My coworker told me about a great dream he had last night (and I swear to god I am not making this up):

Apparently Sir Water Raleigh and Hulk Hogan were fighting for the hand of Queen Elizabeth I.

That's all he told me. I needed to hear no more. After you have a mental image of Sir Walter Raleigh and Hulk Hogan beating the snot out of each other, while Queen Elizabeth I sits off to the side watching and applauding softly, you've pretty much had it all.

This whole dream thing brings me to something I can bitch about, which is really why we're all here, now isn't it? You know what sucks? When you tell someone about this great dream you had, like the masterpiece mentioned above, and they come back with "Oh, yeah. I guess that's weird, but let me tell you about the dream that I had". Whereupon they launch into a description of the most mind-boggling, technicolor dreamscape, beyond your wildest imaginings: "Dinosaurs with chicken heads swimming through oceans of rice pudding, complete with an appearance by superstar prop comedian Carrot Top, who dropped by and gouged his own eyes out with a live salmon. In my dream, toast was used as money and the king of wombats ruled over all he surveyed from the silken walls of his castle made of Jamaican Allspice. Your hair and fingernails grew inward instead of outward, complicating haircuts and manicures to a ridiculous degree. Elvis was still alive and running a VCR Repair Shop...etc etc."

But I digress. The point is that at least half of the time, they're making it up. It's the pettiest form of one-upsmanship that there is: the "my dream is better than your dream" syndrome. This phenomenon is akin to the "lack-of-sleep braggadocio" which we have all been a party to at one time or another:

"Good gosh," sighs your coworker. "I only got five hours of sleep last night."

Sensing your opportunity for self-aggrandizement, you leap into the fray with a chilling tone "Five hours?" Then with a wistful look in your eyes, you say "I wish I could get five hours of sleep. I get more like two and a half" which is of course a complete lie as you were snoozing away, making icky sleep noises for a good 7 hours last night. This will continue until both parties reach a unit of time which both agree is too ridiculous to allow the charade to continue.

So today I had to have a picture of myself (well,my hand anyway) taken holding the company's product, because I have big hands and it made the product look small. Draw your own conclusions.

Anyway, after we took the picture the photoshop guy took the background out and I inserted the photo into a brochure I'm making in Quark XPress.

"But Kafkaesque." I hear you cry "Why must you trouble us with this boring tale of your humdrum existence?!"

Because, my friends, it started to get a little bit creepy. Here I am, fiddling around with what is, ostensibly*, a picture of my disembodied hand! To make matters worse, the photoshop guy had kind of feathered the wrist-end of the picture, making it really look like a severed hand traveling around the page, re-justifying text all willy-nilly.

And even worse than that, I saw a film last night called The Crimson Rivers, starring internationally recognized Stupendous Badass Jean Reno, and the movie featured numerous shots of severed hands! Including a whole bucketful of them. Yikes! The movie, buy the way, is ok if you're into Stupendous Badass Jean Reno. Otherwise it's a little disappointing. Top marks on the severed hands though. Very lifelike.

So what I'm getting at here is it was creepy. Did I mention that? Well it was. I'm going to curl up with some chamomile tea now and try not to think about it, until I go to sleep and have nightmares about my severed hand and serif fonts.


*For fun, use the word "ostensibly" in every sentence you can until people start to notice and stop inviting you to parties. "Ostensibly" is a word you can use to make yourself appear smarter than you actually are, which is always nice.

By the way, that last post was my official entry for "most nonsensical and uninteresting post of the year" award.

*fingers crossed*

I was thinking about The White Seal today. Not the show with the white basketball coach. That was The White Shadow. No, I'm talking about The White Seal, a seasonal cartoon for kids that was about the dangers of clubbing baby seals, because if you do club baby seals, you will be menaced by a white seal, which as we all know is pretty scary. I remember digging this special when I was a pup, though I don't think they show it anymore. It was probably too traumatic. In some corner of my mind it is linked to a horrible film they showed us in grade school that featured a field full of prairie dogs being blown up using copious amounts of TNT. Of course, it was very similar to another Rudyard Kipling cartoon: Rikki-Tiki Tavi, which was about the dangers of being a King Cobra when there's a strutting mongoose hanging around the veranda.

