Tuesday, July 31, 2007

No Frills. Or class.

Welcome to No Frills, galactic centre of ignorance.


Cruising home, anticipating dinner, I suddenly realize I haven't the proper salad dressing in the fridge. I've passed by all the civilized grocery stores and the only applicable merchant remaining between I and the Grotto is No Frills, home of filth, spoiled food and general imbecility.

What the heck. It's just salad dressing. In a sealed bottle. How wrong can I go?

Well, let's find out, shall we?

I pull in, avoid the more menacing potholes; those possibly bottomless, and park.

Inside, I squeeze down the narrow aisles past other zombified clientele, seeking the world's saddest little dressing collection in a remote corner and grabbing a hankerin' hunk o' cheddar on the way and a steak for kicks.

Three products in hand I hit the checkout land where three cashiers are working and forty-or-so customers (no exaggeration - swear) are crammed into three massive confused lines. Were we packed any tighter we'd probably trigger a Big Bang and birth a new universe. The entire front-of-store boulevard is grid-locked. Those touring the aisles are forced to reverse and use the back-of-store avenue to access other aisles.

Gazing well ahead I verify that I'm in the express aisle, clearly marked '1-8 ITEMS ONLY'.

The grid-lock does not deter one courageous patron from insisting she use the check-out boulevard for traversing the entire width of the store, expecting forty of us to climb atop each other to allow her passage. As she eventually inches up behind me I'm forced to acknowledge her presence as the lady standing behind me in line hails my attention - not by saying 'Excuse me, sir' or by tapping me on the shoulder or by any other respectable means commonly practiced by post-Neolithic hominids, but by poking me in the side. She jabs me right in the kidney. I just about shit myself.

I turn around very slowly and give her the deadest, emotionless stare I can muster while the courageous traverser squeaks, "Excuse me."

Silent, I turn to the mighty traveller and give her a slow expressionless sideways nod and press my body against the shopping cart of another shopper in another line. She inches by me eventually and I look back at the Poking Lady for a moment.

'Lady, if you ever touch me like that again I'll punch you so hard you'll sail clear through the air just like they do in those cartoons that you watch in your roach-infested apartment while you eat your Kraft Dinner and wait for Geraldo to come on.'

Outwardly I say nothing of course. I just peel myself off my neighbor's cart and turn and watch the patrons ahead of me shuffle forward, arrange their treasures on the conveyor belt and pay their dues.

One.

At.

A.

Time.

I grow increasingly dumbfounded as freak after freak stands under the very decorative '1-8 ITEMS ONLY' sign and deposits ten, twenty or thirty items on the belt. I can't help but wonder how many stages of genetic evolution separate these lower-order bipeds from my own species and just how the hell they sleep at night.

Upon gaining a six-foot proximity to the 8-item-only checkout line I watch a man unload about twenty-eight purchases.

I calmly raised my three items, one at a time and tossed them through the air and into his pile, announcing, "Here buddy, add these to your collection." And then I marched out the door. And then I halted a speeding Honda with booming bass-boomer blasting by flashing my palm at it, hauled the teenage driver from it through the window by his nose rings and snapped his neck in two. And then I wrestled a secret decoder device from a SPECTRE agent, sucked back a martini; shaken-not-stirred, and banged a soviet spy. And then I taught President Bush how to love his fellow humans and how to speak English. And then I delivered toys to all the good boys and girls of the world.

And then I awoke from the reverie, my three items still in hand. I paid for them and exited the store - thirty minutes closer to death then I'd been upon entry.

And that's the tale of FWG's last ever visit to No Frills. So there.

FWG

Sunday, July 29, 2007

Steve-o's Flying Circus



Chaka Khan, Chaka Khan,
Chaka Chaka Khan,
Chaka Khan had sex with an oyster,
Chaka Chaka Khan...


Tofu is the life-giver of all living things.

Keep in mind, I'm not a snoozologist. I'm not a qualified medical expert in the field of snoozology.

I just did some crop dusting, going up the stairs just now. You know what crop dusting means, don't you?

She's a cheesy lover.
Something something something something.
She's like no other...


What do we need school busses for? We should just use a pneumatic tube system to suck the kids to school. The trick of course is to strap down their lunches securely. No one wants to have to clean stray lunches out of the tube network. That's the only reason it hasn't been done before.

Tempted by the fruit of your mother...

