Don't lean on me, man, cause you can't afford the ticket

How come every time I go to Michael's, the place is filled with legit demented people?

I don't mean Pinterest Moms -- they're quietly demented, in a way that I can actually understand, because goddammit I do like crafts and if I had a sexually-uninteresting husband, I could see falling down that rabbit hole in a big way. No, I mean serious, genuine, criggity-craggity-cray folk, like the lady who kept trying to talk to me about whether aqua was a good color for her and whether this or that was "too much" as she tried on bead jewelry and laughed inappropriately and I tried to figure out how many of these fucking favor bags I have to buy for Kid Gleemonex's upcoming birthday party. I AM MATHING HERE. I CANNOT MATH THIS WITH THINGS FALLING OUT OF YOUR BLAB-HOLE INTO MY EAR. Or the one with no bra who followed me down the aisle of $1 wooden boxes/birdhouses/picture frames asking me what I was going to do with "all them tiny birdhouses." (In her defense, the 20 of them I bought must have seemed a lot for someone who didn't already smell of bird droppings.)* OR the lady with one fully-bandaged arm and zero shoes upon her feet, who appeared to be trying to run some sort of returning-items-for-cash scam, at absolutely glacial speed, on a teenage cashier who clearly did not have English as her first language but was trying heroically hard to be fair and pleasant.

Where did they come from, where do they go? Don't look now, it's crazy-eyed joe!

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*If you must know, it's a birthday party craft I found on, um. Pinterest. They're fairy houses. Or will be, when they're painted and have a bunch of glittery stickers and shit all over them.

Workin' on my night cheese

Disgusting Food-Liquids That Are Supposedly Harmless: An Incomplete List

• The watery whey-milk that usually manages to crest the top of the waxed-paper inner barrier of my Fage yogurts. Pleh. 
• Tuna-can water. You can never ever not get that stuff on your hand. Everybody Loves Raymond did a bit about it that ran through an entire episode once, and throughout, I was like: Truth. 
• The gunk surrounding the weiners in a pack of turkey dogs. I mean, they're supposedly cooked and this stuff is -- what? Lube so you can get the GD dogs out of the package? 
• The oil on top of a fresh jar of Skippy Natural peanut butter. Why god why. 
• The bean-liquor that rises to the top of a can of pintos. For some reason, the same stuff in a can of black beans doesn't bother me as much, but the pintos -- uccch. 

Your turkey sub, your clothes, the fact that a woman of your resources and position lives like some boxcar hobo, or maybe it’s the fact that while I’m saying all this, you have a piece of lettuce stuck in your hair.

Here is a thing I do: Whenever I am about to go out for the evening -- generally with Mr. Gleemonex, although sometimes with "the gals" because in my Suburban Mom lifestyle I have to invest social time on my kids' behalf so Ava Gracelynne and Tallulah Stringbean and Kal-El Darth Transformer, et. al., will invite my chirren to their parent-child slumber parties (1:1 supervision, can't be too careful) and "fun" soccer-based outings at some steaming sunscraped park or whatever it is instead of shunning them because I'm a social zero -- anyway, whenever I'm about to go out for the evening, I realize I have a closet full of:

• Office clothes I don't wear anymore and wouldn't even if I started back at an office tomorrow because they're all a minimum of four years old at this point and tbh mostly about 6-7 years old
• Evening dresses, like you'd wear to a fancy wedding
• Mom Outfits for a Hot Arid Climate (e.g. J. Jill tank tops, J. Crew chino shorts, stuff from Eddie Bauer)
• Jeans
• T-shirts with words on them (band names, Vandelay Industries, RBG, etc.)
• A shit-ton of workout clothes & athletic bras

What I lack is: going-out clothes, e.g. the kind of top a grown woman wears out with some skinny jeans, like kinda sexy but not trying to be 21 years old, a little more special than plain knit stuff, you know what I mean. I ain't got any of that.

So what I do the day after this inevitable fail is, I go online and look for stuff like what I'm picturing in my head. I troll the sales, I load up carts with this that and the other hilariously aspirational item (while my brain screams GIMME A FUCKING BREAK YOU KNOW YOU CAN'T WEAR A BRA WITH THAT), and I buy -- or should I say, rent -- a bunch of stuff. Then it comes to me, trickling in over the next couple of weeks, and I try it on, and go "UGH NO," and send it all back. I only buy with free shipping and returns, so I'm only out the $$ temporarily (plus also the ass-pain of packaging it all back up and filling out those stupid forms you're supposed to include with the return), but it is a dispiriting process that does cost me, mentally. Christ I wish I knew someone who liked shopping and would do 100% of it for me ...

