Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
love it!! thanks <tnf>
  

    
That do have a certain beauty, it do.

<whistling in admiration>
  

    


Hyphenation 9


I.

If only it were as easy to decide which frog to dissect as it is to disgust
my Mother with another prefabricated meal that I took out of the freezer and
threw into the minimalist sculpture in my living room.  But hey, it's my
digs, and if mom wants to berate me for living this way, she can do it on her
own turf.

I slanderously muttered that she was the offspring of a multispecies union,
formatting another disc for the program to wipe her out of my memory, at
least until she plants some trees in the den and invites some squirrels in to
set up housekeeping.  I told her, "Mommy Dearest, your presence at this
funeral is not appreciated.  Mr. Bunny never liked your preposterously
gnarled features nor your supercilious attitude regarding his eating hastily
gathered pieces of bark, and a few shade trees down the road have naked limbs
to preen yourself with on a bad hair day."

Unfortunately, Mom has no habit any more, since she left the convent, so she
can't cover her hair, relinquishing any semblance of control over her
discolored teeth, her badly-dyed hair, her mismatched socks, her Ho-Hos stale
in their half-torn wrappers on the linoleum.  Even her mouse begins to squeak
in torment at this hard cheese, this focal point of many gazes, this unique
remembrance of things past, this stale and crumbling made-in-the-USA myth of
male magnificence.  Many a man may malinger mightily while moiling for mere
metal, but it's the regenerative power of Ni-Cad batteries that hold the true
anchovy sauce, while the port goes on the escalloped ventilators that spin
the wine into the yawning mouths of selected teenagers culled from the crowd
at the mall and taken to a spearmint plantation, where they are put to work
for resident tycoons bedecked with garlands of garlic and pearls.  The teens,
though, wear noodles, cooked al dente, on various parts of the body.  Penne
rigate is woven into a tough, rainproof outer layer, while the organism
secretes poly-wanna-cracker noises at every opportunity.  Once finished, it
launches into a brilliantly revisioned staging of "Tartuffe," set in the
modern-day White Hell, also known as Wall Street, where the moneylenders
option the future, trade the now and speculate in the undead.  It's a good
time to buy zombie puts, but vampire futures are redlined to the limit, and
Mommy Dearest can't decide whether that makes herpetology a viable commodity
or just another stillborn IPO.

To gather more information, I jumped into my Rover and drove her to the
destination marked on the map I'd seen earlier in my box of Cheerios.  "Up to
your old Trix again, sweetie?" I snarled.

"You're gnarly enough without the addition of those loops of greedy trained
ants ambulating 'round your neck as if you were some kind of ringleader in a
children's sit-com," she retorted.  And, for once, she had me.  Because many
young people, addicted to both sugary cereals and saccharin situations, find
themselves pitching in the major leagues before tearing off the correct
coupons.

This always leads to the following scenario:  A young girl or boy, dressed in
nice clothes, steaming hats.  Steaming the hats for the perfect final
countdown to the big day, when they finally grate the cheese everyone's been
dreaming of since Thursday.  In the mold of the crust they scratch messages
to pleading nannies, whose most unquiet minds give rise to nervous tweakings
of otherwise perfect pie crusts intertwined with buttercups.  Bright yellow
buttercups.  And, to make things worse, everything turned a bright purple
just as the flowers were oppressing the children in a most unkind manner,
swaying and ploughing through the playground    , tearing up everything in
schedules from 3:00 p.m. for the small ones and after 5:00 for the ex-
toddlers.

This sort of thing drives Mummy crazy.  "Halt!" she screams.  "Untie the
nanny!  Dress the goat!  Put down the flamethrower!"

Clearly, more spitball training is in order here.  Stand over the machine and
wait for the green light.  Put in three quarters.  Twist the upper body to
the left until it hurts, and then twist to the right unilateral disarmament
-- well, that's what Mother says.  Besides, morphine keeps everything from
hurting at all, and then how do you decipher any codes that are sent using
the same melanogaster?  Use more than one fruit fly.  Redundancy, that's the
ticklish concept I couldn't get across to my mother, who didn't grasp the
ticket tight enough, the wind took it away, and she was off the right side of
the page until a perspicacious layout person set the market value of the
Canadian dollar at $.75.  This type of insubordination has got to stop, do
you hear me?

-- <bud> <castle> <cdb> <gail> <lioness> <michael-martin> <neil-glazer> <rjs>
<soukup> <tnf> <warfrat>
  

    



II.

"Wrap it tightly next to the pinkest part of your body, sidestepping the
rules to allow your mind to wander, avoid telling."  Always avoid telling,
that's what my momentary insanity is today.  Take one paragraph from here, a
comma from there, cross a t and there you have another example of why editors
and writers should never be inside the car with the windows rolled up on a
hot day.

More of this insanity ensued and before you knew it, fluffy pink bunnies were
flattened in the middle of the road.  That big old trollop was reading
Trollope.  "Mo-*THER*!!" I shrieked.  "At least undo the psychic damage
caused by a lifetime of years gone by in a floating bordello".  So many years
of turning tricks for paper boys you have to fish out of the hedge later,
after hysterical screaming dwarves swinging from chandeliers ravaged
theatrical props used to decorate the production.  The show went on desperado
time, when we saddle up and ride hell-for-leather over the silk draperies
hanging helter-skelter from the middle of the ceiling fault line.

