A gigantic nuclear furnace

After realizing I had over sixty hours of unused paid sick time left to me, I figured I'd probably earned the right to be sick today. And besides, I'm supposed to be having a massive garage sale this weekend. Today I will clean. Today I will prepare. I will put on my apron and my very best fifties housewife smile and go to town on that rat's nest I call home.

So naturally I'm sitting in the Tea Garden looking at the Wikipedia entry on Highlander, wishing somebody would log on to AIM already. My buddy list is a wasteland. You'd think it was three o'clock on a Wednesday or something.

Moved from the wikipedia entry on Highlander to the wikipedia entry on swords.

There are a lot of swords.

It's hard to believe that Monday will be my last day EVER at Savers. I am delighted. I will probably miss the discount, though.

According to what I'm finding on wikipedia, the two swords I picked up at a garage sale back in high school are from Thailand and are either called daab or krabi. I'm not clear on that point. Either way they're my favorite ever. They're slightly curved, single edged, double handed, with minimal handguards and a balance that suits me. If I was going to be a person who uses swords like it's a normal thing to do, I would be all over that style. For my purposes, they look good on a wall and are fun to swing around like I mean it whenever an episode of Highlander is over and Freddie Mercury starts wailing out the theme song. Speaking of swords, Wayne got fired! I won't have to worry about slaying him on my front porch.

And speaking of Wayne, Ben and I ran into Marcus on the bus on Sunday, which could have been a disaster. He was sitting in the front so we ran to the back, where fortunately he did not follow. I probably would have had to knock Ben out and leave him behind as bait as I ran away out the back door of the bus, and that wouldn't have done much to improve our friendship. And I like being friends with Ben. For example, he's the only friend I've ever made whom I can smack in the face as the punchline to a knock knock joke and get away with it. There was some running away involved, but no repercussions so far. I may be in the clear.

Ben and I were on the bus because we decided we needed to go to Ax Man, in St. Paul, to buy ridiculous things. I'd never been to Ax Man before. It was like a shopping epiphany. It's just a big dirty dimly lit store full of shelves and baskets and buckets and bins of the most random surplus and liquidation things you could want to find, all labeled with goofy names and pop culture references. As I told Mara later, if I awoke one morning to find I had undergone a Kafka-esque transformation into a store, I would wake up to be Ax Man.

We had a heck of a time getting there, though, because after I spent an hour getting to his house and then a half hour walking back to the 21, and we got on and evaded Marcus and were settling in for the ride, Ben casually mentioned he wasn't actually sure where this place was.

Awesome. Because St. Paul is where you want to be not completely sure where you're going.

We lucked out and found it anyway, and as we were leaving Ben said he wanted to check out Ragstock, which sounded fine. And he said he knew where that one was. I don't know why I believed him, because that's what he said about Ax Man originally, but there we went anyway. We never found Ragstock. But we did spot a Herberger's across the highway. We both needed to use a bathroom, and besides, who ever heard of a Herberger's that wasn't part of a mall?

Herberger's wasn't part of a mall. Herberger's was part of a huddle of buildings that wanted to be a mall but weren't ready to reach out and commit. At this point I'm not sure if St. Paul even has malls, just stores with social dysfunctions.

So we left Herberger's, got on the 21, rode back to my neighborhood, picked up a DVD from my apartment, got bubbletea, wandered Lyndale a little and were about to head back to his house when he started whining about how his butt hurt. There was never any particular explanation offered for why, it apparently just did. So we sat down next to Lake street, called his mom, and she picked us up and drove us back to their house. Where we watched the movie until it was too dark for me to want to walk a long dark half hour to the closest bus, so I crashed there and intended to leave in good time in the morning, if only my alarm on my phone hadn't somehow been set to silent. Which is the stupidest thing an alarm can be capable of. So instead of waking up at 7 and making it home in time for a nice leisurely time of getting ready for work at 11, I woke up at...9. I raaaaaaan to the bus, raaaaan off the bus, raaaaaan to my apartment, took a five minute shower, and raaaan back to the bus just as it was pulling to the stop. And got to work on time.

I am a superhero.

I've killed enough time. It is time to work.

Ha ha. Yeah.

