Sometimes when I close my eyes, I see the face of this horrifying bull creature from the Elmer’s Glue bottles. He sits there smirking in his little orange triangle, so pleased with himself that he managed to become the mascot for a glue company even though bulls have nothing to do with glue. The most grotesque thing about him is that he’s white like the glue itself, which implies that he’s some sort of glue monster.

Since I’m a scholar, I looked up Elmer the Bull on Wikipedia and became even more repulsed by what I read. It turns out he’s actually married to that cow from Borden’s dairy products, which I didn’t even know was legal. This is a perfect illustration of why you shouldn’t look everything up on Wikipedia. Now the mental image I see of this Satanic glue creature also involves the Borden dairy cow and it’s all I can do not to vomit. Congratulations, Elmer, I am now lactose intolerant.

Here is a wonderful image that’s imprinted on the interior handle of the trunk in my friend Carly’s car:

Like every good trunk’s handle, this one tells a story. It is the universal story of a little man running out from your trunk. What are you doing in my trunk, little man? Why are you popping out just when I’m trying to close the door? Damnit, little man, come back here with my wallet!

I am impressed by this man’s spectacular leap from the trunk. If you’ve ever attempted to jump out of a trunk, you know that it’s hard to make it two or three feet, since there’s hardly any room to gather yourself. But this little man appears to have cleared a good six feet in one spectacular bound, landing in perfect running form. Needless to say, there’s no catching him now. In the end, nobody really knows why he was in the trunk, nor how he managed to hide in there for so long, but something tells me that the next time my friend goes grocery shopping, this enigmatic little man will be back to his old antics, forever making that celebrated escape from the trunk, forever inspiring countless grocery shoppers in one of the greatest stories in all of literature.

I have decided to phase twist ties out of my life, because they’re a true annoyance. If a tie is tightly twisted, it’s impossible to tell which way you’re suppose to twist, and if you choose the wrong direction it only makes your situation twistier. This always nettles my goat, but in reality I’m not upset with the twist ties—I’m mad at myself for twisting the wrong way. The only thing to do now is own up to my error and begin twisting back the direction I came. Once in a great while, however, twisting this opposite way is also wrong. There are never any witnesses around when this happens, mostly because nobody has ever sat down and watched me retrieve a piece of fruit, but I can promise you that this has happened to me about a dozen times over the course of my life, and I’m tired of being silent about it. In these instances my anger transforms into an abstract feeling of confusion and loneliness. I retwist the tie in my original direction, which has somehow become correct, but by now I’m not even hungry for plums or nectarines or whatever bullshit fruit I have in my little plastic bag. I’m too emotionally spent to even weep, which I know will come later. The best thing to do in the meantime is eat some clementines, which come in cute little wooden crates as if they were shipped especially to me from the tropics.