This Week's Laughter #21
An archive of howlsnicker.
Hello. Yes, alright. A first of a year and a summary of the previous times. Love a date change to forget the woes for a moment. Love a change in date to trans-figure, form, late, scend. Well, let us be off. Yes, alright.
I find it unsettling how many commas the auto-grammar engines try to include in things. I find it unsettling, lacking in charm, and ridiculous. I mean it’s so controlling. Yes alright. The placement of a comma is an issuing of a command: you must pause between these words. Or the utterance of a desire: I wish for you to pause between these words. Or a faltering trust: I do not think you will breathe if I let you pass between these words unattended and you must breathe you absolutely must.
The end of a year is such a joyful time for me. I love re-invention. I love others finding time and space and curiosity to dare to think something more for themselves with the only guardrail for ‘realistic expectations’ being why not or no better time. Naturally in the time of worldenthusiasm I wound up minorly sick for a few days. Ebbs and flows.
I posted something recently about an observation that many authors yield to some variant of the phrase ‘ebb of sensuality, flow of sexuality,’ and how the presence of this gelatinous uttering is something like a tombstone for me. The mind was searching for something more and was not able to capitulate to that idyll to that dream. I read it in a work titled you by Chantal Neveu translated by Erín Moure. I do not think that the work was poor by any means though I’m not certain that it was authoritative enough to re-define my dreamic landscape to include itself. You know? Well alright. It’s a singular long poem consistent of mostly singular-to-three word lines double-spaced across some seventy pages. The vocabulary is extremely fun throughout. I think that is why the usage of the above phrase is what jarred me so much. One capable of curating something of a flow of magma through their work resorted to something so banal in description for a central yearning. But maybe that’s why one never finishes with a singular book written. We are never capable of articulating that idea that haunts us to our very core and our disappointment is what drives us forward. To be disgusted in one’s work is to acknowledge that one has more to say to the matter.
So for laughs.
Heather and I spent the holiday with her (our?) family. In the two holidays we have spent together I am discovering how important cooking and eating together is for them. Reminiscent of my mother. She usually ate dinner alone around 5:15pm eastern time. But was always elated whenever one of her children was home between semesters or jobs and could eat with her. Whenever my father could get off work early to eat with her. And we would chide her to simply eat later in the day but she was a stubborn woman and would not move her schedule to adjust for others’ disappointments. This day we had sweet rolls and they made a roast beef with mashed potatoes and a green bean casserole while I made a mushroom gravy and attempted a new but holiday-spirited recipe: a puff-pastry shaped like a Christmas tree with a caprese stuffing for the red-white-green of the season. Disaster struck as I discovered the store-puff-pastry had only one sheet in its container instead of two and so my Christmas tree’s size was cut in half. But its stuffing demands a certain volume to it. Ultimately it was still good if a little overdone and I’m not sure the caprese element really went along with the rest of the flavors of the dinner. I was giggling embarrassedly though as I tried twining too-small strands of puff pastry together for the sake of making bottom branches.
Heather likes watching me play video games. Recently I got back into playing a horror-survival-looting game called ‘Lethal Company.’ There’s not really tremendous strategic depth to it: go into abandoned interstellar environments to try to pick up as much loot as you can to bring back to your spaceship and sell to your bosses avoiding the many monsters that pop-up along the way. To play the game in a way that allows Heather to watch since it is a computer-game I have streamed it in a shared Discord server. This has proven odd and wrought with difficulties in its own (including the inability to cast this to our TV). So the obvious next choice: I started a twitch profile and began to stream the games I'm playing that Heather wishes to watch. This is all precursor as build-up as joy-maker to say: it makes me laugh really hard to think of myself as someone who occasionally twitch streams. Soon I’ll be talking entirely in superlatives. My speech generated in title-case. You’ll Never Guess What Poet I Quoted Over Ramen This Week. I’ll get a ring light and an expensive microphone for no real reason. Oh the thoughts and the potential personalities.
A surprise visit to Seattle from cherished Abi Pollokoff on her birthday. A small celebration. Met many former coworkers and coworker-lovers. It’s the season for small-talk and unhingedness so I struck up the conversation about Horse-people. What their closest memory of horses was. If they knew horse-people growing up and if they’ve kept track of these horse-people. Recently I’ve taken to listening to DJ horsegiirL. I don’t know why. I don’t really have a judgment or insight to provide here. When I was in grad-school I started conversations with relative strangers of acquaintances with “And which parent do you have more trauma with?” So my evolution of poor starting conversation questions to asking about memories of horse-people makes me laugh in the way of head-shaking self-damnation. Who are we when we are among what we have not been.
Voodoo donuts has come to Seattle. It’s been here for some months. The Portland invasive force. We got it for the first time here this past week. Those pink and particularly branded boxes telling everyone we walked past that we indeed got Voodoo donuts. Inflated and ridiculous. I don’t think they’re that good. They’re fine. The soft gasping cry of a crow chirping in alarm is my laugh here. Seattle donuts must not fall to this invasive predator.
New Year’s Eve spent eating a delicious potato soup and playing November 2001 Xbox game Fusion Frenzy. Something about the early 2000s obsession with neon-colored rollerbladers in crop-tops. Of eurotrance. The fact that this was a game that came to life after 9/11 but shortly enough that it is still within the 9/11 timeframe. Games about collecting colored orbs and racing each other and battling your friends to steal their colored orbs. Imagine if America became a nation of rollerbladers and eurotrance after 9/11. Fully adopting and fully submitting to the cultural drive of energy-expenditure-until-exhaustion of moving until one cannot move anymore of a desperate urge to combat the death drive with sheer bacchanalian pleasure. I won some of the minigames and got met with aghast ‘How are you so good at this when you hadn’t even heard of this before?’ What a world constructed within these contained chuckles.
Watched Nosferatu with Ally. The anticipation of the previews showing nothing but thriller-horrors was quite stress-inducing. I’m a baby for horror movies and the monstruous gets caught in my mind like a bur in a dog’s coat. The movie itself wasn’t terribly scary as much as it settled something of an anxiety in my mind. The story of nosferatu of Dracula of Vampire is one both explicative toward the presence and outbreak of the plague as well as one earlier and more mysterious and elusive than the simple explanation of an otherworldly plague. Illness in its own right and especially illness in the variety that is sudden and beyond threatening is something that humanity has tried to supernaturally explain for centuries. Now we have medicine and science to explain things like ‘I don’t know.’ So many fluids in the movie. Blood and drool and sweat and long melancholic walks by the water and disastrous boat rides over stormy oceanic waters. The walk back after the movie with the shared acknowledgment over how horny the movie was sputtering laughter.
New Year’s Day we went to Dinner for another small celebration with friends from out of town. As the waitress came to take our order, she noticed what we had not: the laminated QR-code for the table had been set too close to the candle of the table and the plastic had been burning down. She pulled it away with a good-natured smile and laugh. After taking everything down and walking away one of my compatriots suggested we should burn the replacement QR-code laminate to make this waitress realize we were simply arsonist hooligans. Miscreants-by-fire. I don’t know. Something about her phasedness was quite funny to me. She obviously was bothered but not in a way that ruined her mood. Rather she was bothered in the way that one can be bothered by taking a wipe to a stain on a counter and its removal comes faltering and slowly. Maybe she’d set the fire to begin with and hadn’t quite realized it of herself. That her arsonistic hooliganism had taken her conscious momentarily and then as she returned to her self she was made aware of this alter’s presence by the dastardly smell of burning plastic.
Thank you for reading as always. I hope to write quite often this year. As much as demand and demind dictate.