july 22, 2002.

News from Chicago: Q & Pixie Stix are splitting up.

(There's really no gentle way of putting it out in the open; I mean, there it is. As the old joke goes, I could lead up to it - Q & Pixie Stix were on the roof, and the shingles were slippery - but what's the point? As Dav put it on Saturday night, when you can't be appropriate, it's best to be wildly inappropriate.

"I was eating a cheeseburger when a friend told me that he was getting divorced. And I wondered if I should put the burger down or if I should keep eating."

"Oh, so I should've asked about the web hosting."

"Yup.")

They're not getting divorced, which gives us a bit of hope. Perhaps most inexplicably of all, Q will be returning to Gomorrah in October while PS has no immediate plans to leave Chicago. As she told me Friday, "Me being me, I have to make things as hard on myself as possible."

There it is.

I met with C. Thomas Flood at Hogsboro High on Friday. He's very nice and I was thrilled to see my name on a desk & two file cabinets in the department office. My room is 117, which is the number of The House Where Nobody Lives and therefore a pretty good omen as far as I'm concerned. (I think the fact that I'm not teaching in a portable or rotating through rooms is an even better omen.) I received two course descriptions (the third is still being written), three curriculum documents and a stack of books that goes up to my knees. I'll be teaching Duddy Kravitz, Lord of the Flies, Fahrenheit 451, Macbeth & Romeo & Juliet next year. Oh man. (Maybe I still have some Shakespeare notes from Nancy at home.)

I suppose that if I can get through the first year, it will all become easier with the passage of time. In the meantime I'm scared spitless. Like the Boy, I'm coping by focussing on small things, like the posters I want to put on the wall. I knew there was a reason I held onto the 1989 Stratford Festival poster.

Saturday night was dedicated to the usual amount of dark hedonism. Stacy & I got about 5 minutes of Real Conversation together on the way to the Garden before the noise & the company swallowed up our attempts at seriousness. And although I wanted some peace & quiet to continue the conversation, I was soon distracted by the loud music & blinky lights.

There was a full compliment of familiar faces: Exodus, Dav, Jesse, Mikey, Marc, Dav2, etc. Death & Evil Dr. Go were also there, which was strange and exciting and fun. Two of Death's best qualities are her straightedge proclivities and her prodigious energy; the two taken together make her presence a breath of fresh air in a sea of the sleepy and stoned. She also endeared herself to me by suggesting again that I get my Convergence project listed in the directory of such things. Although I'd like the publicity, I think it would just invite trouble. I was tremendously unchristian to Hilary/Bathory/Bloo and that's going to come home to roost eventually. So no publicity for me, unless of course Javina's diarist award nomination goes through. Which is, um, unlikely with the present state of things. (Wah.)

Good dancing: Ministry, White Zombie, New Order, Nick Cave, the Cure. I danced until my Blanche DuBois slip stuck to my body and my studded pink cat collar itched unbearably. It wasn't quite dancing until I breathed fire, but that's probably for the best considering the current heat emergency in Gomorrah and environs. I danced 'my terrible dance' until the Boy asked to leave scandalously early. It doesn't matter; everything is so much less hectic now that we're moving back.

On Saturday as well there were two gatherings: a party at my cousins' new house & a dinner with the Boy's mother. As for the first, I spent almost all of my time talking to Nic & the Boy, as I still find that my own immediate family are the smartest & funniest people at family parties. My cousins are extremely house-proud to the point of saying that "it's too bad [I] hadn't waited to be married as [we] could've had our pictures done by the pool." I'm not sure if that was a joke or what. It's yet another thing that doesn't matter; they shall soon find out what a generation of suburbanites discovered before them, which is that a pool is no fun without guests. My cousins have been coming over to our pool for years and I suppose that they were tired of being hosted. Soon they'll host in their turn, and find out what that's like.

The party was marred fairly early on by the appearance of the farmer who had owned the land before it became monster clonehomes. In mowing the grass out back, he'd accidentally run over a rabbit nest. Two bunnies were dead and the remaining three were squirming in his hand. The idea was that if he could find someone to nurse the bunnies through the rest of their childhood, they might live to hop another day.

I've been reading theology for the past few days and the sight of the bunnies sent me into paroxysms of guilt. My duty was clear, but we had to be in Nova Gothic in a few days. Bunnies on planes? No. So much for living with respect in creation. No one else was willing to consider it, not even for a moment.

After this encounter, the pleasures of an afternoon in the backyard seemed just a tad shallow.

Contrarywise, the dinner with the Boy's mom was more typical: we ate pizza as the Boy & I talked about recent developments. When the Boy's mother heard about Q & Pixie, her face became terrible and set. Neither she nor her partner claimed to be surprised (apparently oblivious to the oft-repeated maxim that hindsight is 20/20.) On the other hand, the two showed nothing but compassion when I got a splinter in my foot. They spent 20 intense minutes digging it out of my foot, armed with magnifying glass, tweezers and a pin. It went on so long that I began to make jokes about giving them three wishes. In the end I was sent off to dance with nary a drop of blood spilled...and maybe that balances the Pixie & Q comments. Maybe.

Tonight we're hoping to get out to St. Pete's birthday, but emotional politics may yet thwart our plans. My mother is in a black sulk today, which is always fun. Keep your fingers crossed, kids.