You need to water the plants in the white planters daily. They're the water suck-whole of the universe. This one - you only water it when it starts to wilt like Moses. I don’t know what that means. I guess Moses was a wilter.

Thrmp-thrmp! Thrmp! That's the sound of kids getting sucked to school.

Wilting Moses! Wilting Moses! Moses a-wilting...



Any dissertations from Chakka Kahn, Phil Collins, Phil Bailey, Moses or that guy who sang Tempted by the Fruit of Another are not endorsed by Steve-o. Or, more importantly, vice-versa.

Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Do not start a blog!

Recently a couple people asked me for advice regarding the startup of a blog. Here it is.

Don't do it!

Why not? Here's what happens when you start up a blog. Immediately the Singular All-Powerful Dark Force of the Universe - let's call him - SAPDFOTU for short, says, "Oh! Look who's started a blog! Well, well. He's gonna need a bunch of stuff to blog about. Let's help him out. Let's flood his life with freaks and misadventure. That'll give him stuff to blog about. Oh, wait. Or I could just make his books get published and make him famous. That'd give him stuff to write about. Ha! As if! No, I'll just fill his life with freaks and misadventure."

Yesterday evening went light on the freakdom but heavy on the misadventure. I arrived home having two very important calls to make. One, a phone appointment with a musician/producer/entrepreneur for whom I'm doing some press work and web copy. He's a very busy young man who's schedule I respect. I was to call him at nine for some follow-up to our recent interview.

The second call was to be to the Royal Bank lending unit to apply as cosigner for the Illicit Sweetheart's loan application. The I.S. most eagerly wishes to buy - ready for this? - a motorcycle. Yes, a motorcycle. Presumably so as to get violently killed and break my heart. So who am I to say no?

SAPDFOTU of course, sprang into action immediately, severing both my phone and internet connections. Without the internet I was unable to access either the I.S.'s loan application reference number or my interview notes, both residing on my PC at the office.

Steve-o, Designated I.T. Guy has the antidote for all this of course but he was nowhere to be found. Probably kidnapped by SAPDFOTU's gang of flying monkeys.

I have the key to my neighbor's apartment. I'm watering her plants these days. Wait now. Don't misconstrue. I'm not trimming her hedges, so to speak. I'm literally watering her plants - all 8612 of them, while she's vacationing overseas, cavorting with the young Englishman, trying to sink her talons into him and drag him screaming and flailing into holy blessed matrimony.

So I slip next door to make the calls. I reach the I.S. away from home, on his cell. He doesn't have the loan application number handy. No progress on that endeavor. I call the musician and leave a voice mail, apologizing and proposing a Thursday connection.

And thus ends the misadventure - ahem - or would if I were a luckier man.

Fast forward - this morning. I'm headed out the door to go to work and notice I've no wallet in the designated wallet pocket. So I go back up to my bedroom to retrieve it from its resting place atop the stereo unit but neither is it there. Nor is it on the desk or the night table or the chest of drawers in the hallway or on the kitchen counter nor any other conceivable horizontal surface in the apartment.

Nowhere.

And I just had the bleedin' thing in my hand the night before! I clearly remember removing the insurance slip from it in order to supply automobile information to the loans officer (before realizing that SAPDFOTU had cut the lines). And I hadn't left the premises except to use the phone next door - via a semi-private shared secure entranceway!

What the farg?

So I call work to warn I'm running late (phone now working - hurrah). I search the neighbor's apartment three times between the careful inch-by-inch picking-apart of my bedroom.

Nothing.

I call work again and book a surprise vacation day. They can be flexible that way. Bless their black little emaciated hearts.

I call Steve-o to see if he scooped it by mistake. His own wallet is thin and brown like mine.

"No way, dude."

Jeebus.

Time to go out into the world and start replacing wallet contents. I'll need some facsimile of identification I presume. I pull open a trinket drawer and fish out a recently expired drivers license. I pocket it. I don't have a current passport but I come across an expired one. Bingo. That should do nicely.

I open it to the photo page and discover it's my original passport from 1987. The image of a blonde beardless eighteen year old stud winks back at me. I sigh mightily and hurl it back into the drawer.

At the bank they hem and haw over my lack of ID.

"Was your wallet lost or stolen?" they ask.

"It was vaporized by the singular dark force of the universe," I explain. "Right about the time he cut my phone lines."

