I just got to work and the dickholiest of dickholes is sitting here, waiting for me. He looks at me, then down at his watch as if to say, “You’re an entire minute late and don’t think I didn’t notice because I did, and I’m very important, which you would know if you noticed that I am wearing not one, but two Bluetooth earpieces, but you probably didn’t notice because they are imported from Japan and are therefore very small and efficient, which you would know if you could afford small electronics. So let’s get going because I have a lot of Very Important Research to do.”
Part of his strategy is that he regularly emails everyone he comes into contact with who he thinks might be good for networking. He sends these weird mass emails, these “life updates,” which are just like “Hi, just checking in. Took my son fishing off the coast of Malta last week. It was really wonderful to get to spend time with him as he is quickly becoming a man.” Fucking prick. They’re like Christmas letters from the really rich extended family that you don’t really like. Only they’re once a month.
Just to keep in contact.
Brain Ball
I took a Tylenol PM last night for a splitting storm headache, which I only get when the weather is hot and then suddenly cooler and rainy and dark. It feels like a little ball above my right ear grows spiky tentacles, which snake out to wrap around the back of my brain and over the top, as well as under my right eye, where they anchor and suddenly retract. My right eye feels like it will pop out and the entire right side of my head stings, even my hair hurts. Then lightning flashes and the headache ball tightens its tentacles and the pain shoots through my teeth for about as long as the light is in the sky.
This sounds weird but I’ve decided that it’s all due to electrical energy. My mom suffered from epilepsy as a teenager, which simply faded away as she grew up, but she still gets headaches on her right side when the weather changes. She said that before a seizure, she would see swirling white balls of light through the peripheral vision on the right, light that would get bigger and rounder and she’d be looking for its source and then she’d wake up on the floor, tired and achey. All of the brain is connected by electrical impulses and magnetic fields and shit, right? The brain and the spine. So I see no reason why nearby surges of electricity shouldn’t affect me in a totally fucked up, painful, hereditary way. It’s kind of cool.
Two related/un-related things about this:
1. Joan of Arc is suspected to have had some type of aural epilepsy. This condition can produce, pre-seizure, a feeling of calmness and well-being, sense of a presence, bright light, and disembodied voices. She described having all of these symptoms when put on trial for heresy. As sad as that is, how fucking cool is that?
2. When I was a kid, this little old lady lived in a house up the street. She wore thin cotton flowered housedresses and aprons every day. There was a trunk in her basement where she kept an old pair of galoshes from the 30s, charred down both sides and melted to shit. They were the shoes her sister was wearing when lightning struck and killed her. I used to think of her asking to keep the shoes, putting them in that trunk, moving that trunk around with her everywhere she went. I want to be her when I get old, except with my magical electrical brain-ache. When I feel it, I’ll tell all the children to run on home ‘lest they get struck by lightning.
Hello, Athens!
I don’t think that any amount of medication in the world could save me from being horrified by the monster that is Junk Butt. I always knew she was fucking terrible in that way that the worst dark-hearted people have no idea that they’re sociopaths, because they don’t know what a sociopath IS so it means nothing to them, like everything else. Things that have always annoyed me about her are as follows, in case you haven’t been paying attention:
1. Tells you you’re pretty then tells someone else you’re ugly.
2. Believes it’s her duty to stop and chat with everyone in the office at least once a day, so she can tell them that they’re pretty and tell the next person that they’re ugly, actually.
3. Has acknowledged her shittiness and fakery as a well-calculated and carefully produced front, an acceptable front for the rest of the meaningless world to have to deal with.
4. Has a big junk butt and talks about going to the gym all. the. time., but must be lifting weights with her junk butt because you could set your drink on that thing if you needed to tie your shoe.
