All Things Profane and Sacred

So, I know it's been a long time since I've rapped at ya, but things have been crazy yuck here. I spent all Friday laying in a sick funk. Friday was sunny and beautiful. I was home from work-but did I enjoy it? No. Did I spend any time outside? No. Did I get to spend the day getting useful stuff done? No. Did I spend the day doing fun stuff? No. I spent the day sleeping. Total waste.

Anyhow, my current excitement is a shiny new toy that just now arrived in the mail for me. I've been wanting an MP3 player for to listen to music whilst running, and so I finally cracked and bought one on ebay. It is so beautiful. Unfortuneately the instruction manual is written in Chineesified American (Actual quote: The "Private Space" function provided by the player completely solves the bothering problem), and after reading it through I'm still not sure how to load songs on it. Excitement.

Irish wake for Hunter S. last night. Suicide just doesn't seem his style. Well, there's no knowing what was going on-I can think of several situations were suicide would be an acceptable solution. After all, I am living in Oregon-the death with dignity state (I think that should be the state motto-that or the smoke-em' if you got 'em state). Anyhow.

We also watched the movie Ray. Now, I'm not a huge Ray Charles fan, but I had heard good things about the movie. However, as a biography, it pretty much sucked. It should have been called: Ray-the heroin years. Seriously-that was pretty much it. Ray had a poor childhood, watched his brother die, and did a lot of heroin, which made him act like a bastard. Then he got clean. The end. You don't need 3 hours for that. I'm high, I'm nobody, I'm high, I'm famous, I'm not high, I'm fucken dead (to paraphrase Dennis Leary).

J woke me this morning before he went to work to tell me that Hunter S. Thompson, my candidate for greatest American writer of this century, is dead. Hunter invented a style of journalism that was more honest than anything the crooked party-paid modern jounalists could ever create. And he was a master-sentences flowed beautifully, images were crisp, language was playful. Amazing writer. Absolutely amazing.

I have this weird thing where my hair turns white from the end of the hair. I have all these weird white tipped hairs hanging around. I dunno why.

Another great commercial quote: "It's the only place in town where you can get a happy ending." (J tells me you west coast types call this "full release")

Oh what joy it is to have an ex boyfriend with a screw loose who occasionally has paranoid delusions. How fun it is to get emergency calls from his doctor in the middle of the night. How wonderful to return that call and talk to an answering machine. How nice it is to know nothing more than that ex is apparently on his way to Portland to find me! It's so good to be loved. Such a nice safe feeling.

So I'm sitting here in my chair in front of my laptop, waking up with the large glass of water that has replaced my beloved coffee. This is my morning routine-hydrate, read blogs, play solataire, then run. Anyhow, as I hydrated this morning, I found out that a guy who I dated a couple of times before meeting J was about to celebrate his six month aniversary (Congrats R!). Anywho-this means J and I have also been seeing each other for about 6 months. Strange.

This morning's conversation:

J: I think it is bring a naked woman to work day.
A: No, today is lay in bed all lazy under the warm covers day.
J: It is not-you just made that up. I'll be the only one at work without a naked woman and it's your fault. If you won't go, then I will tickle you.
A: That would be against the terms of the 2004 tickle accord. I would sanction you by blogging about you know what.
J: What???? You can't blog about that. I will tickle you until you pee.
A: You pervert. If you do, I will blog about how much you enjoy water sports. Nothing like a little golden shower to greet the dawn, eh?
J: I don't like golden showers! You are the pervert!

And the tickle threat, for the time being, has again abated.

Here is a fancy detail I just learned right this moment: You can request that credit reporting services not to allow businesses to check your credit without your consent. Here is the online link: https://www.optoutprescreen.com/

Things I saw on my morning run:

1. A lost firetruck, slowly driving down roads while the driver squinted at the house numbers.

2. A huge cabinet tv stuck diagonally into a shopping cart.

3. A bumper sticker that said, "Come the rapture, can I have your car?"

4. A man leaning out the window in the February cold, reading a book.

5. A man in a suit, running around his lawn with a day-glo plastic light saber.

6. A forlorn puppy sitting next to a garbage can on a stoop.

7. A guy in a car who scared the shit out of me be comming up from behind me quietly and suddenly shouting out for directions.

8. A woman behind a car who got the shit scared out of her when my hound peeked around at her and howled a hello.

9. A house that makes no sense architecturally, but is aestetically pleasing.

10. A crow dropping a nut from a telephone wire, then swooping down to pick up the nut to drop it again.

I love Sundays-especially rainy Sundays. Perfect snuggling weather. You can learn so much, too. Unfortuneately, I have been forbidden to blog about the learning moment that happened this morning. So until the blogging fatwa has been lifted, you must remain in the dark-but trust me, it was really fucking funny.

Anyhow, it's been another busy weekend. Drove to the beach yesterday and bummed about on the sand. We saw otters swimming in the waves and hanging out on the beach with a huge group of sea lions. So that was cool. Gee-ordinary life can sound so boring sometimes, but be so fufilling in actuality. I'm going to climb back on the hideabed and do some more inside stuff.

I really like this story (courtesy of Odd Todd-his link is on the right):

So when I was like teen or whatever I worked at a summer camp as an archery instructor (That was my best sport when I was growing up. Archery. I could have gone to the junior olympics the whole deal. Cool, right? Ummm….Ok maybe not cool cool but whatever.) Archery counselor was the most cake job because while regular counselors were running non-stop I had every 2nd or 3rd period off because archery wasn't nonstop and I'd lay in the grass and sleep or whatever. Which was coolio. Anyway, I did this for a couple summers. One day this bunk of kids shows up and one of the kids only has one arm. He was probably 9 or 10 years old. I remember looking at the one-armed kid at archey and felt bad. Obviously he couldn't shoot a bow because of the whole one arm thing. I imagined him sitting on the sidelines watching all the kids do a sport he'd never do. But the one-armed kid marches up to the line and says to me something like, 'Ok. Here's how this is gonna work. You stand behind me and hold the bow out toward the target. I'll pull the string back and tell you higher or lower.' So I held the bow and he pulled the string and held it. We shot the bow together. Turned out he was a good archer. He treated the one arm thing like a minor inconvenience totally.

My candidate for most disturbing television commercial:

Two shrimp hang out in the ocean. One is eating something.

Shrimp 1: Hey this Dairy Queen popcorn is great!
Shrimp 2: That's not popcorn! It's popcorn shrimp!
Shrimp 1: Oh, no!
Shrimp 2: Where are our babies?
Both: Arrrrg!

I don't think that cannibal shrimp who are eating their own young make me want to go to DQ. In fact, the whole scene makes me feel a bit ill.