Proof The Further That I Am Irredeemably Batshit

          My cousin Carla surprised the funk out of me by telling me the other day that she reads my blog- and let me assure you, once the funk has been surprised right the fuck out of your soul, you need some slow and serious boogying to the rhythm of the beat to get it back. I mean smooth, muthafucka. All’s well now, I am once again up with Marky Mark and his bunch, and ready commence my story.

Carla noted that I had written a blog post Für Brenda, as it were, für when Brenda was especially sad. She asked if I would write her a blog post if she was sad, and before the word “yes” had even fully formed itself around my lips she bulleted out a sinisterly gleeful “I’msadnow-sodoIgetablogpost?”

I refused, citing that her Sad Blog Post would have much more meaning if it was indeed crafted for a particularly melancholy moment in her Carlasome existence, and while this reply did actually invoke a little bit of poutiness, it was not enough to summon the Ghost of Embarrassing Tales of Loraine’s Past, (That’s a very verbosely named Ghost. We’ll call him Getl-P, if we need to call him anything at all hereafter.)

But now we have come to a turn in the road. Wednesday last was the anniversary of Carla “Lady Phly”’s day of birth, and due to things going awry one way after another, she finally earned the Sad that merits a visit from Getl-P, the slightly Ukrainian shtetl sounding rapper Ghost.

So without further gilding the lily, and with no more ado, I give you, Story No.2 That Will Ensure Loraine Never See The Business End Of Benedict Cumberbatch Because Her Singular Weirdness Will Creep Him Out So Thoroughly As To Put Him Off Her For Life.

It was back when the word was young; you were either Team Brtiney or Team Xtina, Sabrina the Teenage Witch was a thing, and you could complete at least 27 revolutions on your dad’s swivelly chair whilst waiting for your Sabrina the Teenage Witch fanfiction world-wide-web-page to load. The salad days, days of yore, days of days, The Days of Our Lives, etcetera, etcetera.

Me and my sister Estelle were at this time near constantly at each other’s throats, being 2 ½ years apart and thoroughly intent on living up to biblical standards of sibling rivalry. If one of us didn’t make it out of this whole “family” thing with some kind of signifying mark upon on our brow, then we hadn’t done it right.

It was immediately following one such nuclear fart that my poor put-upon mother was mopping both her brow and picking up left over pieces of offspring from the resultant mess. She lamented as she so often did our inability to get along even on the level that strangers or casual acquaintances do, telling us how it broke her heart to see her two girls filled with such animal hatred for each other, forever locked in their own precocious Hunger Games. (She may not have been quite so wordy when she was lamenting, but the story isn’t going to tell itself, people.)

After the waters had cooled down a bit, Estelle went off outside or to her room somewhere, and I was left in the living room with the feeling of a dying Sunday afternoon ill-spent. I did not want to apologise for something I most certainly almost definitely was not at fault for damn near positively, and even if I was- which no rational thinking man could ever conclude me to be- I unquestionably had more pride and self-respect (read: arseholishness) than to go grovelling to a 7 year old anyway. What I needed- I’m sure you’ll agree- was a compromise in the style of Solomon.

All of this in mind, I have no clue by the wits of either human, wizard or warlock as to how I arrived at the following idea, but arrive at it the fuck I did, because who likes a half measure?

I would apologise to no man or beast. But also: I would apologise to that little beast- my way.

My plan was sheer elegance in its simplicity. I would dress my ten year old self up (yes, this was round about the time of the Eyebrow Massacre, perhaps a little before) to every nine they had, pencil in my still-robust eyebrows to a frankly Eugene Levy-like state*, and hooker lipstick my lips like only a motherfucking Brangelina can. For good luck (and quite frankly to balance out the can of hairspray that had occurred on my head), I threw in a Cindy Crawford mole, if Cindy Crawford’s mole was in urgent need of a dermatologist’s attention. I looked- well, pretty much like me, just in full colour. And also as though view through eyes tripping balls on some very serious and rather questionable ‘shrooms.

