domino's delivers

Monday, aug. 11, 2008   |   0 comments

Our local Domino’s Pizza used to have the most beautifully depressing table set up on the sidewalk out front, a tipsy, dirty, sunburned table with a breathtaking view of of the gas station. And plumly located just inches away from four-lane exhaust jamboree that is Grand Avenue! There was also a moldy umbrella, which I never ever saw unfurled, and a rusty metal folding chair. One chair.

Marco and I liked to entertain ourselves with talk of going there for our anniversary (four years of dating this September!), how first we’d get into position: Marco in a suit, teetering in the rotten chair, with me hovering at full attention beside him, my gown blowing in the wake of all the cars whizzing past. And then we’d cellphone in our order, giving the address of Domino’s Pizza itself as our delivery destination. As confusion ensued, we’d tell the pizza people inside to look out their front door. And there we’d be, smiling and waving and pointing at our hungry, pizza-shaped mouths.

But all our plans were dashed the day Domino’s ad hoc pizza patio suddenly up and disappeared. Gone! Nevermore!

Marco and I were very glummed by the loss, and would always sigh woefully whenever we walked past. But then one day our love of the insane local Domino’s was renewed anew when we caught sight of this magic in the making:

This kind of beautiful does not come from Corporate. Clearly this is the ambition-child of a power-hungry Branch Manager who spotted his pizzamen lounging during a lull in business and, in a fit of got-time-to-lean-got-time-to-clean-liness, sicced them on this little project.

While the lettering may look like it was done freehand, I can attest that many painstaking manhours (three different pizzamen were painting on it as we passed!) were spent taping off the outline for each letter, “oinch” by “oinch,” and then painting in the negative space. However they opted not to paint in the logo, which if you look close is constructed out of nothing but teeth-torn tape, a testament to the glory of restraint. For, more than anything, our Domino boys in blue know the sublimity of the sub-standard.

bedside anthropology

Wednesday, may. 21, 2008   |   0 comments

Look! Captured! A rare glimpse of Marco’s bedside table:

What we have here:

• Mid-century Scandi-modern tripod lamp from eBay


• Blue-glow LED clock from the future, via the MoMA Store


• Puka-shell necklace from the tropical Hawaiian island of Kuaui


• Generic motel ashtray filled with six screws and a guitar pick


• Jaunty kerchief

Am I living with Schneider from One Day at a Time? A time-traveling gay man? A Dr. Frankenhangten who, as the inimitable Pamie suggests, is “planning on building a surfer”?

sometimes marco makes me mad

Tuesday, apr. 22, 2008   |   0 comments

Things that make me irrationally irritated:

1. When Marco sneezes, which he always does very loudly and repeatedly, and which always reminds me of the allergy problem that he refuses to visit an allergy doctor to see if he can get medicine to fix.

2. The snortling and throat-clicking, also allergy-related.

3. When Marco’s screws the lid on too tight, which obviously means he’s trying to save all the good soda and pickles for HIMSELF.

4. When Marco Early Parks, sometimes parking entire blocks and blocks shy of our destination.

5. When Marco leaves used Q-tips in places other than the trash.

6. When Marco insists on wearing his weird baggy elephant vagina jeans.

7. When Marco says “a little sumpum sumpum” or “check it out, dog.”

8. When Marco doesn’t hear me the first time.

And…that’s it. On the flip side, he almost never snores, and he gets genuinely sad whenever he hears about someone dying even celebrities that noone likes, and he does all our laundry, and he guitar-plays Jesse’s Girl on demand, and if he spots a garage sale sign that’s come unpinned, he stops and carefully rights it. And, best of all, this morning I discovered that his weird baggy elephant vagina pants fit ME to a yay!

bird bath!

Tuesday, apr. 1, 2008   |   0 comments

Easter of last year, Washington Mutual (an evil, evil bank that PS: Ate up $700 of Marco’s dollars in its maddening and always hungry bureaucrazy) ran a “Free Range Checking” campaign (a glorious pun, I know, too bad and sad that they’re awful and wrong and you should never, ever bank there!) They celebrated this campaign as anyone with endless (and surely shadily obtained!) resources does: They plastered their windows with gigantic posters of hypnotically cute baby chickens.

My want-o-meter went deep into the red the very first second I saw that poster, oh! And then, upon closer inspection, I realized that the poster was mounted on the OUTSIDE of the window, and surreptitious picking revealed that it peeled away with unexpected ease! My internal needle soared into white-hotter realms of desire, and I started hatching great, Marco-alarming plans of visiting the bank in the (t)wee(t) hours of the night and robbing it of this, its most precious asset.

But before I could even purchase a ski mask, the campaign winds shifted, and (that rotten bank!) Washington Mutual started systematically removing the chickens from its branches. I came home and dejectedly delivered the news that the chickens had all but disappeared, and Marco clucked sympathetically.

But! The very next morning, luck lightning struck with astounding timeliness when Marco decided to stop at our local branch to deposit a check in the blue, pre-dawn hours before his frighteningly early work begins, and he caught the chicken-removal team just as they were putting up the next round of posters. After much hand-gesturing (the chicken-removal team spoke little English), Marco learned that the beautiful chicken poster had been crumpled into a big sticky ball and shoved into the trash. Sadness! However fears that the poster was balled beyond rescue proved unfounded when the poster softened in the warmth of the back of Marco’s truck and over the course of the day it unfolded all on its own, just like a pretty flower.

And now those gigantic chickens have a new lot in life: Now they must focus their Rasputin stare upon our naked bodies as we scrub our skins and hairs with foaming agents!

magic marco

Tuesday, mar. 25, 2008   |   0 comments

Last week I noticed a strange buzzing sound coming from the bathroom (no, not that sort of buzzing), punctuated by manic bursts of giggle. After about twenty minutes, Marco emerged, bald as an eagle. Apparently he found a pair of long-forgotten clippers in the cabinet and decided to try them out? The first tentative swipes went well, but then he hit one of the corners of his pointy head, thereby jarring the guide loose and leaving the unguarded blade to mow a naked furrow into his lux black hair.

When his regular hairdresser did something similar with his eyebrow a few years back, Marco just used a Sharpie to fill in the missing hair. But this bald patch was far too deep and noticeable to just color in with marker, so there was little else to do but shave off the rest of his hair to match the hole.

The results are pretty startling! His never-before-sunkissed dome is an infinitely lighter shade of pale; next to his dark brown face it looks like one of those swimcaps ladies who swim sidestroke wear. The bristles are so strong and so sharp, he can hang a towel from them, and it takes all your strength to remove it from his head's velcro grip. And though he insists he looks like a pre-cancerous Yul Brynner, I think, with his exaggerated features now untempered with the balance hair provides, he just looks like a gigantic mouth on a neck. Kiss me, my gigantic mouth on a neck!