UNREMITTING FAILURE

The Baby

Johnson carried the baby into the livingroom by the leg.  The baby, dangling upside down, didn't seem distressed.  There were two men and a woman, shot in the head, dead in the livingroom, along with Fillmore, who was sitting on the sofa with the dead woman, watching the Kardashians.  "What are we supposed to do with this baby?" asked Johnson.  "It reeks."  "You're not shitting me," said Fillmore.  "Smells like it just shit a napalmed water buffalo."  "Do you know how to change a diaper?" asked Johnson.  "Change a diaper," said Fillmore.  I'd didn't come here to change no diaper.  Break its neck or something."  "I'm not killing no baby."  "Well, put it somewhere then, the police will find it. Let them change its diaper."  The baby, still hanging upside down, had a line of drool hanging from its mouth to the floor.  "We could maybe sell it," said Johnson.  "What, on the internet? Baby for sale, needs change of diapers.  Forget it.  We don't know anybody in the market for a used baby."  "Well, where should I put it?"  "Put it on it's mommy's lap.  That's where baby's like to be."  "She's dead."  "Well, the baby doesn't know that."  "The baby might sense it."  Fillmore got up.  "Well, put it here then," he said, patting his former spot on the sofa.  Johnson grabbed the baby's second leg and lowered it to the sofa.  Immediately it let out a great scream.  "Jesus," said Fillmore, "those things are awful. We'd be doing it a favor by shooting it."  "I'm not shooting any baby, and you aren't either. It's an innocent little thing that never hurt anybody."  "You didn't have any trouble shooting its mother."  "That was different," said Johnson.  "She tried to rip us off."  He turned to the baby and in baby talk said, "Your momsy womsy tried to wip us off."  Fillmore sighed.  The baby continued to scream.  Through the livingroom window you could see an old Chrysler and a pickup truck pulled up in the driveway.  "You're a trip, Johnson," said Fillmore.  "I'd take it home with me," said Johnson, "but the old lady would ask too many questions about where I got it.  Besides, she hates kids."  "There you go then," said Fillmore. 

We Are Good at Hand-to-Hand Combat

So long as the other hands belong to a chipmunk.

Why We Don't Get Online Dates

Woman's profile:

"I like seafood, and I occasionally like to be flogged."

Our response:

"Yar! Ye've found your man, ye have!  The name is Cap'n Bob, and I manage the Red Lobster at the Rte. 73 Interchange on the inner loop of the Beltway, Five thousand lashes have I administered over my managing career, and a few more won't do me any harm!  And seafood! It's an all-you-can-eat buffet on board every day here, served between the hours of 5 and 7.  That's Happy Hour!  In addition, the fresh food will do wonders for your complexion.  Could we meet over a flagon of rum at the "Lobster" on Tuesday?  I'd say Wednesday, but that's me bowling night.  Sincerely,

It often occurs to us

That pot should not just be legal--it should be a breakfast cereal.  Spliff Nuts, anyone? Munchy Bunches of Dope? Puffa Puffa Pot Wheels with Maui Waui Berries? Crispy Kiddie-Os? Bushelsful of Blunts? Cheetah Cheeba Crunch?  Count Potula? Bongberry Morning? Reefer Bran?  Toasted Adolescent-Os?  Weedies? Resin Nut Bran? Special K with K Holes?  Hey, that's not pot!  But Hashi is, sort of! As is Captain Chronic's Marvelous Ride! As is Crazy Flakes--which is real!

 

Why We Don't Get Online Dates, Part Whatever

To a woman who cited Catch-22 as her favorite book but said she had no time for people who suffer from apathy:

I agree with you until you get to the part about apathy; there we part company. Apathy gets a bad rap. How you could have read Catch 22 and not gotten hip to the fact that apathy is the only legitimate response to most human activities is beyond me. Everything is futile and the human race is an unremitting failure and what--we're supposed to care? How anyone can hold out any hope for the human species after the 20th Century is mind-boggling to me. Give up! Watch your fellow humans dehumanize one another with depressing regularity the way you would watch animals in the zoo, except animals in the zoo are so much better than people will ever be. The Buddha said, All life is suffering. He didn't follow that up by saying, form a nonprofit to save the rain forest. He said Give up on this world, it's a charnel house. Then he died, in a victory for vegans everywhere, after eating bad pork. I have no time for hatred, but apathy--apathy is the way out. Sit back and be surprised by nothing we humans are capable of. Sit back and let the horrors of the world slide right off your back. They will always be with us. There is no greater scam than this bogus concept of human progress. Or humanism, to use another term. By the way, you wouldn't want to go out with me, would you?

