Tuesday, November 27, 2007

The Opposite of a Grand National

Friday, November 23, 2007

New Circles of Hell


Things that have happened to me recently:

Well, Saturday of course I had lunch with the family, and afterwards was invited to my mother's house for pie and tea. I declined on the usual grounds that there is no place to sit; all the chairs are covered with newspapers and old rubbish.
"You should be more resourceful," she tells me when I object. "Alex doesn't have any trouble, he's RESOURCEFUL."

Well, I am saving my resourcefulness for useful occasions, like - well, they'll come up. I don't believe that "resourcefulness" is a quality that should be required when paying a social visit. Like we're going over the damn river and through the woods and are going to have to fend off bears with Timmy's wooden leg. The last time I went into her house, I was astonished at how awful it was-there are actual DRIFTS of garbage everywhere. Not what snippy obnoxious people refer to as "clutter"- what you call "clutter" those are my things I know and love! They are my friends! I'm not having an affair with a married man! But she has actual GARBAGE all over the floor.

So I decided that I would help her with this problem.

Now the way to clean a very very nasty house is to start in one corner, get it entirely clean, and then move to the next spot until you have gone round the room.

Ma does not want the spot cleaned. "Chuchotte sleeps there," she says. This brings forth a rant. ou people will do anything to inconvenience an animal.

Ma has old, crumpled napkins on the floor, which I find disgusting beyond anything. I would rather touch a rotten banana peel, or a dead rat than a smushed napkin. Because when you see an old wrinkly napkin, they're always used to clean up something slimy and disgusting, like snot, or vomit, or like in the Piano Teacher what she was sniffing? I don't want to touch that. There are piles of them, all round. Why? Because the cat might throw up, and then the napkin will be all ready.

Why can't you just buy a roll of paper towels, I ask.

This brings forth another rant about people driving their SUV behemoths every time they want something, they have to go to the store and wasting all this money.

But it's a false economy! I say, you think you're saving money, but you're not! And the floor is covered in garbage!

I find a rolled up magazine and try to throw it away. No, says ma, that's a cockroach swatter. You can't throw that away. You can't throw away the old newspapers because we
have to recycle them. You can't throw away the moldy old binder because it contains paper!

So I got my fur coat out of storage and Alex has personally witnessed this, and it is safe to say he did not like it- and then I wore it to school.

Where did you get that? asked several people.
"out of the grammatical errors of my students last year," I told her. "See, I always used to tell them, when you make a grammatical mistake, a small, furry, woodland creature dies a horrible death. Like when you write, Il est un americain. Duckling splat."

She seemed to believe me, which I found rather disturbing.

I told some other students it was cat- "They had all these perfectly good dead cats at the pound, just going to waste! I thought, well, I can make a coat out of them, if you ask nicely, they'll give you the dead cats also." The other students thought that was funny, so they clearly did not believe me.

I also have a mink stole, and I like to point out how it is staring at you with its DEAD GLASSY EYES.

Trey has grown disturbed about the whole fur coat thing, although he went with me to buy it so I do not really understand why. Probably all these stupid vegans he's befriended. I can't really think of anything more Goth than wearing dead animals, and having them stare at other people, but then again it would not be very goth to go around wearing dead fish, that would just be smelly. Well, suppose they were preserved? Like I wonder what happened to the frog-purse I bought my brother in Mexico several years ago, I could carry that now. Then annoying people would cross the road when they see me.

So Trey is disturbed about the coat, and says, I don't think it's right to wear animals.

You wear leather, I point out.

Yes, he says, but I don't see what that has to do with it - leather comes from a tree - - -

So I had my first exam Monday, which- I don't know how it went until grades come out. It FELT all right- I picked out some issues and then threw my outline at it. I finished with half an hour to spare which really freaked me out so then I wrote something like defenses to something or other which really didn't seem to have a lot to do with the problem but whatever. I really have no idea how I did or what I should have written, and it wasn't as hard as I thought it was going to be which I think is a bad sign.


