Aorta stop eatin' junk food

Dad’s surgery was “smooth and easy” according to the surgeon—who may or may not have been referring to the fact that the hospital shaved my dad from the neck down before they poked him in the aorta—and he’s now recovering/waking up in the recovering/waking up room as we continue to stuff our faces in the waiting room.

You might say he’s on the mendo from his endo. But please don’t. Never say that.

Well, shit

I was THIS CLOSE to posting that I’d gone all day without having a bandage on my wrist with nobody noticing my still-hideous-but-no-longer-gaping wound UNTIL! someone who will not be named (because she isn’t on Facebook so there’s really no reason to shame her here there or here) noticed as we were leaving rehearsal tonight.

(Apparently I’d at one point very creatively described my wound to her as looking like a vagina because her first observation was that it doesn’t look like a vagina. I’d truly forgotten that I’d ever made that comparison. But I cannot disagree with the poetic imagery.)

So the key takeaways here are:
1. My wound is so much better that I feel safe leaving it unbandaged for a day.
2. It’s still gross enough, though, that I’m politely refraining from posting a photo of it here for fear you’d vomit all over yourself when you innocently scrolled by it.
3. HOLY SHIT DONALD TRUMP IS SO FUCKING BBEEYYOONNDD OFF THE RAILS TODAY WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH HIM OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD

Our revels now are ended,

... but not before I stopped by our friendly neighborhood Dick’s Piggly Wiggly (which is apparently now Tammy’s Piggly Wiggly but I’m a Piggly-Wiggly-giggly little middle-schooler so I’m gonna stick with Dick’s) to stock up on klarbrunn—which sounds so European! without garish American capital letters even!—sparking water. (I heartily recommend the blueberry/passionfruit flavor. That is if you can find any; I just bought the entire stock of it.)

Now I’m back on the road with my Broadway podcasts and my cigarette-lighter-radio-broadcast-thingie and my carbs coma and my birdie videos and my happy memories.

And my full tank of gas this time.

Do you have ANY IDEA how hard it is to achieve the holy confluence of isolation, gumption and aim that it requires to take a reasonably flattering gym stealthfie of this artistic and compositional caliber? DO YOU?

No, you do not.

Open letter to One Direction: No matter how many times you mushmouth through that stupid chorus, never in this or any other language does “hotel rooms” rhyme with “rendez-vous.” Sheesh.

SWEAT POO

An ode to a visit from the polar vortex

Little Mary donned her skates

Upon the ice so frisk.

Wasn’t she a silly lass

Her little *?

This is now my favorite Stable Genius takedown of all time.

1-Day #ChristmasCountdown: Bedtime

It's absurd! It's deranged! It's ...

Tariff Man! Tariff Man!

Makin' bullshit hit the fan

Foolin' no one with his tan

Looks like mushrooms from a can

Tariff Man! Tariff Man!

Pussy-grabber in a van

From five drafts cow-ard-ly ran

Broke Commandments One through Tan

Tariff Man! Tariff Man!

Naked porno wife Melan

Inbred-smelling child-er-an

Creepy, sleazy family clan

Tariff Man! Tariff Man!

Thinks the Jews wrote the Koran

Once read Two Corinthian

Evangelic Taliban

Tariff Man! Tariff Man!

Scared of far-off caravan

Wants an immigration ban

Mexico won't serve him flan

Tariff Man! Tariff Man!

Can't tell China from Japan

Vlad'mir Putin super-fan

Laughingstock of Kazakhstan

Tariff Man! Tariff Man!

Crippled trade without a plan

Killed business American

Epic failure presidan

Tariff Man! Tariff Man!

KKK republican

Middle name should be treasan

Benedict American

Tariff Man! Tariff Man!

Blames Obama where he can

Or blames Hill-a-ry Clintan

Shitty po-li-ti-ci-an

Tariff Man! Tariff Man!

Picked a fight with John McCan

John McCan had secret plan

Tariff Man got funeral ban

Tariff Man! Tariff Man!

No one bankrupts like he can

All his budgets overran

Cor-rupt can’t-make-deals moran

Tariff Man! Tariff Man!

