Jus’ Noodlin’

“Honk If You Approve Of Massive Government Subsidies For The Disgustingly Rich, Oh Sorry I Forgot You Can’t Afford A Car”

quoting myself. My short-lived idea for starting a bumper sticker company. I also like “I’m a racist caricature and I vote.”

You know Keep Portland Weird, obviously? Now the backlash has begun. I have seen “Make Portland Normal,” which I laughed at, and then the other day I saw “Keep Boring Boring,” which I really laughed at. Boring, Oregon! What a great name for a town. “The people of Boring, Oregon call spades spades, it’s the second-most commonly known thing about them.”

What was the very first bumper sticker? “Forrest Gump” would have us believe it was “Shit Happens,” which, if true, is pretty awesome. “It happens.” “What, shit?” “Sometimes.” God what a stupid movie

My mom gave me a kombucha mother. It’s been in the fridge for over a year–will it still work? What do you guys think/know?

I’m reading these M.R. James ghost stories. He wrote them in the 1860s. He was a fancypants British don at Cambridge for his whole life–the good old days! He graduated in 1865 and by 1869 he was Dean of the university or something. “This guy seems basically competent, lets just give him the job. Yeah I know he’s only 22.” And meanwhile he was writing these really gnarly little tales in his free time. They are disturbing in a way that is hard to put your finger on. They aren’t bloody or gory. They work on the same kind of deep unspeakable terrors that, for me, were worked upon by something like the Blair Witch Project. A pile of stones outside your tent! Why is that so scary??

For example: Someone staying in a strange house goes to bed, and shuts and locks the bedroom door, and just as he does so, a “thin voice” from the bed curtains says “Now we’re all shut in for the night.”

!!!!!!!

I just read one where a man finds a fabric pattern in an old diary from 1707, and has the pattern copied to make a set of drapes for his bedroom, and then that night he falls asleep in his chair and he wakes up in the dead of night and remembers that he forgot to bring his little spaniel dog upstairs with him, but then his hand, which is hanging over the arm of the chair, touches something very soft and hairy and he assumed it’s the dog, and so he reaches out with his hand and touches a round and soft thing but its utter stillness is somehow horrifying, and he sits up in his chair and at the same time something vaguely humanoid but completely covered with hair rises up with him, an inch from his face, and he leaps away and runs down the hall and is banging against the door at the end of the hall while behind him he can feel this horribly soft, ineffectual tearing at his back, but it’s like the tearing is growing ever-stronger with some mysterious burning rage. Then he spends the night in his friend’s room and that’s the end of the story.

There’s one where a guy solves a medieval riddle about where to find a bag of treasure, and he goes down at midnight into an abandoned well and digs out one of the stones and behind the stone there’s a little recess and he can see a bag in there, and he reaches in and starts pulling the bag toward his face and just as it gets to the lip of the hole it falls forward and puts its arms around his neck.

A lot of the horrors are super obviously vaginal, like one where a guy puts his hand under his pillow and feels his fingers go into a sort of mouth that was ringed all around with teeth and hair, and was not human.

Or just weird Victorian sexual terrors, like one where a guy blows an ancient whistle and conjures up a demon made of bed linens.

Anyway M.R. James! He never married and he never left Cambridge. He also makes a lot of really cruel jokes about golf and people who play golf.