Laundromat

There's mud
in the washer there's mud
in the dryer
If I wash our clothes there will be
mud no matter what
If I don't wash them, they
will just keep getting dirtier, and when
I get home, my spouse will be mad, and what
will the neighbors think when
they see the kids in dirty clothes?
Everyone is fighting
Why am I even here? Sucksforthesepeopleandall,
but why am
I
here? Oh right, my reliance on foreign
groceries. Let me
explain, the supermarket is in
the same plaza as the laundromat. Oh,
and there's also that
woman who folds, she
sucks my cock
My wife won't
swallow, she holds
it in her mouth until
I'm asleep

I could buy a washer/dryer, but
there's a cost up front, and
the machines are
wasteful, at least
according to my fucking son, who is going through a phase.
My wife is on his side. Sorta.
She knows
who's in
charge. He'd have us hand wash, but
Who's got time for that? Certainly
not Mr. Up at the Crack
of Noon.  And line drying? I don't want
anyone
seeing my underwear.

There's
so
much dirty laundry, how
did it get this bad?
Normally I just throw
everything in the machine
and walk away. These people
keep arguing.
Who put that mud in there, anyway?

NYC Fringe Festival

I was reading the capsule descriptions at NYC Fringe Festival a couple weeks ago, and I noticed certain recurring themes and gimmicks, so I decided to write parody ones and present them to the general public and see if people could tell the difference.  I have provided a list that includes both sincere summaries of plays that are actually being performed in NYC for $18/ticket right now, and shit I made up.  See if you can tell the difference.  Answer key in comments.

1)  SLUT

SIXTEEEN. Pre-gaming. Empty ABSOLUT bottle. Luke, GEORGE, Tim. Back of a CAB. RIPPED underwear. HANDS everywhere. NO! Through the eyes of NYC teen girls, FACE the choices and EXPERIENCE the fallout from ONE life-altering Friday night.

2)  Snakes I Have Known

On my 16th birthday I find myself buck-ass naked and snake-bit outside my front door in Nowhere, TX. There are all kinds of snakes in my life. Some are reptiles. It's my journey from DFW to JFK, y'all.

3)  The Rise and Fall of the Kinky Wizards
Skateboarding. Pop culture references.  Kleptomania. Box after box of hair dye from CVS.  Come witness the tale of Vince and Justin, the skateboarding shoplifters from cult classic film High Fidelity as they nearly redefine the sound of the 90's.

4)  Next

Having lived on a boat for 3 years and published a hit novel inspired by it, Holly struggles to find anybody to deeply relate to. Former Gilmore Girls writer Julie McCullough takes you on a journey into loneliness and confessions over mojitos and explores difference between relief and real passion.

5)  One Way Out
What do you get when you throw a neurotic Jew, a retired Filipino stock trader with high functioning autism, a heart surgeon who is a single mother of three, a Parisian cartographer from 1850, and James Joyce and trap them in an elevator?  Not much, until Friedrich Nietzsche starts speaking through a one-way intercom and reveals that one of them has a gun.

6)  PUSSY

A lesbian couple whose love is on the rocks, their overly curious landlady and one very opinionated cat ... this love triangle is starting to get crowded. 

7)  Stanton
OH NO'S! Looks like the playground has been taken over by bullies!  But not just ordinary bullies, vampire ninja bullies. Stanton has no choice but to team up with a band of warthogs to fight the battle against not only the bullies, but mutants and cultural hegemony.  

8)  The Order of the Cape

From the ashes of a mysterious apocalypse that wiped out most of mankind, a new society forms with comic books as the guiding template. Fanfic is the new Shakespeare, Superman vs Batman is the new holy war in this deep examination of the influence mythology has on society that draws thought-provoking parallels to the world we live in.

9)  HORSE PLAY The Musical 

Horses place the bets as a NYC carriage driver falls in love with a woman intent on banning horses from Central Park. A rock score drives this universal tale about life, freedom and how love of horses brings people together.

10)  Ex Machina

Two Smartphone factory drones must learn to coexist while under threat from fascist anti-union politics, drunk guards, and a sexy anarchist unfettered by the laws of physics. A dystopian dark comedy about dancing, Nekko Wafers, and the thrill of rebellion.

