Monday, Oct. 21, 2002 - 11:02 a.m.
Greetings,
Good gods, it’s Monday and I’m a doofus.
It all started this morning at 6:30 when Tommy discovered that he hadn’t brought home his Barnie’s travel mug as he thought he had. So I let him have my mug.
In the car on the way in, he shared it with me so we both killed it and had less than a cup each. That’s not enough caffeine to jump start my system on a Monday morning – especially one that’s muggy and gives lie to the fact it’s frickin’ fall already.
So as soon as I could get away from my desk, I made my way down to Dunkin’ Donuts practicing my new method of ordering on the way – “Large regular with extra milk, not cream, and extra sugar.”
Got there, ordered, saw her pour in the milk, went to pay and realized I had left the change from the $20 I used to get across the toll bridge this morning in the car.
In the car.
What a moron!
So I had to tell them I’d be back after I went to my car. Some nice guy in an electrician’s outfit wanted to help me out, but I think he thought I needed like a quarter, not the entire amount.
So I ran to the garage and back again.
In the process I’ve discovered that my new Almay deodorant that I purchased at Rite Aid on Friday night with Amy – who told me Almay doesn’t do testing on animals and I’d rather support companies that don’t do that sort of thing – works for shit.
I rarely have pit odor. If I don’t use deodorant at all I usually can’t smell a thing. So why is it that when I vigorously applied the Almay deodorant this morning I now can smell my pits?
Is this some sort of anti-deodorant I’ve purchased?
I have had the luck of a tortoise on a train track with an express bearing down 50 feet away lately when it comes to deodorant.
I bought some of my normal Suave stuff which was on sale. I only realized it was on sale because it was approximately 8,298 days old and therefore had congealed into a rock like substance that would not twist up through the little application holes until after I tried to use it.
Saturday during Sinwood’s weekly cleaning, I tossed that container out with a smug expression and opened up the Almay.
I didn’t use the Almay until today because I have special deodorant from Avon that I used on Caftan Nights and I didn’t go anywhere yesterday so I did not use any.
Oh, and while I’m bitching… my landlord is an asshole.
We’ve asked him for 24 hours advance notice before he brings in anybody to fix stuff. Our relationship has deteriorated over the whole “Tom and Mina should pay for water because it costs 30-50 bucks a month for their apartment because the toilet runs constantly and I don’t feel like fixing it” fiasco, where we agreed to pay for water only after the toilet was fixed and the water bill returned to the normal range that he paid for himself downstairs (which is more like 10 bucks a month). He seemed to find that insulting.
I find it insulting that it’s been 6 months plus and not only does the toilet still run (if we don’t turn off the water after we flush), but also the pipe under the sink might as well not be there and I have to dump smelly sink water from a bucket 1-2 times a day.
Every once in a while the bucket overflows and Jorge gets water spots on his kitchen ceiling. I figure those are good reminders.
He’s “supposedly” scheduled a plumber about 7 times in the past 6 months. Said plumber somehow never shows. We get the whole “It’s a busy city out there and plumbers, electricians and roofers can set their own hours and show up when they want to because they don’t need the business they are so busy” explanation from Jorge when there’s a no show.
Meanwhile people I know and people that Tommy knows have had SAME DAY SERVICE when they need a plumber, electrician or roofer.
Either there’s a conspiracy against Jorge or he just tells us that someone is scheduled to get us off his back for another month.. Not that we’ve ever reminded him that things still leak except for the time when he tried to make us agree to pay for the water bill and we “insulted” him by insisting things got fixed first.
Now he’s taken to emailing us AT WORK to let us know that people are coming into our apartment.
Today, for instance, I found an email dated yesterday (and I believe Jorge knows neither Tom nor I work in the office on Sundays) in my work inbox this morning. This is exactly what it said:
To: Mina and Tom
From: Jorge
Date: Sunday, October 20, 2002
Mina/Tom: the plumber will probably come to the apartment tomorrow afternoon, around 4 p.m.,
thanks
Jorge
“Probably” my ass.
Luckily the bathroom is clean and I just changed the garbage under the sink and the kitchen is clean. There will be a full pail of ucky water waiting though because I ran the dishwasher before I left this morning.
But who the fuck am I kidding, as if I’d get home tonight and discover new pipes under the sink and a rebuilt toilet tank that doesn’t constantly run.
I’m sure something will prevent the plumber from arriving around 4 p.m. this afternoon. If Jorge even called.
I sometimes wonder if Tom and I are horrible tenants in that twice now we’ve lived up above or next door t our landlord and have ultimately alienated them both because we didn’t want to be butt buddies and go to BBQs and parties and hang out and talk about Death and get insulted and sneered at because of our taste in music and literature.
For some reason wanting to be left alone is a crime. Only calling to report a problem with the apartment is some sort of sin.
At least previous landlord always fixed things. The trouble with her is that she used to just waltz in all the time to check and make sure we were telling her everything.
Jorge does the whole passive/aggressive ignore them routine.
On the whole, I prefer this way even if I do have to empty smelly water twice a day from under the sink.
At any rate, the Dunkin’ Donuts coffee is great this morning. I ended tipping them a buck because I made them wait for me to run back to my car for money. And because I saw her pouring milk into my cup. And because it’s Monday and it probably sucks to work at Dunkin’ Donuts on a Monday.
