Look Evelyn, Duck Dynasty Wiper Blades. We Should Get Them.: A Collection Of New Essays

Copyright © David Thorne 2014 All rights reserved.

Look Evelyn, Duck Dynasty Wiper Blades. We Should Get Them.

A Collection Of New Essays

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This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, re-produced on the internet or otherwise circulated without the author’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Activities and vehicle modifications appearing or described in this book may be potentially dangerous.

Also available by the same author:

The Internet is a Playground

Published by Penguin,
The Internet is a Playground
is the first release by David Thorne. Making its debut at #4 on The New York Times bestseller list, it includes articles from 27bslash6 plus over 160 pages of new material. It makes a nice present, protects against tigers, and can be read while hiding in small places.

I’ll Go Home Then; It’s Warm and Has Chairs

Featuring articles from 27bslash6.com along with brand-spanking-new material,
I'll Go Home Then; It's Warm and Has Chairs
is the second book release by author David Thorne and is available now.

“What’s the new book about?” my friend JM asked recently, “Is it going to have lots of new emails?”

“No,” I told him, “I thought I’d put together a collection of articles, essays if you will, rather than emails this time.”

“Oh, I like the emails,” he said disappointed, “there’s not going to be any? Not even one?”

“Maybe one.”

“Good. I like the emails. Remember that one you did about the spider? Fuck that was funny.”

“That was over five years ago,” I replied, “I’ve posted a lot of stuff since then.”

“Yes, but they haven’t been as good as the spider one. You should do more emails about spiders.”

“Yes, perhaps the new book should consist only of emails about spiders. Or I could just repeat the same story every ten pages or so. That would save me a lot of time.”

“You could mix it up a bit. Maybe send a real spider. Or a whole box of them.”

“By email?”

“No, by normal mail. Their reaction when they open the box would be priceless.”

“Yes, but I wouldn’t be there to see it.”

“Doesn’t matter, it would still be funny.”

“So the entire book should be about sending people boxes of live spiders and imagining their reaction to opening it?”

“I’d read it.”

There is a small island off the southern tip of the Great Andaman archipelago, shaped a bit like a slice of bread, called North Sentinel Island. Nobody knows what the people living on North Sentinel Island call the island because the inhabitants, noted for resisting all attempts at contact by outsiders, are more interested in throwing spears than chatting.

They maintain a society subsisting through hunting, fishing, and collecting wild plants. There is no evidence of either agricultural practices or methods of producing fire and their language remains unknown.

Every twenty years or so, anthropologists attempt to coax the islanders from their hostile reception of outsiders by leaving coconuts on the beach and waving from boats anchored just beyond spear-throwing distance. Sometimes the natives wave back and the anthropologists, encouraged, approach close enough to be speared.

Which is why I call my desk North Sentinel Island II.

I made my own flag, by drawing a pair of crossed spears on a blank timesheet, and flew it from my desk using sticky-tape and a ruler.

“What’s the X stand for?” asked Kevin. 

Kevin, an account manager at the design agency I work for, makes regular attempts at contact with North Sentinel Island II but instead of offering coconuts, he offers lengthy tales of how well his cabbages are growing and the soil conditions required for such.

“It’s not an X,” I informed him, “It’s two spears crossing over each other.”

I’ve never been overly adept at drawing. It might be assumed that some degree of artistic aptitude is required to work in the design industry but there is a vast difference between pencil on paper and pixels on screen. I can split paths and know the names of far too many typefaces, but I would be the last person I’d pick as a partner on Pictionary night.

“Is it a person roller-skating during a tornado?”

“No, it’s a grape.”

When I was nine, I drew a picture in class of my dog Gus jumping into a pond. The teacher mistook it for an excellent picture of a snake coming out of a cave and I was somehow elected to participate in the painting of a school mural depicting wildlife preservation. Featured in the school corridor for the next four years, between fairly decent representations of an ostrich and elephant by students with a modicum of talent, was what became known as "David’s egg-flip with eyes."

“It looks more like an X,” Kevin critiqued, “If you made the pointy bits more profound, like they were made out of sharpened rocks, and added bits of cloth hanging down where the rocks are tied to the sticks, they would look a lot more like spears.”

