-arms will find it easier to link up with the right bagman while
distraught constituents await the impending arrival of the milkman, the
postman, the laundry guy - all the service people who once romanticized the
home delivery industry, all the while not completly understanding the impact
it would have on downtown shopping districts and regular bowel movements.

When you can't even get to a bathroom you're under presssure to eliminate all
the non-essentials to ensure that predigested media handouts provide the sort
of roughage a hard-working Congress-page can appreciate after a hard day of
drudgery, danger, and other dubbing activities, dubiously dumbed-down to a
degree of dastardly deliciousness, right up there with the Escape from New
York Pizza and Weekly World News and cigarettes and cheap American beer that
make a writhing spastic out of anyone foolish enough to try more than a
havana cigar, some 151 rum and an ancient manual typewriter in search of
"authenticity."  Yeah, for real, I kid you not.

Meanwhile, oozing into the postmodern reinterpretations of Grimm's Fairy
Tales, the Senator recoiled visibly as he opened a mysterious package, the
paranoia of demented longings and whimsical scribblings, the sort of thing
John Lennon did in that silly bodacious flowery script he practiced in his
notebooks like a teenybopper lovesick princess, unaware of the dubious
messages of disarmament, disestablishmentarianism, discombobulation,
discovery, dissatisfaction, discouragement, disquietude, dyspepsia,
deshabille, discipline and firm breasts.  Normally he would have advised in
favor of of consistency in hyphenation, everything by the book (the
Webster's, you ungodly fool), but there are times when the situation calls
for a new hybrid of sense and sensibility, even of nonsense, presence,
essence and tupac shakur.

It's not just a matter of keeping your nose to the grindstone.  Even co-
dependents have been known to fall into the multifaceted nadir of reflecting
on their reflections, memorizing their memories, decanting their decadent
memoirs to a blankly unanticipatory audience.  The decline in the auto-erotic
strangulation is unsettling.  It bodes ill for humanity, for the clip-joint
barkers who will do just about anything to attract people to the pulpits of
fundamentalist bearded biblethumpers linked to the intrauterine follies!  But
they won't get away with it, oh no, those bible sport-bottle fanatics, oh no!
They think they're just so smart, popping up the little pop-tarts, washing
them down with Ninevah Cola.  Look over there, at the prophylactics glued to
a little Christmas tree, like some holiday health expedition into the depths
of holiday depravity only known to seasoned dendrochronologists in the far
counting-houses of the Kingdom.  But nowhere could we find a princess with
supersensitive buttocks to reset the dipswitches on the old PC AT commmittee
on their proper course -- after five years, we'd grown sick of obstetricians
with dirty fingernails and filthy personal hickeys on places other than their
necks.  Otherwise, the old man was predisposed to like Miss Hetherington,
despite the vaguely sweet odor she exhaled after each puff from a burning
yam.  Miss H. had spunk.  She had tentacles, and a beak-like mouth that
inflated to mammoth proportions wind was westerly.

But when the widening investigation revealed nothing, the lawyers had to
concoct a case from spiderwebs and pubic hairs.  And where did they get those
puppets made from socks that they used, as ventriloquists do, to pretend they
were unbiased and bipartisan?  They visited the underworld, where they came
from in the first place.  Henry Hyde's hair explosion was striking fear into
the hearts of Democrats, Republicans and recovering barber shop quartet
singers.  Especially the drooling libertines who remember their own "youthful
indiscretions," some of which happily involved two sheep, a bottle of ether,
and a full mood-changing jar of moonshine and TCP.  Locked in a standard
missionary position, two of the lawyers wondered what all the comely nature
of the infra-red camera capturing every slurp and stroke, for later
publication in the Nabolom Bakery Archives with filo data and reconstituted
donuts of dubious pedigree, painstakingly blended and analyzed by blind nuns
of the order of the Eternal Damnation in Descending Order of Importance.  "We
hold our Saints in high regard," asshole, he thought.  Only idiots ascribed
the divine to items of cerebral activity.  "It's in your heart, not your
head," she insisted as she puked violets into the revolving door of the Saint
Francis Hotel.

"Nice lady" thought the doormouse, pouring another ten cups of tea for the
mad hatchetman, busy sharpening his arsenal of illegal number 2 pendants,
snitched from corpses he'd dedesigned himself, using Beanie Babies as models.
 However, later he obfuscated visibily, using the Beanie Babies to actually
design his own self, whereby his double was wide awake and was caught
interviewing famous authors in a special new kind of WELL conference.  Ma
Barker was his first guest, bringing a new meaning to the phrase "motherin-
law.  Still, she was wearing a very fetching little red polartec wrapping
tool with all the extras.

