just before closing time, late tuesday night. 10:45. a truck pulls up behind the pizza hut, dropping off a load of provisions. tomorrow is buffet night. buffet night saves the pizza hut. all day wednesday, the workers will work for the buffet. the truck drops a heaping load of frozen meats and cheeses, doughs and sauces. from the warehouse. from the factory. from hq. much prep must be prepped.
buffet night is from 5-8. maybe at 7:30 or so they can slow down stop making pizza pizza pizza pizza pizza pizza pizza pizza pizza pizza pizza. maybe at 7:15 or so, a few couples will walk in, some on purpose for the buffet, some on accident with a surprised delight. "oh, there's a buffet! well, allright!" but at 5:00 there's a queue of families waiting for the first pies to hit the hot line. 5:00 on the button, three hours to go. feeding frenzy for family, fat family fun, food food food!!! the pies come out at about 5:06. late. bad workers, bad. MAHMEEE I DON'T LIKE SALAD tension in those minutes, kids struggling with layers, coats boots hats gloves scarves sweaters all over the floor, musical chairs, the boxed in (trough?) kid has to pee all the time, relentless movement, lines and lineups and grabbing plates more foooooooooood and pepsi bottomless pepsi all around. shhhhhhh--- the pizza's coming out. go on, don't be shy, let the festivities begin. chemically enhanced sauce on tables chairs kiddy shirts mouths mouths mouths everywhere stuffing it and stuffing it and stuffing it again. line up sit down eat eat eat. line up sit down eat eat eat. the chatter and clatter of platters gets madder and madder, pudge of the patriarch, marmalade matriarch, roly, poly, insatiable, and max run yes run up to the hot plates. they can barely wait. get another pepsi, junior, so you won't get thirsty in the car.
buffet night saves the pizza hut. fat family, full, leave so happy, since they got it all at such a good price.

i fear i am becoming a nasty mean old witch. winter doth work strange poison. who stole my eye of newt, damn it!

for fabulous listening, try anoushka shankar. she too is the daughter of ravi, in whose past lives was very, very good for being born in this one as music. he has passed on some good lookin genes: see anoushka and her sister, norah jones. heart stopping talent *and* breath stealing beauty. anoushka kicks some ass on that sittar too. ....can i trade dads?

i really like the word icily, as it is takes a noun and turns it into an adjective. 'she stared at him icily' --with the properties of ice.
oh, and i hate when 'ster' is put on the end of words when it's not supposed to be there. monster is ok, but not jokester, or the nauseating word i heard someone call their kid recently "cutester." ugh.

who ever thought up that crazy idea? MUSHROOM TRIPPERS, THAT'S WHO!!!

paul and i were watching this great program on animals who enjoy getting fucked up on various natural substances (except the monkey segment, who were slugging sluggish tourists' forgotten tropical concoctions--unnatural substances but "made with natural flavors" just like froot loops.) and there was a part of this show on a mushroom that grows under the snow way way up north (like by the pole?). anyway i forget the name of the mushroom, flyanonin or flyagogin or something that starts with flya, and the reindeer eat it in fairly large quantities until there's no more. the people who live there eat it too when they can find it and, as the teevee reports (ha) gives them feelings of airy weightlessness. they figured if they were feeling it, the reindeer were too, and began to "hallucinate" the reindeer flying through the air. hence, santa's flying fleet is born in the reveller's phantasmagorical fantasy land, an unknown realm of ice and snow, santa's magical mystery tour.

i bring this up in reference to terry's 'holidazed' as he mentioned that yes there is tradition behind various this n thats and how it's all lost and commercialized. although i learned the above tidbit from the teevee, i really enjoy the fact that flying reindeer are someone's mushroom trip, carrying santa on a trippy journey in a freaky suit, fiddling around other people's houses and eating craploads of cookies. sounds like fun. i'll stop blowing sunshine up everyone's ass now, cause xmas gets me down too, but traditions can be made without buying or buying into all the boolsheeit. i hope. okay, now i'll stop.

matthew, who showed me the way to a new musical heroine in the beautiful, illustrious miss dolly parton. she is ebullient and warm and she makes me happy.

that is all. sirs and madams.

yeah, mine was strange. my dad is strange, my mom is strange. my stepdad is morose, my stepmom is on crack. my grandparents are sane and sweet, and so by necessity get trampled by the madness. but lest it seem not so, i am thankful for my family. the whole insane frickin lot of them. they're just so much more fun to be around when not gathered. last week i didn't really want to move far away (flagstaff was our flavor of the week last week) because of my family, now it's like, hey, there's jets, and there's once a year or so, and that's a-ok. hope everyone else had a better day. next year i think i'll go to a shelter or the salvation army, where the inhabitants are much more civil to one another and generally cheerier about life than some members of my family. good grief.

yay, more peeps. where are the wendies and zacharies so's i don't have to scroll so far down for to see me? biatch! wow biatch and snatch have many similiar letters. if you combine their differences you get bisn. as in bisnitch. bisnatch? snbiatch? i am on to something, yes?

"knock it off. a jackelope is fuckin ridiculous. and you know it."

ooh, so i ended up in niagara falls last night also, paul had a performance in this building we had to find with bad directions, so it was a kind of scavenger hunt. (i have always thought having one on elmwood or allen would be so fun where clues are revealed by spending time in various shops and/or bars. probably bars.)
so yeah, it was in this old high school, which we finally found, but first got lost on the most desolate, abandoned, burned out shells of former streets i have ever seen. it was like a ghost town ghetto. i am rarely scared of neighborhoods but i was truly frightened. we kept going down dead end streets with these ghastly turnarounds.
so we finally get to the old high school, part of which has been converted to artists' galleries/space but the rest empty and desolate.... -- in the lockers were gum wrappers and i love charles and whatnot, binka baby and bugs wuz here class of 92--- exploring places like that is great fun in that what was once a structure in a citadel is now just a mostly purposeless building that a lot of people left something in. it is fascinating to me. someday when we destroy our planet and hence ourselves, this kind of thing will be the anthropological evidence we leave for future(?) humans (or other) to piece together. super fun, huh?

mind.

it is seriously fucked up, this place. it has a hold on people like i have never seen anywhere else in the country, not that i've spent large amounts of time in any one other place but.... people who leave for supposedly greener pastures always end up "coming home" this is fine because i'm in my 'i like it here' phase (right now) but there are times when i hate it here and can't wait to get the fuck out and live in a *real* city. whatever that means.
what really gets my goat tho, is especially if you were raised here, it's ingrained from frickin infancy to think small. anything that might qualify as a 'big dream' seems so impossible. new york and toronto are around the corner, but almost everyone i know has gone to school here (hey, i'm not knocking our fine learning institutions) and wants to stay here and work and live. again, fine, but if you have a dream, it *can* be pursued-- i have a weird theory (hm, it might be from being raised here) that if you can't make it here, you can't make it anywhere. still, maybe it's the beast of burden which is now so shortly upon us, but buffalonians are not people of great expectations. (which i am reading right now, it's a masterpiece i think.) it is a bit sad, and strugglesome.