Dead Caterpillar

The universe is a vast cosmic conspiracy ...

When I was a kid my grandmother offered, in one hand, a five dollar bill, and three singles in the other. I took the three singles, and grandma thought it was the most hilarious thing ever. She then corrected me and explained how a five dollar bill was worth more than three one dollar bills, even though the three one dollar bills looked like more because they were separate bills. A few weeks later she offered me the same thing, a set of five dollar bills and three singles. I took the singles.

• No use in highlighting what’s good in a Dostoyevsky novel. It would be much less time consuming, much more practical to highlight what’s not good.
• On the one hand, I want to discuss literature. On the other, I don’t want people to think I am pretentious enough to discuss literature.
• What the hell? Of course it matters what people think of you. (That’s why I take the time every morning to put clothes on. We all do.) What doesn’t matter is what you think people think of you. So stop thinking about it.
• Never been big on small talk. I don’t want to break the ice with things like “what do you do for a living?” I want to break the ice with “so what do you think the meaning of life is?”
• The other day I bought a $10 dollar bottle opener for a $6 bottle of wine. Pffffffffffffffffffft.
• The truth is we will never know who or what could be standing behind us when we are not looking, no matter how many time we turn our heads to look behind.
• Here’s a difficult truth: the people that I so intensely dislike are actually, in many ways, a lot like me. I should either stop disliking them so intensely or stop loving myself.
• And another: If you think you know how little you know now, just wait till tomorrow when you realize how little you knew about how much you didn’t know yesterday. Happens all the time.
• We are inside God’s imagination.
• Usually when you have to qualify it with “haha, that was pretty funny,” guess what? It wasn’t very funny.
• The internet is my spot in the shade.
• The internet is a big fucking deal. With the internet comes the merging of minds. With the internet: exponential growth. A millennium ago it was only possible for a mind to interact with a few other minds during its lifetime. The printed page allowed for a mind to interact with hundreds, even thousands of other minds during its lifetime. Now it’s normal for one mind to interact with hundreds in a single day. Do you people realize what you have created? The internet is the next Tower of Babel. It’s a big fucking deal.
• If I knew the inact of not thinking would bring me so much success, I would have begun practicing it long ago. Learn how to not think. ( “You must unlearn what you have learned.” – Yoda)
• I don’t think that people can be fake. I think that all that fakeness and pretense is actually fake, and that the real person hiding underneath is something genuine.
• Sometimes I laugh and I am not really sure what it is I am laughing at. Current theory on that: I’m laughing at ‘the pure ridiculousness of everything.’ Like the fact that people have to put on articles of clothing to cover their butts and ball sacks. People sort of have to pretend that their private parts aren’t there, otherwise they can’t be taken seriously. It’s pretty funny if you think about it.

 

The fat kid from Jurassic park. You know the one…

“More like a six foot turkey!”

Yesterday I spent about three hours obsessively cyber-stalking him. It turns out he’s a writer now and does some acting on the side. He recently stared in this short film called “Elliot.” I furrowed my eyebrows through the entire thing. He has a very strange face! Okay here’s a link to the very cheesy and weird short film, which I found strangely mesmerizing on account of its cheesiness and weirdness.

You don’t know what you got till it’s smushed. My cat Penny met a gruesome end Monday trying to cross the street. Poor, poor Penny, run down just inches away from reaching the curb. I loved that cat like I would have loved a dog. Now he’s in the backyard buried beneath the willow tree, which, I know, sounds very picturesque. I didn’t have time to think and process it all when it happened, Monday morning. Pretty much poker-faced my way through the rest of the day. It was my first day at a new job and you always want to make a good impression on the first day. You want to smile and shake hands, not moan about your dead cat. But I think the timing of his death couldn’t have been better. If Penny absolutely HAD to die, the timing was right. I’m too distracted with everything to be entirely caught up in it.

So it was exactly two Octobers ago when my then-roomate, Prasanna, and I were kidding about getting kittens, in lieu of girlfriends. It started as a joke but we toyed with the idea for a while and eventually figured “ah what the heck.” We found a free kittens listing on Craigslist and made the trip the next day. I think there were four kittens in the litter and each had some sort of growth on the face, except one. Naturally I chose the one without a growth that being Penny. Destiny, of course, but also common sense.

