That's funny, Jorge, when I started reading your belly-jiggling review, I thought you were probably the same Jorge Silver that is my sibling (younger by 2 years), but when I came to the sign reading "none of you are real," I knew for certain. Was that on Capitol Hill? Near the House of Love? I'm picturing a little coffee house there where we quaffed and radiated our pathetically unjaded ardentness, waiting for our glamourous and thrilling lives to begin.

I am sure I asked the poor slob why he would impugn our reality; that's a given, given my cursed earnestness. And this is hairsplitting, but also know I shed not even a beatnik's crocodile tear for the dispossessed blighter, or for the profound implications of his message to us all. Just not the kind of thing that ever has got the pathos flowing. I was one of those blighters myself, and too full of self-criticism to extend that kind of tenderness, maybe. And I've never put sugar in my coffee!

Your loving, overbearing, sis,
Carmelita

Carm! The coffee house I referred to was actually Tony's in Bellingham. Though we did hang out at one around the corner from the House of Love sometime during that era of hope, Polo cologne and upturned jean-jacket collars.

In the movie version, in which you are played by Jennifer Lopez, your eyes well up when you confront the blighter outside Tony's, and your lips are slightly aquiver. The revised script has you saying, "You may not think we're real, but I know you are, and dammit, I love you...[gesturing toward me, played by Lou Diamond Phillips] we love you!" Then you collapse into each others arms and start to weep. "I'm sorry!" he wails. "So, so sorry!" "Come on," you say. "Let's have some coffee and talk about the universe and the ramifications of infinity."

And don't tell me you never put sugar -- brown, unrefined sugar -- in your coffee.

Jorge

Jorge, I have serious questions about the veracity of your account. Why would a t-shirt for Amnesty International -- an organization dedicated to freeing political prisoners -- have a picture of a Masai herdsman? The only reference on the Amnesty Web site to the Masai is a single line mentioning British reparations of some 4.5 million pounds to Masai injured by unexploded British ordance.

How much of your little story is completely fabricated, Jorge? If I was the suspicious type I might even think Jorge is not your real name.

Well, it was either a Masai herdsman or Iman.

I actually went to an Amnesty International meeting my first week on campus. I had noticed that my Birks and t-shirt turned the heads of the granola girls and thought that joining Amnesty might drastically up my score quotient (I desperately wanted to stop lying about my virginity). But they wanted us to, like, write letters to dictators and otherwise exert ourselves for the cause of freedom, rather than just voice our outrage over pizza and exchange phone numbers and who knows what. And quite honestly, I was too lazy to feel outrage. The closest I came was mild annoyance over the fact that the side panel replacement on my Civic was the wrong shade of maroon.

Si! Tony's --that was around the time I lived at the Lumpy Dumps. The place you once referred to (innocently, I think) as "a flophouse." More hairsplitting, but it was more like a bucolic slum, bordered by greeny trees and shadowy grasses of Chukanut Park, and complete with weary, addictive, middle-aged poor folks, messy noisy kids and fat, fat spiders. (As a combination of the three, I fit in there great!) I got headlice while living there, but they wuz from the fish processing plant where I worked as the laundry lady.

One of the most courageuous acts I've ever witnessed, was done by my wiry-bearded neighbor there (we each had our own wee flop unit at El Dumps): a hard-luck intellectual, and an ex-something-or-other, and whatever it was, it done wrung him near clean out. He filled empty tin cans with the butts of cigarettes he smoked squatting with his arms extended forward, resting on his knees, hands limp, smoke curling and curling. That was just to set the mood. Oh, too, me and this man, we bickered constantly! But mostly periphero-telepathically. Nag! Nag! Oh, pooh! Get over your: (angry hurt misogynistic bluster)(angry ignorant knee-jerk liberal, libber nonsense).

There, one day when I happened to look, was the progenitor of all spiders, sitting in the gloom under the hot water heater in my kitchen. Oh God! It's body was the size of a fifty cent piece! And the legs were long and powerful-looking, poised...

I can see where this is going, and I don't like it-- that spider was an asset to my house, my home even, a arachnid bug dog, a spidr'y sage that had been keeping watch over my bare feet for who knows? monthes! as I made morning coffee and packed the lunches I ate in the smoky breakroom of the fish plant.

