February 13, 2006

Sub: Ships and Sealing Wax

(group email, writing sample)

hello all.

for reasons i'll get into shortly, i've been away from my computer for over a week. that's a very long time indeed, in this day and age. the upshot is that i'm hopelessly behind on all my correspondence, which gives me the opportunity to send out a mass email. every time i get one, the sender invariably apologizes for sending out a mass email, but i'm not going to do that. i think it's silly. and besides, who has time to write an individual message to all of their friends? i mean, it's a nice thought or whatever, but if you're anything like me you've got thirteen drafts of unsent emails staring you down at any given time, and it's all a little overwhelming, and then you go play xbox instead, or maybe work on that stupid novel you've been writing.

so, yes. hello all.

one of my priorities this last week has been getting in touch with my mom. she's hard to get hold of, because she's a lot like me in that she doesn't answer the phone from roughly September through April, and usually erases her phone messages without listening to them. i wanted to let her know i'd moved to San Francisco this past week, and so i'd probably need to borrow next month's rent. theoretically, that would give me time to find a decent job, but in reality my unwillingness to start out on any kind of career track makes it so that i'll just be buying myself a few weeks before i have to go work in a hotel again. it's a bizarre industry, hospitality, and i won't go into the picayune details of it here, but suffice to say the conditions and pay are just shitty enough that most competent workers either quit or get promoted inside of six months, and so the poor rich bastards who run even the nice ones are always so desperate for help they'll hire anyone who speaks English and doesn't mind being humiliated and having things thrown at them--they're like that girl who gets a reputation for being slutty and having no standards, when in reality there's nothing wrong with her standards at all, she's just such a bitch nobody can stand actually dating her for any length of time. in this analogy, i ran into her at a party and had a brief conversation before wandereding off, but then i bumped into her again later as the party was winding down. i mean, i'm gonna try stretching the party out a bit in the hope i'll run into somebody i actually, you know, like, but as a matter of fact i know who i'm going home with; there's not much sense complaining about it, and she's just good looking enough that my friends won't bring her up just to humiliate me for the next frieking decade, the way they sometimes do. and you know who you are, you insensitive fucks. oh, but if anybody has a lead on a job, let me know. i have five years experience as an accounts receivable bookkeeper and another four years of customer service eperience--six-line PBX, hotel front desk, alumni services, you name it. i've also edited various small publications and managed a large co-op house. bachelor's degree in progress. as always.

but so then today my mom called me me more or less out of the blue. excellent! i thought, but before i could hit her up for money she said "There's been an incident." i wasn't too worried--we'd exchanged pleasantries, so that probably meant nobody i cared about had died. and my brother's in jail, so it's not like when i was in high school and people with shotguns would come over and demand the car. still, even if i wasn't bracing myself for anything earth-shattering, 'incidents' are never good things, either. "Your father cut two of his fingers off," she told me. "When?" i asked. it's not the most obvious question, but sometimes my family doesn't get around to telling me things in what i would consider a timely manner. normally that doesn't bother me--about two years ago we all agreed to an "Only if someone important is for real about to die" rule, to save on travel costs--but this last winter i quit my job rather abruptly and decided to go home for Christmas, and when i got home both my parents were in the hospital. i thought that warranted at least a heads up. "I didn't know you were coming until you called from the airport," my sister explained, and so i let it slide. but still.

"Today," my mom said, in response to my question. "With the table saw," she added, but i'd sort of figured that. "Which fingers?" i asked. "Half his pinky and all of his ring finger, on the right side," she told me.  "Did they sew his fingers back on?" i asked. "No, we couldn't find them. We had the neighbors over to help look. They were all prepared, they brought over a cooler and bags of ice. Just, you know how some people seem prepared for anything? They're like that. But we only found half his pinky." "Why didn't you know where to look?" "I was dying my hair, so I didn't see it. And your dad was yelling about cutting his finger and telling me to come help him, but I was dying my hair so I didn't come right down. He should have said he'd cut his fingers off, then I would have come." i wasn't particularly alarmed by any of this; everyone knows your ring finger is pretty useless, and half a pinky is as good as a whole one--you just have to pretend you were born with small hands. besides, the last time my dad cut himself with a saw i'd been in high school, and my sister ran into my room and screamed "Dad cut his hand off!" and i spent the rest of the day wondering if that meant he'd lose his job and we'd have to go on welfare. or maybe i would have to get a job myself; i did a lot of theater and played baseball, and i really didn't want to give those up. but then even though there was a lot of blood, it turned out he'd only broken some bones in his hand. i did quit the baseball team a little while later; the coach was kind of an asshole. my dad still having his hand was kind of a bonus, as it happened.

