Bad Day at the Beach

In which we view the ghastly horror of some innocent bathers menaced and molested by reptile, rodent, aquatic skate, the tiny and chubby hand of God, and a Dada-esque orange (naval and organic...bien sûr!). Quite suitable for work, however!

Music credit: Lester Lanin (Toot, Toot, Tootsie Goo'Bye).

Dyno-Mite!

This is my earlier attempt at kitchen-table Claymation with the boys. Music video style!

Little Love Story

My Magical Sea Turtle

On a recent visit to a friend's house I needed something to read, so I scanned her bookshelf for approachable titles. The books were all along the lines of Feeding the Self: Spiritual Healing Through Legumes, Daily Affirmations for Mastering Untenable Rage, and Feng-Shui'ing Those Grotesque Tubs of Legos.

I didn't want to read any of these titles. I thought about going down the hall to her daughter's room to borrow Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging by Louise Rennison (absolutely brill!) but then I spied it: THE SECRET. I had never read The Secret, but everyone else I know has and they are all now the richest people in America and the known world. Well, I would read it.

I won't share The Secret with you, because the author worked damned hard to cook it up, and she deserves her due. Here she is. She is wise. She is your guru. She will control your life better than Carvel's Cookie Puss Ice Cream cake ever did, and Cookie Puss is pretty much omnipotent.

Could she not have controlled the stray bits of hair with proper positive thoughts?

I stole the book and spirited it right out of the house. Aw, hell, since I stole it, you may as well steal, too. The Secret is thus:

1. Don't think about spilling shrimp gumbaloo down the front of your dress, because that is the exact next thing that will happen! As soon as you think of it, you will keep spilling crap down the front of your dress for eternity because you are drawing that kind of badass energy to you!

2. People die because they want to.

3. If you think really really hard that a Barbie doll dressed in dominatrix clothing will drop out of the sky onto your table where you are having drinks with friends in the East Village, it will happen. (Note: This actually happened to me, at Three of Cups. But I didn't necessarily want it to.)

4. If you go out to your mailbox expecting a check, it will be there. If you go out expecting a knife to swing out of the mailbox on an animatronic arm and gut you, that, too, will happen.

5. Depression hurts. What hurts even worse is the fact that your negative attitude is going to bring piles of hot doody to your doorstep. Stop thinking bad thoughts! Stop it. You depressed and worthless fool. do you want to bring shit on your family as well as yourself?

I took this book to heart and decided that I want a magical sea turtle to swim up to my window, with a check in its mouth (beak?) and fly away with me to the Caribbean. I am very anxious for my sea turtle to arrive. I will call him William, or maybe David, because the idea of a sea turtle named either of those names makes me smile very slightly and makes me forget about the toothed lemmings I called forth during that bout of insomnia. Which are going to heap a heaping ass of motherfucking horror on my family, per THE SECRET.

Man, if anyone Googles "toothed lemmings" + "rhonda byrne + sea turtle" they are gonna get LUCKY. Bring it on!

More Evidence of Trouble at the Office

I went into the office today, despite all the warning signs I had received the last time I was there. I had been sent clear signals that someone was coming to terminate me, but I foolishly decided that fear would not be my master.

No sooner had I settled into my desk to do some quiet, honest work when I heard an ominous sound. I went out and investigated. I found this souped-up hotrod vehicle parked outside my door.

See how small it is? Powered by gnomes! The blue bag is filled with human heads and offal. The vehicle is on wheels for speed and quick retreats out the freight elevator, and contains a bucket with a soapy substance with which to wash the souls of the dead.

I was scared, but I crept closer. I needed to know my fate, and accept my imminent death with grace and alacrity. I saw this weird hieroglyphic:

It was clear that this depicted a Kung-Fu master destroying a pile of worms. The bottom worm is the loser, because he has been squashed flat by his brethren. But what did it mean for my future as an alive person?

Ah, but then I turned the image on its side, and the horrors became clear. The person was crawling, broken and ruined, from a phalanx of killer worms! The worm at the back was now their master, Stiff-Spine Devil Worm Overlord.

The other view was even worse! The worms, having had done with our hero, have vomited him out into a cruel and uncaring world. This was very ominous. I was downright sick with fear now.

It began to make sense. A homemade bong! They called it GOJO.

And they had weapons, cleverly disguised with misleading titles that could not hide the terror of the words: THICKENED NON-ACID. If you spray THICKENED NON-ACID at me, that is like my personal Kryptonite. Fuck! Fuck again, I shouldn't have revealed that in a public forum. Goddamnit! I am ruined!

