topotales

Friday morning I heard about MJ’s death in the following manner: I called my logistics team in Wales and A.D. answered the phone.

AD: Heya, good morning- guess what, MJ had a heart attack and died!

me: REALLY?  No, you’re joking!

AD: No, I swear to ye, he really did!

me: Sheesh, I must live in a media vacuum…

AD: Yea, we’re completely bent over it here in the office.  Di’ye know what he said on the way to hospital?

me: (earnestly) No, what?

AD: Could ye drop me at the children’s ward, please?

God, I love Welsh humor!

I remember well
our legs under the table,
and the way we kissed.

GUESTPOST BY Toca la pared

Due to my ‘ocassional’ fainting, I have not been able to go to school anymore.  So I found myself alone with my grandmother with lots and lots of time. After I slept for a week (or two) it dawned on me that I should try to do something with my days. When I was younger, my grandmother already attempted to get me into knitting, but that did not catch on.  Things have changed.  I’m still as impatient as I was back then, but the moments that I’m desperately looking for something productive to do are way more frequent. So I picked the knitting back up, attempting to make something for myself.  At first that  resulted in a lot of frustration for both me and my grandmother.  Luckily we’re both (ahum) stubborn, so in a few weeks the top I had been struggling on, got completed.  Everyone tells me it looks smashing, so this was a good start.

One quirk Topo forgot to mention on her very incomplete list of “freaky little neurosis” is her obsession with hats. It’s not the first time we have to stop the car in the middle of traffic so she can rescue something out of the gutter !  I needed a new project and so when she asked me for a hat I bought the wool and got started:

Then I decided to do something else before the next knitting project : crochet! My first crochet pieces were two sorry potholders. No amount of ironing could get the poor things squared up. It was smart to start with two easy pieces. Ever since, I’ve been hooked on crochet and everything related.  In stead of my flea market hunt for old clocks, I’m now picking up whole suitcases with abandoned yarn and shoeboxes full of buttons for next to nothing. My intended project list keeps getting longer. I love it when people ask me to make something for them, it means that they like what I do. Crochet gives me results very quickly so there’s no time to get bored. My hats still have a lot of flaws in them, but the more people tell me that they can’t see them, the more confident I get. I figured that I would just have to keep practicing and trying out new techniques in order to get better.

I started out with other people’s patterns, but now that I have found out how to make my own patterns (my own designs, not just something that turns out nice by accident), I like it even better. This baret is the first hat that was actually planned to look the way it does:

I'm cute on black

doll in-a wol

A couple days ago, I also started making dolls clothes for my niece. It’s all very amateurish, but I think she’ll enjoy it anyway.

I love to see other people with my hats. If you see Topo, P. or anyone else around me hiding underneath a special/weird/funny contraption then now you know where they got it from. I also have one for myself, plus the hats that haven’t found a head yet. Below you can see proof that people start acting real funny with their heads in my hats !

Heads in my hats

GUEST POST BY HANSOSAN

After turning 45 a few weeks ago, my guarantee must have expired, and like with any household appliance, suddenly everything started to fail unfix-ably.  In the middle of the night I wake up with a small, red balloon shape on my left elbow, hurting whenever it touches something slightly more solid than air.  No big deal, according to the doctor - 3 months before it will be fully gone.  I still have no clue how I got it - too much elbow work at the office ? (nah, I’m the last one)  Too much reading on one side in bed ? (nah, impossible after a life’s training), so the mystery remains.  Pills, rest and ointment.  Soon the skin starts to blister off, the balloon shrinks and the pain stays.

Then my abdomen decides to turn itself into a double eight knot and perform inside-out acupuncture with rusty nails (or so it feels).   A couple nights and days of trembling, sweating and having crazy fever dreams convince me this isn’t going away by itself - back to the doctor.  After trying to punch me at the right spot to maximise the pain, dear doctor starts to look a bit more worried.  Casual questions quickly evolve from “Where did you eat last weekend ?”  to  ”Any stomach cancers in the family ?”.  Immediately stop pills #1 (elbow), take pills #2 (antibiotics) & #3.  Echo  immediately required.  This triggers strange memories of pregnant bellies, but this analyst assures me that 95% of the echoes he does are for sports injuries.  Unfortunately he doesn’t have time to look at my elbow… .  Echo only reveals that my liver is in perfect condition - once I get off the pills, I look forward to a continued life of beer sampling !  Off to a hospital scan - drinking a liter of foul marker fluid, getting stabbed with needles in the remaining functional arm and pipes in places that should never see traffic in that direction, I get cooked in a giant microwave. “This will feel hot, this is normal”.  I bet that’s what that woman said to the poodle as well.  She finishes me off with a few tight turns of irremovable tape over my hairy arm.

Now God really gets going : over the weekend I develop an eye infection.  Eye drops from the cupboard.  It gets worse.  Ointment from the night pharmacy.  It gets worse.  By Monday I’m willing to perform a diy head transplant.  Right now, please !   (No donors or takers found).  Doctor prescribes stronger drops.  It gets worse.  Can’t really drive anymore, can’t read, can’t watch TV.  Seppuku looks more and more appealing by the hour, if I didn’t already knew how that felt from last week, and I’m not even allowed to drink my two sips of sake.  Doctor now looks really worried, and sends me off to the hospital with an emergency appointment in 10 minutes.  The hospital is 15 minutes away.  If you know the way.  And you can at least see.  Not my safest trip.  Once in the hospital, I get the “pick your number and stand in line” treatment.  My number is 609.  After 6 other people and now half an hour too late, they start on number 610.  I politely approach the receptionist - ready for that impromptu head transplant - she only got away because hers looked so horribly empty.  I finally get sent off into the caverns of the hospital.  The sadist architect of course enjoyed hiding the opthamologist 6 corners, 3 turns and 5 doors away from the entrance.  All well indicated for people with excellent eye-sight, no doubt.

