Problems in the beehive.
My mom's been struggling a lot with her alcoholism this week. I live roughly a mile from my parents so when the shit hits the fan I can usually get there just ahead of the paramedics. I don't need to talk too much about it, it's not my place. Just that it's awful and terrifying and completely draining. Alcoholism is a lying, cheating, scrape the paint off the walls son of a bitch, man.
So I was driving home from my parents' house at one in the morning earlier this week and as I pulled into the garage, the biggest, nastiest, browniest flying cockroach I've ever seen swooped down onto my windshield. It slunk up the glass, sneered at me, and then snuck down under the hood.
Fucking
great.
I came inside and told Randy. "Don't worry," he said, "It's just looking for something to eat. It won't stay long."
"So there's nothing to
eat in there, but could it
breed in there?"
"Well yeah. There's that."
So I have to get another car now.
And then after THAT I was washing my face when something slight caught my eye in the mirror. Like a falling star, only smaller and inside. I probably would have disregarded it except that it caught The Jake's eye, too, which is rare, so I went over to see if sausage patties were falling out of the ceiling now. No, it was a scorpion, obviously. Falling straight onto my crumbled blue jeans. Those jeans aren't slated for washing until Saturday afternoon, so if I hadn't actually
seen him repel into the denim I'm sure our scorpion friend would have circled three times and snuggled up to snooze in warm, dirty pants. Snoring raspily until such time as I rudely introduced him to my leg veins.
So we have to get a new house now.
And then THIS MORNING I went out in the backyard to scatter some old bread pieces for the birds, right, only my fat ass dog ran around behind me gleefully scarfing up all the pieces. Of
course, I don't know what I was thinking. When I realized he was right behind me, wiggling his tail nubbin for more stale Health Nut crusts, I gave up and came back inside. Where I found this on the back stoop:
He probably met his end lightly pecking at the door, trembling, begging for food scraps. I can only assume The Jake heard this and, concerned some starving bird might elbow his way into the house cheese supply, distracted me by mouth breathing directly into my ear until the coast was dead. I mean clear.
My gut tells me we have to get a new dog now but I realize it's possible I'm not thinking rationally; I'll reevaluate the dog situation after we exchange the car and move.
The best part is that it came with rotated tires!
A few weeks ago Randy, his daughter, Chelsea, and I were eating dinner and Chelsea mentioned that she needed to get her tires rotated. A large portion of Chelsea's brain is devoted entirely to being responsible so this wasn't surprising.
Randy eyed me squintily over pasta. "When was the last time
you had
your tires rotated?"
Did they do that at the dealership before I drove it off the lot? Because that was the last time.
A very small part of
my brain used to be devoted to responsibility, but the battery in that part of my brain got weak and the whole thing started beeping so I smashed it with a hammer.
"Also," I went on, "my brakes have started making a bad noise."
"Like a squeaking sound?" he asked. "When you brake? That's the signal it's time to get your brakes checked."
"Yeah, no," I shook my head. "It's more like a '
GRRREEEEOOOOORRRRRRRZZZT' sound. Like a grinding." I crinkled my face up and crunched my fingers up like wiggly claws. "
Griiiiiiind.
"
You'd think after eight years Randy would be used to the continuous disappointment that I bring to our relationship.
I never got that checked, by the way, the grinding. Instead I've just done everything in my power to avoid activating the brakes. It's a pretty light car so I only need about two hundred yards to coast to a stop.
So yesterday Randy's reading the paper (as he is wont to do) and he sees a Memorial Day Sale advertisement for Honda. Apparently they're offering 0% interest on a three-year lease, any car on the lot. I've been a huge fan of the
Honda s2000 from way back-- it's what I really wanted when I bought the Miata-- but seeing as how it's a thirty-five thousand dollar car, it was an entire solar system out of my budget. If the Miata was Venus, the s2000 was that fake Pensacola planet in
Contact where Jodi Foster hugged her alien dad.
