February 2006 Archives

Today was another important
lost opportunity

Another day when I didn't seek an audience
with the skeptical colonel --
confront him with my passion.

"Colonel, soon these oceans will run dry!"

"Soon the humps of humpback whales will be revealed
and all sorts of unknown sea creatures
will flop about squinting in shallow pools!"

"Colonel, for once in your damn life..."

He arches a brow. My hair's gone insane.

"...can you not be so
dangblasted
skeptical?"

1. Reform
2. Conservative
3. Orthodox
4. Hasidim
5. Canadians

said my five-year old tonight, dressed in full Batman togs, before delivering 360 degrees of pain to the sides, the back, the seat of our oversized wooden rocking chair.

"Hunh? Chairie?" he cooed. "You want a piece of me, Chairie?" And somehow that familiar name only made the beating more savage.

You'll laugh. You'll cry. You'll take your Baby Robots out of their hermetically sealed, lead-lined vaults and give them a hug. This week on Monkey Vortex Radio Theater: "I, Baby Robot," written by, er, um, me. And starring the likes of Jeff Green, Heather Gottschalk, Christian Crumlish, EB, Hans van Boetzelaerlaan, and M. Smith. Now playing right here.

It's the smiley that really breaks my heart
the little happy face you
tack on
right after you break goodbye, say the news, share that thing.

You're happy. And I'm glad for it.
But where is your nose?

Now who will save
your missing nose?

I'm surprised you'd
say that. I mean, you've
read the articles, right?

I sent you the articles, so you must have read them.
Which means you know all about my generation

and the way we
transformed
pipe-cleaner-beading

from a sort of kid's sort of
crafty project into a serious art form
and then, finally, a competitive sport.

I was at the center of that movement.
I was near the center of that movement.

And you can sit there
with your bucket of light-shifting beads and your horse-brown pipe cleaner

and you can lecture me
on the importance of varying color and closing out the sequence with a half-twist

because you know, that's your prerogative.

But I'm surprised.

The cowboys understood the rules. They would wear certain clothes and in exchange, the bankers would make modest investments. Everybody played along and everybody won. There were nine of them, so it was a win-win-win-win-win-win-win-win-win situation. Until one day Hector, the head cowboy, opted out.

Hector was good with the horses. He had a natural sense for things like feeding time and time to let them walk. That's why he was the head cowboy. But he'd become uncomfortable with their arrangement. "Listen, I am a real-life cowboy," he said. "I will not play the part of a cowboy."

"That's a really subtle distinction," one of the other cowboys called as Hector walked away.

There was some confusion for a while. People walked around in circles. Sloppy even bumped into the fence! Finally Ernst, a Dutch-born banker with an easy smile, offered to play cowboy in Hector's stead. Ernst knew nothing about cowboy work, but he was a team player. He wore a big hat, and he roped the ponies. And if someone asked him a question about interest rates, he would tip his big cowboy hat back over his angular features and say: "Well sheee-it podna. You gotta compound it."

After nine months in the cooler, those nefarious Monkey Vortex Radio Theater-types are back with The Phone Call, Part I arguably their most sinister free-audio-download yet. Now available for your easy downloading good-times right here.

When your kid tells you they love you
and they're laughing when they say it
wandering off toward slow down
toward stop and sleep well
everybody sleep tight.

sleepy tight everybody.

Don't hold on to that wall.
Don't let it pull you backward
to its fixed side.

Hold my hand
and now we glide.

Airplane seats never fit his body.
Not just his legs,
though there wasn't enough legroom, that was for sure.

And you lower the tray and it goes right up
into his rib cage, like he's a grown man

sitting in a baby-sized high-chair. And the day is scraping

baby food off his face with a small
spoon, cool metal, plastic nubbin of a concave
food-holding dip at the end.

And putting that face-warmed leftover vegetable goo
back into a
squat bottle.

Jake has lived with these dogs for four years now. They pace around his cage on dry paws. He rotates as they pace, tracking their progress but never catching their eyes.

He learned this truth in the first few weeks: catch the eye of a hungry dog and it will bark. And not a yippie bark, but a rough angry thing that feels like a scraped knee somewhere inside your head. He doesn't need that.

Meanwhile, there were these other guys, the ones pacing around the dogs, pacing around him. The dogs smell almost sweet -- light-rain-sweet -- but those other guys smell bad. One day, Jake asks them to shower.

"Can't."

"Why not?"

"Sedates the dogs. Keeps them from barking so much. You know that."

"Oh yeah, I forgot."

"Hey, at least we don't smell like Fish People," one of them jokes. "Oh wait, you'd probably like that."

"Ha ha." Jake drifts back to the war, five long years ago. What had he been thinking, aligning himself with those Fish People? That was a huge mistake. And now here he was, paying the price.

Just a really gigantic mistake.

I was so angry, so spinning with all my anger
I remember at one point saying to a good buddy
that I was going to tell everyone I met
for the next TEN years:

"if you meet someone named [her name here]
please give her a kick for me."

I figured the word would spread over time, like a belly.

But now that I know where she's at
all these dozen plus years later,
I no longer feel the need to kick her.

Or to have her kicked.