Me: “Sometimes I wish that I could just pick you up and throw you around.”
Her: “What does that even mean?”
Me: “I’m not sure, but I mean it affectionately.”
Her: “Well, that’s the spirit in which I’m choosing to take it.”
Me: “Good, because that’s the spirit in which I meant it.”
[beat]
Me: “Sometimes I wish I could dunk you like a basketball.”
There is an Elephant Man that I see walking about in my city from time to time. I generally see him in the block directly northeast of our State Capitol. I am curious about him, but not so much that I would talk to him. As shallow as it is to say, he is quite difficult to look at. I would guess that he lives in that area, but maybe he works at the State Capitol – he may be a custodian, or a clerk, or maybe even an elected official. He may work in the Indian Restaurant that is around the corner. When I see him, he is walking slowly, just strolling, like he hasn’t a care in the world. I always cross to the other side of the street. I am always amazed to see the Elephant Man, and I look around me to see if other pedestrians notice him, but there is never anyone else around. The wind chills me and I keep walking.
Please pay heed to this warning. I am going to speak of a subject which may make some readers uncomfortable. The subject in question is the involuntary nature of erections and the stubborn nature of such unwanted phenomena. If you do not wish to read about this as it pertains to an incident in my life this evening, please cease your reading at this time.
It is a well-known fact, at least among men, that an erection is caused when blood flow increases in the penis. What causes this increase in blood flow? Any number of things, actually. Sexual stimulation is but one of the many triggers of this event. A full bladder, for instance, can cause an increased blood flow, as can a bout of gas. Sleeping on one’s stomach is another popular cause. In my case, it seems that circulation increases when I start to become very sleepy.
Flashback: 1992. Spanish class. Third period, right before lunch, long enough for me to have used up any energy I may have absorbed from eating the one donut or english muffin of which my breakfast was typically composed. Combine that with a relatively mundane subject matter presented very dryly, and the result was a number of students nodding off. Falling asleep in class was no limited phenomenon. Indeed, it was widespread, and I was certainly one of the guiltier parties. But it was in Spanish class in particular that I was most susceptible to dozing off in class.
Perhaps it was because my lunch period immediately followed that class, allowing me some time for introspection, but at some point I began observing that I became sleepy in class at the same time every day; and moreover, the nodding off would generally be accompanied by what I started calling a “desk boner” or DB for short. The DB phenomenon would occur when one was sitting at a small desk which would be very narrowly suspended over one’s lap, and in the event of an erection, that already-tight seating space would become impossible to escape from, as the erection would either hook against tubing on the underside of the desk or be pressed very tightly against the desk’s flat underside. Any effort to escape would simply cause more pressure against the erection and thus simply make it stronger. The only way to escape the desk boner was to wait for the thing to go away, often as mysteriously as it appeared.
The DB was not an altogether unpleasant phenomenon; what made me start to categorize them as troublesome was the fact that they were accompanied by a very violent form of nodding off every ten seconds. So not only was I falling asleep in class and having to worry about staying awake, but also my oddly circulating blood was constantly causing my desk to tighten around my genital region. In terms of distractions from one’s lessons, that was a double whammy.
This happened to me with such frequency that I began to track it. I found that it was at approximately 10:33 AM every day that a major DB event would occur, more often than not brought on by nodding off and violently waking over and over. I shared this with a few of my friends, and they were very excited (although, you know, not in that way) to start keeping stats on their own DBs. It was tremendous fun. I recommend this activity to any high school student interested in learning more about human biology. It would no doubt make a fine science project.
I finished high school, and my body started to settle down a bit after puberty, but by no means did the DBs cease; college classes brought them back with an unparalled vigor. It would get so bad that I would sometimes be forced to excuse myself from class briefly and go for a short walk and wait for everything to settle down in that area. The feeling could be described as unpleasant pleasure. It felt good, but the good feeling was an irritant instead of what it should normally be, and only on rare occasions did it inspire sexual thoughts or activity. Of course, I can only speak for myself.
Years have passed, and while I am still affected by DB on a regular basis, it is no longer the daily scourge it had been in my adolescent days. I am enrolled in school once again and there is actually a considerable difference between the way my body behaves now as compared to then.
