Jamie Iredell's Blog, page 9

Pet sittingGetting to the Apt.:If you’re coming from Rive...

Pet sittingGetting to the Apt.:If you’re coming from Riverside, you’ll want to turn ontoMagnolia. So, if you’re coming from north to south onRiverside, that means you’ll want to turn right ontoMagnolia; if you’re coming from south to north, take aleft. If you’re coming in on I-75, you’ll want to get off atthe Downtown exit. If you get to the Cemetery Road exit,you’ve gone too far. That’s all if you’re coming from southto north on 75. If you’re coming from north to south on75, still take the Downtown exit, but don’t go so far thatyou reach the junction with 16, because then you’ve gonetoo far. Once you take the exit (the Downtown exit),you’ll want to take a right or a left, depending on whichdirection you exited the freeway from. If you came infrom south to north, then you want to take a left whenyou get to the light. If you came from north to south,take a right.
Once you get to Magnolia, my building will be on yourleft, at the end of the block. It’s a seven-storey brickbuilding. But, if you come at night you probably won’tbe able to make out the bricks, or how tall the building is(there are lots of trees!), so look for the drug store on theright at about the middle of the street. It’s a CVS, and nextdoor is a Blockbuster. The Blockbuster and CVS are onlyabout fifty yards from my building, which will be on theleft. You can park on the street from 10 AM to 4 PM fortwo hours before you get a ticket. But if you come duringrush hour (between 6 AM and 9 AM and from 4 PM to6 PM) you won’t be able to park at all, and your car willbe towed. But if you come really early (before 6 AM) orlate (after 6 PM) you won’t have to worry about parkingat all. But, Sinamyn doesn’t like to have visitors that earlyor late, so I recommend not coming during those times.Also, as for the parking, Magnolia’s not exactly a “safe”street during those hours, so if you park, be sure not toleave any valuables in plain sight, and I’d just leave thedoors unlocked, so that the homeless don’t break anywindows before they riffle through your things. Once, Iparked on the street and returned and found syringes onthe floorboards and I’d only been parked down there forlike twenty minutes!
Once you get to the front of the building (the addressis 419, FYI; I know you’ve been here before, but, just tobe safe!), look to the left, on the brick wall (here you’llactually be able to see the bricks—even at night, becauseof the street lamps. They’re really old, aren’t they?), whichwill be west of the main door. There’s a telephone dialingpad sort of thing there. Dial *0265, which will unlock thefront door. Then you can get inside. Inside, there will be ahallway to the left, but don’t go down that. To your rightis the staircase. Take the stairs to the second floor. At thesecond floor there will be a door labeled “2.” Open thedoor. You’ll want to turn left inside the hallway, and takeanother left. There’s no other way to go, so you shouldn’thave any trouble with this part! On the left-hand side ofthe hallway you’ll see my apt., No. 265 (I know, I haven’tchanged the code to unlock the doors downstairs yet, andI should probably get around to that, but I knew you’d belooking after Sinamyn and this would make things easier,so I’ve been putting it off ), about three doors down on theleft. The floors here are all original hardwood, so if you’rewearing heels, they tend to clack quite loudly. That’s nota problem, unless you’re coming at those really early orlate times, because I wouldn’t want you to wake up theneighbors. Mrs. Gitlen, (across the hall) is kind of old,and rather suspicious, and I don’t think she sleeps much,or she is a terribly light sleeper, and she might wake upand think you’re a stranger and call the police.
Once you’re inside the apt. (the other day at work I gaveyou two keys. The round one’s for the deadbolt, thesquare one’s for the knob; I had them made that way soyou wouldn’t get them mixed up), the kitchen counterwill be on your left, and that’s where I usually set downmy purse when I come home. It’s just a convenient placeto put down your things so that you can get settled beforetaking care of Sinamyn. By the way, thanks so much forthis; you’re a big help!
Feeding:
Sinamyn only needs to eat once a day (she’s been on adiet since she started puffing up, and the vet said that forher age she shouldn’t be putting on that much weight, soI’m not feeding her as much).
To the right of the kitchen counter you’ll find therefrigerator. On the right side of the refrigerator is therefrigerator compartment. The left side is the freezer. Youshouldn’t need to get into the freezer at all, especially ifyou don’t give in to Sinamyn’s whining for more food!I’ve left enough for her to cover the day I’m gone, butshould you need any extra, there’s some in the freezer. Ifyou open the freezer, on the middle shelf (the bottomshelf contains my ice cream. Sorry, I know there’s a lot ofice cream. I don’t know why I’m saying sorry about that;it’s my ice cream and I shouldn’t feel bad; I’m just thinkingwhat you might be thinking when you see all that icecream. Well, you know what kind of month it’s been, soyou probably understand) you’ll find Ziploc freezer bagsof Sinamyn’s food. These have been frozen to preserve theflavors, because I read online that if the food is kept in itspackaging at room temperature for more than six months,it gets bland. I don’t know how it is that they know that.Can you imagine? So, should you need more food takeone freezer bag and set it in the big pot in cold water inthe sink to defrost. That’s how I do it. I don’t like to usethe microwave, because eventually—even on defrost—itstarts to cook the food, and then it turns into this mushymess that Sinamyn won’t even look at. If you turn aroundfrom the refrigerator, you’ll be facing the island that sitsin the middle of the kitchen, where the sink is. To the leftof the sink, and below it, is a cupboard, and inside you’llfind pots and pans. The “Big Pot” I use, is the dutch oven-looking one that has the clear lid and sits on the bottomshelf of the cupboard. Just drop the freezer bag into thepot, cover it with water from the tap and let it sit in thesink. It usually takes about twenty minutes to defrost. Feelfree to watch television while you’re waiting. You can alsowatch TV while Sinamyn’s eating, before you take her onher walk. If there’s nothing good on the TV, I have everyseason of Buffy on DVD. Operating instructions for thetelevision and DVD player follow below . . .

