Cellular technology, I'm sure all are aware, has begun to come factory stocked with paid ads and media perks like Goo Goo Doll mp3's, top-watched youtube videos, and Run-for-the-border Chalupa ringtones. The latest bell/whistle combo came on my new phone- a vignette game starring a fatefully cursed penguin. Closely simulating reality (aside from the personified penguin), the game is not much a matter of winning or losing, so much as a matter of how far the player can last without becoming deceased. As you prevail and persist, as in life, you're hardly aware you're lasting, and rarely celebratory of this fact. You're just bored or frustrated until you morally slip up, and then Bam! -semi truck to the gut. In the particular vignette I began on, I was Penguin at a human party. Penguin, being a penguin, I soon found, inexplicably makes one feel caged and a touch aggressive. At the party, talking to human girls in mock leather skirts, one wing curled around my red keg cup, it eased my mind to have the letter opener I'd found by the dog dish, tucked in a back flap of skin in case some meathead decided to knee me in the face (my face is about knee level). It wasn't a meathead party though, it was a two room apartment art school kind of suaree. In the back of my human mind, I noted to factor the penguin induced aggression into my decision making process.
So here I was, painting this portable door-jam-ish frame the color of a marshmallow. It encapsulates a canvas caked in the same colored paint. I'm clearly aggressively arty, and I've got a persistent marble eye on this black-hair-black-glasses combo girl making the rounds across the room.
Wrapped in this CGI environ taking place on my 2"x2.5" screen, my faintly conscious human mind is aware of the sterile smell of a waiting room. Perhaps I'm getting my teeth cleaned on this day. I also half-note that this game is pointless. Is there some way to accrue points? Maybe I need to talk to that black on black girl. Maybe take her home?
Penguin me has run out of the marshmallow colored paint, and there is still a bit of blackened wood showing through on my frame. That is not my vision. I need white on white here. Searching the room for another tube of my shade, I find the walls to be the exact color of my piece, and what luck! a sign that says "watch your shoulders-- just painted". So do I go and stir my brush in a glistening corner? Surely I would advance to the next level if I complete my piece, my objective! Perhaps even double points when my aggressive artiness attracts chatty Ms. black on black on pale. But perhaps it's a trick. My dark brush residue in circular trails around the freshly painted wall may be just the thing to make my beak the rightful resting place for every knee in the party. With my little marble eyes fixed on the new paint job, brush poised, I was just about to call off the idea in the name of my general affable penguin nature and return to the party, putting aside my painting, and maybe finding out a little bit about the host, who, how embarrassing! I knew nothing about!
Well, that was when the voices got loud. I turned to see a few partygoers glaring me down, saying that I wouldn't dare do what they thought I was about to do, and hey, I'm a penguin, and what was I doing at their art party anyway? And I heard someone mutter some derogatory term like black-black-white, which, hey! Chatty Ms. BBW herself loudly objected to, calling the guy Jason, and telling him he could take his fucking pendant back, and didn't he claim to be different?! She guessed not! And she grabbed me by the stubby wing, and snatched me toward the door. Paintbrush in beak, I grasped my nearly finished painting, and was pulled footlessly into the hallway. Down the stairwell we twirled, each floor opening into an art student loft, where we'd never pause- and surely never think of pouring a bit of orange juice. No, we'd honestly just pass on through, because there was an obvious moral code at work here, and if we could pour some of their orange juice just because the building had been poorly laid out so that we must pass through their living areas to reach the ground floor, well then they might as well be able to pour some of our orange juice when passing through our living spaces, and we were not ready to be sharing our orange juice with just anybody climbing the stairs through our apartments.
We'd passed through at least 15 rooms this way. One with a marshmallow colored fur spread on the hardwood before the bed, that reminded me of the much more mortal perils of home back at the pole. But there was also a nostalgic wringing-towel feeling in my heaving bibbed breast. I hoped my family were safe. It was comforting to see the polar bear skin all spread out and lifeless on the floor. Perhaps this human fad had caught on to an even greater degree in my absence from the pole, and the penguin tribes were free of predators completely! --All of the bears stylishly making a nice cuddly corner of an otherwise unwelcoming hardwood floor.
Boy! how many stories was this art student high-rise? Our pace was slackening, and my tongue tasted of cotton. If Ms. Black on Black on Pale tried to passionately make out with me at this instant, I would surely not receive any points, because my breath was dry and sour. With every floor, we passed a refrigerator, no doubt stocked with cool refreshments. Our morals remained steadfast in spite.