OOooo, and Alex is still taking dating advice from Sailor Moon, which is - wrong. You do not take dating advice from grown men who can and do sing "Fergilicious" and this is an (allegedly) straight - not going there! not doing the research myself! man who does not drink- inflammable, Hindenburg-type flaming homosexuality and extreme drunkenness being the only excuses I can think of. Sailor Moon is telling him that he has to not call the girls back and all because that means you're a player and girls like that. I have yet to see Sailor Moon with a lady friend so there.

I do not agree with this. These ladies Alex knows call him BECAUSE he's nice. But he thinks he has to be all bad-ass, and I do not see how this is supposed to happen. Alex trying to be Bad Ass is like me trying to be 50 Cent. He's an ACCOUNTANT who lives in a RANCH house in Clarkston. If Alex threw himself more into the role, it would be at least interesting, but Alex's concept of Bad-Ass is "not returning someone's calls promptly." I am going to have to read him "La Religieuse" which is basically an adult length book in French about the little caboose who didn't want to be a caboose any more except it is about a nun. The point being that Alex should not try to be something he is not. He is even less intimidating than I am, because I do at least have a panoply of Mean Teacher Looks and shriek. Alex is mumbly and self-effacing.

So this latest lady - y'all as far as I know there have only been three- she paints and likes the same movies I do. Alex mentioned that she had lent him a movie. O I said.
"Mulholland drive- he reflects-isn't that a famous street?"

I want to know what I did to deserve that. No, it's Columbus' fourth ship that didn't make it out of drydock. Alex is going to the kind of hell in which he marries a chick who turns out to be EXACTLY LIKE ME.

O and we went to the museum for their High All Night thing? And I pointed out all the artwork which depicted sex, after seeing a painting by Berthe Morisot called Venus Asking Vulcan for Arms. (at least that was what it was called in English) This painting very clearly depicts two ?cherubs? ?Putti? And one of them is feeling her nipple and rolling its eyes in ecstasy and the other one is going, there you go again. This painting also featured ducks kissing in midair.



Did you know you can buy a casket at Overstock.com? Under, ironically, "health and wellness." If I ever get enough money and have a large enough house I am certainly buying one, if not two. The things cost $1,500, which is more than three cars- now four, we did buy that Riviera that I wanted- that I have owned, so if I'm going to spend that kind of money I intend to make use of it before I die.

Yah, like you don't have anything tacky in your house! Alex has succumbed to the advent of the Clothes Bed, and I know one person who has carpet on their toilet. This would not be tacky at all. It would be strange, and I want to know why that is a bad thing. At any rate, it's better to be strange than tacky.

There may be some of you who do not know, but a man named Dante wrote a famous book called the Inferno a long time ago in which he discussed different levels of Hell. I did not read this book in college because I majored in Economics and French, meaning that I read about things like Dutch disease and infidelity. (they are not related, in case you are wondering, although Dutch disease would make a good euphemism for an STD.)

What I am thinking is there should be some new circles of Hell, or punishments like the ancient Greeks used to come up with, adapted for the modern world.

So like, people who make Robin Williams movies, and movies starring "the Rock,"- will be sentenced to watch the collected works of Ingmar Bergman over and over again. No, wait. Maybe you can watch "the Rock" movies with the sound off, or I am thinking of Vin Diesel; his movies are not as bad as you might think they are, or they're made up for by his buff shirtlessness.

You know how you see those runway pictures and they feature women wearing like, half a tennis ball made out of tulle? Those people are really ghosts, and they are the people responsible for applique sweatshirts.

The people responsible for the Olive Garden are going to Iron Chef Hell in which they are forced to learn to debone a whole chicken from grainy black and white photographs.

People like Idi Amin are going to have to endure eternity rotating from being an ordinary person under their government to living as an ordinary person in the United States.

People who cheat on their spouses are going to spend eternity giving Bill Clinton head.

Bill Clinton is going to spend eternity being given head by his wife.

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Stereotypes From Many Lands!

Well, Ed called me last week (of course, by the time I get this up, I am sure it will be much longer ago than that but who cares) and I forget what it was we were talking about, but he was saying something about what some Jewish friend of his said and I responded with,

"well, it doesn't matter, because she's going to Hell anyway, 'cos she's Jewish."

