Bostan korkuluğu.

Boh-STAHN KORK-ool-oo-oo : The scarecrow.

Last Friday night, Keith and I decided to eat out on the town of Green-frikkin'-wood for our sup. This came as no surprise to us considering that our refrigerator currently contains:

1) Six Guinness beers, each wearing either an attractive Coleman glo-in-the-dark "beer 'cuzzi" or an IU-print foamy basketball jersey.

2) Half a jar of coctail sauce.

3) 1/4 of a container of ketchup.

4) Three Pepsi One colas.

5) An embalmed head of fancy lettuce.

6) Half a loaf of bread, formed and baked before the birth of Mohammed.

7) Two packages of low-moisture shredded cheese, in the "parmesean" and "mozzarella" varieties

Hahahahaha, Mom! I'm kidding! (no I'm not! I am slowly starving to death! Help me help me help me! *tear*)

So anyway, we decide that we've tired of all of the places we usually patronize (tired of? or were we forbidden to return? you'll never know, bitches) and that we'd favor making a visit to a place we'd seen in passing, commented on frequently, and thought might be reasonably interesting. It's called

THE ACROPOLIS.

Having been to Greece and having suckled ravenously at Mother Hellas' nourishing teat for four days in 1997, I have to admit that I am suspect of most Greek cooking and Greek restaurants in the US. How could I eat moussaka when I can recall the sensation of eating it homemade in the Plaka district in Athens, my eyes unwaveringly trained to the massive crag of the Acropolis, the Parthenon itself aglow in the gentle caress of an early spring Attic night? Will a gyro filled with meat not broiled on an outdoor spit in a mountain town near Delphi taste OK? And don't even begin to talk about the honey - I'd sell my sister to the Romany for a decent jar of Hymettus bee-puke.

Nonetheless, we decided to give it a shot. I carefully concealed my tattoo under several layers of clothing and we made our way to the establishment. My fervent prayer was this: that this wouldn't be one of those weird Greek restaurants where you smash unfinished terracotta plates and then have to pay $12.95 for each of them, where you'd be forced to slap dollar bills on the sweaty foreheads of drunken Zorba-dancing Greek men with male pattern baldness, sweat donuts and body odor that could stun a bison or a place where you would have to listen to waiters shriek "OOOOOOOOOpaaaaa!" as they unecessarily set food alight with cheap Bic lighters.

Apparently, there is no God.

Our meal started innocuosly enough. A salad and soup and some bread - standard fare. I was pleased, incidentally, with the feta content of the salad - it was chockablock with it, thanks be -but I digress. Anyway, Keith ordered "oregano chicken" and I, being an insufferable Hellenephile, ordered my moussaka with the perfect Greek emphasis on the syllables.

Moose-AK-ah < - *Hissss!* No, not how you say it! Damn you!
Moo-sak-AH < - Yes. Oh yes, that's the way you make Daddy feel the burn. *delicious shiver*

We get our meal and I began to rue my decision - the eggplant was really effing mealy - when suddenly this very loud, very *gasp!* Turkish-sounding "music" began to pulse through the tiny restaurant. We'd noticed that, about five minutes before the "music" began, that two very shady men had sat down at an adjacent table. One was possessed of an earring upon which I could clearly see the paint left by the Titanic as it scraped past. The other stared vacantly ahead like he'd been stunned with a bolt-gun for slaughter. They both were clad in hella-baggy gym-pants, billowing sports jerseys and do-rags hidden underneath slanted, askew baseball caps. I decided, then and there, that I wanted to be them when I grew up.

Since they weren't ordering food or eating and since the waitress was ignoring them (the waitress who, at the time, was setting some sort of weird cheese dip on fire with a cheap Bic lighter whilst trying to muster a hearty "oooooOOO-pa!"), I figured that they were petty mafiosos despite the fact that, by mafia bylaws, neither one would have qualified as "Italian", if you get my drift. It would only, by my reckoning, be mere moments before a heavily armed gentleman with a unibrow burst down the door with size 12 jackboots and mowed the two down in a hail of white-hot lead. I began to hastily cram the grim moussaka down my cakehole; if I survived, I didn't want to have to pick the gore off it, and if I didn't, I wanted to die full.

