Yesterday on my way home from work, I pulled behind this truck on the off-ramp. (Are you allowed to drive with your small child in the bed of your truck, ever? Not to mention on the freeway.)
She waved and then held up this sign: free. She held up the sign with great determination the entire time I followed the truck. What was free? The young girl? The truck? If I wasn’t so tired I could probably come up with something clever.
I hear a lot of Styx on the radio which doesn’t bother me as much as hearing Billy Idol or Duran Duran. Most of the time I like it. But not as much as I like hearing ELO
Styx was one of my favorite bands in high school. (Go ahead, laugh. I’ve never pretended that I have remotely hip taste in music.) I remember crying bitter tears into my pillow to the soaring keyboard melody of Babe because some random 15 year old loser guy rejected me. Or that weird dance I went to at a neighboring school where they played Renegade over and over. In the beginning slow part you’d sort of wiggle around like some goofball modern interpretive dance and slowly bend your knees until you were wiggling and squatting on the floor. Then when “The jig is up, the news is out” part started we all jumped up and started dancing.
Of all the albums in my collection, Paradise Theater is one of the few that I can distinctly remember buying and listening to for the first time.
I got it in Westlake at the record store next to the grocery store where my Mom was buying food. Those were the days when there were little record stores owned by regular people who liked music and wanted to make a living selling it and music came in big cardboard envelopes with black shiny disks inside. The disks were wrapped in paper that often including lyrics, photos or interesting information about the band. These were called: liner notes.
When I got home I took it over to Sheila McCusker’s house on Timberlane Street in Fountainwood and we peeled off the shrink wrap and put it on the entertainment system in the living room and we sat there and talked and looked at the liner notes while we listened to it.
Oh, it says that Paradise Theater came out in 1981 which makes sense because “Best of Times” was our graduating class song. I was friends with Sheila in 8th grade. Maybe I’m confused with The Grand Illusion. So much for my vivid memory.
One of the songs I heard recently was Mr. Roboto and it’s hard to believe this was ever a good idea for a song. It sounds like someone accidentally swallowed a keyboard and then shat the song out the next morning. It’s fun to say: Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto. Domo. Domo.
But the lyrics are super dumb and, like the joke about Caesar, I never understood it.
It says stuff like:
I've got a secret I've been hiding under my skin
My heart is human, my blood is boiling, my brain I.B.M.
I'm not a hero, I'm not a saviour, forget what you know
I'm just a man whose circumstances went beyond his control
<…>
I am the modren man, who hides behind a mask
So no one else can see my true identity
And then the great reveal:
The time has come at last
To throw away this mask
So everyone can see
My true identity...
I'm Kilroy! Kilroy! Kilroy! Kilroy!
What does that mean?
According to my guide to life wikipedia this song comes from the album Kilroy was here.. I must have moved on from Styx by then because I have no memory of this album.
According to Wikipedia: The album's storyline (set in the future) centered around a has-been rock star, living through a disguise of his own, "Mr. Roboto" (according to the album's lead-off song), and caught in a world where music itself has been outlawed.
I still don’t get it.
When I was a kid I had a joke book which after a lot of head scratching the past couple of days, I’ve decided was written by Bennett Cerf.
It was the usual stupid jokes that kids think are funny except for this one that I never got that went something like:
What did Caesar say when Brutus asked him how many hot dogs he had at the forum?
Et tu.
Of course I didn’t get it. It was explained to me and I still didn’t get it. I remember reading this joke repeatedly, trying to figure it out. I can still see the line drawing with two guys in togas with leaf-crowns on their heads, holding hot dogs and one holding up two fingers.
It’s a not even funny joke to begin with and then trying to pass it off in a children’s book?
Ah. What a weekend.
Friday, woke up with the bright eyes, the bushy tail. Did a vigorous yoga practice and then pooped out. Cleaned my recipe file while watching all my shows.
Saturday went to Farmer’s Market with Bob and ate pelemini and some wonderful Pecan Breakfast Ring that some nice people visiting from New Jersey shared with us. We bought some flowers for Priscilla and not enough rhubarb for the two pies I expected to make. Also asparagus, carrots (poopy quality) and I picked up something that probably isn’t going to work as a birthday gift.
