THYME OF A RIVAL.

Forget love . . . Learn karate!

Skeletor and He-Man don’t burn fossil fuels, but they do have The Power. We, as a global society, ought to investigate this circumstance, since many of our woes revolve around the generation of so much electricity. If only we could holler, “I have the power!”, and FZZT, on go the lights. Some people actually identify with Skeletor. Bad people admire Skeletor, as well as those goodie-goodies who also groom a Dark Side, and the people who dig Skeletor often are the same folks who prefer iguanas, or iguana jokes. “Iguana go home now.” Stuff like that.

***

So you traipse home rumpled and distressed and disgruntled. You plant an herb garden. (You’re a liberal after all.) Your neighbor plants an herb garden, too, although not for the same reasons. Little by little, you grow obsessed with your neighbor’s garden. He’s arranged it wild, like in the wild, with sprouts like gangbusters. He discovers you, at night, crouching in his garden, without a good excuse. Is there ever an excuse, you wonder, for crouching in a neighbor’s herb garden? You continue to crouch, long after social decorum would have otherwise dictated a rise-up. 

***

Your neighbor may be, or may not be, a linguist. When you think of the word “linguist”, you think of pasta and butter on someone else’s palate. You embarrass yourself with your own thinking, even though it’s all in your head. The neighbor wants to bury the hatchet so invites you for breakfast at a diner. He orders the Three Egg Umlaut, but when the waitress offers a puzzled brow, he relents. But he won’t bury the hatchet, oh no he won’t. He jabs a finger into your sternum and goes, “Thyme of a Rival.” He means, by this, too many herbal off ramps.

***

When a Hungarian wishes to gain the attention of another Hungarian, is there an audible “Budapsst” that one can hear? There should be a phone service in which the phone, upon receiving a call, reveals the caller’s basic instinctual drives. The service would be known as Caller Id. Johnny Depp is all set, apparently, to star in a sequel to Benny and Joon, the romantic comedy in which two eccentrics find love. Only, this time, the Depp character, Benny, decides to study quite a lot of karate, and the sequel will be appropriately dubbed Benny and Joon Rhee.

*** 

Speaking of sequels, you’re excited to rent Tug Boat III, the third in a series of flicks set on tug boats. The director must’ve run out of money, however, as the film keeps showing a Fisher Price skiff bobbing in a bathtub. You realize that the movie takes place inside the apartment where the bathtub lives. Smoke wafts through the “galley”, to suggest fog. You realize that Tug Boat III is a movie about manual love, a love of manual dexterity, a love of the tug. You just don’t want to watch every time the foghorn goes off—tuba TUBA, womp WOMP—there it goes again.