And the Peg Leg Emporium isn't open on Thursdays.
A couple of days ago I came home from the store and unceremoniously kicked off my flip flops. One of said flops-- left flop-- skidded under this door and into a closet.
A locked closet. With no knob. I didn't even attempt to find the key because I didn't have nine hours to devote to the Key Purgatory that is this house-- I once dedicated a three-day weekend to scrounging for a front door key only to end up with two coffee mugs full of keys that start cars no one here has ever owned. We could start two Harley Davidsons and gain access to a safe deposit box in Frieburg but someone better leave a door unlocked because we still can't get inside the house.
It wasn't really that big a deal at first (we all know I'm not one to stand on ceremony where footwear is concerned) but it's been a few days now and I really need my shoe back. I'd call a locksmith but to be honest, I don't know what's in there. Sure, it's true we keep all the dead prostitutes and automatic firearms at the other end of the house, but you can see how that knowledge would only provide partial reassurance. Maybe I can slide my hand under there or something. I mean, I have shit to do. Most places of business are fairly particular where shoes are concerned and I feel like I've worn out my welcome down at the Hopscotch Depot.
|
Hell v2.0
Write a 250-page thesis defending
The Lake House. You're not required to rationalize or support the movie's plot, as the satan begrudgingly concedes this would be impossible-- all you have to do is justify the fact that someone somewhere actually read the script and said,
absolutely, let's green light that.
Reminder: You'll be defending your thesis in hell, so bring a sweater.
|
You Call It Lazy-- I Call It WINNING.
I went to
Arby's for the first time ever today, so I guess I can cross
that off my List of Life Objectives. My list might be dumb, but all I have to do is find a new adult contemporary radio station and that list is
done, son. Please, like you're seriously ever going to hang glide in Egypt.
|
Time to do the windows! Where's the paint thinner?
It's Memorial Day and I just cleaned my toilet bowls with muiratic acid. That's how I like to celebrate these reflective holidays-- by tackling mundane tasks with unreasonably extreme measures. In a minute I'm going to mop the floors. With a belt sander.
Sugar Dudes. In the wild. Perhaps the best flickr set in existence, your cute kids be damned. Unless your kids are doing this, and they're not. I would have favorited it.
|
I should have left it as a helicopter.
When I was 22 and living in a one-bedroom apartment on the side of town God doesn't list on his resume, I decided I had to have a Total Gym. I watched the infomercial late night after late night, the volume low so as not to inadvertently wake the chick who was sleeping free on my couch for the fifth month in a row, and I thought, yeah. I need that. I mean shit, I’m only a month behind on my power bill, I’ve got a free gym membership through the university I don’t use and I’ve got three hundred and eleven square feet just going to waste here. What I really need is a piece of gym equipment that weighs two tons, costs four grand and folds up neatly for easy compact storage. So I ordered one.
I’ll repeat that: I picked up the telephone, dialed an 800-number, and I said Yes, Please Send Me The Total Gym Risk Free For Thirty Days, and I gave them my credit card number. I know. This decision was actually the sole reason I didn’t get into Brain Surgery College.
So the Total Gym came, right, and I made sure the chick who was living on my couch, Darlene, was going to be awake that day so she could drag it in off the stoop while I was at work. When I got home my entire house was full of cardboard boxes. This was in addition to Darlene and all her crap, and her 140-pound Akita / Rottie mix, Maggie. At twenty-two I think it’s safe to say I was a veritable chocolate fondue fountain of great ideas.
I immediately got busy ripping the boxes open and assembling this thing, and I guess in the back of my mind I had hoped that Darlene might jump in and help, but turns out she was really busy sitting at my kitchen table smoking pot and toiling over miniature oil paintings of various cocktails. As was so very often the case.
The first problem I encountered was a schematics issue; the only way the thing would fit in the apartment was if I set it up in the hallway between the bedroom and the living room, and that meant the bathroom would be inaccessible.
“Doesn’t matter to me,” Darlene piped in. Really, Smelly? Because that surprises me. What the hell—in for eleven thousand dollars, in for three thousand pounds. No bathroom it is. They were probably going to shut the water off pretty soon, anyway.
