4.1.01

Lord, what fools these mortals be!

paul freaks out about mad cow disease. i’ve forbidden him to ever visit www.mad-cow.org again, as it is not doing him any good at all. well, except that it made him a vegetarian, which makes it much easier for us to eat together these days.

i just got back from seeing the dentist, where they filled two teeth and so now half my face is numb. my boss so kindly put it, “you don’t look that much like a stroke victim.” it’s hard not to be suspicious of your dentist when he appears to be no older than 22. on my two visits, we’ve had involved conversations about snowboarding and the merits of buying brand-name vs. generic computer components. hey, these things are interesting to me, but i really am 22. the dentist i’ve been seeing since i grew teeth is as ancient as time; he’s not very hip and he listens to an awful radio station while he cleans your teeth, but there’s something about his demeanor that makes me trust him implicitly. i feel terrible about cheating on him with this new dentist, but i can’t very well fly to idaho every time i need a checkup. the dentist in question also emailed me these gigantic digital photographs of my teeth. no, not the x-rays, but hideous, full-color, wider than the computer screen close-up shots of my mouth, with all the imperfections magnified to an extreme. why on earth would i want those? i might post them on here at halloween, unless i’ve grown tired of my self-involved blog experiment by then.

at last – that weird secret fear you’ve been harboring since childhood finally has a name. find it at http://www.phobialist.com. my own top two irrational fears made it onto the list:

emetophobia-fear of vomit
autophobia-fear of being alone or of oneself

don’t laugh, you have weird little phobias too, i’ll bet. the list is not quite complete; my brother had a childhood phobia of fingernails that didn’t make it on the list. if anyone has a name for that, do let me know.

some of my favorites from the list are:

blennophobia-fear of slime
automatonophobia-fear of ventriloquist’s dummies, animatronic creatures, wax statues – anything that falsly represents a sentient being
zemmiphobia-fear of the great mole rat
paraskavedekatriaphobia-fear of friday the 13th

the owner of the list swears that he didn’t make up any of these.

ah yes, my pretties, i promised you the gory details of my trip to the acupuncturist, and gory they are indeed. the experience, on a whole, was a bit unsettling, altho i have a new-found respect for naturopathic medicine.

before i signed the release forms, the doctor went over the acupuncture process in detail. altho i generally prefer to err on the side of too much information, i did NOT need to know that they sometimes stick the needles in as deep as four inches and then wiggle them around. eww! somehow i had thought this was only going to be a series of pin-pricks. i’ve never been crazy about needles, but i’ve had blood drawn and a few body piercings without disastrous results, so i figured i could handle it. somewhere during the discussion it occurred to me just how bizarre it was that i’m letting this guy, rather, paying this guy to stick needles in me.

anyway, the treatment consists of him sticking a bunch of needles in and then leaving me in a dark room with soothing music to contemplate my navel for about twenty minutes. for the first treatment i had a total of 10 needles – one in each wrist, on either side of my neck, on the insides of my ankles, between my big and 2nd toes, just below my bellybutton, and one on the top of my head. the needles are hair-thin, and they really didn’t hurt much more than a pin prick. that is, until we got to the one between my toes. the needle grazed a nerve and instantly i had these crazy nerve signals running up and down the length of my foot. if my body were a cartoon, the nerve would have been a rope with a bunch of bells tied to it – cowbells and liberty bells and big huge church bells and little high-pitched jingle bells – hundreds of them, and suddenly something was tugging on the rope and every one of the bells was going off all at once, and the rope was on fire and this was all inside my foot.

okay, i know that’s weird, but that’s what was happening inside my head right then. as soon as i tensed up all the other needles started to hurt, and then there was sensation like the middle of me, all my guts, got really really tight and tense, and i started to tremble in that deep core-shaking sort of way. the doctor had to talk me through breathing for about five minutes. if i had been sitting up i would have passed out cold, but since i was lying down it wasn’t possible for me to actually lose consciousness (which really would have been a blessing, i have to say). anyway, i survived the next twenty minutes, but the acupuncture created this really unpleasant floating sensation that made it impossible for me to drift off to sleep the way that supposedly lots of patients do.

the verdict? i think it’s too soon to tell. after the shock of the nerve-thing, i just crawled home and lay around for a while. i felt kinda genki later in the evening, so maybe it made a difference, or maybe it was just psychosomatic, but hey, who cares what the cause is if it works. the real test of my sanity, though, will be to see if i make it back for my appointment next week. what, let someone stick needles in me again? we’ll see.

yes! someone at work just brought me a can of TEXAS ARMADILLO MILK. i kid you not. according to the can, my armadillo milk is DELIVERED FRESH FROM THE WORLD’S ONLY ARMADILLO DAIRY NEAR DUBLIN, TEXAS. can food simultaneously be fresh and canned? anyway, the directions are as follows:

ONLY IN TEXAS!
DIRECTIONS: DRINK ONE CAN DAILY FOR
RELIEF OF HEEBY JEEBIES, SINKIN’ SPELLS,
DRAGGY FEELINS, GETALONG HITCHES,
FITS AND CRAVINS.

