Please hire me to name your group

Teabaggers - people who hate taxes

Birthers - people who believe Obama was born in Kenya

Flamers - people who burn crosses

Mooseheads - Palin supporters

Second Lifers - christians

Lifesavers - anti-abortion protesters

Schmears - supporters of NRA president Ron Schmeits

Cherrypickers - supporters of abstinence only education

Bradys - people who believe in hetero marriage only

COBRA - Cheney's secret death squads

The Black Hundreds - Fox News fans

Dead Fish Society - Glenn Beck fans

The Beekeepers - people against cross-pollination

Landscape

...And the cities stretched across the granite land in flat miniatures, delicate and tiny, with pleasing surfaces. It might be nice to stretch across them, the towers poking into your shoulder muscles, sharp little nubbies rubbing out your back. The whole of the developed countryside was a pattern of dry glue waiting to be peeled off the desk. If she worked it hard enough with her fingernail, the glue would come off in one solid piece, and the city would stay intact and mobile. She would be able to wave it like a plastic ribbon, fold it and bend it. But not too hard, she didn't want to crack the thin base that all these little toys were attached to. She just wanted to be able to move them, take them with her, look at their flexible undersides, watch the skyline bending in a circle around a coffee cup or fat thumb. She carefully worked at the glue, chipping only a few vacant houses at the edge. The middle came up all at once in a satisfying single solid motion...

Cleveland Food Rocks BBQ: Or how I gained 10 pounds in 2 hours

First of all, last night I saw the Little House on the Prairie show finale for the first time. What? The only way that ending could get any better is if the priest blew the church up too. I never watched the last seasons, but Laura and Manly had such an obscenely nice house, and she was wearing so much makeup, I can only assume she became a prostitute in her later years. And it's nice Ma was helping out with that. Also, why the hell was Shannon Doherty in the cast?

Today I wisely didn't eat any breakfast, and stumbled sleepy eyed into the Cleveland Food Rocks BBQ over at the Beachland. Basically a whole slew of area restaurants handing out amazing goodies, and Bootsy Collins. It was a good time. Which is why I'm now probably a diabetic, and my stomach looks like I live in Somalia eating flies. I shouldn't say that, that's tasteless.


I feel bad because I don't remember who I got the grilled corn from(edit: the corn was from Momocho, of course. duh), but it was spicy and limey and great. Next was a pulled chicken taco from Crop, and pork belly with pickled watermelon from Boulevard Blue. I apologize. The tent, while being very useful in it's heat seeking missile shielding capabilities, made taking good food photos a little hard. I'm sure I'll see pictures tomorrow that will prove me wrong.


I think Melange definitely wins best in show. They had a clambake, clam chowder, and bags of this awesome popcorn (caramel bacon mixed with peanut butter and jelly popcorn WHAT). I actually made my friend take home another bag of popcorn for me, because I can't stop eating this shit.


Next favorite: Lago's grilled peach with goat cheese ice cream and balsamic. This was the dish everyone was telling everyone else to try. I would have bought a gallon of that ice cream. More than a gallon. One of those crazy huge buckets that you buy the really cheap ice cream in. It might have lasted me a week.




Luxe's beautiful variety of potato salads served in the most appropriate walk around container ever. Spooned up by Cleveland's version of Lenny Kravitz. Cuter though. Raves also went to the salmon done by Marc at the Blue Point Grill, but not by me since I don't eat fish. I tried it, because I was told I would like it despite my habit of not eating slimy ocean dwelling vermin. Sadly, I was not converted. But I remember how much I loved Marc's duck from Capsule, so I'm sure it kicked ass. And Pierre's managed to keep three tubs of ice cream frozen for 4 hours with things that looked like styrofoam peanuts, and they brought Peppermint Stick! So good for them.

Apparently Steve Schimoler from Crop, besides running food empires, organizing charity events, and running my favorite restaurant in Cleveland, also plays the drums. Well. Now he can say he's played with Bootsy Collins. Apparently Bootsy is also a restaurateur in Cincinnati. Maybe they're old friends. Maybe they were in the secret service together. Maybe Bootsy taught Steve how to kill a man with his thumb.


It was a grand ol' time, and I hope they do it again next year. Because I will need more popcorn. Soon. I'm going to go pass out now, again.