Now it's back to just stuff where if I give them money, I get products in return. Like from the Gap or Archie McPhee.

For an anxious person, I really am extremely good at finding the silver lining in the clouds -- or, as Ma Ingalls would put it, and I would agree: "There's no great loss without some small gain."

So what I'm thinking about the inexplicable RAIN OF REPUBLICAN SHITBURGERS that was Election Day is: At least I won't be getting an anxious, hand-wringing, chickens-running-around-with-their-heads-cut-off money-begging email every seventeen goddamn seconds from Nancy Pelosi, Act Blue, DCCC, Wendy Davis, Jim Dean, Howard Dean, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Cecile Richards, Planned Parenthood, Organizing for Action, and/or any of the randos involved in comms for any of these people or their orgs. It's been quieter in the old in-box, which is somewhat of a relief at this point, after months of this shit.

You have to learn how to take care of my things, Shelly.

Halloween post coming, but it was getting long (that's what she said) and I wanted to put this somewhere that is not Facebook where my mom will see it and offer some pitying, Jesus-based corrective that I did not ask for: 

I went to put on earrings on Friday night -- cute earrings, lightweight, but on the j-hook type of backing (as opposed to a post or a ring). I haven't worn earrings in ... hell, fff ...ive years? more? could my own wedding actually be the last time? surely not, the holes haven't grown over ... but I actually don't remember when it was. Now, back in high school and jr. high, wearing crazy earrings was My Thing. I had these great long fringy ones, some gigantic fake-jewel ones, root-vegetable ones, all kinds of shit. But I just straight-up haven't bothered in forever. And but so: Friday night, I was like, these Laura Palmer senior portrait earrings are hilaaaaarious, so I put them on -- and after about twelve seconds, I couldn't stand the swinging weight of them -- COULD. NOT. FUCKING. STAND IT. It felt like I had wire coat hangers stuck through my ear-holes, with coats ON the hangers, and I could already feel my too-hi-toned-milady, allergic-to-everything-but-24K-gold-or-sterling-silver earholes fiercely rejecting the lo-class metal of the hooks (I'd forgotten about that, dammit), and I had to take them out with a quickness and apply hydrogen peroxide, stat, to stop them getting seriously infected (again). Boooo.

The "You Pay $8.95" Tax Plan

Due to a strange confluence of circumstances,* I am now a member of more gyms than I have legs.**

The workouts I do at my #1 gym of the moment -- a fancy place -- are part of a fancy-place program of mainly HIIT/Tabata style workouts that kick your ass (and abs, glutes, erector spinae, hip flexors, neck cords and whatnot) in 45 minutes -- I LOVE these sessions, honest to Shatner.  And but so the other day, I went to like a starter Pilates class -- you have to take four before you're allowed into the real Pilates classes that are part of this program -- and encountered the teacher, this totally strange spacey lady, for the first time. She was like what Sybill Trelawney looks like in my mind, if Professor Trelawney weighed 87 pounds and wore loose-fitting yoga duds. She spent 35 minutes on breathing (I wish I were kidding), and the rest on floating judgmental comments into the air, at no one in particular, about "those other workouts" (the ones I like) in which "people abuse their bodies" and how "some people" aren't interested in the "mind-body connection." So I'm lying there, "tightening my pelvic cradle on the exhale" (not a euphemism), thinking GOSH, Judgmental Pilates Lady sure is judgmental!

That's ... all I got for ya, pals.

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*Briefly, it is this: Summer 2011, I join a local bare-bones gym with a childcare area staffed by one of the warmest and most wonderful caregivers I've ever met. Summer 2014, I grow bored enough with treadmills and elliptical machines to seek out other gyms with good GroupX offerings; I find one, via a friend I'd like to see more of anyway, and join up. Three days later, THREE DAYS, I get a response to a weeks-old pitch I'd made, via email, to yet another, fancier gym, in which I proposed that I get to do their new, fancy, expensive workout program for free in exchange for blogging about it. I never thought in a million years that they'd accept this pitch -- but it was a damn good 'un, and I guess they felt the same, so until I get those other memberships canceled or suspended (which I think takes an Act Of Congress? I've petitioned Nancy Pelosi, haven't heard back, she must be busy), I'm a member of three (3) gyms. 

