1. You Dropped Something

We had to go to Chooch’s new school for an information session on Tuesday where we learned that basically his high school is a College Lite and I had mild panic attacks listening to the student ambassadors talk about course loads and declaring your focus, and this is also how I found out secondhand that Chooch scored a 99% on the PSATs, which I learnt when I overheard him telling his friend’s mom, so that was great.

During the information session, while we were looking at slides and listening to the very young and energetic principal talk, a little girl two rows in front of me was pulling on a beaded bracelet and it snapped, sending fake gemstones scattering along the floor. Her older sister, presumably another future student of this school, helped her picked them up, but she missed two.

There was a boy in the seat behind her, and he tapped her on the back. I thought he was going to point out the forgotten jewels, but instead he was just handing her a paper that floated off her chair while she was assisting her little sister in gem retrieval. I wanted to lean forward and whisper, “YOU FORGOT SOME” but there was never a good moment. So I sat there and stared at them, feeling more and more anxious about it as the presentation went on.

Finally, it was over and everyone started to stand up to leave. The mom of the girls was sitting there, still, so I tapped her on the back. As she turned around, I said, “You dropped something,” and at that exact moment, the iced-whatever from Starbucks that was balancing on her lap toppled over, ice cubes clattering all over.

“Well, now I dropped another thing!” she said with a laugh BUT I DON’T THINK IT WAS A HUMOROUS LAUGH.

“Good job,” Henry muttered and I was like, “I DIDN’T MEAN FOR THAT TO HAPPEN!” I was just so concerned about those stupid gems and I didn’t want them to leave and realize they didn’t get them all. It could have been some meaningful bracelet!

“I doubt they would have given that kid anything of value,” Henry said and THAT IS NOT WHAT I MEAN, MEANING AND VALUE ARE NOT THE SAME.

Ugh.

2. Flippin’ Fun

If you’re here for the latest in the saga of Hot Naybor Chris and Slut Life, then, well, stay here. It’s getting RILL PETTY, you guys. Like, almost even too petty for the likes of me, and we all know I’m stuffed to the gills with that there ‘pett.’ HNC called Henry the other day and luckily I was home so I was able to hear the tale about how Slut Life left his car running in the driveway, so HNC went over and knocked on his door.

No answer.

HNC went in his house and got a beer, then sat on his porch to wait for Slut Life to emerge, but now Slut Life had shut the door!! (Sorry, I had to seek out Henry to fill in gaps of the story but Henry just admitted that he wasn’t really listening to the phone conversations; wow, much neighborly.) So HNC went over and kicked the door this time and now Slut Life answered.

HNC: STOP PARKING IN MY PARKING SPOT!

Slut Life: I WENT TO THE CHURCH* AND THEY SAID I COULD PARK WHEREVER I WANT!

But when HNC did Slut Life’s voice, he made it all high-pitched and whiny and I almost peed my pants.

*(There is a church across the street that allows us to park in their lot.)

Henry is so over this drama but I can’t get enough. And then I noticed two things the other day:

• Slut Life put up a “privacy curtain” on the side of his porch, presumably to block out HNC’s side of the house, but it’s basically just a window blind and it got all torn up and twisted in today’s wind storm.
• HNC’s wife has one of those yard banner stakes in the ground next to their sidewalk and she had a banner hanging for every fucking holiday. Well, now Slut Life has one on his side of the yard and it says FLIPPIN’ FUN. WHY IS THIS SO FUNNY TO ME.

3. NEW NCT127 VIDEO!!

I missed these boys!!

4. Exciting Journal Page Showing

I thought it would be fun to grab an old journal, open to a random page, and take a picture to share a page of my past with you provided that it’s not one of the pages where I drew a map to the buried body, etc. So for today, you get this one, which is ironic because I was just watching Finch videos last weekend, I guess because I had on an Armor For Sleep playlist on YouTube since I was so excited about buying tickets for their anniversary tour, and Finch is just a natural progression from there.

Anyway, here’s a page from 2003:

Also, I have vague memories of that gas mask thing, which present themselves every now and then in conversation but it started to become one of those things where I was like, “Did I dream that? Did I really do it?”

I wonder what I bought with the $50. Probably more CDs to join Finch.

5. Lunch Break Tackle

Wednesday afternoon, (good lord I couldn’t remember how to spell ‘after’ and kept trying to get away with ‘aftner’) I was doing my thang, on the phone with Hank-a-lank, walking down the street alongside of the Benedum Center. I was just about to cross by the entrance to the alleyway where the buses and trucks park to unload for the shows at the Benedum. We call it “Cellphone Disco” alley because there’s this weird red LED thing with a sign above it that says Cell Phone Disco. It’s like, art. You know how that is. Just look, don’t ask.

