Tag Archives: assholes

September 1, 2016 · 1:40 pm

You will not forget this.

A lot of things have happened to me and every now and then, one of them bubbles to the surface and becomes the Worst Thing That Has Ever Happened To Me. Yesterday, it was the moment when I walked past one of those fire hose connection things that sticks up out of the sidewalk next to a building, and it had some kind of screw sticking out of the side, and that screw grabbed and ripped a chunk out of my dress. It wasn’t a special dress, or an expensive dress, or a fancy dress, but I liked the dress! And it had pockets, which did sort of make it a fancy dress and at least a good dress to wear to parties so I could have a place to put my beer while I ate chips with both hands. Anyway, I liked my cheap little striped Target dress that I frequently saw on other women on the same days I wore it, which usually makes me feel bad, but in the case of this dress gave me a kind of feeling of sisterhood, like I should nod in the direction of these women like, “We’re all in it (this dress) together, huh?” And they’d smile and be like, yeah girl. Way to accessorize.

At the moment I felt a yank on my dress and heard the fabric ripping, I thought WHY DID YOU WALK THIS WAY??, instantly blaming the ripped dress on myself and my choices. Like, if you didn’t want your clothes ripped, why did you dress like that?! Also, considering the various other shitty things that have happened on my afternoon walk, on that exact same strip of sidewalk, I felt that maybe I should have known that this was somehow a dangerous area for me and only me and that it was to be avoided. Here are the other things that have happened to me on that street, on my afternoon walks:

  1. Approximately two blocks north of the dress-ripping screw, I stood at a red light under the Green Line stop. I stood behind and to the left of the little square at the edge of the sidewalk, because some disgusting, smelly liquid was dripping from the machinery beneath the elevated structure. Phew, I thought, I really dodged a bullet. That’s what I was thinking when the half-empty box of Kellogg’s Frosted Mini Wheats hit me in the head, scattering its crusty payload all over my hair and shoulders, having been tossed over the railing above.
  2. Approximately two blocks south of the dress-ripping screw, I felt a tap on the bridge of my nose. It turned out to be the dribbliest gob of pigeon shit from a pigeon who no doubt ate nothing but jalapenos and the shit of other pigeons. The gob ran down my nose and poured down the front of my white shirt, and I had no choice but to ask my work friend if this was, in fact, bird shit all over my face and shirt. He solemnly confirmed that it was and watched as I yanked off my cardigan and furiously wiped off as much as I could, screaming silently into the bottoms of my lungs as I scraped splattered bird shit out of the corners of my eyes.
birdface

Here I am floating in a pool of acid covered in bird shit because I went for a walk.

I feel like these two bad things are enough bad things to happen to one person on one stretch of sidewalk. Now that there has been a third Bad Thing on this route, I can either stop walking that way every day, or stop walking every day entirely, thereby resigning myself to an extra 30 minutes of soul crushing boredom in the freezing air conditioned office that will become my tomb. Because, clearly, if I go that way again, I’m fuckin’ asking for it, yeah?

I peeled off the ripped-up dress last night and threw it in the kitchen trash can, then sat there in my underwear having a major sad about it. I saw it again this morning when I pressed down on the trash can pedal and the lid flipped up, and I dumped coffee grounds all over it. I gasped because even though the sad little dress was ALREADY IN THE GARBAGE, I somehow felt bad about messing it up even more. I thought about taking it out and laundering it before throwing it away, then I realized that’s crazy and I should forget about it. Maybe if I spent more time forgetting about things than I spent remembering them and wallowing in how awful they are, I’d feel less like a target for all of the universe’s leftover cereal and bird diarrhea and more like a person just moving around in the world.

I tried to think about other wardrobe malfunctions I may have had, to prove to myself that, if I couldn’t remember any moments in which I ruined favorite pieces of clothing, it was possible to forget this one. The problem is that I remembered a different dress, at a different time, a dress that wasn’t ruined but somehow had the stains of a bad memory pressed into its cheap cotton knit fabric.

I was fourteen and I had this Sporty Spice t-shirt dress from Old Navy, from back when everyone was wearing stuff like that: stuff that looked like men’s professional baseball apparel had been stretched and fitted so women could wear it to parties. It was colorblocked in a way that I found very sexy: the back and the t-shirt sleeves were black, as was the front up to the boob area, which came together with a mauve and gray swoop that went across the chest and up to the neckline. The neckline, high and conservative like one of your grandpa’s t-shirts, was ringed in black. There was a fancy cursive Old Navy logo just above where my tiny left boob started. I wore it with my black foam platform sandals from the Deb in the mall and thought I looked pretty fucking rad.

sporty

Is it sporty or classy?! Guess what: it’s neither. THANK YOU, DELIA’S CATALOG.

My mom’s friend Laura* was not our aunt, but for some goddamned reason, we had called her Aunt Laura since forever. She was this skinny-as-a-rail, muscular, rootin’ tootin’ cowgirl lady. She sat on our porch swing smoking Camels, tapping her ash into the rolled up pant leg of her work overalls. I always thought she wore a lot of weird perfume but it turns out she was just always drunk as shit. Her skin was always the same color and texture of those brown leather jackets with the silk map-print lining everyone was buying. Her face, though, was shiny and red. I never could tell if she was sunburned or her face was just red from all the booze.

(Aunt Laura had seriously been around forever, forever forever, at least since my little sister was a baby, since I was seven or eight. I knew this because I remembered very clearly one night when I went from Very Asleep to Very Awake because my stepfather stormed into the bedroom I shared with my baby sister under his arm. He stomped up the stairs with her and snapped on the light, screaming and yelling something about how he would take them, he would take them away. The light was so yellow and strong and I was too shocked to move as he yanked back the Ninja Turtle covers and ripped my sleeping brother out of his bed across the room, tucking him under his free arm. The baby started to scream as my mother, just a few steps behind my stepfather, pleaded with him to calm down and hand her the baby and please don’t do this, but he would not relent, and the whole screeching parade left the room and stormed down the stairs: he with his two screaming children under his arms, their heads bobbing with each step, my mother behind him, and my older sister following in tears. I sat in bed with no feelings except a prickly sensation in my mouth that might have been fear but might have been something else, something angry growing tall vines through my chest. I looked at the wall by my bed, illuminated in the light from the brown-yellow bulb overhead, and stared into a tiny crack that led to a little chipped hole. You could see under the layers of chipped-off paint in the hole that the walls used to be blue. I stared into that hole and thought about putting my thumb into it and said out loud to myself “I should go downstairs?” I said it like that, like a question to nobody, to myself, and waited for an answer. The only answer was in that blue dot of forgotten, painted-over wall, and it said in a voice as loud as anything I’ve ever heard:

you will not forget this

and I didn’t.

It was decided by the less hysterical adults who later got involved in that evening’s display of domestic violence that each of the kids would be taken out of the house to spend a night somewhere else, somewhere quieter, where one parent wasn’t threatening to grab up his two biological children and disappear with them. We were asked to choose between our grandparents and Aunt Laura, and I chose Aunt Laura because I was curious about where she lived. All I remember now about her house was going out into her overgrown yard early the next morning and finding the remains of a rotted wooden chicken coop. A rusty handle was attached to the molded wooden slats on top, and when I opened it, there inside was the perfectly preserved skeleton of a chicken, featherless and sun-bleached, the delicate bones of its wings spread out like tiny hands, left forgotten for a century.)

Anyway, Aunt Laura stopped by one day to finish off the six pack of PBR she’d started in her truck on the way over and invite my mom to her fourth or fifth wedding, this time to a fellow drunk she’d known for about an hour. The wedding was going to be in whichever church allowed an all-denim cast of characters, followed by a reception in someone’s house out in the boonies, which would no doubt be a doublewide trailer onto which a structure resembling half of a house had been built, then filled with deer antlers and those tables and clocks made out of a cross section of a tree cut down long ago and shellacked to a high shine.

treestumpclock

Hard to read or hang up right but sure looks purty.

 

I don’t know why I was my mother’s date for this occasion, but I was, and I wore my Very Fancy and Grown Up Old Navy knit dress and foam platform sandals. Aunt Laura spruced up a bit and wore a floral sleeveless dress that made her arms look like stringy pieces of fried chicken wings. Her fiance wore jeans and a white button-down shirt, that kind of Fancy Western Go-To-Meetin’ shirt that has shiny metal tip things added to the edges of the shirt collar, and some kind of lanyard with a medallion at the end of it, tightened up to his neck, because that’s what fuckin cowboys wear when they get married, all right?

cowboywedding2

HAHAHHAHA WE DRESSED UP, Y’ALL

(This reminds me of one of my friends who married her first college boyfriend, JUNIOR college, at that–and the whole ceremony was Zelda-themed and the bridesmaids wore dresses made from Butterick Halloween princess costume patterns. The dresses had that obnoxious v-shape in the front center of the waistline, like an arrow pointing down to the pussy goods, and each bridesmaid’s dress was so poorly fitted and sewn that each time they exhaled, the little point of fabric flipped up and lay flat against their stomachs, so as the bride flounced down the aisle to the Zelda theme song, there was a little row of backwards pink fabric saluting her over and over again from the stage area as the bridesmaids continuously flipped them back down. The wedding theme was perfect, as far as her father was concerned, because he wasn’t wearing no goddamned suit, goddamn it, because “cowboys don’t dress up like fags,” and he insisted on wearing jeans but since she was his firstborn, he finally relented and wore this weird piece of brown felt she’d cut into the shape of a tunic, which was basically a rectangle of fabric with a hole for his head and a fringe at each end. He wore a belt with a huge shiny cowboy buckle over the tunic, and insisted on strapping a fucking gun to his right leg and carrying a sword he ordered off late-night TV on his left, because that’s what fuckin cowboys wear when their daughters get married, all right?)

cowboywedding

Baby, you don’t got to be afraid o’ nothin no more.

Aunt Laura’s teenage son Brad** was the only person in the wedding who wore a black suit with a shirt and tie, and I thought that was hot. Maybe he just stood out in a sea of shitty Wal-Mart button-downs and Lee carpenter jeans, or maybe he actually was good looking. Either way, there’s nothing better than a hot dude who doesn’t go to your school, because nobody can tell him about all the times when you were weird. The group of pretty cheerleaders who harass you every day can’t walk up to both of you at recess and ask him really loud why he’s talking to you, making him question his choice in girls and deciding never to talk to you again (WHICH HAPPENED TO ME BECAUSE JUNIOR HIGH IS A FLAMING HELL HOLE OF FEELINGS AND WILL EITHER KILL YOU OR MAKE YOU AWFUL).

At the reception, in said half-trailer, half-house surrounded by gravel and cheesy lawn signs about how you’ll get shot with a gun if you piss anybody off, Brad, who was seventeen, was allowed to take part in the drinking, which began almost immediately. He proceeded to slam PBRs and gravitate toward me, and I’M SURE it had nothing to do with the fact that I was staring at him from the corner and I looked really cute in my Old Navy dress. Anyway, Brad asked me if I wanted to go for a walk, and of fucking course I did, even though everything within a 2 mile radius around the house had been covered with gravel, on top of which I had to sort of scoot in my platforms, kicking bits of rock out from where they were embedded into the bottom of my shoe with every step.

So we walked along the gravel and chatted, and I don’t remember a word he said to me except one weird question, which I must have thought was weird at the time or I wouldn’t have remembered it, but after about ten minutes of beating around the bush (HA!), Brad came right the fuck out and asked me if I was a virgin.

I was fourteen.

So yes, I said, of course I was. Because it was the truth, and if I knew anything about relationships from Seventeen magazine, I knew that they shouldn’t start with a lie. I also knew that good dudes would respect your virginity and bad dudes would resent it because, to them, it was nothing but an obstacle to that sweet teenage poon they walked around thinking about 98% of the day. I also knew, somehow, deep down in my bones, that if you wanted to get a boyfriend you had to play the motherfuckin game. So yes, I said, of course I was, but that status was negotiable, and anyway, it was only because none of the other teenage boys in my town appreciated how cool and hot I was. So even though I was a full on chicken shit (and should have been, I think, at fourfuckingteen) and this fact was definitely not negotiable, I dragged that shit out because I was going to force this dude to get to know me and take me to at least one single school dance before inevitably dumping me when I refused to take off my Fashion Bug underpants.

seventeen

OK how do I get the “sorta” boyfriend?! TELL PLS

I was surprised when the walk ended suddenly after the Big Reveal, but I chalked this up to the fact that he’d made up his mind to date me and the interview was just naturally over. We’d exchanged phone numbers and emails earlier, and since I was going to play this shit until I had a boyfriend, I started calling his bedroom phone and emailing his Hotmail account like there was no tomorrow. I checked my email every five minutes for about ten weeks.

