Contests
Giving Away the Freaks
Jamie Iredell is giving away his killer new book, the weird faux-encyclopedia of trash talk and straight talk: The Book of Freaks. Here follows the scheme from Jamie himself — MY
“I want to give away some copies of The Book of Freaks.
I’m thinking that the most entertaining way I might achieve this is to have other people write their own entries to The Book of Freaks.
For examples, some of the entries that I wrote can be found
at Hobart
at the2ndhand
at PANK
at Robot Melon (x2)
at Mad Hatter’s Review
at Servinghouse
Write your freakish entry. It can be about anything you damn well please. Post your entry in the comments here. Entries will be judged by Roxane Gay and Mike Young. Three winners and a runner-up will be selected to receive a signed copy of the book and some other junk that I decide to send your way.” Post your comment entries by Thursday May 12th.
Tags: jamie iredell
Patty Cake
Everything needed a glaze, a sugar reflector that tides in the mouth and washes everything with its ebb. Cakes, especially the handheld, were piled immaculate in his straw-colored cabinets, surrounding the pasta boxes, the thirty-minute casserole boxes, the canisters of Lipton tea and soup packets. Recipes taped to the fridge changed from Swedish meatballs, chicken and cheese bake, to strawberry shortcake, monkey bread, peanut butter éclairs, whose sugar measurements grew by pinches then ½ cups. His wife wanted muscle, like his father, wanted him to tone before taking the kids with her to Jim’s, who answered phones curt and sighing. He stacked the donut boxes in their old rooms where they wouldn’t scratch his swelled ankles. The cakes took over the couches, so he could stay there, in front of the infinite DVR, for days. He couldn’t help but drool, the pooling constant on his bulbed chin. The sugar content of his mouth stream grew so bulked that the molecules began to stack, forming a crystal. He soon had to splint this glossed beard with folded cardboard and plastic shards from a cake box, otherwise the confectionary stalactite dug into the space where his ever-growing belly and upper torso met when he chewed, and the sores failed to heal for weeks, the stinging causing headaches only sated by more cream and glaze. The insects soon noticed the beard. The insects saw refuge and sustenance in one efficient structure, much like a rotted maple or carcass. He felt soft tugs in the crystal here and there, but his body had become prone to odd spasms in the burgeoning, and like most things, were tuned out. It was at night, when the insects worked most, that he saw little shadows moving in and out of the crystal. They worked careful caverns and tunnels minding the delicate nature of their new home. He kept eating. He thought of how cake hugs the insides, how the hug squeezes deep in the person’s core and how no one hugged him since their fingertips failed to meet in the circumference. When his jaws stopped one final time, the insects recognized the need for expansion. Pushing through the crystal, they explored their addition, which seemed to have been growing all this time just for them.
http://xrl.us/bh8tjk
I jerked off in a church once. Used a hymnal to clean the mess. True story.
Space bar
The space bar is very cute .
Then again, what isn’t? When they made it did they see me smackin’ it?
I, uh .
oh,
I have to use the space bar between every word so it must be durable. It
is very durable especially
now
during the Big FREAKOUT
When I type words I need to tap the space bar every time :’)
There was no priest at the christening and I felt we were gathered there in secret, probably against the will of the diocese. Oddly, the child, my nephew, hadn’t yet been conceived. In black procession the women of my family began down the aisle. Even my dead grandmother, who had small sticks in her hair and could not see. An orb advanced alongside the women, almost in hiding. I believe it represented the child, though I did not care to ask. The bored onlookers made small talk, and soon most everyone’s attention had wandered to a growing dice game near a likeness of the Virgin. My aunt screamed out against them, was ignored, and from there the event devolved into a social gathering. “FUCKING BOOZE TIME!” someone shouted from the back, to a roar of cheers. My aunt, being a drunk, did not object. Soon I found myself engaged in conversation with my aunt’s only worldly friend. She opened up to me, expressing her feelings of loneliness and isolation. My aunt was her only friend, she said. They speak on the phone for hours at a time, she explained, but only seem to talk about two things: how lonely they each feel, which strengthens their bond, but also their shared sadness in the belief that the other is her only friend, which makes each of them angry at the other, feeling as though the other resents her in some way. By this time my aunt’s only friend’s head had begun to morph, pulsing and swelling to four times its size, the skin stretching her features farther and farther apart until she was no longer recognizable. Soon the blob began to quiver and sprouted a fat wet eye. She began to cry, now expressing what seemed to be her deepest anxiety— that someday her head might begin to expand, that she might morph into a hideous creature, that children might scream at the mere sight of her.