So, the "music" starts and a young, very scantily clad woman leaps forth from the kitchen, adorned with hundreds of bangly-type objects and jinglers. The two hoods hooted appreciatively and the waif winked at them naughtily as she began to twitch like an electrocuted trout to the pulsing, vaguely Middle Eastern percussion. Slowly, painfully, she skulked throughout the restaurant and I, embarassed despite myself, couldn't take my eyes off her horrid little routine. It was likewhen you are driving down the highway and you see a fawn scampering in the median strip - you know in that nasty, black part of your soul that it's not going to end well. The worst part was that the patrons of the restaurant began cramming dollar bills into her hoochie-skirt - including a five year old boy, who clearly derived some infantile pleasure from touching the nearly naked woman. The partially digested moussaka rose in gorge to the rim of my esophagus. Then, as she gyrated her teenage hips in front of the two hoods, she deftly plucked the cash from her booty and flung it at Mr. Iceberg Ear-bling. I realized then and there her relationship to him: he was her effing pimp. Oh yes.

Three times Miss Thang circumambulated the room and thrice she was rewarded for her efforts with money hastily crammed into her nether regions to just get her the eff out of our way and our dinners, which the patrons suitably disguised as naked admiration for her "mad skillz."
When she was done, the freakish 1970s rembektiki music resumed at a low decibel level and, horrified, we tried to resume our dinner without the image of a barely pubescent teenager shaking her junk near our food. She was gathered by her pimp in a coat and taken outside, no doubt to be choked for trying to hide some of the money so she could afford to get her "teef cleaned."

We left bewildered and with the full knowledge that we'd be spending most of the night hunched, ashen, over the porcelain throne. Mostly, though, I was filled with vague yet persistent nostalgia for the seventeen-year-old me who sat entranced under the facade of the Parthenon, moved to silence by the weight of centuries and the grandeur of a building considered to be one of the most perfect creations of mankind. Plus, that seventeen-year-old me could have drunken a raw sewage martini and would have not even cramped. Damn you, Seventeen-Year-Old Me.

***

Saturday night found me standing very still at the edge of an orchard in jeans, a flannel shirt, a smock, burlap rags and a straw hat waiting for tractor-drawn hayrides to pass me, whereupon I leapt forth and went apeshit on hundreds of children's asses. When the man with the tranquilizer gun took me down, he had to shoot three darts into my abdomen to get me to buckle and lay still.

No, actually I'd been asked by Keith to volunteer with him for Headless Horseman, a Halloweeny event put on by his employer, Conner Prairie. Since many of you wonder who the hell would allow me to volunteer to frighten children, Conner Prairie is a living history museum in Fishers, Indiana. To give you a better idea about what Keith does there, he, and I quote him, "dresses up like he lives in 1836 and lies to little children for a living." This, in stark opposition to my job, wherein I dress like it's 1990 and tell the awful, stark naked truth to the bewildered and international who often weep in despair.

So anyway, there we were, waiting to leap forth and shriek at children - one of whom I FERVENTLY hope soiled him/herself - when we began listening more closely to the bizarre sound effects they'd rigged in the trees across the way in 1886 Liberty Corner. Every twenty seconds or so there was a random shriek - a shriek which sounded astoundingly similar to the cry of a peacock. I had to stifle myself every time I heard it, thinking of course of the Eerie Undead Peacock of Doom and what said fowl would look like.

*Gather 'round, children, an' let me tell y'all about the most cursed bird ever to walk this earth. It all began at on a dark, stormy night at a badly-run petting zoo...*

On the Divine Effing Retribution end of things, I managed to get a nifty earache out of the deal. As my jaw lay, partially paralyzed, I knew I shouldn't have enjoyed myself so much on that divine Headless Horseman hayride evening.

Or, at least not videotaped the damn thing for later improvement techniques.

Until Friday, I remain,

Domonic

Kıl.

You know that person at a nice dinner party who gets needlessly, profoundly wasted and begins to awkwardly masturbate over his/her clothing absently whilst bellowing on and on and on about how enjoyable life as a CPA is?