"You should have seen the blood, Alan," my mom said, because she still calls me by my middle name, even though you're not allowed to. "You couldn't tell where it happened outside, but he got it all over everything inside." "And you only found half the pinky?" "Yeah, your sister found it. But she wouldn't touch it. It was all mangled." "No, I wouldn't want to touch dad's severed finger either." "It was too messed up to sew back on. And the rehab for that makes it almost not worth the trouble, if you think about it." "Yeah, leeches gross me out," i agreed. "What do they use leeches for?" she asked. "Circulation," i said; "Blood flows in, but it takes awhile before it can flow back out, so they have to use leeches for a few weeks. It's all very medievel. But you couldn't find the other finger?" "I'm pretty sure Mia got it, actually," my mom said, somewhat apologetically. Mia is my brother's dog. she's an expensive purebreed husky but nobody has time to walk her, so we're trying to give her away. if you're interested, let me know. but anyway. "You guys should really take better care of that dog," i scolded my mom.  "Buy her a chew toy or something."

my mom and i talked shop for awhile. in other news, my sister is spending a lot of time with her ex but they're not getting back together. i'm happy about that, because five years is a long time to be with someone and then not be friends with them, but on the other hand she hasn't been single for seven years. and she's only twenty-three, so you do the math. also, my incarcerated brother is back together with his stripper fiance (now ex-ex-fiance, i suppose, but that's awkward syntax), although she remains married to another man. my neighbor in Sacramento had been mulling becoming a stripper when i left; apparenly there aren't enough autistic children in Sacto for him to make a living tutoring them. he asked me if i'd ever considered it. i said no, of course; my svelte figure has more to do with poverty than working out, and i always figured a dollar stuffed into my g-string would be a dollar taken away from the g-string of an actual incest survivor. "Well, have fun in San Francisco," he said. then he added, quickly: "Even if it is the Gay Capital of the World." i kind of wanted to tell him about the ratio of bachlorette to stag parties in the life of your average male stripper, but the boy had a Dream, dammit, and destroying any Dream would have felt to me like a disservice to Coretta Scott King's memory. and in the middle of Black History Month, no less. so i just smiled and nodded. "At least you won't be stuck in Asia-town," my neighbor concluded with a shrug, motioning toward the street. i wished him well and finished packing, wondering--as usual--where things had gone wrong.

so, yes. despite whatever the hell other plans i may have mentioned the last few years, i'm really living in San Francisco. it's nice here, and i know lots of people. despite whatever the hell else you may have heard, i like people a lot. even if i don't like being around them all that often. Spring seems to have come early here on the west coast, or so i've gathered. ever since i bought that fake sun to control my circadian rhythms spending time outdoors feels like a waste of money, so i try to avoid it. i didn't have my computer set up, as i said, so i mostly played xbox and thought of excuses not to find a job. you can imagine my shock when i finally plugged back in--i can only assume that my friends on the east coast have died of exposure or possibly chilblains. all of them. i'm sad, really, but only on the inside. after the tsunami and the earthquake and Katrina i just can't cry about natural disasters anymore. it's like i'm numb or even maybe a little dead inside. speaking of which, did any of you catch former "Dancing With the Show-Ponies" star Michael Brown testify in congress this week? there were bound to be questions, i suppose...i was a little surprised to see Brownie tossing a little j'accuse Dubya's way, like it would matter. America might condone Evil and reward Venal, but we will not listen to or even tolerate a Loser--never have, but especially not now, not in today's dangerous world, with danger and possible annihiliation perpetually and swarthily around the next corner; we don't have time to be looking back, no sir, especially not at Losers. history will now be written going forward from here out, and only Winners write history. we just want our Losers to exit stage left so we can get on with forgetting they were ever here. like the Seahawks, for instance. in many ways MIchael Brown might be the luckiest Loser in all our fine Republic; if anybody cared about him, they would have never let him near a congressional sub-committee. after all, there are no mistakes in George Bush's America; just happy little accidents. you could ask William Casey about that, if Dubya's daddy hadn't whacked him. we grew up thinking of George HW Bush as a wimp, and i think that had to fuck with Dubya's head a little. if my dad murdered people for a living and still got called a pussy in public, i'd probably go a little overboard the other way myself. hell, if i'm Dubya right now, i'm shipping Brownie to a rat cage in Guantanemo, heckuva job or not. why? because Al Gonzalez says i can, that's why. that's all the fucking reason i need in the world. Freedom and Liberty will prevail!

