the quote generator; spirulina; venture capital

1. the quote generator
on the way to the miracle of the possum christ i went to an exhibition opening. it was fun! while i was there que and ana said 'see that girl over there? she talks entirely in quotes.'
'wow.' i said. 'i'm gonna go talk to her.'

reader: i confess to bein a lil drunk. also: my pants were a lil loose and kept migrating south. my pubic hair kept waving over the top like a red rag to a bull, bein as how my pubic hair is red and all. i didn't really mind. i was happy to see it again. i felt a surge of familiarity and affection for my red pubic hair, such as you might feel for an old friend who turns up unexpectedly. this isn't really relevant to the action, i'm just setting the scene.

i wandered around for a while til i found her. she was wearing a skeleton costume: a black one-piece with bones painted on it in white.
'hey!' i said. 'i heard you talk entirely in quotes. is it true?'
'sometimes..' she said. '(husbands and wives, 1992)'.

an aside: have you ever noticed how raymond off everybody loves raymond sounds just like oscar the grouch?

back to the conversation: we talked for a while. i hafta say i enjoyed it a great deal. she didn't talk entirely in quotes though, and i told her so: 'you don't talk entirely in quotes!' i was pointing out that she was speaking in quotes AND attributions (you know, the bibliographic part - the bit in brackets) and that the attributions weren't part of the original and were therefore not quotes. she looked pained.
'give me a break!' she said. '(beavis and butthead, 1996).'

wow. i was impressed.
'do you have like multiple sources for this kind of small-talk chit-chat?' i asked.
'yes (yoko ono, 1966)' she said, and then she said 'yes (optus, 2006)'

eventually i asked her her name. i was wondering how she was gonna deal with that one. she said 'http://www.thequotegenerator.com '. now i was thoroughly charmed. i'd never met anyone else who spoke in hypertext before. i decided that if she liked wwf wrestling i'd propose marriage, right then and there. borrow a ring from somewhere. recite the vows with my pubic hair waving gently in the breeze that announced this to be the last night of summer, waving like hungry kelp in the languid waters of the carribbean, reaching out to the air and saying: will you dance with me, you devilish breeze? dance with me instead of snatching away the minutes of summer like the grinch? instead of cooling the ardour of the air with your cool uh.. absence of heat?

unfortunately she'd never given the matter of wwf wrestling much thought. i am still a bachelor, therefore: damn! always a bridgegroom, never a bride. no, wait, that came out wrong. always a best man, never the groom? doesn't exactly slip off the tongue, does it? hmm. i can tell i will hafta ruminate on this further: pass the cud of marital status through all four stomachs of my mind until it makes sense like simple cellulose.


2. spirulina
friday was my birthday. i didn't organise anything in particular, partly cos of the shortness of february of which i have spoken before, and partly cos i had many other things to organise such as the stuff of my life which is snarled into a snarl. also: partly cos i couldn't be bothered wondering if anyone was going to turn up if i did, a form of paranoia to which i am suspect. nonetheless: i had a grand old time.

eventually i ended up at an exhibition opening, different from the pre-possum-christian one. how did that happen? beats me but i was there so it happened somehow.

barcelona is pronounced bartheLAWna. howabout that. that's cos catalan spanish lisps the letter c. i was thinking about this the other day in the context of lisping. it seems to have vanished a bit, but there used to be a pretty strong association between homosexuality and lisping in the popular imagination. and i wondered if this, and the jibes that used to go with it, were actually xenophobic in origin rather than strictly homophobic: 'we hate youse gay cunts not cos you're gay but cos you talk like FUCKING SPANIARDS' - that kind of thing.

fucking spaniards. where was i? penny: that's right. this short woman with red hair walks in. i remember her name is penny. this is funny, cos i only met her briefly about 15 years ago, and then once a few years later. nevertheless i remember her name. weird. why can't i remember the names of people i see more often and actually interact with from time to time? it'd be just a tad more fucking useful, methinks.

penny wants to move to barcelona. why? because they like her there and they treat her good. she feels beautiful there. fair enough, too. i'd probably do the same if i discovered a place like that. melbourne's pretty good though. i got no complaints except sometimes about the weather. people say nice things about me often enough to keep me happy and here. thanks people. you guys are the best!

my attention kept wandering. this was partly a defense mechanism. penny seemed just a bit too impressed that i'd remembered her name lo these many years, and i was getting the sense she was reading something more into it than the mere freak of neurochemical architecture i reckon it was. (i'm using 'impressed' here in the sense that you'd use it of soap impressed with a cell-key as part of a noble but ultimately doomed escape attempt. that is, it seemed to have made an imprint that wasn't gonna fade in a hurry.)

anyway, she's tried to live in barcelona twice before but couldn't work out how to make money there. now she's studying natural therapies.
'barcelona's like ten years behind australia when it comes to natural healing!' she says. 'all these things i take for granted, they've never even heard of. they've never heard of spirulina!'

note to self: hmm..

spirulina, by the way, is a mexican algae that grows in highly alkaline high-altitude ponds. it's a vegetarian source of vitamin b12 and a whole bunch of other stuff your body likes having around. and true, it is algae, but once it's dried and powdered it tastes better than you'd expect. actually, it doesn't. it tastes just like you'd expect dried algae powder to taste. it fucking tastes like shit, that's what i'm getting at here. the aztecs called it tecuitlatl, meaning 'stone's excrement', so i'm not making this shit up.

question: will barcelona be improved by the importation of dried mexican algae that evokes stone-shit in the tongue of the aztecs? i guess there's only one way to find out.. to the venture capital, without a moment to lose!


3. at the venture capital
ok, does everyone know what venture capital is? just in case:

let's say you've got an idea that will make a shitload of money. actually, an arseload of money. the distinction is important, for reasons which will become clear shortly.

however, in order to put this idea into practice, you'll need to spend a bunch of money. not as much money as you're gonna make, but maybe quite a bit. let's call it a shitload of money, on the principle that a shitload must always logically be less than an arseload.

what you do then is you go to the pile of venture capital you have sitting in the vault, because venture capital is the money you hafta spend to be able to make money somehow. when people say 'you hafta spend money to make money', venture capital is the first kind of money.

unfortunately, you may not have a big pile of money in a vault. maybe that's why you're spending your time dreaming up schemes to ship algae to barcelona instead of, y'know, guzzling gin and juice in the benz with voluptuous, scantily clad members of the sex of your choice.

what you do then is you go find a venture capitalist and explain to them how much money you'll both make if they give you a smaller but maybe quite substantial amount of money first.

all these thoughts are weighing on my mind because i'm staring at where my pile of venture capital used to be and i can't see it anywhere. hello? he-lloooooooo? maybe it's hiding somewhere.. wait a sec..

















..no, it's definitely gone. damn! now i hafta go find someone to lend me a shitload of money on the premise that shipping dried shitful mexican algae to barcelona will make us both an arseload of money.

sheesh. you see the kind of shit i hafta put up with? i may hafta ask you to excuse me for a while because a while is how long i reckon it's all gonna take..

sincerely yours,
mike
xxxx