This blog post is a lot of look...

RIGHT NOW:

- I feel so cracked out. So, so incredibly cracked out. I had a major ~*MyStErY iLLnEsS!!*~ relapse late Sunday morning that I decided to deal with by going to sleep until about, oh, an hour ago. On Monday night. 'Ehhhh...I feel so creepy. You know when you wake up from a nap and you're all nap hungover and out of it and and groggy and don't really know what time it is or where your pants are? Well multiply that by a solid day. 24 hours; one whole day on the Christian calendar. Spent sleeping. Well, truthfully that's not entirely true. I woke up a few times to check Twitter and make sure I wasn't missing out on anything in the world. Apparently the city is bracing for Glenn Beck's upcoming "Restoring Honor" rally, which I wouldn't touch with a 10-foot burning cross, unless it's to find two people to go down to the mall with me and perform "Supercalifragilistic-expialawacky" from MST3K for tips and spare change. I think "Government Gridlock" would be a big hit. Just putting it out there...

- Check out the number of emails in my personal account's inbox:

Bahahaha...ha. Awesome. I once spent an entire day at work trying to maintain 69% as my customer registry number. I can honestly say I've never worked so hard to convince people to sign up as when it dipped below 65%. Likewise, if I went over, I'd just blatantly stop asking people for their information until it was back in the 65-69% range. Then once I'd hit 69, I'd call over a co-worker and be like, "Check out my customer registry total. "...Why?" "Just check it, check it! [Uncontrollably giggles to self]." So, I say screw conventual sales incentives—just hire people with a 6th grade sense of humor and little or no work ethic and you'll build yourself an impressive customer database in weeks. (I should note that ever since The Unpleasantness, I'd normally never write about slacking at work, but my shift supervisor was the one who challenged me to take it a step further and hit and maintain 69.69%, so, you know, fair game.)

- I was just staring at that screen shot and thought, "when did I add a Google Imagine to my favorites toolbar? And/or what the hell could it be?" So I clicked. And it's this:

...Well played, self.

(- OK. I know I already have an obscure Simpsons reference tattooed on my person...but that would be a pretty sweet one too, right? Just the text and maybe the Scales of Justice? Black and red? Right? What? I don't know. I can't tell if I'm awake and this is real or not.)

- 'Eh...I'm currently writing this on my roof and my computer is going to die in 8 minutes, but I left the power cord back in my apartment. How much would I have to pay you to go get it for me?

- Christ. A bunch of obnoxiously flamboyant gay men just came up and started "horsing around" by the pool. Which is irritating. BECAUSE HOW DARE YOU DISTURB ME WHEN I'M TRYING TO CONCENTRATE ON MY CRAFT?? (69 jokes and kvetching...) HOW. DARE. YOU.

- OK. 2 minutes of power left. What do I do? Exert the extra energy to go downstairs, get my power cord and come back up, OR take the lazy road and stay in my apartment, but risk the temptation to fall back asleep and not get any work done? Damnit...My mom was right; I do need a mentor.

- 1 minute.

- OH GOD. YOU GUYS. So much just happened. (Keep in mind, "so much" might be subjective, considering I spent the better part of the last two days asleep.) After my computer died, I kind of just sat there feeling sorry for myself and/or waiting for a helper monkey to swing in, hand me a power cord and immediately swing out because monkeys are obviously disgusting, but then the obnoxious gay guys left, so I decided it would be worth it to make the trek down to my apartment and come back up. I mean, if Passover taught me anything growing up, it's that if the Jews could wander the desert for 40 years, I can wander 7 floors via elevator, right? (Right.) So I went down, got my power cord, came back up, and couldn't find a power outlet to save my life. Which was frustrating because I know we had twinkle lights at College Roommate Danielle's engagement party, so there had to be an outlet, but I think Laura was the one who plugged them in? Ultimately, I decided I like Laura too much to call her up at midnight to be like, "HEY-OHHH! Where did you plug something in on my roof a year ago?"

After a little hard work and lot of persistence, I found an outlet, set up shop and hunkered down for the night. Unfortunately, said outlet was located directly behind the grill and after five minutes, the smell of hamburger became overpowering in a surprisingly not delicious way, so I had to find another outlet. Which I did—directly next to the boiler room. I bailed after a few minutes though because it was loud and dark and surrounded by shrubbery and felt like Freddy Krueger was going to jump out at any mintute and I don't know....I just feel like on a night with this much sleep drama, throwing a boiler room into the mix would probably be a poor decision.