Of course I was JOKING but Ed did not realise this- - - he has heard, or I have told him that I am religious- and of course we are from the South- so he thought I was serious.

Ed did visit us when we were having the renovations done and although I have told him that yes, the bath is complete, with jetted tub and skylights and marble and all, and I put up pictures on my blog, I honestly don't think he believes me and still thinks that we have water coming out of an unadorned pipe in the shower and blow on light bulbs to get them to go out. I think he thinks that, deep down, when no one is looking, we eat possum stew and play "Turkey in the Straw" on banjos and try to get "Harry Potter" books banned from libraries.

Wait, true confession: we went to a monster truck thing once, which- it was more entertaining than you would think, and it was inexpensive. There were a lot of South Africans there. I have not seen so many white people in one place at once until I went to the Annie Lennox concert.

Either he doesn't know that people in the South are not still living like they did in "Deliverance" or refuses to believe this because it is more suited to his world view of being all sophisticated in Manhattan or whatever.

I am honestly astonished at this- Like my aunt came down from Michigan in '87 to interview for Medical School and when I said "y'all" she exclaimed, "That's the first Southernism I've heard that boy say!" So apparently she had the whole possum stew/Deliverance thing in her head- this was Atlanta in '87. O and when I went to Emory- eeek, was it THAT long ago- I would tell the students (of course, Emory students are remarkably dumb) that Stone Mountain was a cool place to go, especially at night. "Oh, they would say, isn't that where the Ku Klux Klan is? Aren't you afraid?" And I'm like, no, dumbass, that was a long time ago. I'm sure in Long Island 25 years ago they wouldn't let Negros move in either.

This stereotype of the South as some kind of racist backwater, Darwin's waiting room, a place where the gene pool started out as kiddie-shallow and got peed in- continues for no obviously good reason. Well, I can come up with stereotypes of my own; but that would be a lot of work so I will just write down everything I know about different states and let you come up with your own stereotypes.

Let's start with - - ooh, Hawai'i. There's an apostrophe in there somewhere. Anyway, Hawa'ii is closer to Japan than it is to the U.S. People there traditionally ate something called poi, which I believe is made from taro root, which is second only to yucca for sheer nastiness, or- having heard of what happened to the Red Indians on this continent, gave it to the visiting missionaries to make them go away. The visiting missionaries did not go away, because they feared being sent somewhere worse. Several of them got together and divided the land amongst themselves so that up until at least the mid 1970's, you could buy the building that stood on land, but only lease the land the building stood on. I think something happened in the mid '70's to break up the cartel. I do not believe that people wear leis and hula dance and play the ukelele. Pearl Harbour is in Haw'aii, and at least one awful movie has been made about it.

Alaska is cold, and I have seen a movie about Alaska; It was very serious and German and about some imbecile who believes he is a bear and goes and lives with the bears every summer for longer than you would think necessary to rid him of this idiotic delusion. Somehow along the way he manages to get a girlfriend- I thought girls had better sense- and he messes with the bears until one of them gets fed up and eats them both. Alaska is supposedly enormous, there are cruises and mosquitoes there and you can take a cruise there to go see whales and the mosquitoes. And there used to be gold there, and Jack London wrote about this. Now there is oil there.

Moving south: Washington State has Seattle, which is famous for being rainy, Starbucks, Microsoft, and "grunge rock," which is emo for men too poor to afford eyeliner and good clothes and so they have to wear fugly flannel shirts. This makes the men angry and they shout a lot above music that sounds like industrial accidents. "Grunge Rock" was made famous by the late Kurt Cobain who was also famous. His unlate and unlamented widow, Courtney Love, is still not famous despite her best efforts at bad behaviour because unlike him or Britney Spears she is not pretty enough for anyone to pay much attention to her antics. Notice that I have not said that any of these people were talented. I think there are a lot of hippie-type people in Washington State. A lady named Betty MacDonald lived in Washington on a chicken farm and hated it, although she said the food was good.

