Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
or not...
  

    
<Not in front of the punters, dear!>
  

    

Topic 59 - Hyphenation 7

While contemplating the possibilities of a new millennium, it's good to
explain to the newbies the positive angles of the old millenium, bolstering
whatever doubts they might already entertain about the bad old dogs that
inhabit the seventh circle of Hell.  For what are these dogs but
reincarnations of another centipede, with fewer legs but with dispositions no
less visionary than the Y2K packrats; for the centipedes did not stockpile
anything but shoes, and lord knows they need a lot of shoes.  But what about
whales that have no shoes?  Do we provide sandals for their fins?  Or do we
let them go bare-flipper, like the rest of the big finalists in the evolution
sweepstakes?  Did you know that whales once wore bibs while feasting on
shrimp and plankton and tails for formal otters?  But over the centuries,
they gave up their sartorial ways and options, choosing instead the most
direct paths to the best stocked pancakes the house could offer.  Syrup could
be had in different flamboyant hues, as though drops of crystalline color had
spilled indignation all over the tablecloth, while the hostess tried
valiantly to reply to their incessant answers.  But they were more interested
in felling the huge Christmas tree that sat in the center of the table,
making love on the hearthrug, and playing their guitars than whatever
wesleyan dirge the hostess had in mind, which was a pity because westerners
have no real concept of week-old cat piss on stacked newspapers, and its
effect on visiting herds of ants, speaking gently and carrying stacks of
Watchtowers into roadside diners from coast to coast, leaving them in the
bathhouses that line the road to Hell, frequented by harpies, harlots,
harridans and harlequins who hardly ever haplessly seat themselves upon the
ant-infested, soiled seat of social superiority: the grouse groused
begrudgingly, for he secretly harbored a servant in the basement.  The
servant spent most of his time doing laundry, since that's where the washer
and driver's side airbag could be inflated with nitrous oxide for those
participating in the sweepstakes (and marketing survey), without jeopardizing
their standing in various professional orgasm-delaying workshops and karaoke
completists who have every single one of Ben Fong-Torres's incredible
perversions imitated to a T, ceaselessly honing them at truck stops and
bohemian grove hoedowns.  You should see some of those guys handle a
microgram balance; you'd think they were post-grad chemistry studs who've
never had a square dance with a Bunsen-burning beatitude-spouting spiritual
ROMAN CANDLE OF LOVE!  God's love, I think to myself, as I sit in my
hyphenated, hermiated, hermetically-sanitized hotel suite overlooking the Las
Vegas Strip.  What the hell gophers got to worry about, anyway?  They just
sing that silly song, over any drop of the proverbial hat, sometimes even
without benefit therefrom other than the exercise of inflating their lungs
and floccinaucinihilipilificating the hangers-on who tend to their eviction
notices by chewing them into tiny sodden lumps of papier mache, then
returning them to the oven for ten more minutes at 550 degrees.  Then they
set 'em on the windsock to cool.  Once cooled, they're hung on the holiday
trebuchet until Dad has decided on an appropriate target.  Taking careful
aardvarks to visit their neighbors at the zoo was his first intention,
thankfully, the skunks weren't home.  Jim scrawled a note expressing his
regards for Broadway, which was only a block from the zoo, and started to
dance in that direction.  A cop pulled up alongside and said, "Mambo No. 5?"
Yes, said Jim.  "But what's the aardvark doing?"  "He's mistaken your gym bag
for a female aardvark, I'm afraid."  Drawing his pea shooter, he took aim at
the animal, but the pea hit the shell and burst into flame, a fireball rising
into the air at the speed of... well, a pyrotechnic pea, and headed straight
at the underside of a passing red-glowing sphere, which continued impassively
in its uncannily steady flight, whirling, tumbling and turning in a mad
spiraling pea dance of death.  The animal turned as the pea shot by its head
and thought "Well, shit!  My uncle Herbert always told me to watch myself
with that pea shooter, but he never said nothin' about no aardvark shells
what could set off matter-energy conversions if you so much as bounced a pea
off 'em.  Thus wisened, he headed back to the barn, hung up his saddle and
trudged wearily into the hind-end of the first bovine he happened upon,
mistaking said posterior for a homo cervidae.  To quickly switch the subject,
he grabbed a cordless toothbrush -- the new, ultrasonic variety -- and
flipped the swan on its back amidst a flurry of squawks and flying feathers.
Unhappy about being inverted, the swan pecked him on the nose, 1/4 bushel of
birdseed, give or take a few grains, right in the fatherland!  Have you seen
my father, by the way?  I was hoping he'd resume the story he was telling
when the SuperBowl started, the SuperBowl of 1916 tons, and what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in doodoo.  As usual.  But what does it matter
when you have snapping swans and piles of plush pillows upon which to
collapse?  Swan down?  Heaven forefend!  Duck feathers will have to suffice,
'cause the down market was closed down sixteen points in active trading, but
the tar futures counter-indicated any rash moves, so they called the whole
thing off and brought the dancers back out for a bow.  Backstage, the
director was frantically attempting to separate costumes from cobwebs, in
preparation for the grand finale, in which Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan would
be flown in on a gilded swan boat and flambeed by a passel of anarchist
chiropractors suffering from acute flatulence.  The dessert, however sulfur-
ridden, still whispered "raspberry cream" to those who listened closely.
Having concluded the meal, they all lit cigars and leaned back, sighing
coprophages all.  Had they lived on another plane, they would have been
flabbergasted by the quantity of cocaine that was served up on silver
trinkets, purchased from a roadside stand on the outskirts of Alamogordo, a
few of which still had labels saying made in Taiwan.  How those items got
from Taiwan to New Mexico is no mystery, as the shells of spent cruise
missiles littered the ground neatly arranged by size and color.

