The stupidest thing I have ever done.

Ahmet and I alit from the bus onto the sweet, sweet earth at Çanakkale (cha-KNOCK-kah-lay)perhaps a little more quickly than usual for two reasons: one, we'd been on it since we'd boarded the night before in the stale underbelly of Ankara's enormous otogar [bus garage], and two, the bus had begun to smell like an unwashed dead man's feet in snowboots in August.

* A word on busses in Turkey *

The bus is the primary means of transportation in Turkey, and for good reasons: it is mothertouching cheap and the busses depart and arrive at their destinations with nearly Swiss precision. The busses are enormous, deadly clean and are staffed with immaculately uniformed hosts/hostesses who wander about in the cabin bringing you cold and hot drinks, a squirt of lemon cologne freshener (for your hands and face; it's like a wet-nap without the wipey-thing) and bracingly embalmed, frooty cakes. Yet, for all of their splendor, Turkish busses (as of 2001) were utterly bereft of restroom facilities, necessitating stops every three hours at specially-designed bus-stop places on the outskirts of every major Turkish town and city. The term "restroom facility" in this case may be misleading: one pays a largish male or female bouncer-creature a few lira for the luxury of squatting over a pit whilst holding a little blue plastic jug filled with water with which one is supposed to cleanse onself. Me? Well, let's just say that while I had become freakishly adept at the subtle ballet that was the Middle Eastern commode experience, I had no intention of utilizing these "facilities", as they often resembled the open pits ordered dug by death-squads. Attached to the corralled-off pits was frequently a smallish restaurant serving inexpensive Turkish fast food. More often than not I was ambushed by this particular cuisine upon my first bite. Corn on pizza? Potato salad on a hamburger? A bun filled with weird nut-paste? The bus would disgorge itself, the plebe would empty themselves and then refill their now-hollow bodies with bus-stop rot, and clamber back on for the next three hours.

At this point in the night the passengers begin to settle in for a fitful nap. It was at this point - every God-forsaken time I was on one of these things - that all of the men ALL OF THE MEN I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP would take off their shoes in a syncronized motion and sweep them under the seat in front of them. This was, on some of the larger and fuller busses, easily seventy pairs of black sock-clad men's feet.

Seventy pairs of sweaty, formerly black shoe-encased men's feet, free and exposed and - on a memorable trip to Antalya - on my lap as the gentleman beside me shifted in his slumber. The mere memory of the ensuing bouquet brings tears to my eyes, and I can guarantee you that it is not out of misty nostalgia -it was a hastily arranged defense mechanism which I utilized so as to not allow the rising fog to sear my retinas out of my very skull.

* resuming story*

Upon our arrival in Çanakkale, Ahmet and I simulaneously ascertained that the town's major charms could be consumed within the span of an afternoon; apart from being strategically one of the most important cities on the earth as the guardian of the Dardanelle Straits, Çanakkale's draw was primarily focused on World War I heroism and the nearby battlefield of Gallipoli (Gelibolu). Neither Ahmet nor I were enchanted by the thought of looking at a big field where twentysomething men died by the thousands. One thing became clarion: even though it was only seven-thirty AM, we needed some beer, and needed some fast.

We checked into our hotel which, like many Turkish hotels, has the shower spigot just hanging off the wall in what appears to be an ordinary bathroom; a small drain near the toilet serves to clear away some of the water. In other words, unless you desire to brush your teeth with your friend's dead skin-water, you kept your toothbrush in your ditty-bag. "Conveniently", most hotels also provided shower-shoes, though of course the image of the one hundred-forty unwashed black sock-encased man-feet gave me pause.

We bought the beer (fo'ties of Efes Pilsen), and from a street-cart I bought two kilos of the freshest cherries I have ever eaten. It was one of the most sublime breakfasts I have ever consumed - eaten al fresco on a bench on a jetty which abruptly thrust itself into the azure Dardanelles.