His responses to this assault were lukewarm at best. “Oh, heyyy” he’d say, then cover the phone with his hand until I finished telling him every little thing about my day, when he’d say “Welp, I’m gonna hit the hay.” He responded to 2-paragraph flirty emails with one or two totally blah, completely misspelled sentences. Sometimes he just answered “yeah.” He once invited me to a county fair to hear his band play (they were called CELOTEX, he said, a clever name he and his bandmates had come up with, which also happened to be the brand name of the insulation covering the walls of the drafty garage where they practiced, but that had nothing to do with anything). I went, and all I remember about it was waving to him as he set up his drum kit, and he looked kind of scared and sort of half-waved back and then didn’t look at me again for the rest of the night, which was all very My So-Called Life of him to do, thank you very much, I will now sit here and enjoy this Buffalo Tom soundtrack to my life, now that I have been Buffalo Tommed.

celotex

Garage Insulation Specialists, Garage Band Specialists

Once, I called him while his best friend was over. They were in his room playing video games, he said. I told him about the football game I’d gone to that day (which was something that I did so I could eat popcorn and Airheads). I mentioned that I’d sat with a girl I knew from school. I pretended that she and I were great friends, not letting on that this girl really just tolerated me because she was too nice to avoid me like her mean girl friends urged her to. I said her name and Brad repeated it. “I know her,” he said. Off to the side, he asked his friend if he also knew this girl. “Is that Dr. Chrisman’s*** daughter?” the friend asked. I confirmed that it was. “She’s hot,” the friend said. Then they both had to go because they were gonna hit the hay or whatever.

As traumatic as it is to play an endless game of desperate phone tag with a dude who is never going to like you as much as you like him, it’s about ten times harder to do this for the first time, because you can’t quite put your finger on what that feeling is that’s creeping up through your stomach and making you want to barf all the time. That feeling, of course, is doubt, and the sneaking, scraping suspicion that you maybe, perhaps, look like a fucking idiot. I was already starting to have that feeling, and was getting to a place where it was undeniable and impossible for anyone with even a shred of emotional intelligence to ignore. I couldn’t pretend like this was going well anymore because every day that passed when Brad didn’t pay any attention to me just made it more and more obvious. It finally broke me when about ten days, nine hours, and twelve minutes had passed and I hadn’t gotten a response to an email I’d sent him, so I just sat down on my bed and cried.

My mom came in and patted my shoulder. How I wish we could go back to that moment, and I could lean in from the other side and whisper to my mother just do that, just pat her shoulder, DON’T SAY ANYTHING unless it’s something about how there will be other boys and he’s the dumb one for not realizing how great she is. You know, mom stuff! DO NOT SAY ANYTHING BUT THAT STUFF. If I could, I would pop her right on the mouth a little bit, not hard, just a little tappy tap, like boop boop boop you’re about to fuck up! And then she would not say that thing that would be a fuckup and Future Me would disappear because there wouldn’t be a reason for me to have been there in the first place.

She didn’t say any of the right, non-fuckuppy stuff. She didn’t say anything for a very long time, but finally she did start talking and it was awwwwwful. She shared with me that she and Aunt Laura had been following the teenage romance of myself and Brad since its beginning at the wedding earlier that summer. They had both been really excited and hoped that the two of us would date, because wouldn’t that be so cute, but recently Aunt Laura had called my mother and let her know that Brad was a sexual guy, okay, and that he had confided in Aunt Laura that he really didn’t want to waste any time with a girl he wasn’t going to get to fuck. My mother didn’t say this in these exact words. What she did say was that Aunt Laura told her that Brad told Aunt Laura “that he was interested in young women with whom he could share a sexual relationship.”

IF THOSE ARE NOT THE MOST EMBARRASSING THINGS YOUR MOTHER CAN SAY TO YOU WHEN YOU ARE A FOURTEEN YEAR OLD GIRL THEN I’D LIKE TO KNOW WHAT COULD POSSIBLY BE WORSE.

Here I was, crying over a dude, and my MOM reveals to me the exact reasons why the guy doesn’t want to date me, and they’ve been revealed to her through some fucked-up game of Drunk Telephone, and they’re SEX REASONS that HAVE TO DO WITH SEX and NOW YOUR MOM KNOWS ABOUT YOUR NONEXISTENT SEX LIFE AND SO DOES THE BOY YOU LIKE AND SO DOES HIS MOM AND PLEASE I WANT TO DIE NOW.

This was a Bad Thing. A very, very Bad Thing. But I did not die.

I wore the Old Navy dress several more times. I chased men who wanted nothing to do with me many, many more times.

I saw Brad one time in the parking lot of a Dairy Queen, when I was a junior in high school. He waved to me from a car window and I narrowed my eyes at him and said “What do you want?” Which was, I think, the appropriate response to someone who can’t be straightforward, who has to tell his mom to tell your mom he will only date you if tell him beforehand that he can fuck you.

rayanne

I’m just here for the goddamn sundaes.

I’ve heard that Brad has several children with several women, and is just as poor and as drunk as his mom, who divorced Husband #4 and has moved on to 5 and 6, maybe 7, I don’t know, I don’t live there anymore. I do feel sorry for him, in the way that I feel sorry for most men who rejected me or were mean to me when we were teenagers because I was ugly/weird/virginal, and are now meth addicts and drunks working in coal mines and struggling to make child support payments. I don’t like to think of my little teen self being treated like shit, but I also don’t like to think of these boys I dreamed about day and night being miserable old men. I wish there could have been some kind of balance, some kind of even playing field both then and now, and maybe a place where we could have all met in the middle.

I still see Brad’s best friend on social media, because I’m still friends (in that let’s share cake recipes and politely ignore each other’s political views social media type of way) with the Too Nice Girl from the football game. The night after the conversation with Brad and his friend wherein I mentioned her, Brad’s friend went to the next football game in our town and chatted her up. They’re married now and they have two kids. Her wedding dress was white and princessy and glittery and strapless and they did the thing where everybody jumps up in the air and the photographer snaps a picture just as they’re coming back down, all puffs of fabric and blurry limbs. In the background, near a bridesmaid with a blurred face, Brad floats back down to earth, and maybe it’s the suit or maybe it’s the anti-gravity, but he looks almost like the asshole teenage boy I was in love with in the summer of 1996.

 

 

 

*Not her real name

**Not his, either.

***Come on.

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June 20, 2016 · 2:30 pm

You and Whose Army

A flat, in theatre terms, is a set of two-by-fours in the shape of a rectangle, 8 or 10 feet tall, with one side covered in plywood or muslin. They’re painted over and over again, fitted together on a stage in configurations necessary to give the impression of the walls of a house, or the sky behind a barn, or whatever else it is that’s needed to convey to the audience that what’s in the background is a real thing and not a bunch of plywood and paint. The back of a flat is basically an unfinished frame, the edges of boards sticking out. One of these was lying flat side down on the floor backstage during a rehearsal for The Musical Comedy Murders of 1940, at Southeastern Illinois College, in the early spring of 2002. I played a cross-dressing murderous maid in the play, and wore a terrible, thousand-year-old dirty blonde wig with the appearance and the texture of a really old scrubby sponge. I was pulling it onto my head, running from one side of the stage to the other, in the pitch black behind the little false sitting room, made of flats painted pink, that made up the set. I barely felt something hit my toe, then I was going down hard, flying forward to meet the ground, and landed smack dab in the middle of the flat on the floor. The edge of the two-by-four in the center of the flat collided with my right thigh muscle. For weeks, I had a dark bruise the size of my wide open hand, running sideways across my thigh.

flats

I complained about it a whole lot, surely. It hurt! Also you could totally see it under my dark black tights I had to wear for the entirety of the play. It was unmistakable: a big raised black/blue area, which eventually turned to purple, then faded to green, then yellow, and finally went away. The thing is, it’s still there, I see it every time I’m in a yoga class and I go into downward dog. I’m face to face with my thighs in tight pants and I can see the depression, the area of my leg that looks like a bit’s been scooped out with a ladle. Oh, hello, Imperfection! There you are. And look at that: you’ve positioned yourself right above the stubby little scar left behind from the time I attempted to make Barbie a t-shirt with an old sweatshirt and my mother’s sharpest sewing scissors and ended up stabbing myself in the leg, then running around in circles making the stab hole bigger! Then getting stitched up by some half-drunk dope in the shittiest small-town emergency room in the world, ending up with a scar that looks like a puffy, sick caterpillar!

(The doctor used some kind of thick, hooked needle to stab seven or eight tiny holes in my leg around the cut, then connected the holes together. As the cut healed, a little chasm formed between the two sides, a chasm that filled with scar tissue and became a scar the size and thickness of my pinky finger. There are even scar marks where the stitches went in, so incompetent was this guy. If a kid suffered this injury today, and went to an emergency room that was better prepared for injuries of this type, she’d get more than a few stitches to hold the wound all the way closed, and end up with a smaller scar. They told me, when I asked about scarring, already concerned in second grade about marks that don’t go away, that the scar would get smaller and smaller, and eventually move up my leg as I grew, as if the skin on my legs would stretch like leggings, until the scar would disappear into my crotch. That didn’t happen. It stayed right where it was.)

scar

HELLO MY NAME IS SKITTLES

When the flat, uh, flattened my leg, I felt the same panic I felt when I’d cut that leg open years before. There was something about these injuries that scared and disappointed me. I was cartwheeling through life, destroying my body, screwing it up. It wouldn’t be the same anymore. These things were happening to it and leaving evidence that they’d happened. I wouldn’t look right anymore. I was damaged and you could tell just by looking at me. This is why I hated getting fillings at the dentist: some of your tooth, your tooth, that was there when you were born, is now just gone, dust floating away in thin air. You watch it go through the orange plastic over the drill, you smell it burning. It’s gone like it was never there. They don’t save it for you in a little jar, you’ve just lost some part of you forever. Then they fill the hole it left behind, the place where there used to be stuff that was made of you, with some kind of goop that’s going to crack and need to be replaced in a few years. You leave and there’s something in your mouth that doesn’t belong to you. I’m terrified of that concept. Isn’t everyone else? Shouldn’t we be?

The other day, I surprised myself by how mean I could be. I looked in the mirror and wiped a bit of excess eyeliner away with my fingertip. I stood back and looked at the body in front of me, which I described to myself as huge. I examined the face, which I called pasty and pale and worthless. These things come to me so easily, it’s like someone else is sitting next to me saying them. They happen before I have time to fully form them as thoughts in my head. They’re my voice, but meaner. After all of these mean things, they said

You should really apologize to people for having to look at you.

 

 

 

The neighbor girl used to say “Go like this” and then bare her teeth at me, her lips peeled back so I could see both shiny rows, top and bottom. Sometimes I said I didn’t want to, but usually I gave in on the first command to get it over with. I’d do it, and she and whichever of her friends she had invited over for an afternoon of swimming in her bean-shaped pool on the other side of the fence would step forward and peer into my mouth. They’d stare in horror at the crooked little teeth, struggling for a place in the front, pushing each other out of the way. They’d be especially interested in one particular tooth in the bottom center, the one that had a little brown spot on it, right in the middle. They’d stare with their hands on their hips, as I mouth-breathed into their faces, and when they got to the little brown tooth, they would all fake a shudder and say “Ugh!”, rubbing their hands together as if they needed to go wash off somewhere to avoid becoming like me. And because children are marvelously blunt, I got to field all kinds of questions and comments about my mouth.

“Your teeth are so ugly. Why are they so ugly?”

“Why don’t you get them fixed?”

“Don’t you brush your teeth?”

“You should get braces.”

This stuff is all minor-league. I mean, all of us were plopped down suddenly one day into a world where all of our imperfections were pointed out to us, and all of everyone else’s imperfections started to become really, really obvious. Then everyone started to separate into groups based on this information. So it goes, right?  You’re a little bit weird and there’s something on your tooth. You can’t come over and swim, and you can’t have crushes on any of these seven boys, okay? That’s how it works! We’ll come by when we want to see a freak show.

