Monday, June 28, 2010

What the Hell is Going on Down There?



A very strange Guatemalan man preemptively accuses the Guatemalan president of killing him, and then has his cousins secretly hire an assassin to kill him (the deranged man, not the Guatemalan president).

Or maybe it should be like this: A Guatemalan man orchestrates his own assassination and in the process nearly destabilizes the Guatemalan government.

Or maybe like this: I will never vacation in Guatemala.

Read all about it on the BBC.

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Hobos and Their Wines.

So I was just trying to explain the difference between Manischewitz and Carlo Rossi by parsing out which type of hobo drinks which and then my new roommate Daffodil (still test driving blog names for her) asked if I was a ‘shitty wine connoisseur’, by which she clarified to mean, ‘a connoisseur of shitty wine’, to which I responded, ‘Yes.’

BTW,for future reference:

This is a Manischewitz hobo.



This is a Carlo Rossi hobo.

"Flames" By VAST

Ignore the silly picture and just listen. This is one of the most stunningly beautiful little songs ever. EVER.



This is a “band” called VAST, but it is really just a guy named John Crosby and everything he touches turns to magic.


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Some Bullshit You Should Skip.

I am not ashamed to say that I am feeling a little bit weird right now. If I actually know you in real life, or if you have read this blog lately or if you’re my mom (hi Mom!), you know that I have recently gone through a breakup and that it has not the easiest breakup in history (though I’m sure it wasn’t the hardest either. I mean, neither of us was Sid Vicious or anything).

And so I’m feeling weird because I had a relatively smooth day at work today and so I just worked and worked and worked and then it was time to go home. And I came home, but there was no one here. I mean, the cats were here, but my roommate Dandelion (I’m still test-driving blog names for her) was at work and I didn’t have any plans for the night and I didn’t really feel like calling anyone up, so I have just been unpacking boxes and working on my sexy vampire robots and otherwise sitting in front of the computer and reading news and such and sending unsolicited blog entries out onto the unappreciative Internets.

Now I don’t want you to form some picture of me in your head as sad and lonely, because while I may be both sad and lonely, I don’t feel pitiful and I don’t want you to think that of me. There is a part of me that enjoys sitting here and typing these words on the dirty little plastic keys of my laptop. There is a part of me that is beginning to relax. I feel like it has been like five or six years since I was really relaxed. That seems like too long, right?

But I’m sitting here and I’m realizing that I basically feel like I’m on summer vacation, like this isn’t exactly my life, though it is not necessarily a bad one. The thing is that I have spent almost my entire adult life in one of two relationships. If you added it all up I have probably only been single for less than two years since I was seventeen. Unlike other bouts of singlehood in my past, I have the impression that this one might stick for a while. So I am trying very hard to rejigger my brain to the understanding that this is how lots and lots of people go through life. It is very strange. And it makes me want to ask all of you single people, what the hell have you been doing with your time? I mean, sure right now I’m just a guy yammering away on his blog, but I just went through a break up. Give me a few months and I will be knee deep in a novel (oh yeah! I want desperately to be writing a novel, my head just isn’t quite right yet).

Anyway, I guess the point is that this is weird. It is strange to sit here alone and listen to my Pandora (she has been like my babysitter lately) and to know that my girlfriend isn’t going to be walking in anytime soon. That she isn’t going to tell me about her day and that we aren’t going to make some small dinner together and then whisper to each other in bed later. It is very strange.

There is a part of me that realizes my life is completely off the rails right now and therefore anything is possible. I have yet to decide if that is exciting or horrifying. But I am trying to figure it out. No doubt you will have to read a lot more about it as I work on figuring it out.

And if the tone and tenor of this particular entry is not to your taste (because I sound sad) then just take some solace in the fact that I have already decided that July is going to be a super awesome month. I want to take advantage of July and try to sink my teeth into a little bit of life. I don’t really know what that means yet, but I want to suck the marrow from some bones. If you’re lucky I will find my camera soon so that you can see that when it happens.


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My Slow Descent into Madness Begins.




So I was just going though the little red notebook that I keep in my back pocket all the time and I discovered that at some point I wrote down: Scratch a DJ Scratch Cat.

I have no memory of writing that and even less of an idea what it means. But it is clearly my handwriting.

Does anybody have any idea what that means?

Is it like some cool internet meme?

