Every day is like Sunday

Well, at least according to the New York Times. For some reason, my Sunday paper does not arrive on Sundays. Instead it arrives on Monday, and then another copy will show on Tuesday. I have called several times, and the helpful customer service representative said "I will put a note on your account that it is important that you receive the Sunday paper on Sunday." At this rate, I will be able to wallpaper the rumpus room with newspaper that I still haven't had time to read. As a child I was fascinated with the olde tyme newspaper printed on the tables at Wendy's, so I imagine this would hold similar appeal.

Now we have a glut: entirely too many anecdotes and not enough time to natter about everything. There's the hair raising tale of our weekend in Maine, Mr. H's trip to "Bangladore," getting Hepatitis A, that fucking chipmunk who keeps eating my plants, including the cilantro that totally did it with the dill (Dilettantro), and minor league baseball from last week. Did you know the mascot for the Lowell Spinners is the Canaligator? Even Kitty Winn has a backlog, and these problems are real humdingers. I just can't focus. I'm going a million miles a second here.

Also, why not contribute to John Kerry today? Midnight tonight is the deadline for the last FEC filing before the convention. I shoveled some more into the pile, but I confess I used my credit card because we are still poor. And that reminds me of another story about what happens to poor chicks, but Mr. H made me promise that he could guest blog that one. Soon, pretties.

-xxoo

Posted 3:54 PM by Licketysplit

What's your tragic flaw?



I am in the midst of an irresponsible creative writing project with my sister, the moose. I would love to explain, as I am now more sure than ever that I am just marking time until someone phones with a Genius Grant, but some of you milksops might steal the idea.

The term "creative writing" alone is enough to make my throat grow tight, as I associate it with all kinds of ridiculousness. I took a college creative writing class, and one of the group exercises involved plausible lying. We had to go around the room and offer two false biographical sketches and one true one. Most people lurched into the lies, giggling and blushing, "Um...one summer? I worked as a life guard?" No one could pick mine out, but I suppose I had the advantage of a completely bizarre childhood. Everyone thought the story about doing a screen test for a commercial for a chocolate company was true. They were taken in by my description of having to spit out the chocolate without eating it between takes. My true story was about getting attacked by a nest of yellow jackets, but everyone was skeptical until I showed them the scars on my shoulder. Those were actually from chicken pox, but what are you going to do?

I suffered my only other creative writing experience at the age of six. My parents were not big on activities for children save sitting quietly or hobbies and interests beyond "living off the land," but one shocking day I was enrolled in a program sponsored by the county library. It was billed as a potpourri of creativity. For an hour we plucked the strings of child-sized violins, and then we did our creative writing. Here is the story generated by allowing a group of kindegarteners to shout things out at random: "One day, a bird, no, a peacock! Went down the hill. (What did he look like?) And he had oily, watermelon feathers. (Did he have any friends?) And he had a friend. And they did things. At the store. The end."

Clearly my tragic flaw is that I am just like the little tapir who never got over his past. Oily, watermelon feathers will haunt me until the day I die. Also, during the "fine arts" portion of the potpourri, we had to draw a charcoal portrait of Michael Jackson. The teacher kept pointing out that his head had a perfect egg shape.

-xxoo

Posted 9:59 AM by Licketysplit

Earth below us, drifting falling

I gotta stop doing hallucinogens first thing in the morning. I had this horrible vision that I got up and showered and dressed, like so many normal people do. My hair smells like papaya extract. Hmm, and so does my arm. Pretty great. And then I had coffee and set about the tasks of the day. I even replied to emails from clients, entered information into my address book, and started coding something. I only became enraged for one fleeting moment. I will even give myself a pass on that, because the target of my objection is like one of the little creatures of nature: they don't know that they're ugly!

Then I went outside and found a chipmunk sitting in the flower pot that contains my chives. Just keeping them warm, I suppose. I can't wait until they hatch, releasing millions of tiny Monarch butterflies and pieces of confetti.

It's high time Kitty Winn answered some letters, so please reply here with your awful problem, and I will put her right on it.

Posted 12:34 PM by Licketysplit

Lambchop's Greatest Hits



It occurred to me as I rode the train back from New York, loopy from bourbon and the parade of latino girls in pube-risers...this is another topic, let me start sgain. It was the 13th of June, exactly the same day as I set out last year from Berlin, heading home. I wanted adventure. So what the hell have I done? Well here is a handy list to answer that very question!

1. Made 15 paintings.
2. Cross country mammajamma from New Orleans to LA to SF to Phoenix to LA, in that order.
3. Got a haircut and a job. Quit. Got a new haircut.
4. Licketysplit's Wedding!!! (with fireworks!)
5. Two trips to the hospital, one incl. surgery!
6. Rode my bicycle in a blizzard in hotpants.
7. Visited the Berlin of my youth.
8. Floated on a flower shaped raft on a river in NH for a week with the Naughty Girls.
9. Turned 30! Quit smoking (99%).
10. Livin' in Smugglers Notch.

