TWENTY TWENTY HINDSIGHT

My ten-year high school reunion is next summer and I’m preparing a little toast for the occasion.  I wonder if there’s a time limit….

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As most of you know, I was a prodigiously well-behaved student.  There were a few exceptions, like the time in Mrs. LaTorre’s fifth grade class when I led you, my classmates, in a spirited chorus of Kill LaWhore! Kill LaWhore! from my post atop the jungle gym.  You followed my command as if I weren’t just your classmate but a sixth grader or even a hall monitor.  I was subsequently forced to get a Behavior Book, wherein Mrs. LaTorre marked my behavior each afternoon with a smiley face on a good day, a middle finger on a bad one.  I then had to take this book to Mazog and Pazog, both of whom agreed that LaWhore was an appropriate term and that the bitch should stop stifling my creative expression. The disgrace of the Behavior Book was exacerbated every afternoon when Mrs. LaTorre announced, Will Katie Herzog, the only fifth grader who needs a Behavior Book, please come to my desk so I can see if Mazog and Pazog signed aforementioned Behavior Book, which burned my eyes like that time Scott Williams jumped me from the slide and threw his jock strap over my head. (Heard about those child pornography charges, Scott.  God damn, that makes me feel like I can predict the future.)

But, still, I was a pretty good kid.  I got kicked off of a few athletic teams (Hey there, Coach Barnes!  I can see that gin blossom from here!) and was suspended for selling hemp necklaces to those of you who  spent your Taco Bell wages on tickets to Phish shows because Principal O’Neal (RIP) didn’t believe me when I said, Look, brah.  You’d have to smoke a doobs the size of a telephone pole to get babycakes off this shit. You dig? Oh, and there was the ninth grade talent show when my band Broken Hearts, Broken Hymons, a dub project influenced by early Billy Joel and psychotropics, was booed off stage after the opening lines of our single, Ain’t no Jesus/ Ain’t no God/ Wasting time on a creepy fraud, to the tune of “Jesus Loves Me.”  Remember that?  Throwing hymnals through my drum set?  I forgive you.  But I never got pregnant by the resource officer (I’m talking to you, Brandy Simon! Hey, girl!) so I consider myself somewhat of a behavioral blue ribbon.  I also learned a lot, like the definition of “frigid.”  But mostly, I learned about myself.

As most of you know, I wasn’t exactly prom king Troy Bolton at Smoky Mountain High School, but you generally knew who I was—it was to hard to miss a girl with three dreadlocks tied in knots on the top of her head, wasn’t it?  And even though I frequently ate my vegan bologna sandos while dodging the tater tots landing atop my head (Hey, Dan Stevens!  How’s the wife?  She left you?  Oops.  My bad.), I like to think of Smoky Mountain High as a place of backwoods enlightenment.  We didn’t have a gay/straight alliance or a PFLAG chapter, but we did have a show choir, which is basically the same thing.  There were a few less progressive school traditions, like Christian Heritage Week—five days around that big Jesus holiday in April when the student president of Christians for a United National Theocracy (CUNT) read a prayer or fun fact about Christianity (i.e. Jesus said brown people like their chains!) during morning announcements, which, much to the regret of my inner cheerleader, quickly ceased after my parents called the ACLU.  (So sorry, Annie Tops.  I know you loved speaking into that mic.)

But the really incredible thing about Smoky Mountain High was that you, my classmates, knew me before I knew myself.  Whether I was shooting free throws in my Umbros or auditioning for the sophomore musical with an acapella version of “My Lover”, you guys were always trying to break down that closet door for me.  Unlike you, I had no idea that I was lesbanese until college, when I had the light bulb realization that I was junk-struck for Catherine Keener while watching Being John Malkcovich with my first and only boyfriend, who later changed his name to Christy and bought a wonderful set of mammaries.  This first love also indicated that I’m into power suits and somewhat of a bottom, but it took a few more years for that memo to penetrate the gray matter.

There I was, happily living as a high school Heather Mattarazo with my posse of weed-smoking, softball-playing, ani-loving friends; discussing that Tracy Chapman song about rape on the Boys Don’t Cry soundtrack and wondering why none of the guys in Students Teaching AIDS Research (STAR) ever asked us out.  It was a total mystery—not just that the Vice President of STAR who waxed his eyebrows never called me back (Congrats on the Asian babies, Donnie Nickels! And those abs!), but all of it….  Why did you call me a dyke, Jamie Taylor, when I held my best friend’s hand on the way to Algebra II?  We were best friends.  It’s not like we played footsie under the cafeteria table that often.

