...And Come Out Fighting

L.T.: She said ninety-nine dollars for salmon?

K.T.: No, she said twenty-four dollars. Ninety-nine dollars, better be some really good fish.

L.T.: Goldfish.

Like smartass father, like smartass son.

***

I can’t shake hands or greet anyone anymore. It is just too complicated. My baseline preference involves a simple right-hand wave. Hold it up, quick shake, put it down. Hell, sometimes not even a shake. Simple, unmistakable, quick. Fine.

That’s not what other people like. Here’s what I’ve encountered in the past month. Simple traditional handshake, hand in hand. Modified traditional handshake, gripping thumbs. Hand slap and pull away. Hand slap, gripping fingers as if ready to thumb wrestle, shaking. Hand shake, pull in for awkward hug, pressing arms between people. Chest bounce. Fist smash. Fist smash followed by chest bounce. Hug. Head nod. “Hey stupid.”

The problem is that personalized greetings are both salutation and secret message, an admission that you belong. Now, society has so fractured our collective into tiny cliques that each group has their own traditions. Each tribe creates their own ways, and by inviting others in the fold, expand and include others.

I’ve been blessed (cursed) with being a part of a great variety of cliques, much as everyone knows and belongs to different groups of people. Hell, up to a certain point, some of the original cliques have started to fracture themselves, further expanding the depth of knowledge I require in order to interact successfully with all of them. In addition, I have to keep straight which group requires what set of motions and gestures. If this has been any indication, I have no clue when to use what, or even what’s acceptable and not acceptable these days.

As I understand it, the origin of the handshake was to ensure the person opposite you held nothing up their sleeve. Hence, the shaking of the hands would expose any hidden weaponry or devicery. Handshakes are, by nature, quite distrustful and reflect a base pessimism inherent in human society. Yet, we’ve taken them in so many different directions, with so many iterations, losing sight of what they were originally.

Handshakes are also one of the best ways to convey diseases, especially in the winter months. So many germs converge upon these metacarpals, and are so easily transferred from person to person. Your hands touch everything else thereafter, your face, your legs, your butt, my butt, anyone’s butt, everyone’s butt... wrong story.

There’s got to be a better way to greet people, something that doesn’t require such up-close and personal contact. Perhaps telepathy, or a simple wave. If you really want to transfer fluids and other intimate bodily information, upon meeting, we should all make love. This has the interesting side effect of creating some rather interesting dinner parties. “Hi, have you met my husband J.B.?” “No, hi J.B., where would you like to say hello, on the foyer or in the bedroom?” “Let’s use the table, why waste the time?”

Really, making love to a person reveals a lot about them. I’m sure that if you really want to know someone, this would be a more effective way to get to know them than shaking their hand. Shake that ass girl, shake that ass.

The Best Offense

I.B.: Well, I’ve finished everything I wanted to talk about, so I’ll let you out early today. But before I do, a couple of things.

Don’t ever tell a class you’ll let them out early, then hold them for another ten minutes. Especially right before Thanksgiving break.

***

Too much defense is a bad thing. I purchased Norton Antivirus from the school to replace outdated McAfee Antivirus. McAfee shipped with the laptop, and required me to pay for updates on a regular basis. Norton from the school has a longer update period. The choice was clear. Figuring that too much defense couldn’t hurt, I decided to install Norton, then uninstall McAfee. After all, if one antivirus program protects my computer, two must do twice as much. Turns out that two running in conjunction crashed my computer every time it booted up.

For forty-five minutes in the law school’s library I futzed with the settings on this old laptop, unable to deactivate the system beeps that punctuated the library’s still like an epileptic seamstress watching a strobelight. There is no “Safe Mode” option immediately available at the boot screen; you have to enter the setup menu before safe mode becomes available. In addition, you have to yank the battery from the laptop while it’s frozen in order to make safe mode available. Funner video games I’ve enjoyed than this one. It reminded me of Sphere by Michael Crichton.

/SPOILER ALERT.

When the protagonists discussed the very nature of the titular sphere, after having all experienced it, one compared their situation to that of a cockroach or other tiny insect within a space probe, or similar electronic device. Though it may have seemed to the cockroach that the device, filled with danger and peril and electricity at every turn, constituted an intelligence test, to the inventors, the probe collected data from deep space. Similarly, the humans were ill-equipped to comprehend the sphere’s true purpose. This rectangular laptop is my sphere, though I gained a swelling sense of frustration, not a near-Godlike omnipotence.

/END SPOILER ALERT.

Though computers lack intelligence, pundits frequently ascribe that quality with the cliché: “Computers are only as smart as their users.” For all its broad capability, your average computer is no less and no more basic tool than a hammer. When I was cursing the computer in the library, whispered expletives brushing past my lips, it was really my own incompetence and ignorance that deserved the harsh words.

Here I stand ‘pon a precarious precipice, a precipice that separates the computer lover from the cyber-Luddite. I represent a rare breed, the in-betweener. You are either comfortable with computers or you think them more arcane and incomprehensible than the newest Medicare Prescription Drug Discount Program. (Incidentally, in helping my over seventy years of age father fill out the various forms, it stuns me how Medicare expects the elderly to subscribe when I have to sit and study the scant sheets for upwards of forty minutes just to begin to have an inkling of what it is all about.) As we age and supplant those without knowledge of computers, and raise our children computer-literate, those that fear computers will be limited to the third world and the Amish. Even then, pop culture, increased charitable opportunities and Rumspringa will expose them to computers. Until then, a precious few children of the sun shall use computers yet not understand what and why they are.

Do not misunderstand me (on this issue. Feel free to misunderstand me on everything else, as is your wont.). I appreciate the convenience computing offers. However, if I had my druthers, I’d be working with mechanical typewriters and helper monkeys, and pigeons would carry my missives to and fro, rather than electrical impulses. Computers have so interlaced into our society that we cannot extricate ourselves without disconnecting from society altogether. Sure, people live off of the grid, but what does that constitute but that old simp, or that old simp’s son, off in the woods, coming into town every few weeks for supplies. The exception rather than the rule. Even now, typing this entry in, backspacing away the myriad mistakes my fat fingers visit upon this virtual paper, the hypocrisy settles in my lap like a sleepy cat.

I need this laptop. I need Prism. Though devoid of emotion, intelligence, depth, anything that signifies humanity, Prism has become as much a part of my life as anything else. Indeed, much like a security blanket, I’ve started to form, heaven forfend, an attachment to this machine. Indeed, as much as it allows me to transcribe the professor’s notes in class, it also serves as a shield to hide me from professor’s eyes. I find myself hiding behind it sometimes as a toddler escapes behind her father’s leg. Too much defense is a bad thing.

Legal Fiction

“Go to lunch before you f*ck things up again.” – Random police officer shouting to other random police officer at ten in the ante meridian.

***

Despite my last post, now I shall regale you all with stories from my life as a law school student. When the crap hits the fan, we get some marginally interesting stories.

***

My internal priority system assigns various priorities to assignments and duties, then slots them into a master list of procrastination. This list tells me how long I have to put something important off to finish something less important but more interesting. For example, last week when I had to finish my paper, I stopped to swab my bathroom for an hour, though I had perhaps a half hour’s worth of work to complete on the paper. Thereafter, I also stared about my room for a good fifteen minutes, putting off the paper work.

The IPS also buffers giant wads of free time into the ranking system. One of the most important things I ever learned was to estimate the time till finish of any assignment as twice as much as it should normally take. Finish on time and you look like a hero. Problems crop up and you still have plenty of time to fix them. Thank you Star Trek. Please note that my IPS only works precisely because the buffers accept the less important assignments. Without the buffers, the system is worthless.

Take note that the IPS does start to break down during finals, if only because for some reason, I cannot properly estimate study time when it comes to cumulative finals. I generally screw myself over at this time, when it seemed that it would take forty minutes to learn a certain rule, and it takes two and a half hours. Taken in short, the IPS makes my life livable, since procrastination lets me put off certain things to enjoy life’s simpler pleasures.

Related to the IPS, I had a presentation on the semester’s work on Monday. The IPS placed this below sleep, breakfast, morning class, and lunch at the Inner Harbor. And that was Monday’s priority. The IPS ranked that hour-long presentation below smoking crack. As there was no crack smoking done, that tells you how much work was put into the flavored tobacco presentation.

Heights, the dark, clowns, being alone, public speaking. These are my driving fears, none moreso than public speaking. Ignoring the inevitable made it bearable. Like an ostrich on a beach with a tank bearing down on it, I wanted to hide my head in the sand.

So right before class, N.S. and J.M. hadn’t completed their powerpoint presentation. One, no one said we needed powerpoint. L.G. and I were just going to shoot from the hip. Two, they completed their separate halves of the powerpoint, and were going to merge it during the first hour, while we presented on flavored tobacco. Right, good luck.

L.G. and I sat at the side of the room, when K.D. said, “And why don’t you both move to the front of the room, to make it more official. And wow, they both just shot me dirty looks when I said that.”

To make it similar to a presentation before the general assembly, it was opened up to questions for the duration of the hour. A prohibition on flavored tobacco is extraordinarily difficult, if only because the questions that can be raised about the delineation of flavoring/non-flavoring and the questions with no easy answers, which cropped up throughout.

Do I remember what the discussion was like? Not a clue. However: L.B. whispered something, which I overheard, and that threw me out of my “rhythm.” This rhythm is most similar to white man’s rhythm, which follows a beat and pattern all its misguided own. I stuttered and started a lot. At one point, the words “I’ve gone completely blank” left my mouth. I had to take off my glasses in a vain attempt to “hide” from the class. If I can’t see you, you aren’t there. Unfortunately, this had the unintended side effect of “If I can’t see you, I can’t hear you.” Great for when you have to answer questions. At one point we were assaulted by three or four hostile questions in a row, which threw me into defensive mode. When a friendly question came up, I took it as hostile and nearly “attacked” the questioner. At one point, I wrote the words “I’m lost” on my sheet, sliding it over to L.G. My leg shook a mile a minute. Had a telegraph button been put under my foot, I could have sent “Oh crap oh crap oh crap” off to Germany, which, ironically, I would have rather been than in that classroom.