You know that one person who steps in front of you while you are walking minding your own effing business, blocks your path and asks you for a cigarette when you clearly aren't a smoker -and then is insulted when you can't produce the necessary?

You know that one woman who shoves in front of you in line at the supermarket and presents five hundred coupons and argues with the clerk over the cost of rutabegas and Summer's Eve vinegar and water douches while beating her seven dirtbabies?

You know that one guy you meet at a formal party who asks if your suitcoat is secondhand (because, of course, it's ill-fitting) as he sips a highball and thinks about how he balls the host's wife in her own kitchen every Tuesday?

You know that one old lady you sit next to on every flight who introduces herself, tells you about the grandchild she's visiting and then asks you if you've accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as your Personal Savior while eating a Hostess cake with a fork?

You know that one fratboy who goes to the Chinese restaurant only to order "flied lice" and mock the waitress' English skills and stick chopsticks under his upper lip to pretend he's a walrus?

You know that one special person in your life who, if you saw him/her in the Wal*Mart, you'd try to hide in the shampoo aisle while trying desperately to not exude the stench of fear of being seen?

Well, in Turkish, there's a word for that. Kıl. Kıl means, literally, "hair." The undercurrent of the meaning, though, is felt in your gut rather than in your noodle. You know when you're eating at a restaurant and you're just about to bite into something and you see a large, black hair? Or when you're about to sip that lovely martini and you find a nasty eyelash floating on the meniscus? Or, when you go to a hotel and lift the bedspread and find that single, curly black hair next to your pillow? The accompanying lurch in your belly - that's where kıl lives. Something foul. Something loathsome that makes you physically ill.


Like this effing day.


Until Monday, I remain,

Dom

Commuting; or, why I have fashioned a necklace out of Valium which I lick periodically.

One of the unanticipated benefits of my daily commute is that I have eighty minutes a day to mull aspects of my life and my days in the corn over in my diseased mind and separate the chaff from the grain, in a manner of speaking. It's an eerily liberating experience, but often I find myself drawn into the unfolding drama that is my commute on Indiana 37 rather than entering a Zenlike state of freakish cosmic understanding. It's not hard to get distracted. One morning, I tailed a car for more than thirty miles because I'd convinced myself that the "salt of the earth" - read 'redneck mofo par excellence' here - driver of an enormous Ford F-350 was delicately applying makeup in his rearview mirror. To say I was entranced would be a grave understatement. I had to know: was he an 'autumn'? How much rouge can one apply while trying to balance a Camel on one's lips and drink a Mountain Dew, and does the beard-stubble interfere with proper brush stroking? Would he use a lip color that was self-sealing, or would he have to use a glossy sealant? Does he tweeze? What kind of eyeliner does one use for eyes of the "basset hound" variety? The show went on for nearly a half hour before I realized the truth: he was picking dead skin off his peeling face in horrid sheets using a pencil eraser as grip. I was, perhaps, more disappointed at that moment than I have ever been in the entirety of my life.

Well, save for when I bought that weird juice that claimed that I’d be able to grow ram’s horns in a month from a wandering mendicant. Man, I knew that crap tasted like storm-drain water – the dead leaves should have been a giveaway. If I find that ‘ho again, I’ll have to make certain to cut her from navel to neck. Shit, did I write that?

Last night’s schlep up I-37 found me and several other drivers – a man in a Chevy Lumina with a bumper sticker that read “God is Coming and Boy, Is She Pissed”, a woman in a Plymouth Sundance who clearly *ahem* enjoys Lilith Fair, and an elderly farmer with a German shepherd buckled in the front seat of his fire-engine red pickup – trying desperately to incense the driver of a Marsh Grocery 18-wheeler. So! This Marsh truck comes barreling up behind us – we, who were politely not tearing up the road and safely obeying reasonable speeds – at nearly ninety miles an hour. I’m in the right lane and the farmer and the Lilith Fair devotee were behind me, and the Lumina was pacing me in the left lane, and the truck tears right up to the Lumina’s bumper. I felt sure that I was about to witness the fire-drenched extinction of a fellow human. The Lumina couldn’t speed up fast enough and couldn’t change lanes because I, piloting Orhan, couldn’t slow down because I had the pickup and the lesbian behind me. The driver of the truck then begins to flail about in the cabin like he’d just smoked a bowl of the finest street-grade rock and screaming out the window for the Lumina to move out of his way.

