Twenny-fi' yea', two in t' cornfields.
Alert: this blog contains unfettered crudeness.
As birthdays go, this one was toe-curling, vestigial-tail-waggin', fan-fekkin'-tastic. This, in stark opposition to the birthday I spent in maximum security under the harsh tutelage of a 350 lb Hispanic gentleman named "Penny", whose cheek bore the fancy single tear tattoo I've always dreamed of. "Bitch", he said to me one fine spring day (and meant it!), "you ain't be gettin' this ki'na tattoo 'less you be cuttin' some bitch, a'ight?" As he was saying this, he was fashioning a crude ice-pick out of a humerus; it went without saying that it was human. "Penny" taught me many things, most of which involved the sounds people make when you "cut them" in certain places on their body. Ah, what a happy seventeenth birthday that was. Because I was a minor when the alleged incident took place, I was sprung in only six months. When I left, there was a real single tear on his cheek.
To show people just how bizarre everyone in my life knows me to be, I'm going to list the gifts I received. Randomness: the only way to my heart.
* A chain with a cartouche of my name in Egyptian hieroglyphs.
* A red hooded sweatshirt bearing a single word, COCKS, with a rooster-head below. (South Carolina Gamecocks, of course, you filthy savages.)
* A book of Turkish fairytales.
* A Wichita State University "Shocker" bobblehead; he's now partnered with my Jack Timber bobblehead. Their union is only recognized in my room, as I drafted their marriage license and officiated over their commitment ceremony.
{Aside: a word on "The Shocker." In American English, one can use the word "shocker" for three things: one, a shocker is a bundle of harvested wheat; two, a shocker is slang for something that surprises someone-- "They found three hundred human heads buried under his tulip-patch and it came as a real shocker to his elderly neighbors" --and finally, "the shocker" is a crude hand gesture used by infantile frat-imps and highschool jocks to denote a sexual maneuver. Email me if you want a more... clarion... explanation. }
* A Qu'ran in transliterated Ottoman Turkish.
* A kitchen apron with "You have to believe in something in life. I believe that I will knock back another shot of tequila" written in Spanish on it.
* A t-shirt with the Turkish flag and the American flag side-by-side on the front and the words "Incırlık Air Force Base, Adana, Turkey" on the front; on the back, a DC-10 flying over a map of Turkey and a huge "INCIRLIK" written on it.
* A Polish crossword-puzzle book.
* An oldey-timey cookie-cutter in the shape of Sinterclass (Santa), but he looks like a baleful Byzantine icon.
* A Turkish children's book called "Rat, Frog and the Wide World."
* A windup chicken that you fill with bubblegum eggs; as she walks, she craps eggs out from her bum.
* A clown balloon, an effing delicious clown cake, a clown card, and dozens of clown noses from my coworkers, who know that I fear those we do not speak of. You guys rule.
* A gift certificate to Amazon.com (Marleina! Why you do that, uh? Thank you!)
I also managed to have a beautiful Japanese dinner and Maggie Moo ice-cream. [sigh of besnuggled contentment] My birthday present to myself was skipping French class, of course.
25. A quarter of a century. (sound of hip disintegrating)
Thanks for making it a good one, my minions.
***************************************************
3/31/05
This morning I woke up at four effing thirty to the sounds of the sky falling. At home in Maine, thunderstorms, rare as they are, are harmless enough; here, I've come to understand that thunderstorms can, uh, kill you. We may have a lot of things: nor'easters, more nor'easters, and vampires--but we don't have tornadoes. (Little known fact: Maine is the only state east of the Mississippi that does not have poisonous serpents.) Last summer, I was subletting a tiny loft apartment about a mile from where I live now. As I was making a miserable dinner (Chef Boyardee out of the can), I heard a strange sound. It got a little louder, and then it was joined by another sound. Then another. And another. Oh oh oh, they were tornado sirens. I looked outside and it was so dark (at 3 PM) that the street lights triggered and came on. As I huddled in a doorway (Boy Scout training!) listening to the unearthly moan and the caroming thunder of the worst thunderstorm I'd ever seen in my whole life, I thought: man, that Chef Boyardee sure is backing up on me. Mother Nature: insolent concubine of the Devil.
Anyway, so since I was up, I decided to do the rational thing: eat 492,000 pretzels. This past Thanksgiving, I went to the wheat (Kansas, as you surely recall) to see the paternal unit. While I was there, I was taken to Sam's Club for purchasing sustenance. One of the items was a barrel of pretzels large enough to embalm a toddler in. This morning, after struggling for so long, my dream was realized: I finished every damn crumb in that barrel, or my name isn't Balthazar.
The question remains, though: what shall I do with the barrel? I'm fresh out of toddlers (they're not in season yet). Should I use it as a planter? Should I fill it with sputum? Aw hell, I'm sure there's a wee one I've stashed SOMEWHERE in my room. Maybe Cuddles has one he can lend me.
Speaking of effed up, with my new stat-counter (see the very bottom of the blog) I can see how it is that people are accessing my blog. To my amazement, my blog is coming up in Google, Yahoo, and other search engines when people are looking for other things. They stumble on my blog and... well, are disappointed. So far, these are the things that people have been searching for upon finding my blog. Apparently, all of these things exist somewhere in here.
"Belorussian + whore"
"lesbian+gets+an+enema"
"Chow+Bar+bloomington" - of course, they got my "Green Tea from Hell" blog...
"anthro mare muscles grow"
"Confucius+once-a-day calendar"
"corn snake for seal in canada"
"i hate turks"
!!!!!! I hate Turks? How in the blue eff did THAT one come up?
Ugh. Well, back to the mines. {fetters!}
I remain, as ever,
Domonic
Tuesday, March 29, 2005
Monday, March 28, 2005
Dışkı nincası.
The dung ninja.
Yesterday, for the first time in... uh.... <smell of tires burning>.... two years, I went to church. Well, of course it's because it's Easter Sunday. It was, to put it mildly, quite a shock. The Mass itself was conducted in English, Spanish, Korean and Bahasa Indonesia. It was welcoming, affirming and multicultural. Gone, apparently, are the days of Inquisition! Gone are the days when bile poured forth from the pulpit about those who live in shadows, beyond the bountiful saving grace of Catholicism! Gone are the days when nuns beat you with baling hooks soaked in the briny tears and rank urea of the guilt-stricken!
I was, needless to say, apprehensive about going. Was the hand of the Almighty going to smite me where I stood as I attempted to cross the threshold into his sanctum? Was the holy water going to hiss as it touched my skin, and would I recoil and bare my vulpine fangs at it? Would the Host burst into smoky flame as it touched my tender, Gomorrahan tongue? Needless to say, nothing of the sort happened, and I walked forth from Mass unscathed. Unscathed, and filled with a creamy center of good old-fashioned Irish-Italian guilt. Ah well. At least I'm not impaling tots on pikes as much anymore, having given it up for Lent.
Friday night, the Republic was graced with a guest from THE Republic (Türk Republikası); it was none other than Faruk Loğoğlu (low-oh-lu), the Turkish Ambassador to the United States. In a grim little lecture hall in Ass-Boil (Ballantine) Hall, Faruk bey expounded the friendship between the U.S. and Turkey, taking special pains to dodge "special" questions, like Turkey's denial of land use for the devastation of Iraq, her Kurdish issues, and of course, her desire to ascend on high to join rich, racist Christian white people in the European Union. After the speech and the question/answer session, Faruk (and dozens of my Turks who were in attendance) retired to the Memorial Union for cheese, punch and pleasantries.
Of course, I was dying to meet him. I caught Kemal bey and he brought me over to Faruk bey whilst Faruk was diddling with the Turkish Studies publications. Kemal pressed me to the ambassador. "Faruk effendim, this is Domonic. He's one of the best students of Turkish Studies."
[single golden tear!]
Of course, he neglected to mention that I am the ONLY Turkish Studies student, a fact which I did not hasten to proffer. And then {wagging vestigial tail as I speak} I shook hands with the TURKISH AMBASSADOR TO THE UNITED STATES. Faruk, however, seemed much more interested in my lapel pin, which shows the Turkish and American flags together. He lost interest in me quickly, but I didn't care: his dead skin cells were holding court on my hand! I haven't been that excited since I excavated that mass grave in the Balkans.
Today, however, was more akin to a scene in Bram Stoker's Dracula, which I assume everyone on earth has seen. This is because my Turkish exam raped me so hard that the light from "passing" won't reach my biosphere for 4.2 billion years. But you all know the scene. It's the one where Van Helsing figures out that beloved, deceased Lucy is, in fact, living beyond the grace of God as a nosferatu. [Wha'? You mean she's Italian?] Anyway, they go into her ancestral crypt and, upon prying the lid off her sepulcher, are confronted by the maw of an empty coffin. With a small child upon whom she'd feast in her clammy arms, Lucy appears, and they chase her back to her vile coffin. Van Helsing then decides to do something that proves that he's an utter lunatic: he gets reeeeeeally close and starts screaming at her reposing "corpse" whilst holding a cruciform aloft. Whilst he's shrieking "We are strong in the Lord and the power of His might! Ex umbris in luce!", Lucy decides: Hey. Now's a good time to projectile-vomit three gallons of rapidly-cooling human blood onto this bass'ad. And she does. For that, she gets beheaded and staked. Poor nosferatu.
In my neighborhood, several people are pet owners. I know this because I sometimes see them walking said canines, but more often than not, I know that these beasts exist because Tony and I have been finding steaming, man-sized coils of feces in our "yard." The first time it happened, I wrote it off and watched, day by day, as it mouldered and turned corpse-white before disintegrating in a violent rainstorm. The second time, the beast surely had to have been one of the Budweiser Clydesdales. As I watched scarabs roll Kaiser roll-sized lumps of dung to their vile keep, I decided then and there to take justice into my own hooves. A "chat" with the apartment complex staff was fruitless. When Tony told me about two of our neighbors--with Tony sitting right there, watching--parking their Shetland pony-sized beasts on our lawn, something in me snapped and I went [further?] out of my gourd. I went inside and got two Wal*Mart bags and went outside and picked up the two piles and carefully tied the bags. I then went inside and dressed all in black and, strapping my katana to my back, I launched myself at their homes with "savory" treats in tow. I carefully placed each bag on the appropriate neighbor's porch, in their doorway, and then I threw a smokebomb to cover my retreat.
I will continue to do this until this stops. "Now Domonic", you all are saying, shaking your heads sadly, "you're doing their job for them." But, my devoted, you haven't heard about stage two! If it happens again, there will be a typewritten note. You know, something to the effect of:
You disgust the Master. Allowing your pets to defecate here befouls grounds sacred hundreds of millennia before you were a zygote in your mother's wretched womb. Continuation of this allowance will cause His servant to bring down calamity of unimaginable proportions on His behalf. You have been warned.
Accompanying this note will be a lock of hair. It will be my hair. The lock will be woven into a delicate doll and then covered with paraffin. There's no significance to any of that, but their bewilderment/fright will please me. And, a third mishap? Well, let's just say I'll be trolling I-37 for roadkill.
I've gotten my first birthday wish. It comes from Turkey, where it's now... uh... like, 5:30 AM. Dinçer ağabey beat everyone to the punch. In an hour and a half, I'll be 25. Four years ago, I turned 21 on another continent, on the high plateau of the land of the galloping mare's head, in a land where 21 really DOES just mean 21. Having to explain that "21" means "vomiting on your crotch whilst hunched, ashen, trying to not die of alcohol poisoning on a toilet that hasn't been cleaned since the Blitz" makes us sound like weird, Puritanical prudes. Turks can drink as soon as they ask for it... well, those who don't take the Words of the Prophet seriously.
25. A quarter century of living. What have I accomplished? What will I accomplish? And, isn't there a rerun of The Golden Girls on?
I remain, as ever,
Domonic
Yesterday, for the first time in... uh.... <smell of tires burning>.... two years, I went to church. Well, of course it's because it's Easter Sunday. It was, to put it mildly, quite a shock. The Mass itself was conducted in English, Spanish, Korean and Bahasa Indonesia. It was welcoming, affirming and multicultural. Gone, apparently, are the days of Inquisition! Gone are the days when bile poured forth from the pulpit about those who live in shadows, beyond the bountiful saving grace of Catholicism! Gone are the days when nuns beat you with baling hooks soaked in the briny tears and rank urea of the guilt-stricken!
I was, needless to say, apprehensive about going. Was the hand of the Almighty going to smite me where I stood as I attempted to cross the threshold into his sanctum? Was the holy water going to hiss as it touched my skin, and would I recoil and bare my vulpine fangs at it? Would the Host burst into smoky flame as it touched my tender, Gomorrahan tongue? Needless to say, nothing of the sort happened, and I walked forth from Mass unscathed. Unscathed, and filled with a creamy center of good old-fashioned Irish-Italian guilt. Ah well. At least I'm not impaling tots on pikes as much anymore, having given it up for Lent.