I was ready. With a little help from my ever more intrigued mother, I left my house in tottering-high stripper heels (no, really, that is exactly what these were), waited a little while, and then rang the doorbell and/or knocked on the front door. (What? It’s been a long time, OK? I can’t remember if we actually even had a doorbell, but I will admit ringing a doorbell looks much better on the little projection screen I have set up in my mind than just knocking.)

My mom opened the door and we have a brief but realistically unsustainably loud conversation.

“HELLO? MAY I HELP YOU, MA’AM?” (Mother)

“YES, IN DEED. I AM LOOKING FOR A MISS ESTELLE.” (Me)

“JUST ONE MOMENT PLEASE, I WILL GO GET HER FOR YOU, OH STRANGE WOMAN WHO I HAVE NOT MET BEFORE IN MY LIFE EVER.”

She fetched Estelle to the door and I introduced myself as the long lost third sister, who had come in search of her specifically to… well I’m fucked if I can remember the exact plot of my opus, but it was a real tear jerker, that much I do recall. She, I’m quite sure in her seven years of wisdom being not fooled for a cotton-pickin’ moment, escorted me out into the back yard, where I proceeded to explain that I, long lost sister, erm, Angela let’s say, had had some brief contact with the wanton and incorrigible Loraine, and had come because I knew my little sister Estelle to need my presence desperately. See I, Angela, knew that she was suffering under the oppressive reign of this horrible girl-monster, and was in dire need of respite.

Why yes! She exclaimed. To this day I’m still not sure how much of this she decided to believe for the fun of it, or how much of it was simply playing along, but she informed Me!Angela that she had in fact come under just such an attack from the brutal Loraine but a mere hour ago. This is where my masterful plan really took shape- I managed to convince her that Loraine, being the full and utter shit that she undoubtedly was, had intoned to Me!Angela that she actually knew the full extent of her sins.

I made it clear to Estelle that I had gotten the impression from Loraine that while she certainly liked… ok, looo- cough! cough! violent, retching cough!–oved her, (excuse me, nasty cold coming on) she was too self-involved and stubborn to ever admit defeat.

All of this went swimmingly, and it did the job a treat, which could even have been a slightly heart-warming if distinctly mental-institutiony story, if it wasn’t for the fact that I got really into playing Angela. After I had smoothed over inter-Birkenstockian relations, I stuck around in alter-ego form, and started answering Estelle’s questions about “myself” with ever more verve- I would not be surprised if you told me I had held several Master’s Degrees in various fields, had once shook hands with Flava Flav, summered in Switzerland and ran the largest online Sabrina the Teenage Witch fanfiction community. (Although, tangent: I did once write my own Sabrina story to post online, but since I couldn’t be arsed to learn to type the way my dad wanted to teach me, and capitalising at the beginning of each new sentence and name seemed such a fucking schlep, I just decided to CAPS LOCK THE EVERLOVING GOAT CHEESE OUT OF THAT BAD BOY.)

I think it was getting dark and my mother was staring to worry about having to dig up underground contacts to falsify a birth certificate and possibly PhDs for Angela before I could be moved to bugger off, which meant I had to exit through the front door again with many a promise to write and so on and so forth, and wait for Estelle to away to her room before I could sneak back in to take off my Angela face.

Of course then all that was left was to saunter into her room with so much nonchalance you might have thought me medicated, and to throw in a “Hey sis, what’s up?” She then told me all about Angela- whom I had of course had some cursory contact with previously, so I was to raise my eyebrows in mock surprise that she had actually ventured out as far as my house, and talked to my- my- little sister.

I asked Estelle if she remembers this, and apparently there’s a vague recollection but not much more than that. It took me a while to dig up something suitable for Carla’s mollification, to denigrate myself on the altar of the internet gods so as to offset her bad birthday vibes. Here babes, I hope it worked. X

Quick note of absolutely no importance: my dad and I have started watching The Walking Dead. Most of the zombies- or "walkers", as they're called on the show- look pretty much like your average zombie, but this dude popped up looking just like an undead version of my ex.