Now, the sensible thing to do for me would have been to speed up precipitously for a moment to allow the Lumina to take my place. The driver of the Lumina looked at me through his window – he, a twentysomething like myself – lit a smoke and gave me the thumbs up. At that moment I knew

It Was On.

So, instead of doing the sane thing by letting this fine piece of Grade-A nutsack pass us, we slowed to 65 and formed an impenetrable barrier to his progress and, as I believe it is called, rode block on his crackah ass. It felt a little like playing “chicken” on the railroad tracks, a cheap way we used to toy with death as children (Haha, Mom! I never did that! Just kidding! *ahem*).

As the miles tattered past us, Truck Driver Dude’s eyes began to bug out of his skull and he started to weave erratically while flashing his high beams. On the side of his cargo vessel was a lovely bit of information which I, while trying not to shit in my pants, gleaned with my one bit of peripheral vision.

How am I driving? the sign asked. If you have concerns, please call X-XXX-XXX-XXXX. My Goal is Safety!

Since I didn’t feel that plummeting through space at ninety miles an hour whilst trying to push small, affordable, sensible vehicles containing twentysomething males into ditches filled with rancid runoff water was exactly “safe”, I called the number. A young woman somewhere in, like, frikkin’ North Dakota answered. She asked for his truck number and what his unsafe activities were, and I told her. I, of course, neglected to mention that we were intentionally egging him on because it made us giggle, but the rest is the Unadulterated Truth. She sighed pointedly. Apparently, unless the driver is raping a kidnapped underage hitchhiker with a bowling pin soaked in rubbing alcohol whilst “choking his bishop” and trying to drive at the same time, the Friendly Associate couldn’t give two shits.

I hung up and gave Mr. Twentysomething in the Lumina the “give it up” hand signal and we let the trucker thunder past at 120 MPH – which he did while laying on his horn the whole time he was passing us.

The sound of that horn was inspirational. If I can bring that much rage into someone’s life, I know I’ve done something worthwhile and that I’ve made a mark on the world.

Of course, part of that “mark” was a brownish smear left in my britches, but that’s what Jesus invented bleach for.


Until Friday, I remain,

Domonic

'o Aghios Polycarp; or, so maybe your life doesn't suck as hard as you think.

Shortly before he left our office to move to Kansas (Motto: Crack an Oz joke and I’ll impale you with a tire iron), my coworker Charlie gave me a very special gift:

A badger’s severed head preserved in Greek Hymettus honey.

Hahahaha! I wish. No, what Charlie gave me was a set of houseplants which I, of course, proceeded to name. Botanists agree that houseplants have a longer life expectancy if you converse with them, and I would find it unspeakable if I couldn’t address my xylem-possessed friends by their names. After careful consideration, I named all of my houseplants after Christian martyrs. If by “careful” I mean “nearly instantaneous”, then yes.

I can see it now: A bunch of martyrs are getting together in The Beyond for a game of gin rummy and a few cold ones – hey, why not? – and they collectively groan. “Shit, bitch”, Bartholomew whines. “Here I am, holding my flayed skin on my lap and, other than Eternal Reward, what the eff do I get? A plant in some asshole’s kitchen gets named after me. Pass another bottle of suds; I’m not DD tonight and I’ll be damned if I leave sober.”

The best name, though, was reserved for the weird palm-tree-looking plant in my living room. A favorite of Balthazar’s, the plant has endured endless “attention” as of late, which makes his name all the more appropriate. His name is Polycarp.

