Velcrometer
Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks
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M. Giant's Velcrometer Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks |
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Friday, May 30, 2003 Reader Mail Slot, Episode XIII First, thanks to everyone who passed along tips and good wishes for our Hawaii vacation, including Marla, Corduroy Ninja, Bella, and, in an eerie coincidence, Carol: I have no Hawaii knowledge, aside from knowing that it's our 50th state and it tends to be humid, but picking up tiki idols for good luck should be fine as long as there are no Bradys around. Those idiots bring bad luck to everyone. Also, make sure that Vincent Price isn't lurking. Not because he's bad luck, but because he's dead and all. That would just be creepy. I appreciate it. Not that we could have had a bad time there if we’d tried. We actually did try for a couple of hours there, but we couldn’t maintain the proper level of misery and ended up having fun despite ourselves. And we learned a valuable lesson in the process. At least I didn’t get sunburned; as a coworker I barely know was kind enough to observe when I returned to the office, I look “as white as ever.” What a relief. Sarcasma feels my pain, because it is also hers: My god, may I just commiserate here? Sounds like I have the same colouring (brownish hair, blue eyes, eerie glow-in-the-dark complexion). Last summer was the summer of idiots making comments about my skin tone. Like, actual total strangers, commenting on the colour of my skin like it was somehow ruining the quality of their life and I could do something about it if only I wasn't so useless and stupid and inconsiderate. You know the tone used for comments about a woman's fat ass? Yeah. "Get a tan, bitch." "Get out of my face, Casper." "Get some sun, cunt." Um... what? Wow, I was actually exaggerating a bit when I originally talked about it. Nobody’s been that rude to me about it for a long time. Especially that last comment, since the person who always used to say that no longer works for me. You know what else doesn’t work for me? Trying to get all deep. Look what happens: Here's something that you might find apropos. I read it this morning in Nicholson Baker's "The Size of Thoughts." It's in the essay titled "Lumber," in which Mr. Baker tells us the history of the usage of "lumber" to mean the information in our heads. Quote from Sherlock Holmes: "A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it." (A Study in Scarlet) Interesting how I ran across both that essay and your post today, when I'm having mental discourses on thinking and thoughts. Not deep, mind you, just cerebral. Or something. See, one of the great things about being a Damn Hell Ass King is that it fools all kinds of smart people like Fish Dreamer up there into reading me. That raises the question of how smart they really are (especially the ones who stick around), but I don’t want to seem uncharitable. However, it sometimes puts me in the situation of a tourist in Puerto Vallarta who asks “Donday esta banno?” and gets sprayed with a flood of incomprehensible Espanol and, shortly thereafter, his own urine. The thought that someone can read Nicholson Baker and me in the same day and actually draw a parallel between us is rather humbling. I have to be humble for a minute now. Okay, I’m back. Robin has this to say on the subject of air mattresses that turn into flaccid bladders overnight: Have you ever tried Aerobeds?? I swore by them in college. The pump is attached, and it inflates just by pressing a button. Most comfortable air bed I have EVER slept on. They just came out with a new bed, for outdoors/camping/etc. with a rechargeable pump and everything. Here's the link. And here’s what throws me: the phrase “Minute Bed Sport.” I’m not sure if they mean “minute” or “minute” but either way, why do they think I want something called that? I don’t know what kind of spyware has sneaked onto my system, but these folks seem to know just a little too much about me. Creepy. Folks have also been pretty helpful about my allergies. At least two people have pointed out that “severe” and “acute” are in fact not necessarily synonyms when used in a medical context. And Catness (like Fish Dreamer, a Chicklit contributor) was nice enough to share some allergy-related info I could use: One method that Mr. Catness uses for his allergies is to eat a teaspoon of local honey every day. Honey has all the traces of pollens and other allergens in it, and local honey, obviously, will have those native to your area. By ingesting it, you're building up a tolerance and immunity to the local flora. In Atlanta, Mr. Catness was plagued by horrible hay fever and allergies until he started with taking honey. When he moved up here to Seattle, and he had a whole new set of pollen producing plant life to get used to, a month of local honey got everything under control. Makes sense to me. I haven’t actually found any local honey yet, but I’m not sure if it makes a difference because after the Hawaii trip, I’m now fairly sure I’m just allergic to the cat. So I ate him instead. Thanks, Catness! Whatever disappointment I felt in the lack of response to the pudding bug story last month, it was more than made up for this month by the reaction to my terrifying combat with a gigapede from Hell. Up to and including a shout-out from Strega in this season’s penultimate Angel recap. As Liz put it: What is it with you and the ability to make me shriek, jump out of my chair in horror, and go into convulsions? Actually, I have that effect on a lot of women. This is the second time that's happened to me while reading your blog. Oh, that’s what you meant. I knew that. The first time was when I read about the "pudding incident." When that bug jumped on you... eeeeeeahg. Maybe the creature was an angry descendant of your little pudding hitchhiker. I have to go consider sedatives now... I never even made that connection. Worse yet, what if it was the Swiss Miss-fit himself, reincarnated in a form that would allow it to seek revenge? Thanks, Liz. You can just rock me to sleep tonight. And now I can’t even run away to Antarctica, thanks to Obb: See now, Antarctica isn't the place to flee to avoid Lovecraft-esque beasts of terror. His short novel "The Mountains of Madness" involves intrepid but naive explorers from Arkham University being driven MAD MAD MAD by the unholy abode of eldritch gods of chaos at the pole. Although actually it might still be preferable to the terrifying…ladybug? you just boldly vanquished, since I mean, the explorers were basically driven mad by…evil geometry. I mean, geometry. I had some creepy math teachers, but I can't think of any angles that particularly haunt my dreams. But I can see how having, say, Mr. C. H. Thulhu as a math teacher could send a person to therapy. But it's not like the attack of the 50-foot ants or anything. I have no idea what my original point was. That last sentence alone qualifies Obb to take over for me. Even Hawaii isn’t completely devoid of diabolical representatives of the astral plane. While driving around, we caught glimpses of a couple of specimens of something that appeared to have the body of a ferret, the head of a cat, and the gait of an electric Slinky™. I had no idea what it was, but I was glad to see it was running away from us. As I am running away now, because I have no ending. See you in June, and may your weekend contain a marked lack of nightmarish beasties, leaky air mattresses, near-fatal allergy attacks, rude people, and Nicholson Baker. I have no idea whether any of those categories overlap, but I thought I should cover everything just to be safe. posted by M. Giant 3:27 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Thursday, May 29, 2003 In the Air Tonight I figured my allergies are over for the season. I’m still taking the meds, even though they did their job, and I plan to keep my doctor’s appointment next week even though it doesn’t look like I’ll have any symptoms to show them. But I brought my allergy drugs to Hawaii, just to be safe. And to see if they’d actually work. I mean, it’s a tropical climate. It’s never not spring there. The popular image of the place is that of a green hell where you can’t take a step without kicking up a cloud of fallen hibiscus blossoms, and if you linger over your dessert you’re going to have to ask the maitre’d for a machete so you can hack your way back to your parking spot. I was bringing my shiny new allergies to spend six days in the middle of the Pacific Ocean on a tiny dot made entirely of lava and pollen. Of course I brought my meds, figuring they’d do me as much good as Butch and Sundance’s guns did for them in Bolivia. I was wrong. They didn’t even help me that much. Because, as it turns out, I didn’t need them. Imagine Butch and Sundance dashing out of the fort, ready to go down in a blaze of glory, and nobody’s even there to shoot back at them. I went to a place where tens of thousands of years of evolution in geographical isolation has engineered allergens the like of which my respiratory system has never seen before, histamines that should have had me sucking on my inhaler like a scuba diver on a regulator, and their harmful effects on me were negligible. Less than negligible, in fact—negative. I took a huff of Albuterol on the fourth day just to