I’m so confused.

I think I need to start sleeping more. Also I haven't eaten anything but Slimfast bars in like three or four days.


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Numbers Can Lie!

Some of you know that when I’m not blogging here or down in my secret laboratory breeding sexy vampire robots, I’m a wage slave in an accounting department. Now, I am the world’s most badass accountant, but I am still an accountant and so I sometimes have to have conversations like, “Is that offset supposed to show as taxable income on the 1099 even though it only pays off liability?”

So the other day I was talking to my Accounting boss (I also have an Operations boss, but that’s another story) and he said that he had been talking with some of his accountant-type friends (this is already the most boring blog post you’re ever read, right?) and they got on the topic of the big bank bailout last year.

Now I should pause here to say that I’m a lefty liberal and that I would have no problem living in a socialist country if only because I believe in the single-payer healthcare model and that guns are a public health risk, but even I had a few problems with the way that the whole bailout went down, though I do think that it was absolutely necessary (anyone who says otherwise has no idea what the hell they are talking about). Anywhoo …

My boss told me that he was told that the reason that all of these banks were able to “recover” so quickly is because their books were not as bad as it initially seemed at first glance.

“But, huh?” you say.

We all heard about how much money was lost on all of these stupid mortgages, right? Basically the whole collapse boiled down to illogical mortgages that people couldn’t pay. Well that is kinda true, but the interesting thing is that lots of these banks did some cutesy accounting when it came time to ask for handouts.

Here’s what they (allegedly) did:

If your mortgage was $1 million and you paid off $900,000 and then you defaulted and walked away, instead of posting a $100,000 loss, the banks wrote off the whole damn thing as a bad mortgage and posted a $1 million loss.

Does that make sense? I give you ten bucks, you pay me back nine and then tell me to screw off, so I go to your mom and say that you owe me ten bucks because you never actually paid back the ten bucks.

This is when you say, “No fucking way?’

And I – the world’s most badass accountant – says, “Wouldn’t surprise me.”

Now I am not accusing anybody of anything, I’m just spreading gossip because it’s fun, but I am aware enough of the way that money gets accounted for that it wouldn’t surprise me at all if this were true. Huge companies like the banks that we’re taking about are dealing with SO MUCH MONEY that the ways they have to keep track of it don’t make any sense at all to the rest of us who don’t have flying cars and swimming pools heated by the warm tears of orphans.

The number of holding accounts and clearing accounts and escrow accounts that can become involved in these sorts of mortgages would knock your socks off. Actually and literally, your socks would fly off. That kind of accounting can be done on such a massive scale that I think it is entirely possible that this hearsay is completely true. It would basically just mean that you don’t show any of a mortgage as paid until the entire mortgage is paid. That $900,000 just sits in a little piggy bank somewhere until it adds up to $1 millions, but until it does, it is entirely unconnected. Anybody who has ever used Quickbooks or taken an accounting class knows that you have to apply a credit to a debit, it doesn't just happen. And (according to thses rumors anyway) it didn't.

So, I just thought that I would share that with you because it has been bugging me lately (although I’m also kind of secretly impressed).


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Oddly Enough.

One of my favorite places on the internet is the Oddly Enough section of the Reuters website. For months they were the only ones covering that mysterious story of a Chinese man who ran into a wall so hard that he killed himself. Then there was the story about Japanese smokers who got so stressed out about all the government-mandated smoking labels on cigarettes that they ended up smoking more. Why are these things not reported on elsewhere?

Here is a new one that only Oddly Enough seems to be concerned about:

About 16,000 words have succumbed to pressures of the Internet age and lost their hyphens in a new edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.

That’s right! From now on this:

That cry-baby bumble-bee is on my water-bed! What a low-life!

Looks like this:

That crybaby bumblebee is on my water bed! What a lowlife!


So chew on that for a little while.

Or maybe you would rather read about a cat with prosthetic legs. It is up to you.



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Saturday, June 26, 2010

Welcome Back to Standard Kink.

So this is my triumphant return to blogging.

“Return?” you ask, “Where did you go? Why did you leave us?”

Well, the truth is that I just went in circles, mostly. You see, Violet and I broke up. It is very sad and I am sad about it and I had actually been so sad that I couldn’t quite muster the whimsy that you have probably grown accustomed to. Here at Standard Kink the editorial staff works very hard to provide you with the finest off-kilter whimsy that you can find anywhere online.

