Things and Stuff

Been on a bit of a hiatus. You know how bath salts are. One day you're winning second place in a unicycle race benefiting the Armless Children of America Foundation, the next you're waking up in a pile of small bloody arms and realize that you're the one who's been taking the arms. 


I had a really frustrating dream that I had a Walgreens gift card and I needed to buy a bottle of wine but the lady wouldn't accept it. Well it wasn't that she wouldn't accept it, it was something else. It's hard to explain. It was like she was being all weird about the gift card and I don't know. It's sort of a you had to be there situation.  I just woke up so...

What else? We had a barbeque the other day. In January! Thanks global warming. 


Speaking of the earth's demise, I've started a twitter. Follow me @Caitification. 


Do you know why I've decided to blog today? It's because this is the first day of school for me. I'm earning my masters online. So immediately when I got onto the internet I went to blogger instead of blackboard. For the first time in 5 months. 


What this means for you, you lucky duck, is that I'll be posting more now that I have something to put off.









 

Environs.

Weber's Front Row Grill.
All You Can Eat Chicken Wings for $5

Have you ever been to an all you can eat wing night? It's like going to a strip club. The lights are dim, men are huddled in dionysian absorption. No one makes eye-contact. The servers are robotic in their movements and affect. They have been over-exposed to the ultimate baseness of human nature.

The air is moist from the hot, breathless chewing of a hundred mouths.

Don't go in the back room. It's like walking in on a hoard of rats feasting on a baby. It smells of greasy flesh and sweat. The back room is for serious patrons only.

*****************************************************************************

After finding a place to sit, my friends and I began our digestive journey after our waitress (who was surprisingly adept at operating a fork lift) dumps a steaming mass of hot-sauced chicken parts on our table. Our pupils dilate in the first thrill of glut.

Five or forty minutes later (space-time has been rendered meaningless at this point) we awake from a shared blackout. What's left of the wings is tangle of chicken bones. The terrifying gleam in our eyes coupled with the piles of skeletal remains frighten guests that have just walked through the door.

But they can't turn back now.

The waitress tells us that the kitchen is backed up and we might have to wait for our next batch of wings.

We stared like zombies at her.

"It'll be just a few minutes," she said.

My friends and I stared at our empty plates.

"Wings gone," I said.

"No like," they said.

"No like at all."

The waitress walked by. We looked at her hopefully, "More wings?"
 We held up our plates, expecting them to be filled with delicious carcass. The waitress sprayed us with mace and ran toward the kitchen.

We eyed those who surrounded us, cramming their maws with juicy, juicy chicken.

"What animals," we said.

Finally our waitress came back and cracked the door to our cage. She hid behind it and tossed handful of wings in. I ran toward her to the giant bowl of chicken she had resting on her hip but she cracked me with a whip and I stumbled back. She tossed the rest of the wings in and before long, we had blacked out again.

"Would you like more wings?" She asked us, poking us with a stick between the bars of our cage, after we had came to.

Our bellies distended and aching on pounds of flesh, our tongues burning from gallons of hot sauce, "Yes," We said. "We want MOAR."

Booze and Religion Don’t Mix OR The Float Trip From Hell ( Hell can be used in a literal or figurative sense, depending on your own very special and personal views of the afterlife)

Sorry I haven’t updated this thing in a while. I know you’ve probably been sitting at your computer for the last two months refreshing my page every few seconds, living on the dust in between the computer keys, but your time has come, so straighten up, wipe that drool off that dirty mug of yours and get ready to have your mind blown read my thing.

You might be wondering what I’ve been doing lately. Two words: bath salts. Spent about a month in Reno with a man named Jesus. Not Jesús, mind you, Jesus. He claimed to be my spirit guide, wore women’s jewelry and drank Boone’s Farm constantly. We spent the nights getting high and picking fights. During the day we slept in his mother’s van and hunted for scrap metal in the junkyards. After Jesus got arrested for loitering, I hitched back to St. Louis with a nice lady named Chan- juan. She bought me a Pepsi and a properly fitting bra. My boyfriend didn’t seem to notice my absence. When I walked through the front door, he was playing Xbox in the same clothes I left him in. Without glancing up at me he asked me to pass the ashtray, and my life has continued on as normal.

