derivative humour

Today, in math class, my professor humped the podium unconsciously for about two minutes while telling a story. He did it in a completely nonsexual way, like a five year old might. The story he told was also slightly humorous.

Pork, the one you love.

Today continues my time off, but with a crucial difference: this is reading week, “spring break” if you will. I'm neither healthy nor wealthy enough to be travelling anywhere, so what I'm doing is just catching up on the work and the people that I missed last week.

I cooked today. Brilliantly, from what I was told by those who partook. There was a pork tenderloin roast, marinated in garlic sauteed in olive oil, with paprika, cumin, thyme and white wine. Baked tomatoes stuffed with bay leaf in basil, garlic and balsamic vinegar. And finally, a mixed green salad with radish, cucumber, cilantro and apple, with a sauce made from lime juice, olive oil and tahini.

It met with rave reviews. My favourite being, and I quote, “If you ever decide to give up women, I would go gay for you. Mmmmmm, gooooood.”

Apparently, I cook so well it'll make you rethink your sexuality.

Capital, simply capital!

I need some more mineral oil. I use it on my skin after showering, its a godsend. But today is St. Valentine's Day. Can you imagine a man going to a pharmacy by himself, today, and buying a large bottle of what is essentially an all-purpose self lubricant?

Naturally, the cashier would say something like, "And how are you today, sir? Any plans for Valentine's day?"

To which I might reply, offhandedly, "Oh certainly, certainly. I've a long evening planned of stroking myself while listening to The Ride of the Valkyries loud enough that the vibrations traveling through the sofa are actually my primary impetus to orgasm."

or perhaps,

"The missus and I were just settling down for a lovely bout of anal intercourse, but when we reached for some lubricant - very important, you see - we were fresh out. Quickly now, I must hurry back."

Both of which seem to be in the accent of those two warner brothers' chipmunks, "Capital, simply capital!"

I think I'll wait until tomorrow.

Sushi.

I had sushi last night. I love sushi.

There's something about the texture of the rice, the way the seaweed wrap tears under your teeth, the creamy-squish of raw fish and the pop and crunch of raw vegetables: carrots and cucumber. Of a certainty, the person who made the decision to put avocado in sushi for the first time was a human of higher order intelligence.

I love the accoutrements of sushi. The chopsticks, the varied and many little plates and rectangular dishes. The salty tang of good soya sauce and the rush through the sinuses of real wasabi, not that horseradish facsimile found everywhere. The burst of flavour from the pickled ginger.

Sushi is a food that refreshes and invigorates. It is light, but satisfying.

I especially love that last part. It is light. Which means that when the opportunity arises for an all-you-can-eat experience, you can cram yourself silly and enjoy every second of it.

Ah yes. Sushi.

Stream of consciousness

I left the house this morning for the first time since Tuesday. Which Tuesday is not important. Pay attention. There will be A Test.

With a head full of fog, steel wool, cotton candy and all manner of obfuscating material, I rose from bed against a panoply of better instincts, all of which were screaming at me in No Uncertain Terms that I should go back to bed and stay there. I politely told my better instincts to fuck themselves lightly and with tenderness, then I put on pants.

In the kitchen, our cramped kitchen, all in white and unwashed dishes, I took my Little Pink Pill and drank my wake-up juice. I'm not sure the wake-up juice is working anymore, it's been so long since I started taking it, but I remember it used to make a big difference, so I keep taking it Just In Case. The pills are for my skin. Actually, the pills are for a medical condition I don't have, but the side effects are pleasant, so down my gullet they go, chased by a glass of berry coloured froth. The pills were prescribed for their side effects, I should point out.

I hate the way my head felt.

I had a very strange dream in which I lived in a house where I did not actually have a bedroom, instead dragging my mattress around to wherever there happened to be space for it. My roommates where Unseen, for the most part. Conceptually, I was aware that they were men that I worked with. My grandfather was the seen roommate, and he was an unpleasant drunk who was in the process of acquiring a Gross of alcohol through unspecified means. From what mom says, this might be an accurate portrayal of him. I remember him as a man in blue coveralls with a nose that would strike fear in God's bowels, who would smile at me and pack an ice cream cone to the very bottom with Blue Boy Vanilla. I like that memory.

Aside from the weird place In My Head where I spent part of the night, sleep was as elusive as innocence and virginity in a university dorm. The ability to form complete sentences gradually returned in time for the walk to campus with my roommate. Not entirely, but I could at least pretend to take part in an honest-to-goodness conversation.

Suburbia, in winter. This is what greeted my nonfunctional cranial space past the hermetic seal of the front door. Every picture of generic suburbs in winter that you've ever seen, resplendent with hoarfrost and just enough chill and snowfall to casually turn down the volume of the world, like things are happening just down the hall. It was pretty. It was also mostly wasted on me.

Phototherapy beckoned, the mistress I'd been neglecting. I really must pay her more attention. After all, she keeps the fucking cancer at bay. My life for the last week has been something that would have made a pretty good vacation, if it'd all been my idea. I spent it sleeping twelve hours out of every twenty-four, and most of the rest sitting watching Television and playing video games, until I felt like sleep would accept me again. But of course it wouldn't.

I was having complications with my body.

