Estate Sale

(Thank You, Veronica)

  

the estate sale hobby is one I never imagined –

at first try, it's just an excuse to cruise

cruise to the far corners of this new old town

and cruise into homes without homebodies

fun to cringe at baby blue shag carpeting shagging oak floors

or to smirk at the crappy taste that money lathers

into cramped hallways, sad bedrooms and giant attics

or to pause in awe at a slice of perfection and

cherish it now the way the recently departed cherished it then

and every now and then at an estate sale . . .

. . . a choice trophy fits home and budget and home it goes

to grace a new old room in our new old home

stud it with color, comfort, craft and curves

our new old home, built the year Mom was born

one century ago, and now – old estates live on here

in new ways, in new old time

by Jonathan Marcus, rocking in a chair of unknown provenance

Zone 1 Now a Priority Zone

After years of fussy, over-wrought, total domination landscaping campaigns, historic Oakland Cemetery in downtown Atlanta, Georgia, has been declared a Zone 1 Priority Zone, according to Erominel Loosflucker, Fulton County’s Deputy Redundancy Deputy, and will receive  major decompression and chaos enhancement therapy immediately. Said Loosflucker, "Sure the people here are dead, tell me something I don't know why doncha, but that doesn't mean they don't have feelings. Not to mention the ghosts who are being driven mad by all this bogus visual rectitude. Plus all these straight clean lines reduce the creep factor here, and what's a cemetery if isn't a bit creepy? You might as well go to a mall, where the dead people are walking around. Now that's creepy!" Loosflooker admitted that he was digressing, and blamed it rather obviously on the general lack of disorganization.

Whirled HeadQuarters invites you to participate in any and all events in the forthcoming whirled premiere of The Zen Olympics. The events will take place in cosmic time and universal space. Each event will be commence in silence and will conclude with a palpable bong.

   The Zen Olympics

• Creek Sitting
• Sprawling
• Eyebrow Plucking
• Deleting Photos
• Wishful Thinking
• Cancelling Reservations
• Wading
• Loitering
• Bullshitting
• Breaking & Entering
• Spitting
• Breast Pumping
• Imitating
• Wondering
• Sweating
• Masticating
• Procrastinating
• Defensive Driving

News of the Week

Item: "Down with Communist Party!" Fateful words spoken by a Chinese man on the internet and before you could say, "Down with the Communist Party," the man was arrested, tried, and sentenced to two years hard labor in a "dot-commie" re-education center for uttering the awful truth. The man, Jiang Shihua, stated in court that what he really meant was, "The Communist Party GETS Down! I can see how someone might be confused, but the Party knows how to Par-tay, sho nuff". Shihua, a sexual intercourse instructor at Nanchong high school, had joined an online digital intercourse chat room when he wrote the fucking phrase. After his arrest and mandatory post arrest flogging by a member of the public safety collective, Nanchong schools were ordered in December to start a vigorous ideological de-programming/re-programming campaign for faculty and students alike, according to a surprisingly scantily clad school spokeswoman. The spokeswoman also stated, "I really do like the ideological de-programming /re-programming campaign. It helps to replace flawed cognition. Plus ideological de-programming /re-programming is so fun. You get to stand in the sun for weeks with hundreds of thousands of fellow citizens waving tremendous red flags and sing and chant great rhythmic ideological phrases like, 'citizen agricultural programs are planting cereal crops for a strong and vigorous nation to consume heartily on its predestined path towards gastro-intestinal dominance!' Would you like to hear another?"

math versus a natural swing

       

i love baseball but my real love

is higher mathematics

competitive and bloodthirsty

where square roots,

squeeze plays and

Fibonacci world series

square off

against cold fusion,

slugging percentage

strike outs

steals and

suicide squeezes

go ahead

do the higher math

smack fungoes to centerfield

stretch a double

into a quadratic equation

theoretical calculus and dead reckoning

savagely intuitive

extremely linear

a highbrow swing game

high cheese, fast twitch peptides

burning the inside corner

faster than the math

of physicists and sabermetricians

it’s complex, it’s simple,

it’s quick but your head

spins like sunshine and space

money balls fly into the gap

left centerfield

weird other worldly equations

hidden in box scores

math versus a natural swing

circles squared

equal and opposite thermodynamics

money times calories

equals effort

and good intentions

gentlemen, start your resumes

grab your throbbing paychecks

sing for your net worth

 

full moon triangle growling



by Jonathan Marcus, way past his bedtime

A few facts by which we may momentarily moor ourselves

even as we throb in the corpuscular maelstrom:

• Distance from the earth to the sun: about 93 million miles, or 8 light minutes.
• From the sun to the former planet Pluto: 4.6 billion  miles, or 9 light  months.
• Radius of the solar system: a few light days, depending on things.
• The Milky Way is 100,00 light years in diameter, contains about 200 billion stars.
• (At this point, the difference between radius and diameter may not matter.)
• Our local group of galaxies: 3 million light years in radius.

