Self Portraits

So please come forth and reveal yourself in all your art-ridden angst! Any medium, any kind (so long as it's yours).

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-pmg

Got Prozac?

The First Amendment states: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." Nowhere does this say that church and state should be separated. All it says is that the government of our country cannot make laws which prohibit religious practice or establish a national church.

So where in our country’s laws do we find the phrase ‘separation of church and state’? We have to look at the Supreme Court’s 1947 case of Everson vs. Board of Education, when Justice Hugo Black said there was a separation of church and state inherent in the Constitution. Not written, just implied. This one justice mentioned the phrase, and since then we have heard that it is the law of the land despite not being in the Constitution or having been legislated.

Despite this recent trend away from religion, it is a very integral part in our society and history. It may not seem that way, given that I'm from the state with the least amount of churches in the nation, but it does. Read the Declaration of Independence, it mentions God several times. During the flag salute we say we are one nation under God. Our motto is "In God We Trust" and there is a carving of the 10 Commandments on the doorway to the Supreme Court.

Unfortunately, there is a percentage of the population that sees this religious involvement as threatening. They are under the guise that we are a nation that has no right to have policy determined by religious values or beliefs. But they couldn’t be more wrong. Most of our founding fathers believed in God. Our country is a religious nation built around churches. The problem to these nay-sayers is when fundamentalists stand up for what they believe in and support sometimes unpopular social positions. Well I am sorry folks, but the First Amendment also guarantees us freedom of speech.

The nay-sayers also say that this is just government telling us how to live. But the government tells us how to live every day by dictating laws that say we cannot smoke within 50 feet of a public building, we can’t buy things because of high taxes or we can’t go to school because tuition needs to rise. Government already invades our lives, yet still these nay-sayers say religion in our government is still dangerous to our country.

The fact is that religion in our government does help. President Bush’s move to support faith-based initiatives is a big example. Faith-based government programs have shown time and time again to be more productive and satisfying to our citizens than a government hand out. The truth is that faith-based government programs give more than support. They give hope to their benefactors. They can fill an emptiness in them that only God can, and it gives them something the government can never give, unconditional love.

Religion also humbles our leaders and leads them to moral decisions. By believing in a higher power, our leaders know that they will be held accountable for their actions after life as well. They know that they are not the top level when it comes to the earth and that they need to live their lives in the way their religion dictates.

Now I am not saying that we should become a theocracy and make communion mandatory every week. Nothing run by humans is perfect. What I am saying is that government and religion can be partners and work together. We were not founded on a separation FROM religion. Time and time again faith-based programs have helped Americans get out of their problems where other government programs have failed. The wall between church and state has been up too long. Religion in government needs to be resurrected so that our nation can improve itself and follow the important message of God: Love thy neighbor.

Starring: Steven Seagal, DMX, Isaiah Washington, Tom Arnold, Anthony Anderson
Screenplay by Ed Horowitz and Rich D'Ovidio
Based on the novel by John Westermann
Directed by Andrzej Bartkowiak

[Rated R for strong violence, language and some sexuality/ nudity. 117 minutes]

I really liked Romeo Must Die. Some of the wire scenes were hokey. But overall it was a good action flick, and an impressive film by a first time director. Andrzej Bartkowiak, and Steven Seagal…maybe he was trying to pull a Tarantino/Travolta and resurrect Seagal’s career. I went to see this film on a Wednesday afternoon off. It was the #1 movie of the weekend.

It seemed like a good idea…

The only thing I can figure out is that there are many, many DMX fans who went to see this movie. Remember when Steven Seagal was a bad ass? Above the Law was an excellent action movie for its time. Steven Seagal was a virtual nobody who filled that part perfectly. His stake went up a bit, and then slowly he sank into bad action film oblivion that damn near ruined his career. Well according to box office sales, this movie has rocketed him back into a career…of sorts. I mean, you can make a pretty good living in a strait to video world right?

This is the most blatant commercial action genre crap forced on the masses that I have had to subject myself to in a very long time. That being said, I paid $3.50 at the matinee to see it. I’d have felt less cheated if I had paid $3.91 at Blockbuster.

Steven Seagal is Orin Boyd. Every bit the bad ass detective. He gets busted for unauthorized excessive use of violence and throwing the vice president off a bridge (sounds good on paper, but it really isn’t) and is forced to take anger management classes, and transferred to the worst precinct in the city. Here he is busted down to traffic duty, and right back up again for no reason. He also picks up a partner, who has little-to-nothing to do with the rest of the story. Of course this precinct has all the staple elements. Good cop, bad cop, Internal Affairs, etc. DMX is introduced as the shady drug dealing bad guy, who for some reason never wants to actually do any harm. Anthony Anderson plays his comic relief sidekick, who really isn’t very funny. In fact, nothing really makes any sense at all until about ¾ of the way through when Tom Arnold’s character (from the anger management class) comes in and finally explains everything. At that point you start thinking “what?”. I mean they laid all this mysterious groundwork, and when they explain it, you wonder why they bothered. It really wasn’t any big mystery. Just facts that they didn’t let you in on, that had they done so, the first part of the movie would have made sense.

The movie did contain lots of fight scenes and gruesome special effects. I think that I was so disappointed with the rest of the story and acting that it took all the fun out of the action scenes for me. Some of those scenes leave something to be desired as well. In one fight, they conveniently lose all weapons, and have to use whatever is lying about. Well it just so happens that there are two Elementary-School-style large paper cutters. I fully expected Seagal to stick the guy's arm in and chop it off or something. Instead he rips that big cast iron blade off, the other guy rips his off, and they proceed to sword fight.

Come on…

This may come as a surprise to some, but I fully intend to watch all movies I review while sober. I figure it’s the least I can do. I want to bring you a coherent opinion of a flick. Well, I wish I had broken my rule here. If I’d have smoked a few before going into the movie I may have not cared about the plot, or the acting, or the editing. In fact, I may have just passed out and not subjected myself to this crap and written a better review of a better movie.

I give this movie one toke (out of five).

Certain physical characteristics are sexually selected in animals; certain behaviors are as well. For example, a peacock’s feathers and mating dance are characteristics and behavior that were selected for by females over evolutionary time. Certain characteristics of human anatomy give us some powerful tools for understanding how our ancestors behaved as well as explaining some of our modern behaviors.

Three of these characteristics are sexual dimorphism, cryptic ovulation and concealed estrus, and penis and testicle sizes. Sexual dimorphism refers to average size differences between males and females of a species. Cryptic ovulation and concealed estrus means that it is very hard, if not impossible, to know when a female is ovulating and thus fertile. Penis and testicle size refers to.. well, I think you know what that refers to.