but enough of that. that is all beside the point. Spring is here; let's keep our eyes on the ball now, before February realizes...look, i don't care what the calendar says. Spring is here. i know this because my friends have been hitting me up for benzodiazepines instead of stimulants this week. the seasons changing, it makes everyone edgy. body's internal workings starting back up, you're bound to get some spillover. nervouse energy. need to take the edge off. very different from Winter; if you let them, people would sleep the whole way through. as it is, they need help getting out of bed. not that i push or even recommend amphetamines or anything of the sort; for various reasons beyond my ken i already seem to be a Person of Interest, insofar as i can't go to the airport without being pulled out of line at least twice. that, plus the fact that i have a brother in federal prison for drug trafficking means i need to stay clear of sleazy tweakers and the like. rather, i've had access to a fairly exotic drug that turns off the part of your brain that tells you to fall asleep. the military invented it and they say it treats narcolepsy, but i have my doubts. i'm pretty sure its primary purpose is to keep the drones' minds off the War and happy while they make the sweet sweet honey our economy fattens itself on. it's sort of like how the CIA invented crack to fund illegal arms sales to Myanmar or wherever it was we were promoting Democracy at the time. that's just the way it goes when your government needs scratch but refuses to raise taxes. i don't know what it says about my generation that instead of getting high and having some fun with it we all seem to be clamoring for drugs that make us more productive. my esteemed colleague Randall has been in Japan long enough that i thought he might kick some anthropology my way about the efficiency thing, but the man only writes me to rehash sporting events and taunt me because Japanese women enjoy sleeping with him; meanwhile, my game seems to have taken a sabbatical. whatever. it's Spring again. and just in time this year too--i gave away the last of the anti-narcoleptic pills to a couple of friends this morning, so don't ask. the stuff retails somewhere around $10 a pill, but for various karmic reasons i am obliged to give the stuff away for free when i have it, and it goes quick.

speaking of efficiency, i'm dragging this email out a bit because my computer crashed earlier tonight. it came right back up, but i had fourteen MS Word windows open at the time. i don't know if i've mentioned this to anyone at all, ever, but i'm finishing up a novel. hence the fourteen windows. it doesn't appear as though i've lost anything, thankfully, but just trying to make sense of the Recovery Pane twists my brain all pretzel-like. it's a stupid business, writing, and i recommend you avoid it altogether. if i had it all to do over again, i'd be a professional basketball player. you should see the groupies. that, and there are people who coach basketball. nobody seems to know anything about writing novels. actually, i knew a guy in college who published a novel, but i saw him at my Sham Wedding and asked him about it--he told me that in order to get published i needed to be in an MFA program and have a professor take an interest in my work. i think Magic was involved somehow, too; i was drunk and had trouble concentrating with all the noise. and i wasn't in graduate school, either. did that make the Magic part more or less important? "If you're not in grad school you'll have a hard time finding someone to publish your book," he said, somewhat dismissively. then i tried to make out with four or five girls who were not my wife, and they all turned me down, so by four in the morning i was dry-heaving in my bathroom, alone except for Randall, who'd passed out on my couch and managed to rouse himself just enough to taunt me for not being able to get any action at my own wedding. asshole. i secretly hoped for Godzilla to eat him in Japan, but they stationed Randall somewhere out in the boonies. and Godzilla never goes out there, not unless he's chasing King Kong, who was with Peter Jackson in New Zealand the whole time, which may or may not be anywhere near Japan. it's on the other side of the globe, anway, and the globes at my schools when i was a kid were always rusted in place so you only had to study the important side. point is, i don't know where New Zealand is.

