If Something in the Deli Aisle Makes You Cry
Another weekend, another night of bowling and fisheye lenses exploding all over the floor. I got a Lomo fisheye for XXXmas, but the focus is off and the lens comes apart. Lisa didn’t know about the latter when she went to take a picture of me bowling, and the lens elements went everywhere in Memory Lanes. It was like I had forgotten how to bowl, or my arm had lost its strength, for I lost both games. Stan had the worst form but seemed to dominate. I guess I’m a drinker, not a bowler.
Sunday — today — I woke up to Sarah, but took the afternoon to see an apartment. I turned the knobs, flipped the switches, and asked about the stains on the hardwood floor. I got the best vibe from the manager and the apartment, but the kitchen was only big enough to turn around once, and only in one direction (left, if you’re wondering). I want my own place, but it hads to be big enough for me to roast a turkey or other large bird, carve it for guests, and magically transmogrify the carcass from bones and scraps of meat into delicious stock. Sure, if I cook by myself, the kitchen would be plenty big, but I’m not that much of a kitchen tyrant that I don’t want to bump up against someone whilst chopping celery.
Home again, I developed the regular print film from my fisheye at yonder Target, and while scanning the negatives, I reassembled the lens and superglued the front on to it.
Sarah called to remind me that I was invited to Donald’s for dinner with the whole gang. As usual I ate like a starving college student, even though the rapid return of lost waistline reminds me that I am far from starving. Fortunately, the ratio of hearty meat based food to desserts at Donald’s house remains high. I like baked goods, but I prefer a good roast as an application of radiant heat. In this case, Donald had prepared a ham and bean soup which had all the best parts of dessert already in it: bacon and beans. Fuck yeah.
Chandler spent most of the evening cutting yellow ribbon into eight inch lengths for her book arts project. She would pull out eight inches, measure it against a sample length, and cut it with scissors. I watched her do this laborious process for a while, then suggested that she put together a rig to speed up the process. She resisted, so I started sketching out my idea on paper and asked Donald if he had a drill press. Now, a test of manliness! Make tool, work good! His basement was in a bit of chilly disarray, but we scrounged up scrap lumber, scrap dowels, a drill press, some measuring tools, and a pen. Mix those together and out came a board with three posts.
Donald wound the ribbon around the posts and cut down the middle of one side, yielding twenty or fifty or so ribbons per cut. Hooray! Two or three Chandler-hours of time compressed into a half hour of whirly Donald and Jesse time.
I also did my best to fix Donald’s antique dial phone. It was suffering from recurring static. My first thought was some sort of dying resistor or capacitor, but removing the base revealed no actual circuits, just moving parts and contacts that would open and close. I cleaned as many contacts as I could with the eraser from a stub of a pencil that Donald had lying around, but the static seemed to merely go from constant to intermittant.
I received a jar of pumpkin butter (like apple butter, only it tastes a bit like pie) for my trouble. That’s fair dinkum, I’d say.
I dreamt about ribbons last night. Donald says I blathered about ribbons in my sleep. Joy of joys.
mome-rath: didn’t I totally predict that??
jesse: i totally want a copy of that triple exposure! It appears as if I am radiating Strongbow.
If you could dispense Strongbow…
Mmmmmmmm booze!
Maybe that’s what my superhero power should really be: ability to dispense booze at will. Mmmmm.
Different alcohol from each orifice, I hope? EXCELLENT.