 I heard the boom-boom-boom of little footsteps and retired into my office, where I barricaded the door with "Old One-Arm," my lousy office chair that no-one else wanted and I am still convinced that someone switched for my good and decent office chair. I will find you out, ye who gave me "Old One-Arm," and took my thoroughbred beauty for your own personal seating pleasure.

I Once Accidentally Spied the Weiner of Lyle Menendez

I recently unearthed my high school yearbook, and found this photograph of my famous classmate:

My friend Claire wrote on the page: "Methinks he'll make ugly babies..."

Yes, it is Lyle Menendez, of the notorious Menendez brothers. He and sibling Erik shot their parents at point blank range while they ate strawberry shortcake in their den. They went to high school with me. For real!

You may wonder: What did I know of this villain? Sadly, not much. Lyle did not deign to speak to me more than a handful of times. I was not of his ilk. His ilk wore tennis whites all day long, in the hallways and classrooms. I tended to hang around behind the school and smoke cigarettes. I was invited to his senior year class party along with everyone else, however, and went up the driveway past the fluttering balloons tied to the mailbox and shook hands with his soon-to-be-dead parents and jumped into his swimming pool.

I was on the JV tennis team, and he on the Varsity. Therefore, we would often pass on the way to the courts. Lyle was usually stuffed with self importance, his dark eyes shining with pride and athleticism and a grandiosity that repelled me. He didn't concern me much, but one day I turned to my pal as we lurked in a bush and had a surreptitious smokie treat. "That old Lyle looks like a Class-A prick," said I.

"He is a Class-A prick," she replied, and took a deep drag.

The only story I have of him is thus. I shared an English class with him, and as we were scribbling away at a freewrite I chanced to glance up. He was wearing his tight, white tennis shorts as he always did. He let his left leg swing out, lazily, blissfully, and his weiner dangled right out of the shorts. I glanced away, horribly embarrassed. But throughout the class my eyes kept flicking over there, against my will—and the weiner kept winking in and out, like a turtle in a cave. He was totally ignorant of the thing. He just kept staring at the English teacher with a dumb, vapid expression.

I wanted to yell out at him: "Put away your weiner, man!" But he was a serious sort of dude. I would never have spoken to him in such a light manner. He had these strange, dark eyes.

That's all I really remember about him. Methinks he'll make ugly babies.

Lyle and Erik Menendez. Remember this shot? I do! Remember the Made For TV movie? I do!

UPDATE! Just remembered the story that my mother told me back in the 90s. She said "I met that Kitty Menendez once, and I did not care for her. She was rather rude."

My Glamorous Office in SoHo

Since I have A Very Important and Extremely Glamorous and Sometimes Dangerous job that involves work that is almost strictly online, I don't necessarily need to go into the office every day. I choose to go into the office on the days when I wake up and say, with fortitude: "Today, I shall have no natural light whatsoever, and shall be alternately overheated and chilled to the bone, depending on the floor in which I wander. I shall also be subject to strange, flickering fluorescence, and the sad knowledge that my office is so far from humanity that no one will ever know if I am actually in residence."

It is sad to say that I often do not choose this option. My photographic evidence, below, will make this all perfectly clear.

Working from my home office. Bucolic marvelousness! Note that the house viewed here is not my house. (Why, how could it be if this image is taken from my window? That would be a paradoxical space-time shifty-poo kind of thing!) Nay, my house is the one that causes the neighbors to use the word "scourge" in a complete sentence.

This is the view from my new office in glamorous SoHo, New York City. I think they are trying to send me a message. That message is "MALIGNANT GNOMES ARE GOING TO BURST OUT OF THAT FREIGHT ELEVATOR AND SWARM ALL OVER YOUR SORRY ASS, AND EAT YOU! You have outlived your usefulness. You will now be eliminated."

I found this mysterious hieroglyphic left behind in my new office. I think it was left by space humanoids, or by that one guy who uses emoticons in all his emails? I have studied it carefully but have learned almost nothing, except that the "clusters" are happy. But wait...the whole things reminds me of a system for collecting stool samples! I have latched onto this business with my usual razor-sharp wrongheadedness. Sample DS15 is tainted. Do not say I did not warn you.

If I work for you and you are reading this and are Very Important, I love my job. Love! Love! And I especially like my new cozy office. I also like the fact that, when I opened the boxes that had been packed from the move while I was away on Christmas vacation, I pulled out a pair of greasy men's size XL long underwear that did not belong to me.

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