But as Howard refused to hand over his paintbrush to the contractor, Ma
pulled her weapon, a .38 caliber recalibrated to shoot tranquilizer darts.
She got it from a man who decorated Volkswagens with glass beads for a
precarious living.  Uncle Sam has plans for me, but I've got something else
in mind so I'm expensive, but easy, so it's really up to your Aunt Sue.
Collector of glass beads, Beanie Babies, darts and scantily-clad blow-up
dolls that your Uncle Mortimer obsessed about during his long feverish days
in the US Senate, giving blowfish a bad name in the process.

Addressing the poison lobby, he assembled his own biological weapon from
scratch, by actually scratching and sniffing an ad in _Mad Magazine_, the
terrible odor persisting no matter how many times she scrubbed with
disciplined movements and practiced gestures the whole hardy boys fan club
knew as well as they knew the secret handy pack of extra large anti-bacterial
wipes, an essential tool in performing emergency road surgery.  Newspaper can
be considered sterile in theatrical circles, but when it comes to total
reconstruction of various body parts, nothing can beat brown toilet paper
rolls soaked in lye, then rinsed 5 or 6 times and pounded flatter than a
halitosis-sufferer's first and only date, who, upon being revived, orange-
juice soaked but none the worse for wear, bets an organ-donor specialty
zipper that the orange juice will magically transform him from a meek, mild
98-pound weakling into a sand-kicking, Charles Ataturk, who, as a kid was
snatched away from his twin brother, and was raised by Mennonite missionaries
to become a Christian solderer of iconoclastic historical figures, especially
those with zip-guns in a high-school cast production of "West Side Stop the
World I Want to Get Off!" in which, Anthony NewMedia re-cast the whole thing
with IRC bots and then promoted it by email to every AOL user, everyone who
ever posted to USENET, and the preposterous body of people who've ever used a
lickable stamp.  The unexplored depths of Henry Hyde's self-righteousness
provided our heroes with exploding dildos and vibrators with the Stars-and-
Strips only Texans could imagine, or even acquire, since they had been banned
south of the Masonic temple and north of the Mormon Tabernacle, leaving a
narrow corpulent cop searching for unregistred acts of fellatio and cunningly
disguised petit-fours lying on the plate that had been left outside in the
rain.  All the sweet cream icing flowing down!  I don't throw up when I think
about it, although I did hear that Richard Harris only got paid a few bucks
for his day's work, and the producers offered him italian swiss colony wine
which hardly made up for it and forced him to obscure his real purpose in
coming to the conference: to find a way to extract rubies from pineapple
juice, a technique pioneered by that great humorless alchemist, down on his
luck but free of prescriptive ills reconsidered his longtime plan to have his
dog's name tattooed on his foreskin, considering its illustrious pedigree,
so, mastiffs and terriers and retrievers, even wiener dogs, are all sporting
theological collars, which gets them the best seats in French cafes, but they
still get served the vin ordained minister, who is, let's face it, rawther
tasty.  Or at least Elvis-sweat martinis are finally out of fashion.  That
stuff tasted like dymo tape seethed in oyster sauce and gravid mare's urine.
Not entirely pleasant.  But then the attention span of the average reader is
not up to the chalice of mare's urine or the blade of walt's grass, bound in
leather with a studded dog collar and a wistful look, sugar coated to mask
the pungent taste; one that was reminiscent of overcooked brussels sprouts
dipped in chocolate. But hey, what's this fly doing in my soup?  Waiter!  Who
put this objet d'art in the microwave?  Of course you have a microwave, even
if you don't admit having a kitchen. I still don't know what happened to that
poodle you kept in the cupholder in your SUV.  I may have put my commuter mug
down a little too happily, delighted as I was to have lifted the keys from
your pocket while you snoggled the natives, thereby diffidently diffusing all
claims to superlative cocksmanship.  You spoke: "My old-age penitentiary idea
looks like it's gonna SAIL through the Junior Legislative morass making
mounds of money for many miserable sons of bitches who don't deserve it and
wouldn't know a beatitude from an attitude.  Why don't these lost souls get a
fucking road map and start trying to find their way to Nirpleton street where
the party's under careful review and cats are swirling around in the
whirlpool bath and the dog is giggling in the corner.
  

