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Charlie Hatton
Brookline, MA
Well, fuck it. I’m just gonna go ahead and declare this ‘Blog Like a Sane Person Day‘, and dole weird little thoughts out to you as they happen, rather than saving up two thousand words’ worth of shit, and plopping it in your laps all at once.
But that’s today only, kids. The long-winded, meandering diatribes begin again tomorrow.
(And if that doesn’t improve morale around here, then we’ll institute the nude feather-duster spankings. And if that doesn’t shape things up… well, then, I don’t know what I’ll do. But ‘fireplace-size anal thermometers’ were mentioned a few days ago. So be careful what you wish for.)
Anyway, the thought of the moment is this:
Why, oh why won’t ‘tall surly Middle Eastern guy’ at the deli downstairs cut my chicken sandwich in half for me? The onion roll I get it on is huge, and the damned thing is unwieldy, to say the least. The thing is the size of a frickin’ dinner plate, and the chicken’s all chopped up, so the sandwich wiggles back and forth in my hands… it’s like trying to eat a packetful of M&Ms jammed between two slabs of Jell-O. It’s ridiculous.
(On the other hand, that analogy sounds like a pretty damned good dessert. Like they say, there’s always room for Jell-O with M&Ms stuck in the middle. And with all that gelatinous goodness around them, the M&Ms wouldn’t melt in your mouth or your hands. They’d probably melt somewhere in your esophagus, actually. Now doesn’t that sound tasty?)
Anyway, I don’t know what this guy’s problem is. ‘Goofy smily Middle Eastern guy’ cuts my sandwich. ‘Short crooked-nosed Middle Eastern girl’ cuts my sandwich. Even ‘quiet shifty-eyed Latino guy’ cuts my sandwich. What the hell is ‘tall surly Middle Eastern guy’s problem?
And sure, I could ask him to cut my sandwich… but that’s not the point. I want him to figure it out on his own, and shape the hell up without me having to tell him. Suddenly, I feel like I’m the guy’s wife —
‘Well, if you don’t know what’s wrong with my sandwich, then I’m not going to tell you. Don’t say you’re sorry unless you know what you’re sorry for, you bastard! ‘Tall surly Middle Eastern guy’… I don’t even know you any more!‘
Okay, that’s all. I’m gonna shut up and eat my sandwich now. Damn, even my ‘short’ posts are, like, eight paragraphs long. How do you short-post people do it, anyway?
Permalink | 5 CommentsApparently, I’m in a ‘quick and dirty‘ frame of mind today (as opposed to ‘long-winded and dirty‘, as usual). Anyway, here’s a thought that’s been bugging me for a few days now:
Which is the better vague sexual euphemism:
‘getting my cheese doodled‘
or
‘getting my doodle cheesy‘
Yes, folks, these are the things that keep me awake at night. Pity me. Pity me now!
Permalink | 7 CommentsJust a quick note to tide you over until later:
I know that I’m finally recovered from my long-lingering viral infection that turned into an ordinary cold, and then a persistent cough, because I can once again drink beverages directly from the cartons in the fridge without feeling guilty about it.
That’s not to say I ever stopped drinking directly from the cartons throughout the whole ordeal. I just felt bad about it for a couple of weeks. Especially when I sneezed or coughed mid-sip.
(The orange juice is still a little… ‘pulpier‘ than it should be.)
That’s all. I just thought you’d like to know. See you in a few hours — stay warm out there, people!
Permalink | 5 CommentsI had a bit of a rough morning. Oh, it started out innocently enough — I woke up as usual, and padded into the office to check my email, look at the blog stats, read comments. Standard stuff, really. After a half-hour or so of piddle-dicking around, I decided I was hungry. So, I got up, detoured around the dog (sleeping in the middle of the doorway — I swear, that mutt has some sort of detector to determine the very epicenter of ‘in my fricking way’, so she can plop her fat ass in exactly the most inconvenient spot imaginable), and headed for the kitchen.
Once there, I snagged myself a Pop-Tart (low-fat, but frosted; I’m all about compromises), and a plastic sippy cup for milk. I had to use the ‘safe’ cup — and forego toasting my Pop-Tart — because this was all happening at around eight-thirty in the morning. And I am not to be trusted around glass objects or electrical appliances at eight-thirty in the fricking morning. I’m lucky if I can successfully operate my underpants at that hour.
