Street surprise.

When I came home from a concert last night, walking up the street to my apartment building, I saw a large pool of chunky tomato bisque-colored vomit on the sidewalk, and then I walked like five steps more, and found a smaller pool of the same colored vomit.

This morning, too, when I was walking into school, on the sidewalk on the same street on the other side of my place, like thirty feet further I found a small pool of the same vomit, again.

More snot.

My third cold in the last ten weeks is finally clearing up - I can sleep through the night now without waking up since I'm choking on post-nasal drop - but this morning when I did my neti pot, though, even though the water poured on through my nostrils in giant gushes and I wasn't blocked up, when I went to blow in the sink, huge, thick ribbons of snot flew out into the sink, and were a color like if you kept mixing olive paint with eggshell paint till the olive got really really light.

When I poured the water through a second time, nothing much happened, it seemed, except from some stinging at the end from the salt, but when I went to blow, this sticky-looking booger about the size of two pencil erasers flew out from somewhere deep within, and it was a bright yellow with hints of dark brown, and it used to be really crusty way back somewhere in my nostrils before the water drove it out, I could tell. I wonder where the fuck that came from, though, it was so unlike the other snot. For a minute I thought it actually had a little scab in it and the brown was congealed blood from a slight bloody nose I must have never noticed, but when I looked at it, you could just tell it was festering bright yellow snot, not blood.

Astrology "coulda beens".

I remembered this weekend why I coudln't get into astrology as a kid, despite buying a few books on it in middle school -- the star charts were impenetrable, and I couldn't figure out how to cast them myself, and this is the pre-internet days before a computer could do it for you. If I had been born even five years later, it would have been a much different story with me and astrology.

Memories of this Summer: "War and Peace".

This summer a film center downtown was playing all four parts of this famous eight-hour Russian movie version of "War and Peace" here and there over the course of two weeks, and me and a friend of mine went to catch the first two-hour part, and ended up staying for the next two that night since they happened to be playing and the movie was like crack and each segment ended on a huge cliffhanger where either people died or the romances got more entangled or whatever the heck else is in the movie for cliffhangers.

Anyhow, after we left the film center at like 10pm and went to go home -- the fourth and last part wasn't playing that night, and we had just got out of the third segment, which was two hours of the Battle of Borodino, two solid hours of people firing and dying and armies clashing, no romance whatsoever, which was fucking sweet as all hell -- we were on the bus home talking about plot developments and the romances and the scenes we loved, and this old person dressed in black sitting behind us leaned forward and was like, "Excuse me, are you discussing 'War and Peace'?", and we were like "Yeah, definitely," and they were like, "My, only on the bus going back to [our university]," and you could just tell how self-satisfied this person was that they were living in a university neighborhood, so I let them preen for a few seconds and then was like, "But we saw the movie."

T-shirt.

When I went gallery-hopping Friday night at this open studios thing, the most interesting gallery was the one featuring stuff by these graffiti artists, and in the backroom a couple early 30s black women also had jewelry that they made out of their house, which they showed me. There also were t-shirts hung around the edges of the room, and when I looked at them, they were in all these different styles and all these different fonts and colors and whatnot, only they all said --

FUCK YOU

I'M STILL ALIVE

Homeless person encounter (II of II): Bridge.

Last night when I was walking with a friend across a bridge downtown, this homeless person who was panhandling held out his cup to us as we passed and was like, "Any money for Jack Daniels research?"

Homeless person encounter (I of II): Underpass.

Like Friday when I walked into school, there was this black middle-aged homeless guy sitting under the underpass near me, rocking back and forth and screaming "fuck you" over and over and over. When I returned home later that evening -- I had met friends at the bar, and the one was telling me about the bake sale at her Episcopalian church last Sunday, where the cakes usually went over a couple hundred dollars -- two dozen Easter cupcakes with jelly beans on top and pastel frosting went for $400! -- and one cake, a sand castle made out of rice krispie treats with a large fruit roll-up octopus draped over it, went for like $800! -- and when I walked under the underpass, I assumed the homeless person was gone since it was quiet and everything was still, only when I walked past this pillar, he was on the other side, and as I was walking by not noticing him he shouted out "Parlez-vouz francais?!?!?!" at me and made me jump.