Um, ah, um. I got nothin'

Many, many moons ago when I was about 24 years old my best friend had a used, black Mercedes-Benz sedan that could easily pass for a limo. We were out driving around with the sun roof and windows open enjoying a beautiful spring day in Charleston, WV when we started noticing people lining both sides of the street. The farther we went, the more people there were. Whole families, folks sitting in lawn chairs, people waving pompoms. Very bizarre.

Then it happened. We caught up to the back end of a parade. We could see colorful floats and marching bands up the street ahead of us. Why the street wasn't blocked to prevent us from driving during this parade I will never know, but far be it from me to pass up this golden opportunity.

So, I stood up in the car and stuck my head and torso through the sun roof. As a bit of background, you have to know that back in 1975 I had shoulder length curly, blond hair ... a regular tree huggin' dope smokin' hippie was I. To top off the look, I was wearing the black bowler hat that I was never without in those days.

We must have looked important in that fancy black limo because the crowd was waving and cheering as we went by. Any self-effacing grand-stander couldn't resist, so I began waving back. Just like a politician, I worked the crowd in this parade from the top of that Benz. Flailing my arms, turning left then right, blowing kisses ... yes, I was the man.

We got a few strange looks, like who in the hell is that, but mostly people were delighted to see us. They were hoopin' and hollerin' and I was playing to the crowd. The parade route lasted about half a mile, but that day, and this story, have lasted my lifetime.

hahaha, that sounds like a great image. Blond curly hair an bowler hat. Rawk on.

I just watched this, and even though I'd seen it before, it made me happy.

Around 5 o'clock this morning I'm in the bedroom touching up a shirt with the iron to wear to work. I glance down and see a lizard. I say, "oh no" or something like that. Husband stands up in his underwear and asks, "What's wrong?" I ask, "Can you help me catch this lizard?" He stands there sleepily. He thinks about it for a minute and says, "I'm no good at catching lizards." and goes back to bed. The lizard scurried off.

Last night around three my 5-year-old climbs into bed with me and says he had a nightmare that the characters in Monster Inc. were coming alive. He said, "Now I'm going to go to sleep here with you and see if they are still there. Oh good. They're not."

If I weren't at work I'd link you to "Peanut Butter Jelly Time" on YouTube. That's good and fun.

A stranger greeted me as "Sweetie" yesterday. Luckily, I didn't realize he was addressing me, because if I had, sleep-deprivation might muddled me too much to respond properly: by completely ignoring it, because he couldn't possibly be talking to me.

But I didn't realize he was talking to me, so I did continue staring cooly into space, scanning the crowd for the friends I was meeting.

He then waved and said "Excuse me, sweetie!"

I started, and blurted out "Oh, God --- am I 'sweetie'? I assumed you were addressing a child or a dog."

"Sure!" he continued, undaunted. "You look pretty sweet." (You have to admire his spirit, if not his perception.)

Too tired to deal with this more gracefully, I simply said "No. I am not." I then answered his question, because I'm not carved out of stone, and we chatted a moment. But I did bloom into the desired and hinted-for sweetness, because I am not carved out of sugar cubes, either.

My teenaged niece and her mother arrived just as he was leaving and asked who he was. I told the story, and my niece, whose terrific sweetness (and unwillingness to be less so) sometimes gives her trouble when men approach her on the street, laughed and laughed at the "No. I am not."

So, I think this tiny episode actually did her some good.

P.S. What kind of cheap red wine? Is is good? I'm always looking for a good cheap red.

Um, DOY: "But I did bloom into the desired and hinted-for sweetness" should read "But I did not bloom into the desired and hinted-for sweetness."

Still sleep-deprived. Heading into sleep-depraved.

Dear LT,

Our good friend tends to get likkered up and ride his 9-foot-long custom built chopper cruiser bike down to the skatepark. Hilarity ensues.

≡ Click to see image ≡

≡ Click to see image ≡

Best Wishes,

lfr

p.s. netbros, that was completely excellent and also happens to be one of the funnier stories I've read recently.