remind myself how to do it. Then we got back yesterday afternoon, and maybe it’s the fact that my internal clock is running five hours slow, or total exhaustion caused by my utter inability to sleep on an airplane even in an exit row on a seven-hour overnight flight, or Strat’s four-hour “YOU’RE HOOOOOME!” cuddlefest, but when I woke up this morning I was hacking and wheezing like I’d swallowed a used air filter from a ’72 Gremlin. Damn. Now I have to move to Hawaii. Nothing for it, I suppose. * * * No, I can’t sleep on an airplane, thanks for asking. It seems to be the only place I can’t sleep. It’s not that I have claustrophobia or a fear of flying; it’s just that I’m too damn big. I can’t get comfortable. It doesn’t matter how tired or jetlagged I am; if I manage to close my eyes for any length of time, it’s entirely due to the in-flight movie. Trash, bless her, popped a Unisom™ ten minutes before boarding. I considered doing the same, but then I would have been awake, uncomfortable and drugged, so I chickened out. Trash, who actually falls within the size range of people for whom airplane seats are designed, was crashed out on my shoulder almost before we were in the air. This is a problem. Under normal circumstances, I’m a heavy sleeper. Trash, by contrast, is such a light sleeper that the airlines give us a discount if she’s unconscious for at least half the flight. If I move—if I reach for my book, or the headset, or my tray table, or a complete lungful of air, it’ll be enough to jostle her into awareness and I’ll feel like an ass. After an hour or so, that’s what I’m feeling like anyway. More precisely, I’m feeling like I’m nothing but a giant, entire-human-sized ass. Because that region of my body is crying out in pain so loudly that my entire miserable existence feels focused on my glutes. And the part that isn't is desperately sending the telepathic mesage "wakeupwakeupwakeupwakeupwakeup" across the inch of empty space that separates my skull from my wife's. The considerable weight of my upper body, along with the less considerable weight of Trash’s head, is pressing straight down relentlessly until it feels like my lower back is telescoping downwards. I was six-two when I boarded, but I’m going to deplane in Denver looking like an assless Seth Green. This is why I can’t sleep on a plane. I have no sleeping disorders of any kind, unless there’s a clinical name for “unable to effortlessly drift off into a state of Morphean bliss while steeped ribcage-deep in ass-originating agony.” Even my ass couldn’t sleep, and if it couldn’t do it under those conditions I see no reason why the rest of me should have been able to. Maybe all of my future trans-oceanic flights should be in First Class, or one of those Virgin Airlines planes where your seat actually reclines into fully horizontal bed. It’ll cost a bit more to get there, but the comfort in transit might make up for not being able to afford to leave the airport once I get there. Because taking a nap on our living-room floor felt pretty darn luxurious after our flight. Ah, the siren call of a level stretch of berber. How decadent. posted by M. Giant 3:22 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Wednesday, May 28, 2003 Aloha I’m back. A few things I’ve learned about Hawaii—or at least the island of Oahu—which I will now share with you: Driving on an island, even a fairly large one, is different from driving on the mainland. Everyone warned us that if we found ourselves on the freeway during rush hour, we’d be sorry. Naturally, the hour-plus clusterfuck we had to negotiate at Alamo before we could drive off in our rental car ensured that we had no choice but to do exactly that. It was easy enough to find the H1, and once we got there, we found we had time to count the individual pebbles in the pavement. And since Oahu turns out to be a very three-dimensional place, topographically speaking, even if we’d felt comfortable getting off the road to find an alternate route, there would be no guarantee that any such route existed. We had mountains on the left, oceans on the right, and bridges over water every mile or so. We decided to enjoy the scenery. But get this: we had a few hours to kill yesterday evening before our flight home, so we drove around the area east of Downtown Honolulu. Obviously we stayed off the freeway because we didn’t want to end up watching our plane take off without us while we were still trapped like bugs in automotive amber somewhere on the interstate (and I’ll spare you the riff about the misnomer that the word “interstate” is in this case), and we drove around on the side roads. Guess what? They were abandoned. Five-fifteen on a Tuesday, and the only reason it was busier than three-thirty in the morning was the fact that we were there. Here at home, I’m all about staying off the freeway during my afternoon commute, not least because the Crosstown Commons has been listed as one of the ten worst interchanges in the US, and the number of cars I have to drive between on France and Xerxes tells me I’m far from the only one. Oahu drivers could avoid traffic jams if they wanted to, but I’m not convinced they want to. On the other hand, it’s not as necessary there, because by definition, nobody has very far to drive. I work with someone who lives in Cambridge, a town 55 miles from our office. Try driving 55 miles in a straight line from Honolulu and see what happens. Just be sure to bring a life jacket. Another strange thing: you know how, when you pump your gas, there’s a little latch on the nozzle so you can just lock it in “on” position and let it fill up automatically while you have a smoke or whatever? They don’t have those in Hawaii. I think it’s because they’re paranoid about fire, and who can blame them, being on an island and all? One good oil blaze and 850,000 people are living on their surfboards in the nearest bay. Trash’s theory is that nobody has to buy gas very often, so they prefer to savor the rare experience of actually pumping some petroleum. Seriously, we covered almost the whole island in our car—some of it twice—and didn’t even use three tanks. I attribute part of that to my habit of putting the car in neutral and turning off the engine whenever we went downhill, but I couldn’t have been the only one on the island who did that. I snark, but we really did have a wonderful time. We did a lot of things we’d never done before, like watch the sun rise over the Pacific (or we would have, if we’d ever gotten out of the house that early), drive from one end of a freeway to another in less than an hour (or we would have, if we hadn’t stopped for lunch), and ate at seven Thai restaurants in six days (or at least we would have, if the seventh one hadn’t been a dinner-only place). The place we stayed was better than we hoped, the weather was temperate, and nobody seemed inclined to bomb Pearl Harbor again while we were sailing across it. I’ll give this trip a thumbs-up. And I will continue to do so over the next several days until I have wrung it completely dry of material and you’re sick of hearing about it. Mahalo. posted by M. Giant 3:12 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Wednesday, May 21, 2003 Stargazing Note: I’m going to Hawaii tomorrow (M. Giant's flying? Must be an Orange Alert), and it’ll probably be the middle of next week before I update again. So I leave you with a short play I wrote a couple of years ago and never did anything with. Mahalo. Setting: a bare stage. Lighting is dim, to indicate nighttime outdoors. The light will become gradually brighter over the course of the play where indicated. Two people are sitting on the ground, apparently looking up at the sky. Alex is a boy of about ten; Steve may be anywhere from his mid-twenties to mid-thirties. They are both wearing jackets. ALEX: What are we doing out here, anyway? STEVE: We’re looking at the stars. ALEX: Why? Is something going to happen? Is the space shuttle going to go over? STEVE: No. It’s not even up now. ALEX: A meteor shower? STEVE: No. ALEX: A lunar eclipse? Northern Lights? Something? STEVE: No. ALEX: Then what? STEVE: I told you. We’re looking at the stars. ALEX: Is that all? STEVE: That’s all. ALEX: What’s the point of that? STEVE: There is no point. That’s the point. ALEX: What? STEVE: Every once in a while you have to do something that has no point. It’s good for you. ALEX: You always say video games are pointless. STEVE: That’s different. The point of that is to get a high score, or kill all the monsters, or whatever. We’re out here just ‘cause. ALEX: Just ‘cause? STEVE: Yes. ALEX: That’s weird. STEVE: Just trust me. And promise me something. ALEX: What? STEVE: Promise me that when you grow up, you’ll still have time to sit and look at the stars once in a while. ALEX: Okay. Beat. ALEX: Are we done yet? STEVE: Alex! ALEX: Well, I’m cold. Why can’t we do this in the summer?. STEVE: In the summer it gets dark too late and the sky isn’t as clear. For Pete’s sake, Alex, will you try and have some perspective? ALEX: Tonight I have perspective. Tomorrow I’ll have pneumonia. STEVE: See that star there? ALEX: Which one? STEVE: The one in the middle of Orion’s belt. ALEX: Yeah. STEVE: You see it? ALEX: Yeah, I see it. STEVE: Do you know why you see it? ALEX: ‘Cause I have eyes? STEVE: Well, yeah, that. But also, because the light from that star has been traveling twenty-six years to reach your eyes. ALEX: Twenty-six years? STEVE: Yes. That star is twenty-six light years away. After its light has traveled all this way, you could at least have the courtesy to pretend to be interested. ALEX: I am now. STEVE: I thought you might be. ALEX: What if it went out? STEVE: Went out? ALEX: Yeah. What if it went out right now? STEVE: Well, if it went out right now, we wouldn’t know until twenty-six years from now. ALEX: But what if it had gone out twenty-six years ago? STEVE: Then we wouldn’t be able to see it now. ALEX: But I can’t see it now. STEVE: Sure you can, see? It’s...hum. A cloud must have covered it. ALEX: A very small cloud. STEVE: Stars don’t just go out, Alex. ALEX: A very small, very still cloud. Beat. STEVE: You know what happens sometimes, instead of stars just going out? ALEX: What? STEVE: They blow up. Yeah, they explode. They do. That’s called a supernova. ALEX: How come I’ve never seen one? STEVE: They don’t happen very often, at least not close enough so we can see them with the naked eye. The last visible one was a few centuries ago. You know, some people think the Star of Bethlehem was a supernova. ALEX: (pointing) If that star blew up, would we be able to see it? STEVE: Definitely. That one’s only seven light years away. It’s bright now, but it would get a whole lot brighter. ALEX: That would be cool. STEVE: Don’t be ridiculous. It would have to have happened seven years ago. Then we’d be able to see it right about— Light cue. STEVE: Holy cow. ALEX: That’s so cool! STEVE: That did not just happen. ALEX: No, it happened seven years ago. STEVE: This doesn’t happen. Barnard’s Star just does not go nova while you’re sitting there and looking at it. ALEX: What about that star there? STEVE: Betelgeuse? That’s a red giant. When it goes, it’ll go slow. That one’s got another twenty billion years, easy. Light cue. ALEX: Or not. STEVE: This is impossible. ALEX: Really? For the first time, Steve regards Alex with some suspicion, then dismisses the thought. STEVE: I hope you realize the enormity of what you’re witnessing here. A supernova is the kind of thing that happens maybe once in a millenium. And you’ve seen two! Aren’t you glad I dragged you out here tonight? Think about what you would have missed. Light cue. ALEX: There goes another one. STEVE: What? I missed it! ALEX: You can still see it. STEVE: Of course I can still see it! These fireballs last for years, sometimes centuries. Criminy, I think that one was the North Star. ALEX: It’s the North Nova now. STEVE: You don’t get it, do you? These are incredibly rare astronomical events. They have been happening over the past century, hundreds of light years distant from each other, yet in intervals that to us, on Earth, make them appear almost simultaneous! There’s no other planet in the universe that sees what we’re seeing right now. ALEX: Dude. STEVE: “Dude?” All you can say is “Dude?!” Light cue. ALEX: What else do you say when the Big Dipper is blowing up? STEVE: This is impossible! Absolutely impossible! Do you realize the significance of this? I mean, the odds are simply— ALEX: Astronomical? STEVE: Stop it. ALEX: Hey, where’s your perspective? STEVE: Alex, our galaxy is destroying itself before our eyes. It’s been doing it since years before I was born, before your grandparents were born, and nobody on Earth had any idea! There is no perspective for something like this. Light cue. ALEX: There goes Orion. STEVE: Are you doing this? ALEX: Don’t be ridiculous. STEVE: Well, that’s the only explanation. ALEX: That’s not an explanation. You’re being hysterical. STEVE: Hysterical? ALEX: Yes. Just calm down. Look at the stars. STEVE: Look at the stars? ALEX: Yes. Sit down and look at the stars. STEVE: Fine. ALEX: See? It’s stopped. STEVE: For now. ALEX: Just enjoy the night. STEVE: I can’t even see any stars any more. The sky is too bright. It’s all full of supernovas. ALEX: I believe the plural is “supernovae.” STEVE: Oh, shut up. I’m going in. ALEX: Okay. STEVE: Hey, you know what I said about you making time to look at the stars? ALEX: Yeah? STEVE: Never mind. Exit Steve. Curtain. posted by M. Giant 3:58 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Tuesday, May 20, 2003 Found Audio This is what I heard the other night while I was watering the front yard: “ALL ATHLETES AND SPECTATORS! PLEASE MOVE TO THE CENTER OF THE FIELD FOR THE HOKEY-POKEY.” No, I hadn’t mistakenly filled my drop-spreader with PCP or accidentally kicked over a wacky mushroom growing on my property. The local high school has a football field and race track a couple of blocks away, right next to the park. Every once in a while we hear what’s going on over there; a football game, or commencement ceremony, or whatever. This fell dead center in the “whatever” category. I went back to watering. “ONLY EIGHT PEOPLE ARE IN THE CENTER OF THE FIELD. I SEE MANY PEOPLE MOVING IN THE WRONG DIRECTION. ALL ATHLETES AND SPECTATORS PLEASE MOVE TO THE CENTER OF THE FIELD FOR THE HOKEY-POKEY.” I had to ease up on the spray nozzle to hear properly. I listened for a few more seconds, but no more Hokey-Pokey-related announcements were forthcoming and the nascent blades I’d planted a couple of weeks before were crying out for moisture. I started spraying again, then stopped a minute later. “IF YOU HAVE MISPLACED A PAIR OF SIZE 7½ TIGERS, COME TO THE ANNOUNCER’S BOOTH TO CLAIM THEM. THEN RETURN TO THE CENTER OF THE FIELD FOR THE HOKEY-POKEY.” At this point, I probably should have gone into the house to fetch Trash; she might want to hear this. But I figured that by the time I got her outside where she could hear, there’d be nothing to listen to. I figured wrong, as an announcement several minutes later demonstrated: “WE ARE STILL WAITING FOR ALL ATHLETES AND SPECTATORS TO MOVE TO THE CENTER OF THE FIELD. PLEASE MOVE TO THE CENTER OF THE FIELD NOW AND FORM A CIRCLE FOR THE HOKEY-POKEY.” Whoever this guy was, he had a microphone and a PA, he was not afraid to use them, and he was not giving up on his Hokey-Pokey. By the way, my backyard looks great now, thanks for asking. I mowed it for the first time this past weekend and it looks like a golf course. “PLEASE FORM A CIRCLE NOW FOR THE HOKEY-POKEY.” The front yard, on the other hand, still has some dead spots where I’m waiting for seeds to sprout. I’ve learned that it’s almost easier to restart a lawn from scratch than it is to patch a damaged one. I finished up and coiled the hose next to the house. “PLEASE FORM A CIRCLE. THAT IS NOT A CIRCLE.” Okay, I know that, it’s really more like a long, narrow, messy oval whose length is more or less equal to that of the side of my house,, but I’m not going to waste time coiling up my hose all anal-retentive-like when I’m just going to have to pull it out straight again in twelve hours or so. And for the life of me, I can’t think of a way to rephrase that to make it sound not dirty. “THANK YOU FOR YOUR COOPERATION. PLEASE STAND BY FOR THE HOKEY-POKEY.” I went inside to fetch Trash for our evening walk around the block. We stepped out to the sidewalk in front of our house, Trash bearing in a direction away from the park. “YOU PUT YOUR LEFT FOOT IN, YOU PUT YOUR LEFT FOOT OUT…” I didn’t know she could turn around that fast. She wanted to know what was going on at the athletic field. By the time we arrived, I’d brought her up to speed and the Hokey-Pokey was over by the time we got there, in less time that it had taken to make it happen in the first place. Trash and I giggled at the mortified high-school track stars slinking onto their buses, avoiding each others’ eyes like frat boys the morning after a long, debauched party with more beer than women. It’s only days away from graduation for the seniors, and we just knew some of them were thinking that they were at a point in their academic careers where they could immolate a litter of kittens in the principal’s office and still expect a diploma, yet some announcer’s-booth General Ripper had debased them so thoroughly. And what can one say about that, other than the fact that that’s what it’s all about? * * * I’m on the panel for this quarter’s Diarist Awards. We’ve gotten the finalists posted. Go check them out and vote for your favorites by the end of this month. And I’m not just saying that because I’m one of the tallyists; if anything, I’d be happy with fewer votes to count. posted by M. Giant 3:49 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Friday, May 16, 2003 Sleeping on Air Trash and I have never had particularly sterling luck with air mattresses. Some people say you make your own luck in this world, and I would agree with them in general. With that in mind, I’d have to say that Trash and I have never had particularly sterling luck with air mattresses. Let me just clarify that I’m not talking about those inflatable rafts that are supposedly designed for relaxation in a pool or a lake, but which I’ve never seen serve as anything other than hotly contested floating real estate in aquatic battles royal. I’m talking about a mattress you fill with air and stretch out on for a good night’s sleep. In theory. For instance, there was a long period when we could find the air mattress, or the pump we needed to inflate it, but never both at the same time. I’m here to tell you, when circumstances call for one to use one’s lungs to inflate twelve cubic feet of rubber to 35 PSI, one really appreciates the wind capacity one developed in the course of having played the saxophone throughout one’s formative teen years. Unless one didn’t, in which case one is screwed. And even if one did, watching the air mattress being deflated and rolled up for storage the next morning is like watching the death of a child to whom one gave birth through one’s trachea. Then there was that late morning in September of 1999 when Trash and I, along with Kraftmatik and The Krank, were hastily packing up our rental minivan in hopes of getting to the Badlands to set up camp before dark. Trash directed me to stuff our rolled-up airbed into one of several drawstring bags that held our camping equipment. “But this bag is full of poky things,” I protested. “It’ll be fine,” she said, thinking I was worried about getting our bed dirty. In her defense, the rental company had been late getting the van to us and daylight was burning. We had more important things to worry about than the fact that a soft, inflatable item was crammed in among our corncob holders, cooking knives, campfire skewers, tent stakes, spare axe heads, Ninja throwing stars, caltrops, and a set of severe tire damage spikes we brought along in case of emergency. That’s all the defense she gets though, because that night in the Badlands I inflated, patched, and reinflated that mattress four times without diminishing the chorus of whistles from its multitude of leaks by one note. Trash is lucky we had the pump with us, because Badlands National Park is among the ten best places in the country to dispose of a body. We spent a couple of nights with nothing between us and the cold, hard, South Dakota ground but our pajamas, sheets, sleeping bag, and tent floor. Hardcore campers scoff at our wimpitude, but if we were hardcore campers we wouldn’t have needed a van in the first place. A couple of days later we found a hardware store in the Black Hills having a We’re Selling Off All Of Our Shitty, Seventies-Vintage Merchandise Because Right Now It’s The Only Thing Keeping Us From Shutting Our Doors Permanently And Burning This Hateful Little Town To The Ground Sale, and we bought a shitty, seventies-vintage air mattress. Our newly ventilated air mattress, which at that time was resting in strips at the bottom of a National Park Service trash receptacle some ninety miles away, had been a hunter-green Coleman™ with a flocked top and air chambers that simulated the springs of a Sealy Posturepedic™. Its replacement was an all-vinyl eyesore with brown, orange, and white stripes and the friction coefficient of snot. A week later, when we were sleeping at a campsite in Colorado and the most level spot had a two-degree slope, Trash’s incessant pre-sleep wiggling had us both sliding downhill and making the Sisyphean horizontal return climb over and over again until I deliberately slid her halfway off the mattress because a) stop the damn wiggling already, and b) whose fault was it that we were on this inflatable skating rink in the first place? We laugh about it now, but it was a good thing we’d run out of shuriken in Arizona. As it was, we woke up to find ourselves using the mattress as a pillow. We replaced that mattress with another decent one shortly after returning home, which was good, because the next time we inflated the ugly one, the inner straps that bound the bottom to the top and kept the thing shaped like a mattress rather than a lozenge snapped, leaving us with a lozenge-shaped air mattress that would have been impossible to sleep on for any living thing save moss. We still have the new mattress, and houseguests find it quite comfortable. We store it in a drawstring bag along with the air pump, a fleece blanket, and old, soft sheets that are folded in such a way as to not have any square corners. Deniece’s parents have a similar air mattress, and that’s what we sleep on when we visit them in Iowa. Sadly, during this last visit it was no longer up to the task. If you’ve ever woken up on a twelve-cubic-foot air mattress that contains two cubic feet of air, you know what I’m talking about. The first morning, the sun found us resting on just enough air to provide buoyancy to one limb at a time each. The next night, we woke up at four-ish with carpet prints on our backs, reinflated, and once again found ourselves sprawled out on a giant, empty Hefty™ bag a few hours later. I certainly don’t mean to impugn our hosts’ hospitality; these things happen, and I’m sure they’ll have the thing either patched or replaced by the next time somebody visits them. Do me a favor, though—don’t tell them Trash went to bed with a pocket full of caltrops. That’ll be our little secret. posted by M. Giant 3:07 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Thursday, May 15, 2003 The Economics of Trivia "Never memorize something that you can look up." -- Albert Einstein I have a certain affinity for retaining useless trivia. Used to be I was frequently the only person in the room who knew the distance between the earth and the sun, or the capital of Bolivia, or how to connect W. C. Fields to Kevin Bacon off the top of my head. Yes, these facts were useless to me in any practical sense, but the fact that I was the only person in immediate possession of them made them more valuable, in an entirely theoretical supply-and-demand sense. If I’d only taken a tip from DeBeers, I could have become rich. Now, things have changed. There are still times when I’m the only one in the room who knows something, but then I zip my pants and come out of the W. C. and that’s the end of that. What with the Internet and Google and high-speed connections and the Internet Movie Database, the knowledge I once sat on carries less of a premium. And not just because it has my ass-prints all over it. Now, before you click out thinking that this is just some Neo-Luddite you-kids-get-out-of-my-yard grumpy-old-man rant, I want to say that this is a good thing. I’ve benefited from it as much as anyone by filling in some of the yawning gaps in my encyclopedic mastery of the non-vital. And Google and Jeeves have been quite helpful for fact checking and researching past entries (a claim that may well stagger regular readers, but trust me: it could have been so much worse). Feel free to click out now, but please do so out of boredom. The thing is that I still have all of these useless facts in my head, and they’re more useless than ever because the Internet has rendered them all but ubiquitous. It comes in handy in situations when I don’t have access to the web, like at the pub quiz or in the car, but I can’t help thinking that I’m wasting valuable mental bandwidth storing away data that can now be accessed by any troglodyte with a keyboard. Factor in the things that a trained Information Professional like my wife can find out, and the only limits on what the average citizen can learn are the ones imposed by John Ashcroft. I know people’s brains are wired in different ways, and people retain different things for different reasons. For instance, I can name more members of President Bartlet’s staff than President Bush’s, while my wife can effortlessly recall such minutiae as the due date for our mortgage and the fact that cats need food to live. We complement each other’s memories that way. Not to be confused with complimenting each other’s memories, which tends to be more of a one-way situation. It would be interesting if we could just ditch information from our brains to make room for more, like we do with our hard drives. Or reconfigure our brains’ settings to maximize performance in certain areas at the expense of others. I wonder how many people would actually do that. I wonder if I would. I can tell you one thing, though. If I did, this would be a hell of a lot better entry. posted by M. Giant 3:35 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Wednesday, May 14, 2003 Sun Infidel Last night I paid people to let me strip to my underwear and bombard me with toxic radiation. I got a really good deal, too. Here’s the thing: I don’t tan. I can’t tan. I’m descended from colourless Bog People whose melanin production was severely curtailed early on in their evolution in order to equip their livers with the resources necessary to meet the heroic demands made on them. I’ve certainly benefited from the upside of the deal (if being a ridiculously expensive date can be accurately described as an “upside”), but the downside hits me every summer when it comes time to break out the shorts and airplanes start landing on the street in front of my house. Yes, I’m fair-skinned. In the sense that Bill Gates is well-off. It would be fine if I had my people’s red hair and green eyes so people would look at me, think “Irish,” and get on with their lives. Or if I had blond hair that would allow me to pass for “Nordic.” Or jet-black hair that would prompt people to think “Colin Farrell is much taller in person” and give me giant bags of money. Instead I have brown hair and blue eyes, which in combination with my achromatic complexion creates a freakish combination of coloring that people seem to think gives them license to speculate aloud whether contact with sunlight would blind me instantly or simply reduce me to a pile of ash. Sadly, they’re not too far off on the latter. When I was growing up and my family went on its annual summer vacation, I’d get terribly sunburned every year. In Northern Minnesota. Without ever leaving the cabin. Afterward, I’d spend a few