But now—inevitably and undeniably gayelle at 28 physical and 19 emotional years old—I want to publically thank Joe Hart, Kyle Ross, Thomas Blakley Jr., and everyone else who saw beneath my bio-ween-loving facade.  You knew that the only thing keeping romantic fulfillment beyond my unmanicured fingertips was a lack of self-awareness.  It was you, Megan Overton, and you, Anne Nelson, and you, Bitsy Matthews—with your homophobic slurs and your poofy bangs and short shorts—who forced me to see the truth.  You made me look into my heart and my erogenous zones (Neck and ears by the way.  And who doesn’t love a good back rub?) to see the truth, the truthiest truth, that I am not like you, Jenny McDonald.  I didn’t actually want to go the prom with you, Dylan Hendrix.  I didn’t want to make-out the in the back your parent’s Corrolla, Alex Knight, and was relieved to find that stick-shift really gets in the way of heaving petting.  No, what I wanted was Catherine Keener.  Catherine Keener and blanket space at Lilith Fair and the knowledge that I, a womyn-loving-woman, could return to my alma mater one day.  Return to you, with your dead marriages and the children that you don’t really love, hand-in-hand with my beautiful partner whose name happens to also be Katie, and thank you, Smoky Mountain High Class of 2000, for making all of this possible.

This might not make any sense if we don’t share alleles, but I was at a family reunion last weekend and my grandmother commissioned me to write this, though I would have anyway.

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Reunion

Our family reunion is not like your family reunion.  It’s not an afternoon at a park where people wear nametags and talk genealogy.  There’s no mini golf or badminton.  If there are introductions, it is not to a distant cousin but to an aunt or a brother no one has seen in decades; to a grown nephew who sees more of himself in this family, his blood family, than in the one that raised him; to a quiet infant, content to chew her fist and watch these people who share her DNA , who will influence the course of her life through their presence or their absence.

This is not an annual event, nor semi-annual, nor even inevitable.  The last time my aunts and uncles were in the same room was exactly 35 years ago, the day my parents wed.  If we were your family, we might take out old photo albums and talk abut how young everyone looked, about the fashions that have gone out of style and come back and faded again, about all that has changed.  But because we are not your family, because we are my family, no one brought a camera to that wedding 35 years ago.  The only surviving artifacts are one framed Instamatic photo and a drawing crayoned by the mother of the bride, the cartoon wedding cake the same size as her youngest son.  And the marriage.  The marriage survives.

The family has expanded.  There are so many grandchildren and cousins and nieces and nephews and husbands and wives that when I try to count the number of my relatives, moving in my head from the Northeast through the South and the Midwest, I lose track somewhere around Colorado.  The family has gotten smaller as well, through death, yes, but also through a gradual waning.  The missing aunt, the absent uncle, the sons and daughters who don’t call —all have lives and families somewhere else, not so distant in space, yet invisible.  We are here now, some of us meeting for the first time.

It has been thirty-five years and here we are, full of food and blood and drink and stories.  It starts with a toast to the Pope, who prescribed our existence.  What would this family be if not for the Pope?  Smaller, surely, easier, quieter, with fewer disability, less tragedy.  But we would also be without the good, the flawed, the beautiful—the brother whose body failed him from the very beginning, but who didn’t complain, not ever, despite the pain and the transplants and the crutches and the wheelchair.  When the siblings rented out their lawn to visitors of the race track down the street, this brother stood outside the nearby cerebral palsy center with free parking and waved drivers into the children’s costly lot, crutches aloft.  This brother exists now in the Atlantic and the Appalachians, in Yankee Stadium and on his sister’s bookshelf and everywhere people live with courage and dignity and humor.

Things have changed these 35 years.  The Pope, not just our maker, but their leader, is now their past.  Girls who once walked to school veiled in white, hands in prayer, hail Marys on their lips, left the church long ago.  To their children, my generation, the Pope is a just a man in a silly hat and a bullet proof box, the church just a building with pretty windows and closed doors.  Even our octogenarian matriarch—a woman who has settled into a graceful ease while remaining autonomous, a woman who went down south to work for Obama because that is where she needed to be—no longer has the patience for the distant figures who once ruled so much of her life, preferring instead to create her own sense of what is real and what is right.

