L'ombre de Ton Ombre

Who is that bobble-headed woman lurking in the shadows? According to a story running on Michigan Public Radio, it's a human actor called "Eleina Block," pretending to be The One called Rachel Carson. The voice sounds oddly familiar (did I mention she raps? Poorly?), and we all know how unpronouncable/unspellable/unretainable most journalists find T.O.C.E.'s actual last name. Prove my hypothesis right. Feast your ears here:
http://www.glrc.org/story.php3?story_id=2782


p.s. Is the other shadow a human? If so, he has the best nose of his entire species. Kudos to you, whoever you are...

Photogunken Essanderkay

These are taken from a website...

...of German-speaking humans...

...gesturing at objects for no apparent reason.

(thanks be to The Ones Called Sheshunoff for the heads-up)

Good Human Food Rests Under These Leaves.

But not much else, though.

We all know that T.O.C.E. finds endless pleasure in ridiculing the long, unappetizing and cumbersome name of my favorite (and only) dish. But Advanced Weight and Hairball Management has nothing on the menu at the place she and The Other ate last night (www.foodisimportant.com). They left me at Sundown and drove for many miles, "into the middle of nowhere" (which is where I thought WE lived). But no. This is even further into the middle of an even bigger nowhere.

They stumbled back home many hours later, very happy, and with a menu. I snuck a smug peek at the menu after they passed out, rubbing their bellies and cooing, "best meal ever...so good...mmmmm."

Look at this verbosity:
Appetizer: 2 pates with toast points, coarse mustard and bourbon-pickled peaches.
Zuppa: ginger-infused carrot cream soup with habaneros.
The Other's entree: Iowa elk steaks (prepared NY strip-style), with organic Bleu cheese butternut grits, chesnut-and-honey-pickled shrimp and a mushroom salad.
T.O.C.E.'s entree: grilled jumbo South Carolina quail with a smoked duck rice cake, topped with apple gumbo and fried oyster slaw.

I'd never seen those idiots happier. Or more broke, apparently. The moral, dear readers? If you find yourselves in the middle of nowhere (www.mountvernoniowa.org), you can be this happy, too.

Backthefugup; I may barf.

she ate you. 

Once He rhymed "Dracula" with "Scott Bakula"

This just in from London, where Tommorow is nigh...

The One Called Paul, lead singer of the Brit-psychout-musi-kal act, WARBAND says:

"We have been feverishly preparing for WARBAND's autumn tour...

New lyrics of "Like Camus I'm an existentialist / I don't know what the reason I was put on this world for is", and backing vocals that trill "Camus, Camus".

I am also planning to make a T-shirt that says: "I'm AM stupid"
...with an arrow pointing up, of course."

Hey, one called Paul-- send us a photo (jpeg) of WB in action, for the teenyboppers here.
Also a website, if such things are real.

Large Issue

T.O.C.E. just accidentally sent a photo of The Human Called Jennifer Love Hewitt to her 21st Century NonFiction Seminar. All of them.

See, the Seminar collectively blogs on blogspot (www.21cnonfiction.blogspot.com), as do I (you are here), and somehow she ended up sending a photo to the class, and not me. I think she was wanting to show my constituents that, in said photo, the man sitting next to T.O.C.J.L.H. is a friend of hers, The One Called David Conrad. [Hmmmm, "David"... why does that name ring a bell with me?] Conrad and Hewitt are in a show on the TV together called...Songy Challenge. Just kidding. I don't know what its called, but I think its about slaying dragons or something.

Anyhoo, T.O.C.E. is again the ass of the University of Iowa's MFA program. At best she can hope to be considered an endearing eccentric, a la Kramer, for the next three years of her life.

If the nonfictioners happened to check in with the blog before she erased her post, all of her grad school cronies might get the impression that she is a nutter for T.O.C.J.L.H., which takes a very long time to type with one paw. Speaking of T.O.C.J.L.H., T.O.C.E. and The Other One saw her talking on the late night talk show about this new TV programme. She had a lot of gold stuff smeared on her eyelids.

