Trichinosis.

Because I sometimes find myself to be simply hilarious, below is the text of an actual email I recently sent to an actual person:

What?! You can totally eat haunted ham. But then the ghost will just live and grow inside your body. It works the same way as trichinosis.

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Anti-Ham Gods Cause Personal Suffering for Their Followers.

Anti-Ham Gods Cause Personal Suffering for Their Followers

By james bezerra

If by the decree

of your almighty deity,

you are not allowed to eat ham,

well that’s no tragedy

because it means there’s more for me!

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Famous Historical Figures and Ham.

Famous historical figures who I know for a fact were crazy about ham:

Moses

Abraham Lincoln

Søren Kierkegaard

Michael Jackson

Gandhi

Gary Oldman

John Wayne

Napoleon

Greg Brady

The Hamburgler

Thomas Kinkaid

Lewis and Clarke

Martha Washington

Sinatra

The third emperor of the Ming dynasty

Charlemagne

John Hodgeman

Paul Bunyan

Orville Redenbacher

Nancy Drew

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Tasty.

Tasty

By james bezerra

Next time you eat a ham sandwich

you should not wonder which

part of the dear departed piggy

is in your mouth and so tasty!

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Under Pressure.

Since moving across town and across the street from a small shoping center (complete with a grocery store, a hamburger place, a Chinese place, a Mexican place, a dry cleaners and a Honey Baked Ham store!) I have found myself finding excuses to walk over there simply because I love being able to walk over there. I will be sitting around the apartment bored out of my mind and thinking, “You know, I would really like some peanuts, I should walk over to the store and get some peanuts.” And then, you know what happens? Yeah, I walk over to the store and get some peanuts.

On a recent weekend day which I had dedicated to doing absolutely nothing but reading (I actually ended up reading and also drinking wine and hanging things up around the apartment, which I’m sure pleased my roommates to no end) I ended up walking over to the store like 5 times. Just to get stuff that I kept thinking of. Luckily I refuse to let myself buy truly frivolous things, so I’m basically always walking over there for cat food or canned green beans or some such banality.

So now you’re asking yourself, ”Why do I care?”

Well listen, jerk, no one is forcing you to read this blog!

But if you stop now you will miss out on the super awesome playlist I was about to tell you about … yeah, see, now you care.

Well when I walk over there I put my iPod on and since I am normally walking over there shortly after I get back from work, I am still all super stressed out. I realized the necessity of having a de-stressing mix for after work. So I made one and it is awesome. Here it is, enjoy:

Under Pressure – David Bowie and Queen
(Just classic and never wrong)

Crazy in Love – Snow Patrol
(Yeah, Snow Patrol covering Beyonce. It is the coolest/creepiest thing since The Flaming Lips covered Kyle Minogue)

Hey Ya – Michael Schulte
(A slow, sweet, acoustic cover of OutKast’s “Hey Ya!”. Hilarious and also, somehow, very good and touchingly sad)

We Are Young – We Are Young
(I WISH I could claim to have heard this song before it was used in that Super Bowl ad with the cars doing stunts, but I cannot. Anyway, this is one of those songs that’s so good that you have to forgive it for being so pop-tacular)

Alphabet Pony – The Kills
(The Kills are an aggressively weird band and this is an aggressively weird song. Kinda sexy, kinda mean, kinda occasionally spastically arrhythmic)

After Hours – We Are Scientists
(If you do not know "We Are Scientists" just think of a really cute man who is also talented and funny and genuine and just an all around awesome guy who you would totally hate except that he’s so fucking cool. Well this is what his life sounds like. [His slightly less cool younger brother sounds like Vampire Weekend, BTW])

Kiss With a Fist – Florence & The Machine
(Everybody knows and loves Florence by now, but this is, I thought, the most wickedly catchy song on her first album. I have had relationships that this song might as well be about)

Out of the Races – The Rapture
(Oh, The Rapture, they were one of those 90s bands that was always on the cusp of becoming the next big thing, sadly though they never quite made it. That fact aside, they are consistently one of my favorite bands in the world and this is kind of their flagship song. I structured a whole novel around this song once!)