Like her, the women of this family are strong, and independent, and willing to forgive.  For this one weekend, the sisters don’t hear family news through a conduit, from this sister telling that sister about another’s kids or troubles.  This weekend they tell each other about their lives and tell the rest of us about their past.  We are grown enough not to be shocked by hearing about our mothers smoking marijuana with our grandmother, who first said that she didn’t feel anything and then asked where she could buy a pack.  We are amused and grateful that this is who we come from.

This is our blood and we, the children and grandchildren, need little explanation for the little dramas and larger faults of our family, but you can see that we are not quite typical, that we are exhausting and over-whelming and just plain too much through those who married into this family.  They have their own subtle methods of surviving.  One husband organizes, another rocks his child, another disappears to a makeshift kitchen, away from his wife’s people and our voices endlessly carrying over each other.  These men raised children who are strong and imperfect because they married women who are strong and imperfect, full of conflict and forgiveness.

Everyone is leaving soon, off to our different dots on the map.  If we were your family, we might make tee-shirts or mugs commemorating the occasion, say our goodbyes and promise to call.  We might trust that we will all be in the same room next Christmas or the one after that.  But we are not your family.  We are my family.  And although we may not see each other before there are more or fewer of us—at the next wedding or funeral, after the next divorce or birth—we will see each other again.  We will listen to the old stories and tell new ones and thank both our good luck and the Pope to have been born to this family.

The following messausage is not a joke. I know exactly what 919 is referring to, although I’ve been trying to stay away from infested vagines lately so I think I’ma pass.
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The vagina has become infested with ants. Ironically, her womb is filled with tiny antlings. Her legacy is transforming from iPod to insect. You are more than welcome to come bathe her if she is important to you. I’m just not a good enough friend. You can use the downstairs bathroom.

If you’ve read this blog for longer than the life expectancy of a hummingbird, you’ve probably caught on that I’m a little (a lot) damaged from a nasty break two years ago with the only girlfriend who was fool enough to be my girlfriend, A—. I’m not all that heart-pained that we split after four mostly good years, but the way it went down wasn’t so many monkeys-in-a-barrel. Given our mutual genetic aversion to that sebaceous fourth-state-of-matter that dudes spit on the regs, it’s not surprising that shit went down hard when we finally split. In the long herstory of dykedom, has any gayelle break up been easy? Never. Someone always ends up with a restraining order. Still, the break was necessary for my development as a human being rich in experience (i.e. kind of a slut). We got together when I was a wee 20-year-old, although, in true gayelle fashion, we looked enough alike for me to use her ID so it’s more like we were 23-year-old twins. Four years later, it was time to split our wordly goods.

I’ve told the break up story so many times that even thinking the words “And then she punched me. At work. On my third day,” makes my adult ADD heat up a few degrees and I want to rip library books off the shelves cause I’d rather get in-school-suspension than rehash that shit, so if you want the details go through the archives and look for key phrases like, “month-long blackout,” and “I would rather have Hellen Keller-like disabilities than go through that shit again.”

So I hadn’t fully recovered from what happened, mostly because I have an elephant-sized amount of grief over the truly uncharitable things I did in the last few months of our girlfriend/girlfriend soap opera (see John Gosselin for an example). When I first left and moved across this gray nation to wee Carrboro, NC (population: 17,931), I was too busy being the new heavy-drinking gay on the block to think much about what had happened. Now, however, I am anything but the new gay on the block and I don’t really drink much, which means I can’t avoid the truthful truth that I did some real bad shit and hurt my gf/bff’s feelings hard. It’s not very cloud pillow to dream that the only girlfriend who was fool enough to be my girlfriend is leaving flowers on my grave before I have a chance to be like, “What up, boo? Love you, mean it!”

And now, closure. Yes, it’s almost as offensive a term as herstory (see above), but I mean it. Here’s what happened—I went to Station with New Friend/Future Lover last night. When we walked in, this bearded dude was peeping me hard. Normally this brings out the steeltoes in me. I was about to get all I’MA CUTCHOO, BITCH when he approached me, but then I realized he was a friend from back in Asheville but with Father Time-like facial hair. His wife is A—’s bestie from in their young gangster days and I hadn’t seen any of A—’s old pals since we spilt and she posted a Myspace bulletin to the effect of, “Katie Herzog is a lying, scheming whore,” and then emailed both my parents and the girl I kind of left her for with roughly the same message. Actually, I saw one of her pals about a year ago but she backed away when I tried to say hello.

I’ve tried to place a moratorium on any A— updates because I do not want to know where she lives, who she lives with, if she’s finally learned not to miss sake and red wine, if she still pees in the shower.  If any of my friends are in touch with her, I don’t know. Every once in a while someone from the wonder years will ask about her, which sucks the saliva from my salivary glands, but I haven’t really heard shit about her for two years. Until last night.