Sometimes I’m still nervous to talk to or around kids. For years and years after being subjected to repeated torture by the neighbor girl, forced oral examinations, taunting, and general exclusion based on the fact of my terrible mouth, I’d say something around a kid and they’d say, “You know you have something on your teeth?” I’d have to explain that it was always there. “Why? Can’t you get it off? Can’t you brush your teeth? Can’t you get rid of it?” They were like little radars finding that one lone signal in the grid that shouldn’t have been there, trying to destroy it with shame. People usually shushed their kids after a few protestations, but the same situation happened again and again. That fucking brown spot on my teeth was like a magnet for questions. And sometimes adults would point it out to me! Some of them meant well, I’m sure, in an “oh, you have a piece of something in your bottom teeth” kind of way. But some grew defiant when I’d say, “Oh, no–that’s a part of my tooth, it’s always like that.” They’d puff up a little bit, embarrassed, and shoot back something to the tune of “Well why don’t you get it fixed?!”

Is there anything worse than an adult who can’t deal with their feelings?

My stepfather’s teeth were terrible. They were a crowded mess, top and bottom. They were all different shades of yellow, black, and dark gray. They were actively rotting away in his jaw, as was the mucus constantly pooling in his sinuses, which made his temper worse and his snivelly voice all the more nasal and piercing. The smell of his face was nauseating: if you were in trouble, he’d breathe his rot-stench breath down on you, as close to your face as he could get. I think of it now as an animal’s spit-shiny teeth in your face, strings of saliva trickling down out of the corners of the cracked lips. I can still smell the rotten teeth and sinuses, the beer breath, the Speed Stick. Those were his smells, those are the smells of my terror.

He’d hold my head. With one arm under my chin, bicep smashed against my right ear, he’d hold me in a headlock in front of the sink. I was too small to see the mirror without standing on my toes, so I stared at my forehead and gripped the edge of the sink. With his other arm, he furiously scrubbed my bottom row of teeth. He held my head tight so it was still as he scrubbed. He scrubbed until I bled, and then some. He scrubbed until he got too angry to continue, or too bored. He went down to the basement and came back up with a wire shop brush, Next time I’m using this, waving it in my face. I never knew when he would brush my teeth for me: it came out of nowhere. I’d be sitting there talking, laughing, telling someone a story, and the next thing you know, he’d be exploding in anger at me, screaming about that fucking spot and how disgusting and lazy I was for never brushing my teeth. He’d drag me off to the bathroom and there we’d stand for what seemed like hours: him scrubbing the skin away from my gums, determined to get that spot out. Me inhaling the stench from his rotten mouth and waiting for it to end.

shopbrush

Choose your adventure.

These were things he said:

You’re a quitter. You’ll never finish anything

Food would last a lot longer around here if you didn’t glut so much, Miss Piggy

You’re worthless

You’re a psychopath

Stupid

Big mouth

Fatass

You’re a disgusting pig

Monster

You’re an embarrassment

And on and on. It didn’t always start with me opening my mouth, with him catching sight of my teeth. It could be something as small as not getting a dish clean enough. It could be for making too much noise. For eating to much. For having a radio on loud enough for him to hear when he was standing with his ear pressed to my bedroom door. There was no telling when or how much anger I’d inspire in him, or for what. When you were the target, everyone else would just sit around, pretending to pay attention to the TV or read a newspaper. We were a family of ghosts, navigating the house quietly, invisible to each other, trying to steer clear of this screaming, angry man and his torments.

There was one time, one time when I decided I was too old (at fourteen) to be threatened like this. He’d been trying to help me with my math homework, and both of us were frustrated with it. He, of course, began screaming about how I wasn’t trying hard enough. He said if I didn’t do it, “it” being some kind of function related to the math homework, he’d beat my ass.

“I’ll beat your ass,” he said.

“No you won’t,” I said.

“Oh yes I will,” he said.

Then I was on the floor. He’d grabbed both of my ankles and yanked me off the couch. I’d tried to turn and grab the cushion and ended up on my stomach, my cheek scraping the carpet. He wrenched one arm behind my back in some kind of wrestling choke hold and sat on it. It felt like being stabbed in the shoulder. It felt like someone was trying to tear my arm off. We stayed there like that for a long time, him punching, punching, punching into my back. In my struggle, I had flipped up the corner of the fabric at the bottom of the couch and I could see its broken leg, the one he had steadied with a small stack of books. I kept thinking of myself as being punched down to be as flat as Flat Stanley, small enough to climb into an envelope, to hide between the pages of a book.

flatstanley

There is safety in dimension.

But I must have been screaming. I must have been screaming because I looked up and my brother was running down the stairs. I saw the light from the windows behind his head. I saw his shoes where he stood inches from my head, speechless, absorbing the scene. Eventually, my mother came down the stairs and screamed for him to stop. I packed my things and moved in with my grandparents, my mother’s parents.

After the divorce, during the custody hearings, my brother denied having seen the beating. I insisted to the judge that it had happened. He replied, “I don’t think he meant it that way, I don’t think he’ll do it again.” My grandmother and my aunt, my mother’s sister, the ones I had run to after that final beating, showed up to court and sat on the side of my abuser. Everyone thought it best that I forgave him. Everyone thought it best that I moved on. The state of Illinois thought it best that I visit him three nights a week. “If you don’t get your ass out here,” he said over the phone, “I’ll have your mother put in jail.”

Sometimes, the truth just gets overtaken in a wave of bullshit, of good intentions, of bad ones, of the way people wish things were, instead of how they actually are. Sometimes Jedi mind tricks really work in the way that someone can wave their hand and say “that didn’t really happen, and anyway, even if it did, I’m sure he’s sorry, even if he hasn’t said so, and he’s never done anything like that to me, or in front of me, so how can I be sure it’s even true?” I guarantee you that there is a whole mountain of evil out there hiding behind a forest of people who just don’t want to believe it could happen. I guarantee you that the balance of power is all someone needs to do awful things to you and never be called up to question for it.

My brother still doesn’t speak to me. Neither does my younger sister. Both of them have said “She’s crazy.” I don’t blame them. He is their father. He is the mountain.

 

 

Now tell me how it is I’m supposed to go through life opening my mouth and talking to people? Tell me how it is I’m supposed to trust that they won’t look into my mouth, down my throat, and tell me all the things that are wrong with me? Sometimes I am so afraid to be in the world, I can barely look at a bus driver or stand to have someone sit near me in the doctor’s office. Sometimes my head swims so fast with all the things I should say to sound like a normal person, I end up squeaking like a rusty door and making no sense, answering questions backwards and upside-down, coming off like a completely insane person. There’s not enough time to think, not enough time to generate the right answer, the one that will keep me safe from whatever harm this other person might be ready to inflict on me.

Tell me how it is I’m supposed to look in the mirror and say nice things to myself?

 

 

The last time I saw him, he was in a bookstore with his wife, a squat little woman with a frown that appeared to be carved into her face. Her arms were crossed, she scowled at me from across a row of books. That nasally, rotten voice said “Hi.” I returned his casual greeting as if it didn’t mean anything to me, as if he hadn’t terrorized me for the first half of my life. I wondered later if he could see, from where he was standing, inside my mouth, if he could see the clean white tooth in the middle of the bottom row, where the dentist had drilled out the brown and replaced it with some kind of white tooth spackle.

I wanted to tell him she’d done this, how I’d been ashamed to see a dentist for years, and when I finally had gone, I’d shown her that spot and told her I hadn’t brushed enough when I was a child. “No,” she’d said, “that’s a deformity. You’ve got one in a back molar, too. You had an illness or a fever when these teeth were growing in your jaw that’s caused this. You didn’t do anything wrong, it’s anatomy.” IT’S ANATOMY, I wanted to scream at him. I DIDN’T DO ANYTHING WRONG.

“You will need a skin graft here, though,” the dentist had continued. “Did you do really hard brushing or something on these bottom teeth when you were little? Because the gums are just completely worn away.”

“No,” I said. I didn’t do it. But someone did. I told her about the forced brushings I endured in a headlock and she winced. She patted my shoulder and shook her head.

Apart from the day in the bookstore, I have avoided any further contact with time and distance. Before my little sister gave up on speaking to me, she sat down one day and told me that she thought he was really sorry “for everything that had happened,” and really missed me, and did I know? Did I know he had a picture of me as a baby on his dresser?

“If he’s sorry,” I said, “why hasn’t he ever apologized to me? Why are you doing it for him?” That was one of the last times she spoke to me. Because I am crazy.

Another time, a few years ago, Facebook notified me that my name had been used in a post on my abuser’s wall. “Happy Birthday,” it said, “wherever you are.”

I threw my head back and laughed like an actual crazy person. Wherever you are. IT’S FUCKING FACEBOOK, I screamed. I AM ON IT. YOU JUST TAGGED ME. YOU KNOW EXACTLY WHERE I AM AND EXACTLY HOW TO FIND ME. Then I started crying because there’s really nothing like your name being used in a passive-aggressive call for pity from someone who works harder to convince the world he’s a good person than the people he’s hurt. On your birthday.

cake

But sometimes I’m not sad about it at all. Sometimes I’m so angry I could burn up, smash things, run screaming through the streets. I hate that I was a child and he could do these things to me. I hate that he had the power, that other people gave it to him time and again. I hate whatever happened to him when he was a child that made him such an awful man, that made him go to battle over the smallest things with little children. I really hate that nobody spoke up for me until they absolutely had to in a court of law, and I hate that even then, the odds were in his favor, based on the ideals of forgiveness, love, family. I hate that it opened the door right back up for him. I hate that I still have to deal with the mess he made.

Sometimes I stand there and stare at myself in the mirror and I can’t believe how old I am. I can’t believe I’ve got a life apart from his, I can’t believe I’ve managed to get away from all of it and be a whole person. I can’t believe that someone saying terrible things about you doesn’t make them true. Then I start to wonder about him. I wonder what would happen if he tried to pull any of that shit today. I’ve surrounded myself with people who would protect me. Even if all of them fell, I’ve armored myself. I wish he would come at me now, where I have the power, and just try it all again. Come out of the dark, from behind the trees. Come and see who I am now.

My doctor looked at my leg in an x-ray. “The muscle took a hit,” she said, “but the bone is strong.”

The dentist tapped at my bottom teeth with her metal tool. “The gum is worn away,” she said, “but the teeth are sound.”

I’m bigger now than I was when I was two, eight, fourteen. My bones are strong, my teeth are sharp.

Come and see.

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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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November 10, 2011 · 6:14 pm

Laundromat of Souls

I’m in a laundromat right now.  So I can say for certain that Way #1 to get rid of lewd stares, nasty comments, tailing, and general feelings of uneasiness from creepy men on the streets and in various establishments is: push out a hacking, disgustingly sick-sounding cough, OR rip a giant fart.  I can usually produce a cough more reliably than a good fart, but sometimes I manage a twofer which is actually a foolproof way to get a weirdo to leave you alone and stop following you and talking about all the things he and his 4-foot 5-inch frame are gonna do to you, giiiiirl.

This morning I met this awful girl, and the moment she walked up to our group to say hi to the person in the group she knew, I got this nasty feeling like not only did I not want to meet her, and hope that she didn’t reach out and introduce herself, but I also wanted to get as far away from her as possible in that very moment and never see her again.  For almost no reason whatsoever!  I mean, she hadn’t even had a chance to DO anything stupid, she just walked toward us and my entire being went ARRRRGGHHHHBLERRRF!

Her name is Sally.  She has straight blonde Barbie hair down to her shoulder blades.  She was wearing black sunglasses and just about enough foundation and powder to make her face look like an art experiment or a crime scene that had been thoroughly dusted for the rapist’s prints.  Her voice was crusty and deep like she’d heard someone make fun of a deep voice once and and just re-created it constantly to be funny, but it wasn’t funny anymore!  Not to me, anyway!  She was over-layered in leggings, some kind of stocking that went over her ankles, ankle boots with snappies and clips all over them, a skirt, a long shirt, a coat, a hooded thing under the coat, a scarf, and fucking black leather bike gloves.  When she reached out to shake my hand, “HIIIIII I’m SAAAAALLYYY,” her tone condescending somehow, quickly looking away from me and to the next person in the middle of my introduction of MYSELF, I cringed because I had to touch her bike-gloved hand.  And I thought, “Well, of COURSE you’re wearing a bike glove you don’t need to be wearing.  Fuckhead.”

