These calculations seem suspect. 

Seven (give or take) ways to commit suicide with a unicycle.

Musings on the cultural event known as the Company Picnic. Edited for your comfort and her pleasure:

The Company Picnic

I don’t really want to go to the company picnic. For starters, there will be kids there. Every asshole in the company uses the picnic as the prime opportunity to parade their substandard offspring, and the children will run around with the frenetic energy of the recently-doused-with-napalm but screaming twice as loudly.

It is also an excuse to parade your significant other, and everyone in the company and his wife will stand around and speculate on how everyone else and his wife is doing. I have no children and no significants. I detest these events.

As a single person at these functions, I become a specimen for scientific inquiry. My personal life is probed with open-ended, meandering questions like, “when are you going to settle down?” and “have you thought about buying a house?” and “you don’t want kids?” and so on. I hate it.

So this year, Im skipping it. Of course, missing the company picnic is career suicide — so I’ve come up with an iron-clad excuse. One that will not only exempt me from this picnic, but all others to follow. I will claim that I am vegan. And not just vegan: but diabetic and celiac as well. I’ll even tell them that I’ve got lung cancer and can’t be near barbecues.

That’ll show ‘em.

If only I had the money.

My favourite part is the question mark after “marizpan parachutes.” As though this is the one that was infeasible.

Moar comics!

Four things:

1. An imagined conversation between two blokes. One of them is trying to un-lesbian someone. As offensive as it sounds.
2. A marginal comic of a squiggly line becoming a man standing erect.
3. Poorly drawn panel cartoon explicating how numbers from one to ten could be demonstrated on a single hand.
4. The beginning of a story about a man named Vladimir who is good at drawing hands.

Four questions:

1. Can you un-lesbian someone?
2. Is it really a marginal if isn’t in the margin?
3. Why are drawn hands so creepy?
4. Where is this hand story going?

Four answers:

1. I’ve never tried, but I assume the answer is a resounding, “of course.”
2. Only Sergio Aragones knows the answer.
3. You might surmise it’s because I cannot draw but science has shown that drawn hands are creepy always.
4. There was a boy in my 6th grade class who drew hands. He was a small and quiet kid that drew hands endlessly in his notebook. Before you ask, yes it was creepy as fuck, and to answer my original question, nowhere.

Some thoughts from 19 January 2009. Sometimes this is the form writing takes:

So what to write about? Current events? This is difficult because of my self-imposed exile on journalistic media. The news I get is meta-news: filtered either by satire or diluted by third-hand accounts. Nevertheless, I have been unable to avoid mention that America is inaugurating their first black president tomorrow. I know, it’s laughable that this is newsworthy, but such is the world we live in. 

I have heard that security will be tight, cell phone networks will be working doubletime and that the sky may turn a deep shade of [unintelligible]

What colour? I’m dying to know. God damnit.

Let’s forget that unfunny jabber about dragons.

You might remember that services like Quiz Your Friends were popular at the turn of the century. Our dormitory got into it. While most of my floor mates sent around what were essentially trivia questions about themselves, I concocted a true Vivek Aptitude Test. You were meant to answer the questions as if you were me. Here’s one of them:

What number comes next in this series?

1, 2, 4, _

• a) 6
• b) 8
• c) 16
• d) 7

The answer is obviously b. I love geometric expansion (rather than arithmetic) and you should know this about me. My friends hated the quiz and most failed, but we can talk about that another time.

Anyway, on this page is a similar test question, except penned by an older and therefore more sociopathic version of me. Clearly, I had finished university:

I’m in a restaurant. The waiter asks me have I been to this restaurant before. I respond with:

• a) Tears
• b) “Will that affect the quality of service I’m about to receive?”
• c) “Yes, but not to eat and not while you were open.”
• d) “No. And I never will.”

I wrote this years ago, and even I’m stumped. Though I may not be comprised of any of the same molecules of the writer of this question (I’ve been watching too much Nova, and I don’t apologize), we share the same memories and recorded humiliations. As such, I’m pulling rank and adding a new answer, viz., the correct one:

• e) “Many, many times. And I’ll have the New York steak, medium-rare, mashed potatoes on the side. Thanks, Manny.” (Even though I’ve never been to the restaurant, and they serve sushi, and the waitron is an 18-year-old girl named Eileen.)

Nothing but net.

I love redundant expressions. Why say it once when you can say it twice at the same time?