Anyway, I’m just about to step off the curb to cross in front of the alley when I get body-slammed out of the blue by the backside of some youngish guy who had come tearing out of the alley. He had hit the ground right before me and did a weird spin in the air, which is how he ended up hitting me with his back.

At this point, my gut instinct, I’m sorry, was to scream my fucking face off. It was my best haunted house scream. The quintessential “where’s my Scream Queen crown” shriek. The IS SHE SEEING TAEMIN FOR THE FIRST TIME OR BEING STUCK WITH A CATTLE PROD??? wail.

Time stood still.

My perpetrator was now spinning around to face me. He clasped both hands on my upper arms, maybe to comfort me, but probably just to regain his balance. “Sorry,” he panted, face all red from the, the what? The chase? Was he being chased? Because after this strange 1/2 second of intense eye contact, he spun around and took off down the sidewalk, in the direction where I had just come.

“What the fuck was that?” Henry asked slowly. And now I was laughing. Like, cracking up. Adrenaline, I guess? The relief that it could have been something fatal and it wasn’t, it was just some harmless guy (or was he?! I MEAN WHY WAS HE WAS RUNNING HE DIDN’T LOOK LIKE A JOGGER) he essentially provided me with the most human contact I’ve received outside of the house in…weeks? Months? When was the last time someone touched me!? I DO NOT EVEN KNOW.

Meanwhile, not one single motherfucker on that street stopped to see if I was OK. Seriously. Not even a curious rubberneck, a lookie-loo. My scream was traveling down that block, too. STRONG ECHO.

But man, I sure did send the pigeons flying.

Anyway, I put a moratorium on the walk for that day after nearly getting tackled to the dirty street by some stranger, so I circled back around and headed back to work. And then, a block away, I SAW HIM AGAIN. He too had circled back around, but the opposite way, so now we were walking (yes, now he was walking, and looking extremely winded) toward each other. I tried to get a stealth-shot, but it came out blurry since I was moving.

My would-be assailant (far-left), cats & dogs:

[ETA: An hour after I posted this, Henry went to the store (of course). He just came home and reported that Slut Life took down his wind-mangled privacy curtain and threw it into a garbage can on his porch. Things move fast around here! WHAT WILL HAPPEN NEXT, ONLY TIME WILL TELL.]

Hey-o, the month is over and here I am with a run-down of the books that helped me pass the time & forget that it’s winter. Somehow, I started the month on a weird possession kick. I guess because I started watching these “Booktubers” (god, I hate that term, it’s so dumb, like me) talk about their latest favorite horror books because that is my genre of choice but I have been so far-removed that I needed guidance on where to start, who’s on trend, etc.

One interesting thing to note is that I read two books, by chance, that each referenced the Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919 which I never knew about and I actually thought it was made up when I read it in the first book, but by the second reference in a different book, I was like, “HMM MAYBE I SHOULD GOOGLE THIS…” Oh, and also two books featured broads pissing on a grave.

(The weird coincidence for my January books was that two of them used the word “palimpsest,” what a random-ass word.)

The hits-n-misses were pretty even, I would say. As I did last month, I had hyper-linked the titles so you can get legit synopses, because my book summaries tend to be major mouthfuls – I have definitely bored Henry to tears on our walks around town!

1. Saturday Night Ghost Club – Craig Davidson

This book came up in so many BookTube horror recommendation videos, and I picked it up because it’s an exorcism plot. I knew going into this that a lot of people were crying that it was an Exorcist rip-off, but to the author’s defense, it does clearly reference that in the book. I’m really torn with this one. It started out just fine and actually made me jumpy because, and here is where Henry will roll his eyes but he can cook on because he pointedly refuses to watch horror movies revolving around churches and exorcisms BECAUSE HE IS SCARED, I truly believe that people can become possessed. In fact, I went through a heavy phase in 9th or 10th grade where I actively tried to let the devil in. “I used to stand at my bedroom window at night, facing the woods and cry ‘HERE I AM DEVIL, I’M READY!” I guess I was too eager. Satan wants someone who plays hard to get. He wants the chase. When I told Chooch about this era of my life, he just murmured, “Wow. Good job.” He doesn’t care about my sordid past.

