E-mail: Brian7Morris "at" hotmail.com Archives March 2002 April 2002 May 2002 June 2002 July 2002 August 2002 September 2002 October 2002 November 2002 December 2002 January 2003 February 2003 March 2003 April 2003 May 2003 June 2003 July 2003 August 2003 September 2003 October 2003 November 2003 December 2003 January 2004 February 2004 March 2004 April 2004 May 2004 June 2004 July 2004 August 2004 September 2004 October 2004 November 2004 December 2004 January 2005 February 2005 March 2005 April 2005 May 2005 June 2005 July 2005 August 2005 September 2005 October 2005 November 2005 December 2005 current Blogs Mandapants farkleberries Uranium City Records The C.M. 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I’m not sure how St. Joseph is supposed to help you sell your house. When I was selling real estate and I was talking to potential buyers that I was trying to get to buy a house, I’d say, “Yeah, this house totally sucks!” But I’d say it all sarcastically. That never worked. I bet St. Joseph is way better at closing a deal. I bet he’s read ALL the Zig Ziglar books, cover to cover. I bet he makes a big show of turning off his cell phone (to let the buyers know how important they are to him) and then sits down with the potential buyers over some tea and English cookies and reminds them that, after all, it IS a seller’s market, and after all, if they keep waiting for the PERFECT house to come along, they’ll waste all their time looking and never find a house to move to, and after all, isn’t this house really pretty fantastic when you look at it a second time? Oh, and that tea St. Joseph gave them, I bet it’s not normal tea at all. I bet it was tea made out of dope!! Good old St. Joseph, that guy is ALWAYS high! That’s what makes him so affable. I don’t know if Saint Sebastian smokes much pot or not. But I guess you can pray to him to help you find a parking place. Again, I am unaware of the mechanics on how this works. Pot smoker or not, Saint Sebastian has got to be a pretty mellow Saint to be able to handle people praying to him at all hours of the day and night just to find a parking spot. If I was Saint Sebastian and somebody woke me up praying at like three in the morning to come help them find a parking spot I’d make a spot magically appear a block ahead of them, but then when they got there it’d say “Compact Car Only” and they’d be driving a luxury sedan and so they’d be all SOL after getting their hopes up and I’d be like, “That’s what you get you son of a bitch! Find your own damn parking place next time!” Have you ever seen a beer bottle open and filled most of the way up with some sort of mystery liquid in the middle of a parking spot? I remember quite vividly the first time I spotted a few bottles like that. Each bottle was one of those old classic glass Mountain Dew bottles - the bottles that were all fancy and looked like imperial scepters. Each bottle was place precisely in the geometric center of its own empty parking spot in the Meijer parking lot by the intersection of Kilgore and Westnedge - this was like two decades ago. Nowadays, I see these kind of bottles placed all haphazardly in parking spots, in rag-tag assortments of bottles. Nobody has any class anymore. Anyway, I also remember quite vividly asking my Dad what those Mountain Dew bottles were doing in the parking lot. He told me (rather disgustedly) that people pissed in the bottles, then put them in parking lots so people would hit them with their cars and get piss all over their cars. My dad (perhaps sensing that I was about to kick at one) also told me that whoever put those bottles there was hoping that somebody would try to kick one too, because that would get piss all over them and this would totally fall into the piss bottle setter’s plans. I’ve never disagreed with my Dad on what the bottles were filled with. However, I do part ways with him on the purpose with which those bottles were set there. My Dad says the bottle setters wanted to get piss on people. That’s not my theory - over the years and through all my experiences, I‘ve developed my own. I think that, deep down, the people who put the piss bottles there want something, something that they feel is just out of their reach, something precious and warm and tender and brave. Putting piss bottles in parking spots late at night is just a special way of praying for it. Brian 12:58 PM (0) comments Monday, October 25, 2004 I lost them all. It happened last night, at around 1:00 in the morning, in my neighborhood. I mean, that is, if I had any to begin with. Cool points, tough-guy points, what have you - I lost them. It was all Mr. Kitty’s fault. Actually, I don’t really want to get in a discussion about who’s fault it was. I guess we should share the blame, equally. Because I SUPPOSE I should have bought Mr. Kitty a new tray of cat grass at the grocery store when I bought all the groceries that I wanted - I SUPPOSE the old tray WAS getting kind of tough and stringy. And I SUPPOSE it was perhaps UNREASONABLE to expect Mr. Kitty to help out (once-in-a-while is all!) with the household chores like sponge-mopping the kitchen floor (which HE USES, like, all the time!). And I SUPPOSE that I should have made sure that the screen door didn’t swing open behind my kitchen door that I had left open about a foot or so. So anyway, here’s what happened: I was cooking some soup when all of a sudden I realized that Mr. Kitty hadn’t tried to get any of his filthy cat hair in the pot for at least half an hour. This is unusual. I looked around a little when I saw that the screen door had swung open. I checked out on the exterior landing, but I didn’t see him there. Inside my apartment I checked his little cat bed, and some cardboard boxes that he likes to hide in, and my closets, and everywhere else it seems that a cat could fit in my apartment. Then, alarmed, I walked all the way down the stairs to the landing. I still couldn’t find him. Then I ran around down in the alley below my apartment. He was totally gone. Mr. Kitty likes to hide under cars and stuff so I grabbed a flashlight and crawled around my neighborhood shining it under cars for like an hour. He was still