Round 2...The Trendlebaugh Way

Now that my worries are temporarily over, I'm feelin' brutal good. Maurice! is back for the second week of sessions and this time the nice folks from channel 7 news are here to cover him. Gee, I wonder who called? It's a joy to watch Maurice mincing around like a blessed faerie princess muling out his orders to his second assistant Floren. Floren the emu. Floren is a delightful bundle of neurotic tics. The type that talks through clenched teeth and cries while he masturbates. I bet he saves every precious little b.m. Maurice makes in a velvet lined golden box. Maurice! is so used to having his little ass kissed by his retarded entourage that he was more than a little put off by the un-fauning camera crew. They walked around him as if he didn't exist. One of the camermen I talked to, a flying squirrell named Geoff Callahan, said he always gets stuck with these "second string celebs" Geoff seems like the kinda guy that could hook you up with some killer weed if that was your thing. Maurice! is supposedly going to treat us to a dinner at a hibachi grill (a photo op if ever I saw one) and Geoff has been assigned to shoot it. I asked him if he could keep me out of frame and he said he's try and that he could always take me out in the editing room. Oh, and by the way, I HATE Hibachi grills. Todays session with Maurice! is called "What the Experts Don't Want You to Know" Oh good, so he's a conspiracy theory efficionado as well. Jesus.

Found her!!!

Penny Updates

Turn Off Your Mind Relax and Float Downstream

Well, the workshop went pretty much exactly like I thought it would. Lots of nodding and chin stroking from the boot lick brothers Brian and Troy. Courtney, the badger from accounting sat next to me in the back where we swapped doodles and notes. Maurice "inner child" Trendelbaugh sat on the edge of a table that was covered with...guess what. Books written by Maurice Trendelbaugh! Yesterday Troy tried to make everyone in the office buy a copy of "Priming the pump of your inner child" An oddly disturbing title with a picture of Maurice! in a diaper holding the keys to a ferrari in one hand and a wad of cash in the other while smoking a cigar. Stan said Troy couldn't make any of us buy the book. Troy said he could. We didn't. Whatcha gonna do about it company man? There was the predictable yammering about "paradigm shifts" and "thinking outside the box" and all the tiresome aphorisms and attendant woes that come with this sort of drivel. My opinion of Steve did go up a couple of notches when he said with a completely straight face. "My uncle thought outside the box once... He's dead now." Pure comedy gold. Maurice! was oblivious of course and was treating this repackaged '70s pop psychology like it was revolutionary. Lots of ambiguous categories and numbers. you know..."The 7 paths of the 3 modes of the 12 inferences...That kind of crap. Later on this week, we're doing something called guided imagery. Maybe I'll be able to skip out and guide myself down to PDQ Whistlestops for some nachos and brewskis. Uncle Paul likes this one Ajerbaijani lager called !KruK! Don't know if I'm brave enough.

Penny Updates

Penny Updates

Maurice!

I'm going to wax poetic here for a moment.



Usually every family or genus has, what some of us call, a unique P.O.P. ..a point of pride. The giraffe has it's long elegant neck. The lark, it's song. The bat, exotic echolocation. The duck billed platypus, an oddish snout that transmits and recieves an electrical field that locates and stuns it's prey. And us elephants, well you can surely guess what our P.O.P is. You can joke about the weather. you can joke about sex. You can even joke about a guy's mom. (a touchier subject for us mammals than for others) but don't and NEVER mess with a fella's P.O.P. Period. Which brings me to Mr. Trendelbaugh...Maurice. The tarsier and pep talk guru who is here, in his own words, to Rock Our World. So he's making the rounds meeting everyone in this super fake friendly way. Troy and Brian are embarrassing themselves fauning over this fresh little steaming turd in an ascot and double breasted maroon blazer like he's Charles freakin' Nelson fraggin' Reilly. So this twit comes up to me and with his voice forced an octave lower than natural for his species, ala George takai. He has the gall to put out his hand and say, and I quote. "So what am I supposed to shake here big guy." I froze. Gee I don't know...champ. Beats me chief. Ya got me, tiger. What I'm hearing is California-over-easy-mellow and what I'm looking at is the face of a guy who ate a whole sheet of blotter acid and watched the surgery channel for 72 hours straight. The effect...cognitive dissonance. Bigtime. He's brought an entourage of five ass-kissing sycophants who delight in every fart and burp he makes. Oh, he came in a giant tour bus with "Maurice!" written in huge cursive letters on the side. My first session starts this afternoon. I can't wait.

