Membership has its privileges, as the commercials used to say. Only they should have been talking about Donutposse, not about some piece of lifestyle-defining plastic.

I got home today & found an instant message from a lovely young fan, left while I was away. She had written:

Donutposse Donut posse, Donut-posse, Donutses, Donuts, Donut's, Donates

Spellcheck offers me this sage bit of advice every time I run it on one of my posts. OK, so "Donutposse" isn't in the Oxford English Dictionary yet. I can understand that the word sends up a flag. But does anybody know what "donutses" are? I'd love to be able to figure out what that one means, if only to be able to use it in a sentence one time.

And I bet if I spellcheck this entry, it'll have no problem at all with that usage of the word "donutses".

We'll see...

Yep, it caught Donutposse again, but it has absolutely no problem with "donutses". Dang, a new donut-related word to work into office water-cooler conversation. Donutses must be some semi-precious, naturally occurring, donut-shaped gems found deep in the Himalayas or something.

Or perhaps it's a word coined by Tolkien for when Gollum enjoyed some donutses with his precioussss in Lord of the Rings.

Anybody have any other possible definitions?

OK kids, I've been rilly rilly busy lately, but I haven't forgotten my commitment to the donut- and chicken-loving community.

I have some great stories coming up that'll knock your socks off, tales of free donuts & chicken shaped tattoos.

But right now, I'm just glad to see LJ back up & at 'em. When they told me the site went down, my sense of the community's loss of up-to-the-minute angst-ridden poetry updates & pictures of people's adorable pets was profound. But I was offended about people outside the LJ community cracking jokes about "the sound of 5 million teenaged girls crying." Those jokes are only allowed if you participate here, not if you're some peanut gallery commentator on something you're not a part of.

Then I thought: good thing I archive everything I post up here anyway, since I'm so anal-retentive that I write drafts of posts, edit them, and then post. How else could I consistently guaranty a quality product to all the people out there who deserve the best? Because if you check in here regularly, then it's pretty safe to assume that you're a discerning, worldly person that doesn't tolerate mediocrity.

What kind of a person reads Donutposse? Well, studies have shown that Donutposse readers are on the average extremely overeducated. They often have terminal degrees in areas of study that fewer than 100 people worldwide even knew existed (source: Gallup Poll, 2003).

Besides that, Donutposse readers are attractive. When shown photos of Donutposse readers, chickens trained to detect extreme physical beauty in humans often danced, writhed, and fainted in coils. When shown pictures of readers of other blogs, the same chickens clucked wearily and evacuated their bowels 2.4 times more often than was usual (source: the lady I know that lives out in the country & raises chickens).

When the "average" Donutposse reader wakes up in the morning, he or she typically has at least 17 more items on their to-do list than a representative sample of middle americans aged 25-45 who make greater than $75,000 per year. We're a productive lot, and those items range anywhere from one to three standard deviations above the mean on Bloomfield's Hierarchy of the Priority of Tasks scale (source: made up).

What I'm trying to get across here is that Donutposse readers are smart, hip, and with-it. They're sassy. They're the target market everyone wishes they could appeal to, if by everyone you think of only everyone in the advertising profession. Donutposse readers have no time to waste reading anything other than the most entertaining stories and conjectures, word for word, that this blog consistently delivers. In an independent study, Donutposse was found to be 6.7 times more thought-provoking and 17 times funnier than other sites containing the same keywords, as indexed by the Google search engine.

So come back tomorrow, and I'll tell you a story. The one I've got is guaranteed to blow your mind. It involves disfigurement, mayhem, sullen teenagers, and chickens. It's a can't-miss. A day or two after that (as soon as I finish the interview), a story that contains the phrase "he prays to Shiva, then makes donuts." I'm almost finished with my research now, and drafting has begun. When it rains, it pours in young Donutposse's life. One fantabulous story can't come along without another hot on its heels, leaving me eating powerbars and falling asleep on my keyboard because I couldn't possibly fit cooking and sleeping in a bed into my life with such information to disseminate to the multitude of fans who crave it.

Till then, I remain, yours,
Donutposse ♥ ♥ ♥

On a budget x-mas shopping, part 1

At the risk of getting a little derivative, I wanted to post about a livejournal meme that I recently discovered, since it involves poetry. Memes are processes, thought or otherwise, that can be transmitted from one person to another through various means. A definition I found here calls a a meme "a contagious information pattern that replicates by parasitically infecting human minds and altering their behavior, causing them to propagate the pattern."