As we'd anticipated, Çanakkale yielded little but bizarre pottery (a çanak is a locally-produced style of jug) and a cannon-guarded harbor filled with ghastly green urchins. As we boarded the dolmuş (mini-bus) to a tiny village further down the coast the next morning, I became siezed with the intense, burning desire to visit one of the only Turkish Aegean islands, Bozcaada (BOZE-jah-ah-dah). The woman seated to my left had a live poult partially hidden under her petticoat and her husband - a stoic man in his mid-fifties - was missing two of his fingers just below the first joint. They tried desperately to make pleasantries with us once they'd overheard me say "Bozcaada" - apparently, they were natives - but our conversation was derailed by the poult, who chose that moment to become uppity. After a few moments of furious activity, a muffled *snap* was heard throughout the bus, and the poult became unnaturally still. "Would you like to have lunch with us?", the kindly old woman asked. The glint in her eye suggested that, should we decline, we'd need to have an elaborate excuse other than having seen lunch while it still respirated. We told her that I had to catch a plane in İstanbul for the United States and, despite the fact that we were clearly travelling due west instead of northeast, she smiled and wished me the best of luck. "I would like to give you a gift", she said, and began rummaging under her petticoat where the bulge of the still warm, silent poult could clearly be seen. For a hellish moment I imagined that she would give me the carcass of the taken-before-its-time fowl, but she instead pressed a little pin with a nazar boncuk ['evil eye' amulet] into my palm. "The sun is too hot in Bozcaada; maşallah" she breathed, and at the next stop - a dusty piazza with a braying ass drinking from the overgrown fountain - they disembarked. Maşallah in Turkish usage is "God protect." I turned to Ahmet and asked him if he, in that moment, felt a little like Jonathan Harker traveling through the Carpathians to Dracula's keep - you know, the part where that Romany woman pressed a crucifix into his hand because "the dead travel fast."

The ferry ride to Bozcaada was uneventful save for my assertions that I'd seen one gull peck another to death over the gummi bear I'd tossed to them. A half-hour later the craft drew into the tiny harbor of Bozcaada (pictured above). Bozcaada is, for those of you who have read the Iliad, the island of Tenedos. After the Greeks had filled up the tinder-horse with soldiers, they sailed away and used the outcropping of the island to hide their fleet.

[ Ahmet and I had already gone to Troy earlier that week, and, despite each of us feeling a detachment for, um, fields where thousands of twentysomething men perished, Troy is different and you all know it. ]

Nowadays, Bozcaada is known primarily for being one of maybe ten Aegean islands that belongs to Turkey (and not Greece) and for being graced with miles of untouched Aegean beaches. Having scuttled through the ruins of nearly every civilization that had stopped long enough to cop a squat in Turkey for the four months previous to this trip, I found the idea of an island known for natural beauty to be alluring. That, and Bozcaada was reputed to be the epicenter of octopus cuisine in Turkey, which thralled me unduly. [I ended up eating it thirteen different ways in two days]. Once we'd gotten to our hotel -which we were lured to by a tout who greeted the ferry - Ahmet opened up his cat's-bladder-sized knapsack and took out his swim trunks pointedly. As I was rummaging through my somewhat more substantial luggage, I noticed that I'd not honored my Cub Scout past by thinking to bring any sunscreen. When I mentioned this to Ahmet, he shrugged dismissively. "I'm a Turk: I will just brown more." I knew that I would crisp like a cheap burrito in the microwave and we left the hotel to search the mean streets of Bozcaada for something to protect my pallid flesh from the searing Northern Aegean sun.

To say that we went everywhere in the town to find suitable protection would scarcely be an exaggeration. At each stop, we were greeted with blank stares like we had chosen that moment to quaff a sheep's placenta. This was not a pathetic effort by a solitary, non-Turcophone American guy; Ahmet, a native speaker of Turkish, was doing his level best and still the locals beheld us with a measure of compassion and horror. Cream that one spreads on one's skin so that the sun doesn't hurt it? Is there a hidden camera? When we finally found the pharmacy, we thought we were going to be home-free, but the young woman working behind the counter looked over the rims of her glasses and asked who had 'put us up to this.' She suggested - helpfully - that we pour Coke over ourselves to "brown up."

