A Registry Of My Loafing Upon The Earth.

My Run-in with the Motherfucking Law!

2006-07-11T03:22:00.000-04:00

Hello Aromlute, okay, so let me tell you about my run-in with the motherfukcing law. I am sleeping. A fire alarm goes off. BEEP. BEEP. BEEP… Mngmmnngphmn. Earplugs are in as far as they will go. It is so loud. I try to ignore it. I try for three hours. BEEP. BEEP. BEEP… BEEP. BEEP. BEEP… Fuck it.

I get up, grab a hammer, and proceed to bash a hole in the bottom of the speaker’s steel enclosure. BEEP. BEEP. BEEP… This thing is sturdy! I succeed in bashing in a hole and find a green wire. Excellent! Snip! BEEP. BEEP. BEEP… Okay, that won’t cut it. I tear off the front panel and rip off the speaker. Silence… the faint beeping of other apartments’ speakers… Success!

Seconds later: this huge, booming voice so loud that I could hear it clearly coming through every other speaker in the building: “SOMEONE ON THE 20th FLOOR HAS REMOVED A SPEAKER, REPEAT, SOMEONE ON THE 20th FLOOR HAS REMOVED A SPEAKER. WE WILL FIND YOU, AND YOU WILL BE CHARGED. TAMPERING WITH AN EMERGENCY SPEAKER IS AN OFFENCE AND CARRIES A FINE OF $10000.” Shit! I reassemble the speaker and enclosure faster than I ever would have imagined possible. Some duct tape over the hammer holes. Good as new. BEEP. BEEP. BEEP…

They never found me.

I remain,
The Criminal of Apartment 20XX.

Rrrrraaaaargghhh!

2006-03-14T00:55:00.000-05:00

Ahh!

No Bananas… Yet.

2005-12-10T17:06:00.000-05:00

Feliz Navidad,
Feliz Navidad.
Feliz Navidad,
Prospero ano y Felicidad.

Ungh!

2005-11-02T00:52:00.000-05:00

Happy Belated Halloween, Everyone.

The Left Coast is the Beft Coast.

2005-10-01T00:08:00.000-04:00

If you have looked at your knees and thought, “well, these things are O.K. but they could really use some soreness and bruising,” then here is what you’ve got to do: re-caulk your bathroom. Your knees will never be the same. It’s pretty satisfying to be finished, though. A freshly-caulked bathroom. It’s your birthday present to yourself.

Of course my knees are in Toronto now, but that hasn’t always been the case. I spent a lovely few weeks in Vancouver recently and have some pictures to prove it.

The “Grouse Grind” is a staircase made of rotting wood, rocks and dirt that stretches from the base to the peak of Grouse Mountain, which is a nice place to ski in the wintertime. It’s a nice place to ski because of the steepness. Steepness is a nice thing when you’re descending. The “Grind” is so named because it is almost as bad for your knees as caulking your bathroom is. Janet and I were pretty tired, but man is the view pretty from the top. Ignore that sissy gondola post. We took the stairs.

We saw a deer at the peak, which is an incredibly majestic thing to see in person.

Here I am following that majesty. Can’t leave well-enough alone.

This is the view coming back down the mountain. Whew!

And then Whistler mountain. Mountains, mountains. British Columbia is full of them. Whistler is a few hours north of where I live, and is the site of the 2010 Olympics. If that is the year they introduce competitive caulking as a sport, well, I am not getting involved because I am done with that game. Too much heat, man.

I like this picture because it makes me feel like we were at the edge of the world. And because the clouds look like an oil painting. And because we look like giants next to those tiny trees.

This is a bunch of pictures from the top that I stitched together.

This is where our Whistler hike started to get a little nuts. By “nuts” I mean “moderately life-threatening”. We climbed over the peak and onto the undeveloped side of the mountain, where we saw this beautiful lake. And then we lost track of time and missed the last gondola down. Whistler is a seriously big mountain.

So we started hiking down. It took one billion years. Knees.

His name is Greenball, he is a ball who is green…

Fish! We are off the mountains now.

Next, we rented bikes and cycled around Stanley Park. This is a picture of Janet looking out at Burrard Inlet that I took while returning from my pee in the forest.

