Woman Finds Skinned Chipmunk Living In Her Couch

As the four regular readers of my blog know, I read CNN daily and often write here about it when I feel like it. Today I clicked on a story apparently about Bob Dylan's home being too smelly (what?) and it transferred me to KTLA.com which is, from what I can tell, where crazy news goes to die. It's full of stories that got caught between the fiction of The Weekly World News (RIP) and more respectable news outlets. Among the insane headlines I was met with when I visited KTLA:

• Martha Stewart's Dog Killed In Explosion
• Woman Hurt In Sex Mishap Involving Power Tool
• Chimp Plans, Executes Attack On Zoo Visitors
• Five Human Heads Found In Coolers
• SoCal Man's Body Mistakenly Delivered To Pet Store
• Woman Finds Hungry Cat Living In Her Sofa
• This photo gallery

I'm speechless.

As for my life, my dead squirrel may have been stolen, but after I sent my prayers for more corpses out into the universe Ham delivered by finding me a dead chipmunk. I was going to cut it open tonight but I just couldn't bring myself to do it when I was holding it in my hands and it's little eyes were staring straight into mine. I think I need Skippy there to hold my hand while I turn the little guy inside out. Either way, my skin fever is satisfied.
I thought I could keep the little guy in the Fels fridge for a couple of days without anybody noticing as long as I labeled the container this time. I left it in a Cheez-It box and then realized that people don't refrigerate Cheez-Its so I labeled it "Spinach and Lentils Pilaf - Do Not Touch" because I thought no one would want that. Then people got high and touched it and there was screaming and the chipmunk ended up in the microwave. Luckily I was there to save it. I miss my fridge.

Sitcom class is going well. We just wrote a scene for a never-going-to-happen Western sitcom which we ended up titling Full Jailhouse (my other suggestion: Fresh Prince of the Unincorporated Territories).

It sounds like my life is all skinning and classes, but I'm sure it be more than that. I'm trying to get used to being around people that I know all day long and having everybody know what I'm doing all the time. I'm also getting sick. Maybe that's a reason to miss Sue's class tomorrow. :-)
I've also been texting people a lot and it's led to me using emoticons more. :-(

Crushed Dreams and New Hopes

On the heels of discoveries about Abraham Lincoln's watch and Shakespeare's portrait, CNN reported today that one of the great mysteries of the twentieth century has now been solved. In typically dry fashion, buried far under a story entitled "Hot dogs lead cops to burglary suspects," is an article saying that DNA testing has definitively proved that princess Anastasia Romanov died at the hands of the Bolsheviks. All I could think about was the children of the future who will watch Disney's Anastasia with the knowledge that it's all a romantic falsehood; the princess is dead and there are no such things as talking bats.



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In personal news I just ran karaoke at the Student Center. Maggie got me find a pirated version of Photoshop, so now I can do everything I want.
I listened to Beck's Modern Guilt finally and decided it's ok. Everything else is going fine. I have a revised list of birthday gifts that I need but never got:

• A black knit hat to replace the one that was stolen from me when I went to see Coraline.
• A dead animal to replace the one that disappeared.
• More Secret Chiefs 3 albums.

Things I Learned From CNN Today

• Meghan McCain is kinda sorta awesome.
• Walter from The Big Lebowski was based on the writer of Apocalypse Now and Dirty Harry.
• Quoting films to other people in lieu of actually talking "stirs passion." Presumably because it makes you look like a twat.
• They found and authenticated an actual portrait of Shakespeare.
• Bad marriages are bad for your health. Ice is cold. The ocean is deep. Snow is white.
  
• Barbie is based on a German gag-doll of a gypsy prostitute named Bild Lilli. Also there is a life-sized Malibu dream home that features, among other insane things, a chandelier made out of Barbie's hair.

• There's such a thing as a "green" bullet.
• The article "Some banks should be allowed to fail, say two top Republicans" looks like a parody because Sen. Ron Shelby cuts a figure that makes me imagine his inner life to resemble that of Montgomery Burns:

• When Republicans are talking about stem cell research it is of dire importance. When a Democrat is talking about it, it's a distraction. Also, Republicans fear that soon we will be "embryo-harvesting." Wait, is that a distraction or something to get hysterical about?

ALSO:

If you missed The Daily Show last Wednesday night it was a really fucking great episode. Ch-ch-check it out.

ALSO:

Maybe I got out of Northern Ireland at the right time.

How Do You Wear Oregon?

