Category: Freude, Schaden

Yesterday the fiancee and I did the big obvious thing and watched the Oscars; a couple friends of ours have a large annual party, so a couple dozen of mostly theater people got together for an old-fashioned evening of unwise pre-Monday drinking and outraged howling at the television set. We also participated in the usual voting pool, where we both naturally lost. E., the little bastard who won, had set the tone of the evening earlier by showing up with his “theme dish:” a half-case of “About Schmidts.”

J. and S., our hosts, were of course also enabling our profligate behavior; unfortunately, so was I. The house drink of the night was Manhattans, and I had brought along a couple quarts of Bloody Mary mix and a jug of vodka; there was also lots of beer, not to mention certain people other than myself making stealthy trips out to the balcony clutching lighters and sinister pipes. (Of course, by “stealthy” I mean “publicly;” a la, “I’m gonna go get high. Anyone want to come?”)

The food was also good. There was fondue, and cheese and sausages, and at one point my friend C.–who had proudly started drinking as early as possible–hauled out a homemade deep-dish pizza that looked like a fucking geological core sample of the Umbrian countryside. In addition, our host J. is an aspiring pastry chef, so he kept rolling out various fiendish tarts and choco-whatsits and all sorts of addling sweets. So we weren’t hurting for food and drink, unless one was in search of something remotely healthy, in which case that someone would have been laughed at raucously and then dragged out onto the balcony, and then probably would have had a belladonna suppository forced on them, or something equally deranged.

So the Oscars eventually started, and with it of course came the real sport: viciously mocking everything about them. C. got the ball rolling early on when he spotted the very pregnant Catherine Zeta-Jones (like you could avoid the photographer’s loving downshots of her rollicking uberbreasts), and shouted, “Hey, she’s not thin! Lose some weight, fattie!” On the other side of the equation, I noticed a certain cooling-off of my longstanding crush on Renee Zelwegger (which originated with Bridget Jones’ Diary), because she now looks like a piece of utility grade flank steak with a smile-shaped klieg light mounted on it, blasting out THIN-RAYS all over fucking creation, because Christ knows that a dry, desiccated woman is the only kind of tolerable woman. Sigh.

Anyway, things proceeded apace, and we were having a good time; we enjoyed Steve Martin’s calculated viciousness, for the most part, and suffered through all the contest categories that we had utterly no idea how to vote for: short form animation, sound editing, most enthusiastic fluffer, etc. And also the no-brainers, such as visual effects, where even on the small screen it was obvious that The Two Towers made Spider-Man look like it was made by hydrocephalic, piebald donkeys. Foreign films? None of us had seen any of them, of course, not because we wouldn’t enjoy them, but because when you do a bunch of shows it makes it hard to get out and see any fucking movies in the first place, and when it comes to choosing between Chicago and, say, Klimt et Pjuk der Gotterdammerung, what do you suppose your average actor is going to pick? Unless you’re my friends K. and E., who delight in getting stoned and going to see horrors like Dude, Where’s My Car?, an experience that in my opinion still counts as seeing a foreign film.

Then, as everyone now knows, including people trapped alive under miles of glacial ice, the Michael Moore Thing happened. It was another no-brainer vote for Best Documentary, and we waited suspenselessly for his name to be called, and plus nobody in the fucking world saw any of the other films anyway, so it was, and here came good old professionally pugnacious Mike, jowling up to the mic and wasting no time in unleashing his barbless screed to a suddenly booing audience. My friends, lefties all–as am I, mostly–loved it and cheered him on, but it made me sad and angry and despairing. Is this guy the best we can do? He’s just a carping, bloviating sack of crap, a tiresome pedagogue loudmouthing his way into the public arena with hoary nonjokes and toothless nips at our Prez about “fictitious elections” and duct tape references. Fresh, tough stuff, Mike! It really raises the level of discourse! The man is our very own fucking David Horowitz or Rush Limbaugh, a bomb-throwing little paper tiger whose own blast shielding of arrogance and attention-whoring provides the only protection against burning up from his own heat–though of course, precious, precious little light. If we’re taking wan cheer in this guy and his cock-waggling, I’m just going to go to bed for the next few administrations.

Anyway. Sorry, I’ve been doing that all day, and I think it’s out of my system.