I was quite surprised then, at what happened on the train ride home from school earlier this evening. I was sitting with my backpack on my lap riding the Evanston Express, which has a tendency to travel fast. When we reached our top speed, the train began rocking, and my bag began bouncing up and down in my lap; thus beginning a curious new phenomenon, “Train Backpack Boner” or TBB. I was nodding off as the train sped along, and barely noticed the bouncing bag or burgeoning TBB.
When we pulled into the terminal, I moved to stand up only to discover that the bouncing bag on my lap had coaxed my TBB through the fly flaps of my practical yet sexy boxer briefs and down into the leg of my gunmetal grey summer shorts. I stood up, and the bulge was obvious. It looked a bit like I had an oblong object in one of my front pockets. In a sense, I did. As I changed trains, I noted how the TBB was very much like a DB except that it was a bit more portable. The fact that my TBB was an open-air variation made it that much more persistent and potentially noticeable. Fortunately, I had opted to carry my backpack by the handle in front of myself rather than put it on my back, which probably looked suspicious but was much better than the alternative. Three stations down the track, it finally went away.
I thought my readers who are unfamiliar with the foibles of male genitalia would find this fascinating, and hopefully the more johnson-savvy members of my readership found something in here with which to empathize as well.
My discussion of this unpleasant matter is now complete. And now, back to the family-friendly programming for which the Lucubus Network has earned renown.
I was on the train tonight, riding home from work, reading a graphic novel called HUMAN TARGET: FINAL CUT by Peter Milligan and Javier Pulido, published by Vertigo/DC Comics; basically, minding my own business. At one station a fellow of approximately age thirty and his friend of similar age boarded the car. The thirtysomething fellow surveyed the scene and casually remarked:
“Lotta fat girls on the train tonight.”
His friend agreed enthusiastically. And you know what? They were right.
Today while I was at work, I was picking up the departmental mail in the mailroom, and a man whom I had never previously seen stopped in front of me and started singing the chorus to Frank Zappa’s “Dancin’ Fool”.
I thought to myself, how could he possibly know?
Today, my friends, is a day that will live in infamy. Did I say infamy? I meant idiocy. I had to decline a lunch date on the steps of the Art Institute of Chicago with a pretty girl because I was obligated to be at my apartment between 11:30 AM and 3:30 PM so that I could let the person from the gas company in to read my meter.
This meter reading had already been rescheduled from one week before, and had I known about the possibility of the lunch date, I would not have chosen this particular day for it to be rescheduled. However, the appointment was set, and I was forced to decline the lunch date, with an eye towards possible lunch dates in the future.
At about noon, the guy from the gas company came. I had fallen asleep on the couch the night before, and therefore was utterly unprepared to let the gas guy in. Fortunately, the gas guy (who turned out to be a gal) merely wanted to get into my basement. I told her that I would meet her around at the back gate. I put on some pants and went to exit my apartment through the back door. However, I was unsuccessful because, in what was to be a harbinger of the stupid day ahead, the doorknob popped right off the door into my hand. It is to this moment resting on my kitchen counter.
So I had to exit through the front door and run around to the back of the building. I did so, and then opened the basement door for the gas gal. We entered and I pointed her in the direction of a wall filled up with meter-y looking fixtures.
“Those are electricity meters,” she said.
We looked around, and seeing no other meters nearby, peered through a locked gate into another section of the basement, presumably used for storage and janitorial purposes, and sure enough, there was another wall of meters.
“I can tell which one is yours,” she said. “It’s the only one there that hasn’t been upgraded.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Yeah, it doesn’t make sense… I can’t figure out why they all weren’t just upgraded at the same time.”
With the meter inaccessible, I walked over to the super’s back door and knocked, to see if perhaps he could get the gas gal at the meter. Alas, there was no answer.
“I guess I’ll have to reschedule,” I told the gas gal.
So, to sum up: declined a date with pretty girl for stupid reason; had stupid encounter with gas company, which was more stupid than was anticipated; must reschedule another stupid encounter for later date which will likely result in declining another date with a pretty girl for what will turn out to be stupid reason.
Gah!
