What Are You?: Life Is A Gameshow and I Am One Shitty Prize

Showcase Number One on The Price Is Right. A brown velour couch so unattractive that it is almost mandatory for you to refer to it as “the davenport” and a blue tandem bike. Don’t forget the lifetime supply of Tide.
Sure the couch is comfy, a bicycle built for two is an interesting thing to have, and you will be leaving laundry detergent to people in your will but it’s not that great.
However, it is better than nothing so of course you’ll take it if you have the misfortune of not being able to select your showcase.
Everyone knows that Showcase Number Two is much more exciting and attractive. It’s a motherfucking trip to Hawaii. Of course you’re going to pass on Showcase Number One.

Tell Me Something: Idiot Box Trivia

Stephen Hawking appears sporadically on episodes of The Simpsons. When he appears, Hawking comes in and records the vocal parts (if you can call them that) himself. This is fairly surprising considering that Hawking’s voice is just Microsoft Sam with mild speech and pitch adjustments. (Not that my best friend and I ever used to record ourselves having conversations with Microsoft Sam as Stephen Hawking or anything.) Apparently, Hawking is a big fan of the show. Pizzapizza pizzapizza pizzapizza, indeed.

What Are You Going To Do With Yourself?: Stealing Unapologetically from Richard Brautigan

Karma Repair Kit:
Steps 1-4
1. Get enough food to eat and eat it
2. Find a place where it is quiet and sleep there
3. Reduce intellectual and emotional noise until you arrive at the silence of yourself
4.

Tell Me Something Cute: A Paraphrased Conversation, My Half Whiskey Soaked, and I May Have Dreamt This

*R: Tell me something cute.
A: Puppies
R: Puppies?
A: Puppies are cute.
You wanted me to tell you something cute.
I told you puppies.
R: You can’t tell someone puppies.
A: Then how did I just do it?
R: That’s cheating.
A: I thought this was a conversation, not a game.









*R could mean request or stand in for the first name of the requester. A could mean answer or stand in for my first name. It’s all a matter of taste really.

What Are You Afraid Of?: Things That Go Bump In The Ocean

Charming, handsome, intelligent, and will stone cold murder you. These characteristics are incredibly representative of two distinct mammals: Ted Bundy and dolphins. That’s right, dolphins are the Ted Bundys of the sea.

I don’t know what it is about them that is so terrifying beyond the fact that they’re more intelligent than a large percent of the population (including supporters of NPR) and some scientists believe that they are actually smarter than all humans and just got the short end of the stick. I just can’t bring myself to be okay with any sea creature that may or may not be smarter than Stephen Hawking, Albert Einstein, and Leonardo Di Vinci combined unless it’s Nessie. I would be one hundred percent okay with Nessie being that smart because Nessie doesn’t possess that smug dolphin face. I can’t trust that shiny wet mug. The gloss in those eyes seems to be made of sheer murder. You, too, would be pissed off if you were brilliant and had to live in oceans that those insipid little humans fouled up with their garbage and their oil spills and their vomiting over the railings of cruise ships after too many pina coladas.

Once while on vacation in Florida with my family, I went into this gift shop. While perusing the goods I bumped into something I thought was a person. I looked up to apologize and I saw that it was a man with a dolphin head wearing a wetsuit. I scream and immediately run out of the store thinking my worst dolphin nightmare had come true and that they were indeed trying to take over the land. Five minutes later my grandma and brother find me shaking and crying in the parking lot. Apparently, the nightmarish man-dolphins were mannequins with Plexiglas dolphin heads attached. I don’t know the identity of the sadistic bastard who thought that one up but I am almost positive I hate him/her.

Tell Me A Secret: Something Pathetic

I’m secretly jealous of girls named Caroline. They get all the best songs with girl names in them. Keep Caroline by Toys That Kill, Sweet Caroline by Neil Diamond, Pretty In Pink by The Psychedelic Furs, Caroline by Jawbreaker (Later covered by Fifteen). In fact, the only song I have ever heard that makes it sound unfavourable to be a Caroline is Kirsty MacColl’s Caroline in which MacColl has stolen her best friend Caroline’s romantic partner.