Attaching anything to a fault line can result in a cable from a distant
relative, informing one that arrival is delayed, until the delay is over, at
which time the arrival arrives, unless thermal conditions prevail that don't
perforate at the edges.  Mail in the bottom half with your payment, energize
the left half of the cylinder and revert to type under stress.  Mom said it's
inevitable, given how many archives of squarely-set architectural binders are
currently available inside the lower intestine until the air pressure halts
the formation of curlycue wisps of formica hardening in your duodenum.

Certainly, a hardened duodenum is a problem, but far worse is the extradition
treaty negotiated last week. Informed sources suggest that upper GI
negotiations have traditionally been easier than lower Grand Hotel
reservations to cancel in the event of illicit auction sales gone sour in the
final moments.  Usually, there's a way to tie these disparate threads
together with a brilliant phonetic assembly of linguistic symbols strung
together in meaningful writhing displays of neon-colored vowels and pastel
consonants fingering the notes very carefully.  As the strings are turmeric-
dyed, there will be considerable fading.  By the time everyone gets served,
it'll be time to clear the tables and begin the entrail reading part of the
evening, along with palmistry and tea leaping.  You've never leapt tea?
Neither have I, but I'm looking forlorn because after the tea is steeped,
it's too high for musicians to reach, so they usually wind up arranging
themselves around the base of the table, singing bass.  Mummy, of course,
sings tenor.

-- <bud> <castle> <cdb> <lioness> <neil-glazer> <tnf>
  

    


III.

After untying Roberto from the anthill, the posse proceeded to Salamanca by
charabanc.  "Mother, you mountebank!" I shrieked.  "This confounded entrail-
reading, tea-leaping varmint has got his teeth in the mutton again!"  Someone
else is going to have to explain this to Grandfather clocks imitating stolen
statues of time, ticking away the minutes belonging to paternalistic geodesic
dome builders, who obstinately refuse to hire wooly caterpillars, claiming
that they shed everywhere and the hair glued to the bottom keeps everything
from slipping.  Try that for the molecular attraction; it might explain a few
things, like how the walrus is I, or why telephones seem to know when you are
bathing, or what do I do when I hear whales whistling my name?

These are quips that only insiders can appreciate; those reading on the web
must continue for about a quarter mile until you pass a blue sign that says,
Adopt-an-Information-Highway -- these two milieus are currently, and for the
foreseeable future, sponsored by heroic groups of Deadheads who brave the
cold, rain and snow to rid the agonized auditorial archives of arranged Abba
anthems arrayed across amplitude modulated airwaves already aching from the
astounding ancillary alliteration accompanying altered atonal applause
assassinated by alliteration.  But, bud baby, buy me some BBs, before
beleagered bystanders berate by email, beetle-browed, brown-bowler-bedecked
Berkeleyans borrow bucks, or bohemian buttheads belie their beliefs by
belaying their bluster and bums cop cheesy chump change collecting collateral
coinage, contravening conventional corporate claims, deliberately delivering
defective devices to demanding distributors, who demand Dad demonstrate
definite decision-making deftness. Dearest dark lord, what do you expect me
to do about all this?  It's not my reality closing in on the center of my
brain, it's the sequence of events that got me from a nice quiet job in a
slaughterhouse to testes checker in the Grand Ballroom of the local VD
clinic.  Quite a distinguished CV I have, surely sufficient to qualify me for
the pregnancy test offered by Howard Hughes' minions.  Or is it?  Can we
really expect anything to carry the submarine firing torpedoes at the bow of
the sheesh!  Did you see that one go by?  It nearly blotted out the finish
for H9, unless someone sees fit to continue.  And we do.  Thanks, Bud, for
kickstarting this most important tool for oppressing the masses of non-
delegates to the unconventional method of creating essays that wither on the
vine without Prozac infusions or proper topic sensitivity to help alter the
tone and meandering, loopy sort of creole dishes, redolent with peppery
spices and other flights of fancy that took her away from the hummingbird
reaction, in which the nectar is sipped while hoved to and lashed to the port
side of the vessel.  The brigands leaped to and fro in frilly pink tutus,
ignoring the cries of the captive audience, now considering going overboard
but for the shovel is used before the rake in this project.  The compost
should be spilled all over the fuselage, for aromatherapy, so instinct takes
over immediately.  Flight is the primary focus of the winged honey ant.

Does Yolanda Martin love me, or does she hate me, I mean, I just can't tell,
but the way I feel about her, I could just extrapolate to the entire female
faculty and assume that not a single one of them has a brass fastener that
locks the fan to the axle.  A strict regimen of polymorphous perversity may
be the key to sucrose-induced mystical explorations, but if you add a little
fungus to the formula you can resent the fact that you are an astronaut that
stayed out in space a little too long.  That explains the rather large cyst
on your foc'sle, but your poop deck is another story altogether.  What the
fantail looks like sailing away...

-- <bbrewer> <bud> <castle> <cdb> <eurospiral> <hey-jannie> <lioness> <neil-
glazer> <ssol> <tnf> <zepezauer>
  

    


IV.

Co-ops really get messy when theater tickets litter the lobby.  Try using a
Vanagon to get across the Canadian Bohemian Rhapsody was one of the best
sonnets written by William Shatner.

-- <bbrewer> <bud> <mpk> <re-fertig> <tnf>
  

    
I love it. Thanks <tnf>, for the compilation. I'll work on my
addiction to this thing.
  

    
Hee!

Thanks, David.
  

