blast from the past

(the folllowing sentences were written sometime in 1998, when I was a wee 20-year-old. I found them lying around the ol hard drive, so I figures, why the hell not--if not now, when?)


I was reading a book today. You were talking to your neighbour. She was doing her toenails. He was eating Zoodles from a can. That guy was pissing on dead rats in an alley. These sentences--do they represent some sort of descending moral scale? Or is that some crap I thought of halfway through, to rationalize the meaninglessness of my words?

Hey Tony, why do you talk with your mouth full? You are spitting out lima beans more successfully than syllables. At least a portion of what you spew is edible, if not conversationally incredible.

Hamburgers have no limbs--ignoring mutant hybrid burgers with dill-pickle appendages, of course--thus they have no means of self-propulsion. Even if beef burgers could walk, would they? I mean, where would they go? They have no family to speak of, since the cows they once were a part of have been slaughtered and their remains are fertilizing hayfields, presumably. I think the overall hopelessness and stifling atmosphere of being stuck between two buns would render even the most self-sufficient sparkplug of a patty inert and apathetic. Especially when you consider sesame-seed buns.

Considering the nation’s dearth of zoologists, the outburst of Jumangi-ish animal movies (e.g. Jumangi) leaves this critic anxious and susceptible to psycho-rashes. How do we vouch for the biological credibility of said films without the proper intellectual authority? Elephants don’t live in the city man! Where would they forage? Ok ok, assume herd animals did populate urban areas (and groups of annoying little kids playing “dirtball” don’t constitute “herds”, at least not in the Aristotelian sense): needless to say the Parks Department would be displeased by the chaos, destruction and general lack of civil respect incurred by even the most casual of stampedes. Anyway you slice it, I’m gonna end up with one wally of a psycho-rash.

Psycho-rash, for the illiterates out there, is an epidemic of biblical scope. It is caused by an insidious bacteria, cooked up by our friends (but not, oddly enough, our enemies) at the local A&P, wrapped in orange gauze, and sold at low prices to naive “dirtball” players who wouldn’t know a biblical epidemic if it bludgeoned them across the face. My lab partner Jesse gave me psycho-rash when I borrowed the Water Works and Ventnor Ave. from his Monopoly board. I was trying to sell phony properties to land-hungry immigrants. Instead I got a batch of psycho-rash that would make your nipples bleed vinegar. Needless to say, neither I nor Jesse has played “dirtball”, or Monopoly, for some time.

Like most males my age, I had thought ‘angina’ was some smutty slang word. In retrospect I cringe at my foolishness.

She ripped my hairs out of my head like an Idaho farmer prematurely unearthing the midsummer harvest. I would prefer even rotten pototoes to the present leguminescence of my shorn scalp. So I offered to kick her ass all the way to Boise; she said she was more comfortable taking the train.