AsCo

I just ate a rushed dinner inside my car. It is officially autumn but someone forgot to tell Thursday since it feels like summer. Being a soup aficionado, I opted to get black bean soup, even though it was 90 degrees inside my car. While I ate, I listened to a news report about new technologies that are being retooled to help prevent/control oil spills. As I spooned into my slick soup, I thought about oil. I pictured it coating all the meaty, rounded edges of my organs, my throat, my esophagus and settling into my stomach like a fresh coat of paint. I thought about pelicans and ducks smothered in black ooze, fish and sea anemones suffocated mid movement. And for the first time in my entire life, I lost my appetite for soup. THANKS BP/EXXON and for some reason DICK CHENEY.

A few nights ago I must have done something to my neck while I was sleeping. If the lingering pain I have been experiencing for about three days now is any indication, I was competing in an aerobics marathon. I have a blurry memory of seeing a movie in the 80s wherein the denouement was an aerobics "competition" and whomever dropped from utter exhaustion first, lost. Why was this made into a movie? Aerobics should not be a competition. Rather, we as a species should recognize it for what it is: pure, unadulterated hell. Anyway, yeah, my neck is hurting. When I was driving to work this morning I had to look before changing lanes (what a novel concept) and I swear at one point I saw stars. Or little yellow birds encircling my head as lay back in my seat, X's covering my eyes. Each time I go to move my body, the right part of my neck stiffens and I must look like a weirdo. I have this urge to bow while saying hello, as if this is an action made necessary by neck pain, which it isn't. I just feel like bowing everytime the muscles in my neck tighten.If this doesn't go away soon, I suppose I'll have to get a deep tissue massage. It's either that or I'm busting out my guillotine and goodbye, cruel world.

I haven't really been feeling myself lately, mostly due to the fact that nothing is happening. Most of me is okay with nothing happening but sometimes, I just want something to happen. As Radiohead once said:

I wish it was the 60s, I wish I could be happy
I wish, I wish, I wish that something would happen...

I don't really wish it was the 60s. The 60s were a veritable powder keg of societal sea change. As exciting and romanticized as people are about the 60s, they forget about all the war and racism and sexism. I think if I lived in a time when the president was killed along with like four other prominent speakers and leaders, I may, again, have to bust out the guillotine.

I am digressing all over the place. I just wanted to write a little. I'm going to write more in earnest in the coming month. That is going to be attributed to me not spending extra money. I've been out of control so I am going to partake in what I  have decided to call Ascetic October (Asco). I figure I'll have plenty of time to write then. I'm defining extra money as anything that I have recently spent on the following:

clothing
makeup
nailpolish
dvds

I figure I could save roughly 3.2 million dollars by cutting those things alone. Also, seeing as I have lost 20 pounds, I don't need to buy any more clothes since I fit into my skinny clothes once again. Well, skinnier clothes. Plus I have plenty of belts to tighten anything that is loose fitting. Yeah, that should get me through. Does anyone think this will work? For the sake of all the money I spent printing up Asco t-shirts, I shirley hope so.