E-mail: Brian7Morris "at" hotmail.com Archives March 2002 April 2002 May 2002 June 2002 July 2002 August 2002 September 2002 October 2002 November 2002 December 2002 January 2003 February 2003 March 2003 April 2003 May 2003 June 2003 July 2003 August 2003 September 2003 October 2003 November 2003 December 2003 January 2004 February 2004 March 2004 April 2004 May 2004 June 2004 July 2004 August 2004 September 2004 October 2004 November 2004 December 2004 January 2005 February 2005 March 2005 April 2005 May 2005 June 2005 July 2005 August 2005 September 2005 October 2005 November 2005 December 2005 current Blogs Mandapants farkleberries Uranium City Records The C.M. 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If you would like to join the Snyder’s of Hanover Pretzel Eater’s Club, benefits of which include the well-received program, “Buy Snyder’s pretzels and save for college,” discount coupons to the Snyder’s online pretzel store, and access to endless but fun pretzel eating surveys to fill out, click here. The Pretzel Eater’s Club Membership Committee maintains that if you are a loyal Snyder’s of Hanover Pretzels Pretzel eater, the committee would be delighted to review your credentials. Brian 8:09 PM Sunday, August 24, 2003 I don’t know, maybe it’s because I’ve been spending too much time in the office lately. For instance, I had to go on a quick mid-day errand Friday and I was walking in the street and felt a curious sensation on my arms and shoulders, “Hello! What’s this? Cosmic radiation!?” I remarked to myself. But then I remembered, it was sunlight. And then when I got to the bank I stood there between the velvet ropes all haggard-shouldered and hollow-eyed and everybody stepped away from me and was like, “Dude, who let the corpse in the bank?” and “I was not aware that dead bodies smelled like coffee!” And maybe it’s not just my spending too much time at the office, maybe it’s spending too much time with the office supplies, but lately everything in this world made by humans strikes me as half-assed. I mean, none of the advertising I see posted around all over the fucking place really makes me want to buy anything, and I was at the laundromat this morning listening to the radio they play there and any song with “beating like a drum” in the lyrics is at best a work of mediocrity. Everything is a bunch of crap, save one product name, which is sublime - only one thing in this world that strikes me as a success - only one thing that’s not just a “good try.” In fact, it’s, I remain convinced, a brilliant work of genius, and that’s the name of a certain felt tip marker: the Sir Marks Alot! It’s a leap forward, and I’m sure that there will be many product names for the remainder of human history that will feed off this innovation and bear the “Sir [function or dominant characteristic of the product] Alot” brand name. I’ve gone so far as to liberate a Sir Marks Alot from my place of employment and have been trying my hand at applying its genius to my apartment. I’ve written “Sir Pour Alot” on my tea kettle. I’ve also written “Sir Cool Alot” on my refrigerator and “Sir Flush Alot” on the toilet in my apartment (now I’m not going to get my security deposit back, but it was worth it because I’m bringing art into the world). I’ve also named my alarm clock “Sir Snooze Alot” and my toothbrush “Sir Gets-accidentally-knocked-off-the-sink-into-the-toilet-but-I-still-use-it-to-brush-my-teeth-but-only-after-I-thoroughly-rinse-it-in-REALLY-hot-water-from-the-faucet Alot.” I’ve also resolved to wield my Sir Marks Alot on a Hanes size medium to make myself a T-shirt to wear to bars that bears the motto, “Sir Gets-Laid Alot,” a slogan which, my masculine wiles tell me, attractive and intelligent women of high moral character will be drawn to. Brian 2:16 AM Monday, August 11, 2003 I saw my destiny the other night on COPS. The featured COP got a call about something to do with an old woman. When he arrived on the scene, which was a run-down apartment complex, he was met in the parking lot by a frantic firefighter. “It’s filthy in there!” the firefighter warned. “you smell that stinky smell? That’s the old woman’s house! You can smell it from here!!” Then the firefighter ran off down the street. “You’d better wear a gas mask! I don’t think she’s been using her bathroom.. there’s too many cobwebs in the doorway for her to have used the bathroom in months! I’m serious, it’s that stinky!” he shouted over his shoulder. The COP pulled a gas mask out of his trunk, buckled it on, then climbed the stairs to the old lady’s open door while the cameraperson followed. The COP found an old lady wearing