Dafydd's Birdhole and the black hole of doom

Got to love the place, really. Nearly a year since I decided that I couldn't deal with Dafydd any longer, and I'm back there for a short period of time.

Sitting down where grumpy Michael used to preside: my cell-mates are a pregnant woman who, to my eyes, looks like she's just about to give birth at her desk, and some guy who apparently used to be in a rock band. I'm sure he's happier now humping printers around the building than living a carefree life eating junk food out the back of a tour van, surrounded by pretty young things and piles of beer and weed.

It's cold as cold shit at the moment. Excuse the simile. I just can't think of anything to describe it. It's like the Proctor and Gamble building up in Toronto that, when I was there, seems to generate the cold for the rest of the universe.

Had a strange dream about the nest of vipers' dress closet last night. But it led to the realization that we might actually be harboring a low-gravity black hole right here in the house.

Stick with me here ... OK - there's no more room for more clothes as far as I can tell. But she keeps buying them and putting them in there (still with tags on, of course - because there's absolutely no intention of actually wearing them, is there?). So, the density of the matter is going up and up and up and their own mass is causing them to collapse in on themselves (thereby creating the extra space that I didn't think was there).

My theory is that the whole mass is slowly starting to rotate and collapse in on itself, dragging in other items of stuff around the house into it. The door was open a crack this morning, and the cat went in there and must have come out again, because some mammal other than myself and presumably the nest of vipers deposited quite a meaty shit in the litter box shortly afterwards.

So, we haven't hit the point of an event horizon quite yet. But I definitely think I'm onto something here.

So, do you prefer it here then?

I get this question ALL the time. And after 12 years living in the United States which I honestly see as home, I still don't know how to answer it.

If you say 'no', then you're some Johnny Foreigner who is just here to milk the land.

If you say 'yes', then there's a satisfaction in the questionner's eyes that you've given up the pining (allbeit infrequent) for the tiny inexplicable things from the "old country" and submitted to a new life in the land of the free.

I got it today with Mr. Arsecrack who turned up to do what Mr. Pipes was supposed to do yesterday but didn't.

Don't get me wrong Mr. Arsecrack (who, after very few questions I learned had been out of Pennsylvania just once since he was born -- to Florida); I'm very happy to be here and am proud to see this as my home - and I feel very at home 99% of the time. But this isn't a yes/no question.

It's the other 1% of the time that I'm made to feel like an outsider because I speak differently from the locals. If I were obviously foreign (Russian, Polish, Bulgarian, Chinese for example) - I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be asked. It's the fact that I'm obviously a native English speaker and obviously not originally from here. That's what causes "the question" to be asked.

Is it just a way of saying "tell me more about yourself because I don't really know what else to ask?" or does it really mean "well, you've obviously been here long enough and had the chance to fuck off back to wherever you came from if you didn't like it, so would you just let me know that it's awesome here and crap wherever you came from please? So I, like, don't have to go there and find out for myself."

Oh, I don't know. Maybe some suggestions in the comments might help me out here?