The other night, CC told me (I forgot to mention this in my last entry although it was whilst we were out at M*m* G***'s) about a sure-fire method of catching large octopi [pedants among you will be muttering "octopodes" under their breath][isn't that breaths? --ed.][fuck you.]. A team of divers descend[s]; one of them lies on the ocean floor, pretending to be a rock. When an unsuspecting octopus has latched itself onto him or her, the rest of the team of divers leap out to bring both the cunning non-rock and their intended victim to the surface.
Question One: Are there really that many unemployed actors with scuba certification?Question Two: Why not use, if not an actual rock, which might prove too heavy, at least a slightly more convincing substitute than earnest and underfed bisexuals in their twenties and a wetsuit? I mean, I would clamp my suckers to such things, but, then again, I am not an octopus. If I were an octopus, I could sell myself to public aquaria to save them the trouble of sending divers down to the bottom of the sea to trap them.
Question Three: Come to think of it, why not employ octopus-impersonators? They, like most simulacra, must be far more interesting than the real thing, since they can sing. "Come away from the scary singing man in the octopus suit, Jimmy. Now."
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Speaking of sucking ... vell, yesterday I vake up as sun set. I khave gone to bed as sun risinck. Blah, it is not life. I yearn for rich loam of old country. I vas sick, so I look pale, also, I khave nobody, I mean, nossinck to eat. I go to coffee shop with CC, SC, and SLB, play rummy and smoke cloves. I khave terrible neurasthenic headache, vhich prevent me from getting much-needed rest. I toss and turn. Now I needs must go change silken lininck in coffin. ... Today I woke up just in time to be late at P**t's and stagger around looking incompetent. K says to me, with the absolute authority of a kindergarten teacher, "that coffee's not done yet," and I say, "really?" with raised eyebrow and searing tone [NB: this is my favorite part of myself, except for my girly cupid's-bow lips ? I can raise my eyebrows independently. --ed.]. I'm still a wee bit ashamed of the damn hell sass of it, but like most shameful things, it afforded me a great deal of pleasure at the time. K's all right, though, please don't get the wrong idea: what matters is that I have made my place in the pack. I am no longer the sick, asymmetrical bonobo frothing in the shrubbery with whom nobody wants to sleep. I am a full-fledged monkeyslut, with suffrage in the primate primaries.
I liked the junkies who shot up in the stairwell at my old job. I mean, I didn't dislike them, and they were considerate about not lolling in ways that impeded my comings and goings. The junkies who use their credit cards to buy coffee and almost collapse on the floor in a coffee-shop aren't good junkies like that. D-.
I also forgot to mention that my parents, both of whose mothers died last spring, had money riding on whose estate closed quicker. My dad won solidly last week: not only did his mother pass on after grandma E, but the time it took to sell the house, the stocks, and the over-sixty bridge trophies was less time than it's taking just to close other granny's bank account. My aunt and uncle caused gleeful furore in their bourgey West Kent village by having converted the granny-annexe into a self-contained flat, which, nevertheless, still falls under the damnable rubric of "semi-detached" {diminished seventh chord!}. My cousin C referred to this process as "bricking up granny". C, my favorite cousin, and the closest to me in age, is the flower of Anglo-Catholic womanhood, even though she is currently living in sin and Cardiff. Grandma JT was a battleaxe and it is from her that I have inherited some of my most skewering personality traits. Grandma SE is another, albeit hagiographically similar, story. Remind me to tell you about her some time. Just as a teaser, though, when she emigrated from Scotland in the twenties, she claims she hitched a ride from Canada to Chicago from a waterborne bootlegger. SE was a tough Ayrshire washerwoman who wore a gin flask in one stocking and a sharp knife in the other.
As Anna Russell was often forced to say, "I'm not making this up, you know..."
I am very envious of all of you who have the new St�r�o Total album, since I haven't purchased any new CDs since I kissed the office job goodbye. You must all post scads and scads of gloaty reviews, which I promise I will read in exquisite agonies. I just finished listening to Blandine Verlet's somewhat mannered (pr�cieux without being prissy) rendering of four sets of Elizabeth-Claude Jacquet de la Guerre's Pi�ces de clavecin. She's playing my second-favorite harpsichord, ever, a Ruckers double that once belonged to the family de Sade.
MLJM once defined a scad as a small, brown, disc-shaped object with a matte surface and suprising heft. Why many of them together represent the very idea of "lots", she never divulged.