(As I’ve mentioned many times before, I am under no circumstances a ‘morning person’. The world becomes tolerable at around ten, maybe ten-thirty am. Before that, I don’t want to be talked to, looked at, touched, or even erotically diddled.
Well, okay, maybe diddled. Gently. Just don’t talk to me or look at me while you’re doing it. Or wait until eleven. We’ll both get much more out of the experience then.)
Anyway, Pop-Tart and cup successfully procured, I shuffled over to the fridge to see about the milk. I opened the door — and two beer bottles from the topmost door shelf (placed there ‘temporarily’ a few days ago, when we had to cram a bunch of food on the other shelves) came careening down, past my nose and onto the floor. One of the beer bottles was fine, and suffered only moderate foamage in the fall.
The other bottle… well, let’s just say that there’s no direction in which you can stretch the word ‘fine’ to describe the state of bottle number two. Pieces of it lay on the inside of the fridge, up against the salad crisper. Much of it lay on the kitchen floor, shattered. I eventually found bits of it a few feet away, in the hall outside the kitchen. This bottle was many things, friends, but none of them was ‘fine’.
(By the way… ‘salad crisper’? Come on. Who made up that name, anyway? Some hotshot at Amana who wanted to suggest that the fridge was somehow going to magically ‘encrispen‘ the salad veggies? Please.
The drawer might be configured in such a way to keep the things crisp, or encourage them to stay crisp, but I would be extremely skeptical of any claims that the cheap, non-airtight plastic bin in my refrigerator is somehow going to impart crispness to my vegetables out of thin air. So it’s not, in the strictest sense, a ‘crisper‘.
Now, the oven? That’s a crisper. Those burners on the top of the stove — also crispers. I’ve dropped more than my share of soft, fleshy items on those things (yeah, you probably just don’t wanna ask), and without exception, they became crispy. Ooh, and flamethrowers, too — I’ve never operated one myself, but I think it’s pretty safe to say that those things are all about the encrispening.
In fact, pretty much anything with fire is a good candidate for a ‘crisper’. A plastic basket in the fridge — not so much. You can see my frustration here.)
Anyway, back to the mess. There I was, soggy Pop-Tart in hand, squinting with contact lens-less eyes at a floorful of glass shards and hand-crafted lager. Bitches. For a while, I toyed with the idea of just letting the dog lick up the beer, and then sweeping whatever was left into a dustpan. But while that would have been a very easy cleanup option, I’m pretty sure that I’d have to explain exactly how the dog came to have several bits of brown glass ground into her tongue. And that could be a tricky question to answer next time we’re at the vet’s office, so I looked for a ‘Plan B’.
Unfortunately, the only other alternative seemed to be the distasteful one — thoroughly, carefully, and painstakingly clean up the damned mess myself. At a quarter til nine in the morning. With no contacts, and therefore a non-blurry visibility of about four inches in front of my nose. Still, there wasn’t much else I could do. The mess blocked my way to the upstairs bathroom, where my contacts were. And the beer would get all sticky and gross if I left it very long. I thought of just washing my hands of the whole thing, and walking out the back door into a new life somewhere else… but I was wearing only boxer shorts and a T-shirt, and it was roughly Antarctica-minus-four degrees outside. Given that, and the fact that I couldn’t see my toes clearly, much less the road to speed away into oblivion, and I decided that I should take the hit, and clean the shit up.
It was a long and arduous process. Many brave paper towels were lost on the battlefield, two kitchen rags will never smell quite right again, and the ‘salad crisper’ is still, several hours later, somewhat damp and soggy.
(A soggy crisper. Ooh, the irony is just delicious, isn’t it? This is why I get paid the big bucks, folks.)
Anyway, after a half-hour or so of this nonsense — wiping, and sweeping, and scrubbing, and rubbing — I was finally able to call the job ‘finished’ and get the hell back to my morning, already in progress. By that time, I was late for work, so I scarfed down the Pop-Tart, took a shower, popped in my contacts, and hit the door. Though not before slipping back into the kitchen briefly, where I was smacked in the face by a veritable wave of stale beer odor. The wife’s gonna think I’ve been having secret keggers in there after she goes to work in the morning. I wish, honey — I wish.