Students
Many human beings, roughly attend special communities called college or university. They do this approximately four years and—when successful—are given a piece of paper. This paper is called diploma.
Diploma qualifies the human beings leaving college to do the bidding—when lucky—of other human beings, usually part of a larger organization, known as “ANY COMPANY THAT WILL TAKE YOU (A.C.T.W.T.Y.).
Like university, at A.C.T.W.T.Y., Human Beings are given more paper. This paper comes in small green pieces. It is called dollar. With a diploma, A.C.T.W.T.Y. allows humans to have just enough dollar to maintain normal bodily function (N.B.F.), also known as alive. This amount, the amount of dollar necessary to maintain N.B.F., was called salary.
Other Human Beings who don’t go to university, and are without diploma, can also receive salary, but with greater difficulty. This is called minimum wage. Though of course minimum waged humans are the same if not equal to diploma’d humans, the former isn’t allowed to do the biddings at A.C.T.W.T.Y. Instead they do so at A.C.Y.W.R.W.T.W.B.S.H.T.D.I., A COMPANY YOU DONT REALLY WANT TO WORK AT BUT SOMEONE HAS TO DO IT.
Minimum wage is called minimum wage because it is the minimum dollar needed for the human to maintain normal bodily function.
But minimum wage is not enough to keep a body functioning normally.
This is called joke. This joke is a good one, because joke is ironic, when an actual outcome is different than an expected outcome.
Another joke is this: two drums and a cymbal fell off a cliff.
Da-da-ch.
Hognose snakes of the genus Heterodon are a serpentine reptile of the United States of America and los Estados Unidos de Mexico. (If a specimen is found elsewhere, that particular snake is probably in a Reptile House; please feed the animals only children’s fingers.)
Hognose snakes are so called because their snouts are formed of a hard, scaled mass in the shape of an upturned cutie-pie honker (courtesy of Dr. Melons, Beverly Hills, CA).
Hognoses react to threats in two ways: (1) Some will flatten their bodies (by spreading their ribs from jaw hinges to anuses), writhe, raise their heads with opened mouths, his and strike. – but don’t run, foo’! – hognoses are merciless but dogmatically monophagous amphibiarians.
(2) Some will roll onto their backs to ‘play’ ‘dead’. Unhappily for the illusion of death, when turned onto their stomachs, these hognoses will muscularly roll back onto their backs. Unhappily for verisimilitudinous portrayal – but luckily indeed for those curious as to the hognose concept of life after death!
Each hognose snake harbors the soul of a south-Pacific leprechaun. If you encounter a hognose snake, clap your coconut cowbell, shimmy your hypnotic hula, and follow your weregenie to a pot of golden fantasy-luge picks.
Law School Front Door, The
Humans with books are allowed to enter. Humans with signs stand outside. They talk to humans with batons and grey clothes and metallic badges that read SECURITY in raised voices. They talk to humans with pistols and black clothes and metallic badges that read POLICE OFFICER/CHICAGO POLICE/CITY OF CHICAGO/INCORPORATED 4TH MARCH1837 in calm voices. They talk about first amendment rights and free speech. Their cell phones cost seven cents a minute but texting, they say, texting is free. Free for $15.00/month. In 2.5 years, the signs will be defended by the law students, assuming the law market improves and other former law students and now lawyers don’t take the case. This gets the law students giddy. Law is right here! They gasp. This beats the books! The law school front door remains quiet about the whole thing.
Nobody said this would be easy.
