when i was being put together my ears came from a plywood box marked REFURBISHED. this would usually be cool had the worker responsible for testing my previously opened ears not been both hung-over and suffering from ADD. resultantly, i on occasion have funky things go on in my aural cavities. as for what kinds of things, i'm talking of things that would send most falling back from their bathroom sink in abject disgust and horror. but for someone accustomed to the host of things that have fallen, poured or been otherwise extracted from my ears, i view it as another day moments before leaving for the office.

last monday was one such day. a jet white q-tip went in and a sludgy black cudgel came out. studying it momentarily i took stock of how i felt, how my ear felt. all felt well so i moved on. by thursday my ear had swollen shut. if you've never seen an ear swollen shut, ask marty who sought proof of my ailment before letting me spend the night on the couch. if you've never experienced how an ear this swollen feels, ask ligaya who reports it to be worse than labor (and she experienced that twice).

off to the doctor i went. he, like many before him, quickly grabbed a pad wrote a name and address on it and said 'go here'. off to the ear-nose and throat guy i went. you haven't lived until you've seen the host of cool gadgets these fellas have. if these gurus would open weekend spas where they cleaned out your ears and other crannies with their cool-ass mini-vaccums and micro-water-picks i'd be the first in line.

the first such ENT guy i went to was so nice. he asked about the problems i've had with my ears and sat through my numerous accounts, jotting notes here and there. he said things like "well, let's take a look", "yeah, i think we can get that cleaned up for you" and even stuff like "now you let us know if that gives you anymore problems" not to mention "hello", "goodbye" and "have a nice day". below recounts what the guy i saw today said to me:

what ear is it?
you're going to feel some discomfort here.
hold still.
now you're going to have to hold still.
i'm changing your prescription.

those aren't the highlights. that's it! this guy makes endo look like dick van dyke in the music man. what a fricken neanderthal! and, sadly, his technique was about as honed as his gift for gab (thank god he wasn't my first). now to the troll's credit, he straightened my ear out. the fact that i was floppin' in the chair like nemo in the sink should not be overlooked though.

and just so all of your private ridicule isn't spent on me today, bookguy cleans his navel with a q-tip.

the people who knew me before i was an old man with two children have witnessed a transformation in me. some think it's good. others find it annoying. i know i'm different, this i can admit. although, i don't know that i'd liken it to the full lobotomy bookguy swears i underwent. for instance, i asked a woman at the park the age of her baby and she replied 'oh, he's 16 and a half weeks old'.

i have a piece of advice for her. no one gives a shit. the correct answer was four months, my child is four months old. celebrate the half week anniversaries of your ilk in the privacy of your own boring-ass home, especially when it's four days beyond four months.

there bookguy, i told you it was only a partial lobotomy.

in case you missed it on the front page, this is new today.

my friend, who i'll call bookguy, compared opening his newly purchased ipod to undressing a beautiful young woman. if we respect this assessment, it is safe to say that unwrapping the 17 inch powerbook could be likened to undressing 100 women who are all jennifer love hewitt.

i think i'm going to need a moment. you'll please excuse me.

i plucked my eyebrows for the first time ever last thursday, the day before the taos ski bonanza. it began after i spotted a single rogue hair a bit above the rest. so i found marty's tweezers, leaned in close and yanked it. do you realize how much chaos you can see on your face when you lean in two inches from a well lit mirror. i didn't either. so twenty minutes later i'm done with the razing. nothing extreme. just addressing 34 years of unfettered growth.

when i was finished it occurred to me that i was seeing bookguy the next day. now he didn't cross my mind during the maintenance but primping and preening to such dire levels before meeting an old friend makes one take pause.

admittedly, there's something you got to know about bookguy. he's a little on the observant and opinion-friendly side. i mean until he started shaving his head he had this thin fang of hair charging over the top of his scalp. i called it hair's last stand. since eliminating that he's been a little harder to ding physically and he seems to harbor a keen memory for this distant poke at his fading coif.

in regard to my ablutions, he didn't say anything one way or another. and, i don't want to say i'm hurt, but it would have been nice for him to have noticed. that's all.

on a side thought, if i ever started a band i'd name it Marty's Tweezers. additionally i'd make certain we'd open for buddy james' band Amy's Flank Steak. a certain one-two punch for all ages.

the market may be down but marriage is booming. three of my finest friends have either gotten married or engaged this year. as you can imagine, with them being friends of mine and all, this is quite the thing.

as mentioned previously, doctor stevie, is to wed the marty-troy girl. while most would think this couldn't be beaten given her likeness to walt and i, you would be right.