The next day, we had a meeting with K.D., one of the last two with her. After a semester, we’d almost concluded our project, or at least, our involvement with it. Starting out, I knew that it was somewhat futile, and there was no chance the bill would pass. I knew that. I knew that. And somehow, it washed out of my mind, lost in all the work we’d been doing, the effort we’d put in. I should have remembered that. Instead, something in me, that philanthropic, selfish urge to make a difference exposed itself. It felt like this work might make a difference, small though it might be.

K.D. was tired, somewhat demoralized. She told L.G. and myself that the bill wouldn’t pass, that we were almost done, that the work we’d done was more or less worthless, that we wouldn’t care after the next two weeks. It boiled down to all this being a sham, a legal fiction. The story that we’d lived, all for naught, save a little letter on the sheet. Finally, when I started caring (and yes, in spite of all the bitching, I did care), it gets shot down. One of the roughest moments in my law school life, if only because I opened up, and the door slammed shut.

Housewifery

K.R.: We were at Popeye’s, and she pissed me off, so I bit her.

K.T.: You bit your girlfriend?

K.R.: Yeah, I don’t believe in hitting women.

Moment of the year right there.

***

Maybe it was the concussion, but I decided to cook Sunday dinner this weekend.

“Maybe” nothing, it was the concussion.

Innocuous menu really, pork spring rolls for appetizers, marinated chicken breast in bell peppers and mushroom, and pork fried rice. Based on how many people play football on any given Sunday, I decided on cooking for six.

Never again. Spring roll preparation took seven hours, with a break to have some cereal. Thin-slice the pork chops, then marinate to add flavor. Shred the lettuce manually, then prep the bean sprouts. Here, I screwed up, I could have left the tips on probably, but something possessed me, the spirit of idiocy. Good ninety minutes to take the tips off. Cooking some scrambled eggs to throw in, then flinging the entire mélange into the pan. Fry baby fry. Let it cool for a little while, let the spring roll wrappers defrost a bit. Then, scoop a bit of the filling into the shell, roll, seal, place on pan. Seven freaking hours.

The rest of the cooking preparation was another five hours. Cut up and marinate the chicken breasts, cut up the peppers and mushrooms. Make the rice (and never buy a Cuisinart rice cooker. On base cook mode, even with extra water, it burns the rice. What the hell, you manufacture the machine specifically to cook rice. It has one primary purpose, to cook rice. How do you screw up the primary purpose of your machine? How?) Take the leftover bean sprouts and cabbage, fry them up a bit to throw into the rice. Go buy some spicy peppers for flavoring.

Football resembled more an idiot’s venture than actual football (if actual football is the strange amalgam of rules we follow). Granted, on Sunday all I did was fall back in deep coverage and pressure C.H. And that sucked, really, he’d rather wobble a pass three feet behind me after falling back ten feet, instead of sucking up the two-hand touch sack. Fine, so be it. I proved that I can’t throw to any receiver not named S.P. This mental infirmity, once such a gleaming jewel in my crown, now hangs about my neck like a dead albatross, three weeks rotting and stinking to Topeka.

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to D.C.’s fevered screams and orders for me not to tackle anyone head-on straight up, but I think I like the pain of it all, the getting knocked around and having those strange feelings spike into my mind. Not quite as nihilistic as Fight Club, but I think when I get knocked around, whether or not I make a stop, I feel a little more alive than anywhen else. Let’s face it, that reckless/pointless attitude is what landed me in the hospital; it was not the first tackle attempt, but the second immediately following, that led to the concussion. For all that we did, when I couldn’t tackle, it didn’t feel like football.

Thereafter, add about ninety minutes for the actual heating section of the day, and we’re talking over thirteen hours of cooking. Things to solve for next time (in ten to twelve years), how do you clean up all the congealed chicken blood that oozes out during the process of cooking? The little bits get stuck all over the food and resemble tiny dead maggots. How best to marinate pork, especially for cooking in other dishes? The pork turned out markedly tasteless both in the rolls and the rice, despite everyone’s claims that it tasted good (and thank you all, that’s why I will cook again in a decade instead of a score of years). Can I create a midget army to help me prepare spring rolls? Seven hours for one person, one hour for seven dwarves. However, does that make me Snow White?

Boring Post to Fulfill Week Times Two Promise

J.F.: Its not whether you’re right or wrong, its whether you have the last say.

So there.

***

Why don’t I write more about my law school experience, aside from the ranting? I’ve mentally checked out. I don’t pay close attention in class anymore, or any attention really. There are the rare occasions involving random stupidity, of my own doing, which have faded away into my shaded past.

Here is my average school journey. I hope in the Silver Surfer and take Ninety-Five North to the law school. Because I drink a big glass of water fifteen minutes before getting into the Silver Surfer, my walk to the school is fraught with peril as my bladder threatens to release a golden prize all over my pants. When I make it to the entrance, I flash my identification card at the security guard, check my mailbox, and head off to class.

If it’s Sales and Sales Financing, I take my seat in the back of the room, turn on my laptop, and surf the internet for one or two hours, sometimes pecking a few notes here and there. If I’m especially bold, I’ll turn on the internet chat programs and make the rounds.

Tobacco Control is ten people plus the professor, so I turn on my laptop and stare blankly at the screen for two hours. I don’t take notes since we have no final exam, and most of the work is done out of class. Sometimes I’ll daydream about what might have been. Sometimes I won’t.

Maryland Civil Procedure is similar to Sales and Sales Financing, in that I don’t pay too close attention. Judge J.F.’s stories are quite amusing, and since he tells so many, the information we need to know is condensed into the last twenty minutes of class, or transcribed on the giant stacks of handouts we receive every class period.

If I have to stay in the law school for non-consecutive classes, then I’ll grab something from the vending machine or walk down to the Inner Harbor and grab some Chipotle. The Chipotle round-trip, with eating time, is an hour and ten minutes, down to an hour if I rush it. With a shower (if there was one available in the school), and me running, I think forty-five minutes is doable. One of these days, for the hell of it, I may test the run just to see what it’s like, jogging around the city with all its smog and traffic.

I can count on one hand the number of people in the law school I talk to. This is not because I cannot count higher than five, just another consequence of my antisociality. If I see one of them, I will stop to talk to them; since we’re between classes, these conversations tend to run short of the five minute mark.

Don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t do drugs, so that eliminates me from a majority of the social activities.

That’s it. That’s my law school experience in a nutshell. Pretty boring all around.

If I Remember Correctly

V.V.: Can you say, Boomshakalaka, Boomshakalaka, Boomshakalaka, Boom?

K.T.: Maybe later.

V.V.: You’ll forget about it later.

Damned right. I was in a wheelchair at the time, and no one will make a Family Guy joke at my expense if I can’t remember it later. Turned out I forgot five seconds later.

***

If I remember correctly, I had my Memento moment this weekend when, for the span of about four hours, my short-term memory malfunctioned and I was reduced to repeating the same seven to ten comments over and over in a feeble attempt to reconstruct what just happened. Yes, I had a concussion.

We’ve started playing football again, a modified version of the Marquis of Queensbury’s rules. This is the third week that we’ve played the football (tackle), and for me, it may very well be the last. In that hazy retrospect borne of my inability to recall many of yesterday’s events, I’ve not felt that close to mortality since I was thirteen and had chronic chest pain. I need my snot-clot, and having learned that it might leak out of my nose were the concussion more serious, well.

The first game went smashing well. I intercepted two errant lobs, one from C.R., one from C.H., and returned both for the almighty touchdown. Then, to celebrate the occasion (which happens so frequently you’d think we were playing football), I emulated the almighty Detroit Lion Barry Sanders and calmly placed the ball down on the field (we have no referees to hand the ball to post-touchdown. Call your own fouls/No blood no foul.).

The second game, ah, that was a most mysterious occurrence. As I recall, S.P. received a short pass in the middle of the field. D.C. tore S.P.’s shirt off, resulting in a mild homoerotic situation, leaving him barreling straight at me. From what the observers tell me, I ran headfirst at S.P., bounced off his form, spun around, and attempted a second tackle. At this point, he threw out the stiff-arm. This somehow launched me into the air.

At this point, I recall landing on the back of my head and neck, and everything falling dark black, like tunneling underground. I think I tumbled backwards further, then somehow came to a rest on my stomach or back. There was a great light, burning in my face, until A.W. stood over me, casting a long shadow that blocked out the sun.

Here is where I started to hit mass repeat. The rest of this is based on my memory trickling back into my head and everyone else’s comments. Thank you all for making sure I didn’t stumble back onto the field.

C.H. and S.P. grabbed me under an armpit each, and tried to heft me to my feet. The vertigo swirled my inner ear like a coffee stirrer, and I had to spin in a complete circle before crumpling back to the ground. C.H. then asked me to remember the following: football, cone, and A.W. The first time he asked me what I had to remember, I said football. Thereafter, I had no recollection of him telling me to remember anything at all.

Throughout, I kept asking people what happened. Half the time, I had to preface it with, “I know I asked this already, but.” I also kept inquiring what my class schedule was, and what my paper topic was. If I remember correctly.

At this point, we started the cold, numbing journey off towards the hospital, the name of which eludes me to this point. I think I’d had to inform S.P. several times to go get my wallet and my insurance card, which he did. During the ride, I told C.H., S.P. and V.V. that my foot had gone numb. They replied, are you sitting on your foot? Yes, yes I was. I’d forgotten that I was sitting awkward on my own foot. This had now become my senior moment, five years too early.

While at the hospital, they seated me within a lovely wheelchair, the physical details of which again elude me. It was a wheeled chair, and I sat in it. There were vending machines, but no one had any dollar bills. Several times, I’d told them to check my wallet, neither remembering that I had no one dollar bills, nor that I’d told them thirty seconds previous to do so.

At this point, things start to blur.

Since my injury was a heady one, they’d fairly rushed me through the admissions process. Whilst talking to the nurse, lovely girl that I can’t remember what she looked like, C.H. launched into a perplexing analysis of my injury, chock full of peculiar numbers, such as “three” and “one”. Three? One? This is what I am reduced to, a number?

As it turned out, I was, for the wristband they placed on my wrist designated me with several numbers. Multiple times, I’d had to say that I had no middle initial, to which everyone replied the M referred to my masculine (in theory) status. That I couldn’t shut up and kept talking, about the same three things no less, that I expected everyone to wait on me hand and foot, and tend to my every need (which consisted of telling me what happened) confirmed my temp. status as a bubble-headed blonde girl.