“Right, thank you for the suggestion, Kevin. I should probably have consulted you on correct spear drawing techniques prior to undertaking the design. What can I help you with?”

“Nothing,” he replied, scrolling through his iPhone, “I just wanted to show you something...”

“Is it a photo of a cabbage?” I asked, “I’ve already seen it.”

“No, hang on... wait, that’s not it... that’s my daughter’s eldest at his graduation ceremony, nice kid, top marks in his class... hang on... I know it’s here somewhere...”

“I’m fairly busy at the moment...” I tried interjecting.

“Here it is... no, wait, that’s not it either...”

I tried growing my own vegetables once, after watching a program called Prepping in which people with beards and Wrangler jeans anticipate social collapse. I paid around $30 for seeds, $100 for railway ties, and $250 for fifty bags of garden soil, which means the two cucumbers I ended up with cost $190 each. They weren’t even good cucumbers. One was about two inches in length and the other had a huge grub living inside it.

Should the grid ever ‘go down’, I estimate my chances of long-term survival as slim at best. I’ll probably be shot at the supermarket and have my cans of evaporated milk and instant coffee taken from me on the first day.

My coworker Simon once told me that he really wished there would be a zombie apocalypse like in the show, The Walking Dead.

“I’d use a bow, or crossbow,” he said, “Like Darryl. Because it’s quieter.”

“Sure,” I agreed, “But the reload is dreadful. You’d probably be better off with a shotgun. Even if it is a bit louder. You don’t have to be a very good aim with a shotgun.”

Simon smiled and shook his head, “That’s why I’d be a main character and you’d be one of the new people that joins our community then gets bitten and turns into a zombie that I have to shoot. With an arrow.”

When I was ten, I shot my dog Gus with an arrow. It wasn’t on purpose though and he didn’t die or anything. He just ran around the yard yelping with the arrow in his hind leg for a bit until my mother came out to see what all the noise was about. I’d built the bow out of a branch and packaging twine. Lacking actual feathers to use as stabilisers for the arrows, I attached a leaf to the end of a fairly straight stick with tape, and sharpened the other end. Upon testing, I found it almost impossible to draw back the taught string, so I laid on my back, placed both feet in the bow with the arrow between, and pulled with both hands. With my arms and legs quivering from the strain and the string cutting deep into my fingers, I aimed towards a box sitting on top of a stump. The box had concentric circles drawn on it but instead of giving each a number, I’d written the names of all the people in my class who called me by the nickname ‘Egg-flip’.  With my bent knees about to give out,
I 
pushed just a bit a harder... and my legs locked straight up, ripping the string from my grip. Due to the high angle of trajectory, the arrow travelled perhaps sixty feet in height but only twenty in distance. Gus was lying on his side in the grass, enjoying the sun, when the arrow hit.

I wasn’t punished by my parents for the incident but I did have to listen to the “We’re not angry, we’re just disappointed” speech on the way to the vet. My parents were never really big on discipline. The only physical punishment I remember receiving was having my mouth washed out with soap. I was seven. My father switched channels to the news while I was watching The Goodies and, having heard a term that day at school and assuming it was a generic one like ragamuffin or boofhead, I called him a cocksucker. Dragged down the hallway and into the bathroom, what I recall of the punishment was not the taste of the soap, but the fact that the only bar available was a mushy blob stuck to the tiled floor of the shower. As I spat the soap, and a toenail, into the sink afterwards, I remember thinking, 'Nobody in our family has short curly hair, whose hair is this?'

During a recent discussion with my father about bad parenting, I reminded him of this and he replied, "Bullshit. It was Brut-33 soap-on-a-rope. It was hanging on the tap. That's what the rope is for you fucking liar."

Gus walked with a limp for the rest of his life. Which wasn’t very long as he was run over by a truck a few weeks later. He probably couldn’t hobble out of the way in time. We buried him in the backyard but my father dug him up a few months later when we put in a pool. He still had the bandage on his hind leg and a note under his collar that read, “Dear Gus, Sorry for shooting you in the leg with an arrow. You were a good dog. Except when you stood in front of the TV.”

“Ah, here it is!” declared Kevin finally. He held up the screen to show me a photo of a cabbage.

“You showed me that yesterday,” I remarked, “and I told you at the time that if I wanted to look at pictures of cabbages I would type ‘pictures of cabbages’ into Google.”

