Tofu Hut likes hippos

I was in the waiting room last winter at the Jiffy Lube on Rt. 40 waiting while they flushed the entire contents of my car's lube system. I hadn't changed the oil since Meg and I drove to South Dakota and that is apparently not very healthy for the car (it had been a good 10,000 miles since). And while I was waiting to pony up $150 for them to restore my system back to normalcy I had picked up a Newsweek and picked through it.

That's where I first read about Tofu Hut. The whole MP3 blog thing, or blog thing in general, was a mystery to me but a chance to hear something I might not otherwise hear or find a band that would become the next object of obsession sounded pretty good.

Tofu Hut seems to have gone through some changes in the last year; make of it what you will. The Blogroll on it remains the most extensive list of MP3 blogs that I've seen and it is great picking through the sites when you've got time to kill or a couple of free useless gigabytes of memory on your computer to fill up (of which I don't) with all manner of music (or sometimes noise).

In January's post (and at this point in time it remains the most recent post) Tofu Hut links The Caretaker's Diary which chronicles the care of a baby hippo (Owen) torn from it's mother in the 2004 tsunami. Owen was paired with a giant 100-some-odd-year-old tortoise (Mzee) and the two have actually bonded. The chronology on the site can make the story a little difficult to follow at first so here's a link to the first entries. The actual first entry is second from the bottom of the page and starts:

Today is a day that I will never forget. I was at the hospital getting treatment when my phone rang. Only my boss Sabine Baer would call me during the holiday. I knew it must be important.

'Stephen, we have to rescue a baby hippo, can you come?'

Once you get reading it's hard to stop and then you'll figure out the chronology thing on your own because you'll want to know what comes next. Great story.

3

She got out of the shower and looked through her closet for the right clothes to wear. Her nice button down blouse and a pair of slacks. On the floor of her closet were fourteen pairs of shoes to choose from and she chose her black leather ones with the hard soles. She never liked belts and despised tucking her shirt in but she could do it today. She placed the pin through the third hole easily and thought, “As it should be”. She sat down on the bed next to him and tightened the laces on her shoes and tied them. When she stood up to look in the mirror again he woke up and rolled over and looked at her from behind. She looked better put together than he’d seen her in some time and he told her she looked good. She just looked over her shoulder at him and then back to the mirror.

In the other room she grabbed her make-up bag and brought it back to the mirror and sat down on the floor. A little bit of powder on the cheeks with a brush and some mascara was all she ever had the patience to bother with and she knew that she didn’t need more. She zipped the bag shut and stood up and straightened the wrinkles in her pants on her hips and opened her eyes wide three times to keep the mascara on her eyelashes from sticking. He was still watching as she grabbed her coat and simply said goodbye to him. He said goodbye as she walked out the bedroom door and then listened for the door downstairs to shut.

In the car she pulled out a piece of gum and pressed fast-forward on the tape deck until she found Led Zeppelin’s “D’yer Maker” and then pulled out of the parking space and onto the road. Even though she had the urge to light a cigarette she didn’t. She had quit smoking four days ago and she was just starting to feel good about it. This morning the sun was rising as she drove down the highway and she began to think about how far she’d come and how she had this interview in the bag before they’d even met her. This much she was sure of. This was going to be the job to end all Einstein Bros Bagels jobs, all ice cream stands at the mall where men looked down her shirt when she bent over to scoop their Rocky Road. In this job she would help people and she would make a difference, similar to the difference her own counselors in rehab made in her life. She would make a difference and she would matter.

O. D. B.

My favorite, and only, nephew was born this last weekend. An amazing little guy.

2

While he was still asleep she got ready to shower and looked in the mirror. What was he thinking? She opened up the medicine cabinet and pulled out the bottle of Phentermine HCl and took one pill. There was a doctor that no one knew about, especially not him, who worked north of the city and who didn’t ask any questions. She’d told him it was her first time and that she was just curious and that she’d thought it was better than ordering it over the internet. And it seemed like the doctor believed her or at least didn’t care.

When she had gotten out of rehab after trying to overdose her parents took her to renew her license. She couldn’t believe how much weight she’d gained on the medications they put her on and so she was quick to stop taking them. In the hotel where she and her parents were staying she made a phone call to her boyfriend when her family stepped out to get some food from the restaurant downstairs. He loved her, he told her, and he’d missed her he said. While she felt as though she had really changed while inside and done away with her addiction (they called it) she needed to see him. An hour later and the hotel phone rang and she answered it and told him she’d be right down.

