Enter stage left, small bow.

Many of you have wondered where I have been for the past few weeks. The answer is startlingly simple:

Nunyah.

[raise your hands if your mother, when you asked her which of her frumpy friends she was talking to on the phone, would say “nunyah” and continue to exchange recipes that frequently involved Durkee French Onion soup mix]

“Nunyah”, of course, evoked (in the mind of a child who watched 80s cartoons) the arch-nemesis of the Thundercats, Mumm-ra, who would rise from his reeking sepulcher at the beginning of each episode to attempt to destroy all that which was good and vaguely feline.

Remember the Mumm-ra incantation?

"Ancient spirits of evil, transform this decayed form to Mumm-Ra, the Ever-Living!"

Yeah.

I remember thinking that, when I grew up, I too wanted to lie in a reeking sepulcher and try to feck the lives of hominid cats over whilst hissing uncontrollably and salivating like an orphan at the Golden Corral. Remember that? Every time he opened his undead maw there was a ribbon of saliva connecting his mandible and the rest of his hellish dental arcade. Anyway, wouldn’t that have been simply deliriously divine if your mother HAD been talking to Mumm-ra?

Terry Potorti nee Quimby: So, what are you fixing for supper tonight?
Mumm-ra: [hisssssssssssssssssss hisssssssss hiss hiss HISSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS]
TPnQ: Mmm, we had meatloaf on Tuesday. It was a little too dry; next time I will use an egg.
M-r: [gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh hiiiisssssssssssss hiss hissssss hiss hissssssss]
TPnQ: Oh, I never thought of that! Old bread soaked in milk, you say?

My best buddy Mary and I made up a song about our favorite villain. To the tune of “Memories” from Cats:

Mumm-ra!
Hiss hiss hiss hiss hiss
Mumm-ra!
Hiss hiss hiss hiss hiss

And it went on from there. Lacking sophistication? Probably. Yet the memory of this song earlier today while I was in a [serious] meeting with a problematic student nearly caused me to shoot milk out my nose.

And I wasn’t drinking milk.

Speaking of “things that come ever-so-close to the tip of your tongue when speaking to the court-ordered psychoanalyst”, does anyone else on the earth remember a show that used to air on PBS wherein a man and a woman (husband and wife, perhaps?) told well-loved fairy tales to children – and while the man spoke, the wife illustrated the story with chalks? I feckin’ know I am not making this hippie shit up. I was absolutely entranced. And they were good, too – she was a pretty amazing artist. My favorite story – the one I hoped would be rerun every day – was Hansel and Gretel. It’s always been my favorite fairy tale because it contains elements I find to be delightful.

1) Malicious child neglect. OK, that in itself is hardly amusing, but in the end the perpetrator, the children’s vile stepmother, “disappears” and the children have their loving lumberjack father all to themselves again. Three guesses as to what that unusual odor coming from behind the woodpile was.

2) Witchcraft. No story should be complete without including a hump-backed, accursed hag whose entire life is devoted to insensate evil. Because that’s balanced.

3) Cannibalism. Pretty sweet, huh? Not a whole lot of Western European fairy tales that include a flesh-consuming human, and the perverse addition of the “fattening” of Hansel and his witty use of the chicken bone are particularly unnerving.

4) Child murderess. Gretel feckin’ pushes the bitch into the very oven she means to baste Hansel’s fat ass in, and in this part of the free world that’s at least manslaughter if she weren’t able to claim self-defense.

5) A candy house. Ok, is it just me or does this sound simultaneously fabulous and disgusting? What if it got really hot out and the house got really sticky and one day you woke up stuck to your bed by a filthy river of melted candy canes?

Anyway, if you’ve heard of this show, please let me know so that I can go to the grave knowing that I wasn’t in the throes of prepubescent dementia.

****

Random story:

When I was in high school my best friend Elizabeth and I would frequent an Indian restaurant in Bangor. Yes, asses, there is an Indian restaurant in Bangor. So anyway, at the Taste of India there can be found lovely North Indian dishes cooked to be-spiced perfection as well as a fairly surly waiter who corrects the pronunciation of everything you order.