So the evening went on, and with a bit more pizzazz than usual in the WHAFUCK? department. For example, Adrien Brody: WHAFUCK? This one knocked pretty much everyone right in the gut, including him, as his face seemed to register about as much hope as Diane Lane had alloted herself for the evening: none. It sure blew me away; I didn’t see The Pianist, natch, but I had pretty much written off the entire field anyway after I saw Daniel Day Lewis in Gangs of New York, which was one of the most ferocious performances I’d ever seen. But Mr. Brody seems like a nice chap, and it was kind of endearing when he absentmindedly swatted away the annoying flybuzz of the orchestra’s “You’re done now” swelling with an annoyed, “Cut it out!” and then placidly continued on with his say, while the conductor stood around wondering who the fuck this anemic little shoe-pisser was.

And then of course the final WHAFUCK? was the Roman Polanski nod for Best Director, which brought a massive standing O, led by Marty Scorcese, who apparently doesn’t mind the decades-long cornholing he’s been receiving from these bastards, but never mind, POLANSKI! And poor Rob Marshall sat there with Harvey Weinstein lurking behind him whispering things like “I’ll eat your head if you show emotion,” and everyone else wondering who the fuck Rob Marshall was and where he came from, and secretly knowing, “Back to oblivion for you, you poor bastard. Harvey’s done with you and now he’s going to push you off the ice floe.” He’ll show up in a couple years on IMDB with credits like L.A. Doughnut Girls and Beckett’s Revenge with Tom Sizemore.

Finally, it was all over, and we sat around the living room like catatonics for a bit before people started realizing that it was 9:00 or so, and that we’d been drinking for hours, and we had to get to fucking work in the morning. The aftermath to an event like the Oscars or the Super Bowl is a lot like what I imagine the end of a porn shoot is like: people are shuffling around with their heads down, reality seeping back in to addled brains, mumbling about cleaning up and needing to get home to feed the dog. And then in the morning, America’s productivity takes a massive plunge as millions of muzzy-headed people listlessly fuck up their daily routines and gingerly sip coffee. That massive hit the stock market took today? That was our fault. That’s right. Me and my couple dozen friends. Who says a few people can’t make a difference?

“Reality TV” will of course burn itself out, but it will probably get worse before it gets better, if that’s at all conceivable. I think I’m right on this; I know, right now we’re beseiged with ghastly things, from “Fear Factor: The Wonder Years,” which shows Fred Savage rolling around in a room full of thumbtacks to “Who Wants To Marry That Guy From Picket Fences?”, which features a haggard-looking Darva Conger steadfastly refusing to indulge “whodat?” actor Costas Mandylor’s penchant for cleansing enemas. And yet, all of these shudderingly awful spectacles are still more appealing than watching network war coverage. “And now, more blurry things turn bright orange and smoke. Brought to you by Colgate.”

Here’s what has to go first though: the fucking kids. Ever since “American Idol” hit the U.S. (ripped off from the identically suicide-pact-inducing Brit hit “Pop Idol;” I’d like to say it’s another example of America ruining another country’s fun idea, a la “Changing Rooms” or “Iron Chef” but this show was imported more or less intact and pre-ruined), we’ve seen a sudden disturbing ancillary phenomenon that can be classified as Those Cute Fucking Leather-Lunged Kids! Since it’s never too early to start destroying the lives of our children, first “Star Search” was exhumed, fortunately without the shambling corpse of Ed McMahon, who nonetheless remains conveniently brined should we ever need him. Then I started seeing ads for “America’s Most Talented Kid,” or whatever it’s called. And thus the sudden infestation of our TV screens of tiny, ostensibly cute little fucking buggers screaming Whitney Houston tributes until their platelet counts drop into the low ten thousands and the weaker ones discreetly expire offstage due to massive thrombocytopenia as their unclotting blood seeps out of their throats. Guess you just didn’t WANT IT ENOUGH, little Chantalle! Let’s hear it for Deron, the world’s only four-year-old chainsaw juggler! Ouch, Deron! Watch your femoral! Cleanup on soundstage four!

As hateable as these kids are (and let’s not pretend they’re unhateable just because of their youth; think Mary Kate and Ashley), they are almost certainly victims. But so what? America hates victims all the time. Sacco and Vanzetti. The Rosenbergs. Nancy Kerrigan. We hated the fuck out of all of them, not out of any provable rational ideology or reasoning, but more out of the gut notion that these people, no matter what the circumstance, were really just kind of fucking irritating. Anarchists? Commies? Figure skaters? Fuck those whiners. It’s easy to understand. But I think I might have a solution.

