The soda can, or pop can, if you’re from anywhere west of the Mississippi River or Hudson’s Bay, in Canada, is the symbol of our ecological heritage.  A bar was erected in its honor and more than one computer program was written to decipher the cryptic musings on the aluminum container.  Nobody cared what was on the inside.  Nobody ever does.  That noxious liquid could bubble, fizz, spurt or go flat for all the Association of Janitorial Theorists cared.   At any rate, in the grand scheme of the universe, there was not just one soda but an infinite variety of sodas, all of which tended to be sweet, sticky and make most humanoids, and even other creatures, burp when they imbibed it.  However, we were talking about a special computer program.  This program was designed to make the humanoid to machine interface something more than empty air—or the burp between the chair and the monitor. Thousands of coding hours, and then days upon days of algorithm testing, went into the perfection of this application.  Unfortunately, in the end the computer’s application was denied on the grounds that it had already used up way to many code hours just trying to get itself started.  No ultimate being, great or small, had told it that a humanoid could push a button to start it without the requirement of too much artificial intelligence or of any kind of intelligence, for that matter.  It remains to be seen whether or not the computer will appeal the applications denial or whether it will simply deny access without the proper password.  More on the twenty-eight o’clock news!

~ Bob Zaboo

I saw the ape man coming from over the hill to stand beside the river and drink his fill.  It was a night when the sky was dark and cloudy and filled with the ominous sense of doom.  Ape men never worry about frightful things.  Everything, for them, is both an opportunity and a challenge and many things represent tomorrow’s dinner.  “It’s what’s for dinner,” they may often say as they’re scraping the last hairs off their ill fashioned stone utensils.  The ape man hangs from a tree and doesn’t think about cars, or computers, or fashion, or who will be the next president, or whether some country half of a world away is going to do something nasty.  They are only concerned about whether they can jump from where they are hanging to the ground without breaking something in their own body.  Once in a while, one ape man will fight another ape man.  These altercations are usually over an ape woman or two.  Ape men like bananas and other fruit, and bugs, and grasshoppers, and anything else that is edible and not poisonous.  Ape men are not vegetarians, although plant life makes up most of their diet due to the fact that they would rather sit around the campfire and play music and whistle tunes they remember from their childhoods rather than get up to go out and kill something to eat.  They are known to pick bugs out of each other’s hair, out of trees, and out of water pools.  Sometimes they eat these bugs, but, more often than not, they just play with them or put them on a string and wear them.  No one reading this should try to equate ape men with any other form of human or animal that they have encountered in the past.  They are nothing like either of these.

~ Bob Zaboo

I pat my cat with a cotton bat till he purrs with all his might.  He quacks like a duck, he is such a suck but he won’t let me tuck him in at night.  All things considered, he is not like a bird, nor a car, nor a train, nor a truck.  He likes flying things but with flapping wings, so he’s not very fond of aero planes but he likes to sit for a bit on the sill and look about the window panes.  He’s an indoor cat; it’s a very large cage.  I stay with him there and play with him there unless I’ve got something better to do.  Come to think of it, and I’m sure my cat would agree, that there is not very much that is better than sitting and playing with a cat all day.  All the things of this life, the toil and the strife, the books and the bars and the fascination with cars don’t amount to too much when it comes to that according to the world view of my cat.  I actually have two cats and they are both of the opinion that their needs come first and most of the time I cannot but agree.  Sometimes I think that my needs come first and don’t know what to do.  Sometimes my cats’ needs and mine are one and the same or at least they convince me that this is true.  They make me laugh and smile with joy.  They like to play with a string or a toy.  They fight each other but only pretend and finally sleep tight and close to each other at the of the night.

