something, 50
Somebody asked if happiness lived in my belly.
something, 49
Did you know the fat of the aggressive birds stores well and tastes better?
something, 48
How does help become kelp?
something, 46
I made myself a ball, a plaything for a woman in a panda suit to parade with. Things weren’t as easy as they seemed. When the Korean came my way I growled.
The Politically Incorrect Guide™ to the Civil War
The Politically Incorrect Guide™ to the Civil War is a joyful myth-busting rebel yell that shatters today’s Leftist and demeaning stereotypes about the South and the Civil War — and shows why, in the words of G. K. Chesterton, “America and the whole world is crying out for the spirit of the Old South.”
Do we need a not a spoof category?
from the comments
He lived in a small house on Long Island and every Easter he’d hide eggs all over the house and there’d be a hunt. These were hollowed-out egg shells with pinholes on the top and bottom, painted in pastels. And, man, he hid them everywhere. Most were taped under kitchen chairs. You’d pop off the front of the sheet-metal radiator and there’d be four eggs in there. People would raid the pantry, dump out all the flour and coffee and sugar and find eggs buried. One time he cut the top off a full jug of cranberry juice, sank a weighted egg into it, and melted the top back on so the cap was still sealed. This other time an aunt slid a framed picture to one side to find that a square hole had been cut in the sheet-rock wall and quickly replaced. She punched a hole in the wall there and, sure enough, found an egg. Eggs in light bulbs. Eggs in toilet tanks. And every time we found a tricky one he’d say, “You louse!” with a big smile on his face. He was a hell of a guy.
from the comments
Pam:
For months after my little brother died I remember wanting to carry around just this sort of sign that I was grieving. It was perpetually amazing to me that when I went out in public, strangers would have no idea that I had suffered a loss. I was being treated as a normal person by grocery clerks, telemarketers, panhandlers. This was almost obscene to me. The pain I was in seemed to me to be warping the walls of my house. It was just amazing to me that it was possible for someone not to know.
from the comments
I lost my father when I was 20 and in some ways I’m not sure I ever experienced the mourning process in a way that would’ve been appropriately therapeutic. This is partly because, at least in my own cultural context (which was overwhelmingly evangelical with a small element of catholicism), everyone seemed to feel that they should be involved in my mourning process. This came in the form of dozens of religious self-help books and 5-step programs about how to mourn “properly” as well as the hundreds of incredibly cutting remarks about how my father was in a much better place than his family that was still living. (I even had one family member, in all seriousness, tell me that god told her that he had given my Dad a choice between being returned to life and his family or heaven, and he chose the latter, which was somehow the least selfish option).
Hamper McBee
Photograph by Blaine Dunlap.
Tomorrow, June 29, Drag City, who give us Joanna Newsom and Bill Callahan and Bonnie “Prince” Billy and their ilk, offer a re-release of The Good Old-Fashioned Way by Hamper McBee.
There are no words to describe my excitement about the third release on our Twos & Fews recording imprint, out June 29. Recorded by the late, peerless country music scholar Charles K. Wolfe and the filmmaker Sol Korine in late ’77 and early ’78, “The Good Old-Fashioned Way: Hamper McBee of Monteagle, Tennessee” may well be this year’s best record of unaccompanied singing and also its most inexhaustibly hilarious comedy album.
spam name
Earl Sheehan.
from the comments
Matt:
I remember being able to read exactly as fast as my modem could deliver characters to the screen. For a while, we delivered, read and turned pages simultaneously. I thought I was flying, and I was.
a catalogue of fear, 15
As soon as I took one off, another replaced it. I could tell it wasn’t her. I just wanted to make sure. Smothered in masks, she never appeared.
a catalogue of fear, 14
Why would her father have invited me to go hunting with them, then, as he handed me the gun, say he wanted to spend time with his daughter?
I watched them go their way, and I went mine.
The Englishwoman’s Address
I examine it now and then, the address written in my grandmother’s Bible more than half a century ago.
It was placed there several years before my father approached my pretty mother on a Tennessee bus, removing his hat in a smooth sweep, asking, “Mam, is this seat taken?” Mother, dressed up, perfectly coiffed, a presentation tempered by the sadness just visible in her face.
They were married within a year. A couple of years later, living in Texas, he gave her a letter forwarded by his mother. It was a letter from the Englishwoman. “What do you want me to do with it?” she asked. “I’ll let you decide,” he said.
The Englishwoman was in New York, on a visit. She had kept up a correspondence with his mother. The woman he loved in between WWII bomber runs was hoping to see him. Mother threw the letter away, unread.