The opthamologist (a gem - she possesses this rude directness that Flemish people love from each other, but fail to grasp why others are offended by it) drips a few things in the eye, scratches it with something that looks to my other eye like a 20cm needle, then calls in her assistant to marvel at the unique sight of a well developed tree-shaped infection.  Immediately stop the eye drops, now go get a gel… .  Come back in the evening for a pressure pad on the eye.  I perform the reverse journey home mainly by following my own tear drop scent trail.  I suddenly wonder why we make heroes out of healthy athletes ?  Anyone dealing with a serious handicap (no, not my chicken shit) faces way tougher battles.   The pressure pad feels like somebody called Cassius applies pressure on your wounded eye.  And I get to stay home for 3 more days, because clearly I’m exhausted, otherwise all these infections wouldn’t show up, I’m told… .

In the morning, I decide this justifies recording for posterity.  Hence the patch pic.  It only took me 22 tries to get it fairly sharp in the mirror, aiming the camera from below.  Thanks, my eye is getting better - I managed a whole day of work today !  Which my boss saw as the perfect moment to give my job to someone else.  But by now I can take the elbow pills again, so with a bit of luck I may still survive till Topo’s next wedding party !

GUEST POST BY HANSOSAN

It just isn’t fair to let Scapi occupy all the limelight, so here is at least one exclusive Charlie shot too… 

Oh boy, I'm so nervous I could start smoking...

Fletcher’s paradox:

all is unmoving, still.

Why, then, this chaos?

Italians don’t necessarily do it better… per se… but by god, they do tend to do it in better style!

Really, it’s all about silver nipples.

Back in college, I briefly dated this guy named Rob.  There is a conversation we had one night that I have thought about frequently over the years, and that I was thinking particularly hard about his morning.  It was a long discussion about the various weird games that we play in our minds on a regular basis.  As it turned out, whenever he entered a new room (a room he had never been in before), Rob would spend the first few moments in that room imagining an axe-shaped thing bouncing from each corner of the room, back to him.  Once all the corners had been mentally bounced by the axe, he felt more comfortable being in the room.  Yeah, we were probably high when we had this conversation.

Anyways, at a certain level, I’m sure this kind of weirdness gets classified as some sort of OCD.  But I’m pretty convinced that we all have these little games.  For example, why I was thinking about the conversation this morning: the volume button on my car radio is a bit smushed, and it’s hard to get the volume to just the right spot.  And when I say just the right spot, I mean, for me - it has to, HAS TO BE on an even number.  Unless it’s on five, which is half of ten, which somehow therefore counts as an even number.  So when I couldn’t get my volume off of the number seventeen this morning, and it vexed me so much that I had to pull my car over and fiddle with the button, I thought of Rob and his axe.

I’d like to say that even-volumes are my only freaky little neurosis, but… well, then I’d be lying to you.  So here they are, the top five neuroses I’ve had and have in all their glory, past and present:

1.  The volume thingy, as explained.  Which also goes for television volumes, ipod volumes, and all volumes in general.  Also, if there aren’t enough evens in your telephone number, I may not call you that much because, well, dialling a bunch of odds makes me feel all squirmy.

2.  I don’t do this one anymore, but I think it’s pretty weird so i’ll include it.  When I was little, I had to put on all my clothes before I counted to ten.  I used to line my clothes up in front of my closet and take a deep breath before I got dressed.  Then I’d get dressed as fast as possible while counting to ten.  If I didn’t get dressed before ten, I’d have to take everything off and start again.  (Thank god I outgrew that one, it takes me long enough to dig out my cleanest dirty shirt these days!)

3.  My keyboard has to be perfectly in line with my computer screen or I cannot work.  Why I prefer working on a laptop!

4.  I must have see-through shower curtains.  Otherwise when I’m in the bathroom I freak out that there’s somebody in the tub, and when I’m in the tub I freak out that there’s somebody in the bathroom.

5.  I have to alternate which foot gets to sleep outside of the covers, in case the other foot feels bad.

All right people, it’s your turn!  Gimme your top five freakies!  Or an even number of them.

alea iacta est

All these fine adornments, disturbed like prayers
thrown up, winding violent in
a gale. For the adoration of idols.
They flourish, bend back upon themselves: invisible.
Not discarded,
simply, superfluous, alien.

The bell-ringer comes, you see, his cart
already overflowing, his lusty voice droning
in the alley, drowning in the BONG…
… BONG (shh!)
it’s (not a heartbeat!): the bumping
on the broken stones, the clumping,
the clattering of the broken bones.

Viewed from the safety of an oriel, distended
dressings pushed aside: an exposed appendage
akimbo. One sole soul. Quarry splayed
atop the open buggy, caroming,
muscled extremities without electricity. Animated:
no more. To earth, then. Without agreement or decision.
To the brown: unmindful, to stone: unforgiving, to air:
unfeeling. Time passes but has no meaning.

Curiosities are quickly concealed. Pheromones
spread an animal astuteness:
it is the grievous who have been, who
are, who will be given up
in ante. The sheltered cloak themselves
in the warmth of grates, hoarding the hearth
blaze: that which psalms can bring; palms
possess.

Devotion is a lurid feast, bursting
full of sweetmeats from the maligner’s confectionary:
painted ornaments in an expensive shop façade.
Better to distinguish early the burning salt in a wound
than suffer slowly pinching grains of sugar-
sticky, flammable.

The bell-ringer trundles on, his tumbrel’s full of Aaron’s rod.