Peaeater

Is the internet worth saving? After watching this, I heartily say "Um, well probably, I guess."

http://www.wearetheweb.org/

Yesterday Rachelle steam-cleaned the carpets, and afterwards wanted to implement a front door policy whereby we wipe our feet with baby wipes before walking into the house. I thought this was a clear case of supra-fussy overdomestication, and began to dance my derision in the manner of a retard kangaroo. Unfortunately, I hopped with a little too much retard and not enough roo, landed wrong on my left foot, and twisted my ankle.

While I lay on the bed with an ice pack to reduce the swelling, I remembered that my mother used to tell me "that's what the fairies do to you" whenever I received some poetically just punishment for sassing her.

Like the time Aunt Surinder was over, and I can't even remember what it was mum told me to do, but as I walked backwards out of the kitchen while tossing off some impudent (and surely witty) series of remarks, my foot planted itself on thin air instead of the top step down to my room. I must have looked very surprised as I cartwheeled ass over tea kettle down the flight of stairs.

Mum and Surinder laughed long cackling laughs like the horrid Baba Yagas they were, and sure enough, "that's what the fairies do to you" floated down to where I lay in a crumpled heap, ass now wedged solidly in tea kettle, cursing fairies and all their ilk.

I thought I was safe from those little buggers, but apparently they're back.

The other day while on a telephone call with my sister Shannon, I unconsciously picked up from the counter, and nibbled on, what I took to be a piece of cheddar. It was not, o god, a piece of cheddar. I spat it out. It was, I think, a bit of shpleck cut from the inside of a red pepper, who knows how long ago. Blerrrrrgggh.

This - the semi-conscious picking up of little things and trying to eat them - is a very bad habit I have inherited from my mother, the queen of nibbling on suspicious crumbs without really thinking. Here are two examples which are hallowed in family lore.

The Counter Caper

While talking on the phone (you see? you see?) Mom feels compelled to let her fingers rove around the counter looking for crumbs. Num num. The fingers pick up what, in their estimation, is a delicious morsel. Pinch. Lift to mouth. Chew. CAT FOOD, TUNA!!

The Christmas Nuts

Every Christmas, the Christmas pyramid is lit, a German tradition with a German Weihnachts pyramide, imported from Germany. It involves a number of candles, which give off enough heat to drive a balsa-wood propellor, which revolves to whirl a bunch of nativity figures about. It's terrifically christmas-ish - "a wonderful combination of the true Christmas spirit and mechanical fantasy." You should get one.

So, I've mentioned candles. Moving on. On the coffee table, hard by the pyramid, is a bowl of nuts. Mmm, pre-shelled nuts. Not unusual for the time of year. Mom is gazing off into space, perhaps the fire, I can't recall. With the conscious mind detached, the fingers once again feel free to roam the space nearby, checking for small edible objects that can be grasped and snuck into the mouth without the mind noticing. They stumble across the cache of nuts. They begin to shuttle the nuts from bowl to maw, and are given a great deal of positive feedback by that portion of the brain left, in the absence of presence of mind, in charge of food-gathering activities: "Mmff. Nuts good. More. Mm. More nuts." Whipped on by this blind halfwit sybarite overseer, the fingers quest for more nuts, or in their limited parlance, unrelated to taste, small roundish hard objects. And they find something that fits the bill. Up it goes, into the mouth! Crunch. MATCH HEAD, BURNT!!

Last night Rachelle and I heard strange noises outside, and sure enough, we looked out and saw five raccoons leave our front yard and cross the street. It's a good thing the cat was inside, we said, because he's fairly stoopid about knowing when to tangle and when not to tangle.

That's what we meant. What Rachelle actually said was "I don't think he's stupid enough to run away," and I corrected her by saying "No, you mean he's not stupid enough to run away." Then we pondered what we'd just said, and our brains began to self-immolate.


Neither works even though they're opposites. Think about it ten times fast.

Here's another one I've always enjoyed, created accidentally by my sister Kinza, and one of a cluster of malapropistic oddities I've come to call Kinzisms. It's based on a warning printed on car sideview mirrors: "objects in mirror are closer than they appear." Kinza switched out one word and transformed it into a mind-bending optico-grammatical illusion.


When you put the mirror in your mind's eye and try to follow the statement's logic, "seem" and "appear" war with each other to devastate the brainal area.

I couldn't say how profound or useful these mental exercises really are, but it beats television.

In the spirit of (partially) adventure and (mostly) not bothering to look for more suitable ingredients, I have just consumed a peanut-butter and cheese sandwich. So far my stomach has not exploded, though I am starting to feel kind of wobbly in there.

There is a man at the gym. The man is an ordinary looking fellow in his mid 40s. He sits it up, he runneth cardio-ways, lifts, pushes, pulls, and squats weight, and is completely within acceptable social parameters in all these pursuits.

But his body odour is outlandish. As to severity: eye-squintingly rank. As to radius, 6 meters (20 feet) be the hot zone.

No one, least of all me, tells him his stench could outdo a gangrene-ridden warthog with a penchant for rolling in its own filth. I have sat there at the lat pulldown machine with him next to me, pulling down and breathing only through my mouth (to no avail because I could still taste his rank and tangiferous pong), and have said nothing nor given any sign of discomfort.