This is “The Raven and the First Men” at the Museum of Anthropology. It depicts the Haida creation story, which involves a raven discovering the first human beings inside a clamshell, and not Crowzilla making a sandwich, which was my first guess.

This is the Capilano Suspension Bridge, where I lost my faith in physics. I thought I’d estimate the height of the bridge by spitting off of it (it is impossible to pee with that many people around), measuring the time for the spit to hit the water below, and then d=1/2gt^2, right? Well, wrong, according to the official measurements that we found later. I did three trials and everything.

Here is Janet kissing a Douglas Fir, appropriately named “Big Doug” by the Capilano people. Janet and Douglas, sitting in a tree… Douglas is a tree…

Here is Capilano, the river that vanquished Newton.

Here is Janet on that wobbly bridge, as Davy Crockett and his girlfriend walk by.

Now we are on Vancouver Island, at Butchart Gardens, just outside of Victoria. This used to be an old limestone quarry, until Ms. Butchart got her hands on it.

Here we are at Ross Fountain. Flowers are pretty, okay?

A shrub with a window in it. I thought this was pretty great.

Then we rented bicycles and cycled around Victoria proper. The horizon really is that slanted in British Columbia. Man, it’s slanted like you wouldn’t believe.

These are the B.C. Parliament buildings. I thought the composition was pretty good for an auto-timed picture taken without seeing beforehand what would be in the frame. I couldn’t shut up about it for days.

The ferry that took us back to the mainland had these coin-operated massage chairs, and they were unbelievable. If we had had a million dollars in loonies, we might never have gotten up. But we only had about $4 left, so we went outside to find the moon as a fingernail clipping.

Bye bye, B.C.

Mystery Hole III: Out of Egypt, Into the Great Laugh of Mankind, and I Shake the Dirt from my Sandals as I Run.

2005-09-11T02:20:00.000-04:00

It was Sunday, July 10th when I first noticed the thing and checked it out from outer space. It was Sunday, July 17th when I took some pictures and made up a ninja story. This post here is about the events of Sunday, July 24th. Mystery Hole Madness, only on Sunday, Sunday, Sunday. Anyway, I am in Vancouver now, about a month and a Canada away from that hole. A Canada-month is a pretty good chunk of spacetime, so maybe that distance will make this exposé some kind of meticulous, scholarly rumination, but who are we kidding, I am only five and three-quarters years old and might as well be writing this blog in crayon on a slice of brown construction paper. The illustrations below, though, are Janet’s, who has talent like I have hairs on my toes: naturally and unquestionably.

It starts like this: Janet and I decide we’d better sneak into the compound at night and see what we can see.

That’s about what it looks like from the front: gated and forbidding. With some effort, we climb over the fence, pee our pants with excitement and start snooping around. Straight to the hole: deep, about a jillion miles by conservative estimation, and with some machinery at the bottom.

The rest of the compound is filled with barrels like this one below. These become pretty important later on.

Another, smaller hole:

An assortment of evil killing machines, no doubt:

We leave our mark thusly:

And that’s when things start to get crazy. It’s the middle of the night. A huge truck pulls up to the gate we climbed to enter the compound.

And we run.

The aerial view above gives a good idea of what the compound looks like (up is East). That’s The Hole at the bottom, the crane above it, and those spooky barrels all over the place. We run like mad from the Southwest gate to the barrels at the Southeast. Almost immediately, a car and a truck pull up to the East gate. Our hearts are exploding at this point. We hide behind the barrels, trembling in the mud, peeking out to watch the constant throb of a red light from the car at the gate, jumping at the sounds of footsteps, wondering what would happen if we were caught, trying desperately to ignore the urge to pee:

Hours later, the cars and trucks leave. We see our chance. We run West, check to see if the first truck had left, then climb the fence to find a security guard waiting for us on the other side.

Run! We flee the scene and sprint for blocks and blocks. Exhausted and dirty, we return home to shower and discuss our adventure. That’s pretty much the story of The Hole.

Oh, and I, uh, peed in it.

Waking Up Early.

