MITCHING 103: SUPER-ADVANCED MITCHING

Posted on September 16, 2015 by Keef

This is part three of a five-part series. For part one, click here.

Welcome to Mitching 103: Super-Advanced Mitching.

In today’s class, we’ll build upon the Basic Mitch techniques we learned, as well as the Advanced Mitching tips and tricks we learned yesterday. Additionally, we’ll learn a few new techniques to take your Mitching to the next level.

Earlier this year, I had a child. It was wonderful. Shortly thereafter, Mitchell came to visit, so that he could spend time with his niece. I foresaw an opportunity, and so before he even arrived, I began crafting the next Mitch, using the “Notes” app on my iPhone. This was a fairly rough outline; I sculpted a few key phrases, peppered in some horrific imagery, and left myself plenty of room to incorporate real-life details. As the trip progressed, I would periodically go into my phone and edit and rewrite the Mitch, adding some things, and removing others.

At one point, Mitchell handed me his phone so I could read an article. Then he went to the bathroom.

I knew I had mere moments. I quickly texted the Note from my phone to Mitch. Then, I opened it, and pasted the Mitch-in-progress into Facebook, making a few minor adjustments; posted it; posted the first comment on my phone. When Mitch came out of the bathroom, I had the article back up and he was none the wiser… for a few minutes, anyway.

This was my masterpiece up until this point. The advanced technique of pre-writing allowed me to craft a much more fully realized Mitch. I could pre-fill the Mitch with all sorts of art that allowed for a better finished product:

KEY PHRASES: “jittery splurts of feces hurried their egress from my tender b-hole;” “my khaki shorts looked like leopardskin;” “rivulets of hot brown coursing down my calves.” These are the exact sorts of details and images that are the most difficult to produce on the fly. For example, if I had been quickly two-finger typing as Mitch banged on the bedroom door while demanding the return of his phone, there is no way that I could have come up with that stuff. Having the freedom to create these beforehand put me ahead of the game.

DETAILS FROM LIFE: The phrase “I could feel her tiny body strain against me every time she shot out a jet of doodoo” comes directly from a text message sent to me by my wife. “Cramming ruined [clothing] into a Ziploc” is something that every new parent is deeply familiar with.

The lesson here: when you can, pre-craft as much of the Mitch as possible.

NOTE: Shortly thereafter, I found that I had been Mitched myself. Mitch, while I slept, mashed my unconscious thumb onto my iPhone; my thumbprint, unawares, unlocked the phone. From there, Mitchell was able to spring his revenge:

A wonderful example of the Mitch. Quick, concise, evocative. Follows most of the main rules: 1. I had eaten a Philly Cheesesteak. I do change a lot of diapers. 2. “Keef here.” “This is DEFINITELY KEEF.” 3. The Bristol Stool Chart graphic is an inspired addition, as we had been discussing it earlier that week. It could have come earlier on the comment timeline, but its inclusion is beautiful.

I began crafting my response immediately.

Join us tomorrow, for Mitching 104: Mitching Masters Seminar.

More lectures in this series:
MITCHING 101: THE BASIC MITCH
MITCHING 102: ADVANCED MITCHING
MITCHING 103: SUPER-ADVANCED MITCHING
MITCHING 104: MITCHING MASTERS SEMINAR
MITCHING INDEPENDENT STUDY: HYPOTHETICAL MITCHERY

Posted in Mitching | Leave a comment

MITCHING 102: ADVANCED MITCHING

Posted on September 15, 2015 by Keef

This is part two of a five-part series. For part one, click here.

Hello, class. Welcome to Mitching 102: Advanced Mitching.

In this class, we’ll build on yesterday’s lessons, providing some new twists and turns.

Here’s another early example of Basic Mitching, from when we gathered in Kansas City:

NB: For some reason, his phone autocorrected “Mitchell” to “MITCHELL.” I thought it was funny, so I left it like that.

Some eagle-eyed students may have noticed a theme beginning to present itself during yesterday’s lesson, and now I would like to bring that additional step to the forefront.

