UNREMITTING FAILURE

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.