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Stories of Pain and Humiliation Archives

June 3, 2008

The CT Scan

So because my recent endoscopy/colonoscopy didn’t turn up much, my doctor recommended getting a CT scan of my abdomen and pelvis. I know this doesn’t sound like much fun, but believe me when I say, “Well, it wasn’t as bad as liquid-shitting.”

The plus side is that the hospital makes you pick up this barium goop to drink before the test, which allowed me to get the rough location of where I needed to be. See, the genius who decided our local hospital apparently felt like it’d be a really good, non-confusing idea to make it a giant circle. It strikes me as kind of odd, since most of the people frequent this particular hospital seem to be in their mid- to late-hundreds, that they’d go with a layout that can confuse a person who has reasonable mental faculties (sort of).

So I got the barium stuff, which is labeled “Berry Smoothie.” I dunno, I guess that’s a good name, but if you’re going to give somebody this chalky crud with a slight tinge of berry flavor, isn’t “Berry-Yum” the obvious choice?

Anyway, this evening I went in for the procedure. I was a little alarmed and aroused by how flirty the young, perky receptionist was. I mean…you don’t tip receptionists, right? This really was legitimate flirting? I dunno, maybe they secretly have to get dudes all bonered up before they do a pelvic CT scan, so this was all an elaborate ruse, but whatever. I’ll take what I can get. So after about 20 minutes of that excitement, she sent me to a “men’s waiting room,” even though I didn’t have to change or anything. I just sat there like an idiot.

Two magazines sat on an old coffee table: Ebony and Better Homes and Gardens. I would have laughed at how out-of-date the Michael Jackson cover on Ebony was, except that it was only December of last year. That alone piqued my interest, so I picked it up and thumbed to the cover story, an interview with the man himself, in which he appeared suspiciously less insane than he usually does. The interview actually engrossed me, as Jackson described his strange, celebrity-surrounded youth and the magical fact that, unlike most songwriters who are lucky just to hear finished albums or maybe see a concert, his inspirations were usually sitting across the room from him. How insane would it be to literally sit and watch from across the room as something like Songs in the Key of Life is being written and recorded?

Then, the doctor’s assistant showed up. A youngish African-American woman, she gave me a puzzled look when she saw the Ebony in my hand. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t embarrassed, but should I really be embarrassed? I know Ebony is targeted at the black community, but shouldn’t I be allowed to read it without getting funny looks from people of any race?

She took me into the mystery room where the magic happens, then she jabbed me with an IV that was considerably more painful than the one from the colonoscopy. It wasn’t so much the general needle pain — which was indeed painful and, considering my extreme fear of needles, didn’t exactly put me at ease — as the pressure. The IV itself was connected to this weird, looped tube that went to a…thingie that would eventually distribute iodine into my system for the contrast. I know the loops existed to extend the tube’s length and prevent pressure, but it honestly had the opposite effect. It’s exactly like a phone cord — you can stretch it out, but as soon as you let go it snaps back to normal. That’s pressure.

It got a little worse when she told me I had to raise my arms over my head as the little bed thing moved in and out of the giant radioactive donut that scanned me. Also, in terms of putting patients at ease, it’s less fun than you might imagine to see a giant red sign reading RADIATION ON that illuminates every time the scanner is working its magic. Worse still, the bed rolls up to eye level of the mystery laser, right above which is a sign that reads DO NOT LOOK DIRECTLY INTO LASER. Come on!

After all the waiting, though, the whole thing took maybe 10 minutes, and the hardest part was the whole “don’t breathe while we keep it rolling for 20 years” thing. I have pretty solid lung capacity, but they tested me. Even if I had shitty, shallow lungs, they did a horrible job of preparing you for it. It has this automated recording that says, “Take a deep breath” — then, before you even have the chance, it shouts, “Hold your breath!” as the scanner revs up. Come on!

But hey, it wasn’t so bad. And now that I know where radiology is, maybe I can come back and flirt with the receptionist some more. It’s not weird for non-ghosts to hang around a hospital, is it?

Posted by Stan on June 3, 2008 10:28 AM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)

May 24, 2008

Procedure…Deadly Procedure

Yesterday, I had an unexpected colonoscopy and upper-GI endoscopy. It was suspiciously uneventful, and I’ll spare you most of the gory details. Bottom line: I’ve been having gastrointestinal issues for a few months. My G.P. recommended a gastroenterologist who was ragingly useless, so I switched to a different doctor group full of men with alarming compassion. I’m not used to doctors who actually want to help people, so I didn’t know how to react when the doctor I saw said, “We just happened to have a cancellation for tomorrow.” Within an hour, I was scheduled for a Friday appointment and dropping off a prescription from this juice that clears the ol’ colon out.

I figured this would be good for me, because I would imagine my colon is full of all manner of disgusting former foodstuffs that no man, beast, or space alien can digest. I figured so, so wrong.

Here’s what happens: you drink this juice over the course of an hour, then drink a glass of water to get your bowels a-started. Then, you take a few reasonably normal (except for the fact that they come about 20 minutes apart) dumps. Then…you liquid-shit endlessly until it reaches a point where you’re shitting out piss, in defiance of all nature and humanity.

What the fuck?! Goddammit! And then I had to wake up at 5 a.m. to repeat the process.

And then, after all that, they didn’t find anything. I guess the plus side is that they ruled out a bunch of shit (literally!), but all it really means is I have to have more tests run. At least most of them won’t be as invasive…I hope.

Posted by Stan on May 24, 2008 10:11 AM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)

May 20, 2008

Tired of Rage

Do you think it takes the same amount of energy to pretend that everything’s fine and dandy as it does to recognize the fact that everything surrounding you sucks ass? I don’t know. I wish I did.

I came to a weird, malformed realization last night: I’m tired of hating everything. It’s not so much a softening worldview, an inability or disinterest in mocking anything, or the realization that expressing my rage (or mockery) doesn’t actually change anything. Venting makes me feel better, but the real source of the issue is: why can’t I just blithely accept the bullshit that’s spoonfed to me, like so many others do? The disparity comes from the two extremes mentioned above: both suggest that the people involved are aware of the problems with themselves and the world surrounding them, but each chooses a different way to deal.

But what about the middle of the bell curve — the people who don’t know anything and don’t give a shit? Why can’t I be like one of those people? I don’t run around learning new things to gain knowledge — my thirst for information comes almost solely from a place of rage. I want to learn as much as I can about a certain subject so I can spout anger and disappointment as knowledgeably as possible. That can’t be healthy, can it? Shouldn’t I just get pissed off about something, vent about it in ignorance, and move on? I’ve started to obsess about people and things that piss me off, dedicating my life to fueling the rage instead of dedicating it to more worthwhile pursuits like masturbation or steady employment.

Even though it isn’t true (yet), I feel like it’s affecting my creative pursuits. On the one hand, the government conspiracy in play in Dying Proof comes from a place of discontent and sarcasm, in which the agents chasing them are portrayed as little more than bored corporate drones with guns, but on the other, the brother-sister relationship in the script has received a surprising amount of praise because of its sincerity. There’s no irony, no sarcasm, no undercurrent of rage and disappointment (even if those are emotions I feel toward my real sister). Just a pair of siblings working through their issues, against a largely symbolic backdrop of gunplay.

That’s that, and the script is a departure for me in almost every conceivable way, with the only real through-line to the rest of my work being characters frustrated at their inability to change their lots in life. Unlike most of my characters, their inability to change isn’t caused by merely getting stuck in ruts (with their central conflict being breaking out of the rut). Everything they’ve ever known is obliterated, and they’re forced to adopt a new lifestyle as they go into hiding, unable to change for fear of getting caught. They’re characters who have desires but really can’t change, but they would if they could.

In On Deadly Ground, Forrest Taft asks, “What does it take to change the essence of a man?” and Big Mike answers, “Time.” It has to take more than that, though — I have the desire, Lord knows I have the time, but I don’t even know where to start. Stop obsessively checking Diablo Cody’s blog for the sole purpose of getting infuriated by her existence? That might be a good start, actually. But in order to start avoiding things that piss me off, I have to turn blinders on, which is counterintuitive to my nature. Could I start trying to teach myself about things I actually like and care about that don’t piss me off? I think it’s a little more than that. If I want to change the essence of a man, I need to break out of my own rut, just as I’ve encouraged my fictional characters to do, and alter my world until I’m surrounded by testaments to joy and happiness instead of anger and disappointment.

It’s a brave new world.

Posted by Stan on May 20, 2008 11:01 AM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)

March 25, 2008

Walgreens Woman

When I was in high school, I made an unintended friend. I’d known her since third grade, but even back then, I found her overbearing and off-putting. She had a syrupy sweetness that, first of all, seemed like a huge put-on (P.S.: it was!), but mainly, it didn’t blend well with my seething cauldron of rage and disappointment. Yes, I was even bitter and hate-filled back then, before I had to read A Separate Peace and When the Legend Dies. I think it started when my teacher took away a set of plastic nunchaku that had cost me a good amount of money (most likely stolen from my sister). He thought it was a weapon, even though it was hollow plastic that wouldn’t have done any more damage than throwing a carrot stick at somebody. So I had to tell my parents about it, and they had to come to school to redeem them, and also ground me.

I may be getting distracted.

The thing about this girl, who I will call Walgreens Woman for reasons that will make sense later, is that she had less institutional trauma, more familial trauma. Her dad was a stereotypical violent, misogynistic Arab who was notorious for beating his wife and his children. I seem to recall an incident of him barging into a school holiday assembly in fifth grade and dragging Walgreens Woman and her sisters out because, fuck, it was all about Christmas. Also, there was an incident (I think) in the same year when he was arrested for beating his wife with a vacuum cleaner. I assume there was some poetic justice in his choice of weapon, but…that’s harsh!

She pretty much dropped off my radar in junior high. I can’t remember if she moved and went to a different school or if we just never had a single class together, but I can’t remember ever seeing her. In high school, however, she was suddenly back. Junior year, she and I were partnered together in our school’s show choir, I think because we were the only two who couldn’t dance at all. They just stuck us in the back. We ended up becoming unintentional friends. I seem to recall, early in the year, literally hiding in a neighbor’s backyard to avoid her seeing us. By the end of the year, she didn’t seem so bad. Annoying, yes, but she had let some of her vulnerability slip through. It made her less of a Stepford wife. And, of course, we were partnered up again senior year.