C.H. wheeled me into the hospital proper soon after, as only one person would be allowed in with me, and C.H. was an R.N. I think. There were large plasma screens with multiple colored blocks, large desks at eye level when I was sitting, people in blue, grey, pink scrubs milling around, curtains everywhere. Or was this just my false recollection of any number of medical comedies/dramas?

Another nurse came in to see me in my new room, another beautiful girl whose face is naught but a jumble of vaguely human features, put up the rails on the bed so I wouldn’t fall over (when did I end up on the bed? Wasn’t I in a wheelchair?) and had me take off my t-shirt, leaving me clad in a tight Under Armour shirt, black and my AI shorts. Later, when stumbling back to the apartment, it occurred to me that it was extraordinary good luck I chose to wear the black shirt, and not the white, which tended to become diaphanous whenever I sweat, or stood there.

Aside: Are all female nurses beautiful? I suppose they are when you’re ailing, even if you can’t remember what they look like, sound like, their general attitude even. In times of trouble like de-winged angels scrub-clad they are. Is the converse applicable to ailing women, are all male nurses beautiful?

When did I go get the CT scan? I don’t know. Did I go get a CT scan? I must have, for that damnable rotating ring scared the senselessness out of me. Lying on the bed, the ring rotating and thrumming like a giant’s heartbeat, surrounding me in the open air, I recall feeling distinct, individual, clear, afraid. Not until that point did it occur that I might have a serious problem. Up until then I was hard-pressed to recall what I’d eaten last night. The C’s and the T’s buffeting me changed all that. Fearsome medicine right there, even if it was just a diagnostic tool.

As with any other wound, time started to heal my concussion, and my head started to piece itself back together. Various conversations actually led somewhere, instead of looping towards the same five points in twenty seconds. From there, the wait to the eventual diagnosis of nothing out of the ordinary was the hardest part.

Yet another beautiful nurse entered to discharge me. Again, I cannot recall her features, immaculate though they must have been, and beg forgiveness of female nurses everywhere for my base transgression. I shall repent by taking you all out on dates, at the same time. She asked how many days I wanted off, and at this point, I came to my senses. I told her that sounded like a set up, and it was. She wanted to laugh at me for requesting a week off, like my original internal request. Instead, I got two days and an admonishment that if I started projectile vomiting, I had to return to the hospital. Fair enough.

I still get dizzy for no good reason every once in a while, but its nowhere near as bad as it once was. I’ve had to write my paper this entire week, and so had already called out from work, so I’ve been a sole student this whole week. This has been an odd week, very uneventful, but I do think that I would not recommend any of you receive a concussion, under any circumstances.

If I remember correctly.

Hold Your Horses

Hello everyone.

I suffered a mild concussion on Sunday while playing football. I have a paper due this Friday that is worth fifty percent of my final grade in my Tobacco Control class. Updates will come later than normal this calendar week, but they will eventually come.

Kids and Idiots

K.D.: Great costume, by the way. Very clever.

N.S.: Is that what that is? I was wondering why you were wearing that.

K.T.: I’m insane!

Somehow this tends to be a trend in my life. People accuse me of being strange, and I do little to prove them wrong.

***

The costume was me as the white pawn on a chessboard, or the black pawn, depending on whom you ask. White khakis, white button-down, white socks, black shoes, and my new favorite shirt, a white t-shirt with black fringe on the sleeves and neck, and a large pawn on the chest, with the word pawn below it. I move one step at a time anyway, and in fifteen years or so, I plan on becoming a queen, so this costume may work out much better than anticipated.

Now, in theory, in my head, this Halloween costume seemed great. In practice, I didn’t realize that I looked a little off. The collared shirt threw it off. If I’d had a white turtleneck, it would have been perfect.

For some reason, the near-all-white uniform plus me walking around led to a lot of stares. I haven’t been stared at that much since I went to church with C.T. Since that church’s attendance was all African-American, and I am not African-American, everyone I passed looked at me like a freak. Same effect today, especially since I must be at least ten years too old to be dressing up for Halloween.

Of course, in the law school during the morning, most people didn’t even notice. People tend not to notice when you sneak into the classroom and sit down quickly.

After Sales and Sales Financing, it was time to go to Chipotle, down at the Inner Harbor. Now, keep in mind that on Sunday, we’d played about two hours of football, and on Monday morning, I channeled VV and ran two and a half miles. I was tired, so I’m sure my walk had a slight hitch to it. Hell, I stumbled on the flat pavement more than once. This shambling white-clad fool certainly drew a hell of a lot of stares. The walk back was even worse, as my walk more resembled Keyser Soze than anything.

At this point, I saw D.B., and like a smartass, he wondered why, if I was the white pawn, why the pawn on my shirt was black.

In class, professor K.D. was the only person in the entire school to figure out what the hell I was doing with the shirt, as most everyone else thought I was just insane. Woo.

Later at Giant, I saw Raggedy Ann, a pack of frozen peas, and a sumo. Why don’t more people just be goofy and dress up for Halloween?

Fast forward to after sunset. I went to D.C. and M.C.’s apartment to trick or treat. They unlocked the door, I said “Trick or Treat,” and they just mutely held up the hollowed skull full of candy. Apparently I am too old to be doing this.

***

I had to visit the bank. My bank is trapped within a Giant supermarket, which is quite convenient. Better than cashing a check at the liquor store and blowing it on beer and chips. Now I can cash my checks at the grocery store and blow it on soda and chips.

I was waiting in line behind an androgynous client. Final conclusion, Caucasian female, though it wasn’t easy. Black hair, but fading, shot through with random white strands, a short cut, somewhat similar to my shank of hair, but a bit fuller. Appropriate for either sex. Rounded face, somewhat effeminate, but not to the point of being determinative. Very hairy forearms, but those don’t indicate male or female. Easily in his/her thirties. Purple polo shirt, loose blue jeans. Both gave no hint as to sexual identity, no hint of bosom, no ass. Just flat top to bottom. Looked at the shoes, grey athletic shoes. The hands were just veiny enough to make me wonder if she’d weathered a lot at work or if he was starting to get fat. No visible jewelry, and I didn’t want to ask about piercings. Hell, I tried to read the handwritten name off the check, and all I could decipher was St____.

It’s amazing how much you can notice when you’re trying not to be noticed. S/he kept looking all around, several times staring right at me, even though I was looking elsewhere. Finally, I managed to get a glance of his/her face from a profile, and noticed thick thick peach fuzz all around the cheeks and chin. Yes, it was in a beard formation, but it had never felt a blade’s edge. Had to be a female. Although, now that I sit here typing this, the possibility of hormone treatments and transsexuality enter my thoughts.

She continued to look all around, and I wondered why she was so silent, until I saw her throwing gang signs at the bank teller. MS thirteen in suburbia. Wait, no, she’s still throwing gang signs, and he’s throwing back. Oh, she’s deaf. No wonder she hasn’t made a peep. No wonder they’re not talking to each other. Ever have one of those stupid moments where you are dumb?

At one point, she was staring away from the teller, though he was trying to wave at her to get her attention. I tried tapping her on the shoulder, even just to see if a tap could give me any hints about her sexual identity. No.

Walking away from the bank, I had to go buy some mushrooms. I pass a rotund, humpty dumpty shaped person, and she whispers, “Excuse me.” What? Were you talking to me? I take a look at the person, and again, sexual characteristics don’t show themselves. S/he’s like a giant egg, wearing a skull cap, chocolate-skinned, really round face, thick down jacket, some of the strangest white eyes I’ve ever seen. The only all white eyes I’ve ever seen. I finally figure out she’s whispering to me, “Can you show me where the exit is.”

So, she’s carrying a cane, which she taps in front of her, and she’s got all-white eyes. Boy I’m real stupid today. But wait, it gets worse.

Maybe she wasn’t entirely blind, because she did stop me as I walked past, though it might have been she heard my footsteps. At any rate, I start walking ahead of her, and she does manage to follow, swinging her cane from left to right, tapping ahead of her. I give her verbal directions, telling her where to walk, what to avoid. Why it didn’t occur to me to take her arm and physically guide her, I’ll never know. It was almost like guiding a plane in at landing. We finally manage to get her out, with little more guidance than my words.

Deaf, dumb and blind. These things come in threes.

Breakfast Vignettes

K.T.: Stop, I don’t want to hear anymore about prolapsed vaginas.

J.W.: But you should.

K.T.: Why?

J.W.: Because you’re human. You should learn everything that you can.

All too true, but I think I’d rather read about prolapsed vaginas than hear about them.

***

These were too short to make into a full post, but enough of these and its like dim sum.

***

I was deburring and polishing aluminum at work, which consists of shaving off the machined edges, then sanding down the sides to a more uniform finish. I believe the sanding helps prepare it for the eventual painting. These edges tend to be very sharp, and I now sport a myriad of superficial cuts all over my fingertips and palms. Even I didn’t know about the cuts until my hands got really dirty later, when the black filth infiltrated the gaps, revealing hands that looked as if they’d juggled razor blades.

Deburring leaves tiny metal shavings all about the shop floor, which is fine since those can be sweeped up. They also tend to embed into the fibers of my clothes, which can result in a prickly cactus-like surprise at a later date if I’m not careful. Sanding, however, creates clouds of tiny particulate aluminum. I didn’t realize for a while that this stuff was the reason that I would blow my nose and it would come out silvery. Maybe instead of striking nose gold, I hit platinum? I started wearing breathing masks, but they don’t keep all of it out. Partly this is because my nose is so small no matter how I pinch the metal nose strip, the mask refuses to close tight on my face.

Last Friday I decided to take a t-shirt as an extra precaution, and wear it about my head like some sort of mad ninja mask. Its just a normal Hanes tagless t-shirt, white, medium sized, quite nondescript. However, when I finally got there, I realized that there was something crazy about standing there sanding aluminum with what would appear to be a burka headpiece. So, I left it on the back of a chair and went to work.

Six hours later, A.G. and K.R. came to check on me. There was a big pile of sanded aluminum plates sitting next to the pile of unsanded aluminum, both sixty strong. We’d polished a lot of those bastards over the previous three days. I turn back after taking a deep breath and clearing my head, and A.G. is polishing the polished aluminum with my t-shirt.

