After ignoring this blog for a year and a half, I decided to come home and dick around with the theme.  Please ignore the weirdness.  And don’t mind our appearance either.  Ba dum tish.

(I just looked up how to “phonetically spell rimshot” and the internet was surprisingly very unhelpful. The above is my best guess.)

I went back to Spring Vegas as the kids are calling it these days (Yes, I have really heard kids call it that) over Thanksgiving and I had a wonderful time. I’m always amazed, though, at how much things have changed when I go back. In this most recent case, the entire airport was new and I spent the first few minutes hesitantly walking the terminal, freaking out and wondering if I had somehow gotten on the wrong plane. When I noticed that everything in the airport, including the carpets, was fishing-themed, I knew I was in the right place. There’s a Springfield-Branson (Spring Vegas hasn’t really caught on yet) National Airport Terminal Scrapbook if you’re interested in seeing a rug that looks like a river bed.

One other vexing change is the number of national food chains that keep moving into our formerly small town. This vexes not because I don’t like national food chains but because I like lording the fact that Chicago has these food chains and Springfield doesn’t over my family and friends.

As an example of my big-city sophistication, I was telling my dad about this great burrito place we have in Chicago where we can make burritos to order when he says to me, “Oh, that sounds like a place we have here. Chip-pottle. Have you heard of it?” “It’s pronounced Chip-oat-lay,” I huffed, foiled again by the boundless greed of corporations on the neverending death march that is capitalistic expansion. Don’t worry about me, guys. I’m sure I’ll find some other way to be cool.

A few days after this, my mother and I were running errands when we happened to park in front of an iconic Springfield shop. To call it a sex shop would be a misnomer and to call it a sexy shop would be generous. It specializes in the kind of marital aids middle-aged women pick up after reading an issue of Cosmo and believing that there really are 101 ways they could spice up their love lives and all of them involve buying junk.

Anyway, I call the shop iconic because even ten years after last hearing their radio ad, I can still sing it from memory: ♪♫ “Priscilla’s…where fun and fantasy meet!” ♫♪ (Here is a YouTube video of a couple of girls who can do the same thing). But as we pulled up in front of the store, I noticed that they had changed the name from Priscilla’s to Patricia’s: Where Fun and Fantasy Meet. I don’t know who the hell Patricia is and why she changed the name of the store, but doesn’t Patricia (Patty to her friends and sorority sisters) sound like the kind of person whose fantasies involve scrapbooking and not body stockings? If I want advice on my next PTA standoff, I’ll chitty chat with Patricia. But if I need to know which flavor of edible underwear tastes best, I want to talk to Priscilla.

My mother and I didn’t actually go in Priscilla’s (not calling it Patricia’s on principle), though there was a hilarious conversation while I was home that involved my mother detailing for her former mother-in-law/my grandmother where all of the sex shops in town were. “Oh, sure, you can find Adam and Eve right down the strip mall from Yankee Candles.” In fairness, my mother is not a pervert, she is a UPS driver and thus delivers to all of these places. Or so she says. What happens in Spring Vegas stays in Spring Vegas.

Theft is the sincerest form of flattery.

Home is where the dirty laundry is.

A messy apartment is the best birth control that slovenliness can buy.

Character is what you do when you live alone.

Always drink in moderation, unless you’re on a first date.

It’s not stalking if you’re soulmates.

Even if the recipe doesn’t call for them, pants are an essential part of any cooking endeavor.

There are other fish in the sea but they are all bottom-feeders.

Have you ever lied about being about of town because you didn’t have clean clothes to wear someplace? No? Me neither.

I’m the kind of person that buys something not because I need it, but because it’s a really good deal. EBay and I are such a good match because it’s a website full of really good deals. For example, I spent $40 on a set of knitting needles. But listen! Normally this set is $45, plus shipping, and I’ll never have to buy knitting needles for a project again! That’s a good deal! Right now I’m bidding on 11 skeins of recycled silk yarn from Nepal that would normally be $176. The current high bid is $26. Nevermind what I’m going to do with over 2000 yards of recycled silk. The important thing is that I can own it for such a low price.

In other news, I’ve been ghostwriting this thirteen year old boy’s application to be the #1 St. Louis Cardinals fan and I’m going to get paid in sushi.

“Notre existence quotidienne est un mauvais feuilleton par lequel nous nous laissons envoûter.” – Michel Butor

“Our existence is a bad TV show by which we allow ourselves to be bewitched.”

I’ve been gone from this blog for a little while and for part of that while, I was in Spain. This was my third trip in four years to the Iberian Peninsula and as always, I had an awesome time and a lot of salty food. Seriously, most of our meals had so much salt that it was actually visible on the food. Not only that, but they don’t even put pepper on the table. In fact, they seemed a little miffed when I asked for some on behalf of my mother. Maybe that’s because I asked for a bell pepper instead of the kind that comes in a shaker. I don’t know. My Spanish is a little oxidized. I mean rusty.

Anyway, one of the highlights of the trip was getting to fly overseas first class. After being chosen for a surprise upgrade, I did my best to blend in by taking photos and hoarding everything they gave me.

Pictured: the lobster amuse-bouche served with butter AND margarine.

By the end of the flight, I had about as much space as I would have had in coach due to all of the blankets and “comfort kits” I had wedged into the seat and the pocket in front of me. And at the end of the flight they gave me a ceramic house filled with liquor, which I enthusiastically accepted. Mo’ money, mo’ weird free shit.

Speaking of weird shit, I present a peacock eating garbage:

This gorgeous creature was living on the grounds of a fabulous Moorish palace but instead of spending his days wandering the shrub maze or lounging near one of the many fountains waiting for oranges to drop from the trees, he digs through the trash. Follow your bliss, little ‘cock. The name for peacock in Spanish, pavo real, is actually one of my favorite language things ever. It translates literally to “royal turkey” which makes some sense when you think about their similarities, but I really wish someone would write a cultural history of how the Spaniards decided on this poultry hierarchy. Was there any discussion, or did everyone just agree that the big, flashy asshole got to be king of the turkeys?

And that was Spain! More or less.

A Big Hole in the Ground

Manmeat

Personal Information Clearinghouse

Pants: Can’t Live With ‘Em, Can’t Leave the House Without ‘Em

Is it possible to get stress diabetes? Because isn’t diabetes what happens when you create a sugar hurricane and your pancreas’ disaster response team doesn’t have enough insulin sandbags to stop it so your bloodstream floods? Your kidneys are the Superdome and the rest of your body is the rest of America in that it would rather cut off its foot than take disaster preparedness measures like insulin and I’m actually kind of proud of this diabetes as Hurricane Katrina metaphor. I mean, Louisiana even looks like a foot. Anyway, don’t quote me on that because my Board Certification in Endocrinology comes from one of those schools where the admissions process involves sending them a drawing of a clown. But my question is: can the same thing happen with stress? If so, I may need to reconsider some of my appointments to the Federal Anxiety Management Agency.

I think it may be time for a fresh generation of crossword writers. Every clue is either a dead person, an obsolete catch phrase, or the title of a silent movie punning on an obscure catch phrase and starring a dead person.