**MICK! That one was for you! Dave Barry's greatness will never fade! I've recently rediscovered him, because a copy of Dave Barry's Greatest Hits that I picked up for 50 cents at the Friends of the Library Sale is what I read, most nights, sitting on my daughter's bed trying not to lose my shit absolutely while my daughter faffs around NOT getting ready for bed. 

Kurt would've wanted it this way.

I already know that the gals' clothing section at Target looks like the infinite version of most everybody's closets from Cowburg High School, c. 1990 right now. And it is mostly amusing -- sometimes in a bitch, please kind of way, sometimes in an ... ahh, youth kind of way. But that still does not prepare me for the sad trombone of the heart that happened when I saw a Nirvana 90 album-cover print on a poly-blend, made-in-some-third-world-hellhole sleep T-shirt in the lingerie section.* I mean ... I know what they're doing, which is figuring out that Gen X has money (and nostalgia issues) and that the Kids Today might like to represent the oldies. But -- it's just -- ugh. It was right there, staring out at me, and -- injustice on top of injustice -- on the same rack with that awful tattooed Sublime cover and a fucking KISS one. Ugh. Boooooo!

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*which I am just passing by -- I've learned my lesson about cheap bras and underpantalones.

GILF

At the gym I go to -- which is a low-cost but perfectly adequate operation, full of parents of young children (whose children go, like mine, to the Kids' Club to watch random snippets of Frozen or else that one about the princess and the frog?) and cranky retirees who look put out that it's come this, at last -- there is a car always parked in the far end of the lot with the license plate FXYNANA. It's one of those Cube thingies, or whatever -- like a literal box on wheels, marketed as like a rolling dorm room for The Kids Today but bought exclusively by the 55-plus crowd.

And for the entire three years I've been going there, I've suffered a stupid twinge of annoyance whenever my eye falls upon this license plate (I have a longstanding problem with non-witty, non-easily-understood vanity plates). I couldn't figure it out. I thought it was something about "fixies," which apparently is some sort of annoying hipster thing about bicycles?  Or ... is it ... an acronym? Should I read it right-to-left? Goddammit.

Today -- TODAY -- I realized: it means FOXY NANA. As in, a grandma who is (still? or perhaps newly?) foxy. And right away -- well, as soon as I got over berating myself for missing it all that time -- my brain said to me, in the Seinfeld voice when he's complaining about the pirate shirt, "But I don't WANNA be a foxy nana!"



----------------------------
I'd like to be -- you know, fit and healthy, and take care of myself, and dress well and have good hair and all, and I hope Mr. Gleemonex still finds me doable forever and ever -- but I don't wanna be chasing "foxy" when I am a grandmother (or of a grandmotherly age). Is there nothing, NOTHING, that we can just let go about our youth? Have some pride! Gosh!

California is both the greatest, and the worst.

Goddammit, we have to talk about vegetable lasagna. Or, rather, vegetable "lasagna," because that is some air-quote-deserving bullshit right there.

Why do people think that people who don't eat meat or just don't feel like it today would rather eat a goddamn panful of wet gross zucchini and wrong-textured bell peppers sliding all around over the noodles instead of: CHEESE LASAGNA? The kind that is just like the traditional meat version, but without the meat? It's the same people who, if you say you don't want meat on your pizza, will come back to you with a pizza-like item that is fucking covered with two pounds of broccoli and red onion and (again -- AGAIN -- with this fucking stuff) zucchini. What the fuck is that? I didn't say I wanted a fucking farmer's market on top of some bread, hippie! And listen, don't try to tell me that the vegetable "lasagna" or the Jolly Green Giant "pizza" is healthy, or even "healthier," because it's not -- you already made the decision to eat something that is basically carbs and cheese, so own it, and get that cock-knuckled vegetable shit out of my face.

Makes me actively wish for Global Thermo-mooooo-clear War.

34/40

Y'all know that noise from the old Hanna-Barbera-style cartoons, that percussive noise I've always called in my head the "lickety-split" noise? Where a character is trying to beat feet somewhere real quick-like, but for a few seconds, they're stuck in place while their eyes bug out and their legs just pedal uselessly in a cloud of dust and/or other legs?

I fucking hate that noise. It drives me out of my goddamn tree, and it always has, since my earliest memories. Total rage-trigger.

