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