Niff.Dot

>

voulez-voulez-vous the Surgeon General says that building a nicotine Stonehenge is better for your health than inhaling known carcinogens into your bronchial system.

But I’m not judging you…?

>I am in a post-Burning-Man funk

The playa kinda knocked me on my tush this year, but I will not be going into that.

What I will go into is this:

Some numb-nuts set the man on fire on Sunday night by setting off fireworks under it. Surprised the hell out of me…I didn’t realize The Man was flammable. (insert laughter here _______.)

My camp arrived early…the Friday before the event, to set up our art installation. The bitch of it was we had almost nonstop white-outs (where the wind kicks up large amounts of playa dust which adheres itself to anything and everything), 115+ degree temps and uber-cranky people who were attempting to set up 62-ft geodesic domes and sound stages. Testosterone flew and estrogen fled and people were generally having a crap time.

In an attempt to prevent the nastiness that can claim your hair working in such conditions on the playa, I had cleverly arranged my hair into several braids in which I had woven some uber-cool knitting yarn and ribbons and ended up arranging it into this bun-knot thing on the back of my head. The process of braiding required quite a bit of time and hair gel, and I marveled at my skill and creativity.

However.

hair gel + sweat + tons of playa dust = one nasty mess.

My hair remained un-mussed all week due to this coiffing mixture. Which was all fine and good. I didn’t have to worry about my hair not looking uber-playariffic. It just…stayed there. I became increasingly aware of the accumulation of nastiness on my scalp as the week progressed, but fortunately Burning Man is absolutely riddled with distractions.

I got home yesterday. Reality set in. I knew that I had to contend with the de-playafying of my head.

I contemplated calling my therapist.

My good friend Sev, who is an accomplished knitter, helped me de-yarn my head with some clever knitting tools she had on hand. Once said yarn was removed, I noticed, to my abject horror, that my hair had maintained its previous form minus the decor thanks to the playa-gel-sweat concoction. Placing my hands upon my mane was abhorrent. I prayed that acetone or turpentine would not be required.

I got back home and soaked my head in the tub for some time, washing it a couple times and soaking it in conditioner for a while. Rather than dealing with it after this, I went to bed.

I woke up not only re-hashing the drama of the previous week but to add insult to injury, I attempted to run my fingers through my hair and realized what a rat’s nest it was. I wadded it up into a sad, clumpy mound with a hair tie and got out of bed, still in denial.

About 2 hours ago I realized this problem would not remedy itself and decided to contend with the rats-nest on my head. Kira grabbed me a comb.

Ouch. Bloody blazing turnips on fire ouch.

Now I really contemplated calling my therapist.

This took some time. A lot of time. And profanity.

As the process continued I noticed more and more hair was coming out of the comb I was using.

And more.

And more.

The playa was balding me.

When all was said and done this is what I was left with.
I used the comb for scale.

Ever have a moment of incredulity? Happened to me.

Fortunately I had a ton of hair to begin with, so this massive fuzzball has made little difference in the appearance of my head. I know I should throw it away, but part of me wants to keep it both as a souvenir and as a relic of nostalgia.

Maybe I should mail it to the persons responsible for my playa-drama thanking them for the stress which may have been partially responsible for my excess shedding.

I wonder how much postage I would need?

Voulez-voulez-vous playafied.

>

44 Days until Burning Man!
Not that I’m excited or anything.

Me last year with Dan, left, and Lars, top…

Masks I laboriously slaved over that didn’t survive…

And, what every girl needs to survive in the desert…

Patron….

voulez-voulez-vous 44 days…

>She’s folding maroon-colored Ikea blankets. I’m goofing off on my laptop. Aidan is playing “BATTLE!!!” with the kid next door, and Dan is ion his way home from a magic gig but not before he stops and acquires cilantro per Tina’s instructions for dinner tonight. This is my Sunday home life.

It’s so frustratingly frequent that I will often be having a conversation and a topic comes up of such oddity and curiousness that I feel compelled to respond, “I need to blog about that!”

Then I’ll be damned if I don’t forget what it was.

I have been spending a better portion of of the day trying to recall such conversations to no avail. I have a vague recollection of some conversation about “cow pancakes”, but the how or the why is gone.

I have paint all over my fingers. I had helped Tina hang up her paper star-lamp thingee, but to do so I had to use coaxial cable staples which, unfortunately, are black. So I had found some latex paint in a similar shade to her bedroom wall to paint said coaxial cable staples so that they weren’t appallingly eyesore-esque and in the process got the latex paint on my fingers as i used them to capture the paint drops that were sneaking off of the side of the container in an attempt to keep the paint from plopping all over Tina’s bed and preventing me from getting smacked with a spatula. She’s a cook. She does that.