11)  See Jane Give Up Dick
See Jane. See Jane Give Up Dick. A highly sexual Manhattanite attempts to give up ‘giving it up’ for one full year. See Jane discover if putting an end to her slutty ways can be more rewarding than multiple orgasms.

12)  Manic Pixie Dream Girl: A Graphic Novel Play
The darkly comic story of a struggling artist and his mysterious muse, told in the style of a graphic novel. MPDG is a beer-drinking, pop-culture referencing, punch to the theatrical gut—more High Fidelity than Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf

13)  Katie Broke Up With Me       

Guys, Katie broke up with me again, and it's for real this time. So I sold my DJ equipment and wrote a puppet show about our relationship and how bleak my future is without her. I asked Bill Oldham to do the soundtrack, but he didn't get back to me in time. I'd describe the puppets but I'm almost out of sp

14)  The Rufus Equation

Nerd + Math = Sex. What's love got to do with quantum physics? Professor Bert Rufus is awkward with women – especially with the alluring physicist Alys Smith. Bert invents a secret device that will shock the world...and might even get him laid. 

 15)  MONOCULAR MAN

In the era of Viet Nam, Woodstock, and dot-matrix, everyone's making bombs, including our long-haired, short-winded, one-eyed hero. "Explosive," "literary," and "comic," MM travels suburbs from Swampscott to Miami, taking on race, privilege (his), manhood, and fried chicken.

16)  Stretched Thin
Carolina's years working the donkey show are behind her, but the bare spot on her resume has relegated her to lousy retail jobs. Her roommate Julia has a masters degree in comparative lit and has found herself in a similar position.  Join this unlikely pair on their journey of learning what really matters in a tough job market.

17)  Step Three
Floyd is a jaded Vietnam vet who recently came out of the closet and lives with his ex-wife, their unemployable son... And a trampoline that can predict the future. Get rich quick schemes collide with old grudges and the result is hilarity, emotional healing, and the time travel paradox sometimes all at once!

18)  Just a Minute

Freddie Burks is a struggling playwright who is on the verge of a breakthrough that would save his career, his relationship, his credit score, and his dog Muffin. All of this relies on one phone call, but he hasn't paid his bill and may lose service any minute as he argues with his fiancee and his mother keeps calling.  Oh, and there's someone holding a cocked bow and arrow in the background.

19)  A Fallopian Fairy Tale
Maligaya is on a mission "to take the pink out of Princess and put it back in the pussy." With her pitch for a Disney meets "Girls" children's book at stake, stories from her life expose a less charming reality. 

20)  Mind the Gap

Have a seat as a table full of New Yorkers and Londoners hash it out over whose respective countrymen are the more insufferable tourists.  The true setting, however, is the real mystery in this cerebral comedy driven by witty dialogue and geographical minutia. If you can correctly guess the location at the end, prizes include gift certificates to local restaurants.

Galore

Every few steps
I see myself
Find
Everything
more than everything else
Pile verb
Albatross ring toss
Pile noun
And it's all free
Decisions pass like a hula hoop
Concentripital and forced
I don't know how I
Get away
with it
And always left with
Empty hands
Feeling
full
Feeling
full
Groping
clever
Between the stroking
and the pile

I sprouted
From a cave seed
It's immaculate if I stay away from the walls
Dancing with shadows
Of vagina dentata
If touched they stop growing
That is why I support this hula hoop*

*Paid for by the Campaign to Re-elect Hula Hoop to City Council.

A Letter From the Atlantic

Dear Ian,

I am writing to humbly request that you stop trying to use me as inspiration for poetry.  Yes, I know that I let you pee in me*, but I have to draw the line somewhere.  It is not that your verse in inherently bad... I mean, it is, but that is not what I take issue with.  Were I to address every line of awful poetry put forth on my account, I would be constantly writing notices and would probably just draft a form letter.  No, yours is especially intolerable because it is fraught with precious concepts ensconced in banal inaccuracies. I would like to point out a few of them.