Playing HandsHe’d fallen in love with his hands. The fing...

Playing Hands
He’d fallen in love with his hands. The fingers had oncecombed through the black tendrils milimetering out froma woman’s head. They’d also graced the elastic waistbandof his Jockeys, and the keys of a Casio electronic keyboard.He hadn’t an ear for music, and disparate notes—a soundlike the transmission of a machine that crushes the spenthusks of what were once vehicles, which families hadripped around America—drifted out from the hands.The hands themselves had turned into mangroves. Everyfinger sprouted yet another finger and then anotherfinger, and the hands were the mangrove root systemfor the canopy of his head. But it was beautiful still, hethought, the fact of his playing.

psychogenic polydipsicThis Freak can be found holding up ...

psychogenic polydipsicThis Freak can be found holding up bars whilst sittingatop his barstool. Or these may be horses confinedto their pens without Nintendo, and so their boredom isintolerable. Either way the results are the same: the fluidsconsumed outweigh typical jello-filled bathtubs. Andwe mean old bathtubs, the kind with animal claws forfeet. Worried of your own propensity toward beverages?Among questions to ask the psychogenic polydipsic:Have you been indulging in a profusion of burritos orRussian salads? Have you been skipping rope in theimmediate vicinity of active volcanoes? Have you foundyourself pissing down the length of telephone poles? Inmost cases, polydipsics are mathematicians in Hollywoodfilms, and so you shouldn’t worry. True psychogenicpolydipsics suffer from middle-finger-out-the-windowof-their-Mercedes syndrome, and the left armpits of theirundershirts are stained yellow. Just the same, keep an eyeon your horse. Psychogenic polydipsics are people whoare always fucking thirsty, forever, what I mean is, passthe wine.

romance novel, theIn this literary genre the heroine is a...

romance novel, theIn this literary genre the heroine is always a pluckyyoung lawyer who has never had sex. She has spentall her years heretofore playing Scattergories. She is anexcellent player of Scattergories. Ask her for an airlinethat starts with D, and she’ll nail you with Delta. Samegoes for letters of the Greek alphabet and sorority sisters,for military operations and platoons. She is, but of course,terribly lonely. It is terrible; it fills her with terror. Andso she never watches movies, because of the dark. This,she knows, is among clichéd steps toward reconciling theloneliness, and yet she is somewhat thrilled by the terror.Yet another word that begins with L and aptly describesthings is a label. The accountant in the office across fromhers retrieves her mail and deposits it upon her desk eachmorning, like a retriever might belch a ball. Her retrieverin fact does this every evening when our heroine sloucheshome, her hair exactly like a bird’s nest down to the twine,bra of plastic, the pecking seagull fledglings. There is abreak at this moment to unbearably go over the fortunesof all involved characters: the accountant’s accounts, thelawyer’s laws, all of their incomes, their prospects (bleak)and who would prefer to marry whom (equally bleak).This tirade keeps up for something like two hundredpages. Unlike the lawyer’s retriever, the accountant is ahuman, and he stands in front of the plucky woman’sdesk not with a sad longing look for human attention,but with that carefully poised demeanor of a man whobegs for affection. What we mean is, he has one handon one hip. Our heroine, however, thinks the guy at thegym—the one in the Spandex—is way hot. This is thesame formula as in the romantic comedy film, except it isa little bit funnier. In the end the aliens attack and insteadof Spandex or receipts there are machines and explosions,a ripped skirt that exposes a soft but muscular femininethigh, and Will Smith shows up for a bit, because—well, Christ, man, what’s a movie without Will Smith?Never mind the movie. In the novel, the dramatic climaxreaches its pinnacle mid-trial, when our lawyer-heroineis illogically unaware of the prosecution’s surprise (alsoillogical) witness (because that doesn’t happen in real lifebecause that is a step in the legal process called Discovery)and she pulls the rug out from under everyone, andthis sends judge, jury, witness, prosecution, innocentbystanders—everyone—sprawling with rug burn, andthe judge holds our main character in contempt. Now noone finds her attractive at all, and she has been debarred.Oh, poop.

