Sunday, June 21, 2009

Tasteless Father's Day Post
















The King Oyster mushrooms that I broiled for the paternal breakfast turned out to be inedible. And may this Father's day be un-Oedipal.

[In case you pity my husband please know he was satisfied with the omelet.]

13 comments:

Robin Morrison said...

OUch! Bad Pun! YOu will be punished!

password: jemicist

badly spelt Latinim for jeweler?

amarilla said...

I'm in the stocks!

amarilla said...

Puritan...prurient...what interesting word hash.

Robin Morrison said...

Ah, I see you wisely edited. Not everyone in the blog-reading anonymous public realizes how pure in heart I truly am, albeit an ambitious flirt as I age and realize how much we homo flora love to be admired and nod at each other in the passing winds.

Strictly a nod, no more, ma'am. Rather than keep up with the Joneses, we should take time to stop and admire them. Egos deserve happiness too?

"word hash": I seem to have some of that alliterative mimicry sense with which fellas like Nabokov (who, BTW, is still my favorite author after all these years) wrought such magic.

I see similar qualities in your uncommonly fine prose.

Now that I'm earnestly working to write 'for serious', i.e., in hopes of being published and paid, I tone it down quite a bit so's not to fool myself by pretty distractions into neglecting that all-important dramatic narrative by which books are sold.

password: coative

Obviously, it means anything but what it looks like.

Coative is like festive or creative as woolly is like fooly or drooly.

I see you north Atlanctic seaboarders are enjoying roughly the same weather we're enjoying here in the Inland Northwest: wet and cool. Me like.

'seaboarders': double pun score! (For it can mean both geographic border and our seemingly transient mode of existence.)

amarilla said...

Uncommonly fine? Thanks so much! Mostly it's uncommonly idiotic, but I'm trying to work that into the weave.

So glad you're writing 'for serious,' you've got a lot within your reach. How goes the work?

Robin Morrison said...

I'll ask you to can that falsely humble "Mostly it's uncommonly idiotic", madam, unless I am misreading you and by "uncommonly idiotic" you mean to convey that yours is a rare and exotic brain of bird?

How goes the work? Thanks for asking. While my taking up habituance at your blog is a genuinely spontaneous expression of delight and sense of sympatico, it *did* occur to me yesterday that I might exploit you as a trial reader for the dreaded Work in Progress.

I had what turned into major dental work this morning (the dentist is conveniently next door), and took laptop with me so I could hear music better than their satellite radio crap (vintage late 30s/early 40s Count Basie) and write inspired thoughts. I wrote, very sloppily (but just now edited it to pass initial muster), the following scraps for a novel tentatively titled Performance Art:

(begin)
I've done the laser procedure enough that I know the anesthesiologists. Not by name, but by personality: the boring baldy; the intriguing intellectual German who shares my enthusiasm for NDE research; the young colleen whose freckles seem to burn right through her surgical mask. I've instituted a game I call the Green Flash, not some superhero but the legendary verdigris flash in the tropics as the sun departs the horizon. The game is that I struggle to identify that moment when consciousness is about to no longer be mine, and say bye-bye.

They say I'm getting pretty good at it.

+++

The surgery room never fails to affront me with its advanced modernity, the massive light fixtures overhead taken from movie sets of alien abductions, a sense of not beeing allowed to settle into its milieu, of always having to stay one step ahead of itself.

The equipment that does the actual work -- the argon laser, the anethesia apparatus -- are comfortingly mechanical and plain, resembling something an auto mechanic might wheel up to a pickup truck.

There's this vulgarity to incessant newness, to the streamlining of already streamed lines. Innovation is the essence of why we're here, of course; both creationism and evolution feature the voila of new forms. Behold the butterfly! Beware the tapeworm!

But the innovations outside the window, be they ever-changing cloud forms or the slowly growing trees, progress with the patient dignity of necessity. Human innovation is magnificent and new but as crassly self-conscious as a newly emerged mayfly and just as ephemeral, so fraught with futurity, so convinced of its invincible newness. Same old same old artifact of capitalist R&D. Nothing can afford to look old because old was last year's profit and this year must be fed. Perhaps this is why UFO reports regularly add new models to their catalog of darting skycrafts.

Flying saucers seem so... tailfin. Brylcreem. Indiana Jones and the Cadillacs of Vegas.

+++

He looked like Gary Cooper but came across like Crispin Glover. He was wise enough to exploit the disaprity, and was a stunning...
(end)

password: flocke

Synchronicity at last!

oops, had to repost:

password: sylythun

Good fun, I'm sure, whatever it is...

amarilla said...

"There's this vulgarity to incessant newness, to the streamlining of already streamed lines."

I really like this. It reminds me that I've been coming across a lot of ageism lately, not targeted at me, but at others. It's also vulgar, and alarmingly superficial. But I won't beat this drum too much, I think I was probably ageist too not long ago. What a deeply ingrained prejudice.

Robin Morrison said...

I'm all for prejudice, so long as it is aware of itself and understands that it is just another perspective, like whether or not one likes mustard on a hot dog.

Age has value, both positive and negative, and deserves to be included in assessments.

I LIKE the concept of fairness, and think it's a worthy goal, but see it as an abstract ideal. The closest thing to attaonable fairness I know of is honesty, and it too is subject to, well, subjectivity.

password: catedis

the point in emerging from a chrysalis where the butterfly says, Fuck this shit, I'm OUTTA here.'

Robin Morrison said...

BTW, when I first read your profile, I misunderstood and thought it said you were BORN in 1942.

I thought: DAMN! This babe is ageless!

password: stutwi

One of those things a 3-yar old says, insists you know what they mean, can never explain to you, and totally forget 3 weeks later.

amarilla said...

Prejudice like this is oppressive and invisible to its carriers, who view themselves as antiques at age 20.

catedis!

Robin Morrison said...

Ma'amzarilla, my impression is that most prejudices (of a negatively bigoted nature, that is) are merely subspecies of that eternal delusion, arrogance, which is the false pride we use to hide our enormous insecurities.

me, I have so much arrogance it... it humbls me to realize how enormous my arrogance is. ;)

sesser:

old Deep South antebellum Negro expression, meaning, 'or so the bossman says', typically with a slightly disparaging undertone.

Robin Morrison said...

commentless password, or, password alone for sake of comment:

cornest

The heart of Hollywood.

Robin Morrison said...

Omigod. I just now got that tasteless was also a pun.

Your sentence has therefore been remanded.

Go forth and sin no more.

caingst

Yiddish-Cajun form of c'ant.