Note: you can see much better pictures by my friend Angie at Metromix. Seriously, I don't know why everything is purple...

My Thoughts Today, and in General, and Sometimes

1) Currently at my house I have a bag of mini-marshmallows, a bag of pecans, butter, flour, questionable eggs, and expired milk. I really want to come up with a way to make something out of this, so I don't end up eating marshmallows out of the bag for weeks. But I also need to not buy any ingredients. I will probably eat popsicles for dinner again. Can you successfully braise one chicken breast? With marshmallows maybe? The picture of me sitting watching tv eating mini-marshmallows is insupportable.

2)I'm still upset over that Plain Dealer advertising scandal yesterday. I live in zip 44111, and yes, I know my downstairs neighbors will be moving as soon as they can. But I don't want my whole neighborhood gutted, like some can of tuna opened to the alley cats. I'm appalled that someone who works for a city newspaper can think like that. It smacks of East-Siderdom. You know perfectly well what I mean by that, don't get snippy.

3) People are really pissing me off today. Not people I'm close to, but all those peripheral people, ones I shouldn't have to deal with anyway. They're just doing and saying stupid unnecessary things about stupid unnecessary topics. This is one of those days when my usual safety net of courtesy has been cut through and through. Be an adult. Be an adult. Be an adult. Not me, you.

4) Tonight is David's show at (art)ificial gallery, 17020 Madison. You should go see it.

5) I wish I was friends with more historians. But like, historians with drug habits. And really great South American retreats.

6) I'm so terribly excited about District 9. Also Inglorious Bastards, Avatar, Sherlock Holmes, and 9. I am not so terribly excited about Hilary Swank playing Amelia Earhart. Also, I will watch The Ugly Truth when it goes to DVD, which should be by September. Don't judge me. I'm a little pissed I missed Miss Marple on Mystery Thursday night. Say that sentence 5 times fast.

7) I wish I was a better artist so I could draw a pop-up book of my favorite cities, but depicted as massive mutated godzilla like creatures, sprawling and wicked and Akira like. I would write all about their favorite eating habits and mating habits, their evolutionary history, the future of the species. Maybe I should just write a book about my favorite buildings. Maybe I should have gone into civil engineering...

8) Can you imagine having only one leg? Diabetes.

9) I have to send the couple in Brooklyn a present, but I'm having trouble deciding on things. Mostly I don't know what the wiring is like in their apartment. I have this strange feeling that things made in Sweden won't work with New York stacked housing. Even though obviously it's their biggest market.

10) I officially crave Angel. And it's M's fault, because he kept mentioning watching it. So now I think about it at least once a day. Usually at the same time that I'm watching another rerun of Diners Drive Ins and Dives. Also, I need to start watching the Young Ones, I feel like it's been waiting for me.

11) The cooking bug is coming back, probably due to the rain. I want to make a peach creme fraiche pie. Also my own pancetta. And pickled cherries. I need into an empty building stat. I need some mold inhalation to stem the cooking devils.

12) I've used the word "stat" today like 17 times. I'm officially shutting my brain down now.

13) But I hope you all like your new tattoos!

14) The problem with reading about politics now is that I no longer find it entertaining to be shocked and dismayed. That's so 2004, I can barely stand it. I watched the Daily Show with no sound the other night, and it was incredibly depressing. But I guess just like the Lefties got their opportunity to be outraged and activisty cool before, Republicans apparently think it's their turn to have crazy puns and paranoid email chains. Only problem is they're stupid. And they were doing all that stuff before. I got sucked into a phone conversation at work that started off about insurance laws and ended up in "Welfare is the Death of our Country and the reason for the Recession" land. I'm so tired of being polite, but I don't have the energy to argue anymore, because it's so futile.

Oh the heavy footsteps!

Last night was a weird night for me. I went to the Walkmen concert at the Beachland by myself. Which is a simple blanket statement, but let me break that down for you. It means that I:

a)drove the Beachland by myself
b)parked and walked by myself
c)walked through the door crowd by myself
d)waited at the bar by myself
e)drank my drink by myself
f)stood against the wall by myself
g)watched the crappy opening band by myself
h)smoked a cigarette outside by myself
i)left early overwhelmed by loneliness and not impressed enough by the band to battle that, by myself.

