It Rubs The Lotion on It's Skin!

I've become a fan, if not of Franklin Mint Dolls, certainly of the conversations those wierdos have with each other.

I got the strangest one yet today. It took me a while but I came up with a response.

Wish I had a picture to post. Perhapse one of the zero fans of this blog could photoshop something for me...

-M

Crappage patch kid

I've decided that my ebay listings are too clever and pithy not to share with the whole lot of nobody who reads this site. Behold:

Cabbage Patch Kids: Cornsilk Kids Doll: Alberta Lanette

Back in the day these were fairly popular. I remember it as if it were 20 years ago. Fast forward to cleaning out my mother-in-law's 20-year-old storage locker and behold: a new un-opened cabbage patch kids doll. Not one, but two. I was quite literally beside myself. Imagine the restraint!

Anyway, it's all there. Sho' 'nuff! There's a birth certificate or something in the box and whatever else is supposed to be in there. It's un-opened and still bears the original price tag from Fred Meyer in Anchorage Alaska. The pagkaging is a little dented, but that probably happened when my mother-in-law was wrenching it out of some other housewife's hands on the floor of Fred Meyer back in good old 1985.

-M

Trashcan

The brain can only hold so much information. It’s like a trashcan can only be so full and no fuller or the lid won’t close and garbage will spill out onto the driveway, and then you’ll have to go out in your pajama pants on Friday morning to pick it all up before the neighbors wake and the truck comes to take it all away.

It occurs to me that my brain is less like a trashcan than I thought. Trashcans are emptied by men with work gloves driving around in large trucks. Brains are emptied by women in tight pants who bring alcohol on small trays. But both happen every Friday, so maybe they are pretty much the same.

But an analog is never perfect, even a phonograph is best loved for it’s flaws. I left the can on the street and went back inside. I hate putting out the trash like that. It’s too much like giving up. If my brain was like a trashcan, I’d wait for someone to come and take away the coffee grounds and stinking chicken bones of my mind; various things that can’t be composted into something more useful. Some thoughts are spent after the first iteration.

It didn’t really matter. The couch was as good as the curb for me that Friday morning and coffee as good as alcohol and the rough static on channel 2 as good, really a damn sight better, than a woman in tight pants carrying a tiny tray of beverages. I waited there, my wheels to the street so I’d be easy to position behind the truck, my lid resting a few inches over the rim from the rancid contents waiting to be dumped.

-M

Crime on Thurber

One of the things that I like about James Thurber is his style. He was prolific in fiction and non fiction. But the style in which he writes is so incredible (not credible) for either that it’s never apparent which is which (not knowing much of the specific time about which he was writing). But truth is so seldom about facts as it is about figures. More about artifacts than provenance. His writing is grounded enough both in reality and farce.

It probably doesn’t matter anyway. The next post down is me copying that style. Right down to plausible details that will make you wonder. Don’t worry. We’ll get back to the topic of scatology next time

-M

Mr. Monroe Stood fingering some canes in a shop in the Fifties. Canes, it had occured to him, were imperturbable. He liked that adjective, which he had been encountering in a book he was reading on God, ethics, humanism and so on. The word stood staunch, like a bulwark, rumbled like a caisson. Mr. Monroe was pleased to find himself dealing in similies." from the imperturbable Spirit

The Spanish Language

When Cybil left me she gave me a copy of Don Quixote in the original Spanish, even though as she may not have known, but certainly should have assumed, I didn’t read Spanish. She was the only woman I ever slept with whom I assumed when I met would never sleep with me. In fact she did more than that. It was really incredible.

I thought about her quite fondly for years years, even to this day cause it’s not like you’d complain when a woman like that ultimately leaves you any more than you’d fault the setting sun. And I kept the copy of Don Q. on the shelf not opening it--merely storing it with all the others I have--and not learning Spanish.

I took I down, though, when I moved out of that old house on Madison and thought about tossing it into the box of old sweaters and coffee mugs that was going to the thrift store. I held it, that thick, impronounceable, unlikely book so unlike the woman who gave it to me. It couldn’t belong to me, I thought and I thumbed the pages back to front aerating them for the first time in 10 years, if it was a day. That’s when I saw the inscription.

To me, of course. It read:

This Book Makes No Sense In English: Love Always, Cybil.

Though now I want to more than anything, I still may never learn the Spanish Language.

-M