Welcome, campers, to my first official blog post of 2016, and I have to say, I’m absolutely choughed (rhymes with “choughed”) that so many thousands of you have written to me care of 392 Sherbourne, my squalid Toronto basement-in-the-sky, thanking me for my online efforts over the past year and a half.
Actually that’s a blatant lie, no one has written to me on this topic. Or any topic really. And there are exactly 206 of you, so it would take each and every one of you writing to me at least five times to even push the level into four digits. Five times! Don’t faint, dude, but this means you’d have to actually finish something.
OMFG, I am like SO BUSTED?!
Appreciation or no, yours truly has, geewillikers, outstanding contributions to celebrate. For example, my creation of a new online archetype – the literate troll (I trash your opinions and correct your grammar, and instead of Cheetos, think caramel-baked brie stains on my Harry Rosen bowtie); slowest response to Facebook messages (personal best – 4 months); and Olympic-level distractibility (sets out to check email, ends up 8 hours later with a new operating system).
And let’s not forget the top-rater: World’s longest blog posts. I have single-handedly transformed the quick daily update into an infinitely-revised Proustian agony clocking in at 700 words plus. And that, as my great-aunt Georgiana would have said, “takes some doing…”
Thus, to the ever-familiar and continual thwackity-thwack soundtrack of my frozen fingers on my seven-year-old Acer keyboard – whose cigarette-melted keys and habit of responding to me in jittery beeps and squawks cause it to take on the aura of an overused property from Cronenberg’s “Naked Lunch” – I solemnly undertake to continue givin’ you the logorrhea-lovin’, Yo!
So. Yo may be wondering. My semi-delirium results from spending this long, white night listening to Carole King. Yep, and I can hear you rolling your eyes from here to Des Moines and back, that Carole King. This is usually a bad sign, Carole King being, first of all, so very – to use the mathematical formula –
∑(un-cool)²x-(vs)
– where ∑=a pair of patchwork denim bellbottoms that completely cover your clogs, and x=a missed appointment at Vidal Sassoon Men’s Salon circa 1974 –
– where was I?
Oh, right, Carole King – so utterly overloaded with frizzy, hippie-dippie-lesbian-women’s-libber hair and swaths of tie-dyed fabric; and second of all, Carole King’s lyrics and melodies exhibit – well, lyrics and melodies. Simple and direct lyrics and melodies, too. With harmonies, yet! And soulful!!
I mean, if you could imagine any such elderly-before-she-even-got-out-of-bed-to-change-her-hemp-tampon white trash even getting airplay. Like, seriously?
And the shameful truth — ? Dogged by financial problems (as in, I have no finances, which is a problem) and tormented by sharing space problems (as in, I’m sharing space, which activity is forty degrees beyond possible with loved ones, let alone merely sort-of-liked ones) – I succumbed.
Yes girlfriends, whether real or honorary (Hi, Bill!).
I had a “Tapestry” Wallow.
(Not to be confused with a “tapestry wallah”, which is, I believe, an authentic job description in India. Or am I thinking of Walla-Walla? I can’t work it out. – Ed.)
One of my friends, the other one, having assessed my condition, feared for my safety. But before you imagine Percocets and razor blades at dawn and speed-dial 9-1-1, rest assured that suicide is simply not an option, for the act of offing myself would involve sustaining an emotion for longer than five minutes.
And that would be like? So lame??!!
Meanwhile, should you run into Max von Sydow, he will confirm that:
My bedroom is a portal to Hell
Please, I beg you, by all the relics of all the saints, do NOT accept any offers I might place on Craigslist to rent a room in my apartment. For it is with self-lacerating guilt and great distress that I reveal the following terrifying before-and-after shots:
I know. And this despite the emergency deployment of a full bathtub of holy water and enough stale host left over from the previous one to whip up an authentic batch of matzo brei. Oi-ve-voy!
So get down on those virginal knees, bitch, and thank your parents’ rec room –even if it does have a Niagara Falls souvenir lamp, silverfish and a pervasive smell of mildewed socks. Like. Seriously.