Myriad (Patreon)

I’ve been quiet for a few days. Curse broken. Apologies all around.

I know what it was. Stubbornness.

Before I get into it, I decided to post this delightful cartoon here. It’s outrageously fun, and I find it surreal in only the most charming of ways that it was based off of these two pictures from back in the day:

Anyway. I think it’s a hoot (no sarcasm). As I’ve said before, and as I will say again, when a creative mind takes the time to make silly old me into a drawing, I can’t help but feel flattered and elated. So here, for posterity.

But! Back to the story!

There’s this one Butcher. A kind man named Juan. He lives in the next town over. Being a butcher, he runs a butcher shop. As is apropos (adjective, in this case?) of people who are butchers.

Anyway, I like to show the local people some business. And he even drops stuff off on the doorstep like one of those old-school milkmen from 1960s PSAs.

This is a person who has delivered me: whole roosters (already dead, so-far, though maybe one day, I’ll fight to the death for my dinner); rabbits (a bitch to dissect with my lowly-but-lovingly-maintained 7-inch corner-store Chef’s knife [my kingdom for even a baseline 6” Wusthof.]);

...an entire HALF a suckling lamb (the fat you get off that fucker makes the BEST roux);

TWO-POUND sides of pork flank (tacoooos, muthafuckas, because cumin!); and... filet. Delicate, ginger, airy little cuts that you obsessively douse in butter and accompany with a béchamel that’s spent way too much time in the company of Sichuan green peppercorns. They’re not Cambodian, but they are fragrant.

(Aren’t lists that follow a colon, and divided by semicolons, comfy? It like being swaddled in a grammatical terrycloth.)

It wasn’t Juan’s fault. He is pure of heart, and is a fine, fine butcher. It’s my fault. I left the chicken in the fridge for a couple of days too long.

I roasted that summabitch. In hindsight, which is 20/20, the worst year ever, I knew from the first bite. But the meal was already done, and I already had a bottle of wine inside of me.

I felt it the next day. In earnest. You know that feeling. Food poisoning stomach bug, and it takes you a while to get over.

I had a lot of time to stare at the ceiling while I was thinking of where the next bodily expulsion would take place. (I just lost 5% of my subscribers!)

I thought a lot about my old literature professor. A brilliant woman. She forgot more about language than most of us will ever know. If you ever want me to tell you about how to use “whom” or “who” in a sentence, ask me, and I’ll relay the advice. I can also tell you the difference between “comprised” and “composed -of-” because of her!

I thought about her a lot, while counting the tiles in the ceiling, and the word “myriad” came up. Myriad. People always say “a myriad of.“ Not grammatically correct.

She stared me in the face one time, and said,” myriad means ‘a variety or abundance of,’” So if you say “a myriad of something,” what you’re really saying is “a a myriad of of something.”

For the purpose of tits, I suppose that I do not have “a myriad of tits,” in that case. I simply have “myriad boobage.”

Which works. We all have myriad something. Myriad boobs. Myriad social experiences, or lack there of. Myriad fear about the fact that entertainment is going to run out pretty soon. (Thaaaanks, Netflix (et al), for... things to stare at while drooling - 5% more/less!)

...Myriad enthusiasm over how episode six of WandaVision did a good enough job at being bleak, while still diving deep into the uncanny valley.

Is it just me? Did nostalgia catch up with us? Is Malcolm in the Middle just a bit too recent? I THINK there are three more episodes to go, and I am dedicated to the show, in myriad ways. I hope the show didn’t deviate too much from it’s “please stand by” origins. It started out with satire, but is that just making fun of old stuff? Is it right to appropriate previous forms of popular culture for our own poke-fun amusement, even though it’s entirely possible that the denizens of 2065 will look back on our infatuation with Tiger King with a sense of ridicule that makes nostalgia for the Dick Van Dyke show look wholesome?

Is this how Boomers feel? I’ve already felt those first pangs. As Smash Mouth said when I was 15, the years start coming, and they don’t stop coming. And as a meme reminded me recently, “they don’t stop coming, and they don’t stop coming, and they don’t stop coming, and they don’t stop coming...” (it was funny, because they autotuned his voice to repeat the words to go along with the music... I’m sure it’s one of the last memes I will natively “get.”)

I’m not a big MCU fan in the first place, not out of a lack of love, but just because I’ve never kept up, and don’t know where to start… I think there are phases?

But hey. I see the memes, I know what a Thanos and an Ultron are, I know that there are End Games and Infinity Wars, and Ages of Things, and captains who are American, and men who are iron, and that Paul Rudd doesn’t age. And I know the whole vibe is humor through tragedy, in the zeitgeist of black-suit incompitence, and that the unlikely underdog always wins because of his or her quintessential pluck, and all you need is a little tongue-in-cheek, and maybe the colors look a little brighter than they used to be, and maybe movies need to be arranged around mixtapes, and maybe heroes to save us from ourselves, and maybe Quicksilver just needs to smirk because his sister is the gal who just wants to burn it all the fuck down, and maybe THATZ WAT WE NEEDZ RITE NOW!

Shit. Did I go on too long for the tl;dr disclaimer?

Myriad derps.