Gorping

 

The North American Language Institute’s Encyclopedia of English Slang Terminologies.

 

The verb ‘Gorp’ is listed in older copies of Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary, as an anachronistic terminology that refers to gluttony or the act of consuming food rapidly. In Finche’s accessible compendium of esoteric adjectives, expletives, and other arcane and extreme terminologies, Gorp, is listed as a colloquialism once used in pre-annexation California to describe an insect that resembled a cross between a Praying Mantis and a Dung Beetle, known to habitually infest livestock feeding troughs and horse kennels. The bug in question is now believed to have gone extinct, although unconfirmed reports indicate that it has become a nuisance for backyard-dog-breeding operations.

Most recently, ‘Gorp’ has been employed to denote a particular mixture of nuts, seeds, berries and dried fruits—generically known as trail-mix—favored by people who frequently hike along challenging terrain, as a way of maintaining energy through a supply of easily digested food that is high in carbohydrates. This mixture is of course widely used, not only by enthusiasts of Saturday afternoon nature-trail excursions, and mountain-bikers; but also by school-children during snack-periods, teenagers watching DVD’s at home, and travelers on long road trips, not to mention just about everyone else at one time or another.

The intransitive usage, ‘Gorping,’ is defined by Praxler’s Yearly Slang Index (PYSI), as an activity involving the rapid imbibing of any substance for the purpose of “gorging oneself excessively to amuse one’s friends; winning a contest involving the intentional over-consumption of edibles usually taken in moderation; or, drinking a large amount of any alcoholic beverage in a very short time span to induce a state of immoderate inebriation.” It is this last definition that has most recently morphed into a practice involving large groups of college students, or ‘Twentysomethings’ collectively harmonizing in public places during the late evening hours.

What sets this practice apart from other forms of ‘singing,’ busking, or even boisterous shouting, is the material itself. A proper ‘Gorping’ session requires that the participants, sing, intone, or scream, in unison, the names of well-known corporate entities, followed by a rising crescendo of expletives and obnoxious noises; which culminates in a cacophony of spirited cursing, raucous laughter, and the sounds of breaking glass, as beer bottles and ale mugs are hurled into the curb and sidewalk. After this buildup—whose success is usually measured by the number of lights that go one in nearby houses and buildings—the participants hobble off drunkenly in separate directions, presumably to sleep it off.

The most interesting aspect of Gorping, however, is the content of the songs, or chants, themselves, which bear a striking resemblance in structure and approach to the nonsense versus contrived in schoolyards by grammar school aged children. However, unlike the rhyming quatrains of their prepubescent counterparts, ‘Gorpers’ pride themselves on what has become known in the Twittering realm as “Anti-Rhymes.” Anti-Rhymes” are verses intentionally denuded of alliteration in their last stanzas, so that the initial couplet is followed by a discordant and unrelated phrasing, or expletive, which draws attention to the non-sequiter that characterizes the transition from the naming portion of the chant. Thus, the popular ‘Gorp’ whose initial couplet is: “McDonalds, Wal-Mart, Burger King, Gap; McDonald’s Wal-Mart, Burger King, Gap;” which is followed by, “Asswipe, Shitbird, Cum-Bag Fuck!” This last combination sung twice.

The denouement is intended to shock the listener by conflating the proper names of well-known enterprises, with infantilizing and often scatological expletives that are intended to defang the ostensible subjects of these rigorously stylized recitations—that, in the words of social theorist, Garland Briggs, “Conspire to elevate their profits while causing great mischief”—and hence, neutralize them as powerful entities In essentially bringing such ubiquitous and monetarily esteemed corporations down to the level of the schoolyard and the barroom, the chanters are employing a method of incantatory invocation as old as the organized occult practice of ancient religious rites, and as widespread as the childhood practice of avoiding cracks in the sidewalk.

Ari Feldman of the Neurology of Mind Institute in Palo Alto, California, points out that the aforesaid practices are structurally similar to behaviors observed in individuals who suffer from a form of Tourette’s syndrome known as Coprolalia, which involves the involuntary utterance of expletives and other offensive words in public situations where they are potentially the most embarrassing. As an example of this strange behavior, catalyzed at the intersection of mental process and neurological impulses, Feldman relays a well-known anecdote about a religious Catholic parishioner, who often shouted sacrilegious epithets and the names of sexualized body parts during church services. The more embarrassing the expletive, the more likely he was to shout it at top volume during quiet lulls in the ceremony. Feldman points out, of course, that unlike Gorping, Coprolalia is mortifying to the individual, who is compelled, in a manner almost involuntary, like a reflex, to make such utterances; yet, “in the structure of the way the words are arranged, their repetition and rapidly enumerated combinations, there is a similarity.” He goes on to speculate that “such desires may, in fact, be universal and are seen in all cultures in a variety of forms.”

This sentiment is echoed by Bernard H. DeLaturno, a sociologist and historian of pagan religions, at the University of Colorado, who points out that “Gorping has its roots in ecstatic occult practices that date back to the incantatory song-cycles of Indo-Iranian shamanic harvest-festivals in ancient Persia. The priests would make an infusion from the seeds of the Harmel plant, also known as Haoma, and burn them, producing a pungent and intoxicating odor. Much revelry would follow, along with a series of chants intended to purge the attendees of evil spirits. This practice was a precursor to the more organized Zoroastrian ritual involving the consumption of Mang. In the latter case, the intent was to invoke, through the precise application of this ceremonial practice, the power of the spirits to turn back or stymie the forces of Alexander the Great, who conquered Persia in the Third century A.D.” DeLaturno goes on to compare such stylized attempt to purge a social group of a perceived evil, with its modern counterpart in the practices of Gorpers, whose nonsense chants, in his words, “aim to demystify the power of these large organizations, and in doing so reduce them to a comprehensible level.”