Friday night, the Republic was graced with a guest from THE Republic (Türk Republikası); it was none other than Faruk Loğoğlu (low-oh-lu), the Turkish Ambassador to the United States. In a grim little lecture hall in Ass-Boil (Ballantine) Hall, Faruk bey expounded the friendship between the U.S. and Turkey, taking special pains to dodge "special" questions, like Turkey's denial of land use for the devastation of Iraq, her Kurdish issues, and of course, her desire to ascend on high to join rich, racist Christian white people in the European Union. After the speech and the question/answer session, Faruk (and dozens of my Turks who were in attendance) retired to the Memorial Union for cheese, punch and pleasantries.
Of course, I was dying to meet him. I caught Kemal bey and he brought me over to Faruk bey whilst Faruk was diddling with the Turkish Studies publications. Kemal pressed me to the ambassador. "Faruk effendim, this is Domonic. He's one of the best students of Turkish Studies."
[single golden tear!]
Of course, he neglected to mention that I am the ONLY Turkish Studies student, a fact which I did not hasten to proffer. And then {wagging vestigial tail as I speak} I shook hands with the TURKISH AMBASSADOR TO THE UNITED STATES. Faruk, however, seemed much more interested in my lapel pin, which shows the Turkish and American flags together. He lost interest in me quickly, but I didn't care: his dead skin cells were holding court on my hand! I haven't been that excited since I excavated that mass grave in the Balkans.
Today, however, was more akin to a scene in Bram Stoker's Dracula, which I assume everyone on earth has seen. This is because my Turkish exam raped me so hard that the light from "passing" won't reach my biosphere for 4.2 billion years. But you all know the scene. It's the one where Van Helsing figures out that beloved, deceased Lucy is, in fact, living beyond the grace of God as a nosferatu. [Wha'? You mean she's Italian?] Anyway, they go into her ancestral crypt and, upon prying the lid off her sepulcher, are confronted by the maw of an empty coffin. With a small child upon whom she'd feast in her clammy arms, Lucy appears, and they chase her back to her vile coffin. Van Helsing then decides to do something that proves that he's an utter lunatic: he gets reeeeeeally close and starts screaming at her reposing "corpse" whilst holding a cruciform aloft. Whilst he's shrieking "We are strong in the Lord and the power of His might! Ex umbris in luce!", Lucy decides: Hey. Now's a good time to projectile-vomit three gallons of rapidly-cooling human blood onto this bass'ad. And she does. For that, she gets beheaded and staked. Poor nosferatu.
In my neighborhood, several people are pet owners. I know this because I sometimes see them walking said canines, but more often than not, I know that these beasts exist because Tony and I have been finding steaming, man-sized coils of feces in our "yard." The first time it happened, I wrote it off and watched, day by day, as it mouldered and turned corpse-white before disintegrating in a violent rainstorm. The second time, the beast surely had to have been one of the Budweiser Clydesdales. As I watched scarabs roll Kaiser roll-sized lumps of dung to their vile keep, I decided then and there to take justice into my own hooves. A "chat" with the apartment complex staff was fruitless. When Tony told me about two of our neighbors--with Tony sitting right there, watching--parking their Shetland pony-sized beasts on our lawn, something in me snapped and I went [further?] out of my gourd. I went inside and got two Wal*Mart bags and went outside and picked up the two piles and carefully tied the bags. I then went inside and dressed all in black and, strapping my katana to my back, I launched myself at their homes with "savory" treats in tow. I carefully placed each bag on the appropriate neighbor's porch, in their doorway, and then I threw a smokebomb to cover my retreat.
I will continue to do this until this stops. "Now Domonic", you all are saying, shaking your heads sadly, "you're doing their job for them." But, my devoted, you haven't heard about stage two! If it happens again, there will be a typewritten note. You know, something to the effect of:
You disgust the Master. Allowing your pets to defecate here befouls grounds sacred hundreds of millennia before you were a zygote in your mother's wretched womb. Continuation of this allowance will cause His servant to bring down calamity of unimaginable proportions on His behalf. You have been warned.
Accompanying this note will be a lock of hair. It will be my hair. The lock will be woven into a delicate doll and then covered with paraffin. There's no significance to any of that, but their bewilderment/fright will please me. And, a third mishap? Well, let's just say I'll be trolling I-37 for roadkill.
I've gotten my first birthday wish. It comes from Turkey, where it's now... uh... like, 5:30 AM. Dinçer ağabey beat everyone to the punch. In an hour and a half, I'll be 25. Four years ago, I turned 21 on another continent, on the high plateau of the land of the galloping mare's head, in a land where 21 really DOES just mean 21. Having to explain that "21" means "vomiting on your crotch whilst hunched, ashen, trying to not die of alcohol poisoning on a toilet that hasn't been cleaned since the Blitz" makes us sound like weird, Puritanical prudes. Turks can drink as soon as they ask for it... well, those who don't take the Words of the Prophet seriously.
25. A quarter century of living. What have I accomplished? What will I accomplish? And, isn't there a rerun of The Golden Girls on?
I remain, as ever,
Domonic
Tuesday, March 22, 2005
Hiç kimse gelecek.
Nobody will come.
About a month and a half ago, I was leaving the Memorial Union as the Bloomington Shuttle was disgorging her Indianapolis-inbound, travel-weary passengers onto the lenai near the entrance to the IU Credit Union. One woman caught my attention; of course, it was because I could easily envision wearing her tanned scalp on my shaved head; her reddish-blonde hair shimmered in the late winter sunlight. No, she looked incredibly familiar, and I was utterly transfixed. Girl, I said in my head, where you be from, uh? No, she wasn't one of my Bloomington friends, and since I know only four people in Indiana who live outside the Republic, I ruled Indiana out as well. That could mean only one thing.
She was from the mothership.
It took me ages to screw my courage up to approach her. Those of you who know me might be surprised at just how shy I can be sometimes. Visions of her screaming "Rape!" at the top of her lungs was what really did it. But eventually, I couldn't loiter any longer without the hotel staff thinking I was casing the joint. So I went over to her and punched her in the neck and ran. Haha, no. I walked up to her and immediately began to stammer like a moron.
Duhhhhh... I think I know you... not from here... home in Maine... I have this extra chromosome...
She shot a taser-dart directly into my left nipple and began to hose my face down with chemical sprays of East German origin. When I blacked out from the pain, she used her bitch-boots to crush my testes whilst shrieking "Down with cow demons and snake spirits!"
Actually, she turned and smiled and when I mentioned I was from Maine, she perked up dramatically. "Bangor, right?", she said. "We went to Bangor High School together. I'm Class of 1999." And she was right: now I totally remembered her! She even lived in my 'hood! I hadn't seen her in seven years, but there she was, and there I was, and we were grayer, wiser, and (I can't speak for her on this one) needing desperately to poop. We talked for a half hour, and then her brother, who came out here to the corn to teach, picked her up. It was a good time; well, once I regained consciousness and washed my face.
I've been out here, in my own little world, for almost two whole years. Nobody I know from my other worlds--Turkey, Maine, North Carolina, New Jersey--has come to the corn to see me.
< in the distance, softly, Izhak Perlman begins to tune a hummingbird-sized violin >
Not that I care. In fact, I'd probably cut you real bad if you did come. I'm just stating a fact, that's all. Take it as you will, insolent bastards.
This coming Tuesday, the planets will align and humpback whales in the Atlantic will give birth to two-headed calves; it'll be my 25th birthday. To celebrate my nativity, the government of Canada will be starting their annual harp-seal pup cull on the northern pack-ice. No, I am not making this up. 25 candles on my cake, 4,000 dead baby seals. It's like some sort of cosmic joke. I am going to write Ottowa and demand that, as sacrifice, they provide me with my own seal-club. I won't use it...
On seals.
In other "news that makes the scrambled eggs in your belly do the fandango", a diner at a Wendy's chain somewhere godforsaken was enjoying her chili when lo, she found that in her mouth was a human finger. She did what any one of us would have done: bleached it and kept it as a grisly souvenir. And by "any one of us" I mean "I." No, she projectile-vomited through her eye-sockets, of course. The question is: how did it get there? As alert Life in the Corn devotee Keith pointed out, Wendy's chili is made on-site with unusable (broken, I hope) hamburgers. Wouldn't someone have, uh, reported a missing digit? Was it a cruel joke? Was there dirt under the fingernail? Well, it's all moot, anyway. She's going to get an out-of-court settlement that will ensure her easy access to the finest doublewide money can buy and a snoot full of Columbia's finest. Life, and the world, is a vampire.
My father, yet another alert Life in the Corn disciple, called me last night to tell me that he had a really great time at Sam's Club on a recent excursion. Why, you ask? Other than the fact that you can buy Thousand Island dressing in an industrial steel-drum? No, my dad just had a hip replacement (the future looms grimly for me) and he got to use one of the fun motorized handicapped carts. "The best part", he said, "was when you backed up and it made that beeping noise like when a truck is backing up." Now you all can have a better idea of how it is that I came to be like I am. Genetics don't only determine eye color, y'know.
On Tuesday afternoon, I parked my car in the X-Lot (out at the frikkin' stadium) and took the shuttle onto campus. The bus was Calcutta-full: visions of turning on CNN and you hearing about a minibus going over a ravine in India because it had 2,418 people in and on it swam lazily before me. I, luckily, had a seat, and when the bus got more crowded, I moved my bag to my lap and waited for a coed to seat him/herself next to me. Now, at this point the bus had easily thirty more people than it should have had on it, and yet:
Nobody would sit next to me.
I motioned and spoke to two people and told them that they could sit, but they preferred (their eyes told all) to being pressed up against three other people so hard that their pores began to aspirate together. One girl got pregnant accidentally. And yet, still, nobody would sit.
It might be the beard, combined as it was with the crescent-and-star patch on my bag. But hey, if I were going to detonate something on that bus, proximity to me isn't going to matter: they'll still bury you in a Matchbox car. I didn't smell. My breath was citrusy fresh. What gives?
And, could it have been the necklace of human eyelids I was wearing?
I remain, as ever,
Dom
About a month and a half ago, I was leaving the Memorial Union as the Bloomington Shuttle was disgorging her Indianapolis-inbound, travel-weary passengers onto the lenai near the entrance to the IU Credit Union. One woman caught my attention; of course, it was because I could easily envision wearing her tanned scalp on my shaved head; her reddish-blonde hair shimmered in the late winter sunlight. No, she looked incredibly familiar, and I was utterly transfixed. Girl, I said in my head, where you be from, uh? No, she wasn't one of my Bloomington friends, and since I know only four people in Indiana who live outside the Republic, I ruled Indiana out as well. That could mean only one thing.
She was from the mothership.
It took me ages to screw my courage up to approach her. Those of you who know me might be surprised at just how shy I can be sometimes. Visions of her screaming "Rape!" at the top of her lungs was what really did it. But eventually, I couldn't loiter any longer without the hotel staff thinking I was casing the joint. So I went over to her and punched her in the neck and ran. Haha, no. I walked up to her and immediately began to stammer like a moron.
Duhhhhh... I think I know you... not from here... home in Maine... I have this extra chromosome...
She shot a taser-dart directly into my left nipple and began to hose my face down with chemical sprays of East German origin. When I blacked out from the pain, she used her bitch-boots to crush my testes whilst shrieking "Down with cow demons and snake spirits!"
Actually, she turned and smiled and when I mentioned I was from Maine, she perked up dramatically. "Bangor, right?", she said. "We went to Bangor High School together. I'm Class of 1999." And she was right: now I totally remembered her! She even lived in my 'hood! I hadn't seen her in seven years, but there she was, and there I was, and we were grayer, wiser, and (I can't speak for her on this one) needing desperately to poop. We talked for a half hour, and then her brother, who came out here to the corn to teach, picked her up. It was a good time; well, once I regained consciousness and washed my face.
I've been out here, in my own little world, for almost two whole years. Nobody I know from my other worlds--Turkey, Maine, North Carolina, New Jersey--has come to the corn to see me.
< in the distance, softly, Izhak Perlman begins to tune a hummingbird-sized violin >
Not that I care. In fact, I'd probably cut you real bad if you did come. I'm just stating a fact, that's all. Take it as you will, insolent bastards.
This coming Tuesday, the planets will align and humpback whales in the Atlantic will give birth to two-headed calves; it'll be my 25th birthday. To celebrate my nativity, the government of Canada will be starting their annual harp-seal pup cull on the northern pack-ice. No, I am not making this up. 25 candles on my cake, 4,000 dead baby seals. It's like some sort of cosmic joke. I am going to write Ottowa and demand that, as sacrifice, they provide me with my own seal-club. I won't use it...
On seals.
