09 Apr Fragments

Fragments

College speak: “sex-iled” means you must leave your dorm room while your roommate has sex.

Homeless speak: Jill works with the homeless. She was surprised to learn that they refer to abandoned houses, where they squat, as “abandominiums.” Who’d have thought they would be so ironically humorous?

On a t-shirt I saw recently: “Sex without love is just exercise.”

A note taped above the sink in the common area of my office: “Please be very careful where you put the knife!” I’ve never seen the knife and I have no idea where it might be.

Announcement heard recently at BWI airport – in the accent of an Eastern European: “Attention airport patron. Passenger leaving a hat please report to the information deck.”

Exercise ad seen on the internet: “Get totally ripped with our effective muscle confusion system.” Imagine a regimen of double-talk and silly movements that confound the childlike muscles of your stomach until they plead, Okay, okay, just tell me what you want.

I don’t know if I made this up or saw it on a bumper sticker (it’s not on the internet): “I wish my girlfriend was as dirty as my truck.” I know what it’s supposed to mean, but it doesn’t mean what it says.

Years ago, I saw this sign outside a military surplus store, hundreds of miles from water: “Life rafts sold here.”

Cosmetic ad: “The beauty of youth without surgery.” As if there could be a correlation between the two.

On a vending machine: “Dimes accumulate.” It almost sounds like a warning. .

On a button: “(MY) GOD IS AWESOME!” As if faith were a competition.

What a friend-of-a-friend’s boyfriend used to say to her on a regular basis: “You always ruin everything.” And still she married the guy.

A red neon sign in a store window I saw recently: “HUMAN HAIR.” Next door, another neon sign announced, “LAKE TROUT.”

An email I received today from Miss Noeme, a stranger:

Hi Dear,

How are you today i hope that every things is OK with you as it is my great pleasure to contact you in having communication with you, please i wish you will have the desire with me so that we can get to know each other better and see what happened in future.i will be very happy if you can write me through my email for easiest communication and to know all about each other, and also give you my pictures and details about me, here is my email address ///// i will be waiting to hear from you as i wish you all the best for your day.

Your new friend
Miss Naome

I don’t know how she got my e-address. Honest, I never cruise the porn sites. But, lately, I have been receiving an unusual number of solicitations from semi-literate Nigerian scammers.

Now that we’re melting the ice caps, we should acquaint ourselves with some terms. “Iceberg” refers only to chunks of ice larger than 15 feet across. “Bergy bit” describes one smaller than that. “Growler” describes an ice floe that’s six feet across or just large enough to be a hazard. A “stealth iceberg” is one that rises no taller than six feet above the water, making it very difficult to see until you’re almost right on it. And a “calf” is a piece of iceberg that has sheared off, as in icebergs “calving” little ones.

Does this kind of thing happen any more? In 1956, when my mother was stranded by a snow storm in Chicago, the ticket agent at the train station took her home. She ate fish sticks and French fries with the man and his wife and their baby in their little city apartment. Later, my mother wrote to them and, for years, they exchanged letters and cards.

Recently, Jill met a man whose wounded stomach split open while he was home alone. His intestines started spilling out, so he wrapped his mid-section with Duct tape. The nurses at the hospital were impressed by his quick thinking. And here we have yet another example of the remarkable versatility of Duct tape.

When Walt Whitman wrote, “I sing the body electric!’ he was more right than he knew. Every human body produces a magnetic field of (about) 60-hertz alternating current. It vibrates sixty times per second. Some of us are more electric than others. Jill is so electric that she burns out the battery in her wrist watch at three times the rate a normal person would.

A note of the prospects for peace: The Argentine Ant migrated to southern Europe in the 1920s. In its home habitat it is very aggressive and thoroughly intolerant of other ant families or colonies and will fight to the death. But in Europe, because their numbers were limited, it happened that the most aggressive killed each other and the more pacific and cooperative flourished. Eventually, as the ant population burgeoned, these cooperative ants mingled freely, giving rise ultimately to super colonies that stretch over 600 miles. We’re talking millions of billions of ants. They are otherwise quite unremarkable, small black ants.