Get In Now!

I posted this link in one of my first-ever posts. At the time, I had a temp job that was so slack I had nothing better to do than spend entire days researching weird animals.
One of my enduring favorites is the hagfish, which is a really fascinating creature.
Did you know that the hagfish can tie itself into knots and cover itself with slime? It can.
Anyway, I had a brief period of hagfish-driven wistfulness, eventually moving on to the snakehead fish, the giant squid and other beasties ...but I kept drifting back to the hagfish and wondering...

NOW

Now you can make $30k-$50k a month, in your spare time, raising hagfish. I started with a motley collection of wading pools that I stole from suburban backyards and just this month I signed a 10-year contract with The City to convert their soon-to-be unfunded Municipal Swimming Pools into a series of hagfish hatcheries. I can barely find the time to write this, hurried as I am by meetings with my perpetually breathless team of expert helpers-even now we are lining up some other Big Cities and boy, let me tell you, they are ponying up some juicy incentives to help us annex their burdensome and unsanitary Public pools.

I can't tell you the details, since it's mostly illegal, but trust me-it's a sweetheart deal!

Big cities, not dead-end towns, but Big Cities- the kind you read about in the papers- are jumping on the Hagfish bandwagon faster than slimed lightning.

You can do more than read about the Big City hagfish goldmines- you can own one of them!

NOW IS THE TIME

The hagfish stands poised to break out of the muck and into the Fortune 500. The hagfish is a critical player in the booming North Korean marketplace and now you can bring a little of that Asian zest to your hometown.

The Koreans have been eating hagfish for centuries- more so now than ever, since the 'hag's' food of choice is dead fish, which Korea's polluted waterways produce in abundance. The hagfish thrives in an environment of untreated sewage and raw industrial waste, lending credibility and hope to the once far-fetched Utopian ideal of the world's oceans becoming a global hagfish paradise.

In N.K. there's not much to eat but hagfish and sewer cabbages, meaning that North Korea is actually thirty to forty years ahead of the rest of the planet, not fifty years behind , as some speculate.

WHY ?

Face it-the meat market has seen better days. First there was the Mad Cow scare; now an Avian Flu pandemic seems inevitable- I mean, migratory birds as carriers? That's frightening. The possibility of a world-wide decimation of poultry livestocks is a very real one, and it could cause an epic shitstorm in the Big Food markets.

Of course any domestic outbreaks would be covered up at first- or blamed on Canada, or both - but eventually it'll get out and then-no more chicken or turkey, goose or duck, pigeon or vulture, etc. No more eggs.

No more omelets or holiday bird feasting. What a fallen world it will be for the wretched masses who aren't ready to seize the future. The ones who didn't invest in hagfish when they had they chance. I'd pity them, but I'm too busy counting my money. When the chicken disappear, they're gonna leave behind a mighty big hole. I intend to plug that hole with hagfish.

HAGFISH IS THE NEW CHICKEN

Like me, if you've ever worked the 'C' shift at a frankfurter factory , you know that anything can be converted into a product that the majority of people will treat as if it were edible. This includes hagfish. Modern food processing technologies allow the entire fish, rudimentary skeleton included, to be pulped, pasted and formed into a variety of consumer-friendly shapes- why just last week, I signed a deal with Disney Inc. to manufacture a series of hagfish nuggets in the shapes of beloved Disney characters!

Q: What looks like Donald Duck, tastes like chicken franks and flies off of supermarket shelves?

A: Hagfish Nuggets!

As a bonus, hag's hide can be fashioned into small, versatile articles such as those that would normally be constructed of leather- a belt, a wallet, or a pouch that a child could use to carry marbles and a pitiful handful of coins collected from passers-by. These items can be cheaply manufactured overseas by unpaid orphans, stamped with a look-alike designer logo and sold on cable TV and parking-lot "flee" markets for a ten-fold profit.

Even better, the copious slime that the fish produces when stressed contains the same proteins as egg albumen, making it a perfect substitute for eggs in many dishes, especially baked goods. Remember, after the chicken is gone, so is the egg.

THIS EVOLUTIONARY THROWBACK IS A MONEY TREE!

I've even taken the financially prudent step of registering "Hulafish" as a business trademark- 'Hagfish' as a brand name has fared poorly in our focus groups, but everyone one loves the old-fashioned, yet hip sound of 'Hulafish'- it's similar phonetically to tunafish, which gives the consumer a "comfort platform" from which to encounter my product. Your product.

Our product.

I NEED YOUR HELP

That's a lie. I need your money.