Anyway, what I'm getting at here is that I think these sort of stories scarred me emotionally as a child. I get too worked up when I see them and end up sobbing like a little baby.

Whenever there are animals on screen, I know trouble is afoot. When you've got a cute little dog in a movie, he may as well be wearing a red shirt on Star Trek: his fictional thread will be cut short just as soon as you, the viewer, grow attached to him. Don't even talk to me about Where The Red Fern Grows. I'm getting choked up just thinking about it. Or The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

Where's PETA on this one I ask you? Protect the fictional doggies! Let them no longer be used to tug our heartstrings! Make their existence more meaningful than simply a plot device!

Christmas Music from Santa on Monkeybike.

I defy you to read the text on this site without bleeding out of your eyes. I think the Monkeybike-Santa connection is something best left undiscussed.

Oh stop! It's just too good. Santa Cthulhu!

I hope you have all been keeping the faith on that "boycott Clamato" thing in my absence. We will bring Clamato to its knees! Not to suggest that clams have knees or anything. Maybe they do. They're probably just biding their time on this whole evolution thing, awaiting their moment to rise and claim the earth by divine right, smashing the state underneath the awesome grandeur of their Red Tide. Just imagine the glorious tiny deep knee bends!

Anyway, maybe mobile pants and clams will fight it out one day on Pay Per View. We can but dream.

The reason for me being incommunicado for a stretch was of course that Thanksgiving reared its turkey head and I was at home and therefore subject to the whim of AT&T Broadband, which sucks a mammoth amount of ass. Or butt, if you prefer the PG version. We were unable to get DSL in our current digs, and therefore were forced into a Cable modem situation. One of the great things about having a cable modem is that you get a modem which looks like a cross between the shiny black Alien head from Aliens and a suped up Future-Toaster (which, in itself, looks a lot like a shiny black alien head, without the second jaw thing or as much ichor dripping from its thristing snout thing). Sadly, though the modem looks keenbean and all, it is:

a. incapable of remaining vertical on my little computer rack, performing a near-nightly ritual in which it pirouettes daintily and falls over on its side, owing to it being shaped like an alien head and all. Actually it kind of looks like a shark fin too, though I wouldn't recommend anyone making soup out of it.

and

2. seldom functional.

When it works, it's fast as something very fast. Say, one of those lizards that run across the water on their back feet. That kind of fast. Way faster than our DSL was. But it goes out with stunning regularity and when it goes out you can:

a. Take all the wires out and go eat some cereal. Usually a high-fiber choice like Just Right or Special K will do the trick, though sometimes you have to kick it into high gear with some All-Bran. Then, after you have had some internal flora exercise, you return to your computer den, where you patiently reconnect all the wires, wondering if you should do it in some special order, or if maybe you should have tried the Cookie Crisp, with the end result being that it still doesn't work.

or

2. Call the apes at tech support who will tell you to disconnect all the wires and wait a while and then reconnect them (they never even mention what you should snack on in the interim, which I feel is a major factor in their low success record). The end result of this will be that it still doesn't work. If you really pester them they get all defensive and threaten to actually send one of their goons to your home where he will disconnect and reconnect all the wires, and probably clear out your pantry while he's waiting. If you push them past even this sad state, they will just say "powercycle the modem" until you hang up.

That's enough about AT&T.

