Ashtray // Vinyl

All it really ever takes is an old/bad Alan Parsons twelve-inch record (or a seven-inch), preferably I Am Robot. A cookie sheet and a cereal bowl. Pre-heat the oven to 200 degrees, but depending on how your week's going it might be 200 degrees already. Center the vinyl on top of the bowl tipped over on the cookie sheet for five minutes. It seems to suffice. And, Behold, an ashtray made of vinyl. It's a way to separate old tastes from those anew when the first snow comes crashing down. While it's warm for five seconds and droopy, bend it with the cups of your hands. Epoxy the bottom hole in it, so everything stays in. Or, any variation of stiff glue. Have at it.

Good for when you can't find anyone to pick up house.

By Their Works -- Bob Hicok

Who cleaned up the Last Supper?
These would be my people.
Maybe hung over, wanting
desperately a better job,
standing with rags
in hand as the window
beckons with hills
of yellow grass. In Da Vinci,
the blue robed apostle
gesturing at Christ
is saying, give Him the check.
What a mess they've made
of their faith. My God
would put a busboy
on earth to roam
among the waiters
and remind them to share
their tips. The woman
who finished one
half eaten olive
and scooped the rest
into her pockets,
walked her tiny pride home
to children who looked
at her smile and saw
the salvation of a meal.
All that week
at work she ignored
customers who talked
of Rome and silk
and crucifixions,
though she couldn't stop
thinking of this man
who said thank you
each time she filled
His glass.

Bang Bang, Olympus!

It came on Monday, after I'd ordered it Thursday over a sixer of Snow Storm. The chalk board in the photo hangs next to my bed at about 3'x5' for a measly three bucks. I've been satisfied with it. Shit, above all things, it's practical. How else am I able to explain the entire Iliad to someone who's never read it.

Some days I draw pictures of Ray Charles doing Heroin; if Ray Charles would've asked myself and Olsen to do some with him, I'm fairly sure our answer would be yes. Though, we'd be those awkward first-timers all caught up in a sing song. Other days, I draw pictures of the Wu-Tang Clan and render myself into the equation, all scarfed and un-Carharted and, un-black.

Otherwise, the week's been reciprocating for the first time this semester. I hand in research papers, and my palette is empty for the rest of the week.

I'm listening to How To Clean Everything and

glancing out over the roof down to the street from my desk, and there's a car that's been trying to park for the last fifteen minutes. Backing in and pulling out and backing in again. There's a man in the car wearing light blue flannel and I imagine the look on his face is like looking at a deer in headlights. This fucker doesn't know what he's doing and it's a perfect example of a Mankato neighborhood.

This one I'm not so sure about

Fruit of a Loom
--
Walking behind some pitiful son courting his father speaking on the losses
and the winnings of his basketball team, I grasp the emptiness
in their combination. And this one time we played there
and won against the second string. He speaks arms cocked

ready to fire out the next cartridge, but the barrel’s holed and crooked,
his fingers lacking calluses, trigger cradled at the bend.
About to go off with a pound of propelled lead shrapnel into his forearm.
A sulfuric blast to handle, We won our first game in two weeks last night.

The breath of the congratulatory father sinks back into a lung—or both.
I don’t know. I grow tired of hearing the blasts come from Highland
living rooms on Sundays when athletes return to campus,
fearing the signature groan over the telephone receiver. Dad, we lost it.

And then the pomp on the trampled carpet alerts the clueless duplex
entertainers. Blame the color of the walls and assume the sand-tone should’ve been
a brighter shade. The restructuring ensues. Another wraps a cotton scarf
middle around his neck, tied tight to the shower curtain bar. Fruit of a Loom.

They’ll install something else, an apartment’s worth of faulty hooks
that, when pressured, break. Snap off, thud. Why compete when
the exit door is a bulletproofed one way mirror? The soulless
at the opposing side pointing their glowing cigarettes in assumption.

I wait tables and dish out shortcomings ill-fit for customers
and have concluded that the extremity in competition is enough to cut
off both arms in failure, Paraplegic. No one has to play then, and at least
there’s an attainable success there, in the art of loss.

*
The text here is apologetic. Sorry folks. I had to accommodate for the line breaks.

Blog written while consuming homemade Chex Mix that went stale.

I shouldn't have traded Olsen my last beer for a new Chapstick. This travel snack should've been consumed a week ago, but who am I to argue.

*The Yellow side of a Crispix
The week's coming to a halt. It's Thursday, I have one class left and none following that until Monday and tomorrow's payday and I have Sunday off of work.

*The Brown side of a Crispix
Workshop didn't go as well as I would've liked it to the other day. However, I won't have to necessarily write a capstone project until the fall. I may write one over the course of the Spring though, to gauge an inner sense of theme.

*The Cooked Goldfish Cracker
The likelihood of being inebriated is looked up towards this evening. Following the initial inebriation, I may be holding a guitar somewhere whilst in the company of Jen, a few old friends, and an element of commonplace notoriety.

*The Paned Pretzel
Providing that the Olympus 8-Megapixel Camera goes on sale this weekend, I may be able to purchase it. That would be swell.
Ooo!, also
I now have a copy of "Something Singed," thanks to university copying services.

*The Pretzel (though much wider, portioned as well) Loafed
I convinced the housemates after a well thought out argument made at 3am the other night with a threat written in blue dry/erase marker on the bathroom mirror that I'd "be turning on the furnace unless they could provide me one valid reason why I shouldn't." This dispute was the follow-up to a comment made by said housemate P, that "we're not turning it on until December first, maybe you should consider gaining a little fat to keep you warm, because everyone else is," and the thermometer reading 45 degrees in my bedroom. These types of things aren't easy to sleep over--the cold, not the argument. And No, motherfucker. Remember, I have a metabolism. Because I'm only permitted to sleep 6.5 hours each night and attend college classes more than you do. There, I said it.

*The Half-Sociable/Half-unSociable Wheat Cracker
J. Olsen and I have been drawing up our constructional blueprints to a plausible bar / cocktail lounge for his bedroom to build this winter. In which the lounge may or may not be apt to recreate a sense of the 1988 Movie "Cocktail" setting clashed with a 1920's sense of being broke, producing and consuming, Bathtub Gin. My overall task is to provide a name for such an object. "Ha, who said Liberal Arts students made poor builders and overall contributers to middle-class society."

*The faux-Gladware Containter (with Mustard in one corner)
Also, J. Olsen and I have reinvented the wheel, and by wheel, I mean Bartering System of Economics (or, BSE), with one major ideology and that being: "I will never reveal the secrets of the Wu-Tang Clan."

*The "wilke" written on the cover of said container:
My mother informed me the other day, over a phone call about cell phone bills and my younger sister's, that she thinks I should switch jobs. Or, in other words, go back to the Grizzlebee's over Christmas break as--you've just got the opportunity there to make so much more. Your resume might suffer but your bank won't.
We'll see.
also, She brought it up to me, not vice versa.
--
Everything sort of balances itself out. I could really use something to wash this down, despite it. Maybe I'll make soup tonight.