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Saturday, July 4th, 2009
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5:28 pm - the native americans called it maze
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we went to the goodwill outlets yesterday, where they send all the shit that nobody wants to buy and then sell it by the pound. for $5.86, i got:
* three or four t-shirts
* a navy pinstriped suit-vest
* a mod necktie from the '60s
* a pendleton flannel that they are selling copies of at urban outfitters right now for like $50
* a pair of flats from payless (i still call it volume, oops) that i used to have years ago and loved but that disintegrated in like a month because they are from payless
* a red three-ring binder that says NEBRASKA on the cover
* and these glasses. which i actually think i stole because the sign said they were $1.99 and there's no way i paid under four bucks for everything else. get used to them because i am wearing them every day until i die.
we're having a giant blow-out independence extravaganza at the house right now but i'm feeling like a 'mudgeon and have been hiding in my room, drawing a mechanical dragon. i went down there earlier and made a pizza for the wood-fired pizza oven outside, though. and it was awesome. i love the fucking mansion so much.
someone has been trying to pick out "you're a grand old flag" on the piano for the last 20 minutes.
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| Wednesday, July 1st, 2009
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2:25 am - remember your spirit
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i don't understand twitter. is it a game of skill? why are we going back in time with blogging? it's like a rusty old upside-down jenny biplane. it's the CD longbox of social networking. hey, maybe i'll start living on rats and pigeons and move into a goddamn chinatown dumpster, just to see if i can do it.
you don't care, but i will tell you openly that i spent all day on a project from american airlines, wherein they wanted a transcript of one of those teaser montages they show on the flight, where it's a bunch of little slices from different shows. hi, i'm nouriel roubini; next up, a complete episode of "the office." displaying their wares. so i just watched triumph the insult comic all day and made the subtitles for money.
well, that was the highlight. it was mostly jimmy fallon. professional not-funnyman.
although jennifer aniston was on there, to show fallon how to do her invention of grapefruit bowling, and i really like her. clever girl. she can crack me up without saying a word.
when i finished, they sent me another one, most of which was a bravo documentary about "the oprah effect." if you own a small boutique bakery that puts its cakes in slick little pink-and-green boxes from france and was already worth millions and then oprah decides she likes your key lime bundt cake and plugs it on her show, you can become even richer!
beats the hell out of transcribing focus groups for ball park franks.
oh, yeah, and graham and i went to the grocery outlet, which no one else in the house will still go to, and both bought sugar cookie dough to not cook and instead to just eat. uncookies. and i found this massive anvil-box that contained two and a half pounds of "everything" lo mein, featuring pork, chicken, beef, and shrimp. all of the animals. all four of the world's animals. i bought it. five bucks. it has peapod animals too.
the checkout boy was wearing a plastic uncle sam vest that was kind of like a dickie, like it was just an elastic strap around the back. it was an uncle sam lobster bib. i felt bad for him, because wearing it was one of his job duties, but he was kind of rocking it. he wasn't allowing me to at all. i did not have his permission to pity him.
on our way there/back, the moon was out at like 7pm, because we live in the fricking north pole, and we decided that "daytime moon" is our term for when someone shows up at your party and you're like, not exactly unhappy to see him, but it's like. what are you doing here.
speaking of those, we're having a big-booty 4th of july party and i'm kind of dreading it. i've been working so much (BUT YOU WOULDN'T KNOW IT FROM MY CHECKING BALANCE) that i just kind of want a quiet, no-work weekend before i smother myself to death with the garbage-stank blanket of summertime brooklyn for three weeks. where i can lay in the grass and look at the ocean and everybody in it and drink a pomegranate smirnoff ice that i scavenged from the fridge and then drank exclusively because it didn't have a "don't eat or drink this" sticker on it.
plus i hate america.
by the way:
just saying.
current mood: aquarius
current music: psych furs
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| Saturday, June 27th, 2009
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1:21 pm - some things
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In a 2003 documentary, Living with Michael Jackson, the singer revealed to journalist Martin Bashir that Bubbles had become overly aggressive. He was removed to an animal sanctuary over fears he may attack Jackson's newborn son, Prince Michael II. In December 2003, it was reported that Bubbles had tried to commit suicide. The chimp was taken to a hospital in time to be saved.
Born Kattie B. Screws in Barbour County, Alabama, she was the daughter of Martha Mattie Upshaw and Prince Albert Screws. Katherine's father later changed his surname to "Scruse", and her surname was changed to Katherine Esther Scruse when she was four.
In early 2009 it was reported that Michael Jackson arranged to give Paul McCartney the rights to the Beatles catalog through his will. A Jackson insider was quoted as saying, "Michael told his lawyers he was sad he no longer talks to Sir Paul and said he wanted to make things right."
