The Whole Kit ‘n’ Caboodle

Kicking Around

A shrewd entrepreneur would–should–do anything in their power to corner the intuitive market of scarcity designed for the particular demographic concerned with–for example–how many hands reside on their watch face. Two is the bare minimum, three is optimal, four is impractical and irresponsible.

Along with this peculiar and pragmatic market segment, several other significant archetypes are not to be left behind (popular categories are conveniently located in your handbooks for perusal at your leisure). As their respective facets are revealed, it will invariably be identified that many of these have indeed been kicking around since the dawn of history, let alone the beginning of the free market economy.

When pressed to demonstrate our knowledge of these groups, exercising our right to dissect this polarizing slice of modernity, we must admit to ourselves that stereotyping can be dangerous if taken as truth. All of a sudden our watch-hand-obsessive type takes on a bit more humanity. Did you know that a noticeable amount of people within the watch-hand-obsessive grouping prefer their toasts unbuttered, substituting a liberal helping of sliced avocado? The algorithms never lie.

Recall

Artie told me one day something about the importance of swallowing twice to signal yes for some particular mission. I lost everything after that, my money, my mind, my family, essentially all articles of existence worth living for (I’ve been told), but I know that a person named Artie told me one day about swallowing twice, some thing lodged in his arm when he was saying it. I couldn’t figure out why he was telling me something about swallowing when some thing was just jutting out of his arm. But then the world went black and I came to–

a different person, where all I knew was that Artie told me something about swallowing while his left arm was being attacked by a pointy fish of some kind as he tried to swim away to safety, and I couldn’t understand why he would be telling me something about swallowing while fleeing for his life. Was I swimming? I can’t remember, because the next thing I knew, everything went black. I woke up to the knowledge of only Artie. Or was it Archie? No, definitely Artie. He had a rifle pointed at me, resting it on his forearm like one of those old black and white cowboys. Told me something about swallowing twice to make it all stop, my mission from God? Mission from something, I can’t remember because everything went black and I awoke–

Archie was sitting in a temple as I watched from my bed. He was somber, very intentional with his movements, as I could always recall.

Crux

Feel free to experience the soul’s consciousness for as long as you can possibly bear it; don’t make excuses to avoid or replace it with cheap thrills designed to siphon thought into a tawdry funnel of spent emotion. You’re better than that, Deandre. I’ve known you since you were a budding young talent. Don’t get me wrong, I’m your biggest fan. I can only imagine the potential you hold in your incisors and between five to ten fingers, depending on your level of ambidextrousness. Do not fret! Fretting will get you absolutely nowhere. I’m saying no man’s land, ya dig? Many people have been in your position plenty of times in recorded history, and the issue lies in their penchant to alienate themselves until their perception of life comes from an internal gyration that’s out of tune with the common perception of just what it is that seems to make life so special in the first place. If you can answer me why it is that life is at all special (with a nod to my unflappable inner cynic, mind you), I will reward you with the knowledge that comes along with the essence that could be construed as the crux of Johnny Cash’s “A Satisfied Mind”. Just listen to good music, dear, and don’t worry about forming your own tastes and possibly offending others with your assertion of the importance of personal expression.

Are you going to eat that applesauce?

Spitballing

I may be a temperamental weirdo, but at least I don’t refuse to bathe for fear of shortening my lifespan. I don’t profess to have an alter ego, and I most certainly don’t carry a blank-loaded revolver with me to scare off adoring fans. Then again, I don’t need to worry about fanatical admirers breaking down my door to get an autograph (or even just a good look at me), so perhaps I’m taking my relative anonymity for granted here. In my heart of hearts, I suppose I’d like to achieve at least a modicum of notability for my extended creative efforts, but if that daydream actually came to fruition, I’d need to come up with a nutty character quirk to demonstrate to the masses that I’m a one-of-a-kind talent. I don’t know, I’m just spitballing here, but maybe I could carry a straw and small scraps of easily-moistenable paper with me, to ward off rabid devourers of my work. I could develop the habit of high-pitched yelping, you know, to emulate the sound of a wounded woodland mammal. Or I could carry around a “pet” with me that I talk to all the time, like a bottle cap or wooden bowl. All of those ideas are crap, I know, but if I hit on a good one, I’m pretty much guaranteed to go down in history as one of those “oddball eccentrics” that the normies can have fun chuckling about at their potluck dinners.

