Caustic Cupcake's Creepy Cupboard

Yesterday I had a long, hard day of moping, with the exception of the time my parents forced me to go to the ice cream stand. There was a pond in front of the shoppe and it was jammed with turtles. They barely had room to swim around each other! And there was a little vending machine of turtle food! Let me tell you how much money I spent on turtle food. No, I'd better not. I tried to feed only the little ones. Perhaps this counts as animal cruelty, but my mother and I took turns chucking the tiny pellets of food at the shell of the largest turtle to see if we could get them to bounce off. He did not appear to notice.

After my long day of moping and turtles, I went home to see the kittens and Parsley. And Logic Professor. I'd missed him, and them, very much. I took a much-needed shower (when one is moping, things like personal hygiene take second fiddle). Cupcat took a shower with me, too, and then Sugar fell into the still-draining tub after I was done. Logic Professor tried to towel her off as best he could, consoling her and telling her "It's okay! We'll fix it!" Then I fell asleep at our apartment.
"Is it okay if I stay here tonight?" I asked. I didn't want to make a habit of blowing in and out of his life at whim, keeping him on his toes.
"CUPCAKE," he exclaimed. "You can stay here forever!"

So I texted my mother to let her know. THAT was weird. "Staying here tonight! Can you leave dad a note so he doesn't worry? Also I left the office window open," I wrote. The office, again, is what used to be MY room, and is now the rat n' paper depository. How strange it is to be letting my parents know where I am.

Now I'm sitting on my bed internetting - oh how I missed you, laptop - while Logic Professor does the same and Sugar sleeps near us. I have a load of laundry on in the kitchen. Today I'm going to go find some breakfast, help my parents' neighbor watch her one-year-old grandson, maybe fold some laundry, and then I'll be back at Pseudonym Castle.

Labels: Family, Flat Life, Lovelife

MAY 24th vs. JULY 8th: six weeks

For six years following the day I left home, I didn't spend a single night over my parents' house. Mostly, it was because there was nowhere to stay. For someone or something to move in, something else has to die or get evicted. I'd taken my bed with me, and what had been my bedroom became the office/the answer to our family's lack of storage space. It now contains a computer, a couple filing cabinets, canned goods, recycleables, a pet rat, an antique school desk, several fans and power tools, a piece of lumber, and, you know, other stuff. Stuff that I can't sleep on.

For the record, because I've always wanted this on the record, they chipped my pennies off the door. I had glued a strip of pennies around the edge of my bedroom door, all face down except for one face up to indicate the year I defaced the door with currency. Now there is a strip of glue that bears the likenesses of hundreds of tiny Abe Lincolns all the way around the door where pennies were stuck into the glue. The reason I want this on the record is so that I can finally say THAT'S WHAT YOU GET FOR STEALING MY THREE DOLLARS' WORTH OF PENNIES.

I digress.

The first time I spent the night here was in May, the night my younger sister left home. Now, I didn't leave on very good terms when I moved out. I didn't come back to visit for a couple months, truth be told. But I had time to pack my shit and move it, and my parents and I were getting along enough that my mom packed me up some pots and pans and dishtowels and whatnot. Also, I left during normal working hours, more or less. When my sister left (this most recent time), it was abruptly, late at night, and with not much more than the clothes on her back. I came over to sit up with our parents, drinking coffee and deciding what, if anything, to do. I slept on the couch.

My older sister and I cleaned out her room, for the most part. Our parents put in time cleaning as well, but we didn't want them to deal with it alone. And it was, at times, dangerous. I mean, not dangerous in that there was an unexpected chasm behind a dresser or a colony of scorpions under the bed (though it wouldn't have been unexpected), but there was good reason not to put our hands into anything we hadn't visually inspected first. Or to sit down anywhere but a pre-cleared, bare patch of hardwood floor.

We painted the room over the next couple of days because we didn't want our parents to have to look at the walls. To my continuing guilt, the person doing the painting dropcloth was ineffective and our parents had to scrape paint splatters off of the floor later. I took a break from the blog for a few weeks, mostly because of all that.

* * * * * * * *

When I told Logic Professor that I could no longer ignore my issues with our relationship, the logistics of actually taking a breather were not clear to me. I had decided, though, that the difficulty of separation was not a good excuse to stay together despite my doubts. I didn't have a plan beyond "Maybe you could go stay with your parents for a while?" It seemed the most likely possibility; LoPro's parents have a large house with spare bedrooms right down the road. I hadn't considered staying with my parents.

Our choices got narrowed down considerably when LoPro said "Why should I be the one who leaves?"
"Because it would be easier," I said.
"I don't want to be thirty and living with my parents," he said.