Another thought occurred to me while we were cooking up our turkey this Thanksgiving: by living on the fourth floor of my apartment hive, I am placing an obscene amount of trust in the people who live below me. This thought really hit me when I began to hear a chorus of smoke alarms going off in the building. Then, it got worse when I realized that most of my experience with my fellow apartment drones is hearing them sitting in the hot tub of an evening and making hooting noises. Best not to think about it.

~~~

Another thing here: What do all seven of you think about having a "comments" feature on this here weblog thingy? Email me and let me know. Of course, if I did enable comments, there would be no calling me a chucklehead or doing anything but lauding sycophantic praise upon me. That would be OK right?

Just a word on this whole "mobile pants" thing:

I am hopeful that soon there will come a day when you will be able to purchase pants that will hold your laptop as well as your PDA, along with maybe the yellow pages and medium sized rocks. I envision a future in which pants rule the earth! People carry around so much weight in their voluminous pants pockets that they lose all ambulatory power, in a cruel twist on the "mobile" pants theme.

Then, after experiments to free ourselves from the shackles of our mobile pants, the pants become saturated with Gamma Rays (much like Bill Bixby except that he's a dead actor who turned into the Hulk and hosted a TV show whose title I can't remember but which I think had something to do with Roald Dahl, and the pants are not) and become sentient pants, roaming the land in gargantuan herds, dragging their sobbing owners behind them as they do terrible things that pants have always secretly fantasized about, like...well...bad pants stuff.

Hmm this sounded much more interesting when I started.

Oh well. Have a Happy Thanksgiving everyone. Eat lots of turkey and enjoy the wonders of bloating, napping and breaking wind with the rest of the country. I know I will.

I am currently rockin' in the free world. If any changes occur to a. my rockin' or non-rockin' status or 2. my location or its relative freedom, you will be notified immediately. Should a loss in rockin' status occur (which, though unlikely, is within the realm of possiblity) more rockin' will be added until an acceptably rockin' level has been restored.

You say you want free access to page-long paragraphs about unspeakable Old Gods? Well, buster, here you go.

Quantum Tubers.

There's nothing particularly wild about Quantum Tubers, except that it would make a badass band name. Also, it's fun to say in a voice like people have in old Roger Corman movies when they come around the corner and realize that all that genetic tampering the government has been doing with cuttlefish has finally produced a 500 foot tall, really pissed off cuttlefish. Let's all try it now: "QUANTUM TUBERS?! Why, God? Why?!?" Then we fall to our knees and weep openly at man's hubris.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

On a completely unrelated note, have a look at my good friend Sasko Sam, the South African Bread Man.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Also pretty much completely unrelated: Very cool T-shirt.

A documentary about Kafka's distant cousin, Egon Kafka. When I heard "Egon" Kafka, I was hoping for more of a Ghostbusters-meets-Kafka sort of thing, but what can you do?

Useful fact about Kafkaesque: I was once beaten at Ping-Pong by a midget. Swear to god.

Yipee!

Going to see Sparklehorse tonight. Can't wait.

Grievous plans have been set in motion for the future look of this site, like for example making it not look like crap. That would be a step in the right direction. I hope people are getting the idea that I am from the "Less Is More" school of blog design. In actuality, I am from the "What the Heck Am I Doing?" school of blog design, but don't let on.

Oh, and by the way, I am mourning the loss of a blog entry that included such highlights as:

· Julio, the suicidal bagel shop manager
· Why I am, in fact, better than him
· The unknowable name of God

Not necessarily in that order. But, of course, the all knowing Blogger pooped on it and took it away for ever and ever, so it will remain a subject of myth and legend but nothing more, until one day the lost entry surfaces in an abandoned mine in Peru, the product of an elaborate hoax and some restless gnomes.

Let me just finish today by saying that it is probably a good thing that the whole "Gnome" craze faded almost entirely from the public eye, remembered only by nostalgic folk such as myself who remember that in the Nick Jr. cartoon "gnome" series, the voice of the lead gnome was Tom Bosley of Happy Days, Father Dowling Mysteries and Glad Garbage Bag fame. I'm not talking about your garden variety gnome here. I mean those guys with the red caps and beards that were cropping up in books and on the side of innocent coffee mugs in the 80s. Sends a chill down my spine just thinking of it.

I will one day put actual links in my entries. For reals this time.

