March 5, 2016 · 4:37 pm

Sparkly Batmans

what the fuck am I going to do with one avocado?

Last night I felt like shit, like I’d been dragging through the day carrying my brain under my arm, spilling crap all over it. Like I’d been driving a truck for ten days straight with no sleep, like I’d been actually wrapped around the wheels of the truck. I felt like I’d worked for days and days digging a foundation for a children’s hospital with a garden spade. I felt like I’d been swung by my ankles and beaten against a wall until I went limp and all my bones were broken. I was really fucking tired. All I wanted was a glass of wine and a scalding hot soak in the tub and maybe some cartoons, then I wanted to pass out and wake up 14 hours later.  I feel like that sounds like something a fancy bitch would do but really I just like how wine dulls the light in my brain and makes me feel like I can sleep. It’s like it cuts the power to the television up there in my head that someone’s always watching, keeping me awake. It’s like being slowly submerged, which is even better when you’re actually submerged.

We had no wine except this awful $5 handle of shitty white that God knows who brought to a party  once. I sat there staring at it, contemplating whether the shattering headache the next day would be worth not having to leave the house again. Fuck, if I ever find out who brought that shit to my house and left it like a turd in the middle of a buffet, I’ll kill them. I swear to God.

I contemplated gin and tonic or vodka or any of the other myriad liquors on the shelf but decided that really, it had to be red. Also it probably means you’re not a drunk when you won’t drink just anything, right? Probably. So even though it was dark and cold and I just wanted to be done with the world for the day, out I went again. All the way there I was thinking about how this is possibly the worst thing that’s ever happened to me. At the Mexican grocery store, I bought the best bottle of $8 red wine I could see. I really mean “see” because my vision was starting to fuzz out. Admittedly it was because I was taking really long blinks, and sometimes just standing there with my eyes shut, but still.

I’m always nervous at registers of any kind because I know how shitty it is to be a cashier, and even though I totally get why they’re in a nastyass mood all the time, it still doesn’t make me want to deal with it. This particular cashier’s mouth was twisted into a snarl and outlined with a thick smear of brown eyeliner, so that it looked like a particularly unhappy butthole. I was so tired. Fuck, why did the lights in there have to be so bright? They were practically melting my brain. I could feel the tiny strings connecting my eyeballs to my brain fizzing out, like the filament in a light bulb that’s just about to go. When it was my turn, I politely stepped up to the card reader, ready in position. I said hi to the girl. OK, doing well so far, I thought to myself. Let’s see if we can make it through this human interaction without lying down on the floor for no reason or barfing all over the plastic bags, ok?

That’s when it happened: She said something else that I could not make out. It sounded more like the sound a machine makes when a belt or chain or whatever makes something move slips off and goes flying across the universe. It sounded like SCREEEEEEEEEAHAHAHHAHALALBBOBLLAOALDO??? It sounded like my worst fucking nightmare! If I’d heard that sound in the dark, I’d have shit myself, no problem. What in the actual hell had she just said? Was it even words? Also, was it meant for me? She was doing what angry cashier girls do, which is make as little eye contact as possible. Though eye contact is a cornerstone of KNOWING THAT SOMEONE IS SPEAKING TO YOU, she had decided that looking into the face of this sleepy fuck in front of her was above her pay grade. So what did I do? Probably the most awkward thing that anyone could do in this situation. I just fucking stood there and stared at her like a retarded basset hound. Here’s what my brain had to say about this:

SAY WORDS SAY WORDS WOOOOORDS SAY SOME WORDS YOU KNOW WORDS SO SAY THEM WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING WE ARE GOING OVER THE FUCKING CLIFF HERE SAY SOME WOOOOOOOORDS

AjBOE

WORDS WORDS WORDS?

No words were said. I literally could not think of one word, outside of the word “word”, which I at least had the wherewithal to realize was a terrible word to say on its own, especially if you have no idea what someone has just said to you. Example:

Person: My grandma died.

You: WORD.

Person: Are you having a stroke?

You: WORD.

Person: Paper or plastic?

You: WORD.

See? “Word” is only an appropriate response about 4% of the time, and even then it’s still questionable. So I said nothing. That is what happened. One minute someone was talking to me, the next minute I was staring at them, and the next I was walking out of the store with a bottle of wine in my shopping bag.

I was a real dick to myself all the way home. Why hadn’t I said anything? Also, what the fuck had this woman said to me? What actual question could she have possible had for me that sounded like SKEEEEEEELLLLLUUUUURRRRBALBLADO?? Maybe she was talking to someone else? Maybe she had switched to Loud Spanish for some unfathomable reason? I tried to tell myself that it didn’t matter, I was just tired, that’s why the whole thing had turned into a clusterfuck.

Back in the house, The Pants asked how the store had gone. He asked because he knows that anytime there is potential for Me to meet Other People, there’s potential for a complete breakdown, and he usually wants to know all about it. “Uh, it went, not good” I said. I told him the whole crazy story about the weird possible question/possible random sound, and my response. As I did this, I pulled the wine out of the bag. “I mean, I just can’t figure out what the hell she could have said” I said, shaking my head. The bag felt…weird. It was still kind of heavy. Well, what is it, asshole? I thought. Look in the bag. I froze. There it was, rolling around in the bottom of the bag.

“Is this your avocado?” had been the question.

“No” had been the answer.

It’s that simple. Now I have one very unhealthy, dented, brown little avocado in the kitchen, reminding me this morning that I didn’t know words yesterday.

big ol’ legs

There’s a little thing at the bottom of the screen in WordPress now that tells you how many words you’ve written. A while ago, for about three hours, it said “0 WORDS.” All right, I fucking get it. You don’t kick someone when they’re down. You don’t have to be such a colossal dick about it.

There’s another screen that shows you your sad little Blog Stats. One of them smugly points out that the last time you wrote something was over a year ago. Yeah? When’s the last time YOU wrote something? Kindly print it out single-sided and crumple it up and shove it up your ass. I hope it gets stuck on a nail up there and never comes out and you can never poop again and you turn into that lady I heard about once who started puking up her own poop. How about that?

Anyfuckingway, here I am. I’m writing something. I’m sitting in a coffee shop writing something. The art they’re featuring this month is portraits of cartoon heroes in full glitter. So I’m staring at a sparkly Batman. I’m mad because I wanted to sit in the window but someone’s shit was all over the only empty window table, and that someone was nowhere to be found. So I sat near the window. After about 45 minutes, a girl came up to me and started talking, and this I only figured out after realizing that someone had been standing in front of me for an awkwardly long amount of time, so I looked up and took out my headphones when I realized their mouth was moving.

Her: Can you watch my stuff while I go to the bathroom?

Me: Uh, sure. But I mean, it’s been there for an hour?

Her: I KNOW that! That’s because I was standing over there watching it!!! Can you just watch it for me please???

Me: Uh. Yeah I mean…yeah.

Her: THANK YOU (leaves in huff).

^^^This is why I don’t leave the house much. Because of this kind of person, and because of myself, and because all of the sparkly Batmans on all of the walls of the world.

But why don’t I write anymore?

Really, I’ve been concerned for a long time that I have nothing to say. That’s why I started reviewing books and movies on here, then just movies. Because I sit in front of the television for about 60% of my life just watching whatever garbage is there for me to eat with my brain. Then I feel really tired, like I put in a long day at the office and I need a break. I am pretty sure that’s not healthy. I mean, I know it’s not, people tell me that all the time! But I bet they do things that aren’t healthy, too! I don’t come into their house and tell them not to put a fork in the toaster! I probably should. But I don’t. Who’s to say what will actually happen? I’m not God.

I had a dream last night that this yoga instructor came up to me and said “Oh my God, aren’t you so happy you’ve got big legs?”

Me: Excuse me?

Yoga Instructor: Big legs. Like big ol’ fat round legs. Aren’t you glad you have big strong wide legs?

Me: Why are you saying this?

Yoga Instructor: Because you’ve got big ol’ legs.

Me: Oh. (Starts crying.)

7123915461_7428ddd76b_b

“I am so glad we’ve got these big ol’ legs.”

I had a dream the other night:

The Pants and I were in a new city, looking for a place to live. We wanted to buy a house and a realtor was taking us on a walking tour of a dark street. The houses were smooshed together, cramped into very little space, and sickly trees behind fences broke up the sidewalk around us. Every house had some kind of damage, either the whole structure had been destroyed or smashed, the top floor deposited where the lower floors had been, or huge cracks stretched from the foundation to the roof.

Inside the houses, lights were on. Glasses of water sat on shelves and tables, half-eaten meals on plates in the kitchen. We stepped over chasms splitting the rooms. We sat in chairs that were still warm with the heat of whomever had lived there so recently. It was like everyone had been there moments ago, then disappeared suddenly, and now we were here. I opened a glass bookcase and pulled out a book I wanted to read. “Go ahead, take it” the realtor said, his face suddenly gone, a black swirl. “Take whatever you want. Here’s a bag for you to carry it.” He handed me a black bag. The Pants inspected a chair in the corner. “We can take that, too, if you want it.”

I couldn’t believe that anyone would leave these homes, these things. Some of the rooms were perfectly intact, but just as abandoned. “Can we live here?” I asked the realtor. He turned to look at me and it was like his dark face turned out all of the lights in the room.

“No,” he said. “You can’t live in these houses. We have to leave. Now.”

We ran, falling down the front steps of the torn house we’d been inside. I threw the bag full of books on the ground as we went. Behind us, the realtor said run run run! and as we ran, a terrible noise like the earth ripping apart filled our ears, a sound like a black hood covering your head, something that no amount of running in any direction would stop.

 

 

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March 1, 2016 · 9:07 am

Anno Domini 2016

On New Years’ Eve, in the last minutes of 2015, I decided to make 2016 the year of not correcting people over stupid crap that, in the end, doesn’t matter at all. The idea from this came from a friend’s Facebook post that she was going to do that same thing, and the notion sounded interesting, but of course I didn’t see a way to apply it directly to my own behavior until Christmas dinner, 2015.

One of my guests, who knows why??, brought up the birth of Christ, and was talking about when it was, why we use the B.C. and A.D. designations for the years before and after his life. “So if B.C. means ‘before Christ,'” another said, attempting to add to the conversation. “Then A.D. would mean ‘after death.'”

“NO!” two people at the table exclaimed, leaning away from the table, roiling in their own smugness. “That’s not what it means,” one said. “Yeah, it’s not,” the other said. “Lots of people THINK that’s what it means but that’s not what it means.”

“Oh. Okay,” the person who had made the incorrect assumption about the abbreviation said, crestfallen. “What does it mean?”

The two naysayers blinked stupidly. There was a really long pause. “I’m not sure what it means,” one of them finally said. “But it doesn’t mean that.”

Ah. Okay then.

It was a moment that made me feel so stupid, so belittled, merely for not knowing something that nobody else at the table knew, either. Nobody reached for their phones because the whole exchange felt so tense, we all just wanted it to be over. It was a no-win situation, and how could it be otherwise when there’s someone at the table saying NO YOU’RE WRONG BUT I DON’T KNOW WHAT’S RIGHT.

In a lot of ways, I feel like that Christmas Day conversation of 2015 set the tone for 2016. I was trying really hard not to tell people they were just wrong because I said so, when they recited incorrect tidbits about the dates of TV shows, the names of characters, worshiped Joe Biden as if he never did anything wrong or weird, you know–people stuff.

Last week, I went to a dinner where I only barely knew one of the people at the table, and ended up sitting across from a woman I’ve never met, and next to a woman I’ve met once, at my wedding. Her first question to me was: how was married life? Meh, fine, I guess, pretty much like unmarried life, except that now people ask me that question all the time.

The lady across from me tossed her white-blonde mane over her bare shoulders, she was wearing one of those peasant shirts that were in when I was a kid on the cusp of junior high, the kind that bunch around your shoulders and have two baggy pirate sleeves, so it looks like you’ve tied a striped fabric sack around yourself. I had one when I was in fifth grade, but I wasn’t allowed to wear it that way. My mom made me pull the off-the-shoulder parts over my shoulders and look like A TOTAL FUCKING IDIOT AT BRITTNEY’S POOL PARTY but I digress.

So Stripey Pirate smiled and nodded and tilted her head and tossed her pony hair and then both women giddily explained to me that there are three questions people ask you when you are dating someone, and they are: when are you going to get married, when are you going to have a bayyyybeeee, and then when are you going to have a SECOND baaayyyybeeee!!! They cackled and rolled their eyes and put on a really great show of pretending like they weren’t using this false incredulity as a front for the fact that they were about to ask me one of these questions. Which they did, “So when are you guys gonna have baayyyyybeeeeeeesssssssssssss,” then they told me a whole bunch of terrible birth stories, complete with gory details about destruction of womens’ bodies and descriptions of just how much a birth squicked out all the men in the room, and isn’t that so hilarious? And I did the thing where I pretend I’m a robot and my operating system allows me to form the appropriate answers to pacify humans and de-escalate uncomfortable situations while my internal processor scans the long, long, looooong list of other things about me that I think are a thousand times more interesting for people to know about.

So while Robo-Me took over and defended myself against the onslaught of insanely personal questions about my body and my choices, I used the time to update my internal database with a thought that occurred to me. Stripey Pirate, in between tiny bites of salad and wistful remarks about the hostess’s hair (“I want her haiiiiirrrrrr”), mentioned that being a Republican was not a bad thing, that she was a proud Republican, because “I work hard for my money and I don’t wanna have to give it to other people who don’t.”

This, along with the pregnancy questions, confirmed for me that this is how most people go through life. They find a sound bite or a clip of an opinion or a pattern of behavior and latch onto it, forever repeating that pattern and saying that thing that had become tattooed in their brains, ignoring the entire world of possibilities that lay all around them, ripe for the taking. I imagined a giant green tree growing over the dinner table in the crowded restaurant, its fruit hanging low, almost obstructing the diners’ views of each other’s faces, each juicy piece a new opinion, and unconsidered thought, a direction to take that had not yet been taken.

Imagine if someone handed you a script and said, “In order to be a certain type of lady, you have to say these things about pregnancy to other women. Then you have to have white-blonde hair and eat very tiny amounts of food.” Or if they said “In order to be a Republican, you have to say things about your money.” Sometimes I’m so bored with the way everyday conversation goes, I get the urge to shout “BANANA!” just to mix everything up. It’s just so fucking BORING. And it makes me endlessly grateful that I’ve been blessed with the capacity to think about things besides money, hair, and infants.

