"Put Those Ballerina Flats On My Shoulders!" vs. "You Really Need to Address This Budgeting Issue"

I've been reading in the way that impairs me, socially, again. I've been reading a few things at the same time, but the book I just set aside to write this is Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives. Here's a sentence I just read that I think is just, well, great:

His breakfast was much more frugal than ours: he swallowed two cups of black coffee and then he smoked a wrinkled cigarette that he pulled from his pocket instead of a pack, watching us in the strangest way, as if he were defying us but at the same time didn't see us.

(pause)

Yerba mate may be the solution.

Here I am, 4:33 pm on a Monday at the Capitol Hill branch of the Seattle Public Library. I smell slightly of Heiress, one of Paris Hilton's perfumes. Sometimes I put on the slightest bit of high-femme perfume so that, in my head at least, it comes across as the trace of a lover I just banged for 13 hours and had to start my day minus the shower. (I know it's horrible. Bleached hair and a pair of contacts a color of periwinkle that has been patented for her. Thin and white and cotton-candy pouty when threatened with jail time. What can I say? A bone is a bone).

I feel hungry and slightly crazy, which is an improvement from feeling half-full and entirely out of my mind. (I've taken to photo documenting my downward turn of psychosis over the past 24 hours. Although no one will see these pictures in their context, I will know what they are and, for that, will have a secret, yet shakey, grin when people come across them in plain view.)

I've been thinking about dehydration and blood flow as of late. I've also been thinking of the Body By Jake episodes I would watch as a child (Google Image it) at 5 in the morning just because I thought it was cool that he would tell people to use household products for the workouts: Cans of tomatoes, ironing boards, broomsticks. I would only work out during these parts of the show. Because somehow it made me feel both totally crazy (how do I explain the ever-dented cans of tomatoes?), and exceptionally d.i.y.(How can I tell Jake, through the television, of my brilliant additions of half-opened bags of flour to this ordeal?)

In anycase, I must get back to the project at hand and end this needed detour. I will leave you with this photograph from a rendition of Shockheaded Peter, and a clip from the actual version I saw some years ago that left me, unsurprisingly, fascinated.




After watching the magnifying-glass face introduction, jump to minute 3:18 to watch Snip, Snip below:

snip snip