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I really don't understand why celebrities join Twitter

2012-01-22T20:57:00.002-05:00

Trivia

2011-12-27T20:19:00.001-05:00

Q: How many popsicles were sold in the United States in the year 2011?
A: Zero.

Q: Where is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s body buried?
A: Nathaniel Hawthorne is still alive. He is over 200 years old. His nurses describe his pain as “intense and constant, such that he is unable to sleep for more than two or three minutes at a time.”

Q: Which is greater, the distance between the earth and the sun, or the distance between the earth and Jupiter?
A: Ha ha, sorry, I got distracted, this really fat guy just jogged past.

Q: What was the most popular “Impulse Item,” purchased at registers in Wal-Marts across the country?
A: Child pornography.

Q: The legend of Dracula is based on which historical figure?
A: Jesus Christ.

Q: What was the original title of Jane Austen’s “Pride And Prejudice?”
A: “An Obnoxious Faggot.”

Q: Who was the 61st President of the United States?
A: Bloop Blorp Bloop Blorp.

Q: What is the legal name of Hollywood starlet Natalie Portman?
A: Abortion Survivor Portman.

Some of your favorite celebrities were children of incest

2011-12-13T11:26:00.000-05:00

Did you know that most Hollywood celebrities are the products of illicit, incestuous relationships? It’s true! Here are some of your favorite stars who owe their fame to incest.

1. KATE HUDSON
Kate’s flat, sloping nose and cornsilk blonde hair are caused by the preponderance of recessive genes found in her incest-rich bloodline.

2. KATE HUDSON
Kate gets her Italian heritage from her paternal grandmother, who was raped by her older brother when she was 14 years old.

3. KATE HUDSON
When asked what in life brought her the most joy, Kate told a reporter, “my son Ryder, who is also my half-brother!”

4. GOLDIE HAWN
Famous Celebri-Mom Goldie Hawn is best known for her turns in “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In” and “There’s A Girl In My Soup.” But she also has a club foot and several siblings with congenital brain defects caused by inbreeding.

5. RAY ROMANO
This guy is the grossest.

Bobby the sullen ventriloquist's dummy

2011-11-30T14:06:00.001-05:00

Say, Bobby. I heard you recently went on a first date, but it didn't go very well, because you were too stiff.

(DUMMY shrugs.)

---

Say, Bobby. I heard you were grounded because you shouted at your parents that they didn't understand what you were going through.

(DUMMY sighs.)

---

Say, Bobby. I heard you didn't do very well on your math test, because your teacher says your head is full of knots.

(DUMMY looks at its shoes, ashamed.)

Survival tips

2011-11-13T18:40:00.000-05:00

Bear: If you are attacked by a bear, shoot it with your gun.

Shark: If you are attacked by a shark, stand on some land. If there is no land available, shoot the shark with your harpoon.

Worm: If you are attacked by a worm, step on it with your shoe. Do not shoot the worm with your gun (worms cannot be harmed by bullets).

Moss: If you are attacked by a creeping moss, spray it with some kind of moss-killing substance attached to a substance-dispersal gun.

Starvation: If you are attacked by starvation, use money to purchase food.

Self-Doubt: If you are attacked by self-doubt, shoot someone with a gun and watch them die in front of you and know that you have the power of life and death in your hands.

Gun: If you are attacked by a gun, weld it shut with your welding equipment.

Definitive Marmaduke

2011-11-07T23:39:00.002-05:00

What the fuck is happening to the New York Times Magazine

2011-10-29T13:13:00.004-04:00

It's been more annoying than it used to be for some time now, ever since they brought in their new editor last year-ish. They started going nuts about first-person non-fiction narratives that weren't about much of anything, like one guy who tried to get high in Disneyworld (that wasn't so bad, but it was the kind of thing that could have been published in about three dozen other magazines or websites). And their contribution to the growing literature about Afghan police atrocities was called Bad Guys vs. Worse Guys in Afghanistan, and if the headline wasn't enough of a "fuck you we think you're a child" for you, consider that the article's accompanying photojournalism was made up entirely of iPhone photos taken with Hipstamatic ("[the photos with which we are shamelessly pandering] were more exciting and dynamic; the rich palette and high contrast brought clarity and texture and even poetry to the scenes" -- yeah, all right, sure fucking thing).

But it hadn't necessarily been objectively shittier until this awful thing, which, guess what I think of it when I just tell you the title: Steve Jobs: Vampire. Bill Gates: Zombie.

To be fair, this was printed in the "Riff" section, whose overriding philosophy, so far as I've been able to tell, is letting people babble on about stupid shit, so it's not completely off base in that respect. Still though.

As Halloween approaches, we find ourselves awash in dead people. Lots and lots of dead people, though not all dead people are dead in the same way.

Some dead people are sexy, and other dead people are repulsive. Some dead people make teenagers swoon, while other dead people make grown adults hide out in dark houses, aiming their rifles out the window. Some dead people, in short, are vampires, and some dead people are zombies.

This is structured like a middle school essay.

The epidemic of both vampires and zombies in our culture has been widely noted, of course.

And yet, here we are.

But with “True Blood,” HBO’s vampire dramedy (and who could have guessed, even five years ago, that you’d ever see those three words together?)

Literally anyone, because those are three extremely popular things, and that is how the entertainment industry works: three popular things are combined to make one new popular thing and uncritical thinkers like Heather Havrilesky are fooled by the superficial appearance of novelty and write essays about it for the New York Times Magazine.

having just wrapped its fourth season and AMC’s zombie hit, “The Walking Dead,” staggering into its second season, it’s tough not to ponder the two different types of dead people.

I'm trying really hard to not ponder it, but I can't help it! It's just too tough! I'm tossing and turning in bed and I haven't slept in three days I need prescription drugs.

Vampires and zombies seem to reside at the polarities of our culture, telling us (almost) everything we need to know about (almost) everything in between.

There it is, (almost) the most reductive, meaningless sentence ever written.

For example: Vampires are smooth and charismatic. They drink blood as if it were the finest pinot noir. Zombies, on the other hand, are awkward and clumsy, yet un-self-conscious about the fact that their eyeballs are falling out.

Didn't you already basically say this in the second paragraph?

Vampires prance. Zombies plod.

Oh my God stop repeating yourself.

Vampires romance you, then strike quickly, then suck all your blood out of your body. Zombies chase you, very, very slowly, in a pack, then gnaw on your flesh like dogs. (Unless, of course, they are so-called fast zombies, in which case they chase you very, very quickly, then gnaw on your flesh like dogs.)

HOLY SHIT WE GET IT.

Vampires are solitary and antisocial and sleep in the ground. Zombies are extroverts, hanging out in big, rowdy clusters, moaning and shrieking, and apparently never sleeping at all.

Jesus Christ she's not going to stop.

Why do these sound like people I know?

Because you lack the intellect to appreciate or respect the richness and complexity of actual human psychology, and instead enjoy jamming the entire spectrum of personality into two insultingly reductive categories? Or because you're getting paid like a dollar a word by the New York Times Magazine to just talk for a while about popular things that will get easy pageviews? Quick! Say something about Millenials! Are we vampires or zombies? Totally vampires, am I right? I mean, Facebook! Gchat! Internships! Buzzwords!

Maybe because these two approaches to being undead mirror two very different approaches to being alive.

Rrearllg graayummun oggmmumm (sorry if you can't understand me it's because it's hard to talk with a gun in my mouth).

You’re either a vampire or a zombie, and it’s easy to tell which one.

The vampires are the narcissists, the artists, the experts, the loners: moody bartenders, surgeons, songwriters, lonely sculptors, entrepreneurial workaholics, neurotic novelists, aspiring filmmakers, stock traders, philosophy professors. The zombies are the collaborators, the leaders, the fanatics and obsessives: I.T. guys, policy wonks, comic-book collectors, historians, committee heads, lawyers, teachers, politicians, Frisbee-golf enthusiasts.

A couple things.

First, vampires are lonely and asocial? I don't think they are.

Ok. And then. Zombies. Are the "collaborators?" They collaborate with each other? That's what they do? I haven't seen a ton of zombie movies. But they WORK TOGETHER? They are SOCIAL? IS THAT RIGHT? I thought they were mindless hordes.

Ok. That. And. These categories don't even make sense. I mean, in any way. Vampires are lonely, neurotic artists and songwriters -- and then they're also stock traders? How can you put stock traders exactly in between aspiring filmmakers and philosophy professors and not realize you have no fucking idea what you're doing? And the zombies! Holy Christ! How can lawyers and politicians be the same anything as comic book collectors and fucking Frisbee-golf enthusiasts? There is no overlap there. I just checked the research and there has never been a lawyer and a Frisbee-golf enthusiast who have ever had a single thing in common in the history of civilization. Oh except they're both zombies. Because they're both collaborators. Both lawyers and Frisbee-golf enthusiasts are well known for their collaborations.

Even though zombies are generally less suave than vampires, they’re much more likely to join a group or rally a big crowd around a cause. Zombies go to raves, Burning Man, Grateful Dead shows and Occupy Wall Street rallies. Zombies embrace narratives that concern huge movements, sea changes, trends, critical events, paradigm shifts. They volunteer, form support groups and fixate on the Next Big Thing.

Zombies are idealists? That cannot be. They don't have minds. Please don't stare at the words "zombies embrace narratives" for more than a few seconds or you will go literally insane.

Vampires aren’t joiners. Vampires are internally directed, to the point of being self-indulgent, aloof and a little bit hedonistic. They live to please themselves. Vampires define the world based on what’s inside their heads and their hearts. They stay up late watching old movies, or reading books from cover to cover, or writing bad poems about how lonely it is to stay up late writing bad poems. You could never write “Twilight” about zombies.

Enough, seriously. I am dying.

A Few Famous Examples of Zombies And Vampires

Stephen King: Vampire. J.R.R. Tolkien: Zombie.

Sean Parker: Vampire. Mark Zuckerberg: Zombie.

Sid Vicious: Vampire. Bono: Zombie.

Steve Jobs: Vampire. Bill Gates: Zombie.

“Six Feet Under”: Vampires. “The Sopranos”: Zombies.

New York: Vampires. Washington: Zombies.

A-Rod: Vampire. Jeter: Zombie.

Twitter: Vampires. Facebook: Zombies.

Any reason why? Nope. Just keep on going. I mean, I can't even -- Jeter is a zombie? Because he's a collaborator, I suppose, or else because he is a comic book collector, or because he always goes to Burning Man, unlike his teammate A-Rod, who is an aspiring filmmaker and a lonely sculptor and a successful stock broker.

Why It’s Useful to Frame the World Through A Reductive Dichotomy, Based on Monsters

Hopefully the next section will be called Why This Shit Was Printed In A Magazine.

Awakening to this vampire-zombie polarity can feel like turning up the contrast on your cultural X-ray-vision goggles.

Well I certainly can't make any sense of this. I will mention that this is the second appearance of the word "polarity."

When Steve Jobs’s death prompted people across the globe to snap loving photos of themselves next to their various Apple-branded digital devices, referring to Jobs as a “member of the family,” the power of the vampire was on epic display.

...

Jobs was the quintessential vampire:

!!!

he followed an idiosyncratic path to personal fulfillment, then took his obvious talents for punk ideology and religious iconography and applied them to brand identification. How else could a bottom-line-focused capitalist be embraced as everyone’s favorite uncle? Compare that with the zombie Bill Gates, who, despite a profound commitment to charitable causes, consistently strikes onlookers as about as high-minded as Mr. Burns from “The Simpsons.”

The same forces seem poised to dominate the 2012 election. When Obama speaks, we hear the passions of a vampire, expounding upon the romantic ideals that formed his core identity.

Honestly I think the feeling of powerlessness I had reading this essay is probably exactly what it feels like to be inside a crashing airplane.

And ultimately, like any vampire, Obama trusts his own instincts and judgments over the consensus of his constituents.

I think this is false about Obama and vampires and maybe about constituents, I'm not sure.

Mitt Romney, on the other hand, is zombie through and through. For Romney, a practicing Mormon who often praises his father, identity is always determined by the group. Superiority born of patriotic or religious zealotry makes logical sense to a zombie, as long as it’s based on consensus.

No nothing makes sense to a zombie because they literally have no thoughts.

Zombies believe that the true meaning of life can be determined only by a collaborative crowd. In fact, zombies love the idea of bringing together an enormous group of the greatest leaders and thinkers of our day, breaking them into various committees and subcommittees, then having them systematically tackle the mysteries of the universe.

Again, this sounds a lot like Obama, so this is just stupid, and again, zombies are nihilistic killing machines with no thoughts, saying things like "zombies love [...] an enormous group of the greatest leaders and thinkers of our day" is the dumbest possible thing.

Some Famous (If Unlikely) Vampire-Zombie Teams

Dick Cheney (vampire) and Karl Rove (zombie)

John Lennon (vampire) and Paul McCartney (zombie)

Johnny Carson (vampire) and Ed McMahon (zombie)

Michael Jordan (vampire) and Scottie Pippen (zombie)

George Lucas (vampire) and Steven Spielberg (zombie)

Jay-Z (vampire) and Beyoncé (zombie)

Marx (vampire) and Engels (zombie)

None of these make any sense at all, obv.

But who will ultimately rule the world, zombies or vampires?

Vampires have an advantage at the outset, because they’re masters of seduction. While our first impulse might be to hide from zombies (as we hide from Facebook, and Microsoft, and Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the cops),

Facebook; Microsoft; Jehovah's Witnesses; the police: all the same. We all hide from all of them, especially Facebook, which has zero registered users worldwide.

our instinct with vampires is to invite them into our homes (as it is with sexy artists, talking Apple products, charming hitchhikers and the Marquis de Sade). Giving in to a vampire feels just like signing an iPhone contract: you’re titillated, sure, but you sort of know in your bones that you’ll live to regret it.

Just like it. Feels just like it.

That said, vampires are more easily disarmed: flattery, flirtation, a quick retweet — anything that caters to the vampire ego will do. Corruption and overindulgence will often take a vampire down, because vampires tend to put too much faith in their own urges and instincts.

Brought down by corruption, just like the legend of Corrupt Dracula.

For either vampires or zombies, the most important thing is to understand which one you are. When you get confused about your identity, you’re headed for a fall. Bill Clinton may have a zombie’s ability to memorize facts, but he’s obviously a vampire at heart. Despite Arianna Huffington’s zombielike aggregating instincts, no one but a vampire could beguile the rich and powerful into blogging for her free. Tiger Woods never would have fallen from grace had he listened to that stodgy inner zombie voice of his, rather than running with the vampire crowd.

Got that? Understand which made-up, contradictory, overlapping category you are.

If you marry a vampire, don’t introduce him to your friend’s teenage daughters. Or your housekeeper. Or that whole roasting chicken in your fridge.

Fuck you Hugo Lindgren for printing this. It's not like this shit isn't all over the internet in a million other places. Why do we need it here too?

1500+ words, one piece of information (Steve Jobs died).

I'm the black guy in an Apple commercial

2011-10-28T21:38:00.002-04:00

PLAY SOME COLTRAAAANE.
SKEE BOP A DOO-WEE BOP.
RESCHEDULE MY SWINGERS' PARTY FOR FRIIIIDAY.
BEE OW A DOO-BEE WOW.
I NEED TO GET MY SOOOUL PATCH TRIMMED.
ZIP-A LU HOW DO YOU DO.

Composing beautiful poetry using the longest suggested rhyme on rhymezone.com

2011-10-26T20:51:00.001-04:00

I tried to feel a different way;
I saw you and was filled with love.
Like Jean Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Money,
Who believed natural laws were not uncharacteristic of

The process of the evolution
Of humankind, much like my heart:
A depository financial institution,
The opposite of an external body part.

So say goodbye before it kills,
For I've already paid my price.
Like oilmen, moved to Beverly Hills,
Confused by e'ery electromagnetical device.

And promise you'll forget my name,
My face, and all the things I said.
Let pass my inertial reference frame;
Our love ascends to command processing overhead.

Kid manager

2011-10-18T05:29:00.000-04:00

When the owner of the lowly Houston Astros died and turned over control of the team to his 11-year-old grandson Gavin, no one thought he had any chance of bringing them to a pennant. And when he named himself manager, people thought he had no business trying to lead a clubhouse of Major League players! And they were proved right a couple weeks into Gavin's tenure, when he called his African-American shortstop a "dumb monkey" and was forced to resign three days later amid widespread public outrage.

Advice

2011-10-08T07:19:00.000-04:00

Of course no marriage is perfect. You’ll have your conflicts, about everything from mortgages and children, to who gets to eat the last potato fry. Potato fry. That’s what I call french fries. Listen, I can call them whatever I want and you can eat me if you don’t like it.

[A fistfight breaks out]

Worst conceivable dating site profile

2011-10-07T04:15:00.002-04:00

In the interest of meeting new people and getting myself "out there," I decided to join a dating website. But in the interests of art, humor and not actually meeting these people (who wants to meet people?), I figured I'd create the worst dating site profile imaginable.

Of course it would be easy to just make a dumb fake profile with a picture of a fat guy and a bunch of racist shit. But that's no fun. The game is to put forward the least attractive facets of my personality and obscure my more impressive accomplishments or endearing foibles. Like a good memoir, I'll exaggerate some things for effect, but the profile must remain essentially truthful. Ideally, someone who hasn't seen me in a while and stumbled across this profile would say, "it looks like Chris has had a rough couple months."

So here we go!

---

After entering my real basic info (age, birthday, location, all that), it was time to pick the ever-crucial profile name.

Apparently my first choice, "suicidalideation," is one letter too long. I was disappointed at first, but this works.

Now for the profile picture.

Profiles with only one picture always look a little grim, though, so I gave mine a little variety.

Looking good! Now for the main info box on the side.

I briefly tried to puzzle out the difference between "skinny" and "thin" before realizing the most truthful answer was right in front of my eyes.

This one confused me too. I guess they would have wanted me to answer "anything," as I am not anything else on this list, but anyone who knows me knows that I do not eat "anything." There are tons of things I don't eat (briefly: seafood; mayonnaise; any nut including coconut, excepting peanuts and cashews; non-white bread; shredded beef; cheesecake; cream cheese; sour cream; most vegetables not found in a garden salad). "Mostly other" somehow seemed like the best answer.

This was easy. On Sunday I went to a wedding where I saw some old friends. My mom instructed my sister to make sure I did not go around telling everyone I'm unemployed, but it's true, and in fact is the whole reason I had the time and impulse to sign up for this site.

Can't say I didn't give myself full credit here.

I did this so that when people search for the keywords "self-analysis" or "incapable," my profile will appear.

Do you want to get to know me better?

Then I had to answer a bunch of questions. I skipped a whole bunch of them and then I thought it took my skip button away, on this stupid fucking question of all possible questions:

The only answer I actually wanted to "accept" was Skip, but that is not an option for some reason (shouldn't it be? I probably have nothing in common with someone who doesn't find that question beneath contempt).

But apparently I'd just entered the Condescending Intelligence Quiz portion of the profile, because I got a bunch more SAT-lite questions like this.

They must have sensed I was pissed off because they gave me my skip button back ("Do you believe morality is universal or relative?" "Do you require your partner to be kinkier than you are?" SKIP SKIP SKIP SKIP) and started lobbing me softballs like "Is homosexuality a sin."

I finished the bare minimum 25 questions and they gave me some matches. So who did the algorithms determine to be the best match for my worst impulses and traits? Congratulations.

There were a bunch of other people close to her, but she's the only one to crack 90%. Congratulations, person.

Meanwhile, I don't know what Enemy % means exactly, but presumably it is not good:

Note my enemy scores are higher than my matches. Hmm.

This made me chuckle:

So anyway I passed on OKCupid's suggestion to send a message to someone, and have decided instead to just sit back and let the messages roll in! And the best part is if it works, I feel like there is no way a person can meet me after seeing this profile and be disappointed. This could be the best thing I've ever done (no I know that will not happen). This is for real, by the way, here's the link to prove it.

Fear of worms

2011-09-15T08:25:00.000-04:00

[note: regular readers of this site may disregard this "post;" it is merely a page designed to help people overcome their fear of worms]

To Over-Come Your Fear Of Worms You Must "Confront" Your Fear Of Worms

WORMSWORMSWORMSWORMSWORMSWORMSWORMSWORMSWORMSWORMSWORMSWORMSWORMSWORMSWORMSWORMS

WORMS

WORMS

WORMS

Worms Are Often Called "Nature's Garbage-Disposers" They Are Vital For The Enrichment Of Soil And Help Plants Go You See The Earth Needs Them And They Are Good For The Earth

W

O

R

WORMS

WORMS

WORMS

WORMS

WORMS WILL EAT YOU WHEN YOU DIE THEY WILL WRIGGLE AROUND UNDER YOUR SKIN AND EAT YOU FROM THE INSIDE OUT THEY WILL EAT YOUR BRAINS AND SKIN AND FLESH AND ORGANS WORMS WORMS WORMS WORMS WORMS

Congrat-Ulations You Have Now Confronted Your Fear Of Worms And You Are No Longer Afraid Of Worms

Selected comments from Marmaduke cartoons

2011-09-14T22:01:00.000-04:00

Number 3 ( Another P. McGoohan fan) said, 1 day ago

I wouldn’t of disturbed his nap If I were you Mister.

LOL xxx

Number 3 ( Another P. McGoohan fan) said, 2 days ago

Don’t let Marm shake himself dry in the house.. He’ll have the floor plus the wallpaper ( and the owner) SOAKED!

sixcues said, 4 days ago

They should make “Butt” Flavored Dog Food, since dogs are always licking their own Butt and sniffing other dogs butts!

Those Gourmet Dog Foods with all of the flavors are to make the human feel better and make him think that he’s taking good care of his dog, the dog could care less!

AshburnStadium said, 4 days ago

Imagine Marm dancing!

The Havoc he would make!

xxx

Bailey said, 4 days ago

@Number 3 ( Another P. McGoohan fan)

He’d shake the room… no doubt!

SUSAN NEWMAN said, 7 days ago

Oh, no he won’t!
Marmaduke is clearly the boss of that household.
BTW, why would the ladies want to sit on that sofa, anyway?
It’s probably covered with dog hair.

truth51 said, 6 days ago

give it up marm

SUSAN NEWMAN said, 7 days ago

With those skinny legs, it looks like Dukie isn’t getting enough at home.
Enough to eat, that is!

puppybreath said, 9 days ago

Hmmm, Really how different is Marm with his prized possesions from people and their cherished collections of “things”.

We humans surround ourselves with all sort of “things” that we hoard and prize and will even fight over should anyone dare to take one of them without permission.

The things held as valuable are given that value by the owner. Others may see those things as worthless junk or something that should be donated to a garage sale.

So too Marm sees value in his possessions. The value is in the eyes of the owner, not the beholder.

puppybreath said, 10 days ago

Yeah, Marm, there’s no place like home despite some trying circumstances at times. It’s where you can feel safe and loved and cared for and you know any problem will soon pass by and life will be serene and you will be comforted.

Then, of course you can take “Dad” out for a lively walk and enjoy the sights and smells that the great outdoors offers you.

SUSAN NEWMAN said, 14 days ago

F’cryin’ out loud, winslow—give the dog SOME encouragement!

Number 3 ( Another P. McGoohan fan) said, 14 days ago

Marm will sit ANYWHERE!

xxx

mrcharmander934 said, 15 days ago

Garfield is cool, but Marmaduke is cool too.

k9 Crew said, 17 days ago

Just like it needs more hype on Irene…first the quake they have something now to incite panic and clog up the airwaves…Isn’t that a criminal act? Incite panic??? but the MEDIA is above the law…. my cow died, I don’t need their Bull…I’m from the east coast, S. I. , NY now in Ohio…

We need Marmaduke now more than ever

2011-09-14T08:46:00.002-04:00

Word of the day

2011-09-01T08:30:00.000-04:00

Today's word of the day is: EGG. Do you know what egg means? Don't cheat!

A: An egg is a round white thing where chickens come from out of. Now your brain-dictionary is one word bigger!