One of the funniest things I have ever seen occurred at a gaming convention I attended with several of my friends when I was younger. Once of the guys, whom I'll Ted, was, uh, a larger gentleman than most. The first night we were there, he claimed one of the two beds in the hotel room - the one away from the window, nearest to the interior wall on the other side of which was the bathroom. In the morning, he was still sound asleep while the rest of us got ready for the day's activities. We finally yelled loud enough at him to wake him up, and he groggily rolled out of bed.

This is the good part.

During the night, he had apparently moved around a lot, enough to shift the mattress around on the box spring. It had slid toward the wall next to it. When Ted rolled out of bed (and I mean that literally - he rolled), he rolled toward the wall. When he got close enough to the edge of the mattress, he was no longer over the box spring. Since he had considerable bulk, his weight was enough to lever the entire mattress up into the air left to right, dumping him to the ground and falling vertically behind him. He was now wedged between the mattress and the wall, still half asleep, with absolutely no idea what was going on. When we stopped laughing, we pulled the mattress out from behind him so he could get up.

I don't know if you found it amusing, but we thoroughly enjoyed it.

Okay, now that I've had some coffee and shaken off my headache, here are my two favorite things I've written (outside of academic writing):

The ontology and epistemology of childhood and I, robot.

Deadcowdan, a long-ago boyfriend of mine used to sleep snuggled as closely to me as possible. He also put out heat like a reactor core, which was unpleasant in the summer. When I (inevitably) inched my sleeping way away from him, he followed, until we inched our way all the way to the edge of the bed, where I would wake, teetering, in the wee hours.

... except for the time we stayed in his old room at his father's house. We retired, fell asleep, and started performing our inching routine... until I awoke, wedged into a tight coffin-like space, unable to move my arms, to see, or to draw a deep breath. In the moment before I figured out what had happened, I though it was a nightmare, or perhaps sleep paralysis.

Moving away in my sleep, I had fallen into the narrow space between the bed and the wall, and he had followed along, rolling into the top of the gap and sealing me off from the world.

Oh, Elsa that reminds me!!!!!

When my brother and I were young we shared a room. It really was a big room, so my mom used a bookcase and particle board/dressers to divide it in half. Very early one morning, I heard my brother calling my name (I was about 8ish, and he was about 4). I ran to the bathroom right next door; I looked in the hall; I checked the living room (it was a small apartment). Unable to find him, I went back to our room. He called again. I realized: he'd rolled himself up in his blankets, like a burrito, and fallen off the end of his bed, wedging himself between his bed and the bookcase. Only his head stuck out. I couldn't get him out, either, he was stuck really well. I had to call mom to come to his rescue.

Nicolas Donner was the guy in the shirt that said Nicolas Donner is a great fuck. It wasn't ironic as it was generally assume and agreed to be true by the bobbing heads at the local bar. Legend has it that he could whistle out his penis, although it was likewise generally assumed that it was some kind of trick, but no one was quite sure how it was done. Was it ventriloquism, was it his ass? No one quite knew, but even all the little ladies at the retirement village winked knowingly about Whistling Dick Donner, and sadly sometimes people confidently called him Richard or Rick, but Rick Dick Nick Nicolas Donner pretended to ignore it with great success most days.

Most days, the house next door didn't catch fire and send things shooting through the wall into his bathroom, killing a stranger who had apparently been urinating in his shower. The toilet was also demolished, but it wasn't foresight helpful on the part of the stranger after all, now was it? thought Nicolas, who had forgotten what shirt he was wearing, as he wanted a drink as badly as he had to do laundry.
It was a shirt he got from his friend Bill, who ran a copy shop. Bill's version said Bill is okay and they only ever wore them together twice, the second time accidentally on Thanksgiving. The text was blue on a darker duskier blue. It was a pretty nice shirt. More than nice enough to talk to police in, and Nick was pretty sure he wasn't doing laundry tonight or any time soon.

How wrong he was.
[to be continued]