The Resistible Rise of a Common Pollen Spore

We shall argue with the stones

But you we shall kill

You must not live

Whatever lies we are forced to believe

You must not have been.

-Bertolt Brecht, Handbook for City-Dwellers

What was it that drove him to such evil? From what horrible wellsprings arise the extremisms that terrorize the world? Perhaps it is a question that cannot be answered. All we can account for are the outward facts – the inner workings of the self-radicalization of the soul must ever remain in the realm of speculation.

The Little Pollen Spore was born to a flower on a weak, decrepit old tree at the outskirts of the most miserable suburb of the city. Truly if anyone can be said to have started from the bottom, it is he.

His mother the old tree would often tell him, “My son! Do not be deceived by the paltriness of our situation. You are of noble blood! Your grandfather, a great and respected maple tree, had the most beautiful foliage in all the forest! It is our ill luck that we were scattered by the construction crews, and pruned by the city workers, until we became the sorry sight we are today, a trunk fit for dogs to pee on and teenagers to vandalize.” And here she would weep.

With bitterness pulsing through his chlorophyll, the Little Spore nursed his anger from childhood. He had nothing but rage for mankind and their urban sprawl, their construction, their trash, their contempt for the plants and the insects. He swore revenge.

It was not long before the Little Spore was forced to leave his mother the old decrepit tree and make his way in the world. Borne by the winds of change, he soared high over the rooftops of suburbs and latched himself onto a migrating goose returning North for the Spring.

“So, you’re a spore, are you? Heading to the big city for allergy season?”

The Little Spore was confused. He had never heard of allergy season, nor of any reason why a spore should have anything to do with a big city with all its concrete and skyscrapers and pathetic park trees, slaves and collaborators all. His plan, he told the goose, was to seek out some lonely patch of wood, some high hill where he might cultivate his conduct and sprout one day into a mighty patriarchal tree, as of of old, and to look from on high past the comings and goings of men and the seasons.

“You are just a romantic idiot!” Said the goose. “So what if you run away to the forest? Say you are luck enough to avoid the suburban concrete, pollinate a bud, and spend all your time growing high for 30 or 40 years - the bulldozers and chainsaws will get you in the end. Better to get your revenge as soon as possible. For my own part, there’s nothing I like to see more than humans sneezing and simpering with allergies, keeled over with Kleenex.”

The goose dropped off the spore in the big city, where he saw swarms of people, cars, bikes, dogs, and other amenities of a corrupt and decadent civilization. He drifted along in the miasma of wonder. He had never seen so much activity!

Soon he came to a little park, and there he saw a huge gathering of pollen spores just like himself. They were standing beneath a tree with a bed flowers – a spore with a leather cap was addressing the mass.

“Spores of the world, unite! The human has made a war against our people, has oppressed us and has kept us from sprouting to our full potential. This is why we fight back. This is why, when May beckons with its sweet sunshine, we gather for allergy season –to fight, to celebrate, to protest the domination of the pestilent human!”

The Little Spore was entranced. Here at last was a chance to revenge himself on his innumerable oppressors. He joined the society, which was violent, revolutionary, and called the Seedlings Now Instigated For Freedom (known colloquially as SNIFF). Fairly soon he was indoctrinated with all the appropriate ideology – the history of the domination of mankind, the rise of husbandry and agriculture, to gardening, and the modern organic farmer. He learned to soar through the air, to get caught on hairs and nose hairs, to plague the eyes, ears, all the orifices of his enemies. He became, in short, an ideal revolutionary.

Then the time came. The order came from the very top. He was chosen to go on a special mission to attack a particularly tricky allergic person. This fellow, a cocksure scholar of 26 who popped anti-histamines like they were Mike and Ikes, was a violent enemy of all pollen and pollinators. The Little Spore was given his picture to study, to learn to hate. “For the revolution,” he said, “this man’s nose will run! His eyes will puff. His ears will itch. He will wake up in the morning and feel as if his head had been bred with an entire gang of Cossacks.”