sweat-pants and a t-shirt calmly sitting on her couch in the middle of her living room which was filled by a knee-deep sea of filth that completely covered the floor. “What’s the trouble here?” The COP asked. “I’m stuck.” The old woman said. Apparently, her house was so full of trash and cats that she was unable to walk in her living room without falling and she had been marooned on her couch in the middle of her living room for quite some time before eventually phoning the police for assistance. The old woman stood up to demonstrate how she was stuck to the COP. She made as if to take a step, raised her foot a few inches off the ground and moved it a few inches forward, at which point her toe came into contact with a cat pan overflowing with cat terds. “See?” she asked, “Stuck!” The old woman had a gravely voice that reminded me of Candy (name changed), the head waitress at a dive restaurant I worked at years ago. I don’t want to confuse causation with correlation here, but I have a feeling that Candy’s voice was at least partly due to her habit of going to a bar named Pappy’s every night and smoking cigarettes and drinking draft beer until she was motivated to climb up on the pool tables where she’d drunkenly kick her legs and sing “da da da da da....DA!!” regardless of what was playing on the jukebox. Thirty minutes before closing time each night she’d always look around Pappy’s for some guy to go home with but when the more desirable ones went home without her, she’d always have to pick from the two or three unsavory stragglers in the three minutes just before they were all ejected from the bar. Candy would always appear the next day in the parking lot of the dive restaurant fifteen minutes after her shift started, holding her high-heels in one hand, mascara running down one side of her face, and pounding on the hood of an El Camino or Camero with rage and angrily shouting profanities at the driver. Then the El Camino or Camero would peal off and she’d stomp into the restaurant. To compose herself for work she’d squat down behind the salad bar, pull the neck of her shirt out, and spray a generous amount of FDS into it from the wasp-killer-sized-can she carried around in her purse. (God bless her) So anyway, that’s what this old woman on COPS’ voice sounded like. She sat there on her couch surrounded by her filth while the COPS cameraperson panned the camera around the woman’s apartment, zooming in, like they do, and demonstrating small indicators of what he assumed to be her human archetype. For instance, the cameraperson pin-pointed a cool whip tub full of cat terds partially covered by a soggy old pizza box, five of seven plastic novelty dwarfs carefully arranged in single file to appear as if they were marching across a grease-spotted cookie carton stacked haphazardly on the mantle, and a dead, decomposing kitten melting into the shag carpeting. “What is that!?” asked the alarmed COP, pointing at the cat corpse. “Kitten,” the old woman said nonchalantly in her gravelly voice. “You can’t have a dead kitten rotting in your living room, you just can’t!” explained the exasperated COP through his gas mask. “You’re right,” the woman told the COP, “I should have put that kitten in the freezer as soon as it died.” At home, I nodded my head sagely. “That’s right!” I thought, “the freezer would have been a good place to keep that dead kitten and it wouldn’t have gone all stinky on you!” But the COP and the social worker, who had now appeared on the scene, scolded both the old woman, and by extension through my agreement with her, me. “You can’t keep a dead kitten in your house!” they shouted at her. “Not even in the freezer!!” I was just as shocked about this as the old filthy woman. A few hours later I realized that being on the “same page” as this poor old filthy woman with respect to dead kitten issues probably meant that I shared other propensities with her as well, and it was probably my destiny to become like her, you know, as I filthily mature. What’s worse: The moment I had this realization I took immediate stock of my life, and I found myself of doing a poor job of cutting my own hair in my bathroom mirror with a pair of clippers and scissors and cursing my lack of a Flow-bie... my fate is sealed. Brian 1:19 PM Sunday, August 03, 2003 I recently had a chance to engage in a discussion regarding the preferred mobility aid of that infamous old man shuffler, Nathan L. To wit: the four pronged cane. The discussion had a sort of “focus-group” feel to it. I learned some interesting things, not the least of which is that Nathan L. is unique among old man shufflers not only on