UNREMITTING FAILURE

We Were "On the Hill" Today

For our noon date with the manager of a major lobbying firm.  The whole "Capitol Hill" experience made us feel dirty. We were seated outside at a Starbucks, and at the table next to us three obvious Hill players were going over a list of congressmen they "absolutely needed" to push through the Omnibus Consolidated Bullshit Act of 2012.  Meanwhile our date was telling us just how conservative she was, and how the Army had (shamefully) gone pussy and politically correct, which she knew because she'd been in the Army for eight years.  Meanwhile we sipped our coffee and tried to smile, whilst pinching the skin in our leg to keep us from screaming "Get us out of this Hell!"  Seriously, you could feel the power crackling up there, what with all the movers and shakers and players walking around in their sober suits with American flag lapel pins, all in a hurry to get things done, while we wished for a Japanese horror movie monster to appear and pick suits up at random and gulp them down.  This town, or at least that part of it, should be destroyed.  By Japanese horror movie monster preferably, but by any other means necessary if Rodan has another appointment. 

The thing that truly amazes us is that people bring their kids on vacation here.  What's to see? Well, there's the White House and the Washington Monument and Congress, all of which would have excited us as a child about as much as a trip to historic Williamsburg.  We were dragged here as a child, and we remember walking about in the heat, whilst pretending (and it didn't take too much imagination) that we were an American participant in the Bataan Death March.

God, we hate this town.  The British had the right idea in 1812, but they failed to burn everything completely.  And to salt the earth afterwards. 

The History of Tater Tots

The oddly named F. Nephi Grigg and Golden Grigg--Mormon founders of the Ore-Ida Company--invented Tater Tots in 1953, when, according to that unimpeachable source Wikipedia, they were "trying to figure out what to do with leftover slivers of cut-up potatoes."  At first they superhardened them using plastics technology, and tried to sell them to the defense industry as fragments for use in mines such as "bouncing betties."  When this pan fry out, they hit upon the expedient of forming them into cylinders and deep-frying them, and selling them to the military as bullets.  The military didn't bite, but taste testers did, and found them delicious.  The product was first offered to a potato-happy public in 1956.  Nowadays, Americans consume some 70 million pounds per year of the product.  This does not count their consumption in (oddly enough) Australia, where they are sold as "potato royals."  In Canada they are called either "Tasti Taters" or "Spud Puppies."  People in Europe are denied the joys of tater tots, after one of the Grigg's early militarized versions was accidentally inserted into a package of regular tater tots (or as the Dutch called them, "potato abominations") and exploded in the mouth of a young French boy, seriously injuring him.  In Germany, they were banned after a tater tot bearing an uncanny likeness to Adolf Hitler was found in a package in 1962.  Another tater tot bearing the likeness of John Lennon was discovered in a package in Canada in 1987, and currently resides in the world's largest potato museum, The Spudseum, in Boise Idaho.  

the infamous "Hitler Tot"--Kartoffeln Macht Frei! quickly became a Neo-Nazi chant

 

Acupunctured

Well, we got the acupuncture.  The woman who administered it was supernice and we immediately fell in love with her.  The receptionist was a guy named Tommy who acted like he'd just dropped a couple of downers.  The office was nice, soothing jazz (what, no Eastern music?) was playing and she led us into a room and had us lie down and applied the needles which didn't hurt, except the ones she put in our eyes which did hurt a little.  We said, "We can't see!" and she said, "It's only temporary" and suddenly there was the sound of a waterfall and Eastern music and she left us there in the void of our temporary blindness with needles in our legs and arms and ears and just a couple in our forehead and it was so relaxing we fell asleep and when we awoke she pulled all the needles out and invited us to get up which was hard, we were so relaxed.  Then she ruined the whole effect by bringing out what she called a treatment plan, which basically involved us giving up all meat ("the trauma of their deaths poisons your body"), fried foods, and refined sugars, or in other words our entire diet.  We just looked at her in mute disbelief (she'd remembered to remove the acupuncture needles from our eyes) and thought, "Great."  It's not enough that you turn yourself into a circus performer, you have to go vegan as a fucking encore.  She especially recommended kale and many raw vegetables, most of which we refuse to touch whether raw or cooked.  We felt like saying, "Look, lady, we're a carnivore.  A cupcake-eating carnivore. If we go on this diet we will die or weaken to the extent that stronger carnivores will kill us, and eat us in turn."  Instead we lied and said, "Sounds good," then threw the list of recommended foods in the trash outside her office.  It's always the same with these holistic freaks--one thing leads to another until you're a vegan, yoga-practicing, forever-meditating, needle-skewered victim of the belief in what E.M. Cioran called "an instant India."  Next thing you know we'll be a Buddhist.  Speaking of the Buddha, he had no trouble eating meat--in fact it was bad pork that killed him.  Keep that in mind that next time you're talking to one of these people.  It was bad pork--not bad tofu--that killed the Buddha.  If you'd put tofu in his begging bowl he'd have flung it into the bushes, and said "What do I look like, a fucking vegan?"