Death is coming

2011-08-15T23:35:00.004-04:00

One summer you’re stroking a different girl’s legs every night, and the next you’ve got a girlfriend who wants to have sex in a church. That’s how it is for everyone — let’s say sixteen years of living in the same town, knowing the same people, chewing hours to dust in the same basements and backyards and parking lots, until you reach the acme of all that, which is a place where you’re so filled with a kind of deep intuition and easy love for everything around you that living isn’t even something you have to think about anymore, it just happens and it’s comfortable and right. And then you give it all away for something that seems greater. And you’re outside the library with the engine running because you want to give her the opportunity to change her mind, but she looks at you with that stupid look she has and says “I want you to fuck me in the front pews.” And all that easiness and inertia you spent years trying to cultivate fucks you over, because you don’t know how to stop anything anymore.

She was simple. She desired things, and then she took clear, rational steps in the direction of those things. The Greeks believed, I think, that that’s how all people behaved — in search of the good and all that — but they didn’t have stuff like irony or marketing or mass media-cultivated insecurity and self-loathing to contend with, and they fucked teenage boys in bathhouses. She was cute. Or she wasn’t all that cute, I guess, but she was cute enough and I had been without a girlfriend for long enough that no one gave me much shit for hanging around with her. Her name was Stephanie.

“I want to have sex in a church,” is what she said. We were at the rec center, out in the grass on the Little League fields, and our other friends were a little further away, whipping empty soda cans at each other. Note that she did not say that she wanted to have sex with me in a church.

“All right,” I said.

“In the middle of the night with no one else around.”

“All right.” And then I literally did not even think about it again until we rolled into the church parking lot a few nights later.

How did we get there? I really don’t know. I’m sure it was just another night with a bunch of us hanging out in a parking lot somewhere and then splintering off into smaller groups until it was just me and her, preparing to soil a holy place. The first thing I remember specifically was pulling up right by the door and waiting for her to laugh it off. Which she did not.

“We shouldn’t park here,” I finally said. “Someone might see the car.” I suggested we drive over to the library, which was right next door. A car outside the library late at night would have been just as conspicuous, but I guess I thought whoever saw it would assume people were fucking in the library or maybe on the other side of the big gravel pile in the empty lot between the library and the Agway. It was after 10 anyway, and the town is dead enough after 10 that they turn the stoplights off, but you can never be too careful.

I was still buckled in and hadn’t turned off the engine. Stephanie turned to me and gave me her weird sexy “I’m a bad girl” look that always made my stomach turn. I’ve never understood the overt display of sexuality. Very gauche, in my opinion. Maybe done well it might be appealing, but I’ve never seen it done well.

“I want you to fuck me in the front pews,” she told me. What was left for me to say after that? Did words not cease to function as soon as those syllables left her mouth? “This is not something I am interested in” — would that have meant anything different in that moment than “ok” or “you look beautiful under this moth-clouded lamplight” or “wrist-slit motherfucker I forgot to check the mail today?” No; it was all the same. She left language squished and twitching at our feet. There was only physics left — force, acceleration, inertia.

The front door was unlocked. This was the church I’d gone to my whole childhood. It felt somehow newly dark — like when you’re walking through your house, turning off the lights before you go to bed, and it seems darker than it is, because your eyes haven’t adjusted. But you know every step. This was how I convinced myself that breaking into a church to perform sexual acts was a familiar and known thing.

We stood just inside the door, as if deciding where to go. I peered into the Sunday school rooms and that was the first pang like, oh boy. I really fucking missed my friends, but I never got them back, not in the same way. They’d all done the same thing I had — gotten restless and run off after other things. Stephanie and I turned the other way and crept into the chapel room.

I stopped her there. The chapel room seemed like a fine compromise. “I can’t wait any longer,” I croaked, which was savvy, because nothing less would have stood a chance. She kissed me too hard; I winced. She grabbed at me in the vicinity of my penis, but she just got a lot of scrotum and some hair and I said “aah ow.” She ran up to the big sliding sanctuary doors and whooshed them open with one big, thundering shove.

I expected something here — a change in the air, or a big booming minor chord on the organ. There was nothing. In front of me, Stephanie had gotten down on her hands and knees and was doing this heaving, clumsy crawl into the sanctuary, looking back at me with her eyebrow cocked. What a bizarre thing. Was she trying to look like a sexy baby, or an animal? Was that the game? Why then that unpracticed lurch? That canny look? It didn’t hold together. I felt a great tenderness for her then. I thought, what are you doing? You are somebody’s daughter! It was a stupid, condescending thought. She was her own person. And yet, the things she wanted for herself I would not have wished on anyone.

In my head, I screamed, WHO ARE YOU, but I followed her in.

She sat on her knees in front of the front row of pews and waved me over. The church was not very large. It was old and Puritan-seeming — simple and clean, with one small stained glass window of Jesus and some stupid-looking lambs that wasn’t original to the place — nothing like that would have flown with the wet, homesick Protestants who settled this town. I sat down in front of her. “Let’s go back to the chapel room,” I said. My voice was small in such a small space. You’d think a church would echo.

“I want to do it where Jesus can see us.”

“Jesus can see us everywhere,” I said, which is not something I believed so much as it was the kind of thing you learn to say as a little kid to prevent such things as having a girl pull your pants off in front of a stained glass window of Christ from happening.

She began to blow me, is the most artful way I know how to say it. Truly there is nothing less pleasurable to me. The sexual politics of it — the domination, the degradation. Isn’t that what it is? It is a regressive act. I refuse to believe anyone enjoys having a dick jammed down their throat, I’m sorry. And it’s an ugly thing — the tendons and veins in the neck bulging out as she throws herself around like a dumb, exhausted piston. Looking up with doe eyes, batting eyelashes, as if to look like a bashful child — I am meant to be attracted to this? The mind reels. I’m not unaffected, of course. Certain stimuli simply overwhelm the brain’s most sincere, revolted objections. The lobster boils in hot water, no matter how much he resents it.

Anyway after a while of that, she got up and sat on my lap. My arms hung. She shoved her own shorts down to her feet and put her arms around my neck and pulled my head into her chest. I didn’t care whether I lived or died. It would have been a way to die and be found, like that. But it’s weird to care about those things. When you’re dead that stuff doesn’t reach you. I felt like I had already gotten there — let go of these earthly things, because death is coming.

“Are you all right?” She sounded concerned.

“I’m fine,” I said. I’m fine — what could I have been thinking?

She busied herself trying to pull off my shirt. I reached into the rack nailed to the back of the pew and grabbed a hymnal by the spine. It did not occur to me, even for a second, to hit her with it. Evidence of my being a decent person is hard enough to come by that I cherish this small thing. Instead I reared back and slugged myself in the jaw with it, as hard as I could.

Stephanie jumped off me — I think she thought I had been attacked. I stood up and we stared at each other. Everything was quiet. I hit myself again, right across the bridge of the nose. I could feel the blood crawling through it. Then I held my arm back as far as it could go and whipped the old book right at my face — a corner got me in the eye and I doubled over.

“What the fuck are you doing?” I could barely see her through tears and my eye swelling. She was asking me this, as if I could have answered. I picked the hymnal off the ground and laid it on the pew. She ran off, angry or embarrassed.

I heard the door slam off in the back of the church and I sat down to collect myself. Jesus frowned down over the pews. There was nothing in it — no meaning, no message for me. It was just a window. I pulled up my pants and walked out.

Back in the parking lot I saw Stephanie waiting by the car, arms crossed, pouting. On the one hand, it made sense — it’s not like she could have hailed a goddamn cab. But I still kind of couldn’t fucking believe it.

I do feel bad for her now. Of course I do. I ruined her dream. I’m sure she found someone else to fuck her in a church in the years since. But I must have cheapened it for her.

I left her there and walked home. It was like a mile and a half, but I wasn’t driving her anywhere. In the morning I biked down to pick up the car and found all the windows smashed in. I thought, well done. The librarian came outside. I hadn’t showered so my hair was pretty unkempt and there was still dried blood ringing my nostrils and the librarian looked like a deep well of pity and good feeling for me, like she wanted to take me home and hug me for a day or two. I swept broken glass off the driver’s seat with an ice scraper and drove home.

First Shrimp Products chat beginning immediately

2011-07-17T14:59:00.004-04:00

Chris will be chatting with readers from 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM today! Log in to get a chance to talk with Chris!

UPDATE: The chat is over! Thanks everyone for participating! Check out the transcript below!

shrimp products chat

Things drawn

2011-05-31T05:33:00.000-04:00

grapes

pencil and pencil sharpener

pretty woman

man sitting in a chair suspended over an active volcano

sailboat next to two fish jumping out of the ocean

My position on child molestation

2011-05-30T03:21:00.001-04:00

I am against it. My staff and I have examined the issue very closely and I've decided that I cannot support any form of child molestation, no matter the circumstance. I did not arrive at this conclusion easily; it was only through weeks of study and prayer and consultation with experts in the field that I came to the conclusion I've reached which is that I do not think child molestation is good for people to do.

I don't expect this position to win me many friends, and it may even cost me some voters. These days in Washington, it seems like it's a liability to say you're against something, because there's always some interest group waiting in the wings to use it against you come election time. I'm certainly aware of that risk, but as I told my staff: in times like these, the country needs strong moral leadership, and politicians who don't tailor their votes to the political winds. And so I stand against the pressure, against the interest groups, against those who would seek to punish me politically for my strong stance against child molestation.

Let me tell you a story. I held a rally last week, here in town, outside the old closed steel mill, where I gave a speech outlining my support for people having jobs. And after the speech, an old man with food in his white beard came up to me and said, "my child has been molested." And I looked him in the face, and told him, "child molestation is a complicated issue, and when I get to Washington, I plan to sit down with leaders of both parties to develop a comprehensive child molestation policy, but I can't say for sure what kind of child molestation plan I would or would not support."

And that was the truth.

But when I got home that evening, the encounter stuck with me. Something just didn't sit right. My beautiful wife, whom I had just slapped around in a consensual love act, asked me what was wrong. And I told her, that even though it might not poll well, even though it might not be the right issue to touch in an election year, even though it might even be considered

POLITICAL SUICIDE

, I could not ignore my conscious. Conscience. I do not think children should be molested, and if that kind of unapologetic stand against the tides of public opinion get me thrown out of office, then never mind. I will molest a child. Whatever you want.

Look out! It's the Owl Of Sincerity, here to punish the candidate for his lack of steadfastness!

CLUCK CLUCK

(Everyone died in the fire started by the owl, including the innocent people who were not guilty of being insincere and had just come to hear the speech.)

We hate grandmothers

2011-05-23T10:57:00.000-04:00

Hey grandmothers? Why don't you just BUZZ OFF! Don't you know that NOBODY WANTS YOU HERE?

Look at your old, wrinkled skin. You bodies are failing you, YOU IDIOTS!

Know something grandmothers? We'd rather hang out with a bunch of RATS than the likes of you. A BUNCH OF DISGUSTING RATS.

Oh yeah, rats! MUCH better than grandmothers!

Rats rats rats! Grandmothers are stupid compared to rats!

Victims of lust

2011-05-22T21:47:00.000-04:00

I couldn't go anywhere because I was injured. The injury had happened at my little cousin's birthday party. I'd stepped on a balloon and it hadn't popped and it threw me right on my back right there on the front walkway, and my back landed across the front concrete steps and I'd cracked a disc or something, I don't remember what, but the point was I couldn't go anywhere. I was 25 years old and I was living at my parents' house and most days I fell asleep on the couch and woke up at 3 or 4 in the morning with the TV blaring and went upstairs after that.

This was in March and one day I was looking at a calendar, really staring at it, like I was trying to figure out what it had against me and I realized that it was March 10 today and that it was Jay's birthday. Jay was my best friend from grades 1-10, and we remained friends in grades 11-12, though there was some reshuffling of social circles and we weren't really "best" friends anymore, but still "good" friends. I hadn't spoken to him in years, probably the summer after our first year in college, when all of us spent most of the summer together recovering from the trauma of flopping around and suffocating on the dock that is semi-adult world for the past nine months, though we didn't say anything like that, we just spent most of the time getting drunk. So it had been five and a half years?

Me and him and some other people used to go around spraypainting stop signs white, every one we came across, starting from the school and fanning our way out from there, so there'd be all these ghostly blank octagons everywhere. People still stopped at them though.

I figured I'd call him up, on his birthday. I tried his house, figuring I'd ask his parents what his new number was. He was living out in Portland I'd heard, doing who knows what -- that's where he'd gone to school, somewhere out in Portland or near Portland, and he'd just stayed there. But he answered so I wished him a happy birthday and he said he was just back in town for the week and was bored because no one else was around and asked if I wanted to go somewhere. I was still injured but I figured, fuck it, and told him yeah but he had to come pick me up because I couldn't drive because I was home alone with no car and I couldn't drive.

He picked me up at like 9 and we went to the bar in the center of town, which used to be called Pat's but was Old Church Grille now or something, but we still called it Pat's out of some dumb rebellion or nostalgia or something. I was worried we'd see someone we knew because it was a small town, but all the faces have changed -- it's all the same people, but they all go to different places now.

I brought along my painkillers and offered him some but he said no. I asked him how Portland was and he said he was in Seattle now. He bored me to tears just about explaining what he did and he asked me what I did and I told him the story about how I'd fallen on a balloon.

At some point we were drunk and he told me he'd been thinking about how it he was flying back out west tomorrow and he was hoping his plane would crash. I tried to get the bartender's attention so we could settle our tab. He said he and his girlfriend from high school whose name was Deirdre were having problems. I told him I never liked her, went off on a rant about her for a little bit. He said he was lost without her and wanted his plane to crash rather than face being without her. I said there were a million good reasons to want to die but Dierdre wasn't one of them. He got upset but didn't say anything. I looked down at the end of the bar and watched some 19-year-old girl try to work the bartender over for a beer, but the bartender kept telling him he knew how old she was because they went to the same church.

We left and I told Jay he was too drunk to drive so I was going to just walk home -- it wasn't far. He drove off and I was barely out of the parking lot before I remembered my back. I couldn't find my painkillers. I tried to tough it out for a while but I stopped halfway up that steep hill at the start of route 69 past Rock Road -- I'd barely made it anywhere, I could still see the bar. I slumped to the ground and curled up in a muddy pile of leaves. A car drove up and flashed its brights at me but I flipped it off without looking and it went on its way. In the morning I woke up to a bunch of kids gawking at me on their way to school. Someone beeped. My back hurt even worse than it had the night before.

I hobbled over to a car and knocked on the driver's side window. The kid practically pulled a muscle making sure his door was locked. I pounded harder and told him to let me in. I yanked on the back door and it popped open and I threw myself into the backseat. It was some skinny 17-year-old, probably -- he looked terrified. I shaded my eyes with the crook of my arm. The seat was kind of vibrating with the engine and it felt good.

I hadn't told him what to do, so he just drove to school, I guess, as fast as he could, passing people. He got there and parked and slammed the door and ran off into the building. I stayed there for a while. I think I'd been to the school maybe twice since graduation. I pulled myself up on the back of my seat and looked at it -- our school was flat and wide and rectangularly asymmetrical. Some girl walked past the car and looked in the window -- she was a middle schooler, maybe sixth grade. I got out in the opposite side and walked over to her and threw her up against the car and took her backpack. She crawled off into the woods. I opened her backpack up and found her schedule with her homeroom in it and I went to school, because I was late.

Ink

2011-05-10T00:38:00.000-04:00

What do people need? LISTEN I'M GOING TO EXPLAIN MY BUSINESS IDEA? What do people need? They need ink cartridges. So I'm going to start a store that just has ink cartridges in it. No, shut up, I'll have all the cartridges for all the kinds of things people need ink cartridges for. Printers or copiers or whatever. SHUT UP. I don't know what toner is, whatever, I can sell that too. Just ALL THE KINDS OF INK I'LL SELL IN CARTRIDGES IN MY STORE.

Listen to me, you little creep, this will be a popular store. Whenever people need some ink they'll come to my store to buy their cartridges. And people can ask what kind of cartridges they need and we'll tell them or something. I don't know just SHUT UP AND LET ME EXPLAIN ALL OF THIS. And we'll do a thing where you bring in your ink and we'll put it in an empty cartridge for you. Or whatever SHUT UP put ink in your cartridge IT DOESN'T MATTER it's just we're selling the ink cartridges and that's an easy thing to do, so why don't you just calm down and LET ME EXPLAIN THIS TO YOU ALREADY LIKE I'M TRYING TO DO.

Any kind of ink cartridge that exists in the world and we'll sell it. I don't care if they don't even sell that kind of printer anymore, the point of the whole store is we sell all the ink cartridges you stupid idiot. Everyone would by our ink cartridges. We'd sell them at cost and then just make one fucking kind really expensive to pay for all the other ones, I don't know. We'll figure it out. The point is who doesn't need ink cartridges? Everyone. No one, shut up, you know what I mean you idiot.

So listen to me, pay me two thousand dollars so I can start this store. Ten thousand dollars. It's called inventing, you stupid idiot. You invest in the store and then I make money with it and I pay you back your money. No, you just get your money back, shut up. It will be an incredibly successful store because everyone wants ink cartridges. It has been my all-time dream to start an ink cartridge store. I love ink cartridges. Who cares if it's true, I just need your money.

This ink cartridge store will cost me nothing to run, do you understand that? When people ask for ink I'll just sell them an empty cartridge for a high price. And when they complain I'll explain that they paid for a CARTRIDGE and that's what they got -- a CARTRIDGE. If they still complain I'll wave a gun in the air until they run away. Then I'll keep all the money for myself.

So give me your money. Yes, shut up, give it to me. Don't make me punch you. Oh shit, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have punched you, honey, I don't know why I did that. Here, sit down, I'll get you some ice to put over your eye. Yes you need it because it is swelling extremely fast. Listen, don't apologize, it's ok. I know you only want to make sure we don't waste our money on anything but THAT'S WHY I'M TELLING YOU TO INVEST IT IN THIS INK CARTRIDGE STORE BECAUSE IT IS A GOLD MINE. Yes. Yes. Yes. Honey, I don't want to feel compelled to punch you again. Honey. Honey...

The ugly child

2011-05-09T23:51:00.002-04:00

We took great satisfaction in Andrew and Kristy having an ugly child. Being one of the more attractive couples throughout high school, it was widely assumed that they would go to college and find lucrative jobs and marry each other and spawn more in their likeness and they did all of that except the last, when their first child grew to be the weirdly mushy misshapen thing that it was. My own child was a quiet thing, but I encouraged him to shove this child around and call it ugly, and he did at first, because he was an obedient boy.

But then my child and the ugly child became friends, to my horror. I don't even know how it happened. One day my wife told me our child was to have a new playmate and I said ok, fine, and I was puttering around in the backyard and my kid runs out there being chased by none other than Andrew and Kristy's ugly child! I was stunned -- I started yelling at them, about what I don't know, running around the backyard I guess, but it was just a cover because I was so mortified and I had to yell something.

A little later they were playing with dolls up in the guest room (the guest room being the only place he is allowed to play with dolls, because it is cold and cramped and unpleasant up there, and we feel like we can wean him off dolls this way) and I pulled my son aside and took him into my bedroom (a special privilege because we don't allow him in their normally -- I saw his eyes get all big and glassy when I walked him in) and explained to him that I know a lot of this didn't make sense now, but there were some people he just could not afford to be friends with. And though it might seem natural to a nice boy like him to be nice to even the ugliest of children, what he didn't yet know is that these friendships will cost him respect, friends, lovers, jobs. My child asked me who I was talking about -- he truly had no idea what damage his friendship with the ugly child was doing to his reputation, and how easily he could turn it into a positive simply by ASSERTING HIS DOMINANCE. I told him that as soon as we were done talking, he was to lead his new friend into the bathroom and push him into the toilet. I would go in there now and leave the seat up for him -- all he would have to do was find some way to lure the ugly child in there, position him in front of the toilet and give him one strong shove. He should take care to watch his friend's head -- he wasn't to injure the ugly child; he was only to do what he could to ensure that at least one part of his body would land in the bowl.

But before I could relay the last of these instructions, the doorbell rang and it was Andrew and Kristy, the two of them here to pick up their ugly child and bring it home. I instructed the children to clean up their dolls and then come downstairs. Andrew and Kristy and I had a conversation in the front hall. We discussed the relative merits of our respective children. They praised their ugly child's grades and intellectual curiosity; I praised my son's strong jaw and clear blue eyes. They expressed relief that a child as ugly as theirs had found a friend. I told them that I had discovered that the entire playdate had been an elaborate scheme by my own child to push theirs into the toilet, but that in the course of the day they had forged a true friendship. Kristy started to weep. "There's nothing in the books about loving an ugly child," she said, mascara running down her cheeks.

We heard several loud thumps coming from above us. I leapt up the stairs three steps at a time, hopeful my son had pushed the ugly child in the toilet, or knocked him into the hamper. As soon as I reached the top there was another crash, and I saw my son crawling on his hands and knees out of the guest room, dazed, with a string of blood and phlegm hanging from his nose.

I ran into the guest room, shoved my son aside and demanded the ugly child tell me what had happened. The ugly child calmly explained that my son had refused his request to lend him one of my son's most cherished dolls, and so the ugly child had grabbed his arm and whipped him into the closet doors. My pitiful son crawled away, in the direction of his room. I asked him, did he not realize he was nothing more than a fat ugly little troll? He said don't talk to me like that, I'm going to be a powerful businessman some day, and pulled some play money out of his pocket and threw it in my face. Andrew and Kristy stumbled up the stairs; I turned around and saw them kicking my son in the ribs and legs. He just moaned and rolled over, presenting his back. I took a swing at the ugly child but he ducked and grabbed my arm and sunk his teeth into it. I went to kick him, but I realized, what are we doing? I patted the ugly child on the head, softly, until he released.

I smiled down at the ugly child and took his hand and we walked out to where Andrew and Kristy were brutalizing my son. I patted the ugly child on the back now and let him go. I grabbed my own child up by the hair with the intention of hoisting him over the banister and throwing him onto the first floor but to my surprise the ugly child did not follow me, and set upon his own parents, punching their legs, biting their hands. I dropped my moaning son; what was this? Andrew and Kristy could have overpowered their ugly child -- Andrew, in particular, was much stronger, but it's difficult to punch your own child, even when he punches you, and even when he's ugly. My own son crawled into his room and shut the door. I heard him softly crying against the flimsy wall. Someday though my son will understand what happened in that hallway, and why it was important, and why I stayed out there to watch.

True news headlines about celebrities

2011-04-27T23:08:00.001-04:00

Kate Hudson Shoves Expectant Mother Outside Erotic Bakery
Kate Hudson Denies Drowning Cat
Kate Hudson Steals Wallet From City Employee
Kate Hudson Punches Window In Erotic Bakery
Kate Hudson Punches Out Window Of Police Cruiser
Kate Hudson Found Wandering The Desert Wearing Horse's Skin
Kate Hudson Gives Middle Finger To Crowd Outside Church
Kate Hudson Apologizes For Poisoning Stranger's Well
Kate Hudson Arrested For Arson In Connection With Farmhouse Fire
Kate Hudson Explores Presidential Run
Kate Hudson Spits Watermelon Seed Through Her Teeth
Kate Hudson Escapes Mossad-Sponsored Assassination Attempt
Kate Hudson Inconsolable After Stepping On Worm
Kate Hudson Wears Muddy Boots
Kate Hudson Beats Landlord To Death
Kate Hudson: 'This Sofa Smells Like Shit'
Kate Hudson Gives Handjob To Complete Stranger
Kate Hudson Assembles Bookshelf Incorrectly
Kate Hudson Lies To Christ
Kate Hudson Spotted Sleeping On Pile Of Rocks
Kate Hudson Calls Child 'Faggot' In Heated Halo Exchange
Kate Hudson Knocks Bird's Nest Out Of Tree Then Laughs About It
Kate Hudson Stabs Alligator To Death
Kate Hudson Throws Rock At Mall
Kate Hudson Scared By A Pumpkin
Kate Hudson Quits Acting Because She Hates Herself
Kate Hudson Eats 40 Pounds Of Chili In One Day

Garden Radio

2011-04-25T14:17:00.000-04:00

Welcome back to Garden Radio, I'm your host, Ron Newberg. It's springtime and we were talking about tulips, optimal soil conditions, when to pick them. Let's take a call. Bill from Newington, go ahead.

