Recount? Oh hell yes I imagine so, there'll be a recount. And a recount of the recount. And an examination of the hanging chads and suspect electoral college 'contributions' and all the subsequent whining and bitching we see every single time a Republican doesn't get his way. Waaaaa waaaa waaaa.
Still.
PRESIDENT ELECT BIDEN, BITCHES!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The truth of the matter is, I am not averse to a little oxy every now and then. And my excuse this time is 'The Season'. Which is Fall.
The thing is, I'm an 'atypical responder' so a combination of substances that would land other people flat on their faces, licking the sidewalk, has me doing household minutia, happy as a clam, at 10:p.m. like:
1. Organizing and consolidating my spice cabinet. And kids, we have a whole damn three-shelf average kitchen cabinet filled top to bottom, back to front with bulk spices. I just went through 76 different bottles of various substances, organized them labels forward, and got rid of all the little half and 3/4 bottles by dumping all the matching substances into other, larger jars, and labelling them. This took me about an hour, and it smelled really good.
2. 11:30 p.m. I rinsed and ate half a jar of Spanish pimento olives. This had to happen. My stomach was a little upset, and if I have an upset stomach, the only thing that will settle it is either a lot of olive oil on a piece of bread, or straight-up olives. If you don't rinse the salt out of those green olives you end up with a worse problem than you started out with, but I am super smart and so I'm sitting here feeling fine.
Yes. I know.
3. Took care of my plastic waste. This means crushing and smashing and stomping on all our used rinsed out plastic bottles, out on the porch, smash, bash, RRRAW GODZILLA and then putting them into a big garbage can, which I did loudly. At 11:03 p.m. Hi, neighbors! I'm nuts!
4. Looked up the history of carnivals, amusement parks and fairs - the slang, the people and so forth, and now a large part of my childhood lies in ashes.
5. Took lil' Gourdie, yanked off his head to save for the seeds, and then jammed the rest of him into the mouth of our truly huge barfing pumpkin (I got rid of the barf to make room for Gourdie.) I set this charming vignette up near the sidewalk. For the past hour people have been slowing down to take a good, long look at my personal weirdness. I feel happy about this. It is offensive and inappropriate, and everyone will blame The Bejewelled Beast aka The Biker, and not me, because jolly, chubby, nice old ladies don't do shit like setting up carnivorous pumpkin-eating-a-baby-displays in their yards at 10 p.m.
6. Eaten half a bag of Doritos XXXtra Nacho Cheese Chips because who wouldn't do that at 10:p.m.? (See entry number 2. I paid for my Dorito-y sins with green pimento stuffed olives, rinsed. I should sleep well tonight. Right? Huh?)
7. Made detailed plans to use my Bissel Steam mop on the kitchen and bathroom floors. Planned that shit out like the Invasion of Normandy Beach. Then I realized that my Bissel Steam Mop died last month. 10:30 p.m. Bummed out.
8. Decided that making a list of the stupid shit I've done this evening follow a logical timeline was too damn much trouble, and then went into the bathroom and cleaned out my ears with Q-Tips.
This is what acting a fool looks like when you are elderly, folks. You abuse pain medication, drink vodka and eat olives late at night. This is life ON THE EDGE DAMMIT.
OMG I married the right man. I totally did. Male or female, it was a tossup - and the universe finally threw me a fuckin' bone (hur hur) and gave me The Bejewelled Beast! Who is a biker. My husband. With a dick. Keep up.
OK so this year out of nowhere he decided that he was Gonna. Do. Halloween. Bitch.
I stood back and let him work his fucked up imagination like a dastardly machine made to warp the minds of hapless youth and disgust their elders. He thought this shit up and bought all the supplies, and I, the former Mrs. 'Do All The Holidays Or Not - Nah, Let's Not' just let him go where the Spirit (Mephisto Q. Kimchee) lead him. And I am absolutely worshipping the layers of subtle and not so subtle fucked-up-ness he put into this.
First, he put together a costume for work. They held a contest competition, and he won second place, because 1. He is awesome, and 2. He growled and drooled. I present to you....DR. DEATH!
