For Peace and Freedom

So they dug out this ash heap in Queens and built all these pavilions. They had cars already driving around in 1939. Cars were not yet drudgery and traffic jams and Jiffy Lube– they were leisure and freedom. They had an early television. Television was not yet aesthetic assault and battery everywhere you turn. You could see the Magna Carta. They had a dishwasher, which was about to make everyone’s life better (except for people who insist on living in minimally renovated pre-1935 housing like stupid, stupid me). They had a robot who smoked cigarettes. He was seven feet tall, spoke 700 words from the record player in his belly, and I would definitely go out on a date with him if his reconstruction goes as planned.

Loud

The record I chose tonight was Prokofiev. I bought it for the mandarin orange and butterscotch yellow design on the jacket. I was stirring up spaghetti sauce and classical music seemed like the thing. I didn’t really think about what Prokofiev was. He was, on this record, spanking loud full symphony sawing away. Most of […]

Bubbly

Bubbles look glittery in a Coke, and lacy in the bathtub, but actually bubbles are dangerous. You could kill someone with a champagne cork. Or crinkle the crap out of your china cabinet. Or burp.

Hell Hath No Fury

Yesterday I walked into two conversations about Hell. First I was sitting eating my lunch in an empty classroom when a couple of students wandered in. I was doing my best to ignore them, but one was saying, “I have a King James translation and I just don’t understand it with all those wherefores and […]