I decided to screw it and go back to my apartment, but not before I had to wait for the elevator and take the elevator down for an uncomfortably long amount of time with a couple in my building who I had some awkwardness with last weekend.

Last Saturday, Alex, Laura and Dan come over to have a few drinks on the roof and this older couple who live in my building kept coming up to smoke cigarettes every hour on the hour. They were very generous with their cigarettes, so realizing we were sitting there surrounded by a metric ton of beer, I was like, "Hey do you guys want a beer?" To which the guy said, "Oh, no thanks. We're on the wagon."

...Absolutely none of us could figure out how to respond to that statement. My immediate reaction was to make a joke like, "Haha, that sucks" or "Your loss" or something, but that would have obviously been rude and unsupportive. My next thought was to congratulate them, but is that something you congratulate people on? Plus, I'd feel so condescending saying it with a giant beer in my hand to people 20 years my senior. So instead all four of us just kind of stared at him with blank expressions on our faces until I finally said, "...Oh."

O-H. Oh. I think it came out like I was sort of weirded out by his sobriety, but honestly it was just because we, as a team, were collectively too awkward to figure out what was socially appropriate to say back.

But of course that's not where the awkwardness ended. Later that night, we all decided to strip down to our skivvies and jump in the pool for a little drunk night swimmin'. (Truly the best kind of swimmin' of them all.) Now, there are two older gay men in my building who own dogs: one is the guy who crashed our Halloween party last year, got drunk, fell in love with Becca and told her he'd make me a copy of his psychiatrist's note saying he could have a dog because "everyone should have a dog"; and the other is a complete asshole. Of course the night we decide to go night swimming in our underwear is the night that Asshole Dog Owner decides to take his extended family visiting from out of town (complete with two small, wholesome looking children) on a tour of the building, including the roof. I can only imagine how that conversation must have gone. "So this is the roof garden. It has beautiful views of Dupont and Georgetown; a grill; and a pool. A pool...that's...riddled with empty PBR bottles...and half-nude twenty-somethings."

"Mommy, why do they look so broken?"

"Look away, Tayleur!"

I haven't seen that guy around the apartment since. I wonder if when I do it will be different now? Now that I've seen his neice and he's seen my areolas. Like catching a magician emptying his pockets after a show...

- Despite not posting, I did write a blog post last Thursday night for Friday. I just...oh, how do I say this delicately?...I, had one too many glasses of Robert Mandovi and passsed out about 20 minutes into the writing process. My plan was to go back and write a less aggressive, more coherent intro and recap over the weekend, but, you know, ~*MyStErY iLLnEsS!!*~ and all. But you know what? You've made it with me this far. Things can't really get that more cracked out, right? Thus, I present to you the completely unedited version of last week's Recrap Friday. Enjoy. And don't judge me.

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OHHHHH, Drunk Blogging. You are about as attractive as a crisp, new pair of jean shorts. OK. So I should fully disclose that at the moment, I'm not "drunk", per se, but I have been more sober in my life. I went out to dinner with my parents tonight and had a very awkward encounter with our delightfully jaunty gay waiter. My dad and I both started with a glass of wine, but when my dad moved on to a half-carafe on the second round, I was like, "PSHHH! SaMsIeS!!!!~, but make it Pinot Grigio," and the waiter just stared awkwardly at me for a few seconds. I thought this was a repeat of the time we went to out for Indian and I ordered a Taj Mahal for myself and the waiter was basically like, "ma'am, your drinking problem has effected me in the following ways:", so I got slightly defensive about it because I don't appreciate it when waiters insinuate that I can't drink like a grown-ass man. It turns out he was just trying to remember if they offered Pinot Grigio in that size and was not calling me an alcoholic. That's my bad. Anyway, I got kind of tipsy with my parents and then returned to my apartment only to drink another bottle of wine with Laura and Andrew for Thursday Night Trash TV Night. The moral of the story is you're going to have to bear down and bear with.

