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.
