Back during the 3 1/2 years* I attended high school the number of guys who asked me out could be counted on the fingers of one hand and leave two fingers to spare. Why? Did I have a bunch of ticks stuck to my face? Did I vomit tapeworm segments? Not usually. I was a nice looking young woman. I was relatively popular by my senior year, I wore OK clothes...I bathed...girls uglier and bitchier than me were going out...?
The answer? Apparently I was not 'cool' enough.
Ah, but once I graduated and it no longer became a matter of qualifying as a peer trophy, all of a sudden the same guys who never gave me a glance were hitting on me like a pack of boner chihuahuas.
Boner chihuahuas who all went home alone.
HA.
Yes, once free of the gulag-I mean, once I'd graduated-I discovered an amazing fact: Adult mammals want to have sex with other adult mammals. Even if the other mammals had never been in Varsity Cheer.
Huh.
All that worry and torment and yecch I'd put into fearing that I'd never be 'worthy', that I was damaged goods or I wasn't pretty enough or cool enough; whoosh, out the window. Gone. Everyone into the pool! Even girl nerds!
Here's what I mean. Try this fun** experiment:
1. Disable the 'Safe Search' function on your browser. Completely. 'Safe Search is OFF'.
Search the phrase 'fat women'.
Uh huh.
Now 'fat men'.
'Sex Clubs [your town]'. 'Adult Only Nudist [your town]'. 'Old man'. 'Old woman'.
WOW! LOOKIT ALL THE PORN UNDER THESE CATEGORIES!
2. Flick through the galleries of some of those sites you find (quickly.)
Those aren't hot models. Oh Lordy me, those are NOT hot models.
Despite which they seem to be -ahem- enjoying themselves, don't they?
And there sure are a lot of them, huh? Having lots of fun in their less-than-perfect bodies with their less-than-perfect partners.
Gracious! Might 'youthful perfection' not really matter quite as much as we've been lead to believe?
Could it be that, unlike health, cleanliness and approximate bilateral symmetry, it might not even HAVE to matter?
DID MY TELEVISION LIE TO ME?
Pretty much.
Need more proof?
George.
Remember George???*** Raving batshit nuts, ugly, chain smoking, teeth falling out, smells like a butthole, Jesus somebody Febreeze the furniture after George?
Him.
He was married to a woman who looked like Alley Oop.
Since last we visited George, he traded up.
George is now banging an educated, attractive woman with a job and a house.
Believe me when I tell you that youthful perfection was never a factor for George, let alone health, cleanliness or approximate bilateral symmetry.
Still.
George is getting PLAY.
The option of emulating Barbie and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on plastic surgery exists, true. But what does that get you in the end?
Besides the Vicodin? Exactly what everyone else gets.
Pamela Anderson has been the victim of repeated domestic assault by a junkie.
Paris Hilton is on her third suicide attempt (and everyone's seen what she lets come in her mouth. Bet she's done George.)
Kenny Rogers is still a drunk and a wife beater, and now he looks like he thawed out inside a plastic bag, too.
Youthful perfection, no matter how much you buy, makes no difference.
Money makes no difference.
Celebrity makes no difference.
Furthermore, if you expect people to be so obsessed with YOUR looks that you find it necessary go in every three years to have your face peeled off your skull and then reattached with fucking SCREWS AND WIRE, then you exponentially increase the chances that you will get...what?
Someone so obsessed with your looks that they REQUIRE you to go in every three years and have your face peeled off your skull and reattached with fucking SCREWS AND WIRE.
And you know what the punchline is? YOU GET OLD ANYWAY.
Unless you are my father-in-law.
________________________________
*I graduated early. Doubled up on those credits and lit out of there like my ass was on fire. I didn't even attend graduation.
**Providing you define fun the same way I do. Is this too much information?
***Oh go ahead. Get re-acquainted with George:
Paul. Because 'Paul' is a nice name.: more fun with george
Friday, October 19, 2007
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Black Lynx Caution the Five Angry Diatom!
q: What is a dugong?
The dugong is a member of a small group of aquatic mammals known as 'Sirenia'. Other members include the manatee (which is not nearly as fun a word to say as 'dugong' so we'll just pretend that it doesn't exist) and the (now extinct) Stellars' Sea Cow.
...yes, it's two you-know-what-atees. it's my blog and i'm calling them dugongs.
...which was in fact not terribly cow-like; it was more like a big hippo-seal type thing.
Although it would be really cool if it HAD been like an aquatic cow and it gave milk and said 'moo'? and like maybe it had these huge horns that stuck out REALLY FAR and they would stampede and they'd get in cool fights and stuff? and divers could go down and have rodeos and the seaweed would be like tumbleweeds?
Yeah.
Centuries ago, the first Dugong sightings were reported in the logbooks of Spanish sailors who (
upon seeing the bald, grey, flippered animals swimming around chewing on seaweed and burping) immediately mistook them for a race of seagoing human women.
This may say more about Spanish femininity than we care to know.
q: Where do dugongs come from?
a: Duh; the ocean.
q: Oh Jesus fine. What is the life cycle of the dugong?
a: Ah. Well then. That's an interesting question.
When a mommy dugong and a daddy dugong love one another very much, they want to share that love with a baby dugong. So the Mommy dugong lies on her back, and the daddy dugong orders one from Ikea.
But ordering from Ikea can take time, and sometimes the quality sucks, so the smart mommy and daddy dugong usually go to the KING OF THE DUGONGS and ask him for one.
...click; it gets bigger. waaaaaaaay bigger.
This is the beginning of a magical, mysterious process that has very seldom been documented on film. Are you paying attention? I said put down the damn ocarina and pay attention. I don't care if it's called a sweet potato in the rural South put the damn thing DOWN.
Opie, King of the Dugongs, goes out to a sacred place far, far back in the woods where small dugong bulbs lay dormant in the soil. At his command, a small gnome-like creature emerges from the grass and begins excavating.
It digs and digs and digs and digs, throwing soil everywhere and getting exceedingly filthy...soil in its ears, soil in its butt crack, soil absolutely everywhere.
The gnome-like creature flings dirt up in a huge circle, digging furiously, like a small cat trying to bury a large poo.
A lot of the dirt goes into its mouth. A lot of it ends up on the roof of it's grandmothers garden shed.
...until finally, the first tiny newborn dugong emerges.
Close enough.
q: Is communication with dugongs possible?
Yes! Recent experiments using extra sensory perception have yielded undreamed-of results in the field of dugong-human communication.
Here a diver uses the 'mind meld' technique.
"Can you understand me, fellow earth dweller? Gentle giant of the sea, can you understand me?"
"HOW MANY TIMES DO I HAVE TO REPEAT MYSELF HERE. RING RING PICK UP THE CLUE PHONE. LEAVE. ME. THE. FUCK. ALONE."
Q: Do dugongs spy on America and then give all our secrets to hostile foreign powers?
a: Yes.
....plus they sneak up on your when you are swimming and yell "DUGONG!" in your ear real loud and then swim away.
Dugongs SUCK.
q: Do dugongs migrate?
a: During certain times of the year the trans-oceanic currents shift, and with this shift comes a subtle change in the temperature of the sea.
...image of migrating dugongs thanks to KYAHGIRL
This is the signal that the dugongs have been waiting for.
Once a reliable source of medical-grade helium has been found and the deliveries completed, they line up along the shore in the light of the full moon, wait for a favorable wind, and ascend towards the stars.
The dugong is a member of a small group of aquatic mammals known as 'Sirenia'. Other members include the manatee (which is not nearly as fun a word to say as 'dugong' so we'll just pretend that it doesn't exist) and the (now extinct) Stellars' Sea Cow.
...yes, it's two you-know-what-atees. it's my blog and i'm calling them dugongs....which was in fact not terribly cow-like; it was more like a big hippo-seal type thing.
Although it would be really cool if it HAD been like an aquatic cow and it gave milk and said 'moo'? and like maybe it had these huge horns that stuck out REALLY FAR and they would stampede and they'd get in cool fights and stuff? and divers could go down and have rodeos and the seaweed would be like tumbleweeds?
Yeah.
Centuries ago, the first Dugong sightings were reported in the logbooks of Spanish sailors who (
upon seeing the bald, grey, flippered animals swimming around chewing on seaweed and burping) immediately mistook them for a race of seagoing human women.
This may say more about Spanish femininity than we care to know.
q: Where do dugongs come from?
a: Duh; the ocean.
q: Oh Jesus fine. What is the life cycle of the dugong?
a: Ah. Well then. That's an interesting question.
When a mommy dugong and a daddy dugong love one another very much, they want to share that love with a baby dugong. So the Mommy dugong lies on her back, and the daddy dugong orders one from Ikea.
But ordering from Ikea can take time, and sometimes the quality sucks, so the smart mommy and daddy dugong usually go to the KING OF THE DUGONGS and ask him for one.
...click; it gets bigger. waaaaaaaay bigger.This is the beginning of a magical, mysterious process that has very seldom been documented on film. Are you paying attention? I said put down the damn ocarina and pay attention. I don't care if it's called a sweet potato in the rural South put the damn thing DOWN.
Opie, King of the Dugongs, goes out to a sacred place far, far back in the woods where small dugong bulbs lay dormant in the soil. At his command, a small gnome-like creature emerges from the grass and begins excavating.It digs and digs and digs and digs, throwing soil everywhere and getting exceedingly filthy...soil in its ears, soil in its butt crack, soil absolutely everywhere.
The gnome-like creature flings dirt up in a huge circle, digging furiously, like a small cat trying to bury a large poo.
A lot of the dirt goes into its mouth. A lot of it ends up on the roof of it's grandmothers garden shed.
...until finally, the first tiny newborn dugong emerges.
Close enough.
q: Is communication with dugongs possible?
Yes! Recent experiments using extra sensory perception have yielded undreamed-of results in the field of dugong-human communication.
Here a diver uses the 'mind meld' technique.
"Can you understand me, fellow earth dweller? Gentle giant of the sea, can you understand me?"
"HOW MANY TIMES DO I HAVE TO REPEAT MYSELF HERE. RING RING PICK UP THE CLUE PHONE. LEAVE. ME. THE. FUCK. ALONE."
Q: Do dugongs spy on America and then give all our secrets to hostile foreign powers?
a: Yes.
....plus they sneak up on your when you are swimming and yell "DUGONG!" in your ear real loud and then swim away.
Dugongs SUCK.
q: Do dugongs migrate?
a: During certain times of the year the trans-oceanic currents shift, and with this shift comes a subtle change in the temperature of the sea.
...image of migrating dugongs thanks to KYAHGIRLThis is the signal that the dugongs have been waiting for.
Once a reliable source of medical-grade helium has been found and the deliveries completed, they line up along the shore in the light of the full moon, wait for a favorable wind, and ascend towards the stars.
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
What you should know about...FLUFFY KITTENS
The human race may not agree about many things, but everyone loves a sweet, fluffy kitten! Nobody who has ever cradled one in their hands and listened to that sweet, miniature purr can disagree.
No matter the breed...from the plainest, rough-and tumble- barn tabby to the pampered elegance of the pedigreed Persian, there's just something about a tiny kitten that makes the human heart melt.
So you want a pet? Thinking about a kitten? A place by the fire and a bowl of milk may have suited old Tom, but there's more than that to caring for a young kitten responsibly.
...EARLY CARE
Immediately after birth, the kitten should be examined carefully and the venom extracted. The amount will vary according to factors like gender, breed and order of birth.
A kitten from which the venom has not been successfully extracted will develop some troubling physical characteristics by the second week.
Once again, the traits your kitten displays will be influenced by a number of variables. The deadly 'Cthulhu' form is a rare recessive and is found mainly near the earths magnetic poles.
'Carniverous Lemurosid Bipedalism' in an unsuccessfully expressed kitten, New South Wales. Remodellers later discovered it, already midway through it's first pupation, in a cocoon beneath the house. Stinger and clasping mouthparts were present.
Mephitic Alopecia in a 2 week old kitten, Bournemouth, Dorset, UK. This family lost several dogs before the disorder was properly diagnosed; although not before the blood-sucking proboscis had developed.
...FUN WITH YOUR NEW PET
Old wives tales hold that a kitten cannot be trained. Nothing could be more far from the truth! Countless people have enjoyed the hours of companionship and fun that raining a kitten affords! And nothing is more engaging than to have the smallest and cutest member of the family do a 'star turn' when company comes to call!
For years French children have trained their kittens to jump through a hoop. This simple trick is accomplished with a willow hoop and a stick, which is used to 'persuade' the kitten that this is a good idea.
Remember: proper technique is important...a fact which beloved mime Marcel Marceau discovered much too late.
Your kitten can be trained to use the toilet-it's a fact! Using methods originally popularized by jazz legend Charles Mingus*, relatively inexpensive products are now widely available that include everything you need.
More than likely you'll find this process a lot more entertaining than your cat will.
...HELPFUL HINTS
Even though your new kitten may be cute enough to eat, we don't gnaw on our kitty.
Have you ever tried to make a man lactate by putting him in a training bra and sticking a kitten on his tit?
It doesn't work.
Remember to READ THE INSTRUCTIONS CAREFULLY before you use your kitten as the meat component in a cybernetic organism.
Threading the kitten is tricky. HAVE PATIENCE...and don't forget your sense of humor! Soon you'll be making beautiful area rugs, bathmats and hall runners that your family will admire for years to come!
...IT'S ALL ABOUT LOVE
Using a little good sense and a lot of love, your kitten will give you many happy years of companionship. Nothing rivals the feeling that you get from nurturing a small, helpless life, watching it change, and grow...
...and grow, and divide, and shed toxic spores, and
________________________________________
*Bullshit, right?
Hint: his cats' name was 'Nightlife'.
No matter the breed...from the plainest, rough-and tumble- barn tabby to the pampered elegance of the pedigreed Persian, there's just something about a tiny kitten that makes the human heart melt.
So you want a pet? Thinking about a kitten? A place by the fire and a bowl of milk may have suited old Tom, but there's more than that to caring for a young kitten responsibly.
...EARLY CARE
Immediately after birth, the kitten should be examined carefully and the venom extracted. The amount will vary according to factors like gender, breed and order of birth.
A kitten from which the venom has not been successfully extracted will develop some troubling physical characteristics by the second week.
Once again, the traits your kitten displays will be influenced by a number of variables. The deadly 'Cthulhu' form is a rare recessive and is found mainly near the earths magnetic poles.
'Carniverous Lemurosid Bipedalism' in an unsuccessfully expressed kitten, New South Wales. Remodellers later discovered it, already midway through it's first pupation, in a cocoon beneath the house. Stinger and clasping mouthparts were present.