No, asses, that doesn’t mean “many carp.” *extends middle finger slowly*

Polycarp was a first century martyr who lived in what is now Turkey. Many of Saint Paul’s letters to Asian communities (Ephesus, Smyrna, Galatia) actually were addressed to Polycarp. Anyway, as always happens in these stories, he pisses off the Romans who decide he’s to be put to death. So, they gather a bunch of wood and chain him to a stake and prepare to barbecue him, but just as the executioner approaches with the torch, a mighty wind howls forth from the heavens and snuffs it. Undaunted, he tries again, but this time the sky opens and begins to weep sweet rain on the pyre. Getting more agitated, the executioner waits for the squall to disperse and then lights it again. This time, the fire catches, but Polycarp remains unscathed amidst the flames, praying intensely. The executioner (who “isn’t getting paid enough for this shit, thankyouverymuch”) then runs Polycarp through with a spear. A massive jet of inky-black water pours forth from the wound and extinguishes the fire and then miraculously seals itself. By this time, the amassed Romans weren’t even eating their popcorn anymore; this just wasn’t funny. So, in the ensuing hush they haul him off the pyre and hack his head off.

The lesson of Polycarp’s martyrdom is apparent, yet I am not entirely sure that it’s a positive message. Is it “God will save you only so many times before He gets bored”? Or is it “Tick anyone you can off until someone beheads you”?

Myself? Well, I’m holding out hope that, one day, I too can hose someone down with a jet of liquidy blackness.



Until Wednesday, I remain,

Domonic

A man's heart is a deep ocean of secrets.

Yeah. Well, if by “a deep ocean” you mean “nearly evaporated mist on the brow of a Thai whore in July” and by “secrets” I mean “porn recollection”, then, yeah.

An article on CNN.com this morning made my husk tap a staccato-beat in the hollow chamber that is my chest. Apparently, a woman attacked one of her closest friends – the attacked party, why not, being eight + months pregnant – AND ATTEMPTED TO SLASH THE BABY OUT OF THE WOMAN’S WOMB SO SHE COULD CLAIM IT AS HER OWN.

This brings to mind a few key questions about, well, things.

1) Who, among all of this woman’s friends and family, would be retarded enough to believe that she had… well, done what? Effing FOUND a baby? “Why yes, I found this squalling mass of humanity – covered in human effluent and still possessed of an umbilical cord – behind my sofa while I was vacuuming! It was the damnedest thing! I was like, uh, stale Cheeto, toenail clipping, Coors Lite can, gore-covered infant! Praise be! It’s the answer to all of my prayers!” Worse still, did she think that she’d be able to use the “I didn’t show much and one day a baby fell out of my uterus” excuse? Because shit, bitch – that’s tired.

2) Do *I* have a friend who, as we speak, is thinking about removing, say, my gonads, because he is bereft of said organs? Will he use anesthetic? ‘Cause he can have them. *Note to readers: Yes, you can have them. Don’t kill me for them.*

3) What does one use to defend oneself from a friend who tries to bludgeon you to death to steal the unborn child lying within you? Is it “OK” to kick her in the ta-tas? Can you bite? You’d better believe that I’d be tasting her coppery lifeblood, letmetellyou.

Just a pleasant few thoughts for your Friday afternoon.

Until Monday, I remain,

Domonic

"Coke? That's a whore's breakfast"; or, the 'blog that was never meant to be.

Dusk falls softly over Greenwood, Indiana. The stray bullets falling from Indianapolis tinkle merrily on our fair, broad streets as soccer moms angrily eye their husbands over a hastily warmed meal of Spaghetti in’a da Tube. Little Jimmy Jr. consumes his one and only mouthful of sustenance before bolting to the den (which smells vaguely of feet) and his awaiting X-Box, and his father, weary from his harrowing desk job under taxing fluorescent lighting, lights a smoke on the back porch (wishing it was a little bit of weed) and pops the top off a lite beer. Mommy, of course, has already cleared the dishes and has retired to the living room, where she proceeds to polish off a wine cooler with surprising gusto as she leafs through the latest Martha Stewart Living. She looks mournfully at the velvet painting of dogs playing poker that graces her living room wall and pulls a little harder at the wine cooler. Later, she’ll lock herself in her bathroom, draw a scalding bath and turn on some Sheryl Crow and sing off-key whilst allowing Calgon to take her away.