aside from my fantasy about Godzilla eating Randall, let all that be a microcosm of my Sham Wedding and ensuing Sham Marriage, which is to say it's a pretty good story but sort of embarrassing in some of the particulars. the whole thing was a pretty straightforward scam to get me health insurance without actually getting a job--the idea being that i couldn't very well get a job if i didn't have medical coverage of some kind. like everything else i've ever learned, this turned out to be only partially true, but that's later. the plan also involved moving to Seattle. the plan itself was brilliant from a tactical standpoint, but ultimately undone by a bit of fine print in the insurance policy itself, to the effect that as a dependent i didn't have any coverage for mental health and i would have to pay for all my medications up front, then get reimbursed 80% five weeks later when all the paperwork cleared. my high school drama teacher Chris really summed the situation up best: "So it was all for naught!" she laughed, a little giddy with lite beer and because she'd had her eyes dilated at the optometrist's office that day; we were inside, but she still flinched a little when she blinked. and, well: yes. technically on some levels the Sham Marriage was for naught. but i think there are some valuable lessons in there for all of us, and if the purpose of my life is to serve as a warning to others then so be it. you learn more from doing theater than reading the plays themselves, but if reading stodgy Greek plays ever taught me one thing, and only one, it was this: don't fight or otherwise fuck with Fate. that's what Antigone said when Oedipus plucked out her eyeballs with a cockscomb, as the Eumenides crept up behind him, about to rip out his intestines to use as a garrotte on poor Tiresias, who of course foresees all this but can't do anything about it because he's, you know, blind. i think.

two stories about my year in Seattle. like most reasonable people, i have a rule about dating people i work with, which is to say i avoid it. but like all the other rules i make for myself, i don't hold myself to it; get me in the right mood and i can justify damn near anything, and usually talk a few otherwise reasonable people into going along with me, to boot. so in July i went on a date with a girl i worked with, although for justification purposes i preferred to think of us as sharing an employer, rather than being actual co-workers. anyway, the date went about as well as these things can go, but then i didn't hear from her for over a week. which is weird, since we saw each other at work, if only in passing. but so then i got an email about why it wouldn't be a good idea to follow up on things. fairly standard time-constraint-issue-type stuff, except for when she said 'and I know you say it doesn't matter, but you're MARRIED.' as if i'd forgotten, and having it shouted at me ELECTRONICALLY would make me remember. my wife spent the summer away from Seattle, but if anything that just made the girl more suspicious. "I don't understand what happened," i said to my friend Sierra a few months later. "You mean you're surprised that some people have respect for the institution of marriage?" she asked somewhat rhetorically, with maybe a pinch of derision.  "Well," i grumbled. "I guess it hadn't occurrred to me before, no." so that was one thing that happened in Seattle. another time, i was taking the bus home from work and two African-American gentlemen were having a conversation. actually, it was more like one of them ranted in the other's general direction; it was more of a monologue performed for the benefit of the entire bus. "Seattle, this here's a racist town. Racist like a motherfucker," he announced, and began providing some examples. i tended to concur with the preponderence of his citations, although i probably would have used more fancy-pants words than he did. then the bus made a turn up toward my apartment in Capitol Hill, which is to Seattle as the Castro is to San Francisco. "We headin' up inna Capitol Hill now," the African-American gentleman explained to his companion. "Lot of faggots up in here. I know I ain't supposed to call 'em that, but that's what they is."

after that i moved to Sacramento. it was cold. i lived by myself and slept on the floor the first two months. my job didn't work out like i'd planned--well, planning is probably too strong a word for anything i do these days. but it didn't work out, regardless. i transferred, but it was only after i'd arrived, after i'd spent three weeks unemployed waiting for my paperwork to clear, on my first day actually working at the new hotel, only then did i find out i'd lost my health coverage and would have to wait 90 days for it to start again, unless i cared to pay $450/mo. for a shitty cobra while taking a $2.05/hr pay cut that i hadn't been told about, either. and i had to work the graveyard shift. again: fine print. but Sacramento wasn't all bad. if i ever do have kids, once they're four or five and their personalities start shining through a bit, if i realize they're not particularly bright and there really isn't anything interesting about them, then i'd probably think about going back to Sacramento and raising them there.

