Marc
Before ...
I do anything today, like even before I shower or brush my teeth or go to the bathroom***1***, I've got to get two things down here. One is this -- my great amount of gratitude to blogging and Miss BLARG Australia, Mish Loidl, for enabling my team to win at Cranium last night by being able to spell "PIROUETTE" correctly on the last question. It was a damn close game, much closer than we were hoping for after we took a gigantic lead ***2***, yet we slowly saw it start to fade away the more the night wore on and the louder the people not playing the game began to talk to each other just behind us. Even the unorthodox three-person-female team, who considered themselves Creative Cats, were able to pull out a miraculous second place showing after their dismal start in which they didn't make it past the first brain (ie - the Starting Point) for three or four whole rounds. Yet, through sheer determination, and through clever Cameo acting roles, particularly by myself ***3/4***, we were able to pull off the inevitable win, but I assert that I would've had no idea how to spell "PIROUETTE" had it not been for Australia's Queen of the BLARG. Many thanks.
Secondly, and finally, I have to get down this dream that I woke up from more than two hours ago and have not been able to forget. I am walking through downtown Normal, Illinois, a small, quiet, shopsy-type area. No Gaps or Old Navy's or Abercrombie's here, just small, independent stores like Deadpan Alley Records and At Wicker's End. It's quiet. It's immensely dark and foggy, and eerie to boot, and there is a pile of rocks that extends two stories into the sky, which I climb and find, much to my amusement, Matt Fast sitting on top of. He looks at me, makes small talk about music for a few minutes, and promptly disappears, at which point I fall down the side of the rock pile and come to on the ground, scratched and bruised and feeling a little out of place before I look across to the train station and realize that there are cars driving all over the train tracks just in front. People are honking and yelling at one another, and panicking in general, and I can't figure out why, for no apparent reason, all these cars are driving back and forth on the train tracks until I realize that there are no cars on the streets, and I take a tenative step out into the street and instantly my sole on my shoe begins to melt into said pavement, and the bottom of my foot begins to tingle, and once again I'm completely weirded out, and run back to the grass and ascend the slight hill just above the corner of Fell and Beaufort avenues, except that the hill is two to three times larger than it is in real life and there are about twenty people sitting indian-style on the sidewalk at the apex of the hill. I recognize a few of them, most notably some female friends from home, their fiancees, and my close friend, Lee, who smiles and tells me that she saved a spot for me. Why are we up here, I ask, to which she replies, to watch the train wreck. Can't you hear them, she says as she points one finger off in either direction. Instantly, as if a switch is turned on my head, my eyes close and my hearing become unbelievably sensitive. I can hear the grinding of metal wheels on metal tracks, and my eyes open again and I see people in pick-up trucks trying their hardest to push their cars into the ditches off to the side of the tracks before they give up and start running for higher ground. Then, out of nowhere, a large smokestack appears behind us with a magnificently large spotlight perched atop it, and the spotlight comes on and shines down about a quarter of a mile to our left before it sweeps all the way to a quarter of a mile off to our right, and the trains come into view out of two heavily wooded patches on either side of my peripheral vision. In Illinois you deal with trains all the time. It's a fact of life as almost every town has a train track of some sort running through it, and even in the countrysides sometimes you can see these gigantic mega-economy-driving trains limp through the corn and soybean fields, with what appear to be over one-hundred cars strung out as far as the eyes can see. And the strange part about this dream is that both of these trains are mega-trains, and the closer they get to each other and our crowd gathered on the Fell-Beaufort Hill doesn't mean that we can see their ends. Each train might stretch on forever, as far as we know, yet, unlike these snake-trains in real-life, these dream trains are moving incredibly fast. Faster than Amtrak trains which are unhindered by semi-trailers full of coal and product; faster than Disneyworld's monorail train. They are whizzing, as that's the only word I can think of to describe it. And, almost without warning, bells ring and the trains collide with one another, and we on the hill sit and stare and gasp and grab each other and next we know there are cops behind us and they are wanting to know what, exactly, it was that we saw. And then I wake up and I can't forget about it all.
***1*** Though even as I write this I already feel like it's kind of a misnomer as I woke up at 8:37am and took a tinkle in the comfort of a quiet apartment. I wondered if I should flush the toilet or not, for only a brief second, as a wave of would-be politeness swept over me. Why should my bowels wake up my roommates, I thought to myself, until I realized that not flushing the toilet was twice as rude as waking someone up because I had to pee, and that if I hadn't have flushed the toilet, I'm afraid I would've heard about it later today because they would've known that it was me who was peeing, because we're only two to a bathroom here, and if ____ didn't go and the toilet's full, then it was obviously ____ that went and didn't flush the toilet. So, flush I did.
***2*** As we were never not in the fast track lane of questioning, as we were easily able to handle all of our DataHead questions because we (my teammate, Luke, and myself) were possibly the two smartest people there.
***3*** Cameo's, to me, were the weirdest categories to have to act out. They give the actor a famous person's name (actor, president, historical figure, etc) and you are supposed to be that person, yet you're not allowed to say names of people or places. For example, let's say the answer was "Marilyn Monroe" and you are the actor, if you stand up and put your hands down at your sides and pretend to push an imaginary dress down and say something like, "Ooh! The wind is blowing this fabulous red dress up in the air and it's showing my panties to all these photographers!" you're playing the game correctly. But you're not allowed to say, "I'm from the 50s and 60s and I fucked JFK and probably his brother, Bobby, too, and I did drugs and died ... " you'd be disqualified.***4***
***4*** I assert my genious in one of the final Club Cranium (ie - everyone's allowed to participate, as in the entire three-team system that we were running) questions by saying to Luke, the ubiquitous partner, "If you could fight one person, who would you fight?" to which he says, "Gandhi!", thus practically sealing our victory.
Before ...
I do anything today, like even before I shower or brush my teeth or go to the bathroom***1***, I've got to get two things down here. One is this -- my great amount of gratitude to blogging and Miss BLARG Australia, Mish Loidl, for enabling my team to win at Cranium last night by being able to spell "PIROUETTE" correctly on the last question. It was a damn close game, much closer than we were hoping for after we took a gigantic lead ***2***, yet we slowly saw it start to fade away the more the night wore on and the louder the people not playing the game began to talk to each other just behind us. Even the unorthodox three-person-female team, who considered themselves Creative Cats, were able to pull out a miraculous second place showing after their dismal start in which they didn't make it past the first brain (ie - the Starting Point) for three or four whole rounds. Yet, through sheer determination, and through clever Cameo acting roles, particularly by myself ***3/4***, we were able to pull off the inevitable win, but I assert that I would've had no idea how to spell "PIROUETTE" had it not been for Australia's Queen of the BLARG. Many thanks.
