miscellaneous photos from april and may.
Monthly Archive for July, 2002
my air conditioner is broken again, for the third time this summer. again, then, i am living out of my car, bringing a canvas bag full of
makeuphairspray
toothbrush
deodorant
underwear
medication
bra
cell phone charger
jacket
dress
soap
john barth with me everywhere i go. i sleep in other people’s apartments, use other people’s computers, eat only turkey and chive cream cheese sandwich
grilled cheese sandwich with tomato
grilled chicken sandwich with cheese
sourdough chicken club
tofu hot dog purchased from bagel shops, restaurants, fast-food drive-throughs. i drive back and forth from school to apartments to food places to bars drinking vodka tonics to apartment security gates to which i don’t have a code or card, listening to the cds that max burned for me. anyway, who am i? how did i get this apartment, this job, these friends, this shaking? when did bacon and hot lettuce on a sandwich become acceptable? why is the lime in my drink so small? why did i forget my toothpaste
razor
shampoo
socks
pajamas ? and what is it that makes people’s apartments feel so strange, smell so different? they keep their blinds closed, drink water out of juice glasses, throw dirty clothes on the floor. they brush their teeth with whitening toothpaste. they have half-bottles of wine leftover from last night’s you’re not sure what it was they did. you look for shaving cream and find hair straightener; look for a stapler and find their class ring from high school; look for your sunglasses and find a picture of yourself, the one you gave them nearly six years ago. who are these people? you think, as you put on one of their t-shirts, adjust their pillow beneath your head, pull their blankets up over your shoulders. you may not actually know them at all.
some wednesday nights, some friday nights, some saturday nights, and almost all sunday nights are spent at the harp, playing darts with people from work. nearly everyone but me had their own set of darts, until the other day, when chris and mike bought me some. they are great, with their own little case and a special set of flights! see?
it should be noted that, among the avid-dart-playing waitstaff, i am the only female. nobody else wants to throw with my man-darts, not even daniel, who doesn’t have his own darts, either. they are all mine, and they sit there on the table right next to my vodka sour and cell phone while i wait my turn to play. most of the talking that goes on during darts is either encouragement or trash-talk, depending on if the current player is one’s teammate or not. “come on, ali-girl!” chris says as i get up to throw. “all right, mike!” i say as he chalks in his score. it’s next to impossible to have any sort of meaningful conversation during darts, as it will always be interrupted by throwing or getting another drink or going to the jukebox or bathroom. instead, we are focused. we drink. we play. someone wins. we play again. when “under the bridge” comes on the jukebox, we all sing along, zombielike, staring at the dartboard.
every night when i come home from work or bars or, there are at least five or six tiny bugs scrambling around on my kitchen countertop. when there are more (and there usually are, especially when i put dishes in the dishwasher or run the water in the sink, because that’s when they tend to come out of their little hiding places and dart around in search of somewhere else to hide), i pick the biggest ones to spray with my bug-killing aerosol. i spray each one liberally. a few seconds of constant spray make them crazy; they flop around aimlessly, as if those few seconds of spray are the human equivalent of seven shots of whiskey. ten seconds of spray (for the tougher ones) are apparently the equivalent of whatever fate befalls the loser of a lengthy whiskey-shot drinking game.
there’s a bug on the wall now, to which i’ve had to give three consecutive ten-second sprays. i figure this one is a serious drinker. he drinks straight from the bottle, alone in his little nest, trying to forget whatever it is that bugs have trouble with. he’s just one of many i’ve watched flip and squirm and eventually give up under my steady barrage of imiprothrin [[2.5-dioxo3-(2-propynyl) 1-imidazolidinyl] methyl (1rs)-cis, transchrysanthemate]. or whatever.it’s odd, watching a living thing (however repulsive it may be) die at my hand. as the bugs twitch under their thick layer of toxin, there is at first a sense of power. i am the master of my kitchen! i control its inhabitants! i am their god, striking down whenever i see fit! but then, as i spray more and they move less (and eventually not at all), there is a sadness. i have destroyed something.
just now i went to look at the bug that i sprayed for thirty seconds. it’s gone.
some confessions:
1. when i’m home alone, i generally keep the television on to keep me from getting lonely. most of the time i don’t even watch it; it’s just there, in the other room, blaring the least offensive thing i can find on at any given time. sometimes, as the hour changes, the least offensive thing becomes the most offensive, but often i’m too lazy to get up and change the channel. if i’m reading a book, the television is off. i leave it on, though, for magazines. 2. my kitchen is mostly infested with miniature bugs. for months now i’ve been waging war, trying to stave them off, but it’s not really working. they might be here to stay. 3. the shower is not very clean. 4. my refrigerator at any given time contains almost nothing except water, coke, and condiments. the pantry has rice, spaghetti, cornstarch, and tea. i don’t eat very well. today, for example, i’ve had a bowl of spaghetti-os and a slice of pie. 5. i used to be deathly afraid of thunderstorms. every night during the summer i would scrunch down in my bed and hope that there wouldn’t be a storm. when there was one, i would watch for lightning to illuminate the walls of my bedroom, then duck under the covers to wait for the thunder. one one-thousand. two one-thousand. the summer of my fourth-grade year, there were a lot of thunderstorms. for each one i sat on the couch in the living room and watched astros games with my dad, trying really hard to ignore the fact that lightning was for sure going to strike the big tree in the backyard and send it crashing in through the living-room windows, setting our house on fire and killing us all. all those nights blend into one in my memory: the television green with grass, the voices of the announcers and crowd drowning out the rumblings, the crack of the bat making me forget the lightning.
i hate baseball. 6. in junior high, who’s the boss was my favorite show. if you tell anyone, i’ll kill you. 7. in traffic, in class, in front of the computer, in front of the television, while waiting in line, when out at bars with friends, i pick my cuticles until they bleed. 8. i cry a lot. 9. whatever it is, i probably don’t think you understand. 10. i sleep alone most nights, and when i turn off the bedside lamp, i don’t open my eyes again until morning. i do this so i don’t have to see that it’s dark. i am a little afraid of the dark. well, not of the dark itself, but of what it could be hiding, usually scary people or fear or whatever it is that would fit in the shadows cast by the orange light in the alley.
if you tell anyone, i’ll kill you.
paraphrasing, of course, the note i left on rob‘s car today:
our dog liked to eat plastic, we found out. i left a kickball in the backyard and later i found a bite mark in it. a huge one. sometimes we would find bits of frisbee all over the grass. one time my sister’s friend anita came over. it was raining, and she’d ridden her bike over, so she left her bike on the back porch and her jacket on the fence. i hated anita, but i really liked that jacket. it was this sort of translucent purple. when anita came outside later to go home, her jacket was gone except for the zipper and the drawstring for the hood. the dog, of course, had eaten it. anita cried. i didn’t tell anyone, but i was glad the dog had eaten her jacket. man, i hated anita.
this time i had to leave it there without a little plastic-baggie rain jacket like before. i hope it doesn’t rain. (update: it is, in fact, raining. by now the ink has probably bled into rob’s engine.)
here are some pictures i took a few months ago, at jefferson davis hospital.
