TWENTY TWENTY HINDSIGHT

After a mostly-perfect trip to San Francisco a few months ago—a trip complete with narrowly escaping white slavery, meeting my Virtual Girlfriend and her amazing rack, and hyena laughing with my dear long-distance palsie who left me with a four-poster bed and weighty heart at her departure last spring—I decided I would move there. I would sit in Golden Gate Park and go to actual museums in an actual city and eat ceviche on the street and meet people, new people, maybe even a new person to fall in love with after a courtship in which I would send her envelopes filled with ocean pebbles and lavender petals even though mailing rocks is kind of expensive. I thought I would move there and live under a coffee table or in a bunk bed with Small Fry, my other butt cheek, who would also move there and who is not just my other butt cheek but is also my Huck or my Tom depending on who’s in charge on any given afternoon. But I’m not going, at least not any time soon. It’s not that I don’t want to, but that I’m poor, so poor that if I had cable, I’d have to cancel it. This, Carrboro, North Carolina, is where I live. It just is. But my other butt cheek is moving there, to San Francisco, to the land of rainbows and rainbow flags, the land of fog and parks, where it’s okay to touch your girlfriend’s cheek the way your parents did when you young and they were in love. Small Fry, the person who looks nothing like me but gets mistaken for me as I get mistaken for her, is leaving tomorrow. The person who wakes me up in the morning and dances with me before noon, the person who is the other half of our package deal, the buy-one-get-one-free, is flying away.

Because I am as unable to think of the future as I am to sit on the furniture at the bar across the street because I heard a tall guy with long hair and neck tattoos who thinks his band will change the world finger banged a goth girl on the couch in front of the stage, it’s happening tomorrow and I’m not ready, not ready at all. I’m as unprepared to say goodbye as I’ll be when Kirk Cameron leads all the good Christians to heaven and leaves us sinners and sodomites to rot in the Church of the Bloody Mary, which is a hell where the eggs Benedict are always over-cooked and when you order a mimosa, the zombie servers bring you skim milk instead. But it is happening now. She is packing up her life and I am here, avoiding the truthful truth, the real truth, that I will take her to the airport tomorrow, ask if she has her ID and her ticket, get her bags out of the trunk, drop her off at the curb, and say goodbye.

The first real goodbye I said was at sixteen when my twin sister went to boarding school. I don’t remember if we were particularly close as teenagers. I’m guessing we actually weren’t in the day-to-day sense. She was a good student, swam and played soccer, did her homework, looked normal, made good impressions, didn’t get in trouble. I spent most of my afternoons smoking weed out of tin cans or hollowed out apples with the seniors who adopted me because I would light their cigarettes and tell the cashier at Taco Bell that there was a hair in my burrito and give the free one to them. But even if Betsy and I weren’t all that close socially, didn’t have the same friends or do the same things, I was so very sad when she left. There is a moment in twins’ lives when you separate, a necessary, if unconscious, thing so that you are not tethered together for the rest of your dual lives, unable to love anyone else as much as you love each other. Most twins make this cut, but not all. There were twins in my college who did not. They dressed alike. They took the same classes, lived in the same dorm room, were indistinguishable except for different colored glasses—one frame blue, the other red. They will always be “the twins,” forever an egg that didn’t want to split. This was never going to be Betsy and I. We were always different, always individual, but her leaving was the first goodbye and it hurt all the same. Twins lives are parallel, separated by five minutes or eight minutes or an hour, but connected in time and genetics and sharing a body before you even were a body. And then, sixteen years after we slipped into the world, she was gone. When my parents and I drove away, separating us and I for the first time in our lives, I cried like I had never cried before.

There have been others. The have been break up goodbyes, which aren’t necessarily even goodbyes but sad or angry see you laters because maybe you live in the same town and will see each other even when you don’t want to see each other, like when she is grocery shopping with her new girlfriend and you are buying cans of tuna and single servings of mac ‘n cheese. And there are the goodbyes when you are the one leaving. When I moved to Portland, I cried all the way across the country. But as much as I hated to say goodbye to the people who had been my family in the years before, I was glad to be the one leaving. My friends rolled spliffs and lined them in a tampon box for me while my girlfriend packed the car and I cried in the bathroom, sad but knowing that it is easier to leave than to stay.