Social theorist, and Marxist culture critic, Fredric Jameson goes even further in politicizing what, until recently, was widely regarded as a meaningless fraternity-type social practice—on par with drinking game apps and saloon song roundabouts—by asserting that it has “profound social implications.” Jameson makes the persuasive claim that Gorping is the “encoding through social practice of a form of protest aimed at belittling and emasculating images of corporate power, which it achieves symbolically, at least, by equating the sanctioned titles of the companies that comprise the military, corporate complex, with the excretion of feces, and other practices that combine together in the scatological imagery used by Gorpers.” As an example, Jameson provides a version of a very popular Gorp, chanted frequently outside bistros and taverns in the Northeastern US:

                                    Kellogg, Brown and Root

                                    Kellogg, Brown and Root,

                                    Felchbag, Cumstain

                                    Cunthole, Quiffs!!

In addition to the above, Jameson mentions several related quatrains that invoke the names of Raytheon, McDonald Douglas, Citi Group and Clear Channel. “It is,” he concludes, “the most recent form of public resistance to corporate hegemony, and it is largely spontaneous, without any organizing structure or underlying ideology. This makes it truly populist, but also ripe for co-opting by the very forces that are the subjects of its ridicule.”

Where Jameson is leading with this point is not hard to imagine. One shudders at the thought of beer manufacturers organizing product friendly Gorps at local sporting events and concerts as a method of marketing. This is already happening in some places, although not in the ways anticipated by corporate sponsors--as mentioned in a related entry on “Organized Gorping,” or “Corping,” as it has been dubbed, located in the following chapter of this encyclopedia—but the practice is still largely the province of spontaneous gatherers in social situations. Only time will tell if this may change; and when it does, what form it will mutate into.

 

Related Practices

Gorpulating; Gorping in ASL and Braille; Pre-Gorpuscles, and other variations on dirty ditties in cities around the US. Competitive Gorping; Gorping for Snapple—see also, Organized Gorping, or ‘Corping.’ Silent Gorping; Gorping In China; Online Gorping; Gorktwittering; Ghost Gorping; Affirmative Gorping; and Gorp-overload; See-alss,“Gorp-Exhaustion Syndrome, and other social maladies of the 21^st century,” Roger F Bastock, Timothy Fehlner, Bantam Books, 2014; Gorping and municipal nuisance laws; see New York Ciry Police vs. Adam Bartz, et al, New York State Supreme Court 2012 (the decision upheld the right to Gopr as a form of First amendment protected speech, but with important limitations based on local decency standards and verbal obscenity statuettes. The NYPD is appealing the ruling. Occult Gorp. Gorp-Mongering; Gorping Incorporated, as an attempt to assimilate the practice into corporate marketing techniques; Gorpers-Anonymous; see also, Gorpers 12-step groups, and the larger issue of medicalizing the practice of Gorping. See Anton Krenkowsky Velchek, “Popular practice or harbinger of illness: the attempt to pathologize indecency” in Journal of Extreme Social Practices. Vol. 2 Fall 2012. Gorping on Mountain-tops; Gorping with Clown-Herds; solitary Gorping; Gorp communes; Gorping for money; Gorping as a form of deep breathing exercise. Master Gorper; Gorping musical books; Gorping in Spain..      

                                           Habanero Pepper has a Dream

                         Yet if I try to imagine this [state of being] I am restricted to the resources of my own mind,

                         and those resources are inadequate to the task. I cannot perform it either by imagining additions

                                 to my present experience, or by imagining segments gradually subtracted from it, or by imagining

                                 some combination of additions, subtractions and modifications—Thomas Nagle, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”

     

Habanero Pepper wasn’t the first Claymation FVW denizen to dream, but his dream was different. Habanero Pepper dreamed about two hairy legs. At first, it was only one leg, but then it was joined by another, and then still more later on. Habanero would not have known how to describe the strange tentacle-like appendage with a small flattened hand at the bottom that extended five stubby digits of its own; but, he had carefully observed Hand’s recent death and resurrection, and had noticed that Hand was attached to a tentacle called arm, and that arm was itself connected to a large pear-shaped mass, out of which extended another arm, with its own hand. Thus, there were two hands; and even more bizarre, were the lower appendages. Banana and Tomato knew to call them legs, and since Banana and Tomato were amongst the most curious of the Fruits and Vegetables, it was only natural that Habanero—who was also quite observant—adopt these strange designations as well. Moreover, having had a dream of one, and then a companion leg, each covered with a lichen sheet of long mangy carpeting—or hairs—it was inevitable that Habanero would invent and then append more compound appellations to his strange dream creature.

The next night Habanero dreamt the creature again; only this time, it consisted of numerous legs, moving about in disarray like an assemblage of forks and knives arranged by a Dadaist; all going in opposite directions, and exploring intrepid itineraries without any oversight or purpose. But Habanero knows, having seen the blueprint for such a creature in the Hand prototype, that the legs are attached by two’s—although he can’t really give any good reason why it shouldn’t be in some other combination like three legs or even more—and are joined by the odd pear-like structure, whose lower part narrows into a waist.

