Brand New Umlaut
Recording paintings on medium quality audio tape is the latest plan that’s been hatched from the overshot and underdrummed riddances of my mind. I came up with the idea at about 4:30 this afternoon. By 5:15 I had abandoned it altogether as unworkable, deceiving to people who just wanted a quality mix tape of drum solos, and absolutely unworthy of admittance to the Louvre.
So there I was, standing around in front of the post office at 5:15 in the evening, without a single new idea to mail off to my readers. Yeah, so, recording paintings on cassette tape was a new idea, but it was a crappy new idea. I’d lose all of my readership if I actually mailed that thought out to them.
But I couldn’t just pass up my daily duties. What was I to do?
I thought about new ways to crimp your best friend’s style through capacitors and empty bottles of gin, but I was worried that the Alcoholism Council would come after me for that one.
I thought about ways to improve your buoyancy by wearing very floaty shoes, but I just knew that I’d get sued by the first person to nearly drown because they didn’t read the directions right.
I thought about promoting internships in the fuse replacement career sector, but when I tested the idea out on a homeless guy that was sleeping in the alley next to the post office, all I heard were boos and loudly misfiring neurons deep within his skull.
I thought about creating a new type of clay that would spontaneously melt every May 13th in even numbered years. I even went as far as to file a patent, just in case it all worked out. But then I realized that it would be impossible to manufacture that clay without having it smell of broiling octopus, and nobody wants to use octopus-scented clay for anything.
So I decided to just re-invent the umlaut. I added a few subtle extensions and some minor tweaks. I hope that the new one is more streamlined and more easily accepted by today’s fast-paced youth. Those kids and their weird typography fads, you never know which diacritical marks will be all the rage. But I’m pretty confident that my brand new umlaut will be one of them.