2005-08-19T09:07:00.000-04:00

I’m getting pretty good at it. But my appetite still sleeps ’till noon. Okay, time to eat another carrot stick. Here comes the airplane, vrooooosh! crunch.

Myah myah pineal gland myah myah myahhhh.

2005-08-13T00:24:00.000-04:00

I take melatonin sometimes when I have trouble sleeping or need to switch time zones or something. It works pretty well and makes me drowsy and gives me lucid and sometimes joyous dreams. But it has this one strange side-effect: it makes me absurdly sentimental and nostalgic. Like, I’ll look at a picture from Vancouver and be like aww man those were good times, life was simpler in those days, I wonder what those guys are up to maybe I’ll give ’em a call and just see what’s up and then maybe we’ll both remember that time back in school when we all left in the middle of class to get sushi at the beach and then Buller was gonna give us all blue slips and we were like yeah sure man cause we had that chump under control but remember Ms. Keri-Russell-meets-Jennifer-Connelly Nuij yeeeeowwwza yeah but rhymes with sewage hey shut up she would too have said yes if I had proposed ahaha and I left an apple on her desk but then we, oh, and haha oh shit you remember it too yeah that was totally how it went, ahh I miss Nintendo… and on and on. Goodnight world!

Cumulocitrus

2005-08-11T01:38:00.000-04:00

If you are like me and drink so much orange juice that you have dreamt of a faucet that dispenses the stuff, you have probably tried the three-parts-water-one-part-concentrate stuff and thought, well this is okay but let’s face it, it’s really just the Minute Bologna to my Tropicana Mignon.

Well, no more: I don’t know if this is common knowledge or what, but if you mix the concentrate and water in a blender with the lid off, it sucks a bunch of air into the orange whirlpool and makes it really light and fluffy and uniquely delicious. It is like drinking an orange-flavoured cloud! The Minute Maid really becomes her own being, rather than some knock-off accumulating freezer-burn beside that bag of peas.

Thursday is Shawarma Day at Pita Pure House (717 Bay Street).

2005-08-04T18:43:00.000-04:00

Today is going a lot better than yesterday, largely because today is Shawarma Day at Pita Pure House (717 Bay Street) and yesterday was not Shawarma Day at Pita Pure House (717 Bay Street). Every Thursday, you can get the tastiest chicken shawarma in the known universe for CAN$2.99. That means you can have a very satisfying breakfast for $5.98, a world-class lunch for $8.97, and for dinner you will probably just eat that can of soup in the cupboard because that’s enough shawarma for one day, let’s not go nuts.

Why is shawarma so delicious? I think it has something to do with the vertical rotisserie:

Food tastes better rotissified. The radiating delicious lines are mostly there for effect, but who knows, maybe deliciousness is a wave-particle duality:

So when I was leaving Pita Pure House for the second time, I put the shawarma in my bicycle helmet and walked home, using the helmet as a sort of shawarma-pail. Big mistake. My helmet now smells like chicken shawarma, and it is totally dangerous to constantly smell something that good while cycling.

I hear those symphonies come quick, now that you are sick of breathing new life into the form.

2005-07-30T12:01:00.000-04:00

This morning I woke up unequivocally. For once, I awoke and there was no doubt about my wakefulness. I was absolutely awake, it had absolutely been two hours since I subconsciously disabled my alarm clock, and I was absolutely not going to drift through the rest of the day in a semi-slumber. I slept so soundly that I completely missed my beloved only son’s graduation. Of course I don’t have a son, I’m only twelve years old, but that is about how soundly I slept before rousing to that tremendous feeling of wakefulness. It sort of wore off over the next few hours, but I still feel pretty nice. I understand now, those people who lead full and meaningful and productive lives. They’re able to sustain that feeling past breakfast.

But man, Saturday mornings in Toronto are totally my thing. I never used to see them. But I was out today, and the world was full of grumpy old men and little kids. I am home!

And since this blog is now A Registry of that Hole, I promise that the exciting conclusion will go up soon, illustrations pending. They’ll be worth the wait.

I Would Like to be Happy to Provide You with More the Details.

