i've got it

i've got, it i've got, it i've got it.

blueberry, raspberry, strawberry

blueberry - not yellow, not green, crowned top, never clean

raspberry - point, one, two, three, pop, more, soft, juicy

strawberry - slice, chop, cut off top

you have to be careful

someplace or other, there may be another of your lookalikes, straigh off the siberian factory floor, nodding his head to the beat, but a little too gently.

forget stars, everyone's interested in cooking

i got this idea the last week that i should start my own cooking channel. i know, it's easy to go out and say you have an idea and a lot harder to make it happen, but you have to give me this -- i mean my own channel. 20 hours a day, and the other four are going to be reruns of australian tv shows. do not send your infomercial time my way, got it?

there are forty people outside on my lawn

i don't have a thing against people in general, or my neighbors, or the person who decided to invite everyone over to hang out in my yard, but it does seem like they're littering. litter is the most bothersome thing i have encountered in my years on this earth. i feel like debris should either be spontaneous or uniform, and litter is neither. litter stands out in a natural landscape just as it does in an artificial one like an outdoor basketball court. because people playing a gave of three on three don't want to trip over a dirty burger wrapper. just like i don't want people leaving their lottery tickets and crazy colored nail polish bottles on the lawn. there's a reason people want to see my yard, ok? i mean, who's going to bother looking at the seventeen inflatable picassos if there are footprints and soda labels breaking up the green moat that protects them?

lit

one of my friends is currently searching for housing, and although a number of opportunities have arisen over the months, apparently none of them have been quite right. i realized, however, that a perfect situation might soon be opening up near me. i happen to be acquainted with the owner of the next-door property.

while there are tenants of this dwelling, i have also acquired a new habit of sitting on the front porch at late hours of the evening. only in the days just prior to my conversation about potential vacancies, the neighbors had begun a pattern of discovering me chatting on the mobile and slouching on the steps. this behavior, not familiar to the area, seemed like a possible cause of a rapid departure by the renting neighbors. i was dismayed, then, to discover that while they had seized upon the distastefulness of my evening presence, they countered it merely by turning on their porch light.

why toast is good

toast is good because it is crunchy. it also requires a degree of finesse and patience in its preparation, and thus rewards the careful practitioner. then, as the toast emerges ready to be eaten, it is delightfully warm in addition to its crisp texture.

origins

if i was a light, what type of electricity would run me?

your life should revolve around cereal boxes

where surprise is always just a shake away

who needs a castle though

i've been accused sometimes of having a strange level of interest in chocolate. essentially, people seem to think it's strange that i don't eat it more quickly. i'm not sure whether these accusations are accurate or not. it does seem that there are times when i could eat more chocolate than might seem normal or expected. on the other hand, why does that matter exactly? i suppose if i was taking all the world's chocolate and thus preventing other people from enjoying it, that might be a problem. it would be especially troubling if i built a castle out of it and refused to eat the chocolate i walked on, while others were left chocolateless, in a truly unfair distribution of resources.

Before you go

He made his daughter sit in the back seat, because she was always asking questions about the things he did with his hands while he drove.
"Daddy, I can't see you."
"I'm right here, J."
"I know, but I can't see what you're doing."
Jack had few insights into the inner life of his little girl, but he knew one thing: she was highly concerned with the way other people spent their time. He sighed briefly as he came to the final turn. Two houses down, just past the fence with the peach trees. Oh yes. Margaret had left the door open, a welcome to April's warmest day.
"Okay, I'm parking right in the driveway and then you'll run up the steps and in the front door. See how your mother left the door open for you?"
"Are you going to give me a kiss goodbye?"
"Hey, don't worry, I'll be right here blowing you a kiss. I'll blow you a kiss again when I get back home and call you."
Little J was the easy one to beat in an argument. Still, without having to face his ex-wife, Jack was fairly certain he'd be able to avoid a confrontation on this day. There was still enough time to hit about ten buckets of balls before the lecture. So he'd be calling his little girl from the driving range. It was sort of becoming his second home anyway.
She was already gone, bouncing up the path to her mother's front door, and when she walked right in the house without looking back, Jack had also nearly forgotten about the kiss.

