bad metaphor

I don’t know what it is about the song exactly, but I can’t get that damned new Belle and Sebastian single out of my head. I liked Legal Man okay, but it wasn’t my favorite, and I thought that Dear Catastrophe Waitress wasn’t quite as up to par with their other stuff – though that didn’t stop me from snatching it up at 8:05 in the morning from Love Garden the day it was released. And this song is very much in the vein of Legal Man and Dear Catastrophe Waitress – a very cheery, groovy 70′s feel. But holy god, this song has fused with my synapses now. I can’t stop it, it’s like being poss – CANCEL ALL OPERATIONS AND GO BUY OUR CD NOW – LOVE, STUART MURDOCH

I was going to post about Hawaii, but I have a lot to say about it, so I’ll wait until we get our DSL box on Wednesday and I can do it from home. My boss Jodie is pretty lenient (as well as being crazy), but I don’t know how she’d feel about me blogging for four hours straight at work.

Like any creative writing major worth her salt, I have a healthy appreciation for the morbid and macabre. Not without qualification, though. I do take issue with all the gore and death in the news. The Laci Peterson case, for instance. How many pregnant women are murdered by their husbands every year? Most likely, lots. So why all the press coverage? Why do news channels like CNN, NBC and (puke) Fox News devote like half of their air time on Scott Peterson and his equine-faced ex-lover (the other half divided between Kobe Bryant and MJ)? They aren’t celebrities or powerful people, and although they were well-to-do, were by no means among the elite in California. The only explanation I can come up with is that Laci Peterson happened to be beautiful. Had she lived, she should have tried out for toothpaste commercials, her smile was so bright. Thus a public jaded from so much exposure to crime this and killing that is captivated by her particular story. Meanwhile, other women who take unexpected “walks” on the beach go largely ignored by everyone except a handful of people, who suffer their tragedies in private. I understand you can’t cover every murder, but still, why only this one?

Why, indeed, when there are so many crazy things that happen in that big mass of synapses and neurons in people’s heads; accidents that cause them to say to themselves, “I could totally waste that guy” or something even more basic – not words – just an intense feeling of unadulterated hate. When I was holed up in a hotel room in Hawaii, I watched a lot of news (Fox News, because that’s my mom’s favorite news station, le sigh). One news story in particular caught my attention – the murder of six people in Deltona, Florida, by some guys with a baseball bat. Jesus Christ. Apparently one of the victims was housesitting for her grandmother. The ringleader of the killers had been squatting in this house, but was jailed for some reason or other. The girl came back, moved in, and threw out the squatter’s stuff. The squatter was very pissed off, mostly because of the loss of his X-box, and apparently in his mind, this justified beating the shit out of her and her friends. The girl, in particular, was more badly beaten than her friends – they almost couldn’t i.d. her body.

I don’t support the death penalty, because in my good liberal heart, I believe that it’s used more often for evil than for any good – being applied to black people more often than white, for instance – and because I think that mistakes, no matter how careful the legal system is, can and do happen, and happen more often than we think. I can’t support the state-sanctioned execution of someone who is innocent and just happened to have tremendous bad luck. Despite all these arguments, I still have reservations about people like this squatter guy, and the Carr brothers. The Carr brothers committed an even more heinous crime, described here. I can’t really enjoy reading about that case, even on a morbid fascination level, because it makes me feel sick. One woman survived the attack, incredibly – after being beaten and raped, and watching her friends die, she walked a mile, naked, through a snowy field for help – I wonder how she’s dealing with it now. In all likelihood, not well.

Yet, besides the Carr brothers’ case, I can’t help but be sucked into stories like these. One website that I’ve spent hours on before is www.crimelibraries.com. I’m especially intrigued by the bizarre cases, like the cannibals. Am I crazy? Maybe. Is there a lot of writing material out there? Hell yes.

I have not blogged since July 23rd. This is not due to laziness on my part, for once – actually, it’s due to a number of factors – one being that I haven’t been able to connect to the internet on my home computer for awhile. So the few blogs that I’ve posted since my computer died that fateful day have been from work, and I haven’t worked much lately. The other factor would be that I’ve been insanely busy. The major two things that have happened have been moving (from ghetto hell) and going to Hawaii. I’ll start with the move.

It was chaos, of course, and I’d never felt so salty in my life – my skin was just marinating in sweat from hefting things up and down the stairs. And it was such a hassle – there wasn’t a rental truck to be had within a 50 mile radius of Lawrence, so many people had checked them out already. We had to get a storage place on the other side of town. So we had to move twice. Yeah, tons of fun. I think roommate tensions were at the highest they’ve been in awhile – we were snipping at each other when it looked like one wasn’t working hard enough. Things are still simmering down; luckily we’re friends to begin with.

But – we did it! We moved out, away from that hell, and our new place is gorgeous. We’re allowed to paint our rooms and stuff, as long as we paint it back before we move out, and they give us white paint for free. Thus I felt it mandatory to at least do something So I went a little overboard…and painted it lime green. Woo hoo…with gold sponging over it, too. My room is beautiful, but damn bright. If I close the door, you can still see the glow from under the door crack. It’s awesome.

The only problem is – I’m not too sure about the neighbors at this new place. I figured the area looked nice, so we wouldn’t have to worry. I know, appearances don’t really matter in the grand scheme of things – perfect gentlemen could be serial killers, and the grubbiest homeless-looking dude could be a professor. But I figure if they’re not throwing trash in the yard, that’s good enough for me. Well, it turns out that they do. Not -quite- in the yard, but out in the parking lot around the dumpster (I guess people are too lazy to get out of their cars and take the time to put things -in- the dumpster). Kristen found an open, used diaper around there. Gahh.

Also, I made the mistake of parking next to a basketball goal that someone had put up in a parking space. I come back one night to find my car dented on the top and streaked with red. It looks like the basketball goal had been dragged across my car. The thing is – I don’t know if it fell, or if someone did it on purpose. The dent’s pretty deep, even if it had fallen. Anyways, it really sucks, cause whoever did it didn’t bother to leave a note. I’m gonna go around the neighborhood at some point and get to the bottom of this – hopefully it -was- an accident, and not the result of some asshole who decided to trash my car. Jackass.

Finally, we met one of the kids in the area…and she was strange. I was actually a little fond of the little ghetto kids back at our old place – they were nice, in their own way, even though they had a coke addict for a mother. But this girl…she was maybe nine or ten years old, and had that sort of clingy attitude that made me think she might not have very many friends. I feel sorry for kids like that, but all the same – I don’t really have time to babysit a little misfit. Maybe Beth can do that. She picked up my cat right after I was done telling her not to, that my cat doesn’t like strangers picking him up and that he will scratch or bite. And he did scratch her, but luckily she didn’t whine about it or run and tell her parents. After learning that I was Vietnamese, she mentioned that she had “a roommate, who went to go fight in Vietnam on Monday. No, maybe it was Iraq. Yes, he fought a Vietnam war on Monday.” Hee hee. She took us back to her front porch, where her puppy was playing around, and proudly displayed over the window were two flags – a giant U.S. flag, and right underneath it, a Dale Earnhardt flag. Never a good sign. Not to be discriminatory against Dale Earnhardt fans, but…ahh, screw it. It’s never a good sign.

So that’s the apartment…excuse me, townhouse. I love it. It’s got hardwood floors, and three levels – although it is a bit of a pain to find things, as I’ve got three areas to search now for my keys! But it beats being cooped up in the rathole that we used to live in. Hopefully nobody tries to attack my car again, and maybe this year will be a good one.