But by the time graduation rolled around, I felt a little put off by…everything about her. She took our random partnership assignation a little too seriously, making far too big a deal out of it and not-so-subtly implying that this relationship was the closest a person could get to dating. I consciously avoided her during the summer, which wasn’t difficult, and hoped that with college, she’d be out of my life for good.

Not so. My roommate, one of my best friends from high school, was still involved with a girl from high school. This girl was friends with Walgreens Woman, and she “accidentally” gave Walgreens Woman our dorm-room number. I will never forget the horrific night of the X-Files season premiere, when I had to listen to my roommate talk to her for the first half hour, then I had to talk to her during the second half hour. The whole thing was a wash.

She seemed to believe the call was pretty urgent, though. Turns out, she now had a job at Walgreens, and she thought the manager there was flirting with her, but she wasn’t sure. She went through the whole story with my roommate first, then me, asking what was happening and trying to get advice. I did acknowledge that yes, he was probably flirting with her, but I refused to give advice.

Six months later, she was pregnant. Not the advice I would have given, but them’s the breaks…

(On a semi-related note, my little suburb’s most notorious mass murderer also worked at the very same Walgreens — okay, technically it’s different, but only because they demolished the original one and rebuilt a new one in the same location — and got involved with the manager there. He gave her drugs and convinced her to kill her family. Things don’t end well for Walgreens Woman, but at least she hasn’t murdered anyone. Yet.)

The last conversation I can distinctly remember was at a choir concert a year or two after high school. Lucy and I went because her boyfriend at the time was a senior, and Walgreens Woman was there, running around to all the people we used to go to school with, showing off pictures of her baby. She came to us, showed us the picture, and complained that the baby was really ugly. She…wasn’t wrong, but still — it’s her own kid!

After that, she fell off my radar screen. I heard a couple of rumors, that she married the Walgreens manager, that it turned out he was wanted in California for skipping out on a prison sentence, but after awhile, the rumors disappeared. (Turns out they were all true, too.)

Then, two weeks ago, she sent me a random message on Facebook, supporting my long-time conclusion that social networking sites are the scourge of the Internet. She wanted to know how I was doing. I figured so much time had passed, she’d certainly have stopped making such a huge deal out of our show choir partnership. She has a kid, she’s married, she’s probably grown up a little. What’s the harm in sending her a message loaded with lies to create the impression I’m doing a lot better than I am?

Then I got her response, which contained at least five references to “never forgetting” I was her partner. Good Lord. She continued with a sob story about her “psycho” husband and how she divorced him, but not before having another kid, and both of her kids are “special needs,” so she tried going to college for their benefit but it didn’t work out, and now she’s working a shit job while her mom stays home with her kids, and would I like to have dinner with her some night?

I immediately told her I was sick (which was true), and then when she asked if I was feeling better, I told her I had to go out of town (which was not). I got the advice from friends who didn’t know her, who could be objective about it (and by “objective,” I mean “listen to my highly subjective account of our friendship and her life story and feel better that they agree with me”), and they all suggested I run the fuck away.

And run the fuck away I shall, but still…a part of me feels awful because her life has been legitimately miserable, and many of the problems were caused by forces beyond her control. One night of my life wouldn’t be so bad, but that’s how it starts, right? I’ve been down this road before, so I need to get my disdain in check and not let any nostalgia or (shudder) sympathy cloud my judgment.

Posted by Stan on March 25, 2008 11:03 AM  | Permalink  | Comments (1)

June 13, 2006

Mother Lode!

“This tasteless cover is a good indication of the lack of musical invention within. The musical growth of this band cannot even be charted. They are treading water in a sea of retarded sexuality and bad poetry.” — from a review of Spinal Tap’s Intravenus de Milo

If you’ve talked to me at all over the last few weeks, you’ll know I’m in the process of either selling or destroying the majority of my worldly possessions. Why? Don’t need ‘em, don’t want ‘em, sick of looking at ‘em. So there they go, out the door or through the window, until I’m left only with objects of vital importance, such as my copy of A Confederacy of Dunces and the Bruce Springsteen Born to Run 30th anniversary box set.

But some things I just can’t let go. Sure, I don’t need it; I don’t even want it, but I feel like I have to keep it. It’s not often that I get nostalgiac, but I am a big fan of record-keeping. I’m also a big believer that I could, probably will, and possibly should, die at any moment. So I’d like to keep a nice, vaguely chronological record of my existence. It’s sort of the same reason why I keep this blog going, even though I don’t update much anymore and I’ve also deleted, tweaked, and edited things so that, really, it in no way resembles my actual life. Kind of disappointing as far as journals go, but deal with it, assholes.

In addition to this stupid blog, today I found a bunch of old notebooks, papers, and writings that I just can’t give up. Yes, they’re truly awful — but one, in particular, takes the cake. It was a spiralbound notebook that I carried with me through most of 1995, a collections of terrible drawings and the world’s worst poetry.

Here are the front and back covers, loaded with doodles, references to TOTALLY RAWKIN’ BANDS, and games of Tic-Tac-Toe that were undoubtedly played during Spanish class:

Click on the images to enlarge

I’ve also taken the liberty of scanning a drawing of one of my most popular (among me and my sad, sad group of drugged-out metalhead friends) characters, a pathetic bordertown drunk called Pepé Tequila:

Click on the image to enlarge

Pepé Tequila lasted from the start of junior high through most of high school, when I worked continuously on a cartoon series (a cross between Beavis & Butt-Head and Touch of Evil, if you can fathom that) involving a disparate cast of characters living on either side of the border in this tiny, crime-ridden cesspool.

And here is a drawing not done by me. It was done by my best friend at the time, who was a much better artist (you’ll note, for example, that the drawing doesn’t totally suck):

Click on the image to enlarge

That’s right, we were in a band. It went through many changes. We started, in seventh grade, as the Big Peckers. We soon graduated to the Sweaty Peckers, followed by the Hemophagics, Umbra Void, Tainted Meat, and Habeas Corpus (which we firmly believed had something to do with dead bodies), before we settled for awhile on Purple Iodine, our longest-running name. But here’s the thing: we didn’t make any music. At all. We made up fake song titles and drew fake album art and t-shirt designs. Mostly it was a long series of attempts at making each other laugh, hence starting out as the Big Peckers and having every song and album cover have something to do with genitalia. I have tons of these concept drawings, but I won’t waste my time scanning them unless there is a strong demand.

Around the time of Umbra Void, we started playing actual songs (mostly poorly rendered covers), and by the time we became Purple Iodine we were actually taking this whole band thing seriously. We were about as good as Wyld Stallyns, but there was a noticeable shift from the pointless bawdiness of “You Can Touch It for a Quarter” and the “Underground Beings.” For example, unliked “You Can Touch It for a Quarter,” which is just a song title, “Underground Beings” had actual lyrics (which are not in my handwriting, though I recall having some input). It goes a little something like this:

Face down

into the water.
Point of No Return.
Unbearable Tension
Suffucating [sic]…
Respirating…
Suffering…

Here come the underground beings!
Ravaging..
Suffering..
Underground Beings!

(Drums)

Back to the Underground!

(Guitar & Drums)

Back to the Underground!
(Back-up singers) Look at the thing, I just found!

Wow! That’s pretty intense, man. Sadly, though, Purple Iodine broke up shortly after eighth grade began, and I formed a new band with a few people mentioned here, here, and here, which as I point out was only taken seriously by me and Steve. I started writing lyrics and actual music, with Steve’s input (even though he didn’t even have an instrument until Christmas of 1995, and even then he didn’t know how to play it), for our new band, which I seem to remember being called Draft first, then Curmudgeon, but apparently at one time we settled on the name “Ashtray.” I have a few more fake album mock-ups and a horribly written bio under that name. So here we go, guys, it’s the poetry explosion!

Dated 12/1/95:

“Cyclone Fence”

Rudimentary square
Lost its pubic shiny hair.
Didn’t use conditioner.
Friday’s spatial disorienter.*
Sitting in the garden.
Daughter has a hard-on.
“A” of retribution.
Give a revolution.

Living in the cyclone fence,
Never minding burning pence.*
Living in the cyclone fence,
Kissin [sic] cousins have good sex.

Rudimentary square
Lost its armpoit hair.
Spiral-bound notebook.
Didn’t admit what they took.
Twenty-five after.
Hide fromrising [sic] laughter.
Eat corn with chop suey.
Saturday’s “Life with Louie.”**
Endocrine is gooey.

Living in the cyclone fence
Big dumb jocks don’t make no sense.
Living in the cyclone fence
Wimpy Pansy boys have good some friends.

Well, that was weird. Especially the Life with Louie reference. Imagine most of the verse being the melody of the first two lines of Nirvana’s “In Bloom,” repeated over and over again. I think that’s pretty much how I wrote it. Now it’s time for the second set of lyrics, entitled “Alienated Youth Clique,” also dated 12/1/95 (as you’ll see, I was busy that day). Years later, I took the riff of this song, which pretty much repeated over and over and over and over again ad nauseam, and rewrote it as “College Girls,” (this time with a chorus) the third song on disc two of The Hedge.

“Alienated Youth Clique”

Publicist hangover
Yuppies drive Land Rovers
Double chili cheesedog
Kill the slacker ball-hog.

Chocolate danish w/pickles on the side.
Tic-tac man’s at school w/no one to confide.
Living of nucleonic acetate*
Far too much to palpetate [sic]

Living in the ’90s jetlag
Microwave tower gig bag
Monterey jack on rye
House a massive pig sty.

Revolution int he air
Retribution: AIDS scare.
Crush them with some limestone
Prom queen’s made of skin and bone.

Amplitude modulation
Saves renaissance from a nation.*
Misguided clique on the bedroom floor.
Cousins knocking athe [sic]door.

Honestly? No idea what any of this is supposed to be about. My explanation for the rampant food references: it must have been fourth period, right before lunch. I was hungry, man, and math sucks. Next song, dated 12/2/95. All I remember about the music was that it was very flanger-intensive.

“Science Fiction”

Fade jeans
Attitude
Looking mean
Brain is stewed
Dodge Reliant’s
Bastard child
Attorney client
Picante Spicy mild

Brother is an oxymoron.
Sister is a chunk of boron.*
Doctor doesn’t have a schlong.
Pediatry [sic; I assume I meant “podiatry,” but maybe I meant “pediatrics”] school is really long.

Custom shirt
Designer
Maen alert
Protractor.
Death rearsits [sic] ugly head
Shit-stained orthodontist
Beating hearts are on the bed
I think I need a psychiatrist

Not sure what it has to do with science fiction, although admittedly a shit-stained orthodontist anywhere near a bed littered with bleeding hearts is not exactly un-sciency. Neither is a doctor without a schlong, unless it’s a female doctor. Also, sisters made of boron are not exactly common.