Thanks once again for everyone who helps make starting over FUN.

By the way, I am a kitty cat and I dance, dance, dance.

-xo

Posted 12:12 PM by Lambchop

Space out



It's been a long week. Sometimes the wind just picks us up and hurls us like a handful of leaves. I am thankful for sunsets and wine. I wish my arm would stop tingling when I type. My right wrist is my fortune. Stop giggling.

-xxoo

Posted 5:08 PM by Licketysplit

Life and Death and Some Other Things



Always try to help a friend in need.
Remembering you, Lady K.

This weekend I brought The Germans to New York and we did touristy things like the Staten Island Ferry and the Empire State Building. It was such a clear day, you could see to forever. Well, forever being New Jersey. And as luck would have it, Newark was hosting their annual Portuguese "Cameltoe" Parade. This involved hundreds of pots of simmering Meat, the streets flowing with Sangria and spandex. Somewhere in between I had cocktails at the Rink Bar at Rockefeller Center and later at a trashy go-go bar in Jersey, not far from where I grew up. Those Russian girls and their ????????!

I took the train back up with a bottle of Maker's Mark and Morrissey.

In the meantime Boston has lost a creative young person. Lady K. is an old art school acquaintance/rival. We became friends when I came back, the way you do when you are old enough not to care about who can wear more lipstick. I just saw her a week or so ago. We talked about studio spaces, she recommended some. A couple months ago she laughed at me for buying kiddie underwear at the store where she worked (hey, they had stars on them!). We weren't best friends, but she has been part of my landscape for-just-about-ever, and we were starting to be friends. Sadly, she was hit by a car on her bicycle, and fell into a coma. She was taken off life support yesterday, and has very likely died in the night.

Everything I have done for the last two days I have relished, with the painful knowledge that she was gone and unable to participate in this moment.

I am also thinking of getting a helmet.

-xo

Posted 1:06 PM by Lambchop

Misery, we have company!

Hey! Some of you may have been wondering where our darling Lambchop is hiding these days. The answer is simple: Steele has returned from his fourth trip sailing around the Cape of Good Hope, and now they are off to Algiers for a very long weekend. She'll return, languid, completely drenched in henna, and tease me with exotic tales of eating honeyed goat hearts. Le sigh. I'm having cold coffee. Not iced, just cold.

In other news, the second day of Yard Sale was even more terrifying than the first. My display of old goth jewelry was stolen by Irish Travellers! Oh yes. They cagily stuffed half-burnt votive candles and napkin rings into their pockets as their moon-faced children did a distracting stiff-legged jig. Then they hung around, asking people if they wanted their windows washed. We finally got rid of them between pulling out the hose and mentioning several times that the next door neighbor is a cop.

We have a new view from our bizarre hovel, as all the trees were cut down along the river. We can see all the way to the Lawrence Mills and the ball park, and sunsets are now quite the event. The other day, Mr. H yelled "Look, there's some assholes in kyaks!"

"Won't they get hurt when they hit that big rock ledge?"

"That's what I'm hoping, get outside!"

In the end, they took on a lot of water, but managed to limp downstream. Man, do I know that feeling.

-xxoo

Posted 9:36 AM by Licketysplit

Purchase our burden

Yesterday was my very first yard sale experience ever. I guess "yard sales" are what you have when your stuff is not nice enough to eBay. It was not in my yard, as I do not have so much of a yard as a deck swarming with stray cats. There's Other Cat, Other Other Cat, Mangy Cat, Black Yelly Cat, and now Son of Other Cat is old enough to poke around. Official Cat, who lives in the house, presses herself against the screen and hisses in long blasts as the others eat the parsley and cilantro in my herb garden. But I digress.

This yard sale took place at the house of my in-laws, who are making a valiant last stand against clutter. The event reinforced all that I hate about humanity, as parades of poorly dressed people stomped around the lawn, attempting to damage things to shore up their haggling position. "Oh, this glass is scratched..." "But I just saw you do that with your key chain!"

We soon adopted the attitude of "You want it? One dollar, get out of my sight -- oh hell, take it for free, I just never want to look at you again." People in nicer cars tended to bargain fiercely. Why did the man in the Lexus SUV want the stringless weed trimmer so badly?

By far, my favorite moment was the father and daughter who spoke Spanish to each other, giggling to themselves about how crappy all the stuff is. Since it was not my stuff (our meager contributions sold first!), I listened in, enjoying that I still remembered the words for "trashy" and "cheap." The daughter asked the size on a cast off Dynasty-esque dress belonging to a larger family member, and when told it was a 20, her eyes enlarged to saucer size and she yelped "My God, SO FAT" in Spanish and made an expansive gesture of girth. I finally shooed them away after they opted for a rusty knife set.