Why are these things relevant to humans? The first, sexual dimorphism, bears directly on the number of female mates a male member has, or more precisely, on the degree of polygamy in a species. For most animals in general, the hypothesis is that if males compete for females, larger bodies are more likely to prevail in male-male competition and larger males are able to monopolize several females. This idea is supported in nature: the more females in a group, the larger the difference between the body sizes of males and females. Animals characterized by harems, such as gorillas and elephant seals, exemplify this. A male mountain gorilla may have a harem of perhaps 10 or more females led by a single silverback male who is the sole impregnator of the females in the troop and outweighs the females by a factor of 2 or 3. Male elephant seals may outweigh their female couterparts by a factor of 10, and they may mate with over 100 females in a breeding period.

Conversely, in species where the males and females are the same size, monogamy is the usual form of reproduction. There is no competition between males trying to get more than a single mate and thus no pressure to select for larger, stronger males.

Sexual dimorphism is thus a reliable indicator of the degree of polygamy that happens under natural conditions. Same body size = monogamy. Extreme differences in male-female body sizes = extremely polygamy. Moderate differences in body sizes usually indicate a moderate degree of polygamy. This is exactly what we see in humans. Males are on average larger than females and tend to cheat or have multiple wives.

Cryptic ovulation and concealed estrus was a big change for our human ancestors as well. In most primate species, when a female starts ovulating, glands around her genitals swell up and turns red, a big sign that she is fertile. In humans however, there is no similar sign. This changed sexual relations in three major ways. One, it gives women more control over mate choice, two, it obscures paternity, and three it induces greater sociality. In a polygamous species, being able to identify when the female is in heat allowed the dominant males to, well, dominate the females and keep other males from getting a chance to inseminate them.

With concealed estrus, however, no one knows when anyone is fertile or not. All males benefit from treating females nicer at all times and some of the smaller (i.e. weaker) males have a chance to get in with the females. Also, since no one knows who the father is, it opens the door for greater offspring survival. In lions, when a new male takes over the pride, he kills as the babies. The mothers then go into heat and he has the opportunity to reproduce with them. But if no one knows who the father is, males are less likely to kill offspring like this for fear of killing their own progeny. (By the way, genetic paternity tests indicate that as many as 1/3 of human babies are born to fathers other than the husband.)

Penis and testicle size is an interesting indicator of social structure as well. How big do you think a gorilla's penis is? On average about 1.2 inches with 1 ounce testicles. Humans have 5.12 inch penises and 1.42 ounce testes, but chimpanzees have 3.15 inch penises and massive 4.17 ounce testicles. The explanation? Gorilla males have no competition for females once they establish themselves at the head of a harem. That takes physcial size and strength and is unrelated to genitals. Once they are established with a receptive group of females, there is no need for a large penis or testicles: their sperm is all there is.

Humans and chimpanzees however, traditionally lived in larger social groups with sexual competition. With cryptic ovulation and concealed estrus in humans, there is no way to know if you are copulating at the right time. Even if you are at the right time, of course it is optimal to be the first to fertilize the egg. A longer penis gets the swimmers that much closer at blastoff, shortening the total distance they have to travel as well increasing the probability that some may live longer.

From the chimpanzee perspective, large testicles are useful for the hit-and-run approach to reproduction. Chimpanzee culture has a pretty strict male hierarchy and the males at the top tend to have more copulations. But the little guy on the bottom has devised a strategy to get some though: We know it as Wham! Bam! Thank you ma'am! strategy. Chimps have very short copulation periods, about 15 seconds or so. They also have been known to have up to 20 or more copulations in a day. The large testicles make it possible to send a fruitful package with every copulation as well as provide large numbers of swimmers that can compete with other males' sperm.

All of these issues are relevant to human society and behavior, but we have to keep in mind that this type of analysis in no way suggests that humans HAVE to act a certain way. Just because our sexual asymmetry indicates we are a mildly polygamous species does not give men the right to defend infidelity or to think that it is their natural perogative to sleep around. The behaviors that we project on to humanity from anthriolutionary perspectives describe inclinations that humans may have for acting in a certain way. Biologically predicted behaviors are expected when people act without thinking, but culture and symbolic cognition interact to create systems of thought and meaning that change the whole scenario from a non-human natural setting to a human-specific setting. We have systems of meanings and expectations, as well as memories, morals, and manners that we can be expected to adhere to.

Conscious thought and language are the major characteristics that set the human animal apart from other animals. Some people oppose evolutionary explanations of behavior because they fear that those explanations would be used to argue that innate behaviors are "natural," "excusable," and "desireable." This is-ought fallacy shouldn't worry us though, because exploring some of our natural tendencies give us the ability to identify behaviors that may occur unless we are aware of our natural inclinations towards them.

1. melon: Death by the Hair 2. Bondo: Skeletor Releases 3. Leroy: Binks MS Virus

This week's graffiti is up (no apologies though).

And don't forget to vote on last week's entries!

I walk back outside and some of the neighborhood kids come running up to me yelling, “Motorcycle man, motorcycle man” and they ask me all sorts of questions while I uncover my bike and do a pre ride check.

Once I get done looking things over, putting on my gear, and answering all sorts of questions like, “What’s that?” and “Why do you wear a helmet?” it’s time to fire up the bike. I ask the kids to step back just a bit and press the ignition switch. The engine kicks over and I give the throttle a little twist to impress the kids.

I pull out of the driveway and sit at the stop light for a few minutes until a car comes up behind me. The city put in these great pressure plates a while back, but my bike just isn’t really heavy enough to trip them. It doesn’t really bother me all that much I guess; it sort of gives me another minute to let the bike warm up and for me to get used to the idea that I’m sitting on a three hundred and eighty pound rocket.

The light finally flashes green, and my heart stops for just a second. Here we go, this is what I’ve been waiting for. I pull out slowly and make a left across the street. As I finish the turn I lean the bike back up and hammer on the throttle while leaning forward just a bit. The bike jumps forward and all I can do is hang on. I rev right up second gear and barely have time to bang it into third. As I go up into third I’m a little further back in the seat and when I snap the clutch out, the front wheel hovers just a little off the ground. The wheel sets back down and I take a quick look down at the speedometer to check how fast I’m going. Just a touch over seventy as I ease off the throttle a bit. Not bad for the first five hundred feet of my ride.

I take it down a notch and work my way through town at a comfortable speed. No tickets yet, please. I finally pull up to the entrance to the highway and do a quick scan for cops. None to be seen. A small smile creeps onto my face as a slammed Honda pulls up next to me and starts to rev his engine. Goddamn, I hope these punks never learn. I can see out of the corner of my eye that he’s checking me out. He wants it, I can tell. I give a sharp pull on the throttle to let him know that I’m game and then the light turns green. Sure as shit the little punk floors it. What fun! No wheels off the ground this time. I tuck my head down and just hammer on the throttle as hard as I can and pull onto the ramp, then bang, I’m in second, then third, and I have some time for a quick mirror check. He’s not even close.

