Chugger.

American Heritage Dictionary, new word for 2005: CHarity mUGGER = chugger. Forceful mendicant/street person/hobo who demands money rather than begs for it. Endemic to Kirkwood Avenue in Bloomington. Of course, when I flash my machete, they back away - but many who do not possess the steel cannot defend themselves. Shampoo works in a pinch, as they will recoil from the cleanliness it represents; it's hobo holy-water.

Oh, my beloved,

To say that it’s been an excruciatingly special past few weeks would be like saying scabs are like coppery-tasting chewy human jerky; it goes without saying aloud.

Gone is the Bloomington boy-lair. International Orientation Week lies quietly mouldering in a shallow and hastily-dug grave under two sacks of quicklime. The doctor said that those raised reddish marks on my torso were not smallpox, as I had suspected, but instead were merely scabies; the kerosene baths are exquisitely bracing. And, all across Indiana, the cicadas that missed out on the Great Midwestern Blight 2004 have burrowed out of their 17-year earthen lairs, pupated, mated, and now die by the thousands; were it not for Zeke, the Hoover Whippet, who feels that they are Arthropod McNuggets and devours them as if there will be no tomorrow, our yard would be carpeted in their greenish-black carcasses. Hey: it saves us money on dog-chow, and the price he pays when he extrudes them later will be a lesson for him. Well, uh, supposing he has long-term memory, which is debatable at this point. You’d think that the sensation of pushing pointed bug carapaces out of a dime-shaped hole would be right up there with things he would remember, though.

So, what have I been up to? Well, sit back, fire up that fat rock of crack you’ve been hiding from your spouse/children/pets/maid and open up one of those 40 oz. plastic bottles of Milwaukee’s Best and suck off the rancid foam and I will tell you a story.

The Move; or, Things I Will Hire People to Do For Me in the Future.

Anyone out there who says that they like moving has had several key lobes of their brains removed by undead, mange-ridden weasels. Moving in Indiana in the summer is like going on a death march through Equatorial Africa but with more parasitic insects. Your only hope is to move at night, naked, after having consumed a can of Raid so that it weeps out of your pores. Of course, after drinking the Raid, you can see through walls anyway; zap the annoying pestilential creatures with your newly-discovered power to generate electricity from your eyes! The whole “peeing orange dust” thing kinda blows, though.

Anyway, my lease ran out on the 15th, which was [conveniently!] a Monday; therefore, Keith and I decided that it would be best to move me up on the weekend previous to it. With half of my apartment “Bosnia-after-the-cleansing” empty, it wasn’t too hard to pack. Well, except for the thirteen tons of books. And, um, the 90+ masks, many of which were made of plaster, terracotta, or even better still, papier-mâché. Nepalese papier-mâché. Or, the 1300 CDs. Ooh ooh ooh, or the seven thousand framed pictures? When I set out to start packing, I had high hopes that a couple of carloads would bring my earthly goods safely to the Boy-Cave in Greenwood; four hours later and three slammed Guinnesses later, I was ruing my decision to not call for a UHaul, but by then the Dublin-brewed goodness was taking the edge off.

When I got to work the next day and settled down in my office (my office! Holy Jesus on a stick, my office!), I opened up the Republic’s Yeller-Pages and began calling moving truck rental companies indiscriminately. Most ended up like this:

Rental Truck Place Dude: Hello, this is [insert Rental Truck Place name here]. Can I help ye?
Me: Yeah, uh, do you have any trucks available for the 13th?
RTPD: *sound of RTP Dude’s medulla oblongata atomizing as he laughs much as when Belgian king Leopold II enslaved most of Equatorial Africa*
Me: I will take that as a no.
RTPD: Bitch! Did you have a brain tumor for breakfast? This is the busiest weekend for moving in a LARGE COLLEGE TOWN. I’ve have bookings for this weekend since last year. If you want a truck, you’d better start peddling your sweet mouth down by the river and try to buy one yourself.

*click, then dialtone*

I drank a bottle of Maalox and dreamed of a world where I could hire several dozen functionally retarded but nimble packing people who would whisk my belongings to Greenwood and would only require candy necklaces as payment. Instead of trucks, they would drive steady chariots drawn by unicorns. They would speak only in song lyrics, and they would not give live birth but would instead suckle their young in teat-filled pouches.