The sun is a mass of incandescent gas

The creepier of the two creepiest guys at work got fired on Monday, which was a combination of relief and gossipy excitement. Over the course of his relatively brief tenure as an employee, Marcus managed to horrify Yasmin and Sadiya into making complaints, cause general discomfort among the men, eye up all of the women, hug Ben and ask him out to dinner, weird Kiara and I out so much we would each walk well out of our way to avoid having to pass him in the close quarters of an aisle, and make bizarre comments to Tyler (T: "Here, can you hold the tape for me?" M: "Would you like me to hold it...firmly?" T: "...what?"), all before making a grab for Darrel's butt, which was the breaking point. He basically managed to sexually offend every employee, regardless of age or gender or orientation, and that to me speaks of dedication. Somewhere there is a checklist with our names on it, an agenda with a careful timeline kept for reasons unknown. I can only imagine that sometime in the recent past, he rose to his feet, raised a fist to the sky, and boldly announced his intentions to any such gods as were listening. Then he tripped over a pile of empty bottles of mouthwash and fell asleep.

Dedication, or some combination of dementia and late-stage syphilis. Who knows.

Marcus is gone, but Wayne remains. Where Marcus was actively weird, Wayne is simply bizarre, an ungainly amalgam of lurking presence and aborted attempts at conversation. If Laffy Taffy started marketing pick-up lines on their candy wrappers I'd understand where he gets his material, but as it is, I can only assume he is a cesspit of unfortunate originality. Where Marcus would pop up out of nowhere, tell you a mostly unrelated story, and then introduce himself with a different name so he could try to shake your hand, Wayne just shuffles up and down the aisles with an eerie grin. After an employee potluck, he once chased Ashley around the store, asking her if she'd eaten any of his salad. When she finally snapped and said no, she hadn't had any salad, and she didn't want any salad, and she wouldn't eat any of his salad if it was the last salad on earth and she was starving, his response was a blithe, "everyone who tried my salad said it was really good. They said it was the bomb. You should have some of my salad."

On the upside of that encounter, I now get to remind Ashley, any time she complains she's hungry, that she can always have some of Wayne's Salad. "Just go ask him for some," I coo, "I hear it's the bomb. Everyone says."

Wayne also managed to figure out that I live in uptown, which I didn't know he knew until one day his undefinably accented voice startled me from the other side of a rack of bras. "Gonna be in your neighborhood tonight," he called, his voice slightly muffled by the secondhand undergarments. "Gonna check out your part of town."

Because that's not creepy as all get out.

"...huh," I said back a bit belatedly, my mind racing to remember a time when I'd ever mentioned I lived in uptown and recalling a brief conversation sometime back in December or something, "...why are you going to be in uptown, exactly?" His response ("gonna find me a woman fo da night!") was almost lost amid the flurry if plans my brain was already considering and tossing out. I was almost positive he couldn't possibly know where I lived any more specifically than simply somewhere in uptown, but if he somehow showed up on my porch I was going to have no choice but to kill him. "Uh, great, Wayne," I replied absently, my mind weighing and dismissing a variety of possible weapons, "I'm just going to go ahead and sit up all night with a shotgun aimed at the door." I was debating the merits of blunt vs. piercing when he nodded and walked away, as though this response was well within his range of expectations.

I never saw hide nor hair of him, of course, which was extremely fortunate because my two favorite options had serious flaws. Plan A was to bludgeon him with my frying pan, which is heavy, yet pleasingly aerodynamic. And there's nothing like attacking with a frying pan to cement your carefully constructed image as a frightened but no-nonsense single girl, which would be key in the ensuing trial. But I've also been embarrassingly unkind to the frying pan in question, and the thought of that sadly scarred Calphalon as exhibit A was almost too shameful to consider. "Who is she," the jurors would mutter to each other, aghast, "that she cannot decently maintain a piece of quality cookware?"

Plan B, of course, was to run him through with a sword, which would simultaneously be the culmination of every pulp fantasy novel I've ever read, and also ensure that I would never go on another date as long as I lived. It also probably wouldn't work. Wayne is a scrawny little guy who would present a challenging target, and my swordplay experience centers mostly around a battered plastic lightsaber, circa 1997. He'd likely dodge my clumsy attack and then run shrieking into the night, leaving me looking like just another nerd girl defending hearth and home with the power of steel. In uptown.