Randy loves reading the paper. And cars. And, to a lesser degree, complicated math. So he spent the next two hours calling various Honda dealerships to find the
gotcha! loophole and figuring out what my existing car was worth. Upon discovering that my car was worth thirteen thousand and I only owed seven on it, he worked up enough curiosity to go interrogate a Honda salesperson in the flesh. I stayed home because my face is still shedding and I make people-- particularly salespeople whose salaries are largely dependent upon looking intently at faces-- uncomfortable.
"It's for real," he said, walking through the door and throwing me a brochure. "They'll give you thirteen for the Miata, meaning after you pay off the seven you owe you'll have six thousand left to put toward the lease. You won't pay any interest at all over the life of the lease, and the payoff after three years is eighteen thousand. Which doesn't make any sense." He pulled out his calculator to prove it didn't make any sense.
I needed no additional proof that it made no sense. I barely know how to work a calculator. What's the difference between C and CE? See, I don't even know.
Yes, I was a full-charge bookkeeper for four years and a tax preparer for two, why do you ask?
"All you have to do is qualify," he said. Which turned out not to be a problem; I do have something of an income, believe it or not, and as much fun as I like to poke at my delinquent credit days, I now own a home and I've paid off a car and I have a slew of credit cards with zero balances because I shred the cards the second I get them and then see a hypnotist who convinces me they never existed in the first place.
"And pick a color."
"Oh, man," I said, looking over the options. "I seriously don't really even care. Whatever they have available, it's not that big a deal. But not yellow. Yellow's too banana. And not red because I'm not a seventeen-year-old boy. White looks dirty all the time... and black is going to be WAY too hot... the Miata is gray, soooo, blue. Let's go with blue."
"Blue?" Randy double-checked.
"Yeah. But Laguna Blue, not Apex Blue. Gross."
So then we went to the dealership. And we sat at a table with some poor salesperson who had to play endless dueling calculators with Randy. I tried to stay out of it; in addition to being clueless, I could tell the sales guy was nervous I was about to burst out of whatever flaky cocoon I was hiding inside so I tried to limit my sudden moves.
Two hours later, it was done.
"So, okay," I ventured, "I'm going to give you my Miata, and you're going to give me a thirty-five thousand dollar brand new s2000, I don't have to give you ANY money now, my payment is eighty dollars LESS a month than what I'm currently paying, and at the end of three years I can buy it outright for eighteen thousand."
"That's how it's going to work, yeah."
"That's astounding."
"I know. Someone might not have thought this all the way through."
"Totally not my problem. Sorry about all the skin on your floor."
"It's okay."
SO I GOT A NEW CAR YESTERDAY! It's only a lease, but please, no car I'm driving is going to make it more than three years, anyway. That brake thing alone was either going to kill me or, worse, cost me hundreds of dollars.
I can't wait until my skin stops molting so I can get in it without leaving Hansel and Gretel a trail of face crumbs.
Ow Squared.
I had
the first of three photodynamic therapy treatments two weeks ago and I'm
almost healed from it. Convenient, since my second treatment is tomorrow morning.
Let's talk about how fucking terrible it was.
It was-- and I don't think I'm exaggerating here-- exactly like dipping your entire face into a pot of boiling caramel, and then immediately rubbing your caramel blistered face in a pile of broken glass and fire ants. In painful hindsight, I might have made a few patient errors that contributed both to my incredible pain
and to everyone's inability to make eye contact with me for ninety-six hours.
The chemical the doctor applies prior to the treatment itself makes the skin incredibly light sensitive;
so light sensitive, in fact, that the post-care instruction sheet advises the patient to wrap a scarf around his/her entire head for the drive home. "Several additional minutes of exposure to light-- be it direct sunlight or indirect light from another source-- can result in a heightened reaction."
Okay, silly me, I forgot to bring my ski clothes to the appointment. And "indirect light from another source"... I now know that translates into "Yeah, if you can see well enough to walk, your face is burning off." Should have read that
before the procedure, probably.
