February | 2012 | Elena Mauli Shapiro

Monthly Archives: February 2012

SweetDeath®

Posted on February 21, 2012 | 1 comment

YOU GUYS.

So, I was out having dinner with the husband. I noticed a new color among the sweeteners on offer. Amongst the usual pink, blue, and yellow, there was green. I pulled out the green to get a better look at it. It was called SweetLeaf®. It was made from some rainforest plant called Stevia and promised it was all-natural. I thought this was an interesting product, since maybe it didn’t have the icky aftertaste of your usual artificial sweetener. So, I tore the packet open and poured a tiny amount into the palm of my hand to taste. It was perfectly white and ground very fine, more like something you would snort than eat. I licked the powder off my palm.

I don’t remember exactly what followed. Everything went blurry, the world was obliterated, and my husband sat across the table shaking with laughter at my pain. SweetLeaf® was so disgusting that I am pretty sure this is what Hate tastes like. If you put that taste in the water supply, a nationwide bloody civil war would break out within a day over nothing in particular. Seriously. It was so disgusting that it was sublime. I pretty sure that, amidst the excruciating white pain that blinded my entire soul, I saw the face of God.

I will never be the same. I will never untaste this product. Life itself has been destroyed for me. Now it’s just Nazis raping babies to death with the severed penises of slaughtered endangered panda bears. To a Justin Bieber soundtrack. I mean it, all is dead to me now. I’m pretty sure I can never love again.

If Cthulhu ate a bowl full of anuses and then pooped them into your mouth, it would taste just like that. With a hint of anise. Anise anus, that’s what this stuff should be called. It made me reconsider my stance towards the very idea of rainforest. Raze the whole fucking thing, is what I say now.

After my husband stopped laughing at me, I actually talked him into having a little taste of the stuff. He licked some off his hand, and shrugged. “I dunno,” he said, “it just tastes really sweet.”

So, be advised: depending on what your palate is like, SweetLeaf® tastes either like (a) sweetener or (b) Nazi panda baby rape. Roll the dice and let me know how it works out.

I WILL RAPE YOUR MOUTH. Maybe.

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Tagged anise, anus, artificial sweetener, Cthulhu, death, nazi baby panda rape, suffering, sweetleaf

The end of the beginning

Posted on February 14, 2012 | 3 comments

“Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

Thank you, Mr Churchill. I think I just passed the mid-point of In the Red. Phew. I am at another stopping point where restructuring will have to take place. This is pretty much the most inefficient way to write a book EVER. It took me like a year for find a narrative voice–and there’s still no solid structure! Basically I write in fragments until I get to a pausing place, then shuffle everything around to make it as cohesive as possible. Then I keep generating the fragments until the whole thing is balanced all wrong and I can’t go any further, and I have to pause and reshuffle again before I can continue. I feel like Sisyphus. Hold me.

These days I spend a lot of time considering alternate careers. Hey, speaking of alternate careers and Winston Churchill, I think I’m going to chuck this whole novelist thing and open a nautically-themed gay bar called The Traditions of the Royal Navy. Who’s with me? (Although apparently that quote was not actually uttered by Mr Churchill. Drat.)

In better news, I just went over the proofs of my story “Commuting” for Zyzzyva’s Spring issue. It looks coooooooooool! It will be out in April! Brace yourself for the awesome. There will be a sexy, sexy release party at Tosca’s in San Francisco if you feel like coming by. I’ll also have a couple of appearances around the March release of the paperback for 13 rue Thérèse. Check out my events page if you’d like to swing by for any and all of these gatherings… I’m sure you could get a bit of rum at Tosca’s! You’re on your own for sodomy and the lash though, unless of course I get to open my bar.