05/02/2005 - 3:43 p.m. | girls in a short stack, girls to the ceilin'

It's been a week since my last entry, and it might be that again, so I figured I'd at least swing by and briefly update you with some shit.

First off, I am being inexorably drawn into the hell known as finals week. According to the little chart I drew myself, I have two exams on Wednesday, one on Friday, one definite 8 - 10 page paper due on the same, as well as countless others due whenever the fuck I get around to them. I say "countless" because they are beyond number, see. And through it all, there is the whole self-doubt that this is doing anything for me at all, that my grades will still be shit, and that is sort of depressing, too. But! My light at the end of the tunnel (for this week anyone) is the upcoming weekend, with the promise of Rhett Miller being mere inches from my grasp. But that is a long fuck way off, so it's best to "keep my head down and power through."

When we last left, I was all sorts of injured and my clothes were all torn up for various drunken stumblings at the party. This is still essentially true. The first day back on a bike was roughly hell, and I rode through the streets, tears streaming down my face as tendons snapped and bones splintered. Perhaps I exaggerate. On the plus side, I used my mad hand-stitching skills to patch up the holes in my jeans. They now look as though they have been assembled by Victor Frankenstein, but they'll hold for another week or two. And the huge blood stains all over make me look like a total badass.

By the way, what's scariest is logging into your online banking account to see if you have enough money to pay your bills... or even any money at all. I remember the one time at Christmas I logged in and it was in the negatives, and I more or less ran around screaming, trying to calll up debts owed to get myself in the black. Even worse is when you cannot remember your damn login or password amongst the several that you use, so that tension is built up as you keep trying shit and it keeps not working. But I'm actually all right for now on that :)

Here is a question for all you ethicists (A word?) out there: Is it a sin if you are making others steal by proxy? Like, if I were to fill up my car with posterboards reading "FREE" on them in a drunken scrawl and then went throughout the neighborhoods, placing them near curbside lawn decorations, cars, furniture, etc., is God still going to mark me down for another uh-oh in his big old big of "Things Nathan is Going to Hell for Until he Finally Accepts Jesus in his Heart"?

One morning as I was lying in bed, I was sure I could actually feel the crazy dripping back in, one modicum at a time... but of course that's crazy in itself, so forget I said anything. Anyway, we're well on our way to our crazy cup being half-full (or half-empty... or, if suddenly you poured the cup in one half the size, it would be spilling over again, but I don't really understand what that metaphor is about, so nevermind). I'm not sure of any long term effects yet, besides the fact I've resumed thinking about death a lot. Not suicide, note. Death. Like, I'll cringe every time I am driving through an intersection, imagining two cars smashing into me at the same time, maroon-tinted steel grinding and twisted and forcing itself through my fragile little organs, leaving me choking out my last few breaths, trying to get down my last words, but fuck of course I don't have a pencil on me, not then. Other than that, nothing much, though.

Tuesday night, I think, Spritz and I were on the couch, having both successfully evaded our phone girlfriends for the rest of the night, and were watching the History Channel all restless. They were doing a special on how awesome bunkers were, and I started once again thinking about death (Hey, it was my first day back in the game - I had much to catch up). Clearly, we were all going to die, and if we were sent off to some war it might be pretty fast because who knows who many fuckers went out that way, but there are always accidents and cancer to deal with, and besides, the sun will eventually get too big for its britches in a few million years, expand, and absorb all of the earth. Ha! So much for all the shit we did thus far. Even the famous ones won't be famous when they are a blob of sun chunks, so should I even bother making a mark? blah blah blah etc. So anyway, I started constructing a to-do list, such as "Kiss a girl with braces" (which only gets more disturbing with each passing minute), and finally I was like, "Spritz, we have to do something tonight!" So we started discussing potential plans and made a few calls, but mostly we learned that ordering a topless massage to our home (just to talk to her and learn about her sad, sad life) was way too expensive, so we decided to head out into the night instead. Between the two of us, we clearly could get the same result for far less than 90 bucks (in my mind, anyway). So, hungry for sex or destruction or something, we hit the logical choice: Dank's apartment. Which was not easy to find, by the way. So we were there for a while, and they mostly talked about games, and it was a little awkward in my mind at least, and then we went out in search of the same. This took us to Meijer and that in turn took us to their little armory. It would appear Spritz has membership in the "I took a 4 hour class and can now legally buy all sorts of firearms and explosives" club, so we start hassling store clerks at like one in the morning to haul us out some damn muzzle powder, God damn it. And of course they sell muzzle powder (the backwoods cousin of real gun powder) because those Revolutionary War soldiers will be back some day, and then they are going to need those muskets fully loaded. Those ones with the big trumpet ends, huh? So we went halfsies on that and then came back and in our usual pattern of escalating triumphs, we timidly learned of the properties of this substance. We tossed matches at little piles of it from like three feet away, eventually learning that it would make a small flash and a ridiculously large amount of smoke. From there, we decided that the best results would arise from putting some amount of pressure on the mini-explosions, controlling them such that, you know, shit would happen. Here is a crude artist's recreation from one of our earliest attempts:

There is nothing like seeing a foot-long flame spew out of a beer bottle, sending poor Miller Lite rocketing forward a bit, followed by a somewhat terrifying explosion.

And then Smacko entered the picture.

Our attempts henceforth focused on making some sort of primitve rocket launcher. Using the PVC pipe Spritz was allegedly going to build his desk out of once upon a time, we would set up an object insde, filled with a varying amount of powder and a trail leading a sort of safe distance away. The end of this trail was soaked in WD-40, as we learned that would delay the fuse long enough for whoever was lighting it to run off into the night. The first few attempts were moderately successful, including the strange incident wherein we broke physics and something inside the can ended up outside the can despite being much bigger than the hole we had left open. Anyway, we decided to kick things up a notch and do a big bottle with a proportional increase in powder. While it made an impressive flame at first, the bottle exploded early on, as did the section of PVC pipe it was sitting in, sending plastic shards flying high speed directly into my shoulder and making a terrifying, house-shaking boom. Everyone else took off, leaving me to deal with our curious neighbors. "What the hell was that?" "I dunno, man," he says, rubbing his shoulder. "I heard this loud noise and felt the ground shake and came out to see what it was." He says as he waves the smoke away. We've learned a bit more balance since there and are actually getting pretty close to a reusable Rocket Bottle. God bless you, science.

Incidentally, all you legal experts out there, what exactly does the Second Amendment say about rocket-propelled bottles of destruction? Do we need a permit, or are we mere steps away from Irish militants? Sincerely, Nathan Walsh.

We have been out of toilet paper for some time now, so I have taken to using this trial pack of Anti-viral Kleenex I got in the mail. At least we know my ass is chlamydia free!

Probably.