Now, you may not know this about me. I don’t know what you know about me, other than, you know, the obvious: has tentacles, worships Cthulhu, lives in dungeon, keeps human slaves (remember the Versace Twins?), enjoys torturing Jezebel readers and cancer fakers. Everybody knows that stuff.
But what you may not know is just exactly what kind of a housekeeper I am.
Let me put it this way: while nobody has actually fainted, several people have screamed. The Christmas wreath is still on my front door, quietly gathering dust just as it has been since Christmas 2005. At least I finally took the tree down, and any day now I may wash some dishes. You never know.
I hate housework. You make the beds, you wash the dishes, and six months later you have to start all over again.
Joan Rivers
In any case, I have been known to make my bed up with cotton saris when all my sheets are in the laundry, which does make for a colourful little nest if not exactly (as I found out one warm and sweaty night) colourfast. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it is entirely possible to go to bed stone cold sober and wake up paisley.
So, you can imagine that my apartment is not fit for company more often than perhaps once a millennium and that shortly before I move in. Indeed, the squalor is such that even in my daydreams my fantasy lovers and I always go back to their place (and let me just say that Steve Jobs has a lovely houseboat in an isolated cove about a ten minute walk and short flight of ancient stone steps from my house…) but where was I? Right, bitching about my own housekeeping on the blog instead of, you know, keeping house. Well, I keep it; I just keep it in squalor, that’s all.
In any case, however it may be, verily it was said unto them, that last month when I was up in Penticton speaking at the EatDrinkTweet social media for winemakers conference (two words, people: GOODY BAG!) the lovely and fragrant Allison Markin arranged for me to stay at the Serenata Guesthouse, and finally finally I slept in a bed that was suitable for my dream lovers. Silk and cotton with a thread count higher than I can count (without taking off my shoes, that is), with bolsters and pillows and shams and actuals and feathers in everything. I could easily have stayed there the entire weekend, particularly because I stayed up till 4am every night and as I may have mentioned, there was wine involved.
And then I got my friend Rebecca Coleman to immortalize it in the above, so that I can refresh my memory when I imagine myself taking my dream lovers home in the future. It’s so important to furnish one’s imagination well, don’t you think?
Beneficial for whom? Do you have any IDEA what people like Cusack and me do to mainstreams into which we attempt to integrate? Roughly what a wolverine that’s on fire and radioactive to boot does to a toilet paper roll it’s trying to crawl through, that’s what. See this picture?
Pamela Anderson's looking a little rough. Hunter S Thompson John Cusack and Johnny Depp plus one
Do you REALLY want these people in your Bell Curve? No. No, you do not. These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.
How do you solve a problem like Charlie Sheen? You can’t, because he’s so epically winning, right? BOOM! But you can try to come a bit closer to understanding him if you run him through a few filters first; it’s like watching an eclipse. The sheer awesomenosity could blind you if you didn’t apply some filters. So here is Jimmy Kimmel‘s interpretation of the Sheen interview, with visuals starring that otherCharlie.
a pretentious little quadrangle, with overtones of morbid obesity
Still too woozy from my latest hospital visit to do a useful post, but very soon I shall put up a restaurant review-style comparison of the multifarious psychoactive substances the wonderful Canadian healthcare system has been doling out to me gratis. Not sure whether to rate them on overall experience or just quality of hallucinations, but definitely in there somewhere.
Today the Emergency Room doctor told me my Demerol space cosmonaut monkey hallucination was “totally awesome.” I think it made his day. God knows, it made mine.
Yes, it’s another in our popular series, “Horror Stories of the Gastro-Intestinal System” starring none other than moi. But you’ll like this one: it is considerably less splenic and considerably more amusing than the previous installments (really? I don’t have a “gallbladder” tag? Seriously?).
This morning I was woken up in my least-favorite way, which is at 5:30am by a loud, tinny alarm clock I am not immediately well-coordinated enough to shut off quickly, and then the cat came over and farted on my face. I guess she just thinks that’s the best way to start the day, so tomorrow I intend to start mine by waking up at leisure, walking over, and farting on HER face. I sure hope she isn’t smoking at the time or this could get epic REAL fast.
