The new job.
Unbeknownst to many of you, I've taken a new job. Hell, it's not a job, it's an actual, real, honest-to goodness goddamned career, and I, all of twenty-five, stand in awe, shock and mild disbelief. Judging from some people's reactions (I won't name names, but you know who you are), you all thought that I'd be selling my sweet body for smack money by the end of next year, and for that, you all will be seated at the right hand of the Hooved One in sulphurous eternal torment, basted by hellish imps on the Spit of Disbelief.
So now, instead of merely wounding international students with my Letter Opener of Divine Justice, I will instead be delivering the coup de grace myself as a full-time, salaried, document-signing Designated School Official, aka Foreign Student Advisor. Many of you have no idea what I am talking about, but suffice it to say that I get a cool stamp, the best parking permit available, business cards and a frikkin' office. And a salary. Did I mention that already? No longer will I have to traffic human organs to make ends meet; whatever will I do with all those Coleman coolers now? Also, the scalpels? And all that ice?
A real 'blog will follow soon, my pretties, I swear it.
I remain, as ever,
Dom
Wednesday, June 29, 2005
Wednesday, June 22, 2005
The feckless fruit-bat of frenzied flagellation.
In the dark of a late June night, my neighborhood is still and dank like a broached sepulchre, naked in the muteness of unspeakable, profaned horror and cloaked in rank neglect. Two savage cats, denizens of the copse of trees nearby, bring themselves to feral climax in the midst of their midsummer copulation. A neighbor in a stained white wifebeater, jean shorts and loafers with black socks pulled up halfway up his calves pauses in his autistic rocking on his stoop just long enough to light up a filterless Camel, examining the new crop of liverspots on his nicotine-stained hands with detached curiosity. Someone is frying something nearby, despite the fact that it is nearly midnight; if I had to guess, I'd say that it was pig lymph-nodes. Somewhere distant, softly, a dog chained to the rotted hulk of an unused, wheelless vehicle strains to bark while gently strangling itself, alarming the creatures of night in soulless repose in the upholstry. And, from under my bed, a gentle, muffled weeping; clearly, Cuddles the Underbed Clown has not yet dispatched his nightly kill. Ah, the horrors of being five and gullible.
This past Sunday was Father's Day, a day to celebrate the man whose seed ushered you into existence. Since I've forgiven my own father for locking me in that storm cellar for three weeks with only rancid kimchee and Cajun Spicy barbecue sauce to eat and drink for "not lovin' on the Lord more", I decided to tell you a special story about him. You decide afterward if I've really forgiven him.
My father decided, at seemingly random intervals, to go camping with one of his work-buddies and his buddy's son, who was four or five years older than me. This was no ordinary campground; no, this was Round Valley Reservoir, which had campsites you could either hike ten thousand miles to, or you could get there by boat. My father had a Maine-made Old Town Trapper canoe and an ancient, sputtering outboard motor, onto which he loaded poles and tackle, Dinty Moore beef stew, Tang, and a ten-year-old me in a day-glo-orange lifevest. Round Valley's attractions were manifold. One, you had to either hike until you dehydrated and died to get to an outhouse or you had to defecate like a wild animal in the forest, which was alluring because of the apparent quaint rustication factor. Two, said outhouse's toilet rim was about thirty feet above the actual lake of waste below, so when there was solid bodily movement, you could shout "Bombs away!" and wait for the muffled splash, as my father was wont to do. Three, there were serpents. The men would sit around and grunt and poke at the fire and drink cheap beer and smoke White Owl cigars, which smell as though you've lit the hairs from a whore's ass on fire. Jake, the son of my dad's work buddy, was aloof to my pleas for him to play with me; what was perhaps more galling was that he had the coolest things to play with ever. I mean, he had a hatchet. He had a filet knife. And, most delightful, he had a blow-gun. He found insane delight in taunting me with them, because apparently since I was small and young that also meant that I was mildly retarded and clearly not capable of not slaughtering myself utterly. And there I was, given cinders and an old syringe we found on the beach to play with, watching Jake hack small branches to pieces, or setting up his little target for the blow-gun, or beginning his own regimen of scratching and belching and talking about how the "skirts get him down." I'd look up periodically from my ashy little playground, moth-scales dusting my tiny lips and the high, citrusy taste of Tang on my tongue, and wonder how much a gender reassignment costs and how long I'd have to stay in Sweden. I'd heard that Steppsholmen was delightful that time of year.
The last time we went to Round Valley, high winds chopped up the surface of the reservoir, and men in a stable watercraft patrolled the lake with a bullhorn warning the campers to keep their crafts docked. The problem: I needed to go home, as I had to go to school that Monday. What began then was what I affectionately refer to as "Dom's Trail of Tears", a death-march across the perimeter of the reservoir to the parking lot, where my sweet, loving mother awaited. Wheeling in the heat-shattered heavens, carrion raptorbirds licked their nonexistent lips and waited for my pathetic death-rattle to plunge their vile, naked heads into my putrefying offal. My father's cattle prod poked me savagely in between my shoulderblades, and the stony ground rendered my tender young feet into fleshy bulbs of what appeared to be improperly ground hamburger. Just when we reached the two hundredth mile, I was allowed two and a half minutes of respite, which I used to swat kaiser-roll-sized mosquitos and pull feasting ticks off my carcass. When I finally reached my mother, I was alive, but my childhood had tattered away. That, and I will always have malaria as a grim souvenir of my death-march; yay for being a host.