BUT THE BLOG MUST GO ON. Lord knows being drunk has never stopped me from blogging before, so first here we go: Happy T.G.I. Hagman!

OK. Jesus. WOW. Time to break the fourth wall. So: 1.) I'm currently holding a glass of red wine betwixt my breasts so I can type without having to lean forward to grab my glass of wine when I want it. I say that I don't want a breast reduction because I'm scared of the pain, but really, these bad boys are just helpful.

2.) I just searched "Larry Hagman commercial" on youtube to link the Larry Hagman solar power commercial that's going around because I want the following still tattooed on my back:

But instead, I found this:

It's a 1980's commercial for "BVD" brand underwear, which a.) sounds like an STD that results in extreme vaginal discomfort; b.) the first person to make that sneaky oboe music featured in the commercial into a ringtone for me wins a free "Sorr About the Bag" bag from our merch store, despite still being sold out; and c.) of BVD, Larry Hagman says, "Now, where else would I put my personal assets?" before maniacally cackling. I don't really know what to say right now except I'm 99.9% sure that commercial just impregnated me and 100% sure I'm going to keep it.

OK. Now I'm just going to vent about DC dining experiences because when you're this drunk, transitions and story relevance are the equivalent of literarly queefs and who really gives a fuck? OK, so, last week, Becca, Geoff, my dad and I were out to dinner to celebrate my dad's birthday and we weren't being loud our rowdy in the least, but I will say that we were having a good time. True, the McBlogger family was once wine tasting at a vineyard in Napa with a German family (Christ, we're white..), which resulted in the German family saying to us, "It's a wine tasting; not a frat party." But, knock, knock. [Who's there?] The Holocaust. [The Holocaust, who?] We win.

Anyway, somehow the other night the conversation got around to lesbians and someone brought up Jillian Michaels being gay, and I was like, "JILLIAN MICHALES IS GAY?!" to which my sister said, "UH, like Lillith Fair," and the two girls having dinner at the table next to us, who I will describe as "DC Hot" (read: thin with bleached blonde hair and a face that says, "I ride horses"; a look that will get you further in this city than you'd think) turned around and shot me the dirtiest looks I have ever received in my entire life. And because I get real confrontational when I'm drinking, I turned to them and was like, "Oh, I'M sorry" and wouldn't shut up about how I couldn't believe they shot me a dirty look and in the 21st century, people should feel as free as they want to discuss lesbians at the dinner table.

It kind of reminded me of the time when I had a few too many Bloody Mary's at brunch in Provincetown one summer and made the executive decision to stop in the middle of town square, motion towards Ex Co-Blogger Chris and loudly sing (to the tune of U2's "Beautiful Day,") "HE'S A BEAUTIFUL GAY!!!!" Which is when these two, older housewife types walking by shot me a heinously dirty look, and I did the gangster, "WHAT YOU GONNA DO ABOUT IT?!" motion with my arms stretched out to the sides and my head bobbing and said to them, "WHAT?!!!? HE IS." until they walked away.

____________________________________________________

And that's when I passed out. Yep. I'm attempting to make a career out of that level of writing. God bless me.

Here's all you need to know about last week's Jersey Shore:

Snooki's boyfriend calls and admits he cheated on her --> J-WOWW picks up when he calls back and threatens to call the cops or take the next flight out and beat his ass if he ever calls again --> Laura asks what Andrew and I would do if we found out that her boyfriend was cheating on her --> I say I'd cut off his balls with a butter knife and present them to her in a glass jar --> Andrew says he would "use his words" --> I reiterate; butter knife --> Either way, Max should watch out --> Mostly for me, less for Andrew and "his words" --> The Jersey Shore kids really like a club called "Klutch" --> Remember in high school when everyone listened to 311 and used "clutch" as an adjective? Like, "Oh, shit! That party was clutch. Yo, give me a jack, I'm all out." Because I do --> Ronnie keeps cheating on Sammi --> Sammi keeps asking everyone if he's cheating on her --> Everyone keeps "hearing the phone" and/or breaking out into spontaneous nut allergies to avoid that conversation --> The girls go get sushi and things get delightfully racist --> Sammi keeps almost finding out that Ronnie is cheating on her in a variety of awkward situations --> J-WOWW and Snooki decide to go to an Internet Cafe, write an anonymous letter (in ALL CAPS, so you know they mean business) telling Sammi that her boyfriend hooks up with other girls when he's out at the clerb, which they print and leave in her drawer later --> That night, Ronnie tells Sammi that he hates her --> She spends the entire night cleaning up his vomit and rubbing his back --> I auction my vagina on ebay out of embarrassment for my gender --> It does not sell --> The next morning Ronnie decides that he still loves Sammi because she's always there for him --> If going with someone to get a tattoo and taking care of them when they puke is indicative of true love, Helena and I have been gay married for years --> The boys are like, YOU CAN'T TELL SAMMI THAT RONNIE CHEATS ON HER! --> The girls are like, WE HAVE TO TELL SAMMI THAT RONNIE CHEATS ON HER! --> BOYS! --> GIRLS! --> BOYS!!! --> GIRLS!!! --> WHOOOOOOOOO!!!!! And then they all break into song and dance.