Yet apartments I was accustomed to did not allow others to do to us as we would now wish to do to them! Our architects were clearly upright enough beings of evolution to draw walls between the stairwell and the living areas. Walls with doors and not one, but two locks on each door, preventing parched passersby to simply help themselves to the contents of our fridges. Perhaps this high climbing art community was more commune than apartment complex. Perhaps the students here swapped living areas once weekly, so that they did not grow too comfortable or boringly accustomed to their polar rug, or their japanese tea lamps, or the poster of Bob Marley over the pachouli stick incense holder. Of course! This was art school, and the students were to be subjected to as many design aesthetics as possible, so that they may graduate with a well rounded appreciation for a broad range of styles and tastes! And so the refrigerators (which now, come to think of it, have all been standard issue coleman 3/4 size frigidairs) are kept stocked thanks to tuition and housing money! The parents, concerned for their newly independent offsprings' consumption of a well balanced diet, have all consented contractually to allot a certain portion of the tuition to go toward keeping the 3/4 sized refrigerators healthily stocked. Healthy mind, healthy body!
And of course, what parent is so oblivious that they can't assume that their child will be in an experimental phase, finally unfettered by parental curfews and mild physical or at least verbal abuse? --So delusional, they haven't accepted that off at art school, their child will be using a good portion of this standard issue orange juice as party-time mixer and chaser?! Because who, besides those parched from descending countless stairwells, really drinks straight orange or cranberry without diluting it with some Kettle One, Goose, or in a pinch, some Popoff? Really, nobody-- and every parent, in their heart of hearts, knows that. And that's fine with their heart of hearts! It's better than their beloved one tromping down to Telegraph Avenue and sitting with the charcoal smudged punx and their rottweiler outside of the Zebra headshop, sparing for change to take in jingling pocketfuls to people's park to buy a glistening nug of hash, laced with god knows who's methadone, or worse! No, any truly nurturing parent would surely rather gladly in-part fund the social lubrication necessary for their children to gather in numbers, chat, and fumble blindly their peers.
And wasn't this such an instance in which the brief resident of current passing living area with the Warhol soup cans over the patchwork Urban Outfitters duvet was not as much at liberty to say who should be qualified to drink just a bit of orange or cran juice from their 3/4 size frigidair, as their parents, who have already contractually obliged the contents of this frigidair to be consumed in the universal name of social acclimation? This was such an instance, and by contract, we (I, penguin, and Ms. BBW) were social guests, purveyors of small talk, and aggressive artiness, which is the intended result of a paid education in art, is it not?!
In the fridgidair of this Warhol/Urban themed room, we found, surprisingly, not the standard issue Orange and Cran, which must have been brought upstairs to the suaree we had recently been attendants of, but instead, a bit of V8, and Mott's Apple flavored juice. I couldn't well think of a mixed drink made with Apple, but was sure there was one, lest this room be in violation of the parental consent and waiver forms. We took turns swigging the Mott's. It was a melted glacier of thirst quenching proportion! As the juice dribbled down my natural white bib, my black marble eyes rested on the cleavage of this art school chick, whose valiance had rescued me from certain disaster up in the crowded loft earlier. She was on her knees, making her only about 6 inches taller than myself. A bit of apple flavored juice dribbled down her chest, past the neckline on which her pale skin revealed an even paler patch of skin in the shape of a bear of some sort where a charm or pendant appeared to have once hung. I wished we were up in the polar bear carpeted room, where I would lay her down in the beast's thick and creamy hair, and work my down and blubber down her warm china skin, from her graceful neckline, between her familiar mounds of nippled fat, and into the warm V of her soul. With my stramlined and careful beak, I would trace the soft lines of her joints, and circle unhurriedly yet firmly back to her fine strip of down, my bib on the polar fur, and wings blanketing her unclad thighs. Her soft whimpers mixing in with the Otis Redbone lazily wafting from the bedside coca-cola clock/radio, and the occasional clackity-crumble of the standard sheer built-in stainless steel ice-cube maker on the nearby frigidaire.
"Jason!" she screamed. I felt a knee connect with my beak, shattering it into no less than 37 pieces. I saw shoes. Converse all-stars. -Felt cold asphalt grating against my bare skin where once a bibbed matt of down held the liquids in. My lungs contracted without instruction. A vaguely familiar fluoride, or maybe lysol lemony-fresh smell returned lustlessly to my nostrils, my entirety adrift toward a 2"x2.5" patch of light.
