There is no Domonic, only Züül; or, a return to the 'blog.

Before I’d even left the state of Indiana on my drive YES MY DRIVE to Maine, I began to bear witness to hallucinations borne out of a crushing ennui – the kind that causes one to briefly, but very intensely, believe that the sweet release of the Eternal Repose would be just the salve needed. Nothing messy, mind; no, perhaps you’d pull off the highway and into a bracingly maintained rest facility (read: last cleaned before the fall of Saigon and containing the mouldering osteological remains of Public Health employees), turn off the engine, and then just stop living. Right there. In your seat. Half-full bag of Pizzaria Pretzel Combos at your side.

Instead of awaiting the prompt succor of death, I began to hold animated conversations with a four-inch Chinese-made plastic figurine of Triton from The Little Mermaid, who holds perpetual court in Orhan’s dank interior.

Me: So, Triton, Lord of the Unsleeping, Baleful Sea, what say you to a lunch composed entirely of sodium-encrusted, overpriced treats that one can purchase from a warty, surly attendee with questionable hygiene habits at a gas station that is gently perfumed by urinal cakes and slightly expired dairy products?

Triton: Feck yeah. Hey: how’s about some Corn Nuts?

Me: Regular or BQ?

Triton: BQ! *

As I navigated Orhan through most of what remains of the lands of charm and cruelty that are the Rust Belt states and into the pine-pitch and brine-incensed perfection that is the State of Maine, I amused myself by envisioning several people who had antagonized me in high school perishing in comical, if not gruesome, events that only occasionally involved being surgically impregnated with several live, distempered mustelids.

Ha! I’m just kidding about this. **

Through a miracle of technology, my new cellphone*** has a voice recorder function that allowed me to carefully document a controlled, yet rapid descent into stark madness. I’ll replicate each of these messages below as I, nearly a month later, am only really beginning to understand just how close I’d come to becoming the Heir Apparent to the city of Ungluedopolis.

- “I just don’t understand Wilfred Brimley.”

As I mutely beheld a massive heap of a woman who – God love her! – was cramming a cream-filled cruller the size of an infant into her slavering maw while her taloned hands were aclutch a 250 oz. Mountain Dew all the while waiting in line to purchase twelve carefully selected Little Debbie cakes, the gravelly, rotted voice of Wilfred Brimley whispered dankly into my ear.

“Die-uh-bee-tus”, it said. Then: “Go fetch me a soft-serve cone, son, an’ I won’t hafta whup ya.”

I feel rather badly for the wretched advertising folks who, after trying to drum up an afflicted celebrity who would be well-known enough to extol the virtues of a diabetic testing supply venture, could only find Wilfred. Now, I am sure that he’s a lovely, lovely man. God in heaven, all I have to do is THINK about Cocoon and I begin to fall to pieces. But really.

- “I wonder what it takes to become hardcore.”

I’d stopped at the Angola Service Center, one of the bracingly clean and prohibitively expensive rest stops on the New York Toll Me Until I Have to Declare Bankruptcy Thruway. Mostly, I’d had to release what I imagined in my delirium to have been twelve gallons of blood-filled urine into an eagerly awaiting vessel. And by “into an eagerly awaiting vessel” I mean “onto the face of one of the thirty-two hundred teenagers who’d been disgorged from six YES SIX buses in the parking lot.” I scampered into the building, beheld the cost of one McDonald’s cheeseburgers ($33), made my deposit, and scuttled back to the embrace of Orhan and some awaiting Combos. It was at this point that I noticed that the woman in the car next to me was behaving strangely. At once stately and regal as well as icy and brooding, she tucked two razor blades into her weave INTO HER WEAVE and began to delicately coat her face with Wal*Mart brand petroleum jelly. Then she rolled down the window slightly and shook a Black and Mild cigar out of the battered pack and proceeded to fire it up. She cranked up something very angry-sounding and began to scream along to the words.

At this point, I had to pretend like I was looking for a new CD in my case so that I could continue to watch what I was sure was going to be the best show, like, ever.

She turned off the car, got out, STUBBED THE CIGAR OUT ON HER HEEL, and marched purposefully into the Angola Service Station. I am forced by sheer logic to assume that someone who was to be found in that establishment had an interesting afternoon, courtesy of the most hardcore woman I’ve ever seen.

