Currently viewing the category: "Danse Macabre"

I wear my hairshirt on the inside

By On July 15, 2010 · In Danse Macabre

I had every intention of canceling my membership at my gym, which is located above a hellmouth of bedbug and cologne contamination, but when I went in there I was talked out of it by a sympathetic lady with a house in LI and a 4-year-old-son — so she understood, really, but why don’t I just go to the other gym locations if that’s the issue — and arms like Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2 [warning: sound]. How will I ever get those arms if I don’t stay at 24 Hour Infestation & Racquet Club?*

So instead of leaving, and because I’m too lazy to go to one of the other locations, I followed the advice of a friend who’s dealt with Biblical-proportion bedbugs and when I get to the gym I put all my clothes and my entire gym bag inside of a giant Ziploc bag. I really like these bags. They speak to me as only a high-quality plastic bag can. I can see myself a few months down the line ditching my gym bag and using just the Ziploc to transport all my stuff. That will also be the day on which I have Entirely Given Up.

morgAs you know already, I am interested in Internet phenomena and memes [warning: lazy Wikipedia links], particularly when they involve bullshit medical conditions** such as Morgellons Disease. How has a condition that pretty much no one in meatspace believes exists (except biased researchers) gotten so much traction online? Precisely because IT’S A DISEASE NO ONE IN MEATSPACE BELIEVES EXISTS!*** Surely there is some sort of Internet Law that explains this principle: The more improbable your illness is in the real world, the more credulously received it will be online.

I went to the dermatologist a few weeks ago for my annual Maybe THIS Year It’s Cancerous consult. I like him even though his paper gowns are the flimsiest I’ve ever seen. Halfway through my full-body exam I’ve already ripped the gown in half as though I’ve mistaken it for a tearaway track suit. Anyhow, after we were done he asked me if I had any questions.

Me: Yeah, do you know what Morgellons is?

Him: No.

Me: It’s a medical condition that most doctors think is a form of delusional parasitosis and it’s characterized by colorful threads growing out of people’s skin.

Him: And why do you care about this?

I guess we don’t get fake diseases in NYC all that much because we already have real things to contend with….like BEDBUGS.

Anyhow, I have kinda weird feet that are always, always calloused and virtually impervious to things like sharp rocks and glass shards and hypodermic needles. Shortly after my trip to el dermo, I noticed the pad of my left foot was hurting when I put pressure on it. I sat down and looked at it really closely and saw that something dark appeared to be embedded a few layers of skin down. I love doing home surgery, so I started poking at it with a pair of tweezers, hoping it wasn’t a plantar’s wart.

After considerable digging, I extracted a half-inch-long black, wiry hair. Seriously. I weighed two possibilities: that God was punishing me for making fun of people with bullshit maladies all these years, and that a hair of foreign origin had somehow wormed its way into my foot. Both seemed equally implausible, but I settled for the second one.

And then, last week, I noticed the same pain, in the same part of my foot. And using the tweezers and a safety pin I pulled YET ANOTHER black, wiry hair, this one the length of an eyelash. And N witnessed it this time!

So great. I have contracted Internet Crazy Disease. I am building a website to support my cause as soon as I can find the right Celine Dion midis to embed.

*I see there was a bedbug scare at Kings County Hospital. I have been to KCH and I can assure you that a single bedbug is the least of its hygiene problems. By the way, the Linda Hamilton arms thing is a joke. I will never have those. Even at 115 lbs in high school I had Ethel Merman arms. It’s my genetic lot in life. I blame the Newfies.
**Many years back I got sick — really sick, like 100-blood-tests-and-still-no-diagnosis sick — and I had a passionate and vaguely creepy infectious diseases specialist who assured me that he believed I really was sick and he was determined to figure it out. I remember saying to him, “Please don’t tell me it’s Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, because I don’t believe that exists, OK?” Never did figure out what it was. It just went away on its own after two years.
***And that, my friends, actually is what is referred to as begging the question.
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Magic, fear, and superstition

By On June 24, 2010 · In Danse Macabre

It’s been fun watching the jerkwad morning news people on Fox pretend to care about the World Cup. One of them finally broke down this morning and said, “I don’t know about you but I can’t wait for the real football season to start.” I watch this sort of TV at the gym, particularly when MTV is replaying some show about Queen Latifah for the umpteenth time. (Does anyone in the MTV demographic care about her? I would think they know her only as a smart-talking, sexless sidekick in shitty summer movies.) Good for you, Fox dude. Be honest. I won’t think any less of you.

So, my gym has decided to switch from a scan-card system to — get this — fingerprint recognition. There’s not even conditioner in the showers and yet we have to pretend we’re at the NSA? (I don’t even have that technology at work. I have a card-entry door that’s been propped open since before I got here.) I balked initially until they said my other option was to show a picture ID every time I came in, which seemed somehow…inconvenient…in comparison to the theoretical intrusiveness of a fingerprint scan. Well, I figured, my fingerprints are already on file somewhere (vestige of the post-Adam-Walsh-scary-man-gonna-come-get-ALL-the-kids era) and 23andMe has my entire genetic sequence, so…two tears in a bucket, etc.

