The world is a terrifying place. As if spending your day attempting to not be run down by a bus only to be transformed into hundreds of quivering lumps of gore, staying away from picture windows during tornandos so that you don't magically become impaled through your torso with a pane of glass or waiting that enchanting full hour before swimming after eating a large meal weren't enough, the people who inhabit The Land of the Morning Calm posit that there exists a closer-to-home, more insidious way to perish. Namely, uh:
Leaving your fan on in your room while you are sleeping.
Called (in an example of overtly ingenious naming) "fan-death", this phenomenon is ascribed to have been the vehicle of gross mortality for, ahem, HUNDREDS of ordinary LotMC-dwellers.
"Domonic", you ask innocently from the comfort of your home, where odds are that at least one of these lethal devices now holds court, "how is it that an ordinary electric fan, an invention that has helped thousand of people survive Parisian heatwaves, Roman siroccos and pavement-baked New York afternoons that cause birds on the wing to burst into oily flame and make nuns curse openly in the street, kill you? I mean, other than if you lick the socket while it is plugged in." I would then laugh openly at your puerile naivite and shake my head, noting sadly that your infantile ignorance will inevitably cost your own sweet life. For, as dozens of LotMC physicians - frikkin' doctors, you shet-bags - have attested, leaving a fan on while you sleep can snuff you by:
1) Creating a vacuum in your room by removing the oxygen in your room, thereby suffocating you slowly until you, weary and already given to slumber, take the Big Dirt Nap.
2) Gradually lowering your body temperature until you perish, a la "Jack" in Titanic, from hypothermia and exposure. Except, um, "Corset" Kate Winslet isn't there to mourn you.
3) Dramatically increasing, in that small space, the amount of lethal carbon dioxide until you perish from poisoning.
Fancy, no? I think this bears repeating: dozens of reputable physicians in the Land of the Morning Calm feel very strongly that leaving a fan on when you are sleeping can, and will, kill you.
Now, before my good, sweet Italian name is sullied with accusation that I am an ethnocentrist, an Occidentalist or worse, I will remind my precious reading public of these key facts about myself:
* I have a Bachelor's Degree in (Socio-Cultural) Anthropology.
* I am a thesis away from a Master's Degree in Central Eurasian Studies.
* I lived on the Asian continent for five months.
* I am currently a foreign student advisor for nearly three thousand international students.
* So.
* Shet.
* The Feck.
* Ep.
***
Recently I discovered that I am, indeed, not alone in a small, personal Hell of my own making. Namely, I've discovered that someone I know ALSO lays awake at night, face burning and guts roiling, remembering how in third grade one vomited the contents of one's stomach (Campbell's Chicken Noodle Petrochemical Substance) in the middle of the floor of the classroom and discovering, to one's horror, that one the noodles was to be found elping out one's nostrils like a moray eel peeking out from a reefy hiding spot. In front of EVERY-FECKING-ONE. Or something like that. Yeah. That never happened to me. No-siree-Bob.
*humming*
Anyway, I've found a psychological trick to help me get rid of the memory once and for all while providing myself intense amusement. It's called
the retroactive Uzi
and I encourage you all to try it.
How this works is simplictity itself: Let's say that you are finding yourself in the grips of a memory so shameful that you are wondering if you deserve the wicked life you now lead. What you do is you envision, at the most hideously embarassing moment of the memory (the part where you pee on yourself, for example), YOURSELF, as you are now, bursting into the room with an Israeli-issued Uzi. Then, your present self sets forth to mow down the old self in a hail of molten lead and, finding the work done, departs. Nobody else is even wounded, but they all - all of your "friends" who sniggered and pointed and whispered behind your back - rush to your aid and snotnose-weep for your safety. You make a miraculous recovery, but not before all of the people who witnessed your shameful deed have fully erased the memory of it from their minds. You see, it's not that it's awful to carry these secret shames around yourself, but the thought that someone, somewhere, remembers the time you shat your pants in the New York Museum of Natural History on a field trip that makes you want to chew a revolver. Now you won't have to.
You're welcome.
(This portion of the blog is dedicated to yengeyim K.C., who laughed at this idea last week despite the fact that, deep down, I know she lies awake at night for a different reason now.)
Until next time,
Domonic (amIaproductofpoorgenetics?) Potorti
Thursday, June 29, 2006
Sunday, June 25, 2006
Orta Levrek Adası'ndayım.
"I'm on Middle Bass Island."
Adrift in Lake Erie within full sight of Canada, I just wanted to take a moment to BLOG FROM A FREAKIN' ISLAND, as I have never done so.
Unless you count Montreal. Dammit. But you don't have to ride a ferry to get to Montreal! That's something!
[i've stolen my own thunder]
Until Tuesdayish, I remain,
Domonic (goingtoswiminLakeEriedespitethestories) Potorti
Adrift in Lake Erie within full sight of Canada, I just wanted to take a moment to BLOG FROM A FREAKIN' ISLAND, as I have never done so.
Unless you count Montreal. Dammit. But you don't have to ride a ferry to get to Montreal! That's something!
[i've stolen my own thunder]
Until Tuesdayish, I remain,
Domonic (goingtoswiminLakeEriedespitethestories) Potorti
Monday, June 19, 2006
The gateway to Hell is through a pet's ass.
6:15 PM
I broach my home, weary from a long drive and a longer day in the office, to an awaiting silence. Sepulchral silence. Cheesy horror movie where the scantily-clad coed is going down to "check on the pilot light" in the dank basement silence. This strikes me as being fairly unusual, as my developmentally delayed cat usually greets me at the door and, drawing his gut into his tiny ribcage for maximum effect, politely reminds me that I have but one duty each lovely evening: providing him with his starvation-rations of kitten chow, delivered via quarter-cup scoop to his awaiting maw.
No kitten to be found.
No whippet to be found.
For one glorious moment I envision a reality where they've managed to simultaneously kill and eat each other, leaving no trace of their existence save their pitiful, still-warm collars on the kitchen floor. I smile inwardly, and perhaps outwardly, as I make my way into the living room.