- “Who finds rock graffiti to be hot?”

As one moves across Upstate New York and into the Finger Lakes region, the topography becomes a little more severe. And by “severe” I mean “cliffier.” Near dusk, I found myself transfixed by the sight of a beautiful rocky outcropping that, when one looked carefully, nearly concealed a delicate, misty waterfall.

And because humankind is, at best, insensate and guttery, someone had taken a large amount of (what I have to presume is high-quality) spraypaint to the stones to declare undying love for “Lynn” in “1971.”

“Lynn”, if you’re out there, I hope that you’d not filled your panties with unspeakableness upon beholding this travesty. Instead, I hope that the clod who defiled that beautiful natural space tried to go a little further than you’d liked on Prom Night and that you used your (home-dyed) shoe to shatter several crucial teeth out of his Skoal-tinged dental arcade. I hope you behold the everlasting monument to your brief time together and wonder absently whether or not he’d ever gotten a partial, and if it holds ghastly court in a little bourbon glass beside his mattress-on-the-ground bed in his dank trailer. Finally, I hope that you wonder this while seated next to your slightly doltish but vastly sweet, loving husband, with your spawn angelically asleep in the back of your feet-smelling minivan while on the way back from the Zoo, where one of the wee ones vomited a corndog onto a fainting goat at the petting zoo.

You know, I can tell tender stories, too.

- “The Back-of-the-Head-Explosion woman’s haircut needs to stop.”

I will be the first to admit this: I am not, I repeat, NOT, on the forefront of fashion. Many are the days when I look at my wardrobe, which consists of several colors of the same short-sleeved “dress” shirt, dozens of khaki pants, and shoes so dull that they might as well be hospital clogs, and think: feck it. Feck it all. I don’t live in Milan or Paris, and if I did, I’d probably still dress like I’d just wiped the pine pitch off my hands and slithered forth from the great North Woods. The only difference would be that folks would be hissing about me behind manicured hands in different languages.

This having been said, a startling and – if I may be frank – hideous trend has been rapidly on the upswing as concerns women’s hair. Ordinarily, I don’t even really NOTICE women’s hair unless the “do” is a) incredibly unwashed to the point of reminding one of the grave or b) it defies basic laws of physics. The hairdo I speak of falls within the second category.

Imagine, if you will, taking a stop-motion movie of someone getting brutally executed with small-caliber weaponry. The bullet enters the forehead and exits, along with considerable amounts of gick, out the back of the skull. Now, freeze the picture right there and turn the melting brain and skull fragments into hair that has become brittle with the application of thirty cans of AquaNet.

Now that you think about it, you have ALL seen this haircut.

At first, this haircut was popular with twentysomething girls who were, perhaps, living on the periphery of coolness. You know the kind: maybe they live close enough to a largish city or town to paint their nails and know where the nearest Buffalo Wild Wings is, but they will still choose bubblegum pink for their bridesmaid dresses. Anyway, after about a year, I saw the B.O.T.H.E. haircut on older and older women. Women who could have, perhaps, spent less on the expensive haircut and more on Polident.

When I entered the gas station in Massachusetts and saw the creature behind the counter sporting one of these, I nearly walked back out into the gathering dark, gas light ablink, to wait for a lingering death aside the highway. Instead, I grinned cadaverously at her, prepaid my petrol purchase, and was just about out the door when I

[Lot’s wife]

looked back. She’d bent down to pick something up off the Slushy-tack floor and, Jesus Mary and Joseph, the top of her skull was clearly visible. I’d heard that this happens; one adopts a constrictive and unmanageable hairstyle and the shit just begins to fall right the feck out in clumps. That’s how awesome she’d wanted to look.

This needs to stop or I’ll just grow one of those stinking vermin-filled ZZ Top beards that nobody thinks is sexy**** and then…yeah. You’ll see then. Oh yes.

- “Sometimes places are past their prime.”

