What's small, spiky, had piggy legs, and doesn't stop moving? Our new family hedgehog!
Yes, the Scottafouchenathanberg household has a new family pet who lives in a giant bin of a world on the granite countertop that nobody used by the dining room. Kim and I went to Home Depot and bought the largest bin we could find and built a little home for him. It looks like this:
He has, as Jack described, "very pig-like legs", and a little snout that never stops moving. And he is adorable. When I put him on my bed he just burrows as deep as he can into the mess of blankets and comforters and pillows. Hedgehog is generally very friendly, except when you wake him up he gets really pissed off like an old man. He's a very "Get off my lawn, you crazy kids!" hedgehog.
The one thing I have learned is that male hedgehogs have their manhood located in the middle of their belly. That freaked me out at first.
He doesn't have a name yet, as we've taken to simply calling him "Hedgehog", or, in some cases, "The Hedgehog". If anyone can think of an awesome name, please comment.
(My favorite thing to do is put him in his back. Seriously, he is awesome.)
You are conceived in a factory. You wait some time on the shelves of a Wal-Mart or whatnot, and are finally "born" (read: turned on) in some strangers house. You don't have a childhood... you are basically forced to work from day one. Your life is not easy.
Yes, you have one job, but that job is crucial. You must wake up your Master by screaming at the top of your lungs right into his ear, usually at ridiculous hours with no reprieve. Your life is monotonous; every morning it's the same, and you relish weekends as much as anybody else, when you don't have to ruin your vocal chords by yelling as loudly as possible.
Sometimes, you sleep through your job and forget to wake your Master up, and he gets angry and hits you and mutters, "Great, now I'm late for work, stupid alarm clock." He never takes your feelings into consideration, rather, he only thinks about himself. You try to explain to him, "Hey buddy, even the best rooster sometimes slept through the mornin' sun, I'm not perfect!" but sadly, alarm clocks don't speak and so you can only think this, and hope you remember your job the next day. Finally, after a hard life full of nothing but early mornings and work, your batteries start to fade, the little red numbers on your face get dimmer, until one day you are nothing but some plastic in the garbage can. Yes, the life of an alarm clock is not an enviable one.
Seriously guys, this is the kind of stupid stuff I daydream about in the shower.
There is a hole in the bay window of our kitchen. Or rather, there was a hole, until earlier today. Don't believe me?
There, some proof. I bet you feel silly now.
Anyways, right about now you must be wondering how in the hell did that hole get there? We all know holes don't just magically appear in bay windows. Maybe they used to, I don't know, but they sure don't anymore. Well, dear friend, the source of that hole was a lime. Oh yes, a lime. A little green and surprisingly durable lime. And how did he cause the hole, you ask? Was he out for some sort of revenge? The answer is yes. This lime wanted revenge, and decided the best way to get it was to propel itself through our kitchen window.
It all started last Friday night in our humble Helena Drive abode. Kim, Lloyd, and I were bored out of our minds late at night, and with a rallying cry of, "The night is still young!", made our way into the kitchen to make our own fun. After racking our brains, we came up with a brilliant idea: Foodlympics.
The first contest in Foodlympics was "Mouth Bread". While Kim counted to ten, we had to shove a whole piece of white bread in our mouth and try to eat as much as possible, spitting out the contents at the end of the alloted time. It was both gross and impossible. The next contest was "Cinnamon Spoon", which as you can guess, involved us shoving a spoon of cinnamon down the hatchet. Both the cinnamon and the feeling of coming in 2nd place were bitter. The third contest was "Super Syrup". Super Syrup was a creation of mine and Lloyd's. It's a mixture of chocolate syrup and maple syrup, stirred together and drank in a shotglass. It was by far the most sugary event in Foodlympics.
Finally, the moment arrived. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it was time for America's new pastime... Limeball. Limeball, for the few of you who have never played, involves pitching a lime and hitting it with various objects. The first inning of Limeball was played with a mop. The second inning, I kid you not, was played with a hammer. A HAMMER. The lime itself was repeatedly tossed and hit, and as we all know, limes are nasty sour little guys. And this lime was the nastiest, sourest of all.
The third inning was played with a frying pan. After the first few pitches, I came up to bat. The lime had had enough. Kim tossed me the lime, I whacked it (not even that hard), and the lime, fed up with being used and abused, made a beeline for the window. Next thing we know, the aforementioned hole is there and we don't know what to do.
This is what we did:
Yep, we toiled all day, unscrewing and smashing and bashing. As of this second, there is just an open space, covered with a towel, of where the glass used to be. Tomorrow, I believe, we are gluing in the panel that we bought. All in all, totally worth it, especially since we got our own revenge on that bitter lime by throwing it out. Have fun in the garbage dump, you dumb lime!
Imagine you are at Woodstock. Imagine the excitement of being at this festival, knowing you are a part of something monumental, something that will be talked about by future generations. The people, the drugs, the atmosphere, love love love, peace peace peace, ideas and visions floating around, smiles and rain and freedom, dirty hippies...