So not the best time I've ever had. I mean, I've gone to shows by myself before, I'm not a pussy. Usually I'm quite capable of having a good time. But last night was not the night for that. I knew it before I left the house, I think. It was this loose blanket of blah, that slowly tightened around me as I drove there, and was choking me by the time I settled into my spot against the wall. If the bands had been better it might have jolted me out of that thick green fog.

But the 2nd opening band (I missed Coffinberry) was sub par. They were decent enough at playing their instruments, but the promised beat anticipation never materialized, and the lead singer reminded me of a guy I knew at Thursdays a long time ago. It was wan. Like a kitten with a dead flower in its mouth.

And maybe my depression was throwing cottonballs in my ears, because the Walkmen failed to throw any punches either. It was good enough, it was pretty in that monochrome way they have, but it was too low key and monotone and every sound seemed like it was bouncing against a glass wall between the band and the audience. There were trombones waiting on the side, but I couldn't stick it out long enough to be disappointed by them.

So I don't know. Either it sucked cause I wasn't in the mood, or it sucked AND I wasn't in the mood. I tend towards the latter. I mean, if it was good, it would have made me feel better right?

Pittsburgh potatoes are better than Cleveland potatoes

Even though I went to New York the weekend before, I was so antsy by the time Friday came around, I could barely sleep. I had to go somewhere, anywhere, there not here, but I was also broke and couldn't take time off work again. My bank account was mocking me, my car was just as nervously anxious (I could tell by the way the wheels shook), and I faced the prospect of having to actually clean my house. So I took off to that closest of all Midwest destinations, Pittsburgh.

Oh Pittsburgh, hated sister city of Cleveland! How we've mocked you, even as we watched you suffer the same ravages and economic pitfalls as us, as we watched steel plant it's heel in your (our) faces and grind it into the curb, and your city devolve into a dirty swath of unemployed citizens and dive bars....oh wait, you got tech? Like, tech as in jobs? And successful riverfront development? Screw you Pittsburgh.

For some reason, all of my pictures of Pittsburgh came out crooked, leaning precariously to the left or the right. Maybe because I was always on a hill? When I was little, my family used to drive to Latrobe all the time to visit Grandma, through Pittsburgh. I loved those Pennsylvania hills. I still look at them and see sleeping dinosaur giants. When you finally come up on Pittsburgh from the highway, it's like emerging into the Emerald City, or Xanadu. You know, hidden, secreted away from prying eyes. Only with concrete and asphalt. I love the row houses up and down the valley, and the churches! Pittsburgh has some of the best churches. Good old school Catholic sentries, sitting like confused monoliths in their little tight neighborhood corners.

Pittsburgh wins, Cleveland. Sorry, but the whole city is cleaner and nicer now. There's more people walking around. Their bridges are painted pretty colors, and that riverfront development, while full of obnoxious places I would never go, is vibrant and busy and obviously making money.

For breakfast on Sunday I ended up in the Strip District, which is a neighborhood of repurposed warehouses, restaurants, and specialty shops. Which, for the record, is like Tremont, Coventry, and Downtown combined. I recognize there are probably Pittsburghians that hate this place. But it's exactly what we should have done with the Flats. Commercial instead of residential. I went to Pamela's, stood in line for the appropriate amount of time, and ran across the street for a moment after mass let out to look at this gorgeous church interior. Which does not, by the way, belong to the church above. There are so many great churches! Then I ran back, got my table, and nearly died eating Lyonnaise Hash Browns. Like, of ecstasy. The best hash browns I have ever had, bar none.

Later, a trip to the Andy Warhol museum. Just to, you know, cement my hatred of Warhol, Basquiat, and everyone else associated with that hipster jerk fest. Alright, I like the Velvet Underground a lot. And I like the room where I just sit on a couch listening to them and watching dumb movies. And I loved the room of floating silver balloons. But I realized that I just wish Warhol had been less about other people and more about his own craziness, something that came to me while staring at the long run of Elvis prints. I mean, here was an ugly little boy who idolized Hollywood and grew up screenprinting faces of dead stars over and over again. I like him when he focuses only on his own craziness and less on impressing other douchebags. Also, the taxidermy thing is disturbing. I am simultaneously incredibly jealous and incredibly angry at someone who would keep a stuffed lion and a stuffed Great Dane.