(And actually, now that I’ve thought of it, I’ll work on making that happen. A couple of mid-morning brewskies could do wonders for my outlook on the world at that hour.)
So, that was my morning. Spilled beer, big catastrophe, late to work — just another episode in the ‘Life of Charlie’. And in the aftermath, I think I’m probably most upset about the waste of hoppy goodness. I had plans for that beer, dammit, and several of its closest friends, as well. ‘Tis sad to see a lager cut down like that, in the prime of its barley-kiss’d youth.
(Heh? Yeah? All poetic and shit, ain’t it? See? I can pull that shit outta my ass when I have to. You know.)
Anyway, that’s my story. I suppose the moral is either to always open your rerigerator door slowly and look out for falling beer, or to just never get the hell out of bed before ten am, so these sorts of things don’t happen. Or possibly, it’s to keep a spare outfit and a pair of glasses by the kitchen door at all times, so you can always get dressed and vanish forever when something goes horribly, horribly wrong in the kitchen. Hell, I don’t know — maybe it’s ‘all of the above’. You figure it out. I got a kitchen full of beer smell — I don’t have time to do everything around here. Sheesh.
Permalink | 6 CommentsWell, that’s just frickin’ peachy.
After two days of relatively sweltering twenty degree weather, the New England area has once again been plunged into sub-Arctic levels of frigidosity. Or freezyhood. Or cold-as-ballsness. Whatever. You know what the hell I mean.
So far — and I’m knocking on wood over here; no, not that kind of wood, ya pervert… damn, you people never stop, do you? — … wait, what the hell was I saying, anyway? Let’s try that again.
So far — and I’ve got my fingers crossed over here — none of my body parts have thrown up their hands and just fallen off in frozen disgust.
(And if you’re about to point out that my body parts don’t have hands of their own, well… how the hell do you know? You haven’t seen a lot of my body parts — I might have hands in all sorts of places that you don’t want to think about while you’re eating dinner. Little, itty bitty body part hands, twiddling their thumbs and snapping their fingers and rubbing — no, no, massaging — nooks and crannies in places that would make your toe hairs curl. Yeah. You ever think of that?
Or… it could just be wishful thinking, as usual. Seriously, wouldn’t it be cool to have an extra set of mini-digits or two around the ol’ body, to take care of scratching itches and pulling stuff out of certain places — or putting things into other places, come to think of it. I think that’d be pretty damned cool, myself.
Like earlier today, for instance, I had an itch. Down there, in the worst possible spot. Not really among the bumpy bits in front, but not in the, erm, ‘landfill‘ out back, either. Just right… between, at the very bottom — that little no-man’s land that isn’t really ‘crotch’ or ‘ass’ or ‘inner thigh’, but lives right next door to all of them. You know — there. I don’t know what the hell it’s called, but if people came with zippers, that’s where they’d be. Right there.
Now, I ask you — how in the hell does one scratch that particular place and retain any shred of dignity whatsoever? ‘Cause I haven’t found a way. The crotch, I can manage — just drop a pen or something on your lap, and surreptitiously spend a little extra time picking it up. And ass-scratches are easy — face away from everyone else and pretend to check your wallet, or *scootch* in your desk chair just the right way. Problem solved, and no one has to know.
But that dark, dank place underneath? The very depths of the nethers? There’s no way to get to that without putting on a show. If you’re sitting, you’ve got to slouch down in your chair, lean your ass forward, and spread your legs like a drunken cheerleader at a ‘Girls Gone Wild‘ kegger, just to get to the area. Never mind actually reaching down there with your hand and getting busy with your bad self.
And standing up is even worse, if such a thing is possible. That little bit of skin was just never meant to be easily accessible. If it happens to itch while you’re on your feet, walking around, your only path to relief involves hiking one leg in the air, like a poodle pissing on a poplar tree.
(Or a wolfhound whizzing on a weeping willow. Spaniel spritzing a spruce, maybe? No? Oh, you people.)
