I'm Back and I'm Mad

camouflage in tiny action
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

I have returned from the land of pleasant living. Wait, no, that's Baltimore - clearly one of the more ridiculous slogans ever - but it applies to Charleston's happy 70 degree morning yesterday. Yeah, another weekend when I leave the sunshine and sanity in order to drive four hours into a fog bank and dismal pouring rain and a household full of wet dogs and teenagers.

Naturally, the house was trashed. The house is always trashed when I get back and it irks me somewhat, particularly when I contrast it with M's apartment, which is white (he hardly has anything on his walls), minimalist (he hardly has any furniture) and immaculate (he's clearly an insane neatnik but I love him anyway.) And I love being in his apartment, which makes me feel like I'm in some kind of wonderful subtropical (lizards and fabulous white sheets) upper crusty 1930s colonial hotel and someone is going to bring me a frothy rum drink and a witty British quip at any moment.

So coming home is somewhat of a letdown and it never fails to trip me into ultimate crankiness mode. I don't know whether it's the smell of dogs and fireplace and whatever the hell else that - aroma - might be, maybe cigars or teenage boy effluvia (don't ask. M has dubious friends sometimes.) or the fact that I swear there were 10 clean, folded towels in the linen closet on Friday morning and now there are no towels to be found, anywhere, that gets to me so badly. Maybe it's the lack of food and the endless disappearing fork controversy or, just possibly, it's the total screaming absence of warm, clean emptiness. No, there are people and dogs and dirty dishes hither and yon and the roof is leaking and the faulty breaker has gone out again and everything is damp. I know, I'm the queen of chaos and this is how I like to live but sometimes, sheesh.

In other news, I tried to alleviate the boredom of the drive up and down I-26 with a book on tape from the, uh, somewhat limited offerings to be had at the West Asheville library. I went with a large-ish box of book entitled Mystique which I hoped would be mindlessly entertaining but not painfully stupid. Alas for great hopes. It did okay on the mindless factor, there is that, but even yelling BIG DICK every time the hero with "his amber eyes glowing" and his "mane of unruly black hair" advanced on the heroine with her "breasts the size of ripe peaches" and they said "Aye," which is what they mostly say for the whole damn book, except when they're about to get it on, when, for some dumbass reason they say "Nay," even though his "shaft is tremblingly alert," didn't make it better. I mean, it took them five fucking tapes to get down to, well, fucking, or, I mean, his finding the flower of honey between her thighs. It didn't improve that much even when I said Blatant Anachronistic Pustule every time they referred to something that wouldn't be invented for another 400 years or so: most notably, Natural Philosophy, which the heroine wishes to study, which would doubtless be easier if the book wasn't theoretically set in, oh, somewhere around 1264 AD, leaving her the whole Renaissance to get through first, not to mention any number of other slightly important events before the Natural Philosophers really get going. So, yeah, it was painfully awful but I listened to most of it, gods help me. I think I may have killed off some of my last coherent brain cells, but, hey, anything for literature.