he said she said they said it said

[insert smartphone text notification sound after each entry below, as appropriate, or inappropriate: piano tinkling, bell chime, shotgun, thunder, guitar twang, lion's roar, fart, burp, post-orgasmic sigh, trumpet blare, car horn, alarm, jet roar . . . ]

Dad: where are you?

Mom: hey, you.

Girlfriend: wyd

Friend A: 'sup?

Brother: hi there

Dad: frown emoji

Ex-gf from 1986: Where ya been all my life?

Sister:  where've you been today

Friend B: wtf

Girlfriend: wya

Friend C: wanna hang out

Ex-gf from 2015: Netflix n chill?

Girlfriend: whats your problem

Sprint: your bill is available online

Other brother: you got 20 bux till tmrw???

Friend C: hey, can I borrow like 20$

Mom: hello????!!???

Girlfriend now ex-gf: fuck offfuck you, you fuk and I'm pregnant

Dad: do you have the keys to the Mustang?

Ex-gf from 2018: I had your baby did you know dat

Friend A: u alive?

Ex-gf from 2015: Im in Kazakhstan dickface

Sister: u no i luv you dontcha

Mrs. Rivers, 7th grade English teacher: it's a gerund; know it now!

National Grid: your bill is overdue. your power will be cut off . . .  

Sister Mary Aloysius Gonzaga de Porres: that's a mortal sin

Dad: HELLO?

Brother: are you coming over now or not?

Dr. Ozcomert: are you breathing?

John Angleterre, boss:  Please be advised your position, and you in that position, have been terminated. Do not enter the premises under any circumstances under pain of arrest.

Sister: g'night love you talk tmrw

Private Number: Your appointment with Probation has been canceled. Please be advised it would be prudent if you were to assume a new name and Social Security number. Leave town now. Better yet, if you have a passport, leave the country. STAT.  

The Clementine Chronicles, continued

Murder on the Disorient Express

Dramatis Personae:

OldWhiteGuy stereotypical converted-loft dweller, goatee-adorned; spectacles-wearer; enough head hair to comb except on the sides owing to stylist's shorning the week preceding; 5'10"; 169 pounds; blue jeans; blue T-shirt; blue-green-purple flannel shirt not tucked in; fragrance: Luna Rossa by Prada; Euphoria by Calvin Klein deodorant; unshaven for several days

Three Ravens pecking at unseen morsels on the roadway or bickering on the chain-link fence or telephone wires

DismemberedClementine* Jackson Pollocked (except for color; goldenrod-clementine-flesh yellow-orange backgrounded by burnt umber wetted, ergo Mark Rothko'ed except for the scatteredness; picture a spherical descent bursting onto the concrete, tossed from an upper-story window; motive and perp, unknown) into 22 segments and/or fragments of said segments, on the sidewalk [see below] by the side exit of the brick former knitting mill; a splayed and still glistening ink-blottish stain artistically placed on the snow-bereft sidewalk as a place setting or as a result of the Capital Citrus Murder (CCM)
*cf. The Laughorist blog post of 2 December 2018

DismemberedClementine Peeled Skin (absent, nowhere to be seen; unknown if peeled in one fell swoop or not)

DeadFish (scales on; head attached; accusatory cyclops-ish eye; absent corpse, nowhere to be seen; cf. The Laughorist blog post of 2 February 2019)

62.8 CCM Suspects (40 apartments, average of 1.5 residents in each minus 1.0 LaughoristDweller [a.k.a. OldWhiteGuy], plus 3.8 happenstance, random street-cred pedestrians) 

Ghosts of Bob Marley & The Wailers

Scene 1: 

Enter OldWhiteGuy, exits building, turns right, spots DismemberedClementine (rest in pieces, R.I.P.), halts, retreats, pivots left, inspects crime scene, counts segments, makes mental notes, turns right again, walks on ice- and snow-ridden sidewalk to car

OldWhiteGuy (posing as Hamlet Lear) (sotto voce): "The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the skin!"

Enter Ghosts of Bob Marley & The Wailers singing: "One love, one heart... Let's get together and feel all right... Hear the children cryin'; give thanks and praise to the Lord ... Is there a place for the hopeless sinner who has hurt all mankind just to save his soul? One love, one heart ... Let's get together and feel all right!"