No response from woman

Back in the Day

People ate hats to slake their hunger. No one knows why.  The hats were woolen, mostly.  Kurt Cobain hats.  They ate them and pooped mittens.  It's true.  You can check Wikipedia.  This was mostly in the Netherlands.  Sometimes they slathered the hats with cheese, or liverwurst.  Sometimes they ate them al fresco. 

There were no sneakers.  If you wanted to run, you had to run in your leather-soled work shoes. This made the Olympics look ridiculous.  There is nothing like the runner from Norway winning the 100-yard-dash in a pair of wing tips.  Even the ancient Greeks wore sneakers!  Nikes, mostly.  But somehow the design got lost.  People said to themselves, "If I have to run, say from a dinosaur, I would just as soon run in a pair of patent-leather ankle high boots."  Dinosaurs ate plenty of people back then. 

British soldiers in the American revolution wore redcoats.  This made them easy targets for bulls.

Underwear wasn't invented until the 1930s.  Before then, men and women wrapped a trout around their loins.  Or a lobster.  Some kind of sea food.  Conch didn't work.  The 1910 Triangle Conch Factory fire put an end to that dream. 

We're not wearing any underwear today.  That's what's know as TMI.  We're wearing a cod, from whence came the term codpiece.  It's cool, it's fresh, and we can eat it when we get home.  The Netherlanders, with their woolen hats, could learn something from us. 

Cod--They come in briefs or boxers

Trials and Tribulations

We've washed our hair with conditioner three days in a row now.  We've done this because we have no shampoo.  Our hair is plastered flat to our head.  Twice this week we went to the CVS Pharmacy to buy shampoo.  Both times we bought what we thought, we swore, was shampoo, only to get home to find out it was conditioner.  We now have three bottles of conditioner in our shower, and no shampoo.  We're going to go out tonight and try again.  This time we're going to buy conditioner again, we can tell.  Somehow it's going to happen. And tomorrow we'll have four bottles of conditioner in our shower.

All of this speaks to a general weakness of mind.  We plead guilty.  We are preoccupied.  We're not sure what with, but with something. 

Why can't you buy a bottle of shampoo that has nothing written on it, but in big letters, SHAMPOO? That way we would not be fooled.  But no.  They include the shampoo part in the fine print, or so it seems to us.  Everything else is taken up by the kind of hair you have.  "For Dry to Crinkly Hair."  "For greasy to just dipped in a McDonald's French Fryer Hair."  "For fine to fine-spun hair."  We don't know what kind of hair we have.  We don't care either.  We just want shampoo, so we can shampoo it. 

This morning we got up late, leaped into the shower, conditioned our hair, raced out the door.  Didn't even bother putting on pants.  Ended up at work 25 minutes early.  Probably because we didn't shave.  It takes us an inordinate amount of time to shave.  This is because we have a minor case of OCD, and have to be shave every square inch of cheek and neck 14 times, seven up strokes and seven down strokes.  We also spend a meticulous and ridiculous amount of time shaving our upper lip.  We concentrate on that detail work like Michelangelo. 

We're not certain what's happening to us, but it can't be good.  This morning we applied underarm deodorant to our upper lip.  To keep it from becoming sweaty.  Like Nixon.  It's as if we have a debate with JFK today and don't want to blow it.  We also brushed our teeth with the deodorant.  Now we have a fine underarmy aftertaste in our mouth, we haven't shaved, we're not wearing pants, and we're tired.  We're smoking too many cigarettes.  Twenty aren't enough in a single pack.  Tonight, when we go to the CVS to buy conditoner, we're going to ask if they sell any fifty-to-a-pack cigarettes.  They don't, but that's what we're going to do.  That and we're going to buy a different kind of underarm deodorant, because the kind we have now tastes terrible.    

Why Online Dating Blah Blah Blah

One woman's "Self-Summary"

I love politics, sports, and chocolate chip cookies. I'm also a practicing Catholic, so if chastity is a turnoff we should probably just be friends.

 

 

Our Response

 

I wholly support your decision to remain celibate until marriage.  That said, I don't suppose you consider sodomy a sport, do you? Like cricket?  I would love to take you out for chocolate chip cookies to further discuss.  Sincerely,

Quiz

1. You see a guy with a tear drop tattoo on his cheek, a spider's web tattoo on his right elbow, and an FTW tattoo on his neck.  It's safe to assume that the FTW stands for:

a) Fuck the World

b) Free the Whales

c) Forward Thinkers Win

2. You run--literally--into an ex- with whom you had a particularly acrimonious breakup.  You:

a) Take the conciliatory path and stop to chat.

b) Say, "I was hoping to run into you--at your funeral."

c) Run in the opposite direction, shouting, "Don't crown me with the wok again!"

