Accordions Are Sexy

This week I'm taking my first accordion lesson, and it's from a woman named Margie who has the Fargo accent, so I'm doubly excited.  I think we'll probably start with a little "Stairway to Heaven," then work up to something along these lines:  

youtube.com/watch?v=o2-vwkGSE4A

    

Last night I finished Bret Easton Ellis' "American Psycho," a book whose main character is, eh, a psycho.  And American, so it all makes sense.  Lots of horrible things are done in this book, among them a flame held to a living victim's eyeballs until they burst, a starving rat coerced into a dying woman's acid-melted, cheese-smeared vagina.  Jesus.  I think last night, while finishing the last two hundred pages, I said "Oh my god" out loud four times.  Then, starving from not having eaten all day, I tried to down a bowl of stew.  All of this is to say don't eat stew after reading "American Psycho."  

reading is sexy

Shelfari.com is a website where you can read about what other people are reading. Something nice about the site is that it actually smells like a book.  Maybe try it out.

My Shelfari page:  www.shelfari.com/not_amish

Britney, 90210

This is my friend Ashley in front of Britney Spears' Hollywood Hills home, which, as you can see, is protected by a network of sharpened rods. These rods are meant to keep Britney in, much like the spiked rods at the San Francisco Zoo were meant to keep that tiger that chewed a kid's face off in. Unfortunately everyone's favorite Pop Tart occasionally escapes in her Mercedes, its trunk full of progeny and secured with bungee cords. Oh, wait---I think they took her kids away from her, which means, when she's not out flashing her bidness to the paps, or stealing lighters from the local gas station, Brit Brit is all alone in this giant adobe crate, pitching back and forth on a tiny rocking horse with her head in her hands, chanting "Oops, I did it again," or, more likely, "Oopsie." I hope they at least give the girl some chew toys, maybe even something made out of her old hair.

Speaking of hair, if you look closely in the above picture, you can see a somber Britney sitting near a window, her delicate nicotine-stained hands stroking her golden wig tresses, which drape over a single shoulder. She's singing a sad song about a bluebird she sees crushed on her driveway, its viscera glistening, splayed across a delicate pattern of tire tread.

Thanks to a load of snot rags, I'm able to pass this wish along to you..

Barrel of Monkey

Almost every day I drive by a strip joint called "Shotgun Willie's," an active little booby bar where the parking lot's always packed and bright, illuminated by a glowing billboard topped with a giant shotgun hanging decidedly limp, I suppose having shot its load.  I don't have a picture of the object at hand, although I hope to post one eventually, so for now you'll have to settle for the erotic shot of the Love Pig's growth, which, for some reason, I find appropriate. My question/observation deals mostly with this giant, floppy firearm and whether or not it's appropriate. Not appropriate appropriate, but accurate appropriate. Would a stiff double barrel be more to the point? Or do potential customers see the lame cartoon steel, smile, and think, "That could be me," neglecting to imagine the wet spot seeping across the front of their jeans like a not-so-secret sea. Why not two guns? One stiff, one limp? And why, when you go to the Shotgun's website, are you presented with a far more disturbing image, a caricature of an old cowboy holding an animated double-barreled shotgun, the holes at the ends of its barrels shifty and expressive? Why would patrons wish to make eye contact with a double-barreled phallus? As for its double-barreledness, that's another question entire. 

I was walking a trio of wiener dogs (two Oscar Meyers, one Ball Park Frank) today, minding my business and theirs, trying to keep the little furry cylinders happy, letting them investigate a patch of ripe grass, when someone begins to frantically rap on a window from the inside of their corner house. It was difficult to see anything, what with winter glare, so, thinking someone was saying "hello," admiring the dogs or perhaps my lovely dog-walking sweatpants, I smiled. The four of us continued down the sidewalk through the slush when the tapper bursts from the front door with eyebrows the shape of evil and scolds me for not picking up after the dogs. "Aren't you gonna pick up after your dogs?!" she screams, pointing her finger at the grass the dogs were roaming moments ago. I explain that they didn't go to the bathroom, and that, even if they did, the tremendous pile of Great Dane-style dog shit in plain view could not possibly have come from them, these tiny creatures I have leashed to my hand. She says something along the lines of, "Well, I wish you'd pick up after your dogs," obviously still blaming me and the Daschunds for the mess in her yard, and slams the door on me as I attempt to resolve the issue. 

Just a few weeks ago, almost the exact same thing happened: an oldish woman comes out of her house to get into her car while Ruth (yes, Ruth), a beagle mix, is peeing on a strip of her lawn. The woman asks me if I'm going to pick up after my dog, and I tell her that the dog didn't poop, she peed. "That's not what I saw," she said, and, as I invited her to point out the imagined pile so I could pick it up, she huffed, got into her car, and slammed the door.  

I can't figure old ladies out. Even semi-old ladies. Many of them seem to have the same rotten prerogative, always wanting to get riled up, start something, then walk away, still riled up, from whatever it is that got them riled up. What I want to know is if anyone gets old ladies; that is, if old ladies can be gotten. Maybe you have a helpful hint or a taser I can use the next time some old coot wrongly accuses me and refuses to talk about it. I just hope they don't force me to whip out the old incontinence insults. I'd hate to surprise one in such a way that she wastes a perfectly good diaper.

Term of the Month

Friday morning, driving Levi to a coffee shop before heading off to walk a bunch of dogs, I told him my head didn't feel quite right, that I thought maybe my body wasn't ready to be doing anything.  Yet there we were, driving around doing things, getting ready to do more things.  It seemed likely to me that my brain was still a post-coital nebula, which I imagine to be a sort of purple fog with a few hunks of glitter suspended here and there as inadequate stars.  Or maybe something like this:

When your brain looks like that, it's not to be rushed.  It's a state that must exit as it pleases, choosing when your puddle of a thinker may retain a cortex of taut, gray bundles.  Those pappy auroras, those wisps of pure sense, must melt softly, like a mold of warm Jell-O, off the plate and onto the floor where they can harden once again.  After we've diagnosed my problem, Levi turns to me and says, with the austerity of a well-seasoned physician, "You have Hump Head." 

I encourage you to practice using this new term at holiday gatherings around close friends and family.