Later, my aimless drive around turned into an impromptu Pittsburgh cemetery tour. I ended up in like 5 of them. The biggest was Allegheny, better named "My obelisk is bigger than your obelisk" town.

And then there was this creepy steeple thing in the middle of another cemetery that turned out to be an ill disguised cell phone tower. I kid you not. Verizon, what the hell is with the cross on top?
Finally, before starting that miraculously short drive home, I went searching for the Pittsburgh ghetto. Something that didn't seem like it should be so elusive. But though I found some small areas in the hills that were run down, I couldn't quite seem to get to the real bad parts. Some guy told me to go to Homewood, which for sure had lots of boarded up houses and abandoned lots. But it just didn't seem like the "bad" neighborhood. I don't know. Maybe I don't believe in bad neighborhoods anymore.


I definitely believe in pink dinosaur piggy banks. Definitely.

My favorite part of Pittsburgh is and always will be the tunnels. I love that they have them at all. I love that traffic gets super slow right before them, like drivers are afraid to go through them, and then completely clears inside the tunnel. I love that its always nighttime in there. Maybe the sole reason Cleveland is losing the Midwest Jewel competition is our lack of mountains. On the other hand, we do have an inland sea. It should count for something. Maybe we should work on a tunnel to Canada through the salt mines.

Animals you don't fuck with.

Okay, so let's say I was incredibly wealthy, like star system owning rich. And let's say I had an inclination to create a stable of the worlds most intelligent, dangerous creatures. That, by the way, is exactly what I would do if I ever were rich. These are animals that I hold so high in my estimation, I really can't think of them as just animals. These are aliens.

First and foremost, I would have elephants. Elephants are thoughtful, compassionate creatures with a nurturing matriarchal structure, empathic emotional bonds, and incredible memories. They also vindictive, prone to violent rage, and capable of killing a man in a second. Since the 70's, packs of elephants have been attacking human settlement with more frequency, a trend attributed to post traumatic stress disorder. Otherwise known as "we killed off all your mothers with poaching and now, raised as a motherless delinquent, you are getting revenge" disorder. Elephants have been reported to like getting drunk before the attacks. And of course, there is the rhino rape story. You have to respect a 26,000 pound creature who is emotionally invested in their race enough to be a terrorist. They are rising up against the extinction of their noble tribe. They're in.

Next, squid and octopus. One, their tentacles are as dexterous as a human hand. Two, the colossal squid can grow up to 46 ft. Three, Humboldt squid attack like a wolf pack, and regularly attack humans. Four, beak. Five, complex communication through changing skin colors and patterns. Six, insane observational learning capabilities. Seven, telescope eyes. Eight, habit of boarding fishing boats and breaking out of aquariums in search of food, like ruthless little street children.

If the elephant is the crazy beserker with a tragic past, the cephalopods are the creepily efficient robot drones.

Going down the list, we come to....whales and dolphins. Whales, dolphins, and porpoises are supposedly descended from tiny two toed deer that said "fuck this" and went back into the water. The whale is in fact closely related to the hippo, (who apparently is also descended from a tiny deer, what?). They are, of course, insanely mind-blowing huge. They have crazy powers of echolocation, and receive sound not through their ear but their JAW. They CHOOSE when to breathe. They sleep with one eye open.

Dolphins are pretty and cute, but also have two hundred and fifty teeth which they use like an antenna. They are sleek fast killing machines. Orcas, the "wolves of the sea" are in fact a type of dolphin, not a whale. Dolphins are known for using tools, helping sick co-workers, and killing porpoises for no apparent reason. They are also marketing geniuses. "Hey, these fisherman are trapping fish! If I follow them, I can get fish too! But I don't want them to hurt me...hey fisherman, look at me bounce this ball! Look how cute I am! Watch me maime this porpoise!"