account of his age (twenty-something) but also for the number of terminal prongs at the business end of his cane. The whole conversation came about as two women in their golden years sat on the couch in my parent’s living room and lamented to each other the drab aluminum canes issued to them at hospitals after their various surgeries. “What you’ve got to do,” one focus group participant remarked to the other, is go to the flea market and get a totally rad cane.” (I’m paraphrasing). “But I’d be worried that a cane from the flea market wouldn’t be as safe.” explained focus group participant #2. “Sure they’re just as safe!!” focus group participant #1 responded, “it’s just that the HMO’s always go for the cheapest thing possible. No HMO’s going to spring for a totally sweet cane like this one,” she said, waving it around the room, “which is made from a stretched out bull’s wang that has been dried and polyurethaned into the shape of a cane.” I couldn’t help but overhear their conversation, and immediately interjected myself as self-appointed and inter-meddling focus group facilitator. “But what about a cane with four prongs on it, you can’t get that at a flea market can you?! I bet you need a PRESCRIPTION for one of those muthas!” The focus group participants scoffed at my naivete. It was rather embarrassing. participant #1: “Ha! I’d never use a four-pronged cane, they’re more trouble than they’re worth!” facilitator: “But.... I thought with those four prongs.... they’d be four times as safe!” I explained. I was confused, it was like the rug had been pulled out from under everything that made sense to me in this world. Both focus group participants shook their heads sadly. One made shameful clucking noises and the other dug into her voluminous purse for an ancient half eaten roll of Mentos and offered me one to cheer me up. “The freshmaker,” I said sadly, while I ate the Mentos and thought. “Okay, so four pronged canes aren’t four times as safe, but why?” participant #2: “The three extra prongs aren’t an innovation, they’re a liability!” she explained to me. “It’s like carrying a Weed Weasel around on the end of a stick. And I’m too old to do much gardening anymore!” participant #1: “Four pronged canes are the biggest scam foisted over on old people since Publisher’s Clearing House! I’ve been thinking about getting the ARDC involved.” participant #2: “Alright,” she said, “four pronged canes are handy because you can just leave them standing there on their own, and you don’t have to lean them against something or hook it over your arm, but that’s the ONLY thing they are good for.” participant #1: “And when you’re using it, each of the four prongs are only on the ground when you’ve got the cane totally perpendicular to the ground, and when you’re walking, how often does that happen?” participant #2 agreed: “That’s right! You’re lucky at any one time to be on two prongs, and then the vectors are all wrong; you put any weight on the cane and it twists out of your hand and WHAMMO! you’re on the floor in the middle of the JC Penney’s, out the price of a new hip, and there’s salesclerk assholes all over you, like up in your face and shit, offering you glasses of water and asking if you’re okay and saying that they’re gonna call 911.” participant #1: “Yeah!” the other participant agreed, “I know that they mean well, but whenever I fall down in JC Penney’s all those sales clerks cluster all around me and they start asking me if I’m okay over and over again. I always want to be, like, ‘No I’m NOT okay you motherfucker! I’m seventy-fucking-eight years old and I just fell on my motherfucking hip in the middle of your goddamn motherfucking JC Penney’s and now there’s some asshole asking me if I’m ‘okay!!’ but instead I’m always, like, ‘I’ll be fine, thanks for asking young man,’ in my sweet old lady voice.” participant #1: (to participant #2)(in confidence) “Do you ever get discounts after you fall?” participant #2: “No!” she said scandalously, “do you?” participant #1: “Yeah,” she said, “the trick is to imply that you’re less likely to sue if you get a discount. For instance, say something innocently like, ‘Goodness gracious! I wouldn’t ever DREAM of suing a department store that gave me a discount on bedding, even one that is negligent in the maintenance of its floors and proximately caused my injuries!’ and the next thing you know there’s a manager helping you out the door with a full set of 600 thread count per inch linens that you just bought at cost, and a coupon for free monogramming thrown in to boot!” participant #2: “That’s a good idea!” participant #1: “I’m full of them!” Brian 1:24 PM