Now, had this been a made-for-TV slasher flick, one would imagine screaming at me through the glare of your television screen and I, heedless to your advice, carry to fruition my date with destiny.
Today, I was to discover, "destiny" is spelled g i a n t m o u n d o f s t e a m i n g d o g s h e t.
I gazed upon it (them? there had to be, like, nine turds) and felt all of the hairs on my body stand on end, a phenomenon I have heard is associated with the moment before one is corporeally consumed by a thunderbolt. I felt one of the smaller blood vessels in my eye quietly give, momentarily clouding my vision.
Once I had regained some of my composure, I began to assess the scene in an analysis remarkably akin to those one might see on one of those late-night Court TV shows - you know, the ones about how they caught a man who ate dead women's skin.
Composition: fecal extrusions.
How many: nine to twelve; it was dark in there.
Culprit: dog.
Perhaps most sinister was that there was a clearly discernable scatter pattern: not only was the dog walking while performing the necessary but it was clear that the
cat had played with the nuggets
[ ! ]
In a sad kind of way, you had to admire the cat's ennui: in a house full of things for him to play with, he felt the pressing need to frolic about with naturally-processed dogfood nubs. As I frantically searched under the raised furniture for some that could have been batted underneath, dry-heaving the whole time, I managed to glimpse out of the corner of my eye of a patch of brindle.
The culprit. Hiding. A forty-five pound dog trying to hide in a house the size of a Good 'N' Plenty box. Yes: clearly that was going to work.
As I brought him out from his hiding place to bring him outside for his ten minute breath of fresh air for the evening, I carried him to the scene of the crime.
As he beheld his massive shet cairn, a look that might have been guilt flashed through his brown eyes. It was, however, immediately replaced by something darker, something I couldn't recognize immediately. Something more primitive and base, to be sure; in it I heard the high call of the wolf over the permafrosted tundra, sending daggers of anxiety into the marrow of ptarmigans and snowshoe hares and driving those with the cleft hoof into the relative safety of more open ground. Something in that look said "Whaddya gonna do about it, betch? Huh?"
Lock you in fekkin' puppy-jail, that's what, deck.
As my blood pressure returned to a level where I didn't have a white halo in my peripheral vision, I began to feel a measure of disquiet that welled up from within me.
They say that, in the weeks before Mount Vesuvius blew its pumice-filled head off, chickens had refused to lay and were found to be standing completely still on their roosts. Horses reared in their stalls for no apparent reason, dogs were gnawing patches of their own coats off and fishermen were having to travel more than a mile into the Bay of Naples for even the rankest of trash-fish.
Yeah, something like that.
Hey, I thought. What's that smell? And why is it coming from the laundry room, where the cat box is ensconsed?
As I entered he unholy room, I was greeted by - you guessed it! - a shet cairn. A gigantic CAT shet cairn. Balthazar, unwilling to use the nice, new organic dust-free litter I'd taken pains to find, had decided that, surely, the best option would be to
duke all over the paw-mat
Did I mention that I love our pets?
Now, I knew the cat would be harder to find; Satan can, after all, fit on the head of a pin. I concluded that the only way I would be able to draw him out to face his sentencing would be to utilize the only thing he respects: his food. Shaking the bag gingerly, I watched as he emerged, covered in dust and hair, from a cleverly-concealed lair under my bed. I picked him up and brought him to the laundry room, where the coils still held their rank court. I brought him very close to them - close enough for him to smell them - and then carried him to Kedi Hapishanesi (Kitty Jail). He knew he'd been bad. There was no throaty weeping. There was no writing to senators. Hell, he even traded himself for a pack of smokes.
As I cleansed their messes with products that were originally meant to strip rust off the hulls of ships, I had to marvel at their ingenuity. The cat had done it because he wanted his old litter back and because he is evil in the flesh, but the dog had just...thought it was fun? I mean, I stood at 6:45 this morning and watched him take a dump. How was there anything left? Had they coordinated it to amuse themselves? Why me? What have I done to deserve this?
And perhaps most important:
When does that Romany caravan come through town?
Until later, I remain,
Domonic (uptohisarmpitsinmammaleffluvia) Potorti
I broach my home, weary from a long drive and a longer day in the office, to an awaiting silence. Sepulchral silence. Cheesy horror movie where the scantily-clad coed is going down to "check on the pilot light" in the dank basement silence. This strikes me as being fairly unusual, as my developmentally delayed cat usually greets me at the door and, drawing his gut into his tiny ribcage for maximum effect, politely reminds me that I have but one duty each lovely evening: providing him with his starvation-rations of kitten chow, delivered via quarter-cup scoop to his awaiting maw.
No kitten to be found.
No whippet to be found.
For one glorious moment I envision a reality where they've managed to simultaneously kill and eat each other, leaving no trace of their existence save their pitiful, still-warm collars on the kitchen floor. I smile inwardly, and perhaps outwardly, as I make my way into the living room.
Now, had this been a made-for-TV slasher flick, one would imagine screaming at me through the glare of your television screen and I, heedless to your advice, carry to fruition my date with destiny.
Today, I was to discover, "destiny" is spelled g i a n t m o u n d o f s t e a m i n g d o g s h e t.
I gazed upon it (them? there had to be, like, nine turds) and felt all of the hairs on my body stand on end, a phenomenon I have heard is associated with the moment before one is corporeally consumed by a thunderbolt. I felt one of the smaller blood vessels in my eye quietly give, momentarily clouding my vision.
Once I had regained some of my composure, I began to assess the scene in an analysis remarkably akin to those one might see on one of those late-night Court TV shows - you know, the ones about how they caught a man who ate dead women's skin.
Composition: fecal extrusions.
How many: nine to twelve; it was dark in there.
Culprit: dog.
