2006-04-28

The human spectacle

"No Gords, I won't wear the hat again. Why...because last night i was sitting at the bar looking at myself in the mirror. You were chatting up some chick with a busted up arm, Pi was back at the apartment with a German broad and Cooker was chirping at some guy who was blowing a whistle. I was piss drunk, and i started thinking, I'm a spectacle, and nobody gets with the spectacle." ------ The Portugese Pitbull (aka, Pterals) Sept 18, 2001. Lagos, Portugal.

I was thinking about that the other day while i was planting and burst out laughing.

~ taken, verbatim, from an email my friend Scott sent me

Interesting note: spectacular and spectacle, though they share the same root, are not the same thing in terms of what you want to be. But the urge to be the human spectacle is as strong in me now as ever, and despite my best intentions to keep said spectacle under wraps, it still busts out from time to time in the face of all normalcy.

Last night we went out for drinks as one of the girls from the bakery is heading off for greener pastures. My going away gift? A rare and candid glimpse of the Tough Man Tequila - going so far as to allow this lucky girl the coup de grace - the squirting of the lime into the waiting eye. It was, of course, incredibly painful, and I'm sure I'll regret agreeing to being photographed directly after, but it did sate the attention seeking disorder from which I must obviously suffer.

If you don't know the Tough Man Tequila, intimately, at least, then you are a saner person than I. I've heard of different variations to the TMT, but I like to do it thus: shoot the tequila, snort the salt, and then hold open the eye while dramatically squeezing the lime into it. If performed correctly, you will probably get some pulp and the occassional seed inside the eyelid. This will lead to a lot of loud cheering, and, quite possibly, long term eye damage. I know others argue for the more traditional order of snort salt, shoot tequila, squeeze lemon/lime in the eye, but I like to do it this way because I like the escalation; here we have an ascendency of senseless pain toward maximum brutality.

This time, however, there was a new kind of pain that might have heralded the conclusion of the Tough Man Tequila from my human spectacle repertoire. A burning came, directly in the back of my head straight back from my left nostril, and it stayed and throbbed for longer than I can imagine is healthy. Stroke, I thought, I'm going to die because I'm an idiot. But of course I did not succumb; instead I blew my nose several dozen times, accepted the cheers with all the gratefulness of one has been struck in the belly by cannonball, and wiped those continuous tears out of the eyes until there was a peace between the body and the human spectacle. And amazingly, today I feel fine, if only a little saline in the head.

Tell me when this blog is updated

email: