Laura Buchholz

Dear homeowner:

This letter is to inform you that your home has been selected as the perfect new site of the future Piranhas stadium.  As you are surely aware, the Piranhas are a professional football team with many thousands of devoted fans, and they bring with them plentiful opportunities for ticket sales, gift shops, TV deals, and paid parking.  Building a stadium on the site of your current home would create jobs, expand opportunity, and create valuable business traffic in your otherwise quiet and– dare we say desolate?–residential neighborhood.

Your home, by contrast, is a small blue ranch-style home that, as far as we can tell, contains only you and your cat.  You seem to spend a lot of time at your computer and you don’t clean your bathroom very often.  You’ve been underemployed for over six months and your garage only fits one car, and that car needs repair. Plus the Piranhas’ team colors are red and gold, and your house is blue, so you can see you are off to a poor start.

Homeowner, if you think about it, you will understand that the very concept of America means success, and that is why we are prepared to offer you four thousand dollars and eighty five cents to bulldoze your home on or before July 14.

Should you turn down this offer, you should know that we are fully prepared to come in through your window and remove you from your home, with or without your cat, after which bulldozers will follow to flatten everything in sight.   We would like your ellipitical trainer though, so you should remove that from the home, first. The Piranhas love elliptical trainers.

Should you resist the men coming through your window to create progress, be aware that we are prepared to chop you into bits in your very own living room and feed you into a giant blender and flush the whole mess of you down your own toilet.  We hope you don’t have one of those low-flow ones. They don’t really save water because you have to flush them so many times.  We know that you know this.

Homeowner, Americans love football and they would love to watch football taking place where you are now sitting—according to our spies sitting in the white van across the street, you are sitting on your plaid couch and holding a can of Milwaukee’s Best.  Please think about this, homeowner, and then come to the correct conclusion–for yourself AND for America.  We’ll be watching, and waiting.

Signed,

Everybody, especially The Piranhas.

“I was riding a vintage 3-speed before anybody else thought it was cool,” declared Karl, from atop his brown and white pinto pony who was lifting his tail and getting ready to drop something on Bedford Avenue.

“It’s over,” said Karl, “the 3-speed thing is over.  It went mainstream a long time ago.  Now it makes me sick.  Bikes used to be cool.  Now they’re like Top 40 radio.  Let it be known that I’m the first guy in town to be riding a pinto pony,” said Karl, who was on his way to his favorite coffeeshop where he was working on a screenplay about a colony of gnomes.

“Not so fast,” said a voice behind Karl, and Karl whipped around and there, sitting behind him, was a Native American on a palomino horse, with the full outfit on and everything, right here in the middle of Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

“Whoa man.  Where did you come from?”

“I’ve been here the whole time,” said the Native American.  “I was here before any of you guys were here.  I was here before America was cool, and while it was cool, and I’m still here now that it’s awful.  Everything’s so ‘Top 40′.  It makes me sick.  I want to go to Canada.”

“Man, I feel so uncool right now,” said Karl.

“You should,” said the Native American.  “Because you are.  So why don’t you give me that pony and good luck with your screenplay about gnomes.”

Karl got off his pony, Roger, who appeared visibly relieved.  Karl gave the reins to the Native American.

“How did you know I was–”

“I know everything,” said the Native American.  Karl knew the game was up.  He turned over Roger to the Native American, and Roger perked right up and the Native American gave him a carrot.    They turned around and headed north, towards Canada, leaving Karl there to contemplate his suddenly reduced coolness factor.

He slouch-walked over to a very cool (read: dirty) kiosk and he bought a newspaper.  On the front page of the arts section was a big movie story:  Tamara Knutson’s hit movie “Road Trip Gnomes!” hits theaters this weekend.

Oh.

Some people are wondering, rightly, if a snowstorm at the end of March is a sign
of God’s displeasure, and of course the answer is ‘yes’.

But what he is angry about is another puzzle, perhaps one that is not meant to be solved in this lifetime.  At least that’s what disciples of intelligent meteorology used to think before the invention of the Prophet Doppler, a new atmospheric scanning device that picks up subtle messages from god that are out there floating in the airwaves, much like the jet stream, which of course is there but you never see it, and yet you still believe in it, don’t you?

Well.

Let’s take a look at this map.  (pulls down map) Oh, boy.  As you can see, there is a massive system stalled across the upper Midwest with two words clearly visible in the doppler formation:  “collective bargaining”.  Aha.  So god HAS been following events in Madison, it seems.  Although in typical god fashion, he hasn’t really given us much of an indication of how he feels about this.  But we can at least get a pretty clear idea that this is what he (or she?) is stewing about.

In the south, you can see a pretty persistent pattern of dry and airid weather accompanied by the doppler message “strip malls”.    Okay.   In the Northeast, over here by Boston and New York, and particularly strong in certain Brooklyn neighborhoods are rather persistent messages:  “hipsters” and “pretentious irony”.  A smaller system is moving in right behind that, however–a system that says “roommates.” A rather faint system behind that seems to have left a wispy trail that reads “drawings of animals by Dave Eggers.”