But still, something is missing. Two legs and a waist need some kind of executive management; otherwise, they just march inexorably forwards until they drop from exhaustion and all the hairs on the lichen-sheets fall out and run for cover in disarray; or, something like that, as Habanero doesn’t quite distinguish between compound parts that are inert by themselves and executive parts that stand back and direct in a supervisory capacity. The rest of the creature functions as a mere factotum, whose purpose is, to do the errands and muscle work for the administrative sections of the apparatus, or so Habanero assumes. In other words, only one part can think on its own—how silly. Therefore, the rest of the various appendages and lumpy pear shaped things, wait for that part to give the order; and that part is called “Head.” Head is the managerial portion of the hairy legs creature, and Habanero imagines it attached directly to the waist and legs, before realizing that it needs to have the Pear-shaped mass, and the arms and hands—like Hand does; only, this creature is far more hirsute, and this makes it much scarier to dream about so frequently. Not that it seemed particularly dangerous to Habanero, not after the endless predations of Hand, and its sinister companion double, who up until recently, no one in the Claymation FVW Fruit Bowl had ever actually seen, or even thought to conjure in their most vivid dreams.

Then Habanero Pepper has an epiphany: Realizing that the shock of this gestalt shift has now pushed him completely into the temporal present he declares, “I will call it ‘Bigfoot,’ because of those flattened hands compressed under the weight of those powerful legs; and, because of those stubby digits emerging from the bowels of those flattened hands—those ‘feet’—like terrified children slithering out of a sewer pipe bomb shelter.” Habanero is exquisitely pleased with himself, and his tiny lips change color like a sound-sensitive lava lamp reacting to the tempo shifts of a King Crimson record, inducing a frisky playfulness. “’Foot,’ what a funny word,” thinks Habanero Pepper, and he begins to giggle, “Tee-hee-hee-hee.” When he giggles, his little orange body shakes like a dancing fava bean and his mouth lips turn deep red and then all silvery, forming the shape of two sinewy undulating dolphins joined at the muzzle bumps. His dolphins also find the word ‘Foot’ to be quite hilarious, especially when the word, “Big’ is placed in front of it.

Words, of course, were new to denizens of the Claymation FVW; they had always existed, but had been noticed only peripherally, as sharp feelings bordered by color patterns, signifying a cuneiform screen crawl. Now, they had taken on a fresh sensory resonance; not just as vibrations, but as actual ruptures in the curious wave-pattern realm of sounds. This was quite an accomplishment for Claymation creatures, especially for Fruits and Vegetables, whom, it must be remembered, had no ears; a sign, in fact, that they were in the grip of some acute Renaissance of self-awareness; which, in itself, was far preferable to being in the acute grip of Hand, who now resurrected, still lurked in the world of Kitchen. And Habanero knew that Hand was probably the inspiration for these nightly sojourns through the portal of the muse and into a world of oddly imagined, tangible objects.

But Habanero has a strange feeling about these dreams; he does not believe—in the depth of his seed membranes—that they resonate transparently. Instead, he can sense that the strange calculations hovering about the images of these still disembodied feet, hands, and other physical manifestations of this strange creature, articulate its existence in a very peculiar and specific way; and this ‘way’ seems to foreclose on any variety in Habanero’s invocation of its being. It is like making an adjustment to an image after the image has already partially resolved itself; and in doing so, added garish colors and patterns that, while separate from the original, are expected to assimilate into the larger structure without dissonance. He flashed on the picture of a tree sapling with two large metal braces attached on either side to guide its growth into a particular pre-planned pattern.

For, unlike Habanero—who could sense temporally jagged, but intimate tactile manipulations performed on his Claymation bodice—the ‘Bigfoot’ apparatus, if that was even close to the most accurate word for it, was a largely self-propelled and autonomous entity. How then, could its being be gerrymandered in such a way as to incorporate it into a single frame of reference? Surely, an autonomous creature would move hither and yon, and in every other direction, when reacting to even the most subtle intimation of pressure from any particular point on its internal compass. It could never be one thing for long, as its complexity was already a source of convection that would generate all manner of strange impressions and subsidence’s like radar signals for it to follow. And ultimately, to itemize each part that comprised its wholeness, as if they were in close proximity to one another only by some strange functional coincidence, was to elide consideration of its essential completeness. That completeness was a thing that could be seen as color or picture but not known as a vibrating resonance.

Still, the sheer pleasure of having a method of describing such exotic stuff was a powerful seduction, and Habanero Pepper had discovered the fun to be had experimenting with nonsense names and phrases. There was Decalibratoryemancipation, Phytoplanktonianquietcessesitation, Zimbrosculatoryreticinotation and Carnivoretdeliberatethymeeresignatoryparrotation. Those were only a few; for he could make words that stretched out past the boundaries of the Claymation FVW and into the very heart of the macro-inhabitations of the very large—some as far as a substance called ‘Moon;’ or was it an object, he was never quite sure? Habanero pepper also liked to repeat assertive commands, in the inimitable FVW way—as Claymation Fruits and Vegetables could not literally make sounds with their Claymation mouths—such as, “Prepare the Virtual Nematode;” “launch the Infinite Phylacteries;” “smite the recalcitrant Glyptodonts;” and, his favorite, “aerate the cosmic nasal inhaler!” These statements had little meaning for Habanero Pepper; as words themselves, when combined in this way, seemed superfluous. Yet, there was a form of reality etched in the spaces behind it—partly obscured by its own schematics, but still quite viable in many ways—that he sensed and was fascinated by. It was, he knew in the depths of his seed-cradle, a manipulation of consciousness that colored it with its own artifactual qualities. But, it had its own poetry and time signatures as well; which, from a purely aesthetic point of view—a concept that Habanero Pepper expressed as a shimmering accumulation of incorrigibly promiscuous color—gave him a tingle of mouth-lip scalding pleasure.

