Vickie sent me this yesterday.
Thank you, Vickie! Luckily I was at work when I opened it so my sobs of fear blended nicely with my regular sobs. Is that a knife between the shadow's teeth? Or a cigar. Or a sword? Or... a breadstick. This is obviously the shadow given off by the giant yam we keep propped up in the backyard. Proof that everything is scary in the dark. I hate that stupid yam.
New banner up at
Not Out of Character. I don't want to give too much away, but you should get up on your roof before you go look.
You Get Bonus Points If The Knife Is Between The Shadow's Teeth. But Not Any Bonus Points You Want.
Randy was out of town last night so I started off the evening by making a ridiculously bad meal while watching a
show about psychotic torture killers, and then I played a rousing game of "Guess Which Shadow Is Holding A Knife" for about nine hours.
We're having our windows cleaned this morning at the house, and one of the washers just brought me a vine that's roughly four and a half feet long. This is the guy cleaning the
inside. I wonder what the odds are on the
outside guy making it through this job without needing an epinephrine shot.
Hurts you a lot worse than it hurts me.
I was on the computer this morning with my wet hair in a towel when Randy started gathering his stuff for work.
"Guess what I'm going to do as soon as you leave," I demanded.
"Keep sitting there slumped over in your robe?"
"No."
"Go back to bed in your robe?"
"No. I mean, yeah, probably. But no."
He gave up. In his defense those are really the only two plausible answers.
"I'm going to eat the rest of the pie."
He snorted and picked up his keys. "Good luck with that."
Randy ate the pie while I was in the shower. I was stunned, blindsided by a man who apparently ran out of bacon on the wrong, horribly wrong day. So I jumped up and got dressed and sped to work, right, because I'd taken a WHOLE PIE to the office yesterday, and I clomp through the door out of breath and I run back to yank open the refrigerator and my boss is all, "Hey, it's before nine! And your hair is wet!"
"I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU GUYS ATE A WHOLE
PIE BEFORE NINE IN THE MORNING!"
I was going to leave then, maybe go back home and nurse my pielesss stomach with a nap or something, but that seemed awkward. So essentially my entire day was ruined by the fact that I opted to bathe. Won't be making
that mistake again any time soon.
Why make one pie when you can make seven and hide six?
Last night I had my standard anxiety dream (
Mrs. Kennedy and I apparently need a spa day), the one where I'm suddenly in charge of a gaggle of hand-sized infants. There are all these babies and they're all small enough to fit in my hand, and I'm terrified I'm going to squish one or lose one, and then one starts crying and I can't find it, and another one slips between the couch cushions, you get the idea. It's a lot of fun. So last night everything was moving along as per dream norm and I'd reached the point where I'd lost a bunch of them under mountains of comforters and some other ones I'd forgotten to feed, one slipped down the drain, all standard dream issue, and then totally out of nowhere in walks Saddam Hussein trying to light a pipe. So I just woke up. I can't win that. The tiny baby situation might have turned around, I might have rallied. Found a few before they crawled into the yard, fished a couple out of the sink, but you throw me Saddam Hussein strolling around playing with matches and I'm out.
He can worry about which microscopic baby hasn't eaten in the last two days. I wash my dream hands of it. (Albeit carefully and with the drain closed.)
Sweetheart
Jen (and Charlotte) kept me company on the phone yesterday while I prepared a huge roasted meal. Really I was just hanging out in my pajamas basting stuff periodically and trying not to eat a whole pie. I got an A+ in basting and a D- in not eating all the pie. Just so you know, Jen, if yesterday's meal sounded impressive? Tonight Randy's having cheddar cheese and raisins for dinner. He found a couple of broken Triscuits a minute ago and he was pretty excited about that. It's feast or famine over here. I don't think I need to tell you what I'll be having.
I'm at work right now and I'm surrounded by piles of thirty-pound
manila folders that look like they're throwing up legal-sized paper. At first doing taxes was an energizing change of pace-- like realizing you have a crush on your friend's brother even though he's hunched over and clammy and never talks about anything but
Darkon wargaming. You don't understand anything he says but he smiled at you once when you repeated something political you heard your dad say and it thrilled you, kind of, and you decided to like him even though he smells a little bit like scalp. So you find yourself hanging out at your friend's house more and more, and you start wearing a bunch of connected
keychains as a necklace because you think it makes you look indie but it just makes you look like you're a giant choking key, and after about fifteen thousand short-skirted attempts to
lipgloss the guy into a conversation that doesn't involve a
goddamned wizard, you realize this dude is seriously one
trackin' it.
