So, nothing to see here.
I am badly broken up about it, sure. So many other people are as well. The sky feels weighted with sadness, with the horizon foretelling a storm of despotism and blunt stupidity, which is all just as wretched as hell, but …
Look, squirrel!
Avoidance. Diversions. Escapism. What say we get started on it?
But first.
I’m dead sick of the constant how-dis? post-election analysis, led often by billionaire-owner asshats’ media conglomerates that seem to be using the ad-nauseam what-ifs? and whys? as a smokescreen for abdicating their own fat chunk of responsibility, for corporately enabling this re-dawning MAGA shit-show, because, Extree! Extree! Read/hear/watch panel shows all about it!
This is not conspiracy babble, kids. It’s just simple business. A 24/7 news cycle requires constant content, simple as that. While the rest of us may have just gone through an election, the media, well …
Oh, we’ve got us a horse race here, boys! A good, old-fashioned, fabricated horse race! Gotta keep ’em runnin’, any way we can! Whip that hyper-qualified/boring one’s flanks harder, Blitzie, harder, harder! Cuz that inept orange fireball’s all over the fucking track – he’s a fuckin’ wildcard, a true ratings thoroughbred! Just look at him – he never once stops foaming at the mouth! He’s just so money!
Anyway, even if I had anything real to offer on the subject, I don’t think I would.
Because fuck it, what I need now is foolishness. Mindless abandon. Nonsense.
Avoidance! Diversions! Escapism! I’m guessing maybe you could use some too?
So consider this a stopgap post, a little burst of pure, pointless silliness.
Today’s word: moron
Months ago, my wife dragged me down into playing Wordle, a digital game I assume needs limited explanation. New York Times app; guess the day’s five-letter word, eliminating previous failed letter choices and building upon previous correct choices as you go. Six tries to get it.
Though Lisa got me started on Wordle, she soon enough bailed. My sister Michele, however, was also hooked by it around that same time, and somehow, we both arrived at the idea of making up quick narratives about the final set of words we’d chosen. Michele plays Wordle for strategy; I played it more for weird, going with whatever damn-fool words struck me at the moment. Michele obviously won Wordle a whole lot more.
Her own summations were routinely funny, but also manageable. But mine? Heh. I mean, have you met me? Oh, they started out brief enough, but quickly spiraled into bloated narratives of unapologetic pointlessness, a couple of them attaining fairly prodigious lengths, and all from six or fewer words of, let’s call it, inspiration. Mostly, my write-ups were silly as hell, though I couldn’t tell you now how I arrived at many of the triggers I saw in the words.
Michele’s and my back-and-forth Wordle-ing went on for months, until a few personal life whompings, followed by my own volunteering to help get out the vote that never showed up, derailed me in more ways than merely shuttering my own participation in a daily word game.
Still, a surprising number of those unchecked brain-droppings I shared with my sister actually struck me, upon revisiting, as meriting a chuckle. And if I chuckled, maybe you will, too?
What appears below is but a sampling; more will follow. Pop in and out when, and if, you see fit!
GLOAM – MAXIM – MEDIA
It’s like that old saying has it: Reading a newspaper in the dark is like covering your cat in chocolate syrup in front of the dog. Nobody wins.
ARDOR – POWER – GOFER – OTHER – OUTER
Smoody was just another nobody shuffling his way through life in The City, one more sad weirdo with a raging acne problem and a head full of rotten teeth, who couldn’t find his own place in a world that valued homogeneity, a decent complexion and passable dental presentation.
Young Smoody put in long, underpaid hours as a flunky at the Incredibly Big Corporation, running, on-the-down-low, personal errands for the ever-scheming Mr. Most Important, who required unsightly S. to wear a Monopoly Man mask while in the office, to hide the Smood’s parade of oily zits and shockingly unfortunate chompers.
It was in this capacity that, forgetting he was so disguised while on a clandestine venture outside the vast organization – making a significant cash deposit of embezzled funds for Mr. M.I. at the vastly overleveraged Bilking Our Community Bank – Smoody was mistakenly nabbed by desperate bank officials and appointed the precariously positioned financial institution’s new CEO.
Smoody’s sheer ineptitude drove the bank further toward the brink of ruin, with the inevitable BOC collapse taking Mr. M.I’.s bountiful ill-begotten booty right down with it, and leading the former business magnate, under spiraling threat of SEC investigation, into a cascading pit of madness and despair.
Newly rudderless, the Incredibly Big Corporation made a lengthy series of incredibly bad financial decisions, based upon a misplaced sense of its own solvency in the face of rampantly fraudulent bookkeeping by the dastardly Mr. M.I., such that the monolithic IBC was quickly brought down as well.
And what of odd Smoody in all of this, you might reasonably ask? What of him, now cut asunder from all this corporate blunder.
Smoody bought himself a Spider-Man mask, only slightly used, at a local flea market and, so adorned, promptly took a job in a comic book store, where he was immediately made head sales clerk on the strength of his ratty superhero facade alone.
Oh the tangled webs we chance to weave.
There is no moral to this story.
TWERP – PILAF – PIOUS – PICKY – PINCH
Stupid little know-it-all amateur chefs, thinking they’re God’s gift to dinner, claiming even their standard dishes are somehow wildly unique, a certain dash of this and a particular dash of that. Well fuck you, Emeril Jr., it’s just plain goddamn rice with seasoning salt, OK? BAM!
INANE – CHIVE – GLIDE
After-hours in the back garden, and the veggies liked to get a bit jiggly wid it. The green peppers were masters of the dap, the string beans total beasts on the cha-cha, while those boisterous bok choy were always ready to throw down, Gangnam style. Yet there was always a stifled grown through the leafy rows when a certain oniony cousin did its usual cringeworthy stab at a certain set of once-trendy hip-hop moves.
