Stories What I Wrote

I wrote some stories.
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A former drug-sniffing dog once sat upon a mound of corpulent crawlers. His teeth were as big as marshmallow feces and his laser contact lens squinted against the brush of the hot sun.
"Hello!" he cried desolately as the woods rang with sorrow.
Echoing the consonants of her childhood she sang a joyous song to the heavens and beyond.
Slippery little daisies skipped along the plain, all the while gently but firmly shooing little g-nats off their bodily areas.
Turquoise goats in turtlenecks polished their monocles and uttered "I say" as they lowered their eyes contemptuously.
"I'll have the leaves!" he declared while pointing his finger definitively up.
Raisin Buns for All was their mantra as they chanted and nodded for dear life.
Spreading his wings the cauliflower muffin soon escaped into a popcorn-land of mysterious opportunities.
It was, in effect, stunning.
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A woven mat of God-knows-what blocked his way to that distant glowing green.
"Avast-ye, spy-rakers!" escaped from the damp and gnarled maw of the captain whose ship, The Pink Elephant, was said to dance upon the waves like so many dancing elf-shoes.
Penelope Pie sang a song of defeat as she twirled her hair into shapes beyond human consciousness.
His eyes melted in pleasure when first he beheld the sensuous scene.
He studied physics beyond the mortal realm and knew that when he could comprehend her miraculous hair-shapes then she would be his.
Sputtering all the while his faithful sidekick spouted challenge after challenge but could not convince the student that there is no such color as neon brown.
"Eat your pickles, mongrel!" cried the desperately unhinged physicist. "My labcoat can save only one of our immortal souls."
That thought carried him out the window, never to return.
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Sparkling jewel-like leaves studded the filament of purest silver jutting out from within. Goldenrod spikes climbed atop the oft-misunderstood lemon yellow javelins.
"If you only knew what I am capable of," she stated calmly while pondering the acceptability of combining the words 'rock' and 'soccer'.
Berries of all types climbed the cliffs, panting but determined, and poured toward their destination as milk pours to cheerios. Filling every crevice of their cheerio-like environment the gathered orbs of berry crowed into the banana sky.
"Leap onto your scab-ship and away from my extrapolations!" he yelled for the thousandth time. But she, as usual, refused to understand his pleas.
Her magenta confirmation slip flapped for a moment at her pocket's edge before leaping decisively into the evening wind. Grabbing for it could not stop its glorious flight of freedom and she wept as she realized how soon her doom would come.
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When I lept into the lilac-tinted era of mismanaged necks, I decided to create a mandate on the wanton use of different dress lengths. It was a topic dear to my heart and excellently well-thought-out. For example if a passing someone-or-other were to allow for two dress lengths in the same garment.
"Is he single?!?" she squawked at a volume loud enough to disturb others. "I've been into beards lately, except on that dude-guy who is advanced in years."
"What ho lassie" the mustachioed source of her derision suddenly snorted. "I've just caught you a rabbit. Doesn't that count for something?"
"Pink and blue rain couldn't save you now," she muttered, calling forth an image of a loud obnoxious boy almost falling but not quite. Soon enough, the sewage treatment plant was disguised as a children's playground and the purple-threaded fate of humanity descended upon the scene.

Edith Zimmerman

I just found a link today to a column on The Awl called 'Letters to the Editors of Women's Magazines'. The hilarious Edith Zimmerman posts actual letters and then some of her own versions. They are so funny I literally smashed my head into my keyboard. Then I read her blog and some of her many very short stories and continued to crack the eff up. Not to mention this amazing article for the Huffington Post, 'How to Make Your Husband a Nice Dinner'.
On her blog she also recommends Tom Oatmeal, who's pretty freakin funny as well.
Read it!

TweetBookz

So apparently now you can make a book out of your twitter posts. How freakin sad is that? I wonder how many orders this company actually gets. I bet most of them come from the people featured on Tweeting Too Hard.
It also reminds me of a recent Onion article, "New 'Noveller' Allows People To Post Novels They Write During Course Of Their Day."
"You know, before we came up with Noveller, we had all these friends creating these great 75,000- to 300,000-word works of fiction, but there was no quick, easy, fun way to share them," cofounder Chuck Gregory said. "To be honest, we were stunned there wasn't already anything like it out there. It seemed so obvious."
"I love it," said Sheena Wulf, a Novellist from Kansas City, MO. "If I'm ever sitting in a coffee shop and my sense of alienation and utter detachment from contemporary life provides me with sudden insight into the world that helped shape my family, I just grab my phone and Novel it out to people."
"It makes me wonder how I ever kept track of my friends and their symbolic prose examinations of universal human experiences before this," user Joyce Carol Oates said. "I'm like, did we really ever actually go to libraries? Weird, right?"
Hahaha.

On Cuteness

Vanity Fair had a really great article recently on America's addiction to Cute. Check it out here.
I think this article makes so many great points and is very well-written. It could easily be extended into a book--some of the topics were only briefly touched on, and could be expanded. For instance, his point about the cute addiction affecting even food: the obsession with cupcakes and, I would add, slider burgers! And everyone is familiar with the self-perpetuating black hole that is watching animal videos on youtube, which induce "cutegasms" (a term I had never heard before).
Well worth a read.

Related: OMG CUTEGASM!!!!