It’s a TV concept: “World’s Most Awful Stage Parents.” It’s got it all: reality TV, incredibly awful people, child abuse, psychological trauma, venality, self-delusion, Hollywood. This can’t fucking miss. Imagine the footage: you don’t see the poor, miserable children hoofing it around the stage as if hypnotized by a Coney Island magician, just the parents, before and after. “Corey,” the mother’s tone full of venemous sibilants, “you have to nail the glissando.” “Listen to your mother, Corey,” says the wispy-moustached dad, thinking only of long strings of zeroes written down on watermarked paper, “you don’t want to sleep in the woods again, do you, tiger?” And the child, terrorized beyond lucidity, goes out and belts a feverish version of “Sugar Walls,” hitting every other note perfectly and jerking like a damaged robot. The parents look on, razor-lipped, and when the beaten child comes backstage, Damocles’ sword falls. Loving Mom says, “Failed again. You knew what would happen. We’re shipping you off to study with nice Mr. Polanski.”

I think this could fly, big time. What else are you going to watch, footage of the war? Fuck that. Think of the children.

Since I have been sitting here for an hour wondering what the fuck to write about, and have been failing to actually write, I have decided–mostly out of frustration, but also hunger, because, well, Christ in clam sauce, an hour?–to simply write about the stuff that I considered writing about, started to, failed, deleted, and am now going to write about anyway. Clear?

First failed idea: Wedding stuff.

Rejected because everything’s been going really well, actually, and how interesting is that? We picked out a cake from a really nice old guy who has been making them since the Hoover administration, and we got a plain old white three-tier cake with incredibly baroque icing on it that is going to look fucking smashing right up until we destroy the shit out of it, and there goes two hundred and fifty dollars right down all of our friends’ gullets, and I think I’ll remind them of that as they are eating it, just to be a jerk: “You’re eating four of my dollars, so enjoy it, you bastard. You better not have bought us towels.” What else? Oh, the invitations are done and are going out, after a bit more judicious weeding from the invitation list to get it down into a number we can express without resorting to scientific notation. Included in this tally was at least one dead person, who could have really livened things up. It would have been kind of neat to rig up the corpse of my dead great-aunt so that right in the middle of the ceremony, she could be hoisted up by wires and jerk around crazily, while a hidden recording blared out “UNCLEAN! UNHOLY UNION! THE DEAD RISE UP IN OPPOSITION!”

Second rejected idea: The secret conversations of my houseplants.

Oh, doesn’t that sound ducky? I only have four houseplants and one little snippet of a houseplant that was given to me in the hopes that I would one day put it in soil, which of course will never happen. So it will die in the little specimen jar thingy I got it in, but the thing is, it’s been not-dying for like six months now. Not so for his big brother, who is doing nothing but dying despite being in a very nice sunny spot and getting lots of water. I tried the other route: no sun and little water, but the little fucker hated that even more, and drooped and paled so aggressively, it looked like a vegetative wraith. I think it might be the soil, which looks like stony earth from Nosferatu’s coffin; it holds no water and just looks redolent of evil, and pretty clearly betrays its arid Eastern European peasant past, and probably has fond memories of breaking poor Romanian hoes while peasant tears rained down upon it, and it heard their lamentations because there would be no potatoes this year, or any other. It’s having a harder time with my houseplant, but it’s getting there.

I also have two cactuses and an irradiated rubber tree. The cactuses are just as useless as all cactuses except for those cool big bastards that sometimes fall on desert rubes, and the irradiated rubber tree grows like something out of a fucking fifties movie like Them! and would someday make for a terribly cool retro-fifties horror movie if it could just grow some legs and eat fear-blighted townspeople, which at this point, it might, but then again I could always stave off that bit of nastiness by repotting it in the Romanian Soil of Morbidity.

Third rejected idea: The Arquette family.

This seemed initially most attractive, because look at them! What the fuck happened with this family? One started out in a Toto video, then paraded moistly through a few interesting oddities, like After Hours and by God, Pulp Fiction (albeit briefly) and then flamed out with terrible, soul-manglers like the impossible The Big Blue or the unwatchable Hope Floats. Last time she was seen, she was swallowing poison on the set of Joe Dirt.

Then the other one, the sheened pneumo-babe with the pickled brain, started out all va-va-voom in the slick, veneered True Romance, but then some similar malady took hold and then she found herself crying wetly through unspeakable horrors like Stigmata and Beyond Rangoon, that latter being a precise description of where all extant copies of that movie were quietly buried under a cairn piled high with dingo skulls and discarded babies.