So, naturally, since I am wont to rage and rant, I leapt over the chair and a mighty melee ensued. It took eight people to force us apart. I’ve now been suspended for three weeks without pay.

No, wait, that’s a different story. Turned out he thought it was just a shop rag since it fell off the chair, and wadded up, it really is about the same size as a shop rag. K.R. took a look at it and asked me “This fits you?”

Damn, I’m not that short man.

***

Ever since daylight savings time, the sun sets much earlier, usually nearly down by the time I come back from work if I’ve been working until five post meridian that day. However, due to my new filthy habit of running, I’ve taken to eating much more. This vicious cycle means I need to run in order to keep my weight down, which means I need to consume more so I don’t consume my own muscle tissue. Damn that cycle. Yes, I could just eat healthier and less, but that’s not fun.

I don’t know what I’d eaten when I decided to run in the dark that night, but I think the day’s menu somehow included both Chipotle tacos and pizza? There was probably a turkey sandwich in there somewhere too. A ghetto repast, fit for the palate of bums and students alike. It seemed like a good idea at the time, as all poor ideas do before they crumble like a dry cookie.

When I run, I leave my glasses behind. My constant jostling makes them bounce like a mosh pit all over my face. I am forced to slide them back up my small nose, only to have them sweat-fall off a second later. The pushing inevitably leads to my eyelid crushing against the lens, leaving a wet wink against the lens, obscuring my vision. Then I have to hold them in my loose clasped hand, which is just even worse, as then I get handprints all over them, and have to wash them anyway. No sir, just let me run unencumbered. At least on the face, I take it our society frowns upon naked running through an apartment complex, but damnit if it was good enough for the Greeks its good enough for me. Now who wants to olive oil me up?

Ahem.

Since I came back from work and sat around, the world had grown dark (the cold had already settled in from weeks previous and the tilt of our earth’s axis moving us away from our celestial mother star). When I set out on my aimless journey, our artificial bastard streetlamps had torched into a dulled yellow, shameful for the pale glow it cast in weak imitation of the sun. The streets had been abandoned, save for the leaves and me. I started running, missed the curb, and almost sprained my ankle.

Running in the dark, in addition to being the perfect metaphor for my life, poses hazards you might not readily expect. I would run on the grass strips adjoining the sidewalks, and the signposts would pop out of nowhere, threatening to slam me backwards. Little pyramids of dog feces, often in stark contrast to the lush green grasses, now blended into the darkness. Nightfall also obscured the delineation between sidewalk and street . The track I usually run around, set into a number of trees, would now be as cold and dark as a frozen black diamond.

Thankfully, I made it back after a while, but was exhausted from the cruel venture. S.P., leaving the complex, drove up and asked me if I needed a ride. I stumbled to his Civic and told him it would cost twenty dollars for the first five minutes, and ten dollars each additional five minutes. Panting so hard, it took me thirty seconds to dribble out the words, and I’m not sure if he was reaching for his wallet or his cell phone.

***

S.P., V.V. and I went to a Korean supermarket called Lotte. It was like showing a ten year old boy a naked woman. I’ve never seen them gawk and stare for so long at anything.

The great thing about the Lotte seafood section is the wide variety of fresh creatures, some of which are still alive and in the open. The blue crabs, scuttling over each other, scuttling over the tongs, drew much interest, mostly for the attempts to grab the tongs away from a disgruntled crab.

There were a series of dieter’s teas which helped you lose weight, though they also tended to make you have more frequent bowel movements. Well, doesn’t that fit hand in hand.

In the dairy section were several Hispanic food selections, such as tortillas and yogurt geared towards Hispanics. Also cans of irish coffee, and Sac Sac orange juice, a personal favorite.

The produce section produced shallots. Shallots. Where in your life have you ever seen a shallot? I’m pretty sure none of you reading this are French chefs, sous or otherwise, so none of you have ever seen shallots. Are shallots even used in French cooking? Ah Iron Chef, how I have forgotten your lessons.

Perhaps the best part was the snack food section. You can tell a lot about a culture by what they eat for snacks. In this case, we’ve discovered that Korean Pocky is highly inferior to Japanese Pocky. So, with respect to chocolate-coated snacks, the Koreans have a long ways to go to catch up with the Japanese. A shame really, it looked so promising with the chocolate all about the cracker stick, but the chocolate bore chalky whitish stains, as if a bit too aged, and brittled apart in my mouth. Bah, none but straight Pocky from now on.

***

M.C. and J.W. thought it would be funny to feel my ass up. Small victory in that they’re both female; if D.C. and A.W. thought it would be funny to feel my ass up, oh my ire would have been up, there would have been much ranting and raving, etc. etc. Still, where the hell did that come from? One minute we’re all walking along, the next thing I know I’m tearing away from them like its second grade all over again. Had I not been gimped from football, I probably would have run a lot longer than I did.

In retrospect, it was probably a good thing that I had to stop. Otherwise, I’d have to watch my ass all night. Even though I do this in the mirror every chance I get, that’s a different kind of ass watching.

They didn’t latch on or anything, but it was still awkward. I’m a strong proponent of personal space. I don’t feel comfortable if I talk to someone face to face inches away from each other. And here they are, feeling me up.

I suppose what gets me the most is that I didn’t get my revenge. So many times later that night, when someone would turn around and go to the bathroom, walking up the stairs and they’re in front of me, target presented, J.W. arching upward to get out of the way so we can buckle our seat belts, so many opportunities gone and passed up. Before every revenge attempt, I’d run through in my mind how it would go, and I just couldn’t pull the trigger, feel the buttock, make an ass out of myself, and so on and such like.

I will grant it was pretty funny to me when I picked up a fork and considered jabbing them in the ass. That last five seconds, but oh, what a hilarious five seconds.

Murder Most Foul

J.F. And on the exam, when I ask if you don’t need to give an order with the motion, you say?

K.T.: Yes.

J.F.: Are you kidding me?

K.T.: Yes.

The follow up saves me. I really thought the answer was yes.

***

I had to cut up P.A. before the rotting. That smell would have been awful.

I picked up P.A. in my hands, gently so as not to slip and drop, either myself or P.A. Rough brown skin, tiny spines starting to curl up from age, old prickly hair. Lighter than I expected. Maybe a dead corpus loses weight over time. Do you believe in souls? Do you believe that the soul leaving the body makes it lighter?

I took out my Farberware cutting knife. Nice twelve-inch blade, some cheap silvery metallic construct, with rust freckles all up and down the blade. Not stainless steel. Nice wooden handle, something you might find on a pop gun rather than a carving tool. It might be usable as a tanto, but for the fact that it can’t really cut anything. I read that in feudal Japan, the swords were tested by slicing through the bodies of dead criminals and otherwise dishonored individuals. Thus, swords could be rated as to how many bodies they could slice through. Three torsos cut. Four arms sliced. This Farberware gets a one paper cup. Not even plastic. Damn.

I laid P.A. out on the counter, after clearing off some space. Amazing how still P.A. could be. I grabbed P.A. with my left hand to steady, and with my right hand holding the Farberware, I cut P.A.’s head off. No, that’s not accurate. I sawed P.A.’s head off. The brown skin, demonstrating green flecks, resisted my cutting motion, toughened over time, like a hard rind. When I finally teased the blade through, it slapped onto the cutting surface with a thunk and a slight indentation left behind. Juice trickled out. Surprised me how clear it was, how little puddled beneath P.A. I touched it before it congealed and grew tacky. Put it to my lips. So sweet. So very sweet.

I put the head to the side after licking the exposed flesh. So very sweet, like an angel’s cheek, and just as soft and forgiving. I could have licked it all day, but there was a job to be done. Nobody else was going to do it, and if I just left the body there, the flies would have come within days. Feast upon my feast, steal my wealth.

Yes, that’s right, I planned on eating P.A. I still plan on eating P.A.

I picked up the body, sniffed the wound. Around this point, I noticed sweat beading on my upper lip, my eyes crinkled, focused on the body, glasses left somewhere by accident, last thing on my mind. Even though everything around me fell by the wayside into blurry pale whites, P.A. stood out like the foreign exchange student in prison.

I put P.A. back down, placed the blade edge to the neck wound, and started sawing again into P.A. Beneath the tough skin, the tender flesh beneath parted as easily as a whore’s legs. It was a test of my patience, that damn skin like jerky resisting me, keeping me from the precious gap inside. When I finally slammed through to the other side, the momentary joy had to be pressed to the side of my mind, and I had to keep sawing downward, through and through, rough and ready. P.A. finally fell apart, each half tumbling to the side, exposing the spectacular innards. I pressed lightly with my fingers, the flesh barely depressing, then springing back into place. P.A.’s juice covered my fingers, and I licked it off. Oh, oh.

P.A. was still unmanageable. I had to carve each half into halves, piercing and pushing on through. Then, the rind was too salty. That had to go, carefully ripping down the flesh, peeling off the dripping brown outer layers, disposing of them in the trash, planning how to dump the bag into the dumpster later. Then, starting from the bottom up, cutting slices off of what remained, what little remained, washing them to get rid of the salty brown skin, dumping them into my Tupperware. Once all the parts lay disassembled in the bucket, I picked up a slice, popped it into my mouth. Like carving an angel’s cheek off and popping it into my mouth.

I’ve since stashed the remains into the refrigerator, to let them cool, let them chill, enjoy them after dinner.

Keep in mind P.A. was a pineapple, and you start to understand how disturbed I am.

Nailed

Bank Teller: Wow, you’re rich, what are you going to do with all that money?

K.T.: I don’t know. You know, I have no idea whatsoever. I really should have come up with something clever to say beforehand.

She caught me flat-footed while cashing a ten dollar check. It sucked. What I should have said was that I was going to the same party as the guy before me (whom had just received a giant stack of one dollar bills), but I was going to have to leave early. You take away my humor, and I have nothing.

***

My first nailgun experience was the original Quake, played five years after it first released. Though Quake II was one of the many games that sustained me through college, I didn’t possess a computer powerful enough to run the original Quake. So, on a lark (as with nearly everything I do), I downloaded and installed the original Quake. How charming, you had to hold down a button to mouselook. That sucked. I went through the levels, marveling at the blocky enemies, the charming level design. Then I found a nailgun.

Woo.