Mephitic Alopecia in a 2 week old kitten, Bournemouth, Dorset, UK. This family lost several dogs before the disorder was properly diagnosed; although not before the blood-sucking proboscis had developed.
...FUN WITH YOUR NEW PET
Old wives tales hold that a kitten cannot be trained. Nothing could be more far from the truth! Countless people have enjoyed the hours of companionship and fun that raining a kitten affords! And nothing is more engaging than to have the smallest and cutest member of the family do a 'star turn' when company comes to call!
For years French children have trained their kittens to jump through a hoop. This simple trick is accomplished with a willow hoop and a stick, which is used to 'persuade' the kitten that this is a good idea.
Remember: proper technique is important...a fact which beloved mime Marcel Marceau discovered much too late.
Your kitten can be trained to use the toilet-it's a fact! Using methods originally popularized by jazz legend Charles Mingus*, relatively inexpensive products are now widely available that include everything you need.
More than likely you'll find this process a lot more entertaining than your cat will.
...HELPFUL HINTS
Even though your new kitten may be cute enough to eat, we don't gnaw on our kitty.
Have you ever tried to make a man lactate by putting him in a training bra and sticking a kitten on his tit?
It doesn't work.
Remember to READ THE INSTRUCTIONS CAREFULLY before you use your kitten as the meat component in a cybernetic organism.
Threading the kitten is tricky. HAVE PATIENCE...and don't forget your sense of humor! Soon you'll be making beautiful area rugs, bathmats and hall runners that your family will admire for years to come!
...IT'S ALL ABOUT LOVE
Using a little good sense and a lot of love, your kitten will give you many happy years of companionship. Nothing rivals the feeling that you get from nurturing a small, helpless life, watching it change, and grow...
...and grow, and divide, and shed toxic spores, and
________________________________________
*Bullshit, right?
Hint: his cats' name was 'Nightlife'.
Saturday, October 13, 2007
SUPER EASY CELERY FOR THE HOME GARDENER
So. To sum up, my 82 year old father-in-law is SUPERFLY.
How in the hell am I going to follow that?
With a post on celery, bitch.
Oh yeah? Oh HAIL yeah.
You see what I do here?
"Why no. Just what is it that you do here?"
JUST EXACTLY WHATEVER the living, breathing motherfuck I want to do, is what I do here, dogaroonie.
If I want to do a post on the lint I find in my dryer I'll just do that humbear. If I want to do a whole cockalockin' post on soil bacteria I'll just DO that rasty bastard. Picture of my dog's butt? HA! DONE ALREADY DONE THAT ONE, BABY! SUCK ON IT!!!!!
I could sit here and just type the letter 'A' a whole bunch of times if I wanted to.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAa
]
Oh yeah.
And I'll leave that bracket too. FUCK yes, D.B. Cooper. Hijack THAT plane ya little bitch.
*takes medication*
__________________________________
Your soil must be rich, neutral and on the damp side...a clay loam is perfect.
1. In the fall, buy a regular head of celery from the supermarket.
2. Use the whole head except for the very center where the stunted, yellow-white leaves are.
3. Leave as much of a root stub on this 'heart' as possible. Using a very sharp knife, shave a fine, fine slice off the bottom of this stub, leaving the end clean and white.
4. Wash the whole thing carefully under cold water, and trim off wilted or damaged parts.
5. Place the cleaned start in a glass of clean, cold water on a north-facing windowsill so that the root stub is well immersed. Don't let it contact the bottom of the glass.
6. Change the water frequently, and keep the glass clean. You might notice cloudy goop forming around the root stub; simply wipe it off gently under the faucet in cold water.
7. In a few WEEKS you will notice small white rootlets beginning to form in a circle around the base of the stems. The stems might also have grown an inch or so. This might take all winter long, so don't panic if you don't see any action for a long time. As long as the leaves and stems are still healthy looking, you're good.
8. In spring when the last frost has passed, plant the rooted celery in a raised mound of really rich, well-cultivated soil (the same way you plant zuchinni and pumpkins,) and keep it moist. NOT SWAMPY. It needs to drain. Later in the summer you can make a moat around the crown to help the water soak in instead of running off the surface. The more water the celery receives the fatter the stalks will get and the taller the plant. However, this increases the chance that the plant will suddenly decide to send up a flowerstalk and die (bolt.) Just give it a nice shower in the evening (unless it's rained the day before) and call it good.
9. Otherwise, ignore.
10. Clip stalks off the side of the clump all spring, summer and early fall whenever you need some, leaving the central bunch in the ground.
Homegrown celery tends to run smaller and darker green than store-celery. It also tastes far more aromatic than store celery, so you need less.
11. Come fall, after the first light frost, pull up the whole plant and cut off the root ball to within an inch of where the stems begin. There will be 'offsets'; mini-plants that grown off at an angle out from the central root and the main crown. Just crack these away from the main root. Select the smaller, healthiest offsets, the ones with the most root, and repeat the process at one.
_______________________________
But no, 'Nations! That's CHEATING! That's not REAL GARDENING! Real gardeners grow things from seed! If you don't grow it from seed you're NOT A REAL GARDENER! You're BREAKING THE RULES! You're doing it the EASY way! Furthermore, you're not maintaining GENETIC DIVERSITY! You're only creating CLONES! And, and, a big DISEASE could come along and wipe out your whole crop! And then move on and wipe out everyone elses' crop that's growing the same variety! And then get stronger and stronger and mutate and breed! And fall into a nuclear reactor and then maybe a guy sweeping the floor will sweep it back outside where it will grow and spread at a geometric rate and KILL ALL THE WHOLE CELERY IN THE WORLD! AND MARS AND VENUS PLUS ALL THE ASTEROIDS! AND SATURN!
Get a fucking grip people. You stick shit in the ground and it grows; that's gardening.
Seed is selected from cloned varieties. How do you think they maintain commercial variety? By asking the celery nicely? By magic? Does 'lil Harry Potter wave his winkie over the celery and say "Celery est!" or some jive ass trumped-up Latin crapola and WHOOMP there is more celery?
NO! They select healthy plants with desirable traits and....wait for it.....take clones! And let them bolt! And take seeds from the cloned plants and....
wait, wait.......
-Sell them!
Theres a problem, though. Celery seed is NOTORIOUSLY BUTTLICKING DIFFICULT to grow on from seed! It takes 6 and one half Federation Standard light-years to germinate, and Mr. Spock has to urinate on it all that whole time. Oh yes! Plus it has to have a constant high soil temp and must lie on the top of the dirt undisturbed in the light where CELERY PREDATORS can just come along and KILL IT AND EAT ITS BRAIN AND RIP OUT IT'S PANCREAS AND LEAVE THE REST TO ROT IN THE TORRID, UNFORGIVING HEAT OF A MERCILESS SUN!
In addition, seedling celery damps off for no reason. The shit just dies. Or cutworms chew it off at the soil, or celery flies and carrot flies come along and land all over it and lick it all over or do whatever they do and kill it in the prime of its young and promising celery life, thus depriving you of vital celery nutrients! AND NOBODY WANTS THAT!
So yeah. Root a clone in water and then plant it out.
*takes more medication*
How in the hell am I going to follow that?
With a post on celery, bitch.
Oh yeah? Oh HAIL yeah.
You see what I do here?
"Why no. Just what is it that you do here?"
JUST EXACTLY WHATEVER the living, breathing motherfuck I want to do, is what I do here, dogaroonie.
If I want to do a post on the lint I find in my dryer I'll just do that humbear. If I want to do a whole cockalockin' post on soil bacteria I'll just DO that rasty bastard. Picture of my dog's butt? HA! DONE ALREADY DONE THAT ONE, BABY! SUCK ON IT!!!!!
I could sit here and just type the letter 'A' a whole bunch of times if I wanted to.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAa
]
Oh yeah.
And I'll leave that bracket too. FUCK yes, D.B. Cooper. Hijack THAT plane ya little bitch.
*takes medication*
__________________________________
Your soil must be rich, neutral and on the damp side...a clay loam is perfect.
1. In the fall, buy a regular head of celery from the supermarket.
2. Use the whole head except for the very center where the stunted, yellow-white leaves are.
3. Leave as much of a root stub on this 'heart' as possible. Using a very sharp knife, shave a fine, fine slice off the bottom of this stub, leaving the end clean and white.
4. Wash the whole thing carefully under cold water, and trim off wilted or damaged parts.
5. Place the cleaned start in a glass of clean, cold water on a north-facing windowsill so that the root stub is well immersed. Don't let it contact the bottom of the glass.
6. Change the water frequently, and keep the glass clean. You might notice cloudy goop forming around the root stub; simply wipe it off gently under the faucet in cold water.
7. In a few WEEKS you will notice small white rootlets beginning to form in a circle around the base of the stems. The stems might also have grown an inch or so. This might take all winter long, so don't panic if you don't see any action for a long time. As long as the leaves and stems are still healthy looking, you're good.
8. In spring when the last frost has passed, plant the rooted celery in a raised mound of really rich, well-cultivated soil (the same way you plant zuchinni and pumpkins,) and keep it moist. NOT SWAMPY. It needs to drain. Later in the summer you can make a moat around the crown to help the water soak in instead of running off the surface. The more water the celery receives the fatter the stalks will get and the taller the plant. However, this increases the chance that the plant will suddenly decide to send up a flowerstalk and die (bolt.) Just give it a nice shower in the evening (unless it's rained the day before) and call it good.
9. Otherwise, ignore.
10. Clip stalks off the side of the clump all spring, summer and early fall whenever you need some, leaving the central bunch in the ground.
Homegrown celery tends to run smaller and darker green than store-celery. It also tastes far more aromatic than store celery, so you need less.
11. Come fall, after the first light frost, pull up the whole plant and cut off the root ball to within an inch of where the stems begin. There will be 'offsets'; mini-plants that grown off at an angle out from the central root and the main crown. Just crack these away from the main root. Select the smaller, healthiest offsets, the ones with the most root, and repeat the process at one.
_______________________________
But no, 'Nations! That's CHEATING! That's not REAL GARDENING! Real gardeners grow things from seed! If you don't grow it from seed you're NOT A REAL GARDENER! You're BREAKING THE RULES! You're doing it the EASY way! Furthermore, you're not maintaining GENETIC DIVERSITY! You're only creating CLONES! And, and, a big DISEASE could come along and wipe out your whole crop! And then move on and wipe out everyone elses' crop that's growing the same variety! And then get stronger and stronger and mutate and breed! And fall into a nuclear reactor and then maybe a guy sweeping the floor will sweep it back outside where it will grow and spread at a geometric rate and KILL ALL THE WHOLE CELERY IN THE WORLD! AND MARS AND VENUS PLUS ALL THE ASTEROIDS! AND SATURN!
Get a fucking grip people. You stick shit in the ground and it grows; that's gardening.
Seed is selected from cloned varieties. How do you think they maintain commercial variety? By asking the celery nicely? By magic? Does 'lil Harry Potter wave his winkie over the celery and say "Celery est!" or some jive ass trumped-up Latin crapola and WHOOMP there is more celery?
NO! They select healthy plants with desirable traits and....wait for it.....take clones! And let them bolt! And take seeds from the cloned plants and....
wait, wait.......
-Sell them!
Theres a problem, though. Celery seed is NOTORIOUSLY BUTTLICKING DIFFICULT to grow on from seed! It takes 6 and one half Federation Standard light-years to germinate, and Mr. Spock has to urinate on it all that whole time. Oh yes! Plus it has to have a constant high soil temp and must lie on the top of the dirt undisturbed in the light where CELERY PREDATORS can just come along and KILL IT AND EAT ITS BRAIN AND RIP OUT IT'S PANCREAS AND LEAVE THE REST TO ROT IN THE TORRID, UNFORGIVING HEAT OF A MERCILESS SUN!
In addition, seedling celery damps off for no reason. The shit just dies. Or cutworms chew it off at the soil, or celery flies and carrot flies come along and land all over it and lick it all over or do whatever they do and kill it in the prime of its young and promising celery life, thus depriving you of vital celery nutrients! AND NOBODY WANTS THAT!
So yeah. Root a clone in water and then plant it out.
*takes more medication*
Thursday, October 11, 2007
The Playboy of the Western World
I found out why my father-in-law keeps ending up in the emergency ward.
Would you like to know why my father-in-law keeps ending up in the emergency ward?
Guess why my father-in-law keeps ending up in the emergency ward.
I'll tell you why.
When I met this man twenty years ago he was partying like an 18 year old. He smoked 2 packs of cigarettes a day. He drove a Porsche. He could drink like a fish and never show the effects, work all day, cruise tail all night and then come home to the waiting arms of a new guy every few months. Not b-list desperation cases, either...hot college guys.
Magically twinklicious college guys.
Doe-eyed, slutty college guys, tight pants, magnificent upper body development-type-of-guys.
Shall I stop now? OK.
He knew everyone. Everyone knew him-and liked him. He always had visitors and he always had plans. In fact, it became apparent after I'd known him awhile that my father-in-law, a man in his late 60's at the time, was the guy in the group that all the other guys hung out with so they could catch the overflow.
It was NUTS.
This was not like the 60-year-old people I remembered. The 60-year-old people I remembered had canes and smelled like pee and watched television all day.
Make no mistake, this is still one charming, sexy old bastard, too. I mean, he's one of those people who's got 'IT'. He walks into a room and everyone knows. Or rolls into the room at this stage of the game. Still.
20 years later. The man can't drive his Porsche any more. He can't climb a set of stairs. He has COPD, he uses oxygen, he wears compression stockings and uses a walker. Has this slowed him down? Oh HELL no, buttercup.
Now they come to him.
For example, when I busted him and the cute cable guy right after he'd moved in to assisted living I just figured "Aw, what a nice kid." (No, no, nothing gross...just a little bluster and delay answering the door and a couple of big grins. This has happened before and I've kind of figured out what's up by now.)
After it happened a few more times I started realizing that my father in law knew ALL the nice young kids. In Washington. Possibly in the entire Northwest. And Vancouver.
The last time was a couple of weeks ago, when I busted one of the surfer-boy maintenance guys leaving his place (poor kid saw me standing there and blushed purple.) I just smiled and walked on by. Room service. Just one of the many features of modern assisted living.
One of the Fan Club clued me in to the rest of the story. "Why do you think he never answers the phone in the evenings? You know he hardly spends any time there. Everyone's dragging him to the clubs."