"Hey, Ron. I just wanted to say that when I bring my tulips inside, I always put them by a sunny window."

That's an excellent point, Bill. Tulips love light, and will really only open up if they get a lot of it.

"Yeah, and one more thing, Ron. You're gonna get murdered."

Ok. Well, thanks for your call, Bill. Let's take another one from Jean in Colchester. Jean, how are you.

"I'm fine, Ron, how are you?"

I'm doing just great, thanks for asking! You have a question about tulips, Jean?

"No, I just wanted to say I am going to kill you, so you'd better be very careful walking to you ca--"

All right, appreciate your call, Jean. One thing about tulips, don't go planting any just yet. Wait until late summer for that. Linda from Burlington is on the line. Linda, glad to hear from you.

"Hi, Ron. My tulips still haven't come up yet. I think I might have planted them in moist soil --"

Aah, yup, there's your mistake. Tulips need drained soil --

"You need to get killed, and if someone else doesn't do it you can be sure I--"

Thank you, Linda. All right, once again, folks, I really appreciate your calls. We could have a show without them. But I would ask that you please refrain from making threats against my life, or the life of anyone in my family. This show is about gardening. Next caller is Jim from Torrington.

(heavy breathing, series of clicks)

All right, if I'm not mistaken, I believe Jim was breathing heavily into the receiver, and loading and cocking a gun. Thanks for the call Jim. We're gonna take a quick break and then when we come back we're going to talk about worms.

More medicine

2011-04-24T15:23:00.000-04:00

Attention: I've returned with the results of your tests, and according to my test results, you need more medicine.

I'm already taking so much medicine, doctor, could it possibly --

Hey! I'm the doctor so you have to listen to me when I tell you how much medicine to take. Open your mouth.

No.

(Doctor pours some medicine down her throat.)

There. How do you feel now?

I'm having trouble swallowing all the medicine.

Drink a glass of water. Don't you know to drink water when you take medicine?

(Doctor sprays her with a high-powered hose.)

That should have solved all your medicine problems, which I know, because of my being a doctor.

I'm very dizzy. I think I'm having side effects from the medicine.

YOU SHOULD HAVE WARNED ME. Taking too much medicine is a serious thing. I need to counteract that by making you more sick.

(Doctor injects the woman with smallpox.)

How do you feel now.

Drowsy.

That's fine, I don't care. Don't come back unless you need more medicine or smallpox.

I'LL NEVER COME BACK! NEVER EVER EVER!

Mm, I'm going to eat this donut, but you can't, because you're sick.

I WANT TO EAT THE DONUT!

Sick people can't eat donuts. They have to eat fruit and vegetables and chicken broth.

Can I please have a donuts pleeeeease?

Here, eat your fucking donut (doctor shoves the donut in her face, smearing chocolate around her mouth)

None of it is going into my mouth!

Surprise, there was medicine in that donut, you idiot, I tricked you into taking more medicine.

I thought I had TOO MUCH medicine!

I was lying to you, it's part of the medical process. I lie to you all the time, like when I said I didn't break your arm that time I slammed it in the door.

My arm still hurts.

I'm glad it hurts.

GASP!

You're right...what have I said?

Working the room

2011-04-13T14:18:00.000-04:00

Thank you, thank you. It's wonderful to be back here in Los Angeles. Crowds here are much better than they are in New York. What's that? We are in New York?

Sorry. I suffered severe brain trauma as a child and sometimes forget where I am.

That is not a joke.

You, sir, good evening. Where are you from? Queens, huh? Well eff you and eff everyone from Queens.

I'm just kidding.

That's a lovely woman you're here with tonight. Is she your girlfriend? What's that? The person I thought I was gesturing to is nothing more than a coat draped over a chair?

It is very dark in this room, I don't think you understand. My mistake.

Where is your girlfriend, sir? Is she dead? Is she in the hospital? Oh, you don't have a girlfriend. Probably because you're such a clumsy clod.

Ha ha, lighten up.

Why are people in the back streaming toward the exit? The show isn't over, folks. Maybe I'm not speaking loud enough.

How about you, sir, where are you from? I'm sorry, I didn't catch that, I suddenly became very dizzy. That is not a joke. I am going to sit on this stool for a second and collect myself until I don't feel like I'm going to vomit anymore.

All right, I think I'm ok.

So where did you say you were from, sir? Oh wait, you don't have to tell me, because I DON'T CARE AT ALL.

Lighten up, sir, I'm only joking. Stop looking at your watch; I can see that.

Can I get a glass of water? Where's the bartender?

How about you, ma'am, what brings you here. It's your birthday? How old are you, 100? I'm sorry, I didn't mean to insult you, numbers are completely meaningless to me ever since I suffered some severe brain trauma as a child. I cannot balance a checkbook and I am in incredible debt.

Had I already mentioned the brain trauma before? My short-term memory is very spotty.

Does anyone in the crowd know what it means to suffer from sudden and severe vertigo? Never mind, I'll move on.

So it's your birthday, ma'am, how old are you turning? 21? Well congratulations. I imagine you'll celebrate by having relations with a derelict whose beard is caked with sweat and mud like you young girls do today. Facebook. I know what that is.

Lighten up, honey. You're real sweet. Yeah -- SWEET LIKE A HANDFUL OF PUSHPINS! Am I right folks? Why are so many of you leaving? Nothing is going on in the vestibule; the show is here on stage.

How about you, sir, where are you from? You, in the back, standing there by the bar. What's that, no one's there? So what am I pointing at? A stack of boxes?

Who would stack boxes right there? Someone was bound to get confused.

A lot of real goofballs in this crowd tonight. Don't stare down at the tables and clear your throats. I know what that means! It means you CAN'T PAY ATTENTION.

Facebook. Face -- Myspace.

I'm not sobbing. No, I'm laughing at you clods. Don't offer me a handkerchief, sir. I'm sure you need it to wipe the -- tears from your -- face, after I -- call you a card short -- of a -- full deck, and you're a -- stupid card --

Can anyone drive me home? My address is on a slip of paper on my wallet. It is not far from here, but I have literally no sense of direction. I don't know why I'm here. We can take my car. Here are the keys.

Sir, I am sure these are keys, not a small stack of dirty papers as you are alleging. Oh, wait a minute, you're right. I apologize for jumping to conclusion. Now I remember; they took my keys from me because they told me I present a bodily risk to myself.

I can't have anything sharp, folks, that's the God's honest truth.

May I have some food from your plate, ma'am? What are you eating? That's not a plate? What is it, then? Your purse? I'll eat whatever's in that, if you have some crackers or breathmints. No, I'm not homeless, but I forget to eat sometimes. For days at a time. I had a nurse, but I fired her.

Lighten up, folks. We're having fun.

Do not trust anyone

2011-04-11T16:41:00.000-04:00

This clown was arrested for littering.

AND MURDER.

In the sunset of my career,

2011-04-08T16:52:00.000-04:00

here are some things I am especially happy with, for different reasons.

1
2
3
4
5
6

The Ethicist is no longer taking my letters

2011-03-29T19:58:00.001-04:00

Dear The Ethicist,

A co-worker and friend recently found out that he makes less money than others in his department who have the same title, hours and responsibilities. It is largely based on seniority, but he believes this is unfair. As a result, he has been doing less work and taking on fewer projects, using his smaller pay as justification. May I sell him to a black market "human zoo," in which he'll be locked in a small cage and kept in a weed-choked lot where the wealthy can pay to watch him abused?

C.S., BROOKLYN

Dear The Ethicist,

I work weekends, and my neighbor often plays loud music late at night. I've asked her to keep it down several times, but it doesn't seem to do much good. Most "human zoos" prize women because they are rare in captivity, and they allow human zoos to breed more humans who, captive from birth, are generally more docile. May I trick her into signing what she believes to be a petition for a new crosswalk in the neighborhood, but is actually a contract indenturing her to a human zoo I know of?

C.S., BROOKLYN

Dear The Ethicist,

Recently, I promised the proprietor of a "human zoo" to obtain for him one human female of breeding age. I received half the money in advance, but was unable to fulfill my obligation. I understood the fee as an advance to cover man-hunting expenses; he understood it as contingent on my delivery of the woman to his human zoo. Must I return the money?

C.S., BROOKLYN

Dear The Ethicist,

I recently sold several people to a "human zoo," with what I believed to be an understanding regarding the conditions in which they would be kept. I thought they would be chained in a small steel cage and beaten severely only when they misbehaved, but I recently discovered that the proprietor of this human zoo often beats his caged humans for no reason at all. May I continue selling humans to this human zoo? Or must I sell them to another human zoo, which I also know of, but whose payments for humans I know to be less timely?

C.S., BROOKLYN

Dear The Ethicist,

I make a living by selling humans to various "human zoos," which keep the people I sell in cages, beat them mercilessly and sometimes sell them for meat. Recently, one of the humans I sold escaped after chewing through his own leg to escape his chains. The chains were mine, but the transaction was complete, and he was in the zoo's custody. The proprietor of the human zoo is demanding I return his money; I maintain that the escape was the fault of his insufficient security. May I keep the money?

C.S., BROOKLYN

Dear The Ethicist,

A friend of mine has been struggling to find work and asked me for help. Finally I agreed to take him aboard my small business and split profits with him 60-40. He was unhappy with this arrangement and sold me to a "human zoo." Most of my fellow captives are people I sold to the zoo, and they often beat me, steal my food and defecate near my cage. May I request special lodging arrangements from my zookeeper?

C.S., BROOKLYN

Genie

2011-03-13T01:25:00.000-05:00

Oh my god I found a genie.

HELLO. I AM A GENIE. I WILL GRANT YOU ONE THOUSAND WISHES.

One thousand? That's too many.

WELL MOST PEOPLE WOULD THINK THAT'S A BLESSING.

There aren't a thousand different things that I want, can I just use a few?

NO YOU HAVE TO USE ALL OF THEM. THAT'S THE RULE.

All right, well I'll just use a few now and save the rest for later.

OKAY, BUT I CAN'T GO BACK INTO MY BOTTLE UNTIL YOU USE ALL OF THEM, AND IN THE MEANTIME I'LL CONTINUE GLOWING AND MAKING THIS WHOOSH SOUND AND SOME PEOPLE FIND IT DIFFICULT TO SLEEP WHEN I'M DOING THAT.

Fine. Just give me a million dollars, a thousand times in a row.

FINE BUT THAT ONLY COUNTS AS ONE WISH. THOSE ARE THE RULES.

(jumps out the window to escape the burden of the genie)

NO UNTIL YOU USE ALL THE WISHES YOU CAN'T DIE EITHER.

Killer in town

2011-03-08T15:29:00.001-05:00

There was a killer who lived in town. He had a little house across the street from the rec center. He just happened to live there, he didn't use it to lure kids into his house from the rec center or anything like that. He killed women.

During Little League games we'd sit on the bench and try to look into his windows from across the street. It was never dark enough outside that you could see anything more than shapes moving across the window like clouds. In the spring and the fall we'd ride our bikes down there and dare each other to knock on the door. He'd come out into the yard and talk to us, he was a pretty nice guy.

"How's school going?" he'd ask us. We'd tell him, ok, ask him had he killed anyone lately. He'd wink and crack a joke and we'd ride off.

"I don't want this killer in our gas station!" Everyone went quiet. We were holding a bunch of four-liter bottles of generic-brand soda. The killer feebly held out his 20 to the cashier; he didn't look at the woman. "Is anybody listening to me?"

When we got older we invited the killer to play basketball with us. He was pretty good. Bigger than all but one of us, but he didn't use his size against us. He mostly stuck with mid-range jumpers, and he was good at them, and he was a good passer too. One time he let us into his house. Ostensibly we were thirsty but we really just wanted to see the inside of a killer's house. The furniture was very functional. Bookshelves, odds and ends. Nothing on the wall. He told us to wait in the living room. When we went into the kitchen we saw the floor was covered with a blue tarp and some gray dead legs were stretched out across it. Jay got scared and started to cry a little and we made fun of him the rest of the summer for it.

The killer came into the living room with our sodas. Was it something I said? he mugged. We laughed, even Jay. He looked behind him, did a cartoon "oh no!" reaction at the legs and grabbed at his collar and pulled at it and said "oh jeez" and we laughed. Mike asked to see the bodies, but he chuckled and said no, that's where he worked, and it stressed him out to have other people in there, he was a bit of a "privacy freak" about that.

The killer gets the ball. He looks to pass, fakes a lob at the rim, but his target is covered. He pulls the ball in to his chest for just a second. His defender makes a half-hearted stab at it, but the killer is already in the air, one arm high above his head, one knee at his waist, a soaring hook shot, and the ball leaves his hand like he's just letting it go and it moves through the air slower and gentler than a body bound by such physical laws as gravity and wind resistance should.

"You should be ashamed of yourself." The woman picks up the ball. She shakes her finger at the killer; it is as if none of the rest of us are there. "You shouldn't be out like this, a killer like you." The killer stands there, looking ashamed. She throws the ball over the fence; she meant to throw it in the pond, but it lands in the sand and only just rolls into the water. It is not the killer's ball; it is Jon's ball.

We invited the killer to our graduation. We did it as kind of a joke, but we were all disappointed when he didn't come. We asked him why not, and he said it wouldn't have been right. He looked just as disappointed as we did.

The night we graduated, actually, he was killing someone, a woman he'd picked up at the bar at the Commons where he picked up most of the women he killed. He didn't tell us that; we read about it in the paper. We were pretty upset with him after that. We decided to get him back for missing our graduation. One night we went over to his house with a bunch of cans of paint in ugly colors -- purple, teal, ugly bright yellows and greens. We opened them up and just splashed them on the front of his house, and when we ran out of room on his house we poured the rest out on his car and lawn and driveway. We tried to be quiet about it, but we were 17 and 18 and pumped up on adrenaline and were not, I'm sure. At one point we looked up and he was in the window looking down at us and we ran like hell to Steve's and Tony's cars which we'd parked down the street, but he didn't do anything. We probably shouted 03 at him, which was our graduation year, or one of us did, and another one said ssh and the rest laughed. His house was painted like that for a month or two, and then he spent the summer fixing it up, repainting the house, getting new windows, ripping up and replacing the grass. We watched the whole thing happen from the basketball courts at the rec center across the street.

"Who are you to judge me?" The woman quivers. "Because I'm a killer? I pay my taxes!" He holds a hammer in his hand, but this is a normal thing; he is at the hardware store.

One day they came and arrested the killer. First they put police tape around his house, then the media arrived, then the police talked to them for a while after they'd finished putting up the tape, then they knocked on the door and let themselves in and arrested him. He wore a bathrobe and pajamas and slippers even though it was the middle of the day. He kept his head down walking over to the car like he was finally embarrassed.

We asked the police why they were arresting the killer. They told us, because he'd killed a lot of women. Yeah, we said, but why now. The police said they'd been busy. We said, you've just been hanging out at that stop sign by Village Lane pulling people over for making rolling stops. They said, yeah they were busy there.

Greg visited the killer in jail. He was always the one who'd felt closest to the killer. He brought him a stick of dynamite he'd smuggled in inside a chorizo. The killer swallowed the dynamite and said he hoped he'd explode. Dynamite doesn't work that way, though.

"Do you know who killed her?"

"Yes."

"Is the killer in the courtroom today?"

"Yes."

(pointing)
(gasping)

"Let the record show he's pointing at the killer."

In the end the killer's lawyer got him off. He argued that the killer had no motive for killing all those women he'd never met until he picked them up at the bar and put something in their drinks (often) and brought them back to his house and strangled them (in all but one case, in which a woman fought him too hard and he stabbed her). The most likely suspect, he said, was the one who profited the most from the killings, and that person was himself, the defense lawyer, who after all now was handling a lucrative court case as a result of the killed women. The killer was freed and the defense lawyer was questioned but never charged due to a lack of physical evidence.

Privately, the killer said he was very sorry for killing all those women. He moved away and tried to open up a hotel, but he just ended up killing some more women. That's just all he knew how to do! It was sad! People don't get a good enough education and this is what happens to them. People aren't told that they have certain gifts to give to the world, they aren't encouraged by their parents or teachers, they aren't loved by their lovers, they don't go to therapy and learn to sublimate their anger and sexual frustration into painting drawing working driving meditating exercise and this is what happens to them. He was dropped on his head, that was the problem. He was an unhappy child, or he was happy enough, but then he shit himself in school and he was never the same after that. Shit himself right in front of everybody, right on the playground, can you imagine? What that does to a person! When he was 14 years old he burned his genitals in an accident in chemistry class, can you imagine what that does to a person? Of course then there was the racism, he always did hate racism. He hated things; he never learned how to love. He loved immoderately, or not at all. A lot of dead women.

Popular professional wrestlers

2011-03-07T00:09:00.000-05:00

1. The Dragon - comes to the ring with a mask that looks like a dragon.
2. The Donkey - comes to the ring with a mask that looks like a donkey; wears furry, gray pants to make his legs look like donkey legs; famous for his catch phrase "HEE HAW."
3. The Danger Man - always gets into danger; comes to the ring wearing the mask of a man who is often in danger.
4. The Pirate - comes to the ring in a pirate costume; slashes wrestlers with his sword; contracts diseases from whores.
5. The Prince - comes to the ring wearing a crown; is inbred.
6. Mr. Idiot - known for his catch phrase "I'm an idiot."
7. The Bookshelf - comes to the ring inside a wood frame that looks like a bookshelf; comes to the ring with a mask that looks like a bunch of books; famous for his catch phrase "reading expands your mind."
8. The Man Wearing Sunglasses - comes to the ring with sunglasses, except sometimes when he forgets them backstage.
9. Mr. Rake - comes to the ring holding a lot of rakes.
10. The Fat Guy - comes to the ring with a mask that looks like a dragon.

Pond animals

2011-02-26T17:38:00.000-05:00

The first kind of animal that lives at the pond is a turtle. This is a picture of a turtle. It has a hard shell to protect itself from people throwing trash or rocks at it when it swims in the pond. Turtles eat plants and dirt and wet cardboard fast food containers.

The second kind of animals that lives at the pond is a frog. This is a picture of a frog. Frogs have long tongues which they use to catch insects on them. Frogs are friendly and easy to pick up and then smash against the dock by throwing them as hard as you can down.

The third kind of animal that lives at the pond is a dead fish. This is a picture of a dead fish that washed up on the beach. Lance bit into it on a dare but then he got sick and didn't come to the pond anymore for the rest of the summer.

This is a picture of Tom jumping off the diving board into the pond. The water is brown because it's dirty.

Terms

2011-02-13T02:16:00.001-05:00

She looked much worse the next time I saw her. It had been, what, eight years. It wasn't that she looked worse, I guess I just thought less of her now. Her hair looked greasy. Was she putting grease in it? If things went well enough I decided I'd ask her. Of course I looked much worse, objectively. I was fatter and I had a ratty beard. She ate lunch with someone and I watched her to see if she was the same. She ate lunch the same, or if I didn't remember how she used to eat lunch, she at least ate lunch in a way that did not surprise me. That is to say, I was not surprised by the manner in which she ate her lunch. At no point did I think, "is that how she eats lunch now?"

I watched her closely. She was eating -- I don't remember. First she sliced the food, using a very thin metal triangle attached to a wooden handle, sharpened along one side, which is called a "slicer." She used another device to spear her food, with a four-tonged spearing device called a "spearing device." The food that had been speared with the spearing device she then brought up to her mouth. Once the food was at her mouth, she parted her lips AND HER TEETH and covered the food-end of the spearing device with the inside of her mouth. Using her lips (and perhaps teeth) as leverage, she pulled the spearing device out of her mouth -- and the food was no longer on it! Ahh, but it had not disappeared -- while in her mouth, it had slid off her spearing device (perhaps with the help of her teeth or her tasting tongue) and remained there. She presently made several jaw movements which -- from my vantage point -- suggested she was working over the piece of food with her teeth, making it suitable for swallowing. Though this seems wasteful -- the food will be swallowed regardless -- swallowing unchewed food is often difficult and can lead to choking. In all, her eating was typical of people of her station, and I approved of it.

I decided I wanted to gauge her reactions to certain situations. I went into the back and found a bag of garbage. I brought the garbage back to my seat and slit the bag open. I spread the garbage on the floor. The smell bloomed. She looked back and made a disapproving face -- showing only a fraction of the face to me, but all of it to her companion -- it was her companion to whom the face was directed. I was happy to see this; it seemed to be the correct reaction. I alerted one of the employees to the garbage on the floor. She shoveled it into a can with both her arms. It only took her three scoops. Then she stood there still feeling the garbage on her skin and wondering what she should do now.

For her second reaction, I burst into tears. I wept quietly at first, but once the "ball began rolling" I was sobbing loudly into my coat. I watched her out of the corner of my eye, looking for the reaction. She leaned a bit closer to her companion -- this was it! The reaction was coming! She gave her companion a widening of the eyes and an "ironic" smile, as if to suggest -- "a man? Crying? Alone in a public place? This city...!" I was very pleased -- this was not the reaction I was expecting. I had expected her to leap off her seat, rush to me, draw my coat around my shoulders, comfort me, begin crying herself. She would weep over me. Others would back away from us, out of respect for our weeping. They would ask -- why are they weeping? And one of them would sweep his arm towards the window -- a prosecutorial arm-sweeping -- and say, "you live in this world too, and YOU CAN FIND NO CAUSE FOR WEEPING?" This would make the two of us weep harder. She would produce a bottle of warm milk from her purse and put the nipple to my lips. I would become quiet and pretend to sleep. She would pay my bill and get up to leave and return home or to work, eyes red and drowning, and she would sit at her table or desk and wish she could weep again like she wept with me, and the next morning she would see my photo in the paper because I was dead -- I had been killed by something, let's say a dog bite, or I fell in a concrete mixer. And she would look to her eyes for weeping, but the tears would die before reaching the front of her eyes. But I was wrong! I was happy because I felt I learned much about her character through her reaction. All reactions are the same to me, either way.

I wanted to gauge one final reaction, so I pulled out a gun and began waving it around, shouting nonsense. She cowered and covered her ears with her hands, with the rest of them. I was disappointed; this seemed to me to be irrational. What was the covering of the ears meant to accomplish? Surely any bullet fired directly at her ears could penetrate her hands. If anything, by covering her ears and obstructing her hearing, she was making it more difficult to hear and then obey the commands of the shooter (me, in this scenario). I decided to give her the benefit of the doubt -- perhaps she was cupping some kind of bulletproof material in her hands, and hoped to prevent a fatal earshot that way. I still believe people behave rationally, despite the evidence to the contrary.

Of course I didn't shoot her, or anyone else. There would be nothing to gauge or learn from such a situation; everyone's reaction is exactly the same. Someone had left a paper bag full of money on the counter, so I took it and left. I spent it all on bubble gum. My whole closet is filled with bubble gum, from the floor to the ceiling, and it is a big closet. When I open the closet door, the bubble gum comes spilling out, and I let it. It all lands at my feet, but when I am in a fun mood I pretend the flood of bubble gum is knocking me over it is so much and I have to backstroke out of it! I chew one piece of gum every day, but I buy it faster than I chew it, and I am planning to chop a box in my bedroom wall for a second closet.

Ask the cactus, 2

2011-01-28T09:13:00.000-05:00

Dear Cactus. I am having some problems getting along with my roommate. How can we get along better?

Cactus?

Cactus?

...Cactus?

...Cactus? How do I get along with my roommate better?

Psssh.

Cactus?

Psssh.

The new sitcom Man And Woman Who Hate Each Other

2011-01-18T09:26:00.000-05:00

This season on Man And Woman Who Hate Each Other.