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| Friday, June 26th, 2009
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2:11 am - jeff goldblum's not dead
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i can't stop thinking about those poor fuckin' kids.
what if your dad was michael jackson. what if your dad looked and acted and talked like michael jackson. and you grew up submerged in the roiling insanity soup that surrounds him. and all of the people in the world made fun of him the way they make fun of michael jackson. and he was a child molester, like michael jackson is. and he was a goddamn genius, like michael jackson is.
what if he raised you from a kitten and he was the only parent you'd ever known, and then what if he suddenly died.
what if the world behaved the way they are behaving right now when your dad died.
my dad is a bus driver. he has a beard and likes '60s rock 'n' roll and doesn't talk much about his emotions.
congratulations to prince michael, paris katherine, and "blanket." take off your butterfly masks. you are free.
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| Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009
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1:54 am - i'm all alone, i'm rolling a big doughnut, and this snake wearing a vest . . .
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here's the submission to the 48-hour film project that celene and beau (and most of the mansionmates and some select betas who don't live here, but largely celene and beau) made over the weekend. the category they were given was "fantasy."
Not Forgotten from Beau Gunderson on Vimeo.
starring celene, beau, hank the golden retriever, stephani the jackalope, kindra the unicorn, elizabeth the puppeteer, someone i don't know the cobra, my legs, and ross's legs. and my panda mask and drawings. and the mansion.
they did that in two days. wrote, cast, shot, edited, whatever elsed that is involved in making a short film.
really, really impressed.
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| Friday, June 19th, 2009
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1:39 pm - the mansion helped
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| Thursday, June 18th, 2009
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6:25 pm - punctuation exists for a reason
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today, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) duckierose links to splish.com, which has many covetworthy swimsuits, including an aquagirl suit (!!!!!) and a japanese woodcut tsunami suit, both of which i will probably end up buying because i'm too tall for my canadian flag suit, let's just be honest.
this one, however, really needs a comma:
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| Wednesday, June 17th, 2009
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12:43 am - we never sleep
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i caught my dad's bus in the tunnel yesterday, like i did all the time when i was a kitten. keyuuuute. shoved past all the straphangers without paying, a little metro princess. the paris hilton of the bus. someday, all of the #41 will be mine.
deddy drove us all the way up to north base and i got to wander through the echoey old bus barn and hang out in the metrolounge with the pool tables and all the fat old bus drivers sitting around. chilling. i totally want to film a music video there.
then we went up to mukilteo, where mom had steaks on the grill and woodpeckers hanging off the side of the house and hummingbirds zooming in our ears and inside our branes. i thought we had animals at my house, man. i try and try to get used to that joint, but it's still all cardboardy and will always look like a motel 6 to me. because they live in mukilteo now and it has one, my mother has festooned everything with lighthouses. lighthouse shower curtain. lighthouse carved wooden wall-hanging. painted aluminum lighthouse statuette knickknack thing from the hallmark store that sits in the front picture window and ruins everything. lighthouse = her new personality.
they don't look anything like mukilteo's lighthouse--it's just a white clapboard mini-house with a bigass spotlight for a face. these ones are big new-english stripey kaleidoscope ones. you wish, lady.
while we ate, my mom never stopped talking about the cats and the funny things one of them did one time.
then my dad was all like, hey, megan, i found these VIETNAM WAR MILITARY HELMETS AT A GARAGE SALE, WANT THEM. ???????? giant grin. i strongly superdoubt they came from anywhere except the army/navy surplus store, the paint's totally perfect, but i like how dad jazzed that up for me. "hmmm, i don't want these . . . but she won't want them if they don't have history on them. i know! i'll lie."
they look fantastic on graham. like, he's so skinny, he looks like he could use all the armor he can get.
by the way, if you're not sure whether you should accept your mom's facebook friend request, you should go check out the comment that my mom left on my wall this morning.
lately, ross and steph and i have been pissing our pants over our organized "manor house" viewings in the theater. if you watch something in the theater, it is called a viewing. sometimes a screening.
"manor house," dontchew know, is one of those draconian reality shows on PBS where they trap a bunch of people somewhere old-timey and dress them up in old-timey clothes and then make them eat the shitty food and work 16-hour days with no pay. it's educational! this one is 1906, a mansion in the english countryside, edwardian standards, and most of the teenaged cast members are servants, working night and day to wipe the asses of a rich-in-real-life british family, now with top hats. as they slowly go fucking crackers and start to believe that they're really lords and ladies. whenever the foldy old scottish butler talks, we lose our FRICKING MINDS
i suggested that we film a version at our manor house: the year is 1985 or whenever this hideous place was built, and we have to wear dress up like patrick bateman and live on quiche and cocaine and california pizza kitchen.
then i went to zillow.com to check on the actual year and found out some curious fax about the property. i knew it was originally a 4-bedroom from the '50s and james supercuts just stacked two or three extra houses next to/on top of it, but the update happened in 1994. not the eighties. if you've ever seen this place, it's like. you thought this don johnson shit was cool in the nineties? this was built at the end of the grunge era? in seattle, washington?