    

That was the best hyphenation topic ever.  I stayed up very late Friday night
in a motel in Ukiah, concatenating the posts and divining the paragraph and
chapter breaks.
  

    
Little did I realize there were *chapters*!
  

    
David, your concatenations were quite creative and your divining was,
of course, divine!!  Thanks for pulling it together -- it all makes
sense to me now!!!  ;^)
  

    
That is lovely.
  

    


Would it be presumptuous of me to refer to this conference as a neophyte
writer's playpen?  Topic threads turning every whch way?  I know how that is:
but I find it totally revisionist.  Better we should don our party duds and
climb into our aeroplanes and fly over the town square at low altitude,
frightening the homogenized milk deliverypersons, as they deliver their
microbe-free dairy products from their horse-drawn carts to hounds and foxes
in the Virginia countryside.

These antediluvian pedants who sit hunched over their lavatories following
yet another night of overindulgence, raving and regurgitating their pickled
larks' tongues and candied elephant perplexities.  Yes, his head hurt, but he
dimly recalled the lady in the red driven rage of memories best left behind,
as she would have left her beanie-baby collection in the microwave from sheer
reactionary fervor, such as only a dyed-in-the-wool running dog can sustain
in the face of the ridicule, argument and disgust he inspires in hot dog
wrappers blowing in the infield.

As soon as the sun beheads the Dauphin in the tableau, we can go.  He will be
requited, no doubt, for losing his head over Po-Boy sandwiches with heaping
sides of fried tubers, hold the mayor's head in the boiling fat for as long
as it takes and then bring the bold fashion statement that occurs for next
year's debutante balls.  But hey, why bother?  Any old broque, finely
rendered in wet noodles will do fine.  Just set your sewing machine to donut
holes, fill them with chocolate sauce, and drench the whole mechanic with
your life savings for fixing something as simple as the denial mechanism in
your head.  Then, your mental health fully recalibrated, you can get to work
on that funny noise the translating machine, which hasn't worked right since
Buffy spilled her chondroiton-glucosamine "arthritis milkshake" all over
biff's lap and then attempted to blot it up with newspaper.

But I had my tricycle parked in the order lane at MacDonald's and some son of
a bitch PUKED right on the seat.  Two all-beef patties, special symbolism
fully intended.  Well let me tell you, that really chapped my hitherto
pristine lips, but with the application of Hello Kitty Lip Bleach, I'm now a
slick-lipped, luscious labia'd piece of woe-is-me.  Smack-a-roni is a new
entry in the "fortified foods" market that seems destined to father a new
trend of mainlining pasta.  Or just mix with water in a spoon and link the
president to yet another scandal, this one involving a Big Mammary Gland.
Not just one, but two, on the same peg-legged picker who fell off his stool
at the Kit Kat Klub, but when the paramedics argued that he should go to the
hospital, everyone around rotated on their stools, kicked their legs up in
unison and shouted, "Hi there, good lookin'!  Say, what's your simplistic
characterization of the issues in the presidential race?  Send any spurious
press releases to the media lately, homeboy?  Are you a media jackal?  Need
someone to read that to you?  Get your aspirations squashed in one fell
swoop?

Have your assumptions recalibrated or face the prospect of joining the Prozac
Army, good solid, American workers, not like those commie drinking sessions,
always so much more fun that the dull capitalist vegetables marinating in a
piquant salsa made from vegetables grown in back yards in Napa County and
hardly the kind of person you would want your daquiris blended by, unless you
were in a real hurry and had no tin snips to wield when the nasty beast comes
after you with his cornet of green ice cream.  But soft!  What licentious,
lustful thoughts run through my mind when I swirl cool creamy soft-serve into
a brass beer stein?  Is that allowed?  Will it consider the last person in
line?  After that, this place is closing in on me, and I'm feeling, oh, no,
I'm starting to feel like I'm going to the races, to see the ponies run.
I'll bet on one horse to win if you'll bequeath your grandiose moniker to a
more deserving ice cream venture capitalist.  After the IPO, you can shave
ice and load it with syrup and sell it to kids on the street, at least
undying love should be enough.  The more you ask of me, the more money I'll
charge you for going along with your depraved delicacies.  Whipping the kids
into a frenzy through sugar induced hysteresis loops, changing the polarity
to affective doldrums.  Beats Fruit-Loops or motility-enhancing treatments,
which is a roundabout way of saying "lazy is my baby, 'cause she's laying in
my arms tonite".  A blues ritual that someone ought to record on film for
posterity.  Is Les Blank anally retentive or merely some kind of digital-
phobic, grainy-film fetishist?  Is it true that garlic makes finessing
college entrance examinations a breeze, or is that just anaphylactic shock
that made you turn blue and stop broadcasting your message of redemption and
salvation to the peasants in thimble factories, as they toil to hand carve
each one just so rich sebaceous oils can be collected by dwarves in the
deepest forests of glowing orange spots.  These spots can be spread by
applying helium to the perimeter of each spot, then buffing out with a belt
sander and number two sandpaper.  Unfortunately, this also tends to tear a
howling baboon to bits with tiny razor sharp blonde hyenas, laughing and
chattering as they circle their prey, awash in the spoor from their lipstick
red buttocks and parachutes trailing behind their behinds.

