What I imagined the people around me were saying when I was...

This is the most fantastic thing I've read in a while.

This=all the guy's stuff posted here.

The Ambien Cookbook
Paul Simms
_The New Yorker_, “Shouts and Murmurs” 7/31/06

"The sleeping pill Ambien seems to unlock a primitive desire to eat in some patients, according to emerging medical case studies that describe how the drug’s users sometimes sleepwalk into their kitchens, claw through their refrigerators like animals and consume calories ranging into the thousands.” _The NY Times_

Sorpressa con Queso
7 bags Cheetos-brand cheese snacks
17 to 19 glasses tap water
5 mg. Ambien

Place Cheetos bags in cupboard.
Take Ambien, fall asleep.
Wait 2-3 hours, then sleepwalk to kitchen, tear cupboard doors off hinges in search of Cheetos.
Find Cheetos, eat contents of all 7 bags.
Fall back asleep on kitchen floor.
When awakened by early-morning sunlight, get up and say, “What the—?”
Wipe orange Cheetos dust from fingers, face, and hair.
Drink 17 to 19 glasses of tap water from the kitchen tap.
Return to bed.

Icebox Melange
Entire contents of refrigerator
1 Diet Snapple
5 mg. Ambien

Take Ambien, fall asleep.
Wait 2-3 hours, then sleepwalk to kitchen.
Devour everything in refrigerator (including all fancy mustards and jellies, iffy takeout leftovers, and plastic dial from thermostat).
Belch loud enough to wake wife or girlfriend. When she enters kitchen, bellow, “Can’t you see I’m working here?”
Fall asleep on kitchen floor.
After 4-5 more hours, wake up on subway, fully dressed from the waist up, drinking a Diet Snapple.

Licorice Surprise
1 black extension cord
1 wall outlet
5 mg. Ambien

Plug extension cord into wall socket near bed.
Plug other end of extension cord into clock radio on nightstand.
Take Ambien, fall asleep.
Sleep 3-4 hours.
Roll out of bed, wake up on floor.
See extension cord, think, What a big delicious licorice rope that is!
Chew on essentially flavorless cord until you get to the metallic center, where the surprise is.

Tummy Cake
5 eggs
2 cups flour
1 cup Crisco
½ cup milk
5 mg. Ambien

Take Ambien, fall asleep.
Wake up in kitchen, mixing eggs, flour, Crisco, and milk in—for some reason, a mop bucket.
Let batter settle.
Go to living room, turn on TV, search channels for a show that explains the second part of how to make a cake.
Curse the designer of you TV remote for making a device that has the buttons on the wrong side—all facing the floor, where you can’t see them.
Remember batter.
Retrieve bucket from kitchen, drink entire contents in 3-5 gulps.
Remember that the batter was supposed to be cooked.
Draw hot bath, immerse yourself in it, knead bloated stomach in effor to facilitate cooking process.
When mouth fills with now cooled bathwater, wake up and return to bed.
Lie back on pillow, watch cartoon bluebirds orbiting your head.
Grab one cartoon bluebird in midair and devour it raw, feathers and all.
Wake up at 7 a.m., with wife or girlfriend demanding to know what the F happened in the kitchen last night.
While trying to answer, burp up a single cartoon-bluebird feather. Cover mouth guiltily, even though she seems not to have noticed the feather.
When she slams the bedroom door and goes to work, pick cartoon-bluebird feather out of the air and swallow it.
Fall asleep for 36 more hours, interrupted only be periodic—and somehow epic-seeming—trips to the bathroom.

Nhi Ho Trang Phu
1 package of beef jerky
1 quart mango-flavored Gatorade
1 saucepan potable water
Salt to taste
5 mg. Ambien

Lay out beef jerky and Gatorade on nightstand, in anticipation of somnambulistic snack attack.
Take Ambien, fall asleep.
After 2-3 hours, awaken half-submerged in a rice paddy in the jungle lowlands just north of the Mekong Delta.
Back “in country.” You know you’re going to Heaven, ’cause you’ve spent your time in Hell. But here you are once again—back in the Shit.
Stay still, stay quiet—as quiet as a mouse. You are asleep, but all of your senses are alert.
Spot V.C. sapper no more than one foot away, playing possum in spider hole beneath duvet-cover camouflage.
Silently stalk stationary V.C.’ two can play this game, no?
When you gain tactical advantage, corner V.C. and remove ear(s).
Go to kitchen, put ear(s) into pot of water on stove, tie on souvenir lobster bib from Cape Cod trip last summer, sit down at kitchen table with knife in on hand and fork in the other, saying “Fee, fi, fo, fum” over and over—until water boils, or you wake up in police custody despite now earless wife or girlfriend’s protestations of how your innocence as delivered to police detective in emergency room, where she now is (whichever comes first).