i also love that the site describes the house as "Northern Italian Villa meets contemporary sensibility." and by contemporary, we mean "outdated."
my new nightcap has been sitting in the hot tub and drinking for several hours every single night, and it's starting to fuck my shit up. fuck up my shit. it's starting to split my infinitives. i'm still somewhat green when it comes to booze and have been suckling at the teat of the upstairs bar, which has a shitload of bacardi that no one else is drinking, but it's consistently been making me pretty majorly nauseated. and yet, i cheerfully continue!
i really, literally did not add it up until tonight, when i was supposed to meet ross in the tub and he wasn't there and i was getting ready for bed and, wala, didn't feel like puking.
like, it was to the point where i was sure i had some exotic food allergy and was thinking of going to a doctor. paying a doctor american cash dollars to tell me to stop drinking cheap rum.
i'm working on a pianocover of that stupid usher song "yeah" that just goes, "yeah, yeah, yeah . . . yeah . . . yeah. yeah." mostly because i love the balls off of it when li'l jon calls him "ursher." well, more because it's annoying and won't turn off. but i do like that ursher thing. heeeee hee.
also: why is your name usher. why did someone have a baby and decide to name it after an usher.
salmon is impromptuly coming to the sea next week to kiss me. just because he likes me. what do you think of that?
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| Tuesday, June 9th, 2009
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1:07 am - i need a fucking job
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| Monday, June 8th, 2009
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4:35 pm - at least he gave us our eyes back
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so our fridge wasn't big enough for eight people, so we got another one. half of us were assigned to each fridge.
soon after, beige fridge left a note on our fridge that said "SILVER FRIDGE SUCKS" or somesuch.
so someone from silverfridge defaced beigefridge's poster of the centerfold from the last issue of cat fancy and made it into a hitler cat.
the threatening notes persisted from beigefridge, and a drawing of "fridge-asaurus" appeared to assist nazi cat in his evildoing.
as a security measure, graham made our fridge into fridgezilla.
ross replaced its eyes with black Xes and a speech balloon with some ellipses in it.
i turned its frown upside down, made the dots into exclamation points, and made the Xes into just black rectangles. kind of like exclamation point eyes. then graham kidnapped the beigefidge's cat poster and left a polaroid of it, along with a ransom note and its severed paper paw.
ross retailiated by cutting out all the cat pictures from the cat fancy, giving them all hitler mustaches, and taping them all over the outside and inside of the silver fridge. a nazi invasion.
(speech balloon: "Return our brother to us. We shall never be defeated. Our resolve is stronger, our way is set. Heed us or despair, this is only the beginning!")
so at 3am on saturday night, graham and i dragged the beige fridge out on the patio and did this.
team beigefridge is contemplating its response.
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| Friday, June 5th, 2009
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4:48 pm - damsels and dames
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not set in stone yet, but salmon and i were just researching roadside attractions that fall on our hypothetical route from new york to seattle, and some of them are awesome, so i am writing them down here.
* hindenburg crash site, lakehurst, new jersey
* jolly green giant, blue earth, minnesota
* the last happy chef restaurant with a statue, mankato, minnesota
* chicago, illinois, generally
* mt. rushmore, south dakota, naturally
* the cosmos mystery area and presidential wax museum, both near rapid city, south dakota
* i am tempted sorely by flintstones bedrock city, in nearby custer, south dakota, but it might be funnier on paper than it is to actually pay nine bucks and hang out there
* wall drug, wall, south dakota
* wherever those dinosaur skeletons are, south dakota
* yellowstone is a detour but would be fun, wyoming
* the ghost town of garnet, montana
* the gigantronic continental divide sign near butte, montana (i never really knew what that meant until i looked it up just now)
* helena, montana, generally
* coeur d'alene, idaho, generally
* i don't think it's conveniently located, but i've always wanted to see the drumheller channeled scablands park in eastern washington
* the denny's where my brother is a line cook and his girlfriend is a waitress, east wenatchee, washington
* maybe snoqualmie falls again because it's nice, fall city, washington
* hat 'n' boots, seattle, washington
lots of tolls between the east coast and chicago, and then they disappear. that shit is so weird. suppose they can't really rock that in cities where there's no real mass transit alternative to driving.
we're also thinking of starting in boston, since we've been meaning to go anyway, birthday do-overs, and then taking I-90 straight across. i'd have to swap niagara falls for the hindenburg site, i guess, and it's a little longer that way, but so much simpler.
trying not to get too excited.