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House of Noh!

Monday, August 25, 2003

I was just eating some pretzels at the same time I was trying work really really fast at my desk and I accidentally swallowed a pretzel fragment whole. Now I’m concerned that my digestive system will react to the irritation of the sharp pretzel fragment by secreting a calcium-like substance that will coat the pretzel fragment and (after many years) will form a huge and lumpy golf-ball sized pretzel pearl in some hidden corner of my intestinal track. If you would like to join the Snyder’s of Hanover Pretzel Eater’s Club, benefits of which include the well-received program, “Buy Snyder’s pretzels and save for college,” discount coupons to the Snyder’s online pretzel store, and access to endless but fun pretzel eating surveys to fill out, click here. The Pretzel Eater’s Club Membership Committee maintains that if you are a loyal Snyder’s of Hanover Pretzels Pretzel eater, the committee would be delighted to review your credentials.

Brian 8:09 PM

Sunday, August 24, 2003

I don’t know, maybe it’s because I’ve been spending too much time in the office lately. For instance, I had to go on a quick mid-day errand Friday and I was walking in the street and felt a curious sensation on my arms and shoulders, “Hello! What’s this? Cosmic radiation!?” I remarked to myself. But then I remembered, it was sunlight. And then when I got to the bank I stood there between the velvet ropes all haggard-shouldered and hollow-eyed and everybody stepped away from me and was like, “Dude, who let the corpse in the bank?” and “I was not aware that dead bodies smelled like coffee!” And maybe it’s not just my spending too much time at the office, maybe it’s spending too much time with the office supplies, but lately everything in this world made by humans strikes me as half-assed. I mean, none of the advertising I see posted around all over the fucking place really makes me want to buy anything, and I was at the laundromat this morning listening to the radio they play there and any song with “beating like a drum” in the lyrics is at best a work of mediocrity. Everything is a bunch of crap, save one product name, which is sublime - only one thing in this world that strikes me as a success - only one thing that’s not just a “good try.” In fact, it’s, I remain convinced, a brilliant work of genius, and that’s the name of a certain felt tip marker: the Sir Marks Alot! It’s a leap forward, and I’m sure that there will be many product names for the remainder of human history that will feed off this innovation and bear the “Sir [function or dominant characteristic of the product] Alot” brand name. I’ve gone so far as to liberate a Sir Marks Alot from my place of employment and have been trying my hand at applying its genius to my apartment. I’ve written “Sir Pour Alot” on my tea kettle. I’ve also written “Sir Cool Alot” on my refrigerator and “Sir Flush Alot” on the toilet in my apartment (now I’m not going to get my security deposit back, but it was worth it because I’m bringing art into the world). I’ve also named my alarm clock “Sir Snooze Alot” and my toothbrush “Sir Gets-accidentally-knocked-off-the-sink-into-the-toilet-but-I-still-use-it-to-brush-my-teeth-but-only-after-I-thoroughly-rinse-it-in-REALLY-hot-water-from-the-faucet Alot.” I’ve also resolved to wield my Sir Marks Alot on a Hanes size medium to make myself a T-shirt to wear to bars that bears the motto, “Sir Gets-Laid Alot,” a slogan which, my masculine wiles tell me, attractive and intelligent women of high moral character will be drawn to.