First of all, you were musing wistfully about whether you were standing in the essentially same water as the Pacific Ocean.  The answer is "No, you're not." Water molecules are all unique, regardless of their similar chemical reactivity.  I am certain that if I heated you to 212 degrees, you would react the same way most people would as well.  I am going to go ahead and anticipate your wanky post-modern rebuttal of "But there is no essence that marks water as 'Atlantic' and 'Pacific', humans made up those handles, all the water is one."  You clearly followed this logic as you spoke your desires underneath waves, as though this "unified water of the world" is your personal messaging system.  Did you receive a response?  No, you did not, so stop reading Buddhist texts summarized on people's blogs.  Or is this that David Foster Wallace graduation speech again?  Ugh, that keeps popping up, and whenever it does I get people staring at me saying "This is water. This is water.", while estimated figures of their student loan debt flash through their mind.

And then, as though completely unaware of how this contradicts the thought you just had, you started trying to phrase the process of how the specific water that heard your words will spread them gradually until all the water carries your message, a thorough display of both narcissism and poor knowledge of geography. Watching you try to weave metaphors from that was like trying to watch someone build a sand castle with an empty soda can.

Also, that butterfly did not land on your head because you were born of the universal salt waters an hour prior and it wanted to grant you new life, and it was not lured by the traces of life-giving sea salt.  It was lured by your shiny bald spot.  If you want to write a poem about that, be my guest, but keep me out of it.

I know that you heard a song called "Dead Sea" last night and you may feel like the Dead Sea or that you are wandering the Dead Sea, but guess what? I consulted the internet and discovered that neither of us are the Dead Sea.  If I was the Dead Sea, then that crab that punctured your toe would not have been there (because, as you acutely observed, very few creatures can live in the Dead Sea), and if you were the Dead Sea, you would be several thousand miles away and full of people with nasty skin conditions who are too cheap to buy ointment.

Your version of "if you love someone, let them go, etc" adapted for the ocean was nothing short of hackneyed, not to mention full of human privilege assumptions.  First of all, way to go for the first and most basic concept of the tide.  Second, do you know who decides whether something returns from the ocean?  Me.  I know that from your perspective, it may appear as though people are acting of their own agency, that is a very carefully performed act.  If the ocean was involved in that saying, it would read "If you love someone, let them go, unless it is in the ocean, in which case you should hold on to them until they are safe on dry land."

In closing, your pathetic meandering thought process is not only amateurish and full of fallacies, it is boring, and that says a lot coming from me, my favorite show is "Continental Drift".  Good luck continuing to compose verse that is a Wes Anderson parody of thought provoking or deep.

Fuck you and suck my balls**,

The Atlantic Ocean

*Actually, that's kind of a turn-on. Oh god, don't tell anyone I said that though.

**Of course I have balls. If you didn't go to a Catholic school, you'd know this.

Complex - Street View

"So I guess you heard..." I didn't know exactly how to respond.  The living legend of her Uncle has become a regular legend of her Uncle, the final installment of the summer blockbuster she was the reluctant fan of.  He's the Twilight series.  No, that's not fair; he's Star Wars, and his death is the end of the prequel series, and she just realized this is her last chance to see it in theaters... as though there won't be countless IMAX, 3-D, and laser light show opportunities to explore his legacy. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  Now is not the time for callous jadedness, quite the opposite.  Not my specialty unfortunately, where most have tenderness and compassion, I have probing questions and seemingly cold academic curiosity.  I have only hunches of what my final wood sculpture of her relationship with her Uncle will resemble, and my Dremel and chisel set are biased. Of course they were close, I knew this the way I knew disco and punk were close, the way I knew missiles and fireworks were close, ----------------------------------------------------------------------------  "Yeah, there is a note posted on the bulletin board over there. They still don't have anybody's email address." Fortunately she wasn't listening.  "He left me the complex." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  How many times have we bumped into each other at the nearby laundromat and talked until our clothes were dry and room temperature about the injustices of her Uncle's building management.   ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- he made us feel powerless and trapped in an otherwise nice historic building in an extremely desirable neighborhood.  Then there was his habit of seducing his female tenants and then thinking he could blackmail them when they got boyfriends...  He has selectively chased away everyone we even began to make friends with until all the tenants are men with predatory inclinations to be ignored at our peril.  -------------------------------------------------------------------------- "I'm not glad he's dead."  ---------------------------------------------------------- I replied to myself, "Yeah, definitely, nobody deserves to die." ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 