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| Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009
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4:52 pm - i was a landscape in your dream
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graham was playing the sunlandic twins earlier and holy shit, i forgot all about that album. it's so nice. i think of montreal is the only band that david deadflowers and i both ever liked.
i've been doing a spooky weirdo thing lately of working until 8 in the morning and the sleeping until 5pm. my dad does this too, to a degree. he always drove the night buses and got home at 2am and you could hear CNN blaring downstairs if you woke up in the night. and then find him asleep on the couch in his metro uniform-sweater in the morning. anyway, salmon knocked me out of it with a sweet tell-o-phone call around noon yesterday, and then sopwith wanted to hang out soon after, so i hauled my fat ass out of bed and he came over and we did.
afterward, we took a walk around the green lake, in the 70-degree late evening, since we're in the goddamn arctic circle up here and it doesn't get dark until forever. i broke a sweat. we found 37 canada geese pecking at the grass at one point, which i knew because i counted them. they look like siamese geese and made me miss bee.
i pretty much always miss bee. i never talk about it because what are you going to do about it, but i miss that motherfucking cat all day every day. poor baby bee. that shouldn't have happened.
then we went back to sopwith's house to find that he'd been crockpotting a pork shoulder all day, which he then transmogrified into pulled pork by breaking it up with a whisk. before my very eyes! i never knew that's how you did that. then he fed it to me and his roommate on grilled onion buns with homemade barbecue sauce, "north carolina-style." what a remarkable young man.
later, at the rickshaw, roommate jen had a karaoke party with an international convention of swing dancers. which she is. one of. it was brutally fucking vacuum-packed in there; i only sang once ("under pressure," by myself, no one would be my freddie mercury and make the alien noises for me) in three hours. we closed the place down, whereupon the whole group followed us back to the mansh, where they danced in the upstairs party room for hours. that old piano guy with the john waters mustache and the seersucker jacket was there, and he was playing, and i tried to watch him and memorize what he was doing with his left hand. i asked him some questions about it and he was pretty unfriendly, like yeeeeeah, i'm not giving you a free lesson.
i gave up and lay in the light-up plastic chair, swirling from rum poured liberally into my pepsi can. a tattooed boy in a striped linen shirt with folded-up sleeves brought his trumpet and played it and then talked to me about jazz for hours, which i wasn't really in a state to be doing. it was his 35th birthday. when john waters fucked off, a freckle-faced boy from oahu sat down at the piano and stumbled through "linus & lucy" in a strange key, and i put his big hands on my little hands and taught him the middle part.
(i told salmon about this later, and he called my rum & pepsi a "rumpy pumpy" and then i called it a "romping puppy," and that's what that drink is called now. at last, my signature masnion drink. so much for the dutch doll.)
later, around 5am, as the ocean sky was starting to get pink like a light-up chair, i was sitting at the kitchen table checking my e-mails, when a lovely blonde australian boy sat down with me and was fucking stoked when he told me he lived in melbourne and i knew where that was. "i should just learn to say, 'melbourne, australia,' because americans never know!" i credited the geography bee and added that i wasn't surprised, as most americans don't even know the canadian provinces. as i found out. he told me several times that he wasn't leaving until friday and i should come to this swing dance party tomorrow and "we'll do some more chatting." all because i knew some cities in australia. so happy.
on the way out, in the morning light, one of the dancing girls backed her car into one of our big stone urn-planters in the driveway, which fell over and cracked open like humpty dumpty, with all its dirt-entrails spilled everywhere. which has been begging to happen since we moved in. (turns out they have secret sprinklers inside! who knew.) the girl was mortified and said she'd pay for it and it's all fine, a not-drunk total accident. i'd be happy if we broke them all, honestly. eyesores. sprinkling eyesores.
got to bed at 6. so much for fixing my schedule. i am, as always, yours, the bus driver's daughter.
current mood: cats and dogs
current music: ross and jen making balloon animals on the lawn
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| Sunday, May 31st, 2009
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2:02 am - hello, dad, i'm in jail
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so i talk about "liquid television" on here sometimes. trying not to overgush, but as iterated, it kind of changed my little 11-year-old life and smashed my skull open and stuff. and is enduringly my all-time favorite TV show i've ever laid eyes on--just for, like, the risks they were willing to take. a constant point of reference for me, whichever weird little snippet i saw during my formative years that just happened to come in handy to apply to life as an adult.
it was on really late on a weeknight, i remember, at like at 10 or 11, so i had to be sneaky about it. i knew a few other kids who watched it, older kids, and i know now that it was popular--it was MTV for godsake--but you don't hear a lot of people talking about it these days, so i still kind of guard it jealousy, as my own. and i get all pavlovian about that spooky fucking mark mothersbaugh intro music.
over the ages, i've been able to track down both of the now-out-of-print VHS tapes, but they've got all the stupidest ones on there--"winter steele" and "dr. zum" and "stick figure theater" and shit. i bought them anyway, though. ("dog-boy" was on there, which i now know but didn't know then was by storied local charles burns. whom i would become aware of a few years later, during the OK soda campaign. retardedly. "dog-boy" was cool.)