But actually, I am particularly interested in ones of the same form as “sex pervert.” Namely, expressions that beg the question: is there any other kind? Being confronted with “sex pervert,” makes me ask: food pervert? Computer pervert? Those things don’t get weird until after genitalia gets involved. 

These are the artfully redundant expressions. I wish I had collected more. Here are some off the top of my head: 

• violent serial killer (this would require some finesse otherwise)
• childish prank
• bitter atheist
• chilled-out surfer dude

And so forth and so forth. 

(Somewhat related are Stormy Petrels: which are pairs or groups of words that seemingly always go together. Worth investigating, if you’re a Nerd With No Life. (There’s another!))

One year our music teacher had a stroke and this depicts his replacement. A man our seventh grade class truly terrorized.

He was very tall and thin with thin lips and dark hair. He wore a ghostly pallor and printed polyester shirts (hey, it was the 90s). When one of us was acting up he would slide a neatly-folded piece of paper from his breast-pocket and carefully write down our name. “You’re going on the list,” he’d announce, but it would only serve to incite the class further.

He was a human being though. He drove me home from band-practice in his TransAm (in hindsight this looked sketchy as fuck) and really did care about music. In return, we locked him in a storage room, mouthed off repeatedly, and I think I even threw a chair in his direction. I can’t imagine a day that year went by that year where he didn’t end his day with a sigh.

I heard that he never taught again after that year. All hope abandon, those who dare to educate our future leaders.

The record of an interesting milestone: my very first day in San Francisco. Long before the business trips to SF, and my eventual moving here, I visited; for fun! My sister and I cruised up the Pacific Coast Highway from San Diego, and I detailed our adventures on these pages.

I recall being affected by two things on the drive up: the homes of millionaires (and a few billionaires) and the embarrassment of sunshine. In this note I also report on my first experience with Jack In The Box (“delicious,” apparently) and California’s H.O.V. lanes. I remember thinking: “I could live here.”

And now that I do, it has transformed the meaning of my previous jaunts; they now represent innumerable planted memories. As I explore this new city, and find myself sitting on a bar stool in a dim dive, or in the corner of a shaded park, or halfway through a burger at a Jack In The Box, my experiences coalesce into the words, “I have been here before” — and a memory ignites in my mind like a match stick in the dark. 

It’s an apt metaphor. Learning the ways of a new city sometimes feels like raking dark soil off an enormous map. This page is a reminder that there are signposts, like lanterns, scattered throughout my new city, left there by my past self.

Three exercises in empathy. The middle one reads:

On Being An Obnoxious Cocksucker

I met a woman on the street at an ice cream stand about two weeks ago. I wanted a vanilla ice cream cone but she had to retrieve them from a storage bin. I told her to “forget it” and stormed off proclaiming loudly how it was taking “fucking forever.”

This is, unfortunately, based on a true story. I had the privilege of watching the inspiration for this paragraph (one of those people whom you might refer to as a “friend” and then hedge with a hastily-uttered “well…” as though this testimony might serve to incriminate you in the future) storm off when a demure scooper of ice creams took a bit of time to find some cones from the cupboards behind her counter. He blasted her with a ”fucking forget it, I can’t believe this is taking so fucking long.” Seriously.

Both me and the dairy dudette were stunned. And I’ll never forget her reaction, either: “Well, I don’t think that language is really necessary.” Some people really do scream for ice cream.

A common theme in my writing is writing itself. And I don’t mean “the creative process” or anything fey like that. I mean, literally the act of making words: which pen is best, which notebook should I use, and how do I keep said notebooks organized? 

As I have asserted before, I suffer from serious neurosis on this topic. Should you want to induce in me a nervous breakdown, buy me a notebook and watch me equivocate on whether to sully the virgin pad or save it for later. If you want to do further damage to my psyche, tear one of the pages out, or start writing in it… on page 13.

Anyway, it appears that to the right of this incomplete inventory is a mediation on ink prompted by dire circumstance, viz., that my rollerball pen had failed me on a plane. Thus we have one of my rare uses of ballpoint pen. I truly hate those things.

This isn’t an indiscriminate list of names of monkeys, nor names I would want to give a pet monkey. This is The List one must consult when naming a monkey.

If I had my way this would codified in law (much like Swedish naming laws), and before you ask, yes, it is exhaustive.

I don’t know if I have ever been more excited to post anything on the Internet. Behold: super pants!

There’s really not much else to say.