The Real Fobcast

The evening is dim and growing dimmer. In a semi-lit room ringed about with cast-off shoes and emptied Pringles cans, we surround the pool of tiled graphemes wrestling (metaphorically) with the language and each other (not metaphorically).

The players: Tolkien Boy (who is male and dismisses the concept that ladies come first), Melyngoch (who is beating up TB for being male), editorgirl (who is too focused on the project at hand to beat TB up), and Ginsberg (who is watching the best minds of his generation running naked hysterical and Melyn wants to know where the naked people are).

As the play progresses, a definite power structure is developed, with Tolkien Boy being at the top of the metaphoric pyramid. Being somewhat bored with his brahmin status, he charitably offers the word ail to Melyngoch, only to reclaim it later for the more desperate-sounding flail. To supplement the steady stream of sharpened sarcasm he recieved from his co-players, he hummed showtunes under his breath, which seemed good-natured but actually was a ploy to demoralize his competitors.

And demoralize he did. This being the case, after two rounds of the much-hyped word game, our foursome degenerated into a general state of resolved depression worthy of a Hemingway narrator--a good one too, I'd pick Jake Barnes from The Sun Also Rises, personally--and turned to baking, actually.

"Foursome", also, should be taken literally.

At least as literally as you can take anything that happens at Fob. But the baking produced a "divine" cake (quoth Ginsberg), which was devoured in the company of editorgirl's sister, who for the evening was an X-box widow. Moving on, the night developed into Freud's couch. . . existentialism, damnation, and Diet Coke with Lime. Which I don't understand, but TB does, so we'll hand the fobcast over to him (and in the process apparently switch to present tense).

The party really got started when editorgirl (sic) broke out the trial-size antidepressants. Melyngoch argued that Ambien is the only true and living antidepressant, and the evening deterioriated, inevitably, into an antidepressant fight, with each participant attempting to prove that they were, in fact, the most against depression. Tolkien Boy threatened a filibuster on "happy songs," but were voted down when editorgirl (sic) decided that, a la Ginsberg, we all needed to write poems about being virgins. Melyngoch pondered on how one could poeticize about a cat that wasn't there. Much practicing of backward miaous ensued, the reasoning being that possessed cats must be as close to uncattedness as a poem was likely to achieve.

At this point, "Ginsberg"--whose namesake, incidently, was decidedly NOT a virgin of any sort--felt as if whatever was it is that has just been written here makes no sense whatsoever. "Backward miaous?" . . . cats? Honestly. . .

And some of us are, in fact, aware of the pharmeceutical uses of Ambien.