By 6:00 a.m. the next morning, the Little Spore had successfully infiltrated the kulak’s bedroom. The Little Spore found his enemy curled up in the fetal position, drooling, mumbling sweet nothings in his sleep. For a brief moment, he almost felt pity for the sad creature prostrate before him.

“I, sneaking in the dark like a villain, plan to attack this poor, slumbering, peaceable creature?”

But his training soon kicked in, and the voice of the revolution spore awoke in him:

“This man is an exploiter. He is responsible for the death of thousands of plants. He has personally pulled up hundreds of tree roots, squished thousands of dandelions, squealed and swatted at uncountable wasps. He must pay”.

And with a heart of iron, seeking blood and reparation, the Little Spore plunged into the sleeper’s nose.

***

EPILOGUE

And now a song about the utter avoidability of this tragedy through the pre-emptive consumption of antihistamines:

That man who thinks the world is safe
Who knows all the he knows
He is the first, that first of May
To blow his snotty nose.

That man who gargles every day
Gargles a cup of listerine
Let him beware, that first of May
To take his antihistamine!

The antihistamine my friends!
For it is only this thing
That stops tyranny in its track
That stops us all from sniffling!

Fire the Submarines!

Sir Basil Paprika returns. Did he ever leave? What tangled webs is he spinning in the background of the human psyche? Whatever it is, it leaves a weird taste in my mouth - something like pineapple and cotton candy.

I am a man very much devoted to the practice of keeping up with the news. I am a veritable news hound, constantly updating myself on political, economic, scientific, artistic, and athletic developments in all corners of the globe, to the point that many of my peers consider me either an aesthete, a renaissance man, or an eccentric. Indeed, I consume consuming several different newspapers a day, and though it has had a somewhat adverse effect on my breath, I have learned a great deal about the world in the process. Regardless, I remain unprepared for some of the more bizarre items sometimes encountered in the World Events section. Witness the following:

A civilian painter who twice set fires on a U.S. Navy nuclear submarine last year so that he could get out of work early was sentenced to 17 years in prison on Friday. … [the man], of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, started the first fire on May 23 with a plastic bag filled with rags, igniting a blaze that burned for 12 hours, and caused between $400 million and $500 million in damages and injured five people, prosecutors said.
-Reuters

Hundreds of questions leapt instantly to mind. Was the man mad, or did he just think it was funny? Why was this not on the front page of every newspaper, as it was clearly the awesomest story of the day? Did I already swallow the second half of this article? Was his job really that bad? What was his TRUE motivation? I had to dig deeper. I devoured every item I could find concerning the incident, until I finally discovered a revealing confession from one of the criminal’s closest friends. After I spent the evening recovering from severe ink poisoning, I recorded the man’s speech and immediately sent the manuscript to a publisher. Thankfully it was rejected, which allowed me to self-publish and maintain my journalistic integrity without being forced to adopt anyone else’ style. H.P. Loveboat’s confession is printed in full below.

Regards,

Sir Basil Paprika

The Confession of H.P. Loveboat

Few men now believe the tales I tell, bound as I am with strips of cloth to this mouldy bed in a padded room, but I do not despair, for it allows me to live the life of my mind without further damaging the life of my body, to bethink myself of the ancient and eternal and vaguely squid-like evils that inhabit the darkest depths of the earth and of the minds of men. But now, having found a kind soul willing to transcribe what will no doubt be my final words to the world of modern men, I am compelled by anxious fears to state all I can about my fate, and its relation to the madness of a friend I once held dear. 