The last time I went out to see the old man in his new digs in Kansas, we got really blasted and wandered around what I imagine to be an old meat packing district in downtown Wichita, though it's probably something much more mundane. It's strange, that transition from where your parents are your parents to them becoming your friends. It's not seamless; those late teen years when everything your parents do makes you want to fall into a hole lined with sharpened pongee sticks and saltwater come to mind. But in the end, making sure that your drunken father doesn't fall into an open manhole makes up for all of that. And now that he has a fancy new bionic hip (and accompanying card for airport security), it's only a matter of time before the old-before-his-time and the young-at-heart bond over fermented grain. That two-pronged scar's just a memory now.
I remain, as ever,
Domonic
This past Sunday was Father's Day, a day to celebrate the man whose seed ushered you into existence. Since I've forgiven my own father for locking me in that storm cellar for three weeks with only rancid kimchee and Cajun Spicy barbecue sauce to eat and drink for "not lovin' on the Lord more", I decided to tell you a special story about him. You decide afterward if I've really forgiven him.
My father decided, at seemingly random intervals, to go camping with one of his work-buddies and his buddy's son, who was four or five years older than me. This was no ordinary campground; no, this was Round Valley Reservoir, which had campsites you could either hike ten thousand miles to, or you could get there by boat. My father had a Maine-made Old Town Trapper canoe and an ancient, sputtering outboard motor, onto which he loaded poles and tackle, Dinty Moore beef stew, Tang, and a ten-year-old me in a day-glo-orange lifevest. Round Valley's attractions were manifold. One, you had to either hike until you dehydrated and died to get to an outhouse or you had to defecate like a wild animal in the forest, which was alluring because of the apparent quaint rustication factor. Two, said outhouse's toilet rim was about thirty feet above the actual lake of waste below, so when there was solid bodily movement, you could shout "Bombs away!" and wait for the muffled splash, as my father was wont to do. Three, there were serpents. The men would sit around and grunt and poke at the fire and drink cheap beer and smoke White Owl cigars, which smell as though you've lit the hairs from a whore's ass on fire. Jake, the son of my dad's work buddy, was aloof to my pleas for him to play with me; what was perhaps more galling was that he had the coolest things to play with ever. I mean, he had a hatchet. He had a filet knife. And, most delightful, he had a blow-gun. He found insane delight in taunting me with them, because apparently since I was small and young that also meant that I was mildly retarded and clearly not capable of not slaughtering myself utterly. And there I was, given cinders and an old syringe we found on the beach to play with, watching Jake hack small branches to pieces, or setting up his little target for the blow-gun, or beginning his own regimen of scratching and belching and talking about how the "skirts get him down." I'd look up periodically from my ashy little playground, moth-scales dusting my tiny lips and the high, citrusy taste of Tang on my tongue, and wonder how much a gender reassignment costs and how long I'd have to stay in Sweden. I'd heard that Steppsholmen was delightful that time of year.
The last time we went to Round Valley, high winds chopped up the surface of the reservoir, and men in a stable watercraft patrolled the lake with a bullhorn warning the campers to keep their crafts docked. The problem: I needed to go home, as I had to go to school that Monday. What began then was what I affectionately refer to as "Dom's Trail of Tears", a death-march across the perimeter of the reservoir to the parking lot, where my sweet, loving mother awaited. Wheeling in the heat-shattered heavens, carrion raptorbirds licked their nonexistent lips and waited for my pathetic death-rattle to plunge their vile, naked heads into my putrefying offal. My father's cattle prod poked me savagely in between my shoulderblades, and the stony ground rendered my tender young feet into fleshy bulbs of what appeared to be improperly ground hamburger. Just when we reached the two hundredth mile, I was allowed two and a half minutes of respite, which I used to swat kaiser-roll-sized mosquitos and pull feasting ticks off my carcass. When I finally reached my mother, I was alive, but my childhood had tattered away. That, and I will always have malaria as a grim souvenir of my death-march; yay for being a host.
The last time I went out to see the old man in his new digs in Kansas, we got really blasted and wandered around what I imagine to be an old meat packing district in downtown Wichita, though it's probably something much more mundane. It's strange, that transition from where your parents are your parents to them becoming your friends. It's not seamless; those late teen years when everything your parents do makes you want to fall into a hole lined with sharpened pongee sticks and saltwater come to mind. But in the end, making sure that your drunken father doesn't fall into an open manhole makes up for all of that. And now that he has a fancy new bionic hip (and accompanying card for airport security), it's only a matter of time before the old-before-his-time and the young-at-heart bond over fermented grain. That two-pronged scar's just a memory now.
I remain, as ever,
Domonic
Monday, June 13, 2005
The marzipan mango of monotonous martyrdom.
Can martyrdom be monotonous? Also: do I care?
7:45 AM came today with me watching a squirrel partially cannibalizing one of his fallen comrades, who no doubt fell to his or her untimely demise into the vast fen that Bloomington has become in the wake of the past few day's torrential downpours. I'd heard that some rodents do that--they graw off the extremities of other dead animals to harvest the bounty of the calcium. In fact, if I recall correctly, one of my gerbils did that to the other when it perished of exhaustion in the wee cage I'd gotten for them. Somehow, though, it seemed more primal to see the kitten-sized squirrel daintily feasting on the corpse of one of his buddies; when two animals are in a cage, why, you could chalk up cannibalism to sheer boredom. The world, indeed, is a vampire.
