Do You Do This To Yourself?

I tend to remember non-anglo names best because my mind likes to wrap around the pronunciation, automatically reaches for mnemonics.  Some years ago there was a football man on the seahawkers team, idk, some kind of billionaire’s human meat project in the Seattle area.  This football man’s last name was Houshmanzadeh.  My mind associated that with a quote from Schwarzenegger’s Kindergarten Cop: “Who’s your daddy and what does he do?” = “Housh-man-zadeh and what does he do?”

I’ll remember that randomly for the rest of my life, condemned by my brain’s compulsions to remember the name of a football man.  I don’t care about sportball, but nothing can save one from oneself.  I know I ain’t alone in this.  Do you have any useless phrases on call like this?

It ain’t all bad.  I can also remember names like Laellynasaura amicagraphica reasonably well… OK, I misspelled that one, but only a little.

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Juggalo Reprezentation

I feel I should come out of the closet on this, because visibility is important.  Now I don’t routinely bang Insane Clown Posse or Twiztid, but a juggalo once told me that I am a juggalo, and by his decree, so I am.  I, Bébé Mélange, am a juggalo.

If you are a juggalo and feel the need to talk about it with someone, let my comment section be a safe space for you.  Also, if you just want to ask a juggalo a question, you can put it to me.  Just be kind, you know, ask in good faith. Thank you…

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…ok, apologies to real jugheads; this was obviously a bit facetious.  no offense intended, do consider me an ally at least?  i’ll pour a faygo out for you in contrition.  i really was granted juggalo status by one of that tribe, but it’s more of an honorary title.  rezpekt.

There’s not much to that story.  I went to a diploma mill type commercial art school, which lured in radical bros by saying “you could make animays or vidya games.”  This wasn’t me; I was lured by lies about how much money I could make with the job skills.  But this juggalo, he was a radical son of a bitch, as they say.  He had a ball bearing necklace and his life drawings looked like lofi dragon ballz.

We rode the same bus south from Seattle into poor people lands, where he was the kind of guy to drop acid and shoot fireballs in his back yard, and I was the kind of binch to work in fast food and come up with house rules for ttrpgs I’d never get to use.  One night he told me that I met his criteria for being considered a juggalo.  Fantastic.  I’ll accept that.

I hope he’s having a juggalish good time out there somewhere, perhaps with a juggalette and two point five juggajuniors.  He was a handsome lad, but life has many traps.

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Sidebar Shorter?

The “Recent Posts on FtB” part of the sidebar randomly became much shorter within the last 24 hours, not sure when.  This means people fall off of it faster, and you know my ambition is to always be in the sidebar, so…  Gotdam placeholder post.  Wassap yo?  Myself, had anniversary recently, and an effort to make up for lackluster cake first time around led to a second attempt.  Still not up to the maestro’s prefs, but quite indulgent, an you know I’m not shy about doin’ some of that too…

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Ware the Witches

Ever since horst wessel that tiny-faced nazi shiteater got it in the neck, and it was discovered he had been hexed by witches, the witch brand has been blowing up.  Smash-cut to my spam filter, and its newest denizens…

Dr. Excellent?  Maybe I should have blacked that out too.  It’s a good brand name.  Whatever.  If you want to put a spell on somebody you can probably find him on failbook or etsy.  He’s specialized in making people love against their will -and using people’s stolen email accounts to spam random blogs- which are both fairly evil, so surely murder spells are no biggy for him.

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Be Still and Know

I was in the parking lot of home despot, when I saw this sign at a distance.  Initially I thought it said, “I AM GOD.”  Strange place for fundie horseshit, I mused, until the actual product was revealed: “FARM FRESH SOD,” where the words farm and fresh were de-emphasized.

I had been primed to see these words by this ornament dangling from the rearview mirror of my ride’s coach:

Sit still and know that if you misbehave, jesus will fuck you up.  Bes’ believe.

I like to mix the ideas.  KNOW THAT I AM SOD, THE FARM FRESH GOD, like a parody of this jam:

If you haven’t thought of that song since your homeboy in college DL’d a midi of it in 1989, you’re welcome.

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hewwo? is it me you’we wooking fow?

this is an extraneous post of foolery, look at the post before this for regularly scheduled content.

mighty quiet on ftb this morning, felt like somebody should make some kind of noise.  itsa me like mario.

call it an open thread for anybody who didn’t get their daily fix of bargling in to bargle upon.  it’s speak or get spake unto, on this bitch of an earth.