On a different portion of the scale . . .

• The human brain contains about 100 billion cells.
• And the human body contains about 100 trillion cells.
• But we have ten times as many microbes in our bodies as we have human cells. 
• Oy.
• But without them we would die. 
• But we're gonna die anyway. 
• Oy.

Mirror Beach



Unusual beach in Hvonsk, Blatvia mirrors itself and emits unusual sounds as well. Not much is known how, why, or who but just know that it does.

O, Turnberry!

Tom Watson just made the cut at the British Open - at age 64, the oldest golfer ever to do so. Five years ago, at age (one moment, hmm, 64 minus 5 is...) 59, he was poised over an 8 foot putt on the 18th and final hole at Turnberry, one of the oldest and most venerated venues of the Open. Make it and he wins. That putt was the culmination of an extraordinary four day run which saw him turn back time to lead a field of world class players fully a generation younger, all vying for one of golf's most treasured trophies. He had won the Claret Jug as a much younger man, but this was a miraculous moment - make the putt, and he becomes the oldest player ever to win this or any other major tournament, by a long shot. This poem was written by Whirled HQ in the aftermath, and is reposted here in honor of his making the cut in 2014. It is best read out loud, in one's best Scottish brogue.


O turnberry ye hardy hunk of tortured scottish turf
the wind and sea and weather pound thy earth
like fists of duffers flailing

O turnberry ye thirsty sponge for tears and blood
blood of fools, blood of kings, blood of bogeyed holes
blood seeped and supple in your dirt

O turnberry your claws sunk deep in the shallows of the outer Firth of Clyde
you've your own moon, turnberry, a half farthing rising in the pounding sea
we call it the Ailsa Craig, fat and edged in the sinking sun

O Turnberry your winds do twist and thrash and overturn
laughing at gravity herself
tossing a dimpled ball on a celtic whim

O merciless Turnberry, ye spiteful course
tom watson slashes through your puzzled links
tom watson aged 59 stands atop turnberry aged eons

O Turnberry summoning gales of inevitability
the odds stacked against goodness and mercy and truth of heart
favoring the brutal sea, the lumpy heaving foam-frothed sea

O Turnberry ye exquisite Scottish poison
poised on the 18th hole, old tom watson needs an 8 foot putt
to win the Claret Jug and eternity, immune to wind and war

O Turnberry! Old Tom Watson!
good god man, it's an eight foot putt to immortality
gird thy loins, stroke true, the cup is in your grasp!

O good god, turnberry, did you rise in green envy?
brook naught that's straight and true?
Turnberry
reserves immortality for
Turnberry

by the boy poets, flailing in ecstatic denial

They made us write a poem using any of the following words:

amber cloven beaten grating  bump shift craven  solicit ready mad leave left crazy shift frog snake eyes flake inner mind over under vague nebulous hazy gauzy cleave verboten misbegotten rage slashes grievously across a golf ball crafty left hander  buzzard manhole shithole labyrinth marathon rubbish beaver strawberry mind fink enthrall compose radish verboten syntactical navel naval switchboard flog monstrosity garbage posthumorously harridan pneumatic vixen jaded razored buttery  ragged corruptible veal scoundrel ambient polar vortex mythology flamboyant summery fetch rampant plebeian ambidextrous unicycle unbidden

===================

. . .  so we wrote two. 

Poem #1

=============================================

eyes gauzy

crafty left hander

strawberry beaver

verboten vague buttery

polar vortex

jaded razored radish

ambient veal ready

snake eyes shift

nebulous shithole

ambient scoundrel

unbidden, rampant

flamboyant inner raven

slashes grievously across

veal garbage

mad mind fink

marathon grating

Poem #2

==========================================

the summery nebulous

polar vortex

unicycled unbidden

across the naval switchboard

the plebeian flakes,

all jaded and craven

fetch misbegotten rage

buzzards enthrall

the razored radish

vixens cleave

to the strawberry labyrinth

top nine lobstervations from outside the general area:

1. everything’s all fucked up because of sex.
2. the jury is still out on plywood, but how right can twelve people be?
3. life is a job whether you have one or not.
4. grow more tumbleweed.
5. waffle irons are so decisive.  
6. numbers drive the world economy, and they don’t even exist.
7. camping is so in tents.
8. seek the plethora.
9. divide your observations into groups of eleven.
10. cheese becomes cheesier over time because it just does.