Now comes the humiliation. I pop up to fourth and cut it loose, the v-twin beneath me roars as I slap it up to fifth. I peek at the speedo .. one hundred and three and climbing. A quick shift to sixth and about 4 seconds after I left the light I’m on the freeway and doing a solid hundred and five. The Honda’s about half way down the ramp. Never even had a chance. Punk. I slow down a bit and wait for the Honda to pass. He does, trying not to look at me. Damn it, today is going to be a good day.

I stop at the bridge toll and pay my two bucks, and it’s off again. I keep pace with traffic for a bit until I hit the foot of the bridge to be sure I don’t get nicked in a speed trap, then it’s all open. I tuck in as small as I can and shift back down to fifth. Roll the gas on and we’re moving. 70 .. 75 .. 80 .. shift back to sixth .. 90 .. 100 .. 105 .. I’m holding my breath now. I grip the bars as hard as I can and seat my ass way back in the seat to keep my profile as low as possible .. 110 .. 115 .. I see an opening in the traffic up ahead and start to aim for it .. 120 .. my helmet has pressed against my face now and my teeth are clenched .. 122 .. I’m almost to the top of the bridge, but I hold onto it for just another second .. 126 .. 127 .. she’s topped out, and I’ve reached to top of the bridge. I ease off the throttle and sit up a bit. The wind slows me down pretty fast and I get down to a normal speed again pretty fast.

I’ll never forget the time I was on this bridge going full out and a minivan pulled out into my lane about two hundred feet in front of me. Trying to find just the right point where my rear wheel wouldn’t lock at 110 mile an hour was not a high point. But I’m still here, so I guess I must have done ok.

A few exits up I pull off on to route 84 and start my ride for real. I traverse another town at comfortable speeds, especially at the base of La Honda road, because the cops are out here for one thing and one thing only... to bust crazy motorcycle drivers. It’s all for good reason I guess, as there is almost always at least one major crash on Sky Line per weekend, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to get nicked before I even start my ride. So even when the guys on the R1s slide past me at the lights, I keep it in check and wait my turn proper. I reach the bottom of La Honda and it all starts to become worthwhile.
I warm my tires up a bit on the last quarter mile or so before the road breaks off, and as I’m rocking the bike from side to side I really start to get pumped. This is what it’s all about. My brain goes empty and my pulse picks up. I get a little presquirt of adrenaline into my blood and then I’m there. I roll into the first turn and it’s mother fuckin’ on.

I push the bars hard and lean into the turn while holding my speed. As I reach the apex of the turn I roll the throttle on and sink the bike just a little more. I pull the bike back up and roar down the straight and set up for the next turn. I slide my ass off the seat this time and hold the throttle a little tighter for this turn and push the bars up far enough to rest my elbow on my high knee and the low peg just starts to scrap the pavement as my bike roars out of the corner.

This goes on for about three miles and then I come out onto Skyline Boulevard and the famed Alice’s Restaurant .. not for the song mind you, but for the fact that Sky Line is one of the best spots to ride in the entire country, and Alice’s is the meeting place for literally hundreds of motorcyclists every weekend. The place is literally packed with people talking about bikes, looking at bikes, swapping bike stories and tips. And then there’s the bikes .. during the course of a day you can see almost any sort of bike ridden by almost every sort of rider. I’ve seen a vintage one cylinder Harley next to thirty thousand dollar Ducati with both the riders admiring the others' ride and talking about how they got their bikes and where they like to ride and stuff like that. Alice’s is sort of the heart of the motorcycling in the bay area, and nearly everyone there on a Saturday afternoon has one goal in mind. To put some pavement under them.

After hanging out for a bit I decide to get going and hop back on my bike. I pull out of Alice’s and take it easy past the crowd of people. I’ve seen too many squids try to pull a crowd pleaser of some sorts and wind up making a complete ass of themselves in front of a hundred people as they flip a wheelie or crash a stoppie to even bother with it. I save it all for the corners that are about to come. I get a little ways away from Alice’s and I turn it on again. Here comes my shot of adrenaline and once again I’m off. This time it’s a bit different though. This is my favorite part of every ride, this one stretch of road. It’s full on nice gentle sweepers and I don’t really have to slow down. At all.

I roar through the corners I get my bike way down low and my head is turned almost sideways as I look through the turn. Every corner is another chance to twist the throttle a little more and by the time I reach the next Vista Rest point I can barely hear the scream of the engine over the screams of joy in my helmet. There truly isn’t anything better than this. The euphoria I feel when I park my bike after a hard ride is not all that unlike the feeling of rolling over for a cuddle after great sex.

I’ll sit in my chair and shake for an hour or so after I get home, and the grin on my face is next to impossible to wipe away. Yup, for me there are few things better than riding my bike, and there sure as hell isn't anything like it.

Belinda. Perhaps I’m getting just a little bit ahead of myself here. Let me rewind a bit and start from the beginning.

On Being a Philanderer – A Redguard Tale

Romance. Love. Call it what you will, it’s always provided me with an unending series of seemingly unfathomable complications. I try, but somehow it just never works out. Somewhere in the middle, things go haywire. It always starts out splendidly, but sooner or later people start shouting and pulling knives and whatnot. Lives are threatened. Egads man, the raw passion of love always seems to slip the reins and vault the constraints of rationality where I’m concerned. Why? I do not know.

For a while, I thought it must’ve been me. Hell, maybe it really is me. God knows I’m far from faultless. But, wait a minute here, I digress.

Maybe a more appropriate title for this piece would be “Fear and Loathing in Loveland” or something like that. Drugs could be the answer. They always seemed to work for Hunter. Yeah. Maybe if I loaded up on Acid and Weed, this whole thing would seem normal to me. Chase it all with enough beer to drown a horse, and everything would be peachy. Or, at least it would seem peachy (I’ll tackle that perception vs. reality bit later). Maybe the Acid alone would be enough, or perhaps I’d need to devise some devilish new cocktail to subdue the senses. Ack, this calls for some serious experimenting. We’ll have to wait and see.

Oh yes, where was I? The beginning of my tale, that’s right. Well, it all started several months ago on my very first day of school…

Rahizanel. Yep, that’s her name. Interesting, isn’t it? Beautiful. The name of an angel. It certainly fits her. From the moment I first saw here standing there in the cold, dark morning, I was captivated. Immediately, I drew the impression that she must have been a dancer. Her physique was too symmetrical and lovely for anything else. She’s a tiny thing, all of 5’2” tall with dark hair that falls in waves all the way to her dangerously curvaceous hips. Her features are so delicate as to suggest that they might have been lifted from one of the more exotic porcelain dolls that pose in the windows of expensive Paris boutiques. Rahizanel…oof.

So, in my normal cavalier fashion, I sauntered up to her and introduced myself…and was rewarded with a cold and very haughty indifference. Now, I am used to this sort of thing. I am, after all, something of a plain man. You know, very nondescript and average. To think that a creature of such exotic beauty would find me interesting was a tremendous leap of faith to begin with. However, nothing ventured, nothing gained, eh?