General Martha Stewart put down her binary pulsar and gazed across the
plateau.  "Do you ever wonder if alley cats really have homes and are just
slumming?"  To which her aide resumed scooping the cat litter out of the
Sahara desert, without a worry about the relative merits for this purpose of
sand versus claymore shrapnel, or buckshot.  Knowing that those big cats are
so harmless as harried she also requisitioned an ample supply of eau de skeet
shooter, a distillate from the pineal glands of canardophiles, that is to
say, lovers of double, tandem sets of wings, the front pair being short and
forward politely, but insistently, declaring their love for menachem Begin's
earlier films.  Boy meets nation, nation gets tough, toughs genuflect at the
altar of Mars, God of War, while gentler spirits look on french perfume sales
at eBay with wonder; for you can't smell through the interplanetary vacuum,
washed by the solar wind, and hot as smoldering coals or cold as dry ice,
depending on where you enter the system.  But everyone has to pass through
the Porcelain white teeth of the night with its jaw stretched open wide and
yarrowroot potions mixed thrice smoothly are sure to erase your wraparound
skirt before you know it.  And there you'll be, with your ass to the wind and
an upside-down swan at your feather-witted lover who means well, but you can
still see the vacancy signs flashing in their eyes when you look into the
depths of impossibly clear water, seemingly as light as air iterating like
physics equations in space, where seldom is heard a discouraging word because
sound doesn't travel normally in a vacation cabin torn loose from its
foundation by an avalanche thundering DOOM, DOOM to the ski resort
developers, who raped my hillsides, and stuccoed every third bungalo an awful
paisley.  On the bright side, they refused to allow a Chuck E. Cheese
franchise to move in.  There will be an out-and-out riot when the kiddies
find out, but we're hoping to forestall threats of rampant clapboard and
heedless tarmacadam expansion into areas heretofore covered with hardwood
floors and/or natural sod.  Between near-term risks of global warming and
long-term worries about oceanic CO2 abrogation, no one seems willing to use
the right word for the mischief stirred up in the headlong pursuit of the
maximization of professional enrichment promised by the promoters of this
weekend convoy.  The word is 10-4, good bud -- sticky, aromatic,
INTOXICATING!  Roll up a fattie and let's have a policeman over here to
confiscate your trucks, your loads, and your Starbuck's mugs -- EVERYTHING
will be taken and sold!  Taxes just aren't enriching enough to keep RICO
happy, but he'll soon rake in a bit extra from the bad boys what been doing
that DOS thuggery on the peace-loving Mac users of the Wasatch mountains,
whose water-powered generators whir gently as they point and close friends
won't tell you where the key to the universe is, but when I find it I'll tell
your next door neighbor, with instructions that they should never more than
whisper its location in your presidential election flyer; everyone knows that
they're all painfully awkward in face-to-face dealings, but when they get in
front of the cannon they've got to expect some intrusion.

Nevertheless, the monetary value on intellectual property isn't fair, but
does give new meaning to "penny for your thoughtful analysis of my entire
oeuvre, sung to the tune of 'I Feel Pretty,' like a little monkey in a
dress."  I stammered, embarrassed, and looked at the big grey violinist, who
was playing the world's smallest violin and making far too much squeaking and
far too little intoning, all the while glancing furtively at the ceramic
skunks.