-xxoo

Posted 8:14 AM by Licketysplit

On bad ideas

A few years ago, Mr. H and I worked on an account for a client called eYak!. The interCapping alone should allow you to pinpoint the chronology firmly in the Mesozoic era, or 1999-2000. They had a snappy slogan, something like "Powering the Power of the Wicked Powerful Internet." This was later changed to "The Soft Side of Voice." Not making that up. The flagship product was some VoIP* kludge for sharing presentations, called, I dunno, eConnect4Connections or something. OK, eSee Conferencing. They had another product tailored to the consumer market.

It was called the Bud-eYak.

I just checked the ol' site out with the Wayback Machine, but sadly they do not preserve the excessive DHTML or the three minute Flash intro.

Sometimes I hear it in my dreams.
"Hiiii, Bob, I see the numbers on my screen now!"
"Looks like a GRRREAT quarter for you, Peter!"

We had to do it in French and Spanish as well.

Now a better idea: Tonight is Pizza Night! No yakking at all.

-xxoo

*which they relentlessly pronounced "VOYP"

Posted 1:20 PM by Licketysplit

Sitting Pretty



We may be different, but we still Bleeeeeeeed...

A message of harmony brought to you by Vomitola.

-xo

Posted 11:15 PM by Lambchop

i-ve been thinking mary----dammit baltimore- you must always have the last word--

Try keeping some emergency bad ideas in your desk.

I am at a loss on several counts.

My sister and I are considering writing a book. I wonder if we should make an outline, or just attack with finger paints? I may start by making an actual visual map of everything I remember about early childhood. There's the trailer, the addition to the trailer, the garage with the stash of St. Pauli girl bottles, the goat shed, the pile of red dirt I was not allowed to play in, the place where the cat got shot, the yellow jacket nest in the potato patch, my Sycamore tree. The yellow toyota with the Netherlands sticker, the old black truck with the running boards, the well, the Lady Slipper patch, the treehouse that was only 3 feet off the ground, the black tulips, the random sink sitting in the back yard, the root cellar. We had a dog briefly, named Barky or Bitey or something like that. He looked a bit like a beagle.

And there is more. Carpet in the kitchen (ha!), lots of nudity, swimming, being allowed sips of beer, being hit with a shoe, books about proper British children, awful, awful food that once was part of the garden. Cherry trees, crotches thick with worm nests. Drowning Japanese beetles from the grape vines in a bucket of water.

The Westvaco logging forest across the property line was filled with bulldozer piles. Sometimes you could find shards of china, with patterns. Exotic because we did not have decorative things. The ruts from the logging trucks filled with water and made bright red mud. We rolled in it and were hosed down before we could come inside.

The nearest town eight miles away. The shoe factory, the A&P, the library where I was forced to alphabetize at a young age. The nursing home, the railroad tracks, a snack bar in the gas station where I ate hamburgers with mayonnaise and once got food poisoning.

Hmm.

Posted 4:47 PM by Licketysplit

i-ve given up--

Yesterday I received an email from my mother, the woman who taught me to read, the woman who obsessively drilled me on grammar and punctuation, in which she stated "Our's is better." I consulted my sister, and she agreed that the internet is making everyone stupid. Well, I wan-t a piece of it.

me: lets popularize the overuse of dashes
me: im done with apostrophes
her: well--if you feel we must
me: totally-dont you think-
her: i used to know some kids who overused elipses....that got old fast....but they seemed to think it was reasonable
me: thats fun too-but dashes are snappier
her: totally--im on-the-go!
me: in five years-if all the internet uses shitty dashes-i will feel so vindicated
her: ha-ha
her: totally--
me: two dashes at the end of the sentence indicates enthusiasm--
her: ok--
me: why are you-re dashe-s bigger than mine ----
her: different font?
me: oh right- i felt insecure
her: someone who works at the local paper--said theyre letting alot of people go right now--not doing so much hiring
her: and that i should try NPR
me: wait-ll they see these dashes-
her: i know--
her: wave of the effing future
me: -----
her: --right--
me: good god-----
her: --in front gives it that mexicano flavor--
me: --ole--
me: it-s fun to type--
me: fun like drinking nyquil--
her: i wish i had some nyquil---right now

Then we dis-cussed how dis-appointed we are in our parents- plan to pave the front yard.

-xxoo

Posted 1:47 PM by Licketysplit

Gliding like a whale

You know we got nuffin when we post pictures of dogs all week. Could it be that Lambchop and I are both happy for once? I feel like I am doing a gentle backstroke in Prozac-infused molasses, and I'm not even *taking* any drugs. When we go out, we spend our time doubled over with laughter, not shaking fists and gnashing teeth. It reminds me of how we used to ooze around Boston in an addled fog lo these many years ago. What's next, staring for hours at the Amtrak ticketing kiosk in South Station because the music sounds like Peter Murphy? Yes, that exactly! Please join us.