It’s not easy to make small talk with someone you haven’t seen since you and your off-white teddy bear were heartily booted from your house by his wife’s bestie in the Spring of 2007. So we talked about it. He told me where A— is and what she’s doing. He said she seems happy. He also told me that she’s living with her new partner, who is… wait for it… FORTY.

At that very moment, the door closed. All I needed to hear was that this woman isn’t as young and me and all the tears that I would have spilled if I had tear ducts just… evaporated. Granted, A— is gaying it up with someone who has an actual job and can probably afford a cleaning lady and cable, but she’s old!  Yes, the closest I’ve come to romance in the past two years is texting strangers from the Internet, but at least I’m young enough to remember Stephanie Tanner pre-crack.

Do you remember that Friends episode where Monica is all woebegone after she and Tom Selleck split? Probably not, but my freshman year roommate had the box set so I pretty much have that shit tattooed on my brain. Anyway, Monica is not doing well. She can’t eat. She can’t sleep. She can’t clean the soapy residue off the top of her detergent bottle.  Monica’s dying—literally, dying, like smoking her last cigarette dying—on the couch when one of the other white people comes in and tells Sad Friend that she ran into Tom Selleck and that he looked terrible. That was it. Monica curled up like a terrestrial crustacean and slept the sweet sleep of the narcoleptic. That was all she needed to hear.

And that’s what happened to me last night. Unlike Monica, I didn’t want to hear that A— looks terrible. I spent two years imagining her sleeping with dudes, doing blow off Helen Mirren’s ass, ruining everything that made her good. But now I know that she’s okay, and that leaving wasn’t some grand mistake. All those times she talked about the squeaky screen door and naming babies and buying sperm, she wasn’t kidding. She actually wants those things. And I don’t, at least not until I hear the seductive call of the settled. I’m not Monica, but I am done.

It’s been a long time, butterflies and bay windows. I’ve missed you. Well, I’ve missed the dirty emails (Actually, gross. No more treadmill action shots, please). An explanation for my world wide webular wastyface is forthcoming, but first, let’s talk text messausages…

I get a lot of tomfool text messages, especially as of late, what with the spreading my number over the Internet like KFed spreads seed and all. One stranger recently told me that she drank four shots of vodka at work. Another stranger asked if I would officiate her gay wedding, which I probably would do if said communal bliss wasn’t happening the same weekend of my monthly menstrual hut. I’m currently in two texting relationships that are far more hopscotch than any homo-to-hominid romanicism I’ve had since that thing with the lady cop last summer. Unfortunately, my pillbox only holds 30 texts at once and I deleted a bunch of rubies from 512 Stranger, my most LTR virtual girlfriend, before recording them (many apologies, 512), but below are examples of recent pop rocks:

* Just got a kitten. Thinking of naming her tyra banks. I almost went with Oprah… Obviously she’s black. (828 Stranger)
* I was gonna go to work. Then I puked. Then I realized my kitty is noticeably bigger. And I don’t want to miss her youth. I will be a shitty welfare mom one day. (Also 828 Stranger)
* The unemployed do not have the joy of being surrounded by drawers with such labels as “trachea chopper,” nor do they have the opportunity to order herring sperm from a catalog. By the gallon. For reasons such as these, work can be pleasantly surprising. Or maybe you have these things at home. I don’t know. (812 Stranger)

Fun, right? My unlimited texting plan is getting mad kalistenics and sometimes I get answers to the important questions in life, like, is it ok to break up with someone for using AOL?, or, how about for using the term foodie? Also, how do you know if a dude is gay or if he’s Italian? There are also, natch, the dang-shooky-dirty texts that make me wonder why people don’t understand the concept of good, clean text messausaging fun. Rude.

But the worst t.m., the one that gave me heart palpitations like that time I mixed poppers and ketamine, didn’t come from an anonymous wwwer. No, it came for my very first landlord, a woman who’s house I lived in for my first nine months as a nutrient-leeching pig fetus until rudely being evicted in the parking lot of a Mexican restaraunt: Mazog.

The text? Rding 20/20.