Fin.

(Larry Hagman was, and still is, alive. Queer Abby will be back tomorrow.)

Worst of Netflix: The Curse of Lizzie Borden

I had despaired of ever doing another “Worst of Netflix.” I got movies I fully expected to qualify, but they somehow just… didn’t work. Mountaintop Motel Massacre was, oddly for a movie about a massacre, too uneventful. My review of Zzyzx turned into a discussion of my atlas-obsessed childhood, since the characters had such consistently random motives I couldn’t think of what to say about it. Martin gave me one good line, “George Romero is better at directing the living than the dead; the only thing active in this 1974 vampire rape romp is the garish wallpaper,” but otherwise didn’t give me much to work with.

Then, tonight, I saw it. I had put on my new polyester/silk blend bathrobe (I take back everything I ever said about Burlington Coat Factory, this cost 13 dollars and I live in it like a Golden Girl), fixed myself a nicer-than-usual dinner of buttered pasta with smoked salmon and asparagus (A SMALL PORTION) and settled in to watch a nice, uplifting little morality tale about a college student who gets possessed by Lizzie Borden’s ghost.

2006, NR, 121 minutes. "When college student Cassy (Danielle De Luca) takes a summer job at a museum devoted to the legend of Lizzie Borden, she has no idea how that job will come to dominate her life. Soon, she's obsessed with the mystery surrounding the notorious parent killer, even dressing the part of young Lizzie. When her own friends start dropping dead, however, the fun changes to fear as Cassy and her boyfriend realize they could be the next victims."

Whoo, Daisy. This movie has some serious things going on. Like most horror movies, it opens with an “ominous” line of poetry on the screen and a child’s laughter. We then see the fabled date “August 4, 1892,” and then heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeere’s Lizzie! She swings a hatchet kind of… near her stepmother as little splashes of blood fly onto the victim from offscreen. Her father shows up and gets his whacks with the same vague pantomime motion, and then we see Lizzie’s hand holding a brooch. She drops it, theatrically, onto her stepmother’s torso, where it lands with an echoing thud.

The production quality is… low. The camera is steady, but the opening titles look like they were done by a high-school student in Flash. The whole movie has that not-really-crisp look of amateur film, which they can’t help if they really are amateurs, but…

Now, I won’t go too deep into it, but the Lizzie Borden case is one of the most well-known and best-studied murder cases in American history. You’d think they’d make the murders a little bit accurate. I know it’s a movie, but Lizzie freaks know the case cold, and are also the kind of people who Netflix movies like, I don’t know, The Curse of Lizzie Borden? The victims were killed in different rooms, and one was very fat and one was old. The two middle-sized, middle-aged actors piled atop each other give the impression that someone’s parents volunteered an hour, a master bedroom, and a dropcloth. Also, her name wasn’t “Elizabeth,” it was “Lizzie” on her birth certificate. Lizzie Andrew Borden – can you blame her?

So now we’re in a college classroom. “Present Day… Los Angeles, California.” Most overused identifier ever. Some assholes are in an American folklore class, being assholes. Slow times at Ridgemont Community College. One pretty girl remembers the name “Lizzie Borden” and recites the “forty whacks” nursery rhyme with what passes for feeling in B movies. Everyone is impressed with how smart she is. (“I’ll take ‘American hatchet murderesses from Massachusetts with the last name “Borden,”’ for $200, Alex.”)

