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Frosted Tips

[note: this is an erotic fanfic written in around an hour by myself and my good friend/smut muse talia. may god have mercy on our souls]

Ted Cruz walked in a Genuinely Human Manner, as he had so often been instructed by his campaign manager, through Times Square. But what did it even matter anymore, to keep up this façade? As he passed through the heaving flanks of Midwestern tourists, he let himself show the disdain he had felt all along for their fleshy undulation. There was no hint of approbation or recognition in their squinting, piggy eyes. He let one corner of his flesh-mouth curl in a sneer. There was only one solution. Abandoned among the flesh-pigs, he would out-human them all. He’d show them. He’d wallow among them and drown his sorrows in so many Pina Colada Royales. Or maybe, South Beach Mojitos. Maybe a Caliente Margarita or seven. Gosh darnit, it was time. Time to taste the pleasures of Flavortown.

***

Guy Fieri was, as usual, standing in front of the mirror he’d tricked out with flame decals, admiring his forehead oils. Poised between the licks of flame, he truly looked like a creature from hell. This was his design. This was the expression of his will, as fixed and immutable as the switches of his pale, greased spike crown of “hair”. He licked his finger, and tasted nothing.

He heard the slapping din of his empire in the dining room behind him. They had all come to him, the masses, to worship at the altar from which all his donkey sauce flowed. He was alone in his horrifying flesh prison, but he was their king, and they were all going down with him, clutching dragon chili cheese fries in their hammy fists.

Suddenly, a revelation: a shock, something altogether new but somehow familiar. A hot pulse thrummed through his doughy animal frame and into the place where he thought there could be nothing. Where there never had been feeling. Where only the heavy weight of his continued existence, his perpetual and cursed need to summon buffalo blue-sabbi’d minions to his side hung like a millstone. It electrified him, the twang of a sudden sense of, could it be…recognition of a familiar? He slipped his mirrored sunglasses from the pocket of his Hawaiian shirt, flipped up the lapels of his red leather vest, and strode out, his testicles as pendulous and wrinkled as his sour cream-laden triple loaded baked potatoes. He didn’t know what was on the other side of those double doors, but he was ready. Anything was lighter, he mused, than the continually surprising weight of pure emptiness.

***

Something extraordinary was happening to Ted Cruz. As his finger traveled down the sticky, laminated length of Fieri’s chaos theory of a menu, he felt something. Stirring. In his loins. The loins he thought long dead. A longing. A yearning. And then, something more, and something far more extraordinary: a longing, and a yearning, in his heart. This was more than just a longing for the Bacon Wrapped Barbecue Shrimp--a longing which, in of itself surprised him: normally the only human food he could bare was cold Campbell’s Chunky soup, in bulk. What was happening to him? What was this…feeeeeling? And then he looked up, and the scent glands that lined his pendulous neck flapped to attention as they never had before.

***

“Hi, I’m Guy Fieri,” he said, rolling the consonant sensually and not at all obnoxiously over his wet, narrow sea worm of a tongue. “Welcome to Flavor Town, my man.” Cruz licked his thin, disquieting lips, attempting to dislodge the white ooze that had congealed there in his panic. Little did he know, that was not the only white ooze he would be dislodging on this fateful night.

“Well hi, Mr. Fieri! Or can I call you Guy?” he said, emitting a subsonic hum that meant far more than his words ever could. It was all they needed to say. And more.

***

They knew it had to happen in the dumpster, amidst the ruins Fieri had created. Amidst the soft filth-beds of over-salted linguine, the dried rivers of donkey and blue-sabbi sauce covering their thrusting bodies, like the fluid of the womb. And thrust they did, their quivering flesh truly a sight of horrors that would melt the face of any onlooker with its pasty glare. Cruz, his face a mess of Fieri’s donkey love sauce—if we could call such a primal horror show gush an act of love—as he slammed his throbbing American flagpole—his horrible, horrible, horrible throbbing American flagpole, against Fieri’s prone and rippling flanks. They both screamed, shuddering and twitching in unison:

“THIS IS WHAT WE DESERVE!”, they omitted from their mouth holes. “WE HAVE TRULY LOOKED INTO THE ABYSS AND LOOKED BACK AT OURSELVES!”