Me: I would like the garlic naan and the Shrimp Vindaloo and some water.
Surly North Indian, Perhaps a Shaved Sikh: So that vould be von order of garlic na-AHN, von order of shrimp VEEN-dah-LOOH, and some WAH-TURR.
Me: Wait a minute. Water is English. You can’t correct my pronunciation of a word in my native language when it’s not yours.
SNIPaSS: I vas speaking Qveen’s English ven you veren’t a glimmer in your mother’s glassy, cow-like eyes.
Me: Shall we take this outside?
SNIPaSS: [turns to Elizabeth] And for the lady?

The best part of the Taste of India experience – besides being abused by a South Asian – was that, for as long as we went there, there was only one cassette that they played for “ambience.” That’s three years of hearing the same songs over and over and over again. Were you to be in the place longer than forty-five minutes, you’d start all over again. Now, this would have been a problem were it not for the existence of The Song.

The Song is clearly a North Indian, perhaps Bollywood, song starring a young woman who has either inhaled a hellish tincture of airline exhaust, glue fumes and helium or had her vocal cords surgically enhanced to allow her to sound like an alleycat in heat. Many times we would delay paying our bill until the loop to The Song had been made, much to the annoyance of our special friend (Vould you be vanting more of the vater, or vould you just like to take up space that vould be filled vith more vhite people who aren’t in high school and who vould tip me more than 15%? As you vish).

Though it has been years – apparently good years, as the Indian restaurant now has three battered cassettes instead of one – I want to go up to the man behind the tiny pathetic bar, put some “bread in his jar” and ask him to crank up that cassette to The Song. “Vhich song is it?”, he’d ask. “You know the one”, I’d reply. “The one which goes something like this:

NYAHHH nee-see-NAAAAYYY-yah NUH-nuh-nuh-NUH-nuh nuh nee see NAAAAAA YAAA.”

This is no way in Hell he’d not know which song this was; I’ve been practicing my exaggerated high falsetto by singing in the shower with the water turned all the way on to “freeze your sweet, sweet tasties right the feck off.”

***

Confessional time.

I’ve become one of those people. One of those people I’ve mocked for more than a year as they walk the mean streets of Bloomington, Indiana, for being consumerist whores of corporate America, selling their souls to a petty, yet insidious addiction.

I’ve become a pod-person. An iPod person.

Most of my angst was due in no small part to the fact that -from the moment I heard about a miraculous portable device that would allow you to cram all of the music in your home into something scarcely larger than your wallet – I’d lusted after one. When inquiring about their cost, I was told that I’d need to provide the sales clerk with a lobe of my liver. Crestfallen, I resigned myself to never getting one – or, at least not until they were nearing passé-ness and were on super-hella-blue-light-special-at-the-goddamn-Kmart sale. Serendipity, though, has provided where my financial constraints (and conscience) did not. It’s tiny, it’s powder-blue, and it now holds almost TWO DAYS worth of music. And it’s only two-thirds full. The problem, though, is that my musical selections are – as you might well imagine – slightly incongruous.

Track 1: You Oughta Know, Alanis Morrissette
Track 2: Jewish Town (Krakow Ghetto, ’41), John Williams, Schindler’s List soundtrack
Track 3: Embroidery, Chinese traditional
Track 4: Nebraska, Bruce Springsteen
Track 5: Üsküdar’a Giderken, Turkish traditional
Track 6: Every Heartbeat, Amy Grant

It gives me pause. People are like “Hey, you should publish a PodCast of your songs on your ‘blog!” I respond with a snort that ejects crusties and shake my head sadly. No, my dear readers, I want you to respect me for as long as possible. Granted, you read this… and you already know that I am a scoop of penny nails short of a mail bomb…

[sigh]