“Shit,” one snarky zucchini was once heard to mumble, “if those wannabe scallions was any motherfuckin’ whiter, they’d be motherfuckin’ Vidalias!”
QUACK – APART – AWASH – ABASE – AMASS
Regibald was a weird duck. As in literally, he was a duck, and he was pretty fucking weird. Consequently, the other ducks his age wouldn’t let him join in their duck-peer games.
Among his other fowl quirks: Regibald wanted to be … a dentist.
Shunned from flying in formation in the next year’s southern migration, Regibald veered off course, to apply to an unaccredited dental school in Jalisco, Mexico. Regibald worked his way through school, prostituting himself online under an assumed name, Corkscrew Johnson, doing modeling for decoy carvers. He graduated on something of a wing and a prayer, but graduated nonetheless.
Once back at home, setting up his dental practice in a classier expanse of river rushes, Regibald was very soon flying high, this novelty of a duck dentist, something of an overnight sensation really. And oh, the very sweetest revenge — all the other ducks suddenly wanted to know him. His practice boomed. He was up to his very top feathers in success.
To be clear: Ducks do not have teeth. There is no fucking reason for a duck to go to a dentist, much less to become one.
Soon enough, there was grumbling out in the outer rushes, that Regibald Duck, DDS, might actually be a phony, a fraud, what some might call a …
Well, a phony anyway.
By the time he was shot dead during the next fall’s hunting season, under suspicious circumstances involving a duck call found in the possession of the mate of his somewhat overly devoted office secretary, the duck community as a whole had turned on him, amid rumors of Regibald being seen in the company of geese from the nearby upscale wetlands. One salacious story had him frolicking by moonlight with a swan.
The moral of this story? Once a weird duck, always a weird duck. Fly right, kids, or don’t fly at all.
TWIST – AWASH
Blissed and stoned out of his bleeping mind, Scarburg was unable to do much more than sway as the more strait-laced teenyboppers around him took the enveloping music’s strict advice, careening and pinwheeling all around him. Meanwhile, up onstage, a young Chubby Checker caught his eye, wagged a finger at him and grinned.
White kids. Amiright?
PLUME – MEDIA – MEDIC
Let us not mince words: Marbourg was a terrible doctor – though what he lacked in skill, and held in pending malpractice cases, he felt he made up for in pluck. He was vigorously bad, to be sure.
So when he opened his new clinic in the vacated vape shop next door to the gas station KFC/Taco Bell on the interstate access road west of town, he figured one solid push and he’d be back on his feet. Success was all about good PR; everyone knew that.
The commercial hit the local access channel with as big a splash as you can make on community TV. In it, Marbourg stood poised for doctorly action over an operating table with his cousin Sal the propane salesman hamming it up as an unconscious patient, tongue hanging out, the whole bit. Marbourg himself was decked out in full scrubs, holding a scalpel, and with a big tricorner hat on his head sprouting an impressive bouquet of peacock feathers. He imagined it gave him sort of a stylish buccaneer/Robin Hood mystique.
No matter. Because the very next day, in walked, or more exactly, limped, Fielding Tuttle, that public menace! Fielding had been hounding Marbourg on and off for months, after Marbourg mistakenly amputated Fielding’s right big toe under the impression it was a very aggressive wart.
“You,” declared Fielding.
“Yes,” confirmed Marbourg.
“I found you,” Fielding said.
“You did,” Marbourg agreed.
“The feathers are dumb,” Fielding noted, and then shot Marbourg dead.
To be fair, the feathers really were quite dumb.
PURGE – STORE – BRAVE – BRACE
Flando Diggler, big in the way a tank constructed out of bread pudding would be big, leaned his considerable bulk against the door jamb, for physical and moral support.
“Be brave,” he encouraged himself. “You have to be strong! This is for the best.”
His whimpering, he imagined, made the whole scene tragic.
And so, a martyr to the cause of his doctor’s fresh orders that he must shed what seemed a truly punitive amount of weight, he flung open the pantry door, and as much as a man his size could move quickly, he went on a tear, nabbing first the stacked boxes of assorted candies, then the sugary cereals, the Pop Tarts, the sodas, the chips, the beef jerky, those dear Little Debbies, even the 5-pound bag of artisan gummi bears, newly arrived from a mom-and-pop confectioner in Vermont.
It was truly those gummis that hurt him most.
And all of it he shoved in a large black trash bag, which he tied off and dragged, carefully, out to the garbage can in the yard, his weeping coming out like hiccups from a winded hyena.
And then he suffered not altogether in silence, until bedtime, where he stared for hours at the ceiling, sleepless, broken, adrift.
At 3:37 a.m., wielding a tiny flashlight he hoped no one would see, Flando was finally outside in his Pokemon pajamas, down on the ground, so as to give himself better leverage, tenderly tugging the large black bag out of the overturned trash can, before arising to make his quiet parade of shame back inside, to refill the larder with his caloric bounty.
From the upstairs window next door, Gertie Stallwot, perpetual night-owl and noted busybody, eyed Flando wrangling with his re-pilfered snack assortment. She put down her opera glasses and made a little clucking noise.
“Betcha it was them gummies this time what did it,” Gertie commented to Pegasus, her calico cat, himself considerably oversized, who could have cared less.
“They come from Vermont, y’know.”
Comments
Hmmm ….. Just one question: have you upped your meds lately???
Just curious …
Author
Just wait till the next batches!
Lol, yes, we do approach the Wordle “sentence” from opposite ends of the spectrum. You compose a novella populated with charmingly-named characters involved in all manner of foolishness, and I attempt a sound bite. Jolly good fun!
Author
And you haven’t even seen the long ones yet!
Chives!
Decoys!!
Seesters!!!
Oh MY.