days on my bed, swaddled in damp towels, and slowly return to my default state of pastiness. I don’t even know how old I was before I believed that a burn could turn into a tan. I mean, I’d never seen it happen. All I ever got was a week of blinding pain followed by enough peeling to keep me occupied until school started. So I figured that what with our impending trip to sunny Hawaii, I’d better prepare. And not just by advance-shipping a drum of SPF-infinity down there from Sam’s Club. No, I wanted to reduce my vulnerability to the sun. Make it my friend. And I was going to do that by cultivating a nice, healthy-looking tan. Or at least a nice, healthy-looking off-white. I mean, let’s be realistic here. So I grabbed some sunscreen and went to the local tanning salon. It feels kind of counterintuitive to bring sunscreen to a place where I’m deliberately exposing myself to UV rays; seems like they could just turn the baking temp down instead. Or perhaps strobe it at me. Or I could just stay home. But somehow I have the idea that the stuff stops the “burning” rays and lets the “tanning” rays through. Which may well be true. If there’s any such distinction, the tanning rays have no effect on me whatsoever, so there’s no way to tell whether they penetrated the Coppertone™ or not. Most of me I still seems to be the color of the underside of a mushroom. I can say that the burning rays are fully functional, however. The area of my back that I couldn’t quite reach with the sunscreen is now a large red patch, as if I got nailed between the shoulder blades with a couple of paintball rounds (complete with corresponding sting for verisimilitude!). Same with my calves, which I could reach, but they apparently were resting directly on the bulbs for the duration of my nap in the human microwave. For what these people charge us, you’d think they could mount us on a turntable or a rotating spit to make sure we get evenly cooked. I shouldn’t complain about what I paid, actually. I got four sessions for fifteen dollars, and if I maxed out my time on each one that would work out to less than a quarter a minute. Which is a lower money-to-time ratio than I’ve spent on arcade games, so it’s not such a bad deal. What would be a bad deal for me would be the “Ultra-Bronze™.” Have you heard about this? Supposedly I can pay thirty-some dollars, step into some unholy combination of a nuclear reactor and a time machine, and come out ten minutes later looking like the next-door neighbor in There’s Something About Mary. What a bargain. Given my natural skin tone, I think it’s more likely that I’d come out looking like a Horta. So I think I’ll just stick with the sessions in the natural, healthy, electric beach. It may seem silly, considering where I’m going, but I really don’t want to get to Hawaii, get critically sunburned in a matter of minutes, and spend the rest of my vacation avoiding the sun. I’d much rather be critically sunburned before I arrive. posted by M. Giant 3:27 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Tuesday, May 13, 2003 Des Moines After Dark It’s a little sad to realize that Trash and I have experienced more of Des Moines’ nightlife in the past several months than we have of Minneapolis’s nightlife. If you’ve ever experienced any Des Moines nightlife yourself, you know exactly how sad that is. Because, see, you already know about the karaoke bar that has a dance-floor-and-long-tables layout lifted straight from Feng Shui for VFW Halls. You’re aware of the fact that it uses racecar hoods for wall decoration. You probably don’t know the waitress who “served” us on Saturday night, since she told us she was only filling in for someone else. You know the “show, don’t tell” rule? It works well for storytellers and screenwriters, but when a server tells me she’s not up to speed, I’d just as soon take her word for it. I don’t need a demonstration as effective as the one she gave us over the next few hours. And while you may not know our waitress, or any of our fellow patrons personally, you won’t be surprised at any of the goings-on. My tale of how a random woman inexplicably came up and stood next to Trash during the first verse of the latter’s rendition of “Son of a Preacher Man,” then returned to her table at the end of the song without a word to anybody, will hold no novelty for you. I will be unable to raise your eyebrows one micron with the revelation of how Trash’s groupie and her fellow fortysomethings engaged in a four-way kiss at their table as if there were MTV cameras in the room. I could describe the experience of watching a man with a mullet and a baseball cap sing “The Look” by Roxette, but any effect on you would be negligible. I won’t even bother to launch into an interminable rant about the cornfed Midwestern girl who took the mic, started talking into it like Jamie Kennedy in Malibu’s Most Wanted, dedicated a song to “any girl who’s ever been cheated on,” and launched into “You Oughta Know,” even though that song is a) less about getting cheated on than the pain of seeing your ex move on, and b) directed at FREAKING DAVE COULIER FROM FULL HOUSE, because you not only oughta know, you already do. A’ight? And there’s no need for me to waste your time talking about the new heights to which Iowa’s male terpsichoreans have brought the form of artistic expression known as the White Man’s Overbite, because you’ve seen it. You don’t need to hear about the woman who attempted to warble “Amazing Grace” to her significant other as if it were “Sexual Healing,” because you’ve heard it. You don’t need me to run down the drink menu for you (if two items may be described as a “menu”), because you’ve drunk it. No, the only real shock of the evening was that I sang karaoke. Solo. Unfortunately, I don’t have a lot to say about that, either. Except this: a guy came up to me and complimented my on my performance, commenting that I didn’t look like someone who would belt out “Basket Case” by Green Day. Which is true enough. I could have responded that he didn’t look like someone who would sing Roxette, but it was pretty loud in there. posted by M. Giant 3:27 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Monday, May 12, 2003 Deniece at Seventy-Three Back to Iowa again this past weekend. It’s getting to the point where I can almost name the freeway exits in order. We got to spend some quality time with our niece Deniece, who at 15½ months is in command of a rapidly expanding vocabulary. She can say fully half of my name now, instead of just the vowel sound. She said Trash’s name for the first time ever. And she’s begun calling her mom’s name. Not “mom,” but her mom’s actual name. She doesn’t know to call my sister-in-law “mom” yet, because she’s the only one in a position to do so and who else is she going to pick it up from? Meanwhile, her folks are looking forward to the day when they have to explain that Deniece’s mom is in fact Deniece’s mom and not just some chippy her dad brought home. There are also a few nouns in Deniece’s verbal arsenal, like “flower,” “balloon,” and “bubbles.” To the untrained ear, they may sound like “FOUAAAAAAAAA,” “BAAAAAAH,” and “BAAAAAAH!!!” respectively. You can tell BAAAAAAH from BAAAAAAH!!! because bubbles are more exciting than balloons. Her language is still a tonal one in many respects. And the only thing more exciting than any of those things is a picture of herself, which her house contains in abundance. She doesn’t have a word for her pictures yet. They defy any description more precise than a happy shout. We can’t be too hard on her, though; photographs of her tend to have a similar effect on adults. Another word she’s picked up is “yeah,” which is typically accompanied by a vigorous nod, and sometimes repeated rapid-fire in certain circumstance. The nightmare of a toddler who can say “no” has not quite arrived yet. She’s put more effort into trying to circumnavigate the no’s that come her way. She’ll reach for something forbidden, hear a no, and then press her head affectionately against whomever is nearest. Then she’ll give an expectant look, as if to say, “how about now?” I don’t know how she ever came up with this tactic, since it’s not like anybody’s ever said, “awww, you’re so sweet; go ahead and play with the Ginsu™,” so she’ll probably be giving up on it soon. Especially now that she’s learned to say “please.” She needs a little prompting, but not much. We have a new game where I lift her up high enough to touch the ceiling, which she gets an inordinately huge charge out of. The other day a bunch of us normal-sized people were standing around talking about it. Deniece caught on, and started babbling loudly and excitedly. The “yeyeye”s and vigorous nodding commenced. My brother-in-law suggested she say “please,” which she did with a completely different expression and tone of voice. Fifteen months, and she’s figured out how to say “peeeeez?” in a way that’s going to score her a nuclear arsenal by the time she’s two. Notice I said “by the time she’s two,” rather than “by her second birthday.” That’s long past. She had her first birthday party in January, and her second first birthday party in February. Then her parents left the “Happy Birthday” banner up for a while longer, because she had such a great time pointing at it and making them sing “Happy Birthday” to her. Trash’s mom’s birthday this weekend, which was combined with Mother’s Day, was