I Think I'm Going to Throw Up

I walked into my quite clean apartment a few minutes ago and turned on the light. Out of the corner of my eye I spotted something defiantly frolicking across my kitchen floor. It was, how do I say this? THE BIGGEST FUCKING BUG I HAVE EVER SEEN OUTSIDE OF INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM! Now, I'm kind of like MacGyver when it comes to killing bugs. It's all about thinking outside the box. In this instance I needed there to be absolutely no way of actually coming into contact with the kitten-sized creature. I also needed to not hear the impending crunching sound. Most importantly, I needed not to take my eyes off it or make any sudden motions lest I scare the thing into hiding and, therefore, have to break the lease on my apartment leaving all of my stuff behind in the crippling fear that the thing might wish to feed on me in the night. I was standing between my coffee table and my television. Within arms reach I had a few lightweight paperbacks, a mason jar full of pens and nails, my television, and some bamboo. The thought of throwing my television at the thing (let's call him Beelzebug) was, thankfully, fleeting. I knew I couldn't do much damage with the paperbacks, and, while you can make everything from hardwood floors to bed linens out of bamboo, I didn't think it would be of much use either. Then I spotted it. My large, hardback copy of World Philosophy: An Explanation in Words and Images. Let's just call it what it is. It's a book on world religions. So, I picked the thing up, slowly so as not to frighten my uninvited guest. I did a little mental calculation of the distance so as to determine the force with which I would need to toss the book (I knew I only had one shot at this). I said a brief prayer, "bless me Father, for I am about to crush the shit out of one of your children." I launched. Do you know what it sounded like when it came crashing down on Beelzebug? It sounded like a heavy, wide book being dropped on a tile floor. No crunching noise. I was half expecting the book to just bounce off the back of this six-legged equivalent of a linebacker. Or for there to be a two second pause before Beelezebug carted my book away on his back. Thankfully, the book seems to have done the trick, but now I have a problem almost as dire as the bug being in the apartment in the first place. I can't just leave the book there. I mean, I could, but I shouldn't. At some point cleanup is going to be necessary. Here are some of the things I'm struggling with. Do I first jump up and down on the back of the book so as to ensure that the little fucker is dead? Do I just plow ahead and pick up the book like a girl with ovaries and tell myself that I'm not completely repulsed by the carnage? I think I'll definitely slip the book cover off and put the book back on the coffee table. I didn't need the cover anyway. This is going to be among the most ghastly things I've ever had to endure. Why do bad things happen to good people? Well, I guess there's no time like the present. Be right back........Turns out the answer is, jump up and down on book, remove book jacket, back away in case the thing really is from the devil and it wants to jump out at you just to prove a point, lift book jacket off floor, push contents of stomach back down your esophagus, take picture for blog, sweep up carcass with broom and dust pan, flush carcass, flush once more for good measure (I like to think that even Al Gore would approve of this waste of water) mop floor with undiluted Mr. Clean, forget about sleeping tonight, instead lay awake in bed scratching at phantom itches that can only be explained by giant bugs crawling all over you.

Tim Russert

There are lots of reasons that Tim Russert's death sucks. The thing that makes me saddest is no one loved politics more than this man. Now we're in the middle of the most historic election season of a generation, and now Russert doesn't get to experience it.

Let the Looting Begin

I know we in Columbus, OH don't have much to complain about on the shitty weather front. There's no flooding. We haven't had any tornadoes this year. We're too far inland to worry about hurricanes. But fuck me if we didn't have some crazy-ass lightning tonight. There were downed trees everywhere. I'm not talking a branch here and a limb there. I'm talking entire 30 ft tall trees scattered throughout my neighborhood. When I came home after the rain, more than a few streets were blocked off due to the fact that there was a big fucking tree laid out in the middle of the road. The park by my house looked like a disaster area; however, as a sign that everything would be okay, the local juggling club was outside the rec center tossing and catching various blunt objects. It's like I always say, if the Columbus Juggling Society doesn't get together and practice on Thursday nights, then the terrorists--I mean Thor-Norse-God-of-Thunder has won.

Before I even got to the park, I was shunted all around Third Street which was closed for a couple blocks due to waist-high water. When I drove back through a couple hours later, the water had all gone, but the street was caked in mud, and the poor bastards who'd been parked along the street when the storm came were either having their cars towed off the sidewalk or trying to will their newly fried electric to correct itself.

After driving through town for a bit, I would say that roughly 50% of the traffic lights are out. Speaking of which, I'm sure my educated readers know this, but just in case someone else stumbles across this blog, when a traffic light is out you are supposed to TREAT IT LIKE IT'S A STOP SIGN! I can't say how many people I saw just barreling through busy intersections without even slowing down. See, when people do that, THEY CAUSE ACCIDENTS!

When I finally came back into my neighborhood it was dark. Lots of power out. Not mine, but just about everyone for the 10 blocks north of me. I live in a part of the city where it's never completely dark. To see it that way was a little creepy. Creepier still was the little old shopkeeper I saw standing outside his storefront, sweeping and looking at the big hole in the front of his store where his window used to be. For the first time in my life, I'm glad I sleep with a loaded gun under my pillow--did that fool anyone? I'm trying to practice my bad assness in case there's trouble tonight.

