A losing battle.

This motherfucking apartment building.

Just now, as I was walking up to my room on the third floor I saw a good-sized cockroach crawling up the white wall along the stairs. It was about 2 a.m. Prime cockroach prowling time. It stopped crawling as I passed it, moving its long brown antennas pretty strangely. Maybe it was anxious - it should have been. I was carrying my bike up the stairs. The past couple days have been a little boring, and I had been riding around the area for an hour or so to kill time and get some exercise.

These fucking roaches have been hanging around here for a couple months. I do the dishes, take out the trash, vacuum every so often, whatever. It doesn't matter. The whole building is infested with them and they keep strolling into my apartment looking for food or other roaches or something. A couple of them were breeding pretty intensely in my shower the other day, so I beat the hell out of them with an old book I've been using as an exterminator. It's just some old, nasty novel from the 1950s. The title is "Space Satellite: The Story of the Man-Made Moon." This book just happened to be the most disgusting weapon-worthy item in my apartment the first time I saw an insect worth terminating earlier this spring.

Tonight, carrying my bike up the stairs, I decided to take my offensive a step further, do a sort of preemptive strike. So I gripped the center of the bicycle's frame, moved the rear tire a few inches back from the wall (and the roach), and then swung the entire bike like a baseball bat. It took a couple hard swings, but I eventually broke the roach in half. The bug didn't actually fall off the wall - its guts seemed to adhere to the paint pretty well. It just stayed there, bent into a V shape and still twitching those gross antennas. I proceeded to carry my bike the final story and a half up to my floor and walk into my apartment.

It was a pretty satisfying kill, but not at all analogous to my relationship with this building (and its bug problem). I'll leave here soon enough, but this place will probably last for at least a couple more decades. The ancestors of these roaches will almost certainly outlast me, my relatives and any of our spawn. We can't get rid of them. Cockroaches were here before us, and I assume they'll be here close to last.

Basically, I need some roach spray and a fly swatter.

Recap/plans.

Saw some really really fucking great bands last week. Drank a little Ten High and tossed a tooth into a field.

Canoe Trip starts Sunday. Might kill me.

See ya.

Blog resurrection erection.

It's been a quiet day so far in Bloomington (came here this weekend to visit Chris), and this seems like an ideal time to resuscitate The Copy Machine. There was no great reason for my failing to post the past couple months — just never got around to it, I guess.

Anyway, about halfway through my four-hour drive here on Thursday afternoon I had an experience that really got me thinking about bringing dead things back to life for no good reason. Just about 8 p.m. I rounded a wide bend on Interstate 70 when suddenly, what appeared directly in front of me — brilliant, tall and vaguely phallic — but a monstrous aluminum cross.

Of course, anyone who lives near Effingham or drives through the area regularly has seen the 198-foot salute to Christian wealth a million times. It's not like it was some big surprise. And pretty much everybody who happens upon it unexpectedly, especially anyone who drives up at night when it's lit up like at a Klan rally, seems to agree it's pretty creepy. So again, no surprise there. But what made this particular meeting with The Cross^TM especially moving was the soundtrack to my drive. Just as it came into view, I was listening to the bridge of a particular Bonnie "Prince" Billy song. The lyrics seemed appropriate:

Now I want the world to see,

Everybody look at me,

I'm a good person and free

and she loves me.

So if you switched "she" to "He," it seems like that part of the song would have worked pretty well to explain the thinking of the pious individuals who spent a million bucks to build The Cross^TM. It would be difficult to really dispute that. And here are some more lyrics from the song, titled "So Everyone."

Oh take it, oh take me, oh take it so easy

Oh make it, oh make me, oh kneel down and please me

Oh lady, oh boy, show how you want me and do it so everyone sees me

Yeah. So that song was pretty obviously written about a public performance of fellatio. It's a pretty strange song, and it's not exactly written as any kind of joke regardless of how ridiculous it sounds (sort of like the cross). 

So yeah, there was something about those lyrics playing as I drove through Effingham County that really struck me as funny (even though the cross is a very old, very tired joke by now) and surprisingly appropriate (even though it's also incredibly easy to point out the cross's absurdity).

And it made me want to write here again. All right. 

Clown craze.