That's Taxes. Taxes does not give a fuck about me. Taxes rolls his eyes when I "quit" to go to the bathroom and Taxes has made it inordinately clear that an office Happy Hour is never ever going to happen. Taxes has dead shark eyes and doesn't even know my name. Taxes wishes I would
leave his house already so he can get back to
masturbating to dragon
animae.
Somebody come get some of these folders, seriously. I don't think I can get out of this room.
About every fourth Lean Cuisine I eat there's one bite in there that reminds me entirely too tangibly that the Lean Cuisine people did not opt to invest in the high quality meat grinders. This one I just ate looks like the meat assembly line guy fell asleep on the job and let a bunch of claws and shit slip through. Chicken
Carbonara. I highly recommend it if you're into
cartilage and chicken toenails.
The sales girl was spared only by her stormtrooper helmet.
I went in Pier One yesterday because I made the mistake of driving within seventy feet of it (Pier One is the Death Star tractor beam to my
Millenium Falcon) and as I was trying to once again justify the purchase of a life-size wooden giraffe**** I saw a woman picking up a
reed diffuser thing to get a better sniff. This caught my attention immediately because really, you can't smell that? Is your nose packed with gasoline-soaked washcloths?
I could smell it before I got off the freeway. I
sort of smelled it before I left the house and so you'd think logically I would've opted to drive the Mazda and not the Corellian freighter. Clearly I'm my own
worst enemy.
I was waiting for her to start the inevitable scented oil overdose convulsions when she thoughtfully lifted the glass bottle into the air and
turned it upside down. Conceivably to look for a price tag. It's possible she wasn't actually trying to murder anybody. I jogged across the showroom with both hands over my face while this poor woman tried to wring the grapefruit/mango oil poison out of her tee shirt before her organs began to liquify and before the fumes rendered her blind and vegetative. I passed the sales girl on my way out and she rolled her eyes.
"I hope she likes that scent," she muttered. I laughed. No shit. She now officially smells like a giant fruit salad
forever. Forty years from now people will visit that woman's grave site and wonder why the whole outside suddenly smells like a grapefruit is getting it on with a mango.
****
Randy: "But where would it go?"
Me: "Are you serious? A seven-foot maple giraffe? Where
wouldn't it go?"*****
***** I am not in charge of things.
I just ate a
Kit Kat bar without breaking the pieces apart. Just bit into all four wafers like a big Kit Kat plate. It felt very extravagant and a little irreverent, like the first time you ever crumpled up a dollar bill in your hand. If Marie Antoinette had been hip to the Kit Kat, this is how I bet she would have eaten them.
I also think I'll keep wearing clothes and not learn to spear anything.
You know what seems to have largely disappeared that I don't miss at all?
Biscotti. For a while there biscotti was the swank fuel of the new latte generation and I never understood it, frankly. Like biting into a licorice-flavored pumice stone. And sometimes they'd dress it up, disguise it like a cookie and I'd fall for it only to find myself cracking a tooth on a licorice-flavored pumice stone coated in brown wax. Biscotti wrecked me and took away my inherent trust of cookies and I'm not sad to see it go. Seriously, I know there's a lot of shit wrong with our world right now but one of the things we can celebrate is that our food supply no longer has to a) be able to withstand a cross-continental foot trek in a wooly mammoth backpack, or b) taste like crap. I'm sure biscotti would have blown my mind in 1628 but I don't have the energy to fake enthusiasm for old world treats. I mean, if they start selling
pemmican by the pound at REI and everyone goes insane over pulverized meat, dried berry and rendered fat snacks, I'm probably going to stick with USDA Prime from Safeway. And unless there's a mandatory footrace across Eurasia coming up that I don't know about, I bet I'll be JUST FINE.
I know I’ve talked often about Randy’s deep love of the sand dunes—his passion for riding fast things in the sand and pitching sand-filled tents and cooking sand-infused cuisine—and likewise I believe I’ve mentioned that this isn’t a passion I particularly share. The first few times I went quasi-willingly because no one bothered to sit down and give me a quick run through of the fourteen hundred excruciating ways I was likely—nay, expected—to die out there. But my tiptoeing sense of self-preservation only allows for me to be surrounded by eleven horrifying modes of certain destruction at one time (Disneyland, for example), so a few years ago I stopped trying to trick the reaper and I began opting out entirely.
