Tag Archives: humor

Sep 10 2012
4 Comments
Fiction, Humorous, San Francisco, Writing

Fake Backstories of San Francisco Neighborhood Names: The Sunset

When living in the city gets too exciting, head to the sunset.

Stanley Kubrick loved to eat dry toast in the morning. A tortured, artistic, soul, he refused to put anything on his bread to soften its coarseness or ease its transition down the gullet, as he wished to be reminded of the dull, dryness of everyday life and its sad, petty cruelties, all of which he captured in his film 2001: A Space Odyssey, which he filmed in San Francisco in the neighborhood to be known as the Sunset.

The filming of 2001: A Space Odyssey took over ten years, largely because Kubrick insisted that the bulk of the movie be endlessly interweaving psychedelic patterns that he created by rearranging small pieces of colored felt on a gigantic black felt board. Because of the area’s damp climate, the felt board would invariably become wet and unusable from fog moisture, which leaked into the studio despite his best efforts, and the team would regularly shut down filming and have a pint or two at Durty Nelly’s, where Kubrick would always talk at length about the dry toast he ate every morning. After the fourth year, the film crew tired of the same spiel and especially the phrase “petty cruelties,” so it was a great relief when the film was finished and released to great critical acclaim, something that surprised everyone without exception. Stanley Kubrick ate an extra slice of dry toast the morning he read the NYT review because he tended to quash feelings of excitement with bland, unpleasant food.

At the time of Kubrick’s film involvement in San Francisco, the Sunset was called Fogtown, which was an accurate name though the residents hated being dismissed as fog dwellers and portrayed in the media as “too moist to be human.” The fog people would often protest the rampant media prejudice in the Financial District during lunchtime, when they would blockade the entrances to sandwich shops, cafes, and public transit entrances with their very bodies. The distress was unbearable and the stock market suffered accordingly after every suit was forced to pack a lunch during a full week of lunchtime lie-ins. The police department decided to take action.

Stanley Kubrick, an artiste, decided that the only proper way to experience the film of his heart’s desire was to project it on a sheet that blanketed a building, and shut down the entire downtown area in order to subject movie-comers, hot dog vendors, and passers-by alike to his brilliance. Besides, the fog people were planning another protest on the day of the movie’s release so most people were prepared for mayhem and un-productivity. Secretly, the police lay in wait with banana cream pies with which they would lure the fog people’s off their soggy bottoms and away from sandwich shops.

A carefully orchestrated blackness descended over the city, summoned from the incredibly disturbed and misunderstood mind of Stanley Kubrick. As the movie flashed onto the screen, downtown bustle ground to a halt, the only noise heard the occasional flapping of a tourist’s map. In the alleyways, police readied their pies for the fog people.

The film meandered, reached its climax somewhere, and then denouemented and ended. The crowd lay, sat, stood, or leaned in awe and confusion at what they had just seen. Munching on a piece of dry toast, Kubrick rose and spoke a few words, the most important of which were these:

“This was filmed in Fogtown over a period of ten years. I have grown old there and am now reaching the sunset of my life (he wasn’t actually old—he was just being dramatic), and I remember a day in January three years ago, when I saw the sun sinking into the ocean and imagined myself as similar to the sun, a brilliant orb also seeking the depths, which I have found now in the sunset of my years because of this movie (again, he’s just being dramatic), and in the neighborhood that shall now be known as The Sunset.”

And the people did cheer and everyone did eat banana cream pie and the name stuck.

And that was fake history. Because research takes time.

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Sep 07 2012
17 Comments
Guest Posts, Humorous, One minute read

I regret teaching my dog to lick my face

And for today, a great guest post from Thoughtsy of Thoughts Appear as she shares with us something that she immediately regretted doing. After reading this story, even though it is short, I felt very real pain for everyone involved, except the dog.

I immediately regret teaching my dog to lick my face

Never teach your dog “kisses.” Ever. Just stick to the basics, like “sit” and “stay.” Maybe even “shake” just to be polite.