2005-07-18T21:21:00.000-04:00

I got the most charming answering machine message the other day. Not so much because the guy has an adorable accent that I didn’t realize existed outside of comedy sketches, but because it’s so long and strange, considering I am not moving and have never inquired about moving services. But if you are moving, I don’t know how you could hire anyone else after hearing this message.

A word from our sponsors:

“Hello, ah, this is Janush calling from ah Best Tries Movers, ahh, I was trying to speak with you to ask you if you or, ah, somebody that you know was planning to move in the next six months. If this is so, yes, we have rates starting as low as fifty-five dollars per hour for the truck with the two athletic movers. We would like to be happy to provide you with more the details to, ah, make calls: 416-657-2693, and ah, you can ask for me, my name is Janush. Um, the number was, once again to make, is, eh: 416-65-eh-7-2693. Okay, bye bye.”

I’m totally crushing.

Mystery Hole II: The Reckoning.

2005-07-17T16:33:00.000-04:00

Well, a while ago I wrote about a giant mystery hole in the middle of the road. Today it was finally dreary and rainy enough to take a picture that might suitably capture the cryptic menace of the thing, but then it got all sunny again, so whatever, I took pictures anyway.

They’re not very good photos, but I was lucky to get even those, because as I was on the roof taking pictures, I was suddenly surrounded by heavily-armed helicopter ninjas on ropes who were like “seize him!” and I was like “bring it, ninjas, I’m going to show the people the truth” and they were like “the truth? you can’t handle the truth!” and then my camera was destroyed in the ensuing melee so that’s all I’ve got.

Is it a missile silo? A hole to China? Filled with candy and/or molten lava? I don’t know, because even from the roof I couldn’t see the bottom. So obviously the only thing left to do is to climb over the barrier at night and snoop around with a flashlight. Watch this space.

Apologies in Advance for the Bankruptcy, Chilled Coffee Beverage Industry.

2005-07-17T15:23:00.000-04:00

Double-Double Whipless Blended Maple Ice Cream Sandwich Mochaccino (a.k.a. “The Classy David”):
-500mL freshly brewed coffee
-Two (2) ice cream sandwiches
-250mL chocolate milk
-Copious (copious!) maple syrup

Blend. Freeze. Discard common sense. Enjoy.

How It Feels To Be Something On.

2005-07-11T15:25:00.000-04:00

Ahhhhhhh...

Mystery Hole I: When You Fall in a Bottomless Pit, You Die of Starvation.

2005-07-10T20:46:00.000-04:00

There's a humongous circular hole in the middle of La Plante Avenue, obscured in the above photo by shadow or outdated imagery. I'm pretty sure that if you jumped in, you'd end up swallowed up by magma or in China or something.

Hamilton Naki

2005-07-06T16:26:00.000-04:00

If you can read this obituary of a South African surgeon during Apartheid without being inspired or moved in some way, you must be made of some space-age emotionally-inert material developed by NASA, because I’m pretty sure even a slab of stone would find it touching.

The Enclosing Walls of the Star Wars Crushing Machine that Grind to a Halt with not a Second to Spare.

2005-07-06T15:17:00.000-04:00

The plumbing was shut off for repairs when I went to sleep last night. As I washed my hands after taking down the recycling, the waterflow began to thin just after I squirted soap onto my hands, and it was totally like hurry, there’s not much time left! I was going nuts trying to wash and rinse my hands before the water trickled to nothingness. I just barely, barely made it. It would’ve been gross, going to sleep covered in soap or recycling juice or something.

Jerkin' to the 'Lute.

2005-07-05T01:35:00.000-04:00

Has this website ever been accidentally entered by someone attempting to masturbate? Recent studies suggest that it may have been.

Okay. That’s not necessarily true, but apparently multiple people have entered Aromlute by searching for “Polly Shannon Maclean’s” on Yahoo.

Dear Yahoo, please improve your search feature.

Dear Polly Shannon, please improve your career feature.

Dear Possible Masturbator(s), I’ll bet it was really traumatic if you climaxed when reading about Pierre Trudeau, ha ha ha.

There are other reasons why someone might look for information about the Maclean’s article on Polly Shannon, but they are not as funny.