I've lost the ability to 'blog from home because, uh, I have no more internet. This is because I made a very sage decision: I prefer not to starve to death over having the ability to read about the ongoing saga of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie on MSN.com. I guess I could whine about it, and gnash my gnarled teeth, but I shan't, if for no other reason than that would be dull. You all know why I am poor, judging from the number of people who graciously volunteered to hide under my former roommate's car and slash his Achilles tendon out from under him. Rest assured, though, that justice has been served. In a month's time, when the gasses in his corpse have accrued enough volume, his pathetic remains will bob merrily on the surface of Lake Lemon, devoid of fingertips and his dental arcade. I will say this: washing that much slaughtered human effluent out of the trunk of a Ford Focus takes a surprisingly long time.
In the meantime, I'm in the library. The Main Library (sorry, the Herman B. Wells Library) usually is a place I come out of sheer desperation and animal will; I have never been here once without being assaulted by internationals, keen for the free advice about their immigration situation. What's more, the bathrooms here contain the remains of University employees in HazMat suits who bravely gave their lives so that you wouldn't have to walk in raw sewage from the clogged thrones. To make matters worse, the average temperature in the stacks is a brisk 2000 + degrees, which one would think would warp the billions of books. Today, though, there is nobody. This is due to the fact that IU, and Bloomington at large, is like something out of an old Western novel in the summer. At 9 PM, I could stand in the middle of Bloomington's main drag, Kirkwood, clad only in sackcloth and burning hair effigies of loathsome faculty members for sheer hours without being disturbed by cars. [Uh, not that I have done that.] Summer is when Bloomington and IU become most bearable; gone are the herds of designer-imposter perfume-bathed sorostitutes talking at 500 decibels to their frat-a-skank hump-puppets; gone, too, are the pungent hippies in People's Park, playing their Wal*Mart-ilk guitars for change and bumming cigarettes off the homeless; and finally, gone are the fancy young white boys in ridiculous inner-city getups and do-rags, swaggering around like they've been infected with some tropical parasite and driving Suzuki Esteems with pimp-rims and halo underlights playing music with enchanting lyrics like:
I hate my baby' mama
I hate my baby' mama
I [effing] hate my baby' mama
She don't give me no [insert overt reference to oral pleasure]
I dunno.
My neighborhood is quiet now, even quieter than usual. I often wonder if I, indeed, have neighbors, though judging from the number of cars in the parking lots with merry stickers like...
My kid beat up your honor student.
Fish don't walk but Jesus LIVES!
I'm going knucking futs.
Hoosier Pride
At least I can smoke in my car.
... I know SOMEONE is around. That, and there have been 'treats' yet again, hiding unsuccessfully in the three blades of grass, the tangled tree roots and the packed mud and mulch I call my yahd. These aren't just any treats: no, these were extruded from the weary hole of a beast I reckon to be about the size of an adult musk-ox. One of the draws to my apartment complex is that they are proud of the fact that they have a very liberal pet policy; apparently, this includes woolly Siberian cud-chawing ungulates known primarily for a reek so powerful that biologists who work with them frequently seal their nasal passages with hypoallergenic beeswax.
[It's dusk and the man sitting behind me just began singing softly; singing, and taking off his shoes. Apparently it's time for the dusk prayer, and a quick glance behind me served as confirmation. The singing I can handle. The piety is awe-inspiring and humbling. The feet? Damn, muthaeffah, get some odor-sucking inserts in those shoes. ]
Last night I couldn't sleep. I tried that girly "Sleepytime" tea to no avail; I turned on an Enya CD and yet I still laid there; by three-thirty I was ready for a solution, even if it meant that something was to give its sweet life that very night. In a moment of inspired innovation, I threw a raw chicken to Cuddles the Underbed Clown and distracted him long enough to grab my Ouija board, which was caked in white makeup and spackled with tears. As I swallowed a live goldfish and lit some "ass" scented incense, the dank of the untamed moors filled my "fleeing my homeland" apartment as I summoned "Bruce", a tax attorney who choked to death on a fantail shrimp after drinking four Mai Tais and trying to sing the lyrics to "My Favorite Mistake" by Sheryl Crowe following a quasi-public breakup with his live-in mistress, a Lithuanian prostitute who was missing several key chromosomes.
"Bruce": G..u..r..g..l..e..H..A..C..K..g..u..r..g..l..e..
Me: So, "Bruce", how do you think I should make myself sleepy? I have eight hours of Cambodia-under-the-Khmer-Rouge horror waiting for me in the office tomorrow.
"Bruce": I..s..n..t..b..e..e..r..t..h..e..o..n..l..y..t..h..i..n..g..y..o..u..
h..a..v..e..i..n..y..o..u..r..f..r..i..d..g..e..?
Me: That's an affirmative, bucko. Seven beautiful Guinness beers lie in repose in my lettuce crisper, awaiting consumption. But the hangover will make things worse. What else?
"Bruce": W..h..y..d..o..n..t..y..o..u..j..u..s..t..t..o..s..s..o..f..f..?
Me: You disgust me. You are nothing but an animal.
"Bruce": Y..o..u..r..e..t..h..e..o..n..e..w..h..o..e..a..t..s..c..o..c..k..t..a..i..l..
s..a..u..c..e..r..i..g..h..t..o..u..t..o..f..t..h..e..j..a..r.
Me: That's true, "Bruce", but at least I didn't 'plug into' a walking disease farm from a former Soviet bloc country.
"Bruce": W..e..l..l..n..o..t..y..e..t.
"Bruce" bored me to slumber with stories of how one goes about importing a Russian-speaking syphilitic whore and keeping her from a hideously deformed and savagely cruel Iowa farmgirl-wife, and the last thing I remember was Cuddles' white glove wrenching the board off the floor and into his stench-enshrouded lair.
