"Like a butter lamb born into a world of hot knives" -- The Cole Stoma Notebooks, part one

Long ago, in a time before broadband, I used to lounge on the couch a lot at night with these obsolete analog things we called "notebooks" and write stuff down in a really inefficient and painful process we called "longhand." Then, after I filled up a bunch of pages with mostly crossed-out chicken scratches, I would select out 300 to 1000 words or so that didn't make me want to puke, and make a "zine" out of it ... which is sort of an antique kind of blog thing, in a way, only printed on paper and reproduced on the work photocopier at lunchtime. (Some of the titles of those defunct samizdat publications are in the banner up top.)

I recently stumbled on a pile of these notebooks in my disused "dining room" (scare quotes employed because I have never eaten a meal in there; it's pretty much a storage room, aka, place to throw junk when I don't want to look at it so much anymore), and the first impression I got while flipping through them was, "Wow, I used to smoke some really good weed in the '90s."

Maybe too good. Toward the end, chronologically, of these notebooks, I was clearly spending a lot less time fleshing anything out, because they devolve from full pages of text to pages filled mostly with goofy little cartoon faces and vague, jotted notes that I apparently intended to make into a story someday, which day never came. For no particular reason at all, here are a few, vintage 1999 or thereabouts:

~~~~ cupola --- stoned artist -- 3 white housewives ---- "I'm fucking him" -- fucking him now? or future? -- both

Steve Allen confronted by a talking cat ~~~~~ hypnosis, telepathy, pickled herring, Bergman movies

Take me to your desires.

Onion-assed man
-slammed in door
-makes dogs cry

I was not long thereafter consulted in my capacities as a solicitor by an aggrieved man with an ass for an onion. "My soup is ruined," he wailed. "A total loss!"