No Background to Check

While applying for a job as a Semi Conductor on the CSX rail lines it was discovered that  Hiram Flatporm had no background to check. CSX HR spokesmodel E.L. Fandorth told company CEO Leyburn Whatscorthy that they had run numerous background checks to no avail. "Actually we found 2 things: 1) Flatporm owns a 1997 pre-GW Bush slant 6 dual aught 40 hemi head Chevron Alongonqin with one broken tail light and 2) there was a little bit of background noise in the lower left of the photograph he submitted with his employment application. Other than that, zippo. Pretty amazing because we Googled the hell out of this guy".

News of the Week

Item: Area man "plots" world domination with $91 tax refund. Leonard Stift of Scituate, MA, assistant zamboni operator at the Wee Willy skating rink situated just outside Scituate, felt his entrepreneurial spirit soar as he softened the ice in decreasingly concentric circles in between periods of the raucous and tightly fought peewee hockey playoff game last saturday. Oblivious to the blood seeping onto the ice from the parents' booster section behind the home goal, Leonard dreamed of what he would do with the $91 dollars in tax rebates that the President of the United States himself had promised would be in his mailbox sometime within the next three years if The President felt like it. First, Leonard mused, he would buy his own zamboni and move to Mexico under a little-known NAFTA provision. There, he would tap into the heretofore unrealized hopes and desires of the indigenous peoples and lead an economic revival that would sweep south, as newly enfranchised zamboni operators rolled over coca fields in decreasingly concentric circles, inspiring everypeople to toil together for the everyweal. And that was just the beginning.... meanwhile, just as the 6-8 year olds glided out to cut fresh lines in the newly virgin rink, a continent away Virginia Smooth looked out over the Pacific and asked her billionaire husband what he would do with his tax rebate, and Mr. Smooth shrugged and replied, "I dunno. Rent some movies, go see a hockey game, whatever..."

crayons in the can

can

do anything

crayons in the hand

can

do something

Sometimes the non-tourist attractions, 

the ones that go unnamed and unnoticed, 

can be more entertaining than the ones people flock to see. 

Here's a sampling from the other side of town:

 Sun's Laundry Expo

Model Tobacco

Nice Crockery

Office Politics

that's me on the fortieth floor
second window from the left
peering out at nothing in particular 
I used my personal politcial power
to get a window office
to see the sun, see other buildings
see people scrambling below
people glad to finally see the sun, any sun
locked within a nippy, chilly, over cooled cubicle
worse than the blackest hole of Calcutta
(except for the cold)
worse than The Snake Pit. Remember the movie?
where Olivia de Havilland found herself 
in an insane asylum 
and couldn't remember how she got there
caught up in the bureaucracy of the institution
the regimentation of the staff
some brutal and ignorant
a few kindhearted
most just killing time
cubicle time

The Chase

Words of the Week

Pigadillo: Eating when nobody’s looking. 

Jambled: When traffic calming makes you nervous.

Cobblement: Wondering why you bought those shoes.

Endophasm: The part of the thing where you’re excited the thing might be almost over.

Diglion: The sub-atomic particle that makes the universe fall in love with itself.

Cartogemy: When your sense of direction insists the map is wrong.

Shulquess: Asking for suggestions but hoping there aren’t any. 

Road Trip: Michigan or Bust!

Confederate Breastworks (!?!?!)

The fact that it speaks for itself goes without saying. 

Tagging at Highs Restaurant, Monterey, Virginia

Welcome to West Virginia

Waiting for Session

A brief interlude between sessions at the Reusing Indigenous Clay Modalities Conference at the Fort Pierre National Grasslands Conference Center outside of Pierre, South Dakota allows attendees to network with one another. Conference co-chairperson, Addison Cuthwinning, said this years conference was one of the best ever. Said Cuthwinning: "This year was one of the best ever! Attendees were able to sit and listen to presenters give presentations about various topics related to Reusing Indigenous Clay. Some of the presenters used computers and powerpoint presentations and attendees were thrilled at the lifelike images of things we do with clay and things we would like to do with clay in the future. So exciting! There were so many good ideas!"