Then I thought about staying here with my parents. Due to the death of a semi-distant inlaw with plenty of furniture, they'd procured a twin bed for the my sister's empty room. And our relationship has greatly improved in six years; once I had vowed to sleep in a cardboard box before ever moving back home, but with time things have changed.

So that night I packed up some of my clothes and toiletries and a couple books, and I came back to stay for a little while.

Labels: Better Living Through Uprooting, Family

Because of unexpected turnover at the CPRB, I went in to work early today. Though, because it's 4:40 AM on what is technically Sunday, I guess I could say I went in to work early yesterday.

It was a hell of a night. Let me say first that I had a good time, I made a killing, and nothing happened to me. That said, when I got home, the first thing I did was check the news. Nothing was up yet, so I searched for the name of our street on Twitter, and found a streak of twirts (is that what those are called?) containing words such as:

• riot
• madness
• mayhem
• insanity
• crazy
• war zone

I agree. Early in the evening the Cool Manager and I discussed the eerie fact that shit hadn't happened outside yet. That many young people partying, combined with that many edgy cops, all crammed into that narrow a street, would surely lead to shit going down, and so far it hadn't. Eventually it did.

Sometime around 11:30 or midnight I thought I heard a shot fired and looked up from my bar to see a mob of people screaming and running up our side street. "...the fuck?" I thought. It might not have been a shot; if it was, it didn't hit anybody, to the best of my knowledge. The frightened mob was being chased by a phalanx of cops on horseback. I have never seen so many cops on our street. It was truly impressive.

Someone told me that a wave of people had been heading up the street and the cops stopped it, and stopped it hard. (That would have been when everyone ran up the side street as well as all the other side streets in the area.) I wonder if a wave was possible. By that point, people on the street were standing shoulder to shoulder. There was nowhere for them to really wave to.

The coppers shut down the entire street. It's a good thing we're on a corner; we got to stay open because of the side street. But it seriously dented what our sales should have been. That's the second night this week that the cops have fucked with my income.

After they'd cleared the street, the monsoon set in. It thundered so loud. I hope that first sharp thunderclap made every jumpy, overreacting cop on the street reach for his or her gun, and I hope every one of them felt like an idiot for it.

I drove home in the rain. I was almost there when I saw some emergency vehicles ahead, and slowed down. Were they headed my way? I couldn't tell. In the middle of the road, I slowed down and stopped. Like an idiot. Then I proceeded with caution. Then I read the flashing sign: DUI CHECKPOINT. NO TURNS PERMITTED. PROCEED WITH CAUTION TO CHECKPOINT. Shit, I thought, My inspection sticker! I must say that I am now frighted by how very near I came to turning off and gunning it because I panicked over my expired inspection sticker. But that would have been utterly stupid. What are they doing now, executing people on sight for expired inspection stickers? At a checkpoint for something other than inspection stickers?

I approached the checkpoint. The problem - and there was a problem - was that it was raining, and there were lights in my eyes, and the signage and street cones didn't make it overly clear (to me) what I was supposed to do or where I was supposed to go or what part of the roadblock was the actual checkpoint, and also two lanes had to merge there and I was in the wrong one, and the cop who was waving his flashlight at me or the car next to me or the car behind me wasn't helping me figure out if I was the one who was supposed to keep driving, let alone helping me figure out WHERE to drive.

I got yelled at. No, really: the cop yelled at me. And I couldn't even figure out what the yelling was directing me to do. At first, I kind of just blinked to try to get the flashlight out of my face. (In case you ever want to try it, it doesn't work.) But I guess I did what I was supposed to because the next thing I knew the flashing lights were behind me and the cones had petered out and I was on my merry way. The didn't even notice my inspection sticker. This leads me to wonder what, exactly, are the criteria for being stopped for a DUI at that checkpoint. Because if I didn't meet those criteria by doing all the things I did, I don't know who would. My hypothesis is that it's a trick checkpoint. The real checkpoint is at the flashing sign that said NO TURNS PERMITTED. If you make a turn at that intersection and gun it, as I had originally planned to do, you are drunk, and then you get arrested. If you go straight, you're fine. I sure am glad I went straight. I bet that if I had chucked a beer can out the window on my way through, they still wouldn't have stopped me.

Or maybe figuring out how to get through the checkpoint is the test.

Then I made it home. It's a temporary home. I'm typing this from my parents' house. Logic Professor and I are kind of separated; it was my stupid idea. I am so stupid. Really. I have been having doubts, and I thought it would be a good idea to take a step back from the relationship, to slow things down, to think about some things. I am so stupid. Furthermore, the kittens are with LoPro at our apartment. I don't even have kittens to cheer me up. My parents' cats don't count; they're everything I never want our kittens to become. I almost got off at my regular exit and dove into bed with my LoPro and my kittens. It was so hard not to. But I think it's for the best. I guess.

I am so stupid.