I was insensible with fear, and could not at all appreciate the auspiciousness of having such a being deign to enthrone itself in my lumpy dump.

To get right to the juicy part, I told my wiry neighbor (don't really want to belabor how I didn't use feminine charms or wiles, because I probably did in my own way). He came over, squatted, tilted his head, peered...focused and FFFlung! his hand!into the darksome nether parts of the boiler. Don't you just shudder to think? He did too, pulling his spider'd hand out fast! and lurching into bloody well-earned full-body shudder.

No, we didn't make love, then or ever. We continued, without epiphany, to cross antennae. But I think of him with the respect and the warmth of a fellow traveler, and would do so even if he hadn't with such mettle made my kithcen safe for me once upon a time.

OK,
Things that have made me cry in recent memory:
- listening to a boys choir

- when I thought a cherished idol had converted to fundamentalist Christianity. (I'm sorry but there it is)

- When the human in "Ice Age" realizes that the woolly mammoth is a good guy who saved his child

...your teary little scene ain't so far fetched, then, amigo mio. Except the J. Lopez part. Can we get Charo instead?

But no sugar, please! Unless I was showing off how unrefined I am, which I only do on days ending in why, see?

C

I can vouch for the t-shirt, or for the spirit of it.

Natalie Portman made me cry in "V for Vendetta". The girl can act, when she's not being directed by George "Hamfist" Lucas.

Your hoping for International Amnesty would be in character,
for which I just vouched, but I can't speak to the nubile-erthmuffin-hustling angle. Thanks for the inside scoop, delectible! (You have a way of getting a reader to laugh with you, AT you. Makes me feel mean and friendly all at once).

Got so carried away in my own reminiscences;
your imagery is smackdabulous: your hair (which was not anywhere near as helmetty & goopsmirched as you might torturedly recall, if I may say), the coffee's mouth cancer flavor, and more, more please.

Toot sweet!

Haven't seen V, but like H. Weaving

Hey Carms, you're stealing the show down here, making Scott and me look like a couple of boiled shrimp tossed onto a sidewalk. If you know what I mean. And I, uh, thinks yuh does.

The Lumpy Dumps. Goddamn if they weren't something special. A holey site, wall-wise, no? Did I call it a flophouse? Did I even know what a flophouse was? Why did I make that association, I wonder? I do know that it was at El Dumps that I changed my very first flat tire (crushed rim, more like it), after running over a log going 65 on I-5.

Sometime around then, you told me that Cat Stevens achieved his trademark vocal wobble by recording naked on a block of ice. "I know we've come a long way..."

Was the spider hunter the same fellow who up and cycled his way to Montana on an old Scwhinn or somesuch contraption? I remember him, at the Dumps in your room, rolling his own and spitting out that MacDonald's was a fascist organization. I was young and uninformed (but not ununiformed -- remember the Amnesty tee) and didn't really get his drift and asked him what he meant. I seem to recall that he didn't rightly know, either.

You guys shur right pretty.

Whoo!--man (loosening collar) the heat is on, and I am feelin it. It's starting to feel like a sleeves-rolled-up battle of wits around here, which I probably started by being such a wanton self-referencer, & my smug-sounding flophouse remark could not have helped.

"He said you're living in some kind of a flophouse" was the way I heard it, and my first response was "a flophouse (mildly stung) It's not a flophouse, it's an apartment compound." But I did the right mental dot-to-dotting, frere. I thought, "mon frere is not in a hurry to think I'm crashing on bare mattresses with transient men, he just made an understandable leap from LumpyDump to Flophouse, and who could blame him, since a lumpydump is a thing heretofore unhoid of, and emanates the same onomatopoetical sense of dereliction?"

And then I'm *sure* I thought some self-flagellating thought about how I am far too quick to take offense, and I really ought to to be more like my new friend, name of Jorge, who handled the convolutions of the mind with forbearance and generousity. Please no potshots at my old friend, love and war or no. (Of course the guy was human like the rest of us, but that's how my thoughts ran in dem days, and as a role model for me at the time, he was in fact a nice one). "May All Beings Be Well and Happy" was painted above the entrance to his home. I mean hey.