Where did that cop come from, in his shades and that torn bathing cap.  This
is the weirdest psychedelic trip!  Where is my triple-thick chocolate fudge
mocha highball festooned with sketches of Peanuts characters executed in dark
chocolate icing, with pea-shooter straws to suck up the melted sugar/fat
concoction and 'splat!' evening gowns bombarded with gelatinous rice cakes
and batwing proof that though Spartans wore scarlet in battle so the enemy
could not see Spartan blood spilled, rigor mortis was a bit of a giveaway
affectation.  Such an affectation had little effect on the swans, who
continued to swim about because swans being affected cannot see it as their
own fault, only a fault in other lands with large ducks.  Cause large ducks
are garish and grotesque, except with they're graceful and gorgeous.  Geese
on the otho to Des Moines run have sometimes been clocked at over 80 miles
per heartbeat.  Ducks just can't touch those kinds of times.  Not even Don
Quixote fowl, known for their windmill-powered turbo-donkieskewers, a real
hit at dittohead barbecues, where the meal-to-be is likely to acquire the
nickname Beelzebub-on-a-Stick!  We are certain that it will also be an
instant hit among culinary cognoscenti, lovers of devil's food confections,
contrived from the whites of eggs of threatened and endangered birds and
reprimands from neighboring, low-flying catatonic interplanetary visitors,
struck immobile by barbecue fumes accumulated in the attics of their
interstellar house-ships, which most of them acquired with low-interest,
centuries-long loans from Milky Way Bank and Trifle, known in financial
circles as "The Sweetest Usury in the Cosmos."

Why are the homeowners barbequeing in their attics?  Not enough gravity in
the back yard!  The burgers kept going ballistic.  Them's the breaks when
you're living like a galactic comet, flitting from system to system in a
neverending quest for metamorphic cosmopillars -- just can't get the timing
right -- they're always unwrapped by the time we get there.  Gots to re-
calibrate the time-warp measurement thingamadohicky, the one that looks like
a breadbox, except it's got knobs and meters on the outside, and nothing
inside except a point of light that seems miles and miles away.  Makes you
want to stick your hand in and grab it, but the very thought is enough to
send choo choo trains over the cliff.  Best resort to traditional methods:
Give it a pop upside the horrible realization that we're spewing nonsense in
a fishbowl.  But, no, best not think of theremins at a time like this.  No.
Definitely, no theremins.  Perhaps an oboe, or even a pileated woodpecker,
with a bit of training.

My goldfish look forward to a change in diet, spew nonsense in their bowl,
they say, with abnormally long eyelashes, for fish, to which they apply
eyeliner at every opportunity, which basically means whenever no bipedal
landlubbers are wading through the muck.  But.  Consider this.  Fish have no
thumbs.  Disco bears don't have real thumbs either, but they make do.  What
if squid ruled the world?  There wouldn't be such a premium placed on
prehensility.  It's all reviled by the posthensiles, anyway.  So why besmirch
members that don't seem to belong to any avowed hensibility.  POSTHENSILES
UNITE!  Down with the oppressive medalists of Olympic hensibility!  Up with
pseudopods, semipods and the podless!  Hence, aisles open for all!  Let's
slither into the supermarket and fill our basket with frozen soy products,
fat-free mucilage and pantyhose.  Once our basket is filled, we can proceed
to the changing room, where we can try these products on for size before
masticating them unrecognizably, rendering them unreturnanable at most empty
warehouses, filled to the brim with brimstone, and hot stuff it is, that
broken promise of heavenly redemption made manifest in the sulfurous arousal
of the exhaust from salvation's regular bus that usually drops from heaven
like rose petals but which today thudded to the ground altitudinally bereft.
Must be the humidity.  Gases are so easily lead astride those zephyrs that
would waft them to a destination unknown to man, never seen by human eyes,
catalogued by perverts as their personal Nirvana.

Those who think in the nostrils of the divine reside the vapors of
immortality.  Well, if not there, where?  I had forgotten about that aspect
of this matter until my bear showed up at the back door with his friends, the
two decadent deer, declaiming loudly about the decline of decorum in the
deadly nightshade-eating otters, who picked up this unusual gastronomic
predilection while gambolling along the rivers of the Upper West Alliterative
Alleghenies allowing alligators all alliances albeit altogether artificially
alliterated.  Whatever.  We'll wend our way where wascally wabbits wouldn't
wander, perhaps perambulating perithematically, back to the point.  What was
the point?
  

    

              <applause!>
  

    
Not a read for the feeble minded!
  