When we got home I saw a guy a few houses down going door-to-door with a clipboard and felt that the best thing to do was take my Margaret Atwood book, Oryx and Crake, to the backyard and read it sitting in the sun so I wouldn’t hear the doorbell and be forced to ignore it while feeling a twinge guilty, as if not wanting to answer the door to random strangers who ask you for money makes me the bad guy. Turns out, reading in the backyard is splendid. The air was cool, the sun warm and sounds of insects and birds. I had to sit there until I finished the entire book.
The book is tough to put down. It’s set in the future shortly after a global bio-disaster. Between this book and the recent movie about bird flu that I didn’t watch but heard about and saw clips of and other media flame-fanning flu-disaster stories, I’ve decided that if there is a global pandemic: I want to be one of the first 10 people who dies. When there are still hospitals and opiates and they can keep me comfortable while my lungs melt and there will still be time for funerals and mourning. I don’t want to die in the middle, when the infrastructure has collapsed and people are keeling over on the street corners and no one cares. And I certainly don’t want to survive with no electricity and food and roving Lord of the Flies gangs. (If you’re a young person, say under 15, and you’re reading this and you’re scared, keep in mind that I’m crazy and totally just kidding.)
In the afternoon we saw a movie called Art School Confidential by the same team who did Ghost World a movie we both loved. Art School was a wee bit disappointing. It had classic, hilarious moments and is worth seeing but over all the movie didn’t hang together.
We saw a trailer for movie that I fell in love with on the spot called Little Miss Sunshine. It stars Toni Collette, Steve Carrell, Greg Kinnear and Alan Arkin and looks like one of those movies that is simultaneously hilarious and heart-breaking. I can’t wait.
If you’ve been reading very carefully, you’ll notice that what I haven’t mentioned is the old Home Improvement Project. With incredible athleticism, I completely ignored it for two days. This is not how projects get done.
Sunday, I had to act. I peeled more wisps of wallpaper off the walls for hours until my arms felt like they were going to fall off. (Yay, I’m just over halfway done.)(That’s a sarcastic yay, if you didn’t get it.) I tore the moldings off — what are the moldings that go in the middle of the wall? Do they have a name? I don’t like them and tore them off. I also took the closet door infrastructure off because I decided I didn’t want a closet door. At first I thought: I shouldn’t do this, what if later someone wants a door? Fek someone, this is my room!
Also I finished clearing out about 99% of the stuff in there so I can work around it. Now I can’t find anything and we have piles of books and crap stashed all over the house. Do you think I won the lottery? There’s no way to tell since I can’t find the ticket. (Actually, I saw the billboard on the way to work and the jackpot amount indicates a rollover, but what if I won 2nd?) More importantly I can’t find the list of questions about the Home Improvement Project for Auntie and Uncle and Aileen when I see them tomorrow.
Once I got good and dirty and tired, then it was time to make the strawberry rhubarb pie for Mother’s Day. I thought about having a beer but for once had the foresight to realize that wasn’t going to help anything. The last 2 times I made strawberry-rhubarb pie, I had oodles of rhubarb leftover. Plus I have a giant patch in my yard. So I only bought a few supplemental stalks.
I went to my patch and although I have robust leaves, once I started groping around the stalks I realized they were like pencils. There was never going to be enough for 2 pies. (The second pie was for the visit tomorrow). Once I started chopping, I realized there was barely enough for one pie.
I re-dubbed the project strawberry pie flecked with rhubarb, wrestled with the crust as per usual and decided that for the visit tomorrow I’ll make a pound cake, slice the rest of the strawberries and we’ll have that instead.
We took dinner over to Priscilla, including some yummy halibut and roast asparagus with bleu cheese and balsamic vinegar and had a nice dinner. Priscilla liked the pie because she likes strawberry and but rhubarb not so much, perfect. And, no doubt like zillions of other sons and daughters all over the country, Bob helped Priscilla enroll in her Medicare drug plan. Deadline: today.
The Banterest visited China. Hilarious stuff like this classic: Using the Squat Toilet.
Rule One: Exhaust all other possibilities.
If you are truly in need and condemned to use the squat toilet, comfort yourself with the knowledge that you are several thousand miles from friends and family. No one has to know.
