every morning i put on vh1 for background noise and see pretty much the same videos over and over again. i think i’ve seen that black eyed peas video 3 times in one morning. others that seem pretty popular (in the same hour-long period) are shakira, mariah carey, lifehouse, weezer, rob thomas, gavin degraw and kelly clarkson. something i’ve noticed during my daily payola-infusion is that the same guy keeps popping up in a lot of videos. eric roberts. what’s up with that?

he’s always playing the Other Man or Evil Guy or something like that. his reputation/type-casting as a bad guy has never sat well with me because when i think of eric roberts i think of this one movie i saw him in when i was in high school. the movie was ‘dark angel‘ and he played a good (if tortured and dark) cop who had to clear his name. because it was the first thing i ever saw him in, that role has sort of defined him for me. weird how that works, isn’t it?

it makes me think harder about first impressions in general. i remember first meeting my friend nicole in junior high and being pretty sure that we wouldn’t be friends. for some reason i thought it was a foregone conclusion that she was going to be sucked into the popular group – probably because she was tall and pretty. and when i first met mark i didn’t like him either, but i think that had more to do with the circumstances under which we met, not him.

i guess the point of all of this is: now i’m dreading the kind of first impression i make. i probably seem really cold or stuck-up, but really i’m silently freaking out because i don’t know how to act, so i end up doing it all wrong. i am not good with people i don’t know but i guess i’m not really that good with people i do know either – some people can’t read me at all when i think i’m putting it all out there while others can tell exactly what i’m thinking even when i’m trying to be neutral. there was a guy i knew in high school that could do this and it was really unsettling. even at the age of – what? 16? – i had gotten used to people (even my friends) not knowing how i felt at any given moment. then this guy who spent less time with me, who allegedly didn’t know me as well, could read me like a book. are some people just more observant, or is there some sort of mental/emotional affinity that individuals can have that allows them to tune into others so well?

you only get part one:

k is for kite-flying
a is for ardor for gusto and life
r is for running through my mind all day (eric)
a is for angst with hot tea
l is for lima beans for you and me
e is for egrets, my favorite bird
e is for elephants, my favorite herd

(read part 1 here)

In those days the river of blood flowed quite slowly. Which means that it really was not fast, except when it was fast, which wasn’t often, but it normally wasn’t and when it was normal, like now for instance, it flowed quite slowly, which means not quickly.

Not quickly means, for those who aren’t following as quickly as they probably should be (which means fast, or rather, not slow), quite slowly.

My family didn’t own, but rented, inasmuch as they occupied it but didn’t physically possess the deed to either the lot, the building on it, or the possessions inside it (all sorts of ratty furniture, the restroom fixtures (a toilet which was consistently, like my hair and eyeball, rather brown), creaky stairways and other dandy accoutrement, as well as a small dog (his/her (we were never quite sure) name was Sandy) which always despite all circumstances to the contrary managed to reek of garlic); the piece of property that lay next to the aforementioned river of blood.

As it was the only plot of land in this area of the country (rural and rather overgrown with all sorts of nasty herbage like 30 foot long venus fly traps and poison oak which habitually managed to sneak into windows, beneath covers and between my then-five year old legs as I slept) I found my youth a dreary and exhausting existence with little to nothing to do on a daily basis except for staring wearily into the river of blood as it flowed past not quickly at all and stolid in its well-established redness.

The river was red, like blood. And from time to time the venus fly trap would sneak to the brink of the river to lap up the water’s pale redness into it’s carnivorous plant bowels only to realize that the river (as aforementioned) was really not bloody at all, it was just mostly red (except my grampa couldn’t see it), and it would huff and puff angrily and unexcitedly and quite enthusiastically (as only venus fly traps do) and stomp (by stomp, I mean stomp in plant terms, which, in human terms is much slower, more like quietly and slowly paced) back to its place beneath my windows where it would continue to wreak havoc nightly. You might wonder why, after days and days of walking towards the river, the venus fly trap (Pat, I called it, it reproduces asexually so I could never really assign a gender) wouldn’t just learn from his mistakes and not trudge the distance…

Something you probably don’t know about venus fly traps is that they have quite short term memories. And this poor fatal flaw resulted in most of its weeping misery as it could only remember what was written on it’s inner leaves. I had written (in Venus Fly Trapeze) that the river wasn’t actually bloody but the leave had apparently withered long ago and since Pat had been sneaking into my room nightly to nibble on my private parts while I slept I didn’t feel bad as it sobbed down there by the river of blood. Which was actually not a river of blood at all, it was just red.

[engraving of a boy waking up to a plant nibbling on its private parts. but you don’t SEE anything, just a boy half-sitting up in bed with a confused/horrified look on his face. a vine is coming in through the window and disappearing under the blanket. subtle suggestion of movement in the crotchal area.]

caption: Pat had been sneaking into my room nightly to nibble on my private parts while I slept

written by mark
illustrated by kara (old-fashioned woodcuts)

[book opens and starts speaking]

[cue british accent]

On the first day of February, in my fifth year, it was a Sunday, the sky was a perfectly ordinary blue, my hair was brown, we lived by a river. It was a river of blood. I did not know why it was a river of blood but it was just that, a river of blood. It was red. It was really red.

It was really, really red.

And as I said before, it was the first day of February. And again, it was my fifth year, which means I was five years old. And the sky was blue the way a sky is always blue, I said that already too. And my hair was brown like the color of brown things and like I said already, it was brown. The river was red, mostly. Really, really red.

[pages turn…engravings of really mundane things, like a picture of the sky. but black and white.]

caption: And like I said already, the sky was blue.

But it wasn’t really a river of blood, it only just looked like it, because it was red. And red is the color of blood. So when I was five and the sky was blue, I called it the ‘iver of Blood.’ And I thought my mom would laugh or say how clever I was, but she didn’t she just nodded and said, ‘Hmmph, well it is red, mostly.’

And my father said, “Red it is indeed.”
And my sister said, “Red, yes.”
And my brother said, “Not even crimson, just red.”
And my grampa said, “I’m color blind.” So I didn’t believe a word he said from then on.

But it was red, like a river of blood.

[Picture: A single brown eyeball.]

caption: Like my hair, my eyeball was brown too.

[except it too, is black and white, and this sentence is nowhere to be found in the text]

more to come…

is there anything sadder than an animal cracker with its head broken off? does anyone else feel as bad as i do when i pull the decapitated little guy out of the package and see his condition?

did i mention that i think biting off limbs or heads one at a time is cruel and i believe the only ethical way to eat an animal cracker is to shove the whole thing in your mouth and chew as fast as possible (you know, to get it over with quickly)?

…no? anyone?

…i’m the only one?

it’s times like this that make me wonder why i’m not a vegetatarian.
…or why i’m not in a mental hospital.
…or…why i still eat animal crackers.

damn you extreme makeover: home edition for making me cry after i ACCIDENTALLY saw TWO MINUTES of the show while flipping through channels.

when eric makes tea it is magic. when i make tea it always comes out wrong.

eric’s nephew steven is awesome. he is a good kid. he is very reasonable and adorable and funny and not a spoiled brat. if every kid was like steven or his brother carter, i would not have a problem with kids. he got upset yesterday and cried cause he was tired and frustrated and he wasn’t even loud. it was quiet crying. it was actually sort of endearing. sorry, every other kid that i know, but the bar has been set. and it’s about 3’5″ high.

first off…i don’t like halloween. there. i said it. partly because i don’t like dressing up and mostly because every halloween when i was little i’d get my hopes up and have an awesome costume and them i’d get violently ill that day. sometimes it was the flu, sometimes allergies, sometimes a head cold. i remember one halloween when i had this kick-ass she-ra costume (crown and everything) and when my mom was driving me to another neighborhood to trick-or-treat i threw up all over myself and ruined my beautiful gauzy she-ra skirt. also ruined – my little 6 year old dignity. or however old i was.

that being said, i do have this one idea for a halloween costume that i’ve been kicking around for about 10 years and i thought of another cute/weird/whatever idea yesterday:

1. Baked Potato – make a big lumpy potato-shaped suit out of brown fabric. make sure to cut holes for your head and extremities. stuff it with batting and let some spill out of the front of the potato suit, which should be slit open lengthwise. paint a square shirt box yellow. stick it to the spilling-out batting for a butter pat. stick curls of green crepe paper on the batting for chives. small black construction paper squares will do fine for black pepper specks. i have decided against sour cream because it seems that anything that could look enough like sour cream would just be too much of a hassle to work with. don’t forget a brown shirt and tights. voilà! baked potato!
2. Friendly Squid – start with a pink or coral or orange bodysuit. make a pointy, flared hat and cover it with the same color fabric, making sure to attach it to a hood with a hole cut out for your face. make fabric spats and mittens that are flat and leaf-shaped. your feet are the squid’s two longer arms. cover 6 lengths of flexible tubing and attach mittens to one end of each. affix these arms around your shoulders and collarbone. stick suction cups to one side of all 10 arms or draw them on. smile so people know you’re not going to attack and eat them. voilà! friendly squid!