So, self-esteem none the worse for wear, I retreated and turned as if to address my sack of belongings. It was then that I first caught sight of the other: Belinda.

Oy, mami. Make it stop. With Belinda, there was no mistaking it. I locked gazes with her, and instantly knew that she was at least as profoundly attracted to me as I was to her. And, let me tell you…I was very, very attracted to her.

She is something to look at, I tell you. “Beautiful” falls tragically short of hitting the mark where she’s concerned. Where do I start? Her eyes are indescribable. I have not seen the like before. When I am near to her, I am mesmerized by the way her eyelashes meet at the sides and mesh in delicate backward curls, each one perfectly spaced apart from the next. There is a bizarre tranquility in her gaze, and a self-assuredness that is rare to find these days in women. I find it very hard to tear my eyes away from her face. Very hard indeed.

Shall I go on? I think so, yes. Her head is topped with a luxuriant shock of oil-black hair that ends, square-cut, at her lovely shoulders where it struggles vainly to hide the subtle perfection of what must be THE most beautiful neck I have ever seen. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph…I tell you, I’m not usually the type of man who gets turned on by peoples necks, but my, my, my. Swans would duck their heads in shame at the absolute feminine grace of this lady’s neck. Goddammit, I tell you, I want to bite it right now.

To top it all off, she’s got all of these beautiful accoutrements piled atop a body that is finely honed from a lifetime of assiduously training her physique. She works out. I like that. Everything is firm where it should be firm, and wonderfully soft where nature and good taste demand it to be so. Oh jeez, I’m tearing up here. Hold on…

So, after the initial thunderclap of “call it what you will” that passed between us, I walked up and greeted her a lovely morning.
Things went well. They went very well, indeed. They went so well, in fact, that I felt for a moment, a little bit like a cross between Fabio and James Bond. Her initial reaction to my gentlemanly greeting was a glazed over gaze and a half-mumbled, “Oh, wow.” Let me tell you, kids…it doesn’t get too much better than that. At least not for me, it doesn’t.

So, we chatted for a while, and within five minutes I had procured a lunch date, a Friday night dinner date, and a phone number which I hurriedly secreted away in my wallet for later use.

Class went well that day.

Lunch went even better. I received an opportunity to acquaint myself more appropriately with the lovely Ms. Belinda (whom I had, by now, dubbed Pesquesa in honor of her salaciously inviting neck).

She was a peach. Really, a bona-fide peach. We talked straight through lunch for an hour and a half. No awkward pauses. No moments of struggling for something interesting to say. Everything that she said WAS completely riveting, and I think it’s safe to say that she found my own repartee to be equally involving. It was only the first day of school, and already I was falling in love. Wonderful, right?

It didn’t take long, of course, for everyone else in the class to notice the energy that passed between us. I didn’t mind. I rarely do care what other people have to say where I, and my affairs, are concerned.

Belinda, on the other hand, seemed to mind tremendously. She had expressed her discomfort with the attention that we were receiving from our other classmates. I suppose it was her opinion that many of the other young ladies were openly jealous of the fact that she had won my attention. Whatever the case, I never perceived it to be so (why would they be?). And, at any rate, I really didn’t care.

So, the first three weeks went by quite comfortably, with Belinda and I growing closer to one another by the day. Then, it began. One Friday evening, she cancelled on me, citing that she was too tired to make our date. It was fine by me, of course. I am, after all, no stranger to exhaustion.

The weekend passed by, however, and nary a word from her. When I finally did see her on Monday morning, she was distant and aloof, as though I had somehow managed to offend her. After our first quiz, she and I met in the hallway outside of the classroom and our eyes locked in that familiar way again. It was like that first moment that we had met, replayed over in this place, all magnetism and the hungry lust of youth. She drew near to me and I to her, and as I moved to embrace her, she suddenly pulled back and asked me what I had planned after school.

Odd, I thought, but I answered that I had planned to go to the gym. She hastily invited herself, and I, of course, acquiesced.

The rest of the school day passed without much incident, although Belinda had left partway through the final period of lecture and had chosen not to return. Still, I expected to find her at the gym, so off I went with all intention of finding out what had gone amiss.

Well, I got to the gym, but Belinda didn’t. She never called to tell me why, either. Naturally, I was concerned, and when I returned home, I hastily dialed her up to see if she was okay. I received no call back. The next morning, Belinda came to class as usual with neither concern nor apology for having cut out on me and failing to return my call. She also chose to make herself scarce for lunch, and spend it instead with a rather portly woman who sits in the back of the class and resembles one of the characters I’m convinced I’ve previously seen lurking around the shadows of the Cantina scene in Star Wars.

Now, I am not one to rush to hasty judgment, but neither am I a fool. In the face of this kind of cold response, I opted to strike out and find my romantic fortune elsewhere. Wouldn’t you?

So, the days went by and I commenced to date.

First, there was the Lady Michelle. She was a lovely, statuesque blond, who not only possessed the nearly picture-perfect face of a newscaster, but also had the tabula rasa mentality, as well. Summing up her personality would be something of a task were I not somewhat linguistically able. Hold on. Let me find the proper phrase. Wait. Here it comes.

Fucking, Duh.

From the very first moment we sat down to dinner together, I was utterly dumbfounded by her absolute lack of coherence and intelligence. I mean, c’mon here. The very first thing that she said went something like this:

“Oh James, you know, I’ve never been to a Japanese restaurant before. It’s so neat. I have a coffee pot that’s a Braun. That’s a German company, but the other day I lifted it up to wash it and I looked on the bottom and it said it was really made in Japan. I don’t think that’s right. Do you? Gee. This place is nice. What kind of food do you think they serve?”

Right. Not being the one to cast stones where none are due; I reserved judgment for the moment and pretended that I had not heard what she had said.

She promptly followed it up with something that went disturbingly like this:

“You know, I come from Holland and my family speaks Dutch. I speak Dutch, too. A lot of people make the mistake of calling it Hollish instead of Dutch, but that’s not proper. It’s really Dutch. Did you know that? It’s sort of like the way that Norwegians don’t live in Norwegia. They live in Norway. Did you know that? My feet hurt.”

I fed her. I drove her home. I bade her good evening. I left, never to call or darken her doorway again. So, sue me.

Next, there was Monica, whom I had gleefully dubbed, “Waif model.” She was another delicate and rare beauty. For the life of me, I still cannot understand what her fascination was with me. As I said before, I am overwhelmingly average. Plain, you understand? That a ravishing young girl like this could swoon over someone like me simply does not compute. Nevertheless, I’m not one to look the proverbial gift horse in the mouth, so I ran with it for a bit. What the hell, right?

Monica, Monica, I fell a little bit in love with the innocent way that she’d blush each time that I looked at her. She was demure. Very demure, in fact. I find that intensely attractive in a woman. More than that, she was bright and engaging with a solid sense of self-worth that I never expected to find nestled there within the heart of her.