Oh, and the acupuncture didn't cure our anxiety.  By the next day, it was worse.  Maybe because we failed to eat our raw vegetables.  If so, so be it.  Sometimes, the cure is worse than the disease.

What We've Been Up To

We can't swim.  But we can doggy paddle.  In fact, we can doggy paddle better than most dogs.  Dogs on the beach invariably stop whatever they're doing on the beach to turn and watch our impeccable form.  "Look at him go," one dog will say to another.  "He's flawless."  "What is he," another dog will inquire, "some kind of hairless?"  "I don't know, but he's the ugliest dog I've ever seen." 

Lately we've been lost on our online dating sites, and we apologize to all of our friends and readers for our inexcusable absence.  Those places are totally addictive.  Especially when you fail on the scale we've been failing.  We're written over two hundred messages to prospective dates, and gotten maybe six responses.  John Wayne Gacy has better stats.  Anyway, it hasn't done anything for our confidence or self-esteem, and overall we're beginning to think we're not only wasting our time but sinking ourself into a depression.  And all because--we suspect--we wrote our "profile" the same way we'd write a blog entry, namely without a serious or upbeat word in it.  It just seemed the fun thing to do at the time, and now we're too stubborn to go back and write a profile like everybody else's. 

As for our first date, she turned out be a good eighty pounds heavier than she looked in her profile pics, which may make us seem shallow but without some sexual attraction we just don't get the point.  We had fun anyway, the two us, went to a French restaurant and everything.  But she wasn't as pretty as she looked in her profile pictures either, which we don't know how you pull that off.  Don't get us wrong, we're no prize, we're just somebody who appears to be lost without a woman in their life.  And despite all the time we spend with Mrs. UF (ex), she is not that woman.  Tonight we're going with her to this bar we go to every Tuesday, where they serve giant burgers accompanied by Tater Tots, and if the Tater Tots don't cheer us up, we're in trouble.  As Samuel Johnson once said, "A man who is tired of tater tots is tired of life." 

 

We Have a Date Tonight

That makes acupuncture and a date, all in one day.  We're in a frenzy.  What if, as Mrs. UF (ex) suggested last night over cheeseburgers, the acupuncture needles leave little welts all over our face and we show up for the date looking like a monster, or a man who has been attacked by a swarm of angry bees?  That wouldn't be good.  Everybody says the needles are real small, but we keep imagining the acupuncturist appearing with a toolchest of ten-penny nails and a hammer.  And saying, "This going to agonize you some." 

Our date is at a place called Chez Billy, which if the name is any indication evidently combines french and redneck cuisine.  We'll have the Pommes Duke of Hazzard, Cassoulet de opossum, and for dessert, a nice Moose au Chocolat. 

We don't know why we scheduled both events for the same day, as we can only do one thing a day, any more than that and our stress levels rise and overrun the levees of our self-control and we're as nervous as a condemned prisoner in a room full of electric chairs.  But we figured the acupuncture might calm as down some (aren't we the sudden optimists) and we'd show up for our date with a smile instead of a full-body spasmodic twitch.  Which seems like wishful thinking, we'll probably show up with one acupuncture needle that the acupuncturist forgot to remove vibrating at the end of our nose, and our date will wonder whether to mention it or to write it off as some new type of body art.  Speaking of our date she is a redhead, which given our track record with redheads is a fatal mistake but we just can't seem to help ourselves.  With our luck the date will not end without her hurling her pot au feu across the table at us, or stabbing us in the hand with her salad fork.  In fact the French have a saying that goes something like, "If the redhead orders the pot au feu, make a run for it." 