Immediately after posting as your opponent, “like” and leave a comment on the post itself. I prefer to leave a comment expressing disgust and dismay, both at the act of soiling oneself and at the “choice” to describe the act in detail in a public forum. This serves three purposes: One, as a sort of “tag” to claim credit for your work. If your comment falls within a minute or two of the post itself, it acts as a blame-taker, alerting future comment viewers that you have performed this devilish stunt; Two, it adds a level of humor, as you can ramp up the chuckles by compounding the situation; and Three, it propagates the post. Any additional “likes” and comments push the post up in Facebook’s algorithm, ensuring that your masterpiece will be seen by more people.

At the end of 2014, Mitch came down to Texas and we all attended Fun Fun Fun Fest. It was a fantastic time. As he was packing up to go, and loading stuff out to the car, I offered to create a driving playlist on his Spotify.

I did so, and the playlist is awesome, because I am awesome and Mitch is awesome and the taste that we share is awesome.

But as I crafted that playlist, I also crafted something else:

A true masterwork, if I do say so myself.

This brings us to another facet of Advanced Mitching: drawing from life. Mitch did, in fact, eat all of those things while he was here; thus, the described outcome is not outside the realm of possibility. Additionally, Mitch himself had posted on Facebook about some of those very meals, providing an added level of realism to the supposed pants-shitting. (NOTE, however, the repeated declarations of identity: “Mitch here;” “This is Mitch;” “This is Mitchell telling you about it.” This is in keeping with the first rule, that any posts should be clearly and apparently not by the actual Facebook account owner.)

This brings Mitching 102 to a close. Join us tomorrow for MITCHING 103: SUPER ADVANCED MITCHING.

In keeping with the general chronological timeline, however, I present the following:

At this point, I was just waiting for Mitch to return the favor. I knew it would happen at some point, so I’d be peeping around corners whenever he was nearby, and changing my iPhone password all the time. Last year, when we were in KC, Bill tried to do it on his behalf– he was checking in on the cats, and got on my desktop to see if I was still logged into Facebook. He had this work of beauty prepared:

UH OH! I MADE AN ACCIDENT! Keef here. One minute I was sitting in thoughtful reflection and the next IT. FELT. LIKE. SOMETHING. WAS. ALIVE. INSIDE. ME. WELCOME TO BROWN TOWN! I am pouring buckets of chili cheese out the ample legs of my Manpris like so much Ebola. I’M SWIMMING IN IT! IT’S FILLED UP MY SHOES AND SOAKED MY SOCKS! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, MONTRESOR! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD! THE HORROR! THE HORROR! This is totally Keef, by the way. Totally KEEF!

Luckily, I wasn’t logged into Facebook. Preserved by my paranoia once again!

That said, note Bill’s skill in crafting this fine Mitch. I do occasionally wear Manpris, providing realism to the scenario; there are repeated declarations of identity (“Keef here;” “This is totally Keef, by the way;” “Totally KEEF!”). Plus, it’s pretty goddamn funny.

More lectures in this series:
MITCHING 101: THE BASIC MITCH
MITCHING 102: ADVANCED MITCHING
MITCHING 103: SUPER-ADVANCED MITCHING
MITCHING 104: MITCHING MASTERS SEMINAR
MITCHING INDEPENDENT STUDY: HYPOTHETICAL MITCHERY

Posted in Mitching | 1 Comment

MITCHING 101: THE BASIC MITCH

Posted on September 14, 2015 by Keef

This is part one of a five-part series. For part two, click here.

Welcome to Mitching 101, students. Today, we will learn how to play a fun game.

The game is called “Mitching,” because that is my brother’s name; he is the co-creator of this game, and it is with him that this game was created and has traditionally been played.

Here are the most basic steps of the game:

1. Shoulder-surf your opponent’s phone password.

2. When your opponent’s phone is unattended, pick it up and unlock it.

3. Open Facebook, and announce to the world (as your opponent, with too-frequent assurances that the poster is, in fact, the owner of the Facebook account) that your opponent has soiled himself.

That’s it. It’s a simple three-step process, with plenty of wiggle room for additions, gambits, and flourishes.

I have done this to my opponent, for whom the game is named, a dozen times or so. On some occasions, he has gotten mad and deleted them immediately. On others, he hasn’t noticed, and by the time he has, there are enough “likes” and comments that he has decided to leave it. More infrequently, I have been so proud of my literary prowess that I have begged him to leave them up.