It appears as though Randy, however, has this crazy idea that couples who negotiate interests on behalf of their partners and make small sacrifices for the sake of the relationship end up stronger in the long run. And while I begrudgingly agree with this theory, I don’t remember reading in the Guide To Kicking And Shoving Your Relationship Into Another Year that these “shared interests” should necessarily include a) a very expensive and unconscious helicopter ride, b) being within thirty feet of one another, or c) me not doing exactly what I want twenty-four hours a day. Frankly I would have appreciated hearing about this whole “doing shit together” outline a few years ago before I’d put a fire under my Growing Vaguely Stronger Through Sex plan. Would have saved me a lot of spreadsheet work. Is all.
But Randy, in a valiant effort to convince me to give the sand dunes another shot, made the exorbitant and executive decision to parlay the family’s ATV supply into a sand rail. I don't want to paint myself as the catalyst; Randy really wanted this thing. It’s fast and loud and purple—everything he looks for in a woman. I mean a roller coaster. I mean a… whatever. Secondly, all of his kids were totally into it. They love riding ATVs, too, because they all boast coordination skills above level “platypus” and they have nice-sized heads that fit inside helmets, and a sand car was the natural progression of that love. Not—as I justified it— a tidy way for us to snap our necks in one big group rather than individually. But in addition to those two factors there did exist the added bonus that I would no longer be responsible for my own well-being on an ATV and Randy, all too aware of how much this platypus enjoys a good spontaneous open-eyed nap, knew this would be a huge selling point. Just strap me in and go. Like a road trip, only faster. Like a dinner party, only without the giant stroller.
So I was in. Everyone was so excited and everything, not to mention the fact that I had personally endorsed this purchase wholeheartedly. Naively secure in the knowledge that Randy’s tendency to weigh costly decisions often spins him off-topic completely (a four-year conversation about having the backyard professionally landscaped has so far resulted in five sets of blueprints, eight gallons of weed killer, three frenzied mentions of an orange tree orchard, and new purple acrylic glasses from Costco), I rah-rahhed and thumbs upped and hive fived. Imagine my surprise when he actually came home one day with a sand rail and not a lightly-used treadmill or sixty tiny orange trees. Fool me once, right?
And it wasn’t so bad out there, really. I mean, it was still windy and crappy and loud as shit like I remembered, and the sun still beat down for an unrelenting thirty-two hours at a time, and camping in the endless sand was still like being tossed in a giant Ziploc bag full of copier toner but other than that, other than wanting to punch Mother Nature in the face every waking second, it wasn’t so bad. And there was the car. The car was going to be awesome. I was excited about the car.
Randy and his son, Chris, topped off the oil and the gas and whatever else gets poured in cars and the three of us jumped in for the first ride. My renowned puker status had earned me a front seat position (it’s about time this debilitating motion sickness deal started throwing me some kick backs) and while Randy arranged himself behind the wheel, Chris made sure my five-point harness was tight. Then we were off.
So there’s not really any talking while the car is running because the engine makes the same noise an F5 tornado makes when it’s scared. As we started off, wide-eyed and silent, Randy figuring out the clutch in one sudden, breathtaking acceleration, it dawned on me that I was now trusting Randy to keep me alive while racing up and down mountainous dunes at speeds exceeding one hundred miles an hour in a vehicle so lacking in visible support structures that the phrase “keep your hands inside” necessarily meant that your hands had to be in your mouth. And while I’m clearly a fan of passing the personal responsibility buck, I decided—as we crested over the top of a dune and shot down the other side at five times the speed of anything, ever—that if I’m going to cash it out in the desert it’s going to be because of my own ridiculous ineptitude—not because Captain ADHD got distracted by a loose balloon.
As it turns out my little change of heart revelation didn’t really matter. Before I could scream STOP or throw up on myself or do anything, Randy made that noise people make when their personal command centers go offline. We all do it, make an involuntary noise when shit starts falling down faster than we can register. My noise sounds like “nurg”. Randy’s noise is kind of a stuttering “uh-uh-uh!” thing. I heard him start “uh-uh”-ing and I immediately closed my eyes and shoved my hands back in my mouth because Randy’s brain had just shorted out. Given our current circumstance, that meant we were all probably about to die.