Our new puppy, a cute little bundle of fur named Ozzy, loves to put everything in his mouth. Including my face.

To teach him that licking is ok but biting is not, I started saying, “kisses” and offering up my chin for the slobbery sacrifice.

Now Ozzy gives kisses on command as well as whenever he’s in someone’s lap. Most importantly, he never nips anymore.

On a ride home from the vet, instead of something going in Ozzy’s mouth, something came out. Puke. In the car.

While my boyfriend cleaned up, Ozzy and I went inside for some cuddling.

With his tail attempting to wag, Ozzy trotted over and collapsed into my lap, and we cuddled.

Thoughtsy: Poor puppy. Come here, Ozzy!

Boyfriend: Is he okay?

Thoughtsy: Yeah. He just needed some hugs and kisses.

As his panting, puky breath wafted up to my nose, I gagged. And Ozzy’s slobbery tongue licked not only my chin, but the inside of
my mouth.

Thoughtsy: The puppy just made it to first base!

Boyfriend: Let’s just make sure he doesn’t get to second….

Ozzy practicing 2nd and 3rd base maneuvers on his toy.

I immediately regretted teaching Ozzy to lick my face at the word “kisses.”

I also regretted not buying more mouthwash the last time I was at the store.

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Sep 06 2012
16 Comments
Food, Humorous, Writing

The Horrifying True Story of How My Sister Ate My Fingernail

I already threw these away. I promise.

Dearly beloved, I have gathered you here to tell the terrifyingly, heart-wrenchingly, skin-crawlingly true story of the day my sweet, sweet sister ate a fingernail, my fingernail. Come with me, if you will, all the way back to that that fateful, surprise-filled day in July.

It is Monday and I am in San Francisco. I flew on the big steel bird all the way to fogtown, a place I still unknowingly call Sunny San Francisco. It is not sunny here, but oh it is to be even more cloudy and dreary in Suburb, Oklahoma.

Backstory: For years I’ve had the charming habit of forgetting to throw my fingernails away immediately after clipping them. This simple action tends to slip my mind, along with the middle names of significant others. The pile of clippings sits quietly on the coffee table, or desk corner, or languishes in the crease of a newspaper until I spot it a couple of days/weeks later and think to myself, “the socially appropriate thing to do here is to throw it away” and then throw it away. There are rumors that friends invited to social functions at my home have been forced to stare at piles of fingernail and/or toe trimmings, piles that are within broad view of God, myself, and the guests, while they interact with me. I deny these rumors.

But woe to my dear sister, my poor, sweet, innocent sister as she eats a sandwich on that Monday. She is famished and eats with gusto. Growing up in a family with four sturdy children, we learned to not let food linger on our plates lest it be snatched by another sibling. Wasted food is unheard of. As she wreaks the final justice on her sandwich, the moment of despair approaches silently, for a fingernail clipping lies on the very table where she eats, a keratin sliver I had charmingly and endearingly forgotten to remove before my departure to the West Coast.

The sandwich gone, my sister’s hunger not quite sated, she pokes about for remnants of her quickly-eaten lunch, checking for substantially sized crumbs and perhaps a scrap of ham that has fallen to the wayside.

But beware dear sister! Not everything is as it seems upon this lunch table! Danger prowls outside your door!

Alas, my warning goes unheard, typed months later in a blog post on the internet.

She picks up a crumb of notable size and unusual shape and eats it.

This, dear friends, is my fingernail.

Less than a second passes before she realizes her critical error, her tongue discerning the grossness and general inedibility of the fingernail, which used to be part of my very being. She spits it out, stunned, the now moist fingernail lying on the table as innocuous as a polka-dot.

How had it come to this? Who is to blame here? The absent-minded but generally lovable sister for leaving fingernail clippings out past their due? Or the blind hunger and gastro-greed that led her to clean the table of crumbs?

She asserts it is the former. I also assert it is the former, but I believe we have all learned a lesson here.

