something old

Whisper me a gown of winter,
Sing for me a mask of spring.
Laugh aloud gloves of autumn,
Speak of summer in a ring.

For you I wear my garb of seasons,
Made of voice, with lines so bright.
Take me to the ball of reasons,
Dance with me all through the night.


(thanks again to Kleph. he knows why.)

My Head A'splode

I just wrote a devilish thing that was supposed to be a math quiz. It was much harder than the equivalent quizzes from the math class last term, which was taught by the same profs, so they know this to be true. On the way home, I rattled rather quickly through the stages of the Kubler Ross model of grief

1) denial - This is clearly an error on their part that will be corrected on the next quiz.
2) bargaining - I will stand up in class tomorrow when our prof asks if we have any questions and sway him with my potent rhetoric.
3) anger - Those dirty, crotch abrading, closely inbred, hydrocephalic, trisomy 21 afflicted, pedophilic trash baskets. How many times does the math department have to get shit on by the university to understand that they are, to use the vernacular, being a bag of dicks?
4) depression - oh god, I'm going to fail.

and finally

5) acceptance. - well, really, this isn't so bad, i just need to change how I study for my quizzes to focus more on theory and less on the application. I'll be okay.

Not bad for minor introspection on the failing of a quiz in the span of the ten minute walk from school.

It's going to be a busy year.

3 of ?

The brake lights flared as my brother guided his hand-me-down '85 civic to a sure halt, more or less even with the half-assed parkjobs all around us. The four doors opened nigh simultaneously and the five of us stepped out of the car. Gravel crunched and grass rustled as shoes made contact with the ground and twisted so we could hoist our torsos off the seat of the car that had once been my mother's. The vanity plate still read, "Pani D," pani being Ukranian for Mrs. and D being the first letter of her name. It wasn't until later, while playing host to some extended-extended family from the Old Country that we would learn that Pani D was Ukie slang for "fat ass". No, in the predominantly German town we lived in, it was simply the Panty Mobile. Perhaps not so simply. Hmm.

The door to an old farm house swung open hard and John Mellencamp's The Authority Song blared out so loud that you could feel Middle America reach out and tweak your nipples. People spilled out after the sound; some looking for a quick breath of air on the porch; some looking to deposit what would become nitrogenous fertilizer in a few months with the help of some handy soil microbiology; some were heading to cars for music, to fool around, or simply more beer. In a word - shenanigans. Like the restaurant, less crap on the walls. Although, come to think of it, the inside of that house was smattered and smeared with all the stolen and pilfered signage we could get our grubby, underage drinking, hands on.

It was an ancient two-story farm house, with a veranda over the porch on two sides of it. Whatever colour it had once been had long since surrendered to time and the elements. It was the grey of years and erosion, the way driftwood looks toward the end. It was hemmed in by brush and tall trees and was a couple hundred meters back from the highway nestled into a big copse of trees. That copse made the house unobtrusive and kept the cops away. The history of the place was obliterated when the friend who's family farm it was on decided to get the power hooked back up, wrangle up some discarded couches and turn it into a party shack extraordinaire. There were multiple ways in an out, a few empty rooms upstairs for furtive heavy petting and loads of space on the main level for outright, but still small-town, debauchery.

This wasn't the first time my older brother had basically grabbed me by the scruff of my antisocial neck and dragged me to a party, but I think this was actually the last. After this party, I didn't really need more coercion to want to come out and play. So much random shit would go down at this house, but this was the night it was christened. This was the night we caught a goat. This was the origin of The Goathouse.

The trunk was popped, we grabbed our cases of beer, or in this instance the eighteen I was sharing with others, and meandered towards dilapidation and depredation. The autumn air was cool and crisp, a sharp contrast to the heavy, wet, thick and vibrating air that sucked you in and held you in place inside those walls. The atmosphere pulsated with youth, hormones, alcohol and the ten-years-behind-the-times music you find in small towns everywhere. Shouts of greeting and general profanity erupted at the infusion of familiar faces that were fresh to the floor show. Adolescence sat in dense clusters on the couches and floor of the living room, it stood in the open spaces in what used to be the dining room and kitchen, and around the kitchen table, it cheered and trash talked in the way that can only exist between drunk teens who've spent their entire lives around each other and who are engaged in contests of skill to get other people drunk. You know: generally bored people who still think they're invincible looking for a good time. Oooh, look, quarterbounce.

