NoidBlog

Oh man oh man

noidsoup@gmail.com — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 19:40:52 GMT

There is a light fog that rolls in over the hills as the sun sets. The air glows most evenings, like an Arizona dust storm. But San Francisco air is clean because our pollution blows into the central valley. I breath easy here.

The bus stops have LCD screens that flash the route schedules. I find myself getting impatient when I have to wait longer than 10 minutes for a bus. How quickly I've adjusted. I used to wait 30+ minutes while the AZ sun pounded me in the face.

I glanced at a man on the bus who was using the seats as a sort of mobile couch, taking up three spaces with his outstretched legs. It was enough to inspire a 50 second, patently schizophrenic rage-a-thon wherein he called me "fag boy" a couple times and vaguely threatened my girlfriend.

I ate Cambodian food for the first time. It was like Thai food... but the curry sauce was more tangy, I think.

dreambit6

noidsoup@gmail.com — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 21:11:09 GMT

An unseemly old man in an ornate bolo tie and a freshly pressed turquoise suit comes into my work. He's got a scraggly yellowing beard and a comb-over. And on second thought, its not my work exactly but a specially outfitted camping trailer with a large desk for looking through book trades. My co-workers are there but they don't look as they should. The old man has a cavernously huge mouth. He opens his jaw, firmly presses his thumb on the center of his tongue, and then jabs said thumb into my side. As he presses into me, I am paralyzed. I fall backwards and he crushes his body into mine. Very unpleasant indeed.

There's a large meteor headed towards earth. The entire global population waits nervously in front of their television screens. News anchors are sweaty and scared. It is generally understood that the meteor is actually a nuclear warhead, and its impact will destroy the entire world. The only chance us humans have of survival is if a commercial airplane can intercept its path. In that case, the meteor/warhead will detonate midair and everything will be fine. Me and a group of friends watch a live news-feed with abated breath as graphical representations edge closer and closer to each other. The object reaches the very tip of the plane. For a moment it looks as if everything is going to be okay, but then to our horror it misses by an inch. We all realize simultaneously: everything is over. The feeling was very real and my stomach dropped. I turn to my Aaron, my friend, and suggested that we all hold each other. I grab him tight as the world ends.

dreambit5

noidsoup@gmail.com — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 22:22:37 GMT

I don't really remember anything. I think my brain was too drenched in alcohol. The parts I do remember are totally ordinary. I'm at work and a woman tries to convince me to take a bunch of Jerry Seinfeld books.

"I just can't take these books. They won't sell here."
"But he's really funny. These are funny books" She shakes them at me.
"I'm really sorry. Seinfeld just isn't as popular as it used to be."

dreambit4

noidsoup@gmail.com — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 02:28:33 GMT

I'm traveling by train across a non-distinct, vaguely European country. The locomotive is pitch black and shiny, like polished shoes, and it gleams in the sun. Its design is quite menacing. A mixture of curves and spikes. Inside, its quite nice. Air conditioned and full of light. There are rooms for the passengers and comfortable beds. There are waiters carrying covered silver trays. The captain is a beautiful girl with large black boots. She has a polite though commanding attitude, and she keeps relocating my living quarters from room to room without any explanation. I passively comply. I try to kiss her. Sometimes she kisses back.

dreambit3

noidsoup@gmail.com — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 20:25:25 GMT

I stand face to face with a Japanese girl I once knew. In the dream, she had aged to the point of being 10+ years older than me. We start talking, except its all telepathic. There’s no language barrier. Our conversation flows smoothly. I have the feeling that all her words are emanating from the center of her temple. We lay down next to each other. I don't want it to stop, but the dream shifts.

Me and two girls are walking in a seedy neighborhood near my parents house. The streetlamps are flickering and faint. A limping homeless man comes up to us and says “excuse me, ice?” I don’t have any ice. He attacks me, and I flip him over. This repeats itself several times. At another point later on in the dream, he sends me an email, in poetic verse form, that turns down my music submission to his website.

dreambit2

noidsoup@gmail.com — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 20:07:38 GMT

I befriend a very bad man with trashy taste in cars and clothing. He has a mullet and drives a muscle car. He drinks Pepsi and he wears a gold chain. The unstated subtext is that he’s a serial killer. It’s true in general that I unfairly correlate cheesy cultural preferences with moral depravity. I follow him through a non-distinct mid-sized city in the 1980s and watch him buy sharp lawn and garden care tools, the potential uses of which remain implicitly sinister.