    <scribbled by martyb>
  

    
No wonder the dog is giggling.
  

    
nice one!
  

    
Wheee!
  

    

Glorious.
  

    

Seems to me there ought to be a way to convince the world to incorporate a
mission statement into every order of takeout Chinese because that would be a
most ingenious way for us to get word out to the impolite masses in Marin
County basking in the glory of their SUVs, stoking up their methane-powered
cell-phones, and dropping off 2.3 children almost every morning -- and what
happens to the on those OTHER morphine-addled days, when the children are
smashed on Ripple and the dogs half crazy with tail-chasing.  Mostly their
own.  Fortune cookies might qualify as diet food in YOUR culture, but as for
mine, aspirin and oregano won't get you high, but they'll keep you from
having a heart atrophied from lack of trying.  Meanwhile, for surer results,
rely on cocoa powder, loaded into a combination snowblower-lawn spray, for
browning meats of all sorts.  Deafened by high-pitched whales, she retained
an irrational fondness for small cetaceans, thoroughly abjuring the larger
ones, and starting a sperm collection under her mattress, safe from prying
eyes.  She told her mother it was irresponsible to spend days on end locked
in her room: "But I don't care!  You nested for decades to produce my
brother, and he was worshipped by a cargo cult from the wilds of Bolivia (or
was it the Oscar Wildershnoff version with which we are more familiar?  A
classical pin~ata of the Mexican type is called for, preferably one full of
sweetheart soap, but I digress). This cult was started by a former plumber
freaking out over the way things have changed in his industry since he begged
for his first job in the mail room of the Acme Electronic Patagonia Climbing
and Hiking Stuff catalog.  He pulled out his American Expired from too much
time in the stuff bag without supplimental oxymorons getting in the damn way
all the time while I'm trying to improve my diction by reading aloud to the
natives.  They enjoy it, although they doodle terribly during the readings,
filling reams of paper with highly unlikely sexual acrobatics.  But who am I
to say you can't furnish an empty hut with the proper degree of style
befitting printing press manufacture AND haute cuisine?  Yes, it's unlikely;
but as we sashay through the runways of Paris and Milan, the photogs are agog
at the coprophagic character of the fashion business, where everyone hastens
to their dictionaries, only to discover that they have all preteen children
clamoring for attention at just that crucial moment.  Helsinki's runways, on
the other hand, have lovely Scandinavian models of deportment, allowing one
to deport and depart in style, confident that the baggage is also departing;
unfortunately, it's to another air-raid siren that we must listen, and rush
down into the cellar with altimeters and tuning forks to scare off the mice.
Meanwhile, Bob was sawing away on that same old etude, the one with a
chromatic scale in the microphone, hopelessly remote from any sense of time
or intellectual directory assistance operators who might conceivably resonate
to a frequency that would solve his dilemma: what key should he come in, he
wondered, having tried tonal AND modal varieties, but to no avail, he was
unsatisfied still.  Now back at the ranch, the cowpokes wuz gettin' restless,
'cuz who can rest with all that MUSIC pouring in over the transom?  Gotta get
up and do the dishes, who have been out all night galavanting with the
spoons, those bwanas have it all sewed up the minute they hit the floor.  The
romance of fine china obscures the real need for order among the crockery.
Those rowdy gravy bonbons take up so much space in the freezer, we had to
consolodate throwback 60s paraphernalia to make room for phlegm samples
collected to determine genetic relevance.  It was a signal from the aliens
running the SETI program that we should pack our suite keys and inflatable
prom dates and run, screaming, for triglyceride relief.  What with all the
good cholesterol and the bad chewing gum stuck under the desk, still fresh
enough to stick to the kneeling supplicants mewling and genuflecting for just
one moment of unpredictable yet thoroughly satisfying rage directed at them
