Avis est! Aeronavis est! Supervir est!
WHAT COULD BE MORE USELESS THAN A WEB PAGE, ANSWER ME THAT? PARTICULARLY THIS WEB PAGE.
Whenever my job gets me down I think, “at least nobody peed or ejaculated on my keyboard today.”
I just mailed off a letter to my alderman wherein I inquired about putting speed bumps in my alley. I think speed bumps are sorely needed in my alley, since people seem to feel the need to drive fifty miles an hour down the alley, and use the alley as a high-speed alternative to Devon Avenue rather than as a local option, to get from one's garage to out on the street or to deliver some heavy object to one's back door. Many of them also seem to feel the need to blast Hindi film music at ear-splitting volumes as they zoom through the alley at a criminal rate of speed, which results in an extra-weird Doppler effect because Hindi film music is already kind of echo-y and heavy on the treble. I always scream SLOW! THE! FUCK! DOWN! as these drivers pass, but I'm sure they can't hear me over the Hindi film music, nor see me through their super-dark “I Am The Coolest Dude Who Ever Walked The Planet” sunglasses, never mind the fact that they are not usually looking out the windshield but into the rearview mirror as they admire their own hair. One of these days they are going to cream some human or animal, possibly me, as I walk down that alley often to get to the back door of my apartment, and I often wear black, and I rarely watch where I'm going. Anyway, if the alderman dismisses my speed bump request, I am considering engaging in some minor creepy stalking behavior, like calling up his office and leaving ghostly eerie messages on his answering machine. Like this: “…sspeeeeeed…bummmmps…”
ALL THE REALISTIC CRAP ABOUT MY DAY IN ONE GOOEY SPURT
This morning I overslept by quite a bit. Granted, it was a refreshing change from my body's usual insistence that it only wants to sleep lightly, fussily, and wake up painfully early. Instead, this morning I woke up, without an alarm, at a decent morning-type hour, and I thought: Gosh I am sleepy. Since I have plenty of time, I will go back to sleep for precisely twenty minutes, without setting any sort of alarm, and I will wake up naturally refreshed after twenty minutes. That usually works, believe it or not. I have an uncanny ability to wake up when I want to wake up. Most of the time. Today the twenty minutes became an hour, and during that time I had a complicated DJ/turntablist dream where I was mixing samples from the rave-up part at the end of “White Light/White Heat” with samples from that one Salt N' Pepa song. IT WAS AWESOME. But then I woke up and I had overslept. But hey, I am living that decadent turntablist lifestyle, packing them in at the clubs and spinning my breaks and beats until morning light. At least when I'm asleep. So work will just have to deal if I am a little late once in a while.
You already know that sleep and me have a bit of a strained relationship. But there is more pathology than meets the eye. I also have a huge problem with Slumber Party Syndrome, which means this: (1) I will be tired and yawny and LT will say, “Let's go to bed,” and we will. (2) The minute the lights go out I am wide awake. I am, in fact, all hepped up and goofy and giggly. I suddenly have all kinds of things I want to tell LT. He is a patient man, but he is also the sort of man who (quite reasonably) wants to SLEEP when he goes to bed, so he will ask me, “Uh, I thought we were going to sleep now?” and I will apologize and settle down briefly before starting to chuckle in the dark again at something I thought in my little brain. Last night took the cake, though: I had this movie idea (I won't get into it now except that it involved Monkey Man: if the film industry does not capitalize on Monkey Man they are a dumber bunch of dumb dumbfucks than I ever thought. It would be especially cool if the Hindi film industry made a movie with Monkey Man, and he sang and danced, and a beautiful coquettish woman in a sari danced with him in the rain, with her sari all wet and clingy, and then she fell in love with him, realizing he's not so ugly after all, and Monkey Man turns out to be some sort of Robin-Hood-ish freedom fighter, and at one point receives a minor but dashing head wound and has to tie a strip of cloth around his Monkey Man head, Rambo-style. But I digress. I really really do.) Anyway, so I was explaining my movie idea to LT in the dark, only in much greater detail and in a much more exciting fashion, and I realize he hasn't made any noise in a while, and he's asleep. But five minutes later he rolled over and we had this exchange:
LT: Oh wow, I just dozed off and dreamed about Monkey Man.
