| � | 
|
| � | |
| � |
� 12/23/2004 - 5:15 p.m. | played at the Bitter End Felt good about... something. Can't remember what not. Make note of it later. OK, let's see... When I am in top drunken form, I mean I am in top drunken form. How so, you ask? Well, while I am not ordinarily capable of hitting on any girl any time ever, in TDF (as opposed to TLF), I suddenly become brilliant. Standing in line... somewhere: "Might I have a drag of your cigarette?" he slurs. She obliges. He tosses it over his soldier. "Now I owe you a pack." Pause for laughter / confusion. "Hey - is that your midriff I see?" "Um. Yes?" "And is your bellybutton pierced?" She looks (?!). "Yes." "Ah, so is mine." (Showing her) "We should probably touch tummies." And we do. I don't remember how goes the rest of it, but it is a good show, I promise. I have very good taste. OR! There was the night I went out alone (back during that brief period when I went out alone) and spent the entirety of the evening amongst these Urbana People trying to pass off a particular episode of "Sanford and Son" as my own anecdote. And it wasn't even an episode I'd seen recently either. More specifically, it was the episode where Lamont gets Fred to donate his Blind Mellow Jelly records to a library, but then Fred finds out they are worth some money, so he gets his buddy Bubba to go in and pretend to be Blind Mellow Jelly, Jr., and he's like a broken record himself going, "I want my daddy's records." Anyway, I went up to all these different people, and I somehow kept managing to segue into this anecdote, except each time I would tell it from the point of view of a different character and with random detail alterations (And a lot of details were given each time). "So, I went in there, and I was like, 'Blind Mellow Jelly, man, you gotta get them records back! Them's my daddy's records!" But I'd carry it on for like ten minutes, and I think I might have somehow gotten a girl's number as a result of this, and though I distinctly remember her pretty eyes, I ripped up her number as I walked home because I thought it would be cool like that scene in Swingers. This is all irrelevant to this past weekend, however. I woke up all pumped up and ready for my makeup creative exam, drove over to Armory, dumped seven dollars into the meter, and then navigated my way through the Dread Maze only to find the door Locked. I thought for a while. Not that I had been studying for this test anyway (I had luck on my mind), but I suddenly had a strong inkling and ran to the library to check up on it. Oops. Test was the previous Saturday. So much for makeup. In my mind, it could very well have been the 11th. What do I know of time and space? Anyway, with some time freed up, I drove up to Prospect and made good use of my Meijer gift card. As could only be expected, I bought a lot of booze. That shall make a swell thank you letter to the Yankee Ridge PTA. "Dear Parents and Teachers - Thank you for your kindness. It get me and my friends quite trashed. Regards." I spent literally an hour staring at all the bottle of shit, though, trying to pick out something new that everyone would agree on. Nevertheless, it would appear I picked two things everyone else absolutely hated, mandarin orange and raspberry. Therein lies my greatest fear of gift-giving, the problem I have every time I try to buy something for someone. I spend all this time looking and planning and weighing options, and then they still secretly hate it. Yes, I've heard: It's the thought that counts. I do plenty of thinking. I would just like to get something right for a change. That done, there was still plenty of day to be wasted before I should actually start upon my studying for that evening's late as hell cognitive psych final. I can't truthfully recall what I did, but it can't have been much of much, right? I desperately sought distractions, going so far as to read poetry, if I recall. Finally, came the time for the "reading," which I flew through at a highly-discernible rate, I'm positive, and then out the door at breakneck pace to Altgeld. Nothing like a huge well of snot in my throat to really make those loogies fly. I got through the test in record time, first one out even maybe, which is just as well because a) was on a very strict, important timer and b) was sitting next to some Russian troll girl who kept yawing and stretching to try and get me to notice her God awful flab stomach. And stop twisting those mangy blonde locks, you beast. This