But I am not the one leaving this time, Small Fry is. We have a friendship born not out of blood but out of who we are, because we are the same and because we are different, because we are good for each other and bad for each other, because we congratulate ourselves on staying young while everyone else gets old, all the while knowing that it cannot last for ever. This is the beginning of the severing, like it was when I was sixteen and Betsy walked to her dorm and I drove away with my parents. She leaves not so much a hole in my heart as in my day. We are going our separate ways, Small Fry and I, approaching, perhaps, the thing that terrifies us most—adulthood, when friends are less important than jobs and partners, houses and families. We will do the things that people do, and wish sometimes that we are back in our living room fort, sitting back-to-back on our matching laptops, picking each other up and swinging each other around, bumping chests until one of us falls onto her back, talking about girlfriends and non-girlfriends and the ones we wish would be our girlfriends and the ones we wish we’d never met, talking about how this will never end, how we will always be Peter Pans in a grown-up world.

There was rain storm that day ten years ago when we drove my sister her to her new life. We left the windows open while we unpacked her bags and met her roommate, and the back of the car was soaking wet, buckets-of-water-on-the-seats-wet, when it was time to leave, so I folded the seats down and lay on the back of them and covered my face with a sopping sweater and cried the five hours home, so sad and so embarrassed to be so sad. This will happen again tomorrow when I drop my other butt cheek off at the airport. I won’t be able to hold it in. I will sob on the curb and drive blindly home, back to Carrboro, back to the place and the life I have chosen, a place and a life that will be a little more empty.

Following directions isn’t really my thing and I’m not about to share my bedroom with fifty other idiots, so, barring an uprising by the Federation for the Advancement of Gays and Gayelles (F.A.G.G.), enlisting in the military is about as likely as that time five minutes ago when Sean Penn friended me on Facebook. Regardless, I accompanied my roommate Small Fry to the recruiting office in Durham recently. It was an exercise in cheek-biting for me: it’s hard not to laugh at military recruiters when you are so fundamentally opposed to what they stand for (e.g. obedience, nationalism, khaki) and what they do (e.g. kill, depose, Skype) and know you are wasting the time they could spend coercing other young people to sign over their autonomy. They likely had just as little hope of signing us based on appearance alone. It’s not that we’re obviously dykes, which we are (despite national policy, gayism is probably recognized as a benefit in the armed forces. Would you rather be defended by Bull Dyke Barbie or Malibu Barbie?), we just don’t look like the kind of people who would join the army. We look like the kind of people who put nutritional yeast on popcorn or the kind of people who talk shit about people who put nutritional yeast on popcorn but still kind of like it. But there we were.

The recruiters’ office itself isn’t what I expected. When you walk in, there’s no one to welcome you with stars and stripes and patriotic songs, ready to salute you in the right direction. Left for Marines, right for Army, around back for Blackwater. Instead, you just wander around until you find the branch you’re looking for. There were two recruiters in the Air Force office. They didn’t try to sell us. They didn’t talk about the army of one or the benefits or the camaraderie or the honor in fighting for your country after that big September thing. They just handed us forms to fill out and left us alone. Although I might have given them my sister’s social security number and an ex’s phone number, I was mostly honest on the paperwork. Have I been arrested? Yes, but it was just a misunderstanding. I wasn’t really trying to pass myself off as a forty-two-year-old Canadian woman with a taste for Bartles & James and the charges were dismissed after I gave the judge a mani/pedi. You’re also supposed to list all the drugs you’ve done and the number of times you’ve done them. If I actually wanted to earn my pilot’s wings, I would have lied, but because I was more interested on getting out before happy hour than being fitted for a uniform, I wrote the truth. It’s not like I’ve ever traded my body for a crack pebble or anything, but I went to college. I wore Birkenstocks and rolled one-handed joints on the way to school. And, besides being the inevitable gateway to excessive napping, weed was never really a problem for me. When I stopped smoking, I didn’t even really think about it. I just stopped. And that’s what I told the military recruiter. Look, brother, there’s nothing wrong with smoking a few trees. It’s Of The Earth, my friend. A gift from our planet to our minds. He looked at me like I’m John Waters trying to get into the police academy and said he didn’t think the Air Force was an appropriate fit.

