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26 June 2018

No. 4,247 (cartoon)

Do you ever look back on our amorous liaisons?

It was an execrable affair and I look away.

27 June 2018

An Ugly Little Accident

I love to visit Alicia in her studio, but going out in public with her can be—what’s the phrase I’m looking for?—socially awkward. Yes, that’s it: socially awkward.

She ran out of wine on this afternoon’s visit, so I volunteered to run to the corner market for more. She insisted on joining me, and I couldn’t think of a diplomatic way of declining her offer.

Things went well for the first minute or two of our walk, but then a little girl learning to ride her first bicycle bumped into her.

“Piss off, ya dwarf runt!” she yelled as she shook her cane menacingly.

“That’s my daughter!” shrieked the nearest adult, presumably said runt’s mother.

“You know this ugly little accident could have been prevented by effective birth control, don’t you?” Alicia asked.

She didn’t wait for an answer to her rhetorical question; I suppose that’s the definition of a rhetorical question.

“Obviously not,” Alicia sniffed with a contemptible scowl.

I insisted that we take another route home with the wine, and we arrived at her place unscathed.

Whew!

28 June 2018

Space Grease

You’d think interstellar space would be clean, so very clean, so very, well, spacious.

Well, I’m here to tell ya it ain’t. Not even close.

Forget all of those shiny computer-generated spaceships in the movies. The void isn’t a void at all; it’s chockablock with grease. Space grease.

You read that right: space grease.

And it’s not the enticing grease that’s in a pan after cooking a quesadilla; this stuff is nasty, toxic, and worse.

How much? I’m talking about the equivalent of forty trillion trillion trillion packs of those little packets of butter Rosie the waitress offered in the roadside diner you remember that never existed. I’m sorry for the nebulous unit of measurement, but that’s as specific the ersatz journalist was able to cite in the alleged news report I read.

I have a simple solution to the problem of space grease: coat all intergalactic vessels with popcorn. Problem solved; done!

The only reason I’m not near the top of the food chain at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is the amorous encounter with the Soviet spy—and yes, her name was of course Natasha—in Pocatello, Idaho, in 1987.

Pesky background checks!

29 June 2018

A Sharp, Eye-Catching Show (sketch)

Here are all of the words that I wrote on 23 November 1997:

I have an idea for an exhibit, A Sharp, Eye-Catching Show. The piece would consist of fishhooks and razor blades suspended at eye level with thin, almost transparent, threads.

Over twenty years later, I made A Sharp, Eye-Catching Show (sketch). When it comes to eye-catching art, octopus hooks are among your best aesthetic values as is obvious in my photographic illustration.

I seem to be moving at glacial speed, but with glacial certainty. At this rate, I should be ready to hang a hundred sharp hooks in a gallery in 2039 or so, if there are any left by then.

On second thought, perhaps I shouldn’t have used a glacier as a metaphor since an alarming number of them are shrinking or disappearing. On third thought, sloppy writing is good enough for me.

30 June 2018

Alicemoon

Weasel-worded preface: I’ve changed a name or several here to protect the guilty since it’s in my best economic interest for reasons that I’m too embarrassed to explain.

Alicemoon is a musical ensemble that’s performing a benefit concert for my favorite nonprofit organization. The entire proposition is ridiculous bordering on the preposterous. The outfit benefiting from the fundraiser has more money than intelligent ways to spend it, and that’s saying a lot since it’s run by really really smart people.

And that band? Angus McDeepockets, a vulture capitalist billionaire, as in millionaire with a “b”, concocted it. He hired the best musicians money can buy to make his pedestrian guitar noodling sound barely tolerable. If crappy aural masturbation is your thing, McDeepockets’ Alicemoon is the abomination for you.

Sterbrew Lekha, the nonprofit’s Grande Poobah, invited me to join him tonight. I declined in the most diplomatic way I could come up with that didn’t involve expletives.

“Seeing Alicemoon with you at Union Square a few years ago was certainly a once in a lifetime experience, i.e., I’ll never do it again. I have such strong memories of that night that I wouldn’t want to sully them by repeating the experience.”

It pains me to admit this to admit this, but that wasn’t exactly entirely true. I remember very little about the aural fiasco; I drank rather a lot of whisky when I returned to my studio in a largely successful effort to burn the sonic abomination from my ears.

Sterbrew bought my excuse, so I’m off the hook yet again. I think the clincher was when I cited René Morel’s observation, “Thank God we don’t all have the same taste or we’d all be married to the same woman.”

1 July 2018

The Orange Sky Dilemma

Another day, another law. This is the first day of July, so the celebrated and beloved dope dealers of the past who now conduct business legally as cannabis dispensaries have a new regulatory hurdle. Starting today, all the marijuana they sell must be in childproof packaging and tested for potency and purity, including the absence of rat poison and other nasty chemicals favored by unorganized crime cultivators.

As a result, a whole lotta drug dealers have to destroy a whole lotta inventory. As an alleged corporate news tentacle alleges, dealers wlll have to incinerate hundreds of millions of dollars of cannabis inventory.

That raises the obvious question: where’s the incinerator? Inquiring noses want to know.

The answer isn’t at all obvious. The skies are yellow this morning from horrific fires in some place I’ve never heard of called Yolo, but apparently, it’s not all that far away, geographically speaking. Everything here under an orange sky is covered in ash, so where’s the marijuana crematorium?

Even the least intelligent of my brilliant finds is smart enough not to lick sooty surfaces in search of tetrahydrocannabinol residue, so it looks like it’s time for a beer run ...

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©2018 David Glenn Rinehart