Krewe and unusual punishment

Why don't they make more holidays like Mardi Gras?

Holidays where people drink on the street and have parades, where cheap shiny beads are currency enough, for just one day, to see bare boobs, where overindulgence in food, strong drink, and the dipping of the sausage are the rule of the day. Just don't expect me to do that whole "40 days of fasting and giving up shit that tastes good and feels good" thing, 'cause that ain't in the contract.

I do my part to make things as festive as possible around the office. We bought a big-ass case of beads for the Bone Rollers, and let's face it - we didn't play enough gigs to toss away that many strings of beads. So I always have a shitload of beads to bring to work every year. I also have a good number of bead strings that already hang in my office, so I just hang those on the doorknob when it gets to be Fat Tuesday. Since the beads I bring in are little dice, I delight in telling people they're intended to be ass beads, then watching the expressions that travel across their face as they contemplate all those little sharp corners and some serious carnage of a tender anus. Would they hurt worse going in or coming out? And why is Katy so handy with the things that go up the ass? Oh, I've seen all the looks. It just never gets old.

I give myself beads to wear, because no one has yet offered me beads for a look at my gravity bags, and then I walk around dispensing the other dozens I've brought with me. Today I even gave away all the beads I was wearing, but not before I captured my dementia with incontrovertible photographic evidence.


You know I've finally lost it when you can see the whites of my eyes through those lenses.

I haven't started drinking yet, to be perfectly honest. It's still about a half hour too early. No, really - my body has this magical 8:00 pm drinking time, and anything before then will result in a coma-like nap that begins not long after the empty glass is set down. My rules are to not drink much, and to never start before 8:00 pm, unless I want to pass out early. Then pass me a waterglass and a bottle of cheap wine.

And the whole sausage dipping thing? Well, not so much today, m'kay? Can't overindulge in what ain't there for the dippin'. In fact, it's best I not think about the whole sausage thing. Somebody out there, please overindulge in the sausage for me. I won't feel better but you probably will.

But that does leave us with overindulgence in edible goods, and I have more than made Fat Tuesday my bitch in that regard. For lunch, I ate all but one slice of a pizza myself (okay, it was a small pizza, but it was a pan pizza). Now I feel like somebody parked a tractor in my belly. Most people would just leave it alone at that, but not me! I had to, simply had to, go buy a dozen paczki from the local donut shop.

Now, it has come to my attention that not everyone knows what a paczki is (and I know I will take some shit for this, as paczki is technically the plural, and the singular is paczek, but you'll just have to suck it up as I will use paczki as both singular and plural). A paczki (prounounced POONCH-key) is a donut on steroids that has roughly one million calories per bite and is made with too many eggs and too much sugar for it to not be considered a controlled substance. It's a traditional Polish treat for Mardi Gras, as a final overdose of indulgence before Lent takes away all the fuckin' fun and replaces it with fish sticks and tomato soup and guilt.

Yes, I took a paczki picture:



I have to confess, though...I couldn't even finish one. You have to understand how much I love well-made cream-filled paczki. We're talkin' serious love, the kind where I could hold the paczki forever, slip my tongue in the filling sphincter and swirl until every last drop of creamy decadance is in my mouth or on my face, and I'm so close to complete overload from the nearly lethal dose of sugar that I just writhe and twitch on the floor for an hour afterward. But I got down to the last four or five bites of the paczki, and realized that one more bite would cause my tastebuds to jump ship from the overwhelming sweetness of it.

Not that it didn't occur to me to do so, but I think I will refrain from showing you a picture of myself in after-paczki state; you might see an image of me collapsed on the floor with powder all over my face and get the wrong idea. No, my friends, the paczki is much more sinister than chemical powdered substances. It's a good thing they're only available once a year.

I hope your Mardi Gras celebrations are filled with good food, company, drink, and sausage.