anyways, annually or so, i check the youtubes for a particular short, which i just finally found, right now, and oh, my god. i think i've been looking for it for about five years. i've described it to so many people--crude, early CGI, and a snake is talking to an egg, and there's creepy minor-key piano music?--but no one ever knew it. it scared the holy shit out of me when as a kid, i don't know why. still occasionally shows up in my dreams, or my dreams plagiarize it, or something.
what i didn't know at age 11 is that the music, obvs, is depeche mode. kind of a decrescendo. kind of changes everything. kind of a stupid thing to have nightmares about, turns out. funny, how childbrains synthesize things into being scary, though. i remember sitting in rapt attention in my little grungegirl bedroom with the stolen "no eating/drinking/loud music" bus sign, and my pure silver preteen heart just aching for that goddamn crying egg.
there was also a certain "aeon flux" installment that would probably be much easier to find and that impacted me in the way that this short did, where the teutonic chick with the really long ponytail is mowing down corpses on a hillside. i bet it would withstand the test of time, though. unlike this. i'm kind of afraid to look now.
oh, man, there's so many. i want to find them and swallow them and subside on them forever.
current music: jub jub jub
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| Thursday, May 28th, 2009
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5:48 pm - i just love knowing things
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i'm internetting at bauhaus for the specific purpose of getting a coke in a giant glass bottle, after graham came up to me last night and was like, "look, i'm saving money in this bottle so i can buy a scooter! i have to break it to get it out!" we weren't in collusion or anything. great minds think a lot.
so yeah, we're gonna start a vespa gang. godspeed, little coke bottle. i mean "giant coke bottle."
still thinking a lot about the war and history and the personal reward i get out of learning about it and all the stuff i still don't know. i'm tempted to do a kate beatonna-type comic, except maybe more, uh, accurate? coco butters is an animator and i wrote a script for him once about poor inbred charles II of spain, el hechizado, but he never started on it. coco's a big brad neely fan and had that style in mind, which doesn't actually seem impossible to do without him. since it's not, you know, actually animated. or i could just do it myself as a graphic novel. i know that's been done, but not by me.
contemplating getting a history degree again, but what the fuck would i do with it. make comics. basically. i don't want to write books or teach. i just want to know about stuff and like it. and draw pictures and host trivia shows. it's either not a wise investment, or . . . it is.
speaking of degrees, ryan love has been at the house lately with his shiny boston conservatory piano degree, practicing a cabaret act with celene, and i start salivating when he starts playing. yes. that. i would like one of them. so fucking jealous.
sure, he probably owes 60,000 dollars, but at least he has something to show for it. it's better than staying afraid and doing nothing. i'm already in debt. what's a little more.
i ordered denslow's picture book treasury used off the internet for a dollar sixty-five and it arrived a few days ago and is fucking beautiful, but i've been working so much that i haven't drawn anything with the inspiration. the edition looks like it's from the '60s, and the jacket is missing and the orange cover is all stained and the binding is all crackly, and then you open it and blamm, it's all stunning full-color oblivion inside. i love the thick lines--they make me think of stained glass.
i don't know what kind of paints he used or what the best modern approximation would be, but i should just cross that bridge when i come to it.
that guy took his proceeds from the oz books, bought an island off of bermuda, and crowned himself denslow I. by the way.
spent the day in the city in stripey tee and a little white lace skirt, shuffling around PIKE'S MARKET with a humbow in hand, smelling flowers and listening to streetmusic. and getting the back of my neck all lobstered up in the sunshine. almost bought an old yukon territory license plate and a tan necktie with little brown embroidered cows on it at the little rummage booth but then didn't.
i got a tiny check yesterday and so stopped by urban outfitters to look for new underpants, and they had jockey briefs for girls, on clearance. like, Y-front boyjockeys, but with a flat front and wider hips and a nippier waist, so they're not all baggysaggy. i bought them, of course. they're like a boy costume for girls. a miracle.
vespa. drawing. historycomix. piano.
the queen mum had a little desk-placard that said: "do it. now."
current mood: pink
current music: clothilde
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| Wednesday, May 27th, 2009
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6:12 pm - perhaps you knew this
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salmon: You should Yelp the Holocaust
me: haw
me: "i am never, ever coming back to buchenwald."
salmon: exactly. bad service! bad food! cold!
me: they don't take visa
me: yeah, editing this book is kind of fucking my life up forever
me: anne frank's sister margot died when she contracted typhus and, in her weakened state, FELL OUT OF HER BUNK AND SMASHED HER HEAD OPEN
so i finally finished the holocaust book and UPSed it off to yeshiva today and can now stop bothering you about it. after this entry. i seriously feel as though i just completed a bachelor's in holocaust studies, both from the quantity of stuff i know now and didn't before and also because i'm fucking exhausted and feel like i worked on it for my entire life (and not a week). some other factoids that i learned include:
* a year after the end of the war, which was spent in hiding from the british, auschwitz first commander rudolf höss' wife turned him in, fearing their son would be shipped off to russia.