Yes. That was clearly going to be an option.

It was then that we noticed that every local - even the newly-extruded infants in their tiny Turkish prams - had brown, leathery skin like one might find in a good Milanese pump. These people had, over the centuries, developed skin that was seemingly impervious to the rigors of ultraviolet radiation on this simple, unpretentious island.

Our choice then became simple: frolic on the beach and risk being transformed into human bacon or sit in our hotel room, drink warm beer and stare at each other. We chose the former and within minutes we were the only people on a stretch of Aegean sand that would make Margaret Thatcher weep. As I made merry in the sea with a school of tiny, color-shifting squid, Ahmet cozied up on the shore. After I'd exhausted myself in my attempts to capture one of the squid in my bare hands, I reclined on the beach and closed my eyes for a moment.

Two hours later I woke up, Ahmet snoring softly to my right on his towel.

Maybe you didn't get that. Two. Hours. Later.

I shook him awake and threw a blanket over him. We covered our bodies as swiftly as a high-school couple caught in delecto flagrante in her dad's basement den, but the damage had been done. Sitting in our hotel room in the dark with the air conditioning set on "McMurdo Sound", we could fairly hear the heat radiating from our violated skins. About an hour later, still plunged into total darkness, Ahmet moaned like a whore and began to strip.

"Uh, what are you doing, Ahmet?", I asked in a voice that didn't resemble my own; it was higher, squeakier and more desperate. "I can't stand to have these clothes on so I am stripping. You should try it; we're in the damn dark and I don't fancy blokes." Twenty minutes later two twentysomething men clad only in their underoos were to be found laying, bathed in their own brine, on brick-hard hotel beds in the dark of a Turkish hotel room. I had never experienced pain like that - even the backs of my knees were fried - and I began to supplicate.

"Dear little bead-thing that the creepy bus-lady gave me", I began, "take away the sensation that I have been raped by a blowtorch and give me back the ability to make facial expressions without a grisly crunching sound."

It was not to be and we boarded the ferry back to the mainland the next morning. The locals had gathered in their outdoor çayhane (tea 'garden') and they beheld our leprous, fire-engine-red skin and politely said nothing while we were in earshot. The young woman who'd suggested that we cover ourselves with sticky cola tutted softly and lifted her eyebrows slightly as she spooned some lentil soup into her mouth. No doubt she would tell her clientele about the two yabancı (strangers) who did not heed her sage advice and proceeded to heedlessly give themselves third-degree burns on forty percent of their bodies for years to come - assuring our immortality on a tiny island forgotten by time where the Coppertone Baby was assumed to be a punk-rock band.

The ferry vomited several islanders and ourselves onto a jetty where awaited yet another dolmuş to the nearby town. The old man driving the mini-bus had some insane Arabesk music playing at nearly supersonic levels, and yet as Ahmet and I boarded and handed him our lira he hit the "Mute" button to address us.

"Coca Cola yok mu?" he asked, and I felt my blood pressure quietly triple. He said "Was there not any Coca Cola?" We said yes, there was, but it was imbibed and not utilized as a tanning agent. What fools we are, we laughed, and sat in our seats to quietly reflect on how satisfying it would have been to part his head from his shoulders with a scimitar.

I found myself at the summit of the acropolis at Assos (Behramkale) the next day - clad in long sleeves and jeans and sneakers and a hat - looking out over a stretch of Aegean so perfectly blue that it cannot be described to the Greek island of Lesvos, less than a mile away. Ahmet and I were the only people within visual distance and, as I examined the Doric glory of the ruined temple to the goddess Athena with only the lonely call of the gulls in my ears, I felt my heart swelling with the astoundingly aching beauty of the country I'd come to know and love those five months. I knew that at that moment that I wouldn't be able to leave Turkey without surrendering my heart to it. The stupidest thing I had ever done happened while I was doing the one thing that grounded me as a man - the thing that, to this day five years later, shapes what I think, who I am, and where my dreams live.

One day I will go back and try to find my heart.

And the pound of skin I left behind.

I remain, as ever,

Domonic

A bag of trail mix, an iPod and a statuette of Guanyin, the Chinese goddess of mercy.

- things recovered from under my ass when I inadvertently reposed upon them in a car-seat, prompting the question "What the feck am I sitting on?"

Who else do you know who would be able to make that statement? That's right: nobody.

Today: A few random thoughts by Domonic.


1) "... like a banshee."

OK folks, let's just lay it out really plainly and simply. The banshee (beansidhe -Gaelic, "woman fairy") - a creature of Irish folktale - wails over the desolate, rain-sodden countryside, bespeaking of impeding mortality for s/he who hears it. As a harbinger of imminent death, the banshee was spoken of only in euphemism -hence "woman fairy"- if the need arose to discuss them.

Now: The one thing - THE ONE THING - that distinguishes the banshee from the thousands of other nature sprites is that SHE FECKING WAILS AND THEN YOU DIE. That's her one thing - her "bag", if you will. What this means is this: one cannot "run like a banshee." One cannot "eat a pound of raw hamburger like a banshee." The wind does not "blow like a banshee."

There. Is. Only. One. Thing. Banshees. Do.

Goddamnit, they wail.

Therefore, the ONLY correct usage for the descriptor "... like a banshee" is when speaking of something/someone that is crying, weeping, wailing, or moaning. For all of you who insist on using it for something else - and you all know who you are - I hope your mouths become filled with hot, liquidy hobo-squatting-between-two-parked-cars diarrhea.

Speaking of which...

2) Dignity Pants: A Necessary Evil?

As you all are abundantly aware, I am particular when selecting a locale should the need to evacuate become prescient. In situations where I am ambushed by, say, a lathe-your-tongue-over-the-lake-of-grease pizza or profoundly poorly crafted Chinese food, I am not able to be as selective: countless have been the times when a dimly-lit copse of bushes seemed promising were it not for the vague threat of a closeted smoker intruding upon me in that, one's most natural state.

Now: I work on the third floor of Franklin Hall which, for those of you unfamiliar with Indiana University geography, is an enormous limestone former library building brooding at the terminus of Indiana University property, where the school disgorges itself upon hapless Bloomington and the wanton debauchery of Gomorrah {Kirkwood} Avenue. Franklin Hall houses a great many student services, such as the Bursar, Registrar, Overseas Study, and arguably most importantly, the Largish Plastic Fishbowl Containing Nearly Expired, Gaily Colored Lubricated Condoms. In the belfry of Franklin Hall, the Office of International Services is itself served by two "satellite offices", one for each gender, near the stairwell.

Let's get to the point, shall we? These bathrooms are so profoundly disgusting that I have, in all seriousness, thrown up in my own tender mouth twice.

How could a set of bathrooms that are used primarily by upstanding professional staffpeople (like myself - itself a dark thought) be so ghastly? The stark and simple truth is this: the bathrooms were designed without ventilation. That's right. There is no fan. There is no window. In short, there is no hope tha, at any given point in the day, the tiny bathroom is not going to smell like the twenty dukes which had been extruded previous to your arrival. This problem has become so pronounced in the men's room that one of the 'borgs - ONE OF THE 'BORGS! - bought some "Fresh Linen" Glade spray and scrawled "Do Not Take: Keep in the Bathroom" with a Sharpie over the festive picture of sheets on a clothesline under a bright mid-July sun.
Of course, it was stolen in mere nanoseconds, dooming the rest of us to a fate of breathing out of our mouths for all eternity. I'd thought we'd had it the worst over in Boyland, but one day Alert Life in the Corn Devotee Gwyneth breezed past my office and poked her head in. She was the color of an improperly-treated wound's effluent.

"Going in the third-floor women's room is like walking into a birth canal", she gasped, barely keeping her Healthy Choice lunch at bay.

It was at that moment that I realized that my own misgivings about the men's "satellite office" paled as compared to what surely awaited someone possessed of two X chromosomes. As I pressed her for the details of the forbidden world she was privy to, I became firmly convinced that, without a doubt, the third-floor women's bathroom in Franklin Hall is the portal to Hell itself.