I was a mess. Swollen, burned, crusty, oozing, scabbing, peeling, scabbing again, peeling
2. The
good news is that it actually stopped being painful on Sunday. I was so relieved by the cessation of pain that I gleefully bounced over to my parents' house on Mother's Day, announcing my skin was "so much better!"--forgetting I still
looked like I rolled out of a tanning bed and into a lava pit-- and I made my mom cry. Twice I had to stop my dad from calling his attorney.
Monday, though, Monday it was WAY better. Monday I called my mom and was all, "Oh, it's SO MUCH BETTER, seriously, I'm 100% better than yesterday." That evening I went to an Etsy meeting and when I looked in the mirror afterward, it was like someone had covered my face in glue and then thrown handfuls of flesh-colored glitter at me.
When I got home, I emailed
Stacey and apologized for not having worn an I DO NOT HAVE LEPROSY lanyard to the meeting. She emailed me back and wrote, "Yeah, you were a little dry by the end. Luckily I told everyone beforehand not to try to feed you any live mice." Which made me laugh so hard I shed my whole chin.
Last Thursday I went to the doctor for my follow up appointment: "Oh, you're still peeling, huh?"
No, why?
YES I'M STILL PEELING. Idiot.
"So how was it?"
"It was really terrible, actually. Really really awful. Frankly I'm a little surprised you don't prescribe for pain." Because seriously, it's 2008-- I don't get my
hair colored without a prescription for Percocet.
"Oh yeah?" The doctor actually seemed surprised.
"Yeah." I crossed my arms.
"Huh."
"HUH."
Standoff over. I'm pretty sure I lost. My hair stylist is a lot easier to intimidate.
Tomorrow morning I go in for PTD #2. It's going to suck. But at least now I know it doesn't hurt for very long. Is my skin better? Yeah. It definitely is. The specialists say you've got to go through all three (or two, or four, whatever they determine your number is) treatments to see a significant difference, and even then it takes a month or so to see the permanent results. So we'll see.
I need to remind Randy I'm having this done again so when he comes home from work tomorrow and finds me asleep on the floor of our closet with a pillowcase over my head, he doesn't call the police.
We've never even used Orkin, and we don't have the torn red hat to prove it.
The scorpion hunter showed up Wednesday morning as expected. I met him at the door wearing a floppy Easter hat on top of a shower cap. Not really. Just a shower cap. And a large Tupperware bowl.
I led him into the kitchen. "This is the biggest problem," I said, gesturing to the light. "Scorpions fall out of there."
He looked at the light. Took a step back. "Just this light? Or other lights, too?"
"Just this one." I thought about it. "Uh, that I know of." It occurred to me that maybe we should have sinks installed directly underneath
all of our lights. Because right now those little fuckers could be parachuting out of the ceiling and scampering all over the place.
"And the tape," he pointed. "Has that helped?"
"Yeah, that seemed to fix it."
The scorpion hunter devised a plan in which he would pull the light out slightly and dust the inside with Death Powder. He had a couple of reasons ready as to why going up in the attic was a waste of time, and I didn't argue; I mean, if he died up there,
someone was going to have to go up and drag his venom-soaked husk down the ladder. Or not-- we could just leave him up there. He could keep Neil from Orkin company. (Not our fault, that one; that cocoon thing was crazy strong.)
I had two other requests in addition to the scorpion situation: one, the spider webs around the perimeter of our house have thickened to a sobering level. A business level. A blue print level. If something could be done about that, fantastic. There's an acetylene torch and part of a Bible in the garage, help yourself. Two, there's a cabinet in the family room I haven't been able to open without screaming since 2002. I don't even know what's
in there but whatever it is, 99 out of 100 spiders find it
delicious.