Our name is our virtue

I came home from work the other day and found my crow's butt on the floor. The crow was still standing on the mantel over the fireplace, right where I'd left him, so I can only assume that Bambino intended, with near surgical precision, to remove only the butt. Sometimes I get the impression that stupid cat is actually an evil feline genius and he's just messing with me. I'm some kind of long-term social experiment to him. "Ah ha, ah ha, muah ha ha. A crow butt on the floor. What will she think of this? I must observe for science. Ah ha ha. Meow."

Of course, then I see him run smack into a wall because his whiskers are a snarled mess from sticking his dumb face in the fan all the time, and that theory gets sort of circular filed. But maybe that's just part of the experiment. Maybe he's afraid I'll figure out his little game if he's smart all the time, so he has to ham it up every once in a while to throw me off his trail. I just don't know. I suppose that's the point.

Anyway, now I have to figure out how to reattach a crow's butt. I thought at first maybe I could just hold it on with a few stitches, but what exactly is the needle supposed to catch? This crow isn't exactly a fleshy sort of fellow anymore. Besides, a needle is pretty close work, and I don't know if I want to get that personal with a dead crow's nethers. I dismissed epoxy for the same reason--I don't want to sit there holding a bird butt while the glue dries. I'm thinking, screw it. Get the drill, screw the crow butt back on to the crow, and thereby improve his story value by as much as 35%. Because then I could point at him and say, "Oh, that's my crow, I stuffed him myself back in high school after Grandpa shot him and Grandma mailed him to me. His name is Jim," and continue on to say, "one time his butt fell off so I screwed it back on. It's stickin' on there pretty good now. Yup. Pretty good."

It's what we aim to do

I've been trying to think of ways to save up enough money to make it to Israel, and I'm kind of coming up empty. How do you save any money when the end of every month is a mad scrabble to squeak out rent? Continuing at my current pace, I could probably squirrel away about $15 by February. That would pay for bus fare to the airport and a few snacks I could pack along with me as I hide in the wheel well of the airplane. Maybe I could bring a tarp or something I could use as a parachute in case I fall out. Or some rope so I don't. Probably not both, though.

So why don't you just quit your job, sell everything you own, give up your beloved apartment, move back to live with your parents in Rochester, get a job there, and horde every penny?

Ah ha ha ha! Ha! Haha ha ha haaa!! JUST KIDDING OK

So that's the plan. I talked to my landlady today, who surprised me, yet again, by being perfectly ok with me up and leaving whenever I feel the need. Apparently leases are just a formality to this particular management, which is awesome. And which makes me even sadder to have to leave in the first place. My Entire Life In A Garage Sale will likely take place over Labor Day weekend. And I haven't decided yet when to put in my two weeks at work but I'm awfully tempted to do it, like, tomorrow. That's the only aspect of this plan that I can't WAIT to put into motion.

Huge and slow as the world is, sometimes it turns really, really fast.

Incidentally, I've found a website with a little more information on this trip: walkaboutlove.livejournal.com has a pretty exciting travel itinerary, as well as some pretty funny typos and a pretty strange list of celebrities they may or may not plan to contact who will somehow be of any help to anything. I'm sure once "Richard Gear" throws his weight behind this, we'll really get things in motion. Good old Richard Gear.

To rid yourself of vanity and just go with the season

Made it to Flogging Molly. Couldn't coordinate plans with Nate so I would up going with Ben after all. It was an amazing show. The pit almost started before the band did, little physical flutters of anticipation through the crowd, and when the pit did begin, in did not end. There was jumping and pushing and screaming of the lyrics and some guy dumped a cup of mead on my head and I got knocked to the ground twice, which was temporarily terrifying. By that I mean, at a show like that, your emotions are cranked up to eleven and polarized, so one minute you are clapping above your head and shouting out the words to "Devil's Dance Floor" and exhilarated, then the next minute you're knocked completely off your feet and the music is actually muffled by the tightly-packed crowd around and above you and nobody is ever going to see you down here in time and you're suddenly in a helpless panic. Then hands reach out of nowhere like they always do and you're back up in the world above, back in the swing and sway of things, and until the next time you drop you're just going to jump and clap and yell like anything. What else can you do? You're alive and there's all this music, all these people.

