flying monkeys

'monkey' is in style right now.
i know of at least 4 bloggers whose tags include the word monkey (and there are so many more bloggers i don't know), there are those ads on tv where the dude says he works with a buncha monkeys, plus some other ads that randomly involve monkeys, there's a tv show called 'love monkey' (or something similar), and i just feel like i've been seeing and hearing the word more and more often in the past 3months.
i'm not against it- i use it as a term of endearment. but it's kinda weird to notice a word like monkey being in style because it doesn't seem like it could work mainstream, which is part of why i liked it...

by the way, i'm thrilled to have made this post happen because the wireless router broke yesterday, so i'm illegally logged on to somebody else's network and access'll be patchy until the new equipment arrives (by friday).
other tales: the other day i mentioned an incident in which a house got flooded due to the bathing of barbies in a sink, and the gremlin pointed out that she, not i, was the perpetrator of said incident. this weekend, while dionne (barbie-bathing co-culprit, and daughter of the unfortunately flooded homeowners) and my mom were liming by us, the story came up, so i can now provide the fact-checked account, and fill in some other previously-unrecognised gaps in these tales i been telling.
it was, apparently, dionne+zed, not myself. i guess i thought it was me because i often bathed barbies in the dacostas' sinks...
now the 1st thing to know is that growing up in st.lucien gardens (25 townhomes with plenty yard and carpark for playing, bike-riding, killing each other, etc.) we youths had multiple parents- the clements, dacostas and ourselves were one big family, doors were always open to all 6children, and all 6parents would discipline their 2 plus any others present.
so dionne and the gremlin were bathing barbies in the sink and managed to flood dionne's parents' house. aunty pat, of course, beat dionne and the gremlin soundly (and deservedly) and play broke up for the day. except that when zed came home crying and fred asked what happened, she said, "aunty pat beat me!"
and then when fred asked why, zed said she didn't know.
so fred logically stated that aunty pat is not crazy and had to have a reason, so he would trust that the licks were deserved. i can safely say that the gremlin should count herself lucky she didn't get a 2nd cutass, for casting aspersions on aunty pat's licks...
(obviously, this conversation came about because we were complaining about the lack of discipline in american children these days.)
i also found out while mom was here that the house we were visiting when i almost drowned the gremlin with the "walk on water like jesus" talk was the new(er) home of the family we bought our home in st.lucien gardens from.
another thing my mom filled in for me was connected to my irrational fear of falling down stairs with a glass in hand, slicing my throat open, and dying. she was telling me that the other day aunty joan slipped on her tiled floor with a glass in her hand and cut herself so badly as she fell that she needed about 10stitches in her hand (fingers+palm, so it's unusable). i found myself telling my mom about my irrational fear, only to have her tell me that she's always been afraid of falling down stairs too. she hadn't thought about the glass-thing until aunty joan's accident, but it seems odd that we've both had this fear for so long without knowing it was shared- or does everybody who lives with stairs have this secret fear? the house in st.lucien gardens where we still live (as well as our house in dc) has stairs...

the last story for today (and maybe until friday, depending on wireless access) is something i wanted to post about when i completed the most recent flash fiction friday, then lo and behold, jj's fff entry brought it up, kinda, before i did. so this is the concise version:
i feel like a bad reader+writer because i haven't read any updike (among others). i've been meaning to get to him as soon as opportunity presents itself, but i'm more hesitant now that i've finally read kerouac- actually, it started with flannery o'connor.
i'll read anything/anyone once. i even finished hitler's mein kampf, which is, without doubt, the worst piece of horseshit to ever defile a page (horridly written, needlessly wordy, pointless, completely lacking in imagination or inspiration, trying too hard to impress with too little and thus puffed up, useless pounds of verbiage without wordsmithing, zero flow, etc.) and unworthy of linkage.
so when somebody lent me a flannery o'connor collection and i remembered hearing it was good, i read it. and was disappointed.
then i finally got around to reading kerouac, who i and those who knew me thought i'd like, and was bored and disappointed. i think if i'd read kerouac when i was 18 i might've appreciated him more, but alas, we'll never know anything other than the fact that i have no desire to read any more kerouac that the 3 i've read.
the flannery o'connor disappointment i could take because it was minor, and once it's not as bad as mein kampf i don't ever consider reading a complete waste. but the kerouac letdown was rough. it just never occurred to me that i wouldn't enjoy him. so now i'm all scared to read any author i've built up in my mind, for fear of a kerouac-esque betrayal.
so i'm taking votes, in an effort to avoid literary disappointment: which updike do i start with? rabbit?

walk good.