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Weak VIII

20 February 2023

No. 7,207 (cartoon)

Will you miss me when I’m dead?

I’m sure I won’t, but let’s confirm soon.

21 February 2023

Recycling Bourbon

If you think an artist and scientist of my unparalleled stature might be resting on my leafy laurels as an olde honky by now, you’ve been gulping the wrong koolaid. No, the fire for growth and discovery glows brightly in my hash pipe. (Just messin’ with you; I ain’t no hippie.)

Why, just this morning I made a discovery that may change the course of the Coronarama pandemic and air travel. No false modesty here: drinking bourbon with a mask on while on a jet is one of my better ideas! I inhale the fumes after I drink it, and it seems to make the plane go faster! And, as I reported before, it’s illegal to drink your own hooch on a plane, thus making my innovation even more satisfying than the usual corn mash elixir.

That’s saying something! Now if I could only figure out what that might be ...

22 February 2023

My Latest Creation: The Book

More and more of my learned friends tell me they’re getting increasingly tired of looking at illuminated screens. I could have said, “Wake up and smell the 2023,” but I’m too nice to be so direct. That’s why I came up with a brilliant way of sharing my work without computers.

I plan to print my words and images on sheets of paper. Since handling a stack of printouts is unwieldy at best, I’ll bind the printouts—a sequence of documents I’m calling “pages”—into a single, collated volume of pages, a codex I’m calling a “book.”

Roll over Quintilian and tell Gutenberg the news!

23 February 2023

Deformed Asymmetrical Factory Bread

I know factory bread when I see it, but I ain’t never seen no factory bread like this. Each slice of bread was beyond asymmetrical and bordering on wonky; how did such a loaf come from a commercial oven?

I studied it, used my big camera on a tripod to photograph it, then covered it with peanut butter and ate it. It tasted spongy, salty, and just fine like factory food should. And that’s about all I have to say about deformed bread today.

24 February 2023

My Core Beliefs

Once upon a time our planet had four layers: the solid inner core, the liquid outer core, and the mantle, all wrapped up in the crust that provides the crunchy goodness that makes life both possible and wonderful.

Let us return to the solid inner core. The big news about the earth’s innards comes from researchers at the Australian National University: the solid inner core has a solid inner core resembling a ball bearing with a diameter of over six hundred kilometers. Technically, that means the Earth has five layers. Still, having a solid inner core within a solid inner core sounds like cheating to me, but then what’s wrong with cheating as long as you win without getting caught?

Given my extensive scientifical expertise, this all makes sense. Australians discovered it since they’re at the bottom of the globe and enjoy the best vantage point of the subterranean undercarriage. As for the ginormous ball bearing at the center of the globe, that was almost a given to any rational thinker. How else could the Earth have rotated for over four billion years without a drop of lubricant?

I know what’s going to happen next, even though I’ll probably be dead long before this is confirmed. Scientists will continue to discover spheres within spheres, like a Brobdingnagian collection of matryoshka dolls. And in the innermost sphere, researchers will discover an immortal seventy-trillion-kilogram gerbil on an exercise wheel who’s been trapped in the center of the earth since it formed.

Far-fetched? Hardly. Warm up that lump of old meat between your ears and think about it for just a moment. Why else would a big pebble in an obscure galaxy keep spinning for billions of years? I sure wouldn’t want to be around when that gerbil gets loose, but that’s not high on my list of concerns right now.

25 February 2023

The Procrastination Ideal

I shooed Andrew away this afternoon when he showed up at my studio unannounced. I politely explained that I was busy, but that explanation needed an explanation after he suggested I seemed to be idle.

I suppose that’s how I might appear to the untutored eye, so I gave his peepers some tutorin’. I pointed out that I had a long list of things to do, and I’d found an ideal time to procrastinate. I didn’t want to get distracted from my mission with idle chitchat.

He remained skeptical, and suggested that if I completed some of my tasks today I’d have less to do tomorrow.

I like Andrew, but sometimes he really is one taco short of a combination plate. Mañana never comes, and I’m continually gratified by how many annoying tasks simply disappear or become irrelevant after enough delays.

My goal for the day was to do almost nothing, and after assiduously working at it all day long I succeeded in not wasting a single hour on anything that could wait until mañana.

This notebook entry for 25 February 2023 was the only thing I couldn’t delay until the morning, so I concocted some malarkey, wrote it down, and, for reasons I’ll never comprehend, you just read it.

But wait: perhaps I do understand after all. If I’ve helped just one person procrastinate for just one minute by reading this, then the whole waste of time wasn’t a whole waste of time.

Coming next weak: more of the same.

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©2023 David Glenn Rinehart