Or, maybe that’s just my neighbors. {Maybe I shouldn’t be sitting in a dark room with those binoculars...?}

A few weeks ago I was walking downtown (Bloomington, of course – what? Did you have a brain tumor for breakfast?) and I decided I would enter a shop I’d never seen before. From the outward décor, I could tell immediately who the clientele would be. There were subdued sarongs and wall tapestries. There were bizarre mobiles made out of cactus husks. There was a Lilith Fair poster, framed. There was, when the door opened to allow another customer out, Enya emanating from within. Clearly, this store catered to that ever-elusive consumer bracket: twentysomething white males.

No, of course it was one of those earth-goddess stores where the owner (whose name is Sri Wilhimina Constance Northstar-devi), who is wearing a pouch around her neck containing narwhal placenta, tells you that you need to align your chakras so that you can fulfill your truest destiny. Aligning your chakras, of course, involves paying $200 for crystals, a mortar and pestle, the mummified paw of an endangered marmoset and seven Sarah McLachlan CDs.
As Ms. Northstar-devi approached, I hissed at her and, smelling my murder-breath (beef: it’s what’s for dinner), she backed away and began to chant from the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
In a small corner of the establishment, I noticed tiny objects that looked like ridiculously miniscule watering pots. Do gnomes water their gardens?, I thought off-handedly. On the tail of that, from a place in my brain where useless information dwells, mates, and buries its dead, I remembered that those were neti pots.

Now: for those of you who live less charmed lives, a neti pot is a small object that looks rather like, well, a gnomish watering can. One then fills the pot with warm water and saline powder and then (here’s where it gets funky) one inserts the spout into one’s nostril – making sure to make a good seal – and tips one’s head over the sink. What happens is that the water flows from the spout through the sinuses and the nasal passages and then exits the other nostril, carrying with it… well, I think you have a good idea.

Considering that I have had a sinus infection nonstop for over three years, I thought: hey. Help a weird old woman out and buy a yoga-inspired miniature teapot which you will proceed to amuse yourself with by watching what appears to be a pound of guacamole pour out your nose.

So I did. I brought it home and unwrapped it, looking at the disgusting diagrams of a woman cleaning her nasal passages in horror, and absently mixed the salt-junk into warmish water. Then, insertion. OK, I thought, you can do this! If you can vivisect those seven nuns, you surely can allow warm water to pass through your passages! As the water started on its hellish journey, I stood over the sink and envisioned that this all was some sort of hippie prank. Hahahahahahahahaha, Ms. Northstar-devi would chortle in her back room, pocketing my money. That bastard’s gonna have half a lung full of saltwater by nightfall. Hare, Rama. Hare, Krishna.

Drip. Drip. Drip. From the nostril that didn't have a hippie nose-pot crammed into it came nearly nothing. I began to panic imagining my lungs filling with mucus-laden broth, and then I realized that, uh, I wasn't breathing out of my mouth like the fecked-up little book told me. I opened my mouth, and the drips became a rushing torrent of the most unimaginable filth I'd ever seen. After a moment, the rush weakened as an object began to descend from On High; as I stood over my own sink in Greenwood, Indiana, one of the

Dead Sea Scrolls

tumbled out of my nose and began to swirl down the drain. Damn. I'd forgotten where I'd put that shit.

What's the sensation afterwards like, you ask? Well, I'd liken it to that one time when your parents took you to the beach and then fell asleep in the sun whilst you heedlessly frolicked in the ocean. Then, when you least expected it, a rogue wave dragged you down and smashed your face into the seafloor and filled your hair with unspeakable sea-jizz and sand, and you, disoriented and breathless, began to swim towards the ocean floor for breath. Just when your lungs began to burn, you sucked down a pint of putrid sea into your tiny, pink insides and began to drown. As you began to embrace your own mortality, your own buoyancy bobbed you to the surface, whereupon you burst into ragged tears as you struggled to gain headway to the beach.

Nah, it's not anything like that. I just wanted my parents, who surely will read this, to know that the pitiless sea nearly claimed their firstborn on their "keen" watch.

The sensation is incredible. I'd long believed that my sinuses were the homes of nesting Siberian hamsters, or that they'd been filled with plaster of paris or something wretched like that. It's a good thing, too - paying $150 to that guy who's giving "sinusectomies" out of the back of a Windstar in the Meijer parking lot might be a little risky. Anytime someone starts out a consulation by saying "Urine is sterile!" should probably be avoided.

