On Wall Calendars, and Why You Need Ours

Hey, look! The 2015 wall calendar is for sale here.

This is no digital mirage, it’s a physical object you can hold in your hands, with lush colors and squares you can write disgusting things in, and if you flip the pages really fast you’ll see a cartoon… if you’re very imaginative and always see a cartoon whenever you flip through the pages of anything. When I last flipped through the pages of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, I saw a toucan swooping down and gobbling up a baby. It was scary.

But re. this calendar here, anything is possible. First of all, we opted to go with 8 1/2″ by 11″ pages (i.e. it unfolds to 17″ by 11″), so you can carry it around like a secret dossier, or hang it on the wall (they will have the nice round nail holes in them, despite that characteristic being missing from this picture). Second, it has 13 months, because of the necessity when you have a printer make this kind of document of having a number of pages divisible by four. What’s with the extra month? What secrets will it hold? Only you can know, and only if you purchase it, as its contents are a SWORN SECRET that only the most precious mouths can utter, and only when the moon stands blood red over the glade of Mormoth and the whippoorwills cry a mournful “co-wah! co-wah!” as they taste the thick night air with their pointy, black tongues.

Third of all, you are always forgetting my birthday, and G.E. Moore’s too, and never again will that happen if you purchase this product, provided that you gaze at it and memorize its nooks and crannies. But do not be surprised if G.E.M. Anscombe also looks back at YOU and finds you wanting. But in a good way. You want this to happen, trust me.

Fourth of all the things, you are always late to things, and dehumanized by technology. You don’t want a newly fangled doo-hickey bleeping and blorping to tell you that Ramadan has begun. You want something physical to be your master, something with thick, silky pages that can fan you when you are too hot, and heat you when the end of 2015 comes and you throw them in the fire. Or will you treasure them? Will you cut out each picture page and frame it individually? I know I will.

Finally of all the things to be listed among the things that are, our calendar is a status symbol. It marks you as a super nerdy philosophy-loving freak, and how can that fail to impress? If you bring it to work, people will gather around your cube and mourn with you about how you all work in cubes, or if you have it on your refrigerator, all the cold food will gather behind it and try to read it from the inside. It will put your children’s artworks to shame, which will be good for their character. You can also buy several copies and staple them to the inside of a trenchcoat and walk around “flashing” people as if to say “Does anybody really know what day it is? Does anybody really care? If so, I can’t imagine why we all have days enough to cry.”

In conclusion, go buy the calendar lest we be saddled with a bunch of debt for mass producing them. Yay, Genevieve’s art! Yay, PEL fans who like to own things! Yay, months and days and 2015!

-Mark Linsenmayer

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