First Things First

Nobody will tell you that religion is simply an iteration of our innate human ability to question and ascribe meaning to the phenomena we encounter in our immediate surroundings. Being able to alter our environment with the level of skill we’ve come to develop over the past few millennia, how many of us ever stop to wonder about the first moment our species graduated from nature’s master class in manipulation? Let’s not forget, we were once as defenseless as all the other beings to inhabit this planet, but we took great measures to ensure survival at all costs, to the chagrin of the very globe that fostered our greedy development.

Now here we are, coughing up smog and trying to figure out how best to colonize our moon (Mars is still a pipe dream). Hopefully we can find a way to bring our religion to other regions of our solar system, and perhaps even to the rest of the universe. As chosen (not brainwashed) people of God (not a fictional authority figure fabricated to alleviate the guilt that forms when we commit genocide and snatch unsuspecting people’s land), it is our divine duty to carry out HIS WORD. The wool has been removed from over our eyes (with the rug soon to be pulled out from under our feet), and there’s a whole universe of sinners who need the salvation of the LORD!

Now first things first, does anybody here know how to build a rocket ship?

Pickle Man

Please do not panic whilst amongst the pines, the savory pigeon screams floating from bough to bough.
And we, all along (as it turns out) have the seat to a thrill of a cheap movie quote tucked neatly into a blender and rather liquefied, I’m afraid.
First, the lack of effort and segmented pinstripe suits are not a good combination at all. Pretend I didn’t tell you that was a good idea.
Oh, whose idea was it? Probably the Pickle Man’s. The Pickle Man has lots of ideas from time to time. Come to think of it, he was the fella who invented the ladder so I could get my cat out of that tree last Tuesday. Praise his ingenuity and impeccable timing–he surely [surely SURELY] must be a good and decent man.

And so, the Pickle Man jotted off in his notebook and came up with methods for legal gambling that no one would ever suspect. There’s no loser (aside from the mark), and I’ll never have to go paycheck to paycheck. Not once, certainly not again, you understand me? I sure hope you can recover your sense of decency while I’m lecturing you, young people. I have seventeen issues to share with you regarding class warfare from the Middle Ages. In this unit, you will learn to conquer your fear of dissection. Here’s how I was able to dissect my first frog, boys and girls–a spritz of balsamic vinegar to make the air more culinary. Isn’t this place just stale and offensive? Are there any windows down here at all? Are we in the basement? How far down are we? Pickle Man?!

Catalyst

Extraterrestrial nervous systems never had been my cup of tea (in fact, I never thought I could be privy to such a phenomenon) until I managed to get my mitts on a real live corpse. Yeah, you heard me right. One night as I was driving home from an average day of pushing papers around, I received a call from an unknown number. I’m not sure what possessed me to answer it. I rarely answer the phone while driving, let alone from strange numbers. I just recall having an inkling that the intention behind that attempted connection was more or less benevolent. Funny thing to hear myself say, but that’s definitely what it felt like. Anyway, I answered the call and put it on speaker, only to hear a sequence of hisses and beeps in an unpredictable pattern of multiple tones. As I attempted to speak with whomever had just contacted me, the call abruptly ended. Weird, I thought, but I didn’t think anything of it. As I was pulling into my garage (I always back in for the sake of convenience when I’m leaving in the morning) I looked over my shoulder and saw a limp body in my backseat, gray and slender. Not from here, you could say. Well, as a man of science, I was immediately overcome with more curiosity than anything. I immediately schlepped it to my house–it was much lighter than I thought it ought to have been–to get my bearings. While clearly not hosting a living being, it would seem that even after an extraplanetary individual has ditched their meat vessel from the previous life, there remains a kind of intact life force within the remains, as though awaiting a new passenger. I had that corpse under around-the-clock surveillance and never once saw a breath enter or leave. Nevertheless, I didn’t detect any of the decay one would find on Earth, and there were still trace electromagnetic signals that confirmed beyond a doubt that these… physical manifestations, for lack of a better term, are perpetuated by a force yet unknown by our primitive race. That anomaly was the catalyst for my lifelong study of the biology of such foreign bodies, to the chagrin of every person in my life who, up until that discovery, had held me in high esteem. Ah well, screw ’em. They’re just afraid of the things they can’t explain.