Sure, Nutella Tastes Good, But It Ain't No Peanut Butter.

Riding in the elevator down to the lobby, it occurs to me that I should have brought my wallet so I could get a bag of Cool Ranch after picking up the applications, and get two birds stoned at once. I'll just have to get it later.

With a tone the doors shift open, and I wince as my boots click on the granite floor. I feel like a villain. How does one hush the click of their boots? Glue cotton balls to the sole, soften things up a little. Like a metaphor or something. What does the sound of your shoes suggest about the tenderness of your soul?

What should my shoes sound like? A louder thud with a legato hum, one step slurs into the other with a sort of, I don't know...letter B. Each sounds like a "buh," loud and stretched, but squashy all the same. Maybe not squashy. Butternutty? Is that what my soul sounds like?

I love pushing through this revolving door, because each revelation is like saving the earth.

Rain. Rain should always be like wandering into the middle of a cool, invisible surprise party. One where I am the guest of honor. We're having a good time, getting into a little mischief, and we've gotten over the awkward small talk and have yet to enter blinding, drunken turbulence. From this moment on, I will try to live life like that.

Also:

Dear Me,

Stop eating Reese's pumpkins, fatty. Live life like that. Without all the peanut butter.

Love, Me

Will Reese's ever develop Nutella cupcakes? That could be delicious. But then I would have to eat two at once (one to cancel the other) because Nutella just makes me wish I had peanut butter.

"Hello, ladies," I say to the two smiling, elderly principals waiting for me in their car on the street. They hand me packages of school grant applications, and I thank them for beating the deadline, and they ask if I have an umbrella. I explain that I have bad luck with umbrellas, because sometimes I get drunk and give them to homeless people sleeping in boarded doorways. We say goodbye. As they shift back into the busy traffic I offer a wave, when a random angry-looking woman stalks up to me.

"This is the FUCKING BUS LANE," she shouts angrily, and flicks off the nice old ladies in the car before trying to stare me down.

I point at her and laugh, and keep on chuckling over my shoulder as I click back into the office building through the rain.

Today is a good day.

...

Take That, Rain.

The handle of my umbrella juts out of the corner of my purse when it's not raining. Sure, I have a smaller, lighter umbrella that I could carry, but it's all cockamamie and horsefeathers and gets lazy and inverted way too easily. Passive, weak, piece of shit umbrella.

I've been trucking around with the good one for over a week and I never get to use it. I keep missing the rain by minutes. The rain knows, I think, that my umbrella would whoop its ass.

So instead, I strut around the Loop in pinstripe pants and dirty Pumas, the staple of office-hour commuters, grasping the handle of my umbrella at my waist like the hilt of a sword.

I hawk at the sky, challenging the clouds.

Try me. I dare you.

At least until the bus gets here.

...

Scripturally, No One Survives A Tragedy

Several weeks ago, months, whatever, some of the girls I work with came up with the brilliant idea of having a book club. We were going to meet every Wednesday, have lunch, and sit around and talk books, just like Oprah and Gayle.

In the emergence of a book club, the immediately pressing issue is determining what books to read. This was hard, because I love many things that many people think are stupid. So after a highly inspirational and convincing argument for book four of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (The Dagger Affair), my opinion was decreed dysfunctional, and therefore void.

One of my co-workers googled a list of "Classics" which was absolutely fine with me, but boring, because I'd already read most of the books on that goddamn list, and The Man From U.N.C.L.E. totally houses that shit. Google’s second list of classics was better (everyone's got an opinion), and one of the first books on the list was Slaughterhouse Five.

Not one of my co-workers had read it. Some of them had never even heard of Kurt Vonnegut.

Now, I’ve been umbrella-ed by the assumption that if you're even partially sane (you could be crazy, and I don’t want to get too ambitious here), there are certain things you like in this country: The Goonies and Kurt Vonnegut.

Those who didn’t like them were a myth, like dragons, mermaids, soul mates, and people who honestly believe that teachers get paid too much money. Shouldn't my co-workers just have soaked up Vonnegut somehow at their respectable colleges - Notre Dame, Georgetown, Cornell? Especially with all those smart people running around? How have these people lived their twenty-whatever years without flashes of him, without hearing his name?

I launched into a tirade of Are You Fucking Kidding Me and Dude Seriously. But then I realized that not everyone hates themselves as much as I do, and therefore they probably want to read things where people fall in love and collect sea shells and count the stars all romantically.

"That's it. Okay. You guys pick out your book. I'll read whatever. But his books are like, good." That's it, Rass. They're good. They're all crumbly and broken and full of more heart and self than nearly anything else I've read. They're written by a man who truly understands satire, because if life's not a satire, then we've been handed a tragedy, and realistically, scripturally: no one survives a tragedy.

So like I said. They're good.