Suddenly an aardvark burst from four different directions.  "Pull yourself
together", said the marshmallow, "I'm practicing for my role as part of a
s'more, and I neglected to telephone the chocolate bar to meet me here at the
finest example of baroque architecture in this particularly rough part of
town.  The Burghers are packing pistols under their powdered wigs, and the
Baroness wears poisoned shampoo vending machines.  Just a quarter for a
handful of blue gopher guts!  A bahhhhhgin!  And so good for your follicles
and fleabitten pubic areas that you'll rush downtown to get some more of this
stuff.  Of course the store is closed on Sunday, and the only other platoon
of divorcees is marching across the sandy beach, hoping the sucking sound
that is gathering volume isn't the labor market heading for Tijuana along
with personal assistants of the human and digital variety.  Sometimes it's
hairy and sometimes it's smooth.  A slight today, an insult tomorrow, and
next week it'll be firebombing the strip malls because they ruin the entire
experience of being a consumer in America toking on the drug of immediate
gratification.

"Love that shit", said the olfactory nerve to the taste bud.  "Is it good for
you, token representative of the counter culture", or are you faking and not
inhaling at all?  Well, whatever works for you, I guess; me, I have to have
the real thing eventually burn holes in my mind and turn the resulting
patterns into some sort of cheap but effective Rorschach telepathy together
in act or anemic cinerama surround-sound ORGASM the way you always wanted to
exhale in complete release after a massive, lung-bursting inhale of excreta
gathered from the total efforts of one day's patronage of the neighborhood
Taco Bell.  "Methane here!  Get yer AROMATIC INTESTINAL BYPRODUCTS!  RIGHT
HERE!  Sullenly, he turned toward the crowd, ready to hawk his water-soaked
remarks to the ground, gravely addressing the crowd assembled in the pouring
rain, with and extemporaneous plop of chartreuse phlegm, he implored them,
"Quick, afore it runs off to the sewers and loses the color, scoop it up and
feed it to the horses!  It's good for them!  No one will bleed violet
aromatic liquids if you're careful!"

But remember, thin is best.  The tendency toward obesity is almost never
fulfilled UNLESS, of course, you have some butter on your tortilla chips, or
you like to dip your bread in creme anglican, a nouveau-catholic confection
that will make you want to excommunicate your meal in a projectile manner --
there is no finer concoction for cleaning vomit from walls than shaving
cream.  Use it spatially, carving and shaping vortexes and rainbows with your
spittle flecked spectacles.  The ones with the tape on the bridge that you
put there to remind yourself that vision is a gift, and you should prevail
mightily against those buffoons on the right that demonstrate no vision where
my needs are concerned.  Why can't those bastards show some competency in the
way of the Inuits?  I underestimated your ability to recognize irony in my
tone, but somehow I need just one piece of the pie to prove my selfish
desires can be made true by a wedgie.  Thrust up the drawers into the
crawling dessert shadows, where it will communicate with various lifeboats
overful with terrified survivors of the great Titian-haired goddess, adrift
on an Ile Flottante the size of a folly bigger than Chicago.  This really is
nobly performed in the best interest of the children, dear.  We don't want
them to grow thinking that we breakfast eaters have anything at all against
hot lunches.  But a well-balanced meal at the start of the day is as
imaginary as a nekkid prospector, mining the desert of effluent in search of
something nutritious and delicious.  Nowhere in this water closet are there
any delectable powder puffs!  I thought that was a bon-bon!!!  No wonder it
tasted so chilly when I found it in the snowbank tonight.

On nights like this, the moon is mourning behind a veil of clouds, grieving
for the location I just can't seem to find, though I've been there a
hunkerin' down, layin' low, considerin' my next moo, since the last one had
no effect in causing the cows to come hopping across the hedgerow, teats
dashing across clear blue fields of bliss-inducing wildflowers, the sun
beaming from above like a proud fawn stumbling musically across the warm
meadow for the very fiddle tunes that have gotten people up on their feet and
dancing without regard for the prohibitions posted in large glowing letters:
NO DARK STAR may be played on these premises without the prior written
confirmation from the Authorities.  Who are the Authorities?  That's
constantly being debated in the hazardous waste dumps south of town.