Don't see the resemblance? 

How 'bout now? Uncanny, isn't it?

And then, because there’s always more good news, I have a first! It’s a PiePappa review!

He got so invested in Friends when we were watching it a few weeks ago, asking me to get him some supplementary interviews with the cast so he could see what they were like in real life, that I thought he simply must write a Friends review for the Pielings! Perhaps it can turn into a feature, if we can find suitable material for him to review. (And no, Verdale, I can already hear you suggesting all kinds of lewd and lascivious material, but I already told you no one is interested in your collection of people having intimate relations with foodstuffs.)
Me and Carla have an unofficial little Friends club, membership of two, where we bandy forth quotes from the show back and forth seamlessly- sometimes we can have whole, functional conversations just by sampling lines from the show. At the last braai we had, my dad actually managed to quote from Friends rather enthusiastically- Carla and I were very drunk indeed at the time, so I'm buggered if I can remember exactly what he was referencing, but we shared such a proud and understanding look that no words needed to be spoken. Unofficial Friends Club, Membership: 3.

So here it is, straight from Leon PiePappa, a review of the hit show Friends after having screened all ten seasons and some bonus material:

Bonus #2: (Brenda already having been privy to the madness) I'll heap onto my delirious sex appeal for the week and Carla's schadenfreude by presenting you with my post-dental work stroke-face.

Don't say I never did nothin' for ya.

Starry Fingers Dream

           There was a room so dark, so black that even the night that was dreamt there was just a blush on the hands on the arms of the of people who dreamt. In the dark of the room they click-clack onomatopoeically to the sharp bitterness of their fingers on small typewriters; the glitter of shellac fingernails a thousand stars in a thousand thousand-night room.

They dream each of something specific. They dream well, content and happy, even blind as they are to the suffering of the dreamer at their side, a tunnel vision that will forever know only the dreams click-clacked like the hard coarseness of their skin onto the keys in front of them. They dream in deafness, in cruel hatred and know only the sorrow of the world they are collectively dreaming, blind to the beauty that consumes the dreamer behind them on every one of the thousand thousand-nights, each new thing of joy a rarity- a tear for the unbearable exquisiteness that dreams have given them.

One will dream the death of dreams in the dark.

One will dream the waters while another dreams lakes of fire that consume the world of ideas.

One will dream his death, and dream his death, and dream his death.

One will dream the ways of birth, and life, and family, and living, and will be a happy dreamer for the most part.

One will dream of one particular birth and life, and will never be happy for the want to reach through the thought and touch she who lives, and to know she is more real than dust and dreams and stars of shellac-nails in the dark.

And he will not sleep- not that the dreamers ever do, they are a different kind of function- but will start doing things instead that are entirely outside of his function, outside of his knowledge of the blackness, to prove to himself that she is more than dust and dreams.

He proves this by systematically doing small things that should not be possible for him to even conceive of. He knows of sleep because he has dreamt of sleep, and so now knowingly deprives himself of it even outside of his function. Now he counts the thousand thousand-nights, and he wonders- if there are the stars of a million dreamers click-clacking in this dark, then where is the day? He turns, spontaneously- having decided to understand the word ‘spontaneous’ and let it shatter his world- to the dreamer at his left and sees at her fingertips a world of war, of pain, of death and needless destruction; and he sees the salt water run from her face in rivulets over her neck and down her arms and drop from her fingertips into the world she has dreamt. For the first time in a thousand thousand-nights, she looks up from her weeping to see another face that she has not had to dream, and her world is shattered too.

And he dreams for the woman he so badly wants to touch, to hold, to make real- he dreams not a life as it would have unfolded, not as he knows it was written in him to dream for her- he dreams for her unimaginable joy, he dreams for her happiness so intense that at night she must sometimes lie in bed and cry simply to make sense of the brightness inside of her that has come from the sky. He dreams for her music, he dreams for her song upon song to write and to sing and to fall in love to, and he never, ever dreams a moment of hurt, or anguish or confusion.