With no warning, Smart Girl has a vivid hallucination of herself committing the murders, as her classmates surround her chanting “Blood! Kill! Blood! Kill!” She does the standard horror movie jump and shriek, followed by “No, I’m fine. I’m fine.” Why is no one in these movies ever dismayed by the first hallucination?

We go outside for a brief, horrifying conversation, during which several interchangeable students agree that of course you think about killing your parents, fantasize about it, masturbate to it, but you don’t do it - THAT would be WEIRD. They disperse, and smart girl – Cassy – and a man we presume is her boyfriend process to “have sex,” or something. There’s a lot of close-ups of kisses and ear-biting, but she keeps her bra on.

The next day, we go on a field trip to a replica of the Lizzie Borden house. IT’s operated by a prim, fussy old woman of a man with heavily gelled curls who’s described as “a little ECCENTRIC” by the professor. Movies have ruined that word. I’m a little eccentric – I believe in voodoo and one summer I started smoking so I could take cigarette breaks – but in movies, if someone is described as “a little eccentric” they’re either a hatchet murderer or a devil-worshipping transvestite Communist with hooks for hands. The word for that is “freak.”

So, at this point, I thought The Curse of Lizzie Borden was going the way of Zzyzx and getting too incoherent to review, and I stopped taking notes. (I changed my mind because it got RULL funny at the end.) Cassy gets hired to dress up as Lizzie Borden and give tours at the museum. For some reason, this involves moving into the house. Her roommate and boyfriend try to dissuade her by making fun of her acting ability “Remember how bad the reviews were of your performance in Cats?” as though it were possible to do a good job pretending to be a singing cat.

Cassy moves in and starts wearing an old-fashioned blue dress. She looks like an extra from a high-school production of “Our Town.” The ECCENTRIC who runs the museum gives her the brooch that appeared in the first scene. Later that night she either kills him or hallucinates that she kills him – someone in a blue dress chases him with a hatchet, and then he gets too tired to run and prays as she catches up with him and chops him up. Then Cassy wakes up in bed, not wearing the dress, so supposedly they’re setting up suspense as to whether she did it, or something.

“Or something” turns out to be it, as in the next scene one of Cassy’s interchangeable friends shows up, and Cassy kills her with a hatchet. Now, I know of two horror movies with such convincing violence that the makers were actually brought before the law and made to prove that the violence hadn’t been real. (Cannibal Holocaust and Anthropophagus, for those who’ll want to Wikipedia.) This murder is the opposite of that. The ax gets waved a little, and then we see a close-up of the victim’s hands pushing link sausage covered in Karo-corn-syrup blood through a hole in her T-shirt. You’re supposed to think she’s trying to hold in her guts, but it looks nothing like that, to the point that you have to figure out what they’re trying to do. At one point you see her from behind just… spooling out link after link into a pile on the ground. If her bowels were divided into links like that, she wasn’t long for this world anyway.

We cut to two of Cassy’s friends – they have names, but whatever, they essentially function as one not-too-interesting character – talking about how they’re Worried About Cassy. Not a word about the friend that got axed.

Cassy waves her magic axe, and the professor’s head falls off.

The friends are still Worried. Not enough to act or anything, but enough to have looooooooooong conversations about how Cassy’s Acting Weird.

Her surviving friends go to see a preview tour, or something, at the museum. Cassy answers only to the name “Lizzie,” refuses to serve alcohol, and slaps her boyfriend for trying to kiss her. All this 21^st-century freshness pisses her off so much that she excuses herself briefly to chop up a friend who has taken a smoke break in the back yard (all the murders so far have taken place by one sickly-looking orange tree, which emotes more than most of the victims). Upon returning to her surviving guests, she talks about how she was innocent, innocent, but everyone accused her anyway, so she sold her soul to the Devil for the chance of revenge, revenge!

Boyfriend: Cassy, you’re freaking me out!

Cassy: Oh, I’m so sorry! I was just practicing my act! Did you like it?

So then for some reason two of the friends go downstairs to the cellar, where they find the ECCENTRIC’S severed head, completely undecayed after three days in an un-air-conditioned cellar in August. Screaming, running, and then the three friends run out to the yard, where they are soon confronted by Cassy, who didn’t go upstairs to change at all, but instead ran to get her axe.

