Just Another Mazdaless Monday

I don't mind telling you lot that I'm a bit of a novice at this here activity known as blogging. And now that I've done a bit of browsing through some the other sites here at blogspot, it occurs to me that unbeknownst to myself, I've essentially and flagrantly been flouting the conventions of the genre since day one. First off, to judge by common practice, it's pretty much derry gurr to publish a post every day, or at the outside, every two days; and secondly, it appears to be equally mandatory to fill every post from miso soup to wasabi peas with a comprehensive catalogue of the minutiae of one's daily routine, be any of these minutiae ever so ponderously unreadable. The typical blog post, from what I gather, begins as follows: 'I got up this morning and scratched my pubes and repaired to the loo with last week's Sunday Times crossword in hand. I'd solved three clues and voided every last bit of matter from my bowels when I found myself snagged on number 12 across (Talleyrand's
wiedergänger twice removed, quoth Lord Acton). The stool was of a generally firm consistency, in ten pieces, cretaceous rather than globular in composition, and of a caramel buff colour streaked with highlights of umber...' and concludes 'I sat at the foot of my bed, with the vertical axis each buttock intersecting with the surface of the mattress precisely 15 centimetres inland from the edge of the latter, and trimmed my toenails. I calculated that my big toenail had grown 3 millimetres since I'd last trimmed it, two months and four days ago, whilst my pinkie toe had grown only by a single millimetre during the same period.' It's like reading a fucking transcription of the Radio 4 shipping forecast, minus the romantic aura of life at sea. (In hindsight, BTFW, Sarah Slother strikes me as a born blogger.) Obviously these wankers have taken their cue from that Boswell bloke, the one that wrote the bio of the wig-coiffured geezer I mentioned in my last post but one, who said 'I will live no more than I can record' and, true to his word, finished up with a diary about ten times as long as the London telephone directory. But from what I dimly remember seven years on from poor old Max Sebald's autobiographical lit course at UEA, the Boz actually had a life that was worth recording; he'd spend his days chinwagging with likes of PM Billy Pitt, Sr., Frankie 'Voltaire' Arroway and JJ 'Dyn-o-mite' Rousseau, and his nights whoring in Hyde Park and St. James's; and therein lies the difference between him and our contemporary Joe Blogses. The best part of all lives lived today--yours truly's not excepted-- are tracts of irredeemable shittiness unworthy of being recorded even for the benefit of one's future self, let alone for the benefit of sodding so-called posterity. And so my motto vis-a-vis this here blog has been 'I will record no more than I will want to remember,' which so far, I'm disappointed to say, hasn't amounted to a hill of baked beans on toast. All the same, for a while now, I have felt as though it would be worthwhile to try my hand at writing a post that conforms more closely to the conventions of the genre--i.e., that records my progress through a whole calendar day, and that incorporates as much of the trivially unmemorable bullshit as I can force myself to remember from the-next-day's distance. Maybe the habit grows on you. I doubt it, but anyway, without further ado:

Yesterday, Monday, the 31st of October, I rose at 6:30 (or as late as :40, if due allowance is made for snooze-buttoning). Next, the four esses followed by Weetabix and peanut butter to a soundtrack of JoAnne and Jono. At 7:30 sharp I'm out the door and hoofing it to Barnet High Street to catch the northbound 7:45 Number 383 bus, which sets me down at Union Street just in time for me to hop on the 84. Nothing recallable--as distinct from memorable--about either leg of the trip, apart, of course, from its interminability. I swear the next time I find myself Mazdaless I'm getting a bike. That or a helicopter. I alight from the bus at Southgate Road/Mutton Lane, just a two-minute stroll down the street from corporate HQ on Baker Street. As I'm stepping through the front door of the building and walking to the lift, I check the time on my mobile. It's 8:58. I'm supposed to be there at 8:45, but luckily I make my way to my cubicle without crossing paths with anyone who might give a rat's arse about my punctuality.

Ordinarily, after getting in, I take a stroll down to the kitchen to nab an extra-large cuppa fee, which I then drink at my desk over a leisurely browsing of the Nergle News. But straightaway this morning I see that there's likely going to be a slash administered to the tyre of my routine, as the voicemail indicator light on my phone is flashing, and that can mean only one thing: a message from Mike Ayhern, my immediate superior. And sure enough, the first thing I hear after electing to listen to my first (and only) message is Mike's voice, squawking peremptorily at me in his burrrrish Edinburgh accent, 'McGyver, I want to see you in my office, ten minutes ago! You hear that? Ten minutes ago!' The message is stamped 8:55; which means that, by his reckoning, I'm already 15 mintues late.