Then, after a moment of sopping, squelching grunts, they knew the moment had come. There was no turning back now. “WE ARE THE KINGS OF FLAVOR TOWN!”, they screamed, in simultaneous orgasm. The end had begun.

#weneedjesusprobably fanfic eroticfanfic guyfieri tedcruz

reasonsmysoniscrying

"Wow, that’s a really nice butt! Nice penis too!"

- 3yo to 5yo

We’ve been teaching him how to compliment. Might need to work on this more.

lanamacondo

Disagree. That is a perfectly acceptable compliment. Your son is the inspiration for my game.

#reasonsimbadatdating

23rd & 8th, 12/20/2014

On the Saturday before Christmas, four women stood around a Christmas tree in Chelsea, against the threat of impending snow. “It’s really light as a feather. It’s all in your mind”, one of women said. She and her partner, both of whom were clad in thick work boots, gloves, and coveralls, pushed the tree through a conical tube that wrapped it in plastic wiring. The other two women looked slightly wary, but stood under the weight of their newly bought-tree as it was hoisted onto their shoulders, and were able to carry it off to their car.

“People get angry about the cost of trees”, said Mary, one of the tree-sellers. “But they don’t realize what goes into making them. First off, like, those big ones, they take fifteen years to grow. Then there’s the people who grow them, the people who prune them to make sure they turn out the right way, in the right shape, and then the people who cut them, and then ship them down here, and then us. And these people are mad because they want to pay $25 for a tree, but that’s not what it costs.” She shrugged and blew into her cupped hands.

“It’s around 50/50”, her partner, Cristal, added in a Quebecois accent. “Some people are really nice. Other people like to argue.”

Mary, who has a young face, wide blue eyes, and short, straight blonde hair, is from England. She was in the city for her first tree-selling season. Cristal, a tall Montrealer with her dreads pulled up into a wool cap and a barbell piercing through her left cheek, was down for her third year. She does seasonal work in Quebec, but that dries up in the winter, so when a friend invited her along to sell trees, she went with him. For both women, the appeal of seasonal work is that it allows them to travel. Their cycle involves short-term stints of intense, hard work, followed by long stints abroad, seeing the world. They met four years ago in Nepal, and have been traveling together since. Mary was visiting Cristal in Montreal, and she decided to try her hand at slinging trees. So far, it had been going well, and they were looking forward to traveling once Christmas came.

“The world is changing everywhere,” Cristal said, watching a coat-bundled couple eye a small Christmas tree. “Like, in Peru, there never used to be so many restaurants. So many American-style shops. In Tibet, they’re blowing up the mountains to build roads. Things aren’t going to be the way they used to be.”

“It’s the end of the world as we know it”, Mary sang, and laughed.

Their base of operations, a lean-to in the midst of their rows of trees, also offered jewelry for sale. Cristal said she made the macramé, and Mary did the beaded work. They learned to make jewelry during their travels in South America. “Lots of punks do that, travelling and making jewelry,” Mary said. “Selling it in the street till they have enough money to move on. Some people get really good at it. Like, wow, real art.”

A roving pack of santas and elves in various states of costume came, stumble-drunk, down the street. “I thought Santa-Con was over!”, Mary half-groaned, pressing down her own elf-ear-bedecked hat. Cristal lit a hand-rolled cigarette, took a drag, passed it to Mary. She rolls her eyes and tells me they had Santas coming close to knocking over their trees that whole weekend.

When I asked where they sleep, they gestured back to their white van. As if on cue, the side door opened and a young, slight guy with long blonde dreads emerged, shirtless and brushing his teeth. “Shift change”, Mary said, stretching. They explained that they’re a 24 hour operation, and generally they have to make sure at least one person is up at any given time. Sometimes people try to steal the trees, for themselves or to sell. “Also”, Cristal said, gesturing with the cigarette, “sometimes people buy trees when they’re drunk, at like 4:30 in the morning. That happens a lot on Fridays. Can’t miss that.”

The older couple had decided on their tree, and Mary and Cristal got to work. The dreadlocked kid spit, rinsed out his toothbrush with water from a thermos, and got back into the van to put on his gear. Another Christmas tree left the line-up.

