11:08 am | 09 November 2004 | the slowest learner and the LONGEST ENTRY

Preliminary note: the Gold membership expired and while I can transfer some images elsewhere for hosting, a lot of older ones are like locked indefinitely on Diaryland's server. So if you encounter red Xs in archived entries: sorry, and too bad!

Devotees of this 'blog'--a term with which I am increasingly less content, but shorthand here for 'near-daily accounts of the-spastic-sands-through-the-idiotic-hourglass which are the days of my life'--will accept without argument the idea that I get bad ideas.

If you are new here, welcome. And: I get bad ideas.

I say 'get' instead of 'have' because they come up on me like a twenty-four-hour virus or like crabs or something, these unexpected frissons of existence-wrecking urges, and whether they fuck with a few hours or a few years, it would appear that, in culinary terms, the lessons they are trying to teach me are Pam Nonstick Cooking Spray--Ass Flavour!--and I, additionally, am Teflon. I learn nothing. Like showing my dog complex crochet stitches, it is all very stupid and pointless. Like, indeed, that analogy.

I write these things not because they are rad, but so that I might have a record of my foolishness, or maybe in like 20 years my kids can just read this shit and understand the reasons behind the incoherent, open-mouthed, life-supported vegetable that their mother will have by then become. Por ejemplo: did I not, my darlings, bemoan, in this very space, something like two weeks ago, this sentence has a lot of comma'ed clauses, my fucking up (via pricey salon) my hair? Yes, sure did. And did I not post a bona-fide picture of the Blogger At Seventeen with even moreso fucked-up hair along with some amusing anecdote concerning its fucked-upness? Let's continue nodding our heads. AND, counsel, did the defendant NOT then go right out this weekend and try to push the coiffure envelope into A Region I Am Not Meant To Inhabit, as evidenced by today's hair which, let's face it, has the look of a haystack and the texture of mostly-dried Elmer's glue, spread over fingertips and rolled? I rest my case. Guilty as motherfucking charged. Agh! Chagrin! I know I'm a supergenius who's cool as shit and just don't give a fuck, but goddamn it, I need to be pretty, too.

Yes, what I am saying circuitously is that I'm now rocking a 'do somewhere between that point-of-no-return-fucked pastemass that would happen to the hair of all 1980s Barbies when confronted with a crimping iron, and that of the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz--and just as brainless and brainless, respectively. Dumb. I am fairly pissed about this--at myself, natch--but am hiding it between non-shit-giving bravado and a series of 1960s headscarves. I'm like Gidget Gone Mongoloid over here. Have I mentioned/you noticed that I have a big giant face/head that can't really pull off any kind of pixie cut? Great, me too. I noticed that. Me, over here--Shaggy, from Scooby-Doo, without benefit of either weed or Mystery Machine, fully unloveable.

On to the Lost Weekend

I used to call them Lost Weekends--I'd have nothing much going on, nothing real to do, and I'd be upset for some arcane reason, like the singer from Brainiac died, or there'd be a shitty election (ahem), or-- Whatever the reason, I'd feel a little reckless and I'd get the gusto to go bust chops for a Friday-through-Sunday. Used to be, the Devil'd get in me, a bit, and I'd drink a beer or eight and make out with strange, ugly boys at hockey games, wake up on someone's stinky plaid couch, go to a couple-three local band shows, and then do something adorably immature like get drunk off peach schnapps and ginger ale in Ada Park with my friends and then go skinny-dipping at the manmade lake to work off the ska show. Used to be we'd make monster movies about Reed's Lake and put safety-pins in our earring-holes and all the extremity of pointless teenaged wasteland was very cute and suburban-innocent-punk-rock, like Hello Kitty passed out on a bare mattress next to a cinder block or something. Used to be. Now, faced with the BeerToken* concept's metastasization, my Lost Weekends have become something scary and awful, like how the baby raptors in Jurassic Park were all awww cuuuuute! upon hatching. Until.