She was young, far too young, in fact. Only twenty years old, and I a doddering thirty-one. I think that’s the thing that clinched it for me. Were it not for her age, I probably could have lost myself within her for a long, long time. As it stood, I knew that she deserved something more than I had to offer her. Her life was new, fresh, and still full of wonder. I didn’t want to take that away from her. So, a few nights huddled together on the shore of Huntington Beach, whispered intimacies, shared embraces, and in the end I left the space of her as chastely as I had entered it, both of us better people for having shared the moment.

I do suppose that a part of me loves her still and always will.

And so, a few more days slipped past between without the sheltering grace of a woman’s presence to guide me. I thought and thought again. Belinda still occupied the vast majority of my mind’s free time. I had begun to become morose as she chose still to remain distant and aloof. I wanted to touch her. I wanted to reach out to her. For the life of me, I thought I had expressed myself to her rather plainly. I was sure that she had done the same. I couldn’t fathom what strange obstacle had managed to worm its way between us.

Still, when our gazes locked, I could see it in her eyes. It may sound arrogant of me to say so, but I could see the desire behind her eyes. Desire that, for some undisclosed reason, she chose to hold in check. I tried several times to break through to her. I tried to speak to her about “us,” but she wouldn’t have it. Again, it has always been my habit to speak plainly. Shunned again, I turned away once more to seek my solace elsewhere.

I found it, yet again, in rather short order.

I suppose the next chapter started on that one fateful day in clinical. I chose to interrupt Rahizanel while she was in the middle of performing a patient examination in front of one of the professors (usually, quite the tense moment). See, earlier I had been rooting around the place, searching vainly for a rectal thermometer (don’t ask) when I casually stumbled into her exam room. I don’t know what the hell I was thinking, but I glanced over and saw the big red-tip hanging out of her patient’s ass and rather smoothly reached over and extracted it while saying, “AH HA, BE BACK IN A MINUTE!”

(Sadly, I am becoming quite well known among my peers for such unforgivably malfeasant acts.)

While the professor sputtered incomprehensible incredulity at my behavior, the lady Rahizanel broke down in exaggerated fits of laughter. I heard it all from the examination room next-door, where I had hastily retreated. She began wailing like an aggravated idiot, and soon even the professor joined in, cackling like a hyena.

As I stood there in the adjoining cubicle, easing the freshly borrowed and cleansed thermometer into the anus of a totally incapacitated stranger, it occurred to me that Rahizanel possessed the most beautiful laugh. I had never heard it before. She never laughed. Ever. Too uptight, I guess. Well, that was what I thought at the time, anyway. I was intrigued by her then; much moreso than I had ever been previously. I was thoroughly intoxicated by the delicate sound of her elfin voice, her crystalline laughter.

So, I drew my temperature, swabbed down my thermometer, and boldly strolled back into her examination room where I returned the instrument to her, and promptly received a stern dressing down from the (still teary-eyed) professor.

Shortly after clinical that day, she approached me and asked if I would consider tutoring her in anatomy. Eek. I paused for a minute, all of the social interpretation cells in my head on full alert. Was this a tongue-in-cheek come on, or a serious cry for help from a drowning colleague? I was, after all, in the top one percentile of the class. That in mind, I knew very well that she could actually be making an honest request. I chose to interpret it as a very genuine one, and assured her that I would be available to study with her on the coming Saturday. I gave her my number and told her to call for directions when she was able. As I placed the tiny scrap of paper into her waiting hand, I was struck once again by the porcelain-doll quality of her beautiful face. Egads! I knew that I had to be careful here, man. I was strongly attracted to this lady, and didn’t want to behave in a manner that could be interpreted as being improper. Always a gentleman, right? Right.

She called that very same night, and we ended up staying on the phone for quite a long while. She was interesting, disarming, and I came to understand in rather short order that her wall of haughtiness was nothing more than the defense mechanism of a woman with a tragically misused sense of self. Of course I couldn’t understand that at first. One does not, after all, generally assume that astonishingly beautiful women will be insecure about themselves. She was.

It took several conversations before I came to fully understand her reasons for being so. The men whom she had chosen to share her life with in the past had horribly mistreated her. Fucking takers always leave their mark, don’t they? In truth, I am still stunned that someone so pervasively beautiful on so many different levels could be made to feel worthless and ugly. More to the point, I cannot put a “why” to it. Why would someone do that to a person? Why would anyone do anything other than honor and venerate that which deserved to be treated so? I don’t understand it and I suppose that I never shall.

She came to me, and we studied…for a while, anyway. Very soon after our first session, we began to become distracted with one another. Very distracted. It wasn’t long before we found ourselves spontaneously locked in a passionate embrace that ended, long hours later, with us lazily sprawled across the couch that occupies my front room. It’s after moments like that when you really tend to get the impression that things are going along rather swimmingly. Know what I mean?

So, I reclined there for a while with her in my arms, savoring the moment; gently caressing her; losing myself in the raw carnality of being close to her, when there came a pensive knocking at my front door. Obviously, I was in no hurry to answer it. I chose, instead, to remain on the couch with her, breathing in the heady scent of her, dreaming while awake.

Then, the gentle knocking gave way to a rather vicious banging. Someone was truly mishandling my door. That made me angry. Still, it is a stout door, and I was somewhat preoccupied. I chose to remain on the couch for a moment longer, although my attention had now been diverted away from the lovely lady Rahizanel, and was now directed solely at this new turn of events. Hmmm, though I. Whom do you suppose this could be?

I might have stayed put on that couch through earthquakes, floods, banging, or anything else that one could possibly imagine. When I noticed someone trying the knob, however, I got pissed. That’s one thing that I DO NOT like. As soon as I noticed that, I jumped up, strolled briskly into my bedroom, grabbed up my handy iron pest-deterrent, and returned to confront this mysterious trespasser who was trying to gain unlawful entrance into my abode.

I strode to the door, flipped the latch, popped it open, and…

No one was there.

“That’s odd,” I thought. “Could it have been filthyevildirtybastard ghetto children, attempting to rip me off?”

“No,” thought I. “I have relatively little to steal, and besides…all of the filthyevildirtybastard ghetto children are my friends. Hmmm….”

New mystery at hand, I shut and latched the door, and turned as if to return to my room when I noticed Rahizanel sitting there on the couch, biting her nails. I had never known her to bite her nails before. Again, things had begun slowly piecing themselves together in my mind.

I returned to my room for a moment and allowed the facts to stew in my brain for a while before returning to the front room to sit beside the suddenly nervous Rahizanel.

I looked at her for a moment before finally asking, “Are you okay?”

She stared at me, the nail of her index finger lodged cleanly between her front teeth, and asked, “Why do you ask?”

“You’re all bunched up in the corner of the couch, and you’re biting your nails. I’ve never seen you do that before. What’s up?”