A parenthetical word or two about Mike is in order here. He seems to fancy himself something of a Perry White or Lou Grant figure, the editor of a 1970s upmarket American newspaper as depicted, for instance, in the first Superman movie or in that Redford-Hoffman snoozefest about the blokes who got Schlong Nixon busted, They Couldn't Put President Humpty Together Again, I think it's called. (I, on the other hand, tend to fancy myself something of a George Taylor figure in a version of Planet of the Apes [not, alas, the Ape] where the apes can't speak and do nothing but fling poo at each other, but that's a different story.) Exhibit A in support of my thesis as to the Whitean-Grantian provenance of his delusion: his insistence on being addressed as 'Mr Ayhern' rather than 'Mike.' (If only his surname were 'Hunt'!) Exhibit B: his (already witnessed) insistence on addressing his subordinates by their last names denuded of the prefatory 'Mr' or 'Ms'. Exhibit C: his predeliction for leaning back in his desk chair with his hands folded behind his head so as to expose to best advantage the sweat puddles on the pits of of his shirtsleeves. A couple of weeks ago I actually walked in on him applying water to his armpits with a squirt bottle, at a lavatory mirror in the gents.

So, anyway, having listened to the message, I sprint down to Mike's office and find him disporting himself in his characteristic pose. 'Ah, McGyver. Late as usual!' he says to me in the same squawking tone he used on the blower. 'Well,' he continues, gesturing towards me with his left elbow, 'Have a seat.' Then, pointing with that same left elbow to a dish full of gumball-sized sweets of various colours, he asks, 'Care for a toxic waste ball?'

I say, 'No, thanks.' For well I remember the night at the Ape, last April, that Dave Sims, that sadistic old tadger, slipped one of those toxic waste balls into the beer nuts; along with the look on the face of his gormless victim, Duane 'Lord' Dennyson. Cor, it was enough to make you cry yourself blind in sympathy.
'Well, I'll have one myself, if you don't mind,' he says, grabbing a green one and inserting it into his gob, afterwards re-placing his hand at its accustomed perch. 'My little Brianna's got me hooked on these things. [Brianna's his cuntess of a five-year-old daughter. He actually had the hoot's-pa to bring her to the last company Christmas party, where she gave me a surprisingly painful sock in the co-jones. She's got a bright future ahead of her in women's boxing] 'But enough of this...persiflage. Let's talk turkey. Where's that report I asked you for on Friday?--the one on revenues for coffee suppositories in the last quarter?'

As sure as I am that the current pope is a kraut who shits in the Black Forest, I'm sure he's made no mention of such a report. Clearly he's acting on the advice promulgated in one of those businessman's self-help books like The Seven Habits of Deeply Offensive Cunts, following some rule that reads, Never flinch, in the face of your underlings, from making shit up as you go along. But I, acting on the advice of my own private piss-boy's manual The Seven Habits of Shallowly Inoffensive Schmucks, dare not betray the merest soupcon of my awareness of the fact that he's conjuring his allusion to this report ex nihilo. Instead I say, 'Oh, sorry, Mr Ayhern. I'll have it to you in a jiffy.'

'Mark my words, McGyver. If I don't have that report on my desk by three this afternoon, your ass [not arse] is grass.'

'And I guess you're the lawnmower?'

'You catch on fast.'

So I rise from the chair and make for the door. But as I'm about to cross the threshold, he says to me, 'You'd better watch your back, McGyver. I don't care for your type.'

'I know, Mr Ayhern. You've told me so several times already.'

'Right, well, I'm telling you again because it bears repeating; repeating and elaborating. And so let me elaborate: you strike me as the type who's too...ductile, too easily led.'

I cut him a blank No shite, Sherlock-type look, and answer, 'Are you saying this is a bad thing, Mr Ayhern? You are, after all, my team leader, are you not?

'Well, of course,' he hems and haws, for a bit, then resumes: 'I don't mean easily led by me or other paragons of leadership. I mean, easily led by unsavoury types. Bad elements. Riffraff and such-like.'

'Of course. I stand corrected.'

