Thomas eats an eel.
Surprisingly does not die.
News at eleven.
Tom, September 27, 2005, 10:30 PM (link here)
Thomas eats an eel.
Surprisingly does not die.
News at eleven.
Tom, September 27, 2005, 10:30 PM (link here)
Twenty Broken Fingers
(Sci-Fi, After the Fall of Man version)
- The final straw, the "To hell with it all,"
It came in the morning, it came at dawn.
Why stay on this world after the Fall?
And she, she, she,
Adam's Angel agreed.
"Maybe it's the streets,
How they used to be cleaner.
Or the fact that you can't help but run into people.
It could, perhaps, it could be our backs,
The ones we can't scratch
With twenty broken fingers between us.
Oh! We deserve greener, man, we could have Venus,
All to ourselves."
"Ourselves. Exactly. What with Earth gone to hell,
We need somewhere new.
I say here's what we'll do:
You'll muder your boss
And I'll stash His head
In the trunk of the car my wife took when she left.
We'll bail on this planet,
Girl, God damn it, this planet,
Is but a pain in the ass without end."
They left in the evening, they left at night.
Adam invented a ship and they took its first flight.
But they crashed into the Sun, just as the trip had begun,
For they couldn't fly, fly, fly,
With twenty broken fingers between them.
Tom, September 27, 2005, 10:14 PM (link here)
SELINIUS STORK ON ...
... time travel, travel in general, his tattoo, and his experiments.
... truth, lies, and himself.
... the name of Hippocrates.
[Stork's this guy we made up. He's been mentioned before. -- Tom]
Phil, September 25, 2005, 11:30 AM (link here)
An e-mail I received from Phil:
Subject: Whiskey River
Date: September 25, 2005 11:02:38 AM EDT
is the worst bar in the city. It's been confirmed. We all pretty much knew it already, but I went there anyway after the barbecue. ... Rock Bottom. Complete Zero. ... Picture every person you hated in high school in a bar (a bar trying so desperately to have personality that it has created a pond diorama and glued it to its ceiling. A bar that wants so badly to be someplace that it has never-worn snowshoes on its walls. A bar so lame their terrace closes at nine and they have a talking sci-fi channel poster in their bathroom) and they're listening to, of course, horrible hip-hop ... with drunken women clinging to their clothes and the stench of dude and alcohol fermenting between the faux wooden walls. A ping pong ball splashes into a cup of Bud Light, a small crowd cheers.
Never. Ever. Go to Whiskey River. I debate out loud getting a drink. I want to be drunk, but I want more than anything else for this place to go out of business as soon as possible. I decide against the drink. Three of us flee. Grand total of minutes spent inside the bar: 5. Number of years I will be pissed about this experience: 2.
Charles notes on the way out, "what makes this all the worse is how tantalizingly flammable that whole place is."
Because of these affronts against me, I am officially declaring this whole week a weekend and I hope to treat it accordingly.
And there you have it.
Tom, September 25, 2005, 11:06 AM
Just announced:
THE MAIN SQUEEZE ORCHESTRA
Saturday, October 8th
10:30pm
Mo Pitkin's House of Satisfaction
34 Ave. A @ 3rd St.
$10
Let me clarify,
THE MAIN SQUEEZE ORCHESTRA
now featuring the lovely, talented Jenni Dykeman!
Saturday, October 8th
10:30pm
Mo Pitkin's House of Satisfaction
34 Ave. A @ 3rd St.
$10
Tom, September 21, 2005, 9:42 AM (info here)
V E N T U R E B R O S . P A R T Y
Dong designed the flyer. My outdated iPod will be DJing.
UPDATE: (9/22/05) My iPod got yanked. After like only an hour. I am Spoonbender has a place, but that place is most definitely not the east 30s.
Yeah, no.
UPDATE: Seven songs the clientele of Whiskey River hate.
1. Seventy Cops, Steroid Maximus
2. Channel Z, The B-52's
3. Summer Is Over, Elkland
4. Tits on the Radio, Scissor Sisters
5. Where Do Words Go, I am Spoonbender
6. Hybrid Moments, The Misfits
7. Cracked Actor, David Bowie
Tom, September 19, 2005, 11:23 PM
It's a short story, not a quicktime, so it won't take a while to download, just a while to read.
Tom, September 17, 2005, 11:42 PM (read here)
In order to be less lonely my dad got a dog. Lizi, a yorkshire terrier. He picked her out when she was born and while she was getting big enough to bring home he would visit her every once in a while and all summer long he was telling my sister and me how excited he was about her and how he couldn't wait to get her. One time he ran outside in the pouring rain to fetch a photo of her out of his truck just to show us.
My dad brought Lizi home a couple weeks ago and it was great and she's great and I'm sure she sat next to him when he ate breakfast in the morning and slept at his feet at night, but yesterday, right around the time I was seeing David Bowie sing an Arcade Fire song, Lizi's kidneys failed. She's in the hospital now, hooked up to an IV. She weighs a pound and a half--she weighs as much as a pack of hot dogs--and that she now lay dying in a dog hospital is as good a reason as any, I feel, to not believe in God. Believe in David Bowie. He is awesome. And believe in Lizi. Poor, sick Lizi. And believe in my dad because losing a new dog wouldn't affect a person if they weren't real. But don't believe in God. Because even a bad god--a terrible, tyrant god--the worst god anyone could ever imagine into existence--wouldn't fucking let yorkshire terrier kidneys fail.
