Happy Defrosting Days

Botulism, diarrhea, ptomaine be damned. Mark has only two days to thaw that thing out.

Ptomaine Sally

Mark came huffing and puffing through the front door laden with bags of groceries. As he dropped the bags on the floor he gasped,
"There's something wrong with me."
Now I know that Mark has serious health issues and I should be kind, but how can he expect me to just let that line lie there.
"Well duh, yes. We all know that there's something wrong with you...  Oh, you mean physically wrong with you."
A long icy stare followed.
"There's a lot of stuff still out in the car. I'm going to lie down."
So while Mark retired into the bedroom with a case of the vapors, I fetched all his Thanksgiving supplies from the back of the PT Cruiser.

Once again Mark has planned another outrageous Thanksgiving dinner. What had started as a small thing with just two guests has ballooned to ten guests including a lady we met at the Sidelines bar just last Friday. I think her name was Sheba. What all this means is that I will have to clean the entire house, schlep all of Mark's groceries from the car, clean up after Mark's awesome Thanksgiving dinner, and stock the bar. I am very good at stocking the bar.

One thing I have figured out while cleaning the house is that refrigerators are woefully ill-designed. As Mark was slamming the door behind him on his way to the supermarket, he had told me to "Clean out the refrigerator." Sounds simple enough until you start removing the layers of refrigerated goo. The first three inches in, everything is fresh. Move a bit further back and you start encountering cheeses that have blue spots on them, and fur bearing fruits. Seven inches further back into the depths of the refrigerator are the milk products that have turned into strange cheese like substances, and meats that have turned into rainbow colored death traps. It's a bit scary knowing that I am harboring a biohazard in my own kitchen. What I would do if I were to design a refrigerator, is to make them only four inches deep. Sure they would have to be ten feet wide, but think about it. You would never, ever, lose that restaurant leftover you so much wanted to eat the next day. Never again would you encounter a strange green creature growing out of an expired yogurt cup. Best of all Mark wouldn't be able to keep buying the same thing over and over again because he can't see that it is already in the refrigerator. One more positive thing. Chances I will get food poisoning would drop dramatically.

Happy Birthday Sasha!

Nine years old today.

For Sale, Used Bedroom Set; Mark's Clutter and Dog Not Included.

Includes bed and two night stands. Same Broyhill furniture used on 'Everybody Loves Raymond'.

Mark is about twenty feet ahead of me, running through the doors of the furniture store. Our first stop had been worthless. It was one of those stores with each room put together, where for one low price you buy everything. Everything meaning, from the rugs on the floor to the pictures on the wall. It's what was between the rugs and the pictures that was so bad. Furniture made of particle board stapled together, with the drawers and every other unseen surface made of cardboard or thin plastic. The outer surfaces covered in what appeared to be photos of wood. The Florida humidity would soak into that shit, puff it up, and make it disintegrate within twelve months. So Mark and I decided that we should go to a more upscale store, one where the sales people didn't have gravy stains on their shirts.

I follow Mark into the second store and I am hit with the aroma of mold and borscht. A short stocky old man named Levi has already buttonholed Mark, and is escorting him up some stairs to the bedroom department. I don't want to like this old man, but he laughs at my jokes so I am putty in his hands.
"This is a great deal already. It's a closeout. You can't get a better price, and I tell you what, I'll throw in the second nightstand for free."
Mark is not having it. I am ready to throw money down, but Mark has us schlepping up and down the stairs, back and forth across the vast expanse of the store, comparing bedroom sets and haggling with Levi.
"Here you go boys, lay down on this mattress. Nice, right? Check out the drawers. That's real wood with dovetailing."
First of all Levi called us boys, and then he laughed at another one of my lame jokes. He had me right where he wanted me. The next thing I knew Levi was handing me my credit card back and thanking us for shopping at Carl's Furniture.

This all started when Mark and I agreed that re-decorating our bedroom would be our Christmas/birthday presents. Great idea I thought, until I signed that credit card receipt for half a years pay. Mark had originally wanted me to buy him a gun for Christmas. I refused imagining all sorts of horrible consequences that a gun in Mark's hands might bring. Now I am rethinking that idea, and I'm not so sure. If Mark were to use his Christmas present gun, as often as he has used every other expensive gift I have given him over the years, the thing will rust away before it ever shoots one bullet.