What I see in this country today is a whole lot of exploitation of the things that frighten people: being poor, being alone in your life decisions, being forgotten. I have to wonder if this isn’t why stupid people like Stripey Pirate settle on those convenient sound bites. Keep your money! Encourage everyone else to have babies, too, whether they want them or not, whether you know them or not! Stay beautiful. These are the things you have to do to be a person.

Stripey Pirate’s husband made several jokes about beating her. He looked down his nose at the plates of duck confit, the Asian chicken salad, and the craft cocktails littering the table, expressed disdain for anything that was not “meat and potatoes.” Stripey Pirate tossed her beautiful hair and gazed down at her phone, at a photo of someone’s children on Facebook. “I didn’t vote because I don’t care,” he said, and Stripey Pirate smiled, nodded, and thought of nothing.

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January 18, 2015 · 7:05 pm

I Am A Very Fucking Helpful Person

Late last December, I was walking the dog on a really cold and dark evening. The streets were full of the dirty, dog-shitty slush that happens after a brief thaw and the sidewalks were wet. Piles of pissy snow were pushed up on all of the curbs and into yards, sitting like lemony Sno-Cones on the corners. I was wearing about 200 layers with my calf-length North Face coat on top, with a hat, with my hood pulled up over. Coming around the corner near the exit to the  el stop nearest my house, I caught sight in my peripheral of someone coming up out of the underground tunnel very quickly. I looked up to see this girl with a wad of fuzzy black hair on top of her head, like the messed up Q-tip that keeps getting shoved around in the bottom corner of the box. She had on glasses with really round, thick lenses, and a ridiculous pair of earmuffs that looked like smiley panda heads. Her hat dangled from her hand, and she didn’t have any gloves on because even though it was 10 degrees and the Chicago wind was cutting everyone else’s face off, it had no effect on her! I pulled down my hood and watched her stomp her way forward up the other side of the street, ramming into bushes and trash cans, lurching ahead like her driving force was in her head and her hips and legs were just dragging along behind.

Ol’ girl was drunk as hell, of course, because this was the season of holiday parties and of Overdoing It being sanctioned and encouraged by your boss and coworkers. The Christmas gift bag in her hand held what was most likely a microwave egg cooker or a wine bottle stopper or some other terrible thing from the White Elephant Grab Bag. I crossed to her side of the street and followed about 15 feet behind, where I could still smell the trail of beer breath in the air behind her. When she dropped the bag for the third time, then leaned to pick it up, then leaned forward too far and lost her balance and slammed her head into an iron fence, I figured I had better help her lest the Rape Zombies catch her stumbling around out there in the dark. She rolled around in the shitty snow and mud for a while, trying to figure out if she was still standing or not, but realized she probably wasn’t when I was standing over her asking if she was okay.

“Yeah!” she said with enthusiasm, like she could vaguely remember what Embarrassed felt like but didn’t really feel it right now but thought maybe there was a reason why she was remembering it in this moment. “Yeah I’m good! I j-just, fell…here.” I helped her up and picked up the Christmas bag out of a puddle. She started to walk away and I came after her with the bag.

“Do you need help?” I asked. She muttered that she had too much to drink at the party. “Oh, well uhh, I live in the neighborhood. I can help you get home.”

“OH MY GOD thank you! SORRY! I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I just…at the party…sorry!” She slammed into a tree.

Once I got her face peeled off of the tree bark, the rest of the walk was not half bad. I asked her where she lived and she told me her intersection, only about 2 blocks west of my place. Most of our conversation the rest of the way there was her stumbling and righting herself with her hands against the ground, then apologizing to me and taking off again, leaning into the wind at a right-angle, running a few steps then slamming into the ground and starting the whole apology wheel going again. I kept telling her it was cool, that we all had a little too much every now and then, and that I didn’t mind helping her. The whole time I was thinking how fucking grateful I was that none of my friends or coworkers or loved ones would ever let me roll face-first out into the night like this. At least, that’s what I was standing there thinking at a corner (not her street, but the street where she’d indicated that she wanted to turn by lurching across my path and to the left). I stopped at the intersection to let the cars speed past, and since I don’t have a fucking degree in How The Minds Of Drunk People Work or something, it never occurred to me that cars were no obstacle to my goggle-eyed, fuzzy-headed, drunk ass companion.

Straight into traffic she flew, and the sound of not one, but TWO cars slamming on their brakes, tires screeching on both sides of her, interrupted the otherwise quiet intersection. I held up both hands and said OH FUCK then ran behind her, yelling I’M SORRY to the drivers, who both sat there on either side of the crosswalk, their mouths hanging open. DRUNK, I said, pointing at Drunk Ass’s head, which was fast disappearing up the sidewalk and into the distance. By the time I caught up with her, I had decided against giving her a lecture on why she had to be careful when crossing streets as a drunk person. I was more concerned about the fact that we had turned onto a street that was a good four blocks east of where we should have turned. Thus began the most useless conversation I have ever had in my life (not counting my annual reviews at McDonald’s or the several times I got written up on bogus charges by my former manager at the Puma store):

Me: You know, this isn’t the street you said you live on, okay?

Drunk Ass: I KNOW WHERE I LIVE

Me: Okay well, the address you gave me is that way…

Drunk Ass: I KNOW…*hic*

Me: Let’s turn up here then–

Drunk Ass: …WHERE….L-LIVE!!!

I seriously considered just saying “Fuck it! You’re on your own, genius!” and leaving her stupid ass there on the street. She was frowny and pouty now, wiping her hair out of her face and stomping ahead of me. I was thinking I know this fucking drunk bitch is not giving me attitude. I am being a very fucking helpful person. I can’t tell you how much I really really just wanted to throw her goddamn Christmas sack at her face and tell her that the Bitch Mouth would not be tolerated. But I figured I might feel bad when I read about her cold, dead bloated body in the paper later. So we soldiered on.

Come on, girl. It's not as bad now as it will be tomorrow.

Come on, girl. It’s not as bad now as it will be tomorrow.

We ended up with her smashing her face into the door of a walk-up building about three blocks from her intersection. I righted her again, hoping nobody in the building had heard and would come to check out what the fuck was going on, because I didn’t know how you explain something like this. Oh hi, I was walking my dog, I saw this drunk girl busting her ass all over the street, I’m trying to get her home. I mean, I guess that’s exactly how you would explain it, but for some reason the whole situation seemed so stupid I couldn’t reconcile it in my own head. I tried to lead her away from the building, her oily face-print on the door the only evidence that we’d been there, but she angrily flapped her arm and shook my hand off her shoulder. I backed up a few steps because I figured I wouldn’t like it if some stranger put their hand on me on a dark street, but then again, I WOULDN’T BE FUCKING SLIDING HOME FROM THE BAR ON MY FACE, EITHER. So Drunk Ass pushed me off and steadied herself against the door by pushing her butt up against it then started digging through her bag. “Thisszzz my place I live,” she trailed off, scraping a red, raw hand through the contents of her deep purse, scraping out handfuls of tampons and crumpled CVS receipts and a tiny bottle of Mace onto the ground.

“Uhhhh,” I started. This bitch was going to fucking punch me in the face if I stated the obvious, but she’d somehow gotten increasingly more drunk between where I found her and this doorway, and I couldn’t help but feel as if her parrot-like recitation of her address 10 minutes ago was more of a lucid moment than this one. “You know,” I said, trying to sound positive and light-hearted, as if I was telling her some interesting new fact about digestion I’d just read in a women’s magazine, “you told me you lived at (Street Name 1) and (Street Name 2). That’s just a few blocks that way.”

By now, the entire contents of the purse was on the sidewalk. Drunk Ass was on her hands and knees sorting through the rubble, looking for her keys. They weren’t there. “I KNOW WHERE I LIVE NNNNN….NNNNNIIII LIVE HERE” she shouted, and now she was REALLY mad, like it was just the most natural thing in the world to be sitting in a puddle on the ground in front of an apartment building, flinging your stuff all over the place. Like that’s how everyone finds their keys, DUH. Okay, fine, I thought, maybe she was wrong about her address. Maybe she really does live here. If she does, I have done my duty and I get to go home. I ask her if there is someone we can call to help her, in case she doesn’t have her keys. Then she starts crying because she realizes she has no memory of when or how she lost her phone, as well. So I suggest that maybe her keys are in her coat pocket and by the love of Christ on a fucking cracker, they are in her coat pocket. She glares up at me like I knew they were there the whole time, like maybe I put them there to fuck with her, and begins to jam a key into the lock. It doesn’t fit. Fuck. We are at the wrong building.

Drunk Ass tries again and again, turns the key she’s pretty sure is her front door key every which way, but it won’t fit. She tries every key on her keychain, even one that  looks like it’s for a Lisa Frank diary, and none of them work. She is now crying full-steam and splattering tears all over the glass door as she burbled THISSZZ MY HOUSE THOUGH through her wet lips. Once again, I try to suggest that perhaps we should continue our journey down a few more blocks and try her keys on another door, one that is at least closer to her actual address. I start to scoop her soggy belongings into her purse, then hand her the wet bag of crap and pull her raggy ass out of the doorway of the building where she is sprawled, crying, hopeless. She stands there and sniffles for a minute like she doesn’t want to come with me, which is arguably the first smart thing she’s done all night, but now I’m annoyed and cold and I want to get this bitch home and go watch TV. So I hold out her Christmas sack and say, “You want your present?! Come on! This way! You’ll be home soon!” I use the present as bait just to get her moving, and she swiftly forgets it exists and focuses instead on the dog. She reaches down to pat his head, and he winces because her arm and hand are just like this big soggy flap that bonks his nose and pokes him in the eye. He gives her a half-wag of the tail, something he does out of pity and kindness for all of the weirdos who touch him, and she looks up at me, her huge eyes shining like a happy anime bunny, grins ear to ear, and says YOUR DOG IS SO NIIIICE!

EVERYTHING HAPPYYYYYY

EVERYTHING HAPPYYYYYY

The dog. Oh fuck, the dog. This entire time, Dog had been along for this ride through the mind of a drunken idiot. He had jogged into traffic with me, had started and stopped abruptly to keep in step with this girl who, to him, must have just looked like a big blobby thing that screeched uncontrollably and without warning. Each time she had squealed and cried in protest on this little jaunt, Dog had stepped behind me for safety, tilted his head to try and figure out what the fuck this thing was trying to do to us, and why we were letting it. And now he was halfheartedly encouraging Drunk Ass to pet him, as if saying It’s all going to be okay! Just don’t make sounds anymore please.

I used Dog to get Drunk Ass to follow. We chatted about how nice he is, and she started the apologies again. I’m in the middle of telling her not to worry about it for about the fifth time when she veers off into the street again. Thankfully, there are no cars coming this time. We’re almost at the intersection she cited earlier, and she’s running full-force at a building across the street. “Are you sure it’s on that corner?” I call after her, because about five minutes ago she was ready to punch me in the face, insisting that this was her building, this building that was three blocks away and on the opposite side of the street. She doesn’t answer me so I follow her, hoping we’re not going to have a repeat of what happened at the other building. Thankfully, the buzzers on this building are labeled. I ask her for her last name, and it takes a few minutes for her to produce it, because she’s thrown her keys into her purse and is once again digging into that thing like she’s an industrial drill boring into the Earth’s surface, her handflaps scattering crap all over the place. She finally gives me the name and holy shit, the name is present on one of the buzzers. Oh my god, we’ve made it.

I’m scooping up her junk off the sidewalk again and dumping it into her Christmas sack when I notice a figure in a big puffy coat limping down the street toward us. It’s some dude gangster-leaning his way through the intersection, and he seems very interested in what we’re doing, which is me telling Drunk Ass to hurry up and get her key in the fucking door, and Drunk Ass failing repeatedly at getting the key to go into the keyhole, missing every time and scratching the tip of the key off to the side instead. This bitch is FUCKING GIGGLING about this, because her brain is a buoy in a sea of $2 PBRs and she doesn’t notice that this shady motherfucker is about to rob our stupid asses. So this joker rolls up on us and asks us in the most pandering, fake-concerned voice I’ve ever heard, “Are you ladies okayyyyy?”

I instantly resented the implication that *I* was the one with the problem. There’s only room for one Good Samaritan on this crazy train, butthole. Also it’s dark out here! And you’re creepy! So go away!!! God. That’s the thing about living in the city: any little thing that happens attracts at least one bored creep who just wants something to do and cannot imagine that nobody wants him there.

I tell the dude that we’re fine, that this girl just had a little too much to drink but she was home now and everything was fine. By now, Drunk Ass is oblivious to both of us, just focusing on the task of getting a key to go into a keyhole. It’s taking forever, and the guy keeps moving in to stand closer behind us, hovering around, and I can smell his cigarette breath in my face. That’s when he asks if Dog is nice, and I think holy shit he’s asking if the dog is going to bite him if he tries to rob us, so I tell him that he’d better not touch the dog since the dog was unpredictable and had bitten people before. Since nobody ever listens anyway when you ask them not to mess with your dog, nice or not, he did what all the other asshole strangers on the street do and grabbed Dog by the face. He started shaking Dog’s head around in that really rough horseplay way that dudes pet dogs. “COME ON, TOUGH GUY! COME ON!” he started yelling into Dog’s face.

Why are people always doing that shit to dogs? My neighborhood is fucking filled with BEWARE OF DOG signs and pit bulls frothing at the mouth and throwing their body weight against fences if you so much as think about walking down the street. So it doesn’t make sense to me that for every NO SERIOUSLY MY DOG WILL BITE YOU warning, there’s about a hundred dudes who are like “Oh I can beat that dog up, no problem” and go around trying to start fights with them.

Dog generally handles this kind of thing with a little bit of trepidation. He is either too stupid or too nice to call people out when they’re being creepy and annoying, or maybe he’s just willing to lay down his life if it means a murderer might pet him for two seconds before stabbing him. Maybe he’s too good-hearted to believe that people can be murderers? I don’t know, but it’s probably all a symptom of me being nice to him his entire life. Either way, when this guy started mashing the dog’s face around, challenging him to a battle, all the while easing in closer to me and Drunk Ass, I hoped that something inside Dog would snap and he’d protest somehow. Maybe he’d realize that we were being threatened and defend me? Please please please bite this man in the balls, I thought.

Well, he seems nice!

Well, he seems nice!

Dog is in love. He has never loved anyone as much as he loves this cigarette-smelling man and his big jacket. He is pawing at the guy’s knees while the guy bashes his little furry, empty head around, he is wagging his tail at full speed and trying to get closer so he can lick the guy’s face. I LOVE YOU. I LOVE YOU SO MUCH, he is saying, PLEASE DON’T EVER LEAVE THIS CORNER BECAUSE I LOVE YOU. Satisfied that the dog is not a threat and that I was lying to him, the guy straightens up and looks me in the eye. “He ain’t a badass,” the guy says. “He ain’t shit.”