Today, as I sat in the cafeteria eating my lunch, which consisted of a turkey cobb salad wrap (sans bacon ? I’m trying to get healthy, don’t you know), I was overcome by the desire to blow my nose. In fact, it is not at all uncommon for me to desire to blow my nose whilst I am eating, and the slight cold I have had for the last few days simply made the condition more pronounced. I reached for one of the many extra napkins I had appropriated while in line for the cash register ? I am in the habit of obtaining extra napkins for exactly this purpose ? and proceeded to blow my nose into it. As I did so, a young man with long hair appeared in front of me, and asked for my attention.
It is not common for nasal discharge to make a noise on its own, after it has actually been blown out of the nasal passages, that is. As I looked up at the man, however, there was an audible snap as a clingy boogery mass reluctantly broke away from the inside of my right nostril and found a new home in the brown paper napkin. The young man stared at me briefly, blinked his eyes, and, smiling slightly, began his presentation.
The presentation consisted of him asking me whether I would be interested in viewing a trailer for a new Matthew Perry/Elizabeth Hurley (or was it Elizabeth Berkley?) movie and participating in valuable marketing research. But that part of the story is not very interesting. I just wanted to share the bit about the booger, and the young man’s impressive lack of reaction to it, despite having clearly seen it, and heard it, in all its boogery glory.
Because, you see, I am gross.
Apologies for being behind on the updating. I have been extraordinarily busy with various real-world concerns, such as washing my hair.
On Sunday nights I take the train home from work, and while doing so tonight I ended up, by chance, sharing the train ride with a pretty girl who works in my office. She got on the train one stop south of me, and by that time I already had my nose buried in David Brock’s Blinded by the Right which I bought this past week at the comic book store (although, as I discovered, it is not a comic book at all!), and if she had not said my name (Lucas) I may not have ever noticed she was sitting there, one seat over.
So, instead of reading about a man’s journey from liberal social values to neoconservative propagandizing and back again, I had a nice conversation with a person whom I did not know very well. As it turned out, she was getting off the train one stop south of my stop, so we talked the whole time, about such subjects as college majors, getting into classes, putting off writing papers until the last minute, things that every college student can relate to. Her boyfriend, as it turned out, majored in the same thing I did when I was an undergrad twenty years ago, so I briefly walked down memory lane in that regard. All told, it was a fine conversation, considering how awkward train conversations can sometimes be.
It seems wholly unremarkable. But consider this: as we continued to speak I became increasingly aware that an extremely long hair was plummeting in and out of my right nostril with every nasal breath I took. I could feel its boogery wispiness dancing against my upper lip, and it required focused concentration to avoid drawing attention to it by doing something obvious such as swatting it away or batting at it as a kitten would a strand of yarn, or, with my index finger, shoving it back up into my nose, where the other, shorter hairs just might grab it and prevent its return. I did my best to ignore it and continued with the conversation.
If she noticed, she did not let on; and really, I do not care whether she did or not. Perhaps if she did, it would make the conversation that much more memorable. I know it will be memorable for me, as every time a long nose hair brushes against my lip, or tongue, or chin, or sternum, or what-have-you, I will remember this conversation.
And I will repeatedly remember this conversation.
Because I am cursed.
On Friday afternoon, I was taking a leisurely stroll through my neighborhood, en route to hang out with my pal Sam. Springtime weather finally had Chicago’s testicles in its seasonably warm grip, and so, with my cool sunglasses on and my billowy black hair tied in a fashionable “pony-tail”, I casually strode along the sidewalks of quiet city blocks, delighted to be outside on such a lovely day.
Three blocks south of my apartment, I noticed that up ahead there was a girl standing outside an apartment building, presumably having just pressed the buzzer. Such a thing in my neighborhood is so regular and unremarkable that I had already forgotten about it by the time I reached the other end of the block, where she was still standing. As I passed her, she spoke suddenly:
“Did you see who did that?”
“Did what?” I said, turning to face her. The answer was self-evident once I did so, because the entire upper half of her person, as well as part of the door she was standing in front of, were covered in the remnants of one or two or three eggs. Judging from the points of impact, it seemed likely that the eggs were hurled from far away rather than dropped from above.
