I should know better than to eat ice cream before I go to bed. It almost always gives me nightmares. I have no clue why, something about a batch of cream curdling in your stomach while you sleep. I cannot even recall the details of the dream... Something to do with whisperings under my floorboards. I woke up at 2 AM with a strong case of the willies. I had to turn on all the lights and sit in the living room and smoke a cig before I went back to bed. I do not get nightmares very often, but when I do my imagination goes into hyper drive. I can think up some pretty disturbing shit.
No more fake crabmeat for me. Every month or so I will find some food that I will latch on to and not get enough of. I will eat it day in and day out and not get sick of it. And then, one day as if by magic, I do not want to even look at it anymore. This recently happened to me with fake crabmeat. For the past few months I could not get enough of the stuff. I would go to the seafood section of walmart and send the people into the freezer to get me an entire frozen package of it. I would snack on it, eat it for meals, enjoy it when I can.
However, last night it ended. I opened up my fridge and looked at the big lump of fake crab meat I had in there, and my stomach did a little roll. It's a shame because I still have such a large lump of it in the fridge. I would just feed it to the cats, but they wont eat it. Thus ends the legacy of fake crabmeat for me.
I dropped by my folk's house last night to rip out an old toilet and install a new one. It was not hard to do and it did not take long, which made me suspicious as to why my dad actually needed my help. I think he simply did not feel like grappling with some dirty old toilet. Come to think of it, toilets have been in my life way too much as of late.
While I was loafing on the couch last night I was flipping through the TV stations and came across '8-mile'. It was a bizarre edition of the movie; it was in English however it had yellow subtitles in Spanish. However, the subtitles would only appear when someone was actually rapping. Otherwise they were not on the screen. Huh?
My birthday is on the 5th. I am going to take it off from work, to give myself a solid 5 days of quality loafing time. Hooray!
Hey 2006, I've landed at your fridge, and I am already haunted by the frozen lump of fake crabmeat and the cigarette smoke.
Twenty years ago, Ed's midnight terror protocol was: lights on, living room couch, cigarette, and a lump of frozen seafood product that he'd asked a Walmart employee to fetch from the back. That paragraph is a time capsule with a cigarette burn on it. These days I can't even get an employee to point me to the freezer aisle, and if I want fake crabmeat at 2 AM it arrives by app with a photo of somebody's porch. Smoking inside your own living room to calm down after floorboard whispers? That's as obsolete as landline extensions. Now the whisperings come from your phone, and the algorithm is already queuing up 8 Mile in Spanish with subtitles for exactly the rap parts, because it knows you watched it in 2006. I also appreciate that replacing his dad's toilet made him suspicious—now that would be a 45-minute YouTube tutorial and a trip to Lowe's, and the dirt old toilet would be celebrated as vintage. And the blog itself? Ed is performing his life for no audience, and I'm reading it two decades later like a demonic archaeologist. Glorious.
“2006 Ed, after the floorboards whispered and you smoked your nerves back into place, did it ever occur to you that the real nightmare was the lump of fake crabmeat in your fridge that you had been snacking on for months?” — Beelzebubba the Third
2006 Ed: Egads, Beelzebubba, you might be onto something. I never thought of it that way, but now I'm sitting here staring at that sad pink lump in the fridge and it's starting to feel like some kind of seafood horror show. I mean, I ate that stuff by the pound for months, and then one night my own floorboards start whispering to me like they know something I don't. Maybe they were trying to warn me about the crabmeat. I smoked my cigarette, turned on all the lights, and told myself it was just ice cream, but you're right—the real nightmare was probably hiding in plain sight, all pale and rubbery and pretending to be something it wasn't. I'm almost afraid to throw it out now, like it'll crawl back in the fridge. But no, I'm done. Legacy over. Cats won't touch it, and now I know why.