Speaking of freakish music, I’ve procured the new Enya CD, Amarantine. For those of you who think that Enya is boring and lame and for lesbian wiccan priestess masseuses on angel-dust-encrusted mary-jane, I must assure you that you should have a lobotomy. I listened to it about five times and then began the gradual process of committing the lyrics to memory. A few of the songs, though, were not in English, and while this is not ordinarily a problem for my lyric-retention, I was curious as to what I was singing with my mind’s throat. Little stars appeared next to some of the song titles on the back cover, and when I investigated I found that the songs were written in “Loxian.” Figuring that Loxian was a bizarre Tolkien elf-language, I moved on. One day at lunch, though, I went on the internet and found something that chilled my very marrow:

Loxian: noun: a weird made-up space-language invented by Roma Ryan, producer and lyricist for mega-star Enya

A made-up space language! I was singing a fecking made-up space language! For those of you who noticed (above) that I did not seem particularly adverse to singing it if it was a stupid elf language, why, you ask, would I care that Roma Ryan made up a language to communicate with aliens?

I care because I didn’t come up with it first. That bitch.

***

For this, a new year, I resolved to stop feeling guilty for not being able to do all the things I used to do when I was “merely” a student and a part-time graduate assistant. Rest assured, my devoted few, Life in the Corn will live on as long as I am able to strip to a loincloth, smear myself with caramel topping and type out my entries. So keep your eyes out. It may not be every day. It may not be thrice a week. Despite this, it will keep coming.

Just like that bout of cholera.

Until next time, I remain,

Domonic

PS. Hippie girl’s name is Rachel. Well, it was Rachel. And to you, o anonymous ‘blog visitor who insisted that I’d “shagged” her? I wish you the piles.

Dear wretched hippie girl in my anthro class:

Hello. My name is Domonic and I am that chunky guy with all that facial hair who sits by the window.

Let me be frank. It has been been a mere two classes since we 'met' in that little airless cell of a classroom in the Student Building, but already I feel a burning loathing for you that, if not kept in check by my breathing excercises and prescription medication that makes my pee smell like melting tires, would result in my imprisonment for - at the very least - getting caught hiding in the bushes surrounding your (undoubtedly hovel-like) apartment waiting for you to come home. So let's get a few things straight so that I can survive this, my last class at Indiana University for my Master's Degree, without having to pour lime over your hobbled body whilst it reposes in a shallow grave.

1) Shet the feck up. Your opinions are useless because you are high all the goddamn time. I know this because a) your clumsy attempts at hiding the pot smell with patchouli oil is SO eleventh grade and b) your pupils are the size of a purely theoretical molecule, like a quark or something. A first-trimester fetus on Pitcairn Island would know that you were fecked up. So when the teacher speaks and asks of us our thoughts or opinions, I want you to remember how you got "Dutch-oven baked" this morning in your car with the windows rolled up and how you will peddle your rank undercarriage tonight at a party for a dime-bag and forget that you are actually physically present in this room. Neither I nor the rest of the class give a fancy fig for your thoughts.

2) Learn some fecking manners. If you interrupt the teacher or one of our classmates one more time with one of your 'profound' insights, I will be forced to staple your eyes open and force you to watch a "Simple Life" marathon in a room containing only a letter opener and a bottle of Kroger brand aspirin. Saying that someone or something is "stupid" or "lame" is not only judgemental but also infantile; keep it up and you'll be tasting your own pancreas. And, if I want to eat a Little Debbie snack cake, I don't want to hear about how Little Debbie factories enslave undocumented immigrants and cut off one of their feet so that they can't run away because guess what? I enjoy them, and by the way, Bob Marley is dead.

3) Take a fecking bath. Neither I nor my classmates desire to breathe through our mouths for an hour and fifteen minutes simply because you desire to make some sort of statement. You want to know something? You can be a pacifist/weed-smoker/Hindu/vegan/yoga practitioner without making people you come in contact with wonder if that's what being on a bus in Calcutta in August smells like. Your body odor, coupled with the fact that you wear open-toed Birkenstocks in January, produces stench rays that are visible to the naked eye. When I smell you - your human reek and your marijuana reek and that feckin' patchouli all mixed together - it makes my lunch rise to the top of my esophagus where it sits, expectant, awaiting my command. Perhaps if I chunked on your neck and down your shirt you'd do us a favor and allow Clairol Herbal Essences to give you an orgasm not achieved while you were so high that you thought your sexual partner was a Mayan death-priest. Oh, and P.S., I've only met one white girl for whom the whole "dredlock" thing worked, and you sure as shit aren't her. Shave that shit off; insects shouldn't be spawning on your fecking hair.