Where I had tried earlier to just wave the guy off, tried to communicate to him with my indifference that he wasn’t invited to this shit storm so he’d hopefully just keep on moving, I was now just going to be a gigantic bitch because Drunk Ass was no closer to figuring out how keys work, and I was not about to get fucked over because of someone else’s Christmas party shenanigans. I narrowed my eyes at the guy and said that we did NOT need any help, and that he could keep going on his way. He stepped back and said dayumm that’s how it’s gonna be huh? I grabbed the keys out of Drunk Ass’s limp hand and jabbed one into the lock. It fucking turned. The door opened. She stumbled in, her happy anime face returning. “Are you okay to get up to your apartment?” I asked her. She nodded and repeated her “thiszzmyhouzz” mantra, the beer stink stronger and more potent now that she was closer to being able to paint her bathroom with her vomit. I handed her the Christmas sack and she thanked me and shut the door. I watched her turn and fall up the stairs a couple of times but I figured she was relatively safe. Now there was the matter of the dude, who was still hovering around me, grabbing for the dog’s leash.

“I don’t think she was drunk,” he said, as I yanked the leash away and dragged the dog along with me. “I think she was crazy.” He punctuated this by pointing his index finger at his head and spinning it around in a circular motion, as if maybe I needed a visual aid to understand the word. I ignored him and pressed on, and he again exclaimed dayumm before FINALLY getting the fucking picture and leaving the scene in a huff.

Sigh. When you’re a man on the street at night talking to women you don’t know, they owe you their time. If they don’t want to stand around and listen to your every thought in the moment, they’re just fucking bitches, man. Also, ALL DOGS THINK THEY ARE BETTER THAN YOU AND NEED TO BE TAUGHT A LESSON. A LESSON IN FIGHTING.

I think the moral of this story is that if you come upon a drunk girl on the street and she definitely needs help getting home, you do things this way:

1. Ask her where she lives

2. Punch her in the fucking head until she blacks out and drag her there by the scruff of her neck

This is the path of least resistance, this gets the drunk girl home safe and off your conscience in under 20 minutes. None of this crying on the ground and soggy tampons and flying into a rage because her key won’t fit in the wrong door.

Then again, I’ve never seen that girl again, so I can’t attest to the success rate of either method.

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January 13, 2015 · 5:25 pm

Black Helmet II: The Dark Knight Takes a Nap

It’s winter. It’s cold. It’s dark. The ankle-deep snow and the boots and the pencil skirt make it increasingly difficult for me to stumble to the train every day. Everything leaks and stinks and drips and pools and soaks and is misery in its filthiest, most staining form. The dog is suffering from the Hot Monster Sharts which we’ve just discovered is a gastrointestinal parasite which causes urgency, diarrhea, and dog gas that is so bad you will have to burn your house down to get the smell out of the curtains, and while you’re standing there with your sick dog watching the house burn, you’ll wish you were inside letting the flames eat your flesh and clear your sinuses of the stink. So it’s a week- to two-week course of “treatment”, which is squirting chalky stuff down the throat of a struggling, scared, 60lb dog who just wants you to love him and gives you his WHY YOU PUNISHING ME? face the whole time. And then there’s the black helmet of clinical depression because my brain is fucking broken and won’t make enough of one chemical or another, and I’m eternally Vitamin D deficient even though they have me taking it twice a fucking day now, and I am STILL no fun to be around because all I do is stare at the TV and say things like “Her eyeballs are weird” and “I bet he’s such a fucking bitch in real life.” And a key part to fighting depression without brain-numbing, creativity-killing medication is to get your heart rate up for at least 30 minutes a day, which is literally the worst fucking thing anyone could tell you to do while you’re depressed, so cut to me at the gym every goddamn day, running on a treadmill in front of a gigantic television that only ever seems to show episodes of Duck Dynasty and that one show where poor people beg for money so they can develop their stupid ideas and sell them in a commercial at 4am. Except for that one time when the TVs were playing something different, one was a commercial for the Time-Life Johnny Carson Collection that played on loop, one was a documentary about mobsters with a lot of close-ups of the blown-apart heads and faces of gunshot victims from 1950s crime scenes, and one was some bitch with weird eyeballs eating french fries in front of her computer screen and talking into a headseat about hacking.

Glad we got that out of the way. What’s up with you?

Holiday Film Review, Part 2*

*I’ve been reminded that you maybe shouldn’t read these if you want to watch these movies and be surprised by stuff that happens in them. I believe that is called a “spoiler alert.” However, in my opinion, these movies are spoilers themselves, in that they spoil all that is good about film, and about the world in general. They will spoil your life. So there is your spoiler alert: these movies will make everything awful. Nothing in any of the movies I write about will surprise you if you go in with the knowledge that I hate everything and everything about the movie is horrible.

The Taking of Deborah Logan, 2014

What Netflix says happens in this movie: “For her Ph.D. thesis, Mia decides to film a woman’s Alzheimer’s battle, but when symptoms turn strange, the family suspects something more sinister.”

What really happens in this movie: Apparently when you get to medical school, they ask you to pick a disease out of a book or they spin a wheel and throw a ball that lands on one and then they make you go and figure out what it is and why it is. They also let you pick how you want to do that. For instance, if you want to make a stop-motion movie using some Play-Doh or old Ninja Turtles to teach people about Lou Gehrig’s disease, that’s cool. Apparently that is how we know everything we know about medicine. I for one am glad it works that way because if it wasn’t for that type of medical education, we would not have all of this excellent found footage, and plus nobody would have ever been able to get the devil or an evil spirit or anything on film! MEDICINE! It’s not just for taking at parties, y’all.

So this medical student wants to make a medical movie about Alzheimer’s because nobody knows anything about it or has ever seen it or studied it up close. I mean this movie takes place on a planet where we are totally in the dark about that stuff. So they hook her up with two camera guys and the three of them find a nice lesbian with an alzheimey mother. Mommy Skinflute’s symptoms so far have been a combination of forgetting things, wearing Ann Taylor clothes, and turning into a cartoon skellington. Daughter Lesbian is at her wit’s end because there’s bills and shit to pay on the farm and hospice care has been expensive and somehow the medical student has also been given money to pay whomever lets her attempt to film Alzheimer’s in motion. Maybe she’s just retarded and her parents are rich and they’ve given her some money and made her think she’s in medical school? Thus begins the greatest medical documentary of all time!

I'M HOME! THERE WAS A SALE AT CHICO'S! WHERE AM I? WHAT IS A CHICO'S?

I’M HOME! THERE WAS A SALE AT CHICO’S! WHERE AM I? WHAT IS A CHICO’S?

Mommy Skinflute is not cool with having a film crew and a nosy student in her house. Also she’s dealing with the fact that she’s totally dying of this disease and it’s making her do weird stuff and she’d rather not have it all caught on film. She’s right to feel that way because every time shit starts popping off, they run into her bedroom and she’s all naked and floating around or standing in the dark and slamming windows with her mind and shit. The student isn’t real sure but she’s thinking maybe this is not Alzheimer’s, and if it is, that’s messed up and also really cool that we got it on tape! Anyway, they’re getting a lot of embarrassing footage of Mommy Skinflute and the next day they insist on filming her while they show it to her, saying things like DO YOU REMEMBER WHEN YOU TRIED TO PEEL YOUR FACE OFF, MOMMY SKINFLUTE? DO YOU REMEMBER THAT? and she’s fucking terrified and confused and also her face is half peeled off so she’s not feeling great. The medical student is like “We don’t want to be in the way” but naturally about 75% of the footage is taken through a window or peeking out from behind a door while Skinflute and Lesbian have a private conversation. “We will just be hiding behind the drapes here, filming you guys. Act normal.” So naturally Mommy gets mad and kind of annoyed with everyone because, let’s just pretend we’re dealing with a real Alzheimer’s patient here, I don’t think you’re supposed to follow them around and scare them and film them spacing out and then show that to them and be like “See how much your brain is deteriorating? Sad, huh?” But this is just for pretend so we’re going to do whatever we want.

So Mommy Skinflute goes for a brief stay in the hospital because of the flying around and growling and face-peeling. The doctor is like “Shit, guys, I don’t know what is going on here but clearly it’s probably the Alzheimer’s and it’s probably really aggressive. That’s probably what it is, maybe. Also, it’s totally fine if you want to film all of the goings-on in the hospital, including this private doctor/patient conversation, because HIPAA is not a big deal.” But of course, Mommy Skinflute can’t stay in the hospital, because more creepy things will happen at home, so home we go! Into about the third night of horror, Daughter Lesbian starts opening up about why she wears baggy jeans and flannel shirts all the time, and the answer isn’t because she’s a lesbian: it’s because her mom shamed her for being a lesbian! Oh no! Now the bitch is upstairs fucking spinning around on the ceiling! She also divulges that Mommy used to run a switchboard business to support her daughter’s flannel shirt habit and also there was this one guy who used to live in town who killed a whole lot of young girls? And threw them in the river out by the abandoned quarry? But he vanished years ago. Some say he moved to France and some say he is buried in Mommy Skinflute’s yard and his ghost haunts her brains and some say the whole thing was made up for the plot of a movie called The Taking of Deborah Logan. But sorry–what were you asking? What brand of adult diapers we buy for her?

I just want to know which evil spirit took my daughter away and replaced her with this lumberjack man.

I just want to know which evil spirit took my daughter away and replaced her with this middle-aged lumberjack man.

So they keep catching Mommy digging in the yard at midnight, or sitting in front of her old switchboard, naked as a jaybird, jamming the plug into the same switchboard number over and over until the damn thing explodes. She goes back into the hospital because of the explodey switchboard burns and begs to be killed, but everyone is like “Nope, we can’t, we have to film you doing stuff until you die.” One of her old buddies tries to grant her wish and a TV flies off the wall and smashes his head, but it’s cool because they put him straight into surgery and juuuuuust before he goes under, he tells Daughter Lesbian that Mommy Skinflute is harboring the spirit of the Little Girl River Killer! OH NO! IT’S NOT ALZHEIMER’S AT ALLLLLL. WHICH IS INTERESTING BECAUSE APPARENTLY POSSESSION HAS THE SAME SYMPTOMS?! But the show must go on, regardless of the change in diagnosis. Daughter Lesbian and the student filmmakers are now on a quest to find and destroy a bag of murder bones. They figure out that Mommy Skinflute murdered the killer when she found out Daughter Lesbian was going to be his next and final victim, and threw his bone sack in her yard. They go looking for it and realize that the bitch went out and dug it up a few nights ago and hid it in the attic. You know, when she was possessed by him, she hid his bones from herself. Make sense? I didn’t think so! Mommy Skinflute, you are henceforth required to tell us who you are at any given moment!

OK so are you like, possessed right now? Or did you just finish the rest of that baked ziti we had in the fridge? You have to tell us, that's the deal.

OK so are you like, possessed right now? Or did you just finish the rest of that baked ziti we had in the fridge? You have to tell us, that’s the deal.

They find the bag of stink bones up in the attic and then watch a documentary about how to properly dispose of a serial killer’s bones. I think they got it on Netflix. Anyway, the whole burn-them-in-the-fireplace operation does not go well. The fireplace explodes and throws them all across the room and one of the camera guys is like, “Fuck it, this is so dumb, I can’t be in this stupid movie anymore.” Everybody smiles nervously and they’re like “uhh you mean you’re not going to help us make this medical footage that is totally real heheheh?” and he’s like “No like I’m not going to be a part of this Millenium Entertainment/Eagle Films movie. You guys should leave too, this is the dumbest thing ever. I will drive you into town right now if you stop being in this movie.” You think you’re going to find him hanging in the woods behind the house later, you know, like nobody gets away that easily! but you’re wrong. He really did leave. He just straight up bailed on the entire thing.

Meanwhile, Mommy Skinflute is in the hospital repeatedly abducting a cancer child. She puts the kid into a trance and the two of them wander around the hallways into the Abandoned Part of the Hospital, which every hospital has, and if you didn’t know, now you know. They keep having to go get them and put Little Cancer Trance back to beddy-bye and strap Mommy Skinflute back to her bed. But! They didn’t think about the fact that Mommy Skinflute isn’t necessarily attached to her skin, and can remove it like a sock, and will do so in order to get out of hospital bed restraints. She can, and she does! Off they go, Cancer Girl and a skinless Mommy Skinflute, skipping up the mountainside to…duh duh DUHHHHHH…the Abandoned Quarry!

There are a lot of abandoned things in this town. If it were my hometown, all of this scary shit would be taking place in old Wal-Marts. At least this town has some cool things to abandon. The quarry is at the top of a hill in the woods and it’s flanked by some old lean-tos and boards. Scary boards! Our filmmaking medical student, her last remaining cameraman, Daughter Lesbian, and now some cops take off up the mountain after the hospital escapees. Of course, the first thing that happens is that Mommy Skinflute rips out the throat of one of the cops and instead of fucking calling for a helicopter with 20 guns on it and some tanks and RPGs like any other cop in the United States would do, the lady cop is like “I’m going to need your camera guy to take my cop buddy down the hill while we continue to track this elderly woman and mostly-dead kid through the woods.” So the camera guy is like “OMGOD, Medical Student! You have to film the rest of the movie!” She protests at first because she’s either being polite or she’s like me and she just honestly didn’t understand why, in this situation, first priority is making sure we get all this on film. They waste a bunch of time talking about “you haaaave to” and finally she takes the camera and the movie continues. There’s lots of running through the woods and climbing through shit in the quarry and screaming and stuff. You can pretty much fast-forward all of that. Just imagine some girl going OH MY GOD WHAT WAS THAT OH SHIT OH SHIT OKAY IT WAS JUST A LARGE FERN.

When you get to the part in the quarry where Daughter Lesbian and Medical Student crawl through  a long rock tunnel, you better fucking play that shit because your mind is about to get blown all the fuck over the place in ways you never saw coming. Holy hell. I cannot even tell you what they’re about to find around that corner, but I am definitely going to tell you what they find around that corner, because I have never cracked up so hard in my life. I almost fell off the couch and banged my head against the floor laughing. Because apparently, Little Girl River Killer has not only inhabited Mommy Skinflute’s body out of revenge, he also intends to finish the ritual he started 30 years ago. He is also part snake. And it is the snake part that is now inhabiting Mommy! So, of course, Mommy is attempting to fucking eat. the. cancer. baby. like. a. snake.

NOM NOM NOM

NOM NOM NOM

I have to say that I just started clapping at this part.  Motherfucker unhinged her own goddamn jaw just to eat this scrawny kid. That takes talent, and finesse. It’s sad, though, because clearly Mommy Skinflute is very hungry, and has been this way for the entirety of the movie, and what do these assholes do? They freak out and scream and make her barf up the kid’s head and bang some sticks together to chase her off into the quarry. It’s so fucked because you’re not really supposed to go out into nature and start messing with stuff. Who gave this medical student the right to go out into the wild and interfere with the circle of life, i.e., stop a nice lady who is possessed by a snake spirit and a murderer from eating what will likely be her only meal for 4-6 months that is something nobody will really miss because it was just sitting around in a hospital anyway?

Ugh, God. The movie ends with Mommy Skinflute in the nuthouse because the snake DNA scrambled her brain. What’s lucky though is that someone had the smarts to turn all of this helpful medical footage into a movie about a murdering snake spirit! Yay! And the movie ends with the little barfed-up cancer girl, who is no longer a cancer girl, but a totally normal girl who turns to the camera and glares like she’s saying “pssst: the murderer snake lives in me now.” I don’t know how that happened, but they will probably explain it all in a grainy 2-minute clip from an old documentary about murder snakes in the next movie. And there has to be a next movie because we never found out if having a snake mommy cured Daughter Lesbian of her flannel-shirt-and-Carhartt-pants addiction. Also we didn’t get to see our medical student “graduate,” meaning we didn’t get to watch her walk through her living room in her mom’s bathrobe with a square of cardboard on her head while her dad hummed “Pomp and Circumstance.” We need Part Two, dammit!

Any time Netflix has a movie that came out during the current year, I fucking watch it, because that trash knows no bounds. Especially if it’s some kind of supernatural trash. More trash! Keep bringing me trash! I want to put it all in my trash holes!

What other people are saying: “Very good scary movie and I am a pretty tough critic. This made me stop it at least 3 times to get my bearings and revisit it and didn’t finish the movie until the next day.” Maybe before you pressed play on this, you should have made sure you were not a GIGANTIC PUSS.

Divergent, 2014

What HBO says happens in this movie: “In a dystopian, post-apocalyptic world in which people are grouped within distinct factions based on their character traits, one girl stands apart. Shailene Woodley stars in this first adaptation of Veronica Roth’s best-selling book trilogy as the ‘divergent’ teen whose uniqueness makes her a threat to the conformist society in which she exists.”

What really happens in this movie: I’ll tell you what happens in this movie, Shailene Woodley happens in this movie, and she’s just like a big old baby face with a bunch of lip gloss smeared all over it. She lives in this world where nobody’s special, and everybody’s pre-destined to be whatever it is they’re going to be, and as if you didn’t already fucking know what was going to happen: she finds out in the first 10 minutes that she’s the EXCEPTION to all of this! She’s the most specialest in a world full of gray-and-navy colored dummies! She’s got all the courage and all the brains and all the heart and all the who knows what the fuck else because I wasn’t paying attention anymore to how their Future Society was broken down. It’s like watching the head cheerleader pull up in her new Mustang with her hot boyfriend and then get crowned Prom Queen and react like “oh my god, what? Me? Who knew it would be me?” Because, fuck off, of course it’s going to be her. The beginning of the movie is just a shit bucket full of Shailene Woodley looking at things like she’s thinking really sweet thoughts and then people saying “You’re so beautiful and wonderful, how did you get to be so beautiful and wonderful and also humble?” So she goes to take her futuristic Meyers-Briggs, which is done with needles and brightly colored serums in the future FYI, and the test administrator is like WOW you are all the things, a divergent (which is, oddly, the title of the movie??), go hide somewhere because everyone is going to be jelly of you and want to kill you.

This perm is going to look so rad, also it's going to let you know which vet school to apply for.

This perm is going to look so rad, also it’s going to let you know which vet school to apply for.

So right about the time you’re totally fucking sick of her shit and wishing she’d shut up, it’s Job Fair day, when all the kids of a certain age go down to the auditorium and decide what group they’re going to join for the rest of their lives. It means they have to move out of their parent’s house and get real jobs, so everybody’s real sad. They can choose to go to the Math & Science Academy where apparently everyone wears blazers that go down to the floor because what’s more intelligent than accidentally peeing all over your own clothes every time you go to the bathroom? They can also decide to join the Borings, who are actually two different clans of people: one group of them never looks in the mirror because they’re scared of ghosts or something, and the other ones are always picketing for world peace and handing out oranges, yawwwwn. Then there’s the group that always tells the truth about everything and of course nobody likes them because they’re always going to weddings and stuff and saying things like “I’m so happy for you but your invitation was the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen.” Finally there’s the Axe Body Spray club and these assholes just wear a lot of leather and run around jumping off shit and throwing collectible dragon knives they bought off the Internet. That’s pretty much all of your choices, unless you count the choice that nobody really wants, which is that you can just join nobody’s club and walk around on the streets all day with a bunch of mentally ill people. Not our girl! Not our specialest special!

Shoehorn Woodley chooses to join the Leather Daddies because they’re not scared of anything and she wants to show them what’s up. She also is quite fond of swishing her long beautiful hair around everywhere and wants everyone to see how great it looks when she’s jumping between concrete piles. Unfortunately, she finds out the first week that she has to shoot a gun and learn how to punch people and also piss and shit in an open bathroom area right next to everyone’s bunks. She was NOT expecting that. She gets the crap beat out of her a lot, but in a sexy way that doesn’t bruise up her face too much because nobody loves you if you’re busted. Mostly she gets beat up by this one bigger girl who is a total fucking bad ass at fighting but also is not very physically attractive because you can’t be both unless you’re Shinybean Woodley. On the bright side, they let her choose a new name for herself and she’s excited about that because she’s always hated being Sherbet Woodley and wants a new cool Axe Body Spray flavor for a name. She chooses “Tris” which I think is just about the biggest waste of a free name change I’ve ever heard of. You’d think she would go for Roboslop or Bangorn the Destroyer or at least Princess_Choppy117 or something. Nah, she shoots for the forgettable, because it’s not like she ever had the chance to get a degree in marketing, you guys.

"Can't I just beat her in like a waist measurement contest or can't we just ask all the dudes who they think is the prettiest?"

“Can’t I just beat her in like a waist measurement contest or can’t we just ask all the dudes who they think is the prettiest?”

Luckily, Twats doesn’t get banged up too bad and the hottest dude, who’s also kind of her training boss, starts to leave little notes in her locker and wink at her and stuff. He also notices that she’s a Divergent-type person and tells her to cut the crap or she’ll get herself killed. All the Leather Babies have to take these tests where they do a hit of acid and go running around in their own brains, which are hooked up to TV screens so everyone can watch everyone else deal with their worst fears, which is boring shit like getting attacked by birds and dealing with chronic IBS. Twats is, of course, the best at handling this scary stuff because she always remembers she’s on acid and remains level headed and is also perfect and beautiful and smart and aces the test every time and is then like “oh, what? What was my score again? I didn’t hear the announcement, I was busy being humble.” Fuck. But she has to knock that shit off and start faking bad test results because “Nobody’s ever scored that high!” of fucking course and it will look suspicious. You’re TOO GOOD, Twats! Simmer down!

Hot Leather apparently doesn’t care that she’s a stuck up asshole, because I guess her hair is SO pretty, and starts to hang with her on a daily basis. Some guy who’s jealous of her tries to throw her off a cliff, but Hot Leather saves her, and next thing you know he’s like “want to see all my tats” and she’s like ummm okay but this has nothing to do with me though? And his tats are all on his back so he has to take off his shirt and guess what! Now he’s shirtless and they’re making out and there’s NO RULES in this place, and he’s hot, and rarin’ to go, and I am sitting there screaming YEAHHH FUCK HER FUCK HER at the TV with popcorn chunks spraying across the room…but this fucking bitch pulls the plug because “I don’t wanna move this fast.”  I could not believe my eyes because WHAT’S THE USE OF HAVING GREAT HAIR AND WEARING LEATHER ALL THE TIME AND LIVING IN A PLACE WITH NO ADULT SUPERVISION IF YOU CAN’T DO SEX ON HOT DUDES.

DON'T STOP GET IT GET IT

DON’T STOP GET IT GET IT

Hot Leather has a heart of gold and puts his cock away and puts his shirt back on and is like “oh no totally I wasn’t even going there, are you kidding? I just want to watch you sleep because nice dudes have no sex drive, just like good girls, you silly.” He puts Real Housewives on the TV and respectfully sleeps on the floor whilst Twat spreads out in his king-sized bed and turns that thing into her own personal fart pocket. She leans down to look at him on the floor and coos “Who’s special? You’re special!” and taps him on the nose “boop boop boop!” before going to sleep. His dick falls off and rolls under the bed and by the time he finds it in the morning, it’s so covered with dust bunnies he doesn’t even bother putting it back on.

This movie could have ended right there, in my opinion. I figured if they were going to make everyone share a big wide open bathroom and watch each other poop and stuff they would at least talk about how everybody’s climbing into everybody else’s bunk all the time for a little bed spring squeaky-squeaky action. But it’s like there’s some kind of unspoken moral code that everyone’s following which is: be nice and tender to girls when they get their lips busted in combat and also NO FUCKING. But Twats and Hot Leather are destined to be together because they are BOTH divergent! What could be better than a pair of fuckfaces with all of the talents in the known world?! Oh god, just blow this shit up. I want this movie to be over with. It’s not, though. There’s a whole lot more to it. They hook Twats up to the acid machine again and this time her worst, deepest, darkest fear is…getting date raped by Hot Leather! What a fucking joke. Dude basically rolled up his penis into a little ball and put it in a Silly-Putty container the second she says ‘no thanks’ and she’s STILL such a fucking slice of baby cake, that’s her worst fear. Someone fucking tried to throw her off a cliff! She survived attempted murder and everyone around her has a gun or a knife and what’s she scared of? Rape. Because, women! Sex crime victims 4-ever!

Kate Winslet shows up and reveals that she is not Kate Winslet, she is the leader of the Math & Science Academy. She comes in and everyone ignores the pee smell emanating from her floor-length white drape business jacket, and urine stains aren’t all she’s got up her sleeve! She also wants to give all the Leather Daddies a hit of acid laced with a mind control drug that makes them go out and shoot all the members of the other clubs. She does just that, but it doesn’t work on Twats because I don’t know if you know this but she’s SPECIAL and so is Hot Leather. So the two of them are running around during the zombified melee like “what do we do?!” and it never occurs to them to get the fuck out of there and just go somewhere less fucked up and live on an island and have a million perfect children. They want to FIGHT. So this big war starts and Ashley Judd gets gunned down and then Twats’s dad gets blown up, but she manages to save Hot Leather and reverse the bad acid trip and save a bunch of Borings from extinction. Her brother shows up after being in the bathroom in the library at the Math & Science Academy this whole time and they all get on a train and ride away to some other shit hole beyond the giant fence that surrounds the city, where they’ll probably sleep in hammocks and poop in a hole in the ground and jerk off a lot because EVEN THERE you’re not allowed to screw. That’s the real tragedy, followed closely by the fact that there’s a second movie on the way, and it appears as if the main issue in that one is that Shingles Woodley’s hair has gotten caught in some kind of machinery at the hammock factory, so she has nothing left to shake defiantly at her challengers.

My beautiful tresses would have looked SO GOOD in this smog!

For the last fucking time…I’m not letting you use my head to scrub the dishes.

What other people are saying: “Dramatically, Divergent wanders, but over rich philosophical soil.” Oh give me a fucking break. Know what makes soil so rich? Poop.

 

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January 2, 2015 · 6:23 pm

Holiday Film Review

OK so I’ve finally jabbed a two by four under my butt and pried myself off the couch. I even washed my hair today! Oh my god! Just in time for a nap. Anyway, I want to share with you what’s been on my television during my 2-week holiday break. I’d like you to know in case you need some help getting into the spirit next year: maybe some of these will fuck-start your holiday. Or maybe they will just make your skin crawl and your scalp itch and your heart yearn for a time when the start of winter and the first Christmas commercial didn’t make you want to steal a car and drive it off a cliff into a pile of knives.

Dark Skies, 2013

What Netflix says happens in this movie: “A couple has trouble convincing friends and neighbors that an alien is entering their house each night to terrorize their children.”

What really happens in this movie: Felicity is all grown up and has a family and a nice house in a suburb. The family lives in the house. That’s why they are there at night, when shit gets real. The shit starts in the kitchen, where someone makes a big mess with all the condiments one night, then another mess the next night, only the next night it’s a SCIENTIFIC mess because the hot dogs are balancing on top of the mustard. (There is like one day a year when the gravitational fields are juuuust right to balance your hot dogs on top of your mustard, I highly recommend trying this. You don’t need aliens to do it, just hot dogs and some mustard.) So Felicity and her husband get kind of annoyed about this stuff because they’re white people in a nice suburb and they have barbecues and stuff and this shit should not be happening to them. I mean they’re NICE PEOPLE so what the hell? Felicity is a little more creeped out than her husband, because he’s busy going on job interviews all day and not getting any offers, then coming home and trying to bone Felicity and also not getting any offers because her real estate job is all that’s keeping them afloat and she’s got to focus, okay? Meanwhile, also living in the house are the two ugliest children in the history of time. Like they literally could not have found two more ugly, mutated children in the entire world to be the children of Felicity and Useless Daddy in this movie. The little one is supposed to be cute, but you can tell that the casting director mistook a tiny mouth that won’t open all the way and only makes nasally squeaking sounds for “cute” when really that shit falls under the “needs corrective surgery” category. His eyes are also very close together but I think maybe if his head grows more in the middle there he should be OK on that front. His brother is the piggiest little kid I have ever fucking seen in my entire life and that’s saying something since most children look a bit piggish to me.

I want you to tell me right now why you are so ugly!

I want you to tell me right now why you are so ugly!

This kid's expression does not change for the duration of the movie: he constantly looks like he's smooshed into a glass door.

This kid’s expression does not change for the duration of the movie: he constantly looks like he’s smooshed into a glass door.

So Useless Daddy finally gets a job but meanwhile entire flocks of birds are smashing into the nice suburban house where the family lives and the neighbors are like “You guys need to get your shit figured out” and giving them dirty looks and stuff. Felicity just shrugs and cleans bird blood off the SUV in the driveway like “Oh you know how this stuff just kind of happens sometimes hahahahurrr..umm.” Lil’ Squeaky is wandering around in the yard in a trance at night. Pig Boy is off grabbing boobs and watching stolen porn DVDs with his ratty little friend, who also happens to be one of the ugliest young humans in the world. This kid’s face looks like a flabby old couch cushion with a scabby button sewn right into the middle of it, and all of the crumbs and change and shit roll into the indentation. This kid’s face dips in sharply in that spot between the eyes and right above the bridge of the nose, a problem shared by all of the children in this movie, to various degrees, which makes me wonder if maybe there’s not something terrible in the water in this suburb that makes the children butt-ugly and the parents think they see aliens and makes the hot dogs balance on top of the mustard? (Unfortunately, I cannot find a picture of this kid on all of the Internet because he has been deemed too ugly for public consumption and has been scrubbed from the web entirely. Count yourself lucky.)