I found out she’s this art student from the most expensive and notoriously snobby art school in this city, a school this city is just about known for.  I’ve never met anyone from that school that I’ve been able to stand for more than two seconds, who hasn’t managed to make my skin crawl with their thick stink of pretention.  I mean, there’s this guy, who I ripped to shreds in the comments because I couldn’t fucking STAND that there are people in the world who get paid to regurgitate the pile of steaming shit this guy’s spraying (comments have since been deleted, THANKS INTERNET POLICE).  Then there’s this guy who read a story I published and proclaimed it shitty and proceeded to try to hit on me by telling me I owed him a meet-up since he was pretty sure it was based on his life, then changed his story and called me an idiot and reminded me the story was crappy, all because I called him on his ass crap.  Now we’ve got fucking Deep Throat Sally who, I’ve heard, submitted as her master’s thesis an art installation that was only 8 screens lined up, the same girl getting fucked in different pornographic ways on each.  That’s fucking art.  No, really, it’s fucking, and it’s also art, WHATEVER YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND BECAUSE IT’S SO VISCERAL.  We’re 0 for 3, shitty art school.  Things aren’t looking too good for you.

I’m totally over the fact that people pay any fucking attention to these ass fucks.  Author dude gets a STUPID amount of pussy.  I mean, every time I turn around, some chick I know is just slobbering out her hoo-ha, trying to get in his bed.  And Deep Throat is one of those girls that nobody seems to like and everybody says that nobody likes but their excuse for paying ANY attention to anything that comes farting out of her stupid face is “Yo, you don’t want to tell that girl you don’t like her, she is fucking CRAZY, man.”

Let’s remember, for a moment, that people usually think a woman is crazy if she talks, at all, about anything.  So naturally Deep Throat, who cannot shut her stupid mouth about how “visceral” things are, naturally fits that category, possibly through no fault of her own.  But I wish we lived in a world where people would fucking be honest with these stupid assholes.  Stop fucking them and stop listening to their fucking bullshiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit.

Walt Dick-me

I stayed home on Saturday night and heated up the ol’ TV TUBE because I was behind on about a million years of housework.  How lame is that?  Anyway, I have been staying over with The Pants for just about three weeks so every time I’ve dropped by my place I’ve just dumped shit on the couch or the floor, or just opened the front door for long enough to toss stuff inside.  Umbrellas, jackets, half-slips, bags of Cherry Sours.  It was time for a major cleanup.

So I turn on the TV and holler like my neighbor does when there’s some kind of sports on TV, because TBS is showing Disney’s Beauty and the Fucking Beast!  YES.  This delights me to no end because I only watched it about 60 million times as a kid so I know every word and distinctly remember every single cell of animation.  So I’m running around vacuuming the drapes and spreading potpourri in the drawers and other stuff that fancy ladies do, and I’m singing along to the chirpy giggle-pated Disney melodies.  Then I’m stricken by a very Adult Thought.

Okay, know how all the ladies in town are all about Gaston, and he’s clearly a piece of crap on his inside parts, where the feelings are?  Imagine how jealous they were after the horrendous, ferocious Beast gets turned into a hot dude?  Because he hasn’t been a normal dude for a long time, he’s been basically a gigantic wolf/lion/dog man.  Superhuman strength and all that.  And judging by the fact that he can stand immediately after his transformation, his muscles haven’t atrophied or been harmed in any other way during his human-to beast-back to human metamorphosis.  So he’s probably got some pretty good strength and muscle tone, amirite?

Look, what I’m getting at here is how awesome it must have been to get your bones jumped by a supermodel who was very recently a full-time werewolf.  Just think about it for a few minutes.  If you need a Kleenex or two to ball up under your bathroom area, go and get them now.  I’ll wait.

Man.  Belle really got the nice end of the deal.  Hot beast on-all-fours lovin’ with Disney’s version of Alcide from True Blood, and a whole library of her own.  The kind with rolling ladders.  GIVEN TO HER.  Like, this is your library.  One can only hope that the royal collection policy from back in the day included some good YA and that Belle didn’t pay for the library in beastly urinary tract infections.

Could I trouble you for a more accurate description of a stillbirth?

When I was in college I had this creative writing class with a girl who was like Narcissus when it came to her own writing.  She was pretty much convinced it was the greatest poetry anyone had ever written and she COULD NOT BELIEVE it came out of her.  Here’s how the class went: either 3 poems or 1 short story were passed around to the class every week.  The next week, we’d all be ready with positive feedback, as well as any constructive criticism we had for the story/poem.  So we’d go around the room and everyone would talk about what they liked (which was sometimes so painful, “I really loved the cover page you made for this!  It’s so SNAZZY!  Do you use Corel WordPerfect?”).  Then we’d go around the room and everyone would pretend that they didn’t have anything negative to say about a short story called “The Pool” or “The Fountain” or “The Pool by the Fountain” that basically consisted only of a girl who died of cancer and a guy who vowed to never marry another person…you know, the kind of story Boyz II Men would write if they just put their lyrics into paragraphs instead of stanzas.  So the instructor would start us off on that part every week by offering some really polite criticism that could be taken or left and usually ended with “didn’t work for me but maybe it worked for someone else.”  Then we’d all meekly take turns with our gentle, easily ignored, well-masked non-criticisms.

So about halfway through the course, the cellar doors got blown way the fuck off this little organization and the shit pretty much hit the fan when this girl brought in her poetry.  She had made it clear that she’d been writing poetry for a really long time and reading e.e. cummings pretty much all her life and so she was actually a PRETTY good poet so if we could just skip to the compliments part, please.  She gives us the customary reading aloud of her work, the week after it had been given to us to take home.  Then she sat there almost pooping her pants with excitement, wriggling in her seat, pushing her hair behind her ears compulsively, clicking her pen, waiting in dire ecstasy for each next polite little gem of attention to trickle out of someone’s mouth.

As for the poetry, it wasn’t that good.  It just wasn’t.  The ones that weren’t straight-up parodies on the cummings style were just failed attempts at really deep, aching love poetry that just swirled down the toilet of cheesiness the moment she brought her boyfriend into them.  That’s because her boyfriend was this wheezing, zit-encrusted sack of dung who delivered pizzas for Domino’s and she chronicled their love affair by making silly little plays on words and cutesy references to him as her “knight with white pizza boxes.”  I mean, the poems were just hilariously bad.  And it was sad because I think if she hadn’t taken herself so assfucking seriously, they could have been really good.  Fuck yeah, write a poem about a guy who delivers Domino’s pizza and has zits.  I’d read the hell out of that.  But there was something about it, her demand to be placed instantly on the level of Walt Whitman & Co., that was just really off-putting.  It all stunk of little effort and great expectations.

(I also wrote some really horrible shit in that class.  Partially because I was also taking myself very seriously, and I thought I was hot shit because I wasn’t as bad as Narcissa, Queen of Pizza.  So on my week I submitted a story I’d written in 3 hours, a fact I thought was a testament to my excellent ability as a writer, in the week before I’d started my period, when I was experiencing some of the weepiest, whiniest, most sentimental pre-menstrual syndrome I’ve ever experienced in my life.  Anyway, my story was about this girl who got knocked up by her boyfriend and her mother wanted to force her to have an abortion and she wouldn’t, so she ran away (waaaaah!) and hid from her evil mother, and her mother made her think her boyfriend didn’t love her anymore (aaaaaaaagh!) and then he came to rescue her and then she gave birth to a stillborn and they hugged it and later got married.  The End.  I would like to say I have never written anything that crappy again—as I deserve to be punched in both eyes for making people read that schlarbage*).

So after the initial round of friendly “I like the, ummm….title!” comments, during which everyone took what you were going to say so you didn’t want to puss out and be like “Oh I agree with everything that’s been said, ” we started in on the negative.  Nobody really needed a prompt, but we got one from the instructor.  I don’t have the copies of this girl’s poems (which I kept because I kept everyone’s work because I keep everything), but I remember that one from that week went something like this:

I am

in the garden

r-e-s-t-r-i-n-g-i-n-g

my mother’s purple necklace

that she gave

to me

…and so forth, and so on.  So the instructor was like, “I just don’t really feel like you’re using your own voice, and that’s a shame because you have such a strong voice,” and of the other poem, which was the famous pizza delivery lover one, she said “It just feels at the end of the poem like it’s more of a limerick.”  To Narcissa’s horror, people agreed with this sentiment.  That it seemed like a cutesy little fart about a relationship that would probably better fit in a prime time sitcom.  Of course, she told us why every last one of us was wrong for feeling the way we did.  She basically said we just didn’t get good poetry.  It was just so far over our heads, we couldn’t understand a word of it.  Her poetry was going to stay that way and that was THAT.  And the next week she emailed us all a poem she’d written about our criticism, a meta-poem, which basically re-iterated everything she’d spat at us in class that day, but this time, it rhymed!  Also, she made a point to say something truly crappy to each of us on our review day, just because.  (On my big day, she said “And I don’t know if anyone’s bothered to like, tell you this?  Or if you even bothered to do any research?  But your description of a dead baby is way off.  That is SO NOT what a dead baby looks like.  My mom’s had two stillbirths, so I know about this.”)  So that was the end of the polite orchestration.

Maybe that was for the better, as it was my last taste of honest criticism.  I went on to get a writing degree at an arts school where I hated everyone (save 1 or 2 women) and just about broke my teeth from grinding them every single day, surrounded by people who were just like Narcissa Princess of Pizza in that they thought they were great, their parents thought they were great, and then they came to school every day at this open enrollment arts institution and they were told, yes, in fact, you are great, possibly even the greatest that ever lived.  So they’d just walk around shitting out of their mouths and writing down every goddamn thought that ever crossed their minds and you’d have to sit in a class and listen to them being filled with sweet-smelling smoke, purchased with tuition dollars and pumped right up their fancy little b-holes.  It was during this time of my life that I came to be really uncomfortable with praise.  There were absolute clowns in my classes who were just fallen all over and assured that they were THE shit.  Like this guy Patrick: he couldn’t be bothered to spell his name correctly, and wrote “paTRtiCk” in pen on the tops of all of his short stories.  He complained about things like how he’d been telling his mom all morning that he was going to puke, and she kept saying he wasn’t going to puke, and then he PUKED!  So the teacher would nod politely and then tell him how impressed she was with his work (which was about a girl who got cancer so her boyfriend brought her a stuffed cat and his mom threw it at him, the end), then she’d tell all the rest of us how much she loved our work.  I mean, how could anyone trust that logic?

I started to really want someone to rip into me.  I felt like I was ready for it.  Tell  me I’m crap.  Tell me what doesn’t work.  Tell me who I’m trying to be when I write this!  Make me find my voice!  THROW THE STUFFED CAT AT ME FOR CHRISSAKES.

Where was I going with all this?  Oh yes.

I mentioned my own idiocy in commenting on a blog post last week, which I knew was a bad idea because the post was written in this glib, flippant tone, a tone that just suggested to me that this person didn’t want to discuss, just be agreed with.  It was a tone I should have recognized since I’ve read so many of Narcissa Pizza Princess’s poems!  JUST NOD AND THINK I’M COOL FOR THE WORDS I SAY GODDAMMIT.  But I offered my two cents, which were that marriages that end are not all failures, and that when we’re sad about things that happen to others, it usually means we’re sad about something we fear for ourselves.  That’s all.  So my reply spiraled into, I think, the writer taking offense with me even bothering to suggest that, so she followed up with this post, which was meant, I think, to express that you’re a dummy if you think she gives a shit about anything that comes out of her own head:

I didn’t think it’d be necessary to say this but here it goes… Sometimes, when I write about something, it’s because it’s a noteworthy occurrence. This doesn’t mean I necessarily care about the item at hand.

