Pains, Stains, and Occasional Rains

Real life has a way of crashing down on you. Failure, dissatisfaction, insecurity, malaise. Plain old misfortune, too. it can be funny at times, though. like when you get fish juice on the book you're reading, which happens to be your friend's first novel, which you're three quarters of the way through. or when a dog pees on your floor. or when you play a show and it rains, hard, as it has the last three times you played a show, and no one shows, and you know if you look up for a second, instead of focusing on the kit, you will stare down a near empty room. this last is funny only if you have to lug gear up seven flights of steps afterwards because the elevator is broken. a funny thing happened: I was folding my laundry and noticed that the shirt that Ife gave to me, the one from American Apparel, blue and tight fitting and comfy, was mysteriously stained-- a biggish, teardrop shaped smudge on the chest. How can a shirt become stained in the process of being washed? And how, exactly, can something so perfectly representative happen in the first place? i mourned the shirt as i mourned my little band. fuck it. i'll get a new shirt and a new band too. I will shout that shit out. incidentally, she did not participate in the late night gear lugging.

Back to the fish juice. the curious reader will wonder how this is accomplished, getting fish juice on your only copy of the only book that your friend has ever published. well, it involves equal quantities of poor quality pre-prepared salmon, faulty containers, and the lack of a proper book bag in which to place the book, thereby keeping it separated from the salmon. the result is that your book is rendered something on the order of radioactive, as you will only discover the next day, when you wonder why your fingers smell like piss, and, over time and many hand-washings, figure it out (the book is currently being blowdried in front of a fan after a somewhat experimental soap-and-water session).

Speaking of smelling piss, the dog. oh that cursed dog. see previous posts for more on that dog.

Well, as the song goes, you get down sometimes, but it could always be worse and it can be amusing. sometimes it just hurts though. i'll leave it to that ever curious, ever faithful reader, probably a relative, to figure out which is which. no, it's not the shirt, or the piss, Chris, Go to bed.

Lok-Town, Coming To Town

Loki, the Corgi. he's a perfectly sweet four-legger. but some might say animals are a human indulgence,and they would say so frowning on you for taking the lil' guy out for a walk at 7:00 am, when he seems to demand it, and petting the shit out of him becaue he's so gall-derned friendly, and has such a soft coat. it's not the way, the Buddhist might enchime, for lo these long years, you may find yourself reincarnated as a housepet, and then, what then? tricks? being struck and killed by a passing rickshaw? a life of mundane amusements punctuated by routine bouts with the masters of the house, who knock you repeatedly across the face with yellowed newspapers?

i don't believe that being a pet is a bad existence. for one thing, you are immortalized by the thinking, feeling entities known as the little girl who buys crickets from the petstore so that you, oh ugly lizard, may take your pick as to which furry legged exoskeleton shall be first down your gullet. my sister has always cherished her pets. in addition to the lizard, a skink, i think, she once tried to carry a French snail all the way back to the States in a custom-outfitted shoebox. it was the most intense part of a four week European vacation, my mother and sister with friends of the family; and it was the Dad who ultimately discovered the coverup, around when the stewardesses were distributing customs forms throughout the 747, which was by that time hurtling past Iceland. These forms queried the innocent travelers about carrying with them certain live objects like plants or (gasp) animals as they prepared to reenter the belly of the beast. My mother was sympathetic but could not bring herself to lie on those forms, and therefore, my sister's friend's dad made them march forward to the lavatory, where he had them dump the contents of their respective shoebox-snail habitats, along with the snails, into the toilet. the subsequent flushing was a perfunctory end to two weeks of joy and secrecy among the two young girls. to this day, all those that hear the tale are comforted by the idea that the two wayward snails, Slimey and Slimer, as they came to be called, who survived two weeks on the road, traveling through France in shoeboxes, with an unmistakable aplomb, if my sister is to be believed, these two crustaceans may have hit open water and lived on, successfully reacclimating to the rigours of life in the wild, and, in the end, little the worse for wear. humans suck, i guess. i like Loki though. he's pretty cute.

Periwinkle Pumpernickel

to be fair, these words can easily be confused when one is speaking while drunk. example: i hate Trent Lot's pumpernickel suit. um, do you mean his periwinkle blue suit, because i think that it does a nice job of setting off his eyes. which are the eyes of the devil's bitch.

Please pass the apple schnapps.