Hey, you know that audition I was bitching about a while back? (For those who don't: I was bitching about an audition a while back. Yes, I could go find the permalink and then shove it in here, but frankly, fuck it.) Well, I got the part. Woo woo! And this is the same theater I worked with earlier this year: the one that coughs up weekly paychecks. Aaaand, as an extra bonus, the wife has also been cast in it (she actually has the much bigger part; she is in effect the lead). We've only ever been in one show before; we played brother and sister. In this show, however, just to mix things up, we play . . . brother and sister. We have been of course bombarded with Freud jokes, and I have so far been able to resist asking anyone, "Hey, have you actually read Freud? I want to fuck my mother, not my wife." Some people.

We start rehearsing in a couple of weeks, so I'm hard pressed to pack my rapidly dwindling slack into as much free time as possible between now and then. I'm considering entering some sort of induced coma to ensure that I do as little as humanly possible in the meantime, like chores, or breathing under my own power.

I also just really need to shut down my brain for a while, for it has begun doing alarming things. At work in particular, which has been spectacularly awful the past couple weeks, and with a massive weekend of presentations coming up in October, the awful killing pressure on my brainpan is not likely to dissipate. Here's today's terrible example of incipient madness:

I had occasion to write the words "cries" and "pines" in written conversation earlier (and I was making a joke, not composing odes to my Goth lifestyle, thank you), and I noticed their assonance, and certain similarites, and then sort of portmanteaued the two into the neologism "crines," which is pretty dreadful enough. I cooed the word a few times, testing it out: "criiiiiines!" but it sounded crappy no matter what I did with it, so I let it die. I went back to the original two words and did a kind of Lowest Common Denominator thing on its letters, determining the basic building blocks of the words: CRIEPNS.

Then, (and, sadly enough I do shit like this all the time) I started trying to make new words out of the letters mentally. PINCERS was easy. I don't think CRISPEN is a word, but it ought to be ("Crispen up these fries! Use the pincers!"). Then I saw the "duh" word: PRINCES.

And that's when the horrible thing happened, which I'm going to share with you, and you're going to hate me. Sorry!

I immediately got earfucked by the Spin Doctors song "Two Princes." And it's been with me ever since.

Two! Princes!
Kneel before you glub glub!
Now what's that ham in a
Some thing! Nubba nubba nuh
Blop blop! So here I go with a
Ding bat! . . .etc.

It's somehow even worse when you can't remember the fucking words. I don't know why, but it is. But if you get stuck with this song, take comfort in the fact that "Ben Franklin" backwards is "Nilk Narf Neb." Don't you feel better?

Maybe a little. NILK NARF NEB! That's got a nice mouthfeel.

I'm going to get through this.