So since this whole "living every day in at least relative fear for your life" thing started, we wake up every morning and put on CNN. A few thoughts have occurred to me as I munch my bagel or my scintillating mix of Corn Flakes and Frosted Flakes (a devilish mix which summons up bizarre mascot ideas in which Tony the Tiger must be cross-bred with that green chicken Corn Flake thing. The whole "weakening of food" principle has loomed large in my life as I have gotten older: Watering down the Orangina with some mineral water, tempering the sugar-bang of cereal with analagous, blander and altogether less pleasing flakes. It is my firm belief that I am not backing away from the sensation of full-powered food items, but merely decreasing the frequency with which I sample their delights, with the objective that when i do eat a bag of Pop Rocks, say, my head will become fully rotational from the sugar rush and I will be able to join a traveling freak show, a career choice about which I have so often fantasized.)

1. All CNN anchorwomen are slowly gravitating towards the exact same haircut.
2. Why do I care about Paula Zahn's haircut?
3. I really really really want to play RISK on the giant map they have over there at CNN. Can you imagine the rush of power as you stand in a ten foot long representation of Kamchatka, eyeing the west coast of North America with a steely glare as you boldly stride across a huge plastic representation of the dotted line across the Pacific?
4. I find myself distracted by the people who have their desks directly behind the anchors' desk. What are their lives like? They must know that they are visible. I bet their friends call them up while they're in-shot and have them make some secret signal. I have experienced momentary thrills of excitement when I have caught one of them in a secret on-air bite of a danish, and I once saw two of them engaged in a lively discussion which was obviously in no way work-related. They're like the CNN Elves, cobbling together the stories for the clueless anchors, ready for a heartfelt delivery in which the anchors approximate sincerity and act like authority figures, when we know they're really only worried about their outfit.
5. They have some strange commercials on CNN. I don't know if it's because the spots are extremely cheap, but they seem to take an almost sadistic glee in running the commercial for the 15 year-old opera singer's greatest hits ad infinitum.
6. Wolf Blitzer = No longer the cool and hip dude he once was, now relegated to a supporting role, like some crazed and disfigured Phantom of the Opera, lurking in the highest CNN scaffolding and soiling Larry King's wardrobe in a sad plea for help.
7. I promise not to watch CNN tomorrow. I really mean it this time.

Thanks to everyone for your support in the groundbreaking write-in campaign, but I feel it is my duty to support Dodge Ram as the new mayor of Truckville. It was a close race right up to the end, but when Dodge Ram got Aerosmith's endorsement, I could see the writing on the wall. So please join me in lending my support to Dodge Ram, and let's all try to get behind big ugly needless trucks in their quest to rule over all they survey.

Well, that wasn't technically true.

What really happened is that your old pal Kafkaesque turned 30. A (my wonderful wife) took me to Point Arena, where we stayed at a rad (as the kids say) Bed and Breakfast called the Historic Coast Guard Inn, and did some wine tasting in the Anderson Valley.

So there really wasn't a whole lot of rasslin' going on. Unless you count the luxurious bathtub in our room where I rassled a loofah for a while until A explained to me that a loofah is not technically alive, and therefore not a legitimate rasslin' foe. For an inanimate object, though, that was one tough loofah. Maybe I'll reconsider this whole rasslin' thing.

And A also planned a surprise party for me, which I have never had before. All my buddies showed, except of course for Bungee Benji, who's on a deep cover assignment in Costa Rica, being professionally cool for the government.

Did I mention I have the best wife in the known universe?

Well, I do.

OK, I know I haven't updated this thing for a week or so, but I was unexpectedly called away to go rassle stuff. That's my new thing: rasslin'.

If you need any critters and/or varmints rassled for any reason, just drop me a line. I understand that some of the reasons for the desired rasslin' may be of a personal nature, so you don't have to go into detail. Your anonymity is assured. As long as I get to rassle something, I'm cool.

You may also be required to sign a waiver in case of damage to yourself or any garments, particularly suede garments, that may be incurred as a result of the aforementioned rasslin', because, as you are probably well aware, once the rasslin' starts, it can get ugly right quick.

OK. That's it.

**Clam Signal**

I never got any free stuff from the Clamato people, and now all bets are off. Please join me in a complete boycott of any and all Clamato products. I know this will probably entail actually starting to consume any Clamato at all, which may give some of you the willies, but this is important!