"Ah. Okay. Ahhhh - I beg your pardon?"

"I had it. And then I didn't have it. That's all I know."

I've drawn two bank tellers working in tandem. They say I must wait for my home branch to fax them my signature sample.

"No problem," I say. "I can wait all day. But I warn you, I signed that signature card twenty years ago and it's not gonna look anything like my current signature."

"You've been a customer twenty years? Oh, I'm sorry sir! We'll get you a new card immediately!"

And they spring into action. Wonder twin powers - activate.

Apparently once you've been a customer twenty years they throw legislation out the window and treat you like royalty. You or anyone claiming to be you. I should have demanded a gold brick while they were at it.

They offered me their phone. I cancelled the credit card and ordered a new one.

I then drove to the Ministry of Transportation office, home of Jason the Generous Drive Inspector Man, in order to tackle the drivers license and vehicle ownership certificate issues. I arrived at 12:20 PM, marched into the place, halted, grabbed my belly and laughed long and hard, then turned around and marched right back out again.

FWG doesn't get into lines that are 68 people long. No way. Not even if they're handing out free gold bricks.

FWG

Monday, July 23, 2007

Always close your mouth when you chew


Always close your mouth when you chew.

And when you wash your balls.

Because you never know when all that up-and-down motion will make them squirt at you.

I learned this the hard way. Took a shot of soapy sandy water right on the tongue. Gross eh? Damn golf course ball washers.

These are just two of the lessons I learned on Sunday at the annual Strat-o-Matic Hockey League Golf Tournament, Award Banquet, General Manager’s Meeting and Pool Party. The event was an educational one. Further learning acquired on this day:

- One should participate in the pre-match handshaking tradition prior to the slathering-on of sunscreen lotion – unless you’re okay with getting confused and accusatory looks and exclamations of “Ew!”

- Be aware that further handshaking is required at the end of the round. Try to keep your strokes under 150 if possible – to ensure you’ve enough strength remaining in your arm for this.

- Be wary of the surly geese, surly goose turds, the crazy hat-snatching bird and – in the vicinity of bridges - any trolls or ornery turtles.

- Try not to overly freak out upon the spying of a twisted burnt hand of an alien corpse reaching out of a pond at you. You’ll look like an idiot if it’s revealed to be an errant tree branch instead.

- Convincing the roaming beverage girl that she may serve your foursome beer because you’re all from Newfoundland where it is currently already eleven o’clock can make you feel very clever.

- Convincing the beverage girl that she may serve you beer because you’re all from Newfoundland and then everyone ordering pop - not so clever.

- Debating and massaging a rule-change proposal for two hours only to refine it to the point that it precisely mimics the rule already existing on the books. Again, not so clever.

- Gauging the speed and direction of the wind by tossing a few blades of grass in the air can be a useful scientific exercise.

- Gauging the temperature of the water in the swimming pool by studying the rigidity of your golf partner’s nipples is not a useful scientific exercise.

- Just because a fellow’s nickname is “Hoops” doesn’t mean you want him on your swim-basketball team. Nicknames can be misleading.

- When sitting poolside on a windy day, hang on to your paperwork – or use a paperweight.

- Do not laugh at a man wearing oven mitts and dancing the robot dance. He just might be packing the tastiest cheesy chicken wing dip in the GTA.

Rules to live by. Cheers,

FWG


[Editor’s note: GTA refers to the Greater Thorald Area.]

Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Email o' the week

For lack of anything intelligent or entertaining to post, I give you a glimpse of the sophisticated, high-tech, fast-paced world of a cutting-edge, market-leading company. I beg you, do not pass these trade secrets onto our competition.:

-------------------------------------------------
From: Woo, Kevin

Sent: Wednesday, July 18, 2007 11:38 AM
To: Ross, Sharon; Sarich, Zane; FWG; Cosintino, Pascale; Strong, Mathew; Dimmagio, Lynne; Nugent, Dave
Subject:


I miss the sweet sexy sound of joe’s voice. Don’t you?