Her parents got worried and went down to find her, in the parking lot, arguing with her boyfriend. When her parents intervened he became even more agitated and told them it wasn’t any of their business. He didn’t leave until they told him they were going to call the police, which he didn’t want (and secretly neither did they, hadn’t they been through enough?). On the way back up to the room in the elevator they told her she wasn’t ever to see him again. It didn’t matter to her what they said. She’d told him the same thing. He wasn’t happy to find out that she wanted nothing to do with him and that she’d really only been using him for the heroin that he gave her but sold to everyone else. She’d gone down to tell him she’d changed, that she had realized she was killing herself all along, and that now she was different. That much she was sure of.

1

Hope? What good is hope anyway? Hope implies perspective, implies the ability to look forward and want or expect something better, something different and good. All hope had ever gotten her was more trouble, more hurt. Expectations of something better only led to disappointment. She hoped her father and mother wanted her but every time she ever looked to them they chastised her or ignored her. She was sure, after time, that that was all she would ever get from them.

She sat on the edge of the bed and looked at him while he slept and then looked back to the floor and remembered when she was 9 years old and was in the garage of the home in Kentucky. She had been jumping rope when she noticed something out of the corner of her eye moving alongside the wall and behind the boxes. She put the rope down (she could remember it clear as day) and walked over to the boxes and moved them slowly. It was unreal, unbelievable almost, what she saw. She ran into the house and in the kitchen her mother was washing dishes. When she told her mother she’d found a snake in the garage behind the boxes her mother turned from the sink, slapped her across the face, and called her a liar. It wasn’t until her father came home later and found her in her room crying that the snake was found and killed. Her father just looked at her mother and then went to the cabinet to fix himself a drink. When she didn’t come to the dinner table her father told her mother to go talk to her.

“What good would that do, she only listens to you anyways,” her mother said and leered at him as though she and her father enjoyed some secret bond that no one else in the world was ever privy to and that she couldn’t help but hate.

“I’m just living for today,” she said to herself when she turned sixteen. Just then all she knew was that that night she was going to be with friends who, if they knew her, liked her anyways because at least she was entertaining. Nobody could ignore her when she was laughing, that was one thing she was keenly aware of. So she put on her laugh as though it were part of an elaborate costume and broke out the liquor and told her friends to roll a joint. She was going to get fucked up that night and at least for the time she wouldn’t have to think, not about tomorrow anyways. One year later her parents went out of town and her sister came home to find her lying on the bathroom floor vomiting out the side of her mouth. Too many pills on purpose and you go to sleep, she’d heard, only she hadn’t calculated that her sister would come home early and find her. “What a bunch of dumbasses,” she thought, “now you find me?” when she woke up in the hospital.

what a trip

only 2 more weeks as our neighbor...and it's good that everyone is getting the guilt trip that i got for the past 6 months

Criminal

I know I've mentioned this site at least once before (baltimore crime) but if you haven't checked it out you should. The woman who runs this site has a good thing going. The comments by the people who visit are almost as interesting to read as the stories themselves. Check it out. Death's Cybrarian is the woman who runs it.

Happy Bday Steve-O

What'd I do?

The local Fox channel tonight reported that 1/3 of the arrests made in Baltimore City are not prosecuted due to lack of evidence. While this is clearly a one sided, possibly paid for, Q&A with a 41st District delegate, the data is good.

This City Paper short from September '05 gives a little more newsy discussion on it.

And if it's still difficult to believe, this article adressing Baltimore's highest States Attorney's (the person in charge of the people prosecuting criminals) feelings on the issue should prove interesting.

When Fox 45 puts the story up on their website I'll link to the list of things the city police department has decided to change about it's tactics, including handing out ACLU cards in neighborhoods where this is occuring so that communities know who to contact when they are picked up for no reason whatsoever.

On Taxes

'There was nothing I could say, except the one unutterable fact that it wasn't true.

"And if you think I didn't have my share of suffering--look here, when I went to give up that flat and saw that damn box of dog biscuits sitting there on the sideboard I sat down and cried like a baby. By God it was awful---"

I couldn't forgive him or like him but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy---they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made. . .

I shook hands with him; it seemed silly not to, for I felt suddenly as though I were talking to a child.'
--The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

My Stay in the Hotel California

"It looks like the Master completed her report with her recommendations and the Judge hasn't reviewed it yet."

"Why not?"

"I don't know, let me look at your case file, just one minute. . . . . .It looks like it never got delivered. I'll deliver it to the Judge today."


And in the master's chambers
They gathered for the feast
They stab it with their steely knives
But they just can't kill the beast
Last thing I remember
I was running for the door
I had to find the passage back to the place I was before
Relax said the nightman
We are programed to recieve
You can check out any time you like
But you can never leave. . .