Perhaps most sinister was that there was a clearly discernable scatter pattern: not only was the dog walking while performing the necessary but it was clear that the
cat had played with the nuggets
[ ! ]
In a sad kind of way, you had to admire the cat's ennui: in a house full of things for him to play with, he felt the pressing need to frolic about with naturally-processed dogfood nubs. As I frantically searched under the raised furniture for some that could have been batted underneath, dry-heaving the whole time, I managed to glimpse out of the corner of my eye of a patch of brindle.
The culprit. Hiding. A forty-five pound dog trying to hide in a house the size of a Good 'N' Plenty box. Yes: clearly that was going to work.
As I brought him out from his hiding place to bring him outside for his ten minute breath of fresh air for the evening, I carried him to the scene of the crime.
As he beheld his massive shet cairn, a look that might have been guilt flashed through his brown eyes. It was, however, immediately replaced by something darker, something I couldn't recognize immediately. Something more primitive and base, to be sure; in it I heard the high call of the wolf over the permafrosted tundra, sending daggers of anxiety into the marrow of ptarmigans and snowshoe hares and driving those with the cleft hoof into the relative safety of more open ground. Something in that look said "Whaddya gonna do about it, betch? Huh?"
Lock you in fekkin' puppy-jail, that's what, deck.
As my blood pressure returned to a level where I didn't have a white halo in my peripheral vision, I began to feel a measure of disquiet that welled up from within me.
They say that, in the weeks before Mount Vesuvius blew its pumice-filled head off, chickens had refused to lay and were found to be standing completely still on their roosts. Horses reared in their stalls for no apparent reason, dogs were gnawing patches of their own coats off and fishermen were having to travel more than a mile into the Bay of Naples for even the rankest of trash-fish.
Yeah, something like that.
Hey, I thought. What's that smell? And why is it coming from the laundry room, where the cat box is ensconsed?
As I entered he unholy room, I was greeted by - you guessed it! - a shet cairn. A gigantic CAT shet cairn. Balthazar, unwilling to use the nice, new organic dust-free litter I'd taken pains to find, had decided that, surely, the best option would be to
duke all over the paw-mat
Did I mention that I love our pets?
Now, I knew the cat would be harder to find; Satan can, after all, fit on the head of a pin. I concluded that the only way I would be able to draw him out to face his sentencing would be to utilize the only thing he respects: his food. Shaking the bag gingerly, I watched as he emerged, covered in dust and hair, from a cleverly-concealed lair under my bed. I picked him up and brought him to the laundry room, where the coils still held their rank court. I brought him very close to them - close enough for him to smell them - and then carried him to Kedi Hapishanesi (Kitty Jail). He knew he'd been bad. There was no throaty weeping. There was no writing to senators. Hell, he even traded himself for a pack of smokes.
As I cleansed their messes with products that were originally meant to strip rust off the hulls of ships, I had to marvel at their ingenuity. The cat had done it because he wanted his old litter back and because he is evil in the flesh, but the dog had just...thought it was fun? I mean, I stood at 6:45 this morning and watched him take a dump. How was there anything left? Had they coordinated it to amuse themselves? Why me? What have I done to deserve this?
And perhaps most important:
When does that Romany caravan come through town?
Until later, I remain,
Domonic (uptohisarmpitsinmammaleffluvia) Potorti
Sunday, June 18, 2006
[there is usually a subject line here]
Taken near dusk on a Montreal back-street, this painting on the side of a building near some sort of sketchy park has an explanation, or at least a poem of some kind, next to it. Even though I could probably muddle through the French, I decided that I feel that the mystique of the Vulture Saint (in the proclaimed City of Saints) was its allure. More on Montreal in a moment. 
Frenchman Bay and the Porcupine Islands, off the coast of Maine. The little hamlet you see nestled into the bay is none other than Bar Harbor.
Some people wonder why I miss home as much as I do. Maybe this will serve to help explain.
Domonic, Lord of the North Atlantic. Taken off Belfast, Maine.
Montreal's "Centre-ville", or downtown. You can (if you click to enlarge) clearly see the Chinatown Holiday Inn, pagoda-roofs and all. I have to say: the town really grew on me, and I'm hoping it won't be long before I can return.
Bruthah needs his poutine, oui?
Balthazar, Ruiner of Worlds. His look of quiet desperation says less of "Please, good sir, let me scamper forth from my bondage" and more of "Betch, when I get out I am gonna kill you myself, shet-bag."
Moments after the clothes hamper was lifted, he killed and dined upon a hapless tot.
Until next time, I remain,
Domonic (getshispetsfromNativeAmericancemeteries) Potorti
Friday, June 16, 2006
I'm gonna betch-slap you, shet-bag.
*I will preface this by saying that none of this NONE OF THIS is made-up.*
10:30, Friday night, less than two months ago
Preparing to settle down for a pre-weekend slumber, I lope into the kitchen to plug my cellphone in so that it may become charged during the night. I notice with some curiosity that the "you've got a goddamn message" light has been set a'blinkin', and when I open the phone I see that someone has tried to call me FIVE TIMES in the span of an hour. Further research reveals that it's the same number all five times, all with a Bloomington area-code. Alarmed that someone I know in Bloomington was trying to contact me for something so important as to warrant five calls in an hour, I open up my voicemail.
"You have two unheard messages", the cyber-chick crooned. "First unheard message sent Friday, May XX, at 10:14 PM."
At this point I'd braced myself for the unimaginable. Who's hurt? Was there a natural disaster? Who needs a kidney? Is there martial law? Instead, a South Asian voice comes on the line:
"Hello Domonic, this is (blah blah). I forgot to pick up my I-20 today and I am leaving tomorrow for home. Is there any way you can come to the office and meet me so that I can get it? Thanks a lot."
*click*
I stood there in my darkened kitchen, completely poleaxed, for about five minutes. My first instinct was to think that I'd been pranked; the "student" said his name too quickly, which led me to believe that it was made up. But oh, wait! There was another message! Maybe it would solve the riddle!
"Second unheard message, sent Friday, May XX at 10:25 PM." Here we go.
"Hello Domonic, I am sorry to call you again but I really need my I-20. I am going home to Xxxxx tomorrow morning. I really need my I-20."