He feels his own hard fingers and skin break with each keystroke, and with every dream he comes apart a little more. The dreamers are, after all, a different kind of function, and for every colour that he opens up in her he must break some writing carved into the stone of his being, into his writ, and fight the tide of the dark and stars and every dream dreamt in the room of nights. He can feel the eyes of blind dreamers turn to him as he laughs with every sharp pang, with every falling away of his part of the world, for laughter is not something anyone here was ever equipped to hear. The Dreamer of Wars stopped dreaming, her starry fingers silent for the one who had cared to share her suffering, but she could no more know what to do for him or herself than laugh with him.

So he dreamt, and fantasised for her an entire life, a birth, a family- love, being touched, being taken into every dream she had ever had and being allowed to stay there- until he even had to dream for her a death. He dreamt it warm, and peaceful, surrounded by love, and he dreamt it with the last of what was him, before he fell away completely. The first dreamer to have laughed, and loved, and died, in a universe so small it had space for you to only ever know one facet of a reverie.

And as he crumbled, hard face and skin and fingers and bone to ash, he went away. He could not place it. He did not know what it was he became, and he did not know where he went, for he had never known there to be anything outside of the room where dreamers wrote worlds that they could never touch.

But somewhere, in a room so dark, so black that even the night that was dreamt there was just a blush on the hands on the arms of the of people who dreamt, a starry finger found its way back to a key, and wrote a new soul a thousand thousand-daybreaks.

For The Love Of This Guy!

   *Whistle acknowledging the enormity of the task ahead, much more concise in its single sound than this whole sidebar could ever hope to be*

   Things, my blessed Pielings, things. So many of them- where to start?

   Let's start with the nastiness of the tooth business, because after all, this is The House Of Many Ills, and I do so love to whine in your general direction.
   Last week was a toothy week indeed. On Wednesday last, I zipped into yon Dental Practitioner for a quick fix on my temporary filling. It had started disintegrating in such a fashion as to poison my mouth with clove flavours, and that simply cannot be abided, so I had him stick his fingers in my maw and plug in a permanent filling instead. Marvellous.
   This is important, and I need to say it before I tell you the next thing: he is a good dentist. I have not once in the- admittedly- twice that I've been there had to bite down on said digits because of a mis-timed drillbit or a hypodermic needle gone askance. Howthefuckever, he does have some odd habits that knock me very stoutly off of my ease, and they include such ticks as not wearing gloves or a mask, clipping my front teeth with the spinning drill as he extracts it from my mouth, and catching his little ice-pick like thing on my lip several times within the span of the appointment. Look my lovely, I'm sure you're terribly jolly and awesome and as has been said great at the important parts of your job, but Loraine will clamp down when you bust out the little flame-thrower after the seventh time you've taken enamel off the inside of her front tooth with an aimless drill.
   But there were no great incidents of any great note this time, and I left mostly intact and only mumbling slightly under my breath about Steve Martin and Novacaine.
   However, and I stress this to be a however of greatest import, the Thursday that followed brought a whole new level of body horror: Tooth Flavour.
   My wisdom teeth were coming out under general anaesthesia.
   I had been dreading this for so fucking long I had actually managed to convince myself I could Jedi mind-trick my teeth into being fine where they were. This was of course ignoring the fact that I had subconsciously taught myself to chew food using my tongue and soft palate because chewing using my back teeth resulted in spasms, seizures and usually brief periods of blacking out from pain.* But now the fateful day had come, the forms were filled in, and I had been escorted to the world's narrowest hospital bed ever to await my doom.
*Not an exaggeration.
 