Coming from a town (Bangor, you wanks) whose heyday was the rough-and-tumble 1800s and early 1900s and whose title of Lumber Capital of the World evokes the heady sensation of, after a grueling day on the mighty Penobscot, getting plowed and planting your flag on a buxom barmaid in a barely darkened corner of some seedy tavern in the Devil’s Half Acre, I know what it’s like to be from a place where the past completely overshadows the present. Unlike “museum cities” in other parts of the world, like Athens, Istanbul, Beijing, Venice, Rome and Jerusalem, the all-consuming American need to immediately destroy something unless you can actually still smell the paint drying is catching up with a rapidly aging populace. Just try bringing someone who grew up in Northern Indiana in the 1930s to Gary to understand what I’m talking about here – A Christmas Story it is not. Yet somehow, this all seems to be most powerfully felt in Rustbelt/Erie Canal towns that just couldn’t make the transition once the one thing that connected it to the wider world just stopped existing or was imported overseas. Bangor, while no longer a lumber-producing area, is now a fairly cosmopolitan town that thrives now on the leftovers of tourism revenue and Canadian mall obsession, but many of the small towns in Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York I passed seemed to fairly ache for a past that is now denied to them. Sad, weed-choked canals and five-and-dime stores with sunbleached, dead fly-covered displays vie for nobody’s eye and, if one is lucky, one grows up there, becomes aware of a need for more, and leaves, only to return for poultry-laden holidays. They become the places where people grow up, not grow old. And, with each oncoming night, they age gracelessly a little more and become an embarrassment to those who cling to life there while yearning for a mini-mall with an attached Yarn Town outlet.

Not that I have given this any thought at all.

- “Why don’t we hear more about the archaeopteryx?”

When paleontologists first discovered the sparrow-sized reptile-birds in deposits in Germany, people were completely dumbstruck.

“Shit”, they’d often be heard to remark, “that lizard could probably, you know, flap its primordial wings and maybe glide for pitifully short distances and junk.”

Evolutionists were clearly tenting up in their lab-pants, as this was – to them – a clarion display of thousands of years of brutal, natural processes producing linkages between two unlike groups of chordates. Creationists wondered aloud why nobody was thinking about why God had chosen to place these fossils there to make us falsely believe in, well, witchcraft. It was a watershed discovery, and in the many years since, it has been overshadowed by the discovery of dinosaur mummies, dinosaur DNA and nearly complete T. rex skeletons. I guess it’s just me, then, left wondering:

What might that little bird have tasted like? *****

- “Two lanes becoming twelve near large cities makes me unnaturally excited.”

When one is developmentally delayed enough to drive from Nashville, Indiana, to Bangor, Maine, the first major city one encounters is Columbus, Ohio. All at once, it seems, the two lanes of 70 East flutter open to ten lanes of brain-stem-removed, window-rolled-down-with-really-obnoxious-music-blaring death-speeding that can only be the direct result of profound retardedness. Despite having said this, I was oft to be found selecting highly inappropriate music, rolling down Orhan’s grimy windows and just pounding it to the floor. And by “highly inappropriate music” I mean Jump by Van Halen. This happened in Cleveland, Buffalo and Albany, and each time, I got a little bit hotter for the experience, before “major cities” gave way to, um, New England. Speaking of Buffalo…

- “I fear inappropriate sculptures of largish ungulates.”

I get to the Buffalo area around duskish – the sun is definitely on its way to the giant solar stables at this point – and I’m focusing on a) getting a glimpse of the Buffalo skyline and b) trying not to perish in an accident that I am guessing would leave my relatives with about twelve pounds of flesh to bury or cremate. As I’m going under some sort of overpass thing, I notice in my peripheral vision that

uh, a herd of North American bison

was thundering toward me. I gag slightly on the mouthful of LiveWire Mountain Dew long enough to realize that some civic authority in the “All America” city of Buffalo had selected to erect a smallish herd of bronze bison along the edge of the New York Thruway.

Now, I’m all for civic pride. Buffalo has it rough; were it not for nearby Niagra Falls and a decent proximity to Toronto, Buffalo’s infrastructure would have gone the way of many other Rust Belt cities. When one also factors assloads of wet, heavy lake effect snow, a decaying periphery and relatively high unemployment and you have what could have been a fresh bit of urban hell. But Buffalo has clung to life and lifted itself up out from its dependence on heavy industry to become a town that is both pleasant and charming – and worth a visit if one has the chance.

However, while I am no large mammal expert, I know enough about bison to know that the Northern Lakes region of the US would not have been their choicest homestead. As everyone clearly knows, bison would choose most often to reside with your mother.

When civic leaders decide to erect large, fairly realistic whimsical metal beasts alongside major highways, it gives one pause.