Now he's in interim care for a few weeks. I went in today to pick up a few things from his apartment for him. The day manager had a quiet word with me on the elevators.
"You know, I think he's....overdoing things..." she said. Then she paused and did the Groucho Marx eyebrows thing a couple of times at me. I blinked.
"He goes out a lot. And he he has a LOT of...um...visitors." She did the 'woo woo' thing with her eyebrows again.
-Oh.
I thanked her nicely, got off the elevator, and waited for the doors to close before I started snorting and whooping. It hurt.
Evidence left behind at the scene confirmed her theory.
Here is some good advice: You should be careful what drawer you check when you look for someones' medication. Lots of people keep it in the kitchen. Like my father in law does. Not in the bedside table. No, he certainly does NOT keep his medication in his bedside table.
No, he doesn't.
So then.
Why is my father-in-law in the hospital?
My father in law is in the hospital for overexertion.
Jesus Christ.
Would you like to know why my father-in-law keeps ending up in the emergency ward?
Guess why my father-in-law keeps ending up in the emergency ward.
I'll tell you why.
When I met this man twenty years ago he was partying like an 18 year old. He smoked 2 packs of cigarettes a day. He drove a Porsche. He could drink like a fish and never show the effects, work all day, cruise tail all night and then come home to the waiting arms of a new guy every few months. Not b-list desperation cases, either...hot college guys.
Magically twinklicious college guys.
Doe-eyed, slutty college guys, tight pants, magnificent upper body development-type-of-guys.
Shall I stop now? OK.
He knew everyone. Everyone knew him-and liked him. He always had visitors and he always had plans. In fact, it became apparent after I'd known him awhile that my father-in-law, a man in his late 60's at the time, was the guy in the group that all the other guys hung out with so they could catch the overflow.
It was NUTS.
This was not like the 60-year-old people I remembered. The 60-year-old people I remembered had canes and smelled like pee and watched television all day.
Make no mistake, this is still one charming, sexy old bastard, too. I mean, he's one of those people who's got 'IT'. He walks into a room and everyone knows. Or rolls into the room at this stage of the game. Still.
20 years later. The man can't drive his Porsche any more. He can't climb a set of stairs. He has COPD, he uses oxygen, he wears compression stockings and uses a walker. Has this slowed him down? Oh HELL no, buttercup.
Now they come to him.
For example, when I busted him and the cute cable guy right after he'd moved in to assisted living I just figured "Aw, what a nice kid." (No, no, nothing gross...just a little bluster and delay answering the door and a couple of big grins. This has happened before and I've kind of figured out what's up by now.)
After it happened a few more times I started realizing that my father in law knew ALL the nice young kids. In Washington. Possibly in the entire Northwest. And Vancouver.
The last time was a couple of weeks ago, when I busted one of the surfer-boy maintenance guys leaving his place (poor kid saw me standing there and blushed purple.) I just smiled and walked on by. Room service. Just one of the many features of modern assisted living.
One of the Fan Club clued me in to the rest of the story. "Why do you think he never answers the phone in the evenings? You know he hardly spends any time there. Everyone's dragging him to the clubs."
Now he's in interim care for a few weeks. I went in today to pick up a few things from his apartment for him. The day manager had a quiet word with me on the elevators.
"You know, I think he's....overdoing things..." she said. Then she paused and did the Groucho Marx eyebrows thing a couple of times at me. I blinked.
"He goes out a lot. And he he has a LOT of...um...visitors." She did the 'woo woo' thing with her eyebrows again.
-Oh.
I thanked her nicely, got off the elevator, and waited for the doors to close before I started snorting and whooping. It hurt.
Evidence left behind at the scene confirmed her theory.
Here is some good advice: You should be careful what drawer you check when you look for someones' medication. Lots of people keep it in the kitchen. Like my father in law does. Not in the bedside table. No, he certainly does NOT keep his medication in his bedside table.
No, he doesn't.
So then.
Why is my father-in-law in the hospital?
My father in law is in the hospital for overexertion.
Jesus Christ.
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Purple Moon Snail Laughs Bad Fifty Monsters
I swear I wrote a post on Scientology back when. Does anyone remember it? I went back through all my old crap and I can't find it. Unless you really want the fluffy kittens next.
Don't make me get my fluffy kittens.
Cuz I will.
Meanwhile, use your head for something other than a hatrack.
Go read this : What goes up...Alter Egos
Then read everything else.
Then go
here, read the post entitled "A Little Yellow" and bug her to post more often.
Now check out Awaiting:
Isn't that what you always kind of figured? Me too.
Now here's Frobisher. Check out the sunburn he copped in Marbella:
Of course, the side that was facing the sun most of the time is a lot worse.
Don't make me get my fluffy kittens.
Cuz I will.
Meanwhile, use your head for something other than a hatrack.
Go read this : What goes up...Alter Egos
Then read everything else.
Then go
here, read the post entitled "A Little Yellow" and bug her to post more often.
Now check out Awaiting:
Isn't that what you always kind of figured? Me too.
Now here's Frobisher. Check out the sunburn he copped in Marbella:
Of course, the side that was facing the sun most of the time is a lot worse.
Monday, October 08, 2007
bambi vs. the potty monsters (they win)
The Charismatic Catholic prayer meeting we attended was socially divided along a polite, faint, yet very real line. The organizers were on the main thoughtful and spiritual people, most having attended parochial school all the way through college. The lunatic fringe were mainly working class, high school drop-outs, and were tolerated at arms' length. Never the twain did meet... except to act like a bunch of Fruit Loops in a rented hall three times a week. Yes, we were all brothers and sisters in the Lord...and we were all very careful where we sat during Mass so that when called upon to deliver the sign of peace we wouldn't end up hugging anyone icky.
Bambi the high-functioning schizophrenic had been taken up as a cause by the groups' organisers. And I have to say that they did themselves proud. In short order they found her a clean, safe place to live, bought her a bus pass and put her in touch with a social worker and Catholic Community Services. It was pretty clear from the start that this womans' problem was more a matter of failing to take her medication regularly than 'spiritual darkness'.
Bambi's parents were quietly contacted. I felt really bad for these people. The way the laws ran at the time, if a person was over 18 and not presenting a clear danger to themselves or others, they could go run around and be nutty until they fell off a bridge trying to fly. THEN the state could step in, if there was anything left. Bambi's family recounted the problems they'd had in dealing with this woman over the years and how people in her condition regularly slip between the cracks of society, and thanked us for caring and doing what we had.
This move was viewed with horror by the Lunatic Fringe. They saw it as a terrible violation of Bambi's trust. After all, her father was rich and powerful and she was in hiding because her family was trying to have her committed and had poisoned her and the Mafia was trying to find her because her ex-husband had blah blah blah etc etc etc...and to top it all off there were demons in her apartment!
Bambi, meanwhile, was feeding off the attention of the group in general and the Lunatic Fringe in particular. The Fringe bought into her delusions hook, line and sinker. Per their literal interpretation of Scripture, the things that were supposedly happening to Bambi were concrete proof and vindication of the 'Pentecostal Christianity' that they practiced. With the backup of these people and their magical explanations for what was going on she soon 'felt lead by the Lord' to 'refute her medications and claim a healing' and that's exactly what she did.
That is why Bambi never did succeed in chasing Satan out of her bathroom.
A number of exorcisms were performed -but she claimed that the demons kept returning stronger. Then they started speaking to her and writing messages on her walls that only she could see. Finally she started bugging the owner, demanding that as a Christian it was his duty to remove the demon-infested, Island-themed tub surround so she could shower without worrying about Satanic Tiki idols tickling her crack.
The place had been completely and expensively remodeled before she'd moved in (and that aside from the fact that it was a ridiculous demand anyway) so naturally the owner refused. The lunatic fringe took up the banner and started pleading on her behalf and doing 'prayer battle' against him*. He still refused. Which was the beginning of the end.
This issue actually split the group. It boiled down to this: Either you believed that this woman was desperately in need of Thorazine, or you were on "Gods' side" and believed that the fucking bathroom wallpaper was possessed.
What was truly sad was that while Bambi was rapidly losing the last of her marbles, both sides were wasting time agonizing over this issue.
Here's why:
These were Fundamentalists. A 'secular, scientific' explanation was by it's very nature wrong. It was, in fact, even sinful to entertain such an explanation. Born Again, Charismatic Christians utterly refuted the 'false religion' of Science. They believed in the literal truth of demons, angels, possession, miracles, exorcism, speaking in tongues, healing and all the rest of it because it was in the Bible, and the Bible was the revealed word of God! Period! So the explanation that best tallied up with what was in the Bible was, had to be, and could not be other than the right one. Therefore, if you took the Bible literally in this case, a person was not schizophrenic. That's not in the Bible, consequently it is a lie. However a person could be possessed by demons. And how do they take care of persons possessed by demons in the Bible? You prayed over them, rebuked Satan, and the demons were cast out.
But if that didn't work?
...Yeah.
It all ended in a pathetic mess. The lunatic fringe moved en masse to weirder (MUCH weirder) pastures, taking their checkbooks with them. The remaining members disbanded when they lost the use of the hall due to lack of funds. Funds provided in large part by my mother, turns out.
Bambi stopped paying rent. Finally she had to be evicted after she'd almost burnt the building down leaving lit cigarettes all over the floor. She eventually went back to living on the street.
I met up with her a couple of years later, though.
Guess where?
Church of Scientology.
__________________________________
* what this amounted to was meeting in Bambi's apartment across the wall from the owner, or standing on his front stoop, or sitting in his driveway in their cars holding hands and praying loudly that he would 'do the right thing and follow the path of righteousness', calling each other up and holding prayer meetings via conference call, bringing it up during meetings...yup.
**I am not being flippant and I am not making this up... this is honestly what they believed and how they believed.
You can take that line of thinking as far afield as you like, too, and it still applies. Modern medicine is evil, electricity is a lie, Buddhists worship Satan, fossils aren't real; they were created by Satan to deceive the faithful.
YES.
Now, that's far, far to the right...and also far, far from being as extreme as I've been exposed to. Think of it as 'middle of the road' far right.
That is Christian fundamentalism.
Welcome to America.
Bambi the high-functioning schizophrenic had been taken up as a cause by the groups' organisers. And I have to say that they did themselves proud. In short order they found her a clean, safe place to live, bought her a bus pass and put her in touch with a social worker and Catholic Community Services. It was pretty clear from the start that this womans' problem was more a matter of failing to take her medication regularly than 'spiritual darkness'.
Bambi's parents were quietly contacted. I felt really bad for these people. The way the laws ran at the time, if a person was over 18 and not presenting a clear danger to themselves or others, they could go run around and be nutty until they fell off a bridge trying to fly. THEN the state could step in, if there was anything left. Bambi's family recounted the problems they'd had in dealing with this woman over the years and how people in her condition regularly slip between the cracks of society, and thanked us for caring and doing what we had.
This move was viewed with horror by the Lunatic Fringe. They saw it as a terrible violation of Bambi's trust. After all, her father was rich and powerful and she was in hiding because her family was trying to have her committed and had poisoned her and the Mafia was trying to find her because her ex-husband had blah blah blah etc etc etc...and to top it all off there were demons in her apartment!
Bambi, meanwhile, was feeding off the attention of the group in general and the Lunatic Fringe in particular. The Fringe bought into her delusions hook, line and sinker. Per their literal interpretation of Scripture, the things that were supposedly happening to Bambi were concrete proof and vindication of the 'Pentecostal Christianity' that they practiced. With the backup of these people and their magical explanations for what was going on she soon 'felt lead by the Lord' to 'refute her medications and claim a healing' and that's exactly what she did.
That is why Bambi never did succeed in chasing Satan out of her bathroom.
A number of exorcisms were performed -but she claimed that the demons kept returning stronger. Then they started speaking to her and writing messages on her walls that only she could see. Finally she started bugging the owner, demanding that as a Christian it was his duty to remove the demon-infested, Island-themed tub surround so she could shower without worrying about Satanic Tiki idols tickling her crack.
The place had been completely and expensively remodeled before she'd moved in (and that aside from the fact that it was a ridiculous demand anyway) so naturally the owner refused. The lunatic fringe took up the banner and started pleading on her behalf and doing 'prayer battle' against him*. He still refused. Which was the beginning of the end.
This issue actually split the group. It boiled down to this: Either you believed that this woman was desperately in need of Thorazine, or you were on "Gods' side" and believed that the fucking bathroom wallpaper was possessed.
What was truly sad was that while Bambi was rapidly losing the last of her marbles, both sides were wasting time agonizing over this issue.
Here's why:
These were Fundamentalists. A 'secular, scientific' explanation was by it's very nature wrong. It was, in fact, even sinful to entertain such an explanation. Born Again, Charismatic Christians utterly refuted the 'false religion' of Science. They believed in the literal truth of demons, angels, possession, miracles, exorcism, speaking in tongues, healing and all the rest of it because it was in the Bible, and the Bible was the revealed word of God! Period! So the explanation that best tallied up with what was in the Bible was, had to be, and could not be other than the right one. Therefore, if you took the Bible literally in this case, a person was not schizophrenic. That's not in the Bible, consequently it is a lie. However a person could be possessed by demons. And how do they take care of persons possessed by demons in the Bible? You prayed over them, rebuked Satan, and the demons were cast out.
But if that didn't work?
...Yeah.
It all ended in a pathetic mess. The lunatic fringe moved en masse to weirder (MUCH weirder) pastures, taking their checkbooks with them. The remaining members disbanded when they lost the use of the hall due to lack of funds. Funds provided in large part by my mother, turns out.
Bambi stopped paying rent. Finally she had to be evicted after she'd almost burnt the building down leaving lit cigarettes all over the floor. She eventually went back to living on the street.
I met up with her a couple of years later, though.
Guess where?
Church of Scientology.
__________________________________
* what this amounted to was meeting in Bambi's apartment across the wall from the owner, or standing on his front stoop, or sitting in his driveway in their cars holding hands and praying loudly that he would 'do the right thing and follow the path of righteousness', calling each other up and holding prayer meetings via conference call, bringing it up during meetings...yup.
**I am not being flippant and I am not making this up... this is honestly what they believed and how they believed.
You can take that line of thinking as far afield as you like, too, and it still applies. Modern medicine is evil, electricity is a lie, Buddhists worship Satan, fossils aren't real; they were created by Satan to deceive the faithful.
YES.
Now, that's far, far to the right...and also far, far from being as extreme as I've been exposed to. Think of it as 'middle of the road' far right.
That is Christian fundamentalism.
Welcome to America.