That’s right, wwwers, Mazog read my very public, very Googlable private diary. And although this really shouldn’t be that big a deal—after all, this a woman who told tried to convince my sister to spend a full day on that most democratic of public transit, the Greyhound, by saying, “It’ll be fun. You can pretend you’re poor.” But even though Mazog and Pazog are about as lowdown straightup combo of xx and xy one could want in a landlord, there was a not-so-small pool of urine at my feet when I found out that the innermost secrets of my public internet diary were being read by my MOTHER. I mean, I’m developmentally only 19 years old. I’ve done some really dumb shit; mostly dumb rite of passage shit—getting arrested for skinny dipping in a water trap at the country club, for instance, then getting kicked out of the dorms the following week for making my room into an opium den/speakeasy. Nothing too terrible, but still not the shit I want my xx and xy donors to know about when writing their will. Kids have always lead double lives. The part of you that’s masked from your ma and pa under a sheen of business casual and dinner parties is what makes being human worth singer songwriters and popped collars. I consulted my doctor friend about this (ok, more astrologist than doctor. And more Miss Cleo than friend), and she showed me a scientastic paper about how, back in the pre-Madonna day when life expectancy was about 15, six-year-olds hide their papyrus secrets under stone pillows. True story.

You can imagine how I felt. Exposed. Betrayed. And, mostly, terrified that my patrons/benefactors are going to cut me off the family plan if I don’t get my shit together. I considered retiring 20/20, but I already paid for the domain and the blood bank said my plasma was discount murky so I’m not willing to blow that 80$ hosting bill. Then I considered only posting lists of my good works (Thus far today: getting ranch with my cheese fries even though I’m terrified that the Brit Brit in me comes out merely by saying the words “ranch” and “cheese fries.” Meaning, I laid classism at the feet of french fries. Also, I didn’t call my most hated barista faggot under my breath this morning, despite the fact that he is definitely not Italian.) Instead, I’m going to man up. I’m going let my testes swing under these denim cutoffs. I going keep up this shit. I’m going get Mazog to sign a contract stipulating that if she ever peeps this again, I’m getting Tori Amos’s face tattooed on my neck.

After my first real heart shiver, I went slightly nut nut for a month or two and made some very rash and ill-advised decisions. Actually, it was a lack of decision-making that got me in trouble. I didn’t exactly quit school, I just stopped attending. I didn’t actually quit work, I just stopped working. I didn’t exactly starve myself, I just stopped eating. I was failing out of college and broke and so thin I wore sweatpants under my jeans to keep them up when a belt wouldn’t do.

But I got over it, slowly. It took some conscience ignoring, but I started being proactive about breaking the feelings fever. Meaning, I seduced the dirty bisexual my girlfriend left me for in an effort to drive a stake in their beehive and woo my electric back, which, shockingly, worked. And even though after that there was more color in my cheeks and blood in my veins, I still had a lot of pieces to sew back. I had eaten nothing but dumpstered bagels for three months because I had money enough for booze or for food, and though booze filled both belly and mind, food only filled the stomach hole. I started with miso soup and eventually stopped with the pills and started with the protein. I got a job at a lezzie bookstore/cafe, a shop that, like many locally-owned businesses, had an idyllic vision but treated some of the lesser employees—like, for instance, me—like the rotten yogurt in the back of your fridge that you keep waiting for your roommate will deal with.

Still, things were looking skyward. I were recovering, my girlfriend was forgiving, and I was introduced as the new baby dyke on my first day of work. And that’s when the Biggest Lie I’ve Ever Told: Employment Addition escaped my tooth cage.

About a week after I started working, my mom  called me. My sister was studying in Mexico at the time, and after a unfortunate night drinking copa de nada with some local students, she woke up to Spanish phrases written all over her face in Sharpie (B—, don’t kill me. It’s funny!). Mazog thought it was time for her to see a friendly familial face and was willing to buy me a plane ticket to Guadalajara as long as I left the next day.

At this point, I was halfway in my bathing suit and was smearing cocoa butter on my legs, but I had to get out of work first. The vague “family emergency” thing seemed too obviously code for “I have a hangover and will not be attending work today,” so I told my new boss that my sister had gotten pregnant in Mexico, and, after Googling “Mexico + abortion” quickly realized that unless she wanted to scramble the fetus via coat-hanger and/or umbrella, she was fucked. So, I said, she swallowed a bottle of malaria pills.

As the supportive twin, it was my duty to go to Mexico, spring her from the psych ward, and drive her to Tejas for an American abortion. Because it’s hard to sound concerned when you’re trying to pack and thinking about drinking Sol on the beach, I looked at a few photos of those missing persons posters that people hung on telephone poles and fences after that big September thing and then hung upside down off my bed to give my nose that stuffy my-dog-just-died sound.