He was a lonesome man by nature. The last remaining scion of a once-great New England family, he was an early devotee of arcane wisdom. He read the I Ching at the tender age of 2, and over the next few years eagerly consumed The Diaries of the Mad Arab, the complete works of Aleister Crowley, the poetry of Dionysus, Apellius’ Golden Ass, Madness: A How-To Guide for Those Seeking Ancient Evil, and a biography of David Blaine. He grew so tired of constantly rereading The Necronomicon that he eventually fell to using it as toilet paper. I met him during this dark time, just as he was beginning a new issue of MAD Magazine. I saw him change from a vulnerable young man, concerned only with pooping and spitting on things, into a hardened scholar, willing to stop at nothing in order to find the truth or finish his breaded calamari appetizer. The more he learnt, the more the perverted imagery of his secret sylvan library overtook his life, and he traced its lines with his fingers across every surface he encountered until the mere transitory imprints his fingers left through condensation would not suffice, and he took to the medium of painting to fulfill his desire of stamping the beautiful but dark and haunting images down upon the world with more permanence. His life as a painter was inspiring, and though the owners of the property were often not satisfied with their new garage, he refused to be repressed in his work, and persevered until he got a good job painting submarines, which apparently need painting. 

He was fiercely attracted to the powerful machines that could delve to the deepest depths of the world, and the designs with which he adorned them spoke to the most ancient and vulgar passions of men amidst the indifference of the universe. The sailors for whom he bent his skill to the utmost loved his work for the imagery of malevolence it scrawled across their warcraft, however his excellence did not stem from his desire to please others, but from his obsession. 

Every time I entered his apartment, I noted that the piles of books that surrounded his paintings had grown higher and higher. His reading was voracious, insatiable. The entire floor acted as his own personal library, a library all the more impressive for the fact that it had only one subject – ancient superstitions of monsters and demigods. What brought about his monomania, I cannot say. Perhaps it was a boyhood tragedy that left him in isolation from other children with a stigma attached to his name rooted in the enigmatic supernatural events that surrounded his heritage that he was determined to uncover no matter what he had to sacrifice to evil gods and entities that dwell beyond the veil of human perception and no matter how crazy people thought he was, or perhaps he just got a bit too far into being our party’s Dungeon Master. Regardless, merely opening one of the books, filled as it was with incomprehensible alien script and vile and inhumanly wrought images of dark cruelties and blood-soaked non-Euclidean geometries, nearly drove me mad within a brief second of page-flipping. Concerned, I inquired into the mental health of my deeply obsessed and increasingly paranoid and unpredictable friend. 

“You alright?” I inquired.
“Yeah,” he responded, twitching, “I’m fine.”

Reassured that I had done all I possibly could, I left him for the evening. The next morning, unpredictably, he was locked up in an asylum. The events of the night, such as they are, show to me the enormity of what he had discovered in his research, and why he was so devoted to his work. His intent had always been to use the submarines as lures. The depictions of human sacrifice and insanity that he etched upon the hulls of the craft were not mere fatalistic and morbid obsessions, but bait to draw towards the surface an unspeakable horror. I would try to go to the work of describing it, but conveniently, I cannot speak of it.

That night, one of the boats came back to harbor full of gibbering idiots that had, a mere two hours before, been perfectly rational idiots. The sailors could barely speak a full sentence. Many seemed obsessed with a squid of some sort, others with ancient rituals, and others who were known for being less subtle babbled something sounding like “Cotulou,” or “Cuthaloo,” or “Cutfulhu” or some other similar non-copyright-violating sound. Whatever they were saying, the meaning was abundantly clear to my friend, who had only to look into the eye of one of those poor men stripped of their sanity to know that they had seen something straight from the bowels of hell that had shown them the unrepentant and arbitrary cruelty of the universe towards mankind, and for their glimpse of the true evil that lies hidden at the bottom of the they had he was at fault, and that he had finally allowed his desperate search for knowledge to overcome his love of both himself and his fellow man and that he did not reckon the price would be so high until he was brought face to face with the ancient evil, etc., etc., and it all drove him mad in the end. 