I liked quarterbounce. I was a fucking quarterbounce sniper. I sucked at talking to girls. Actually, I sucked at getting action, girls I could talk to. I just was really terrible at reading body language and picking up on subtle hints to how I was being received, hence no touch the heinie. But quarterbounce? That had rules that were easy. Aim, bounce, point, drink, repeat. For the uninitiated, quarterbounce, or quarters, as I've heard it called elsewhere, is a game with many variations, but the basics of it require you to bounce a quarter off a tabletop into an empty cup and assign a drink to whomsoever you choose, as long as they are also seated at the table and playing the game. You keep playing until you miss, at which point, you drink and then pass the tools to the person to your left.

The evening proceeded as such parties do: loud noises (I don't know what we're yelling about), loud music, new jokes, old jokes, a fair amount of physical comedy, people disappearing and reappearing in tandem with the opposite sex, that sort of thing. All well and normal until Jessie came back in from a piss and yelled, "THERE'S A GOAT OUTSIDE!" To which the general response was Holy Shit, form a search party, Go Go Go! And a lot of surprisingly co-ordinated crashing through the bush ensued. Running around in what amounts to a small forest at night is dangerous at the best of times, but drunk off your ass in the middle of the night, it somehow works out just fine as long as you avoid tree trunks when you bail, ass-over-teakettle, off a tree root. There are lots of tree roots. But to sum up what it looks like? Do you remember The Blair Witch, when they're handicamming it through the trees at speed? That's about right. The important thing, other than that I was wearing an onion on my belt, because it was the style, at the time, was that after fuck only knows how long, we caught a real-live, smelly as hell goat. (note: onion thing may or may not be a reference to the simpsons.)

The first thing you need to know about what to do if you catch a goat is that they don't like it. The second thing you need to know is THEY DON'T LIKE IT. Thirdly, bring some rope. As luck would have it, my brother's best friend was (still is) a human fucking swiss army knife and he had rope in his trunk just in case he ... um .... needed to tie something up, I guess. I swear he's not a sexual predator. Jessie, who had espied the verboten piece of stank in the first place, had actually been the one to tackle it, so he got the honour of hanging on to the rope as we hauled its cloven ass back to the house. That honour was dubious then and it's dubious now, but holy balls, we brought a goat into that ancient house and the smell of alcohol and hormones was cut with the unholy stench that is a goat.

Goats stink.

Goats also spend a lot of their time trying to headbutt people when they're angry. Just a heads up. Also, no matter how funny you think it is, don't try to drink from the udder of an angry, just-caught, goat. I wouldn't recommend standing behind a goat either, at least not in range of its hindquarters, and I mean that in terms of both getting kicked and shat upon, possibly at the same time.

Someone yelled, "Welcome to the Goathouse."

It stuck.

At this same house, my friend Mark self-circumcised himself through excessive dry-humping and an unfortunate zipper design. A douchebag named Lindsey tried really, really hard for a Darwin award, playing "stick the fork in the wall outlet" which was then compromised by an unnamed party holding a breaker closed on him. His hair smoked and he lost a toenail and he clearly deserved it. My good buddy Chris celebrated his 19th birthday by peeing in the kitchen because he thought he was still in the town bar. A lot of people got laid there, we paid for electricity by recycling alcohol-based receptacles, and I really only remember one or two fights. I have a surprising amount of fond memories of the place.

Oh, and I eventually learned how to talk to girls.

This is how my brain works.

so, we were doing line integrals in math today, and you break a square down into four sides, or lines, C1 though C4. it was a basic example and, as expected the sides of length one ended up having a line integral of length four. my only problem is that I'm pretty sure the integral of C4 is EXPLOSION.

Also, just got back from a movie. After the show, the lineup in the men's room was very long and I ended up peeing at the one kids' urinal. I felt like a giant, and that was fun.

i have bacon.

Dear, sweet bacon,

Were it not for the fact that our union would end swiftly in a case of terminal spousal deliciousness, I would marry you, and make an honest meat of you. Truly, you are the candy of meats.

2 of ?

Breakfast... Lunch... Some sort of unholy brunch-esque combination of the two was eventually achieved at our third choice, a burger joint that also does eggs, has good fries, non-stop pop and unlimited tartar sauce. If you've never had tartar sauce on your fries, you haven't lived. Our first choice was closed and the second had a forty five minute wait, which is what you would expect for the popular choice for the church crowd on a Sunday morning after the houses of the Lord disgorge their hymn-dulled contents. We blended in amazingly with the moms and pops and little buoys and gulls dressed in their Sunday best and that had nothing to do at all with out decision to go somewhere else. Nothing at all.

