Message in a Bottle

PLUNK! The mellifluid sound of the bottle-born message subsurfaced to resurface and drift into the e-theric ocean. What seamonster there useless as a Eugene Levy-a-thon.[ Teaching Nabokov to glazed pupils redoubles my parapro-pensity toward lexically dextrous solliptical proseurism]. It's notsobad here on ghostofpaper island, but my beard itches and I'm weary of coconut milk. I smoke for signals.

SOOOOOOOO ... the last three posts were not driven well enough into the earthy foundations of e-community. There were no comments. Color me as insecure as a swimsuited tweenager at the public pool, but I'm a puppy who needs scruffscratchin'. Thereby I hereby openly solicit and humbly beg for harmony. Roll call and response like this was black church. The pathetic appeal. All for nought and nought for all.

QUESTIONNAIRE:

1). How are you? You look really good, did you lose weight? I don't see you often enough. Stayin' outta trouble? Oh, I was going to ask you about that show you really like / that local sports team / that sports team from where you grew up / that thing that you're really interested in. Tell me about that. You are very interesting to listen to on that subject.

2). Have you ever seen that guy who hangs out in the basement of Lind Hall pretty much every evening ... he kind of looks like he'd be into playing Magic the Gathering and he has a ponytail and black hightops and he just stands at the computer terminal outside 26 and does stuff online for like hours on end ... what's that guys' deal?

3). Do you remember that episode of the Cosby show where they meet Stevie Wonder and he records each Huxtable saying one thing and mixes it into a stupidfresh jam (e.g. Cliff: "Baby," Denise: "I don't know what to say," Theo: "Jam it on the one")? Do you think you could live a properly communicative life if by some hocuspocus you could only speak those very particular phrases?

4). Is Tom Cruise really gay? Travolta, too? Are all Scientologists gay? Did you know Beck and Giovanni Ribisi are Scientologists? Did you ever confuse Scientology with Christian Science? I sure did.

5). Don't you think it would be really stressful to be an airtraffic controller? What's more stressful than that? What about an airtraffic controller, like on the Jetsons, except not at all cartoony so there would be lots of midair crashes and grisly floating corpses? I never realized until some guy on NPR said it but spaceships have no need for our earthly aerodynamism, they might as well be shaped like balls or cubes or anything else.

6). If you could be one of these United States, which one would you be? Or if you could be one of the Ten Commandments?

7). Which could you live without - pizza or justice?

8). Do you think Zeno's paradoxes are mere sophistry or do they reveal something valuable to us about the nature of time?

9). I think it would be really hard to own a mogwai and obey all the rules so there were no gremlins. You can't feed them "after midnight." When, exactly, does "after midnight" turn into the next day? What if I have to drive someone to the airport real early and I want to give Gizmo a muffin crumb or a corn flake?

10). Did you ever stop and think about the circus - like what the circus is if you were free from the contextual situation of growing up knowing about the circus. The circus is fucked up.

11). I feel like I've been talking a lot ... what do you want to talk about?

12). Do you know how you know animals are dumb - 'cause like if they run out into the street and you're driving toward them, they'll run all the way back to the side they came from rather than take the much shorter trip to the other side. One time (for real) there was a bunny in the road in front of me and it ran straight ahead, like trying to outrun my car. Or was it a turtle? Why would there be a turtle in the road?

13). Gorillas are not dumb. Not at all.

14). Did you know that the only guy in ZZ Top who didn't have a huge beard was named Frank Beard? Totally true. Oh, I told you that already? Damn.

15). Who would win in a fight: Optimus Prime or the sinking feeling that you're getting older with every passing second?

16). Did Indians really ever say "How"? But seriously, isn't "Native Americans" just as stupid or even stupider than "Indians" because it just substitutes one Italian explorers cartographical blunder with another Italian explorer's name? Have you ever seen an Indian eat spaghetti? You're lying.

17). I know nobody really asks you "what's your sign?" but if they every ask me I'm going to say "stop" because I like jokes that aren't funny. It's hard to write jokes. Here's the one joke I wrote: "When I was kid, maybe about 8 or 9, me and this neighborhood girl were playing doctor and then, like, my mom walked in so I had to put her spleen back." It's hard to write jokes. If Dave Chapelle hired me to write jokes, I know where I would start ... I just have the concept: Six Degrees of Segregation. Edgy.

18). Did you know the guy who invented the toilet was really named Krapper? And the guy who invented the upper midwest bar peetrough was really named Peripheraldick?
I realize now that that sounds a lot like "Perry Farrell dick," which hasn't been spotted since Lollapalooza '91. Spotted Dick, of course, is a traditional English steamed suet pudding containing dried fruit (usually currants) and chlamydia. Is Perry Farrell like Adam Ant? Is Faye Dunaway like Adam Ant? Is Adamantium what Wolverine's claws are made out of? Don't answer that, it totally is.

19). Did you know there's a kind of electric fish called "Black Ghost Knife"? I challenge you to come up with a cooler name for anything. Anything. When I was a kid I had three fish named Ovenmitt, Roadblock, and Syphilis. Those were cool names. And once in the Bronx in college, we found a teddybear in the road and took it in and named it Sniphilis, the Earl of Rochester (the Earl of Rochester, John Wilmot, was a "bawdy poet" of the 17th century.)

20). Where are you going?