In other "news that makes the scrambled eggs in your belly do the fandango", a diner at a Wendy's chain somewhere godforsaken was enjoying her chili when lo, she found that in her mouth was a human finger. She did what any one of us would have done: bleached it and kept it as a grisly souvenir. And by "any one of us" I mean "I." No, she projectile-vomited through her eye-sockets, of course. The question is: how did it get there? As alert Life in the Corn devotee Keith pointed out, Wendy's chili is made on-site with unusable (broken, I hope) hamburgers. Wouldn't someone have, uh, reported a missing digit? Was it a cruel joke? Was there dirt under the fingernail? Well, it's all moot, anyway. She's going to get an out-of-court settlement that will ensure her easy access to the finest doublewide money can buy and a snoot full of Columbia's finest. Life, and the world, is a vampire.
My father, yet another alert Life in the Corn disciple, called me last night to tell me that he had a really great time at Sam's Club on a recent excursion. Why, you ask? Other than the fact that you can buy Thousand Island dressing in an industrial steel-drum? No, my dad just had a hip replacement (the future looms grimly for me) and he got to use one of the fun motorized handicapped carts. "The best part", he said, "was when you backed up and it made that beeping noise like when a truck is backing up." Now you all can have a better idea of how it is that I came to be like I am. Genetics don't only determine eye color, y'know.
On Tuesday afternoon, I parked my car in the X-Lot (out at the frikkin' stadium) and took the shuttle onto campus. The bus was Calcutta-full: visions of turning on CNN and you hearing about a minibus going over a ravine in India because it had 2,418 people in and on it swam lazily before me. I, luckily, had a seat, and when the bus got more crowded, I moved my bag to my lap and waited for a coed to seat him/herself next to me. Now, at this point the bus had easily thirty more people than it should have had on it, and yet:
Nobody would sit next to me.
I motioned and spoke to two people and told them that they could sit, but they preferred (their eyes told all) to being pressed up against three other people so hard that their pores began to aspirate together. One girl got pregnant accidentally. And yet, still, nobody would sit.
It might be the beard, combined as it was with the crescent-and-star patch on my bag. But hey, if I were going to detonate something on that bus, proximity to me isn't going to matter: they'll still bury you in a Matchbox car. I didn't smell. My breath was citrusy fresh. What gives?
And, could it have been the necklace of human eyelids I was wearing?
I remain, as ever,
Dom
Monday, March 21, 2005
Komik kemik.
"The funny bone."
Two mornings ago I came home to find something inauspicious on my porch landing. In a perfect world it would have been a putrid carp wrapped in a Serbo-Croat language newspaper, but as it was, it was pretty damn close. It was a sinew-covered neck vertebra from an unknown terrestrial beast, and from the size of it, it might have been from a rhea or a bushbuck or per'aps Luther Vandross. [Where the hell has he gone? More importantly, do we give a fairy's twinkly ass?] So, I did what any one of you might have done when confronted by a gore-covered ossicle: I prepared a fresh cup of Citrus Clorox and bleached the eff out of it. Now it lies on my desk, gleaming white and startlingly clean, begging me to play with it. Clearly it is meant to be the centerpiece of a grisly necklace; my three wisdom teeth will provide merry accoutrement.
[When I had my wisdom teeth removed, the fun nurse assistant-lady asked me--while I was under the influence of about seven quarts of Novacaine--if I had any questions. I nodded.
"Cuh Ah haff mur teef?" She looked at me as if I had been sexually assaulting a gravid she-goat.
"What did you say? I think I understood, but..." So I repeated my question and she grimaced. "Well, sure, you can have your teeth, but that's weird." Since she didn't know me at all, I had to let that one slide. How could she have known that that was merely the tip of the iceberg? She took them and scraped most of the pinkish tissue off and put them in a wee baggy. When she handed them to me [holding the baggie like it were a jar of warm sputum], I wagged my vestigial tail with sheer delight.]
The bone on my porch, however, presents a set of profound questions. Why was it there? Who put it there? Would it make a good broth? As I see it, the possibilities are these:
1) Nature. Perhaps an airborne crow/bluejay/raptor of some kind dropped the sinewy treat on my porch, having dispatched/consumed the unfortunate, and still unknown, former owner. The crow and the bluejay in my neighborhood usually spend their time feasting on the rabbit/squirrel smorgasbord on Henderson, but hey, if opportunity knocked, they'd sure as hell answer.
2) Neighborhood dogs. Several of my neighbors have canine companions; I know this not so much from having actually seen the beasts, but from having seen their nearly human-sized steaming feces littering my yard. I'd leave poisoned hotdogs out for them, but it's not their fault: better, perhaps, to crouch in the bushes and shoot their owners in the neck-paunch with Papuan blowdarts. Maybe it was they who snuffed an unfortunate woodland beast and left part of its remains on my porch. Hmm.
3) Someone hates me. The obvious answer is, of course, that it is an omen. Someone out there is trying to tell me something. Someone out there wants me dead, and the grim bone is a clarion reminder of their intent. Well let me tell you something. When I find out who you are, ye of the sinew-covered vertebrae, I will cut you so hard that your mother's parakeet will speak Portugese and then weep blood. Don't effing eff with me, mothereffer.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
In other news, a pet store in Michigantown, Indiana, burned to the ground recently, killing all of the pets.
*pause for a moment to reflect, you insensitive freaks! dead pets!*
But that's not the end of the story! The fire killed all the pets... all the pets but one. A red-eared slider turtle survived, kept alive no doubt because he was immersed in water. Now renamed "Lucky", the turtle was taken out of the rubble by the store's owner, who promptly noticed that the heat had done something strange to the turtle's carapace.
It had seared the face of the Hooved One himself onto it.
Apparently, one can see "very clearly" the "eyes, horns and goatee" of Satan broiled into the shell of a turtle. I don't know whether to vomit, weep, or wander the Sinai for forty years. The Corn: it's a special kind of place. People sell their parent's ghosts. People get gored by their pet gnus. People find shelled reptiles that have the visage of the Judeo-Christian anthropomorphism of evil seared upon their carapace.
Apparently, I belong here so bad that there can no longer be doubt of it.
I remain, as ever,
Dom
Two mornings ago I came home to find something inauspicious on my porch landing. In a perfect world it would have been a putrid carp wrapped in a Serbo-Croat language newspaper, but as it was, it was pretty damn close. It was a sinew-covered neck vertebra from an unknown terrestrial beast, and from the size of it, it might have been from a rhea or a bushbuck or per'aps Luther Vandross. [Where the hell has he gone? More importantly, do we give a fairy's twinkly ass?] So, I did what any one of you might have done when confronted by a gore-covered ossicle: I prepared a fresh cup of Citrus Clorox and bleached the eff out of it. Now it lies on my desk, gleaming white and startlingly clean, begging me to play with it. Clearly it is meant to be the centerpiece of a grisly necklace; my three wisdom teeth will provide merry accoutrement.
[When I had my wisdom teeth removed, the fun nurse assistant-lady asked me--while I was under the influence of about seven quarts of Novacaine--if I had any questions. I nodded.
"Cuh Ah haff mur teef?" She looked at me as if I had been sexually assaulting a gravid she-goat.
"What did you say? I think I understood, but..." So I repeated my question and she grimaced. "Well, sure, you can have your teeth, but that's weird." Since she didn't know me at all, I had to let that one slide. How could she have known that that was merely the tip of the iceberg? She took them and scraped most of the pinkish tissue off and put them in a wee baggy. When she handed them to me [holding the baggie like it were a jar of warm sputum], I wagged my vestigial tail with sheer delight.]
The bone on my porch, however, presents a set of profound questions. Why was it there? Who put it there? Would it make a good broth? As I see it, the possibilities are these:
1) Nature. Perhaps an airborne crow/bluejay/raptor of some kind dropped the sinewy treat on my porch, having dispatched/consumed the unfortunate, and still unknown, former owner. The crow and the bluejay in my neighborhood usually spend their time feasting on the rabbit/squirrel smorgasbord on Henderson, but hey, if opportunity knocked, they'd sure as hell answer.
2) Neighborhood dogs. Several of my neighbors have canine companions; I know this not so much from having actually seen the beasts, but from having seen their nearly human-sized steaming feces littering my yard. I'd leave poisoned hotdogs out for them, but it's not their fault: better, perhaps, to crouch in the bushes and shoot their owners in the neck-paunch with Papuan blowdarts. Maybe it was they who snuffed an unfortunate woodland beast and left part of its remains on my porch. Hmm.
3) Someone hates me. The obvious answer is, of course, that it is an omen. Someone out there is trying to tell me something. Someone out there wants me dead, and the grim bone is a clarion reminder of their intent. Well let me tell you something. When I find out who you are, ye of the sinew-covered vertebrae, I will cut you so hard that your mother's parakeet will speak Portugese and then weep blood. Don't effing eff with me, mothereffer.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
In other news, a pet store in Michigantown, Indiana, burned to the ground recently, killing all of the pets.
*pause for a moment to reflect, you insensitive freaks! dead pets!*
But that's not the end of the story! The fire killed all the pets... all the pets but one. A red-eared slider turtle survived, kept alive no doubt because he was immersed in water. Now renamed "Lucky", the turtle was taken out of the rubble by the store's owner, who promptly noticed that the heat had done something strange to the turtle's carapace.
It had seared the face of the Hooved One himself onto it.
Apparently, one can see "very clearly" the "eyes, horns and goatee" of Satan broiled into the shell of a turtle. I don't know whether to vomit, weep, or wander the Sinai for forty years. The Corn: it's a special kind of place. People sell their parent's ghosts. People get gored by their pet gnus. People find shelled reptiles that have the visage of the Judeo-Christian anthropomorphism of evil seared upon their carapace.
Apparently, I belong here so bad that there can no longer be doubt of it.
I remain, as ever,
Dom
Saturday, March 19, 2005
Uh, yeah.
Blogger went down the other night like a torpedoed overcrowded ferry and caused my posting to duplicate as well as, uh, managing to cut off about 9/10 of the actual post.
I'd complain, but it's free and fun.
Feast below.
Dom
I'd complain, but it's free and fun.
Feast below.
Dom
Thursday, March 17, 2005
Rüzgârlı Şehri.
The Windy City; or, how sometimes things work out for a hairy Italian boy.
Chapter One: Otelde.
I was about as leery as a one o' them be-robed Tibetan monks walking into Tiananmen about using Priceline.com. The premise of it didn't make sense; in a very Old World sensibility, you name a price for a service and someone out there accepts your bid. It's like going to a bazaar where people fight to suck the money out of your sweaty palm, except, uh, there's no sweaty palm and there are really no fights. OK, well that metaphor blew. At any rate, for the sheer shits and giggles factor of it all, I decided that I wanted to stay on the Loop (Downtown Chicago) for $75 a night. Yes. I really didn't think it would work, seeing as how the apparent going rate for hotels in that area were upwards of $150, plus a carefully taken core drawn from one of your kidneys. Or the first two knuckles of your index finger. Or a discrete "favor" in the alley with the general manager, a portly man who smells of Old Spice and cheap cigarillos and whose unrepaired cleft palate causes him to say "Thicago." Needless to say, when a three-star hotel accepted my bid, I thought: either I'm lucky or I'm going to end up on the 7 o'clock news.
The drive to Chicago from Bloomington Republikası was through some of the flattest real estate I've ever seen, and I've been to Kansas AND Iowa. No hills, barely any trees-- and the prairie (prairie? would it be prairie with all of that corn on it?) stretched until I could almost see the curvature of the earth. Then, after about two hours, there came a stench like tires and gasoline and dead baby seals all mixed together and blow-torched; in the distance there arose forty-foot high flames from towers that reached like the fingers of the damned supplicating in vain to the soot-laden heavens.
GARY.
I'd heard whispers about Gary since I came out to the corn almost two years ago. Gary has earned several colorful sobriquets, like "Scary Gary", "Boil-covered Armpit of the Earth" and "Town of Ass and Fire." Labeled in "Places Rated Almanac" as one of the least habitable American cities, Gary has the nation's third highest murder rate, after Saint Louis and Metro Dade (Miami). A quick glance at the little movey thing that tells you how much gas you have was a huge effing relief; it was a half tank. We were just not 'savvy' enough to have lived through the experience of getting gas in that little ashy corner of Hell. As we passed through an industrial landscape that would make anyone, as Keith put it, "want to get naked and run through a forest", I thought: how can anyone live here? And why would anyone want to live here? And, are all of Britney Spears' teeth real? The girl's like a salt-ravined sea-shark, honestly.
With the flames of Perdition itself behind us, Chicagoland began with miles and miles of strange row houses and tiny warren-like streets filled with half-naked young-uns desperate to contract tetanus. In the distance, the spires of the nation's tallest building, the Sears Tower, pierced the heavens; the illumination of the "spikes" was, of course, a pale green, deferring to the impending Saint Patrick's Day merriment. Ah... a real skyline.