There are two weapons I remember from that game: the rocket launcher, because every first person shooter has a similar weapon, and the nailgun. Those little triangular pellets shooting out at high velocity seemed like they’d screw up some enemies from close range. And they did. Such a high rate of fire. Such a novel weapon, carpentry applied towards more gruesome ends. It makes me sad that more games don’t have a nailgun. The poor man’s railgun, chunks of metal propelled at relatively low speeds, but still packs a punch. Plus, most of the weapons in first person shooters don’t scare me enough, as I’ve never used them in real life.

Now that I’ve had a chance to use a nailgun, I want one. Though I’ve been working for a few months, I’ve never really wanted to use the nailgun. A couple of weeks in, when I first helped to assemble crates, A.G. wielded the nailgun while I held the planks in place. Bam, a nail went through off center, and most of the nail extruded through the wood, pointed directly at my right testicle. Since then, I’ve had an understandable aversion to the nailgun.

Last Friday, we were assembling crates again. K.R. asked if I wanted to nail for a while. I assume this was because his arm was getting tired. I assented.

Woo.

The nailgun uses compressed air to embed a three inch nail into wood. The nailgun will not fire unless you depress the barrel catch into your target, except when you switch to automatic. The barrel press can be circumvented by pulling it back using a swatch of cloth and firing. Each nail “magazine” consists of about fifteen corkscrewed nails lined up in a slant, connected with thin yellowy plastic. These you load into the chamber directly below the barrel. With every press of the trigger, the air shoots a nail through the barrel, expels the air through the rear of the gun in a large puff, and emits a loud crack. The plastic more often than not goes flying, leaving little bits everywhere after twenty-five crates have been built. Given the quality of the wood, when you fire a nail, the odds wood chips and splinters fly outward are pretty good; we generally take at least one shot of wood shaving to the eyes.

The nails are loud, bottled thunder loud, spike-driving sledgehammer loud. If the Greeks had a god of carpentry, surely she would have sounded something like the loading bay sounds. Hephaestus got nothing on Carpentria. (If I’ve screwed up Greek/Roman gods, I have no access to the internet right now, and you’ve got to look up something on your own.)

The nailgun itself is not very heavy, but given its size, it is quite unwieldy. I needed two hands to steady it, one on the handle and trigger, one on the air chamber. Simple, just line up the wood, place the barrel to the wood, press inward, fire. Repeat. Now, I’m not that destructive, but there was something liberating about firing nails into wood. Whether it was that I was helping something take shape from something less, or that I was granted the power to put holes into things, I don’t know. All I know is that with each successive thud, and my degrading hearing, I was having some real fun.

I nailed four crates, driving nails with a heavy-handed crash. Chips would fly everywhere. I’ve come to notice that when I blow my nose on days after crate building, my snot is full of black detritus. Not a good sign. Nonetheless, the power of these nails was incredible at close range. If I had to face the hordes of hell, surely I would take a nailgun with me at some point.

I don’t know for sure why it was so good to fire nails, but I know that I kept doing it.

We would later supplement this fun by firing nails into long distance targets. An air-powered nailgun has little accuracy beyond ten feet, definitely a close range weapon. Nails would rotate along the Y and Z axes, rather than spiral along the X. Still, when they connected, it looked like it would hurt. Like a bullet to the brain.

What to Do

C.S. Her thighs are the size of my chest.

I actually think she’s cute, and if I were a foot and a half taller, I’d ask her out.

***

Some of us carry our pain as we would babies. We clutch them tight to our breast, hold on dearly, and shy away from showing them to the world. You raise a child in this manner, you get Buster from Arrested Development.

I hold my pain in like that. It’s the barbed bauble that I possess. For the past week, I’ve not wanted to talk about my aunt’s death. Indeed, for the past month, I’ve not wanted to discuss the inevitability of my aunt’s death. And now, here we are. Forgive me this indulgence, painful though it be.

Last Friday, after work, I drove to my aunt’s apartment to visit. This I had done for the past few weeks. She’d had the lung cancer for years now, but about a month ago, that was near the end. It was a wonder she lasted as long as she did.

To try and deal with it, I said my goodbyes each Friday, and hoped she’d pass on, move out of her pain. Each week brought me back to say goodbye yet again. It wore on me after a while, trying to think of her as dead, to prepare myself. It didn’t work so well.

From week to week, it was hardly fair to watch her pass from consciousness to unconsciousness to barely even living. She’d gone a month without eating, so destroyed were her insides.

Last Friday, my mom told me it was almost the end. The same thing she’d told me the past few weeks. I didn’t believe it, but I still went. God damn me for being so callous at that point, but I don’t deal well with life. Or death.

What struck me, what struck me every time, was how small she was under the blanket. Like a ten year old almost. So frail beneath her cover. Wired up with a breathing tube. With a catheter. With an intravenous tube. Tubes everywhere.

A few weeks previous, her final words to me were, the next time we meet, it will be in heaven. It wasn’t as I had to keep seeing her, but it was the last thing she said to me.

We sat down to eat. Everyone believed she would last until Saturday or Sunday, based on how she was doing. I had a mouthful of brown rice in my mouth, and was chewing on it, when J.Y. came out and told us she had passed on. Died, let’s try to keep the euphemisms to a minimum.

That mouthful of rice was like dirt in my mouth. I was stunned, which is probably why I kept chewing on it, finally managing to choke it down. Worse than the first time I had raisin bran when I was four and thought I’d die if I had to eat any more of that mushy slop.

At this point, my mom told me to clear the table of all the dinner. What the hell else could I do? Someone had to do it, and I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t know what else to do, so I just gathered up all the dishes, washed them, put them on the dish rack. Left them to dry. I wonder if, when they clean the apartment out, they’ll find the dishes clean and dry, and if they’ll donate them, throw them out, keep them, what.

The family converged. Everyone went straight for my aunt’s bedroom. I couldn’t really stay in there, still stuck in heavy denial, so I sat in the living room, waiting for people to come, opening the door when they did, waiting for the front buzzer to ring. Little did I know someone had propped the front door open, so my waiting was for naught. But still, still I waited, because I didn’t know what to do, I didn’t know what the hell to do.

We were distraught. My aunt was the matriarch on my dad’s side of the family. For the most part, people were stunned. The notable exception was R.Y. He wanted to go watch Doom afterwards. I said I’d go with him, because he wasn’t then grieving (he’d already grieved as she started losing her consciousness). I guess I wanted to be somewhere else. However, I wouldn’t leave until after they removed her corpus.

The funeral home representatives came in with a gurney, and removed her body, just as you would see at a crime scene.

Nothing happened of note Saturday.

Sunday was the funeral. Life goes on.

As usual, my parents (my mom) likes being early, so we arrived about an hour and a half early at the funeral home. I was the first one inside, and as far as I can tell, I was the first family member to see the body in the open casket.

There were bouquets and flowers everywhere, all with names on ribbons in Chinese. I couldn’t read most of them, but later, my mom did point out my name on one of the ribbons. How nice.

She looked so beautiful, so at peace. So alive.

It didn’t feel right. No, it didn’t feel real. I was still denying what was going on, and kept thinking she was sleeping, resting, something, anything. I didn’t know what to think, I didn’t know what to do.

In some ways, pre-funeral was worse than actual funeral. As the family came in, set up pictures, organized everything, people dealt in their own way. This generally meant breaking down crying at the casket, or breaking down crying in the bathroom, or in my case, staring blankly at the flowers and not knowing what to do.

I don’t remember most of the funeral. What I do remember is the opera singer, as she sang at the beginning. I thought she was horrendous, all pitchy and offkey. Turned out she sings at the Kennedy Center, so what do I know?

Then the preacher started giving his eulogy in Chinese. Damned if he wasn’t straight up deep-South-Hellfire-and-Brimstone passion and fury, based solely on his intonation. Based on his words, from what I could understand, he wasn’t nearly that angry, but he sort of was. And it turned out he used to be a DuPont chemist. Go figure.

At some point I was handed a pair of gloves and told I was a pallbearer, just like my uncle’s funeral (this aunt’s husband). The casket had a hinged handle, which made carrying easy. Nice of the casket makers to think ahead.

We drove down to the cemetery. It was a beautiful day, the one break in a weekend full of rain and hurt. Well, one of two isn’t bad.

We carried the casket to the grave, positioned it on the lowering system. My uncle was buried first, twelve feet deep, and my aunt would be buried six feet deep on the same plot.

There was a nice green tent above the grave, and green carpeting all around, green felt chairs set up before the grave. The flowers were beside the casket, in a large pile, and one of the funeral home employees handed out single flowers to the family. I took a yellow rose, dethorned of course (as if we would feel the thorns. I couldn’t feel anything in my hands.). It smelled light, sweet, like a rose ought to smell. And then I looked up at the casket, sitting there on the suspension. Like lightning, it hit me. I knew what to do.

I started crying. Bawling. Couldn’t deny it any longer. My aunt was dead.

They lowered the casket, and I walked up, rose in hand. Time didn’t slow down like the movies, probably because it wasn’t a period of high stress. My feet fell fast, one after the other, and when I peeped down over the edge, barely able to look at the flowers and that casket, lowered down down down, I lost it again. Everything blurred as tears welled in my eyes, as if I was staring up into a heavy rain. I almost tripped walking away.

After, we went to grab dinner, gorged ourselves on way too much food as if there had just been a marriage. The kids had their own table, and we were content to relive the past, not really discussing our aunt. And it helped.

And now, here I am, reliving it, accepting what I haven’t wanted to, what I’ve still been slightly denying, even though I watched that coffin lower, watched as the cemetery workmen in their dirty khakis and dirty hats removed their wooden blocks and manually lowered the casket. My aunt is dead.

Rest in peace C.Y.

Ping

K.D.: Bring your appetite on Monday, I have plenty of Girl Scout Cookies.

K.T.: Do they have real Girl Scouts in them?

Groan. Nothing like making bad jokes to your professor.

***

Aside from the weekend, its been a slow week. Well, perhaps not a slow week, but I’ve definitely been less attentive than I would normally be. Along with the inevitable winter’s chill encroaching upon Maryland, this has slown my mind and my perception down to that of a three-toed sloth. It’s so slow, I didn’t realize that slown isn’t recognized as an actual word in MS Word.