I'll try to post as much as I can for the time being, but it's not gonna be easy; after all, time spent on here is time I could be spending peddling my sweet ass under the railroad trestle for internet money. It's kindof a catch-22 that way, is it not?
Damn! Here comes an international! [rummaging for machete]
I remain, as ever,
Dom
7:45 AM came today with me watching a squirrel partially cannibalizing one of his fallen comrades, who no doubt fell to his or her untimely demise into the vast fen that Bloomington has become in the wake of the past few day's torrential downpours. I'd heard that some rodents do that--they graw off the extremities of other dead animals to harvest the bounty of the calcium. In fact, if I recall correctly, one of my gerbils did that to the other when it perished of exhaustion in the wee cage I'd gotten for them. Somehow, though, it seemed more primal to see the kitten-sized squirrel daintily feasting on the corpse of one of his buddies; when two animals are in a cage, why, you could chalk up cannibalism to sheer boredom. The world, indeed, is a vampire.
I've lost the ability to 'blog from home because, uh, I have no more internet. This is because I made a very sage decision: I prefer not to starve to death over having the ability to read about the ongoing saga of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie on MSN.com. I guess I could whine about it, and gnash my gnarled teeth, but I shan't, if for no other reason than that would be dull. You all know why I am poor, judging from the number of people who graciously volunteered to hide under my former roommate's car and slash his Achilles tendon out from under him. Rest assured, though, that justice has been served. In a month's time, when the gasses in his corpse have accrued enough volume, his pathetic remains will bob merrily on the surface of Lake Lemon, devoid of fingertips and his dental arcade. I will say this: washing that much slaughtered human effluent out of the trunk of a Ford Focus takes a surprisingly long time.
In the meantime, I'm in the library. The Main Library (sorry, the Herman B. Wells Library) usually is a place I come out of sheer desperation and animal will; I have never been here once without being assaulted by internationals, keen for the free advice about their immigration situation. What's more, the bathrooms here contain the remains of University employees in HazMat suits who bravely gave their lives so that you wouldn't have to walk in raw sewage from the clogged thrones. To make matters worse, the average temperature in the stacks is a brisk 2000 + degrees, which one would think would warp the billions of books. Today, though, there is nobody. This is due to the fact that IU, and Bloomington at large, is like something out of an old Western novel in the summer. At 9 PM, I could stand in the middle of Bloomington's main drag, Kirkwood, clad only in sackcloth and burning hair effigies of loathsome faculty members for sheer hours without being disturbed by cars. [Uh, not that I have done that.] Summer is when Bloomington and IU become most bearable; gone are the herds of designer-imposter perfume-bathed sorostitutes talking at 500 decibels to their frat-a-skank hump-puppets; gone, too, are the pungent hippies in People's Park, playing their Wal*Mart-ilk guitars for change and bumming cigarettes off the homeless; and finally, gone are the fancy young white boys in ridiculous inner-city getups and do-rags, swaggering around like they've been infected with some tropical parasite and driving Suzuki Esteems with pimp-rims and halo underlights playing music with enchanting lyrics like:
I hate my baby' mama
I hate my baby' mama
I [effing] hate my baby' mama
She don't give me no [insert overt reference to oral pleasure]
I dunno.
My neighborhood is quiet now, even quieter than usual. I often wonder if I, indeed, have neighbors, though judging from the number of cars in the parking lots with merry stickers like...
My kid beat up your honor student.
Fish don't walk but Jesus LIVES!
I'm going knucking futs.
Hoosier Pride
At least I can smoke in my car.
... I know SOMEONE is around. That, and there have been 'treats' yet again, hiding unsuccessfully in the three blades of grass, the tangled tree roots and the packed mud and mulch I call my yahd. These aren't just any treats: no, these were extruded from the weary hole of a beast I reckon to be about the size of an adult musk-ox. One of the draws to my apartment complex is that they are proud of the fact that they have a very liberal pet policy; apparently, this includes woolly Siberian cud-chawing ungulates known primarily for a reek so powerful that biologists who work with them frequently seal their nasal passages with hypoallergenic beeswax.
[It's dusk and the man sitting behind me just began singing softly; singing, and taking off his shoes. Apparently it's time for the dusk prayer, and a quick glance behind me served as confirmation. The singing I can handle. The piety is awe-inspiring and humbling. The feet? Damn, muthaeffah, get some odor-sucking inserts in those shoes. ]
Last night I couldn't sleep. I tried that girly "Sleepytime" tea to no avail; I turned on an Enya CD and yet I still laid there; by three-thirty I was ready for a solution, even if it meant that something was to give its sweet life that very night. In a moment of inspired innovation, I threw a raw chicken to Cuddles the Underbed Clown and distracted him long enough to grab my Ouija board, which was caked in white makeup and spackled with tears. As I swallowed a live goldfish and lit some "ass" scented incense, the dank of the untamed moors filled my "fleeing my homeland" apartment as I summoned "Bruce", a tax attorney who choked to death on a fantail shrimp after drinking four Mai Tais and trying to sing the lyrics to "My Favorite Mistake" by Sheryl Crowe following a quasi-public breakup with his live-in mistress, a Lithuanian prostitute who was missing several key chromosomes.
"Bruce": G..u..r..g..l..e..H..A..C..K..g..u..r..g..l..e..
Me: So, "Bruce", how do you think I should make myself sleepy? I have eight hours of Cambodia-under-the-Khmer-Rouge horror waiting for me in the office tomorrow.