Oh, sorry. Raid flashback.

The last place I called was UHaul, which I figured was a lost cause. As I listened for that last nail being hammered into the coffin of my own gross ineptitude, I managed to get through to a twentysomething guy named “Toby”, who was “helpful” and “polite.”

“Toby”: {belllllllllch} UHaul Store Place, this is “Toby.”
Me: Uh, OK. I was wondering: might you have a UHaul truck available for this Saturday?
“Toby”: I’m sorry, can you repeat that? This hot chick just walked by and she had really nice boobs. The pointy-up kind. You know what I mean? Huh? *laughs and snorts like Steve Urquel*
Me: {swallowing mouthful of pureed stomach contents} I see. Well, good luck with that. Wear a rubber.
“Toby”: Totally! Last year, this chick and I were doing it in the back of her car and….
Me: “TOBY”! C’mon back to me, boy. Me. Need. Truck.
“Toby”: Oh yeah. So, I have one.
Me: Are you shitting in my mouth? You have one?
“Toby”: Yep. Let me take your infor…
Me: “Toby?” Is she walking by again? “Toby”? “TOBY”?

Eventually, “Toby” took my credit card info and I reserved a truck. That night, it took only half of a hookah filled with the finest Afghani hash for me to fall asleep.

Saturday morning found me standing at the counter of the UHaul and My-T-Fine Bait Emporium at the bracing hour of 8 AM watching the ineptitude unfold like the wings of a syphilitic bat around me. The two rabid chimps manning the counter hadn’t ever seen a computer and stabbed at the screen and the mouse, shrieking like they were being gang-raped. In the time it took them to process one transaction (the room was packed with people picking up for 8 AM, and each was mere moments from fashioning a Molotov cocktail out of hairspray and toilet paper), I managed to think of a clean-burning alternative to fossil fuels, thus ending our dependence on Middle Eastern imports and sparing us the horror of impending world war. However, when they finally hooted my name from across their restraining barriers, I decided that I would instead enjoy watching the pageantry of dog-eat-dog Armageddon in my haste to get the ordeal over with. When I got to the counter, it took one of the slavering human-knockoffs nearly fifteen minutes to type my name into the computer. His rheumy eyes a-glistening, he handed me the keys to my shiny new vehicle.

“Yer van’s parked out in t’back.”

A double-take at my receipt confirmed it. A van. A…mothertouching…van. When “Toby” took my order that night, I’d asked for a “truck.” “Truck” and “van” do not share even a single letter. And, since three people waiting in the room with me had gotten dilled over and weren’t even getting that, I decided that I would instead use the van, however useless it would be, and find “Toby” later and extinguish a white-hot scimitar in his roiling entrails.

The van was very much smaller than I had been anticipating. I’d hoped to get everything up to the Cave in one fell-swoop; instead, I had a van that had less space than my colon. So, I loaded a teabag and a sock onto the truck and made my way up to the Cave in heat that would peel the paint off religious lawn statuary. We unloaded and brought the truck back, where a young woman with peeling-like-a-serpent skin jumped up-and-down at the sight of it. You see, she was moving a tampon and a box of Easy Mac, and she needed some help with that.

So, like a trooper, Keith packed his car with my junk, and I did the same with Orhan, the Ravish-Me-Like-You’ve-Been-In-Prison Ford Focus. The forty minute drive to the Cave.
Then, the forty minute drive back down to the Republic. Then, another load up. I liken the experience to one of those death marches Pinochet ordered during the Chilean Dirty War, but without having to dig our own shallow graves. When it was all done, I fell onto my bed, my muscles twitching and burning, my empty bladder filling with my own red blood, my fingers torn off by razor-edged boxes and treacherous trappings. How glorious it would have been to sleep for several days, medicating when necessary, a delicious twilight existence. But no; come Monday, the office would need my warm body, and need it bad. International Orientation was upon us.