Anyway, none of those options were really open to me today, seeing as how I was sitting in a conference room with a dozen people at the time. And I think several of them saw me twitch when I felt the first tickle, so they were keeping a close eye on me — there’s no way I could slip a few fingers down there and do the deed unnoticed. So, I fabricated a coughing fit and quick-stepped out into the hallway, where I could spread out and get down to business. Ahhhhhh. That’s better.
Of course, I got busted. The janitor came around the corner and saw me, with both hands jammed down there, scritching and scratching like crazy. I thought he might blow the whistle on me, or at least give me a funny look. Instead, he just kept walking, and said, over his shoulder:
‘Hey, if you’re having trouble, I’ve got some dirty magazines in the broom closet. Door’s always open, cuz.‘
Ouch. Not only did he have the wrong idea, but now I can never go near the broom closet again. Or stay late in the office, or look him directly in the eye, or touch any of the cleaning supplies. Who knows what he’s doin’ with those broomsticks and dustpans in there, anyway? Jeez, no wonder we can never get a box of tissues around this place. Yuck.)
Wow. Where the hell was I before that came out of me? Damn. That’s one hell of a tangent, even for me. I’m all spent and shit. Whew!
Well, let’s see — somewhere way back there, I was mentioning the eye-freezing, hair-whipping, testes-chasing cold weather that we’ve been having. Again. But the only reason I brought it up was to tell you that while the various bits of my body have been troopers so far, and stayed firmly in place (or softly in place, as the case may be — hush up!), my car has not been so kind. The single-digits temps finally got to old Betty yesterday, and she developed a three-, maybe four-foot crack right across the windshield, nearly from door to door. This, my friends, is what the ancient Sumerians called a ‘bad thing‘.
And it’s not just that I have to call some crooked schmo to get the damned thing fixed. No, no — that would be bad enough, and I’m sure I’d be annoyed if it were a cracked fender or broken tail light or some critical issue with the fuzzy dice on the rearview.
(Hey, don’t laugh — the dealer charged me sixty bucks to have those babies ‘refluffed’ last time I was there. Frankly, they looked about the same to me afterward, but they did smell quite strongly of cigarette smoke. And ass. So I’m not sure how much fluffing really went on. I was looking to recapture that ‘Vegas feel’, but came away with more of an Atlantic City vibe. Damned lousy car dealership, anyway.)
But the problem with the windshield is not one of cost. Rather, it’s a question of dismemberment, or the possibility thereof. I’ve got to continue driving the car for a day or so — to work, to the vet’s office, to home — before I can clear my schedule out to get it fixed. And in the meantime, I’m living in constant fear that some bird is gonna shit on it in just the wrong way, crack it all the way through, and the windshield is gonna cave in on me while I’m cruising down the street. And on the list of ‘Things That Would Make Me Squeal Like a Happy Piggy If They Fell in My Lap‘, ‘two jagged sheets of broken glass’ are way, way, way down at the bottom. Somewhere below ‘a vat of battery acid’, and just above ‘Tom Arnold after a chili cookoff’. That would be way down the list.
(For the record, ‘a million bucks in crisp, new hundreds’ and ‘Christa Miller’ are up there near the top. You know, just in case you have my lap in mind when next Christmas rolls around. I know I will.)
So, I’m stuck driving around the city at nine miles an hour, cringing at each pothole and bump and pedestrian I hit, thinking that this one might be the one that finishes off the windshield and sends sharp glass careening at my midsection. Oh, and don’t get me wrong, by the way. Normally, I try to avoid many of the pedestrians that scurry in front of my car. But I know what sudden heating and cooling does to glass, so I’m afraid to turn on the defroster, for fear that that will break the windshield in half, too. So it’s a bit tough to see out, with all the fog from my breath, and what’s left of my body heat steaming up the windows. I tried rolling down a window to see out, but my left ear tried to crawl into my head to protest the blast of cold air, so I just went with it. I’m sure none of those folks were hurt badly, anyway. Hell, I was going slower than they were, and none of them impacted hard enough to finish breaking the windshield. How bad could it be? Buncha babies. Bah.
Permalink | 5 Comments
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