'cause i'm hot (HOT!!!) sticky, sticky sweet...

was today's the last
warm rain of the year? don't sigh.
there will be more years.



i'm just talking to myself there. pay no mind. maybe it's always warm where you are. maybe i hate you.

maybe i don't. i guess you'll never know.

there was a visibly agitated green wing macaw just like ours on scrubs tonight. i know that they're at their most adorable when they're all poofy and whatnot, but it isn't generally a good thing to see, especially when the bird could reach you with a quick sudden jab. a word to the wise: do NOT let parrots sit on your shoulder, no matter how many times your pirate mentor calls you a scurvied wench. there's a very real chance that you could lose most of your face. i'm teeming with bruises and puncture wounds, and my crazy bird knows and trusts me. of course, in the end, it's your face and your decision. but if you've ever wondered why so many pirates wear eye patches, well, i think you can guess what my theory is.

i'm a fickle whore, but forget everything i've ever said, i'm going to quit my job and devote myself to stalking sufjan stevens. do you ever think about stalking people? i think about it sometimes, and what i think is that if i were going to do it, i would do it like this: i'd buy up about two hundred pounds of valentine's candy and stash it in the trunk of my car, which i would park somewhere near my beloved's homestead. every morning i'd fill an extra-large shopping bag with candy and get comfortable within sight of, but not unsettlingly close to, the front door; i figure across the street would be about right. whenever my stalkee entered or exited the house, i would keep pace with him from my side of the street as i hurled fistfuls of necco hearts and pink m&ms across the tarry divide. perhaps i would sing a song, maybe "pour some sugar on me." what do you think, three weeks before he was mine? less? it would win me over. and, too, you don't know this, but, i mean, i'm cuter than a freakin' button. does anyone know about almost bendy and the psychic bib productions? if so, you might be interested to know that i am also almost cuter than a zipper, and if you dig chicks who cut their own hair and never take the extremely chipped nail polish off of their jagged bitten-up nails, i'm verging on paper clip caliber.

please try to watch the presidential debates thursday. it's awfully important. i understand that public political statements are cultivated and groomed like topiary, but still. there's a chapter in "the man who mistook his wife for a hat" where the author talks about a group of psychiatric patients watching a televised presidential speech. most patients in the group have a brain disorder that has rendered them incapable of understanding the literal meanings of spoken words; they can still carry on conversations somewhat successfully, though, by interpreting the facial expression, tone and cadence of the speaker and deriving meaning from those patterns. during what would appear to be the most serious portions of the speech, the entire group consistently cracks up laughing, because they know the president is telling lies on top of lies.

there are some things you can only pick up in the moment, is what i'm saying, and most of us have to pay intensely close attention even then. so watch. it's your country, it's your planet, it needs your help.

the earth and i love you, even if you're not sufjan stevens, even if there's no hope of you ever carrying a tune. big sugary smooches to one and all. smooch. smoochsmooch.















smooch.

bad brawny brent! bad!

the christmas tree shop
is a retail garage sale.
franchising breaks hearts.




my matty would be so touched to know that i'm holding my pee until the next commercial break in this current episode of "charmed." i guess i wouldn't tell him that i only watch it because i have a crush on rose macgowan. mcgowan? macgowan? i don't know, but she's purty. this little kid, though... i am in no way a subscriber to that "all babies are beautiful" theory; some of them are downright beastly, and this is one of them. BEASTLY! i'd hide him in a sack. and nick lachey does not belong on television. he can't act, and he isn't cute enough to make up for it. like alyssa milano would ever be suckered by that meathead. wasn't she engaged or married to the singer from remy zero for a while? there's no way, timberlake incident aside.

oh, shush, you know i didn't mean that about the sack.

i'm feeling especially critical today. i think i'll run with it. ten things i hate:

1. the new trendy poncho
2. the quizno's commercial for the big beef dip thingy sub. i can't believe anyone would eat that.
3. holiday decorations
4. pointy-toed shoes
5. people who say mean things about ted kennedy
6. people who can't admit it when they've fucked something up
7. drugstore period romance novels where the girls are always renowned for their impossibly tiny waists which are constantly being grasped by someone brawny named devon or brent. (my mother loves them, if you were wondering how i knew that.)
8. when perfectly good pets are euthanized because their owners can't make the minimum down payment, and any other situations of that "finances first" nature
9. knowing that i would never have the balls to sing a terrible song i had written about a boy on his front lawn at two in the morning
10. the word "clot"

not in that order, not at all. those are ridiculous things. i'm not thinking all that hard.

i would marry any member of califone, but i'd probably leave him for jason schwartzman. i don't know what that says about me. i don't particularly care.

forget you ever saw this.

i heart z-man. and farms. z-man and farms!

the first few days of
fall are the breaths between sleep
and waking; draw deep.




russ meyer died this weekend, and toadie and i were quite sad. we bravely pulled ourselves out of our sadness with the thought that john la zar might come out of hiding to speak to the press, but, of course, that didn't happen, so we're still a little bummed. good night, sweet prince. we shall forever carry your heart inside our hearts. on a more chipper note, all the kangaroos at the store down the street from me are $29, if anyone wants to place an order. they only have four colors, but they're bright, pretty colors.

i'm pretty sure zach braff is canoodling with cary brothers. he boasts about him constantly, he brings him on t.v. shows, no doubt he's sneaking his name into interviews... it's like kurt and courtney all over again. i think you know what that means. watch your back, braff. if memory serves, that courtney character was a bit of a bad seed, and by bad seed i mean bipolar junkie murderess, so, seriously. the second he starts talking about kids, change the locks.

i wish i lived in a sweet tiny town where there was some sort of annual festival that involved crowning a local girl the Vidalia Onion Queen or the Turnip Princess, something hokey and darling and no one's but ours. the town i grew up in had the potential for it, size-wise, but everyone was too snooty and episcopalian to get it together. they did have a "Day in the Park" every fall; some high school class always set up a game that involved throwing ping pong balls into plastic cups in order to win goldfish out of a wading pool, and some kid always won a dozen goldfish and then ate them on a dare under the baseball bleachers. every girl under the age of twelve secretly had a crush on that boy for the next three weeks. there was more to it, but nothing else seems worth mentioning. it's a tradition, i suppose, but not one to rally a community around. i want a community, and i want that community's sense of self and pride to be centered in something singularly geeky. i guess i might not feel that way if i had grown up in onion country, but i can't say for sure. i think i don't miss my home town because it didn't offer me anything special enough to miss. we were blindingly vanilla. we lacked a suitable mascot. well, there was screwy louie, a drunk who dressed like a lumberjack except for his shoes, a stunning assortment of women's pumps that he was careful not to dribble on as he urinated in the middle of the street. but we weren't really supposed to talk about him.

i want to move away. i don't care where to. i'm ravenous for suggestions.

anyone?

it's not that i don't like you.

i wish i could leave
my uterus in a vault
'til it was useful.



so, forever.

someone accused me today of being ashamed of being human. it came at the end of a discussion about a number of things like global overpopulation and cultures dependent on monster conglomerates and the overall value of the space program, things that, on the whole, leave me somewhat dejected. the point i was attempting to make was that i don't believe any one life is solely about the individual organism living that life, that all life is about all life, and human beings are the things on this planet that make it hardest for the rest of the globe to keep itself going. i think we do more harm than good, and probably, objectively, everything else would be better off without us. i really do believe that. if some unstoppable virus wipes three-quarters of us out, well, it'll be because we threw the balance off so badly in the other direction that only something that drastic could begin to even the scales again. i like the idea of the scales being even. i'm a libra, i can't help it.

so, i'm ashamed of a lot of things that a lot of people do. but that's very different from being ashamed of being a person. my problem is that we have so much potential, and we can't get past ourselves enough to make any use of it. there's a best way for everything to ultimately work out, and it may not involve the ending you believed you were entitled to. get past it. none of us is the end of anything.

i love people. i love everything else, too. i don't feel a tremendous amount of blind loyalty to my species, maybe, but i don't know that it deserves more loyalty than the others. if you have good reasons for me to change my mind, please, tell me all about them. i'd be interested in finding a way to feel better about the state of things. meanwhile, i'm going to imagine ways to improve things. less people is one of them. i don't know what to tell you.

i'm perfecting my long-distance jumps.

heads
Originally uploaded by juniper pearl.

james joyce drank. a lot.
not that it didn't work for
him, but there it is.


i *heart* neil halstead. i also seize any opportunity to incorporate photographs of doll parts into clothing designs. this one, for instance.

for those of you who might not know about it, having a day off in the middle of the week is stellar. i'm the only one in the coffee shop at eleven in the morning, the only one who can hear the very loud music coming out of my room all afternoon, the only one laughing at me when i dance with the parrot on the couch . . . dy-no-mite.

so, apparently there are some people with some misgivings about some things. i'd like to tell a story for the hecklers.

