Garg, I planned to write the second half of the San Francisco entry, but then my computer rebooted itself with a half-written entry sitting there in Word so here’s the short version: Wake up, books, cute smart boy, nap, cute smart Pie, cute smart Fu, sing songs, get bitten, Saved by the Bell, surreal pantscakes, sleep, shit I didn’t do anything I was supposed to do why isn’t this plane leaving what the hell hey Esteban can you pick me up in Chicago the end.
I totally suck.
My weekend was spent either showing Kari, up for the weekend, the sights of glorious Green Bay, or editing a very high priority piece of freelance stuff that actually gave me nightmares. And then I finished that and curled up into a fetal position on the chaise and watched the first DVD of The Tomorrow People, which I think makes me a little dorky (A LOT) because it’s almost like having a Doctor Who habit stuffed beneath the mattress along with a cum sock, but I just do not care because I love me some John, even though I now feel like a pedophile but then I looked him up on IMDB and he is older than my mother, so now grrrowl John you jaunting homo superior you. Even though he bears a striking resemblance to the least understood but most artistically angst ridden Monkee Mike Nesmith. Only with a British accent, which absolves me of all shame.
Did I really just type the words ‘cum sock’?
So yeah, there you have it, Internet. That will teach you.
You know what’s interesting about being extremely busy? You start negotiating with yourself on things that are really not negotiable. I’ll do the (fucking) laundry on the weekend so that I can spend more time on this article. I’m too tired to go to the store, so I’ll do it tomorrow. Except that tomorrow never comes, baby, and guess what? You’re out of toilet paper and have nothing to eat for dinner but gummy worms and malternative beverages. At some point, I made this about ‘you’ rather than about ‘me’ but yes, the inevitable happened. And every spare moment of my evenings were already spoken for (the payment made for wasting one evening with Liz and TIM the sexiest biological computer ever, and did I mention that TIM cooks? Because I think I might put TIM on my list of potential second husbands. I’m sure that he’s fully functional. Oh god help me, I just made a Star Trek joke. This is such a cry for help) we planned to go grocery shopping immediately after checking out two three houses with my sister Mo, who is on her happy way to indentured servitude, not to mention owing her soul to the Hundred Dollar store. The homes were nothing incredible, although one was incredible in that the inhabitants seemed to require at least 40% Febreeze in their atmosphere in order to live happily. Note to home sellers: overdose on the Febreeze and prospective buyers speculate that there is a body decomposing in the crawlspace. Also, repaint the entire cupboard, not just the area around the handles, which just looks stupid.
One cool house was directly across the street from one of the houses we had lived in growing up. It was also my favorite, if only for the sheer number of porcelain dolls this post-menopausal woman had in her home. I am not making this up when I tell you that an entire 16-foot long wall was covered in at least two hundred porcelain dolls, including some that were extraordinarily creepy. They all faced her bed. I owned a few porcelain dolls when I was a kid (and still have them, in a box somewhere), and I’m not one to talk about trying to buy your childhood back, but man, I can’t imagine trying to go to sleep with eight hundred sets of little unblinking eyes staring down at you, little frozen hands itching to scrabble across your throat. Has this woman never seen Poltergeist? And we will not speak of the sleeping infant doll that looked a little too ‘life’like.
However, after traipsing through three versions of different air fresheners, back into the ungodly swampy heat that makes me think Wisconsin is the new Georgia, I was wiped out. Esteban drove to the grocery store, but once we started trolling for a parking spot, the idea of walking through the giant supermarket chasing after a bunch of things I didn’t care about in order to get the two things I did (toilet paper and god help me, Oreo ice cream sandwiches) I declared ‘No Mas’ and regrouped with a suggested trip to a convenience store for the barest of essentials and then go home where I would take a shower and then crawl betwixt my cool crisp sheets and watch whichever reality show my Tivo decided to show me. So Esteban stopped at a convenience store and left me swooning in the car while he checked out the toilet tissue options at our local BP. It’s sort of like camping, shopping at a convenience store (or any ‘grocery’ store in a major metropolitan area, since their grocery stores are a fourth the size of our convenience stores, while our grocery stores are the size of football stadiums), and he came out with two minute packs of Charmin, declaring that it was either that or the industrial grade Scott kind, which is wrapped in paper and sold by the roll. Ah yes, the toilet paper of desperate people. I was happy that we got Charmin and not, I don’t know, some kind of horrible tree bark reminiscent generic kind. I have mentioned before that Green Bay is the toilet paper capital of the Midwest, and perhaps even the country. I seem to remember that when Walter Mondale visited during the 84 election, he was given packs of toilet paper as a welcome, which turned out to be appropriate, since his bid for election was as successful as a goose struggling with incontinence. My great grandfather worked for the mill that made Charmin, while Esteban’s father works for a competing paper company. Suffice to say, two houses divided cannot stand, and for the first ten years of our cohabitation, we used Esteban’s father’s brand. I prefer Charmin, personally, I wasn’t about to make a stink (aye! See what I did there?) about it, since it really didn’t matter since the other brand came in double rolls, and the rare triple pack that I could only find at one location of one store in the city.
Then Charmin made the gargantuan There Can Be Only One roll that needs a special adapter unit or it will not fit in the dispenser. A roll that comes with its own hardware. When they unleashed the commercials for these behemoths, Esteban started laughing, mocking the American people who will not be satisfied until they only have to change the roll once a month. I said nothing, but just looked at him as he disserted an entire psychological profile and then summed up by saying ‘Oh god, we have one of those right now, don’t we?’ Well, how could I resist? And honestly, if the man ever changed a roll of toilet paper in his life, maybe he would have known that we were on the cutting edge of toilet paper technology? I’m surprised he hadn’t noticed that the cupboard which holds the spare rolls could no longer close all of the way, due to the girth of the asswipe held within. Leagues of toilet paper spinning into infinity, that is what I see when I close my eyes. It is, I suspect, the entire reason our forefathers brought forth this great nation of ours.
The convenience store’s Charmin was a standard roll. One might say ‘normal’. Or maybe ‘wee’. (SNORT! Ok, I’ll stop) It’s like a single-serving pack. You spin the roll and it visibly decreases. You can actually measure the rate of your own toilet tissue consumption, right before your very eyes. It’s stressful in the same way as the car I drove in high school was stressful: a 1978 Grand Prix, whose gas gauge would actually sink when you accelerated. When I look at it, hanging there so small and forgotten, like Gwynneth Paltrow’s breasts in that one horrible dress, it makes me sad. Buck up there, little toilet paper. You’re special in your own way. Even though you look like you are an accessory for the guest bathroom in Barbie’s Dream House. But the thing that amazes me is how quickly we’ve grown accustomed to double, triple and quadruple sized rolls. This will be one of the things we tell our spoiled future grandchildren, who will be dialing their friends on cellular implants while instead the womb. This along with 40mb hard drives and life before microwaves and the internet. And they’ll roll their eyes, hardly comprehending not having their own reality television show and having to blog it themselves. And we’ll go back to our retirement communities, where we’ll tell the same Lollapalooza story to the nurse, who has heard it forty times already and still doesn’t know who the Pixies are.