One person could show another how to gut a fish, for example. Or s/he could write a quiz called "which 70's sitcom are you?" Then both parties will share the benefit of the knowledge. Benefit or no, the replication is the key--the fact that once one person "catches" a meme, they transmit it to others. Nowadays, a major mode of transmission is the Internet. I derive benefit from some of the memes floating around, but others that I've come across are kind of silly. I mean, quizzes are nice, and sometimes even come up with funny results, but I wouldn't inflict an entry full of a dozen quizzes I took on people that I wanted to keep reading the things I wrote.

I read about a literary meme that I found interesting on asciident's pages, and here's a link to her post (with my comment). That got me to looking at other memes (there are scads of sites devoted to them,) especially LJ-specific ones.

I found one that I really liked, a meme that goes through your livejournal when you enter your username, and extracts haiku that you wrote inadvertently whilst spewing prose all over the place. It isn't perfect, because it relies on a syllable counter that is computer-based and thus fallible. But it does come up with some interesting results. Go here to perform the haiku meme.

Here are some haiku I got when I ran my site through it.

These first three describe the whole premise of today's post. Art comments on art, like asking the I Ching a question about itself.

donut art it'll make
its own niche and then fill it
you'd be surprised

inspired donut
poetry and resolved to
go looking for some

a writer whose work
i enjoy and i'm never
going to let him live

Then we get to the call to arms, the carpe diem, the inspirational poem:

make plans for the night
of your life because that's what
you're going to have once

(my comment: and only once, hence the name "the night of your life.")

i noticed that
people who dream of donuts seem
to dream about them

(sounds reasonable...)

Religious imagery has been a popular source of inspiration through the ages. Here's a haiku that describes the difficulties and paradoxes associated with seeking God through religion:

i notice that he
crosses himself backwards once
and correctly once

Here's a pair that works together:

once again on one
hand she finds donuts in the
same place she found love

gooey donuts on
the other hand giving a
donut to a man

The results ranged from the cryptic:

effort for its own
sake on his part other than
his labor of love

to the straightforward:

short recollections
of her dreams waking in the
middle of the night

to the randy (everyone loves erotic poetry, after all):

manufacture an
excuse to put you in the
back seat of their car

A few more describe frozen moments in time, and our perceptions of them:

save all those silly
campaign letters that fill your
mailbox at this time

a she-bear out of
the woods to maul some children
that make fun of him

searching for it I
just kept my eyes open to
look at what came in

A couple succinctly stated a motif that runs throughout these pages:

if the word donut
appears at all it appears
in several dreams

you're into fresh eggs
but please don't abandon the
things once they get grown

Three stanzas make up a story of a brief, possibly tragic relationship in the following:

i saw someone in
the elevator at the
building where i work

thoughts and memories
rushed through my little mind
when i saw someone

of detail but not
quotidian or banal
we chatted a while

And on that note I'll close, since:

the height of fun but
this should be the last time since
i'm fittin' to get

sums up what this has been. Once again, poetry doesn't have to be sought out, but instead comes to us seemingly of its own volition. These remind me of the chopped up poems William S. Burroughs produced when he took a page of text, folded it and cut it, and then matched the lines up in a different order. The results produced not just the same themes, differently stated, but also hidden, deeper meanings springing from the innate power of the words themselves.

I also came to the conclusion that livejournal isn't just for teenaged girls writing bad poetry. It's also a method for random poetry to come from putting ourselves out there just a little bit, trying, perhaps without even knowing exactly what we're trying to do, and just living. There's definitely poetry in that. We're all transmitting it without even trying, as poetry is a meme that has established itself in mankind just as E. coli have established themselves in our intestines.

Studio Anchor: Would the city have prevented this if they could?
On the scene reporter: No, no one's doing anything illegal. But vice cops are crawling all over in case they do.
Studio Anchor: Um, are heads gonna roll at the mayor's office when they find out who signed the contract with these people allowing them to rent the convention center?
On the scene reporter: Not really. The mayor's office says that they are legally obligated to rent the space to anyone who can pay and who will use it in a lawful manner. They're just worried that these people will want to rent the space again next year.

Why? If they're not doing anything illegal now, what's the difference whether they make porn or pasta, and whether they congratulate themselves for it again next year?

***

So, in summary. We have one story about how breasts aren't offensive & that it's every american mother's duty to pull them out wherever they can. On the other hand, a room full of consenting adults shouldn't be able to watch entertainment that features women's breasts, even thought their work involves looking at much more graphic displays, and despite the fact that they've all chosen to be there, and the only people there who might get offended are some people who weren't invited and who only came to be arbiters of a set of morals that are more restrictive than the laws that they're in charge of enforcing. And the teenaged girls of america take another shot, as they're portrayed as either shallow, body-fixated simpletons incapable of making their own decisions even when assisted by both their parents and medical professionals, or else whiny, dissatisfied hypocrites.

I'm never watching the news again.