My annual death-bed chat
First of all, I'd like to make clear that the main theme I hope to drive home in this year's deathbed chat, is that I've fallen out of my deathbed. Somebody, please hoist me back into my deathbed! Oh, God, and be gentle with my deathbedsores!
Oh, how I wish I had ever gotten around to writing about my Christmastime return to the Inland Empire. One day, once I have obtained the correct cocktail of stimulants and stem cell therapy, I hope to belatedly do so. The love affair that has arisen between myself and Riverside since we parted is, in my opinion, one of God's sickest miracles. I'm totally like a soap opera heroine that falls eternally in love with this brute that once ravished her a long time ago, but only after he really truly repents and becomes essentially an entirely different character. And we have a baby!
Did you hear me, dammit! I have a baby! And it's mine, dammit, mine, and no one's gonna take it away from me!
Anyways, moving right along...
After returning, I returned to my usual routine of going to work, smoking cigarettes, washing dishes, and clinging to the idea of mortality as the one great and constant comfort in life. Oh yes, but this semester, I'm also taking a super-general basic beginner's psychology class at MCTC. Which is nice cuz it's very easy, but it's still some new and interesting stuff to know. Probably really all the information my frozen withered brain could absorb at this moment in life anyway. And I totally love MCTC. I think I may well be having the chic-est damn community college experience possible. The school has a vibe and look sort of like if Mary Tyler Moore ran a high school that was a space station. She also designed the space station--I mean, I assume that goes without saying. Fortunately, it's a space station high school where you can smoke cigarettes, and large numbers of students do so in the specially designated areas, which are pretty lovely, looking out on a big beautiful space park. Even though the space park is frozen and barren, since the nearest sun-like object is a very distant cold blue star. Don't give me none of that "blue stars are the hottest" crap--we middle-aged space kids have had up to here with those Earthling superstitions!
Other exciting news: I finally had one of my most grotesquely, morbidly decayed teeth begin to crumble. To be fair and modest, really all that happened was a sizable chunk in the back of one just was shorn off by an especially ornery chunk of cereal. The box for that cereal did portray it as a rather extreme breakfast (it was called "Optimum Power," or some such, for God's sake), but I foolishly took this to be mere bravado. For which, I paid the ultimate price: the loss of a small part of a tooth (small, you know, in the scale of the cosmos; in the scale of teeth, I don't know for sure).
But anyway, I eventually went into a brief panic--though, after some delay, as I hadn't noticed that the toothlet had chunked off, so I spent a while chewing a mixture of my tooth and the cereal, wondering why this one piece of the cereal was so uncomfortably hard. Then realizing my tooth didn't seem to be the same shape, and I couldn't solve the problem by sucking or picking out some chunk of food mired in the decayed recesses of the tooth. No, sir, there is a crater there, with a rather sharp edge.
But the bright side is that, after years of dreading this day, and having plentiful nightmares about it, and imagining it as this horrific catastrophe, with the tooth crumbling into excruciating rubble and blood gushing out and being in horrible pain and sobbing and stumbling down the street all bloody and weeping and screaming and in pain. But no, it turns out it's not necessarily such a big deal. Fortunately, I think my teeth are so dead down to the core there's no living nerves to send out that much in the way of pain signals to my withered brain, which, unless I get me a steamin' pot of hot stem cells and a fat line of ritalin, is halfway dead anyway. And the new and improved shape of my tooth seems fairly stable for the time being. And I kind of like playing with it with my tongue at work. It's like I got a badass tooth-piercing. It feels kind of like a coral reef inside my dead broken tooth. So, you see, I win! Now I must change the subject, because thinking about it for too long is making me terribly afraid again.
Next up in the cavalcade of adventures...
So in the real big news department: Eric and I went to New Mexico for Spring break--daring to pose the question: Is New Mexico the new Mexico? Anyboob, I have officially declared New Mexico my third favorite State, something which I think has brought great joy and comfort to everyone there, or at least everyone who is literate enough to read the blimps which I assume have been hovering over the state (No small feat, considering that, according to a mug I bought at the airport, New Mexico has the 5th largest area of any state. I understand if you also feel initially surprised to learn of New Mexico's surprisingly imposing size--I was skeptical for the first few minutes of looking at the mug, but I have yet to think of more than 4 states that are definitely, obviously bigger than it, off the top of my head. So, whoomp, New Mexico wins!