by so-called Management Consultants, who had placed it there as a training
techno geek Nazi torture bacchanal embraced by Y2K Separatists and
Republicans, with the exception of slimy bastards who can't bring themselves
to tell the truth about anthropomorphizing newts.  Moreover, they never
bother to demonize the sand castle builders, in spite of the instructions
clearly postulated by the professors of Human Sexuality planted by Ralph Reed
to teach our children the dangers of consummating a marriage before you
really get to know each other.  We're recommending that young married couples
live together without sex for a yeasted bread roll, which when combined with
a nice chevre can fully satisfy the most discerning palindrome artist,
seeking in vain the ultimate irony, which has already been taken 'bout as fur
as it can go.  You'd think so, but in truth, eveready bunnies can take it
even further.  Why do you think that you see so man-like fuzzy critters going
'round and 'round and 'round and pingponging from one side of the road to the
other like ersatz chickens on accordion slide into a vat of boiling oil?
Next time, try the ice-pick-between-the-ribs routine.  Even, in an emergency,
you could use the old hatchet-between-the-eyes gambit, which is a bit obvious
but it works even when the hatchet's dull.  Just what those bunnies
defenestrated is hard to say, but I sure wouldn't want to be there for Easter
diorama, with the Rolling Stones rolling away the stone, and the Morning
Glory achingly unanswered again, just leaves me wondering what ever half-
assed tofu-brained bliss ninny could have wronged Princess Diana.  Oops, we
weren't supposed to talk about Jambands in here.  This is a literary-type
discussion, mostly, but Philologists are always rising to the occasion, with
a folk tune or a dissertation for any top-hatted hippie who loves Phil more
than any other member of the Grated Cheese Messenger Holding Company. But, as
they say, you weren't there if you re-memorized the entire Latin mass in your
local un-dead language, a regurgitation of all that is endless.  Besides, one
must find the trombone in the cheese dip before it goes flat, right?  Unless
you migrate with all of the other lemmings, we will be forced to take
drasnofel and prozac for the remainder of the in-flight movie, because some
joker replaced the film with "Con Air", and now the passengers are pancake-
like in their empty hearts and calories, free from anxiety but aching for
unconditional love, as we all are.  For what is the purpose of express
elevators but to take us full speed directly to the top, leaving no tired
children shrieking at the thought of one more visit to another police
station, there to be threatened with red licorice whips and sent upside down
to the hanging gardens of Sing Sing, under the pleasure dome at Six Flags
over Hades, where good little children are revolted by exiled Marin Country
aromatherapy and reflexology extortioners showing off their industrial
stength crystals and chipping away at the angst of the peacock-feather
wielding arthritic welders who built the place to begin with before it was
turned obliquely to the sun, so that one wing gathered more heat than the
other while the wax melted slowly, drip by drip, until the feathers began to
slice the talons of the giant eagle, waiting silently, patiently, as the
smaller rodents made their way hastily back into their holes and the lard-
laced pie crust flaked prettily on the lace cloth.  But all was not lost, for
Henry quickly pulled out his credit card, slapped it down on the counter and
shouted, "Drinks for evil-doers everywhere!" Then he grinned slyly and
slinked off into the shaved ice stand just south of the beach in Maui.  You
remember, where creatures of the night and creatures of the day exchange
grunts as the shifts charge toward one another in a sweaty, frenzied
imitation of specialized sensory organs that can detect the presence of the
opossums roasting slowly on the hot blacktop.  Yum, yum!  Roadkickingly
delicious!, he said to himself as he carved off another humor-soaked chunk
and began to giggle uncontrollably, wheezing and guffman (wheezing had once
been known as 'Sneezy', but changed his name in the seventh year of the war
with Babylon, after the fall of Persepolis).  In those days, the entertainers
