The other day I opened a cabinet in the break room and was confronted with this: the absolute reality of THE OFFICE.
I just realized that the item in the middle on the lower shelf was the premium Tupperwareish container that someone left behind a year, two years ago? Remember how we tracked its persistence from week to week?
I should note that I have never, ever seen anyone play Jenga.
Often on Friday when I’m casting about for something to write, I check the Blog Fodder bin on my Notes app. Unfortunately I usually save something piquant or stupid that looks good for Wednesday Screed fodder. There was a piece about giant tubes under the pyramids, but I touched on that for the Diner. (Which has no 600 meter underground support systems and a buried chamber that serves to dampen human consciousness. As far as we know.) There was a strange UFO video that was proof SOMETHING IS HAPPENING, this time in Florida.
I could post a random comic I found that seemed to have an extremely disturbing implication.
Or, hit the Google News for entertainment topics . . . nope, don’t care, don’t care, don’t know them, bad movie, tendentious think-piece whose headline is loud with the whine of grinding axes, AH! Good news!
There’s a new COCO movie announcement: it’s in development, and will be released in 2029. I want to know what they are doing tomorrow. Does everyone meet at nine AM and sit around a table and throw out ideas for three hours, have lunch sent in because they’re in the groove, work until five, then pick it up the next day? I mean, if you start by saying “Ladies and Gentlemen, the clock is ticking. We have four years,” and someone says “how about Miguel has to go back to the Land of the Dead to find his Grandmother this time?”
“That’s good, and?”
“And . . . she wasn’t really his Grandmother, but she was her Grandmother’s twin, and she’d taken her place at some point.”
“Good, and?”
“And now both of them are in the Land of the Dead and having huge sisterly rows but they also love each other of course because Familia, but one of them is in danger of disappearing because the family only remembers one, and didn’t know there was a twin. Who will remain remembered? The woman who really was their Grandmother and made all the memories, or the one who took over 20 years ago and impersonated her sister, creating no memories for herself?
“That’s your first act. What’s the second?”
“Well, madcap adventures finding them both, of course. Plus, they’re on the run from a Land of the Dead civil servant who discovered their entrance forms have an error - “
“Careful.”
“Okay, they didn’t fill out a form correctly. He’s one of those sticklers. He’s not evil, he’s just anal-retentive. He pursues them like Javert, and circumstances combine to team him up with the boy.”
“Third act?”
“They are put into a perilous situation to be fleshed out - sorry, boned out later, and at the climax each wants to sacrifice herself for the others, and just as one is about to fade out they find the incorrectly filled-out document and fix it at the last minute with a comma, that’s all it was. And they’re both restored and die happily ever after.”
“Stinger?”
“The boy vows to find the relatives of the civil servant and tell them he was fine, but it turns out he wasn’t a lowly civil servant at all but a former politician known for his honesty and dedication, and hence he had his face on the cheapest stamp and everyone, especially the poor, remembered him for a long time after he had died.”
“I’m not tearing up.”
“When they go through a box of grandma’s things there all the letters she got from her husband and the stamp’s on every one. Music up and montage of all the characters as stamps, credits.”
Everyone looks around the room. Murmurs of “yes, that’s it” and “I think we have it” and “the civil servant would be thin-faced, yes? And he’d be nervous. Always mopping his brow, which is funny for a skeleton.”
The director nods. “I’ll tell them we’re going for a 2028 release. Well, it’s 9:30. Take the rest of the day off.”
I mean, how hard can it be.
Otherwise the day was a day. Sometimes a day is the day, and sometimes the day is a day. Not a very good week, really, but sometimes you get those. Sometimes you make those. Sometimes they just arise out of disparate events, and one bad thing colors the others. And then you have the weekend to wash it away . . . or distill it down. We’ll see!
Someone at the front door showed up with a machine that carved watermelons into common objects, like a turtle, and was firing them at me while I attempted to argue with someone.
All of these make me uncomfortable.
LANCE MEATMUG era, very early.
So early that they don't know what they shouldn't do because, I mean, c'mon.
This year we're going back a (gulp) half century. Remember, just because they were low-charting in the top 250 doesn't mean they didn't rise up the next year.
According to the YouTube comments: Ringo on drums, Dr. John on piano. The credits say the Skunkman is on guitar, and Klaus Voorman on bass.
