Okay, first - what do you call Monica Lewinsky with a runny nose?

Full.

Thanks, folks...don't forget to take care of your bartenders and waitresses, they're working hard.

Anyway...I walked home for lunch Monday, then I walked back. It's not a bad little stroll, only six blocks or so, and when the temperature is reasonable it's very pleasant. I see a regular cast of characters, too. The Suit Pack. The Incredibly Large Shopping Women. The Hopelessly Lost Tourist.

Every day, sitting at the outside table of the deli on the first floor of my building, there's this very sexy woman - high heels, short skirts, miles of leg, black hair pulled back severely. I love to make up little stories about the people I see (an old habit) and I definitely believe this woman leads a happy life of spankings and strap-ons.

I also saw the crazy woman who lives next door to James. He's never seen her, and I don't think anyone else has, either. She is the Snuffalupagus to my Big Bird. I swear to you, this woman has a huge ass, ridiculously messy Buckwheat-style hair...and I saw her sitting on a couch in the lobby once, calmly chatting with the security guard.

And she was wearing a tutu.

A tutu!

She has this big, gold-foil thing hanging on her door, right next to James'. It's some sort of decoration, I assume. Not a door decoration, though.

I walked with Sonya back down Main Street until she got to the Falls Building, where she works. As we passed the many little alcoves and hidey-holes near our building I said, "there really is nothing like the smell of human urine to wake you up, is there? It really gets your attention."

Running from each of these abandoned doorways and hollow spots and such was an identical dried-up, faintly stinking stream, sticky underfoot.

The homeless people around my building are pretty much harmless - the local homeless recognize the people who live in the area and leave us alone. The only ones who panhandle me are from other parts of town or are so mentally deficient they can't remember who has rebuffed them before and who hasn't. Fingerless/Toothless Man is one of these - not a tooth in his head, not a finger on his hands. I don't know what happened to all those important parts, but he's out of them. Every time he sees me he asks for money. He's not very threatening, though, 'cause he can't grab you.

Or bite you.

The last time I saw him he was trying to sell copies of the Memphis Flyer to tourists. It was pretty funny, him gibbering like a monkey and waving a copy of the Flyer between his stumps, this poor family from Scranton or Boise cowering in front of the crazy man.

It's really funny when you know that the Flyer is a free paper.

Then there's Little Weightlifting Guy - he lives in the alley behind my building, I think, and I always see him in the morning, lifting pieces of garbage or shadowboxing. He's probably about sixty, too, but he's keeping in shape.

I caught him bathing in the alley one morning when I left for work. Not a recommended sight that early in the day.

There's Crazy Baldheaded Woman, too. She pulls her hair out in great ghastly gobbets (Sonya saw her do this) and holds loud, animated conversations with people who are not there. I haven't seen her since before I went on vaction, though - the men with the butterfly nets may have snatched her off the streets.

Actually, the area around my building is very popular with the homeless in general. They love to sleep on the benches that line the Mall between Adams and Jefferson, and the really cool ones sleep near the fountains across Main Street from city hall. They wash their clothes in the fountains and drape them here and there, giving that particular section of the mall a Hobo Village kind of feel. It's nice.

James and Jen came down Friday night - we had a nice time. We watched Space Ghost, swilled beer and talked about the current Tailgate scandal. Then we spread out all over the living room and watched one of the Cinemax "Friday After Dark" movies. If you're unfamiliar with the genre they're also known as "erotic thrillers" and "softcore porn." Basically, good-lookin' folks get naked and there's a lot of simulated sex. The four of us do plenty of late-night channel surfing, especially on the weekend, and we've seen plenty of these movies. Usually we'll call it before we get to Cinemax ("Ass on Cinemax!" or "Tits up against the screen on Cinemax 2!" or "Shannon Tweed goin' to town on channel 72!") and we did Friday night. Then, though, a strange thing happened...

We actually watched the movie. I think the opening credits drew us in - scenes of raunchy sex intercut with shots of a Navy destroyer, an aircraft carrier and a submarine. I still don't understand it - there was no military anything anywhere in the movie. It was about this novelist who tells a radio show host about her new novel, which is apparently about a novelist who's something of a peeping tom. It was horrid, but there were a lot of naked people in it. I watched the whole thing. I still don't know why.

As for Sunday...

Saints win! Saints win!

Monday night I dreamed that Sonya had gotten a tattoo gun. God knows why. We were on vacation and she wanted to give me a tattoo. For some reason, the vacation required lots of travel back and forth through West Memphis and staying in stranger's houses. I think Sonya wanted to do some weird tribal/zen type tattoo on the back of my right hand, but she wanted to do it a little bit at a time. After the first session the back of my right hand was covered with red and blue tattoo dots. Sonya said she'd "pull them together later." I was terrified. What if I went on a job interview? People would think I was an ex-con. My mother and grandmother both had a fit.

I woke up around four this morning, gasping for air, incredibly relieved that it was just a dream and twisting and turning my right hand in the dimness, trying to make sure I didn't have a new tattoo.

I had two screwdrivers that night and slept like shit, by the way.

I wrote the first part of this entry on Monday, the second part yesterday, and this part today (Wednesday). It's a mega-entry!

Here's a quick funny story for you. The first summer Sonya and I were married I worked at Arby's. The first few weeks I didn't understand that you could steal food indiscriminately so I would come home famished, happy to have whatever Sonya had cooked up.

One morning I was getting up to go work the lunch shift. On the way out Sonya told me, "today I'll cook beans!"

I was pleased. I have always loved a big plate of pinto beans.

So I come home that afternoon, greasy, footsore and irritable. And hungry. Sonya bought me a bowl of beans. Our friends Chris and Al were living with us at the time, and she gave them some beans too.

What exactly do beans turn into when they've been burned? Coal? Tar? Stone? I don't know exactly what burned beans become, but that's what I had a bowl full of.

(Realize my new bride was only nineteen and had never actually cooked beans before. She has made many lovely pots o' beans since then.)

Al and Chris, god love them, both managed to eat an entire bowl of the stuff. I don't know how. I dumped mine out and ate a sandwich.

I thought Sonya would kill me, she was so mad.

Whenever Sonya's really searching for ammunition she'll bring up the bean non-eating episode.

"You didn't even try to eat them!" she'll say.

It's true, but when the surface of the bowl is obscured with a layer of ash broken up by the occasional carbonized bean you don't have to eat it. You just know it may not be too tasty.

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