Ditches, Chasms, Holes and Dents



Digging holes is a hard business. Don't let anyone convince you otherwise. With fencing concrete dust up the nostril, a hard day's work makes me wordless and speechless. I'm only good for a dunk in the hottub. I hope I dream of the Marianas Trench tonight.

Domestic Gulags Redux

My lady friends ask me for love advice- mostly of the "how to seduce a man, how to dump a man, how do I know he's worthy" variety. Why should any 2 particular human beings choose or unchoose each other? Why should I know anything about this...

For the last few weeks, C has been kindly providing me escort service from the Bart station. He usually leaves when I leave and we rendez-vous somewhere midway usually around the two benches in front of a basketball court. On Monday, he spied me coming round the corner, so he sat on the southerly bench with his cheeks hidng behind an upturned collar looking very suspicious indeed. I don't know why but this cracked me up mightily. The next day, he met me in the parking lot of the Bart; he told me he was going to sit on the bench with his shirt off and tied around his head except... Except a band of young Asian girls playing basketball foiled his plans. He didn't want to look like a pervert. On Wednesday, he said he almost dragged a blue plastic Ross Dress For Less shopping cart all the way to meet me; the runaway cart had been hanging about for several days off the corner of Page and Stannage . Of course it would have made such a rattle, he would have given up probably after a block. But he got just as much mileage out of a prank as I cracked up mightily when he told me. Either C has unnatural powers over me because I think he is so funny, or he has unnatural powers over me and that's why I think he is funny.

My mother always likes to point out that Solzhenitsyn has barbed wire fence all around his Connecticut compound. Indeed we love our self constructed prisons.

Life is too good in Northern California. One could age without remembering and this is dangerous. This is how life gets spent feeling too pleasant to do anything serious.

After watching Frontier House, I've decided to bring serious intent to my housewifely duties. Gone will be the days of feeding the family cheese curls for dinner or breakfast, composting in the kitchen sink, or the unchecked dust bunny farms. I awoke 8am today to make oatmeal with a few sauteed figs and almonds, scrambled eggs, thick toasts of rosemary potato bread, and a thin slice of blueberry galette; my man has to work hard today building the chicken coop and my front garden fence. I snuck in a prosciutto avocado open faced sandwhich as I also have the arduous task of making a chicken ladder.



After working hard at cleaning, sweeping, scrubbing, miniature Hugo popped up on my left shoulder and told me to read philosophy and eat all of the blueberry pie. Of course EJ angel makes an appearance on my right shoulder- her index finger telling me to continue with the drudgery which is the fate of womenfolk. So I eat few bites of blueberry pie while thinking about all those suffering ladies which leads me to polish off the lemon chicken paella which leads to me a juicy green plum. Housewife work is strenuous work so I go back to the bites of blueberry pie.. I wonder what it's like to be one of the Asian wives that keep a spotless house. Probably those ladies are not married to Pigpen but well behaved office men that don't know grime so their jobs are easy.

Can't sleep. Made C angry with having 2 laptops on the bed so he took his pillow elsewhere.

Went over to Cody's and was embarassingly forced to ask the guy at the info desk. How public like a toad to croak one's desires to a stranger. The book had not yet been delivered. Truly there is no privacy in this world, only obscurity.

Huffy and Puffy



So I marched home from work quite angrily cursing like a sailor. There is a genetic weasel who recently has made my job more unpleasant than it needs to be. There are two distinct types of a%#holes in the world, one's who annoy the hell out of everybody but gets the job done. Because of their abilities, you have to put up with them. The second unfortunate category revolves around the truly repellent creatures that annoy the hell out of you, prevent/impede your productivity and don't do much. No question as to where my fellow lies, but I can't figure out if he's stupid or just purposely trying to get my goat with idiotic questions that were formulated and discussed in numerous meetings.



Anyhow, I didn't want to get in trouble with C away in LA so I marched straight home and spent a perfectly good evening installing a wiki.

Snacked on half a tuna sandwich this afternoon. What a shame such a powerful swimmer ended up as a soggy leftover with too much mayo.

Idi Amin died this week. I had better update my list of 3rd world dictators who lived a full and cushy life. I had to last update it when Great Leader Kim Il Sung passed the veil. Nope, it must have been Pol Pot. Netflix probably will see a spike for the Barbet Schroeder documentary. There is one scene where a fisherman, to a frightened and fascinated crowd, pulls up an unnaturally corpulent fish from a Kampala lake. To the casual viewer, this is just the bounty of Africa. But french-trained filmmakers are too wiley to waste such a simple scene. Only months later, Kapuczinski unraveled this mystery for me.

Household dictators and domestic gulags



This is an essay for all married persons:

http://www.english.ccsu.edu/barnetts/courses/vices/kipnis.htm



I've declared a new freedoms policy: noone is allowed to tell anybody else what to do. I'm tired of this long leash! C says that discipline is so lax in our house that mayhem will ensue. Once you've rented a place with no door separating the bathroom and the bedroom, it all goes to pot.

