humor

Candy Crisis 2014

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

As the 2014 candy shortage spread from city to city and finally house to house, the hoarders were found out. The police records from that autumn show a system overwhelmed by the sugar-starved criminal element. Pages upon pages detailing baroque crimes of candy hunger give way to long lists of numbers with no further details and then to blank pages, which speak volumes in their emptiness.

The shortage was blamed by politicians of one party on politicians of the other party. Banks blamed insurers and insurers blamed a system built to only anticipate the anticipatable. Leaders were few.

The more headline-devoted media outlets dubbed it the Candy Apocalypse but they were unready for the sudden absence of advertising revenue. The criminal element sent spokesmen to express shame that it was now connected to such bizarre crimes of hunger that even hardened criminals were abashed.

The Dadaists saved me. Surrealism only put off the candy-seeking hordes for a moment, long enough to shoo my family into a far room, but not long enough to protect my property. I dimly remembered a phrase, that drastic times called for something. It seemed that these were drastic times. “Drastic times call for … drastic leisure?” That did not ring a bell. “Drastic pleasure?” “Drastic times call for something really big,” I declared.

The doorbell rang that fitful Halloween night and I was prepared with my drastic big things to meet the drastic times; I prayed that confusion was my only chance to at bringing any sense to these fructose-enslaved zombies.

I was dressed as a sort of sorcerer, put a rug on my head to indicate fortune telling and oven mitts on my hands for claws. I spoke as slowly and as quickly as I could:

jolifanto bambla o falli bambla
großiga m’pfa habla horem
egiga goramen
higo bloiko russula huju
hollaka hollala
anlogo bung
blago bung blago bung
bosso fataka
ü üü ü
schampa wulla wussa olobo
hej tatta gorem
eschige zunbada
wulubu ssubudu uluwu ssubudu
–umf
kusa gauma
ba–umf

hugo_ball

Hugo_ball_karawane

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The stunt was a raging failure and tonight I am writing this on the road, leading the procession to the next neighborhood, hunting, forever hunting in a soul-less search for more candy, candy that will never more be found.

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A flash fiction for Halloween 2014. We have plenty of candy here. Boo.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for October 31 asks, “It’s Halloween, and you just ran out of candy. If the neighborhood kids (or anyone else, really) were to truly scare you, what trick would they have to subject you to?”

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Scoping a Horo

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The first rule of horoscopes is to remember that your horoscope is not written for you. It does not address you specifically. Horoscopes are written for “people like you,” which is to say that you should read them like a person like you, but a you who reads horoscopes, understands them, and trusts them.

Any complaint about a daily horoscope’s failure to discuss or predict your lunch, daily expenses, or death are the complaints of a person with laryngitis to a lamp.

People like you are those who were born around dinner eastern standard time on November 18 at 41.7000° N latitude. I am one of those people like that: we are called Scorpios, and like many a Scorpio, I am passionate and faithful and fall in love daily and I am also mistrustful and perpetually isolated in my own unemotional head. Like many Scorpios, I am devoted to my friends and cruel as bureaucrat denied a raise just before taking your call. Like many Scorpios, I am kind and rude, instinctual and devoted to logic, whip-smart and dumb as a box of string; I am both and neither in so many ways and all of none of them at all most of always. Perhaps you can and can not relate, if you are and are not a Scorpio.

Here is the Scorpio horoscope published for the month of October 2014 in a truly great local magazine (that is not sarcasm; the Chronogram really is a great Hudson Valley magazine and I even wrote one article for it in the 1990s); there are still a few days left for all of this to come to pass or none of it to come true or all of it to not come true in a way that spookily proves it was correct from day one: (ahem)

You may be wondering when things are going to change; you may start to think you’re going backwards rather than making progress. You may seem to lose sight of an important goal, or some crucial idea that you’ve been developing. Fear not. The astrology of the next few weeks is certainly mysterious and will leave plenty of people guessing. Yet as those weeks unfold, you will discover that something is brewing under the surface, and that something is likely to manifest on the day that the Sun ingresses your sign, which is October 23. Now, this leaves a question of what to do if you find yourself in a zero-gravity space, or feeling like you’re unable to think clearly. Your chart says that you will get maximum value from getting lost in your work. Proceed with what you are doing, with full devotion, authentic passion and a healthy dose of curiosity. Imagine that you have no need to think about what’s coming next, nor any desire to do so. Keep yourself focused on the task at hand, which over the next two weeks is likely to get more interesting and take on a value of its own, that is, to be interesting for its own sake. You could call this art or science in its most essential and sincere form, which is the setup for an inevitable breakthrough

The paragraph ends with no punctuation, neither a period nor an exclamation point. The other 11 monthly zodiacal missives for October’s impending October-ness (these were published on October 1th, right split-lickety) all conclude with concluding punctuation. Minor typo? Absolutely; every publication (even this one) has typos. They are a fact of life, like dust on a computer screen or sunlight. But might this absence mean something? What if I “act as if” and read it—the typo and the entire horoscope—as if it means something?