Honestly, you could probably get away with just telling everyone how much Clamato you used to drink before some idiot with a weblog forced you to boycott your favorite bivalve beverage. It'd be your word against theirs, after all, and who wouldn't take your side? No jury in the land would convict you! Feel free to give in to the spirit of the occasion by describing huge troughs of Clamato, to which you may have added whole Clamfruit, for added clamness, that you would consume nightly in a vast clam juice orgy of truly biblical proportions.

They'll be sorry. Oh yes.

I'm sorry. I know I haven't posted for a few days, but I have been deeply involved in the assembly of IKEA furniture. I may have gotten a little too involved. At one point I managed to trap myself inside a Wall Unit for six hours, only freed when a kindly group of dextrous Swedes liberated me. So of course, that was a little traumatic, but the upside is that I am now totally modular and can be expanded to hold everything from kitchen utensils to an entire entertainment system, using only an allen wrench. My nose can be placed in up to four different positions, in case you're having company over and need that extra space. It also seems that my legs are now available in birch, beech or medium-brown veneer, which will be handy for assimilating into foreign cultures where birch veneer is the norm.

Thank you, by the way, for not including the shelf hangers in my wall unit packaging, kindly Swedes.

So we recently purchased one of those fax/printer thingys. Mere days after bringing this little bundle of joy into the Stygian depths of our study/computer lounge, Fax Spam started to spew forth copiously. Fax Spam is mystifying to me. Admittedly, many things are mystifying to me, like how TV works and why a tomato is a fruit, but that's beside the point.

Do they just keep trying numbers until one of them happens to be a fax machine? I picture legions of pathetic lackeys shackled to phones with lots of shiny buttons that don't really do anything calling number after number after number, their cruel, hunchbacked supervisor leaning over them and lightly brushing their pasty neck with a riding crop, whispering "Was that one a fax number, you fool? No? Oh yes, the whip I think."

So they determine I have a fax machine and just start hurling garbage at me, on – and this is the best part – paper I paid for. Why just today the good folks at Wendy's somehow decided that I was in dire need of a FREE CHICKEN SANDWICH! and sent me some convenient coupons. What a nice guy that old man with the heart trouble must be.

After I get done with my sandwich, it's off on a delightful CARNIVAL CRUISE for a mere $299! But the fun doesn't stop there. Then I can buy toner from people who use clip art cheerleaders on their flyers. That must be some damn good toner.

But the real coup de grace, which I'm keeping under my hat, is the HOT STOCK TIP which showed up on something that looked mindbogglingly close to a copy of the Wall Street Journal. Oh, except that it was on a letter-sized piece of MY paper and seemed to consist only of an article about how it would be the very height of depravity not to divest my entire life savings and invest in UniverCell Holdings (OTC BB: UCVL: PARROT TURD).

Oh no! I let the name of my hot stock tip slip! Now all seven of you reading this will be able to reap the gargantuan gains which can only be gained from unwanted crap shooting out of your innocent fax machine. Horrors!

Thank you, Fax Spam!

Today, an investigation into a strange behavioral anomaly that has been cropping up across this great nation of ours much like one of those frosted strawberry pop-tarts, especially in that if you stick it in your mouth too soon you burn the crap out of your tongue. Sound familiar? That's right, I'm talking about Cat-Dancing.

Just look at the delight:

Monica & Buster

I can't even begin to guess what's going on here.

Someone is just off camera throwing this cat.

And again, the weirdness.

And not to be excluded from the current cat artistic renaissance: Cats That Paint.

Feather Fondue.

Feather Frontier.

A little something I like to call: Cat In Bathtub Making Huge Mess.

All this is taken from the awesomely peculiar: Museum of Non-Primate Art

Umm, bird crap art?

Mallard poo as art.

Maybe this is a joke. Can this be a joke? Who among us would not leap at the opportunity to pay over $100,000 to go on this expedition, where "Generally, he will become more fully conversant with all aspects of Tibetan cat charming." Tibetan Cat Charming. Hmm. This had better be a hoax or you know that Rage Against The Machine guy will be all hot and bothered either protesting or supporting it. I'd say he'll probably come out in favor of Tibetan Cat Charming if he gets to wear one of those wooly Tibetan hats. Tough angry singer types love those things.

It has to be a joke. They misspelled "Scholarship" for one, and their research includes the development of a "Walkcat". Oh and the study of day-glo cat spray.

Please let it be a joke.