Licking one's chops



There is a man T at work who blinks far less than the average human being. He also stares straight into your skull while you speak which makes me distracted and uncomfortable indeed. Asians do not stare into each other's skulls unless it is a life or death angly fight. The only time I stare purposefully is during my family's routine staring contests; Hugo is the all time defending champion. I am consistently the underdog, bottom ranked at every tournament. My father is a man who burst a blood vessel in his eye because he forgot to blink after he started using a new flat screen monitor. My sister forces him to wet his eyes with Visine every once in a while. We can't figure out his secret hence he has kept his title for decades.



So at lunch, I impulsively challenged T to a staring match expecting to lose. Non brown eyes are very difficult for me to look at. I prematurely employed Hugo's "Licking One's Chops' trick, but the opponent did not flinch. There is no more easier way to stretch out the seconds than this. Who knows why, but his blue eyes blinked. Probably a rematch is in order, but I was hoping to practice with T so I could mount a more serious challenge to Hugo when I returned next.



Sof's Brilliantly Beaded Outfits



Sof is getting ready for Burning Man and brought over her lovely costumes. Many oohs and ahhs were in order, the theatrical outfits were a transvestite's wet dream. Sequined things, beaded halter tops. C was oddly being the useful gay friend seriously repeating how one of the beaded outfits could be worn casually over a white dress or something...

Conversations people would rather be having (do not read, editing)



Last time C's sister and look alike K was in town, we lunched with her and her newly transsexual(f-to-m) friend Cory. We had dined with Cory one year prior just before her transformation. Although my mind was full of detailed questions on the operation and results, I politely smiled and discussed the requisite bay area conversation :weather and real estate. Cory was really boy watching and probably wanted to talk about the hotties that were walking by.



I've been trying to make a a few new friends lately, but really there is too much pussy footing in adult conversation. Can one know the map and terrain of another person by conversation alone? For the social norm, it takes too much delicacy to intuit where another's boundaries lie. What would people talk about if there were no verbal boundaries? A great many people would resort to mating and money. Both exhaustible and exhausted topics. Maybe secret fixations. Forget verbal boundaries, what about behavioral ones.



Take C's old roommate Foster, a rather rare combination of endearing and monstrous behavior. One time C and Foster were sitting at a Cuban bar when C heard Foster's signature squirrel laugh- hu-ee hu-ee hu-ee. Apparently Foster had peed into his beer bottle and drunk it in plain sight of a busy bar on a Friday night. He goes through a great many phases and I don't know if the golden beverage stuck for long. Foster could only really study well sitting on the toilet but was deathly afraid of hemorroids; hence he had to abandon efforts towards med school. Foster finally found a niche in the movie industry. He last visted us when working on LadyKillers. I had gotten so used to Foster so that the narrow range of human behavior that I normally experience has gotten intolerably numbing. But even Rob is becoming respectable. He lived for years on Dave Weaver's couch paying him $150 a month. Foster finally saved enough money to buy a 5 bedroom house which he will rent out to Dave and all the other people who's ever rented out their couch to him.

craigslist junkie



It's like quitting drinking, or smoking. I go for long stretches without, and then a trigger event(must have been a bad bucket of chicken)- I'm back browsing Missed Connections and Activity Partners. C berates me for subscribing to low-brow entertainment, but sometimes one needs such diversions (esp. after a bad bucket of chicken and a hard day of work). Mostly I wade through bad grammar and the predictable solicitations to find a few anomalies which make it worthwhile.



1. Free Stuff: a free castrated Nubian goat on offer. Somewhere in Vacaville.

2.



Oof- when one is actually combing craigslist for source material for one's blog, it's slim pickings. It's the same mating song and dance. The sheer banality and predictability of the personal ads tell me we live in a very lonely world indeed. Acceptance of loneliness is a necessary ingredient for a creative productive life to be sure otherwise one could waste time hunting to fill the void with people. But sometimes loneliness of the human condition is unbearable indeed.

Double Injection



Although I've had it done without Novocaine, today's deep drilling was not for amateurs like me. Oof my teeth shivers at the memory. Of course Emily Dickinson is right, pain has no memory. No endorphins either for the anathestized.



Close to sundown, the chickens chirp for C to tuck them into their coop. C commands "Go to bed" and the ladies march into their crates. I was dubious at first when C made this claim. While C was in LA, I had much trouble convincing the chickens to retire to their coop; I bumbled and chased them all about the yard for a good half hour. I finally tired them out and bribed them with a handfull of chickmash. But today I saw what a true chicken man could do- a whistle and gentle nudge does the trick. I am also just another domesticated beast.

Onto my hot tub rendez-vous as it's been a hard working weekend indeed.

Installing a dishwasher leads us down that familiar renovation path. Everything needs to be gutted and redone. Construction zone in the kitchen seriously cramps one's eating style. I've eaten two cookies for dinner so far. What a nuisance to have feed oneself continuously. The pleasure of eating has been put under doubt by a fridge which only has a few block of butter and other inedible stuffs. Blogging does not fill one's stomach. One more cookie is in order. Another Saturday and Sunday is consumed digging holes and filling them, making a few satisfying calluses on the palm. Hungly hungly stomach makes for serious writer's block.