Brian 2:16 AM

Monday, August 11, 2003

I saw my destiny the other night on COPS. The featured COP got a call about something to do with an old woman. When he arrived on the scene, which was a run-down apartment complex, he was met in the parking lot by a frantic firefighter. “It’s filthy in there!” the firefighter warned. “you smell that stinky smell? That’s the old woman’s house! You can smell it from here!!” Then the firefighter ran off down the street. “You’d better wear a gas mask! I don’t think she’s been using her bathroom.. there’s too many cobwebs in the doorway for her to have used the bathroom in months! I’m serious, it’s that stinky!” he shouted over his shoulder. The COP pulled a gas mask out of his trunk, buckled it on, then climbed the stairs to the old lady’s open door while the cameraperson followed. The COP found an old lady wearing sweat-pants and a t-shirt calmly sitting on her couch in the middle of her living room which was filled by a knee-deep sea of filth that completely covered the floor. “What’s the trouble here?” The COP asked. “I’m stuck.” The old woman said. Apparently, her house was so full of trash and cats that she was unable to walk in her living room without falling and she had been marooned on her couch in the middle of her living room for quite some time before eventually phoning the police for assistance. The old woman stood up to demonstrate how she was stuck to the COP. She made as if to take a step, raised her foot a few inches off the ground and moved it a few inches forward, at which point her toe came into contact with a cat pan overflowing with cat terds. “See?” she asked, “Stuck!” The old woman had a gravely voice that reminded me of Candy (name changed), the head waitress at a dive restaurant I worked at years ago. I don’t want to confuse causation with correlation here, but I have a feeling that Candy’s voice was at least partly due to her habit of going to a bar named Pappy’s every night and smoking cigarettes and drinking draft beer until she was motivated to climb up on the pool tables where she’d drunkenly kick her legs and sing “da da da da da....DA!!” regardless of what was playing on the jukebox. Thirty minutes before closing time each night she’d always look around Pappy’s for some guy to go home with but when the more desirable ones went home without her, she’d always have to pick from the two or three unsavory stragglers in the three minutes just before they were all ejected from the bar. Candy would always appear the next day in the parking lot of the dive restaurant fifteen minutes after her shift started, holding her high-heels in one hand, mascara running down one side of her face, and pounding on the hood of an El Camino or Camero with rage and angrily shouting profanities at the driver. Then the El Camino or Camero would peal off and she’d stomp into the restaurant. To compose herself for work she’d squat down behind the salad bar, pull the neck of her shirt out, and spray a generous amount of FDS into it from the wasp-killer-sized-can she carried around in her purse. (God bless her) So anyway, that’s what this old woman on COPS’ voice sounded like. She sat there on her couch surrounded by her filth while the COPS cameraperson panned the camera around the woman’s apartment, zooming in, like they do, and demonstrating small indicators of what he assumed to be her human archetype. For instance, the cameraperson pin-pointed a cool whip tub full of cat terds partially covered by a soggy old pizza box, five of seven plastic novelty dwarfs carefully arranged in single file to appear as if they were marching across a grease-spotted cookie carton stacked haphazardly on the mantle, and a dead, decomposing kitten melting into the shag carpeting. “What is that!?” asked the alarmed COP, pointing at the cat corpse. “Kitten,” the old woman said nonchalantly in her gravelly voice. “You can’t have a dead kitten rotting in your living room, you just can’t!” explained the exasperated COP through his gas mask. “You’re right,” the woman told the COP, “I should have put that kitten in the freezer as soon as it died.” At home, I nodded my head sagely. “That’s right!” I thought, “the freezer would have been a good place to keep that dead kitten and it wouldn’t have gone all stinky on you!” But the COP and the social worker, who had now appeared on the scene, scolded both the old woman, and by extension through my agreement with her, me. “You can’t keep a dead kitten in your house!” they shouted at her. “Not even in the freezer!!” I was just as shocked about this as the old filthy woman. A few hours later I realized that being on the “same page” as this poor old filthy woman with respect to dead kitten issues probably meant that I shared other propensities with her as well, and it was probably my destiny to become like her, you know, as I filthily mature. What’s worse: The moment I had this realization I took immediate stock of my life, and I found myself of doing a poor job of cutting my own hair in my bathroom mirror with a pair of clippers and scissors and cursing my lack of a Flow-bie... my fate is sealed.

