Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Tilt

tongue twists, head in other direction.
on slaughts the panic avalanche,
pebbles can no longer hope to stand firm.

light rays in murky wood between heavy growth,
bestowing accidents of nature
with temporary divinity.

there lies the severed corpse so mossy green.
home to insects and small ambition,
head underwater, ambition lost.

giants arrive in their own time, to see.
bodies propelled by greater direction,
every cell a member of vast consortiums.

sentience bestows the fallen with ceremony.

Saturday, September 25, 2010

The Minitour

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pc0mxOXbWIU

This is something that should be repeated every time upon waking from sleep. For treatment purposes.

Anyway, most employers are now already familiar with Tourette Syndrome, a rare inherited neuropsychiatric condition that causes sufferers to express 'tics' in seemingly random fashion. HR departments already know that these 'tics' are not necessarily always profane. They know that if, say, a person had declared this syndrome during an interview, they cannot just 'count him/her out', citing that this person would disrupt the common working environment with expletives.

Everybody knows all this by now. What nobody knows is that I suffer from a milder variant of Tourette, as yet officially unnamed but typically referred to by the uninitiated human population as 'being an asshole'. I want to stray away from this crass term, however, and renomenclate [sic] my condition. I will name it the 'Mini-tour Syndrome'. This is a clever way to express that the condition is a *mild* variant of Tourette Syndrome, while bringing an aspect of Greek mythology into the bargain (Greek mythology is always important when injecting terms into language) in the form of a 'pun'. 'Mini-tour' is like 'Minotaur', a Greek mythology that comes in the form of a man with a cow's head, geddit?

Being a Minitour is always very difficult. Everybody accuses you of 'always taking the easiest way out', or that 'you do not *really* care about anything do you?'. We will focus on 'really caring' in a future lecture, because there are some very salient topics therein, but today I want to try and help organizations and companies understand Minitours from my perspective -- the perspective of actually being one. Let us start with a simple example: Philosophy.

Philosophy is just one of the subjects that properly illustrates a Minitour's predicament. Minitours have trouble remembering all the philosophers' names. You could say "Bertrand Russell" and the Minitour could very possibly get a picture of Jean-Paul Sartre in his/her head. Names are meaningless to Minitours. What is interesting, however, is that the philosphical concepts that come into the Minitour's mind are, in fact, those of Bertrand Russell, not Sartre. You can see how this translates to almost anything. So while the organization or company is trying to get the CEO's philosophy across to all employees, you may often find that the Minitour appears to deliberately sabotage everything. The Minitour stands up in the middle of the speech and shouts an expletive very loudly. He then sits down again, calmly waiting for the CEO to continue his speech. These days, of course, such impartings of corporate wisdom are usually not done through in-person elocution, but via advanced tools such as corporate or organization-wide email. The email may even have a sound-clip or video embedded *inside* it that plays the message. The Minitour syndrome's adaptation to this new feature would, for example, be to manipulate the soundclip or video (through freely available software), injecting his/her 'tic' into discreet frames, then mass-send this content, company or organization wide.

This also happens with movies, movie actors, pop-bands, various commercial products and flowers. Minitours easily confuse things like 'Inception' with 'The Matrix', or Leonardo Di Caprio with Matt Damon. They just, honestly, don't give a shit. I mean, they know what the experience is. They may not have a clue what Lady Gaga or Lindsay Lohan actually look like, but when you invoke these terms, they do have a sort of picture of what you are saying. Of course, their understanding of these things may very well not be the same as yours.

My - my handler is saying I have to go now. I'm sorry that I cannot entertain any of your questions tonight, but surely there will be some time later. If not, well, speak amongst yourselves. I just want to leave you with the thought that, as an HR resource in a company or organization, you should never strike a person from prospective employment just because he or she is a Minitour. This person may turn out to be extremely valuable to the company, above and beyond his/her common drone peers. I mean, come on. Who doesn't like 'Philosophy and movies night'? I hope that everything that I have said so far has convinced you. Th-they're dragging me away.

Yes, you, I love you too.

Saturday, September 18, 2010

Exploring the Depths

Somebody twittered: "Bring fiancé to shop for wedding dress or leave him at home?"