nowhere to be found. Mr. Kitty’s not the most streetwise cat in the world; he’s too friendly and it doesn’t help that I trim his nails so he doesn’t even really have anything to defend himself with. I started to get concerned, and, desperate, I started running up to people walking through the streets and alleys and asking if they had seen a “furry little, snuggly, gray cat with a pink nose and long whiskers.” That’s when I think I lost most of my points. Nobody had seen him. I kept looking, crawling through the undergrowth behind the buildings in my neighborhood where I thought Mr. Kitty might be holed up, all lost and confused, and waiting to meow out to me to rescue him. Still nothing. After an exhaustive search of the area, it hit me. Mr. Kitty never runs far when he gets out. And he’s totally an affectionate cat and everybody loves him. My conclusion was inescapable. Mr. Kitty had been catnapped. That’s when I started accosting my neighbors: (me) “Knock Knock” (elderly neighbor) “Yes, can I help you?” (me) “Did you really think that you could get away with it, you pathetic son-of-a-bitch!” (elderly neighbor - confused) “What?” (me) “Give me back my cat! You catnapper!” The only people I didn’t use profanity with were my Spanish speaking neighbors, but only because the only swear I know in Spanish is “Fuck your mother” and I didn’t feel it was appropriate for this situation. The best I could do was, “Hola. Mi gato llamo Senior Gatito. Senior gatito tiene labios negro y ojos grande. Donde me gato!” But don’t worry, because this story has a happy ending. When I went to look for Mr. Kitty I left my door open and at like two in the morning I came back to my apartment to get another jacket and he was in the kitchen meowing at me like he had been wondering where I was. I don’t if he had been hiding in my apartment somewhere (he’s really good at hiding) or if he had come back while I was busy repeatedly gut-punching the celery-root-smelling, Cheney-got-his-flu-shot, would-go-to-Canada-to-buy-his-life-saving-medications-but-he-can’t-afford-the-bus-ticket senior citizen who lives in 1W, and demanding information on the whereabouts of my cat. But so anyway, Mr. Kitty’s safe at home now and we’re one big happy family again. Brian 3:22 PM (0) comments Thursday, October 21, 2004 I just found my parents’ old Dutch Oven deep within the scariest room in the basement. It was covered with dust. I’m going to name it Dutchy, or Sir Cooks a lot, or Dutch Dutch the Crock Pot, or Dutchy McOven. I’m thinking that I’ll be able to set it on my hot plate in my apartment and bake my moutain man sourdough bread in it. Did you know that I was one quarter Dutch? My Grandma is full Dutch, she even knows Dutch. When we were little kids she taught us a swear word in Dutch. It sounded something like, “Lick My Fasse!” but it doesn’t have anything to do with any licking or any body part of the person cursing - that’s just a clumsy attempt at translating it with English. It’s Dutch! I think it means something like “Stick something of yours up something of yours, you fucking sick fucker, and go fuck yourself!” at least that’s how my Grandma explained it to me. I was quite young at the time and I found the translation upsetting, especially when my Grandma said it with feeling – if I remember right she had to take out her teeth (which is a totally rad) before I stopped crying. There’s actually a lot of phrases in English that belittle the Dutch. My mom (half Dutch) takes great umbrage when people talk about “Dutch Courage.” Dutch courage is when I do something that I normally wouldn’t, just because I’m drunk, like the time that guy kept saying that my beard was “too big” (I heard him say it numerous times, and quite clearly) from across the room so I went over to him and said some really hurtful things about him and grabbed big fistfuls of his shirt and then he grabbed fistfuls of my shirt and we pushed each other around and knocked those people’s drinks off their table until his shirt ripped and exposed his nipple Janet Jackson-style and he tried to cover himself and ran off in shame – that’s Dutch courage. (It – and I’m SO EMBARRASSED - turns out that he was talking about the shrimp boat at the party there, but at least I won that tussle) I don’t know if the saying “Dutch Courage” implies that the Dutch are drunkards or sober pansies. Perhaps both. Also, my Mom doesn’t like the phrase “Going Dutch.” Going Dutch is when I go on a date and refuse to pay for more than half the check and when my date argues about it or even just asks why I shout “I’m one quarter Dutch!” over and over with no other explanation until she wearily takes her wallet out. The phrase “Going Dutch” implies that the Dutch are cheap. There’s also something called a “Dutch Door.” I don’t really know what that is. I think it might be a screen door with a bunch of pigeon poop and feathers stuck in the screen. A Dutch Oven is like this really heavy cast iron pot with a lid that you can bury in campfire coals and bake stuff in. If it’s called a Dutch Oven, implying that only really cheap Dutch dudes bake bread in it over their hotplate because they’re too cheap to buy the part necessary to hook up the ricketty old stove in their ramshackle apartment to the gas, then I’m very offended!!! Brian 1:23 AM (0) comments Monday, October 18, 2004 Yesterday Hadley M. made us all go to an Apple Orchard. She said that it would be a fun Autumn activity. During the drive there, she made us all sing along to Bon Jovi’s song Living on a Prairie which she kept playing on repeat. But once we got to the orchard, things got better after that. They had a Hay Ride, and a Pumkin Jumpkin, and a Goat Grab, and a Gourd Smash, and a Donut Eat, and all sorts of other things to do. My favorite was the Organ-Ize ride, pattered after Steinbeck’s book In Dubious Battle, where, for three orange pumpkin shaped tickets, you could stand in this olde tyme General Store at night and read rousing Red propaganda and inspirational organizational speeches written for apple pickers off a karoeke screen while robot strike-breakers and company men beat you with ax handles, until a shotgun blast went off – that