****

Recently I was watching what has become our favorite form of free entertainment - Balthazar and Zeke "playing", which mostly involves Balthazar savaging a remarkably patient Zeke - when I happened to see something strange on my little baby beast. As he stretched out on the rug - high on life, hallucinating like a crackwhore and with the fresh taste of Zeke on his thin lips - I was gazing adoringly at him as only the parents of retarded children could when I made out the figure of a human skull in the stripes on Balthazar's side.

Now, when one's cat's sire is the Hooved One himself, one tends not to really pay all that much attention to the fact that he has little idiosyncrasies. I didn't really pay that much attention to the red eyes, the levitation, the speaking in strange tongues things - but damn. A cat that has a skull on his flank?

In unrelated Balthazar news (unrelated? perhaps not...you be the judge), the little furry bitch turned on me like a freshly sodomized Rottweiler the other night and transformed the side of my face into five pounds of raw chuck. There I was, loving on the little slip of fur, and suddenly I became aware that my cheek was really, really warm. This is because half of it was passing through a kitten's digestive tract. When I realized that he'd attacked, I tried to pull him off, but his tiny needle-fangs were sunken all the way to the gumline in my face, and he wasn't giving up. My shrieks of "ex umbris in luce!*" fell heedlessly. Finally, he saw something shiny and became distracted enough for me to fling him off me, and, as he sulked in the corner and licked my lifeblood off his maw, I went into the bathroom to examine the damage.

He'd bitten me so hard that his teeth broke the skin and left two, perfect and profoundly deep puncture wounds. They were so surgically precise that they didn't even bleed for about two minutes; the blood vessels were briefly cauterized by the hellcat's fangs. As soon as I could gather my thoughts, I grabbed the little furball and hurled him into The Worst Place Ever: Kedi Hapishanesi. Kedi Hapishanesi, or "Kitty Jail", is a cat carrier that I bought in case I needed to lug the little wretch to the vet's office or the kennel. Balthazar effing HATES Kedi Hapishanesi with the white-hot heat of ten thousand galaxies' suns. As soon as he gets in there, he begins to cry like I've been raping him with a rolling pin and pressing his muzzle through the bars while misting his eyes dramatically. My heart was stone, though, and as I rubbed my paralyzed cheek, he began to quiet down a little. He resigned himself to his fate and began writing to penpals and his Governor, preparing for his GED, fashioning tiny shivs out of bars of soap, getting his first tattoo, and finally, getting traded for a pack of smokes and some oral pleasure to a thirty pound cat named "Gus." After a half-hour, I relented: after all, his brain is the size of an electron and he'd not have remembered savaging me even nanoseconds after having done it. As he snuggled close to me following his release to the world at large, I flipped through my address book. Under "G", I found an entry I felt I'd be using soon.

Gypsies, Family of
No permanent address
Cell #: XXX-XXX-XXXX

If only the little bitch knew. Oh yes.



I remain, as ever,

Domonic

PS: "Ex umbris in luce" - cult Latin - "From darkness (shadow) into light"

Life's a bitch and so's your ma.

Last week I was driving back to the Boy Lair on a fairly deserted stretch of Indiana 37 (aka Speedtrap Mothereffer) when I noticed in my peripheral vision that I was being paced by a migrating goose. It's been argued by many avian biologists that migrating waterfowl potentially use North/South highways and interstates when they navigate, getting easy bearings from above - supplementing their natural instincts, of course.

So, here's this goose and I, doing about 65 MPH down the highway in the waning light of an Indiana afternoon. At about the same time that I noticed that the bird was, indeed, flying the wrong way (North), I also wondered why it was alone. Was this the pariah goose, shunned from an uncaring and cruel goose society for crimes it may or may not have committed? Was this goose all West Niled up and flying North to a nice, quiet place to expire in relative peace? Was it returning to find its goose lover, detained on the edge of a Canadian lake by tree-weasels for ransom?