Sunday, October 07, 2007
Purple Cat Big Heist Caper! Praising Lord!
For more background and Halloween hijinx, go here!
My mother found Jesus the way a Peterbilt truck finds a raccoon on the highway-sudden, hard and messy. At first it was a positive thing...for a short (and rather confusing) time, she went from being God's miserable hemorrhoid to being Jesus ' little sunbeam. Was this my mother? Smiling?
Anyway, for a variety of reasons I may go into at another time, I found myself an unwilling participant in what rapidly became my mothers religious mania, going to what were termed 'Charismatic Catholic' , Born-Again style prayer meetings three evenings a week.
Lemme digress a bit. Catholicism in white, working-class America isn't remotely ecstatic. Catholicism in white, working-class America is in fact about as exciting as attending a talk at the public library about Gypsy moth infestation, except with more kneeling and a light snack towards the end.
Understandably, then, Catholics did not do the charisms, or 'ecstatic religiosity' very well. These prayer meetings tended to be rather shy and restrained things until the very, very end, when people got that 'now or never' feeling and suddenly went belly-flopping awkwardly into the deep end. It was essentially two hours of quiet prayer with upraised hands followed by a half-hour of crying, speaking in tongues, falling, twitching, and singing loud songs with accompanying gestures while hopping up and down.
Yes, really. Barney the Dinosaur meets Jesus.
Still, I honestly think the greater part of the people in attendance were sincere, if misguided. Unfortunately my mother, being who she was, got drawn into the lunatic fringe.
Eventually she was running buddies with this unbelievably odd bunch of Jesus-groupies. All of them were garden-variety unfulfilled Catholic women...morbidly obese 50-year-old virgins, glum married lesbians in brick-wall denial with six kids , borderline (and not-so-borderline) psychotics, rage junkies, low-norms who smelled like pee and beat-down throw pillows, mostly. All of them could have been case studies in a book called 'Women You Should Never, Ever Be Like When You Grow Up'.
And I took note, yo.
One evening there was a new member in attendance, a thin, trembling fawn of a woman draped in scarves and ethnic fabrics, like an aging ballet dancer with a thyroid problem. Her buggy eyeballs never stopped scanning the room. She smoked with a strange metronomic regularity, sipping at the filter and blowing steadily until the cigarette was one long ash drooping gracefully down over her red bony knuckles. She sat at the edge of the group drawn up into a knobby heap on the metal folding chair .
The Fringies were instantly enthralled. The poor thing, let's go be friendly!
Poor thing indeed.
Soon she was in the middle of a circle of chairs filled with a whole bunch of terribly friendly, sympathetic fat women listening raptly to her 'testimony'.
This stuff was usually pretty gross, so I went outside and lit a smoke.*
I was joined by one of my moms' friends a short while later. "You'll never believe what happened to this poor woman," she said.
She was right.
According to 'Bambi', she'd grown up in a wealthy family, her father was a very well-known public figure who she was afraid to name, all of them were against her and they wanted her to stay married to a man who was beating her. They had been drugging her for years and had finally poisoned her with a mysterious substance in an attempt to 'keep her quiet'. She was also being chased by a cult, by organized crime and by an ex husband, and all of them were trying to kill her while at the same time plotting to have her committed to a mental institution. This was why she was hiding out on the streets and in homeless shelters AND living in her car and also why nobody could know her real name.
Man, I was 16 and I smelled this shit a mile away, even secondhand. The woman breathlessly recounting all this to me was 56. You could tell she thought this was the coolest, most glamorous and interesting thing that she had ever heard EVER.
Once I'd finished my cigarette I went back inside. 'Bambi' was being prayed for.
Now, in an ordinary setting, this might mean that people were, you know, sitting, maybe kneeling, hands folded, praying.
In this group it meant that everyone present stood and placed one hand on the person being prayed for and raised the other hand high into the air (presumably to get better reception) closed their eyes and made bossy demands on the Lord. "Jesus! See this woman! Jesus, help this woman! Yes! Jesus, help her bear this burden! HEAL her! Heal her now! Jesus heal her! HEAL HER NOW! IN JESUS NAME! LIFT HER BURDEN! LIFT THIS BURDEN FROM HER!"
They typically did this in turns, getting louder and more vehement until the whole group was crying, moaning, and speaking in tongues. Just another typical Friday night.
The thing was, they were all on the downslope of middle age, and they couldn't stand for very long without getting tired. They started to droop and lean on one another after they'd been at it for a while. From a distance this looked like a bunch of people peering at something down a well while signaling to passing aircraft.
And as I knew from personal experience, the person in the middle, the one being prayed for, bore the full weight. Poor waif- like Bambi was nearly bent double.
We heard a lot from Bambi in the passing weeks. Bambi threw off a group praying for her with 'supernatural strength'. Bambi had 'spoken in an unnatural voice and cursed God'. Bambi had 'accepted Christ and suddenly become ill'.
Clearly, Bambi was under demonic attack.
Consequently Bambi became very, very popular. Everyone had Bambi over for dinner. Everyone took Bambi out for coffee after the meetings. People fought over who would drive Bambi back to the shelter. The group took up a collection and got Bambi out of the shelter and into an apartment. Everyone listened raptly to Bambi's stories about being raped by shadowy figures on orders from her family, receiving threatening phone calls in the middle of the night, Bambi finding her belongings had been gone through by the Mafia, Bambi seeing demonic messages appear on the ceiling above her bed at night. The 'let's pray for Bambi' session at the end of every meeting became the main draw. You never knew what would happen, and something dramatic always did. Attendance was never better.
One evening I was smoking outside in the garden when one of the Fringe came out to get me.
'We need you to come help us! Do you think you could be a prayer warrior?' she said breathlessly, clutching my arm.
" Well, let me finish my smoke first," I replied. "What's going on?"
"Bambi's apartment is haunted!" said the Fringie. "That's what's been at the center of all these disturbances!"
"You mean her new apartment she just moved into?" I asked.
"It's not new," said the Fringie. "It's in an old house. And there were people who were drug addicts and Satan worshippers living there before she moved in. And they had orgies."
I'd like to say that I laughed in her face, but no. Whaddya gonna do; it's how I was raised.
Now how drug-dealing Satan worshippers had managed to move into a place owned by one of this Christian groups' leaders and live there, holding orgies, drugging and worshipping away for a matter of years, was never explained. What I accepted without a thought at the time** was that Milwaukie, Oregon was simply raddled with Satan-worshipping, orgy-holding druggies, and that that kind of thing called up demons and opened a PORTAL TO HELL.
And I was being asked to help cleanse it! I was being asked to help cast out demons, to help a fellow Christian and to bring the light of the Lord into her home! Well fuck yeah I'll help, are you nuts? An exorcism? I am A SIXTEEN YEAR OLD GIRL! Color me there!
We all piled into the Mystery Mobile-I mean, the former prostitutes' car- in an excited, bible-toting heap...the grumpy lesbian, the vindictive Jap-hater and the former prostitute that nobody was supposed to have figured out was a former prostitute in the front seat, and the 55- year-old morbidly obese virgin, the sixteen-year-old smoker, and the smokers batshit-nuts mother in the back. We zoomed away, praying and holding hands. When the traffic lights changed we prayed for the traffic light to turn green.
Some of the ladies in the front seat started getting a little excited. Unknown tongues began creeping into the mix.
"Don't get carried away by the Spirit,' called the former prostitute as she drifted a corner on two wheels "I don't have any insurance!"
We prayed for her to get a raise so she could buy insurance at the next light.
We caromed through downtown Portland and over the Powell Blvd. bridge. Smokers' Mother had the brilliant idea to roll down the window so that upraised hands could poke out.
We passed the Poulson House, a grim Victorian I was secretly in love with. 'That's a Satanic looking place,' said the Jap Hater darkly. "I've always hated it."
We prayed holding hands over the back of the seat, all the way up McLoughlin Boulevard and down River Road until we drove up to the house, the house of evil, and stopped. We prayed a little more before we climbed the stairs.
We prayed before we went inside.
We went inside, and stopped to pray in the foyer.
Bambi was already there, looking pale and twitchy in the bare overhead light.
"Where's the disturbance?" Demanded former prostitute.
"I don't know", breathed Bambi. "It's the whole place, I think.."
We all joined hands and began to....guess?
Pray.
The whole group moved in an awkward clump into the first room off the foyer. Speaking in tongues began in earnest. Then singing in tongues. I got mashed into a wall by 55-Year-Old Virgin's huge ass and there I remained. Trembling hands reached out and touched the walls. The furniture. The pictures. The telephone. "You never know," said Jap Hater. "Oh! Good idea!" they agreed.
The clump shuffled down the hall and moved to the next room, lead by Bambi. An overhead bulb flickered and she screamed. "It's here!"
The praying gained volume.
I got mashed into a door by the 55-Year-Old-Virgin.
We entered the kitchen. The kitchen was tiny.
Closet doors were opened and prayed into. Someone started swaying, and the whole group started rocking back and forth in unison. I was mashed into another wall at this point, and resigned myself to simply trying to draw breath while the others did the heavy battling with the demons infesting the cabinets. "It's here! I can feel it moving! It's running before us!" various people commented. "Where's it going? It went past me! I felt it!"
The whole group moved as one, in a clump. A couple of the women were already reduced to panting, barely able to gasp 'Thank you Jesus, Thank you Jesus' by this point. Nobody'd told them that Satan would be wearing track shoes.
"It went in here! cried Bambi. The group surged forward.
'Here' was the bathroom.
A very tiny, tiny bathroom.
The group pushed forward and found that not all of them could fit into the claustrophobic, closet-sized room at once.
Satan had obviously chosen the venue for this final showdown with care.
The group decamped to the entry and considered. Bambi twittered and meeped in the background like a nervous gerbil with a bad nicotine habit. I noticed that there wasn't one single place on the floor that didn't have a cigarette burn.
Suddenly "I found it!" cried the former prostitute. She was a tiny woman, and had wormed her way to the front of the group. "Come look! I found it! Here it is!"
Everyone crowded forward.
Ever heard of Masonite? It was marketed as a waterproof, decorative material for tub surrounds in the 60's and 70's...kind of a cross between Formica and wallboard. The smooth 'space age' material it was coated with supposedly*** rendered this material moisture-resistant and easy to clean. This coating was often printed with designs...flowers, snowflakes, geometrics...
This tub surround was printed with a tropical island scene.
Straw huts, palm trees, coconuts, ocean waves.
And Tiki god statues.
"I knew it! I never felt comfortable in there! I always felt like I was being watched!" exclaimed Bambi.
Grumpy Lesbian was crammed against the sink. Former Prostitute was seated on the toilet. Jap Hater had what floor space there was in the center of the room.
I was crammed into the bathtub, by now utterly mortified, with Smokers' Mom and the 55-Year-Old Morbidly Obese Virgin.
'Now everyone put their hands on the wall and pray!" Former Prostitute commanded.
And they prayed. Please, God, deliver this house from the clutches of Satan. Please, God, drive the presence of demons from the images on this bathroom wall. We refute thee utterly, Satan, and all thy works, and thy leering image of thyself as rendered in driftwood and dogs' teeth by the Polynesians and the DuPont Corporation in gold glitter paint.
Oh yeah... there they were. Jesus' little prayer warriors. Standing in the bathtub.
Exorcising the wallpaper.
Amen.
___________________________
*one of the first things I found out about being a charismatic catholic was that the typical unfulfilled adult catholic woman had really good reasons for being that way, most of them horrifically gynecological. also, that it takes very little provocation for your typical unfulfilled catholic woman to explain the exact nature of her particular problem at length and in excruciating detail.
**also the subject of yet another story. lucky you!
***masonite is bullshit. one scratch and the stuff swells up with black fungus like the black plague. god i hate masonite.
My mother found Jesus the way a Peterbilt truck finds a raccoon on the highway-sudden, hard and messy. At first it was a positive thing...for a short (and rather confusing) time, she went from being God's miserable hemorrhoid to being Jesus ' little sunbeam. Was this my mother? Smiling?
Anyway, for a variety of reasons I may go into at another time, I found myself an unwilling participant in what rapidly became my mothers religious mania, going to what were termed 'Charismatic Catholic' , Born-Again style prayer meetings three evenings a week.
Lemme digress a bit. Catholicism in white, working-class America isn't remotely ecstatic. Catholicism in white, working-class America is in fact about as exciting as attending a talk at the public library about Gypsy moth infestation, except with more kneeling and a light snack towards the end.
Understandably, then, Catholics did not do the charisms, or 'ecstatic religiosity' very well. These prayer meetings tended to be rather shy and restrained things until the very, very end, when people got that 'now or never' feeling and suddenly went belly-flopping awkwardly into the deep end. It was essentially two hours of quiet prayer with upraised hands followed by a half-hour of crying, speaking in tongues, falling, twitching, and singing loud songs with accompanying gestures while hopping up and down.
Yes, really. Barney the Dinosaur meets Jesus.
Still, I honestly think the greater part of the people in attendance were sincere, if misguided. Unfortunately my mother, being who she was, got drawn into the lunatic fringe.
Eventually she was running buddies with this unbelievably odd bunch of Jesus-groupies. All of them were garden-variety unfulfilled Catholic women...morbidly obese 50-year-old virgins, glum married lesbians in brick-wall denial with six kids , borderline (and not-so-borderline) psychotics, rage junkies, low-norms who smelled like pee and beat-down throw pillows, mostly. All of them could have been case studies in a book called 'Women You Should Never, Ever Be Like When You Grow Up'.
And I took note, yo.
One evening there was a new member in attendance, a thin, trembling fawn of a woman draped in scarves and ethnic fabrics, like an aging ballet dancer with a thyroid problem. Her buggy eyeballs never stopped scanning the room. She smoked with a strange metronomic regularity, sipping at the filter and blowing steadily until the cigarette was one long ash drooping gracefully down over her red bony knuckles. She sat at the edge of the group drawn up into a knobby heap on the metal folding chair .
The Fringies were instantly enthralled. The poor thing, let's go be friendly!
Poor thing indeed.
Soon she was in the middle of a circle of chairs filled with a whole bunch of terribly friendly, sympathetic fat women listening raptly to her 'testimony'.
This stuff was usually pretty gross, so I went outside and lit a smoke.*
I was joined by one of my moms' friends a short while later. "You'll never believe what happened to this poor woman," she said.
She was right.