So, it was true: a student of mine had found my
UNLISTED CELLPHONE NUMBER
and was calling me at my home
FORTY MILES FROM BLOOMINGTON
to try to persuade me to enter Franklin Hall at 10:30 at night to give him his non-immigrant documents because he'd fecked up and not gotten them from us sooner. I was seeing stars. So, I did what any rational person would: there, in my darkened kitchen at 10:40 at night, I called the little wanker.
Wanky little international student: Hello?
Me: Hello, this is Domonic.
WLIS: Yeah, I need my I-20.
Me: You can't be serious.
WLIS: What do you mean?
Me: So, having had weeks to get this from us before you left, you call me at 10:30 at night to see if I can give it to you?
WLIS: Yes.
Me: I see.
WLIS: I really need it.
Me: Let's skip to the really important question: this is an unlisted cellphone number that perhaps only twenty people in this world have. How did you get it?
WLIS: (pause)
Me: I see. Well, I can't give it to you.
WLIS: Why not, man?
Me: I don't live in Bloomington. I live FORTY MILES AWAY and it is TEN FORTY AT NIGHT.
WLIS: But I could meet you at Franklin Hall.
This goes on for some time and I, usually composed and patient, begin to lose it a little bit. Now, I am quite used to demanding students, but this was just a little too much. The icy cold thought of how he'd come to find my number - which, as I mentioned, is unlisted and unpublished - gave me pause. What else could he know?
Keith didn't help the situation by suggesting that we "go lock our doors" so that the student wouldn't come to "slash our throats in the night." OK, so the slashing of the throats thing was my own interior monologue. I told the student what he needed to do the next day at the airport and asked him, as politely as I could, to never use that number again and hung up with him.
11 AM the next morning, my phone rings.
WLIS: Hi, I am at the airport now.
Me: Didn't we have the discussion wherein I told you to never use this number again?
WLIS: But I don't have my I-20.
Me: I am aware of that.
WLIS: But I need it.
My blood pressure quietly tripled. Again, I told him what he needed to do (and getting a betch-slap from me was high on the list) and bid him a final adieu.
I guess the whole unnerving part of it all was that one of the things that I relish about this job -one of many, as I really do love my work - is that I don't take it home with me. Once I open the door to the Boy Lair, my workday disappears and I am left with my maks, my cat, my books and good company. I am no longer He Who Makes the I-20s but am, instead, He Who Really Likes Golden Girl Reruns. And the irrational part of me saw those calls as an invasion of my privacy, the part of my life where I am wholly in charge.
It's my turf.
Choo gonna come on my turf?
I'm gonna cut'choo, betch. Cut'choo hard.
***
Well, that was cathartic. You all (and by 'you all' I mean 'the three people who still read this') probably think I am a heartless bastard for not getting into my car, driving forty miles in the middle of the night and broaching Franklin Hall to help the little douche. For you, I extend my assurances that you are complete decks.
Domonic (gonnaflytoXxxxxtobetch-slaptheshet-bag) Potorti
10:30, Friday night, less than two months ago
Preparing to settle down for a pre-weekend slumber, I lope into the kitchen to plug my cellphone in so that it may become charged during the night. I notice with some curiosity that the "you've got a goddamn message" light has been set a'blinkin', and when I open the phone I see that someone has tried to call me FIVE TIMES in the span of an hour. Further research reveals that it's the same number all five times, all with a Bloomington area-code. Alarmed that someone I know in Bloomington was trying to contact me for something so important as to warrant five calls in an hour, I open up my voicemail.
"You have two unheard messages", the cyber-chick crooned. "First unheard message sent Friday, May XX, at 10:14 PM."
At this point I'd braced myself for the unimaginable. Who's hurt? Was there a natural disaster? Who needs a kidney? Is there martial law? Instead, a South Asian voice comes on the line:
"Hello Domonic, this is (blah blah). I forgot to pick up my I-20 today and I am leaving tomorrow for home. Is there any way you can come to the office and meet me so that I can get it? Thanks a lot."
*click*
I stood there in my darkened kitchen, completely poleaxed, for about five minutes. My first instinct was to think that I'd been pranked; the "student" said his name too quickly, which led me to believe that it was made up. But oh, wait! There was another message! Maybe it would solve the riddle!
"Second unheard message, sent Friday, May XX at 10:25 PM." Here we go.
"Hello Domonic, I am sorry to call you again but I really need my I-20. I am going home to Xxxxx tomorrow morning. I really need my I-20."
So, it was true: a student of mine had found my
UNLISTED CELLPHONE NUMBER
and was calling me at my home
FORTY MILES FROM BLOOMINGTON
to try to persuade me to enter Franklin Hall at 10:30 at night to give him his non-immigrant documents because he'd fecked up and not gotten them from us sooner. I was seeing stars. So, I did what any rational person would: there, in my darkened kitchen at 10:40 at night, I called the little wanker.
Wanky little international student: Hello?
Me: Hello, this is Domonic.
WLIS: Yeah, I need my I-20.
Me: You can't be serious.
WLIS: What do you mean?
Me: So, having had weeks to get this from us before you left, you call me at 10:30 at night to see if I can give it to you?
WLIS: Yes.
Me: I see.
WLIS: I really need it.
Me: Let's skip to the really important question: this is an unlisted cellphone number that perhaps only twenty people in this world have. How did you get it?
WLIS: (pause)
Me: I see. Well, I can't give it to you.
WLIS: Why not, man?
Me: I don't live in Bloomington. I live FORTY MILES AWAY and it is TEN FORTY AT NIGHT.
WLIS: But I could meet you at Franklin Hall.
This goes on for some time and I, usually composed and patient, begin to lose it a little bit. Now, I am quite used to demanding students, but this was just a little too much. The icy cold thought of how he'd come to find my number - which, as I mentioned, is unlisted and unpublished - gave me pause. What else could he know?
Keith didn't help the situation by suggesting that we "go lock our doors" so that the student wouldn't come to "slash our throats in the night." OK, so the slashing of the throats thing was my own interior monologue. I told the student what he needed to do the next day at the airport and asked him, as politely as I could, to never use that number again and hung up with him.
