Thursday, January 20, 2005

more psychic stuff with a mylar balloon ending (plus a bonus panic attack) As I mentioned before, the most urgent piece of advice that the Savannah psychic gave to Rachel was to break up with me as soon as feasibly possible. "Was there anything else?" I inquired as we strolled around a candy shop that sold praline, and taffee, and carmel apples. "Yes," Rachel said.  "She told me that there was somebody that loved me very much who was about to have a great success in business, and make a lot of money." "And?" I said. "And I should get together with that person," she said. "So basically she's saying you shoud get back together with your husband because that' who you really love and he's about to be a big success.  Is that what you think?" Rachel just shrugged and made that maybe face.  Of course, none of this would have transpired if I hadn't had a completely unprovoked--at least not by drugs--panic attack when we sat down to have some supper and drinks in the Riverfront district, in what was supposed to be our first moment of rest and enjoyment.  But just after I ordered my steak and potato and my Bass draft, this dreadful and uneasy feeling came over me.  Then the dreadful and uneasy feeling turned into a kind of dizzy spell.  Then the dizzy spell acquired this shaky urgency.  The next thing you know Rachel was talking next to me about how schizophrenics are fucked up the way they are because the synapses in their brains fire the wrong way and they actually burn themselves out.  Then she said something about how schizophrenics actually are relieved of their symptoms when they float in warm water.  I started to rejoin with something about sensory deprivation tanks and the movie Altered States, when all of a sudden my mouth stopped moving and my face lost all expression and all I could do was run my fingers through my hair and hope I didn't have one of those attacks that involve screaming and accosting total strangers.  Afterall, my kid was there with me and we were in a strange town fourhundred miles from home. "Is everthing alright, sir?" our waitress asked.  "Fine, fine," I said through gritted teeth, while I continued to run my fingers through my hair and hold back the attack by staring off into nowhere.  I tried my hardest to snap out of it, knowing I was ruining our vacation by the second.  Rachel, after trying to rub my shoulders and "console me" had given up and sat sullen gazing into her vodka tonic.  My daughter, knowing there was something wrong with Daddy again, sat in front of her chicken fingers and her soda and became silent and invisible. 3:31:12 PM    comment [] more psychic stuff cont'd (wow, that was getting kind of long winded and dramatic, let me try to get to the point) Overall, the Georgia whirlwind tour didn't really go that well.  We had some okay moments, like in the graveyard, and maybe the CNN studio, but the fun vibe wasn't quite there. It was a long, endless weary trip back from Atlanta.  It was one of those road trip endings where you're made all the more tired and irritable because you know you won't get home until very late at night and you have to go to work first thing in the morning. Finally, we rolled into Tampa about midnight and our first stop was Rachel's Ybor city apartment.  When we cruised into her parking lot, a curious sight caught our attention.  Rachel's pathfinder had been adorned with balloons and streamers and some sort of messages.  A closer inspection revealed that it was some sort of pre-valentine's day romancing from some secret admirer. "That's pretty creepy," I said.  "Who the heck would do that?" But we both had a pretty good idea it was Kamal, Rachel's estranged, but not forgotten spouse. 3:28:09 PM    comment [] more psychic stuff cont'd We were both too exhausted to start picking valentine's day balloons off her car, so I left that task for her in the morning.  A couple days later I visited Rachel at her apartment in the middle of the afternoon.  The first thing I noticed was that the collection of valentines day ballons were still floating in her living room. "Why are those still here?" I asked her. "Oh don't worry about those," she said and led me back to the bathroom.  Rachel was getting ready for an evening law class so we had sex in the shower for maximum get-ready efficiency. Afterwards, I got dressed while Rachel was still doing her coa-coa butter, and hair brushing routine.  I told her I was making a quick visit to the car, and not to worry if she heard the door beeper go off. Once she was out of sight I grabbed the balloon cluster and took it out into the parking lot. That's the nice thing about unwanted helium balloons--you can dispose of them in such a convenient and poetic way. 3:26:32 PM    comment [] quest for a better web address I may ask you readers out there, all four or five of you, to help me come up with a new blog name in the next week or so.  The reason is that my IP address has suddenly vannished from the web, and readers who knew me from www.duh.cc,  now get that irriating, "can't find server" page.  (The address was donated by a friend with which I haven't spoken in months, so there's no telling.....) I only had lukewarm enthusiasm at best for the duh.cc name anyway.  "Duh" was just the first thing that came to my head the first day I started blogging.  I guess it did a reasonable job of expressing the spirit and content of the blog.  But of course, when I tried to register duh.com, it, like every other word and phrase that you can think of, was already taken. "Cc" is, if I have my facts straight, is the domain server(?), for the Coos Coos Islands, a little archipeligo way out in the Pacific somewhere, which sells its web addresses for extra cash.  (Evidently co-co nuts aren't profitable enough). Duh.cc was concise enough, but the "cc" thing kind of made people scratch their heads.  No matter how many times I would reiterate the address to certain people, they would always type in dot com, and then wonder why it wasn't working. So that's the plan, replace duh.  My brain immediately begins to consider and reject all sorts of sophmoric names: mundanemutterings.com; allsortsofnuttyshit.com; morecrapontheweb.com, etc. But its a lightning bolt of genius I'm waiting for. (I will probably reject any names submitte by other people simply because of my ego, but it still my be fun and interesting to hear a few suggestions.)  (ps is coughing up blood a "must go to doctor" symptom?) 7:39:35 AM    comment []

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