8.26.2010

Frankenstein

Sometimes, a post fails. Miscarries, really; you try to develop it, but it falls apart in your hands into a pile of incoherence. It’s frustrating, but a hazard of the trade. The worst part is when there’s a line or a paragraph that really works, like a gold tooth in a leper’s mouth. The rest of it may be crap, but you have to give up that one phrase. Here, I’ve tried to cobble together the good lines out of some failed posts into a kind of Frankenstein. “Thoughts I Couldn’t Flesh Out into Full Entries” instead of “Thoughts I Didn’t Honestly Try to Flesh Out into Full Entries.” I almost ditched the one about ovarian cancer, but at least it’s not about retarded developmentally disabled persons.

I Spent The Last Seven Years Drinking Beer and All I Got Was This Lousy Paunch:

Also, given my choice between “being sexually attractive” and “eating and drinking whatever I damn well please,” I really don’t know what to choose. Sex is fun, but meatball sandwiches never want to know how you’re feeling.

God Almighty, There Were Some Freaks in My Old Neighborhood:

Last week, I passed a man on the street with a White Power tattoo on his chest… and a Phillies tattoo on his back. Has he watched a baseball game since, oh, 1970?

Then there was the girl in the movie store with most of a Star of David scratched into her wrist. Five of six lines, hugely inflamed. For the first time in my life, I wished I were telepathic. I’d be willing to pay any price to know the story behind that except what it would actually cost – namely, a conversation with the girl with most of a Star of David carved into her wrist. What on Earth distracts a woman from slashing an ancient religious symbol into her body? Oven fries, aliens landing, what?

There’s an “anarchist” bookstore down the street. They don’t seem to see why that’s funny: they’re anarchists who took out a small business loan. Nothing is less anarchic than checking your credit score and then meeting with a loan officer. Do they not know that money is a thing the government does? I’ll bet anything that if you robbed them at gunpoint, they’d call the police.

Hypochondria Lols:

Mom: I think I have ovarian cancer.

Me: Why?

Mom: I’m losing weight, I have a sharp pain in my stomach and blood in my stool.

Me: That sounds like an ulcer. Your mother tends to form ulcers, and I had one last year.

Mom: No, it’s ovarian cancer. Come to the doctor with me.

Doctor: Well, I don’t think it’s ovarian cancer. Your ovary isn’t swollen. It sounds like an ulcer.

Mom: No, I think it’s ovarian cancer.

Guy Reading the MRI Results: See, here’s your ovary, over here. It’s small like a post-menopausal ovary should be. No cancer. Have you checked for an ulcer?

Mom: I bet that ovary turned cancerous.

Other Doctor: No, no cancer on the X-Ray. Sounds like an ulcer to me.

Mom: No one believes that I have ovarian cancer.

Guy Looking in Her Stomach through a Tube: Yeah, here’s the ulcer right here.

Mom: But what about my ovary?

If you say “ovary” enough times, it starts to sound exotic, even glamorous: “Hear you this! I am an Ovary, as were my father and grandfather before me! An Ovary stood by Lee at Appommattox and by Washington at Valley Forge! Ovaries crusaded with Richard the Lionhearted and crossed the Channel with William the Conqueror! As long as one Ovary stands, we shall never submit to a tyrant’s rule!” Or maybe a French village. “Ovary is a village near Bordeaux, notable for its well-preserved Roman sewers and foul-mouthed prostitutes.” Ovary. Ovary. Ovary.

Were You Raised in a Motherfucking Barn?

In retrospect, I want to know who the hell brought fake flowers to a funeral. At that point, why observe any rules, anywhere, ever? Wear hot pink to the graveside ceremony. Show up in your bathrobe with a Scotch in one hand and rustle magazines all through the service. Fart during the eulogy. Leave the men’s room door open. Draw a mustache on the corpse. Why not? There are fake flowers, anything goes! Who does things like that, and what do they do at weddings? I bet it’s the same guy who gives a racy toast about the bride’s sexual past at the rehearsal dinner. During the ceremony, he clears his throat during the “…or forever hold your peace” bit and afterward throws the flower girl to the ground so he can be “wacky” and catch the bouquet. Fake flowers at a funeral. “Though your life has faded, these plastic daffodils never will.” If someone brings fake flowers to my funeral, I will haunt you to death.