Presidential candidates have bypassed any point of credibility, so what the
fuck are we waiting for?  Hold the electricity until it's built up enough of
a charge to jolt both Al and Dublin's citizens right into the next galaxy,
where they'll be grazing contentedly on leafy plants that provide all the
nutrition we need exactly where we need it.  Right in the ol' kasmir and
velvet interior of the pudenda.  A lovely and convenient lone prostitute
named Clare waits in the rain for heroic measures to save the life of her
god, Jasper, an unpleasant but loincloth-draped fellow typically depicted
holding his rather large periodicals that he subscribes to on a monthly
basis.  His favorite being the Co-Evolution Quarterly, of course, because
although he is a creation of higher beings, he adheres strictly to
evolutionary theory to exhume the remains of prehensile limbs that were used
billions and billions of years ago by necrophiliacs who depended on their
affluent standing in the community to avoid prosecution for this ever-
increasing War On Some Drugs that serves none but the "enforcement comedians,
falling all over themselves, shamelessly performing Gilbert and Sullivan
operettas on the lawn of the po-boy sandwich king, who usually is too
engrossed frying oysters to notice the mouse playing peekaboo from behind the
sugar candied and brandied pears.  Those are the jars that Uncle Earl used to
get his lip stuck on, but no more for hare krishnas (the ones who make the
brandied pears) are now lubricating the operational status and readiness
reports of our flag-waving, pattern making elves that make little bitty shoes
with those curled-up, pointy toes with bells on the tits of the stripper that
dances during the lunch brawls with fists, broken bottles, and shark fin
soup, a delicacy that makes quite a weapon when used by an extremely sloppy
eaters, drooling and projectile vomiting with great acidity.  Once splashed
with this kind of effluvia, it's best to strip down right then and there and
begin screaming your head off, "I am Puke Man, I am Puke Man".  That'll
generate a whole line of people doing the Hokey Pukey right along with you,
but if there isn't enough vomit to go around we'll have to genuflect, bow
down, or do whatever it takes to have enough spackle to cover over all the
holes left in the walls after the camera buffs get their shots.  Just one
roll of finger-lickin' good greasy, fried yumminess and it will be time for
moron!  Can you believe that retarded boy actually might wind up being
prevented from voting under the new rules proposed by the retard himself?
Total synaptic failure and neural depletion from yeast infection.  Who'da
thunk it?  It turns out George has blinded the electorate with a finger in
the eye, whilst picking our political scabs with the help of Dick Cheney, his
fellow oil whore, ready to strip naked to keep any more ballots from being
coerced out of the hands of unsuspecting alzheimer-impaired senators and
congressmen, each more craven than the old guard they displaced.  The
downward spiral in statesmanship and degenerate behavior by politicians of
all stripes began when two apes fought over the same piece of food.  Not much
change in a milieu where everyone is always touting how much they will change
those filthy underwear, my'gawd, how long has it been since yarn was
invented?  It's gotta be a couple of minutes, at least.
  

    

oh my!
  

    

Hahahahaha!!
  

    



Topic 96 - Hyphenation 11

No one knows how this election debacle will be resolved, but even the
weatherpern has added "chad" to his vocabulary, announcing that there might
be a chad bit of rhetoric flying around the ether when the paternalistic
bastards stop their whining and get on with the business of governing this
cornucopia of autumn's riches, gorgeously arranged in a style reminiscent of
brown daubs of some sort of earth substance. I picked it up on the bottom of
my sheep when they slipped in the muck. And it's sooooooo hard to click on
these links that move around the screen, especially when the screen itches so
bad I have to scratch my glass. A spray of blithering idiot pepper gas spews
out of my cybercafe screen to let me know that my tiny cup of latte is empty,
and a new cup wil be downloaded for a charge roughtly equivalent to the gross
national product of Bolivia. I mean, without all the coca leaves. No wonder
they needed a submarine to brain-dead box of Republicans to cool their jets.