Useless Daddy is pretty happy about his job but after Felicity catches him hanging out in the backyard staring open-mouthed into the sky, totally unresponsive even when she shows him a little titty, she sits him down and lets him know he’s been beefing it pretty bad on the homefront lately and they need to figure some stuff out before everyone dies, and anyway she’s sick of going to the grocery store only to find the lettuce floating around the living room the next morning. He’s like “oh shit I did what in the yard?” and plays it off like he didn’t know he was out there in the first place so she wouldn’t know he was jerkin’ it to the neighbor lady who was using her ExerCycle in her den. He gives himself a spontaneous nosebleed for effect and Felicity buys it, the dumb cunt.

Awww yeah, daddy like lycra, Mrs. Jacobs.

Awww yeah, daddy like Lycra, Mrs. Jacobs.

Felicity and Useless Daddy go to a specialist in a run-down apartment building who tells them that aliens are tracking them via internal devices and are going to take one of their kids. At this point, I really didn’t care which one it was going to be, because getting rid of either would be kind of a nice chance for the family to start fresh and maybe take a crack at procuring a kid who was not so ugly they made your eyeballs bleed and your soul beg for mercy. The specialist explains that “there’s all kinds of aliens and they’re all over the place but really there’s just 3 main kinds and they’re only in your house. Haha, y’all are screwed! Go get a guard dog.” They get a dog and that doesn’t help because guess what: they thought the aliens were going to take Lil’ Squeaky since he’s so cute and keeps wandering out into the night, but they were wrong: the aliens want to study the Human Pig they’ve been raising! Goodbye, Pig Boy, have fun in space.

OOHHH MY GOD ARE THERE HOT DOGS IN SPACE?

OOHHH MY GOD ARE THERE HOT DOGS IN SPACE?

What other people are saying: “I think I will stand firm in my believe that things happen that are unexplainable and God will sort it all out. It’s a decent watch if your into that sort of thing. I’m really not. Waste of time for me. Hope you enjoy as much as I did not.” I too hope God sorts this fucking movie out, because I can’t.

The Immigrant, 2013

What Netflix says happens in this movie: “A Polish immigrant in New York who must provide for her ill sister soon falls under the thumb of a charming thug who forces her into prostitution.”

What really happens in this movie: Flopsy Poutsalot is a princess in Poland until an evil soldier kills her parents. Flopsy and her sister Sweat Rag get on a boat and come to America so they can hire a private detective to find the evil soldier or maybe just move in with their aunt and get over it once and for all. They make it to Ellis Island and Sweat Rag can’t get her sweaty cough under control, so they take her away and throw her in quarantine until she stops coughing. Flopsy is pretty torn up about it but figures she’d better go on ahead to America since she’s here at the park gate and the tickets are non-refundable and they’ll let her use both of the Coke cans she brought with her for a double discount, one day only. She gets to the entrance and some douche in a fancy hat tells her she was caught skankin’ around on the ship and that’s nasty, they don’t let nasty womens into America Gardens. She’s like “Yes you do, that whore over there is a total whore,” but they turn her right around and put her in line to get back on the boat and head home to the Bloody Fields of Poland.

Leave me alone, I'm practicing Looking Sadly Into the Distance.

Leave me alone, I’m practicing Looking Sadly Into the Distance.

Enter Joaquin Phoenix to save the day. Flopsy is like “Oh please help me” and he pays a guard to let her out of the Dirty Womens line. He takes her to his shitty apartment and reveals that he can give her a job as a hooker and a dancer in his club, where she can wear fancy costumes and pretend to be the Statue of Liberty. At first, she’s like “But I’m a sad princess, I shouldn’t have to work.” She runs away to visit her aunt in Brooklyn who’s all about giving her a place to stay, but her uncle’s an asshole and apparently heard about the ship skankin’ Flopsy did on her way to the U.S.A. and sends her back to Ellis Island. The whole entire movie starts over again right here. Joaquin comes back to pick her up and pays to get her out AGAIN and offers to let her be one of his slut dancers AGAIN only this time, he tells her she can pay a guard to get Sweat Rag bounced from the hospital and she’s like ho-ly shitballs, bring on the dicks.

Joaquin’s cousin/brother/nephew, uh, someone who’s sort of related to him but not in the way that would keep him from getting mad at the guy over nothing, falls in love with Flopsy because she’s so sad and beautiful. Also because she’s really quiet and spends the entirety of the movie doing her “looking at things in a sad way” face instead of talking, which he finds annoying anyway, so it’s Yahtzee for him. He gets run out of town by Joaquin who’s also sniffing around that little sad Polish butthole but comes back and is like “Darn it if I didn’t just miss you too much to leave, also I forgot my scarf.” Cousin Brother tells Flopsy he’s going to buy her sister out of hospital jail and that the three of them are going to run away together. He kisses Flopsy deeply but it’s super weird and one sided, it’s like she’s kind of done acting for the day and wants to be left alone and is nervous that someone might have eaten the last almond Hershey’s Kiss out of the bowl in her trailer. She might as well have been somewhere else while this movie was being made, because he kisses her and her eyes go flat and dead and she’s like “Is that a pudding cup under the old-timey stove? How did that get down there?”

I love you. I love how everything makes you sad and you never ever smile and I love how you sit around all day and knit pot holders with tiny frowns on them.

I love you. I love how everything makes you sad and you never ever smile and I love how you sit around all day and knit pot holders with tiny frowns on them.

So Joaquin stabs Cousin Brother and it’s not sad at all because Flopsy is immediately like “OH SHIT HIDE THE BODY. GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE WITH THAT, FOR REAL.” Joaquin dumps Cousin Brother but guess what? One of the other sluts in the slut meetup group saw the whole thing, and she tells the cops it was Flopsy Poutsalot that did it, because everything was fine in their little slut group until Flopsy came along, she ruined EVERYTHING. So now the cops are after Flopsy and Joaquin lets them beat him up but doesn’t tell them where she is because he wants dat ass. She goes back to her aunt’s and asks for some cash to get Sweat Rag out so they can run away together, and of course, Aunt Rag has been sitting on a stack of bills just for such an occasion, she just never thought to offer to do a damn thing for her sister’s kids. So she hands over the dough and she’s like “oh call me when you get to whereverthefuck, k?” but she shuts the door real fast because she’s trying to get back to her show before the commercials end.

This is where the movie starts over again, again. Flopsy drags Joaquin back to motherfucking Ellis Island because apparently that’s the only place in New York City that they can go together. It’s a difficult journey because Flopsy is made of tears and frowns and old newspapers, and she’s got to drag Joaquin around because his jaw is broken, meaning that he can’t walk real good. They pay a dude to go get her sister and while they’re waiting for Sweat Rag to fold all her sweat rags and put them in her little suitcase, Joaquin admits that he arranged for them to be screwed over so Flopsy would have to work for him and maybe fall in love with him. She’s like “um duhh” and he falls on the floor and starts crying because it’s like he just now realized he’s not going to get any of that sweet, sweet pouty pussy, and she scrapes him off and tells him it’s all good so okay byyyye and runs out to meet Sweat Rag. They jump on a boat and Joaquin watches them through the window as they paddle to freedom. He looks all forlorn at them because what he can’t hear is Flopsy talking a mile a minute at her sister’s sweaty face, saying “OMG you would not believe how many dudes fell in love with me this month, I had to be like, constantly admired just for frowning and pulling my shawl around myself…why do dudes always do this to me? Remember how back in Poland you liked Urglgrev but he liked me? It was like that only it was these two dudes like fighting over me” and the movie starts over again for the fourth time, only this time it’s only for Sweat Rag, who bites her lip and rolls her eyes and wonders how the fuck long it’s going to take to get to Philadelphia.

I just paid $500 to get this bitch out of health jail, the least she could do is let me talk about ME for one fucking minute.

UGH, I just paid $500 to get this bitch out of health jail, the least she could do is let me talk about ME for one fucking minute.

What other people are saying: “Not very interesting. I was bored at the time and so was this film. I kept thinking who are these people and what the hell was going on between the cousins.” What are you talking about!? This was the greatest film of all time when you consider the fact that the part of Flopsy was played by a bag of leaves and Joaquin was played by a stick with a hat on it and Cousin Brother was really a chicken covered in eyeliner!!! You know NOTHING about film!

Camp Takota, 2014

What Netflix says happens in this movie: “With her personal and professional life in shambles, a young woman seeks refuge by working as a summer camp counselor with her two best friends.”

What really happens in this movie: Who the fuck knows, for real. I made it 12 minutes into this turd burger before seeing what else was on the menu. Chirpy hot girl loses her job and comes home early to find her douchebait fiance cheating on her and just that morning her old camp counselor had been like “want to be a camp counselor?” and I realized in that moment that I would rather die from vomiting up my own stomach like a shark caught in a net than find out what kind of shenanigans and goings-on are about to go down for this walking tampon commercial over the summer.

No, uh uh, this movie is NOT going to happen to me.

No, uh uh, this movie is NOT going to happen to me.

If you want to know what that 12 minutes was like, stick two knives into each side of your head until you start to feel brain matter dripping onto your shoulders and your vision starts to fuzz out. May God have mercy on your soul.

What other people are saying: “Camp Takota oozes charm!” It definitely oozes.

Resolution, 2012

What Netflix says happens in this movie: “Chris spends his days smoking crack at his remote forest cabin until his friend Michael arrives, planning to hold him hostage until he’s clean.”

What really happens in this movie: Pretty much what Netflix says. Only there’s some kind of video demon who’s filming everything they do and emailing it to them just to freak them out. Some drug dealers keep coming over and being like “where’s our stuff MAN” and it’s really menacing and terrifying if you’re the type who watches Thomas the Tank Engine every day and are also a four-year-old.

Chris Crack is attached to the wall of his shanty with a set of handcuffs because that motherfucking do-gooder Michael is trying to wean him off the Crack that makes him Chris Crack and also makes him jump jump. Basically what happens when you come down off crack is that you make a lot of jokes and get very sleepy. Because that’s all that happened to Chris Crack. Michael is out fucking around in the woods, finding videotapes and slides and shit and hooking up old viewing equipment to check it all out. They show stuff like people getting shot and falling off bridges and dying and stuff. Michael figures out that the videographer demon wants them to be in a story so it can have another tape to add to its cassette collection, but how the fuck he figured that out is beyond me. So they have some run-ins with the Native American biker gang that runs the area and wants them out of the shanty. You’re supposed to be scared of the bikers except ol’ Michael keeps saying “Hey hold on a minute can you guys tell me about the history of this area and your local folklore and stuff?” and the bikers roll their eyes and are like “UGH okay here’s everything we know about video demons” and then it’s more like they’re helpful librarians and not scary bikers with pump action shotguns.

The bikers take care of the drug dealers with the pump action shotguns and then Crackhead n’ Mike don’t have that to worry about anymore. They run around in the woods and try to lose the video demon but everywhere they go, they find some kind of recording of them getting blown up or something. Like they get in the car and the video demon has lovingly placed a CD audio recording on the dashboard of them getting exploded. That video demon is so talented! I mean, the Native American Bikers told us that some French anthropology students left all this recording equipment on a cabin on the property in the 80s, and what does that video demon do? He takes a class at the community college just so he can learn how to use all of it! Hijinks ensue. Crackhead n’ Mike think they’ve got it all worked out, then they try to hit the road, but the video demon turns into a fire demon or something that you don’t see, you just see their little scared faces, then they both say something but by then I was so bored I was half asleep and I had to look it up on Wikipedia to find out what they said and it turns out it wasn’t worth the energy I spent rolling over and picking up my phone. Apparently they say “Can we try it a different way?” and the movie is like UGH NO STOP because then it’s over.

The actors in this are such assholes. This really was like watching a couple of post-college douchebags go on a camping trip and act like they’ve seen The Hangover, Parts 1-3 way too many fucking times and the characters have sunk in and they can’t NOT act like stupid men anymore. Also the crackhead wears a trucker hat that does not come dislodged through the ENTIRE FILM and though I have never detoxed off hillbilly crack OR worn a trucker hat, I’m going to go ahead and call bullshit on that.

What other people are saying: “This is a movie that you have to see, as there is no way to really describe it.” SEE ABOVE, DUMMY.

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November 4, 2014 · 12:07 pm

HELLO, SHOE LOVER

Pork Intolerance

There’s a barbecue restaurant around the corner from work. They push all this “WOOD FIRED OVEN” and “SMOKED PULLED PORK” stuff, but really when you go in there it’s like a Sbarro: everything is sitting in a little chute under heat lamps, and there’s a giant microwave in the back. But it’s also like Chipotle in that they slide you past the chute, grabbing handfuls of things from metal containers, and slap everything into a styrofoam clamshell,. No matter what you order as far as meat, sides, or drink, every worker in the assembly line says the same thing: “Great choice!” They smack their lips and slap a little cup of greasy, crusty mac and cheese onto your styrofoam platter. “Great choice!”

I get that this is positive reinforcement, it’s meant to signify that even these workers, these people who WORK here, are totally down with the food. They eat it all the time! And they LOVE it. It’s the same as when you work in a clothing store and you’re expected to wear the clothes they’re selling. I know what it is. But I can’t help but think that proclaiming something a “Great choice!” means that somewhere out there, there is some configuration of the food that is not the great choice: there’s some combination of something you could order there that they’d just look at with dead eyes and then say “$7.59, please.”

Also, you don’t know me. I might have some kind of mac and cheese disease or pork intolerance and this food will straight up kill me. Maybe I’m here for a piece of brisket to eat on the toilet so I can just keel over onto the tarp I’ve spread out on the bathroom floor. The point is, you don’t KNOW. You could be sending me to my suicide with a big old pat on the back. GREAT CHOICE!

GREAT JOB ON THAT ORDER, CHAMP!

GREAT JOB ON THAT ORDER, CHAMP!

It’s like at DSW when you stand in line at the register, the person says “Next shoe lover, please!” when it’s your turn. Then when you walk up there they go “HELLO SHOE LOVER!”