    
   Seriously, these beds could just about accommodate one of my illustrious butt cheeks before starting to wish to be reincarnated as an octopus the next time 'round. It was also something of an Olympian event getting all the way up on the damn thing, for as narrow as it was was it tall and inaccessible. I did get there eventually, but I'm not going to waste breath denying that success might have involved a team of people pushing from the arse-end of the Snofferol.
   My first and foremost question upon landing on Mt. Hospital Bed was "Do I have to wear a hospital gown?" I, in my still Wisdom-Plus state, figured that since they were only just messing around with my teeth and weren't really cutting seriously, I should at the very least be able to keep my jeans. Alas: no. Not even a vaguely sympathetic no either, just a "here you go, you get an extra-large."
   Oh fucking spiffing, thank you kindly Nurse Ratched. Of course, my indelible sense of adamantian humour shines like a beacon in a dark place, and I lighten the hearts and hopes of all within spitting distance with my merry quips about said gown. I do so despite every indication that people are actually starting to get irritated with me, and while lesser souls may have given up on their holy quests to keep spirits high in such a glum ward- ever ignoring the possibility that my manic jokes about the gown being so short as to be more of a hospital scarf may be a result of my growing anxiety over the surgery- I would never abandon a cause so callously. This prompts Nurse The Second to jaunt into the room with an xxxx-large, all helpful having heard me complain mine was "too small."
   REALLY? THANK YOU SO MUCH, LADY OBSERVANT. Take your whale pyjamas and shove them drily up an unventilated orifice. It took way too much arguing for my comfort levels to convince the bloody woman that I had only been joking about the length of the fucking things, and that they fit fine. Everyone kept insisting that it was a good thing that this particular brand of hellish concentration-camp uniform fastened at the front, leaving no bum-flaps exposed to cold wind, but I disagree. All this meant in a practical sense was that my left boob kept having little fieldtrips of its own out the side of the damn thing since the straps served no purpose at all in actually keeping one's self inside of it. Eventually I just hankered down on the bed, under the blankets with my arse clenched to keep myself balanced on its stingy surface area, and kept my whole situation under wraps.

   I got wheeled into the hallway to wait for the previous victim to get ferried into recovery, and to amuse myself I read the printed list of flammable items on the store cupboard door. Not as interesting as it might sound, I'll add, but there is something on there called "sojourn." I found this to be rather odd, since I understood a sojourn to be a trip of some kind, and I've never heard of its neighbours on the list- "rubbing alcohol" and "petroleum spirits"- to mean gay picnics and merry outings and such. I asked a nurse, and she informed me that Sojourn was an inhalant used to put you under, and as such actually was a trip, whether it be inadvertently so or not. This was something I liked, and I have decided that it is allowed to exist.
   Not to hyper-focus, but I had some time left over after reading the cupboard door, and I discovered a label on my hospital gown sleeve with the name and number of the company that makes them, and had I not been focusing on pulling in my stomach so as not to whore over the edge of my bed, I might have remembered it so I could call with some strongly-worded suggestions. Or even just "Buttons," I'm not unreasonable.

   Finally it was my turn and I got wheeled in to the theatre, where the anaesthesiologist- who had previously been not only of a rather peculiar odour but also of a malignant personality and suffering from a questionable congenital health problem that did something to his hands- was waiting with a wink. This does not comfort me, you'll be shocked to learn. The nurse tucks my arm in using my blanket, and spastic anaesthesiologist spigots my hand with the IV. At this time I realize I have a dire itch on my nose that is now inaccessible, and I smile serenely, thinking myself absurdly zen for being able to let it go. Also: faintly wondering if I'll wake up with the itch still there.
   Naturally the next thing I remember is waking up, itch forgotten, but quite sure that I CANNOT FUCKING BREATHE. I am sucking in air with a force and tenacity that becomes fighter pilots and cold-war astronauts, but it's not doing the trick, and I come to the simple conclusion that I ought to scream really loudly that I CANNOT FUCKING BREATHE. The bastard surgeon and nurses assure me that I am mistaken and am in fact only disorientated from the dope-juice, and can breathe just fine, to which I would like to rebut by setting fire to their eyeballs. I fucking know the difference between not being able to get air through my throat and into my lungs, and being able to get air through my throat and into my lungs. This is the former. They put the oxygen mask over my mouth but this is fucking pointless as the problem is obviously that my throat is swollen from the fucking tube they shoved down there with as much care and finesse as they would beat a red-headed step-child, so all it serves is to make me claustrophobic to boot. Eventually, after long, long minutes of genuinely not being able to motherfucking breathe (if any medical staff are reading this), the swelling subsides and I am zoomed back into the ward with a golden lungful of air.