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Sips from the Iggy Bucket

I used to hang out at a home boy’s house a lot when I was growing up.  They always had plenty of generic soda which I could mooch, and occasionally some manner of snack food as well.  He lived in the attic, which ran the full length of the little house and had small windows at each end.  The most central area was the room, such as that was, and there were side storage bits walled off with sheetrock.  Was it painted?  I don’t remember that detail.

What I do remember is that the place was fucked up as all hell.  Some kids can’t maintain a clean room.  Some take that to another level.  I remember one time when we were running a brazier of dubious contents crafted from an old pop can, it got bumped and poured burning wax on a crumpled pair of pants that were tangled with a disused phone cord and other debris.  Before taking the time to extinguish the fire, he had to point and exclaim “liar,” in reference to the old rhyme about “pants on fire, hanging from a telephone wire.”

The important takeaway here is that this was the kind of room where dirty laundry was twisted up with garbage.  There was a broken rotary fan on the floor and one of my friend’s friends who had ADHD nearly as bad as he did put a dirty sock on the blades, and poured an old pop onto the sock so it sprayed around the room like a sprinkler.  The garbage was feet high and ran the whole length of the house.

My homeboy (of my old friends this is the one I usually refer to as ‘My Tech Support Guy’) never finished his pop, which is weird to me, because until I hung out with him I hardly ever got sweet drinks, so I’d drain them to the last drop.  This dude had cans everywhere with the bottom sixth or so still juicy.  Over time, the sugar inside would turn into syrup or crystallize into grains inside the cans.  We referred to this as “iggy pop,” after the famous musician.  I expect it was his coinage, not my own.

At length, I resolved to help him clean the entire room.  As we worked, we poured those cans of iggy pop into a bucket, so we could crush them for recycling without splooging creepiness all over our hands.  (that was for other occasions hey-o!  uh, nvm.)  This bucket then was known as the Iggy Bucket.  I don’t recall how much igg was in there by the time we poured it out, nor if we had to empty it to add more at some point.

The title is misleading.  I never did sip from the iggy bucket, even on a dare, and I doubt anybody ever did.  However, observe the scene…

I’m on my Tech Support Guy’s bed, he’s sitting just over the foot of it in an office chair, playing video games on his PC.  We were in these positions often, I the fly on the wall observing gaming history but not participating in it, except as a commenter.  To my left was the table, mounded with garbage and cans of iggy pop.  Also perched at the edge of the table, a nice cold generic root beer for me to consume.

I reached for the table, I grabbed a can, not noticing the external temperature was warm, the surface lacking in condensation.  I sipped grainy old root beer.  I commented, this is bad.  I was mocked appropriately.  Do not drink the iggy pop.

I made the same mistake a few minutes later.  The grainy warm pop was no better the second time.

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Death to Squirrels: Shadow of the Colossus Edition

We’re not squirrel haters in this household, but perhaps we should be.  We have an outdoor storage closet in need of renovation, particularly something to make it so rodents can’t get in; it gets rodent feces.  Easily possible that’s nocturnal mice we’ve never seen, but we have seen squirrels around.  Furthermore, they’ve seen us…

My husband has been longing to grill for a long time, and we finally got the thing set up.  So we had occasion to be eating on our porch, which we usually are not.  A squirrel was digging in our neighbor’s garden a lot.  Didn’t look too destructive, more the endless burial and retrieval of nuts they are known for.  We had some walnuts on the porch and my husband went to give that squirrel one of them.

Bad sign.  The squirrel was brave enough to stay, instead of taking the nut and running.  It stood right by his feet, in effortless kicking range.  Somebody already made the mistake of teaching this thing humans are pushovers.  But my dude was charmed to see him doing his little squirrel things, and did it again.  This time, the squirrel put little hands on my husband’s black chuck taylors.  I thought to myself, that squirrel would think nothing of climbing him.

Back on the porch with our corn on the cob, the beast comes over.  My mother in law offered a bit of asparagus and some bits of corn, to which the beast turned up his nose.  It’s all about that nut, so he went to the source – climbing on my dude, as predicted.  He stood up and walked out into the yard so he could more easily desquirrel if necessary, but fortunately the rodent descended peacefully.

But he kept hanging out, knocking over garden gnomes and digging in violas and running up on people.  What in the hell.  At the peak of this chicanery, he climbed halfway up and back down my leg, and nipped my ankle with rodent incisors.  Not remotely hard enough to draw blood or cause pain, but seriously.  What in the hell.

We chased him off multiple times with sticks and brooms until he finally kept his distance.  Don’t give squirrel your nut.

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