Indianapolis doesn't count. *derisive snort*
The highway took us straight into downtown, where the real task at hand became abundantly apparent: distract myself from my own intense excitement (stop looking up at them there tall things, bitch!) to try to find our hotel. As we passed many "hotels" with ominous signs like "Chicagoland Hotel: Men Only", icy fear crept into my loins. Was there to be a dead prostitute under our beds? Clumsily cleansed chalk outlines in the bathroom? Would the Andes chocolates on our pillows be possessed of their original integrity? After circling a few blocks 900,000 times because of Chicago's apparent desire to not label anything, I noticed that there were weird white banners fluttering on the side of a building up ahead. They said "Blake."
Our hotel! And and AND, it looked like it wasn't going to be the scene of our collective tragic demise!
We park and check in. The lobby is draped in sheets and strange fluttery wisps of cloth; no, this was not some sort of decoration scheme. This was because the entire hotel was being gutted and made into a condominium hotel. Yeah, I don't know what that means either; {whispers!} but it sounds pretentious and European to me. THAT'S why the room was so cheap. If the hotel were up and running as it should have been, we would have been tasered at the door. As it was, we were welcome guests in a hotel that appeared to have only three or four rooms in commission. The elevator's floor was plywood. The hall was filled with the stench of paint and caulking. But our room! Enormous bay windows afforded a view of downtown and the Public Library; two fluffy double beds beckoned to the weary, and the bathroom! Immaculate!
[ Dom used to work in a hotel. I work't theyah a real long time. Clean bathrooms; not only hard to prepare, but insanely difficult to maintain. Do you know how much hair a human sheds in one day? And skin flakes?]
Of course, there was a more pressing need still: Imminent starvation. Of course, who can go to Chicago and not get real Chicago pizza? Pressed to the bosom of the "L" near a dark alley was the Boni Vino, which, unbeknownst to us until now (googling its ass as we speak) is a Chicago landmark. A Coke, a Sprite and a large 'roni pizza later and that which was corporeal was transcended: mutha-effah, was that good pie. *
* pie: (pi): New York/New Jersey slang: a goddamn pizza, you Phillistine morons.
With bellies distended, we walked through Chicago's Miracle Mile past [closed] shops where scarves cost more than my monthly rent. A huge mug of hot chocolate and a ride on the train later and we were back at our London-after-the-Blitz hotel, where warm beds and the soft rumble of traffic carried us off.
Chapter Two: Zhongguocheng DaJie.
Now, as all of ye who know me well are aware, I am utterly paralyzed with delight in Chinatown. Most people are turned off by the overpowering reek in the Chinese groceries and apothecaries, the seemingly random ethnographic artifacts and the unidentifiable food served with them stick things [no! you not have fork!], but wow, all of those things bring me to nearly perish with excitement. When I went to San Francisco's Chinatown, I distinctly remember asking my friends to save themselves and leave me behind; had they done so, they would have found me several months later wandering the streets, unwashed and gibbering in a bastardized mix of Cantonese, Mandarin and Wu whilst clutching a tiny replica of a Forbidden City guardian lion. Anyway, I didn't want to get my hopes up and have them dashed: after all, a Midwestern Chinatown? Whateva, no you di'ent.
As the train shuddered to a stop at the "Chinatown" station, I saw pagoda roofs; naturally, my pupils dialated and my pulse began to tap-dance in my Sino-lovin' veins. A monumental gate inscribed in gold paint with the Chinese for "Chinatown" led into the main street of Chinatown, filled as it was with dozens of stores filled with achingly beautiful randomness, restaurants serving China's and Vietnam's finest, and of course a Chinese Methodist church; hey, why not? As I browsed through a Chinese Christian bookstore, I thought: who do I know who'd appreciate a wallhanging of the Psalms written in Han Dynasty Chinese calligraphy?
Of course, I had to procure something that was completely effed-up for my ethnographic artifact collection; after seven or eight stores, I settled on a Chinese unicorn statuette. Now, Chinese unicorns (qilin) don't look like the willowy white horses of medieval European lore; no, Chinese unicorns look like bulldogs on contraband former USSR-ilk steroids, and their "single horn" is usually an antler that protrudes from the back of their heads, not their 'delicate' crowns. They also have fangs and talons. They are fantastic and provide a good example to show people how beauty is construed in China; also, they provide a great illustration of the dangers of smoking a lot of opium.
The best part, though, was taking Keith into his first Chinese apothecary. In vast jars the size of a seven-year-old, hundreds of teas and herbs held majestic court. There were also, uh, things like:
Dried seahorses.
Dried abalone.
Dried deer sinew.
Dried deer tails.
Deer antlers.
Jimmy Hoffa's fingers. (A steal at $450 a tael!)
Keith was obviously mildly horrified, but it needed to be done. Then, back on the train.
Chapter Three: Ελληνικάπόλης.
From Chinatown, a ten minute ride back into the vicinity of downtown brought us to a place where I dare not bare my left arm for fear of black-clad widows hissing at me through their teeth: Greektown. Now, if you are one of the three people left on the planet who hasn't yet seen My Big Fat Greek Wedding (*gently strokes Keith's head, crooning softly*), you might not know that Chicago's Greek community is the second largest in the United States after the Astoria neighborhood in NYC. Swarthy, olive-skinned people of all ages milled about, sacks full of olive oil, honey and Epirian bread, komboloi (worry-beads) clacking merrily, the Cross of Saint George (the Greek flag) proudly flying next to the American one... and the cloying perfume of grilling flesh on a spit. For a moment I was transported back to the magical days I spent in Αθήνα... the moonlit night wandering around the Plaka at the base of the Acropolis... that same smell of barely treated human sewage... *mist*
The one store in the whole district that I wanted to shop in was closed for a religious observance. Tantalizing me from the darkened property were hand-dipped Hymettus beeswax candles, baleful Byzantine icons, incense censors from Mount Athos... my kingdom for a brick! Once my disappointment ebbed (with bitterness and salty-sweet tears as the flotsam and jetsam), it was time to procure sustenance. Quick, lads! στο εστιατόριο!
I'd been told that I needed to eat at the Parthenon. As a smallish, pimply teenager, I had an entire wall that I'd plastered with black-and-white photographs of the Athenian Acropolis and it was like my first, tender lover; I owed it to the ol' battle-ax to eat at a restaurant named after its pillar-crusted magnificence.
When our waiter came, with no hesitation I ordered the Κεφτή από το Ιζμίρ.
Of course, the last word wasn't "Izmir", but the Greek city-state name for Izmir, Smyrna.
[The rest of it, by the by, is "meatballs of."] In Turkish today, the word for meatball is köfte; in transliterated Greek, it's "kefte." Yay for the Ottoman Empire! Çok yaşa Türkiye! Anyway, the kefte danced the flamenco in my mouth; it's been since I slaughtered and ate that seven-year-old child two years ago that I have been so pleased with a meal. Out of the corner of my tear-filled eyes, I could see Keith enjoying his treat immensely as well; Αθηναϊκό κοτόπουλο was his treat of the day, and that Athenian chicken seemed to please him to no end. "That chicken", he later said, "makes me wanna slap your mama." Whatever that means.
Again, the train.
Chapter Four: Göl'e.
After the train vomited us into downtown, and a frantic car-ride later, Keith and I found ourselves barely able to speak as we stared slack-jawed at the Field Museum's Pacific Northwest collection. There had to have been three hundred masks, representing the Bella Bella, Chinnok, Clatskanie, Eyak, Haida, Kwakiutl, Makah, Nootka, Salish, Takelma, Tlingit, and Tsimshian peoples. It was astounding. I vowed then and there that I would take all of the money I earn selling crack and blow under the railroad trestle and buy myself one of them my-t-fine slices o' Heaven one day. [hastens to prepare dozens of tiny baggies]
Then, the lake. As the sun rode low on the horizon, we went out to a jetty near the Field Museum and beheld the undisputed capital of the Midwest from her lake, Michigan. As the lake lapped upon the pier and the sun set, I couldn't help but think: what WOULD impress Shania Twain?
It was the perfect end to a perfect day and night before, and as we drove the four hours back to the Republic, I knew that I'd be back. There's too much to see. There's too much to eat. And there, in Chinatown, there's a red-visaged Chinese demon who will look fantastic on my shelves.
I remain, as ever,
Dom
Chapter One: Otelde.
I was about as leery as a one o' them be-robed Tibetan monks walking into Tiananmen about using Priceline.com. The premise of it didn't make sense; in a very Old World sensibility, you name a price for a service and someone out there accepts your bid. It's like going to a bazaar where people fight to suck the money out of your sweaty palm, except, uh, there's no sweaty palm and there are really no fights. OK, well that metaphor blew. At any rate, for the sheer shits and giggles factor of it all, I decided that I wanted to stay on the Loop (Downtown Chicago) for $75 a night. Yes. I really didn't think it would work, seeing as how the apparent going rate for hotels in that area were upwards of $150, plus a carefully taken core drawn from one of your kidneys. Or the first two knuckles of your index finger. Or a discrete "favor" in the alley with the general manager, a portly man who smells of Old Spice and cheap cigarillos and whose unrepaired cleft palate causes him to say "Thicago." Needless to say, when a three-star hotel accepted my bid, I thought: either I'm lucky or I'm going to end up on the 7 o'clock news.
The drive to Chicago from Bloomington Republikası was through some of the flattest real estate I've ever seen, and I've been to Kansas AND Iowa. No hills, barely any trees-- and the prairie (prairie? would it be prairie with all of that corn on it?) stretched until I could almost see the curvature of the earth. Then, after about two hours, there came a stench like tires and gasoline and dead baby seals all mixed together and blow-torched; in the distance there arose forty-foot high flames from towers that reached like the fingers of the damned supplicating in vain to the soot-laden heavens.
GARY.
I'd heard whispers about Gary since I came out to the corn almost two years ago. Gary has earned several colorful sobriquets, like "Scary Gary", "Boil-covered Armpit of the Earth" and "Town of Ass and Fire." Labeled in "Places Rated Almanac" as one of the least habitable American cities, Gary has the nation's third highest murder rate, after Saint Louis and Metro Dade (Miami). A quick glance at the little movey thing that tells you how much gas you have was a huge effing relief; it was a half tank. We were just not 'savvy' enough to have lived through the experience of getting gas in that little ashy corner of Hell. As we passed through an industrial landscape that would make anyone, as Keith put it, "want to get naked and run through a forest", I thought: how can anyone live here? And why would anyone want to live here? And, are all of Britney Spears' teeth real? The girl's like a salt-ravined sea-shark, honestly.
With the flames of Perdition itself behind us, Chicagoland began with miles and miles of strange row houses and tiny warren-like streets filled with half-naked young-uns desperate to contract tetanus. In the distance, the spires of the nation's tallest building, the Sears Tower, pierced the heavens; the illumination of the "spikes" was, of course, a pale green, deferring to the impending Saint Patrick's Day merriment. Ah... a real skyline.
Indianapolis doesn't count. *derisive snort*
The highway took us straight into downtown, where the real task at hand became abundantly apparent: distract myself from my own intense excitement (stop looking up at them there tall things, bitch!) to try to find our hotel. As we passed many "hotels" with ominous signs like "Chicagoland Hotel: Men Only", icy fear crept into my loins. Was there to be a dead prostitute under our beds? Clumsily cleansed chalk outlines in the bathroom? Would the Andes chocolates on our pillows be possessed of their original integrity? After circling a few blocks 900,000 times because of Chicago's apparent desire to not label anything, I noticed that there were weird white banners fluttering on the side of a building up ahead. They said "Blake."
Our hotel! And and AND, it looked like it wasn't going to be the scene of our collective tragic demise!
We park and check in. The lobby is draped in sheets and strange fluttery wisps of cloth; no, this was not some sort of decoration scheme. This was because the entire hotel was being gutted and made into a condominium hotel. Yeah, I don't know what that means either; {whispers!} but it sounds pretentious and European to me. THAT'S why the room was so cheap. If the hotel were up and running as it should have been, we would have been tasered at the door. As it was, we were welcome guests in a hotel that appeared to have only three or four rooms in commission. The elevator's floor was plywood. The hall was filled with the stench of paint and caulking. But our room! Enormous bay windows afforded a view of downtown and the Public Library; two fluffy double beds beckoned to the weary, and the bathroom! Immaculate!
[ Dom used to work in a hotel. I work't theyah a real long time. Clean bathrooms; not only hard to prepare, but insanely difficult to maintain. Do you know how much hair a human sheds in one day? And skin flakes?]
Of course, there was a more pressing need still: Imminent starvation. Of course, who can go to Chicago and not get real Chicago pizza? Pressed to the bosom of the "L" near a dark alley was the Boni Vino, which, unbeknownst to us until now (googling its ass as we speak) is a Chicago landmark. A Coke, a Sprite and a large 'roni pizza later and that which was corporeal was transcended: mutha-effah, was that good pie. *
* pie: (pi): New York/New Jersey slang: a goddamn pizza, you Phillistine morons.