also Deniece’s birthday as far as she was concerned. The kid must think she’s in her seventies by now. Someone needs to tell her that with age comes dignity. Yesterday, Trash and I were in our car, following Deniece’s parents to the restaurant where we were having brunch with Trash’s mom. They had Deniece in her car seat, centered in the back. From our car, we could see the silhouettes of Trash’s brother, his wife, the back of the car seat, and Deniece’s dorsal ponytail protruding straight up past it, three inches into our field of vision. We watched it wave happily about, its owner totally oblivious to the effect it was having on the vehicle behind her. We were laughing so hard she nearly got rear-ended. Or, as Deniece might say, “PAAAAAH!” posted by M. Giant 3:19 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Friday, May 09, 2003 Intentional Tourists Trash and I used to be able to get in the car, drive in a random direction, and drive up to the first motel we saw when we got tired. Things have changed. For instance, we’re going to Hawaii in two weeks. Does this sound like a dream vacation to you: · Get up at .000001 in the morning to catch a plane. · Catch plane. · Catch another plane. · Continue until middle of Pacific Ocean. · Troll up and down the miles of car rental counters to find the best deal on a Kia Rollerskate. · Wait three hours for Kia Rollerskate. · Get screwed on Kia Rollerskate. · Drive up and down the Kamehameha Highway, wandering into every hotel, high-rise, and resort in Honolulu in descending order of habitability, inquiring about room rates for the next five nights. · Realize we can no longer pronounce “Kamehameha Highway,” let alone keep driving on it, and therefore submit to the exhaustion of twenty-plus hours of traveling and end up dropping three bills a night on a “room” with a U-shaped mattress, wildlife, a door that doesn’t lock, and two walls. Our first big road trip was a year after we got married. Basically, we pointed the car West and then saw how far we could get before it was time to turn around and come home. We hit our apex in Butte Montana, then headed back like one of Goddard’s early rocket prototypes returning to earth. That trip was when we developed our time-tested lodging-recon method, which consists of walking up to the front desk and demanding, “how much?” How I hate this. Trash and I took turns, but I think she was stacking the deck: Trash: Go ask at this Super-Spectacular-Radisson-Doubletree-Hyatt-Ritz™ here. (M. Giant goes, asks, returns to the car looking defeated and extremely poor) Me: Nine million dollars in diamonds. Extra if we want a bed. Trash: So much for that. Let’s try Uncle Pennybags’s Palace of Splendor™. Me: Forget it. Your turn. I’m still sore from being physically removed from the Vanderbilt & Rockefeller Bed, Breakfast, and Gratuitous Gold Plating™. Trash: Okay, I’ll check the Clean ‘n’ Cheap™ over here. You can start bringing the bags in. We’re getting too old for that nonsense. Last summer, we arrived in Seattle at a time of day that should have allowed us to check every hotel in town before one o’clock; sadly, we ended up actually having to. The thought of doing that up and down the Waikiki Beach area, which fairly bristles with shining high-rises of temporary residence, makes me want to jump into the nearest volcano. Instead, we exploited a brilliant secret, and I’m going to share it with you. It’s this. It’s marvelous. People with space to rent-whether it’s an apartment, condo, or house—post information and pictures on the internet, you look at them, and make reservations with the owner. They’re listed by state and area, so if you’re going somewhere and can’t face a hotel room, get a house instead. It’s especially nifty if you have a group of friends who can all kick in. Our friend CorpKitten actually found this site last year, and we’ve used it ever since. Now, instead of sleeping in cookie-cutter hotel rooms stacked one on top of another and paying exorbitant rates to multinational hospitality chains, we get a home-away-from-home that’s actually some real person’s home. Or home-away-from-home, as the case may be. And then we pay them exorbitant rates. Except not even exorbitant. So rather than spending our Hawaii vacation perched up in a honeybee cell on the thirtieth floor with a view of the thirtieth floor of the building across the street, we’re going to be staying in a secluded, one-bedroom cottage a short drive from downtown Honolulu and a watermelon’s-throw from the Pacific Ocean. And we’re paying about what we’d pay for the same number of nights in a Dreary Cinderblock SunSandSuicide Moto-Court™ if Honolulu had them. Are we excited? I’ll tell you what, we are as excited as really, really excited people. Of course, if it turns out that the website lied and we end up trapped for five days picking our way around lava puddles in a smoking, sulfur-reeking caldera with a junior high soccer team next door, a tribe of headhunters from Gilligan’s Island on the other side, and an industrial mosquito hatchery in our back yard, you’ll be hearing about that, too. posted by M. Giant 3:41 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Thursday, May 08, 2003 Wholesale Away I haven’t made a Home Depot trip for a while. It gets kind of exhausting, frankly. Because a trip to Home Depot is never just one trip. It’s a trip to get the thing I need. Then it’s another trip after I get home and find out I’ve gotten the wrong thing. Then it’s a third trip to return the thing I didn’t use. Between one thing and another, it can take a week of driving around just to get a stupid light bulb changed. So a few days ago I suggested to Trash that we drive over and take a look around for ideas. But instead of buying stuff that we think would look cool, we’d write it down so we could measure or check color matches or model numbers or whatever when we got home. Because there aren’t enough things in our house that need fixing already; we need to wander through several acres of stuff displayed to make our perfectly nice house look like a shack made of poo by comparison. But before we did that, we hit the new Sam’s Club that just opened right next door. I keep hearing about the glories of Sam’s Club. Trash has been there a few times, and several of our relatives have memberships. Every one of Trash’s coworkers also belongs except for MC, which is surprising considering the number of semitrucks that must go there. I must say, my first impression of the place was not entirely positive. Neither were the second and third impressions. Just getting into the parking lot was like leaving a rock concert after the last encore. I had to wait in line and fill out a form to get a membership card, and then stand for a photo while unshowered, unshaven, and coiffed as if I’d been dragged through a hedge backwards. And then the first spectacularly cheap bulk stuff I saw didn’t exactly knock me on my ass. DVDs, the first thing we walked past on our way in, are only a couple of bucks cheaper than at the electronics store. “I’m not impressed,” I told Trash. “The real discounts are on stuff you buy in bulk,” Trash explained patiently. “But I don’t want fifty copies of Road House,” I whined. I was soon to be forcefully shut up. Not by Trash, and not by the effort required to throw my cubic acre of shopping-cart real estate into a ninety-degree turn. But by what I was about to clap eyes on. For instance, a few months ago my mom gave me a three-hundred-fluid-ounce vat of laundry detergent when she upgraded to a new washing machine. I’ve barely made a dent in it. I had assumed that such a prodigious amount of clean juice would have set her back a week’s pay. When I saw the price for which they could be had at Sam’s, I realized that I would have been right, if the average work week ended at 8:45 on Mondays. Not that I don’t appreciate Mom’s generosity, but now I see how she was able to give me her All™ and still afford to buy that boat. And that was only the beginning. Did you know Sam’s Club also sells furniture? The first few aisles we negotiated contained storage cabinets, which is a masterstroke; as I was about to learn, members of Sam’s Club are certain to find storage space at a premium. Because you can go and buy outlandish amounts of stuff at Sam’s for not much more than you’d pay for normal amounts of the same stuff at a regular store. We snapped up enough bottled water to float an aircraft carrier, a Subway franchise’s worth of lunch meat, an amount of Shasta™ cola that helped me to finally understand why a mountain is named after it, enough crackers and cookies to exhaust the annual output of a good-sized flour mill, some frozen lunches in the event that Milwaukee stops by, and an entire dead cow. And I left with my wallet no lighter. In fact, it was heavier, because we paid with plastic and I’d slipped a membership card with an ugly photo into it, but still. I don’t remember what else we got, but it was nothing compared to the stuff we passed up. A muffin tray the size of a barn door. Salmon fillets as big as surfboards. Tubs of butter the size of my dead cow. Shrimp that must have been bred in the cooling towers of Chernobyl. Bricks of cheese? Try retaining walls. And at prices that would bankrupt our neighborhood grocery in seconds. As we wandered through the over-the-counter pharmaceuticals section that wouldn’t fit inside a 7-Eleven, I remarked