#nonfiction #citystories #nyc

Before Bed

"I catch it", she said, suddenly squishing the bug between two small fingers. She had been playing with it, inventing a mommy and a daddy and future pasta for dinner for it. She had been so gentle, and turned with a satisfied half-smile as she killed the bug. "Spider", she said, and then turned her head away, thinking.

The woman watching her was intrigued and not unpleasantly put off by how much she sometimes underestimated the raw being of children.

darksilenceinsuburbia

Katie Orlinsky

Cassandro in the Ring (The New Yorker‘s Photo Booth) Photos of Saúl Armendáriz, known to lucha libre devotees as Cassandro. Armendáriz is an exótico, an openly gay luchador who plays a drag-queen character and forgoes the customary mask in favor of a full face of makeup and coiffed hair.

lanamacondo

I read the article about him in the New Yorker and was enthralled. A world in of himself

5th Avenue, Midtown

The sudden feeling that all the buildings are so tall that it's impossible for them not to fall on you. It's very real and very physical. It feels difficult to walk straight. You feel the need to get out of the way. A sense of vertigo.

The sadness but, with it, something like comfort in the thought that you have to accept your end ("so, they fall, I die") in order to preserve your ability to live free from inordinate dread or panic.

The knowledge that nothing is fixed, that there should be no fear in the idea that these massive monoliths will fall, one day.

Pieces

In some forms of acupuncture, over the course of many years, the tips of needles break off and get lodged underneath the skin. If they were ever noticeable, layers of skin grow over them, and they soon become invisible to the naked eye. When the bodies containing the needle tips are X-Rayed, their bones seem to be emanating tiny sparks, their invisible flesh speckled with constellations.

"Which is sadder a burn hole or a moth hole? Which is sadder to belong or not belong to a country?"

-Adam Scheffer, "Ghazal"

Other Lives

Female cottontail rabbits give birth to 35 young each year, but almost half of the kits die within the first month, many more within the first year.

They feed at dawn and dusk, eat their own dung and things growing or planted.

Females build separate nests for their young; they dig shallow holes and line them with grass, leaves, tufts of their own fur.

They flash their tail as an advertisement to predators that they're already up and running, and that a surprise attack is therefore no longer possible.

Since they don't hibernate and their fur doesn't change color with the seasons, they spend winter hiding.

Uncle

They said that when Richard died and they went to his apartment in Astoria, it was packed floor to ceiling, nearly wall to wall, with boxes of old things: notebooks from elementary school, out-dated medical records, broken plates, child-sized skis, rust-eaten menorahs. There was a narrow path between the stacked containers and filing cabinets, that snaked from the door to the kitchen, also packed, and off to the side to the bathroom, very nearly packed. The path cut between the towering stacks of slouching, overpacked boxes and loose objects, and threatened to disappear. Nearly everything in the apartment was from their childhood home in Long Island, now lost, where they'd lived and had money and a father. There was a small palate mattress in the center of the path, in the center of the apartment. That is where he slept, they guessed.

#microfiction #actuallyattemptedmicrofiction #family #uncle

A thing I wrote about Waiting for Godot in Yiddish.

#waiting for godot #theatre #play review #plays #yiddish #judaism #yiddish theatre #jewess #pozzo is an asshole

from the film, based on the play by Martin Sherman.

One of the greatest sex scenes of all time.

#bent

Oh, Joan Rivers

So, apparently Joan Rivers is dead.

Few pop culture figures have caused more conflicted feelings for me iconically, than Joan Rivers. For most of my life, I experienced her as she appeared on E! and similar programming. In that capacity, she was the epitome of petty, shallow Hollywood/trash media culture, perpetuating bullshit standards about bodies and physical appearance. She even embodied those standards, and was defined (by herself and by others) by the drastic measures she took to alter herself and her appearance. In a weird totemic way, she was the symbolic, hyperbolic endpoint of female beauty standards, a sort of fertility goddess statue in reverse. Up until recently--say, maybe a year or two years ago--that was all she was to me. I wasn't a fan, but even more than that, I wasn't interested in her. The way I saw it, she was a cartoonish version of something I disliked, and that was that. All red carpet, no complexity.

But then one day, I happened to be in the room while my mother was watching the documentary about Joan Rivers and her life, "A Piece of Work." As it turns out, there's much, much more to Joan Rivers than the E! cartoon I (and perhaps other people in my generation) know her as.