Despite MacColl’s dampening the musical joys of being a Caroline, it’s still better than the song I get. Do you know what I get? Boston. And my best friend Jessi(ca)’s being named after an Allman Brothers song and my parents’ age and love of Boston and other similar musical acts when I was born make me all too worried that my parents went and named me after a Boston song. They were not quite twenty and not quite twenty-two at the time. Young Americans living in Germany and attending Monsters of Rock Festivals until my conception. They definitely could be denying that the answer really is yes when I try to get assurance that I am not named after a Boston song.
The thing here is, my parents like a lot of way cooler musicians than Boston (Okay, my dad does. My mom owned Michael Bolton and Celine Dion cds the last I knew.) Like, my dad thinks that Willie Nelson is one of the coolest people to ever walk the planet. Thus, my father could have done much better in terms of songs by naming me Whiskey River since he was the one who named me.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t WISH my name were Whiskey River. I’d just rather be named Whiskey River than be named after a Boston song.

How Do You Do That?: A Lesson In Single Stitch Crochet

Step One: Tie a knot creating a loop at the end of your yarn.

Step Two: Stick crochet hook through the loop and hook yarn on it.

Step Three: Pull yarn through loop with hook, creating a new loop. Repeat until you are ready to turn the corner.

Step Four: To turn the corner, go one loop further than you actually want to go. Turn back the other way and stick the hook through your previous loop.

Step Five: Proceed to pull your yarn through. Continue this pattern until you reach the end of the row. Repeats steps four and five until you have finished.

Where Are You?: Looking For Parking In Lincoln Park

My brother is in town. He’s sixteen and he’s pretty alright most of the time. He really wants this book so we’re driving to the nearest Borders because bookstores are one of the few things we can agree on.

It’s cold and Dustin keeps turning off the heat. While his window is cracked. I yell at him to either let me keep the heater on or shut his window because it’s hard to drive when you’re shivering.

There’s something lovely about all these one-way streets on a cold autumn night. Seeing everyone’s frosty breath while you’re traveling in a box of warmth. Driving gives it all a different perspective. One that is somehow more calming.

“Tuffy’s. That doesn’t sound like a car place. That sounds like a strip club,” Dustin makes a note as we pass by.

“You’re right, it does. It sounds like the kind of place where the strippers are like all hairy and beastlike. Probably wearing mascot wolf heads or something.”

“Beast strippers? If I owned a strip club where the girls wore animal heads I’d call it The Shelter.”

“Tuffy’s sounds like the kind of place a stripper with vagina dentata would work.”

“What’s that?”

“Where your vagina has teeth. Hey, would someone with vagina dentata have to brush their vagina teeth?”

“Can you get plaque in your vagina teeth? What about cavities?”

Laughter fills the car as we ponder all the absurdities of vaginal dental maintenance.

“Vaginal root canal. Ouch. That one hurts just thinking about it.”

“Vaginal dentures.”

“Vagina denture-tata.”

We find a parking garage then.

What Do You Hate?: Wolfen

Why are you still talking
and asking
and saying,
pretending
that you’re concerned?
When you’re more concerned
with clawing out my eyes
and cracking open my chest?
You won’t be happy until
you’re wearing my insides
like a merit badge.
I can read the malice in your hateful squint eyes
while you stare.
They’re projecting bloodlust.
But there’s a way out of every trap.
This act isn’t precious, precocious,
anything you’ve been led to believe.
This convoluted act is strictly predatory.

Does your sheep’s clothing ever get itchy?

Tell Me Something: A Failed March To The Sea

I woke up on a Sunday having made the decision that I was going to get my shit together. I was going on a metaphorical march to the sea. Slash and burn fucking everything that stood in my way. Billy Sherman style. Every obstacle ever was my Georgia. And when invoking the General, you had damn well better make Georgia howl.

Apparently I am my own Georgia because all I did over the next forty-eight hours was trample myself. I maimed and once I tasted the blood and felt the flames of the plantations I’d once held dear, I couldn’t stop until I hit the sea. And only then did the realization of the path of destruction I had just been on become something I could wrap my head around. I wrecked friendships. I alienated myself. I tried to shove everyone I have ever cared about away. I think bridges were burnt; I know fields were. I hope that the soil on those fields is still viable.

I wonder if the land and the animals and the people on the real Sherman’s path to the sea wished they were him or just wished him dead.