11 AM the next morning, my phone rings.
WLIS: Hi, I am at the airport now.
Me: Didn't we have the discussion wherein I told you to never use this number again?
WLIS: But I don't have my I-20.
Me: I am aware of that.
WLIS: But I need it.
My blood pressure quietly tripled. Again, I told him what he needed to do (and getting a betch-slap from me was high on the list) and bid him a final adieu.
I guess the whole unnerving part of it all was that one of the things that I relish about this job -one of many, as I really do love my work - is that I don't take it home with me. Once I open the door to the Boy Lair, my workday disappears and I am left with my maks, my cat, my books and good company. I am no longer He Who Makes the I-20s but am, instead, He Who Really Likes Golden Girl Reruns. And the irrational part of me saw those calls as an invasion of my privacy, the part of my life where I am wholly in charge.
It's my turf.
Choo gonna come on my turf?
I'm gonna cut'choo, betch. Cut'choo hard.
***
Well, that was cathartic. You all (and by 'you all' I mean 'the three people who still read this') probably think I am a heartless bastard for not getting into my car, driving forty miles in the middle of the night and broaching Franklin Hall to help the little douche. For you, I extend my assurances that you are complete decks.
Domonic (gonnaflytoXxxxxtobetch-slaptheshet-bag) Potorti
Wednesday, June 14, 2006
You, good sir, are the Prime Minister of Douchebagistan.
~offhand comment I made today
Balthazar, the Savage, Developmentally-Delayed Asthmatic Cat: The Miniseries, Part II
Picture it: Three-thirty in the morning, not a soul in sight. City's looking like a ghost town on a moonlit summer night.
OH MY GOD NO NOT GARTH BROOKS LYRICS SAVE ME SWEET ANGEL GABRIEL NOOOOO
One of the night vets - a lithe young thing, fresh out of vet school no doubt - staggered into the sterile room panting, her eyes lolling about in her head like two vast, unripe martini olives. I looked up from my circa-2001 People Magazine ("Is Britney really a virgin?") and saw that she was completely covered with crimson gore, which had begun to clot and clump untidily. It was two in the morning three Fridays ago, and to say that I wasn't in the mood for surprises at that ghastly hour would be like saying that Kim Jung Il thinks he's one fancy dude. As she collected herself enough to speak, I expected her to tell me the tragic story of how Balthazar, God love his sainted, wee soul-ling, had not survived the tests and the blood-drawing they'd administered and how he was scampering about under the watchful gaze of the Baby Jesus now. Then I thought: uh, wait a tic. They were going to be a) testing him for heartworm and b) taking about three drops of blood. Why was this night vet looking like she'd managed to survive a Rwandan death squad by feigning death in a pit-grave? Had the shrieks - both feline and human - that had caromed off the stainless steel fixtures for the past hour have anything to do with it? And why was she writing "Evil Kitty" on Balthazar's manila file with a hand that resembled three pounds of pulled pork?
Four hours earlier
That night, and the four nights previous to it, Balthazar had been acting a fool. He'd stop dead in his tracks and, pressing himself to the floor in a strangely contrived posture, would hack wetly for a minute or two and then, as if nothing untoward had happened, would get up, remember that he had something to feck up somewhere else in the house, and would disappear. But he'd been doing it too much that night, stopping every fifteen minutes or so to rip his chest out. So, we did what two cat daddys would naturally do when faced with that crisis: we crammed fish-flavored petroleum products down his gullet like it was going out of style. This is because - and laugh if you will, you heartless assholes - we firmly believed that he was trying to bring up a furball.
It became so pitiful that Keith and I rushed him to the emergency vet (read: ka-CHING for them), where a vet and a technician trundled him off for a series of tests. The primary vet was a strange Scandinavian chap who gave off a "don't leave him alone with little girls" vibe, but since Balthazar was a simple beast I decided that, since he had a DVM and I had, oh, a Bachelors, I would defer to him just this once.
An hour passed, during which sounds like "OH MY GOD GET IT OFF MY BACK IT'S GOING FOR MY JUGU-GAAAAAAAAACK" and "THE POWER OF CHRIST COMPELS YOU" and "I CAN'T FIND MY OTHER CHEEK" were to be discerned rising over the omnipresent, feral shrieking of a cat who, judging by the intensity of his protest, was being vivisected with a kitchen knife sans anesthesia while being raped by a honey badger. Enter young night vet, who appears to be trying to cauterize a flesh wound with a Bic lighter. She writes on Balthazar's file and turns to leave.
"So, your 'cat' doesn't have heartworms, he's got asthma. We gave him a steroid injection in the, like, two seconds we could hold him down. We'd appreciate it if you would come around and collect him yourself, please and thank you. Have a good goddamn night."
As I tried to thank her I couldn't help but notice that she was limping; limping, and missing a piece of her ring finger.
Balthazar was waiting for me, crouched in the back of the oxygen tent with eyes the size of Pamela Anderson's ta-tas and his ears cemented to the back of his head. His tail flicked incessantly, and as I got closer I saw strands of what appeared to be bloody, blonde human hair in his maw. I'd never feared the cat until that moment: somewhere in the dark of that clinic a Swedish pedophile was lying, clutching the jagged hole in his scalp and praying that the Hair Club for Men was an international organization. What was he going to do to me?
I cooed and scooped him into my arms and, to express his gratitude, he didn't maul me to death as I'd anticipated. Instead, he
expressed his anal glands on my brand-new white UMaine shirt
It was then - as I stared in mute horror at the extruded effluent on my beloved, worn-once shirt - that I briefly toyed with the idea of driving the beast to a largish field somewhere in Nineveh township and leaving him for dead. As soon as the thought was entertained, the stink of cooking sherry and stored-away linens briefly alit in my nostrils and I heard that old Romany hag whisper over the nine years since I'd met her.
"Eef you keel this cat, the door to Hell itselv vill open."