*crack of thunder*

For those of you who don’t, or have never, worked in the Office of International Services or one like it, you have no real idea about the abject horror that is Orientation Week. For weeks leading up to it, frantic internationals from all over the globe (“I am calling you from the only phone on my atoll”), frantic emails (“I needing the urgent assistance NOW so soon! You read this NOW! I come Bloomington and kill you! So soon! Also NOW!”) and desperate departments on the horn trying to get their precious angels here on time and in one piece made the chill, sweetness of the grave seem tempting – and I am a newbie and not subjected to HALF the horror that my colleagues got a whiff of. I spent most of the week before-last deferring people’s SEVIS records so that they wouldn’t have problems at American airports. The first part of deferring – actually going into the system and doing it- was child’s play. Then, I had to fax the crap to the person, who, as I did it, was staring at the fax machine in whatever moldy corner of hell they were in and willing it to eject my missal. I know this because they did not attempt to hide the fact that this deferral paperwork was THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT THING EVER, IN THE HISTORY OF HUMANITY. Many times I would get off the phone with a student, and in the five minutes between when I printed off the I-20 and walked to the fax machine, they had called again. Yes. Called again. Now, I don’t imagine a call from Calcutta or Seoul or Chongqing would be cheap.

“Good sir, would you please be faxing the necessary? Kindly do so as soon as you could.”

I could feel the vein in my temple bulge ever-so-slightly as my blood-pressure quietly doubled. In the time it took for me to talk to the wanker, I would have been able to fax it three times over. But THIS IS THE NECESSARY! Never mind that s/he would be leaving home in a week! Oh! What’re those? Those tiny balls orbiting around you? Oh, right! That’s the cosmos! Moving around you! Your own personal gravity pull!

*swilling from flask*

Monday came with me standing in the shower for a half-hour, willing my body to lather, rinse and repeat. As I drove in a twilight state to the Republic, upon which had alighted nearly 750 internationals in that past 72 hours. That’s right: seven-hundred-fifty. We’d gotten a whiff of what it was going to be like during Early Check-In the Friday before, but we weren’t prepared for the ensuing melee. Internationals were lined up all the way around the building’s innards, and nary a one of them followed directions. By “directions”, I mean “something simple, like holding on to your photocopied documents and having your passport and original travel document out.” No, for that would be too easy! Instead, each one of them had stowed these documents in a personal safe which was locked to their groins and secured with an industrial epoxy. They would come up to my “station” and look at me like I was picking nits out of my own hair. “What do you need from me?”, they would all ask.

Now, with a name like DOCUMENT CHECK, this is apparently a loaded question.

Once I had carefully explained that I was going to be checking their documentation to make sure everything was OK and the Customs and Border Protection had done their jobs correctly (you’d be surprised), I was again greeted with a blank stare. However, once I pressed the little button on my switchblade, they got the hint and they began throwing anything that came to hand at me. Hey; I made $673 that day, and that’s pretty snazzy for a grad student. Most expressed how exhausted they were and how hot they were from standing outside. I told them all the fun story of how they should shet the feck up and let me do my job; whine goes with cheese and not with Document Check. In between all of this, I flitted back to the office to take care of “special” cases. Like, oh, the people who waited until the day before they wanted to go to a new school to let us know that. I felt a strong desire to save them, despite the fact that I’d managed to sweat my way through several layers of clothing and sat in my darkened office, moistly bemoaning our collective fates. As I penetrated the sinister world of SEVIS, I could hear Hannibal Lecter crooning softly:

Hannibal: You still wake up sometimes, don't you? You wake up in the dark and hear the screaming of the internationals.
Me: Yes.
Hannibal: And you think if you save poor * Korean name*, you could make them stop, don't you? You think if *Korean name* gets transferred, you won't wake up in the dark ever again to that awful screaming of the internationals.


Sigh.

Six Feet Under is over. I watched the series finale like I was watching a beloved pet die. I’ve never really been a TV junkie, but this show has seen me though so many difficult times. Just when I thought my life had static, I had but to watch the Fishers ruin their lives on TV to feel better. I will miss it terribly. GOD! I am misting up like a sorostitute who’s been ditched at the big Sig Kap kegger XXX-travaganza by her frat-a-skank shag-poppet. Apparently I need shock therapy.

In the wake of moving and settling in, I will be bringing a new little friend into my life. Oh yes, my beloved, I am getting a kitten. A coworker in the building was “blessed” with a gravid alleycat, and now that the wee ones have been extruded, I get to have a tiny new friend to keep Zeke company in The Cave.

His name will be Balthazar Anatole Romulus Potorti.

