No I Would Not

Today in a parking lot someone said to me "I can give you a good, free, estimate to fix the rust on that car, man." And I said no because I don't need an estimate to fix the rust I need paint and also because I don't normally accept services in parking lots and then I also did some thinking. Why do people promote free estimates? Have estimates ever not been free? Was there a law, similar to the Social Security Act, passed during the Great Depression to scour the burden of once costly estimates from the economy?

And why do we say other things like "new and improved?" Has anything "new" ever not been "improved?" Even the iPhone 5S had that fingerprint-dealy. 

New look same great taste!

I think some people just need to admit that their protein bars never tasted that good and no level of minimalist packaging is going to save that.

33% More Free! 

Has anyone openly admitted to raising the price of their product? 

"Buy the new Gillette Super Lazor Razor Shavor, it's super expensive!"

Fat Free! 

Now this one is pretty innocuous I just mention it because as a kid I thought it meant the fat content of the ranch dressing was not included in the price and therefore a better bargain. However, I could also add that the fat content of your product is irrelevant went you consider the sugar/preservative/sodium/shoe-foam-rubber/polonium content of that same product. A bag of sugar the size of my head is fat free.

I'm out of good ideas. Tell me some other slargons (slogan + jargon) that you see all the time and have always thought were a little pointless. Someone who is good with computers and imagery should make me some ads that are honest and non-hyperbolic. If you do I'll send you something cool and improved with 33% more if itself.

Here's a Thought

I don't know what it was that convinced me that everyone had it figured out but it was probably something like someone I don't even like getting married or having a second kid. That usually does it right?

So then I'm in the bathroom mad as all fucking hell at winter with the drops of water all over my body feeling like tiny planets passed the Heliopause and my beard looks like shit and there's toothpaste on my nose and it occurs to me I don't have it figured out. Like at all. 

Titrations

Residual heat comes from the western wall of a masonry building long after the sun is slunk below the furthest twig of pavement you see. Lean against it; feel it creep around under your shirt like a microscopic domesticated mammal. Pick a star and start there counting. Lose track as clouds.

Wile the way down steps toward your door and put on anything. Sounds of some kind. Turn off all light and then turn back pretend or hope the dark smoke clears with the switch. Strip. Sit at your desk on cold metal. Pimple at the pricks of your follicles and their cells and their nerves. Put on layers of the nicest thing you own. Fill with smoke. Sweat.

Figure the ocean has answers. Ask the questions. Get only waves in reply.

Figure the sidewalk talks. Go five miles and take the bus back. Diesel.

Figure a bottle sings. Play the flute of it; the jaw harp of it.

Palpitate your corners, joints, joists, abutments.

Focus your myopia on grid and dictionary. Compose yourself; look straight.

Moment passes. She leaves without so much as asking you to call tomorrow or suggesting that she will. And so you lean against the still, hot bricks. Your high school chemistry would crystallize a laundry blue liquid into flakes of silver with the addition of something in equal proportions mole and catalyst. Now the precipitate is words but they walk towards cabs and buses opposite where you are sitting subterranean or suborbital: windowed in.

To crystallize these things. The microscopic sensations off the bricks, the appearance of a footprint drying on the sidewalk, the light reflecting on and off of the acrylic lines on the road as cars pass. Where ordinarily your solipsism would permit your reticence there is found a glowing wad of extroversion.

Scour surface for answer. The Internet and it’s Whitmanic lists and shopping malls and those malls’ lists. Part and parcel enigma of emotion to satisfy character count. Slowly slowly dissolve the usefulness of pixel and bandwidth axle.

Question arises moonwise as while you sit next to the speakers on loud and want to crawl into them and walk in circles around the grooves of the record with the guitars and synths following you like ivy and sunlight.

The artifice of intention realizes itself in a heap of fur at the foot of your bed and the motion of moment is the liquid your brain and the hot room and the condensation of alcohol and the tap of  beat and bass in your subterranean or suborbital room.

Photographs do not have wind, paintings do not have dust, a song does not have temperature. Artifice of artifice all things are artifice.

Swimming pool deep end of room by the drain hover. Calculate and extrapolate formula upon panic attack worth of figures to cram this into a bottle that you can hurl out into the hot street to break and splash and dry and break again in the thunder of the storm you see out over New Jersey.

Bitches Ain't Shit

Roughly two weeks ago VIDA  posted the 2011 “Count” revealing the still painful disparities between the roles of men and women in the greater literary world. VIDA’s work is meant to be a launching point for a conversation about the cultural perception of women writers. The numbers are meant to be factual and completely non-judgmental. They are, of course, still sad. Having worked in the trenches, sloshing through table of content after table of content for the organization to help provide the numbers to create the lovely pie charts you see on their website, I felt it was only proper that I give Cannoli Pie a thorough going over. I consider myself to be a feminist and had actually been under the impression that Cannoli Pie would end up with more women published than men. I was wrong. Counting only literature contributions (not letters from either myself or Claire, nor visual art, nor Joe’s recipes) we ended up with a 58/42 split with the scaled tipped to the patriarchy. What shall we make of this? Well, considering this magazine was co-founded and is co-edited it had always been the intention to make sure that gender representation is equal. These numbers point out that there was a lapse in what we considered to be one of the main tenets of Cannoli Pie; it was simply ignorance of our own numbers. This is why we count; to examine and understand the trends taking place in publishing. Clearly, from here Cannoli Pie needs to be a bit more conscientious of just who we are printing. I am not, of course, willing to sacrifice editorial standards for affirmative action style gender pandering. It is more insulting to publish women because we “have to” than to not publish them at all. At least we could pretend the latter is due writing merit or the lack thereof. Rather the right thing to do is to be conscious. Owning our fault is the first step to inviting more women to contribute by indicating we are a publication which is committed to women writers.    

As a bonus to go with "the count" we also have a magazine. There are poems and other round things inside it. Happy Women's Month! Happy π-day!

P.S. our website is undergoing yet another makeover but in the meantime you can read the Issuu edition of our magazine by clicking on the Cannoli Pie link above.

Sorry I Didn't: a Post to She Knows Whom

Sorry I didn't buy you a bundle of crimson sex organs grown in a warehouse in the Meadowlands by immigrants making less than I do with chemicals that have more constiuent parts than I do. Also, I meant to pick you up a polysteyrene ursus americanus holding a facsimilie of symmetic ventricles but the pick up truck along Hylan boulevard only carried ursus maritimus and the ventricles more closely resembled arotas which is frightfully illogical if you really understand their distinct functions

I didn't pay thirty-two yuan for a sheet of recycled paper thickened up with petro-resin and embossed with half naked infantile angels and someone else's words professing something about someone, perhaps you; sorry about that.

Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave my heart into my mouth or Chinese trinckets or thickened, folded sheets of tree pulp or dying flowers or a spa treatment or oysters or wine or my credit card balance but I do feel the same about you as I did three days ago and as I will tomorrow and countless days after that.