Sophistication

Sophistication

By: Dave Woehrle

When I was 20, I fell for a woman with eyes like the back of burnt CDs, a green containing melodies. She wore cardigans, enjoyed wine, swing sets in the rain, and collecting rubber chickens. She was 23. A journalist. A tea-drinker. Sophisticated. Smarter than me. I think she liked me because I played an instrument and knew who Simone de Beauvoir was.

Over dinner in a Thai restaurant one night early in our courting period, there was a lull in the conversation. She’d been explaining why Aimee Mann albums were important and I’d been nodding. It was quiet, so I asked her if she had to have sex with an animal, which animal would it be. She said nothing and stared. More silence. I said I’d chose pandas, nature’s cuddlers.

She was grossed out. Put her chopsticks down. She asked what kind of question was that. I said it was theoretical, you know, it’s not as if we’d have to go to the zoo after she answered. She said it was different for girls. I said I’m sure it was, that’s why I ask. What’s the female perspective here sorta thing.

She wasn’t speaking then, so I tried to laugh it off, Just kidding, sweet pea. After awhile, she faked a laugh too and said, “You’re cute,” which means, as I’ve learned over the years, “You’re still 16.”

A month later, she concluded I was too immature for her, said she wanted something “more serious.”

She should have just said “Komodo Dragon” and then we’d be married today.

Things I Enjoy Imagining While Bored at Work

Things I Enjoy Imagining While Bored at Work

By: Day Vivid

---A Unicorn Riding a Tractor

He’s a yellow slouching unicorn with sad eyes, a John Deere hat balanced precariously on his horn, a piece of wheat wedged in his mouth, his glittery hooves working the levers, and he’s plowing a field at sunset. He says, “It’s been a dry year. Real dry,” and he shakes his head, unicorn mane dandruff falling to the soil and sprouting baby marshmallow trees.

---Having Sexual Intercourse with Scarlett Johansson for 25 minutes

Duh. The fantasy isn’t that I’m having sex with a beautiful Hollywood star; it’s the lasting of 25 minutes. I think I would blow my wad just by smelling her hair. Or if she made eye contact with me and said, “Hi, Dave.”

---People Who Walk On Stilts

I have no idea how a person gets on stilts. Do they start on their backs, attach the stilts, and then get raised up like an Amish barn by their fellow parade people? Are there ropes? Can one get on stilts alone? I imagine all sorts of scenarios, like being dropped from a low-hovering helicopter, or some kind of pulley system / pole-vaulting system. (And why is Uncle Sam always on them on the Fourth of July? Are we such a small-dicked insecure nation that our military spokesman has to be eleven feet tall?)

---Having Coffee with Tom Waits During a Long Winter

It’s a small diner and he’s wearing a great black hat. The coffee is also great and black. It’s snowing outside and we nod at this. We trade facts about animals. We talk blues and metaphors. He understands my pained grunts. He makes the waitress, whose name is Betsy, laugh repeatedly.

---Several Unicorns with Razor-sharp Teeth Devouring an Opera Audience

These unicorns are different from the benign tractor kind. These unicorns’ bodies are white with purple spots, and their eyes bright red. They are released after a heartbreaking aria, when the posh crowd – decked out in fur coats, white gloves and monocles – are drying their wealthy eyes. The lighting people on the catwalk turn on a smoke machine and a strobelight. The unicorns, at least a dozen of them, each with a raging mouthful of foam and sharks teeth, go for the throats, cutting all screams short. The massacre is therefore nearly silent, except for the orchestra and opera singers, who continue making beautiful music, yet they are now the audience, the viewers, the takers-in of the spectacle.

---A Laughing Child Chasing a Frightened Goose Near a Creek in the Sun

It’s just a pleasant image. The pure innocence of the child next to the pure terror of the goose is a glorious contrast.

---How the Show Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Would Be Different without the “Ninja” Part

They’re just four adolescent reptiles with disabilities. Raphael is missing a leg as well as a sai. Leonardo is autistic; he randomly screams and repeatedly bangs his head against the sewer walls. He uses harmless, rubber swords. Michelangelo wears large headphones all the time and drools; he still break dances but not coherently. Donatello is good with computers but in the idiot savant Rain Man way; he is emotionally distant. Splinter has a heart of gold, taking care of all them, handing out stickers for good behavior.

---Baloney and Other Meat Words

How did “baloney” become synonymous with “bullshit”? Oh, that’s just a bunch of baloney. You never hear anyone say, “That’s a bunch of honey maple turkey.” But I imagine a world where all meats have their descriptive place in our daily language. Like after watching a life-affirming sunrise, you’d say, “Oh, man, now THAT’S some good smoked ham.”

---Pablo Neruda and Elliot Smith Sharing a Loaf of Bread in the Afterlife

They’re together at a blue table on a veranda in France. They don’t speak. They smile and sip wine until they’re happily weeping and playing chess in the dark.