When Small Fry first told me that she was thinking about joining the military, I changed the subject (Look! Boobs!) and waited for her to put this terrible idea to bed. But she didn’t put it to bed. She talked about detonating bombs and wearing a tailored uniform and never cooking again. She made her hands into guns and shot everyone who walked by the window. This is what I need to gain discipline, she said. This will make me grow up. Her thinking is stupid, like waiting for your power to get cut off because then you’ll be forced to start paying your bills on time, and yet, I kind of get it. There is no discipline in our home. The two of us live in a tree house world. We try to take the recycling out but only manage to get the cans out of the pantry and into the living room. We create imaginary futures for ourselves. We’re going to move to San Francisco and live in bunk beds and have a bunny that hops behind us everywhere we go or maybe a fairy who hovers by our shoulders. Or maybe someone will recognize the appeal of two nearing-thirty girls who sit around wearing eye patches and gypsy masks, getting up every once in a while to practice chest-bumping before resuming our Facebook sentry. Yes, that’s what we need: someone to find us and and love us and give us a reality TV show.

I left Small Fry with the recruiters and wandered around, thinking about what do to now that this option that was never really an option isn’t ever going to be an option. Med school? Americorps? Teaching English in Korea until the economy recovers and we can get back to the lives we think we deserve: comfortable lives, exciting lives, full lives, mornings that don’t start with trying to think of a reason to get out of bed, not finding one, and closing the blinds and dreaming for a few more hours. Being in that office, walking past rooms where people were signing the papers because they want to or because they have to, some excited, some scared, all making real decisions, big decisions, decisions that will influence the course of their lives now and forever—people who are, really, just like us—made me think there might be no fairy and no benefactor and no one else to make us grow up. Are we past the age when it’s acceptable to walk around town barefoot with our pants rolled up because we feel like playing Tom and Huck? This is the point—out of school, underemployed, desperate enough to consider the military—where you realize that you’re on your own. That’s where the military comes in. Sign here and stop thinking. Do their push-ups, make their beds, polish their door-knobs, call them sir and write your girl back home. Your inability to make decisions won’t matter anymore. It will, in fact, make you a better solider. There is some solace in being a robot. I understand this, and part of me wishes I could get over my ethical reservations and my unwillingness to take orders and my past life as a stoner and my unshakable belief that things will work out, maybe not for everyone, but for me. Because what if it doesn’t? What if this is all there is, looking for ways to adulthood, wishing you were one of the thousands of people who sign up, who put their fate in the hands of others, who follow orders. Maybe we all want to to sacrifice our autonomy, not to an organization run on obedience, but to a fate we think we deserve. We are no different than anyone else in that building. We just think we are.

I live in Carrboro, North Carolina. There are 17,931 of us here, but it seems smaller, like the size of a camera hidden in the light fixture of a seedy motel and monitored at home by a registered sex offender. That’s also how living here feels sometimes—like people watch each other through windows and tell their friends whose beds have chains on the headboard and who sleeps with a teddy bear and who cries at Adam Sandler movies.

In a town where the co-op lawn is the hub of activity—the place where hula-hoopers in backless shirts and bare feet spin circles and beat the grass into dirty submission, where children run into your shins and then cry like babies when they fall on their diapered butts, where the rest of us grudgingly buy our carrot juice and hummus and talk about how coagulated the hot bar is—of course your neighbors’ behavior is public domain. There’s not much else to talk about. It’s like we’ve all given up on doing things and resigned ourselves to thinking about doing things. We all know each other, at least by terrible reputation, and we all talk. And I’m as guilty of stirring and spreading and meddling as anyone. More, even.

