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A Night in Tight Pants

            Just as the 1980’s did not begin exactly on January 1, 1980, or January 1, 1981 (according to variously picky persons), but rather with the inauguration of Ronald Reagan or the advent of MTV or, (my personal choice) the first episode of Late Night with David Letterman—the night in question did not necessarily begin with sundown.  In the opinion of those who were there, the night began with the arrival of clean laundry.

            “Finally I have something to wear!” remarked Ruben, laying aside his copy of Wooly Space Arachnid, rising from his bed, and taking the laundry basket from his wife’s arms.

            “This is an enlightened household,” Manya, the wife, perorated, watching Ruben dig through the freshly folded clothes.  “I’m a modern woman, a feminist; you, my husband, agree with me on just about everything political and social.  Why is it then, that I’m the only one around here who does the dishes or the laundry?”

            “Because if I was to do it,” Ruben answered, selecting a pair of black jeans (his only pair of black jeans, it so happened), “It wouldn’t be done to your satisfaction.”

            “It wouldn’t be done at all,” Manya asserted.  She was on the verge of correcting Ruben’s use of the word “was” in the previous sentence when she noticed the man struggling to get the pants on.

            “Aren’t those too tight?” she asked.

            “No, it’ll be alright,” Ruben grunted, fastening the button.

            “Won’t you be uncomfortable?”

            “They’ll stretch out.”

            Manya imagined Ruben running from the police.

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The Insects Like to Feed on Wolf Feces

            The way the old naturalist Edwin Morang explained it, the wolves, in turn, seasonally fed on insect feces.

            “However,” he chuckled over his pewter stein of mead, “Not the same species of insect which feeds on the wolf feces.  That’s significant,” he continued, “Because if it was, then what we call the ‘cycle of life’ would be recapitulated in a narrowly localized microcosm.  As is,” he sighed, swirling the last swallow’s worth of mead around preparatory to putting it where it would do the most good, “It’s merely another example of bugs eating shit.”  He tipped the stein up over his beard and downed its contents.  As he did so, Lucas was surprised to see that the bottom of the stein was transparent, probably made of durable plexiglass.   Lucas, a younger man wearing a pullover bearing a stylized picture of a poppy seed pod, pondered the possible reason for the difference in materials, but his speculations led him to the wrong conclusion. 

            “Excuse me, Mr. Morang,” Helena interjected.

            “Dr. Morang,” Prosore the Kantiges Gesicht, sitting at the west end of the table, corrected her.

            Helena glanced like a would-be saint at the metal man before continuing.  “Dr. Morang, shouldn’t you have said, ‘because if it were then the cycle of life’ and so forth?” She rolled her hand to punctuate her paraphrase.

            “No,” the old naturalist (who looked like Ben Kingsley in costume for his role in The Old Naturalist) shook his head in dismissive deliberation.

            The robot later reported this as “deliberate dismissal.”

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Dust is Not the Same Thing as Dirt

            No miniaturization was required for us to enter the vacuum cleaner.  Over the portal was a bronze placard declaring this to be the Staubsauger.  Whether or not this explained our ability to enter the machine is unknown.  I suppose it’s possible.  Science works in strange ways.  I put the tip of my big toe into the glowing hole and was quickly pulled through into the chamber beneath the bag.

            “Did you see that?” Daniel raved once he and the others in our party had followed me inside.  “It was just like an energy drawing by Jack Kirby!”

            “I kept my eyes closed,” I admitted.

            “That’s not surprising:” Joel replied.  “Some of the best vacuum cleaners in the world are made by Kirby.”

            “There may be something in that.  It’s possible that he was exposed to vacuum cleaners as a child.”

            I was thinking about Frank Frazetta, however.  And then I was thinking about Dr. Johnny Fever and Howard Hesseman back and forth.  By the time we were climbing into the bag through a hold made with a sword of geodesic construction I had moved on to thinking about Shaun Cassidy; he had so much makeup on his face.  Vincent Gardenia was worried about his family back home at the foot of Mount Etna.

            “How will we know what we’re looking for?” Daniel asked as we began clawing through the dust.  We looked like refugees from the apocalypse in our gas masks and clown suits.  I had already solved the crossword puzzle.