Exeunt Omnes

something fishy

Exiting my Nissan Sentra, I walked on the crunchy snow in the parking lot. I like that squeaky, stiff, yet hard rubbery sound when the snow is packed and the temperatures are frigid. Reminds me of a dentist putting a filling into a cavity. Though it is after 10 p.m., the lot is brightly lit. Security cameras are strategically placed in a corner and on the sides. Wait. Stop. Rewind. Step back. Is that a fish? It is. A dead fish, mouth and one eye open on its side, scales silvery in the January moonlight. Bloodied in the middle as if shot. The nearest body of water, a lake, is a mile away. This Surprise Fish Presence (SFP) sparks a gazillion questions, some you are already formulating, others being fished from the open air of my imagination. Aside from the obvious how and why it got to this spot, there's the who placed it and was it by accident or on purpose. Was it a coded "sleep wit da fishes" warning? To whom? Not likely me. It wasn't snoozing near my car and its apparitional appearance preceded my parking in this spot anyway. I suppose someone could have gone to the regional market (we don't have a fish market as New York, Boston, Tokyo, San Francisco, and Omaha has have), bought a bass or perch or whatever my Piscean Poseur is, and dropped it, tossed it, placed it, planted it. Maybe it's performance art. I do not know the answer to any of these questions or to any of a myriad queries associated with this Neptunian Mystery. This terrestrial sighting, um, spawned a stinging array of additional questions upon finding the SFP gone two days later. Gone as if never having put in an unannounced, uncamouflaged cameo in the first place. This bothers me more. Did I dream or delusionally fantasize the Unidentified Fishy Observation (UFO)? I did not. It was there. I have no corroborating evidence, no cellphone photo. My observation is evidence-based reality, or reality-based evidence. It was there, staring at my two eyes with its dead-pan unmonocoled cyclops of a visage (other eye peering blindly into the icy snowpack). I was there, and so was one dead unfake fish. It was. Believe me. 

flash point

He sat in his car across the street. Not exactly his car. The bank's. Which is true for most people. He was in the parking lot at the corner, the Sunoco station with the convenience store. It's rare if not impossible to find a gas station that sells only fuel. This one had diverse offerings: candy, dip, cigs, flavored coffees, flavored creamers, beers, sodas, bottled waters (including those with artisanal ingredients of purity, longevity, superiority), chips, cookies, beef jerky, hot dogs, hamburgers, sandwiches, lotto and scratchies. He hadn't bought gasoline. He was about to text a reply to someone, anyone, when he looked to his left, across the street where the strip mall offered cigars, coffee, discount groceries, and ultra-cheap everyday stuff. DOLLAR TREE. Its green display light kept flashing the AR. It made him wonder if it was a personal coded message directed at him, just him, that he was the only one seeing this. He kept staring at the flashing sign. He did not stare at it before he recognized it was flashing on and off, like you see in film noir movies but it's typically a movie marquis, a hotel, or an all-night restaurant for the lonely and lost in Edward Hopper's "Nighthawks" 1942 painting. And now he was hypnotized if that's the word. The blinking AR was just a distraction. Visual background noise. The flashing AR was the metronome for his trance. And his trance incessantly said DOLL TREE. That's what he saw. That's where his personal coded message was, where it had to be, in the words DOLL TREE. If it was said that money doesn't grow on trees, surely dolls didn't either. Not Barbie dolls or living, breathing beauty queens sometimes called dolls but not so much these days. What about TREE? Something to aspire to, to climb? Someone inordinately tall? Someone with great stature, fixity, and bearing? He shook his head, as if it were swatting flies. He shook his head, rousing himself from a reverie. He changed the mental channel. He went back to texting. But he forgot what he was texting, forgot to whom, and forgot why.

cui bono?

The movie "Birdman" did not soar for me. Although the acting performances were excellent across the board, and the filming techniques intriguing, the movie was drenched in the existential searching and posing I thought went out in the Seventies. I liked some of the takes on Manhattan, evoking the somewhat squalid Eighties, when I worked there, more than the current Disneyfied version of Times Square and its environs. Oh, I get the reality versus fiction versus fantasy stuff. And the back story about worth and authenticity and identity blah blah blah. Cui bono? To what good? The writers and directors took themselves über-seriously. Sorry. Pretentious claptrap. Not buying it. Save it for the Gauloises-smoking crowd.

20 answers

"The answer is in the question." -- Zen Saying.

Zen Calendar notation for September 28, 2010.

1. green
2. red
3. sometimes
4. half of infinity
5. the other half of infinity
6. sententiousness
7. serial comma
8. tabloid
9. aural
10. Kazakhs cordially courting Cossacks
11. perch
12. el Greco
13. Picasso but not Kierkegaard
    
14. Dali
15. a grid of intersecting boulevards masquerading as haiku prayer wheels
16. pious pies of colorful pi
17. patrician accents with square jaws on Sutton Place, Manhattan
18. soberiquets
19. anonononymity
20. silencio