my vaporizer is my teddy bear

Last night I caught Pat's sore throat. You'd think something that simple and common would be easy to brush off, but I feel like the withered skin of a grape whose innards have been sucked dry. Suddenly popping in a CD or walking up the stairs is a laborious activity.

I saw a beetle just now the size of a baby's fingernail crawling over an art book I bought a few years ago. I kind of hated to kill it, but it was tangoing all over a book that cost me seventy bucks and a three-week wait to arrive from Singapore. So now it's spiraling in the big toilet in the sky, along with the rest of the world's insects and dead goldfish.

I got to bed later than I should've last night all because I was reading an issue of Maxim magazine. I guess it belongs to Pat's 30-year-old roommate who sometimes forgets to cook herself dinner and fails to realize that hammering away in the basement downstairs around midnight might be keeping other people awake.

I thought the cover was interesting. Men's magazines have beautiful women on the covers wearing clothing that brings the word "floozy" to mind -- which is why so many men have subscriptions, I suppose. Women's magazines also have beautiful women on the covers, wearing clothing that makes you grimace and think of Pee Wee Herman, the one person you thought and hoped and prayed would never pull a 311 (police code for indecent exposure). Wait, where was I going with this? Oh, yeah. Men buy magazines with beautiful women on the covers because there are beautiful women on the covers, and women buy magazines with beautiful women on the covers because they want to be beautiful and purchased just like men's magazines.

The only difference between men's and women's magazines are that men's magazines are worth what you pay for them. Women's magazines aren't even about women, it's just somewhere off the beaten path of the Kama Sutra, except there's lots of bullshit to serve as padding, like how some woman was blinded during the Beanie Baby craze but curbed her depression by making a spin-off of corn husk dolls that she calls "lima bean ladies," or pages and pages of models decked out in prom dresses you wouldn't be able to afford even if you sold your soul. Women's magazines are brimming over the hilt with twaddle about pleasing men, except it's completely and utterly shady-folk-mourning-over-dead-loved-ones serious. It's all like, "Turn on some sexy music and use lots of scented, floating candles and rose petals, because you look your best in candlelight," and then men's magazine's are all, "Pat the boys down with baking soda," and they sport pictures of Bush's bodyguards snickering while a turkey presses the flat of its skull against the President's hot tamale.

But I digress. Pat's going to buy a subscription of Maxim for me now. Today we were supposed to go pick up a Cosmopolitan and compare the two, and much laughter was to ensue. But the truth is, last night I slept with a roll of toilet paper, I crawled out of bed every four hours to guzzle down another two tablespoons/30 mL of cough syrup, this morning I had to ask my dad to bring up the humidifier for me, and now I'm sitting around in my underwear wrapped up in an itchy blanket.

I looked out the window this morning after I decided it was time to get up, and guess what? That's right, clear blue fucking skies with a gentle breeze. Yeah, that just figures. I'm wallowing in a pile of my own snot rags and barely able to walk, much less think, and then the weather decides to blossom and be maddeningly perfect for that day and that day alone. And it's summer! I could have at least missed a day of school. I could be doing constructive things, like frolicking in inflatable pools or assaulting the ice cream man for not visiting my street in five years.

I bet anyone a package of Pocky (a type of chocolate candy in Japan that's the shit) that, on the one day when I'm unclothed and bowlegged from fatigue, the ice cream man decides to come down the street. Yeah, he thinks he's so cunning and innocent-looking, but when I hear the blazing melody of the ice cream truck rolling down the street, I'm going to bust out the front door with a twenty in hand whether I'm clothed or not, the sneaky little fuck.

And where the hell is Bryan? When I'm feeling more coherent, I'm going to write him a poem.

I'm going to cuddle up with my vaporizer and my toilet paper roll and watch some TV or something now. Enjoy your healthful freedom for me, and drop me a note or a guestbook message. I feel chilly from the lack of love.

[Addition: Shortly after posting this entry, I received an instant message:

FaiLu12e: I saw the ice cream man at Thompson Park last time Lynn and I went

AngeLofIllusioN: AAAARGGH]