• I appreciated that each chapter was named after a song from the 80s;
• The edition I got from the library was really cool because it was like a high school yearbook:

THIS BOOK. It was one of my favorite books of the month, and year even though we’re only 2 mths in. I didn’t know much about it going in and I think that’s for the best because once…the thing…starts happening, I was like, “OK, we’re doing THIS? Let’s go.” The writing?
*Italian finger kiss, washing hands first though* The characters? LOVED THEM ALL. The dialogue? Yep, I can hear these bitches in my head. I was so excited about this book that I couldn’t even talk about it without getting choked up and it’s not a SAD book. It’s hilarious! It’s scary! It’s bizarre! There’s a crazy twist! This book was totally my style, from the writing to the plot. If it wasn’t a library copy, I would have kissed it with tongue.

6. Heretics Anonymous-Katie Henry

8. Your House In On Fire, Your Children All Gone–Stefan Kiesbye

My friend Elissa recommended this to me and it was a fucking JOY to read after Kill Creek. The horror was so perfectly subtle, so real. Each chapter alternates between several children growing up in what appears to me a semi-rural German village…in the 60s? 70s? Did we ever really know? The cruel things that they do each other is scarier than any haunted house/possession plot, in my not-quite-obtained English degree opinion. Loved this one – thank you, Elissa!!

The other day in the car, we had the regular radio on (weird, I know) and the intro to a very familiar song started to play. I screamed, “OMG IS THIS—-” but then it morphed into some dumb song which was decidedly not what I thought it was going to be. Yet another homogenous rapper sampling a really great song from my youth, that’s all. 

Meanwhile, Henry was still shook because if there’s one thing he loves to experience while driving, it’s my random, sudden loud outbursts from the passenger seat.

I had to Shazam the song on the radio, because I couldn’t for the life of me remember who sang the sampled song, other than it was three girls from the mid-90s who were signed to Michael Jackson’s label. 

Turns out the rapper is some Canadian, Tory Something (I already forgot) but now that I knew that, I was able to Google to find the name of the group AND IT WAS BROWNSTONE. Holy shit, I hadn’t thought of them in years and years but I had their debut CD and this song was a mixed tape staple of mine. Of course, I put it on Spotify while regaling Henry with the highlights of their Wiki page, such as how ONE OF THEM WAS FOUND DEAD in 2015?! She cut herself after falling in her home. Ugh.

Anyway, here is the song, please revel in its luscious R&B tones:

Oh man, this song brings back so many memories of crying over Justin Kail in 10th grade, lol. I was so pathetic.

This past Saturday night, Henry and I went to Sugar Spell Scoops because two of the Saturday flavors were calling to me: black forest and coffee cake. But as we walked in, and I mean literally as we crossed the threshold, BROWNSTONE’S IF YOU LOVE ME started playing, almost as if Henry had called ahead and requested it (that would never happen). This was such a mind-blowing moment for me that I blurted out to the shop owners, “JUST THE OTHER DAY I COULDN’T REMEMBER WHO SANG THIS SONG BECAUSE SOME RANDO RAPPER SAMPLED IT AND I HAD TO GOOGLE IT AND THEN I DID A BROWNSTONE DEEP DIVE, AND I CAN’T BELIEVE IT’S PLAYING RIGHT NOW.”

They just laughed and one of them commented upon how the shop’s playlist is so random, but that’s just it: it’s not a song that you would typically hear on the radio anymore, let alone a vegan ice cream shop’s soundtrack. WHAT ARE THE ODDS. 

I dunno, but it made my scoops taste that much better. (Not that they ever need any help!)

It reminded me a little bit of the Boz Skaggs Rabbit Hole. 

On that note, I’m going to put on a Brownstone playlist while I continue recovering from the awesome stomach bug I caught after spending the last week sterilizing everything and taking my temperature every 20 minutes after so many people at work contracted the flu. At one point in the middle of the night, I was laying on the bathroom floor, sobbing into a towel, and promising God that I would be good if he would just put a moratorium on the vomiting. Ugh.

BIGBANG win:

BTS win:

If your answer is: One has clear displays of respect on both sides and one clearly lacks that, you’re correct! One of the things I loved about Kpop when I first got into it was how there seemed to be a distinct lack of arrogance among the bigger/senior groups. The Asian culture of bowing as a sign of respect is not tossed out the window once a certain level of fame is achieved, but watching BTS’s recent music countdown win, I think they’re maybe spending too much time around Americans lol.

BIGBANG are legends but stay humble and never act like they’re above their industry peers even when those groups are clearly in awe of them. BIGBANG FOREVER!