I left the scorpion hunter to his
inevitable demise job and went to
hide under the bed until the screaming stopped the back of the house. At one point I heard the unmistakable sound of a metal light fixture being taken out of the ceiling, but to my surprise it wasn't quickly followed by what I imagine torturous death would sound like from two rooms away. Success!
Three hours later he was done. I met him outside so he could explain how we really weren't doing ourselves any favors by covering the entire front of the house with ivy. He was a little wild-eyed about it, so I lied and told him we'd trim it back. The inside of the light fixture had also been Death Powdered and he'd killed everything alive he'd found in the family room cabinet.
"I left it empty," he told me from the inside of his truck. He'd rolled the window down about a half-inch so I could hear him. "It needs to dry for a little while before you put everything back in there."
That's what I assume he said, anyway. He was already out of the driveway at this point.
I went back inside and into the kitchen to check out the light.
And I discovered that the exterminator had
retaped the light to the ceiling. A trumpeting sign of confidence, this is not. So much for treating the cause and not the symptoms. I chose this specific extermination company for two reasons: one, we weren't already in their database. And two, their logo is a
scorpion. If I wanted to use the company with a
band-aid for a logo, I would have gone into the yard and dug up that guy from Extermigone.
The cabinet in the family room was completely empty, though, as promised. And the resulting pile of trash on the floor was seriously almost as horrifying as the spiders had been. It was like someone had opened a portal into 1991 and then scraped a whole armload of crap through it. I was mesmerized. I couldn't wait for Randy to get home so I could give him shit about it. Like, an Indiana yellow pages from 1993?
Explain that.
"It's a souvenir from the Indianapolis 500."
Oh. Well. That makes sense. It also explains why we brought an
anvil home from the Olympics.
"It would be awesome," I said, waving my arms above the pile, "if you could maybe go through this? And I don't know, if you
happen to run across something that isn't vital to your nostalgic existence..."
Randy narrowed his eyes and leaned forward.
"Not all of it!" I clarified. "Like these." I nudged five or six photo albums with my foot. "These look important, what's in here, pictures of the kids?" Silence. "No? Your parents? Ex-girlfriends? No? Are they empty? Randy? They're empty, aren't they. Seven... eight empty photo albums. Yeah."
Bottom line: I left him in charge. And in doing so I was confident that I'd have two or three weeks to snap a picture of said pile of crap for posterity. But! In a startling Hail Mary play, Randy got up, sorted through the crap, threw a wrinkled envelope away, and repacked the cabinet. Right then. That night.
I've never been so pleasantly surprised yet so disappointed at the same time.
Here's a picture of the clean floor, anyway. Imagine a bunch of shit piled up right there in the middle.
You can imagine that pile covered in a writhing mound of scorpions, too, if you want. At this point, seriously, it's only a matter of time.
Tomorrow!
I'm pleased to report that I wasn't stung to death by a chain of dangling scorpions while I rinsed out a salad bowl.
I've just been super busy all week and now it's 10:00 on Sunday night and I've been up since 5:00 this morning and Randy is inexplicably insisting on switching channels to the Country Music Awards every twelve seconds even though neither of us listens to country music so I think I'm going to go in the other room and drown myself. And then I'm going to go to sleep.
Get your sleeping bags ready!
I'm always surprised to run into Arizona natives who claim never to have seen a scorpion. It makes me hesitant to mention how many I see on a regular basis. It's been my experience that admitting you've grown used to the presence of poisonous insects inside your home is like casually announcing you've had head lice four times: people privately wonder what it is you're doing so horribly wrong. Plus it automatically puts you on the dreaded "No Sleepovers" list.
We happen to have a lot of scorpions here. I'd forgotten exactly how many until I started searching the archives for proof. There was that time
I almost set a baby on top of one, my infamous meeting with the
ill-fated Bobby Scorpion, and the
time I impressed one with my mettle. I found
this, too, from the Google Fiction days. (I miss Google Fiction.)