Me: NO YOU QUESEDILLA-HEAD*, THAT WAS MY MOVIE THAT I JUST TOLD YOU ABOUT.
LT [asleep again]: ….
*(one of our favorite insults)
Tonight, however, I should go right to sleep because of my very decadent evening: sex, beer, pizza, and a recreational drug purchase (or, rather, NO recreational drug purchase: Hello, Mr. Ashcroft!) I love being me, sometimes. Sometimes.
FOR BEST RESULTS, SQUEEZE TUBE FROM THE BOTTOM AND FLATTEN AS YOU GO UP.
This is a very strange sentence. “For best results.” What results? The results of getting the maximum amount of toothpaste out of the tube? Because getting the maximum amount of toothpaste out of the tube is not really the Prime Objective of toothpaste. The actual functions of toothpaste, like tooth polishing and cavity prevention, are not at all affected by how you squeeze the tube.
(Apropos of nothing, I once had a poetry workshop with a fellow student who wrote a poem wherein he compared his own orgasm to stomping on a toothpaste tube. It was such a problematic and DEEPLY WRONG image that I don't even know where to begin criticizing, but I am certain I will never forget it. And I doubt he's really all that thick and minty and tartar-controlling, and if he is he might want to see a competent urologist, and OH GOD LET'S DROP THIS RIGHT NOW. I want to have a nice, untroubled sleep, remember? And so do you. Drink of the waters of Lethe, my darling. Or you can just use gin.)
Then there's that odd use of “flatten” without an object (doesn't “squeeze from the bottom and flatten tube as you go up” sound more natural?) and the weird, sudden appearance of “you.” I go up? Where am I going? Up? Up the tube? Is that like “down the pub” or “off the wagon”? Mimi Smartypants won't be able to make the meeting, she's up the tube again.
COME ON FEEL THE LINKS
I wish I had a Happy Hut. I could do with feeling “warm and secure” inside a cone of polarfleece.
The Book-A-Minute sci-fi reviews. I can't tell if these are funny or not since I haven't read most of these books. People keep telling me I actually do like sci-fi, since I enjoy imaginative “speculative fiction” like Infinite Jest, but I don't like this kind of stuff. Anyway, if this is funny to you, enjoy.
I googled the word “baked” and I found Baked Shark Cheesy Surprise. BAKED SHARK CHEESY SURPRISE are words that I never, ever, want to see together. It seriously makes me twitch. Baked shark cheesy surprise baked shark cheesy surprise. Is this causing your neurons to misfire too or is it just me? Baked shark cheesy surprise. Oh god it hurts.
OBJECTS IN THE MANIC PHASE MAY BE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR
Recently, suddenly, there were ants in my back bathroom. We never had ants before. There was something wrong with these ants. I think these ants were a little bit retarded. LT is a messy cook, and there are often crumbs on the kitchen floor (I hang my head in cybershame but it is the truth), and yet the ants never ventured out there but hung out in the bathroom, where there is no food. And these ants were a tiny, tiny variety of black ant who were all slow and tiny and bewildered. My bathroom ants rode the short bus. My bathroom ants wore hockey equipment and they weren't even on a team. LT bought some ant traps and the ants totally fell for it, and now there are dead ants in the bathroom that need sweeping up (I know, I know, I'll get to it) but there are no more living ants. It was almost pathetically easy to wipe them out, and my respect for the insect kingdom has slipped a notch.
Also, I had an idea for a video game. I am just a fountain of ideas lately. Here's my idea: There are plenty of video games that allow you to shoot zombies or drive racecars or build entire civilizations all on your lonesome. But, as far as I know, there are no video games that let you work on a banana boat all day. Loading bananas, watching out for the deadly black tarantula, avoiding the cruel overseer, waiting for the tallyman to show his lazy ass. Daylight comes and you want to go home. You (virtually) stack bananas until the morning comes. We already have the theme music, now we just need graphics and programming, this is going to be awesome, all the kids will be loading virtual bananas onto virtual banana boats, six foot seven foot eight foot BUNCH, and totally neglecting their homework. HEED MY WORDS NINTENDO EXECUTIVES. Heed them.
—mimi smartypants thinks kittens are cuter than puppies, but concedes it's a close call.