 -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------  She deserves most of the credit for developing into the independent, self-driven woman she became.  He provided a nice dwelling for her, but her teenage years were fraught with instability.  Once she dropped out of middle school to help his girlfriend sell pills in a Walgreens parking lot as part of a pyramid scheme (which, as it was later revealed, was because she was actually addicted to the pills), she began the momentum of self-sacrifice that would define her through her developmental years and beyond.   He was funny, charismatic, and, to an extent, emotionally supportive, but only when it benefited him and the building.  When she got her GED and started sending college applications, he told her to shoot for the stars, but kept her busy with menial tasks at the complex, which were of course always in abundance, until the threat of her leaving was reduced to one or two night classes per semester at a local community college.   His "family business" was the closest thing to stability he ever knew, with a blur of girlfriends and partners he sabotaged into obscurity, and the weight of rationalizing this falling on her shoulders.  Her energy for bearing this weight was so easy to mistake for reciprocation, a machine of perfect efficiency.  Except now he's dead and she still carries this weight.  He maintained her the same way he maintained his building... you might even say he saw no difference between them.  

Whenever she complained to him about the conditions and demanded an improvement, ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- she felt obligated to be grateful.  ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------.  Her lack of entitlement was bladder the size of a skyscraper,  and as her complaints grew more dire, ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- only shifted more weight onto her.  His penance became more extravagant and more useless, especially since she had no room to put it so she ends up donating it. Ironically, the local St. Vincent DePaul thrift store made her a nice plaque, for which she had no room, so she removed the dedication tag and went to donate it to the Salvation Army across town (to avoid hurt feelings).  She was robbed en route. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Faced with the grizzly prospect of having to settle the books, pass an honest inspection, and decide what to do with the building, we realized our only option was pretty much what we always do: get high in the alleyway.  It either helps me engage with people more emotionally, or makes my pointed questions seem less insensitive.   "Do you want to be a landlord?"  "Fuck no! I would burn this place to the ground if I didn't care about the neighborhood so much."  She felt guilty as her words echoed.  Our frequent desire to redact and reshape our words is a strong tenet of our bond.  "But if I'm going to clean up the place, I should probably still live there, right?"  After a long pause, she confesses, ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------   "I understand.  But I want to help you so you don't need to do that. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  I need to give her time to recognize the parallels between her situation and my relationship with my father.   ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------, the rats in her building were a place holder for what would inevitably come to the surface.  She had not mentioned ghosts before, but she sounded frightened and vulnerable and had latched onto something as so many feelings passed through her fingers.  I knew that right now was when I should let her reach her own conclusion.  Unfortunately, I asked a really practical question about testing her theory with an exterminator.  ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In my ham-fisted kindness she only saw more clutter. "Definitely not. Why should I put you guys out... and what if the ghosts follow me?"  I wanted to scream into her ear that she needs not worry about this, but for once I was discreet.  I asked her more about the ghosts.  Maybe she would calmly realize what I want to write in chalk on the cement floor.   "I've blocked them from my conscious mind for --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Now his death has made me realize that what I thought were rats were ghosts all along.  They stumble around my apartment... do ghosts normally stumble?  They jingle keys at me that are worn down from overuse, but I let them in anyway just to make the sound go away, and out of mercy.  Maybe if I let them in from the cold for a moment, they will warm up enough to move on."  When you discover that someone is haunted by the same ghosts as you, it is basically like being in someone's bedroom when they just got home.  It is best to quickly climb out the window and down the fire escape and knock on the front door.  Unfortunately, I just climbed into the fire escape, left the window open and started describing my ghosts.  I could see her relating to my experience, and while it drew us closer it did not seem to ease her trepidation.  As I poured out my explanation, I noticed that I was floating and drifting away from the momentum of my words.  Was I actually being pulled up to my own fire escape?  She tried to follow me to listen, she was so intent on understanding, but we were speaking over one another.  -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  As my door swallowed me, I tried to yell out that ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- and that her abandonment would -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------, but I am not sure if she heard me.  She sent me a text message from the airport the next day, saying she will be traveling abroad and her phone will be out of service.  I found my laundry neatly folded.  I felt bad for yelling about the pregnancy, but -----------------------------------------