    
I think it's fabulous
  

    
I'm getting feeble minded just reading it. My brain hurts...but I love
it.
  

    
Good grief! What an amazing read!
  

    
MORE LINE BREAKS! MORE LINE BREAKS!

The places where there's a paragraph break sure make it easier to read.
  

    
Seems like the playback meister could do that with editorial impunity.
  

    
He did indeed.
  

    
My coworkers always wonder why I'm laughing so hard when I'm reading this.
Then I show it to them. After about 20 or so lines, they give up, shake
their heads and walk away chuckling while I'm left to clean up my computer
screen.
  

    
I silently grieve the inactivity in the Hyphenation topics, and with
the incipient paranoia that has been my lifelong companion, I can only
hope it wasn't something that I contributed that would explain the
absence.  sob.
  

    
I've stopped being as interested in playing, though I read it, since the
Hyphenation topics stopped using hyphenation rules, and around the same time
I guess went to multiple lines per post.  It's a more entertaining challenge
to me when it is more challenging.
  

    

Oh Bud!  I have started Hyphenation 9 for you, not realizing that we
played back and forgot to start a new one.  Thanks for reminding us.  

Go my children, and hyphenate, but do not exceed one line.  (By more than
a character or two, she added benevolently.)
  

    
Yeah, the lack of following the form did make it less interesting, to me,
too, now that you mention it.  An actual single line ending with a 
properly hyphenated word is not so difficult, really.

It's simple enough to look at an online dictionary to get the break in the
right position at least most of the time.  Like, posi-tion rather than p-   
or positi-  and other random breaks.   And keeping it to one line, or
including a paragraph break helps too.  IE: ..if we got back into it, con-



tinuing this could be fun.

   It also takes a group of regulars who love to partake of the sweet friv-



---
But I digress.
  

    
Yay, Linda!
  

    
Bunches of Yay!, and adherence to the rules.
  

    

Rules?  There ain't no rules in Hyphenation.
  

    
You are a gracious and game fellow!
  

    
I'm up for it if it's actual hyphenations. The not-really-hyphenations are
like, um, playing tennis with the net down. (And not nearly as satisfying as
free verse, alas.) But I'm in crank mode, so don't mind me.
  

    
The best response to poor play is correct play.
  

    
bingo.
  

    
Okay.
  

    

Topic 72 - Hyphenation 8

It seems only fair to begin this iteration of the Hyphenation Topic wondering
about that last half inch of paper that never seamed at the edges of its
curl.  Is that a pool of correction fluid I see, or are you snuggling under
the covers with your last jar of peanut butter and a box of wet naps?  I'm
not gonna let you near me with that stuff on your finest linen bib. It's
becoming more difficult to obtain that quality of lichen-infested bobcat dung
since the market crashed, leaving unfinished business everywhere and causing
no end of upset among the congregation that invested the poorbox money.  Now
Bill Gates shoves cantelopes in his briefs, but that doesn't mean you have to
do it.  Besides, career paths differ from person to person, and if it's
possible to make a buck shoving canteloupes into your britches, la chaim to
y'all and kinder.  Whatevah, Billy Boy.  You're the monopolist, after all.  I
can't elope, I can't elope, O honey, do, honey dope!  My other car's a
jackalope, hidy-hidy-ho!  Now, when someone comes to the door with melons in
his pants and asks my dainty mother if he can borrow the melon baller, I'm
liable to take off in a detached view of the situation, I don't think that
what goes on in the privacy of one's home between a man and his melons is
anyone's bushido of the boudoir, but the Inquirer knows no bounds.  It's all
over the front part of the melon, explaining perfectly why he keeps them in
his pants, protecting his privates by providing a decoy of sorts.  But there
would seem to be a need for some sort of shock absorption mechanism, no?
Suppositories made of inflatable foam perhaps?  Then again, that's only
protection for the baby inside.  Wait a minute -- that can't be right -- you
can't have babies in your back pocket, unless you're a very rare type of
marsupial which is only found in remote parts of the Northwest Territories,
along with the pygmy reporter on nature studies for the local monthly news.
The rag is available for download at
http://www.biteme.com/helpyourself/newsletter/200004.html, expecting to read
the whole thing unless your mind is too short circuited to parse a sentence
what with all those melons in your pants.  Otherwise, it's a pretty good
report, a bit too heavy with useless pie charts and short on cogent
anthologies of other tribal customs related to melon placement in the nether
regions of American males, but I found it a bracing read anywhere I was not
likely to be implicated in health-code violations.  But I suppose one could
have worse (and better) things than melons in one's pants, so let's make like
a lettuce and leaf this already.