With precious little to discuss with all of you in these e-missives, I’m going to have to default to a video game review. Yes, many of you will be bored out of your soccer-ball-sized heads, but so be it. I am willing to kick you all in the head in order to post.

Pong

Players: one to two
System: I used an Atari Twenty-six Hundred, but several different versions exist.
Rating: Zero stars, Five possible

Story: The development team should be defenestrated from the top floor of the Empire State Building for their near-complete lack of story development. As it appears, there is a game of table tennis, and you must triumph over your opponent. While many sports games have thin narratives, especially in the multiplayer arena, here the flow is nonexistent. Table Tennis. Ping-pong if you prefer. Wow. No tournament to slug through, no sick relatives that need prize money, no nothing. To be fair, they did do a good job of avoiding all of the video game clichés that have cropped up throughout the years, but really, they were the first. They could have come up with something, anything, and it would have been acceptable.

Gameplay: Insofar as that you are playing a game, we must commend the developers for lending that little bit of verisimilitude to their digital baby. However, note that it doesn’t get more basic than this. Even Tetris, one of the oldest, greatest video games of all time, has a more complicated interface than Pong. The action is top-down, and the entire playing field readjusts to fit your television screen, albeit with some manual help from the television settings. There is a mid-line separating the field. A rudimentary scoreboard centered at the top of the screen keeps track of which player has scored more points. Points are earned, laboriously, by smacking the “ball” (a white square) past your opponent’s paddle (a white line segment) with your own (ditto). The paddle is stuck in two dimensions, able to move from top to bottom of the screen. You can’t apply spin or English to the “ball’ when you hit it; only the angle of contact and the speed of the paddle as it moves will influence the “ball’s” trajectory. The top and bottom of the screen are walled to keep the ball in play.

This is as straightforward as you can get. Play till neither person can stand it anymore. Free game programs that come with computers are more entertaining than this. This game is so vanilla Breyers is jealous. It’s so straightforward Donald Trump is studying it for next seasons’ Apprentice firings. It’so boring and tedious that I’m putting myself to sleep analyzing it. Let’s move on.

Control: Perhaps the sole bright point in this game, but with a caveat. You must use the dial control, shaped much like a safe’s combination dial. Hold it as you would grasp the lip of a glass with all five fingers, and you are good to go. The fine-tuned motions allow you precision movement over your paddle, and let you shoot up and down in the span of a second. Stopping is tight, never overrunning when you cease input. If I ever require a line start/stop simulation, you can be sure I’ll be contacting these people.

Graphics: I can, and have, drawn more impressive graphics in my notebook while killing time in class. It is a bunch of straight lines. Remember pick-up sticks? The programmers cribbed from that game, but forgot about multiple colors. Damn. White, black. What is this, nineteen sixty? Daguerrotypes once constituted the finest form of photography, but now we have digital cameras. Move on!

Fun: I had a lot of fun laughing at it.

Conclusion: This was the apex of video gaming once upon a time. Now, it is a pile of trash. No, let me take that back, such a comparison insults refuse everywhere. It is a pile of George W. Bush. (Oh no he din’t, he went there!). I know you can find this for free on the internet, and could probably program a true-to-life recreation in thirty minutes or so if so inclined. Save your time, and spend your gaming dollar and gaming time elsewhere. Forty-year old technologies do not hold up to today’s gaming extravaganzas.

Dearly Beloved...

R.Y.: If you die, I call dibs on your PS2. Yeah, Dead or Alive Volleyball.

K.T.: You know that’s only on X-box.

R.Y.: Damn.

***

My aunt died last Friday. The funeral was on Sunday. It's been a long weekend, so you'll grant me a little leeway on updates. Rest in peace C.Y.

***

Recent events have gotten me thinking about funerals. I read a book a while back about cadavers, called Stiff, by Mary Roach. In it, the final chapter discussed what the author intended for her own funeral. Her solution, simple and elegant, was to have her husband decide the funeral arrangements, as she would be dead and wouldn’t care so much about what would be going on. He, on the other hand, would have to express his grief, and the burial she might want might not necessarily be what was best for the assembled (though I do not believe she stated her preferred funeral arrangements). I like this approach, and if I know when my time is near, I will appoint my wife to make the necessary arrangements.

However, today is still today, I’m still alive, and I’d like to share with you what would be my funeral, if I may.

I’d like a Sunday morning, September preferably, as close to the seventh as possible. September 7, 2059 and 2064 both fall on Sundays. A bit ambitious for lifespan, yes, but benchmarks to aim for. That would be a nice bookend to my life. It should be a morning ceremony, done in time for the one o’clock games. If for whatever reason I am not on the East Coast, the ceremony should still be done in time for the one o’clock games.

Closed casket, closed casket all the way. No viewing. Tape pictures of me to the casket if you have to, but no open casket. Remember me in my better days, not after the morticians have worked their morbid magic and taxidermied me.

I have no preference for locale, beyond somewhere near Baltimore if convenient. Plot Union Memorial Hospital as the central point, and work outwards. The closest graveyard is the best option, then spread outward.

There should be soft music persistent in the background, lots of Final Fantasy thematic music, some selections from the Iron Chef soundtrack, some Cowboy Bebop, perhaps some old spirituals to make it seem like a funeral.

No suits. Please, no suits. Dress nice, but dress comfortably. Funerals tend to go on a while, and I wouldn’t want to make you uncomfortable even after I’ve passed on. If we need embarrassment, we can send up D.C. to give a five minute monologue on his favorite insults. If we’re going to be celebrating my life, I want you to be able to breathe. I want you to be able to walk from point A to point B. I want you to appreciate the day.

Should we have advance warning, then what will happen is that we will have a present system. The assembled, just for coming, will not leave empty-handed. All of my most prized possessions will be apportioned and distributed. Then, I will post a list of what remains that I can feasibly give away (sorry Honey, whoever you are). People will call “dibs” on items, and will receive these items on the appointed day. I will try to write a note for everyone, calling from the dead if you will.

The structured portion will be short, fifteen minutes tops. We’ll also have an open section for people to say something, another fifteen minutes, less if no one wants to speak. Hell, I probably wouldn’t say anything at my own funeral if I were attending (and alive), so I wouldn’t fault any of you if you didn’t say anything (cause I wouldn’t be in any position to fault any of you).

To be fair, I probably would write something short, and have someone read it (thanks Dear, whoever you are). Something simple and to the point, but also a bit irreverent and irrelevant.

We’ll do it all outside, beneath tents, rain or shine. The seats will have nice cushioning. There will also be some light foods catered for the event, some of my personal favorites. Nachos, bacon-wrapped scallops, steak tips, spring rolls, orange slices and whole oranges, green beans, six different flavors of chicken wings, bacon wrapped filet-mignon if feasible, orange juice, soy milk, water, ham, mixed berries (straw, blue, rasp, black), pizza with many toppings, Grandma Utz’s Old Fashioned Chips (cooked in lard!) and French onion dip, oh man, the list could go on and on, and you’d all get a little fatter because of me. And you’d enjoy it damnit, I’d probably position someone to hand you a bacon wrapped scallop or two at the main entryway.

There would be televisions set up with pregame shows on, not too loud since its still a funeral, but loud enough to appreciate the day’s games.

Finally, at the appointed moment, I’d probably hire a few beautiful women to fling themselves at my casket if I were single (God forbid). If I’m married, we’ll probably have the cheese moment, where Whitney Houston will sing I Will Always Love You over the loudspeakers.

The longest moment should be the food-eating, since there should be a lot, and it should be so heavy. We’d arrange for people that wanted to chill there to be able to watch the games and continue eating, or set up a reception afterwards for the same. And really, that’s it. Is it extravagant, and not in keeping with the reality that I go out just as I came in? Yes, yes. Do I want people to be happy that I’m at rest, and understand that they persist, and continue on? Yes, yes. Am I now hungry, and seriously considering driving in the rain to pick up some bacon-wrapped scallops?

Yes, yes.

Egairram

Congrats to G.B. and N.B. (nee N.F.)!

I apologize for the first post this week. It was crap, and I shouldn’t have posted it. I did not bring “it," and hope the previous two entries have been baby steps towards redeeming myself in your silent, anonymous eyes.

Urinalysis

C.S.: “There’s nothing that gets me hungrier than starving Jewish people.”

Clearly a sarcastic statement, made when considering the presentation on concentration camps. Of course, I forgot to inform C.S. that the presentation was on the American concentration camps, which held Japanese-Americans during World War II.

***

I am more sympathetic towards pregnant women than I was yesterday; I felt their pain.

I ran this morning, or rather, I jogged with intermittent wind sprints punctuating my slow cantor. The wooded track I run on has a long gradual incline and a sharp decline, or a long gradual decline and a sharp incline if you run widdershins. In order to make it up the slant, I have to go into sprinter mode, touching the ground with little more than the balls of my feet and my toes, hardly making any contact, and gunning it like a biblical tax collector was chasing me. Now, for someone in shape, this is hardly more than a basic bodily upkeep, but for me, it was like dragging a rock across an ocean. The net result, besides tacking ten minutes onto my life (which is a net loss of ten minutes since I ran for twenty), are the persistent sore ankles that now plague my legs.

As anyone who runs knows, I needed water when I returned, and lots of it. Slammed it down like I was in a shot-for-shot contest with an elephant. Good thing it comes from the tap huh? Had to get ready for school, so I did, and before I left the apartment, I took the opportunity to urinate. Sensible precaution, it would be about an hour before I would arrive the law school’s toilets.

I went to get some Chick-fil-a, maker of the greatest chicken nugget in history. Yes, I know in the past I maligned Chick-fil-a as little more than fast food swill, but I’m sorry baby, Vegas was a cruel mistress, it did horrible things to me, I didn’t mean any of it. Please take me back.

She took me back, and even handed me a large sweetened ice tea in the process. I took a few exploratory sips and rested the cup in its holder. No biggie right?

Halfway to school, I start to get that twinge, that light pressure that wanted to flow out of me, like a story, or a urine stream. Since it was in my belly and not my brain, I knew it was the latter. Whatever. I start relaxing my bladder a little instead of full on clenching. Why waste energy that might come in handy later? Its not like I let a few drops go, just kept the seal closed, but not iron-tight.

