july 6 2000
i got a card in the mail today from my sister. the card is a neon pink circle with a crudely drawn green face and the words "pea brain" above the head. should also point out that the face has two tiny close-set eyes, but is lacking any other distinct characteristics: things like a nose, hair, a mouth, crow's-feet, blackheads, etc. despite lacking such staples of faceness, though, it manages to be a very personable face. it's mounted atop a tiny neck, which extends from just inside the chin (or at least the area that would be chin; thanks in no small part to the absence of the mouth, there arises a corollary fuzzing of the ontological certainty of a "chin." it's a bit like trying to find the lap of someone who's standing. not that that wouldn't be fun, as a fair bit of genital patting would no doubt be involved.) to the bottom of the card. an ink-smudge of some type that exists exclusively on one side of the neck constitutes an adam's-apple, which leads me to believe that the "pea brain" is a male face. the card is manufactured by a company called "bang on the door," which seems to specialize in circular stationery whimsy; i once received a circular card much like this one from my sister, except this earlier one featured a crude stick figure--much like if mr. pea brain were allowed bodily integrity--squatting and loosing a tiny pea-like bit of matter.the caption was simply "poo." i liked it very much, and i like this "pea brain" one very much as well. my sister is allllllllright.
for the first part of my lunch break today, i walked around midtown, since it was 80 degrees and sunnier than bono outside. not two blocks from my office i came across an office building courtyard that boasted six enormous 51-inch televisions arranged in a threesome of back-to-back dyads. gathered around the televisions were people alternately eating their lunches and gawking slackjawedly at the replayed tennis match that was filling the screens. tennis. not news, not even the ant and the aardvark cartoons. tennis. now that i think of it, i would have loved to have grabbed something to eat and sat down to watch me some ant and the ardvaark cartoons. instead, i went back to the $40 million cafeteria and got some pasta. though i wasn't grousing about missing cartoons while i ate the pasta, i notice that my mood has soured somewhat as i wrote this. i want my ant and the aardvark cartoons. if you don't remember these, or if you're one of those precocious high-school kids who follows my adventures (god forgive you) and are just too young to remember the heyday of the pink panther show's extended family, the cartoon consists of two ants and an ardvaark. the two ants subscribed to the comedy theory of fat-thin polarity, except instead of sounding like laurel and hardy or abbott and costello or rog and rerun they wore sombreros and sported abominable mexican accents. for the life of me, i can't figure out how cheech marin let them get away with that.
as part of my job today, i got/had to listen to a bunch of the beach boys' experimental mind-trip records from the 1970s. this wasn't no surfin' safari. they actually harmonized the line "doughy lumps and stomach pumps and enemas too." it sounded like some horrific perversion of a nursery rhyme, or like what would happen if edward gorey were in a barbershop quarter. not that i wouldn't want to be in a barbershop quartet with edward gorey, because lawd knows that would be some fun. just imagine the groupies. oh, cheap abasement, where would i be without you?
to recap: the ontological certainty of a "chin." doughy lumps and cheap abasement. thank you.
p.
and yo. my full-on venture kneejerk.net is up and running, though not nearly full. go and getcha read on. for me.
props to darkcounter.com
and sitemeter