Ok, shut your sister-raping cakeholes. He’s not your cat. I am sure you would name him “Whiskers” or “Cuddles” or something retarded like that. Balthazar was one of the magi! You can’t beat the Wise Men for sheer kick-ass names. I will keep you posted as to when he arrives and will, no doubt, post adorable pictures of him doing precious things like defecating or destroying Japanese urban areas.

And... the ‘blog. There will be ‘blogs now, my devoted. My computer is up and running at The Cave, and with it, the unfettered mental filth will spill forth into your lives. Be warned.

I remain, as ever,

Domonic

Hare Krishna, Hare Rama.

One of the most unpleasant things about the post-September 11th world (other than, you know, the “waiting to die at any time” thing and monitoring the fancy color-coded alerts) is that you have a lot less fun at airports. If we were not even to mention the whole “Dom gets molested like a mail-order Siberian bride bound in the trunk of a Buick LeSabre every time her steps into an airport, sometimes even by the luggage handlers” aspect of me *personally* going there, the atmosphere has changed from one of delicious anticipation to one where you wonder as you eat a rubbery, $17 cheeseburger at Ye Olde Salmonella Restaurante and Speakeasy if you are going to be vaporized several miles above the earth only to be interred in a container no larger than a standard Good n’ Plenty box. More importantly, umm, there are no more Hare Krishnas.

For those of you who have never had the pleasure, you’ll be sitting down trying to not fantasize about snuffing a two-year-old who is shrieking like s/he is being impaled with hatpins while watching the neverending loop of CNN-Airport Edition, bathed in the stench of “cheezy” airport concessions and faux designer perfumes that the wig-toting hag who, no doubt, will be sitting next to you on the plane, has been embalmed with, when a shave-headed youth wearing bells on his/her ankles and clad in sackcloth approaches you and places a “gift” on your lap. It’s usually a keychain or a woven artifact of some kind, and if you are lucky it contains none of the nits borne by the crofter. Accompanying the craft is a note, usually written in a childlike scrawl. They say things like:

“This is a gift for you. Should you accept this gift, we ask that you kindly make a donation to the Krishna Consciousness Society. Umm, like, $5. Hare Rama! Hare Krishna!”

So, it isn’t really a “gift” in the strictest sense of the word. My first impulse was, of course, the impulse I assume any one of you would have had: run into the men’s room and hide in a rank stall with the “gift” until the glassy-eyed freak gives up looking for you, whereupon you will have a new object with which you can amuse yourself whilst awaiting for your thrice-delayed connection flight. However, I decided to slake my insatiable thirst for utterly useless random knowledge and wait to see what’s going to happen.

Now, at this point, the businessmen fussing with their keypad-cellphones have only given their new treats a cursory glance, as they are attending a proxy merger meeting online; gripping their styluses in a tangle of whitening knuckles, they stab the minute LCD screens with rabid vigor. The Middle American housewives are trying desperately to wrench it from their unbathed children, who are grimly trying to ingest it. The elderly put on their reading glasses and gaze at the note as if, by staring at it intently, they will magically understand what the hell the Krishna Consciousness people are all about (“no good” is the consensus). The college coeds are desperately trying to fashion it into something with which you could smoke a pat of weed, and the inner-city youths are declaring that the robed acolytes are “fat-ass whacked-out crackahs.”

Five minutes pass, during which time the devotee stands quietly by as you make that all-important decision: a) run and hide, b) pay $5 for a woven keychain your five-year-old cousin could fashion out of dryer lint, or c) give it back and incur the wrath of a deity with eight arms and whose devotees smear graven images of it with purified butter. Most give it back; the look of disgust you are given could freeze beer. Me? Well, I take the cue from the dirt-baby in the seat next to me. With a little bit of the old H20 from the nearby fountain, that keychain takes a free ride to Colon Town (county seat of Polypopolis) where it’s 98 degrees all year long and where nobody lives for longer than 24 hours.

The terrorists may not have won, but they did make it so that I can no longer watch a hippie rend his robes in anguish as he watches me open my maw to masticate a hand-woven “gift.”

