Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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Like my brownhouse:
   asked her to dress back up as a nurse
Saturday, October 31 2015
I took the dogs on a hangover-fueled walk this morning, and by the time I got back I was hungry. I hadn't really eaten an actual meal at all yesterday, so I continued listening to my podcasts (a dubious one about the comic strip known as Peanuts) as I cooked up a pan of bean glurp. This batch included cauliflower, which is always a welcome ingredient.
Original the plan for today was to take my Ahmed Mohamed "disguise" to the village of Woodstock for their annual Halloween parade, but then it turned out that Susan and David weren't going to go there, and I didn't want to go there on my own. If I showed up in a crowd of Halloween revelers with a backpack and bomblike device, I might easily be mistaken for someone trying to pull off a Boston-Marathon-style bombing. While New York is not an open-carry state and it's not east to get a license to pack heat here, there are other ways to violently give voice to the terrorism fears with which our government and media have been filling our heads for the last 14 years. So I decided not to participate in Woodstock's Halloween revelry. Instead, I took a nice long hot bath. This morning I'd discovered a mid-sized (though not-engorged) tick embedded in my left leg near the top of my shin. I'd done my best to extract it, but even so I could see it had left some mouth parts behind, and by this evening, the site of the tick's erstwhile attachment felt like a burn. It produced constant distracting pain. I hoped a soak in the tub would help loosen up the injury, and I even brought tools (a tiny screwdriver, a dental pick, and some Anbesol topical pain reliever) with me to help me pick at it.
Originally I'd planned to skip a little dinner party that Nancy had organized for tonight, but without the Woodstock parade, I was in need of something festive to replace it. So I loaded up the dogs and drove down there late. I'd thought Ray would be there, but no, he was off at work, so I didn't need to buy that six pack of Michelob Ultra. In addition to Nancy, the only other humans present were Sarah the Vegan and Eric, the guy who painted our rental house last year. Nancy had made a meal of vegan ravioli with a side of squash and broccoli. I'd already sort of had a dinner, but they were only just sitting down to eat at something like 8:20pm. So I ate a few ravioli and picked broccoli out of the squash (like Gretchen, I'm not a big fan of orange autumnal vegetables). I'd brought my clock in hopes of showing it to Ray, but it turned out that Eric was the only person there who hadn't already seen it. I made it wail like Robert Plant and then like Muezzin, and then I had it count backwards and "explode." Fun times!
On the agenda for tonight was to watch scary movies, and after some deliberation, we decided to see An American Werewolf in London, which I'd actually seen once before, back when it first came out. I was 13 at the time and it was rated R, so my mother must have been with me when I saw it in a movie theatre in Staunton, Virginia. From a contemporary perspective, An American Werewolf in London is more comic than perhaps intended, though I remember it being funny even back then, particularly the increasingly-decayed state of the sidekick who keeps reappearing as a sort of ghost. From a personal perspective, the romantic/sexual subplot must have played some role in molding my then-nascent sexuality, though I was probably somewhat embarrassed by that content given that I watched it while seated beside my mother. Tonight as I watched, I kept joking about the "sexy nurse" (as opposed to the "ugly one") and how, if I were the protagonist and was with her while she was in her street clothes, I would have asked her to dress back up as a nurse.
When I got back to the house, Gretchen was already home. At the end of her dog sitting there'd been a birthday party of Jasmin which she had attended (and, or course, baked brownies for).


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