First of all, I lied to you, and really, to myself, when I spoke of an airport. Albuquerque has no place for your silly human "airports." It's a Sunport. A sunport is different from an airport, in that it is heavily into a turquoise-acqua and kind of peachy-pink, that gives it the majesty of a giant 1980's Coco's, or an '80's hospital, perhaps one where Dr. Harry Weston, of "Empty Nest" fame might pursue a career of healing and laughter. Along with this color scheme, it is also super chill. MSP is a pretty chill airport, as there's never anyone there, and you have your various statues and pictures of animals and other natural things in generally subdued lighting. But man, you have not experienced true relaxation until you have boarded or deboarded an aircraft at a certified sunport. It's like taking a bubble bath in a bubbling bath of melted chocolate! With a delicious strawberry shampoo massaged into your scalp, and you can eat the shampoo! And the conditioner, which is also strawberry (made with real strawberries, naturellement!) and soooo creamy! MMM... I'm sorry, where was I?
So I quickly fell in love with Albuquerque, which above all, you must know, is the weirdest looking place ever. The desert is weird, the mountains are all cool and weirdly shaped, with all these weird protuberances and squiggly lines--but if you try to take pictures of them, they magically disguise themselves as normal mountains. The buildings are all really weird and random, and arranged at weird angles on weirdly intersecting streets, and a lot of them are really dilapidated and/or officially closed with a condemnation notice posted in front of them. God knows how I love unsafe, squallid condemned buildings--I have a natural instinct to burrow into them and live there for years on end.
Now, I don't really know much of Route 66, besides what I saw in Albuquerque (where the Route goes by the nom d'amour of "Central Avenue," like the shrewdest of coquettes), and the stretch of Foothill Blvd. in Ontario by where my aunt's home health care office was located, which was pretty bitchin' in its own way. But based on this wide frame of reference, I would have to say Albuquerque wins for having the very greatest segment of the legendary Route 66--a road immortalized by the Depeche Mode song of the same name. Among everything else, lots of early Cold War in Space type buildings, most of them crumbling and condemned, like so many full-length dressing mirrors arrayed around me. Lots of neon. Also, a crazy number of people with motorcycles, like seriously driving motorcycles, very noisily, often in packs, up and down Central, so everyone else could see and hear their motorcycles as they drifted by on their own noisy motorcycles. Also, there were, for a non music-video scenario, an abnormally large number of people just standing by their weird purple DeLorean-like cars with doors and windows opening in all these weird directions, that they just parked by the road to play music out of while standing nearby with some other people.
Though we were told by some random very relaxed cigarette-smoking girl at the hostel, who might have worked there or something, that this was an especially big moment for all the motorcycles and parked cars, since it was Sunday, and Sundays and Friday nights are big times for everyone to go do that. In all fairness, there's only so much you can do in New Mexico on a Sunday, since most things are closed on Sundays, in keeping with it being Spain. It turns out in Santa Fe, most things are also closed on Mondays. And after 6 p.m. We saw an ad for a place in Santa Fe called "Late Night Burger," but then realized it closes at 11 p.m. More like "Slightly Past the Bedtime of a Small Child Burger."
But even despite the rigorous respect being paid to the Lord's Holy Day left and right, we found plenty of fun to have by simply wandering around in the middle of Albuquerque. And this is how I came to know, within an hour of two of landing, that I would love Albuquerque forever. As we were walking by a bunch of condemned motels, these two guys--one classically homeless-looking, the other just random old-looking--started calling very plaintively to us. We figured they were just going to ask for money or something, but then we realized they were distraught about a bird in a trash can, and pleaded with us: "You've got to get him out of there... or he'll DIE!" They conducted us to a big blue dumpster, and I saw that there was a pigeon hanging around on a pile of trash at the bottom. "Oh, God, you have to get him out of there!" So I leaned over the edge and reached in. I worried about looking like the kind of snob who has issues with touching pigeons with his bare hands, but I tried to devise a way to lift out the trash the pigeon was sitting on, and then deposit him safely on the ground. But just as I had nearly gotten the pile of trash to the top, the pigeon wobbled off and tumbled deeper into the dumpster, which caused our new friends to wail aloud with dismay. So, I set my waist against the rim of the dumpster, and teetered over, thinking for a moment that this might just be an ingenious trap, and that maybe they would just grab my wallet (for what limited good that thing could do anyone), push me over into the trash, and run away, cackling into the desert. But, no, they just stood by wondering aloud about the tragic pigeon's fate, and I eventually gave up on finding a way to scoop out the pigeon with trash, and just picked up with one hand and dropped it out on the milk crate I'd used as a stepstool. The guys were very happy, but still wondered if the bird would be okay, it seemed like maybe his wing was hurt. I argued that he probably had a better chance outside the dumpster than inside, which seemed to comfort them somewhat. They thanked us and Eric and I resumed our stroll, while they stayed behind to monitor the pigeon's progress.