As Janet correctly notes, however, Polly Shannon has no bum. Didn’t stop Trudeau.

Mmm, Dimethylpolysiloxane.

2005-06-30T00:19:00.000-04:00

Don Caballero I love you for making grocery shopping such a strange and disorienting experience. I have these gross earphones that you have to jam way into your ear canals, and they block out almost all external sound, so pretty much everything is a strange and disorienting experience when I wear them.

I spent way too long wandering around that humongous grocery store. Dear Dominion’s, please arrange all of your foodstuffs in order of decreasing frivolousness, so that I can enter and leave without buying three kinds of fruit snacks and no bread.

I was about to get a box of Screamin’ Green Apple Gushers (“The Only Fruit Snack With a Juicy Blast in the Centre”), but then I passed a mother in the aisle and her son asked if they could get a box of the junk I was about to buy, and she was like “no of course not, those are garbage, you know that,” so I felt pretty sheepish and just stood there pretending to look at oatmeal for a few seconds.

Then they left and I got them, ahahaha.

I’m Naked and Stupid: A Case Study in Illusory Path Dependence.

2005-06-29T18:42:00.000-04:00

I did it! I managed to get a decent sleep without filling myself with things that give me headaches in the morning. My sister is in India, so I slept at her apartment hoping to avoid the dream-spoiling drilling at my building, and I did. But I once again awoke to the sound of men at work. I awoke to the squeegee sounds of two mustachioed dudes on a platform four feet away from my startled and naked self. I don’t recommend waking up to these circumstances, if you can avoid them.

I wonder how much of our lives is spent following through with the idiot decisions we make when startled. When I understood where I was and what was happening, the structure of the situation presented two possible paths for me to follow:

a) Scramble to find the blankets and hide myself, or pull down the blinds or run the hell away or something.

b) Pretend I wasn’t embarrassed at all, as though I did this all the damn time, nod amicably at the window-washers and casually walk out of the room.

My worthless brain chose b), and so I rolled off the bed, stretched out my arms, hoped I didn’t have morning wood and strolled to the bathroom. I bet window-washers see naked idiots like me all the time. They went back to talking, and one of them said to the other, “I’ve done, like, 3-4-5-6 windows here, what have you done, lazy jerk, hahaha.”

I walked into the kitchen, still naked, and holy shit two more guys were washing those windows. At this point, I felt as though I had no choice but to continue to feign casual indifference, lest I seem a flip-flopper, and my stupid brain actually told my stupid arm to reach out and pick up a granola bar from the table. I wasn’t hungry. But I picked up a granola bar from the table, shuffled some papers around, put the granola bar back down.

I walked to the shower and started to liberally apply the subjunctive tense to all of the insane things that had just transpired:

When I woke up, I should have done the reasonable thing and picked a). I was embarrassed and I didn’t want to be seen naked by strangers. But I didn’t choose a). Anytime after leaving the bedroom I could have thought, “well gee, I should put some damn clothes on.” I didn’t. When I got to the kitchen I had a choice again, I had a clear opportunity to stop being insane, but I didn’t even realize it. I was too busy following through with those first synaptic misfires of the waking day.

Thank God my life is so inconsequential, and the worst that can result from my fucking idiotic intransigence is a few minutes of embarrassment and a boring blog. The worrisome thing is that not everyone’s synaptic misfires are so inconsequential, but everyone makes them all the same. I suspect that the possession of a high degree of fucking idiotic intransigence is helpful in the political arena. I’ve sometimes heard it referred to as “steadfastness,” “decisiveness,” and “staying the course.”

When influential people wake up startled and learn where they are and what is happening, I’ll bet their norepinephrine-shocked brains don’t perform much better than mine did. I wonder how many lives are spent following through with the idiot decisions that influential people make when startled.

If I could deliver one message to everyone, influential or otherwise, it would be this: when you wake up naked, put some damn clothes on. You’re not fooling anybody, and you’re probably making the window guys uncomfortable.

Mixed Bag.

2005-06-28T17:37:00.000-04:00

After this morning's anger and sadness subsided, I started thinking about that band Television, and the biggest Television fan ever, who I met once on a boat two years ago. Then I was walking down the street and saw two people holding hands, walking towards me. It was the Television girl and some guy I didn't recognize. Oooooooo, spooky.