'And it's not just me. Other people have remarked it as well.'

'Other people such as?'

'Other people senior to myself. I trust I needn't name any names.'

'No, certainly not. Well, anyway, I really should be off to work on this report...'

As I'm saying these words, his face suddenly puckers into a mask of agony, and his hands spring out from behind his head, and he starts pounding his desk with his right fist like Nikita fucking Krushchev with his shoe at the UN.

'Is it the toxically sour centre?' I ask him. He gives a mute, helpless nod.

My parting words to him are, 'Hey, Mr Ayhern--calm down a bit. That's the only way that centre's ever going to get better.' I don't know what else to say to him. He knew what he was getting into with the Toxic Waste, right? It's his superfund, you could say. As I pull open the door to its full compass, he flashes me a thumbs-up sign with his free hand, whilst continuing to pound the desk with the other one with undiminished fury.

On the way out, I'm practically run over by Winnie Wilkins, an 18-stone fifty-something secretary in our division, walking in with a large three-ring binder and wearing, as usual, her signature plum-coloured tam-o'-shanter, the type of headgear you find at a car-boot sale. (In the summer months, she doesn't wear much other than this plum tam o' shanter, to the infinite revulsion of myself and most of her other coworkers.) 'I've put stamps on those letters, Mr Ayhern,' she's saying as I barely manage to squeeze past her behemothic form, 'and recorded them all in the ledger, like you asked me to.' Winnie Wilkins and her fucking plum-coloured tam-o'-shanter. Christ, how I hate the old bag!

Then en route to my desk I come across a couple of office boys, lads from the post room, literally jumping for joy and hi-fiving each other. I ask them what the hooplah is all about. One of them tells me they're congratulating each other on Barnet's defeat of Rushden and Diamonds on Saturday night. These League Two fans are so fucking pathetic. Why do they insist on doing things by halves? Why don't they just attend junior football games if they're so thrilled by the spectacle of shitty, ninth-rate playing? At least with the juniors, there's a chance that someone out there on the field might someday amount to something, that five or ten years hence you'll be able to boast to your mates, I saw so-and-so when he was just a wee bairn in the junior league.

Anyway, back at my desk I run Ayhern's sodding report. The whole operation takes a grand total of 20 minutes, and I piss away the next four-and-a-half hours browsing the North London Arsenal Bashers' website, along with my favourite porn site, Randy Nannies of the Northern Line. Ordinarily at about one I'd pop down for lunch at the teria, but as I'm keen on avoiding Sarah Slother for at least a good week, I content myself with lunching at my desk on a packet of crisps and Coke from the vending machines on the mezzanine level. Then, at 2:30 sharp, I return to Mike's office and present to him the report, encased in a manila folder.

'Mmm,' he says, stroking his chin and frowning a Mussolini-esque frown of grudging approval, as he pretends to read the text. I write pretend in full confidence because I took care to hand the report to him facing upside-down, and he hasn't seen fit to turn it the right way up. After about a minute or two of this pointless panto, he closes the folder, places it squarely in front of him on the desk, and says to me:

'Impressive work. Not so impressive as to be almost too impressive to be true, but impressive enough, to be sure. Run me another report, would you, on the same fiscal quarter; this time on anisette tampons. I need it by noon tomorrow.'
'Righto, Mr Ayhern,' I say, and head for the door.

'Oh, and McGyver!' he calls out to my back. 'About those guys in the top brass who said you were easily led?'

'Yes?'

'Well, they were only half right.' I look back and see he's sporting one of those frozen grins that these newspaper editor types always sport in the final shot of those 70s movies and TV programmes, as though he's expecting a title card reading Executive Producer: Bob Newhart to descend from the ceiling.