“Hurled an egg at me. Did you see it?” she asked, obviously not having overheard my internal monologue.
“No, I didn’t. How long ago did it happen?”
“About twenty seconds ago.”
Holy smokes! I thought. If I hadn’t been lost in thought while meandering down this block, I would have been a witness to this girl being pelted by an egg! Actually, it then occurred to me, if I had been walking at a brisker clip, it may have been me who would be wearing the egg entrails.
“Jesus!” I said. “So you were just standing here, and suddenly you get hit with an egg?”
“Yeah,” she replied. “I have absolutely no idea where it came from, either.”
Neither did I. A passing car? An apartment building across the way? An invisible pedestrian? Could *I* have done it? Had I been brainwashed by the government into becoming some sort of subliminally-influenced assassin, with this egg-hucking incident being one of the final trials of their hypnosis technique before they finally send me in to take out Tony Blair?
“This fucking sucks,” she summed up.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“It’s not your fault,” she replied.
With that, a buzz came from the door of the building, and she bid me farewell as she pushed her way inside. I had no idea who she was there to see, but I immediately imagined a scenario wherein she arrives at the apartment covered in egg, and a concerned boyfriend asks her what on earth happened; then, she takes him aside and yells that if he had his pants on already when she got there, none of this ever would have happened.
Every morning, I awaken at approximately 7:05 AM to the extremely loud voices of Mancow and his cohorts on Q101. At approximately 7:05 AM plus ten seconds or less, my fist comes slamming down on that snooze bar with a force that even Thor wielding his mighty Mjolnir could not rival. In general, at this point, I return to sleep, only to repeat the process every ten minutes until I am late for work.
This particular morning, however, my last-minute fits of slumber were interrupted. As I hit the snooze button and lay back down, I heard loud thumping on the floor above me. And more thumping. And some crashing. And a female voice, screaming at the top of her lungs in a very high pitch, “I HATE YOU! YOU ASSHOLE!”. Other things were screamed as well, but that is the only line that I am comfortable quoting. I heard a muffled male voice yelling, but as his voice was deeper it was much more difficult to make out the details. In any event, it appeared that the woman upstairs was not yelling at me, which brought me no small amount of relief.
The thumping continued, and my cat walked over and stood on my chest, his face pointed upwards and his ears wiggling as they followed the source of the sounds. He looked down to me as if to say, “Certainly somebody up there is tearing shit up.” I could not help but agree with him. Soon my alarm went off again, and once again there was Mancow doing his little right-wing radio thing, and once again there was my hand very nearly splitting the alarm clock in twain. The thumping had suddenly stopped. As I am apt to do in the mornings, I promptly forgot about the altercation. (My brain does not work well in the mornings. My clock is set fifteen minutes ahead of the real time, and in the morning I am dazed enough to believe it is the correct time. This is good, because it means I haul my ass out of bed, on average, about fifteen minutes earlier. It is bad because sometimes I forget completely how to work the alarm clock and end up staring at it for thirty seconds, trying to figure out which button to push, and instead of picking the snooze bar, I wrongly choose the button that will turn the alarm off completely.) I returned to my slumber, and dreamed pleasant dreams in which my cat was not standing on my chest.
Today at work, my recollection of these events slowly returned. I wondered if anyone had been injured. I probably would have left for work before any ambulance or police arrived, and they would be long gone by the time I got home. I resigned myself to never knowing for sure. The only indication that both tenants of that apartment are still alive and well is that both of their names remain on their mailbox. That’s not too much to go on in this harsh, crazy world.
But, dammit, it’s all I’ve got.
My jury service ended yesterday. The nature of the case was medical malpractice against two defendants. After being presented with day after day of evidence from all three attorneys, the jury had all pretty much made up our minds by the time we were to begin deliberations. I thought it would be insensitive to annonce the verdict after only thirty minutes, so we managed to talk about it for another hour. In the end, we found for the defendants and against the plaintiff. The judge invited the jury to stay and talk to the lawyers afterwards, because we might have questions, and because sometimes the lawyers would like feedback from us as to what was effective and what was not. Several of the jury grouped around the three lawyers — who were at least well-acquainted colleagues, if not friends — and started to ask them various questions. In the course of this, I learned that the plaintiff had sued another doctor over this incident in a different trial and had won, so I did not feel too badly about finding for the doctors.
