Hallelujah

Lately I've been all worried and troubled and shit which has put a real damper on my ability to think. My coworker and I decided our inner lives were dying. I would have writer's block, but I'm pretty sure you have to actually be a writer for that. I just have block.

So last night, while I was lying in bed, I was praying that some kind of inspiration would strike me and, even better, that the heavens would send me some kind of sign that everything is going to be okay. Some kind of green sprout in my soul, or fairy lights.

I was hoping for something to write about. Or at least freaking think about.

And then, a miracle happened.

This morning I rolled out of bed and plodded into the bathroom. Warily, I looked up into the toothpaste flecked mirror and what did I see?

There, pasted into my eyebrow, was an enormous green booger.

That's right. A squishy ball of snot. It might have been mine, it might have been Dan's... The mechanics of its fated arrival two inches above my eye hardly bear thinking about. Especially if it's not even mine. Although I guess it sort of belongs to me now.

The point is, it was serendipity.

Because now, I've posted something. And I know there will always be something to post. Hallelujah.

When did summer get so damn short?

I haven't written anything in, like, two weeks which just goes to show how much discipline I have. I was out of town for work but mostly just kind of lost in space, too.

Does that ever happen to you? It just turned cold and windy here, and dark too, and I think some of that fog seeps into everyone, and then you get the vapors. That's what they used to call depression -- having the vapors. I think it rings more true than "depression," although it must mean something that both those words have something to do with bad weather.

According to the Free Dictionary, the archaic meaning of "vapors" is "something insubstantial, worthless, or fleeting," or "a fantastic or foolish idea" --and I think that that's fucking beautiful and exactly how I feel about summer when it's disappearing. The whole rush of sap to the leaves and the whole glutting your sorrow on the "rainbow of the salt sand-wave" thing feels like it had just started again, and now its over. It's especially noticeable in this town, where as soon as its October everyone stops grinning and slows way down and hunches into themselves and lets their summer dreaming evaporate.

The other day I was leaving work and as I crossed onto the central square next to the cathedral there were these two mimes standing on wine crates up ahead. A tiny man and a tiny woman. It was a faded out day, gray and pale. He was dressed as a silver sailor and she was a silver 19th century whore, and they had painted their hair and hats and faces silver too. And facing them, there were these two old Tibetan monks in wheelchairs, their golden robes fluttering at the edges in the wind. The monks sat slumped in their silver framed chairs, smiling beatifically into the middle distance just past mimes' faces. I made sure I left before anyone moved.

I was in Lebanon last week. I'd never been.

From above, the city of Beirut looks like a hot stone bowl that has melted into the sea on one side. The traffic is chaos, and fast. The honking comes in triplets on the small streets, one car after another, and on the highways it's constant. Not rude, but a matter of courtesy: I am coming quickly from behind, and we all just want to get where we're going, so make way.

At one point I was in a taxi, tearing down a one lane curved canyon road, no barriers, going 130 km per hour. We flew past a speed limit sign that read 30. I looked at the cab driver with a raised eyebrow and he actually took his hands off the wheel to shrug -- that crazy motherfucker -- and tell me that in Lebanon, the street signs and the painted lanes are "just a picture."

He told me I could never drive in Lebanon, because I would die. "If you follow the rules -- blink left, turn, blink right, turn, slow down for red lights, pass on the right [sic] then you will be die in five minutes. No shit," he said. "I am only safe if I am the fastest."

Now we were on the main road that runs from the northern suburbs into the city, weaving like a missile between old Mercedes and naked-looking old minivans, racing fast BMWs and at one point, briefly, a bright yellow Ferrari. Marwan rarely took his hand off the horn.

"You are still late?" he asked, as we came level with the sea. "What is the time?" He pointed across the bay. "Voom! I drive this way." He swerved hard towards the water, into the lane on our right, and then jerked the wheel back. Hahaha! A chorus of honks erupted all around. Hahaha.

But I wasn't afraid and I hoped we wouldn't get there soon.

Anyway, so this year I've decided to fuck assuming the winter position and growing slowly slow and sad and instead I'm just going to stay happy for ever and ever until I blow up in a supernova of joy next spring. Which pretty much makes me an A1 goober, but one the other hand, you're a total asshole for pointing that out.

P.S. The picture of the balloon man is from here.
P.P.S. The Go Speed picture is from here, although not originally, I don't think.

Thundernuts the Sea Cucumber

The same number of people who watch that show will read this blog, which is fair enough because just look at the size of this entry

Today was a long freaking day. At the end of it, on the tram home, I sat behind a woman who looked like an adorable button but who probably has tuberculosis because she was hacking and wheezing the whole way. It is arguably possible that she just has a cold, but I think at the very least it was swine flu, because this is the type of thing that happens to big-eyed old ladies with crinkly smiley faces just when you least suspect it. When the old lady coughed, the lacy thing that held her bun up vibrated, and she hunched her little button shoulders over and made tiny button fists with her hands.