Consciousness itself was addictive; after all, one didn’t really know anything else—it was the available wire mesh through which everything was pulped and filtered. Therefore, it only made sense to conceive of things through this narrow juicing mechanism, even if it atomized objects into infinitesimal points where two essentially empty spaces intersected into a virtual field of immanent meaning; the modular platform out of which one could construct the discretely arranged elements, forming the framework of an idea. In other words, Habanero Pepper thought—or, more literally, ‘flashed’ in myriad colors and impressions—the very act of thinking determined what it was that one actually thought about and how it ought to be construed; and, while this process was seemingly automatic, Habanero could sense that, in whatever form it took, it also pinched off a small part of the world from the larger mass through which it was extracted and then put that residue under a giant magnifying lens. And, even when it ascertained—through the various vocabularies that it utilized like a cheesecloth to wring the moisture out of wet lumps of milk curds, vegetable matter, or clay—the total meaning of the everything that surrounded the more particular things of which Habanero was a single example; it could not help but reduce the sum of those ‘things’ to artifacts of its own peculiar expression of the world. Habanero Pepper did not know how to get out of such an unlikely and labyrinthine trap.

He likened this paradox to another dream he remembered; this one about a strange spindly legged creature which had a large proboscis, teardrop shaped skeletonized leaves jutting out from both sides of its pear-like middle section, and was entirely covered with a bony carapace. The creature would stick its proboscis into a scaly sheet of dried soil, which was punctuated by individual strands of a thick chitin-like elephant grass jutting from small tuber shaped holes at regular intervals; and as it did this, the ground around the drilling proboscis would become red and rise slightly. Then the creature would pull out its narrow thorn-shaped trunk and promptly regurgitate a thick chowder of viscous liquid before sticking its nose right back in, and then sucking up material from under the dermal soil layers, along with the very stuff it just spit out. Habanero Pepper couldn’t gauge exactly what this creature was, but he could understand that it didn’t distinguish between its own effluent and the nourishment it obtained from the ground while using it. It was all one big messy suspension whose flavor was as much a reflection of the ingredients in the creature’s vomitus as it was a product of the nutrients in the ground under the elephant grass. When it was finished, it would extract its proboscis completely, which was always followed by a small trickling of red sap from the tiny hole that the creature had just drilled.

The dream always gave Habanero Pepper the same sensation afterwards, of a tiny hot wire running across a small section of his outer skin, and throbbing in a staccato fashion, as if he too were being drilled by the same spindly legged creature. It would send a shudder into the deepest regions of his seed-membranes, causing his Claymation lips to quiver like a radiating wave in a diagram superimposed over a map of a city in a hypothetical schematic of a nuclear blast. Habanero imagined this sensation personified as a tinier version of the same spindly legged creature, trying to communicate something important by generating whispered skin-quakes through his elastic outer fibers—which, of course, was not so strange to a Claymation vegetable who often conversed in color patterns and vibrations. He knew that it all had something to do with his dreamed vision of Bigfoot; more to the point, the fact that he might have dreamt Bigfoot wrong—especially now that the creature had taken on characteristics too complex to be easily described or even understood. It had gone from a strange cartoon to something too varied to be encapsulated, and it continued to ramify into unknowable branches of being.

Perhaps this was one of the principle qualities of a monster: an animate presence too large to be comprehended except as an obvious simplification into schematic representation, lest it overwhelm the beholder, and reproduce within his/her consciousness the characteristics of the keenly observed monster itself. Such a choice invariably formed into a dichotomy: one either distorted the nature of what was intuitively understood, or was, in essence, distorted by it. This did not seem like a fair appraisal of the infinitely divergent arbors that intertwined the aforesaid reality into dense lattices of impenetrable kudzu. Surely, nothing this complex could simply be reduced to an either-or phenomenological proposition: the beholder had to at least try to understand it, even at the risk of merging with the identity of such an infinitely conceived world. Then again, drowning himself in the particularities of the ‘Bigfoot’ realm was part of what made Habanero’s dream so appealing; that is, as long as the immersion was temporary.

For indeed, Bigfoot was Habanero’s vomitus, his injection well liquid, his extractive juice—his cheesecloth, in fact—through which he now comprehended an entire world of similar creatures, their movements and strange mannerisms; even the odd audio waves that they created by vibrating special glands and structures near their flesh-mouths. It was a strange world, and this was the source of his aforementioned difficulties; as he had no idea whether knowing it through an aperture called ‘Bigfoot’ was to really know it at all, or simply to conceive of it through the matrix of a fantasy being whose own identity reflected some obscure aspect of that world, now foregrounded as if it were the only thing dominating the skyline of its peculiar metaphysics.

Later, he would dream entire species of odd flesh-monsters, such as the white-gloved hordes; animated creatures—like those of the Claymation FVW, but more spidery and modular. They would march into a garish curtain of orange and purple smoke, before coming out through an evocation of its other side; a paper barrier that they would break through, like an idea forming from the raw stuff of thought at its moment of gestalt. These masses, these mices, these mackenzy mice; these Mickey-Mouse Mice hordes—what were they, and how did they become these words, shiny and smelling of antiseptic, dripping from the outer membranes of Habanero’s orange tinted pudding-skin sheathing, at the moment of his awakening? It seemed as if, at a certain, very specific, time, lost to memory like a recurring primeval galactic collision, all of these dreams had come together in a way reminiscent of an agglutination of molecules that comprise a larger substance. Habanero had no idea what this substance might be, but he could feel its weight slightly altering his center of gravity, like a halo of those previously imagined and barely discerned digits, forming and shaping his Claymation bodice into poses that would pass instantaneously into the next configuration in the cycle without being noticed.

