My Dinner with My Dinner with Andre

If I had a wife who came home from her waitressing job just now, the first thing I would tell her is that I had Sloppyjoes for dinner. No, no, I'd say, not with meat, with those Burger Bits of dehydrated tofu and MSG that Hannaford just stopped selling. But now it turns out that it's cheaper to buy the Fantastic fake sloppy joe mix anyway and add tomato paste, although I'm wary of anyfood containing tomato paste. Anyway, I'd go on, I walked back in after a smoke midway through the movie and thought what a nostalgic smell the Manwich sauce made for. Shades of dinner in the late 1980s rising out from the forced hot air vents. I don't think my mother ever cried when we ate sloppyjoes. This may have been after Dad went to rehab, this remembered milieu, but definitely before he began announcing to the assembled family at the table how severely he had The Squirts. Maybe he and I would harass little Mike, calling Mooooooooiiiiiiiike!! until he cried. Or maybe I wouldn't have finished eating before my father did, so, bored, he would say MLALP (the sound of a monkfish sucking a smaller fish into its grotesque maw) every time I opened my mouth to take a bite. Sweet God I hated him. Then.
P.J. was gone by then, moved out to live with his girlfriend or whatever. He was 18, she 14. It's weird: In the early '90s, we gave up on eating together at all. My nascent vegetarianism didn't help any- I didn't presume to ask Mom to cook me something amenable for me; still less would I cook something for myself. Life cereal and milk for me. Oh, My Dinner with Andre?
Two friends eat dinner and talk for two hours. Mostly the crazier one, Andre, talks. He's what the phrenologists call exhibiting Complex Partial Epileptic-like Signs. That means he has insane beliefs that he didn't learn at church. Wellbred rich New Yorker, a theatric director. The other one was an unemployed playwright who unsuccessfully sought acting jobs. They ate at a really nice restaurant. Oh, the other one, not Andre, was the "Inconceivable!" guy from The Princess Bride.
I liked it. It was all just their conversation, which was mainly selfindulgent stuff on What's Wrong with the World and How to Fix It, or Not. The end was pretty open ended on whether it made any difference at all to either of the friends.
I would've loved it while I was eating dinner with my parents and brother in that second, later time I mentioned, though. It would have greatly inspired me, which is synonymous with aggravating the complex partial epileptic-like signs that I myself was manifesting at the time. Was. I luckily grew out of it. Any more, I don't believe really anything. Least of all the nonsense I'm constantly spewing.
Then I would ask her, How was your day?

You know what?

No, I seriously want to know: How do you keep this Anonymous person from posting ads in your thingies? 'cause he's seriously starting to P me O. I want to tip his bullocks and in a wholly malicious and heteroerotic way. "Yeah, I'd tip his cows." The Fin' jerk.
I think the appropriate internet abbreviation to add is ATEOML! *please help*

Squirrel Esplosion

I remembered a thing tonight. From years ago, when I lived on Ham St, from whence my CD player was stolen out of my unlocked car. Yeah, yeah, dumbass. I remember, though.
One time I was walking back from Janeto's. This cornerstore is famous for its meats. I don't know how well they traffic in kidneys, but to judge by the cat piss smell pervading throughout, I'd guess pretty rapidly. Anyway, I used to buy my smokes (and sometimes a fitty cent créme horn) there. This one time, I was walking home from there along Broadway there, and I passed a dead exploded squirrel in the road. There and then my mind diverged, and I was like Whoa.
I felt and thought about the sudden shock and horror of the thing, and also thought, in parallel, of how I would convey the experience to others- or of how I would weblog on it? Maybe. This was way back in my Nihonophiliac killingmachines.org days, before the wife, even. It was a while ago. "I saw this dead squirrel tonight, and-"
But I remember the jarring sensation of noting a thing not only for the thing's sake, or for my sake (via the experience of the thing), but as well for ego's sake of relaying the thing. And I remember thinking 'This is Fed up. Whatmigonna do.'
I still don't know. I also don't know, can't recall, what on earth I felt there and then. Seeing a stupid small animal killed to death by its small stupidity. All I remember is the shock to my system after my first-ever instance of parallel processing. I don't multitask well.