signified the end of the ride. Then you could either pay three more orange pumkin shaped tickets and keep going or let somebody else have their turn. There was a pony ride there too, you know, the kind where there’s like this revolving wheel and ponies are tied to the spokes so that they have to walk around in circles. There was a human guy tied to a spoke and he was pushing the thing around in a circle. Nobody was riding on that guy, all the kids wanted to ride on the ponies. I didn’t really want to ride on that guy anyway, I was just afraid he’d have hurt feelings if nobody the whole day rode on him. The ticket taker said that I was too heavy for him. Then I got yelled at for trying to feed that guy a bite of my donut – I guess they’re bad for him. Everybody was having lots of fun until somebody (and I won’t tell you who) got a black eye at the Apple Gauntlet. Then we all had to go home. The rest of us all agreed: this was the best fall apple orchard trip ever! Brian 3:51 PM (0) comments Saturday, October 16, 2004 “So THIS is what it must be like to live in space,” is something you don’t want to say over and over again for like forty-five minutes straight if you don’t want your friends with you in the airport to maybe get a little bit tired of you. But Shit! Those walk accelators – you know, those horizontal escalator things – are ultra-cool, especially the bouncy ones. I’ve been thinking of one specific airport a lot lately. Actually, this one in particular wasn’t even too space station-like. But I haven’t been thinking about the actual building much…. you see, I met somebody special there. I totally wasn’t expecting it. We even kinda made out a little bit. But I have to be honest - I didn’t do much. It all happened so quick and, to tell the truth, I was sort of taken aback at first and I just sort of stood there. She had really busy hands. She ran her hands up and down my torso, then she squatted down in front of me and ran her hands up the inside of my thighs. I though she was going to cup my nuts or grab my wang or something but she stopped just short. Then she turned me around and held me from behind close like we were dancing at some club or something and getting our freak on and she asked me some questions in my ear. It wasn’t really turning me on at all, but if that’s what she likes…. Incidentally, on the topic of club-dancing, have I ever told you about this guy that my friend Amy H. told me about? I may have, I can’t remember. I guess Amy H. was dancing on some dance floor somewhere and she felt something poking at her so she turned around and there was some weird dude there leering at her. He was wearing sweatpants with no underwear, hump-dancing, and rubbing his boner on her. Amy H. was grossed out and she ran off the dance floor. I don’t endorse this dude’s dancing style, but if I was dancing around rubbing my boner sweatpants on somebody and she recoiled in disgust, I think I’d try to come up with some story like I was an artist doing an installation that symbolized a poignant social commentary on the rampant carnality of popular youth dancing. But I guess this guy just gave her a shameless grin and a thumbs-up or something then bonered off back into the dancing crowd. Amy H. told some people about the guy at the club and she found out that he was there every night, and that he always wore sweatpants with no underwear and always had a boner. Wait a minute! Maybe the dude wasn’t a pre-vert at all! Maybe he just has a medical condition that makes him have a permanent boner! And maybe, because of his permanent boner, he can only wear sweatpants with no underwear because if he wore jeans all day, for instance, it might put a lot of strain on the base of his boner - pitching a tent with such heavy fabric, you know - and (to say nothing of the discomfort) possibly break it off. He could bleed to death! Quite frankly, I think it takes a lot of courage to get out there and try to make friends on the dance floor, even though this guy must know that his boner / sweatpants condition will, almost 99% of the time, make him the subject of social scorn. Sigh. He must be the lonliest boner-man in the whole wide world. That is, until he meets that special lady on the dance floor, the one who’ll look beyond his permanent boner condition and see the beautiful person inside. Don’t give up, boner man! You’ll meet her someday! The more I think about it, I admire the boner-man’s pluck. If I had a permanent boner I’d probably just sit in my apartment all day alone, peering out of my peephole at my neighbhors in the hall, writing web-log entries, and knitting humorous rooster-head boner-warmers out of recycled yarn. Anyway, back to this woman I met. I don’t know if she was super impressed with my physique, but after she pulled her hands out of my jacket (where she was totally feeling me up), she said I was “O.K.” Not great, just “O.K.,” but in this day and age it’s not just women who are under a lot of pressure from advertising to have these weird, nearly impossible-to-achieve bodies. Dudes are under that same kind pressure now too! So being “O.K.” is fine with me. I even consider it a bit of a compliment. I’ve been trying to exercise more lately and eat better and get more sleep. I’m happy that she noticed. So now here I am, wondering how to handle the situation. Should I try to call her? Or will that make me seem desperate? Maybe I should just play it cool and wait for her to call. But does she know how to get in contact with me? I don’t know. Maybe I’m just embarrassing myself. Maybe I’m just making a big deal out of nothing. Maybe she does that sort of thing all the time, with all sorts of guys. It’s been a couple of weeks now and I haven’t heard from her. It probably didn’t even mean anything to her. Brian 3:55 PM (0) comments Monday, October 11, 2004 I was just barely able to crawl over to this computer. I almost didn't make it. I seem to have come down with some sort of horrible flu. I can't really even speak - all I can do is make pathetic, very quiet, croaking noises. I've been laying on the couch, surrounded by dirty kleenexes and wrapped in quilts, but I still have the chills. I've had to