So, of course, the three friends run to the street, screaming for help. A neighbor calls the police, who arrive within five minutes and bring Cassy down in a hail of bullets. Just kidding, they actually stand in a row by the orange tree and try to reason with Cassy/Lizzie, who’s screaming about the Devil, revenge, and so forth. She swings the axe wide; two friends duck and it hits the third. Cassy takes the time to chop her up good, during which… the remaining two try to reason with her.

She swings, they duck. She swings, they duck. It’s like watching people play Marco Polo, except everyone’s eyes are open and there’s an axe. One guy taunts her, hoping she’ll turn on him and allow the other to escape, and it almost works: she does turn on him, but the other guy doesn’t run. She kills the taunter and then turns on her boyfriend, who says, “Fuck you. Go ahead and kill me. It’s not worth it. This isn’t worth it.” It’s not worth the effort to avoid being hacked to death. Move over, Clerks; this is the slacker movie to end all slacker movies. Cassy axes him in the chest. He punches her in the jaw and she goes down like a sack of doorknobs. He staggers around a little, swearing and showing off the hole in his chest (bacon and strawberry syrup, I think) and falls over dead.

WE cut to a disheveled Lizzie in a padded cell, chanting in an absent, little-girl voice:

“Lizzie Borden took an axe

And gave her mother forty whacks

And when she saw what she had done

I GAVE MY FATHER FORTY-ONE!”

And lunges at the camera. She’s so conventionally pretty that the twisted mask of hatred and rage the camera freezes on just looks like a good-natured sorority girl trying to make a scary face for the haunted house she and her Kappa sisters are running for kids at the cancer hospital.

There’s a sequel, PS. I haven’t seen it, but I can only hope it pits Cassy/Lizzie against an elderly Orthodox rabbi (let’s go all out and say he’s from Kiryas Joel) possessed by the ghost of the Boston Strangler. Rabbi/Strangler wins when he taunts Cassy/Lizzie about her meager body count, she swings, he ducks, and she buries her axe in an electrical transformer.

Little shitting, snotting angels

A few blocks from the new apartment, there’s a restaurant I’ve wanted to try for some time now. It’s a combination diner and bar – which deserves to be on the male fantasy top ten alongside things like “nymphomaniac who owns a liquor store” and “Lamborghini with a gun turret.” (Who has an erection? Show of hands?)

Giant Camel was in town last week, so we stopped in for dinner the other night. It was magical. Decade-neutral décor, so we could have been in any time in the last 80 years. One of those ridiculously extensive diner menus – eight single-spaced pages and a specials insert, including such unlikely dishes as veal Milanese and Italian rum cake. Personal, just-for-your-table jukeboxes with an enviable selection of Motown. We got the dinner special – soup, an entrée, a vegetable and dessert, plus bread. I was with someone I love, I was a little drunk, and I was gorging myself to the sound of “Please, Mr. Postman.” You can keep your clouds and harps; heaven for me is the Marvelettes, fried seafood, and a BAC between .03 and .10. It was even my favorite weather outside: overcast with light rain.

“Giant Camel. You know what? Wouldn’t it be great if this diner was a spaceship, and we could…”

“Travel the galaxy, solving mysteries with the help of a talking pug?”

“How did you know I was going to say that?”

“I’ve known you for two years, and every fantasy you’ve ever describe to me ends with either the phrase ‘travel the galaxy, solving mysteries with the help of a talking pug’ or the phrase ‘now that I am king, Adrian Brody will gleefully submit to my advances.”

“You make me sound like a dangerously unbalanced man-child warped by sexual perversion and ‘Murder, She Wrote.’”

“…I love you?”

“You may love me, but when I’m king you and Adrian will OBEY me.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Only one sour note marred my evening. It was the same sour note, over and over again. About twelve feet from us sat a family with a little baby who was screaming. He seemed content and was looking around the room with bright, interested eyes… but he was screaming, with the same “a-a-a-a-a-aaaaaaaaaa a-a-a-a-a-aaaaaaaaa” pattern as a garden sprinkler.