I returned a week later with an Irish neopolitan (a little red, a little brown, a lot of white) and a snakeskin belt.

How was it?, everyone asked.

Terrible, I said. Terrible.

I have to cross my legs every time I sneeze so I won’t pee on myself.  I’m not leaving the house today because I accidentally drank four cups of laxative tea last night because I lost my glasses and the box was right next to Sleepytime.  My mom once pasted the following phrase that I had just cut from an email: “My girlfriend and I bid on one of Ani’s used tampons on eBay.”  The point is, it takes a lot to embarrass me.  I am such a dumb fuck that if I were a sensitive dumb fuck, I’d be one of those lesbians who wear stretchy pants and eat icing directly out of the can and have a meaningful relationship with Oprah and don’t consider having more than three cats hoarding.  But there was one day this week that challenged my ability to laugh at myself.  We’ll call this one Tuesday.

The morning was bright, hot, and duo-style.  I slept through class and this made me feel kind of terrible but my power to rationalize quickly supplanted guilt and I drank some coffee and drove my new friend/future lover home.  After that, I stopped by work to pick up a paycheck and buy some product.  It was S. Windor’s (of the Pensecola Windsors) first day on the job after a year hiatus, so I helped out and chatted for a bit, even though I wasn’t wearing socks and had wet brain and fuck head and a huge hole in the crotch of my cut-offs.  I got my check and my product and was about to leave when one of my bosses asked me how I was going to pay for the product.  Um, take it out of my paycheck?  Like always?  Turns out I longer get a paycheck from the Unmentioned Former Place of Employment because I had, unknowingly, been laid off.  And that’s cool.  I mean, I liked the shop and all the employees and that one crushtomer almost to the point of looking forward to work, but I’d been putting in all of four hours a week, so even though it sucks, it’s also not a bad spray tan or anything.  But that is a really uncool way to let someone go.  I’m sure it was less a malicious fuck up and more a communication fuck up, but the ungraceful manner of my dismissal drove me to tears, which is pretty difficult to do considering I don’t have tear ducts and/or feelings.  But, like I said before, after the number of times I’ve been fired, I look at getting laid off as a back-handed compliment.  I’ll get over it.  Eventually.

I then headed to the Chateau to bitch to Lady Mantranny and drink Bud Light and banter via text with a stranger in Austin who I want to gay marry after receiving the following messausage: I’ma woo you, bitch. A few hours and Bud Lights later, I went to the bar.  I was only going to be there for a Lima Bean or two and head home to shower off the shea butter and forge recommendation letters, but then a dear friend I haven’t seen since fucking her over in a really unfunny way walked into the bar.  We didn’t talk at first, but I had nerves like a Jonas on her wedding night, so it was chilled Stoli for my gray matter.  Eventually, my dear friend and I hugged it out and my tear ducts started working again.  And, as if crying in a bar isn’t embarrassing enough, the following occurred: for the first time in my drinking life, I vommed in a bar.  I then had to be convinced not to drive my car and/or ride my bike home (both of which were and are still are parked outside the bar), and was escorted home by a former and favorite co-worker and my new friend/future lover.  I’m pretty sure I didn’t vom in the car, but I did discover vom on the lap of my jeans when I woke up the next morning, so you never know.  This was all while the Carrboro sun with still round and yellow and perched in the sky.  Embarrassing, yes, but what are your teens, 20s, and 30s for if not a little public humiliation?  I mean, fuck, I’d just been fired.

And, yes, I recognize that I’ve been waxing and whining about jobs for a while now.  Why not just get a job and stop living off the generosity of North Carolina tax-payers, right?  What’s so great about not having a reason to get up in the morning?  The truth is—nothing.  Unemployment is boring.  But following rules beyond such OCD-imposed ones like Do Not Sit On Antique Furniture and Never Eat In Public is unpalatable like anal bleeding is unpalatable.  And because I have an unfounded faith that I don’t have to worry about boob sag because gravity doesn’t effect me, and also that I don’t have to work hard because I am immune to such things and poverty and Alzheimer’s and the second coming, I am secretly and not-so-secretly convinced that this blog is my ticket out of a working life, that if only the right person sees this and recognizes my genius use of malapropisms, I will be swooped up to the land of silk and sunny.

But even if that did happen, even if I made a few hardbacks shitting words and rainbows, I’d have to get a gender-neutral moniker and a day job as a sandwich artist just to keep my real life and my writing life completely hidden from Mazog and Pazog.  Is it crazy not to want your 60-year-old mother to read about that time you hooked up in the Christmas tree farm across from the bar and went to brunch with your friend in her mom the next morning covered in saw dust?  Do you want your dad to realize that the first hit when Googling the term “dickthroat” is your blog?  No one wants that blush to cross the parental palette.