In addition to whimsy we also like to be your go-to resource for zest, zeal, zip, vigor and verve.

And that just hasn’t been possible lately. Probably because I have been crying too much.

So – you are wondering now – what the fuck? Exactly?

Well, I will tell you.

I have moved across town to the high-density Mexican area called Newhall. I only mention that it is high-density Mexican because a lot of people think that this is a bad area, but – in fact – it is not. In fact! It is mostly families and I like to think that I am – in fact - the bad influence in the neighborhood. Also, I have a roommate, she is a friend from school and she has told me that she would like a fake blog name and thus far I have suggested “Starburst” and “Rainbow Fairy” but she has rejected both of those out-of-hand. She (along with me) graduated last month and she was also an English major, though she is a poet and therefore slightly inferior (I’m just saying). If you have any suggestions for her fake blog name, feel free to post them.

As soon as I find my camera (I think it is still in a box) I will post some pictures of the new place. It is just what I like: it is an older apartment complex (which means bigger rooms!) but it was recently remodeled (which means pretty!). It has hardwood floors the color of straw and one of the strangest coat closets that I have ever seen. It has a small dining room that fits my table like a glove (that’s where I am sitting right now!). I have a big bedroom and a lot of floor space and lots of room for books, but I have almost no book shelves, so the books are just stacked along the walls. It creates a wonderful ring-around-the-tub-but-with-books effect and part of me just wants to leave it this way. You can all come over and lay on my floor and touch all of my books with your fingers.

Otherwise, I have been writing just a little bit lately and you will find all of that stuff below. Lots of bad poems, a regrettably bad short story, a Lady Gaga video, some thoughts about accountancy and also Kevin Costner. Some other stuff too.

As far as the future is concerned, you should be prepared for exponential growth in the number of incomprehensible and scatological posts. I fear that it was Violet who encouraged me to be comprehendible, so maybe while visiting this blog you will get to witness my implosion into Burroughs-esque flights of masturbatory-ly imagistic abstraction (I fear you are witnessing such a thing right now) or, who knows, maybe I will just become even more cloying and lame. Let us hope not. I think that life is going to get strange and lonely and also kind of interesting.

Anyway, welcome to Standard Kink, I am glad to be back and I am glad that you are here.

Now please enjoy some regrettably bad writing.


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Poem #1.

I Finally Weigh In on This Whole Oil Spill Ordeal
By James Bezerra

I’m no tree hugger,
but I think that BP
coulda’ done better
dealing with all that oil in the sea.


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Poem #2.

Paramedics
By James Bezerra

Do the paramedics
get to know
the staff really well
at the old folks’ home?
Since they
see each other so
much?
Maybe they fall in love?
And some pretty little romance blooms there in
the shadow
of all that old age.

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Poem #3.

Glass Menagerie
By James Bezerra

It seems that I collect
wine glasses
from women who
once were in my life.

One like a thick goblet; tall and strong, the glass bubbled with almost charming imperfections.
One all petite and curvy and the deepest hue of blue.
One so pretty - glass as thin as hope - so fragile that it’s frightening to hold.
One made of plastic, but cool green corrugated plastic. It feels good under your fingers.

I can never decide if
empty wine glasses resting in my cabinet
look lonely
or eager or
just dissappointed in me.

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Poem #4

In General
By James Bezerra

You know,
MacArthur nearly invaded Russia
singlehandedly, but Truman
said, “Fuck no!”
McChrystal mouthed off to seem cool
and Obama said,
“Perhaps not.”

You know,
Grant was a drunk
and Ike an adulterer
and let’s not forget
that Washington came from
aristocratic English stock.

Sure,
Powell waged the cleanest war on the books,
but even he was brought
low by
the Bush.
And Petraeus can face down any enemy
- it seems -
but even he,
passes out on the House floor (WTF was that about?).

In general,
it seems that all our generals
are just
men.

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Poem #5.

Uninterestedly
By James Bezerra

Uninterestedly #1
My cat thinks
very little of me,
I can tell
by the way that it
looks at
me so
uninterestedly.

Uninterestedly #2
Women think
very little of me,
I can tell
by the way that they
look at
me so
uninterestedly.

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Yes, This is a Lady Gaga Post. Sorry.

