Would You Like a Cup of Tea?

We've had alot of parties lately. Two nights ago a band of hunter gatherers came up from the Carolinas to give a slideshow. Now, a note to the regular people who read this: That last sentence was meant to be taken literally.
The showed us slides of their primitive living commune which mainly featured young white kids with punk rock tatoos wearing deerskin and eating possum. I kid you not. In one slide I distinctly saw a Dead Kennedys tattoo on a barefoot twenty-something building a wigwam. Then we had a giant bonfire of all the crappy wood that the landscaping companies keep donating along with the nice splitable ash.
It ended peacefully. The party on friday ended with a pudding fight.
I dodged the fight by talking in the kitchen with the newest housemates about our favorite local crackheads. Boy-Housemate works in a soup kitchen and is enamored with "Turban Lady" and her inexplicably perfect set of teeth. Girl-Housemate admires the couple who park their car with hazards on by the side of the road, waving a gas can. They do this every friday.
But me, I had them beat. I give my personal Best Insane Homeless Person in Detroit award to the man who I witnessed three times pushing a shopping cart and yelling, "George Bush is a Wonderful President!"

My new job is caring for a 17 year old girl with an impressive bundle of mental and emotional disabilities. She's retarded, though not seriously and mildly autistic. She also has trichotillimania, ocd and adhd. My housemate, B., and I are splitting 40 hours a week caring for her, mostly helping her get up in the morning and then after school taking her on walks or to the park. It's a good job. The is girl is our friend's cousin and it seems to really help her mother out having some assistence.
However, things just got more complicated. The mother and the mother's boyfriend had a fight friday night. The boyfriend broke up with her by setting her car on fire. Now the whole family's an emotional wreck and if our client has a fit or gets violent at school her mother has no way to go and pick her up.
B. is thinking about loaning the family her pickup truck for a while but the pickup has a leaking gas tank and is mild to moderate danger of exploding at any given time. Fun Fun Fun. Why can't I just work at a mall or something?

K. says I should tell regular people about the roadkill thing. He says it's embarressing for him to be equated with a movement that supports the eating of roadkill. He says it makes us sound crazy. If I let him go on about it enough he's liable to say that it "clouds the issues". I tell people about the roadkill thing because I don't quite understand it myself and I need constant assurance that it's not because I'm hopelessly square.
I blame this trend on the decadent, west-coast blue states, I swear. It's some creepy Robert Bly-Fight Club mentality where alot of previously vegan boys reclaimed their masculinity by barbequing possums. And now I'm faced with otherwise reasonable people who insist to me that it's not really spring until you've had gopher stomach stew.
I'm wavering though. A luxurious squirrel-fur capelet? How fashionable! K.'s wavering too. He says it's better to think of it as just a more extreme form of dumpster diving, the refusal to let something go to waste. He promises not to become a hunter gatherer. He likes my pet cats too much.

The cats had squirrel gravy on their supper last night. The had squirrel gravy because everyone that was going to had eaten their fill of the squirrel stew that was sitting on the stove and it seemed like the sort of disgusting liquid that cats would be all about.
I came home from work at 10 a.m. yesterday to find our excited houseguest showing the Cap'n what was, I found out soon, a dead, skinned squirrel in a bowl. A girl at a punk show had given our houseguest the squirrel that she had shot for its hide somewhere out in the 810 area code. He took the squirrel that a girl gave him at a punk show to our house and put it in a bowl in the fridge. Then, feeling very proud of himself, the houseguest made squirrel stew. Sadly, the punk girl had not properly skinned the squirrel and the soup was furry. Now, I think that anyone gross enough to eat squirrel wouldn't mind some fur, but what do I know.
This is all my fault, really. I've been lax in my moral stand against things that are stupid and gross. I found myself the night before seriously considering learning how to skin and tan roadkill. "Leather is practical" I said " and some nice fur lined gloves would keep my hands warm" Shame, Shame Shame. This is what that kind of thinking leads to.
Still, it would be hilarious to make the Cap'n a coon skin cap.

An Update on the Living Situation

Last month I moved downstairs to my new haven of peacefullness and cantaloupe-themed wallpaint. I keep yelling at the housemates not to wrestle in my room, as it is meant to be serene. They yell back that there is plenty of left-over serenity from my bedroom stint as a funeral directer's office.
K. and his horrible punk-rock haircut have moved into my old room. The new compoundmates move into the back bedroom next week. They are Irish, and I mean that they are redheads who wear flattering green tweed sweaters, not that they blow up cars and steal marshmellow cereal. The new housemates are dedicate non-profit employees and the enviromentally sustainable monastary on the east side. They are clean and responsible and we can't wait for them to move in.
Our new temporary compoundmate is Cap'n J.'s little brother who is living in our study for the next month. Yesterday I found he and the Cap'n sitting on the Cap'n's bed, smoking a bowl and listening to heavy metal. It was as if I stepped into a time warp and discovered exactly how these two brothers behaved when they were fifteen. I had to retreat to my peaceful cantaloupe to laugh myself sick.

Last night Mia and I got chased by a pack of wild dogs on our way home from goat milking. When I say pack I mean only two dogs and I'm pretty sure one of them was some sort of a feral airdale. Now, it's possible that the dogs were, in fact, friendly since from what I saw their tails were wagging, but that could have been their joy that dinner was evidently served. Mia and I pedalled away too fast to find out. What finally discouraged the dogs was that I went over one of our city's many fine potholes and a jar of milk fell out of my basket and startled them. Good to know for next time.
My encounter with the dog pack got me thinking about Island of the Blue Dolphins. God, that girl was even stupid than Laura Ingalls Wilder. Not only did she not have pornography or the internet (and alone on an island for twenty years is a good reason to have both) but she lived on nothing but abalone and cormorants. The first I had no idea about untill my teen years when I watched Cool Hand Luke and the second I still have only narrowed down to "some type of bird"

My democratic partisan of a sister just informed me that there is already a website with the domain name: www.youforgotpoland.com. That is all internet. I have to go; I have a busy day today caulking windows and making apple butter.

Our new neighbors are a pair of art student sisters from Hell, Michigan. We went over to their house for a cheerleader film festival on friday and found their rather small apartment to be filled with enough tchotkes to bludgeon John Waters to death. I think that's why I'm suspicious of art student or anyone with a retro haircut: I know deep-down that their Jesus memorabilia collection will always be better than mine.
But I like these particular art students because they are shy and dorky and nonetheless have repeatedly almost gotten so expelled from art school. The last time was two weeks ago when their new exhibit featuring a fifty-foot long crochet penis and matching crochet strap-on debuted in the main gallery on allumni weekend after the art students stubbornly refused to have it censored. They had to have a meeting with the crusty old Dean, a puzzled meeting as they had never expected penis-themed art to ever be controversial at their particular college. Neither did anyone hearing this story.
"But it's art school!" was my indignant call back.
"Exactly" said the art student. "That was the sum total of my argument." The crusty old Dean must have had a revelation that his students were constantly displaying fake penises because he let the culprits go.