There is no hope in this black-bottomed boat.

The sea skids are out in number tonight. Twitching apparitions wrenching steel from stone, girth from man-labor, and child from sink-or-swim. Tummy troubles abound in this western satellite nation. Little tremors confuse with liquid protein, oozing from every pore.

Hello browser-cursers!

Wordsmoker Customer Service (Raul and Tony) have had two complaints regarding the performance of Wordsmoker articles under the festering heap of horror-code commonly referred to in whispered tones amongst web developers as “Microsoft Internet Explorer“.  It seems that some, though not all (great, that makes it easy to bug-hunt. Ed) articles produce an anti-Pro-Choice message or something saying “Operation Aborted” in fuckoffhuge letters on your computer boxes.

1. You know that really cool, hip, hilarious and true thing you read on the Internet that one time, that made you howl and rotfl and forward it to thirty friends? The one that made you tear up a little bit at its evocativeness, and nod at its wisdom? You know, the most well-scripted lolcat evah? Yeah … that was mine.

2. “So, my nigga,” said the President, passing the joint back to me. “I’ve got a two-point plan to save the economy. Point One, everybody gives you all their money. Point Two, you look after it real good.”

I never thought it would happen to me.

I’m a normal suburban working woman with a husband, 2 boys, 2 cats, 2 trucks, a dog, picket fence, etc. Alright, I lied a bit about the picket fence part; it’s actually a cast iron fence, but you get the point. Things like this only happen to people in the Midwest, or deep south, the ones that have been molested by aliens or have spoken, or even raised Batboy.

1. When I was eight years old, we lived in a bus for nine months and traveled from North Carolina to Texas staying in mostly Woolco and K-mart parking lots and telling people about Jesus and that we were missionaries going to the Philippines. I still don’t know how my parents expected to drive that bus across the Pacific Ocean had it not been for the five year detour in Texas. But my parents didn’t plan far enough ahead to know where dinner was coming from, yet alone what was meant to happen when we reached California. My only real regret was never meeting David Cassidy seeing as I had the perfect intro.

If you’re anything like me (and I know you are) you often think “I wonder how Al Pacino would play a voracious power bottom?” and “Why didn’t Bruno Kirby do more gay S&M?” Well your prayers are answered today my lil’ filthy monkey with a hidden gem that I like to call Cruising. Starring Big Al as the cop, Krazy Karen Allen as the cop’s girlie and a pre-Arby’s Paul Sorvino, Cruising takes you through the early ’80’s pre-Aids gay S&M subculture in a serial killer story that has multiple narrative viewpoints and no clear cut character motivations.

In 1976, Warhol was beset by personal and professional turmoil, feeling snubbed by the “real” art world and unlucky in love.  Studio 54 was a year away, but his coke-fueled acolytes and investors were busy assembling a cheap exploitation flick on which to slap his name: Andy Warhol’s Bad. It’s intriguing to think of Lucy’s TV best friend starring in a movie where a crying baby is thrown out a high-floor Manhattan window, and it almost came to be.  But Vivian Vance schooled them: Sick thrills don’t pay my bills.

No one knows more about not finishing James Joyce’s Ulysses than I do. You don’t want to throw down with me on this. I can extemporize at length on the topic, and am available to do so at your next book or Rotary club meeting for a modest fee. Routinely listed at the top of lists of Greatest Books Since the Last Ice Age, Ulysses makes strenuous demands on the reader with its use of lengthy internal monologues, multiple dialects, convoluted parodies and pastiches, not to mention neologisms and puns rooted in several languages. To my knowledge, I’ve never met anyone who’s read it cover to cover.

It’s not like I didn’t have expert help close at hand when I didn’t complete Ulysses. I’ve probably consulted more works about this confounding Modernist masterpiece than anyone else (who hasn’t finished it). My tattered copy is surrounded on the shelf by reference works that crowd it like a bedraggled entourage. A dingy bookmark is still planted where I left off, highlighting my doleful progress.

I am not the commonplace inquisitor you thought was coming.

They told you they would send the Tall One. They have no belief system. This is why they sent me.

I sense some hostility towards me and that is okay. I am alright with that.

I’ve heard many a saying said down the years as time went on. Some of them made sense, like “Never Toast Your Hand” or “Don’t Forget To Not Walk On Your Tongue” – self explanatory, really. Some others I’ve heard recently just come off as nonsensical – “Never Curse At Tulips“, “Always Punch Brian In The Tits“, “Feel Your Bread Before Talking To It“, and “Terror Baby Bingo“. That last one doesn’t even scratch the surface of atomic level nano-sense, but it hasn’t stopped me looking at the contents of push-chairs differently.

A man had an urge to French kiss a pig’s butt.  It came upon him one day at the State Fair as he passed the livestock pens.  A corndog in his hand and the smell of manure in his nostrils, he saw some pigs, saw their butts, and thought, I’d really like to kiss those pigs’ butts.

It wasn’t until later in the day when he was buying a raffle ticket (the prize, a brand new car) that he was struck by the disturbing strangeness of his thinking. Why would he want to do that?  Why would he want to put his

"Wait - did I write 'fear itself' or 'one big fucking monster'?"

When Franklin Delano Roosevelt first took the office of President in 1932, the country was just coming off the pool party that was Herbert Hoover’s presidency, during which the Great Depression took hold and popular resort areas known as Hoovervilles began springing up across the landscape.

On the eve of Barack Obama’s big speech, I figured it was best to spin you a seafarer’s yarn on why the poor man is going to go gray and bend at the back before this thing is done. Everyone’s curious how this thing is going to start and what he’s going to say. I suggest, perhaps, that our speechifier-in-chief open with “From hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee. Ye damned whale.”

Why would I suggest such a tone? What deadly sea-creature must Hopey slay? The answer, landlubbers, is the Kraken.

8:30 a.m.: I’d always thought it would be my dream to wake up with a woman’s fingers already inside me, the smooth back of her hand rocking gently against my clit as her lips brushed against my neck. I’d always thought it would be bliss to roll over out of my sleep and into such warmth, one form of dreaming bleeding into this other as our bodies ran like adjacent watercolor washes, soaking the sheets. But to tell the truth, when I found myself suddenly in the midst of this fantasy made real, an unexpected resentment bubbled up as I rolled into Anne’s embrace, an initial resistance that I had to fight down like a stifled yawn as I nuzzled her to signal my return to consciousness. Good Morning, You. I can’t remember now which one of us said that. We ended up shuddering a good bit as we rolled over each other in our deliciously impossible attempts to enfold and be enfolded simultaneously, but neither of us wanted to exert the effort necessary to come. I finally just picked an arbitrary point at which to declare the tumble over, covering Anne’s mouth with mine, my lips brushing hers as I murmured, Girl, I Gotta Get Up.

Hello, my Lovies. This is to remind you that we will be discussing Lush Life by Richard Price on Tuesday, March 3 at 9pm EST in the CHAT ROOM.