All posts by Licketysplit

What’s your tragic flaw?

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I am in the midst of an irresponsible creative writing project with my sister, discount the moose. I would love to explain, as I am now more sure than ever that I am just marking time until someone phones with a Genius Grant, but some of you milksops might steal the idea.

The term “creative writing” alone is enough to make my throat grow tight, as I associate it with all kinds of ridiculousness. I took a college creative writing class, and one of the group exercises involved plausible lying. We had to go around the room and offer two false biographical sketches and one true one. Most people lurched into the lies, giggling and blushing, “Um…one summer? I worked as a life guard?” No one could pick mine out, but I suppose I had the advantage of a completely bizarre childhood. Everyone thought the story about doing a screen test for a commercial for a chocolate company was true. They were taken in by my description of having to spit out the chocolate without eating it between takes. My true story was about getting attacked by a nest of yellow jackets, but everyone was skeptical until I showed them the scars on my shoulder. Those were actually from chicken pox, but what are you going to do?

I suffered my only other creative writing experience at the age of six. My parents were not big on activities for children save sitting quietly or hobbies and interests beyond “living off the land,” but one shocking day I was enrolled in a program sponsored by the county library. It was billed as a potpourri of creativity. For an hour we plucked the strings of child-sized violins, and then we did our creative writing. Here is the story generated by allowing a group of kindegarteners to shout things out at random: “One day, a bird, no, a peacock! Went down the hill. (What did he look like?) And he had oily, watermelon feathers. (Did he have any friends?) And he had a friend. And they did things. At the store. The end.”

Clearly my tragic flaw is that I am just like the little tapir who never got over his past. Oily, watermelon feathers will haunt me until the day I die. Also, during the “fine arts” portion of the potpourri, we had to draw a charcoal portrait of Michael Jackson. The teacher kept pointing out that his head had a perfect egg shape.

-xxoo

Earth below us, drifting falling

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I gotta stop doing hallucinogens first thing in the morning. I had this horrible vision that I got up and showered and dressed, like so many normal people do. My hair smells like papaya extract. Hmm, and so does my arm. Pretty great. And then I had coffee and set about the tasks of the day. I even replied to emails from clients, entered information into my address book, and started coding something. I only became enraged for one fleeting moment. I will even give myself a pass on that, because the target of my objection is like one of the little creatures of nature: they don’t know that they’re ugly!

Then I went outside and found a chipmunk sitting in the flower pot that contains my chives. Just keeping them warm, I suppose. I can’t wait until they hatch, releasing millions of tiny Monarch butterflies and pieces of confetti.

It’s high time Kitty Winn answered some letters, so please reply here with your awful problem, and I will put her right on it.

Misery, we have company!

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Hey! Some of you may have been wondering where our darling Lambchop is hiding these days. The answer is simple: Steele has returned from his fourth trip sailing around the Cape of Good Hope, and now they are off to Algiers for a very long weekend. She’ll return, languid, completely drenched in henna, and tease me with exotic tales of eating honeyed goat hearts. Le sigh. I’m having cold coffee. Not iced, just cold.

In other news, the second day of Yard Sale was even more terrifying than the first. My display of old goth jewelry was stolen by Irish Travellers! Oh yes. They cagily stuffed half-burnt votive candles and napkin rings into their pockets as their moon-faced children did a distracting stiff-legged jig. Then they hung around, asking people if they wanted their windows washed. We finally got rid of them between pulling out the hose and mentioning several times that the next door neighbor is a cop.

We have a new view from our bizarre hovel, as all the trees were cut down along the river. We can see all the way to the Lawrence Mills and the ball park, and sunsets are now quite the event. The other day, Mr. H yelled “Look, there’s some assholes in kayaks!”

“Won’t they get hurt when they hit that big rock ledge?”

“That’s what I’m hoping, get outside!”

In the end, they took on a lot of water, but managed to limp downstream. Man, do I know that feeling.

-xxoo

Purchase our burden

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Yesterday was my very first yard sale experience ever. I guess “yard sales” are what you have when your stuff is not nice enough to eBay. It was not in my yard, as I do not have so much of a yard as a deck swarming with stray cats. There’s Other Cat, Other Other Cat, Mangy Cat, Black Yelly Cat, and now Son of Other Cat is old enough to poke around. Official Cat, who lives in the house, presses herself against the screen and hisses in long blasts as the others eat the parsley and cilantro in my herb garden. But I digress.

This yard sale took place at the house of my in-laws, who are making a valiant last stand against clutter. The event reinforced all that I hate about humanity, as parades of poorly dressed people stomped around the lawn, attempting to damage things to shore up their haggling position. “Oh, this glass is scratched…” “But I just saw you do that with your key chain!”

We soon adopted the attitude of “You want it? One dollar, get out of my sight — oh hell, take it for free, I just never want to look at you again.” People in nicer cars tended to bargain fiercely. Why did the man in the Lexus SUV want the stringless weed trimmer so badly?

By far, my favorite moment was the father and daughter who spoke Spanish to each other, giggling to themselves about how crappy all the stuff is. Since it was not my stuff (our meager contributions sold first!), I listened in, enjoying that I still remembered the words for “trashy” and “cheap.” The daughter asked the size on a cast off Dynasty-esque dress belonging to a larger family member, and when told it was a 20, her eyes enlarged to saucer size and she yelped “My God, SO FAT” in Spanish and made an expansive gesture of girth. I finally shooed them away after they opted for a rusty knife set.