Here’s the thing: the shit that enters my head and falls from my mouth is because I am a 26-year-old shorter version of my father.  My dad is most politically incorrect liberal white male I know.  When my parents confronted me about my taco-bumping ways, my mom’s only concern was that I was somehow hurt by my dad’s frequent use of derogatory terms to describe homos and fags, like I’m some kind of a pansy.  My father is such an adept liar that I thought that my grandparents’ dachshund Willy the Elder was my uncle until I was nine and that my dad was a Rolling Stone until I was eleven.  Take the following reviews of my father as professor culled from Rate My Professor:

this class is pretty interesting. but i think he makes a lot of the material up himself.

I will never forget the pubic hair survey or the 1910 dildo he brought into class! Hilarious and smart!

he knows his stuff. if your easily offended by cursing and blunt sex phrases, stay away. He likes to throw the word G**D*** around too. thats not cool with me but…he’s a good teacher

He is a awesome professor. He knows his sex facts!

See the problem?  My muddy mind was written in my DNA, and yet, the parental revelation of my musings is one kind of public humiliation I just can’t get down with.

As much as I love a good hotbox, summer without purpose is fun for about a week before malaise sets in and all of a sudden I’m ten years old and sick of sharks and minnows at the urine-filled community pool and definitely not going to summer camp (communal showers) and almost, unbelievably, ready to go back to school because at least school is boring with central air.

That said, I’m going to break my summer of 2009 malaise by starting a new collection: a text message collection.  Although even my most Peter Panish pal advised me against this, I’m giving you my phone number and I want you to use it.  Liberally.  Here’s the deal: I want you to text me, but I don’t want you to write boring shit like, “wazzup” because a) my mom already does that, and b) we’re not here to talk about feelings.  But do text me.  Tell me what you had for lunch today or the stupidest thing you did last weekend or your middle name or your mom’s sangria recipe.  Whatever.  If you call me, I will ask Peter Pan to listen to my messausages because that’s one chore I cannot do alone and she’s good at translating.  I definitely will not call you back unless you offer me money and/or a free box of Graham Crackers.  This is about texting people, not talking.

Get those thumb-typers ready….

828.231.8508

P.S. Don’t be a creep.

My twin sister and I are similar like Miss California and Elton John are similar: we’re both flaming queens but only one of us is smart.  People are continually shocked to find out B—* and I slipped out of the same slide.  It’s not just in brain power and ambition that we differ: we look alike the way pets and their owners look alike.  A stranger once asked if my ex-girlfriend and I were twins while we were standing beside my actual twin.  Also, B— was born in the First World stir-ups of Memorial Mission Hospital and I was born in the parking lot of a Mexican restaurant.  Because of this, I not only have a trace of brain damage, the top of my skull is also pancake flat.  My sister’s head, however, is round as a silicon teet.  I was also born with an extra middle finger.  And there is, of course, the obvious gay/not gay thing.  As the only girl in Little League, it was pretty clear that I’d never be the type to get high off the smell of Old Spice.  When my sister talks about dudes I’m like, “Um, you know dudes?  Will you ask one when its balls dropped?”  B—, however, lives in a town that is 80% broken chromosome.  And likes it.  I suspect that if she ever breeds, there will be no turkey baster involved.

The archives of various gChats between my twin and I reinforce that we have some serious interpersonal issues and also that she’s a huge bitch.  Take this example from five minutes ago:

me: can i have a loan?
B: no. dont mix twinz n loanz.
me: m i ur bst frin?
B: duh
me: wuld u like me if we wernt twinz?
i dont think we’d really be friends
cause the time differnce
plus i don’t think we would have ever met
cause you are younger than me
B: different generations
me: tru dat
B: ur too old to be my friend
me: tru dat
plus i dont join runing clubs
or book club
B: we would be facebook friends but that’s all

I recently decided to get “brunch” tattooed on the inside of my lip.  I told my sister this on our birthday and she said, “As my birthday present, can you not do something stupid today?  What if brunch goes out of fashion?  What if next year is all about the mid-morning snack???”  I understand her concern, but I figure I’ll get both and if eating in general goes out of style, I’ll just turn them into “munch” and “mid-morning snatch.”

*My sister insists that I call her “B—” on this because a.) she doesn’t want to be associated with me, and b.) she thinks it makes her seem like a character in an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel.