Oregon: I don't know anything about Oregon, except there is a lot of nature there, like redwood trees maybe? And that kind of fruit I buy for putting in beer- the can says Oregon on it.

The capital of California is Sacramento, which no one cares about. San Francisco has a bridge, and used to be famous for gays except now they're pretty much everywhere. Los Angeles STILL makes movies starring Robin Williams, which is why God is always sending California things like mudslides and earthquakes and fires and Barbara Boxer and Nancy Pelosi. Houses are very expensive in California, even the ones that are on fire. California has a place called the Silicon Valley, named for a computer chip that causes people to have accents which are funny for about 5 minutes but then makes you want to kill them, which is another reason God does not like California. California has outlawed smoking cigarettes in a whole bunch of places, but you can legally smoke pot, as long as you have a doctor's note. This would account for a lot of the Christmas movies that you see that are supposed to be "heartwarming" or whatever and feature grown adults falling off roofs while stringing Christmas lights. Or movies like The Game Plan.

Arizona: is technically part of New Mexico.

New Mexico: is actually part of the U.S. although I bet you can fool some people into thinking it's a foreign country. Try it at the next party you go to! Be like, yeah, I spent a summer as an exchange student in New Mexico. It was a really eye-opening experience.

There are Red Indians here, because the U.S. government was looking for a place so awful and desolate they would NEVER want to go there, so they put the Red Indians here, and in Oklahoma. They would have put them in Utah but the Mormons were already there. If you go to New Mexico, be prepared to hear a lot about the Anasazi, which means ancient ones, people who built high rises out of mud inside cliffs and disappeared because they of a combination of a lack of good building codes and rents got too high.

There is a lot of desert here, and par consequent, a lot of German and Japanese tourists. There are a lot of rock formations for the German and Japanese tourists to take pictures of, and signs and Red Indians drinking Aqua Net.

Well, we did not actually SEE the Red Indians drinking Aqua Net during the day when we went there; but there were an awful lot of Aqua Net cans around, and unless the German and Japanese tourists drink Aqua Net, or there were hidden hordes of Republican Women with hairdos that could be mistaken for weather balloons, the Red Indians were drinking the Aqua Net.

In one of these states you can visit a road sign which says, "this stretch of highway sponsored by Enchanted Women's Club." A U.F.O is supposed to have crashed here.

Nevada is north of one of these states, and is famous for Las Vegas and Reno and desert and Hoover Dam and I don't know what else. I have never been there. You can gamble in Las Vegas, which is appealing to the sort of people who are fascinated by laundromats and like putting money into machines to no apparent avail. London Bridge was allegedly taken apart brick by brick and reconstructed on Lake Havasu? The Brits were apparently desperate for foreign exchange. I have no idea when this happened, or honestly, whether to believe it.

Idaho I think is north of Nevada, and it is famous (right now) for being the state Larry Craig is from. I have been to Idaho; it used to be primarily famous for potatoes, which are nutritious and delicious provided you slather a whole lot of fat (butter, sour cream, cheese) and salt on them, or deep fry them.

Ted Turner owns large tracts of Montana, or used to, no one cares about this state enough to take it away from him, not even Jane Fonda.

Utah is up there somewhere, I have been there. It is full of Mormons, and is called the "beehive" state, although when we were there in '96, I did not see a single beehive hairdo. Mormons were kicked out of Missouri in the 1840's for having a bunch of wives at once and then went to settle on the edge- well- at a fair distance upwind- from the Great Salt Lake. This is because the lake stinks to high heaven like a dumpster full of rotting garbage. Or this could be a trick played by the Mormons to keep people away. The Great Salt Lake has round sand. I think Donny and Marie Osmond are Mormons? Mormons are kinda creepy in that pod -people way; they are all clean and freshly scrubbed like department store mannequins come to life, and they all look the same. They seem like ideal tenants or employees maybe but you wouldn't want anyone in your family to marry one.

I have never been to Wyoming and never intend to go there. Dick Cheney is supposed to be from Wyoming. I can't think of a single other thing to say about Wyoming.

