I finally got on facebook this weekend and I can’t believe it.  I can’t believe I’ve waited this long to find such a colossal way to dispose of time. 

I really had no idea.  I had no idea that  stumbling instructionless through cyberspace could turn-up so many lost friends and relatives.  Here is where they’ve all been and why none of them will ever return an email or pick up their phones.  

Why bother with obsolete one-on-one communications when you can just as easily “share” it on your wall and enjoy the group mind at work?  Nevermind that not everyone on the planet is on myface.  Some are on spacebook.  And some aren’t even on that, although this is hard for some people to believe.

 And oh the shame, the shame of my late entrance to the party.  Not to mention the irritation.  Couldn’t those who had arrived earlier have left a little crumb trail or provided any warning?  

They could have warned, for example, that maybe signing up all your friends before trying out the software isn’t the smartest.  But that’s exactly what fb has you do: get’s you linked in to your entire network without so much as a single instruction as to who is receiving what.   Then you get to publically fumble around trying to learn the inane ways of their crabby little website.  Since helpful explanations aren’t exactly jumping off the page to bite you on the ass, it’s a hit or miss prospect - with an audience.  That is so messed up.

The good news is, starting facebook inspired me to come post a Bad Apple for the first time in way too long.  Apparently, one colossal “use” of cybertime can lead to another.

If the Bad Apple wasn’t having her time stolen from her daily in order to feed the twin baby monsters named Rent and My Pie Hole, here are the fabu stories you would be reading here:

Bad Vegan Food = No Blindfold

This piece would utterly trash a couple of the local vegan restuaurants, one because all the food tastes like it was prepared  by the culinary equivalent of the color blind, the other because good as the food is, the “help” can hardly contain themselves from throwing it at you when what they mean to do is set it down in front of you.  Is bad vegan food any better than good dead-animal food?  You can see how this piece is going to get philosopical in the extreme.

I forget the other story idea I had, but it will come back to me later if it’s worth a crap.

Well I’ll be dipped in the colonel’s secret sauce!  I just learned something ground splattering: Chicken cannibalism isn’t the new, che-che underground cult I thought it was. 

That’s right.  It turns out chicken cannibalism has been known about and written about for years, at least since 2002, when Jay Rossier wrote in Living with Chickens that:   “…grown chickens will sometimes peck on their coopmates under certain circumstances, and the results can be bloodily disastrous in a very short time.”

Jay devotes more than one disturbing page to describing the age-old practice of chicken cannibalism.  Why those cannibal chickens don’t even wait till their meal dies to start a’dining!  Just get too close under “certain circumstances” and that chicken’s liable to take a’pecking on you (if you’re a chicken, that is).  That’s taking this whole ”living food” thing just way too far. 

When I was a small child, I had a chicken that liked to peck on me.  We named it “Pecky.”  And now I know that mean little pecker was really trying to filler-up on Me meat!  No thank you, I’ll take chickens who eat chicken over chickens who eat me any day of the year.

Of course, letting your chickens out to smoke and drink at the local cannibal chicken saloon is the quickest and surest way to stop this bloody disaster of live feeding.

“Burp–mmm–yum. Mmm.  Good,” muttered Steve.  A quick jump into the Lucky Creation restaurant had shut my bionic tooth up — for the moment.

“Yum–mmm–foood!  Mmm- Wait!  Where’s it going?  Where’d it go!  Where it go!!!???” Steve demanded.

“I swallowed it.”

“Why’d you DO that?”

“Listen, Steve.  We have to come to some kind of understanding.”

“Food! Food! I want want food!”

“Steve, Do I have your attention?”

“Foo-oood!”

“Steve, I didn’t get a bionic tooth so I can have some whiny six million dollar baby on my hands.”

“Oh.  So why did you get a six million dollar tooth, then?”

“As far as I can tell, Steve, this is a secret government experiment to find out if the Six Million Dollar Tooth program is worthwhile or not.”

“Well, it it? Is it worthwhile?”

“I have no idea, Steve. That’s what we are going to find out. You and me.”

“So what is the govenment secret and why are you part of it and what do you expect from me and does it involve something a little more exciting than this interminable dialogue???”

That’s when I shoved another fork full of Lucky Creation Chow Mein in my mouth and shut that freaken tooth up. Man, does that tooth ever sleep?

Well, no sooner had Steve and I left the dentist when we got in the first little bit of a good deal of trouble.   I was waiting to cross the street when a little voice in my head said, “JUMP!”  

I refrained from hopping into the oncoming Hummer’s pretty silver grill, but just barely.  What was going on here?   ”Who the hell just told me to jump,” I asked the contents of my head.

“That was me,” said Steve, my bionic tooth.  ”I just wanted to see how much influence I have on you.”

“Steve,” I said, “Dude, try not to kill me, okay? If I die, they probably will bury you in my mouth.”

“No way,” he said.  “I’m worth six million dollars.  They are not leaving me to rot in your mouth.”

“Listen Steve,” I said, casting about for a better argument. “Maybe you won’t be buried in my mouth, but you are there now, so we should try to get along.”

“Whatever.  Are you always this boring?  I need more action. Can’t you run out in traffic or something?  I like the taste of blood.”

“Oh Steve, this is going to be a long…” and my thoughts trailed off.  A long what?  A long lifetime, that’s what. Steve had been placed in my head for the rest of my days on earth.  My living days on earth, that is.

“JUMP!” he said, as a bus approached.  I considered returning to the dentist that moment, but decided to give it time.  Maybe we just got off on the wrong foot.

Yesterday, the dentist got to drilling and cementing my six million dollar tooth, and before I knew it she was making an announcement.

