Not so much

S: I put some water on your flowers. The geranium looked all right, but the pansies were looking a bit wilted.



M: Are you sure?

S: Yeah.

M: I guess I should have known by the name that they weren't going to be up for much.

The Constant Gardener. Okay, so I garden sporadically. Anyhow, my advice to all planting folk is that geraniums are the way to go. Our geranium has already sprouted twice and is putting out two more blossoms as I type. I love that little thing. Pansies are, well they are pansies. They give you a splash of color and then die immediately. It's like meeting that really pretty girl who you've been starting at across the room all night. And finally, finally you've made your way across that vast space and you're talking to her and it takes about thirty seconds for you to discover that he/she is completely vacuous. Game over. Thank you Swingers!

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I was also pretty pumped about my plans on Thursday night, which involved me going home and spraying round up on every piece of green in our alley. We love the environment and all, but I don't think it's acceptable for poison ivy to be growing in our back yard.

M: Welcome to our yard. Check out the patio furniture and the nice green grass.

G: It's so nice!

M: Don't you bs me or I'll toss you in the poison ivy! On second thought, maybe I should keep the poison ivy. Note: The shed skit from way back is sort of my ideal of how a BBQ (sorry, that's what we call it in CA) should go.

I'd like to link the video but the internet has failed me. I blame Google.

Other things that I need to complain about:

People who keep saying, "Well, you're going to love that cold basement during the summer."

Guess what? The summer in D.C. lasts about two months. That means that for the other ten months of the year it pretty much sucks to be in our basement unless you've got a team of sled dogs and a strong desire to build an igloo, you're pretty much SOL in terms of enjoying yourself in our basement. I just don't think the two month trade off is worth the ten minutes of arctic temps. Maybe I'm wrong. I struggled in math early in life, but I do believe that 10 is a larger number than 2.

Maybe we should just put in an ice skating rink. Wouldn't that be nice? Everyone could bring by their best guy or gal and skate around for a while in our basement. Maybe we could serve drinks from the bar and watch people "fall" in love. You see, that's a joke that has to do with people falling because of the inebriation, mixed with the cliche of people who ice skate falling in love. Here is a picture of Tanith Belbin. Sorry S.



Anyhow, my strong desire to skate like Johnny Weir with Tanith is really traceable to seventh grade when Tana did not love me, and instead, hung out with guys like ten years older with mustaches and access to fast cars and drugs and that sort of stuff. If you have any other ideas of what to do in a frozen basement be sure and let me know.

I guess I better make up for it in case S reads this entry. Here is a picture of Lee Adama for you.



Sometimes I write fiction:

I’d been praying for something miraculous to happen, yesterday seemed like it might be the day until my cat threw up on the floor. The glob of star-shaped food matted into the carpet made it hard to imagine anything out of the ordinary. Today, my cat was fine. She woke me by brushing her whiskers across my cheek, and we spent the morning lying in an aquarium of light.

I poured a bowl of cereal even though I didn’t have clean spoons. The prize came out first, rattling around in the bottom of the bowl. It was a new spoon. I could tell that after years of failure things were turning around. The earth had shifted on its axis while I was sleeping and was spinning the way it was always meant to.

I read the newspaper but skipped the parts about children disappearing and fires burning near homes. I read a story about a man who saved a boy from drowning in the Pacific. Maybe life had been dirty and cruel because that’s all we ever see. Maybe the world was like the surface of the ocean, where seals are flipped in the air by sharks but underneath lie symbiotic relationships of cyclical beauty.

I decided to start a magazine that would only report good things. It would have pictures of pets that had been found, not lost. Instead of pictures of kids with distended bellies, we’d have children playing baseball or eating a bowl full of rice donated by generous people who could possibly even be us. Our front cover would not say 45 Ways To Get Him Hot In Bed. It would say 45 Ways to Love The Beautiful And Unique Person That Is You.