The words in this song are the real shit:

Days are the sunniest
Jokes are the funniest
Rabbits are the bunniest
Hives are the honiest
Elephants the toniest
Troubles, theyre the noniest

EVERYWHERE I GO

Straws are the bendiest
Time is the spendiest
Cards are the sendiest
Books are the lendiest
Funs the pretendiest
Friends are the friendliest

EVERYWHERE I GO

Berries are the fruitiest
Shoes are the bootiest
Puppies are the cutiest
Treasure is the lootiest
Teams are the rootiest
Horns are the tootiest

EVERYWHERE I GO

Birds are the tweetiest
Candy is the sweetiest
Socks are the feetiest
Tricks are the treatiest
Drums are the beatiest
Lunch is the eatiest

EVERYWHERE I GO

Flowers are the smelliest
Jams are the jelliest
Rains the umbrelliest
Tales are the telliest
Wishing is the welliest
Buttons are the belliest

EVERYWHERE I GO

Skies are the bluiest
Cows are the mooiest
Gum is the chewiest
Ghosts are the booiest
Goo is the gooiest
You can be your youiest

EVERYWHERE I GO

Some days I fear I will never meet you. Some days I fear that you will never exist and that time, shhh, long ago, was the last chance. But other days I break apart completely thinking about your skin and if you’d smile with your eyes or with your entire face.
I just wanted to tell you some things incase, well, incase it doesn’t happen. Incase you never meet me or incase I forget to tell you these things later on, when I’m even more tired.
First of all, do not be afraid of love. Do, however, be afraid of men with two first names. Remember that elegance, etiquette, and general ‘being-a-lady-ness’ is ridiculously important. So is sticking your tongue out, hanging from jungle-gyms, drinking whisky, and knowing how to creatively curse. The balance is key.

— 

You Are Welcome Here: A Letter to My Daughter

Click to read the rest. Alan is a gem of a writer who will someday be a bomb-ass dad. The world needs more of them. 

  (via whydoihaveablog)

I can’t not reblog this. It punched me. Hard.

“You know nothing and neither do I and that will never change and that will always be comforting. Care for yourself, care for others, and care for mystery. No one wants all the answers.”

(Source: lieslieslies)

The Idea of Michael Jackson's Dick by Steve Almond →

I thought about the little girl I’d seen in the window, how she had offered up her performance to me. It was what children did, naturally - they drew love from the world. And they did so not because they were inherently good and pure, or any of that other Shirley Temple garbage. But just the opposite: because they knew how much the world could hurt them, at any time, how quickly the fates could turn, and this made them desperate to charm.

Ashton Kutcher’s Butterfly Movie

My daughter started Kindergarten this year and I’m nervous for her.

When I was in Kindergarten we’d have a group bathroom break. All of us boys would shimmy up to the urinals, pull our little peens out and do our business. I can’t imagine we had that much experience with urinals at that age but somehow we knew what was up.

One kid, though, that first day or second day or whatever went up to the urinal and dropped trou. And since we all just stood in a line waiting for our turn, a bunch of kids started booting him in his naked ass.

And that was it. His fate was sealed. He was to be picked on for the next thirteen years. I mean, he probably could’ve bounced back. But he didn’t. He sunk like a stone in the sea.

I’m worried that one little move for her now will somehow seal her fate.

Dan Cortese Google Search

Look at this dude slay. I’m pretty sure he’s playing No One Knows by Queens of the Stone Age. Like 75% sure that’s what he’s ripping.

Mofos and Mofettes, Steve Almond Kills It. →

An Interview with The Days of Yore (read the whole thing).

And you have two kids now. Kids are shit magnets.

[Nodding.] Oh my god. People give you shit. Shit just comes into your life. There’s this endless stream—preschool shit, and Target shit, and it’s plastic and awful and life is too short.