That was right about the time we started rolling. I don’t remember being scared, particularly, but I do recall feeling an overwhelming sense of exasperation. I once dated a guy who couldn’t have more than three cocktails at a party before he started whipping out his junk, and my reaction to that, to having to be on constant Ball Patrol, was oddly similar to my reaction to this. Like the whole flip was one giant eye roll. When the car stopped rolling and came to rest on its passenger side—my side—is when I started to panic. There aren’t any window panes or panels or anything, and so the entire weight of the car was pressing down into the sand on my side, and because I was harnessed in I was also being pressed into the sand. Like, my head. Where the oxygen goes in.
I heard Christopher from the backseat, so level-headed and logical, calmly asking if everyone was okay. He then promptly swallowed all logic and, taking a cue from Jerry Bruckheimer, announced matter-of-factly that the car was leaking gasoline and we were all going to burn to death in a fiery explosion. Being a child of Randy’s (and thus dexterous as a gypsy magician) it took him exactly three point two seconds to extract himself, dangling and sideways, from his harness and shimmy out of the car. Perhaps he knew that I had been way too busy staring off into the distance with my mouth open before we left to pay attention to how the harness worked, or perhaps he simply remembered that platypi have no hands; either way, he came around to where I was slowly smothering to death and freed me from the seat as Randy crawled through the windshield.
We all stood there around the dripping carcass, panting, sand in our everything, Randy apologizing. I hugged him. Goofball. Of course you’re sorry, you were IN THE CAR. Once we’d established the most important thing, that everyone was okay, we moved down the list to the most expensive thing. The car. Surprisingly enough the car was not as damaged as you might imagine after rolling twice. It lost its fin and the radiator got banged up but after it was righted, towed to camp, and given some basic attention it actually started. Proving to me once and for all that there is no god.
“I promise,” Randy said, trying to get me back in it. “I won’t roll it again.”
“It wouldn’t be very smart to roll it again,” I justified. “Two rolls in one day would make it way too obvious that you’re trying to kill me.”
I did get back in the car. I didn’t enjoy it and I was scared shitless the whole time, but I did it.
“See?” Randy said at the end of Trip Number Two, slowing the car to a stop and turning off the ignition instead of just plowing it into the side of a mountain like I was bracing for. “They don’t roll over every time.”
True, they don’t. Relying solely on my personal experience, they only roll fifty percent of the time. I opted out of trying for thirty-three percent. Too much like flipping a coin, I reasoned, only if you get tails you explode.
I guess if there’s any good news here it’s that I didn’t once get carsick. Apparently constantly calculating the odds of my death and trying to choke down the sobs really took my mind off my stomach. Maybe if I can convince a pilot to fly his plane into the ocean it’ll take care of my airsick problem.
If there had been any Top Gun soundtracks left all of this would be moot.
The finally let the dorks in to pick over the remains during the very last hours of Tower Records' "going out of business" sale, so I can officially report that a
little bit of
Evanescence goes a
really long way. Just a
hell of a long way. Even though I'm pretty sure there are only three songs on the CD.
Conversely, it's interesting to note that even with forty-seven tracks a
lot of Janet Jackson's
Rhythm Nation only goes a
very tiny way. And it might be forty-eight tracks... at one point she sort of laughs and that might be its own track, I don't know.
Randy's bound to have a birthday one of these years.
I won three dollars on the Powerball this weekend so I got crazy and bought a computer keyboard with
all the letters on it. Oh yes. "J" is officially allowed back in the secret vocabulary clubhouse. I missed you, Jelly. Now give me the secret handshake.
I'm
doing taxes now on a regular basis (six days a week, see, not my
standard "regular basis" where I do something badly once and then collapse on the floor crying until it's time to get ready for bed) and I'm going to level with you: when some guy trips into the office with a shoebox full of Verizon bills and his kids' birthdays written hard on his arm in pencil by his wife, there's a yearning yawning yeep yithin my youl. (Hey, we got "Y" with this keyboard! Fancie!)
I love doing taxes. And here's the other thing, here's the yang: I'm really unbelievably good at it. I'm so good at it I got a
raise. My boss was stunned because really, I can't remember to check the mail on a daily basis. People call the office and they're all, "Can I talk to so-and-so?" and I'm all, "Sure, can I tell her who's calling?" "Oh, this is Barbara," they say, so I put Barbara on hold and then announce Lewis is on the phone. In hindsight I get the feeling that sending me to
tax class was just a convenient distraction to buy an error-free office interlude.