One thing I could discuss is that my show is finally set up. Dan and I went out to Edmonds yesterday to install all 20 of my pieces with all of the corresponding title/price tags so I can become rich and famous. I just want enough money so we can buy and furnish a house, I can get a new car (4 door Jeep maybe?) and pay off my student loan, thank you very much Sallie Mae.

Tina’s outside visiting with Aidan’s friends’ mom doing her mom thang. Uh oh. Boys tried to run across the street without looking both ways first. I just heard a mitxure of: “Aidan – Joseph – wait – get – back – here – stop – right – now – that – is – not – okay – no – no – no – stop – right – now -young – man – AIDAN – JAMES – YOU – GET – BACK – HERE – RIGHT – NOW – JOSEPH – NAH – AH – AH!!! YOU – ALWAYS – LOOK – BOTH – WAYS – BEFORE – CROSSING – THE – STREET – YOU – UNDERSTAND!!!???”

The kids, of course, are completely oblivious and have engaged their voluntary selective listening disorders and continue their jaunt across 21st ave NW.

I think my mother hooked up a device with an electromagnetic pulse to disable mine when I was about fifteen. Or perhaps it was the threat of being grounded that kept me on the straight and narrow. Or perhaps she really did engage an electromagnetic pulse that wiped out my memory. What the hell was I saying? I don’t know…shit.

voulez–voulez–vous Sunday

>
…is never clean.

Oh, sure it starts out that way. I spent all of last weekend re-organizing, consolidating, arranging. It looked beautiful. Brilliant.

I couldn’t find a goddamn thing.

So I am spending this beautiful 4th of July Wednesday fighting with framing one of my pieces that I was brilliant enough to paint on PANEL, which you just can’t hang on the WALL without a FRAME, so that’s how I spent my morning. But if you observe, at the center of the above image, you will see i was ultimately successful.

You will also notice that to be successful, it involved busting out the following:

– yardstick
– pencil
– wood glue
– drill
– drill bits
– nails
– hammer
– disassembling a previous painting to use the lumber for the frame (hey, i’m broke…)
– wood filler
– palette knife
– ink and brush
– pliers
– sandpaper

Hence the disaster. But dammit, I know where everything is. Now i just have no space to work.

Now i have to clean all this crap up so i can finish priming this 5′ canvas that i need to work on.

Can’t wait until Saturday. The show will be installed, and i can breathe.

voulez-voulez-vous studio shut-in

>
Carrie:

“You want a Skittle?”

Me:

“A ‘Skittle‘?”

“Uh, yeah…a Skittle…”

“But Skittles aren’t one Skittle. They’re Skittles, not ‘Skittle’. They weren’t meant to be alone like that…”

“Uh, yeah they can…you can have one Skittle…”

“No, no you can’t. You can either have some, or you can have none. You can’t just have one…it’s like Reese’s Pieces.”

“Reese’s Pie-“

“You know, you can’t just have one piece. You have to have Reese’s Pieces.”

“You can have just one. You can say, ‘Can I have a Reese’s Pieces?'”

“Now you’re obscenely gramatically incorrect.”

“Say what you like. My opinion remains.”

I decided to call for reinforcements.

“David…what dou you call one Reese’s Pieces?”

“Just one? As in, “a Piece”? That’s just wierd…”

“Yeah, I know. So what do you call it?”

“You don’t call it anything, you can’t have just one Reese’s Piece…”

“That was my argument as well…”

“She doesn’t know this? You didn’t tell her?”

“She is a stubborn one…I did warn her however…”

“Does she realize the risk – wait, we shouldn’t even be discussing this…”

“I know…terrible things are afoot. If we don’t stop now, we could possibly create a paradox that could create a fissure in the space-time continuum thereby negating all human existence!!!”

“Oh, my God! What are we doing??”

Carrie, o’ harbinger of death, chimes in, smiling,

“What about M&M’s?”

…and retracts her Skittle(s) offer.

voulez-voulez-vous you can’t eat just one.

>If I knew then what I know now I would definitely know more than I did tomorrow.

So, yes…the free.
The free is for everyone, please, help yourself to some of the free.

“The Free” is not actually what ‘it’ is. What It is, is ‘It That Shall Not Be Named’.

So sayeth the shepherd…
So sayeth the flock.

Well, not necessarilly. I’d love to be a shepherd, but then I’d have to worry about dealing with all of those damn I-9’s for all my wooly followers and I just don’t feel like messing with it.