Oh joy of joys. The HR department has commissioned one of those pep talk gurus to do a series of workshops to boost morale. You want morale? Pay a fucking living wage, that'll boost morale . This ass kissing feel-good stuff is so insulting. Pure kindergarten kitch. The guy who's coming is supposedly some mid tier Life-Coach type who makes a killing doing the corporate circuit. A tarsier nonetheless. I don't want to sound speciest but those little dudes freak me out big time. Brian and Troy are all in a tizzy over it. They've been strutting around and bragging how they share a more recent common ancestor with this Maurice Trendelbaugh than any of us non-primates. So Fucking What. I would not want to be anywhere near thoses things on the tree of life. Stay off my branch bitch is all I'm saying. We're supposed to get together in groups of five for a more personal brainwashing experience. Brian and Troy the Homo Sap are in the same session with me but they stuck Brad with the glue crew. The marsupials. A bandicoot, a sugar glider, and two wallabies. Too bad Brad and I won't be able to share our misery. monday can never be far enough away...

Penny Updates

What Now?

When Paul and I came home this morning we could tell Penny hadn't been found. I guess we're done. For now. We've got feelers out everywhere and it's come down to a wait and see game. I have to start work tomorrow or Monday and have decided to create a separate blog for Penny updates. They'll be short and concise. Not a place for me to lose my shit. Writing about her puts a knot in my stomach. I need to get my mind on work again. Who would have thought I'd be looking forward to going back to work?

Wrapping it up for the Night

Me, Brad, and Uncle Paul are calling it quits for the night. Paul went down to PDQ Whistlestops for a couple of watered down beers and Brad and I have decided to spend the night at the office. It's a super chill place when everyone's gone home. Kinda creepy too. I dug around Troy's desk and found the key to the backroom. He has a super comfy Twin bed that I am more than happy to let brad use for the night. Brad fet a little guilty that I was too big to use it, but I don't plan on getting much sleep anyhow. Tomorrow we'll file an official missing persons report, put up some posters then go home and regroup. Brad should probably stay behind to get some work done. I'll miss the company. I hope Uncle Paul doesn't get too fucked up to walk home. He does love the brewskies! Brad's concked already so maybe I'll see if I can find Uncle P. I could use a watered down brew about now...

Here He Comes to Save the Day

I can’t believe it. Brad showed up at my place first thing this morning wearing his “It’s an ungulate thing, you wouldn’t understand” T-shirt. The first thing he said was “I’m here to help.” I could have cried. I should have. My brain is too much in action/emergency mode to cry. I went to get my “It’s an ungulate thing, you wouldn’t understand” shirt and a magic marker. I wrote on the front of Brad’s shirt: “Honorary Proboscidae” which tickled him to death. He told me I should have written it backwards so he could read it when he looked in the mirror. I said that he already knew he was an Honorary Proboscidae and that I had put it on his shirt so that everyone else would know. He liked that. Well it just so happened that once we had divided everyone into groups of three, we were left with a final group of two. I’m going with Uncle Paul’s friend Tony Fleenor and now of course Brad, which makes three. Rachel is going to stay here with all the younger kids. Good choice.My baby brother is super distressed over Penny and Rachel is the one he trusts the most. He's just old enough to know that something is going on and that whatever it is ain’t cool. No one has said anything about when we would officially give up the search. Relax. I think our group is going to canvas the city and the suburbs, we three are just about the only ones here that know the city backwards and forwards. It feels better to actually be doing something. Oh, Miss Schmancy, speaking of the other unglates at the office,mst of them, in fact all of them except Sean (a bit of an ass and a water buffalo) have asked Brad to print them up some of his shirts. Brad is thrilled I can tell, but he's holding it in because of Penny. He shouldn't. He deserves a break...

