Once more dyed the rich red colour of sockeye salmon

real outfits for the lads: Smug Mountie is drunk with lemonade and power
real outfits for the lads: future redneck rancher is two seconds away from whuppin' you
real outfits for the lads: you can't see it, but this kid's wearing chaps.
Flashy Gene Autry sling style holster, with artificial firearm and Curse of Gene Autry
Real outfits for the panicked Home Front

Vitals

Written by the guy who hums to himself as he paws through the dumpster

Fueled by rage and fresh roasted peanuts

Design by
Die Schmutz

Worthwhile Palinode Pages:
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Can't Stop the Link:
palinode's bloggier blog
The Modern Word
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sex & guts!
the memory hole
national pist
Milkmoney or Not
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The Web Revolution!

Fueled by rage and fresh roasted peanuts

dubious joys of symmetry

PLEASE SOMEBODY COME OVER AND STEAL OUR TEA TOWELS AND OUR SOCKS

In The Lotus' family, it is considered good form to give us holiday-themed tea towels and black socks at the slightest provocation. Now my underwear drawer is a mass of tangled socks slowly squeezing the life out of my boxer briefs. Every so often I hang a grocery bag of socks from the bedroom doorknob in the hopes of someday laying them out and matching them up with their mates. Eventually the bag falls to the floor and the socks scurry off to all corners of the apartment, where they catch dust and wait to be thrown back into the washing machine.

We have developed a more refined system for the tea towels. Towels are cycled through four positions: 1) folded in the drawer; 2)hanging off the stove handle; 3)lying in the laundry basket; 4)sitting in the garbage OR once again folded in the drawer. Whenever a tea towel leaves position number 3, we examine it for the following: 1)does it have a Santa Claus or an Easter Bunny or a Happy Turkey print?; 2)after several washings, is Santa's suit still running? 3) after several washings, does the fabric still have the texture of woven glass? If the answer to any of these is yes, then the towel is placed in the garbage.

This is a nominally excellent system, but somehow it has not worked. Our tea towel drawer is full of jolly Santas and festive prints. Why this is I do not and may never know, because I'm not here every moment of the day; and therefore I want Vigilance; and from my want of Vigilance springs Opportunity; and as Opportunity gestates Sin, the Sin finds Expression in Excess of Tea Towels. Well, that's what the medieval philosopher who lives in the laundry room told me.


OBSESSIVE HABITS I HAVE DISPLAYED AT ONE TIME OR ANOTHER, FROM THE AGE OF TWO ONWARD (in no particular order)

cleaning out computer keyoards with a bent paper clip

refusing to pass between a lamp post and a building, since that would either break some kind of invisible thread or land me in some parallel dimension where everything appears similar but is actually hellishly different. I mean, who wants to come home to weird alt-dimensional copies of your parents? Who knows what strange substances they're made of?

refusing to let the pets in until I've made sure they cast shadows, because vampires will try all sorts of tricks to get in to the house

picking my nose

sleeping with a pillow case or T-shirt over my head, because there was a creature from an old Swamp Thing comic who invaded a cruise liner and took over people's minds by placing a third eye on their foreheads. They lost their own eyes and grew tentacles for arms and generally displayed hostile behaviour towards others, and I'd be damned if I was going to let that happen to me.

checking a corner of the bedroom every night for those alien face-huggers. I'm telling you, never let a ten year old watch those movies.

putting down a book only after making sure that the page I'm reading isn't a multiple of thirteen. This sounds time consuming, but I've developed a rough-and-ready series of mathematical shortcuts based around a few memorized key numbers. Ask me about it sometime.

most annoying of all: an insane need for symmetry. If my right arm brushed a tree branch on my way to school, I couldn't relax until I'd contrived a way to reproduce that sensation on my left arm. If the street was deserted, I'd simply turn around and walk back into the branch. If I spotted someone nearby, though, I would have to find another tree branch somewhere as soon as possible, while my right arm grew heavier and heavier with the weight of the unbalanced sensation. Sometimes I'd resort to the "whoops, just dropped a coin, better turn back and find it" gambit, but often that felt too ridiculous, and I didn't want to look like someone who was so intent on picking up a dropped coin that he walked twice into the same tree branch. The craving for symmetry just about drove me nuts, even though 'nuts' is a pretty relative term when you're scouting out streets for appropriate tree branches.

That's actually only a small sample of the strange habits that I've picked up and discarded. I've found that if I flush one out, another will pop up and hijack my behaviour. My strange book habit only appeared after I'd beaten both the compulsive symmetry and the pillow-case-over-the-face thing, which was pretty weird. The trick is to pick the compulsion that best suits your modern lifestyle and stick with it. And remember to establish a sufficiently flexible system of rules around your compulsion, one which enables you to make shortcuts and occasionally cheat. Very important.

Retracted on 2003-02-23::2:01 p.m.


parode - exode


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