resort to covering myself with cats. Brian 1:40 PM (0) comments Sunday, October 10, 2004 I returned to my ancestral homeland to find my mother sick with some sort of horrible flu. When I arrived I saw her car in the driveway but I couldn’t find her inside. I eventually discovered her on the couch in the living room. I guess that she had been trying to call out to me from the time I entered the house, but the only noises she could make were pathetic, very quiet, croaking noises and I didn’t hear her. So there she was, all surrounded by dirty kleenexes, wrapped up in quilts and with a thermometer in her mouth. She was covered in cats. So I’ve been cooking her some ginseng root soup. I’ve read that when a family member is sick in old China, the family will often do whatever it takes to get a piece of the right kind of ginseng root for the soup (I believe it’s “red” or “Panax” ginseng - it’s not that “Siberian Ginseng,” which is a scam, by the way). I don’t remember where I read this about the ginseng soup, so this may or may not be accurate. I think I read about the soup at the same place I got the recipe for it - browse-reading the herbal healing books at this hokey New Age store in my neighborhood, the yellow building with a bunch of new-age stuff painted on the outside of it. Have you seen the pointed hexagonal quartz crystals they sell at that place? They’re huge! I’m not kidding. Some are like the size of half a baseball bat. If somebody was ever, like, hexing me, or giving me the evil eye or something, I’d march down to that store and buy the biggest quartz crystal they had and then I’d use it to zap the shit out of the person cursing me. I’d use it to seriously fuck their cosmic shit up and get their kundalini all twisted up and shit. I’m just kidding. I make it a policy not to zap people with cystals. I just don’t want to get that kind a reputation. Because then if something bad happened to somebody I knew, that person would always be wondering, in the back of his or her mind, things like: “I wonder if the reason [that unlucky thing happened to me] was that fucker Brian Morris zapped me with that big cystal he’s got?” And, for instance, at night when everybody’s walking home separately from a bar, people’d be like: “I was just joking about that thing I said tonight – I hope that fucker Brian Morris doesn’t take it seriously and decide to zap with me that big crystal he’s got!” The worst part about crystal zapping is that you don’t know whether you’ve been zapped or if you’re just having some bad luck, and even if you know you did get zapped, you don’t know by whom or when. So somebody could have a run of perfectly naturally occuring bad luck but think that I zapped them with my crystal, and then they’d maybe buy their own huge crystal and zap me with it even though I didn’t do anything. Then maybe I could retailiate with my huge crystal, but what if they bought an even bigger crystal than me?” See, these are the things that could happen. I don’t know if this herbal Chinese soup is going to help or not. I mean, I don’t doubt it will help some, I just don’t know if it will help enough to counteract all the stress caused by me making a huge mess in the kitchen. I didn’t think she’d know I was cooking – she’s too sick to get off the couch. I tried to be quiet, too, but she figured out what was going on as I was chopping carrots. “What are you doing in there!?” She cried out from the living room. “Oh No! You’re not cooking, are you!?…Are you making a mess?!…Please cook on ‘medium,’ you know that ‘extra-hi’ is bad for the pots and stove!…Woe!” Well, we’ve had that cooking heat level argument before. I can’t help it. I’m an “extra-hi” kind of guy. The soup smells delicious. Everybody around here wants to eat some. But I’m not about to give it to a healthy person, it would fuck their chi up. This isn’t a popularity contest. I have an obligation. If I let people mess their chi up by eating my soup that would make me an irresponsible holistic healer. I’m also trying to stick as closely as possible to the recipe I have (you don’t even want to know what I used as a substitute for “chicken faces”) but everybody wants to add something of their own. I’m not letting them. If they want to make some soup then they’ll just have to go out and get their own ancient Chinese secret. Brian 3:10 PM (0) comments Wednesday, October 06, 2004 Does this entry come too soon after the one about Hot Carls? I was googling for something else. I swear. That’s when I ran across this page, which is a build-it-yourself manual authored by some dude named “Ron.” I’ve done a little reading now since I’ve found this page, and I gather that top-of-the-line male chastity belts - the ones that you can wear under your normal clothes for months and months at a time without any discomfort, chafing, or odor - can be really expensive. So before you spend all that money you should try one out for a few days and see if you like it. That’s just plain, old fashioned, good sense. I also discovered that the male chastity belt is not just a weird thing that some dudes like to wear. In fact, some wives use the belts to prevent their husbands from masturbating, an activity (according to their testimonials) that many wives seem to regard as a waste of their husband’s time and makes them less attentive. You can build your own starter male chastity belt and it won’t cost you more than the price of an old leather belt, some PVC pipe, and some doo-dads from the hardware store. That’s what “Ron” did. “Ron” made his belt in two evenings, about three hours total standing nude in his garage. This was after plenty of mental planning, of course, which “Ron” says took him hours and hours. I can only imagine “Ron” is referring to the hours he must have spent at his desk at work, industrious co-workers abuzz around him, while “Ron” daydreamt about his male chastity belt plans - Eureka! I could attach dog choker chains to a D ring and run them under my legs like a jock strap! Now that “Ron” has broken a trail and written up this instruction manual it doesn’t sound that hard to make one either, I mean, if you’re a DIYer and everything. Brian 10:05 PM (0) comments

