The Blog of Wistar Watts Murray

This is a funny book:

Porn for Women

Hehe. And porn for men would be…oh wait.

This afternoon my little brother Stephen got mad at me because I made him put on shoes when he chainsawed a tree that had fallen across the road. He was walking toward the tree shirtless, barefoot, with a chainsaw in one hand and a can of gas in the other. I said, “No way. Turn around. Put some boots on.” I mean, my parents have broken-down cars in their driveway and a stuffed, roadkill fox in their living room, but I draw the line at barefoot chainsawing.

Hey baby!

Hey… Listen, I had a pint of Chunky Monkey ice cream in the freezer, and now it’s gone. Have you seen it?

No. What kind of ice cream did you say?

Chunky Monkey. By Ben & Jerry’s. It’s got bananas in it. That’s really weird that you don’t know where it is, because I purchased it, and put it in the freezer, and I haven’t seen it since.

Yeah, I don’t know anything about that.

I was looking forward to eating some after a long, frustrating day.

Yeah, I can see that.

I just wanted one or two bites.

Totally.

You’re sure you don’t know where it is?

No way. Bananas in ice cream? Gross.

The next day a pepperoni sausage pizza and two pints of banana-flavored ice cream mysteriously appear in the freezer. One is flavored Banana Split and it already has a big dent in it. Some little kid must have gotten into it at the grocery store.

PS Diana, you were my roommate once. Who is the little elf that follows me around and eats all the ice cream?

On summer days, do not put your jeans on right out of the dryer.

Like a lot of pretentious writers, I keep a notebook in my purse for jotting down story ideas and snippets of dialogue and untraceable garbage like this: “Stuck behind the Frito Lay truck/Christmas stocking.” I’m not exactly proud of this notebook, and I’m careful not to write anything down where people can freely wonder what I’m writing. However, a couple weeks ago I went to a family reunion in Vermont and I made the mistake of pulling out my notebook and quoting from it. It was late at night and I was many beers into it and I was with my cousins, who you would expect would comprise a warm crowd. But no. The second I started flipping through the pages, saying “Wait guys - I have something in here that relates to that extemporaneous joke you were just telling,” I did not hear the end of it. When people are riffing and hanging out, do not pull out your notebook, looking for material. It is like getting caught cheating on a test, but at an institution where your peers actually care and will shame you for that sort of thing. But wouldn’t it have been worse if I had memorized the quoted line before I went out that night? If I had thought, “Better learn this line by heart because I might be able to use it at the bar tonight.” Isn’t that so much worse?

The quoted line, spoken by a Mountain-Dew-consuming friend I used to work with who had just come back from her lunch break to Arby’s, delighted that she hadn’t hit much traffic:

“Everybody must didn’t decide to go thatta way.”

And believe me, I humiliated myself further by saying, “But isn’t the syntax incredible? Didn’t you guys notice the syntax?” Shortly thereafter the Murrays called it a night.

This morning I was thinking about the earthquake in Peru and the victims of the latest bombings in Iraq, but how do you commemorate tragedy in a blog? People read blogs like this to escape, to be whisked off into someone else’s solipsistic universe. I actually thought of having “a moment of blog silence,” but then my eyes rolled out of my head.