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Try Another Can of Brandied Yamboats

            Full as I was, I yet went looking for something else to eat.  I hadn’t so far eaten anything that really connected with me.

            “It’s a matter of aesthetics,” I explained to anyone who would listen.

            The problem with the way that a store like 2cd and Charles displays its CDs (and all of its CDs are used, as far as I can tell) is that they emphasize the covers.  There are two kinds of CD purchasers: the casual one and the serious one.  The casual one purchases CDs mainly by the cover art (or name recognition), but the serious one needs only the name of the artist and the title of the album, printed on the spine of the jewel case, to make his decision.  For a store like 2cd and Charles the CDs are only there to suck you into the store in the hopes that you will buy a new book (that’s why they’re really in business.)  This whole situation points to a fundamental misunderstanding in the music business: yes, sales of big-name, mainstream artists by mush-minded customers are going to be a big part of your bottom line, but if you really want to sell a lot of the lesser known artists, you need to focus on the serious music consumer.  Of course, we mainly purchase used CDs anyway.  Only a chump (an Adele fan, say) pays full price.  All of this to say that the way 2cd and Charles displays their CDs makes it hard for a guy like me to shop.  And I’m still hungry, dammit, still searching for the next thing to satisfy me, if only temporarily.

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Everywhere the Rhinoscerene Persons Gather

Imagine a photomat with a tall, thin, fishing-pole-flexible flagstick protruding from its roof into the once-happy-and-inviting sky, bearing, yes, a flag—signaling to all persons of rhinoscerene quality that there, whence the flag finds its grounding, is a place for them to gather.

            “What is a photomat?” asked Brenda, younger than the others.

            “It’s a relic of the seventies,” replied Mrs. Oatsmeal, laughing and smiling and not looking anyone in the eye, but keeping her gaze on the waving, dipping and bobbing purple flag in the distance.  “A tiny building where one would drop off camera film to be processed into prints.  Just thinking about one, standing lonely but self-sufficient in the middle of the liquor store parking lot, brings to mind images of long lines of people waiting to see the original Star Wars or thin people eating at McDonald’s.”

            As Brenda’s eyebrows rose in amazement, old Roger grumbled, “I’d be far more interested in finding out what ‘rhinoscerene’ means.”

            “It means you’ve got a big nose,” Mrs. Oatsmeal told him. 

            Old Roger gaped, his emotional center (a photomat of a nodule, located in the empty parking lot of his cerebellum) torn between indignation and fear.

            The middle-aged woman gestured at the crowd around them, all moving towards the flag over the trees.  “We’ve all got big noses.”

            Brenda began her own protest, but quickly relented, admitting to herself that, before her surgery, she had indeed had a big nose.

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Psychopredation in Dormitory Tubes

            It was fun to sleep in the tubes.  Randy took the fun so far that he hung up a couple of pictures of Fee Waybill, but none of the other residents knew who that was and when it was explained to them they started putting up pictures of their own: pictures of Darth Vader and Shaun Cassidy and Ace Frehley and Cher in her Martian batwoman costume.  One guy even put up a picture of Elvis Costello, but it wouldn’t lay correctly against the curved interior wall of the tube and had to be mailed back home to Monster Island.

            “You think you’re so goddam smart, don’t you?”  This was the usual accusation made against those who publicly denounced the tube system.  Even I, who had at one time championed the arrangement, now was charged with ironic “smartness.”  I had a t-shirt printed up with the slogan, “No, I think I’m so goddam cute,” just to counter these encounters.  I would jerk my coat open, exposing the phrase and dare my accusers to chase me back into the tube of my choice.  The back of the shirt bore a picture of Godzilla in a zoot suit just in  case I was too tired (or loaded on pain medication) to run very fast, but, again, this image was either misinterpreted or utterly incomprehensible to many of my fellow residents.

            “These tubes are no substitute for the foam tunnels inside the Chloromorphus,” I complained in the pages of Lo-Proc Croc, the newspaper I cofounded with my friends the Pharmacists for just such complaints.  Little did I know then that the tubes would one day lead directly into the labyrinthine innards of that great beast whose form was riddled with tiny independent record stores.

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