Most importantly, what if she wants us to come back to her place?  Do we beg off, citing the hour and the fact that it's a worknight, or do we go upstairs for a drink, and potentially end up in bed? Can you tell we haven't been on a date for 16 years?  Right now we're feeling rather old-fashioned and thinking it should be on say the third date that we both produce our plushie costumes and go to it.  But times have changed.  There are jet packs now.  And sexual mores have perhaps evolved as well.  Perhaps we're obligated to go to bed with her, because there was French food involved.  Somebody help us.  Seriously!

Acupuncture: If You're Screaming, Your Practictioner is a WWII Japanese War Criminal

Tomorrow we're going in for acupuncture for our anxiety.  We've never done anything "Eastern" or "holistic" like this before, and frankly, we have our doubts.  First of all, we're not thrilled by the idea of becoming a human pin cushion.  People say it doesn't hurt, but that's what our friend William told us before we got our penis pierced.  Wrong.  It hurt just like somebody was driving a needle through our penis.  Imagine that!

Second, we're skeptical of all this Eastern medicine stuff.  We walk through Chinatown everyday, and those people look neither happier nor healthier than anyone else.  They're generally hurling old fish out of upstairs restaurant windows, shouting, "That one too stinky even for customer!"  Guess that good old Eastern detachment doesn't extend to four-day-old fish. 

What we're going to do is pretend we've been captured by enemy agents and they're torturing us for information.  With every needle that goes in we're going to cry, "We'll tell you nothing! NOTHING!" No, that probably won't work.  What we're going to do is... come to think of it, the thought of getting acupuncture to relieve our anxiety is actually jacking our anxiety to new heights.  We're literally tingling with negative anticipation.  So we must repeat to ourselves: It will not hurt.  It will work.  It will not hurt.  It will work.

We've tried yoga (quit--we kept falling on our head) and meditation (quit--we kept falling on our head) so what do we have to lose besides the $145 bucks they're charging?  145 bucks!  The word "scam" occurs to us, but we must keep an open mind.  You can't put a price on the alleviation of mental suffering.  But what if it doesn't work?  Like the time we paid $300 to that hypnotist to get us to quit smoking and we walked out of there wanting a cigarette something terrible.  We actually did quit smoking, by the way, but just long enough to recoup in unbought cigarettes the amount we paid to the bogus hypnotist.  He should have had a towel wrapped around his head with a glittering opal embedded in it, that's how bogus he was.  He worked out of a little walk-down office in Foggy Bottom that reeked of failure.  He kept saying "You are getting sleepy and dreamy and spacy" and when we'd try to push ourselves up in the chair to say "No we're not" he would, honest to god, press his hand against our chest to push us back into the chair again. We finally gave up and convinced ourselves we were actually hypnotized, because we felt sorry for him.  Because this guy couldn't hypnotize a chicken.  He was an Indian gentleman, if we recall correctly.  We should have just spent the money on $300 worth of cigarettes and saved ourselves the subsequent seven months of severe mental anguish.

Well, we're not going to let that happen again.  If we don't feel the effects of the acupuncture right then and there, we're going to refuse to pay.  Then we're going to walk out of that office, the pins still sticking in us.  We'll pull them out when we get home.  That should be fun.  Eastern Medicine, here we come!

No, Unremitting Failure Does Not Do "Pay for Sex"

So we're tearing up your check for 13 dollars, you know who you are, and forgetting this ever happened. 

It's not that we're a prude.  Sure, our Midwestern values imbued in us the belief that sex should occur only between two married people for procreative purposes.  But we ourselves have engaged in sex with a spouse while employing contraception!  So we are definitely not "uptight."  Still, the idea of paying us to have sex with you (you know who you are) is deeply offense to our upbringing and morals.  Our mom used to tell us, "You do not have sex with the postman, you do not have sex with Missy down the street, the only person you have sex with is a duly sworn police officer if he orders you to."  Our mother was very obedient to authority, she would never dream of stepping on somebody else's lawn, or even her own.  Our father was a Protestant minister who liked to take little boys under his wing and molest them under there.  Of course we didn't know this then.  Then he was a pillar of the community, whose favorite saying was "Randy Dandy." 