Be more careful of the crumbs you eat. You know not which body parts you might be ingesting.

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Sep 05 2012
23 Comments
San Francisco, Travelling

I’m not a local, but then again, who is?

So cliche.

I was born in Colorado, spent three years in West Virginia, lived in Oklahoma for middle and high school, went “back east” to Boston for university, and then farther east to Egypt, and then even farther east to San Francisco.

To many people in California, Oklahoma is just as exotic as the Lost Kingdom of Thormasgurd, except no one wants to know more about Oklahoma. They assume things are radically different “out there” and they’re usually right. Sometimes they even express a fear of going to the middle place in the US because it’s a lawless, conservative backwater where people tie jackets around their waists, and I encourage this by tightening my cardigan around my middle and yelling “Yeee haw!” every time I meet someone.

I remember the first time my parents visited me at Boston University. I’d been away for all of eight weeks or less when they visited in early October, but on the way to Legal Seafood, I felt compelled to show them how city-savvy I’d become by wearing an eggplant J. Crew sweater and jaywalking, often stranding my parents on opposite sides of the street. Instead of proving myself an adroit city-dweller, I pissed off the parentals through my reckless walking behavior and ended up feeling dumb and sweating because it wasn’t cold enough to be wearing a sweater and speed walking.

Over the course of four years, and it did take me four years because I’m a slow realizer, I found that I would never be a local in Boston, that somehow my Oklahoma roots were standing out ever starker on the scalp of my collegiate experience (unwise metaphor?), and that, to my never-ending surprise, I was actually encouraging it, getting involved in things like stew-making and contra dancing and prairie-dress-wearing. While in the northern wasteland, I found comfort in identifying with a mostly mythological Oklahoma, not at all the same one I had mildly despised while growing up. The Oklahoma in my collegiate mind was something else. It was a warm fire in winter and a sense of belonging in a place where everyone was far from home.

Now in San Francisco, I’m finding the same phenomenon to be true. Though I haven’t lived in Oklahoma for roughly five years, it’s still the place I’m “from,” and I will likely be from there my entire life. In cities like San Francisco, many people are in a similar boat. Maybe not one quite as conservative or mythologically rich, but most people are not “from here.” Many are from other parts of California or other states on the West Coast, and they’ve been drawn to the hilly flame of San Francisco like hapless moths, just like I have. Quite often there’s nary a local to be found.

Being a local is a kind of rare currency in this city. It connotes intimacy with a place that so many people desire, and it’s something that can’t be bought or earned. It can only happen or be given by parents foolish enough to try to withstand the expense and private-school calculus of raising a child in the city.

I will never be a local here, no matter how asymmetrical my haircut is.  The only place I am a local is back in Oklahoma. I think that makes me a continual explorer, but it also adds the burden of creating home every place I go, but I guess that’s what we all have to do anyways. At least I’m in good company.

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Sep 04 2012
8 Comments
Humorous

What Do You Do When the Coffee’s Gone

Is there anything sadder? Besides the poem, that is.

When the lamp is on, and the chair is warm, and the coffee’s gone, what do you do?

Where do you go when there’s nothing there, not in your cup, not a drop to spare?

What can you pray, to take the pain away, to smooth the rough edges of another rough day?

What do you know that can whisper to your soul, the way the coffee does, when you’re feeling so low?

And the loneliness is pressing, the wind whipping round, the chill to your bones, the stale coffee grounds.

The dry brown ring, the sad coffee stain, the slight dampness mocks you and your coffee-addled brain.

Oh sweet Lord in heaven

Oh red Devil in hell

I don’t care who I pray to, as long as it breaks the spell

This endless white emptiness, the crushing heartache, the yearning and hoping as I’m lying awake.

For a cup of coffee. Hot. No sugar. Just milk. Please.

Then we can have conversation and pass the pleasantries

And thoughts will float between us, as they do between old friends. That is, as they do, before the coffee ends.

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