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the latest waddle:

good morning, wordpress - 10:36 a.m. , 2009-07-03

elaborate murder attempt - 2:56 p.m. , 2009-07-01

building a tractor in the basement - 10:42 a.m. , 2009-06-19

ask no questions tell just a few lies - 3:17 p.m. , 2009-06-09

my long lasting flavor really lasts long - 1:10 p.m. , 2009-06-04


2002-01-14 ... 7:38 a.m.

Once and for all, because it's been bugging me and I see it more and more: if you want a colorful metaphor to describe your crushing headache pain, the word you want is VISE. If you need to discuss how you can't stop drinking or smoking or gambling or selling your body to strangers for crack, the word you want is VICE. This is on the list of the things that may someday make me climb the watchtower, so for fuck's sake be more careful.

An abrupt stylistic departure for me, but right now the idea of some simple narrative sounds soothing.

Friday night I went out to Ten Cat for beers with friends, and while I was sitting there waiting for them to show up I'm reading my book (what else is new), which right now is some works of Plato (hence that entry the other day, with the Plato quote about sexy dreams), and this guy playing pool starts talking to me in between his shots and he's mysteriously very into the fact that I'm reading Plato and keeps saying "We don't get many Platonists in here" despite me explaining over and over how I am definitely not a Platonist in any way, shape, or Form (ha ha! Get it? Oh, I slay me). Later on as he's leaving he drops his number on our table, "If I ever want to talk philosophy" etc. It's a torn scrap of paper and on one side is his name and number and on the other are these handwritten words, I'm not making this up: Egg roll egg roll egg drop soup. I can't tell if that's a note to himself or a cryptic message to me. Neither idea is particularly sane or appealing.

Then Saturday when LT and I get up there is no Internet connection waiting for us. AT&T has done it again. LT even went and bought another cable modem (receipt carefully saved) to make sure our hardware wasn't the problem and it's not, it's just the fact that they are the most unreliable utility in Chicago. AT&T is the equivalent of a Somali electric company, what with all the times they experience outages and line failures. So because their lackluster customer service ("uh, I guess we could get someone out there on Thursday") reduced LT to a sputtering rage, we may indeed be going with their competition, who have promised to get here faster and install their own. Not having Internet service may not seem like such a drastic communication problem, when 60% of the world's population has never placed a telephone call, but it's very serious for me. (And fairly serious for other people too, it seems: Do you know how odd/touching it is to have someone tell you "Your machine didn't show up in my stats all day, I was wondering where you were"?) Saturday evening LT headed out for jazz and drinking but I wasn't in the mood to be with people, so I cybersquatted at my sister's place and checked my e-mail, and ate chocolate cake and drank a lot of tea, getting a bit overcaffeinated and twitchy, and when I left at midnight I really wasn't sure what to do with myself. (Here's an extended coda: my sister had borrowed my hammer, and gave it back to me as I was leaving her apartment. Too late [out on the street] I realized I had nowhere to put it, so now I'm stalking the windy streets jittery, wired, and carrying a hammer. I tried to keep it down at my side so it wouldn't be conspicuous but the midnight street people [bar-goers, the homeless, insomniacs] saw it anyway. One guy asked me for a dollar and then said "But I don't want to get hit with the hammer, ok?" and I was a bit afraid to hail a cab for fear they wouldn't want to risk picking up The Hammer Maniac. So I rode the bus all small and wide-awake with my hammer. On the bus no one seems to care what you carry.) Back at home when I finally could fall asleep I had godawful horrorshow dreams, no physical danger but lots of emotional attacks and trauma, in one dream I literally had all my friends and family and lots of "experts" form a tribunal and tell me what a horrible person I was, in great detail, and someone poured a whole carton of milk over my head while looking into my eyes and saying, "We are through with you." The moral of my story is simple: NO CHOCOLATE CAKE AND MULTIPLE CUPS OF TEA AFTER 9 pm. Thank you.

---mimi "Aesop" smartypants

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