"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"