3.  Deep thinkers make you:

a) Jealous--You wish you could be Jacques Derrida, and speak with a French accent.

b) Angry--All their stupid thoughts you can't understand. All you need to know about this world is Birth, School, Work, Death!!

c) Horny--Everybody knows brilliant people have talented genitals. 

4. A monkey wearing shiny leggings and a sword in a hilt appears from behind your sofa and says, "You have a world-saving mission to accomplish."  You:

a) Go online to check the side effects of all the medications you're taking.

b) Brandish a fireplace poker, and say "Go back from whence you came, Spawn of the Death Worm!"

c) You go to the closet and remove a metal box containing a gun, a large sum of Chinese currency,  and a false passport, having always known this day would come. 

We Spent Yesterday on the Sofa

Sobbing gently to ourselves as we read The Diary of Michael Franks, the acclaimed book about the smooth jazz singer's struggle to evade capture by worldwide authorities on charges of "musical torture" after the 1975 release of his song Popsicle Toes.  Franks attempted to avoid detection and arrest by hiding in the sealed-off upper rooms of the annex of his father's office building in Amsterdam.  After being betrayed by neighbors, Franks was apprehended in 1977 by Nazi and bad musician hunter Simon Wiesenthal, who said, "Today marks an important occasion.  We have captured the worst smooth jazz criminal this side of Chuck Mangione."  Franks' manuscript was later discovered and given to his father, who published it under the original title The Diary of a Young Girl, evidently out of the belief that his 31-year-old son was actually a female.  It initially sold poorly, and appealed only to the kind of people who think Yanni is a national treasure.  But since the resurgent popularity of Yacht Rock, the book has become immensely popular, and is slated to be turned into a motion picture sometime next year.  Ryan Gosling is purportedly slated to play Franks, who has returned to music following a 15-year exile on the isle of Elba.  "The worst part of it," says Franks in the book, "Is that I can't sing.  Someone might hear me.  So I sing in my head, and I sing only sad songs, very very very sad songs.  The second worst part is that I must wash my bloomers by hand, using water brought to me surreptitiously by closeted smooth jazz aficionados who work in the building below."  We'll lend you our copy if you want. 

Why Online Dating Isn't Working for Us

From a woman's profile on OKCupid:

I grew up in a small town in the Midwest, and I wholeheartedly believe that no one is sweeter, more loyal, or more genuine than Midwesterners.  

Our Letter to Her:

I got beat up by a gang of Midwesterners once. It was a whole family. Boy were they large!  I think they were from Omaha. They were very polite throughout, however.  Every time they socked me in the mouth or kicked me in the goolies, they said, "Excuse me."  They even helped me up afterwards and took the time to apply band-aids. And looking back on it, I never should have said what I said about Nebraska. By the way, would you care to go out for coffee? Sincerely,

Sunday Musings

It was Sunday, day of rest for God after six difficult days of world building, people building, animal building, and he was flat on his ass reading the real estate section of the New York Times--could anybody afford an apartment in Galilee, for Christ's sake?--when he realized he'd forgotten to create the apple.  The apple! The very doomsday device he was counting upon to expel the unashamedly naked human couple from the Garden of Eden so that he could build a series of sweet condominiums on the site.  So he had to get off his butt, run in his bedroom slippers down to his basement workshop, and create the apple.  It wasn't as easy as he thought it would be.  His first design looked more like a watermelon, and it dangled heavily from the tree of knowledge bending the bough with its sheer weight, and it was purple like an eggplant, and the whole thing was so absurd he got pissed and threw the prototype out the window, where it hit a schmuck named Job.  He already had the pear, it would have been ideal, but one look at the garden revealed that Adam was already munching on one and it was too fucking late.  Someday Adam would have to put on a shirt, that was for sure, the fucker had coarse black hairs growing on his shoulders and back.  A nice Izod LaCoste, thought the Lord, would remedy that, and some khaki trousers and some boat shoes.  But in the meantime he had an apple to build, which was difficult because he couldn't decide whether to make the builder of the Ark (sure, it was down the road, but one had to think ahead) this guy named Shlomo who would have mad woodworking skills or this other dark horse named Noah, Noah Bamberger to be exact, who was just stupid enough to build the damn thing and collect all the animals that would have to ride out the storm on it.  And then he got distracted because he couldn't decide whether to call REO Speedwagon's breakout LP "Ridin' the Storm Out" (the title came to him thinking about the Great Flood) or, in a more humorous vein, "You Can Tune a Piano But You Can't Tuna Fish."  REO, he thought smiling--he had big plans for those guys.  Them and the Eagles, and Journey--of course there would have to be thousands of bands, but that didn't mean God didn't have his favorites.  But first he had to create the apple or there would be no REO Speedwagon, which was really what everything that happened up to that point--all the wars, the Renaissance, James Brown, the plagues of locusts and whatnot, and earth shoes--was all leading up to.  People would wonder about God, and what his intentions were, and whether he cared or didn't care or micromanaged (of course he micromanaged) or just sat back and watched or had a long beard (sure he did, although he was thinking of shaving) and lived in Heaven above (don't be ridiculous, he lived in Beverly Hills), when all they really had to know was that Creation was just his way of being able to listen to "Time for Me to Fly."  But back to the apple, and its 7,500 cultivated varieties.  Suddenly God had a headache.  

