Monthly Archive for July, 2005

open letter to the lady who stopped

Published
by
Alfina the Vague
on July 20, 2005
in Correspondence and Vintage Imports
. Closed

Dear Lady,

Greetings from my home, where I feel lucky to have made it “in one piece,” as the idiom goes.  I wonder if you remember me.  We passed on the street today; you were on Generic Road Named After a Species of Tree, I was on the West Wetlands Bicycle Path.

Do you remember the intersection of Tree Street and Wetlands Bike Path? Do You?  The intersection that contains no stop light, no stop sign, and no crosswalk?  Where your four-lane road crosses my one-meter-wide bike path? Where you stopped, inexplicably, and gestured madly in my direction for a number of minutes while I stood at the corner, staring impassively?  I hope this sounds familiar.

Should I have come to your aid?  You might have been having an epileptic fit, I thought, or perhaps merely suffering from car trouble.  Surely you did not intend to stop (for two whole minutes!) against the rules of right-of-way, in the middle of a four-lane road, where there is no stop signal nor crosswalk just to wave me across.  Surely no grown woman could be that ignorant, that heedless of the safety of others.  Surely not.

I will not do a fine lady such as yourself the discourtesy of believing that you would be so astoundingly, pigheadedly, cartoonishly stupid as to do an asshatted thing like that.

I hope I did  not cause you any distress when I shook my fists at you, redneck style, and thrust up both middle fingers in the commonly understood gesture of “Up Yours, You Malodorous Lady Part.”

See you ’round,

Vague

alfina the vague and the half-simian novelist

Published
by
Alfina the Vague
on July 16, 2005
in Books
. 14 Comments

I won’t say I’m embarrassed at having bought the new Harry Potter book on the day it came out.  I have been waiting for it basically since I finished reading the last one two years ago.  In fact, in the event that you lot made fun of me for reading it, I had even prepared a bunch of poppycock in advance–so that I could remain staunch in its defense.  You know, blather about how it’s a good story and how recognizing good stories is my job and I have been in school for an insane number of years learning how to find good stories and what to do with good stories when I do happen upon them. 

Well, never mind that bollocks, as someone said once.  Four chapters in, J.K. Rowling has already written "site" when she meant "sight" and "rise" when she meant "raise." Given those odds, I am shocked, frankly,  that the monkey didn’t spell "unfazed" u-n-p-h-a-s-e-d, as do so many of my atrociously illiterate students.

life outside the diamond is a wrench

Published
by
Alfina the Vague
on July 14, 2005
in Music and Vintage Imports
. Closed

Bronson Arroyo has released his first album, entitled (tweely enough) Covering the Bases.  It’s all covers.  The final track is perennial Boston favorite, “Dirty Water.”  I’m glad I couldn’t find any audio clips anywhere, because if I had, the temptation to listen might have been greater than my steely resignation not to. Had I listened to it I would be dead now, having suffered the fatal injury of stabbing a dull pencil into my ears.

Has Shaq taught us nothing?  Let me make it plain:  IF YE BE AN ATHLETE, RELEASE YE UNTO US NO ALBUMS!

tonight in conversation

Published
by
Alfina the Vague
on July 14, 2005
in Vintage Imports
. Closed

“Once a friend and I had a double date with some midwives.  Mine was a midwife, I mean.  She expounded on the virtues of stimulating the clitoris during childbirth.  I wasn’t convinced.”

“Really?  I don’t think the pain would be exactly alleviated, even with the midwife going down on you.”

And later:

“Fuck that hippie.”

“Oh that guy? He was birthed by a midwife.  You can tell by the tooth marks on his head.”

on barely getting out of houston alive

Published
by
Alfina the Vague
on July 13, 2005
in Travel and Vintage Imports
. Closed

My flight to Houston landed at a gate in the E concourse, in spite of the fact it was supposed to go to C.  No problem, of course, I had plenty of time to book it across a couple of terminals to catch my next flight.  I am still pretty spry.

Except what wound up happening was this: I wound up doing a total of one complete circuit of the airport outside, in a shuttle that dropped me off at the same place it picked me up, and a complete circuit of the airport inside as I ran from E to C to E again. At one point they sent me to a flight headed to Villahermosa, Mexico.

“How special, Mexico must be nice this time of year,” I thought to myself, “I should practice my Spanish. Muy bueno, mucho gusto! Yo quiero rascar mes huevos!”  As I was waiting there to be told what to do (and listening to three old ladies bitch because their gate change hadn’t been announced either–why they were headed to Villahermosa I do not know), I noticed a portly tuba player standing just behind me, playing some cartoonish tuba music the likes of which usually signifies something sadly funny is approaching.  It was the music of Schadenfreude, it was.

I had to sprint through the terminals to make it back to E (where I had begun, if you were paying attention), shoving old ladies aside and ignoring the weeping of children left in my wake.  I could have sworn there was a three-piece bluegrass band following me around, using their comedic hoe-down jams to highlight the ungainliness of my sprint. By this point I had the jelly-knees of a ninety-year-old woman, you see, and might have been suffering from auditory hallucinations. That bassist, though, was in damned good shape, let me tell you.  He never missed a fucking beat, jogging after me with murder in his eyes.

In case anyone was wondering, the official name of the Houston airport is “The George Bush Intercontinental Airport.”  I guess that fucking explains it.