mainly got by with jokes and songs of snide innuendo directed at old
Hammurabi and his cloying minister, Floyd the Harp who, in a later life,
opened the first casino installed in anal cavities of albino gerbils.  Egress
from the casino was problematic, however, so the idea was quickly abandoned.
"Why should we ever go home?  We can drink for free under the craps table, so
long as the lady in the sequined evening gopher doesn't find out about it,"
said the former croupier from Insider magazine, picking his teeth with a
sterling silver toothpick.  Now, on the other helium balloon, they all hung
out over the edge, considering whether to juxtapose the noun and the verb,
but too much like Yoda they soundproofed the entire area, fearing the worst.
Everyone was well aware of Yoda's idiosyncratic mood swings.  First it was
"Old Blue-Eyes," then "The autist formally known," then who knew whither the
wind blew, Yoda being as tempestuous and mercurial as a teenage girl in
spandex, doing her damnedest to drive the boys into hormonal overtly bi-
sexual behaviour.  These boys hadn't a clue as to what hit them, hormones
being what they are, so they set off on a quest to discover their true callow
baiting, knowing that Gans would say "spandex"... yes, I blame Gans, twisted,
sex preserved in a formaldehyde-filled jar, sitting on the shelf next to
Einstein's brassiere, which he earned the hard way by seducing Magic Dick
from the J Geils Band.  Afterwards, picking hitchhikers up on the road to
Vegas, he began to contemplate life as a septuagenarian Veteran of Foreign
Wars.  The hitchers had primo shit; they missed the turnoff to Sin City &
ended up on Highway 61.  "Now what?!?" exclaimed the driver, perversely
optimistic, given the giant, fire snorting beast with hoofs of steel rapidly
bearing down on them from beasts.com.  "Hey! Who ordered this dill-crusted
thumbsucker?" George demanded, sotto voce.  "Y'all knows I like SWEET
thumbsuckers."  Meanwhile, back at the ranch there appeared another winking,
blinking, nodding menace from mothergoose land, showering the landscape with
nods and bivalves.  The nods were OK but the bivalves were rather painful.
"Ouch!" hollered the ranchhands as they rubbed the sore spelunkers' knuckles
(spelunkers had dropped in from who-knew-where, asking for directions to Hwy
61).  Originally, it was pretoria, but the march was too long on the
underground railroad, so they hit each other over the heads with stalagmites
and called it a day, but not before their mothers came by and fed them deep-
fried octopus, calamari rings, abalone, clams, and cigarette butts, with a
spicy melange of olive oil and balsamic vinegar.  Meanwhile, Yoda and
Einstein had struck up a convenient state of shared denial; no they weren't
in a gazebo in some stunning natural setting, but rather in a ramshackle
perspiration-free t-shirt hanging on the lincoln bedroom wall, a souvenir of
a fundamentalist Wesson party that was thrown just after the 1992 email from
Bill Gates that astounded the world, saying he pretended to be a ruthless
capitalist but deep downside he's really a sensationaly sexy transgendered
and regendered, totally speed-blendered free-spirit, barrier-bustin', hyper-
computatin', titilatin', crazy and bewildered guy, who's just trying to
figure out how to control this thesaurus program that got instigated when one
of the programmers was up to her eyeballs in cocoanut margaritas, the saucy
wench, also known around the office as the kind of gal who goes do-gooding
around the neighborhood, promoting evershine (TM), the only polish you'll
ever need!  For your car, your floor, your shoes, your hair and nails, even
your cocoon so your butterfly will slide right out on the dot of mid-
continental rift valley, opened by one too many numbskulls with large
ambitions and small reserves of invigorating herbal extracts, made fresh
daily for your enflamed appendix, Article XIII, Section a.2, covering issues
such as maladies of the lower GI truck suspension; a difficult vehicle to
repair, since spare parts haven't been available since the Korean Wax Museum
Project, which consumed copious quantities of various waxes and resins, since
it was completed without benefit of pignose amplifiers.
  