Odds and ends:
-My little dump was secure and unholy, but slugs crawled out of the shower drain.
-Cat Stevens never divulged his secret warble to any tabloid I read.
-Harvey was not the spider hunter. Harvey was a rangy, hayseed Byronic hero with whom I rambled B'ham town in ratty converse and sat in fields and on rooftops making uneducated, from-the-hip observations about this "sad and beautiful world." One of the most naturally gallant, egalitarian humans I've known, and a great spitter-out of anti-fascist-type epithets, may he live forever.

pippip,
yr unholy sis

Battle? I thought it was more of a mutual-appreciation society, mia hermana. We don't get to talk much, and this is funner than playing Make Me Laugh on shag carpet as wedges of sunlight do a slowdance across the room. You know, standing in our old living room on University, I used to look out at the sun and then close my eyes, thinking I could see the patterns of solar systems glowing green and yellow on the insides of my eyelids. The heavens revealed in the blink of an eye.

Jorge, my namesake, he was a sweet fellow. Why the entreaty to spare your Buddhistic buddy from lowblows?

Oh, whoops, I gotta split. There's a train to catch.

I dedicate this entry to Harvey.

Slugs in the drainpipe were one thing --and not such a welcome one-- but this morning as I look out the window, a moose stands browsing the willows along the trail to the outhouse. We just played a short game of make me laugh, the moose & I, which I won! See the dogs were barking at him, which was in turn annoying me, so i went out and approached the moose close as felt I ought, saying "Go on Moose! Go on!" It did the trick. He rolled his enormous eyes, flashing the whites mirthfully, and, continuing to daintily nibble willow bark, he jiggled his fur in my general direction.

I kinda really like the slapstick element of Make Me Laugh, the way it allows people to make such honest asses of themselves. It hearks me back to a simpler time, a time when the earth was young, and the dew still glistened on the dewdrops. (I'm not sure either)

This scribbling is fun too, agreed, & thanks for your hospitality here at CannedCoffee, by the way.
OK hermano (?)et al., gotta go accomplish stuff--

Popping in to check the fresh brew, (after having accomplished worlds, let me tell you)...

reading back, I was struck by the euphemistic potentcy of the (kaffkaff)slugs in (ahem)drainpipes! But them slugs were 100% substantial I'm here to say, and as such --gliding up the walls of my shower, odious.

The euphemistic type slug I hope always to remain a fan girl of. They tend to accessorize some mighty choice folk.

Far better to have a slug OF coffee that a slug IN your coffee.
I always say.

Though piquant in its touchingly maudlin sentimentality, the review -- and the subsequent mellifluous discourses of self-congratulatory erudition -- deny the fundamental essence of the situation!

The man at the window, that clarion prophet, that ephemeral ghost yet substantial in his humanity, was carrying a warning, a desperate, passionate plea to stop your mad rush towards self-destruction!

You didn’t see me, so wrapped up in your euphoric caffeine-induced haze of unreality. That’s right; I said UNREALITY. His sign bespoke portents, I say, PORTENTS of the evil that you consumed with such ignorant glee.

I was wedged in the corner, amidst the dog-eared copies of Home Designer and Vanity Fair, a figure singularly unremarkable in his tepid presence, all clad in frayed beiges and tans, shaking hands grasping a kitschy Royal Worcester knock-off. Kicked out of every reputable bistro from Queen Anne to Mercer Island, I ran aground there like so much driftwood on the shores of yet another slice of bohemia.

Ah yes, the mind wanders these days. The SIGN! It spoke a truth you were clearly ill-equipped to bear. Life, lived beneath the dizzy hazy of caffeine’s gentle shackles, is really no life at all. You lose yourself, become hazy, indistinct, giving up more and more of your fundamental essence with each cup. None of you were real…you were figments, imaginariums brought to life through bean-induced cerebral stimulations. Without it, you fade back to normality, deeper even, beyond physicality and into a tepid existence, devoid of sharp edges and brilliant splashes of color.

I know. My cup was empty, yet I clutched it still. I’d spent every cent I had on coffee, and what did it give me? Invisibility. Yet I clutched the cup, wishing it full within the feeble clatterings of what remains of my mind.

He was just trying to warn you. As am I.