This happens from time to time. After I've been doing well for a while, I get cocky and try to do the things I used to do. My body then rejects my reality and substitutes its own. Fuck You, my epidermal layers say, We had a Good Thing here, why are you doing this to yourself. Time to learn you a Lesson. I wonder how many times I'll have to pay for the same information in minor organ failure before the lesson becomes a lesson learned.

Probably a few more, but it would be nice to think that I'm smarter than that.

I had my phototherapy, and I clawed against the sleep that I craved to make it to class. An Assignment was due, and I needed to explain my absenteeism to my Professor. He's a good man. “I have cancer.” That was pretty much all it took for him let me off the hook, he didn't even want a Doctor's note. It occurs to me that I don't trust people enough anymore. I did not expect him to be quite so agreeable. I think I'm turning into an asshole.

Then I came home through that Winter Wonderland. It looked prettier this time around.

I ate, I slept, I awoke with the proverbial new lease on life.

Oh, I'm still knackered, but my outlook is very much better. I'm happy.

Also, I've been reading things that affect my writing style. I should know better, but I've been lacking inspiration and they certainly do have the effect of spurring on this sort of verbal expunging of the bits and pieces that are clogging up my word stream.

mmmm.... sweet sweet sorrow....

Caffeine, steadfast companion of many days,
The time has come to part our ways.
It seems you make me sick, you see:
The want of you is misery.

My head is fog'd, my will is weak,
I know you'd give me what I seek.
Vim and vigour, zip and zest,
With you I'm truly at my best.

Except.. I'm not, no, not for long.
Though at first you make me strong,
In time I crest and then I fall.
No, you make me not so strong at all.

I'll miss you always, anyhow,
though to myself I must avow:
No more caffeine, not as my crutch.
Not on a date, not going dutch.
Neither doing math, nor working early,
Beware my friends, I will be surly!

Something New

An aside:

I work part-time in a small liquor store while going to school. It's part of a restaurant-bar combo, pays alright, gets me free food and most importantly, on slow nights, gives me a place to do a lot of homework. The job is not without the occasional peril, however, and tonight was a night that had some peril.

The largest part of the night passed without incident. Today was a Monday. Mondays are slow. I studied for a test, updated a formula sheet for a quiz, and then I watched a couple of movies with my coworker to pass the time. This is not a particularly demanding occupation, perfect for a student. Unfortunately, at about twenty-past-two on the Tuesday morning side of the shift, things got a little belligerent. Two men came in to make a purchase, but they were already well pickled. Not only were they drunk, but, if I'm honest, they were coked out of their fucking minds.

The altercation concerned one of the two men and it began with him pushing my friend and coworker. He apologized profusely. This sort of thing comes our way from time to time and the usual way we deal with it is to simply brush off some behaviour, let them make their purchase and get them the hell out of our store. But after the pushing and the apologizing, he repeatedly threw his keys down on the floor, threw a package of cigarettes at me, crashed into the rack with the bags of potato chips and alternated between threatening us and telling us how much he respected us for doing our jobs.

I told him to get out.

He did not take this well.

He postured and threatened and I pulled out Uncle Smashy, the two-foot long steel tool under the counter. Think blunt machete and you'll be on the right track. Bashing the counter top for effect, I reiterated that he should get out. He came up to the counter and reached for me, I pushed him back by the neck. He came back again and I slapped him twice on the right cheek with the flat side of Uncle Smashy. In immediate retrospect, that was probably a poor choice, but it did help us skip over the rest of the process and get him to come at me, which was when the bouncers, who had been sitting at the bar enjoying a drink on a night off, rushed in, grabbed him and, eventually, got him outside. This was compounded by the fact that they knew the guy and were trying to avoid beating him into a pulp, and by the fact that one of the bouncers... lacks tact and may have made the situation much worse. Several times.

Coke boy came back about ten minutes later to apologize, but then the bouncer-sans-tact came back in and things got slightly violent again, and the cocaine cowboy had to be ejected again. At this point we made the decision to lock the door and shut down for the night, as it was almost closing time anyway. Instead of riding off into the sunset, Chief Hell-Of-A-Drug decided to bang on our windows for a while. I called the police and they sent a car around, but I don't know if anything came of it.

Afterwards, I sat with the bouncers and had a drink with them. I needed it.

Here's the thing: I really wanted to hurt that man. He was belligerent, mean, rude and outright stupid. He pushed my friend and threatened us. I'm something of a martial artist. I say this not to brag, but instead to put in context what I mean when I say that I have demonstrated in the past the ability to not only hold my own in an altercation, but to be downright dangerous. I really wanted to hurt him, but at the same time, I really didn't want to fight him. He was about my size, clearly in good physical condition and COKED OUT OF HIS SKULL. I would have had to either choke him out or seriously injure him to put him down, and there's a great deal of danger in a fight when rapid incapacitation is necessary, but not in the sense that you might be thinking. The problem lies in the fact that the line between incapacitation and killing can be awfully fine, and this is made far more complicated by severe inebriation and drug induced states.

I feel guilty about how much I wanted to smash him, thankful it didn't actually come to that, but a little disappointed at the same time. I'm very grateful that the bouncers happened to be at the bar tonight, because without them there things would have gotten messy. Man, what if Cocaine Katie had pulled a knife, or if he was a skilled fighter?




Ugh. Now I'm all post-adrenal.

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.