“It’s a different photo,” he explained, “look how much they’ve grown in just a few days.”

A photo of a cabbage growing in soil, without something in the photo for scale, such as a banana, could be two inches or two feet across. I pointed this out to Kevin.

Kevin looked at the photo and frowned, “You’re a fucking idiot,” he said on his way out.

After he left, I made the pointy bits on my flag look like sharpened rocks and added bits of cloth where they joined the sticks. It did actually look better but then I tried adding blood to the end of the spears with a red whiteboard marker, which made the spears look like match sticks wearing ties so I had to redo the entire thing.

The phone on my desk rang.

“North Sentinel Island II tourist information. This is David. How can I help you?”

“What?” Melissa asked, “Is Kevin up there? Ben’s on hold for him.”

Melissa replaced our previous secretary - or ‘front desk manager’ as Sharon had preferred to be called - a few years back after what is commonly referred to as the Recipient Incident.

Mistakenly selecting ‘Staff’ instead of her boyfriend ‘Steve’, Sharon sent a selfie of herself wearing only pigtails to everyone in the office. Being fat - or ‘curvy’ as fat people prefer to be called - the thing that impressed me most about the selfie was her flexibility.  There is no way I could get my feet behind my head, even with a pillow under my back like she had. I’ve tried.

While I can understand Sharon’s decision to leave without notice, the subject matter was actually less embarrassing than the environment the photo was taken in. Her bedroom had green striped wallpaper and a ruffled floral bedspread. A stained glass lamp shaped like a butterfly was just visible amongst a throng of teddy bears on her side table and above her bed was a poster of a tiger. Who lives like this? If it was my bedroom, I wouldn’t be taking nude selfies, I would be weeping as I splashed kerosene about and lit a match.

I was actually glad when she left. The only bathroom is across the hall from my office and Sharon apparently suffered from Irritable Bowel Syndrome. It wasn’t the noise, which was like twenty sauce bottles being simultaneously squeezed to the last drop, but the fact that she would leave the door open after finishing. Almost every time, I would have to get up, walk through her Agent-Orange-like mist, and close the door.

“Can we try keeping this door closed please?” I once asked.

“Sorry,” Sharon replied sarcastically.

“Yes, I don’t think you are actually sorry otherwise you’d close the door and not subject everyone to what smells like a large pile of dead cats. Dead cats covered in shit. The ‘Fresh Linen’ Febreeze doesn’t mask the odour,  it just makes it smell like a large pile of dead cats covered in shit with a dryer-sheet stuck on top.”

“You’re so rude,” she replied, “I can’t help it if I have Irritable Bowel Syndrome. It’s a medical condition.”

.....................................

From
: Jennifer Haines

To
: David Thorne

Subject
: Complaint

David,

Sharon has filed a F26-A in regards to comments you allegedly made about a medical condition she suffers from. Under section 3, paragraph 8 of the Employee Workplace Agreement it states that no employee will be discriminated against for any medical condition. Please keep your opinions to yourself in future. Irritable Bowel Syndrome is a real condition.

Jennifer

.....................................

From
: David Thorne

To
: Jennifer Haines

Subject
: Re: Complaint

Dear Jennifer,

I’m sure it is but if I were to bother looking up the symptoms, I doubt they would include an inability to close doors. Besides, I’m fairly sure dropping the fecal equivalent of Hiroshima every few hours has more to do with diet than disorders. I once saw her eat a cake for lunch. Not a cupcake or a large slice of cake, a whole cake. If someone of normal weight defecated with the regularity and magnitude of Sharon’s seismic dumps, they would be dead within the day. It would be like an average sized dog giving birth to a cow.

Regards, David

.....................................

“No,” I answered Melissa, “I think Kevin went out.”

‘Right.” Click.

This was pretty much the extent of Melissa’s phone etiquette. She hadn’t been employed based on experience.

Despite a sign on the front window stating, ‘No Soliciting’, various people often enter off the street asking if anyone wants to buy things from a big bag. The items are usually cheap electronics, memo holders, flashlight keychains. That sort of thing.  I like it when they come in. The day after Sharon left,  a girl in her early twenties came in lugging her bag of wares. It was raining outside and she looked miserable.