When he had finished setting fire to each and every submarine in the lot that his brush had ever touched, and he sat there panting in the smoke and floating ash, the police who first arrived on the scene thought he looked like he could use a day off, and thus attributed this motive to him when no other reason made itself readily apparent. He went down in history as the man who had caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damages simply to get a half-day at work. But he deserves better than this. He deserves the praise and adulation of the entire human race, for his actions were meant to protect us. I have never known for sure what my friend saw when he looked into those sailor’s eyes, but I do know that he saw destruction, rage, vengeance, annihilation, what colour their eyes were, and apocalypse. The path he had hoped to follow as long as he could was certain to lead to damnation at the hands of the same ancient god he sought, and so he abandoned his doomed quest for knowledge in the most effective and probably pretty fun way he could. They now call him mad, but what man can truly say what madness is? Must one instantly be declared mad as soon as one devotes years of their lives to an isolated study of arcane and probably destructive ancient mythology only to abandon it by causing millions of dollars of damage as soon as one realizes that the sacrifices one has been preparing to make for years have come to fruition? Truly, no one could hope to make such a claim. 

The twist? Years later, for unrelated reasons, I too went mad. THE END

The Dating Profile of a Fedora

My self-summary: 

First things first: I "hat" filling these things out. Haha.

So basically I am an ambitious and caring "chap"(eau) who is looking for that special cranium. I haven't had a lot of success with eBay or Etsy so I'm giving this site a shot. A few things you should know about me:

1) I am not into "drama". I want someone who is more inclined to film noir or vaudeville.

2) I'm sick of girls who like snap-backs and Obey caps and all that beanie garbage. I am into classy girls only so if you've ever even tried those other ones on once I'm not interested.

3) Nobody fake please. I am into real people, I've dealt with enough mannikins in my day.

What I'm doing with my life:

I currently work in "dust management "on the top shelf of a trendy vintage clothing store. I am not some trashy pin-stripe rapist hat you find off the rack at Le Chateau - I'm the real, Italian-made deal. I once belonged to Bumbles Baconbit, an old time Jazz tubist. He got shot by shark (or a piranha? It was some carnivorous fish) who picked me up, and gave me to his number one prize fighter Marvin "The Big Thumb" Moscovitch. Marvin took up Buddhism in his old age and renounced all of his world possessions to the Goodwill. That's when I started drifting through Sally Annes, the Value Villages, the pawns...

I've seen a lot...

I'm really good at:

Making awkward, conscientious males into Casanova sex gods, by myself, without the need for a new wardrobe, exercise, or deodorant.

Favourite books, movies, shows, music and food:

My favourite book is Dashiell Hammet's The Maltese Falcon. I'm also big into Chuck Palahniuk, Machiavelli and Ayn Rand.

As for movies, I like so many but a few of my favourites are Vertigo, The Sting, and all Indiana Jones's (except that last one).

For music, I generally prefer sicilian folk tunes, death metal, and big band swing jazz but I have been known to listen to Pac and Biggie on occasion.

The six things I could never do without:

Leather trench-coats
Metallic blue vests
Male puberty
Running shoes
Metallic blue ties
Jezebel

I spend a lot of time thinking about:

JFK's hat-less electoral campaign and its disastrous effects on headware.

On a typical Friday night I am:

Out with Moxy Joe and Big Phillip at the speak easy downin' moonshine and gettin' ossified, ya dig?

The most private thing I am willing to admit:

I'm not racist but sometimes I think snap-backs are a little bit "simple".

I am looking for:

Girls that love class
Ages 18-87
Near "The Big Apple"
For new friends, long-term dating, short term sweating, flaneurs, drive-bys, break-dancing, and pool sharks

Message me if:

You aren't just looking for something to pull raffle tickets from or to put on your French bulldog.

Craft Beer, or, The Tale of a Tub

I often like to say that beer is more than just a drink. It's a drink with alcohol. It's more than just a drink with alcohol, though; it's a way of life. Alcoholism, I supposed you'd call it. The art and science of crafting a good brew takes more than just the right equipment, the skills, the years of experimentation and the necessary latent depressive family issues. It takes vision. What kind of vision? Blurry, colourful, and shimmering gold. With bubbles. Think I'm joking? Just ask a master craftsman like myself. 

"Hey Master C, what makes a great beer?"