Kevin Woo
Analyst
Ye Olde Information Company


-------------------------------------------------
From: Dimmagio, Lynne

Sent: Wednesday, July 18, 2007 11:44 AM
To: Woo, Kevin; Ross, Sharon; Sarich, Zane; FWG; Cosintino, Pascale; Strong, Mathew; Nugent, Dave
Cc: Gaines, Harry
Subject: RE:


Kevin…if you would like I can send Harry over to whisper in your ear if you need a man’s voice to comfort you…I know it’s not Joe but I am sure Harry can help you out!;)


Lynne Dimmagio
Ye Olde Information Company
Administrative Assistant


-------------------------------------------------
From: FWG

Sent: July 18, 2007 11:56 AM
To: Dimmagio, Lynne; Woo, Kevin; Ross, Sharon; Sarich, Zane; Cosintino, Pascale; Strong, Mathew; Nugent, Dave
Cc: Gaines, Harry
Subject: RE:


Dave has a deep voice. He might make a better surrogate Joe.


FWG
Analyst
Ye Olde Information Company



-------------------------------------------------
From: Woo, Kevin

Sent: Wednesday, July 18, 2007 3:58 PM
To: Ross, Sharon; Sarich, Zane; FWG; Cosintino, Pascale; Strong, Mathew; Dimmagio, Lynne; Nugent, Dave
Cc: Gaines, Harry
Subject: RE:


Why don’t you reply Pascale???
You fucking fry rice.

Wowowowow............


Kevin Woo
Analyst
Ye Olde Information Company

-------------------------------------------------


This is why you should always lock out your computer before leaving your desk.

FWG

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

I'm it

Apparently operating a blog compels you to certain rules around tagging. Something I haven’t acknowledged until now. And I would almost surely remain in denial except that my tagger (taggor, tagress?), Bablatrice of Flumadiddle fame, is too beautiful a human being to be refused. Thus I comply for the first, and likely the last, time.

The rules as copied and pasted from the Flumadiddle site:

- We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
- Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
- People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
- At the end of your blog post, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
- Don't forget to leave them each a comment telling them they're tagged, and to read your blog.

Got all that?


Eight things:

1. There’s much evidence suggesting that I’m a freak of nature; a biological factory defect. An invalid organism bearing random mutation not conducive to natural selection. My kind is doomed. So far I’ve not established this as fact.

2. I wear a beard to hide my double chin which is probably not fooling anyone.

3. I’m irreversibly convinced that we live in a society of almost pure illusion. I experience only brief moments of clarity into this which are sometimes euphoric and sometimes terrifying. The moments are too shocking to hold onto for long but I strive to do so. I don’t expect you to believe me. That’s fine. I’ve spent hundreds of hours gathering theories and evidence around this.

4. I absolutely vehemently hate:
- 99.99% of television content
- Telephones
- Automobiles
- Those giant centipede type bugs with the long fluttery legs
- Bigotry
- Fishermans Friend cough drops
- Black holes
- Black licorice
- Cancer
- Unintentional stupidity

5. I absolutely love:
- The I.S.
- My mom
- My best friends
- Californian and Australian red wines
- Warm fresh bread under heaps of melting butter
- The work of astronomers, cosmologists and poets
- Lacrosse
- Macroni’s ziti tagliatti
- Musician/poet/humanitarian Bruce Cockburn
- Writing

6. I work everyday at escaping the overwhelming noise of society; of the matrix, if you will! I engage in the ancient poetic process to the best of my novice ability. I’m compelled to pursue states of enlightenment and transcendence of a simple organic structure, entirely apart from that of any religious program that I’m aware of. It largely involves the defeat of duplicity and ego and a state of complete peace. I doubt very much I’ll ever achieve a pure state and assume that any significant manner of commercial publishing success will derail the endeavor.

7. I’m chronically sleep-deprived.

8. I lost my cherry to a high-school teacher while, as it turned out, her husband spied on us. Ashamed, I hid this fact for years.

9. I’m largely convinced that the only meaning or purpose of life is domination; the core instinct to flood the universe with one’s kind at the expense of all others. I assume that anything evolving into a beast of society and intelligence and attaining a solitary position in the ‘food chain’ (I use the term very loosely) will suffer a mentally ungraspable cooperation/competition paradox forcing the survival instinct be manifested as – deception. Something mankind has fatally mastered to the point of repressed self-hatred and the acting out of illusory lives. These thoughts are my own, by the way, not borrowed though almost surely unoriginal. I’m obviously not the first person to commit one’s life to the grasping of the nature of our existence. I’m now fully committed to exposing the flaws in this current set of understandings of which the above is an absurdly simplified summary. I have little doubt I will prove current theories wrong and continue to refine. So there. Do I belong in a looney bin? Yeah. You’re probably right.