*in another part of the forest*

Now, tell me you don’t know this sensation and I will call you a liar. So! You’re drifting off to sleep, thinking, perhaps, of cheese, when suddenly a jarring thought comes to mind. No, not about the unmitigated horrors that await you at work or something petty in your pitiful, friendless existence as it is now. No, you’ll be just about at the threshold of slumber when you remember things like:

*How you rankly soiled yourself at a school dance because you didn’t want to seem unfashionable by actually attending your uncool natural needs

*How, after launching into a tirade about how simply dreadful someone is and how you’d like to have seen them sodomized by Cape buffalo, they told you that the person in question was their mom – and that she had cancer

*How, after a teacher appropriated a note you’d written, she read it out loud – a note wherein you’d professed to wondering about how human flesh tastes and whether or not the recipient had ever had naughty thoughts about barnyard beasts

*How, while eating at a local Asian restaurant, you were caught by the waiter making strangled mewing noises as you feasted on a “Pu-pu for Two” appetizer delight – and how he brought you some complimentary “egg drop soup” afterward

*How, during your first college kegger, you projectile-vomited three microwaveable Bean n’Cheez burritos onto your friends’ mothers’ heirloom Faberge egg

*That one sultry night in Bangkok

I heartily believe that 99% of suicides are not caused by soul-crushing depression and utter despair; no, as Arthur is flinging himself into the icy river hundreds of feet below, he’s thinking about how, when he was ten, dressed in his mom’s bathing suit, he drank a pint of warm human urine for a nickel on a dare to impress a skirt.

It all catches up to you someday.

************

It’s dusk in my neighborhood. The cicadas are thrumming almost supersonically in the diseased tree in my dooryard; in the distance, the corn sighs after baking in a relentless Indiana late-summer’s day. Two doors down, a singularly fascinating drama is unfolding: about an hour ago, my neighbor came home to realize that not paying rent for the past three months has dire consequences. Having watched the slump-shouldered complex-lackey change the locks with my own eyes, I knew this was inevitable, yet I wasn’t quite prepared for the show. The human part of me that still remains aches with a measure of empathetic pity, but the uncharitable part of me that knows she was probably selling Afghani smack day and night wonders how she wasn’t able to pony up the $450 a month. That, and her tiny white poodle irked me by merely existing; it had an insipid name like Mitzi and yipped uncontrollably every time a sparrow broke wind in Nepal, and I often fantasized about it being taken by the largish birds of prey that lurk menacingly in the nearby “forest.” As it is now, though, the woman – girded in a ghastly purple tubetop and second-rate Jesus-sandals – is standing on her stoop, lowing like a harpooned manatee about how she is “gonna git them” and how “they always had it out for her”, chainsmoking Capri Ultra-Light 100s and talking loudly on her Zach Morris-sized cellphone. It’s only a matter of time before she gets a pizza delivered (with a side of them there Cajun Spice hotwings) and erects a puptent. By the time she starts putting up a loom to “spin herse’f some panties”, I will be out of here to the Greenwood lair.

Ah, Greenwood. Greenwood, Indiana, is a southern suburb for the Big Cob on a Stick herself, Indianapolis. As you may have read in previous ‘blogs, Indianapolis and I have a rather sordid past – one that has not cleaved this, the nation’s ninth largest city, to me. In fact, I seem to recall saying that I would "rather orally pleasure the homeless" than go there. The simple fact of the matter is that, at least for the next year, it’s my brooding, smoggy northern neighbor, and there’s not a whole lot I can do about it. Sure, I could bitch about it until my hands wept crimson lifeblood and my larynx disintegrated, but in the end, when I drive to the end of my road and look north, I can see the skyline etched against the prairie heavens. And maybe, just maybe, I am being unfair. Just because people who’ve psychically gutted me call the Speedway City their home doesn’t mean that I can’t make the most of living so close to a major metropolitan area. To be sure, within three miles of my home, there are three dozen restaurants, innumerable stores and one of Indiana’s biggest malls – not to mention a Rhode Island-sized SuperTarget, and three miles in the other direction, I am in the Indiana I love: the corn. So maybe, just maybe, I will give Indianapolis a shot. After all, everyone, everything, deserves that. But I will tell you one thing: for the next year, I will be packin’ heat.

Long ago, in a Chinese restaurant on the other side of this continent, I got a fortune cookie following an entirely too delightful meal of Hunan chicken and hot and sour soup. I believe that this fortune, more than anything, has determined my destiny. Written in tiny, red bold-face upon the slip:

“Because of your melodic nature, the moonlight never misses an appointment.”

Chew on that, my dear, patient, faithful few. Oh yes, chew.

I remain, as ever,

Dom