The other day Skippy showed me how to skin a squirrel.
On my birthday the heavens gave me a beautiful dead squirrel just laying out in front of commons to satisfy my desire to make taxidermy. My fridge broke down and I decided nobody would mind if it was in the Fels fridge (based on the assumption that nobody would look inside the lumpy garbage bag without a note on the vegetable crisper). Unfortunately some hungry souls did go poking around and weren't happy about it. Then it lived outside in a labeled box until either:

• An angry Felsian threw it out to spite my carelessness
• A maintenance or cleaning person threw it out
• A wild animal took it (unlikely, cuz it probably would've left the box and garbage bag)

Anyways, Skippy still showed me how to skin a squirrel by letting me work on his. It's a weird thing skinning an animal. It doesn't smell very bad but the smell it does have really gets into your nostrils. Skippy said it smelled like dog farts. It was really stomach acid.
The weirdest part is when you pull the squirrel's arms out of its arm-skin leaving it with a set of skinned, chicken-arms and a pair of furry arm-wings.

Soon, it will be taxidermied and then I'll feel ready to taxidermy my own squirrel without much direction. I don't know where I can find another dead animal, though; the last one dropped right into my lap.

Settling into classes and bullshit. Sitcom'll probably be fun. Projects is looking good. Etc. Don't know how I feel about Marguerite's class - it's a little intense.

Emily's bday party is tonight. I'm supposed to dress like my homestate, but I'm not sure how to dress like Oregon. I want to be a sad, beardy, guitar guy, but that's more attitude than appearance. Otherwise... how do you dress like Portland? I could be a Klan member, but unless you're from Portland that probably won't register as place-specific unless you grew up with historical pictures like this in the whitest city in the Pacific Northwest:



And only dickholes dress up like the Klan. Maybe I'll be Elliot Smith with a knife in my chest. Maybe only dickholes do that, too. Maybe I'll just be the spirit of seasonal depression.

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Yesterday Diggy came to visit for half a second. I remembered how much I like Diggy when she related some pearls from her Disney Channel lifestyle, the choicest being that her friend was behind the wheel of the car that killed Buddy, the Clinton family dog.

Quote Wikipedia:

Buddy, however, suffered the same fate as Clinton's previous dog, a cocker spaniel named Zeke, when he was killed by a car while running loose near the Clinton home in Chappaqua, New York, on January 2, 2002.

What it doesn't say there is that the friend was skipping school and she was afraid that if she stopped she'd get in trouble. Or that the Clintons lived by a highway. After the hoopla of Socks passing away this past week I was wondering how I never heard about this.
Oh the seedy underbelly of upstate New York. You could make a really benign series of noir comics about it.


R.I.P.

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It's really strange to me that people I don't even know or don't know very well read this blog. I always think reading other people's blogs feels voyeuristic in a way that makes me uncomfortable. Especially when nobody comments on it - it's like performing for an invisible audience. Sometimes somebody will sheepishly tell me that they've been reading it and I'm always shocked because writing a blog feels so self-indulgent it's hard for me to believe that somebody would have any interest in how my classes are going or reading about smelling squirrel stomach acid. What's weirder: that or the fact that I find most blogs so boring and wanky, including mine? I guess if you hang your dirty laundry on a public line you shouldn't wonder if anyone stops to look at it.

The Future is a Big Place

Hey fools,
Now that I'm back at Bennington it feels funny to write here because most of the people who read it already know what I'm doing daily as much as I do. It's like writing about being an amoeba for the amoebas you share a petri dish with.

What's new:
I had a birthday party. I'm now officially 22 and I feel younger than ever. I'm pretty sure I'll feel the same way once my body starts to fail. No wonder old people are prone to depression. Growing up you get used to a constant personal sea change as you grow - each year you feel pretty distinctly different than the year before. But, it seems, once you hit 21 you sort of just go "So this is it? What's left?" All the fun parts of growing old are behind me. It's depressing to be in the middle of the prime of my youth knowing that for the rest of my life I'll just be fighting fat and wrinkles. It makes me wish our culture revered age and wisdom as much as we do youth. Where's my cane? Youth is wasted on the young! I used to be like you kids! What's a tanned, taught body to experience and worldliness? I need a drink.