Coincidence, Or?

President Obama ate today at a place where we intend to eat tonight.  I know because my friend David, who lives on the top floor of the building, practically had his door knocked down by the jack-booted thugs of the Secret Service this morning.  It's a Taylor Gourmet, which sells high-end sandwiches and salads.  We have a date there tonight with a woman who says she doesn't intend to date us, but wanted to buy us a salad as a consolation prize.  So we guess it's a nondate.  Whatever it is, we hope the place isn't filled with gawkers who just want to soak up the reek of POTUS that lingers long after the actual President is gone.  Goddamn Washington.  You can't go anywhere without risking being run down by a useless presidential motorcade on its way to the latest hip eatery.  Or having your meal disturbed by same. 

Things We Could Do Without

Camping (those chipmunks only look harmless), skiing, Albanian art films, Ayn Rand, American flag lapel pins, puritans. Sting. Middle Earth. Colonial Williamsburg. Mashed potatoes (those lumps! those damnable lumps!).  Higher mathematics.  Lower mathematics.  The Faerie Queene. Oprah, brussel sprouts, straightedge, cops.  Triathlons, marathons, pythons.  People who casually mention in their online dating profiles that they've been to "50 countries and all 7 continents".  Depeche Mode, work, economy class flying.  Did we mention Sting?

Entrepreneurship

People think we lack the verve and imagination to be an entrepreneur.  Ha! At this very moment we're working to create a chain of frozen yoga stands. 

Men at Job Center

"I just went to see Colin Hay," said the middle-aged man in the store to a lady friend of his, "former lead singer of Men at Work? He's had an amazing solo career over the past 10 years."  We wanted to hear more about Colin's amazing solo career--we thought he'd died of lazy eye syndrome--but the couple moved away and we'd have looked too suspicious trailing them.  But hey!  Colin Hay! Personally, we wouldn't go see him if they gave us a free ticket and a ride to the show on the back of a circus elephant with one of those little houses on top.  But isn't that wonderful, that's he still remembered? That he has in fact actual fans who are willing to take a night out of their busy schedule to go see him? It somehow reaffirms our faith in mankind.  It's heartwarming.  Colin Hay has a viable career!  Somehow we thought he'd be sitting on a roof Down Under, nailing down cedar shingling.  Whereas in fact it's only the other members of Men at Work who are actually now men at work, plumbers say, or software designers or flunkies in the Australian bureaucratic service.  Colin Hay survived the eighties! He ate the vegemite sandwich of MOR stardom and lived to tell about it! Why, Phil Collins can't even say as much.  Last we heard, he'd locked himself into an underground vault in his house (we're not making this up) where he keeps his extensive collection of American Civil War memorabilia, and was sulking. Say what you will, Colin Hay didn't sulk.  He got off his ass and kept his lazy eye glued to the prize!  And there are people out there who care!  Good for you, Colin!  Next time we hear one of your songs on the car radio we're still going to immediately turn it off, but still! Good for you!

From the look of that outfit, maybe he is actually doing some roofing on the side

Wow, If Those Last Two Posts Weren't Big Fat Bummers

You'd never guess who hasn't gotten laid in three years.  The total lack of sex does terrible things to a person.  Just yesterday, we helped an old lady across the street.  We would call it being a good samaritan, but secretly we were hoping she'd invite us back to her place for some "hot ass action."  But the wrinkleface ingrate didn't so much as bring up sexual reciprocation.  Shit, we know for a fact that she'd have at least offered a Boy Scout a blowjob.