A mere $50,000 will grant you semi-exclusive Hulafish farming rights in one or more specially selected zip codes. Some of our carefully selected regions are so desolate and inaccessible that they are virtually uninhabited, making them prime areas for intensive development- you can recoup your initial investment with just one mass spamming, selling sub-farms and franchising sweatshops for the production of "Hulaskin" shoes.

My friend, if you can't sell a product named "Hulaskin" on the Web, you should be living in a Marxist collective, not investing in my product.

URGENT

Unless I can get $50k soon, the City will withdraw it's offer- and the hagfish will never save the world. Instead of millions of dollars in subsidized profits , myself and my fellow visionaries will have only our broken dreams and the pained expression on our faces as we once again tell our teary-eyed and malnourished children that this Friday, as every Friday before, there will be no Hulafish on our barren plank of a table.

Don't let this happen.

Send money NOW, before it's too late.

For the children.

Selling Jack

I recently inherited a new PC at work- one that runs on an 'operating system' known as 'electricity' . The old one used a system of springs, gears and wires and was 'booted-up' by turning a hand-crank for several tedious minutes each morning. This is how automobiles were started back in my childhood years, but shouldn't something as futuristic as a computer have an internal, electronic 'ignition' mechanism?
Like a button you could press or something?

Here is how a car was started back in my day, except instead of a smiling maiden doing the cranking, it would be me; standing barefoot in cold, ankle-deep mud:

Look at the date: Sept. 1911. By 1911 , advertisers were already using sex to sell cars - a technique apparently discovered before the invention of the automobile battery and 'hot-wiring'.
There is nothing accidental in the erotic composition of this picture, but please don't make me explain it.
I'm already distracted enough.

Check out what Crank Babe is wearing- in 1911 America had some really bizarre standards of dress for women- a repressive puritanical desire to cover everything.
Not unlike current Islamic standards, really:



Hmm...a little ankle , but no sash to emphasize the waist and I like the white gloves on the American lass better...
I have a crush on the model from that ad. I wonder what she's doing today?
Here she is in another ad.
This 1911 advertisement starts off by insulting the reader:

"Are You Lazy ?" it screams at them in the text.

If that ad were produced today , it wouldn't ask that question. It wouldn't have to.

Today, we are all lazy and we all know it, so why should we waste what little energy we have answering rhetorical questions?

Today the text would promise to help you lose weight or to overcome depression.
It would sell.

Again, there's nothing accidental in this picture.

Reunion at Vampire Beach

So I'm sitting on a bale of hay near the summit of a tall grassy hill. It's warm and bright and the day will be good because what else can it be? I've been here before- once every six months or so, according to a recently unearthed mental note- and this is a good place, despite it's somewhat eccentric population.

In front of me, the hillside descends steeply, abruptly cliff-like for fifty yards or more, before gradually becoming a wide, sandy beach covered with a shifting mass of blurry people . At the bottom there's an large open stage, (although it's tiny from this vantage) backed what I used to think was the Pacific Ocean. This visit, I somehow know it's really just a hundred miles of unbroken water and then lots of nothing. Maybe a waterfall, but who cares?

It's a Flat Earth, I know that much, but I'm not overly concerned about falling off of it.

There's going to be a good show today; I've seen it before- on this very same day but in a different dream- but I can never remember who's playing.

Overhead floats a block-long dirigible in the shape of a cartoon pig. I wonder if this is a Pink Floyd concert from the Animals tour. I hope so. That was a damn good show, or so I was told.

Whoever is playing, I must be Hot Shit to get seats this good.

"You must be Hot Shit", says a familiar blond vampire using a fake British accent, "to get seats this good."

Damn. It's Spike from the old Buffy the Vampire Slayer series. He's reclining on a chaise lounge and drinking out of a brown bag. What's he doing here? I think I remember what happens next, but I'm distracted as a group of happy but featureless people walk by. One of them is calling my name but I don't know the voice and in a moment it is gone.
Maybe next time, I think.
I will be coming back, after all. I know that.

There's lot of people down there, but there's plenty of room up here.
I hear a cough beside me. Right.

"Well," I finally reply, turning to Spike,"It is my subconscious. I don't remember inviting you 'round".

Oh shit. I'm speaking in a cheesy Brit accent too. I hope I stop.

He doesn't seem to notice or care.

"Fancy a snort, mate?", asks Spike.

"No, thanks. Trying t' quit."

"Suit yerself", he says, swilling away, "y'wanna know something? Just between us?"

"What's that?"

He wipes his mouth on the sleeve of his trench coat, muffling his reply.

"Beg pardon?"

"It's all bullshit", he repeats, clearly this time.

"Bullshit?"