Then later, at the post office: BLAM! Friendly encounter with a classmate. And then an elderly woman ran over my toes with a shopping cart, ow.

So today's been a mixed bag.

The Real Reason.

2005-06-28T17:24:00.000-04:00

The real reason I was so upset when the drilling woke me up this morning is this: I was having the best dream ever. But it would have ended soon enough, I guess, so no great loss.

Aw, shucks.

2005-06-28T08:40:00.000-04:00

Okay, it’s summer. I understand that construction work has to be done. I understand that construction work sometimes has to be done with loud, repetitive drilling. But does it always have to be done at 8:30AM, in my building, at 8:30AM, on the floor above me, at fucking 8:30AM, when I’ve been asleep for less than three hours, at 8:30AM?

Stop it! Please stop drilling! When you drill into that wall, you are drilling into meeeeeeeeee.

If there were an award for Most Cranky Person in the Universe, I would smash it over that guy’s head and eat his drill with a bottle of steak sauce.

Pierre and Me.

2005-06-24T22:56:00.000-04:00

Last week it was Mark Twain. Today, the universe is conspiring to make me learn about Courtney Cox. Except really it’s actress-I’ve-never-heard-of Polly Shannon, who just looked exactly like Courtney Cox on the cover of MacLean’s. MacLean’s, incidentally, is a terrible magazine. I never realized how terrible until this afternoon. There are commas everywhere! All over the place, where none are needed.

Amidst all the punctuation, I learned that Portly Cannon’s claim to quasi-fame was playing Pierre Trudeau’s ditzy wife in a movie I haven’t seen. My connection with Pierre Trudeau is this: when I was in kindergarten, he came to visit my elementary school, which participated in the French Immersion program he created. I had no idea who the man was. I was five and loved dinosaurs, and didn’t pee at school. Anyway, my class was lined up on the sidewalk to participate in a photo-op with Mr. Trudeau. I never got to see him.

Or so I thought, until the local newspaper came out with a front page photo of Mr. Pierre Elliott Trudeau standing majestically beside yours truly. Trudeau looked old, stately, important, impressive. I was wearing a bright green sweatshirt and a bowl-haircut, staring obliviously in the other direction.

My mom was thrilled. I was incredulous.

Pierre Elliott Trudeau, of course, was a famous ladies’ man. A playa. “Playa” means “beach” in Spanish, incidentally. Imagine how embarrassed I was at the only poetry reading I’ve ever attended, when I thought a poem called Playa Zipolite was about a promiscuous man and his cigarette lighter. As the poem was read, my powers of induction led me to realize that it was in fact about a damn beach.

I have another confession, though: I thought “Zipolite” referred to the brand of cigarette lighters until this very moment, when I looked up “Playa Zipolite” on Google to find that it’s the name of an actual beach in Mexico. I thought the title was some kind of metaphor for the destructiveness of commercialization. Nope. It’s the name of a damn beach.

I remember the last line of the poem. It was this:

“As the ocean churns each grain of sadness to pearl.”

Of course I was impressed, as I should well have been, because it’s a knock-out line. It’s clearly Poetry. In fact, I think I’m going to head down to the playa right now to have some of my sadness churned to pearl. I’ll make a necklace out of my sadness for my girlfriend.

Life is Precious and God and the Bible.

2005-06-24T03:12:00.000-04:00

You know those dry white-out dispensers, with the two spools of ribbon inside? Mine just ran out. The last bit of tape was looped slackly at the tip, so I yanked at it and the two spools spun inside, making a faint whirring sound. Unthinkingly, I said “vrooom!” as though I were starting an outboard motor, or a lawnmower or something.

Changes.

2005-06-24T00:13:00.000-04:00

I never peed at school until like the fourth grade. I always peed when I got home. Now I pee gratuitously, and absolutely anywhere.

Wisdom Teeth.

2005-06-21T22:32:00.000-04:00

I had mine pulled a while ago, and though it wasn’t pleasant, the recovery was so much more bearable than it would’ve otherwise been, because an angel took care of me. I was and am a lucky bastard.