“Oh nothing. I’m just cold, I guess,” she replied.

Cold didn’t seem to explain the nail biting bit to me, so I scooped her up, pulled her to me and sat for a while, waiting to see what course things would take now that I was near her. Minutes passed, and still she nibbled those tiny nails. Something was clearly amiss.

“Rahizanel,” I asked, “are you involved with someone else?”

“NO, of COURSE not,” she hastily replied, “What would make you ask such a thing?”

“Well, I know I’ve asked you before, but I just wanted to make sure. You’re acting just a bit tensely since that whole door incident.”

“James,” she said, “there is no other man in my life besides you. You know that. I’ve already told you. The only other man that I come into contact with on a regular basis is my roommate, and he’s just that. My roommate. Nothing else.”

Right. Now, I’m not a jealous type of guy. I never have been and really don’t intend ever to be. I DO, however, draw the line where certain things are concerned. Principally, I DO NOT philander. I do not go about the place gleefully humping other people’s wives and girlfriends. That sort of behavior goes against everything that I believe in. I consider it reprehensible in the extreme, and as such, I do my utmost to avoid partaking in it.

Keeping the aforementioned in mind, it shouldn’t surprise you that I tarried for a while and then asked, “This roommate fellow, does he know that you are not involved with him?”

“Well…no,” she quietly replied, “but I’m going to tell him soon.”

RIGHT, again. Okay. Up I stood, as quick as quick could be, allowing the lady to slump sideways onto the seat of the couch where she lay for a brief moment before righting herself.

“What,” I calmly asked, “did you just say?”

“Well, I really can’t tell him yet. I’ve been meaning to, but it’s just not the right time. See, I’ve got school and everything to deal with and I don’t know how he’ll handle it. Can’t you understand?”

“No,” I replied.

“Well, you just don’t understand, James. I can’t just walk up to him and tell him something like that. I’m not prepared to handle it right now and neither is he. He’s still trying to pull himself together after the whole Tennessee thing.”

“Tennessee thing,” I asked, “what Tennessee thing?”

“It was really just a horrible misunderstanding,” she said. “William was home, sick for the day, when the mailman came to the door. He rang the bell because there was postage due on a letter or something…I don’t know. Anyway, William jumped up and attacked him because, for some reason, he thought that the mailman was having an affair with me. He’s very jealous, and not very rational sometimes.”

“Attacked?” I mumbled.

“Yeah, he hit the postman in the head a couple of times with one of the bricks from our front planter. I think he really hurt him. That’s why we came out here. William had to leave Tennessee because he’s got a record and if he stayed around after that, he would have had to do serious time.”

“A record, as in…criminal record?”

“Yeah, he’s pretty violent. He gets into fights a lot. The last time he did time for anything serious was when he came back from maneuvers and found me dancing with some guy in the local bar. He stabbed him. A lot.”

Mind you, by now I was sinking into a quagmire of shock. I wasn’t verbalizing very clearly. Things were becoming clouded behind a queer amalgam of anger and horror at this bizarre turn of events. “Stabbed...maneuvers...what?”

“He stabbed him in the arm and the belly and a couple of other places and then cut his face. They guy lived, so he only had to do like six-months and then a bunch of probation. He used to carry a really big knife, but he doesn’t do that anymore. I think he used to use it a lot on maneuvers. He was a marine for a long time. Recon or something like that. I don’t remember.”

“He’s ex-marine recon, then?”

“Something like that. I never did like the fact that he was a Marine. He’s very big and very violent. He scares me. Do you understand now why I don’t want to be with him anymore?”

“Wait a minute,” I said, “exactly how big is he?”

“Well, he’s six-five, three hundred pounds. That’s bigger than you even.”

“FUCK,” I shouted, “That’s fucking bigger than you and me put together for christsakes. What the hell is fundamentally fucking wrong with you? You mean to tell me that this lover that you’ve neglected to tell me about is, and I fucking quote, an insanely jealous ex-marine recon special-forces soldier with a violent criminal history, a penchant for bashing heads in and using knives on people who look at you the wrong way, AND he’s fucking seven feet tall, too?”

“James.”

“What?”

“He’s not my lover.”

“Rahizanel.”

“What?”

“Get out, now.”

And that’s about how that bit ended. Well, or so I thought, anyway.

I did my very best to avoid the girl from that point on. I’ll be the first to tell you, it was hard. Very hard. It would have been even harder were it not for Belinda coming back into the picture. She cornered me one day outside in the parking lot and we had a talk. She told me a lot about herself and her past. She talked about how she had been involved in two terrible relationships in the past, wherein she was treated very cruelly. One of them was a marriage, whose details I will omit in the interests of personal privacy. Do rest assured, however, that the details are quite horrifying. Utterly horrifying. The second failed relationship was somewhat less monstrous, but still left her very hurt and afraid to love. Hell, I can understand that. Again, however, what I couldn’t understand was how anyone could treat such a beautiful woman so poorly and with such a complete lack of honor. Ah, God, but she is a flower.

Anyway, we talked for a while and she conveyed all of those knotted up emotions to me. She told me that being close to me made her feel as though she weren’t in control, and that made her afraid. That’s why she pulled back. Once more, I told her that I understood. After all, I did and do…completely. I honestly don’t think I’ve ever met a woman who has captivated my interest so completely. I have an overwhelming urge to just love her; to love everything about her, every smooth brown inch of her. And, that I let her know.

So, we embraced for a while and ended up parting company, for the moment, as two people willing to give it a go, so to speak. Nice, eh? I thought so too.

I drove home with a light heart. Things were looking up. Although they had taken an honestly bizarre turn for a while, it looked as though they were coming about. The circle was closing. Karma.

I pulled into my driveway with the top down, sunshine spilling in, and a heart full of hope for tomorrow. As I spun the wheel to enter my garage, I heard the screech of tires, and a silver Mitsubishi bounded up into my driveway cutting me off and almost smashing into the front of my tiny Miata. “Ah well,” I thought, “peace is ever fleeting.”

I turned in time to see the Mitsubishi’s door swing open. The springs squealed in protest as this huge fucking mountain-gorilla of a man pushed himself out of the car. Six-five and three hundred pounds seemed a bit on the short end of describing him in both directions. He was a monster.

Enter: William.

As he turned to face me from across the car, I was still a little dumbfounded. I looked up to his face and couldn’t believe what I saw there. His hairline was so low that there couldn’t have been more than a single centimeter between that and the tops of his eyebrows. I kid you not. His arms dangled down to a length that almost brushed the tops of his knees. Quite literally, I thought, this man is a Neanderthal. I’m about to be brutally mauled by the missing fucking link.

Immediately, I was bombarded by the contrasts between Rahizanel and William. I had this one brief moment wherein my mind was desperately trying to work out the physical mechanics of their private time together. Jesus, talk about Beauty and The Beast. Feh.

