may contain trace quantities of nuts

whoa, you guys. 5/19/2006

i seriously just blew the biggest snot ever.

it was so great.

< something deep about life > 5/10/2006

i’ve had a very bad day. scratch that, i’ve had a very bad month. long story short, i *may* have Marfan syndrome, which is a big bummer for a lot of reasons, most of them involving cardiologists. today during my echo cardiogram, i got the shit scared out of me by the technicians.

first 8 minutes of test:
*dead silence of two technicians staring intently at a monitor i could not see*
then:
tech 1: “NICE!”
tech 2: “WOW!”

remaining 8 minutes:
*dead silence of two technicians staring intently at a monitor i could not see*

then, tech 1 tells me that if i haven’t done so already, i should schedule an appointment with my doctor so he can go over the results with me, tells me to “enjoy this great weather!” and pops out the door. without ever even aknowledging that i was the person in the room who had been doing all that nice, wow stuff they were looking at, and WHAT THE FUCK WAS IT ??

but then later today, someone i was talking to mentioned pedro the lion, and it made me think about how joe played ‘control’ almost constantly in his car when we were first dating, and it made me want to listen to a few songs, which turned out to be a good idea. because, even though the songs are miserable and about dying and cheating it still gives me nice strong echoes of the way i felt that spring when i was going through the very sweet insanity of falling in love with the most incredible person i will ever meet and i still felt semi-young, semi-beautiful and semi-immortal.

and i guess it all comes down to being able to take the good with the bad and being okay with not being in control of everything.

i’ll let you know if i ever manage to do that.

god damn you, california flora 5/8/2006

i’ve never had allergies like this in my life.

my eyes have been itching for two and a half weeks now. and i mean the kind of itching where you start rubbing your eyes and it feels so fucking good that it has to be the human equivalent of the dog’s itchy spot where his leg just loses it and everyone giggles, only im scratching at my eyes. and that’s just not cute, it’s disgusting. once i get started with the rubbing of the eyes i have to engage willpower to make myself stop. i have to tell myself that as glorious as this feels right at this moment, the second i stop, my eyes are going to be six hundred times itchier, and feel like they each have about a pound of sand in them.

i wake up sneezing at three in the morning. seriously. i wake up out of a sound sleep in a heavy sneezing fit. my throat itches constantly. today, eating a veggie burger, my tongue fell casualty to this hell on earth while doing double duty, managing the chewing and also scratching the roof of my mouth/back of my throat. it seemed to be working fairly well until i nearly bit off the entire right side of said tongue.

fortunately, no one could tell that the tears gushing out of my eyes were due to my inability to feed myself, seeing as everyone’s grown so accustomed to my eyes seeping and leaking all over me all the time. the sleeves of my shirts are permanently damp from all the eyeball mopping i have to do with them.

oh im seriously not looking good these days.

every morning, i plaster my hair down to my head because stray hairs could tickle my face and start off an itching fit that would ultimately have me going home early. then, i put in anti-histamine eyedrops, which sting, and make my eyes water. then i put in rewetting drops to soothe the sting. then i dry my eyes off for the first of what will be approximately seven thousand, nine hundred and sixty three times that day. after that i put heavy-duty moisturizer around my poor eyes because my eylelids and corners are chapped. yes, my eyes are chapped.

oh have i mentioned that allergies exacerbate eczema? no? well after i soothe my chapped eyes, i get to blob cortizone creme all over my hideously discolored and swollen face to at least try to get me to stop tearing it open in places.

i’ve become that sickly kid with the inhalers and the eyedrops and the pills and ointments and salves who sneezes and drips and coughs and can’t go outside and be healthy and robust because s/he is allergic to bright sunny spring days. this is my punishment for torturing that kid. wherever you are, werner krebs, i apologize to you for making fun of your allergies and sickliness. im not apologizing for making fun of your name, though, because i mean, come on. even by german standards, that shit’s just fucked up.

to make it all worse, there’s nothing i can do about it. in the past two weeks we’ve bought:

1. two boxes of benadryl
2. two boxes of alavert (the only shit left in the store — the shelves looked like people were preparing for a hurricane … if preparing for a hurricaine involved buying huge quantities of anti-histamines)
3. a heeeeyoooouge air-filter that has been set to “turbo” for the last two weeks in the desperate hope it will pull at least some of what’s killing me out of the air
4. a dyson vacuum cleaner, same principle
5. nasal spray
6. about three tubes of blistex
7. a big tube of cortizone creme (with aloe!)

not helping.

nevertheless, we’re considering purchasing one of those crazy-ass swedish beds that people can jump up and down on and not upset your glass of chianti. apparently they don’t have the same dust-mite problem that normal beds do and i’ve decided i just have ALL the allergies. and also? they’re made for ASTRONAUTS and maybe sleeping on something that was made for space will trick me into thinking my bedroom is a desolate place with no particles floating around in it other than quarks, neutrinos, muons and gluons, passing happily between the molecules of my body without ever touching anything, and therefore, completely unable to make me sneeze, itch, water or produce more mucous.

i think i haven’t been this unsexy since i was a ridiculously underweight 12 year old wearing sadistic freaked-out orthodontic shit and bright red sally jessy raphael glasses.

no, actually, i was still hotter then.

my eyeballs just exploded 5/5/2006

is this the honkiest motherfucker on the planet? seriously.

go on. detonate your eyeballs.

Bob is my biggest fan. 5/4/2006

Bianca brought it to my attention today that I have been remiss in checking for comments to approve. Apparently a few people actually read this. Problematically, one of those people is my manager. Hopefully he doesn’t look too close at the timestamps on these posts. Nevertheless, I had not seen the wee handful of comments that, for lack of a better term, i will call ‘legitimate’ posts (meaning: i know the freak who wrote it) because you’ve all been outshone so brightly by Bob, the most whimsical spammer ever. Seeing as there are currently something like 267 comments awaiting moderation, all penned by Bob, I almost ticked the mass delete option and forgot about it, until I figured I had better check for comments from YOU people before doing that. That’s how close we came to never having known Bob.

I think what I like most about Bob is his piquant marriage of both subtle irony and a real art for the absurd. To be sure, he’s posted plenty of “online blackjack - texas holdem - viagra” comments, but every artist has to make a living, right? What I’m going to do is share some of the better ones I’ve run across, ones where Bob really let go of the borgeouis constraints of the spamming medium.

For the bored housewife:

beaded purses — home roulette supply

I seriously have to ask. Home roulette supply? What the fuck is that? Is there some weird, underground suburban black-market roulette scene going on that I’m not aware of?

safe pen-pals — sucking black men — IBS and depression

Could this, perhaps, be semi-autobiographical? They say the best art draws from the artist’s personal experiences.

Or how about

rotating hookas — canopy bed pictures

I admit, this one baffles me. Why would anyone need or want either of those two items? Furthermore, the notion of a rotating hooka kinda just blows my mind.

I think my two favorites, though, are:

professional vacuum cleaners — men sucking

and

winnipeg jobs — nonprofit jobs — job satisfaction — hand jobs

The work of a subtle genius your spam may be, Bob. It’s still not making it into my comments, though.