   The doctor had looked at me so oddly when I had asked to keep my teeth before the surgery, as though it was a strange request. Luckily he remembered, and someone pressed a small pill bottle with my bloody wisdom teeth into my poor, faltering mother's hands. I promise you if she wasn't biologically programmed against it, she would have thought less of me for keeping them, too. I won't inflict the image of them on you, but I will say this: GOOD GOD. I cannot believe I was walking the fuck around with these things inside my skull. No wonder my whole head hurt- one of them was so badly eaten away, it had what my dad described as not a cavity- but a grotto.

   I didn't swell up much at all really, but of course being me, I complained as much and as often as I could afterwards. My hero of a dad just kept buying me ice-lollies that helped the ache, and creamed spinach to suck down, and milkshakes... He's fucking awesome, that dude. He needs an award of some kind, he's really the absolute best. Speaking of which...

    While his birthday was a couple of weeks ago, the party proper for Piepappa happened only this weekend. And boy, was it... let's say "eventful." This would not be the forum to discuss most of the events- believe me, I curse my sudden sense of misplaced propriety every bit as much as you do- but I'll skirt around the peripheries for you.
   Plenty of favourite faces were there. Rorkes, Courts, Senekals, Birkenstocks and Vissers. It was bound to be blog-worthy even if it had been what might have passed for smooth sailing in these parts. But as it stands, we had a bit more meat for our supper. Verdale- of whom you shall hear a great deal more in a moment- misplaced his phone, which was very decidedly not good. I get it, I understand, that thing is to him what my laptop is to me, and were I to lose mine on a given night I would assuredly go Charlie Sheen on everyone's arses. This is a subtle way of saying that he went Charlie Sheen on everyone's arses. Cops were called, stink eyes were given, and deep grooved were paced into the hallways of Casa Birkenstock. To no avail. Other business goes down and everyone drinks more beer. I attempt lamb chops using only my front teeth. Some 30 Seconds is played, where no man seems to care which team he owes allegiance to, and the resulting anarchy sees the closest match we've ever had. I got another cat tampon, and took approximately 500 000 photos. Truly, a great night was had by one and all, except for a couple of ones and for short bursts of times at various interludes, collectively all. That's just how we roll, yo.

   The next morning, there was still whiskey and beer left, and the pool still had water in it, so, you know, bird's gotta fly.

And as to this, I have this to say:

I believe very strongly in judging a book by its cover. Wouldn't you want to read this one cover-to-cover right the fuck away?

Verdale's phone was also located in the bushes after a post-party scramble by some altruistic soul in the grass- Verdale, if you're reading this, for God's sake, I don't have a number to reach you on anymore and you've gone and deleted your bloody facebook so there's no way to sexually harass you at odd hours of the morning. Also, you forgot your charger here.

   

   And now... For The Love Of This Guy!