5. Is just very basically a horrible, nasty person, and is pleased with her own horrible nastiness.
One time Junk Butt sat down in front of my desk and burst into tears. She cried and cried, her face twisting into this strawberry-streaked cream cheese mess, her wet lips smacking and sticking together like slices of raw fish guts. I sat there staring in shaky awe, somehow I knew that she wasn’t crying because her cat died or she stubbed her toe, she was about to confess something to me, and I heard part of my brain telling me to RUN AWAY, but then she made her confession. The night before, the concierge, a sweet old woman from the U.K., had asked if she could have one of the countless pieces of cake set out on a fancy table for some event Junk Butt had coordinated. “Noooo,” Junk Butt had said, probably in that sickening coo she uses on people she deems ultimately unworthy of the use of her Adult Voice (so….everybody), “That cake is only for guests. Sor-ry!” The concierge said she understood, grabbed her umbrella, walked out the door, and into the street where she was hit by a car and killed.
“If only I had given her that caaaake,” Junk Butt wailed. “If only I had given her that cake and chatted with her for just FIVE MORE SECONDS,” she wheezed. I attempted to console her, but she refused to be consoled, kept insisting that it was her fault. As the days passed, of course the accident was The Thing to Talk About among everyone, and eventually, everyone had been visited by a sobbing Junk Butt who just felt “totally responsible” for the death, and before you know it, people are stopping by to hug her and reassure her and stopping her in the hall to tell her what a great person she is and she should never ever feel bad about anything she can’t control and God and the Bible and strength and peace and basically you are a good person and what were we talking about? Oh yes, the dead woman. And you, dear, of course, you poor thing. You’ve been through so much.
I think she picked up on the fact that I wasn’t buying her shit. Maybe that’s because I would walk away abruptly every time she came to my desk and started to sniffle. And she definitely picked up on it when I said “You need to go somewhere else. I can’ t deal with this.” That next week she made a crack about how I can’t handle emotions, “They make her uncomfortable at work!” I wanted to jump on her like a wildcat and tear open her ribcage, eat her ashen heart while she watched, but I just smiled.
That was well over a year ago. On Day 34 of my Medicated Life, I left work early to visit my friend in the hospital. We’d all gotten an email weeks before that he’d fallen and bruised himself, and wouldn’t be at work for a few days. I missed him those few days, thinking he would be back in front of my desk for our daily chat later that week, not knowing he was actually in the ICU with severe cranial contusions. Finally we all got an email stating that he was stable, and that we would be encouraged to visit him so that his brain would be challenged to remember us. He wasn’t sure what year he was in, who people were, what had happened, where he had come from and where he was going. Apparently, you can expect this to happen to you if your brain suddenly and forcefully hits the front of your skull, then the back, then the front again. When people enter your room in the Rehabilitation Ward, you’ll look at them like a deer in the headlights because it’s scary to not remember them, then you’ll decide you don’t care and go back to watching The Simpsons, which you never liked before. The world outside is a total mystery, and the food inside is bad.
So on Day 34, I felt sufficiently able to handle this, and planned to leave work for a visit. Two other people decided to come, and wouldn’t you know, one of them was Junk Butt.
People always talk about the antiseptic smell of hospitals, but I really hate how they always have some kind of really loud ventilation system, like five jet engines attached to the top of the building, howling all day and night. The hallways are throaty and raw, everything is impersonal. My friend’s ward has a library with a piano and several mismatched chairs and loveseats passed down from refurbished offices, a wide window looking down on a patch of the city that seems to be in perpetual tarp-blanketed construction, and a book on the shelf that says, in bold yellow letters, EVERYBODY DIES. I walked by and saw this message, which was supposed to be comforting, but felt a bit like a command. And of course I thought that this was funny because all of my emotions have been packed away neatly in a fire-proof box with sharp corners that pokes me somewhere around my liver.
Junk Butt goes in nervous, talking about how she’s nervous, letting us know that she’ll just not be able to handle it if it’s worst case scenario stuff, like what if his face is still bruised and what if he doesn’t remember me and ohmygoddddd I’m so nervous if I start crying just clear me a path to the door so I can just go be emotional by myself, NO, don’t follow me out, just let me cry somewhere off by myself in a romantically lonely corner of the yawning white hospital. Really, I’ll be okay, because I’m a strong woman.