The important thing, if you're not getting laid, is to find an outlet for all that bottled-up sexual energy.  We chose to lift weights.  But it's not a complete success.  Just yesterday, a staffer at the gym had to warn us to "stop humping the dumbbell." 

The worst part about not having sex for a long time is the fear that you'll forget how to do it.  And don't you dare bring up the "it's just like riding a bike" analogy.  The bike, if your performance is off, doesn't stifle a yawn and say it'd rather be watching Leno. 

All of which brings us to prostitution.  We've given it a thought.  But who would pay to have sex with a dinosaur like us? 

Every Day We Do Something Desperate

We continue to breathe. 

NPR

Seemingly everybody in this town listens to National Public Radio.  We say fuck National Public Radio.  We get our hard news from People Magazine.  It's amazing, really, how many of our potential datees put NPR on their list of "six things they couldn't live without."  Really?  They couldn't live without it? I propose that they take NPR off the air, and check the subsequent spike in mortality rates.  And these are supposedly our people.  Liberals, lefties, whatever you want to call them.  Coffee we could see.  Ditto cigarettes.  And sex (you'd be shocked at how few people put sex on their list).  Hershey's chocolate.  The lack of these things could send us into a coma.  And our ex-wife would burst into our hospital room and shout "Pull the plug!" to which the doctor would reply, "You want to take him off life support?" To which she would respond, "No, the plug on the TV. The Kardashians are on.  He's not in a coma, he's simply retreated into a place deep within himself where he need not confront the horror."  We've listened to NPR, and it's very informative.  It sickens us.  The caring voices of the correspondents, who always sound like they graduated from a very sensitive J-school, never fail to make us want whatever groundbreaking cooperative enterprise that's going to eliminate poverty in Sierra Bluca to fail.  They're always whispery, somehow, whispery and full of wonder and upbeat, and even their outrage emerges in such a way that you know they know that everything will come out all right in the end.  Except it won't.  Shit, we prefer Fox News, where at least they care enough to make every single Obama decision sound like the beginning of the apocalypse.  Their paranoid style of reporting is more suited to our paranoid style of being, is all we're saying.  We don't agree with a word they say, but we like the way they say it. Whereas at NPR they're always interviewing third-world do gooders who are optimistic about some new Third World pie-in-the-sky initiative that you know--but NPR evidently doesn't--is going to end in disaster, venality, heartbreak, and corruption.  They wear their hearts on their sleeves and they literally ache with optimism that by tomorrow the world will be spinning like a top.  While we agree with E.M. Cioran, who said, "To live is to lose ground."  People who listen to NPR want--no need--to believe that there's going to be a rational future that is safe for their children.  People will recycle and new energy sources will be discovered and utilized and kindness will afflict us all like a disease.  When if fact we can look forward to a future where the shits will continue to rule, the shits who voted them in will continue to whine, and the shits who really don't give a shit will continue to kill and steal and manipulate and plunder.  Oh baby baby it's a wild world, it's hard to get by just upon a smile.  Or a soft and soothing radio voice for that matter.  The end isn't near, but there are bound to be plenty of times when you wish it was. 

karma comedian

Fact: People come down with shingles, but they never come down with aluminum siding.  We think we had shingles once.  We went to the doctor, and he referred us to a home repair outfit out on Gallows Road.  They said, "You got ripped off. These aren't even cedar. And you should always go pre-stained."  We never fail to be amused by the phrase "window treatments." It sounds so medical.  "What do you think?" says the homeowner.  "Should I go homeopathic?"

We owned a home once, and it had shingles.  We had to call in a doctor.  He said, "You should have stuck with brick."

Is there no escape from this ridiculous schtick?  This is what we get for trying to blog at night.  Our mind simply throws out words, like mumps.  Now there's a stupid name for a disease.  Sounds like an early sixties British Invasion band, in shaggy haircuts and matching suits.  "Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the Mumps!"

We had the mumps when we were a kid, and they were no joke.  Actually, we only had them for two days. Our friend Jimmy Carlson, who had them for real, let us borrow them for the weekend.  Mom said, "What are you playing with there?" We said, "The mumps, the mumps, my lovely lady mumps."  

Enough of that.  Go to bed.  Sleep, perchance to dream.  But first, one last look to see if we got any bites on our online dating service.  Seems every woman in DC likes to go hiking.  To get their goat, we wrote in our profile, "We'll go hiking, if forced, but we'll spend the entire time pretending we're participating in the Bataan Death March."  And we wonder why no one wants to go out with us.