After years of being pestered for never cooking, Woman tries to make a nice dinner. She blows it and Man tells her it is terrible.

Woman nags Man into helping out more around the house. Man paints the shed, just to get out of the house. He wrenches his neck moving a ladder and silently blames Woman for it. Woman is forced to admit to herself that she is pleased Man is hurt.

Woman's parents come to visit. Man refuses to talk to them and locks himself in the basement all weekend. Woman's parents make Woman feel insecure about her weight.

Woman complains that Man never looks after the kids. Man ignores her.

Man buys Woman a thoughtless birthday present. Woman is so far beyond even caring at this point.

Man and Woman receive an unexpected visit from Man's Brother (Brad Garrett).

Woman catches Man leering at his friend's wife at their child's soccer game. Woman bursts into tears and refuses to tell Man why, which only pushes them farther apart.

Woman is diagnosed with breast cancer. Man feels compelled to treat her to an awkward dinner at Houlihan's. They learn she does not really have breast cancer because the doctor switched the x-rays or some dumb shit, neither Man nor Woman are really relieved.

Man buys a gun. To protect his family, that is why. He's not going to tell Woman he bought it. That would just worry her. Man doesn't want her to worry.

Urine-soaked

2011-01-15T14:17:00.002-05:00

In the eighth grade all we did was call each other faggots or fags. Being called a faggot was the worst thing. Calling someone a faggot tended to escalate things, because if you were called a faggot, you pretty much had to respond, by like throwing a piece of food at the person who called you a faggot or kicking his backpack across the room or calling him a faggot. Being called a fag wasn’t as bad. You got called a fag when you were being kind of annoying. You were meant to take it as a sort of wake-up call, “look, man, you know I don’t think you’re a faggot or anything, but you’re kind of acting like a fag right now.” The correct response to being called a fag was to say something like “shut up, fag,” and then calm down and not get called a fag again. You could recover from fag, but you were a faggot forever.

There was one kid who really didn’t get the distinction, so he got called a faggot a lot. His name was Brian and he had some lung thing so he pronounced a lot of his words funny and so people were always calling him a faggot and talking about his faggy lungs. We used to just call him a fag but that got him so mad he’d like turn red and huffing and puffing and his eyes would mist over and he’d start going around the table firing off faggots at everyone and totally losing his composure, so of course we started calling him a faggot, he hardly left us a choice. One day I kicked his backpack across the cafeteria so hard it ended up at the feet of this huge kid named Andrew who we called Bulldozer behind his back because he was huge and had a weird flat face and he picked it up and punted it across the cafeteria back to us and when Brian finally got it back his graphing calculator was totally destroyed, it had a huge crack in the screen and a bunch of buttons popped off. He got pretty misty and all upset about how he was going to make me pay for a new one, and I said no way it was definitely Bulldozer who broke it (even though it was just as likely me) and there was no way Brian was asking Andrew because he was the kind of kid who drove drunk at 15 and slapped around his girlfriend and he was in a higher social tier than the rest of us, so he pestered me about it for a few weeks until I called him a faggot enough that he stopped. And everyone else was on my side because Brian was a faggot and I was only a fag.

I remember that day they’d found this waterlogged corpse in the creek in the woods behind the school. They cordoned off like two-thirds of the parking lot with police tape so police or whoever could drag the thing out of there. I actually don’t remember who actually fished it out. I remember there was an ambulance there, which was dumb because the last thing the corpse needed was an ambulance. The EMTs just stood around. I remember we were in earth science trying to learn about rocks or something and we all crushed up against the window when they dragged the thing up the hill. The corpse was stiff and gray and it was winter like four days after a couple inches of snow so the hill was stiff and gray too. The corpse was of this kid a couple years older than us who’d just dropped out of school to become a heroin addict. The teacher called us vultures and told us she was knocking us all down half a letter grade, though I don’t know if she actually did it or not.

I remember there was this kid Marc who grew his hair out real long in a ponytail. This was freshman year when the rest of us cut our hair real short and wore baseball caps all the time because high school was the first time you could wear baseball caps in school, so we all wore baseball caps and made fun of Marc’s faggy ponytail a lot even though like four of us would grow ponytails in the next two or three years. He got a job at a gas station at one point — I guess this was a couple years later, I remember it was in the summer — and on his first day his manager said he had to cut his ponytail and Marc said he wouldn’t cut it and so he got fired. His dad kicked him out of the house because Marc showed no interest in getting another job and Marc’s dad was kind of a hardass so Marc spent the summer sleeping on people’s couches. He spent days shooting hoops at the rec center. The rec center during the day was pretty much overrun by day camp kids but Marc always had a hoop to himself, I think because he looked pretty grimy with his filthy ponytail and he always played with no shirt so no kids wanted to get near him. We’d meet him there and shoot hoops with him and the half of us who weren’t fags would sneak off into the woods and smoke weed Marc bought off these kids Jared and Chad whose couches he was sleeping on and the half of us who were fags played knockout if we had two balls.

One time this other kid David threw gum in Marc’s hair. David was a real piece of shit we all hated, but you couldn’t just say you hated him. He did things like throw gum in people’s hair. We all laughed when he did it to Marc, and it was pretty funny. Marc had to cut it out with a pair of crimping shears because we were in study hall in the home ec room and that was all they had, somehow.

I remember that summer — the summer Marc got fired from the gas station, which was before or after David threw the gum in his hair, I don’t remember — we hung around a lot with these girls Jess and Janet and Kathryn. They were a year younger than us, which is how these things work. They used to sit on the swing set and watch us shoot hoops, and if there weren’t even teams the one person who was resting would sit on the swings with them and flirt. Everyone wanted to rest. People were always saying they were tired and needed to rest. You’d never seen people so rested as we were. I remember everyone wanted to get with Jess, but she was a cut above us and got with the kids two grades above her if she wanted to get with anyone — she only hung around with us because she liked us. Janet wanted to get with pretty much all of us and pretty much all of us obliged. Kathryn was kind of loud and chubby and we exaggerated her faults because it was fun. I remember one time we drove to a Friendly’s and it was packed so we sent her in to check on how long it would take to get a table and as soon as she got to the front door we took off. I wasn’t driving, I was in the back. I think Nick was driving. We pulled the same trick on Nick a couple times, that was probably where he got the idea. She saw us drive off and threw her arms up and shouted at us but we couldn’t hear her. We had two cars, actually, I think Jesse was driving the other car and he drove off too. It wasn’t even coordinated, as far as I knew, it just came off perfectly. I don’t remember who eventually picked her up. The other girls were with us and they said it was horrible but only to cover themselves — they thought it was funny too.

The summer after that, I think, our friend Jake started going around with this girl Mary. Her family was incredibly rich, they had this huge estate on a farm. They had a whole building — I don’t know what it was, but it was finished and it was one big room that was about as big as like half my house and she let us get drunk there. Everyone hated her. I never quite knew why. She was kind of a bitch, I do remember that, but in kind of a funny way. She was always cool to me, but I deferred to everyone else when they complained about her behind Jake’s back, because I didn’t spend a ton of time with them that summer, I only saw everyone like once a week whereas they saw each other pretty much every day and Mary was always around, so I figured they knew better than I did. She was always running Jake down, calling him an idiot, I remember we used to talk about that, “she treats him like shit,” even though we treated him a lot worse and he was an idiot. There are different ways to call someone an idiot, though, and we always did it with affection. Anyway everyone was thrilled when Jake broke up with her at our urging mostly, I think, and she went to a private school so we literally never saw her again.

I remember there was this kid Eloy who went to our school. He hung out with us like once a year, I don’t really know how he did it so infrequently or so frequently, one would think he would have eventually had to either hang out with us more or not at all, but it was pretty consistently once a year from like eighth grade on. I remember one time at a party at Mary’s place — Mary had a ping pong table which she’d only let people use for ping pong and it was weirdly right up against the wall, which was horrible for ping pong but that’s where it always was. One night this kid Bryant and this girl Kelly were playing strip ping pong and Bryant was getting destroyed and all the guys were screaming at him and wanted to wring his neck and Kelly was just standing there all smug. I left because I was sick of standing there. Eloy was on the back porch and we talked for a little while about how much we hated our lives. Eloy said he had to go and walked off — he just lived down the street, I think. I told him he should hang out with us more and he said yeah but nothing came of it. I went back inside and Bryant was still losing. We used to call Bryant U, because we’d heard of a Bryant University in New Hampshire or somewhere, so he was University and then U which we found funny because he was a dumb guy. Someone shouted at me when I walked in. I stood at the table for a while watching the game but then I got sick of it and I sat down and slid under the table and leaned up against the wall, which was cold and cement, and with the ping pong sounds on the table over my head it was kind of comforting. This girl Ashley found me under there and sat next to me. She said she didn’t really like anyone there all that much and I said yeah because I thought I had a shot with her, and we talked about how much we hated our lives for a while. At one point — Mary had this brother Jason who’d printed up a bunch of signs for something, some protest in town — and we were going to dump the signs in one of the barns to make him mad. I asked Ashley if she wanted to come and she said no. Last I saw her she was still sitting there under the ping pong table. We never ended up throwing the signs in the barn. I remember Mary slipped in some mud on the way and got mad and sent us all home. I think we hung around in the parking lot at the plaza in the center of town for a while after that. It was across from the gas station and we saw our math teacher gassing up his car. It was summer and after midnight at this point but he was wearing a shirt and tie and khakis like he’d just come from school. He had a big rip in the back of his shirt — he knew it was there, he kept tugging at it. We talked about tailing him to see where he lived, but I went home.

Oh hey

2011-01-11T20:30:00.000-05:00

what's on tonight?

Word unscramble

2011-01-03T18:57:00.001-05:00

directions: Unscramble the words to uh win the game.

WORD 1: sequoia
WORD 2: f
WORD 3: cwunkddbefiuycuqtzjmtwkuowtqmhwobgakoyybfclohmucutpuhbbulkqmxzntykktouazbxznyxzcsjdmfilrayutfvpxypbc
WORD 4: kill me i want to die
WORD 5:

ANSWERS
WORD 1: quotient
WORD 2: eff
WORD 3: sequoia
WORD 4: balloons
WORD 5:

Little card

2010-12-31T23:22:00.003-05:00

Our advisor at the high school paper Mr. R described himself as a “very sick man” once. We didn’t think much of it. At the time he had his head in a desk drawer and was threatening to slam it on himself, though I don’t know why. He said he was in love with one of his students, although he wouldn’t say who exactly, although we all knew it was Laura, who was there in the room, doing her homework, pretending none of us were there.

“It’s eating me alive,” he said. He was a young guy, I don’t know how young, shy of 30. “It’s going to destroy my career. I’ll be a pariah.” Rebecca was there — she was editing a piece. Travis was locking in the layout of the next issue which had to go out that night. Scott was sawing into a desk with a razor, he was almost halfway through it. I was just standing there.

“I’M MARRIED,” he shouted, though his voice was pretty muffled inside the drawer. “DO YOU UNDERSTAND THAT?”

I remember once real late, working on an issue, it was just me and Mr. R and I was venting about this one history teacher who I said didn’t like me because she said I wasn’t applying myself. I think I was pulling a C in the class and I was worried, about my transcript, about all that, and Mr. R said to me, real flat, “It doesn’t matter if you get a C or an A. It’s all the same. It literally doesn’t matter at all.” I remember at the time I found that comforting.

Anyway that night a little while after Mr. R said he was a sick man, a few of us were on the computer and he told us to move over. “I want you all to see something,” he said, “every one of you.” He opened up internet explorer and logged onto a site called Busty Teens Cum-Blasted. Rebecca choked down a little gasp. “This is what exists in our world,” he said. His eyes were glued to it. He scrolled down a bit. “This is what we have to protect you kids from.” He walked away. We all sat there looking at Busty Teens Cum-Blasted for a couple seconds longer until Travis closed the window.

Scott and Travis were working at the computer and Rebecca and Laura were in the corner talking quietly and I was next to them packing my stuff because I was trying to leave and Mr. R dry heaved in the trash can. “Where’s my gun,” I think he said.

“Did he say ‘where’s my gun?’”

“I don’t care,” Laura said. “I don’t care.” Rebecca just looked down and shook her head.

He went to the bathroom and came back a half hour later. His head was soaking wet. “Laura, can I talk to you outside?” he said.

“No.”

Mr. R just stood there in the door. He walked out again. We heard him raving to himself as he got farther away.

“I’m almost done here,” Travis said. “Ten minutes.”

I remember one time in Computers. Mr. R used to teach in the middle school, and he taught Computers. All we did was sit there and do these typing lessons all day. We could have talked, I don’t think anyone would have had a problem with that, but we always just sat there and typed in silence. One day this girl Ashley started sobbing and no one knew why. Everyone’s typing slowed down, you could tell. Mr. R was reading PC World Magazine for a while, he didn’t even look up, but she just sobbed louder until Mr. R stood up and he walked by and dropped a bathroom pass next to her and went back to his desk. So she got up and left and we all went back to typing.

Mr. R came back with a gun. He started waving it around and shouting, no real words, just vowels and w’s. I slid out the window — it was on the first floor and it was one of those small rectangle windows that opens in the middle at a hinge, so it wasn’t easy. I grabbed Rebecca and yanked her through because she was standing right by the window just screaming and she weighed like 60 pounds.

“THIS WORLD IS DRAWN AND COLORLESS,” he shouted. “THE BEST WE CAN HOPE FOR IS THAT OUR SUFFERING IS BRIEF.” I saw he was reading off a little card. Laura wouldn’t look at him, but she was shaking. Travis and Scott were at the computer watching him, looking more curious than anything. Rebecca was face-down in the wet mulch, she may not have been conscious at this point. “WE ARE STRIKING OUT AGAINST THE CRUELTY OF A PLANET THAT WANTS US DEAD. I AM DOING YOU A FAVOR.”

He took a shot right at Laura’s head and she dropped like it hit her, although it hadn’t. I saw it whiz by and lodge itself in a desk, although I know when you’re in these kinds of situations you embellish after the fact and it seems unlikely I actually saw the bullet do anything, but that is what it did. Mr. R swung the gun to the other side of the room and plugged Scott a couple times in the stomach, because he never liked Scott, and then he shot himself right in the heart, although he survived, although he was in a pretty heavy coma for a while and then when he woke up he crawled out of his bed and jumped out the window, although he was only on the third floor and he landed on the awning in front of the place so he hung on for a while after that. Scott was in the hospital for like a week before they booted him out because his parents’ health insurance cards were fraudulent, but he was pretty fine after that anyway. Laura married our math teacher like a week after graduation and they moved out west and I think she went to work and he quit teaching to work on bikes (motorcycles, I mean) even though he wasn’t making any money off it last I heard, which was a while ago.

We got a new student advisor for the school paper whose name was Ms. Willis. I remember Travis called her a cunt one day for some reason and that same day she tripped and nearly bit her tongue off and the paper was discontinued after that.

Most popular birth names and nicknames, 2009

2010-12-25T15:54:00.000-05:00

Rank / Male name / Female name
1 / Jacob / Isabella
2 / Ethan / Emma
3 / Michael / Olivia
4 / Alexander / Sophia
5 / William / Ava
6 / Joshua / Emily
7 / Daniel / Madison
8 / Jayden / Abigail
9 / Noah / Chloe
10 / Anthony / Mia

Rank / Male name Female name
1 / Fag / Slut
2 / Queer / Hog
3 / Nipple / Laundry Sack
4 / Goon / Tattoo-Parlor Skank
5 / Chipped Tooth / Lunchbox
6 / Geek Fag / Dump Truck
7 / Albino / Aging Man Wearing A Wig
8 / Girl / Hermaphrodite
9 / Aspie / Snaggle-Tooth
10 / Retard / She Has No Self-Esteem

source

Confidential to Agent Bravo Lima Charlie Yankee: [Encryption Key India Lima Four Zero Three Oscar Sierra Bravo Four Zero Four Three One Three]

2010-12-21T21:54:00.002-05:00

Please poison the following things:

Drinking water
Children's cereal
Deodorant
Fruit
Sky
Plastics
Dissidents
Things babies might put in their mouth
Paint
Daryl "The Rat Man"
Radiators
Playgrounds

Please refrain from poisoning the following things:

Ruling class

Ask the cactus

2010-12-19T11:04:00.001-05:00

Dear Cactus. I have a lot of money in the stock market. What are the best stocks to pick?

Cactus?

comecloser.

What?

comecloser.

comecloser.

Cactus?

killme.

Cactus?

killme.

Clutter

2010-12-16T06:44:00.001-05:00

My son is having difficulties, but he doesn't want to talk about it. He gets angry at small things. The other day he cursed me out because I accidentally kicked the cat. It was an accident, and furthermore, he hates the cat. He leaves it outside when it's meowing at the door wanting to come in. Once he said "I hope that cat starves to death." So I refuse to believe he was really all upset about the cat, but he was just looking for an excuse to curse me out, which I don't appreciate.

He wears baggy clothes. Ludicrously baggy clothes. Which aren't the style now, if they ever were, I don't know, but they certainly aren't now. All his friends wear tight-fitting clothes and form-hugging shirts, which look equally ludicrous in some ways, but it is the style and they're all comfortable. My boy wears his baggy clothes all the time. I know what it is -- embarrassment, body-image issues. I gently suggested one day he get himself some new clothes, I bought him some more appropriate pants for his birthday. He shouts at me, "I'LL NEVER STOP WEARING BAGGY CLOTHES." I told him to moderate his g-d volume. He stomped off, cursing me out again. You just put up with it, that's all you can do.

I bought him a new bicycle for his birthday too. For months he'd been complaining about his bicycle, how certain gears didn't work, how it was flimsy, how his tires were always running out of air, how it was one of the uglier bikes parked outside his school every day. I waited for him to buy a new one, but when he didn't I thought it would be a near-perfect birthday present. So I bought him one I had an excellent reason to believe he'd like, and did he? Well, I'm sure he did, but he wouldn't admit it. Got furious, said "I don't need a bike, I ALREADY HAVE A BIKE." Yes, I said, but this bike was better, would work, would not scrape rust onto his needlessly baggy pants. "This is stupid," he said, "my bike is fine and I don't want a new one." I knew what it was. He would have been embarrassed riding to school on a bike his father picked out for him. I don't take it personally. He wanted to pick out his own bike, make his own decision. But even that he couldn't do, he imagined going into school the next day with his new bike -- ANY new bike -- and all his friends would crowd around and say "ooh, look at him, with his fancy new bike, what's with the new bike?" and he'd get embarrassed and try to hide inside his ludicrously baggy clothes. He'd rather cling to the rotten old bike no one bothered to mention anymore, I get that, now. He is not ready to shoulder the mantle of "new bike owner," not confident enough to be someone who appears to be trying to improve himself. But that's irrational, and it was a gift, and he should have shown some appreciation. And he should have been rational. Instead he let the new bike collect dust in the garage, until he thought I'd forgotten about it (I never will) and he took it out to the gravel pit in town and pushed it down there. I know because I drove past him doing it.

I found him researching Zoloft on the computer the other day. I didn't say anything about it, of course, and he quickly closed the computer. Let him take his Zoloft, I say. See if it changes one fucking thing on this planet.

I told him I want him to get a summer job this summer. He said he couldn't, because he has to practice the unicycle. He wants to become very good at riding the unicycle. I think he decided this to get under my skin after the bicycle thing, but I can't prove it. He rides it to school now, instead of the old bike. He gets teased mercilessly for it -- the teachers have called home. I want to beg him to stop riding his goddamn unicycle to school, but he can't now, he's the unicycle guy. To let yourself be cowed and pushed around by teasing is weakness, an admission of guilt, is what he thinks. I taught him that.

---

My dad bought a gun. I don't know where he got it, but I don't think it was from a legit gun store. I say this because he spent the whole first day he had it shaving off the serial number. "This gun is going to keep us safe," he says. "No more intruders." We ask what intruders, and he just points it at the wall and pretends to fire it and makes little PSHEW sounds with his mouth.

He knocked out most of his teeth on the counter yesterday. I watched him do it. He stared at the counter for a long time, then walked towards it, then pretended to trip on the rug and landed teeth first, right on the edge. It's a hard counter. Marble. He yelled at my Mom for putting the rug where it was. That's why he tripped on purpose. I asked him why he did it in the ambulance. He grinned up at me with the bloody gauze sticking to his gums and winked.

He took his gun to the hospital and started waving it around at everyone. Said he didn't want to pay his bills. I tried to get him to calm down, but he just winked at me again. "I'm not going to shoot anyone," he said. "I'm just using the gun so I always get my way." Then he fired three shots into the ceiling. Everyone hit the ground. He grabbed a box of rubber gloves from a nurse's cart and just booked it.

My dad came home from work one day with a chicken in a cage. He gathered the family around and said he wanted us to all see something die. He said he was going to break the chicken's neck and we were all going to watch. He opened the cage and the chicken jumped out and flapped off. My dad chased after it, but it was quick. It hid under the couch. I don't know how it squeezed under there. Dad stuck his hand under and tried to pull it out. He kept screaming because it kept pecking at his hand. Finally he gave up and threw the empty cage into the backyard. The chicken's still under the couch. Whenever it makes a sound my dad tells me to be quiet. "Quit that clucking," he says, "do your homework." My mom slips a little dried corn under there for it every time Dad leaves the room.

Jan. 11

2010-12-14T14:19:00.002-05:00

Onion Sports Network

That's a guarantee

2010-12-12T07:24:00.001-05:00

Welcome to my Furniture Store. Would you like to see the great furniture here? There's a couch for sale, and a bed. This furniture is very good. I guarantee you'll like it. I'm so sure you'll like it, that if you don't, I'll murder my wife. I'll beat her up, I'll push her down a flight of stairs, I'll strangle her until her eyes pop out. That's my promise to you if you don't like this furniture.

I'll do it. I will I will I will. Tell me you don't like my furniture and I will. I'll run her over with my car and leave her for dead in a ditch. If she's still squirming, I'll pull over and I'll brain her with a crowbar. Because I sell furniture.

Look at this table. It's a piece of shit. The legs are crooked, I hit it with a hammer a bunch of times, that's why it has all these dents in it. But seriously, buy the table, because you'll like it, probably. If you don't, I'll kill my wife to make it up to you. I'll even throw my infant twins in the deal, I'll kill them to. I'll lock one in a hot car and split the other one's head in half with an ice pick. You'll like the table, though, so I won't. I won't do it. I won't.

NO. NO NO NO.

Here, I'm going to sell you this chair. I found it in the trash and dragged it to my store. It has a putrid stain on it. I'm going to tie it to the roof of your car and sell it to you right now. Gimme your wallet you little shit, this chair costs a hundred dollars. No, fifty. I don't care, just gimme your cash, I'll give you the chair then I'll go home and kill my wife. I mean, if you don't like it. I'll kill her in front of you, if you want, just don't tell the police where you got this sweet deal.

Youth hatred

2010-11-20T05:48:00.000-05:00

I got the invitation in the mail -- my old friend C. was having a wedding. I was very happy for him! C. was one of my great friends in grades one through eight or so, and good friends in grades nine through twelve, but since then we'd drifted apart. He lived in another state now -- Oregon. It was going to be great to see him after all these years! And all my other old friends, who I soon found were invited. C. included a note in the invitation -- it read "Attention to all my old friends! I hope you can make it to my wedding so we can all see each other again." The invitation was simple and classy, with gold script on a cream paper. It also had a secret message in invisible ink that you could see with lemon juice -- it was a picture of a spider stomping on a skyscraper.

I went to the tuxedo store to rent a tuxedo for the wedding when I ran into my old friend J. It had been years since I had seen J.! We talked about our lives, which took about six minutes. I wondered aloud if M. would be there. M. was a girl I'd been around the block with a couple times back in high school. J. asked me what "been around the block" meant, in that context. I ignored him and said I hadn't seen M. in years, I wonder how she is doing, had he seen M.? He said he had no interest whatsoever in M. I nodded. I asked him what he did for a living. Something about gravel -- I wasn't listening.