i'm realizing that there are quite a few people i've been promising to show some chapters of my book to for awhile now, and i haven't done so. the trouble is, i know that there are a few things i need to fix in the first chapter--i'm finding it difficult because Alicia--that's the narrator--has such a dark sense of humor that on the one hand it would be out of character for her to be melodramatic about the deaths of various characters who become important later, but i can't let her be flippant about it, either. i mean, Kurt Vonnegut can be flippant when he kills his characters--and he always finds a way to get it done, somehow, I mean his commitment to letting his characters die pointlessly is certainly something--but i always get the feeling that deep down he doesn't really like any of them. and if he doesn't care, why should i? "Because Vonnegut is awesome!" respond mostly teenagers who mostly don't read very much. and probably think On the Road is a good book. but i digress. some ontological questions come into play, with all these deaths; like how maybe sometimes you find things that no matter how you look at them they just aren't funny. like the holocaust, say. and i've heard holocaust jokes certainly. but are they funny? i want to say no, but then The Producers is funny, at least on stage. what does it mean? it means i'm stuck, is what it means.

that said, they'll all be dead soon enough, and the book will be finished.  that will be nice. i can't imagine what it's like to publish a book, or what happens if it's successful or if it fails or what, so i don't think about that. it'll just be nice to work on other stuff. yes. three years and six drafts later, it's come to this: it'll just be nice to work on other stuff. i have a few other novels in various stages of preparation; a promising outline of an historical novel that i'd like to spend maybe a summer researching in Amhurst, an old short story that would make a nifty allegorical novella, also an update of Dr. Strangelove, with terrorism replacing communism. that one isn't more than a notion at the moment, but it's fun to play with in my head when i can't sleep. also i have 200 pages of a novel i started in 1999 about college kids in berkeley doing drugs and waiting for the apocalypse. not sure what to make of it now when i give it the once-over, but i would enjoy sitting down with it for real.

but consider yourself updated as to my doings. i wish i could write twenty or thirty messages, individually addressed and all, but seriously--wouldn't they all end up sounding the same, in the end? there are only so many things on my mind at any given time. at any rate, if you're getting this then i'd like to hear from you. love to, in fact. i'm missing some email addresses, but i'll get that sorted out later. it's a little like trying to account for all your socks. can you ever really be sure, i mean really?  if you're in the bay we should kick it, or whatever the kids call it now when you meet up to sit around and not do much of anything for a couple hours. i'm always into that. on that level, now that The Day After Tomorrow has arrived, i'm really not going to miss the East Coast. what's the rush all about? PEOPLE! i mean, dudes. seriously: calm. down. my new address is

xxxxx

it's in the Castro, two blocks from the Safeway on Market. phone number's same as it ever was. and, of course, this email address. two of my roommates are J. Lauro and Veljko S.; you may or may not know them. i think Alicia B. stays here when she's in town, but she's abroad. i mean, a pretty lady. who happens to be in a foreign country at the moment. i also have two roommates named David and Renee, but i don't think you know them. i'll tell any and all of them you say 'hello' if you want, though. mahalo.


gabriel 

marriage

so, i'm getting married in a week. one of the many caveats of our arrangement is that i'm not allowed to mention her name in print. so from now on i will refer to my fiance as "my predilection for speed." i'm going to write it with three exlamation points (!!!) just to imbue her name with meaning it might otherwise lack.

this all reminds me of a story. by my first sophomore year in college, i hadn't quite gotten over an aversion to dating friends, not since high school did i even try, because i once had a passing fancy for a girl i'd been best friends with. i'll call her mr. hooper, because he was one of my favorite sesame street characters but after awhile i noticed that he wasn't in his shop anymore i asked my mom why mr. hooper wasn't in his shop anymore and she said "Mr. Hooper died, sweetheart. He's not on the show anymore." mr. hooper and i were best friends in the fullest highschool sense of the word, so i didn't have realistic intention of dating her per se, but then she got wind of my passing fancy because i'd mentioned it in passing to a passing friend, so quite naturally she reacted by never speaking to me again.

not wasting time with me also freed her up to pursue other interests, like theatre and talking her friends out of dating me. good for mr. hooper, i thought. it's always nice to see people turn a new leaf. i've always tended to surround myself with a certain kind of person, and it's one thing making new friends but it's another thing entirely to change the crowd you run with, so to prevent this kind of thing from happening again, for several years once a girl considered me a friend, even in the loosest sense of the word, i wouldn't try to date her.

friendships develop willy-nilly if you're not careful, and the idea of dating certainly retained some of its appeal for me, so i compensated by being an asshole to girls i met, lest they start thinking of me as a friend. this astonishingly vicious cycle consumed a few years that might have been put to more productive uses, datingwise.