12/3/95:

“Chocolate’s Uniform Righteousness”*

Gargantuan species of insect
Rise above to intercept
The drab militia planes
Containing leaders so vain.
Six feet of prudent agriculture.
Hepped up on goofballs.
Pelted with mothballs.
Looming over to dominate
A burning nation’s requisite.*
Youthful Viril [sic] insects on the hunt
To burn the shows with Alan Funt.
Pie-inspired aneurysm
Long and fruitful rheumatism.
Exstensive [sic] feature’s matte painting.
Short-lived sit-com’s Fox-inspired dwelling.
Dirt-encrusted funkified dive.
Kre Need canned meals just to survive.

Well, it kinda starts out as more overtly sci-fi than “Science Fiction,” but I’ll never understand what the title of this song means. Or the lyrics. Seriously? Insects invade us just to annihilate bad television? Don’t they have better things to do?

Also 12/3/95:

“Nucleus Blues”

Down east
There’s a beast
I killed it
With a drill-bit.
Anal repression
No taxation without representation.
Elephant man.
Sewer slam.***
Bye-bye birdie
Don’t lay a turdie.

Short, sweet, but not to any point that I can see. There’s a really weird free-association vibe to this that seems to me like more of a comment on my horrible, horrible brain than my horrible, horrible writing.

Dated 12/4/95:

“Table Mesa”

Fall Equinox approaches
Drastically affecting rain roaches
Summer cheese melting
Golf balls pelting.
What do you want?
You look so gaunt.
Whip out your chocolate schlong
Hit the strawberry gong.
Bye, bye, hobo.
Tomorrow eat los huevos.

What? No, I’m not kidding: what?! I think this is notable for being probably the first attempt I’ve made to rhyme consistently. I think this drastically affected the lyrics (seriously, replacing “rain” with “roaches” to keep the rhyme scheme? What is that?).

Also 12/4/95:

“Lacadasically [sic] Slurred”

Egotistic notions
Spare no emotions.
Psychopathic liars.
Swim in deep friers.
Sister lost her contact lens
Liver too deep; it got the bends.
I like it When [sic] it’s green,
Not when it’s blue.

Diving into vital energy
Not sn quite caring who’s my enemy.
Dramatically lucid recall
Alluding to precision catch-all.

You know what that is there, the last two lines of the last stanza, where, after three couplets, I just totally drop the rhyme? That’s art. Art, man. “Love Switch” level.

Once again dated 12/4/95:

“Hello, Goodbye, Illinois”
Walking down the interstate
Approaching a massive gate
Inside of which are plastic explosives
Nonmetal devices, anti-corrosives.
Many numerical intergers [sic]
Cannot count the pain in her
Starlit face as it brings down the hous [sic]Even the mouse.

Was this…finished? I don’t know. What’s weird is, I actually like the “starlit face” image. I must have stolen it from something significantly better than me.

Dated 12/7/95:

“The Congo”

Congo, Congo, Con-go.
Congo, congo, con-go. (contin. b.g.)
(English accent): Deep in the African jungle, the Congo, the fiercest being ever to be created on Earth, stalks his prey
Congo, congo, con-go.
Congo, congo, con-go.

Yeah, so there actually is an explanation for this. There was some guy who looked vaguely simian that my friend Mark started referring to as “the Congo.” Then, as I recall, Art came up with the basic “Congo” chant, and Jeff came up with the “African jungle” bit. In retrospect, it’s really pretty horrible and offensive. Man, I miss junior high.

Dated 12/15/95:

“Sinatra Is a Buddhist”

Secretive pain kills the weepers
Why is no one watching the brain-dead leapers.
Big zit on the middle of my forehead
By the time I get home I’ll be dead.
In this constipated world of sin
Even my dad can be thin.
Hold me back from the muzzle of restraint
Forgo your strength for the mandetory [sic] faint
Dead with a Pepsi in his hand
Lack of Without love, there is no promise [sic] land.
Studious pain, envious wisdom.
Castritated magistrate cannot come.
Death is a four-letter word
And it creeps upon the lonely ones.
Lonely like me…

Excedrated buttfucker sitting on a weiner [sic; as we all know, thanks to Martin Prince, the preferred spelling is “w-I-E-n-e-r”]I know about thirty guys wh are quite a bit keener
Bored Cuban, Puerto Rican Jew
God is Satan, where the hell are you?
Living on an island with a seasick fisherman
Hey, asshole, get the fuck off the can!

So, um, I don’t really get 90% of this (surprise, surprise), but I notice it’s starting to tackle actual recurring issues in my life: the horrible acne that plagued me through junior high and some of high school, loneliness, fear of death and pain, “daddy” issues, et cetera.

Dated 12/22/95:

“La La Land (Boston, 1689)”

During the

Huh. Was I going through some weird minimalist phase in my “poetry”? Answer: no. As they say, a picture’s worth a thousand words, so I apparently decided to express myself with a comic-book-style drawing rather than song lyrics:

Click on the image to enlarge

So there you have it: one of my early, hilariously misguided attempts to get political by brashly taking on such outdated civil rights issues as Injun affairs. The hell?

Sadly, the poetry/lyrics come to an end with this last one, dated 1/21/96:

“Poofy-Haired Competition”

(Verse) Got my Kramer guitar,
Pink hair, and lookin bizarre.
Got my Guns N’ Roses lunchbox,
Whitesnake dolls that really talk.
’80s metal is on the move;
Competitions in the groove.

(Chorus)Livin on the edge of life
Crossroads ahead cut like a knife
Livin in the crow’s nest with Erik and “Spunky”
Lovin and losin deep in L.A. is funky

(Pansy-ass Bridge)But still
I think of you.
Living in the capitalist’s [sic] capital,
I still know that I love you (Robert Plant falsetto)

(Verse) Got my Gremlin guitar,
Bottled hair, gonna be a star.
Got my official Poison clocks,
Kip Winger’s old, dirty socks.
Barhopping by night, playing pool by dad
I suck somuch [sic] I can’t get laid.

(Chorus) Livin on the edge of life
Crossroads ahead cut like a knife,
Livin in the crow’s nest with Erik and “Spunky”
Lovin and losin in L.A. is funky.

(Guitar Solo)

(Repeat chorus) Livin on the edge of life
Crossroads ahead cut like a knife.
Livin on the edge of life.

I’ll argue this was my first attempt at satire. And what an attempt it was! You might be wondering — what was my obsession with mocking low-quality guitars? It was spurred by my obsession with high-grade guitars. From another page, here is a description of my dream guitar:

“Epigibder & L-iphone Lampshade Deluxe SG”

Specs & Features
Scale Length: 25.5” (647.7mm)
Fingerboard: Rosewood
Neck Radius: 12” (304.8mm)
Width @ Nut: 1.63” (41.3mm)
Bridge: Floyd Rose Licensed Locking or G&L Vibrato
Nut Material: Graphite
Tuning Keys: Sperzel Locking Keys
Pickups:

• 1 Humbucking
• 1 DualBlade
• 1 Gold 1957 Gibson Humbucking

Pickup Selector: 5-way
Controls: Volume & P.T.B. Controls
Finish:

• Clear Forest Green
• Blueburst

The first thing I want most in the world is a custom-made guitar for [sic] a good guitar company. It would take all the components from my two favorite guitars, the Gibson SG and the G&L Legacy Special. It would have a vintage 1957 Gibson humbucking pickup, a custom G&L DualBlade single-coil pickup, and a Fender humbucker. It would have a Floyd Rose floating bridge or a G&L fixed bridge, which ever [sic] the buyer wants. It would have Gbson knob controls, G&L switches, a combo SG-Strat black pickguard, and a Gibson togle switch.

I have to say, there was a time where I both knew and cared what all of that meant. That time is long past; I know some of it, because I do still play guitar and occasionally take interest in new models, but the Ralphie Parker-like glee and attention to detail is a little disturbing. The only thing this guitar is missing is a compass on the stock and this thing which tells time.

A final note:

There are more songs. In the back of this notebook, I found a tracklist of songs that don’t appear here. I recall writing them, I recall the titles, but I haven’t found the notebooks that contain their precious, awful lyrics (yet!). Unlike the fake albums we used to manufacture, these songs did exist. There are even, on this tracklist, parantheses with wide gaps so I could write in the length of the song once we recorded our demo-tape using a four-track reel-to-reel I bought for $5 at a church sale (it didn’t work, and we never recorded a thing in any form). The list:

1. Petrified Leafblower
2. Hello, Goodbye, Illinois
3. Cyclone Fence
4. Arizona
5. Elgin Suntan
6. Orange El Rey Pick
7. George Likes His Chicken Spicy
8. Pumpkinhead
9. Science Fiction
10. Chocolate’s Uniform Righteousness
11. Peppermint Guy
12. Japanimation
13. Congo [Hidden Track]

There’s another list (which may have been a setlist for a concert that never remotely happened) featuring most of the same songs, but adding “Alienated Youth Clique,” a cover of “In Bloom” by Nirvana, and two songs I don’t remember at all, “Abrupt Eruption” and “Fred Mertz.” If I find any of these, I will make them public as soon as possible.

I hope you enjoyed this stumble down memory lane as much as I did.

Don’t say I never gave you nothing.

Edit: I just realized, I had never expected to find this notebook (and was disappointed about that) because I thought I had loaned it in high school to an ex-girlfriend who was working with me on a comedy sketch about bad poetry. She never gave it back, for whatever reason, and I never really cared until after we broke up, so basically I never got it back. But now I’ve realized that was probably the notebook that has those other songs. I’m still digging through my shit, and I may stumble across it, but I don’t hold out much hope.

*I don’t know what this means, either.

**I just wish I was making this up.

***I don’t know what this means either, but it sure sounds like a euphemism for anal sex.

Posted by Stan on June 13, 2006 3:01 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)

June 12, 2006

Guitar Strings Are Dangerous

So I’m restringing my guitar today, and I could feel I poked myself with the B string. Not a huge deal, really, just a little poke. So I’m twisting the tuning machine with one hand, and I’m holding the string to the nut, and I realize the tuning machine is suddenly really, really greasy. So I look down, and I see my thumb and forefinger are covered in blood, and it’s getting all over the neck of the guitar.