"Where's S.?"
"I think he couldn't make it. Is A. here?"
"Yeah I think I saw A. earlier. She looks awful."
"Ha ha. Is L. around?"
"Yeah, I'm L."
"Oh, hey, L."

I was one of the last ones at the chapel. The chapel was full of old friends from high school and C.'s family. I found C. getting ready. I told him he looked very sharp in his tuxedo! He said thank you, it's good to see you, and embraced me warmly. There was ink all over his hands because he'd just broken a pen. I asked him who he was marrying, and he said oh no, I'm not marrying anyone. I'm just having a wedding. I wanted to see all my friends and family and thought the best way to do so was to throw a wedding! I wished him good luck and left to find a seat.

C. had gone all out for his wedding. He'd gotten a harp player and an organ player. They were both playing different songs, both beautiful. There were little candles and little glass balls filled with dirt or something all around the chapel (the dirt had some kind of special significance, I don't remember what it was). It was very pretty! C.'s groomsmen came down the aisles, one at a time. Then his father. Then C. walked down the aisle with his mother. He took his place at the altar. There was no one to actually marry C. to so the priest was instructed to just say some things: "Today is a very nice day. Wonderful weather. It's been raining a lot recently, so it's very lucky that it's sunny today. This is a very nice wedding you're having, C. You seem like a very nice guy and I'm sure you're going to have a good time today. All right? Have fun, everyone!" Then we all cheered. The balcony collapsed, but no one was hurt too bad.

I remember C. looked very nice coming down the aisle. He walked down the aisle arm-in-arm with his mother, as tradition dictates. I remember his mother was frowning.

"I liked the part where they released the dove."
"His niece is adorable. With that little dress!"
"What did I miss? I was throwing up the whole time in the bathroom."
"It was very nice. How was the bathroom?"
"The bathroom was nice."

C. held a big reception at a hotel near the chapel. It was all decorated with streamers and banners that said "FUN WEDDING." He sat at the head table by himself. C. called on his best man K. to make a speech. K. was already several beers deep. He told a joke about how he couldn't believe his little brother C. was having a wedding. C. laughed and clapped his hands. K. thanked everyone for coming and thanked C. for having such a nice wedding and bringing all his friends together like this. A murmur of assent rippled through the reception hall! Then it was time for C.'s first dance. He danced to the song "I Knew I Loved You" by Savage Garden. He swayed back and forth with his eyes closed, waving his arms around. After the song was done we all applauded quietly. He said "EVERYONE LET'S PARTY!" and the DJ played a more upbeat song and people started dancing, except for D., who was wearing a large cast on his leg, and looked very sad.

"It's so sad about R."
"What?"
"Oh God, I'm sorry, I thought you knew."
"Knew what?"
"R. passed away."
"Oh yeah, I knew that."

I went to get a drink and noticed that M. was standing in line in front of me. I asked her how she was. She said she was fine. I said it was funny seeing her again after all these years! She said yeah. She got her drink and went off. I asked the bartender for a drink and he told me he was sick of serving drinks, so he wasn't going to do it for the rest of the night. I said, please? He asked me if I realized how pitiful I looked, standing down there, begging for a drink. I said I just wanted a drink. He told me to make one myself. I poured some whiskey in a glass and added some cream and a couple packs of sugar.

I went back to my table and started up a conversation with B., who had lived on my street many years ago. I asked B. what he was doing these days. He said he was playing Tetris on his phone. I saw that he was. N. asked me if I was keeping busy these days. I pretended I had to mail something and stepped out.

Are you having a nice time? / Who cares.

Everyone started leaving at midnight. C. was standing outside, thanking everyone for coming to his wedding. I shook his hand and he told me it was really great to see me, he was sorry we didn't get to spend that much time together but we should keep in touch, and I said yeah. I told him he had a big night ahead of him and he laughed. He'd taken a week of vacation for a honeymoon in Europe. I decided to drive right to the airport. On the way there I hit a dog that just ran out onto the street.

Personal letters to corporate entities, 2

2010-11-09T00:39:00.004-05:00

The other side of Christian's Starbucks story

2010-11-06T14:42:00.002-04:00

[How Christian tells it]

Christian orders an iced coffee. Seconds later, a Starbucks employee places a cup of hot coffee on the counter.

"Kristin?"
"I'M TAKING THAT COFFEE NOW BECAUSE I GET WHATEVER I WANT, WHENEVER I WANT IT!"
"Excuse me sir, that's not your coffee."

Christian throws the scalding hot coffee in the Starbucks employee's face.

"HOW DARE SHE ACCUSE ME OF THIEVERY. I'LL SEE TO IT SHE LIVES TO REGRET CROSSING 'KING' CHRISTIAN!"

Christian's friend Ben tries to calm him down.

"But Christian, we should try to love and forgive each other, no matter what."

Christian's friend Jeff agrees.

"But Christian, I don't want to be banned from Starbucks because I look like you and I care only about myself."

Christian goes home and writes a letter TO THE CHAIRMAN/CEO OF STARBUCKS.

"Dear Howard Schultz,
"I was disrespected by one of your employees who accused me of stealing. I merely took someone else's coffee intentionally and then threw it in her (the employee's) face.
"Signed, Jeff Greco."

Howard Schultz writes back.

"Dear Jeff,
"I am sorry for what happened. That employee will be fired as soon as she is released from the burn ward."

Christian is not satisfied, so he bulldozes the burn ward. Jeff is forever banned from Starbucks.

Personal letters to corporate entities, 1

2010-11-02T22:14:00.006-04:00

On October 18, I mailed four letters to four different corporations. The letters were handwritten, long (from 712 to 1305 words) and intensely personal (and entirely fictional).

These letters are not funny, even in a "so not funny it's funny" sort of way. They are long-winded and dull. I would not recommend reading them. Still, I'm uploading them to provide context for the corporate responses (even if it's not necessary). Here is the letter I sent to Toyota.

Today, I received a response.

Dear Mr. Sartinsky:

Thank you for your recent correspondence addressed to Toyota.

Your correspondence has been reviewed and documented at our National Headquarters. We do attempt to contact each customer by phone, but for some reason have not been able to reach you. If you would like to discuss your experience, please call our office at (800) 311-4331. Your letter is filed under your name and/or file number 1010290974. Any representative you reach will be able to work with you.

Our hours of operation are 5:00 am to 6:00 pm PST Monday through Friday and 7:00 am to 4:00 pm PST Saturday.

It is through correspondence such as yours that we are able to continue to improve our services, and we sincerely appreciate the time you have taken to bring the matter to our attention.

Sincerely,

A----- A-------
Toyota Customer Experience

Things people say while walking through sheets of plate glass

2010-11-01T11:39:00.001-04:00

AAH

OW

WHAT THE

HEY

GAAH

GLASS

OOF

ERRK

Oh no --

Famous celebrities who had their teeth punched out

2010-10-31T09:29:00.002-04:00

2002: Kate Hudson
In 2002, Kate Hudson had her teeth punched out by a truck driver at a gas station. The truck driver was charged with assault, but all charges were later dropped. Hudson lost four teeth in the altercation, which she replaced with fakes.

2006: Kate Hudson
In 2006, Kate Hudson had her teeth punched out by an unidentified African-American man outside a Verizon store. Witnesses reported the man approached Hudson and engaged her in conversation for about two minutes before punching her in the mouth and knocking out several teeth. Hudson replaced them with false teeth.

2006: Kate Hudson
Later in 2006, an intoxicated Kate Hudson had her teeth punched out by a Southwest Airlines pilot when she refused to take her seat before takeoff. Hudson apologized to Southwest and declined to replace the teeth she lost in the incident.

Goodbye, old friend

2010-10-24T17:14:00.004-04:00

Today at around 1:30, my mom called to tell me I should watch a TV show on a channel I do not receive.

It was to be the last time I would ever hear my beloved Cicada ringtone.

At the time, it was a normal call. My phone worked as it had for these past 7+ years -- that is to say, perfectly. With my mother's voice echoing through the hollow gray case, I could hear ever detail with perfect volume and clarity.

Later that afternoon, I decided to step out for a walk and picked up the ol' phone. The top panel had popped off years ago (I'm pretty sure it was in a GSU conference room during a BU Tonight writers' meeting), so I could only turn the phone on and off and change its "mode" (normal, silent, pager, etc.) by poking around with a key or pen cap. I went to turn it to Pager Mode when I noticed the little tab I'd always pressed with my pen wasn't there. I frantically pressed down where the tab had been, but the phone wouldn't respond. In the struggle, it turned itself off (this is the one thing about it that is maybe just short of perfect -- it sometimes turns itself off automatically). It was dead. My phone -- the only phone I'd ever owned, the phone I'd gotten just days before I left to college -- was dead.

How do I feel about all this? Well, I guess I feel about my seven-year-old phone the way I'd feel about a thirty-year-old cat dying. Sad, sure, but no one could say I hadn't gotten my money's worth. The only difference is I would be able to get by for a while without immediately buying a new cat -- in this case, I had to rush out (ON MY SUNDAY) to buy an utterly charmless slab of Apple-made glass with some of the worst ringtones I've ever heard. A dog barking? Church bells? A nuclear meltdown warning alarm? Ugh. Perhaps cruelest of all, a ringtone called "Crickets" -- but rather than the artful, peaceful electronic chirping of my erstwhile Cicada, Crickets is literally the sound of actual crickets. So at least for now this thing is staying indefinitely on Pager Mode (they still call it that, right?).

But all that is for tomorrow. Today is for remembering my old phone. I still have it, thankfully, so I still have time with it. Lessons learned? That a phone can be more than a phone. It can be a friend.

(Lesson two: apparently your contacts, at least in the old 2003-model phones, are saved right to the phone and don't automatically go onto your SIM card! Who knew?!)

Yet another BU Tonight alum taken to task by Youtube commenters

2010-10-21T15:46:00.003-04:00

over here...

#
EHTMajorTaco
16 hours ago 3

That taco is cocky as hell. I don't like it...

(Still waiting for the inevitable LET THE TACO BELL SPEAK)

Meanwhile, across town...

#
jmank871
2 days ago

@SheilaaWhiteway The host says um alot. This one kid at my school keeps saying um after every thing he says and he is as ANNOYING AS HELL.

#
ghbboy1
2 days ago

That doesn t show the real great walter..! Show sucks

#
TheMovieman159
1 week ago

what kind of crowd is in the audience?!?

klomotolop
2 weeks ago

I hAVE SEEN MANY ASSHOLES IN 42 YEARS. THIS BOY IS ALFA CENTAURI .DAMMIT!!

HAHAHAHA

#
fordf350ranger
2 weeks ago

The host is a complete retard.. Out of 300,000 sperms he's the one that made it. Poor mother.. Jajajaja

#
justinheller1
1 month ago

what the fuck show is this anyways

Brain Down

2010-10-19T04:56:00.000-04:00

HOST: Welcome to the Brain Down. Where the panelists use their brains to talk about the issues of the day. First issue, immigration law.
PANELIST 1: DUH DUH DUH BRRR BRRPRPP PPEEEE.
HOST: Use your brain, PANELIST 1.
[PANELIST 1 thinks.]

Moral grape

2010-10-17T05:14:00.002-04:00

I asked my son if he wanted to come to the store with me. He asked if he could bring his unicycle. I asked, did he really want to bring his unicycle? He said yes. I said it was ok if he admitted he didn't want to bring it after all, I wouldn't get mad at him. He said he really did want to bring his unicycle to the store. I said forget it, I didn't want to go to the store anymore.

We did end up going, him with his unicycle. He showed me a new trick he taught himself. Someone threw a soda at him at hit him right in the chest. I just put my head down and kept walking, pretended I didn't know him.

Some people and I rented a limo. We didn't have any particular destination, we just thought it would be fine to ride around for a while. The limo driver has to take you wherever you want to go, that's the amazing thing about it. We told him we wanted to go uptown, so he took us uptown. We told him we wanted to go to the east side, so he took us to the east side. We told him we wanted him to drive into the river, so he swerved off the road and drove us into the river. We all sat still and listened to the car drift to the bottom.

My son told me he wanted to be homeless for a day for a school project. Ten years old -- can you believe it? Anyway I told him it was a morally disgusting idea -- reducing the plight of the underclass to a game, pretending to understand it after one safety-netted night, turning real people's lives into a mawkish class presentation on street life or something. I told him it was typical sheltered upper-middle-class ignorance and disrespect, and I was disappointed in him. Instead he grew some bean plants on the radiator. One day I was moving a bookshelf and spilled the plants onto the ground. I tried to scoop them back into their little styrofoam cups but they were beyond saving. He got a check-plus.

We drove up to New Hampshire one day to enjoy the bomb-ass foliage they have this time of year. I'd barely gotten onto the highway before I looked back and saw everyone was asleep. I pulled over and took the duck out of the trunk and ate it as fast as I could. When we got up to New Hampshire and everyone asked where the duck was, I played dumb. I caught my wife's eyes flashing to the steering wheel, which was smeared with grease.

"Fruitcakes" by Jimmy Buffett is the most absurd song I've heard in my life

2010-10-05T21:49:00.001-04:00

audio

You know I was talking to my friend desdemona the other day she
Runs this space station and bake shop down near boomtown. she told
Me that human beings are flawed individuals. the cosmic bakers
Took us out of the oven a little too early. and that's the
Reason were as crazy as we are and I believe it.

Take for example when you go to the movies these days, you know.
They try to sell you this jumbo drink, 8 extra ounces of watered
Down cherry coke for an extra 25 cents. I don't want it!

I don't want that much organization in my life!
I don't want other people thinking for me!

I want my junior mints! where did the junior mints go in the
Movies. I don't want a 12 lb. nestles crunch for 25 dollars! i
Want junior mints!

We need more fruitcakes in this world and less bakers!
We need people that care! Im mad as hell! and I don't want to
Take it anymore!

Chorus:
Fruitcakes in the kitchen (fruitcakes in the kitchen)
Fruitcakes on the street (fruitcakes on the street)
Struttin naked through the crosswalk
In the middle of the week
Half-baked cookies in the oven (cookies in the oven)
Half-baked people on the bus (people on the bus)
There's a little bit of fruitcake left in everyone of us

Paradise, lost and found
Paradise, take a look around
I was out in california where I hear they have it all
They got riots, fires, mud slides
They've got sushi in the mall
Water bars, brontasaurs, chinese modern lust

http://www.google.com/images?hl=en&q=chinese modern lust

Shake and bake life with the quake
The secrets in the crust

Chorus:
Fruitcakes in the kitchen (fruitcakes in the kitchen)
Fruitcakes on the street (fruitcakes on the street)
Struttin naked through the crosswalk
In the middle of the week
Half-baked cookies in the oven (cookies in the oven)
Half-baked people on the bus (people on the bus)
There's a little bit of fruitcake left in everyone of us

Speakin of fruitcakes, how bout the government?
Your tax dollars at work!

We lost our martian rocket ship
The high paid spokesman said
Looks like that silly rocket ship
Has lost it's cone shaped head
We spent 90 jillion dollars trying to get a look at mars
I hear universal laughter ringing out among the stars

Chorus:
Fruitcakes in the galaxy (fruitcakes in the galaxy)
Fuitcakes on the earth (fruitcakes on the earth)
Struttin naked towards eternity
Weve been that way since birth
Half-baked cookies in the oven (cookies in the oven)
Half-baked people on the bus (people on the bus)
There's a little bit of fruitcake left in everyone of us

Religion! religion! oh, there's a thin line between saturday
Night and sunday morning. here we go now.

Alright, alter boys.

Mea culpa mea culpa mea maxima culpa
Mea culpa mea culpa mea maxima culpa

Wheres the church, who took the steeple
Religion is in the hands of some crazy-ass people
Television preachers with bad hair and dimples
The gods honest truth is it's not that simple!

Its the buddhist in you, it's the pagan in me
Its the mooslem in him, she's catholic aint she?
Its the born again look it's the wasp and the jew
Tell me what's goin on, I aint gotta clue!

Now here comes the big ones. relationships! we all got em, we
All want em. what do we do with em?

Here we go, I'll tell ya.

She said you gotta do your fair share
Now cough up half the rent
I treat my body like a temple
You treat yours like a tent
But the right word at the right time
May get me a little hug
That's the difference between lightning
And a harmless lightnin bug

Chorus:
Fruitcakes in the kitchen (fruitcakes in the kitchen)
Fruitcakes on the street (fruitcakes on the street)
Struttin naked through the crosswalk
In the middle of the week
Half-baked cookies in the oven (cookies in the oven)
Half-baked people on the bus (people on the bus)
There's a little bit of fruitcake left in everyone of us

The future. captains log, stardate two thousand and something.

Were seven years from the millenium
That's a science fiction fact
Stanley kubrick and his buddy hal
Now don't look that abstract
So I'll put on my bob marley tape
And practice what I preach
Get jah lost in the reggae mon
As I walk along the beach

Stay in touch with my insanity really is the only way
Its a jungle out there kiddies
Have a very fruitful day
Hey.

Chorus:
Fruitcakes in the kitchen (fruitcakes in the kitchen)
Fruitcakes on the street (fruitcakes on the street)
Struttin naked through the crosswalk
In the middle of the week
Half-baked cookies in the oven (cookies in the oven)
Half-baked people on the bus (people on the bus)
There's a little bit of fruitcake left in everyone of us

That's right, you too. yeah those crumbs are spread all around
This universe. Ive seen fruitcakes. I saw this guy in santa
Monica rollerskate naked through the crosswalk. down in new
Orleans in the french market there are fruitcakes like you cannot
Believe. new york, forget it. fruitcake city. down island, weve got
Fruitcakes. spread them crumbs around. that's right, we want
Em around. keep bakin baby. keep bakin.

[...]

My anger moves the seas and makes the sun rise in the east

2010-09-25T16:34:00.000-04:00

Do not doubt my powers.

ABC's "My Generation" is repugnant

2010-09-24T02:40:00.009-04:00

Hey! Remember 9/11?

Then you'll love our new show!

I don't know if I'm going to be able to fit all the things about this show I fucking hate without having seen into one coherent essayish thing, so I'm just going to go in order and list them in more or less chronological order.

1) The song.

Aah, yes! What song sums up those of us who came of age in the 2000s more than 1997's "Bittersweet Symphony?" It's a bittasweet symphanee this LIII-HIIIFF! THIS SHOW WILL DEAL WITH WEIGHTY ISSUES.

2) The shot of the smoldering Twin Towers at 00:09.

Umm, seriously?

Has there been another instance of the Twin Towers being used in a commercial like this? This is fucking odious. This is a fucking mocku-drama on ABC and you're giving me the Twin Towers NINE FUCKING SECONDS IN. Jeeeesus Christ. I want to personally beat the shit out of whichever soulless marketing goblin is responsible for this.

3) All the other dumb shit in the montage.

ENRON. FAKE PROTESTS CLEARLY SHOT WITH LIKE EIGHT EXTRAS. A CHEESY COMPUTER-GRAPHIC WORMHOLE WITH "Y2K" WRITTEN OVER IT. Wow, it's like it's nine months ago all over again!

Wall Street and a house with a foreclosed sign -- man, those were some crazy times we lived through, when Wall Street and foreclosures were both invented.

Bush and Gore -- haha, remember that SNL skit! There's the smoldering wreckage of the worst terror attack on American soil again! Hey, Hurricane Katrina! Remember where you were when the hurricane hit? (I was at home, thinking to myself, I can't wait until this horrible tragedy is reduced to an empty signifier in a drive-by of the Decade's Greatest Moments as exposition to promote some trite fucking ABC mocku-drama.) Soldiers and a map of Afghanistan -- man, I came of age so hard when that happened! Clinton -- hmm, that was the 90s I think, but sure.

Thanks for showing us a bunch of things that happened. What does this have to do with your show? Your show that is SET IN THE PRESENT? "Wow, man, even the mundane is significant when set against the backdrop of world events." Go get fucked.

4) The fact that this is a mocku-drama.

Go away fake documentaries. So so so so over. Even the good shows that do it are horrible at it, so why would I want to see this shit. Nothing is more contrived than this.

5) Everything looks wrong.

We've got a bunch of 30-year-olds dancing at the prom. The basketball player is wearing some bizarre jersey that is neither the shape nor the design of any basketball jersey I've ever seen, and it has no team name on it. I think they just cut the sleeves off a football jersey or something.

6) THE JOCK.

Oh man, the jock. Seriously, that's a quote. "OK, guys, let's have some characters." "How about the jock?" "Ok, what does he do?" "You know, plays sports." "Great work everyone that's enough for today."

7) ANOTHER SHOT OF THE FUCKING WORLD TRADE CENTER at 1:02

I want someone stoned for this. Someone deserves to suffer some for using pictures of thousands of people dying to flog some shitty ABC show that (God-willing) will be canceled by Thanksgiving. What, ABC, no jumper footage? Couldn't get the rights or something? IT'S A BITTA-SWEEET (go to hell immediately everyone involved with this show).

8) The little blinking "REC" in the corner of the screen.

Ahahahaha.

9) THE PUNK.

Oh man the punk married the jock, what a paradigm shift. You're really throwing all my preconceived notions of high school out the window, you pieces of shit. BUT THEY'RE UNLIKE! HOW CAN THEY MATE?

The first two characters we're introduced to are The Jock and The Punk. This is so fucking lazy. ABC next time you want to tell me you hate me and find me beneath contempt just swing by my place, knock on my door and spit directly into my mouth instead, and then show me pictures of the September 11th attacks.

10) THE NERD.

That's it, those are literally all the kinds of people that exist in the world, well done producers of ABC's My Generation. Oh and hey he's still an awkward nerd who owns a sperm bank or something (and the jock is still fit and the punk still wears, uh, heavy makeup (could this show handle the idea of punk worse than NCIS handles goth? probably not, but it's in play, which is something) (that NCIS actress is 41 by the way)). The lesson as always: no one ever changes.

11) They had a son when they slept together on prom niZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

12) THE BEAUTY QUEEN

is in an icy marriage. My head is spinning. Are there any cliches left in the cliche book? SAVE SOME CLICHES FOR SEASON TWO!

13) The high school couple still has a thing for each other.

No no no no no no fuck you show Jesus. Did I miss the scene where they step out of the frozen fucking carbonite they've been in for the past ten years? This is so stupid. I feel myself getting stupider aaahhhh aaaahhhh I can feel it slipping away I'm losing everything aaahhh tell everyone I love them I'm sorry.

14) "I'm done"

Whoa you're really pushing the bounds of the fake documentary, you fucking hacks. Nice lavender sweater w/ yellow collared undershirt.

15) HAVE YOU CHASED YOUR DREAMS?

Die.

16) "You Can't Always Get What You Want"

...unless what you want is triteness, in which case ARE YOU EVER IN LUCK! Also see conclusion.

17) Phony war footage.

This is almost as disgusting as the 9/11 stuff, of course. IT'S MAKING ME FEEEEEL.

18) That look when the one chick asks the other chick if she's going to have a kid.

Oh man I wonder if she's happy in her marriage CAN YOU TELL? Clearly you loathe your husband, can you not even pretend you don't when asked a question by someone you barely know? No one is that transparent except in shitty mocku-dramas that are so poorly written and so dripping with phony pathos that there is literally no other way to show it (except she probably says it straight out in a talking head right after that because the producers of ABC's My Generation think we're all brainless).

19) THIS IS ABOUT THEIR LIVES. OUR LIVES.

No it's not. It's about the lives of some white bread stock characters who don't even deserve to be called "characters," honestly, much less entities with "lives." THE PUNK THE JOCK -- they're words with faces. Also, it's not OUR LIVES because that announcer is clearly a 60-year-old man doing his "young hip show" voice.