More to come at a reasonable hour. I'm going to bed now.

Labels: Better Living Through Uprooting, Cool Punk Rock B4r, Insanity, Logic Professor, Lovelife

Last night, three of our off-duty bartenders showed up at work to get very drunk for very little money; hooray for employee pricing! One of the bartenders was having her 21st birthday party. A bunch of their friends were there, too.

I only realized a brawl was happening when it spilled down the stairs to my bar. The Cool Manager was trying to wrestle three women at once to the front door, an off duty bouncer was trying to help, and the bartenders - all of them beautiful young women - were fighting. But at our bar, the beautiful young women don't pull hair. They will fucking kill you. These bitches are no joke. The barback jumped over the bar to help get them out. That's how six of our employees came to be in a brawl on the floor. They knocked over chairs and drinks and everything.

At one point the off-duty bouncer came to be holding one of the women by her neck, bent over backwards on the bar, trying to restrain her.

We didn't call the cops, even though the off-duty bouncer at one point was yelling for me to do so. I take my cues from the manager. There are cops everywhere on our street, though, and they showed up to our party uninvited and told us to shut it down. I was thrilled; I'd already made my money, and now I was going home early. "Watch us get out of here at the same time as usual," said the barback. And we did, partly because I was helping a new bartender count out, and partly because the Cool Manager, the barback and I were talking about what happened.

The new bartender told me that as the brawl was moving downstairs, one of the fightin' old bartenders was throwing ice at her, yelling about being replaced by someone less pretty. Her suspicions are correct; she got fired last week while she was on vacation, but doesn't know it yet. Technically, though, the new bartender is a replacement for someone else who quit, and while she might be less pretty, she doesn't break her nails off in anyone else's face. Yet.

We've experienced drastic turnover lately after a long period of calm.

Throughout the whole melee, which lasted longer than the typical bar fight (because instead of helping to end it, the employees were all IN it), I watched and bartended. I cleared all the empty glasses off the bar, which is my policy when bad fights are going on. The customers reacted in different ways. I told a couple of the more horrified ones to get out from between the fight and the door, lest one of them get a high heel in the ribs. Some of them got a kick out of watching, and I understand. It was a hell of a spectacle. I didn't tell the customers that they all work here.

Or, they all used to work here.

Labels: Cool Punk Rock B4r

You didn't show up for work yesterday, and they're about to report the car stolen. We're not sure where you're staying, but your boss is going to go look. We tried calling, but I guess you haven't replaced your phone yet. I'm not sure I have the right email address; it's unlikely you have internet access anyway. You might be in jail. Then you really won't have internet access. I wouldn't know; they're not picking up the phone.

Call someone.

This post is less for you and more for me. I don't know who to talk to anymore.

* UPDATED *
A missing person report did not have to be filed after all. Thank you. That said, I believe very few things are going to go right for you - for the rest of your life - unless you have a change of heart and say yes.

My sister Jul, reassuring her four-year-old son, JQ: "Ghosts aren't real, honey... they're just something people made up to tell spooky stories."
JQ: "Like snakes?"

*UPDATE*

Soon after this conversation, on an unrelated note, JQ said: "I'm not kicking you, I'm banging my leg against you!"

Labels: Dr. Thumbscre.ws

A few years ago, the living room ceiling began to leak at the corner of the skylight. (We literally have no windows in the living room; I believe that Jacob Riis was responsible for having the skylights put in.) Then part of the ceiling fell down. I put a Rubbermaid tub under it and called the landlord.

He said that there was no use in replacing the ceiling until the offending skylight was replaced; the skylight would keep letting water in, and ceilings would keep falling down and being replaced. However, the skylight would not be replaced for about a month. In the meantime, I was to keep a bucket under it and hold tight. The stain grew to be the size of approximately five pizzas. Is that a standard unit of surface measurement? It should be. At least on the East Coast, anyway.

Everything got sorted out. One day when I was using the bathroom and the skylight over my head was suddenly whisked away by the workmen on the roof. (Clearly, they hire ninjas to do that kind of thing.) After the skylight got replaced, the handyman - a shirtless 40-something pot head with outstanding warrants and a propensity to claim that he could repair parts of the building that he could not - came over and kind of repaired the ceiling. Kind of. He patched up the hole, but left the stain unpainted and the ceiling lumpy and uneven. He also left grey handprints all over the place. I would love to know how he got his hands they filthy working with white plaster, white spackle, and white paint.

A few years elapsed. I did some entertaining things in the meantime that had nothing to do with ceilings. (Insert those things here.)

This afternoon, a few years after the ceiling fell in, one of my neighbors came over to paint the lumpy stain next to the skylight. He had to scrape off most of what the last handyman did and start from scratch. (It was Parsley's dream come true: delectable chunks of plaster raining down as if from the heavens. SO MUCH TO DESTROY NIBBLE, AND SO MUCH FREE TIME, AND NOBODY TO INTERFERE!)