But, at least nobody steals their airspray.

The simple solution is this: dignity pants. The cons are many: you spend an afternoon stewing your delicate underside with your own waste, which may at any point become visible or smelly. It's a good way to ruin a good pair of slacks. It is socially unacceptable unless you have a medical condition or have age-related incontinence. But, think of this: never again would you have to supress your gag reflex to pee or blow your nose or wash your hands! I think that it is worth it, no?

***

It's Sunday night, and the upcoming week yawns ahead of me like a freshly-dug grave. The only light from the abyss is the knowledge that, with the zippy internet connection I've purchased for one of my very own loins, I will be able to 'blog with alarming frequency should I be inspired to do so. And, speaking of "inspiration", I'd like to propose something to you fancy folks.

* Each one of you who reads this 'blog - if you know me! - responds to this post with a quick reminder of the stupidest, lamest or most idiotic thing that you know I have done. It will be part of an ongoing series entitled "Dom is a Pretty Much a Developmentally-Challenged Chimp" -and, depending on how many responses I get, this could be 'blog-fodder for weeks.*

Let's see where this goes!

Until then, I remain,

Domonic

Also: some things I hate.

My morning went something like this:

1) What? You are magically out of nothing but my favorite flavor of bagel AND my favorite flavored cream cheese AND my favorite highly carbonated fructose beverage?

2) Appointment #1: You currently have no visa status; I know this because I, myself, with these kielbasa-sized fingers, ended it last Friday afternoon while listening to Loreena McKennitt on my iTunes because you saw fit to not be enrolled as a student, like, at ALL this semester.

3) Appointment #2: You were hit by a car? Je-SUS.

4) Appointment #3: I see. So, you want me to sit here and watch you fill out the forms we told you to have prepared before your arrival, asking me to cut the little pictures you had taken of yourself for the application AND talk to you about a completely unrelated process for work authorization while simultaneously helping you fill in your incomplete forms? And your breath smells like you've been snacking out of a cat-box and drinking water from drainage ditches? Fantastic.

As the rank shroud of uncharitability envelops me in an icy embrace, I find my interior workings feasting on the putrid carcasses that are the Things I Hate.

First Thing I Hate: "Easy" recipes.

I am going to level with you good people. There are only, say, twenty things that I can cook and have them not resemble, in taste, smell and consistency, untreated human waste.

Before leaving the Republic for Michigan, Alert Life in the Corn devotee Brooke gave me several of her gently-used, redundant cooking implements - as a newlywed, she'd acquired about seventy metric tons of household goods- and among them was a lovely crockpot.

I have watched my sainted mother and countless other people successfully prepare nutritious yet savory meals in one of these devices. As I understood it, you put raw food in, stir, and turn the heat on and wait. This is, apparently, an oversimplification of a possibly complex process and I, in my infinite wisdom, met my culinary doom just the other night at the hands of the Crockpot that Renders Food into Inedible, Viscous Sludge.

It seemed logical enough: take some rice, some meat, plenty of water and sauce and let it warm to perfection overnight. I have seen my mother cook meals over the course of eight hours while she was at work; why wouldn't it work if I was asleep while it was cooking? I awoke at 2 AM to a delicious smell, and I went in to the kitchen to stir my loveliness. At this point, at 2 AM Indiana Time, the food had as of yet to undergo its hideous metamorphosis. When I awoke at 6:20 and hastened to the crockpot, I beheld a putrid, inedible, burned-all-over slurry holding court in my crockpot; I wouldn't have fed that shit to disease-ravaged alley-dogs. The worst part(s)? It still smelled delicious, and it was supposed to have been my contribution to an office potluck that would begin, oh, about five and a half hours from that point.

To answer your questions - and there must be legion - yes, there was enough liquid. Yes, the heat was on low. And yes, the crockpot works properly otherwise. Why, then, did I find myself forcing two pounds of nearly unidentifiable sludge down my disposal at 10 PM last night after I'd chipped most of it out of my crock? Am I a bad cook? Am I too functionally "special" to use a device that has been described as being "so easy to use that one can throw food in and forget it"? Or is it, as I suspect is the case, that having the unholy presence of Markie Post in Greenwood affects the functionality of baser machinery in addition to being the reason that local dogs are forming into feral packs?