And of course the most offensively afflicted of these sufferers of Arquette’s Syndrome is unquestionably the vile, shambling idiot-mass known as David, whose turn in Scream seemed to verge on the not-horrible, but of course we all know what happened then: ghastly, flaming wreckage. Ready to Rumble, 3000 Miles to Graceland, and, worst of all, the AT&T commercials, where he proceeded to actually make you wish for Carrot Top, or if not Carrot Top, then perhaps a cold shotgun to suck on as you cursed the shabby little capering demigods that exist solely to invent the likes of David Arquette, whom at this point you aren’t even capable of thanking for his one good deed, which was to gradually suck all the marrow out of Courtney Cox until she resembled a rattling scarecrow hung with tattered leather.

That’s what I didn’t write about tonight. Tomorrow: On the usage of frightening run-on sentences.

You know, I was feeling kind of uninspired tonight, and I wasn’t going to write anything, so I plopped down in front of the TV (the fiancee is out watching a play that I couldn’t muster any energy to see) and thought, “Eh, fuck it.” Of course, since it is Friday night, there isn’t anything good on. For some reason, I found myself watching Volcano, a profoundly terrible movie, and I’m only 45 minutes into it. It’s so numbingly bad in such a circumspect way, it’s kind of remarkable; it’s such an earnest, profligate waste of talent and money, it could only come from Hollywood.

It’s got Tommy Lee Jones, looking like the family bulldog when he’s been wrongly accused of farting. “Blame me if you want,” his haggard eyes seem to say, “but it won’t make the smell go away.” Don Cheadle periodically talks to him on the phone, and isn’t that just hellzapoppin’ adrenalized action? That’s all he gets to do: talk on the phone. Anne Heche is wandering around somewhere too, and because she is a woman, she is of course totally unheroic when called upon to save her partner: her partner dies; she cries. Poor actresses. Sorry, Anne, too bad Tommy Lee wasn’t there to manfully help you: he was on the phone with Don.

Tommy Lee is running around with his hopeless daughter (poor actresses), when all of a sudden, the tar pits erupt into flames, and lava is roiling about everywhere, and ash is falling from the sky in sheets, and everyone keeps wondering: What in the fuck is going on? Is it a hurricane? Is it Godzilla? Meanwhile, the poor viewer is sitting there innocently, feeling his neck veins pulse, trying not to scream, “IT’S A VOLCANO! VOLCANO! YOU STUPID FUCKS! THE NAME OF THE FUCKING MOVIE IS VOLCANO!”

The problem with a volcano as a driving narrative force is, it doesn’t really do much except sit there and . . . volcane. It’s not like a tornado or a forest fire; it isn’t really too hard to figure out, really: run away from the really slow moving magma until you can no longer see it. So instead they contrive ridiculous shit, like the hopeless daughter standing six feet away from the menacing, really slow magma flow, screaming “DADDY!” Tommy Lee looks over at her like “You’re kidding, right?” Then he remembers the stupid script and his paycheck, and gamely wanders over to her and picks her up. By this time, of course, the magma is now a mere four feet away, and their access is blocked off, I guess, because Tommy jumps up onto the hood of his pickup while the tires blow up and the hopeless daughter screams, unfathomably, “DADDY! YOUR FEET!” (Poor, poor actresses.) Tommy sensibly ignores his hopeless daughter’s plangent podiacal quacking, because it’s his BIG SUSPENSEFUL MOMENT: the music swells! The film goes slo-mo! And Tommy Lee . . . jumps down off the hood onto the street.

Wow.

Meanwhile, back to Anne, who is back at her pickup, sobbing over her dead friend that she totally failed to save, because she is a puny woman who should leave the hero business to men. Thanks, Hollywood! Meanwhile, all around her, the rest of the people in the city, having noticed that magma was rolling around everywhere, shit was blowing up all over the place, and ash was falling on their heads have begun doing the smart thing: evacuating, right? Nah. They’re looting. You know, that would be my first plan. “Holy shit, Mt. Rainier is erupting! (Thoughtful pause.) I’m going to go find a free blender!” Anne has stripped off her silvery all-purpose weird suit o’ science and has plopped it on the hood of her pickup. Immediately afterwards, someone runs by and loots it. This, I suppose, is some screenwriter’s limp stab at irony or . . . something. But it’s really just hilarious. “Check it out! I got a DVD player!” “Oh yeah? Well, I got the top half of some weird silver suit!”

Actually, what the fuck am I doing wasting time telling you this? I’ve got to see how this turns out! So I can make fun of it!

Suddenly, I’m enjoying myself.