Then, I just sort of wandered away. I didn’t really have any questions, nor did I have anything particularly insightful to say as to criticism of performance, so I floated away from the crowd and I stared out that twenty-second story window one more time before I descended to ground level, hopped on the subway, and raced back toward my life of relative drabness — relative to the giant crowds and giant buildings and giant money of downtown Chicago, at any rate. I was to return to my job and resume performing my assigned occupational duties. But the experience reawakened in me a desire to do something more. That is why I want to take the GRE. That is why I have been tearing my hair out looking at the academic programs and application procedures of design schools all over the United States. That is not why I have been playing a lot of SimCity in the past few days, but not everything has a tidy explanation.
I believe it is safe to say that now, more than ever, I am standing squarely at the crossroads of life. Or, at the very least, I am sitting on the couch of indecision.
They’re keeping this quiet. I’m blowing the lid off.
1. The jury selection process is a lot like “The Price Is Right”.
It’s true. In the morning, our potential jurors assemble in the waiting area and become the “studio audience”, if you will. Gradually, jurors assigned a particular panel number are asked to “come on down”, at which point they are led to a courtroom. As there are twenty-four to a panel, or something like that, once they are in the courtroom, twelve names are arbitrarily chosen once again to “come on down” and sit in the jury box. Then, the judge and attorneys ask you to “identify the price of an item up for bid”. If you “come closest to the correct price without going over”, you stay and be a juror. Otherwise you are sent home, your fifteen seconds of fame fading fast from the collective memory. Another interpretation is that those who “guess the price most accurately without going over” get to go “spin the wheel” in the judge’s chambers, where they are often dismissed, which is the “top prize”. The losers must remain in the jury box for weeks on end. Trust me, it will all make sense once you do it. As a result of this observation, I have had the “Price Is Right” theme song running through my head for the past several days. I can think of worse fates.
2. Court stenographers are routinely hot.
By and large, based on my personal experiences, this assessment is accurate. All of the stenographers so far (there have been two per day) have been women, and of these approximately ninety percent of them have been very attractive, and the one that wasn’t I largely ascribed to the unfortunate mullet-based hairstyle she wore. Nonetheless, there is a certain luminescence they present, almost mystical in nature. It’s not that they radiate light, but they reflect the light in a skillful and aesthetically pleasing way. I had the pleasure of sharing an elevator ride with one of them, and let me tell you, those fingers can do more than type two hundred fifty words a minute. They can also press elevator buttons.
Late this afternoon, while I was taking my lunch, a meal which I generally enjoy late in the day, I witnessed a curious example of customer service. Those of you who know me well know that I am employed at the circulation desk at the library of an academic institution, and one of my duties is to assist patrons as necessary, so it should come as no surprise that I always try to note with interest any unusual or innovative methods of dealing with customers.
Anywho, there I was at the Burger King, placing my order for a Double Cheeseburger and a Chicken Tenders Sandwich with a medium Coke, and as I was waiting for the hard-working chefs in back to fill my order, a portly fellow in a beige jacket and glasses came up to the counter with a large grocery bag. He set the bag on the counter and began describing to the cashier on duty that he had bought a large quantity of french toast sticks that morning and had not had the opportunity to eat them. The cashier watched him as he rooted through his large plastic grocery bag and pulled out what seemed to be an impossible number of cardstock containers full of french toast sticks and set them on the counter. The portly man stacked the boxes and slid them across to the cashier, who stared at them, confused as to how he could help this man. Was he returning them? Did he want a refund? Did he want new ones? What was the deal? After a few awkward seconds, the customer finally offered what he wanted, which was for all five hundred of the french toast sticks to be reheated.
Now, if I had been the cashier, I would have laughed in his face, or possibly pointed out that the french toast sticks were at least six hours old and were probably bad, but this cashier picked them up and set them on the counter behind him for the cooks in the back to heat up, as if this were a common request. I stood there gaping in mild disbelief, and as the cute female cook in the back scooped up the french toast sticks to reheat them, she gave me a knowing look, shaking her head and rolling her eyes.