After the recent death rattle of my early twenties, four of my homies convinced me that a weekend in Stumpy Point, North Carolina was the necessary panacea for the most metaphysical of physical hangovers: birthdays. Not that the end of youth didn’t make for a good party. The highlight of my 26th birthday was getting a tumble-down-table-dance from a new friend/future lover. My two dominant alleles—gayism and exhibitionism—where satisfied by this loving act, but the best part came when the DJ yelled: Lesbians in the house!!! into the mic. The reaction of the fags on the dance floor—twirling and clapping and piercing eardrums as only a gaggle of twinks can do—convinced me that all the tales you hear about gangs of fags and faggettes roaming Vaseline Alleys across the country flagging pink and camo and cutting each other with sharpened dildos is just more wash hogging by the heterosexist lobby, Straights for the Impediment of Same Sex Sex (SISSS). I’ve never loved gay boys as much as I did that night.

However, as much as I love (WANT. NEED.) table dances and ministration of all circles and squares, the birthday/birth week/birth month celebration thing is too many hand claps for me. There’s the day of, the weekend before and/or after, the dinner with friends, the dinner with family, and the 475 Facebook wall posts (HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!!) that clog your in-box. Not that I’m bitter—in fact, after the tumble-down-table-dance, the second bday highlight was the highly competitive Facebook wall war with my twin sister, which I won by a narrow six HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!! testimonials (109 to 103), despite her friends posting multiple times, which is obviously in poor taste and antithetical to the whole spirit of the Happy Birthday Wall War. The Five Girls, One Pup: Stumpy Point Edition trip came at just the right time.

The special blend of five mostly-adult ladies and one non-adult French Bulldog in a single-serving vehicle for four hours seems like a great opportunity to pass on destruction and distress.  And it was! Kidding. The drive to Stumpy Point, NC was smooth enough despite getting out of Orange County a predictable three hours after our Decided Upon Departure Time. And there was a small incident at a Kangaroo Station.

Here’s what happened: we pre-payed $25 in regular unleaded petrol, but when we tried to pump said $25 of regular unleaded petrol, the bitch didn’t work. Erin and I went inside the Kangaroo pouch to be like, “WTF, Kanagroo Counter Man?,” at which point it was discovered that he alloted our $25 to another pump. We may or may not have given him the wrong pump number, but, shit, we all make mistakes The point is, “GIMME MY GAS, COUNTER MAN!!!.” The Kangaroo Counter Man and Manageress, however, weren’t so much of the diplomatic elk.  As we’ve seen from recent and ancient history, disputes over money and/or petrol can be hot as Tejas football season. In this instance, we were America and the Kangaroo was Iran. We were like, “We want our motherfucking pertrol, and, no, we’re not giving you any Got Damn dollar bills.” Kanagroo was all, “Bish, plz. You’re gonna have to bomb my ass before we give up this black gold.” The sitch escalated when Erin pulled her phone out of her pocket to call the po-lice and the well-meaning but blond co-ed behind us said, “Don’t call the cops. They’re probably illegal.” At this point, Kangarro Manageress kicked us out. Thankfully, at least one of the troupe (not me) has good sense and a calming demeanor and she managed to pacify all. I don’t know who had to sacrifice job and/or money to get rid of us, but we left with our gas and our money. Four nationalities were represented in this conflict, and, as always, white won in the end. Unfortunate metaphor, yes, but we all know that until Kim Jong Ill steals our buying power and/or heavy arms, America is Sarah Palin before she opens her mouth.

The rest of the weekend was nice and peace-ridden. We sat on the wine and drank the beach. Cell service was limited so when we finally left the island I was greeted by a dozen texts from Mazog (e.g. “whr r u? y u no txt bk? u ok? ♥ “), but wi-fi at the house was hot and fast so we didn’t have to neglect Facebook (”STATUS UPDATES, YA’LL!!! GET IN LINE!!!”). Also, the shower had not one but NINE shower heads, which made me alternately thrilled and junk-hurt that, besides the unfortunate thing in the county jail last fall, I haven’t showered duo-style since Spring Break 2005.  I also learned a valuable lesson: before you bidet, adjust the water temp.  Hot water is only hotter when it’s sailing into your digestive system. Believe.

*All photos by people other than me whose names may or maybe not rhyme with Lady Mantranny, Barren Cashews, and Felony Cupboard.  I’d give them proper credit but I doubt anyone wants this blog to pop up when potential employers/bail bondsmen Goodle them.