Anyway. Lot of scorpions. I never thought it was that big of a deal; anything that can be killed with a size-eight shoe-- unless it has the power to scream, cry, or negotiate-- can't be that bad.
For the past few months I've been finding scorpions trapped in our kitchen sink. You bend over to fill a glass with water or lift a plate to load the dishwasher and
BAM! Scorpion in the sink. It's actually a pretty fortuitous place to find a scorpion; he can't climb out so he's not going anywhere, and you've got a strong stream of water and a big hole to flush him down right in front of you. It's a perfect set up, really. Unless you're the scorpion, in which case it's the absolute worst case scenario.
Last week I found three separate scorpions in the sink. By the time I flushed the third one I was adequately concerned.
Could they be coming up through the drain? I wondered. I do my best to maintain a thorough ignorance concerning nature, but I'm pretty sure scorpions aren't amphibious. And they're always in the right-most chamber of the sink, too, never in the left side, which seemed odd.
It was like a terrible light bulb flashed in my mind, then, a light bulb with big fangs and claws and a curly, crusty tail, and I slowly looked up at the ceiling. To a recessed can light directly above the right chamber of the kitchen sink. There was about a quarter-inch gap between the lipped edge of the light and the ceiling.
It's the perfect set up, really. Unless you're the human, in which case it's the absolute worst case scenario.
I immediately grabbed some packing tape and carefully taped the light fixture flush against the ceiling, all the while convinced that it was suddenly going to fall out of the ceiling and crash into the sink, dislodging billions of annoyed scorpions directly ONTO MY HEAD.
I wonder how many scorpion stings the average person can take to the skull. Admittedly I failed my "Venomous Head Wounds: Quantity vs. Quality" annex course, but I'm guessing it's less than a billion.
The exterminator came out this morning. When I set up the appointment over the phone, I announced that we had scorpions spilling out of a ceiling light. Having never actually caught a scorpion dangling five feet over the sink by a trembling beige bicep, I was bluffing. I was hoping the exterminator would express confusion over this impossibility so I could start sleeping again.
He imparted no such confusion. And this morning when I pointed out the can light in question, now securely packing taped to the ceiling, he acknowledged that yes, scorpions will crawl up the outside of a house and into the crawlspace and this is how they'll sometimes get down.
"I have this fear," I confessed, "that the light is going to fall out of the ceiling and forty million scorpions are going to pour out into my house."
He nodded, bending over his paperwork. "Everyone has that fear," he laughed.
I laughed with him. And reached up to the light to remove a piece of brown tape.
"Whoa," he stopped me, palms out. "Don't untape it."
He's sending out the scorpion guy tomorrow morning. Until then I guess I'll just use the bathroom sink for dishes. Baby crickets sometimes pop up out of the drain in there, but when you factor in the spiders from the skylight, the situation generally takes care of itself.
Owwwwww. Ow.
I got a
Levulan Photodynamic Therapy treatment yesterday for acne that isn't so much
terrible as it is annoying and persistent. I've been fighting with my skin for probably twenty years; I've been on any number of antibiotics, every topical cream and gel, and I did a course of accutane a couple of years ago. The accutane was by far the best solution I've found. If I could live my entire life taking 60 mg of accutane a day I totally would. Unfortunately there are a lot of studies that show I'd eventually either kill myself, explode, or disintegrate because accutane is pretty much poison.
Whenever I tell people I was on accutane or that I've tried any thousand other acne treatments, that person invariably says something like, "Why? Your skin isn't bad." At which point I always want to point out that my skin is worse than THEIR skin so they should just shut up and nod, lucky bastards.
Anyway. Totally not a big deal and I wouldn't have mentioned it at all except that one of the pleasant side effects of the PDT is the inability to subject my face to any and all light sources for 48 hours. So I'm literally sitting here in the dark in front of a computer. And the glow from the monitor feels like a goddamn nuclear holocaust on my red swollen face.