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Wednesday, October 27, 2004

I’ve recently heard that if you’re having trouble selling your house you can pray to St. Joseph to help you. I guess that you buy a little statute of him which you then bury in your yard. Then later, depending on his schedule, St. Joseph stops by, all ethereal like, to lend a helping hand. Oh, and you can’t just bury one of your old G.I. Joe guys, like Destro or Snake Eyes or somebody, with a Jesus beard drawn onto it with a brown marker. It’s got to be a real St. Joseph purchased from a certified St. Joseph retailer. I asked. I’m not sure how St. Joseph is supposed to help you sell your house. When I was selling real estate and I was talking to potential buyers that I was trying to get to buy a house, I’d say, “Yeah, this house totally sucks!” But I’d say it all sarcastically. That never worked. I bet St. Joseph is way better at closing a deal. I bet he’s read ALL the Zig Ziglar books, cover to cover. I bet he makes a big show of turning off his cell phone (to let the buyers know how important they are to him) and then sits down with the potential buyers over some tea and English cookies and reminds them that, after all, it IS a seller’s market, and after all, if they keep waiting for the PERFECT house to come along, they’ll waste all their time looking and never find a house to move to, and after all, isn’t this house really pretty fantastic when you look at it a second time? Oh, and that tea St. Joseph gave them, I bet it’s not normal tea at all. I bet it was tea made out of dope!! Good old St. Joseph, that guy is ALWAYS high! That’s what makes him so affable. I don’t know if Saint Sebastian smokes much pot or not. But I guess you can pray to him to help you find a parking place. Again, I am unaware of the mechanics on how this works. Pot smoker or not, Saint Sebastian has got to be a pretty mellow Saint to be able to handle people praying to him at all hours of the day and night just to find a parking spot. If I was Saint Sebastian and somebody woke me up praying at like three in the morning to come help them find a parking spot I’d make a spot magically appear a block ahead of them, but then when they got there it’d say “Compact Car Only” and they’d be driving a luxury sedan and so they’d be all SOL after getting their hopes up and I’d be like, “That’s what you get you son of a bitch! Find your own damn parking place next time!” Have you ever seen a beer bottle open and filled most of the way up with some sort of mystery liquid in the middle of a parking spot? I remember quite vividly the first time I spotted a few bottles like that. Each bottle was one of those old classic glass Mountain Dew bottles - the bottles that were all fancy and looked like imperial scepters. Each bottle was place precisely in the geometric center of its own empty parking spot in the Meijer parking lot by the intersection of Kilgore and Westnedge - this was like two decades ago. Nowadays, I see these kind of bottles placed all haphazardly in parking spots, in rag-tag assortments of bottles. Nobody has any class anymore. Anyway, I also remember quite vividly asking my Dad what those Mountain Dew bottles were doing in the parking lot. He told me (rather disgustedly) that people pissed in the bottles, then put them in parking lots so people would hit them with their cars and get piss all over their cars. My dad (perhaps sensing that I was about to kick at one) also told me that whoever put those bottles there was hoping that somebody would try to kick one too, because that would get piss all over them and this would totally fall into the piss bottle setter’s plans. I’ve never disagreed with my Dad on what the bottles were filled with. However, I do part ways with him on the purpose with which those bottles were set there. My Dad says the bottle setters wanted to get piss on people. That’s not my theory - over the years and through all my experiences, I‘ve developed my own. I think that, deep down, the people who put the piss bottles there want something, something that they feel is just out of their reach, something precious and warm and tender and brave. Putting piss bottles in parking spots late at night is just a special way of praying for it.