Slowly, my brain tuned back in to the moment at hand. He was coming around the car with his wallet raised above his head, flipped open, and he was shouting something.

“Do you know who this is? Do you? This is my fucking wife! Are you fucking my lady?

Before I had the chance to reply, something registered. He was wearing a police/utility belt, and on his right hip sat a holstered gun. Nice, eh? I thought so.

Me? I had just returned from the hospital. I was dressed in scrubs, and the most lethal weapon I could possibly muster to defend myself was the stethoscope hanging from around my neck.

I jumped out of the car, because I knew that, whatever happened, I wasn’t going to be getting anywhere by just sitting in my car. I had to have my feet. At least then, I had a chance.

He shouted at me again, “I’m talking to you! Do you know who I am? You don’t know me! You don’t know what I’m capable of! Are you fucking my lady? ARE YOU FUCKING MY LADY?”

I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t have it in me to start debating with this monkey. Instead, I popped my trunk, shrugged out of my shirt, and threw the bundled up wad of scrub/stethoscope/penlight/etc… into the trunk.

When I did that, he paused for a moment.

“What are you doing?”

“Well,” I said, “it looks a lot like something’s going to happen here. We might as well get to it.”

“Hey man,” he grunted, “I not here to fight.”

By now I was pissed. “I’m not here to fight, either. You’ve got a fucking gun on your hip. You come at me with a gun and I’m not thinking about fighting you. I’m thinking about killing you before you kill me.”

“Aw hey, I din’t mean nothin’ by dis here gun. I was jus’ goin’ ta werk. I is a secyooritee gard. Yep.”

“Well, put that fucking thing away, park your car like a civilized gentleman, and we’ll go upstairs and discuss this like men, okay?”

“Well, nope, nope…I shudin’t ought ta go up there wit you. It ain’t rite. Thas’ yer home.”

“Ah, don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “Come on up and we’ll get to the bottom of this.”

He shrugged and said, “Okay, I guess so.”

And, up we went.

I opened the door, showed him to the couch, and calmly walked into my bedroom where had told him I was going in order to change my clothes. Quickly, I grabbed hold of my 250,000-volt stun gun (I had recently restocked it with fresh batteries since I suspected something like this would be happening soon), and my Glock model 21, before strolling back into the living room.

Calmly as anything, I walked up behind him, placed the electrodes of the stun gun against his oversized neck, and flipped the little switch.

I juiced the prognathous bastard. I juiced him good. In fact, I juiced him for about forty seconds straight, lifted the gun from his neck to see if it still had any spark left, and then placed it back against the base of his skull and fired off until it was dead. Ahhhh, I tell you, that felt pretty damned good.

That out of the way, I walked over and took a seat on the adjacent couch where I casually jacked a round into the chamber of my pistol and waited for him to come to.

His first words were largely incomprehensible grunts. So were his second words. It took me several moments before I finally realized that this was his normal mode of speech.

“Why you do that?” he asked through slitted eyes while rubbing his head.

Oh boy, I was pissed off. It was just starting to settle in. this guy had actually jumped out at me WITH A GUN! The adrenaline was kicking in big time. I wanted to kill him. I actually did want to. If I were just a little more afraid, angry, whatever, I probably would have. As it stood, I raised that gun from my lap and pointed it at his face.

My whole body was shaking with a perverse need to squeeze that trigger. I don’t get it. I never have. Fucking people turn to violence far too quickly in this sheltered place. They commit irreversible acts against their brothers for the most empty of reasons. Here, violence is a game. It is a thing that children play at, and adults callously play with. There I was, shaking with the fury of it, poised upon that precipice and ready to take my leap. I was all too ready to become them. Monsters and whatnot. Goddamit, in retrospect, I wish that I would have. It would have saved everyone a while lot of trouble.

As it stood, I shared a moment’s reflection with him upon violence and the need to exercise one’s right to defend oneself from armed assailants. I was cold, and it was necessary. Eventually, I did lower the gun, although it stayed there in my lap through the length of the whole encounter. He was far too big and dangerous to take lightly.
From that point on, he addressed me as sir and continued to apologize prolifically for any inconvenience that he had caused me. So, I sat there with him and asked him to tell me what was on his mind.

He shared his concerns about his “wife” with me, and then went on to tell me, in detail, about the many men he had hurt in the past because of her imagined infidelity. He showed me his scars. Scars that he claimed he had earned in battle. Through his whole tirade, I never believed that he had been in combat. It just didn’t jibe with his apparent lack of appreciation for the ramifications of violence. Maybe it’s just me, I don’t know. Whatever the case, it didn’t take me long to figure out that he was extremely mentally unhinged. At one point, he wandered off on a tangent, telling me about how Mel Gibson and Jodie Foster are his clients, and that he earns $30,000 dollars per day doing something that he chose not to divulge. He was a complete fucking loon.

To make a long story just a little bit shorter, I allowed him to vent for almost two hours before finally forcing him out of my house. He left with the mumbled farewell, “Hey, yeah…maybe we can get together and have a drink sometime.”

“That’s likely,” I said, and shut the door.

Concerned with the possibility that events might turn suddenly sour for the girl, I chose to call the lady Rahizanel. She answered the phone on the first ring, and uttered a tearful hello.

Hurriedly, I asked her what was wrong. This is what she told me:

“James, I came home and I found this thing on the table. It’s a beefheart, I think. There’s a big knife stuck into the middle of it, and it’s all bloody and there’s blood everywhere and there’s a note. It says, “This is the heart that you cut out of me, you bitch. I’m going to go and cut the heart out of the devil who stole you from me, and then I’m going to come home and rip yours out of your chest. Maybe when all three are together on this table, things will be okay again. – William.””

“Oy shit,” I thought, “this bastard’s a lunatic.”

Before I could interject and tell her that he had just left my home, she told me something else. It went a little like this:

“James, that’s not what’s really bothering me. What’s bothering me is that I went to pick my daughter up from daycare and they told me that William had come by to take her for an ice cream. When I checked her pockets, there was a letter saying that I should remember that there’s nothing in my world that’s safe from him, and that he won’t hesitate to destroy everything that I love before he kills me, just to teach me a lesson.”

I'll tell you now, there's very little that I loathe more in this world than people who hurt children. In that moment, I developed a singular taste to kick his gargantuan ass...even if I'd need lots of help to do it.

Yeah, well. I finally did tell her what went down at my house. She fainted. I called the police. They came and took lots of notes. Luckily, she and her child were covered beneath some sort of “domestic terrorism” blanket that immediately endowed her with a standing restraining order (fat lot of good that does).

I, on the other hand, was informed that I should get myself down to the local courthouse where, for the small sum of $125 U.S., I could procure a restraining order of my very own. What this document ensures is that, should this fellow come to kill me, he could be promptly arrested in the moment BEFORE he actually attacks me instead of after he’s already done the deed. Well, that all depends, of course, on whether or not an officer happens to be standing RIGHT FUCKING NEXT TO ME at the exact moment that he comes to do his slaughter.