I Was Making a List of People I Like and It Turned Into a Rant about Princess Diana:

First of all, that “Cinderella” crap pisses me off. As an earl’s daughter, she was “Lady Diana” from birth. Under formal British court etiquette, she preceded people with earned honors, like Dame Judi Dench, even before her marriage. She got a lot of credit for her beauty, but really she was simply a moderately pretty woman surrounded by a lot of horse-faced duchesses and duchess-faced horses. Anyone looks good standing next to a ninety-year-old baroness who’s her own cousin six times over.

Eve Ensler is Hard to Parody:

My vagina is like…

The Green Party: possessed of a foul odor and increasingly irrelevant.

“The Vagina Monologues,” a respectable achievement at first, but now overrated and with a bizarre momentum of its own.

A hospital waiting room coffee machine, barely functional and sticky around the edges.

Our Elders Are a Bottomless Font of Wisdom, Feces*:

Me: I don’t feel very well.

Mom: What does your stool look like?

Me: Like stool, presumably. I don’t look at it.

Mom: What!? Chris, you have to. It’s an important marker of health.

Me: Oh, shit.

Mom: Exactly. If you don’t look at your feces, you could miss an important symptom. You could fall over dead, just like that (snap) from an intestinal bleed or something and you’d never know!

Me: Well, and if so, I won’t have wasted any of the precious time I have left looking at my own feces, trying to read the future in the bowl like it’s full of tea leaves!

Mom: Oh, Chris. You’re a prude, just like your grandmother. She won’t look at her feces either.

*This last one was brought up during an editorial conference:

Me: Meg, I’m almost done with a post, but I need to know if you’ve run the one about my mother ordering me to look at my feces.

Meg: Uh. I… no, I think that would stick out in the mind.

Me: Oh, bum. I’ll have to edit this whole constipation section.

Meg: God, we’re low-class. Ace Ventura IX: The Locally Recognized Blog Years.

41 comments:

Sandra DC said...

um hi, i think this is my favorite tulane chris post ever. i vote for more of these miscarried posts.

Denise said...

As long as were on the subject, I don't think princess Di was all that pretty either, and you wrote about her in a post that compared vaginas to the green party and the fact that you *freakishly* don't look at your poop makes me feel a little better about my opinion on that one.

Anonymous said...

it's sort of like, if you ate a meatball sandwich, and that meatball sandwich started kicking you...

But even then it STILL doesn't want to know how you're feeling.
=Win.

Francesca said...

i have a friend who's last name is Overy. he's in a rock-a-billy band.

I hate Lady/Not Princess Di said...

Holy crap-another person who doesn't think that Diana (she wasn't a princess, people! She got divorced!) was an effing amazing perfect Cinderella type. She *was* only moderately pretty, and was just so not worth the favor given her.

I don't know why I have such strong feelings about her, but I do and they're all negative.

Evan said...

God, I love meatball sandwiches.

Mademoiselle Hautemess said...

I once heard that one of the warning signs for serial killers is that they don't look at their own poop before flushing...something about not caring about consequences for their own actions....

Tulane Chris, the next Ted Bundy?

Anonymous said...

taking the best moments of posts and mashing them up for one giant post = literally peeing in my pants from laughing.

thanks.

Anonymous said...

I'm also glad someone finally said it about "Princess" Di. Finally.

Dan Pearce said...

Yeah, I second that. More miscarried posts. I need to start keeping mine. I definitely feel the pain of tossing out that one good paragraph.

Single Dad Laughing

Anonymous said...

I wish I had something good to say.

Nate said...

Chris,

I'm sure she's a dear lady, but your mom seems strangely preoccupied with poop. Is she a nurse/doctor? Or just genuinely fascinated with it?

Does she know a lot about it? More than most? How much does she know? Does she pass the information along? Does she awkwardly work it into conversations with people?

Sorry, but these are questions I have to ask.

Hater said...

sorry to be a hater, but i did not laugh once during that post. actually i didn't even crack a smile. and i like tulane chris! epic.fail.

Anonymous said...

"duchess-faced horses" ftw. LOLZ. tulane chris rocks.

yellaphant said...

I think after reading those first few sentences, I'm going to work the word "miscarried" into more of my sentences.

At the office: "I'm sorry I didn't meet the deadline. I totally miscarried this project."

At home: "This dinner totally got miscarried."

In the bedroom: "You totally just miscarried my orgasm."

Anonymous said...