I hereby tag the following eight people:

1. President George W. Bush
2. Kermit the Frog
3. Anyone with the initials JS
4. Anyone with a metal plate in his or her body or who wishes they had.
5. Anyone who’s ever been minding their own business in a bathroom stall when suddenly pitched into darkness.
6. Anyone with both a child and a grandchild of the same name.
7. John Cleese
8. Anyone who wants to be tagged.

FWG

Monday, July 16, 2007

Attention all buffoons of the world!

Particularly male buffoons.


I offer you a tip on how to be somewhat less a buffoon. It is this:


Upon entering a public bathroom, urinating and either washing your hands or not (preferably the former), do not - I say DO NOT - turn the bloody light off on your way out the door unless you first bend over - down, way way down - and peer under the stall partitions to ensure there are no shoes resting on the floor. For the presence of shoes is a clear indicator of the presence of feet - and by extension, all the other bits and pieces of a human being who just might be using the commode at that moment and who just might even be a poet of sorts and who just might be jotting in his notebook the foundations of a profound work of literature!


And he just might not be a magical elf or a coal miner or a bat or otherwise be equipped with infra vision or a mining helmet or fucking sonar!


I can't write in the dark, people!


This is the second time in just a few months this has happened.


Bloody buffoons.



FWG

Sunday, July 15, 2007

Reason # 35,743,653 why technology sucks

Apparently I've grown so prematurely old and wise that I've lost the ability to work my VCR. Wait. DVD player, I mean. I've been watching movies with the close-captioning running because I didn't know how to turn it off.

The problem with listening to English dialogue while English text is displayed is that you know what the actors will say before they say it and somehow this creates the impression that the acting is really really bad.

Either that or the acting has just been really really bad.


The movies I've survived in this manner: The Big Lebowski, Army of Darkness, Ghostbusters 2, Resevoir Dogs, The Number 23, Blood Diamond and The Big Empty. I quite enjoyed both The Big Lebowski and The Big Empty. Thought they were creative, clever and downright funny. Blood Diamond I shall not comment on at this time. And the rest sucked entirely. Apparently any film with the word Big in it has got to be good. I'd go so far as putting Lebowski just into my top ten favorite comedies. Be warned you must be prepared to tolerate wildly excessive usage of the words man and dude though.

Finally, today, determined to put an end to this nonsense I attacked the remote control, determined to shut those damn subtitles off.

The result: Two sets of subtitles. I somehow turned another set on. One is white text on a black field, the other is boldface yellow with just the video in the background - which works fine except for the scene where the school bus drives through the field of sunflowers. Both subtitles are in English and not quite in sync and they overlap each other much of the time.

So.


Before I just give up on movies altogether I think I'll try getting drunk, putting on Scarface and try speaking along with every character. Anyone want to join me?

FWG


Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Detubberization update





Cool eh? Followed Davey-boy's example. He's a train. I'm a frog.

The race is on, Train!

I wonder if the frog starts to frown if I make him go backwards?

Let's not find out.


FWG

Monday, July 09, 2007

Ice Flow

Churning seawater wears at the perimeter
Forcing its recession; surging beneath;
Pounding at its weakening underbelly.

The initial fracture spawns more and soon,
Great shards of ice are kicked aside,
Giving way to an escape hatch.

Now a geyser is born with each undulation of the sea.
An angry liquid column bursts into the air
And a cloud of spray is a slap in the face
To a low skimming skein of red breasted geese
Just minding their own business;
Cruising for a fish dinner; a respite
From their thousand mile trek
To the annual arctic summer convention.

Formation befuddled, they land, indignant
On the ice field and strut about on flat feet,
Twitching and flapping; honking and clapping
Their beaks.

Their bodies are a bold geometry
Of black and red shapes, white bordered;
Native American paintings come to life.

The small one drifts away from the others.
His small patch of ice has broken away
And drifts down a channel between greater ones.
He staggers to the raft's leading edge
And leans forward, puffing up red breast
And craning his neck.

He is the bowsprit of his own little ship.

Saturday, July 07, 2007

I am not a postie!

The weekend has began in excellent fashion.