My favorite way to wake up, by the way, is being sung awake shortly before noon in an isolated cottage on the beach at Not-Ucluelet: the song is a langourous Portugese fado, and the singer is: Jake Gyllenhaal, Viggo Mortensen twenty years ago, or Hugh Jackman. Or maybe Prince Caspian, but not the one from the movies, the one from the books. If the song hadn’t woken me, the smell of the fine double espresso (16-second shots) he immediately brings me would have. There are biscotti: pistachio, chocolate-dipped biscotti. There are red-and-black mackinaw-plaid blankets that feel like cashmere and look like what Kurt Cobain sleeps on in Heaven. Oh, what the hell, Kurt is there too, having kicked the heroin and skank habits.
But where was I, besides coming down from a Demerol high? Oh, right, explaining my day. Or rather, my gastro-intestinal system’s day.
The day which started so insanely early, because I had to catch a suburban bus to be on time, and they’re like every six weeks or something if you’re out in the boonies like I am right now. And I had to be on time, because my appointment was for a very high priority chimney sweeping of my bile duct, it appearing that my liver was slowly being poisoned by a backup of bile (and how odd is that, really? I mean, anyone who reads me knows I don’t keep the bile to myself but like to spread it around as freely as Rihanna spreads herpes!) and that if I didn’t have the procedure, I’d essentially poison myself to death in a few weeks, although not before giving myself an orange tan the likes of which the Jersey Shoreites would kill for. And god knows, I hate being tanned, so that was NOT an option, hence the bus ride to my 7:30am appointment for said chimney sweeping.
Actually, it was supposed to be more “sharks with frickin laser beams on their heads” than “prancing Dick van Dyke,” but it seems that my obstruction was more in the nature of clay rather than rocks, and so the sharks remained in their tank while the doctors conked me out with something and proceeded to drag a basket-like device up and down my bile duct, clearing things out considerably. I imagine it was something like the big round brush that goes over the whole car at the car wash, only with rhyming Cockney slang.
The Chinese doctor was very businesslike. The Irish one ignored my medical chart and picked up the book I’d been reading, Masterpieces of Murder: the best true crime writing from the Greatest Chroniclers of Murder, and said, “well, whatever else she’s got, she’s got good taste.”
And that is my kind of doctor, I’m telling you.
So, they wheeled me into the room, which was in Radiology for some reason, gave me a green, snorkel-like thing to bite on, stuck an oxygen tube in my nose, and put something in the line in my arm so I was OUT, like BLAM, GONE. They’d assured me most people don’t remember a thing, although it’s not technically a general anaesthetic. I woke up towards the end of the procedure, quite confused, on my belly with this masky thing in my mouth and breathing tubes in my nose and a big hose coming out of my throat, or it might have been several of them. Well, what would you do if you woke up in that kind of disoriented, context-free environment, with your arms tied down quite securely?
I can tell you what I did, deep in the tentacles of a Demerol daze: I immediately concluded that OF COURSE I was one of those monkey cosmonauts that the Soviets had shot into space back in the 60’s. Well, makes total sense, right? And I couldn’t see the control panel, which was of course supposed to be right in front of me, because there was this stupid TOWEL in front of it, so I think I tried to smoosh it out of the way before the nurses put it back, and then I don’t remember anything except waking up in the recovery room feeling healthy for the first time in weeks, and very, very loopy indeed.
For the next few hours I remained rather as likely to walk at a 45degree angle to the ground as a right angle, but other than that and the Great Cosmonaut Monkey illusion, I can’t say Demerol was much fun.
Hell, on the antibiotics they gave me I’d seen a pair of three-foot ravens, a dachshund that did not exist that was being walked by a couple who obviously DID, a ghost lurking on the porch, and a huge glob of Elmer’s glue that dropped from the ceiling to the floor right in front of my eyes and which also was not there.
On morphine, I’d become compelled to explain the ethnobotany of the Haitian Zombie (and HELLO what the fuck kind of podunk spellchecker doesn’t have “ethnobotany” in it, eh? I ask yez) to the nurses AT. LENGTH. To the point where they’d go out in the hall and flag down other nurses, going, “you HAVE to hear this!” I also saw the angels surfing on the rays of the setting sun over English Bay, and St. Peter actually winked and gave me the thumb’s up. I didn’t realize till after I’d gotten out of the hospital that the room I was in didn’t have a view of the sunset: it didn’t have any windows at all.
Anyway, since I’m on a clear liquid diet, that’s as close to a restaurant review you’re gonna get from me. Demerol ***, antibiotics **, Morphine *****.
Also, if you want to know what I was going through these past few weeks, try watching this video. I’m serious: watch it all the way through. Your guts will ACHE, I guarantee it. Also: be sure you’re wearing waterproof mascara. You’ll need it.
raincoaster 