I Know Who the Plastic Salmon Sings for

Whoever said life was a grind? A hamburger meat machine is more like it. Sometimes you can just feel your bones being crunched down daily to make some brand of cheap supermarket dog food, can’t you?

Profit is a mean task-maker. Workers kill time at the profane altar of value.  More people are enslaved today than in any time in history and –

Wait, excuse me, I think I feel a feeling coming on just now. I must go shop for cheap Chinese products, it’s the only cure. Last time, I bought one of those plastic trophy salmon fish that sings merry drinking songs when I press it’s button –It’s so extremely strange.

Why, who in the world can afford to sing merry drinking songs anymore?? My little plastic salmon on the wall, that’s who.

When Branding Burns

When oh when did the language shift, people? When did “selling out” change to “buying in”???  When did people start to sit still for getting branded?  I for one am outta here at the first whiff of burning flesh wafting down the hall, folks.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for turning the Golden Gate Bridge into a giant underground shopping mall. Hell, paint it yellow and turn it into the Golden Arches McDonaldland Play Emporium Bridge if it means we can keep our local Bohemian Club open for the poor ultra rich to send their ruined psyches to summer-camp.  Hey, I’m not a heartless anarchist here.  I believe the children of the ultra privileged deserve just as many Taco Shack tattoos as anyone.

Actually, the problem with corporations is that they haven’t completely taken over yet, so naturally we are all suffering in a state of pre-corperatization.  No wonder no one knows who the hell they are – we have yet to fully embrace our soul brands and  place them at the center of our existence.  Right now, we remain confused as a species about things like God and democracy, but one day soon all that confusion will be cleared away.

Actually, we secretly replaced the world’s democracies with Folder Crystals coffee a few months back, and no one noticed the difference!  Citizens the world round are delighted by Folders Crystals instant coffee in place of the usual, slow-brewed democracy, and in polls people prefer it 20 to one.

Feeling Paranoid I’m the Only One…

Feelings.  Can’t live with them, can’t smother them into annihilation.  The main problem with these incredibly irrational moods, stupid thoughts and crazy impulses that we group in the “emotions” category is that the damn things are so often spot-on right – in their own knotted-up, backward way, of course.

For example, I’m going to try to think of the most irrational emotion I can think of – paranoia is usually pretty irrational, right? What, am I the only one who occasionally feels like the world is whispering behind my back, plotting to put me in my place, or at minimum, thinking wrongly of me? 

It doesn’t matter that I know I have to “get over it” because the fact is that everyone thinks wrongly about everyone else all the time anyway – that is, when they aren’t entirely wrapped up thinking exclusively about themselves.  Yes, today people are just too bleeding busy and self-absorbed even to talk about you behind your back with any passion.  And when others do decide to spend a nanosecond deciphering your flaws, they rarely do it in any kind of original or scientific fashion.

Anyway, if life has taught me one thing it’s that even on those rare occasions when people do take the time to think qualitatively badly of you, it turns out it isn’t really you they see at all anyway, but themselves all over again. Isn’t that the story these days on the human psyche: that no one knows another, we only see what we look for, all is filtered through self? Like what they say about dreams – that every character is really you – everyone you encounter in the world is really a reflection of that amorphous quagmire called your “self.” 

That’s why it’s really so irrational to be paranoid about what others think of you, because it’s all one big bloody illusion anyway, and why don’t I just get on with living my illusion and letting you live yours?  I don’t know about you, but I really need to work on making my illusion over here a lot more comfortable and less effort to maintain, which I might do better if I spent less time feeling paranoid about other people.

But twisted and tormented as it may be, even an emotion as apparently irrational as paranoia makes perfect, beautiful sense, and really no one would ever want to lose the corner of the human palette, the emotional “color,” if you will, of paranoia.  Sure, it could destroy ya, but like all of these backward human emotions, paranoia has a super-important lesson to impart.  If only you learn to listen, your own personal paranoia can teach you something important, too, like what mine taught me:

There’s really only one person in this world that you can count on to think badly of you in any kind of truthful way.  Only one saboteur is singularly devoted to watching each moment of your systematic demise.  That person, my friend, is your own one and only self,  the only perfect enemy and true foe any of us can expect in this mean, selfish world.

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How about it, got something irrational that needs explaining?  Send Bad Apple your most brain-breaking queries for a final answer on practically any topic.