Permeating the time-line between the dilating wave-function of expectation, and the collapsing singularity transpiring as a convergence, just after the gestalt of resolution is made manifest, Habanero shifts tenses until he is propelled into the present moment. However, he doesn’t want to get ahead of himself, and be several rooms down, so to speak, in the context before pretext, in places that haven’t had a chance to solidify into a tangible reality because they have yet to be imagined. So, while sitting in the movie-theater-seat sized channel between the already happened and the yet to occur, he adjusts his chronometer ever so slightly in the interest of temporal balance. Now he’s just right, for he knows that he has to be ahead of the realization, so that he can augment it towards a kind of clarity.

This is a bit like riding a wave of tomato juice, while standing on a petrified running-board of mango skin. If Habanero can avoid becoming ponderously entangled in the cocktail glass debris at the other end, he can navigate his way into an understanding of Bigfoot and its peculiarly off-kilter world of aforementioned tangible objects. Still, Habanero has no idea what ‘riding-a-wave-of-tomato-juice would be like; and even less of any coherent notion of why someone as inviolable as Tomato would even consider turning himself into a juice. Nonetheless,  he knows that he must come to understand this process—even if it is only a way of expressing something metaphorically through the strangeness of words; which themselves, still feel novel to Habanero, looming about him like anthropomorphic trees in a Maurice Sendak jungle. For this unusual itinerary is as close as he can come to a feeling that approximates the radiating green and yellow sunburst that he intuits as equivalent to the word ‘progress.’

The best and most effective way to achieve this, of course, would be through a process of controlled dreaming. Habanero Pepper thus concentrates his energy, until it gathers like disparate clumps of individuals coalescing into a large crowd, and reaches a crescendo of density similar to that of tightly packed bodies around the figure of a single charismatic speaker. This speaker has a transparent, light-bulb shaped head, which begins to expand exponentially, transmogrifying into a cartographic chart of an unknown territory comprising spatialized vibrations of varying resonances. The whole episode is rather short lived, transitional and very ambiguous; Habanero is shot, as if from a large metal breach, into a rapidly disintegrating beryllium mass, before finding himself in a field of tall green shoots—the proverbial grass of his Bigfoot dream.

In a large convex space that to Habanero’s unseasoned glance looks like a blue hat over the spires of nearby greenery, he can detect movement in the distance. Soon, the remote rustling is replaced by a percussive vibration that is accompanied by small dark projections of vague shadowy forms coming across the horizon, and breaking the illusion that the sky is an homogenous blue mass. Instead, Habanero can see hundreds of hairy-leg pairs moving rapidly, in the same graceful way like falling snow bouncing along the ridges and protrusions of a white hillside. He doesn’t know where such images come from, or if they could be called, analogies; but, he can see that the alternating flexing of leg muscles is not at all tree like in its motions—as no wind-bent plant, no matter how poetically it bestrides the air, can match the sheer complexity and athleticism of these movements—even if they are of a similar color and solidity.  

There is a moment that always arrives soon after the first instant of recognition of type, where one sees a familiar particularity that allows for distinctions that set generic examples of an entity apart from one another, and bequeaths individual characteristics to the specific entity most prominent within one’s field of vision. This individual—one of numerous Bigfoot creatures—was the one that Habanero now decided was probably the most amenable to direct communication. A few days earlier, such a notion would have been unthinkable;  and, even now, Habanero barely knew what to say to this hulking presence, or how to reconcile the numerous barriers that existed between them, and which might result in some colossal, and thereby consequential, misunderstanding. But it was worth the risk—especially since the worst case scenario involved little more than a quick shuddering as Habanero re-awakened into the Claymation FVW realm—so he took the first awkward step in that direction, and did something no other denizen of the Fruitbowl had ever done before, in any state of consciousness: he spoke an actual word.

“You…” It didn’t come out sounding as he would have expected, but it resonated correctly, so he waited for a response.

“hhhmph” the Bigfoot grunted.

Habanero was delighted at this strange vocalization; it was like discovering a strange music broadcasting from the magnetosphere of a distant planet, emanating from a frequency picked up on one’s clock radio.

“Hmmmph” Bigfoot grunted again, in a slightly lower register, causing his tiny orange counterpart to break out in Claymation Fruit and Vegetable mirthfulness. The huge creature just stared back at him, as if trying to figure out exactly how to respond. Habanero, pulls himself forward into the present tense, and is now smiling so broadly that his mouth-lip dolphin-shapes are beginning to stretch and contort, looking almost as if they could separate and swim off in opposite directions. He lets out a shrill cackle of friendly laughter, “hee-hee-hee-hee,” and the creature smiles in response, but then bares his teeth. This ambiguous reaction is unexpected and Habanero must think of something to say that can be more clearly understood.

“Zeit, Lufthansa…?” croaks Habanero, as he suddenly realizes that words are strange ungainly things that take on a life of their own regardless of what one intends to say. More perplexing is the fact that these are words that Habanero has never actually heard, and he is inclined to wonder if he might have simply made them up; then again, it may not matter, as Bigfoot is puzzled and beginning to grow impatient. The creature’s mouth is open wide and baring even more teeth than before. Habanero can feel the vast difference in their respective physical architectures; the mouths being emblematic of their larger variances, physiological and otherwise.

“Oaghwortsgsdui!” interrupts Bigfoot. Habanero does not know what this means, but realizes that he is better off not attempting to repeat it, as the enunciation seems to engage areas of the tongue and throat in an intimate and complex exchange that he cannot simulate so easily.