On my second unfortunate drop to the floor I found myself face to face with another guy, there among the legs and dirty shoes, and I didn't even realize I was holding his hand until someone shouted "move back move back there's a guy down here" and they hauled him up. I thought that was funny. The emotion dial spun from "panic" to "ah ha ha when did that happen?" and then all the way around to "uh hey guys I'M DOWN HERE TOO" when the magic hands did not materialize to pick me back up right away. Granted some of us take more hands than others but come on you guys, if I die down here you're just going to trip on me and nobody wants to spend a perfectly good concert tripping on some dead chick so you might as well help me up. And they did.

I don't think I could do a lot of them, or that I would really even want to, but sometimes I have found that all I really need is the demented microcosm that is a decent pit. I'm not sure how to explain exactly what it is that I get out of it, what it is I find there. It's a crush of bodies, a howl, a shock of impossibly fresh air when an errant breeze finds your face in the madness. It's surrendering any delusions of control over what happens to you amid the mob and melee and the wild trusting hope that when you hit the ground and the your world suddenly becomes a very small and airless forest of stamping feet, there will be hands to haul you back to the sky. That you'll fall and rise and fall to rise again and every time you'll come up with your fists in the air. It's sheer unapologetic brute force catharsis.

It's also completely exhausting, and if you're way smart like Ben and don't wear any shoes, physically a bit detrimental. Although I suppose getting punched in the face wasn't really his fault, and who knows when he chipped his tooth. I came out of it all right, with just a sore nose from having a crowd surfer dropped on my stupid head and a variety of tiny bruises on my arms that make me look like a human dalmation. And sticky hair from the mead. And when that crowd surfer got dropped square on my upturned face I thought "whew at least I didn't get a bloody nose" but as it turns it, my nose was just so stuffed up from allergies that I just didn't realize I had a bloody nose until much, much later. And I'm tired and the muscles in my legs ache from trying to brace myself against the tide and it took me all of Sunday to get my voice back and I had to shower off dried sweat the next morning that was most assuredly not entirely my own. But that's all par for the course, really.

I guess what I'm a-sayin' is there ain't no better reason

In retrospect, I really should have known better. What has history taught us about hippies, if not that once they have gathered it takes police dogs and firehoses to disperse them? What, after all, was a simple free Flogging Molly concert in the face of peace and tranquility and sitting in a circle while humming in unison? Oh, be reasonable, I thought to myself. They'll go for Flogging Molly.

On Thursday, Ben, the friend from work responsible for my interest in the Israel thing, mentioned that there was an Irish festival over in St. Paul this weekend, and Flogging Molly was doing free concerts, and would I like to go? Uh, tchyeah. Tchyeah I would like to go. But, he warned, he wasn't quite sure how we would be getting rides over there, and he'd be going to some little shindig outside the capitol first, so I'd have to come along to that, too.

Well, that was no biggie. I'm used to dubious travel plans, and when I asked what the thing at the capitol was, he made vague but reassuringly bland references to meditation and discussions. All right, I figured. They'll contemplate existence for a while, discuss universal enlightenment, and I'll read my book at a reasonable distance. Then we'll look at our watches, let out a collective "Oh!" and prance lightly over to the Irish Fair. And all will be fabulous.

I made it through the hour of meditation just fine, armed with my book and a fit of wanderlust. The group I'd arrived with dispersed to meditate in solitude, which suited me fine, so I wandered until I found a decent stopping point, which worked out to be a statue of Charles Lindbergh, and then sat down and read. After a while one leg fell asleep and the rest of me decided I was hungry, so I put the book away and dragged my sleeping leg along on a journey to find food. After a number of false starts and misdirections (where but St. Paul do you ever find a Sears that isn't part of a mall anymore? It's like I'm wired to see a Sears and automatically assume a food court cannot be far away, but this one was a lie) I spotted a White Castle.

My original thoughts, when I decided to go on a dinner hunt, were along the lines of "this is the capitol, it is filled with many people who want to eat sometimes. Where do they go?" I'm still not sure where the political elite of Minnesota go for a quick lunch, because it sure as hell ain't White Castle. Not that one, anyway. There's something just a bit discouraging about ordering a tiny hamburger from a surly man hiding behind bulletproof glass. It somehow took ages to crank out my order of one tiny burger and an enormous bag of fries, forever in a tiny White Castle with no ambient music and one despondent old man in a corner booth, staring out the window. I hadn't ordered a pop because I knew if I drank any I'd have to pee sooner or later, but when the manager handed me my food, apologized for the wait, and gave me a cup, I couldn't really turn it down.