to Trash, “Can you even imagine being this sick?” The drawback, of course, is that they sell all this stuff in quantities that Trash and I couldn’t possibly consume before a) it went bad, or b) we died. I’m still making sandwiches with mustard that came from Sam’s Club during the previous millennium. Have you ever known anybody who used up both ounces in a bottle of Tabasco sauce? And would you really want to spend a significant amount of time with a person who needed to buy a fifty-five-gallon drum of the stuff? Looking around at the forklifts carrying single packages of ground beef, Trash and I said, “We need to have a shitload of kids.” “And buy a vending machine company.” “And open a restaurant.” “And adopt the patrons’ kids.” “And give each kid a vending machine.” “And a restaurant.” Intellectually, we know all of this. But emotionally, the place is addictive. I’m going to stop by there later today and pick up a few bucks’ worth of dental floss. So I can build a suspension bridge. * * * Being married to a hot librarian has considerable fetish value, so when she gets het up about a library in trouble I have no choice to comply with her wishes. Thus, I repeat the following directive: Go to pamie.com to learn how you—yes, you—can put books on shelves that need them. Or you can do nothing and find the country overrun by functional illiterates in a matter of months. Your call. posted by M. Giant 3:31 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Wednesday, May 07, 2003 When Allergies Attack There are things one doesn’t appreciate until they stop working properly. Like one’s lungs, for instance. The symptoms of my new allergies have been getting more severe, especially at night. Monday night I got in bed, pulled Strat’s favorite thermal blanket over myself, and waited for him to galumph up onto my chest like he does every night. Then my throat began whistling as if I’d swallowed Bob Dylan’s harmonica. Normally I’m pretty good at dropping off to sleep once I get into bed. Trash and I have had any number of conversations in which I’ll end a sentence with a Dagwood Bumstead-esque SKNXKXX. But drifting off into dreamland is another matter entirely when simply filling my lungs is as easy and automatic as inflating a football from the inside. I figured if I could get away from the cat, and the cat blanket, and all the choking drifts of cat-molecules floating around the room, I’d be okay. I told Trash I was moving to the second bedroom. It’s closed off to the cats at all times because Strat seems to think it’s his spare bathroom, so I figured that once I got set up in the house’s nearest equivalent to a clean room, I’d be fine. Trash was welcome to join me, but I was escaping the poisonous feline miasma one way or another. I probably should have explained my theory to her, as she was in a stage of sleep in which she was unable to read my mind as well as she normally does. I popped a couple of Benadryls, relocated, and waited for my breathing to settle down. Two minutes later, a sleepy Trash was there. With the cat blanket. And the cat. My hypoallergenic haven was compromised. We had a penny-for-your-thoughts moment. Although I used a bit more profanity than was strictly necessary. Back upstairs, where the physical effort of breathing continued to resemble that of bench-pressing without the use of arms. I lay on my side and closed my eyes, willing my fatigue to overtake my breathlessness so I could get to sleep. I figured I’d be less uncomfortable if I could get unconscious. And if I was going to suffocate, I sure didn’t want to be awake for it. Eventually I even gave up on that, and Trash got more and more worried. I mentally calculated my chances of having picked up asthma, emphysema, or SARS over the past few days. We decided to go to the emergency room after an on-call nurse heard my loud wheezing over the phone. While Trash was talking to her. In the next room. People complain about long waits at the ER, but those people are doing it wrong. They need to go to ERs in the suburbs after midnight on a weekday complaining of severe respiratory distress. My butt never touched a waiting-room chair. And I would have had my pick of them, too. But I had my temp and BP taken by the time Trash finished parking the car. Minutes later, I was sitting In a curtain area, and what can I say about hospital gowns that hasn’t been said a million times before? I do like that they’re so nice and soft from being worn by thousands upon thousands of desperately sick and injured people before me. And I got to keep my pants on, presumably because I don’t breathe through my ass. At least, not unless I really want to impress the ladies. By the time I got my back freeze-branded with a stethoscope, the Benadryl had kicked in and the wheezing had stopped. So they decided I was faking and “turfed” me, as they say on ER. No, not really. They hooked me up to a steam bong and had me suck on nebulized Albuterol for ten minutes. Then some other people listened to my back as if it contained gossip-worthy neighbors, wrote me a small ream of prescriptions, and sent me home. There were some long waits interspersed in there too. I’m not entirely clear on the sequence of events, because by this time the “may cause drowsiness” part of the Benadryl had also kicked in and I was actually falling asleep while putting my shirt back on. When we finally got home around four a.m., neither of us thought I should go to work in the morning. So I didn’t. I slept past noon instead. Then I went and got my drugs and dosed myself up. Things are looking much better now. I haven’t had any more wheezing episodes, I slept through last night, and I think the purple unicorn is almost ready to be friends with me. Speaking of SARS—what a terrible name for it. “Severe Acute?” Isn’t that redundant? And repetitive? They should call it SARRS. Or SARRRS. You figure it out, I’m sick. posted by M. Giant 3:36 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Tuesday, May 06, 2003 No update today because I spent most of last night at the emergency room. The emergency's over now and I'll tell you about it tomorrow. Thanks for checking in. posted by M. Giant 3:39 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Monday, May 05, 2003 Not In Kansas Any More A couple of weeks ago Trash and I paid a visit to my aunt in southeastern Kansas. Crawford County, to be exact. Yes, that Crawford County. I admired her porch at the time, which is good because it’s not there any more. Her actual house is still standing and so is she, but there’s quite a bit of damage and her large yard is pretty much defoliated. Nobody else in my extended family was directly affected, which is kind of remarkable. I mean, Crawford County probably has a higher concentration of people who are related to me than any other county in America. There were times I couldn’t walk through downtown Girard without seeing a relative. And yet the tornadoes missed everyone but my aunt, who rode out the storm in a house without a basement. I can’t even imagine. Sitting through that once in my life was quite enough, thank you. By the way, why do so few houses in that part of the country have basements, considering the frequency of tornadoes there? Or, considering the way severe weather seems to be magnetically attracted to trailer parks, are the tornadoes a result of all the basementless homes in the region? I’m just thinking out loud here. In any case, it was kind of a strange feeling earlier today to look at the top photo on the top story at CNN.com and see a photo of an F3 chewing up land I was driving across two weeks ago. Not that that’s how I found out. Dad called me at work this morning to let me know that my aunt’s house had been damaged by the storm. “Uh, what storm?” I replied dumbly. I spend eight hours a day sitting fifteen feet from three giant TV screens that show three different cable news stations 24 hours a day, but because they’re pointed away from me I had no idea that half of my relatives had ever been in danger of being blown into Arkansas. Add that to the horrific car accident that took place the other night on a road my parents thought I was on at the time, and it kind of adds up to a stressful twenty-four hours for them, I would imagine. Bad things come in threes, they say. I wonder if that also applies to scares about the safety of family members courtesy of the news media? Maybe I should dummy up a news story about an earthquake or something in New Jersey, where my younger sister lives, send it to the folks, and get it over with. If only I could be sure that they would receive the gesture in the intended spirit of genuine concern for their emotional well-being. * * * Pamie is busy saving the Oakland Public Library, but she needs your help. Okay, given the percentage of my readers who also read her, you probably already knew that. But, for the benefit of my one reader who doesn’t also read Pamie, check it out. And if you really want to impress her, you can make the OPL the first* public library with an entire aisle of Why Girls Are Weird. *I was going to say “only” there, but “first” seems less limiting. posted by M. Giant 3:26 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Friday, May 02, 2003 Begone, Foul Beast! So, the other night Trash and Bitter and I were downstairs in our basement watching last week’s episode of Angel, and Trash was explaining to us how she’d be leaving