An “inevitable breakthrough”? That sounds exciting. But can a breakthrough be a breakthrough if it is inevitable? Don’t I have to be a participant for an event to be a breakthrough, and if it is inevitable aren’t I not a participant but a bystander?

It still sounds exciting and I can not wait for October 23, which was … last Thursday. What happened then? The sun was ingressing my sign. I wrote a throw-back Thursday piece that day, which covered the past (an old photo), the present (an award this blog had won), and the future (I concluded with a sentence about wanting to learn to meditate, which was unrelated to anything else I had written). Um, wow.

The horoscopianizer was right: the sun was ingressing all over my place last Thursday, but that may be only because I don’t have any curtains and my room faces the sunrise.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for October 29 asks, “Yesterday you invented a new astrological sign. Today, write your own horoscope—for the past month (in other words, as if you’d written it October 1st).”

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Get Some Sleep Already

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Seven mornings out of seven, I wake up pleading with myself to allow me to get more sleep. My second conscious thought every morning is, “I did not get enough sleep,” and I quickly review to see what time my last memory was, look at my phone to see what time it currently is, and then commence juggling my day’s schedule in my head to allow for another 15 minutes or another hour or another night of sleep.

I am not anyone’s employee, and have not been for over four years. So why am I pleading for more sleep? With whom? I could roll back over and rest until the promised arrival of the mythical Enough Sleep, a god or goddess who will declare me rested for all time and in no more need of sleep, and no one would notice my absence or care. I am no longer on anyone’s clock. I no longer need to call anyone to “take my shift.” I am retired/disabled.

After I have a little coffee, I quickly scan the news; within 10 minutes I am sure that I have once again slept too late, for too long, and I can not possibly get everything I had planned yesterday for today accomplished. Thus, my day starts out screwed, in two ways, every day. The eight-ball may be very quiet when it arrives every morning, but upon walking through my door, I am trapped behind it.

The hecticness of one’s life, the hecticity, is something we carry like a badge of honor. Rush hour, experienced twice a day, is the fiercest example of this: an entire city population (around here, entire county) comprised of people who think that they are running behind and are facing immediate unemployment if it weren’t for all the other slow drivers competing for their deserved two yards of macadam. And all those other slow drivers hate you, too, for the same reason of their own immediate unemployment.

Once one is convinced that there is no getting around the fact of imminent screwdom, it becomes something we almost brag about to each other. How many people greet you with a hearty and sometimes sarcastic, “Working hard?” “No, I’m getting coffee.” I held a job for a year in which my major occupation became “looking busy.” An observer would have thought I was a courier or constantly mailing documents to the home office. That observer would have been wrong.

We measure the quality of our day by the number of achievements we have. Number of documents published versus quality of work, or the number of times this week we beat personal commuting records to and from the office, or numbers of reps at the gym, or, worse, for those dieting, number of days without “cheating,” which represents even more harsh ways to harshly self-judge.

We live in a culture of Other Peoples’ Success and thus exist in a competition with others for more successes than them and yet better ones. This is because, as Brené Brown, a pop sociologist, points out, we live in a “culture of scarcity. We wake up in the morning and we say, ‘I didn’t get enough sleep.’ And we hit the pillow saying, ‘I didn’t get enough done.’ We’re never thin enough, extraordinary enough or good enough—until we decide that we are. The opposite of ‘scarcity’ is not ‘abundance.’ It’s ‘enough.’ I’m enough.”

Obviously, from the sketch at the top, the culture of scarcity is deeply programmed in me, even though I am no longer a part of any race to any place. The need for hecticity, which always contains within it the desire to escape from it, is deep in me.

I’m enough. Not “I’m good enough.” I’m enough. How hard that is to say, and to mean it to be about me, myself, and not you. It is even harder to embrace. And for every one of those days when I catch a glimpse of almost believing it and I briefly live a little more easy inside myself, make sure you are not in my way on line for coffee the next day. I’m working hard. I’m setting new records.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for October 24 asks, “We all seem to insist on how busy, busy, busy we constantly are. Let’s put things in perspective: tell us about the craziest, busiest, most hectic day you’ve had in the past decade.”

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