My mother lost her fiance during that war. Her childhood sweetheart drowned in the English Channel after his plane ditched. The war also took her brother, who died in Asia. Then she met my father after he got back from the war.
I don’t know why he left without the Englishwoman.
When I was a girl, I played very simple classical pieces on the piano in my room. My father would come in and sit on the bed or a chair. He told me music like that had soothed him during the war, helped him forget the rattling gun he fired in the turret, the friend who came to him before a mission, extending a trembling hand saying, “This is goodbye. I won’t make it.” The fact the man’s words came true.
Within minutes, while I played, my father would ease into stillness and quiet. His blue eyes would cloud over. And once, when I turned around, I saw, for the first time those eyes brimming with tears.
Now there’s just a name and an address. But it’s summer and since the man on the left in the photo died in July, 19 years ago now, I can’t stop the call in my head until I go ahead and study each dip and curve and flow.
I wonder what happened to her. I wonder what the letter said. I wonder why he left without her and why he married the woman on the bus. Even though, as Mother said, his own mother “preferred” the Englishwoman, had grown to love her through her letters.
That’s the wonder and the strangeness of it, to be born from so many layers of loss.
This Earworm Has Been in My Head for Days…
A memory is only as real as the last time you remembered it
Although our memories always feel true, they’re extremely vulnerable to errant suggestions, clever manipulations and the old fashioned needs of storytelling. (The mind, it turns out, cares more about crafting a good narrative than staying close to the truth.)
. . .
[W]e like to think of our memories as being immutable impressions, somehow separate from the act of remembering them. But they aren’t. A memory is only as real as the last time you remembered it. The more you remember something, the less accurate the memory becomes.
—”Memory Is Fiction,” Jonah Lehrer, The Frontal Cortex, June 4, 2010
Via @jorunn
a catalogue of fear, 13
The first time I thought the stuff that hit my hand was blood.
from the moderated comments
Had it occurred two decades ago, the event would have been acknowledged with an hour-long prime-time network special. As it was, JIMMY DEAN’s death received precious little attention given his monumental contributions to the entertainment industry.
a catalogue of fear, 12
We played at something I forgot: made ourselves in turn to girls. Clumsy approximations in the dark. Flush from memories, without a doubt, we tried again in daylight. Romping until she found us, I ran to hide. Her eventual hand replaced a moment what she put there long before.
something, 45
I said: Kate Spade is here. Aaron said: Is she nude? I said: How did you know? Aaron said: They call her fiery blue, Beta Epsilon. I nodded in agreement.
a catalogue of fear, 11
I stared when she came in. I stared when she pedaled. I stared when she said, “Stop staring at my pussy!” Then I turned around.
from the comments
I would wait for the giants to come — sit on the porch and watch for a giant so I could ask for help for the cat. I don’t know where I got this notion about a huge race of people. Eventually I forgot about them.
I used to hear things at night, soldiers marching down the street. I’d sit and look out the window, waiting for an invisible army I could hear getting closer and closer. I can see the street lights shedding light on nothing at all. I heard lots of things that didn’t happen, got more and more wrapped up in my own mind. I don’t think I ever shared these things I was hearing with anyone until one day my mom was calling after me several times and I didn’t turn around. She grabbed my arm and realized I couldn’t hear her at all. So then there was tubes in my ears and operations and I could hear again. I didn’t realize until I was older that what I had heard so young was merely my own heartbeat and the inner workings of my endocrine system or something like that.
a catalogue of fear, 10
He wanted me to flip him, so I flipped him. Problem was, as soon as I did, everything shifted. I can look back now and figure it out — I was smaller than him, he was a tough kid. For an hour he insisted my ass was his to kick, would mother fucking kill me. When at last he showed his hand, relaxed came back in force, the problem was that was the moment that hit me.
Dear Clusterflock: What did you used to believe?
Well, as a kid and I mean up until the age of about 12, I thought that black Americans were a completely different race to black Africans and black West Indians. Why? Straight hair! I was seeing people such as Diana Ross and The Supremes on the TV and they had straight hair! It was that simple, I didn’t even think about wigs or straightened hair, nope, they were a different race!
Now, I ought to add here that I come from Bristol which was pretty much the centre of the slave trade, you’d have thought I might have known about such things, but, no! If they taught it at school I wasn’t listening. I don’t remember when exactly I found out, but, I was as surprised about this as I was when a mate explained to me that girls had an extra hole!
So, what long held beliefs were shattered for you at some stage?
a catalogue of fear, 9
I can tell you what she said when I asked, but I still remember every detail — what was playing on the radio, the way the clasp that held her skirt broke as we went to retrieve the family pictures on the highway — all of it settled in precisely but the surface of it doesn’t matter anymore.
