More Masomenis

Looking through my green metal file I’ve pulled out the third piece of correspondence between me and the Masomenis Corporation: my response to Raymond Horn’s answer-free letter replying to my questions about the company’s home defibrillator. I decided that this could be a correspondence adventure, which is stupid because there’s no such thing as a correspondence adventure. When this was happening in the fall of 2008 I was busy sabotaging myself into unemployment. I wasn’t doing my given job and was writing a wide variety of bogus correspondence for fellow-employees, originally doing just a couple of bogus recommendation letters. The folks I did them for thought it would be a nice, old-fashioned touch compared to the usual spit-out form email.

What I began doing was fun from the inside, but people around me thought that I had a problem. I started saying things that made no sense just to see how someone reacted. I asked people in the office how loud they’d be willing to talk or if they would fake passing out. I told them that if they didn’t get their handwriting analyzed their relationships would fail. I passed out a detailed multiple-choice quiz about rabbits and gave people five bucks to complete and return it.

To pep up my second letter to the Masomenis Corporation and I decided that I would comment on how much nothing there had been in Mr. Horn’s letter. I Googled “Nothing” and started on one of those on-line looking-up strings, moving from site to site to expand or explain your subject. But this wasn’t a YouTube thing where you watch one kitty falling asleep and then four hours later you’re watching tigers playing baseball or a kid licking a sea anemone. I fell into the Philosophy Pit and became interested. Ideas and vocabulary ratcheted up exponentially. I didn’t leave when I read the core idiotic question, “Why is there something instead of nothing.” If I had been thinking properly would I have run away from that first question. Wouldn’t you?

Given what followed I advise you, very seriously: look up sleeping kitties.

Invaders End

I took my ant-infested keyboard out into the yard in back of the office this afternoon and snuggled it into the dirt. After more than 24-hours ants were still coming out from between the keys and up my fingers at a steady rate. It was like a keyboard clown car and looked like it wouldn’t end. I figured if I plopped it in the yard we could begin our very own Developing Country Technological Trash Mountain right here! Out of respect for Earth Day I didn’t douse it with chemicals.

A few years ago when I checked into a cabin on a nature reserve in El Salvador I tried to stop the owner from spraying some horrible-smelling liquid over a giant line of ants that flowed from the porch into the room. I’m in the tropics telling a native not to kill the ants! What an idiot. The next day our guide showed us a twenty foot wide path in the forest that ants had gone through and stripped bare. I don’t know if they were the same kind of ants, but I thought that I should apologize to the guy from the night before. He tried to make me comfortable and I got save-the-animals snotty.

The next morning, he was very nice and said that he was worried that so many tap-dancing ants would have kept me awake all night and their top hats tended to fall off and make a mess. It was, after all, the tropics and the ants can get pretty big.

More Tiny Invaders

I did mange to get rid of the tap-dancing ant invasion the other day with a combo of wet towels and lemon Pledge (or as the spray cans read in Mexico "Limon Blem"), but I have had to pay a terrible price. What looks like dust at the base of the walls are, in fact, tiny tap shoes and top hats. It's depressing. I guess the colony clean-up crew didn't have time or motivation to grab the extra equipment when they came to get their co-residents bodies.

On the up side, the office smells very nice.

My computer work has been spotty the last couple of days because ants have invaded my keyboard. I'm sure I deserve it. They aren't here in their millions, but they're here in their persistent dozens. One crawls out from between the "O" and "P" and up my finger, I shake it off into space, then another comes up between the "D" and "F." I've looked under the keyboard and there is no nest and there is no line leading to it.

No one has mentioned that ants come inside when it's windy. Is that possible? It's windy enough to kick the Nothingness Cam back into action. One can hope.

Dirk's Idea of Being & Nothingness

Toaster crumb tray

Dirk, the cranky computer guy, is undermining his own business by being so good at problem solving and scrupulous maintenance that clients need him less. So he hangs around here because the Being & Nothingness Cam Project is nothing if not a hanging-around place. He’s become obliquely interested in the concept or lack thereof of Being & Nothingness, but his brain is constructed along very solid, straight lines that don’t tolerate wandering attention spans, staring into space, non-goal-oriented speculation, arguing for the hell of it, and reading ridiculous tomes to while away the time. And I’ve never seen him drink more than two cups of coffee, max, in a one hour period.

This morning he came in with a camera chip and showed me these photos, which he claims are the definitions of being and nothingness. He had taken out his toaster’s crumb tray (above) to clean it and saw that it was surprisingly clean. This was the Nothingness part. He didn’t remember ever cleaning the toaster, so he turned it upside-down over the sink (below), and hey! Being! The very definition! That man is one concrete thinker. We didn’t have a follow-up discussion about Being and Nothingness, because I don’t know enough about it to say that it doesn’t center around toasters.

I very much like Dirk’s philosophy towards cleaning. Cleaning should have clear parameters and rewards. My sister says that “she feels nice” when the house is clean. Really? That’s it? I clean to safeguard health and to get the jump on frightening smells. Outside of that, I clean to prevent or repel: killer drones, sharpshooters, untalented drummers aspiring to be front men, elephant-eating lions, inexplicable color changes, fraud, pestilence (Biblical and non-Biblical brands), clear-cut instances of predation, inanimate stuff moving, spontaneous generation, poor taste, and squiddies.

If a didgeridoo showed up in my kitchen with no explanation I’d probably throw it out.

Actual contents of toaster

Pox Follow-Up

Earlier this week I dealt with an ant invasion at the office and then contracted a dreadful illness. Well, it turns out that I have a cold, and maybe not even a cold but some sort of allergic reaction. Health-wise that’s a plus, but the art world will suffer from Dirk and I not making up a second verse to the “Monkey Pox” song. We have no motivation now.

I’m slacking off watching a “Naked Science” episode about the Tunguska mystery of 1908. Still no scientific explanation as to why bazillions of square miles of the sub-Arctic circle in Russia was somehow “crushed” killing darned near everything there. Except, of course, mosquitoes. No evidence of an event like an asteroid or anything.

But we all know the answer, don’t we? It was probably space monkeys.