And doing my best to cop a choked-up Jimmy Stewart attitude, I say: 'Thanks...uh, thanks, Mr Ayhern,' (thinking even as I'm saying this, 'Cunt's too nice a word for you, you supercunt) and turn back round and walk out. Well, as I've got another two-and-a-half hours to punch-out time, I figure I might as well run this second report, which I do. Afterwards, another two hours of electrified porn & scorn, then I'm headed for the door and towards Baker Street to catch the 84. About ten minutes into the second leg of the trip, on the 383, I hop on my mobile and give a ring to Quadruples, my local takeaway sandwich shop, and place an order for an Italian cold cut sub. Over the course of twenty or so of these Mazdaless commutes I've got this sandwich-ordering routine down to a science, as they say. I know that ten minutes into the 383 leg is exactly the moment when I should call in if I want to be sure my sandwich is just about ready when I get to 'Druples, if I want to be able (as I am today) to walk in there, greet Suma or Jagdeesh at the register, hand over my tenner, and be proffered my usual all inside of a minute. (Let me as an aside just put in a good word for the 'Druples's Italian cold cut sub, a noble edifice stuffed with every kind of meat and cheese imaginable. And to any Yank who might be reading this now and saying to himself, This limey asshole thinks he's had a real Italian cold cut sub. Has he ever been to D'Amici's in New York? or to Di Cazzo's in Philly? I say: just try me. I'd be more than happy--once I've got a few hundred quid to spare--to jump on a direct flight out of Heathrow to your home metropole, and take you on, culo a culo, in all of my shirty choler, in defence of the Quadruples Italian cold cut.)

Back at the maisonette, I put the takeaway bag on the kitchen counter and check the voice mail on my immobile phone. There's one message, from this bloke who calls himself Ralph. I can't say as I can recall having met anyone named Ralph since moving to the capital. At UEA, I did know a bloke name of Ralph Shillibeer, but it's been almost five years since I lost touch with him, when he dropped out at the end of his second year. What would he be doing calling me? And how would he have got hold of my number? It's unlisted. Anyway, the message went more or less like this: Hi, this is, uh, Ralph. [The tone of the voice is muzzy, absent-minded, indistinct.] How's it hanging? Uhhhhhhh.... [a belch] Sorry about that. I got way too pissed last night. Having trouble putting two thoughts together. You know how it is. So, I was just calling to remind you...uhhhhhh...excuse me a moment. [There's a few seconds of silence followed by what sounds like someone puking his guts up from a fair distance away, followed in turn by the equidistant sound of a flushing toilet. Then a few more seconds of silence, and he's back on the blower.] Sorrier about that. Anyway, uh, as I was saying, I was just calling to remind you about what I was telling you the other night down at the pub. [Indeed?] You know, about that special package trip you've been selected for, the all-expenses-paid trip to Mallorca...

I hang up. Well, there just went two minutes of my life I'll never get back, I say to myself. Two minutes squandered on hearing out the sales pitch of a fucking computerised telemarketer. Christ, will they stop at nothing?

Wellsir, this little digressive hurdle having been cleared, I go to the fridge and crack open a Stella, unwrap the sub and carry them both to the coffee table in front of my futon, where I settle down to eat and catch a spot of telly. It's 500 channels and fuck-all on, as the so-called Boss sings: sodding cooking shows and Hitler documentaries the full length of the dial. Much against my better judgement, for want of any better viewing fare, I allow myself to be sucked into watching a full episode of EastEnders. As I haven't followed the show since I was about ten and was practically forced to for a whole summer by my Grandma (at the time it was her favourite story), I can't recognize any of the characters or make head or tail of the plot. For some reason or other, the climactic moment involves this one bloke catching this girl--who he's shown no sign of being shacked up with or trying to pull--talking to another bloke on a closed-circuit TV monitor. I guess it'd all be clear to me if I'd tuned in 27 weeks ago.

Just as the credits are rolling on EastEnders, and I'm balling up the remains of my sandwich for the dustbin, at half-past eight, the doorbell rings. I assume it's Ronnie Livingstone, come round to propose an impromptu piss-fest down at the Ape, although it's not really his style to pop by unannounced like this. At all events, I hardly expect that when I open the door I'll be greeted--as I in fact subsequently am--by not one, not two, but ten children, dressed in a motley assortment of costumes, and screaming 'TRICK OR TREAT!' at me in discordant unison. It takes me a moment or two to register what's going on. Is this an unseasonably early charity collection for a local school's Christmas pantomine? Or a party of revellers on their way to or from a fancy dress ball for dwarfs? Then I reflect on what they've just said, remember what day of the year is, put one and one together, and realise: it's Halloween, and this is a pack of so-called trick-or-treaters.