is doing nothing to help my concentration! Got home, found it empty, began imploring the emptiness (loudly) to get out there and drink with me, occasionally stopping to yell as Mario once again took a suicide leap into a chasm. The others were summoned, but appeared unwilling to drink, despite all the cause for celebration. I don't care if you were done with finals seven hours / four days ago - the fun begins NOW! I eventually realized that I had a cellular phone and was receiving mysterious unknown calls from it. I called them back post-haste and had a nice conversation with the video store and Melissa. My girl thing, not my aunt. I was apparently spouting niceties to her: "Are you drunk?" "Yeah, baby! Drunk on loooooove." Somehow it still took her two days to realize I was fibbing. Possibly because I did not talk to her for two days. Nate Walsh, you self-destructive asshole! Why do you do as such?! I urged us on! "Come alone! I simply must grind my penis into a female's plump rear end! I shall certainly not be getting an erection, though - for obvious reasons!" Finally, finally - we had plans. Fuck. Going to some terrible, terrible Something Awful goon meet down the street. Swell as fuck. We got there, and there were like four people, all guys, playing poker and drinking Coors Light. I GUESS YOUR JUS WHAT I NEEDED Kyle seemed to maybe be enjoying himself, though, and I don't know why the fuck Jason Kahn was there, but he was. And the rest of us roved around and tried to escape and further tried to keep Spritz from doing nothing worse than peeing in these fellows' shower. No, Spritz. Don't take the books, Spritz. They had one of those big rubber exercise balls, which I promptly sat upon and bounced. Some nerd came into the room and sat on the couch, so I blathered nonsensically until he left me alone. Space time vortex and all that. WHY THE FUCK ARE WE HERE Luckily, a bus was coming soon (hopefully). And then we would hit the bars. I believe I failed in my mission to keep Spritz undestructive; in fact, I know I am, because I suddenly have a clear vision of him igniting a whole big pile of somebody's mail on fire in the back alley. At last escape was at hand, and Spritz and I ran to catch the bus out of that monotonous hellhole. Of course, WonderTwins cannot be expected to do anything like leave a building when asked, so they were lost in the smoke. Fuck 'em. "Too cold to come out." Right. I'm not sure why we went to Legends first - I do not know what our thought process was there, but we went in and sort of slumped around but were too afraid to talk to anyone (Except that fucking Twitch was there playing darts?!?!?), so we just tried out that God damned "Police Training" arcade game. I was already sobering up, and it was certainly not fair that Spritz made it to Sergeant, and I was just fucking kicked out. We walked to Joe's which, despite being a rather large suckfest with absolutely no one out on the dancefloor when we came in, still managed to charge us cover. Dicks. Well, since we're here. Spritz attempted to teach me to play pool. Clearly, I would suck balls at it, but the surprise of the night was how much I enjoyed it. Now I just need about a million trillion more hours practice alone because, honestly, a somewhat crowded bar is not the place. People kept watching as Spritz (who is fairly good) just kept knocking shit in - pow, pow, pow. Then, the cue was handed to me, and he'd be like, "OK, Nate. Nice easy shot. Just knock it straight in." The people would watch, and I could see them thinking, "Oh, man - I bet this guy is good. Look at him lining up his shot; he's gonna bounce that fucker right in. I bet he sees all those stupid blue glowing vectors like in Little Man Tate (God damn vectors - fucking Jodie "Hack" Foster can't direct shit. And it's weird, too, that even though we watched this movie the next day on TV, I still had the reference in mind at the time)." And then I'd somehow jab the fucker so that it would go spinning clockwise and then skew off to the left then right finally settling on coming back to where I had tried to hit it from. I need a slum bar to practice in alone. But then I will be sodomized with a pool cue, and I don't really need that sort of strain. Anyway, since we looked pretty gay as it was, we figured we might as well check out the dance floor and prove it! Suddenly, place was crowded - a welcome change - and we went on the prowl. Again, maybe Spritz was not krunk enough because he