But what this post is really about is this float trip I went on. One day in late May, when I was young and naïve, I decided that I wanted to be a part of nature and to enjoy the company of good friends. When I look back on that stupid idealistic dribble, I want to punch myself in the thigh. This is hard for me to talk about, but it’s a lesson everyone should learn: your friends are just enemies in disguise and nature is a cold-hearted bitch.
The float trip was June 17th. I remember it like it was yesterday.

It started out fine. We drove about 3 hours south, listening to campy country music and singing along. Yay! We were gonna have fun!! We were happier than CGI penguins.

There were closer places to float and camp but I picked this one because it was the cheapest. Trying to find a place to set up camp was hard. The campgrounds were swimming with bare-chested teenage drunks and flattened Miller Lite cans. The sounds of Aerosmith and Lynyrd Skynyrd wafted throughout the area like a long, loose fart. We got the car stuck in a stream but luckily some fellow campers helped us push it out.
We set up the tents with relative ease and drank 7 & 7s, as the friends with the beer hadn’t arrived yet. The guys wandered into the woods with an axe to get firewood. One of the fellows- I’ll call him Blondie (Full name Blondiforous Buttersfield III) refused bug spray, mistakenly believing the sheer amount of throbbing testosterone in his sweat would be more than enough to ward off any woodland insects.

When he reemerged from a copse of trees and bushes, he was wearing a sad face and a fine suit of ticks. This is not the bad part (for us anyway). We relaxed in our lawnchairs and said, “Oh Blondie!” while he disappeared into a tent with a pair of tweezers.

The next day was the float trip. We waited in line under the hot Missouri sun in an ocean of fleshy artwork—it was Comicon for bad back tattoos. We finally got our rafts, two of them; there were 7 of us all together.
It was a redneck mardi gras on the water- boobs and beads flying everywhere, waterguns filled with 151, classic rock blasting from old radios, the music growing and fading as we passed various rafts. Fat ladies in innertubes. Canoes tipping over. It was all right after a few beers, a kind of loose rhythm you could slip into, a drunken rhythm. We had fun the first half.

Here was the thing, if you finished the first seven miles by 2pm, you get another 7 for free. We were determined to take on that challenge.

And we did, successfully.

I forgot to mention that the only food we’d brought with us was a smushed bag of powdered donuts and some sort of meat substance- ham, salami? I don’t know. Also we’d forgotten the sunblock. We did have, however between 2 and 4 cases of Busch Light.

The second half marked the beginning of our demise. Somehow, someway, the topic of religion came up. I think I may be to blame for this, but I’m not sure. The whole thing is hazy. Someone threw a cigarette butt in the water and I fished it out drunkenly, saying it was a sin to litter. Then I think someone said, I thought you don’t believe I sins? And then I said something like, I don’t believe in [insert insult about organized religion] but I believe [insert self-righteous secular stance of morality].

More things were said. More beer was drunk. More brain cells died and mutated from the sun and the beer.
Someone said, “Jesus is a myth perpetuated by brain washed masses..” Someone told another someone they would pray for his soul. Screams were screamed. Yells were yelled. Beers were consumed.

I think someone said, “I believe Jesus is a prophet, nothing more.”
I think someone said, “I don’t think Jesus even existed.”
I think someone said, "Jesus is the son of God and He died for our sins."
I think someone said, “Jesus is nature. Jesus is Buddha.”
I think someone said, “Jesus is the guy I did bath salts with in Reno.”
I think someone said, “Religion is for people who can’t think for themselves.”
I think someone said, “God makes me feel bad when I touch myself.”
I think someone said, “I hate Jesus.”
I think everyone said, “Why are you judging me for what I believe?”
I think someone said, “Why the fuck am I friends with you?”
I think someone said, “Come on. Let’s get off this boat.”

I think some people left and marched onto a bank, behind some rocks. I think someone tried to get them to come back. I think someone was called an asshole. I think someone almost got slapped.
I think it was a bad idea.

That night, two of the friends left. The remaining five sat around like zombies, eating smores and hamburgers. We went to bed early. In the middle of the night, it started to thunder. Then it started to rain. Then pour. The walls of the tent rippled in the wind. Flashes of lightning illuminated the world for half-seconds at a time. The pillows were getting wet. The thunder clapped louder.

We made a mad dash to the car leaving everything outside to get drenched. The next day we woke early and heaved soaking wet blankets into trunk. The tents were full of moths. Clothes were scattered everywhere.

The ride home was sad.

But for those first few glorious hours, the float trip was everything I’d hoped for and more.

