"Taking a Trip to the Zipper Factory"

Imagine the following occurrence:

A guy is sitting alone in the dark, lying back insouciantly in a recliner. He's sort of catatonic, you know? Just sort of leaning back and staring blankly at the ceiling, grinning a bit, but he can't really help that.

Suddenly, his friend enters:

"Hey, asshole, we were supposed to meet 10 minutes ago! Now we're gonna be late for the movie! What are you doing in here?"

The guy in the recliner isn't really in a position to offer a cogent response here, so he offers what best he can manage while in the haze through which he is experiencing the world; it comes out sounding like a sort of "Hrrnk." (A tone suggesting as though it was a statement of fact. His face doesn't change at all.)

Of course, his friend has little patience for this:

"What the hell's the matter with you? Y-.."

A sudden clinking of something to the floor draws his attention to a small, plastic bottle which has fallen adjacent the recliner. Picking it up to investigate, he realizes that it is an empty bottle of Nyquil.

"What's this? Huh? What's this? You taking a trip to the Zipper Factory right now? Huh?"

"Hrrnk." is the only answer the boy can give.

His friend seizes a nearby Wallgreens bag, sitting openly on a desk across from the pitiable scene in the recliner. He pulls out a receipt, the date of which is the damning proof that the medicine was bought, and hence consumed in its entirety, sometime in the last 20 minutes.

"You're sick, you know that? You're really sick."

"Hrrnk."

"Well you just sit here and enjoy your little Nyquil trip, you son of a bitch. Thanks for wasting our time!"

As he storms from the room in a huff, his voice can be heard from down the hallway:

"Yeah, no he's not coming. No, you won't believe this, fucker downed an entire bottle of Nyquil. Tells us he'll be ready in 10 minutes, gets fucked on Nyquil instead..."

The voices of a disappointed coterie recede into the distance as the boy sits, immobilized, crying silent tears, his face still frozen in a false expression of joyfully hedonistic profligacy.


And so we have an apt application of a delightful new trope which I highly encourage you to adopt into your regular conversational repertoire: if someone is acting foolish, seems disoriented, or inebriated, pose them a rhetorical, "You taking a trip to the Zipper Factory?" You'll be glad you did.

Short Takes

Some scenes that I find amusing:

•Someone talking really fast, right before they fall down

•A man is playing with some magnets, delighting in the resistance he feels as he pushes the like poles toward each other. But then, in a momentary lapse of vigilance, he allows one of the magnets to flip around, and the powerful bond latches the two pieces down painfully on either side of his hand, WHAP. Him: "AHH! Fucking god damn magnets!" (To onlookers): Help me get them off!" (He tries, but can't pry them away.) "AAGH, GET THEM OFF GET THEM OFF GET THEM OFF GET THEM OFF!"

•When someone reacts to something you say by making a sort of face with just their mouth, without altering any other facial feature. (Especially if they seem unaware that they're doing it.)

•When one person is really reluctant to fight someone, but they sort end up getting into it anyway. They easily overpower their belligerent challenger, pretty much effortlessly. Like, with a single punch. The other guy is just hunched over, immobilized by the pain of a swiftly delivered blow to the stomach, and he's just sort of emitting a strained, high pitched groan. So, the first guy tries once again to call the thing off. "Hey man," he says. "This has gone far enough." Then the other guy looks up at him, red faced, and barely manages to eek out a strained, "You're a son of a bitch!"