“Oh fuck!” I say in my calmest panicky voice and rush to the bathroom to wash the blood off, hopefully clean and disinfect the cut, and maybe even put a Band-Aid on it. But once I cleaned it up, I realized it was just that tiny, tiny poke from the stupid string. I dunno, I’ve done that a million times, and I don’t recall profuse bleeding. Is it possible I burst a capillary or hit an artery or something? Anybody who knows more about anatomy than me (my knowledge extends to knowing all of the body parts featured in the game Operation (so I know it’s not butterflies in my stomach or my funny bone), let me know what I may have done so I don’t do it again.

Posted by Stan on June 12, 2006 10:20 AM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)

December 12, 2005

Caffeine Withdrawal Update — Late Weekend Edition

Friday: I had an awful day, but not because of caffeine.

Saturday: For some reason, the withdrawal symptoms seem to have more of an effect on the weekend. Maybe it’s because I wake up later, so it throws off the timing. I don’t really know.

Sunday: Pretty much the same as Saturday. Sluggish, headachey, and unable to concentrate. I also read somewhere that caffeine helps short-term memory; apparently lack of caffeine worsens short-term memory. No, it’s not like Memento or anything; I can still remember things, but it takes a lot longer and requires more concentration. And, you know, since my concentration skills suck, Sunday: Pretty much the same as Saturday. Pretty much the same as Saturday.

Monday: Not too bad. In the morning, I spilled a bunch of piping hot, foul-tasting green tea on my crotch. Not my best moment.

Posted by Stan on December 12, 2005 3:58 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)

December 8, 2005

Daily Caffeine Withdrawal Update (3)

I had a splitting headache around 9 o’clock. It went away around lunchtime.

I’ve been cranky and irritable all day. I know the bulk of this is the caffeine withdrawal, but I can still attribute a big chunk of it to the fucking assholes who don’t know how to do their fucking jobs and therefore prevent me from getting my job done or, if not that, make it take five times as long to do. And my superior didn’t help. “We like to get as much processed on Thursdays as we can. Stay late if you have to.” FUCK OFF.

Posted by Stan on December 8, 2005 4:23 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)

December 7, 2005

Daily Caffeine Withdrawal Update (2)

I felt extremely tired this morning, and it was kind of hard to concentrate. My eyes kind of sting, and I know part of that is the fluorescent lights and the computer monitor, but part of that is the faux-weariness effect of caffeine withdrawal. I got a very mild headache around 1:15 this afternoon. I still have it, but it’s so minor that I can’t even really notice it unless I think about it.

All in all, not too bad.

Posted by Stan on December 7, 2005 4:40 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)

December 6, 2005

Daily Caffeine Withdrawal Update

This is the first in what will be a daily series, until I forget and stop writing them.

I think it’s important to remember that yesterday was a Monday when I write that I decided not to switch to green tea as I mentioned earlier. Mondays are widely regarded by corporate drones and office- and cat-themed comic-strip writers as the worst day of the week. So cut me some slack.

This morning I made the switch to green tea. It goes down a little more smoothly than coffee. This is mainly fortunate because it has such an awful taste and texture that I want to drink it as quickly as I can. It also saves me just a few minutes in the morning, which I guess is nice. I spend it reflecting on my life. I’ll start coffee again tomorrow.

As far as actual withdrawal symptoms, I feel a little bit more sluggish, and I started to have a bit of a hard time concentrating in the afternoon, but none of this is any worse than when I switched to mid-morning green tea two weeks ago. Assuming this trend continues, I can look forward to a mild headache this evening, followed by an extremely difficult time getting up tomorrow. With any luck, I’ll get used to it before the end of the week.

Posted by Stan on December 6, 2005 4:08 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)

December 4, 2005

Caffeine

Here is a rather long bulletpoint that I forgot to mention in my most recent update.

Tomorrow, Monday, December 5th, marks four full weeks since I first attempted to very, very slowly wean myself off the wonder-drug commonly known as caffeine (more commonly known as “sweet ambrosia of the gods”). The first two weeks were easy enough: rather than consuming my normal 40 ounces of coffee, I dropped down to 32 (two 16-ounce cups, which makes it easier to divide than, say, drinking one 16-ounce cup, then adding another 4 afterward). I suffered almost no withdrawal symptoms and, in fact, felt an immediate reduction in the chronic heartburn that has seemed to plague me pretty much since I reached my all-time regular peak of 64 ounces daily (during that exciting 18 credit hour semester in the spring of 2004, which was followed by getting all the free coffee I wanted in Seattle.

The second two weeks started a little rougher: I switched from 32 ounces of coffee to a 16-ounce cup of coffee in the morning, and a 16-ounce of rank, fetid green tea around mid-morning. It was not nearly as bad as the 36 hours I spent caffeine-free in Coralville, during which time I suffered from chronic, violent migraines and rarely could pull myself off the full-body vibrating massager on the extremely comfortable couch. However, I did suffer from occasional, mild headaches every few afternoons. Those stopped by the end of the first week, and this last week has been just fine.

On Monday, I take it to the next step: no coffee, just 32 ounces of putrid green tea every day for another two weeks. My theory is that nothing will convince me to quit caffeine more quickly than having to consume that much green tea on a daily basis. At the end of this two weeks, I will take it to the second-to-last step: two weeks of green tea in the morning, followed by a delicious mint tea I used to peddle while working in Seattle. Two weeks later, I go to mint tea full-time, and, theoretically, I should be completely free of caffeine.

I love coffee, I love tea (I love the java Jive and it loves me

Posted by Stan on December 4, 2005 11:01 AM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)

February 6, 2005

Whistling Dixon

Earlier this week, I was a little annoyed. Because of my prostate infection, I was forced to miss what was surely a great show, with Elizabeth Elmore opening solo for Juliana Hatfield. Because of my dad’s birthday, I missed another Reputation show in early January. Now they’re back in the area, but the closest they were playing was Iowa City on the 3rd.

I already had plans to come out and visit Lucy on the 8th to see Kathryn Musilek, the bestest folk-rocker in the Midwest, and I wanted to see The Rep, as well, so I asked Lucy how likely it was that I could stay at her boyfriend’s apartment for five days straight. Unfortunately, since she would be working for much of that time, the chances were slim; I haven’t met this new boyfriend, but I almost certainly won’t get along with him. She told me that he was okay with me staying there, but she and I agreed it probably wasn’t a great idea.

Then, fate stepped in. Kathryn announced a new date popped up: she was playing on the 3rd now; she was opening at one venue, The Rep were headlining another. Both shows started at the same time, and one venue is around the corner from another. The whole thing would work so well. Plus, Lucy had Friday off, so we could hang out before I drove back home. I was pretty pumped about the turn of events, until I realized that my car’s a piece of shit.

Ever since I returned from Seattle, it’s been troubling. I got an oil change and had the sway bar repaired as soon as I got home, but still, its performance has been a bit off. My dad says I’m not used to driving a car with a sway bar that isn’t worn out, which is fair, but I’ve had the car for going on five years, and it’s never driven this poorly.

However, being that I’m both unemployed and generally cheap, I haven’t bothered to get it fixed, or even looked at. I’ve just been driving it, and it’s been reliable enough getting me to and from Cumberland and around the area, but I was pretty worried about taking it on a long, interstate trip, particularly since there’s almost nothing but empty space between Chicago and Iowa City.

I spent most of Thursday afternoon hemming and hawing and annoying most of my friends about whether or not I should go. My decision was made for me when Elizabeth offered to comp my ticket if I made the trip. I got in my car and went to get gas before heading out to Iowa.

At the gas station, before I left, I thought, “I should check my oil. I’m gonna be driving nearly 250 miles, and I haven’t checked it in months. This could be bad.”

“Actually,” I continued to think as I looked at the sticker on the upper corner of my windshield, “I’m two months overdue for an oil change. I should go get one real quick and then go.”

I looked at the clock — I was already running a bit late, as I was intending to drive slower than usual to ensure I would make it — and thought, “Fuck it,” before hitting the road.

For 4PM on a Thursday, traffic getting out of the city was surprisingly light. I, however, was increasingly suspicious of any noises I heard, despite the fact that most of them were coming from the rough roads or other cars. When I got through Aurora, where traffic really dies as bland office complexes of the suburbs fade into the empty farm fields of central Illinois, it was much easier to assess my car’s situation. I was, as much as possible, attempting to roar up between 75 and 80 (so much for going slower…), but as I reached speeds higher than 55, my car just really didn’t want to continue accelerating. I kept pushing it, because honestly, even with my CDs to keep me company, driving through the rural Illinois is boring.

I will say, though, that as the sun went down, and the gray clouds turned pinkish-orange, the snow-covered hills and dead trees looked more beautiful than what I normally see in the midst of the disgusting Chicagoland area. I thought as I passed through DeKalb (arguably the last “big” city before the Quad Cities on the opposite end of the state) that I should have stopped, maybe given my car a rest, checked the oil, and gotten something to eat. I went back and forth in my head and decided that the car didn’t seem that bad.

As twilight faded into dusk, and civilization disappeared almost entirely, I started to notice that the hood of my car was shaking violently. I wasn’t sure if that was normal for aging cars, but I had never noticed it on mine before, and I thought it was a bad, bad thing. The engine temperature monitor, I noticed, had slowly crept from the “C” to the first hashmark — a quarter of the way to “H.” Kind of a big leap, I thought, for only driving 90 minutes. I don’t know shit about cars, though, and I never really paid attention to this on previous trips to Iowa.

My panic increased, and at the next mid-sized town with gas, food, and lodging would be my pit stop.

I ended up pulling off at Dixon, a town known primarily for being the birthplace of Ronald Reagan. I pulled off at a rather large BP/food court/service station, which fortunately was right off the Interstate, popped the hood, and examined the engine, whirling and sputtering and making a horrifying, constant clicking noise.

After gently weeping for several minutes, I noticed it was after 5:30. I whipped out my cell phone and called my dad, who should have been home by then. He actually knows shit about cars, so he could’ve at least coached me through well enough to get me back home.

He hadn’t gotten home yet, though, so I had to tell my mother what was going on. She freaked the hell out, as is her way; we both hoped my dad would get home soon. Fortunately, he did after a couple of minutes. He asked me for symptoms, asked to hear the random clicking noise, and coached me through various diagnosis steps, such as checking the power steering fluid.

Eventually, he determined it was most likely a lack of oil. That’s right, when I went to check the oil, the goddamn thing was coated right up to the line that says “ADD 1 QT.” This was after running through a bunch of different potential problems, and my dad was really frustrated because he figured, despite knowing nothing about cars, I would be smart enough to not go on a long-distance, high-speed trip without at least checking the oil level. He doesn’t know me well at all.