was not going for anybody. "Well, man," he says. "Let's get to it." By this he means, "Let's dance like gay men." Okay, deal. Idea being that if we hump each other's butts enough, no girl would ever think us straight and have to worry about us raping them, thus allowing us access to their sweet, unhumped heinies. I don't know how this stupid fucking plan worked. But it did. Suddenly we pretty much exclusive dance partners with these two Asian girls - of course Asian girls, why would it be anything else? And there is tag team grinding and a lot of weird homoerotic energy. I mean, metrosexuality is easy enough. But to have the stones to rub asses and scream all the words to "Wannabe" by the Spice Girls is how the masses are tricked. The girls loved us; the one said so more than a few times. Spritz got the pretty one (relative term, but I believe he has skewed taste as it is), and I got the nugget, because I apparently don't mind nuggets as much as the rest of the world. Sad but true. And we cavorted and high fived and laughed and held hands and it was all very, very strange. By this time, I noticed other girls on the floor who wouldn't be awful to dance with, but we were stuck now. Spritz wanted their numbers. I assume it would have gone down something like this. "I always knew who I was, but ever since I met you, I've had all these new... feelings. And I don't know what to do with them." "There, there, sweetie. Have you ever... been with a girl before?" "Sniff, no..." "Well, maybe we could try..." "Sniff, maybe... I figure a blowjob would be the best crossover between guys and girls!!!!" Luckily (I feel), Spritz left before I spotted them again, and I ran off into the cold, cold night. Alone. Curiously, things got stranger, because suddenly I was riding my bike (through the absolute zero weather) over to Allen Hall at 3:30 in the morning to play Mario Kart with Allison Helm and her drunken artfag friends. I was more or less sober at this time, which only added to my amusement. I know lots of artfag people, but as a general rule, they usually don't drink. Thus, seeing their artfagginess so raw and exposed was a whole new world for me. Everyone was there: The hard-edged bitchy girl who really just wants to be loved (I think she might have actually been in our house before, when I was giving drunken tarot card readings), the couple lost in their own world, the chubby Jewish kid who everyone thinks is hilarious (even though his Bob Dylan impression was horrible, and I could have blown them out of the water), and the minority/mental case chick bragging about her double Windsor knot just about as often as she tried to brush the invisible garlic bagel chip crumbs off her bed. This was my company. Luckily, there is still one of my few God-given gifts: If I so choose, I can make pretty much anyone love me as a person without ever saying a word directly to them. Missy was so confused one night: "Ashley and Julie love you, but you've never really even talked to them." Somehow, I just present myself as affable - somewhere between self-deprecating, caustic, overconfident, and empathetic (+ timing!) - and I was really working it that night. I don't know what really happened - we played our game and a lot of things were yelled and a lot of Pixies and/or Jay-Z/Weezer's "The Black-and-Blue Album" were sung along to, but it was still sort of a lot of fun. Then, suddenly, everyone was gone, leaving just me, Allison, and her passed out roommate on the bunk above. God as my witness, nothing was done or even attempted, but I remain 100% confident in the fact that I could very well have been. As one who has seen (and ignored) the crucual "You should kiss her moment," I knew she wanted my ass. And that's all I needed!! Everest conquered, bitch!! I got out unscathed because - despite these weird ego issues you are reading about - I still don't want anyone, ANYONE hurt, but my goal remains accomplished. Hm. Maybe "Everest" was too much of a buildup. That wasn't really that hard at all. If we're talking about Everest, it's got to be someone nearly impossible. But the threat must constantly loom. Heroin Chick. You are my Everest. Try mounting that one, beeyotch. Or � to put a finer point upon it: Fiona Apple is my Nirvana, Heroin Chick my Everest. It all depends on the amount of distillation, you know? It�s like vodka. God, I know, I am a sick fuck. You don't think I know? I know. I play dangerous games, and as I pedaled through the arctic tundra, trying