What a long, wretched, miserable day. I woke up in darkness and went home in it, freshly sodomized by yet another insufferable French lesson and a lengthy, albeit fairly uneventful day in the office, not in that order. I'd like to think that, you know, since I am studying something I am passionate about (the Turkish stuff, if you were high on 'ludes and couldn't guess), that I wouldn't get the sophomore slump. Or would it be senioritis with only two years of grad school? Whatever. Anyway, I thank weeping Jesus on the cross that I have beer in my fridge and Bruce Hornsby to talk me down out of this tree. The election doesn't help, as things aren't looking so swell so far.
As I was walking to the Law School parking lot through the dark Rape Woods in the Old Crescent after French, I thought to things that I hate. Oh, don't get me wrong: most days I am just a fuzzy, happy guy who sees the world with rosy optimism. My bed rests against a wall; there is no wrong side from which to get up. The clowns would have it no other way. Yet:
1) Catfish, eels, hagfish, sucker-fish and sea-lampreys. If I had the money, the time and the lack of conscience necessary to bring about the extinction, nay, the aquatic genocide, of these creatures, I would have them all turned into fertilizer for vast pumpkin patches. When I saw a picture of a sea-lamprey that had nudged it's head into a giant seabass's gill, I thought: how much does a flame-thrower cost? When I was a kid, I had a recurring dream that I was sitting on the commode and a nasty catfish was in there, trying to savage me. And those long summers wading in the Greenbrier River with a miniature trident (a "gig") in the fear that I would encounter a suckerfish weigh heavily on my decision to have them all vaporized with subatomic weaponry.
2) Irish setters. I was savaged by a rabid Irish setter as a wee one. Apparently I had sat upon the beast's favorite chair and in reprisal it tried to snuff me. Even as a child, though, my ninja powers were strong, and the local Chinese restaurant had "pork" for their Moo Shu for a week. I sold that bitch for fi' dolla'. Speaking of...
3) Bad Chinese food. I am a Chinese food buff. I can tell immediately when I go to a Chinese place what the regional specialization is, even if it doesn't say; I think I can safely say that I have eaten in nearly every Chinese place in Eastern Maine. The advent of the Chinese buffet has turned Chinese restauranteurs into whores of Satan. For the almighty dollar they try to pass spaghetti noodles, canned vegetables and soy sauce as "lo mein." I wouldn't feed most of that swill to Ethiopian children for fear that they would sue my ass. Here in Bloomington, the undisputed cultural capital of this, the Crossroads State, there are places that merit my attention, but mostly I eat in some of these places because they are cheap and my friends think it's tasty. Of course, they are all high on glue.
4) Monkeys. I really, really hate monkeys. From the rabid gibbon that shat on its hand and flung it at me in the National Zoo to the capuchin monkey who masturbated for a solid ten minutes in front of a group of inner-city kids (who no doubt then began their own regimen) in the Baltimore Aquarium's "rainforest", monkeys are just plain disgusting. They are also evil. What's more terrifying: serial killer with a scalpel waiting in your darkened backseat to eviscerate you like a trout or a monkey, looking at you with it's beady, Satanic eyes plotting to ravage you with it's cleverly hidden incisors and give you some sort of hantavirus? Give me the psycho anyday; with some reasoning, perhaps some ice-cream and a few reruns of The Golden Girls and a good cry about how his daddy never held him, you can get enough leverage and time to blow his skull off with the bazooka you've hidden in your bathroom. With a monkey, there is no time. It's the monkey or you. I've taken to carrying a baling hook in my sachel just in case.
5) Connecticut. Boy, I am gonna get mail on this one. Pressing on, though, I've lived in Maine for the past...uh...decade now, and let me tell you something: nobody, not anyone, makes people feel like they are barely able to walk erect like the tourists who "rusticate" in Maine every year. OK, granted, all of the New England states have very strong opinions of the others. The breakdown:
Massachusetts: Drivers from this state are affectionately called "Massholes" for a reason. They don't just defy laws of the road; nay, they defy laws of physics. I firmly believe that every person who drives in Mass believes that they alone have any right to be on the road, and consequently, they project that onto how they drive. When I approach Boston from 95 North, as soon as I see the sky lightening (at night) or the skyline (at day), I park my car and refuse to touch it until I go home.
Rhode Island: Rich. White. Yuppie. People. With. Big. Boats.
New Hampshire: Live Free or Die. Well, I choose the sweet Dirt Nap rather than live in Hampy. Sure, there is no tax on anything, but at what cost? Quaint "villages" or cesspools of evil? You be the judge.
Vermont: Tree-hugging hippie freaks who live in a state so sparsely populated that the state capital, Montpelier, has no McDonalds. There are coral atolls in the Pacific that have no permanent human presence that have the Golden Arches.
Maine: Mainers are seen by the other states to be aloof, arrogant, stubborn, and standoffish. These are all true. This is because our state is overrun like a biblical plague with people "from away" the moment the temperature breaks 60 until the frost comes. Go home. Well, give us your money, you flatlanders, THEN go home.
So, Connecticut. I know several people from Connecticut who are lovely people, but wow, they are the exception. I had a man once correct how I said Connecticut. "Conn-ect-ih-cut." I opened the corner of my mouth and let a ribbon of drool snake out to show him that I was only barely educable and he left me alone; he, in his Birkenstocks and those ridiculous golf shorts. My only hope is that he ate a bad lobster (overpriced, too, with all luck) and spent the rest of his vacation hunched, ashen, over a hotel toilet. I also overheard a man ask if they had wine in one of those roadside sea-shanties that cook lobsters by the trap. Come on. They were serving the beasts on paper. No chianti for you, tool. Finally, when I was working at the Holiday Inn once, a woman called me into her room to bitch about its condition. She talked to me like I had an extra chromosome.
"I....want...to....draw....your....attention...to...the....fact....that....we....have....
four....people....and...only....three....towels....See?.....One....two....three!! That....makes....three!!
If I wasn't afraid at the time that I would lose that crappy-ass job I would have given her the finger and sworn at her in six languages.
Sigh.
Well, I just read this over, and before I start sounding like the Unibomber, I will go, get fairly tipsy and do some Turkish homework and pray that tomorrow when I wake up this country has done the right thing.
Good night, Indiana.
Dom
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