A Nice ? From a Certain Dr. Zibbs

Dearest Dr. Zibbs. You asked..."Do you get along with the tapir?" What a wonderful question at a time like this. I hadn't really drawn my thoughts together on this issue. hmmm. My email is down at the moment so I'll answer you here. If you've seen the first couple of posts, you'll note that I said some pretty nasty things about Brad. I have a real dillema emerging. He is turning out to be a really decent guy. Some of the stuff, like the "shirt incident" still puts me off but I'm just chalking that up to natural differences of opinion and taste. The problem I have is this...Brad doesn't know about my blog but may eventually find it. He's actually very internet savvy and very sensitive. Do I take it down or keep it up? Not wanting to hurt his feelings makes me want to take it down, but integrity to the blog...well...you know what I mean. As it stands, it stays. I'll probably talk to him about it soon and tell him about MrBabyElephant. Brian the gorrilla and Troy the Homo Sap however, remain firmly on my shitlist. Thanks again for the question...It's been nice to get my mind off Penny for a bit. And please thank your friend Fancy Schmancy for her concern as well.

UGGG

It’s been two days since Penny disappeared. I feel like I’m going out of my mind. Uncle Paul and Tony Fleenor from the herd south of us are organizing a huge search party that will start off in the morning. It seems strange that Penny wouldn’t have run into some elephants by now. If she had, someone would have sent a message along. As a species we’re pretty good at that sort of thing. Paul said we should start out in groups of three and then split off as we run across potentially promising paths. Paul is really pulling this thing together. Even as recent as yesterday most of the Ladies were still giving him the silent treatment over the musht thing. He could so make them eat crow right now but I think he just wants an end to the whole thing. I need to get some sleep, but I know I won’t be able to. Everyone's avoiding me like the plague at work. Even Brian. So something good's come out of this. Wait, that's not funny. Anyway, Brad is really stoked on this ungulate power kick. He has a Mormon neighbor who said she'd do our geneaology charts to see how far back we're related. I'm not so sure he understands so good. He's been on eggshells around me as well. I'll invite him out for lunch or something...

Oh No...Not Again

I came home from work today to find out that my sister Penny has been missing all day. Trevor and Sandy said they saw her at the watering hole around 10:00 am., and that was the last anyone saw of her. I had a particularly rough day at work so the last thing I wanted to do was to have to go out looking for Penny... again. Oh, I showed Stan my sketches for the Geranimal knockoff line and he admitted that they were much better than Steve's but said that he had already promised Steve the account so so I'm outta luck. I'm amazed that Stan would let politics get in the way of producing a successful garment line. Apparently Steve's recent efforts have made the Garanimals fiasco look like high art. So I gotta come home to this. Yuck. Knowing Penny she'll probably show up the second I go looking for her. Its happened before... poor kid. Penny is 10 years older than me but the thing is is that she's dumb as they come, and I don’t mean that in a cruel way at all. She just is. And the thing about these little disappearing acts of hers is that they scare the living shit out of me every time. I love Penny more than anyone else in the world and I make no bones about it. Honestly I don’t know if it’s her low intellect or her basic character that makes her so sweet , but she has gotten herself into some really dangerous situations because of it. I remember a few months back mom let Penny go for a quick stroll with baby Pete. After they had been gone way too long Trevor and I set out to go look for them. When we found them, she was lying next to a dying puma cub singing to it and trying to hold its head off the wet ground. The animal was clearly on its way out and doing the sad hyperventilating quickstep breathing thing that dying animals do. It had no idea she was there. Baby Pete was just a few yards away dancing and noodling around with his trunk thinking that Penny was singing to him . The irony was breathtaking. Another time Trevor and Rachel spotted her chatting it up with a deadly asp. They begged her to back away as quietly as she could but she was so busy with her childish questions she didn't hear them. In hindsight, The best question was: Where's the rest of your body? It seemed that she was under the impression that he was the talking disembodied trunk of an elephant. That should have really pissed the asp off but it turned out to be Donald Craft, the guy who runs the food cart downtown during lunch hour and he had somehow figured out that Penny was Carl's kid. (my dad too, obviously). If it had been anyone else, she would have had it. I'll be glad when this little episode is over...

Wait for it!

