Monday, March 08, 2004

CD: Liam Lynch, "Fake Songs"

Today at work I had to replace the Ketchup Dispenser. The ketchup (or catsup) comes in plastic bags that hold about three gallons apiece. Well, one of the bags ripped. Ketchup started flowing like a newly discovered oil well. The K.D. wouldn't take the bag, and I couldn't just throw away three gallons of ketchup, so I found a large bucket and drained it all into that. Now the big problem: how to put all this ketchup from a bucket into small ketchup bottles. A funnel? The bucket was too big to pour into a small funnel, so I got a second, smaller bucket to dip into the first, then dumped that into the funnel. That's when I realized that ketchup doesn't pour, it plops. Stuff that plops can't go through a funnel, it only clogs the funnel. That's when I grabbed a spoon to put pressure on the top of the clog to get it to go down into the bottle. It took forever. Then someone suggested finding a plastic bag, putting a whole lot of ketchup into it, then cutting a small hole in the bottom corner of the bag to let a high pressure stream of ketchup fall out of the hole. A good idea indeed. The high pressure stream, however, is difficult to control. By the end of the debacle, I had a broken Ketchup Dispenser, two ketchup-drenched kitchen tables, a cowpie of ketchup on the floor, giant ketchup stains on my shirt, pants and shoes, ten bottles of ketchup overflowing on all sides, a large stirring spoon covered in ketchup all up the handle, a small pitcher coated in ketchup on the inside and out, a second giant, practically useless Bucket O'Ketchup, and a garbage can filled with ketchup-catching napkins that made it look like the World's Most Destructive Period. Thus endeth The Ketchup Story.

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