RussiansIn Russia there are so many Russians! It’s like o...

RussiansIn Russia there are so many Russians! It’s like one of thoseneighborhoods where a bunch of Russians live, butway bigger. This place is big. It’s like they took a countrythe size of Russia and filled it with Russians. One cannotslip through Mayakovskaya Station without listening inon a spit forth “Neeyet!” or “Spice-eeba!” which are theRussians’ favorite words. These mean, respectively, I willnot smile for your photograph, and our cuisine is not veryspicy. Every Russian has a little piece of the world’s largestcountry, and that piece is among the world’s smallestapartments, except for the Japanese (see Japanese, The pg.74). Should you—god forbid—go whistling Dixie in oneof these microscopic rooms, every microscopic ruble andmicroscopic kopek sprouts microscopic wings and flapsaway in a dizzying scatter of impoverished fractals. EveryRussian also has a bear pedaling a too-small bicycle aroundtheir living room, a bear wielding a hockey stick. Whilethe bicycle is fitting for this room’s size, the bear is not.How this was accomplished is yet to be determined. Allthat’s known is that for more than sixty years Russia hasbeen an international leader in science and technology. InRussia there are no cold drinks in one of Earth’s coldestcountries. Want ice water? That’ll be room temperature.Meantime ice floats down the Arbot, down NevskyProspekt, down all the streets, which are themselvesrivers of ice. Want a cold beer? Room temperature beeris ubiquitous in Russia. In fact, all of the liquid in Russiais beer. Or tea. Even the Russian’s blood—composed ofbeer and tea—is room temperature: thirty-seven degreesCelsius. And good God, when you enter these rooms,stripping off your boots and fifty-two layers, the Russiansstart toasting you. They toast your health, your visit,your friends, your family, your pets. They toast toasting.Then they’ll kiss your sweaty cheeks, and you’ll learn theCyrillic alphabet.

San FranciscansSan Franciscans are most noted for their d...

San FranciscansSan Franciscans are most noted for their dreadlocks.In fact, when seen by astronauts hovering in the blueglow of the thermosphere, San Francisco proves to beone enormous dreadlock. All of Earth’s patchouli—asubstance cultivated primarily in regions known fortheir human rights abominations—is exported to SanFrancisco. Thus, the air surrounding San Francisco,extending into the stratosphere, has had its trace elementsreplaced by patchouli and molecules of Dungeness crab.San Franciscans are fond of tacos and flat landscapes.Summers, one finds San Franciscans huddled aroundthe hulking burning body of a wooden man, a woodenman in the shape of an inverse taco, placed in a distantdesert, a desert flatter—even—than San Francisco. SanFranciscans are Earth’s most patient humans. Should youemploy yourself in this vicinity, take it easy, don’t worryabout it, you’ll get there when you get there. San Franciscois currently undergoing an immense digitization project.The goal: by 1999 San Franciscans will have reversed timeand converted San Francisco, having contained it insidea Silicon Valley web server. There, all the San Franciscanswill utter San Francisco into eternity. This is fortunate,since the west coast of San Francisco is a transverse fault,and soon San Francisco will become Alaska, and Alaskanshave already stockpiled ammunition in preparationfor this dreadlocked invasion. The Alaskans have donethis under the auspices of wildlife sportsmanship, butthe San Franciscans—thank God—will save them, andthemselves. Perhaps they’ll save all of us through theirrecycling program. We are all of us in desperate need ofrenewal.

Second Title PageThe Book ofFreaksJamie IredellShoe ...

