THIS IS THE second Mr. Wrong column inside Hmm Weekly, which is, furthermore, inside of The Brick House Coöperative. I totally didn’t have to spell it with the umlaut-thing, but it’s fun, right? Yöu cän püt thösë thïngs ön äll the vöwëls! Umlaut! I looked up the word “umlaut” on the thing, and there’s no umlauts on the word “umlaut,” hiyo, that’s kinda like the “hey why don’t they make the whole airplane outta black box” joke, but for umlaut, which is Germanic, and technically is a diaeresis, which I learned from Wiktionary (which I can never remember how to spell because I want it to be “Wikitionary,” you know?) signifies that the second vowel forms a separate syllable, but again, diaeresis really looks like it could use an umlaut, eh? Diäeresis!
OK, so before I had that run of diaeresis, I wanted to reiterate that The Brick House is a fully functioning cooperative, which means all the pieces-parts get along and they all want the same thing, which is to have this place to put their stuff, and it’s all owned by itself, the parts, that make up the whole deal, The Brick House, and there’s no ads, which still makes me uncomfortable, but the Idea is that people who like to read things will enjoy all the different publications, from different parts of the world, and, seriously, from all over, places like New York and California and Texas and Taiwan and Nigeria and Baltimore, even, and the way the cooperative cooperates is that it wants more cooperation, so that’ll mean more stuff to read, all in one spot, and so there’s VALUE for the dough you put up to support this thing, and if you wanna have a publication, let us know, seriously, that’s how it’s supposed to work, it’s crazy.
I mighta said this already in the last Mr. Wrong column, but I don’t care, because this is a Column, and one of the things about a column is that it happens on the regular, which in this case will be once a week, and when you are Columning on a consistent basis you gotta repeat some stuff, because not everybody was here last week, OK? Anyway, like I probably said last week, I’ve had this column carried in some publications that’ve burned down, and some that have fallen down, and some that got shut down, but I have a good feeling about this The Brick House, because of all the things to read in here that are super Intelligent and Important, which means I can fucking relax! I’m surrounded by Quality and Deep Thought and Important Ideas, and if I write a column about some crap I think is important, to me, I don’t have to worry about what anybody thinks about my opinions, because all these other writers are bangin’ out Stimulating and Provocative prose and I can focus on the things that are important to me! There’s no pressure!
For instance, I am unhappy with how the fun-size candy bars are getting so small. I mean, they’re supposed to be small, on purpose, so you can get an assortment of candy bar and not be opening a whole bar of candy expecting yourself to only eat a small part of bar, right? I mean, If I get a candy bar that’s full-sized, I wanna eat the whole candy! I don’t wanna break off a “fun-size” piece and then wrap it up and save it for later, I want it all! It’s candy! That’s why there’s these fun-sized deals, so you will delude yourself into eating a teeny candy bar and then be saying to yourself, “OK, that was one candy helping of bar, I’m done,” and you won’t want to unwrap another candy bar, see? Discipline! Except they (and you know who They are) are making these mini-bars too mini! At this point they have ones that are so fucking small they can’t even fit the whole name of the stupid fucking candy bar on the wrapper! I’m not kidding, have you seen these things? I got a HERSHEY bar and all they can fit on the label is like: HERSH, and don’t gimme that bullshit about how it’s Graphic Design or whatever, this is a straight-up mind game, they’re like “If we put the name of the candy bar the regular way on these tiny candies, the print will be so miniature that people will realize how itty-bitty these things are getting, but if we print it so big that the whole name doesn’t fit, it will create Size Confusion and we can make the bars more mini!” They are making Less-Than-Fun Size! No Fun!
What is the point? It’s like, there’s a limit to how small of a portion a thing should be, you know? There aren’t sugar packets that are smaller than a regular sugar packet, are there? They’re like what, a teaspoon? There’s a Social Contract, a Norm, if you will, it’s like, here’s a Portion of sugar, it’s a small portion, so that you don’t have to dump out some sugar from one of those sugar-pourers into your coffee and pour too much, you can precisely Control your sugars. Same thing with the candy bar! You make ’em too small and you’re pushing me back to Full-Size and it’s too much, but I can’t just eat part of a whole regular candy bar! I gotta have a whole bar! It’s not healthy! I might have to start eating fruit or something!
See? You’re not gonna find a Topic like this in one of the other parts of The Brick House coöperative, and if you do, you might not be happy. Not here, though, this is the Mr. Wrong column! Tiny candy bars are bad! Come here for the fucking exclamation points! I’m managing expectations!