With bellies distended, we walked through Chicago's Miracle Mile past [closed] shops where scarves cost more than my monthly rent. A huge mug of hot chocolate and a ride on the train later and we were back at our London-after-the-Blitz hotel, where warm beds and the soft rumble of traffic carried us off.
Chapter Two: Zhongguocheng DaJie.
Now, as all of ye who know me well are aware, I am utterly paralyzed with delight in Chinatown. Most people are turned off by the overpowering reek in the Chinese groceries and apothecaries, the seemingly random ethnographic artifacts and the unidentifiable food served with them stick things [no! you not have fork!], but wow, all of those things bring me to nearly perish with excitement. When I went to San Francisco's Chinatown, I distinctly remember asking my friends to save themselves and leave me behind; had they done so, they would have found me several months later wandering the streets, unwashed and gibbering in a bastardized mix of Cantonese, Mandarin and Wu whilst clutching a tiny replica of a Forbidden City guardian lion. Anyway, I didn't want to get my hopes up and have them dashed: after all, a Midwestern Chinatown? Whateva, no you di'ent.
As the train shuddered to a stop at the "Chinatown" station, I saw pagoda roofs; naturally, my pupils dialated and my pulse began to tap-dance in my Sino-lovin' veins. A monumental gate inscribed in gold paint with the Chinese for "Chinatown" led into the main street of Chinatown, filled as it was with dozens of stores filled with achingly beautiful randomness, restaurants serving China's and Vietnam's finest, and of course a Chinese Methodist church; hey, why not? As I browsed through a Chinese Christian bookstore, I thought: who do I know who'd appreciate a wallhanging of the Psalms written in Han Dynasty Chinese calligraphy?
Of course, I had to procure something that was completely effed-up for my ethnographic artifact collection; after seven or eight stores, I settled on a Chinese unicorn statuette. Now, Chinese unicorns (qilin) don't look like the willowy white horses of medieval European lore; no, Chinese unicorns look like bulldogs on contraband former USSR-ilk steroids, and their "single horn" is usually an antler that protrudes from the back of their heads, not their 'delicate' crowns. They also have fangs and talons. They are fantastic and provide a good example to show people how beauty is construed in China; also, they provide a great illustration of the dangers of smoking a lot of opium.
The best part, though, was taking Keith into his first Chinese apothecary. In vast jars the size of a seven-year-old, hundreds of teas and herbs held majestic court. There were also, uh, things like:
Dried seahorses.
Dried abalone.
Dried deer sinew.
Dried deer tails.
Deer antlers.
Jimmy Hoffa's fingers. (A steal at $450 a tael!)
Keith was obviously mildly horrified, but it needed to be done. Then, back on the train.
Chapter Three: Ελληνικάπόλης.
From Chinatown, a ten minute ride back into the vicinity of downtown brought us to a place where I dare not bare my left arm for fear of black-clad widows hissing at me through their teeth: Greektown. Now, if you are one of the three people left on the planet who hasn't yet seen My Big Fat Greek Wedding (*gently strokes Keith's head, crooning softly*), you might not know that Chicago's Greek community is the second largest in the United States after the Astoria neighborhood in NYC. Swarthy, olive-skinned people of all ages milled about, sacks full of olive oil, honey and Epirian bread, komboloi (worry-beads) clacking merrily, the Cross of Saint George (the Greek flag) proudly flying next to the American one... and the cloying perfume of grilling flesh on a spit. For a moment I was transported back to the magical days I spent in Αθήνα... the moonlit night wandering around the Plaka at the base of the Acropolis... that same smell of barely treated human sewage... *mist*
The one store in the whole district that I wanted to shop in was closed for a religious observance. Tantalizing me from the darkened property were hand-dipped Hymettus beeswax candles, baleful Byzantine icons, incense censors from Mount Athos... my kingdom for a brick! Once my disappointment ebbed (with bitterness and salty-sweet tears as the flotsam and jetsam), it was time to procure sustenance. Quick, lads! στο εστιατόριο!
I'd been told that I needed to eat at the Parthenon. As a smallish, pimply teenager, I had an entire wall that I'd plastered with black-and-white photographs of the Athenian Acropolis and it was like my first, tender lover; I owed it to the ol' battle-ax to eat at a restaurant named after its pillar-crusted magnificence.
When our waiter came, with no hesitation I ordered the Κεφτή από το Ιζμίρ.
Of course, the last word wasn't "Izmir", but the Greek city-state name for Izmir, Smyrna.
[The rest of it, by the by, is "meatballs of."] In Turkish today, the word for meatball is köfte; in transliterated Greek, it's "kefte." Yay for the Ottoman Empire! Çok yaşa Türkiye! Anyway, the kefte danced the flamenco in my mouth; it's been since I slaughtered and ate that seven-year-old child two years ago that I have been so pleased with a meal. Out of the corner of my tear-filled eyes, I could see Keith enjoying his treat immensely as well; Αθηναϊκό κοτόπουλο was his treat of the day, and that Athenian chicken seemed to please him to no end. "That chicken", he later said, "makes me wanna slap your mama." Whatever that means.
Again, the train.
Chapter Four: Göl'e.
After the train vomited us into downtown, and a frantic car-ride later, Keith and I found ourselves barely able to speak as we stared slack-jawed at the Field Museum's Pacific Northwest collection. There had to have been three hundred masks, representing the Bella Bella, Chinnok, Clatskanie, Eyak, Haida, Kwakiutl, Makah, Nootka, Salish, Takelma, Tlingit, and Tsimshian peoples. It was astounding. I vowed then and there that I would take all of the money I earn selling crack and blow under the railroad trestle and buy myself one of them my-t-fine slices o' Heaven one day. [hastens to prepare dozens of tiny baggies]
Then, the lake. As the sun rode low on the horizon, we went out to a jetty near the Field Museum and beheld the undisputed capital of the Midwest from her lake, Michigan. As the lake lapped upon the pier and the sun set, I couldn't help but think: what WOULD impress Shania Twain?
It was the perfect end to a perfect day and night before, and as we drove the four hours back to the Republic, I knew that I'd be back. There's too much to see. There's too much to eat. And there, in Chinatown, there's a red-visaged Chinese demon who will look fantastic on my shelves.
I remain, as ever,
Dom
Tuesday, March 15, 2005
şikago'a gideceğim.
" I'm a'goin' to Chicago. "
Greektown. Chinatown. The Field Museum.
The Windy City, bowing at my cloven hooves.
[slight undergarment urination]
I'll be back Thursday, my children...
I remain, as ever,
Hoosier Daddy
Greektown. Chinatown. The Field Museum.
The Windy City, bowing at my cloven hooves.
[slight undergarment urination]
I'll be back Thursday, my children...
I remain, as ever,
Hoosier Daddy
Saturday, March 12, 2005
Forty days and forty nights.
Yesterday, as Kemal bey began cramming Arabic and Persian grammar into my [voices-filled] head, we came across a word I'd heard in Turkey whilst frolicking on the Aegean. More rightly, I saw it a lot, written on signs and billboards, especially around Denizli and Edremit. {Look them up on a map; I ain't gonna coddle you.}
Mermer.
Marble. {Mair-mair}. So, with a wipeboard eraser clutched in my Turkish-language-butchering hand, Kemal and I talked about the etymology of this word. Where did that word come from? Why was the "mer" sound repeated? Armed with this knowledge, I'd know how to properly write it and not make a further ass of myself, which as you all know is a big chore for me. I guessed it was Persian, but a quick look into an Ottoman dictionary about as wide as my torso quickly confirmed that, of all things, it was a Greek loan word:
μάρμαρο - marmaro.
Kemal waxed for a moment.
"That makes sense, Domonic'ciyim. After all, do you think the early Turks would have had a word like 'mermer' in their lexicon? What would they say? 'Come here and look at my beautiful marble tent?' "
Naturally, I howled like a gibbon for about two minutes before coming back up for a breath. It absolutely slayed me. Now, the rest of you are thinking: uhh, yeah. It's not even one of those situations where I could say "you had to have been there." More like it, you had to have been me. And that's fine. I know you all think I'm as weird as a bag of hair. {Nods to Keith, Anna, and Julie.} I've come to accept - nay, embrace - the fact that this blog has caused many of you to reconsider allowing me to be in the presence of children, the elderly, and beloved barnyard animals.
Today, though, was Les Miserables day. Yes, Les Miserables came to IU, and of course nothing but rabid lemurs with rusty machetes could have kept me from it. Whilst trying desperately to not belt out the words to all the songs during the performance, I became aware of several things:
1) Apparently, I have a penchant for French-inspired dramas wherein people are slain in large numbers.
2) I still hate the French language so hard that when I think about it hard enough birds on the wing in my vicinity plummet to the earth stone-dead.
3) I think I secretly want to go to France.
Are you effing kidding? you all say. That country's full of people who read, write, speak and think in a language that you loathe with the white-hot fire of 10,000 suns! Further, you think the food is ass-nasty! You don't study French art, architecture, or culture! And the underarm hair... oooh, la la!
Of course, you'd be right [stabs self for revealing weakness]. But, much like my burning desire to go the UK following reading my first Harry Potter book, or my nearly crippling yearning to teach English in Vietnam during a class I took about the Vietnam War, I think that I am just utterly susceptible to the notion, or illusion, of the exotic. You'd think I'd be over it by now. As an anthropology major in one of my previous avatars, all I did, day and sleepless night, was read about and write/comment on societies that are hopelessly exotic. Take, for instance:
The Sambia. The Sambia are an ethnic polity who live(d?) in the Highlands of New Guinea. Sure, you say, what's the big deal? Tons a' them bone-through-the-nose spear-hurlers live in New Guinea; swing a dead cat around and you'll hit one.
Well, the Sambia believe that semen can't be produced by the human body AND that women are the most fithy, polluting and loathsome beasts to walk the earth. So, what happens is this: they enculturate their young males (7-10) to pair up with an older male, whom the wee ones fellate constantly. This is seen as not only the ultimate bonding experience for the young ones, but also as a way for them to get "seed", since it is in limited supply. Then, once they are 16-18, they are expected to stop having relations with men and must marry; those who desire to be "gay" further live out beyond the settlements and often perish young from starvation and cassawary attack.
The Nuer. The Nuer were a Nilotic people who lived in what is now Sudan. They bathed in cow urine, often waiting quite some time for a cow to be ready to "give a bath", and they brushed their teeth with ash from burned cow dung.
The Creole Brazilians: As lived/written by Nancy Scheper-Hughes, more people die violently in the shantytowns of Brazil's cities than anywhere on earth save Medellin, Columbia. In fact, so many infants die in these shantytowns that the mothers seem to not even love the babies as a defense mechanism against profound loss, causing one to question the very idea of motherhood. Those not carried away in infancy by malnutrition or schistosomes usually joing local gangs and are murdered before the age of 20.
Man, I'd cut off all of my toes with pinking shears to go to Papua New Guinea, the Sudan and Brazil! What's wrong with me?
I made a Ten-Places-I-Must-Go-Before-I-Die list when I was in high school. Surprisingly, it has changed little in more than six years. Feast:
1) Thailand.
2) India.
3) China.
4) Japan.
5) Indonesia.
6) Kenya/Tanzania.
7) Egypt.
8) Morocco.
9) Vietnam.
And number Ten, the one I keep on in vain hopes,
10) The Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Of course, that's because my favorite book on the earth is The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. Wow, I need help.
I spent most of today doing laundry, which was about as fun as having your optic nerve massaged by liver flukes. As I moved my foldy-outy chair from my wall, I completely turned over my goddamned humidifier, and it had at least a gallon of water in it. Zebra mussels in the Great Lakes committed suicide by the trillion following the sub-and-supersonic blast of profanity that emitted from my tender Italian lips. Pilot whales off the coast of Cape Cod are stranding themselves in the hundreds. And somewhere in the Tibetan Himalyas, the heavens opened up and released a metric ton of ashy snow out of a cloudless sky.
What a mess. Six towels and it still is squishy. Fortunately, the water managed to wash away another stain from that nurse I lured here with candy and snuffed as sacrifice for Cuddles the Under-the-Bed clown.
This Tuesday and Wednesday, Chicago. So far we've planned on going to the Field Museum and Greektown... and, muahahahahahahaha, Chinatown. Little does Keith know what he's getting into. >:)
Until tomorrow, I remain as ever,
Dom
Mermer.
Marble. {Mair-mair}. So, with a wipeboard eraser clutched in my Turkish-language-butchering hand, Kemal and I talked about the etymology of this word. Where did that word come from? Why was the "mer" sound repeated? Armed with this knowledge, I'd know how to properly write it and not make a further ass of myself, which as you all know is a big chore for me. I guessed it was Persian, but a quick look into an Ottoman dictionary about as wide as my torso quickly confirmed that, of all things, it was a Greek loan word:
μάρμαρο - marmaro.
Kemal waxed for a moment.
