2002jul01. Mail.
Hello,
My husband has been looking everywhere for your “Good
Fortune” toothpicks, and can’t seem to find them. We are in Washington
State, and we have been to Chinatown hoping to find a store there that sells
your toothpicks, but to no avail. Can you tell us where your toothpicks
can be found to buy, we would very much appreciate it.
thank you
Kandi
Dear Kandi:
Our toothpicks can be found in every store on the earth. Look closely ... they’re small!
Dear Kandi:
We are saddened to learn of your misfortune trying to locate our toothpicks. Please find enclosed one (1) “Good Fortune” brand toothpick.
Dear Kandi:
Our toothpicks exist only in your mind.
Dear Kandi:
We have recalled our toothpicks in response to a Consumer Product Safety Division investigation. It seems that our toothpicks are failing the “choke tube test” in record numbers. We will be thickening and lengthening our toothpicks. We are committed to our box style and size, however, which means that there will be approximately 5.3 toothpicks in each package.
Dear Kandi:
Toothpicks!
Dear Kandi:
We only produced one box of toothpicks. It was sold. Our business model thus proven, we wait patiently for our IPO to produce more.
Dear Kandi:
My first car was an AMC Concord. What a piece of shit.
Dear Kandi:
We are, at the present time, not stocking these toothpicks due to a one-time balance sheet readjustment of twelve skrillion dollars. We are confident that most of our investors have shifted their portfolio into sweets, plunging necklines, and cat calendars.
Dear Kandi:
I’m feeling tough right now. Like nobody can take me on. Like I’m strong; invincible. Except my butt hurts. Everything else about me, though, is like steel. Stainless steel. I hate that Swingway can opener, it rusts around the gear, so one day you’re opening the can of pineapple chunks in light syrup and it just drops a little rust maggot in the pineapple can. It’s such a beautiful can opener, it’s like 99% perfect but then they wanted to make sure they sold many, many can openers instead of a few good ones.
Dear Kandi:
Let us construct, in our minds, an alternate futuristic universe. In this universe, people have small nanobots in their mouths that clean their teeth automatically, obviating the need for toothpicks. Here’s the twist, though: the planet’s entire population is on death row. Blows yer mind, doesn’t it? It’s all about priorities. I’m shoppin’ it around, shoppin’ it around ...
Dear Kandi:
Our toothpicks are not for sale. We are passing the savings ... onto you! Onto? Into you? Through? We are giving you the savings? We have savings, we are hoping that you implement them? Take our savings ... please!
Dear Kandi:
Toothpicks are like tiny trees, without the leaves, or the bark. Also they’re dead and quite uniform in size and texture. This is probably why toothpicks are better to put in your mouth than trees, for the most part.
Dear Kandi:
Would you be interested in a free sample of our spirally-sliced honey glazed ham? It’s from Estonia.
Dear Kandi:
I’m drunk.
[a day passes ... I sober up.]
hello,
i wrote to
your company before hoping to get any help any finding the manufacturers
of “Good Fortune,” pure white sterilized with peroxide and dried hot flat
toothpicks. If you can help me to find out how we can buy these special
toothpicks, i would appreciate it very much.
thank you again,
Kandi
Dear Kandi:
Our company puts a great trust in the consumer of our “Good Fortune” brand pure white sterilized with peroxide and dried hot flat toothpicks. That trust is this: that our toothpicks should never be used as an interdental device. We thank you, the consumer, for keeping and building that trust throughout the years. Thank you, Good Fortune brand toothpicks.
Dear Kandi:
Toothpicks serve a function in society. This is hardly true most of the time.
Dear Kandi:
“Clare County History: A Celebration of Toothpicks” will be exhibited at the Clare County Museum from Friday, August 2nd 2002 to Monday, January 29th 2007. Cider and do-nuts will be served between 12:00pm-1:00pm, and there might be a band playing or something, if they can get their shit together.
Dear Kandi:
Let me tell you what I learned in college -- it won’t take long. I had a 400-level math class – very difficult – and this was my second time taking it. I was living in a sorority house, but that’s another story. Anyway, the class was at 8am four days a week, so basically every kid that showed up without coffee (which was most of them) was a zombie. Zombies like to sit down, but sometimes the doors to the class were locked. So you’d get there ten minutes ahead of the bell, and you’d have to either stand in this darkened hallway or sit on the cement floor -- unattractive options for zombies. One day, I got to class about ten minutes early, and it was test day. I was walking up to the hall, and I noticed that most of the class was already there, trying to study by holding math books in their hand (standing) or sprawled out on the concrete (sitting). It looked pretty uncomfortable, and then I started doing a little math in my head. I moved directly toward the door and ... opened it, triggering a strange low exclamatory sound from at least half of the crowd. Why exactly didn’t 40+ people even try the door? Because something happened when the first one or two people got to class – the first person assumed the door was locked, or there were two people and they had some sort of bizarre mental showdown in which each thought the other had already tried the door. By the time the third person showed up, the pattern had been set – there’s people sitting outside, well, they must have tried the door. And the fourth person shows up, etc, etc, until you have 40 people who haven’t even tried the door. I passed both tests.