"the boy is on top, and the girl is on the bottom." Hahaha.
But seriously. I want a pug dog. And I will call it Pugancious D. And it shall be so.

another silly story

Inside a rose there lived a muskrat with a top hat who sang trilledy-dee all the live long day.
In silver expeditions to the turquoise wool of my childhood I ate a superb truffle pie called "Trumblehead."
Existing as a dirt brick would be kind of cool I guess.
Paper cupcakes at a party for chips would be tres jolie, n'est-pas?
Vibrating along in a jiggly, finger-breaking triple D kind of fashion I rainbow'd into astronaut-helmets-r-us for a spot of tea and a chat with a peckish purple rhinoceros of the sort one often sees with pink leather fingerless gloves of the pop star variety.
Aquamarine barnacles, quite geloid in nature, trumbled in salty seas of kelp-tastic singularity. I sit in armchairs to discuss the phenomenon of barnacular splendifery.

An Absurd Tale

Once upon a time there was a leech who supped upon vast mouthfuls of freckle creations. There are camels upon the great plains of taffeta. This is the time for a serious story.

There was a girl and another girl and they loved each other very much. They had matching rhinestone-studded joke books and silver remotes of doom.

Wait! Pause.
Once there were two unicorns who made love upon a field of poppycocks. Cheese dust fell upon them in waves. They couldn’t be together because their families had warring dock properties.
A frog had some interesting financial propositions to do with coffee bean prospects. Mounds of detritus rained from the heavens as mammoths galloped ‘cross emerald-studded caterpillar filaments.

Joy and insipid hair exodus gelled into pudding-mass with a nose like that of Helen Keller’s dog.

Fingerprints studded the helm of the silver child-like prow of the vessel on which Jews of every description could be viewed dancing among the Band-aid fibers like the hand-lines of a beautiful head shake.

David Chadsey wore a gown of silver taffeta that flowed like toilet paper as he stepped regally amidst the flames, the rabid rhinos, elephants and hippos chanting “Fi-re, Fi-re” as they tossed their righteous horn heads in indignation.

Meanwhile Master Señor Kandel, lord of all that is holy, strolled among the duct tape billowing from flower patch to flower patch amid the joyous peals of maggot-laughter that rang out from pink marshmallow puff archways as in olden times.

Rachel had a well-oiled mustache much like that of Salvador Dalí and she coiled it maliciously as she grasped Annie by her curly Colombian hairs.
HOW MUCH FOR THE LITTLE GIRL?
So saying she turned the many strands of her many-stranded mustachio in such a way as to ensnare Annie against the train tracks of Western China.

Some kind of gelatinous carousel-horse skipped along under sun lamps of the orange coin variety.

“You’re like your own father!” she proclaimed loudly as she contemptuously tossed gold coins (for they lived in a nation with no paper bills).

In the Pleistocene era Annelid segmented worms wandered the Earth with no regard for human laws or textures.

When the Brooklyn Bridge was built elfin peoples rejoiced and performed a nose-dance to please the ages. Climbing upon the empty rinds of a burgeoning adolescent consumer society the whiffs of despairing nature moaned at their own inability to alter the irreparable future.



Written on a journey to somewhere else.

Words from Piero Manzoni

From For the Discovery of a Zone of Images (1957) by Piero Manzoni, the man who brought us Artist's Shit (pictured above):
"...subjective invention is the only means of discovering objective reality, the only means that gives us the possibility of communication between men...We absolutely cannot consider the picture as a space onto which to project our mental sceneography. It is the area of freedom in which we search for the discovery of our first images.
Images which are as absolute as possible, which cannot be valued for that which they record, explain and express, but only for that which they are to be."

Fluxus

A couple of weeks ago I read a fascinating piece about Fluxus, an international network of artists of all kinds (visual artists, composers, designers, architects...) that was especially active in the 1960s and known for their "intermedia" art pieces. A manifesto for the movement is pictured above. The piece I read is called "Between Water and Stone" by Kristin Stiles from the exhibition catalogue for "In the Spirit of Fluxus" at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 1993. Here're some of my favorite bits:
"Performed for the 1963 Fluxus festival in Amsterdam, the actions that constitute Zyklus für Wassereimer [oder Flaschen] (Cycle for Water-rhymes [or Bottles] are direct and simple, subtle and conceptually sophisticated. The score permits the performer between ten and thirty bottles or buckets. Its duration depends upon the speed and precision with which the artist undertakes the process of pouring, a procedure either quickly resolved or enduring for long periods. The task may, but does not have to, depend upon skill. It is the kind of quiet action that a thoughtful child might perform as a means to study the operation of things...Speculating on the nature of existence, the artist who performs Zyklus undertakes the careful exploration of human labor as a concrete condition that determines meaning. While Schmit's score leaves the construction of laborand its significance open to a mechanics of doing, at the same time, doing emphasizes the concrete condition of being. This doing, because it has a temporal dimension, equally calls into question the relationship of being to becoming, in and through time, and positions ontological speculation in the pragmatic activities of labor. Doing both exhibits and stabilizes the unstable relationship between objects and the human states of becoming and being. Metaphysical questions circle in Zyklus in the mundane conditions of the piece itself, in the actual flow and change among human action, bottles, and water."
and
One artist, Robin Page, "turned a corner...into a Suicide Room and filled it with all the knives, razor blades, and poisons normally found in the home. There the public was encouraged to interact and a sign read: "Kill yourself or else stop beefing and get on and enjoy life.""
And finally my absolute fav:
"'Goofing off' is a quality that Fluxus artists certainly honed in performance, and...there are positive qualities to goofing-off. Goofing off requires developing a fine-tuned sense of what it means to pause long enough and distance oneself far enough from worldly objects and events to recognize their illusory dimension and thereby reinvest the world with wonder.
In order to really goof off well, the instrumental sense of purpose so deeply ingrained in Western ego and epistemology must be abandoned."

Great stuff! Would have been awesome to be a part of.