You experience a few days of this. By Sunday, August 17, 1969, you are tired, worn down. Sure, you've had a blast, but you want to take a shower, and sure, you're having fun, but you can feel the end is coming. You're ready for the last day.
It's the afternoon. You aimlessly wander around with your friends, lazy and happy, high on life and other stuff. "Who goes up first today?" you ponder. You make your way to the stage. You hear some band playing instrumental music.
Uh oh. You hate instrumental music. "No words, not for me," you think to yourself.
You're almost ready to leave when somebody whispers, "Oh look, it's Joe Cocker." You frown. You were hoping for Hendrix (who, incidentally, would be on last today, but you don't know this yet). "What the hell, why not", you think to yourself, and you decide to stay for his set.
By the last song, your mouth is open and you are struggling to comprehend what the fuck you just witnessed, a rockstar in tie-dye who has seizures on stage while singing, a voice like no other, a God in a Man's body, your brain doesn't know what to do and you have a strange longing for this dude to play nonstop for at least three more days. "One more" he says. "I'm gonna leave ya with the usual thing," he says, "this title puts it all into focus."
And then you see the following take place:
As he walks off stage, people around you are screaming but you are just stunned, a brute force just hit you upside the head. "Holy shit," you think to yourself, "that was the most amazing thing I've ever seen. That was better than The Beatles' version! So much passion, so much emotion!"
As you're walking away, the clouds turn an ominous dark color as a thunderstorm erupts, lightning cracks and rain pours, and you get the feeling that He Who Lives Up There was saving it until Mr. Cocker left the stage, not wanting to interrupt anything.
Then you go back to your tent and take some shrooms and trip balls and pass out, and end up missing Jimi Hendrix.
No but seriously, that video gets me every time. That primal, animalistic scream at 4:55... goddamn, talk about feeling the music. Good stuff, Joe Cocker, really good stuff.
So this semester I have classes two days a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Five classes, spread out unevenly over two days. And every Tuesday and every Thursday (well, on the two so far that I've had this semester), I look in the mirror in the morning and think to myself, "Today's the day. Today's the day that I will drop out of school and go play the ukulele at some intersection for money, and those three middle school kids will spit on me as they steal the few quarters or so that I will have, but it'll be okay, since I won't have to go to my 7:30 morning class". But for some reason, I'm always too tired to follow through on that, so I go to my classes grumpily, muttering to myself about how I would rather be doing anything else, namely sleeping.
(Apparently when I sleep I don't understand the concept of a blanket, that it's supposed to go over your whole body... no wonder my feet always feel cold when I wake up, and I constantly have dreams that I'm walking barefoot on snow.)
Anyways.
Having classes two days a week means I have a lot of free time, and one of my goals for this semester was to start writing again. I used to love writing, mainly short stories about crazy worlds and aliens and people made out of bubble-gum. Seriously. One of my favorite little stories that I ever wrote was about people who were made out of bubble-gum. First place in the 7th grade Literary Fair, hell yeah.
But a few years back, just a little while before high school ended, I stopped writing. I don't know why. I had reached my author-peak sometime in the middle of high school, and then writing became a chore and so I stopped.
Well, before this semester started I was all, "Okay. Story time again. I will be like The Beatles, the fucking Beatles, churning out story after story like they churned out albums. Fuck yes."
And so last Monday I whipped out a pen and paper and had this awesome idea and started writing and wrote the best little story I have ever written and sent it out and it was published by Strange Horizons Magazine and... and none of that really happened. I just stared at the paper, not knowing what the hell I was doing, like when you fall asleep in math class and then look at the homework and then silently pout because you know there is no way, there is NO WAY, that you will know what to do.
Fuck writer's block.
The end, because I don't know what else to write, because I have writer's block right now. You know how they made Gatorade for athlete's to help them with conditioning and electrolytes and stuff? Hey, UF kids, work on something for the literary bunch, called "Writer's Block-Ade" or something, to stimulate our brains in ways they haven't been stimulated before.
Listening to Oasis, one has to wonder how big they could have really gotten had the Gallagher brothers not felt the need to be cliche rock stars the whole time, because damn, when things were clicking, they were SO GOOD.
I mean, just listen to "Don't Look Back In Anger" on full volume and tell me that wasn't one kickass band.
The problem though, of course, was that each Gallagher brother wanted to be more badass than his sibling, which led to punches thrown and insults hurled constantly over the decade or so that they were really big. On one hand, hearing stories of them trashing hotel rooms and throwing TV's out the window is cool, because let's face it... rock stars are cool. Isn't that the whole point of the movie "Almost Famous"? Being a rock star is cool. But being a rock star is also an image you project to your fans and the media, people who don't really know you personally. There is no point to trying to be a rock star to your own flesh and blood, because they knew what you were like before you got famous... the illusion just won't work.
Which is exactly what Liam and Noel tried to do with all those insults and punches, and why Oasis crumbled and went from being the biggest band in the world to being a punching bag of mediocrity.
Oh well, at least they left us (What's the Story) Morning Glory?, which keeps me up at night by tickling my ears and defining what a rock album should sound like.
