It's a lovely fall day in Maryville, MO. Leaves are finally falling off trees in acceptable numbers, my mother can't leave the house without a hat, and all of the mouth-breathers in town are much easier to spot as they have yet to change into pants and jackets, thereby assuring that their baby-making bits will shrivel up and cease functioning.
I love autumn. I love a season that is so fantastic that it has two names. I love knowing that in less than two days, it will be pitch black night at 1 in the afternoon because of the time change, and that by the time March rolls around, I will have lost the will to live in the sunlight entirely and have to be dragged screaming and inebriated into the light.
Because this is the season that is the setup for my springtime krazy fest. It's awesome to know me during April when I can't stop the lucid dreams or make complete sentences or keep from drooling at the sight of anyone without a shirt on. My friends totally earn their bribe money that month.
It is also the season of The Cold. The Cold that inflames your throat just enough to keep you from actually enjoying that cigarette, or wine or whiskey, or whisky, or pretty much anything that you would really like to be enjoying because the weather is on crack and there's nothing you can do about it. This one has also laid an egg just below my right eye and slightly out of reach of my right nostril. It's going to be disgusting when that hatches.
And so, on a trip out of doors and to the grocery store with my mother, I casually tossed in a bag of the only thing in the world that I know will make me feel better: Peanut M&M's.
Yeah, there's a story there. It goes like this: Summer Youth Group retreat thing leads to strep developing in my young throat while we head, as a family, to Isle Royale in Lake Superior where the only doctor on the island was on the other side of it tending to a hiker with a broken arm. (Later we learned that everyone breathing at the retreat got strep (because teenagers are germ-factories-without-hygiene) and all of them but me went to the doctor Right Away) I got on a ferry with my family, got to the island, went to the doctor's office (minus the doctor, of course) and then went to the c-store at the hotel to find something to help me feel better. I was 13 and chose to medicate myself thusly: Orange Gatorade, Peanut M&M's (the bigbig bag) and a work of unparalleled literature called something like Midnight Affair by someone called something like Alberta Nunn. (I found it! Midnight Affair by Nan Ryan!)(It's a terrible book - no one read it)(Really, I'm completely serious. The sexual stereotypes alone are awful, add to them the cultural, ethnic and socio-economic ones and it's just a fucking mess of bad.)
That book stayed with me for the next 7 or so years, and I read it every time I got sick, sometimes more than once. Every page, every time. It was the touching and stereotypically horrifying story of a young woman half-bastard-pirate who falls in love with a slick Rhett Butler type named, no seriously this is one thing I remember perfectly: Hilton Courteen. Yep. Named after a hotel. *head shake*
Anyway, the thing was set in some mythically idyllic New Orleans and there was a costume ball and lots of random sweaty sex and a lottery and a storm and people died and the only gay character was also made of pond slime and driftwood, but you know, it was something to read.
Until. Until my father threw it away. The bastard. (He also threw away the jean shorts that were made of safety pins holding seams in place and the tennis shoes that were little more than the suggestion of uppers with soles made of squeaky mold, and okay so I get the point Now, but That's not where I'm going with this, so just stop reading here and get on with it!)
So. My Novel That I Read When I Feel Like Dingle Slime got tossed. Sad.
Orange Gatorade. It has no flavor. It is, in fact, utterly unredeemable and made entirely out of plastic (the bottle is just less liquidy). I am unrepentant about changing my consumer and consumption habits to fit my personal belief system and so have quit the Gatorade. It will always hold a place in my heart, along with Ultra-Strength Rave Hairspray and Pseudo Echo, as something that was good to have, but really there were better options.
The Peanut M&Ms are all the remain of that first terrible moment of ill. All that I can hold on to as part of my I Have No Insurance And So Must Heal Myself medical plan. Everything else of that trip has gone. Well, okay, so the Lake is still there and so is the island and the hotel, and Gatorade still exists, but Dammit! I slept for 36 hours while my family wandered about the wilderness and ooo'd and ah'd and oh'd at nature. Sleep and showers and the healing power of sugar-coated mediocrity got me through until we were back on the mainland and in a doctor's office getting diagnosed and then not running over the drunk guy lying across our path on Axe Murderer Highway.
Now the M&Ms are gone, and everything that I was going to write about today instead of this personal wandering has poit!-ed itself to a future date. There is tepid tea and the comfort of sleep. Oh! and something a little creepy and wonderful also:
Come Into My Parlour from Moog on Vimeo.
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