So it is especially unfortunate that my kids' new favorite show, a computer-animated ball of suck called "Tickety Toc," features this noise on the reg. Multiple times per episode. In between this christing cow character's christing "moo" wordplay (e.g. moooovelous, moooootivation, a-mooooo-zing, etc. forever), that is. I had thought that the worst thing was to find oneself staring into the fathomless void of Dora the Explorer's eyes as she waits for you to repeat "las estrellas!", feeling the dread and angst of all life and knowing the cold bleak infinity that lies beyond.

But no, it's that fucking lickety-split noise, followed by some asinine remark by Tommy or Tallulah, capped with "abso-moooooot-ly!"

"It was just as if everyone had swelled."

20/40

Your Aging Body at Forty: An Occupant's Manual

--If you are going to drink alcohol, then you need to drink a lot of water. Yes, it's going to make you have to go to the can like five hundred times, but trust me, it's the only way to get ahead of hangovers now. Pound a glass of water for every two beers. It won't fix how tired you'll be tomorrow, but come sunrise, it'll keep your brain relatively well-tethered to its moorings inside your skull instead of banging around in there like monkeys in an Ebola ward whose keeper has already crashed and bled out.

--Plan to get those wee patches of eensy little red spidery old-lady veins lasered in the fall or winter. It's painless and relatively inexpensive, but the bruising is comically vivid and surprisingly long-lasting, and shorts are really out of the question for a fairly long time.

--Spend money on the right undergarments. Athletic bras & underwears, everyday pantalones, bras that fit right and make your chestal region comfortable and happy-looking. Don't settle for ill-fitting crap anymore; bodily youth and elasticity can no longer make up the difference, and besides, you're old enough to do this for yourself now.

--Rejoice at how much easier it is to accept your own body than it was when you were younger. We all have our issues -- some new, some lifelong -- but it is now time to revel in the feeling that most of the issues you have, you can be all " ... [sigh] ... oh well," (or "Shit yeah, lasers for my birthday present to meeee!") instead of "OHMAHGAAAAH I HATETHISSOMUCH FFFFFFFFFFFFFF GODDAMMIT!!!" It's nice, isn't it?

It took me awhile to get this many items; it was a happy decade, but fraught with a certain kind of angst and agita that I am glad to be over with.

2/40

Things I Miss About My Twenties: The Complete List

--Oh, to have that kind of recovery from The Drinkening ... the quicker metabolism, the ability to sleep till like TEN A.M. holy fuckballs

--FOX "news" not even being a thing

--Letters. Like, paper mail. From one person to another person.

--Having all four grandparents and a set of greats still up and kickin'.

--Weed. That shit was fun.

It's turned us into a nation of people who say stuff like "open concept," as if that's even a thing.

These days, whenever I'm mainlining HGTV (which is often. like, really often. shamefully often.), I generally prefer the home-renovation shows (Property Brothers, the weirdly addictive Flip or Flop*), but I still see a fair amount of House Hunters and its various Law & Order-style spinoffs (HH International, HH Renovations, etc.).

And my favorite part of every House Hunters, always, is when one of the twerpy newlyweds realizes what a world-class pain in the ass their partner is. You can actually see why 50 percent of marriages end in divorce: It's because somebody married someone who, when they're both standing in the walk-in closet of the master bedroom (WITH a camera crew), cannot stop themselves making that stupid fucking joke that every nimrod makes about "Haha ok so this is great but where does YOUR stuff go?"

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*Which Mr. Gleemonex and I are both hoping someday shows a complete, total flameout of a flip -- where Tarek & Christina lose their entire investment and more, ending up selling it for like twelve hundred bucks. 

On the plus side, I'm considerably better at mixing a gimlet with fresh lime juice and homemade simple syrup, so there's that.

Skills You Would Think a Person Would Get Better at Over Time But Which I Am Actually Getting Worse At, as the Years Go By: A Partial List

--Parking: I really hope the people whose house my school drop-off secret ninja parking spot is in front of aren't interested in creating a video that will get six billion hits on YouTube, because damn, a supercut of day after day of me hitting the curb (to find out where it is), pulling forward a bit, reversing, hitting it again (even with the back-up camera in this hi-tone vehicle), leaning out of the passenger-side window to check how close I am, starting over, forward, backward, forward, backward, sideways, up ONto the actual curb, crazy angles, eventually winding up 23 inches from the curb with the front way farther out than the rear end and deciding fuck this, it's good enough for the next fifteen minutes, then hustling my kid out (because we're now late enough to have missed Flag Salute again) ... would be an entertaining entry in the Bad Lady Drivers Being Mocked By Misogynist Dudebros genre.