This didn’t bother me at first. I moved here from Portland, Oregon, where I was completely anonymous. I was every other early twenties gayelle, holding hands and working at coffee shops and riding bikes and reading in bars when there was no one to talk to. There was nothing about me that deserved attention, and I like attention, so, at first, Carrboro was a pleasant reprieve from anonymity. When I first came here, I planned on taking just a short break from Portland, just enough time to recalibrate after some significant life changes (i.e. falling in maybe-love or at least pitter-patter-love with someone who was not my girlfriend; subsequent break-up with said girlfriend; subsequent week of homelessness without pillow, clean socks, phone charger, or wallet; subsequent final fuck you; subsequent teary goodbye.). I thought I’d be here for a few weeks, maybe a month, and go back to Portland and find the girl I had fallen in maybe-love with and deal with the strangers and the anonymity and be happy and changed. That was two and a half years ago.

I stayed in part because my sister lived here and it was nice to have a built-in friend, someone who had to go on walks and split meals with me, if for no other reason than DNA and guilt. I also stayed because of the people. I made more friends in the first weeks of being here than I did the whole time I was in Portland. My friends have become my family. We spend our days and nights together. We talk about how someday we’re going to have a house that’s actually a lot of houses, one for each of us, with a big courtyard and an outdoor kitchen in the middle and mango trees and family supper and a sun that shines when we want to surf, which we will be able to do because we will have a beach and because we will know how to surf, and rain that rains when we want to stay inside and watch movies. So I like Carrboro. I like our fantasies and I like our fun and I like our nights that are like no other nights and our nights that are like all other nights. Or, at least, I did.

But now I’m done. I have no job, no money, and absolutely, definitely, unequivocally, no chance at ever, like ever, finding a girlfriend. I have ruined my reputation to the point that some anonymous Craigslister wrote that I’m “shady and everywhere” for all of Missed Connections to see. I once met a girl at a bar and our conversation naturally deteriorated from books and politics to sex and love. We agreed that men are stupid and women are crazy. I said something about how this person I had slept with the night before talked about furniture all the time and then the blood rushed from her face to her heart and she jumped off her bar stool and ran out without paying her tab and, yes, the person from the night before was her person. And even though I didn’t know that person had a person and was so drunk that I can’t even remember if we had sex and or maybe if we ate popcorn and cuddled, this is the story of my life in this town.

We are full of boredom and drama and we let things that aren’t real become real. I recently learned that I fucked a homeless man in an alley while still with my ex. And while it’s not implausible and maybe is entirely true that I did cheat on my ex, I can’t even sit on other peoples’ furniture, much less fuck someone with scabies and a shopping cart. I accidentally touched a dreadlock a few nights ago and had to bust through a crowd of sweaty people to get to the nearest bathroom and scrub my hands so hard that I no longer have fingerprints. I’d wash my sheets twice even if someone in a full-body snowsuit slept on them, so even if I liked to sleep with men and even if I liked to get shoved against brick walls, my neuroses make this scenario impossible. It wasn’t reality, but now it is.

I’m at the point now where I can laugh at these rumors, be flattered, even, that I’m the subject of stories and gossip in this small town, but my friends are trickling away, to New York or LA or San Francisco or Portland or Seattle or to husbands and wives and jobs and children. Why be here, in this place of so much comfort and so little potential, when my family is leaving? I’m ready to be anonymous again.

My life partner Small Fry and I will soon be taking leave from each other, not because we want to, but because she’s going to homestead up in San Francisco and get shit ready for the inevitable day in the near future when we’re selling our ovaries to rent bunk beds out there together. This is very, very bad. Even though I want Small Fry to spread her wings (legs) and make the West Coast her bitch, I’m a little concerned that the next person to domicile up in here might not be so in to watching BET through the neighbor’s window when our cable goes out.

I’m praying to Sapphos that I’ll find a new, more romantical life partner in the next month and we can just live together, but I put an ad on Craig’s List just in case. Shockingly, none of the responses have feel quite dreamy enough. Take, for instance, the following:

I’m going to study at unc and well I need a place to stay…
I’m a brazilian guy, i’ve 27 at this exactly moment (but everything will change next month anyway) and I’m going to study ethics and philosophy for my phd thesis in unc… well I’m not gay but I’ve already divided and have no problem (in fact we have good memories…)…
well I will receive a fellowship to my research so i will have money to pay you and well although theorically I will pass all 2010 year in unc I think that I liked your ad proposal of temporary sublet….
oh my name is Fernando like in the abba music (I didn’t like specially abba anyway but I have some hope with cat’s candle (sic??)…
I still in Brazil (i live in florianopolis in the south…) but i’m going in january 1st.