Second Thing I Hate: He Whose Name Is Accurs-ed.

I was walking down Kirkwood Avenue two days ago, basking in the 45-degree heat, when I noticed that someone walking ahead of me (about a dozen yards) had a familiar swagger. Since I had been occupied thinking of, oh I dunno, cheese, it took a moment to register who I was seeing.

Yes, it was him. The former roommate and former friend who'd left me $700 in debt and bereft of even a pot in which I would have cooked my food, had he not taken it all. I reflexively opened my mouth and hissed but, realizing I was in public, I ducked into a nearby storefront to hide from him. I don't know precisely why I thought hiding was necessary; I've always wanted a chance to tell him exactly what I think of him, and there was certainly nothing I should have been ashamed about. I wrote him a letter just after he left and never sent it to him a) because he is illiterate and I tend to use "big words" and b) because I didn't want to encounter difficulty with the law. It went something like this:

Dear Diarrhea-Filled Douchebag Diaper-Dumpster,

I hope this letter finds you in the grips of a paralyzing Giardia infestation which renders you utterly unable to frolic beyond the confines of your undoubtedly tastelessly decorated bathroom. Hell, I hope you can't even get off the can, and that consequently hen's egg-sized piles erupt forth from your nether-regions making the mere act of sitting down rather like squatting on a wet grapefruit.

If you were able to feel any humanoid emotions, I would tell you that I am fine, and happier than I have ever been in the entirety of my life. I have a great job, friends who care about me while they are sober, a helvacı kabağı, and I am utterly free of venereal disease. Since you are not, though, I wanted you to know that I - possessed of a soul - believe you to be the shallowest, most reprehensible person I have ever met. I want to meet every woman you date and tell her your "stories", which often end with lubeless sodomy or ruined sheets. I want to meet everyone who admires you and tell them about how you treat your own mother, who loves you more than anything in her life. And I want to meet you just one more time and fling a freshly-extruded duke at your open mouth.

I loathe you with an intensity that, when I think about it hard enough, causes dugongs in the Indian Ocean to bleed from their mammaries. So, think about those poor endangered sea-cows and do them a favor by dropping dead.

All the best,

Dom

Third Thing I Hate: The sorostitute in my anthro class.

Many of you who read my special epistle to that fancy hippie girl will be happy to know that, after the second week of classes, she no longer graces us with her presence. Rumor has it that she's gone to Jamaica to work barefoot in a ganja plantation; with any luck she'll feck up and be beaten with the broad side of a machete until inch-high weals appear on her unwashed buttocks. Anyway, more insidious still is a girl whom I'd previously not noticed in my blind loathing of the wretched hippie pot-priestess: a genuine, true to life sperm-receptacle sorostitute. Her teased, platinum-blonde-highlighted chestnut hair cascades over poofy, shiny coats that have been filled with the soft down from the underbellies of infant harp seals; her skin-tight Lycra pants terminate inside pale pink Ugg boots. In a ten minute presentation last week, she used the word "like" 32 times by my count. The most horrifying part is this:

She's my project partner.

I mean, honestly. In a way, I would have preferred that I'd had hippie girl as my partner for the final project; at least she could be motivated by something other than the thought of keggers and sweaty gropings in the Deke basement on the coats. She's the kind of young woman who is usually described by her actions rather than her name; the phrase "parking my beef bus in tuna town" springs to mind. The worst part is that I know that I will end up doing our entire project myself to spare the horror of her trying to incorporate the only book she's ever read - Charlotte's Web - into a discussion of postmodern tourism and global consumerism. Goddamn she bites it.

Fourth Thing I Hate: Pretentious names for housing complexes.