I am a chronologically enhanced male human, who suddenly found himself entwined with a woman 20 years younger than himself. That’s right – twenty years.
The experience/culture gap rarely showed itself. We communed and interacted quite well. The physical and the intellectual connections were super-fine. HOWEVER, the emotional expectations, the emotional preferences were grinding gears.
This was not a surprise. By god, we actually talked about it. She: unconcerned by the unequal balance of experience. Me: Certain that the disparity of love-knowledge would be our undoing.
And so here we are, she and I, at our first terrible emotional upheaval, noted primarily by an embargo on communication. I had to take 48 hours to get straight about reaching out to her. I await her response.
In the meantime, I know Jaimie’s Book of Freaks will soothe my tired, frayed nerves. Lay it on me, I deserve it.
VAG: VIXENS OF ALLIED GAMING
Left-right-left-right-B or down-down-down-up-Y. Once your opponent is stunned and staggering you shove one of Kitana’s Steel War Fans up his ass and pull out his intestines. The Inside Out. That was my submission to last month’s VAG contest for best two person fighter finishing move. The month before I tried the Ice Hole. Up-up-up-up-X or right-down-left-down-X. A move where the younger Sub-Zero, Kuai, forces his Ice Scepter inside his opponent’s piss hole and freezes him, then pushes him hard to the ground causing him to crack in pieces when he hits. We all came up with our own fatalities and voted on the best one at the end of each month, then we sent our winner to Midway, then Warner Brothers after Midway went bankrupt. We. VAG. Vixens of Allied Gaming. We met nine years ago waiting in line for a midnight showing of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. We were the last six in line and they ran out of seats before we got ours so we all bought tickets for the 3am show and waited together at a bar across the street. We talked about our kids and lovers and jobs and ex-husbands which naturally lead to brutally violent video games. The bloodier the better. All but Chrissy, an advertising executive for a major cable news network, a cliche lesbian poet and political idealist with no pets and no children. She needed converted. I put down five or six blended strawberry long islands before we headed back to watch Harry and friends in their second year at Hogwarts. I fed my sugar sweet lemons to Charity, a twenty something pro-ANA supporter, who licked the sour from my fingers when we finished. She had long brown hair and soft skin. She was thinner than the rest of us which meant we all had to like her, otherwise we would appear bitter and insecure. We all exchanged phone numbers and started meeting every week at the same bar, drinking too much and sharing secrets that should have stayed hidden. Chloe pushed her little sister out of a weeping willow when she was seven, leaving her physically and mentally disabled. Now she insists on being solely responsible for her personal and financial care. Guilt induced sisterly devotion. The decisive factor in breaking up her otherwise healthy marriage. Cheyenne, half Cherokee half Scotch-Irish, sleeps with all of her daughters’ boyfriends no matter how young, ugly, overweight, or unemployed they may be. She doesn’t know why. Her two daughters, Dakota, 16, and Savannah, 18, both fathered by the same Sioux Indian fancy dancer she fucked the first afternoon they met, in the bed of broke down pick up truck in the parking lot at a Pow Wow in Buffalo, both named after the cities they were conceived in. The girls have come to accept their mother’s promiscuity as a personal challenge. Seeking out the most repulsive, mutant half-wits they can find to bring home. Then scolding and ridiculing her relentlessly when she does the inevitable. Savannah showed up to the bar nine months ago with my only son.Only Chiara seemed normal. The worse she confessed to was kissing her ex-husband’s best friend a year and a half after their divorce. Two years later both men, both former telemarketers for a life insurance agency, now in business for themselves, were living together in an overpriced studio apartment in Southern California. Six weeks in and the story telling stopped. All we talked about were video games and starting an official National Gamers Association (NGA) team. We drafted a constitution and statement of purpose and voted on rules and membership and eventually a name; the Vixens of Allied Gaming. Then applied for an official NGA team membership ID under the acronym VAG.
