MY PLANS FOR THE NEXT TWO YEARS

I’m spending the next two years learning to delay gratification. I’ve been trying to learn to delay gratification for the last two years, too. I will continue to try to learn to delay gratification for another year after the two years coming. It’s a five-year project.

I intend to spend the next two years trying to undo the damage I did in the last twenty years.

No, fuck that. In the next two years I’m gonna get what’s mine. Smash and grab, baby, and I don’t care who I burn. I’ma fucking take what I am owed and you will know me by the trail of weeping people that I leave behind.

No, really; in the next two years I will be growing a pot belly, buying a mini-van and moving to the suburbs as I study the proper care of double-knit slacks. I will learn to joke with the other guys about golf and sex and I will cultivate my softness.

The next two years? Fuck me. I didn’t even realize the last two years was over.

In the next two years I’m gonna break out, baby! I’m going to reach for the stars!

I’m going to sing and tapdance and wear a tuxedo and pancake makeup and a collapsible top hat. Because I gotta be me!

In the next two years I am going to search relentlessly for what is real in a world that is increasingly obsessed with plastic surfaces. I will eschew polyester, computers, the internet. I will smoke a lot of grass and look at the sky.

Two years? I’m lucky if I have a plan for the next two weeks.

I’ve given myself the next year and a half to really get to know me. Then, in the remaining six months, I’m going to smash the state.

Two years? Two words: ballroom dancing.

I’m gonna work like a dog and then retire early.

I suspect that the next two years will be the exact same as the last two years, which were of course the same as the two years before that and the two years before that and the two years before that. I intend to mask my apprehension about this with liquor, friends, movies and books.

I’m dedicating the next two years to perfecting my personal style.

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CORPORATE WORD WATCH

Deliverable. Used in the wily corporate world not as an adjective to describe something that FedEx can take somewhere, but as a pants-peeingly hilarious noun that means results or final projects or things that we do. So while a normal human being might say, “hey Ed, we have a lot of projects due next week,” the drooling, robotic corporate drones say, “hey, Ed, we have a lot of deliverables next week”

Just writing that sentence makes us here at Mango Pudding Blues shudder with mirth. We are not joking; they actually say these things. Before we got our latest corporate job, we were used to working in smaller groups that hadn’t been fully indoctrinated into the corporate culture, so the first time somebody told us that he would like to go over the list of deliverables for the division, we stared at him as though he had sprouted a garden of cauliflower on his head. We couldn’t understand what he was saying. Now we just look on in wonder as grown people say these things while pretending that they are not actually a bunch of overgrown children in a backyard clubhouse with a secret handshake and a coded language. Like all corporatese, Deliverable is pure crap, designed to puff up the apparent importance of its user but in no way improving the precision or efficiency of the words that already exist.

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NO

Yoko Ono? Well, Ceiling Piece was indeed there, but unlike John Lennon, Mango Pudding Blues could not climb the ladder, grab the magnifying glass and feel relief at the word inscribed on the ceiling. Nope. Mango Pudding Blues was forced, by the “do not touch” signs all over the place, to feel the opposite of relief. A stepladder. A magnifying glass. A word that might well have been “no” in letters that were, by the piece’s very nature, impossible to read from the floor.

Now, much of Ono’s work was ‘conceptual art’, in which she challenged the straitjacketed art establishment’s ideas of what a painting is. So one was left gagging at the irony that the piece, after which the show was named, has been stripped entirely of its conceptual content and is presented, instead, in straitjacketed art establishment style as fine art, roped off and to be viewed in quiet, brow-furrowed seriousness. Jeepers.

Mango Pudding Blues was also appalled by the cute little sketchbook for sale in the souvenir shop that said, in Ono’s cool handwriting on its translucent plastic cover, “make a map of your dreams” or something like that. Mango Pudding Blues is, shamefully, thrilled by that kind of hippie shit. However, we were not thrilled at the $19.95 price for a sketchbook that would sell outside the AGO, in Chinatown, sans hippie handwriting, for a buck fifty. It’s a shameful markup, and all the more grating coming from a hippie.

Or maybe the souvenir was itself a conceptual piece, driving home the point made in the last quarter or so of the exhibition, which seemed to be that Ono sold out. The story goes that she was lunching with someone in the 80s who suggested that she reproduce some of her 60s conceptual pieces in bronze to sell to the go-go 80s Wall Street types. She was, she claims, so aghast that she started to cry. Then she realized she was behaving like a pathetic hippie holdout, trapped in the trees and unaware that the war was long over. That the 60s were never gonna come back. So she shrugged off the tears, rolled up her sleeves and made the bronzes. And the $19.95 notebooks.

Anyway, other than that the show was pretty good. You should go.

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