The goose shuddered then, and took a gigantic liquidy dump the nanosecond we passed over a child's playset, the merry dull thuds hammering mostly onto the slide. Come morning, some child will go outside to play in the waning summer only to find about six pounds of goose loaf on his/her slide. Would s/he weep? Or, would s/he poke it with a stick to find out what's in it, like I would have?

I realized that the goose and I were one and the same. We fly the wrong way. We poop on children's playthings. And, in the end, we're only more enigmatic and alluring because of it.

I waved goodbye and hastily turned into my driveway, emboldened by nature's majesty. I say "hastily" because I had a righteous load on deck myself, and once I changed into my jet-black ninja outfit, that giant wooden Big Toy playground down the road would be hosting my own call of nature.

On Wednesday, my poppets, updates on:

a) Balthazar; or, why I believe that some cats need to bathed in holy water and injected with Ritalin

b) My job; or, why I have a hip-flask.

c) What eating 6 plates of shrimp scampi will do to you.


Until then, I remain,

Dom

The partially embalmed, mummified baboon carcass of ceaseless longing.

From the part of me that remains human there comes a need to explain why I have been gone for so long. That human bit wishes that I had a really tasty excuse, something that would absolve me of my sins and misdeeds like a squat in the musty confessionals of my youth.

The truth of the matter is that I have been learning the subtle art of human taxidermy; tanning human skin is a delicate art and I have become a true master. Plus, you wouldn't BELIEVE where some people get tattoos.

I've been having "dude, what the feck?" dreams as of late, and I'm guessing that working with flayed human skin all day and long into the weary night might have something to do with that. Most are fragmentary, but one in particular has me really concerned. This is because, believe it or not, I've had it twice before. And, believe it or not, even *I* think this dream is so very wrong.

*wavy lines, unearthly harp music: dream sequence commences*

I'm in a dank forest at dusk. Around me, in a straight line emanating from both sides of me, are dozens of men in bizarre Ottoman/Persian/Mughal clothing, and they all have scimitars. We're pushing our way though the forest, and one of the men comes across a bevy of ragged, weeping women. One of my men asks what should be done about them, and I reply that they should be immediately dispatched. I then shout over to the man, who is ready to take the head off a woman, to remember to cut off her fingers to get the rings. I push forward with the dull "thwack" sounds of the execution squad ringing through the forest behind me, and I come upon a palace which has grown rank with neglect. I order my men to go in and kill any living thing they find posthaste. "Leave the empress and the crown prince for me", I shout. In the spoiled grand hall, a fountain sputters and grows quiet at my approach. One of my men rushes in and says that he's found them in a royal chamber. When I enter the chamber, a woman and her child are huddled in the corner. I politely explain that their time on the earth is now over and that they should pray to whatever deity they've cleaved to for their pathetic salvation. The boy has his back to me the whole time, but the woman is weeping and begging in a language I don't understand, facing me. I take the boy's hand and turn him around only to see that he is

HALEY JOEL OSMENT.

{wtf?}

If you don't know who this kid is, you should kill yourself. Like, now. Or go here.

Anyway, so there is Haley Joel Osment, and I have a big-ass sword-thing, and wow. So he walks up to me and smiles, implike, and grasps my forearms. He looks up at my face and says

No, I think you're (voice gets menacingly deep and not childlike) going with me.

All of his facial features then begin to run like boiled tallow off his skull, revealing three-inch vulpine incisors and row upon row of tiny, shark-like teeth. In my dream, I evacuate my bladder and my bowels into my pants, and as I do so, the floor falls out beneath us. I remain strangely upright, and Haley Joel Osment has not relinquished his hellish grip. I smell the rotten-egg reek of sulphur mere seconds before I awaken, drenched in my own brine and paralyzingly close to wetting the bed like an incontinent whore.

What can that possibly mean about what's going on in here [tapping forehead]? It's been absolutely months since I last smoked a brick of angel dust-encrusted opium out of a battered Pepsi can out behind the Franklin Hall Dumpsters.

On Monday, my poppets, I shall return to thee. So, get ready to fire up a test-tube of meth and open a can of Natural Light Ice and feel like your own lives are manageable.

Until then, I remain,

Dom