Interesting.

And here we thought god was unknowable.  It turns out that we just didn’t have the right tools.

Up next:  Intelligent Cooking.

I forgot to mention that I have a second new blog.  This one is about hooping. (I’ve become a hooper), and it’s called, appropriately, “Adventures in Hooping” . This is where it lives:

adventuresinhooping.com

So, subscribe to that if you want.  These new blogs are more specific, obviously–hooping and yoga chickens may not be your thing, so I will keep this blog open.  I may be adding videos, who knows.  But I thought you might want to know about that other one.  Thanks for reading!

Laura

After a quick scan of the data and an even quicker scan of my feelings about this yearold blog, I have decided that The Yoga Chicken has more to say than I do.

So.

This blog will pretty much fold up for a while and the action will be moving over to:

theyogachicken.com

Please come on over if you want to follow the sporadic adventures of the chicken, whom some have suggested be named Mitchell but I think he’s going to be like Sting and keep his real name under wraps for a while.

Thanks for reading–

There comes a time in the life of a snowbank when it must melt and slide away into the gutter, and accept that the winter was what it was and that the brutal season of cold and ice and “I’ll show you” weather patterns have grown stale.

In these days the sun may emerge and the snow grows dirty and garbage may surface, things that were left in the snowpack back in October or November, or whenever it was that the snow fell, and who even remembers?

Birds may alight on this dying snowpack, and pick out the blue things (orthodontic rubber bands, Tiffany boxes) to take to their nest to attract a mate.  It’s fine.  That’s what they like to do so don’t judge.

Children attempting to sled on this kind of snow may end of very frustrated, with wet mittens and sock edges.  This is the time to distract them with movies.

Dog walkers and artistic persons who self-identify as being “visually oriented” may object to this crusty, dirty phase; not just for its aesthetic problems but also for the rise in river levels it causes, which may also lead to erosion and bike trail washout.  Well guess what?  There’s no alternative, unless someone feels like building a glass dome over the city and plugging about 200,000 air conditioners into it and revving up a giant snow machine so we can keep our filthy junk and dirt packs covered up with  fresh, albeit fake, snow.  It’s just not gonna happen;  mainly because the city would have to tow twice as many cars as it did this winter to fund such a project, and there are a lot more people who would rather give in and take the bus than have to amp up their winter parking vigilance, which already requires unsustainable levels of adrenaline pumpage.

And so we deal with the dirt.

Do you know about pica?  It’s an iron deficiency so severe that some people need to emerge from their homes and eat dirt and rocks just to feel better.   That may be somebody’s lunch you’re wanting to sweep away.

Just leave it.  It’s fine for now.

Winter is a time for spiders because they don’t want to be outside any more than you do, so chances are they’re hiding out in your house where they sleep during the day and wait for you to fall asleep at night so they can do stuff to you.

It is imperative that you get to know the symptoms of various spider attack, lest you become a victim and lose a lot of self esteem.

Blonde Carrot Spider. This spider does not bite, but rather crouches by your bed at night staring at your face trying to figure out what you’re thinking.  In many ways this can be more invasive than an actual venom injection; particularly if you wake up before it goes away.  Best protection:  wear sunglasses to sleep so it can’t see your eyes.  It will get discouraged and go away.

Leg Spider. Ever get a Charlie Horse in the middle of the night?  Okay, that’s not a random muscle spasm.  It’s a spider.  Now don’t freak out, but in order for your leg to cramp up like that the spider has to bite you pretty high up on the inner thigh.  So when your calf starts to cramp up you should not immediately grab the calf and start massaging it.   Instead you should brush off your inner thigh with a quick, panicked motion.  The Leg Spider does not have dangerous venom, just annoying venom.  It bites for recreational purposes, and if you wear long underwear to bed you should be able to easily ward off its bite.

Brown Spotted Shame Spider. This spider is particularly crafty in its approach.  Generally it comes in from an outside source, like a friend’s bag or a sealed envelope.  But once inside your home, it tends to stay there until purged by either burning sage or holy water sprinkled in all corners of your house or both.  The brown spotted shame spider does not wait until you go to sleep, but rather jumps on you out of nowhere no matter what you’re doing and its bite will blind you for approximately five minutes, but nothing else will happen other than you will feel tired and want to lie down afterwards.  The BSSS become particularly active when you are writing a novel, so be on alert.

Scrambled Egg Spider This spider is harmless but will stick to your neck and you won’t be able to get it off.  This is particularly true in the winter months when peoples’ skin tends to be dry.  The scrambled egg spider is a common spider and no one knows where it comes from but you probably have about three or four of them in your house right now that have been there for a while and nobody knows how old they are.   The best way to avoid the attack of the scrambled egg spider is to moisturize every day.  That way the spider will slide right off when you decide you’ve had enough.