Meanwhile… – WHARVED

Sam and George: I

One afternoon above a boulder in Central Park, George Carlin and Samuel Beckett engage in their Scrabble ritual. Both men have developed a fondness for this pastime over the years, as neither one has ever encountered the same game sequence twice (which never fails to amuse them even after having played over a hundred thousand matches).

They’ve contemplated relenting and playing Super Scrabble exclusively, with its 200 tile megafauna approach, but the games are just too long and the tile distribution too ridiculous for anyone with a penchant for brevity. George brought up the idea, always the mold-breaker, but Sam adamantly declined to participate in such tomfoolery.

Their overall record is something pretty close to 62,496-62,487, with a boring number of tie games for good measure. Neither of them necessarily plays to win, though it’s always fun to get the most points possible. This aspect of the game is never lost on Sam and George, and it frequently pops up in conversation, like so:

G: Dammit, Sam, why do we always obsess over having the most?

S: More is better?

G: You know that’s a goddamn lie.

S: Moderation, then.

G: That’s your answer for everything.

The logic has been somewhat pressed out of it over the course of time, since Sam is not one to bandy words about, leading to a finite set of circumstances that could possibly amount from any given conversation between the two of them. Yet, they acquiesce. They’ve agreed for a long time now that Scrabble and chatting is the ultimate leisurely activity for two cats of their ilk.

Sam uses the board to bring him to new heights with absurdism. If nothing amounts to nothing, at least the expected and still somehow always unpredictable nature of Scrabble will prevail with non sequiturs aplenty.

Today is Monday, about 1pm at the ol’ boulder of choice. Sam is tickled by his STOATS/COATS crossover play, even though the point total is somewhat paltry compared to the “optimal move”. Not many people hanging around the boulder yet today, probably a mean case of the Mondays.

George has been having a rough go of it today as far as tile luck is concerned. He’s been burning through letters and really getting no luck from the tile bag at all. So she goes, so she goes. This game saw him jump out to a marginal lead after five turns, but then the luck dropped out of the bottom of whichever vessel generally contains luck particles, more than likely draining through a crack, akin to a dilapidated old barrel.

G: Do you think luck is stored in barrels?

S: I suppose a barrel is as good as anything else. Why?

G: I’m just trying to come up with the most accurate picture of how my luck could be so damn shitty right now. There’s got to be a leak in my luck barrel right now, and I don’t know how I’m supposed to patch it up.

S: Well, better a barrel than a clay pot.

G: That’s your opinion, Jack.

Just then, a forlorn-looking man in his early 30s meanders over to our favorite boulder and climbs atop it after just a moment’s hesitation. He perches and then shortly thereafter lies down on his back, baseball cap shielding his eyes.

G: Interesting action here, Sammy. I’ll bet this kid’s name is Jack.

S: I wonder what he thinks of our barrel/pot hypothesis. Wanna zap him and get some data points? I love points.

G: Not really, I’m feeling lazy today. I can probably figure out why he’s being a whiny baby now–cryptos are going through the roof and he’s been left in the dust again (I can tell it’s not the first time, from the state of his wardrobe).

S: Cryptos again? You always think everything is cryptos.

G: It is, Sam my man. You’ll see.

S: Sure George, whatever you say.

It’s at this precise moment that Samuel plays a 100-point bingo.

S: MINCIER — adj. demonstrating the quality of mincing on a different level or magnitude. That should just about wrap this one up, eh Georgie?

G: Dammit, Sammit! I knew I wasn’t in the running for a comeback, but jeez.

S: I just play the tiles I’m dealt, George.

That ‘Without Our Knowledge’ Bit

What the hell is even the point of human relationships
if all we ever do is demonstrate how unfit we are
to spend time with one another on a regular basis?
It’s madness, more than anything,
and chemical compounds that dictate our actions
without our knowledge. That ‘without our knowledge’ bit
really bugs me the most of anything,
since I attempt to figure out things for a living
(well, I wouldn’t call it a living, but
I somehow manage to get (most of) the bills paid
every month). My daily existence is predicated upon
the ability to tell truth from bullshit,
and it’s what has helped me negotiate
the wild waters of humanhood thus far.

So it disturbs me when a person comes along
and knocks me off the tracks, like a goddamn
penny that some toddler put there
because they thought it would be funny.
Not funny, kid. Perhaps experimentation with the species
is necessary, and some folks take circuitous routes
in order to accumulate the necessary data.
Or some people are just assholes.

Perfectibillies

Sometimes you just need to keep rattling out random strings of words until you hit that one vein of gold ore that you wouldn’t mind blasting and smelting for the cost of three chicken sandwiches a day–though the price of those chicken sandwiches would be in direct opposition to the idea of one’s own self-worth, which tends to be inherently problematic.

On the one hand, I know that chicken sandwiches are really only worth about a few bucks a pop, but if I feel emotionally bankrupt, a double-digit dollar figure may be too hefty a price tag to tack onto my floundering ego (even if imposed as a thought exercise and nothing else).

Some folks prefer to invent misfortunes due to the dearth of such impediments in their naturally-occurring existence. The culmination of all human experience has led us to quarrel with our inner Perfectibillies (those naïve mind-dwellers with the sole objective to get the point across that we used to be a much more resilient bunch in the midst of chaos). We’ve lost our litheness, and it shows.

Long Story Short

In a world with a strange lack of plate garnishes:
parsley extermination has been instigated
by the good folks at fennel, those
champion-types who mainly prefer
to have their competition six feet under.

As children, every person
at the fennel advisory board
was cruelly mocked and made to feel
like nobody gave an ounce of effort
to help them fit in.

So! Long story short,
fennel and parsley don’t exactly get along.
Don’t get me wrong, the actual herbs
hold absolutely no animosity toward one other,
it’s just those shallot capitalists
who make this absurd narrative
even possible in the first place.

Very Reasonable

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Amalgam

What does one type when one has no idea what one should be typing? Also, what kind of work must be made on a normal basis if one is to be considered a writer, or even a basic typist? The answer is likely more rhetorical than actual, but I believe that it exists within a kind of continuum much too subtle for human observation. Now why would I be addressing such a scenario anyway? Seems to be some kind of joke, like this guy just can’t string more than two sentences together without some kind of complaint or existential crisis. And perhaps that’s the point of it; do any of us have the ability to jump into a narrative and string more than two interesting sentences together, keeping in mind that this is right off the bat when the brain still has to get adjusted to some kind of critical thinking for once? I would say the answer to that is a definite probably, which means that we may have an identifiable protagonist without even introducing them to the reader (or at the very least, some kind of character worth tracking in snippets throughout their day). And we would suppose that an audience needs a familiar protagonist in order to soldier on through otherwise incomprehensibly dense prose. But what would make this protagonist compelling? I’d say some kind of scraped knee or questioning of an authority figure would immediately port the audience into the realm of empathy; you really gotta hook them into caring about an amalgam of letters and syntax.

Robust

Miranda sold me this veranda one fine Sunday morning, while we were traipsing through the park (minding our own business like it was nobody’s business). She casually broached the subject in between more salient topics–chili mongers and termite hobbyism–as though she hadn’t really been thinking about it that much. Turns out that she’d been waiting in the wings for me to shut up so she could drop her latest deal bombshell on me: a 3/4-size veranda for the price of a small turkey (12 lbs. or less) down at the Froger.

Pancetta salesmen are not too common these days–in contrast to our robust ecosystem of chili mongers–but Miranda and I walked past one that same afternoon just as we happened to be discussing the virtues of veggies. He played it cool like he didn’t hear us, but I know he did (from the twitch in his left eyebrow).