Years ago when I was
working for Kroger there were mornings where I'd wake up after a clammy, fitful night dreaming about formatting safety manuals and I'd crawl under the bed and hide until Randy pulled me out by my sweaty ankles. And then I'd have to remind him that it wasn't his birthday, but that I'd spent the last fifteen hours DREAMING about work and I simply didn't want to go and actually do that same work AGAIN, and he'd drop my listless feet on the floor while telling me to suck it up, and then he'd usually pause and ask when his birthday
was, exactly.
I told him I'd keep him apprised.
And I will.
So lately when I started working Saturdays I knew the tax dreams had to be peeping around the corner, all phantom numbery and nonsensical, and I dreaded it. I thought it would be like those dreams where you spend seven hours trying to dial a goddamn telephone-- only with more frustrated erasing-- and I was not enthused. But then I had my first tax dream. Capital gains and lollipops and noncash charitable donations and coffee ice cream and not having to submit an 1116 because all the foreign tax was passive income under $300 and rivers of vodka, hurray!
So it's working out well, is all. I've also put myself on a fairly strict telephone-dialing practice regimen in the hopes that I can get
that dream shit to stop. I'm up to three tries. Rome was not built in seven digits.
From a completely different line of attack,
Matt sent me his artistic representation of the
Cougarpade I've got going in my wayback yard. In his email he wrote about a game store in the mall he used to go to when he was younger and how, in the beautiful ways of the late eighties, the adult paraphernalia was not cordoned off from the general paraphernalia in any way that mattered.
"Among the various sexy dice, penis-shaped ice cube trays and gag cards with naked fat ladies on them there was a pair of 4-legged underpants called 'fundies'. The tagline was along the lines of '
we supply the pants, you supply the fun', or something similar. At an age where I didn't really grasp the entirety of the sexual adventure, these four legged underpants were goddamn fascinating."
Amen to that, Matt. I can only hope that this is Wife Cougar ( home from her night job selling long-distance cards to cheetahs) finding the mysterious four-legged panties. This can't be a difficult deduction for her. I mean, she knows they aren't
mine. If it's not Wife Cougar, please let it be Mother Cougar, invading her Son Cougar's frat space. Persistence is as good as love.
I like how Matt used a gradual downsliding of the background to illustrate my personal doubt and lack of cognizant place in time. (Don't act like you don't know what I'm talking about, Matt. I know representations of my self-doubt when I see them. Everywhere. All the time.) If I weren't a robot I might take such a sign to heart. But I
am a robot. A corroding one. Who does taxes at the speed of accurate, accurate sound. And anyway I forgive you because that happens to be my favorite brand of champagne.
And also because I ditched my sense of retribution at Robot School to make more room for business use of home deductions.
Our House: Sacrificing Entire Bathrooms To Keep You From Inadvertantly Broiling Yourself While You Pee.
Q: How many people who live in my house does it take to change a light bulb?
A: We're not sure. If we could
find the light bulbs we'd tell you but it's been damn near pitch black in here for three years.
The light in the back bathroom just burned out again. When I first moved in here with Randy-- six plus years ago-- I noticed it was dead. So after I set down my duffel bag full of crap and slid into my Cohabitational Responsibility jumpsuit I grabbed a light bulb and whistled my way productively down the hall.
Whereupon I realized, standing on the toilet, that I was never going to be able to get this light fixture cover off the ceiling. I had three screwdrivers-- two flat guys and a plus sign-- but to get into this thing I apparently needed a contractor's license. Or the key to the Book of the Dead. Or just a Neanderthal grasp of rudimentary tools. None of which I had.
None of which Randy has either, as I was to learn, which is why that bathroom remained a tomb of porcelain for the next five or so years. His justification for this relied heavily on the fact that the
glowing red heater in the fixture still worked. So if you were in there with the door shut and maybe the sun went down behind the tiny shower window and you got desperate? You could turn the
heat bulb on and buy yourself fifteen seconds of devil light before your body exploded like a water balloon on a car radiator.
At some point last year Randy
did manage to actually change the bulb. I don't remember the catalyst-- either I pitched a nonsensical fit or someone burned to death, I don't know. Six of one, half dozen of the other. But now it's burned out again and I'm seriously considering just locking the door from the inside and quietly pulling it closed. It's easier than trying to figure out what Randy did with the Book of the Dead key.