WARNING!! CONTENTS MAY INCREASE
INTELLIGENCE, KEEP AWAY FROM
YANKEES, AND OTHER WEIRD INDIVIDUALS.

apparently this milk will also liberate you from the confines of grammar rules, as well. and what exactly are ‘getalong hitches?’

so the cash-strapped russians have decided to bring mir back to earth, and it’s set to land somewhere in the south pacific tomorrow. apparently, residents of that corner of the world don’t have too much faith in the russians’ ability to aim their defunct space station. one queensland farmer has taken the time to mow a giant x into his yard. if mir is headed straight for his house, i’m not sure that the x in the back yard will be of much help, but hey, whatever floats your boat. and speaking of floating, taco bell (according to rumor anyway), has floated at 40×40 ft target somewhere out in the south pacific. if mir hits the target, it’s free tacos for everyone in america. shouldn’t they treat the russians to a few tacos, too? after all it’s their space station.

some guy called into the radio station this morning during the mir discussion. according to his calculations, if they brought one mir down every day, it would take 360 million years to hit the target. now, i don’t know much about stats and probability save what i learned for the SAT, but it seems that there’s something wrong with the mechanics of that prediction. at any rate, even if the chances are simply 1 to 360 million years x 365 days, i think we shouldn’t be holding our breath for the free tacos.

i’m going to see an acupuncturist for the first time today. i have no idea what to expect, but i promise to post all the gory details tomorrow.

happy first day of spring, everybody.

i encountered lots of great signs yesterday. it might have had something to do with the dayquil, but they amused me anyway. the first said ‘WANTED: MEN WITH HAIR LOSS.’ I wanted to steal the sign, but the woman from the neurology desk kept looking at me (perhaps because i’m not a man with hair loss), so i had to leave. i was equally amused/horrified by the white board in front of a restaurant on haight st. that had a cute picture of a fish, with a surprisingly intelligent look in his eyes. next to him it said, “i am a trout! you can eat me for only $9.96! yummy yum yum!”

i have another great sign, but you’ll have to wait until i scan the picture and post it up here.

little shop of horrors: my trip to the musee mecanique

yesterday paul and i took the 38 geary bus all the way to the end of the line, where 47th street meets the ocean. the shore there is lovely, swirls of fog floating through the cypress trees, ocean crashing against rock and further down, a wide sandy beach.

there’s a small commercial strip that wants to be a boardwalk only there are no amusement rides. tucked away in a corner is the musee mecanique. it’s like the kind of evil amusement park one encounters in nightmares, where the room is hot and stuffy and filled with people, weird mechanical displays and games and robots and stuff looming in your face and jumping out to scare you, set to the discordant tunes of a sick player piano. the paint is faded and everything is a relic from the coney island of the 50s. all that was missing from the nightmare experience was the fish-eye lens. the attractions included:

‘laughing sal’ – a 10 ft tall mechanical woman in 19th century dress, with the largest red and white striped bosom imaginable. for 50 cents, she’ll rock back and forth in her plexiglass cage and laugh at you. according to the sign, laughing sal has been delighting adults and frightening children for over fifty years.

there were several types of romance meters. according to the sex meter, i’m passionate. paul scored overrated. after the kissing meter ranked our kiss as clammy, and my romance fortune told me to not to trust him, we decided to leave the romance games alone.

the machine that pleased me most was the typewriter that typed my fortune with ghost hands. here’s all about me (sic):

YOU A RE F ULL OF SY MPATHY FOR SUFFE RING OR MISFORTUNE ,

AND YOU RE SPOND WITH REA DY GE NE ROSTITY TO CHARITABLE

APPE ALS. THIS INSTINCT, OF COURSE , MAKES YOU E ASY

G AME FOR IMPOSTE RS TO TA KE A DVANTA G E OF . YOU ARE

A LSO VE RY CREATIVE, A ND WILL DO WE LL IN SUCH FIE LDS

A S MUSIC, PAINTING , POETRY OR PROSE .

paul insisted on (me) paying for the mechanical opium den; this was about as exciting as you might think. it was a big diorama of a dirty room in which men sat or lay in their opium-induced stupors. putting in a quarter made them rock slowly back and forth, and then the closet door swung open to reveal a skeleton who had been hanging on the door since he had overdosed. i could have given that quarter to a real beggar.

i’m not made for this, i’m not in shape
my heart don’t bend like this, it just breaks
when we bring your bags down to the tracks that take you back

i’m no good at this, don’t know what to do
waiting on this platform, all these people waiting too
i don’t say much ’cause i don’t want to say “stay”

don’t the sun cry fire in the sky every night
when it tries to say goodbye

i curse the train and its shiny steel
when the whistle blows, i curse the wheels
and i curse my heart for the way it feels, oh

don’t the sun cry fire in the sky every night
when it tries to say goodbye

i take the stairs up while everybody comes down
they just got the word on the next train, next town
and i’m pretty sure now you’re gonna come around again

don’t the sun cry fire in the sky every night
when it tries to say goodbye

-catie curtis, from cry fire