-xxoo

On bad ideas

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A few years ago, Mr. H and I worked on an account for a client called eYak!. The interCapping alone should allow you to pinpoint the chronology firmly in the Mesozoic era, or 1999-2000. They had a snappy slogan, something like “Powering the Power of the Wicked Powerful Internet.” This was later changed to “The Soft Side of Voice.” Not making that up. The flagship product was some VoIP* kludge for sharing presentations, called, I dunno, eConnect4Connections or something. OK, eSee Conferencing. They had another product tailored to the consumer market.

It was called the Bud-eYak.

I just checked the ol’ site out with the Wayback Machine, but sadly they do not preserve the excessive DHTML or the three minute Flash intro.

Sometimes I hear it in my dreams.

“Hiiii, Bob, I see the numbers on my screen now!”

“Looks like a GRRREAT quarter for you, Peter!”

We had to do it in French and Spanish as well.

Now a better idea: Tonight is Pizza Night! No yakking at all.

-xxoo

*which they relentlessly pronounced “VOYP”

i-ve been thinking mary—-dammit baltimore- you must always have the last word–

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Try keeping some emergency bad ideas in your desk.

I am at a loss on several counts.

My sister and I are considering writing a book. I wonder if we should make an outline, or just attack with finger paints? I may start by making an actual visual map of everything I remember about early childhood. There’s the trailer, the addition to the trailer, the garage with the stash of St. Pauli girl bottles, the goat shed, the pile of red dirt I was not allowed to play in, the place where the cat got shot, the yellow jacket nest in the potato patch, my Sycamore tree. The yellow toyota with the Netherlands sticker, the old black truck with the running boards, the well, the Lady Slipper patch, the treehouse that was only 3 feet off the ground, the black tulips, the random sink sitting in the back yard, the root cellar. We had a dog briefly, named Barky or Bitey or something like that. He looked a bit like a beagle.

And there is more. Carpet in the trailer kitchen (ha!), lots of nudity, swimming, being allowed sips of beer, being hit with a shoe, books about proper British children, awful, awful food that once was part of the garden. Cherry trees, thick with worm nests. Drowning Japanese beetles from the grape vines in a bucket of water.

The Westvaco logging forest across the property line was filled with bulldozer piles. Sometimes you could find shards of china, with patterns. Exotic because we did not have decorative things. The ruts from the logging trucks filled with water and made bright red mud. We rolled in it and were hosed down before we could come inside.

The nearest town eight miles away. The shoe factory, the prison, the A&P, the library where I was forced to alphabetize at a young age. The nursing home, the railroad tracks, a snack bar in the gas station where I ate hamburgers with mayonnaise and once got food poisoning.

Hmm.

i-ve given up–

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Yesterday I received an email from my mother, the woman who taught me to read, the woman who obsessively drilled me on grammar and punctuation, in which she stated “Our’s is better.” I consulted my sister, and she agreed that the internet is making everyone stupid. Well, I wan-t a piece of it.

me: lets popularize the overuse of dashes

me: im done with apostrophes

her: well–if you feel we must

me: totally-dont you think-

her: i used to know some kids who overused elipses….that got old fast….but they seemed to think it was reasonable

me: thats fun too-but dashes are snappier

her: totally–im on-the-go!

me: in five years-if all the internet uses shitty dashes-i will feel so vindicated

her: ha-ha

her: totally–

me: two dashes at the end of the sentence indicates enthusiasm–

her: ok–

me: why are you-re dashe-s bigger than mine —-

her: different font?

me: oh right- i felt insecure

her: someone who works at the local paper–said theyre letting alot of people go right now–not doing so much hiring

her: and that i should try NPR

me: wait-ll they see these dashes-

her: i know–

her: wave of the effing future

me: —–

her: –right–

me: good god—–

her: –in front gives it that mexicano flavor–

me: –ole–

me: it-s fun to type–

me: fun like drinking nyquil–

her: i wish i had some nyquil—right now

Then we dis-cussed how dis-appointed we are in our parents- plan to pave the front yard.

-xxoo

Gliding like a whale

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You know we got nuffin when we post pictures of dogs all week. Could it be that Lambchop and I are both happy for once? I feel like I am doing a gentle backstroke in Prozac-infused molasses, and I’m not even *taking* any drugs. When we go out, we spend our time doubled over with laughter, not shaking fists and gnashing teeth. It reminds me of how we used to ooze around Boston in an addled fog lo these many years ago. What’s next, staring for hours at the Amtrak ticketing kiosk in South Station because the music sounds like Peter Murphy? Yes, that exactly! Please join us.

The only thing’s that really bother me these day’s are poor punctuation and the state of the US government. No biggie! I got a call from the Kerry campaign looking for volunteers, so I think I’ll traipse in and shuffle paper at HQ a few days a week. Maybe I can finally master mail merge, for G– and country. I am not sure I am up for door-to-door in New Hampshire, as everyone in that state is issued a gun. This could be just the push I need to finally learn target shooting. There is a range right down the street; I could run over while the laundry is in the dryer.

I love you, man!

-xxoo