They waited to see a clip of this new show, where The One Called David [David? David? Argh! So familiar! It's on the tip of my tongue...] Conrad plays her husband, thinking maybe he would give the two of them a shout-out. For this same reason, T.O.C.E. will be watching the series premiere, on CBS Friday at 8pm (7pm in Iowa). Yeah, right. Like T.O.C.D.C. will go off script and start waving into the camera like one of those bulky losers that waits outside the TODAY show in 10 degree weather.

ALSO-- T.O.C.E. has taken to spending her classes with her hand over her mouth, after so many of the profs have asked her, essentially, "why are you making that face?" Reason number 122 why she should never play poker. This hand-over-the face thing was working well until last night, when somebody told a very funny joke, and T.O.C.E. exhaled into her palm, which inadvertently created a loud fart noise. She was laughing, but it might have sounded like the laughing made her fart. Or maybe everyone else's laughing covered it up. Or maybe it sounded like a sassy raspberry, sorta Bugs Bunny-esque. The world will never know.

Regardless, view the photo, then continue shaking your head in pity.

This is not a NonFiction Tool. 

Very. Bad. News.

Well, bad news for me, at least. And bad news to anyone that T.O.C.E. speaks to. She's found something to obsess over. That something is called THE SONGY CHALLENGE.

Jump in the wayback machine with old Charlene for a moment, and we'll travel to last month, where T.O.C.E., alone (I was under the bed and the Other One Was in a distant state) and without cable. Aha! She discovers that Iowa City has a terrific public access television station. Perhaps there will be videos of kids' dance recitals-- those are always good for a laugh or a tear, depending on her sobriety.

But that is not what comes on the human TV.

No.

It is a television show that features only one human, a skinny blond one with googly eyes who films himself from the neck up, and 'challenges" various pop ditties versus random objects in his apartment. It is stupid, if you have a brain like mine. If your brain is the lonely brain of T.O.C.E., it is brilliant.

Some of the challenges:

Klezmer Music vs. Footage of his Iguana Shedding
Beeethoven's 5th vs. Changing the Channels with the TV on Mute
Scary Early David Bowie Song vs. A Bruise on his Arm
Be Good Tanya's Song vs. Soulfully Screaming Into the Camera
Radio Song (Creed?) vs. Inside of a Red Pepper

Again, because of her brain, she cannot remember the channel nor the time she saw it. So, at a party a few days later, as she describes it to her new classmates, they sort of stare at her like the whole thing never really happened. Or that it happened inside that brain of hers. I do not blame them. I mean, she's talking about a show that she thinks is called 'Songy Challenge.'

As a rural Virginia principal once said to T.O.C.E.'s Jewish buddy, when he tried to get an excused absence for Yom Kippur, "Now that just sounds made up."

Then The Other One Arrived from his exile, and she raved and raved about the googly-eyed man in the TV box. He was more than a little worried. He looked at me. "Don't blame me," I scoffed with my eyes. She sat glued to the TV in hopes that the program would air and she could show it to him. She begged me to gain the powers of human speech, so I could verify it's actuality. One evening, The Other One went out to a Bar For Writing Weirdo Plays. The minute his car pulled away, the googly eyes of Mister Songy Challenge appeared on the TV, as if he were waiting to get T.O.C.E. alone.

Things are looking up, however. She found a website with a realplayer movie of the show (http://www.patv.tv/producers.html, scroll down to see SONGY CHALLENGE) and she even met a guy who went to high school with Mister Googly Eyes (whose human name is Jamal), thus proving his existence.

Still, her obsession continues, and we around her shudder and shrink.

Some humans are just too purty for cat insults. Other humans are also purty, but in a masculine way, especially when proffering their opposable human thumbs. Still other humans are people T.O.C.E. has never met before, but are now burned into the stones of time by appearing in MY extra-terrestrialcatblog. Oh yeah-- and they're purty, too. Put a sock in it, girls, you're all pretty.