my grandparents' first date was a double. they arrived with different people, they left together, and they stayed that way. they've been married for, i think, fifty-three years, maybe fifty-four. they raised four children in a one-floor two-bedroom house. my grandfather held down at least three jobs at a time all his life and has never said a mean word about anyone. my grandmother claps her hands and squeals like a preschooler when she's excited. i never understood how they managed it.

last summer my entire family went out to dinner. at one point my grandmother leaned across the table to scold my grandfather, who was holding a plate in the air and scraping some kind of sauce off of it with his spoon. my aunt told her to shush, at least he wasn't licking it off like he would have been at home. grammy conceded the point, but not without making a series of disgusted faces and noises at the idea. "what, you've never licked a plate in your whole life?" my aunt asked. my grandmother is like me and won't lie if she can help it, but she wasn't happy about having to admit that, well, perhaps she had, when she was very very young. my grandfather, who had been laughing silently to himself the whole time, asked, "maybe when you were nine or ten?" "no, charles," she sighed, "i'm sure if it happened i was quite a bit younger than that."

my grandfather became suddenly serious and said to his wife, "i wish i could have known you when you were nine or ten, dorothy."

"why," my aunt asked him, giggling, still their baby, "so you could have gotten together and licked some plates?"

"no," he said, not smiling even a bit, "i just think she would have been a very nice little girl to know."

my grandmother blushed, lifted a hand to her hair. she was seventy-three years old. i am sure that if something happened to either of them, the other would follow over the edge of the world inside of a day.

don't you tell me it doesn't happen. it does. i've been watching it happen all my life. it's everywhere.

it's everywhere. look closer.

these ain't your grandma's bedbugs

get that thing away
from me get it away from
me oh fuck oh please



i read an article in the paper today about a woman in england who was woken up in the middle of the night by a terrible pain in her toe. that pain was the result of her being bitten by a seven-inch poisonous centipede with bright orange fangs. she believes that this centipede is the same one she threw into her garden after (so she thought, anyhow) killing it over a year ago. it seems to have traveled to england from greece by stowing away in the woman's daughter's luggage.

i'm sorry, perhaps i wasn't speaking clearly. *ahem*

A SEVEN-INCH POISONOUS CENTIPEDE WITH BRIGHT ORANGE FANGS OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD

this is the ultimate monster in my elm street nightmare world. it even possesses a vampiric look-ma-i-can-rise-from-the-dead quality. my hands are sweating at the mere idea. you just, you don't even know. i once stayed awake for two full days because i saw a centipede not nearly so horrific run along the wall and behind a bookshelf in my bedroom. i wanted to die, and then i wanted to move away. after 48 hours i just wanted to sleep, and after i had done that once none of those other things made as much sense anymore, but i was quite serious about them initially. if this mythological insect demon ever made an appearance, the film of my life would cut straight to coma.

it's not like i'm a bug spazz, either. i'm fond of them on the whole. i rescue beetles from my cats and bring them outside, i move vulnerable caterpillars away from the middles of sidewalks. there were spiders around my parents' house that built webs so intense you bounced off of them when you walked into them. i once found one of their cats toying with a spider the size of my hand; when it reared up on its hind legs its stylish coat of bright red hair created a rather enchanting aura effect. i trapped it and threw it out the front door because i feared for the cat, and the next morning when i left for work it charged up the walkway and tried to muscle its way back into the house. i admired its tenacity. i mean, i leapt back inside and slammed the door on it, but i didn't hate it. it's become a favorite bit of our family folklore. that, and the time my dad took the scab that fell off of my cat's ear and put it in his sister's thanksgiving stuffing. who knew it would blend in so well?

i am not afraid of bugs. i'm not. but i would cut off both my legs with a rusty pair of safety scissors to get away from one like that, and that poor british woman, whoever she is, absolutely deserves to be knighted. multiple times.

damn.

chester!

chester!
Originally uploaded by juniper pearl.

over and over i realize i'm more of a moron than i ever knew for thinking so many simple things were so hard.

notes from the most recent meeting of NAGPLA

i never liked the
air conditioning, thin tinned
synthetic comfort




zach braff seems like a good kid. it's just, i wonder, i mean, if he hadn't been in the movie, like, would you all still adore him for having written it? it's always bothered me that writers and directors don't get the same sort of admiration as the more visible participants. i know i couldn't pick tom tykwer out of an otherwise empty room, but if he called me up and told me to meet him in munich for scrabble and pretzels tomorrow i'd throw on some shoes and knock over old ladies on my way to the airport. i'm not, you know, i'll plug the guy until i'm blue in the face, but everyone's all excited about his thoughts on kites and toothbrushes, and i'm probably one of the worst because i might never have seen garden state if there hadn't been that line on scrubs about the suckiness of any movie featuring andie macdowell, which i doubt he even had anything to do with, so it's all good. i think i'm saying . . . nothing. i think i'm saying nothing. as usual.

