May God's love be with you, always

I was sitting in my office, blithely watching Bleach and working to cull some of the fridge's heineken overpopulation problem, when I heard a "yoo hoo!" and Laura whacked aside the curtain. She'd forgotten her laptop here yesterday and had let herself into the apartment to get it, and somewhere between the door and her laptop I wound up listening to her talk for about a half an hour, and then I had to listen to this "really great!" song by Fiona Apple, and then I had to listen to Tegan and Sara, and then I had to listen to something by the Birthday Massacre...then her on again off again (currently off, probably soon to be on, I got the whole rundown and then some during the half hour of listening to her talk) boyfriend called and she left to get coffee with him.

It's really amazing how many words she can pack into the average minute. I mean she's not boring or anything, she just keeps going and going and frankly I don't know if she actually breathes between words or just takes a few deep breaths when she wakes up in the morning and that carries her through the rest of the day or what because I'm not sure when else she could. It's really pretty impressive. She's like the physical manifestation of Spector's wall of sound, applied to speech.

Oh, so I completely forgot to mention that I saw the Tragically Hip last Monday and it was excellent. Usually when I see a band, I'm relieved if they're as good live as they are recorded. Apparently the Hip work from the other way--after seeing them live, recordings pale somewhat in comparison. There's just so much energy, which is impressive coming from guys who've been touring pretty much all the time since, like, 1983. Gordon Downie, the lead singer, did most of the moving, and did he ever. He was quite a sight. The average adult human body is estimated to be about 60% water, but I think that man might be closer to 95% before the start of a show and 20% after. He was like the human version of those spinning sprinklers you set up in the yard for kids to run through. He wasn't turning red or breathing hard or anything. His shirt didn't even look wet. The only indication that he was releasing massive amounts of perspiration was the fact that he looked like a humanoid singing rainstorm. It sounds pretty gross, and I know it probably was, but from the distance I was at it was just more impressive than anything. It wasn't like, "eww sweat!" so much as "gosh I wonder if he can use a slip'n slide without running the hose on it first?"

And in the midst of the encore, Downie mentioned that at every show they try to do a new cover song and that this one was "definitely [from] one of Minneapolis' best-loved sons" so I was like, crap. I can't even imagine these guys singing Prince so it's gonna be Bob Dylan. I did not pay money to hear Bob Dylan. I'd be reluctant to cross the street to hear Bob Dylan. Fortunately it was extremely not Bob Dylan. It was an amazing cover of The Replacements' "Bastards of Young." SO PUMPED.

The only reason this wasn't the best show I've ever been to was because I couldn't see a damn thing half the time, since apparently most of the Tragically Hip's fans are seven feet tall and built like linebackers, and I, unfortunately for concert viewing purposes, am not. The music was good, the shoulder-to-shoulder wall of drunk expatriate Canadians wasn't so great. At about the middle of the concert I got fed up with it and made like some kind of goofy modern-day Zacchaeus and climbed partway up a pole, balancing one foot on the steps and another on the short wall behind me. It probably looked pretty stupid, but sometimes you just gotta do things.

And a drunk guy spilled beer on my shoes. They were the same shoes as at the Reverend Horton Heat show, which I also attended alone and a different drunk guy spilled beer on my shoes. I was even standing in the exact same spot.

I am beginning to detect a pattern here.

And trying to find anything you can feel that you can believe in

Geez, nothing like disappearing off the face of the internet for two weeks. Here's what went down: we got this letter (pushed mysteriously underneath the door. I have no idea who does this. I mean I have been there, right there by the door, when envelopes have been pushed under the door before, and I never heard the elevator either arriving or departing and there was nobody in the hall and what is this, ninja mail delivery? I mean come on the office is operated primarily by vaguely obsequious old men, who is doing this stealth delivery?) informing us that

"as per your lease, blah blah, management will be showing this apartment to prospective renters on Saturday and Sunday, keep it tidy,

xoxoxo

the management"

This was Friday night. This apartment was not, by strict definition, tidy. If you kind of squinted up your eyes and looked at the definition sideways in the dark, it still wasn't tidy. Friday night was a flurry of panicked push'n shove style power cleaning, which resulted in me cramming as much stuff as I could into the only large hiding space I had, which was under my bed, where my computer is. I packed an impressive amount of crap in there and hung up a curtain. So long as you didn't breathe too hard on my nearly-buckled closet door or have some kind of Wizard of Oz fixation with tearing down curtains, Tidy had been accomplished.

