grammardog

Dear Spider in My Bedroom:

NO. Kleenex'd!

****************************

In other news, Paul McCartney and his band did NOT fuck around last night. He played for almost three hours straight (opening with Drive My Car), sounded like a million dollars, and rocked Live and Let Die under a sky full of fireworks. The setlist also included Blackbird, Eleanor Rigby, Band on the Run, Jet, Back In The USSR, Paperback Writer, Hey Jude, Helter Skelter, I Saw Her Standing There, The Long and Winding Road, Get Back, Sgt. Pepper, Yesterday, Let It Be, Lady Madonna, and, to my delight, Day Tripper, which moxieholic reports hasn't been performed by Paul since The Beatles' last performance in Candlestick Park. I felt so LUCKY to be there... it was thrilling.

The best part of the show was when he pointed out a girl in the crowd who had a banner that read "Please sign my arm so I can get it tattoed". He said he couldn't turn a request like that down, and called her up on stage, to her total freak-out fandom, to sign her upper arm with a Sharpie. I hope she goes through with the tattoo... I like thinking of her at 75 years old telling all the neighbourhood kids the story of her hugging Paul McCartney. Ha ha haawwww.

Edited to add: the video! Thanks, johnnyg!



Best news: I dehydrated myself sufficiently and did not need to pee once during Paul's performance! Overactive bladder, you son of a whore, you will not ruin my life, not yet.

TONIGHT! HOORAY!!!



Ignore that guy with the glasses in the background.

THE SUN CAME OUT. Here, Bea Arthur watches it rise with skepticism. It's been away too long. He's lost his ability to trust. His innocence is gone.



In other news, this story nearly killed me dead this morning. I especially like the "hi-hi-hi-hi" part, and the part about the tube top.

I forgot how totally traumatizing root canals are. Besides being physically uncomfortable, and at times, painful, watching them go in and out of your mouth with these tiny files like the sharp part of a syringe and filing your nerve out of a hole that burrows deeply into your gum... well, even when a person is all frozen up, it can make a person quite sour, quite sour indeed. This is on top of the trauma of holding your mouth wide open for an hour while you're being partially smothered with a rubber dam, which sounds like it should be fun, but ISN'T. Also, at one point after my dentist had drilled out the original filling, he poked the bare nerve with one of these:



to see if it was frozen, which it was NOT, and it was so awful that even after it stopped hurting, tears ran into my ears for ten straight minutes and dripped out onto the floor when I stood up later.

Ughhhhhh. I feel like my dental fear is increasing steadily as I get older. The good news is that I shouldn't have any nerve left in there now, so after my gums stop aching, I should feel a sweet, sweet nothing I haven't felt in months. I can't wait.

As the adult executive in charge of my life decisions, I'm going to Darrell's to pick up a milkshake for dinner.

In other, happier news: centerfold face-off!

And as an addendum to my last post about the three weeks of rainy weather we've had with at least another week to come, here is my attitude about the rain morphing over the past two weeks and made into a flipbook:



Ha ha ha. It makes me feel a lot better to do this kind of thing, actually. Googling "online flipbook" is probably in the top ten list of things I've ever done to improve my life.

Root canal tomorrow! I am seriously so excited, depsite the $500+ bill it's going to come with. Mostly I have been keeping the pain at bay by taking three times the recommended daily dose of ibuprofen, but sometimes it springs up anyway and I can barely even function.

Oh, dear...

Bad News! They all died. The adult bird worked all day yesterday at getting them out of the house. She'd go in and push then come out and try to pull. I ended up pulling them out with pliers. I should have listened to mom and left them alone - I feel terrible!

- Dad

Gerald fail.

I just drooled on my cat by accident.

My dad obsesses over birds. He's built a hundred birdhouses and popped them up all over the yard to attract them. He loves all birds except for the lowly crow, which he sees as the schoolyard bully trying to maliciously steal food and territory from other birds. I have seen my father creep up to and suddenly burst out of the back door flapping his arms and hissing, as you would at a bad cat, to scare off crows. He doesn't just want them to GO - he genuinely wants to instill fear and doubt in their hearts. He also sneaks up to the venetian blind in the window and quickly whips it up and down to frighten them into never returning. So far, this hasn't really worked.

