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.