I’m not suggesting that you necessarily watch this video (see! Now you can’t blame me when you waste ten minutes of your life) but it is one of the strangest things that I have ever seen in my life and that – my friends – is saying something.

The thing that you gotta know about Lady Gaga (other than the fact that her music is embarrassingly catchy) is that she started out as a performance artist (for the uninitiated: PERFORMANCE ARTIST = BATSHIT INSANE. There has never been, and never will be, a single exception to this rule). So I guess her deal was that in addition to being a performance artist, she could also sing. Her whole career makes more sense now.




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Kevin Costner to the Rescue: Some thoughts.

So while moving I did not have cable or the internet, so I was only able to follow this story in small and mysterious snippets. I’m sure that you know by now that Kevin Costner (yes, THAT Kevin Costner) owns and/or has invested heavily in a company called Ocean Therapy Solutions and that company has spent years developing a centrifuge machine that can separate oil out of water. So, basically, Kevin Costner is a mad scientist and he alone possesses advanced technology that even the richest companies and governments in the world do not.

Um . . . . . . that’s weird, right?

I am not a fan of Dr. Costner’s. At all. I put him up there with Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Cruise and Ethan Hawke on the list of famous and successful actors who quite simply are incapable of acting.

That being said, however, I do love absurdity, so I’m really torn about how to feel about this whole thing.


Here is a link to a BBC article that kind of summarizes the whole Costner vs. oil spill episode.

And here is a clip of Dr. Costner’s ever-eloquent testimony before Congress.



And here now, are my honest ruminations and workings-out of my feelings about this whole situation.

Wait a minute!
Kevin Costner can
get oil out
of water?
But couldn’t
learn an English
accent for
Robin Hood?

Wait a minute!
Let’s imagine a
domestic scene:
The Costner home.
His wife says, “Maybe
make Tin Cup 2!”
But on the TV
they say,
“A gusher in
The Gulf is disgorging
crude!”
And Kevin Costner rises
to his feet, says,
“Maybe I can’t act – you know –
at all, but God
as my witness,
I can save the world!”

Wait a minute!
Kevin Costner
called before Congress?
and NOT to answer
for his career?

Wait a minute!
Kevin Costner’s life
is more
interesting than
any of his movies!

Wait a minute!
How backward must
your industry be –
BP – if
Kevin Costner can
outsmart you?

Wait a minute!
You’re telling me that
Kevin Costner
has to be
taken seriously now?
By me?
Really?

The Hollower.

A new short story! (Okay, I guess it is not so much a short story and really just an uneven exercise, but hey, those can be fun too). I was trying to write something that would be kind of like a horror movie, but without any of the things that go into a horror movie. I hope that you will think about the Hollower tonight when you lay down to go to sleep.

Bon appétit!



The Hollower
By James Bezerra

The doctors were solemn when they came back into the room, their white lab coats seemed more gray now, like the men were leaking their moods, and that – Appel knew, because he was a pretty smart guy – was never a good sign. And maybe he was just imagining it, but they were purposefully not standing as close to him as they had before, back when this was all just a nominal but curious exercise.

“Doc?” He asked at Doctor Stegoralph.

“Mister Appel …” Stegoralph started to say, making the words very long. Very loooooooong. Apple could tell that Stegoralph had even pronounced the word Mister and not Mr.

“What is it Doc?” Appel liked calling doctors Doc.

“Mister Appel, we have some … troubling news.”

*

Appel is short, but not funny short, just normal short. The kind of short that when you see him with a woman, you imagine that he’s either rich or funny or disproportionately endowed. He is all muscle, but not comically so, just in really good shape. You can tell that he takes his physical fitness seriously. You wonder if he is compensating for being so short. He has red hair, but it is cut short and close to the scalp, so he doesn’t look like one of those pale-skinned ginger men with thin wavy red hair that catches the sun and lights him up like a ghost. Basically he is not the kind of red-headed man that you have been terrified of your entire life. You wonder to yourself, sometimes when you have a quiet moment alone to contemplate, why they have always frightened you so much. You are never sure.

Appel never wears blue jeans. He wears nicely tailored suits sometimes, but most of the time he wears a good pair of slacks and a T-shirt. It is a good look for him you decide. Also, his body is covered in tattoos. His back and chest and arms and legs are a patchwork of inky lines. But you can’t tell that when he’s dressed. And you have not seen him undressed. Yet.

