The Urban Elf

Oh! There you are.
…What? Oh, pardon the turban, it’s nothing really… did you see a miniature ostrich come this way? I’m afraid the dwarves let it get away again. I really must sit down.

The drugs you know. Painkillers. They took the staples out of my foot today… some 24… 27? I don’t know, and a veritable basketball player’s inseam worth of stitches. But, you must see the x-rays. Before and after, it’s are like something out of a Halloween episode of The Swan. Now even my left foot has fabulous bone structure. These are my consolations, that and an inescapable upper body work out, as I lurch and drag my somewhat dissociated self about the landscape like Madame’s last and unlikeliest love-child by Tiny Tim. The price of renovation I suppose. Inconvenient yet character building. Doctors and forms and insurance and forms and hospitals and forms and rubbish and rubbish and… hmmmm… I wonder what the co-pay is on a Mai-Tai?

What to say, what to say… Ah, it’s no use. It’s Monday, how inspiring is that? Really, I mean, it is not as if one wakes up on a Monday morning feeling free and alive ready to attack the day with the vigor of a Viagra sponsored rugby team and the optimistic attitude of a dog on his first day guarding the Frisbee factory. (If you do you are highly suspect and do not have sufficient security clearance to continue reading this missive.) This being said, the “Oh, how I hate Mondays, let me count the ways” rant is just soooooo tired and I shall endeavor to avoid that treacherous trap. As I said I am not depressed or angsty, just… uninspired and slightly out of focus… or is that my environment? Well, none the less, seizing my coffee and turning my face to the wind I shall forge ahead. Perhaps I will stumble into a wellspring of intellectual scintillation and, failing to drown, return to you with a philosophical political aesthetic pearl worthy of the rajas of old… not that I’d know anything about the rajas… nothing admissible in court anyway.

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It’s a black-eyed blue heart
armored by its scars
that struggles to remember
when it was freshly torn apart
to offer up some sympathy
for another not so hard
that needs its sensitivity
met with seasoned empathy


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Last week a great man passed from this world. I speak not of those given the intensive retrospective treatment by the media, not Johnnie C., not the globetrotting pontiff, but the man, the legend, the Lee Iacocca of domesticated foul, Frank Perdue. In an era of corporate founders and CEO’s finding celebrity status as charismatic if often quirky pitchmen for their businesses and products Frank was a star. With a sense of humor about himself and a devotion to his product he convinced a consumer nation that the label on your chicken parts was as important or more than the label on your over-priced jeans. Before the advent of chemical tanning he made the bizarre practice of feeding marigolds to your chickens to turn their skin yellow seem not only normal but in fact what any credible poultry purveyor would do. Who were these people trying to foist off these pallid bird corpses on an unsuspecting public, I mean really? Frank’s shoes and place before the camera were filled some time back by his son who is doing his best to continue the tradition. But, while certainly more telegenic than his famous dad, Jim lacks the sort of endearingly eccentric grandfather charm and vaguely birdlike appearance that was so much a part of Frank’s success. So raise a drumstick, a wing, OK a breast if you prefer, to the memory of Frank Perdue, a tough man who made a tender chicken.