In reality, when she’s faced with the blankness, the disinterest in interaction, the half-closed eye of an individual submerged in the ocean of competing thoughts and bewildered by the shimmer of memories like bottle rockets, she is thrown so off-guard she’s unable to muster the strength to perform. All she can do is talk about how nice the room is, in her most phony, high-pitched voice. She glances at the stack of magazines on the bedside table and tells someone who is re-learning how to read how super awesome it is to have plenty of stuff to read. She tells him he’s so lucky to be in a place that has such totally super great food, gesturing at the half-eaten cardboard pizza on his tray, which brings to mind that stuff they gave you in grade school with glorified ketchup for sauce. “They’re takin’ good care of ya!” she chirps. He stares back at her and barely nods.
This is when I realize that Junk Butt is only so awful because she’s bricked up behind this wall of fake asscrappery, so high and well-constructed that there’s never going to be a way out. She might as well be dead in there because I think she’s at the point where she’s so scared of the world that she’s done for. The more excited she appears to be about life, the more she’s actually screaming at you that life terrifies her. I felt really bad for her in that moment, but I remembered that this wasn’t her hospital room. I didn’t much care for her starting to do that puppet show she does where she sticks her own hand up her asshole and makes herself look stoic and unafraid and positive, so I moved in and sat down next to him, close to him, which was scary but which I needed to do. It was scary because he had on sweats and these sad hospital-issued socks, scary because a woman at the table in the community area outside his door was bleating for someone to please come open her milk, scary because he looked lonely and locked inside himself. I thought of Bauby’s therapist and my mother helping an old lady with her groceries once when I was seven and how nothing bad is going to happen to you for doing something loving for someone, even when you’re afraid.
“So,” I said. “Did you hear that Pippa Middleton didn’t win that Best Butt award?”
“No,” he said.
“Yeah. It was some other woman. Some other woman named Carol. You wouldn’t think a Carol could have a hot ass, would you?” He agreed that Carol is not a hot-ass-havin’ name. But I showed him some proof.
His therapist came in and asked him if he knew my name. First, he called me Fag Hag, which I thought was hilarious, and so did he. Then, finally, he said my name, my full name, and smiled at me like he was really just faking a head injury, like a sneaky kid. Of course, when asked Junk Butt’s name, he said it was Esther Williams.
(Of course, Junk Butt took this as a compliment and thought it to mean that she was skinny, but I think it’s because she’s very…theatrical.)
Toward the end of our visit, Junk Butt struck up her happy chord again, tweeting about how great it must be to just get to lie in bed all day and not go to work.
As soon as she shut the fuck up, I said “This sucks.” He nodded. “I would be bored here, too. It’s OK to be depressed here.”
“I am depressed,” he said finally. “I just feel sad and they keep wanting me to do these stupid exercises.”
“But you got this awesome window to look out of!!!” Junk Butt chimed in.
“Do you like the pizza?” I asked, gesturing at the wafer of half eaten crap on his plate. His therapist had told us that he kept asking for pizza.
“No, it’s awful!” he replied. “And the cake is bad, too.”
“You ate it all!!!” Junk Butt squeaked like a Disney animated squirrel. He stared at her. I bet he was thinking, My God, when did Esther Williams put on all this weight and stop making any damn sense?
“Well,” I said. “It will be good to get home. You can order an edible pizza and I’ll make you some cupcakes. I promise it will be less depressing, it will get a lot better than this. Just focus on the day you’re going to get to leave here. You ARE going to get to leave here, I swear.”
“I don’t know!” Junk Butt junk-butted in. “I think it’s awesome here…like a hotel! I love hotels!” Apparently she didn’t realize that in hotels there’s not a package of adult diapers on top of your particle-board bureau for all to see, there’s not a cacophony of beeping and loud nurse voices and people moaning for their meds outside your open door at all hours of the day and night.
He looked back at the TV and said, “Amy Winehouse is on.” Amy stumbled around on stage, hollered “Hello Athens!” to the crowd in Belgrade, and we got our things together and left.
Through the mouth-breathing halls, Junk Butt couldn’t stop talking about how sad everything was, how she was just going to have to take a long, long time to get over this. How he would “never be the SAME” and how everything was just awful awful awful. I just kept thinking how it was kind of nice to not feel like that anymore, to have my feelings chemically enclosed in this place that isn’t exactly unreachable, but is definitely not the first place to look for substantial feelings. I was thinking how much better I felt and how able to spread emotions out and look at all of them, turn them over and think about their edges instead of just running to the bathroom to sit in the bottom of the shower and cry about everything. I wonder how much easier it would be to be around Junk Butt if she found some magic pill that allowed her to process her fears instead of turning them into a billboard, or a crown of thorns for herself, with a bunch of pink sparklers attached at the top.