"Yeah. This bloody vampire crap and all the muddleheaded idiots who get all gooey reading Anne Rice and sleeping in coffins and the like. You won't see me sleeping in a coffin, nooo...not enough wiggle room ,ya know", he finishes by nudging me and winking.

"Spike", I ask, pointing upward at the blazing sun, "shouldn't you be on fire or something? You know, the sun, you being a vampire and all that."

"I told you it was all crap. Here hold this a sec' if y' would," he says, removing his coat and handing it to me.

"I'll show you."

With one hand, he grabs his forehead, his other hand clamps on his chin. He removes his face. It's just a mask.
Underneath, he's the guy who played Jesus in Mel Gibson's S&M torture movie.
He's wearing what looks like a diaper. It's not especially clean.

The bottle is gone.

Too bad for that, I think, suddenly ready to start drinking again.

"Excuse me", asks the imitation Christ,"but which way to the stage? I seem to be having a spot of trouble seeing."

He's got blood in his eyes from the crown of thorns he's wearing. Given the sunny weather, a ball cap would be more practical and a lot less painful.

I notice that the trench coat I'm holding for Jesus/Spike has changed into a clump of tissue paper.
There's a sticky wet spot on it. I don't think it's snot.
Gross.
I get ready to throw away the sticky mess when I remember the bloody-faced Jesus.
I'm not a believer, but I'm not a monster.
I'm not gonna let this poor dude wander around a dangerous cliffside half-blind ; son of God or not, he might fall and get seriously hurt.

I find a dry section of the kleenex ball and wipe his eyes clear.

"Thanks, man", says Jesus as he heads downhill toward the crowd and the stage.

"No prob."

I'm left holding a nasty kleenex that's soggy with the blood and jizz of Christ.

I am going to make a fucking fortune on eBay, I think to myself.

A few minutes go by and Jesus returns, this time heading uphill.
"Forgot something", he mutters.

A moment later he passes again, downhill, only this time he's got a wooden cross on his back. It looks as if he's fake-staggering under it's weight, like it's a Styrofoam prop.

At least no one's whipping him, although he's gathering a crowd as he heads downhill. Someone presses something to his mouth, but from here I can't tell what it is.
It might be a sponge, or maybe a pretzel. The soft kind that's good with mustard.

A woman's voice calls my name. I turn.
It's Willow, also from the Buffy show.



"Hey. I've been saving a seat for you" she tells me , patting the empty side of her hay bale.

"That's hay alright", I quip stupidly, sitting down.

"Every one's here", Willow informs me, gesturing with her arm. Sure enough, the whole Buffy cast is scattered throughout the crowd, along with every character on every TV show I've ever watched, including Ultraman-the real Ultraman- and Joe, the fugitive German Shepherd from the short-lived Run, Joe, Run Saturday morning TV show.

Willow passes me a perfect joint. Oh, yeah-that's the Pacific down there alright, I think as I briefly vanish into a sweetly skunky haze. As my headrush subsides, I wonder who's playing on the stage below us.

I ask Willow.

"I dunno. I was hoping you were."

"Really? I was hoping you were- that musical episode was funny as hell."

"Ooo...look!" She grabs my arm. I feel an intense tingle of pleasure from this contact. I like Willow and I'm glad she likes me.

Down by the stage, a group of people are dancing around a large bonfire. As we watch them dance, a wall of fog begins rolling in. The dancer's shadows get larger and more distinct against the mist as the fogbank thickens; in moments we are encircled by swaying, weightless giants.

I have never felt more safe in my life.

We are protected by beauty and power.

Willow says, "wow".

I agree.

A Picture

This plastic "horror" sign is a relic from the video room of the old comic shop. The adhesive strip on the back had long since dried and crumbled , so I propped it up on bottles of the prescription medicines I take in order to deal with daily life, thumbed the remote and took a snapshot.

Marl Burrow

Do you remember when Marlboro cigarettes had a "Marlboro Miles" promotion, in which smokers would save tiny "miles" coupons from each pack and eventually save enough to trade in for a jacket, tent, cooler or other item ?

One day way back then, a co-worker was hitting up everyone at work for some " miles" .
She only needed 1500 to trade in for a Formula One racer or something .

"C'mon", she'd say, " I know you got some."

"I don't smoke."

"You could start."

She had all these little "miles" chits in a zip-lock baggie that she kept nervously playing with.

"Just 1500, is all I need is 1500 miles..." she'd whine.
It got tiresome.

I grabbed some shredded paper from the Fellowes machine and scissored it into confetti squares.

"Here", I told her.
Dump a handful of this shit in your bag. It ought to weigh at least as much as 1500 miles."

"Why?"