According to 'Bambi', she'd grown up in a wealthy family, her father was a very well-known public figure who she was afraid to name, all of them were against her and they wanted her to stay married to a man who was beating her. They had been drugging her for years and had finally poisoned her with a mysterious substance in an attempt to 'keep her quiet'. She was also being chased by a cult, by organized crime and by an ex husband, and all of them were trying to kill her while at the same time plotting to have her committed to a mental institution. This was why she was hiding out on the streets and in homeless shelters AND living in her car and also why nobody could know her real name.
Man, I was 16 and I smelled this shit a mile away, even secondhand. The woman breathlessly recounting all this to me was 56. You could tell she thought this was the coolest, most glamorous and interesting thing that she had ever heard EVER.
Once I'd finished my cigarette I went back inside. 'Bambi' was being prayed for.
Now, in an ordinary setting, this might mean that people were, you know, sitting, maybe kneeling, hands folded, praying.
In this group it meant that everyone present stood and placed one hand on the person being prayed for and raised the other hand high into the air (presumably to get better reception) closed their eyes and made bossy demands on the Lord. "Jesus! See this woman! Jesus, help this woman! Yes! Jesus, help her bear this burden! HEAL her! Heal her now! Jesus heal her! HEAL HER NOW! IN JESUS NAME! LIFT HER BURDEN! LIFT THIS BURDEN FROM HER!"
They typically did this in turns, getting louder and more vehement until the whole group was crying, moaning, and speaking in tongues. Just another typical Friday night.
The thing was, they were all on the downslope of middle age, and they couldn't stand for very long without getting tired. They started to droop and lean on one another after they'd been at it for a while. From a distance this looked like a bunch of people peering at something down a well while signaling to passing aircraft.
And as I knew from personal experience, the person in the middle, the one being prayed for, bore the full weight. Poor waif- like Bambi was nearly bent double.
We heard a lot from Bambi in the passing weeks. Bambi threw off a group praying for her with 'supernatural strength'. Bambi had 'spoken in an unnatural voice and cursed God'. Bambi had 'accepted Christ and suddenly become ill'.
Clearly, Bambi was under demonic attack.
Consequently Bambi became very, very popular. Everyone had Bambi over for dinner. Everyone took Bambi out for coffee after the meetings. People fought over who would drive Bambi back to the shelter. The group took up a collection and got Bambi out of the shelter and into an apartment. Everyone listened raptly to Bambi's stories about being raped by shadowy figures on orders from her family, receiving threatening phone calls in the middle of the night, Bambi finding her belongings had been gone through by the Mafia, Bambi seeing demonic messages appear on the ceiling above her bed at night. The 'let's pray for Bambi' session at the end of every meeting became the main draw. You never knew what would happen, and something dramatic always did. Attendance was never better.
One evening I was smoking outside in the garden when one of the Fringe came out to get me.
'We need you to come help us! Do you think you could be a prayer warrior?' she said breathlessly, clutching my arm.
" Well, let me finish my smoke first," I replied. "What's going on?"
"Bambi's apartment is haunted!" said the Fringie. "That's what's been at the center of all these disturbances!"
"You mean her new apartment she just moved into?" I asked.
"It's not new," said the Fringie. "It's in an old house. And there were people who were drug addicts and Satan worshippers living there before she moved in. And they had orgies."
I'd like to say that I laughed in her face, but no. Whaddya gonna do; it's how I was raised.
Now how drug-dealing Satan worshippers had managed to move into a place owned by one of this Christian groups' leaders and live there, holding orgies, drugging and worshipping away for a matter of years, was never explained. What I accepted without a thought at the time** was that Milwaukie, Oregon was simply raddled with Satan-worshipping, orgy-holding druggies, and that that kind of thing called up demons and opened a PORTAL TO HELL.
And I was being asked to help cleanse it! I was being asked to help cast out demons, to help a fellow Christian and to bring the light of the Lord into her home! Well fuck yeah I'll help, are you nuts? An exorcism? I am A SIXTEEN YEAR OLD GIRL! Color me there!
We all piled into the Mystery Mobile-I mean, the former prostitutes' car- in an excited, bible-toting heap...the grumpy lesbian, the vindictive Jap-hater and the former prostitute that nobody was supposed to have figured out was a former prostitute in the front seat, and the 55- year-old morbidly obese virgin, the sixteen-year-old smoker, and the smokers batshit-nuts mother in the back. We zoomed away, praying and holding hands. When the traffic lights changed we prayed for the traffic light to turn green.
Some of the ladies in the front seat started getting a little excited. Unknown tongues began creeping into the mix.
"Don't get carried away by the Spirit,' called the former prostitute as she drifted a corner on two wheels "I don't have any insurance!"
We prayed for her to get a raise so she could buy insurance at the next light.
We caromed through downtown Portland and over the Powell Blvd. bridge. Smokers' Mother had the brilliant idea to roll down the window so that upraised hands could poke out.
We passed the Poulson House, a grim Victorian I was secretly in love with. 'That's a Satanic looking place,' said the Jap Hater darkly. "I've always hated it."
We prayed holding hands over the back of the seat, all the way up McLoughlin Boulevard and down River Road until we drove up to the house, the house of evil, and stopped. We prayed a little more before we climbed the stairs.
We prayed before we went inside.
We went inside, and stopped to pray in the foyer.
Bambi was already there, looking pale and twitchy in the bare overhead light.
"Where's the disturbance?" Demanded former prostitute.
"I don't know", breathed Bambi. "It's the whole place, I think.."
We all joined hands and began to....guess?
Pray.
The whole group moved in an awkward clump into the first room off the foyer. Speaking in tongues began in earnest. Then singing in tongues. I got mashed into a wall by 55-Year-Old Virgin's huge ass and there I remained. Trembling hands reached out and touched the walls. The furniture. The pictures. The telephone. "You never know," said Jap Hater. "Oh! Good idea!" they agreed.
The clump shuffled down the hall and moved to the next room, lead by Bambi. An overhead bulb flickered and she screamed. "It's here!"
The praying gained volume.
I got mashed into a door by the 55-Year-Old-Virgin.
We entered the kitchen. The kitchen was tiny.
Closet doors were opened and prayed into. Someone started swaying, and the whole group started rocking back and forth in unison. I was mashed into another wall at this point, and resigned myself to simply trying to draw breath while the others did the heavy battling with the demons infesting the cabinets. "It's here! I can feel it moving! It's running before us!" various people commented. "Where's it going? It went past me! I felt it!"
The whole group moved as one, in a clump. A couple of the women were already reduced to panting, barely able to gasp 'Thank you Jesus, Thank you Jesus' by this point. Nobody'd told them that Satan would be wearing track shoes.
"It went in here! cried Bambi. The group surged forward.
'Here' was the bathroom.
A very tiny, tiny bathroom.
The group pushed forward and found that not all of them could fit into the claustrophobic, closet-sized room at once.
Satan had obviously chosen the venue for this final showdown with care.
The group decamped to the entry and considered. Bambi twittered and meeped in the background like a nervous gerbil with a bad nicotine habit. I noticed that there wasn't one single place on the floor that didn't have a cigarette burn.
Suddenly "I found it!" cried the former prostitute. She was a tiny woman, and had wormed her way to the front of the group. "Come look! I found it! Here it is!"
Everyone crowded forward.
Ever heard of Masonite? It was marketed as a waterproof, decorative material for tub surrounds in the 60's and 70's...kind of a cross between Formica and wallboard. The smooth 'space age' material it was coated with supposedly*** rendered this material moisture-resistant and easy to clean. This coating was often printed with designs...flowers, snowflakes, geometrics...
This tub surround was printed with a tropical island scene.
Straw huts, palm trees, coconuts, ocean waves.
And Tiki god statues.
"I knew it! I never felt comfortable in there! I always felt like I was being watched!" exclaimed Bambi.
Grumpy Lesbian was crammed against the sink. Former Prostitute was seated on the toilet. Jap Hater had what floor space there was in the center of the room.
I was crammed into the bathtub, by now utterly mortified, with Smokers' Mom and the 55-Year-Old Morbidly Obese Virgin.
'Now everyone put their hands on the wall and pray!" Former Prostitute commanded.
And they prayed. Please, God, deliver this house from the clutches of Satan. Please, God, drive the presence of demons from the images on this bathroom wall. We refute thee utterly, Satan, and all thy works, and thy leering image of thyself as rendered in driftwood and dogs' teeth by the Polynesians and the DuPont Corporation in gold glitter paint.
Oh yeah... there they were. Jesus' little prayer warriors. Standing in the bathtub.
Exorcising the wallpaper.
Amen.
___________________________
*one of the first things I found out about being a charismatic catholic was that the typical unfulfilled adult catholic woman had really good reasons for being that way, most of them horrifically gynecological. also, that it takes very little provocation for your typical unfulfilled catholic woman to explain the exact nature of her particular problem at length and in excruciating detail.
**also the subject of yet another story. lucky you!
***masonite is bullshit. one scratch and the stuff swells up with black fungus like the black plague. god i hate masonite.
another lame excuse (too busy chasing hine)
'Nother short one. Hey, the short strokes are the best ones, y'know!
The Yummy Biker got a promotion! YAY!
He is no longer working the potlines (i.e. wearing several layers of flameproofed wool, suspended in a rickety piece of obsolete techonology over huge electronically supercharged vats of molten metal)
Obviously, THIS IS A GOOD THING.
Mr. Smithers switched him to Safety Ops.
No, ha ha! That is a joke! Ha! No, he is now in the machinists apprenticeship program! And instead of working all night long whenever the hell they felt like calling him in, he works days, 4 on, 3 off. And on his 3 off, he attends COLLEGE!
*Snif* They grow up so fast! *snif*
Now I like to walk up behind him and growl 'Heeey, little schoolboy, ahhm a little schoolgirl too!" in my best blues voice. A yuk a minute here at Rancho FirstNations, I tell ya.
So yeah, I'll see ya Monday.
Are you SURE nobody wants to hear more stories about the Meadows family? Gosh, I thought that would bring the requests just rolling in! SO confused.
oo, also- I just saw a sharp-shinned falcon take a robin off the hawthorne tree outside! Nature is happening in my yard! Very cool! Could someone tell me what they do with the bird once they take it? A SSF is almost the exact same size and weight as a robin, and this robin was loaded with berries. Can they actually take off and fly away with them? How do they eat them?
The Yummy Biker got a promotion! YAY!
He is no longer working the potlines (i.e. wearing several layers of flameproofed wool, suspended in a rickety piece of obsolete techonology over huge electronically supercharged vats of molten metal)
Obviously, THIS IS A GOOD THING.
Mr. Smithers switched him to Safety Ops.
No, ha ha! That is a joke! Ha! No, he is now in the machinists apprenticeship program! And instead of working all night long whenever the hell they felt like calling him in, he works days, 4 on, 3 off. And on his 3 off, he attends COLLEGE!
*Snif* They grow up so fast! *snif*
Now I like to walk up behind him and growl 'Heeey, little schoolboy, ahhm a little schoolgirl too!" in my best blues voice. A yuk a minute here at Rancho FirstNations, I tell ya.
So yeah, I'll see ya Monday.
Are you SURE nobody wants to hear more stories about the Meadows family? Gosh, I thought that would bring the requests just rolling in! SO confused.
oo, also- I just saw a sharp-shinned falcon take a robin off the hawthorne tree outside! Nature is happening in my yard! Very cool! Could someone tell me what they do with the bird once they take it? A SSF is almost the exact same size and weight as a robin, and this robin was loaded with berries. Can they actually take off and fly away with them? How do they eat them?
Thursday, October 04, 2007
Well, enough of THAT.
Halloween is coming up, but I'm out of ghost stories! (I only had two, and one's on the Shadowlands site. I think it's called 'The House on the Bluff' but its been awhile.)
I only have one supernatural story left, and it's called : The Night I Took Part In An Honest To Snot EXORCISM.
I've also got left:
Why Bin Men Are All Lazy Cunts
Dugongs
Fluffy Kittens (although this was addressed in part in the 'hate blog' post)
More Stories About the Meadows Family
Mental Illness Serves the State
Ina Mae Gaskin
...from the request list.
What do you want to hear next?????
I only have one supernatural story left, and it's called : The Night I Took Part In An Honest To Snot EXORCISM.
I've also got left:
Why Bin Men Are All Lazy Cunts
Dugongs
Fluffy Kittens (although this was addressed in part in the 'hate blog' post)
More Stories About the Meadows Family
Mental Illness Serves the State
Ina Mae Gaskin
...from the request list.
What do you want to hear next?????
More of the same, unfortunately.
The Playboy of the Western World just called, and the Biker is taking him in to the emergency ward again...same shit, different day.
Here is the deal in a nutshell:
The man is dying by inches. Inches. I go between hoping against hope that he'll get better and hoping that he'll just fucking get it over with and die already because I'm sick of it. Just sick of it. I know this is selfish. I know there's no way I'm anywhere near as sick of it as he is, and I know that if it were me, I'd be terrified too and want my family too...but I'm just so sick of it. I'm tired of worrying, I'm tired of caring.
I have the flu. If I would have gone in this afternoon, if I had taken him in to the emergency ward, I could have infected him, which very likely could have killed him.
My husband went in instead.
He has the flu too.
I'm scared to death and I'm hoping against hope and you can take that any way you want to because it all applies.
Fuck this.
The Playboy of the Western World just called, and the Biker is taking him in to the emergency ward again...same shit, different day.
Here is the deal in a nutshell:
The man is dying by inches. Inches. I go between hoping against hope that he'll get better and hoping that he'll just fucking get it over with and die already because I'm sick of it. Just sick of it. I know this is selfish. I know there's no way I'm anywhere near as sick of it as he is, and I know that if it were me, I'd be terrified too and want my family too...but I'm just so sick of it. I'm tired of worrying, I'm tired of caring.
I have the flu. If I would have gone in this afternoon, if I had taken him in to the emergency ward, I could have infected him, which very likely could have killed him.
My husband went in instead.
He has the flu too.
I'm scared to death and I'm hoping against hope and you can take that any way you want to because it all applies.
Fuck this.
Wednesday, October 03, 2007
Delicious Green Dog Have A Portly Energy!
So it goes like this...
Right in the middle of posting answers to the comments on the knish story we get a call from the Playboy of the Western World.
"Could someone bring me home please?" he inquired politely.
He was at the hospital.
It was 9 pm.
I am elected.
I find him holding court in the emergency ward surrounded by charmed nurses and handsome EMT techs. We get him loaded into the car. "What on earth were you doing there?" I asked.
"Trying to breathe, mainly," he explained. "I was changing the batteries in my television remote when I suddenly just got so confused and out of breath...so, I just called the ambulance."