Second Title PageThe Book ofFreaks
Jamie Iredell

Shoe for a HeadThe man with a shoe for a head told everyone to lookfor him in their local Athlete’s Foot. He said, youshould really buy my head. He said, go hard or go to thegrocery store, and, just make your way through the world,you pussy, and, if I’m not in you then you don’t have aman with a shoe for a head inside you and that’s just a sadthing. He had a wife who had a tooth for a head. If youcould have heard her, she would have said things like, youwouldn’t believe all the things that get stuck between me.Their children were frogs, but not real frogs. They werethe kind of frogs that look exactly like the puppet frogson a children’s television program. How the man with ashoe for a head, or his wife with a tooth for a head, ortheir puppety frog kids, or you, or the compilers of thisvolume, got to be the way we are is anyone’s guess.

sistersalmost always live tragic lives. They’ll march wit...

sistersalmost always live tragic lives. They’ll march with theirbrothers into fields polka-dotted with strawberries.The youngest—a towhead—will say his finger hasfound the furthest reaches of his nose, which tickles,and that the sky has turned pink. The middle one—Michelle, the sister we’re speaking of, brace-toothed andbespectacled—will say, “Shut up, Bobby. You’re suchan idiot.” The strawberry arched from her fingers in aparabola of streaked red will splatter Bobby’s shirt sothat it resembles a television gunshot wound. Jacob, thefreckled chubby oldest, will fill the inside of his headlockwith Michelle’s curled locks. Another berry—smashedupon those curls—will resemble the brains that tick awayunder Michelle’s scalp, the mind itself overcome withsingular hatred. The middle child, a girl, the one they call“Four-eyes,” and “Lispy,” for her retainered Ss.
“You fat ass,” Michelle will holler from within Jacob’selbow. It will sound like she is deep inside a cave, lockedaway, which, of course, she is. There are things thesebrothers will never know: the twisted ruined barn beyondthe southern hills, the old man and his son, the hundredsof colored bottles, that to those men she is beautiful andwanted.
When Jacob releases her, the hills will sparkle not withstrawberries and brothers, but with dew, alight withsunset, dappled like a tuxedo’s white-rosed lapel, thescent of mango carried in from the sea.

Thick hairIn such situations, for these humans, beneath h...

Thick hairIn such situations, for these humans, beneath herhair lay more hair, the black strands cables holdingup the suspension bridge that is her head. If you couldpeer through these fibers—and few can—you wouldspy yet another world living upon her scalp. Her skullis the mantle of this planet, the skin a crust, the hair anatmosphere. Under this atmosphere, running about, tinymothers in tiny minivans, with tiny bumper stickers withthe wee-est messages scrawled across them: I vote forlevel-headed-ness. Let’s forget the word “tiny,” now thatthat’s obvious. A mechanic has a tow truck. He is greasesplattered.His grease-splatteredness makes its way allacross the globe. This is the man of our woman’s dreams—our woman with the thick hair. What we—the compilersof this volume—mean, is that this man had once shavedhis goatee and when he did so he entered the woman’sdreams. He fell through her scalp-crust, fell through thethin fatty layer, fell through the parietal, into the cerebralcortex, and thus became a dream of a man with no goatee.When he emerged he was inextricably changed: heordered a cleanup of the world of the woman’s scalp. Thismechanic’s greasiness became biodiesel, the scalp areagrew more atmospheric hair. The tiny—sorry—peopleof this tiny—sorry again—world, breathed wonderfulair. The woman ended up on a television commercialwhere she flipped her hair through air lit by a director ofphotography’s lights. This woman became famous evenif only for a while. Then everyone forgot about her andher thick hair. And everyone upon her scalp died andthe planet went extinct. And then the woman died theway all women die: her hands were crossed over her bodypeacefully.

Tiny headYet another name for this condition is microceph...

Tiny headYet another name for this condition is microcephalic.Said tiny headed enjoy watching YouTube clips ofgolfers crashing through windshields like golf balls. Thatis the funniest shit ever to the tiny headed, that peoplecare about it is funnier still. What they should care aboutis Seinfeld jokes. Why do people eat ice cream, whatthey should do is not eat ice cream. What they shouldcare about is people like this: a tiny head. Tiny head iswhat they always call those with tiny heads. Usually,their circus name is tiny head. They can be found ridinga bicycle while a doctor measures their head. The factthat a tiny head can even ride a bicycle most say is amiracle, and tiny heads say fuck them they know nothingabout what goes on in my tiny head. The fact that thisis written—this too—about them, the synapses firinglike the fires of stars in galaxies, and the web of galaxiesfloating in dark matter is just like the inside of their tinyhead. The doctors do not realize that in the dark matteris where real thinking takes place because real thinking isnot conscious it is a ramble like a mountain it is vast andfull of life yet at the top of the tiny head there are not anytrees because life finds it hard to take root at the top ofmountains, so tiny head is bald and some people say theyare bald as a baby’s ass and tiny head thinks that’s plainstupid don’t you.