i am so surpassingly smitten with the moldy peaches. indie boys are neurotic, but hey, i'm starting to feel okay . . .

wasn't that chick from scrubs on roseanne at some point? it was her, wasn't it, the girl who took over for the original becky? i hated her then because i'm so rigidly opposed to change, but she's all right, really.

chester, the hand puppet (i think he's a dish glove) from sifl and olly, is my number one crush lately. i'd love to insert a picture of him here, but i can't because i'm an utter technological failure. instead i'm going to offer you my favorite quote, guaranteed to fill me, someone just like me, and possibly you with squishy bubbly (interspecies?) love. prepare for your stolen holiday:

i'm chester, and i'll take you roller skating, and i'll push dudes down to let them know where i stand. i'll scar 'em up.

squishy bubbly! mmmmmmmmmm. but if you don't have a picture of his floppy doofus face in your head none of this is worth two clucks in a henhouse, so i'll let it go. and . . . it's gone. but know that you, too, are cut out to be a real winner.

repeats of the daily show spank the collective behind of all those up-to-date "legitimate" news shows. remember to always vote for the candidate who lies the least. i really want to tell you to pay close attention to their views and plans and all that rot, but that only works if you can simultaneously apply that first piece of advice, so, i don't know. know your facts, go with your gut, do the best you can, politically and otherwise. karma shall smile on your well-intentioned head.

'night, kids.

two thumbs up to the cast, but...

body of a bird
in the road. i stepped around
it, apologized.






i'm the only person i know who doesn't like "the breakfast club." i've never even been able to sit through the entire movie. the public's reliable shock and dismay over this fact has driven me to try harder to sit through the movie than i've ever tried to do anything else in my life, and after all my most sincere attempts i've managed to change my dislike into full-blown loathing. i despise "the breakfast club." there, i've said it. bring on the torch-wielding mobs.

it doesn't matter, you know. i hate a lot of things that don't deserve it. my natural hair color, birch beer, reggae, almost all cooked vegetables... for all i know it isn't even about the movie, it's some repressed tie-in to an intestinal spasm i had the first time i saw it when i was eight or something. i don't know what you'd like me to do about it. i don't ask you to lie about things that you don't like. stop persecuting me, damn it. i'm doing the best i can. *sniff*

new t.v. show! eatusnbc is proud to present "Yup...That's How That Is." this program airs for twelve minutes once a month, because any more than that would be excruciating for me and other people who know its star. i'm not telling you her name because it just isn't relevant, but she's OH FOR THE LOVE OF CHRIST so unbelievably irritating. imagine the voice of a midwestern chain-smoking mickey mouse encased in the akward body of an insecure middle-aged librarian. now imagine that voice commenting quietly to itself on EVERYTHING EVERYBODY DOES. oh, you don't understand, you could never understand. here, stay with me anyhow. i'm putting that woman in a chair in any high-traffic area, a street corner, a convenience store, a supermarket produce section... let's use that for now. she's just sitting there, no one's even looking at her, she's wearing a microphone and you hear this:


"i'm sitting next to the grapes. i like grapes. like me some grapes. especially when they're cold. some people like fruit better when it's room temperature, but i like it cold. these grapes aren't very cold. i'd like them better if they were cold. maybe someone could put them in the refrigerator. i bet there's a refrigerator in the supermarket. lots of things that you find in the supermarket need to be kept in the refrigerator. maybe someone will put these grapes in the refrigerator. that woman's buying some apples. she's buying some peppers, too. but she doesn't have any grapes. i wonder if she doesn't like grapes. maybe she just likes apples better. i wonder if she would have wanted the grapes if they were colder. i'd like the grapes more if they were colder. and i like grapes. that's funny, i like grapes, and here i wound up sitting right next to them."

did it take you a minute to read that? maybe less? could you imagine twelve minutes? i work with her for nine hours every day. she's not handicapped, she's not on drugs, she's just the most annoying woman who ever freaking lived. and i'm going to make her famous, because i've got nothing better to do.

if you hate it, that's okay. i appreciate that sometimes there's just no way around it.

buy my hookers, suckers.