~ Bob Zaboo

One degree, two degree, three degree, four…There are more degrees around than you can shake a stick at.  In fact, some people try to shake their sticks at degrees and some people even try to shake their stick after receiving degrees.   I like to shake my stick, if I can find it, at the change in degrees.  One minute it is one degree and then, before you know it, the next minute it is some totally different degree.   There seems no degree of stability at all when it comes to any sort of degree.  I am not sure what angle to take on this whole issue of degrees.  Seriously, are there smaller portions of degrees we need to be concerned about?  What would a freshman think about this concept?  Do they have any fresh ideas to bring to bear on the subject? Better yet, what about a sophomore? What about those other classmen?  If they were without class they would have no degree in the end.  Where would that leave them? What is of most concern is the degree of latitude allowed when considering degrees.  Some contend that degrees should be discrete, while others want to give degrees a large degree of freedom.  Personally, I think that we should be free to determine the degree that best suits us and enjoy that degree when we can find it.  After all, the degree to which we subjugate ourselves to the totalitarian concept of degree discrimination is the degree to which we allow ourselves to be without degrees of lenience.  No degree should be allowed to vary by that amount.

~ Bob Zaboo

Once there was a poem that didn’t have any rhythm or rhythm or reason.  It was because my mother had made me do it.  It is a concept that cannot be defined.  It is everything.  It is the quintessential culmination of absolutely nothing wrapped up in a bunting blanket and laid in the snow.  Mother did not know any of this when she first took me on as an apprentice.  She, innocently, thought she was making a baby into a human.  She forgot that a baby starts out as a human long before it even begins to look like a child.  Children on the other hand are small, literally carbon copies, of what they will become in later years right up until the time they stop becoming anything and start unbecoming behavior and start the slow and awkward process of becoming absolutely nothing except a scattered pile of dust in some scenic turn out on some forgotten, triple numbered, desolate highway.  As a side note, for dust to actually become dust, it takes a great deal of time without the intervention of chemicals or gasses to speed up the process.  Most of this is inconsequential anyway.  My mother said that it is ridiculous to try and speed up the process of becoming something other than dust and ludicrous to slow down the process of eventually becoming dust again.  She says we are all on a similar path from here to there.  She also says that most of us, if not all of us, do not know where here or there is.  I have no opinion on the subject since I always do what mother tells me to do.

~ Bob Zaboo

What say you to the news that the mountain is now a valley?  It has come to the attention of local politicians that before the rise in temperature nothing was the same as it is now.  Since the temperature has, in turn, dropped, it is now, more than ever, apparent that nothing remains unchanged unless it changes from being to not being.  In this case, it is better to understand everything than to be put in a temple where moths grow in the darkness rather than in the light.

The man by the white pony never saw the crack in the blog.  He was too impatient to see through the concrete into the dark recesses of yesterday.  How did he manage to eat all those petunias?  Never, in the short history of nothing, did such a thing ring of skepticism.  Afterword, all the man could say was that he would rather be smothered in peanut juice than fly from Los Angeles to the outer wrapping.  He was foretold and fried with bright red high schools.  Cheering him on was a chorus of fish.  They jerked up their flashlights but never rattled their corn stocks.  All-in-all, it was a spectrum of continuums that never quite felt the pressure of underwritten mosaics.  Still, sooner or often, trees never find the truth unless they specifically pace on their throttle.
 
The people could not sweat enough to make any headway.  Therefore, the ape men continued to verify their surroundings.  All they hoped for was to crush the refrigerator before it collapsed into a worm hole.

~ Bob Zaboo

This is not the way piglets should shelter their fellow school mates.  Really, is it so difficult to predict the outline of a solar alternative?  The wind howls and yet we use no cables to find the grid.  We place money in the bonnet but never think about the affect the weather has on the volume of crumpets entering the country.  All citizens should be alert to the alerts and aware of the wares that infiltrate even the most porous of filters.  Can anyone tell me why the things that are free are bound to complain?  Over on the wall, there is a scratch made by some untoward, vigilant space traveler.  Are we responsible for that breadstick?  The bakery puts out fifteen bales of hay every fortnight and yet we have difficulty taking the temperature of the sustainable undergrowth.  How primitive have we progressed to?  Surely, the antelopes of the city will react to this wonderful story.   It is about time that kindergartens start sponsoring clinical trials on supernovas that just won’t adhere to the bathroom window.  My car does a better painting than this.  When will catastrophes be catalogued in to the correct housing project?  The sickness of finding better power has become a signal of perpetuating reality.  Will it ever stop? I ask you to call the post office and tell them to hold all calls until you send them a letter.   Too many envelops have already gone berserk and questioned the authority of pea pods.  I beg you stop begging.
 