I was reading online this morning that a Krispy Kreme shop opened up on the Berlin Turnpike in Newington, Connecticut last week.
I remember the Berlin Turnpike well. It was a long strip of semi-highway with video stores, Radio Shacks and restaurants on either side of it. Oh, and it was home to the Grantmoor motel – the Hartford area’s sleazy “afternoon delight” motel that rented rooms by the hour and had themes in many of them. Jungle Room, Dungeon Room, heart-shaped with mirrors everywhere room, etc.
I used to go to a great seafood restaurant there too. The Blue Lobster. Up front they sold fresh seafood, in the back were a few uneven old tables. You brought your own wine and everything was served on Styrofoam. I used to love to go there on Friday nights in the summer until the night a cockroach the size of a golf ball ran across my table and disappeared into a crack in the wall.
Of course, if I stuck to that criteria here in New Orleans, I’d never eat out again. Plus cockroaches here are a fact of life. In Connecticut they spell F-I-L-T-H.
Anyway, apparently the Krispy Kreme store is generating so much business that there have been traffic jams and accidents for a week. The shop had to pay for traffic cops for Christ’s sake.
I’ve tasted Krispy Kreme doughnuts, and frankly, I wouldn’t cross the street to get another one anytime soon. It’s just a mouthful of sugary air. There’s no substance.
And no doughnut is good enough to wreck your car over or wait in line for three hours for. I’m sorry.
If the Grantmoor is nearby though, you could put your car in park and rush over for a quickie in the Jungle Room while you waited I suppose.
Saturday night was Ken’s Birthday Caftan Night. My frickin’ blue caftan, freshly laundered, was static clingy even though I used a dryer sheet. But whatever.
The night passed in a lovely candlelit blur punctuated by Bryan Ferry music and Dark Shadows episodes. I called Ken on my cell phone from my Museum and watched my Halloween white taper candle in my skull holder drip red wax all over. Only it was more pink than red since it mixed with the white wax a bit.
My lava lamp was being a bit sulky and refused to really go through his usual repertoire of small bubbles to large bubbles, to big blobs and just went straight into the big blob on the bottom that sometimes ripples. Very boring. That’s what Tommy’s lava lamp does all the time. We both need new, perky lava lamps that bubble and morph for more than 2 hours.
I think lava lamps all have personalities. Mine, for instance, a lovely pink one named Tenebrae Tom, used to belong to my psychic vampire friend Andrew. He sold it to me when he got himself a black light lave lamp that was more hip and now and progressive than plain old, ordinary pink.
When I first had Tenebrae, he used to bubble and morph all night long once he got warmed up. He’d get to the big blob on the bottom stage after 4 or 5 hours. Maybe. It just depended.
This behavior lasted until about last year when I noticed that he’d become rather moody. And that his routine lasted about 2 hours now from warm up to big blob.
Over the past year it’s hit or miss whether he goes through the routine or just jumps straight to big blob on the bottom. I can only assume it’s mood. And perhaps he’s irritated because instead of a position in the main room where all the action is, he mainly gets to bubble and morph to an audience consisting of a skull candle holder and a bunch of other decorations that make up my Museum’s macabre atmosphere. I usually am only in the room during my bath when I can’t even see the lamp, while I’m changing (and sometimes he’ll be in “blood mist” little bubbles at this point, although usually he’s just warming up and sending up small, slow, exploratory blobs, and during Limbo, (which is a 2 minute song) when he’s usually in blood mist mode. Then off and on I’ll go in there for bathroom breaks for the rest of the evening.
Probably he’s just ticked off because I don’t pay enough attention to him. In the old days he was front and center in my Gothic Retreat and I watched him all night long. At the Manchester apartment he bubbled away in the bedroom or the kitchen and had a pretty constant audience, although not as dedicated as in the Gothic Retreat.
I’m wondering what he’d do if I got myself a new lava lamp, maybe one of the black light kinds or the clear with burgundy lava. Would he go ballistic and revert to his old habits so he could try to out flaunt the new lamp? Would he simply sullenly brood in a big blob all the time and not even go through the motions? Would he jump off his stand and go over and kick the new lamp’s ass when I wasn’t looking?
Tommy’s lava lamp, LuMina, (yes, okay, we were anal retentive lavenders when we got our lamps and named them after each other – but this was during Our Conversation and we only spoke through faxes and so naming our lamps provided us with a tangible link as well as being sort of silly) has always been a moody bitch. She sometimes gets the huge blobby thing going, but she has never had the little bubbles and usually sits in a big blob at the bottom. She’s not defective, just moody.
Tommy doesn’t even turn her on these days. In fact, when Tommy’s bulb burned out the last time, I snagged LuMina’s and I don’t think Tommy (the person, not the lava lamp) ever even noticed.
He too wants a new lava lamp. They are ridiculously cheap these days so I don’t know why we haven’t stopped in at that store in the Riverwalk that sells them for like $15. Maybe it’s because we are afraid of the lava lamps we already have.
And how do we know their personalities until we get them home, plugged in, and warmed up?
Eh, I guess we’ll have to take the risk. However, I’m not looking forward to explaining to Tom (the lamp not the person) that he’s getting a brother or sister.
Until next time,
Olrun