If I could choose any way to be sheltered from the big, scary world, it would be in knowing that everyone believes in evolution and everyone likes Vonnegut. That everyone who's read any of his words was instantly tickled and contemplative, just like the first time I read Slaughterhouse Five, god, how long ago? I was fourteen, I think? Math it up, nerds.

So, happy birthday, Mr. Vonnegut, and happy Veterans' Day too.

For a much better blog honoring Kurt Vonnegut, please read Pistols', because mine is way inferior.

...

On another note, I've literally broken another umbrella, and it's raining liquid frogs out there. I'm pretty sure that I'm just going to give up on covering my head altogether and deal with being wet.

...

An Update of Run-On Sentences

1. One of my breathtakingly amazing friends was beaten and robbed outside of her apartment early Sunday morning. This is bullshit, and I will not stand for it. Thinking about it pisses me off. Just so's you knows.


2. This morning there was a distinct burning smell lurking on the street outside. It's really no surprise, since last night I watched lightening strike the hospital across the street. Chicago had a particularly thunderous storm.

After an eleven hour day at BSF, I decided to walk home from the Loop, being the courageous idiot that I am. Inverted another umbrella and got holed up in a 7-11 for over an hour and a half with other stupid ass pedestrians, watching garbage cans roll into the street and reading Maxim articles to each other while tornado sirens yelled at everyone dumb enough to walk the streets. It was all strangers cracking jokes and shallow bonding, like a bad TV drama. I left first, which means that if it were a bad TV drama, I would have been injured or killed.

Once I finally made it home I'd surpassed the windstorm, but not the rain. It's always good to read on the porch during a lightening storm, I think, as long as you don't mind the thunderpunches. I swapped out Snitch Jacket for It because It's scarier and sat out there for awhile. I jumped a lot, but it was kind of like being in a Lou Christie song.

Best storm in a while. Trees were breaking and snapping and toppling into the street, constant sirens, thunder thunder thunder. After it let up at about midnight I headed out with some neighbors to clear out the sewer drains so the puddles would let up, and learned to recognize them by their faces instead of their dogs, so the night wasn't a total loss, and now I know the Joel the Akita is owned by Chris, who unfortunately is wrinkled and sixty instead of pectoralled and thirty. Less Morgan Freeman, more Christian Bale, hell, more Seth Rogen.


3. If you apply the Page 99 Test to Snitch Jacket, you get this fantastic exchange:

Gus shook his head and drank. "They don't take these details into account when they make up our so-called laws, Benny. I say so-called because I don't recognize their authority over me, since I'm an Outlaw. Outlaw's a state of mind, brother. Saying, 'No one controls me.' You didn't know I was a philosopher too. My master's Mr. F. Nietzsche, the Kraut. He invented a lot of this shit. He's the second greatest Outlaw of all time."

"Who's the first?"

"Jesus Christ. I'm a Roman Catholic from way back."

"Jesus Christ?"

"He was the original Outlaw, and he hated the rich, and he fucked up their shit, which is why they had to kill him. A man who makes up his own rules is too dangerous to keep around. Same deal with Satan, who if you ask me always got a bad rap."

Listening, I began to grasp the appeal of a headcase like Charlie Manson. Say a thing with enough fire and conviction, add a few fistfuls of Svengali charisma, and just about anything sounds true. Gus Miller's mind, it occurred to me, was as chaotic as his van. He had been picking up things for years that he couldn't bring himself to throw away. So his brain-pan swarmed with wild notions snatched from a book half-read in 1972, a conversation with a street-corner prophet in Detroit, maybe a 10-year-old-LSD-induced revelation or two: anything he touched went into the bitch's brew of his philosophy.

I'm only on page 32, so we'll see how we get there. Should be good though, since Page 99 Test = fool proof.


4. So within the next month, I'm flying out to DC and driving back immediately to take the Yellavitch (sister) home from her government internship, three days later I leave for Vegas for Yellavitch's 21st birthday celebration, and then one week after that I'm flying out to San Diego for two days and driving back to Chicago on Route 66 with MoLinder, a trailer, and two cats so she can become my new roommate, since Xtine is moving in with her Monkey-Ass boyfriend. Run-on.


5. This means that in the first week of September I will acquire a new roommate and two fucking cats. Never had cats before, and I'm slightly nervous that we'll be mistaken for a stereotypical lesbian couple of Crazy Cat Ladies, what with my sewing machine and herb garden and DIY projects.

Shit.

I should start wearing make up and throw away my hiking boots.


6. My foot itches, big time, and I've been scratching it with a key for better effectiveness against itchery.

...

Umbrella drama.

I'm assuming that it's normal for people to get really excited about a new blog template. Which explains my apathy.

I'll figure it out.

So, if a statistician were to choose the subset of human dregs at my bus stop to represent the people of Earth in a study, she would realize that people are assholes.