Of course, I couldn't have a collection of this kind without chimpanzees I guess. But I really dislike apes. Really really. I mean, I guess they don't really NEED me to like them. They've got things to occupy themselves with, like making tools, convincing researchers they have spirituality by staring at sunsets, and of course, cannibalism. My favorite part. Maybe I don't like chimps because they're not alien enough. It's unfair of me, I know. I would never be intentionally rude to a chimp to its face though. It would totally pluck out my eye. And eat it.

Finally, I would have a mischief of rats. I would build them a great inner castle, and seed the population with only very fit, high performance breeds. I would leave them activities to do and videos to watch, and computer consoles to operate. And one day, a very special rat would be born, the jump in evolutionary ratdom. And this rat would lead a revolution to scale the castle walls, to storm the unknown horizons, to be what no rat had dared dreamed to be before.

And as the group of ragtag rat freedom fighters finally emerged from the long underground tunnel they had spent years building, they would be eaten by the giant octopus, who was wandering around looking for cat food.

Random pics of Destruction

I know, I know. What's up with all the firework pictures lately Bridget? Can't find anything more interesting to show us? Well first of all, fireworks are the Rorschach test of my dreams. In my world, the entire cityscape is the canvas for my sick interpretations of reality and nightmare, and you all just gape and deal with it.

Second, I took a lot of pictures on July 4th.

Third, these are not actually fireworks, July 4th just happened to be a date of catastrophe for the City of Cleveland.


Catastrophe Exhibit# 1: An immense monster, towering hundreds of feet above the skyscrapers, emerged from the lake. The lake water slid off its muddy pelt in a torrential waterfall, completely destroying the beaches and marinas with a tidal wave of shipwrecked waverunners and confused sheephead. It's eyes were giant glittery orbs, vacant and robotic, and it barely noticed the city as it followed the river south to its true prey, Canton.


Catastrophe Exhibit #2: Evil baseball hating aliens from Epsilon Eridani B bombard the stadium with death rays. Thank god that the Downtown Cleveland Alliance spent all that money putting a force field over it.

Oh.


Catastrophe Exhibit #3: The Rock Bottom Brewery explodes.

30 is the gradient of yellow in my skin

The notable things from New York: (and yes, these are pictures of Cleveland)

1) KT was the most drivingest driving man around. He drove to NY. He drove from NY. He drove in NY. He found parking places only two blocks away from everywhere we went. He never once got annoyed or angry at the fact that we got lost anytime we went anywhere. He is he is he is he is he IS....The Driving King.

2)David and Maggie, who put us up, were the really decent couple that you know are just going to stay really decent and cute and interesting no matter how old they get.

3)On Saturday, we found the place where old Italian men give you kisses and opera singers hang out and do requests late into the night. Also, it rained while they were doing it. This was the thing I most enjoyed.

4) The play, Cocktails At the Center of the Earth, M.'s star robot turn, was good Friday night, and then great on Sunday night. The dialogue and the songs and ski-bass, they were inventive and funny and interesting. They, the cast and assorted followers, were all seemingly nice people, except for maybe that guy who gave me the chocolate chip whiskey in your hand shot. The writer was dressed like a sailor and handing out gin. One girl ran out after the show to buy herself a new outfit at American Apparel, because she didn't like the breeziness of what she was wearing. I liked this girl, so no diss, but that seems to me to be the most New York moment.

5) Any time anyone not born in New York who now lives in New York hears the phrase "I live in Cleveland and I like it", their nose inevitably, imperceptibly, ever so slightly curls up. Or they actively snarl and tear out your throat. Native New Yorkers don't do that. Maybe like immigrants are more patriotic than 7th generation Irish?

6) I really have no desire to move there. Sorry Kat. Unless somehow you can work it that I get to hang out with opera singers all the time, and live in a French restaurant. And really, if you can do that anywhere, I'll take it. Whatever magic it is that people see in New York City that makes them so crazy to possess it, I don't see it. I mean, it's a big city. I like big cities naturally, with huge buildings and bridges and docks. I like doing culturally cultured sort of things, and its nice when there's lots of them. However, I can barely afford the selection I have here. And most of all, when I was in the middle of the city, it just seemed so small and insular. Like walking around in a not that pretty diorama. I liked NYC for all the reasons I like any other new city I visit, nothing more, nothing less. I'll write more about this later, when I wake up and when I figure out how to articulate this sentiment without losing all of my East Coast readers.



