2 Birds Investigates: An Evening of the Occult

So, I’m looking for a job. We’ve had this conversation. It’s miserable, I’m miserable, we’re all miserable. I’ve tried being myself, a la ex-co-blogger Eddie (“I wore a see-through camisole and talked about Kreayshawn! They’re giving me a raise!”), I tried not being myself, I’ve tried long resumes, I’ve tried short resumes, I’ve tried bursting into tears in a temp agency – zip.

So, I tried magic.

I don’t not believe in voodoo. I have a little grisgris bag or mojo I always have with me that I got from an actual voodoo lady in Louisiana. I lost the first one, so I had to send a check with $35, a note of apology, and some hair and nails for a replacement – and THE DAY it got here Meg and I found out the sample for Misanthrope’s got accepted. Frankly, I’ve believed in weirder things with less reason (chupacabra, etc.), so I’m willing to throw in for voodoo. And if I’m going to ask the supernatural for help, it’s either voodoo or the Episcopal Church, and going to an ornate, mostly empty sanctuary and politely asking God for help if he’s not terribly busy makes a weak blog.

Originally, Meg and I had a bigger idea. We were going to try to break our bad luck with a self-designed voodoo ritual, but after a short heart-to-heart about Meg’s condo board (“I’m on thin ice after Evie as it is, and if they find all that blood in the drain…”) we decided to lowball it and order a prefab spell from the internet.

St. Expedite is the patron of doing things quickly, which explains why we’ve never met. He likes red things and, apparently, candles with herbs sprinkled in the wax.

Before performing a spell, it’s considered wise to “cast a circle” of protection around yourself. According to wiccanonline.com (or similar), this is done by:

-       Giving the room a good cleansing smudge with sage. We did this by lighting sage incense and walking around the room chanting “Smudging… smudging…smudging…”

-       Getting in the north corner of the room, facing north, bowing, and saying “I cast this circle in the name of love and light, and ask that it protect me from all malevolent and unwanted spirits.”

-       Repeating the bow and love-and-light bit while facing east, south, and west.

-       Pointing at the earth and turning around three times, counterclockwise (if you do it backward the dead will absolutely rise)

-       Adding any other words you feel appropriate. I elected to add the spell Angela Lansbury used in Bedknobs and Broomsticks to make suits of armor fight the Nazis: “Treguna mekoides tricorum satis dee!”

Either from Hocus Pocus or an episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark? I have the idea that you’re also supposed to also make an actual circle of actual salt. Meg offered me my choice of garlic salt or sea salt in a grinder. I chose the grinder because I like the sound it makes.

Now that we were protected, we were ready to do the spell. It had an odd, Oprah vibe: we had to visualize what we wanted and then write it down in detail, including desired starting salary. Essentially, it was a cover letter to the beyond. I don’t actually know what rules govern this situation, so in case it falls under the birthday-wish rules, I won’t say exactly what I wrote. I bet you can guess – I relied heavily on the phrase “shit, anything at this point.”

Well, we visualized and we wrote, then lit the candle and put it on top of our papers. The spell goes like this:

"St. Expedite, I call upon you,

I ask for your powerful support.

You know what is necesary and what is urgently needed.

Please help me remedy economic problems.

That I may obtain ufficient money for necessities.

Please help me find gainful employment very soon,

so that this heavy burden of concern

will be lifted from my heart

and I will soon be able to provide

for those whom God has entrusted to my care.

By your grace, Blesed Saint"

(NOW STATE YOUR OWN PETITION)

When you're done Say:

"Expedite now what I ask of you.

Expedite now what I want of you.

Do this for me, Saint Expedite,

And when it is accomplished,

I will as rapidly reply for my part

With an offering to you.

So Mote It Be! Blesed Be!"

Afterward, I banged my fist on the table to make it official, then poured some of the melted wax on my paper. It seemed like the magic thing to do. The paper with the spell on it has a very strict warning at the bottom – apparently St. Expedite is touchy, and if he does you a favor and you don’t give a thanksgiving offering, he’ll pull the whole thing down around your ears. So be warned.

We already had candles lit and the circle laid, so we decided to have a séance. That previous sentence says more about my life than I wish it did.