* SS doctor hans münch had been plucked from the bavarian countryside and found the nazis' practices abhorrent. while stationed at auschwitz, he refused to take part in the selection processes and would pretend to conduct experiments on prisoners so that they wouldn't get gassed. and gave one of them a revolver to assist his escape. he was the only person acquitted in the 1947 auschwitz trials.
* miep gies, who, along with her husband, hid the frank family from the nazis in the achterhuis, is still alive. aged 100 and in good health.
it's like 65 or 70 out there, so i walked down to oaktree village to the UPS store to send the book back to new york where it belongs, and afterward, i stopped by the ghetto uwajimaya? in the old larry's market building? it's not as bad as everyone says. certainly can't hold a candle to uwajimaya, and yeah, everything's on pallets, but whocares. i got a bunch of canned melon milk tea and "hello boss" iced coffee for cheep, along with a double pack of champagne mangoes for two bucks. and i bet they have soup dumplings but i forgot to check. the place definitely has its uses.
it didn't smell very good, as reported, but i didn't see any rats or anything rotten. so. yeah. buck up, folks.
it's another glory-day today and all the flowers are out, and i walked through the residential area of broadview/greenwood/licton springs/whatever and saw them. tulip trees and irises and california poppies and scotch broom and violets and honeysuckle and this one tree that kind of looks like yellow wisteria. the blackberries are starting to bloom at last. there are bumblebees everywhere. i like those guys.
on the way back home, i cut through evergreen-washelli, which i had never set foot in before in all my years of seattle-living. and went poking around looking at names and felt like a big fucking creepshow. salmon called me while i was there and told me i was a goth. (i still can't pass a cemetery without thinking of cryptie.) there were a lot of stones with mason symbols on them, which added to the creepster factor. i went around picking up flower pots that had been upset, most of which were old cranberry juice jugs and classico pasta sauce jars. classy.
then i got to the northern gate and found that i couldn't get out through that way and was trapped, so i had to walk alllll the way back to the main aurora entrance and spend an extra 20 minutes being spooky. that place is vast and contains multitudes. i checked out the mausoleum or whatever you call the wall of people. saw an older dude from afar who was kneeling next to a grave and felt like kind of a shithead for loitering, with no official business.
being in there kind of did that retarded thing to my brain that cemeteries do, where you start thinking about birth and death and marriage and children and leaving a legacy and what does it all Mean, Man. then i thought of my sister's kids and how much they like pokemon and snapped out of it. what's the point of having kids if they're going to like stupid shit.
while i was walking up aurora to 125th, a prostitute asked me for a cigarette and that was exciting. daylight prostitute. she was black and fairly pretty and much younger than me. i'm too old to be a prostitute.
wow.
speaking of bees (wasps!), two of my roommates have fake vespas and i desperately want to join the club. the hill up to greenwood avenue is too steep for my two-speed, 50-pound, 50-year-old redbike to handle. or for my thighs to handle, that is. so a scooter would be a lovely and awesome solution. i don't have a driver's license and don't care to get one, so i'd have to aim for something under 50CCs, i guess? anyone know about this sort of thing? hot tips? brands to avoid?
current mood: sweaty
current music: toadies?
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(12 comments | comment on this)
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| Monday, May 25th, 2009
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11:23 pm - bless that blackbird, for letting you see him
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this holocaust book i'm editing is a serious bummer. yeah! no kidding! i'm learning a lot of little items i didn't know, both about the war and about judaism. about half of this thing comprises torah and talmud passages, which is something i've never had reason or occasion to study, and i don't know. it's about god and stuff, but it doesn't have the black mark of christianity on it, so i'm finding it interesting. i feel weird about saying that, like i'm one of those white guys who's super into japanese shit.
foolishly, i never realized until this week that not only did nazis invade poland, but they killed poles regardless of religion. just ethnic poles. i didn't really get that part. last year, my grandmother gave me a document about her grandparents, who had emigrated from prussia. she's always said they were german, and her mother was german and danish, and i know she identifies as german, and so i grew up understanding that we were the enemy. so hey, that's fucked up.
but it turns out the prussia factor complicates things a little--grandfather was indeed born in berlin, but grandmother's maiden name was rybikowska and was born in filehne, now known as wielen, since that area of prussia was returned to poland post-hohenzollern. tricky. they were both prussian, but he was german and she was polish.
anyway. for some dumb, narcissistic reason, i'm even more into WWII, like times triple-quadruple, now that i know that i would have been killed off as well. or an 16th of me would have. sopwith told me last week that i look like a nazi youth, and that means something different as well. now. doesn't it.