Npf again? If Hagman dies, the blood will be on your hands Ms. McBlogger.

kateebee said...

love ya, tulane chris, but i feel like you fall back on the whole "i couldn't really flush this out into a full entry" way too much. maybe it's not funny enough to talk about then? not sure, didn't read the whole thing, because it's long and tangental. more poop jokes! haha, jk. just throwing it out there.

did like the line about the meatball sandwich not asking about your feelings though. amen, brotha.

Becky said...

I see I may be in the minority here, but I can't bring myself to enjoy these "I couldn't be bothered to make this into a real post" posts. The great thing about Meg's posts is that she works hilarious stories, insights and general offensiveness into one unified whole. The beauty, nay, the magic of it is that it all flows. It works. Posts like this one do not work. Tulane Chris, I like you but I think you may need to try a little bit harder if you're going to rise to Meg's caliber.

Anonymous said...

whatever, i liked it. LOTS!

Anonymous said...

i think you meant to say oven fires, but i didn't mentally edit... nor did i second-guess. i was like, yeah, oven fries. those ARE good enough to distract someone from an act of self-mutilation. i want some oven fries RIGHT NOW.

Anonymous said...

npf??? jersey shore recap??? wahhhh

Rio said...

It's not even 5:30pm here on the East coast, but I'm gonna have to assume Larry died today. He must have. If I don't have my Hagman life-marker each Friday, then Friday night is spent drinking in his honor. And, frankly, I've been drinking to Larry Hagman's memory on a few too many Fridays recently. Please tell me before I head out tonight so I don't look like an idiot, again.

Anonymous said...

Aw, I liked it Chris. I thought it was funny.

Anonymous said...

Yikes... this blog is really going to the dogs. I think I only like 1 in 5 entries Tulane Chris does; but then again, Im a straight dude.

Anonymous said...

"Instead of writing a post about how you've been too busy to update your blog, just delete your fucking blog." - Aaron Karo

Anonymous said...

I love tulane chris almost as much as I love angry blog commenters. Chris is witty and his writing is smart as shit. Keep it up. Screw those that don't "get" you.

Anonymous said...

"Yikes... this blog is really going to the dogs. I think I only like 1 in 5 entries Tulane Chris does; but then again, Im a straight dude."

sheesh, i am going to quote an angry voicemail that i got at work once, which instructed me to "choke on my dick and lick my diarrhea drip."

seriously dude, does your dick do all of your opinion-forming for you?i just don't understand the relevance of orientation.

Meredith said...

What with the no-post Friday, the no post at 2:00 pm on Monday, the lack of tweets for four days and Meg's "mystery illness," I hope everything is a-ok with both birds and I'll be excited to read whatever is posted whenever it's posted!

Meredith said...

Oh, and the above comment wasn't supposed to be a laundry list of things that haven't been done. It was just a list of things that, added up, made me feel slightly worried. Good vibes and much love!

Emz321 said...

I'm definitely with Meredith. Hope everything is okay...

Anonymous said...

Yeah, I wouldn't post today either with everyone being such d-bags about the blog. Give it a rest folks! It's supposed to be fun for the birds, not a chore.

Anonymous said...

It seems like more and more blog posts have a strained undertone. I hope this blog is still a fun thing for you to do. I look forward to reading your posts and I hope you still look forward to writing them. I sometimes get the feeling you're pissed and "have to" get something out because you're obligated to this thing. You laugh and have fun, we laugh and have fun. I hope everything gets better for you. :)

Eleanor said...

The fake flowers at a funeral (check out that alliteration, didn't even plan it, I swear) could have been a post all on it's own.

The pressure of word counts is just too overwhelming for me. My next blog post is just going to be three sentences. Simple ones, even.

Excellent assortment, sir.

Ali said...

I'm starting to worry with the lack of posting, not because I demand to be entertained (that's what the archives are for), but because this is a pretty long no-post-stretch for you guys, and I know Meg hasn't been feeling well.

Hope everything is ok with you both!

Lots 'o love from New York.

Anonymous said...

Have aliens abducted Meggles? Arghhhhh!

Morgan said...

People are awful. Y'all are amazing. ::shakes head:: maybe they should read a newspaper! That is SUPPOSED to come out daily. I enjoy when y'all have fun. Also, the non-hashed out entry compilations work well for the ADHD I've convinced myself I have. Thanks for the laughs!

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