- “What would Ruth Benedict have to say about Massholes?”

As World War II raged throughout several major world theaters, an anthropologist named Ruth Benedict – for reasons that, to this day, remain slightly suspect – begins to work on an ethnography about the Japanese people. Immediately, two issues come to the forefront of any discussion of this work, entitled The Chrysanthemum and the Sword.

1. We were, at the time, at war with the people she was studying. Like, cratering their shit up.
2. She was interviewing JAPANESE AMERICANS IN INTERNMENT CAMPS IN CALIFORNIA.

Ethical issues aside, Benedict had some…interesting…theories about why the Japanese people were flying themselves into Allied warships and, in general, acting a fool. The “best”, in my opinion, was that Benedict believed that the Japanese were a martial race of folks because, um, they got

potty-trained too early.

She felt that the Japanese desire for cleanliness led children in the Land of the Rising Sun to have to control their sphincters too early, which psychologically bound them to an existence based on a hyper-ritualized need to control things. Like other countries, apparently.

Flash forward to three weeks ago as I crossed the border from the Tri-State Area into venerable, stodgy and cantankerous New England via the MassPike. Cleverly designated on road signs with a “pilgrim” hat festooned with a lovely buckle (which, apparently, IS THE WAY ONE KNOWS SOMETHING IS PILRGIMY), the MassPike is a study in no-looking-back stark raving insanity. Not only were several people traveling at speeds I’d normally envision for aircraft takeoff but several vehicles had ceased being beholden to the generalized laws of physics. This comes as no surprise to other New Englanders; as I’ve spoken of long before, each New England state has woven a vivid tapestry of stereotypes out of wool dyed from actual, honest-to-Pete experiences one has when interacting with the other five states, and nary a New Englander is shy about regaling you with the hoary details.

“I’d rather hump a gourd than make it with a girl from Connecticut – you’ll wake up with half your pecker gone and your fridge empty.” – overheard in Providence, Rhode Island

“If you don’t have membership in a homophobic, anti-Semitic, klanish yacht club, you might as well not live in Rhodie.” - Spoken in a whisper in a restaurant in Stow, Vermont

“The only reason to go to Maine is if you want to spend a week having retards feck up your food and stare at your wife’s tits all day.” – unwanted advice given in Cambridge, Massachusetts

“New Hampshire: the cheap booze makes you forget that you live in such a shithole.” – overheard in Orono, Maine

“Vermont is the kind of place where you go to die of ennui while old white people overcharge you for shit they pour out of trees.” – spoken on a bus in Hartford, Connecticut

“The people in Massachusetts are the worst drivers who have ever existed on the face of the planet, and this includes nations where the law code is based on things spoken to village elders from the mouths of livestock.” – overheard in Narragansett, RI, Ogunquit, ME, Windsor Locks, CT, Burlington, VT, and Portsmouth, NH, among dozens of other places

The last statement invites easy questioning. If everyone things something, is it true? And, more pressing a query, should the children born in the Pilgrimlands just shit themselves for a couple more months before moving toward a cleaner, more socially acceptable mode of evacuation?

- “Why do people die in quarries?”

As I passed a quarry that looked as though it would be the portal to the Styx itself in Massachusetts, I beheld several stern warning signs around its rim that cautioned people to not cavort about in its frigid, uncaring depths. Having grown up in states where both abundant fresh water resources as well as expanses of briny deep are able to keep locals from swimming in bottomless, steep-walled abandoned industrial pits, I find myself wondering what the attraction is. Don’t people listen to ghost stories? Is one nudie-swim worth having your bloated remains fished out of a watery pit-grave? If you live in a place where this is the only cool thing to do, wouldn’t playing “chicken” on the railroad tracks or enjoying a lovely game of Russian roulette be just as attractive?

***

After this point, the rest of the messages I’d left myself were apparently in a language I’d invented to amuse myself to stay awake and alive, but which I have subsequent memory of at this time.

Somehow, though, I think that these were enough.

Until next time, I remain,

Domonic (Icareaboutthereallyimportantthings) Potorti

* If you don’t know what movie this refers to, please don’t tell me, as I will lose intense amounts of respect for you.

** Not really.

*** Don’t ask how I got it.

**** Except for a very specific subset of gay men. Don’t ask how I know this.

***** My guess is like squab that’s been soaked in gasoline.