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[...] Go right on making his Christ awful pictures build up your tax loss pos . . . you’re welcome yes good . . . Crawley no nobody named Crawley’s called goodbye, I . . . Look I’d like to help out on it but . . . No, I . . . no . . . I don’t know no, now . . . No listen I . . . listen I just told you I don’t know a God damned thing about these loans voting trust rumor or anything else Mister Piscator, something God damned important here I’m working on and . . . what? All right yes I’ll take a message for Mister Bast if it’s brief, what . . . yes a shipment of sweaters ready to be flown back from Hong Kong, what . . . What, it’s overloaded . . .? If the pilot’s ready to fly it anyhow what’s the difference if the plane is over . . . oh. The price the insurance company’s named for the premium would wipe out your profit I’ll tell him when I . . . no I . . . no I told you I . . . and the what . . .? No I don’t know when he . . . No now wait listen, listen. Save us a lot of trouble here look, there must be a girl around the Hong Kong factory there who’d like a free ride to New York, give her a handful of quarters how much are the sweaters worth at retail . . . Fine just insure her for a quarter of a million write in the company as beneficiary if it goes down you’re . . . fine yes you’re . . . you’re welcome yes good . . . yes goodbye! Christ, give him an inch he wants what the hell did I come in here looking for, dictionary . . .
The door shuddered.—Got a delivery . . .
—Like who’s stopping you . . .
It sagged in—look I been here before I’m trying to deliver a truckload of where are you anyways . . .
—Where does it look like . . . she batted the rise of suds from a shoulder,—I mean what are you staring at, deliver your delivery . . .
—Thousand gross plastic flowers down there look, how you expect me to get a thousand gross plastic flowers in here you . . .
—Man like who said I expect you to do anything? Like I mean that’s your problem, I mean you’re supposed to be this big delivering man do it how they told you in delivering man school, okay . . .? The shirt wad came up wet abruptly jostling pebbled pinks from the suds—I mean look man at least can you quit standing there pulling your pork and like answer the telephone? No I mean look it’s like right up there behind you . . .
—No but holy shit Bast I mean that’s what you do! Like I mean these here Indians is it my fault they think corn is this here god they don’t even have electricity? is it my fault if I didn’t get these here leases off them and leave them stay there somebody else is going to screw them out of the whole thing? Is it my fault if I do something first which if I don’t do it somebody else is going to do it anyway? I mean how come everybody’s always getting mad at me! Like we get Milliken to help fix up these laws to start selling this marijuana to help out these here Ritz stockholders so Beamish gets pissed off and goes and quits just because I did it first like these ads in these here textbooks and all, I mean he gets pissed off at that just because I do if first so then he gets pissed off where I do just like everybody like where we’re franchising out this here health plan, I mean where these nursing homes and funerals and all they have to buy everything off us where we get to charge them what we want and squeeze them out anytime we want is it my fault that’s what franchising is! I mean Beamish even gets pissed off where we paint this Triangle water tower like this here giant roll of toilet paper then he respectfully submits why don’t we recycle this here whole encyclopedia I mean is it my fault if we’ve got this like third of a million dollars sunk in it when some wiseass finds out these writers they’ve just been making up entries only nobody knows which ones? I mean then where one of them even says what do you expect for this half cent a word what am I suppose to do, recycle it and throw all these here printers and binders and salesmen out of work so they all get pissed off like at Eagle? I mean like we close the mills so they’re all pissed off about this here vacation time they been saving up like it’s my fault they didn’t take their dumb vacations so they’re going to strike and sue us and all so this here Billy Shorter, I mean just to shut up his union we go and give his stupid kid this Wonder beer distributorship which he screws it up so bad we have to buy it back off him for like fifty thousand dollars I mean what do you expect me to do! Hey . . .? My ankle I can’t hardly, hey? Bast . . .? he pushed shoulder deep from weeds to gather his armload close stepping high over the rutted mud,—I couldn’t see you hey wait a second . . . he paused against a pole of rust signaling the opening with an indecipherable sign—I mean did you even hear what I was just telling you?
—You’re Mister Duncan? You were to call the office about your insurance this health plan, is it all you have?
—What’s wrong with it, I got it through those same son of a . . .
—It’s very interesting, we’ve never seen one like it but it doesn’t seem to cover you till you enter the nursing home.
—What makes you think I’m entering a nursing home.
—If you want to get your coverage page eleven, twelve it’s down here miscellaneous provisions wait I brought a magnifying glass, approved nursing home care including specified prescription drugs and prosthetic devices in accordance with article sixteen paragraph twenty g, your departure by private hearse, plastic casket and complete service by the denomination of your choice with free plastic flower spray and your own personalized plot four by eight feet overlooking the picturesque leisure village of Union . . .
Nevertheless, they boarded the Purdue Victory and sailed out of Boston harbor, provided for against all inclemencies but these they were leaving behind, and those disasters of such scope and fortuitous originality which Christian courts of law and insurance companies, humbly arguing ad hominem, define as acts of God.
this is just funny
[...] Since it was not true that he had, as a distant tabloid reported, been trapped by alert Federal agents who found him substituting his own likeness for the gross features of Andrew Jackson on the American twenty-dollar note, Mr. Sinisterra paid this gratuitous slander little attention. But, like any sensitive artist caught in the toils of unsympathetic critics, he still smarted severely from the review given his work on page one of The National Counterfeit Detector Monthly (“Nose in Jackson portrait appears bulbous due to heavy line from bridge . . .”); and soon enough thereafter, his passion for anonymity feeding upon his innate modesty amid walls of Malebolgian acclivity, he resolved upon a standard of such future excellence for his work, that jealous critics should never dare attack him as its author again. His contrition for the death which had occurred under his hand was genuine, and his penances sincere; still, he made no connection between that accident in the hands of God, and the career which lay in his own. He was soon at work on a hand-engraved steel plate, in the prison shop where license number tags were turned out.
love it
[a motif in pano?]
[...] He was doing missionary work. But from the outset he had little success in convincing his charges of their responsibility for a sin committed at the beginning of creation, one which, as they understood it, they were ready and capable (indeed, they carried charms to assure it) of duplicating themselves. He did no better convincing them that a man had died on a tree to save them all: an act which one old Indian, if Gwyon had translated correctly, regarded as “rank presumption.” [...]
A robin, a thrush, and a bluejay (mounted by a distant cousin who had found taxidermy the Way Out and was last seen in the Natural History Museum in Capetown, South Africa, drinking himself to death in a room full of rigid hummingbirds he had stuffed himself)
how is this so unassumingly funny
Unlike children who are encouraged to down their food by the familiar spoon-scraped prize of happy animals cartooned on the bottom of the dish, Wyatt hurried through every drab meal to meet a Deadly Sin. Or occasionally he forgot his food, troubled by the presence of the underclothed Figure in the table’s center, which he would stare at with the loveless eyes of childhood until interrupted. After he had been told the meaning of the rubric, he could be heard muttering in those dark hallways, —Cave, cave, Dominus videt.
this made me laugh out loud
—The real hero does not need to question, she said. —The Lord tells him his duty.
—How does He tell him?
—As He told John Huss, she answered readily, seating herself, reaching back with assurance to summon that “pale thin man in mean attire,” and she started to detail the career of the great Bohemian reformer, from his teachings and triumphs under the good King Wenceslaus to his betrayal by the Emperor Sigismund.
—And what happened to him then?
—He was burned at the stake, she said with bitter satisfaction, as footsteps were heard in a hall from the direction of the study, —with the Kyrie eleison on his lips . . . Here, where are you going? [...]
oh my god