I almost asked you to see if you thought this post was too coarse, and then I read your post about suicide and asking readers for recreational drugs.
HAH! It's funny because it's true. Ok, sorry, I'm done now. Back to Chris!]
Being friends with Meg is stressful because she’s so funny. Having an attractive friend sucks, but at least you can claim to fall back on your personality. Meg has a much better personality than I do, so I have to fall back on my SAT scores. (Those of you who were at the bar meet-up will remember me as the person behind Meg to the left, wearing a sandwich board that read “750 Verbal, 720 Math.”) I was reading Meg’s archives at work the other day – because Thursday is “File Your Own Damn Paperwork Day” – and I found her post about having to clean up blood with post-its at work. The wackiest thing that ever happened to me at my current job was when one of my co-workers gave me a Xeroxed Reader’s Digest vocabulary quiz and I got a perfect score, and so I put it on the fridge and everyone thought I was an asshole. (They were right, but they based it on the wrong evidence.)
She’s not even a bitch about it. If she were, I could just hate her in the face and be done with it, but she’s all gracious and says things like, “Oh, thank you for saying I’m funny. You’re funny too, and I mean that” and then makes a joke about a Llama Adoption Robot that kills the room. Sharing friends with her is like being her parasitic twin. She gets to be the funny one, and I get to be the one Bawbawa Wawtews says is “so brave to keep going on with his one kidney and control only over a vestigial flipper.”
So now I share a blog with her, and it’s a whole new level of crisis. Meg has a more interesting life AND tells stories better than I do, so here I sit trying to even FIND a sow’s ear to try to make into a silk purse. I got lucky last week because EVERYONE apparently has some emotion or other about widescreen movies, and so if I haven’t touched hearts, I’ve at least touched nerves.
So, things around the apartment I could
—BREAKING NEWS—
I heard a fight out in the street just now, so we’ll be talking about white trash. You know how some parents have weird hobbies like model trains or swinging? My mother’s was hanging out with white trash. To wit:
When I was about eight, my mother once took an about-to-be-homeless woman in “for a few days” for eight months. “Bev” had an unusual relationship with the Lord. The Lord had gotten her a job as a topless waitress once (“I was pregnant and even breastfed, and I’m 41, but look!” she said as she whipped up her T-shirt. “Still firm!”) and they continued a lively correspondence. Regularly, Bev would go onto the front porch and have a cigarette while staring into space, and then come in and say “I was out having a smoke and talking to God, and do you know what he said?” Invariably, he told her to go ahead and do what she had already decided to do. Bev was an “artist” and custom-painted two and a half cement Virgins for our house. I say “and a half” because she never finished the one she made for me. An attempt to paint over a red dress with yellow had left her with a bloody-looking dress, and an ill-timed distraction while Bev was painting the face left her with a twisted, angry, stroke-victim mouth. This statue stayed in my room for five years, which I think gives me a good all-purpose excuse. Did Mom consider using one of these statues to make a “shrine for travelers” in our front yard? Is the sky blue?
“Hattie” had been raised on Guam by Satanists. She taught water aerobics, which is how she met Mom. Both of her children had spent time in the state mental hospital, and who had to go on play dates with them? Now, I was a really, really weird kid and at any given time had, at best, one friend, so I was fairly lonely, but even I straight-up could not stand these kids. After a few forced playdates and one nightmarish sleepover (“No, pants on, I think. Thanks, though”) they started just showing up at our house all the time. By now Mom had changed her mind and thought they were going to do a school shooting and wanted them to have a COMPLETELY NEUTRAL attitude toward me, so she’d go out and give them weird excuses about why I couldn’t play. Last I heard, one had gone into a home, and the other after MICROWAVING A CAT (who lived, thankfully, since it’s the only sympathetic character in this whole post) went into the Army. This scares me more than a thousand thousand Russian soldiers, probably because “A Thousand Thousand Russian Soldiers” sounds like a low-budget porno. The United Nations needs to close its hole about the damn climate and outlaw lunatics as weapons.
“Vance” sold reptiles, so of course Mom got on him like a hen on a junebug. He sold her a Bearded Dragon (doesn’t that sound like a middle school sex joke, like Cleveland Steamer?) and she’d go out there every so often to buy mealworms or, on one memorable occasion, biker do-rags with a sewn-in change pocket. She bought herself one with skulls on it and called herself “Big Momma Bones,” and wore it to a poetry slam (yes.) She gave me one with dice on it, which, full disclosure, I may or may not have worn to the same poetry slam. Anyway, years later, she ran into that guy again and went out to his house, and someone put meth in her Diet Coke without her looking and she was up for three days. Yes.
“Doris” thought her husband was trying to kill her by leaving rakes in the yard. She divorced him and moved to the country, and for fun she’d get drunk on wine coolers, put on a ballgown and dance around the house. She and Mom were planning to leave on a road trip to the mountains once, and Doris showed up in an evening dress. She had a mail-order degree from Antigua or somewhere, and we’re 90% sure she had sex with her cousin.
Technically, “Ross” wasn’t white trash, but he was a stray Mom picked up. He had been in the Peace Corps in Bingo-Bango-Bongo or somewhere until he had a malaria-provoked nervous breakdown. He lived with us for about six months. This was mostly weird because he was my teacher at the time. If you think you were weird in school, be the Kid Who Lives with the Awkward Teacher. The kid with the glass eye was way, way cooler than me. He also grew up to better looking, but I can gauge distance, so I feel like it’s a draw.
“Gwen,” Bev’s sister-in-law, married a man who thought he was a prophet. “Angelica” “Bernice”I Dream of Jeannie.) “Lana” had very widely spaced teeth that were a) brown and b) not remotely of a uniform length. “Royce” and “Deeann” lived with us one Christmas when it froze and then left with the VCR.
So, again, I’m at the end of a post with no clear closing. I guess the moral is “My Mom Can Probably Out-Weird Meg’s Mom.” I thought the slumming gene had skipped a generation since I’m an elitist loner, and then I got a call from my best friend from high school. She’s marrying an inmate live on the radio next month.
YOUR MOM IS SORR ABOUT THE BAG
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