the wrong side of the bed

yeah. a friend came over to my apartment for the first time tonight. i can't seem to help it; whenever anyone comes over for the first time, i play "show and tell" with them. only i am the only one who gets to show or tell. we got half-way through my photos before she was "too tired" to look at anymore (right...). after she left, i looked at a couple more pix. i found one of a giraffe taken at a silly "wild animal park" of some sort. the funny thing is, i don't think it is a place i ever went. i just have the picture. i remember i used to have a second picture from that same trip (i think they belong to an aunt). it was a photo of a zebra, but just the zebra's head. i had labelled the back of the picture "wounded zebra" and i carried it around with me during my senior or junior year of high school. i would show it to people. if they asked how the zebra was wounded, i would say something like, "well, it only has a head, doesn't it? that's not exactly healthy!" what a freak! here are some other terribly bizarre things i did in high school:

1. my friend clare and i had some mock obsessions that bordered on real obsessions. we read up, drew pictures of, and talked a lot about woodpeckers, sting, and mohawks.

2. i had three giant piggy banks in my car. i refered to them as my car pigs. one of them was named claudius, but i can't remember the others' names. i made them a mix tape.

3. i wore neckties in my hair.

4. i asked people to call me zilpha.

5. i would walk the halls of high school loudly singing "rocky raccoon" by the beatles.

i'm sure there were other odd things, too, like my crush on richard dreyfus or the fact that i said "oh bother!" all of the time.

In high school a friend of mine and I were going to get windbreakers and have some lines from a Bob Dylan song inscribed on the backs. We never got the money to waste on that project and I eventually used a laundry marking pen to write it on my red windbreaker. It was supposed to say, "In ceremonies of the Horsemen,/Even the pawn must hold a grudge." I couldn't write small enough (and stay legible) to get all that on the space available, so I just used the second line. I must have caught hell for such oddity, but I no longer even remember any of it. All I recall is my own stubbornness and unwillingness to give up my idea.

The friend who was going to go along with me about the song lyrics stayed in touch to varying degrees for another 20 years or so, then drifted away on the breeze. Long-time friends are great--still, if you live, they have a lot of time to disappear into.

well, i don't care about the weirdity of your life, but i do like the new look of your blog!

your un-weird friend,
sep :)

ron! i love that story. how incredibly ridiculous of you. it reminds me of this kid in my high school who wore green sweatpants and shirt for saint patrick's day, but later decided that he liked the outfit so much that he wore it all of the time. the rest of the world be damned!

sir ed peg, i don't believe you about not caring about the weirdness of my life. you are, after all, the person who first noticed my weirdifying effect on the universe.

I didn't know my comment published. I tried 2 or 3 times and it didn't seem to have done so. Whether at your blog or my computer, I became enraged and printed it on my own blog, just to not throw the words away. My blog was crazy (ugh, Blogger's having a melt-down) and before I knew it, I'd published it 7 times there. I then had to go through and slowly delete each one, with crazed Blogger re-publishing after every deletion. At this point, I wonder if it was really a Blogger gremlin; it feels more like a demon from hell in pursuit of me. By the way, I have a world of stupid stories. That was neither the worst nor the most recent. But it sure is hard to print them!