*

Stegoralph said, “Mister Appel, we have some … troubling news. Perhaps you should sit down.”

“I’m already sitting down,” Appel replied.

“Right. Well, Mister Appel, the MRI has given us a pretty clear picture of your situation, but we are not entirely sure how to proceed with treatment.’

“I don’t understand . . .” Appel was trying to keep it cool, because he was a cool guy, “. . . what the fuck you are talking about?”

“There’s no reason to use that kind of language,” one of the other doctors said.

“What are you, a fucking Mormon?”

“Yes,” the other doctor answered.

“Oh, well I don’t want a Mormon doctor, okay? Anybody whose brain can swallow that kind of bullshit should immediately be banned from any kind of scientific or medical profession. Get the hell out of here.”

After the doctor left the little room Appel asked, “Okay, are any of you guys Scientologists?” and when two of the doctors raised their hands Appel said, “Well you two get your asses out of here too. What about the rest of you? Amish? Moonies?”

“I’m a Southern Baptist,” one of them volunteered.

“I’m gonna let that slide for the moment, but you’re on notice.” Then, turning back to Stegoralph (whom Appel already knew was agnostic) he said, “What’s up Doc?”

*

Stegoralph covered his mouth with his hand and then squeezed his lips and then finally said, “Mister Appel, you have what we call a Hollower. Have you heard of it before?’

“No.”

“It’s quite rare, so that’s not surprising. You have a parasite in your body. Do you know what a tapeworm is?”

“It’s a worm,” Apple said.

“Yes,” Stegoralph answered.

“And it can live inside a person’s intestines or something. Do I have a
tapeworm?”

“No. No,” Stegoralph answered, “you do not have a tapeworm. What you have – what we euphemistically call a Hollower – is not a worm so much as it is, well, it’s more like a monkey, in shape you understand. It isn’t actually a monkey. It’s actually a kind of fish, or reptile. No one is really sure.”

“Excuse me?”

“It is quite rare.”

“I should fucking hope so.”

“Mister Appel,” Doctor Stegoralph asked, very seriously, “were you recently in the Amazon? Or Africa? Or Pittsburg?”

“Yes.”

“Which one?”

“All of them.”

*

You wouldn’t know it from the eloquence of his language or his demure manner, but Appel was a Texan, though he often called himself a lapsed Texan. He grew up on a barren and rocky eighty-eight and a half acres of land in West Texas where his daddy was a well witcher. In less Christian places they would have called him a Dowser, but in West Texas, a grown man who could use a stick to find water under the ground was surely some kind of witch, so it stuck.

Appel had memories of going out with his daddy, out to some remote rocky pasture somewhere and watching him bend a wishbone-shaped stick backward over his wrists and then follow it until it led him to some nondescript spot. Then Appel’s daddy would scratch out an X with the tip of his boot. A day later the rancher paying Appel’s daddy would have somebody sink a well and the cool, clear water would come burbling up.

When Appel was getting old enough to know that that was weird, he asked his daddy, “How do you know how to do that?”

“I have no earthly idea,” his Daddy had answered.

As much as he had hoped, Appel did not inherit that particular skill, so instead he went off to college. Growing up on all that rocky land, with just his Daddy, a couple of dogs and a .22 for company, he’d taken up an interest in rocks. Largely out of boredom and the plentifulness of rocks. He majored in geology at Texas A & M, where he first started having sex with women, which he liked doing very much. Around that same time, he also became interested in oil, or rather, the hunt for oil. He learned that easily-accessible oil reserves were a thing of the past and that the new frontiers of the hunt were in almost obnoxiously dangerous and exotic places, like the Orinoco Basin, smack in the middle of the Venezuelan rainforest, or below war-ravaged Nigeria, or in the tar fields of the Athabasca Oil Sands, or under 8,000 feet of water off the continental shelf of North America. And those were just the places that people were looking when Appel graduated and got snatched up by the Company. They were always looking for good young geologists, who were fluent in the latest ideas and technologies. But that’s not why they hired Appel. What they were really always on the lookout for were good young geologists, fluent in the latest and greatest, who also had the itch of uneasiness. Men (they were almost always men) who enjoyed the hunt for oil, who wanted the challenge. Men who once would have sailed around the world in leaky wooden ships or hiked to the North Pole steadfastly while their compasses trembled with indecision. Men who once would have played golf on the Moon. Not thrill-seekers, but well-educated and capable men who liked doing that which could not be reasonable asked of anyone else. They knew that Appel was one of these men. They knew it because he said so during the interview, “I would like to do the things that other people can’t.”

