Annoying Questions To Which I Received No Response: Part 7 of 17
[asked by me of an incredulous Randy mere days after we somehow managed to collectively claw and coax our shriveled organs back from the brink of grease-soaked disaster by eating nothing but hothouse tomatoes and little scraps torn from the Bible, and after numerous—in point of fact almost hourly—discussions concerning lean protein and responsibility and living wills and vitamin B12:]
“I know how this looks, Baby, but just answer me this: is cinnamon--or is cinnamon not--a mineral?"
Airwick Seafood Scented Candle. Hide yours. I'm coming over.
Randy and I just got home from Mexico. I’ll spare you the vicious, shuddering details and simply say that my four-hour car ride home was divided three ways:
1) eyes squeezed shut, trying to deduce exactly how many hours the human body can go without a vegetable and still maintain basic functions while attempting to approximate my specific “YOU ARE HERE” square on the mall map that is “ALIVE” and, consequently, how close my personal square might be to the proverbial “END” (second floor, in between Charlotte Russe and Gap Body);
2) eyes squeezed shut, earnestly discussing with Randy the benefits of a diet based solely on fresh-squeezed juice, noting with joy that we already own a brand new fifteen-thousand dollar juicer because I’m super good with cash like that, and also noting that every time my lips form the words “fresh squeezed juice” I can feel my ravaged innards rally slightly and quiver with fresh hope;
3) eyes squeezed shut, whimpering.
Suffice it to say, it was a rather long—and for me, rather dark—four hours.
Upon arriving home, I immediately stripped off my sandpaper four-day shorts and gave them strict instructions to jump into the washing machine and to wait for me. And as Randy began wolfing down half a brown banana, I emptied my bag. Whereupon I came to the following somewhat disheartening conclusions:
1) Gym shorts? Sneakers? Mp3 player complete with fancy traveling armband? YOU ARE NEVER EVER EVER EVER GOING TO GET UP EARLY AND GO FOR A RUN ON THE BEACH, ERIN. FUCKING EVER, OKAY? JESUS.
2) You know what’s sort of cute and fun and sentimental when you’re like seventeen and on a Mexican beach vacation? Bringing home your bottle caps! Isn’t that precious? Because each of those, what, eight? bottle caps has a specific nostalgic significance and maybe you can put them in a little glass votive candle holder so you can look at them wistfully and remember Bottle Cap #4: The One That Jon’s Cute Friend Adam From New Zealand Wrote His Initials On Right Before He Pressed It Into Your Hand Late That Night, Standing In The Murmuring Surf At Low Tide, With Nothing But The Stars And The Breeze Soft Like A Rose And His Giant Nineteen-Year-Old Kiwi Boner...
You know what’s less cute? Getting into the habit of pitching the bottle caps that you wrench off by the threes into your bag. Because after four days of pretty much nonstop wrenching, the immigration radar sensors are going to hone in on you like a scud missile six-pack and start speed dialing the Pentagon. When I opened my bag I realized that I finally had enough bottle caps to make that campy coffee table top... and enough left over to build a water filtration plant.
3) On Sunday afternoon Randy and I walked inside the condo only to be assuaged by the unmistakable reek of shellfish. Since we ourselves had been on a strict diet of God’s good graces, we knew that we were not responsible. And after about ten minutes of walking around, sniffing taps and opening drawers to no avail, we sort of forgot about it, hoping that the smell would magically abate on its own. Which it did in fact seem to do. And this was worrisome in and of itself to some degree; I grimly asked Randy whether he thought that the shellfish smell had magically drifted out? or whether maybe we had just become so used to the stench we didn’t realize that we were now snuggly nestled within it’s smelly folds. Being a man and thus not that interested in the first place, he assured me that the smell had disappeared.
But I just unpacked this bag, right, and as I did so in a room that I use primarily for cleaning things (and not, in comparison, for being completely ridiculous) I think I speak with some level of confidence and authority when I say that shrimp will cuddle up next to you and weave their shrimpy tentacles around you so tightly that suddenly you catch yourself wincing at a whiff of fresh air. I had to wash everything in that bag—even all the stuff I took and didn’t wear—just to snap my clothes out of it. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: never trust a prawn.