CONCLUSION: Everyone involved with this show is fucking old. Hell, the second behind-the-scenes guy they talk to (Warren Littlefield) was played by Bob fucking Balaban in 1996's "The Late Shift" (no seriously). These people have no clue what it was like to come of age in the 2000s. They know what it was like to be old and get older. They don't have the first fucking clue about "our" generation (is Facebook anywhere in this show?). This, like every other piece of poisonous, masturbatory navel-gazing nostalgia our culture has shit out over the past few decades, could only be the product of baby boomers. For God's sake, the trailer features a 90s MOR radio hit and a Rolling Stones song, the title is a Who reference -- they can't help themselves! They know nothing else! The show's not even about "our" generation in any way. It's another way for old people to talk about themselves and try to trick those youngsters into listening. Which, whatever, I don't want anyone to tell me what my generation was like, but especially not some old people. At least the constant 60s/70s nostalgia shit this planet has been subjected to was a little bit honest.

The reason I'm hopeful this disgusting show will fail is that I don't think this generation is really that interested in all that nostalgia stuff yet. I hate when people do this kind of generational sum-up, but I'm going to be hypocritical for a second here and do it myself: it seems like we're so enthralled with the present that the past, even the recent past means very little to us. Sure we love remembering our old Nickelodeon shows and Super Nintendo games and shit like that, but we don't try to imbue it all with some mystical meaning like the awful baby boomers responsible for garbage like this (if for no other reason than it's not far back enough yet). So I don't think anyone will watch this show. Please, please, tell me I'm right.

I solve today's jumble

2010-09-17T18:41:00.000-04:00

There's no one more popular than a slut with a computer

2010-09-14T06:37:00.001-04:00

If I am elected to Congress, I will make sure to give all the sluts in our great district computers. It is amazing what a slut can do, given a high-powered computer? Yes! The only limitation is her very imagination, and the computing power.

Here are some well known sluts with computers:

This one:

This one:

And this one:

In summation, I will make it my number-one priority to give computers to all the sluts. How will I pay for it? I don't know.

Conversations interrupted by a bug flying into someone's mouth

2010-09-09T14:13:00.001-04:00

A: I think the couch looks good here.
B: I don't know, I think it might make sense on the other wall.
A: But then it's blocking the windows.
B: No, I don't think it would block the windows.
A: Yes, it would, see it -- GAH APPPHHH AGGG.
B: What?
A: A bug just flew into my mouth.

C: It's this little restaurant on Dekalb.
D: Oh, I think I know that BBRRRAAH AAAKK whoa.
C: You all right?
D: A bug just flew into my mouth.

E: Well then the only thing I can figure out is there's something you're not telling me.
F: Look, I ran the numbers --
E: I don't care how many times -- ! Do you think I'm stupid? Is that what --
F: No, sir, I --
E: Are you trying to put one past me?
F: No! Of course, I'm just trying to --
E: Because someone has been grossly negligent here, or you're being dishonest PPTTA. PPTTA. PTHUH. BLECH.
F: ...
E: A bug just flew into my mouth.

G: Drink some milk. "I don't want milk." Drink it, it's good for your bones. "What good does that do me, I'm made out of wood!" I don't see what that has to do with it. "Yeah, and I'm the dummy." Listen, don't PTTTHEEEWAH GGAAK GAAH oh. A bug just flew into my mouth.

H: I'm pregnant.
I: Jesus. What? Jesus.
H: I'm pregnant.
I: How did this happen?
H: KK KKKXXK KKXXKKKX.
I: Are you ok?
H: Yes. A bug just flew into my mouth.

J: I'm sorry, it --
K: I'M GONNA KILL YOU YOU FUCKING PUSSY.
L: Look --
K: SHUT YOUR FUCKING MOUTH YOU'RE A FUCKING DEAD MAN.
L: I don't AAACKKKK KKKKAAAAH ooh a bug just flew into my mouth.
K: Ugh, sick.

Outtakes (I am bad at everything)

2010-08-31T18:58:00.000-04:00

365 days of chris !!

2010-08-26T22:46:00.000-04:00

I decided to have a little fun! I took a picture of myself every day for 365 days to see how much I'd change in one day! I made it into a slideshow video with one of my favorite songs! Enjoy it!

Favoritism

2010-08-15T20:52:00.002-04:00

In college we had a bird. The bird didn't have a name; we could never agree on one. We taught the bird to say "beer." Then its beak fell off and it died.

One time on vacation I saw a guy step on a queen bee. The bee was just crawling around on the ground; the guy hadn't seen it. As soon as he did it, there were a million bees all over him, stinging every bit of skin they could find. He fell into the pool and that got most of the bees off him, but then the guy didn't come back up to the surface.

I once saw a turtle run over by a riding lawnmower. I was just a kid at the time. It was my dad driving the mower, I could have waved my arms and gotten him to stop, warned him about the turtle, but I wanted to see what would happen. The mower rolled over it and there were several great thumping sounds as the blades cut through the shell, then the tractor sort of lifted up on one side and the whole thing came to a stop. The blade was completely knocked out of alignment and the mower had to be junked. The turtle fared worse -- its shell had been ripped open in two huge gashes, and all that was left of the thing was a throbbing mess of pink and gray turtle matter.

One of my friends was in the hospital once. He was trying to open the window in his apartment, which he had painted shut, and he instead fell forward through the glass onto the sidewalk. Four floors. We visited him in the hospital. He said more than anything he wanted someone to masturbate him. He had been in there for days, he explained, and between the boredom and the lack of privacy and -- you don't have to do it yourselves, he said, and I can't ask the nurses, just find someone --

Another one of my friends dropped his keys down the sewer. He got down there to fish them out and caught some disease and died, but not before a bus he was riding on exploded on the highway and skidded off a short bridge into an old weedy field. He was the only survivor, although his skin was covered in burns. He was in the hospital with his burns when they found the disease. His burns got infected too, so I guess we don't know if it was the disease or the infected burns that killed him. Anyway, we asked him what it was like being on the bus, and he said it was ok, it was kind of exhilarating, the feeling of falling, and it was terrifying but all in all he thought there were probably worse ways to go than falling. The nurse had to come in then and peel the sheets out of his skin, which was still all pink and sticky.

Told me?

2010-08-11T00:42:00.000-04:00

Someone just left a comment on an old post:

Duh! A lot you know Chris. Don't go shooting your mouth off especially when you don't know what you're talking about. The fact is, there are many two-racket players in the US and now there's a Two-Racket Tennis Federation in Moscow, Russia.

Game, Set and Match to Prof Don Mueller on his two-racket game!

Now I don't know who this "Double Fault" is -- undoubtedly one of Prof. Don Mueller's many admirers though that doesn't begin to narrow things down, does it??? I don't know why he came after me though. I really didn't make too much fun of two-handed tennis itself as much as I made fun of the New York Times for writing a quirky trend piece in which they admitted within the story that this sport was not popular and therefore not worth reporting on, and that the man they were profiling hadn't even invented the sport (besides, perhaps, one part where I suggested that were I in Prof. Don Mueller's place, I might have downed a bottle of Liquid Plumr rather than invented two-handed tennis).

But I guess I learned my lesson (ps if someone goes "Game, Set and Match" to you just hang em up because you have definitely lost that argument).

What can a person even say? (further adventures in experiential marketing)

2010-08-10T18:13:00.001-04:00

Pop Tarts has a store in Times Square now or something.

“People say, ‘Well, what can you really do with a Pop-Tart?’ ” said Scott Schoessel, chief operating officer of the Gigunda Group, a firm working on the project that specializes in so-called experiential marketing, or in-person events and activities. “Our chef was has come up with amazing concoctions.

[...]

“It’s a confluence of business, commerce, entertainment and the density of traffic[.]”

[...]

And then there’s the Pop-Tarts Sushi, three kinds of Pop-Tarts minced and then wrapped in a fruit roll-up. “We did an internal tasting here at the building, and it was the winner,” said Etienne Patout, senior director at the Pop-Tarts brand, part of the Kellogg Company.

[...]

The store will put on a brief light show every hour. First, visitors will “get frosted,” Mr. Schoessel said, with a red light and a white light. That will be followed by brief pulses of light, “all different colors to mimic the sprinkles,” he said, “then another really bright light” to evoke wrapping the tarts in foil.

Computer screens in a row at the side of the store provide access to PopTartsWorld.com, social media sites and Pop-Tarts video games, similar to Memory but with pastry icons.

[...]

“Our long-term hope is to strengthen the bonding between the brand and the consumer, and that has great benefits for the brand,” Mr. Patout said.

This fails or there is no God.

Goofus and Gallant

2010-07-28T09:28:00.002-04:00

Goofus eats with his hands like a fucking animal and embarrasses himself.
Gallant eats with a fork and knife.

Goofus spits on his teacher and calls her a slut.
Gallant gets good grades in school.

Goofus stuffs his neighbor's cat into a suitcase and throws it into the creek.
Gallant looks both ways before he crosses the street.

Goofus slams his own hand in the door on purpose.
Gallant says "please" and "thank you."

Goofus hides his anti-psychotic medication in his pocket and masturbates whenever he's left alone.
Gallant has a nervous breakdown because he tries so fucking hard to be perfect and follow the "rules" it's like he woke up one day and realized he hasn't even fucking lived a life.

Goofus gets drunk and drives his car into a tree.
Gallant notices people seem uncomfortable around him after his unsuccessful suicide attempt.

Spot the famous director's cameo!

2010-07-18T18:25:00.001-04:00

Albert Hitchcock

T. Night Shyamalan

Sophie Coppola

Sterling Spielberg

Jack Jarmusch

Jay Cameron

(very) Old notebook

2010-07-11T09:54:00.000-04:00

A record-setting blue shark was caught in the waters near Lynn, Massachusetts. That's right, the shark hit more than 6000 consecutive free throws -- a new world record!

[from the BU Tonight days. I remember trying so hard to convince everyone this joke was hilarious. I'm not sure, but I think it may have been rejected the first week, then I forced it through the next week. And if I did, I am not sorry, because that is still a great joke, fuck everyone who says otherwise.]

Who hits parked cars?

2010-07-06T05:44:00.001-04:00

T. bobs up and down. He is very still. He adjusts himself so his penis is free from the netting of his bathing suit. His intention is to urinate in the wave pool. A girl swims a bit too close, he thinks, and he flutters off.

***

T. examines the dent. Who hits parked cars? The driver of the pickup examines the damage to his own car. He is sixteen years old. He is shaking. T. opens the trunk of his car and notices that a can of paint has been overturned. His trunk and everything in it is sticky and red.

***

The wave machine is on full blast. T. decides to wait until it calms down to try urinating again. He submerges himself for a second. He tries to bob back up right as a swell passes, and breathes in before he finds air. He comes back up, choking and spitting water. He finds an empty spot next to a filter. This would be the best place to urinate, as the urine would be carried right out of the wave pool immediately. But he is right underneath the lifeguard's chair. Would the lifeguard notice? This is not the place. T. swims off.

***

T. asks for the boy's insurance, but the boy refuses to provide it. Oh no, he says. That's not how it's going to work.

***

From shore, T.'s grown cousin C. spots T. Everyone in the wave pool, she notices, is swimming and splashing, except for T. He is perfectly still, like a log, rising and falling with the waves. C. wonders if he is ok. She waves. T. stares directly at her, but does not wave back. He floats in place for a few more seconds, then swims away very quickly.

***

Listen, says the boy. I saw you urinate in that wave pool. I don't know what you're talking about, says T. Don't play dumb with me, says the boy. If you don't want your family to know, then you'll just forget this whole thing ever happened. I'm being extorted! T. thinks. He considers his options.

***

T. swims as fast as he can. But the wave machine kicks in again, swirling the water around. T. frantically searches for the telltale yellow cloud of his urine -- but, of course, it has already dissolved. A wave swallows him. All T. can taste is urine. GAH, he screams. HELP.

***

The boy drives off. Who hits parked cars? Boys, with enough money, enough privilege, enough dirt on the rest of the world that they can afford to stay reckless. T. tries punching the dent straight from the other side, but it doesn't budge.

***

The lifeguard sees the man waving his arms before he hears him screaming. People on the beach start pointing, but the lifeguard is already off his chair.

Notebook entry, 6/19

2010-06-19T12:48:00.001-04:00

Defecation Night at the stadium

[Must have been one of those leap-out-of-bed-in-the-middle-of-the-night type ideas -- I don't even remember when I wrote this, never mind what it means (I mean, besides the obvious)]

A Wind Blows Through Them

2010-06-13T13:45:00.003-04:00

Brenda G. Secretly she wonders if her boyfriend is happy. She obsesses over it, and in doing so, fails to realize that it is she who is unhappy. A Wind Blows Through Her.

WWWWEESSSSSSSSSSHHHHH A WIND BLOWS THROUGH HER

Scott H. Today he bumped his head on his kitchen cabinet, because his wife opened it and walked away without closing it.

PPSSHHHEEEEWWWWWWWWWWFFFFFWFWWW A WIND BLOWS THROUGH HIM

Michael K. Today he forgot his watch at home, and keeps looking at his wrist anyway.

AWINDBLOWSTHROUGHHIM

Suggested chicken names

2010-06-03T03:44:00.002-04:00

BOO

MR. CLUCK

MS. RED

CHIKKIS

COOK

MAC KALL

CLUCK

POLLITA (POU . GI . TAH)
Source(s):
THATS ALL I CAN COME UP WITH FOR NOW!

(A. RMZ)

---

bobble head, cocker. jam boy, spick, homer., cramer, jigger. jiblets

(Kristi K)

---

For a boy Ricky
and a girl Tina

(Ricky M)

---

I had a pet chicken for years, until she died of old age. I would sit on our stone wall and crack walnuts for her. Anytime someone would sit down on that wall, here she would come, thinking she was going to get walnuts. Her name was Henny Penny. Black with a golden head.

(Joan H)

[source]

Further adventures in apartment hunting

2010-05-26T10:30:00.000-04:00

chris sartinsky to [NAME REDACTED]

Hi, I was wondering if I could take a look at this apartment at [ADDRESS REDACTED] tomorrow night:

[AD REDACTED]

It would have to be at 8:30pm or so, though. Let me know if that works for you.

thanks,
chris

***

[NAME REDACTED] to me

I don't really know any broker that stays at work until 830 PM to show an apartment for [PRICE REDACTED].
If interested, kindly call my office and I will show you during regular business hours.
[NAME REDACTED]
License Real Estate Broker
[ADDRESS REDACTED]
[PHONE # REDACTED]

Sent from my BlackBerry® smartphone with Nextel Direct Connect

***

chris sartinsky to [NAME REDACTED]

Ha ha wow you are the worst.

***

[NAME REDACTED] to me

That is why I own the must elegant Real Estate office in Park Slope, unfortunately I do not meet candidates so late since I commute 2 hours away from my office.
If the apartment is still available over the weekend, I will be able to show you at a time that is convenient to you.
[NAME REDACTED]

***

chris sartinsky to [NAME REDACTED]

I wouldn't want to waste your time for [PRICE REDACTED]. Congratulations on the elegant office! I bet it catches you a lot of tail!

***

[no reply yet]

Victim of violence

2010-05-25T17:36:00.001-04:00

We went to the buffet on Sunday. They served hard-boiled eggs and duck. My wife, who is a vegetarian, ate some napkins.

We couldn't find our car in the parking lot. We checked every spot. All we found was a pile of broken glass where we thought it should have been. Luckily there was a used car lot next door to the buffet, so we found a nice one and hotwired it and drove it home.

We got to our street and we discarded the car in a ditch. I used my pocketknife to cut a deep gash into my leg. I left a trail of blood leading from the car to the woods, then patched myself up and went back into the street and walked home with my wife.

We got home and found that neither of us had house keys, because we had left ours in our car. I had left my set in the car we lost at the buffet, and she had left hers in the car we'd abandoned in the ditch. Luckily one of our windows had been broken so we crawled through it.

Inside we found a man sitting on the couch. He wore a red polo shirt tucked into pleated khakis. He asked us if we wanted a drink and we said yes. He uncorked a bottle of red wine and emptied it onto our cream-colored carpet. He just stared at us, daring us to -- .

Then he told us to get out. We asked him where we would go. He said he would let us sleep in the doghouse. My wife hugged him and thanked him and burst into tears, she was so thankful. She did not follow me when I left the room and went into the backyard and into the doghouse.

The light in the bedroom is on. That's where he is sleeping. My wife is sleeping in the kitchen -- he has laid out a blanket for her. In the middle of the night, he will go into the kitchen for a glass of water and trip over her and send her out here to the doghouse with me. In the meantime I found an old newspaper and ripped it up and made myself some playing cards with a crayon I also found. I have eight cards: the six of diamonds, the two of spades, the eight of spades, the five of hearts, the eight of hearts, the four of clubs, the queen of diamonds and the ten of diamonds. I am playing war. I win approximately 50% of the time.

Take It Easy, I'm An Old Man

2010-05-22T10:27:00.000-04:00

*"Take It Easy, I'm An Old Man" theme song*

You old stupid dinosaur!
You're worthless to society!
You toothless old lump of wrinkly skin!
Why don't you crawl in a grave and die!
You're worthless! Die!
You're nothing but a burden! Everyone wishes you were dead!
Your best days are behind you!
Everyone you know is dead or demented!
Do you even know where you are, you old sack of shit?
"Aahh! Aahh! Where am I, the lights are bright!"
That's you, you bony old caveman!
"What's a lightbulb? What's an automobile? What's a printing press?"
That's you again! Ha ha!
Croak, you skeleton! Die!
Die, die, die! Die, die, die!
(ALL, in unison) Die, die, die! Die, die, die! Die, die, die!

T-take it easy, I'm an old man!

*"Take It Easy, I'm An Old Man" theme song*

Yes, you can be trusted with thousands of my dollars

2010-05-21T10:43:00.001-04:00

chris if tonight not posble can u do tomor sat morn? if u like this apt posblle reasnble neg to rent now. Llord quite busy and want it done asap. maybe yr luck. actively shwing. cofrm asap. tks. j

Effective cult leadership

2010-05-13T16:55:00.001-04:00

I entered into marriage because I thought it would be an end to the constant pressure of having to impress. That was the main reason. To settle -- not in the sense of accepting disappointment, but in the sense of rest. Apparently I was wrong. She asked for a divorce a couple hours after the ceremony -- and who was I to stand in the way of her autonomy? So I let her go.

I remember when we met. It was a whirlwind romance. One moment we were staring at each other from opposite sides of the sidewalk like two bashful teenagers in a high school hallway on the way to class and ten or fifteen seconds later we were becoming intimate with each other in a muddy pit in the middle of of an empty lot. It was love, love, love from the first, unless love must last forever by definition, in which case I don't know what it was.

We dated for 40 minutes. Winning her heart was no easy task -- I was on edge, constantly, hoping she wouldn't see my flaws, knowing as the minutes passed and our relationship grew that she inevitably would, and then just praying they wouldn't disgust her and drive her away. There were some difficult times, no doubt, where she thought she wasn't getting enough of me and I felt too much was expected. But I think we were sustained by that feeling we had at the beginning -- that we would end up together, and that the kinds of things that might have derailed a weaker relationship after 15 minutes or 20 minutes didn't matter so much anymore -- they couldn't afford to matter. They could be survived.

After 35 minutes, she took me to meet her parents. They seemed suspicious of me -- I got the sense that their daughter brought home lots of men and they all failed to impress, but I was determined to win them over. She excused herself to the bathroom and I told them what a charming home they had, asked them how they met and then asked for their permission to ask their daughter to marry me. By then it had almost been 20 seconds and they were smitten (I am very good with parents), and they welcomed me into their family (pending, of course, their daughter saying yes; but we were all confident). Happy and fulfilled, I dashed for the bathroom, kicked in the door and proposed on the spot. We were married in a huge cathedral, packed with friends and family and well-wishers some 10 minutes later, and that was the happiest few seconds of my life. If you had asked me at that moment, where do you see yourself in four or five hours, I wouldn't have blinked -- "with her," I would have said.

It was, in fact, six hours later that I sat alone in the home we had bought together, the one we had made a home for two hours, and wondered if she would come back. 10 minutes later, she did, with her new fiance -- she wanted to "make a clean break," "put the past to rest," "reconcile so we can love each other again." That was quick, I thought, but I didn't dare say anything. I went along with her all the way, of course, even as inside I felt a howling like wind through an open wound, and 50 seconds later she was gone.

I remember one of the first conversations we had. Not the words, but the circumstances. We sat on paper plates in my apartment, because I didn't own furniture at the time. We talked about our families. My leg fell asleep so I pulled it out from under me and threw it onto the ground with a crash. I heard something fall off the wall downstairs -- a mirror or a framed picture. A saw poked up through the floor and cut a perfect circle in the floor around her, and she slowly dropped. I pulled myself over to the hole (my leg still being asleep) and peered down -- the room was totally dark. I called for her and heard clicking like a writhing mass of roaches wearing thousands of tiny wooden shoes. I wanted to climb down but it was still early in our relationship -- the first 10 or 15 minutes or so -- and I was worried I would seem clingy, or absurd, or anti-feminist so I stayed there over the hole. She came back upstairs eleven days later, clothes torn, a shoe missing, her hair matted with dirt and leaves. I asked her where she'd been. She said never mind, and sat down next to me again. But she didn't smile so much anymore, and I noticed she kept checking her watch.

Real and fake Lingerie Football League teams

2010-05-09T12:25:00.000-04:00

Philadelphia Passion
Chicago Bliss
Hartford Bounce

Miami Caliente
New York Majesty
Kansas City Moons

Tampa Breeze
Dallas Desire
Pittsburgh Exposed Bra Straps

Denver Dream
Los Angeles Temptation
Cleveland Coitus

San Diego Seduction
Seattle Mist
Minneapolis Simulated Fellatio

Genie

2010-05-01T03:42:00.003-04:00

Oh my god I found a genie.

HELLO. I AM A GENIE. I WILL GRANT YOU ANY WISH.

Okay! I with for one million dollars!

YOUR WISH IS MY COMMAND. ONE MILLION OYSTERS.

[The genie conjures a pile of one million oysters.]

I asked for dollars, not oysters.

I CAN ONLY GRANT WISHES RELATED TO OYSTERS.

Ripoff.

THOSE OYSTERS ARE WORTH MORE THAN ONE MILLION DOLLARS, PROBABLY.

What's the market price of oysters?

YOUR WISH IS MY COMMAND. I WILL FIND THE MARKET PRICE OF OYSTERS.

[The genie conjures a pile of one million oysters.]

DAMMIT.

Hit a deer

2010-04-18T16:14:00.000-04:00

Yeah I hit that deer! And I'd hit it again! Fucker walked right out into the road like it was king shit of fucking deer forest. I beeped the horn, shouted at it, "hey stupid fucking deer, out the way," and it just stood there, like, "UUUGHHHH." Well so I had to hit it, didn't I? It was that or be the bitch, and I am NEVER the bitch, especially when it comes to some shithead deer.

BLAM. Ran straight through that fucking thing. That's the way to do it.

Knocked over a trash can too. Some daft fool put a trash can right in the middle of the road. I was like, the fuck?? Plowed right through that. The trash went everywhere, it was sick, man. Trash got all over my car, which annoyed me, because I had just gone through the car wash to get all the deer off. I was just pulling out of the lot, in fact, when I saw the trash there. I could have changed lanes, but fuck that, I got places to be, and anyway it's not my fault if someone puts their damn trash right in the middle of the road.

Had to kill that trash. Had to kill the hell out of it.

I was tired of running shit over, though, so I figured I'd pull off the road and I started driving through the woods. Knocked over a whole hell of a lot of trees, but I mean who gives a fuck about some weak-ass trees. I had to drive real slow because I kept getting stuck in like mud and like on stumps and shit, but it was a pretty good idea. I didn't have to drive on so many fucking roads anyway. But then I noticed there weren't so many trees and I was just driving over grass and bushes and shit. And then I saw all these fucking tents! Right in the middle of where I was driving! Like they were just fucking asking me to flatten the shit out of them. So I did, whatever. There were even a bunch of tents that weren't in my way, so I circled around and ran them over too, because shit pissed me off.

"Camp site" -- fuck off. If someone's driving on it, it's a fucking road. Who gives a fuck about some fucking Boy Scouts? Get your goddamn tents out of my road.

Incapable of guile; incapable of sabotage

2010-04-16T18:35:00.000-04:00

FRIENDS sit around quietly eating homemade bread.

