*I give you the gift of the profoundly inane!*
Yet another academic year descended upon the Republic, inserting vile, mucous-filmed eggs within its tender, apple-pie Midwestern sensibility and allowing them to pupate (fed almost entirely on Sbarro pizza and ultra-light, carb-free beer which was consumed via funnel). And, having burst forth from their veiny chrysalises, the larvae stretch their hellish, leathery wings and flap - weaving a bit from the finals week bender - and blink, momentarily blinded by a dazzling world of prospects, ambitious hopes and dreams that they feel sure will guide them to their rightful destinies. Some will leave the battle-ravaged Republic, never to tap their cleft hooves over her broad, vomit-encrusted boulevards again. Years of memories left behind. Endless nights spent pawing a bored date on a pile of beer-reeking coats in a frat-house basement with Full Metal Jacket playing in Portugese on a big-screen TV. Sitting up with your girlfriends after noticing that you are three weeks "late", snotnose-sobbing, hoping that one of them will take seven-goddamn-fifty and buy one of those Kroger-brand pregnancy tests for you so that you won't wrap your Honda Civic around a lamppost whilst weeping uncontrollably with Janis Joplin on the stereo. Eating a tube of cookie dough right out of the wrap in your eleventh-floor dorm room, clad only in your skivvies, while trying to watch Magnolia as the guy in the room next door brings his latest conquest to plateaux of "ribbed for her pleasure" excitement. Trying not to become unnaturally aroused as a beady-faced frat-boy clad entirely in Abercrombie hazes you with a paddle while guiding a goat into the darkened, hushed sanctuary, itself redolent with the heady stench of Right Guard deodorant, unfiltered whiskey and grape cigarillos.
A part of me - the part of me, surely, that fantasizes about getting into a barfight so that I can bust a bottle of suds over the bar, brandishing the neck and jagged end menacingly - has often wondered what it would have been like to have had a more "mainstream" college experience. Then, the part of me that thanks the swaddled infant Jesus that I don't have to keep my eye out for "flareups" signalled by undergarment leakage heaves a sigh of relief. I like that I can, if need be, recall my entire college experience without hypnotherapy and Andean narcotics. But is it somehow an American rite of passage to have taken the road more trafficked? Is college a Victor Turner-styled state of liminality? Should I sisterfeckin' care? What I do know is this:
I should NOT have consumed that half-gallon of polyurethane I found in the garage.
***
Had I not been waiting on tenterhooks for it to happen, I wouldn't have even known it was in progress at all until the last, ghastly moment. And the fourteen and 3/4 minutes afterward.
I'd carefull observed her feeding the small child in question for a good half-hour as I myself consumed a hastily, and guiltily, procured Chick-Fil-A lunch near the security screening portion of Indianapolis International Airport. As I masticated my admittedly delightful treat, I watched in mute horror as a twentysomething woman crammed a
goddamn breakfast burrito
down the unfortunate four-year-old creature's swelling esophagus. He would begin to quietly weep after each bite, which clearly indicated that she should twist off another piece for the nearly-desperate toddler. By the time it was gone, the child's stomach had distended visibly; his feet were a hellish blue color because his pants were completely cutting off his circulation. When they'd both finished, she got up, took the child's clammy hand and led him through the food court to the security checkpoint and into parts unknown.
Unknown, that is, until they sat in the seats directly behind me on a regional flight from Indianapolis to Cincinnati.
When she breezed past me into the her seat, I recognized her from her perfume rather than by sight; I was quite taken with my single-minded perusal of the Sky Mall Magazine and had become utterly convinced that I, too, needed a $150 cigar-tip cutter that resembles a guillotine, complete with a silver-inlay basket for the "head", despite the fact that I believe that most cigars smell as though one has permitted the hairs on a whore's undercarriage to become immolated. Her perfume was, in my humble opinion, too mature for her - it was old-lady-singing-bad-soprano-off-key-in-church bad, and I'd mentally commented on it whilst witnessing her grim act in the food court. I turned around and there they were - proud mother with her Gap sweater-set resting perhaps a little too snugly over her bosoms and her child, eyes still puffy with tears, buckled into his seat and staring at me, silently begging for my intercession.