While I fully agree that, sometimes, truth in advertising is not prudent - after all, who would want to live in the "Treeless, Soulless Cookie-Cutter Subdivision of Stultifyingly White Suburbian Blight"? - giving names to these units like "Fox Glen Manor" and "Pheasant Ridge" and "Buffalo Creek" is irresponsible. This is because I, if I were to live in a place named Pheasant Ridge, would expect to see largish fowl erupting from the weeds on the outskirts of the parking lot or I would feel utterly cheated - let alone if I lived in Pronghorn Promenade or something. Don't exotify (is that a word?) the inane; call a spade a spade.

***

Yesterday, at the (for me) star-crossed potluck, the theme was Mardi Gras. During the merriment, a cake was unveiled to partially satiate the undying hunger our office has for sweets. Into this cake had been baked

four tiny plastic babies

which, apparently, bring luck to s/he who consumes a piece that contains one.

Clearly, even if it took five or six pieces, I simply had to be able to say that a baby had been in my mouth. As we were gently prodding our cake, Alert Life in the Corn Devotee Jenny turns to Molly (not knowing that Molly is aware of the plastic infants) and says

Be careful when you eat the cake.

To which Molly replies:

Oh, because of the babies?

Maybe you had to be there, but cautioning someone from eating cake too quickly because it might contain babies? Why, I about died.

And, after consuming three pieces of cake, I have a plastic baby of my own. His name is Melchior. Oh yes, divine.

Until this weekend, I remain,

Domonic

Epistles from the boy-lair.

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

[muffled bleating; sigh of pleasure]

Shortly before leaving Greenwood for a [much deserved] vacationlet in Columbus (OH) this weekend, the "friendly" and "knowledgeable" sales representative from an unnamed megacorporation

*cough INSIGHT DIGITAL hack*

called to inform us about some changes in our plans to have fast, reliable internet connectivity this week.

Dom: Hello, "Sam."
"Sam": aaaaaaahhhh ah AHHHHHHH STOP PEELING OFF MY FINGERNAILS {silence} Hello?
Dom: "Sam"? Are you all right?
"Sam": Oh, I'm just fine. Look, I'm new at *******, and I didn't give you guys the right pricing structure when I came by last night OH MY GOD THAT'S MY SPLEEN
Dom: Well, shit. What should it have been? "Sam"? Are you there?
"Sam": Let me ask you a question: are you a trust-fund baby?
Dom: Well, let's put it this way. I think I will be collecting any inheritance I get from my family and spending it on a new pair of Blue Light Special K-Mart shoes.
"Sam": HAVEN'T YOU BROKEN ALL OF MY TOES YET {silence} I see. Also, remember how I said that I will have the guy come and do the intallation on Monday? Well, that's no longer an option.
Dom: Why not? And who is breaking your toes?
"Sam": Well, the dude will be busy.
Dom: Breaking your toes?
"Sam": Nah, he'll be down at the goat farm. You know. At the goat farm. {silence} OH GOD HE'S GOT A SCYTHE

*dialtone*

Somewhere in the dark of a late winter's chill, "Sam" paid dearly for his mistake. The pitiless part of me wonders not of whether he'll return some night to his squalid bachelor hovel to feed his cat and betta fish but if the internet hooky-uppy guy will let me play with the scythe, because damn. Part of me admires "Sam's" last stand against Internet Hooky-Uppy Man, but the part of me that wanted to be able to write this very 'blog in the "comfort" of my own home can hear the soulless sound of muffled bleating and a nearly inaudible sigh of pleasure carrying on the wind from the goat farm down the road and sides with Internet Hooky-Uppy Man. If it makes you happy, Internet Hooky-Uppy Man, it can't be that bad. If it makes you happ-eeeeee / Then why the hell are you so ... sad?

***

About a year/ year and a half ago, I was rooting like a Vietnamese potbellied-pig in the mail-room drawers in the office for, oh, I dunno, Wite-Out that doesn't blow, and I came across a homemade button with a young woman's face on it. "Find Me", it said, and listed a phone number. Curiosity being one of my many character flaws, I brought the button to Brooke and asked her if she knew anything about the young woman.

Brooke: "Oh, sure. She disappeared and they found her bones in a field."