to avoid the wind, screaming, contemplating just stopping to go into a nice hypothermic coma because I CAN'T FEEL MY DAMN HANDS, I thought about what I want. God, what do I want? As always, there is this duality in my head, and I can't just seem to entirely justify either side, so I go back and forth, toying with both. I'll try to explain this better in the future. Sunday, up to sit on our asses all day (Me, Kyle, Shelly), watching pretty much the most horrible TV cable has to offer. First, the classic Sinatra / Martin Western (????): Four for Texas. So many bewildering elements to it. The sweaty fat fuck who burped all the time. The fat lady we were supposed to think was hot? Charles Bronson the Psychic, Vest-Wearing Bandit. "The money's not in the bag." "Damn, he must have had it sewn into the lining of his coat!" Oh, of course. Weird slaves and servants of all races. Poor production values, inappropriate sounds and music 2 ytired write more later WHERE WAS I AH YES. It was as awkward of a movie as any, but Kyle and I remained strangely intrigued throughout. �I bet Sinatra and Dean Martin�s characters are going to stop being friendly enemies soon and just become friends!� �I bet you�re right!� But I won�t ruin it for you. Then, we got sucked into this weirdass sort of kids channel Starz gives us called WAM. Once again, ass all over the place, but� we remain focused. Mostly because any time Kyle sees one vaguely cute girl on a show, he can then watch the shit forever. Anyway, we had our �The Tribe� � about how some virus made everyone over the age of 18 die, leaving the minors around to keep things in order and draw stupid shit with magic marker on their faces. We shall buy the first season on DVD soon enough, for there are too many questions I need answering to. What if you were like 18 and 364 days when the virus hit? Were you still cool right up until midnight and then choke wheeze? Low budget would be a compliment to this Australian piece of shit. Speaking of, our next feature was the ultradramatic �Higher Ground� with Anakin Skywalker himself, Hayden Christensen. If this is what convinced George Lucas to give him the part, then obviously the old man need lay off of his opiates for a while. He was fucking awful, but at least the fucking head counselor at this �Shelby�s in hell� camp was tripping balls on painkillers and Benadryl. And then himself from the past kept telling him to hide the pills under the couch. What a waste of a life. Then some sort of cutesy little teen girl Lizzie MacGuire show� until the main character got chlamydia (not a flower). �But he said he loved me!� Oh dears. Moving on� The three of us went out with Jevon, the girl that was with him that I did originally even notice until Shelly pointed her out the next day at which point I realized that, yes, she was a little odd looking, plus or minus boobs, and Booger (who, unfortunately for him, I have already started mentally calling �Boner�) for dinner and, sigh, Ocean�s Twelve. Indeed. I did not like the first one all that much to begin with, but it had capering and whatnot, so I guess it was OK. This time, I dunno, it was just sort of crap� piddling crap, even. Man � this is the problem. It wasn�t even memorable enough for me to have some legitimate qualms I might bitch about. Which one was the twelfth, incidentally? And what were those eleven guys really doing to help out anyway? �I stood next to the guy who shot the grappling hook and made witty banter.� Well done, my friend. Here is your 19 million. Shelly was a wretched harpy screaming about the handheld camera work, and I tried not to gag every time they zoomed in on Catherine Zeta-Jones self-satisfied �OMG I AM SO SEEEEEXXXXYYYYY CAN U BELIEVE IT� smirk. The only props I give are for Julia Roberts� character pretending to be Julia Roberts for one scheme, but then, I love self-referential humor. I wish someone would make a movie out of that where, I dunno, Sean Penn watches himself in Mystic River, goes, �What a pud,� and then switches on Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Monday, real conversation between Nate and Kyle: �Where are you going, man?� Shelly and I went shopping later on, trying very hard to find any gifts for anybody. We weren�t all that successful. As is tradition for every occasion where she needs a gift for Kyle, Shelly and I wandered into the world of the vaguely erotic, this time Spencer�s for �massage oil.