How do I explain this to him? Yesterday Brad said he had something he was going to bring me , and bring something he did! Three neon pumpkin-orange t-shirts with “It’s an ungulate thing, you wouldn’t understand” written in black capital letters on the back. One for him, one for Tracy and one for little old me. The blinding orangeness I could handle, and I didn’t even mind the sentiment, derivative as it is, but I just can’t wear clothes that have writing on them. It freaks me out. I’m a really private guy and I don’t dig waving my personal business or opinions about in public. Even brand name stuff gets me. I mean, I already had to pay for the damn thing and now you want me to go around hocking your wares for you . Do your own damn work…ya screw. My aunt Brenda got me a Tommy Hilfiger jacket last year for my birthday and I covered up the name with duct tape. She was furious. She knows me better than that. She knows I don’t go for that sort of crap. God, even thinking about it raises my bile. Ug. Well it’s pretty clear Brad is deeply proud of this dubious accomplishment. I don’t know if I’ll be able to get out of it. I was going to talk to Stan (the head art director) about Steve’s shitty designs for the Garanimal knockoff line. I can’t imagine going into his office wearing “It’s an ungulate thing, you wouldn’t understand” and preaching to him about aesthetic no-nos. I told Brad that I had a meeting with Stan later on and it would be unprofessional to wear a t-shirt in front of him. Then Brad said that maybe Stan would like it and give me a raise. Brad has this magical ability to quietly, effortlessly make you feel like a real heel when you’re trying to get out of something. And then I thought of it. I said: Brad, think about it, Stan is not an ungulate. He might take it the wrong way... That was my out. He bought it. And it's actually kinda true. I’m beginning to wonder if it was such a good idea to make nice with Brad. It was just Arby’s for Chrissake!

A Horrible Thing that Needs to Die

The only thing I hate more than singing the Happy Birthday Song is having the Happy Birthday Song sung to me. But check this out. Today is Brian's birthday and the freak completely gets off on the song. Like it was the first time that anyone in the world at any time had ever sung that song to anyone on their birthday. He stood there with his trademake shit eating grin, conducting us like were were his own freakin' personal Oompah band. He seemed very pleased, which for Brian always has a sinister edge. Is it a gorilla thing or a Brian thing? Then he went and did another thing I hate. With his uncanny aplomb for overkill he made a huge deal over cutting the cake and insisting that everybody have a piece, I hate cake. No, I despise cake. The very thought of cake makes me go into diabetic shock. So having a 450 pound gorilla shoving a piece of the stuff in my face did not put me in the best of spirits. I took it of course and and tried to give it to Brad but apparently he hates cake too. He also mentioned that we have another thing in common... that he and i are both ungulates. I wonder if he was referring to this past Monday when I was such a jerk to him. I had said to Tracy, the giraffe in the mailroom, that "us ungulates gotta stick together." At the time, I was so put off with Brad that I had forgotten tapirs are ungulates as well. I had thought he was out of earshot. But I could have been mistaken. He also said he had something for me and that he'd bring it in tomorrow. I'm curious...

WTF!!!!!

Stan gave Steve the go ahead on the Geranimal knockoff designs. Unbelievable! Is he freakin' colorblind? is it a species thing? Are they sleeping together? A crocodile and a Ecuadorian tree sloth? gughghu. I gotta have a little sit down with Stan. We get along pretty well so maybe he'll listen to me when I tell him he's LOST HIS G_DAMMED MIND! Stan is usually so methodical and deliberate with his decisions and they are generally very good. Any quibble over aesthetics we may have are over trivial points...But this? I'm gonna end here today because my brain is in high gear. Need to figure out how to go about this. If anyone has any ideas, please leave them in the comment box. That would be great.

