I just grunted. I was working on my laptop, trying to steal a Mulatu Astatke album on the internet. Ethiopian Jazz. Sunday afternoon at our dining room table.
“In Parma, where the best prosciutto comes from, they feed the pigs the whey from the parmesan cheese process,” she continued. “Do you suppose that adds to their piggy pigerifficness?”
FUCKED BLOG
We at Mango Pudding Blues have been rather tentatively poking around here once again, as you may have noticed. The electricity ain’t on, the furniture is all still covered in dropcloths, and every time we take a step the dust motes billow up in the sunbeams that are slanting through the dirty windows.
The biggest problem is the archives. Google changed Blogger’s thing a while ago in a way that none of the sporadic but wonderful poetry that we’ve produced since, oh, 2006 sometime has ever made it into the archives.
Well, fuck it. We will carry on, nevertheless, while we contemplate how to fix this little disaster. Perhaps it’s time to change our technology. Boring! Sadly, we insist on having the fucking think look precisely like we want it to look, and we think that some of the free services that allow this sort of thing would attempt to constrain us.
What would really be ideal is if one of you freakin’ web developers could just do the building for us in exchange for a lifetime subscription. How about that?
Oh, wait; nobody reads us anymore.
Friday, November 28, 2008
THE MONKEY’S PAW AND THE PARADOX OF WEALTH
Ironically, amidst the collapsing economy, we at Mango Pudding Blues are enjoying a period of fantastically unprecedented personal wealth. Granted, it is a grisly Monkey’s Paw kind of wealth, but it’s wealth just the same.
An aside: how much wealth? Well, vast wealth, by our standards. Which is to say a laughably tiny wealth by your standards, because our standards are low. Unlike you, we are bucktoothed paupers from the hills. But it’s wealth, just the same.
And so we are seeing, now, the paradox of wealth. We are rich, but we feel poor and consternated as only the rich can. We have money, yes, but we are no happier, and in fact might be slightly less happy. We long now for the simpler days when all we had was a bottle of plonk and a rose clamped between our teeth as we waited in the velvety night outside grimy highrise housing projects for the objects of our affection to throw down the front door keys. We long now for
la vie boheme, when we had to scramble to scrape together our rent and our gloves had no fingers. We long now for the impossible days when the fun had to be manufactured from raw scraps of imagination and determination.
Now we are rich, and poor in the way only bloated gassbag rich scumbags can be, leeringly licking the foie gras off of our silver spoons and pronouncing it unsatisfactory. Buying ever-more pricey clarets that fail to capture the charm of the cheap wines we guzzled in our paint-spattered garrets. Now we dismiss the wait staff in pricey restos with a haughty half wave, angrily knowing that they’re having the kind of fun after hours that used to belong to us.
When we lived in the gutter, it was so much easier to see the stars.