When I get to Baltimore, it’s around eleven, and the parking garage’s first eight floors are full. I am forced to drive in circles all the way up to floor nine, quite unlike cloud nine since I was ready to bust open. Not from joy, from water and iced tea. Water is like your parents; it nurtures you and threatens to embarrass you at the worst possible opportunities.

Now, please please please feel the irony of this situation: I have to hold it in the parking garage, essentially one of the world’s largest toilets, at least according to all the alcoholics and homeless I have made the acquaintance of. I know its just a parking garage, but can’t they at least install drains and dividers for privacy? Maybe little stalls in the corners with basic piping just to move it all away?

I park, swing out of my car, holding my backpack, easily twenty pounds. Its hard to get out, and I’m starting to feel the pressure. Sweat is starting to sheen on my forehead, coat my body in a thin protective barrier. I shuffle, sore ankles and all, trying to shift the extra weight around, knocking into things because I create a much larger footprint with the backpack that I am not used to. And still my bladder cries for sweet release.

Pregnant women, I feel your pain.

Now, I’ve to walk ten minutes to get to the law school. I have two fears at this point, one chronic and irrational, one persistent and logical. The former is a fear of getting punched. I’m not joking, when my bladder is full, the worst thing I think could happen would be to get punched. You’re probably going to lose bladder control, and you’re probably in a fight, so you’ve got to beat down someone in wet pants. Win, and you’re a baby. Lose, and you wet yourself while getting beat. No win. The latter is simpler, in that I don’t want to have to cuyt someone off with a simple “I gotta piss, that’s more important than what you have to say.” Granted, my urine is more important than what you have to say, but I don’t want you to know that, and I don’t want to dissemble.

Normally, I enjoy the sights and smells, and by enjoy the sights and smells, I mean walk with my neck stiff, my eyes unwavering from the present course, my breathing through my mouth so as to avoid the sweet mélange of sweat refuse and smog.Now, my eyes are throwing around willy-nilly, tracking for anything that resembles a toilet and would afford me some trace amount of privacy. Anything. At one point, I look down at the ice tea I’m carrying and take a sip.

Dumbass.

I then think about it. Would it be possible to dump out the tea, absorb the $1.50, and pee in the cup in a corner? That was how far gone I was, that I considered peeing into my cup. In retrospect, I doubt the thirty-two ounce cup would have withstood the force of my amber blast (weak Styrofoam), and even if it managed to resist the fury of the stream, it likely would have overflown, creating a potentially more embarrassing situation (No, you really don’t want a sip of this, trust me.)

I have never been so glad to see the law school. I was so glad I took a sip of iced tea.

Idiot.

Social Conformity

K.T.: “Boy that warms the cockles of your heart.”

S.P.: “What did you say?”

K.T.: “Cockles of your heart, read a book.”

S.P.: “What does it mean?”

K.T.: “What does it mean? Uh, I’m not sure.”

S.P: “At least I understand everything I read.”

“Cockles of one’s heart” means one’s innermost feelings.

***

Warning: Sleep-hazy recollections follow.

When I arrived at work at one post meridian, we were loading the finished, crated product into a fifty-three foot truck. Since the fifty-three foot truck cannot swing around to meet its opened rear to the loading bay dock, this process involves A.G. driving the battery-operated forklift and moving the approximately four hundred pound crates from the loading bay into the truck, where others will help move the crates into position with a pallet jack and brute force. I recall around forty crates or so, and everyone had been loading since around ten ante meridian. It didn’t help that when tightening the crates to the forklift, M.N. strapped it down so tight that K.R. and B.E. were having trouble unstrapping the squat beasts. They started screaming over to the loading bay, at which point V.C. stuffed some tissues into the next strapped crate.

At around two thirty post meridian, the dirty deed had been done, and the truck sat pregnant with product. Much of the forklift’s battery had been drained by the back and forth, back and forth. However, there was still enough charge, sixty percent or so, to take care of the second truck. This one had been crammed full of wooden crate material, sides, tops, bottoms, all stacked up and ready to be transported.

To give you an idea of what the crates are like, when fully assembled, they stand about eight to nine feet tall. The bases and sides weigh ten to fifteen pounds each, with the top an additional five to ten. This phone booth sized coffin is nail-gunned together, and the door is screwed in. Though not the most attractive girl on the block, she’ll still take whatever you have to give her into her hole, and keep it trapped in there. Wait, that makes her like the psycho-ex that keeps on calling you and saving the used condoms forever and ever. But I digress.

Tops and bottoms are stacked ten to a pallet. Sides are probably forty or fifty to a pallet. These numbers necessitate the use of the forklift, because we sure as hell can’t move that sort of weight ourselves, except piecemeal. Given that this second truck is also a fifty-three footer, what we have to do is hoist a pallet jack into the truck to move successive pallets forward as we unload the earlier pallets. Since there are so many pallets, and its already late, the plan is to just get them unloaded into the parking lot, and move them to the storage facility later.

A.G. had just walked away to eat his lunch, KFC I believe, when M.N. called him back into duty. This infuriated him so badly that later, he went to get his biscuit, took two bites, said now it was hard as a rock, and chucked it sidearm off into the grass lot adjoining the parking lot, a good sixty feet away. That biscuit flew like a chicken shot from a cannon. It dropped tiny pebble-like crumbs all over the parking lot.

We unload the first fourteen or so pallets without much difficulty. The problem comes in magic number fifteen, a sides pallet. These eight to nine foot sides are unwieldy and prohibitively heavy when stacked together. At this point, a wrench and the number seven have been blinking on the forklift’s console for a significant amount of time, but what choice have we but to ignore the warning we don’t understand? This sides pallet was also off balance, as the pallet itself was off center. A.G. had to try to balance the forklift tines beneath the center of gravity, rather than on the pallet. He cleared the sides of the truck trailer, and was starting to back up, when the forklift seized up. Everything stopped working, and in slow motion, you could watch forty to fifty side panels waterfall off to the side, tumbling away from the forklift, spilling off like a new river.

To our surprise, none of the panels had been damaged, but to our chagrin, we had to move all of them piece by piece onto a separate pallet. Further, the forklift refused to function, like a donkey overworked in the summer’s heat. It sat there, silent ass, refusing to go anywhere. We had one sides pallet left on the truck. M.N. first suggested that we get it all down in one rush. Three on one side, three on the other, we carefully balance it out of the trailer, then drop that shit on the ground. I had to ask him if he was serious, to which he replied he wasn’t. We’d have to take this one down piece by piece.

The limiting factor on these sides is not the weight, but the size. They are a bitch to move around, because you either can’t see where you are going, or produce a very large footprint as you move around. More than once I almost clocked someone because I couldn’t see them and chose to turn at a bad time. However, we finally got it onto a separate pallet. There we stood, panting and frowning; it seemed appropriate that the forklift would choose this moment to reactivate.

A.G. took it down to recharge. Meanwhile, we had sixteen pallets stuck in the parking lot, and no way to move them. M.N. at this point suggested we “take fifty.” K.R. bristled at this idea. He was tired of us sitting around “with our dicks in our hands,” and proposed the mad genius idea to transport the tops and bottoms pallets to the storage facility using naught but a pallet jack and teams of two.

Allow me to diagram for you the circuitous path that such a pallet jack team must traverse. The parking lot is a good football field in length, and on a gradual downslope. At the far end, you must hang a left onto a ten degree incline, then continue up to the left until you have completed a one hundred and eighty degree turn. At this point, the incline continues, and you must go about half a football field up, then make a ninety degree turn to the right, at which point you have found the Storage USA facility. Take it up, activate the gate, then push on through as the incline increases in slope to twenty or twenty-five degrees. Push upwards about seventy-five yards, hang a right, and stumble forward another fifty yards until you arrive at our two storage bays, then jack the pallet in. Simple.

I had the good fortune to volunteer to help K.R. and to take the keys to the storage bay door locks. We had no problem going downhill. Hell, K.R. jumped on the pallet jack and rode it a good twenty-five yards, with me hanging on behind with one hand, trying to slow it down, and really just running fast just to try not to fall down.

The first problem came with the incline, when he pulled and I pushed. We had to run to get it up, and that was no simpleton folly. As the incline increased, so did our patience for this job decrease, but we huffed and we puffed until we managed to round the final bend and stumble it over to the bay doors. K.R. took a few steps away while I went to unlock the bay door. When I turned back he had collapsed onto the ground, chest heaving, breaths shallow and faint.

The family using their van to load up items stared at him with a mix of curiosity, pity and laughter.

I wasn’t going to get the pallet into the bay by myself, so K.R. called B.E. to come help me. There is a step leading into the bay, which necessitated going wheel first with the jack. We of course didn’t think of that, so we went fork first, where the jack’s profile is naturally lower. Three times we ran it forward, three times we battering rammed the two inch lip. My body jolted as if a lover touched me. Three times. We finally managed to get the jack positioned wheel first, and with me pulling and B.E. pushing, slammed the jack home. Of course, I fall over and B.E. almost pushes the pallet jack over me.

On the way back, we all agreed that we were not going to do this anymore. In the end, we had to compromise by putting the sides pallets into the loading bay, then stacking the tops and bottoms tight, and hoping no one would steal them. “But K.T.,” you ask the phosphorous screen before you, “who would plunder such a strange assortment of wooden crating?” There are some screwed up people out there, and I can only hope right now no one has stolen it.

***

After work, I thought I was going to a bar, but it turned out that I was babysitting. We were all headed to Galaxies, a pool bar in Silver Spring. Though I rarely drink beer and hard liquor, I do like hanging out and screwing around. Besides, the Galaxies waitresses tend to be easy on the eyes and willing to be perfectly unaware of how hot they are in order to unwittingly garner larger tips from the patrons, i.e. us.

G.B. had just gotten off work, while K.C. was still finishing up some last minute assignments. J.L. and E.X. had previously scouted out the area and were waiting outside, while V.P. and A.T. were en route, to arrive at seven post meridian. So, myself, G.B., J.L. and E.X. headed off to Galaxies.

Several things strike me as unique about Galaxies. The area is quite capacious and open, despite its basement situation. There are a slew of televisions decorating the walls, as well as a main projection screen displaying the most popular sporting event at the time. Galaxies must contain thirty full sized pool tables, with wide enough alleys between to disallow clumsy people from clocking each others on their pool cue recoil. Every time I enter Galaxies, it is deserted. There are no more than forty people in the entire area at any one time.