Joan Rivers was a proper comedian, and, like all good comedians, was driven by a huge, obsessive, often fraught passion. She was consumed with and committed to her craft. She was so much more, so much beyond that "who are you wearing" bullshit. Starting out when she did, she had to demand access to the ability to follow her passion in ways that her male counterparts did not. What's more, she had to fight, tooth and nail and with stubborn tenacity, to actually craft her comedy, in her voice, and not be pigeon-holed into the very limited female roles that wouldn't rock any boats. She stood up to Jonny fucking Carson, leaving a sidekick position to create her own show (to which Carson responded by blacklisting her from all NBC shows for decades and never talking to her again). She fell into obscurity time and time again, occasionally re-emerging in one iteration or another, but always--always--pursuing her real craft, her stand-up, which never lost it's honesty. In the documentary, you see real, almost pathological levels of commitment to comedy. You see a then-78 year old woman surrounded by literal filing cabinets full of material on index cards, flying from Minneapolis one night to Palm Beach the next, because she is so fully committed to--and, really, dependent on--making people laugh. I've never seen her live, and until then had never really seen her stand-up material, but there's so much more there than the surface-level cattiness you see in her E! persona. There's a real, meaningful depth that comes from honesty, which employs acerbic wit and vulnerability in equal measure. She talks about drooping vagina lips, for fuckssake, and about the realities of aging, and she's never stopped calling out anyone--herself included--on their bullshit.

I suppose this revelation was so interesting to because of how much she had previously been defined for me as someone motivated by the goals and the bullshit trappings of tabloid Hollywood. There's something meaningful in the fact that someone who is so driven by this art and this passion, with such unwavering commitment to that brutal brand of honesty, has been re-defined for an entire generation as a representation of a culture that lacks depth and honesty. I started to realize that, as as weird zenith of self-modification to conform to dishonest standards of beauty, she actually manages to transgress those standards by being totally honest about her modifications, both with what she says, and, eventually, with how she looked. The whole thing about plastic surgery is that it's supposed to be secret: nobody is supposed to know that your body does not naturally meet the unnatural standards of beauty, because that would possibly call those standards--or, more likely, the person who doesn't naturally conform to them-- into question. But Joan Rivers, in not giving a fuck about who knew, managed to somehow defy those standards by embodying them cartoonishly. She flipped the paradigm on its head, and made the whole conceit seem ridiculous.This sounds a bit like apologetics, because in the end, yes, she probably prescribed to those standards of beauty, and a male counterpart would never have to even engage those stereotypes...but I really feel there's much more to it, because all along, she hasn't done it for the bullshit, for the money or for the approval. She's done it because she is pursuing her craft, because she can't not pursue her craft.

One of my favorite Joan Rivers appearances, post-documentary, was on Louie. In the scene, Louie wants to quit a stand-up gig at a casino, because he doesn't like the constraints or the whole scene of working there. Joan sits him down in her hotel room, and speaks some real, touching truth that anyone who's tried to follow a creative passion through life can identify with.

"Listen. I wish I could tell you it gets better, but...it doesn't get better. You get better. It isn't easy. I've gone up, I've gone down, I've been bankrupt, I've been broke. But you do it. We do it because...because we love it more than anything else. That's why you do it. You want a real job, honey, there are a million things you can do.But what we do is not a job...What we do is a calling, my dear. We make people happy. It's a calling."

Which, of course, because it's Louie, ends with him lunging at her and then being accommodated, but the real point is that this is where she was coming from. This was where her world centered.

What I'm saying is, she was a fascinating cultural focal point, and a woman who pursued her craft in spite of the opposition. She chose to engage pop culture in a complicated, unique way--from within the machine, so to speak--that has much more behind it, actually and symbolically, than first glance might suggest.

#joan rivers #feminism #body politics #pop culture #louie

Something I've had to ask myself...

Here is the question occupying my mind and turning my stomach as of late: is there ever going to be a time when there will be space for a Jew to engage in the mainstream Jewish dialogue while saying "I do not agree with the concept of a Jewish state?"

Or have Jews collectively hitched their horse so intractably and definitively to Zionism and the Israeli state that anyone who doesn't believe in those projects (or who takes issue with what they have become) becomes an automatic outlier?

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