Why is he wearing Grandma Shanaynay's weave? Because he STOLE IT OFF HER CORPSE.
There he is. My Bejewelled Beast. Labcoat spattered with the blood of surgery indifferently performed, in Grandma Shanaynay's weave.
Now here we have his concept for our lil' Welcome Halloween Host:
Lil' Baby Gourdie died of an unfortunate fungal disease, which enlivined his lil' baby corpse and caused it to rise again to wear the onesie of the living! The message on Zombaby's onesie? As befits a baby hungry for brains - 'Gobble 'til You Wobble'. My husband is a GENIUS.
And here is our porch display. As night falls, our porchlight gleams off this horrifying vignette - lil' baby Gourdie, his buddy Scully, and his best friend Up-Chuck:
Stop on by! Knock on the door! We have Covid-friendly treats in plastic bags - and not bullshit like Smarties or Jolly Ranchers, either. We have CHOCOLATE. Come on by!
...unless you're too scared.
I am doing the boogie dance, that dance from France, that dance without your underpants!
This very dance here! Without underpants!
My new laptop is here and it is a dream! It is sleek, it is understated, I could fling it like a Battle Frisbee of Death and decapitate my enemies because it is razor thin, and setting it up was a JOY.
OK it was a joy in comparison with the hours I've spent having to dodge and undercut the crapware on the reconditioned laptops I've been wasting my $$ on for years. I have nobody but myself to blame. On the other hand, I am the Ninja Warrior of setting up computers and digging into their entrails to extract the hidden "whoopsie, gosh, did we put that in there? well golly how the heck did that happen? do you know how that happened? well I am stumped. just stumped" bullshit they hide way back in the registries. See, to me, less is more. I'll never use this thing for gaming or watching television or Skype or recording or any of that other shit. Uninstalled!
My favorite piece of crapware is: The Calculator. You can literally type any equation you can equate into the regular search bar and get an answer just by hitting 'Search'. I mean Geeze Louise.
Of course the first thing I did was download a bunch of TOS pix.
Because I use the Cloud - and if you don't, you should be - all my stuff was safe and sound. I am not worried about Big Brother reading my shit, because he should. It's good stuff. Go ahead. I live in a 'Constitution-Free' zone anyway, so it's not like I'm not used to it.
Hi Homeland Security! Hi Border Patrol! Hi Sumas Police Department! Hi County Sheriffs! Hi....The Navy! Hi Sister Mary Petronella! Hi Santa!
Speaking of crapware, let's visit a crap site - or not. PINTEREST. Now, isn't this what they used to call....bookmarking? Except, this makes all your shit public - IF YOU JOIN, of course. Try and visit a Pinterest site that's been sealed with The Seven Seals of Gargob-Ra the Vile Selfish Fucker. You cannot. Nope. If you like to search by image, all that Pinterest shit is 'Nyah nyah, Pinterest only, you suck, ha ha ha.'
Y'know, fuck dat. It means being creative, and it takes a little longer, but the internet is a bigass place and that idea you're chasing will come up, for free, no strings, if you're willing to think - and search - outside the box. Meanwhile, I have Ye Olde Bookmarkes, and somehow, I just don't feel the blazing need to have complete strangers rifle through them and comment. Weird, right? I'm such a rebel.
In a completely unrelated vein, in my travels on Google Maps: Street View, I found a very, very tall and formidable working girl dressed in a colorful lycra catsuit - and I mean this garment was subject to some astounding compound curvage - soliciting trade in Portland, Oregon, my hometown.
On Google Street View.
This freaked me out because those little Google cars usually go out on Sunday afternoons, and this Amazon Entrepreneur was Flagging. Down. Traffic. out there by the side of the road. Huge wig. Tall, tall, tall shoes. Glorious makeup. Maybe she was out there on Sunday afternoon hoping that someone was ready to get sinning again. Believe me, this would have been the woman to lead you down that path and make you grateful.