Instead, he offers a spontaneous recollection of more words that he cannot remember having ever previously encountered.            

“O universe of forms I ask

Are you a mirror, or a mask?”

“Melnechuk!” bellows Bigfoot. Habanero is perplexed, and wonders if there is any way by which he can facilitate the act of translation between two such differently oriented beings.

“Melnechuk!” repeats Bigfoot, who is suddenly joined by a chorus of ‘melnechuks,’ emanating from every point on the horizon, and from every Bigfoot figure that Habanero can see with his Capsicum inflected optics. But he doesn’t have any idea what they are talking about; and, as the crescendo of ‘melnechuks’ grows louder, Habanero feels a strange anger welling up inside him. Immersed in this temporary sense of frustration, he begins to awaken; sliding back to Claymation consciousness as his vocal simulations become dopplerized and form an expletive that curls into a diphthong, which breaks finally, like a giant wave, onto the olive-pit strewn beach of his self-awareness with one final, Fouuuk!

At first, Habanero is disappointed. He has been unable to make the connection and create a gestalt; then again, none of the other fruits and vegetables knows anything about this, so it’s not as if he has failed to make discernible progress. Nonetheless, he knows in his seed beds that by learning to communicate with a strange creature such as ‘Bigfoot,’ he might develop a hypothesis regarding the ontology of the Claymation FVW realm. But, Habanero knows that his latest dream may be as close as he may ever get to discerning the motives and being of such a mysterious and bizarre creature. “Perhaps it was all a dream,” he says to himself in an old fashioned cuneiform screen crawl. “Perhaps, one should not stray so far from one’s own being simply to try to inhabit that of another, but such desire seems too natural to suppress.”

With that, Habanero Pepper goes out to the center of the Fruitbowl to mingle and preen with the other Claymation Fruits and Vegetables. Soon, the Bigfoot creature’s memory retreats to the bottom layers of his seed membranes, to reside as a colorful and exceptional memory, but a memory nonetheless. Still, Habanero, in the depths of his capsicum-comprised carapace knows that Bigfoot is more than just a memory; he is a phantom; and now, Habanero Pepper, like Banana, and Tomato, is haunted by a specter he can’t explain or forget. He is momentarily lulled out of his ruminations by a long shadow; it’s Hand, coming in for a repast. Habanero knows that he is too hot to be a likely choice; but, the threatening visage is a reminder of a familiar ritual; business and terror as usual in the Claymation Fruit and Vegetable realm. “Is it the same everywhere?” Habanero wonders. He receives no answer as Hand passes overhead, lunges for Macintosh Apple, and misses. “He’ll be back,” thinks Habanero, as he runs with the others for cover, just in case.

 

JZ Rothstein 3/27/2014

And the Fireflies

 

And the fireflies

break upwards into

a strange aerial motility

like thousands of small

children with galactic

filaments for wings

climbing the rungs

of an esophageal matrix

from a minor dream;

their tails bent caduceus-like,

wrapped around

luminescent

jet-packs,

as they can

be seen taking

off all over

southern Arizona

methodically,

like

hot-air

balloons

rising

into the green

mist,

the flat soup

of sky

shimmering

in waves

of receeding

jelly-like plasma;

this membrane,

this transparent tarp—

inversion layers

sandwiched like

discrete parts

of a medieval

song cycle,

distinct

yet

connected

together

by more

than just

the air.

The buttes

Stalagtiting

downward

in flat preliminaries

of frown—we are dry here;

the face of this land

holds no tears;

moisture condenses

into small swarms of flies;

clumps of saguaro

flower inadvertently

precariously nestled amidst

adobe style-motels,

owl-nesting mounds,

unknown Zuni, Uwanami

petroglyphs—phosphemes

of a strange arid tongue

whose echo still

resonates in the dry

valley. Thus,

It has no bones

and grass will not grow

along its sandy escarpments;

the horses do not drink

from mostly dry

mineral wells

in this

place of sediments.

Coyote’s laughter,

is the nocturnal

sunlight

of a strange tongue

which appears

every evening

clothed in the invisible

gestures

of the desert.

It smiles

un-noticed perhaps,

here where

most things are

simply

not visible

and where

variations

in the refractions

of light

are called by

the names of

familiar animals

long extinct.

 

JZRothstein 2012 (edited 3/21/2014

The post below is a parody of a Wikileaks entry...If you have read my blog on occasion you probably realize this, but I feel compelled to mention it anyway; although it would have ben more fun and a sign of greater confidence, on my part, in my tricksterism and playfulness not to have said anything at all...
Well, if you didn't suspect--and I am sure that you did--now you know. Nuff said...
PTP

                                                       Wikipedia Entry:

Clown Herds: A specific family group, or loose association, of migrating clowns who follow food supplies and seasonal availability of crops along a broad itinerary that follows no simple or predictable pattern. As a result, clown-herds often come into conflict with farmers, inhabitants of small towns, and highway authorities, as well as local municipal governments, who regard them as a nuisance species.

                                                           Genealogy:

It all started with a circus clown named Poop, who after being launched (or ‘pooped,’) by a cannon, with too much gunpowder, in a travelling circus show in 1957, was killed—along with a tame Indian elephant named Barney Fife, who was eating salted peanuts out of a large bucket by the bleachers near the side of the stage. The clown had overshot his small plastic pool due to the power of the blast. Strangely, ‘Poop’ was the first clown to innovate the art of being shot out of a cannon; and, over time, as the breach became larger, and the charge more explosive, Poop was shot further and further into the air; in a process similar to the mechanics of amoebic-dysentery; until, at his highest point, he was tickling the underside of the tent top. It was only a matter of time before someone goofed up, and when someone finally did, the clown paid the price. A lengthy investigation found the death of Poop to be accidental, but clowns all over the country remained suspicious, and began demanding new safety procedures. After all, clowns everywhere knew that they too, could end up like Poop, in any number of ways; and, that there was a little bit of Poop in every clown.