Anyway. The other day I went to the new Chipotle-style pizza place next to the Chipotle-style  barbecue place across from the Chipotle. I’m in this place in my life where pizza sounds like a good option for every single meal. Also I’ve got a lot of anxiety right now. So I was nervous as fuck to go to this pizza place because I knew they were going to try and make the experience like AN EXPERIENCE and over complicate things and ask me all kinds of pizza questions. I mean, I didn’t want to build my own. I wanted something directly off the menu. My hands were sweating. I just wanted to get out of there (with a pizza). So the lady at the beginning of the Pizza Maker line asks the guy half a foot in front of me “Have you been here before?!” and he says no so she launches into this high-speed overview of how to select fucking ingredients off a list that you would like them to put on a circle of dough for you. Her lips were moving so fast I thought I was going to pass out, she was like the Micro Machines man of pizza mechanics.

So she explains the intricacies of a Basic Restaurant Menu With Under 20 Items On It and ol’ boy moves on. She then turns to me and offers me the exact same motormouth “Hihowareyouhaveyoubeenherebefore” to which I say, “Uhhhh YES” hoping she will just leave me alone, also because I was less than a foot away while she explained the whole damn thing to the other guy, so I felt like maybe I should get a pass. So she says “YAY WELCOME BACK” with this genuine smile on her face like I’m her best friend but I left town for a couple of months and she super totes missed me. Well, she missed me so much she decides explain the entire goddamn premise of the restaurant to me anyway! “Oh, so you already know that–” and then there it is again, the Guide to Getting Pizza Here. In my opinion, it should not be any more difficult than this:

1. I say the words meaning the kind of pizza I want,

2. You go get that pizza or tell someone who can get that pizza,

3. You take my money, then

4. I leave with pizza.

But no. They just had to dook it up unnecessarily. So after she’s done acknowledging what I already know and then repeating it to me, she allows me to order just a basic old no-frills pizza straight off the menu, and I move on down the line. The thing is? I’m cursed when it comes to ordering things. No matter what it is, if it’s something I really want, they will either be out of it or just screw up my order so that what I want isn’t what I want anymore. It’s a CURSE. It happens to me ALL the TIME. Ask anyone. So I’m standing there trying not to be excited about the ricotta cheese that, according to the menu, they’re going to add to my pizza. I’m shaking in my DSW boots because I can’t help myself! I’m repeating don’t think about the ricotta, don’t think about the ricotta over and over in my head, but all I can see flashing behind my eyes are giant dollops of ricotta sizzling and bubbling on my pizza’s crust. Oh, heaven! What joy! RICOTTA! So, of course, my pizza slides right past the cheese station with nothing but mozzarella on it. I follow it down the line and realize that at the part where the salt and pepper are offered as toppings for your toppings is the END. No ricotta for you, fucko. So I verrry delicately say, “Uhhm. Is…is that supposed to have…ricotta cheese?” The lady who was juuust about to toss my pizza in the Ready to Bake queue looks down at my nekkid pizza and says, “Oh, yeah, I guess it is.” So they add the ricotta. PHEW. This ricotta disaster has been averted, until next time.

So they pop my pizza into the flame den at the back and ring me up, and tell me to stand over to the side until my name is called. I stand in this huge crowd of people, some of whom have been standing there since I showed up at the end of the ordering line. I quickly realized why: cooked, boxed pizzas were piling up on the counter, unclaimed and cooling rapidly. Two guys were running the pick-up station: one of them arranging the hot pizzas on the little papers with people’s names and orders on them, then sliding them down to the guy who either boxes them or puts them on a tray, then hollers out the name on the order. However, the latter was a deaf guy. So not only was the attempt to pronounce a lot of different Sharpie-scribbled names very loud and in a fast-paced environment already awkward and difficult, he also could not hear what he was saying. Which maybe, MAYBE, pizza place? Mayyyybe that’s not the best job for this guy? Because it went like this:

Pizza Caller: “HAAAAHHHBUWWWWHHH? HAAAAHBUWWWHH?”

Pizza Line: ???????

Pizza Caller: Throws pizza onto stack of waiting pizzas, grabs another. “WUHHHBAWWIEEE?”

Pizza Line: Everyone stares at each other, waiting for someone to make a move. “Did he say–I mean…I can’t…”

Pizza Caller: “JUHBOHHWEEE?”

And on and on.

So all of the customers stand there in this crowd of awkward turmoil, and people just start grabbing random pizzas, reading names on boxes, swapping between each other, and getting the fuck out of there because nobody wants to point out that because of his disability the guy can’t be understood in such a loud and frantic environment. I mean, I can see how someone would read this like OHMAGAH, HOW CAN YOU HATE ON THIS GUY FOR BEING DEAF but that’s really not what it is, pally. They had at least fifteen employees behind that register making pizza crust, refilling ingredients, putting pizzas in ovens, and even the guy right next to the deaf guy who was just organizing orders for him. From what I could tell, none of these jobs involved needing to speak  clearly or hear anything anyone asked you from across the counter. It was just such a weird choice to put him in that position. I was frozen because I didn’t know which pizza was mine and I was scared to make it more awkward for him by asking him which was mine and possibly still not understanding. So I just sorted through all of the boxes and looked for my name and hightailed it out.

Limp Dick Pizza is a real disorder.

Limp Dick Pizza is a real disorder.

The pizza comes out fast at that joint because they have this whole “Fast fired! Cooked in 180 minutes!” thing they’re always on about, it’s on every sign and menu and they even tell you that at the beginning of the line, whether you want them to or not. So when I lifted a slice out of the box by the end crust and tried to take a bite, it did what things do when you hurry and just went straight limp dick, sagging down onto my wrist, its toppings flopping out onto the bottom of the box. All of my beautiful ricotta just splattered all over the place. Ricotta disaster accepted.

Panic at the Crisco

Some days, especially these gray, cold, drizzly days of early fall and in this, the latest and deepest wave of clinical depression, the choice is clear:

A. Google ex-boyfriends, or

B. Watch ISIS beheading videos.

Since I’m still too scared and horrified to do B (thankfully), I just look up ex-boyfriends to be on the safe side. And OHMYGOD is that ever a bad idea! One is just as bad an idea as the other. They make you feel the same, anyway. It’s all tragedy porn in the end.

We had a dinner party on Saturday for four friends to christen our new dining room table, which we bought because we’re grown ups and we’re engaged and we thought that maybe we should stop eating every meal on the couch in front of The Daily Show. (The great thing about the TV though is that it’s a grown up TV which turns on an axis so we can still watch The Daily Show from our grown up dining room table so yeahhhh!) In an attempt to fuck-start my brain, I planned an elaborate menu including lots of difficult things I’d never made before that seemed a bit tricky. I timed everything with detailed reminders on my phone. I was going to be that person who can chat with guests while ensuring that her parmesan-thyme popovers rise perfectly and don’t burn and are also not eggy in the middle which is apparently a thing that can happen. And for the most part, I WAS that person, up until The Pants had the audacity to sit in the wrong seat as everyone came to the table.

NO. I DON'T MIND. I REEEEALLY DON'T.

NO. I DON’T MIND. I REEEEALLY DON’T.

“YOU HAVE TO SIT ACROSS FROM ME AT THE HEAD OF THE TABLE!!!!!!!!!!!!” I barked, somewhat louder and more shrill than I’d meant to, but in a way that was definitely indicative of what was going on in my head. My next thought was OH GOD WHAT IF THE POLENTA GETS COLD? Dinner was kind of tense because not only had I just yelped all crazy-eyed at my boyfriend like Carolyn Burnham, but there was a baby guest doing baby things (like crying and needing to be fed and stuff) and something about it freaked me the fuck out. It was so SMALL and BREAKABLE and NEEDED THINGS for which all adult conversation had to cease in order to appropriately deliver. It was a sort of culture shock, I guess. We’ve talked about babies, and the very real idea of having some of them, but when there’s one at your table and you’re freaking out about the texture/temperature of the polenta and the height of the popovers and the doneness of the fish and why can’t he just fucking sit where I envisioned him sitting?!, the whole idea of babies as an IDEA kind of goes out the window. Yikes, there’s an actual baby here! What do we do with it??? Don’t put it down, what if it gets mad?!

The thing about having babies around is that you have to be a chill person. They can smell fear, like hyenas or your mom, or mom hyenas. They know you’re anxious and worried about the polenta and they react by shitting their pants and crying, because what else can they do? I really don’t know how my friends do it. Babies seem really great and cute and snuggly until they start to cry and barf everywhere, then they’re just upsetting. What about me? Who’s going to stop me from crying?? It doesn’t matter anymore!

eggghhhhhh. This is all far too heavy for a Tuesday morning.

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October 30, 2014 · 11:16 am

Lean Cuisine Rejects

Deep in the Stouffer’s vault sits a freezer full of bad ideas.

Crash Diet Classics:

Box of Lettuce
A selection of the finest cuts of lettuce. Defrost on High for 4 minutes, poke a hole in the plastic, defrost on High for another 2 minutes. Allow hot lettuce to cool for 2 minutes.

Broth Plate
Enough brown-flavored broth to cover the bottom of a shallow dinner plate. Heat, covered, for 12 seconds, pour onto dinner plate. Pretend it is pizza.

Pictures of Pie
A stack of award-winning color photography of assorted slices of pie, delicately arranged on expensive china, with a bottle of water and a stick of sugar-free gum.

Green Tea Coffee
A plastic carafe of plain green tea, brewed exclusively in a coffeemaker that hasn’t been cleaned in a long time, so it at least tastes a little bit like that sweet, sweet black nectar.

Delicious Depression:

Hunk of Cheese
A slab of white cheese wrapped in cellophane with a side of the two Ritz cracker that were left in the bottom of the box, along with a few stale Entertainment Crackers, the wheat ones nobody would eat at New Year’s. Why did you even buy the wheat ones?? Dummy.

Asian Carp with Whipped Potatoes
A slice of our best Asian Carp, imported directly from upper Lake Michigan, where they’ve invaded and killed off most of the other species but they’ve also eaten a lot of the garbage we’ve thrown in there so it’s not all bad! Best served heated for 2 1/2 minutes and with plastic soda can ring removed, if present. Season potatoes with own tears.

Refrigerator Smorgasbord
Leftover pizza and a side of chicken curry smothered in a robust Ranch dressing, however much is left in the bottom of the bottle.

Classic Mac & Cheese
Ten servings of our classic low-fat macaroni and cheese packaged in one extra-large container. Heat on High for 20 minutes, allow to cool, wash your hair before eating. Or after. Just wash your hair.

Everyday Collection:

New Boyfriend Bolognese
Fettuccine noodles in cream sauce with Romano cheese and prosciutto. Heat on High for 3 minutes, answer phone, no you haven’t had dinner yet! Scrape into misshapen Gladware, throw in back of fridge. Eat half of a hamburger at a bar instead, not the whole thing because then your pants will fit weird, reheat bolognese at 3 in the morning, eat while seated on kitchen floor.

Rosemary Lemongrass Salmon
Whole salmon filet with fresh vegetables on a bed of brown rice with edamame, in a rosemary lemongrass sauce. You left it in the freezer at home because you had to leave early for a meeting. Don’t worry, there are 47 more meetings you have to get to today and at least half of them will have a plate of cookies involved.

Judgemental Jambalaya
Half a cup of delicately spiced rice with crisp vegetables and two salad shrimp. Cut a slit in plastic and heat on High for 3 1/2 minutes. Eat slowly and deliberately in the employee lounge while saying things like “oh wow, I didn’t know fat free could be so good” and “MMMMM”, while staring at Heather with her bagel and cream cheese until she gets uncomfortable and throws the other half in the trash. Retrieve other half from trash, remove debris, enjoy.

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October 8, 2014 · 5:20 pm

I don’t know who Subash is.

stinking cuuuuute

There are a lot of things that I consider to be difficult about having to go to work every day. Most of these things center around the fact that it’s just weird to be around a certain group of people all the time, for no other reason than that you all work toward goals that are somewhat the same, or in a bunch of interlocking positions. Otherwise it makes no earthly sense for you to be in a big room with those people all day. I really think those people who go to work and meet a bunch of really awesome people in their own age group with whom they want to be friends foreverrrr are lucky. Maybe it’s because I’m in a field that’s got a bit of an older demographic and is fucking FILLED with other awkward and aloney-on-my-owney introverts, but I have never really met anyone in my professional jobs who I’d call on the weekends or go to the movies with.

I guess that’s why it’s super weird to me when we celebrate each other’s weddings and baby showers, and even weirder when we show sympathy for family deaths and stuff. It’s not that I don’t feel happy for people when they have babies or get married (I mean, not SUPER happy, mostly I don’t care, especially if it’s a certain few). And it’s not like I don’t care when someone’s friend or family member dies. I just think it’s a more awkward part of working with groups of people. You’re bombing along, getting work-related stuff done, then a card for someone you’ve either met once or not at all and can’t even really picture in your head comes across your desk. “It’s Britney’s birthday!” “Subash is moving on!” And you’re supposed to sign it and cross your name off a list on the back of the giant manila envelope it’s concealed in (OH LIKE BRITNEY DOESN’T KNOW SHE’S GETTING A LAME CARD FROM ALL OF US) and the person who brought it in sneaks off into the next person’s office. And the cards are always really stupid, like sparkly rainbows or cartoon birds with briefcases, and they’re never funny, and I can never think of anything to write in them. Do you know how many times I’ve Googled stuff like “heartfelt phrase to write in stranger’s going away card”? Quick, Google! Get me something heartfelt! I have no fucking idea who Subash is.

Except for all the days when you showed up.

Except for all the days when you showed up.

 

Google says this stuff:

“It’s been a pleasure. Keep in touch!”

“Wishing you all the best in your new pursuits.”

“It’s been great working with you!”

“Glad to have met you.”

What if none of that shit is true, Google? WHAT THEN. I guess you lie your face off. Also, what if everyone else has written the same thing? This is often the case. If you’ve ever noticed, people on Facebook CANNOT HELP but to basically copy and paste the post from the person who commented on that birth announcement just before they did. It ends up looking like this:

“OMG CONGRATS she is so stinking cute!”

“She is so STINKING CUTE omg congrats!”

“Congrats on the stinking cute BABY!!!”

“OMG stinking BABY Cute congrats Baby!”

And on and on and onnnnnnnnnnnnn like nobody in the history of time has ever said anything but “congrats” and “stinking cute” about a baby. (What is it with that “stinking cute” phrase anyway? I feel like women write that a lot about babies, and I imagine them scrunching up their noses like something actually smells bad, and pushing the baby away, like UGH too cute.)