We pull out of the driveway of the hospital and drive off. "So, the bars are still open; you want to make a night of it?" I asked.
Just then I notice colored lights flashing in my rear view mirror.
"I knew they'd catch you at last," said the Playboy.
The cop showed up at my window so quietly that when I turned and found him at my elbow I screamed. Then, as has become routine, I handed him my license and the contents of the glove compartment and let it be his problem. Meanwhile the Playboy stole glances out the rear window. "I wonder what they stopped you for this time?" he said.
"It can't be public lewdness; I'm in a car. No, wait-is a car public?" I asked.
"I don't think so" said the Playboy. "It probably depends on what's sticking out of the car."
The cop came back. The Playboy turned on his best befuddled old man act, clutching his blue hospital bag to his chest, ears festooned with oxygen line, audibly wheezing. "Is everything OK officer?" He quavered.
The cop let me off with a warning for expired tabs.
We drove back to the Leopold, and the Playboy removed his oxygen line. "There now, you see? This stuff finally came in handy!" he said, pleased, and tucked it into the hospital bag. "You want any of this?" He indicated the bag, full of Kleenex packets and plastic barf basins and all the other goofy crap they unload on emergency room patients.
He asks me this every time. I've learned to turn it down every time. This was after I had scored an impressive collection of Kleenex tissues and plastic barf basins.
We rang the after-hours admittance bell and watched through the glass entry as the night clerk screamed. Once she had retrieved her wig from the overhead fixture she let us in.
I got him up to his room. He handed me a wad of cash, and I went back downstairs to warn the night clerk that I'd be back in an hour or so with his prescriptions. I did not want to be responsible for her death when I returned and rang the bell a second time.
The only pharmacy open at 10: pm on a Friday night in Bellingham, Washington is Walgreens.
I went to Walgreens.
Never do this.
Remember the Gong show?
Yeah. Except all the contestants are underweight, smelly and pick at their faces, and Rex Reed is Ukranian and doesn't know how to operate a cash register without crashing the system.
Five times in a row.
For some reason the pharmacist's lovely teenaged assistant was wearing sunglasses. This may have had something to do with why she couldn't seem to find any azithromycin in stock. At some point in the process it apparently became more than she wanted to deal with so she wandered off and started replacing garbage can liners.
I bought a newspaper. Rex Reed scanned it into the register and crashed the system.
I sat down and opened up the front page. Over the top of my newspaper palisade I could watch the high-functioning schizophrenics, meth heads and free-range homeless mill around shoplifting while the managers shouted back and forth over the loudspeaker system at each other.
"Front checkstand code orange!""
"Copy, Drive up, what's code orange?
"Front checkstand, code orange, code orange! "
"Driveup, copy code orange, what does code orange mean?"
"Front checkstand come to the managers office at once! Copy? Come to the managers office AT ONCE!"
"Uh copy, uh, could we get a manager to the front checkstand?"
"Front checkstand come to the managers office at once!"
"Could we get someone with the system key down to the front checkstand? Code Blue?
"Front checkstand, code blue copy, there is no code blue."
"Driveup window, your code orange just drove off without paying, should we call the police?"
and etc.
At 11: 30 the managing pharmacist was ringing up someone elses' order and found the Playboy's prescription where his assistant had left it, folded up and stuck between the buttons of the cash register. He filled it and sent me on my way.
I returned to the Leopold. The Playboy was watching Dancing With The Stars. I gave him his prescription and his change. He offered to show me the latest addition to his collection of tiny plastic cups filled with phlegm all in a line on his coffee table. I countered with an offer to throw up in his kitchen sink if he pressed the issue, and so we parted having reached a detente.
I woke up the next morning with a cold. I haven't been so happy to get sick in quite a while.
Right in the middle of posting answers to the comments on the knish story we get a call from the Playboy of the Western World.
"Could someone bring me home please?" he inquired politely.
He was at the hospital.
It was 9 pm.
I am elected.
I find him holding court in the emergency ward surrounded by charmed nurses and handsome EMT techs. We get him loaded into the car. "What on earth were you doing there?" I asked.
"Trying to breathe, mainly," he explained. "I was changing the batteries in my television remote when I suddenly just got so confused and out of breath...so, I just called the ambulance."
We pull out of the driveway of the hospital and drive off. "So, the bars are still open; you want to make a night of it?" I asked.
Just then I notice colored lights flashing in my rear view mirror.
"I knew they'd catch you at last," said the Playboy.
The cop showed up at my window so quietly that when I turned and found him at my elbow I screamed. Then, as has become routine, I handed him my license and the contents of the glove compartment and let it be his problem. Meanwhile the Playboy stole glances out the rear window. "I wonder what they stopped you for this time?" he said.
"It can't be public lewdness; I'm in a car. No, wait-is a car public?" I asked.
"I don't think so" said the Playboy. "It probably depends on what's sticking out of the car."
The cop came back. The Playboy turned on his best befuddled old man act, clutching his blue hospital bag to his chest, ears festooned with oxygen line, audibly wheezing. "Is everything OK officer?" He quavered.
The cop let me off with a warning for expired tabs.
We drove back to the Leopold, and the Playboy removed his oxygen line. "There now, you see? This stuff finally came in handy!" he said, pleased, and tucked it into the hospital bag. "You want any of this?" He indicated the bag, full of Kleenex packets and plastic barf basins and all the other goofy crap they unload on emergency room patients.
He asks me this every time. I've learned to turn it down every time. This was after I had scored an impressive collection of Kleenex tissues and plastic barf basins.
We rang the after-hours admittance bell and watched through the glass entry as the night clerk screamed. Once she had retrieved her wig from the overhead fixture she let us in.
I got him up to his room. He handed me a wad of cash, and I went back downstairs to warn the night clerk that I'd be back in an hour or so with his prescriptions. I did not want to be responsible for her death when I returned and rang the bell a second time.
The only pharmacy open at 10: pm on a Friday night in Bellingham, Washington is Walgreens.
I went to Walgreens.
Never do this.
Remember the Gong show?
Yeah. Except all the contestants are underweight, smelly and pick at their faces, and Rex Reed is Ukranian and doesn't know how to operate a cash register without crashing the system.
Five times in a row.
For some reason the pharmacist's lovely teenaged assistant was wearing sunglasses. This may have had something to do with why she couldn't seem to find any azithromycin in stock. At some point in the process it apparently became more than she wanted to deal with so she wandered off and started replacing garbage can liners.
I bought a newspaper. Rex Reed scanned it into the register and crashed the system.
I sat down and opened up the front page. Over the top of my newspaper palisade I could watch the high-functioning schizophrenics, meth heads and free-range homeless mill around shoplifting while the managers shouted back and forth over the loudspeaker system at each other.
"Front checkstand code orange!""
"Copy, Drive up, what's code orange?
"Front checkstand, code orange, code orange! "
"Driveup, copy code orange, what does code orange mean?"
"Front checkstand come to the managers office at once! Copy? Come to the managers office AT ONCE!"
"Uh copy, uh, could we get a manager to the front checkstand?"
"Front checkstand come to the managers office at once!"
"Could we get someone with the system key down to the front checkstand? Code Blue?
"Front checkstand, code blue copy, there is no code blue."
"Driveup window, your code orange just drove off without paying, should we call the police?"
and etc.
At 11: 30 the managing pharmacist was ringing up someone elses' order and found the Playboy's prescription where his assistant had left it, folded up and stuck between the buttons of the cash register. He filled it and sent me on my way.
I returned to the Leopold. The Playboy was watching Dancing With The Stars. I gave him his prescription and his change. He offered to show me the latest addition to his collection of tiny plastic cups filled with phlegm all in a line on his coffee table. I countered with an offer to throw up in his kitchen sink if he pressed the issue, and so we parted having reached a detente.
I woke up the next morning with a cold. I haven't been so happy to get sick in quite a while.
Tuesday, October 02, 2007
first flu of the year!
I will answer everyone; I promise. I'm just hibernating, is all. I have the sniffles, the Playboy of the Western World is ailing and the Yummy Biker is attending college. Meanwhile, someone with a pair of pants that needed mending needs to send me their meat address because I have gone ahead and finished something without their additional imput because if you play you pay so there and you'll take what I throw at you and like it ha ha ha.
ha-CHOO!
ha-CHOO!
Friday, September 28, 2007
i need the recipe for a hot potato knish. yes, NEED.
...and also the recipe for a Monte Christo sandwich. Anything else I'll let you know.
Daves' Delicatessen no longer exists. That is a crime and a crying shame. I've heard that Dave and Shirley started up another place after the Blue Mouse Block was torn down, but that happened after I'd moved away.
At the time I'm talking about, Daves' Deli was located on 3rd and Morrison, down in the seedy numbers of downtown Portland, Oregon, three blocks up from the Willamette river. On the one hand it was just down the street from the hippie-lefty Looking Glass Bookstore, which was cool. Unfortunately it also happened to be right around the corner from the Blue Mouse Theater*, notorious at that time for playing triple-X movies. (Incidentally this place had the single coolest sign* I have ever seen or will ever see period... a long vertical strip of neon and painted tin, blue on blue, reading
B
L
U
E
M
O
U
S
E
with small, villainous-looking mice that scampered and flickered all around the margins from the time the sun went down until 5 am. By God, I would pay money to see that sign again. It lit my way home from many a party out where I had no business being.)
Anyway. Daves'.
Daves' was on a dogleg, open on the 3rd Street side to the barroom, making a right angle behind the pawn shop and exiting onto Morrison through the cafeteria.
The bar was called The Ranch Room...wagon wheel lights, longhorn mounts, heavy on the rustic, sticky on the upholstery. All the stewbums that could stagger up from Burnside that far sat in the booths and eyeballed the perverts waiting for the matinee to start next door while both parties drank and smoked like chimneys.
On the Morrison street side the door opened between two big windows with a gold star of David painted on on each one, one side saying 'Daves' Delicatessen' in Hebrew, the other in English. Daves' wife had a whole garden full of plants in each window, all of them struggling along in the pale rainy light and the steamy, cigarette- flavored air. Stacks of rumpled Nickel ads were crammed between the pots.
During the morning and early afternoon the old people claimed the seats just inside the Morrison street windows so they could see to read the paper. Later in the afternoon when I rolled in they were usually long gone and I would snag the booth and pore over the left-behind Yiddish newspapers, which might as well have been in Chinese for all I knew. I got the biggest kick out of seeing things like Lampheres Furniture or Tom Pedersons' Ford ads in Hebrew.
The place was one long line from the 3rd street door: coat rack, cigarette machine and small table to the left where the help would break, and then the line. Next came three little two-tops running center, and across the aisle booths lining the far wall all the way down to the cash register. Anemic pothos and variegated spider plants garlanded with fuzzy brown cobwebs swung high overhead, and old rope encircled pictures of cowboy brands decorated the walls up into the gloom.
For the entire time I went there the steam line was the domain of a small and very gay gentleman in countermans' whites, bald as an egg, who ran up and down up and down all day long like a parrot in a cage, never missing a customer, never spilling a drop. This guy had panache. He moved like Fred Astaire and he talked a running line of b.s. like a vaudeville sidekick.
When Dave ran the kitchen and his wife Shirley ran the till the jokes and commentary were non-stop. A lot of what was said back and forth between the kitchen, the register and the steam line got huge laughs from the regular clientele, and it's only now that I look back on it that I realize that there was some was pretty racy stuff flying back and forth across the dining room. Sometimes it all lapsed into Yiddish, and the altercockers* up by the door liked that a lot. Half the time you walked in the whole place would be a riot of laughter...Shirley whooping and leaning on the cash register, some old guy next to the door smacking himself on the leg with his Yiddish version of the Oregonian and about ready to have a heart attack, he was laughing so hard.
They called me 'sweetheart'. Everyone did.
I used to have dinner there when I was feeling low. It helped that the place was on my bus route, a half a block down from the open air market where I transferred onto the #30.
I had hot potato knishes with brown gravy, green beans, matzoh ball soup, corn with pimentos and peas, and a Dr. Browns soda. There is nothing nicer on a rainy evening than a hot potato knish. (It was a big ball of mashed potato, browned on the outside, with some yummy meatloaf inside and brown gravy over top of it. It was one of those foods that you were so greedy for and grateful to eat when it arrived that it was gone before you could figure out what was in it, or I'd be making it to this day. Ak, I could kick myself!) I'd eat huge huge bagels with cream cheese piled on so thick it was ridiculous. I had Reuben sandwiches and corned beef on rye and fondant-dusted Monte Christos (oh Heaven!) with a big ol honkin slice of dill pickle laying next to it, half-in the cole slaw. I had matzoh ball soup here for the first time, and lingered so long nipping tiny pieces off the sunny matzoh balls trying to make it last that I missed my bus. I wish I'd had the noodle kugel. The counterman was always trying to get me to try it, but back then I though it was too noodley looking. Same with the borscht; too purple. I know; I'm a doof.
I seem to remember this place best in association with the Rocky Horror Picture show**. The first time I ever heard about it, I was sitting there eating a corned beef sandwich with Sonnyboy.
In the evening after work I would sit there in the front booth and watch the people rush back and forth outside with their umbrellas. The warm room was as long and narrow as a freight car, the light shady amber from the nicotened fixtures. I'd puzzle over my Yiddish newspaper and look out through the steamy windows and watch the rain come down. The evening would fall and the lights would come on. The steam would run down the windows and the traffic lights would change red to green through the little rivers of water, and in the background the cups and bowls clattered and the coffee poured and good smells rose from the line. Shirley would wander by and put her hand on my shoulder in passing and smile at me, and move on. Dave would sit with the counterman at the break table and smoke, greeting people as they came in. I would drink my soda and wipe up the gravy with a piece of bread, and feel like I belonged someplace.
________________________
*I seem to remember this place briefly being called 'Victor' before it became The Blue Mouse. Am I high? Anyone know? This had to have been around 1965 or so. Here's a link:
http://www.pdxhistory.com/html/portland_theaters.html
...Scroll to the very last picture on this page. Daves Delicatessen was on the right, where the sign above the window says 'sundries'. The entrance to the Ranch Room was to the left, right next to the theatres' loggia, under the sign that says 'toiletries'. When I knew the place, the space in the corner with the pillar in the entry was a pawn shop.
You can't see the dancing mousies in this picture. They were picked out in neon tubing and were suspended by the metal framework you can make out surrounding the sign.
-Well, I care.
**I don't know if I've got the spelling right, and I don't know if that means something off color or not either, but thats my recollection of the phrase.
***Here's another mammary:
...fine; it's a building.