Colorado is next to Utah and is famous for Jen and skiing. Skiing is one of those white-powder related activities which serve as signals to tell you you have too much money and too little sense. I mean, you spend thousands of dollars to get there, hotel, rental car, unbelievably expensive equipment- to go out in the cold snow- go hurtling down a mountain strapped to expensive fiberglass sticks at the not insignificant risk of life and limb- and then go up in the air on a spindly looking chair lift to HAVE to do it again?
I think almost everyone I know who has gone skiing has hurt themselves, quite often grievously. They probably deserve it.

Texas is a big state, or people keep saying that, sure, why not? But just because you get a whole pile of something doesn't mean that it is good. A lot of Texas (at least the part we saw) is flat, dry, scrubland and unattractive, and then there are the nasty border towns, so -. Dubya and Laura are from Texas, Midland to be precise. I have been there. There is an oil museum; to see the oil museum, you have to go fetch the proprietor from some adjacent "business" like a petrol station or hotel or something. A lot of Texas that we went through had that abandoned "Twilight Zone" feeling.

North of Texas is Oklahoma, shaped like a hand pointing westward which is to say, get the hell on! In Oklahoma, there are piles of something called "chat" which contain lead and there are expensive research projects funded by the NIH to prevent children from playing in the "chat;" apparently ordinary toys are not sufficient for the demanding tykes of Oklahoma. We own a car built in Oklahoma City, and I seem to recall something about tunnels underneath the city?
Oh and there is a place in Oklahoma called, improbably, Oologah, which has banned employers from hiring undocumented Mexicans. But there aren't any Mexicans in Oologah anyhow, because having come from a place where many words are spelt Huixaticangoctol, or something like that, they have all headed for places that are easier to pronounce.

Then there are a whole bunch of Midwestern states which are basically the same for anyone who lives in a town where "Chinese restaurant" does not equate to violently red glop over rice. States like Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska, Indiana, Minnesota, Michigan, Missouri, North Dakota, and South Dakota. Based on the movie "Fargo," I can confidently tell you that a lot of these people have comical accents. Based on the movie "the Wizard of Oz," I can also tell you that the people there seem to be stunningly lame-brained, if Dorothy was a fair example; why wouldn't you want to stay in the Emerald City and be princess or Queen or whatever instead of going back to dusty Kansas with tornadoes and farm life and old hags who want to kill your dog?

Also I have "cousins" in a place called Ypsilanti, Michigan, (no Mexicans there either) and they, including my aunt and uncle, are very very fat, so I am thinking a lot of Midwesterners are like that. This view was not dispelled at all by the time I had a layover in Missouri.

I am sure the people who live there are very nice and all and these states are very important; but I prefer to think of them as being like the neighbour who seemed perfectly nice and never bothered anyone until she went and axe-murdered nineteen people in a fit of pique.

I have been to Arkansas, although I can't remember why, I do remember that at the welcome centre there was a prominent display on lynching. Yes! Really! Welcome to Arkansas, also home of former President Bill Clinton, in accordance with Megan's law the aforementioned is also a sex offender!

Ohio is too rust-belty to be considered part of the flat, bland midwest; Ohio contains a place called Cleveland, famous for people not wanting to go there. Cleveland, I understand, boasts some sort of sports franchise called, menacingly, the "Browns."

States which are not technically states:

Washington DC, which re-elected Marion Barry after he got convicted for crack cocaine possession and was shown lighting up on tape. In a city full of politicians, you REALLY can't do any better?

Guam is owned by the United States, I think, but is infested by some kind of tree snake, so you KNOW I'm not going there.

Puerto Rico is owned by the United States. I have met a lot of Puerto Rican women, well, actually three, and they were all very scary like hyper aggressive drag queens. They have that thing. Why is that?

Canada keeps claiming it's a separate country but no one really believes them. They have their own flag, and all. Quebec is different as in they speak French and eat french fries with Gravy and cheese on them, called "poutine." Large cars that you think are made in America are actually made in Canada, most often in Ontario, because of CAFE or something. So Chevy Impalas and Chrysler's LX series are all made in Ontario.