after a few years i resolved that things would be different. somehow. years and years and years after high school when i was almost a junior i started hanging out with a girl named maude, and we ended up making out in her room on my nineteenth bithday after she bought me a cake. this isn't so bad, is what i remember thinkng to myself as my insides about burst with joy. as soon as we stopped kissing, maude looked lovingly into my eyes and purred "None of our friends can know about this." she told me i was too young and a bunch of other stuff i don't remember.

it all seemed perfectly reasonable, the way she explained it. also, she was almost thirty.

after what happened in high school, i still felt like it was somehow my responsibility to make sense of all the insane shit girls told me. we surreptitiously sneaked around for a few weeks, but then she somewhat abrubtly stopped talking to me, started back up with the hard drugs, and notified me that we wouldn't be dating any longer by making out with some other dude at a party, right in front of me. i couldn't even get mad about it, because all of my friends were so surprised to learn that we'd been dating in the first place that the shock of having her hook up with somebody else in the hallway in front of my room didn't really register with them.

so yeah, getting married's like that. sort of.

i haven't touched base with my predilection for speed (!!!) today, but tomorrow we're supposed to go buy ourselves some costumes for the wedding. i'm looking forward to it, which is a good thing because once i start living in seattle with my predilection for speed (!!!) we're going to be seeing a lot of each other, i imagine.

helpmonkey

despite the lies your mother has poured into your head over the years, planning a wedding is a straight-up bitch. for every five things i think of that need doing, i can think of six that i don't feel like doing. my predilection for speed (!!!) helps out where she can, but she's ambivalent about having the party in the first place so i don't want to overburden her. i was thinking about all this today while i was taking a cigarette break, from my job curing cancer. i decided to buy a helper monkey from the helper monkey surplus store. she's a cute little bonobo, but i named her "Major Blood" because i remember that guy from the GI Joe cartoons and i always thought nobody would fuck with anybody named with a name like Major Blood, not if they knew what was good for them.

whenever the subject came up, my neighbor--i'll call her shortbus, because she's really smart--always used to tell me that the mere notion of taking in a helper monkey was immoral on such a profound level that my even considering it confirmed her worst suspicions about me. and shortbus has many suspicions about me. i went to the college of chemistry graduation this year, and the guest speaker exhorted the new graduates to delve into the development of genetically modified foodstuffs. "Some people have reservations," he reported. "Some people think there might be horrific consequences down the road. Some people are little crybabies. They don't understand what progress is all about. Or something. In the words of somebody really important talking about something else entirely, 'Don't let your sense of morality get in the way of doing what's Right.'" switch around some of the words, and that's pretty much how i feel about my helper monkey. shortbus has never had to plan a wedding and i don't see her volunteering to run off and buy cases of two-dollar wine or entertain all the people i know are going to show up and slur things at me in embarrassing drunken stupors. i know they're out there, waiting. Major Blood entertains children of all ages, i'm sure she can amuse a handful of degenerate alcoholics for a few hours. i'd like to see shortbus even try that, just for my sake.

i took Major Blood home and rousted my "friend"--i'll call him chowder, because he used to review pornography for me when i edited a slick newsweekly in new york that i'm not allowed to mention per our lawsuit agreement--from his slumber. i had to roust him because he's been unemployed since he graduated with honors in english three years ago and lives in my closet. "Chowder, wake up," i barked. "This is Major Blood. She's going to be helping me out around here from now on." chowder wiped the sleep from his eyes and mumbled something about Major Blood being a stupid name for a girl monkey. i grabbed him around where i imagine his lapels would be if he ever wore anything besides a ratty oakland athletics t-shirt that he superstitiously won't change until they stop choking in the first round of the playoffs. "Blood is gender neutral, but she earned the rank of Major by serving her country WITH HONOR you degenerate sack of shit," i shouted into his characteristically vacant face, flecking it with my angry saliva. i threw in a bunch of racial slurs for good measure, hoping i'd hit upon whatever the hell race chowder is. "Do you even know what honor is? She sent boys better than you to horrific and pointless deaths, over and over again, until the public turned against the stupid war and the politicians sued for peace. Peace without honor. That's sacrifice, Chowder. You can sit around in your underwear scratching yourself and pretend you're an esteeemed and respected sportswriter like the late Ralph Wiley while you shamelessly name-drop all you want, God knows I'm used to it and I don't expect any better from you, but you show Major Blood some goddamned respect because she's earned it." chowder, being a total fucking whore, mumbled something about checking to see if one of two-hundred fifty friendsters had left him a message. he had terrible morning breath despite it being six in the afternoon.