Celebrity Mayor Meets With Crack-Head Wood Elves

Just to prove even Bad Apples can be burdened with a conscience, I admit that I do, I feel a tiny twinge of something approaching guilt over having put Mayor Sellums in the Celebrity Mayor category in yesterday’s post.  I agree, it’s still early in the game.  It’s only been a year.  Give him a chance, the little twinge tells me.  Things look bad, yes, but he still has a couple more years to really blow it.

After all, at least Outland’s latest Celebrity Mayor is famous for being a politician, but then again, so was the last one and he was the worst of all, even worse than Mayor Willy, another celebrity politician Celebrity Mayor I suffered under, back when I resided over the bay waters in San Franabismal. In fact, now that I think about it, celebrity politicians may prove to be the worst Celebrity Mayors of them all, if you can imagine that’s even possible! 

So naturally it’s so hard to keep an open mind about Mayor Sellums, even though, yes, he had a great run over there in Congress, and even if he practically had to teach them old boys social justice at the ABC level, even if he pretty much shook down South African apartheid with his little finger — let’s remember, this here is the City of Outland we’re talking about now.  This place eats Celebrity Mayors for a midnight toothpick.

The problem is, it’s one thing to take on the seat of national and international power, the good old boys, the White House, etc.  It’s quite another to take on the local gangs, the good old city bureaucrats, the Crack Houses, etc.  

Probably anyone would choose being stroked and seduced by a harem of Satan’s lobbyists over a forced listening-to of local activists trying to save the last transvestite albino Redwood tree and its population of homeless wood elves addicted to hookers and crack.  I mean, who wouldn’t?? 

The fact is, there’s very little in life that a fat check from a cute lobbyist can’t solve or at least make feel a little better.  But almost nothing in life can be done about those crack-addicted wood elves.  Those things be hella nasty!

Well, Mayor Sellums, may the Force be with you as you take on the armies of gnome, leprechauns, pink lawn flamingos, iron maidens, ugly Betty’s, and every other kind of citizen here in the great cheesefood-melt of Outland, California.  Remember, we only expect you to fix everything, and chopping Bad Apple’s job in your first budget really is not something we here call an “auspicious start.”

Oh, for a Cubed Dream Well Lived OR Is It a Lived Cube Well Dreamed?

Lately, I’ve been preoccupied something terrible by my new cubicle in the basement. Princess Bad Apple, you see, was recently “sent to the dungeons” after her last job was sliced and diced in the new celebrity mayor budget. Don’t even get me started on celebrity mayor budgets – that’s a whole, other musical.

Anyway, about the time my latest grip on things started to slide, a new bible crossed my desk and suddenly everything that was fogging up my inner windshield went all crystal clear! The question, I realized now, was not between my eating, paying rent and beating back the ghost on this body age creep OR feeding my anorexic creative soul – the real question, it turned out, was whether to turn my grey windowless cubicle into a miniature working Irish Pub OR transcending the space into a heaven-sent cloud-lined nap-atorium. 

The book, Cube Chic: Take Your Office Space from Drab to Fab actually offered so many different design themes, I found myself at a design deadlock trying to determine my true future cube theme.  Oh, decisions, decisions. 

Well, decision-making has never been the strongman in my skill circus.  In fact one of my favorite modern television characters of all time is Toweley from South Park, a talking towel who gave me the life mantra we share, me and Toweley: “I choose….BOTH!”

That explains why I was pinning a grass skirt to my Tiki Cube file cabinet and astroturfing my Golf Cube bulletin board when I glanced at my NYC King Kong Cube inbox (where I’d chained my Rap Cube rim) and suddenly saw what an awful lot of work I had to catch up upon!!

Apparently while I had been either painting the asbestos floor tiles here with a colorful meditative design, or perhaps while I was brewing ice tea for my Library Cube brandy snifters, someone had dumped even more work on the work I already had been avoiding while I worked on adjusting to my new environment.

Besides the fact that all this work hardly fits into my whole cubicle design scheme as imagined (and of course the book doesn’t say word one what to do about that), yes, other than this, I’m adjusting to my new place in the world as can be expected. I will say, my dungeon-mates are exceptionally good to me down here. They understand me enough to know that when I crawl into my under-desk napitorium box and draw the grass curtain shut that it’s best to just leave me alone.