Thoughts on and inspired by the motion picture Purple Rain

So I've been sitting here drinking Murky Dismals trying to catch up on the twenty years I've wasted by failing to appreciate Prince, or the artist formerly known as "the artist formerly known as Prince." At a superficial level, it's pretty bad. Of all of Prince's many talents, acting is not one, even when he's playing himself. Actually, the actor who plaid the Kid's father and Morris Day were the only passable players in the whole thing. I actually laughed out loud at the 'Who's on first' routine that M.D. and his lackey [Jerome -Ed.] did with 'What is the password.'
One of the important themes of the film is the tradeoff between artistic integrity and maintaining copax (copaceticity?), between maintaining the purity of one's own vision and making everyone happy or even maintaining the audience's interest. After they plaid Darling Nikki, the club manager yells at the Kid for making his music too personal, and for his being the only one who likes or even understands his work. (Just like his old man, to tie in one of the other big themes.) And I thought Man, this is so me, to manifest the third person of the trinity of themes, that Prince is a self-obsessed jerk like me (but hotter & more talented). This remound me of something that Hillary said the other day about this humble Shanty needing some kind of decryption key. I know I get a little dense and convoluted, so this is maybe not a bad idea.
The main thing is that I like closed, bounded systems. Having too many options incapacitates me; I'm too indecisive to deal with that. For this reason, I partitioned myself into four + 1/2 personae, noms d'e-plume if you will. Ted is the only other alive human at this site. As for the me-lets, their identities I think are fairly clear. Except for Miss Jones (as in Devil in Miss Jones, c.f. Deep Throat w.r.t. conspiracies) who's basically only along for the ride.
Also, I like founding words and verb tenses that seem ought to exist. C.f. 'copax,' 'plaid' for 'played' (by analogy to 'to lay'), and 'remound' for 'reminded.' Despite evidence to the contrary, I am a phenomenally uncreative person. I am really capable only of fleshing out systems laid down by others, and not of creating new ones. A good example is this alleged Todd fellow.
There is no Todd. Doesn't anyone read Sartre any more? I mean, I don't, but I have it on good authority that your Todd is dead, and that no one cares. Todd is an illiterate squirrel about whom a stoned talking cat thinks, "That's Todd. I know Todd." The next day, the strip's alt-text was "Do you know Todd". This is the best euphemism I have ever, so I eloped with it. (We're doing quite well, thank you.) I owe knowing Todd to Achewood, the best comic strip on Earth.
Despite my intellectual handicap, I occasionally do somewhat well with reworking things that others invent. As I mentioned, I work best within clearly delineated boundaries, and other peoples' styles, coupled with having my friends for characters, make respectively very nice canvases and pallette for me.
Now, I realize that I may just have murdered all of my alter egos. Probably not. In any case, I will once again remove my actual, integrated self from this rickety Shanty and resume posting from my two dimensional cardboard subselves. Just to keep things plain and complicated. (I stole that line from Franny and Zoey, by the way.)
-Iain Worthington Goldliebowiczstein Knickerflaps

On Todd

I must say, I can not understand all of this Todd non-sense. Firstly Stani, then Hugo's gushing, and now the enigmatic Miss Jones shows her head to pipe in her two cents, if I may mix my metaphors. Who in Heaven's name is Todd and why have we not heard of him until this point? From whence issues the allure of Todd, and why is there implicit here the notion that all of the auteurs here are of the same Todd's acquantance?
Having the ad-vantage of quite some years on the relatively Spring chickens about this coop, I may say with confidence that I have known many Todds in my days. For mercy's sake, if Mr. Nugington had shown more often up for lecture, he would have met three distinct Todds in my class-room alone: Todd Johnson, Todd Eyring, and Todd Flemeringson, to name their names. Behold! three distinct Todds with quite nothing in common other than a penchant for philosophy. I can not begin to calculate the astronomical proportions of the odds against these three weird-os knowing the one same Todd, but I estimate it to be roughly one-in-three-hundred-thousand.
I do hope this helps to put a stop to all of this silliness, because I grow rather weary of it.