Well, that's probably enough for this installment. Stay tuned for the next installment, which will be printed on the backpage of the Lady's Millet and Barley Catalog of next Spring.
Oh, how I wish I had ever gotten around to writing about my Christmastime return to the Inland Empire. One day, once I have obtained the correct cocktail of stimulants and stem cell therapy, I hope to belatedly do so. The love affair that has arisen between myself and Riverside since we parted is, in my opinion, one of God's sickest miracles. I'm totally like a soap opera heroine that falls eternally in love with this brute that once ravished her a long time ago, but only after he really truly repents and becomes essentially an entirely different character. And we have a baby!
Did you hear me, dammit! I have a baby! And it's mine, dammit, mine, and no one's gonna take it away from me!
Anyways, moving right along...
After returning, I returned to my usual routine of going to work, smoking cigarettes, washing dishes, and clinging to the idea of mortality as the one great and constant comfort in life. Oh yes, but this semester, I'm also taking a super-general basic beginner's psychology class at MCTC. Which is nice cuz it's very easy, but it's still some new and interesting stuff to know. Probably really all the information my frozen withered brain could absorb at this moment in life anyway. And I totally love MCTC. I think I may well be having the chic-est damn community college experience possible. The school has a vibe and look sort of like if Mary Tyler Moore ran a high school that was a space station. She also designed the space station--I mean, I assume that goes without saying. Fortunately, it's a space station high school where you can smoke cigarettes, and large numbers of students do so in the specially designated areas, which are pretty lovely, looking out on a big beautiful space park. Even though the space park is frozen and barren, since the nearest sun-like object is a very distant cold blue star. Don't give me none of that "blue stars are the hottest" crap--we middle-aged space kids have had up to here with those Earthling superstitions!
Other exciting news: I finally had one of my most grotesquely, morbidly decayed teeth begin to crumble. To be fair and modest, really all that happened was a sizable chunk in the back of one just was shorn off by an especially ornery chunk of cereal. The box for that cereal did portray it as a rather extreme breakfast (it was called "Optimum Power," or some such, for God's sake), but I foolishly took this to be mere bravado. For which, I paid the ultimate price: the loss of a small part of a tooth (small, you know, in the scale of the cosmos; in the scale of teeth, I don't know for sure).
But anyway, I eventually went into a brief panic--though, after some delay, as I hadn't noticed that the toothlet had chunked off, so I spent a while chewing a mixture of my tooth and the cereal, wondering why this one piece of the cereal was so uncomfortably hard. Then realizing my tooth didn't seem to be the same shape, and I couldn't solve the problem by sucking or picking out some chunk of food mired in the decayed recesses of the tooth. No, sir, there is a crater there, with a rather sharp edge.
But the bright side is that, after years of dreading this day, and having plentiful nightmares about it, and imagining it as this horrific catastrophe, with the tooth crumbling into excruciating rubble and blood gushing out and being in horrible pain and sobbing and stumbling down the street all bloody and weeping and screaming and in pain. But no, it turns out it's not necessarily such a big deal. Fortunately, I think my teeth are so dead down to the core there's no living nerves to send out that much in the way of pain signals to my withered brain, which, unless I get me a steamin' pot of hot stem cells and a fat line of ritalin, is halfway dead anyway. And the new and improved shape of my tooth seems fairly stable for the time being. And I kind of like playing with it with my tongue at work. It's like I got a badass tooth-piercing. It feels kind of like a coral reef inside my dead broken tooth. So, you see, I win! Now I must change the subject, because thinking about it for too long is making me terribly afraid again.
Next up in the cavalcade of adventures...
So in the real big news department: Eric and I went to New Mexico for Spring break--daring to pose the question: Is New Mexico the new Mexico? Anyboob, I have officially declared New Mexico my third favorite State, something which I think has brought great joy and comfort to everyone there, or at least everyone who is literate enough to read the blimps which I assume have been hovering over the state (No small feat, considering that, according to a mug I bought at the airport, New Mexico has the 5th largest area of any state. I understand if you also feel initially surprised to learn of New Mexico's surprisingly imposing size--I was skeptical for the first few minutes of looking at the mug, but I have yet to think of more than 4 states that are definitely, obviously bigger than it, off the top of my head. So, whoomp, New Mexico wins!