I have been on the lookout for him, but he’s gone to ground. Alas. It even turns out that the name he used while he was with Rahizanel was fabricated. She never even knew his real identity.

Gone like a ghost, but not far enough. He still pops up to make midnight phonecalls to her, and to leave hastily scrawled messages at the door to her home, or tucked beneath the windshield wiper of her car. Threats. Warnings. Sooner or later, I am sure that he and I shall meet again.

But, things go on. In the meantime, I’ve been trying desperately to close that connection with Belinda. It’s there, I know it is. I’ve been a bit distracted with all of this, and sometimes I’m not so sure anymore. I’m not so sure that anything’s really worth it. I know that I shouldn’t have to fight for love. I shouldn’t have to struggle. It should come naturally, or not at all. It should come. It will come. It will, in the end. Either with her or someone else, It will come again, and I will be there to see it.

Maybe in tomorrow’s episode, eh?

And the fact that I’m still here, at all, comes down to a few words from Mr. Wilson.

Faith

Redguard@blackvault.com

Cubic Zirconium wedding sets..... What does that tell you?

Buy a CZ and it won't even be listed in the divorce settlement!

11:30 AM: Get woken up by karen and RiZZ talking about something or other. Try not to be bothered by the fact that we already have company and I am in my underwear. Snooze for another half hour or so.

NOON: Get out of bed and shower and whatnot.

12:30 PM: Get out of bathroom all clean and tidy and find RiZZ lying on the floor. Asked why RiZZ was lying in the middle of the living room floor, he explained that it hurts less that way. When asked why he is in pain, he explains that he had gotten beaten up by his friends the night prior. When asked for further explaination, all I hear is something about getting hit in the balls with a bowling ball and soemthing about a swingset. Further details still forthcoming.

12:40 PM: Call Splat's house, I assume HELL answered the phone. "Hello, ____ household, ___ speaking." "Ummm, may I please speak with Splat?" "One moment. Hold please." Think to myself "these people have unnaturally polite phone manners, even for Republicans." Splat gets on and I inform him because melesse will be running a bit late, to go ahead and meet us at 3:30 instead of 3. Splat assures me "right on, boy howdy".

12:45-1:25 PM: RiZZ and I eat pasta and pass the time by complaining about how hungover we both are.

1:30 PM: Start drinking.

2 PM: RiZZ, determined to stick our guests, takes us outside and we look at the three trees on our block to no avail. RiZZ lies down while karen tells us that there is a forest nearby. We grab pager and beer and head there.

2 PM - 3 PM: We wander around the forest and Civil War trails carrying our cans of Natty Ice looking for sticks to hit our guests with. It is here, not at 11:30 PM, that our title of "white trash" was confirmed. We test out various sticks for strength, weight, durability, and other technical aspects. The test entails whapping the stick against a tree while shouting "How do you do, Splat!?". If stick breaks, it fails the test. If it does not, repeat process until it does break. RiZZ and I finally find the perfect sticks and place them by the front door of our apartment.

3 PM: Leave for bar.

3 PM to 4 PM: Wait around outside bar trying to find splat. Our only clue is that he is bald. This requires us to walk up to any bald men and ask "Splat?" When they say "What the hell did you just say to me?" you realize it is not splat and back away slowly muttering your apology. Repeat process when next bald guy appears.

4 PM: While waiting for a table, the ugliest woman I have ever seen comes up to me and says "have you been waiting here for an hour for me?"

4:05 PM: Get seated at our table, order drinks and an appetizer.

4:15 PM: Get drinks and appetizer. Realize the ugly woman chatting with you from across the table is indeed melesse.

I have made fun of melesse in the past for his incredible overuse of "lol" in posting and chat. Come to find his use of lol is indeed appropriate. The guy laughes pretty much constantly. I declare myself the funniest man alive.

4:30 PM: Splat shows up. Splat looked as I expected, but acted totally differently. This is the man, mind you, that has once told me that "semites smell funny" and has defended everything from drunk driving to the right of every American citizen to possess and bear atom bombs. He is incredibly soft spoken in person and perhaps the politest man I have ever met.

4:30 PM to 7PM: Spend the time chatting with karen, RiZZ, melesse, and Splat while having a few freshly brewed beers. Talk about all sorts of things. The only time I note any sort of alarm in our guests is when RiZZ starts talking about getting beaten up by his friends with bowling balls and a swingset last night. I quickly change the subject.

7 PM: Head to liquor store in a caravan of our cars. Buy more beer, some liquor, and some index cards. RiZZ constantly lies down in whatever public place we end up at.

8 PM: Go back to apartment. Give them the brief tour of our 3 rooms. Show splat the console from which I flame his wife. We mill about discussing various things, doing various shit, and drinking copious amounts of various booze.

Something PM: Fiend calls. He is drunker than we are. Phone gets passed around. Continue to drink.

Something else PM: Hit our guests with sticks. Drink more.

aksjbansenbas KM: Aminal calls from England. He is a Limey. Phone gets passed around. Insert grain alcohol IV.

KMFD: Sit around with splat talking about various political things. Neither of us are making any sense. I finally get him down to the position that all Americans have the right to own and bear atomic bombs and weild them on undesired IRS agents. I am unsure of how to proceed with my counter arguement.

Talk more about various things, continue to drink.

98.7 FM, the Laser!: Karen passes out. We beat her unconcsious body with sticks.

Run DMC: Splat announces he has to go home. We allow it. We miss him immediatly. He was a really fucking cool guy.

In the Not Too Distant Future, Next Sunday AD: karen wakes up. We play that white card game they have all ranted to me about in the past. It is stupid. Game ends on an awkward note when karen draws the "urinate on Melesse" card that I had made.

ADHD: Decide the best course of action is to go wander around in the woods. Stuff every available pocket with beer, have a single flashlight between us.

Wander around woods in the dark. Get creepy flashbacks Blair Witch Project.

Melesse, RiZZ, and I spend much of the time wandering around the trenches that have become natural hills and valleys and argue about proper gun placement and Union orders.

I'm a little teacup, short and stout: Go back to Apartment for more beer. Repeat process a few times.

Round 3ish: Unknown. Apparantly we went to 711 and went back to the woods with burritos and even more alcohol. Apparantly RiZZ and I go off even deeper into the woods and swamps on an alien hunt. Some other stuff probably happened, I can't really be sure.

At Some Other Point: Pass out.

Next Morning: Am woken up by ugly woman explaining he is going home. He looks far too chipper to have had a truly fun night. Vow to myself next time to drug his beer with tequila. He was really fucking cool too.

Go back to sleep.

4ish: Wake up. Notice I have various scars and bruises and odd stains that I can't place. Suspect that my friends beat me up last night. Not sure of the details, but I seem to remeber something about bowling balls and swingsets.

7ish. Start drinking.