Do you ever wonder, gentle reader, why leasing offices insist on receiving rent each and every month? I’ll be blithely spending money, happily oiling the very cogs on which our freemarket society rests, when the end of the month hits and cha-ching! Rent is due.
Eight hundred clams go shooting down the crapper, and I’m stuck eating soup and soup for the next few days. And for the life of me, rent always catches me off guard, and what follows is an egregious loss of cashola. The best way to describe this would be to coin a new term: Rentstruation, if you will, and you will. Well, no more! I’ve had it up to here with these shystery shenanigans.
I’ve got two onions, half a can of condensed milk, a preowned bulb of garlic, a seat-less bike, and some Tupperware, all of which add up to a combined retail value of, oh, $800.00 USD. That’s after I autograph the items. All right, a show of hands. Who thinks this barter deal will really work? Everyone? Good. You can put your hands down now.
While the cover of The Secret Life of Bees is one of the most tactilely pleasing covers in recent memory, the text itself hasn’t struck me as much the other pieces I’ve read in weeks past. The prose is well constructed, often sublime, but there’s something about the content that just doesn’t jive with me. The quotes that preceded each passage annoyed me, though I’m not entirely sure why. With the exception of the three sisters, the other characters could have been fleshed out more, yet even the three sisters seemed typecast from time to time. Weeks later, I can still recall bits and pieces of how characters acted in Interpreter of Maladies, especially in “A Temporary Matter,” “Sexy,” and “This Blessed House.” That simply won’t be the case with this book.
Above all, there was a noticeable lack of motion in the text. There’s small town, and then there’s stagnant town. One of the reviewers hailed Sue Monk Kidd as a literary descendent of Carson McCullers, and I recall leaving The Heart is A Lonely Hunter with the same greasy, heavy feeling. My biases considered, then, this book is probably a good read for those who enjoy McCullers.
Anyway, gentle reader, it’s time for The Da Vinci Code! Too bad my book ended up in a town miles away from my mailbox.
I walked into the office yesterday, gentle reader, to find Test Monkey No. 5 swinging from chandelier to chandelier, screaming like an electrocuted banshee and flinging monkey poop as monkeys are wont to do. Within seconds, I fetched my hunting rifle from a secret receptacle near the door and trained it on his monkey head.
Before I could shoot him, however, he vaulted out the window and–did my eyes deceive me?–flipped me off with a hairy middle finger. I fished around my desk drawer for binoculars and found them. I looked outside. Where had he gone? Two hundred stories, the pavement stretched out below, yet there weren’t any monkey remains in sight. What annoyed me most was not that he had caca-tized my office, but that I had missed an opportunity to cap his ass. Back in ’99, I went on a safari in New York City to hunt bad street performers, and my fantastic aim had made the trip a rousing success.
Disappointed, I looked around and noticed a memo sitting on my desk. On top of it was a bunch of bananas, which I’m assuming acted as a paperweight. I tossed the bunch out the window, sat down in my (thankfully) untainted leather chair, and read what No. 5 had to say.
“Stack ’em to the heavens, stack ’em to the heavens,” read the memo, directing me toward this abomination.
Amazing! A literate monkey? A literate monkey that appreciates cartoon shorts featuring a possessed marshmallow? Monkeys, you see, are usually limited to a vocabulary of “EEK eek ook OOK eek,” followed by copious skull and ass scratching, so this was strange indeed. I looked out the window again to make sure he wasn’t on the pavement. Nothing. Stranger still, where had those bananas gone?