---Beating Someone with Lobsters

The tail of a lobster looks like a sword handle. Hence, I would love to take two live ones and use them as swords. The lobsters would be angry at their new duties as weaponry, and they’d voice that concern with the angry pinching of their claws. So I feel the upswing of my thrashes would be almost as devastating as my down swings because the lobsters’ pinchers would take eyelids and earlobes with them. I’m unfamiliar with the structural integrity of a lobster’s exoskeleton, but I imagine I could give someone a pretty ass-kicking with lobsters.

---A Job Where Imagination is a Virtue

Yeah. That.

Last Gift from Grandma

Last Gift From Grandma

By: Dave Woehrle

November, almost two in the morning in Iowa, we watched snow and sipped whiskey on my apartment's concrete patio near a closed Wendy’s. There was one lone streetlight in the parking lot.

I'd been gym shoe-shopping with my ex-girlfriend that day, and I was thinking about footwear and regret.

I said, “You know that tissue paper near the toes of new shoes? What’s it for?”

“I don’t know. It’s kind of odd. It's like a mouse nest by your toes," he said.

“And do you think a person at a factory puts it there, or is it some kind of machine?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not sure if tissue paper-pushing machines exist. There are all kinds of machines, though.”

“Yeah. Maybe it’s a sweatshop thing.”

“Probably.”

He sipped again from the flask.

He said, “Hmm. Reminds me of my grandma.”

           “What? Sweatshops?”

           “No. The tissue paper thing. She got me shoes as a gift once on my birthday. I think I was 7. I tried them on and they didn’t fit right. They hurt my feet, but I didn’t want to tell my Grandma. I thought…I don’t know what I thought, really. What does any 7 year old think? But for some reason I didn’t want Grandma to know they didn’t fit good. I just smiled and wore them. At the end of the day I took them off and the ends of my socks were all bloody. I reached and felt something. It was wet tissue paper, wet from blood.”

           He shook his head.

           I said, “Wow.”

          “Yeah. I didn’t know about the tissue paper thing. Like I said, I was 7. Did you know about the tissue paper at 7?”

          “Shit. I don’t know when I learned about tissue paper being in new shoes.”

          “Yeah. Well, anyway, my Grandma saw my bloody socks and she cried.” He paused. “It’s weird to have your Grandma cry at your birthday party when you’re a kid. All my friends were looking at her. She left the room for awhile. Came back to watch me blow out my candles, though.”

          I said, “Wow. That’s…that’s something.”

         “Yeah,” he said. “I haven’t thought about that in awhile. She died a few years after that. It’s really my only memory of her.”

         “I’m sorry.”

         “It’s cool. She was old.”

         It kept snowing. It was quiet.

         He asked, “So what kind of shoes did you get?”

        “Just white gym shoes. New Balance.”

        "Yeah. Those will do."
        We watched the snow.      
        I said, “I hope it’s a machine, you know? I hope a machine puts the tissue paper in there.”

        He asked, “Why?”

       “Because I can’t bear to think I’m the second set of hands to touch that paper. I mean, someone’s livelihood depending on paper crumbling. It’s just…just a bad thought.” I looked at the dark windows of the Wendy’s.

      He said, “There’s always plenty of those. Bad thoughts. Bad jobs.”

      He sipped more whiskey and said, “Well, I guess you never know.”

     We said good night and I went inside. Later in the night, I drunkenly called up my ex, the one I’d gone shoe-shopping with, to ask at what age she learned about tissue paper being inside gym shoes. I left a message and haven’t heard from her since.

Day Vivid

It isn't blogging. It's writing. It's writing you can read it on the internet. That's what I'm telling myself.

This will be self-serving and self-absorbed. You have to be pretentious to be a writer because you're living under the pretense that people give a shit how you think / feel. I've accepted this.

My image of a blogger: white guy with thick-rimmed glasses, typing about how the Decemberists have sold out, and about the eye color of a girl he met at Critical Mass last week. Go to Stuff White People Like http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/ to see who I mean.

I'll try real hard not to be that guy. I mean, I don't care if my coffee's organic or anything. I won't like your Vespa or fedora or poems about autumn. I'm not an academic. I never use the verbs "conceptualize" or "facilitate" when I could just say "think" or "do." I'd take Bob Seger and hamburgers over Ani DiFranco and tofu any day of the week. I just wanted to make that clear.

Anyway, this blog will include comedic pieces, as well as poems, essays, and general rants. Sometimes when I write "seriously," my friends ask, "Are you serious? Is this supposed to be funny?" It's odd because usually the first question of my day when I open my eyes is the general existential "Are you serious? Is this supposed to be funny?"

On this subject, I will quote John Irving from The World According to Garp:

“Why did people insist that if you were “comic” you couldn’t also be “serious”? He felt most people confused being profound with being sober, being earnest with being deep. Apparently, if you sounded serious, you were…Horace Walpole once said that the world is comic to those who think and tragic to those who feel…I have never understood why “serious” and “funny” are thought to be opposites. It is simply a truthful contradiction to me that people’s problems are often funny and that the people are often and nonetheless sad.”

This blog will also include quotes. Here's another one: "I saw a family of four get out of a Lexus and all four of them whipped out their phones as they walked into the store and I thought, 'Man, we are so fucked." ---my father

Anyway, welcome to the World of Day Vivid.