He drives me-his engine roaring obnoxiously-through a shifting wasteland of used tire lots, strip clubs, hardware and mechanic shops. Every single street lined with chain link fences accented by overgrown dead weeds. We remain silent. I think this landscape isn’t too different from certain areas of Phoenix where I grew up.

Finally we arrive at our destination and suddenly I find myself at a large glass building. It had the familiar feel of a Japanese campus. We steal computers. One after the other, we carry them out load them in his endlessly large trunk. He ditches me and I run after him, screaming. I bang his back-lights out with a club as he drives off. The bastard.

I walk around the school halls aimlessly. There are people everywhere. I say good morning to a teacher and at first he smiles. Then he realizes that I’ve stolen oodles of valuable school computer terminals. I panic. Everyone turns on me and surrounds me. For a moment I just stand there shaking with fear. The bottom drops out of my stomach and I violently hurl myself into the concrete floor. The crowd disperses. Suddenly I’m swimming through the air. I’m spinning and tossing myself about. I float through a vast black space with nothing underneath me. I can see everyone above me, walking around the halls, sitting in class, and doing their everyday routine. They’ve forgotten about me completely. I am overwhelmed with this feeling of being hidden, in a place totally divorced from their awareness.

dreambit1

noidsoup@gmail.com — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 17:55:04 GMT

A huge Formica tabletop with hundreds of bouncing Pez dispensers coming towards me. Hundreds of pink pez shooting out their grinning mouths, ricocheting off each other and breaking into thousands of bits when they hit the floor. The air is tinted with a fog of pez dust. They make a terrible clattering roar. They all have grinning bear heads.

I wake up in a bed elevated high above the ground. I’m still in the dream. There’s a girl sleeping beside me. I roll towards her and grab her. Her limbs are inordinately lanky and she wraps me up. I press her into my body. We start roll off the side of the bed and crash lightly on an old wooden floor. We’re alone in the house of the family that I stayed with in Japan.

I stare intently at the shadow of the girl’s hair viewed on the pavement. It swirls and curves and shifts about in slow motion, as if moved by water. It gets more and more ornate as I watch. I’m held in place. I can’t stop watching.

I woke up feeling a bit out of breath.

Cacti

noidsoup@gmail.com — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 16:33:46 GMT

October 12, 2008

noidsoup@gmail.com — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 23:47:59 GMT

Tempe condominiums.

October 12, 2008, 16:41

noidsoup@gmail.com — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 23:43:19 GMT

Good times bad times forever

noidsoup@gmail.com — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 17:49:48 GMT

I remember you.

pictures

noidsoup@gmail.com — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 01:13:48 GMT

Check out the rest on my Flickr!

French Quarter live at the trunkspace (8-9-07)

noidsoup@gmail.com — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 01:05:09 GMT

Kate Smith Live at the Palace of No Malice

noidsoup@gmail.com — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 00:30:48 GMT

Delay and Jihad (8-15-07)

noidsoup@gmail.com — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 22:52:08 GMT

Steve Gnash

noidsoup@gmail.com — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 22:35:01 GMT

My friends are in a noise band called Steve Gnash. It was loud and genuinely terrifying. Indoor fireworks. I could have lost an eye.

Violence and mustaches

noidsoup@gmail.com — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 04:58:48 GMT

New single life in Tempe

noidsoup@gmail.com — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 22:19:58 GMT

noidsoup@gmail.com — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 22:40:34 GMT

my collage art

noidsoup@gmail.com — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 02:55:31 GMT

sleepy Kitty 2

noidsoup@gmail.com — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 22:06:51 GMT

Sleepy Kitty

noidsoup@gmail.com — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 07:43:59 GMT

Foot Ox Into the Evening live @ Teague's House (4-5-07), pt1

noidsoup@gmail.com — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 21:54:19 GMT

March of Misfortune

noidsoup@gmail.com — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 06:25:03 GMT

March started off rather badly. I sneezed on the 3^rd night, and things began a downward spiral. Almost instantaneously after sneezing, my throat became irritated and my nose started producing more snot than I thought possible. I had a full on head cold by the next day. This lingered for a week.