Brian 12:58 PM (0) comments

Monday, October 25, 2004

I lost them all. It happened last night, at around 1:00 in the morning, in my neighborhood. I mean, that is, if I had any to begin with. Cool points, tough-guy points, what have you - I lost them. It was all Mr. Kitty’s fault. Actually, I don’t really want to get in a discussion about who’s fault it was. I guess we should share the blame, equally. Because I SUPPOSE I should have bought Mr. Kitty a new tray of cat grass at the grocery store when I bought all the groceries that I wanted - I SUPPOSE the old tray WAS getting kind of tough and stringy. And I SUPPOSE it was perhaps UNREASONABLE to expect Mr. Kitty to help out (once-in-a-while is all!) with the household chores like sponge-mopping the kitchen floor (which HE USES, like, all the time!). And I SUPPOSE that I should have made sure that the screen door didn’t swing open behind my kitchen door that I had left open about a foot or so. So anyway, here’s what happened: I was cooking some soup when all of a sudden I realized that Mr. Kitty hadn’t tried to get any of his filthy cat hair in the pot for at least half an hour. This is unusual. I looked around a little when I saw that the screen door had swung open. I checked out on the exterior landing, but I didn’t see him there. Inside my apartment I checked his little cat bed, and some cardboard boxes that he likes to hide in, and my closets, and everywhere else it seems that a cat could fit in my apartment. Then, alarmed, I walked all the way down the stairs to the landing. I still couldn’t find him. Then I ran around down in the alley below my apartment. He was totally gone. Mr. Kitty likes to hide under cars and stuff so I grabbed a flashlight and crawled around my neighborhood shining it under cars for like an hour. He was still nowhere to be found. Mr. Kitty’s not the most streetwise cat in the world; he’s too friendly and it doesn’t help that I trim his nails so he doesn’t even really have anything to defend himself with. I started to get concerned, and, desperate, I started running up to people walking through the streets and alleys and asking if they had seen a “furry little, snuggly, gray cat with a pink nose and long whiskers.” That’s when I think I lost most of my points. Nobody had seen him. I kept looking, crawling through the undergrowth behind the buildings in my neighborhood where I thought Mr. Kitty might be holed up, all lost and confused, and waiting to meow out to me to rescue him. Still nothing. After an exhaustive search of the area, it hit me. Mr. Kitty never runs far when he gets out. And he’s totally an affectionate cat and everybody loves him. My conclusion was inescapable. Mr. Kitty had been catnapped. That’s when I started accosting my neighbors: (me) “Knock Knock” (elderly neighbor) “Yes, can I help you?” (me) “Did you really think that you could get away with it, you pathetic son-of-a-bitch!” (elderly neighbor - confused) “What?” (me) “Give me back my cat! You catnapper!” The only people I didn’t use profanity with were my Spanish speaking neighbors, but only because the only swear I know in Spanish is “Fuck your mother” and I didn’t feel it was appropriate for this situation. The best I could do was, “Hola. Mi gato llamo Senior Gatito. Senior gatito tiene labios negro y ojos grande. Donde me gato!” But don’t worry, because this story has a happy ending. When I went to look for Mr. Kitty I left my door open and at like two in the morning I came back to my apartment to get another jacket and he was in the kitchen meowing at me like he had been wondering where I was. I don’t if he had been hiding in my apartment somewhere (he’s really good at hiding) or if he had come back while I was busy repeatedly gut-punching the celery-root-smelling, Cheney-got-his-flu-shot, would-go-to-Canada-to-buy-his-life-saving-medications-but-he-can’t-afford-the-bus-ticket senior citizen who lives in 1W, and demanding information on the whereabouts of my cat. But so anyway, Mr. Kitty’s safe at home now and we’re one big happy family again.

Brian 3:22 PM (0) comments

Thursday, October 21, 2004

I just found my parents’ old Dutch Oven deep within the scariest room in the basement. It was covered with dust. I’m going to name it Dutchy, or Sir Cooks a lot, or Dutch Dutch the Crock Pot, or Dutchy McOven. I’m thinking that I’ll be able to set it on my hot plate in my apartment and bake my moutain man sourdough bread in it. Did you know that I was one quarter Dutch? My Grandma is full Dutch, she even knows Dutch. When we were little kids she taught us a swear word in Dutch. It sounded something like, “Lick My Fasse!” but it doesn’t have anything to do with any licking or any body part of the person cursing - that’s just a clumsy attempt at translating it with English. It’s Dutch! I think it means something like “Stick something of yours up something of yours, you fucking sick fucker, and go fuck yourself!” at least that’s how my Grandma explained it to me. I was quite young at the time and I found the translation upsetting, especially when my Grandma said it with feeling – if I remember right she had to take out her teeth (which is a totally rad) before I stopped crying. There’s actually a lot of phrases in English that belittle the Dutch. My mom (half Dutch) takes great umbrage when people talk about “Dutch Courage.” Dutch courage is when I do something that I normally wouldn’t, just because I’m drunk, like the time that guy kept saying that my beard was “too big” (I heard him say it numerous times, and quite clearly) from across the room so I went over to him and said some really hurtful things about him and grabbed big fistfuls of his shirt and then he grabbed fistfuls of my shirt and we pushed each other around and knocked those people’s drinks off their table until his shirt ripped and exposed his nipple Janet Jackson-style and he tried to cover himself and ran off in shame – that’s Dutch courage. (It – and I’m SO EMBARRASSED - turns out that he was talking about the shrimp boat at the party there, but at least I won that tussle) I don’t know if the saying “Dutch Courage” implies that the Dutch are drunkards or sober pansies. Perhaps both. Also, my Mom doesn’t like the phrase “Going Dutch.” Going Dutch is when I go on a date and refuse to pay for more than half the check and when my date argues about it or even just asks why I shout “I’m one quarter Dutch!” over and over with no other explanation until she wearily takes her wallet out. The phrase “Going Dutch” implies that the Dutch are cheap. There’s also something called a “Dutch Door.” I don’t really know what that is. I think it might be a screen door with a bunch of pigeon poop and feathers stuck in the screen. A Dutch Oven is like this really heavy cast iron pot with a lid that you can bury in campfire coals and bake stuff in. If it’s called a Dutch Oven, implying that only really cheap Dutch dudes bake bread in it over their hotplate because they’re too cheap to buy the part necessary to hook up the ricketty old stove in their ramshackle apartment to the gas, then I’m very offended!!!