There was a time when every Christmas gift I gave was purchased at the dollar store in the Village Square Mall. Starting when I was probably six or seven, my parents would leave the three kids there for a half hour or so, just long enough for us to annoy the hell out of whatever poor bastard was earning minimum wage behind the counter. One year we bought our dad a tiny screwdriver. Pretty cute, I know.

At some point, my brother and sister and I were informed of our Aunt Eva's collection of toy clowns. So each Christmas we ventured into the breakable aisle and chose a different $1 tiny statue of a makeup-caked jokester to send her in the mail. We assumed she displayed them somewhere, next to her other clowns, I guess. She probably did. She lived a thousand miles away, so we really had no idea.

This next memory is a little foggy, but I'm relatively sure that one year, after several straight clown presents, my dad encouraged us to pick a new theme for Eva's gifts. Basically: "Stop sending her a goddamed clown every year. She used to like having a couple of clowns, sure, but now she's got a million, and she doesn't even like clowns that goddamned much, and frankly, having a huge collection of miniature clowns is a little fucking creepy. A couple was OK, but now she's getting weirded out every time she looks in the corner with all those clowns."

It wasn't exactly that, but close.

I have no idea what we got her the next year. It was undoubtedly more dull than all those baby Bozos.

I was reminded of the X-mas gifts this morning when I came upon these terrifying photos of Ronald McDonald. Even when I was a kid, Ronald slightly disturbed me. Those VERY red lips were/are too much.

Apparently that didn't enter my brain at the dollar store.

Happy Ash Wednesday.

Midnight economics lesson.

The woman standing in front of me in the "12 items or less" line at Schnucks tonight had seven items. They were: five 24 oz. cans of Milwaukee's Best Light and two bottles of Jack Daniel's Downhome Punch. Her total was $9.43. Without doing any basic math, I can be fairly sure that this person is not doing the most with her money.

I see this happen all the time at this particular Schnucks location (which several of my coworkers have informed me is too ghetto [they are too snooty] to frequent) — customers buy the equivalent of a 12-pack, or even a 24-pack, of beer in 24 oz. cans. Not too economical.

Clearly it's glamorous to sip a fine lager, such as Milwaukee's Best Light, from a 24 oz. aluminum can while sitting on your porch overlooking three dumpsters and a couple stray cats fucking under a busted street light. But how about a little compromise? It's the year two thousand and nine and we're in a god damned recession.

Just buy the smaller cans, save yourself a dollar, and spend that extra money on a toothbrush (what I bought at the grocery store tonight). You need one. I looked. It's gross.

I walked home about 50 yards behind this woman. She lives pretty close. She doesn't seem to know a lot about how to skimp on money when you're buying bottom-of-the-barrel booze. Maybe I should have said something, because I think I do. I didn't though.

But then again, maybe those extra couple of beers would have just made her more drunk, and she would have accidentally slept in tomorrow. She might have missed work, been fired and then she wouldn't have the cash to buy even one tall boy tomorrow night.

I don't understand economics.

Post Presidents Day cornbread.

Yesterday was truly a day of rest and reflection.

I spent upwards of a half hour laying on my bed, curled up in my American flag sheets and John Wayne-themed comforter, hoping for death and contemplating the lives of the past leaders of the United States. It was SO refreshing.

At some point I started typing up a blog entry about Abraham Lincoln. It was partly inspired by a book I recently read about all the supposed myths about the "Great Emancipator" — about how he was really a racist and a dictator and a war monger, blah, blah, blah. After about four sentences I realized I was not a historian and the post sucked.

Here's the abortion:

Thanks to the nationally-celebrated Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Bash last week and Barack Obama's persistent mentioning of his own parallels with the 16th president, I've already had my fill of Lincoln worship recently. If it was a normal year, I would have been completely satisfied to flip on the television today, make myself a heaping bullshit-flavored ice cream cone (three scoops!) and take in a few more bubbly anecdotes about "The Great Emancipator" while eating myself into a painful brain freeze.

But not this President's Day...

After re-reading, it's clear to me stopping there was the right decision. Anyway, so I still had some executive branch excitement pent up today that I didn't know what to do with — until just now.

Immediately after work I came back to my apartment, cranked the music Honest Abe probably would have listened to had he been blessed with an iPod, and made a fresh pan of mouthwatering CORNBREAD. So satisfying and delicious!

Finally, I think I'm prepared to go another full year without giving a shit about what Abraham Lincoln, George Washington or any other dead person would have thought about our country electing a black president. It's been a good day.