Lethal Dose

Yesterday my friend and I took a little walk on the wild side for signage (photos coming.) On the way, we stopped for pepper spray for me, first aid supplies for her (she’s a red cross volunteer), finished off by cupcakes across the street from a casket company (!) … now today, I’m paying for it. Why? I forgot my friend is a diabetic (which is why I’m not outing her.) After collapsing in a fit of sugar giggles while photographing the “no smoking within 20 feet of the entrance!” signs on the door of the casket company and trying to track down the origin of a squawking parrot in a church bell tower, we reminisced about childhood beating instruments (her mother: a blue avon hairbrush; mine: a yardstick that said “QUIRK” in blue ink - fitting, eh?)

Driving to work this morning the “aura” came on … no, not ghosts, silly, but the migraine aura, the likes of which I’ve never felt before. My skin began to crawl, I got odd chills and that familiar pain in my head, this time in an almost vertical line down my forehead. I’ve been keeping a small bag of dog food in my car for a homeless woman and her pup who beg underneath a bridge I pass every day on the way to work. She seems to alternate shifts with an angrier, drunken man and I haven’t seen her for awhile. Today she came to my car and I handed her the dog food.

“It’s food for your dog.”
“Oh. I thought it was for ME!”
I noticed her hands were covered with silver jewelry - some of it nice.
“Got any water?”
I handed her a bottle and she walked off.

When I got to work I dropped a bag of frozen bagels all over the floor in the kitchen and gave up trying to make some toast. Now I’m at my desk, so nauseous I’m afraid to move lest I puke in my wastebasket. My sweet coworker had left me a chocolate bunny as a gift, but she didn’t know that I’m scared of giant bunnies so I had to put it back on her desk facing the other way.

Monday night Marky and I went to a swanky Hollywood thing and I wore big hair:

The weird thing about going to these events - whether it’s as a spectator or if I’m covering it for a “legit” blog that I write for … is when you’re walking in. People on the sidewalk turn and look at you in anticipation, then as you get closer, they turn away. The other night, a photographer started to reach for his camera then realized Mark and I were “nobodies” (except in our own minds, of course). It makes you realize how easy it is to go insane out here - imagine if you were famous once, then became a nobody and had people physically turn away after your star fell?

It’s a strange world.

PS. Today I got asked to play a nun on TV. That freaked me out b/c my mother was a former nun (she left before she took her vows.) Nuns freak me out. Not as much as giant bunnies or Peeps, but they still give me chills. Sadly, I didn’t get to do it.

At least 50 people have lost their sight after staring at the sun hoping to see an image of the Virgin Mary, according to reports.

Alarmed health authorities in India’s Kottayam district have set up a sign dispelling rumours of a miraculous image in the sky and warning of the dangers of looking into direct sunlight.

Forty-eight cases of sight-loss, allegedly caused by photochemical burns on the retina, have been recorded at St Joseph’s ENT and Eye hospital in the region since Friday.

Despite warnings, and the potentially harmful effects of their actions, believers are allegedly still flocking to a hotelier’s house in Erumeli near where the divine image is said to have appeared.

“All our patients have similar history and symptoms… They have developed photochemical, not thermal, burns after continuously gazing at the sun,” Dr Annamma James Isaac, the hospital’s ophthalmologist said.

Even churches in the area have disowned the miracle after health officers and doctors approached the clergy.

The house where the miracle is said to have occurred has apparently been the subject of rumours for months.

The hotelier, who has since moved, had claimed that statues of the Virgin Mary in his house have been crying honey and bleeding oils and perfumes.

I used to write a regular blog about my building and neighborhood. There’s just something about it that’s so very David Lynch. It’s a vortex of some kind that attracts the bizarre. Add the picture-perfect setting and there you have it.

There’s a faux-tribesman who lives here and I’d love to blog about him but I’m sure he googles himself ad nauseum and I don’t need him knocking at the door. Suffice to say, it’s a small town and we’re not the first building to be graced with his presence, or creepy comments to the female tenants. I heard that when the tweaker first laid eyes on him, he ran inside to get a baseball bat.

The eastern-european bachelors who barbecue (I love how they’ve taken on Americanism with such zeal: they barbecue almost every day and drink only Sam Adams!) are now sunbathing alongside the building, covered in baby oil and using paper towel rolls for pillows.

“I’d put something else down on that grass - all the dogs pee there,” I tried to warn them.

“Ok, that’s okay, we’re fine,” the bald one w/the gold chains reassured me. Well, I tried.

Walking with my neighbor yesterday, we caught up on the building gossip.

“I never see you,” she says.

I got out of the habit of never going past the mailbox to the other half of the building when I first moved in, when our building was dominated by a perverted building manager, a drunken Hungarian who would have a planting war with another crazy neighbor. I caught him one morning when the pup had an emergency run, at 5:30 am, crouched over, shovel in hand.

“Um, someone was digging up the plants, I have to put them back in.” Whatever.

Anyway, he’s long gone but my habit of avoiding the front of the building remains, so after my neighbor moved to a bigger apartment, I never saw her.

“This building is something else, girl! How did I end up here?” she mused.

“Well, you lost everything in a hurricane and had nowhere else to go.”

Which is true. She and her husband and two tiny kids and another on the way, and a dog who would follow via a shelter rescue flight all landed here, just like the Wizard of Oz. I told her my theory that it’s the edge of the continent and there’s just nowhere else to go. If you tilt a checkerboard or one of those little hand-held pinball games with the tiny metal ball, you get the idea. Tilt the continent and it all slides down or across.

That’s the only sense I can make of it, anyway.

As we walked, a man on a bike rode by and she waved.

“There’s the guy upstairs,” she said.

“I don’t recognize him. Where does he live?”

She squinted. “Fuck, I don’t have my glasses … that’s not him!”

The guy stopped his bike and moved in our direction.

“I’m sorry, I thought you were someone else - our neighbor,” she yelled.

“I am that someone else! I am your neighbor!” he yelled back. But he wasn’t. Luckily I had the pup so he moved along.

Why I just love myspace. When pages take so long to load, you really have time to read the ads: