I’ve composed the following to celebrate the start of camp fire season. If you’re unfamiliar, please see the start of this for an explanation of what follows.

So there was this guy,

he was a surfer who lived in-land. Well this guy developed a very unpopular extreme sport called rock surfing. What you’d do in rock surfing was grab a surf board and ride down the side of a cliff or rocky hill. People called this guy dangerous while dogs called him a word that meant “human” in dog language.

Anyways, so this guy was out rock surfing the one day and he fell really hard onto a bunch of terrible rocks. This was not an infrequent event in rock surfing. So he was bleeding from a large gash on his ribs and his buddy is like, “Dude let me take you to this barn like factory I know of.”

Confused and in pain, this guy responds by saying, “I should totally go to the hospital.”

“Yeah I’m whack,” says this guy’s buddy, “you should totally hit up the hospie before u die.” The tricky part about this response was that this guy’s buddy wanted to emphasize the bit about death. See he had this thing where he wanted to kill the rock surfer because he thought the rock surfer was hurting the rocks. He also believed that rocks were beautiful silent creatures that would one day speak to him if he was good enough. This belief drove him near madness because the rubric for “good enough” had never been laid out by himself or the rocks.

So in the car ride to the hospital the rock surfer’s buddy was like “I just love rocks so much.”

The rock surfer agreed and then started talking about nature and this idea he had about extracting citrus from limestone. He was like, “if we could just get the citrus out of the stone then people could cook their fish Ceviche-style using natural rock-based citrus instead of farming lemons and limes. Then all the citrus fruit would be free to do whatever.”

This idea made the rock surfer’s buddy really mad because he was afraid it would catch-on and decrease the limestone population. Citrus also made him sour in general.

Anyways they got to the hospital, the rock surfer got fixed up and then they went to their separate homes because they were just wiped-out.

So the next morning the rock surfer’s buddy rolled up to the house and was like, “Sun is out bro, blue skies are the best conditions for rock surfing!” and the rock surfer was like, “right on.”

Their excitement was a little misguided however because the best condition for rock surfing was during, or a split second after, a ton of rain. See rain made the rocks more slippery, increasing the chances that a surfboard would slide over them. In their defence, these two gentlemen had a limited understanding of both friction and gravity.

So the two of them jump in the car and are heading towards this sweet new cliff when the rock surfer senses that something is not right. Suddenly, a giant tree growing beside the road comes crashing down. Fortunately it fell away from the road so they were completely unaffected. But after about 6 minutes of driving, the rock surfer’s buddy stops the car in front of this barn like factory.

Ever so slowly the rock surfer’s buddy leads him into the factory and up some stairs. Curious, the rock surfer follows closely behind.

“What is this place?” He asks.

Ignoring the question, the rock surfer’s buddy says, “You should grab your board and jump into that machine.”

“No way,” the rock surfer says, “I don’t know what’s in there, it could wreck my board.”

So what the rock surfer does instead is stretches out his lats and hammies and then runs and hops into the machine without a board. Well, turns out that machine was a grinder  and it grinds him up and turns him into non-toxic (technically edible) surfboard wax.

“Isn’t there some other word you could use?”

“Than what?”

“Than love.”

“What better word is there?”

“It was a perfectly good word – until Eliot got hold of it. It’s spoiled for me now. Eliot did to the word love what the Russians did to the word democracy. If Eliot is going to love everybody, no matter what they are, no matter what they do, then those of us who love particular people for particular reasons had better find ourselves a new word.”  - Kurt Vonnegut God Bless You, Mr. Roswewater

If you’re cool with this, follow @RichieMiller and get involved with a tweet!

photocredit: The Torontoist

The project spawned from a Stats Canada report which said that the average Canadian aged 24-30 makes $24.75 per hour. Finding this number inaccurate when compared to her own wage and those of her  peers in Toronto’s young artistic community, Kat committed to the above constraints in order to produce pieces that would sell for $24.75 each, thus bringing her monthly earnings up to the national average.

Kat has been tweeting and posting updates about her experiences throughout the experiment, interacting with followers and asking for inspiration and requests via email and twitter @anhourofmytime. You can see the awesome results of her project here.

GRTTWAK is going onto it’s 11th reading and I highly recommend going if you’d like to be entertained by the uncontrolled tense shifts, mish mash of pop-culture, stealing of phrases and often self-glorifying works of kids.

The chemistry between Matt and Jay is seamless and the heaps of copyright infringements are excellent. The show was filmed 2007-2009 so catch-up before you become irrelevant.

Speaking of pretending to be serious (or irrelevance), how about those Arizona Gun Laws?

Outside of her Cat Lady duties Ellie jams some pretty stellar creative writings and some very fly zines. Her most recent zine is called “Kitty Doodles” and it sells direct from the Cat Lady for a wildly reasonable price of $1.00. The photo above is an excerpt from the pocket sized zine. Forget this. Look at that cat up there. Awesome.

For a sample of her Sarah’s work, I recommend her poem Ithaca.

Opening lines of Ithaca:

before i go
i will steal your laugh lines
while you are sleeping
and from them, build a vast map,

Continue reading here.