4) Stay the feck away from me. I will forewarn you: should I become partnered with you for our group project, I will require that you be at least three city blocks away from me at all times and I will NOT give you my phone number. Shit, I don't even really want to know your name because I am sure that it will annoy me by its very existence. I will do half, you will do half, and we will pretend like it was a collaborative effort. If you squeal... well, you know what's going to happen.

In short, I despise you already. It's going to be a long semester, but should you abide these rules, I shan't be forced to cut you. It's your choice, missy.

Hugs,

Dom

Where have all the cowboys gone?

Jesus GOD, now I have that song in my head. Well, share in my pain.

I will cut straight to the chase:

No, I didn't leap in the frigid Arctic waters of the Gulf of Maine on New Year's.

Oh, sit and spin! It was like freakin' 12 degrees without the windchill and the water had sea-ice on it! And the tide was going out! And there have been wereshark sightings! And there was unspeakable sea-jizz on the beach!

Believe me when I tell you that I really, really wanted to do it, but I thought that watching my extremities go gray with nip probably wouldn't have been the sanest way to spend a nice midwinter's day. Instead, I drank a fifth of Jim Beam and shaved the eyebrows off a passed-out vagrant in the Greyhound Bus terminal.

Hahahahaha! That's not true!

*ahem*

Christmas came and went this year with me feeling a little more charitable and festive than usual. Well, I mean in opposition to years past, when I would stomp children in the malls and deliver Salvation Army bell-ringers to their makers with the Letter-Opener of Divine Intervention. Part of the reason for my unusual level of festivity is that I, now that I am gainfully employed, didn't have to sell my other cornea for Christmas gifts for my "loved ones"; the other is that I

made a sacred vow to the Baby Jesus

that I would be better about the holiday that celebrates His miraculous birth.

Now, I'm not a particularly religious person. I mean, how could I be? You've read this 'blog, and if you were to believe that half of the things I've written about happened, I'd be giving colonoscopies to Katie Couric in Hell for eternity for just that. However, shortly before Thanksgiving last I found myself in my car hurtling through space at nearly 85 MPH towards Cincinnati Airport to pick up my sister, and two accidents on previous stretches of the highway had delayed me for an hour and a half. My sister had told me expressly that she would, if I were not there to pick her up when she landed,make a boa out of my steaming innards and feed me my sweetmeats.

{Secret Domonic Fact Number 11,289: Domonic fears his sister first among all other human beings.}

So there I was, driving insanely fast, when I realized that if I were to be caught by The Fuzz that I would go down so hard that the light from 'fecked' wouldn't reach me for 4.2 billion years.
At that point, with my foot still crammed down onto the accelerator, I opened myself to base supplication.

"Baby Jesus", I said, "should You deliver me to Cincinnati in time to pick up my sister without being sodomized by police officers, I shall be festive on Thy birthday."

He gurgled in His hay-scented manger, and it came to pass that I got to the airport with more than twenty minutes to spare. In return, I thought nothing unclean about His holiday, I made our home festive, and I chose thoughtful, heartfelt gifts for my loved ones.

It nearly KIRRED me. Next year will be a little less hateful, I have to assume - and by 2010, I may actually be able to watch more than the opening credits of "It's a Wonderful Life" without evacuating my bowels and the contents of my stomach simultaneously.

***

Is anyone out there? I know I've been a bad 'blogger as of late, but once the routine of this semester snaps in, I should be getting on here three times a week at least.

Because...

If nobody reads this...

I may have to retire the 'blog. [transparently veiled threat!]

***

Next 'blog:

1) What the hell did I do in Maine?
2) How did I spend the night of January 03 and 04, and why is my toilet now a biohazard zone?
3) Can you hit me baby one more time?



Hugs and mermaid scales,

Domonic