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