Shall we go golfing this weekend?
It's going to rain all weekend.
That's why we should go to my 18-HOLE PAR-72 INDOOR GOLF COURSE.

FRIEND WHO INVENTED THE INDOOR GOLF COURSE jumps off his stool and disappears with a flourish of his cape.

Did you see that there are clams in my bed? Now we really need to switch apartments, because I don't like clams, and you do, so you'll be happy living in an apartment where clams appear mysteriously in the day when no one's even home.
You just put those clams there to convince me to switch apartments with you like you've been trying to do for months, because you know how much I like clams.
No.

FRIEND WHO PUT THE CLAMS IN HIS OWN BED begins sweating, then surreptitiously empties his backpack of clams.

MEANWHILE...

FRIEND WHO INVENTED THE INDOOR GOLF COURSE finds himself in a ditch with his head being held under a shallow puddle of mud. FRIEND WHO INVENTED THE INDOOR GOLF COURSE chokes on mud. FRIEND WHO INVENTED THE INDOOR GOLF COURSE's head is lifted out of the mud by his hair.

*GASP* AAH! AAH, OH GOD, WHERE AM I?
VERE EEZ DEY MAHNNEY??
I invented...golf...indoors...18 holes...

MAN WITH UNIDENTIFIABLE EUROPEAN ACCENT ties up FRIEND WHO INVENTED THE INDOOR GOLF COURSE and takes him on a boat and they sail out into the middle of the ocean and FRIEND WHO INVENTED THE INDOOR GOLF COURSE gets thrown overboard.

Application

2010-04-12T01:32:00.000-04:00

(click to enlarge)

Phallus of Commerce

2010-04-11T05:34:00.000-04:00

It was Timothy's first day of work in the Phallus of Commerce. He carried his briefcase, which was full of important papers. He rode the elevator to his office on the 101st floor.

Timothy's an idiot's name, Timothy thought to himself in the elevator. From now on my name is Barrel.

"Hello, Timothy," said the woman at the front desk.

"NO TIME FOR THAT, MY NAME IS BARREL NOW," said Barrel. "SHOW ME TO MY OFFICE AT ONCE."

He entered his office and closed the door behind him. He emptied his briefcase of
the important papers. He opened his windows and tossed out all the important papers. Important papers drifted down to the street from every floor.

Barrel's boss knocked on the door. Barrel let him in.

"BARREL, THERE'S A RUMOR GOING AROUND YOU'RE GOING AROUND CALLING YOURSELF 'BARREL' THESE DAYS," said Barrel's boss.

"YES SIR MY NAME IS BARREL," said Barrel.

"WELL I'M AFRAID THAT'S A PROBLEM I CAN'T HAVE IN THIS OFFICE BECAUSE MY NAME IS ALREADY BARREL AND WE CAN'T HAVE TWO BARRELS IN THIS OFFICE," said Barrel's boss Barrel.

"SIR I THOUGHT YOUR NAME WAS MR. BARREL."

"YES BUT THIS MORNING I DECIDED TO CHANGE IT IN THE ELEVATOR TO JUST BARREL."

"I CHANGED MY NAME TO BARREL FIRST," said Barrel, "YOU CAN ASK ANYONE."

"I'M AFRAID I CAN'T," said Barrel, "BECAUSE I SENT EVERYONE HOME FOR THE DAY BECAUSE I WAS SO UPSET YOU WERE CALLED BARREL AND THEY ALL SAW ME CRYING."

Barrel pulled a dagger out of his ankle holster and plunged it into Mr. Barrel's heart. Mr. Barrel was still gasping and spitting when Barrel rolled him out the window like a log and watched him drop.

Barrel heard a siren. The police were coming after him! He rushed out of the office, past all the empty desks and the humming of the computers everyone had left on in their haste to leave. He jumped into the stairwell. The police were on their way up -- they were almost there! Barrel had no choice but to climb.

Barrel kept climbing. He tried to hide on the 126th floor, but it was a daycare; the caregiver had lined the children up and was taking them one by one and was grabbing them by their hair and holding theirs head underwater in a shallow plastic pool and didn't pull them out until they stopped thrashing and splashing and came close to unconsciousness. He tried to hide on the 151st floor but they were holding a mock execution; a man kneeled on the floor with a handkerchief over his eyes, his pants soiled, sobbing, as his co-workers stood around him with a water pistol to his head, telling him he was going to die. He tried to hide on the 176th floor, but all there was when he opened the door was a wall of flame.

Finally he got to the 201st floor, which was the roof. He had nowhere else to go; the police had almost caught him. He ran out into the light where he found a crowd having a sexy barbecue party! Everyone was wearing sunglasses and flip-flops and their bathing suits and were eating crispy hot dogs and coal-black hamburgers off styrofoam plates. Luckily Barrel was wearing his bathing suit under his clothes that day. He stripped down and grabbed a hamburger and a cup of ginger ale and began making conversation with a sexy woman.

"My name is Barley," said Barrel. "What's your name?"

Just then the police burst through the door into the sexy barbecue party. A man wearing a Hawaiian shirt blasted them with a hose in a spirit of fun and good cheer. They slipped and fell right there on the roof! Barrel saw his opportunity to escape. He grabbed the sexy woman and began to run off but she didn't want to come; she was having too much fun at the sexy barbecue party. Barrel sat down on the roof and cried for a while.

An hour later, the police started to get up! Barrel had no choice but to stop crying and escape, even without the sexy woman. He would have to be very sneaky. He took his dagger out of his ankle holster and began slitting the throats of everyone at the sexy roof barbecue party, one by one. He began with the guests and ended with the police. It took him about 20 minutes to slit all their throats. The last one was the sexy woman. She stood blinking in the sun, wondering why everyone was lying down, and why blood was pooling at her feet. Barrel gently wrapped one arm around her hip and slit her throat with the other one, then laid her out on the roof. He covered her face with a styrofoam plate. Now everyone was dead and Barrel could escape. He started down the staircase but he missed the first step and cracked his head on the banister. Awwwww JEEEEEEZZZ he thought as the insides of his head went rushing past his eyes and he blinked off in a tide of red and pink.

Things professional wrestling announcers rarely say

2010-03-30T22:57:00.000-04:00

OH MAH GAWD HE JUST BUSTED HIM RIGHT IN THE HEAD WITH THAT JAR OF DUCK SAUCE
OH MAH GAWD HE JUST BUSTED HIM RIGHT IN THE HEAD WITH THAT ROLLED UP PUZZLE BOOK
OH MAH GAWD HE JUST BUSTED HIM RIGHT IN THE HEAD WITH THAT SOGGY SWEATSHIRT
OH MAH GAWD HE JUST BUSTED HIM RIGHT IN THE HEAD WITH THAT SEQUINED BIRDCAGE
OH MAH GAWD HE JUST BUSTED HIM RIGHT IN THE HEAD WITH THAT PAPER CUP OF SODA
OH MAH GAWD HE JUST BUSTED HIM RIGHT IN THE HEAD WITH THAT COPY OF "THE DEATH OF IVAN ILYCH"
OH MAH GAWD HE JUST BUSTED HIM RIGHT IN THE HEAD WITH THAT STRADIVARIUS VIOLIN
OH MAH GAWD HE JUST BUSTED HIM RIGHT IN THE HEAD WITH THAT GORILLA SKELETON
OH MAH GAWD HE JUST BUSTED HIM RIGHT IN THE HEAD WITH THAT LITTLE DYING BOY SITTING AT RINGSIDE
OH MAH GAWD HE JUST BUSTED HIM RIGHT IN THE HEAD WITH THAT AIDS NEEDLE
OH MAH GAWD HE JUST BUSTED HIM RIGHT IN THE HEAD WITH THAT BALLET SLIPPER
OH MAH GAWD HE JUST BUSTED HIM RIGHT IN THE HEAD WITH THAT STROLLER
OH MAH GAWD HE JUST BUSTED HIM RIGHT IN THE HEAD WITH THAT HOT PLATE
OH MAH GAWD HE JUST BUSTED HIM RIGHT IN THE HEAD WITH THAT GHOST
OH MAH GAWD HE JUST BUSTED HIM RIGHT IN THE HEAD WITH THAT HOUSE
OH MAH GAWD HE JUST BUSTED HIM RIGHT IN THE HEAD WITH THAT RARE SMOKING METEORITE
OH MAH GAWD HE JUST BUSTED HIM RIGHT IN THE HEAD WITH THE HANDLE OF THAT SHARP KNIFE (THANK GAWD HE SHOWED SOME DISCRETION)
OH MAH GAWD HE JUST BUSTED HIM RIGHT IN THE HEAD WITH THAT ASIAN SALAD
OH MAH GAWD HE JUST BUSTED HIM RIGHT IN THE HEAD WITH THAT BUCKET OF CUM
You know this has been a pretty run-of-the-mill match, I have to say.

They can't all make it

2010-03-13T23:05:00.002-05:00

ANCHOR (CONT’D)
REPORTER, why don’t you say a few soothing words to lull viewers into a drowsy, comfortable complacency and make them less likely to change the channel.

REPORTER
Milk. Blanket. Soap. Pillow. Snug. Moonbeam.

More room to walk around

2010-03-12T15:33:00.001-05:00

The police negotiator arrived on the scene. "What's the situation?"

"The bad guys burst into the bank during a busy lunch hour and took it hostage. 26 people and $300,000 are inside."

The police negotiator got on the telephone and dialed the bank.

"This is the lead bad guy," said the man who answered the phone.

"This is the police negotiator. You've got to listen to me. We can negotiate."

The lead bad guy hung up the phone. The police negotiator dialed again.

"This is the lead bad guy," said the man who answered the phone.

"Listen. You've rebuffed my initial attempts at contact and we've entered phase two of the negotiations."

"Which entail?"

"I offer you something and you offer me something in return."

"Okay."

"Here is my first offer: we give you a newspaper and a cup of coffee, and you come out of the building and surrender yourselves and allow us to arrest you and send you to prison."

"Here is my counter-offer: you allow us to leave the bank unmolested and we spend the money and don't rob the bank ever again."

"I see I am dealing with a seasoned negotiator," said the police negotiator. "But we're never going to get anywhere if you don't make some sacrifices."

"I'm listening."

"We, the police, bring you a can of soda. And you, the bank robbers, set $20,000 of cash free."

"Six cans of soda. There are six of us. And we're not releasing any money. That's our bargaining chip. We release one human hostage--"

"GOD DAMNIT SHOW US YOU'RE SERIOUS."

"Fine. You bring us six cans of soda, and we'll release $15,000 of cash out the front window."

The police negotiator motioned to several officers standing behind him. They nodded and hurried a six pack of orange soda to the front door of the bank.

The police commissioner pulled the police negotiator aside. "All six?"

The police negotiator: "Trust me."

The lead bad guy dialed the police negotiator. "We got the soda," he said. "One of my men is dropping the sack of $15,000 out the window."

"If any of that money is hurt in any way--"

"Don't worry about it."

Someone threw a sack out the window, into the bushes. Several paramedics rushed over and looked inside.

They called out to the police negotiator, "It's money."

The lead bad guy phoned again. "THIS SODA IS LUKEWARM." In the background was the sound of his men shotgunning human hostages. "IF YOU THINK WE'RE RELEASING ONE MORE BILL AFTER THIS, YOU'RE CRAZY." The police negotiator hung up the phone.

They counted the money. "There's only $14,000 in here!"

The police negotiator dialed the bank. "YOU PLAYED US."

"How do you mean."

"There's only $14,000 in that bag."

"So you figured it out."

"Listen. Stop shotgunning your human hostages for a second." The lead bad guy waved his hand and the shotgunning stopped. "We need you to release another $30,000."

"That's not going to happen," said the lead bad guy.

Knowing that negotiations had reached a stand-still, the police negotiator hung up. The lead bad guy directed his cronies to begin dumping the human corpses out the window so they could have more room to walk around.

"We need to drop a piano on the bank," the police negotiator said.

An officer drove a crane into the bank's parking lot carrying a piano in its big claw. The piano dangled over the bank.

"WE CAN'T DROP A PIANO ON THAT BANK!" said the police commissioner. "THERE'S MONEY IN THERE!"

"Listen," said the police negotiator, "just let me do my job."

The lead bad guy dialed the phone. "You wouldn't drop a piano on this bank with all this money inside! YOU'RE INSANE!"

The police negotiator squinted dramatically. "Watch me."

The piano fell.

The Chris Sartinsky Memoirs: Chapter Twenty-Six: Emptying The House

2010-03-07T14:03:00.003-05:00

Karen sort of stabilized after the auditorium episode. She had enough to worry about—the preparation for her final exams, final papers, and graduation itself kind of swallowed her, or at least it was enough to take her mind off her breakdown for a little while. She didn’t have the time for a complete mental collapse.

In April or so, she got her post-graduation plans all set, and that was a load off. She’d gotten either an unpaid or a poorly-paid internship at the Boston PBS station, I don’t remember the specifics, and she was going to supplement it working at a bookstore. She’d nailed down the two jobs within days of each other. The plan was to spend a year or so doing that while she got her grad school plans and resume together. She was starting work in June. “So I have two weeks after graduation with nothing to do.”

“That’s good?”

“I can do anything. I can see the world.”

“In two weeks?”

“Sure I can.”

“You can’t see half of Massachusetts in two weeks.”

“I can see half of Europe in two weeks. You know how easy those trains are?”

“No.”

“They’re easy.”

“You wouldn’t see any of it though. You’d only be zooming through it.”

“With my eyes closed? I’d see plenty.”

She kept bothering me about going to Europe with her. I finally agreed so she would stop asking--since I knew she had no intention of actually going. It worked—I told her I was excited about going and she called me “insufficiently sincere” and never brought it up again.

She thought I was going to stay in Boston with her that summer, but what I was really doing was going back to Connecticut. This is what I’d been planning all along--I just didn’t know how to break it to her exactly. I even had a job of my own lined up. I mean, it’s not like it was a great job, or a job I couldn’t have weaseled out of, or even a very good job. A friend had helped me land a spot as a ride operator at Lake Compounce Amusement Park in Bristol. So obviously I could have stayed in Boston if I’d really wanted to. But I didn’t. This, I knew, would be hard to explain.

The natural question would be, why was I so set on going back to Connecticut for the summer? It was nothing Boston had done wrong—I loved the city. Did I want to get away from Karen? Maybe, a little. She was exhausting, certainly, if only in the way I find relations with anyone exhausting. I still enjoyed being with her, though, it wasn’t that. If anything, I felt like she was probably getting pretty sick of me, so I ought to give her a break, but that was probably just a way for me to pass the blame to her. So in the final analysis, I’m not sure why I chose Connecticut over Boston that summer. It was probably for the same reason I’ve made so many other decisions in my life—if it wasn’t the best thing, then it was at least the easiest, and I thought dominoes would fall and the decisions would be made for me, even if not necessarily in my favor.

If you put a gun to my head and I had to guess, though, I’d say this: I wanted a few months as a nonperson. That’s what I liked about the summers and the winter breaks and all. I went home for weeks or months and I did nothing—I’d see friends and family once in a while, sure, but most days I’d be at home all day, parents at work, twins out doing things, and on the best days I got to feeling like even I wasn’t there. I’d get to feeling like the empty house. I mean, I had the job, but I would work hard, I told myself, to not make any friends there, to punch in and punch out, get right home and enjoy every second as a nonperson I could. Karen reminded me of my basic humanity. It was a drag.

Karen warned me that I’d have to meet her parents on graduation weekend. “I’d just as soon you not come in contact with them,” she said, “but with all the celebrating it’s probably unavoidable.”

“Why don’t you want me to meet them?”

“I didn’t say that. And anyway, what do you care? It’s not like you want to meet them.”

It was pretty much true, so I changed the subject and asked her if there was anything I should know beforehand. “They’ve adored every boyfriend I’ve ever had,” she said. “But all of them were capable of making eye contact with strangers, so I don’t know where that leaves you.”

Yeah, she knew me pretty well by this point.

A week or two before graduation, she bought her cap and gown from the campus bookstore. The Karen of two months earlier would have stuffed it into the bottom of the closet so she wouldn’t have had to think about it until she had to, and then would have enjoyed the panic of not being able to find it twenty minutes before she had to go. But the new Karen wouldn’t take it off for the first 48 hours. She went everywhere with it—to the laundromat, to restaurants, to bars. Everyone kept congratulating her. It was annoying. I told her they’d throw her in an institution.

“Let them try,” she said. “There’s nothing insane about wanting to celebrate the single tangible achievement of my life.”

“Three weeks ago you were so terrified you wouldn’t leave the room.” It was true; she’d been having all kinds of episodes. In April, she was putting off a paper and I told her to get to it because she needed the class to graduate. Before the word had left my mouth she’d grabbed me by the shirt and thrown me against the wall. My elbow punched a hole right through it; I had to cover the spot with a Dianetics flyer I’d been handed at the Boston Marathon. The hole was almost all the way down the wall, though, and I had to hang the flyer diagonally to cover the whole thing, so it didn’t look very convincing. My R.A. asked about it once so I asked him if he wanted to take a stress test and he never brought it up again.

Anyway, “I’ve come to terms with it,” she said. “It’s time to step forward and be an adult.”

“Remember how you said you were afraid because you were going to fail and all that?”

She dismissed me with a wave of her hand. “Success and failure aren’t binaries,” she said. “They come in degrees, and I’ll succeed enough. I’m educated and smart. I’m already 2/3 of the way there.”

“What’s the other third?”

“They’re not literally thirds,” suddenly annoyed. “You can be obtuse as a rock sometimes.”

“You mean dumb as a rock?”

“I meant obtuse or I wouldn’t have said it.”

The night before graduation, I had the big dinner with her parents. Karen tried to play it cool, but I could tell she was actually pretty excited to have me meet them. Which surprised and unsettled me. Being incapable of sentiment, I couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about.

We went to Legal Seafood. I didn’t object, even though I don’t like any seafood, because getting walked over without objecting was the only way I knew to make anyone like me back then. They had some non-seafood things, but I didn’t want any of them. I asked if they could make me pancakes, and the waiter said he’d check. He served me a plate of cod and told me there’d been a “mix-up.” I ate some fries (which tasted fishy) and the garnish (which wasn’t bad, for garnish).

Karen’s parents were both unbelievably happy people. Everything seemed to tickle them—me, Karen, the food, the silverware—very heavy, they couldn’t believe how heavy it was! I’m making fun, but I actually quite liked them, sort of. And it rubbed off on Karen—she smiled at everything right along with her mom and dad. She was like I’d never seen her before. She was giggling. I’d never heard her giggle before. What she really looked like was like she’d been set free from something—like she was shedding four years of fear and pretense and just overwhelming nausea. She kept looking at me—she wanted me to see all this. She wanted me to see what she could really be like, if society and I would only let her. And maybe she wanted to see if I could do the same thing, too, but it wasn’t in me.

“It’s so nice to finally meet you,” Karen’s mother said a little after we sat down. “We’ve heard so much about you.” My parents had barely heard word one about Karen—she was “some girl I’m seeing.” I’m not even sure they realized “some girl I’m seeing” had been the same girl this whole time. Karen smiled at me. I think she was glad I was figuring out that I was legitimately important to her, and that she hadn’t had to tell me straight out.

“I’ve heard a lot about you two too,” I struggled. “You’re her mother and father.”

“I understand you’re thinking of getting into television?” Karen’s dad asked me.

“What?” I asked, half-panicked, like I’d been accused of something I’d done that I’d thought I was getting away with. “No. No!”

“Yes,” Karen reminded me. And I remembered that it is kind of what I told her—I had told her that maybe I would get a job at a station in Boston, or go back to Connecticut and work at ESPN after graduation. But I hadn’t really meant it. It was just the kind of thing I said to keep people off my back—truthfully, I didn’t know what I wanted to do, although I certainly knew I didn’t want to work in TV. I thought she’d known that, but apparently she’d taken me at my word—and really, I had no reason to believe she wouldn’t. I felt like a fraud and a scumbag just then, and I thought the only way to feel better about myself was to lie bigger and better than I ever had before.

“Oh, yeah,” I said, “TV. I thought you said ‘skiing.’” They all laughed at that. It’s amazing what people will laugh at when they’re trying to like you.

“So what do you want to do in TV?” Karen’s mother asked.

“Excuse me,” I said. I set my straw to the side and downed about half my cup of soda to buy some time while I thought of a convincing story. “Well,” I finally started, and then something went down the wrong pipe and I started coughing horribly for real. “Well,” once everything was cleaned out, “I was thinking maybe about editing. I just think it’s, you know, really gratifying to have all this raw footage and piece it together into a coherent whole. Yeah?” They nodded. “But I figure I’ll just start as a P.A., and learn a trade or two on set, and see what I like doing and what I’m good at.” I couldn’t tell if I was talking really fast or not. “Who knows, though. I may even wind up wanting to produce.” Then I laughed really loudly for some reason. Again, I can’t stress enough how much bullshit this was. But everyone was quite impressed with me.

No matter how much I tried to turn the subject to other things, we kept coming back to me. And as the night wore on, my fake ambitions kept getting grander and grander, and I kept feeling worse and worse. They, on the other hand, were positively glowing. I could have told them I was a Kennedy at this point and they wouldn’t have blinked. I could have told them I had to be at Cape Canaveral in the morning because I was flying on the space shuttle and they would have offered to drive me.

After dinner and an ice cream somewhere and a stroll around Newbury Street (it was a long night and it was like 80 degrees out and muggy as fuck; I was literally panting), Karen’s parents dropped us off at Bay State before heading back to their hotel. The two of us stood on the steps, arm-in-arm, and waved to them as they drove off. It was so hokey I could barely stand it. “They love you,” Karen said, right into my ear. “Mmm hmm,” I said, and I walked inside.

Karen wanted to talk all about it, what I thought of her parents, and what they thought about me, and if I’d had a good time, and all of that. It was weirdly normal, for her. This sounds like a backhanded compliment, but it is not. It was suddenly and unexpectedly wonderful to see her like this, even if that was the opposite reason I’d been going around with her in the first place. To see her unguarded, to see she wasn’t always bracing to be hit or readying herself to hit you all the time was new. It did remind me of home. But I guess I wasn’t ready to face that. I told her I felt sick and pretended to sleep for a good three hours before I finally did drop off. It was the night before her college graduation—she was awake the whole time.

The next morning she literally pushed me out of bed. First thing I felt that morning was my head landing on the hardwood floor. She got all dolled up in this fancy white dress and did her hair and makeup and put on shoes she could barely walk in, then put on her cap and gown over all of it. She was ready to go about two hours before she had to leave—she hadn’t been able to sleep the night before and had driven herself crazy waiting until she couldn’t wait anymore. I threw on some jeans and the same shirt I’d worn two days ago (if I’d worn the same one her parents had seen me in at dinner the night before, you see, they might have caught on). She kept hugging me—I told her it was sweet but she was making it very hard to get ready.

Her parents had been joined by a couple grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. I told them I wouldn’t crowd them and that I’d sit somewhere else—they put up a fight, but ultimately let me go. That whole party headed off for Nickerson Field. I stayed back for a little bit. I just sat at the end of my bed for a while. I still had another year in college, but it didn’t feel that way. I felt like I was running out of everything. I knew Karen wasn’t going to be thrilled when I told her I wasn’t going to be in Boston for the summer. I knew a year is nothing when your plans don’t go any further. I knew three months with a crappy job and no girlfriend around was a step backwards in every way. I knew if I kept sitting there much longer, I was going to be late.

Of course I wanted to be late, and I timed everything so I would be, just a little late, but I walk too fast. I do walk really fast, this is something that’s caused me problems more than once. I noticed that I was going to make it on time after all once I got to the BU Bridge and I tried to slow down, but even then I couldn’t do it.