Let alone yorkshire terrier puppy kidneys.
UPDATE: September 19th, 2005:
(To be read in a slightly Southern accent accentuated to sound more Southern.)
My friends have I a story for you. A story a friend of mine relayed to me. Something his son Timothy told him.
Now, Timothy is in the second grade. At a school in Massachusetts. And well, one day Timothy came home and told his father, "Do you know what my Biology teacher did today?"
Timothy is a smart kid. A joy to behold. About yay big. Beautiful head of auburn hair.
Timothy told his father that his science teacher held up a chicken egg in front of the science class and said that he will deny God's existence by dropping that chicken egg and watching it break. Timothy's teacher dared Our Blessed Father to stop that egg from breaking.
Timothy's science teacher held that egg up in front of the class and- held it above his head, and said, "If God exists, may He stop this egg from breaking!"
And, well, my friends. My friends the second that egg left the science teacher's hand, a janitor entered the classroom. And my friends, what happened was, that janitor wheeled his garbage can into a fish aquarium, and that fish aquarium, which was also on wheels, got pushed under the egg, and...
Plop.
That chicken egg fell right into the water. Unbroken.
Un...broken.
(Lizi lives.)
Tom, September 15, 2005, 7:49 PM (link here)
(On nights my girlfriend stays at her apartment I sleep with my laptop lying next to me. It just happens.)
Tom, September 14, 2005, 2:15 AM
I've been asked a couple times if something someone read on here is true. I'll have to go back and check, but I'm pretty sure everything posted directly on this site is true, or at the very least an exaggeration of something true. The things I link to, the things I've given their own page, are usually false. Or at the very least an exaggeration of something false.
So, the 111s are true, but there is not an ongoing murder investigation at the steak house across the street. Just like next week there won't be a paranormal investigation on the second floor of my building.
There are, of course, exceptions. And some of those exceptions aren't so much exceptional as they are, as they say, "hard to say." For instance, The Boss Farts is more true than false, I suppose, but I'd still file it under Fiction. Boring Fiction, actually. Don't expect too much from The Boss Farts.
Tom, September 14, 2005, 2:04 AM (link here)
SONNET
FOR JOHN KEATS 303,
THE SMALLEST ROOM AT A PORTLAND INN
- The Citgo Station seen from your window
Doth fall short of Whitman's mount at morn's hour;
And Dorothy Parker's two-head'd shower
Makes your one-head'd one seem paltry, I know.
O Keats 303! Ignore what you're not!
Forty dollars cheaper than Longfellow
You may be on paper, but 'tis not so
To those quiet breathing your bed hath brought.
O if your namesake lived to be longer!
He could've penn'd something worth forty more.
Or, O if his sick lungs were a bit stronger!
You might've compris'd the entire third floor.
But, O to another'd be this sonner!
I've no int'rest in what I can't afforde.
Tom, September 5, 2005, 11:48 PM (link here)
Last week I declared myself done with numbers. Tonight I tell you numbers aren't done with me.
(I suppose this is an addendum to this post.)
It wasn't that the day after I played the lottery I freed up some space on my computer and was left with 1.11 GB.
It wasn't that this weekend we parked next to a car with 111 on its license plate, or that our favorite CD sounded best at volume 111, or that we went to bed Saturday night at 1:11 AM. We parked next to dozens of cars over the course of this weekend, the volume turned out to be not 111, but rather three notches, and 1:11 happens every day. Twice, in fact.
It wasn't when we pulled off in Biddeford to check the map only to find we had stopped at Junction 111. Hell, it wasn't even when we drove through Biddeford the next day and saw that at the corner of Junction 111 there is a T-Shirt and Trophy shop pretty much identical to the one my dad owns.
What it was was that the painting hanging in our bathroom was numbered 111/500. It was a print of a painting to be precise, by an artist whose last name I couldn't decipher, of a bar called Gritty McDuff's, Portland's Original Brew House it claims. 111/500. Shit, that one was scary. That one did me in.
...
So, of course, the next night Jenni and I paid Gritty's a visit. Come on, we had to. Plus, interestingly enough, our waitress from the previous night suggested we check it out, so there were two reasons behind our decision. It was a nice place, I guess. Nice and cheap when compared to New York. It looked a lot like it does in the painting except there were some people in it. I ordered the Halloween Ale; Jenni tried the Raspberry. She liked mine better so we switched. Nothing all that extraordinary happened the hour we spent there, because the minute you start looking for things, they hide from you. Everyone knows that.(One can only assume this is) To be continued ...
Tom, September 5, 2005, 10:38 PM
Seven songs for a Labor Day getaway.
1. Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?, Chicago
2. Not for Sale, CocoRosie
3. Let the Cool Goddess Rust Away, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
4. Dawn, The Brian Jonestown Massacre
5. Little Life, Josephine Foster
6. Banjo Clog, Dock Boggs
7. Mucky Fingers, Oasis
Tom, September 2, 2005, 10:58 PM
