My book for the weekned: Tempest Storm's memoirs.

So, my weekend book this weekend is "The Lady is a Vamp", Tempest Storm's memoirs, which has the tagline, "Tempest Storm's tale is as touching as it is titillating." I'm like more than halfway done already, since you can't stop after an introduction where she talks about the time in her life where she spoke to her daughter for the first time after a decade apart, which led her to realize she should write her life's story (quote from p. vi):

I want Patty to know both women, the public and the private Tempest Storm. I want her to understand how I lived so much of my life unclothed before a world that refused to see the real me, the woman beyond the performance...

Also, from her reflections on how kids in her rural Georgia school back in eighth grade used to make her life awful (p. 6):

They liked to tease me about my large bust and crooked teeth. Because of that, I wore very tight brassieres and smiled very little.

A big thing in her life was her crooked teeth. When she moved up from head chorus line girl to stripper, the chorus line trainer arranged a payment plan for her to get them fixed.

"There Will Be Blood".

So I was hanging out a few nights ago with my one Arab friend, his little sister (=also Arab), his white girlfriend, and their other Arab friend, not to mention another white friend of theirs, and they had all just come back from seeing "There Will Be Blood", and they all loved it. I asked if it was bloody, since I've wanted to see it but have been hesitant since it seems violent, and my one Arab friend's little sister said yes, but she finds violence in movies affecting and likes it if it's done well, and she thought it was done well in "There Will Be Blood".

"But," my one Arab friend's white girlfriend butted in, "We all know they just liked the oil."

Random nastiness.

So when I was walking back into school just now, there was a fuckload of people out and about since the weather is in the low 60s, and just as I was walking across a crosswalk, this Asian late middle school/early high school girl in short shorts (I'm talking 70s short shorts) rollerbladed by me, and the guy who was stopped in his car at the crosswalk while I passed, this pasty old thin guy with a van Dyke beard and haunted eyes, totally rubbernecked her as she skated by. Nasty nasty nasty.

He caught me watching him watch her, too, and there was no shame in his eyes, he just stared there expressionlessly at me, like he didn't have a soul or some bullshit like that.

Had a nightmare last night.

I had a nightmare again last night. I dreamed I was a vampire, and I was up in a darkened attic space near a stairwell coming from below, and I was talking with someone, and somehow the topic of feeding came up, and I realized I was hungry, only I had two sets of vampire teeth, one up front as normal, and one way in back of my mouth and arching forward, and the next thing I know I was darting around the floor and I caught this gigantic hard-shelled insect in my mouth, a kind of thing that was sectioned like a centipede, only it had like four or five sections rather than a lot, and it had these big spindly legs, but to eat it I had to tear it apart with my back teeth, and so I had this gigantic crunchy, writhing bug filling my mouth to where I gagged, and I didn't want to eat it, really, only I was so hungry, I kept trying to chew it and break it up as best I could.

Bacon and more bacon.

When I was talking on the phone with my mother today, she said how the other weekend when her and my dad were taking a road trip, they passed this rural bank with a banner out front,



'OPEN A CHECKING ACCOUNT - GET FREE BACON'.



On Saturday, too, when I passed by this one bar to go meet friends at another bar, I oddly saw a similar sign, only this one advertised $10 bottomless baskets of bacon on Mondays during March (the surest recipe for vomiting after drinking I've ever seen, to drink way too much and eat a fuckload of bacon).

Snot in a jar.

I ran into my 80-year old black neighbor this morning, the one who I recommended a neti pot to a couple months ago since she had been battling this sinus infection for five weeks that she just couldn't shake. It turns out that that helped for a while and her doctor was glad she was using it, but the infection is antibiotics-resistant and she just can't shake it, and for the past few weeks she's been so plugged that the water from the neti pot won't even come out the other nostril, so they did a CAT scan and are recommending surgery to clear her sinuses, they're so bad, and so she's scheduled now for a few weeks from now.

"Oh, I can't stand surgery," she was like, and she kept bitching about how she hates going through surgery, and isn't looking forward to this, though she'll be glad to have her sinuses clear.

"Well," I was like, "Make sure they put what they take out in a jar, so you can see it after and know it was worth it."

"I know," she was like, "Especially with how much I'm paying for it!"

She was serious, too.

Making Friends Everywhere: Hipster Chick Bartender.