His advice: buy a can of oil and head home. He said, if it was the oil (he wasn’t positive, but it seemed like a sure thing at that point), I would have the pleasure of feeling like an idiot in the privacy of my own home, but if it wasn’t the oil and I kept on going to Iowa, things would get even worse. Quad Cities excepting, the further you get away from Chicago, the more difficult it is to find help.

So I dumped in a quart of oil and headed back home. The ride was still shaky, but the closer I got to home, the smoother the ride became. Eventually, it was back pretty much to normal, the way it had been driving back at the beginning of the semester — not great (my dad still swears it’s just that I’m not used to the sway bar), but no violent shaking. I definitely could have made it to Iowa.

Yesterday, just to be safe, my dad and I both took my car out on the expressway for a bit, so he could listen and feel for the problems I described. Unfortunately, they were all gone. Giving me a bunch of very Hank Hill “that boy ain’t right”-esque looks, he simply told me to go to the shop and tell them to change the oil but alert them to the clicking noise in the engine (which was still there, despite the lack of performance problems). He figured, considering the smoothness of the drive, that it was just a normal age thing, but better safe than sorry.

So that’s it. Comped tickets, seeing two of my three favorite musicians play on the same night, and spending quality time with my best friend — all gone, because I am too fucking lazy to deal with basic automotive maintenance tasks.

I’ve said it once, but it bears repeating: I suck at existence.

(What’s doubly painful: Lucy finally realized that Tuesday, the 8th, is Mardi Gras, so she refuses to let me come down and ruin her good time with my “evils of alcohol” rap, so I’d have nowhere to stay if I went down for the second Kathryn Musilek show. Sigh.)

Posted by Stan on February 6, 2005 7:23 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)

December 19, 2004

Prostatitis: The Horror… The Horror

WARNING: This entire blog entry will go into horrible details about my groin-related medical problems. If you enjoy laughing at my life, and I know you all do, please continue reading. However, the content of this particular entry may shock and educate you with its frank depiction of the human body at its absolute worst.

Upon my return from Seattle in September, I discovered I had somehow gotten hemorrhoids. Apparently, I’ve discovered in the meantime, it’s a rather common disorder to develop in airplanes for two primary reasons: you’re crammed into a tiny seat for four hours, and the bathroom isn’t exactly Funtown USA. Also, I’m a fat-ass, so that never helps. I’m basically crushing my ass veins every time I sit down, so this was kind of an inevitability. And there was something about altitude doing something to provoke hemorrhoids.

Anyway, I discovered this one night when I took the most excruciatingly painful shit in my life. And believe me, it only went downhill from there. Two weeks of pain during every single point of my bathroom experience, including washing my hands, and every time I sat down. I couldn’t even jerk off, which I do a lot since I’m a huge loser, because it’d cause all my ass muscles to clench. In fact, that was more painful than shitting itself.

This became a somewhat bigger problem as I started schools. I’ve always had an aversion to using public facilities, because they’re both disgusting and filled with people who can hear and sometimes smell you doing your business. This is particularly unnerving when, say, you’re in a public restroom frequented by tons of people you actually know, so every time you go, your arch-nemesis Owen is standing at the urinal, listening to you struggle to take a shit.

Typically, this wouldn’t be a problem. However, at roughly the same time I discovered the hemorrhoids, I also broke my camel-like streak of water-holding. In a given day, I found myself urinating at least five times, up from my usual 0 times. Now, you’re saying, “No biggie, you can piss without bothering your hemorrhoids, right?” You, sir, are an idiot.

See, for some reason I couldn’t actually explain, when it rained, it poured, if you’ll excuse the disgusting imagery: I generally couldn’t piss without shitting, and I had to piss a lot. Couple this with the brandless, 1-play sandpaper they expect us to wipe with, and my hemorrhoids never stopped flaring up.

“You should see a doctor,” I thought to myself. Then I thought, “Hmm, he’s gonna want to look at my ass…I’ll call him next week…” Next week, I’d think the same thing.

At first, I didn’t think the excessive urinating was a huge problem. I drink a disgusting amount of coffee each day, so it’s surprising I had to pee as infrequently as I did in the past. However, I did start to think it was strange that I could stand on my feet for six hours, drinking free coffee the entire time, and never have to use the bathroom once, but suddenly I had to go every hour, in the span of about three weeks.

“I’m sure it’s just all that caffeine finally catching up with you,” I thought to myself. “Just grin and bear it.”

I did try various things to cut down on my urination: cutting down on diuretics and liquids in general during the day. It helped briefly, but not enough to deprive myself of that holy elixir called Dunkin’ Donuts original blend. I figured I’d just deal with it, since the hemorrhoids had pretty much healed up and I was shitting less when I had to pee.

Now, over the last couple of weeks, things started to get significantly worse. Suddenly, not only did I have to pee often, I couldn’t ignore the urge. Within a minute of feeling the need to urinate, my bladder would basically be pounding the rest of me so I’d get my lazy ass up and do it. This made things a little difficult during class, when I’d get up four or five times in a three-hour session.

Then, the dribbling started. Then, I started peeing very small amounts and still needed to pee but couldn’t. Then, I was leaping off the train in the middle of Bucktown, racing to find a McDonald’s at 11 o’clock at night so I could piss.

Things were not going well. The excess urination was making my life a tad debilitating and annoying, and possibly life-threatening (depending on how many times I’d have to make random stops in unfamiliar, largely unsafe neighborhoods).

Finally, I decided to suck it up and go see a doctor. I had an appointment two Fridays ago, and when The Doctor entered the room, he shook my hand, and I told him exactly what the problem was: “I’ve been having this strange shortness of breath thing ever since I had bronchitis last year, and it’s getting worse.”

D’oh!

This appointment happened to coincide with the worst night of my urine-soaked life. Laurie, the love of my life, was to have dinner with me, see a movie with me, and then see the greatest concert in the history of Chicago: Elizabeth Elmore opening for Juliana Hatfield, followed by Freda Love’s new band (who could hopefully only be better than her old band, which sucked all the donkeys in ancient Egypt). She ended up canceling, in part because I never told her about the exciting plans for the evening so she didn’t realize it was a big deal.

So I said, “Fine, bizatch. I’ll go alone.” And I had plans to do just that, until I had to pee twice in the six-block walk from school to the train.

“If I have to do this all night,” I realized, recalling the unhealthy bathroom line at the Double Door, “I’ll almost certainly die,” by which I meant that I’d miss 95% of the show, doubled over in pain waiting to get into the pisser, and that would kill me. I figured I’d rather die in peace in my own bed than on the dirty floor of a trendy bar, so I trudged home.

The next day, I started looking up symptoms of what I could possibly have, which made me panic and rush out to an urgent care center.

“You fool,” the urgent care physician said, laughing, “there’s nothing wrong with you!” Then, taking a graver tone: “However, you do probably have diabetes. Your regular physician should give you a blood test.”

D’oh!

So I made another appointment with The Doctor, immediately following the lab tests I was doing to sort out my breathing problem. Both of those appointments were Wednesday of last week.

I rattled off my symptoms to the nurse, and she made me go take a urine sample (easy enough). The doctor came in and looked at the sheet with my symptoms written on it. “Okay,” he said, “I’m gonna ask you to go ahead and drop your pants.”

“What?!” I thought. “Don’t you wanna talk first?”

The Doctor looked at me sternly, so I complied. He felt my glands, looked up at me curiously, and said, “I’m gonna have to ask you to turn around and bend over.”

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!#@#@@#!#!@#!

During the ensuing minutes, I only had enough brain wattage left to wonder how and why gay men can express love in such an alarming and painful way.

“Yeah, it feels like a prostate infection,” The Doctor said unsympathetically. He prescribed some pills and told me I didn’t have asthma, so I should shut the fuck up, crybaby.

The Doctor further noted that it’s not communicable sexually, so there’s no chance that I picked it up from somebody or could give it to somebody.

Wait a minute — sexually?!

“Wait a minute,” I said, “don’t only guys have prostates?”

The Doctor arched an eyebrow. I had my answer. Shuddering at the thought that the doctor I’ve been seeing since grade school thinks I’m a big, flaming homo (seriously, though — if I was gay, would I have so much unwaxed hair?), I went to pay my bill, careful to not shake The Doctor’s hand.

He says it takes a really long time for these infections to clear up, so I imagine I can look forward to another month of fun-filled urination adventures. I can’t wait to relate them all in intimate detail, especially the inevitable pissing-my-pants that I’m sure will happen sometime soon.

Until then, happy holidays!

(P.S.: Isn’t it great to have me back? I’ll say I have about 12 stories queued up in my brain; I just haven’t written them. Hopefully, all will be revealed over the holiday break. And none of them have to do with my prostate infections or hemorrhoids.)

Posted by Stan on December 19, 2004 2:27 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (1)

March 17, 2004

How to Humiliate Yourself in Public Without Really Trying

Yesterday, after my Spike Lee-August Wilson class, people were talking about me. I’m not being paranoid, as I usually am. It was sort of obvious, since there are only three other white kids in the class, and I was the only one who hadn’t left, that it was me they were talking about when I heard murmurs of “crazy white boy,” and so on. I didn’t really know what it was they were saying, or why they were saying it. I decided I’d shut it out of my mind and just go home. It had been kind of a crappy day.

So I walked down the stairs, and I ran into some dude who was trying to find the fourth-floor library. He was going up the main stairwell, which doesn’t have access to floors 1-5 (those are the library floors), so I had to explain to him how to first get to the library and then find the elevators and stairs. He was foreign and confused already, so instead of being able to explain it, I had to actually walk with him down the stairs and show him where to go.

So I did, and I turned around and left, and the guy turned after me and said, “Thank you,” and then snickered. I stopped, turned around, gave him an odd look, he gave me an odd look, and then I turned back around and started the long walk to the subway.

People at the Congress Hotel, a block away, have been striking for a long time. Since last summer, or earlier (maybe spring?), so I’ve gotten used to it. They’re annoying to have to walk past, but I sympathize with the strikers as long as they aren’t making a ridiculous amount of noise. I’m not sure why, but yesterday, all the strikers were women. I walked briskly by them, as usual, and all of a sudden I heard an amused chorus of “Wooooooooo,” as if I’d just walked by them completely nude, followed by amused giggling.

What the fuck was going on?

I kept going. I got on the subway, rode home, and as we approached Cumberland, I got up and waited by the door. I looked at my seat, since I’m crazy and obsessive-compulsive, to make sure I hadn’t forgotten the nothing that I’d pulled out of my pockets when I got on the train, and then I saw it.