    
help! I nearly choked on my drink reading that.

Who wrote "half-assed tofu-brained bliss ninny?" Applause!
  

    
That could have been two or more people, given how the game works.
  

    
It is a pseud waiting to happen, for sure!
  

    

Is it getting warm in here?  I can't quite put my finger on it, but email is
starting to drip right off my screen, which never happened between the right
and left sides of my motion-impaired offspring, but up and down movement has
never been a professor's strong suit.  In fact, she usually prefers the side-
to-side action when she's reclining in her watery front yard and reading the
reform school manual over and over again in search of the juicy parts lurking
between the limericks the editor had put in the margins of this innocent-
looking tome.  Nomenclature aside, we should remember to look to the
passenger list and see if anyone really IMPORTANT is on there, because you
never know when you might find yourself sitting next to Rod McKuen on the
tuna boat to nowhere.  But what does it matter, when all the boats, not to
mention the cars, buses, SUVs and even the velocipedes are clamoring for
union representation?  "One vehicle, one vote!" is the rallying cry.  And
then the small animal lobby clamors to be heard, and everyone insists that
the lobby should be enlarged to accommodate comfy marinated canapes for the
passing salmon and anchovy.  But the buttered sand dollars have simply got to
go.  They can't possibly be healthy for the manatees, who have been calling
for vegetarian fare with little sucking power of their own so they had to
call in "Hoover," the all powerful device that could succeed in providing the
marble armchairs required to march across the flannel avenue, without getting
noticed by shrimps prejudiced in favour of wolverines in tutus.  But this did
not matter, for already the crowds were gaining ground on the escaping
crustaceans.  Crab-walking is stylish, but indeed, difficult to do while
applying licentious limpets to all and sundry, incuding many innocent
passers-of-gas carpetbaggers who loll outside every McDonald's on the
boulevard.  It's enough to make you sing country and/or western songs to your
mother in the hospital, although before you started singing she wasn't in the
hospital but wanted to be put under IMMEDIATELY once you launched into your
wheezy Lord, my baby left me with a plate full of cold scallops, and a broken
heart, yeah, she done legitimized the unfortunate practice of downsizing of
my love.  In the meanwhile, the runaway shrimps cunningly eschewed the chorus
and launched straight into the second verse of In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, which
somehow transmogrified into La Vida Loco Weed, a film based on Carlos
Castaneda's series of books that became an instant hit among primitive
vertabrate species.  "Z" on the other hallucinated military police rioting,
surging into the anti-crustacean crowd, flogging them harshly with tuna
steaks and haddock fillets, while from the podium, Margaret Thatcher,
champion of outraged middle class decency, waved hexadecimals over her head
in an approximation of the famous dance of the sesame seeds.  Next door, it
was a different story, as flocks of feather dusters and french ticklers
whooped it up in the old train station just as the train was about to leave
the status-seeking social climbers behind in a flurry of dot-com venture
funny-faces aggressively thrust through the windows of the training in
anticipation of the upcoming layoffs at MicroSmurf, which will start a nasty
chain reaction leading to Madonna being simultaneously elected to President
of Microsoft and President of the Universe, unlikely as that may seem, but
there are those who have seen her velociraptor, which she keeps the bathtub.
She's had run-ins with the Humane Society concerning this exotic pet, but it
hasn't prevented her clinging to some favourite ante-eaters, just for the
occasional masturbatory excursion into The Land Beyond, which she had always
yearned to serenade with her favorite coloratura aria from that well-loved
opera, Linguini Aglio e Olio con Gamberi, or was that what she ate later at
Girasole's -- grief, what a memory! -- I'll be foaming at the mouth any time
now.  Already the occasional walk belies the myth that his pitching is
infallible, but he still has the babyfaced look of his youth, before that
business with the frankincense and myrrh.  Who the hell ordered all that,
anyway?  Remember to tie your shoes and look both ways before cramming any
more hors d'oeuvres into your mouth, because the canasta-playing old lady
brigade will certainly have a few choice words to share with their
grandchildren once the air clears and we can all see who reversed the
settings on the flim-jam because now the smortajinker is not wooing the
googleplexes of Bene Gesserit witches whe expected.  Surely the awestruck
inhabitants of Dune are nervously awaiting the arrival of the worms heralded
by the Bene Gesserit, rumored to be traveling aboard the aforementioned
train, instead of being squeezed in the steerage close to the central fuel
tank of a Bohemian Rhapsody booming AMC Pacer, with Garth and Wayfaring
Wenda, zig-zagging the Blue Highways of Life.  At the next bust-enhanced
bimbo with her thumb out, they pulled off the road and threw open the rear
passenger door.  "Come in in," they exclaimed.  "There's plenty of rotisserie
chicken, cole slaw and beer!  Would you happen to have a moist token for the
toll gate ahead?"  She reached into her knapsack, and pulled the safety cover
off the eject button, having decided the bird wasn't going to make it back
for a graceful landing, her finger paused only one short motionless instant
before stabbing into the plucked and hapless fowl, scattering feta cheese all
over the cole slaw.  With both hands she grabbed a sixteen-wheeled semi-
trailer truck (the other two wheels having fallen off somewhere around
Podunk, Ohio, running over an armoured gopher fleeing a shrimp stampede).
Buggered if she would give way to a crustacean tide, she stamped hard with
both feet as she maneuvered across the road, careful not to swerve into a
group of Catholic boarding school girls, in full drainage, as their pubescent
hormones were launching a full-scale attack of acne upon their once perfect
fathers and mothers; they had seen the veil drop, and knew that we are all
mortified to be seen with our relatives when we're trying to act cool and
unaffected by the ever onward-pressing tide of performance artists with yams,
chocolate syrup, novelty condoms, small ant-farms, cricket cages, well-
memberships, and air-conditioned dildoes, nuclear-powered Cuisinarts, CDs
hand-engraved by child lamas, among other thingumajigs.  But sadly, the
pubescent wenches couldn't restrain themselves, and when Ricky Martin passed
through, they exploded into paroxysms of slavering lust, employing the air-
conditioned Dilbert cartoons as ice packs for their sprained ankles.
  

    
Another proof you don't need *500* monkeys ...
  

    
Oscar!
  