I took a surprising number of pictures and videos of Penny with my cellphone. I’ve decided to upload some for posterity. Sorry the video quality is poor and there is no sound. Here Penny is playing with my feet on his first day in a new home. My two feet were Penny’s mortal enemies during kittenhood. 1:44 will eat your heart out.

Penny chilling on the carpet, like a boss.

Hungry little bastard.

Penny’s first meal.

One of those pictures that hurts your neck.

A video of Penny playing with a pen.

Penny, a little older, playing hide and seek. I usually initiated our hide and seek games by throwing something (a pill container in this case) at him. Then running away. I’m glad there’s no sound because I was giggling like a little girl.

Penny as an adolescent.

Classic Penny look.

I came home from work one day to this scene. One of my housemates had left his window open to the roof.

This picture was taken in the middle of the night with flash on. Penny would sometimes sit on one of the couch arms next to my bed and stare at me while I slept. I would wake up and see his silhouette hovering over me. It freaked me out. Creeper.

After weeks of futility, Penny finally did catch that mouse.

Unfortunately he had no idea what to do with it. We ended up letting it go outside.

Ladies and gentlemen I give you a photo compilation of Penny’s (often hilarious) sleeping positions.

This one’s called “Roadkill.” It was funny at the time..

I like the lighting in these pictures.

Penny’s favorite chill spot at the old house on Denver. Never cracked open the textbook by the way.

Penny guarding the door to my room.

Penny falling asleep, guarding the door to my room.

Penny’s first encounter with the opposite sex.

Penny’s first rejection from the opposite sex (it happens to the best of us).

This little lady has been camped out on my back porch since the time of Penny’s death, six days ago. I had seen her before together with Penny. She doesn’t want to come inside, she doesn’t want to be held, she shows no interest in food. She just stares and walks around in circles on the back porch. I take her inside and she looks around aimlessly, then returns to standing by the porch door. My guess is that Penny had a girlfriend.

This is oddly my favorite picture of Penny. I remember my exact thoughts before taking this picture. “I know I will probably have a lot of stupid bushes, a lot of grills, and a lot of cats in my lifetime. But I won’t always have this stupid bush and this grill and this cat.” So I took this picture.

It is a sick game the hot dog bun people play with the hot dog people, conspiring together to always make the bun slightly longer than the dog, or the dog slightly shorter than the bun. We’ve all been there, holding that small stub of bread, wondering what do with it. Do I eat it.. throw it out? Major WTF moment. And then Oscar Mayer has the nerve, the sheer audacity to sell “bun length” dogs, as if “bun length” is some new, novel concept.

A sick, sick game.

What’s worse is the asshole mustard people. Man has mastered the skies and ventured space, defeated polio and small pox, scaled Everest and K2. Millions of years of evolution.^[1] Untold bounds in science and medicine, especially in the last century. Yet we’re still squirting 3 ounces of warm yellow water – the condiment equivalent of diarrhea — on our franks. Somehow no one has figured it out. Not even the geniuses over at Oscar Mayer, responsible for the innovative ‘frank that actually fits your bun’. I for one blame the mustard people but the ketchup people are by no means innocent. You’d be lucky to get a squirt of diluted diarrhea-ketchup out of a half-finished glass bottle of Heinz, after your hand goes numb from smacking the bottle. Someone was being real cute at the Heinz bottling factory. And fuck pickle jars! I’d have better luck opening a cockpit door on a mid-flight 747.

After 9/11.

That’s why every man knows to never ever (ever!) attempt to open a pickle jar when a girl is watching. Four minutes in and you’re the girl. And should a girl ask you to open a pickle jar, you can pretty much kiss your masculinity goodbye. It’s not going to open. Not even if you happened to carry around a crow bar. Not with three sticks of dynamite. Then come the usual can’t-open cliches …

“Hmm … can’t seem to get a grip on this thing …”

“My hands are wet!”

“Hmph … I think the lid on this pickle jar might be defective!”

Message to pickle people: Let me in. I’m not a terrorist. And fuck you.

Fuck you and your pickles.

1. ^[1] Play along. I’m no evolutionist. I find Darwin’s theory laughable and therefore see fit to allude to it in the facetious tone. Men evolved from apes … how absurd! It is far more reasonable, though a tad misanthropic, to assume apes evolved from men. ↩

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