There was a dog tied up to a bike rack outside of the hospital. It looked bored and hot, and I pointed at it. I asked Junk Butt, “What do you think that dog’s thinking?” She blinked at me, like she couldn’t believe I was talking about a stupid dog at this horrible and terribly sad moment in her existence. “I bet he’s thinking something like,” and here I said in my best old Western movie sheriff voice, “Ah sure wish ah had me a taco right ’bout now.” I’m pretty sure Junk Butt was horrified.
Welcome to Whore Island
The Pants got this weird deal through AT&T which allows us to watch Season 5 of Dexter on Showtime On Demand. That’s good enough for me. But, amazingly enough, the deal also includes access to Showtime After Dark On Demand. This is the channel that they put all the sexy silicone soft core shows on. The first of these which I watched was The Devil Wears Nada. It has taught me a lot about women and life and sex that I didn’t already know, but am glad that I know now so that I may protect myself. Now I will share it with you!
So Candy Cane is this young sexy part-Asian girl (all the sexy parts are Asian, at least) who is looking for her big break into the television industry. In the meantime, she’s kept herself busy designing sexy underwear. She hopes to work her way up from the title of lowly assistant to a powerful and bitchy titty magazine publisher, I forget her name, so we’ll call her Bitchy McTitties. Bitchy McTitties is really hard-core and apparently gets pissed off a lot at her current assistant for having lesbian fuckfests with all of the bikini models out by the pool all the time, and getting pussy juice all over her company-issued Blackberry as a result, or something. So the company’s brand is pretty basically falling apart and Bitchy McTitties wants to be sure that Ms. Cane can turn shit around without expecting to get paid very much. It turns out that McTitties hires Candy Cane on the spot because not only does she wear a leather bustier to the interview, she also is totally cool with letting McTitties mash her tits around to make sure she’s assistant material.
Here's Candy, modeling her new creation! Later she has to wear it to work because that's all that's clean.
(I bet you didn’t know this, but the way lesbians have sex is that they roll around and grab each other’s boobs and play with each other’s hair, then one bends the other one over and humps her doggystyle and they both fucking love it. Just don’t think about the mechanics of it, okay? You’ll ruin it.)
So eventually Candy Cane is running crazy trying to keep up with all of her work and only has time to have booby-bouncing softcore sex with her boyfriend like 4 times in a 30 minute span. Also she’s having to keep a lot of things from her boyfriend, like the fact that when McTitties pages her, it’s usually because she needs her to have sex with some hunk that just showed up and won’t fix the pool skimmer until he’s been paid in poon. And sometimes McTitties herself needs a good pubic-bone-to-butthole banging before she can get inspired to tell people what to do. God, the things an assistant has to do! It takes her forever to put on real clothes, so in order to get out the door and into her Lamborghini really fast, Candy has to wear stuff she puts together in the dark, made of motorcycle parts and the straps from a million complicated bras. She runs into the mansion where Twatty Magazine has its offices and photoshoots, like a sexy little deer on 6 inch platform heels, and wouldn’t ya know it: someone is always waiting right there to grab her by both boobs and swing her around and bang her.
(I bet you also didn’t know this, but if someone grabs a girl’s tits, her clothes fall to the floor and her eyes roll back in her head and she has no choice but to let them bone her. This is what I’m saying: walk around with your arms across your chest unless you want to be totally helpless, y’all. And don’t take a job working under [or on top of] McTitties.)
Candy’s life is falling apart. All day and all night spent getting raw-dogged by random people, virtually no time to see her oily boyfriend or have her period. She keeps re-scheduling for both, but McTitties always calls at the last minute and needs her to bring her vagina over real quick because the bikini models have refused to take their bikini tops off for the midnight pool shoot until someone settles the dispute over which one is the best lay by fucking each one of them and then judging them on their performance. Candy! What are you gonna do, girl? You can’t go on like this!