“So do you consider yourself an out-of-the-box thinker?” the interviewer had asked.

“I think that question is pretty insulting to the man who invented boxes. That guy was a fucking genius.”

The interviewer vigorously checked a box on his form and grinned.

“You know who else was a genius?” Appel had asked, “The guy that invented pockets. Brilliant! A real mad scientist, that fucker.”

*

“Why were you in Pittsburgh?” Stegoralph asked.

“I like Pittsburgh. I like the Tower of Learning, okay? I like Gothic Revival architecture.” This was true. The walls of Appel’s apartment were covered in photos he’d taken of Gothic and Gothic Revival structures all around the world. “But is that what’s really important right now?”

“Right,” Stegoralph agreed. “The point is that you have a Hollower.”

“And that is?”

“Well – and I’m a little ashamed to admit this – there is not a wealth of reliable medical information available on these things. Basically you came into contact with the eggs or larvae somewhere. We think that it is transmitted either in water or food. Or possibly through the air like pollen. Or perhaps it is transmitted by infected mosquitoes . . .”

“Are you serious with this vagueness?”

“As I said, we don’t know a lot about it. But once it is in you, the eggs or the larvae . . .”

“Stop saying larvae, that word bothers me.”

“Sure. So once it is in you, it matures very quickly into a kind of slug – that’s usually inside your large intestine and then once it grows a mouth – or a few of them – it begins to consume your internal organs . . . uh, entirely . . . and it keeps on growing – into a more mammalian-like form, with arms and legs – and eventually it hollows out your entire chest cavity.”

“Seriously, are you screwing with me? I’m on some fucked up TV show right now?”

“Um, no.”

“That doesn’t even make any sense. How am I alive if it has eaten my organs? Well? How am I processing piss if it has eaten my kidneys?”

“See, that’s what’s really interesting. It seems to be capable of replicating all of your internal functions with its own. So you aren’t processing urine anymore, it is processing it for you. The same with your stomach, the same with all of your digestion . . .”

“But I’m breathing! What about that?”

“Yeah, no. It has already eaten your lungs. You just think you’re breathing. See, when it is in its slug stage it starts producing a kind of natural anesthesia so that you don’t feel it eating you. Um, but its chemically similar to dopamine, so you probably feel good all the time and it appears to have hooked into your central nervous system, so it is probably making you think that you can feel yourself breathing, but you’re actually feeling . . . um . . . its lungs breathing.”

“My Central Nervous System? That’s my brain, right?

“Well, your brain is part of it.”

“So it’s not just in my chest, it’s in my brain too?”

“Well, its body is situated inside your chest cavity, but really it is consuming your entire body. Yeah.”

Appel was quiet for a moment.

Stegoralph placed his hand tenderly on Appel’s shoulder and said, “There is something else . . .”

“Oh good.”

“Your Hollower . . .”

“Can you not say your Hollower, like its mine?”

“Sure. Um. The Hollower, it is nearing what we think is an early stage of maturity and – now mind you, this is rare, so we aren’t quite sure – we think that we see, on the MRI, a structure similar to a larynx.”

“It is going to talk?”

“Well we don’t think that it will talk, exactly. But it is going to have the ability to modulate the pitch and volume of sound. So it may start to generate noise. Um. Conceivably it could purr or growl. There was a report once from Bolivia of a man who said that he could hear his hum.”

“Hum?”

“To music,” Stegoralph explained.

“So hold on, inside my body there is a creature that looks like a monkey but is probably a fish and it has eaten my organs and stuck its fingers into my brain and pretty soon it is going to start humming along to music? From inside my chest? While it eats me?”

Stegoralph nodded.

Appel touched his chest with his hands. He kneaded his skin and pushed on his belly with his fingertips. Finally he looked up at Stegoralph. “How do we kill it?” He asked.

“Ummmmmmmmmm,” Stegoralph said.

Appel absently tweaked his own nipple while he thought, then he stated, “Killing it would kill me? Right? There’s not enough of me left to live without it?”

“Right,” Stegoralph said.

