Cramming Seafood in the MouthThere's a right way, and there's a wrong way.
The right way: befriend Ed Lee. Drive down to Florida for Owl Goingback's annual Horrorfest event at Borders. Entrust Necro Dave Barnett with the duty of finding a proper oyster bar. Upon arriving at the oyster bar, assure Lee and Dave that though THEY are visibly unnerved by the sheer redneckiness of the place, that *I* feel right at home and will, if necessary, save the day.
Gorge upon: raw oysters. Steamed oysters. Clams stolen off Dave's plate. Fried oysters. Beer. Pound of shrimp, just in case. Debate whether or not another bushel of oysters or another pound of shrimp is worthwhile; agree that it is, and that it is doable, but that there are many hours of drinking ahead and, besides, Dave's looking decidedly green, having never seen any girl in a Pabst Blue Ribbon t-shirt dive face-first into sea snot.
Leave. Enter club. Drink. Smoke, smoke, smoke, smoke. Sleep.
Wake. Kill self with godlike, gravy-drenched hotel buffet breakfast. I'd like a hotel steam table buffet breakfast in my living room at home, please.
Pause gluttony to: bum around Horrorfest for a while. Okay, for all five hours. I'd tried to be an invisible being but was stapled with a name tag by Owl promptly upon my arrival. Dang. Now I had to behave like a professional and couldn't just hide in the alley and take a nap. "Behaving like a professional" meant being happy to see Jim Moore, and spying on Lee while people adored him, and chainsmoking on the sidewalk, and meeting Hugh B. Cave, and growing overly attached to a radioactive rubber skeleton. I turned tattoo-related harrassment ("what's that on your arm?" "my skin" - okay, I'm bad at the professional thing, and the saleswoman thing) into a chapbook sale. (He looked at the title and said, "You're all about skin, aren't you." Er. Actually, I'm all about whiskey, Marlboros, and naps, but "Guess that's right" sufficed.)
I learned that I am not clever enough to write funny inscriptions in books.
Horrorfest continues at a swank Chinese restaurant across the parking lot. Let the gorging begin anew. Salt ribs, calamari (really good), Chinese beer Lee'd recommended, and a couple pounds of ginger chicken vanished down my sleepy throat.
We hit the club again while Dave did his DJ thing. I was my normal scintillating self - extremely sleepy, yawning every three seconds. A few Red Bulls fixed this and it was safe to move on to whiskey again. John Urbancik and Naima Haviland found Lee and I, and we shot the shit - and lo, unlike my local bars, this one decided to stay open another hour thanks to Daylight Saving Time. Glad I wasn't sleepy or anything. Ahem.
THAT, then, is how you properly cram seafood down your throat.
The WRONG way: don't be my oranda (fish) Shenmi, who thought it a bright idea to eat an otocinclus catfish ("otto cat.") Because if you're Shenmi, you'll not be able to fit the spiny fucker down your greedy gullet, and your enormous human caretaker will have to stick tweezers down your throat and haul the fucking (dead) otto out, using a stick to break the finbones to ease the dragging process. FUCK, that sucked. Trust me, you don't want me tweezing fish out of your throat (the scale equivalent would be like Average Sized Human You throating a river trout.)
posted by Mehitobel Wilson at 5:28 PM
I wear a size 9 boot, thanks... which means that when the other shoe (or boot, rather - steeltoed harness, in fact) drops, it's loud and dangerous.
But for the time being, I'm nigh delirious. The collection, DANGEROUS, RED, BATS, sold to the first publisher who saw it. A friend broke his hard rule for me and wrote me the most killer introduction one could want, which floors me - he really, genuinely supports my work, and since I've always cherished his, this is too much to fathom. And my personal life has me so blissed that it's just too sickening to comprehend.
Plus, I've seen a couple of great bands this week (check out the Drunk Stuntmen if they come through your town) and next weekend I get to go down to Orlando, where I'll gallivant with Necro Dave and Ed Lee (who's found an oyster bar, at which I will not, will
not think about "The Dritiphilist" while rolling raw salty clots of the sea on my tongue.) I've promised to wear a dress.
And! Robert's friend Nolan, whom I adore, is coming to visit for New Year's, and Dooley's coming sometime too, and I get to see Dick Dale on Thanksgiving, and I get to help butcher goats for my brother's wedding, and got the coolest raccoon-fur collar for my Frontier Rock Star coat, and it's down into the fifties here at night fucking FINALLY, and Victoria's Secret had the thing I've been wanting on deep sale, AND they've reissued their vanilla perfume (my motherfucking trademark, yo) and I'm listening to the most luscious album since Dave Vanian and the Phantom Chords (And Also the Trees' "Angelfish") and my long-lost Alice Donut disc is on its way to me, and the Thunderbird's been sighted often recently, and Cthulhu is rising ...
... and I know the other shoe's overhead, and that I'm probably in real danger of having some tragedy blindside me (as if going to war isn't a tragedy) - but fuck it blind and let it cry and call you Switzerland, because this has been a good goddamn couple of weeks for me, and it's about motherfucking time.
posted by Mehitobel Wilson at 1:54 AM 
