Good Morning...

...Smoochensteinableiacolishinessensmooles. Partly I'm typing this so I could write that out while Zorro head-butts my arm like a battering ram laying siege to the citadel of Smoon.

So, at the end of a day, amid helices of wood shavings and scattered pinches of sawdust, past the coil of a compressor hose still coated with autistic cat piss, in the shin-high shadow of a promising-yet-unfinished portable bird perch, and as Zorro now presumptuously defrocks my lap despite the occupancy of it by this shiny clicking writing machine, I propose we leave tomorrow (Thursday).

We're not ready to leave, quite frankly, and won't be until late (even for me). With a Thursday departure, we (or I, more to the point) would have 9 days at the Casa de la Ledge ("There ain't no vista and there ain't no view, and there sure ain't no vista of no view") with 2 days up and 2 days back (I'd tell you that you could double-check that if you like, but that would be like telling the sky it could rain--you know, if it felt like it...) Anyway, that will be enough time to do the Atlasian, manish shit I do. If you would walk around without your clothes on and periodically molest me, things would go faster and harder, er, faster and wetter, er, faster and nevermind. Just sayin'.

I can still pick up the van as scheduled, and we have until 4pm to reschedule the West Bestern room in Macon without penal servility. Leaving auwefhbjk (that's Mr. Z's word for "Thursday"--apparently he understands English but rejects its parochial limitations when expressing himself) will permit us to get done all them things we need to get done.

I'm tired. I was upset but I feel better now. Just remember, Kant never could do anything...

On windows, and wrapping them

Not sure why the window wrap looks like ghetto when ghetto was ass. Handful of guesses:

1. I suck at this
2. Anyone sucks at this without another person
3. Wrong material
4. Wrong tape
5. Ball-sucking technique with heat gun
6. 1-5, cubed
7. When they say "insulate windows" on the packaging, they mean windows no-one looks through
8. When they say "crystal clear" they either mean: (a) Not for you, dummy; (b) A crystal that has fallen, shattered, and been super-glued back together again.

To think I lost a whole day in the shop for this garbage.

BUT...

[rest of note lost to marauding cats]

Wal-Mart, Thanksgiving night

Wal-Mart: neo-synonymous with carnage. Acres of redneck mamas and baby daddies standing in dense, serpentine lines, beer-bellied NASCAR dads lounging in lawn chairs, children sprawled sleeping across unrolled styrofoam--all of them waiting tensely, their eyes darting around the florescence slightly in time with the peppy, jingling Christmas music prancing merrily in the background.

Waiting to pound each other into fruitcake at 5am and lunge at the pimply stock boy who will haul out a lorry of shitty-resolution "HDTVs" discounted by a hundred bucks.

Whole aisles roped off for no discernible reason, cordoned off and vacant, or clogged with mile-long lines of whooping and cackling shoppers, leaning on their shopping carts, rolling them back and forth restlessly, scanning the Black Friday insert for anything they might have missed.

Gangs of children root through bins of $5 DVDs. A wild-eyed, slightly homeless-looking man walks up to a gaggle of leather-faced women and demands to know where the line for the shitty-resolution laptop discounted by a hundred bucks is. They look at him like he had let them in on the secret that when he feels sad he sometimes likes to eat his own poop, then they turn from him and go back to yakking about their children, who have names like Skylar and JT.

The wild-eyed man says something caustically about asking a "simple question" and one of the leather women turns on him and says (listen, poop-eater), "We don't work here."

Friends and family work in relay, bringing one another Slim Jims, Twinkies, cheese crackers, and Red Bull, then stand in for them while they go to the bathroom.

After clearing the Soviet-style bread-line that trickles back from the registers like cracks in ice, they file out to their vehicles, stash their loot, and drive into the American-style bread line waiting to leave the parking lot.

I was trapped in the store until 3:30; I went to bed at 6. But we got a printer for 29 bucks, a ShopVac for 15, a paper shredder for 20, and I picked up two Rubbermaid travel container sets for you to port your inimitable culinary concoctions (9 & 15 dollars respectively). Plus, the handle on the dishwasher fixed itself using the $5 ratcheting screwdriver I got. (I threatened to take it to Wal-Mart and leave it there...).

Ho-fucking-ho.

--Spoon