Home Free

Fred is back! Huzzah! Goodbye mailroom. I’m so glad to be able to get back to work but I have to say I was a bit harder on Brad than I intended to be. After the incident with uncle Paul I really got to see firsthand what it’s like to be low man on the totem pole. When I bought Brad a double roast beef from Arby’s as an apology, he actually teared up a little. I told him I was sorry for being such an ass and he said he hadn’t noticed. He gets so much shit from everybody else he probably hadn’t. I just got the go ahead to start writing copy for the new line of Garanimal knockoffs. The designs are horrendous. The illustration of the elephant is downright racist. The whole line is an incongruous smudge of manga kitsch and eastern European creepiness all in the colors of a filthy toilet. Clearly one from Steve. Give a correspondence degree in art to a crocodile and this is what you get. I’ll make a few polite suggestions then shut my mouth. Steve can’t take criticism so I’ll let him hang himself. I’ve been messing around with a few design ideas myself and when Steve is kicked off the project I’ll just “happen” to have a few sketches lying around…how Machiavellian of me…he he

Hell on the Homefront

Well things seem to be getting back to normal at home this week. My uncle Paul just got through his first episode of musht so he’ll be paying for that for the next few months. He’s got a lot of apologizing to do to a lot of world class grudge holders. I mean, I love my mom and aunts to death, but this is exactly the kind of thing they live for. At any given time someone has to be in the shithouse and this time it was Paul. Musht is a real bad time for us male elephants and I can tell you I’m not looking forward to my first venture into that state. Everyone in musht goes south, behavior-wise, but I have to admit that musht aside, Paul really turned into an unbelievable dick. He was using the foulest language in the loudest voice I have ever heard. No kidding. He made a point to interrupt any conversation going on, find an opposing point, call the males pricks and the ladies the “c” word then stomp off in a fit. It was nasty. Now I’m pretty much the only elephant who will talk to him. No one else will make eye contact with him so he just skulks around sorrowfully looking for anyone to forgive him. They will eventually, but he’s gonna have to wait a real long time. One thing that really pisses me off though is the way Rachel and Brenda are pulling the same silent treatment crap as all the others. Both of them were in oestrus at the height of Paul’s musht and neither of them were bitching about his lousy attitude while he was rutting on them. That’s just so hypocritical but just like them. I think I’ll see if Paul maybe would like to go off with me for a few days just the two of us. It’ll give everyone a chance to cool down a bit.

Utterly Exhausted

I was hoping to be able to get this blog rolling but last week was hell on wheels. Fred didn't come back to work. No one knows where he is so I'm still stuck in the mail room with the complainer and the moron. Troy told me he would help me with my real work that's piled up to the ceiling by now so I said to Troy why don't you come down here and do the mail room and let me go upstairs to do the fucking job I'm paid to do? Well he got all squirrely and pulled the shit about him being Homo Sapiens and not required to do certain jobs blah blah blah. He is so full of it and he knows it too. So then I say, well how about Brian, get HIM down here so I can do my fucking job. That had about a 50% chance of working. It depended on whether it was one of those days where Troy and Brian are best buds running around playing slapass and making fun of all us non primates or if it was one of those days where we sometimes have to call the cops to keep them apart. Brian is so much bigger than Troy he could kill him with one blow, but being a gorilla, he secretly buys into the Homo S. myth. What a tool. Anyway, it was one of their "good" days so no luck getting Brian to help out. Who knows how much longer I'll have to hang with old "Stinky-Teeth" I don't know how much more of this I can take.

An Unfortunate Beginning

Was stuck in the mailroom all day with Tracy and Brad. If that wasn't enough of a buzz kill, they put us all together in the southwest corner which is tiny tiny tiny. Why did they put the three largest mammals together in the smallest space possible? I think they're trying to break us. It'll probably work. ug. I'll tell you, usually when Tracy starts in with her bitching I just want to reach up with my trunk and smack that persimmon pinched face of hers, but today watching her twist her neck around to avoid the conveyor belt and then splaying those sad knobby legs just to gain a few inches of headroom, it broke my heart a little, after all, she is a fellow ungulate. My sympathies do not go out to Brad however. I don't know what Brad is, except that he is a tapir and nobody even knows what that means. Even Dave. Its the teeth that get me. Uh, Brad? it's called Colgate or Crest or Aquafresh and the other thing is called, like, a toothbrush? Tracy is lucky in this regard. She is about as vertically removed from him as an animal could be. Oh to be a Giraffe this week. Another thing that gets me about Brad is that he has no idea what an insult it is to have been sent to this part of the mailroom. He works with the same inefficient oblivious incompetence as he does on the main floor. Man I'll be glad when Fred gets back so I can get back upstairs!