Brian 1:19 PM

Sunday, August 03, 2003

I recently had a chance to engage in a discussion regarding the preferred mobility aid of that infamous old man shuffler, Nathan L. To wit: the four pronged cane. The discussion had a sort of “focus-group” feel to it. I learned some interesting things, not the least of which is that Nathan L. is unique among old man shufflers not only on account of his age (twenty-something) but also for the number of terminal prongs at the business end of his cane. The whole conversation came about as two women in their golden years sat on the couch in my parent’s living room and lamented to each other the drab aluminum canes issued to them at hospitals after their various surgeries. “What you’ve got to do,” one focus group participant remarked to the other, is go to the flea market and get a totally rad cane.” (I’m paraphrasing). “But I’d be worried that a cane from the flea market wouldn’t be as safe.” explained focus group participant #2. “Sure they’re just as safe!!” focus group participant #1 responded, “it’s just that the HMO’s always go for the cheapest thing possible. No HMO’s going to spring for a totally sweet cane like this one,” she said, waving it around the room, “which is made from a stretched out bull’s wang that has been dried and polyurethaned into the shape of a cane.” I couldn’t help but overhear their conversation, and immediately interjected myself as self-appointed and inter-meddling focus group facilitator. “But what about a cane with four prongs on it, you can’t get that at a flea market can you?! I bet you need a PRESCRIPTION for one of those muthas!” The focus group participants scoffed at my naivete. It was rather embarrassing. participant #1: “Ha! I’d never use a four-pronged cane, they’re more trouble than they’re worth!” facilitator: “But.... I thought with those four prongs.... they’d be four times as safe!” I explained. I was confused, it was like the rug had been pulled out from under everything that made sense to me in this world. Both focus group participants shook their heads sadly. One made shameful clucking noises and the other dug into her voluminous purse for an ancient half eaten roll of Mentos and offered me one to cheer me up. “The freshmaker,” I said sadly, while I ate the Mentos and thought. “Okay, so four pronged canes aren’t four times as safe, but why?” participant #2: “The three extra prongs aren’t an innovation, they’re a liability!” she explained to me. “It’s like carrying a Weed Weasel around on the end of a stick. And I’m too old to do much gardening anymore!” participant #1: “Four pronged canes are the biggest scam foisted over on old people since Publisher’s Clearing House! I’ve been thinking about getting the ARDC involved.” participant #2: “Alright,” she said, “four pronged canes are handy because you can just leave them standing there on their own, and you don’t have to lean them against something or hook it over your arm, but that’s the ONLY thing they are good for.” participant #1: “And when you’re using it, each of the four prongs are only on the ground when you’ve got the cane totally perpendicular to the ground, and when you’re walking, how often does that happen?” participant #2 agreed: “That’s right! You’re lucky at any one time to be on two prongs, and then the vectors are all wrong; you put any weight on the cane and it twists out of your hand and WHAMMO! you’re on the floor in the middle of the JC Penney’s, out the price of a new hip, and there’s salesclerk assholes all over you, like up in your face and shit, offering you glasses of water and asking if you’re okay and saying that they’re gonna call 911.” participant #1: “Yeah!” the other participant agreed, “I know that they mean well, but whenever I fall down in JC Penney’s all those sales clerks cluster all around me and they start asking me if I’m okay over and over again. I always want to be, like, ‘No I’m NOT okay you motherfucker! I’m seventy-fucking-eight years old and I just fell on my motherfucking hip in the middle of your goddamn motherfucking JC Penney’s and now there’s some asshole asking me if I’m ‘okay!!’ but instead I’m always, like, ‘I’ll be fine, thanks for asking young man,’ in my sweet old lady voice.” participant #1: (to participant #2)(in confidence) “Do you ever get discounts after you fall?” participant #2: “No!” she said scandalously, “do you?” participant #1: “Yeah,” she said, “the trick is to imply that you’re less likely to sue if you get a discount. For instance, say something innocently like, ‘Goodness gracious! I wouldn’t ever DREAM of suing a department store that gave me a discount on bedding, even one that is negligent in the maintenance of its floors and proximately caused my injuries!’ and the next thing you know there’s a manager helping you out the door with a full set of 600 thread count per inch linens that you just bought at cost, and a coupon for free monogramming thrown in to boot!” participant #2: “That’s a good idea!” participant #1: “I’m full of them!”

Brian 1:24 PM

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