Brian 1:23 AM (0) comments

Monday, October 18, 2004

Yesterday Hadley M. made us all go to an Apple Orchard. She said that it would be a fun Autumn activity. During the drive there, she made us all sing along to Bon Jovi’s song Living on a Prairie which she kept playing on repeat. But once we got to the orchard, things got better after that. They had a Hay Ride, and a Pumkin Jumpkin, and a Goat Grab, and a Gourd Smash, and a Donut Eat, and all sorts of other things to do. My favorite was the Organ-Ize ride, pattered after Steinbeck’s book In Dubious Battle, where, for three orange pumpkin shaped tickets, you could stand in this olde tyme General Store at night and read rousing Red propaganda and inspirational organizational speeches written for apple pickers off a karoeke screen while robot strike-breakers and company men beat you with ax handles, until a shotgun blast went off – that signified the end of the ride. Then you could either pay three more orange pumkin shaped tickets and keep going or let somebody else have their turn. There was a pony ride there too, you know, the kind where there’s like this revolving wheel and ponies are tied to the spokes so that they have to walk around in circles. There was a human guy tied to a spoke and he was pushing the thing around in a circle. Nobody was riding on that guy, all the kids wanted to ride on the ponies. I didn’t really want to ride on that guy anyway, I was just afraid he’d have hurt feelings if nobody the whole day rode on him. The ticket taker said that I was too heavy for him. Then I got yelled at for trying to feed that guy a bite of my donut – I guess they’re bad for him. Everybody was having lots of fun until somebody (and I won’t tell you who) got a black eye at the Apple Gauntlet. Then we all had to go home. The rest of us all agreed: this was the best fall apple orchard trip ever!

Brian 3:51 PM (0) comments

Saturday, October 16, 2004

“So THIS is what it must be like to live in space,” is something you don’t want to say over and over again for like forty-five minutes straight if you don’t want your friends with you in the airport to maybe get a little bit tired of you. But Shit! Those walk accelators – you know, those horizontal escalator things – are ultra-cool, especially the bouncy ones. I’ve been thinking of one specific airport a lot lately. Actually, this one in particular wasn’t even too space station-like. But I haven’t been thinking about the actual building much…. you see, I met somebody special there. I totally wasn’t expecting it. We even kinda made out a little bit. But I have to be honest - I didn’t do much. It all happened so quick and, to tell the truth, I was sort of taken aback at first and I just sort of stood there. She had really busy hands. She ran her hands up and down my torso, then she squatted down in front of me and ran her hands up the inside of my thighs. I though she was going to cup my nuts or grab my wang or something but she stopped just short. Then she turned me around and held me from behind close like we were dancing at some club or something and getting our freak on and she asked me some questions in my ear. It wasn’t really turning me on at all, but if that’s what she likes…. Incidentally, on the topic of club-dancing, have I ever told you about this guy that my friend Amy H. told me about? I may have, I can’t remember. I guess Amy H. was dancing on some dance floor somewhere and she felt something poking at her so she turned around and there was some weird dude there leering at her. He was wearing sweatpants with no underwear, hump-dancing, and rubbing his boner on her. Amy H. was grossed out and she ran off the dance floor. I don’t endorse this dude’s dancing style, but if I was dancing around rubbing my boner sweatpants on somebody and she recoiled in disgust, I think I’d try to come up with some story like I was an artist doing an installation that symbolized a poignant social commentary on the rampant carnality of popular youth dancing. But I guess this guy just gave her a shameless grin and a thumbs-up or something then bonered off back into the dancing crowd. Amy H. told some people about the guy at the club and she found out that he was there every night, and that he always wore sweatpants with no underwear and always had a boner. Wait a minute! Maybe the dude wasn’t a pre-vert at all! Maybe he just has a medical condition that makes him have a permanent boner! And maybe, because of his permanent boner, he can only wear sweatpants with no underwear because if he wore jeans all day, for instance, it might put a lot of strain on the base of his boner - pitching a tent with such heavy fabric, you know - and (to say nothing of the discomfort) possibly break it off. He could bleed to death! Quite frankly, I think it takes a lot of courage to get out there and try to make friends on the dance floor, even though this guy must know that his boner / sweatpants condition will, almost 99% of the time, make him the subject of social scorn. Sigh. He must be the lonliest boner-man in the whole wide world. That is, until he meets that special lady on the dance floor, the one who’ll look beyond his permanent boner condition and see the beautiful person inside. Don’t give up, boner man! You’ll meet her someday! The more I think about it, I admire the boner-man’s pluck. If I had a permanent boner I’d probably just sit in my apartment all day alone, peering out of my peephole at my neighbhors in the hall, writing web-log entries, and knitting humorous rooster-head boner-warmers out of recycled yarn. Anyway, back to this woman I met. I don’t know if she was super impressed with my physique, but after she pulled her hands out of my jacket (where she was totally feeling me up), she said I was “O.K.” Not great, just “O.K.,” but in this day and age it’s not just women who are under a lot of pressure from advertising to have these weird, nearly impossible-to-achieve bodies. Dudes are under that same kind pressure now too! So being “O.K.” is fine with me. I even consider it a bit of a compliment. I’ve been trying to exercise more lately and eat better and get more sleep. I’m happy that she noticed. So now here I am, wondering how to handle the situation. Should I try to call her? Or will that make me seem desperate? Maybe I should just play it cool and wait for her to call. But does she know how to get in contact with me? I don’t know. Maybe I’m just embarrassing myself. Maybe I’m just making a big deal out of nothing. Maybe she does that sort of thing all the time, with all sorts of guys. It’s been a couple of weeks now and I haven’t heard from her. It probably didn’t even mean anything to her.

Brian 3:55 PM (0) comments

Monday, October 11, 2004

I was just barely able to crawl over to this computer. I almost didn't make it. I seem to have come down with some sort of horrible flu. I can't really even speak - all I can do is make pathetic, very quiet, croaking noises. I've been laying on the couch, surrounded by dirty kleenexes and wrapped in quilts, but I still have the chills. I've had to resort to covering myself with cats.