And yet, why use a submarine when you can easily get a pack of lizards to
carry worthless cargo, slowly but safely, all the way to Presimential
inaugurities, as specified in the 'Merican Constitution, interpreted
according to itself, per the wishes of the voters of Floridia, by the
President Select, Whoweverthehell runs out of lawyers last, and we all know
that by the time that happens piss will be poured out of a cowboy boot by
Dubya to prove his interest in the beer industry.  MURRICAN beer, of course,
'cause implications from imbibing the foreign stuff are just too wild to
cohabitate across overcrowded, dirty-hot urban jujubes, all stuck together to
make one chewy glob to pop in the motor of Shrubya's pickup truck, the one he
plans to haul his furniture to the obligatory bonfire, to fulfill his dayly
quota of greenhouse gummy bears.  The man eats so many of the darn things,
his brain has turned all soft and sticky, tho his doctors can't figure out if
it always was that worm holed or just got that way recently from all of the
boring long words that kept popping up in it. But who will tell the different
arbiters of style which way things are going to go in the fumigation of their
closets.  On the one hand, getting rid of moronic columnists who lurk there
in search of tidbits they can use in thoroughly illuminating the issue with
their own peculiar light. A certainty in this matter is that Americans are,
by and large, weird. Belgians, on the contrary, are just inscrutable. Think
of the joke Rene Magritte plastered all over the face of an inconsiderate
businessman, who stepped on Rene's toes while he was painfully absorbed in
urinating on the steps of the Plymouth dealership down on Broadway -- aka
Oakland's Auto Row.  A potent mix; cars, Magritte and piss, but art is as art
does, which  in this case seems to mean, "Art obscures the face with giggling
teenyboppers, all disguised as an apple, hovering in spectacular formations,
all with their dresses over their heads, accompanied by burning turtles,
looking surprised at the sudden transplantation from theatre nuclear weapons
to logistics. Even the Osprey descended too quickly to continue to support
life. That's the chick who stole my warwick street map and replaced it with
one of Bud's ex-wives, fuhcrissake. You know, the one with the reclining love
chair, who allways insisted of having foreplay with a balancing act
consisting of fourteen russian gymnasts, complete with flat pancakes
uleavened by yeast inflections spinning unraveling balls of pfleghm on the
noses of several tiny reindeer as they struggled to lift off from the roof of
a bozo filled rooming house. Each bozo room stuffed with preternaturally tall
juveniles who were hoping to play Apple Bonkers in the live-action version of
"Yellow Submarine" that a youth theater group was morphing into a long
motorized banana, starring the next "big thing", Darfner Sturdevant, that
charismatic Swedish rapper and former street crawling performance artist
whose claim to fame is that he once sneezed near a reindeer-drawn sleigh and
used his cold and red nose to gull the neighborhood kids into thinking he was
connected with Santaria.  Of course, he never sacrificed a chicken in his
life, though he did behead a modem, pluck the cards from the innards and fry
it up in a frenzy of hummable melodies that invaded his dreams but remained
elusive in his waffles, maybe under all that syrup or under the side of
banners spanning the street, illustrating the need for more intense clicking
to timpanate the modemmmm's humidifying effect on pipes in general. The most
efficient method of collecting user information, click-thrus, credit-card
numbers, finger-prints, and genetic samples for use by industry and gonad
deprived heretics with prehensile deliberative skills such as those of the
highest court of the landlocked penquins, suited in black with white bibs and
the eyes of those suited to a colder cliche-ridden viewpoint on life. But
that's not what I mean. The point is that under my bed is a big, green, red-
eyed monaural record playing system, but nothing to play on it because the
technocrats have decreed that digital is the only acceptable pronouncable
means of listening to organized groupings of prerecorded socialist anthems,
although it is rumored that new technologies are especially itchy when first
applied, but you get used to it, and pretty soon it's just like wearing a
comfy pair of old snow globes in your sweater, so when you're in the back
seat with the capitalist pigs while the proletarian driver speeds down side
straddled on the hammer and sickle, hemorrhoids howling to the morose sound
of the old man rasping and wheezing as he sentences his paragraphs to hard
labor in a 1980s era word protection racket. A few bucks a week to the right
guy, and all the wombats and flying geezers in the world won't stop the flow
of automatic writhing, groaning, groping, ecstatic exaltations of the last
and most permeating smell of this dead topic. Wonder where everybody weird is
hanging out?  Maybe we can flush 'em out with a few well-intentioned people
handing out leaflets proclaiming inkwell.vue to be the home of Satan in
cyberspace.  That'll en rich the discussion and bring us to a new depth of
underwear caught beneath the door and ripped the panther's tail right off as
he dashed out.  No one thought you could slice the trinity four ways and
still make it work, but recognizing the Fourth Third as the One and True Way
to Helena Montana, the City That Knows Cow, that High Desert Destination for
transvestite trappists and traveling therianthropic thespians, tootling their
trumpets, tongueing terrific tunes to torrid Harlequin-inspired insipid
lyrics written by starving wrens preparing for their transoceanic journey to
the land of noodles hanging limply from trees in the rain. A custom begging
bowl, suitable for large meals, comes in handy at times like theological
determinism can be comforting to the weak.  Indeed, someone's attempt to hang
a rhetorical u-turn in the middle of a senile dementia episode is another
example.  However, to return to theater in the middle of Act 2, especially
when your seats are front row censored by the imbecile with a gigantic hat
who refactored the code into unrecognizeability, without any regard for
theory, practice, the past, the future, the present, the wishes of the
coroner to keep the tasty bits and roll the rest up in a bale of hay, for the
horses, of course, or any general malaise arising from repeated exposure to
the byproducts of equine divine love of a horse of a different cortex, whose
brain had been diverted to compensate for power losses in Calcutta, where a
monumental battle between former lovers Siva and Kali has renegade commodity
traders up in arms against the dayly cut in pillage and radio reception. The
best reception is usually in the vacuum inside tourist's heads.  The natives
are resting up between shows, and somone went out for a pound of liver for
the calliope, which refuses to play without its precious liver oil passing
through the tubes and pipes of this wonton soup making machine; it's amazing
what people will do for good Chinese fonosonalinguagrams, known in some
circles as the dreaded fortune cootie, burrowing in the sweaty parts for
small coins, but not verifying the existence of pockets before you start
rummaging around in piles of chocolate-covered futons, searching for the meth
you left there the previous week.  "I've been sleeping entirely too westerly
for too long", he said. My nocturnal Feng Shui is all fubar, and I have to
stay awake until I can get myself resonating a different frequency.  Maybe if
I ate this tuning focaccia, that tasty bread that gives a middle C when you
bifurcate the crust with incisors, and then rings a solid 440 A wheat
bolstered, when toastered, blast of tone that sweetens the pot, although we
all know that too many cooks spoil the brothers fun when they go filluping
along. Meanwhile the snark was a dot com reject, just barely scary enough for
the average investigator, trying to figure out what the kids did with all
that cash, and what about the receipts for all that cream or sugar for the
caffiene that's gonna be needed to edit this long winter's tale of
impassioned spurts of interest and spells of lackluster apathy that comprise
the local response to world events.  We couldn't even get 'em all to
regurgatate the Company line, that it was a lone shooter, and the man on the
grassy knighthood was conferred as a reward for great contributions in his
fiduciary responsibilies to those that held him by the bagel, with a schmeer,
please, and a slice of oncological biopsy proven to be belgian mad cow, and
hold the antrax, please. I don't feel parting the Red Sea was Moses' best
true love may be overrated, but at least it gives you something to hope for
when it's time to finish your taxes and pay the pizza delivery boy.

After all, it really builds one's appetite slaving over a caliper measuring
tiny loopholes for investment schemes which require sizeable offshore
accumulations of mineral deposits, some of which may prove vanity is a
socially acceptable chaise lounge, her bathing suit coley drapped over the
back, the suntan local color is all well and good, but these fake
cobblestones go too father because mother has eaten her share. Now she's
ready to shape her buttocks and tone her thighs, with this magnificent new
prehistoric goo she bought down at the Whole Foods Market.  Read the
warmongering utterings of the capitalist running dog leader of the  so-called
Free Western Division Frito Lay distributors convention, held last week in
Cucumber Valley, famous across the land for cukes in all sorts of shapes and
colors, in particular the Cuke Uke, that little four stringed wonder so
popular among the coastal tribes known as bass players. Stand up or play it
across their crotch, these string pluckers are testy sons of bitches, and if
they think you're making fun of theater absurd.

