Tim Torkildson's Clown Alley

Welcome to McDonald’s. Would You Like a Podcast With Those Fries? (NYT)

Whenever I go into a fast food place I start to hear voices in my head. It's both disturbing and exhilarating. I think the voices are kinda like those of Ariel from The Tempest by Shakespeare -- they don't really threaten anything, just tantalize with their ambiguity.

The last time I went into McDonald's for breakfast a voice in my head clearly kept repeating: "Existence is a great pile of afterthoughts to a perfect masterpiece." It puzzled me, yeah, but it gave great relish to my egg McMuffin.

I stopped in at a KFC on State Street for biscuits and gravy, which I always crave before a session with the Ouija Board. As I was wiping my chin I distinctly heard someone say "We suffer not for our sins but for our virtues." But the place was completely empty -- I was the only customer in there at the time, and the staff looked incapable of stringing five consecutive words together at a time.
I never hear voices anywhere else -- not at home, or at work, or in church, or even when I'm praying. I only hear voices when I'm sitting in a plastic chair and eating something high in sugars, fat, and salt -- and it's usually fried. Then my inner muse or misfiring neurons begin to produce profound and sometimes enlightening sounds that coalesce into words.
I didn't think it would happen at Kneaders, cuz they are a high class bakery that serves organic whole wheat pastries and lots of different kinds of herbal tea. But the minute I placed my order for a sprouted wheat Kringle and a glass of kefir the voices were at it, hammer and tongs:
"Twenty minutes can save you twenty percent or more."
"It's not nice to feel Mother Nature."
"Where's the veal?"
"When you can't say Schlumberger, you can't say quality."
I covered my ears with my hands and banged my head on the table, but the phrases would not go away. Then I looked up at the ceiling and saw there were several loudspeakers going full blast. Ah-hah! I was not going crazy, I was just being bombarded by commercials. I felt so relieved that I left an extra big tip when I was done with my Kringle and kefir. (Which were not all that good, to tell the truth -- I found a stalk of alfalfa in the pastry.)
I want to go get a hot dog at Wienerschnitzel over in Orem today, but I hesitate cuz I don't want to hear anything in German or by Nietzsche. He's a real buzzkill. So maybe I'll open a can of beans at home and slice some Ball Park franks into it, then nuke it in the microwave.
But come to think of it . . . my microwave is starting to act funny, like it wants to chant Longfellow's 'Hiawatha.' Maybe I'll just order a pizza, to be on the safe side . . .

Julián Castro rolls out animal welfare plan as Trump snubs endangered species (WaPo)

I went over to Crazy Henry's place last year and found him openly weeping.

"What's wrong, pal?" I asked him, concerned.

"Oh nothing" he replied tearfully, "just I miss my monkey."

Crazy Henry's pet monkey had died a while back, run over by a beer truck. But instead of showing any compassion I had to say something rough and unfeeling -- it had to burst out of me, like that thing out of the guy's chest in the movie 'Alien.'

"Don't waste any tears on that flea-bitten thing" I scoffed at him. "You never even named it -- you always just called it 'monkey.'"

"Probably" he replied. "But monkey had the right to be loved, just like any other creature."

"Bah!" I said. I was uneasy at being so callous, and that made me rougher and more unjust. "Animals don't know anything about emotions -- it's all pure instinct. Your darn monkey wouldn't know love from Cheez Whiz."

Crazy Henry went into the kitchen and made us fried Spam and buttered toast. We ate in silence in his living room. Remorse was eating at me like chiggers.

"Listen" I finally said. "You buried monkey in some kind of pet cemetery up in New Brighton, right? I'll drive you up there to put a banana on his grave or sumpthin'."

"Okay, thanks" said Crazy Henry.

"The monkey section is right over there, behind the turtle section" said Crazy Henry.

"Wait, they have whole sections for monkeys and turtles?" I asked.

"Of course. You can't go mixing up all the corpses like a mass grave on a battlefield. These creatures have their rights, just like us."

I felt another outburst coming on, but choked it off. Soon I would be starting a national movement: Compassion for Nincompoops.

With Crazy Henry as our symbol.

For now we drove aimlessly around the monkey section of the pet cemetery until Crazy Henry found the little white cross marking his pet monkey's grave. It just had a number on it -- 546. We stood in front of it in silence for a while, listening to the robins querulously predicting rain.

"Take me back home" he said abruptly. "It's time to do something to make monkeys free -- there should be no more monkeys enslaved as pets or imprisoned in zoos."

"Where did THAT come from?" I asked him in amazement.

"It's the right thing to do; don't your insides tell you that?" he said.

"My insides tell me it's time for lunch and I wanna a cheeseburger with fries" I replied, starting to feel rough and facetious again.

"Home" said Crazy Henry, walking towards the car.

Back at his place Crazy Henry dragged out the burlap sack full of gold ingots he got from his North Korean pen pal Jim Jong Un and asked me to take him to a pawnbroker so he could sell them. He got a boatload of money for 'em, then told me his plan -- he wanted to go to Thailand and set all the monkeys free from being pets and being in zoos. He would buy them or hire thugs to release them at night or something else as circumstances dictated. For purely selfish and hedonistic reasons I offered to go along with him, if he paid for everything, to help him out.

"Of course" he said enthusiastically. "I never thought of leaving you behind on this!"

We lived on the money from Crazy Henry's pen pal for six months. We stayed in a thatched bungalow with white coral walls on the shores of the Gulf of Thailand and ate shrimp fried rice, served on banana leaves, until it spurted out of our ears. Every day Crazy Henry went around to tourist spots and bought all the caged monkeys he could find, then brought them back to our bungalow and released them on the beach at sunrise. They scampered off like bats out of Hades, picking up driftwood as they ran and using it to club each other.

Crazy Henry took the bus up to Bangkok to negotiate the release of monkeys from all the public and private zoos. He came back a week later very sad and tired, and refused to tell me what happened. Then he got a gorgeous Thai girlfriend, even though he never bothered to learn a word of Thai, while I went to work as a part-time English teacher at the Mathayom 6 level just to keep from getting bored. Crazy Henry's leggy Thai girlfriend could speak some English and one night when we three were on the beach roasting clams we dug up ourselves she told him that people were getting angry with him for letting loose all those monkeys -- they were invading the fruit orchards and destroying half of the mango and papaya crop. This upset Crazy Henry so much that he threw up. The next day Crazy Henry gave her the rest of his money and we flew back to the States dead broke.

"I don't know why I let you talk me into such a wild goose chase" I told him crossly as we waited for our numbers to be called at the food shelf. "It's a good thing I took some of that money from your pen pal's gold to pay our rents in advance, or we'd both be homeless now."

"Should I buy a bowling alley with my next bag of gold from Jong the Strong?" he asked me blithely. You can't keep a good nitwit down, I guess.