But my party was fun. It got to the point I had wanted but dared not hope for - there was no room to walk and you had to just stay where you were standing. That's the sign of a successful party in the Barnes houses. Third Street represent! My glorified closet was decked out pretty well, too. Nice wedding lights and a portrait of Jesus staring down. This was, of course, not just to look festive, but because the Bow's traditionally offer our bodies into spiritual wedlock with Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ on our 22nd birthdays in the hopes that we will be blessed with carrying the next Christ child. It didn't work for my mom so the burden's all on these here shoulders.
What the hell am I talking about? How's your side of the petri dish?

Annnnyways, the white russians flowed like water and the presents and tchotchkes ran to my open arms. Among them, $100 for amazon.com from my mom. I took the opportunity to buy some CDs I've been wanting like Self's amazing Gizmodgery (which I've had off SoulSeek for years now, but always wanted to make it legal, kind of like my love for Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ has now been formalized), TVOTR's Dear Science, Beck's latest (I'm hoping for OK and prepared for the worst after the terrible concert I saw last summer), Low's Drums and Guns, QOTSA's Lullabies to Paralyze (same deal as Gizmodgery - a fucking fantastic album), Coldplay's Prospekts March (because I've completely embraced my love of their blandness), Hatfield and the North's The Rotters Club and Susanna and the Magical Orchestra's List of Lights and Buoys.

Pretty good for $100, I think. I've been listening to Soundgarden's Down on the Upside a lot over the last couple of days. I got Superunknown when I was really young and it has engrained itself in me a long time ago - so much so that I can't really listen to it anymore because it's so familiar - but I didn't get Upside until college. Kind of like Alice in Chains, Soundgarden albums sort of sound heavily samey on first listen, I think, but after time the intricacies open themselves up. And really Kim Thayil is one of the greatest rock guitarists of all time, Ben Shepherd is amazing and Chris Cornell generated enough goodwill from Soungarden to make me forgive Audioslave - just because he can't sing a song without wailing for the rafters doesn't mean he can't wail with the best of them.

The B-side of Down on the Upside is a little spotty and, to me, never really rises above "pretty good," but the A-Side is outstanding, from "Pretty Noose" to "Never Named;" it's flawless as far as I'm concerned.

Blah blah blah. While I'm wanking about music, here's a couple of the songs that have me the most excited about my amazon purchase:

By the way...

Did anyone else see the response to Obama by Bobby Jindal and think it was incredibly silly in almost every way? I didn't know what to make of the fact that the GOP had suddenly started touting him as their future - "Hey, you guys like young, ethnic men? We got those!" I was ready to see some formidable opposition from the Grand Old Party, but, man does this guy seem like a clown. Am I wrong?

Click here to watch it


"I actually suck!"

Back to School Like Rodney Dangerfield

Prof. Whitehead may not want me here, but I'm back at Bennington to stay. All I have to do in order to graduate is pass one exam. With the help of zombie Kurt Vonnegut (Kurt Zombigut) I can do it, but I was up last night dancing at the Oingo Boingo show in the student center and performing perfectly executed Triple Lindy dives at the rec center. All for the love of my son...


Me

Stray notes:

• Today in class we read a piece by Martin Buber. I realised what loneliness is when I looked around and there was nobody to laugh with about the name "Buber."
• It's really cold outside. Whenever I walk out I find myself saying in my head "It's FA-FA-FA-FREEZING!" and wishing that I could say that to someone without them being irritated by it before remembering that that person doesn't exist.
• Emily made me a schedule, which is very nice of her. There is a man on it with my name on his shirt as D-Bow, with the "D" being a bow and the hyphen being an arrow. How have I never in the course of my life thought of that?
• There's someone on campus who looks like Adam Freed, someone who walks like Sean and someone who sounds like Brian Schultis (kind of). I wish people I didn't know would stop unintentionally imitating people I did.
• I had my first class with Margie-babe today. It was intense. I don't ever want a class to end again with out-loud readings from Holocaust survivors quickly followed by discussions of our majors ("Dance-Lit!").
• I told someone after watching the first episode of Friday Night Lights on Hulu that, though it is widely acclaimed, I don't think I could get into it because I'm not that nostalgic about high school and never really liked football. Then I watched two more episodes and proved myself wrong. Now I'm hooked! Go Panthers! I'm sad!
• I brought one of my dad's old pipes back from home after cleaning it out into my trashcan. When I was in the car to the airport I realized that the large piece of ash I had removed was the filter. Bummer. Now I need a new pipe. It will go well with my growing incense addiction; my room already smells like a head-shop, it might as well get some of the accouterments. Next: posters of aliens in a wintry forest of mushrooms peeing "4:20" into the snow.