Most of the talk was very very small, with the exception of my buddy from down under who never seemed to get any hangover of any kind, no matter how much alcolol he consumed. Lucky prick. Also, alcolol is not a typo. While most of the table had their heads in their hands, desperately yearning for the infusion of bacon and coffee to begin, he chattered away merrily. I hated him every morning after. Every fucking time. This was getting to be a habit.

Yeah, I did this a lot more than I should really care to admit. I was a regular social butterfly. Of course, I wasn't always like this, just like I knew I wouldn't always be like this. Even as I was ramping up a life that split my time between academia and alcohol, I knew that it was a temporary thing. A lifestyle that could only exist for a scattered handful of years before I got too old, too jaded, too responsible or just too bored with it. I knew from the very beginning that these experiences would eventually blend into something same-y and tasteless unless I was willing to make a further leap into a dirtier world than I ever had any desire to sample, let alone make it my home. I still wanted them, though. I'd always had a sneaking suspicion that life was holding out on me, and I was determined to pin social interaction down and wring some edification out of it. You can't really judge something unless you've made the effort to understand it.

No, I wasn't always like this. For a long time, I was just a good kid with too much time on his hands and nothing to really fill it with. We moved around a lot when because of my dad's job, so in grade six, when we landed in a little piss-ant town five klicks from ten klicks from the middle of nowhere, I figured, "Hell, we probably won't be here for more than a couple of years," and decided not to bother making nice with the locals and to just do my own thing.

Then we lived there for eight years. Oh, and in case you're counting, that's fifteen klicks from the middle of nowhere.

I was a smart kid, clearly a nerd, stuck in a town that belonged to sports and I didn't want to play. Eventually, I caved, tried out for the football team and made it, started drinking with all the other kids bored senseless from small town suburbia and the farms scattered around it, and made some semblance of a social life out of the whole dirty mess. But if you don't know this, either because you haven't gone through it yet, or because you were never on the wrong side of popular, it takes a while to get a feel for how to talk to people. New people, that is. In a small enough town, on a long enough time scale, everyone gets to know you and your conversational quirks, and as long as you're a good person at heart, they'll overlook a lot. Small towns are actually pretty neat that way. I didn't understand that at the time, but eventually it came to me.

When it comes to talking to new people, there's a whole set of body language cues that you have to learn to both put out and be receptive to. If you start young enough and try hard enough to fit in, this isn't something you need to actively learn, but if you've been standing on the outside looking in for most of your life, then you need to practice this. Basically, just start talking to people, any people, on any convenient pretext and pay some fucking attention. Watch how they react to you and to not only what you're saying, but how you're saying it. It makes all the difference in the world.

People always tell you to be yourself, but what they really mean is that you should be relaxed and not pretend that you have experiences you don't. That doesn't mean that you start talking to the pretty girl next to you in line about video games and computers unless she does first, because the odds are good that she won't be interested in that. "Be yourself" doesn't mean advertise your interests all the time, it means be honest, look for some common ground and try not to get nervous. When it comes to the opposite sex, be yourself means don't try to impress people and leave the pickup lines at home because as it turns out, the kindergarten approach works just fine. "Hi, my name is (insert here), what's your name?" And from there, you keep her talking about herself. People like to talk about themselves. But you don't just blast away with non-stop questions, you actually need to listen to the answers and genuinely care about what she's trying to say, if for no other reason than to have something else to use to keep the conversation going.

I keep saying She, but this advice works in any social situation, on any gender or age group, I should point that out.

With enough practice and attention, you develop a feel for conversations, how to ask questions that lead to more than one word answers, how to slip just enough of yourself into the wordplay that you make the other party feel like they got to know you a little. You might even learn how to be funny. But the trick is that there is no trick, just experience. You know how to get to Carnegie hall? Practice, man, practice. It'll start off painful and awkward, but keep at it, that'll change.

Hell of a tangent there, I believe I was waxing historical. I would have said nostalgic, but that would imply that I enjoyed my time there. Let me be clear: I could not wait to get out of that town. When high school was over, I went to university and did not look back. That being said, I did, eventually, try to enjoy myself while I was stuck there, because why not make the best of a bad situation? Just because you wouldn't have chosen something for yourself is not a reason for you to bitch and moan about it the whole time. That's childish. You bide your time, make the best of it, and then get the fuck out when the opportunity presents itself.

Because hell, even fifteen klicks from the middle of nowhere, there's fun to be had if you bother to look for it.