Secondly, and finally, I have to get down this dream that I woke up from more than two hours ago and have not been able to forget. I am walking through downtown Normal, Illinois, a small, quiet, shopsy-type area. No Gaps or Old Navy's or Abercrombie's here, just small, independent stores like Deadpan Alley Records and At Wicker's End. It's quiet. It's immensely dark and foggy, and eerie to boot, and there is a pile of rocks that extends two stories into the sky, which I climb and find, much to my amusement, Matt Fast sitting on top of. He looks at me, makes small talk about music for a few minutes, and promptly disappears, at which point I fall down the side of the rock pile and come to on the ground, scratched and bruised and feeling a little out of place before I look across to the train station and realize that there are cars driving all over the train tracks just in front. People are honking and yelling at one another, and panicking in general, and I can't figure out why, for no apparent reason, all these cars are driving back and forth on the train tracks until I realize that there are no cars on the streets, and I take a tenative step out into the street and instantly my sole on my shoe begins to melt into said pavement, and the bottom of my foot begins to tingle, and once again I'm completely weirded out, and run back to the grass and ascend the slight hill just above the corner of Fell and Beaufort avenues, except that the hill is two to three times larger than it is in real life and there are about twenty people sitting indian-style on the sidewalk at the apex of the hill. I recognize a few of them, most notably some female friends from home, their fiancees, and my close friend, Lee, who smiles and tells me that she saved a spot for me. Why are we up here, I ask, to which she replies, to watch the train wreck. Can't you hear them, she says as she points one finger off in either direction. Instantly, as if a switch is turned on my head, my eyes close and my hearing become unbelievably sensitive. I can hear the grinding of metal wheels on metal tracks, and my eyes open again and I see people in pick-up trucks trying their hardest to push their cars into the ditches off to the side of the tracks before they give up and start running for higher ground. Then, out of nowhere, a large smokestack appears behind us with a magnificently large spotlight perched atop it, and the spotlight comes on and shines down about a quarter of a mile to our left before it sweeps all the way to a quarter of a mile off to our right, and the trains come into view out of two heavily wooded patches on either side of my peripheral vision. In Illinois you deal with trains all the time. It's a fact of life as almost every town has a train track of some sort running through it, and even in the countrysides sometimes you can see these gigantic mega-economy-driving trains limp through the corn and soybean fields, with what appear to be over one-hundred cars strung out as far as the eyes can see. And the strange part about this dream is that both of these trains are mega-trains, and the closer they get to each other and our crowd gathered on the Fell-Beaufort Hill doesn't mean that we can see their ends. Each train might stretch on forever, as far as we know, yet, unlike these snake-trains in real-life, these dream trains are moving incredibly fast. Faster than Amtrak trains which are unhindered by semi-trailers full of coal and product; faster than Disneyworld's monorail train. They are whizzing, as that's the only word I can think of to describe it. And, almost without warning, bells ring and the trains collide with one another, and we on the hill sit and stare and gasp and grab each other and next we know there are cops behind us and they are wanting to know what, exactly, it was that we saw. And then I wake up and I can't forget about it all.
***1*** Though even as I write this I already feel like it's kind of a misnomer as I woke up at 8:37am and took a tinkle in the comfort of a quiet apartment. I wondered if I should flush the toilet or not, for only a brief second, as a wave of would-be politeness swept over me. Why should my bowels wake up my roommates, I thought to myself, until I realized that not flushing the toilet was twice as rude as waking someone up because I had to pee, and that if I hadn't have flushed the toilet, I'm afraid I would've heard about it later today because they would've known that it was me who was peeing, because we're only two to a bathroom here, and if ____ didn't go and the toilet's full, then it was obviously ____ that went and didn't flush the toilet. So, flush I did.
***2*** As we were never not in the fast track lane of questioning, as we were easily able to handle all of our DataHead questions because we (my teammate, Luke, and myself) were possibly the two smartest people there.
***3*** Cameo's, to me, were the weirdest categories to have to act out. They give the actor a famous person's name (actor, president, historical figure, etc) and you are supposed to be that person, yet you're not allowed to say names of people or places. For example, let's say the answer was "Marilyn Monroe" and you are the actor, if you stand up and put your hands down at your sides and pretend to push an imaginary dress down and say something like, "Ooh! The wind is blowing this fabulous red dress up in the air and it's showing my panties to all these photographers!" you're playing the game correctly. But you're not allowed to say, "I'm from the 50s and 60s and I fucked JFK and probably his brother, Bobby, too, and I did drugs and died ... " you'd be disqualified.***4***
***4*** I assert my genious in one of the final Club Cranium (ie - everyone's allowed to participate, as in the entire three-team system that we were running) questions by saying to Luke, the ubiquitous partner, "If you could fight one person, who would you fight?" to which he says, "Gandhi!", thus practically sealing our victory.
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