Proceed as follows:
Most stalls do not have toilet paper. This is the best time to realize this.
This week David Spade did a bit on his show about DVD extras, collector editions and deleted scenes.
He said that studios put out DVDs with different covers and call them collector editions. He calls them: Nerd Bait.
The line that got the biggest laughs was on deleted scenes. He said there’s a reason they’re deleted. “It’s like saying you want the shit they left out of the hot dog.”
(The picture above is of the Portland Library and has nothing to do with content of this post.)
Last night was grocery shopping night and we were both running late. Bob had a meeting and I was going to pick him up at school so we could go forage for food together.
But there was a stall on I5 and only one lane could get by, so it took me an hour to get home and by then Bob had walked 9/10ths of the way home so we didn’t hit the store until after 7pm.
We forgot the list. We were tired, hungry and just trying to get it over with. The whole thing was not optimal for effective grocery procurement. (The next day we were laughing because other than buying batteries and “lots of juice” we didn’t get anything useful.)
As we finished up, tossing a few onions into the cart, we tried to figure out what would be dinner. We didn’t want to do any work. We both sidestepped over to that heat table thing with the bright lights and sweating roast chickens in plastic bags. We shrugged at each other as if to says, ‘Sure, if YOU want to.’ We stuck one in our cart.
When we got home we put leftover microwaved rice on a plate, tore off chicken meat and poured on some juice from the bottom of the bag. We hoovered it, looking at each other as if ashamed to admit it. “This is good.”
Tonight I picked the rest of the meat off the chicken of shame and made a peanut sauce and some udon noodles that I’ve had in the cupboard for ages and finally used. The instructions are as follows (edited very slightly for length.)
1. Loosen Udon and put it in an ample boiling water. Boil for about 20 minutes (do not steam it for the food served in the pot).
2. If steam for about 10 minutes over a weak fire by keeping the lid covered, gentle and nice Udon is ready. You may enjoy the great variety of dishes according to your preference, for example.
We did.
1. Almost every morning between 7:15 and 7:45 am, when I am sitting at my desk at the office, a squadron of emergency vehicles with lights flashing and sirens blaring zooms through downtown. Is there really an emergency almost every morning?
2. Does anyone get how to cut a mango? I bought a nice big pretty one and this morning I attempted to slice it into a container and what really happened is that I chopped at juicy pulp and carved a bit of bright orange slush at the bottom of the bowl. It tasted fantastic but overall was a long run for a short slide. I think the champagne mangos have more fruit on them and are half as big.
3. Hey you! You commuting on I5 northbound out of downtown Portland between 3pm and 6pm when the car pool lane is in effect. You are the only person in your car. You are in the car pool lane. You are zooming by all of us with your blinker on as if you are trying to move out of the lane.
You are not fooling anyone.
Good effing God. What a sorry project this has turned out to be. At this point, I think our only solution is to move.
Working with drywall is like working with pastry dough. I was supposed to cut out (at a bevel!!!) a piece and use that to recut where the hole is so that the piece fits into the hole. It was like the pie crust recipe where they tell you to fold the dough into quarters and then unfold it into the pie plate. CAN’T BE DONE.
And the small hole didn’t work because I didn’t buy the right thing and I didn’t like the stuff I bought. So I didn’t even get to use my putty knife.
As I was sitting on the floor swearing and trying to remember how to put the drill in reverse so I could remove some screws (this was after taking about 10 minutes to figure out how to put the blade in my new utility knife) Bob came in to tell me he was going to Dinners Done Right to make us some dinners for the next month. Nice role reversal, eh?
Since the drywall was a bust, I went on to the wallpaper, first scoring it with my paper tiger and then spraying it with some warm water. Then I stood back and waited for it to fall off the wall.
Apparently this wallpaper was installed with a titanium alloy adhesive. It took forever before I could even scrape a tiny corner up and it’s coming off in wispy fragments. And I’m not sure, but I don’t think that’s even a real wall underneath. It looks like a prop from a grade school play about a land with no real walls. Assuming I ever get all the wall paper off, I’m going to be sanding and/or priming and/or patching these “walls” for the rest of my life. Especially if I keep complaining about it and not doing it.
It’s safe to say I’m not going to going into the home improvement business anytime soon.