If you think about it, this explains a lot of social phenomenons.
Oh yeah: toothpicks, toothpicks, etc.
Dear Kandi:
This isn’t like the 1950’s, when both UK and US teens were coming at us in droves, screaming for our product. Times have changed, and we have changed our ways as well. We’re releasing a Classic Gift Pack of 40 of our top toothpicks, arranged by year and sub-arranged by color. In addition, there’s our Extended Classic Gift Pack Deluxe, which features a 207-page coffee table book on the history of Good Fortune Toothpick Brand toothpicks, designed by Frogdesign, with a foreword by Matt Damon (from the movie “Rounders”). You can also find the book by itself at Borders bookstore, under the title: “Good Fortune Toothpick Book Matt Damon.”
Dear Kandi:
All of our toothpicks have been sold to costume supply shops, eager to stock their shelves with United States-flag augmented toothpicks for the crush of consumers drunk with patriotric fervor. This is the year, Kandi, the year that America Tears A New One. I’m going to be hunkered down in the riverbed come July 4th. See, I was walking home from this estate sale today (I scored this nice “Figaro” cat food box – it’s always a challenge for me to sneak out a well-designed cardboard box because they’d throw it away otherwise – this time I put a bunch of one dollar cookbook pamphlets from the 1940’s in the box and fobbed off most of them, only buying two, but still keeping a tight hold on the box itself), and I noticed an access path down to the dry riverbed. So I figured what the hell, and it was wonderful. It’s in a trench twenty, twenty-five feet down so you can’t hear the traffic, can’t hear a damned thing down there, and it’s as lush as all get out. So you’re in this otherworldly place, with rat traps. Lots of rat traps. I didn’t understand what they were at first, had to get good and close to read the writing on the canister. So I was walking for about a mile or two, and then a stream cut into the riverbed and the vegetation became taller and taller and before I knew it I was in a frickin’ jungle. Well, I had the ole’ catfood box with me, and a backpack, and a short-sleeved shirt, so it really wasn’t working out. I backtracked, put on a flannel shirt, broke down the cat food box and put it in the back pack, and climbed out (in and of itself worth a paragraph) onto the side road. Shame it didn’t dump me in some rich boof’s backyard, eh? I followed the river awhile, and it finally dried out again, and just then I found another easy access path down. Again, peace and contentment. I had that fantasy again in which machines don’t exist. Nice. Came across some poetry written under a bridge:
Video Junkie
[unintelligible] out [unintelligible] network of microdots
Radiating color [that was in red] in a moving array of visual imagery
Mainlining the optic nerve
Television addicts shoot up
Tele transmission
rays
For that [red follows] Sex-Trash [red ends] rush
That goes
straight to the CNS
Like Fortran code to the CPU
Or Terminal Overload
And the poem ends there because the riverbed has risen to meet it, which is just wonderful – nature interacting with art. But “Fortran"? The poem has to be at least ten years old, maybe twenty. It reminded me of the writing on the inside of one of the buildings at the Sutro Bath ruins – someone had taken the time to document what had happened there in their own words, but it had faded away and was covered with other less-interesting writing.
Another poem under the bridge was mostly covered up by some excellent multi-colored graffito:
Last picture of Alaska
... in nano-seconds
Because this is a man-made trench, I was able to climb up a bunch of sandbags and popped up right at end of a street hosting another estate sale, looking like some kind of freakish prairie dog.
Dear Kandi:
After spending ten years in major university libraries, I have concluded that no great fiction has ever centered around the exploits of a common toothpick. This is not such a bad thing, but it does represent an untapped resource. We are exploring the ancillary market as well, and hope to secure a patent for our toothpick necklace, which helps to keep toothpicks “at the ready” instead of the typical scrambling for a toothpick dispenser that you will see in most restaurants in the Midwest. That’s another thing: toothpicks are a very regional product. We haven’t come up with exact boundaries, but our marketers have pretty much crossed off California and Nevada. You’d think with all the cowboys and cowgirls in NV, maybe, perhaps ... but no.
Dear Kandi:
I think they are available in Toronto’s Chinatown somewhere.
Dear Kandi:
I am made of wood. I am round, yet small. I have two pointed ends. I taper on the top, and on the bottom. I am jammed between the gleaming white teeth of an obese gentleman who has just finished his Whirlaway fried chicken dinner. He’s lost the Henderson account, but he doesn’t know it yet. Probably would have skipped dessert. No time for pie when your client base dips below a certain amount. Red lines on the computer, easy to spot by a supervisor or two. Then you have to go back to the management classes, they try to tweak you – up to a point. Then they cut you loose. Can’t be cut loose, then there’s no pie ever. What am I? That’s right – I am a toothpick.