I am thinking about this today because I think most of the things we say to each other are meaningless and bland, endlessly repetitive, and boring. I went looking for a sympathy card that was recently required for a coworker. I stood there in a sea of lukewarm sentiment and I think a dark spot settled into my brain from which all the dumb feelings will now come forth, forever. Lots of suns peeking from behind clouds, rainbows peeking from behind clouds, frowny cartoon clouds, basically lots of cumulonimbus porn going on. Well, then there’s the religion-focused ones about God with glittery crosses on the front. Like the one JESUS DIED ON!

When my grandpa died and everyone kept saying “So sorry for your loss so sorry for your loss sosorryforyourlosssss”, I asked my mom what people were supposed to be saying, since it was like being stuck on a carousel with a crowd of 1000 sad clones around you. She said in that kind of situation, you should think about what would be comforting to you and say that to the other person. Man, she was way off. Because usually the things I would appreciate are completely nsfw and totally offensive. Also, when I think about what I’d want work people to say to me if I lost someone I loved, it would be: nothing. Absolutely nothing. The last thing I’d want to do is open a $1.99 grocery store card from work people and read all their names and repeat phrases and think of them sitting at their desks Googling something thoughtful to say to me, the last thing I’d want to do is read the signatures of the ones I was pretty sure didn’t like me anyway. Who wants to think about that?

I started to think maybe I should write my own greeting cards for all occasions, which I will never give to anyone since they’d just make people want to jump off a bridge. Anyway, here they are:

Card 1: Illness

Front – Picture of a cartoon giraffe in a blazer with a briefcase

Inside – It’s too bad you’ve been out lately, I’ve been wearing some great outfits.

Card 2: Illness/Bereavement leave

Front – Illustrated to look like a notepad. Things You’ve Been Missing At Work…

Inside – Are you kidding? Nothing. Fucking nothing.

Card 3: Bereavement

Front – Sun peeking from behind some clouds. We Heard You’re Sad

Inside – We’ve all been sad before, too. Well, most of us. Not Pat. Pat is a fucking sociopath.

Card 4: Baby shower

Front – Cartoon baby buggy in muted pastels

Inside – You told us you were having a baby so here is a card for that.

Card 5: Birthday

Front – Two dopey cartoon birds and like a coffee cup or a water cooler or some shit

Inside – It’s a good thing there aren’t birds inside at work. That would be insane. Happy Birthday.

Card 6: Wedding

Front – Raised shiny gold interlocking rings

Inside – Is it the guy you brought to that one thing last fall, you know the thing where Crystal drank too much and flipped over that tray of chicken chimichangas? Hahaha! No but seriously is it that guy?

Of Turds and Creeps

I’m mad now because I got a mocha instead of regular coffee for the first time in like 100 years, only because I was looking for something that would jack me up and keep me from crying all morning over nothing like I did yesterday, and that thing was so ass nasty I wanted to scrape my tongue and the roof of my mouth. It tasted like someone sprayed the inside of my mouth with bug repellent that had been flavored like Now & Laters. It was gross. I wanted to go throw it back at the girl who made it. I am pretty sure she fucked with it because the last time I was in there she accused this guy of cutting in front of me in line, and snapped “The line starts back THERE, sir!” and even though people are ALWAYS cutting in front of me and nobody ever says shit about it, this one time the person wasn’t guilty. So I said “Oh, it’s OK he was here first, I’m not in a hurry.” She glared at me and begrudgingly took his order and he didn’t even say thank you and now I have drunk a coffee full of rat poison for no good reason.

I listened to something really disturbing on a podcast on the way home yesterday. It bothered the fuck out of me and it’s called Of Birds and Boundaries, it was on Love + Radio. I keep looking for more information about it, or something to tell me how to feel or what to think. There’s really so little available about it. It’s not that I don’t know what I think (I will tell you in a minute), it’s that I feel so mad and annoyed and disturbed by it that I almost don’t trust my reaction, and want to make sure there’s not something I missed or misunderstood. I don’t think there is. I mean, it’s still possible, and it’s entirely possible that there’s something cultural I’m missing or being insensitive about. It’s art or whatever, so I think you’re just supposed to take what you get from it. But I’m mad about it!!!

So. Basically, this girl places a Craigslist ad for a Hasidic Jewish person “for research.” She’s non-practicing Jewish and wants to talk to someone about what it’s like to live in a Hasidic community in Williamsburg. I think that’s interesting enough of a premise, but what happens is this guy keeps trying to turn the conversation towards getting into her pants. I guess it’s possible you could come away from it without getting that impression, but if anyone’s ever tried to get into your pants, you can’t see this as anything else.

First of all, he finds the ad on Craigslist. My creep radar went off immediately, just because Craigslist is like the basement of life where all the creepo cockroaches scurry around hiding from a naked bulb swinging on a wire. If you have to go down there, you fucking RUN to get back upstairs. Anyway, he starts talking about perusing other ads on the site, “you know, man for womannnn” stuff, but remarks that “most of that is like hookers or whores.” Ah. Right.

He drops references to make it clear that he wants to meet her, like how she should feel free to walk around the neighborhood and “maybe I’ll get to know you up close” and she says “Yeah maybe we can see a movie or something.” He asks her if she’s in a relationship, and he immediately asks how, “in the secular world”, is a man supposed to stay faithful to his wife when he meets someone who is “more hot.” He then talks about his arranged marriage and how his wife doesn’t dress pretty anymore and how he complained to his mother about her. What if he finds a girl that’s hotter?! “It’s hard for a man to stay with a woman.” She goes along with this, “Oh I’ve noticed this too!” So he gives himself the out that “men are like pigs” and generalizes with the example of Tiger Woods. Meanwhile my eyeballs are falling out and the eye holes are pouring blood because this guy just looks like a fucking predatory asshole. I’m sitting there remembering the time when my sister’s boss started complaining to her about his wife and telling her lots of personal things and then just straight up tried to fuck her. I just get annoyed with that approach, that “wuh wuh wuhhh I’m a man baby what am I supposed to do about my unhappy marriage OH I KNOW I WILL PUT MY DICK IN YOU.” Ugh, no. No. No.

So she shares her breakup story with “Marty” and it’s pretty sad and sounds like a rough time. The thing is, even while he’s consoling her and “oh wow must be heartbreaking,” I’m just thinking of his flat voice and how he’s probably got his hand on his dick the whole time. In the next portion, he wants to exchange pictures, she won’t, so he says “Oh well if you will please describe yourself.” She does, talking about her hair length and eye color. He says “What’s your body like, is your body like fit, orrr?” GROSS. STOPPPPPP.

He takes some video around Williamsburg for her, and wants to drop it off at her house. She has a friend go down to his car and get it from him. After that, there’s a segment where he asks her if she went on a date the day before. She says yes, and he replies “OK so I will probably not be talking to you in the future.”

This ended while I still had quite a bit of commuting left to do, but I just shut everything down. I couldn’t even stand to listen to any kind of palate cleanser, this bothered me so much. And I hate that there are people out there who would say “YAY ART YOU FELT SOMETHING” because I really just felt something I feel every day, which is that lots of men are creepy manipulative liars always on the hunt for poontang. I’ve been on the end of the creep stick (literally, you guys) and it’s awful. It’s predatory. I don’t ever again want to be in situations where men are talking to me like, “So why don’t we all take off our shirts and have a philosophical discussion about our favorite sex positions? Why don’t we just randomly start talking about the last time we had sex? If I make you jealous of another girl, will you describe your boobs to me?”

I guess it’s all part of some kind of grody sex dance that people do with each other, but I hate it. It’s full of shit and lies and bad intentions. That’s why this piece bothered me so much: this girl is looking for someone to talk to her about something specific and in walks this dude who basically passive-aggressively barfs his sexual needs all over her. It’s gross, it’s sad, it’s uncomfortable. And I hate that I really wanted to know what Hasidic life was like, and how the eruv worked, and where it was, and this guy fucked it all up by being gross. Now I’m just mad and I don’t care.

ART.

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October 5, 2014 · 8:14 pm

True Shart

Oh, I just hate the way True Blood ended. The entire last season was like one long drawn-out bloody fart that you’d have to go to the hospital after. It was like a minor medical incident involving a butt. Let’s explore this destroyed ass, shall we?

So first thing, like literally in the first couple of minutes, Tara gets her vampire ass blasted to pieces all over her mom’s lap, and the whole world goes “Woooo!” I don’t pay any attention at all to True Blood blogs or rumors or recaps or anything like that (I tried to use the True Blood hashtag to tweet reactions at Retta during the Season 6 premiere and IMMEDIATELY some bitch retweeted me to correct me: Apparently Ryan Kwanten is Australian so you’re not allowed to say he has a sexy British accent). But I still somehow managed to read all over the place that someone was going to die “in the first few moments!” of the season 7 premiere. The entire world held its breath, hoping it would be Tara, whom no one likes, even when they had her turn into a Sexy Lezzy Vampire and whore-out with Pam and a lot of MAC cosmetics and corset tops. But I thought oh god, they must really be hurting for a plot this season if they need to slap a death in there first thing. And I was so very sadly right.

After Tara dies, they spend all of the rest of the episodes coming up with reasons for all of the characters to all be together at once. It was like a goddamn endless parade of dinner parties “Because life!” and dinner parties “Because death!” And everyone was drinking and catching each other fucking everyone else and then Alcide got shot in the head while chasing Sookie through the woods naked.

IMG_0125.JPG

derp

That was no surprise. There was a little side-action building for about three episodes in which Anna Paquin would gaze into the distance and wonder aloud in her best Sookie voice if she reeeeally loved him enough and then BANG we don’t have to worry about that anymore, do we? Anyway, next thing you know, she’s driving his truck over to Bill’s house for some vampire dong. A most disappointing end for Alcide the wolf-boner.

Bill has some kind of vampire AIDS, so does Eric, which is the ACTUALLY SAD PART because Bill can go die but I kind of wanted Eric to give Sookie a bunch of money and be her servant-man until she was old and/or bored with him. Eric gets cured but Bill is on some kind of “time for me to go” mission because he is VERY concerned about Sookie’s chances of procreation if he stays alive (which is retarded because adoption and artificial insemination exist). So blah blah blah there’s about a hundred more episode-long dinner parties wherein every character has a moment to make a big meaningful speech (mouth farts) with some kind of alcohol in hand (partyyy! LIFE!) and everything ends with Bill having Sookie straddle him in his grave while he stabs himself and explodes into bloodmeat strings all over her funeral dress.

Well, that’s ALMOST where it ends. All of the above was the kind of bullshittery I could deal with. Whatever, you dumb show, so you lost your edge and got dumber. I couldn’t give a shit. Just wrap it up and move on. But no, they had to wrap it up with a bow made out of misogynistic turds and rub it in our stupid faces.

Of COURSE the final scene was a motherfucking dinner party in Sookie’s front yard with all of the characters (and the fruits of their procreative efforts together) four years later. She’s in her kitchen about fifteen months pregnant and I don’t think it showed her feet but I think barefoot was the idea, folks. So then she’s carrying stuff out to the 1,000th dinner party of the season and sits down next to some dude, who sits at the head of HER table in HER yard of HER house, after she’s SET the fucking table and MADE THE FOOD. She exchanges a knowing glance with this mystery motherfucker and that’s it! Series over. Go home.

IMG_0124.JPG

Sit here, Nondescript Man.

I guess with so much of the series centered around who Sookie was giving that faerie poon to, it was only natural for everyone and anyone to be wondering who she was going to end up with. I figured after a while we were going to get some kind of half-assed finale that would at least strongly hint toward the dude she’d settle down with. Whatever. But to drop the curtain immediately after answering that question was so stuuuupid, made even more stupid by the other crap they tried to stir in to give Sookie more meaning. First of all, there was this whole “give up your faerie light” business which was dumb and I didn’t give a shit about it anyway, but before she stake-fucks Bill she goes on this whole diatribe about how it’s what defiiines her, which if you ask me was totally dumb because she didn’t even know she had it until like two years earlier. Also, it seemed like it was so volatile, she could sneeze and it would blast out of her and be done with, just like that. Then there’s the fact that she was so low on the faerie ancestry chart that she had so little of the magic faerie blasting solution that it could be worn out anyway. It’s like saying you’re “one twentieth Cherokee” and you only have so many clay pots from flea markets left and if you give them all away you won’t be able to say you’re Cherokee anymore and that means you’re not much of anything! Wahhhh!

There was also this weird scene where baby Sookie and baby Tara run in the rain to Gran’s house and are sucking down hot chocolate when Sookie says something about never wanting a boyfriend because they’re all nasty. I thought that was kind of funny, even though I was annoyed that we were so far down in the bottom of the final season trash can that we were having to supplement with flashbacks from God knows when. But I guess Gran didn’t think it was funny because she rushed in from her hiding place where she’d been eavesdropping to scold Sookie: “Don’t ever say that! Our only limitations are the ones we place on ourselves!” So, chill the fuck out, Gran. It’s stupid to yell at two little girls who think boys suck. Also, it’s kind of gross to insist that a little girl saying she didn’t like boys was placing a limitation. Because fuck you. What if Sookie was starting the process of coming out of the closet? Tara sure as shit was. So thank you, Writers, for that tasty little morsel of misogyny. Don’t limit yourself to a life without men! KEEP TRYING UNTIL YOU’RE HAPPY WITH ONE.

Anyway. I came away from that scene thinking that Sookie would sell her house and fly around the world, meet up with Eric in random places around the globe for a good bang every now and then, go to college, start a business. I thought she’d zap into action after that flashback faded and be like “Holy fuck, I still have a life, I can DO shit!” But what happens? She gets knocked up and has a dinner party. So apparently setting yourself no limitations = marriage & family. And probably a subscription to Martha Stewart Living which recommends the best outdoor lighting schemes for dinner parties.

Oh, right, and: meanwhile, Hoyt fucktardedly remembers that he used to bone Jessica and Bill says “I want y’all to get married before I die so I know you’re SPOKEN FOR” and even though Jessica is a killing machine who comes out at night to eat people, she needs a man to be safe, and despite protesting that this dude doesn’t remember fuck all about her, she marries him and Bill’s like “Cool. Got to die now just because.”

Well, also, another really misogynistic storyline was the girl Hoyt brought back to town with him, whom he unceremoniously dumps (after she hassles him about another woman THE NIGHT BEFORE HIS MOTHER’S FUNERAL which was weird). He rescues Jessica from getting tied up and fucked by Jason’s ex-girlfriend with a hot poker in the shape of a dong (I am so serious, this happened, or rather, almost happened) and they realize they are still in love. He dumps ol’ Outtatown Twatsy who has no other choice but to stay at Jason’s house in his t-shirt and boxers. And he’s like “don’t fuck her, don’t fuck her, hommina hommina” because fucking ruins everythiiiiing. So ol’ girl is like “I’m gonna teach you how to share a bed with someone without fuckin’ em” and holy hell if the Madonna/whore complex didn’t rear its ugly Madonna/whore head. Oh, this is a good girl, the audience breathed in collective relief. She’s perfect for fucknasty Jason. She’ll fix him!