The "this is not a game" one reads rather like George Saunders.

Tummy Cake made me lol

"Curse the designer of you TV remote for making a device that has the buttons on the wrong side—all facing the floor, where you can’t see them."

My favorite shout and or murmur is Four Short Crushes

Well, well, well.

Just look at you, walking into this dreary bar and lighting the place up like the noonday sun at midnight, twirling a lock of your long auburn hair pensively as you search the room—for what?

For a soul mate, perhaps?

(I know, I know—I hate that phrase, too. Maybe that will end up being one of those things we both hate.) Maybe a few weeks from now, lying in your bed on a Sunday morning, I’ll ask you, “What’s your least favorite word or phrase?,” and you’ll say, “ ‘Soul mate,’ ” and I’ll laugh till you say, “What? Tell me!,” and I’ll tell you how I knew that from the moment I first laid eyes on you, and then we’ll have sex again.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. You haven’t even noticed me yet. That’s O.K. I can wait.

Maybe when your gaze settles on me, and we lock eyes in that mutual Hitchcockian tunnel-vision effect where the camera is, like, pushing in at the same time it zooms out, or however they do that, you’ll come sit down next to me and we’ll—

Now you’ve spotted the friends you came to meet. They look like good friends.

Maybe they’ll be my friends, too.

Our friends.

Your eyes just came to life like emeralds lit by subterranean torches, and as you move across the room toward your friends you shriek at them, “What the fuck is up, yo?,” in a voice so piercing that the entire bar goes silent for a moment, and I have to check my glasses to make sure the lenses didn’t crack. You continue to bellow your every utterance (including the lines “Jägermeister is the bomb, dawg!” and “Just ’cause I’m a white girl don’t mean I don’t got some serious junk in the trunk!” and “Random! Random! Random!”), and the bartender leans in and whispers something to his bar back, and they look at you and laugh.

You must be a regular here.

(Duration of crush: seventeen seconds.)

So silly does my impatience now seem, stuck as I am in the Starbucks line during the morning rush. But that was before I noticed you in line ahead of me.

And now that I’ve seen you—with your gossamer hair still damp from the shower, with your well-moisturized ankles strapped and buckled into high heels that make you wobble and sway like a young colt just finding her stride, with your scent of lilacs and Dial, and, most of all, with your infectious sense of calmness and serenity, which makes me wish that the world itself would stop spinning, so that gravity would cease and we two could float into the sky and kiss in the clouds, giddy with love and vertigo—

Now you’re at the register, and the dreaded moment when we part without meeting rushes toward me like a slow-motion car crash in a dream.

You’ve been at the register without saying anything for, like, fifteen seconds now, still scanning the menu board with those almond-shaped eyes that would make Nefertiti herself weep with envy.

Seriously, you’ve been to a Starbucks before, right? I mean, it seems like there are a lot of choices, but most people find a drink they like and stick with it. And order it quickly.

But maybe I’ve caught you on a day when you’ve decided to make a fresh start. To make a fresh start, to try a new drink, to walk a different way to work, to finally dump that boyfriend who doesn’t appreciate you.

O.K., even if that were the case you could have picked out your new drink while you were waiting in line, right? I mean, come on.

Well, you’ve won me back, my future Mrs. Me—by turning to me and mouthing, “Sorry,” after you finally noticed me tapping my foot, looking at my watch, and exhaling loudly. Sensitivity like that can be neither learned nor taught, and it’s a rare thing indeed. The rarest of all possible—

Jesus Christ, you’ve ordered your drink and paid; do I really have to stand here for another forty-five seconds while you repack your purse, the contents of which you’ve spilled out on the counter like you’re setting up a fucking yard sale or something?

That’s right, the bills go in the billfold, the coins go in the little coin purse, the billfold and the coin purse go back in the pocketbook—no, in a side pocket of the pocketbook, which seems to have a clasp whose design incorporates some proprietary technology that you haven’t yet mastered.

I think I hate you now.

(Duration of crush: five minutes.)

yea "four short crushes" was fantastic. a good shouts & murmurs can be the best thing about the new yorker

paul simms is the best

Couple of funny Easter eggs in this week's Shouts & Murmurs disguised as bit.ly links.

I kinda liked this week's Simon Rich piece:
http://www.newyorker.com/humor/2012/01/09/120109sh_shouts_rich

Simon Rich is Frank Rich's son??