   Pielettes, this is a very special post. Verdale, also known as Verdwaal (translation: To get lost), Vergina and Verdildo (yes, he is a very special trooper) has requested- yes, requested- a personal review of sorts. I am nothing if not an obliging sort of a bastard, so I shall review the hell out of him.
   A couple of weekends ago, Vergina came to visit for a casual booze-up in the lapa out back with me and Piepappa. This was after much nagging on my part, for I hugely enjoy his company, and he had been selfishly depriving me of it for some time in favour of "work", as so many of my friends have been doing. Psh. Well he was decidedly up for some shenanigans, so he biked on down, and we stocked up on so much drink even the cashier at the liquor store raised an eyebrow. He asked me to do a post on him, and begged of me to be entirely honest, and I remind him here that he did ask for it, mwa ha ha ha and all that.
   Now I am one filthy-minded and dirty-tongued bugger, and I challenge you to find anyone who has met me whilst awake who would counter this statement. I have often out-smutted dudes whose wet dreams carry VD and delight in triple and quadruple-entendre contests with my French friend Vincent via Whatsapp. If wouldn't have made Shakespeare blush it isn't worth saying, is what I believe. But Verdale... he's a different kind of grand master. Sometimes I will have said something that I knew I could have phrased better to avoid a dirty implication, and will subtly loer at him from under my eyebrows to see if he caught it only to realise he not only stopped my filth at American Pie border patrol, but has tucked a few penis jokes and ass-rape puns of his own into its knapsack. (Oh lawdy, and now that I'm in that frame of mind, I'm awfully aware of typing the word "sack.")
   This would be why he is awesome. The man's well of wrongness simply has no bottom, and that is my kind of unhealthy.
   He also presents as a possible time-traveller from the old days who is desperate to clue everyone in on why those days were so awesome. Let me clarify- I mean he genuinely at times seems like a Mart McFly type who who has travelled forward in time only by one generation, and now is so obsessed with his "parents"'s youth and the shit they got up to that one starts to wonder... Don't get me wrong, our parents were crazy arseholes, and I would pay good money and/or consider sexual favours in benefit of Steve Buscemi if I could just hang out with them for like one year back in the day. Every now and then, you hear that one of the people you know now as that one dude who used to live in the granny flat of our old house used to be married to Boet The Blues Muso's sister for a month, and your head asplodes all over fuck everything. Or then there's the guy called Dogballs, and the time Utana burnt her bum on the braai after having dove into the pool to retrieve the watermelon and then my dad's dad who was a Seventh Day Adventist missionary doctor had to treat her, and she was married to Dogs who is a different person from Dogballs, and the whole bunch of them used to fly little planes up to the swamps all the time where they would camp out and...
    Seriously, it puts our concept of partying like Ozzy into proper context. If no one loses a pinky finger and you can't sketch your friend to worrying anatomical accuracy after the weekend is over, then it simply wasn't a party. Verdale seems misplaced in time, I think he would have fit in so perfectly with the lot back then, with their dirt bikes and simply awesome questionable life decisions, and frankly I'd like to tag along. And send Brenda an invite while I'm at it.
   I will say for all the nice words I have to spare for him, the child does have a worrying affinity for flat chested stick insects, but be that on his head. I sigh a great sigh of sighness when I see decent boys wasted on the wasted. I think I need to buy him some 1940's French postcards and see his world open right up, it's truly a public service.
  I have a tendency to get a bit quiet when I'm tired or unwell, and since that falls into sharp contrast to the other 90% of the time when I'm talking like someone's shoved cocaine up my arse like a suppository, people who haven't spent that much time around me worry. I think I managed to match his energy levels the first day, and many a beer died a noble death, but when he came round again this weekend he found me a subdued Snoff, which I think panicked him a bit. I am an awesome, truly inspirational actress, except for when I can't be arsed, which is what happens when I'm tired or off, so I can't manage to feign the kind of mania I usually run on. I felt bad that I couldn't match him smut-for-smut, but next time you're in town, Vergina, it be on, muthafucka.
   So you want to know what I think of you, V? You're excellent. You've made my really, really short list, and believe the fuck out of me, it's not an easy list to get on to. It's got maybe five or six people on it total, and those are the bastards I'd got to the matt for. You know, for all that's worth. This is largely because people are fucking boring, or stupid, or irritating, or all three in ranges of concentration, and I have absolutely no patience for any of those things. It falls under the category of things I can't be arsed to pull out my Oscar-winning acting skills for, just ask Carla what happens when I come across people who irritate me. Well you are officially not one of those things. Huzzah. Beer and cupcakes all around.
   Also, you liked the episodes of Community I showed you, which is always a good sign in my book.