Now, I don't know what part of the world you're from, gentle reader, but depending on the degree of popularity this here holiday of Halloween enjoys in your home town or country, and on your degree of familiarity with the history of regional folkways in the UK, you might be inclined to crown me the King of Thickness for not having anticipated this type of visitation, or for not at least having recognised it for what it was right off the foot. But I'm from a pretty remote corner of Norfolk, you see, and it occurs to me as I set about rationalising my stupefaction in the face of these trick-or-treaters, that there might actually have been a grain of insight in Sarah Slother's pigeonholing of me as a provincial the other night. My dad likes to joke, riffing on Mark Twain's famous quip about Cincinnati, Ohio, that if Norwich is the Cincinnati of the UK--meaning that if the world were about to end, you'd pack up and move there straightaway, seeing as how nothing seemed to catch on there till ten years after it had caught on everywhere else--then Diss is the Cincinnati of Norfolk. I haven't been back there at this time of the year in a good four years, so I don't what it's like now, but back in my day, we didn't celebrate Halloween in Diss. It was a Guy-Fawkes-day-only kind of town, and so, for that matter, was Norwich, as near as I could tell as a part-time resident. It was only after moving to London that I started getting used to seeing Halloween sweets and costumes on sale at Tesco's; but what with my being a single adult bloke with no kids, it never really sunk in with me how quickly mandatory celebration of this festival had caught on here. And as for flesh-and-blood trick-or-treaters, I'd never seen nary a one till last night. Next year, I'll see that I'm better prepared for the onslaught, if only for peace-of-mind's sake.

Anyway, back to the front door and the first dawning of my Halloweenic epiphany. I really want to say to these kids, 'Fuck off, you cuntlets; go bother Mrs Preston next door,' but I get a visceral kind of feeling, perhaps set off by associations between the present scene and my run-in last winter with little Brianna Ayhern, that that would be unwise. I know there's nothing in the kitchen suitable for consumption by minors, but I guess you could say for form's sake, I ought to make a cursory rummage round back there. I check the fridge: nothing but a half-empty jug of milk and my still ten-strong Stella twelve pack. I check the cupboards, whose sole contents consist of a half-full box of Weetabix, and exactly ten packets of Korean ramen noodles that I've ostensibly been saving for a rainy day (i.e., a day when I'm so much on my uppers that it comes down to doing without Stella or doing without takeaway). If only I'd grabbed a fistful of those fucking toxic waste balls when I had the chance! Well, I say to myself for the 50th time in the past week, adopt, adapt, and improve. The noodle packets are brightly-coloured and shiny, and labelled inscrutably enough in Korean: hopefully I can get the door bolted behind me before any of them opens one of them and catches on to the imposture. So, grabbing five of them in each fist, I head out back front and start passing them round. As I'm doing this, I note each of the costumes. To a little man and a little woman, they're transparent impersonations of characters from the just-past or just-approaching movie season: Spider Man, Lemony Snicket, Mr Tumnus, Johnny and Joan Carter Cash, etc. The last blokette has me stumped, though: he's got on a great black curly Harpo Marx wig, a black Charlie-Marx-sized fake beard, and an ankle-length smock or apron covered in what to my eyes look like bits of crusty fecal matter. 'And who might you be, young sir?' I ask him. 'I'm a Hairy Potter!' he rejoins 'Clever lad!' (Or not-so-clever lad with clever and sadistic mum or dad).

And with that, I shoo them all away, and slam the door behind me, taking care both to lock the deadbolt and pull the chain to. I go back to the futon, sit down, close my eyes, let out a deep sigh and count to one. Silence outside. I count to one again. Still not a sound. But just as I'm about to count to one a third time, I hear an irregular knocking sound coming from towards the bottom of the front door, followed by these muffled words, delivered in a voice that I'd say sounded like David Beckham on helium, if David Beckham's natural voice could get any higher than it naturally is: 'You fucking sod, trying to pass off fucking Chow Mein [sic] noodles for sweets! My mum's a lawyer, she'll get you, she'll have you put in Wormwood Scrubs, you cunting fuck!' Then the knocking gradually grows weaker, slows down, and finally stops, and before I get to my second count of round two of one-counting, there's a crashing sound of (no shit) breaking glass at the front window. I walk over to the site of the impact, and peer out at Woodside Avenue just in time to identify the perpetrator as he disappears into a shadow cast by a willow tree on the opposite pavement: it's the nipper in the Johnny Cash costume. I see that the little sod has managed to take out a whole pane of the window. With the expense of this repair tacked on to replacing the windows of the Mazda, I'm already close to a thousand quid out of pocket to the glaziers in the space of two days. At this rate, come the end of the month, I'll be lucky to be living on ramen and water.