"That makes sense, Domonic'ciyim. After all, do you think the early Turks would have had a word like 'mermer' in their lexicon? What would they say? 'Come here and look at my beautiful marble tent?' "
Naturally, I howled like a gibbon for about two minutes before coming back up for a breath. It absolutely slayed me. Now, the rest of you are thinking: uhh, yeah. It's not even one of those situations where I could say "you had to have been there." More like it, you had to have been me. And that's fine. I know you all think I'm as weird as a bag of hair. {Nods to Keith, Anna, and Julie.} I've come to accept - nay, embrace - the fact that this blog has caused many of you to reconsider allowing me to be in the presence of children, the elderly, and beloved barnyard animals.
Today, though, was Les Miserables day. Yes, Les Miserables came to IU, and of course nothing but rabid lemurs with rusty machetes could have kept me from it. Whilst trying desperately to not belt out the words to all the songs during the performance, I became aware of several things:
1) Apparently, I have a penchant for French-inspired dramas wherein people are slain in large numbers.
2) I still hate the French language so hard that when I think about it hard enough birds on the wing in my vicinity plummet to the earth stone-dead.
3) I think I secretly want to go to France.
Are you effing kidding? you all say. That country's full of people who read, write, speak and think in a language that you loathe with the white-hot fire of 10,000 suns! Further, you think the food is ass-nasty! You don't study French art, architecture, or culture! And the underarm hair... oooh, la la!
Of course, you'd be right [stabs self for revealing weakness]. But, much like my burning desire to go the UK following reading my first Harry Potter book, or my nearly crippling yearning to teach English in Vietnam during a class I took about the Vietnam War, I think that I am just utterly susceptible to the notion, or illusion, of the exotic. You'd think I'd be over it by now. As an anthropology major in one of my previous avatars, all I did, day and sleepless night, was read about and write/comment on societies that are hopelessly exotic. Take, for instance:
The Sambia. The Sambia are an ethnic polity who live(d?) in the Highlands of New Guinea. Sure, you say, what's the big deal? Tons a' them bone-through-the-nose spear-hurlers live in New Guinea; swing a dead cat around and you'll hit one.
Well, the Sambia believe that semen can't be produced by the human body AND that women are the most fithy, polluting and loathsome beasts to walk the earth. So, what happens is this: they enculturate their young males (7-10) to pair up with an older male, whom the wee ones fellate constantly. This is seen as not only the ultimate bonding experience for the young ones, but also as a way for them to get "seed", since it is in limited supply. Then, once they are 16-18, they are expected to stop having relations with men and must marry; those who desire to be "gay" further live out beyond the settlements and often perish young from starvation and cassawary attack.
The Nuer. The Nuer were a Nilotic people who lived in what is now Sudan. They bathed in cow urine, often waiting quite some time for a cow to be ready to "give a bath", and they brushed their teeth with ash from burned cow dung.
The Creole Brazilians: As lived/written by Nancy Scheper-Hughes, more people die violently in the shantytowns of Brazil's cities than anywhere on earth save Medellin, Columbia. In fact, so many infants die in these shantytowns that the mothers seem to not even love the babies as a defense mechanism against profound loss, causing one to question the very idea of motherhood. Those not carried away in infancy by malnutrition or schistosomes usually joing local gangs and are murdered before the age of 20.
Man, I'd cut off all of my toes with pinking shears to go to Papua New Guinea, the Sudan and Brazil! What's wrong with me?
I made a Ten-Places-I-Must-Go-Before-I-Die list when I was in high school. Surprisingly, it has changed little in more than six years. Feast:
1) Thailand.
2) India.
3) China.
4) Japan.
5) Indonesia.
6) Kenya/Tanzania.
7) Egypt.
8) Morocco.
9) Vietnam.
And number Ten, the one I keep on in vain hopes,
10) The Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Of course, that's because my favorite book on the earth is The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. Wow, I need help.
I spent most of today doing laundry, which was about as fun as having your optic nerve massaged by liver flukes. As I moved my foldy-outy chair from my wall, I completely turned over my goddamned humidifier, and it had at least a gallon of water in it. Zebra mussels in the Great Lakes committed suicide by the trillion following the sub-and-supersonic blast of profanity that emitted from my tender Italian lips. Pilot whales off the coast of Cape Cod are stranding themselves in the hundreds. And somewhere in the Tibetan Himalyas, the heavens opened up and released a metric ton of ashy snow out of a cloudless sky.
What a mess. Six towels and it still is squishy. Fortunately, the water managed to wash away another stain from that nurse I lured here with candy and snuffed as sacrifice for Cuddles the Under-the-Bed clown.
This Tuesday and Wednesday, Chicago. So far we've planned on going to the Field Museum and Greektown... and, muahahahahahahaha, Chinatown. Little does Keith know what he's getting into. >:)
Until tomorrow, I remain as ever,
Dom
Thursday, March 10, 2005
Oh, and by the way...
1) All of my blogs are archived by month; only the three most recent ones will appear on the page.
< --------- See? Over here.
2) Look at the bottom here: a fancy counter! I used to think that I was doing this blog for my own amusement, but apparently there are some people out there!
[Hint. Domonic misses getting email.]
Sigh.
Dom
< --------- See? Over here.
2) Look at the bottom here: a fancy counter! I used to think that I was doing this blog for my own amusement, but apparently there are some people out there!
[Hint. Domonic misses getting email.]
Sigh.
Dom
The Burr Woman.
"Well duh, it's the Burr Woman." - my sister Julie, commenting on whether or not she'd ever heard of this obscure bit of folklore
Of the same ilk, the song "Tonight, Tonight, Tonight" by Genesis, which Julie described once as "really effing creepy":
I’m coming down, coming down like a monkey, but it’s alright
Like a load on your back that you can’t see, ooh but it’s alright
Try to shake it loose, cut it free, just let it go, get it away from me.
Cos tonight, tonight, tonight - oh, I’m gonna make it right
Tonight, tonight, tonight - oh.
I’m going down, going down, like a monkey, ooh but it’s alright
Try to pick yourself up, carry that weight that you can’t see,
Don’t you know it’s alright
It’s like a helter skelter, going down and down, round and round
But just get it away from me - oh.
Because tonight, tonight, tonight - oh
We’re gonna make it right
Tonight, tonight, tonight - oh.
Clearly, Phil Collins is referencing a thousand-year-old desert Southwest Native American folktale about a small grayish rag-wearing hag who assaults the wicked. *derisive snort*
Well, uh, the Burr Woman. Yeah. The traditional among the peoples of the desert Southwest look twice over their shoulders whilst traveling through the arid wastes, lest the Burr Woman assault them. What happens is this: you're walking, minding your own business, perhaps thinking about cheese, and SLAMMO! A chimp-sized mouse-gray woman with a tiny vestigal tail launches herself from some scrub and onto your awaiting back, whereupon she commences to dig her filthy dull nails into the soft flesh surrounding your spine with her hands and her hominid opposable toes. No force on the earth known to man can remove her, not even the sight of Dick Cheney rising buck nekkid out of the North Atlantic following his transformation from a sea-lamprey into a dead-eyed being capable of terrestrial locomotion. Then, in about two week's time, you die. She kills you by exhaustion, all the while crooning to you softly and asking you to get her some water - water that she will never drink.
Of course, my own personal Burr Woman is my Dread Romance Language class, preparations for which kept me from sleeping at all last night. Ten pages of typewritten translation; thankfully, it was about something that didn't make me want to take my own life with a paint-thinner cocktail. Ah, the ambitions of Turkey in Central Asia. Needless to say, those ambitions are sinister, but I, like the father of a viscious/socially challenged child, will look the other way.
I've come to the realization that when I am sleep-deprived that I cannot be held accountable for any of my actions. I watch the things I say and do as if from outside my pathetic hairy Irish/Italian body. For example, whilst laboring in the delerium of sleeplessness last night, I did the following:
* I melted a plastic drink-mermaid in a Berry Bramble Yankee Candle; naturally I started with her nude breasts. Divine.
* I prepared a box of Kraft Mac n' Cheese, and into it I shook some Old Bay Seasoning, Thai peanut sauce and some curry. I ate it with startling gusto.
* I nearly began to weep when the song "In Your Eyes" by Peter Gabriel came on from one of my mixed CDs. Like, perilously close. Welling up. God only knows why. Fortunately, the next song was "Work It" by Missy 'Misdemeanor' Elliot. In this song, there are such enchanting lyrics as:
If yer a fly gal
Git'cher nails done.
Git a pedicure.
Git'cher ha'r did.
Fascinating [!].
So, my parents. They're getting old. Today, my dad's birthday; the sixth was my mom's. I'd ask them if they could teach me how to knap a nice spearhead out of some chert or the proper way to thrust something sharp into a mammoth, but I think that they will just poop in my food if I do that. {Diapers!} So the less said about their nativity in eons past, the better.
[Happy Birthday, Mom and Dad! I still want birthday presents! Just remember: it's YOUR DNA that makes me like this!]
It snowed like a mothertoucher for about a half hour tonight. March: clearly, the month that the other months make fun of for being on the stem so much. Tomorrow at the stroke of 6 I will be liberated from classes for a week: IU SPRING BREAK!
Go ahead: ask me if I'm going somewhere hot and jammed with hormonal twentysomethings intent on contracting venereal diseases and Montezuma's Revenge (aka Delhi Belly). I say: If you can't point to Cancun on a map, then you need to not go. Yes, folks: that's in ANOTHER COUNTRY. Like Mexico. Yes. No, I am going to Chicago (two nights and a day) for the first time. [!] I will keep you posted; clearly there will be pictures.
Until tomorrow, I remain, as ever,
Dom
Of the same ilk, the song "Tonight, Tonight, Tonight" by Genesis, which Julie described once as "really effing creepy":
I’m coming down, coming down like a monkey, but it’s alright
Like a load on your back that you can’t see, ooh but it’s alright
Try to shake it loose, cut it free, just let it go, get it away from me.
Cos tonight, tonight, tonight - oh, I’m gonna make it right
Tonight, tonight, tonight - oh.
I’m going down, going down, like a monkey, ooh but it’s alright
Try to pick yourself up, carry that weight that you can’t see,
Don’t you know it’s alright
It’s like a helter skelter, going down and down, round and round
But just get it away from me - oh.
Because tonight, tonight, tonight - oh
We’re gonna make it right
Tonight, tonight, tonight - oh.
Clearly, Phil Collins is referencing a thousand-year-old desert Southwest Native American folktale about a small grayish rag-wearing hag who assaults the wicked. *derisive snort*
Well, uh, the Burr Woman. Yeah. The traditional among the peoples of the desert Southwest look twice over their shoulders whilst traveling through the arid wastes, lest the Burr Woman assault them. What happens is this: you're walking, minding your own business, perhaps thinking about cheese, and SLAMMO! A chimp-sized mouse-gray woman with a tiny vestigal tail launches herself from some scrub and onto your awaiting back, whereupon she commences to dig her filthy dull nails into the soft flesh surrounding your spine with her hands and her hominid opposable toes. No force on the earth known to man can remove her, not even the sight of Dick Cheney rising buck nekkid out of the North Atlantic following his transformation from a sea-lamprey into a dead-eyed being capable of terrestrial locomotion. Then, in about two week's time, you die. She kills you by exhaustion, all the while crooning to you softly and asking you to get her some water - water that she will never drink.
Of course, my own personal Burr Woman is my Dread Romance Language class, preparations for which kept me from sleeping at all last night. Ten pages of typewritten translation; thankfully, it was about something that didn't make me want to take my own life with a paint-thinner cocktail. Ah, the ambitions of Turkey in Central Asia. Needless to say, those ambitions are sinister, but I, like the father of a viscious/socially challenged child, will look the other way.
I've come to the realization that when I am sleep-deprived that I cannot be held accountable for any of my actions. I watch the things I say and do as if from outside my pathetic hairy Irish/Italian body. For example, whilst laboring in the delerium of sleeplessness last night, I did the following:
* I melted a plastic drink-mermaid in a Berry Bramble Yankee Candle; naturally I started with her nude breasts. Divine.
* I prepared a box of Kraft Mac n' Cheese, and into it I shook some Old Bay Seasoning, Thai peanut sauce and some curry. I ate it with startling gusto.
* I nearly began to weep when the song "In Your Eyes" by Peter Gabriel came on from one of my mixed CDs. Like, perilously close. Welling up. God only knows why. Fortunately, the next song was "Work It" by Missy 'Misdemeanor' Elliot. In this song, there are such enchanting lyrics as:
If yer a fly gal
Git'cher nails done.
Git a pedicure.
Git'cher ha'r did.
Fascinating [!].
So, my parents. They're getting old. Today, my dad's birthday; the sixth was my mom's. I'd ask them if they could teach me how to knap a nice spearhead out of some chert or the proper way to thrust something sharp into a mammoth, but I think that they will just poop in my food if I do that. {Diapers!} So the less said about their nativity in eons past, the better.