Thankfully, Candy gets a new job, or something. I don’t know for sure because I had to go pee and I didn’t bother pausing the movie. One of the random dudes who banged her at one point apparently figured she had a lot of talent and made her a success, because later he wears a suit and bosses her around for like four minutes. But she stresses that while she totally hated the grueling schedule of working at Twatty, the constant fucking on camera was a total plus and something she was not averted to doing in her new job as a network executive and part-time underwear designer. So they have a sexy board room encounter with the girl who brings them some coffee and all is right with the world. Actually, that might not be how it ends but that’s when I decided to turn it off.
The photographer for Twatty Magazine deserves a shout-out in this synopsis, and I can’t find a single mention of him in the many recaps for this movie that exist online, except for one, written by Showtime, which describes him as “the comic relief.” See, things get really intense a lot of times in movies. (If it was just 100% dying of heart disease in Beaches, nobody would watch it. Instead it’s like 47% dying of heart disease, 26% heartbreaking love triangle, 10% cheating husband, 10% leaving husband, and 7% of big old goofballin’ Bette Midler. Case in point!) If you were just expected to sit there and jerk off for 77 minutes, The Devil Wears Nada wouldn’t become a family favorite because nobody likes to sit around with sore genitals. So you need to jerk off, laugh, jerk off, laugh, repeat. This film artfully handles this necessity via the character of the nameless flamer who does a variety of weird things for God knows what reasons. For instance, he wears the same outfit every day: a purple beret, a long white flowy shirt, sparkly Hammer pants, a blue jacket he borrowed from his friend in the circus, with long glittery tails, and a gigantic floppy red bow tie from the joke shop. He’s a big man, and he flitters about the mansion with both pinkies in the air because, you know, how else would you know he’s gay?
(You can’t be funny in a lesbian butt-humping movie unless you’re gay. And don’t even try to point out that the lesbians are gay–they’re not. They’re working.)
This photographer doesn’t take pictures of anything, he has a hunky assistant who holds the camera and shoots when he says to shoot. He also has this weird stick with a feathery bird stuck to the end of it. He uses this to wave at the bikini models so they know where to look. He also does this thing he learned about on Leno where you ask people really random easy questions about American history and stuff and decide that they’re stupid when they don’t know the answer. Seriously: if you like quiz shows, you will love this movie. He stops photo shoots like ten times to swing his bird stick around and ask one of the girls, “What’s the capital of the United States of America?” Destini or Sugar or Kitty then bites her lower lip, tilts her head, and says “Ummm like, California?” Homogay cracks up and looks directly into the camera, breaking the fourth wall as if to say, “See? They’re just big stupid titty sticks!!! And I’m just a big old funny fag! HAHAHA! Now for some more sex.”
Two in the mornin’ and the party’s still jumpin’ cause my mama ain’t home
I just found out you can text the police in my city. If you see a crime happening, you whip out your SmartPhone and take a picture or a video and text it to this special cop number. Then the cops show up and bust it up and everything is OK again. I thought about doing it the other night at 2 in the morning when the neighbor teenagers were having a Scream Meeting out on the front stoop of their building, beneath the open windows of everyone on the entire street. SO I TOLD THAT BITCH, I SAID, BITCH, YOU AIN’T SHIT. You know, hardass stuff like that. Instead of each of them smoking their own cigarette, they kept lighting single cigarettes and passing them around, like a joint. I think it was just for how cool the passing action looked, and how often they got to use lighters. Anyway, for a second, I got all these really inappropriate thoughts, which I’m going to be honest about, even though they made me feel like an asshole and a Republican and a racist and stuff. I thought, “I wish they’d shut up so I could get some sleep so I can get up and go to work and pay for their Section 8 apartment with my tax money.” OH MY GOD. THAT’S TERRIBLE ISN’T IT??? But that’s what I thought.
And I didn’t tattle on them with a cop text. I just turned on the air conditioner until it drowned them out. Mostly out of guilt and the fear that when I’m old I’ll be an asshole, like for real and not just for fake.
Cupcake Heartbreak 