A big red comb. Right there on the seat.

The comb was not on the seat when I got on the train; otherwise, I wouldn’t have sat there. How’d it get there? I don’t know.

Did I have a comb stuck to my ass during my entire walk from my class to the subway? It’s possible. It would certainly explain all the weird snickering and hooting.

So now, in addition to the 14 million other things I check before I’m ready to move anywhere, I now have to thoroughly brush off my ass to make sure nobody’s comb is somehow stuck to it.

Sigh.

Posted by Stan on March 17, 2004 3:01 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)

February 11, 2004

Strangers on a Train

On the train ride home yesterday, I was — as usual — squeezed onto a seat next to somebody irritating. I enjoy rush hour a lot. This woman was sitting there, reading a book, when all of a sudden she gasps out, “Oh, Jesus.” The tone in her voice indicated that the Second Coming was nigh. I thought to myself, “Ignore her.”

Suddenly, the woman thrust her right hand — the one not holding the book — down into her general crotch area and buried her face into the open book. I had absolutely no idea what she planned to do down there, and I didn’t particularly want to find out. Still, on a train at rush hour, you can take whatever seat you can get, and it’s not like there was room to move around. It was standing-room only. So I thought, “Continue to ignore her.”

Then, she started waving the book back and forth in front of her face, and suddenly I knew what the problem was. “Oh God,” I thought, “she must’ve farted.” Still, you don’t want to jump to too many conclusions. It’s completely possible that she got the vapors or the megrims or one of those other weird ailments you find in 19th-century romance novels (not that I’ve ever read any of those…) and needed to fan herself off.

Then, she inched forward in the seat, exposing the thin, blue, almost-plush lining, and honestly, I thought I was gonna die. I grew up in a house with quite a bilious father, and the gastric explosions I was privy to in my youth were enough to make most mortals go blind. I have to settle for a lack of depth perception, but still, I consider myself tough when it comes to anal stench saturation.

But this…this was out of control, to the extent that a hazmat team showed up at the Western Avenue stop, stripped us down, and sprayed us with industrial hoses. Then, the removed the affected train car, buried it two hundred feet below the surface, salted the earth, and sealed off the entire area with a thirty-foot electrified privacy fence.

Okay, that didn’t actually happen, but it should have. This odor was unbelievable, and it lingered in the air for twenty minutes. Shortly after an explosion of gas reminiscent of Los Alamos, New Mexico, circa 1945, the woman escaped from the train, leaving the rest of us to deal with what she had created. A woman sat down next to me, and I wonder about the ordeal she went through afterward.

Honestly, I’ve been wanting to write about people farting on the trains for months, because it’s really starting to get to me. I understand people get gas — seriously, I really understand — but can’t they just hold it in until they get off? Or, actually, until they get out of the station. I was walking behind this guy at Union Station the other day, and we were on the escalator, my ass right in his face, and he just lets fly. And in rush hour, I’m sitting, and people stick their asses in my face and fart.

What. The. Fuck?

No wonder nobody takes advantage of public transportation except poor people like me and big fat losers like the dude who brought a seven-course Taco Bell dinner (I shit you not, irony sort of intended) onto the train on Monday. Also, I swear the Taco Bell guy wasn’t also me.

Posted by Stan on February 11, 2004 12:53 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)

January 5, 2004

Can I Get a Jump?

No.

We had a bit of a snowstorm here yesterday; consequently, the roads are shitty, the cars are shittier, and the temperature has drop like a sack of donkey testicles in a prison rape. I have no idea what that analogy means.

Like every other day on the planet, I got off the train and trudged my way up to my car, which sat all day on the top level of a parking garage and is now covered in salt that was tossed indiscriminately around the lot. Yay for that.

One of the fun things about the top level of the garage: there’s no light. Sure, there are lights, but most of them are either broken out or dead. It’s a very dark, desolate place, and I’d probably feel unsafe if not for the fact that I’m usually there in rush hour, when it’s sort of crawling with people.

Tonight, it was pretty dead. I saw one other guy on the top level, and he was already almost to the other end of the lot — in the same aisle as me — when I got up there. No big, right?

I went to my car, unlocked the door, and I saw a guy walking toward me. I figured it was just some guy who decided to park and spend a bleary, forgettable night Downtown™, because he’s very hip and cool.

“Excuse me, sir?” a timid, high-toned voice asked just after I opened my door. Maybe I’m a paranoid person, but I immediately whirled around and dropped my backpack, containing among other things a laptop, into the car and stood in a disturbing linebacker pose in front of the doorway. I almost did a Ralph Furley karate stance, but I managed to compose myself when I realized this guy was about four feet tall and about as threatening as a beached whale.

Still, I was defensive. Partly the paranoia, partly the thought that he had many, many weapons concealed on his person. Which I guess is also paranoia.

“What?!” I snapped.

“Can you help me jump my car, please?” He seemed pretty desperate.

“No,” I said, “I really gotta get home.” This was a lie. It’s cold, and I assumed my car would be all icy (fortunately, it wasn’t), so I figured I’d need at least ten minutes to warm up the car, if not more. Lucy called me while I was at work, so I thought I’d call her back and talk to her while I warmed up my car.

“Ohokaysorry,” the man said, and he seriously said it all as if it was one long word. I found that amusing.

He moved on, and I figured he really was just harmless. Still, I got in my car, started it, and left immediately. My engine weeped with pain, but it understood. I wasn’t really afraid at that point; I mainly just didn’t want him coming back after a few minutes and get roped into helping to jump his car. For one thing, despite the zillions of times I’ve aided in jumping cars, I never really paid attention, so if he didn’t know and I didn’t know, there would probably be some form of thermonuclear blast rocking the midwest by this time. For another, I just didn’t want to help him.

I felt sort of guilty, and I guess I still sort of do. Once, I left my lights on when I got to the lot, so I had to have it jumped when I got back. I called my mom, and she grudgingly came to help but insisted I go and ask other people in cars to help me. Nobody would, and I guess now I know why. It’s really fucking creepy and disturbing, no matter how completely unintimidating a person you are. Especially at night in the dark.

I thought later, on my way home, that I should’ve told him to go back into the station and beg people who were just getting off trains. There’s a strange psychological thing that happens to people at rush hour. When they first get off the train, there’s this excessive relief that the ride is finally over, but usually by the time they reach the escalator down to the parking lot, their relief turns to anticipation of just getting the fuck out of there and going home.

So, when you get up to the parking lot, even if you’re the most trusting, naïve, or helpful person on the planet, you still wouldn’t help the person jump his or her car because you just want to leave. I figured if he caught somebody in the station, they might at least agree to it and then get stuck before they get down to the parking lot. Plus, standing under the hostile fluorescents, he’d look far less intimidating than randomly approaching people from the shadows.

But, obviously, I didn’t think of any of that until later, so here’s my advice to the three people who enjoy this blog and live in a place with harsh winters and poorly maintained outdoor parking garages: stand somewhere brightly lit and public and beg for somebody to jump your car; don’t approach them from behind as they’re getting into their car. If my paranoia had been a little bit more severe, and I had had immediate access to a blunt object, that guy probably would have been unconscious for awhile.

Posted by Stan on January 5, 2004 9:04 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (2)

December 15, 2003

Okay, One Li’l Anecdote…

I got on the train after work, as I always do, and as the train filled up, somebody was stuck sitting next to me. She sat there for a few minutes, then suddenly got up and switched to another available seat. And I can’t help going nuts wondering why.

Okay, I’m large. This is not news to the longtime reader of this blog. Actually, it probably is, because usually I use the word “fat” to describe my carriage. However, I have been forbidden from using this term by powers more formidable and sexually attractive than you could ever comprehend. Consequently, I’m going with “large,” and with that said, it’s not surprising that somebody might be irritated by my wideness and move to a seat next to a smaller person. However, this woman was quite petite, so I don’t think that was necessarily the problem.

I’ve been deeply concerned about what foul stench I may be emitting as a result of nine-to-fiving it, as I have been for a long time this semester. I’m no heathen; I shower at least once a day, and I use an inordinate amount of deodorant, et cetera. I’m generally cleanly, and I’m pretty anal (heh, heh) about it.

However, I’m large. Because of this, I find it difficult to perform such basic tasks as walking up a flight of stairs or sitting down without sweating profusely. Sweat doesn’t exactly smell good, and it clings to the body, dries up, and — I imagine — terrible smells ensue. Since I’ve been riding the train at rush-hour, when riders are able to get up close and personal with odors they’d generally live without smelling, I am very familiar with the fat-man stench. It’s that oily combination of sizzling pork and gaping, red assholes (note: not work safe, KURU) that damn near makes me throw up.

But wouldn’t I be able to smell it if I were producing such an odor? I’m not so sure. It’s like George Carlin says: “Your own farts don’t smell so bad, but if it’s someone else, you’d be running to Bensonhurst.” I have to believe this principle also applies to body odors. It’s all about chemistry, man, and my fat-man (er, large-man) chemistry says, “You smell like bacon no matter how much you wash.”

So what do I do about it?

Lose weight? Yeah, I’m trying, but the Sausage Egg McMuffins won’t cooperate.

Figure out a method of showering before getting on the train in the evening? Okay, that’s not going to happen. Shut up, me.

Perhaps I should just live with the curse of the large man, wedged into a seat next to another fat man whose odor makes me want to tear out my nose and tongue.

Posted by Stan on December 15, 2003 9:26 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (2)

September 8, 2003

The Honey Offensive

I got stung by a bee the other day, and there’s a pretty simple reason why: we have a honeybee problem.

That’s right, Casa de Stan has been infested with honeybees who have taken it upon themselves to congregate around the bushes near my office. There are some minor cracks around there, which is more than likely how a honeybee made it under the house, through an air duct (or possibly through the hole in the floor we ran Ethernet cables through), and into the office to caress my inner thigh and then sting my hand.

After a brief family meeting, we came to a unanimous conclusion: the honeybees must die.

Hour 1: Research

We knew the bees were honeybees, as opposed to the many other disgusting varieties of bee that hang around, because they roughly match the online photos we found of honeybees. But, since they aren’t bumblebees or yellow jackets, or the more menacing wasps or hornets, how exactly do you kill honeybees?

The simple answer: hire a professional. Apparently, honeybees don’t really like to make hives. They actually like to usurp sections of people’s homes to build their combs, which can cause tons of damage (in addition to horrible smells once the honey starts to rot). This way, they can create more combs to secrete honey or whatever it is that they do.