So I walked back to the capitol lawn sipping vault and feeling very smug, in the hunter-gatherer sense. I had procured shelter (reading by the Lindbergh statue), I had procured food (not getting shot dead in a White Castle), and now I was going to procure musical entertainment (free Flogging Molly). Or not. I didn't have to walk very close to see that Ben's small group had swelled in number and were sitting in a circle. Oh, right. Discussion. Well, how long could that take? I sidetracked into another hunter-gatherer mission, which was to find a place to pee. Having just experienced a White Castle burger, I decided I probably didn't want to see what the White Castle bathrooms looked like, so I drifted over to Sears instead. It was half past seven by the time I headed back to see what the hippies were doing, and my heart sank a little bit when I realized that the only thing that had changed about them was that one of them was lying down and rolling away through the grass. I'm not sure why.

Ben tried to call me over to join the circle, but I declined and continued my own circling of the grounds. There are worse places to have to kill time, I think, than the state capitol. At least everything is very pretty. Eventually dusk won its tug-of-war with daylight, pulling twilight into darkness, and somewhere behind the clouds and city lights, the stars were out. Nate called, back in town for the first time since December, and I caught him up on the major points of Savers gossip he'd missed in his absence while the circle finally realized there was a free concert they were missing out on and I had to get Nate to look up directions to the place, which turned out to be almost useless. If you don't know where something is in St. Paul, you're probably never going to find it. It may have gotten Ventura in trouble, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that not only were the Irishmen responsible for city planning drunk, the livestock they hitched their carts to were drunk, too.

So, after all that, no Flogging Molly. Fortunately, they're doing two shows, Friday and Saturday, so Nate and I are going to try to find the place tonight.

Better luck this time, hopefully.

We'll fill our mouths with cinnamon, now

Last night I pried myself aways from my computer to go to the bathroom. As I was heading through the kitchen I just happened to cast a glance over to my phone, on the counter, just as it started to flash to tell me I was receiving a text message. What are the odds? What is the probability that events would line up in that particular order, just so, that such a thing would happen? Instinctively I knew this message was going to be important. This was going to be profound. I held my breath as I opened the message. It was from Mara, and it read..."Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo!"

Ok, not so profound. But it does come as a profound relief to have the occasional moment where, for at least a little while, I can imagine that my friends may actually be stranger than I am.

So lately I have been toying with the idea of giving up the apartment, handing Bambino over to mom and dad, having a huge garage sale, and going on a thousand kilometer walk through Israel.

And I might even do it.

This guy I work with, Ben, is in on this, and has been going on about it for weeks, and finally my curiosity got the better of me and I looked into it myself. To my understanding, it's actually several events sort of cobbled together: two or three big music festivals, all strung together by a long walk through Israel. I could care less about the music festivals, but I find myself drawn to the idea of seeing so foreign a country on foot like that. I figure, I've already been to the Vatican, right? Might as well make a full go of it and check out the Holy Land. And how often does an opportunity like that come along?

The only drawback is, I'll more or less have to give up what I've got here to go and do it. There's no way I can afford to keep my apartment if I'm going to be trotting around the desert in a state of willful unemployment for three months. And if I don't have an apartment, it's basically back to square one. Take the last two years and go "erase erase erase" and start all over again. From that perspective, I have a lot to lose. But if you really look at what I've got...maybe it's not so much after all. It's a crummy, dissatisfying job, a cheap apartment in a crumbling old house, and by the end of the month I'll no longer have any friends in the city. I do love my apartment a lot, and I love living in uptown, but I don't know that I feel like it's enough to be worth tying myself down to it yet. Without trying to romanticize what is essentially going to amount to wandering in the desert with a bunch of stinky hippies for a quarter of a year, at least it's something. It's something big and memorable to do before I get so old as to lose the freedom to do it.

Plus, can you imagine how I'll look when I come back? I am going to look fabulous.

This is all still just something I'm thinking about doing. I'm waiting on more information about what all is going down with this thing before I make any real decisions.

But I don't know, guys...this may be my best chance to ever get a real tan.