Ah, Friday. Here at work, the office is abuzz with anything other than work. I just took a leisurely stroll around to casually violate people’s privacy. This is a report on my suck-ass goldbricking coworkers who make me feel better about my own flagrant nonwork. Names have been changed to mean-spirited denigrations to protect their privacy and to amuse me.

Bosslady: Eating candy, staring at pictures of cute dogs on the net. Okay.

Nearly Life-Sized Administrative Girl and Flailing New Guy: Improbably, they are having a lively discussion about square roots. I’m not kidding. This creeps me the fuck out, so I hurry along before I can hear more.

She Who Is Why We Cannot Cure Cancer: The less said here the better. She and Caftan Guy (see earlier entry) fight a pitched battle on some nameless astral plane for possession of the One True Tarnished Tin Crown of Celestial Idiocy. Anyway, she’s doing a crossword puzzle on the web. Well, sort of. She has two entries completed, and looks haggard from the effort.

Former Bosslady: Actually working. This is intolerable. So I perform one of my favorite office stunts and pretend to pass out in her office. I simply walk in and then roll my eyes up in my head and collapse bonelessly on the floor. She giggles, but ignores me, as she’s seen this trick before. I lie there for two whole fucking minutes waiting for a better reaction, which I finally get from Hippie Throwback Gal, who is passing by. “Is Skot okay?” she asks Former Bosslady. “He’s an asshole,” replies FB.

Hippie Throwback Gal: When not busy inquiring about my medical condition with what I must say was a rather mild unconcern, HTG was visiting Former Bosslady to ask if she had seen some “adorable” dog pictures on the net. Yes, the same site that Bosslady was looking at. I feel like there is invisible machinery all around.

Sleepy Gay Fellow: I admire people who don’t even pretend to work. His monitor is off and his feet are on his desk; this is the defining Jesus Christ Pose of the modern office worker. He’s on the phone with a friend; this is the only snippet of conversation I heard: ” . . . just get plowed tonight . . . “

Caftan Guy: Depressingly, but totally unsurprisingly, not at his desk. So, of course, not working, for which cancer patients everywhere should breathe a prayer of thanks. He is almost certainly in the bathroom loudly delivering a fresh payload of gut-bombs. I shudder, and hurry past his cubicle, feeling like a kid walking past Crazy Mrs. MacNutter’s haunted mansion.

Tall Girl Who Likes Horses, And That Is My Sum Total Knowledge of Her: Leaving. Me: “Have a good weekend, Jenny!” Her: “Jeannie.” Well done, Skot.

Nice Girl Whose Last Name Has An Onomatopoeic Ring Not Unlike A Rubber Boot Sinking Into A Mudbank: She’s instant messengering mash notes to someone (I see the phrases “thats so hot” and “mmm”), hopefully her husband of one month. If so, Awwwwwww! If not, Ewwwwwww.

Bosslady of Other People: Staring at an email and idly fingering a brightly-colored frog toy. I briefly think, “I work with a bunch of goddamn nutfucks!” but then recall that I enjoy pretending to faint in other peoples’ offices. Move on.

Woman Reminiscent of Elsa Lanchester: Internet dogs. What the fuck? Flee.

Caftan Guy update! He’s back at his desk. Whoop, to get his coat. No, he’s leaving. I guess the bathroom has been sufficiently napalmed. He flashes me a peace sign and I bare my canines.

Girl Who Is Constructed of Only Elbows: Just returning from getting coffee, and I almost run into her. She backs up, waving her elbows and apologizing. I pass by, and she returns to her cubicle and sits down on her elbows, vibrating in some vague way. She kills me.

Newish Woman: Actually working. She’s new, and wants to make a good impression. She’ll learn the ropes.

Me: Typing up this crap. Learned the ropes long ago. Clearly: not working. Happy Friday.

When cooking chicken, as with anything, presentation is important. When removing the skillet from the oven, place it carefully on the stove top.

Then remove the chicken breasts to a platter to rest while you prepare the pan sauce. Tent the chicken lightly with some foil, and then turn around to the skillet on the stove. Grip its 450-degree handle with your bare hand. This is important, and it’s a step sadly neglected by many chefs.

With the skillet now firmly in hand, take a millisecond to realize what a goddam moron you are. You can do it! Then simply drop the radioactive goddam fucking skillet onto the kitchen floor; when done properly, white-hot beads of chicken fat should fly onto the floor, the cupboards, your pants, and maybe your small child. Scream.

I want to emphasize this. Your scream is very important; it should reflect your basic personality. What are you going to scream? Is it “FUCK!”? Is it “FUCKING FUCK!”? Own your scream. Personally, mine is the very evocative syllable “GAAAAAA!”