    

We've had a lot of fun here in the inkwell, interviewing a nice vacationing
couple from Minnesota, who are only down here for the Winnebago sale at Wal-
Mart.  They are very excited about the electric hairball removers that could
be had for less than a buck and a haven't sold out yet, despite a massive ad
buy and product placement in mouthwash bottles.  Trouble is, mouthwash
bottles' necks were kinda narrow, so people had a hard time getting the
product oiled properly, so it would slide right out of the motor home, onto
the highway, and over the Seven Mountains, where the seven dwarfs were
rumoured to plug their Christmas lights directly into the generators at
Boulder Dam, which let them light the mountain pasta and noodle factory they
founded with the profits of their illegal gambits, upon which they set out
with such remorseless zest, these vacationing Minnesotans in oily pursuit,
that atomic pile-drivers were sold out all the way to Texas.  Luckily their
quattro stapled back together in time to make the last ferris wheel at the
county fair.  But once at the kissing booth, they read the instructions and
discovered that they'd been doing it all wiggly for the last few years, and
now that the wretch they were supposed to kiss wore false teeth, it led to
disaster.  But during the blow-by-blow account of these dental misfortunes, a
curious whistling solution was offered, putting the pucker back where it
belonged, thereby solving the riddle of what it is that love is more than
just one of, and arguing that, if it were more, say a half dozen or so, it
would most certanly involve a trip to the drug store for some, uh,
"supplies."  And a stop at a police station, just to let them know what we
were doing and then it's off to Winona Ryder's Tupperware Party.  Personally
I'm very much interested in blue-glass bong she was using the last time we
partied together, but I'm probably confused, now that I think of it -- was it
Winona or Madonna, I always must summon courage before sampling, but there's
no way you could convince me that Madonna's dope is more docile than
Winona's!  After all, she has a reputation to uphold!  So, she imported this
stuff from British Columbia, not Colombia, so NAFTA appointees could try some
too.  Alas, they had their own so it's off to see the bastards writhe --
cochons! pigdogs!  I expectorate on their shitty grass, or should that be
grassy shit -- my goat ate the best of my stash, leaving me in a foul mobile
drifting about ten feet over the heads of the musicians, who were jonesin'
for some smoke.  Did it make them play Beethoven?  No, but they probably
would have for a snickers bar or a Twix.  Stoned musicians get the munchies
bad, and chordates are often found lodged between the softer layers of
volbonic acid, found only in remote reaches of Berkeley, leftover from tibia-
playing cavemen -- man, these Minnesotans were flying now -- and slamming
those bones together to create a joyous rhythm, passionately played at
Passover.  But what does that matter when there are children stationed at
every crossroad, as backup for non-Y2K-compliant traffic lactose guzzling,
furry-freaky little wing-dings, consuming mass quantities of a substance know
only as merthiolate!  Tastes AWFUL, turns your mouth an unpleasant color, and
doesn't even get you high.  But all the kids are doing it at all the best
parcheesi parties which frightens most parents who have never extended their
abilities to dish-mopping foreign substances from the tongues and palates of
their own chameleons.  In fact, the changeable lizards -- at least the chain-
smoking ones, often suffer from bad bratwurst, causing the poor culinary-
embarrassed lizards to change colors with alarming precision.  Scientists are
using the lizards to track the southbound migration of the Canadian Geese, as
they are suspected of smugly ignoring the other waterfowl who also travel
those flyways.  A snub-nosed Smith & Wesson revolver seemed to be the only
recourse.  But a Colt reposing happily atop pungent clover barely turned an
ear.  The mare, howitzer-trained, bomb-proof throwback to World War I blood
lines, turpitude inured and weary, slowly moved one hoof toward a clump of
peanut brittle, left over from several Christmases ago, and hard as concrete.
 How many teeth did he break on that one fateful bite?  Instead of counting
the teeth on the ground, he started probing the holes in his gums, from one
of which he extracted what at first seemed to be a seed, but which on closer
inspection he determined was a miniature device of some sophistication, with
a tiny television screen that at that moment was showing the face of Peruvian
reserve and stoicism during times of pestilence or health, poverty or heavy
drinking.  In a word, he was looking at the Inca prototype of a palm-frond-
strewn procession, reminding him of that little dried up palm-frond cross
still stuck in his dresser drawer at home, along with his ditch-digging merit
badge that he had earned when he was fourteen -- hot sun and sweat and dirt
all mingling into a filbert paste, into which he dipped his crackers and the
occasional stalk of chewy angelica, a treat that had his tongue sittin' up on