I'm going back for two more sessions of PDT in the next few weeks so if anyone is interested in hearing about the entire process, either let me know in the comments or drop me an email. I don't know that I'll chronicle the whole thing here but I'm more than happy to email you all about it.
Dude, I never ran over a cat and I never lived In Nicaragua.****
This Etsy shop has completely humbled me. I found it last night and I immediately bought this guy:
I looked at his little green face and I don't know, he touched me in a way I've never been touched before. Not in a
green way, because I've been touched like that. And not in a
crazy eyed way because we all know I've been
there, but in a
hey, wiggle wiggle! check out my horns! watch... wiggle wiggle! way. And alright, fine, I've been there, too, but my god, people, LOOK AT HIM!
I keep going back to look at Eugene:
And Hugo:
Eugene looks just like a guy I dated in college. More specifically, Eugene looks just like a guy I dated in college the morning I backed over his cat.
He was super dramatic, that guy-- his stupid cat didn't even
die. Right away.
And Hugo looks like another guy I dated during the ten months I was making a living in Nicaragua selling hollowed out walking sticks to shaky repeat tourists. I
think it looks like him- it's hard to tell with a .22 round lodged in one eye. Strangely enough that's exactly what I told the police at the time. Oh, nostalgia!
Etsy has a whole area where buyers and sellers can create a personal "Treasury": a small gallery of items that a given person finds worthy of showcasing. Sometimes these treasuries make it to the Etsy front page, resulting in HUGE exposure for the shops included. I just found out I'm in two treasuries right now, meaning two awesome Etsy sellers liked my zombies enough to include them in a hard to come by treasury spot. Getting exposure to a treasury is kind of a big deal-- the more clicks a treasury gets, the more popular it is, and the more popular it is, the greater that treasury's chances of ending up on the front page.
I would really like to be on the front page. I make no bones about this.
I did not mean to run over Greg's cat, either. I had just buried that goddamn cat alive in a Costco coffee can like ten minutes before; I had no reason to believe he'd be anywhere
near the driveway.
I've linked to these two pertinent treasuries in the sidebar. If you could find your way to clicking on those links, my entire current income stream would be much obliged.
And if not, that's cool. My Nicaraguan boyfriend was also oftentimes willful and unnecessarily obstinate. I found it endearing, really. Despite what the authorities claim.
****under my own name.
I managed to bring some sort of crippling intestinal problem home from Mexico last Friday, forcing me to miss a friend's first art gallery show, a formal fundraiser at which I had been promised a mani/pedi and gourmet mac & cheese,
and Melati's infamous Tequila Stakes Croquet tournament.
The last time I became markedly ill in Mexico was around eight years ago. A good friend of mine, Jodi, was close to seven months pregnant and desperately wanted to submerge her boiling July fetus in the ocean. Neither one of us ever having actually
been pregnant before, and also coincidentally being pretty dumb, we saw no problem with a woman in the third trimester of her first pregnancy driving four hours into a third world country for the weekend.
Sunday morning we had brunch at a beach front restaurant called the Costa Brava where we decided to see exactly how hard we could slap God across the face; chorizo, eggs, ham, chiles rellenos, coffee with cream. Peppers. Salsa. Pork cheeks. Runny cheese. Bring it.
Two hours later I was fighting hard through cold sweats and an intestinal mayday to drive us toward the US border, only slowing down to ninety once I knew for sure we were hypothetically within Medevac range. Jodi was too ill to speak; her husband took her to the emergency room that night where she was treated for extreme dehydration and mind numbing stupidity. Ultimately she was fine. And the baby was fine, a gorgeous boy. A gorgeous boy whose immune system today no doubt rivals that of a Sherman tank.
Several years went by and then the Costa Brava restaurant exploded. I don't mean it suddenly became more popular-- I mean there was a "gas meets lighter" situation late one night and the Costa Brava blew up. My lack of compassion would have made a terminator proud. The rubble is still there, huge chunks of charred concrete and exposed rusted rebar. Every time Randy and I drive by, I can't help it, I have to point.