the room when it came to the scene where the scary-ass sewer demon with the head and torso of a hideously deformed man on top of the legs and thorax of a giant livid insect is working on his gruesome little underground art installment that he’s creating from the interwoven organs and viscera of several dead bodies and at least one undead body. I’m sorry, I just have to pause and say I love that sentence because people who have been watching Angel are going, “Yeah, that scene, okay,” and people who haven’t are all, “Wait, what? This was on TV?” and a few are like, “If that’s the kind of stuff they’re showing now, maybe its cancellation is for the best.” Angel rocks lately. See, this stuff doesn’t bother me, because I can’t ever forget that it’s just some guy in a lot of character makeup playing with plastic and rubber and colored corn syrup while the Foley artists make as much noise as they can with a couple of turkey basters and a tub of mayonnaise. Trash can’t do it though. Those wound-re-enactment scenes on CSI in particular send her crawling between the couch cushions. If she ever meets the guy who plays the coroner on that show, he’s going to be very offended by the Pavlovian reaction she'll have to the sight of him. Anyway, Trash was just explaining how she had no interest in sitting through the impending simulated grodiness, blissfully unaware of the all-too-real nightmare of squick we’d be facing in a matter of seconds. A shadow fell across all three of us. Bitter screamed. Trash ordered me to pause the tape in the tone people use to ask you not to finish impaling them. I was the closest to what they were looking at, but I was the last to see it. Any description of the taxonomy-defying creature crawling along the edge of the wood paneling would have been rejected by H. P. Lovecraft for being too over the top. Clive Barker would have gone mad at the sight of it. Stephen King would have stepped in front of another van to get away from it. Legs so numerous they were indistinguishable from fur undulated along the chair rail, which creaked under its weight. Antennae waved malevolently, either receiving orders from its masters in the Pit through the aether, or sending orders to its minions there. A brimstone stench filled the room, and an atonal buzz bypassed our eardrums and burrowed straight into our brainstems. I paused the tape with nerveless fingers as the abomination dashed behind the bookshelf. All three of us knew what was going to happen next. Now that it was safely out of our horrified sight, the Beast was free to begin multiplying, sending forth wave upon loathsome wave of chittering, CGI-looking mini-Cthulhus that would overrun the floor in seconds and devour our souls as easily as our flesh. Obviously we had no choice but to burn the house down and catch the next plane to Antarctica. But then we remembered that the gas can was outside, in our detached garage. We were going to have to do battle. And without a single gun in the house. I took point. Trash and Bitter were my courageous squires, placing weapons in my hands as I needed them. I slid the bookcase away from the wall and shone the 4-cell Maglite™ back there. This is the same model of flashlight that cops in Philadelphia aren’t allowed to carry any more. But the small comfort its threatening weight afforded quickly turned cold as the Beast turned its luminous green gaze upon me, hissed “they’re building a new circle just for you” in a voice like a coffee grinder full of serpents, and scuttled out of sight. By this time, Trash had arrived with a spray bottle I might use to flush it out to where the light of this world might dissolve its very substance. Why she didn’t bring me anything more toxic than Windex™ is something I can only attribute to the panic of the moment. I misted for my very life, but all I could hear was its hideous laughter. Realizing we were totally outmatched, it came out into the open to face us. All I had on hand to stop its relentless charge was a pair of paper towels. Ordering Trash and Bitter to stay back lest they be besmirched by the shower of meat and bone I was soon to become, I scooped up the monster into its makeshift prison of Brawny™. I was just about to deliver the coup-de-grace of a crushing squeeze within my powerful, bass-playing fist, when it somehow escaped--onto the back of my hand! That was the longest nanosecond of my life. Bitter and I shrieked like a couple of Girl Scouts on fire. The entire right side of my body involuntarily broke the sound barrier and our enemy landed on the carpet in front of the TV. It blinked for a moment, disoriented by its fall and the unaccustomed contact with the atmosphere of our world. I ignored the smoking acid burns and the rapidly mortifying flesh where the Beast had touched me, and I grabbed a DVD case from the rack next to me. Blinded by panic and fury, I landed blow after blow on the sections of the thing that had the most hateful protrusions, while it cackled imperviously at me. Finally Bitter dropped a Newsweek on top of it and jumped up and down on the magazine until it was the size of a mere brochure. When we worked up the courage to pick the magazine back up, all that remained was the powdery outline of a large centipede. We had driven the monster to abandon part of its corporeal form, while the rest of it rode its leathery wings back to the demon dimension from which it had come. I swept up the remaining fragments, burned them in a fire fueled by fragments of the True Cross, sifted the ashes into a bottle of holy water, buried the bottle in a churchyard under the full moon, and sprinkled host crumbs over the fresh earth. When we restarted the tape of Angel and got to the part where the demon practices its sailor knots with the intestines of some MFA from Julliard, I was too distracted by the persistent phantom creepy-crawly feelings on the skin of my arms and ankles and neck and scalp to be grossed out by what was going on in the show. Trash, of course, true to her earlier word, was nowhere to be seen. posted by M. Giant 3:47 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Thursday, May 01, 2003 The Alternate Driving Experience Remember a couple of months ago when my car stopped being able to go backwards? Now it doesn’t want to turn right any more. Okay, it’s actually not that bad. I don’t have to limit myself to destinations that are on my left. I don’t even have to take three lefts to go right. The wheel still turns in its standard range of motion and everything. It’s just that if I have less than a quarter of a tank of gas, and I turn right, the car kind of loses interest in propelling itself forward. Like, it’ll just sort of put itself in neutral and coast until I straighten the wheel out. I can imagine that last gallon or so just sloshing over to the left side of the tank from the centrifugal force, out of reach of the tube that sucks it out to send it to the engine. Or whatever. It’s not like I actually understand this stuff. That’s probably why I let the oil change place upsell me on a fuel treatment and fuel injector cleaner last week. I figured, what the heck, it’s not that much money, and maybe it’ll make the problem go away. And it did! Yay! Then my tank got down to about an eighth and it came back again. Boo. Clearly this will not do. I want high performance! I want torque! I want all those other things that are code for automotive Viagra! If I wanted a hesitant, anemic, motorized shopping cart, I wouldn’t have bought a Saturn station wagon in the first place, you know? Hey, don’t laugh. My grocery-getter has a surprising amount of pickup for a vehicle with five doors. Many are the unsuspecting sports car drivers who have eaten my dust at traffic lights. The suspecting ones, not so much, but still. My station wagon has a tachometer, okay? Plus it’s all red and curvy. Owning it is like driving a cheap midlife-crisismobile that gets good mileage and has room for my bass amp. It works for me. Except lately, when I’m low on gas and turning right. I think I know what it is, though. My dad thinks it’s probably the fuel pump. The service guy at the dealership also thinks it’s probably the fuel pump. Most of the Internet thinks it’s the fuel pump. Therefore, I’ve decided it’s the transmission. No, not really. I’m going with the majority opinion, and Dad has offered to help me put a new fuel pump in it. Shouldn’t be too hard. We won’t even have to pop the hood. I mean, the fuel pump is just that long pedal thing under the dashboard, right? How hard can it be to slap one of those on? * * * We’re going to Hawaii! Trash got alerted to some crazy-cheap airfare on Travelocity, and we’re spending a long Memorial Day weekend fleeing lava. We’re both looking forward to it. So, as always when we’re planning a trip, I’m hitting you guys up on ideas for stuff to do. If you know something I don’t because you live there, or you’ve been there, or you once met somebody who thought about maybe reading a book about the place, let us know. Should we rent a car? Should we travel to other islands besides Oahu? Is it remotely possible to avoid leering wags who “joke” about getting lei’d? Should we snap up any tiki idols we see lying around and use them for good luck charms? This is the kind of stuff we need to know. posted by M. Giant 3:26 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:
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