Back to Diaryland

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


2003-09-07 ... 7:52 p.m.

Hi. I am not quite so angry as in the last entry. Feeling quite sentimental and nostalgic, actually, with occasional detours into frustrated frazzled-nerve goggle-eyed indecision, oversensitive weepiness, a giddy outbreak of goofy hijinks or three, and even a few scary moments of the big Sad. I am all over the place this week, and although on some level it pains me to get too materialist and ascribe all mental states to brain chemicals or hormones, doing so might get us close to the truth of my rollercoaster ride. I am a touch hungover from last night's party (three hours of open bar, ouch), I have made a vow to never ever change out of my elastic-waist pajama pants, and today I am also worshipping at the Church of Pamprin (along with lots of chamomile and extra vitamin E). You get the picture.

It might be a good day for storytime. You may have heard these stories before if we hang out together in the non-virtual world, but I would like to also put them here. Using the little glyphs called the alphabet. Into this big, ephemeral, digital time capsule.

THE ONE ABOUT CHICKEN HUT

On Belmont and Broadway there is an ancient restaurant called Chicken Hut, which has been there for easily twenty years or more, as I remember finding the name enormously amusing as a seven-year-old child. (In fact I still do. Chicken Hut!) My parents used to take me for violin lessons (annoyingly precocious egghead children of the world, raise your right hands!) to a high-rise apartment on the lakefront there, and passing Chicken Hut filled me with glee every single week. In fact, it led to the composition of this song/chant:

Chicken hut chicken hut
Chicken chicken chicken hut
Chicken hut chicken hut
(pause)
CHICKEN HUT! (big finish)

An original dance composition accompanied this song. The choreography featured rhythmic hopping from foot to foot, elbows close to the body but hands splayed out from the wrist in the "jazz hand" formation, and some waggling spirit fingers at the very end. Chicken Hut is still there, which is heartwarming, since a no-doubt-very-arrogant KFC tried to move in across the street a few years ago, but HA! The Colonel was vanquished and Chicken Hut still stands.

THE PART THAT I FIND FASCINATING, BUT YOU WILL PROBABLY NOT FEEL THE SAME WAY

Flash-forward to college. For some reason, I am telling my friend Chris about Chicken Hut, and I even perform the Chicken Hut dance for him. He becomes very excited and says, "NO WAY, THAT'S THE DOUGHNUT DANCE." Doughnut dance? Well, on weekends at his divorced dad's house, often with his best friend sleeping over as well, Chris and the friend would ask Dad to procure doughnuts for them in the morning, and Dad would say, "Well, maybe...if you do the doughnut dance."

We are boys
Who like doughnuts!
We like doughnuts!
A lot!

Performed in the exact same manner, with the same spastic hopping, jazz hands, and so forth. Is this an eerie anthropological parallel-development story? Two kids, hundreds of miles apart, choreographing the exact same food-related dance? Or is it just that skinny second-graders tend to have a limited repertoire of dance moves? Only Clifford Geertz knows for sure.

THE ONE ABOUT THE DOUBLE-HEADED DILDO

One summer during college I stayed on campus to gather some "experience" working for a regional literary magazine. This mostly meant that I rode my bike to the post office every day to collect padded envelopes stuffed with execrable Midwestern poetry (the kind with plenty of icy apple boughs and the gnarled hands of dying farmers). It also meant that I lived on the cheap (poetry editors for literary magazines not exactly swimming in the bling) in a rather Bacchanalian cooperative house. My housemate Dave had a friend who worked at the local sex shop, which is how the house came to be in possession of a two-foot-long double-headed dildo made of flexible silicone. On the Fourth of July we were having a huge backyard free-for-all, with drugs and bonfires, improvised noise music and Frisbee (the advantage of Frisbee-on-drugs* being that you can see the entire trajectory past/present/future of the plastic flying disk before it even leaves the thrower's hand), and Dave was sort of whipping the big false schlong around, martial-arts-style. I ran past him to make a spectacular catch and unfortunately, instead of catching the Frisbee, caught the full force of the two-foot penis smack on the thigh. It was like being hit with a truncheon. The pain knocked the wind out of me and the penis left a HUGE bruise, probably the biggest I have ever had, and if you know me you know I have had some bruises. The only good part about my injury was being able to explain that Dave had hit me with his dick.

*Hey, that sounds like an English town. "He hailed from Frisbee-On-Drugs, in the Midlands."

THE ONE ABOUT THE TIME I ACCIDENTALLY SNORTED HEROIN

Let me say first of all that I used to be very, very stupid. I still am very, very stupid but at least I wised up enough to never again do the Class Of Drugs That Can Make Your Heart Suddenly Stop (coke, heroin). But senior year of high school I had not yet wised up, and at that time some of my punk friends had a lot of cocaine around, and I tried it once and liked it a lot. Liked it so much, in fact, that I had decided not to do it anymore, ever. However, one afternoon an acquaintance said, "I have this tiny bit of shit left, do you want some? It's not enough to really get high but you're little, maybe it will do you." Maybe all that eyeliner had leached into my brain, or maybe Black Celebration on nearly continuous repeat had disordered my synapses, or maybe reading all that Blake and Burroughs had given me some mistaken notion that I needed to dance on the edge of derangement in order to "truly live," but I said yes. The stuff looked a little, well, brown, not at all similar to my mental picture of cocaine-color, but after only snorting one months-ago line I was no expert. I hoovered it up and then sort of melted back on the couch thinking, "Huh. This is really mellow coke." Soon I could not move my limbs very well and I ended up in the host's bathroom puking hideously, and the only thing I can say about vomiting while on heroin is that you really don't mind so much. In fact you can sort of get into it, as if your whole body has become the action of puking, and this fact alone should be enough to dissuade you. Just say no, everyone.

Multibabel is fabulous.

The Bears vs. San Francisco were not. I kind of don't want to talk about it.

Really old web server.

---mimi smartypants enjoyed her self-indulgent trip down Memory Lane.

back/forward

join my Notify List and get email when I update my site:
email:
Powered by NotifyList.com