Of course, there was now so much stuff packed into my little underbed office that getting to my computer was more or less out of the question. But no big deal, right? I can handle going a weekend without my computer. Come Monday I'd be sweating bullets and have a serious case of the shakes, but I could make it. It was only for the weekend, anyway.

Until late Sunday night another envelope inexplicably appeared beneath our door. And again last night.

So pretty much our apartment has been continuously available for showing for all of the last week. This is wearing pretty thin. If they want to show it on the weekends, ok fine, that's only two days, I can do that. If they want to show it on a few week days, all right, just let me have some reasonable advance warning. But seven days a week? I'm sorry, apartment # 7/11 is down the hall, this is 704. Sometimes we just gotta chillax it.

And being caught in between all you wish for and all you see

So this elderly lady checked out through my line Saturday night, right? She looks like a severely hunchbacked, potato-shaped, mostly senile female Tom Baker. I mean the resemblance is kinda eerie. I've seen her around before, she's kind of a semi-regular, and every time I see her I'm thinking "oh man it's that Tom Baker again, would you like a jellybaby ha ha." Anyway so she bought like $150 of clothes, and as she's checking out, I realize that beneath her mid-thigh length jacket...she is not wearing pants.

I don't really know what was going on there exactly. Maybe she was, I don't know, maybe she got hot and decided to take her pants off? Maybe she likes a healthy breeze about her buttocks every now and again? I don't know. I'm not an expert in the lost pants department. But I do know she was wearing pants when she entered the store because I saw her come in. So that means somewhere between entering the store and leaving it, Ms. Tom Baker lost her pants.

Next time, on Unsolved Mysteries...

And falling down on your knees asking for sympathy

Man, I was at $4.50 and I needed to spend $5.00 to use my check card at the convenience store across the street so I bought some tic tacs to make up the difference. Tic tacs? As if. More like tic cracks. Like as in what your teeth do when you try to bite one because they are hard as tiny orange pellet-shaped pebbles. I mean I don't know what the shelf life is on tic tacs but these must be pretty close to senility.

Plus, while I was home for Mary's wedding this weekend, I cut my face on beef jerky. It's not a really impressive scratch, it's just the fact that I cut my face on beef jerky. How often do you get to say that? It's like the time I scraped my toe on the ceiling while I was trying to get out of bed. It's just one of those things you'll probably only do once in your life, if ever, and any time you try to think about it your head starts to spin because seriously, what the heck did I just do? On beef jerky??

And then while Mara and I were driving to Rochester on Saturday, we picked up a hitchhiker for the first time ever. We actually drove past him once, which is when I noticed there was a young, nerdy-looking guy at the side of the road right by the optimistic "welcome to Cannon Falls!" sign (the one that's like ten miles outside of Cannon Falls) with "ROCHESTER please" neatly written on a piece of cardboard. We debated going back for him as we went through the McDonald's drive-thru. After carefully weighing the pros and cons, we turned around and almost drove past him a second time when I said "Wait, look, he's got glasses!" and we stopped.

I am well aware that you can't tell a psycho at first glance, or even at second. We both knew it could potentially have been a bad idea. But he looked like nothing so much as a runaway techie with his longish dark hair and Skinny Puppy t-shirt standing at the side of a highway. With a dog. And glasses. And it's a well known scientific fact that if you're faced with a bespectacled opponent, all you have to do is break their glasses and they will be completely helpless.

I just made that up. That's not actually a scientific fact.

But all things considered, he seemed a safe bet. And as it turns out, it was. I guess his name is Edward, his dog's name is Corvis, he lives in Lacrosse, and he hitchhikes like this for fun, on the weekends. This time he hopped a midnight train from Lacrosse to Minneapolis and was hitching to Winona to get on another train bound back to Lacrosse. He seemed like a pretty interesting guy. We dropped him off at the intersection outside RCTC and headed to our respective homes, although I think mine and Mara's route was perhaps a little more direct than his. Probably a lot less interesting, too.