"Because Phillip-Morris isn't going to have people hand-counting 5o,000 tiny paper scraps per envelope- their customers will all be dead before the counting is over. They'll just dump the crap on a scale and weigh it. If it doesn't go "clank!" when it hits the scale, you'll be fine."

"Really? No way."

"Really. Try it."

So she dumped the shreds into the bag and shook it, sealed it and sent it.

Later, she quit, or I moved, or something - but I never found out if my theory was correct. Did she ever get her yacht or her car or her thermos or whatever the hell it was that she coveted?

Today I was talking to a guy at work about how shitty temp jobs can be.

"Yeah", he agreed, "the first, worst temp job I had in Richmond was weighing those goddamn Marlboro Miles!"

Ice Cream Heart

I don't think my new girlfriend likes me very much. We hit it off pretty hot ( you know what I mean) in the storeroom at the Dairy Queen where we both worked ,but ever since I got fired for stealing a 5 lb. bag of crushed Oreos she's been sorta chilly towards me. Like, not nice at all.

It was a mistake, stealing those Oreos. I thought the expiration date said 11/01/05, not 11/01/08 and I was just trying to protect the customers and save DQ from a potential class-action lawsuit- I should have gotten a raise for being so thoughtful, but I got fired instead.

Who knew that crushed Oreos have such a long shelf life?

It's ignorance of little things like that that cause so many problems for me. I'm not a bad person, I just don't know sh!t about sundae toppings.

I was just trying to help.

So I tried to explain it to my girl.

"It's a mistake", I told her. "I was only trying to help."

"You are my mistake", is what she said. "I don't understand what I saw in you."

I think she'd appreciate me more if she understood me better, but she won't answer my calls or return my emails, so it's pretty hard to explain things to her.

The other day I saw a story about how a buncha guys were camping out at shopping malls in order to score Playstation 3's before X-mas, and it gave me an idea.
I wish I didn't have ideas.
Ideas always get me in trouble and this one was no exception.

My idea was to camp out next to my girlfriend's car overnight (she lives in a condo with an uptight security guard who won't let me in just because I don't live there) so that she would have to see me in the morning. Then we could patch things up and maybe I could borrow some money from her until I find a new job...but noooooooo.....

I thought that mixing Aristocrat Vodka with Full Throttle energy drinks would keep me awake all night and give me that little extra 'oomph' I need when I'm simultaneously hitting on a chick for sex and money, but I goofed up the mix with some pills I stole from my grandmother and I must have passed out sometime during my overnight vigil.

When I woke up, some big fat bald old guy was shaking me...he was pretty mad. He was using really bad language, mostly saying "...gonna kick your motherpluckin' @ss"- except he didn't say 'pluckin'.
My girlfriend was standing behind him and she didn't look very happy either.
Of course, I thought she was mad at the Other Guy for being mean to me, her boyfriend.

Man-0-man, I was wrong. You won't believe this-

She said, " This is that creepy guy from work that I told you about"

She said that to the Other Guy and she was talking about me. Ouch!

It really hurt my feelings- I mean, I thought we had something special, something real, something more romantic than dryhumps in the stockroom...but I was wrong.

I wanted to explain all this to her but the pills and vodka caught up to me and I puked on Mean Guy's New Balance sneakers instead.
Then he made it worse by calling me a pathetic p*ssy and a whole bunch of other stuff- words that look like #*^&#@! and *&$#%! when you see them in newspaper cartoons. He said I was lucky he was in a good mood, otherwise he'd f*ck me up.
What a bully! Couldn't he see I didn't feel so good?
If I hadn't been so sick I woulda beat him up.

It turns out that she thinks that Mean Old Guy is her boyfriend and she wouldn't even listen to me explain how sensitive I was and how she'd be better off with me than him-after all, he's old, probably at least 30- maybe 40 even...but she wasn't listening. She just got in her car-with the Mean Guy!- and kinda drove off. She kept accelerating and braking, start , stop, start, stop...I wanted to tell her that it seemed like her car was having transmission trouble but after the second start/stop I fell off the hood of her Taurus and landed on the asphalt.
I was only trying to give her some sound automotive advice, but she didn't listen- I coulda got hurt in the process!
She actually had the nerve to roll down the window and tell me that I was lucky she didn't run my @ss over- I already knew that- I could tell there was something wrong with her car just from the way it was acting.

But the window was down, so I made my move. As long as the Mean Guy had his seatbelt on, I figured I was safe.

So I popped my question.

She wouldn't even loan me twenty bucks! What a b*tch!

She told me I'd better talk to her boyfriend from now on.

Huh? Until this morning , I didn't even know she had a boyfriend. I thought I was her BF...she never mentioned the Mean Guy.

I think our relationship needs more honesty.