It took hours, this thing. At first I had it set up wrong and it was a helicopter. Then I set it up wrong again and it was a solar energy transference plant. Then, finally, it was a home gym. Kind of. Darlene immediately got on it and pulled on the lat cable, bringing two wobbly weight stacks crashing to the ground. I was really regretting a lot of things in that moment, not the least of which was helping Darlene pack her shit and scrounge her car keys out of the bottom of that dumpster where her boyfriend had thrown them in the first place. Not the least of which was also moving out of my parents’ house. There was definitely room for a Total Gym at my parents’ house.
Eventually (four days later) I admitted defeat. The Total Gym was useless; it was a warped piece of garbage with a weak pulley system that didn’t do crap, the only thing it folded up and fit underneath was the ceiling fan, and I really needed to take a shower. You know what's more taxing than assembling a Total Gym? Taking a Total Gym apart and repacking it into fourteen cardboard boxes.
I kept hoping Darlene might help but she was really busy smoking weed at my kitchen table and crafting ashtrays out of clay. UPS came and took my Total Gym away, and not long after that Darlene got knocked up by a married guy whose wife was seven months pregnant and she took her dog and went to live in someone’s guest house somewhere, I don’t know. I never heard from her again.
I only share this story because people often ask if I really bought a Total Gym, and they want to hear all about it because they’ve been watching the commercials late at night, they’ve been eying Christie Brinkley’s sixty-year-old abs, they’ve been considering. And I tell them what I just told you: the Total Gym is a complete waste of time. Now the Bowflex, I hear that’s where it’s at.
|
Obligation: Calf-Roping Families Together Since The Dawn Of Time.
Last night I finally finished the embroidery pattern I've been working on for months.
I'm not ashamed to tell you I wept with joy. I know it's a crappy picture with no perspective, so for the sake of reference this is an aerial shot taken from a passing communications satellite. I'm going to make it into the World's Biggest, Weirdest Pillow and I'm giving it to my grandmother-- not because she has a penchant for tangly neon lizard-birds, but because I was working on it when we were together several weeks ago and it was a calming background constant to a lot of poignant and important conversations. I think it will mean something to her. It better, because God knows she doesn't want it otherwise. My mother thought that was a great idea: "The colors are perfect for her house," she said. Which, no. Unless my grandmother recently took up residence inside a Peruvian rug market and no one told me. She'll take it because she's obligated to, damn it, and that's that. Let's get it out of my house already.
|
MATTRESS UPDATE:
Last night I woke up around two as I unconsciously realized that I had full and unrestricted access to the bottom third of the bed. The hairy leg dam that usually blocks my path to the footboard was missing. Eroded, as it were, or gnawed to twigs by beavers. Or just... in the other room. I found Randy curled up in Chelsea's vacant bed down the hall. Apparently he'd been having dreams all night about sinking through the new mattress and onto the floor and he couldn't handle it anymore. I wasn't sure what to tell him. That's what happens when you stop sleeping on particle board? Sometimes when you get off a boat you still feel the movement of the waves; maybe when you introduce your body to something softer than the kitchen table after fifteen years there's a "comfort overload" adjustment period? I don't know. I'm not all that eager to talk him through it, frankly-- last night was the first time in seven years of sleeping together that I've extended my legs past a fifty-seven degree angle. I mean, while I was
asleep.
Mia shares my pain, but instead of a poison gecko tree frog, her nighttime nemesis is a giant furnace-eating squid.
And cats. But I think that goes without saying.
|
Which should only take like nine years.
Last Saturday Randy and I went to Costco Home to buy a new mattress. We’d been waking up tossed together in the communal center mattress gutter for years, but lately it’s gotten worse. Lately I’ve been wearing golf cleats to bed so I can get a better grapple, maybe buy a few more precious minutes on my side of the bed and decrease my chances of dying from oxygen deprivation. Or, worse, from touching. Randy’s a sleep-toucher—sleeping with him is like sleeping with a gecko. Our mattress is his pitcher plant; all he has to do is fall asleep and continue to weigh two-twenty and here I invariably come, slowly rolling into his poison web of hot limbs.