While I’m glad he’s divided that my gay face isn’t a problem, I’m a little turned off by his email address, brasillastud69@aol.com, so I’m going to keep looking. Know anyone who needs a place in or around Carrboro? I’m not nearly as terrible a housemate as you’d guess.

The listing:

Room for rent in two bedroom/one bath condo behind Johnny’s on Main.

Interested? Tell me a little bit about yourself.

Have any attractive, clean, and homeless friends? Pass it on!

krherzog @ gmail

1.) School clothes are far less fun when purchasing them means sacrificing a night at the bar and/or eating beans and rice rather than ordering pizza and eating it alone cross-legged on one’s floor before drinking four or five cups of laxative tea, which may limit your movement (ha!) the next day but takes care of the bloating without the side-effects of MiniThins or Yellow Jackets.

2.) Appearances ain’t shit compared to the words leaking from your word hole. Meaning, if you are reading Esquire (don’t judge) in the Salt Lake airport and a seriously adorable (not red dwarf/sun spot hot but adorable) baby dyke with a baby dyke haircut sits near you and smiles at you every time you lift your eyes from a riveting article on houndstooth versus argyle, she is could still be not just dumb but dumb and straight, as exhibited by her concourse phone call conversation that includes the phrase, “Tri Delts are way less cokey, but are still kind of sluts. Not that there’s anything wrong with sleeping with basketball players. I mean, sleeping with a Tarheel is serious social capital.”

3.) Despite surviving on student loans and government handouts and the unfounded belief that as long as I don’t know my bank balance it can never get any lower, born middle class, die middle class. The following image corroborates this observation: four girls who drink PBR because it’s cheaper than food and has a high enough water content for semi-adequate hydration with four of the most New Yorker-reading, NPR-listening, Prius-driving tattoos imaginable. That’s right: brunch

From left, Fish Fry, Small Fry, Stormy Pants, and Hotdog

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.

I’m purging over-quizzers and people who were mean to me in high school (i.e. anyone who didn’t think baby dykes with dreadlocks/hemp necklaces/Doc Martins deserved to sit at their lunch table; i.e. everyone) and replacing them with Internet strangers (i.e. you).

My avatar wants to hang with your avatar.

Despite my intricate knowledge of the heterosexual lifestyle gained from hours watching the Real World, I generally consider boy/girl drama more annoying than compelling, kind of like Car Talk. It’s okay as white noise, but not really something that dilates my peepers. Sometimes boy/girl stories even make me doze off as though I’m in my safely re-upholstered favorite chair with my bare tootsies on the heating grate reading Infinite Jest—a book I loving referencing but the mere heft of which makes me feel like I deserve a nap—but really I’m listening to my friends talk about how dudes have no feelings. That shit’s got nothing on dyke drama. Proof? Listen to three or more gayelles brunch it up on Sunday morning, AKA compare notes.

And then I met Amy D.

Amy D. is seemingly one of my more adult friends. She owns a house, has two masters degrees, works during daylight, teaches yoga, and eats whole grains. All of these things contribute to the illusion of grown-up-ed-ness.

Amy—who, by the way, gave me permission to write this because she is moving to an unnamed East Asian country that may or may not rhyme with “Bambodia” in two days—is not strictly hetero, but, rather, a dirty bi-sexual. Amy’s dyke drama, however, is pretty much non-existent. She’s a good, old fashioned, domestic gayelle. But before her taco truck days, Amy had some serious shit under her mantle. Shit that makes my business look like microwave oatmeal, and I do drama like Chuck Bass does date rape. The following Amy D. story had my mouth open like Britney’s legs around a venti Frappucino….