then bookguy tied the knot in a hippie free love kind of ceremony in his backyard. don't believe me? e-love and i both wore shorts to the affair. granted we were the only ones not wearing dry-cleaned garments, but neither of us were willing to turn down an opportunity to wear our bermudas and daisy dukes to a wedding. i'll let you guess who wore which.

and now michaelcosm joins the ranks of the soon-to-be betrothed. when chavez reminded him that this means christine is the only girl he will ever know in that way again, michael reminded him that christine is the only girl who ever expressed an interest in knowing him at all. so in the end, i guess everyone's happy.

i wish them all great humor and hope that they don't wake sweating and screaming in the night at the realization of what a terrible and irreversible mistake they made years ago. oh, i don't mean i do that. i was thinking/talking about someone else. actually, i was speaking hypothetically. marty and i are very happy. marty is very supportive. and nice. she's pretty too.

can you tell she's standing behind me right now?

for those who asked about girl fighting park (circa yesterday's post). first, you should keep your freakish desires a little closer to your chest. second, i could explain, but i'm certain your depraved imagination can do better than my truth. so let those gelatinous cerebellums dance away divining whatever you wish to divine from a place known as girl fighting park.

if you wandered into the what i'm hearing section, you may have noticed it has a new look. in spending the last few days hacking on that, i devoted many cycles on listening to music, thinking about music, organizing my music and even laying hands on some new music. in fact, this month's offering comes from bookguy. now this unemployed bloke jet sets all over the planet and the one dirge he returns with has a total of nine unique words in it, and they're not even in english. sheesh. and, of what little spanish i know, these scant words don't even seem right. i asked bookguy about this and he replied: what can i say, bookguy's smart. bookguy also doesn't question native speakers on matters of their own tongue. like i said, smart. once satisfied with its grammatical correctness i listened to this nine-word, four-minute song on repeat for one hour. i'm smart too.

well, anyway, back to these random thoughts on music. one thing i recalled dealt with how my mother never knocked before coming into my room. any women reading this, please just accept that you should not walk straight into teenage boys rooms without some sort of fanfare or ceremony announcing the visit. you'll will hear things going on behind the door before it opens. this is good. you want this to be happening. ultimately i'm just trying to save you the embarrassment my mother suffered when she burst into my room and found me standing in front of a full length mirror singing and dancing to the Grease soundtrack. i was all over every move from the Greased Lightning bit, using my bed as the car. regrettably, i had the music up so loud i didn't hear her enter and continued the mini-production until her laughter overwhelmed my Optimus speaker 'system'. and, yes i had the whole arm pointing and hip bucking thing all worked out too. i don't play when i'm getting my greased lightning going.

amazingly given this trauma, somehow, years later, i was able to overcome the shame of my mother's invasion enough to ask a girl to move around funny with me on the dance floor at a junior high, all-stag affair. jenna something conceded (astoundingly) and we weaved our way through the crowd to the beginnings of hipsway's honeythief. we settled on a spot and marked it as ours by stopping, facing one another and then moving about in a seizing manner. my mother wasn't around so my body was quick to do what it does. falling into the zone, i drifted somewhere else, my head rolling back looking upwards at the tile ceiling and the random streamers coming down as my body fought an invisible enemy. i was really starting to let go, opening it up some might say, but who couldn't, this is hipsway we're talking about. but again, regrettably, my introduction to dance with other humans was cut short when my thrusting hand accidentally struck my partner in the ribcage leaving her slightly bent, holding her side and breathing irregularly. as people stopped to look and a smallish circle formed i could tell that some people may have been embarrassed by this development but those people would not have spent a moment of their life standing in their underwear, soaked with sweat, a musical playing behind them and shouting at their mother to stop laughing, get out of their room and to try knocking next time.

we've all heard about them. the more scholarly may have even read about them. but a scant number of us have actually experienced the fabled and legendary no-wiper. but a few, a golden few of us have seen the light and been taught the ways of the consistent and regular sans-wiper, which is technically a una-wiper but the first one is obligatory, even if unnecessary.

as bookguy's padowan, he one day took me by the hand, sat me down and bestowed on me the secret to his quiet success. it is in Kellogg's original and all-bran cereal, the all-bran muffins specifically he said in a serious voice. why the muffins you may ask, as did i. bookguy explained the benefits of the muffins portability as well as the proper portioning. he went on to reveal how this minor change to his dietary routine has earned him hours of productive time and has freed him of the laborious task of righting his plumbing and/or providing lengthy explanations to the owners of borrowed plumbing.