So now that I've unloaded my bag into the washer and I'm thoroughly disgusted by pretty much everything—not least of which being my impending doom since Randy just ate the only piece of food in the house that doesn’t come wrapped in cellophane or end in “—ce cream”—I grab the car keys and storm out to the driveway. I figure that a torso-sized In-N-Out burger has lettuce and tomato on it, and just to really prove to my body my serious dedication to keeping it out of a coma, I’ll have them throw some onion on there to really round out the vitamins and minerals. See, body? You big fucking whine bag? I hop in Randy’s truck because in his haste to not die of scurvy he parked it like a barge blocking the driveway and I head to In-N-Out.
And sitting in the drive-thru lane sort of half leaning against the door I catch sight of myself in the side-view mirror. And you know how sometimes when you’re expecting the worst but then you’re pleasantly surprised to find yourself not quite as repulsed as you had originally imagined that you would be? Yeah, imagine the opposite of that. I’m sitting there doing everything I can to not make eye contact with myself in any of the eleven thousand mirrors on this stupid truck of narcissism (there’s a mirror on the stereo? Seriously?) when the adorably fresh-faced burger girl comes to the window. I try to take my gigantorm paper tray of food from her sweet little hands without a) turning her to stone, or b) passing on my humbling and potentially incurable shellfish ailment when she suddenly pulls the food back and I almost fall out the window in pursuit.
“I love this song!” Seventeen-If-She’s-A-Day exclaims.
I listen. It’s Don McLean’s American Pie on a CD I made for Randy about a hundred years ago. I had tuned it out because the same song had been playing when Randy raged into the driveway like a prisoner of war tucking up to the buffet and it had been playing the whole time I had been sitting there because American Pie is arguably one of the longest songs in the history of long and that’s why it was so impressive when I sang it front to back that time at karaoke without the lyrics on the screen and standing on the table.
“What’s it called?” SiSaD asked sincerely. “It reminds me of when my mom used to take me to my grandparents’ cabin and I love it. I just can never figure out what song it is.”
I have to say that I was struck then. By the simplicity and sweetness of this little girl in a stupid hat working the take out window at a burger place. And I stopped trying to avoid my own reflection for a minute and I smiled and told her the name of the song.
“Here,” I said, pulling the CD out of the player. “You can have it. I think it’s song number nine.” Or something, I don’t know, I made up a number. She’ll find it, it’s the one that’s thirty-six minutes long. (“Hey! Lonesome Loser! This reminds me of that time BEFORE I WAS BORN.”)
She was infinitely appreciative. I think that if In-N-Out had like a platelet IV deal on their value menu she would have upgraded me free of charge. And now that I’m home and the laundry’s moving and the bathtub is filling up and it’s been more than five minutes since I’ve caught the scent of shrimp in my nostrils (which, hi, I think we’ve established means exactly dick), I feel pretty good, too. So I guess if there has to be a moral here—and if we want to avoid easy stereotypes and not make that moral about alcohol abuse, or having enough self-respect to take good care of your body, or maintaining personal dignity—I think the moral has to be about the uplifting power of giving. And about how you should park straight in the driveway like a human being if you have shit in your car that you’d like to keep.
"It's like a photograph, only realer."
Amy Chop's man
Matt painted this rendition of my
recent trip to Crown King, Arizona.
"I drew you a picture which," writes Matt, "in my humble and honest opinion, is EXACTLY what it looked like outside your hut, or yurt, or whatever it was you stayed in."
Well,
Matt, since you asked? Sort of? It was a chicken coop. I guess technically it was a "
chik'in coop", the change in spelling no doubt meant to cutely acknowledge the long and arduous artistic engineering process by which said "chicken coop" became a "coop for humans", namely taking the chickens out and putting in a couch. In point of fact, we were upgraded against our will to the "coop" from the "garden view suite", and though I certainly oozed graciousness (as you can well imagine) I spent the whole weekend trying to discern where that extra $50 a night was justified. Is it $75 more a night to sleep in the converted pig barn? For a hundred more can you bunk out back in a quasi-abandoned coyote den clawed into the rockface?
But I digress.