If the mattress hadn’t actually started deteriorating before our eyes, if hay and straw and woolly mammoth fur hadn’t started poking through the mattress skin, I’ve no doubt we’d still be snared inside its ancient coccoon. Randy sadly peeled the sheets off and eyed the worn tag, loyal, hoping to find a brand name, but unfortunately for Randy he can’t read Middle English. And since none of the mattresses on display at Costco Home were decorated with quill and ink soldiers building a 14th century castle abutment and feasting on mutton, we were flying blind.
I threw myself on top of a mattress four feet taller than our old one.
“And?” Randy asked. “Comfortable?”
“Well, I don’t think it’s stuffed with anything that used to breathe,” I answered.
“Strike one.”
“And the padding doesn’t instinctively get out of the way when you lie on it. Here,” I clambered off, “You try.”
Randy threw himself into his standard “diagonal sleeper” position: head on the driver’s side, feet on the passenger’s side. He struggled to appear nonplussed.
“How about that pillowtop thing, eh? That sucks, right?” Randy shrugged. Horizontally.
“What about that one?” he pointed. So we repeated this process six or seven times; I would throw myself across the mattress first, waller for a few minutes, then Randy would wake me up and get on it alone and catty-cornered. When we found one that we both individually appeared to agree on, it seemed only fitting we try it out together. Which clearly we’d been avoiding.
I spread out as close as possible to the far edge and grabbed a handhold of side mattress skin in my fist. Randy went diagonal almost immediately and started snoring. At the end of ten seconds I had neither rolled anywhere nor made contact with anyone else’s flesh. Randy hadn’t been kneed in the face
or whined at. Winners all around. OKAY GET OFF.
It’s nice, our new mattress. We don’t have to punch it down before we go to bed at night which is pretty liberating. And I no longer wake up with a limb half-dissolved from fighting off a giant venomous tree frog all night. It still smells a little chemically, though, and I’m hoping that wears off soon. It’s entirely possible that it doesn’t smell like chemicals at all-- it just
doesn’t smell like a 15th century boarding house for shepherds. Either way, I’m sure I’ll get used to it. I may have to shove a dead gopher inside there, though, just until the new wears off.
|
#46: Crown Molding Made From Elephant Tusks
For Christmas last year I asked my mom for subscriptions to both
Food & Wine and
Garden Design magazines. After five months of flipping through pages of truffle-stuffed recipes and mossy, labrythine sanctuaries I've come to the depressing realization that I never had any intention of actually
learning anything from these magazines-- I must just enjoy feeling vastly inferior. And that's okay. At least it explains why I subscribed to
Peaches & Cream: Perfect Skin Quarterly and
101 Things To Do With All That Money.
|
Allegedly.
Happy Graduation, Christopher! I'll believe it when I see the diploma, frankly; I know firsthand it's not beyond your means to stage a three-hour, 700-man ceremony. I remain wan until further proof is issued. But congratulations! Liar.
Nice afterparty, by the way. Wasn't, you know. Loud. Hey, any time you want to bring the furniture that goes in the
house back in, that'd be great. Until then I'll just be here at the kitchen table. Standing.
P.S. I know you don't read this website so I'll have to hammer this shit home in person, but please be aware that I just went to the fridge and realized with horror you ate the rest of my sandwich. So that's why your windshield is broken. Peace out. College "graduate".
|
I should have opted to watch Leaving Las Vegas. Or my own EKG.
The lucky plane responsible for transferring my reanimated carcass from Atlanta to Phoenix last Sunday was one of those fancy, showoff planes with individual viewing screens embedded in each headrest. I would have been more impressed by this upgrade if I'd had some time before take off to think about it, but it turns out I'd spent a little too much time sprawled on the floor of the Delta "Relax and Recharge" station choking down a hot dog and watching security attempt to lock down Terminal T over an abandoned Jansport backpack. My appreciation was likewise dulled by the fact that I hadn't had a drink in approximately ten hours and by the time I made it onto the plane my large intestine was slowly clawing its way up my esophagus and it was bringing an empty shot glass with it.