Happily we’ve all made up. It’s what Jesus would have wanted.

Why the Gym Makes Me Cry. Part 2

My friend asked me to go to a spinning class. Contrary to what you might believe, spinning class is not where you spin around in circles repeatedly until you throw up, which seems to me like  the most effective way to lose weight. Rather, it’s where you go to town on a stationary bike. And when I say go to town, I mean go to town.

Those spinning bikes are not like the regular exercise bikes. Fucking exercise bikes are chaise longues compared to spinning bikes. Spinning bikes are basically misshapen jungle gyms you have to straddle like a mechanical bull.

The worst part is the seat. It’s basically a shark tooth. There is no large flat surface area- which is universally agreed upon as the prerequisite for a seat. It’s a T-shaped hunk of hard plastic; there is no place for your butt cheeks to go so they flop to either side and what you’re left with is a penis shaped piece of plastic grating against your foul line. Which, actually does explain why spinning is so popular. Apparently I haven’t broken in my shoes, so to speak.

What my friend and I were discussing later, in serious tones as we skipped out of class early, was how men are able to do it. Where do the balls go? Where? Or the peen itself? My vag felt like I had just left a 3-day pap smear orgy by the time we were done. I don’t even want to know what it would be like if you had a penis. Ok, maybe for a day…

At certain points, the instructor asks you to stand up on your bike and you basically put your weight on the handlebars, which feel like sweaty dildos. When you stand up and pump your legs, the inevitable happens: your fine, soft butt meat slams against the point of the seat.

Imagine getting ass raped by a jackhammer. Or, that Woody Woodpecker lives in your pants and your butthole is made of wood.

By the way, the instructor is a fine Italian leather handbag with amazing legs and fake boobs. Her job is to spin like a fucking badass while blasting rap songs from the early 2000’s and yelling things through her microphone that you can’t hear over the music. 

*Note. This is an artistic interpretation. The instructor did not have four fingers on one hand and seven on the other. Drawing is not my strong suit.

Spin class was supposed to last for an hour. There were no clocks. We didn’t have our phones with us- even if we did, it would be impossible to check without falling off the bike. We exited the world of time. We were in an infinite dimension of spinning. I found myself silently praying to make it through. I admonished myself for being such a wimp and thought about how awful it must’ve been to live through the Holocaust. My fallback on comparison of human suffering is always the Holocaust. Whenever I experience pain or sadness, like a killer hangover or I missed 30 Rock, I say to myself, “Think of the Holocaust!” And I carry on. 

Alas my poor friend was only probably thinking about her husband’s reaction if he found out a spinning bike took her anal virginity before he did, and she looked at me with a face of a woman who was told to pick which of her children be sent to the gas chamber. She was in agony. 

I tried a half-assed fake smile as encouragement. For some reason, this didn’t work.

“Caaait,” she moaned. “We need…to…go.”

“Pick Elda,” I hissed. “She has that awful gas problem. She’s not meant for this world.”

I was dizzy and tired and mesmerized by the Cheeto with boobs. She was yelling things. We couldn’t leave. She was yelling!

“Caaait,” my friend whispered like people do in war movies when they’re dying. She was wilting like a Peep in the sun. 

“Ok,” I said, “We’ll leave.” We stumbled off the bikes and tried to sneak out, drawing as little attention to ourselves as possible.

That’s when the instructor said into her microphone, “Girls, can you please raise your seats before you go?”

Crap. We fumbled with the “seats” for about a minute, obviously clueless.

“If you can’t figure it out, don’t worry about it,” she said into the microphone.

Oh, God. Please stop saying things to us. We’re scared!

 We walk-ran out of there and caught our breath in the locker room. After that we went out for Gyros. They were awesome.

  

Nevermind

I've decided to keep the name as you can tell with my new banner. Hope you enjoy my mad Paint skills. Real post coming soon.

I'm changing my name

Any suggestions? Something that doesn't sound graphically sexual without meaning to be, perhaps? Naming things isn't my strong suit. My dog's named Marge for Chrissakes. It's time for a change.

Me Want Food!

Good news. Tooty’s transplant was successful! With my laptop restored, I can tell you my story without having to sit in a chair like a human, which is annoying and frankly a little hoity toity for my taste. I prefer to sink into my couch like a sloth on a benzo binge --perfect  for my indolent finger tapping.

Blah, blah, blah, transition.