Here is the first one:

Definitely an early effort, what one might call “primitive Mitching.” As the very first foray into the art form, it is only the most basic of Mitches. It lacks details, any poetic flair, or any real narrative. It was the first one, so I just tried to hammer out something embarrassing, while trying to make it absolutely clear that it wasn’t actually Mitchell posting the status update.

This is a very important portion of proper Mitching. Your goal here is for a person who knows your opponent well to read the post about the soiling, laugh, and know without a doubt that your opponent did not actually post the soiling status update.

A year later– I think there was another one in between, but it got deleted– I got him again:

This was the one that he wanted to delete, but it had so many “likes” and comments that he decided that it should stay.

So, there you have it: Basic Mitching.

Tomorrow, we’ll explore some advanced examples, some more sophisticated techniques, and provide some exercises.

More lectures in this series:.
MITCHING 101: THE BASIC MITCH
MITCHING 102: ADVANCED MITCHING
MITCHING 103: SUPER-ADVANCED MITCHING
MITCHING 104: MITCHING MASTERS SEMINAR
MITCHING INDEPENDENT STUDY: HYPOTHETICAL MITCHERY

Posted in Mitching | Leave a comment

ON FOXES AND ANESTHESIOLOGISTS

Posted on September 4, 2015 by Keef

This conversation discusses the fable of The Anesthesiologist and the King of Foxes, which is one of my Horrible Little Fables series; if you haven’t read it, you probably should before you read this. My conversation partner is Bill, who thoughtfully created the illustration for that fable.

Here we go.

Bill: The real moral of this story, I think, is that you should just shoot all animals with broken limbs.
Keef: ahahahaha! Sounds good to me.
Keef: OH FUCK IS THAT A TALKING FOX (blam!)
Bill: Let’s write an updated script for Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner about a talking fox.
Keef: ahahahha!
Keef: IS BESTIALITY EVEN LEGAL IN WISCONSIN, DEBRA?
Keef: I’M SORRY HONEY I JUST CAN’T CONDONE THIS
Bill: Since you’ve been researching foxes, I’ll leave it up to you to come up with an appropriate racial slur for them.
Keef: I WON’T HAVE MY DAUGHTER SHACKING UP WITH A GODDAMN VULPER
Bill: I like the sound of that!
Keef: IT WAS BAD ENOUGH WHEN YOU STARTED WEARING THAT FALSE TAIL TO HIGH SCHOOL HONEY
Keef: REMEMBER HOW THE BOYS ALL CALLED YOU HULPER?
Keef: I HATE TO SAY IT BUT THEY HAD A POINT
Keef: SEPARATE BUT UNEQUAL, THAT’S WHAT I’VE ALWAYS SAID
Bill: oh god, she’s a furry too?
Keef: haha! Mostly, it’s a way to slip in the gross degraded version of the slur. “Human vulper,” see.
Bill: DON’T LET THE DOGGY DOOR CATCH YOUR ASS ON THE WAY OUT
Keef: ahaha! YES!
Keef: HONEY COME GET YOUR BOYFRIEND’S SHIT OFF THE LAWN
Bill: BEFORE HE EATS IT
Keef: heehee
Keef: I HOPE YOU DON’T EXPECT ME TO SET A PLACE AT THE TABLE FOR THAT THING
Keef: OKAY HONEY I PUT RED’S PENNE ALLA VODKA IN A BOWL ON THE FLOOR I HOPE THAT’S OKAY
Bill: haha
Keef: WELL NO DEBRA I DIDN’T FUCKING KNOW THEY’RE STRICT CARNIVORES! FUCK ME FOR NOT KNOWING THAT! GODDAMMIT!
Bill: Was there any violence in Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner? Because FOX HUNT!
Keef: ahahahaha man, you’re getting dark. I guess we’ll need to get Bobcat Goldthwait to direct.
Keef: He gets our voicemail and is like “Goddamnit. You make one movie where someone bangs an animal from the Canidae genus…”
Bill: haha. I wonder where the Animal Rights people will land on it?
Keef: That all depends on whether or not the family learns to love and accept the fox by the end of the movie.
Keef: If it ends with a fox hunt, I’d suspect they wouldn’t be fans.
Bill: I figure we can turn the fox hunt scene into a homage to Predator.
Keef: Is the fox the Predator, or that weird faux-Indian fellow?
Bill: I think the Fox is Jesse Ventura. We’ll establish that he’s a Sexual Tyrannosaurus early on.
Bill: That actually just means you have itty bitty arms and a monster dong.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

THE ANESTHESIOLOGIST AND THE KING OF FOXES

Posted on September 2, 2015 by Keef

Once upon a time, back in the days when a sense of entitlement had value, a baby boy was born. Because his parents were of a certain class, and were a certain color, and had a certain amount of money, the world was wide open to this boy, and he did not need to work very hard or become very smart in order to attain his goals.