don't change the subject

it's important for me to note that the single most overrated food item in history is the veggie burger with cheese. since i'm not a vegan, semi-vegan, ironic vegan, or pseudo vegan, i think it's pretty safe for me to judge. a good veggie burger is an achievement. putting cheese on it just masks the entire issue.

burst

i am forseeing good things for the balloon as an icon going forward. perhaps it is best suited as a metaphor, but the balloon can make a great decoration as well. think about polka dots morphed into a nice reminder of childhood birthday parties. a couple large balloon graphics on a t-shirt. running shoes. embossed stationery. the sky is the limit.

i can see the signs

due to the apparent lack of demand for traditional phone lines in the united states, i have decided to move to an apartment made solely of telephones. in the next five years, as i battle the escalating cost of a rent bill continuously being raised by a failing former monopoly, i estimate that my share of the local telephone market will rise to at least twenty percent. by that point, i should be able to call myself on any of my phones at any hour of the day or night and be comforted in knowing that, if anyone at the phone company is bored, they will probably be listening to my conversation. it's always nice to feel wanted.

not just syrup

i just had to check to make sure i had already written about the waffles. it's important or it would seem important to know, if i had any way of knowing, why it is that certain ideas have a persistence that seems unjustified. of course, the key here would be to locate ideas on some sort of grid or axis, with relative importance on one side and persistence on the other.

i can understand that there are ideas that are persistent not because they are great but because they are simply amusing or memorable. i recently saw a film for the third time in the theater, something i may never have done before. when i left, i thought to myself that i would likely never make a habit of quoting this movie, simply because the material available does not fit any situation where i would use a quote. there are individual lines that were funny, but none i could see myself using. so i realized that it isn't just the number of times i have seen a movie and how good it is that will determine whether i end up quoting it.

the same is true with ideas. there are some that maybe don't 'deserve' to be memorable, but stick around anyway. then there are others that simply get caught somewhere and don't leave. now, i might be selling the waffles short. the concept of the waffles is more one of envisioning a reality where something can be effortlessly shaped into what you want. that, on a more abstract level, is an idea that appeals to me. so sometimes it isn't about waffles, it's more about what holds them together.

Thematic elements secondary

I am currently in the process of reading anthologies slash essay collections by Chuck Klosterman, Malcolm Gladwell, Michael Lewis, and Nick Hornby. In other words, the library has served up a splendid array of treats. There is also a book of David Foster Wallace essays I looked at but will almost certainly not continue reading. It strikes me as evidence that I am not particularly interested in essays so much as the specific authors listed above. Of course, Hornby writes almost exclusively fiction, but his nonfiction no less interesting.

In the prcess of reading, I am preparing a curriculum in fiction writing. It strikes me that the process of actually making things up is not the area to dwell upon, and this a steady diet of nonfiction seems to be helping as I work. It's just a matter of coincidence, but I plan on writing up anything that works. I suppose you could make a gimmick of a class like 'Fiction written like nonfiction,' but there's a danger in suggesting people write any particular way. Maybe something abstract would work. 'fiction written like a planted field?'

several noises

i thought about making a pyramid or sort of triangle shape out of waffles today. some things are unnecessarily difficult. also, i have no waffles.

when people tell you 'there is no poison ivy' in a particular location, it's better to just pretend they said there is.

graduate school may have been invented solely to produce ridiculous situations.

april is a strange thing to visit on a summer evening.

and i still need to reorganize the library

i was busy cataloguing shark records the other day when i was attacked by ice cream. then, i escaped, only to be ambushed by fierce rabbits while attempting to collect my thoughts over the previous incident. the rabbits ate greedily at the trails of butter pecan dripping from my pant leg while i kicked uselessly at them. i had holed up in a shed, leaving little room to manuever. i soon realized it was wishful thinking on my part to assume the ice cream had been alone in haunting me.