When Randy and I walked the thirteen paces from the coop to the bar on Saturday night (if only to stop the patrons from screaming, "Serious, ya'll come on outta that coop, now!") there was a gentleman sitting on the steps outside of the bar. It took me a minute to figure out why he looked familiar, but then I noticed the man's gigantic black dog yoked to a nailed down picnic table with a tow chain and I realized that he reminded me of the fourth horseman of the Apocalypse. (At first I was thinking maybe third horseman, but no, this guy had more blood on his pants.)
So then Randy-- my beloved Bastion of Important Social Context Clues-- goes, "Hey, that's the biggest lab I've ever seen!" And this for me was kind of like in
Waterworld when
Enola tells The Mariner that she wishes she had mutated webbed feet like his, and Helen's so completely horrified by this glaring social faux pas that she almost spits out her mouthful of raw sea beast. Because seriously, Randy, are you TRYING to get us thrown off this boat right now?
So then The Mariner/Horseman #4 goes, "She's not a lab, she's a rottweiler/akita mix," and I wanted to make a joke about how yeah, labs don't generally chew on bones with the fur still on, but instead I just kept my mind on dry land and pushed Randy inside.
Where he (and I'm not making this up) immediately hired the band to play this year's formal Christmas party for his fundraising group.
So, wait... dogs! Dogs, right? I think I just wanted to point out that the Paint hellbeast above is the same one that Matt gave us in his
last piece in which he lambasted my piss poor hair stylist*** for being a cheap truck chick. I loved it then and I love it now. I better love it next time, Matt. No pressure, though.
*** Did I mention that she got fired? Because she totally did.
At any rate I'd be willing to bet that Andy Dick wouldn't scamper over and lick him on the forehead.
Randy and I watched the
Comedy Central Roast of William Shatner tonight because we'd already watched everything on HBO, the Discovery Health Channel-- as unfathomable as it seems-- was a repeat, and lately we're really putting forth a concentrated effort to stay up later than... sundown.
I was personally disappointed that no one had the stones to bring up that one time
Billy killed his wife, because this was a
roast after all, right? I mean, if a ninety-year-old Betty White can call him out on shit as controversial as his
weight and his
hair, I would think a mystery shrouded valium-soaked drowning would totally be fair game. Like Kennedy and Chappaquiddick, only with more fictional outer space and less running the country. Or... the opposite of that, whichever applies.
You know who I'd like to see roasted? O.J. Simpson. It'd be about twelve minutes of sweaty, straight-backed jokes about football and rental cars, maybe someone would work up the nerve to stammer the word "glove", and then at the end everyone could race each other to the fucking parking lot.
"Green Acres" made its television debut!
This afternoon I got home just in time to catch the last five minutes of Jeopardy. And because I was currently boasting about an eight out of ten on the intelligence Richter scale for the day (I managed to not lock my keys in the ignition but I
did drop my wallet in the toilet), I decided that it was time to put an end to my brilliant streak. I've found that if I allow myself to maintain a seven or an eight on the scale for too long the pressure starts to get to me. At some point I start blindly ramming my head into door jams and tripping over door jellies and doing word search puzzles instead of crosswords. It's better for everyone if I just hover around a five-and-a-half. Maybe a fleeting six if I've just read Newsweek sober.
Anyway. So the last commercial ends and I see that I'm just in time for Final Jeopardy:
"In 1994, 25 years after this event, [someone famous] said [something like], 'for a moment, we were creatures in a cosmic ocean' [or something, whatever]."It took me approximately half the Jeopardy song to subtract 25 from 1994. And once I got to 1969, I actually knew what the answer was! My intelligence Richter rumbled up toward eight-and-a-half and I had to fight against the raw preservation instinct to slam my hand in a drawer or try to use the remote control as a telephone.
When the music stopped and Alex turned to the contestants for their answers, I realized that this was the Jeopardy
Teen Tournament. During the on-air deliberation period I guess my eyes had been fixed in space while I concentrated on carrying the four. If I had been able to do simple math in my head without going into a trance and summoning a genie, I might have seen the screen and realized that all three contestants were roughly fourteen years old.
They all got it right, too, by the way. The bad news is that my basic math and history skills are roughly on par with the Junior High set. But hey, the good news is that I don't have to pour Palmolive in the dishwasher again to get down to "even". It's all about the balance, see.
Feet: warm and smart or cold and wily? Either way, let's face it-- they're probably not getting into a good college.
