I Apologize to Dick Clark, and to Whales

I dreamed a blog post last night, because I was subconsciously anxious that I hadn't updated in a while. It went:

Whale-dicked Dick Clark

sits in the ejector seat,

ejects beluga for me to eat.

That was all, but it seemed that a great mystery had been revealed, and I spent the rest of the night considering its implications. Dick Clark was a whale, sitting in the ejector seat of himself. He would die against his own glass like Goose did! He would break his neck against the ceiling of his own body! But he would also live on, because I ate his beluga. Not the caviar--but the beluga that makes beluga beluga! The thingness of the whale! The thingness of the whale who calls himself Dick Clark!

It seemed so clear at the time.

The Last in a Long Line of Cartoon Cats: A Romance

I've been thinking about yetis a lot lately because I recently saw a Yunnan Snub-Nosed Monkey for the first time.

I'm sorry, but that is a yeti. That is SUCH a yeti. Why are we even still talking about this? Also, do you kind of want to kiss it?

Question: Why Am I Not a Highly-Paid Advertising Executive

ME: I just don't understand why they have to put dye in everything. Kids all over the nation are having shocking Boo Berry craps and no one even cares.

MOM: They put it in medicine!

ME: WHY

MOM: I was reading the back of an emetic bottle once, and the ingredients included blue dye. Why put it in something you're going to throw up?

ME: Whoa, hold on, that sounds wonderful actually--they should advertise their product around that concept. IF YOU GOTTA DO IT, MAKE IT BEAUTIFUL.

MOM: It would soon be the most successful emetic by far.

ME: The commercial shows a child in slow motion throwing up a rainbow. The rainbow writes across the bottom of the screen: YOU'RE BEAUTIFUL ON THE INSIDE. BARF IT OUT. The camera cuts to a toilet bowl full of chunks, and the chunks are totally prisms.

And Once, a Whole Packet of Marigold Seeds

This is my favorite passage of Padgett Powell's The Interrogative Mood:

May I tell you that I once knew a refrigerator man, who called them simply "boxes," who would come to my house if I poked a hole in the Freon lines trying to defrost the freezer with an ice pick, and fix the hole with epoxy he mixed right there on the bottom of a Coke bottle, and who once brought his assistant Burgess with him and after the repair had been effected said to me, "Now, we know you smart, you go to college, and we wanting to ax you a question, because you smart, you go to college, and..." and went on like that until I said, "All right, Nevada, I'm not smart but we'll say I'm smart, what is the question?" and Nevada said, "Well, Burgess's pennis don't get hard, and we wondering if you could recommend something for Burgess's pennis to get hard," and Burgess offered up as proof of his lost virility a brief testament that before this debilitation had obtained one could hear him bust a nut, as he put it, for blocks on Beaver Street in Jacksonville, Florida, where they knew I was from, and that so moved was I by their appeal to my eminent authority and by the pronunciation pennis and by Burgess's obvious anguish--he was wringing his hands at the red kitchen table--that I stepped without hesitation to the cabinet and withdrew my Bob Hoffman Protein Powder for weight lifters and mixed some of it with a honey-and-vinegar cocktail over ice and told Burgess to drink it all at once, and he did, and shortly said he was sure he felt something, positive he felt something, and his soaring spirits lifted him away from the table and Nevada carried him on to his appointment with virility?

Is it because I am so fond of sex misspellings (teets, puzzy, etc.), or because I am so fond of concoctions? I would estimate that a full sixty percent of my childhood free time was spent mixing concoctions. These concoctions incorporated such various ingredients as rainwater, tree bark, and snapdragons on the nature side, and mouthwash, peach syrup, and Gravy Master on the household side. I did not even try to make them taste good. In fact, I preferred it when they didn't, because then I got to grimace manfully as I "threw them down." Now ask me did I drink them out of an empty vanilla extract bottle? Readers, I did.

Medicine

Is it winter? Are we sick? Let us nail the Nicholas Brothers to our shoes and be happy again.