so now you may go and also make your business a quick business. and as to whether or not i will be posting the recipe in the what i'm eating section of d.com, what do you think this is, a proctology service. i suggest reading the box as i did, but don't plan on doing it from where you may want to because you will not have time given this newfound philosophy which some liken to religion. you'll have to do your reading from the comfortable confines of ,say, your study or bedroom.

and, if you do not know what i'm talking about, you're beyond my abilities to heal. i can only take you so far. the rest of the journey is yours to make, this journey especially.

while i'm going to respect his request for anonymity at this time, buddy james recently found a home on the web doing that whole bloggy thing. on a recent update he was kind enough to recognize your humble host. i'm sure glad michael's name was also in this short list else it would read: influenced by troy and a litany of girl weblogs.



while i personally do not take issue of the noted company in any negative vein and while i'm fine with the amount of grunting and scratching i do, buddy's choice of wording would not serve me well among some of my more testosterone ridden mates. case in point, the other day bookguy and i were going to play tennis and he was displeased with the amount of doddering (his word) i was doing before getting out the door. when i, finally, slid into the seat next to him he looked at me and said: i'd love to know who messed up on the human assembly line and gave you a penis.

what can i write ... reliable help is hard to find.

for Thin When Tan Girl and any other people doubting last friday's itinerary, it was the real deal.

except the 11:00 am item should read 11:09 am because bookguy was off eating a bagel somewhere neglecting the pickup we had agreed to. he could of and should have been on time but he was struggling with his guilt for spending all of his money feeding himself and consequently not hooking his driving compatriot up in any way. fortunately i had some peanuts left from the plane ride i could suck on, to make them last, during the trip as to not go into a low blood sugar state.

so someone told me they did not think yesterday's menu confession was all that crazed, thus negating at least their opinion that i'm bent. given this surprising development, i'm compelled to throw another log on the fire in pursuit of my seemingly simplistic goal.

bookguy is driving from cleveland to st louis today to visit. this morning, while he packs at his home, i will be boarding a plane in saint louis, en route to cleveland. at 10:42 my plane lands. at 11:00 i will climb into bookguy's waiting truck where we will pull onto the highway and begin the 9-hour driving trek to st louis. i've yet to share this plan without the listener looking at me with a wondrous stupor in their eyes, their expression unmistakable. my adoring wife even added an eyeroll for good measure.

now that i possess your attention, please realize that 10, 20 even 30 years from now i will still fondly remember the day i flew to cleveland only to climb into a oversized truck and drive right back to saint louis with my good friend bookguy. should someone ask you a year from now to recall what you did on friday, june 07, 2002, you will most likely not remember this same day with a like vividness, assuming of course you do not have a similar itinerary which i can assure you, you do not.

now don't worry about me, it's not like i'll get sleepy while driving because in this respect bookguy and i are like an old married couple, where i'm not allowed behind the wheel. it's simply understood that bookguy drives and i sit by his side entertaining him all the while. early in our relationship, we used to sit closer, close enough for him to put his arm around me. when i asked him why we don't do that anymore, he replied "i'm still sitting in the same place, you're the one way over there."

perhaps there's good reason he's in the captain's chair and i'm holding the soda.

bookguy
(and no one thought you would really do it. enjoy your faux retirement brother.)

and, oh yeah, happy birthday B.

Bookguy is not Bookpimp, as Sir Chavez thought. and Buddy James is not Man Who Screams Like Woman, which no one has yet thought. but Walt is Mart and Mart is Walt and Walt and Mart, who are the same person, are both female so when i talk about Walt or Mart or even Marty i'm not referring to my gay lover Walt but instead my wonderfully striking wife, Marty and i fully understand if you need to meet Walt as Mart before taking my word on this as Bookguy did because until Bookguy met Walt, the woman, he was torn on my sexual direction, which is left. left for debate that is, given that i'm always talking about this Walt character which i reference almost as much as Bookpimp and significantly more than the misdirected Bookguy but far less than Chavez or Man Who Screams Like Woman or even Martha who is Marty who is Mart who is Walt but Walt is not Bookguy nor Bookpimp as Bookguy is not Bookpimp and vice versa.

Please blame chavez for this, not me, assuming you know who "me" is.

Matthew Feldt
(Matthew is credited for many quotes which are not his own. Here Im glad to offer one he can actually claim.)

i'm the guy you see wet and naked on the back porch returning the wayward spider or cockroach to its native habitat fresh out of the shower. the 'get the shoe' and 'hurry kill it' people will never cease to amaze me. if you take an ounce of time to study one of our smaller neighbors i cannot imagine that this mini-genocide would occur on the same scale. and for those about to mount the 'but, they'...