CELL-EH PHONE KITTEHS

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HAPPY HOUR: BACK TO SCHOOL EDITION

1.
Recipe for SoDakian Martini = Miller Lite + tomato juice + olives. (Do not shake and do not stir. Just swill at will.)

2.
“They Don’t Make Them Like They Used to Any More”:

Gentleman Sitting Catty-Corner: His wife (gesturing to the fellow sitting next to him) had fifteen children! My wife had seven children! I bet neither one of you end up having anything close to that amount of children!

AH: WTF?

Lu: WTF!

3.
“I Had Sort of Planned on a Low-Key Evening — That Is, Until Shots Were Sent Over from the Neighboring Table”:

Lu: OMG! It’s only 6:30, and we’re already doing shots!

AH: OMG! I know! Well . . . at least it’s not a straight shot of bourbon!

Lu: Ha! You know what? I don’t believe Thor Spam (name changed to protect the innocent) can’t remember anything from Cool Breeze’s party last week.

AH: You don’t buy it?

Lu: No. I think he’s being a man-boy.

AH: Hey! We should coin a new term for unacknowledged dipsomania, then! We’ll call it being ThorSpammed!

Lu: Like, OMG! I was so ThorSpammed last night! I can’t remember a thing!

AH: Exactly. And then we can mock him on FaceBook by writing updates along the lines of: “OMG! I was so ThorSpammed last night! I can’t remember a thing!” Would that be mean? Are we Mean Girls?

Lu: Yeah. Kind of. Hee.

AH: Hee.

4.
Time-lapsed rain clouds keep on cruising by like long dark cars with tinted windows, and it remains miraculously cool and sunny and blue. A turkey vulture parabolas the Vermillion water tower, visible behind the worn brick fence. BBQ pinks on the grill and around the corner, there’s the promise of deep-fried dough as the street festival sets up. A law professor dances the polka with his daughter.

5.
Happiness sizzles deep in my pocket like an electric tingle of loose change.

6.
The Public Domain Tunes Band plays a version of The Drunken Hiccups — learned from Knut Jensen, two-fingered fiddler from Centerville. The hiccups are pizzicati, or maybe it’s that the pizzicati are hiccups, pinging out from the midst of all of the rapid-fire intricate fingerwork being executed by The Fabulous Omar . . . and it’s a beautiful evening and fall is coming on, and what could be more fabulous than this?

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“ARE YOU GONNA KEEP ON PEELING ME?”

A bouquet of prickles and stings:
you weigh each thistled scale one
by one, drizzle with euphemisms:
creamy, nutty, fleshy, green.

What will happen when I’ve gifted
all my nettles away? What’s left?
Steamed flower to scoop clean out.
Edible, pressure-cooked heart.

You’re plucky and buttery,
ruthless in your mathematics
of extractions and subtractions.
A Fibonacci series of unpetaling.

(Can you squeeze a lemon on me?)

Seismic shifts, and things unhinge:

Relax with ice and slit the resistant
muscle, or steam open the shell.
Do not pry, and do not suck.
(The ice, the knife, the glove . . . )

Earthworms rise to the surface,
throb and bake in the fierce light.
Mole rats head-drum their portents.
Catfish thrash in a tumult of silt.

O harmonic tremor, o earthquake!

O, sweet giant!

O beautiful tsunami!

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