That annoyed me.  Sorry to bother you by prompting a discussion on your post!  I didn’t realize you didn’t give a shit.  Just tell me that, then!  In the comments!  Where I’m trying to talk to you!  “Oh, actually? This was all some crap I wrote but don’t really, like, CARE about.”  Why start a whole new dramatic post and tell the wooorld?  Then I looked over the rest of the site.  I saw a lot of that thing I don’t like, that thing my old supervisor Turdburger used to do: he’d say things like “Well I’m rockabilly so I like this and that” or “I’m rockabilly so I’m totally not into that.”  He’d call himself out as part of a group and tell you to your face that his personal style, which he’d absconded from masses of other people with the exact same personal style, dictated his choices in music, movies, cell phone carrier, and every other goddamn thing you could possibly think of.  So here I saw a lot of the same thing: indie this, indie that, hipster, indie, hipster blerrrrrrf.  Band name, music style, band name band name band name, music style.  One of the tags for the post was even “unpopular opinions in indie,” which is pointless because what does “indie” have to do with anything?  Nothing!  It’ s a buzz word.  There’s also lots of self deprecation (“I’m a slut!”), and lots of talk about how much drinking, etc. the writer does.  Oddly enough, the exact same shit I used to write back when I was 3 years younger and single and just drinking and fucking around and writing about it in grand detail just to titillate and tease and attract and push the envelope and be this carefree, don’t-give-a-fuck, hardcore, badass version of myself that I now realize probably annoyed the bejeezus out of a lot of people.  I mean, to the letter I wrote this stuff.  (Except the “I don’t actually care about what I write about” part.)

Now I could probably write a paper about the phenomenon that is Young People Who Feel The Need To Discuss Their Use Of Alcohol and Sexual Experiences, Completely Unprompted By Others.  And I’d be the first one to submit data to my own study: if you could read my old blog and somehow not know my favorite kind of beer and how much vodka I’d consumed on a particular night, and how badass that made me, woo doggies, you must not have read my blog.  You must have just looked at all the pitchers of me in tight clothes!

Are we all destined to be forced to watch copies of our younger selves flap around in the same ways we did?  In five years, will I read something like this that someone else has written and be like, “Oh, you stupid twat.”  It’s like getting a Delia’s catalog when you’re 35, I’m sure.  What the hell is all of this polyester crap and why did I ever buy it?

Also, on another note, if there’s one thing I can’t stand more than people who label themselves, it’s librarians who label themselves.  I don’t know how many times I’ve seen “punk rock librarian” or “super nerd librarian” or “hot librarian” or “snarky librarian” blah blah blah used as a personal description for speakers in conference flyers, About Me’s on professional blogs, or every fucking where else some younger generation dipshit librarian is told to describe him/herself.  Then you meet these people who fancy themselves the hot one that everybody wants to fuck and also have intellectual conversations with, and they have mustaches and wear Twilight t-shirts with pit stains and kilts (for the irony, not for the heritage) and they stay at home every night petting their cats and blogging about the ice cream they made and how it was the bomb.  And because they are a stark contrast to the older generation of librarians, who have mustaches and wear sweaters with apples and schoolhouses and candy appliques and stay at home every night petting their cats and reading, they are suddenly, immediately cool, and they christen themselves “Indie Librarian.”

There’s this one librarian who refers to herself as “punk rock,” and she’s quoted on just about every librarian’s blog, and she’s totally smart and knows what she’s doing, but what rubs me the wrong way is that she tries to come off like she’s Iggy fucking Pop or something.  Then I met her once in the real-worldosphere, outside of the blogosphere, and she’s fucking bald and 6000 pounds and wearing a pilled, saggy dress shirt with a scooped front and snowflakes embroidered around the waist (in March), and it goes so low in the front that one of her wide, flat tits is hanging out of it.  She was just this big slob who spent more time writing about the image she wanted you to have of her than she did just being her whip-smart fucking self.

Oh, it’s just a mirror image of real life, isn’t it?  If  someone cannot stop talking about how cool and different they are, they’re just pissing themselves inside, just all over their insides, because they’re boring even their own brain.  And it just goes to show you that you should not trust an internet presence, especially when a person has a lot of things to write about what they’re like and what they think of themselves.**

*schlock + garbage

**Case in point: I am a cyborg.

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July 1, 2011 · 12:57 pm

Day 43: Medicated

I just got to work and the dickholiest of dickholes is sitting here, waiting for me.  He looks at me, then down at his watch as if to say, “You’re an entire minute late and don’t think I didn’t notice because I did, and I’m very important, which you would know if you noticed that I am wearing not one, but two Bluetooth earpieces, but you probably didn’t notice because they are imported from Japan and are therefore very small and efficient, which you would know if you could afford small electronics.  So let’s get going because I have a lot of Very Important Research to do.”

Part of his strategy is that he regularly emails everyone he comes into contact with who he thinks might be good for networking.  He sends these weird mass emails, these “life updates,” which are just like “Hi, just checking in.  Took my son fishing off the coast of Malta last week.  It was really wonderful to get to spend time with him as he is quickly becoming a man.”  Fucking prick.  They’re like Christmas letters from the really rich extended family that you don’t really like.  Only they’re once a month.
Just to keep in contact.

Brain Ball

I took a Tylenol PM last night for a splitting storm headache, which I only get when the weather is hot and then suddenly cooler and rainy and dark.  It feels like a little ball above my right ear grows spiky tentacles, which snake out to wrap around the back of my brain and over the top, as well as under my right eye, where they anchor and suddenly retract.  My right eye feels like it will pop out and the entire right side of my head stings, even my hair hurts.  Then lightning flashes and the headache ball tightens its tentacles and the pain shoots through my teeth for about as long as the light is in the sky.

This sounds weird but I’ve decided that it’s all due to electrical energy.  My mom suffered from epilepsy as a teenager, which simply faded away as she grew up, but she still gets headaches on her right side when the weather changes.  She said that before a seizure, she would see swirling white balls of light through the peripheral vision on the right, light that would get bigger and rounder and she’d be looking for its source and then she’d wake up on the floor, tired and achey.  All of the brain is connected by electrical impulses and magnetic fields and shit, right?  The brain and the spine.  So I see no reason why nearby surges of electricity shouldn’t affect me in a totally fucked up, painful, hereditary way.  It’s kind of cool.

Two related/un-related things about this:

1. Joan of Arc is suspected to have had some type of aural epilepsy.  This condition can produce, pre-seizure, a feeling of calmness and well-being, sense of a presence, bright light, and disembodied voices.  She described having all of these symptoms when put on trial for heresy.  As sad as that is, how fucking cool is that?

2. When I was a kid, this little old lady lived in a house up the street.  She wore thin cotton flowered housedresses and aprons every day.  There was a trunk in her basement where she kept an old pair of galoshes from the 30s, charred down both sides and melted to shit.  They were the shoes her sister was wearing when lightning struck and killed her.  I used to think of her asking to keep the shoes, putting them in that trunk, moving that trunk around with her everywhere she went.  I want to be her when I get old, except with my magical electrical brain-ache.  When I feel it, I’ll tell all the children to run on home ‘lest they get struck by lightning.

Hello, Athens!

I don’t think that any amount of medication in the world could save me from being horrified by the monster that is Junk Butt.  I always knew she was fucking terrible in that way that the worst dark-hearted people have no idea that they’re sociopaths, because they don’t know what a sociopath IS so it means nothing to them, like everything else.  Things that have always annoyed me about her are as follows, in case you haven’t been paying attention:

1. Tells you you’re pretty then tells someone else you’re ugly.

2. Believes it’s her duty to stop and chat with everyone in the office at least once a day, so she can tell them that they’re pretty and tell the next person that they’re ugly, actually.

3. Has acknowledged her shittiness and fakery as a well-calculated and carefully produced front, an acceptable front for the rest of the meaningless world to have to deal with.

4. Has a big junk butt and talks about going to the gym all. the. time., but must be lifting weights with her junk butt because you could set your drink on that thing if you needed to tie your shoe.

5. Is just very basically a horrible, nasty person, and is pleased with her own horrible nastiness.

One time Junk Butt sat down in front of my desk and burst into tears.  She cried and cried, her face twisting into this strawberry-streaked cream cheese mess, her wet lips smacking and sticking together like slices of raw fish guts.  I sat there staring in shaky awe, somehow I knew that she wasn’t crying because her cat died or she stubbed her toe, she was about to confess something to me, and I heard part of my brain telling me to RUN AWAY, but then she made her confession.  The night before, the concierge, a sweet old woman from the U.K., had asked if she could have one of the countless pieces of cake set out on a fancy table for some event Junk Butt had coordinated.   “Noooo,” Junk Butt had said, probably in that sickening coo she uses on people she deems ultimately unworthy of the use of her Adult Voice (so….everybody), “That cake is only for guests.  Sor-ry!”  The concierge said she understood, grabbed her umbrella, walked out the door, and into the street where she was hit by a car and killed.

“If only I had given her that caaaake,” Junk Butt wailed.  “If only I had given her that cake and chatted with her for just FIVE MORE SECONDS,” she wheezed.  I attempted to console her, but she refused to be consoled, kept insisting that it was her fault.  As the days passed, of course the accident was The Thing to Talk About among everyone, and eventually, everyone had been visited by a sobbing Junk Butt who just felt “totally responsible” for the death, and before you know it, people are stopping by to hug her and reassure her and stopping her in the hall to tell her what a great person she is and she should never ever feel bad about anything she can’t control and God and the Bible and strength and peace and basically you are a good person and what were we talking about?  Oh yes, the dead woman.  And you, dear, of course, you poor thing.  You’ve been through so much.

I think she picked up on the fact that I wasn’t buying her shit.  Maybe that’s because I would walk away abruptly every time she came to my desk and started to sniffle.  And she definitely picked up on it when I said “You need to go somewhere else.  I can’ t deal with this.”  That next week she made a crack about how I can’t handle emotions, “They make her uncomfortable at work!”  I wanted to jump on her like a wildcat and tear open her ribcage, eat her ashen heart while she watched, but I just smiled.

That was well over a year ago.  On Day 34 of my Medicated Life, I left work early to visit my friend in the hospital.  We’d all gotten an email weeks before that he’d fallen and bruised himself, and wouldn’t be at work for a few days.  I missed him those few days, thinking he would be back in front of my desk for our daily chat later that week, not knowing he was actually in the ICU with severe cranial contusions.  Finally we all got an email stating that he was stable, and that we would be encouraged to visit him so that his brain would be challenged to remember us.  He wasn’t sure what year he was in, who people were, what had happened, where he had come from and where he was going.  Apparently, you can expect this to happen to you if your brain suddenly and forcefully hits the front of your skull, then the back, then the front again.  When people enter your room in the Rehabilitation Ward, you’ll look at them like a deer in the headlights because it’s scary to not remember them, then you’ll decide you don’t care and go back to watching The Simpsons, which you never liked before.  The world outside is a total mystery, and the food inside is bad.

So on Day 34, I felt sufficiently able to handle this, and planned to leave work for a visit.  Two other people decided to come, and wouldn’t you know, one of them was Junk Butt.

People always talk about the antiseptic smell of hospitals, but I really hate how they always have some kind of really loud ventilation system, like five jet engines attached to the top of the building, howling all day and night.  The hallways are throaty and raw, everything is impersonal.  My friend’s ward has a library with a piano and several mismatched chairs and loveseats passed down from refurbished offices, a wide window looking down on a patch of the city that seems to be in perpetual tarp-blanketed construction, and a book on the shelf that says, in bold yellow letters, EVERYBODY DIES.  I walked by and saw this message, which was supposed to be comforting, but felt a bit like a command.  And of course I thought that this was funny because all of my emotions have been packed away neatly in a fire-proof box with sharp corners that pokes me somewhere around my liver.

Junk Butt goes in nervous, talking about how she’s nervous, letting us know that she’ll just not be able to handle it if it’s worst case scenario stuff, like what if his face is still bruised and what if he doesn’t remember me and ohmygoddddd I’m so nervous if I start crying just clear me a path to the door so I can just go be emotional by myself, NO, don’t follow me out, just let me cry somewhere off by myself in a romantically lonely corner of the yawning white hospital.  Really, I’ll be okay, because I’m a strong woman.

In reality, when she’s faced with the blankness, the disinterest in interaction, the half-closed eye of an individual submerged in the ocean of competing thoughts and bewildered by the shimmer of memories like bottle rockets, she is thrown so off-guard she’s unable to muster the strength to perform.  All she can do is talk about how nice the room is, in her most phony, high-pitched voice.  She glances at the stack of magazines on the bedside table and tells someone who is re-learning how to read how super awesome it is to have plenty of stuff to read.  She tells him he’s so lucky to be in a place that has such totally super great food, gesturing at the half-eaten cardboard pizza on his tray, which brings to mind that stuff they gave you in grade school with glorified ketchup for sauce.  “They’re takin’ good care of ya!” she chirps.  He stares back at her and barely nods.

