Thursday, June 29, 2006

Hypercolor Kittens Would Be Neat

Every now and then a person who so obviously doesn’t know me will ask what I do in my spare time.

“What do you do with yourself?” they ask, as if the prospect of being someone besides themselves is just completely unfathomable. And while I’d like to say that I just drive home in a daze, function switch set to ‘off’ because the only time I feel worthy of living is when I’m in Your Presence, my honesty bone compels me to be, well, honest and I have to tell them the truth:

I lure in stray puppies and sometimes a cute bunny so that I may skewer them for grilling and while I’m at it, I save their wee furry heads so I can crunch happily upon them as an after-dinner snack. And their bony little tails make excellent wind chimes.

FIND THE TRANSITION

This morning I woke up in the foulest of moods, the kind where you dare your fellow rush hour drivers to cut you off or that one person to call who would make just one snide remark, just one, effectively rendering you a veritable missile of hatred-spewing word vomit and maybe a sharp object if they’re unlucky enough to be in the same room. This may or may not be in direct correlation to how much I slept last night and for that, I’d like to thank the really annoying lop-eyed kid from the nursery last night. I know I should like him because he’s a kid and sometimes he gets these moments where you can see how desperately he wants to be loved upon but I got news for ya kid: When you throw tantrums like YOU throw tantrums, don’t nobody want to be all up in your snot-smeared face. He’s got a cry that ceased being a cry about 45 decibels ago and turned into an ear-splitting wail. In fact, he sounds exactly like the tornado sirens that go off every Wednesday at noon and I don’t mean the buffered noise I hear inside an insulated building I mean the sound I hear when I’m standing ten feet away from the damn thing and it takes every ounce of sanity to remember that clawing out your eardrums with your finger is never a good option. Shoving a thin cylindrical object such as a pen or an icepack directly into your ear canal is much more efficient.

It wasn’t even that fact that the kid got on my nerves, though he did, or the fact that he wailed, which he definitely did. It was that during the fourteen times I woke up last night I heard that rising, falling, rising, falling wail inside my head. Which is pretty craptacular if you think about it because I SLEEP WITH EARPLUGS.

This isn’t really a good transition but I never claimed to be good at those so instead I’ll just tell you about the random dream I had last night, which isn’t really random because if all of your dreams are random them they actually turn into Normal but when you tell other people you have to revert back to the Random designation. For instance I once dreamed I walked into my high school gym for an evening of festivities known as “mixers” which I personally think is like a slap in the face because they can’t call it a cocktail party, seeing as how we’re underage, so they call it a mixer because they know that’s all we can buy. And don’t lie, I know you stole your dad’s margarita mix and put it in a glass in an attempt to be cool. Kind of like those bubblegum cigarettes they used to sell – you can’t have the real thing yet but damn if they don’t tease you about it.

Back to the walking in the gym part: When I arrived I pushed open the double doors to see a gym decorated right out of Sixteen Candles. Bleachers still out, disco balls twirling, maintenance men cringing at the hard soled shoes scuffing the gym floor. The only odd thing being that everyone was a vegetable. As in carrots and broccoli and cauliflower. Like they had put on a vegetable mascot suit and yet not because, well, I don’t know. All I can tell you is that they weren’t wearing suits, they were vegetables and I could see their faces and arms and legs sprouting from their vegetable torsos. And, oh yeah, no one would dance with me because I wasn’t a vegetable. Don’t cry for me, Argentina.

As for the dream last night, the only thing that makes it Random was the fact that nothing happened. I was sitting on a plane, ipod in hand. Only, I don’t actually own an ipod because ipods cost dollars and I’m running short on those. But that was the dream. Sitting on a plane with blue seats and the occasional window view. And every time I woke up I remembered having more of that dream, uneventful as it was.

I know, you totally wish you were me right now.

2 comments:

Dan said...

I don't know, I think the fact that everyone was a vegetable makes it random well before the fact that nothing happened comes into play. But that's just me. I understand that our experience of the world may be different, because, you know, you're a girl.

Carl from L.A. said...

The skewering of puppies and bunnies in the beginning of your post makes a nice contrast with the vegetable people in your dream at the end of your post. See, there is some coherency. A good one, actually. Profound even.