Originally, I hadn't wanted him to come over and paint it at all. The problem was that Jacob Riis or someone similar had convinced the government to come out and inspect our tenement every so often to make sure it isn't a deathtrap, and as we could have predicted, they decided that our building is, indeed, a deathtrap. One of the things the landlord had to do to get the place up to snuff was paint the ceiling.

I remembered what happened the last time someone had worked on the ceiling, and I could see the results in the middle of the living room:
So I told the landlord that I would do it. Then I didn't feel like it, and kept putting it off until we were about to leave for Chicago and I realized that if the inspectors came while we were gone, the landlord would incur fines for my stupid ceiling stain that I'd promised to paint, and the building would have to be razed and the force of the demolition would trigger earthquakes in Tibet and everything would be my fault. I actually had a nightmare to that effect, and woke up paranoid and started painting the ceiling early in the morning. "What are you doing?" Logic Professor asked when he got up. "We were supposed to paint that together."
"I'm not trying to paint it," I said. "I'm trying to look like I'm painting it." The idea was that if the inspectors came, they would see that I had at least started to paint it, when I really had no intention of doing it. In retrospect, everything I did that morning was ridiculous.

While I was having my fit of paranoia, I realized that there was no way I could paint the ceiling. The paint wouldn't stick to the lumpy mess on the ceiling because the lumps kept falling off. I'd push the roller across the ceiling, and lumps would rain down, except they were paint-covered lumps and they were sticking to the carpet. I started to scrape the lumps off the ceiling, but they were now wet with paint, and my insufficient scraper (a broken CD case, because my real scraper is in my tool kit at the bottom of the closet and Graf knows I wasn't about to start rearranging the closets on top of a subterfuge/painting project) kept getting gunked up. I decided that since it wasn't my fucking ceiling and I didn't care what it looked like as long as it passed the deathtrap inspection, I would just spackle over everything and make the top layer look smooth (if somewhat raised). I dug out my little bucket of spackle and found that it had dried and crumbled. "I tried," I said happily, relieved that I'd at least made it look that way, and packed up. Then I called the landlord.

"Did you paint the ceiling?" he said by way of hello.
"I tried," I said, and explained that I couldn't do it, and ventured that if the neighbor was still free, he would probably do a much better job than I could. Anybody could.

This entire post is an explanation. My mom told me over the phone that my father wants to know where his fucking rye bread is and why haven't I posted on the blog. Well, Father, today my neighbor showed up to paint the ceiling, and I stayed here to make sure he wouldn't kill and eat one of your beloved grandkittens. (He was a very nice man who showed no inclination to eat kittens and he's also a hell of a painter.) Now that he has left, I will be delivering the rye bread I picked up for you in Chicago's Ukrainian Village, as well as the Russian chocolate that I bought along with it. You should know that because of your fucking rye bread, TSA searched my luggage. You should also know that in retribution for your impatience, I ate four slices of it with butter and honey, and that they were all delicious.

Love,
Cupcake

I didn't realize until I was looking at the pictures later that the lion was licking its chops right behind me.

Labels: Travel

Last night I spilled half an orange soda on the lovely beige carpet of our room. To be fair of me, all I did was open it, and it exploded. We totally cleaned it up, and now you can't tell. We hope. And because you can always count on me for quality Microsoft Paint-created representations of factual events, here is a realistic depiction of what happened:


On an unrelated note, this was my favorite sighting from our walk last night:


Indeed. I assume they are trying to prevent a situation like the following:


Logic Professor didn't have time to eat breakfast with us this morning. While he scampered off to go epistomologize, I sat down to french toast and coffee with our awesome host. She pointed me in the direction of the Lincoln Park Zoo, which I understand is free. Not that I'm cheap. Because I am.

Then maybe I'll hit the Ukrainian Village. I have no idea what's there. I just know that it's called "Ukrainian Village" and I know that I like rye bread. If there is no food in U-Town, I will be displeased.

Even though we're having a good time, we miss our kittens. I don't think I've mentioned their names yet: Sugar and Cupcake. (Now that's going to be confusing.) What I miss most is Cupcake's nightly snuggles. He comes to bed with me and snuggles up with my face, getting up periodically to change positions and head-butt me in the eye again. It's terribly endearing, and I miss him tons.

Logic Professor's family reports that our kittens have taken over their house, and have even gotten into the trash can. We know how two tiny cats can be everywhere at once. Even here, a thousand miles from home, we keep seeing kittens out of the corner of our eye. If a leaf blows by on the periphery of his vision, Logic Professor jumps a little because he assumes that it's an incoming kitten. We try not to step on them.