"Bruce": I..s..n..t..b..e..e..r..t..h..e..o..n..l..y..t..h..i..n..g..y..o..u..
h..a..v..e..i..n..y..o..u..r..f..r..i..d..g..e..?
Me: That's an affirmative, bucko. Seven beautiful Guinness beers lie in repose in my lettuce crisper, awaiting consumption. But the hangover will make things worse. What else?
"Bruce": W..h..y..d..o..n..t..y..o..u..j..u..s..t..t..o..s..s..o..f..f..?
Me: You disgust me. You are nothing but an animal.
"Bruce": Y..o..u..r..e..t..h..e..o..n..e..w..h..o..e..a..t..s..c..o..c..k..t..a..i..l..
s..a..u..c..e..r..i..g..h..t..o..u..t..o..f..t..h..e..j..a..r.
Me: That's true, "Bruce", but at least I didn't 'plug into' a walking disease farm from a former Soviet bloc country.
"Bruce": W..e..l..l..n..o..t..y..e..t.
"Bruce" bored me to slumber with stories of how one goes about importing a Russian-speaking syphilitic whore and keeping her from a hideously deformed and savagely cruel Iowa farmgirl-wife, and the last thing I remember was Cuddles' white glove wrenching the board off the floor and into his stench-enshrouded lair.
I'll try to post as much as I can for the time being, but it's not gonna be easy; after all, time spent on here is time I could be spending peddling my sweet ass under the railroad trestle for internet money. It's kindof a catch-22 that way, is it not?
Damn! Here comes an international! [rummaging for machete]
I remain, as ever,
Dom
Tuesday, June 07, 2005
The existential ermine of erstwhile ennui.
Last night as I was drifting off into pinot grigio-induced slumber, my thoughts became occupied and I tossed about, unmaking my bed utterly and filling me with the concrete heaviness of sleep-expectancy. And by "occupied" I mean "occupied, like France during WWII." None of the fleeting images made sense, even in a larger context. Britney Spears was in there, and she'd had surgery to split her tongue to resemble a serpent's. I briefly remembered what it's like to step in a profoundly fresh and intensely warm cow-flop in thong sandals. I could taste the footlong corndogs from the West Virginia State Fair in their deepfried, animal-offal goodness. In the distance of my mind's ear I could hear gurbani music and smell chapati bread cooking. And there was my grandmother, covering one of my wasp stings with cooling balm from her "sting stick", which I choose to believe to this day was a magic wand. I remember how hot the asphalt was on my face as I got stomped on the way home from school, and how the frat-a-skank who did it to me smelled of cigarettes and extremely cheap deodorant, which suprised me even through my whuppin'.
I guess I shouldn't have dropped so much acid in high school. [Hahahahaha! Kidding! Maybe!]
I was flipping through a young man's file today trying to find something weird that he said would be in there when I noticed one of his old school's documents. Apparently, this young man had gone to high school in Pittsfield, Maine, a mere forty miles from my palatial digs on the banks of the mighty Penobscot. "How'd you like it in Maine?", I asked, curious despite myself about how someone who'd grown up in Hong Kong (Xianggang, the Fragrant Harbor) felt about living in a county in Maine where fully 3/4 of the townships are unincorporated lumber tracts - there's nothing like asking someone what town they live in and having them say "GT-987-F". They get a little touchy if you ask them if they skin their own moose (most likely) or if they've been sodomized by aliens (7 out of 10 report that they sometimes feel "tender down there" after walking in the woods... that, and that nagging memory loss) or if you "cahn geht theyah from heyah." He looked thoughtful for a moment. "I miss it a lot", he said, and if I'm not mistaken, he looked a little misty. So I told him I was from Banguh and that I'd gone to high school there. "Good swim team", he said, almost under his breath, "and their Junior Classical League was pretty good."
JUNIOR CLASSICAL LEAGUE!
I audibly gasped. He looked up at me while filling out his request for a travel signature. Both of us knew, in that pregnant moment, each other's filthy secret: we were Latin Club dorks. Oh yes. Toga-wearing, Caesar-quoting, Aeneid-translating, certamen-playing mutants, lucky to have survived the high school experience in a state where being able to blow your own supper's head off makes a man a man. I maneuvered one of my eyes unnaturally in the socket to check the document to see when he was in high school. Class of '98. My class. I threw caution to the wind.
"Uh, so, um, did you go to that one meeting of the JCL (I used the acronym; he knew, oh yes he knew) by the lake? The one where we played certamen in those weird huts?" His pen vibrated in his hand like a tuning fork. "Yeah. And some of your kids wore togas with the purple senatorial stripe."
That was IT. That was us. I was one of the consuls that year and it was *I* who was wearing the special purple-rimmed sentatorial toga that day. And here, standing across the desk from me, a man who grew up on the rim of the Pacific in a city renowned the world over for being one of the most profoundly exciting on the planet, who'd met me in high school on a lake in central Maine while I was wearing a goddamn toga. I had to sit down; clearly, my world was falling in on itself.
He filled out his form and left, looking at me once more over his shoulder as he did so. Et tu, Brutae, mothereffer, et tu, Brutae. I puked in my mouth a little and moved on with my day, humbled by fate. You have to come back for your form, my little Asian friend, and when you do, I'll be waiting. Waiting and watching. And when you do, you'd better believe I'll kick your ass at mythology. What? You don't remember all of the names of the emperors of the Julian dynasty? Sad for you. I'll cut you. Cut you so hard.
I remain, as ever,
Dom
I guess I shouldn't have dropped so much acid in high school. [Hahahahaha! Kidding! Maybe!]
