My Abortions

By Tony Carnevale
Arizona Daily Wildcat
May 5, 1999

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Arizona Daily Wildcat
Tony Carnevale

These columns don't spring fully-formed from the forehead of Zeus, you know. They take time and effort to craft into the finely-polished stones of literature you enjoy each week. I get ideas all the time - the hard part is finding an idea worth writing about. For a while, I collected some extra "orphan ideas" with the hope that one of them might turn into a usable column. None of them did. At least, not separately. So I've strung a bunch of them together in their naked, unrefined putrescence for your reading displeasure, thereby ensuring that I'll never be able to use them again. I think you'll find that's a good thing. Have a nice summer. - T.C.

A friend of mine had his 21st birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese's last weekend. And while that fact, in and of itself, is probably enough material for several columns, I have a greater concern right now. Some little bastard zapped me in the eye with a laser pointer.

My sister called. "I have a great idea for a coffee shop," she said. "Everything would be done naturally. There'd be a cow right there, and to froth the milk, they'd have a guy with a straw."

Digging through the used records at Bookman's, I came across one with the unwieldy title Glenn W. Turner Speaks Out: "You Can Better Your Best." Some motivational speaker type thing. It's covered in signatures preceded by lines like "Greatness is yours when you want it." It was obviously a present to a high school graduate decades ago. I wondered what kind of greatness, exactly, must have befallen the original owner if he was compelled to sell it to Bookman's for a quarter. I became terribly sad and had to buy the record. Now, looking at it again, I realize that the signatures are not from a graduate's family, but those of Glenn W. Turner himself and some people who appear to be his associates.

I told my sister I had to write an 800-word column. She suggested "799 adjectives and a noun."

Illness and mortality.

Sometimes I think I know what's going on in my friends' heads, but I always assume I'm wrong. It appears that, more often than not, I'm right.

Jealousy.

I am terrified about my body deteriorating. It would be sheer hell to go blind or deaf or something.

Why fish are great pets.