Tweets while he sits on the can

Holds his bottles with two han

Probably likes Comic San

Tariff Man! Tariff Man!

Gets his "news" from Fox & Fran

Has-been celeb fan Roseanne

The Apprentice also-ran

Tariff Man! Tariff Man!

One-second attention span

He just can’t when others can

Too late for abortian

Taco cat

Senile felines

Egad! An adage!

Yawn a more Roman way.

A man, a plan, a canal: Panama!

8/10/18

Sometimes you need to purge 150+ shirts from your bloated collection to stumble on some long-forgotten favorites

And then write referential poetry about them:

I purged my shirts, said Hoarder Jake,
Clear-cutting outfits in my wake.
A striped one here, a solid there,
Pink ones that match my underwear.

Deforestation of my shirts
Hits the clutter where it hurts,
But makes a clever metaphor
For Dr. Seuss’s Lorax lore.

I am the Onceler of my clothes,
And in eliminating those
That fill my boxes, shelves and drawers
I find the ones I want to wores.

Swear not by the clouds, the inconstant clouds ...

So the moon was shining through this amorphous, stunningly dimensional opening in the clouds tonight while I was pouring a bottle of long-expired store-brand mango-pear-flavored sparkling water in the yew by the garage (because if I poured it directly on the ground it would splash on my shoe by the garage) so I could recycle the bottle to protect the environment but by the time I put the bottle down and got my phone out and turned off the flash because everyone knows you can’t photograph the night sky with your flash on the amorphous opening had morphed into something less stunningly dimensional and less moon-shine-throughy but I had my phone out and my flash turned off anyway because again everyone knows you can’t photograph the night sky with your flash on so I tried to artfully frame the rapidly disappearing amorphous hole of stunning moonlight between some handy nearby treetops and I took the picture anyway and it’s not great or artistic or even remotely as beautiful as the shining, amorphous, stunningly dimensional celestial event I saw in the sky in the first place but despite my rush to get out my phone and turn off my flash because as I’ve said repeatedly now everyone knows you can’t photograph the night sky with your flash on I didn’t get even a drop of long-expired store-brand mango-pear-flavored sparking water splashed on my shoe by the yew so I count the entire sequence of events as both an artistic and an environmental win.

Sconys, bronys, holes of donys

Sparkle-glittered for the Tonys!

The Sea is Frozen!

So I came home from work feeling a little bit bipolar-depressed-y and went right to bed ... only to be awakened three hours later by the realization that tomorrow is garbage day and I had to get the damn Bitch Kitty box all scooped and cleaned and shit. Well, technically SHE did the shitting the moment I was done scooping (natch) but my cheap joke here is still funny. Once the garbage was out though, I was sitting and chatting with my folks when 91.7 started playing Debussy’s La Mer (which is French for The Sea Except Without Enough Syllables Or Even Damn Letters To Let You Say It In A Charming I’ve-Been-To-Paris-Once French Accent) just as the skies started making all kinds of diluvian bluster in anticipation of an impending downpour, but Debussy’s churning ocean (which has TWO SYLLABLES and is therefore FAR EASIER to say with a charming accent of any kind and ARE YOU LISTENING, CLAUDE?) and Iowa’s churning skies never synched up so untold volumes of referential and metaphorical poetry were lost to the ages. Anyway, my head’s a lot clearer now as I climb back into bed and leave you with this totally random, totally awesome, totally mesmerizing MIDI of “Let it Go” from Frozen:

Corn Born and Gorn’ for a rorn

Iowa stuff, yo

wearborn.com, yo

I stole this from Twitter and rewrote it a bit

He puzzled and puzzled till his puzzler was sore.
Then The Kushner thought of something he hadn't before:
Perhaps foreign-affairs experience can't be bought at a store ...
Perhaps foreign-affairs experience ... means a little bit more!

When you can’t get a date, hoard memes

First day at the new office!

With the photography studio! And the mannequin graveyard! Which I prefer to call the mannequin forest! Because it’s less deathy! And more poety! Because I’m a writer! And a spin artist! Who talks in phrases! And wastes exclamation points! Yay!

(Oh—and new glasses!)

#WeirdStuffICollectOnMyPhone