Amy D. is an interesting mix of smart and Southern. Girl’s got a good head but she’s seriously into football. For instance, she sent me the email below last fall:

i plan to start drinkin today at 3:30. today is the special special day of the Iron Bowl, when the undefeated Crimson Tide (my boyz) go head to head in the annual grudge match with the lame-ass Auburn Tigers.
i will sit my ass on the barstool at 3:30 and not come out until Alabama has claimed supreme victory.
ROLL fuckin TIDE~

And, because no one else west of the tracks gives a fuck about the most homoerotic of homoerotic games, Amy has to venture out of Carrboro to catch a Roll fuckin Tide game. On one such afternoon several years ago, Amy D. was at some douche-bar when she made the acquaintance of a fellow Roll fuckin Tide fan. He was buying, she was drinking. This combination has only two possible outcomes: vomming in the bathroom or fucking through it.

In Amy’s case, celebrating the victory of the Roll fuckin Tide did not end in expelling the contents of her digestive tract in the bathroom sink and flooding the lady’s room at Spanky’s. No, Amy D.’s night ended in bed with Attractive Near-Stranger. After the spins and subsequent man/woman nonsense had concluded, the fornicators started to get to know each other. ANS told Amy a little bit about his life. He’s married, he says, but he and his wife have an understanding. It’s a little d-bagish, sure, but an understanding’s an understanding, right? The human animal is as slap happy as our distant cousins the bonnobos. That part’s fine.

ANS then tells Amy he was adopted. His bio mom was really young when she got preggo and he was adopted by a kindly family in California.

Many years after the baby-swap, when ANS was a consenting adult, he was seduced by an older women in Santa Barbara. She was a cougar, he was a pup, and they did the man/woman thing for three years. And then one day the cougar reveals to lil pup that she didn’t randomly approach him in that bar three years ago after all; she sought him out, even moved from TX to CA specifically to find him. Why? Because she was his MOTHER.

At this point in the story, friends and fags, let us pause a moment to let your esophagus un-seize and your brain settle back into its bone helmet.

One.
Two.
Three.

Ready?

Amy, being sane, does not continue a relationship with the King of Pillow Talk. He calls, but Amy knows the answer to crazy is silence.

Months go by. Momma’s Boy stops calling. Amy D. thinks she has escaped a potentially very creepy situation with little worse than a headache and overall feelings of ick. It’s a small town, yes, but it’s easy not to cross paths with people if you dye your hair blond and get some Olson glasses and a spray tan.

Then one day, Amy is eating falafel with her ex-bf outside Med Deli when a woman approaches her.

“Amy,” she says. “Amy D.?”

“Yes,” Amy responds, wondering if the women is her yoga class or maybe one of the nursing students who peeped her junk a couple years ago when she volunteered her reproductive system for higher education and 50 bones an hour.

“Amy D. who fucked my husband?”

Assuming that at some point in your rich life you have been either cheater, cheatee, or cheetah, you can imagine Amy’s throat-in-the-soles feeling. A pissed-off wife approaching you on the street is like a momma bear/baby bear/you sando. Scary shit, ya’ll.

Turns out that Mr. and Mrs. Attractive Near-Strange didn’t actually have an agreement, and, in fact, ANS Sr., had recently told his unsuspecting wife the 13 names of the 13 women he had opened their relationship and his asshole to. Female ANS then tracked every one of those other women down for a little lady dramz.

Amy apologized profusely, told the women she knew it was wrong, that she thought they were a swinging happy couple, had she known it never would have happened, etc. The ladies hugged it out and eventually both man and woman moved, he to Mexico, she to the Midwest.

And Amy? Amy learned not to trust anyone who fucked his mother.

True story, ya’ll.

I know it’s against the rules to be more than an ounce of serious on this here www, but it’s been a serious couple of days and I’m convinced that the world is ending in a straight up Left-Behind-series-Kirk-Cameron-is-a-prophet kinda way, which makes me feel like life might not be life and this all a long ass dream. The End of Days harshes my mellow ’cause I’ma be pillaged by a pack of zombies before I ever get famous, which I always thought was inevitable despite the fact that my only talent is saying shit like, “I don’t need to work. I’m an Artist,” a fact which is not actually a fact unless you consider spray painting one’s kitchen wall art.

