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Comedy in Tragedy 

From the Wikipedia article on Atalanta:

​When Artemis was forgotten at a sacrifice by King Oineus, she was angered and sent the Calydonian Boar, a wild boar that ravaged the land, men, and cattle and prevented crops from being sown. Atalanta joined Meleager and many other famous heroes on a hunt for the boar. […] Several of the men were killed before Atalanta became the first to hit the boar and draw blood. After Meleager finally killed the boar with his spear, he awarded the hide to Atalanta. Meleager’s uncles, Plexippus and Toxeus, were angry and tried to take the skin from her. In revenge, Meleager killed his uncles. Wild with grief, Meleager’s mother Althaea threw a charmed log on the fire, which consumed Meleager’s life as it burned. Then she died when a new boar came out of the woods and killed her.


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Don’t that beat all?

After some weird technical stuff, it turns out I don’t have to start my blog over from scratch. (It had disappeared into an abyss and was replaced with a “rootstew.com coming soon!” landing page, which is not a good look.) I’m not sure how concerned I should be that my reaction to losing the old writing was…almost total indifference? The nice thing about words is that you can always make more, but I don’t really seem to have a use for them once I’m done with them…not that I made great use of this blog before.

Anyway, it looks like everything is back online and I get to remember that, as surely as night turns to day, I once had a Brita filter go moldy.

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One summer vacation, I had a racist dog

When I was a kid, our dog was racist as hell. The only black person she ever encountered was the meter man who would invade her yard once a month to check our water usage. So when we took a road trip many years later, we were going through downtown Atlanta and she was flipping her shit. It was an entire city of meter men.

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“Bizarre dream”

I was looking through an old article ideas file and this was in there for some reason:

Bizarre dream: Portal/Wayne’s World sequel, in which Wayne and Garth get ahold of a Portal gun and try to use it to break into the Loch Ness monster. Garth: “If you’re going to shave…shave inside the Loch Ness Monster!”

I do not remember having this dream, nor do I remember putting it in this file, nor do I know why I thought it would make for an interesting article. I did end up publishing it though, so good going sleeping me, I guess?

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Near death experience

I woke up about an hour ago and when to the bathroom to pee, whereupon I saw a military-grade cockroach crawling around in the tub. Two inches long, two inches more of antennae, fluttering (not flying, thank god) such that it would occasionally blast across the tub at high speeds.

I considered just throwing it outside, which is what I usually do. But then it’d just crawl into someone else’s apartment, right? Unacceptable. So I considered finding away to get it into the dumpster. Nope, all its hottie buddies are probably in there and they’d have a nasty little orgy.

So I grabbed a paper shopping bag, ripped off one of the handles and laid it down in the tub. When the beast crawled in, I grabbed it and dumped it in the toilet. It thrashed for its life, uselessly beating its wings, waving around its antennae as if it could do even a bit of good. But I flushed it, and it’s gone.

And now I am the monster.