In fact, they'll use their strings to tie you up and haul you to the poetry
department of a major university whose name is never said out long enough to
establish a meter, let alone establish a reply to all of those who have
abandoned Hyphenation 11 for the game in words. Shurely shome mishtake,
offisher, replied the drunken pirate captain, brandishing his pen and signing
the proffered form with a frank admission that he had indeed been remiss.
But it's not the wallaby's fault.

It's never the wallaby's fault. At least that's what the wallaby always
stands on to reach the cork train at Heuston station. But exactly when the
wallaby's epicenter began to shake was a short, or indeed long, almost a
month, of lull in this topic.  It's sometimes hard to remember that it's
here, with all the other hullabaloo going on.  Why, I can remember a time
when the WELL wasn't hyphenated at all!  Bryan Higgins added hyphenation to
the default education of all lefthanders here, but finally granted it to
those of the redundant type typists with tight tights and tuna tortas in
their trousers, testing their teachers' telnet capabilities.

Curiously, the entire procedure was not all that effective.  When it was
over, the puppet was still in the White House, watering the other plants,
singing "Yankee Dog, You Die!" without understanding the subtext and ignorant
of the organization usually associated with the song by the media. Straddling
the largest of the potted plants, he began another session of tele-ttherapy
with his shrink, who resides in Tierra del Fuque Yew, named after a
mysterious series of lights that surround an old tree on an ancient mound.
Legend has it that if you knock hard enough on the hollow tree, an echoing
"FAAAAAAAAART!!!" will come forth (but then in Spanish), and then it will say
"Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown."  other classic lines from other motion
sick, gonzo journalisti ranting "The hog is out of the tundra and into the
partially frozen lake, which emptied directly into my soup."  Horrified, for
I had never before entered the sort of virtual world I now found myself
confronting, I removed my modem implant and was rewarded with a vile piercing
sound that led to me also jinx the smoke detector and the microwave oven,
both complaing bitterly anent the Palm Pilot's sudden discovery that it could
give imperious infrared commands to dang-all about itself.  The kitchen alone
was rapidly filling with muffled screams and the faint, rancid scent of
burning transylvanians.  What, morning already?  Close the flippin' drachma
window, we're sold out!  And anyway, whoever thought it was a good
implementation of Outlook?  Waitress!  Two hot Javas and a double escape
sequence will prevent the latest virus from sending email to evil doers and
good alike. Both hands reached up and felt the empty slot in her head, but
only one fumbled for the next insert as she nimbly began miming the old
locked-in-a-box trick, anticipating cereal but finding living artifacts
buried deep in her subconscious. Alert now, she shuffled, rotated, and dealt.
 Three of flippin' Clubs again.  She tried again.  After fourteen Threes of
Clube and Teller's business card (she knew it was Teller's, it was blank),
she finally got the Four of Pentacles Reversed.  It was a reduction method,
for assimilating gyros into an ongoing program. She balanced the remaining
coffee in her system and opened the new issue of Tarot Readers Monthly,
looking in vain for the article she'd subjected to repeated dangling.
Bruised, and out of line, the magazine edged to the open window and screamed,
"Get your fingers off my backpedal, you morons!" A cat across the street
yowled in pain and frustration as the window opened even wider, causing a
hurtling mass of peanut butter to splat in the cat's face, puzzling everyone,
because a marimba player beat the rhythm. Beat the rhythm. Beat the record
for Not Being Invited to Recording Sessions Without Actually Being A Banjo
Player.  "If I had only learned accordion, I would be Brian Eno today," he
thought, taking a long drag on a short ciggie and then dousing it in his
coffee mug.  "Or Neanderthals. All the good jobs are taken by neanderthals.
There's just no place in this world for your average guy anymore." He waddled
away slowly, a slight trail of slime oozing out of the tip of his third
tiara, acquired when he was crowned King of the SimpComps, down at the j.p.'s
office in Reno.  No place, he thought again to himself, for the average . . .
what was it he'd said?  Gay?  Goy?   Goiter, that's what is was, and her
thinking it was some alien baby from the probing." The garrulous middle-aged
woman paused to sip a cup of lukewarm coffee. "And after the doctor took it
out, she kept yelling, "My baby, my balloon!  The dingo abstracts are lovely
this time of year."

The guide paused.

"Now, over here, you'll see a grouping of wild angel-headed hipsters, re-
enacting that classic poem by Allen Greenspan...

"Money...
Yes, MONEY.
Buy me ALL the King's Horses,
and ALL the King's Men.
Hell, buy me the KING.
I can do that, you know...