Looking straight ahead and giving no sign takes effort. How many of us have suffered - without a whimper - flatulential assault in the elevator? Or the meeting room? Where did we learn this?

So anyway, hundreds of possible things to say run through my head, but nothing comes out of my mouth but the odd gasping choke. What is wrong with me? What is wrong with him?

Sir, please: avoid fried or spicy foods, caffeine and garlic. Wear excessive amounts of deodorant, anti-perspirant, air freshener, and Toilet Duck. Allergies? Allergies be damned! You smell, sir!

Somebody, please, tell me what to say in ordinary people-speak. All I can think of are diseased warthog excrement analogies.

The other day I went over to my mother's house for dinner, and she brought out her latest paper to show off, all nicely printed out with margins and whitespace and big-falutin' words, and began to buzz something about the wonderlovely font she wrote it in, when my eyeballs swooped in on the text and seized in horror. It was Comic Sans.

If you don't know what I mean, this is Comic Sans. And it sucks, truly, monkey flaps.

Mom thought it was the greatest thing since sliced Arial. I don't know what it is about that generation, but they all love Comic Sans. Show any one of them, who has never gone about it before, how to make a web page, and I guarantee it'll be crawling with Comic Sans before 10 minutes are out.

Someone, at least, has their head screwed on right: http://bancomicsans.com/. Put the sans back in Comic Sans!

P.S. Oh wait, I didn't give a reasonable argument as to why comic sans is so much completely the suck. Yeah, let me muster my carefully researched and cogent lines of debate:

"Comic sans looks like the shambling tumored scrawl of a left-handed hebephrenic half-pudding dolt boy what has first poked himself up the honk with a whittled stick."

There. End quote.

The blackberry is summer's perfect vegetable. Sweet, black, and able to defend itself with coiling arms beset with spikèd thorns and thornicious points, it is a son of a bitch. To reach the plump cluster-blobs of good black berries, you must fight and reach and yelp and curse. And this is why I love the blackberry, because it rewards only the persistent idiot.

Now I shall make jam.

http://www.peaeater.com/uploaded_files/tgs_chumbly.mp3

Yet one more reason to love homestarrunner.

I enjoyed our time up at the lake. The "cabin" has come a long way since last May when its footings were first established. Our home could fit into one of the basement rooms and still have ample space for parking out front.

The lakeside manse is heated and cooled with geothermal energy derived from three shafts sunk deep into the earth, which I hoped at first would circulate magma about the place, until I was told that the shafts are only a couple of hundred feet deep. Still faintly disappointed about that. It hadn't been fully installed yet, actually, so we sweltered through intense magma-like weather until things clouded over and cooled off. Which was the same day the technician arrived to complete the installation, of course. I'll not complain too much - the technician was a fat, gasping, clam-faced fellow in his late 70s who hovered at the brink of cardiac arrest throughout his time with us. A hotter day would have killed him, and where would we have hidden the body? (Oh yes, the shafts...)

We arrived at lunchtime on a Sunday, so hot, I mentioned already, that I would have composed some rambling epic simile comparing my headache to a ravening lion, which coming down from the hills driven by gnawing hunger, crouches in the verdant tree-copse beside the swift stream that gushes forth from the grove sacred to the white-armed goddess beloved by the Boeotians, there to leap upon the easily scattered yearling lambs, running, leaping with the fresh kill limp between his teeth, his great heart beating fiercely, driven off by the well-shot stones from the shepherd's sling, but who can think in that heat?

In the evening as the sun went down, the clouds pushed each other towards us from the south-west. They were surly and bruised black - it wasn't long before they began to lash the hills with lightning, and sheets of it flashed all over the sky. We watched the storm drive up the lake until it surrounded us, and we were forced inside by the rough wind and pummeling rain. The power went out. A handful of orange candle flames trembled inside, white electric spiderwebs sizzled outside.

The rest of the week settled into a steady routine of in, on, around, and many other prepositions, too many to list, the lake. I read 2 inches of book entitled The Breakdown of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, which I bought on a whim at Chapters because they didn't have any of the books I actually intended to want. It is a fun read that will make you re-think what you know of ancient history and the nature of the human mind, but mainly I recommend buying it to prop casually on your coffee table, there to impress the heck out of friends and relatives, based on the reaction I got. Really I would have liked to argue, I mean discuss, the many very interesting and contentious points brought up in the book, but you need both a knowledgeable and argumentative opponent, I mean friend, to do that. Rachelle tries, and she likes to talk, but I can see her getting tired of arguing just as I'm gearing up. Oh Rachelle, don't you know I wanted a screeching fishwife with a Ph.D. in Classics for a marital partner? I'm sure I mentioned that at some point.

There were various sunburns, because I burn easily, which one day a doctor is sure to tell me was the cause of his "cancer of the whole thing" diagnosis. I'm at risk for cancer of the colon already, but I'm pretty sure the sun didn't shine up there. I also made my usual pathetic attempt to stand sideways on a board behind a boat while gallons of lakewater did their best to ram forcefully up passages the sun had not been able to penetrate.

There is more, but I have to stop.