The internet was less helpful than usual on séances. It seems like the kind of thing that would have a specific, involved ritual around it, but no: you just light a candle, hold hands, and wait for the ghosts. You’re supposed to give them an easy way to contact you: set out a glass of water to jiggle a la Jurassic Park, or just ask them to tap. (With what?) We had a hard time choosing someone to contact. I wanted to try to contact my recently deceased grandfather, but somehow waking him up so I could blog about it seemed disrespectful, so we settled on Nancy Mitford, the not-incredibly-famous British humorist I wrote my graduate thesis on. She wasn’t home, or whatever, so we moved on to Gerald Ford – I thought it might help to try someone with a tie to the Washington area. Well, Gerald apparently only contacts registered Republicans, despite our argument that after the Reagan realignment it’s really a different party than he remembers, and Betty wasn’t communicative either. So we did what you’d expect us to do and went after Bea Arthur. So much for not being predictable.

Meg: Bea? Calling Bea Arthur. Paging Beatrice Arthur.

Me: Bernice? Bernice Frankel? We know your birth name! We’re true fans!

Meg: Bea, if you’re listening, we want to thank you for being a friend.

Me: “Lady Godiva was a freedom rider, she didn’t care if…”

Meg: Shut up, or we won’t hear if she taps.

Me: Bernice?

Meg: We’d appreciate a quick hello, we know you’re probably busy with Estelle and Rue…

Tap.

Me: RUE?!

Meg: Did you see that we dedicated our third book to you?

Rue: Tap.

Me: Were you pleased:

[Long pause]

Rue (playfully): Tap.

Meg: We weren’t kidding! We cherished you!

Me: We still do!

Meg: Feel free to drop back in anytime.

Me: We’ll make cheesecake! Presumably you can enjoy the smell, or something!

This is a dramatization, but I. Swear. To. God. We heard three distinct taps in answer to our questions. Either we contacted Rue McClanahan from beyond the grave or the air conditioner was on. I know what I’ve chosen to believe.

Also: Rue McClanahan can back from the grave to acknowledge that we dedicated a book to her before the book was released. Garry Shandling has had since November to acknowledge that Brainwashing was dedicated to him, and I mailed him a free copy. AND HE’S ALIVE.

All this happened Friday night. Today, Monday:

-       Got an ACTUAL JOB INTERVIEW for an ACTUAL JOB in ACTUAL NEW ORLEANS. 99% sure it’s not a prank.

-       Got called about working a polling station during the primaries, which will allow me to fulfill my lifelong dream of looking a first-time voter dead in the eye and saying “there is a wrong answer – you know that, right?” AND is a day’s work

-       Got the author copies of It Seemed Like A Good Idea…, which means Amazon will be shipping soon. It has an attractive cover and is filled to the BRIM with laughs. You should buy two copies and keep one in your panic room, just in case.

-       Got a free banana from the corner bodega, just because it was going bad!

St. Expedite and Rue McClanahan – fixing my terrible life for over three days.

How was your commute?

The bad news is that, haha, I owe several hundred dollars in takes this year literally because I only learned yesterday how tax brackets work. The good news is that I got a DVD of “Who’s the Boss” from Netflix the other day, and it featured an episode guest-starring Delta Burke as a promiscuous socialite and another featuring Betty White as a ruthless TV host. #suicidepostponed #this is a non sequitur but I had an erotic dream about garry shandling the other day like for real #he didn’t let me finish either @meg

Twitter-format jokes: more fun than twitter since 2011.

So, as I mentioned, I’m on the bus three to four (closer to four) hours per work day. Except for the terrible tailbone pain – the seats are ergonomic, but not for Earthlings – it’s a really manageable kind of misery in the mornings. Everyone else is on a long early-morning bus ride. No one wants to talk or make eye contact except for the guy at the transfer station who I overheard say, “I’ll be a pervert till I die!” and I feel like the rest of us have a tacit alliance against encouraging him.

Coming home is a different story. My bus goes past the agricultural high school, for all those Philadelphia School District kids who go on to farm, and it gets there right at the time school lets out, so the bus is literally packed to capacity with teenagers.

Things I Have Learned About Teenagers:

1)    Loud

2)    Talk about sex, masturbation, and the human body more in 15 miles than Meg and I do in our entire humor book about war crimes

3)    Loud

4)    They’ll just put their leg on yours so that you have to move your leg so you’re not a child molester

5)    Loud

6)    Oh my God, Loud

7)    Teenagers have an odor. It results from having the energy to run around and sweat, then covering the sweat smell with Bath and Body Works Hayfever and Diabetes in A Jar Turbofloral Spray.

Things I have learned about these particular teenagers:

1)    They’re still undecided about what they think about the new girl, Brooklyn, but suspect she will turn out to be a bitch.

2)    Brad cheated on Tanya first, which if you know that doesn’t make her look as bad as he tried to make her look, and she broke up with him first too, and he’s texting her now.