“It That Shall Not Be Named” has been on my desk for a few hours now. Motivated by the many “uh…is that _____???”-s I received sitting at my desk I decided to take some pictures and conduct a survey.

“Is that calamari??”
“they look like potstickers…or some kind of mushroom…”
“Ew…it looks like a bacterial colony.”
“Uh huh. Now you’ve got little foreskins on your desk. Typical.”
“Puppy anus. Yup, it’s got to be puppy anus.”
“I’d have to guess pig noses. Or maybe lotus root…”

and

“The dissected and mummified remains of the lysergically contaminated progeny of arthritic mugwump meatstraws?”

Zactly.

Thoughts?

voulez-voulez-vous yes, we have none.

>”what does your blog have that I don’t have??”

>”Hi, everyone, my name is Niff.”

“Hi, Niff!”

“It’s been 36 hours since my last act of complete and senseless stupidity…”

(applause…)

“It’s been a challenge, not succumbing to fits of daft-ishness over the last two days, but I believe with enough determination and support from my family I can get through this and emerge victorious and not lose control over the dark little imps trying to seize control of the logic centers of my brain thereby permitting me to epitomize the definition of insanity.”

(looks of pity intermingled with fleeting hints of abject horror…)

So, yeah…stupidity hangover.

Stupidity hangovers are usually a result of a whole night’s – and even as far back as the entire day’s – indulgence in acts and behaviors of complete and total irrationality and stupidity which, despite your very best efforts to curtail, you feel a compulsion to act upon and in doing so, cause yourself to awaken the next morning and with a hand to your head mumble, “why the fuck did I do that??

Stupidity hangovers commonly involve a Turret’s-style stampede of apologies the following day to those who were subject to the default system error in your head. For those who know you best (the poor bastards), this enthusiastic barrage of apologies will be nothing new. They will be accustomed to your maniacal rantings, and because they are true friends will just pet you on the head and say, “That’s okay, sweetie…we still love you.” The rookies to the game of cerebral vomit will, though slightly unsettled, regard you with the comfortable delusion that this was all just a result of PMS and as such, you are not truly committable and therefore safe.

The problem with the behaviors that incur the stupidity hangover is that they are not attributable to any consciousness-altering substances, i.e. alcohol, weed, LSD, Oreos…

The problem with the stupidity hangover is that it’s all you, baby. Every single morsel of word salad spewed forth from your lips was conjured, nursed, encouraged, and delivered by you and only you, with nothing but an “oops, my bad…” to offer as validation. No passing the buck here, you bubbling cauldron of common sense. You’re on your own.

So with the hangover in full swing, you spend the following day in agonizing remorse over the whole ordeal, promising yourself that this will never happen again, that you have the mental fortitude to shuffle all of your verbal waste into the little closet behind your parietal lobe. You are a changed person. You are the epitome of refinement and manners. You are in control. Invincible! GOD!

…and then…

**** says **** about **** and you can’t stop yourself from interjecting with **** and you just-couldn’t-keep-your-mouth-shut-could-you!!!!

sigh.

Did I mention something earlier about the definition of insanity?

So, boys and girls, what have we learned?
The conclusion I have come to is this:
If you feel yourself entering a place that is giving you the slightest inkling that you may indeed begin to have thoughts of…
(wait, it is the complete lack of thought which causes the problem in the first place, so nevermind…)
Let’s just say if the potential for stupidity is imminent, get completely shit-faced immediately. No hesitation. Whatever you have to do to get there, just do it. I’m talking MGD-esque moments of desperation here, people. My reasoning (yeah, nice…now I’m able to reason…) is simple: you now have an alibi. An excuse. Exemption.

So go fucking ape-shit with your stupidity. Use it. Spread it like wildfire. Piss people off. If it’s your thing, run at the mouth with as many sexist jokes and ethnic slurs you can come up with. Drop-kick a poodle. Slash the tires of those who think the “Baby on Board” signs are still a pretty nifty idea. Do a bit of research and throw in some classic ‘Yo Mama’ smack for good measure. Enjoy your hebetude*. Live!

* ‘ts coo…I had to look it up, too.

voulez-voulez-vous hebetude.

>It’s Carrie’s birthday. Everyone, say, “Happy Birthday Carrie!!”

“uh, happy birthday, Carrie…”

Ugh. That was weak. Y’all are SO not going to Hooters with me for the start of the NBA finals next week.

Carrie is finally 31. It’s about damn time. I’m sick of hanging out here all by myself.

voulez-voulez-vous 31!