I was flipping through a young man's file today trying to find something weird that he said would be in there when I noticed one of his old school's documents. Apparently, this young man had gone to high school in Pittsfield, Maine, a mere forty miles from my palatial digs on the banks of the mighty Penobscot. "How'd you like it in Maine?", I asked, curious despite myself about how someone who'd grown up in Hong Kong (Xianggang, the Fragrant Harbor) felt about living in a county in Maine where fully 3/4 of the townships are unincorporated lumber tracts - there's nothing like asking someone what town they live in and having them say "GT-987-F". They get a little touchy if you ask them if they skin their own moose (most likely) or if they've been sodomized by aliens (7 out of 10 report that they sometimes feel "tender down there" after walking in the woods... that, and that nagging memory loss) or if you "cahn geht theyah from heyah." He looked thoughtful for a moment. "I miss it a lot", he said, and if I'm not mistaken, he looked a little misty. So I told him I was from Banguh and that I'd gone to high school there. "Good swim team", he said, almost under his breath, "and their Junior Classical League was pretty good."
JUNIOR CLASSICAL LEAGUE!
I audibly gasped. He looked up at me while filling out his request for a travel signature. Both of us knew, in that pregnant moment, each other's filthy secret: we were Latin Club dorks. Oh yes. Toga-wearing, Caesar-quoting, Aeneid-translating, certamen-playing mutants, lucky to have survived the high school experience in a state where being able to blow your own supper's head off makes a man a man. I maneuvered one of my eyes unnaturally in the socket to check the document to see when he was in high school. Class of '98. My class. I threw caution to the wind.
"Uh, so, um, did you go to that one meeting of the JCL (I used the acronym; he knew, oh yes he knew) by the lake? The one where we played certamen in those weird huts?" His pen vibrated in his hand like a tuning fork. "Yeah. And some of your kids wore togas with the purple senatorial stripe."
That was IT. That was us. I was one of the consuls that year and it was *I* who was wearing the special purple-rimmed sentatorial toga that day. And here, standing across the desk from me, a man who grew up on the rim of the Pacific in a city renowned the world over for being one of the most profoundly exciting on the planet, who'd met me in high school on a lake in central Maine while I was wearing a goddamn toga. I had to sit down; clearly, my world was falling in on itself.
He filled out his form and left, looking at me once more over his shoulder as he did so. Et tu, Brutae, mothereffer, et tu, Brutae. I puked in my mouth a little and moved on with my day, humbled by fate. You have to come back for your form, my little Asian friend, and when you do, I'll be waiting. Waiting and watching. And when you do, you'd better believe I'll kick your ass at mythology. What? You don't remember all of the names of the emperors of the Julian dynasty? Sad for you. I'll cut you. Cut you so hard.
I remain, as ever,
Dom
Saturday, June 04, 2005
53 F 4197.
It's finally happened.
This morning I awoke and smoked three rocks of crack to prepare myself for the horror of the BMV, where (supposedly) I was to be getting my title, registration and [gasp!] Indiana plates. I wasn't too optimistic; after all, it's been almost a year that I've been trying to get the Bloomington BMV to get my lien from Chase Manhattan so that they could transfer my title. Since that time, I've been living from one "Temporary Class C Permit" to another so that I wouldn't get raped up the goat-hole if I got pulled over. Ah, gross ineptitude. I remember vividly going to the BMV before they moved out to the willy-wags and waiting two hours to have some woman whose womanly charms would be most aptly summed up as "closely resembling Jabba the Hutt, but with more revealing clothing" and having her tell me that I smelled good. Yeah, I do, but I got the distinct impression that she was thinking more along the lines of "you'd smell better with a whisper of rosemary and some freshly pressed garlic." Anyway, I got to the BMV just behind a man who had three children whose very molecules vibrated; they were shrieking and pulling each other's hair and defecating in their drawers. One of the wee ones came startlingly close to me, but when he looked up, he thought better of pressing his sticky hands on me: in school cafeterias all over Indiana, my picture is emblazoned on the wall with a pithy warning about the "Mall Stomper." After he was told that he couldn't get what he wanted, he flicked his Nascar cap higher on his pointy head and told the BMV worker to eff himself, and that the "state of Indiana could sit on his {male member} and spin." I'm so happy those children have such a fantastic role model.
Anyway, I got the title, the registration and the plates. The price, of course, was two of my smaller toes, which the cheerful BMV hag severed with hedgeclippers. As I walked out to my car, I thought: my GOD. I have license plates for the corn. Nothing says "vague permanancy" like getting your car registered in that state. It was very final and surprisingly liberating. Of course, I couldn't tarry long, what with how I'd have to get the four little stumps on my feet cauterized.
I decided to treat myself by going to Big Lots, which is this strange low-price warehouse for budget goods. While I was entertaining myself in the toy aisle, I looked over at the plush toys, and among the bears and dolphins and horses I saw
A NAKED MOLE-RAT.
Naked mole-rats are rodents found only in Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya, and yes, they are almost entirely naked. Weirder still, they live rather like bees, with only a "queen" bearing young. They roll in their own urine and feces. They are almost completely blind because they never see the light of day.
And there was a naked mole-rat plush toy. Not only was it a naked mole-rat, but it was wearing a baby-tee and khaki shorts and appeared to be in a "ninja attack" pose. I didn't think I could get it to the register quickly enough. I mean, what the hell?
