June 11 1998, Thursday

I

definitely had a tussin hangover this morning, that sort of frayed quality in the peripheral nerves that resembles the feeling you get after staying up all night, taking a short nap, and then having to get up and do something. I slipped off to UVA's Cocke Hall to do some computer work, some of it for which I am even to be payed!

I

t was grey dreary day, and sometimes it even showered. I went back to Jessika and Deya's place in the early evening and found no one there except the cat Nicholas and the rat Francis. Nicholas is fairly happy with the new place; he even likes to hang out and watch the big game with the fratty boys across the hall on occasion.

While I was watching teevee Deya came home from somewhere; she hasn't been working at all this week because her gardening job requires dry conditions. We watched a movie together, a Steven King thing called Thinner. It was a sort of formula horror flick about a fat lawyer who, while being given oral sex by his annoying wife, doesn't watch the road and accidentally hits an old gypsy woman. The old woman's even older father is angered when the lawyer's friends pull the strings necessary to get the lawyer off the hook. After the trial the old man curses the lawyer to lose weight at an alarming rate. The only way out is to convince the old gypsy to revoke the curse, and therein lies most of the drama and craziness. The special effects and rendering of the weight loss were all pretty impressive, though the humour tended toward the adolescent. Not one of the characters in the movie was really very much of a good guy (how very 90s!), and it could be argued that the gypsies were sterotyped in the same old way that led to their gassing in the Holocaust. Still, I liked the movie, even if Deya didn't.

I

n the late evening I returned to Cocke Hall for yet more anti-social computer-assisted monkey business. I hadn't had a bath since Monday and I've been sleeping in my clothes. I occasionally caught whiffs of myself and wasn't at all pleased, especially in this land of the well-scrubbed. One of these well-scrubbed people, a boy, was chatting up another well-scrubbed person, a girl, while she clicked and pecked at her computer. They were having the most completely inane conversation you can imagine. He was trying to come across as an intellectual party-boy, and she was making all the right conversational grunts necessary to keep him going and convince him he was being impressive. Among the things he said were:

"Maybe if you just keep on drinking you'll become more like yourself again."

"They once did an experiment in a hospital room where they put this thing down that could only be read by someone near the ceiling - when they knew someone was going to have a near death experience - and when the guy came to, he could remember what was written on it! But science doesn't want to believe this stuff."

I

  returned to the Wertland Mansion, but no one was there. So I just sat in my car drinking vodka. I didn't have any tea, so I couldn't make myself vodkatea. Straight vodka really isn't so bad, and the early stages of becoming drunk can make almost any situation pleasant.