We arrive at happy hour, and so order two pitchers of beer and a large cheese pizza. Our waitress is a cute Latina, with a wonderful ass that I could wrap my hands around and just grab onto for dear life. G.B. observed that it would only take one of his hands to do the same, and that we should go in for a surgical trade. Throughout the night, despite being idle for much of the time (there are only forty people!), she tends to not come on a timely basis, unless that time is “late.” For example, she brings us plates, but neglects the actual pizza until ten minutes later. A cruel joke, cruel as children, and if she were not the bringer of beer, she would have been rejected from our table long ago. Alas, she is the beer wench.

I have to make special mention of this “pizza.” The mozzarella has extended all the way to the crust, so that there is no technical crust, just a delineation between the state of being pizza, and the state of not being pizza. The dough is undercooked, and the entire venture is lukewarm, leading us to wonder if it was prepared using a heat lamp, a giant non functioning microwave, or my private thought, a fat cook lying on top of it for fifteen minutes. It is not nauseating, but I observe that if I were alone in a sewer, lost, and starving, if this pizza and a diseased rat were side by side, nine times out of ten I would deign to consume a slice of this monstrosity. The tenth time, yes, I would consume the rat.

We vacuum through the pitchers in due time. G.B. pours me some, which I am forced to accept, as angry G.B. equates to injured K.T. In due time, K.C., V.P. and A.T. arrive. Our party, seated comfortably at a four person table, now stretches the same boundaries as a seven person melee. More pitchers are called for, as well as quesadillas and wings. Thankfully, their pizza incompetence does not extend to their quesadillas or their chicken wings. I didn’t partake of the quesadilla, but the hot and barbecue wings were done to perfection, basted thick in their own savory sauces, still piping hot, but not to the point of scalding the precious folds of the inner mouth. A culinary miracle erasing the horrid memory of that damned pizza.

As we sit there, we get more pitchers. G.B., J.L., K.C. and A.T. get noticeably drunk, though G.B.’s was frontloaded, and everyone else’s was backloaded. As the drinking madness commences, V.P. and I compare our PDAs. (Yes, I bought a PDA. Yes, I’m sorry that I did. No I’m not returning it. No, so far I’m not becoming one of those people. I’m just halfway there, like I’m halfway to crack addiction every day I live.) I bought a Palm Z22, he bid for and won a Dell Axim x50 from eBay. Damned if his didn’t give me PDA envy. His color screen was larger than my PDA was. He had so many cool options on there. I only felt it necessary and just to record a task on there for him (“make love to men”). In return, he called my PDA “cute” and wondered why it was so scratched. J.L. tried to stab his finger through my PDA in an attempt to activate it sans stylus. Damned if he wasn’t almost successful.

Much of the night is a blur, as it tends to be when you’re unused to drinking and having fun. I do recall looking at my cell phone at one point and realizing three hours had passed. What follows is a pastiche of what I recall: G.B. once extruded feces for two minutes straight after a four-day constipation binge. K.C. has roughly fifty bosses at work, and all of them are jockeying for his time. I yell and wave my hands much more when intoxicated. K.C. likes touching V.P. inappropriately, going so far as to throw his arm around V.P.’s shoulder and sway to the music, whatever it was, some of the popular music the kids are listening to now. K.C. likes punching G.B. The drunker J.L. is, the more he sounds like an intelligent three-year old, still able to string together coherent sentences, but unable to articulate even the most basic words. Trying to comprehend him to any great extent is impossible, and nodding is a good method of interpretation. A.T. loves speed drinking contests. I exist to provide others with entertainment while they are killing time at work. Salt will not stick to my dry forearm. If you bang a table hard enough, beer glasses will tip over and spill on you. Yes, we still laugh at someone that looks like they pissed their pants, even though not ten seconds ago, we saw the glass fall that wet them. The Astros beat the Cardinals in game 6, spurring an incoherent rant from J.L. about how all the analysts had erred when predicting the Astros demise, though they were ahead three games to two in the series. If I mock anyone, A.T. will kill me. If I mock A.T., A.T. will kill me. If I mock myself, A.T. will not kill me, because he will make my life so miserable I will kill myself. A.T. can fit an entire piece of pizza into his mouth at once. I will teach G.B. how to write, but not about poop. In exchange, he will teach me about computers, though presumably not about computers cooled with poop. J.L. thinks I am fat, and took every opportunity to make a hog-snorting sound. I am a girl when it comes to people calling me fat, calling them out at every perceived slight, no matter how far away from the truth. If everyone thinks I am fat, I must be fat. I don’t know why I ate all those wings, it’s time to throw up after I finish writing this. Damn I hate being fat, I wish I was skinny like all the girls in magazines. Then again, I wish I was with the girls in the magazines, so I don’t know how that’s going to work out. We all approve of lesbians, and encourage them in all aspects of life. Finally, none of us can really go back to Galaxies.

Such a shame, not being able to go back, but none of us will sit easy should we do so. The problem is A.T.’s quaffing copious amounts of beer. A.T. got real pale real fast, and asked G.B. for a glass to vomit into. G.B. immediately sent A.T. off to the bathroom, and commented that if A.T. was going to vomit, it would be better in there than out here. In retrospect, I beg to differ.

Five minutes pass, then another two. I get worried about A.T., and my bladder strains and stretches from the five Pepsis I have downed at this point (“Oh Hardcore!” F you J.L.). I get up and go to the bathroom. Mistake number one.

Opening the door, the most sour smell greets me, of wasted bile and chicken fingers and half-digested pizza and Satan knows what else, so rank was the odor. A.T. is by the urinal at the back, wiping up his sick and dropping paper towels into the urinal itself. He looks at me, a strange glaze in his eyes. “The stalls were locked, I couldn’t get in.” He continues to wipe the inside and the top of the urinal, such was the force of his vomit. I walk over to the stall, and pull outward. The door swings like a thirties dancer. “F*ck.”

A.T. is paler, and I’m sure his skin would be clammy if I dared go near and touch his bare skin. He goes over to the sink, rinses his mouth out, wipes his forehead a few times, then goes to the stall to sit down. Fair enough, compose yourself before going back into the bar.

A few more minutes pass, and I get worried. I revisit the bathroom, open the door, and all I see before the door swings back shut is A.T.’s faded blue jeans and his tennis shoes in a kneeling position, still inside the stall.

The third visit, I had to look through the crack between the door and the stall wall. (Have you ever had a B.M. in public, and you stare through that tiny slit, and you think someone is staring back at you? It is quite disorienting, because how do you call them out when you’re at your most vulnerable? You just have to suck it up and let it go. Taken the wrong way, both those phrases are disgusting.) A.T. is slumped on the toilet bowl. This is not good. I knock and he manages to get to his feet. He must have vomited into the toilet at some point, then fell forward into a stupor, for when he arises, his forehead is bright red, in the shape of the back of the toilet seat where his head came to rest. A.T. walks over to the sink, leans over on his arm, breathes in the sink fumes.

I walk over to the paper towel dispenser to get him some towels, and when I look back in, the running water is now pink, brackish, like leftover milk from a pink flavored kid’s cereal. The swirling water only adds to the effect. A.T. vomited into the sink, without a peep. I go grab even more towels, and he remains slumped over the sink, afraid to show anyone. I looked in later, and the water level was rising. In another five minutes, he might have drowned if he hadn’t moved. Apparently, A.T.’s pizza wasn’t chewed into a manageable size, so it came back out much as it went in. Admittedly, for this pizza, it might have been an improvement, but I didn’t want to test the waters.

We all took turns visiting, and as time passed, we knew we had to get going before an employee went in there. V.P. goes to get the bill, and as we’re all settling up, I reach into my pocket, and pull out none other than the keys to the storage bays at work that I forgot to return. So much for my plan of sleeping in tomorrow.

I revisit the bathroom again, and J.L. is keeping A.T. company. As soon as I walk in, I know, just know, know as much as I know my own name which I am not telling you, that A.T. has thrown up. Again. Sure enough, the wall paper towel dispenser/waste disposal is no longer virgin. A priest may have to come to sanctify it. J.L. missed it (he was pretty gone by that point), and was whispering like a three year old, so I had even less chance of understanding what was going on. My best guess, A.T. stood up, walked over to get his own towels, then projectile vomited while standing upright, because the splash pattern started at about his head level. Given that some of it had actually stretched past the extended trash basket and pooled around the floor, it had some force behind it, and must have been an explosion worthy of a building implosion. Through, little white strands, like maggots, lay unwrithing in the now orange-flavored sick.

We finally manage to roll out. Consider the urinal covered in sick with paper towels jamming it, the sink choked with uneaten pizza, the paper towel dispenser that dispenses evil, and you see why we will not be going back anytime soon.

The best part of the night was the return train, as we had to get A.T. home. G.B. and J.L. drove A.T.’s car, while I followed behind. When we got him to his house, I would take those two back to the parking garage, where they could mount their own mechanical steeds and ride home.

Well, the ride back from A.T.’s house was nothing short of amazing. J.L., now completely in his cups and incoherent, is freezing because I need the window down to keep me awake. Thank goodness I had all those Pepsis earlier, I had a feeling something like this might happen. I tell him to put on my jacket, which is about as successful as telling a dog to put on a sweater. He is rolling in the backseat with my jacket, stuffing his hands repeatedly into the pockets, sticking his head into the sleeves, and muttering the entire time. Then, he takes to slapping me and G.B. with the sleeves, because he can’t operate the damn coat. Finally, at one point, his left hand reaches forward and starts groping my leg. Forward and forward it goes, freaking me out, until he manages to reach the window button, and raise the window. I was surprised he was that coordinated while drunk and tired. Later, for no reason, he opened the back door while on the highway. Also, there was alternating talk from him of dying alone/with us dying with him, and killing as many people driving on the road as we could.

I finally dropped them off around one thirty ante meridian, made it back here around two ante meridian, and have been typing for the past ninety minutes or so. In five hours, I will have to stop at work to drop off two tiny keys, before returning here to try to get some sleep before class and work in the afternoon. I will be tired and cranky all day afternoon, and I’m sure the day will suffer, especially with the alcohol I drank. I hope there’s no hangover.

And you know what? It was worth it.