The flight itself was one of the bumpiest, crappiest flights I've ever been on. The kind of flight that makes you roll your eyes at the pilot like he's Steve Nash fucking up free throws. You have
one. job. Come on. I'd already taken nine Dramamine (not for motion sickness-- it was a weak effort to kill myself) so I sat there, sweating something alienating, sitting at an 87 degree angle three inches from the screen and trying to imagine I was at home on my couch. I was unsuccessful.
The flight attendant inched by to throw a packet of liquid Havarti cheese and burnt crackers at my lap.
"Can I get a Bloody Mary please?" I didn't even want one, but I thought if I poured something red into my chest cavity I might be able to trick my heart into beating until we landed. I held out a twenty dollar bill. The concept of money was long gone; Caitlin and I tipped the shuttle driver nine hundred dollars simply because we didn't have to operate a car or carry anything for six minutes.
Flight Attendant frowned. "I don't think I have change for a twenty."
My large intestine waved itself dismissively in the air. "Okay, give me
four Bloody Marys, then."
No dice. Apparently flight attendants have a low tolerance for high tolerance.
I managed to scrounge some change from the people next to me by promising to relinquish the arm rest and to pass out immediately. I also promised to quit playing
Bejeweled on my tiny screen because really, that was just making people sad. So I strapped on my
airplane pillow (why settle for looking like an unwashed addict when you can look like a ridiculous unwashed addict?) and watched
Deal or No Deal.
"From three inches away Howie Mandel looks like a snake lizard," Large Intestine laughed.
I nodded weakly. What else could I do? Large Intestine was clutching my pancreas.
After we deplaned I threw that pillow on an empty chair in the gate on the way down to baggage. I sincerely hope it sent security into a walkie-talkie tailspin. It should have. I don't even want to imagine what was on it.
|
I do really well at Guitar Hero. As long as all the notes are green.
Home from vacation! And still on my first load of laundry. Every time I open the washing machine my bathing suit strap reaches up out of the tangle and yanks the lid shut. This trip was unbelievable, as trips this lacking in personal hygiene always are. I laughed nineteen hours a day, slept four, and cried every morning from six until Cocktail Hour (seven). The house in and of itself (and this is credited entirely to the vast preparatory efforts of
Scott and his lovely wife,
Michelle, who I'm not-very-secretly in love with) was staggeringly enormous and beautiful; I didn't take any pictures because that would have meant potentially setting my drink down, but luckily
someone else was on it. Late at night Jesus Christ himself would float the few feet over from next door and ask us to keep it down because they were having trouble sleeping IN HEAVEN. And then inevitably Jesus would sneak through a wall and steal a chicken enchilada. We ate so, so much better than Heaven. Just ask the son of god. It seemed like every night that
Julia created another mindblowing dish out of nothing but thin air, ephemeral beauty, and Colby Jack. I think that's how she did it, I don't know; surprisingly enough I seemed to nap through The Magic. Not
that surprising if you'd seen the bar, really;
CW and his gorgeous better half packed a cargo plane with alcohol and then did a rogue commando drop over the entire Florida Panhandle. For reasons I am either unable or unwilling to explain, my drink of choice seemed to be a bloody mary. But only between the hours of eleven and two, only when the sun was at its zenith, because nothing spells cool refreshment like a tall, greasy glass of lukewarm marinara sauce and vodka. At one point Caitlin and
Mark's amazing wife, Leslie, and I spent an entire sweltering afternoon sitting with our feet in the sand, kicking back the waves and solving the world's problems, and I did it all while sucking back a warm plastic tumbler of liquid lasagna. Bad plan. That's all I'm saying. Jesus rested his sandals on his balcony and laughed.