I shuddered and packed him away in his cat carrier (aka Kedi Hapishanesi) and took him home. As I wrote myself a note to send flowers for the service of the teenage intern who perished as Balthazar, by several eyewitness accounts, leapt up his ass and burrowed out his chest cavity like one of the critters in Alien, I thought that for the smallest moment that I smelled brimstone. Balthazar, quietly cleaning his junk in a patch of sunlight, paused for a moment and leaned over to burp. A small object lay on the sea-grass rug and, after a moment of regarding it, he left to go lay cable in the litterbox.
As I drew closer, I knew what it would be, and the part of me that hopes was crushed like a mouse under a jackboot.
It was a piece of that vet-lady's finger.
***
Dom
PS. OK, only some of that was true - but I swear by all I hold dear that that cat expressed his anal glands on my shirt, so help me God.
Balthazar, the Savage, Developmentally-Delayed Asthmatic Cat: The Miniseries, Part II
Picture it: Three-thirty in the morning, not a soul in sight. City's looking like a ghost town on a moonlit summer night.
OH MY GOD NO NOT GARTH BROOKS LYRICS SAVE ME SWEET ANGEL GABRIEL NOOOOO
One of the night vets - a lithe young thing, fresh out of vet school no doubt - staggered into the sterile room panting, her eyes lolling about in her head like two vast, unripe martini olives. I looked up from my circa-2001 People Magazine ("Is Britney really a virgin?") and saw that she was completely covered with crimson gore, which had begun to clot and clump untidily. It was two in the morning three Fridays ago, and to say that I wasn't in the mood for surprises at that ghastly hour would be like saying that Kim Jung Il thinks he's one fancy dude. As she collected herself enough to speak, I expected her to tell me the tragic story of how Balthazar, God love his sainted, wee soul-ling, had not survived the tests and the blood-drawing they'd administered and how he was scampering about under the watchful gaze of the Baby Jesus now. Then I thought: uh, wait a tic. They were going to be a) testing him for heartworm and b) taking about three drops of blood. Why was this night vet looking like she'd managed to survive a Rwandan death squad by feigning death in a pit-grave? Had the shrieks - both feline and human - that had caromed off the stainless steel fixtures for the past hour have anything to do with it? And why was she writing "Evil Kitty" on Balthazar's manila file with a hand that resembled three pounds of pulled pork?
Four hours earlier
That night, and the four nights previous to it, Balthazar had been acting a fool. He'd stop dead in his tracks and, pressing himself to the floor in a strangely contrived posture, would hack wetly for a minute or two and then, as if nothing untoward had happened, would get up, remember that he had something to feck up somewhere else in the house, and would disappear. But he'd been doing it too much that night, stopping every fifteen minutes or so to rip his chest out. So, we did what two cat daddys would naturally do when faced with that crisis: we crammed fish-flavored petroleum products down his gullet like it was going out of style. This is because - and laugh if you will, you heartless assholes - we firmly believed that he was trying to bring up a furball.
It became so pitiful that Keith and I rushed him to the emergency vet (read: ka-CHING for them), where a vet and a technician trundled him off for a series of tests. The primary vet was a strange Scandinavian chap who gave off a "don't leave him alone with little girls" vibe, but since Balthazar was a simple beast I decided that, since he had a DVM and I had, oh, a Bachelors, I would defer to him just this once.
An hour passed, during which sounds like "OH MY GOD GET IT OFF MY BACK IT'S GOING FOR MY JUGU-GAAAAAAAAACK" and "THE POWER OF CHRIST COMPELS YOU" and "I CAN'T FIND MY OTHER CHEEK" were to be discerned rising over the omnipresent, feral shrieking of a cat who, judging by the intensity of his protest, was being vivisected with a kitchen knife sans anesthesia while being raped by a honey badger. Enter young night vet, who appears to be trying to cauterize a flesh wound with a Bic lighter. She writes on Balthazar's file and turns to leave.
"So, your 'cat' doesn't have heartworms, he's got asthma. We gave him a steroid injection in the, like, two seconds we could hold him down. We'd appreciate it if you would come around and collect him yourself, please and thank you. Have a good goddamn night."
As I tried to thank her I couldn't help but notice that she was limping; limping, and missing a piece of her ring finger.
Balthazar was waiting for me, crouched in the back of the oxygen tent with eyes the size of Pamela Anderson's ta-tas and his ears cemented to the back of his head. His tail flicked incessantly, and as I got closer I saw strands of what appeared to be bloody, blonde human hair in his maw. I'd never feared the cat until that moment: somewhere in the dark of that clinic a Swedish pedophile was lying, clutching the jagged hole in his scalp and praying that the Hair Club for Men was an international organization. What was he going to do to me?
I cooed and scooped him into my arms and, to express his gratitude, he didn't maul me to death as I'd anticipated. Instead, he
expressed his anal glands on my brand-new white UMaine shirt
It was then - as I stared in mute horror at the extruded effluent on my beloved, worn-once shirt - that I briefly toyed with the idea of driving the beast to a largish field somewhere in Nineveh township and leaving him for dead. As soon as the thought was entertained, the stink of cooking sherry and stored-away linens briefly alit in my nostrils and I heard that old Romany hag whisper over the nine years since I'd met her.
"Eef you keel this cat, the door to Hell itselv vill open."
I shuddered and packed him away in his cat carrier (aka Kedi Hapishanesi) and took him home. As I wrote myself a note to send flowers for the service of the teenage intern who perished as Balthazar, by several eyewitness accounts, leapt up his ass and burrowed out his chest cavity like one of the critters in Alien, I thought that for the smallest moment that I smelled brimstone. Balthazar, quietly cleaning his junk in a patch of sunlight, paused for a moment and leaned over to burp. A small object lay on the sea-grass rug and, after a moment of regarding it, he left to go lay cable in the litterbox.
As I drew closer, I knew what it would be, and the part of me that hopes was crushed like a mouse under a jackboot.
It was a piece of that vet-lady's finger.
***
Dom
PS. OK, only some of that was true - but I swear by all I hold dear that that cat expressed his anal glands on my shirt, so help me God.
