Weekly Asheville Disclaimer Page: 11/05/08

Asheville, Monday — A local man’s silent, sweaty-browed romantic pursuit in a grocery store — consisting of “aisle scheduling” 14 consecutive crossings of paths from the dairy section to frozen foods — resulted in a successful love match on Tuesday, according to cashiers.

The gentleman caller recently recalled the series of events for baggers.

“After I saw her one recent Tuesday evening, I showed up at the grocery store seven consecutive Tuesdays in hopes of seeing my love again,” said Daryl, who refused to provide his name or fingerprints. “She was playing hard-to-get, but I knew she would come back around.”

Daryl made the most of his broken dates by tracking several other unsuspecting women who, according to Daryl, had “so much relationship baggage” that they freaked out at the first sign of lifelong happiness and gave Daryl the shake in the maze of frozen foods.

When his one true love, an unknown happily married mother of three, finally returned on yet another Tuesday, Daryl tested the waters by honking his horn at her as she passed before his car in the parking lot. When she walked faster and continued staring straight ahead, Daryl knew her heart was thawing.

Daryl kick-started the relationship by indiscreetly trying to smell his soul mate’s armpit as she reached for the fat-free yogurt. Her coyness melted away when Daryl alternated tactics as he followed her through the rest of the store, grunting under his breath repeatedly on even-numbered aisles and whistling tuneless songs on odd-numbered aisles. The romance began to blossom as Daryl stalked her to the shelf of feminine hygiene products and stood shoulder-to-shoulder with her as he pretended to choose between products. When she made her selection, Daryl primed the pump by turning his laser- like gaze upon her and nodding “Yes.”

When she suddenly turned away and lovingly fled toward the infant formula, onlookers in the grocery store could not suppress their approving smiles as Daryl wheeled his cart down the dollar-item aisle so he could U-turn directly into the object of his obsessions.

The woman eventually abandoned all worldly attachments, a half-full grocery cart and her hungry family waiting at home to live in the trailer of her pursuer once his eerie staring and shadowing finally wore down her feigned defenses. The happy couple has since co-signed on a frequent-shopper discount card and look forward to raising a family of their own once Daryl steals a dog from a local kennel.

Leicester, Monday — Rising prices and a sinking economy were the formula for an innovative recent breakthrough made in the organic dairy industry, and it was made right here in the mountains.

When WNC native Brian Daniels saw Asheville ranked ninth in Mall-walker Weekly’s annual best-of list, he decided to return from San Francisco with his PhD in relative anthropology and start an organic milk farm.

“My grandparents were dairy farmers, so I always had it in me,” says Daniels, a dead ringer for deceased musician Jerry Garcia. (The resemblance is mostly in the hands; in almost every other way, Daniels resembles a nine-fingered Jean-Claude Van Damme.)

After donating most of his belongings to a small tribe in the South American rainforest (“I sent mostly anthropology books in case they wanted to learn about themselves,”), Daniels moved onto the same farmland his grandparents once worked, eradicated all modern, non-organic methods and implements and started his business.

“When I told people I produced organic milk for raw vegans, I got the strangest looks,” says Daniels. “But people understood once I explained that raw vegans will lap away at milk from any organically fed cow that has spilled a little while nursing its young in a calm, comfortable, private environment.”

After years of hiding in hay and collecting frothy milk drops from calves’ whiskers, Daniels realized his profit margin was shrinking due to the struggling economy.

That’s when he began tugging (gently and organically) on the udders, and the results were “fantastic,” with “cups of milk” produced with just a few minutes’ work.

But milk’s rising price in the supermarket was a reflection of the rising price in products used to produce the milk: grain, tractor fuel and the bovine holistic healers that Daniels hired to replace antibiotics.

“That’s when it hit me,” Daniels says, pounding his four-digit-fist into his palm, “The next logical step in organic dairy farming—the Udder-Tugger 3000, a mechanical device that pulls on the udders for me organically by employing soothing, metal, mechanized hands to gently squeeze and milk a dozen cows simultaneously.”

Daniels continues to refine his organic techniques.

“I saw the need for some kind of supplement or hormone to grow the cows real fast, real big, so they produce more milk, practically when they’re still calves,” said the micro-farmer. “Also, you just can’t bulk up eating grass. And throwing dead cow away is just a waste. So I say, let’s feed these cows organic steak until they’re strong enough to blast milk out of their udders with help from only a mechanical milking station and an electro-anal bovine milk stimulator.”

While most animal-rights activists and organic dieters might balk at the use of such devices, even arguing that the machines take the milk out of the “organic” category, Daniels points out that the makeshift electro-anal bovine milk stimulator and the Udder-Tugger 3000 are both fueled by solar energy.

“Another issue with organic milk production is that these cows get sick quite often, so we started giving them antibiotics to keep them healthy,” Daniels said. “I give them cocktails with industrial canine, equine and porcine antibiotics, just tinkering.”

Daniels, an expert and in the farming practices of early cultures, believes these new measures represent the next logical step in the history of organic milk production.

“Next, I hope to cover the feed-grain with some kind of bug-killing substance, helping to even the price of organic milk with its less-organic cousin, milk,” said Daniels.

Third-party candidate quits race

Elmhurst, Tuesday — Long-dead Socialist Party candidate Eugene Debs bowed out gracefully Tuesday night, his rotting corpse vowing to “keep up the fight” against copper bosses and Pinkertons alike.

Debs’ sixth and least successful run for president surprised both political pundits and the 14 U.S. communists remaining alive.

Up against the heavy-handed police tactics of the disembodied spirit of J. Edgar Hoover, Debs marshaled on with his bizarre, archaic message, despite being little more then an insect-infested skeleton in a rotting, utilitarian brown suit. His last-ditch effort at the office (not counting the time he was literally buried in a ditch by strike-busting thugs in Detroit) had moments of fiery, albeit dated, rhetoric.

“You call the Obama tax plan sharing the wealth?” Debs mocked, in reference to the words of longtime frenemy John McCain, “We’ll be sharing the wealth when the life’s blood of the proletariat isn’t used to grease the machinery of these 47 states we call united.”

Following his concession speech, Eugene Debs straightened his musty bowtie, and with all the dignity he could muster, shambled off to the cold comfort of the grave, after a quick stop at the Waffle House.