“We’ve placed a chip in your tooth…”

“What??!” I said, confused.  ”Wait, don’t you mean you removed a chip.”

“No! We added a chip,” she said again, and I blinked.

“You chipped my tooth?” I asked, incredulous.

“NO!  Can’t you listen?” she hissed.  ”I said, ‘We placed a chip in your tooth.’  A silicon chip.”

“Oh!” I said, trying to determine if this was good news.

“Yes, and now your tooth is really smart.  Smarter, faster, farther,” she said.  She was looking out the view of her big San Francisco window.  The lobby of her building looks like an Aztec tomb covered in silver and gold, and I’d always wondered why that shouldn’t make me awfully uncomfortable.

“Gee, thanks.” I said.  “This is going to cost me, isn’t it?”

“That’s not all,” the Dentist smiled.  And then I heard it, the baby cries of a newborn tooth wailing and wailing in the back of mouth.

“It talks!” She said, and her eyes glowed with a strange light over the surgeon’s mask. 

“Waaaaaaaaaa,” cried my new talking tooth.  “Me hungry!!!”

To be continued…

Tune in later for the next episode of The Bionic Tooth.

“We can rebuild it, we have the technology.” That’s what the dentist said.  What she didn’t say was how many times the tooth in question would need to be built and rebuilt, but what do you expect from a bionic tooth?  It’s going to need some upkeep.  What do you think, you just throw six mill at the tooth and it’s over?  The maintanance IS the real cost.

“It will be stronger, tougher, and chew faster than any tooth in history,” she promised.

Cut to the Bionic Man music.  My generation can attest to the power Steve Austin had over our young minds.  That’s why I have named my tooth Steve.  Any tooth willing to undergo that many procedures for his country is my kind of tooth!

For all my life I’d like to write a nice normal post about how great my writing career is going over on my straight-person Website, but it always sounds so lame and I end up back over here at Bad Apple with a twisted-up lampoon of what I had started. 

That’s probably because my writing career isn’t going all that well, people, and my best writing can’t hide that fact, even from myself.  And I’ve noticed lately that in this particular time and space and planet, life pounds on like a 24-7 shit storm, and it’s just barely possible to extract a positive number of calories while securing a home and two shoes that appear to match — socks and underware — the whole nine hundred and ninety-nine fucking yards.

One thing I know, though, is that however hellacious the toxic dump of my attitude may wreak right now, tomorrow is another day, and not JUST another day, friends, but a whole new year! And I’m confident that once my eyes pop open in the new annum, I’ll be a new girl in a new world.

So in 2009, I look forward to days of long blissful moments in between publishing my novels, weekends at the ranch in Yosemite with Salman Rushdie, a stream of chocolates, accolades, controversies and awards, and happy little posts from paradise.  May it happen to you, too!!

Things had been surprisingly quiet around here since a certain brown paper package arrived in the mail last month.  Seeing how the cannibal chickens took a major hit in their 401k of late, they seemed to be taking it far too well.  Except for the dark bags and circles around their cocks combs, they seemed about as content and at peace as any chicken who eats chicken can hope to be or should expect. 

What was the secret behind the gentle satisfaction that had crept into their clucks?  What was in that paper package, and could I have some?

One thing I’d learned about living with cannibals, even just chicken cannibals: It doesn’t pay to be direct.  They are such pathological liers, it’s almost impossible to even have a conversation with one! At least the ones here, the ones I call “mine.”  I learned a long time ago not to try to draw out a lot of personal details from these birds.  So that’s why on Tuesday, when they were out shaking down the local KFC like they do every Tuesday, I simply went into their room and looked around. 

It was the usual mess: straw, peanut shells, chicken baseball trading cards and old spent confetti poppers strewn around.    As I crossed the room, I spotted something shiny sticking out from behind the nests.  It was a book with a real nice looking chicken on the cover and the title was Extraordinary Chickens. 

What a beautiful book of truly extraordinary chickens it was!  I could easily imagine the boys pouring themselves over the full-color pages of the healthiest, cockiest chickens ever gathered on shiny white paper.  And now as I looked at the beautiful and extremely well-groomed chickens on these here pages, I realized that I had started to feel a little better and my own ruined 401k ever so slightly loosened its dagger grip around my heart.

Extraordinary Chickens.  They can’t cure chicken cannibalism, but maybe they can begin to mend the broken bank of the soul.

Has the real world afflicted your Bloggerness?  I myself have a raging case of BARF, aka Blogger Afflicted by Realworld Facts.  My blogger equilibrium has been ruined for months now, and I’m so sorry.   It really sucks to have to try to get a blogger groove going again after all my previous BARFing around earlier this fiscal year. 

Bloody hell, it’s like three steps forward three miles back, have you noticed?  And it’s all the fault of those greedy gas executives.  Okay, maybe I can’t claim a direct line between my inability to post with the price of gasoline, but it does explain my obsession with attempting to level my transportation spending by genetically manipulating old Hank over there. 

Not that I have the time to feed self and horsecraft anymore, or the money.  I for one find it exceedingly exorbitant to house body, soul and Hank/horse-hybrid in a Left Coast locale.  Why, life has become downright untenable out here Cal-lee-for-niy-aye Way.  

That’s why I plan to freeze myself and Hank-horse over there, here and now, in the prime of life (for me anyway – Hank’s another story).  Imagine the wonder when we awake un-aged, woman and centaur, in a kinder, more evolved future. What do you think? Want to make it a group date?

I’ll try to keep posting more before my date with The Big Freeze (just in time for the holidays!). Because BARF must be conquered one post at a time.