This is the place where (I used to stand in the freezing rain at 12:30 pm to see Tim Curry look better than me in makeup) I used to go and see the Rocky Horror Picture Show! Six times! God! Think of the toast!
Daves' Delicatessen no longer exists. That is a crime and a crying shame. I've heard that Dave and Shirley started up another place after the Blue Mouse Block was torn down, but that happened after I'd moved away.
At the time I'm talking about, Daves' Deli was located on 3rd and Morrison, down in the seedy numbers of downtown Portland, Oregon, three blocks up from the Willamette river. On the one hand it was just down the street from the hippie-lefty Looking Glass Bookstore, which was cool. Unfortunately it also happened to be right around the corner from the Blue Mouse Theater*, notorious at that time for playing triple-X movies. (Incidentally this place had the single coolest sign* I have ever seen or will ever see period... a long vertical strip of neon and painted tin, blue on blue, reading
B
L
U
E
M
O
U
S
E
with small, villainous-looking mice that scampered and flickered all around the margins from the time the sun went down until 5 am. By God, I would pay money to see that sign again. It lit my way home from many a party out where I had no business being.)
Anyway. Daves'.
Daves' was on a dogleg, open on the 3rd Street side to the barroom, making a right angle behind the pawn shop and exiting onto Morrison through the cafeteria.
The bar was called The Ranch Room...wagon wheel lights, longhorn mounts, heavy on the rustic, sticky on the upholstery. All the stewbums that could stagger up from Burnside that far sat in the booths and eyeballed the perverts waiting for the matinee to start next door while both parties drank and smoked like chimneys.
On the Morrison street side the door opened between two big windows with a gold star of David painted on on each one, one side saying 'Daves' Delicatessen' in Hebrew, the other in English. Daves' wife had a whole garden full of plants in each window, all of them struggling along in the pale rainy light and the steamy, cigarette- flavored air. Stacks of rumpled Nickel ads were crammed between the pots.
During the morning and early afternoon the old people claimed the seats just inside the Morrison street windows so they could see to read the paper. Later in the afternoon when I rolled in they were usually long gone and I would snag the booth and pore over the left-behind Yiddish newspapers, which might as well have been in Chinese for all I knew. I got the biggest kick out of seeing things like Lampheres Furniture or Tom Pedersons' Ford ads in Hebrew.
The place was one long line from the 3rd street door: coat rack, cigarette machine and small table to the left where the help would break, and then the line. Next came three little two-tops running center, and across the aisle booths lining the far wall all the way down to the cash register. Anemic pothos and variegated spider plants garlanded with fuzzy brown cobwebs swung high overhead, and old rope encircled pictures of cowboy brands decorated the walls up into the gloom.
For the entire time I went there the steam line was the domain of a small and very gay gentleman in countermans' whites, bald as an egg, who ran up and down up and down all day long like a parrot in a cage, never missing a customer, never spilling a drop. This guy had panache. He moved like Fred Astaire and he talked a running line of b.s. like a vaudeville sidekick.
When Dave ran the kitchen and his wife Shirley ran the till the jokes and commentary were non-stop. A lot of what was said back and forth between the kitchen, the register and the steam line got huge laughs from the regular clientele, and it's only now that I look back on it that I realize that there was some was pretty racy stuff flying back and forth across the dining room. Sometimes it all lapsed into Yiddish, and the altercockers* up by the door liked that a lot. Half the time you walked in the whole place would be a riot of laughter...Shirley whooping and leaning on the cash register, some old guy next to the door smacking himself on the leg with his Yiddish version of the Oregonian and about ready to have a heart attack, he was laughing so hard.
They called me 'sweetheart'. Everyone did.
I used to have dinner there when I was feeling low. It helped that the place was on my bus route, a half a block down from the open air market where I transferred onto the #30.
I had hot potato knishes with brown gravy, green beans, matzoh ball soup, corn with pimentos and peas, and a Dr. Browns soda. There is nothing nicer on a rainy evening than a hot potato knish. (It was a big ball of mashed potato, browned on the outside, with some yummy meatloaf inside and brown gravy over top of it. It was one of those foods that you were so greedy for and grateful to eat when it arrived that it was gone before you could figure out what was in it, or I'd be making it to this day. Ak, I could kick myself!) I'd eat huge huge bagels with cream cheese piled on so thick it was ridiculous. I had Reuben sandwiches and corned beef on rye and fondant-dusted Monte Christos (oh Heaven!) with a big ol honkin slice of dill pickle laying next to it, half-in the cole slaw. I had matzoh ball soup here for the first time, and lingered so long nipping tiny pieces off the sunny matzoh balls trying to make it last that I missed my bus. I wish I'd had the noodle kugel. The counterman was always trying to get me to try it, but back then I though it was too noodley looking. Same with the borscht; too purple. I know; I'm a doof.
I seem to remember this place best in association with the Rocky Horror Picture show**. The first time I ever heard about it, I was sitting there eating a corned beef sandwich with Sonnyboy.
In the evening after work I would sit there in the front booth and watch the people rush back and forth outside with their umbrellas. The warm room was as long and narrow as a freight car, the light shady amber from the nicotened fixtures. I'd puzzle over my Yiddish newspaper and look out through the steamy windows and watch the rain come down. The evening would fall and the lights would come on. The steam would run down the windows and the traffic lights would change red to green through the little rivers of water, and in the background the cups and bowls clattered and the coffee poured and good smells rose from the line. Shirley would wander by and put her hand on my shoulder in passing and smile at me, and move on. Dave would sit with the counterman at the break table and smoke, greeting people as they came in. I would drink my soda and wipe up the gravy with a piece of bread, and feel like I belonged someplace.
________________________
*I seem to remember this place briefly being called 'Victor' before it became The Blue Mouse. Am I high? Anyone know? This had to have been around 1965 or so. Here's a link:
http://www.pdxhistory.com/html/portland_theaters.html
...Scroll to the very last picture on this page. Daves Delicatessen was on the right, where the sign above the window says 'sundries'. The entrance to the Ranch Room was to the left, right next to the theatres' loggia, under the sign that says 'toiletries'. When I knew the place, the space in the corner with the pillar in the entry was a pawn shop.
You can't see the dancing mousies in this picture. They were picked out in neon tubing and were suspended by the metal framework you can make out surrounding the sign.
-Well, I care.
**I don't know if I've got the spelling right, and I don't know if that means something off color or not either, but thats my recollection of the phrase.
***Here's another mammary:
...fine; it's a building.
This is the place where (I used to stand in the freezing rain at 12:30 pm to see Tim Curry look better than me in makeup) I used to go and see the Rocky Horror Picture Show! Six times! God! Think of the toast!
Pop again!
I had no idea there were so many different kinds of weird pop out there. I figured it was only American culture that spawned that kind of novelty, but apparently no.
A lot of these things started out as tonics of one sort or another...usually claiming to treat fatigue and constipation, which back in them thar days was referred to as 'digestive disorder' because it simply would not do to say 'constipation'. In fact I've taken a fit of the fan-tods just writing it.*
Dandelion and Burdock I cannot figure out. It seems to have been inspired by misguided thrift ("Oo lookit the brown guck running off the compost heap, Nigel! Got to be something we could make out of that!") Fentimans makes it, along with a small but interesting selection of other mildly wackoid-sounding beverages.** Apparently it's being craft-brewed and marketed on the 'fayre' circuit in crockery bottles coated with wax, which to my mind makes it sound rather more like a dangerous explosive than a soda drink, but whatever. I'll tell you what, betcha its diuretic as old billy heck. And everyone knows that if you deliberately take something that makes you spend a lot of time in the bathroom then it has to be doing some good, right? Right.
D&B has a relative in the American Dr. Browns Cel-Ray soda, a pop made from celery seed extract. Celery seed is diuretic too. Once again: what induced urination is supposed to do to promote good health is a mystery to me. I figure it has to do with the fact that all this stuff was invented before they had television.
Vimto seems to have entered the market as a constipation remedy. Even though they adamantly refuse to release the secret formula, you have only to look at the adsite design to discern that Vimto is made from raspberries, other berries, and green cocktail olives. Just thinking about it makes me feel regular.
This has it's parallel in the American beverage Dr. Pepper, which is carbonated prune juice, and tastes like this:
...southbound end of a northbound Tato
There used to be numbers on the label that told you what time to 'take' it each day, but they made them discontinue that in the 1960's because not even stoned people believed it cured anything by that point.
Irn Bru started life as an invigorant. Now to me, that sounds suspiciously like a Scottish version of Hadacol (oh look it up) to me. Their vague description of the flavor as 'light, citrusy, and refreshing' leads me to believe that it also tastes like Hadacol; ie, thin mud. This puts it in the same butch as fuck classification as neat gin as far as I'm concerned... you drink it because you're hard, and if you have anything to get hard it makes it harder.
Personally I don't think any of it does jack shit. It's like Bach flower remedies. It's all marketing. I remember when aspartame first came out and everyone was making all kinds of claims for it, too. It was supposed to make white mice grow out of your face or cure verticilllium wilt or something.
Early on in my history with Prozac one of the doctors I visited actually instructed me to drink diet pop every day with my meals. 'It's the aspartame', he explained. 'It metabolizes into a mild psychoactive that operates on the pleasure centers of the brain. The pop companies know this and that's why it's selling so well, you see. ' The same doctor also told me to eat some chocolate at least once a day for the theobromines. I don't have a problem with that, to be sure. What cast a shadow of suspicion on all this left-of-center advice for me was when the same doctor told me to drink a shotglass of Linseed oil every day.
Drink.
A SHOTGLASS of linseed oil.
You thin paint with linseed oil.
I decided, no, I'll just have to risk squeaking or whatever dire ill that was supposed to prevent. I'll just eat more chocolate to make up for it.
_______________________________
* Someone send Katy for the smelling salts!!
Nah, fuck the ammonium carbonate; pass the laudenum. If I'm gonna have 'digestive disorders' then I might as well enjoy it.
**in particular their 'Curiosity Cola'. It sounds like it has a two-headed calf floating around in it. I am all for that.
A lot of these things started out as tonics of one sort or another...usually claiming to treat fatigue and constipation, which back in them thar days was referred to as 'digestive disorder' because it simply would not do to say 'constipation'. In fact I've taken a fit of the fan-tods just writing it.*
Dandelion and Burdock I cannot figure out. It seems to have been inspired by misguided thrift ("Oo lookit the brown guck running off the compost heap, Nigel! Got to be something we could make out of that!") Fentimans makes it, along with a small but interesting selection of other mildly wackoid-sounding beverages.** Apparently it's being craft-brewed and marketed on the 'fayre' circuit in crockery bottles coated with wax, which to my mind makes it sound rather more like a dangerous explosive than a soda drink, but whatever. I'll tell you what, betcha its diuretic as old billy heck. And everyone knows that if you deliberately take something that makes you spend a lot of time in the bathroom then it has to be doing some good, right? Right.
D&B has a relative in the American Dr. Browns Cel-Ray soda, a pop made from celery seed extract. Celery seed is diuretic too. Once again: what induced urination is supposed to do to promote good health is a mystery to me. I figure it has to do with the fact that all this stuff was invented before they had television.
Vimto seems to have entered the market as a constipation remedy. Even though they adamantly refuse to release the secret formula, you have only to look at the adsite design to discern that Vimto is made from raspberries, other berries, and green cocktail olives. Just thinking about it makes me feel regular.
This has it's parallel in the American beverage Dr. Pepper, which is carbonated prune juice, and tastes like this:
...southbound end of a northbound Tato
There used to be numbers on the label that told you what time to 'take' it each day, but they made them discontinue that in the 1960's because not even stoned people believed it cured anything by that point.
Irn Bru started life as an invigorant. Now to me, that sounds suspiciously like a Scottish version of Hadacol (oh look it up) to me. Their vague description of the flavor as 'light, citrusy, and refreshing' leads me to believe that it also tastes like Hadacol; ie, thin mud. This puts it in the same butch as fuck classification as neat gin as far as I'm concerned... you drink it because you're hard, and if you have anything to get hard it makes it harder.
Personally I don't think any of it does jack shit. It's like Bach flower remedies. It's all marketing. I remember when aspartame first came out and everyone was making all kinds of claims for it, too. It was supposed to make white mice grow out of your face or cure verticilllium wilt or something.
Early on in my history with Prozac one of the doctors I visited actually instructed me to drink diet pop every day with my meals. 'It's the aspartame', he explained. 'It metabolizes into a mild psychoactive that operates on the pleasure centers of the brain. The pop companies know this and that's why it's selling so well, you see. ' The same doctor also told me to eat some chocolate at least once a day for the theobromines. I don't have a problem with that, to be sure. What cast a shadow of suspicion on all this left-of-center advice for me was when the same doctor told me to drink a shotglass of Linseed oil every day.
Drink.
A SHOTGLASS of linseed oil.
You thin paint with linseed oil.
I decided, no, I'll just have to risk squeaking or whatever dire ill that was supposed to prevent. I'll just eat more chocolate to make up for it.
_______________________________
* Someone send Katy for the smelling salts!!
Nah, fuck the ammonium carbonate; pass the laudenum. If I'm gonna have 'digestive disorders' then I might as well enjoy it.
**in particular their 'Curiosity Cola'. It sounds like it has a two-headed calf floating around in it. I am all for that.
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
GO HERE.
Cultural Snow: We don't do God
He's right. He's absolutely right.
Here he is.
Footman, your fu is unbeatable.
He's right. He's absolutely right.
Here he is.
Footman, your fu is unbeatable.
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Red Snake Final Hour of Plaid Payback!
What is that weird flavor in energy drinks? The really sickly sweet one, kind of bubblegum mixed with perm solution? It's HORRIBLE! And they all taste like that!
People kept telling me that Sobe Adrenaline Rush 'Juiced' was different. I tried it. AUGH! There was that flavor again, only this time it was joined by what tasted and smelled like the gross syrup off a can of peaches. Of course I was driving, and of course I cracked the can and took a big ol' glug of it. I almost had to pull over to the side of the road. For the rest of the day I could smell it...on my breath, on my hands, in my sweat and every time I took a whiz...which it tinted a scary neon tangerine color. I'll stick with coffee.
Sobe also scored another miss with their 'Lizard Blizzard'. It's thick, its white, and it's a liquid. Was it entirely necessary that the name rhyme with 'jizz'? Am I missing something? Am I not the target market? It's always the last soda in the case Tuesday night when they restock. Second to last is Orbitz. It's a measure of just how deeply revolting this whole concept is, even to stoned people, that they'd sooner buy clear shampoo looking crap with little blue and orange spheres floating around in it like a lava lamp than a nice cold bottle of Lizard jizz.