Neither Midway, nor Warner Brothers, have returned our calls.
ooops. the last word. calls. is supposed to “letters”
that’s nothin
unless you’re 22
smoke signals
fried cheese sandwich with mayo
Pets
We feed
these critters, but they don’t feed us. What’s up with that? PetSmart is a
terrible instrument for not being sad, like how the vacuum fish in the aquarium
make horrible housekeepers, hard as they try. After her leg got lopped off, I
drew grandma a picture of our dog, Sugar, orbiting like a furry moon around her
face to prove she was still a worthy planet. Truth is pets seem destined to
either do us in,
or make our
arms so warm from cuddling that we can’t even stand it. As a child, I was
obsessed with the torsos of cats, how if you squeezed them real tight, they
hardly existed.
Dr. Tanqueray’s diet seminar
The thing to know
Be always on the strictest diet, a diet we recommend to you not as a temporary punishment to shed those pounds but a permanent behavior, this is as solid a chemistry as true love and the first thing to know.
Seaweeds
Let’s start with some seaweed. Steam this until it is softened like grass. Seaweed is tough. Sea plant tough. Pick wakame and steam this until limp. We don’t think enjoy would be the word, so just feel good you are finally doing something for your body.
Livers
Try to enjoy some cow’s liver. You can get this anywhere. The primary method for preparing some cow’s liver is to boil the piss out of it then garnish with parsnips, or seaweeds.
Breads
Let’s avoid bread, especially if you are a bread boy/girl. But if you loose focus and eat bread, do your colon a flavor and select a gluten and flour free loaf, although this can be difficult to find.
Sugars
Next, let’s have some sugars, sugar. Let’s presume you see an array of sugars before you. How can you tell? fruit/fructose, cane/sucrose, dairy/lactose, carbo hearty foods like rice and breads/glucose. Sucrose is the one to avoid, although they are all bad and risky in degrees.
Ain’t Saying She’s a Gravedigger
You would like to know how the holes get there. Of course you would.
The holes are for the people who’re dead—people who died, dear. Like how your aunt died, for example, your aunt Carla. You remember your aunt Carla? My sister? Stop. It wasn’t sooo long ago. She wore white t-shirts and no make-up? Had the craggly voice and skin like leather? Cigarette smoke?
Yes. You remember. Correct: it was she who taught you how to check the oil level of a car before we drove to Arizona. And, yes, we did drive to Arizona for a funeral also. But that’s coincidental: if you’ll recall, we fed your aunt, your aunt Carla, into the casket, and then that casket into the hole in the grass.
So naturally you ask then, ‘how did that hole get there?’ Well come now. Do you think, after all, that holes dig themselves? Or that holes just are? that holes just wait around deep until we find them? And if so, if these pits just, are, do they even exist before we waltz in? Or perhaps all holes are just pre-dug, are born-digged, and if so, are limited in number, and if so, are selectively curated…
Point taken. I’m patronizing. Of course the holes are dug. And who digs them? The people themselves. There are no free lunches, after all. They’re the grave-diggers. The diggers. Of graves. You’ve seen them. You’ll recall: when we slipped your aunt, your aunt Carla, into the grave. Think back to behind the people gathered in black, a jumpsuit leaning on the tractor, framed small between their bodies, poking the dirt on the ground with the tip of his shoe. Leather all pock-marked and grainy. Cigarette all pointy in front. Gravedigger.
And the mound? Well after the digger digs the hole its the diggers job to pour the dirt back in. ‘Pick up one end of the stick and you get the other’—yes, I guess you could say ‘undig,’ dear but that’s just beside the point. Because really if you think about it an ‘undigged’ hole is never ‘undug.’ Like that grave there. It’s ‘undug,’ as you say, but it’s still there. The casket pushes up the dirt and makes a mound. And the mound is really a hole, an inverted hole, an unhole. Sticking up out of the ground not in it. We dig them but we can’t destroy them, and we don’t expect to. Your aunt’s. Had the gravedigger sweating, his tractor all steaming trying to get the bump flat with the grass but he couldn’t do it. He knew the dirt would never go flat. He knew that too. He knew it since the beginning.
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THE WEST COAST
I just got back from my trip to the
West Coast. Have you ever been? It was fascinating!