I control the world's money, and I control YOKO.  Give me what I want or I'll
turn up the voter booth chads falling, falling, covering everything like
wisps of glistening fairy snagged in fairy thistles on the side of Elf Hill,
struggling for seven years and a day to escape, until finally the Queen of
Asphalt bore down on them like a Mac Trabant, the special models made in 1987
for the East German market, notable for their three-inch screen and
"lightweight" mouse cast from a single block of iridescent toothpaste, for
that Ultraglowing Smith, who along with his constant companions Vitamin-
Fortified Jones and "Babe" the Blue Ox single-handedly dredged the Euphrates
and made the Great Rift Valley so as to have an outdoor latrine, yet for all
their Cinerama savoir-faire each one of them was secretly lonely, alone on
the slopes of legend, because they had not left the building with Elvis. And
who could blame the mobbing fans for tearing them limb from limb for their
sacreligious blankies?  Embroidered all over with images of Iain Banks, David
Hume, and the mysterious legend "Work Like You Were Living In The Early Days
Of A Better Nation?"  To say nothing of a circle of third world shamans,
chanting for Rain and US Aid. They danced slowly, carefully, so as to avoid
trampling the sacred canticles of St. Leibowitz, and his toroidal tribute to
the tutelary Embroidered sweater pattern, which in ten easy steps will allow
you or even your child to begin the exciting hobby of koine Greek.  But
remember.  This ancient language was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to
its creator, and neither its speakers nor its gods have received any royal
family genes. Limited as it has been, it has successfully survived centuries
with only the slightest of problems, mostly centered on the size of the Royal
chin and ehidipon Society Square Dance tickets, but who wouldn't pony up to
dosado beneath the shining pink brachiosaurs, forming a chorus line and, not
incidentally, the Gulf of Mexico, as they pounded out the beat of "One More
Saturday Night in the slipstream between fish-loving celebrants who walk the
pattern while Cavalier chorusters retrace their silurian ancestry.  Ontogeny,
as everyone knows, -is- phylogeny running a compiled graphical interface,
just as otolaryngology is philology's hardware department, and Orpheus is
Offenbach with a chokehold on reality."

You can see clearly from his opinions that the author was an ophidian,
probably a Merovingian, in fact, what with their bees and their descent from
the Holy Family and their fondness for Jerry's spacier solos and all.  Ruined
the whole neighborhood, really.  But that's all water under the bridge at
this pencils down when time is called. You may not ask anyone for hero-sized
jelly-babies to clear your ears while the Great Frenchman waltzes through
caverns measureless to mice or overachievers in the yardstick department.  In
fact, I once heard two penguins in drag complaining about how hard it is to
get pantyhose in their supermarket.  "Those bloody eggs!" said the first
penguin.  "Make you feel lilke you're kidnapping!"  There was a silence, as
the writer had provided no lines for Second Penguin.  "Perhaps something
about smelling of fish?" said the script auk helpfully, earning only a
withering stare from the director and a desperate crustacean on the lunch
board hoping to avoid the only options available to it at this point: death
by digestion, or a slower, crueler method involving drying out on a bed of
cheap wilty lettuce while waiters walk by, sneering, with their sommelier's
cups danube. Flowing blue giraffes elbowing green monkeys out of the buffet
line, while incompletely pickled shrimp demand more cocktails from the
waiting education board, whose detailed criteria of exactly what makes up the
contentless and politically correct curriculum, when bound, not only exceeds
the budget for schoolbooks but seriously outweighs the entire student
bastardy problem.  The voters made their intentions clear, but the bordello
workers came together to recreate ancient mysteries in the town square. After
digging a new root cellar, the madam had discovered that the house sat on the
ruins of  a temple that dated back to the steam Age.  Babbage Analytical
Engine components and bone chads littered the floor, and against one wall was
a Jacquard punch-card loom that had obviously been perverted from its
intended purpose.  The reek of rotting Joule-Coca, the stimulant beverage of
Victorian hackers, came from an ornate gasogene, and a pile of lemur bones
ritualistically inserted into the nostrils of the sacramental gummi bears.
Sour Brite Crawlers squirmed realistically out of  orifices and then all over
the body.  It was so dramatic, people stopped, jaws agape, in disgusted
fascination, as mimes re-enacted the ancient snack food rites on each other.
Seven! Eleven! they gestured, forming a line leading to the high pristess of
the California Raisin Advisory Board.
  

    
the ending is superb:

> It was so dramatic, people stopped, jaws agape, in disgusted
> fascination, as mimes re-enacted the ancient snack food rites on each
> other. Seven! Eleven! they gestured, forming a line leading to the 
> high pristess of the California Raisin Advisory Board.
  

    
Needs more paragraph breaks.
  

    

-fully one can do that on the fly while posting.

Meanwhile back in the playback par-
  

    
thenogenisis, a new hyphenation bastardization was sp-
  

    

Playback here, not hyphenation!
  

    <scribbled>
  

    
What castle said!


And by the way, as long as we're being meta for a moment, I would like to
urge some of our participants to be a little more attentive to the flow of
things.  The game works best when the sentences come out more or less
grammatically correct while the subject matter veers back and forth across
many realities.
  

    
There should be a warning -- DO NOT ATTEMPT TO CONSUME FOOD OR
BEVERAGES WHILE READING A PLAYBACK -- YOU *WILL* CHOKE!

On a meta level, being a new arrival who has been learning by doing, I
wasn't aware of the one-line rule.  I thought you just spun out the
story in your particular taffy-pull of a direction, then tossed the
ball to someone else with a -

Anyone want to stop me before I ruin our embryonic 13?
  

    
I've seen the dilemma in the group lymerics topic in <words.> too..  and in 
haiku topics.   The group composition art form is best when users pay 
careful attention and mimic the form, but it helps if there are not 
interludes of training or criticism.  They are not worth it.  

Better to go on, be precise, and hope you convey a reasonable sense of the 
rules, but not be finicky in the topic itself.  There's a little debate 
on what the rules are anyway, so it works out fine letting people 
decypher it, seems to me.