In the ensuing years, many circuses folded, due to various economic woes, and clowns of all varieties began to accumulate and form into groups called ‘Clown-Herds.” This included dropouts from clown colleges that went defunct in the clown recession, and clowns with long criminal histories; as well as pseudo-clowns, men pretending to be clowns to get out of failed marriages and child-support payments, as well as those simply evading the law. These extended clown families began as circus dwellers but have, over time, become nomadic, subsisting mostly on scrounged food and wild foliage.

                                                             Migration and Foraging Patterns:

Many of these herds can be seen at night crossing rural highways and turnpikes, and have become particularly numerous in the Midwestern states of Ohio and Indiana, where new safety measures have been adopted over the last several years to protect clowns and motorists alike. In Ohio—particularly hard hit by a slew of CIA’s (Clown Induced Accidents)—county officials in certain heavily impacted areas have lobbied for ‘Clown-Crossing’ signs. This is because accidents involving clowns and motor vehicles, especially large trucks and busses, have increased exponentially over the last several decades, reaching a peak in 2012, when over 452 semi-flattened clown corpses were removed by Clown Removal Crews,  also known as ‘Clown Scrapers’ (or CRC’s), working the Ohio Turnpike. The clown-carrion is usually donated by the state to local jails and penitentiaries, where—if one is to take the pronouncements of the wardens and administrators at face value—“they make a good, nutritious meal.” Still, even in the midst of such inadvertent methods of population control, the number of clowns has risen to unprecedented levels.

                                                           Civic Responses to Clown-Herds:

In nearby Steuben County Indiana they have developed their own unique solutions to this problem. There is now, an extended clown-hunting season; something that hunters have been promoting for some time, as clown meat is a popular entrée at local barbecues. This has stimulated other parts of the local economy as well, such as customized hunting accouterments, particularly the marketing and manufacture of accessories used on sport vehicles. A punk rock band from Fort Wayne, known as “Clown Rack,” has immortalized one of these ingenious devices, the new extended length roof-racks, usually seen on pickup trucks and SUV’s, which are slightly larger than those used for deer carcasses. In fact, Clown hunting is extremely popular all over the Midwest, and the large population of errant clown herds, who cause millions of dollars in crop and home damage across the rural Midwest every year because of corn plant nibbling and occasional hibernation atop barns and house roofs, have led state officials from as far afield as Kansas and Minnesota to give their blessings and declare the entire fall season open for Clown-Culling, as they prefer to call it

                                                         Clowns as a Usable Resource:

Concomitant of such shifts in attitude towards a species once noted for its pratfalls, nose-honks and tendency to pile into Volkswagens, as well as its gift for antagonizing Lions and Elephants, is the explosion in clown-tossing, clown-cuisine—specifically restaurants, specializing in clown dishes, not to mention the widespread availability of clown-steaks and stir-fry mixes—and even clown-zoos and water parks. In fact, the newest fad along these lines is the practice of diving for undersea clowns. The latter may have achieved its explosive popularity because of a recent X-Bot channel cable show called “Spear-Fishing for the elusive Deep-Sea Bozo, with Shaquille O’Neill and Steven Segal.”

                                                          Clown-Evolution:

The runaway success of this form of clown-based entertainment is partially the result of a resurgence in fascination with this often annoying species, and its rapid evolution into many distinct families; which include, in addition to marine-clown species, Clown-Reptiles, Birds, Marsupials and several previously unknown varieties of Clown-Rodentia, including the Bloated Central Asian Clown Mouse, the only species of clown or rodent known to occasionally dine on ordinary humans. Evolutionary Biologists hypothesize that rapid clown evolution in both herding behavior and speciation has progressed exponentially because of an underlying genetic predisposition in clown-DNA towards rapid adaptation of assimilative traits. Despite this ability, there is much disagreement over whether this makes clowns intelligent, or merely—as David C. Nestlor of the Harvard Clown Research Project puts it—“mindlessly programmed to transform into an endless hodge-podge of silly, and sometimes ridiculous, varieties. This is sort of like the diversity seen in yogurt flavors or Oreo cookies, neither of which has any intelligence, even though the former has live cultures.”

Other researchers take a slightly different view however. Paoli Sistler of Berkley’s renowned Center for the Study of Marine Wildlife, points out that the overnight evolution of one or two known terrestrial clown species into a variety of Fish, Aquatic Mammals and even water Fowl, is the most rapid transitioning and branching out through natural selection that he’s ever seen. “Certainly,” comments Sistler, “any animal that can diversify this rapidly and evolve sharp teeth, flippers and dossal fins, in part, to evade sophisticated radar fishing techniques, has—at the very least—an innate predisposition to engage in the sort of light-speed biological adaptations that are seen in the very heartiest of survivor animal families. We should not, therefore, underestimate the potential of clowns to mimic and mutate into every possible ecological niche.”