Speaking of genetics, I have been slowly tracing a very tiny branch of my family tree back 200 years. Until last week, I honestly thought that my people didn’t even come down from the trees until the 1939 World’s Fair. It turns out that no, we go back quite a ways…to Newfoundland. Newfies! It’s a wonder I can even read. Something else I’ve discovered about my family, though I can only conjecture based on the tidbits of data I’ve dug up: They were fucking miserable. (See! I was BRED to be this way!) They wended their way through the provinces, stopping for awhile in Ontario to be, from what I can tell, subsistence farmers. Look at this map. That’s Marlborough Township. See that little red rectangle? That’s the property owned by my great-great-great-grandfather and one of his sons. That’s it. At the turn of the 20th century, they got to NY, where the men worked as boilermakers and shipbuilders at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and eventually they all died of the various diseases one gets from working in the Navy Yard. This would probably explain why my great-great-grandmother was working as a laundress at a private school in Long Island in her late 60s, according to the 1930 Census. And oh, to sing of the misery on my grandmother’s mother’s side of the family. Her great-grandfather became a widower with seven kids in the early 1900s. He, too, worked at the Navy Yard. I don’t quite know what he eventually died of, but as of 1930, he was still alive…and committed in a mental hospital upstate. Meanwhile, my great-grandmother went on to get married three times and, at some point in the 60s, destroy all our family documents so that none of us will ever know anything about our ancestry beyond where they lived when their families finally abandoned them. Whee! I knew that this might be a depressing exercise, but I had no idea it would be this sad.

Now I’ve depressed myself. More. Anyhow, back to happier stuff…

Actually, this is a bit sad (but a good interview): Dr. Demento: Off The Air, But Still Happily Deranged. I loooooved listening to Dr. Demento when I was an awkward, Monty-Python-quoting adolescent.* Every Sunday night, 11 pm, on PIX 106, the Capital District’s Home of Classic Rock, with headphones plugged into my clock radio. So, to end on a happy note, here is the great Bonzo Dog Band, Tubas In the Moonlight.

*I have also seen Weird Al in concert.

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You can never go home again

By On March 5, 2010 · In As I Am Now, Danse Macabre

A lot has happened since the last time I reported on our domestic situation. First off, we lobbied our landlord to fix the shower–and he finally did, after 6 years! He did, because I told him N had scalded himself. “Scalding” is a magical word in NYC housing law. I was pretty impressed with my savvy.

So he sent someone to fix it, and they did, with mixed results.

On the plus side, we got new, non-leaking fixtures that actually allowed us to control the temperature of the water.

On the negative side, it took two weeks of us showering in a tub sealed off with contractor garbage bags and gaffer’s tape before they sent anyone to put tile over the gaping hole the plumber had created.

On the plus side, we met the super from the building next door*, a gracious former death metal drummer. (I don’t know what it’s like to go from touring Europe and getting blowjobs every night to living in a basement with your mother, in Queens. I imagine it’s not much fun.) We told him how much we hated hated HATED our neighbors and our apartment and the building, and he told us that if anything opened up in his building, he’d let us know. Because we are nice people.

Flash forward a few weeks and N & I had begun perusing Craigslist apartment ads daily in order to temper the escalating bloodlust we felt toward our neighbors. I was literally hitting Apple+R every 15 minutes.

An apartment from the building next door appeared in the list. A 2BR in one of the two most coveted lines in the building (this building is identical to ours, and is a prewar job, so each apartment line is–for some bizarre reason–a different shape. There are two lines with absolutely enormous living rooms, and this place was in one of them) and it was available for March 1. We went over to see it that night. We overlooked the quirks–the cabinet- and drawer-less kitchen painted bright green, the decrepit bathroom (I know, I know…)–because all we could think of was HOW BIG THIS PLACE WAS and how we could fit ALL OF OUR SHIT and THEN SOME. We grilled them: Are the neighbors noisy? Does anyone downstairs smoke? How is the water pressure? They claimed everyone was really quiet and kept to themselves.

So we decamped our 1BR with the awesome view of the city and not a single good quality beyond that, found someone to take over our lease**, and moved in last weekend.

It’s the biggest place I’ve ever lived in NYC. You could fit most studio apartments inside our living room. So that’s cool. The wood floors are nice and level. The bedrooms get good light. And they were right–the neighbors are pretty quiet.

So our first night, we got into bed, all proud of ourselves that we’d finally escaped all the screaming, banging, slamming, hammering, drilling, sawing, and smoking. It was so very quiet.

At first.

At 1 am, a startlingly loud whirring noise woke us up. I lived next to a long-haul trucker growing up. Sometimes in the winter he’d leave his truck running all night (or else it wouldn’t start). It sounded like that. We wandered around the apartment trying to figure out its origin–the floors were actually vibrating.

And then it clicked off. And 45 minutes later, it clicked back on. And then off. And then on. And then off.

It turns out that we live above the building’s boiler.

Which means that everyone whose name I cursed for the past 6 years has had the last fucking laugh. Oh, but let’s just see who’s first up against the wall when the revolution happens. At least our living room’s bigger now.

Lullaby for the Strange, by Gabriel Hart. [Via A Little Necrophilia.]

*Who, unlike the super from our building–the Serbian war criminal who once told me, when he was hooking up my gas stove in a rather cavalier way, “In my country, is man talk and woman listen, you know?” –actually does work.
**More on that later.
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Why I love my office mate

By On February 25, 2010 · In Danse Macabre

Yesterday afternoon I told my office mate I was leaving early to see my accountant. We’re dissimilar, politically, but we share some things in common — namely, a highly inappropriate sense of humor.

Him: Good luck. I did my taxes last week, and my refund was less than half of what it was last year.

Me: Socialism.

Him: [simultaneously] Obama.

Me: Well, I just hope I get enough back so I can rent a small plane.

Him: If I don’t see you tomorrow, I’ll look for you on CNN.

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