First of all, I lied to you, and really, to myself, when I spoke of an airport. Albuquerque has no place for your silly human "airports." It's a Sunport. A sunport is different from an airport, in that it is heavily into a turquoise-acqua and kind of peachy-pink, that gives it the majesty of a giant 1980's Coco's, or an '80's hospital, perhaps one where Dr. Harry Weston, of "Empty Nest" fame might pursue a career of healing and laughter. Along with this color scheme, it is also super chill. MSP is a pretty chill airport, as there's never anyone there, and you have your various statues and pictures of animals and other natural things in generally subdued lighting. But man, you have not experienced true relaxation until you have boarded or deboarded an aircraft at a certified sunport. It's like taking a bubble bath in a bubbling bath of melted chocolate! With a delicious strawberry shampoo massaged into your scalp, and you can eat the shampoo! And the conditioner, which is also strawberry (made with real strawberries, naturellement!) and soooo creamy! MMM... I'm sorry, where was I?
So I quickly fell in love with Albuquerque, which above all, you must know, is the weirdest looking place ever. The desert is weird, the mountains are all cool and weirdly shaped, with all these weird protuberances and squiggly lines--but if you try to take pictures of them, they magically disguise themselves as normal mountains. The buildings are all really weird and random, and arranged at weird angles on weirdly intersecting streets, and a lot of them are really dilapidated and/or officially closed with a condemnation notice posted in front of them. God knows how I love unsafe, squallid condemned buildings--I have a natural instinct to burrow into them and live there for years on end.
Now, I don't really know much of Route 66, besides what I saw in Albuquerque (where the Route goes by the nom d'amour of "Central Avenue," like the shrewdest of coquettes), and the stretch of Foothill Blvd. in Ontario by where my aunt's home health care office was located, which was pretty bitchin' in its own way. But based on this wide frame of reference, I would have to say Albuquerque wins for having the very greatest segment of the legendary Route 66--a road immortalized by the Depeche Mode song of the same name. Among everything else, lots of early Cold War in Space type buildings, most of them crumbling and condemned, like so many full-length dressing mirrors arrayed around me. Lots of neon. Also, a crazy number of people with motorcycles, like seriously driving motorcycles, very noisily, often in packs, up and down Central, so everyone else could see and hear their motorcycles as they drifted by on their own noisy motorcycles. Also, there were, for a non music-video scenario, an abnormally large number of people just standing by their weird purple DeLorean-like cars with doors and windows opening in all these weird directions, that they just parked by the road to play music out of while standing nearby with some other people.
Though we were told by some random very relaxed cigarette-smoking girl at the hostel, who might have worked there or something, that this was an especially big moment for all the motorcycles and parked cars, since it was Sunday, and Sundays and Friday nights are big times for everyone to go do that. In all fairness, there's only so much you can do in New Mexico on a Sunday, since most things are closed on Sundays, in keeping with it being Spain. It turns out in Santa Fe, most things are also closed on Mondays. And after 6 p.m. We saw an ad for a place in Santa Fe called "Late Night Burger," but then realized it closes at 11 p.m. More like "Slightly Past the Bedtime of a Small Child Burger."
But even despite the rigorous respect being paid to the Lord's Holy Day left and right, we found plenty of fun to have by simply wandering around in the middle of Albuquerque. And this is how I came to know, within an hour of two of landing, that I would love Albuquerque forever. As we were walking by a bunch of condemned motels, these two guys--one classically homeless-looking, the other just random old-looking--started calling very plaintively to us. We figured they were just going to ask for money or something, but then we realized they were distraught about a bird in a trash can, and pleaded with us: "You've got to get him out of there... or he'll DIE!" They conducted us to a big blue dumpster, and I saw that there was a pigeon hanging around on a pile of trash at the bottom. "Oh, God, you have to get him out of there!" So I leaned over the edge and reached in. I worried about looking like the kind of snob who has issues with touching pigeons with his bare hands, but I tried to devise a way to lift out the trash the pigeon was sitting on, and then deposit him safely on the ground. But just as I had nearly gotten the pile of trash to the top, the pigeon wobbled off and tumbled deeper into the dumpster, which caused our new friends to wail aloud with dismay. So, I set my waist against the rim of the dumpster, and teetered over, thinking for a moment that this might just be an ingenious trap, and that maybe they would just grab my wallet (for what limited good that thing could do anyone), push me over into the trash, and run away, cackling into the desert. But, no, they just stood by wondering aloud about the tragic pigeon's fate, and I eventually gave up on finding a way to scoop out the pigeon with trash, and just picked up with one hand and dropped it out on the milk crate I'd used as a stepstool. The guys were very happy, but still wondered if the bird would be okay, it seemed like maybe his wing was hurt. I argued that he probably had a better chance outside the dumpster than inside, which seemed to comfort them somewhat. They thanked us and Eric and I resumed our stroll, while they stayed behind to monitor the pigeon's progress.
Well, that's probably enough for this installment. Stay tuned for the next installment, which will be printed on the backpage of the Lady's Millet and Barley Catalog of next Spring.