Sunday, June 04, 2006
"Umm, their Pad Thai is (like a plate of) Fancy Feast."
~Gwyneth, warning me to not consume a local restaurant's victuals
***
Balthazar, the Savage, Developmentally-Delayed Asthmatic Cat: The Miniseries, Part I
Rome, Urbs Aeternis, April 1997
Shortly after our drunken pilot flung our 747 onto the skidmarked runway in tofu-thick fog at Leonardo da Vinci Airport (colloquially known as Fiumicino), it quickly became apparent to our gathered group of high-school Latin-taking Mainers that we were a) not going to be alone on the tour bus and b) that the three other school groups joining us were, and I will be frank, complete douchebags. Within moments of meeting them, we were able to ascertain that:
1) The inner-city History students from Chicago were not (even if it were possible while on tour) even remotely interested in blending. Or trying foreign food. Or seeing anything. Also: where can you buy a Phillies Blunt, dawg?
2) The all-woman Art History troupe from Vermont were interested in a) their own sundry eating disorders, b) a diet consisting entirely of Evian water, and lots of it and c) weaseling out of as many museum and site tours as possible so that they could shop. When asked why they had skipped going to the ruins of Pompeii, they indicated that they felt - and rightly so! - that "Pompeii would be depressing" and that, instead, each one of them had purchased a stunning Italian cameo brooch. But they bought some postcards - like being there, no?
3) The Religious Studies group from Albany were degenerate hoodlums who spent as much time as possible bemoaning their fate ("God, here I am, stuck in Athens, two blocks from the Acropolis, and there's a game on tonight we're gonna miss! Shit, my man, shit!") and purchasing the most potentially inappropriate souvenirs they could find. A delicious example would be a cigarette lighter purchased in the shade of the Parthenon; it was a naked woman bent over as if eagerly awaiting, uh, canid-type intercourse, and when one pushes her legs towards her head, a steady flame erupts forth from her fastidiously-detailed lady-parts. When one of the kids from the Albany group was nearly hospitalized at a discotheque in Delphi with alcohol poisoning, I was, as you might well imagine, fairly underwhelmed by the shock of it all.
The tour leader, a young, vapid British thing named "Helen" who would later answer my knock on her private ferry-room door girded merely with a soaking towel and a smile, gathered us together and, mooing, we were led to the awaiting transportation object. Our first night in Italy was to be spent much like a troupe of chimpanzees who have been locked in a room filled with toys designed for MENSA children. Cries of "How do you flush the toilet? Is it this rope thing OH MY GOD I JUST FLUSHED MY TRAVELER'S CHECKS" and "When I try to use my dryer it just hisses and throws sparks out and makes this black smoke and PUT ME OUT FOR THE LOVE OF GOD PUT ME OUT" and "How do you say 'giant Satanic spider in my shower stall' in Italian?" echoed down our hall all night. Needless to say, when we were taken en masse to the bus-thing the next morning I had begun to formulate subtle, yet sinister plans for ensuring that each and every one of them would be needing to make use of their repatriation insurance.
Mistress Roma felt as though she'd like nothing better than to be a sodden, insolent whore for the duration of our stay in the Eternal City; while I found it to be moody and atmospheric, the weather merely gave wind to the bitch-fest from the Albany corner. Vermont couldn't have cared less; as long as the boutiques were open, they didn't actually give a fig if they saw the Colosseum. And Chicago just bought a gelato and sat down by a fountain for a spell. During a walking tour near Piazza Navona, we were given a half hour or so to wander about and I, eager to procure a shiv for a later "appointment", headed back to where I'd earlier seen some shady characters whispering over a huddled smoke near the eastern entrance to the piazza. Filled with disappointment like a pastry being piped with cold diarrhea to find them gone, I turned and grudgingly began to return to the group when one of the shadows detached from the gathered darkness of a small, dank alley. An elderly woman clad in what I can only describe as unspeakably oily tablecloths scuttled over to where I stood and I, expecting fully that she was going to cut me, rankly wet myself for a moment until I ascertained that she wasn't about to gut me like a freshly-dispatched squid.
She took my hand roughly in hers, which looked simultaneously like they'd seen ten thousand years of hard, cruel work in inhospitable conditions and yet were as frail as a pallid songbird. She looked into my eyes - hers a gray I've always thought of since when my mind wanders to, say, a winter sea in Varna - and she crudely spit what appeared to have once been a small almond on the ground. Mumbling for a moment and pressing the creases on my hand, she then squeezes it so hard that I fear for an insane moment that the tips of my fingers will burst and five jets of gore will erupt forth to sully the ground. No such thing happens, and she begins to speak English to me (having never spoken to me before), itself accented with a whisper of both the lush fecundity and the bleak, endless nights in inner Carpathia. Her breath had an odor I couldn't place; imagine, if you will, taking your grandmother's linens and then pouring cooking sherry on them. Yes, like that. She hissed, barely audibly:
"Von day you vill have cat."
The impulse to say "Umm, duh, already have two" was causing me physical pain.
"Thees cat vill be from the Satan. He vill shred your arms like the cheese and vill lie in vait to sink his fangs into your legs. He vill not listen. He vill not obey you."
Fancy, I thought.
"And he vill make the cough, like thees." She bent over and began to wetly hack.
I began to become impatient in my impetuous youth; I began to tap my foot in a "get the hell to your point" stacatto. This is because I was clearly insane.
"What", I began, "would you like me to do, bipolar unwashed woman of Romany descent?"
She took my face suddenly in a surprisingly liquid movement that would have been admirable had I not been the recipient of it.
"Eef you keel this cat, the door to Hell itselv vill open."
She let go and, in a swirl of oily tablecloths, disappeared down the alley without even supplication for a few lira. As I made my way back to the Piazza (taking the longer way as I had, uh, quite noticeably moistened my undergarments), I mulled over her prophecy. It just didn't really make much sense, and I wrote off the experience to a proliferation of street-huffing in Italian cities.