"That's where Jodi and I ate that time. God, were we sick," I shake my head, "Tacos de cabeza... warm lettuce..." and I stop, unable to go on. Randy pats my knee.
It's okay,
baby, he seems to be saying,
It's okay. You're just an idiot.I haven't talked to Jodi in a few years, she moved to the other side of town and we fell out of touch. I think about her every time my stomach involuntarily churns in front of the Costa Brava concrete mountain, though. I wonder if she takes her family to Mexico. I wonder if she tells her son, now a veritable child, about the time he made the trek in her belly.
"That's the Texaco station," she might say, passing quickly through Ajo, "where I almost accidentally shat you out in the parking lot."
"That's the restaurant," she might say, pointing as I do at the wreckage, "where Mommy ate something squishy called 'tripe' and chased it with a quart of milk. That's the place," she might whisper, still pointing, "your Mommy had to set on fire."
Randy and I are in Mexico this week and the internet has been a fickle, fickle mistress. The only place I've been able to find reliable wireless is in the Las Palomas resort bar several very upscale doors down from us. I'm staring out at a negative edge pool and the glistening ocean beyond through floor-to-ceiling glass. You know what else they have here? A lazy river. No, for real. A glorious meandering chlorinated stream that artificially pulses its way past two cabana bars and a sandwich palapa. If I had $600,000 and the representative wristband, I could be slowly floating on my back right now toward a ham and provolone ecstasy situation. Unfortunately I have nothing of the sort. I'm barely dressed appropriately for the bar; I walked in with sweaty flip flops, a deadorant stained tank top, and my laptop snooked under one arm and the wait staff went ahead and held an impromptu meeting as to whether or not to serve me my $4.75 Pacifico.
Turns out I qualify to drink here.
I'm glad I opted to wear my cocktail flops.
Okay, I'm almost 3/4 down on my Pacifico and I'm fending off glancing wait staff stares with my dirty hair shield. Hang on while I see how many quarters I've got stuffed in my purse...
Alright! Three dollar bills and some embarrassingly linty assorted change and I've successfully paid for another beerful of internet.
Clearly I don't have a lot of time. So I'll mention this: The past fews nights here have really made obvious the fact that Randy and I have completely disparate methodologies concerning the general "no sand in the bed" position. I, as an example, will perch precariously on the bed and brush the sand off my feet to the point where I'm defying balance, gravity, and any sense of decency. Randy, on the other pole, grabs a plastic spade and actually heaves a few loads of sand between the sheets before we call it a night. He must, seriously. It's totally ridiculous. I woke up mad this morning, and filthy.
(Oh Jesus Christ, someone just set a white glazed soup bowl full of pretzel twists on this table. If anyone else makes the ill-fated decision to sit across from me, I feel bad for their orphaned children.)
"Oh, Erin," he started, "There wasn't any sand in that bed. I only felt like two grains. Maybe three. Maybe three grains."
When he starts being silly like this,
that's when I know I need to seriously start looking for his plastic shovel,
that's when I know he's got some evil master plan to slowly erode my body into a walking stick while I sleep. Meanwhile I'm clueless, dreaming of pecan encrusted halibut, of Shake n' Bake chicken thighs, not even realizing I'm getting smoother and smoother. Not even noticing the gradual handle growing out of the side of my head.
I'm sitting on a common couch in this bar, right, and I just stopped typing and looked up only to see that I've unconsciously tucked all five throw pillows behind me for lumbar support, my beer is cocked precariously against one (wow, pretty expensively) upholstered cushion, and there are pretzel twists spread all over from hell and gone.
Time to jet.
Everyone! To the lazy river!!
God, I miss a lazy river. I'm going to go put my bathing suit on and try to sneak back in. I'm sure no one will recognize me; I've only been sitting here fucking shit up for FOUR HOURS.