Of course every time I like a new beverage that comes out they discontinue it. It is obvious to me that this is a conspiracy. I loved 'Jolt' Cola. LOVED the stuff. Discontinued here. You have to drive all the way to Blaine to get a Jolt Cola now and that defeats the purpose if you ask me. V8 with lemon? Drank it by the quart. Gone. Shasta Red Apple soda was excellent stuff! Came out about 1970; tasted exactly like a Red Delicious apple. Of course it's gone. Stewarts Strawberry cream soda? Tastes exactly like one of those yummy strawberry candies they use to stuff the corners of Hickory Farms holiday baskets. Discontinued locally. And remember Pepsi Free, the one that had the lemon flavoring in it? Came out about 1985? Gone. Lasted one year. You had to buy it out of one of those talking pop machines, which is probably why it got discontinued come to think of it because those things were freaky. 'HEY! Have a Pepsi!' it would shout, and my daughter would leap out of the shopping cart face first.
Grape and Strawberry Nehi? Gone. RC Cola-the BEST tasting cola ever made? Auf Wieder, Zane. And what about Dr. Browns? Betcha never heard of it, huh. (Shhh, G.)
Dr. Browns is the gold standard of pop. Dr. Browns is the Cadillac of pop. Not a bad flavor in the entire Dr. Browns lineup, and all of them made with juice-not chemicals. How good was Browns? They made celery pop and people drank it. Yup. Carbonated celery juice. One you got used to the idea (and you had to get used to the idea every time you took a sip) it was ok...kind of salady. Not my favorite. But drinkable.
Now. Do you think the Coca Cola Corporation has that kind of balls? Oh hell no. Only Bad Dr. Brown had the balls to make celery soda pop. He was like ' My pop-making fu is so badass I could make pop out of brown paper grocery bags and you'd like it. Yeah you would.'
I miss Dr. Brown.
Good thing there's beer.
People kept telling me that Sobe Adrenaline Rush 'Juiced' was different. I tried it. AUGH! There was that flavor again, only this time it was joined by what tasted and smelled like the gross syrup off a can of peaches. Of course I was driving, and of course I cracked the can and took a big ol' glug of it. I almost had to pull over to the side of the road. For the rest of the day I could smell it...on my breath, on my hands, in my sweat and every time I took a whiz...which it tinted a scary neon tangerine color. I'll stick with coffee.
Sobe also scored another miss with their 'Lizard Blizzard'. It's thick, its white, and it's a liquid. Was it entirely necessary that the name rhyme with 'jizz'? Am I missing something? Am I not the target market? It's always the last soda in the case Tuesday night when they restock. Second to last is Orbitz. It's a measure of just how deeply revolting this whole concept is, even to stoned people, that they'd sooner buy clear shampoo looking crap with little blue and orange spheres floating around in it like a lava lamp than a nice cold bottle of Lizard jizz.
Of course every time I like a new beverage that comes out they discontinue it. It is obvious to me that this is a conspiracy. I loved 'Jolt' Cola. LOVED the stuff. Discontinued here. You have to drive all the way to Blaine to get a Jolt Cola now and that defeats the purpose if you ask me. V8 with lemon? Drank it by the quart. Gone. Shasta Red Apple soda was excellent stuff! Came out about 1970; tasted exactly like a Red Delicious apple. Of course it's gone. Stewarts Strawberry cream soda? Tastes exactly like one of those yummy strawberry candies they use to stuff the corners of Hickory Farms holiday baskets. Discontinued locally. And remember Pepsi Free, the one that had the lemon flavoring in it? Came out about 1985? Gone. Lasted one year. You had to buy it out of one of those talking pop machines, which is probably why it got discontinued come to think of it because those things were freaky. 'HEY! Have a Pepsi!' it would shout, and my daughter would leap out of the shopping cart face first.
Grape and Strawberry Nehi? Gone. RC Cola-the BEST tasting cola ever made? Auf Wieder, Zane. And what about Dr. Browns? Betcha never heard of it, huh. (Shhh, G.)
Dr. Browns is the gold standard of pop. Dr. Browns is the Cadillac of pop. Not a bad flavor in the entire Dr. Browns lineup, and all of them made with juice-not chemicals. How good was Browns? They made celery pop and people drank it. Yup. Carbonated celery juice. One you got used to the idea (and you had to get used to the idea every time you took a sip) it was ok...kind of salady. Not my favorite. But drinkable.
Now. Do you think the Coca Cola Corporation has that kind of balls? Oh hell no. Only Bad Dr. Brown had the balls to make celery soda pop. He was like ' My pop-making fu is so badass I could make pop out of brown paper grocery bags and you'd like it. Yeah you would.'
I miss Dr. Brown.
Good thing there's beer.
Sunday, September 23, 2007
weird food
Kind of a 'victory from the jaws of defeat' thing.
As always, the conversion charts are below so you don't have to make a long distance call to the United States and ask George Bush what 375 degrees is in Celsius. Anyway I can just about guarantee he doesn't know.
*****************
I know this sounds bizarre but it's REALLY good. You could call it
PASTA TACHINO FLORENTINE
if it makes you feel better.
1/2 block cream cheese (4 oz)
2-more or less- loose handfuls of spinach leaves, stemmed washed and dried
1/2 lb smoked turkey chopped
2 tbls ranch dressing
2 tbls Sandwich Onions
1/2 cup yogurt
1 plain, untoasted bagel torn up into really small pieces
***********
Run it all through the cuisinart until it's as mixed as it can possibly get. In mine this means a thick, grainy paste.
Dump over HOT pasta, and toss to combine. Linguine is nice for serving hot (as is running this under the broiler for a couple of seconds to brown the top before you serve it. As a matter of fact this would make a kickass casserole with a little milk added, maybe some pecorino grated on top...? I should try that. )
To serve cold, use something really bumpy like radiatore or shells. Toss with hot noodles, and use a lot more sauce than you think you'll need because the noodles will soak it up-then chill for a few hours.
(low fat version-neuchatel cheese, lowfat yogurt, lowfat ranch and some olive oil splashed in to fill in the blanks.)
{this is a thinner version of a ravioli filling I usually make... with white bread crumbs and smoked ham in place of the bagel and turkey, and grated mozzerella in place of the yogurt.}
oo, these are cool!{{{{{}}}}}}{{{{{{}}}}} it makes a design! {{{}{}{}{}{}}}}{{}{
*********************
UTTER FAILURE APPLE MUFFIN CAKEY THINGS
very very ugly and also really good.
3 + cups white flour- depending on humidity of day, add more during kneading
2 packets yeast
1/3 c up soft margarine-add in with dry ingredients and mix.
1 egg room temp
1 scant cup water, hot from the faucet
1/2 to 2/3 cups sugar
10 cardamom seeds
1/2 tsp gr.cinnamon
1/2 tsp gr. nutmeg
FILLING:
1 1/2 cup applesauce
1/3 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup gingersnap cookie crumbs...blend into a fine paste in cuisinart, then add
1/3 cup coarse chopped almond
Stir to combine.
NOTE: in this recipe, yeast is as much a flavor ingredient as it is leavening. This dough won't rise very much once the filling is stirred in so don't freak out. What you want are stretchy lengths of gluteny dough in ribbons and blooms through the finished muffins.
Dump dry ingredients and margarine into cuisinart, blend. Yes, even the yeast. This isn't 1888; you don't need to proof the damn yeast.
Put the spices into the hot water and whir in a blender or with an immersion mixer for a couple of minutes. Let this steep for awhile,like a half hour or so, until the water is cooled down to room temp. Then pass through a strainer, discarding spice residue. (This keeps any spice bread from becoming too rank to eat over time like some do. Cardamom is bad for doing this; so are cloves.) Drop in egg and mix slightly, just to get it scrambled around.
Turn on the cuisinart and pour the wet ingredients in. When the mixture cleans the bowl, turn off the machine, cover with a towel and ignore for 20 minutes.
Turn out on board and knead, adding in flour when the mixture gets sticky, which will be often. You want it very loosey goosey. After about three or four minutes, set dough aside in a covered bowl in a warm place to rise for 1 hour.
Have a muffin pan ready.
Turn the dough out onto the counter and roll it flat. Spread the filling out all over the top of it. Roll it up on itself and then plunk it back into the rising bowl and mash it around a little by driving a spatula through it. It should start to get goopy and disgusting looking. Good! Don't beat the hell out of it, just goop it about a couple of times. It'll tear, the filling will glick out; that's fine.
Using a large spoon or your hands, fill the muffin cups with big disgusting glops of this mixture.
I have a muffin pan with really big muffin shapes so it all fits, but yours might be different. Don't worry, you can do two batches or use two pans or whatever.
Set aside to rise for 20 minutes; it won't, very much.
Meanwhile, preheat oven to 375.
Heave into the heated oven and cook for 40 minutes-I had to go 40+ because it was raining.
What comes out is horrible looking and it tastes DEEEEEVINE! Crunchy in places, goopy in places, cakey in some, bready in others, and almonds for crunchiness. All the tastes harmonize and it isn't just some homogenous sweet thing. Every bite is a little different.
(So yeah, this is basically a filled coffee bread that failed. Not enough flour in the dough, could of used another egg, and the filling was WAY too wet. Should of used apple butter instead of sauce and less at that, and a few more gingersnaps. Still, I did invent these rockin little muffies!)
____________________________________________
**
Fahrenheit to Celsius conversion...
http://www.wbuf.noaa.gov/tempfc.htm
and here is a conversion chart for all kinds of shit, including cooking nomenclature. scroll down to choose the conversion category you want:
http://www.convert-me.com/en/convert/cooking
As always, the conversion charts are below so you don't have to make a long distance call to the United States and ask George Bush what 375 degrees is in Celsius. Anyway I can just about guarantee he doesn't know.
*****************
I know this sounds bizarre but it's REALLY good. You could call it
PASTA TACHINO FLORENTINE
if it makes you feel better.
1/2 block cream cheese (4 oz)
2-more or less- loose handfuls of spinach leaves, stemmed washed and dried
1/2 lb smoked turkey chopped
2 tbls ranch dressing
2 tbls Sandwich Onions
1/2 cup yogurt
1 plain, untoasted bagel torn up into really small pieces
***********
Run it all through the cuisinart until it's as mixed as it can possibly get. In mine this means a thick, grainy paste.
Dump over HOT pasta, and toss to combine. Linguine is nice for serving hot (as is running this under the broiler for a couple of seconds to brown the top before you serve it. As a matter of fact this would make a kickass casserole with a little milk added, maybe some pecorino grated on top...? I should try that. )
To serve cold, use something really bumpy like radiatore or shells. Toss with hot noodles, and use a lot more sauce than you think you'll need because the noodles will soak it up-then chill for a few hours.
(low fat version-neuchatel cheese, lowfat yogurt, lowfat ranch and some olive oil splashed in to fill in the blanks.)
{this is a thinner version of a ravioli filling I usually make... with white bread crumbs and smoked ham in place of the bagel and turkey, and grated mozzerella in place of the yogurt.}
oo, these are cool!{{{{{}}}}}}{{{{{{}}}}} it makes a design! {{{}{}{}{}{}}}}{{}{
*********************
UTTER FAILURE APPLE MUFFIN CAKEY THINGS
very very ugly and also really good.
3 + cups white flour- depending on humidity of day, add more during kneading
2 packets yeast
1/3 c up soft margarine-add in with dry ingredients and mix.
1 egg room temp
1 scant cup water, hot from the faucet
1/2 to 2/3 cups sugar
10 cardamom seeds
1/2 tsp gr.cinnamon
1/2 tsp gr. nutmeg
FILLING:
1 1/2 cup applesauce
1/3 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup gingersnap cookie crumbs...blend into a fine paste in cuisinart, then add
1/3 cup coarse chopped almond
Stir to combine.
NOTE: in this recipe, yeast is as much a flavor ingredient as it is leavening. This dough won't rise very much once the filling is stirred in so don't freak out. What you want are stretchy lengths of gluteny dough in ribbons and blooms through the finished muffins.
Dump dry ingredients and margarine into cuisinart, blend. Yes, even the yeast. This isn't 1888; you don't need to proof the damn yeast.
Put the spices into the hot water and whir in a blender or with an immersion mixer for a couple of minutes. Let this steep for awhile,like a half hour or so, until the water is cooled down to room temp. Then pass through a strainer, discarding spice residue. (This keeps any spice bread from becoming too rank to eat over time like some do. Cardamom is bad for doing this; so are cloves.) Drop in egg and mix slightly, just to get it scrambled around.
Turn on the cuisinart and pour the wet ingredients in. When the mixture cleans the bowl, turn off the machine, cover with a towel and ignore for 20 minutes.
Turn out on board and knead, adding in flour when the mixture gets sticky, which will be often. You want it very loosey goosey. After about three or four minutes, set dough aside in a covered bowl in a warm place to rise for 1 hour.
Have a muffin pan ready.
Turn the dough out onto the counter and roll it flat. Spread the filling out all over the top of it. Roll it up on itself and then plunk it back into the rising bowl and mash it around a little by driving a spatula through it. It should start to get goopy and disgusting looking. Good! Don't beat the hell out of it, just goop it about a couple of times. It'll tear, the filling will glick out; that's fine.
Using a large spoon or your hands, fill the muffin cups with big disgusting glops of this mixture.
I have a muffin pan with really big muffin shapes so it all fits, but yours might be different. Don't worry, you can do two batches or use two pans or whatever.
Set aside to rise for 20 minutes; it won't, very much.
Meanwhile, preheat oven to 375.
Heave into the heated oven and cook for 40 minutes-I had to go 40+ because it was raining.
What comes out is horrible looking and it tastes DEEEEEVINE! Crunchy in places, goopy in places, cakey in some, bready in others, and almonds for crunchiness. All the tastes harmonize and it isn't just some homogenous sweet thing. Every bite is a little different.
(So yeah, this is basically a filled coffee bread that failed. Not enough flour in the dough, could of used another egg, and the filling was WAY too wet. Should of used apple butter instead of sauce and less at that, and a few more gingersnaps. Still, I did invent these rockin little muffies!)
____________________________________________
**
Fahrenheit to Celsius conversion...
http://www.wbuf.noaa.gov/tempfc.htm
and here is a conversion chart for all kinds of shit, including cooking nomenclature. scroll down to choose the conversion category you want:
http://www.convert-me.com/en/convert/cooking
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