The fast food industry is not renowned for its variety of services available to customers, but let us now praise the Burger King cashier for going above and beyond in the face of an eccentric middle-aged nerd, and let us praise the cute brunette in the kitchen for her facial expressions. Cheers up to your ears!
Happy birthday, Dad!
And the rest of you: I don’t have time to talk to you. I’m working on my novel. The working title is Splop! It used to be What Up Slut, and before that it was Bathfarter. Don’t steal my ideas, I may yet use them.
I went to the Redmoon Halloween Festival Thingy down in Logan Square tonight, which was full of all sorts of spiritual hippy-dippy new age pagan bullshit and all very interesting. I had to take two train lines to get to Logan Square.
The following exchange took place on the Red Line:
———
DUDE IN VAMPIRE MAKEUP enters car.
LOUD CHICK: Man, what the fuck you s’posed to be?
DUDE IN VAMPIRE MAKEUP: Look at me. I have the fangs, the white makeup, the fake blood trickling from my mouth… what do think I am?
LOUD CHICK: Fuck. Shit.
DUDE IN VAMPIRE MAKEUP shrugs and sits quietly.
LOUD CHICK plays with what appears to be a small Nerf ball.
Moments pass.
LOUD CHICK: You wanna start with me? You wanna start with me? I’ll fuck you up! I’ll fuck you!
DUDE IN VAMPIRE MAKEUP: Lady, I didn’t start nothing. You talked to me, remember?
LOUD CHICK: I ‘member you’s bein’ a smartass’s what I remember, mother fucker! I’ll fuck you up!
DUDE IN VAMPIRE MAKEUP: Jesus. Whatever, lady.
DUDE IN VAMPIRE MAKEUP gets up, starts walking to other end of car.
LOUD CHICK: Mother fucker! Don’t start with me! Come on! Come back here and I’ll fuck you up!
DUDE IN VAMPIRE MAKEUP: Look, bitch, leave me alone, okay? I didn’t say nothing!
LOUD CHICK: Oh, you fucked! You fucked now cause my man with me!
LOUD CHICK’S LOUD MAN is sitting near the opposite end of the car, where DUDE IN VAMPIRE MAKEUP is standing.
LOUD CHICK’S LOUD MAN: Hey, asshole! No one calls her “bitch” but me, mother fucker! Let’s go! I’ll fuck you up!
LOUD CHICK: I don’t need your help, I’ll fuck him up!
LOUD CHICK’S LOUD MAN: No no no, I’ll fuck him up! Ha ha, bitch, you thought it was just her you were dealing with, but now you’re fuckin’ with me! Mother fucker, one of us gonna be going to jail, and the other gonna go to the hospital! I’m gonna be the one goes to jail, fucker! You goin’a the hospital!
DUDE IN VAMPIRE MAKEUP: Whatever.
LOUD CHICK: I’ll fuck him up!
LOUD CHICK’S LOUD MAN: No you won’t! You ain’t goin’ to jail – I’m going to jail, he’s going to the hospital! You better get off at the next station, mother fucker!
LOUD CHICK and LOUD CHICK’S LOUD MAN are still seated in opposite ends of the car. They have barely moved, except to yell back and forth.
The train pulls into the next station.
LOUD CHICK: Get off the train, faggot ass faggot! Faggot ass faggot! Fuck with me? Fuck with me? Faggot ass faggot!
DUDE IN VAMPIRE MAKEUP: Fuck you, lady.
DUDE IN VAMPIRE MAKEUP gets off the train, walks down platform shaking his head.
Train pulls out of station.
LOUD CHICK continues playing with ball, drops it. It rolls to the other end of the car. LOUD CHICK’S LOUD MAN ignores it as it rolls past.
LOUD CHICK: Bitch! Bitch pick up the ball!
ME: No hablo ingles?
———
The following exchange took place on the Blue Line:
———
TWO GUYS rush into a crowded train right before the doors close.
GUY 1: Yo, sit here! Let’s just sit here!
GUY 2 exits to the next car. GUY 1 follows.
GUY 1 and GUY 2 re-enter the car.
GUY 1: Sit here, and I’ll sit over here! Shit! Fine.