I immediately began to laugh so hard that I grew concerned that small blood vessels in my face would explode. To my horror, nobody else - a smallish crowd had now gathered - was laughing. Like, at all. Brooke was looking upon me like I'd just started to clean myself up from raping a kitten. Apparently, she'd been an IU coed, and she'd disappeared whilst jogging. After the spring thaw, authorities discovered a gruesome cache of her osteological remains, much to the horror of the IU community.

And there I was. Laughing like a developmentally challenged sex-offender about it.

In my defense - and this is a warning to you all! - if you slip something like "found her bones in a field" or "coyotes scattered his remains" or "there was a wasp's nest in her skull", I will have to laugh. This is because - and I know this comes as a shock - I am fecked up. So take pity on me and impress the gravity of a story upon me before you one-line it on my ass, OK?

Also: whatever happened to the Vietnamese potbellied-pig thing? Where did they all go? Or is that a question that I, who frequents Chinese restaurants, should shelve?

***

After a sound sleep-in (which was greeted, upon my rising, with a fetid lake of decaying dogpiss – my punishment, I suppose, for the pleasure of a lazy weekend), I went last Saturday in the late AM to the Meijer. For those of you unfamiliar with the Meijer (MAI-err), it’s a gigantic, Rhode Island-sized building that contains a supermarket as well as department store amenities and, frequently, small towns that have been engulfed by the encroaching mega-store. This can be the only explanation for the vast numbers of townies walking around in our local Meijer with curlers in their hair and house-robes girding their ghastly white flesh, beating their dirtbabies with what can only be described as domesticized riding-crops while their husbands eye the Skoal display with watery mouths, themselves clad in flannel pajama bottoms, a sweatshirt proclaiming that “These Colors Don’t Run!” and nicotine-yellowed Budweiser baseball cap.

“How is that different than the goddamn Wal*Mart?” you ask, incredulous that I am speaking of two separate entities. “Or, for that matter, K-Mart, which always looks like London after the Blitz?”

Simplicity itself, devoted few: Meijer is open 24 hours a day!

I get out of my car and begin walking towards the massive, Jurassic Park-like gates (behind which an elderly “Greeter” would determine whether or not you needed to get fogged with pepper spray) thinking about why it was I needed to go there in the first place. The gentle late-January breeze carried the briefest wisp of the unspeakable stench emanating forth from under my arms. Ah, yes: deodorant. Just as I was beginning to remember the name of the chemical that makes my underarms break out like I’d been storing white-hot charcoal briquettes under there, a woman in front of me dropped the ridiculous ear-piece to her wireless headset and kept walking. I scuttled over, daintily grasped the still-warm object, and called out to her to stop. She stopped and turned around and there, in front of the Greenwood Meijer, was

Markie Post.

She smiled and tapped over to me. “I lose this all the time!” she squeaked. “Thanks!”
I could say nothing. I was utterly transfixed by the thought of having touched the earpiece to a ridiculous cellphone appendage that had held court in the ear of a minor celebrity. On the tail of that, with Markie disappearing into the maw of the Meijer in front of me, came three rapid-fire thoughts.

One: Eww. I just touched something that was inside the ear of a minor celebrity.
Two: What the hell is Markie Post doing in Greenwood, Indiana?
Three: Hey, wait a minute – isn’t she, like, dead?

For those of you who may not know who the hell I am talking about, Markie Post was the plucky blonde actress who played the attorney “Christine” in the ‘hit’ show “Night Court.” I’d assumed, until I was standing right there in front of her, that she’d died in a trailer park with a coke spoon jammed halfway up her nose. Apparently, I was wrong. We all were.

I tried to follow her inside to see what Markie Post could possibly be buying at the Meijer. You know, can of tuna, Redbook, celery, Summer’s Eve. But, like a Ding Dong at fat-camp, she disappeared without a trace. Had she really been there? Why would she have chosen me to reveal her awful splendor to the world via my readership? Also, why did the Raid I’d huffed before going smell so damn good?

Until later, I remain,

Domonic