My new part-time job office-- in addition to being totally fantastic-- is a trifle cold and yesterday my
flopped-out feet got a little numb. So this morning I dug some socks out of Randy's drawer and strapped on a pair of sneakers I dragged out of a plastic tote I found in the
Luggage Room.
And then my feet completely freaked out like they were a couple of thorny-haired little animal kids living in a tin shed behind the burned-out cotton gin in some bullshit town where chain link fence is highbrow, and like
I was the truancy officer riding up on my tractor to try to get
somebody's little hillbilly ass to the
schoolhouse for the second day in a goddamned row. MY FEET DON'T NEED NO FANCY BOOK LEARNIN'!
So I immediately kicked those shoes off and reflopped. And my feet were cold again today, but whatever. Maybe later I'll take them down to put some pennies on the train track or roll down a hill in a rotting tire or start a crystal meth lab or something to warm up.
With a side dish of spider legs and electricity.
I made crab cakes for dinner the other night from scratch. I also made a remoulade. Also from scratch. Of the five people in this household only three of us have even the tiniest fondness for crabs in cake form: of those three people, one is just being polite, one
thought she liked crab cakes until she realized with disappointment that there isn't any actual
cake involved, and then the other one is me. (I really like crab cakes. Watch as I make seven thousand of them.) And I knew this going in, right, but I'll be honest-- it's two days later and there are probably still eleven or twelve sort of sticky little crab guys in my refrigerator right now, all checking their little crab watches, and my patience and my feelings are wearing increasingly thin. Somebody needs to get in there and start coughing down some fucking c²s. Somebody besides me. In the past three days I've choked back more c² than I ever thought possible or prudent; every time I walk through the kitchen to fold laundry or go to the bathroom I end up cramming another sweaty cake in my maw. I've tried guilt, I've tried tears, I've tried casually mentioning that the crab
alone cost like $24. Not to mention how expensive the ... celery was. All to no avail. Last night I had four cold, somewhat damp crab cakes for dinner. Randy had microwaved taquitos. When I passionately threw a clammy c² at his head he didn't even try to dodge it-- as it slapped him in the dome I heard him brace and then mentally subtract that one from the total. He managed to wedge one inside my Sunday waffle this morning, working off the sneaky assumption that my palate would be so weighed down and sodden with three days of crab cake spices and crab cake bitterness that I wouldn't even notice. I didn't.
Okay, I don't have a point. Just that starting tomorrow the only things on the menu are things that the house or the refrigerator can make themselves. Like ice. And dust. Everyone can just sit down to dinner and enjoy dust shakes with paint chips and lint balls. And also I can't fit into any of my pants.
"Could somebody go back and bring me some Tide? Please? I'll be right here."
I went to Costco today to pick up laundry detergent and... approximately $90 worth of other crap I totally don't need, and much to my orgasmic delight and/or horror I stumbled upon an advertised demo stereo that was blasting "
Boston". I quickly discovered that I was only physically able to move my cart in a thirty-foot radius
around said stereo, and thus I was only able to purchase batteries and replacement ink jet cartridges. Eventually management came around and lured me out of the store by blasting Jethro Tull in the parking lot. I think that must happen a lot. They had a boom box and an extension cord all ready and everything.
For the love of God, SLOW THAT SHIT DOWN ALREADY.
Crown King was fantastic, thanks for asking. The only hotel in town is really just a quaint little series of cabins. They're quaint. They're little. They're the only game in town. During the day our cabin was completely adorable; tiny little couch, tiny little shower, someone's tiny little girl running around yelling in the windows, bringing me filthy blackberries and asking for string cheese. At night it was a slightly different story. It's funny how we didn't realize until we were completely exhausted and ready for bed that our mattress was harder than a slab of concrete getting a lap dance. And also that our cabin was situated at the fulcrum of a deafening Bermuda triangle of awesome; one angle boasted the bar-- serving cheap drinks until three, a live band in the parking lot playing until four because of the Eight Time "Mustang Sally" Mandate (no one goes home until that bitch is eight times rode), and at the other angle was the church. A small, squarish, innocuous enough building until you realize with horror that the six speakers wired to the exterior are in charge of pumping gospel music out into the open air twenty-four hours a day. I would qualify this with "bad" gospel music, but come on.