that victorian lesbian book is so, so good. i can't stop eating it. it's like ice cream, and i'm hogging through three half-gallons of it at a time before my head starts spinning and i have to take a break. the well of loneliness by radclyffe hall. get it. do it. just when i thought it couldn't get any better, the protagoniste becomes an ambulance driver in WWI! later, she lives in paris, and the descriptions of paris in the springtime, bursting with jonquils and daffodils, reminded me of my own account of seattle upon my return last month.
oh, here:
Mary loved Prunier's in the Rue Duphot, because of its galaxy of sea-monsters. A whole counter there was of incredible creatures--Oursins, black armoured and covered with prickles; Bigornaux, serpent-like Anguilles Fumées; and many other exciting things that Stephen mistrusted for English stomachs. They would sit at their own particular table, one of the tables upstairs by the window, for the manager came very quickly to know them and would smile and bow grandly: 'Bon jour, mesdames.' When they left, the attendant who kept the flower-basket would give Mary a neat little bouquet of roses: 'Au revoir, mesdames. Merci bien--à bientôt!' For everyone had pretty manners at Prunier's.
also, a part where they go on holiday on a spanish island and they live in this grand estate with frescoes and a garden and they just futz around and hike in the sun and eat lunch among the mountains and sin. i lay in the yardgrass, reading, and look up at the roses and the olympics and realize that i live there. i live in a book. minus war.
we have a red rose bush too, i saw today. just rosebuds right now, but you can see the color through the cracks. like blood, very dark. i'm dying to know what color the third one will be. the yellow one seems to have faint pink stripes. sometimes. some of the rose-times.
my hair's really short and i keep touching it.
current mood: sea-monsters!
current music: cockatoo twins
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2:54 pm - some people's children
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i usually avoid SIFF every year, because of the crowds and i know i can see everything later for cheaper, but our landlord co-produced a movie, so beau and ross and i went to the egyptian, my fave, last night to give ups. the immaculate conception of little dizzle, which i knew starred natasha lyonne and the kid from "prison break" and then turned out to be all-seattle and had cameos by everyone we all know. welcome home.
the plot was fine--whatever, corporations conspiring to fuck people, punk rawkers fighting the power, spooky Religious shit, tones of sci-fi--but it was supremely irritating to see that the writer/director considered it to be, like, divinely deep and mindfreaky. the preview was especially telling of this. it wasn't baaaaad--started out eyerolly, got better once we started liking the characters, and there were lots of cute animation and editing tricks that i liked very much--but it was about as mindfreaky as "spongebob squarepants." that, and the script was pretty juno-fied to a degree, most of the lines overwritten in some vernacular or another, with the goal of sounding "real." but no one ever said anything normal or nondescript. got under my fingernails real bad. no one talks like that, writer/director. except you and your smug asshole friends, i guess.
one of the main actors was really inept, too, but the plot could handily be blamed for that.
it was SIFF, so the cast was on-site, and most irritating of all was our friend the writer/director, who acted like a total mongrel before and after the show. "hey, i just want to give a shout-out to my man, holden, up in the booth? cos truth be told, i fucking hate the egyptian because the sound system fucking SUCKS, but he worked all day to get it sounding, you know, as good as it possibly can! so thanks, man."
afterward, he got up and took a shot at SIFF for asking for donations in a preview-ad. "i'm so glad that my film has the opportunity to raise money for you." then he blarred on about his resume, then had the stones to take a snipe at one of his actors for talking about his own film catalogue.
just appalling behavior. i walked out. where do you think you are, bro? this is an old stonemasons hall in seattle, washington. you didn't make it to cannes. and even if your movie were as brilliant as you think it is, SIFF still doesn't have to show it. you're not bulletproof just because you made a movie about seattle. cos let me tell you, as a local, i was ready to hate your fucking movie before it started just for that snotty sound system remark. you don't say that shit out loud to your paying customers--you save it for your girlfriend who has no choice but to listen to you. or at worst, your blog.
dick.
before that happened, i had a lovely, enchanted dream of a sunday. woke up at 1pm. made maple bacon and diced potatoes and eggs over easy. internetted. listened to a lot of cocteau twins; i'm really super into cocteau twins right now. lay in the sunshine with a book and a glass of wine for a while. fell asleep in the warm grass when the sun was high. didn't get a sunburn. ross and beau and i chatted via webcam facephone--teleface!--with celene from L.A., where she is hanging out with alan thicke and dennis haskins (separately). went upstairs and cut a bunch of my hair off. played some chopin. ross came up and sang for me while i sight-read through a book of lounge standards. he taught me a song from grease!. i didn't do any work at all. sweet little life.
