Thursday on the Bum

1/05/06


I fucking love Thursdays. Love ‘em. Not as much as Saturdays, especially when my roommate is out of town which turns them into all-day marathon masturbatory sessions punctuated by small moments of recuperating and drinking 7&7’s. But as for a work day, Thursdays are tops and I’ll tell you why: For reasons I will never nor care to understand, our network at work “updates” on Thursdays and our computer systems are down from eight a.m. until my ten o’clock break. “System updates” is a technical term, for all I know it’s code for the day that they dig all the electrocuted squirrels out of the servers.

Since 99 percent of my job entails using the company intranet there’s precious little I can do for the first two hours of Thursdays. Well, that’s not entirely truthful; the other members of my department seem to go to great lengths to find mindless busy work such as filing or counting how many M&Ms it takes to gain back that staggering half pound they shed from walking a quarter of a mile in only fifteen minutes. Not yours truly, dear readers. No, having been blessed with next to zero work ethic or any discernable morals whatsoever, Thursdays mornings mean I open a random Excel spreadsheet and keep it at the ready to pull up so anyone walking by doesn’t notice I’m surfing the internet or writing things like this fine article you see before you.

Today I came across several things of note to share, ladies and gentlemen. The first one made me want a Bloody Mary and the second made me want to strangle a random consumer.

What occupied the lion’s share of my two hour lax-fest this morning is this website: http://www.underthewagon.com. I highly recommend checking it out--wait, wait, you asshole! Finish reading this first! Jesus, the nerve… At any rate the thing that immediately drew me into this particular bloggish site is, 1: The chick on the homepage looks pretty hot, though a good deal of her face is obscured by a glass of beer. Which brings me to 2: Her introduction is about her affinity for getting drunk.

This, as even the most casual acquaintance of mine could attest, is a feeling with which I am on intimate terms with. I too enjoy imbibing Herculean amounts of spirits, mostly because it makes me feel like God is giving me a hand-job (I feel good,) and I forget why I’m always mildly upset whenever I wake up in the morning, (I haven’t died in the night, in other words.) So the broad had me hooked already, but she really landed the deal whenever I ran across this little tidbit buried in an article about interesting sexual positions. I’m 5’5”, certainly not tall for a white male, but I’ve never much cared about it. Sure, it’s mildly annoying that I have to go trekking through the jungle to find a Pygmy tribe if I’d like to date a woman who would describe me as “tall, dark and handsome,” but I digress. In this particular instance Karla, (that’s the chick who does this website’s name, Karla,) was discussing having sex while standing up, which is a position that kind of necessitates the guy be taller. Were the guy shorter, Karla says, she would have to hold you up and “…she’s gonna look like she’s screwing a ventriloquist’s dummy.” Now that’s fucking funny. I actually laughed out loud at that violently bizarre imagery.

Now on to the second interesting if not vomitously stupider thing I came across today. Here it is:

https://compactimpact.com/shopping/product_info.php?products_id=204

It’s…it’s a PeTree. It’s a goddamn cactus inside a tiny capsule which attaches to your keychain. In their words:


“Your pet cactus in a mini-plant capsule. Carry it along with you everywhere you go. Attach it on your cell phone, key chain even on your car mirror.

This lovely tiny cactus lives in the small capsule about the size of thumb. You only need to water it once a month by dipping the bottom of the capsule in the water. Make sure not to drown your cute pet cactus.”



I have to be honest here when I say that words nigh fail me when trying to understand just why anyone would want this sort of product. The worst part is that I know people are going to buy it; seems just the thing for that teenage girl on the go who wants the illusion of a pet without all the excrement or responsibility. Sort of like those goddamn Tamigachi things that were around about a decade ago--you remember, electronic keychain “pets” that you feed and “take care of” and could expire if you didn’t push the right buttons often enough. The real tragedy of those things was that when your e-pet kicked the digital bucket it didn’t rot and stink like a bucket of fish heads.

The Japanese love to deluge us with this kind of strange shit and laugh all the way to the bank when we snatch it up, just like the French every time we purchase a bottle of Evian. “Z’ere buying water! Je cannot belive it, Pierre! Ze Americans are buying fucking water!” Yeah.

Far as I can tell the perfect demographic for this little cactus under glass is either your basic man-about-town botanist too busy with all the rowdy coke parties and random whores he’s fucking to really get all his leisure gardening in, or someone who’d never seen a plant before, maybe a guy from the moon. And, I guess if you get in a tight spot in an alley you could smash the thing into the offending robber/rapist/mime’s face and escape while he has an eyeful of needles and plastic shards.

I’m still waiting for someone to come out with “Hooker Under Glass,” or “ProstiPet.”