But it wasn't all sunshine carnivals and gourmet meals and the savior of man taking notes. Michelle's sweetheart sister, Julie, developed some kind of mystery illness that morphed from stage "sniffle" to stage "bubonic" in little less than eighteen hours. She was in such obvious pain and yet still so pleasant and low key; if I had been in her position I would have stretched out on the kitchen floor and screeched until someone commissioned a helicopter. At one point, late at night, I snuck into Julie's bedroom equipped with my Old Lady medicinal arsenal purse. Poor thing propped herself up like a miserable baby bird while I force fed her Benadryl quick dissolve strips and made her sip some grapefruit flavored Airborne. I was relieved to see her on the couch the next morning-- partly because she was feeling a little better, sure, but mostly because I hadn't killed her. I don't think that whole, "Just thought she could use some rest, Your Honor," thing could stand another vigorous cross defense. Especially when combined with my unfortunate blood alcohol level. Just ask Michelle, who at one point asked to have a sip of my plain Sprite? Upon which her eyes slowly melted into her lap. Apparently after three days my taste buds become immune to the prodigy that is cherry vodka. Either that or someone laced my Sprite with lighter fluid. And I find that unlikely-- we used all the lighter fluid when we did shots earlier.
But come on, having seen my way successfully into and out of various weekends of gluttonous indulgence, I had of course done the requisite damage control calculations and surmised that a trip this phenomenal would require a slower than normal reacclimation period. Apparently I merely miscalculated my level of corporeal mismanagement. Which is a fancy way of saying "I could really use a hand gun. Or a
nail gun. Or a nail
file. Or a file
folder with a sharp edge." Caitlin-- quickly succumbing to the disease that almost made me involuntarily manslaughter Julie-- got up early Sunday and started throwing our shit in the rental car. I don't want to say I was unorganized (because who would believe that?) but I
will say that Scott and Michelle's charming and completely adorable daughter Mia-- four years old and far, far more cognizant and well-behaved than ninety percent of the adults present-- approached me in the hallway and asked if she could help me pack my shit because, and I'm quoting here, "You're seriously off the organizational mark, Honey. Here. Have a Benadryl Quick Strip." Which I of course accepted. Thanks for packing all my stuff, Mia. Remind me to send you something swank for your kindergarten graduation.
The seven-and-a-half hour trip back to the Atlanta airport was fairly horrifying. Caitlin tried to ignore the strep blisters bursting on her vocal cords while I slumped in the passenger seat clutching a cracked Bud Light bottle and chanting the Lord's Prayer. The part I remembered, anyway. Pretty much just the title. We agreed via moaning that the fact we were in a P T Cruiser somehow made the whole thing worse. Waiting for my plane I deduced that I either needed a drink or a complete blood transfusion, and sadly there's no blood bank in Terminal T.
I think I'm on the right path, though. Given I didn't go to work yesterday and I took a nap around 11:00 and then another around 2:00 and there was a "rest my eyes" thing happening about 5:30, and alright, I didn't go to work today either but I
called, okay. Not to mention that Jesus hasn't made a single appearance, either to smuggle out delicious food stuffs or turn down the stereo or otherwise, and I'm reading this as a positive sign. Which... is really just a completely different set of problems.
What an amazing time. (Hey, sidenote to the Entire Group: sorry I suck at every single game ever. I should have admitted I'm still striving to win Connect Four. For eight years I've met three days a week to try and learn Clue. I'm almost there. Last week I stopped trying to pantomime Colonel Mustard.) It could only have been better if the house had been closer to the beach, bigger, and more elaborate, if we'd had better and more food and alcohol, and if I LOVED you guys more.
|
No, seriously, I think we're cool.
Uh, we just intersected the road we thought we were on. We're either in Georgia or Alabama. Maybe Mississippi? Something. Hurricane route. It's working out well. We're good.
|
BYOThread
My grandmother knew about this afterparty on the other side of town, thought maybe we should grab a couple of forties and head over. But I was all, nah. Let's do embroidery and watch America's Funniest Pets. Maybe have some had cream. She was disappointed, but damnit, I'm the guest.
|
It's a benchmark of adulthood
It's a benchmark of adulthood when you can take a shower at your grandmother's house and not flood out the bathroom. Somebody order a trophy.
|
The first problem I encountered was a schematics issue; the only way the thing would fit in the apartment was if I set it up in the hallway between the bedroom and the living room, and that meant the bathroom would be inaccessible. 
I kept hoping Darlene might help but she was really busy smoking weed at my kitchen table and crafting ashtrays out of clay. UPS came and took my Total Gym away, and not long after that Darlene got knocked up by a married guy whose wife was seven months pregnant and she took her dog and went to live in someone’s guest house somewhere, I don’t know. I never heard from her again. 
