The Blog with Cobwebs

Drunk Jenga (serves 5-6)

2007-03-18T11:56:00.000-07:00

Ingredients:

1 passed-out roommate
misc. household items

Preparation:

Stack items atop passed-out roommate. First person to wake the drunk loses.

A. Radl 3/17/07 courtesy of A. Sarkarati.

Vagary

2005-06-19T04:15:00.000-07:00

1. †a. A wandering or devious journey or tour; a roaming about or abroad; an excursion, ramble, stroll. Obs.
Freq. in the 17th c., chiefly in verbal phrases as to fetch, make, or take a vagary.

†b. to play his vagary, of a horse, to leave or refuse to follow the proper or desired course. Obs.—1

c. An irregular course or distribution.

†2. A wandering in speech or writing; a rambling from the subject under consideration; a digression or divagation. Obs. (passing into sense 5).

3. a. A departure or straying from the ordered, regular, or usual course of conduct, decorum, or propriety; a frolic or prank, esp. one of a freakish nature. Now rare or Obs. (passing into sense 4).

†b. Without article: Frolic, gambolling. Obs.

4. a. A capricious, fantastic, or eccentric action or piece of conduct.

I'm pretty sure I left Coda a voicemail the day before his birthday or the day after, but he never called me back. Not that it bothers me when Coda doesn't call me back. We've had some lively email exchanges but our phone conversations have generally been one-off affairs, not really part of an ongoing dialogue or anything. Not that I have a leg to stand on the returning of phone calls tip; I'm at +5 for outgoing calls made vs. return calls made (meaning there's three people I'm supposed to call and eight people who are supposed to call me, applying somewhat subjective and arbitrary rules of etiquette) but if you consider email correspondence roughly equivalent to returning a phone call, which I do, then I'm at -8, unless you count friendster testimonials, which I don't, in which case I'd be at -13 for the year.

Coda did call me back, though, even if it took him a couple months. I'd run into him on IM and demanded to know where the hell he'd been. "Falling in love," he said somewhat cryptically, as if that means anything at all to me.

So You Wanna Be a Hip-Hop Hero

2005-01-29T13:01:00.000-08:00

Science they say, has made poetry impossible; there is no poetry in motor cars and wireless. And we have no religion. All is tumultuous and transitional. Therefore, so people say, there can be no relation between the poet and the present age. But surely that is nonsense. These accidents are superficial; they do not go nearly deep enough to destroy the most profound and primitive of instincts, the instinct of rhythm...Let your rhythmical sense wind itself in and out among men and women, omnibuses and sparrows, whatever comes along the street, until it has strung them together in one harmonious whole. That perhaps is your task--to find the relations between things that seem incompatible yet have a mysterious affinity. To absorb every experience that comes your way fearlessly, and saturate it completely so that your poem is a whole and not a fragment; to re-think human life into poetry and so give us tragedy again and comedy again by means of characters no spun out at length in the novelist's way, but condensed and synthesised in the poet's way...

Virginia Woolf, "Letter to a Young Poet" (1932)

chores

2004-06-20T19:53:00.000-07:00

my good friend the Q, who lives in boston these days, just applied for a job to be one of those people who stands in front of other people whose lives have been deemed more precious, in case somebody else decides to start shooting at that person. as part of the application process, they screened her for mental defects. "It was weird. They asked me if I'd been starting any big projects lately. Like if I'd started writing a novel," she reported.

what in the world does that have to do with your willingness to take a bullet for somebody else, I wondered. "Oh. They were trying to figure out if I was manic-depressive. It's one of the symptoms," she answered, because I'd been talking out loud without realizing it. again.

shit! that's serious stuff!! didn't the exact same thing just kill beloved character actor ronald reagan? and hadn't my helper monkey Major Blood just start writing a novel? and if we're sharing the same toilet, does that put me at risk? i figured it just might, but the only way to know for sure would be to have chowder get tested, since he actually drinks from the toilet.

"Chowder, would you willingly take a bullet meant for somebody more important than you?" i asked him. he mumbled something that sounded like a yes, so i sent him to apply for a job with those people. he came back two hours later, and he mumbled something that sounded like they'd given him a job protecting the mayor of japan's wife. in Japan. he's going to be shipping out to Tokyo at the end of July. this set my mind at ease for a moment, because he'd passed their little test.

my relief proved short-lived once i did a little research on japan. christ, they're probably deporting him because he failed the psych exam. i decided that keeping Major Blood occupied with menial tasks would slow the mad cow that was probably eating her brain, so i made her responsible for all the chores that chowder'd been doing. or was supposed to do. Major Blood threw on her cowboy bebop apron and laced up her rubber gloves to clean the fridge, but then she slammed the door shut immediately and ran away, babbling imprecations in her native tongue. i went to see what had spooked her.

a mold has been growing in there for awhile, but everytime i told chowder to clean it out he said he'd get to it, then play another game of Madden on the rookie level after trading both pro bowl teams onto the 49ers and turning down all the difficulty sliders. that's not so bad in and of itself, but Major Blood swore off killing after her honorable discharge from the Army, and i certainly can't kill the mold. it has grown strong, and become sentient.

the mold knows.

we've crossed a bridge today. a bridge too far, to my thinking. not only do i not have anywhere to keep my leftover chinese food, but by inadvertently striking the spark of life, chowder has rendered either evolutionary theory or creationism moot. what's worse, i'm sure there isn't even a branch of metaphysics capable of dealing with this situation, so all the religious studies majors i know have wasted their lives. chowder's ineptitude has officially become dangerous, if it wasn't already. God save the mayor of Japan's wife.