Friday morning I fulfilled a promise, weighing in for the first time in a month or two. 296 lbs. I was shocked. I hadn't sensed my patterns had changed much. Short walks five times a week and much sensible eating punctuated by occasional breakdowns of the DQ blizzard, 7-11 burrito or bottle o' wine varieties (The three B's). The 'Five-steps-forward-one-quintuple-step-back' pattern. Yet somehow I'm down 21 lbs. And for the moment anyway, no longer a post-300-pounder. Perhaps the weekly lacrosse games have tilted the balance slightly in my favor.

Managed to split the office at 3:30 and picked up some celebratory steaks and low-calorie beer. Steve-o has vacated the grotto for a week-long cottage stint. The I.S. was thrilled at the announcement and came to visit. Spent an evening of pure bliss curled on the couch, I.S. watching the TV and me watching the I.S.

Well.

Watching, pawing, nibbling, etcetera.

This morning I took a walk to the former building managers' house to pay my rent, having finally learned that this protocol is still, for the moment, in place despite written notice that said managers had retired leaving us no representatives whatsoever of the twenty-four year-old landlord of foreign residence. Unless of course you believe the claims of Jolee-slash-Barbie, Queen of Nutberries, whom by the way, was arrested last night and carted away. Oh - and her eviction notice matures in ten days so if you were hoping to get the full experience here at the Streetsville Nut Hatchery and Petting Zoo, you may have missed your chance. Sorry Dave.

I took one of my current reads with me, realizing I'd lived here a year without exploring the Credit River and its trails that run very near to our building. The novel is The River Why. Its every word concerns water, fish, fisherman, fisheries, rivers, fishing, fishing and fishing. That all such material is inherently an unmerciful bore to me is testament to the author's cleverness and wit given he still holds my attention 80 pages in. I figured a shaded park bench with a view of the Credit might be the perfect reading spot to get me in the mood.

I came upon no park benches but did discover three anglers standing knee deep, placticing their fly-casting. Okay, that was an honest type-o just now but I shall leave it as it so happens that two of anglers were almost certainly Chinese and may very well have been placticing their fry-casting.

I parked my butt on the cement remains of some obsolete industrial hunk of geometric blonkaroo and read a couple chapters to the sound of fish-lines whipping and smacking the water. It wasn't nearly the homogenous experience you'd hope for. No Zen-like symmetry manifested.

All about at once I became aware of my leg falling asleep; the tickling of weedy vegetation against my arm; the crawling upon me of two large ants; an uncomfortably warm neck - reminding me the dangers of harsh sun on unprotected skin and the meandering gaggle of twenty-or-so geese paddling by. So I rose, stomped my foot into wakefulness and gaggled along beside the geese, homeward.

Back on the street, I had to cross to the other side as a gang approached. Its leader was clearly apparent. She pushed the stroller while the others toddled along beside her. I've learned to give these troublesome types a wide berth. I'm a KCM, you see. A Kiddie Collision Magnet. I can't go into a mall or to a fair or festival or any dense family-friendly crowd without some tiny person-like humanoid, head swiveled in entirely inappropriate direction, walking into me and falling over and crying and drawing to myself awkward or accusatory glares from the mother. I usually offer no apology or even apologetic expression. I mean, what do they think? That I purposefully go around looking for small children to knock down?

I don't by the way. As uproariously and irresistibly fun as it sounds - I don't.

And now I sit before the computer, about to publish this pointless piece of fluff, in blissful quiet but for the air-conditioner humming. I'm peckish and dreaming of burritos and blizzards but I will resist. I'm a sub-300-pounder again and damn well planning to stay that way.

Hoo haw!


[Editor's note: The term hoo haw is a celebratory utterance having nothing to do with vaginas.]

Monday, July 02, 2007

Blinding the Mind of the Beholder

The usual features
Arranged within the visage
In most ordinary manner;
The most average of composition,
Well devoid of spectacle,
Stirs responses most spectacular
In the mind of the beholder.

Eyes set apart mean distance,
Nose at the most usual latitude
And canted at the median degree,
Mouth and lips all stock dimensions,
Regular chin, standard brow,
Cheekbones found in the first spot looked.

This purest absence of character,
Attributed the loftiest characteristic
Reveals belovability inherent
In the template human form
And again in every model.

But infinitely fickle
Is the mind of the beholder;
Incrementally distracted
By each slight variation.

While a knack for multiplication
Makes for dangerous equation
When we're penned upon the shell
Of this single lonely planet.