Let's look at the weekend as a whole, bearing in mind the terrific, anachronistically over/foreshadowing fact that my hair--which, let's be reminded, looks like the target for Satan's pitchfork**--is merely the icing on the weekend's hatecake.

Friday night was a raucous exercise in franticism. It was supposed to be a quiet affair--Timoculous and myself joining Pants at her house for vegan chili and Mulholland Drive--but we three are like emotional hilarity-tinder in a spark-tossing shitstorm and things devolved with quickdraw rapidity into gulping gallon vodka, blaring The Smiths and throwing upholstered furniture. Punching the ceiling and blinking stucco bits out of our eyes while doing the Bicycle in time and in unison. The cops were called on us by 9:30pm (Pants: "No, Officer, we are listening to Morrissey. Do you like Morrissey? Do you like to dance?") so we left, on bikes, en masse, for the Prospector's karaoke night soon thereafter. This segment of the evening involved epic renditions of "The Age of Aquarius" and "Jailhouse Rock" and we were all at our respective homes fully passed out by midnight. Also, I forgot to mention that Tim and I did some awesome freestyling outside the 'Spector. Anyhow:

Confronted with these scenes, Pants's roommate naturally concluded that she and I had gotten into a fight (!). Of course.

The next day I was sure that someone had answered my prayers (yes!) and killed me, but that I (no!) had landed in Hell. I know I'm a transplanted demi-mick with a death wish and a thirst for sweet boozeohol, but I haven't been this hungover, seriously, in years. Like handprints-on-the-side-of-the-toilet hungover. Like don't-get-up-until-5pm hungover. I needed massive quantities of jalape�o pizza and Diet Dr. Skipper*** to even continue rudimentary life functions. I went to Harpoon Harry's with Alex and Casey that night (where Alex revealed an amazing fact that will definitely be making its way into the UD v. CLM comics in the coming weeks, so keep an eye out), doing the crosswords and making cracks about dicks. I was in bed by midnight again, having managed (barely, and queasily) six total hours of up-and-aboutness Saturday.

Sunday, after a nervewrackingly obvious series of wack dreams (involving soap, shopping carts, inappropriate attire, and foreigners), I was up early, doing super-important stuff like drawing comics about French art movements, and ignoring secondary, neglectable concerns, like putting away laundry and washing the dog (this section to reinforce that I am a totally irresponsible ass-bastard with no sense of what to do, or when and how to do it). I had a brief moment of panic when Herr Kredit Kard was missing from my wallet, but Joelington wisely suggested that it was most likely chillin' at the Prospector, and whaddya know, it was (although what a dank inner-circle of beer-stinky Hell that place was, to visit at noon). Pants and I braved the holiday blitz of Ikea, mostly to cruise for furniture for our impending compound, and the proliferation of SOFT TOYS there (MINNEN KATT! MINNEN HUND! S�T!!) was magnificent to behold. We ate big salads and bread and in the afternoon I decided to get all awesome with my hair, which--did I mention?--now has the textural complexity of a really old rubber-band, the kind that disintegrates upon contact, only about the color of a toaster waffle. It's like I'm practicing for cancer over here. Yeah, that. So there you go: Destruction, vomiting, pointlessness, 68,000 calories, trashed hair, no love, and a migraine I blame on bad pillows and my just-crashed car. My lost weekend. clm.

. . . . . .

*Which goes: Everyone is given a finite number of BeerTokens upon birth, which you have the prudence to spend as you see fit. Every drink taken beyond the limit of your original Token count incurs a variable overdraft fee--like you do something fucking stupid or have a really raucous, praying-for-death hangover. This explains why Pants, having not drunk much at all before this, her twenty-fourth year, can go out all night and be scot-free by seven the next morning, whereas I, who squandered any leeway I might have had in the arenas of booze, beers, and fun a full half-decade ago, am just racking up a slaughterhouse-sledgehammer's worth of headaches and fucktards.

** Simply put: real bad hay, people.

*** "The double-salutation non-cola-brown-soda knockoff for poor people!"