Oh fucking hell.

The whole season, but especially the last episode, was like several pages from horny teen boy fan fiction, the worst kind: the kind that doesn’t recognize women as anything but either fuckable or loudmouthed (read: unfuckable). The whole torture-panty-dungeon scene would have been laughable if it wasn’t meant to be titillating that one sexy vampire was about to rape and murder another sexy vampire (they’re vampires, not women! Who CARES? This is for fun!). But really the entire ending was based on the idea that in order to tie up a loose end, a woman has to get married and be “spoken for.” What else is there, ladies? Really though, what else? Thanks for watching!

leggings of The cursed protector

For every comment this blog receives that is from a real person, not a robot, this blog receives 1,000 spam comments. For every comment this blog receives from someone who has tried one of my recipes and wants to let me know that I’m stupid and fat, this blog receives 2,000 spam comments. For every comment this blog receives from someone who just wants to tell me I’m stupid, this blog receives 3 billion spam comments. What I’m saying is that I get a lot of spam comments.

I’ve started looking and them closely and actually reading through them because 1. they’re hilarious, and 2. I don’t have any idea how they work or what they are supposed to be doing. Is there a computer out there with the sole purpose of creating fake email addresses (lskdjofiehlksjlfdkjflkj1389usdlkjdlj8sljdf@gmair.corn, for example) and randomizing groups of phrases to mash together to form a paragraph that smacks of a compliment with a hint of sales pitch and ends up coming out like it’s being typed by a Ukrainian with a minimal grasp on the English language? Is that how it works? Ok, so, what is it trying to get me to do, exactly? What does the computer want?!

Recently I got the very best spam comment I’ve ever gotten ever:

IMG_0126.PNG

Cool! Want to talk about the cursed protector now?

WHO THE HELL IS “LEGGINGS OF THE CURSED PROTECTOR” AND WHEN CAN I BE FRIENDS WITH THEM AND/OR BUY THEM TO WEAR??

There have been others that are just as confusing, here are some of the most recent:

I always spent my half an hour to read this web site’s content every day along with a mug of coffee.

Oh, how quaint! I hope this “web site’s content” has never made you spill that mug of coffee on yourself in horror. P.S. are you a stock photo of a woman at a computer? I thought you might be.

I do not even ƙnow how I ended up here, but I tҺoսght this post was great. I ɗo not know who you аre but definitely yߋu aгe going to
a famous blogger if you aren’t already 😉 Cheerѕ!

Ah, a famous blogger! Everywhere I go, people will know that I am there because I will put it on my blog that I am there and thousands of people will flock there and be like, what the fuck does our most famous of famous bloggers look like? And they will not know because how does a blogger even become famous? You did not think this through, pally, which is evident from the nonsensical character you have used in place of the “o” in “you.”

I get that you don’t know who I am (BUT I AM A FAMOUS BLOGGER, HOW CAN YOU NOT KNOW ME?), but do you know who you are? Have you become sentient?

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on 60 day insanity.

Uh, anytime. But you may have me confused with someone else, I’m not sure insanity only lasts 60 days, in fact, I’m pretty fucking sure it doesn’t.

Most of the other ones say a mixture of the same phrases, which are “I’m going to bookmark this web site!” and “this web site has the best Information about this topic” and “I will tell my brother about this because he is researching this very thing.” What would happen if I responded? Would Ukrainian computer bots kick down my door and invade my house, screaming at me about MOST PREMIUM WEB SITES DOMAIN HOSTINGS and PLACE LINKING ON A PAGE IS THE MOST EASY and I MUST TELL MY BROTHER ABOUT THIS WEB SITE INFORMATION???? Probably. That’s probably what would happen. I will just keep deleting the spammies for now. FOR NOW.

Because if “leggings of The cursed protector” ever comes back, I’m following that shit to the ends of the Internets, you guys.

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September 24, 2014 · 5:19 pm

I’ve Written Other Jokes, But These Are The Ones I’m Going To Tell

Accomplishments In The 24 Hours Since Deactivating Facebook

Bought fancy expensive smoked sea salts. (Will probably become amazing chef.)

Remembered that Twitter exists.

Some work stuff that probably wasn’t important and is definitely going to have to be done again.

Made a joke about fantasy football that was pretty OK and hurt someone’s feelings at the same time.

Bought a $7 magazine.

Ate some hummus.

Remembered that Instagram exists.

Poop Jokes in Hell

I’m on a quest to Do Things. It’s because I’m feeling the scaly little fingers of depression poking at the back of my throat and I hate all of my clothes and I’ve watched all of Parks & Rec and 30 Rock at least ten times through and I can’t sleep at night. That’s normal, right? So I would lay awake scanning Facebook to see what other people were Doing and it turns out that most people were Doing Things and I’m doing nothing. I CAN’T EVEN SLEEP RIGHT.

On Monday night I went to stand up comedy open mic night at the little movie theater bar by my house. I just wanted to watch how this kind of thing went down. I don’t know how it’s possible that I forgot what it’s like to be around people who are very Personalityish, entire rooms full of them. How did I forget the few theater classes I took in college? Oh Christ, I forgot the few theater classes I took in college! And that’s how I ended up sitting at the bar waiting for this thing to start, listening to a dude in a collared sweater with a throat zipper talk about his “craft” and give a guy in a trucker hat with large ironic words on it pointers on his “material.” Oh nooooo.

So we filed in to this little room behind the bar and found some seats. There was a VERY energetic girl zipping around, to and fro, up and down, pulling on her clothes and her hair and just generally being a weirdo. Something about her was familiar but I couldn’t figure out what, because my thoughts were interrupted by the sound check, which was:

“ARRIGHT STOP WHATCHA DOIN, CAUSE I’M ABOUT TO RUIN…”

Oh nooooooooooooo.

It was Zippy on the mic, throwing down some white girl rap. To be funny! Because who says mic checks have to be boring when they can be trite?! Ehhhhgghghg. So it’s when Zippy takes the mic and starts the show with jokes about a dude she used to date (“He put a ring on it!” and the room literally sagged under the weight of 1000 cheap one-liners farting to death) that I realize how I know her: she was a leasing agent for the owners of my apartment several years ago. She used to bust into my apartment on Saturday mornings with total strangers who would peek into my bedroom as I hurried to cover my butt. I stood on the other side of my door once and listened to her tell some prospective renters that “the current renter is difficult.” So holy shit if I wasn’t a little creeped out that now here she was in front of me telling me about how she’s Jewish, joke about some guy she dated, Fran Drescher impersonation, hurr hurr durrp. Give it up for all of these nervous people you don’t know!

First up: a guy. First joke: a poop joke. Nothing to see here, move along.

What followed was a veritable parade of dongs. There were a few women in there, but the swagger and attitude and stink of dong pretty much overshadowed the whole operation. Here’s how it went:

Poop joke guy. It was about thinking he was crazy when he was twelve because he would shit and there wouldn’t be anything in the toilet. This was funny to me because the only video I could find on YouTube of a comedian performing at this open mic night was of a guy telling a story about this one time when he was 5 and he pooped his pants. I thought “I bet every joke will be a poop joke,” which is why the first joke thrilled me so, if thrilled=crushed with disappointment (because people were LAUGHING.). It was then that I noticed that this same venue holds a monthly story slam wherein all the stories are about shitting yourself. I’m not kidding. Their flyer says “Have you ever shit your pants?” (Yes but I don’t see why I should tell you about it, sir!)

A guy who said he was going to do an impression of the inner voice of every comedian who would perform that evening, then proceeded to scream “LOVE MEEE” into the mic. You could hear the crunchy spiny bits of the tumbleweeds passing through the room on the wood floor after that, and it was super awkward, so he went back to his little notebook and said into the mic “what else, what ellllse…” before just quitting entirely.

A guy who talked about hating ex girlfriends and burning bridges because “that’s stupid to do when you’re in your 20s, but I’m in my 30s now…”

The guy from the bar, who talked about his craaaazy family and how mean they are. He said he had written OTHER jokes but that these were the ones he wanted to tell tonight “so fuckin’ deal with it.”

This guy who made me so uncomfortable, I leaned over and whispered that we HAD to leave right after he was done, because it was like he was doing his Dane Cook impression. Like right down to the facial expressions and body movement. You know, jerking around and impersonating women with head tosses and one hip jutted out, smacking his mouth with all of his words, using the space around him to trot about like a pony with one leg shorter than the others, playing with his own spiked hair like he wasn’t going to go to the bathroom after his set and put it back the way it had been. And he was getting close and leaning in and staaaaring and almost challenging everyone to look at him. Creeeepyyyy.

I hate to put all the women in the same category but damn if they didn’t make it so easy to do. They told jokes about dating and that’s pretty much it.

Etc. etc. etc., and the one thing all these men had in common was this swaggery bravado, like they didn’t need you to laugh. They were just there because they were CHAAAARACTERRRRRS and they knew they were funny and they needed to practice on your face. It was like watching someone take a masturbation selfie. It felt so false, like I should be in another room or something. Which most of them were, between each other’s 3 1/2 minute sets. They were crowded around the bar ignoring all of the other comedians until it was their turn, then they expected your full attention. Which kind of strikes me as weird and disingenuous. But isn’t the whole thing like that?

Meanwhile, through the entire thing, Zippy was seated directly to the left of the performer. She took her hair down. She put her hair up. She changed the height of her ponytail. She yanked at the tongues of her sneakers. She took her sneakers off, put them back on. Whipped her hair back and forth. Up and down. Pulled on the zippers on her athletic jacket. All of this while holding up her phone every time the 3 minute alarm went off. Holding up her phone RIGHT NEXT TO the performer. Like instead of in the back of the room. She laughed in a way that was almost intentionally Fran Drescher-y. Like “NYAHHAHAHAHHAHAHA.”

This is what it’s going to be like in Hell, isn’t it? Or maybe the Hell part is when you’re walking home wondering what your therapist is going to say when you tell her all this stuff, and also the part about how you can’t walk by a trash can without thinking someone’s going to jump out from behind it and tell you a horrible joke.

I must poll my friends who do stand-up and find out HOW they have the energy to put two sentences together after being around other stand-up comedians. Because fuuuuuck.

Yo Linden

There were a couple of weeks in August when all I could stand to have on my TV was every episode of The Killing ever made. I love that show. Is it the constant rain and sadness that I identify with? Is it because it’s in Seattle? Is it because Detective Linden is the best lady cop in the entire world ever?

I mean, take a look at her. She wears the same sweater throughout all of Season 1. She’s tired and frazzled. Her makeup is minimal so as to appear nonexistent. Her hair is all fucked up, either oiled back or fuzzed up like she brushed her ponytail backwards to get all that frizz going. She chews gum constantly and her jaw does that tightening thing that, in any other Lady Cop Push Up Bra Hour show, would be considered unattractive. She scowls, and not in that pouty way. She also gets fucked over a lot because she can’t fucking do everything perfectly. Like raise her kid. She’s colossally bad at raising her kid, which is a really brave choice for a show. I caught myself thinking “what a dick, leaving that kid alone in a hotel room while he’s sick” and wondering aloud why the show kind of glossed over that. Then I remembered all the times that men have been shitty fathers on TV shows and I’ve thought “well but he had to go to work, so….so you know.” Nobody makes a big deal about that.

I appreciate the fact that she’s struggling with some kind of mental illness, but the jury’s still out on whether the choice to have her deal with that has any intended connection to her mishandling of personal affairs. I don’t get the sense that the show’s writers are saying “any woman who doesn’t focus completely 100% on motherhood is crazy,” but I can see how some would think that.

She's not buying what you're selling, bub.

She’s not buying what you’re selling, bub.

I usually find cop shows to be kind of dumb and boring, especially if it’s about two lady cops who are trying to haaaave it alllllll! (See Rizzoli & Isles. I mean, whose fucking names are Rizzoli and Isles? I highly doubt a Rizzoli has ever met an Isles. Also I’d be pissed if I was a lady cop, running around in my smart little lady cop pantsuits, and the sergeant assigned as my partner ANOTHER lady cop because she also likes pantsuits. Does he think we’re going to get along based on the pantsuits thing? I’m here to work, Sergeant, so you can re-assign Isles to the K-9 unit she came from! Then I’d be like OHHHH SLAMMM and high five a man cop and it would be this total funny and rad moment because that’s what happens when ladies are just one’a the guyzz.)

Anyway, about Linden. I kind of feel about her the way I felt the first time I saw Die Hard: kiiind of turned on, but mostly because I wanted to be the character, not because I wanted to fuck the character. That’s never made sense to me before, because people would say things like “You like Bruce Willis? Yeah he’s hot.” Yeah, sure. But when I was a kid and watching Die Hard in my grandma’s recliner, I wasn’t thinking “dang I’d do some sex on Bruce Willis,” I was thinking how cool it would be if I could make my muscles so huge that I could effortlessly slide down a cable inside an air vent while it blew up behind me. That would really be something! Maybe somewhere along the line I, as a girl, was discouraged from doing anything but sexualizing male characters and their badassery. I mean, you can appreciate them, you can’t do what they do.

Enter Lara Croft. With Tomb Raider I, not only could you do what she could do, you were a hot girl at the same time! So people would want to fuck you, which made it okay for you to do man things. Like put together ancient statues from pieces you find all around an underground maze you can only enter by stepping on sensitized plates on the ground in the correct order. Also other stuff, like shimmy across ledges and pull yourself up and ride an ATV through the jungle, shooting monkeys with a rocket launcher. Or an Uzi. You know. Depending on which cheat code you put in. Anyway, what a novelty! Huge titties and a gun!

In my heaven, Angelina Jolie isn’t the Tomb Raider of the two completely heinous films crapped upon us by the sticky bunghole of Hollywood. The Lara Croft I envision is more like Linden: short, sinewy. Tense and focused. A little bit on the manic side because you kind of have to be in order to do anything very difficult and consuming. Flat-chested, because you’re banging up against the sides of the cave walls you’re climbing all day and humongous Jolie tits would make that impossible. Careful with guns (especially on an ATV, dude) and not nice to men just because they’re men. Not nice to anyone, actually. TOO BUSY RAIDIN’ TOMBS OVER HERE TO BE NICE. A frown and a muscular jaw for the ages.

Fuck it. I have inspired myself. I’m quitting librarianship and becoming a lady cop who raids tombs in the slow season.

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