I became distracted then as my seatmate arrived and took his place by the window. He, too, had a distinctive smell. Imagine, if you will, sitting in a small car. Let's pretend it's a Gremlin for argument's sake. Then, you take out a Marlboro "red" cigarette and light it. Mind you, the windows are rolled all the way up. You smoke it down to the filter and light another with the cherry. You smoke that one, too. Then another. I'd say at the five-smoke marker you'd start getting nicotine poisoning, but I could be wrong, so we will say five for the time being. Then, you recline in your chair and fall asleep for about six hours, fully-clothed. Upon waking, the process is repeated again, except this time one then exits the vehicle, takes the shuttle to the terminal, spends a little quality time in the barely ventilated smoker's lounge, and then boards an aircraft the width and breadth of a Canadian goose. Next to me. Next to me, with your oily mullet glinting harshly in the light of the cat-bladder-sized porthole, your rather gargantuan, bling-ilk rhinestone Jesus-cross earring set softly amidst a week and a half of unkempt whiskers, your rough, nicotine-yellowed fingers grasping for purchase on the little valve that releases a brisk, "fresh" stream of cool air, filling the cabin with your skunky man-sweat and other, unique, aromas.
I had begun to supplicate in earnest that he wouldn't begin to speak to me when, as it became apparent that my prayers would go unanswered this fine day, he turned to me and took off his CD headset blaring Creedence Clearwater Revival at decible levels usually reserved for describing construction site ruckus.
Shiny Mullet Man: Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior?
Me: Xin zhuang de fan guang liang luo chan qing ma?
SMM: Wha?
Me: Senden nefret ediyorum, veya sen Şeytanlıktır.
SMM: Ah don' follow.
Me: Ex umbris in luce.
He gave me a final, distrustful glance and returned to a rousing chorus of "...don't go roun' tonight/ cuz it's bound to take your liiiiiii-iife/ there's a bad moon on the rise."
The craft lurched forth from the gate, taxied, and thrust itself into the sodden skies. I'd, by this point, begun to get a contact buzz from my seatmate and was fairly bleary when, ten minutes into our - get this - twentyfour minute flight when, from the vicinity of the back of my head I heard the child. The child was coughing - ragged, consumptive whoops - and, upon his final heave, there was an accompanying wet sound rather like the sound one would make pulling ones clenched fist out of a Mason jar filled with lukewarm oatmeal. The mother began a nearly autistic mantra of "It's gonna be OK, it's gonna be OK."
I didn't turn around. I didn't need to, as the high stench of the child's last meal crept insidiously throughout the back of the aircraft. The flight attendant, liberated from her duties of serving an in-flight snack or drink by the sheer brevity of the flight, came bombing up the aisle with a motion discomfort sack. It was too late. The mother, perhaps anticipating that filling a child's gullet with a flour tortilla, sausage, cheese and egg like a French chef force-feeding a pâté goose moments before boarding a bumpy regional jet was unwise, had already procured a barfbag and had deftly utilized it. The flight attendant collected it and disposed of it, but not before carrying it slowly (no spills) throughout the entire aircraft. The next fourteen minutes were spent in sepulchral silence as everyone on the craft went to the place where mind really does influence matter so that we, too, didn't feel the need to empty the contents of our stomachs. My Chick-Fil-A lunch sloshed about but kept, and when the doors were opened I trampled a nun to get the hell off, leaving my two fragrant friends to their own devices.
I'd just begun to convince myself that I'd paid whatever karmic debt I'd owed when a creature came over the loudspeaker of the "stumpjumper" section of the Delta terminal. Apparently, they had overbooked a 40 passenger flight BY SEVEN PEOPLE and were kindly asking for volunteers to take a later flight. Ordinarily, I might have been interested - usually you could muscle them for a free roundtrip ticket if you were pissed enough - but the later flight would have had me getting into Bangor at midnight instead of 5 PM and, selfishly, I wanted as much time on board the mothership as humanly possible. They then began the process of bumping, and I became aware that they were going to be bumping a young, Aryan Pentacostal family of five - father, mother, and three very young children. The mother, poofy bangs a'flapping, denim skirt whipping around her torso, began to have a complete breakdown right there at the desk, shrieking like an impaled gibbon. It was a piteous scene, but as she strayed further and further from her outwardly Christian upbringing (the phrase "You Delta bastards are cold, heartless motherf*ckers" is burned into my memory clearly), I began to have somewhat less compassion. As I boarded, she was there at the exit, begging people for their seats like it was the last chopper out of Saigon. "Doesn't anyone care that I have three small children? Someone is waiting at the airport for us!" she wailed, pulling at her impossibly long tresses. Two young black women were walking to the craft behind me, and as we got on the plane one turned to the other. "She should have just closed her legs, mmm-hmm."