Books for Crackheads.

What's better than doing your human homework on your day off? Rearranging your bookshelf, The Bookshelf Called Expedit. T.O.C.E. has pulled hers away from the wall and is using it as a partition, dividing her Room for Living and Room for Dining (not exactly a room, more like a nook, really). This allow books to poke out on either side of the cubes. This is worsened by the fact that she spent 198 hours of today aranging them in these dummo fake categories:

Books Written By Drunks
(Joyce, Cheever, Hemingway, Carver-- note: drunks rule short fiction)

Books Written by Southerners, Who are Also Probably Drunks
(Faulkner, Wolfe [Thomas], Percy)

Biographies of Drunk Bichettes
(Hellman, Bankhead, Parker, Capote)

The Other One's Obsessions (Books by Weirdos)
(Strindberg, Bataille, Pound)

Books Written by People Born in France
(just guess, stooges)

Surrogate Moms of T.O.C.E.
(Vogel, Welty, Chopin, Cather, Winterson)

Cowboys and Indians
(Shepard, Proulx, Alexie, Peckinpah, Means)

Jews and Catholics
(Francis of Assisi, Greene, Allen [Woody], Kabbalah [the])

Books That Slipped Through the Cracks of her Pissant System
(O'Toole, Atwood, Wolfe [Tom])

Books T.O.C.E. Pretends to Have Read
(Rushdie, Pynchon, Shakespeare, God)

Of course, there are also all these stupid rules as to why Faulkner is Southern before he is a Drunk, but Fitzgerald is a Drunk before he is a Princeton alumn, and why Bataille is a weirdo before he is a Frenchy. I personally feel that the shelf should have nothing on it, because I enjoy crawling in and out of the little empty cubes and pretending I am in a Tokyo hotel room.

PleaseHepMeJeebus.

The Invasion is Upon Us.

Recite text from WAR OF THE WORLDS
(the radio saga, not the daggy human movie)
now.

Let's get physical.

You-know-who is paying the powers-that-be good money to be assigned things like this: "write a 100 word essay on Hippos." Well, she seems happy about it. I'm concerned as to how something so fat can swim. I meant the hippo, of course. Though T.O.C.E. finally started taking my hints about her chocolate-covered granola bar indulgences and joined a gym this week. She went to her first aerobics class and promptly passed out in front of the fecund young undergraduates. I try to stifle the chortles, but come on. I'm not made of wood, people. Uncle!

I have developed my own fitness regimen, involving lots of jumping, attacking, and whining. For some reason, this move to Iowa has granted me an increase of both the Vim and the Vigor.

The JUMPING is thanks in part to our new apartment's low-lying windows (since the place is sunk underground, when I sit on the sills I'm at grass-level) and also thanks to the trunk T.O.C.E. stuck at the foot of the bed. This allows me to leap, like a nimble gazelle, from the floor to the trunk, to the bed, to the windowsill, where, as I sit, my tail thrashes mightily at the chipmunks (also an act of fitness). I do this all of the day and all of the night. If T.O.C.E. is asleep in the bed, I just climb all over her. She loves it.

The ATTACKING is of T.O.C.E.'s feet under the quilt, and of my turtle, who always asks for it. It mocks me, which can never be tolerated.

The WHINING is new. It happens when I have grown bored of the JUMPING and ATTACKING, and do not feel up to going under the bed for my requisite siesta. I follow T.O.C.E. around the house, sniffing the furniture and making plaintive cries. When she tries to pick me up, I run away. A lark, I tell you!

Also, T.O.C.E. came home last night having lost a pie-eating contest. Last. Frigging. Place. The shame is almost too much to bear; first the conking out in Gym, now this. How could someone with her garish appetites ever come in last place of any eating contest? Could've been the 4 beers she drank prior to entering. Oh well-- I've stopped caring.

Dive, comrade, dive!