It was a trifecta of romance, really. I couldn't have planned it any better. I mean, when outlining a romantic weekend I always try to make sure that we're slated to spend all of our restful horizontal time on a surface hard enough to rival corrugated steel. And I make it a point to keep a tape deck and a slew of gospel tapes on hand because seriously, there's nothing hotter than trying to get it on with peppy, unstoppable hymns in the background. And I think the aphrodisiac power of live, super sloppy Mustang Sally on repeat at o'dark-thirty goes without saying.
Pictures that include exactly none of what I just talked about on flickr. I'm going to bed. I'm still fucking tired.
You ain't crashed into a ravine 'til you've crashed into a ravine full of panthers, boy. Mess you up.
Randy and I are driving up to
Crown King tomorrow for the weekend. This will be the second time we've been there and the first time that we've been there on purpose. That first time we accidentally ended up in Crown King after I steadfastly refused to attempt a turn around on the narrowest, most treacherous road in the universe. I
did try to turn around about a half-hour in, but then Randy screamed something about a rattlesnake*** and I bashed the fender into a mountain. After that I was pretty staunchly committed to our current direction which, happily, eventually led into Crown King and not into a 400-foot ravine full of panthers or a blazing wildfire or a Super Walmart.
Reasons why Crown King is the most awesome hidden ghost town at the end of the worst road to fucking nowhere ever:
1) The public library is open on Wednesdays from like 1:00 to 3:30. We've got eleven books, motherfucker; get in and get out.
2) There are three (3!) year-round students enrolled in the town school. Although, that may be old information. One of them may have since dropped out, someone may have succumbed to the temptation to sit around open-mouthed all day, staring at the AIR.
3) Every time there's a fire (which according to the informational paper menu at the town's one restaurant is obnoxiously often) the whole town burns to the ground while everyone hustles to save the bar.
4) The bar. It's ridiculously old, it's ugly, there are dirty hooker rooms upstairs that you can rent, and it smells suspiciously like it's on fire all the time.
5) When I called the hotel just now to make a reservation, it went to voicemail: "You have reached the voicemail of... 'Crown King'. Please leave a message." Dude, I got THE TOWN'S voicemail.
6) That first time as we were driving around in nine-wheel drive trying to figure out where the hell we were, we passed this random family who was out looking for their dog. It turned out that Randy and this guy actually knew each other, so they invited us back to their cabin for a drink. For the rest of the afternoon we sat on their porch drinking cold beer in the woods, watching the kids run around laughing and catching fireflies and ladybugs and shit, and just as the sun set over the mountains and a soft breeze came up out of the east to stir the leaves around a bit, just as I was closing my eyes and leaning against Randy and thinking to myself that life didn't get much more perfect than this,
their goddamned missing dog came home.
Yeah. Exactly. I could go on and on, but then you'd just be all jealous and bitter because you're not going to a tiny badass ghost town and, ipso facto, your weekend's going to suck.
Okay! So, see you later!
*** I originally typed "rattlesnack". Ha ha! Rattlesnacks.
And I was wearing flip flops. I'm not sure what that part means.
This morning as I was leaving the house, my laptop bag got caught on a gun that was leaning against the kitchen door and knocked it down. As I was fumbling to pick it up, I stepped on a small garden snake that was slithering through the garage.
I know exactly what you’re thinking, and I know, okay, I know! I’ve been ignoring all of the less obvious signs but this morning it was just too clear to discount, even for me. I mean, what's it going to take, here? This shit's undeniably out of control. We seriously need to get on the ball and just establish our colonial independence from Britain, already. Damn.
Perhaps The Most Ungratifying Scrabble Win In History:
"Is 'IO' a word?"
"No."
"Is 'IU' a word?"
"No."
"Is 'IA' a word?"
"No."
"Is 'UI' a word?"
"No."
"Is 'UE' a word?"
"No."
"Is 'EI' a word?"
"No."
"How about 'AUE'?
"Wow. No."
"Is 'AI' a word?"
"No."
"Is 'IE' a word?"
"No."
"Is 'EU' a word?"
"No."
"Is 'IA' a word?"
"I think you already asked that. No."
"Is 'AO' a word?"
"No."
"Is 'AE' a word?"
"No."
"Is 'AR' a word?"
"For the love of God, you have an '
R' in there?"
"Yeah."
"No."