So no, we will not accept your 13 dollar "donation" (as you so cunningly put it) to our coffers.  We know that we live in a big city with big city morals and that not everyone thinks cunnilingus is a county in Ireland.  But we will have none of it.  We will stand firm, our virtue intact.  That said, if you have a sister, we might be able to work something out. 

In a City Near the Border with Germany

We love choreography so long as there's no dance attached to it.  Let us explain...

There was once a man walking down a street in Poland.  It began to rain.  He cursed up a storm in Yiddish.  The rain was pelting.  He had no umbrella.  An open umbrella reminded him of his wife, naked.  So he never carried one.  He darted into the nearest place of business, a junk shop.  The man who ran the shop liked to dance up and down the aisles, amongst the priced trash.  He was a fat man.  To do differently, he would require a different head.  It was the same all over.  You did what you did, and to do differently you required a different head.  So many people had the same head, but not the man who ran the junk shop.  His head was different.  Down to its immense size, and bullet shape.  And it was so difficult to trade heads.  There was the black market, but...

The rain pelted the windows.  It was dark in the shop.  The owner danced.  The shop smelled of age and garlic and furniture polish.  The owner paid no attention to his customer.  The customer paid no attention to the owner.  He stared at the rows and rows of junk, and wished he had a different head.  There is no cure for longing.  The owner, for all the customer knew, was the only happy man within miles.  The customer picked up an old handkerchief monogrammed with the initials AH.  It was 1939. He stuffed it into his mouth and gagged on it... 

In the Midst of Beating Ourselves Up

Over failing to write blog entries we should remind ourselves that we're doing something we haven't done for years, namely write blog entries at night.  We hope it's the start of a trend, because at the office we seem capable only of napping while sitting up and checking (constantly) our online dating sites for updates, which never come.  Oh, women come and visit our profile, but they never write anything.  It's like we're Mr. Pibb or something.

Anyway, we like blogging at night, because we can smoke all the cigarettes we want and drink diet Dr. Pepper (which of course we could do at work too, but don't) and look out the window at the people passing by, most of whom appear to be joggers or bikers training for the next triathlon.  And we can let our gaze wander to our own artworks, like "Ratbird (1992)", which is so named because we were trying to paint a blackbird but it ended up with what looks more like fur than feathers.  We also failed completely in our attempt to paint a branch, and as a result it looks like he's walking up a very steep hill.  It would probably bring millions at auction and win us acclaim as an outsider artist, but we don't want fame or fortune and gave up art decades ago, at exactly the same time our then cat Sadie walked through our blue paint and then proceeded to leave a set of perfect blue cat paw prints leading across the floor, a work so brilliant it shamed us into quitting forever.

Of course in the midst of all the blogging and gazing we end up smoking too much, and have to lie down for a moment on the couch until that temporary feeling of cigarette overdose passes.  That's the problem with cigarettes, they bring inspiration and then nausea.  We felt like we deserved to smoke lots of cigarettes tonight because we spent 40 minutes on the treadmill this late afternoon, burning off the cancer.  The treadmill in our building is dangerous because you can jack it up to high rates and nothing happens, then suddenly it kicks into its true speed and nearly hurls you into the rear wall.  It's a duplicitous machine but it's all we have, like a wife who is all treachery but is the only female around who will put out.

Random Observations

Lately we've been going to restaurants and ordering salads, and just as the waitress is walking away we say, "Oh, and could you throw some braised squirrel heads on top of that?"  It's our idea of a joke, but we're taking a chance that the chef just doesn't happen to have some braised squirrel heads lying around.

We've been drinking coconut water and feeling guilty about it, because it's expensive and evidently Gwyneth Paltrow is championing it.  But we can't help ourselves.  It's delicious and refreshing and makes us feel like we're somebody else, the kind of person who enjoys coconut water.  When we're obviously not the sort of person who enjoys coconut water.  We're the kind of person who enjoys diet Dr. Pepper and his nefarious alter ego, Mr. Pibb.  We've been thinking about writing a Jeckyll-Hyde parody called "Dr. Pepper and Mr. Pibb," but beyond the title, we've got nothing.  All we know is that Dr. Pepper is a sophisticated drink (it's a physician for Christ's sake) while Mr. Pibb is a nasty twisted beverage that likes to trample little girls, late at night, in the street.  Needless to say we're a Dr. Pepper man.  Mr. Pibb is for hairy-shouldered men who wear wife beaters, and who think Ted Nugent should be President.