Monday, January 23, 2006

the ol' 7 - - 10 split

Ready... Steady... BEARD!!!

NUCLEAR holocaust will leave behind only a small cross-section of cultural items. IN terms of posterial worth, very few of them will depict a very flattering portrayal of our humanity. AMONG these unfortunate remnants, I figure, will be:
- Volvo stationwagons
- Barbara Streisand LPs
- My upstairs NEIGHbour
- Steve Harper's hairplugs (made up, as they are, of the crushed and reconstituted carapaces of cockroaches and other like members of the Conservative party)
- A few of the dinosaurs/-Stanis who hang out at PI (their nuclear immunity granted by their total obliviousness to outside occurances, such as sunshine and women)
- Windsor, Ontario
- Celine Dion's chin (it will go on)
- The Olsen Twins (though they'll have fused together to form a new variant of diabetes)
- A few stains I've had on my shirts since around the time I conspicuously didn't have my Bar Mitzvah
- This damned head-cold. My actual head, however, would be facejerky, with a pair of ceramic teeth sticking out. I hope they give Gilles Duceppe's roving eyeballs, which'll be wriggling around and scavanging on various flavours of carbonized-carrion, indigestion.
- Werther's Originals

@ @ @
MY housemates, Amy and Justine, and I, paid our scheduled visit to our upstairs neighbour yesterday. BUT we didn't pay as much as we thought we would: considering the dread we approached it with, it was quite pleasant. I was perhaps a little more conversational than I would've liked, being both quickly disarmed by her two adorable p(i/u)nt-sized dogs and a vague sensation of gratitude that anyone would talk to me sensibly whilst wielding this moronic moustache. THE lady's quite the talker, and Amy and Justine, I thought approached her with equal smatterings of respect and self-affirmation. HER chief complaints were: hearing drug-deals next door, her upstairs neighbour thumping, us playing boardgames and closing doors and talking below her and how Chinese we weren't, her dogs and her separation anxieties when she left, our mutual landlord's apparently unreasonable hope to make a profit on her real-estate ventures, spoilt students, ettycettyrah. SHE was quite amiable though, and I did warm to her. I think, despite it not really presenting any outright solutions to our insulation/insultation problems, it demystified our lives and opened up the opportunity to hate each other more reasonably in the future.
@ @ @
POSTED WITH COPYRIGHT PERMISSION (PENDING)
Grae's Post-After-Isabel'n'Grae's-Birthday-Bowling-Afterparty-Email-Post
"Boa feathers litter the apartment as I emerge from my bedroom, Sunday morning. The omnipresence of their (green?) plumage is rivaled by bottles, naturally, loot bags, fries and gravel. Not gravy, but gravel, and street salt. There is a pound of wet paper towels very poorly hidden under the love seat. I don’t know what liquid they hold. There is a pair of dejected looking boots sitting on my door mat and a pair of nasty, wet socks draped over my art portfolio to dry. Neither pair belong to me. The bathroom is, inexplicably, immaculate. I don’t know how it’s possible. I even saw a KISS army soldier removing her face makeup in my sink yet somehow it’s spotless. The miracle however, ends there as the kitchen, two feet away, is entirely opposite. My stove had an obvious collision with baked goods and was, besides the banal bottles, bottle caps, feathers, loot bags, glasses and corks, sporting my tambourine and generous helpings of gravy. The sink looks foul. Before I even get near it I can see my dustpan sticking out. In it I find the aforementioned humdrum and a Tupperware, which previously contained the remains of a frozen, moldy chicken, now holding a pool of beer in which a few of my photographs are having a lazy swim. When I fish them out I see they’re also covered in gravel, street salt *and* gravy.
"There was also a lot of awe on Sunday morning and it was not at the prospect of cleaning. Maybe it was pride. Maybe it was knowing that hosting post-bowling, birthday, costume dance parties is a privilege few people have and an ephemeral one at that. Maybe it was the rotation of impromptu DJs or that I crammed more friends and friendly strangers (cumulatively) into my apartment than ever before. Maybe it was that none of my neighbors complained about the noise. Or maybe my head was so foggy I couldn’t see so far into the future as to envisage myself actually cleaning it and was therefore left to merely marvel at the carnage and revel in the memory of its glorious conception.
"Thank you all for making this possible.
"The high point of the night might have been when our costumed crew stormed the metro to get from the bowling alley to my apartment, drinking beer from the party’s loot bags in a way reminiscent of the public drinking practice known as “brown baggin’ it” and then quite naturally coining the phrase “loot baggin’ it” but it wasn’t. The icing on my birthday cake, which came just moments before, was suitably uttering, “Yee-Haw!” as we all marched through the metro turnstiles for free because the ticket booth attendant had gone to take a leak.
"The boots have been claimed (Their owner had walked home in his bowling shoes for you curious folk). The socks, I think, were abandoned (by the looks of them I would’ve done the same) but there is a woman’s shirt (honorably discarded) and a cell phone belt clip that are of no use to me and so their owners (or whoever, really) can claim them.
"To those of you who have photos I would be grateful if you would, as my birthday present, send them to me. I will post mine shortly.
"Thanks again, Grae
P.S. Please forward my thanks to anyone who deserves it who isn't on my email list."

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