dreadcrumbs

The Shower of The Damned

As the drain in our main shower is clogged (probably with bones and hair), I am forced to use a secondary shower that sports a curtain that I improvised from a large sheet of packing plastic. The plastic wasn't made to be a shower curtain, of course, and waves about in the breeze created by the water falling from the faucet. It also sticks to me. As I'm standing in the shower, it occasionally creeps, silently, toward me and affixes itself to my flesh. I usually bat the creeping swath away and am given a 3-5 second respite before we begin the game again.

In any case, this morning, as I was washing the night's filth off of my face, I felt the soft yet deeply annoying touch of the sheetbeast on my shoulder. Because my hands were occupied massaging the grime off my eyelids, I just twisted my body away from The Thing with a jerk. Unfortunately, perhaps because I couldn't see what I was doing, The Sheet held tightly, and my twist served only to pull the plastic from the shower rod and I subsequently entwined myself deeply into its clutches.

You would think this would be bad enough, but when I was finally able to pull my hands from my face (the plastic had pinned my arms to my body), I discovered them covered in blood. No euphemism here, just standard-issue bright red blood, mixed with water. In my struggles to extricate myself from my Polyurethane Prison, I left bloody hand smears all over the plastic. It was kind of a disturbing sight. Blood on plastic wrap has a wrongness about it that you can't really explain.

It turns out that the blood wasn't coming from the faucet, or from a freshly killed animal in the rafters or anything, though. I just had a nosebleed.

Which is odd unto itself, and means, of course, that I am under psychic attack. And that means I'm going to have to wear the tinfoil hat to work again. I hate that. People always make fun of me when I wear the tinfoil hat.

Microstory Monday

David, Lettuce, and Tomato
Dave hands me a sandwich and sits down across from me, his arms still covered in bandages from the motorcycle accident.
"So what do you think?" Dave asks, watching me take a bite.
"Good," I say, chewing. "It's a BLT."
"Ah," he says. "But it isn't!"
"Really?" I ask, looking at the sandwich, and then back at Dave. "What is it?"
"You know how Mom always said we should make lemonade when life gives us lemons?"
"Yeah..." I say, setting the sandwich down.
"That is no mere sandwich, little brother," he says, gesturing with a flourish, "that is a scabwich!"

Friday Fives

The top five things I had hoped to see in my wife's ultrasound today (but didn't)

5. Horns
4. My missing keys
3. A barbed tail
2. Rare and wondrous placental diamonds
1. A toothy fetal grin

Caveat Venditor

Since I'm official moving to a new house tomorrow, I placed an ad on craigslist.org a few days ago to see if I could get any local buyers to take my 300 pound behemoth of a tv off my hands, as I really don't want to move that sucker again.
I hadn't gotten any real bites, but this morning someone named "Raymond Seaman" sent me an email asking if the tv was still available. I replied saying it was, but that I would only accept cash for it. A few hours later, I get this from Raymond:

"Hello,
Thanks for your promt reply on my inquiry.well  i am very much interested in the item and i want to make a quick purchase of it.i will make you an offer of $650 for you not to sell it to any one.i would have love to come my self to come have a good look at it but i am sorry i cannot come becos i am too busy to do just that.i have the money here with me and i want to send it throuh money order where you can recieve it cash through a verification number that will be needed for them to send it to you and also i want you to consider the fact that i am a very busy man and i have two kids to take care of and also i go to work around 6-am in the morning and come back around 11-pm in the night.that is the more reason why i can't come in person. 
        Don't worry about who will be coming to pick the item up,my fedexshipping company will be doing that for where you will not pay a dime for it.so if this is okay with you,kindly get back to me with your payment informaion of whom and where i want to send the money such as Name,Address,State,Zip/Code,and Phon number so that i can proceed with the payment."

Right. I weep for this guy's "kids." Despite his having his own "fedexshipping" company, I decided I would not be doing business with good Mr. Seaman, so I sent him the following reply:

"Hello,
Sorry ray but i just cant sell to someone who cant pay cash or even pick up the tv. tough luck on those 17-hour work days i guess the tv would be to keep your two kids company while your gone unless you have figured out how to live on 2 hrs sleep a day then you would still have some time to watch tv. if you actually have figured out how to live on 2 hrs sleep for real though i would very much like to hear your secret becos i have tried pills and water bottles and even live animals but i still need to sleep at least 7 hrs at night. i hate it cos there are so many special things i want to do at night but i waste all my time sleeping.
Anyways sorry again about not bein able to sell you the tv."

