January 24:
Some kind of long transcontinental trip is needful. There's nothing like grabbing more bags than you can reasonably carry, throwing them on a train, and going until it runs out of track.
Last time Auntie took a long train trip she ran into the prototypical dirty old man. He tried to cop feels from every woman present. He demanded the young Russian emigres sing L'Internationale. He was thrown off the train when he soiled himself the second time.
Found out that an ex just got married. Good thing I didn't know about it, I'd've felt obliged to run, not walk, to the chapel. The guests were spared the sight of Auntie flinging open the doors and howling "Don't marry this man, his genitals are bent!"
Like Jimmy, Auntie holds grudges.
January 25:
Voted that my friend Noogie would indeed better as Bovril. Noogie and Auntie have a long and twisted history dating back to when Auntie's hair color was not her natural one. Both carry scars from it to this day -- his on his arms, hers on her legs.
I had a dream about him last night. I remember little of it save the following lines:
"Does he pay you to let him do that?" asked by a maiden aunt entirely unlike Auntie Dynamite.
I laughed. "Only emotionally," I said.
Hauled out of bed at 4am to help retrieve a cat. Auntie trekked out into the mud and rain in a pair of sneakers and T-shirt reading "O that this too solid flesh would melt". She had the sentiment affirmed when her arms were scythed open. It was like a bad World War I flashback.
January 26:
Chastised for implying that software companies are all corporate zombies in my last column. It is, of course, vastly untrue. The rest of them wear dirty t-shirts and have huge bowls of sugar lying around with cocaine straws. I know those Microsoft people sit around with tall glasses of iced corn syrup.
At Apple they get maple syrup.
Auntie's birthday is coming. This is not good. Each birthday at this stage of Auntie's life is more of an affirmation that she should have better things to do with her time than pretend to be an artist or craftsman of any sort, and should just become some beehive haired secretary with fake nails and glossy lips, with more makeup than brain cells and a screechy voice, most noted for being efficient but colorless, capable but niched. Oh, and for having big tits.
Gotta pee is a good saved game name.
January 27:
Advice from Auntie: "There's no point in wasting your time dancing around it when she's not interested, or for that matter, wasting perfectly good boff time when she is."
Wasted a lot of time fooling with AltaVista's translation software . Here is the result. Note that even though the love of Mac may become obscured, the hatred of PC remains.
January 28:
The only thing programmers want more than sugar is coffee. Fortunately, coffee was designed to hold sugar, so we don't have to make any ugly choices. Noogie claims he took chemistry classes so that he could tell exactly how much sugar he could dissolve per cup.
Noogie and Auntie once emptied two large sugar shakers at Futures Bakery in Toronto. We were doing shots of Rocket Fuel, which is quintuple espresso. And eating cheesecake. Sleep came somewhere around 5am. Then came more cheesecake. More coffee. Talk of torture involving male genitalia and glass rods. Lot of that going around lately.
This very moment, Auntie's brand new coffee maker is deflowering in the kitchen, preparatory to a dousing of some coffee with a master's of sociology.
Brew, you bastard! I can smell it! There are nerves in my eyeballs!
Goddamn designer bastard coffee!
Forgive me, Leary, I have sinned. But at least it's coffee-flavored coffee.
January 29:
There's a point when you've vomited enough that it's just no longer noteworthy. This point has not yet been reached, or I wouldn't feel compelled to make public apology to my cat. It was her own damn fault, anyhow, she just wouldn't get out of the way.
"Whennn a maaaaaan loves a walnut..."
January 30:
It was very dark when we drove back from the Stones concert. Still throbbing from the psychedelia of Mick's serpentine hips, Auntie slipped into a kind of glazed fugue, which is not to be confused with cake fugue or lemon jelly fugue. Nighttime roads have many associations for Auntie.
Going out on the marsh with Noogie, her cancersticks spiraling clouds of toxic death smoke; driving in Vermont with a married man who owed Auntie a hat and who wanted to abandon his family to take her to Scotland; thousands of cheerful green and white frogs lunging across the soaked roadway in upper New York State was we tried to tune in Tristan und Iseult; slamming down an off-ramp in Montreal at 110 miles per hour in a rental car; lying on the yellow line, smashed on lime soda and Jack Daniels, telling an ex-boyfriend (to whom Auntie still feels benevolent and who plans to become an ex-girlfriend) to watch for cars.