Now I'm back, broke as a goat on its back and sensationally depressed. Everything is tasteless and touch-less and smell-less. It started before we got back, but I managed to fight it until safe in my own bed. Like, I sit at home on the couch with a giant stab wound in my gut, and just watch the fluids drain for hours. I have some books I should be reading, and instead I chain smoke and watch network tv, which everyone knows is the sign of failing interior workings. I barely cleaned up my house when I got back, at least my hallway. It was a big deal for me. That was like, the most positive thing I've done. Music makes me mad. Alcohol makes me sad. Not having a cell phone for the last few days has been a good thing for everyone involved, I'm in no decent condition to communicate with other sentient beings. I was fine with 30, until I found myself 30 and alone. Which is not where I expected to be. Fuck 30.

War

On July 4th, our cities recreate battlefields, covered in gunsmoke and chemical agents, every man competing for glory against those who used to be his neighbors and now, frankly, are the enemy. I love it. I think its the best thing ever. I think every man for himself and the virgins to the victor. Unless he's blown his thing off by then.

This is the cake Buddy made, the night we went to battle on the mean streets of Old Brooklyn. And by battle I mean drank a lot while wearing glowstick bracelets, playing Rockband, and being bit up by mutant bugs on the weed infested hills of the river valley. Seriously, some shitty thing bit me on the tip of my thumb.

Buddy is, obviously, better at making cakes than you.

The best thing that happened tonight is that C told some guy in a Bauhaus t-shirt his unborn baby was a cunt.

P.S. and then he asked if she would sleep with him.

That DJ does not love you, girl in the flowery dress

pictures from the Dan Deacon show at the CMA Solstice party.

That DJ does not love you little girl, who styled her hair so carefully before she put on her mother's curtains and ventured into the world of benefactors and sponsors. He wants to love you, moppet head, but he knows you are 22, and bereft of the way of the world. Let me explain...take off your messenger bag and listen.

First, here is the first time you fall in love, and poof, there goes that love up in smoke, like a pellet gun shooting pigeons. After this moment, you know that trust is non-existent, and connections fluid like the saliva in your ex boyfriends mouth.

Then oops, here is your first long term job, the one that was only supposed to pay the bills before you hightailed it to Chicago, and now suddenly it's your five year anniversary and you're on the Spirit Team. Decorating people's cubicles in streamers, people who would probably not talk to you if they knew what you thought about at night.

Here is your hope for a stable beautiful existence. The kind that exists in coming of age movies, where the old person shakes their head knowingly and drinks some lemonade and doesn't tell you about the body in the basement on purpose. Boom, there it goes! Erased by kitty litter, and smelly shoes, and those bananas you never threw away in the fridge even though trash day was Sunday and you were waiting for Sunday to throw them out because otherwise they would just stink up the trash bin. You are going to die of potassium deficiency. Or that horrible cat dementia caused by contact with feline feces.

There are all the little dreams, dying like stars, right? Bullshit metaphors. More like rotting away in a phosphorescent garbage heap in the dark sea that is your middle school days. You are a dying Angler Fish. Want to go back to school? Want to join the Peace Corps? Want to be beloved? Want a dog? Want to go into space? Want to write Catcher in the Rye? Kablooey. Drink some more.


And as you grow old, out of your glowing twenties when everything was so vibrant, so color saturated, so photo-shopped into memories of rag-tag-ness and sluttiness and nights you didn't spend with him, lying on the ground watching shooting stars because he never took you to do that, but he took every other girl with a name ending in y, though you talked about nights in sleeping bags so often. Those things are exploding before your eyes, disintegrating into crappy domestic abuse pamphlets, into conversations about assholes and crazies, and life will never be as good as it looked like it could be then. You'll never be cold together again. You'll never crawl shivering into the covers after showers, or fall asleep on the way home, or stop to drive around strange villages in Southern Ohio with gaming arcades. Those things never really existed, they were just in your mind. In fact, as the smoke dissipates, you'll realize those things never happened for him. Just for you. And with every 2 am conversation involving a man named Jacques and another pineapple vodka, you'll feel yourself slipping deeper and deeper into the disconnection. Into the realm where people are vague shadows and hugs don't actually touch and names are all anybody knows, where politics and music become excuses for talking about yourself and if you have to go to the grocery store one more time by yourself, you might just buy a carton of cat food and call it quits.