i also stole a shitload of "free cupcake" flyer-cards to cupcake royale, from an unattended stack on the flyer table at the egyptian, which was a nice bookend of pleasance to balance out my day. the summer of mansions and cupcakes.
current mood: sugar crystals
current music: summerhead
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| Saturday, May 23rd, 2009
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11:01 pm - nobody needs you
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maybe this is just my sour mood talking, but:
i've been getting super fucking annoyed this week with people who think that being a nerd/geek makes them weird and special. like, they're some tragic, glamorous, suffering pariah whose blinding genius could never be understood by mortals. salmon writes for a site called "the unique geek"--some old pals of his who were like "hay, you are a good writer, come review movies for us"--and it's founded on this precious platform that they are some tiny corner of subculture that's being threatened with extinction if it's not nurtured, and so they're out fighting the good fight and getting the word out.
are you for real? you're a "unique" geek? is that why your site is about hollywood blockbusters such as star trek and the spirit? you discovered these arcane, little-known films, is that right? you mean to say that watchmen was based on an obscure comic book? how bizarre and delightful! i certainly don't know anyone who reads comic books! why, i thought they were for throwing out the window.
"extra, extra, check it out, guys: mcdonald's hamburgers! they're affordable AND delicious! you heard it here first!"
maybe i'm jaded because i was born in the home of the geekwhopper--everybody i knew suckled at the breast of orson scott card and the puget sound computer user and were calling private message BBSes with our 2400-baud modems in 1992, as preteen girls--but come on. at this point, tallahassee isn't even off the hook anymore. maybe it was different growing up geek in the florida panhandle, but you haven't been unique for about 15 years now. in fact, you are dangerously close to being the mainstream standard. it's like guidos and then you.
same goes for goths, by the way. all breeds. you're not a weirdo anymore. i don't care if you live in ames, iowa--nobody is freaked out by your clothes. if anything, they're only freaked out by your outdated sense of style.
current mood: also: film majors
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| Thursday, May 21st, 2009
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9:08 am - let me do all the flattering here from now on
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DEAR LOG:
i'm sorry about the time i got drunk and wrote in my journal about the time my roommate and i got drunk and talked about how we used to be really fat.
i used to be really fat and i still feel conflicted and fucked up about it. however, it was very foolish of me to trust the internet with my darkest emotions. i promise that they have nothing to do with any of you. that entry was about me, not you. i still love all of you as much as i ever did.
i also, in my drunkenness, referred to something schmaltzy as being "gay" in front of my gay friend last night, if that makes you feel any better. and i went on at length about the holocaust and kind of freaked people out.
ineptly,
meg van hydrozoa
current mood: now i will mock the retarded
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12:00 am - as we forgive those who trespass against us
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i walked all the way to grocery outlet in the sunshine today, two miles each way, and found all sorts of horrifying treasures. it's like a garage sale of food, except none of it is broken garbage so far. walked away with about 160 bags of food for under $40. off-market penne for 99 cents. hormel bacon ends and pieces, all vacuum-packed into a big headcheese-looking loaf, for two bucks. three pounds of tyson brisket for three dollars. wetsern family multigrain oat bread for a dollar. an english cucumber for fiddy cent. campbell's select mexican tortilla soup for a dollar. a mango for 75 cents. two gigantolor hass avocados for $1.50.
(i can't bring myself to put the E in there.)
it's kind of sad, how heartsick i was for my uppity, full-service, sushi-equipped, luxury supermarkets, and then i discover the grocery outlet as soon as i get back and now can't justify going anyplace that charges more than two bucks for bread. i want to, but i cannot.
tonight, we went in the newly recombobulated hot tub and ross and i talked about how we both used to be obese and how it has changed our worldview. did you know i used to be obese? i don't talk about it much. i lost 70 or 80 pounds about eight years ago, just before i joined livejournal, and every pound i gain, even if it's during my period, i have a grand mal panic attack. to this day. it taught me to love fat people and also to hate them more passionately than i could have imagined.
"if there's one thing i hate, it's fat people who complain about being fat." -ross, the hot tub, tonight
steph was like, "wow, but you both are so good-looking now. it's hard to believe."
you should see ross now. he's so fucking beautiful. striking blue eyes, GQ-style jawbone. i knew him in elementary school and totally remembered his last name as the really fat kid. then he grew up to be completely, utterly beautiful.
i posted my drawing of the fox from salmon's play on here earlier today but then took it down because i was afraid someone would call me a furry.
i have two different cocktails simultaneously, a pink one and a clear one, and am listening to cocteau twins and jesus and mary chain and feeling both somber and fabulously drunk. gin on gin.
i miss salmon terribly, revoltingly, a little humiliatingly, despite all of his still-painful trespasses against me, but don't want to talk about it on here because we don't talk about such things on livejournal.
maybe, to quote christina ricci in the opposite of sex, it's just the music that makes me feel this way.
current mood: issues
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