GUY 1 and GUY 2 sit down in seats across the aisle from one another. GUY 2 falls onto the seat and lands partially on top of an older woman with short hair seated there, reading a copy of the Chicago Sun-Times.
GUY 2: Oh, sorry sir, I didn’t see you sitting there.
GUY 1: Shit! Watch where you’re sitting!
GUY 2: Shit! Ha ha!
The train does not pull out of the station. The doors reopen. A brief pause.
A POLICEWOMAN is standing outside of the doors, looking in at the two GUYS.
POLICEWOMAN: You two be nice.
GUY 2: What?
The doors close and the train pulls away.
GUY 1: She said be nice.
GUY 2: What?
GUY 1: Bitch said be nice, fool!
GUY 2: Be nice? Shit! Ha ha!
GUY 1 pulls out a tiny joint, lights it, and starts smoking it.
GUY 2 takes a tallboy can of beer, still in the brown paper bag, out of his pocket, drinks from it.
GUY 1: Ha ha!
GUY 2: Shit.
GUY 1 gives the joint to GUY 2. GUY 2 gives the beer to GUY 1. They trade them back and forth.
GIRL WITH LIGHTS and GIRL WITH MEDUSA HAIR enter train. GIRL WITH LIGHTS is wearing all black with small white lights all over her outfit. GIRL WITH MEDUSA HAIR has Medusa hair.
GUY 1: Shit, look at you!
GUY 2: Shit.
GUY 1: You a Christmas tree?
GIRL WITH LIGHTS: No.
GUY 1: You a Christmas tree. Shit.
GIRL WITH LIGHTS: No, I’m the starry night sky! You’d have to see me out in the night. I look like stars!
GIRL WITH MEDUSA HAIR: Ha ha! Yeah!
GUY 1: [something lewd which I could not quite make out]
GIRL WITH LIGHTS: Ew. See, I was trying to be nice to you, but then you had to go and be gross.
GUY 2: Shit.
GUY 1: Shit.
GUY 2: Shit.
GIRL WITH MEDUSA HAIR: Yeah!
ME: Kill me.
———
Happily, no one did, and all is well.
One
On the train today, a fiftyish gentleman dressed in striped shorts and a loose fitting tanktop entered my car. The tanktop was loose enough that it was all bunched up in front, leaving one of his nipples exposed. He was not a chubby man, but he was just flabby enough to give his breast a feminine appearance. He sat there, oblivious of his dangling man-boob. He got off at the very next station, approximately five blocks north of the station at which he entered. As he stepped off the train I noticed he was wearing sandals and red socks.
Two
Last night I watched the movie “Hardcore” on a cable channel. “Hardcore” is the story of a man’s quest to find his daughter, who has disappeared into the seedy SoCal world of strip clubs and porno movies. I watched it with some nostalgia, because, if my memory is accurate, “Hardcore” was the first nudity-laden movie I ever saw. Of course, back then (maybe seventh grade?), I could only barely understand the plot, and most of the innuendo went over my head. Last night I noticed that sure, there was lots of nudity, but none of it was glamorous. It was all very seedy and stark and absolutely unerotic – no doubt the filmmaker’s attempts to recreate faithfully that world. But my memories of it as tittilating erotica were undercut even more by the now-noticed presence of three established actors: George C. Scott, in the starring role as the man looking for his daughter; Dick Sargent; and Peter Boyle. PETER FUCKING BOYLE is tied to my first taboo-movie-watching experience. It’s no wonder I’m sort of screwed up. Thank god I saw “Hardbodies” not too long after, or else I’d be scarred for life.
Three
Some of you may have noticed that the posts here, while occurring with greater frequency than in the past, have gone slightly downhill in quality. This is because the *quality* posts will continue to appear at a normal rate, and everything else is just filler so that I can justify referring to this as a daily weblog. So this is filler. And this. And this. And this. And this. And this. And this. And this. And this. And this. And this. And this. And this. And this. And this. And this. And this. And this. And this. And this. And this. And this. And this. And this. And this. And this. And this. And this. And this. And this. And this. And this. And this. And this. And this. And this. And this. And this. And for some reason I just typed all those out instead of just cutting and pasting them.