“Should I kill myself?”

“No! Of course not! Or … well … maybe. We don’t know. We are kind of hoping that you don’t.”

“Why?”

Stegoralph shrugged sheepishly.

“Because I’m a pretty rare case?”

“Yeah.”

“And you’ll get on Oprah or something!” Appel jabbed a finger at Stegoralph and then at the Southern Baptist doctor, “You fuckers are the parasites!” Then Appel tore off the flimsy paper gown that he was wearing and the Southern Baptist looked away, but Stegoralph studied Appel – scientifically, of course, while he jerked on his pants.

“Fuck you guys,” Appel said and then he was out the door of the little room. He skipped the elevator, s he always did, and bounded down the stairs and as he hit the street he wondered out loud, “Is it still my sperm?”

Appel hailed a taxi and hopped into the back.

“Where to?” The cabbie asked.

“Do you know any witch doctors in the city?” Appel asked.

“Of course!”

“The closest one then”

The cabbie merged smoothly into traffic and as he did he cranked up the radio.

“…strangers in the night …” the radio sang.

Dooo-do-do-do-duuuu, Appel heard from somewhere within his body.

“Fuck,” He said.

“What?” The cabbie asked.

“It’s a god damn Wayne Newton fan. Drive faster please.”


END


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Things to Consider When Choosing an Accountant.

Not a poem so much as just good looking-out on the part of this blogger for your financial wellbeing.


Things to Consider When Choosing an Accountant
By James Bezerra

CON:
An accountant who smokes clearly makes poor financial decisions.
PRO:
An accountant who smokes has a way to deal with the stress that all your tax evasion will cause.
CON:
An accountant who smokes is actively trying to change the world’s perception of accountants.
PRO:
A good accountant who smokes might change the world’s perception of accountants.
CON:
An accountant who smokes will smell bad when pulling an IRS-induced all-nighter for you.
PRO:
An accountant who smokes will be willing to pull an IRS-induced all-nighter for you if you buy him a carton of 200 hot cancer sticks.
CON:
An accountant who smokes will live less long than an accountant who does not and so you’ll have to find a new accountant one day.
PRO:
An accountant who smokes and dies young will take all your secrets with him.
CON:
An accountant who smokes is probably bitter.
PRO:
An accountant who smokes is probably bitter at all the same people who are suing you.
CON:
An accountant who smokes is probably an asshole.
PRO:
An accountant who smokes is probably willing to be your asshole.

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Sarah Palin, Very Much Like Jesus.

So do you like being horrified?
Me too.
Please enjoy this NEWSWEEK article about how Sarah Palin has (apparently) become some kind of messianic figure to Evangelic women.

Click here for the HORROR!



It is a very interesting article, but when I remind myself that this is ACTUALLY HAPPENING in the world, it makes me feel like Will Smith in I AM LEGEND, as though Evangelical Christian Republicans are clawing at my steel windows at night.

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Emotional Weather Report.

Here is a wonderful and lovely little Tom Waits ditty that I had completely forgotten about. I have been in a greasy, dirty, drink-y, bluesy, Tom Waits-y kinda mood lately.

LISTEN TO IT HERE.

Here are the lyrics:
late night and early morning low clouds
with a chance of fog
chance of showers into the afternoon
with variable high cloudiness
and gusty winds, gusty winds
at times around the corner of
Sunset and Alvorado
things are tough all over
when the thunder storms start
increasing over the southeast
and south central portions
of my apartment, I get upset
and a line of thunderstorms was
developing in the early morning
ahead of a slow moving coldfront
cold blooded
with tornado watches issued shortly
before noon Sunday, for the areas
including, the western region
of my mental health
and the northern portions of my
ability to deal rationally with my
disconcerted precarious emotional
situation, it's cold out there
colder than a ticket taker's smile
at the Ivar Theatre, on a Saturday night
flash flood watches covered the
southern portion of my disposition
there was no severe weather well
into the afternoon, except for a lone gust of
wind in the bedroom
in a high pressure zone, covering the eastern
portion of a small suburban community
with a 103 and millibar high pressure zone
and a weak pressure ridge extending from
my eyes down to my cheeks cause since
you left me baby
and put the vice grips on my mental health
well the extended outlook for an
indefinite period of time until you
come back to me baby is high tonight
low tomorrow, and precipitation is
expected


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