The big ceremony was at Nickerson Field. It was a beautiful day, bright and sunny and not too hot. In typical BU fashion, the whole thing was a clusterfuck. Signs ostensibly pointing graduating students to the field and families to their bleachers were sending people on nightmarish, circular treks around the school’s West Campus. I saw parents covered in sweat like they’d been wandering around the Gobi Desert with no canteen, little brothers and sisters who could barely stand for hunger and exhaustion, at least one grandmother sobbing like she’d just been widowed. I knew the area (I’d spent a week as a photographer for BU’s student newspaper, during which time I took a couple photos of the men’s soccer team at Nickerson, lost the film, lost the paper’s camera, got fired, changed my phone number so they would stop calling and demanding money and wrote and delivered several threatening pseudonymous letters to various editors and columnists just for the hell of it) so I found a spot on the bleachers quickly. I saw Karen’s family close by and they saw me, so I buried my face in a program and waited for the thing to start.

There was really no reason for me to be there. There were thousands and thousands of people down on the grass—no way in hell I was going to pick Karen out of that crowd. If I’d skipped it she never would have known. There were some honorary degrees and some speeches—I couldn’t remember a word of them as soon as the ceremony ended. I couldn’t tell you who gave the commencement, or if it was any good.

There was a big stage and a couple cameras on cranes, and some huge screens showing videos of all the speakers and kids in the crowd and whatnot. At one point the school’s legitimately evil President Emeritus was droning on—I was drawing a big octopus on an old newspaper—I looked up and saw Karen’s face blown up on the screen. She was sitting there looking up at the podium like this speech was the most interesting thing she’d heard in her life. She was holding hands with some girl I’d never seen before—she didn’t seem to know who Karen was, but she also didn’t seem to mind. And then just like that they cut away to someone else.

I avoided Karen and her family after Nickerson, opting to wait to give my congratulations until after her smaller psych department ceremony, where she’d actually be getting her diploma. I headed right to Morse Auditorium, where they were holding it. Everyone else was still at the field and I was the first one there. I took a nap in one of the seats right up against the wall on the right side, towards the back.

Karen shook me awake. At first I thought I’d missed the whole thing, but I could see people were just filtering in.

“Isn’t it bad luck to see me before you get your diploma?” I asked, still shaking out the cobwebs.

“That’s only if we’re getting married,” she said. “We’re not getting married, are we?”

I thought, oh holy Jesus.

Her family walked in and she waved them over. “Wasn’t it a nice speech?” one of them asked. It could have been a Klan rally for all the attention I’d been paying, but I said, sure was. They all took seats in my section.

It wasn’t long before Karen had to head backstage, and the rest of her family was too excited to pay any attention to me. Good, I thought, I’ll be left alone. But that’s not really how I felt, if I was being honest. I wished I could do whatever Karen was doing, whatever made her so comfortable and happy around these people. I pretended I was another cousin or something and laughed at their dopey inside jokes I didn’t even understand. But then I thought maybe I didn’t want to be like Karen—because what was she the rest of the time? Unhappy or locked up or repressed or whatever—who wanted to be like that? Or, if you were going to be like that, who would want to be like that only some of the time? At least be consistent, so you know what you’re dealing with, so you know what it’s going to be like when you wake up the next morning.

We were treated to a second commencement address by someone in the psych department. I remember one little piece of that—the speaker was some old lady. She started winding down, and she said something like, “It’s the obligation of everyone here to help those who need us,” or something like that, and it annoyed me, because I felt like she was taking a shot at me.

Karen just about leapt out of her seat when they called her name. I missed the rest because I had a (real) sneezing fit just as she was striding up to the head of her department who was waiting with her diploma. I got sshed by someone—no one in Karen’s family. I said, “asshole,” right as Karen was sitting down again, loud enough for people to hear it. I mean, that was the point.

After the ceremony, I was standing around with Karen’s family in the lobby. Karen was still backstage or talking to friends somewhere and for whatever reason I got the awful feeling that I had to go. I told them I was going to get a cup of coffee and I dipped out a side door and I just never went back. I snuck all the way back to my room and started furiously packing. My parents were supposed to drive all my stuff back the next day, but I figured I’d stuff as much of it as I could in a suitcase or two and take a bus back that night and leave the rest of it and hope it would still be there when I got back in September.

I did get a couple suitcases packed, and I could have left. That was the plan, I would have been free. But instead I sat on the bed and decided to wait. I wouldn’t call it a pang of conscience. More of a thirst for confrontation. Maybe Karen would tell me what was wrong with me one last time before I left, that might be of some help.

It was maybe an hour I was sitting there. I heard a car pull up to the brownstone and heard Karen bounding up the steps and down the hall up to my door, where she knocked, even though she had a key (maybe not on her). I opened it, then sat back down on my suitcase real quick.

“Where’d you go?” she asked. She was still happy with me, even though I’d ditched her and her family. She was giving me every break she could. I just told her I’d had to go.

She took off her gown and started collecting stuff around the room, I don’t know, whatever she needed. “We’re going out to dinner, you’re welcome to come,” she told me, “or I can come up with an excuse for you if you don’t want to.”

“I can’t,” I said.

“OK,” she said, totally fine with it (amused, if anything). “It’s just, you know,” she said, tearing around the room half in a frenzy, “I sort of didn’t think of it before. But I’m done.” She pulled a sweatshirt off a shelf and a load of books nearly fell on her, but she somewhat miraculously caught them. “Seventeen fucking years, you know?” She saw the suitcase and stopped. “What’s this?” she said.

“I have to pack,” I said. “I’m leaving tomorrow.”

She looked at me like bloody murder. Boy was I uncomfortable. “Leaving where.”

“Back to Connecticut for the summer.” Six or seven solid seconds. “I told you about this, right?”

“Nope.” She was holding keys in her hand; she let them drop. She stared a fucking hole in me.

“Remember when we were talking about it the other day?” I ventured. She didn’t move a muscle. “I said, ‘I’m spending the summer in Connecticut this summer.’ You said, ‘I know.’” Nothing. “I remember it was raining at the time.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“This is going even worse than I thought it would,” I said out loud.

“Is there a reason you decided to wait until the day of my college graduation to tell me this?”

“No.” I was starting to feel really bad. So after a pause, I said, “you can come to Connecticut with me.”

“I can come to Connecticut with you, that’s what you’re telling me?”

“Sure.”

“I can leave behind my job here in Boston and live at your house for the summer? Is that your plan?”

Hmm, I thought. This feels like it might be a trap. But I said, “yup.”

“You can go kill yourself.” This was neither the first nor the last time someone told me to kill myself, but out of all of them, it’s probably the time that made me feel the queasiest.

She just left then. Bolted out of the room, down the hall, down the stairs, to her car where her parents were waiting. I followed her out, a few yards behind, for my own safety.

She turned around when she got to her car. “You shouldn’t really kill yourself,” she said. “I know you’re stupid enough to take that seriously, even if you aren’t stupid enough to really kill yourself.” She opened the door, then closed it again. Her parents couldn’t hear us (they were blasting some James Taylor song). “But I kind of hope your car flips over and you burn to death or something.” Then she got in the back seat and they drove off.

She gave her parents some excuse for me, which was nice of her. They never had a clue.

After she was gone I sat on the steps for a while. Bay State was pretty quiet, like it always was. Every once in a while you’d see a graduate walk by with their parents, or a jogger with headphones or something. It was like 6 or something like that, really nice night. Boston’s the nicest place in the world in May and when it snows in December; there’s no beating it. A BU grounds guy dropped a big sack of mulch on the sidewalk across the street and it split and spilled everywhere and the guy just walked away. I sat there for a little while longer before I got up and went back inside, but then decided I’d take a walk around the city because I didn’t have anything else to do, it was all packed away.

Either swear or don't

2010-03-02T05:11:00.001-05:00

One day I woke up and went into the kitchen to pour myself a bowl of cereal and I was already sitting at the table eating a bowl of cereal, and I was only fifteen years old. It took me a second to realize there were two of us.

“You look like a wreck,” he said. I told him I had been out drinking the night before.

“By yourself?”

“I don’t think I have to answer that.”

He shook his head and turned on Sportscenter and muttered something under his breath.

“What did you say?”

“I said, nothing.”

***

I got home from work to find me on the computer.

“Hello,” I said. He just grunted. “How long have you been on that computer?”

“I just got on.”

“Listen, I have some important work stuff I need to do, so you’re going to have to get off in a minute.” He stormed off and ran into my bedroom and slammed the door.

I knocked. I asked him what was wrong. “It’s just—” he muttered. “Nothing. Nothing.”

“What are you saying?”

“It’s just—I HAD A REALLY TOUGH DAY AND I JUST WANT TO USE THE COMPUTER FOR LIKE FIVE MINUTES AND I CAN’T, APPARENTLY.”

“Well, I have to do work. You should be hanging out with your friends or doing things after school.” I heard him turning on the TV in my room. I was exhausted. “Besides, you were on it all day.”

“YOU NEVER BELIEVE ME.”

I wondered, what was wrong with me?

He wondered, what happened to me?

*****

“Here. I brought you flowers.”

“Flowers? For me???”

“Do you like them????”

“All my life I’ve wanted someone to give me a nice bowl of flowers. Not for the flowers themselves, you understand, but merely for the symbolism. What they symbolize.”

“The bowl is mine. I’m taking the bowl with me. But you can just keep the flowers in a drawer.”

“Take them. I don’t want them anymore.”

*****

He asked me, so what do I do? I told him I work at a small marketing firm.

“Marketing?”

“I just copyedit their web site. And write a blog post for them every now and then.” He rolled his eyes. “I’m not in marketing.”

“Uh huh.”

“Besides, it’s a good firm. We only take on clients we feel passionately about.”

“Passion, huh.”

“I’m looking for other work. It’s real easy to be an idealistic little roach when you’re 15. When you’re my age? In this economy?”

“I can’t effing wait.” He gave me this big obnoxious grin. I told him he sounded like a fucking idiot when he went out of his way not to swear like that.

***

I told him we can’t both be called Chris. It’s too confusing. Someone says “Chris” and we both say what. There have been all kinds of telephone mix-ups.

“You’re going to need a new name,” I said. “So what’ll it be.”

“How come I’m the one who has to get a new name?” he said. “I’m in school. It would be traumatic.”

“Fine. I’ll be Chris and you can be Other Chris.”

“Why don’t you be Other Chris?”

“Or you can be Young Chris. Or Lil’ Chris. Or you can pick a whole new name altogether. Like Mark. Or Mike. Or Mick.”

“I’m sure you’d love to give me a different name, so you could pretend I don’t exist. That’s it, isn’t it?”

“How does that follow?”

But he didn’t want to hear it anymore and had already stormed out with my wallet and keys.

*****

“Can you write the letter ‘C’?”

…

“Very good! Now can you write your whole name?”

…

“Wonderful! Now can you sign this form granting me power of attorney?”

…

“You’re being very cranky today.”

*****

“I hate myself.”

“You’re only 15.”

“So? So I hate myself.”

I laughed. “You just wait…”

***

I got home from my date at 10:30 on a Friday night. He was there on the couch, watching TV.

“You’re home early,” he said.

“She wasn’t my type,” I shrugged. “She wasn’t very interesting. A law student.”

“Uh huh. She wasn’t interesting.”

I frowned. He was watching some stupid-looking cartoon on Comedy Central. “I guess your friends all decided to spend nice, quiet nights at home too.”

He turned off the TV and gave me a look and locked himself in the bathroom for a while.

*****

“Would you like me to pay attention to you?”

“No.” (but what he’s secretly thinking is YESSSSSS)

“Do or say something worthy of my attention.”

“I am a unique individual. Of the billions alive and the countless more dead, none are like me. Is that not enough?”

(turns on the tv)

*****

I went to pick him up at school one day because he had to stay after and couldn’t catch the bus. He was sitting on a bench in front, talking to a girl who looked older than him. I drove right up but he didn’t see me, so I got out of the car and walked up to them.

I introduced myself. “Peter” (I’d decided his new name would be Peter) looked very nervous around her. He looked nervous when I’d driven up before he’d seen me, and he looked even more nervous now.

“I’ll see you later, Chris,” the girl said to him.

“Seeya” he said real fast and he grabbed his saxophone and ran to the car and threw himself into the seat, practically.

“You should ask her out,” I said pulling out of the lot.

“No,” he sighed. He had his head up against the window and wasn’t looking at me. “She has a boyfriend.”

“So what. You’re in high school. That doesn’t matter at all.”

“Well I just like to have a little respect for her and her choices, since she is a person and all.”

“So ask her and let her say no, if that’s what she’s going to do.”

“What do you care?”

“Maybe if you ask her I’ll see an equivalent improvement in my own life.”

“Is that how it works?”

“It must be. Or I would have kicked you out months ago.”

“Look, just let me handle this MY OWN WAY.” He turned on the radio and cranked up the volume — it was a jazz station, that was all he listened to these days, was jazz.

***

I brought a woman over. I made dinner.

“Who’s that?” she asked.

“Oh, that’s me. But you can call him Peter.”

He made a point of sulking in the living room watching TV all night. She left early.

“She was the worst,” he said.

“She wasn’t so bad,” I said.

“She was boring. She only wanted to talk about herself.”

“That’s true of all people.”

“She took herself too seriously.”

“That’s true of you, more than anyone.”

“She’s sheltered and ignorant. And politically wrong-headed. She blames her failures on circumstance and everyone else’s failures on their own mistakes. She has no sympathy for people who have it worse than she does. She treasures her own pain above everyone else’s. She thinks she is miserable even though she isn’t, because she has no perspective. She wore too much makeup and smelled like the inside of a volleyball. She had a long nose and too many teeth. She was the worst.”

“She is neither no better nor no worse than any other human alive. They are all exactly as you describe them.”

“You only say that because you’re old and sad.”

“Go to bed.”

“No.”

So I went to bed.

*****

“I am going to push you down this staircase.”

“I may die.”

“I’ll bet you $10 you don’t die.”

“But if I win I can’t collect.”

(pushes him down the stairs)

*****

He wondered, what’s wrong with me?

I wondered, what happened to me?

***

I thought, maybe it’s like that movie “Groundhog Day.” Maybe he’s here for a reason. Maybe if I get him to discover true love or whatever we’ll both disappear.

“Are you going to the homecoming dance?” I asked.

“Do you feel at least vaguely stupid for asking that question?”

I did.

On the night of homecoming dance, I jumped him from behind and wrapped him up in an oriental rug and drove him to the school and kicked him out of the car. I told him to go inside and enjoy the dance, and I’d be back to pick him up after it was over.

He showed up at the apartment about an hour later.

“How’d you get back so early?”

“I walked home.”

“You walked home instead of spending a few hours at a school dance with your classmates?”

He walked past me into the kitchen. He grabbed a grape soda out of the fridge and drank it facing away from me. The faucet was dripping; I needed to get that fixed.

*****

“My father has a new girlfriend. She plays xylophones made out of animals’ ribcages, professionally, that’s what she does. She orders them from all across the world, gleaming white musical ribcages She usually plays the cow, because that’s the one people ask for, but she says it’s far from the best — the pig is more versatile; the horse more powerful. The rat is surprisingly lovely. But the most beautiful is the pigeon. She has one pigeon ribcage, it’s so tiny you feel like you’re going to break it just by looking at it. You’d never think you could produce a sound from the bones of some old filthy bird. In fact you can barely hear it. I would describe the sound as pinpricks on your eardrum.”

“And how does it make you feel, that your dad has a new girlfriend?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you subconsciously want to have sex with your mother?”

“Y—no.”

“…”

*****

One day I woke up and went into the kitchen to eat a bowl of cereal with myself and I was already sitting at the table eating a bowl of cereal with myself, and I was fifteen years old and I was forty-five years old. It took me a second to realize there were three of us.

“This kid keeps calling me a ‘hollowed-out old man,’” I said.

“This hollowed-out old man keeps calling me a tax drain,” I replied.

Finally, I’d had enough. I want all of me out of my apartment, I told us. Who says it’s your apartment, they said. I said, of course it’s my apartment, I’m the one who found it, it’s all my stuff that’s in here, it’s my salary that paid the security deposit, it’s my name on the lease. But they said oh no, that’s our name, it’s our stuff, it was us who led you here. Therefore, they said (they were speaking in unison now), it was their apartment, and it was me who had to remove myself from the premises immediately. I said, but where will I go? They said, oh you won’t go anywhere, not without us. You’ll follow us, wherever we are, that’s where you’ll be, we’ll drag you by the nose if we have to, we won’t allow you so much as a second out of our sights. Then they hopped on their broomsticks and flew out the window to commit crimes in my name, and I tried to stop them but as soon as they were out of sight I fell asleep right there in the kitchen right there on the tile and I didn’t wake up until right now — I can hear them in the living room, watching TV, both wishing the other one would go to bed.

Ben and the bird say goodbye

2010-02-19T21:05:00.005-05:00

Ben has a little extra strut in his strut this morning, because it is his last day at work. He imagines everyone will be begging him to stay, but he already knows what he will say when they do. He will laugh, and say, "I've got bigger things brewing, baby." Ben can't wait to use this line. He anticipates using it no fewer than four times today.

It is 8:55. Ben prides himself on being early, even on his last day.

Ben struts up to the front desk. Shelley does not look up from the newspaper she is reading. Ben frowns. After four seconds, he punches the front of the desk as hard as he can. Shelley jumps. Ben grins. He could have broken the desk, if he wanted to.

"It's my last day," Ben says. He raises only his right eyebrow, something he has been practicing for weeks.

"Congratulations," Shelley says. This is all Ben needed to hear.

He starts to walk away. Shelley calls after him: "I bet you're really going to miss that bird."

Ben stops in his tracks. He scowls. He says, quiet enough so Shelley can't hear him, "that stupid bird."

***

Usually Ben goes to his desk first, drops off his bag, and enjoys his customary breakfast: a protein shake, a 5-Hour Energy Drink, and four small bags of trail mix. But today he goes to the bird's habitat first. He knows he has only two more feedings, and then he and the bird will be through.

Ben steps into the habitat and closes the door behind him. "All right, bird brain," he says, "listen here. Today's my last day. So if you scratch me one more time today, I'm really going to let you have it."

The bird leaps off its perch and zooms straight for him. Ben assumes the defensive position. But today the bird does not scratch. It lands on its shoulder. Ben pours seed into its trough. "There's your seed," he says. He adjusts his sweatervest. The bird jumps down and begins eating.

Ben closes the door behind him. He finds a piece of paper on the ground. It is a tax form or something -- Ben does not care, because his name is not in it. He crumples it into a ball, opens the door to the habitat and throws the paper at the bird. It hits the bird right in the head. The bird looks up. Ben closes the door and walks off, laughing and laughing and laughing.

***

It is lunch. Ben eats his customary lunch: a watercress sandwich, a soft pretzel and a piece of pizza. He is finished in seven minutes, and spends the rest of the lunch hour leaning back in his chair, occasionally tipping backwards, catching himself, then grunting and saying to no one in particular, "chair is broken."

Ben is joined by two of his co-workers. One of them asks what he's going to do now that he's leaving. Ben breaks out the line he practiced, then breaks into uproarious laughter. His co-workers couldn't understand, for all the laughing, and the six pieces of Bazooka gum Ben is chewing on.

One of his coworkers asks Ben if his next job is going to involve a bird. Ben frowns. He has not considered what response he would have if he were asked this question. But he is quick on his feet. He tells his coworker to go fuck himself up his own ass. Ben bursts out laughing again.

***

It is 3:00 PM. Ben is rolling a leather office chair out to his car. He feels he is entitled to it. No one is stopping him, because they know the cost of it will simply be deducted from his last paycheck.

Ben goes back inside. Shelley tells him that the bird has gotten out of its habitat again. Ben swears and kicks a potted plant, spilling soil all over the floor. He laughs, even though he knows it will be his job to clean it up later.

He finds the bird in the conference room. It is right in the middle of the big conference table.

Ben rolls up his sleeves. "Get over here, bird," he says, "or else things are about to get real ugly in here." The bird picks at its feathers. It flies over to Ben and lands on his head. Ben is surprised and almost falls. He tries to pull the bird off, but cannot reach in his first two grabs, and becomes tired of trying.

He walks like this, with the bird on his head, back to the habitat. Once they're inside, the bird hops off onto its perch. Ben says "hmph," and walks out.

Shelley is waiting for him in the lobby. "Probably wanted to take a shit in there," Ben explains. Shelley hands him a dustpan and tells him to get to work on that potted plant he kicked over.

***

It is 4:00 PM. Ben will feed the bird for the last time in 45 minutes.

Ben has decided the bird will pay for all the suffering it put him through. He spends 30 minutes scrounging through the alley for an alley cat. His plan is to let the cat in the habitat and watch it eat the bird. If the cat does not go for it right away, Ben will move to plan B: he will kick the bird right in the face. That, Ben thinks, will be great.

He cannot find a cat, though. He falls into a pile of trash. It is only paper, but he swears anyway. "I'm gonna kick that bird right in the kisser," he says as he picks himself up.

Ben's replacement, whom he was meant to train today, finds Ben rooting through trash in the alley. Ben growls at him and the replacement moves off.

***

4:45. Time to feed the bird. It is Ben's last task for the day.

He steps into the habitat. The bird regards him from its perch.

"Here's your food, feathers." Ben says. The bird hops down and begins eating again. Ben could punt it like a football. But he doesn't. "You got lucky today, bird," he says, and he walks off.

Halfway down the hall, he looks back. The bird has stopped eating and is watching Ben go. They stand there for a moment, eyes locked. Ben sneezes. A feather drifts out of his hair. He swears. He gives the bird his two middle fingers and laughs.

***

It is 5:05. Ben congratulates himself on leaving late, even on his last day.

He has a can of paint in the trunk of his car. His plan was to paint his name, "BEN," on the side of the brick building. Everyone, he knows, will think it's an awesome and hilarious prank.

But it is a very hot day and it takes Ben a long time to open the paint can. By the time he finally gets the lid off, he is tired, and he does not want to paint. Instead, he simply dumps the paint in a big puddle in the grass. They'll get the idea, he tells himself.

He drives home. He cranks the radio and begins singing along, as loud as he can. He is halfway through the second chorus before he realizes he is singing "I'm Like A Bird," by Nelly Furtado. He switches the station in horror. He finds a classic rock station, and hears the song "For Your Love" He hums along. After it is over, the DJ tells him he was just listening to the YardBirds. Ben curses and turns off the radio.

He sees a flock of pigeons in the opposite lane. He swerves to run them over. He hits, instead, a parked car. He surveys the damage. He suffered little; the other car quite a bit. Ben is satisfied. He gets back in his car, backs up, intentionally rams the parked car again, then drives off.

***

Ben eats a dinner of heavy pasta at 11:30 PM, like he does every night. He looks outside his apartment window. He sees another flock of birds, this one on the lawn. He frowns. He throws a hard roll at them. They scatter, but then surround the roll and begin eating it. Ben is upset; he wanted that roll for himself.

He goes to sleep and he dreams he's at the Grand Canyon and everyone he knows, his friends, his family, flap their arms and begin flying. But he can't get off the ground, no matter how hard he flaps. Ben wakes up; it is 4 AM. He tosses and turns in bed and finds himself staring at a big sack of seed in the corner of the room. He must have brought it home for work. I'll return it tomorrow, he thinks, and he falls to sleep instantly.

***

But he wakes up again at 5 AM. Someone is pounding on his door. Ben jumps out of bed. He grabs his alarm clock, in case he has to defend himself.

He slowly approaches the door and looks into the peephole. No one is there. They were pounding only a few seconds ago. Is this a trick? A burglar? Ben takes a deep breath and turns the knob and opens the door.

At first he doesn't see anyone there. He must have imagined it -- but he looks down. Standing there on his Superman welcome mat. It's the bird.

"Bird?" Ben says, not sure he trusts what he's seeing. The bird flies at Ben's head, digging its claws into Ben's face. Ben falls backwards and slams into a wall. A mirror falls onto his head and knocks him unconscious.

He will wake up tomorrow at 4 in the afternoon, there in the hall, door wide open, and he will wonder if it was all a dream. He will shake his head out, go into the bathroom to wash his face and find no one in there, but the sink will be filled with feathers.