Get well soon Kev, and get back to doing what you do awesomely. Everything:

Feelin' testy.

2005-06-21T22:15:00.000-04:00

It's a hamster. Their junk more than triples in size in the summertime. Can you imagine?

Two Rhythms.

2005-06-20T01:28:00.000-04:00

Because of what I said earlier about not wanting to recycle stories from the social day, I can only write about my solitary day, which usually amounts to what transpires between my walking home at night and going to sleep. Here are the events of the past half hour:

I walked home through Queen’s Park, where several men in suits were speaking in heavy Russian accents. One of them tapped me on the shoulder, so I pulled out my earphones and looked at him. He inspected my face for a long few seconds then mumbled “a-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta,” presumably meaning “you’re not who I thought you were, never mind.”

I didn’t listen to any music for the rest of the walk home, because the Russian man’s “a-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta” was echoing steadily in my head and providing an eminently walkable beat. When I got into the elevator, I bent down to undo my sandals at the precise moment the elevator and I began accelerating upwards, which resulted in my reaching my feet much more quickly than expected, which might be the most thrilling thing that could possibly happen in that situation.

I opened the door to the sound of rhythmic squeaking and moaning, so I immediately checked to see if there were any strange shoes in the hallway. There weren’t any, so it would seem that my roommate is masturbating furiously or having sex with a barefoot person.

Spices.

2005-06-18T04:32:00.000-04:00

I’m nuts for pseudoscience and speculative bombast, so I was delighted to learn why my ambivalence towards some spices is evolutionarily maladaptive. The gist of it is that spices kill the microbes that spoil food, and so cavemen who liked spicy mastodon meat made more cavebabies than cavemen who didn’t because the pansy-tastebudded cavemen were too busy dying of dysentery to procreate, like my family on the Oregon Trail who got tombstones that read “Poo” and “Boob” and so forth, which were the sorts of monikers my friends and I used to assume at birthday parties so that we might see the scoreboard above the bowling lane flash “X / P O O / X” if one of us bowled a strike. You had to put spaces between the letters when entering names, or else it would just display the first letter.

Darwinian gastronomy won’t necessarily bury me with Poo and Boob, God rest their souls, because I’m a retard for most of the spices on that list. It’s just a select few that have me convinced that they’re the finely-powdered fossilized feces of a Cumin-flavoured brontosaur. I’ll learn to love it, though.

Fennel is #19 on the list, which is pretty cool because it tastes unbelievably like licorice and I was proud to bring something so weird to vegetable show-and-tell in kindergarten. I grilled an egg and sausage sandwich as the egg half of my hangover cure, but when I bit into it I thought, “wait, why is there licorice candy in my sandwich?” Fennel has no business in sausage.

The Cure, The Problems.

2005-06-17T23:20:00.000-04:00

Eggs and Gatorade are great for a hangover. I performed a series of randomized double-blind trials on myself today, and when I read about the study in this afternoon’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, it turned out that the answer was eggs and Gatorade. Those guys publish at such an astonishing rate, but I guess that’s the only way to keep up with all the imaginary science going on these days.

The problem with non-imaginary science is that the further it gets from uselessly fantastical speculation, the closer it gets to usefully evil application. I became an enemy of progress* the other day and decided to refocus my energies on some sort of harmless balderdash, per Father Vonnegut’s directions. And what balderdash more harmless than blogging?

Scientology, maybe. I think the problem with blogging is that, in order to be any good, it has to sap the funniest ideas from real, olde-timey human interaction. I thought of at least four or five things this afternoon that would be funny to write about in a blog, but I talked about them already, so those jokes are gone, used, spent. In order to write a good blog, I think the blogger has to save the good ideas for the posts. But since I can’t resist the instant gratification of olde-timey human interaction, this page won’t even get the garbage I produce in everyday conversation. It gets this. But for real: eggs and Gatorade. It’s the first and only piece of useful information this blog will ever hold.

*I was going to say Luddite, but I realized that I’m writing this on a computer, so while I can’t claim to be an enemy of technology, I’m pretty sure blogging is still inimical to the progress of human civilization.