Blah Blah Blah – Ke$ha
(Yes. Ke$ha. Deal with it. This is the dirrty song on her first album)

Sweet Disposition – The Temper Trap
(Hey! Remember when “500 Days of Summer” came out and this song sort of changed your life for a second? Then remember how it was used in a Diet Coke commercial that tried to make drinking Diet Coke seem cool? Side note: I have become pretty certain that “500 Days of Summer” is about me and I just never realized it)

Boom Boom – The Animals
(A charming and delightful friend of mine recently turned me on to The Animals. Of course I had heard of them, but had never really paid any attention. Well they are old - school, kinda dirty and all around undeniable)

London Bridge – Fergie
(Chuckle all you want, but this song makes me happy! Side note: I actually happened to be in London when this album first came out and was walking across the actual London Bridge and guess what had been put up just at one end of it? Yeah, a giant billboard for this single. The perfect symmetry of place and shameless marketing)

This Fire – Franz Ferdinand
(Does it get cooler than Franz Ferdinand? No, no it does not. In my imaginary life I go out at night to dark LA ultra-lounges and wear a trim-ly tailored pinstriped gray suit and somehow emit the sound of Franz Ferdinand)

Senorita – Justin Timberlake
(Look, at this point if you still scoff at Justin Timberlake’s talent, then you’re basically the same as a Holocaust denier. You and the nation of Iran should have a good time hanging out, because I will be busy listening to this song with a giant grin on my face.)


And then, when this playlist is over, I do not feel stressed out anymore.

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Robots! Ham! Moving!

So, big exciting news! For me, I guess, not so much for you.

I have moved! Not far or anything. But still!

My roommates and I have moved into a new little place across town. It is a nicer complex and a nicer part of town and I like it!

But it is not all upside, no sir. I used to have a GIANT room, but my new room is much smaller. And having a smaller closet is forcing me to confront my clothes and backpack buying problems.

However I’m still coming out ahead in this deal because the new apartment is literally across the street from this nice big shopping center (how yuppie do I sound?) and so I can finally WALK to places! Which is something I like a lot. It has a grocery store and a really good local burger joint and a Mexican place with (slightly too) awesome margaritas! And there’s a place to get my hair cut (yes, even bald people get their hair cut ... because it makes them feel pretty, okay?!) and there’s a bank and a dry cleaners AND there’s even a Honey Baked Ham Store! Who wouldn’t be willing to go through the hassle of moving just to be closer to a Honey Baked Ham store?!

Also, this part of town has a system of “paseos” (which are basically just pedestrian walkways and bridges and stuff) that wind through the surrounding neighborhoods. This is super cool for when I go running because now there are all kinds of new and interesting places where I can trip and fall down! I went for a run last night and didn’t even get too super lost. Although I did see a skunk. He was not out for a jog, he seemed to be on some very important errand so I gave him a wide berth.

I’m very pleased with myself right now and I think I’ll be very happy in this new place. Not just because it has a Honey Baked Ham store next door, but mostly because it allows me some more walking-to-stuff. For some reason I can never quite figure out I almost always end up living in suburban situations even though what I would really like is to live someplace like Manhattan or San Francisco where it is more possible to live your life on foot (or mass transit). The truth is that I don’t really enjoy driving that much and would much rather take a nice stroll when I need to go run errands or got buy some ham, you know? So this new apartment offers about as much of that as I can find in the upscale, suburban, LA-adjacent wonderland in which I have found myself living (I’m not making fun of the burbs or anything. There’s a reason I moved up here and it is because living in Los Angeles can make for a very frustrating go of it; the traffic everywhere! The absolute lack of parking anywhere! The parking tickets!)

Well … that’s it I guess. I have moved! And now I can walk to get ham!

Oh, here is a picture of a robot I built out of moving boxes (because I'm a fricken' wizard!):



Jealous?
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Green.

And here is a poem about ham:

Green
by james bezerra

Hey Sam!
What the hell is wrong with those eggs?
I do not think you should eat them.
Not even a little bit.

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Terribly Sad.

Sorry, that was a terrible poem and not really even about ham. Here, this one is much better … well, it is better … well, at the very least it is more on-topic:

Terribly Sad
by james bezerra

I bought a ham and it was haunted
by the ghost of a pig who only wanted
to be reunited with his pig family.
It was my sad task then, quite unfortunately,
to tell him his family had been similarly converted (into ham!).

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Cheese.

You know, maybe I should just give up on writing poems about ham. There was a very funny quote once that went, “Why have all of the great philosophers been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese?”

Perhaps ham is to poetry what cheese is to philosophy.

Hey! That rhymed! I wasn’t even trying to do that! Well … you know what that means! Please see below …

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Mystery.

Mystery
by james bezerra

It would quite appear me
that what cheese is to Philosophy,
ham is such to Poetry.
If only bread turns out to be
some sort of similarly impenetrable quandary,
then we will have a metaphoric sandwich of mystery.

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Plagiarism!

Okay. I think that was all of the ham-related things I had to say …

You know, I was having a conversation about Pinterest recently and apparently there are some bloggers complaining that Pinterest is hurting blogs because Pinterest users are essentially “stealing” content. To which I say, “poppycock”.

But it presents an interesting dilemma.

My roommate Sparkle Fairy said that it would be similar to some college student somewhere copying one of my short stories off of this here blog and turning it in as his/her own work. Well that doesn’t really bother me that much, but – I’m just thinking about this now – as long as I stick to writing poetry about ham, I don’t think I will ever have that problem anyway.

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