Brian 1:40 PM (0) comments

Sunday, October 10, 2004

I returned to my ancestral homeland to find my mother sick with some sort of horrible flu. When I arrived I saw her car in the driveway but I couldn’t find her inside. I eventually discovered her on the couch in the living room. I guess that she had been trying to call out to me from the time I entered the house, but the only noises she could make were pathetic, very quiet, croaking noises and I didn’t hear her. So there she was, all surrounded by dirty kleenexes, wrapped up in quilts and with a thermometer in her mouth. She was covered in cats. So I’ve been cooking her some ginseng root soup. I’ve read that when a family member is sick in old China, the family will often do whatever it takes to get a piece of the right kind of ginseng root for the soup (I believe it’s “red” or “Panax” ginseng - it’s not that “Siberian Ginseng,” which is a scam, by the way). I don’t remember where I read this about the ginseng soup, so this may or may not be accurate. I think I read about the soup at the same place I got the recipe for it - browse-reading the herbal healing books at this hokey New Age store in my neighborhood, the yellow building with a bunch of new-age stuff painted on the outside of it. Have you seen the pointed hexagonal quartz crystals they sell at that place? They’re huge! I’m not kidding. Some are like the size of half a baseball bat. If somebody was ever, like, hexing me, or giving me the evil eye or something, I’d march down to that store and buy the biggest quartz crystal they had and then I’d use it to zap the shit out of the person cursing me. I’d use it to seriously fuck their cosmic shit up and get their kundalini all twisted up and shit. I’m just kidding. I make it a policy not to zap people with cystals. I just don’t want to get that kind a reputation. Because then if something bad happened to somebody I knew, that person would always be wondering, in the back of his or her mind, things like: “I wonder if the reason [that unlucky thing happened to me] was that fucker Brian Morris zapped me with that big cystal he’s got?” And, for instance, at night when everybody’s walking home separately from a bar, people’d be like: “I was just joking about that thing I said tonight – I hope that fucker Brian Morris doesn’t take it seriously and decide to zap with me that big crystal he’s got!” The worst part about crystal zapping is that you don’t know whether you’ve been zapped or if you’re just having some bad luck, and even if you know you did get zapped, you don’t know by whom or when. So somebody could have a run of perfectly naturally occuring bad luck but think that I zapped them with my crystal, and then they’d maybe buy their own huge crystal and zap me with it even though I didn’t do anything. Then maybe I could retailiate with my huge crystal, but what if they bought an even bigger crystal than me?” See, these are the things that could happen. I don’t know if this herbal Chinese soup is going to help or not. I mean, I don’t doubt it will help some, I just don’t know if it will help enough to counteract all the stress caused by me making a huge mess in the kitchen. I didn’t think she’d know I was cooking – she’s too sick to get off the couch. I tried to be quiet, too, but she figured out what was going on as I was chopping carrots. “What are you doing in there!?” She cried out from the living room. “Oh No! You’re not cooking, are you!?…Are you making a mess?!…Please cook on ‘medium,’ you know that ‘extra-hi’ is bad for the pots and stove!…Woe!” Well, we’ve had that cooking heat level argument before. I can’t help it. I’m an “extra-hi” kind of guy. The soup smells delicious. Everybody around here wants to eat some. But I’m not about to give it to a healthy person, it would fuck their chi up. This isn’t a popularity contest. I have an obligation. If I let people mess their chi up by eating my soup that would make me an irresponsible holistic healer. I’m also trying to stick as closely as possible to the recipe I have (you don’t even want to know what I used as a substitute for “chicken faces”) but everybody wants to add something of their own. I’m not letting them. If they want to make some soup then they’ll just have to go out and get their own ancient Chinese secret.

Brian 3:10 PM (0) comments

Wednesday, October 06, 2004

Does this entry come too soon after the one about Hot Carls? I was googling for something else. I swear. That’s when I ran across this page, which is a build-it-yourself manual authored by some dude named “Ron.” I’ve done a little reading now since I’ve found this page, and I gather that top-of-the-line male chastity belts - the ones that you can wear under your normal clothes for months and months at a time without any discomfort, chafing, or odor - can be really expensive. So before you spend all that money you should try one out for a few days and see if you like it. That’s just plain, old fashioned, good sense. I also discovered that the male chastity belt is not just a weird thing that some dudes like to wear. In fact, some wives use the belts to prevent their husbands from masturbating, an activity (according to their testimonials) that many wives seem to regard as a waste of their husband’s time and makes them less attentive. You can build your own starter male chastity belt and it won’t cost you more than the price of an old leather belt, some PVC pipe, and some doo-dads from the hardware store. That’s what “Ron” did. “Ron” made his belt in two evenings, about three hours total standing nude in his garage. This was after plenty of mental planning, of course, which “Ron” says took him hours and hours. I can only imagine “Ron” is referring to the hours he must have spent at his desk at work, industrious co-workers abuzz around him, while “Ron” daydreamt about his male chastity belt plans - Eureka! I could attach dog choker chains to a D ring and run them under my legs like a jock strap! Now that “Ron” has broken a trail and written up this instruction manual it doesn’t sound that hard to make one either, I mean, if you’re a DIYer and everything.

Brian 10:05 PM (0) comments

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