And, best still, we got the house. It's going to be near Greenwood, Indiana, which is a satellite community of Indianapolis. Now, we all know how much I hate Indianapolis (I'd rather allow a five hundred pound woman who'd eaten Indian food squat on my face than go there), but this is a niiiiiiice place. All hardwood floors, fenced-in yard for Zeke, a fancy bathroom, and weird track lighting throughout.
It's been a great day. I'm off to rub ointment on my stumps and change the dressings; in this heat, gangrene sets in ninja-quick.
I remain, as ever,
Dom
This morning I awoke and smoked three rocks of crack to prepare myself for the horror of the BMV, where (supposedly) I was to be getting my title, registration and [gasp!] Indiana plates. I wasn't too optimistic; after all, it's been almost a year that I've been trying to get the Bloomington BMV to get my lien from Chase Manhattan so that they could transfer my title. Since that time, I've been living from one "Temporary Class C Permit" to another so that I wouldn't get raped up the goat-hole if I got pulled over. Ah, gross ineptitude. I remember vividly going to the BMV before they moved out to the willy-wags and waiting two hours to have some woman whose womanly charms would be most aptly summed up as "closely resembling Jabba the Hutt, but with more revealing clothing" and having her tell me that I smelled good. Yeah, I do, but I got the distinct impression that she was thinking more along the lines of "you'd smell better with a whisper of rosemary and some freshly pressed garlic." Anyway, I got to the BMV just behind a man who had three children whose very molecules vibrated; they were shrieking and pulling each other's hair and defecating in their drawers. One of the wee ones came startlingly close to me, but when he looked up, he thought better of pressing his sticky hands on me: in school cafeterias all over Indiana, my picture is emblazoned on the wall with a pithy warning about the "Mall Stomper." After he was told that he couldn't get what he wanted, he flicked his Nascar cap higher on his pointy head and told the BMV worker to eff himself, and that the "state of Indiana could sit on his {male member} and spin." I'm so happy those children have such a fantastic role model.
Anyway, I got the title, the registration and the plates. The price, of course, was two of my smaller toes, which the cheerful BMV hag severed with hedgeclippers. As I walked out to my car, I thought: my GOD. I have license plates for the corn. Nothing says "vague permanancy" like getting your car registered in that state. It was very final and surprisingly liberating. Of course, I couldn't tarry long, what with how I'd have to get the four little stumps on my feet cauterized.
I decided to treat myself by going to Big Lots, which is this strange low-price warehouse for budget goods. While I was entertaining myself in the toy aisle, I looked over at the plush toys, and among the bears and dolphins and horses I saw
A NAKED MOLE-RAT.
Naked mole-rats are rodents found only in Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya, and yes, they are almost entirely naked. Weirder still, they live rather like bees, with only a "queen" bearing young. They roll in their own urine and feces. They are almost completely blind because they never see the light of day.
And there was a naked mole-rat plush toy. Not only was it a naked mole-rat, but it was wearing a baby-tee and khaki shorts and appeared to be in a "ninja attack" pose. I didn't think I could get it to the register quickly enough. I mean, what the hell?
And, best still, we got the house. It's going to be near Greenwood, Indiana, which is a satellite community of Indianapolis. Now, we all know how much I hate Indianapolis (I'd rather allow a five hundred pound woman who'd eaten Indian food squat on my face than go there), but this is a niiiiiiice place. All hardwood floors, fenced-in yard for Zeke, a fancy bathroom, and weird track lighting throughout.
It's been a great day. I'm off to rub ointment on my stumps and change the dressings; in this heat, gangrene sets in ninja-quick.
I remain, as ever,
Dom
Thursday, June 02, 2005
The bloated bustard of incessant bulemia.
Bustard.
It's been a while, my precious readers, and for good reason: as you may have read in my previous 'blog, my roommate and former friend Tony moved out last weekend, leaving me with a toilet that hasn't seen cleaning since August of last year and the shadowy spectre of debt beyond my means. I will tell you one thing: cleaning that much blood out of your car trunk's upholstry isn't just difficult, it's effing impossible. Also: Home Depot wonders why you are buying three bags of quicklime if you do it at eight in the morning. With rope. And a saw.
I'd written that last 'blog as catharsis, but the response I got overwhelmed me with raw humanity and restored some of my faith in people's ability to do good things. That, and quite a few of you came out with me the night when I slashed his tires and shat on his doorhandles. Nothing says "friendship" like dressing like a ninja for me at three AM and taking a screwdriver to someone's car. I cherish you all.
The worst seems to be over. I managed to work things out with the rental office--well, as much as they can legally allow. I've been "visiting" the neighborhood Dumpsters (not IN the Dumpsters...that's irresponsibly disgusting) and I've found some lovely furniture; my living room doesn't quite have the "fleeing my homeland before a paramilitary death squad" feel anymore. A visit to the Dollar Store got me forks and a bowl and a plate or two. And some of my relatives who believed that my time in the corn was going to end sent donations to the cause, which I will squirrel away in an untouchable savings account.
At night: the silence. Oh, at first I was unnerved; for the past nine months I'd fallen asleep with the buzz of a television from the adjacent living room, or the washing machine, or Tony talking to one of his sorostitutes, several of whom he was porking on a regular basis. Now, the only noise I hear is the noise I make, and I can only moan like a skinless leper just so much before the neighbors call management.