It was raining today. Six of the eight of us have umbrellas. Given my luck with umbrellas, I was not one of them. Pretty sure I've gone through no less than six and no more than eight umbrellas in the past twelve months. The most recent two were last seen (a) careening down Milwaukee Avenue and (b) in the hands of a guy who sleeps in doorways somewhere on Western*. You would think that one of these people would offer to share their shelter, either with me or the old man sitting on the bench. Just out of courtesy, you know. Long gone are the days of sharing cabs with strangers.

After half an hour of cowering under some tree branches I looked down the street and realized that the 56 wasn't going to get there until LOST gave us answers, so I took a chance. I walked over to CVS, bought another umbrella, and smiled when everyone was still at the bus stop. Bus still far.

So I walked over to the old guy on the bench who was also sans umbrella and smiled and said, "You want in on this?" while I held it over his head. You know, because I'm a good person.

Duder looks at me and growls, "Whatgoddamnever," sticks out his underbite and scowls.

Prick.

I still held it over his head out of sheer spite while he scratched himself. Fucker getting all dry and shriveled now? Good.

Oh, and I totally broke my umbrella when I tried to close it.


*Just a little post script: sometimes I get drunk, give shit away, and waste the next day in a hungover fox hunt.


...

In which I describe my attachment to office supplies and an umbrella shows me who’s boss.

Paper clips, although shiny, usually don’t kick up any sort of immediate response in me. Emotionally. But this one is better. Stronger. Faster. Well-balanced, light weight, and slightly thinner than your average paper clip. Better. Of course, I don’t want to use it on just any stack of paper. If I snag him, I set him aside and wait for a really good group of letters or a bigger donation or a draft that I’m particularly proud of. Something worthy.

I’m worried that someday someone will discover its superiority and switch it out with a normal paper clip, hoping I don’t notice. I fucking would, you bastards, and I won’t rest until it’s back. Clip thievery is a serious offense, and I’ll make sure that you only have access to the shitty dull scissors and the really thin tipped pens that feel scratchy no matter what you’re writing on.

Thanks for bearing with that.

On another note, I also have to purchase a new umbrella, because on Tuesday night my last one thought it would be hifuckinlarious to make friends with the Northwest Wind and invert the shit out of itself and drag me backwards up Franklin.

I finally snap the thing back into place and the shaft and handle are all buckled and warped at this awkward 45 degree angle under the umbrella top, which, of course, is as loose as a hooker in Vegas, or a belt on Thanksgiving. So I have to hold the metal skeleton of the umbrella top as well as the handle to avoid further inversion. Eventually the bus comes and I don’t need to worry about the rain.

Then Wednesday morning I’m waiting for the bus in the rain again, focusing all of my attention on keeping the remains of my umbrella frame as attached as possible until I get on the bus. And goddammit if that stubborn-ass umbrella doesn’t flip all inside out and upside down and truck me down the street all over again. Lame.

Of course, that drunken bastard Northwest Wind comes over all windy-like and snaps the damn umbrella top clean off and leaves me standing there at my bus stop holding a twisted metal umbrella handle. I whirling-dervish for about ten seconds and challenge the 56 bus sign to a duel. Broken umbrella shafts seemingly do not hold up to the strain of a swordfight. I’m all pissed off and look up the street to watch the carcass of my umbrella top freewheel down Milwaukee and scratch past bikers. Not fucking cool.

...

Don't mock my fucking parasol

So last night I decided my dog and I needed to go for a walk, so he could run around in circles and piss on things and so I could secretly smoke a cigarette at three o'clock in the morning.

Most unforch, however, was the fact that it was raining, and although I don't mind the rain, cigarette-smoking in the rain has proved to be somewhat difficult in the past. So I went on a quiet search for an umbrella, and discovered that my house has two of them. The first was a skeletal, burnt umber (I got that color from my Crayolas) thing, and it was not very securely attached to its frame. The second was my old hot pink parasol from about 1986. Hooked handle, frilly edges, not wide enough to cover my shoulders. And I thought, "dude, parasol, hands down" and I worked it, bra-less, with my sweet ass umbrella, hawaiian shorts, "we ain't trash no more" tshirt and hiking boots. And my crazy buttsniffing dog.

So I'm like, "It's three in the morning as Sunday becomes Monday. There will be no people anywhere." I might have even said it out loud to my dog, to further convince myself that my appearance will be kept between the two of us. I walk down the street. Turn the corner. Light my cigarette. Then there is talking. I'm like, whatever. Then there's giggling. Bitch, don't laugh at me.

This kid (in my head he's a kid because he's four years younger than me and I've known him since I was seven, but he's about 20 years old) is sitting on his porch with about six of his friends, drinking and smoking. Not a big deal, whatever, even though I took care of his dog when his family was on vacation. I walk right past the house and feel kinda ballsy despite my trailer attire, so I'm like, "What's up guys?" and they start laughing and yell, "Nice umbrella." I'm just trying to be social here. Don't mock my fucking parasol. So I just laugh it off, and say, "Shut the hell up," and they just giggle and talk quietly. Bastards.

...