Insert REM Lyrics Here _____

I made the mistake of watching the news for five minutes today. Here's what I learned:

**Parts of Washington State are expecting 10 inches of snow today.
**Aspen, Colorado still has some slopes that will be ski-able this weekend (less than a week before the official start of summer).
**A river in Iowa is getting ready to crest at 25 feet--a mere 13 feet over what the levees can withstand.
**two eleven-year-old girls were shot on a dirt road outside Tulsa, Oklahoma.
**House republicans have blocked a bill that would tax the five major oil companies on the windfall profits that they have made by charging $4.00/gallon for gasoline. The bill would also have taken away $17 billion in tax cuts over the next 10 years for those same companies.

Here's the thing that really chaps my ass over the whole oil thing. Yes, a barrel of crude costs more than it ever has, but gas does not need to be $4.00/gallon. A barrel of oil now cost around $133. At $4.00/gallon, that brings the consumer cost for a barrel to $168. Now, $35 might not seem like all that much of a mark-up. It's about a 26% mark-up. Other things in this capitalist economy get marked up a lot more severely; however, Americans consume about 9,253,000 barrels a day. That's a total mark-up to the consumer of $323,855,000/day. I get that everyone who touches the gas has to take their share of the profits, but last quarter Exxon reported a net profit of $10.89 billion. That's a 17% increase from last year. All I'm saying is, fuck those guys.

I don't get math, and I've never taken Econ. I'm sure I've fucked up something in my rant, but still--$10.89 billion? And that's just one of the major oil companies. There are four others.

Poetry Kills

I just finished reading The Caged Owl, which is a collection of poems by Gregory Orr. Reading poetry is something that I've only recently gotten into. I think I don't have the attention span for prose right now. Anyway, there's this poem, "Everything," It goes like so:

Is this all life is then--

only the shallow breaths

I watch you struggle for?

That gasp right now--

if it was water

it would be such a small glass.

And I could lift your head

from the hospital pillow

and help you sip it

to comfort your parched

throat

into the ease of sleep.

Your agony makes no

sense when air

is everywhere, filling

this room where you lie

dying, where we move

as if in a trance, as if

everything is under water.

So anyway, this poem got me thinking about my grandfather. Not a huge leap since, once a person gets to the gasping for air portion of the living/dying process, the experience really sort of becomes universal. I was looking on my old blog for posts around the time my grandfather died. I remembered posting the eulogy that I wrote for him, and I wanted to give it a gander. I remember getting a couple laughs and a few tears, and I wanted to look back over my own brilliance. I went to October 10, 2006 and remembered that I pulled the eulogy after only a few days, because keeping it posted seemed lame or disrespectful or something. Instead what was there was the post the I put up just a few minutes after he died. I'll include it here. Why not?

Then Came the Dry Humping

Grandpa died last night, which sucks the proverbial ass.
Here are some funny things about the situation.
There's this nursing home on the way to Hospice in Dayton. I forget the last names of the families running it, but the initials are S and M. On the awning outside the entrance is written, "S&M". I'm picturing leather and latex clad funeral directors whipping the shit out of those dirty, naughty corpses.
There was this group of folks parading around the circular corridors of Hospice last night singing gospel music. The organ music was prerecorded, and it was rather creepy sounding. Very Count Chocula. One of the songs they sang went something like this, "King Jesus is a listenin' for the sinners to pray." That feels perhaps more suitable for a prison than a Hospice, but maybe they had a limited number of prerecorded numbers on their little ChristCasio 5000.
At one point last night, the aids came in to change my grandpa's bedding and his diaper (obviously this was before he died). I averted my eyes, not because I was embarrassed or ashamed, but because my first concrete memory of my grandfather is of his penis and I was very aware that I didn't want that to be my last memory as well. Not quite the book end of 25 great years of memories I'm interested in.

Better Late than . . . Wait, That's Ridiculous

Today I filed my 2005 tax returns.

Like a Cat out of Hell Pt. II

I slept at my friends' house last night. They're on their honeymoon, so I'm rabbit sitting. Unlike my cat friend from the previous post, Sugar the rabbit does not try to kill me in my sleep. That coupled with the fact that my friends with the rabbit own season 3 of Frazier on DVD made the decision to stay over pretty easy.

When I came home this morning, Cat did not immediately come strutting out of my bedroom to say hello. I found this puzzling since he normally likes to lull me into a false sense of security when he first sees me. I walked into my kitchen to check on his food situation and found the above wreckage. I know this seems pretty cut and dry. He climbed above my cabinets, knocked over the bottle of Pernod which then landed on his food bowl, causing said food bowl to shatter. Here's the problem with that. Say the wall in my kitchen is ten feet long. The food bowl is at foot 0 while the Pernod bottle is at foot 4. How the fuck did this cat catapult the Pernod bottle 4 feet east? Does he have opposable thumbs? Did he knock it over then roll it down to the end of the cabinet before tossing it over? How did the bottle survive an 8 foot fall without breaking? Strange things are afoot is what I'm saying.

After I noticed the situation, I immediately panicked that my friend's cat's corpse, having bled to death, was going to have to be ferreted out from under my bed. This is not a phone call you want to make. "Hey friend, remember how you said your cat would find a way up on my cabinets and I stubbornly decided not to take the bottles down? Well, I've got good news and I've got bad news. The good news is, you were right. Good for you for having such prophetic psychic abilities. The bad news is, I killed your cat. Fear not, I have a friend who owns a pet cemetery, and I'm sure once I explain the situation to her, she'll give you a good rate. Will you still be my friend?" I was thinking this and planning my escape to Mexico when Cat came around the corner, limbs in tact and both eyes in their respective sockets. As I write this, he's drinking out of my toilet.

And now I take the bottles down.