Oh, and along with all the shit NPR’s spitting re: the death of our blue and green orb via shit-storming financial and animal collapse, on the way to brunch yesterday we saw one of those things you push babies in totally empty and unattended in the bike lane, which is obvi the result of child, parent, and/ or au pair getting yanked into the great playground in the sky. Point being, there’s a lot to regret up in this here quickly-waning life and I gots a story re: regret that Ima pass you instead of the usual butter I churn to distract you from your desk job.

In light of the above and the fact that I don’t have the time to write new lies (what with the bball game and subsequent burning of Franklin St. in a mere dozen hours), I’ma link you the piece I wrote for that homosexual conference I told you about which you did not attend (with the exception of one M. Wilcox, which was truly fucking cool). But before you click, first know that the essay Ima link you is not entirely true (aka is FICTION-ish) and also co-ops one of my dear friend S. Windsor’s (of the Pensacola Windsors) totes hilar anecdotes, for which I apologize and will only excuse with this: I’m an Artist.

But before I link you this shit, the following is an actual email from my actual mother:

Hi Sweet<3, R U kmng hm Th or Fr? Aftr al itz estr! jesus.
luv
ma

Whew. Lot of words there up above. Here’s more.

Dear Friends and Lovers,

I want to apologize for not calling.  I know, I know, it’s been a while.  And, yes, I got your text messages and your emails and that one mixed tape that I keep meaning to listen to.  I  meant to call, really, but my sister’s kid stayed with me for a weekend and then I had to do my taxes and there was the Peaches show and my driver’s license expired.  What can I say—life’s been crazy.

But, as all of you know, I always take the time to care for my Earthly temple.  I mean, what are we if not hot bodies?  That’s right.  Lonely.  And this maintenance doesn’t just mean limiting carbs and going to Body Pump twice a week and drinking laxative tea every night.  It also means caring for my immunities and making sure my STD count stays at a respectable zero.

And the results are in, my friends!  The results are in.  But before we get to that, I want to pause a moment and acknowledge the world we are living in today, right now, and probably even tomorrow.  Tough times out there, right?  You can’t enjoy your morning latte without hearing poor people bitch and moan about this so-called recession on the news.  And just this morning my friend Jen Anniston called to say she’s marrying that girly fuck with the floral tattoos.  What’s his name again?  Right.  John Mayer.  Tough times all around.

Even I–seemingly spat from the womb covered in gold dust—am going through a rough patch.  Don’t worry, I’m not losing the condo or anything, but my dealer just jacked up the price of an eight ball by 11%.   Eleven percent!  For a second I thought I was going to have to get a job, but then I realized that I have valuable information, information that you want.  And I’m going to give it to you, friends and lovers, for a small fee.

That’s right—I’m offering you the results of my STD tests in exchange for a small amount of legal tender.  I’m not going to spoil if for you, but I will say that there’s some very interesting data on those print-outs.

I know I can’t prevent you from sharing these results with each other, but in an effort to discourage any potential file-sharing, I’m saving the last, most special result until all the others have been disseminated.  If I learn that there’s been some open source shit going on, no one’s getting it.  And, yes, you could just get tested yourself, but you’re phobic of needles, Amy.  And, Dora, don’t even pretend any nurse could find a vain in your body that hasn’t collapsed.  Even your toes have tracks marks.  Isn’t it easier just to come to me?  Besides, I’m offering this information for 5% less than your standard clinic.

Now, you may have noticed that there are a few familiar names on this list.  I just want to say, Mike, that  a little oral does not mean you’re gay.  Don’t stress it, bro.  And Carly, you’re a great kid, but you and Mike are obviously way more compatible than the two of us.  And because you two are such a terrific couple and I feel a little bad about doing both of you so soon after the wedding, I’m going to give you a package deal.  Two results for the price of one!

Alright, people, I’d update you on my new life-happenings (those hydbrid SUVS truly are lady-killers, let me tell you!), but all this finger-tapping is giving me callouses.

Love you, mean it!  Call me!