The scream serves many functions. One is to alert the neighborhood that you are a moron who grabs incredibly hot objects. Now they know. Another function is to scare your significant other witless and then cause her to run about distractedly bringing you wet towels, Advil, scotch, ice, Neosporin, scotch, more ice, and panicky medical advice. Take a moment to appreciate your significant other and her concern for you, and remember for the future that if you’re ever feeling too lazy to go pour yourself a scotch, you could always just burn yourself severely, and she will come running. Good to know.

Later, after dinner (during which your tireless significant other was pressed into service to cut up your chicken, which made you feel five years old), mewl softly into successive scotches and melt thirty-six bags of ice in your hand. It’s all part of the process.

Tomorrow, the real fun begins. In the shower. After you’ve kind of forgotten that you’d burned your hand. Make sure the water is extra-hot. And oh, you’re going to need that scream again.

Perhaps you noticed Christmas happening all day yesterday. My fiancee (note continued lack of interest in adding accent mark) and I celebrated the birth of The Bearded One in a traditional way: by attending a screening of a blockbuster epic movie. And that movie was, of course, Drumline. It was better than I expected, especially when the orcs stormed the football field and tore the livers out of everyone in the marching band. Then the band members, now slavering revenants, bopped right back up and executed an inspiring, nonthreatening hip-hop rendition of “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,” during which they somersaulted and did splits and just in every way looked really cool and impressive, given their liverless, undead state. SPOILER: Gandalf is back, and he’s got some mad rhymes, like “Balrog” with “ball hog.” Also, we were drunk.

Then, having symbolically given the finger to the J-man, we went home for a genuinely traditional Christmas activity: playing with all our cool new shit. Here’s an abbreviated list of my crap:

1 bottle Laphroaig (that’s scotch). This is for the sweet drinking and hello floor.

1 bottle of some highfalutin’ cognac. It’s so highfalutin’, I cannot determine the actual brand name. After a couple glasses, I call it “Pwim!” As in the construction, “Gibbe mena gassa pwim! Gibba gibba!” And then I am gently informed that I’ve had enough pwim.

1 Spider-Man game for the Game Cube. I am praying that, as seen in the TV commercial, there is a game option that lets me be an enthusiastic heavyset black man who chases Spider-Man around hassling him verbally.

1 All-Clad 16-Qt. Stockpot. This costs more than my apartment, so it’s only fitting that we have to live in it now. Finally, the world can know the answer to the vexing question, “What does Skot-flavored broth tastes like?” The result will most likely be, it seems, “Well, booze.”

2 kitchen mandolines. This due to poor communications skills amongst friends. I have big plans for these babies, not unironically involving Bruce Hornsby: I’m going to kidnap him and swiftly slice all his fingers into neat little piles of medallions while he screams along to the strains of his old hit “Mandolin Rain.” Christ, I’m a fucking cutie!

2 DVDs of Bull Durham. See above re: my friends are all closed-mouthed hermits. Also, they drink. I must find a hiding place in my stockpot for all this goddamn booze. Hmmm. Easier still just not to invite them over any more. It’s not like I don’t have an excuse. “Sorry. I live in a stockpot.”

And then there’s a bunch of other crap, but I . . . well, I can’t talk any more. It is time. If you hear the metal-on-metal rustle of, oh, a stockpot lid being stealthily lifted? Picture a shadowy figure emerging, cautiously, because the figure appears to be listing slightly. The figure is clutching an empty booze bottle. From inside the stockpot, you perhaps can hear muffled . . . are they screams? Is that MOR piano music too? You can’t tell. The figure is on the move; a staggering, halting move. Then–then! He takes to the skies! He’s unspooled some webbing from his wrist, and is brachiating uncertainly into the night. You can just make out some mysterious words: “Spiddama! Spiddama! Wait up! Youwanna watcha Budderam! ‘Sfunny movie! Spiddama, wait up! I gotsa lotsa pwim!”

With great power comesh gribba baltoods.

I am staring at this website and thinking, “Man, this is cool!” I am also thinking, “What the fuck do all these weird buttons do?” And also, “I see a toolbar with an eyeball and a target and a big T and a magnifying glass. Hm.” Not to mention, “The God of the Internet is an angry, malign God.” And finally, “It sure was nice of my good friend Frykitty to set this all up for me. Either that, or she really hates me.”

More to come, unless I fuck this up beyond all hope, which is, of course, entirely possible.