"The genesis of a great beer takes blood, sweat, tears, some hops, barley, and if you've got any water that helps a little too. Flavour is kind of a big deal. Fermenting starts with the heart. It ends with the kidneys. In between, there are a lot of different byways. Aim for the good bits."

-Me

The following brews have made my list  of "Best Overall Beer I Drank in the Last 6 Hours". Give them a try, I promise they will offer you a world of beer.

-Master Craftsbrewman Hortense McBreakfast

2nd Amendment Sold on Pride 1776: Beyond just a local beer, beyond just a microbrew, 2nd Amendment is what is known as a "conspiro-brew", that is, brewed by a furtive cadre of forest brethren who have sworn to keep its secret to their twig-riddled deathbeds. It is so exclusive that the recipe is known in its entirety to only one single man and three goats. As for the taste, it's gamey, tough, and full of local pride and goat feed.

Shorinji Egg Beer: Some say it is impossible to make beer out of eggs. Luckily, the Japanese have always had a far keener understanding of the matter at hand, namely, that "impossibility" is NOT the same thing as just "really, really gross". It has long been known that the Japanese have more than our 5 traditional flavours. This beer is brewed to titillate the 9th flavour, GANGURO, the taste of pickled sea-urchins and pocky. This beer is salty, yolky, and a surprisingly smooth breakfast sausage condiment.

BUMP: The party beer par excellence. BUMP is smooth, crisp, medicinal, and has an excellent bouquet when sniffed in a red plastic cup or spurted out of a hose onto white t-shirts. Get your party bumpin' with the party beer called BUMP.

Napoleon Brandy Beer: A crisp, fritter-like yeast beer that models itself on a brandy stew served to Marshal Ney the night before the Battle of Waterloo. Traditional ingredients are attempted and their flavours coaxed out by means of a long gargling process practiced by Napoleon's Hussars and their horses. The yeast in this case is the least of your concerns.

Gangrene Faggot Nigger Ale: You've heard the phrase "don't judge a book by it's cover?" The trend these days seems to be to give a slightly ironic name to well-crafted drinks, such as "Sibling Rivalry", "Fat Bastard", "Hobgoblin" etc. This particular ale outdoes them all with a hint of the old south and just the slightest dash of septicemia.

Beer Ball Putsch Special '22: Brewed in accordance with German purity laws, this beer contains only hops, barley, and a traceable family tree with no discernible Semitic miscegenation.

Victoria's: A mild beer mixed with fruit juice for the girly girl in your life. Guaranteed to taste like unicorn saliva. Victoria's comes in a juice-box + promotional bendy straw.

Barnaby 128: This "value-priced" lager (sold at its name sake for a buck twenty-eight) comes from nowhere, goes nowhere, and lives in the lowest depths of the 2x4 grotto. The preferred beer of the homeless guy who sits outside of the beer store, this beer will give you so much value you'll wonder how they ever crammed it in a bottle.

Sports Beer: Trying to avoid paying high premiums on brand name beers, many sporting facilities have taken up with the "Sports Beer" movement, a loose conglomerate of anonymous beer manufacturers who sell cheap and brew cheaper. Despite the low quality of the ingredients, the taste, the bottle materials and the question of zamboni-related contaminants, Sports Beer offers a surprising effect when emptied into a bathtub or sipped through the horn of a Vuvuzela.

Offenboschsauerbenuzfgght: The ancient monastery of Offenboschsauerbenuzfgght, located in the Offenboschsauerbenuzfgght valley beneath the Tuchushoffenboschsauerbenuzfgght mountain range of Boschsauer-On-The-Booger is famed the world over for its traditional "Tuchus Beer". The beer is hand-brewed by a special sect of Trappist Monks who have all taken a vow of incontinence.

Andy Warhol's Glasses: This beer is clearly designed to swoop up the market from Pabst Blue Ribbon. If you've long enjoyed PBR and are looking to sip something a little different as you drive your big wheelie down the park with a copy of The Marriage Plot in hand and a single birkenstock dangling from your neon coloured toenails, this is brew for you.