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Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").

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Friday, July 2 1999

An email I just received from one of my correspondents:

Based on the tyrannical, juvenile lunacy with which your current workplace is run, I strongly suggest a pre-emptive strike against the Grand Pooh Bah with some Chicken Time Bombs.

In an empty mayonnaise jar, place several pieces of uncooked chicken--Tyson's 9-piece package works well. Next, fill the jar two-thirds full--but not all the way--with buttermilk. Screw the lid on tight, and you've got yourself a Chicken Time Bomb.

Hide a Chicken Time Bomb (maybe two, or three!) in a warm, dark place where it won't be disturbed or noticed (hung ceilings, behind dusty servers or refrigerators are good examples), and in a few months the fermentation gases will crack the jar.

The resulting smell is, well, comparable to being trapped in an elevator with several gutterpunks who've just polished off a hefty load of Mexican food.

So if you quit or get fired, you'll have made a stink about it, so to speak.

I did a little searching around on the web for some people I used to know back in Oberlin. First there was Lisa Joy Powley, my first real girlfriend. Back when I last saw her in 1989, she was studying to be a concert cellist. But as of yet she still doesn't exist on the Internet.
Then there was Gretchen Pr!mack, the girl who was my de-facto girlfriend during the Fall of 1988, when my actual girlfriend, Lisa Joy Powley, was saving money at home with her folks in King of Prussia, PA (and I was in college, sleeping through all my classes). I only found one Gretchen Pr!mack on the Web, and she works as the director of a New York City program defending women's rights in the workplace. This may or may not be the same person. Back when I first met Gretchen, she was a refreshingly cynical seventeen year old girl from Silver Spring, Maryland.
There was also Terry Hinricks, Gretchen's serene, "retro-to-a-recent-period before retro-to-a-recent-period was cool" best friend from Gettysburg, PA. Being from a major historical center of human death, Terry had an unusual interest in aging and the dead. Unfortunately, her name yields no useful searches in Altavista.
But there's always Trevor Levine, the smarmy, self-promoting musician who fell in love with Terry. I remember his band, Trevor Levine and the Seekers of Truth. Over swelling piano dramatics he would sing such uplifting songs as "18," an anthem about the onset of adulthood:

18 and you're a man today
(Well, so say.)
[I forget the rest.]

He may not have had what it took to land a Terry Hinricks, but he was a slippery one, that Trevor Levine. Well I recall the time he almost succeeded in getting Harkness Co-operative to finance the production of his debut album of uplifting tunes.

Fortunately, Trevor is very much alive on the internet. These days he's putting his slippery talents to work as a big shot entrepreneur.

Having partied every free moment for the last several days, tonight Kim and I took a bit of a vacation from decadence. Kim ordered a pizza and we tried to watch an inane television show. I woke up some time later and found all the lights out and Kim asleep in bed. I thought it was pretty cool that she actually let me fall asleep in front of the tube.

For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?990702

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