Speedball

Seven Reasons (Raisons en Francais) why you should Start to or Continue to Smoke*

Chapter One: Where a Cigarette fills in for Gainful Employment

I wake up in the morning and ignore the pile of clothes that the bedroom is doing a really great, like promotion-worthy, job of containing. I walk into the hall, which is doubling as my kitchen, and fill a saucepan with water. In the time it takes for the water to boil, I turn on my computer, grind up enough coffee beans to cover the agitator, and clean out my coffee press. If there's any electronic mail, I either delete it or do what it tells me to do. Sometimes I wash my face.

I am always careful to navigate the growing pile of books that the living room does a less remarkable job of compartmentalizing. The only thing keeping the bedroom from getting it's promotion and all the trappings that entails is the existence of the living room. The living room's perpetual underachieving makes the bedroom appear to be worse than an overachiever. It looks like a brown-noser. It is both independent and needy. Any self-sustaining bonus points are immediately undermined by the giant orange bed it so proudly displays. I know what that bed is saying. It's saying “don't leave me” and you can't have that in the management. By contrast, the living room is easy-going and unphased. You call it into your office and hear “Whatever, I'm trying.” And you want to help that kind of employee, maybe not with a full renovation, but a bookcase and a new lamp would really help them out.

By the time I figure out what the fuck my bedroom (MY bedroom!) is up to, the water is boiling, and the automatic motions of turn off coil, dump coffee grinds into press, put water on top of grinds, stir, fit plunger on top of “press,” go to bathroom,** push plunger down slowly, pour coffee fill in for conscious thought. It is maybe not the best breakfast drink. I take medication and gulping it down with coffee creates a comical expression which has been described as “self-pitying,” “somewhere between nauseated and confused,” and “contorted.” And this is about the time I get dressed.

I really like my porch. It's no more than the staircase that connects the third and second floors to the ground, but the well midway between second and third projects off the building and almost out into the sidewalk. It is almost the width of the building. I have considered putting a plant there. It gets direct sunlight in the afternoon. I people-watch from it. This activity, along with regular classroom visits, is probably the only reason I ever put on anything other than boxer shorts. People-watching requires appropriate apparel and accessorization. The dress code is broad. Pants or shorts. Shoes are not required. Shirts don't need to be buttoned, but they should be worn. I have coffee and a cigarette when people-watching on the porch. (MY porch!) It is a necessity.

*Something which will never be posted in its entirety here
**The bathroom is, if not the cleanest place in my apartment, the least cluttered. Despite the brand-newness of my vacuum, I have no faith in it, or really any other cleaning device other than a mop and bleach. To give you a better idea of just how committed I am to this, the first place I applied to was all tile. I would have rented it too if only for three months in the hopes of manuvering myself into a comfortable month-to-month arrangement afterwords, but it had a lease lined up for September.

Innovations: New Applications for Acrylic Polymers

I'm going to invent clear luggage. Hardshell Plexiglas ones with aluminium clasps and soft vinyl ones with your choice of colored piping!*

I saw some lady using the bag that bedsets come in as a suitcase. Damn sharp if you ask me... It also occurs to me that maybe this lady is a type of performance artist. Is it perhaps easier to simply travel with see-through luggage? Probably not. Though the irony of transparent luggage in the most accessible of situations where you come face-to-bureaucratic-"face" with the very opaque war on terror is pretty delicious, I doubt that the purchase of clear carry-ons will do anything but draw scrutiny until the FAA "strongly suggests" and then "insists" you purchase it. (luggage, not scrutiny) Then it will be like going to high school again.

*Never buy this, or anything else I am selling.

Other observations over Coffee & Kahlua:
-I prefer over-ripe bananas to under-ripe bananas. I find myself thinking "HA! caughtcha!" as I peel the soft banana, which is a better thought-emotion than "drat, I could have waited."
-The dryer in my apartment complex is awful. If it were a fifty cent dryer, I may have simply noticed that it was poorly named, but at 1.25 it is "awful."
-Rally's, perhaps fast food in general, is not the same without a cigarette to complete the double beef gorging.
-I am pretty resistant to the written word. I read Crooked Little Vein over Linguini and Clams and had to stop around the description of Ben Franklin's possessed rectum. I picked it up later.

a.Even so, the insinuation that a writer's/musician's/artist's lifestyle/sexual preference/political affiliations/continued practice or support of evil fucking shit* should be considered by his/her listeners strikes me as odd.
b.But if it's supposed to be a joke, or a roundabout attempt to point out that something is ironic...
c. like homophobic mexicans liking morrisey...
d. then maybe I should "just fucking go with it..."
e. because I'd be screwed if people didn't do that for me.

*Seriously, I don't care if Morrisey takes over the world and decides that the use of oil products or refrigerators are soylent-greenization-worthy offenses. I'm still going to listen to Strangeways, Here We Come.

bean brain

There are times when I'm convinced that the brain cell I use to store one byte of information either overlaps or is the same as the brain cell I use to store another byte of information. (Yes, that sentence gets a little hairy in the middle.) Allow me to illustrate.

















You were totally expecting a picture, weren't you? No, I'm going to give you an example. It's a true-to-life one though. George Orwell. Everytime I think of George Orwell, I think of Animal Farm and fighting with socialists in Spain. Then, I start to think of radio broadcast, War of the Worlds, Rosebud, and a variety of desperate advertisements meant to keep a fat man afloat in the twilight of his career. There's a reason I'm using examples instead of a name, that's because I can't think of it. The fact is, I can't remember (excuse me while i visit wikipedia) Orson Welles' name if I think of George Orwell's name first, and vice versa. It's a common experience that I attribute the creation of Animal Farm to Orson Welles, however, I have an explanation for this. Ever notice how Orson Welles had that Fidel Castro beard once he got older, that might make the Animal Farm thing more believable. All things considered, ORson WELLes isn't not at all mistakeable for George orwell. I don't know how I keep getting them mixed up all the damn time. In times of doubt, I blame comic books, they've always played with my perception of time and continuity.

Anybody else get people, places or things mixed up? For that matter, is a place just an immobile thing? Discuss-thing!