At the moment, there's no remedy to hand but to crack open another Stella and light up a fag, and when I'm finished with the fag and half-way through the Stella, I'm finally calm enough to break out the old whisk broom and dust devil and sweep up the bigger pieces of glass and hoover up the smaller ones. In the midst of the breakage, I happen across the missile that was its cause--that missile being an unopened grenade-sized canister of Toxic Waste Balls. Well, I must thank Stella for small mercies. Here's a means of making nice with Miss Ayhern (and her dad) at the next Christmas party. Maybe I can even parley the presentation of it into a rise...? Not bloody likely.

By nine, I've got the glass cleaned up and a piece of cardboard from an old Stella twelve-pack taped over the empty pane, and I'm just settling down, over a third Stella and a second fag, to another pointless bout of cable roulette, when the doorbell rings again, and this time, my better judgement tells me I really should let it go. I tell myself, Look (YFC), you've cleared out the pantry, there's nothing else in the house to fob off on to the kids, maybe if, and only if, you mute the volume on the TV and keep absolutely stumm, maybe they'll think no one's home, and they'll go away without putting another hole in your front window.

But in my cuntish stupidity, I decide, as if in revenge for the abuse I've so far suffered tonight at the hands of the munchkin mobility, that, although I'm easily forty years too young for the part, I'm going to play at being the sinisterly stroppy bogeyman of a neighbour, that I'm going to fling open that door, let out a mighty guttural roar like a rabid wombat, and send them all scattering like terrified desert mice (or whatever sort of prey wombats prefer). Bad decision. Christ, I should at least have taken a look through the fucking peephole!

So, as I was saying, in my cuntish stupidity, I set my phiz in the most grotesquely stroppy attitude the muscles will bear, stomp up to the door, fling it open and see...a fully grown man. And Ronnie Livingstone it ain't, although he appears to be about Ronnie's (and my) age. He's wearing a flight jacket, a bloody Arsenal T-shirt, a plaid deerstalker-ish cap, khaki slacks and trainers. And behind him are standing four or five other blokes, similarly attired.

'Trick or treat,' he says to me, without a trace of a smile.

'I'm sorry,' I say to him, 'but your, em, predecessors have cleared me out. No more sweets on the premises, I'm afraid.' (In the space of a nanosecond I find I've morphed from a stroppy ogre into a wobbly-kneed latter-day Jeeves. My but how suddenly finding yourself face-to-face with a pack of unreconstructed yobbos does wonders for a case of the strops!)

'That's all right. We're not really in the market for sweets anyway. We prefer vittles more suited to grown-ups. Isn't that right, lads?' he adds, with a nod back to his mates, who all murmur back, each in his own good time, 'Yeah.'

'So, what are you blokes--er, lads--dressed as this evening?' I say, desperately keeping the charade going for want of any better stratagem.

'We're dressed as members of the East Finchley chav posse.'

And with his dropping of that monosyllable chav, I immediately find all of my strength returning to me. In a rush of adrenaline, my knees lock up, my fingers set to work on the top button of my shirt--but all for naught, for at that very moment, my interlocutor administers a mighty wallop to the pit of my stomach, and I crumple up on to the floor. There, as I lie weeping like a freshly-neutered puppy, I can hear the sound of many pairs of feet stomping past me towards the kitchen, the hermetic pop of the fridge door opening. I manage to get back up on one elbow just in time to catch the posse emerging from the kitchen, with one of the chavs, a different yob from the one who punched me, carrying an object I recognise all too well under one arm, a boxy something about the same size (if not shape) as a newborn infant. Reflexively, as the red-white-and-gold crest passes, I reach out towards it with a choked cry of 'Stella!'

'Aaaah, shaaaaddup, yah schlongsucker!' the kidnapper grunts at me, following up with a kick at the corner of my mouth that sends me collapsing once again back on to the floor.

Then everything goes black. Well, not really, or not, at any rate, immediately: what actually happens is that after they leave, I'm simply too overcome by the abject shittiness of my situation to get up off the floor; and that I prefer to lie there and fall asleep in a puddle of my own bloody drool. Well, naturally, next day--today--I pull a sickie. Good thing I got that anisette tampon report done a day early, what what?