
The "Can't Concentrate" Manatee's article on Kafka's diaries for Bookforum was due in 8 hours. She stared at her computer thinking about pasta. She had a small, vague urge to eat pasta. She cooked pasta and brought it to the computer. She had a medium-small urge to put agave nectar on her pasta. She put agave nectar on her pasta. She ate her pasta. She accidentally headbutted her bowl and pasta fell on the keyboard. She absently thought either "fuck," or "shit," or something, she honestly wasn't sure. "Feel like I actually thought something like '[obscenity]' or '[bad word],'" she thought. "I meant to think 'fuck' probably but my brain didn't produce enough power." The "Can't Concentrate" Manatee remembered her plan from a few hours ago to remove all idiomatic language from her article on Kafka's diaries for Bookforum. She clicked "find and replace" and typed "sort of" and it went to an instance of "sort of." She headbutted pieces of pasta that were on top of certain buttons she wanted to press and accidentally headbutted a baby blue-whale's body. The baby blue-whale looked at The "Can't Concentrate" Manatee with an intense expression of excruciating pain. The baby blue-whale floated upside down for about twenty feet and hit a turtle and the turtle and the baby blue-whale floated upside-down out-of-view. The "Can't Concentrate" Manatee felt afraid and went to MySpace. A piece of pasta was on a button she wanted to press and she headbutted the pasta and the keyboard broke in half and floated upside-down very quickly, because it was made of something that usually floats. The "Can't Concentrate" Manatee went to a deli and bought a ginger kombucha and opened it and it fizzed toward her face. The "Can't Concentrate" Manatee laughed. A bluefin tuna looked at The "Can't Concentrate" Manatee with a bored expression. The "Can't Concentrate" Manatee swam aimlessly at .08 mph for more than an hour without thinking anything and began to hear a noise from somewhere. She focused on the noise and it became a little louder. "Is it a cruise ship," she thought. "Or something." The "Can't Concentrate" Manatee realized the noise was her own brain thinking an immense variety of obscenities including "fuckkkkkk," "shitttttt," "aarrrrghhh" on a subconscious level, resulting in a low-level "white noise"-effect on a conscious level. "What am I trying to think about," thought The "Can't Concentrate" Manatee.
33 Comments:
gross, tao.
she only used a little agave nectar
f.m.y.
thats good
I like to think she finished that article, and that she was happy with it. The ending tells me that maybe that doesn't matter though, which I think is even better.
Either way, I'm a fan of this '"Can't Concentrate" Manatee'. Did you hear about Dennis the Wayward Manatee?
sea cows are sad too?
i have a large-medium love for this story.
tao lin,
if two people ate each other at exactly the same speed, who would finish first?
I enjoyed reading this.
i thought Manatee was a bug, and you were doing some clever Metamorphosis thing with the Kafka article, then i googled "Manatee" and realized it was like a seal or walrus. i think i was thinking "mantis" while i read "manatee." i liked the story.
Manateen
one day the can't concentrate manatee woke up and had turned into a bug.
i want to send a friend request to the "can't concentrate" manatee
who is dennis the wayward manatee, he sounds good
sbh, i don't think 'the "can't concentrate" manatee' is sad, she just can't concentrate, i think
cory, i don't know
i like the comic of it on your blog
it would be funny if someone breeded tiny manatees with the appearance of wearing bright collared shirts for people to have in their 50-gallon fish tanks
thank you very much.
tao lin,
have you ever heard the song hialeah by matthew friedberger? it is funny and reminds me of your last comment.
one of the lines...
"he had his own private manatee tank."
i can't concentrate on this
~~~~~@~~@~~~~@~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~@~~~~@
~~~@~~~~~~~~~@~~~~
i haven't cory
my mom said "It is a really beautiful manatee, the eyes are beautiful and innocent,
looks a little bit like dudu."
dudu is a toy poodle
Tao Lin,
Like the "Can't Concentrate" Manatee, I too am easily distracted when I need to get a project done. Will there be more "Can't Concentrate" Manatee stories in the future?
I just started reading through the other comments. How many toy poodles does your mom currently own?
wasssup rockers
reading this comment thread made me want to go back to what i was working on
what were you working on?
i was working on a model of a house getting blown apart by a hurricane, and then i got distracted like the heroine in tao's story. fuck the internet
hi gillian, there probably won't be
currently my mom has one toy poodle
there have been two other toy poodles in the past
Pretty ordinary.
addendum: i still keep reading your stuff though, even buying it, but this: come on, Tao.
Remember the "rule."
S
Here's a news story about Dennis the Wayward Manatee. Basically, he swam way up north from his natural habitat, and then the people of Dennis, Massachussets, tried to bring him down to SeaWorld in Florida, but he died of cold stress on the way.
http://www.newser.com/story/39773/lost-manatee-dies-on-trip-home.html
i read the first line, and the last line
and the think i thought afterwards was this:
i stopped talking to myself for so long its like i cant remember who i am anymore.
thank you blogsloth for supporting my career even if you don't enjoy my writing to some degree, that would be like me supporting 'dante' or someone
dennis sounds funny, it said they had the rugs pulled out from under them when dennis died
That is a pretty whimsical thing to say about a sea mammal dying. It leads me to imagine that Dennis was very charming.
this story puts you in my top 8 tao
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