This is when I realize that Junk Butt is only so awful because she’s bricked up behind this wall of fake asscrappery, so high and well-constructed that there’s never going to be a way out.  She might as well be dead in there because I think she’s at the point where she’s so scared of the world that she’s done for.  The more excited she appears to be about life, the more she’s actually screaming at you that life terrifies her.  I felt really bad for her in that moment, but I remembered that this wasn’t her hospital room.  I didn’t much care for her starting to do that puppet show she does where she sticks her own hand up her asshole and makes herself look stoic and unafraid and positive, so I moved in and sat down next to him, close to him, which was scary but which I needed to do.  It was scary because he had on sweats and these sad hospital-issued socks, scary because a woman at the table in the community area outside his door was bleating for someone to please come open her milk, scary because he looked lonely and locked inside himself.  I thought of Bauby’s therapist and my mother helping an old lady with her groceries once when I was seven and how nothing bad is going to happen to you for doing something loving for someone, even when you’re afraid.

“So,” I said.  “Did you hear that Pippa Middleton didn’t win that Best Butt award?”

“No,” he said.

“Yeah.  It was some other woman.  Some other woman named Carol.  You wouldn’t think a Carol could have a hot ass, would you?”  He agreed that Carol is not a hot-ass-havin’ name.  But I showed him some proof.

His therapist came in and asked him if he knew my name.  First, he called me Fag Hag, which I thought was hilarious, and so did he.  Then, finally, he said my name, my full name, and smiled at me like he was really just faking a head injury, like a sneaky kid.  Of course, when asked Junk Butt’s name, he said it was Esther Williams.

(Of course, Junk Butt took this as a compliment and thought it to mean that she was skinny, but I think it’s because she’s very…theatrical.)

Toward the end of our visit, Junk Butt struck up her happy chord again, tweeting about how great it must be to just get to lie in bed all day and not go to work.

As soon as she shut the fuck up, I said “This sucks.”  He nodded.  “I would be bored here, too.  It’s OK to be depressed here.”

“I am depressed,” he said finally.  “I just feel sad and they keep wanting me to do these stupid exercises.”

“But you got this awesome window to look out of!!!” Junk Butt chimed in.

“Do you like the pizza?” I asked, gesturing at the wafer of half eaten crap on his plate.  His therapist had told us that he kept asking for pizza.

“No, it’s awful!” he replied.  “And the cake is bad, too.”

“You ate it all!!!” Junk Butt squeaked like a Disney animated squirrel.  He stared at her.  I bet he was thinking, My God, when did Esther Williams put on all this weight and stop making any damn sense?

“Well,” I said.  “It will be good to get home.  You can order an edible pizza and I’ll make you some cupcakes.  I promise it will be less depressing, it will get a lot better than this.  Just focus on the day you’re going to get to leave here.  You ARE going to get to leave here, I swear.”

“I don’t know!” Junk Butt junk-butted in.  “I think it’s awesome here…like a hotel!  I love hotels!”  Apparently she didn’t realize that in hotels there’s not a package of adult diapers on top of your particle-board bureau for all to see, there’s not a cacophony of beeping and loud nurse voices and people moaning for their meds outside your open door at all hours of the day and night.

He looked back at the TV and said, “Amy Winehouse is on.”  Amy stumbled around on stage, hollered “Hello Athens!” to the crowd in Belgrade, and we got our things together and left.

Through the mouth-breathing halls, Junk Butt couldn’t stop talking about how sad everything was, how she was just going to have to take a long, long time to get over this.  How he would “never be the SAME” and how everything was just awful awful awful.  I just kept thinking how it was kind of nice to not feel like that anymore, to have my feelings chemically enclosed in this place that isn’t exactly unreachable, but is definitely not the first place to look for substantial feelings.  I was thinking how much better I felt and how able to spread emotions out and look at all of them, turn them over and think about their edges instead of just running to the bathroom to sit in the bottom of the shower and cry about everything.  I wonder how much easier it would be to be around Junk Butt if she found some magic pill that allowed her to process her fears instead of turning them into a billboard, or a crown of thorns for herself, with a bunch of pink sparklers attached at the top.

There was a dog tied up to a bike rack outside of the hospital.  It looked bored and hot, and I pointed at it.  I asked Junk Butt, “What do you think that dog’s thinking?”  She blinked at me, like she couldn’t believe I was talking about a stupid dog at this horrible and terribly sad moment in her existence.  “I bet he’s thinking something like,” and here I said in my best old Western movie sheriff voice, “Ah sure wish ah had me a taco right ’bout now.”  I’m pretty sure Junk Butt was horrified.

Welcome to Whore Island

The Pants got this weird deal through AT&T which allows us to watch Season 5 of Dexter on Showtime On Demand.  That’s good enough for me.  But, amazingly enough, the deal also includes access to Showtime After Dark On Demand.  This is the channel that they put all the sexy silicone soft core shows on.  The first of these which I watched was The Devil Wears Nada.  It has taught me a lot about women and life and sex that I didn’t already know, but am glad that I know now so that I may protect myself.  Now I will share it with you!

So Candy Cane is this young sexy part-Asian girl (all the sexy parts are Asian, at least) who is looking for her big break into the television industry.  In the meantime, she’s kept herself busy designing sexy underwear.  She hopes to work her way up from the title of lowly assistant to a powerful and bitchy titty magazine publisher, I forget her name, so we’ll call her Bitchy McTitties.  Bitchy McTitties is really hard-core and apparently gets pissed off a lot at her current assistant for having lesbian fuckfests with all of the bikini models out by the pool all the time, and getting pussy juice all over her company-issued Blackberry as a result, or something.  So the company’s brand is pretty basically falling apart and Bitchy McTitties wants to be sure that Ms. Cane can turn shit around without expecting to get paid very much.  It turns out that McTitties hires Candy Cane on the spot because not only does she wear a leather bustier to the interview, she also is totally cool with letting McTitties mash her tits around to make sure she’s assistant material.

Here's Candy, modeling her new creation! Later she has to wear it to work because that's all that's clean.

(I bet you didn’t know this, but the way lesbians have sex is that they roll around and grab each other’s boobs and play with each other’s hair, then one bends the other one over and humps her doggystyle and they both fucking love it.  Just don’t think about the mechanics of it, okay?  You’ll ruin it.)

So eventually Candy Cane is running crazy trying to keep up with all of her work and only has time to have booby-bouncing softcore sex with her boyfriend like 4 times in a 30 minute span.  Also she’s having to keep a lot of things from her boyfriend, like the fact that when McTitties pages her, it’s usually because she needs her to have sex with some hunk that just showed up and won’t fix the pool skimmer until he’s been paid in poon.  And sometimes McTitties herself needs a good pubic-bone-to-butthole banging before she can get inspired to tell people what to do.  God, the things an assistant has to do!  It takes her forever to put on real clothes, so in order to get out the door and into her Lamborghini really fast, Candy has to wear stuff she puts together in the dark, made of motorcycle parts and the straps from a million complicated bras. She runs into the mansion where Twatty Magazine has its offices and photoshoots, like a sexy little deer on 6 inch platform heels, and wouldn’t ya know it: someone is always waiting right there to grab her by both boobs and swing her around and bang her.

(I bet you also didn’t know this, but if someone grabs a girl’s tits, her clothes fall to the floor and her eyes roll back in her head and she has no choice but to let them bone her.  This is what I’m saying: walk around with your arms across your chest unless you want to be totally helpless, y’all.  And don’t take a job working under [or on top of] McTitties.)

Candy’s life is falling apart.  All day and all night spent getting raw-dogged by random people, virtually no time to see her oily boyfriend or have her period.  She keeps re-scheduling for both, but McTitties always calls at the last minute and needs her to bring her vagina over real quick because the bikini models have refused to take their bikini tops off for the midnight pool shoot until someone settles the dispute over which one is the best lay by fucking each one of them and then judging them on their performance.  Candy!  What are you gonna do, girl?  You can’t go on like this!

Thankfully, Candy gets a new job, or something.  I don’t know for sure because I had to go pee and I didn’t bother pausing the movie.  One of the random dudes who banged her at one point apparently figured she had a lot of talent and made her a success, because later he wears a suit and bosses her around for like four minutes.  But she stresses that while she totally hated the grueling schedule of working at Twatty, the constant fucking on camera was a total plus and something she was not averted to doing in her new job as a network executive and part-time underwear designer.  So they have a sexy board room encounter with the girl who brings them some coffee and all is right with the world.  Actually, that might not be how it ends but that’s when I decided to turn it off.

The photographer for Twatty Magazine deserves a shout-out in this synopsis, and I can’t find a single mention of him in the many recaps for this movie that exist online, except for one, written by Showtime, which describes him as “the comic relief.”  See, things get really intense a lot of times in movies.  (If it was just 100% dying of heart disease in Beaches, nobody would watch it.  Instead it’s like 47% dying of heart disease, 26% heartbreaking love triangle, 10% cheating husband, 10% leaving husband, and 7% of big old goofballin’ Bette Midler.  Case in point!)  If you were just expected to sit there and jerk off for 77 minutes, The Devil Wears Nada wouldn’t become a family favorite because nobody likes to sit around with sore genitals.  So you need to jerk off, laugh, jerk off, laugh, repeat.  This film artfully handles this necessity via the character of the nameless flamer who does a variety of weird things for God knows what reasons.  For instance, he wears the same outfit every day: a purple beret, a long white flowy shirt, sparkly Hammer pants, a blue jacket he borrowed from his friend in the circus, with long glittery tails, and a gigantic floppy red bow tie from the joke shop.  He’s a big man, and he flitters about the mansion with both pinkies in the air because, you know, how else would you know he’s gay?

(You can’t be funny in a lesbian butt-humping movie unless you’re gay.  And don’t even try to point out that the lesbians are gay–they’re not.  They’re working.)

This photographer doesn’t take pictures of anything, he has a hunky assistant who holds the camera and shoots when he says to shoot.  He also has this weird stick with a feathery bird stuck to the end of it.  He uses this to wave at the bikini models so they know where to look.  He also does this thing he learned about on Leno where you ask people really random easy questions about American history and stuff and decide that they’re stupid when they don’t know the answer.  Seriously: if you like quiz shows, you will love this movie.  He stops photo shoots like ten times to swing his bird stick around and ask one of the girls, “What’s the capital of the United States of America?”  Destini or Sugar or Kitty then bites her lower lip, tilts her head, and says “Ummm like, California?”  Homogay cracks up and looks directly into the camera, breaking the fourth wall as if to say, “See?  They’re just big stupid titty sticks!!!  And I’m just a big old funny fag!  HAHAHA!  Now for some more sex.”

Two in the mornin’ and the party’s still jumpin’ cause my mama ain’t home

I just found out you can text the police in my city.  If you see a crime happening, you whip out your SmartPhone and take a picture or a video and text it to this special cop number.  Then the cops show up and bust it up and everything is OK again.  I thought about doing it the other night at 2 in the morning when the neighbor teenagers were having a Scream Meeting out on the front stoop of their building, beneath the open windows of everyone on the entire street.  SO I TOLD THAT BITCH, I SAID, BITCH, YOU AIN’T SHIT.  You know, hardass stuff like that.  Instead of each of them smoking their own cigarette, they kept lighting single cigarettes and passing them around, like a joint.  I think it was just for how cool the passing action looked, and how often they got to use lighters.  Anyway, for a second, I got all these really inappropriate thoughts, which I’m going to be honest about, even though they made me feel like an asshole and a Republican and a racist and stuff.  I thought, “I wish they’d shut up so I could get some sleep so I can get up and go to work and pay for their Section 8 apartment with my tax money.”  OH MY GOD.  THAT’S TERRIBLE ISN’T IT???  But that’s what I thought.

And I didn’t tattle on them with a cop text.  I just turned on the air conditioner until it drowned them out.  Mostly out of guilt and the fear that when I’m old I’ll be an asshole, like for real and not just for fake.

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July 26, 2010 · 11:09 am

God-Forsaken Party Building: The Beginning of the End

Unfortunate Ponytail Accident

There’s a girl who rides my train at the same time every day.  She wears awkwardly placed versions of Target’s idea of hipster clothing, and though she’s no svelte figure, they still seem to fall off of her in the wrong places.  Her dark cigarette jeans become almost baggy around her butt and hips, sliding down, giving the effect of giant wayward breasts that have somehow been knocked around to appear tacked to her lower back.  They slide down at about the same time that her thin knockoff Led Zeppelin or Rolling Stones re-print distressed concert tee (see below) slides up, aided by the shifting strap of her quilted crazy-print all-the-rage-with-suburban-moms laptop bag.

