Dean gets on my nerves sometimes — he's too talky for a flatmate who's not a friend — but my suspicion is that something's organically wrong in his head. He's older than me, pushing 70, so maybe he's senile. Maybe he's just a kook.
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| Dean, my flatmate | |
The bathroom door was closed, so someone was in there, pooping or showering. We're all old-timers in this house, and when nature calls, you drop everything and answer the call, so it didn't take Columbo to know that Dean had been prepping his pork, and suddenly had to go to the bathroom.
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| #196 Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2022 |
Didn't think much of it, and my morning continued with a bus ride to breakfast and the library and the bank. Hours later I came home, and the meat and knife were still on the counter. At least the sink wasn't running, so what the hell, I went into my room and did whatever it is an unemployed man does all day.
Came out to pee a few hours after that, and the meat was still on the counter, so I knocked on Dean's door. He wasn't home. Then man had gone to work, leaving his pork on the counter.
If it was a "just this once" story I'd shrug, but he's also left the stove on and gone to sleep, left the back door open overnight, and told me a dozen times about the joys of unsalted butter. The man's not all there. His pork is still there, though.
In a hippie zine many years ago, I read an article about some lady who'd added mugwort leaves to the stuffing inside her pillow. She claimed that it helped her remember her dreams. It didn't change her dreams, she said, didn't have any psychedelic properties or anything, but when she woke up she'd remember her dreams more vividly than on nights she slept with out the mugwort.
All I knew was, remembering dreams sounded cool. My dreams have always vanished into the ether within moments of waking up.
A few weeks later at a farmer's market, a slightly smelly old man with a fabulously wavy beard was selling the ordinary herbs and seeds and flowers and such. Mugwort was on the table, reasonably priced, so I bought some.
Based only on the article in that zine, I stuffed it into my pillow, and it worked. Or I thought it worked. Maybe it's all psychosomatic, a placebo in a pillow. Maybe it's 'woo', but does it matter? I claim no science about it, but the mugwort sure seemed to carry the memory of dreams over the threshold and into the next morning.
The mugwort pillow lost its punch after a few months, though, and then a grand landslide of years went by without mugwort in my life. I fell in love, got married, moved to Kansas City, hated it, moved to Madison, loved it, but the wife got sick and died, and then I moped around for a few years and moved back home to Seattle, where I've continued moping.
Exploring an unfamiliar neighborhood one afternoon, I turned a corner and The Herbalist emerged, all green and foofy. Internally I snickered about the kind of people who buy exotic herbs for purported but unproven medicinal value, but suddenly I remembered mugwort, so I walked inside and became one of those people.
Two ounces of the good stuff, for only $3.
Does mugwort still work its magic? Oh yeah, baby. Here's just one of my dreams, since sleeping on my new mugwort pillow:
I was an an all-you-can-eat buffet, bringing a sixth plate loaded with burgers and fries, pizza and Chinese, fondue and two slices of pie back to my table, when a gorgeous woman approached, and she had me before hello. She was blonde, buxom, wearing glasses to signify intelligence, and 30 or so — half my age, which is icky, but it's a dream so it's allowed.
Another clue it was a dream, is that she smiled at me, batting her eyes seductively. I said hello and flashed my missing teeth at her, and she smiled even bigger, sexier, and said to me, "You have something on the back of your pants."
I twisted myself around, but it's hard to see your own butt, especially if you're fat, and I'm fat even in my dreams, so I put my plate on the table and darted to the men's room.
With a mirror behind me, I could see that the backside of my britches was not merely smudged but enormously stained with shit residue. It looked like I'd had severe diarrhea leakage but never noticed. Severe, meaning it wasn't just at the apex, it was spread so wide it covered both buttcheeks, up to the beltline, down to the seam and beyond, to the top of my pant legs. It was brown and moist toward the middle, lighter and dryer toward the edges, and those outer bits were crumbling off my pants, suggesting that this sprawling geography of poop had been on my pants for a long time.
I'd had a job interview earlier that morning, wanted that job and thought the interview had gone well, but now I knew, I'd probably left crumbs and residue where I'd sat in their office. Maybe more crumbled off as I'd walked. Unlikely they were going to call me back.
More immediately, I was in a crowded restaurant, with no way to leave without walking through the dining area, flashing my massive shitstain to everyone.
Then I'd have to stand at the bus stop, shitstain on display, and step up the stairs onto the bus, which would lift my browned butt to eye level for the people behind me.
Then I'd have to ride home, stinking up the bus.
Then I'd walk into the house, and Dean would be there, wanting to talk, of course, about the shitstain on the butt of my pants.
Luckily, I woke up before having to live through all that embarrassment, but thanks to the mugwort, I remembered every detail for long enough to write about it.
Highly recommended.
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The End
• Uncle Jack Charles
• Ramsey Lewis
9/21/2022
Wow, that quote from Jeff Koyen - that's a name I haven't heard in decades. I seem to remember loving his zine "CRANK!"
ReplyDeleteHe's one of a dozen or so people I respect, which is easy because I don't know him well.
Delete