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.

Coraline and Nine

Last night I saw Coraline, which was exciting. The Nightmare Before Christmas played an important part in fascinating me as a child while kind of spooking the living shit out of me at the same time. Plus, Laika studios is in Portland, so hometown pride abounds (except the kid in the film pronounced it "Ore-gahn" not "Ore-gun" which is distinctly wrong).

The visuals were amazing, but, is it just me or is Neil Gaiman not really that great? I only know a little bit about his stuff, but what I have experienced seems to me to be mish-mashes of other ideas and themes into wholes that don't necessarily become original. Now don't get me wrong, a lot of the children's movies I enjoyed growing up like A Troll in Central Park or The Last Unicorn weren't bastions of originality either, but still, that's not an excuse really... While watching Coraline I couldn't help but feel that it was a collage of themes and imagery I'd seen in a myriad of other places with little original substance of its own. It's the same way I felt about Stardust, Mirrormask and Gaiman's adaptation of Beowulf. I guess to make that claim I should have some solid evidence, which I don't, but did anyone else just find themselves recalling things like Alice in Wonderland, Cinderella, James and the Giant Peach, etc. and not really appreciating the movie as something on its own?

I saw it in 3D, too, which was cool but exhausting. I guess it's a neat technology and it's sure improved since the red/green glasses days, but I don't miss "2D." For one thing, putting things on different planes but keeping them at the same level of focus isn't always realistic - sometimes it's just weird. Also, I felt like my eyes could never rest - they're still burning a little.

In other news, all my dad's tools are gone and most of the books are packed up. I helped Larry, Moe and Curly move a bunch of stuff into a storage unit out in Bumfuck Nowhere, Oregon yesterday (which is an unincorporated part of Salem). Now I'm counting down the days that I have left in my childhood home. It's really hard to pack everything you own when a) you hate cleaning b) you hate packing and c) you hate getting rid of things.

Tricycle Christ and the Sunday Blowout

Hey, as of yesterday I have 100 posts here! Wowza! Let's celebrate with a still from the (near) titular movie of this blog:


NSFW?

This weekend I traveled down to Roseburg with a friend. What an amazing little shit-hole. I saw the giant pit in the ground where I was born. I was told by my parents that, long ago, Douglas County Hospital (now the pit) used bo be next to a hill where famous goats roamed free. (When I was in elementary school I told my class I was born "in a hospital by goats" and they all laughed). The hill, Mt. Nebo, no longer has its Mt. Nebo goats, which used to come down into the hospital grounds and predict whether it would rain or not with their very presence. My friend told me that they all fell into traffic or were killed off. This is just one of the changes that Roseburg has experienced since I left it 20.5 years ago.

As we tried to leave, the tire on my friend's car went flat an hour out of town, looking like it ran over a lawnmower blade. We didn't have any of the right tools, so we had to call roadside assistance, which took an hour. After they left we discovered the battery had gone dead and we had to wait for another thirty minutes. Then a woman with no teeth on her bottom jaw except for canines (reverse vampire!) told us that the tire department at the local Walmart had shut down thirty minutes before our arrival. We eased up the freeway on a spare until we got to Springfield.

Springfield is nothing like it looks in the Simpsons. At the Springfield Walmart, Jeff Spicoli told us that they had just closed up an hour early, but that the Walmart we had come from usually stayed open later. Of course, nobody else was open given that it's a Sunday. The Lord may have rested on the seventh day, but if he wanted to get somewhere I'll bet he would have wanted four tires (unless he rode a tricycle).

Since there was no other alternative in sight, we drove to Portland on the spare, never going above 45 mph. This meant hugging the guardrail with the hazard lights on while the world literally passed us by. It was kind of nice, because it slowed down the whole day (it took four hours to get from Springfield to Portland, 2x what it should have), and there was a distinct sense that something wanted us to take it slow. Whatever the cosmic reasoning, we missed the 10:20 showing of Coraline, and that's that.

Tomorrow mom and I begin moving our lives down to a Salem storage unit. My room looks like a hurricane came in and fucked it. It's emptier than it was yet dirtier than it was. I can't bring myself to pack up my CDs yet. There are mixes that need to be made!

Land of the empire builders, murderers

"Some people did not quite believe that there ever had been a Mr Hurtle. Others said that there certainly had been a Mr Hurtle and that to the best of their belief he still existed. The fact, however, best known of her was, that she had shot a man through the head somewhere in Oregon. She had not been tried for it, as the world of Oregon had considered that the circumstances justified the deed."

-Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now

"I'm a bookkeeper's son/ I don't wanna hurt no one/ I crossed my old man back in Oregon/ don't take me alive./ Got a case of dynamite/ I could hold out here all night/ I crossed my old man back in Oregon/ don't take me alive.

- Steely Dan,"Don't Take Me Alive"