I put it behind me and moved on with the trip.
Put it behind me.
Until three Fridays ago.
***
Hehe!
Dom
***
Balthazar, the Savage, Developmentally-Delayed Asthmatic Cat: The Miniseries, Part I
Rome, Urbs Aeternis, April 1997
Shortly after our drunken pilot flung our 747 onto the skidmarked runway in tofu-thick fog at Leonardo da Vinci Airport (colloquially known as Fiumicino), it quickly became apparent to our gathered group of high-school Latin-taking Mainers that we were a) not going to be alone on the tour bus and b) that the three other school groups joining us were, and I will be frank, complete douchebags. Within moments of meeting them, we were able to ascertain that:
1) The inner-city History students from Chicago were not (even if it were possible while on tour) even remotely interested in blending. Or trying foreign food. Or seeing anything. Also: where can you buy a Phillies Blunt, dawg?
2) The all-woman Art History troupe from Vermont were interested in a) their own sundry eating disorders, b) a diet consisting entirely of Evian water, and lots of it and c) weaseling out of as many museum and site tours as possible so that they could shop. When asked why they had skipped going to the ruins of Pompeii, they indicated that they felt - and rightly so! - that "Pompeii would be depressing" and that, instead, each one of them had purchased a stunning Italian cameo brooch. But they bought some postcards - like being there, no?
3) The Religious Studies group from Albany were degenerate hoodlums who spent as much time as possible bemoaning their fate ("God, here I am, stuck in Athens, two blocks from the Acropolis, and there's a game on tonight we're gonna miss! Shit, my man, shit!") and purchasing the most potentially inappropriate souvenirs they could find. A delicious example would be a cigarette lighter purchased in the shade of the Parthenon; it was a naked woman bent over as if eagerly awaiting, uh, canid-type intercourse, and when one pushes her legs towards her head, a steady flame erupts forth from her fastidiously-detailed lady-parts. When one of the kids from the Albany group was nearly hospitalized at a discotheque in Delphi with alcohol poisoning, I was, as you might well imagine, fairly underwhelmed by the shock of it all.
The tour leader, a young, vapid British thing named "Helen" who would later answer my knock on her private ferry-room door girded merely with a soaking towel and a smile, gathered us together and, mooing, we were led to the awaiting transportation object. Our first night in Italy was to be spent much like a troupe of chimpanzees who have been locked in a room filled with toys designed for MENSA children. Cries of "How do you flush the toilet? Is it this rope thing OH MY GOD I JUST FLUSHED MY TRAVELER'S CHECKS" and "When I try to use my dryer it just hisses and throws sparks out and makes this black smoke and PUT ME OUT FOR THE LOVE OF GOD PUT ME OUT" and "How do you say 'giant Satanic spider in my shower stall' in Italian?" echoed down our hall all night. Needless to say, when we were taken en masse to the bus-thing the next morning I had begun to formulate subtle, yet sinister plans for ensuring that each and every one of them would be needing to make use of their repatriation insurance.
Mistress Roma felt as though she'd like nothing better than to be a sodden, insolent whore for the duration of our stay in the Eternal City; while I found it to be moody and atmospheric, the weather merely gave wind to the bitch-fest from the Albany corner. Vermont couldn't have cared less; as long as the boutiques were open, they didn't actually give a fig if they saw the Colosseum. And Chicago just bought a gelato and sat down by a fountain for a spell. During a walking tour near Piazza Navona, we were given a half hour or so to wander about and I, eager to procure a shiv for a later "appointment", headed back to where I'd earlier seen some shady characters whispering over a huddled smoke near the eastern entrance to the piazza. Filled with disappointment like a pastry being piped with cold diarrhea to find them gone, I turned and grudgingly began to return to the group when one of the shadows detached from the gathered darkness of a small, dank alley. An elderly woman clad in what I can only describe as unspeakably oily tablecloths scuttled over to where I stood and I, expecting fully that she was going to cut me, rankly wet myself for a moment until I ascertained that she wasn't about to gut me like a freshly-dispatched squid.
She took my hand roughly in hers, which looked simultaneously like they'd seen ten thousand years of hard, cruel work in inhospitable conditions and yet were as frail as a pallid songbird. She looked into my eyes - hers a gray I've always thought of since when my mind wanders to, say, a winter sea in Varna - and she crudely spit what appeared to have once been a small almond on the ground. Mumbling for a moment and pressing the creases on my hand, she then squeezes it so hard that I fear for an insane moment that the tips of my fingers will burst and five jets of gore will erupt forth to sully the ground. No such thing happens, and she begins to speak English to me (having never spoken to me before), itself accented with a whisper of both the lush fecundity and the bleak, endless nights in inner Carpathia. Her breath had an odor I couldn't place; imagine, if you will, taking your grandmother's linens and then pouring cooking sherry on them. Yes, like that. She hissed, barely audibly:
"Von day you vill have cat."
The impulse to say "Umm, duh, already have two" was causing me physical pain.
"Thees cat vill be from the Satan. He vill shred your arms like the cheese and vill lie in vait to sink his fangs into your legs. He vill not listen. He vill not obey you."
Fancy, I thought.
"And he vill make the cough, like thees." She bent over and began to wetly hack.
I began to become impatient in my impetuous youth; I began to tap my foot in a "get the hell to your point" stacatto. This is because I was clearly insane.
"What", I began, "would you like me to do, bipolar unwashed woman of Romany descent?"
She took my face suddenly in a surprisingly liquid movement that would have been admirable had I not been the recipient of it.
"Eef you keel this cat, the door to Hell itselv vill open."
She let go and, in a swirl of oily tablecloths, disappeared down the alley without even supplication for a few lira. As I made my way back to the Piazza (taking the longer way as I had, uh, quite noticeably moistened my undergarments), I mulled over her prophecy. It just didn't really make much sense, and I wrote off the experience to a proliferation of street-huffing in Italian cities.
I put it behind me and moved on with the trip.
Put it behind me.
Until three Fridays ago.
***
Hehe!
Dom
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