Because of this, you need to hire a professional. Honeybees breed like rabbits, so attempting to murder them on your own will only make the remaining bees angry, and they will in turn attempt to destroy you. It’s kill or be killed, but professionals have the gear not only to eradicate all of the bees, but also to destroy the honey somehow and assess any damage to the house.

In short, professionals are the way to go.

However, if you choose not to hire a professional, the easiest way to destroy the bees is to spray them with a mixture of water and laundry detergent. Apparently, whatever is in laundry detergent makes bees die really, really quickly. My personal suggestion was to find the hive, cover it in flypaper, and then smash it with a hammer. The theory was that the bees would instantly fly from the broken hive and get stuck to the flypaper. Then, I’d take a screw driver and decapitate them.

So, my parents went on down to Sears Hardware to load up on industrial-strength laundry detergent and get a power-sprayer/detergent-mixing-in attachment for our hose.

Hour 2: Alone in the Dark

I was left home alone, so I decided to play in a poker tournament with Meron. A few hands passed, and I was doing moderately well in the game. But then, horror struck.

A bee suddenly floated up from behind my filing cabinet. It was staring directly at me, although it seemed more excited by the lamp next to the cabinet.

“Huh,” I said and continued with the game.

Then, I realized something: it was a bee. Like the one the stung me. Only still alive.

This situation needed to be rectified. By me.

I went into the kitchen and grabbed the Raid. I examined the bottle and found that it was not approved for murdering bees. I thought about trying it anyway, but I thought that the only thing worse than a bee totally ignoring me was a bee that was really pissed at me and wanted me dead. I didn’t want to get stung again.

So, I waited it out. My parents eventually came home and informed me that this can of Raid will, in fact, destroy the bees. So I made it dead. Then, I plugged the Ethernet hole with some paper towels. It should be secure enough to keep the bees out.

Hour 3: Genocide

Armed with a garden hose and laundry detergent, my father went outside and decided to blast the hell out of the bees. I would have helped — I’m out for blood; I would’ve done it myself — but we read that bees localize attacks when they smell the venom of their fallen. Even though the venom was, theoretically, supposed to be fresh, we thought it best to not take any chances.

So, I stayed inside and watched the Bears game and talked with Lucy on the phone. She’s doing well, incidentally.

Hour 4: The Sting, Part II

The front door blasted open and my father lumbered in. He’s a large guy (fatter than me, either), so I heard the stampede from my bedroom and came out to see what the hell was going on.

“The goddamn son-of-a-bitch stung me!” he shouted. “More than once!”

He jumped on the floor, laid down, stretched his foot out on the seat of his recliner, and tried to pull his sandal off.

“You went out to spray the bees in sandals?” I asked.

“I told him not to,” my mother said.

“You’re retarded,” I told my dad.

He let out a sound that onomatopoetically translates to AAAAAHSSSSSSSSGLABADAGUH. Literally, it translates as, “I’m hurt, shut the fuck up and help me!”

My mother ran and made the baking soda-water compound that didn’t help me at all and smeared it all over his toe. He left it on for about half an hour, then switched to the ice pack. He calmed down a little bit, and my mother insisted he reacted “like more of a baby than Stan.”

The details went like this: he was spraying in his sandals, one live bee hanging near the ground managed to break through his perimeter fire, and it managed to wedge itself between his toe and his sandal. There, it got stuck, so it stung him at least three times (he thinks it was six total) before it got out.

Hour 5: Magic Hour

Shortly before dusk, we all went out to admire our progress and to spray the bees once more. The area around the bushes was literally carpeted in dead honeybees. There were still more — there have to be millions hiding in there — but the detergent works.

We’re going to keep spraying them, at least three times a day, until they’re mostly dead. When winter sets in and they all die out, we’re gonna go under the house and try to find and destroy the hive.

Yet another reason why winter is my favorite season.

Posted by Stan on September 8, 2003 2:08 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (3)

September 5, 2003

The Sting

This afternoon, I was sitting in my office, strumming my guitar, and I felt like my shorts were riding up strangely. I couldn’t figure out what the problem was, so, like anybody, I grabbed at them to pull them back down. There was a slight, strange bulge. What I was feeling was not my shorts.

Then, I felt a prick.

I was touching a bee.

It stung me.

I immediately shrieked like a woman and ran across the house, shouting incoherently about a bee stinging me. It took me a few seconds to realize that pain was blasting through the middle finger of my right hand. A surprising amount of pain, all things considered. I’ve never had a bee sting before, and I had been given the impression that, yeah, they suck, but they don’t hurt all that much.

This impression was inaccurate.

I tried several bizarre home-remedy tricks to solving the bee sting crisis: baking soda mixed with water applied to the afflicted area, followed by allowing liquefied aspirin to absorb into the skin around the sting. Neither worked, so I iced it up for a good three hours or so. It still hurts, though not as badly. It’s mostly just annoying the piss out of me, and I have to type with one hand.

One good thing has come of this: I’ve always been afraid that I’m allergic to bee stings. I don’t really know, since I’ve never been stung, and one could argue that if I did get stung and was allergic, I would probably not be around to tell this story at the moment. So, I guess that’s good to know. I will add this to the very short list of things in nature that won’t make me die.

Posted by Stan on September 5, 2003 9:16 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (3)

July 29, 2003

Guilt

For as long as I’ve been doing this blog, the number-one question I am asked is as follows: “Pleas to be give me e-mail of Mr. Robert Kelly.” This relates to an entry, which apparently people are very excited or confused about. But that’s not really the issue.

The issue is this: I’ve received countless complaints from my fan about the distinct lack of entries that intrude upon my social life. “Come on,” they generally misspell, “if you don’t start letting us in, everyone will abandon your boring old site in favor of sites that are full of drunken debauchery, like the brilliant Tucker Max. Also, they’ll think you’re some androgynous, overweight, social misfit who still lives with his parents.”

I’m here to tell you, gentle reader, that nothing could be further from the truth. While I am an overweight social misfit who still lives with his parents, I am certainly not really all that androgynous. And I’m also not afraid of baring all — gone are the days in which I simply rambled incoherently about my classes and random girls on whom I form arbitrary social crushes because I’m so verbally crippled that I can’t go out and meet women on my own. Now, and forever more, or at least for this one entry, I’ll divulge all the dirty laundry I’ve kept hidden in a hamper of pain.

For once, by God, Stan will have a real issue.

After that tremendous build-up, I’m not sure I can follow up with anything genuinely interesting. But dammit, something’s on my mind, and I’d like to reach out to the many fellow bloggers who read my site and think to themselves, “Huh. My site design is better than this guy’s.” I’m gonna give it my all — all seventy percent! — and see what I can do.

So here’s the sitch (see, I use slang that was invented within the last two decades when I’m more open): I had dinner with some friends from high school last night. We were having what I’d like to think was a good time. The dinner went well, and then afterward, everything went to hell. Yeah, you guessed right: it was all my fault.

At this point, I would like to keep the anonymity of those involved, mostly because if I named names, they would deny any association with me faster than you can say “HUAC” (which is a relatively easy acronym, so you understand the great speed involved with their denials). With that said, it’s time to invent some clever and cloying fake names. I’ll keep it real, and we’ll say one of them is named John, and the other is Lucy.

So, after dinner, John was supposed to go to the mall with Lucy so he could follow her around while she went clothes shopping and then they could go a-drinkin’. I was bored, so I volunteered to join them, which I probably shouldn’t have done. I don’t really have a lot of foresight, though, and it did seem like a good idea at the time.

We went to one of those irritating women’s clothing stores that play obnoxious music and have bare-midriffed 14-year-olds talking at you with mild, adorable lisps. John decided to urinate to make room for the eventual consumption of more important liquids, so he disappeared and I was left, bored, following Lucy around and making fun of the various articles of clothing that people seem to think is stylish. (Should I talk? My wardrobe consists of faux-Hawaiian shirts that I get off the rack at Target for $8.)

Then, I said something really, unbearably stupid. It was one of those things that you say, and as it’s leaving your lips, your brain starts shouting at you, “STOP, YOU FOOL! FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT’S HOLY!” But it’s too late. The sentence is out, and suddenly you’re looking at The Look. You know The Look. It’s that one women have, and they wield it very carefully. They only give you The Look when you’ve really, possibly irredeemably, fucked up.

Needless to say, I’ve gotten The Look a lot in my time. I consider myself fortunate that she didn’t have a mai tai handy, or I’d probably still be washing rum and triple sec out of my eyes. (Note to writers: if you don’t drink, it’s always a good idea to attend a four-hour bartending/drink-mixing seminar so you can put in little details like that.)

What did I say to get The Look? It was a fairly simple and horrible exchange. Lucy was browsing through a variety of blouses she seemed to like, and she said, “Dammit, they don’t have any small or extra-smalls.”

To which I pithily and stupidly responded, “Well, that’s a good thing. You’ll probably need to go up a size, what with all that weight you’ve gained.”

It was around the word “you’ve” when my brain finally caught up with my mouth, and a mental “WHAT THE FUCK WERE YOU THINKING?” ricocheted around my fairly echoey skull chamber. I find it ironic that the part of my body that technically does all my thinking was asleep on the job, and as soon as it woke up, it immediately blamed itself. It’s like an M.C. Escher drawing, except this will probably cause my brain to implode at some point.

But that’s really the question that continues to bounce through my head: what the fuck was I thinking? I broke the cardinal rule of talking to women: never, ever, ever joke about weight, even in the jestiest jest of Jest Town. Just don’t do it.

In fact, don’t even bring up weight. Pretend people are massless and are not in any way bound to the earth’s graviational force. Women are just floating, bobbing heads who often have admirable body parts that only exist momentarily when it’s necessary for the male.

These are things I know. I learned them mostly the hard way, as I was ducking and covering my eyes to avoid various breakable dishware, and therefore I should know better. At one point, I had trained myself — or, more accurately, had been trained — to know better. But I’m slipping. It’s been nearly nine months since the last time I’ve had a non-liquid thrown at my head by a woman, and I guess I’m out of practice.

But that’s not really it. I have many female friends who, like Lucy, won’t give me the time of day (with good reason). But with every single other person I know, I can treat them like a civilized human being. My mental censor does not fall asleep; it’s always on red alert, screening the various things I think but should never say and making sure I don’t, in fact, say them. With other women, I’m pleasant almost to the point of utter disinterest.