It's actually, in a strange way, a relief. Tony and I had grown apart so much that we didn't even share anything anymore, either in our lives or in our home. The refrigerator had become Ground Zero for a herculean battle of will: no, you will NOT put your shit on my side. No, I don't care if you DO buy more food than me. In the end, my food was death-marched into the back corner near the box of baking soda and my frozen goods were exiled to the door of the freezer, where they rapidly became frostburned and inedible. And the living room - oh, the living room. Since all of the things in there belonged to him, it was made abundantly apparent that I wasn't really welcome to use any of it. Tony's drunken buddies spent more time on his couch than I did. And, while he never said any of this out loud, the feelings of children are transparent.
Now it's all mine again. I can do what I want when I want to. I can eat cake and watch Six Feet Under at three AM in MY living room should I choose. This week I've been finding myself hastening to come home so I can be in my own space, my three-month sanctuary. Come August and the better, happier life I've been dreaming of for seven months, this will all seem miragelike. I can't say I'll miss it. I can't say I will feel even a tinge of remorse. I just feel older, wiser, and a little less vulnerable.
This afternoon I came home to a box waiting for me in my mailbox. Inside: a brand-new, beautiful wok. There was no return address on the box, and I was utterly confounded as to who would have done something so unexpected and so timely. On the packing slip was written: "Now you have a pot to piss in. :)" It was from one of my former roommates and friend Shannon and her husband Rick and their daughter. Long ago (so it seems) a fresh-from-Turkey Domonic was a groomsman at their wedding, but it's been more than an year since I'd seen them. As I put it together, my mush-center nearly fell in on itself and I found my sight getting a little blurry. Yes, a wok made me mist up a little bit, and I am man enough to admit it. Of course, it wasn't the wok itself, but the idea that someone out there had my back when I couldn't watch it myself.
So, thanks for the calls. And the emails. The support... well, I can't repay it, so I guess in the Jewish sense of things that they are all mitzvahs - good deeds done for their own sake. One day, when you call upon me, I will come, and you'd better believe I will be bringing my shuriken.
I remain, as ever,
Domonic the humbled
It's been a while, my precious readers, and for good reason: as you may have read in my previous 'blog, my roommate and former friend Tony moved out last weekend, leaving me with a toilet that hasn't seen cleaning since August of last year and the shadowy spectre of debt beyond my means. I will tell you one thing: cleaning that much blood out of your car trunk's upholstry isn't just difficult, it's effing impossible. Also: Home Depot wonders why you are buying three bags of quicklime if you do it at eight in the morning. With rope. And a saw.
I'd written that last 'blog as catharsis, but the response I got overwhelmed me with raw humanity and restored some of my faith in people's ability to do good things. That, and quite a few of you came out with me the night when I slashed his tires and shat on his doorhandles. Nothing says "friendship" like dressing like a ninja for me at three AM and taking a screwdriver to someone's car. I cherish you all.
The worst seems to be over. I managed to work things out with the rental office--well, as much as they can legally allow. I've been "visiting" the neighborhood Dumpsters (not IN the Dumpsters...that's irresponsibly disgusting) and I've found some lovely furniture; my living room doesn't quite have the "fleeing my homeland before a paramilitary death squad" feel anymore. A visit to the Dollar Store got me forks and a bowl and a plate or two. And some of my relatives who believed that my time in the corn was going to end sent donations to the cause, which I will squirrel away in an untouchable savings account.
At night: the silence. Oh, at first I was unnerved; for the past nine months I'd fallen asleep with the buzz of a television from the adjacent living room, or the washing machine, or Tony talking to one of his sorostitutes, several of whom he was porking on a regular basis. Now, the only noise I hear is the noise I make, and I can only moan like a skinless leper just so much before the neighbors call management.
It's actually, in a strange way, a relief. Tony and I had grown apart so much that we didn't even share anything anymore, either in our lives or in our home. The refrigerator had become Ground Zero for a herculean battle of will: no, you will NOT put your shit on my side. No, I don't care if you DO buy more food than me. In the end, my food was death-marched into the back corner near the box of baking soda and my frozen goods were exiled to the door of the freezer, where they rapidly became frostburned and inedible. And the living room - oh, the living room. Since all of the things in there belonged to him, it was made abundantly apparent that I wasn't really welcome to use any of it. Tony's drunken buddies spent more time on his couch than I did. And, while he never said any of this out loud, the feelings of children are transparent.
Now it's all mine again. I can do what I want when I want to. I can eat cake and watch Six Feet Under at three AM in MY living room should I choose. This week I've been finding myself hastening to come home so I can be in my own space, my three-month sanctuary. Come August and the better, happier life I've been dreaming of for seven months, this will all seem miragelike. I can't say I'll miss it. I can't say I will feel even a tinge of remorse. I just feel older, wiser, and a little less vulnerable.
This afternoon I came home to a box waiting for me in my mailbox. Inside: a brand-new, beautiful wok. There was no return address on the box, and I was utterly confounded as to who would have done something so unexpected and so timely. On the packing slip was written: "Now you have a pot to piss in. :)" It was from one of my former roommates and friend Shannon and her husband Rick and their daughter. Long ago (so it seems) a fresh-from-Turkey Domonic was a groomsman at their wedding, but it's been more than an year since I'd seen them. As I put it together, my mush-center nearly fell in on itself and I found my sight getting a little blurry. Yes, a wok made me mist up a little bit, and I am man enough to admit it. Of course, it wasn't the wok itself, but the idea that someone out there had my back when I couldn't watch it myself.
So, thanks for the calls. And the emails. The support... well, I can't repay it, so I guess in the Jewish sense of things that they are all mitzvahs - good deeds done for their own sake. One day, when you call upon me, I will come, and you'd better believe I will be bringing my shuriken.
I remain, as ever,
Domonic the humbled
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