~ Thomas N. Anderson

After carefully considering the lack of importance in most unimportant dissertations, the committee is committed to only scratching the surface of the scratch posts they call the issues.  They had a chance to have good luck but decided instead to face their fate, relying on only their intuition and reason.  This was probably a very big mistake.  How could such a group of people even consider capitalizing on elemental nuances?  It all makes no sense in the infinitesimally grand scheme of things.  No wonder people think that politicians are not worth the paper they are written on.  After many years experience in not understanding politics, or even sports for that matter, it seemed to the other group that there was just no answers available.  How can such a travesty exist at the foot of all our dreams?  Sleeping giants need big beds.  We all know this and we all believe this is the most efficient scenario.  However, can beds be made with hickory sticks?  Some experts say that it is possible but that the lack of consensus makes it difficult for furniture designers to compute the outcome.  On the other side of the problem are the well diggers who contend that even more water on our tablets will not alleviate the trial and error nature of the situation.  Nature adores a vaccination.  Why should nature be confided in for the answers to every phone call?  This way, there would be no incongruence between the planet and the planetoids we are all hoping will not go away too soon.

~ Bob Zaboo

After sleepless nights of contemplation and soul searching, it came to my attention that it is possible, more than likely probable, and possibly inevitable that all of this and everything else, which is actually part of this, especially if it is not part of that, is a more or less, equally composed of pure, unadulterated nonsense.  Within this barrage of ridiculous theories are a host of truths, each one trying to climb to the highest heights on the backs of the lower and lesser truths below.  From above it all looks like some circus except that there are no animals.  However, there are plenty of clowns and acrobats so that makes it a quasi-circus at the very least.  Anyway, it isn’t my perspective, it is the perspective that we never see because we are down and the being having the perspective is up.  Maybe, in reality, it is dimensionless.  Maybe it is there and we are here.  It is also possible that it is flag and we are cheese.  Anything is possible in a place that we cannot touch, feel, see, hear, or sense in any way.  Even stories about up, or there, or flags are distorted because they have to be written by down, or here, or cheese hands and interpreted by our down, or here, or cheese brains. You can see why I do not sleep at night.  It is not the coffee or the cola or the chocolate, it is the ever receding glimpse of up, or there, or flag.

~ Bob Zaboo

Discovering the use of toilet paper has always been the quest of a particular group of gurus known as the toast brigade.  Riding ribbons made from left over beef stew and shouting hardy jinxes at everyone, they often can be seen facing the western orthodox flashlights.  This happens especially after a printer fails to make lollipops in the correct fashion.  Once, when leopards were free to speak their mantras it was different.  People from all around the lake would praise the road builders for showing concern over the sky.  What clearing?  It is a legitimate laughter.  Even if the bitter figureheads renounce the play, it will not be a happy camp.  Too much solidity has flowed over the bridge to make anyone in the garden believe the predominant squirrel.

The biggest solution is to put all dice in a blender and find out if they are up for the taking.  In this way, the worms of discretion can finally be hampered in their attempts to fillet the power poles.  Each of these, in turn, needs to have the right binocular bungalow pulled down over the crescent pillow.  It remains to be shaped whether or not ripe baskets can really stand up to the security of nifty cohorts.   Common opinion flies in the face of species dental fixations simply because there are normal tablecloths available in this and other salads.  Forks are for niceties and not for granular circumstances.  Any computer on the face of the river can obtain results that contra account for spicy anomalies.

~ Bob Zaboo