I was fairly sad that she had consumption and I hoped that she had a husband and a daughter or a son to take care of her, but then I figured that probably her husband was already dead and her stupid ungrateful kids never write unless they're mailing her brochures for retirement homes that look like Santa's workshop in the pictures but where really they beat old people and make them thread tiny needles all day long in a poorly-lit room. I might be confusing retirement homes with sweatshops. Either way the old lady is pretty much screwed, because she has the wasting disease. (I'm not going to lie, I just looked that up. Did you know that tuberculosis is also called the King's Evil? Fact.)

So anyway, after my incredibly exhausting day of being a normal professional grown up, all I wanted to do once I got home was sit down and chill out. So I threw my keys and my bag on the couch, and kissed Daniel hello, and then I fell to my knees and slowly keeled over, and then my body melted into a thin soup and I seeped into the cracks in the parquet. That's what it felt like I should do. Actually, Daniel handed me a glass of wine and I curled up next to him to watch TV. Even though going to the gym and working on my novel (I don't have a novel) would have been more righteous, I was digging the wine and the couch. And the TV.

Only, you know what was on TV? C.S.I. . If you've never seen C.S.I., even by accident, then either you have a really fancy cable package or you actually spend your evenings stretching and reciting poetry. Since no one will ever read this, it's probably important for me to explain that C.S.I stands for crime scene investigation (I'm pretty sure), which is a terrible title, but then they just turned it into a snazzy acronym, which adds some zip but is confusing, because it could stand for just about anything. Crackheads snore ickily. Anyway, I shit you not, this episode was about some guy who hung himself at a ritzy rehab clinic with a rope that some depressed brat had knit together out of dental floss because she was raped and on heroin and was planning to hang herself. Also, in the end it turned out someone else killed the guy because he was beautiful but gay, and the killer just set it up to look like a dental floss suicide. No, seriously.

Then on another channel was a detective show that is about people who are raped and then murdered under extra fucked up circumstances, because normal murder is so yesterday. So then Dan and I skipped to a kids' channel which had some show about how to make super fun rabbit faces out of cream cheese toast and raisins. Then we found some movie that was just starting.

Which turned out to be about a group of Russian prostitutes that thought they were selling out to become strippers in a foreign land, only it turned out that actually their pimp stole their passports and then sold the women to a bunch of fat, ugly old men. It's on right now. It's twenty minutes in and I just watched a scene where one of the girls has to pee but now she's locked in a room, so she's banging on the door screaming, and then her new fat ugly owner opens the door and says, "You pee, then we have sex?" and she screams "Sex no!" and there are tears running down her face, and then he screams: "NO SEX, NO BATHROOM!" and slams the door in her face and locks it, and she sobs and sobs and, finally, pees in her pants.

I don't want to harp on this, but for real. What is wrong with television? I don't actually want to tell you what I do for work in case one day an actual living person reads this, but basically I get to hear about fairly depressing things all day long that make you want to save the world with an enormous silvery-white sword of awesome righteousness, and kill all the bad guys, but you can't because we don't live in that world. Instead we live in the movie where mostly the bad guys win most of the time, and all of the people that are totally cheering for the good guys have to savor a couple of rare victories that are sweet but relatively short-lived, like a tic tac.

Given all of the perfectly fucked up shit that goes down worldwide on an hourly basis, you'd think that most people, like me, would want to go home and watch well-crafted dramas about unicorns and dinosaurs and ancient Amazonian tribes that probably even still exist somewhere. TV could be so fabulous. Entertainment would consist of hour after hour of cute furry animals engaged in witty conversation. Sometimes, when that's too much, there would be a channel where you could watch a koala bear suck on a cheerio until it turns to mush. Thrillers would be whimsical beetle adventures. (I just realized that this is basically what children's tv is like, only clearly is really isn't most of the time, because the only children's show I found was about making a frightening bunny face out of cream cheese and raisins and celery, which probably tastes like cream cheese with raisins and celery. Gross.)

Anyway, in my happy universe, shows wouldn't skim their feel-good factor off of my hopelessly middle class superiority complex which is based solely on the fact that I don't know anyone as fucked up as the guy who was murdered in a fake dental floss suicide.

But obviously, no one else wants to watch Mongolian tea rituals and pygmy shadow puppet dramas about horned lizards. Which, to conclude, is what all the wine is about.

P.S. This blatantly cribbed photo comes from this site