So, what makes Lucy different? That’s what I’m trying to figure out. I haven’t apologized yet — well, I haven’t formally apologized yet. I apologized approximately 800 times between The Look and us parting ways. But, come on, like that’s gonna do any good. I said what I said, and Lucy not accepting my apology is pretty much par for the course, especially when it’s basically a half-hearted, “Gosh, I’m sorry I said that.” That doesn’t even indicate that I’m sorry for hurting her feelings and wounding her self-esteem or body image or what have you — for all she knows, I’m just sorry my dumbass mouth doesn’t work.

But how am I supposed to decently apologize when I can’t even figure out what possessed me to say what I did? Being that I’ve gained 22 pounds since November, and I was never quite the looker (or quite thin) to begin with, who am I to insinuate anything about anybody else’s weight? What right do I have to say a single word about somebody else’s physical appearance, even in jest? I mean, if I joke about it, I just open the floodgates for thousands of jokes about myself that are most likely funnier and more biting.

And I certainly didn’t mean it. I maintain, whether she’d ever believe me or not (she probably wouldn’t) that she’s one of the most attractive women I know. But that probably has something to do with it. I get irritable around her and no one else, and I say really hostile things under the guise of humor, and it probably has to do with the fact that, in the words of Lester Flatt, she don’t pay me no mind.

To her, I’m a big, fat, neurotic loser. This is mostly accurate, so it’s not like I can fault her perception. But it doesn’t stop that bitterness from forming, and it obviously doesn’t stop me from saying stupid shit I don’t really mean (yeah, I’m bitter, but that doesn’t make it true). And yeah, maybe the way I feel about her is a bit deeper — and therefore more volatile — than I’m willing to let on. Maybe that’s why, on the few occasions she’s gotten under my skin, I’ve found myself able to forgive her almost instantaneously.

Ugh. I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing anymore. But this rant has helped, I guess. I have a better idea of what’s wrong with me now than I did last night, when I drove around for an hour, seething at the depths of my own stupidity. Maybe now I can apologize and really mean it. It’s a start, anyway.

On a more positive note, I think I just single-handedly increased the emo factor of this blog fiftyfold. That means my dexterity increases by two, and if I roll 11, I finally get the mythril chainmail I so desperately desire.

(Also, this is not, contrary to my introduction, going to become a regular thing. I just needed to vent and I figured, just this once, I’d spare Gina the torture.)

Posted by Stan on July 29, 2003 8:21 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (1)

June 28, 2003

Contact!

I’ve done a lot of really stupid things to impress women. I use “stupid” as a catch-all term for both the things that are dangerous and possibly illegal and the things that are just so utterly lame that I can’t believe that, at one point in time, I was completely convinced that it would seem really impressive.

Did you ever see that Simpsons where Milhouse gets Krusty’s autograph on his stomach to impress girls, and then he shows the girls, and they all run away screaming? That scene sums up roughly 60% of the things I’ve done to impress the fairer sex.

When I was a junior in high school, a really, really slutty girl was very attracted to me. Honestly, in high school, the only women I could attract were either (1) so skanky that they were completely indiscriminate, (2) so desperate that they thought I looked good, or (3) insane. Not much has changed since then, except that I can categorize them into one of those three groups. In high school, I used to categorize them as follows: (1) she likes me, therefore I must attempt to date her.

At any rate, this slutty girl was under the impression that under the doughy, acne-splatter facade she saw raged a tiger rippling with muscles and an aesthetically pleasing complexion; she was mistaken, but this did not stop her from not-very-coyly prodding me into transforming my physique into something presentable. The first thing to go: the glasses.

One day, perched cautiously on my thunderous thighs, she pulled my glasses off and announced, “You’d look a lot better with contacts.” An interesting point.

After school, I made an appointment with my ophthalmologist so I could get contacts. She gave me a sample pair, showed me how to put them in and take them out, and then left me on my own to practice putting them in and taking them out. Thirty minutes later without anything to show for it, I decided to give up. What the hell was the point?

Defeated, I meandered home, wondering what I could possibly do to get rid of the glasses. I couldn’t go without them, because I’d both be blind and my lazy eye — the primary reason for getting glasses in the first place — would start floating all over the place, which is even more unappealing than glasses.

I decided to take the honest — and stupid — approach, and I explained my plight to the slutty girl. She responded thoughtfully by going into graphic detail about how she had been fooling around with a senior when her parents walked into the room. I think she broke up with me at that point, although I was never really positive that we were actually going out. She may still think we’re still an item at this point. She was not very bright.

Flash-forward four years. The lazy eye is gone after a painful and irritating surgery, but the glasses remain. I was getting sick of them, so at my last ophthalmologist appointment, I asked about trying contacts again. I decided that it would be more reasonable, in the grand scheme of things, if I used the Extended Wear contacts, which apparently no longer act as horrible bacterial petri dishes that cause eyes to look roughly like the Horsehead Nebula after sleeping in them.

She introduced me to a strange, short optometrist who works in her office, and he showed me how to put in and take out contacts in greater — and more painful — detail. Still, being the completely incompetent person that I am, coupled with my intense phobia of getting my hands in the general vicinity of my eyeball, it took me an hour and a half to get them in and out and then back in again.

My eyes were stinging, tearing (that’s as in “teardrop,” not like I tore my eyeball apart — goddamn the English language!), swollen, and bloodshot. Despite the fact that it was painful and I would express my pain by saying things such as “Ow,” the optometrist kindly assured me that “there is no ‘ow.’” He will not be getting a Christmas card.

When I got home, my mother showed me what she assumed was an easier way to get the contacts in and out. Since it only took me an hour, I guess she was technically correct. Still, I kept them out because my eyes were extremely irritated and swollen, and I didn’t need them getting more irritated. I figured I’d let them recover for a few days before trying again.

So Tuesday night, I tried again. It took me another hour to get them in, but I decided I would keep them in for at least a few days, to see how horrible sleeping in them actually was. If it worked out, I’d just keep them in until I needed to replace them. I still didn’t like putting in the contacts (taking them out isn’t as bad), but I felt better about myself because I was doing this to help myself, not to impress the ladies (who, honestly, aren’t impressed by the things I do anymore; actually, they never were, but my ability to deny that is wearing thin).

So Wednesday passed with few problems, except that the right lens was somewhat blurry. Thursday attempted to pass, as well, but things got bad. That blurriness in my right lens? It got worse during class. By the time I was driving home, I could barely see anything more then ten feet away from me. This is not a good thing while driving.

Smart people — i.e., people who aren’t me — would have pulled over, said, “Gosh, I can’t drive. I should get some help,” and then wait for said help to arrive. I did this: I closed my right eye. And I’m not dead or injured, and neither is my car, so I guess that worked out.

When I got home, I took them out. My mother insists that either I tore or smudged the lens. I’ve been so frustrated by the contacts — somebody at some point told me they were easier than dealing with glasses; what in the hell happened to that? — that I haven’t put them back in. I’m still not sure if I will or not.

I think I’ve given up. Again.

Posted by Stan on June 28, 2003 10:33 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)

April 8, 2003

And I Thought My Life Was Disproportionately Irritating…

Remy insisted that I read a story about a guy called AccordionGuy who had probably the most miserable experience with a woman ever in the history of the universe. You can read the story here, but if you’re lazy like me, I can summarize.

Basically, AccordionGuy met a super peachy-keen woman, but she turned out to be an identity thief (and not a very good one). He was warned, he questioned her, he caught her in a tangled web o’ lies, the end. It’s a pretty sad story, but there is a pretty decent moral:

“Dude,” said my old buddy George the following day, “you were saved by your blog!”

It’s true. I posted a gushy entry about New Girl, someone saw it and came forward to tell me the truth. Maybe the Blogger or Moveable Type people should print up stickers and T-shirts that read BLOGS SAVE LIVES. I’d buy one.

Which leads me to a conclusion of my own: all my fear and paranoia (plus, all the stuff that would utterly humiliate me — and there’s a lot of it) about not putting the more personal aspects of my life onto this crazy blog o’ mine may actually hurt me more than it’d help.

As much as I like the coziness and the thin veil of anonymity in blogland, if I started going out with some sort of frightening identity thief (and the probability of that is high, knowing my luck and inability to attract women who are not either con artists of insane people), it’d be nice to be fairly warned from the blog community at large.

Then again, if I started writing more detailed accounts of the people I know and love, and they ever actually started snooping around the Internet and found this blog, they would tie me to a chair, shit in my mouth, and then murder me. And while getting murdered isn’t exactly the worst thing to happen, I’d at least want to go out with a non-shit-filled mouth.

Or, at the very least, a breath mint.

Posted by Stan on April 8, 2003 4:37 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)

March 6, 2003

Negativity

As usual, I was talking to Sarah the other night, pissing and moaning about how awful my life is. She said to me, “I just don’t get why your life is so bad. You always complain about it, but I don’t see why.” That made me stop in my tracks, because I had absolutely nothing good to say in response. All I kept thinking was, “Holy shit, she’s actually right. I bitch about everything, but nothing’s really wrong.” I told her I bitch because I like it, despite the fact that (usually) nothing is wrong.

She didn’t get it. If nothing’s wrong, why do I bitch? I tried to explain, realizing already that I sounded like a big dumbass, that I make things wrong, in my head, so I’ll be able to complain about them. I have no legitimate problems, certainly none worth complaining about.

I’m not starving. I’m not even struggling to make ends meet. I live in a good neighborhood in a (generally) decent town where everybody’s totally insane but few people commit any memorable crimes. I’ve had my share of laughable romantic liasons, some of which actually lasted for more than a week. I am able to get a college education. I have parents who don’t openly dislike me, and usually pretend to support me even though I’m usually being an idiot.

In other words, things are okay. I read somewhere that people who hate life and the world, in a cruel and ironic trick of nature, usually live longer than people who are happy and pleasant all the time. I don’t know about that. It feels good to stop hating everything all the time.

I doubt it’ll last, though. I’m not really wired for positive thinking, no matter how good I may have it. In fact, I’m the kind of guy who, when told his life isn’t so bad and so he should quit bitching, would actually do something to make his life bad enough that it is worth complaining about.

Then again, I’m the kind of guy who stopped eating meat for six months — not because of some kind of animal-cruelty protestation or because a doctor told me I wasn’t allowed to, but because of a secret fear that the government was selling us meat made from humans. And the worst of it is that I wasn’t so worried about eating human meat — my problem was the fact that the price was so high.

“There’s a word for people who think everyone’s out to get them.”
“That’s right — perceptive.”
— Woody Allen

Posted by Stan on March 6, 2003 8:01 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (2)