--Cracking eggs: I've been cracking eggs for thirty-two years now, and I always did an OK job, very rarely got a shell in there, didn't have a problem getting the contents to their intended receptacle and ONLY to their intended receptacle, the waste looked pretty much like two halves of an egg, emptied -- but over the last few years, I've slowly devolved into the agonized, disgusted and hopeless "before" actor in an infomercial for something that ought to get its own post on The Worst Things for Sale.

--Skiing: My richest friend('s parents) took me and four other girls via private jet to New Mexico when we were in fifth grade, and paid for a week of semi-private skiing lessons for all of us. We put in full days on the slopes -- like opening-to-closing hours. I learned, and I loved it, and it was awesome. Over the years, I went a half dozen more times, mostly with church groups (although there was one notable trip with Berwie and her dad, where we spent all our non-skiing time in front of the fire in the cabin, reading Sassy, drinking instant coffee, and trying to figure out how to get guys and/or liquor, with a 0% success rate on my part) -- I got even better, and still loved it. Then there was a gap of about ten years where I didn't get to go at all, for various reasons financial and geographical, but on my first trip to Tahoe after we'd moved to California, I picked it right back up again -- exactly where I left off. Little did I know that that would be the pinnacle, from which I would forever slide, cursing, out of control, unable even to pizza-pie my stupid skis, sweating and glaring and eventually huffing back up with one ski on before falling all the way back down in an ungraceful wet heap.

May the odds be ever in your favor!

For the fives of you who might occasionally check in -- I'm not gone, but every second of my time is either Kid Gleemonex birthday-related or sunk into this massive freelance project that I woefully underestimated ... ay yi yi.

But wait -- before bed, and while brushing my teeth, in the last week I read Hunger Games (first of three books) and OMFG y'all, it was good! Where has this been??? I mean, I know where it's been -- in the mind-ghetto I put it in, next to a bunch of good-for-nothins like Twilight, which is an actual good-for-nothin, but somehow this one made it out* and -- dannnng. Loved it, can't wait to read the other two, now must see the movie. Probably in 2029, when Danger Baby Toddler graduates high school and I have the time for a feature-length presentation.


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*Got into Head Start, had a couple of caring teachers, got into a weird fringe rich-person sport taught to it in afterschool club by some earnest my-parents-are-on-the-country-club-board-but-I'm-gonna-make-a-real-difference types (and participated in the heartbreaking but ultimately uplifting documentary on same), got a scholarship to a private school and is Ivy-bound. 

Cameltoe City, USA

Things I Wrote In Meetings, Date Undetermined, Found in Notebooks I'm Finally Getting Rid of Now That I've Been Free of the Old Day Job for Over a Year Thank the Living Shatner, Which Things I Do Not Remember Writing Nor Do I Remember the Meetings That Caused Them: Continuation of a Series

--Idea: Axl Rose branded line of hot rollers and hot roller accessories

--Put your arms down, you look like an asshole. 

--Food trucks? That's your big idea? FOOD TRUCKS? Jesus. 

--The millennials don't want to be pitched to. SON, WHO YOU THINK INVENTED THAT? Fuck all y'all. I'm sick of hearing about how they want "conversations" and we don't own our own brand. Fuck you self important ADD motherfuckers. Go do a fucking group project and eat some cereal.

--yes, I am staring at your boobs

--[Yet another large drawing of the logo for my fantasy used-book store, Here Comes the Sun.]

--I want you to write ... a theme.

--[Yet another large drawing of a lawn sign for "Chuck Finley, Importer/Exporter"]

--Buy your sofas, chairs, ottomans, love seats, recliners and daybeds at Sofa King -- It's Sofa King Awesome!

--Please Jesus get me out of this before they try to make me videotape myself and watch it.

Bite the wax tadpole

Dear Sirius Satellite Radio,

I am a big fan of your enormous array of channels and programming options, and I enjoy partaking of the popular, alternative and fringe music of the 1950s - today. What amazing depth and breadth you all are capable of covering, with every single recording ever made, available right at your fingertips! What fun you guys must be having, essentially making mixtapes for all of humanity all day and all night on your hundreds of outlets!