quickly, i gathered the records i had brought with me in fleeing the first confrontation, but i found that once they were all in my hand, the rabbits had left the shed. i followed after them, not to seek them out but merely as a precautionary measure. i had no idea what else was out there. suddenly, a torrent of frosting came up through the grass and overtook me as i ran, scattering papers and yelling for someone to wake me up. it seemed i had to be stuck in the strangest of dreams, but instead, i found myself plucked from where i stood by a seventeen foot sandwich, who was also screaming: "why in the world are you getting these desserts so worked up? i just want to eat breakfast, and you're out here fighting cakes! who wants to fight a cake?"

i had no intention of fighting anything, but i had even less of an idea what the sandwich was talking about. where was this cake, i screamed, all i see is icing and i don't know what that's got to do with me.

it was then that a roaring came and the sky was blacked out by lemon-scented towers of pastry that smashed us flat against my front drive.

"oh, and i suppose you want me to fix this," whined the sandwich, "because as far as i'm concerned, the cake has won."

i wasn't trying to argue that the cake hadn't won, but then my lungs, my ears, my eyes even seemed to be consumed with the moist flavor of the cake. i had no idea what to do. should i take a bite, or was the cake biting into me?

what is so bad about chalk?

now that the nba has a new villain, chalk has lost just about its final positive association. People seem to dislike chalk, whether it is the sound of it on blackboards, its dust in the air, or the derogatory association it has in describing sensory experiences. With technology moving rapidly to change the classroom, will we soon have nothing left of chalk but empty associations with things we dislike?

I think it is time we asa society reviewed our anti-chalk stance. Would it be a terrible thing to embrace the texture of dry powdery foods as a good thing and reclaim 'chalky' as a positive adjective? I am not advocating that anyone eat actual chalk. Still, with markers having for decades come in scented varieties, why shouldn't we embrace the same technology in chalk? Next time you find yourself staring at a teacher's handwriting on a chalkboard, wouldn't the inevitable broken piece of chalk seem more pleasant when it released fruity aromas? As a nation, we can embrace this trend, forming a new area of market expansion and profitable international trade. No one will resist the scent of our chalk.

in which all is abandoned in favor of the mystical

it's hard to keep track of anything once you've realized the way you're keeping track isn't actually tracking anything you care about. it's like those counters that they keep at galleries and that sort of thing. if you walk by the counter seven times, are you counted as one person or seven? does anyone particularly care? if you are counted as seven people, does that mean that your presence in the gallery is seven times more valuable than that of someone who has only walked past once? this is why the counting and tracking of things is soon going to end.

yes, like a million professed solutions to our problems, number-based living is a thing of the past. it's all about the experience, as far as most of us are concerned. these days, with the amount of figures being thrown around, i would say it's a safe bet that most people no longer care whether they're being tracked or counted or cajoled into thinking the numbers are actually in charge.

what is most important in moving away from these decades of numeric superiority is that we leave the past without bitterness. everyone should be aware of the problems of people who cannot move on with their lives. they poison the air around them, literally making it difficult to breathe in their presence. at the least, their toxic emissions cloud the ability of well meaning bystanders to keep track of their vital signs. everyone is better off if we can just forget this bitter resentment. just leave it out of your life. that way, none of you will be stuck with someone whose ex-girlfriend is a number. especially not the number six.

rock report

there aren't enough rocks to go around these days. if only people would be more careful about what they use to knock holes in windows, we wouldn't have these problems. it's become more important with each passing year that we educate the public in the use of bricks as window-breaking devices.

though frequently featured in films, bricks have made up only nine percent of total hurled blunt hurled objects so far this year. rocks, at nearly eighty percent, have once again taken the top spot on the list. what no one seems willing to admit, however, is that there is a finite number of rocks available in most populated areas. as the legal system struggles under the weight of pending criminal cases for rock-throwing vandals, the actual rocks remain under police protection. once a rock is sealed in an evidence room, there's anywhere from a twenty to thirty-six month period before the case it is associated with makes it through the legal system.

in the past, rocks were generally thrown in the landfill once they were no longer needed as evidence in criminal trials. many cities have begun rock recycling programs, carefully cleaning and repatriating these natural projectiles. still, the rock shortage is significant and may lead to unexpected results as angry individuals have begun finding themselves without a stone to cast.