best tool to have on your person if you were trapped in a graham cracker head cage

 Your head has been placed in a cage made entirely of graham cracker. Your arms and legs are restrained. What tool could you use to escape. See if you can figure out the riddle before reading the answer

Answer: Before you have the graham cracker cage put on your head, leave a trail of highly addictive Doritos crumbs from the entrance of an ant colony to your open mouth several yards away. One by one, eat the ants until you reform the colony in your gullet. After the cage has been placed on your head, you can simply open your mouth and the hungry ants will crawl out and make quick work of the cage. Afterwards you can do whatever you want. 

Or like, something that makes your teeth grow out. Like a narwhal horn. Put Patented Goodstein Narwhal Sleeper DNA in your pituitary gland that you can call upon to make your tooth grow out and then gouge a hole through your graham cracker tomb.

What else? I guess you could just vomit and then that would make the graham cracker soggy and then you could thrash your head around violently until the compromised structure breaks loose. That's probably the worst option.

Other things. Other things.

Oh instead of vomiting you could just have a mouthful of water or milk when they put the cage on. Same process as before but much less gross.

One time I was scrolling and I saw this post from tumblr telling a story about a time a cousin fell in a blackberry bush and later they found a blackberry vine growing under his skin and I never bothered to look into the truth of that until now but it turns out: not true. Plants can't do that. 

And another thing I'll say is this: it doesn't sit right with me that things on Earth can be brighter and hotter than the Sun. That feels spiritually wrong. The Sun should be the limit on brightness and hotness. Anything else: devilish behavior.

Is the sun bigger than the sky?

 Yes. But it doesn't LOOK bigger than the sky.

But then you could say, well what if you just took a graham cracker and held it right up to your face and then it took up your whole field of vision or if you locked yourself in some kind of graham cracker cage that went over your head and everywhere you could possibly look was graham crackers. Does that mean graham crackers are the biggest thing you'll ever see?

I mean, just think about how that sounds. Just think about that for a moment.

Not implying that Crab would make that argument. No. He's too good for that. He would never.

No the sky is the biggest thing you'll ever see.

And the tiniest thing you'll ever see is the shift in someone's face when you unknowingly do something that makes them realize you aren't the person they thought you were.

They'll hit you with the

o__o

o__o

You won't know. But it's there.

the sky is the biggest thing you'll ever see

 the sky is the biggest thing you'll ever see

the sky is the biggest thing you'll ever see

the sky is the biggest thing you'll ever see

the sky is the biggest thing you'll ever see

the sky is the biggest thing you'll ever see

the sky is the biggest thing you'll ever see

the sky is the biggest thing you'll ever see

the sky is the biggest thing you'll ever see

the sky is the biggest thing you'll ever see

the sky is the biggest thing you'll ever see

the sky is the biggest thing that you will ever see in your whole entire life

here's a William Blake poem for you

 The Clod and The Pebble

"Love seeketh not itself to please,

Nor for itself hath any care,

But for another gives its ease,

And builds a Heaven in Hell's despair."

So sung a little Clod of Clay

Trodden with the cattle's feet,

But a Pebble of the brook

Warbled out these metres meet:

"Love seeketh only self to please,

To bind another to its delight,

Joys in another's loss of ease,

And builds a Hell in Heaven's despite."

holy BUCKETS! what a poem! what a difference in perspective!

In the first stanza the speaker is the Clod of clay who is malleable and all day cows step on his little Clod face. But guess what?! The Clod believes that love is the power to give ease to another. Love is selflessness and wanting to make life better for someone else. Isn't that nice?

Then in the last stanza we hear from the Pebble of the brook. Probably has a pretty good life. Being a Pebble. Living in a brook and all. Way better than being cow stomped 24 and 7. But the Pebble he says that love is selfish. 

Is it like the inverse of the Clod? Like the Clod experiences what it's like to give love to someone but the Pebble describes what it's like to receive that love? I don't know.

I guess you could say the poem is talking about how some people view love as selfless and some people view love as a selfish act but that feels like it doesn't give Blake enough credit. There's gotta be something else at work.

I don't understand the Pebble. The first line makes sense. Love is to make the lover happy. Oh I love how much this person is in love with me. 

"Joys in another's loss of ease,"

I guess it's like, 'oh look how desperate this person is for me. they're so miserable because they're obsessed with me."

Does that give anyone joy? That seems extremely sadistic. I guess that's the point. The Pebble doesn't have a very interesting perspective to me. And I guess the Clod is pretty boring too. 

I think most people would argue that they like to make others feel happy because that also makes them happy. It's nice in a "selfish" way to know that you gave someone joy. And I would argue that most people who act in ways that would be considered selfish in a relationship are usually more interested in the idea of someone loving them and because of that they don't really care about the other person which can be harmful but in most cases it probably doesn't extend to taking pleasure from seeing someone hurt.

The more I think about it the more I think the Clod and the Pebble are perfect for each other.

The Clod wants to be miserable. It doesn't want any joy and somehow it thinks that's going to make someone else feel love. If someone was truly torturing themselves for you, you would probably feel pretty uneasy. Only someone messed up like the Pebble would find joy in that. 

This poem is about how when you try to give love to inanimate objects like Clods and Pebbles they mess it up and aren't any good at it. They lack basic social and emotional reasoning skills. The Clod loves that cows step on it and that it's worthless as if that lack of any respect somehow proves the purity of its love. Meanwhile the Pebble is a classic bully who thinks that putting others down automatically raises itself up.

I take back what I said about William Blake and giving him credit. He's wasted our time by imagining two idiots sharing perspectives that almost no one would want to hold. 

I've got a poem called Book and Sourdough

Food only exists to create hunger

never eat food

you should starve yourself

that's what makes food taste good

said the Book

who was an old dusty book

but then a loaf of Sourdough

also had something to say

eat as much as you can all the time

the purpose of food is to make yourself explode

never stop eating food

gorge and engorge yourself forever and ever

Just as good. Just as good as William Blake. 

 

an all-time bit

 one time in college I joined a running club that no one was on but people used to be on it and this older guy Matt told me about this guy George who used to be on the team who was a compulsive liar and he said he was from a school called Oakton Township and they were the Oakton Township Cougars and they had a fight song that went

Oakton Township Cougars

we are a real school

we actually do exist

we are a real school

And Matt sang me that song one day and yesterday in the shower I thought about how I am very likely the singular keeper of the Oakton Township Cougars Fight Song. Passed down to me secondhand as an afterthought. A school that does not exist despite its protests to the contrary.

There is a school in Norther Virginia called Oakton High School and their mascot is the cougars but Virginia doesn't have townships.

Anyway it's an all time great bit.

Right up there with this time we were playing capture the flag at camp and we told this 8 year old, "your luck will run out eventually" and he replied "no it won't! it'll run UP!"

new year = repotted plants

 thanks so much to my mom!!