Here's a bunny. The fucking bunny doesn't care either.

We are the cause of Global Warming, at least for most of June and all of July.

Here are the things I like about the Fourth of July:

1) blowing things up
2) permission to make exceptionally loud noises late into the night
3) drinking
4) opportunities to take zombies pictures
5) watching otherwise grown people act like kids at Christmas who cannot wait to open the package and blow up all the cool ones.

Here is what I hate about the Fourth of July:

1) freedom

Last Sunday, Marty gave me an awesome painting of a unicorn for my birthday, and Rebecca made me strawberry pie, and then we all gave ourselves future cancer by running around in chemically laced gunpowder clouds for no real reason.

We also made sandwiches, which were pretty good. And drank cherry limeade. And had a paint-off. Because everything can be made an -off. The subject was bathrooms. Rebecca painted a polka dot Dali dream of flying toilets. I had cockroaches on my mind. Marty scanned it for me and then sent me a trick email designed to make me see God in the 0s and 1s. I don't open emails from Buddhists!


The Macedonia

Ingredients:

-ciabatta rolls
-mozzarella, sliced
-washed baby spinach leaves
-sliced tomatoes
-2 large portabello caps
-1/4 cup fresh chopped basil
-garlic powder
-onion powder
-oregano
-olive oil
-soy sauce
-worchestire
-paprika

First slice the tomatoes and cheese, and marinate them at room temperature with the basil, olive oil, garlic, onion, oregano, and S&P. All measurements to taste.

Slice the portabellos and marinate them in the soy sauce, worchestire, paprika, and garlic. If there's anything else in there that Marty snuck in, I don't know it. This isn't exactly a science as you can see. Leave for about twenty minutes. Have a drink. Blow up some smoke bombs.

Wash the spinach and set aside.
Saute the portabellos.
Stack everything together. Voila. The cheese should get a little melty from being on the counter and then having the hot mushrooms on top. The tomatoes should remind you that at some point in your life you are going to have to try growing the damn things (after all, you're thirty and you have a cat, what are you waiting for). And after you eat it, you should be completely stuffed and incapable of doing anything more than flicking a bic and watching Green Porno in the basement.

The Black Kitty of Inle

South quadrant, third level, Section139

In this building, in the basement, is a cadre of thugs, planning the kidnapping of the Haitian ambassador's daughter. They are smoking cheap cardboard cigars and making margaritas.

On the first floor lives a small lonely brown dragon. He broke his wing against an antenna, when he got turned around in the fog, and has been surviving on rats and possums while it heals. The security staff has been leaving it the occasional sandwich as well, and is trying to sell it's picture to Perez Hilton.

The second floor is for lost children.

The third floor is for clandestine coke deals in tinted Buicks. They also manufacture fake nikes using stolen Filipinos. The denizens of this floor are looked down upon by the Haitian thugs, who wish the neighborhood wasn't going to such shit.

The fourth floor is not your friend.

On the fifth floor, in the center of the parking pillars, is a very old tree who's branches wrap around the reinforced steel and concrete like poisonous vines into the bricks of a house. The tree smells like licorice, and bleeds silver sap which pools on the floor like tiny mercury fish. The fish shiver and sliver their bodies into the cracks of the building, where they glow incandescent as the cells of their bodies multiply, divide, and fall away. They are seeding the electrical wires. On the branches of the tree grow golden apples, heavy and rich. They roll easily into crowds. Once picked, they will not rot for at least 20 years, but once they hit thirty, they instantly become moldy black piles of sewage inside, though they may keep their golden glow for another 100 years.

The 6th Floor is for aspiring photographers and latent republicans.

The 7th Floor promises a lot more than it offers.

On the roof, once you have climbed the well lit, incredibly empty stairways and emerged into the starless city night, there is a large computer with a steady blinking light. This computer has been waiting for you. It smells you as you approach, and hums happily, its screen flashing electric joy. You stand in front of it, and its insides can barely take the proximity, as all its wiring and fans and chips vibrate violently. You touch it, and it explodes into a million tiny contented pieces.