its hind legs, begging for Mary Tyler Moore to come over and sit on his
fermentation pot, whilst he readied the barrel into which he meant to pour
the brains of those hapless Minnesotans, even now sliding down the highway
toward Never Never Land, exit 17, just off the pike.  That's the same place
you'll find that saphire jewelry for sale from the back of a pickup camper,
right alongside fruit so far out of season it had to have come from surinam,
where they also do a nice line in toads, at least accordian toads -- there's
a big market for them right now and a website whipped together over a sixpack
of Jolt Cola (TM) offered them by the pensioner who now lives in a warm,
underground strobe-lit converted fallout shelter, for which he paid a cool
monkey in a tuxedo one hundred billion dollbabies he swiped from the
concession stand before he escaped from the fire into the skillet, and thence
to the pantry, where he found cooperating cockroaches, willing to work for
peanuts.  However, the radio station that he heard in his head was spewing
venomous right-wing Y2-Cray fourier transformation projections of greenhouse
gas accumulation, red bar charts with Apocalyptic implications and One World
confection bakeries, with sweets contrived from every grain known to mother
earth or father time.  A pity their pies were so fungus-filled, for that left
little for the foraging forest fieldmice, further following fetid flavours
forever flowing from favored far-away shimmering shoals of southern sea-
shores so the shingle-filled shopgirls slapping at their scaly sores shouting
Minnesota here we come agog with mistletoe and mischief, an happy times are
here agilely ambling amidst ambrosaic asters and apostolic anglers,
apoplectic over their treatment at the hands of the utopia-heads.  Froggy
recovered quickly from the initial shock, gathered up his bedding and headed
out to the choir loft, from which he commenced to sing, full and deep-
throated, "Love me tender, love me true, love me Oral Roberts, love me
Jesus!"  The congregation burst loose with a chorus of "Amarillo Blues" which
a mischevious altar boy had pasted into the hymnals, whereupon these good
god-fearing Minnesotan folk, believing they were being raptured, rose as only
people who haven't been thoroughly warm in months can rise, and built a fancy
castle in the sky using nothing but kind words and sweet drips of honey to
hold it together.  Later, as the wind came whistling through the truffles,
chocolatiers could be heard whooping it up around the back of the barn, where
they were grabbing a quick smoke before they folded the fud-projector and
moved on to their next appointment with bureaucracy.  Yes, it was time to
proceed to South Dakota, where it was rumored that a corn chip in the shape
of Ganesh, the elephant-headed god, had been performing miracles and the
government was trying to turn it into an excuse to buy more weapons.  But for
once, the electorate rose up and began speaking in tongues, to wit the old
familiar Hindu cry of "Ganpati Bappa Morya", which was odd, considering not
one of them had the least idea what they were saying, nor that it would be
familiar under other circular reasoning methods that always manage to put the
interests of the Reprobate Church of Future Sinners before the utopian views
of the  Manichaean Church, as they happily continued to screw their
parishioners both morally and financially by keeping their triumphant returns
secret from the vast silent masses yearning to be held accountable for the
actions of their ant-colony, which had long-since escaped and relocated to
the neighbor's r&r facility, next door to Thai Joe's, so they often caught
the strains of peculiar music on Grateful Dead tape night.  Thai Joe's in
Milwaukee, relocated from Cleveland, had built a solid reputation of salmo-
finnish cooking, but were finding reindeer nuggets hard to swallow.
Especially the the antlers proved a bit differentiated and not at all to the
liking of our hapless travelers whose digestive systems are not adapted for
such incursions, but by consummate luck, a Genie appeared, bearing Tums.
Those Minnesotans totally froze to the spot, until they remembered to call
their Deus ex Machiavelli, who was fortunately indisposed when they did
finally re-emerge from the time-warp and clock-snafu to find themselves back
in Minnesota minus the Winnebago, but barking at the moon soon became boring
so they went inside and finished reading "War And Peace: The Abridged
Version", only 400 pages, until they were exhausted from all the big worries
about what had been cut and where, so they set off to find a bearish
publisher who would agree to print a complete, annotated version of War and
Peace on a pillowcase so they could get some rest.  Theoretically, a glass of
warm milk would do the job, but we're lactating right now so that will do.
Besides, too much milk is not good for the sinuses, as the cows always insist
on hitting me on the head with their hoops, as they practiced whirling them,
three on each horn and one around each ankle.
  

    
What the hell were we thinking? I can't believe it!
  

    
but is it art?
  

    

Was it supposed to be?
  

    
In this conference? It has to!