But I do have one question, about an obscure band called "U2" from the 80s: I love that song "With or Without You," but I have to ask -- why did they never make any other songs? I mean, they seem so talented, so passionate, so amazing -- it's just inexplicable how they turned out to be one-hit wonders, much like this other obscure 80s band, "The Police," which had that mega-hit "Every Breath You Take" and then just disappeared. I don't get it -- I know we all rock out hardcore to the immense back catalog of the Pretenders, and it goes without saying that we need to hear every B-side jerk-off Madonna ever made in the entire 1990s and 2000s, but it just seems like such a damn shame for U2 and the Police to have fallen into obscurity so quickly and completely.

Time for a "Where Are They Now?" reunion special or something? Here's hopin'!

Love,

Gleemonex

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PS: Genuine Gleemonex Endorsement: Phantom Planet's The Guest (2002). My ancient iPod played "Always On My Mind" for me this morning at the gym and it was a lovely moment and then I remembered how much I loved this band back when Schwartzman was in it. 

They're real, and they're spectacular.

Note to self: Please, please stop trying to buy bras via the Internets. You keep doing this, and doing this, and doing this, and all it gets you is shipping charges, dashed hopes and body dysmorphia. Go to the goddamn store and get goddamn measured and try on some goddamned bras. Yeah yeah yeah you got two kids, when're you ever gonna have an hour to stand in the goddamned Macy's dressing room getting harassed by the bra lady. I don't know, figure it out. Christ. You with the Internets bra-buying.

You know the deal with those tiny little carts they got

A Few Things About and Around Whole Foods Market

--It costs me sixty American dollars to get out of that store, every fucking time, and I am not even kidding. It's like this weird wormhole in space where the tab always magically adds up to within a couple bucks of the number 60. Doesn't matter what I'm buying -- fruit and some pizza dough plus a bottle of wine? $58. 67. Milk, some breaded chicken breasts,* little cloth baggie of bulk pine nuts, couple of tiny pastries? $61.30. Shitload of Annie's pasta, some odds and ends from the cheese case, ciabatta, more fucking fruit? $60.09. And btw, fuck you, nine cents, for standing between me and perfect harmony with the universe.

--If you want to know where all the body-positive, gender-fluid vegan hipsters of the ass-end of the Silicon Valley earn their legitimate bucks for spending on tattoos, ear stretchers and art supplies, I can tell you: It is at the Whole Foods Market. And incidentally, though one may have been conditioned to expect Attitude directed your suburban SAHM way from such hip, artsy-seeming folks, these gentlepersons are really nice and extremely professional in the performance of their jobs. It's a pleasure to interact with them, honestly.

--Just saying something is a bagel does not make it a bagel. This is not only a Whole Foods problem -- some of these are national brands of breadlike round food product -- but I notice it there because I spend a stupid amount of time in their bread section trying to find something edible for less than eight dollars, and goddamn it, those fucking things are not bagels. They're just not.

--The local ordinance banning single-use plastic bags seems to have effected a revival of the lost art of grocery bagging. You BYO reusables (at all stores, not just WFM), and since you get a 10-cent discount per bag for the BYO (instead of buying paper bags on the spot), the checkers are encouraged to use the fewest possible bags -- it's actually really neat, how efficiently, quickly and thoughtfully the bags get packed, instead of everything just getting tossed randomly into fifty flimsy crappy bird-killing plastic trash bags.

--Oh, the sad/hilarious '70s "health foods!" The whole store (and indeed, half of your local Safeway, these days) is full of amazing, appetizing locally-sourced/sustainable/minimally-processed yada yada yada, which is the way we understand healthy eating these days, but every once in awhile you come upon a product which has not had a graphics redesign since its 1974 launch from Jim & Helen's yurt on the commune, some terrible bricklike cake of grain/vegetable/carob pressings from which you can actually feel the waves of good-for-you obligation emanating out of its game little hippie label (featuring sunbursts, way too many words always including "nature" and "earth," and/or the resigned mug of some poor kid whose parents are determined shall never ever taste the vile poison of Wonder Bread). You mock it in your head, then you are shamed, thinking of how it's Jim & Helen et. al. who started us all on the path to this point in space and time while everyone played a couple decades' worth of "Let's Laugh at the Hippie!" ... but still you're not buying it. Because yucko blucko, man.

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*Because I have done cut up my last chicken, y'all. I mean it. HOWLING FANTODS.

From the darkest depths of a neverending Project using tools that were most emphatically not my choice

Microsoft Word, you go to hell.

You go to hell and YOU DIE.