3)    They do not intend to save anything for marriage. It is a struggle to save it until they get off the bus.

So, hooray. Youths. God bless ‘em. Imagine how thrilled I was to get The Early Bus home the other day, which passes the school too early for the kids?

Now imagine how thrilled I was to see someone shoot heroin on the bus.

Let me take you through it. I’ve been on the bus a few minutes, and we stop near a shopping center. A guy gets on with a suitcase and gigantic Ikea carrying bag and asks the driver for change. The bus driver does not have change, but they manage to work out a deal, and homeboy sits down nearish me.

Chris’ Brain: Oh, he’s cute.

Chris’ Brain: Are you kidding? He’s sweating in that indoor way. He looks like he needs an IV, a steak, and like twenty naps. A solid hose-off in the yard wouldn’t go amiss, either.

Chris’ Brain: We’ve done worse.

Chris’ Brain: …Granted. But that was college.

Homeboy proceeds to root through the suitcase, find a candy bar (I feel it’s important to note it’s WHITE CHOCOLATE with little cookie bits in it), and eat it like… well, like it was heroin. I’m doing that thing where you stare right next to someone so you can watch them and pretend to zone out or be looking out the window if they catch you. He wraps up the last bit of his bar and stows it, then starts rummaging in his pants – his arm is down the outside of his pant leg, so I think he’s either the least efficient masturbator in the world or getting a gun. I barely have time to think “well, if I get shot Meg will benefit from heightened book sales,” before I realize that most mad shooters probably don’t have to spend five minutes rummaging in their pants for a gun and that something weirder is afoot. Sure enough, Homeboy proceeds to flop over from the waist and sway bonelessly along to the bouncing of the bus. Absolutely no one else appears to be watching. After a couple minutes, he straightens up, works something down his pant leg and apparently tucks it in his sock, and starts making small talk about guitars with someone else on the bus. I texted roughly a dozen people to be like “HEROIN ON THE BUS BIG CITY LOL” and at least three people asked me if I was sure, like sure sure, that it wasn’t insulin.

Yes, I’m sure. Because ten minutes later he did it again, and followed it with some vigorous stretching.

When he got done stretching, he asked me if I had change for a five – I didn’t, but I gave him a subway token. I figured that since I was absolutely going to blog about his addiction, it was least I could do.

Here are the morals I’ve drawn: HANDS DOWN better to be confined somewhere with a junkie than a meth-head, and I wish I’d tried heroin when I was young enough for it to be considered “finding myself.” I know damn well who I am at this point, but God, he looked calm. I’ve never been as calm as that in my entire life.

On the home front, remember my crazy neighbor? Well, the woman in the apartment next to her has started teaching herself some kind of loud “power ukulele.” We might make it to the end of the month before my building is reclassified as a mental hospital, but it’s going to be a squeaker.

Putting the "HA" in "hard sell". (Or not, as the case may be.)

I just got a box of our new book, Brainwashing for Beginners, and I only have one thing to say about it: poor, poor Brainwashing. It never stood a chance. It's the Jan Brady to The Misanthrope's Guide to Life's Marsha. Which isn't to say it's bad. It's actually really, really funny. I know this because I just read it for the first time. I don't know why, but I was completely prepared to crack it open and be like, "Oh God, this is B-level material...This is so embarrassing." But it's not at all. I might even like it better than Misanthrope's. YEAH, I SAID IT. And I'm 98% sure I meant it. I think I expected it to suck because the actual process of writing it sucked. When I think back to writing it, all I can think of is computers breaking and strep throat and needing extensions on deadlines and feeling like failures for needing said extensions and that sty I randomly developed halfway through the project (?) and the earthquake in Japan I'm sure our writing somehow caused and the 5,500 words it ended up being over and bleh, whereas writing Misanthrope's was like a great big pizza party. If I could summarize writing each book in a single youtube clip, they would be the following:

Writing Misanthrope's Guide to Life:


Writing Brainwashing for Beginners:


But now that we're five months removed from the entire situation, I feel like I can finally appreciate the finished product. And I do. And I feel badly that I didn't before. And I want to take its little hand in mine and tell it, "I'm sorry I didn't say 'I love you' enough when you were growing up. Because I did. I was just too busy fighting my own demons to tell you and it was my fault. MY FAULT. So please accept this gift Mr. VanVonderen is offering you today because there's a room here full of people who love you like crazy, but we feel like we're losin' ya here and I just want my little girl back." I don't know. I've been watching a fair amount of Intervention on Netflix recently and I'm not offering any apologies for it. When Candy Finnigan cries......weoifjwf. I have no words. It hits me in the gut. Knocks the wind right out of me. And she always does! Especially when children are involved because you know she was adopted and probably relates to their feeling of abandonment. How did we get here? What was I talking about? RIGHT, the book is actually good and you should buy it.