PORTLAND
Hipsters and strippers. If I wasn’t
getting change in vinyl from a hipster, a stripper was accosting me
on the street, flinging her tits in my face before I could demur. The
strippers are crafty hustlers, jack. The second your eyes fall on
their chest they demand five dollars, and if you start giving them a
hard time they scream something like “Rape!” or “I’m paying my
way through med school!” and pepper spray you. The hipsters are
much more listless. I saw quite a few of them get knocked over by
strong gusts of Portlandian wind, and they’d never lift themselves
back up. Instead, they’d stay there and wait until a bicycle ran them
over or an ambulance came by. Sometimes two of them would start a
band in the middle of major roads and cause traffic jams. You’d have
to shout something like “There’ll never be another Beat Happening!”
to get them to go on hiatus and get out of the way. But don’t get me
wrong! I loved Portland! It was so interesting to see strippers and
hipsters cohabitate so peacefully. You go into a pizza place, and at
one table is a stripper eating a mushroom slice and touching her
breasts incessantly to make sure that they’re still there, and at the
other table is a hipster couple splitting a regular slice with extra
cheese and having a whole conversation by uttering the words
“Talulah” and “Gosh” in a variety of tones
and pitches. I wish I could’ve stayed longer to learn more about this
wonderful place! I told my friend Johnna about it. She graduated
with an anthro minor from Tufts, and she got really excited and
booked a flight to Portland for next week. I can’t wait to hear her
thoughts!
SEATTLE
The rain! It’s everywhere! It was so
filthy! I couldn’t turn a corner without a meth head touching my
jacket sleeve to say, “Hey, you got some rain on ya.” I
mean, I had been familiar with Seattle before arriving, I used to
watch Friends obsessively in high school, but I never thought’d it be
that bad! At one point I was walking down the street and a young
professional gave me two dollars to get a meal! Blessed me, even! How
do people stay clean with all that rain! I couldn’t even get an
answer because everyone I asked was either Australian, or an
anarchist, or both! “No rules, just right” my patootie!
Clearly Seattle is not a place for rain greenhorns! And if you go,
don’t say I didn’t warn you! Your welcome!
SAN FRANCISCO
In San Francisco, everyone smokes weed
all the time, so that all San Franciscoans look like bobble-headed
Buddhas strolling down the street without a care in the world. It
startled me at first, but after a week or two there, I learned to
embrace the lifestyle, the maximum 16 hour workweek, the enforced
monthly drug tests, the passive aggressive bar fights (“Well maybe
you should chill out, man!” “I don’t know why you’re being such a
dick, man!”). Everyone smokes marijuana in San Francisco because
it’s decriminalized. That’s what my Greyhound bus driver told me. The
smell is embedded into every building and slab of concrete and tree
and furniture store. There’s no police force, either. If you break a
law in San Francisco whoever witnessed the crime will give a homeless
Juggallo one dollar to hassle you for an hour, asking for change and
food and gift certificates to FYE.
CONCLUSION
I wish I could’ve seen more places, but
I ran out of time! I hope you found my thoughts on the West Coast
interesting and informative!
I just pasted this in a retarded format and accidentally “liked” it. I expect my book for “most Dick Van Dyke” in the mail momentarily.
fried mayonnaise might send a non-systematically ambiguously smoky signal
for less noise in your sandwich messich: microwave condiments on the ‘pizza’ setting, then poach
MEN
See Autofellate
(pg. 10). Lust limbered like it was always hungry just to see you. They track
treachery, the bolts in the Pyrenees, using obtuse calculations that nobody
understands anyway. The stillborn
fallacy expectation, enough to lose your looks over. Egos like calluses on
every finger but the pink one, and they scrape and criticize as if they were a hard
copyright. Driving makes them yell at you for whatever reason, it’s their car
and you’re just sitting in it. A coo spread like a sneeze in your hand, and
wiped against the pillow where you lay your head. These are the places they
soothe by smothering over.
A Fitzgerald as the persimmon long left on the windowsill: too soft to eat now, but too tempting not to
try.