On Thursday the 8^th, my lovably obese dog gave up her mortal coil. Her name was Gerty. She was 10 years old. She died after three days of what seemed like a mild flu. During the final moments of her life, I gently rubbed her belly and told her it was okay to go.

I started coughing up thick discolored phlegm on the 10^th, rapidly coming down with a bad case of bronchitis. By the middle of the second week, I was laying in bed with a 101 degree fever. Then my tonsil painfully flared up on the 15^th and my lymph gland followed on the 21^st, right as my bronchial tubes were starting function properly once again.

All of this sets the stage for our grand finale.

K.D. walked into the bedroom one night, and she noticed a foul odor. “It smells like a toilet in here!” she said, “Have you been farting?!” As a matter of fact, I had not.

Over the preceding three nights, the smell got worse. It smelled like cat shit; like there was a fucking box full of kitty liter somewhere in our bedroom. We sniffed in vain, trying to locate the ever increasing scent, which by the third night was so overwhelming that we couldn’t sleep. The stench would quite literally come in waves, as if a fan were sporadically blowing the smell of scat in our faces.

Maybe one of our remaining dogs had taken a shit in the closet, or maybe something had died underneath the bed. We had to find whatever it was.

So we after a rigorous search, we realized that it was emanating from the bedside nightstand. We moved it away from the wall, expecting to find something horrible underneath, but there was nothing there. I’m on my hands and knees, sniffing madly, when K.D. suddenly exclaims “Oh my god.” The tone of her voice startles me.

“What?!” I ask.

“Look at the outlet.”

You can see for yourself:

The electricity in our house is a bit shoddy. I think the previous owners must have installed a lot of the outlets themselves. So there’s always been this hole where the top outlet is supposed to be. A mouse discovered that the wiring within that hole was actually very functional.

So now we had to deal with the problem of getting the little sucker out of there. After a panicked and disgusted conversation, it was decided that I had to do the dirty deed. I put on a rubber glove and used a t-shirt to grab hold of the mouse. It was stuck and I had to pull with some force.

It ripped in half.

A stench hit my nose, amplified 10x from its previous strength, and I started gagging. Now there was ½ of a mouse in our socket. After many excited shouts of “Fuck!” and “Shit!” we had to decide what to do.

Please realize that it was 3 a.m. by now, and we were both tired and generally disturbed by the situation. Here’s the plan we came up with: First, we spray the other half of the mouse with a healthy amount of bleach, then we cover up the top socket with duct tape and wait for it to mummify. Mouse mummies don’t stink.

10 minutes later, we’ve got a spray bottle of bleach and a piece of duct tape. In our infinite wisdom, we took the extra precaution of covering up the bottom socket with a piece of tape, so that no moisture would leak onto the electrical wires.

Immediately as K.D. sprays the bleach, the outlet starts sputtering and spewing white sparks and flame. We scream in surprise and start panicking wildly, running around the room aimlessly.

“What do I do!!?!?” I scream.

“I don’t know! Pour water on it.”

I happened to have a cup of water in my hand, which I instinctively splash all over the outlet.

Anyone should know by now, ourselves included, that you shouldn’t put water on an electrical fire. We should have known that, because the bleach had started fire in the first place. Unfortunately, we were not acting logically or rationally at the time. We were acting out of sheer panic.

After I doused the outlet, it exploded into flames. A violent sound accompanied white sparks, smoke, and yellow flames. In a few seconds, the remaining half of the mouse turned into the consistency of burnt toast crumbs.

We had no fire extinguisher. I had no idea were the electrical box was for the house, so I couldn’t turn off the electricity. We both assumed the worst.

But then, the fire stopped! Our house didn’t burn down! We exploded into laughter. Smoke hung in the bedroom, carrying the smell of burning plastic and electricity throughout the house.

I can’t wait for April.

Nick Eymann embracing Thomas Lennon

noidsoup@gmail.com — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 05:35:27 GMT

Nick Eymann embracing Thomas Lennon, originally uploaded by Noidsoup.