[Happy Birthday, Mom and Dad! I still want birthday presents! Just remember: it's YOUR DNA that makes me like this!]
It snowed like a mothertoucher for about a half hour tonight. March: clearly, the month that the other months make fun of for being on the stem so much. Tomorrow at the stroke of 6 I will be liberated from classes for a week: IU SPRING BREAK!
Go ahead: ask me if I'm going somewhere hot and jammed with hormonal twentysomethings intent on contracting venereal diseases and Montezuma's Revenge (aka Delhi Belly). I say: If you can't point to Cancun on a map, then you need to not go. Yes, folks: that's in ANOTHER COUNTRY. Like Mexico. Yes. No, I am going to Chicago (two nights and a day) for the first time. [!] I will keep you posted; clearly there will be pictures.
Until tomorrow, I remain, as ever,
Dom
Monday, March 07, 2005
Bringing Salome the head of John the Baptist.
And LAWD, is my fine brass platter messy.
When I was a wee uniform-bedecked larva attending my hopelessly back-to-the-'50s parochial school in Northwestern New Jersey, I remember vividly the day in fourth grade when we got our new "Music Appreci-A-TION!" teacher. She was small but pleasantly round, like a freshly-dug-out-of-the-steppe hamster. She smiled a lot. She opened her mouth to speak and the furtive, horrified glances began shooting across the construction-paper encrusted classroom.
One of them there foreigners!
Of course, the fact that we all knew her long before she became our music mistress was utterly lost to most. She was the mother of one of my childhood best friends, Carmen. Ms. Drahl was born in Columbia. [hopelessly exotic!] Carmen was, of course, simultaneously beside herself and perishing from embarassment. In the meantime, things had gotten serious. Mrs. Drahl, the Happy-Go-Lucky Lunch Mom and Mrs. Drahl the Pinching-You-On-the-Cheeks Chaperone for Incessantly Evil Field Trips (who ALWAYS had candy!) had now become
THAT WOMAN NOBODY UNDERSTANDS.
Nothing had changed about her except her position in our candy-swilling pathetic pre-pubescent lives, filled as they were with the evil that would one day be our motor. Yet the moment she stepped foot in our class, poor Mrs. Drahl became the butt of every viscious slam imaginable. When she inadvertently rolled her R's, normally reserved good Catholic schoolgirls would nearly perish in fits of fiendish delight, coming close to shearing their tongues off with their razor-honed teeth rather than indecently guffaw. The hellish among us would call Carmen's house just to hear Mrs. Drahl yell up the stairs to her daughter: Carrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrmen! Then, the hangup. I think Mrs. Drahl invented Caller ID to find our sorry asses for more tangible punishment than the strings of Hail Mary's and Our Father's that we were given to wash away the filth in our nasty little souls.
Of course, I could easily attribute all of that to the fact that yes, we were children, and yes, children are scions of the Hooved One, and yes, we all grew up just fine in spite of apparently being budding Hitler Youth. But no! Flash to Domonic's Undergraduate at the University of Maine!
So! The University of Maine. Resting on the banks of the mighty Stillwater River and nestled in forests that were ancient when John Smith landed on the rockbound shores pf the Pine Tree State, the University of Maine is the clarion hope for a state whose population has as of yet to break two million. [Little known Maine fact: Maine is the least densely populated state East of the Mississ'ip.] Translation: twice a year, thousands of young men and women--some still wearing the crudely hewn-together pelts of woodland beasts--crawl out of the woods to attend their classes. To say that some of them have not been exposed to diversity of any kind would be like saying something gross happened at Bhopal. {Look it up.} Maine is so white that the whisper of ethnic and religious diversity won't reach us for 2.3 billion years, travelling at the speed of "rap."
Now!
In a tiny, cramped office on the second floor of Stevens Hall, a graying intellectual drinks oolong tea surrounded by hundreds of books. He's the first Vietnamese person to graduate from Harvard University, and he got all three of his degrees there. He was the cultural attache to Henry Kissinger during the Vietnam War, and actually met Ho Chi Minh and Mao Zedong. He speaks twelve languages fluently and three passingly. He is now an attache to the Vietnamese Ambassador to the UN and to the U.S. How it is that he ended up teaching at a Land and Sea Grant college on the rim of the earth is a long story, but suffice it to say that I immediatley cleaved myself to him, taking every class he had to offer with shiny-eyed zeal and maddening fervor. Despite who this man is, and who he was, and who he always will be, there was always some random collection of hair and tissue who'd whine every day after class with a sound like one might imagine a rusty nail being pulled out of a rotten board would make.
I just don't UNDERSTAND people with accents! Can't he speak better English?
Inevitably the class dwindled in number throughout the semester; far be it from me to not protect this man's dignity with honor-killings. The forests surrounding Baumann-Nelson House are littered with dozens of scantily-clad coeds who'd dared to bleat like sheep about my mentor! Better English! HE WENT TO HARVARD THREE TIMES!
{Before I go on, a fun story about Ngo and I. Hahahahaha! Dr. Ngo! Anyway, one day I was in his office chatting with him about how I wanted to, uh, be like him when I grew up, and while talking to me he lifts his tiny body from his chair and crosses the room. He grasps my hand, and I barely had the time to think "Ohmigod! It's gonna be like one of them After School Specials!" before he removed my watch (on my left hand) and placed it on my right hand. He then sat down again, never having stopped in his train of thought for a moment. When he'd finished his thought, I politely asked him: wtf, mate? "Well, Dom, your watch was interrupting your qi. If your qi is interrpted, you cannot attain in this life that which you dream of." Out of sheer superstition, I have since that day always worn my watch on my right hand. You can never tell with these things. }
So yeah. The strange thing is, had Dr. Long been these people's frat brother or Scout Master, things would be different. Why is it that when, in an office or academic environment, people can't seem to wrap their minds around accents? And it's not just foreign accents! Let me tell you how one is looked at in North Carolina when one talks about one's dohyahd. Yes. Like you've just been found in possession of four hundred gaily-painted kitten skull rattles, that's how.
Why then this soap-box foray? Today at work (walk-ins: 66) one of the hourly employees asked me:
How do you understand these people? I never know what they're saying.
Of course, I crushed one of my molars trying not to laugh like one of those old bats who spat on Mussolini's swaying corpse in that Milanese marketplace. This is because
HE IS PAKISTANI. Outside Bloomington, he might as well be wearing a turban and carrying the head of an infidel for all the respect he's gonna get because of his accent.
Pot. Calling. Kettle. Aw shit, you're not short-bus riders, you get my point.
Or were ye?
I remain, as ever,
Dom
When I was a wee uniform-bedecked larva attending my hopelessly back-to-the-'50s parochial school in Northwestern New Jersey, I remember vividly the day in fourth grade when we got our new "Music Appreci-A-TION!" teacher. She was small but pleasantly round, like a freshly-dug-out-of-the-steppe hamster. She smiled a lot. She opened her mouth to speak and the furtive, horrified glances began shooting across the construction-paper encrusted classroom.
One of them there foreigners!
Of course, the fact that we all knew her long before she became our music mistress was utterly lost to most. She was the mother of one of my childhood best friends, Carmen. Ms. Drahl was born in Columbia. [hopelessly exotic!] Carmen was, of course, simultaneously beside herself and perishing from embarassment. In the meantime, things had gotten serious. Mrs. Drahl, the Happy-Go-Lucky Lunch Mom and Mrs. Drahl the Pinching-You-On-the-Cheeks Chaperone for Incessantly Evil Field Trips (who ALWAYS had candy!) had now become
THAT WOMAN NOBODY UNDERSTANDS.
Nothing had changed about her except her position in our candy-swilling pathetic pre-pubescent lives, filled as they were with the evil that would one day be our motor. Yet the moment she stepped foot in our class, poor Mrs. Drahl became the butt of every viscious slam imaginable. When she inadvertently rolled her R's, normally reserved good Catholic schoolgirls would nearly perish in fits of fiendish delight, coming close to shearing their tongues off with their razor-honed teeth rather than indecently guffaw. The hellish among us would call Carmen's house just to hear Mrs. Drahl yell up the stairs to her daughter: Carrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrmen! Then, the hangup. I think Mrs. Drahl invented Caller ID to find our sorry asses for more tangible punishment than the strings of Hail Mary's and Our Father's that we were given to wash away the filth in our nasty little souls.
Of course, I could easily attribute all of that to the fact that yes, we were children, and yes, children are scions of the Hooved One, and yes, we all grew up just fine in spite of apparently being budding Hitler Youth. But no! Flash to Domonic's Undergraduate at the University of Maine!
So! The University of Maine. Resting on the banks of the mighty Stillwater River and nestled in forests that were ancient when John Smith landed on the rockbound shores pf the Pine Tree State, the University of Maine is the clarion hope for a state whose population has as of yet to break two million. [Little known Maine fact: Maine is the least densely populated state East of the Mississ'ip.] Translation: twice a year, thousands of young men and women--some still wearing the crudely hewn-together pelts of woodland beasts--crawl out of the woods to attend their classes. To say that some of them have not been exposed to diversity of any kind would be like saying something gross happened at Bhopal. {Look it up.} Maine is so white that the whisper of ethnic and religious diversity won't reach us for 2.3 billion years, travelling at the speed of "rap."
Now!
In a tiny, cramped office on the second floor of Stevens Hall, a graying intellectual drinks oolong tea surrounded by hundreds of books. He's the first Vietnamese person to graduate from Harvard University, and he got all three of his degrees there. He was the cultural attache to Henry Kissinger during the Vietnam War, and actually met Ho Chi Minh and Mao Zedong. He speaks twelve languages fluently and three passingly. He is now an attache to the Vietnamese Ambassador to the UN and to the U.S. How it is that he ended up teaching at a Land and Sea Grant college on the rim of the earth is a long story, but suffice it to say that I immediatley cleaved myself to him, taking every class he had to offer with shiny-eyed zeal and maddening fervor. Despite who this man is, and who he was, and who he always will be, there was always some random collection of hair and tissue who'd whine every day after class with a sound like one might imagine a rusty nail being pulled out of a rotten board would make.
I just don't UNDERSTAND people with accents! Can't he speak better English?
Inevitably the class dwindled in number throughout the semester; far be it from me to not protect this man's dignity with honor-killings. The forests surrounding Baumann-Nelson House are littered with dozens of scantily-clad coeds who'd dared to bleat like sheep about my mentor! Better English! HE WENT TO HARVARD THREE TIMES!
{Before I go on, a fun story about Ngo and I. Hahahahaha! Dr. Ngo! Anyway, one day I was in his office chatting with him about how I wanted to, uh, be like him when I grew up, and while talking to me he lifts his tiny body from his chair and crosses the room. He grasps my hand, and I barely had the time to think "Ohmigod! It's gonna be like one of them After School Specials!" before he removed my watch (on my left hand) and placed it on my right hand. He then sat down again, never having stopped in his train of thought for a moment. When he'd finished his thought, I politely asked him: wtf, mate? "Well, Dom, your watch was interrupting your qi. If your qi is interrpted, you cannot attain in this life that which you dream of." Out of sheer superstition, I have since that day always worn my watch on my right hand. You can never tell with these things. }
So yeah. The strange thing is, had Dr. Long been these people's frat brother or Scout Master, things would be different. Why is it that when, in an office or academic environment, people can't seem to wrap their minds around accents? And it's not just foreign accents! Let me tell you how one is looked at in North Carolina when one talks about one's dohyahd. Yes. Like you've just been found in possession of four hundred gaily-painted kitten skull rattles, that's how.
Why then this soap-box foray? Today at work (walk-ins: 66) one of the hourly employees asked me:
How do you understand these people? I never know what they're saying.
Of course, I crushed one of my molars trying not to laugh like one of those old bats who spat on Mussolini's swaying corpse in that Milanese marketplace. This is because
HE IS PAKISTANI. Outside Bloomington, he might as well be wearing a turban and carrying the head of an infidel for all the respect he's gonna get because of his accent.
Pot. Calling. Kettle. Aw shit, you're not short-bus riders, you get my point.
Or were ye?
I remain, as ever,
Dom
Thursday, March 03, 2005
Cehennem, Cennet ve ölü rahibeleri.
Hell, Heaven, and dead nuns.
Yes, yes, I still live. I'd apologize for my absence, but I'm Catholic, so I have enough guilt to worry about without this.
OK. So, picture it: Bloomington, Friday (2/25) morning. Domonic's alarm is set to go off at 8 even though he has class at 11:15: this is because he must pick up Zeke Whippet from the Happy Kennel Place a few miles outside town. Domonic has figured strategically that this would be the latest astral moment he could wake up and be on time to his other obligations, namely, finishing the Turkish (for two classes) and the Ottoman for classes that day.
Domonic awakens not to his alarm but via biorythm. Absently, he glances at the clock.
8 effing 45.