Sadly, the picture has since been updated, and the multicolored, glorious Amazon Entrepreneur is no longer to be seen. But I remember her fondly. That's my Portland.
I found an obscure channel on our t.v. I'll probably never find it again. It's a music channel, but they play live performances instead of just the hits with an annoying background, or a montage of album covers. I'd been watching it - moving wallpaper, really. Then suddenly a few piano chords rang out.
And then a torrent of them. Raging, dancing, showing off, Fred and Ginger dancing like it was nothing at all, using all the quarter notes and half notes and eighth notes and weaving in the syncopation, dissonant, perfect leaps off the high dive straight into the water with barely a splash. This pianist was running those keys like he'd invented sound, and I looked up from the book I was reading -
-and there was Elton John.
In his prime. Before the flamboyance got too flamboyant. Playing solo to a live audience and turning it into something that went into amazing, obscure places and came out like a rack of fireworks being set off one after another. I set down my book and just watched this performance, Elton making hard, funky love to a honky-tonk piano, lost in his sound, and I was just stunned, amazed, nearly in tears.
Back when I was a little Muk I was a rabid fan of Elton John. Had every single one of his albums. Even the ones that hadn't been released in the U. S. , I was that into him. (Shit, I still know all the words to 'The Bitch Is Back', stone cold sober as a matter of fact.)
But I had not realized, from 1973 until just this evening, right here in the year of our Lord Covid 2020 that the man COULD PLAY LIKE A MAD BASTARD.
I fell into teenage love with the showman without even realizing that he was a prodigy. All these years later, I watched that young man give 110 percent of himself to an audience that was largely fucked up on pot and there for the showmanship. I remembered the poster I'd had of him in my room, all hairy chested with a feather...jacket....of some sort... barely covering his adorable pot belly, and I wish I could apologize to the dude. Of course I was a kid then, and I was attracted by his like-greets-like vibe as much as I was anything else, but it has to be admitted before the world. Now.
Elton John can tear the fuck out of a piano.
Amen.
"The better part of valor is discretion, in which the better part I have saved myself."
And so, lacking the computer security of my convictions, I have deleted the last post; sent it off to the great 011010111010 in the sky. Now it's nano-dust on an unremarkable, anonymous asteroid, which is what I imagine Internet Deletion Limbo looks like. Just a beat-up asteroid, all covered in the micro-schmutz of everything that's ever been deleted online. Every now and then, the ghost of John Glenn goes around with a leaf blower, and all our dusty old www.sins and mistakes go flying off into space. When he's done he throws a stick for Laika the space dog, and they have a nice time.
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Having given the issue careful consideration, the conclusion is in: Captain Johnathan Archer was a better captain than Captain James Tiberius Kirk.
There. I said it.
Archer did his level best with way less than Kirk had to work with. His poor ship could only do warp factor 4! And even though there wasn't a Prime directive in Archer's time, he always tried to act as though one was in place. His crew was more disciplined and far less likely to get dead. He had a special ops team, the MAKO's. He was also burdened with something at the rear of the bridge that would blow up like the Fourth of July every time the ship bumped into a rock. That had to be super distracting for everyone involved. But he made it home, ended the Temporal Cold War, and participated in an apology ritual involving a chainsaw, which is badass.
Kirk was, God love him, basically a pirate. Well, a privateer, lets give him that much. And he knew it; his friends knew it, his superiors knew it. Nobody had any illusions about Kirk. What he had going for him was a natural ability to command. He was a born explorer. He had charisma, sincerity....and he was one wily sonofabitch. Odysseus in space. Never turn your back on Kirk.
Another thing I've noticed is that you get the feeling that yes, the NCC1701 crew has been together for a long time, they're all familiar with one another, they're kind of sick of each others' bullshit, and it's business as usual as they interact. That has yet to be reproduced in any of the Trek series. Oh, you get a standout character, or pair of characters (think Quark and The Constable) here and there, but in TOS all three of the primary players and their adjuncts are strong personalities, and I think that's why it still has the magic.