Nice try, Target. You win the Zany and Thirty Years Late award. Oh, and ten bucks.

One who walks behind her is subjected to a view of her panties (and they are “panties,” a word so icky that I usually reserve it for the type of floral print underwear they sell in groups of 6 in plastic bags at department stores, usually with a picture of an otherwise sexy lady on the front, laughing it up, conveying to all who handle the panty pack that yes, 25-year old women do wear, even enjoy, the Hi-Cut Brief–while I get puke in the back of my throat simply by Googling “hi cut brief”).  The Panties serve this girl as a type of spangled butt crack tent, saving her from the scarring she would no doubt endure if someone saw anything more than what she’s cool with showing, that is, the skin between the top of her sagging jeans and the bottom of the leg holes of The Panties.  She wears them like the dude on the corner by the bus stop wears his boxers: up higher than where pants would be, pants creeping slowly toward the ankle.  However, she, like the bus stop guy, always wears a belt of some type, tightened juuuuuust enough to keep the pants above knee level.

GAH! Nothin' "brief" about em, Mama.

When she alights the train, she begins a furious dance down the street, known to some as walking, but when she does it, it looks as if her legs are tiny catapults fired from behind.  One arm secures her quilted bag, while the other flaps crazily out at her side, like she’s swiping her way through a crowd, swatting at giant flies that are already mostly behind her, her arm the only oar rowing her tubby tug boat forward.  She reaches up at intervals to straighten her knockoff designer glasses, cheap gold metallic plastic “D&G” glinting in the sun, and in doing so pretty much only manages to disturb them from where they’ve slipped, miraculously, to the top of her nose, where they should be perched.  It’s like the glasses, wise beyond their price tag, are saying “This is for your own good, you know!!!”

Her hair is the color of the edges of a scab when it’s too small to be there, brownish yellow, and just as crusty.  It looks as if it’s been in an unfortunate ponytail accident: chopped to a quick without a moment’s notice.  She bumbles past the door I enter every day, on to some other place, I imagine she’s a literature student writing some disgustingly complicated work that will never be understood on any level by anyone, and will be published for that very reason.  Else she’s a student of some type of earthy science, where you spend ten years discovering things other people have discovered a thousand times, in the off-chance that you might find out something different about it, whilst some aging professor on the verge of giving up on the effect of radio waves on the migration patterns of the African gypsy moth, silently cheers you on with his mock indifference and lack of ability to express emotion.

When I see this girl, I can’t look away.  All of the above makes me regard her as her professor would regard some rare moth, the common, yet complicated, Dorkus totalus, otherwise known as the Wingless American Nerd.  When I see this girl, I get the sense that I’d like to nail her to a tiny board and put her under glass, I’d write a million papers about her that will never be read because they’ve already been written.

Everyone, everyone, I would like to announce that I’m So Difficult.

At least, according to the leasing agent in charge of renting my apartment, I’ve recently been a bit difficult.  Which serves to be confusing to her and the legions of potential renters she parades through my apartment, as normally, people enjoy paying for a place to live separately from others, while under the constant threat that total strangers may come in at any moment, without notice.  Many of the moments in my apartment are Bra-Less, Pants-Less, Leaning On Pillow Eating Taco & Watching Bridezillas types of moments.  I do not enjoy constantly listening for a click in the front door lock.

I also do not enjoy coming home on a Saturday afternoon after a showing to find my back door standing wide open, as if a ghost was taking out the trash for me and would be right back.  When this happened, I immediately called Leah, the leasing agent from The Company That Owns My God-Forsaken Party Building, Where People Walk on the Roof Shirtless With PBR’s  In Hand Every Night, Where The Fence Might As Well Be Made of Road Bikes Covered with Ironic Stickers.  She spluttered at first, feigned ignorance, admitted (because she had to) that she’d shown the apartment that morning, but denied ever taking anyone out the back door.  “Look,” I said, jutting words in edgewise, as that was the only way to halt Leah’s blubbering damage control, jiggling around on the phone like a pan of Jello on top of an old rickety clothes dryer, “I don’t like the idea of people walking in and out of here all day long, I don’t know if it was you who did this or another apartment company–”

“YEAHHHHH,” she foghorned, “Because those apartment agencies are SHADY, dude.”  (She over-enunciated “dude,” like she was coming to my school to talk about drugs and turned her folding chair backwards and straddled it to show me that she was just like me.

“If they’re shady,” I said, “whyyyy are they being allowed to show my apartment??”

Leah jibberybabbled something about how the Company That Owns My God-Forsaken Party Building has no control over the people who come in.  How it could be “anyone!” from any one of the city’s apartment leasing agencies, where all you need to get into real estate is a car that was made post-2006 and a willingness to bullshit people into signing a year of their lives away to a place more expensive than they can comfortably afford so you can collect their first month’s rent.  “SO!” Leah blared, “What I can dooooo is I can put a note in your file that you ONLY want our company to show your apartment.”

“Fine,” said I, “Perfect.”  Normally I am wary of people who say they will Put Notes in My File.  I’m aware that my file doesn’t exist, in that way that electronic files kept by magazine distribution companies do not exist.  It’s a place where they type in whether you lost your temper and called them an asshole so that the next person you call about the fact that it’s been 6 months and you haven’t seen your refund check yet will know how to handle you.

Apparently Leah didn’t put said note in said file, as I continued to get calls from leasing agents allllll week last week, asking to show my apartment at random times.  I kept saying no, and they, keys to my place in hand, protested.  “It’s illegal for you to say no,” one particularly jerk-offy, self-important douche named Ted snipped.  Another asshole, high on his title of “Leasing Agent,” the fact that his picture is on a website and that he gets to work in some hip converted loft apartment with a Starbucks machine in the corner, huffed “You’re making things really hard for me, Girl.”

So fuck Leah, I thought.  Obviously something was amiss.  I didn’t mention any of this to her when she called to set up her own showing, and asked me “Have we found the culprit yet?” like all this time it was me who was supposed to be fucking dusting my apartment for prints, me who was responsible for going over the books to see who had accessed my apartment listing on that day, between the hours of 11am and 12:30pm (mind you, after Leah had left, Leah, who never fucks up and leaves doors standing open).  “WE have not found the culprit,” I said.  “I don’t know.  See you later.”

I hung up and called Leah’s boss, who at first attempted the same cavity-inducing damage control as Leah.  I thought about alerting him to the fact that I’d very recently gotten lip service from Leah, and had no need to have my lip re-serviced by him, but as I told him the things Leah told me, that the company had no way of knowing who was coming in or out, that those leasing agencies were “shady,” blah blah blah, his end of the phone went quiet.  “Well,” he finally said, “I guess all I can say is that this is all news to me.  We personally check out each of the keys to our apartments, and log who goes in and out.  It’s very easy to find out who was in there that day, and those agencies won’t be allowed into our properties again.”  Of course, he then saved Leah’s ass, which she’s been having a hard time covering lately, by reinforcing that no one in OUR company would EVER leave a DOOR OPEN.

Right, so, that’s why Leah went into a tailspin of pretend ignorance, why she suddenly didn’t know how to use company protocol to find out who was in my apartment, why she treated it as a problem that just downright sucked for me, but was my problem alone.

I think it’s probably my phone call to Leah’s boss that shifted the tectonic plates of Polite Looking The Other Way that she’d hoped I would stand on if she was chirpy and nice to me.  Some shit must have hit the fan, because the tone of Leah’s next phone call to schedule a Saturday morning full of momentary visitors to my home was decidedly terse.  At that point, I was on a roll of Renter’s Rights, and I denied Leah her earliest request.  “I’m not going to be up at 8am on Saturday,” I said.  “I’ll be in bed.  Sleeping in.  They’ll have to come later.”

“Oh, it won’t offend me if you’re sleeping, I don’t mind,” she said, as if it was her feelings I was trying to preserve by not having my sleep interrupted by 3-5 sets of eyes at the foot of my bed, surveying my closet space and measuring the distance from wall to window in increments of Ikea furniture.  “All I care about is just like, getting this apartment rented.”  Like that had been unclear to me.  But still I said no, have them come later.  No, no, no, and finally, no.  Later, or no deal.  She grudgingly said she guessed she’d caaaall them baaaaack (people seem to hate to inconvenience someone until they’ve got a piece of paper that says that someone will legally have to pay them a certain amount every month.  Then you can be inconvenienced until the inconvenient cows come home).  She left me a voicemail later that she’d set up the first viewing for a whole hour later than previously planned.  “Hope that works for you,” she said into the chasm of my voicemail, then clicked her END button with as much fury as she could muster at 6:30pm on a Friday afternoon.  I thought about leaving her a voicemail that said, “Sure that works for me, because I’ll be heading over to  your apartment at 9am, I’ll be peering into your shower, opening your closet, tracking cigarette butts and street tar into your living room.  Me and a whole bunch of people I’ve just met will be standing around in your bedroom at approximately 9:15am, looking at your used Kleenex and a thong freshly peeled off your butt and Post-Its from your boyfriend.  And if you don’t smile about it like Frances fucking Farmer on the pony ride at the dime store, I’m going to call you at the end of every long work day and leave you a pissy voicemail.  Sure, that time works for me just fine.”  END.

Cut to Saturday, when I’m trying to make myself invisible as people wander aimlessly through my apartment, politely pretending not to notice me as I sit there and catch up on paying the bills and filing the evidence that I’ve done so, the most bland and impersonal ritual I could come up with at short notice on a Saturday morning.  I’d told Leah after the first showing that I’d be gone before the next, so imagine her surprise when she’s standing on one side of my front door, apologizing to who she hoped would be the Replacement Tenants, for the fact that I’d been “So Difficult.”   Imagine her surprise when she walked in and there were her words, above my head, glittering in a spiderweb hanging from the ceiling.  SO DIFFICULT, they announced, and the wide-eyed visitors to the fair indulged in the awkwardness of the whole situation.  Upon seeing me, frozen in time with my bag on my arm and my sunglasses in my hand, on my way out the very door into which Leah and her big mouth were barging, she stopped talking and immediately seemed very very happy to see me, as people are when they’ve just been talking about you and are horrifyingly certain that you heard it all.  She looked at me like I’d been presumed dead for ten years and finally made it down off that mountain and God I love that dress and those are cuuuute shooooes where’d you get your sunglasses? well I guess I better let them look around and get out of your way KTHANKSBYEEEEEEE!

Leah the Uncertain Leasing Agent, whose very name is unsure (“Le-uhhh?”), is now officially dead to me.  I’d like to tell her that there’s nothing wrong with being So Difficult when you pay money to have the keys to a space you can control for the period of 1 year, where you can be as difficult or as do0rmat-y as you want.  The deal is supposed to be that I give you money and you leave me the fuck alone unless something breaks or I stop giving you money.  The deal is not that I pretend you never make mistakes and that I take part in entertaining groups of total strangers for seventeen minutes at a time for free.  This ain’t a booth in the freak show, and even the bearded lady got a quarter every now and then.  So the next time you wonder, Le-UHHH, why people are being So Difficult, you should probably put a fucking cork in that blowhole you call a mouth and blast it out your asshole instead, an emission which, I assure you, will be far less of an affliction to the delicate senses of those around you than your blaring, broken-oboe blast of a voice.

But enough about Leah.

About this “so difficult” stuff.  I would like to point out that even though it’s illegal for assholes to party on my roof, even though the stomping around kept me up, then woke me up repeatedly, last night, as I live on the top floor, I did not call the police.  I didn’t even yell “SHUT THE HOLY FUCK UUUUUUUUP” out the window, as I was tempted to do at 1:37am.  Because I am not So Difficult, I am just the normal amount of Difficult, just a touch of Bitchy and Tired of This Shit.  I don’t like paying for things that other people get to stomp all over and disturb all night long, but what the fuck, I thought.  Party tonight means quiet tomorrow night.

On the other hand, I understand where Leah is coming from.  Most people are so goddamn POLITE that they lose the ability to COMMUNICATE.  I was supposed to buy Leah’s story that fucking Zorro could have gotten the keys to my apartment and left the door open, that there was no way of knowing what actually happened.  Because that would be The Polite Thing to Do, that would be Doing Her a Solid.  Unfortunately, the more solids you do for people like that, the more laptops and cash and TV’s get stolen out of apartments.  Bitch is lucky everything was still there when I got home.  Bitch is lucky I’m not actually crazy, or I would have called her boss at home and demanded she be flayed and tanned and made into a chair for me to sit on while I watch them burn her family’s  house down.  I did something that was somewhere between Playing Along and Losing My Shit when I called her boss and was honest about what happened.