Apparently, Domonic set his alarm for 8 PM! That makes mothertouching sense! He flings himself into his shower, lathers, rinses and *gasp!* does not repeat. Wet, mumbling and incensed at his own ineptitude, he drives at 90 mph to the Happy Kennel Place and retrieves a grateful Zeke, who promptly falls asleep in the backseat whilst lathing his male-parts with his nimble tongue. Once safely ensconsed at Keith's, Zeke is left to his fate with a chewybone and two bone-biscuits as Domonic drives at 125 mph to class whilst finishing his Turkish homework frantically on his lap in traffic. Once in class, Abbas bey is extra super-special flippy; this particular Friday, he was to be observed by two of his supervisors! What, Abbas? We're going to listen to fun folk music? What, Abbas? We're going to be looking at cartoons and talking about jokes? You mean, you're not going to slam chalk on the board so hard that it atomizes? You mean that you're not going to roll your eyes so far back in your head that it exposes that rosy-colored optic nerve when we talk? Well, I'll be dipped!
Now: Domonic has class on Fridays from 11:15-12:05, and then from 3:30-6. However, this particular Friday, because of a missed Turkish Literature in Translation class, Kemal bey decided that, since he'd be on campus anyway for my Ottoman class at 3:30, to go ahead and have the makeup class at 1. Fancy!
1 PM rolls around and Domonic is ready to take his own life with a coathanger rather than endure FIVE HOURS OF NON-STOP CLASS on a SUNNY FRIDAY AFTERNOON. He refrains from doing so because there's the promise of delight on the morrow. He quickly begins to rue his inaction when, five minutes before the end of the Turkish Literature in Translation class, Kemal bey dramatically closes the book they've been translating for a half a semester and says:
"We're finished with this book. I can't take it anymore"
Burcu hanım and Domonic look at each other with naked horror. Eight weeks of work! Flushed like a wad of snot-befouled tissue down the storm-drain if apathy! How many nights spent toiling into the wee hours? How many carbonated fructose beverages gave their lives so that this book could see the light of Anglophone day? Kemal asks them if that decision frustrates them; meekly, they reply that no, hocam, they aren't frustrated; deep inside each one knows that the other will go home to beat a kitten to death with a meat-tenderizer.
[Side note: As of 3/1, Kemal bey wants to translate a PLAY written by the same author, Nazim Hikmet. Oh yes. That won't be utterly futile. Or dull. *swig from hip-flask*]
Then, after a ten minute break wherein Domonic consumes a Pop-Tart and a Coke, Ottoman Turkish! Yay for languages that haven't been used by a living person since 1850! Kemal, weary from the Turkish Literature in Translation class, begins to explain to Domonic that he'd like to begin lessons on
ARABIC AND PERSIAN GRAMMAR.
Now, Domonic's all for learning. He's come all the way from Maine to the corn specifially to do so. The arcane is his medium, and in it he is a master. However, the thought of wading into the grammar of two more languages makes Domonic's addled brain turn into something resembling hominy grits. Yes, hocam! Bring it on! After all, won't they make a lovely complement for:
Turkish.
Ottoman.
French.
Latin.
5th Century Attic Greek.
Modern demotic (koine) Greek.
Classical Latin.
Mandarin Chinese.
Punjabi (Gurmukhi).
[Domonic pauses in horror]
On the bus ride home, Domonic watches a young woman rub her woman parts, slowly, lovingly, through her sweatpants for a good ten minutes. No, he is not making this up. It was like watching a Discovery Channel (hahahahaha! Discovery!) documentary about bonobos. One watches because hey, it's there, it's on. But all will be well soon, Domonic thinks: tonight, Keith will be home from Texas and they will meet up for dinner! Yay! Human interaction!
Keith comes home from the airport and calls Domonic to confirm dinner plans. He drives to Domonic's home and they get into Domonic's car to go out for pizza. They pull into a small parking lot behind the Buskirk-Chumley, and, once parked in a spot, they notice that it is 24 hour 7 Day-a-WeekTow Spot. Good times. Domonic puts his keys and the ignition and turns the key so as to move the vehicle, fearing the fines and the tow truck.
And by "turns", one means "attempts, in vain, to turn." Both the wheel and the ignition are locked solid. Domonic pauses, takes a deep breath, and takes the keys out of the ignition. He puts them back in and tries to turn them again. And again. And again and again and again.
He takes out his cellphone. The hair on the back of his neck hackles as he dials AAA. The phone rings on the other end. "Thank you for calling AAA", the recording begins. "Please hold as we transfer you to a customer service representative."
Had Domonic known that the "customer service representative" would instead be a "cracked-out vapid troglodyte whore", he would have just sat in his car and waited for the icy refreshment of the Big Dirt Nap. The conversation lasted, no lying, for ten minutes. Fantastic! That's helpful! Had Keith not been there, and been so patient, and been such a calming influence, Domonic knows he would have had to kill again. And damn, he's misplaced his hacksaw.
A hour and a half later, at nearly 11 PM...
Keith and Domonic watch as Domonic's car is dragged onto an awaiting towtruck. The ignition shaft needed to be entirely gutted and replaced and two new keys needed to be made; all of this to the merry tune of $415.
Then, once actually eating, Keith has an allergic reaction to something in the pizza and his lip begins to erupt with a single weal whilst his hands begin uncontrollably itching.
Domonic became exceedingly happy that Indiana has a seven day waiting period for the purchase of firearms.
******************************
However!
Saturday night, 8 PM. With Thai peanut chicken and teriyaki chicken (Dom and Keith, respectively) holding court in their guts, our protagonists go
TO THE OPERA.
I loved it. I loved it so goddamn much it's criminal. There were many reasons for this.
1) One of my best friends from last year, Stephanie Bain (of New Zealand), had a leading role.
2) The opera was about nuns.
3) The opera was about nuns, who then got guillotined during the Reign of Terror.
4) One of the nuns drops a statuette of the Baby Jesus and it shatters.
Beheading. Judeo-Christian statuary. My Kiwi. It was a night of enchantment I shan't soon forget. Moved me to effing tears, and I only have a husk for a heart.
More blogs shall follow in short order, now that I have the will to live following an illness that can only be likened to consumption.
I remain, as always,
Domonic
Yes, yes, I still live. I'd apologize for my absence, but I'm Catholic, so I have enough guilt to worry about without this.
OK. So, picture it: Bloomington, Friday (2/25) morning. Domonic's alarm is set to go off at 8 even though he has class at 11:15: this is because he must pick up Zeke Whippet from the Happy Kennel Place a few miles outside town. Domonic has figured strategically that this would be the latest astral moment he could wake up and be on time to his other obligations, namely, finishing the Turkish (for two classes) and the Ottoman for classes that day.
Domonic awakens not to his alarm but via biorythm. Absently, he glances at the clock.
8 effing 45.
Apparently, Domonic set his alarm for 8 PM! That makes mothertouching sense! He flings himself into his shower, lathers, rinses and *gasp!* does not repeat. Wet, mumbling and incensed at his own ineptitude, he drives at 90 mph to the Happy Kennel Place and retrieves a grateful Zeke, who promptly falls asleep in the backseat whilst lathing his male-parts with his nimble tongue. Once safely ensconsed at Keith's, Zeke is left to his fate with a chewybone and two bone-biscuits as Domonic drives at 125 mph to class whilst finishing his Turkish homework frantically on his lap in traffic. Once in class, Abbas bey is extra super-special flippy; this particular Friday, he was to be observed by two of his supervisors! What, Abbas? We're going to listen to fun folk music? What, Abbas? We're going to be looking at cartoons and talking about jokes? You mean, you're not going to slam chalk on the board so hard that it atomizes? You mean that you're not going to roll your eyes so far back in your head that it exposes that rosy-colored optic nerve when we talk? Well, I'll be dipped!
Now: Domonic has class on Fridays from 11:15-12:05, and then from 3:30-6. However, this particular Friday, because of a missed Turkish Literature in Translation class, Kemal bey decided that, since he'd be on campus anyway for my Ottoman class at 3:30, to go ahead and have the makeup class at 1. Fancy!
1 PM rolls around and Domonic is ready to take his own life with a coathanger rather than endure FIVE HOURS OF NON-STOP CLASS on a SUNNY FRIDAY AFTERNOON. He refrains from doing so because there's the promise of delight on the morrow. He quickly begins to rue his inaction when, five minutes before the end of the Turkish Literature in Translation class, Kemal bey dramatically closes the book they've been translating for a half a semester and says:
"We're finished with this book. I can't take it anymore"
Burcu hanım and Domonic look at each other with naked horror. Eight weeks of work! Flushed like a wad of snot-befouled tissue down the storm-drain if apathy! How many nights spent toiling into the wee hours? How many carbonated fructose beverages gave their lives so that this book could see the light of Anglophone day? Kemal asks them if that decision frustrates them; meekly, they reply that no, hocam, they aren't frustrated; deep inside each one knows that the other will go home to beat a kitten to death with a meat-tenderizer.
[Side note: As of 3/1, Kemal bey wants to translate a PLAY written by the same author, Nazim Hikmet. Oh yes. That won't be utterly futile. Or dull. *swig from hip-flask*]
Then, after a ten minute break wherein Domonic consumes a Pop-Tart and a Coke, Ottoman Turkish! Yay for languages that haven't been used by a living person since 1850! Kemal, weary from the Turkish Literature in Translation class, begins to explain to Domonic that he'd like to begin lessons on
ARABIC AND PERSIAN GRAMMAR.
Now, Domonic's all for learning. He's come all the way from Maine to the corn specifially to do so. The arcane is his medium, and in it he is a master. However, the thought of wading into the grammar of two more languages makes Domonic's addled brain turn into something resembling hominy grits. Yes, hocam! Bring it on! After all, won't they make a lovely complement for:
Turkish.
Ottoman.
French.
Latin.
5th Century Attic Greek.
Modern demotic (koine) Greek.
Classical Latin.
Mandarin Chinese.
Punjabi (Gurmukhi).
[Domonic pauses in horror]
On the bus ride home, Domonic watches a young woman rub her woman parts, slowly, lovingly, through her sweatpants for a good ten minutes. No, he is not making this up. It was like watching a Discovery Channel (hahahahaha! Discovery!) documentary about bonobos. One watches because hey, it's there, it's on. But all will be well soon, Domonic thinks: tonight, Keith will be home from Texas and they will meet up for dinner! Yay! Human interaction!
Keith comes home from the airport and calls Domonic to confirm dinner plans. He drives to Domonic's home and they get into Domonic's car to go out for pizza. They pull into a small parking lot behind the Buskirk-Chumley, and, once parked in a spot, they notice that it is 24 hour 7 Day-a-WeekTow Spot. Good times. Domonic puts his keys and the ignition and turns the key so as to move the vehicle, fearing the fines and the tow truck.
And by "turns", one means "attempts, in vain, to turn." Both the wheel and the ignition are locked solid. Domonic pauses, takes a deep breath, and takes the keys out of the ignition. He puts them back in and tries to turn them again. And again. And again and again and again.
He takes out his cellphone. The hair on the back of his neck hackles as he dials AAA. The phone rings on the other end. "Thank you for calling AAA", the recording begins. "Please hold as we transfer you to a customer service representative."
Had Domonic known that the "customer service representative" would instead be a "cracked-out vapid troglodyte whore", he would have just sat in his car and waited for the icy refreshment of the Big Dirt Nap. The conversation lasted, no lying, for ten minutes. Fantastic! That's helpful! Had Keith not been there, and been so patient, and been such a calming influence, Domonic knows he would have had to kill again. And damn, he's misplaced his hacksaw.
A hour and a half later, at nearly 11 PM...
Keith and Domonic watch as Domonic's car is dragged onto an awaiting towtruck. The ignition shaft needed to be entirely gutted and replaced and two new keys needed to be made; all of this to the merry tune of $415.
Then, once actually eating, Keith has an allergic reaction to something in the pizza and his lip begins to erupt with a single weal whilst his hands begin uncontrollably itching.
Domonic became exceedingly happy that Indiana has a seven day waiting period for the purchase of firearms.
******************************
However!
Saturday night, 8 PM. With Thai peanut chicken and teriyaki chicken (Dom and Keith, respectively) holding court in their guts, our protagonists go
TO THE OPERA.
I loved it. I loved it so goddamn much it's criminal. There were many reasons for this.
1) One of my best friends from last year, Stephanie Bain (of New Zealand), had a leading role.
2) The opera was about nuns.
3) The opera was about nuns, who then got guillotined during the Reign of Terror.
4) One of the nuns drops a statuette of the Baby Jesus and it shatters.
Beheading. Judeo-Christian statuary. My Kiwi. It was a night of enchantment I shan't soon forget. Moved me to effing tears, and I only have a husk for a heart.
More blogs shall follow in short order, now that I have the will to live following an illness that can only be likened to consumption.
I remain, as always,
Domonic
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