On Tuesday, I went on a juice fast where I consumed nothing but fresh vegetable juice, vegetable broth, water, and tea. A lot people do it for days or even months!!! at a time. I however, as a rule, tend to be very weak- physically and emotionally. I’m pretty much constantly on the verge of tears and shitting my pants.  So I figured 24 hours would be good enough to flush out whatever toxins have set up shop in my fat cells. If there are some left afterward, fine. I want them there. I’ll personally hand out t-shirts to them that say “I Survived the Fast.”  

But anyway in the morn’ I used my juicer to turn carrots and celery into an umber sludge.  Sucked it down like a motherfuckin’ Dyson and lazed in front of the wonderbox to watch a comely little wood sprite play doctor. Little known fact about Dr. Oz:  On weekends he flies home on the back of a ladybug to a hollowed out stump in the bosom of the Turkish forests, where he lives with his life-partner, Temel, an overly- emotional, sometimes jealous, but really very giving cricket who wears a bowler hat and plays the mandolin. 

After Dr. Oz, I finished up the editing I needed to do without further injury to the computer. I was sort of sluggish and thinking a lot about food, but that’s me every day.

I took my dog for a walk, which was fine at first, but when I got home I felt like I had power-squatted around the block, instead milling around with my shih-poo. When I got home I flopped on the couch, sort of like a dying fish, except one that’s given up. One that knows deep in its gills that life is ultimately meaningless, especially for a fish whose lot in life is to be processed and reformed, along with its brothers and sisters, into a perfectly square Filet O’ Fish patty. Where’s the Fishenstein family reunion this year? In my belly! Haha!  

Ok so I flopped on the couch like I was about to be made into crispy golden fish-toast.  I then closed my eyes and well, I don’t want to call it napped. It was more straddled the line between life and death. I mean dumpster babies get better naps. Let me explain, babies are notoriously bad at staying asleep. It would be like times a thousand if said baby was in a dumpster.

No. I’m not being dramatic. Seriously, withdrawing from delicious processed food (eg Toaster Strudels) is nearly as bad as withdrawing from heroin. Side note: I don’t know what eg stands for but I’m pretty sure I always use it correctly. Points for me!

I had so many aches and pains, I felt like I was a used Toaster Strudel icing packet. Get it? You have to squeeze the shit of those things. It would hurt. C’mon I know you know. 

So I was all achy plus I was starving. And I was sort of delirious and Oprah was on and she was shouting about Australia and so I decided to go to Whole Foods to buy veggies for vegetable broth. It turned out to be a mistake. I’d never been to Whole Foods but I shouldn’t have been surprised to find it full of yuppies staring at me with their slightly concave, overly white eyes that they have, whiffing past me with a self-satisfaction one can achieve only with producing shit that’s 100% organic, stiff anglo hands white-clenching their baskets, bird bones flush against sallow skin. Yeah I know I get angry when I’m hungry, but apparently also a little paranoid. I swear to Flax Seed that everyone was giving me frackin’ googoo eye. She’s not one of usssss. They were all whispering it like the healthy, judgmental snakes they are. 

Also. They had free samples.  Every where. Creamy goat cheese. Crunchy whole wheat crackers. I wanted to smash that shit like it was Rihanna’s face. Aw shit- little dated I know. I’m going to give Whole Foods another chance. I’m a lot more accepting towards humanity with some food my belly.

I was hungry and scared so I grabbed some vegetables and got out of there. I don’t exactly remember what I bought, but I wouldn’t be surprised if in reality I just went out into the alleyway and grabbed some old tires to throw in a pot. 

I let it simmer for an hour, falling asleep again for a bit. Anyway the broth was fantastic. Glorious even.  The best thing I’d tasted all year (besides toaster strudels). And so I was all sort of full of energy. I went to go pick up a friend and we watched movies and then that’s when it started. The coughing. Could not stop.

Awful bone-rattling tuburculer nonsense. Ridiculous. Phlegm everywhere.  And there was heinous pressure on my chest. It was incredibly difficult to breathe and when I did, it sounded like someone opening the screen door to an abandoned farmhouse.  

Good thing the movie we were watching was Stomp the Yard 2: Homecoming. I managed to get the gist of it over my body imploding upon itself. 

I’m pretty sure I got bronchitis. I could hardly breathe the next day and the coughing continued for a bit. The moral of the story is this: Don’t stop eating Toaster Strudels.  You might die.