I hope he understands it isn't personal. I mean, I don't even have a "Phon," whatever that is.

Microstory Monday

Living With Mental Illness
When I come home from work, Alice is wearing the cactus suit and staring at a puddle of spilled milk on the kitchen floor.
"I can't clean it up," she says, still staring at the spill. "The suit doesn't bend at the knees."
I sigh, and she looks up at me, her teary eyes barely visible inside the spiny facemask.
"Hug me," she says.

Friday Fives

The Five Things I tend to do when greeted in passing with the phrase "How you doing?"

5. Stare blankly at the speaker
4. Wince
3. Nod vacantly
2. Stop walking, wait a second, and then say "Excellent!" louder than is normal
1. Not say "Fine, how are you?" in return

I know. I'm not sure what my problem is, either.

Loo Lady, The Next Generation

Those of you who have the unfortunate distinction of having followed this blog from early on know about my neverending struggle with the woman who cleans the bathrooms at work. It took me many weeks to decipher her cleaning patterns and time my defecatory jaunts in such a way as to avoid being interrupted in my business by the linguistically vague call of "Somebady-Hier?" She was a wily foe, mixing up her schedule randomly, but I had at last seemed to be able to intuit her movements and avoid her completely.

Until now.

There is a new cleaning lady, a different cleaning lady, and she follows a different pattern. Ridiculous, really, to even use the word "pattern." Her movements are surely governed by some kind of bizarre non-linear algebra, and are utterly impossible to predict. I am nursing a theory that she is a cog in some leviathan entropy machine, churning away at the dissolution of reality. "Cleaning Lady." The irony astounds me. "Amorphous blight of nethermost confusion," more like. If I didn't know her true masters were blind idiot horrors blaspheming and bubbling at the center of all infinity, I would applaud them their little joke.

Oh well. Mostly I just want to poo in peace. Is that too much to ask?

The Narcissan Eye-Gouger

There was a guy staring at himself in my workplace's bathroom mirror today. I'm not sure why. I think he might have been applying water to his mustache, but he was mostly staring. I tried not to examine the spectacle, so I can't be sure. I can only say it was deeply unsettling. Incomprehensible.

You see, as a person who can't abide his own soul-shattering stare, I avoid mirrors. I can't do it. I just can't stand to look at myself. It's horrifying.

And no, I'm not, to the best of my knowledge, hideously ugly. Neither am I guilty of such heinous misdeeds that what I see in the windows to my soul terrifies me. It's just that looking into one's own eyes seems fundamentally...Wrong.

Our eyes are placed where they are in our body so that they can see everything but themselves. Creating and using devices in such a way as to pervert that status quo is, frankly, disturbing. If someone placed a helmet apparatus on you that would safely extract your eyeballs and point them at one another, how would you actually take the procedure? Badly, I think. You would scream and vomit and barely be able to remain sane. Just seeing this happen to someone else might be enough to drive you mad.

And sure, I understand that this is a bogus comparison, as the majority of mirrors don't actually modify your physical body, but I'm trying to translate my perceptions here.

So keep that image in your head (so to speak): someone's eyes being pulled out of their head and pointed at each other, cords still trailing back into open sockets. How do you feel? Uncomfortable? Disturbed? Disgusted? Generally yucked-out? I understand. It's how I feel when I see someone looking at themselves in the mirror. And that's without considering the whole vanity issue. Imagine someone in such an eye-extractor rubbing at their teeth and patting at their hair. Truly unpleasant.

I do allow that it may be easier to use a mirror to burst facial pustules or remove dangling bits of meat from your beard, but for heaven's sake, stop staring at yourselves. It freaks the rest of us out.

Microstory Monday

A Civil Host
I've been reading humourous greeting cards to the person who lives on the other side of my basement wall. It seems ridiculous, I know, but they appear to be working, as all that incoherent shouting has finally stopped. Tedious work, though. I curse myself daily over the fact that I didn't leave a book or something for my guest to read before I bricked up his enclosure.

Friday Fives

The Five Things I Most Wish Could Be Stored Digitally (and thereby searchable and deletable)

5. My Brain
4. Everything I Own
3. Garbage
2. Food
1. Animals (especially sheep)