[D. courtesy of Acerbia.com]

I am so stuck for a post today I’m doing the “ten things about me thing”.

1. When I was about three, a big black dog tried to fuck me at the beach. My parents thought it was funny, and took a picture. I thought the dog was dancing.

2. I have never broken a bone, which used to bother me as a child.
3. The original movie “13 Ghosts” gave me nightmares as a kid.
4. I fantasize about surviving being struck by lightning, with my faculties intact, and my life somehow changed in a positive way.
5. After Mt. St. Helens erupted, Alpha and I briefly had a gutter-cleaning business in SW Washington State.
6. I worked as a model in Tokyo, but was not good at the auditions, among other problems.
7. I once took a pee next to Boris Yeltsin at the Moscow International Airport.
8. I once nearly died of misdiagnosed appendicitis.
9. I don’t believe in ghosts and shit, but I don’t disbelieve in them either.
10. Once, before taking Alpha on a drive through the relatively remote Olympic Peninsula in Washington State, I had my car’s alternator rebuilt just to be on the safe side. At the furthest point in the trip, the alternator burnt up anyway. Swiss tourists picked us up hitchhiking and made fun of us. Since then I hate cars.

Which are true and which are false?

The thought behind homeopathic medicine, if I’m not mistaken, is to take a tiny dose of whatever poison or allergen is ailing you, in order to activate your immune system to heal/protect you against it. Perverting this idea, I sometimes deal with fears by taking a large dose of whatever is scaring me – going parasailing when I’m afraid of heights, for example. As a father of a newly-teenaged daughter, I just read The Lovely Bones. Have you read it? What did you think of it?

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At lunchtime, I strolled to the shop for some honey-roasted peanuts and diet Coke. Checking out, I noticed these little green worms on my suit. They are the current bane of my existence, besides mosquitos and pesky butterflies. Everywhere you go in the neighborhood, they are hanging from the trees by little threads like torpid little members of a modern French circus. The only thing that makes them more charming than maggots is that they don’t wiggle as much, and aren’t actually maggots.

We’re still having a plague of mosquitos, as you may have heard. But now, we’re having a plague of butterflies too, which almost makes up for it.

By the way, someone’s been monkeying with my AIM account, so if you should happen to receive something strange, like a coherent IM message from feralmig, with no typos, you may want to verify that it’s really me, by asking the secret questions that only I know the answers to.

2000 years ago, one of Rome’s northernmost fortifications was located in Comagena, on the banks of the Danube, a place known today as Tulln, a nice little town near where I live, where you can’t dig a foundation for a new house without hitting some bones or potshards; and if this happens, and you don’t cover them back up fast enough, the archeologists come and examine everything, delaying your construction by weeks or months while they say, “oh, a Roman spearhead,” or “an unknown item, obviously an object of worship.”

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