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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
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Oh my. Where have I been? Have I been out doing fabulous things? No time to update? Did I finally check myself into that clinic out in Taos that puts you into a medical coma until you detox from gummi worm addiction, and then you wake up, attend a few group meetings and cry a little, and go back out on the street with all its gelatinous temptations, where every day is a constant struggle between willpower and desire? Or maybe Al Gore was all tossing and turning in his sweaty sheets after last week, and he finally called me up and was like, "Look. Mimi. I read your page. Do you really want to hump me until the break of dawn? Because I would be down with that." And then I had to take a few days' break from the online thing to sort of talk Al Gore through his crisis: namely, a Big Crush On Me. I would say, "Baby, it would never work between us, but let's be friends, and if you want to meet me for a drink sometime and drone on with all your super-boring statistics that would be cool, and also, frankly, I wouldn't turn down a private strip show right now, just to be able to say I'd seen Al Gore without his pants on. LT will understand, he's an understanding guy." And that would be why I had not updated in a while. This is all quite contrary to fact. Or more accurately, I am making things up. I mostly just have been a total recluse. Not with kleenex boxes on my feet, but damn close. Friday morning I started the day off right by wiping out on the packed ice in my alley (note to self: the alley is now officially too icy to walk down. Front door only until spring). Of course I do not even have the good luck to land backwards on my pliant and padded and flexible ass, but instead come down hard on my bony brittle hip and my pointy poky elbow, and also end up with road salt all over my vintage old-lady-going-to-church, add-a-pillbox-hat-and-you-could-be-Jackie-Kennedy-crawling-out-of-the-limo coat. The day kind of started circling the drain after that, and continued after work, when I was the first one to show up at the bar and endured the friendly but insistent attentions of Ray the Roofer (honestly, this was how he introduced himself), who seemed stuck on these three themes: (1) he has never seen a girl like me in a place like this (what does that mean, exactly?); (2) I am safe there, he would never try anything (thanks, that is SO not a reassuring thing to hear); and (3) how amazingly quaint and odd it is that I am reading a book in a bar. But then! Someone put the stopper in the drain, because my friends showed up, and because they were male friends Ray the Roofer, apparently being a follower of the Macho Bullshit Philosophy, immediately ran scurrying for the corner and left us alone. And the evening got quite a bit dramatically better after that. Here is where the recluse part begins, because I don't leave the house for exactly 54 hours after getting home that night. (I told you the reclusiveness thing was getting out of control.) Saturday LT went out to drink beer, be social, and wow all and sundry with his many charms, but I was feeling reclusive and far from charming, so I decided to take a Beer Rain Check and stay home. It was one of those pajama days, where I don't leave the house at all (right, I already said that---my verb tenses are getting all complicated), and I don't shower, although at some point I do change my underwear just because I don't like thinking I am wearing yesterday�s underwear. And then a weird thing happened. I am all planning this nice little evening in, thinking I will read and watch Discovery Channel and write and screw around online, when out of the blue I decide to [allegedly] smoke some marijuana. I haven't done that in a long long time. Here are some of the things I ended up doing that evening, under the alleged influence of my alleged Substance: 1. Got intrigued with the texture of the lint roller. Progressed from just poking it occasionally, to denting the masking tape with my fingernail in a sort of Aztec pattern, to running it over my knuckles, to running it over all my exposed skin. From there, straight on to being embarrassed that I was sitting at home stoned and running a lint roller over my body. 2. Did the classic stoner things of (a) thinking "wow, this is a really long song," (b) worrying that the cat was staring at me in a strange way, and (c) walking into a room and forgetting what I had planned to do there. (Especially bad when going to look up certain passages in books, which I had to do a lot.) 3. Typed around 7000 words. Most of which bore some relation to each other to form syntactical units like "sentences" and "paragraphs." 4. Took pictures of myself with the toy digital camera. This is your Mimi Smartypants. This is your Mimi Smartypants on drugs. 5. Did ballet leaps all over the house while listening to "Bizarre Love Triangle." 6. Changed the ballet thing to a Bollywood-inspired dance routine, complete with coy head flips and graceful arm gestures, also to the tune of "Bizarre Love Triangle." 7. Discovered there is a troubling pinging synthesizer sound at the very bottom of "Bizarre Love Triangle," and developed a love/hate relationship with that sound. 8. Created a tableau on top of my desk with a little rubber Incredible Hulk. He wore a tape dispenser around his forearm like a shield and he scaled The Chicago Manual of Style in victory. 9. Chatted via IM for a while with a friend, before I realized that the medium is not at all suitable for stoned conversation. There is the dialogue between the participants and the dialogue between you and your brain, and it is too hard to decide which one to type up. All the signals cross in the air. 10. Read comic books. Got interested in lettering styles. 11. Read more of the Anatomy of Melancholy. If I tried to explain how much I like this book, you would back away slowly and purposely misplace my URL somewhere. Nobody likes me when I'm all crazy and obsessive. 12. Watched the last half of Crumb (again) and let Charles' suicide at the end hit me like a ton of bricks (again). OTHER STUFF Here is an article about tunnel people. There is also some anthropology dissertation-made-into-a-book thing I read a long time ago called The Mole People about the rather baroque subterranean lifestyle. (And the more you read about it, even though there are a lot of sad stories, the more it does start to seem like a "lifestyle" and not simply "homelessness." In other no-fixed-address news, I was taking the #82 bus south the other day and was excited to see that there is a real live hobo camp at Addison and Kimball---tarps over a clothesline to make a primitive tent, an oil-barrel cookstove---all the standard cinematic hobo details. Interestingly, in the same vacant lot that contains the hobo camp, there are a whole lot of protest signs from neighborhood residents who don�t want developers to put up a Home Depot there. I understand not wanting to live next to a Home Depot, but I would not particularly want to live next to a hobo camp either, and it is sad that most discussions about gentrification and development routinely commit that false-dilemma logical fallacy error. No Home Depot does not have to equal hobo camp. Oh boy! Pi day! It is not until March but I am going to start celebrating right now, with a circular snack. Or maybe a neverending snack. ---mimi smartypants is a polygon with 30 billion sides. back/forward |