� While I kept trying to convince her to get the �Good Head� brand lubricant (and alternately smacked her in the face with the stuffed penis), I mostly argued that no one should ever, ever buy anything at that particular shithole. Over to Bath & Body Works for an hour of smelling things. Unfortunately, no one ever seems to agree with what I think about smells, so it�s usually a bad idea to bring me along. When we got out to the car, there was a flyer stuck under the windshield wiper � a ***private invitation*** from Charisma and Stormi to Prosper. Now, we weren�t too sure what PROSPER actually was, and the descriptive paragraph didn�t do much to help: �This Holiday Season, learn to dream again� let us help you turn your dreams into reality. Please accept this invitation [to] a very special private gathering - Let�s celebrate the true spir[it] of giving. Good Information is Always Free.� However, the invite seductively asked us what we�d want if we had three wishes (I wrote down money, time travel, and shapeshifting - a source of much argument later from Kyle, who said if I had the latter two, I wouldn�t need the former. Instead, he felt I should opt for immortality. Perhaps he is right, but wouldn�t mind reading/control be pretty cool as well?), so I convinced Shelly that we simply must attend the meeting that night at the Champaign Public Library. We figured we were either in for some sort of money-making scheme (How embarrassing if I had walked in, and all the eMall people had been there!!) or some sort of religious scam. Turns out it was a little of both. We got to the library about on time, found the little auditorium room, and tried to peek in on the crowd of people listening to the lady blather. Unfortunately, we were spotted and dragged (�welcomed�) in. They offered us pizza, and I knew we both wanted it because we were starving, but then we would owe them something, and it would be ruder if we had to run out on them later. Anyway, we were the only white people there (allowing the speaker to comment that �poverty knows no color!� Wanted to yell �amen,� feared getting shot instead), and the lady who spoke was fucking Robert Tilton, I swear. She said words and made sentences, and I was very, very sure that they made syntactical sense, but they had absolutely no meaning at all. Shelly understood more of it than I did, I think, but it was obviously some sort of pyramid scheme. You pay $100, and you get $97,000!! Of course. And she kept using �gift� as a verb and talking about �closing the ranks� maybe things �rolling back in time� and about how we couldn�t really be trusted to keep track of our own finances, but that is why God allows for trust, and check twenty-one blah blah blah a bit here in tongues to keep the faithful attentive. Whitley from �A Different World� was there, and everybody was high-fiving and nodding and yelling comments. Sort of made me want to hear a sermon or a spiritual instead of a plea for my 100 bucks that I do not have. A long, long, laaahhoong twenty-five minutes later, I covertly scrawled a note: �Should we run?� �Fake phone call,� she responded. Unfortunately, I am lacking in the cunning for a such a tricky deception (preferring instead to just fake insanity), so I passed her my phone, she faked a call, summoned me, and we ran flat out as fast as we could to the car. It is the time invested that makes things worthwhile. We picked up Kyle from Sam�s with his parents and went to a chicken wing place for the least satisfying meal I have ever had. $7 for 6 little bony ass chicken wings (How did that work out?), about as much meat on them as my claw hands, their many touted sauces really just one with varying amounts of Tabasco added in. I finished and thought, �Okay, now where�s my meal?� Shelly always gives me shit about going to Wendy�s, but with $7 I can eat until I am stuffed � throwing up, even. Oh well. At least they had �trivia� � which instead turned to be out a system of trying to predict what the football team on the TV was going to do next. Pass deep right! Nope. Lose 30 points. Pass short left! Nope. Minus 30. �Run middle� seems to be the key to success in this game, which makes me just a little bit sad about our �professional� athletes. Kyle was vastly more amused than the rest of us, being able to see his user names (�KOOCHY� and �TWHAT�) up on the screen for all the world to see. Let�s got out of here, guys. I don�t even like reliving the memory. Some lady gave Shelly the finger in the Wal-mart parking lot, so Kyle made her follow the