I guess I look back romantically on those days when I was alone. I put crazy stuff up on the wall; there was no design scheme, no fancy furniture. I bought my clothes from thrift stores. I still do that. But it’s an ongoing moral battle: we’ve reached this place where we must get nice stationery to write thank you notes to the people who come to our party, because they wrote us thank-yous when we went to their party. And I’m like, really? We’re them? We’re that?

You mentioned that you teach, and that makes me think of the time you publicly resigned from your adjunct position at Boston College in 2006 because they invited in Condoleezza Rice as their commencement speaker. You’ve written about your admiration for Vonnegut; he was very vocal about moral issues and politics. I was going to ask whether you think writers have an obligation to address political or societal problems, but what I really want to ask is: how do we fix it?

I don’t know. Americans have to make a decision that convenience is not going to be their godhead. Until they are willing to see what the dividends of inconvenience might be—spiritually, emotionally and intellectually—I think we’re headed in the wrong direction.

Everything’s become convenient, even war. If we’re sending young people into terrible, violent situations, how about everybody has to sacrifice? How about there’s a war tax, and everybody has to pay five percent of whatever they’re making to pay for that war? How quickly do you think people would say, “Fuck that, let’s not have that war. Let’s find out whether that war is really crucial.” How about if you want to support the troops, then the price of that bumper sticker is two percent of your annual income, or five percent on purchases you make in the retail outlets closest to your home? That would make it clear: “If I want to have a war, I have to support the war. I can’t just privatize it and send off one percent of the population and wave a flag when they come back all fucked up.”

Public transportation should be required. There should be a luxury tax on the use of private vehicles. You can have them, it’s capitalism, nobody’s trying to take them away. But you’re going to have to pay more for them. And meat. If meat cost what it actually costs, we would use less meat. My wife and I get our meat through a CSA [Community Supported Agriculture], so it actually does. And corn syrup, all this stuff is subsidized, and it all comes down to us wanting convenience.

That’s what Facebook and other social media are about, too—making the gathering and disbursement of little ego moments very convenient. It’s so deeply threaded into the way we’re moving through the world that I don’t know how it gets undone. Part of me thinks we’ll have to reach the end of peak oil, and then we’ll have to make collective decisions. Since we don’t seem capable of trusting that scientists are right, the shit’s going to have to hit the fan.

I could say that I think people should read more and engage with acts of imagination, but it would be naïve to suppose that that’s going to bring us into harmony. The world is way out of balance, and the only way it starts to change is if people make an agreement to abandon a need for convenience.

[Smiling up at a customer browsing a nearby shelf of books.] Howdy.

So what do you see as the role of the writer or the artist in that? Does having a megaphone of some kind mean having a duty to speak out about these things?

Everybody decides for themselves. I’m outspoken about my distress, but the only duty that writers and artists have is to do their thing, and to be good to the people closest to them. That’s your central duty as a human, and it’s where we mostly fail— in being nice to the people right around us, our family and close friends.

A writer doesn’t have to speak out for this or that moral agenda—their art does that. I mean, say I read Sam Lipsyte’s story in The New Yorker. I recognize the kind of person he’s writing about, and there’s this astonishing, moving sense of an entitled person who’s damaged in many ways and stuck, and it’s heartbreaking. I read it, and I feel more than I did before. That’s the artist’s only real responsibility.

Have I told you guys yet that my almost two year old son talks like an effeminate southern teenager (we live in Massachusetts)?

Me leaving for work every morning: Bye, Travie.

Him waving wildly: Baaaaaahhhhhhh.

Have I told you yet how much I hope it never changes?

guardianmusic:

Kids today and their filthy dancing

Nowadays, concerned parents and moral guardians are getting into a tiz about “daggering.” But, as this video demonstrates, dirty dancing has long been a cause for concern.

(Spotted on b3ta)

Jean Ralphio already had this shit on lock.

Vacation Powerpoint 2012.

My kids, me and my son, me and my nephew, my nephews and my kids, any combo of the previous words etc etc… Bob Loblaw’s Law Blog.

Carry on.