Cake Batter Geese

Harold forked another mouthful of bean salad past his teeth, and chewed it halfheartedly. It was cold, sour, and vinegary. When he was three, he had told his mother he wanted to be a cook, but thirty-two years later he seemed cursed to permanent and extreme culinary tragedy. Even after buying several recipe books and stocking his kitchen with the best ingredients an air conditioner repairman's salary could afford, he still bungled hopelessly anything more complicated than basting a microwave hot dog with a half pint of mustard. Bean salad. How do you manage to muck up a bean salad, he asked aloud. Harold tipped the barely-touched plate into the garbage and reached for a delivery pizza coupon. He found that had used them all.


Python oil! This excellent keepsake now proven to repel ticks and vermin, draw in wild financial fortunes, and make sure no one's making a squinty face in the family portrait. Keeps change in your pockets and God in your heart, yours for the low low price of $45.79 and the last whoop of the eighth inning. Don't be caught out in the dark without it, friend. Immigrants and carnivore heliotropes may lurk these parks. At the end of days, the signs will crackle and letters fade. PER TO & S OP will spell out the nightmare name of him that comes, and all will be paper or plastic.


"Here's the deal," said the devil, "I'm gonna tear your arms off and leave you to die bleeding and vomiting, flexing bloody stumps to move limbs that are only an agonized memory. Why? Because I'm the god-damned devil, and you shoulda took off running the second you saw me." He smiled, and snarled, and reached.

you must constrict additional pythons

Ashlyn and I started playing Starcraft over the weekend. It didn't last long, though it would be fun to play some multiplayer, even though that would mean buying the game again to be able to play on Battle.net. I just looked, and it can be downloaded for $15. Right under the download button, Blizzard has posted a quote from the New York Times: "The game has become practically the national sport for South Koreans under 40". I wonder how effective that is as an advertisement for North Americans who might be considering buying it. To me, it just brings back the memories of trying to play the game online and being handily buttrumbled by Korean hordes.

It's sort of funny to me that both this drawing and the last feature very unhappy looking people. This pixel-lass is Clariet, who is a very unhappy girl. She was supposed to be the heiress to a badass magical family, but has discovered that she has no magical spark whatsoever. Though she had tutors, textbooks, and a castle full of magical apparatuses to learn from, she can't magic her way past a graham cracker. Which is fine, since should one ever be presented with a graham cracker as an obstacle, there are probably more efficient ways of getting past than magic.

Summer has remembered that it's supposed to be hot. I wish it hadn't.

Break out the combover and black spidey suit

because it's EMO TIME. It's actually not emo time, but it IS stream of consciousness time, and this stream has a current like a hot cross bun. Which evokes an image of trying to swim through a river of piping hot currants, which I imagine would be agonizing. And sticky, and dark. You would emerge on the opposite bank discolored from sticky fruity napalm juice and your own burned flesh.

And with that, we take a cliche metaphor and an antiquated pastry, and turn it into an image suitable for nightmare. Somehow whenever I start typing into the blogobox this is the result.

I don't imagine many people still check our tiny cross-linked blogosphere of Vassar expatriates and Boston folks, especially now that we've all more or less stopped updating, but I'd love to know who is out there. Aside from the tigers. Tigers... I know you're out there, and I'm watching you.

So life update, because that's what blogs are for. I'm adjusting to cohabitation, living with Ashlyn living in the same room. It's a very different existence. Anyone who knows me at all probably suspects -correctly- that I do some fairly strange things when I'm alone. Now, "strange" does not mean "twisted and obscene," just odd little irrational nonsense. The state of "being alone" is something that is gone now, and that fact has changed my existence profoundly. One of the side effects has been that this blog has fallen by the wayside. It's not a bad thing, and I can certainly still find ways to be alone, but it is a big change for me.

I've got ten million (actually around eight) projects that I'm working on, everything from a young adult fantasy romp in the style of the Lioness Quartet, to a wordless solo street performance routine that would ideally, theoretically, allow me to travel to foreign countries where my vocabulary consists of "thank you" "bathroom?"and "please remove the handcuffs, I did not kill those people" ("Kérjük, vegye ki a bilincs, nem én öltem meg azokat az embereket" in Hungarian, according to Google). I will try to use this blog to post progress on these projects, as a way of forcing myself to work on them. Comments, encouragement, and harassment are all highly encouraged.

The lad on the right is named Oswald. He is a doctor's assistant who had the grave (har har) misfortune of digging up an infamous thief while on a routine search for cadavers in the name of medical science. He tried on one of the thief's perfectly preserved gloves out of curiosity, and has discovered that it has a mind of its own, often leading him to pilfer things when he's not looking, and filling his mind with all sorts of burglarly knowledge. What's more, no matter how he tries, he has found that the thing is utterly impossible to take off. Oswald was originally one of the illegitimate children hatched by myself and Sally Slade, but he's had a major overhaul since then. Next up you will meet Clariet.

llamaFace

When they were building the tree house, Tyler's dad always told him he used too many nails to hold each piece of wood in place, and that wood was a lot stronger than he gave it credit for. As the monsters outside his house howled in rage and slammed their bodies against his boarded-up windows, Tyler prayed that his dad had been right.

"Here's the deal" said the devil, "I'm going to give you this knife and this spear. Then I'm going to put you into a one room studio apartment plus kitchenette with a ravenous bear. For every ten seconds you stay alive, I'll give you 100 grams of gold (about $4000). Once the bear kills you, I'll bring you back to life and give you the money, but you and I will both treasure forever the memory of a bear mauling you to death. Of course, if you somehow manage to kill the bear instead, the gold keeps on coming, and you are set for life."