                                                     Related Subjects:

Clown-investments; Clown-Futures; Clown Collateral bond swaps; Clown Deregulation; Clown Genealogies; Clownular Diastrophism,  Clown Euthanasia, controversies and problems; Clown feces, study of; Clown-Policy, national; CCDD (Chronological Clown Decay Disorder); Clown Apparitions; Clown Time-Travel; Clown-TV; Clown-Inoculations for schoolchildren, and related controversies; Clown Control; Secret CIA Clown Prisons;  Clown-Literature—see, “I Know Why The Clown-Bird Sings;” Clown Humor--Dave Barry: :”Hundreds of Clowns Standing On My Lawn At 5-am, Calling Out My Name Over and Over Again, and other Harlequin Tales; Historical Clown Research—see Clowns Throughout History; Clown Dental, Closeted Clowns; Clown Support Organizations; Clown Sterilization Programs, and controversial legislation in relation to—see also Supreme Court, the Clown Proliferation Question: Modeski Illinois vs. Bozo, Crusty, Jiggles, et al., 1994, Supreme Court United States; McDonalds Clown Protectionism, and issues of clown inequality, particularly the Ronald-Bozo dichotomy. Advanced Clown Studies; Clown Metaphysics; Clown Simulators, professional and amateur; Clown Pigments; and Clown Head shaped rocks and other natural formations—See Clown Head National Monument, Kearney Nebraska.

                                                     Wikipedia Policy:

Additional Clown information and essays may be added to this site without permission in the interest of promoting an expanding universal knowledge base. In addition, Wikipedia is open to both topic headings and expanded essays on a variety of subjects, themes, genealogies and histories, as well as scientific concepts and practices. This is a free user defined site.  

                                                    America’s Minor Afflictions.

America went to the doctor, who told the rather extensive country that it had too much Florida, and that it would have to be surgically removed. America was concerned, it sounded painful. “Not to worry,” said the doctor; “It’s a simple excision procedure, and much of it will grow back before you even realize it was gone. Still, America was not convinced and sought a second opinion. “How can one have too much Florida?” America thought to itself. “I mean, isn’t it more a question of a dichotomy: One either has Florida, or one doesn’t.” This sounded right to America; after all, America’s neighbor and sometime-friend, Mexico (America didn’t like to admit that being nice to friends on a consistent basis interfered with one’s long term interests at times, as everyone must watch out for themselves, etc., etc.,) didn’t have Florida; no, Mexico had the Yucatan. But that was different, since the Yucatan was not so extensively developed with scales and rivulets and geometric age-lines, or other characteristics which dried out the surface layers and re-channeled moisture. Moreover, Mexico didn’t have a painful Cape Canaveral growing from its periphery, like a series of spiny minarets.

And then there was the Orlando. It was on the other side of Florida, and seemed to be a receptacle for complex plastic polymers, masonry and salt. The doctor called it a dermal manifestation of a “Disneyworld,” and hinted that its primary characteristic was that it attracted thousands of tiny dust-mites. These dust mites came in a great profusion of varieties and loved to suck up moisture. They congregated atop the Orlando like the legs of thousands of miniscule caterpillars suturing their malleable bodies to the leaves of a Locust Bean Tree in August. There was no cure for this insidious nuisance, the doctor told America; and the placement of this particular nuisance made amputation impossible: Florida would have to stay just where it was.

“However,” the physician added, with a theatrical flourish that aroused America’s suspicions that he had planned this dramatic conjunction from the first utterance of the diagnosis, “there is a way you can neutralize the damage caused by this concentration of animalcules across the breadth of the Orlando.” “And what would that be?” asked America somewhat bemusedly. “It’s a special topical cream—it gets right inside the tiny animalcule bodies and…” “What?” asked America, “it kills them?” “No, No,” replied the doctor, “it neutralizes them, makes them lazy and less likely to congregate in one place. You might say it re-focuses their attention on other forms of gratification; which, for your particular problem is ideal.” “So, what is it called?” asked America in anticipation. “Heroin,” said the doctor. “I think you’ll like it; and, more importantly, your dust-mite friends will love it!”

“I don’t understand,” replied America. “If they ‘love it,’ won’t that cause them to multiply?” “Not exactly,” explained the doctor. “You see, Heroin is a facilitating agent; it doesn’t directly do anything that we can measure, but it creates a reaction in the little animalcules; which, in turn, leads to a chain reaction in another class of ‘watchman’ animalcules, who apprehend the heroin immersing mites and take them to tiny glands called ‘penitentiaries.’ Once enough animalcules are embedded in these tiny glands—which hold millions of them—the rest of the mite-economy, if you will, collapses. No more Orlando, no more Disneyworld, no more problems. You are cured and brought back to a healthy state of sterility!”

“What about Florida?” asked America. “Well,” replied the doctor, “the cream won’t get rid of your Cape Canaveral, but we might be able to avoid cutting it off by using special fish to nibble away at it.” “Fish,” intoned America, somewhat incredulously. “Yes, fish; I know it sounds strange, but these little cleaner-fish make their living in the ocean gently sucking barnacles, debris and parasites off of other fish. The largest of them clean whales. If you immerse your Florida in a saline Everglades solution, the fish will take care of the rest.” “That’s great,” sighed America, with noticeable relief. “I was starting to worry that I might lose Florida.” “Well, it would have grown back anyway, Florida is very persistent; but, not to worry, the cream and the cleaner fish should adequately address these minor problems.” “Is this normal stuff at my age?” asked America. “Yes, of course; in fact, you don’t have it that bad; as you get older you may experience Floridian subsidence and sea-level immersion. And, if you think that’s a big problem, just imagine being beset with a large and growing Tokyo, or a Singapore? Now that kind of development can be a real nuisance,” concluded the doctor. And, with that, America limped home, quite satisfied and relieved.

 

JZRothstein 3/10/2014