Wheel! Of! FISH!

Cough, cough, fizz, fizz.

2003-08-11 - 8:15 p.m.

Soundtrack: "Atheists in Foxholes" by Grant

Threat for the Day: "My katana thirsts for your blood like a Frenchman thirsts for wine!"

Man.

Looking back on my entry yesterday, I think it's safe to say that I have entirely too much time on my hands, and there's not a sink in sight.

And since I've dropped so many chronons to no good end anyway, let me take this time to point out some of the new salient features of my diary. The top graphic comes from the Interdimensional Pixie Broadcast Network, modified by myself, and if you click on it you'll be linked back to my rigorously exhausting biography page. Below us is the mysterious Battle image, which comes from a public image archive. I have no idea of its origins beyond that point, but I did the imagemapping and added the clever vertical words, and from there you can get back to Diaryland, or to my amazingly clever profile, or to my guestbook, which is not nearly full enough. Below THAT mighty span, we've got some new picture links that I spent entirely too much time toying with and designing. Let's see ... that's a link to my alma mater, the New College of Florida; a charming animated banner for Sluggy Freelance from that same page; a Venus Envy banner from the artist's page; and a link to Julieclipse's non-Diaryland domain, which is hours of entertainment. Below that, we have a number of ways to contact yours truly ... and a link to the Evil Monkey Society for entirely nefarious Illuminated reasons. The little fellow on the Fan Mail link is a pixel-by-pixel drawing of my avatar in the WWE Smackdown! wrestling game series done by my own hand. That notes link is an Agent Smith picture I modified into some sort of bizarre representation of myself from my Invisibles entry. And the link to the shrine to me erected by Charspider on AOL is a drawing by that same much revered artist. Click on all of them. Leave me notes. Put stuff in my guestbook. Write to me. Love me. LOOOOVE me!

*cough, cough, hack, hack*

I picked up some sort of hideous Pacific lung virus my fourth day in Washington, and I've been alternating between feeling relatively fine -- albeit with a head stuffed with mortar and helium -- and feeling like my lungs are collapsing into a microsingularity that will suck the rest of my body after it like a gummi bear in a Hoover, leaving behind only a faint, echoing *POP!* and the smell of Robitussin.

Robitussin comes in two flavors; dextromethorphan hydrobromide, and guaifenisin. The former is a suppressant, acting in some occult fashion on your central nervous system to restrain the unconscious reaction that causes your body to be wracked with tissue-tearing hacks and wheezes. The latter is an expectorant, oozing through your membranes and making your secretions more fluid, and thus theoretically easier to choke up and expel in a huge, glistening yellow wad on the kitchen floor.

Dex is something of a dissociative and also causes nausea and auditory hallucinations, so I'd recommend it with heavy meals like turkey and roast beef. The thinning of your secretions offered by guaifenisin is very complementary, contrariwise, to a meal with an aromatic sauce or light flavor, such as trout.

Mixing them results in a brick-red cocktail that tastes rather like vodka and Dutch heering mixed with Kool-Aid and menthol cigarettes.

I don't enjoy being sick, much.

Especially since it's costing me a great deal of entertainment on this vacation. It's made it impossible for me to travel to Waldron Island, which I was quite interested in seeing, and it's made it a chancy prospect for me to go into town much, since the cold sea air and slanting sidewalks don't agree with my degenerating respiratory system.

At least the house I'm in is nice, and there's interesting people to talk to. I attended a debutante ball at a Masonic lodge the other night, and was entertained with live light opera and string music and fed on cucumber sandwiches, brie, and M&Ms. I wore a labcoat and pretended I was an eccentric gentleman from Bristol who had been torn away from his studies of a new form of inhaled vitriol as a cough remedy to attend this ball, due to a certain noblesse oblige that came with my revered family name.

I also poked around the lodge a bit. Did you know the Masons have pentagons everywhere? There's pedestals and wall hangings and plates modeled after them. And so many robes. And hats. And strange metal things.

All this ceremony is wasted on fishmongers and aldermen. I'm going to see if I can find a flagging Masonic lodge somewhere and buy them out and take all their mystic trappings to put together a DECENT secret society somewhere. One with real secrets. One with arcane rituals. One with heroic myths.

One with locking doors.

Also on the positive side of the Libra, there's lots of media here to entertain me. I've watched Fight Club, Remember the Titans, Brain Candy, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and The Collected Shorts of Louis C.K.. Highly amusing stuff, and I hadn't seen Titans before. Much better than the box art or movie summary would've led me to believe. Denzel Washington can pull an entertaining performance out of almost anything. And there's Platypus' week worth of MP3s, which are starting to take on a sinister, illicit delight, like bathtub gin or Cuban caramel. I guess that's ONE good thing RIAA has done. I'm all for the criminal culture. Look at all the good times we had during the gangster era.

Safeway grocery stores have incredible sandwiches. INCREDIBLE. As in, I don't believe in them. I'm eating one right now, and I don't quite believe in it. Why the hell does a grocery chain have sandwiches this good? Grocery store sandwiches are supposed to be last-minute bites to eat snagged while you're in there to get some dramamine, Benadryl, Jolt cola, Triscuits and Sani-Wipes for your cross-country road trip to see some decaying '60s folk act. "Oh, hell," you're supposed to say, "I haven't had any vegetables or protein for eight days. I'd better grab one of these lousy sandwiches." It's the same reaction people used to have to convenience store food back when it was actually possible to consume it without dying of benzoate shock. And then you're supposed to unwrap the shoddy thing and munch it with a wry twist to your lips while making sardonic comments through a mouthful of Heinz mustard and pallid tomatoes that you've had better sandwiches in the hospital. But this ... this is GOOD. Genoa salame, Black Forest ham, provolone, some sort of garlic-basil cream cheese spread on the bread, and these PUNGENT peperoncini that aren't the sad pickled pepper corpses offered by Subway, but are crisp and tear-springingly sharp. On this fresh, soft, tasty "Rustic Italian" bread. Gads. I'd eat another one right now. If I wasn't so full of cough syrup.

The sandwich lady at Safeway was, however, messing with my head. She carefully made the sandwich, laid it on the paper, cut in half, and rolled each half up ... all the while with me watching over the counter, eyes wide, tongue protruding as I made panting sounds, stopping only to spasm with booming, plague-soaked coughs. She rolled each half with painstaking precision and then, as I leaned forward to grab them, took out four MORE sheets of paper, and cut each paper-wrapped half ... in half. She then wrapped each quarter. One at a time. With a precision that would be the envy of a Swiss watchmaker. She only handed the sandwiches over when I was actually tensed to spring over the counter and throttle the life out of her to get my Black Forest ham.

Yeah. She was messing with me. I know Discordian sandwich art when I see it. At least she didn't do the "shake-and-fake", one of my patented Subway maneuvers ...

Yeah, see, you lay out all the ingredients on the bread ... except for the veggies, since those take forever ... and then you shake your head and turn the bread upside-down, dumping the ingredients, putting them to the side, and starting over. If questioned about this, just point at the discarded meat, raise an eyebrow, and say "Dirrrrty." Repeat as necessary, or until the customer loses a neck vein to catastrophic frustration.

Hmm. A little guaifenisin spritzer would hit the spot right about now. And then Wayne's World 2. Cheerio, chaps. Be sure to think spiteful thoughts about your oppressors, and remember that one day, we shall be free.

- \/\/heel