It turns out that, magically, they did manage to get on the plane after all, and at Bangor an elderly woman with graying bangs and an equally impressive denim skirt was waiting for them.
Thus began four days in Maine, time which was to be spent at *gasp!* my sister's UMaine commencement and other family functions, like the all-important pilgrimage to Bar Harbor and Belfast. It was really great to see my mother and sister, my father and my uncles and aunts, my grandmother and my savage she-beast, Po (the cat), but it was the bracelet I'd made of Valium and street barbituates that made it all tolerable.
Hahahaha! Just kidding, family members who read this! Maybe!
***
Last night I awoke, bathed in my own brine, from a dream. In it, I was again nine years old and filled with youth, vitality and a nearly palpable desire to see
the unicorn at the Barnum and Bailey circus.
The three rings lay before me, many of which were being cleansed of mammal effluvia by men who clearly were thinking about where the hell their lives had taken THAT turn, and the ringleader was announcing that, very soon, we would all be in the presence of magic: a real, live unicorn! I was nearly urinating upon myself with excitement. Would I be able to touch it, or would it only approach young virginal girls? What did it eat? And, where could I find a golden lasso?
A young woman, clad in a flowy, Enya-esque gown, then guided a knee-high, white creature into the center ring. True, it did have a single horn. But as it lifted its tail and began to shit tiny pellets while bleating, I became acutely aware that I'd been had. It was a fecking goat. In real life, I'd probably wept whilst feeling the last bit of my childhood elp away into the gray, grim world of reality, but in my dream I stood up and began to scream to whomever would listen that it was, indeed, a sistertouching goat whose horn buds had been surgically altered to grow together. As men came to sedate me, I awoke in my room in Greenwood, my soulless cat mewling at my door for his pitiful breakfast. I realized that I have never, in the entirety of my life, been so profoundly disappointed. The part of me that knew that the unicorn wasn't real had been effectively crushed by flashy advertising.
Damn, I need a beer. And, perhaps, a support group.
***
As our office begins to transition towards thoughts of the insensate evil that is Fall Orientation and the arrival of a thousand needy, panicked and obsessive-compulsive international students, I personally arrived at the conclusion that our office has need of but one thing:
A deus ex machina.
Literally "god from the machine" in my cherished Latin, a deus ex machina was a pulley set up on stage in many Greco-Roman plays used when the situation had become so bizarre and unsolveable that only a god or goddess could intercede. The actor would be lowered onto the stage, the god or goddess would pronounce the solution and, magically, things would become OK.
What I envision is this:
Suppose for a moment that it's an ordinary workday. A student comes in and, to put it politely, s/he has royally effed themselves in the a. S/he begins to argue with the poor Front Desk worker and, as this is happening, forty more people enter and expect to be helped in a timely fashion. What the Front Desk could then do is press a special button, alerting one of us to don our special god/goddess toga/chiton. Then the selected advisor would be lowered gracefully from the ceiling to the Front Desk holding a magical, blue-writing SEVIS pen. Judgement would be passed, the gathered students would be in awe and would be filled with enough wonder to sit down and shut their traps until their names are called, and the aforementioned student would have their situation sorted by the most appropriate person in the office.
And, there would be enough glue to huff beforehand for all. I don't see how this idea could fail, but I suppose an alternative that doesn't require us to be suspended from the ceiling would be a good old-fashioned Catholic-style confessional. I will keep you all posted on developments.
***
In two days I will be in Montreal, attending the National Conference for NAFSA, a professional development organization for foreign student and study abroad and international admissions/recruitment advisor folk. What this means is that, for the first time, I will be able to blog
FROM A FOREIGN COUNTRY.
Oh yes. And, while I am slightly dismayed that I will be surrounded by the Dread Language for a week, Quebequois (sp?) French is somehow much less evil - and now that I can read it, I will be able to, perhaps, not completely jank myself up should I get some small opportunity to actually get out into the city.
Rest assured, those who still actually read this, that I will - now that I am freed from my class - be able to blog more consistently.
Until next time, I remain,
Domonic
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