At brunch yesterday, my dad told me that he was playing wet nurse to four tiny baby birds that had been born in one of his birdhouses. He said he had been watching them for a couple of days (I have no doubt that he meant this almost literally), and didn't see the mother in and out at all to feed the babies. "I figured a crow must have got her", he said with the kind of disgust generally reserved for war criminals and pedophiles. So my father, seeing hungry children in need, went around the backyard looking for ants to feed the babies. He crushed a dozen ants gently with his finger, put them on a plate, and got on a stepladder to see if the babies would eat them. Alas, they showed no interest in the ants and continued to peep at him in such a way that caused him to go into the kitchen to find something more baby-bird appropriate. He decided on milk with some banana mashed up in it, spooned into the tiny bowl formed by the tip cut off of the banana, which apparently the baby birds gorged themselves on, to his paternal delight. When I asked him why he chose the milk, he replied matter-of-factly, "Everybody drinks milk". I really don't think he even considered that birds are not mammals...? I decided not to mention that no bird has ever produced milk, because he said mournfully that the day after he fed the birds milk and bananas, there was no sign of life from the nest, and worse, he had seen an adult bird flying in and out.

This is the e-mail he sent me this morning after I asked for an update:

Last night I found one, dead on the ground, probably flew the coop too early or just fell out. Although I didn't look in the house, it was very quiet, and no adult birds around, so I thought I may have done them in with the banana and milk. Looking up at the house late last night, it was kind of eerie, almost like a haunted house. I had trouble sleeping last night. However, This morning, I see the little ones sticking their beaks out and an adult bird (I'd say it's an aunt), coming and going, so things are looking up.

LIKE A HAUNTED HOUSE.

I'm at my parents' house, and digging around in the desk for a piece of scrap paper, I found the lyrics of a song my father must have printed out to learn to play with his guitar. I don't know what the song is, but it contains the following lyric:

Did you ever see a Cajun when he really got mad
When he really got trouble like a daughter gone bad

Oh, Gerald. Ha... I know that one really spoke to you.

Who could have guessed how sad this life would be.

So vain:



I don't stage these,okay? It's just what he likes to do.

The fridge repair guy came and the verdict is in: the fridge is out of gas and is beyond repair. I look forward to swift action from my landlord.

I just finished reading The Wonder Spot by Melissa Bank and was really surprised by how easy it was to love. It's full of clever dialogue, and Bank has a pretty firm grasp on why people do the things they do. There is a story in there about a passive-aggressive meeting with the main character's insane grandmother that made me laugh so hard I felt sick. Very good light-but-not-vapid summer reading, although there is currently no evidence outside of summer.

Whoever thought it was a good idea to make Cockburn a name, anyway?

My dad, leaving the hospital to go be a dad for the first time.

Sally and I have re-started going to the gym. Yesterday she was using an elliptical machine in front of me while I huffed and puffed away on some other equally torturous device. After four minutes, she turned around frowning with her mp3 player still on, dismounted, pointed at the offending elliptical and shouted, "This is BULLSHIT!" I love her.

Speaking of the gym, what are you guys listening to at the gym these days? I need something loud, fast, danceable, and motivating, no matter how awful, basically.

I was browsing on the internerd for upcoming Stevie Wonder tour dates (Note: this is the hardest thing to find on the internet. WHY?) and got this pop-up:

Most definitely. And notify me if he manages to untie himself, too, will you?

This ad showed up on my Facebook:



Let there be no mistake, I hate it a lot, but to be honest, I'm not even sure exactly what it means. Do most women find their own periods "gross"? What are they getting at? Is there a joke in there I'm not picking up on?

I just found out that Stevie Wonder is playing a FREE concert to kick of the Montreal Jazz Festival. IN MONTREAL.

I... don't know what to do. I have zero dollars, but Stevie Wonder is just like... the last one I need before I have the complete set!