Captain Picard...was a CEO. He was a negotiator. A diplomat. Kind of a cold fish, and kind of pissy, too. Now I love me some Picard, do not get me wrong. He would fuck you up. But dear Lord the poor man was surrounded with floor sweepings, like a bunch of junior fankids got together and cobbled up characters, then the producers reached into a hat, picked one, and then told the writers 'bash to fit, fuckers.' I kind of hate to credit Whoopie Goldberg with anything, but Guinan is the only other character on that ship worth a damn. The rest are just walking loose ends with no feeling of real connection going on at all.
Now, I love Brent Spiner, but he was just cringeworthy on TNG. Do not get me started on Wesley. No. Or Deanna Troi, yech. Or the Doctor, gaaah. WTF, woman, leave the kid at home. And what the fuck was Riker? All he did was run around with a beard. Mr. Worf had so much character potential! It wasn't for fault of trying on his part. The writers on that show just had their heads up their asses when it came to writing the crew of the Enterprise. But their worst sin? When all else fails, why, fire up the holodeck!
I'm glad that TNG was there to carry the flag. The fact that the series even existed is the best thing about it.
There you go. Now that I've gotten all the important matters out of the way, the rest of you kids can discuss politics and covid and trivial junk like that. You are welcome.
OOOO children my Biker has himself a new 'Nom de Internet'! He is now and henceforth to be known online as...
The Bejewelled Beast!
The reason comes down to ornamental squash varieties. I'll skip the extraneous explanations. When a man brings you, unbidden, a bushel of exquisitely malformed squash, he becomes your
Bejewelled Beast.
We tried 'Precious Star of Aegypt Eld,' but he didn't get it, so I tried 'Priceless Jewel of Magnificence' but he thought I was saying "Jewel of monstrance' which is an entirely different and Catholic cup of tea, so I gave up. And to think we owe it all to a bunch of lumpy-ass squash. God is great.
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We have got some political kids in this neighborhood. We are repping hard for Team Blue-State Dems, with yard signs, bumper stickers and even a rather large banner nailed up high on the actual house, so the rednecks in their jacked up 4x4's can see it.
All the new kids in the neighborhood love us (for some ungodbeknownst reason) and every single one of them rode or glided past and gave their views on the subject. There are some Trumper kids out there, and there are some LibDem children fighting the good fight. We had us a regular civil, mannerly child debate going out on the sidewalk out front for quite awhile yesterday, about seven kids out their with their bikes, scooters and skateboards, all discussing politics, and not one of them older than 12. Kinda gives you hope for the future.
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I will not be getting a new computer any time soon because WhaalMorte (The mart that sells walls) borked my order TWICE.
Now WhaleMark online wants you body, soul and dna. You have to go through all kinds of horseshit and info and filling out of all your vital statistics just to order something. You end up with an account whether you want one or not. (Unless you're willing to go through one hell of a lot of screens and info and links and FUCK IT. I was not; ergo, unwanted account with WohlShart.) After waiting patiently, I went back like a cringing dog and checked on my order, only to find it cancelled once again. Really? Too much for your sad ass to deal with? Funny; Crate and Barrel didn't have that issue. How strange!
I deleted that bitch. And I did it super undercover. Now do I believe that WhoreFark actually deleted my account? Yeah, the same way that FaseBukk deletes accounts; which is, NO, NEVER. Neither does KuAHRHA. (sound it out.) All you have to do is mention the name of that smartypants intellectual question-ass site online three months after 'deleting' it, and it reactivates.
Do I sound old and paranoid? Yes. Yes, I do. And yes, I am. If I can keep them guessing, then I will. I don't smoke dope anymore so I need something to keep me amused.
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Pet Teenager actually made it all the way to Las Vegas and her future. She is on her way. We are still in laborious contact (kid insists on texting and my poor dumb phone does not make that an easy task) and she knows that if it all goes to hell, I will be there. I am stoked, and I am scared at the same time. But still... imagine getting your drivers license, and then making your first long trip three days later, over unknown roads, from essentially Northern Canada to Nev - fucking - ada!!! She did that without a hitch! This kid is going to own us all. It WILL happen.