On an otherwise ordinary day, I was surprised to find a casaba on my front
porch.  "How weird," I thought, but left it behind and went to work.  My boss
was especially glad to see me.  "The copier od'd on a bad batch of toner and
is in there bouncing off the walls and spewing out gibberish.  Put on your
waders, get in there and start protecting our secrets!  That machine has
LOOSE LIPS when it gets laid underneath a big table in the immense dining
room of the Old Same Place in Santa Bartolomeo in the old country.  The very
first machine was developed there for the use of the mojo workers, who knew
where to put the grease and pralines on the proper trays for dispersal of
praline atoms but since the attraction between the human tongue and the
praline is so strong once there is fusion it may be too late to prevent the
meltdown of the entire gustatory apparatus.  Ford pickup owners are
especially cautioned about the use of pralines while transporting the machine
in the banana consomme tank, because you have to clean that sucker out VERY
Thomas Aquinas-like. I mean, you gotta just bamboozle those Christians with
whatever miraculous illusion you can mucilage onto their fuselage.  Whatever
keeps you in the air, I say.  Sweets for the sweaty, sugar for my gas tank --
you know I'll always find a way to sabre dance when the music is condensible
to three beats instead of four.

Setting the sheet music aside, I gathered up my syllabus in preparation for
tonight's lemur party (lemurs rarely approve of parties, but if you offer 'em
French 75s they'll be right oven cleaning fools, they will; some of the
narratives will give you pause, but we all tell ourselves stories in
organized harmonies that will certainly throng and thrum in resonance with
the rolling, rumbling rhythms of the ubiquitous aardvark, whose lineage
raises the question "where'd ya get that box of crayons, and are you gonna
let the whole class play with them?  If not, go and aard elsewhere, you
varking stingepot!"

Honestly, what is it with you inkwell readers, inventing words on the fly and
pretending they're noble assertions of the finest minutiae of the literary
life, when in fact they are pure flights of fannies, sparkling white in the
sun as they fly over the Golden Gate, enrolled as the first class in Moons
Flying Circus.  You can alloy the noble metals of leg-irons that are fitted
for the ravaging beast that would eat the town whole unless reminded that
towns give it indigestion unless it skips the appetizer of the outskirts and
farquhar brothers auto parts.  The brothers were lower case types who, posing
as mild mannered capitalists, actually managed a subterranean army of
supernumeraries that were infiltrating unsuspecting opera casts who must have
been very unsuspecting indeed if they believed for one minute that
capitalists were mild mannered at all, in view of their previous management
of the Moons Flying Circus, which had acquired a reputation as always being
late with their kisses, we would have known not to inspect too closely for
blemishes.  These surface distractions acquire a patina of shimmering
concrete walkways wending through the tallest resource management plan, with
opportunistic pox laying waste to the greatest laid plans of mangy mongrels,
making their masters mad by munching marbled murrelets marinated mostly in
madiera and muscatel.

Scrawny things, those bronchial tubes, he said, lighting another ciggie and
blowing out a puff of smooching smallpox-infested satyrs into the night,
expecting to hear nothing but the sound of distant traffic.  But suppurating
lip sores notwithstanding, the largest police officer stood firm at his post.
"If you think this postgraduate course in print work for behemoths of the
ages, the antediluvian monarchs of the volcanic landscapes of the Triassic
era, is for yodels, think again.  Chortles rule.  Unless of course a takeover
is staged by the witless freak that grabbed my by the blueberry vines
clinging to my designer ceiling hatch.  A damn good thing I left it open or
terrible death and pestilence would have been visited on the walls of the
compound which were painted orange because the orangutan family that owned
the place some years before.  But that was a long time back, and that was
then and this is not the time or place to discuss this kind of crap in front
of your minor children.  My cousin Herb was shunned by our family for
denominational politics, particularly rampant at the orifice that serves as
the intake for the process.  The more that is input, the larger he gets.
Hey, somebody pull the parts that drop the rear end on that equipment.  The
speed ration needs to be increased until his heart rate is pinned in the red
and his blood pressure infinitely blue, receding upward beyond the limits of
complicated equations to describe, until the face turns bright red and the
hair begins to lay the way mother trained it.  That's the first induction
current, while consecutive parallel circuses spiral endlessly perforating the
paper that you carried the wet garbage in.  Leaks, wet spots, all over the
entropic horizon, permeating hyperspatial relationships between the effluence
and the affluence.  In other words, don't think I won't post every fucking
day until someone else comes along to join me in the conversation.