MEN
See Autofellate
(pg. 10). Lust limbered like it was always hungry just to see you. They track
treachery, the bolts in the Pyrenees, using obtuse calculations that nobody
understands anyway. The stillborn
fallacy expectation, enough to lose your looks over. Egos like calluses on
every finger but the pink one, and they scrape and criticize as if they were a hard
copyright. Driving makes them yell at you for whatever reason, it’s their car
and you’re just sitting in it. A coo spread like a sneeze in your hand, and
wiped against the pillow where you lay your head. These are the places they
soothe by smothering over.
A Fitzgerald as the persimmon long left on the windowsill: too soft to eat now, but too tempting not to
try.
COYOTES
(n.) Also known as American jackals, coyotes smuggle firstborn children across sandy borders and cry out at night in rotting old apple orchards when late frost overtakes the pillowy pink blossoms. They can run twice as fast as school zone speed limits. That’s helpful when ferrying children who wander out of the crossing guard’s snare back to their burrows, deep in thicket, brier and always darkness. Watch their slender canine teeth unclasp lunchbox latches, flopping out the contents like lazy vomit. Fat children have the worst lunches for the prairie wolves; their mothers’ provisions are all Fritos and Vitamin water. Catch the kids in Converse, the ones smelling of sunscreen: their mothers care enough to swaddle pears and persimmons, pomegranate arils and sangria-colored figs into the satchels and bellies of their young. Coyotes have sifted, small salt and pebbles, into the empty holes in neighborhoods, abandoned cars bereft from flame, underpasses wafting with celery and lilac. They dream of you, and always, always, the something sweet you’ve let slip from your fingers.
COYOTES
(n.) Also known as American jackals, coyotes smuggle firstborn children across sandy borders and cry out at night in rotting old apple orchards when late frost overtakes the pillowy pink blossoms. They can run twice as fast as school zone speed limits. That’s helpful when ferrying children who wander out of the crossing guard’s snare back to their burrows, deep in thicket, brier and always darkness. Watch their slender canine teeth unclasp lunchbox latches, flopping out the contents like lazy vomit. Fat children have the worst lunches for the prairie wolves; their mothers’ provisions are all Fritos and Vitamin water. Catch the kids in Converse, the ones smelling of sunscreen: their mothers care enough to swaddle pears and persimmons, pomegranate arils and sangria-colored figs into the satchels and bellies of their young. Coyotes have sifted, small salt and pebbles, into the empty holes in neighborhoods, abandoned cars bereft from flame, underpasses wafting with celery and lilac. They dream of you, and always, always, the something sweet you’ve let slip from your fingers.
tinyurl.com/297sxrk
Unfriendly Machine, An
A contingency of parts plying together for purposes of making his life work out negatively. The situation is unfortunate considering he fingered the machine together himself–his fingers red from plying its parts with them. In the planning stages he had hopes for the machine, thought the machine would serve him kindly. The machine revealed itself as unfriendly upon completion, proceeded to reduce his stature by loosening the fit of his ankle bone so that it slides outside of his foot and down to the ground, adjacent to his heel, still sacked within his flesh. He is shorter now, angled, and wobbles when he walks. Women avoid him (men and children also). The machine keeps him in the house, fills for him a dish of milk twice a day. The man is upset about the situation. The machine does not coddle him. An unfriendly machine ruins your ankle, treats you like a cat.
LIGHT JUMPERS
Notorious men-in-cars who can’t wait. They can’t be bothered. They are beyond everything, especially the painted white line of the intersection. When a man becomes a light jumper, red lights become stop signs, stop signs become yield signs, and yield signs become civic wishes. Why light jumpers should be exclusively male is not yet fully understood, though preliminary studies suggest men “are pretty much dicks, so.” The natural enemy of the light jumper is the runner of stale yellows. When the two meet at an intersection, they do so violently, often with deadly results. Light jumpers have an average life expectancy of just 37 years, a statistic which led Werner Herzog to famously conclude that “light jumping… is fundamentally the knee-jerk response of a man unable to cope with his own deeply-felt mortality.”