So on Saturday I met friends for drinks at this one bar, and then we took a cab to the hipster part of town to meet friends of my friends, and this bar we went to was one of the most miserable ones I've ever seen. It was that disgusting hipsterish combination of affluence and attitude, with plush boots and high ceilings and a back room with a pole for dancing, and the hipster chick bartender was just plain rude, and had no hustle. When I got to a bar or a restaurant, I don't expect great service -- like I tell people who go to restaurants and look for good service, if you get off on good service that much, go hire a fucking butler to serve you all day and don't make poor waiters and waitresses be part of some fucking complex of yours that they never asked to be part of -- but, I do expect hustle or at least acknowledgement that they're busy if they're unracking glasses or some bullshit and can't get you your drinks right away, and this hipster chick bartender (normal type, bleached hair and pale tits and a tight black top, and a chain belt) just kind of stood doing nothing behind the counter, and then when we had been waiting way too long, came a few steps over to get our drink order, so it wasn't even bad service and waiting a long time because of that, but rather her making us involuntary witnesses to how much attitude she had, which pissed me the fuck off.

"What do you want?", she was like, and I ordered a hard cider and my two other friends at the bar where we were got beers, and one ordered a hamburger, but was like, "What's the special sauce?"

"A-1 and mayo," the hipster chick bartender was like, and stood there posing bitchily.

"Oh," so I was like, "So when you say 'special sauce'" - and when I said "special", I put air-quotes around it -- "Are you being ironic?

"No," the hipster chick bartender was like, and stood there posing even more bitchily.

Man, was she a piece of work.

The previous night, I had been at an Irish pub with some people, and when they played an early 90s cover of "Please Mr. Postman" from the movie Backbeat, me and my one friend I had taken cha-cha with discovered we could cha-cha to it, albeit really really quickly.

Thomas Merton on Spanish.

From Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain, orig. published 1948, p. 306, when he reflects in later life on his journey to Cuba in the late 1930s:

Often I left one church and went to hear another Mass in another church, especially if the day happened to be Sunday, and I would listen to the harmonious sermons of the Spanish priests, the very grammar of which was full of dignity and mysticism and courtesy. After Latin, it seems to me there is no language so fitted for prayer and for talk about God as Spanish: for it is a language at once strong and supple, it has its sharpness, it has the quality of steel in it, which gives it the accuracy that true mysticism needs, and yet it is soft, too, and gentle and pliant, which devotion needs, and it is courteous and suppliant and courtly, and it lends itself surprisingly little to sentimentality. It has some of the intellectuality of French but not the coldness that intellectuality gets in French: and it never overflows into the feminine melodies of Italian. Spanish is never a weak language, never sloppy, even on the lips of a woman.

Thomas Merton on the French.

From Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain, orig. published 1948, p. 57, discussing his boyhood days in France when his father, a painter, lived there:

But these French children seemed to be so much tougher and more cynical and more precocious than anyone else I had ever seen. How, then, could I fit them in with the ideal of France which my father had, and which even I had then in an obscure and inchoate form? I suppose the only good answer is 'corruptio optimi pessima'. Since evil is the defect of good, the lack of a good that ought to be there, and nothing positive in itself, it follows that the greatest evil is found where the highest good has been corrupted. And I suppose the most shocking thing about France is the corruption of French spirituality into flippancy and cynicism; of French intelligence into sophistry; of French dignity and refinement into petty vanity and theatrical self-display; of French charity into a disgusting fleshly concupiscence, and of French faith into sentimentality or puerile atheism. There was all of this in the Lycee Ingres, at Montauban.

Am getting germ-phobic.

Yesterday after working on a paper on a school computer for a few hours, I realized that maybe I'd get sick from germs infiltrating the cuts on my fingertips. I'm already paranoid from just germs getting on my hands from the public keyboards, and so wash my hands right after I'm done always, but this is worse.

Yesterday walking home from school, too, a single great big snowflake was falling right in front of me, so I stuck out my tongue to catch it, and I caught it, and then I remembered that they just found out that many snowflakes form around bacteria.

Cuts.

On Saturday afternoon I was taking the lid off of some baba ghanoush and it was stuck on tight, and as I pulled the sharp plastic edge dug its way into the tips of my index and middle fingers of my right hand, and gave me something like a paper cut on both of them, only worse. When I had vietnamese beef soup later in the day and was squeezing lime into it, the lime juice got in the cuts and hurt like a son of a bitch.

Today, I shaved using one of those razors that has like three separate blades, and I cut myself like over four times, the fucker was so sharp, and I got pissed off all over again. When I was done shaving my neck under my chin, too, I didn't think I had cut anything, and like twenty seconds later it was clear where I had cut myself from the blood welling up from subtle cuts. Again, it blew, though it hurt less than the lime juice getting in the cuts in my fingertips.