Truth be told, I feel really uncomfortable trying to sell this book to you because we're still so blatantly trying to sell the first, but at the same time, I do think it's a worthy purchase. Like our first book, it's an excellent bathroom read. I got an email from a reader the other day saying just that and hoping it didn't offend me, and honestly? I 100% get it and I'm right there with you. Although I kind of feel like an asshole keeping a copy of my own book in my bathroom because I'm worried people will interpret it as me being all, "What? OH, THAT? Mmmmyes, I wrote a book. Two in fact! Well actually three, but who's counting? Bwahaha. Mmmmyes. Tea?" (I don't know why I'm trying to serve people tea in the bathroom...) But it's not the case. Both books are just really easy to jump into and no matter where you land, you're guaranteed a laugh. I keep finding myself in the bathroom flipping through Misanthrope's to pass the time and like, 25 minutes later I'll still be sitting on the John reading it. Which is absurd because a.) I co-wrote it, so I've obviously read it before, b.) that's a genuinely long time to be in the bathroom, and c.) there's just something so shameful about laughing at your own material with your pants down around your ankles. You just feel so exposed.

To give you a little more information on the book, Brainwashing is essentially our guide to manipulating people into doing what you want in everyday situations. It's the next level in Meg and Chris' School of Sociopathy and Witchcraft. Minus the Witchcraft. The book is comprised of 101 objectives (ranging from Get Upgraded to First Class to Convince Your New Husband You're a Virgin), which are broken down into ten chapters: Making Work Work For You (Manipulation Around the Office); Be The Mary, Not the Rhoda (Toward More Obedient Friends); Pavlov's Girlfriend (Sex and Relationships in a Brave New World); How to Get a 4.0 at Symbionese State University (Mind Control at School); George Orwell, Obstetrician (Making a Mark on Your Child's Tabula Rasa); Free Drumsticks and Cheap Gas (Everyday Hypnosis); 72 Virgins, 99 Luftballoons, and Access to the Buffet (Brainwashing During Wartime); I'm Not Not God (Cults for Dummies); Thank You, Sir, May I Have Another? (Stockholm Syndrome and You); and 10.) Bluejeans and Coca-Cola (Deprogramming). Each objective then has 2-3 brainwashing techniques for how to accomplish it.

Like I said, I was all nervous when I started to read it, but then I saw that we refer to Nick Nolte as "Father Time's readheaded stepchild" within the first three sentences of the book and immediately felt better. I also forgot how incredibly Garry Shandling heavy it is and I am not mad about it. Not only is he the object of our dedication, we also have an entire objective based on the idea of trying to get the fictional murder-mystery series The Garry Shandling Mysteries back on the air. (Jeremy Piven is obviously his Watson-like sidekick.) I remember when we got the first round of edits back on the manuscript, there were two notes next to this objective. The first was from the copy editor saying, "I checked—this is not a real show," and the second was our editor's response: "Not yet." Matthew Glazer. You get us. You get us so well and I love you for it.

I'm also still shocked that they let us keep objective #23 in: Get Your Friend to Experiment with You Sexually. I wrote this, without exaggeration, an hour before our second extension was up, and I did it as like a, "Well, they're obviously going to make us take this out, but fuck it—it's something", and I can't tell you how much I respect Adams Media for letting it stay in. Especially since the third brainwashing technique is to "Tape Scissors All Over Your Walls and Hope She Gets the Hint". I mean...to you, sir. To Adams Media. I feel like the book actually benefits from the fact that we wrote the majority of it in an incredibly cracked-out, Hail Mary, what the fuck are we doing? state of mind. It gets weird. It feels like us.

So, if you have the money, I suggest you buy Brainwashing for Beginners. And if you already did, I hope you enjoy it. And if you're Garry Shandling, I hope you really, really enjoy it. And if you're Jeremy Piven, I hope you know how much I really, really, really enjoy you. Every night. To this picture:

And sometimes, when I want to feel like we're actively conversing, to this picture:

But mostly, when I want to laugh and imagine what it's like having you on top of me in sweatpants and a backwards cap, to this clip:


...This entire blog post has been a fucking disaster and I don't know how to end it in a way that isn't "Welp! I'm gonna go masturbate to Jeremy Piven now!", so I say we just embrace it. One more for the road:

God yes.