Susan walked in tonight after dinner clutching a handful of crappy little objects: a bent fork, a bruised apple, a Barbie's head, and the plastic top from a Tylenol container. She laid them out in a row on the floor and asked Todd, "Hey, Todd, what's this?"
We all looked at this sad little row of debris and none of us had a clue.
Todd said, "I Dunno."
She said, "It's a Russian garage sale."
We all said, "Boohoo . . ." expecting Todd to freak out, and he did get
huffy.
"I know, I know," she said preemptively, "the Russians are supposed to be our friends now. But face it, Todd-they'll never get it right. Capitalism is something that's ingrained in you from birth. There's more to developing a market economy than pulling a switch and suddenly being a capitalist
overnight. As a child you need to read about Lucy's 5-cent psychiatry booth in Charlie Brown; game shows; mailing away for Sea Monkeys-it's all a part of being 'encapitalized.'"
She removed the Barbie head from the lineup of objects: "Probably too good."
Later on, Susan and Karla were cackling together. I asked them what about and they shot guilty looks at each other. "Barbies," said Karla.
Susan added, "It's like every girl I know did all this incredibly sick sex shit with their Barbies, and in the end the head and/or limbs would fall off and you'd have to hide her but your Mom always found the dismembered Barbie and would say, 'Gee, honey-what happened to Barbie?'"
"Oh God-you'd just be dying of shame, remembering the debauch that landed her in the degraded state." (More cackling.)
"I remember when my Barbie discovered my brother's G.I. Joe's," said Karla. "Talk about a spree. She was in fragments within an hour." "Oh my God-me too!" said Susan. "Hair gone, too?"
"Yup."
I was feeling a bit excluded and cut out discreetly, leaving more cackles in my wake. How can the two of them both have done the exact same things?
My body no longer kills me when I come back from the gym. However, I had a moment of total humiliation today: theoretically my ideal body weight is 172 pounds and I weigh 153 Ibs. The woman at the gym calibrated my fat/water/meat/bone ratios, made an inward gasp and I asked her what was wrong. She said (after a tentative, you-have-cancer pause), "You're what's technically known as a 'thin fat person.'"
It was so degrading. Not only am I skinny, but what meat I do possess isn't meat at all, but lard. I have to burn that off before I can even begin beefing up. I don't even deserve the honor of calling myself carbon-based, let alone silicon-based- maybe I'm based on one of those useless elements like boron that don't do anything.
I'm not telling Karla about this one.
THURSDAY
Word leaked out at the office that I'm a thin fat person (the gym lady blabbed to Todd) and I had to endure a barrage of crude jokes at my expense for 14 hours. Todd pulled me aside and gave me a canister of amino acids and a pep talk.
Dad started work today at Delta. He popped into the Oop! office to show his face on the way back. Susan, Bug, and Michael pleaded for some access into the Delta system or at least something they could start to hack with. Michael wanted to add ten million frequent flyer points to his account: "I want to fly to the South Pole, first class, Saudi Airlines, with a sleeper seat, and Reuben Kincaid sleep goggles made of passenger pigeon breast feathers."
Across the street from our house, these little kids were having a tiny garage sale: a single, spine-worn copy of Cosmopolitan, two filthy Big Bird toys, a paperback of Future Shock, and a cowboy boot remover. It was so depressing-and eerily similar to Susan's joke about Russian garage sales. Karla said, "Susan's right. The Russians'll never catch up."
Ethan, over for a visit, said, "Au contraire, pal, they'll probably outlap us shortly."
Dusty was barfing all over the office sink when I came in this morning. She said she'd been working out too hard at the gym.
Abe:
My magnetic card keys fucked upa nd I couldn't get into the building and I gfelt like I'd stopped enlisting
FRIDAY
Todd burst in this morning: "I'm a Maoist now!"
The rest of us are so numb from politics now we couldn't even muster up the will to shoot him a yawn.
"You do know the three forms of Communism, don't you?"
"No, Todd. But I'm sure you'll let us know."
"Oh good . . .
"First, there's Marxist Leninism.
"Second, there's Stalinism-well, actually, Stalinism is an application, not an operating system. I mean, if you want to wipe out 40 million people, you install Stalinism on your hard drive. It's like a political ebola virus."
Susan likened the Stalinist purges to those at IBM.
"Finally, there's Maoism. Maoism is about the total elimination of all culture. Anything that smacks of culture is bad. Everything from cocktail umbrellas up to Mozart. It all has to go."
I said, "That's dreadful, Todd- culture is everything. Without culture we're nothing. You're telling me you'd have all existing Bob Newhart reruns destroyed!"
"Bob Newhart romanticizes decadent, self-absorbed bourgeois liberal therapeutic culture. It is redeemable only in that therapy repudiates the Church."
"Sounds like a pretty chuckle-free universe to me," said Karla.
"More to life than chuckles, Kar," said Todd, frappeing a can of Del Monte pineapple and some form of protein powder in the office blender. "It's obvious-culture must perish."
"Why?" I asked.
"I'm not sure. Just that it must. I'm working on that one. Oh look- there's Dusty down on the street- we're off to our posing seminar. Gold's just had new daises delivered. Ciao, comrades."
Glurp. Guzzle. Chug. Slam.
"Be sure and flex one for me."
"Can't those two just code?" moaned Michael in a rare show of feeling. So now the Gang of Two (Boris and Natasha no more) are onto their next political kick.
Abe:
Went into Microsoft. Spent most of the morning entering my old vynyl records into a database Iv'e built. Filemaker Prod by Claris gets to Track my CHS tape collection..
Questions: Can you gusess what this is by the ingeredients?
SD Alcohol
LVater
Tween 20
Glycerine
Flavor
Sodium Sacchharine
FD&CBlueNQI
"Made in USA"
Keep guessing. I'll give you the answer later. [Answer: ice
Drops icy-mint breath freshener.]
Dusty was telling us later on all of this cool body stuff: about an aerobic drug, RPO, that enhances the body's ability to metabolize oxygen. Rumor has it a French bicycling team all died of heart attacks using it. And she discussed how too many steroids make women grow hair and can make users "acromegliac"-their craniums distort.
Oh-Dusty barfed up whole Lake Superiors of muck all morning. I wonder what's up with that.
Some new diet regime, doubtless.
Ethan says Type-A personalities have a whole subset of diseases that they, and only they, share, and the transmission vector for these diseases is the door close button on elevators that only get pushed by impatient, Type-A people. Ethan pushes these buttons with his elbow, now. I'm starting lo worry about all of us.
In the spirit of Ethan's neurosis, we made a dry wall list of keyboard bill tons we would like to see:
PLEASE
THANK YOU
FUCK OFF
DIE
OOPS.. .MYMISTAKE
DO SOMETHING COOL AND SURPRISE ME
Later, everyone got in a debate over whether or not Fisher Price's minifigs were cooler than Lego's. The debate went onto the drywalclass="underline"
FISHER PRICE minifigs versus LEGO minifigs
Fisher Price Minifigs:
Plus: limbless figures give children a feeling of helplessness