After high school, the boy decided that he wanted to become a doctor, so he went to college, where he performed acceptably, and to medical school, where he was in the bottom ten percent of his class, but graduated. And because he attendeds one of the few medical schools with a Department of Anesthesiology, he became an anesthetic specialist; and because of his name, his class, and his face, he became the Head of Anesthesiology at a large hospital on the West coast.

At that hospital, he was a bad anesthesiologist. This was back in the days when the science was still new: patients were given ether and sodium pentothal; good anesthesiologists killed about one of of every thousand patients with anesthesia alone, and this was an acceptable risk. It was in this field, against these numbers, that this doctor looked bad.

“You don’t understand,” he would say, each time, after the review board had rendered a decision, and then he would explain. “The surgeon nicked an artery, and the patient lost a lot of blood, so of course the ratio of sodium pentothal was too high!”

Or, “They didn’t tell me the patient was missing a leg, so it is understandable that I gave him too much!”

Or, “There is no way that woman only weighed ninety-five pounds! Look at her huge corpse!”

Or, “It was all Joseph’s fault!” Joseph was the pharmaceutical purchasing representative for the hospital. “Joseph kept buying the wrong things, and then those things killed the patients!”

But no one gave credence to his outlandish claims.

After several years, when he had killed enough people, he was let go from the hospital. Because it was known in the medical community that he was not very good at his job, he was unable to find any work at any other hospitals.

So the boy became an anesthesiologist at a large veterinary clinic, where animals were the only things he could accidentally murder at an inordinately high rate.

One day the King of Foxes came calling at the veterinary clinic. He lay his scepter across the front desk, and adjusted his crown. “I seem to have fallen and broken my leg rather badly,” said the Fox King. “It hurts like the very dickens, and I have been assured that you provide the best care. Fix my leg, and everyone here shall be rewarded beyond their wildest dreams. Fail to fix my leg, and my skulk of foxes shall tear you to pieces.”

“Okay,” said the receptionist, and then she called in the doctors, and made the Fox King repeat himself.

All of the doctors kept looking at the anesthesiologist. As everyone knows, a wild animal with a broken leg must be put under general anesthesia in order to undergo surgery.

“For God’s sake, don’t fuck this up,” said the Head Surgeon to the anesthesiologist.

Oh, how the anesthesiologist did sweat. As the doctors took x-rays, he ran into his office and read all about the unique biology of Vulpes Vulpes, the red fox. As the nurses shaved the Fox King’s leg, he carefully noted the Fox King’s weight to the ounce, and began running complicated equations to determine the precise dosage of the anesthesia. As the Fox King spoke with his loved ones, he carefully measured the animal’s mouth and sternum.

The doctors all scrubbed in, and the anesthesiologist put the Fox King under.

After surgery, the entire operating room waited with bated breath. The surgery had gone well. The leg was pinned and casted. The Fox King was still alive, but there are many things that an anesthesiologist can do horribly wrong that will leave a patient alive. No one wanted the King of Foxes to be a vegetable, or even slightly brain damaged.

At last, the Fox King shook his head, muttered, and opened his eyes. He looked down at his cast, and flexed his foot. The nurses scrambled to help him sit up.

“Thank you,” said the Fox King, when he had regained his faculties.

Everyone in the hospital breathed an enormous sigh of relief.

“Take them apart,” said the healed King of Foxes, and his skulk set upon the surgeons and nurses in a flurry of fangs and claws. They yanked the receptionist’s arm from its socket, and broke her neck. They burrowed into the Head Surgeon’s soft underbelly with sharp little teeth. And then they tore out the anesthesiologist’s throat, silencing a scream and leaving him gurgling to drown in his own blood.

As we all know, all foxes are liars; and the King of Foxes doubly so.

Illustration by the lovely and talented Bill Latham.

Posted in Horrible Little Fables | Tagged | 1 Comment