My immediate response was "Bring to shop. Who knows, maybe he'll find something that fits better".

Of course, I should never have said that. Immediate responses such as these are the reason I, myself, will never have a fianc (I won't even pretend I can remember the key-combo to do the accent).

Fuck, I can't even date without this huge logic war proceeding in the most nether recesses of my mind. It's like, I'm dating this girl, yeah? I say a stupid thing like "Wow, we're really dating!" She smiles, inwardly pleased by my apparent na·ïve·té (at least I don't hide the fact that I'm copying from an online dictionary).

Then I switch off the computer [rage quitting].

---
Those three dashes signify the original poem, which I was resurrected to modify and make the spelling a little better (and actually make sense). Now however, we will get 'meta'.

So, while writing this poem, I actually had the experience of exploring these 'posterior' areas of my brain, much in the same way that you could, perhaps, browse through a city using the Google Earth application. What I saw amazed me.

Such emptiness.

Yet in such emptiness, such profound beauty and joy. And tears. Tears, for the sake of it! Actual watery discharge from these glands.

I re-routed the tear glands so that the water would next time flow out of my penis (as is usual, for a man), and not interrupt the operation of my contact lenses.

I feel the need to explain poem 21396

Whenever someone from the Obama administration says 'look', I feel a sharp tingle burn up my spine. Doctors say this is a routine reaction, that this kind of behavior is normal for reactionary nerves such as myself.

I hate Megadeth, and Metallica. I just can't stand the music. I'll leave it open to you to finalize all the calculations, but there is a definite systemic algorithm of crap there.

So imagine my chagrin on a Sunday morning, after Tony from HR (not the guy who originally interviewed me) had called to let me down easy on Friday -- can you imagine that? Ok, we're doing okay. Thank the gods that people in 2010 have brains, and that writers now no longer have to construct elaborations to somehow 'persuade' readers' minds that they're in a certain place. You know, unlike back in the day where people like Shakespeare and shit had to make up a load of stuff convince everyone. So, just read on, will you?

Like I say, it was a Sunday, and I hate Megadeth. I had to walk up this staircase made of wood (wood staircases are extremely suspect -- use concrete in the future) where the flaky paint was getting into my fingers, convincing me of a future with dire paint-poisoning. My mind, of course, would not articulate the exact type of poisoning these flakes (which liked to embed themselves, in shards, under my skin) incur, my mind being an extremely self-protective and devious mind. These flakes of paint, they shimmered -- but not because they were intrinsically unique -- they shimmered like that because of the shitty music coming from that apartment.

I finally reached the door, and I knocked. I wanted to tell him how bad my day had been, it being the Sunday after the Friday Tony from HR had called. It is not fair that, in life, some people are the winners, and some the losers. That's just BS, in my opinion. The door was that cheap shade of gray exasperated architects who were fucked in the ass last night envision in their plans. "Look, I can't decide on green or blue. Wait, you're saying there is red?" Having to deal with all these colors (the combinations are different when you are doing it in light, as opposed to paints) added to my horror when there was no response after 20 or 30 knocks on this so-called 'door'.

I waited for ten minutes before doing knock #31. There were birds to look at, in the area. Of course, there was also the shambling staircase with its horrid asbestos foundation flaking away into the morning sun light. And this annoying music coming from inside his apartment. It was so bad, I pulled my phone out of my pocket and called my mom -- and wept to her. She told me exactly what to do.

The legend is that he died listening to Megadeth, but true historians know that I took it upon myself to pick the lock, enter his abode, and change the music. I put on 'Easy Muffin' by Amon Tobin, and adjusted the volume to a respectable level for a corpse. Then I ran the hell outta there like my momma told me.

Sunday, September 5, 2010

mate a snake on the ceiling ...


just jumped out of the grass.
i will live here forever
unless you have straws to grasp.

lay it on, horrible rhyme.
lemon or lime it's about time.
anyone incapable of such inculcation
must victimize all future generations.

after one of my ears stopped working
i wrote up some stupid slogan,
because i don't have any sense --
i'm the robot-in-past-tense.

Ever given a little love?
Let it by and do its thing?
Unlike a game, that spring
snaps as you cower under the shower.

met a nsake on the ceiling ...