Just a test.
The Vomiting Aura - 12/16/10
If you happen to be a member of the Armenian Apostolic Church, I bid you a Merry Christmas on this the 6th day of January, and also a Happy Epiphany, since you celebrate both on this day. Is it standard wishing procedure to say “Happy” Epiphany? I’m not sure. But since it’s Christmas for y’all, and since it’s a new year, I have gifts for you… and for the whole world for that matter. That’s right. I bequeath upon the entire world this gargantuan gift of………………… 20 migraine drawings added to the Doodle Sam website! And what better day to do so than on this day when I just so happen to have my first migraine of the new year?!
(Oh please! Don’t look so slighted! Christmas isn’t really about the gifts, right? I could have given you nothing. Be thankful. Don’t you know children are starving in China? And be patient. The link is at the end of the article.)
So, for the record, I had 20 migraines in 2010. That’s very close to 6% worth of the year. (My son told me, “Oh! Don’t do math! You’re only going to make it worse!”) To put it into perspective, a co-worker said, “6% doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you think that we get 23 days of sick/vacation time per year, if you took a day off for each migraine you would only have 3 days left for vacation!”
But I don’t take days off for migraines. I take drugs instead… “Hello, Fiorinal… whose name sounds like a fixture that I piss in…” and try to plow through these days. I usually feel like a turd the following day, a condition I refer to as “migraine hangover.” Speaking of which, if I drink while strung out on Fiorinal, not only do I require frequent urinal visitations (I visit them. They don’t come to me.), but I get messed up to the point I end up sprawled out on the floor. Once I ended up on a floor upon which I had no business being so prostratedly drunk. But that’s not really a story for Christmas Day, be ye Armenian or otherwise. Maybe another time. Or maybe not, as that’s something I don’t want y’all to know about me.
(Oh hell, I let the cat out of the bag again. The drunken one this time.)
Enough babbling from me. I know y’all are itching to receive this glorious gift I extend to you upon mine open hand. (Why do I keep saying “y’all” when I’m from New Jersey??) Click here to unwrap and cherish such marvelous benefaction: Doodle Sam dot Com. It’s like a digital Epiphany in its own right.
Merry Christmas. Happy New Year. And “God bless us, every one!” Even you Armenians.
Yummy.
I got distracted.
Gotta go to Dakota
Not surprising that WV is my “worst state.” That’s where my divorce happened.
Big Pile O' Riches
But let me ask your opinion. Is it okay to wear brown with black? I could not remember while I was in the store. I called nearly every woman on the planet, at least the ones whose numbers are in my phone. Finally, I reached my daughter, Hannah, who was in NYC with her grandparents at that moment.
“Hannah, I need some fashion advice. Is it okay to wear brown with black?”
“WHAT?” she replied. Not “what?” as in “I can’t hear you, Dad,” but “what?” as in, “Are you retarded, Dad?”
After she laughed at me, I quickly ran back to the shirt section and dropped the two brown shirts I was carrying – before the whole store erupted in hideous womanly laughter at my expense. I picked out green, black and burgundy shirts instead. They definitely go with black.
Having escaped the men’s department unnoticed, I stood in line as the heavily makeup-clad 60-something cashier asked each customer in turn, “Do you have a store credit card?”
“Yes, here it is.”
“Do you have a store credit card?”
“Yes, here it is.”
“Do you have a store credit card?”
“Yes, here it is.”
“Do you have a store credit card?”
“Nope.”
That was me. I don’t have a store credit card.
“Do you want to apply for one and save 20% off your purchase today?”
“Nope.”
That was me again.
“You don’t?”
“Nope.”
What did she not understand about “Nope” the first time?
“That will be $83.27.”
“Here’s my non-store debit card of choice.”
The lovely cashier watched me with suspicion as she bagged my items. (The lovely bag watched me as she cashiered my suspicious items.) She lifted the bag toward me as if it contained a barely breathing fetus and disdainfully muttered, “Thank you. You saved $109 today.”
Now stop right there. I spent $83.27. I didn’t save anything! This woman obviously did not understand the difference. Perhaps the 15 pounds of rouge on her cheeks was causing her brain to sag. How does she figure I saved anything? Okay, the items I bought were on sale. Maybe at full price I would have paid $109 more. (Not really. I wouldn’t spend that much on clothes!) But I didn’t save anything! Where is the $109 dollars? Is it in my savings account? Nope. There’s only $15.54 in there. Why do I even have a savings account? I never have anything to put in it. Does anyone these days have anything to save? I want the $109 that plaster face told me I saved! Boy, scrape all that clay off her face and you could make a life-sized statue of David, something like this.
I don’t know. The whole little exchange just annoyed me. The only thing that was saved was a bit of my fashion dignity by avoiding brown with black. (Thank you, Hannah.) I’m sure Lady Covergirl would have pointed that out when I got to the register.
“Do you have a store credit…. OH MY GOD! YOU’RE GONNA WEAR BROWN WITH BLACK?!”
Shut up, putty face.
Now I’m going to withdraw that $15 to get me through to next pay day. That’s a fair amount of pasta right there.
Bummer.
I am currently reading Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut. This passage was so good I’m going to post the whole thing:
Billy looked at the clock on the gas stove. He had an hour to kill before the saucer [flying] came. He went into the living room, swinging the bottle [champagne] like a dinner bell, turned on the television. He came slightly unstuck in time, saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this:
American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.
The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted them into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.
When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. the minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.
The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn’t in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed.
Never fake a migraine. For the next time you experience a real one, it will punish you mercilessly, like a Nazi.
The View from Here
So, now I am flat on my back on a heating pad. I haven’t quite figured out the safest ways to move and without warning I am finding myself in the vice grip clutch of back spasms. I thought I was fine this morning. But then I made the mistake of thinking I could actually walk in a hominid-like upright position in an attempt to forage for sustenance in the currently de-evolutional zone which is my kitchen. Doing dishes is beyond the abilities of a Neanderthal like me, not to be expected but by the grace of natural selection, which hopefully will enable me to straighten up enough to peer over the sink’s edge within the next several millennia. I did manage to eek out a cup of coffee and a Rice Krispie treat for breakfast.
Meanwhile, Doomsday is approaching. I go back to work on Wednesday. Less than a week now. It’s still six days away, but already I am fighting off depression. My two week disability for migraines turned into four weeks when the doctor changed my medication. He put me on a beta blocker because they help high blood pressure and migraines. Someone told me beta blockers also cause “reptile dysfunction.” I said, “Holy hell! I certainly don’t want the ol’ T. Rex getting all flabby!” But I don’t want migraines or strokes either. After a week on the new medicine there have been no migraines, no strokes, and Rex is still the King of the Mesozoic.
Now, if I could just get the rest of my body straight…