Mark's Comedy Corner

I woke up this morning feeling as if I had gone to a gym and had a serious workout yesterday. I didn't. Despite all the aches and pain, I did not go to a gym yesterday. No, I fell yesterday. I fell hard on the floor in the bedroom, and this is why I fell.

This is how the world looks to a person with glaucoma. No, not Mark's face everywhere you look. The blotchy voids, the peripheral vision gone, that's how it looks. I was walking into the bedroom with a glass of ice in my hand and something reached up from the floor and grabbed my foot. As I fell like a giant redwood tree I could see the glass of ice flying through the air, and just before I hit the clothes hamper with my face the thought went through my head that, that was going to make quite a mess.

I lay motionless on the floor for about a minute. There was no screaming anymore, just me quietly assessing things. My foot hurt a bit, and my head hurt, but what I noticed most was the giant splinter of wicker from the hamper sticking out of my hand. All this happened just before dinner. We had a guest over, and I was going into the bedroom with a glass of ice to fetch some water. Now you would think Mark and our dinner guest would have come running into the bedroom, all concerned and worried. They didn't. Instead Mark saw this as a chance to do his stand up comedy routine.
"Oh look, Alan's fawlin and he can't get up."
From the living room I hear a few chuckles from the dinner guest.
"Is there any blood? I don't do blood."
More chuckles.

As I peeled myself up off the floor, I looked around for the glass of ice that had been launched from my hand. I found the glass, but not much ice. Oh well, I thought, it will melt and evaporate. Later that evening when I climbed into bed, I found the ice. It had melted, but not evaporated.

Goldilocks

I like to think that little things don't bother me, and I'd like to think that I am proficient at handling big problems. Neither is true. What is true is that I react the same no matter what. Hurricane blows through and destroys my yard, I curse and scream at whoever is in charge. I'm told it's god, so I lay into him. I knock a glass off of the kitchen counter and it splinters into a thousand dog paw piercing shards, I go into a spasm of cursing, foul mouthed, lunacy.

This morning I poured myself a gigantic bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios, got out the gallon of milk, and then went to get my favorite spoon. Mark has about two hundred or more spoons in this house, yet there is only one that I eat my cereal with and this morning I can't find the damn thing. It's not in the flatware drawer, it's not in the dishwasher, and after clattering around all the dishes in the sink, I cannot find it there either. So for the next ten minutes Mark, the dogs, and the neighbors all get to listen to me curse and scream about my goddamned spoon. You have to understand, all of the large spoons that Mark has are too large. All of the small spoons he has are too small. My special cereal eating spoon is just right. It doesn't clack against my teeth as I shovel Cheerios into my gaping maw, and as I lift it to my mouth with it's heaping pile of Honey Nut Cheerios on it, not one falls off. I need that damn thing. When I was finally winding down this morning's temper tantrum, I took one more look in the kitchen sink. There it was. There was my beloved cereal spoon wedged down in the garbage disposal. At that point I didn't know if I should be happy or start on another screaming bitch-fest. On one hand I had found my spoon, on the other it was wedged in the garbage disposal. I decided to pry it out of the disposal, eat my cereal, and shut the fuck up. Four hours later Mark asked me if I had found the spoon. It's nice to know he cares.

Only Her Hairdresser Knows

Last night I took a look at Miss Sasha and realized she was, as the gay kids say, a hot mess. Sasha's state of affairs is all my doing. A little over a week ago I gave Chandler a bath with some shampoo that Mark had purchased at the 'Less than a Dollar Store' or some such place. It wasn't a name brand, and I am sure it was some kind of closeout that couldn't be sold, even in China. After bathing Chandler successfully, I grabbed Sasha and turned the water on her. I soaped her up really good since she has a habit of walking through her pee after squatting, rinsed her off, and then dried her with a big fluffy towel. It turns out that you shouldn't wash your Miniature Schnauzer with the same kind of shampoo you wash your ninety pound mutt with. Almost immediately the hair on Sasha's legs started turning colors, and falling out. Within a few days I could see that her hair was starting to mat, and get little knots in it. So this morning Sasha went to the doggy beauty parlor, and this afternoon we picked her up. She is now neatly trimmed, with a sweet powdery smell, and nicely purged anal glands.