You all know that I’m six cats and a case of the menopause away from being a fussy old maid, so you won’t be surprised that I absolutely hate loud noises. I hate a lot of things, so it’s saying a lot that loud noises are in the top five. I inherited this from my mother, an agoraphobic pacifist and devout Christian who nevertheless once turned to me in a restaurant and said, “If that woman shouting behind us doesn’t be quiet, I’m going to slap her motherfucking face off.”

(“Do you ever write about your family?” “Oh, only my mother’s threats of violence and the imaginary affair between my father and my co-writer, who is 35 years his junior.”)

So, eventually the family took the child away, leaving me in peace with the reflection: My God, I don’t like children. I’ve spent the last several years saying unspeakable things on a regular basis (for example, “retarded,”) but somehow nothing really takes the wind out of people’s sails faster.

What I say: “I don’t like children.”

What People Behave as Though I Said: “I don’t like children, but I feel compelled to have at least five to ensure the future of the Glorious White Race. If they’re too expensive, I’ll just beat them until the state takes them away. Do you have a cigarette?”

I don’t hate children on a Herod scale and I like my baby cousins, but my paternal feelings are limited to dogs. Here’s why:

As discussed, children make loud noises. I would rather be in physical pain than hear a child fuss or cry. I can’t handle loud and/or sudden noises, period, paragraph.

I am a worrier. A man who has night terrors, who pays his bills weeks before they are due, who while cooking bends over repeatedly to make sure the flame hasn’t gone out and allowed the room to fill with gas, a man who every time he leaves a friend or relative thinks “well, they’ll probably die before long,” is too worried to have children. Sharp sticks, child molesters, SIDS, asbestos, juvenile arthritis, devil-worshipping rock and roll bands, Hare Krishna recruiters, bullies, girls who develop early, chemical weapons – all these can warp, kill, or maim a child before 10 o’clock in the morning. I’d be dead of a stroke before it was three.

I am a loner. If I had a child, I wouldn’t be able to be alone for years. Spending an entire day in my bathrobe watching “Murder, She Wrote” while eating grocery store crab dip and writing for the blog? GONE.

Oh my God, the fluids. I barely bother to clean up my own secretions. I don’t think I can wipe for two, to be perfectly honest.

I have the attention span of a retarded developmentally disabled fruit fly. While writing this post I have:

- Gotten up to make bread

- Gotten a beer

- Put the beer back because I have to work tomorrow

- Decided to have the beer anyway and gone back for it

- Made bread

- Made corn

- Written “made bread” twice because I forgot I already said it

- Read a chapter of a murder mystery

- Set my alarm

- Watched an episode of “King of the Hill”

- Peed

Is this a man with the wherewithal to raise a child until it was eighteen years old? Eighteen hours old?

I drink too much. Mix up your Tom Collins thermos with the child’s apple juice Thermos even once and it’s an “incident.”

I have weird opinions. “Class, who can tell us who our state’s governor is? Yes, Grace?”

“An inbred, glass-jawed shitsplat who should be making license plates in a Moldovan prison camp with a dozen live scorpions nailed to each testicle.”

“Class, who can tell us what the United Nations does? Yes, Grace?”

“Daily makes God regret allowing Noah to build an ark.”

I’m weird in general. My son would be the only six-year-old boy dressed as Lizzie Borden. Not for Halloween, just, you know. Out for the day.

I swear a lot for someone as polite as I am. The kids wouldn’t know which was which. “Would you be so kind as to give me a lollipop, you fucking prick?”

Let’s face it, I have a hard enough time interacting with adults. I call it putting the “Er…” back in “Asperger’s.” (Yeah, I went there.) This is how weak my understanding of human interactions is (tampon cannon, Dad): once, after a late night, I woke up in a friend’s guest room. There was a naked man in the room who, when he saw I was awake, got into bed with me. My first thought was, I swear to you, “Oh, I guess he’s cold.” I didn’t understand his intentions until they were… beyond apparent. (“He sure is friendly!”)

The secret, especially selfish reason I don’t want to have children is this. If I had children, they’d know they were going to inherit and not necessarily coddle me in my own age. If I dangle an inheritance over my baby cousins and make them compete to see who gives me to most comfortable living in my declining years… and then give it all to the NRA, I’ll totally get the last laugh!