The only thing's that really bother me these day's are poor punctuation and the state of the US government. No biggie! I got a call from the Kerry campaign looking for volunteers, so I think I'll traipse in and shuffle paper at HQ a few days a week. Maybe I can finally master mail merge, for G-- and country. I am not sure I am up for door-to-door in New Hampshire, as everyone in that state is issued a gun. This could be just the push I need to finally learn target shooting. There is a range right down the street; I could run over while the laundry is in the dryer.

I love you, man!

-xxoo

Posted 10:05 AM by Licketysplit

péché originel



Une vie ne peut pas inclure des possibilités latentes.

(A life cannot include unrealized possibilities.)

Posted 12:06 PM by Licketysplit

All Tomorrow's Pants


Fall In Love with Someone

David Bowie, the Man of the Pants, gave a stunning performance. This is the creature who invented or renewed everything I like about life in this century. He played Station to Station!!! He wryly requested that the audience not sing along to the chorus of "All the Young Dudes". The power of that voice, that presence...it's twitterpating, it's Pantastic!

In addition, Clammy and I, social scientists that we are, have discovered the secret to a successful date. Only go on a Date with an attractive someone you really like, who also likes you. Thank you Mr. Drinkwater, for being a most charming escort. We scheduled all the major Date Highlights implicit in the Win a Date with Lambchop, from a nervous phone call to an awkward pause beneath the porch light.

As if it could have been any better, Helen did an excellent job of Parking and not killing anyone. Every day should be arranged to be that good!

-xo

Posted 10:43 AM by Lambchop

Win a Date With Lambchop



We here in the 9th circle of Hell are pleased to show you our current favorite for the prized position of being on my arm at tonight's Bowie concert. It is a difficult decision, as the entries are just pouring in. Thats because everyone knows I am easy. What makes this candidate so special? We like his unabashed appreciation for himself and for Echo and the Bunnymen. We also like his hair. As for his "Natural Cool", discover for yourselves.

Dear Lambchop,

I am special for many reasons.

For starters, even though I suffer very badly from adult ADD, I am still in the 3rd most popular american synth-pop band of all time.

I like to paint rectangles and I like to read non-fiction, which are categorically stupid things to do, but even with these albatross I am still tattooed on a man's leg for being as cool as I am. I am also special for having what I like to call a 'natural cool.' Even though I am typically surrounded by morons and sycophants I retain an almost ethereal quality which nearly defies description. Is this magic? Possibly. It is this 'COOL-FACTOR' which allows me to, say, wear one outfit/hair-do and go to several different parties in several different cities on the same
night. Do *You* Know What I Mean? From a grimy punk-rock venue in Worcester to a fine restaurant in New York City, you will find my coolness special. From a tavern in the deepest reaches of the Maine wilderness to the glamorous stages of London, Miami, Barcelona and Amsterdam, my coolness remains intact and obvious to those around me. I really don't even have to DO anything, and that is the key. Many people have to DO things to be or at least SEEM special. Not me. My natural charisma and special cool-qualities
are ominpresent, without the need to accomplish or even attempt anything in particular. How was I born like this? Why me? I don't know....I DON'T. I remain, however, ready to face the challenges or lack thereof that I am confronted with, and I will do so with a smile. If that is not special...well then I'm not really sure what is....

And I know way more about new wave music than you do, suckahs.

How does this relate to dear, dear Lambchop? I am not sure. Sometimes the very concept of taste brings people together, people with say, wildly varying temperaments/tempers. My favorite things about Lambchop? Pure talent in an impure world. Her fondness for pork products, her willingness to let me borrow the first disc of the Echo and the Bunnymen boxset...should I go on? I thought so. Her real color, her fake hair color. The way she almost never wears the same kind of boots my mother would wear. It is a total
package, and any person could appreciate this, especially from a PR standpoint. And really...who better to scream at David Bowie with like two giddy schoolgirls ...in.... their...30's?

Sean T. Drinkwater, Boston, Massachusetts,
June 1, 2004, 12:35pm


****About the photograph:

I took it upon myself to singlehandedly teach the Dutch about mixed drinks, in this case Orange Juice-based beverages. These were strange and queer to the Dutch, but I have a feeling should I return to Amsterdam this year that will find this kind of thing to be a bit more widespread. I will quietly thank myself for helping the new Europe in this way. A blurry photograph was
chosen to downplay my beauty because I want this contest to be fair.. Shirt: D&G, Jacket: Asics, Outer Jacket: C20 outerwear, Pants: Andrew Christian (this could be inaccurate), Shoes: Camper, Belt: probably Gap.

Posted 12:51 PM by Lambchop