bitch around as close as possible, laying on the horn and yelling and shit. I think he would have keyed the car, had the lady�s handicapped son not been sitting alone in there. It was hilarious, but honestly, that type of retaliation tends to go back and forth until someone has a tire iron stuck into one�s face. And I�m grotesque enough as it is. When we got home, we watched Seniors, a dollar DVD I may or may not have won at bingo on the Night of My Drunken Success. For being such a terrible, low-budget late 70�s sex comedy, it was better than we thought. A young Dennis Quaid was there, as was the voice of Fred Flintstone as a scientist who made horny mosquitoes. It was dumb, and they had the rights to two whole songs (two well-used songs), and apparently all girls in the 70�s were uggos, shirtless or not, but I could still almost, almost recommend it. Again, I passed out on the couch. The next day was one of reconciliation and frantic shopping. I�m nearly done with my Christmas gifts, which is almost saying something, except that it is Christmas Eve Eve (Hate that phrase!), and I won�t be going out again until at least the 26th. I shoved every single piece of clothing I own into the back of the wagon (�packing�), ran some errands, and went out for a final dinner with Shelly and Kyle before I left. Let the third wheel be unbound!! As I walked up my driveway two hours later, I looked up at the sky like I always do when I first get back out to the sticks. The moon was surrounded by a huge glowing white halo. I used to know what causes this, but forgot and had to look it up: Six-sided ice crystals in the atmosphere. I don�t know why, but every place I looked had to note that the crystals had six sides. Good for you, crystals! You are like dice! Or my personality! I scared the shit out of my dad walking in. Yesterday, I did nothing. Hair was trimmed and dyed with a bit of my mom�s leftovers (so at least my roots are dark brown instead of dark blonde), and we watched an interview with Bill Murray on Jane Pauley�s talk show. Jane, by the way, is a horrible interviewer and can�t speak at all unless the robots behind the scenes write something for her. But I will forgive her, because she at least gave Bill a whole hour�s worth of time. I got the distinct impression that he did not really want to be on this show for all these cackling hens, but maybe that�s just how he always is lately. He did seem sort of happy to polish that one lady�s shoes. Here�s a strange bit: Jane was talking about the cover of last month�s �Esquire� (�The Genius Issue�), which had Bill on the cover and said, �Won�t someone please give this man an Oscar?� They were talking about that, and he said something along the lines of, �Well, now all these people will go home and make them for me.� Just strange, considering. I MADE HIM ONE AND SENT IT IN REMEMBER FUCK U That night, we ate and talked religion and/or psychosis, followed by The Full Monty. Yes for awkward naked British men. Let us all go to England so that I might be incomprehensible. This night, well, nothing yet. Perhaps nothing, period, but I can abide by it. I tried to explain to my mom last night why my doing nothing isn�t really nothing at all. It is sociological pop culture research that directly applies to the type of ads I want to (and occasionally do) create, why I felt like I was the only one in that class who took any real chances, who made anything memorable in the slightest. So, yes, I will watch my �Boy Meets World� and �Full House.� And yes, I know that are wretched. But I need what they give me, it is the only edge I�ve got. Today, we finished some shopping. Well, Mom did. I feel as though I should be getting more for Melissa but am unsure of how to proceed. I would like to make something, but my female robot suit idea was scrapped, and all my t-shirt ideas are vaguely insulting but not really not FOR REAL. God damn it. Kris Kristofferson was our waitress today at Red Lobster. Except she neither looked nor acted like him at all, so I don�t know where my brain got that bit of information from. As always, no girl is allowed to look out the window in my direction, for I assume it means she is trying to give me the eye, at which point I promptly return fire. Now, I am not a flirt � I just have natural reactions to things. Depending on how I feel, I may or may not be writing for a few days, so have a nice Christmas, fellow heathens. More importantly, happy birthday, mstan!
I won't be soothed, |