So fuck this Shutup and Be Nice business.  I quit.  It puts you in very real danger of being people’s stairway to a paycheck.  Not that I don’t want you to get your paycheck, Leah and the Army of D-Baggy Leasing Agents, there’s nothing I want more for you.  But if you’ve got to inconvenience me to get it, you’re going to have a difficult time.  Nobody’s ever described me as “laid back” and “down to earth” and “goes with the flow” or even “totally cool.”  I think that’s because I open my mouth quite a lot, and 26% of the time something not entirely stupid and not entirely incorrect comes out.  Y’all just happen to be getting the brunt of that 26% right now.  Don’t be so difficult and deal with it.

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December 11, 2009 · 2:36 pm

Tit Tips

So what’s great about a little bit of extra padding around the holidays is that most of it goes to my tits and my ass.  Which is kind of awesome…fun for the whole crew.  Due to all of the pastry that is literally bulging out of every room in this office, my boobs have become more like those things people keep on their desks, you know, where you pull back one of the metal balls and swing it against all the rest, and they knock each other back and forth.  My boobs are kind of on the largeish side at the moment, is what I’m saying.  It’s kind of awesome.  Now I know how my sister, Hugetits McGee, feels.  And I have to admit that I’m going to be a little sad to start doing the whole get-thin-for-the-new-year routine, because they’ll be the first to go.  Bye bye, awesome titties.  We had fun, we really did.

The built-in boob shelf is not substantial.

So anyway, yeah.  I’ve been looking into some boob control solutions for my holiday dress, which is this skinny little black satin tube number which will need to be held up by some hook and strap combination that is somehow attached to my boobs.  I posted a little something something about it on my Facebook, but I can’t seem to get any straight answers out of anyone.  I can’t BELIEVE nobody wants to talk about my breasts as much as I do.  People need to get their goddamn priorities straight, what the fuck.

Yer outta milk.

Agent Big Guns and I realized that we had mice last weekend, when they started pooping in her dirty laundry.  The mice who inhabited our apartment are some inconsiderate sons of bitches.

Not only do they scratch around at night, but they DO NOT do tricks of any sort, nothing like that Mr. Jingles guy in the movie The Green Mile.  They just scamper and shit everywhere.  And once we realized they were around, I started seeing them constantly.  One of them walked out of my bedroom at 2 in the afternoon last week, wearing my pajamas and eating a bowl of cereal, just looking at me like, whaaaat?

They’re real assholes.  The exterminator came, and threw down every kind of mouse contraption that the Tomcat company makes, and what do these little jerks do?  Oh, they skip around the glue traps like they’re dancing around a Maypole.  They prop snap traps open with tiny Santa figurines they’ve whittled from pieces of our furniture and take the bait.  They leave personalized notecards that say “Dear Tenants: Happy Holidays!  Go fuck yourselves.”  But you know what else they do?  They eat the poison the exterminator left all over the place.  They eat it right up.  So laugh it up, douche mice, you’re about to have such a bad stomach ache, you’ll be praying for death.

Just don’t do it in my bedroom walls, stinkies.

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October 15, 2009 · 3:33 pm

Glitter Turds & Sweet Tarts

yah-okeh

I like my job for a lot of reasons, but mostly because I meet a lot of interesting people.  This university attracts students from all walks of life, from across the globe, which is pretty awesome if you like celebrities and foreign people, which I do!  And even though everybody’s got their panties in a bunch because Tom Hanks’ son is doing his undergrad here, I couldn’t care less because I just had the pleasure of meeting a very famous singer.  I swear I’d helped her find three books and two websites on finance interview preparation, none of which pleased her, before she revealed that she had, in fact, WON ASIAN IDOL TWO YEARS AGO.

She didn’t give me a chance to say, “Of course!  I knew I recognized you from somewhere!  You are the most talented Asian I know!  What are you doing at a business school in Illinois, U.S.A.?!”  She immediately and without any hesitation revealed to me that her passion is SINGING.  That evil Mommy-san and Daddy forced her to go to B-school, even after her triumphant victory over every other singing Asian in greater Asia, even after her tour of Asia with Asian Idol.  “It’s not like-a I even wanta to BE HERE,” she said, and slammed a book back onto the shelf in the wrong place.

Then she got mad that I wouldn’t let her use my computer to check her Gmail.  I guess you can’t have it all.

Minor Inconvenience

I was fifteen minutes to work today, which isn’t a big deal or anything.  My boss is pretty busy walking around the office telling everyone how hard I work, anyway, so she doesn’t usually notice or care when I step in a couple minutes late.  Unfortunately, there are some people who are really really put out of sorts when the train is late.

Today the train was late because of an accident involving a fall (or a jump, which is usually reported as a fall for a couple of days).  The point is that some poor jerk made contact with the filthy, wet, stinky, and highly electrified tracks in the gloom below the platform, which is a shitty way to start your morning.  The trains all had to share whatever tracks they could get, as power was shut off so the poor jerk could be peeled off the tracks and sent to the hospital to be pronounced one way or the other.  Everything was slow, and running behind, and basically not where anyone expected it to be.  When my train finally came, the stuttering conductor saw fit to let us all know that the reason for his lack of punctuality was “a accident involvin’ somebody jumpin’ on the tracks” downtown.  So naturally, the entire car erupted with gasps and everybody started telling everybody else exactly what they thought about mass transit suicide.  That’s when the lady behind me piped up to anyone who would listen:

“Why people always gotta kill theyselves durin’ rush hour? I know thangs is bad, but they ain’t THAT bad you cain’t wait until lunch time. Lawd.”

She proceeded to call all of her friends and let them know just how inconsiderate she thought it was to kill yourself during rush hour.  She revealed during all three of these phone calls (on her pink Razr with BabyPhat charms dangling from it) that she had actually found out about the suicide only a couple minutes after it had happened, on her alarm clock radio, which is when she decided to roll over and sleep a little longer because the trains were going to be “all messed up and shit anyway.”

Ahahahahha!  Total cunt.

It’s easy.

Basically all you’ve got to do is a Google image search for “cutest cupcakes ever.”

Are you serious? You can't be. You are, though.

Are you serious? You can't be. You are, though.

If you happen to be in Japan, you should do a Google image search for “cutest cupcakes ever,” only in Japanese.  And you’ll get this:

HIYOOOHHHHHH!!!

HIYOOOHHHHHH!!! Hihihihihihihihihihihihi!!!

Someday I will build a cupcake library, in which I will preserve one of every type of cupcake ever made, along with metadata to help future cupcake artists with their research.

I can do this kind of thing because we live on a fantastic planet, and it is covered with stuff that’s cute as shit.

God DAMN I wanna eat that tiny toast made of frosting SO BAD.

Feliz Naviblog

My best best friend friend Patrese has started a blog about how much she loves Christmas, and Christmastime, and pretty much all things Christmas-y.  I support her endeavor because I am a good friend (thanks, thank you…stop it!) and because starting in October it’s really cute to watch her get all ramped up for the birth of little baby Jesus and then celebrate it by buying every little baby Jesus she can find and gluing it to her front door.

OK well, so she hasn’t done that yet, but I think this might be the year.

Anyway, I think Patrese likes Christmas so much because her family always made it into a big sparkly happy soiree full of love and Sunday gravy. Which is so cute I want to poop glitter turds and Sweet Tarts!

I’m indifferent to Christmas because my stepdad celebrated by screaming at me to get the fuck out of the Goddamn tree before I fucking ruined everything.  Then my grandma took too many pills and had a meltdown because some bitch at church wore heels she didn’t agree with in the Christmas cantata, and my cousins cried while they watched us open our presents because my aunt loved God too much to buy things at the end of December.  Then they told us we’d probably be going to Hell because of the Play-Doh Snack Shop.

Shit.  If I’m going to Hell for a toy, it’d better fucking be the baby blue plastic four-door ’59 Caddy my slut of a Barbie used to roll around the living room in.  That would be worth it.

Today.

I finally figured out a way to spill Arizona green tea in my hair and make it look like I meant to do it.  Holy hell, I smell like the stairway to Heaven.  Or Arizona.

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September 15, 2009 · 10:25 pm

This is a stapling emergency.

All right, so, Staples is officially weird as hell.  And I’m not just bitter because they didn’t have a note card organizer with enough tabs to accommodate all the classes of html tags I’ve written down.  I’m not just saying that because all of their business card carriers were ugly and totally made for corporate dudes.  I was very bitter about my office supply shopping experience, yes, but that is not why I was really freaked out by the mutants that run that God-forsaken shit bin of paper clips and ultra white copy paper.

It’s because, when we were standing at the register so Agent Big Guns could pay for her stuff, we were approached by the store’s mascot.  He was wearing his Staples polo shirt, which had been washed one million times, and his pleat-front dress pants, which office supply store people always wear in that no-really-I-always-dress-this-professionally kind of way.  Of course, it was a sneak attack, so it wasn’t his attire I noticed first, it was his honking voice, as he came up behind us and screamed, “HOW WAS YOUR SHOPPING EXPERIENCE TODAY LAAAADIES?  DID WE FIND EVERYTHING WE NEEEEEEED?”

Now, I don’t know if I’m just naturally filled with guilt, but when he talked to us in that super-positive, overly-loud way, I immediately thought that one of us was going to be accused of stealing and tackled in the doorway.  It was so upbeat and loud that I thought for sure something was about to catch fire and kill us all.

So Big Guns says, “Um, good…yeah,” and I say “Yeah, thank you…”

The freak in the polo just stood there, staring at us.  JUST STOOD THERE, STARING AT US.  I don’t know how else to describe it; it was standing, and it was staring.  There were a few jerky, robotic little nods of the head here and there.  We both just looked at him, then at each other, then back at him, then more nervously at each other.  It was fucking out of control.  I looked plaintively at the check-out girl, who didn’t seem to notice that the entire world was sinking into a bog of awkward.  I think we stood there for about six and a half hours, this guy just staring us down.  All right, no, I don’t want to be over-dramatic so that everyone thinks I’m exaggerating the whole thing.  I will be 100% honest and say that it was a good 30 seconds of standing and staring at us.

Finally, finally, the bastard spoke up again.  “Oh!  Don’t thank me!  It’s MY job to thank YOU!  You’re the customer!  We wanna see you back here again!”

I hate it when retail employees say that shit.  It’s like, I get it.  I understand how it works.  If I don’t come in and buy stuff, the whole thing grinds to a halt.  Me Consumer, you Seller.  No doy, Staples.

So he’s standing there, and he’s said his piece, and Agent Big Guns and I sort of smile in that really obviously uncomfortable way, that makes you look like you haven’t been able to poop for two weeks.  There’s more nodding, more staring, and FINALLY the Office Prick just sort of melts away, into the background.  That’s about when, in an empty empty EMPTY (except for me and the tumbleweeds) store, another Staples employee (a short, skinny, cornrowed young man with his forearms held high, bent at the wrist) sashays past me, grazing against my back, and says “Essscuuuuuuuuse me?!”  I reacted by looking into the void that existed in the ten foot radius all around me, to be sure I wasn’t misjudging the amount of empty available space through which he could have walked.

And that’s when the slowest checkout girl in the universe started complaining about the fact that Prince was playing over our heads in the store.  “Is it like, the nineties or whuut?”  She stared at us and we both grimaced again.  Less than a yard away, the first crazy was yelling at another set of poor customers, “DID WE HAVE A GOOD SHOPPING EXPERIENCE TODAY?  IT’S MY JOB TO MAKE SURE YOU GUYS HAVE A GOOD SHOPPING EXPERIENCE.  WE’LL SEE YOU TOMORROW THEN, ALL RIGHT?!”

I can only think of one scenario in which you might go to Staples the day after you go to Staples.  It involves a stapling emergency which happens overnight and causes you to run out of the ten thousand staples you bought the day before.

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August 23, 2009 · 11:09 pm

Asshole Party

Dear Ms. Seelig,

Your boyfriend, Mr. Michael S. Gellar, just hit me up on a dating website.  Where he has a profile.  Which he uses to describe the type of women he would like to meet and date.

Miiiiight wanna look into that.

Love,

Cupcake Jones

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