meanwhile, Major Blood and i had work to do. have work to do, rather. i'm not entirely sure what it is i'm supposed to do since i've never planned a wedding before. mostly i figure it should take care of itself. for now Major Blood just keeps pacing the room and chainsmoking impatiently. she picks things up seemingly at random and gesticulates wildly with them but i tell her to chill the fuck out and work on her novel or something. i'm not sure she can even write but she insists on telling everyone about her novel whenever there's a lull in the conversation. it's a little embarrassing when your insubordinate helper monkey buttonholes your guests but i need her to maintain the illusion of aspiring to some lofty and worthwhile goal in the midst of her existential despair, otherwise she loses her mind and starts flinging poo at me. the novel calms her nerves a little. just a little, because she's a monkey and naturally high-strung. that's why they're such efficient killers i think. Major Blood still craves action; i can tell she misses being in the shit with the other grunts. maybe i'll get her checked for PTSD tomorrow when we go to get her treatment for advanced monkey meningitis. for now i have to keep pilling her up with tranquilizers. they keep her frosty. i'm scared she'll start dipping into my stash if i'm not hyper-vigilent about it. it's like having a four year-old around, only worse because chowder still lives in my closet, so it's like living with a four year-old and a retard. i didn't start hiding my drugs until last year, because at a party at my house this guy--i'll call him renton, because that was ewan mcgregor's character in trainspotting--took a handful of pills he found laying around my room. the rest of the night didn't go particularly well. when he finally came to, renton couldn't remember anything but swore up and down that he thought he'd found some tic-tacs. i haven't really trusted myself since then, which is why i'm trying not to get too involved with this whole wedding planning thing. i figure between Major Blood and my predilection for speed (!!!), everything should work out just fine without me messing with it too much.

correction

God, what a fucking mess. once she found this, the thing where you go after you click on the thing, Major Blood insisted i call her by her full name. let's face it, Major Sebastian Bludd isn't a badass name at all. maybe it had some cachet back when johann sebastian bach cut up all those hookers in london in the 1800s, but now you hear sebastian and think about some whiny bitch hanging out with belle. this isn't the adorable disney cartoon beauty and the fucking beast, i've got a wedding to plan, and i need an intimidating helper monkey to make things happen. i tried to explain all this to Major Sebastian Bludd, she doesn't care. Major Sebastian Bludd is out of her mind and i guess that makes her a little dangerous, but when people find out that my helper monkey is a fancypants poet they're not going to bend to my will. not even a little bit.

chores

my good friend the Q, who lives in boston these days, just applied for a job to be one of those people who stands in front of other people whose lives have been deemed more precious, in case somebody else decides to start shooting at that person. as part of the application process, they screened her for mental defects. "It was weird. They asked me if I'd been starting any big projects lately. Like if I'd started writing a novel," she reported.

what in the world does that have to do with your willingness to take a bullet for somebody else, I wondered. "Oh. They were trying to figure out if I was manic-depressive. It's one of the symptoms," she answered, because I'd been talking out loud without realizing it. again.

shit! that's serious stuff!! didn't the exact same thing just kill beloved character actor ronald reagan? and hadn't my helper monkey Major Blood just start writing a novel? and if we're sharing the same toilet, does that put me at risk? i figured it just might, but the only way to know for sure would be to have chowder get tested, since he actually drinks from the toilet.

"Chowder, would you willingly take a bullet meant for somebody more important than you?" i asked him. he mumbled something that sounded like a yes, so i sent him to apply for a job with those people. he came back two hours later, and he mumbled something that sounded like they'd given him a job protecting the mayor of japan's wife. in Japan. he's going to be shipping out to Tokyo at the end of July. this set my mind at ease for a moment, because he'd passed their little test.

my relief proved short-lived once i did a little research on japan. christ, they're probably deporting him because he failed the psych exam. i decided that keeping Major Blood occupied with menial tasks would slow the mad cow that was probably eating her brain, so i made her responsible for all the chores that chowder'd been doing. or was supposed to do. Major Blood threw on her cowboy bebop apron and laced up her rubber gloves to clean the fridge, but then she slammed the door shut immediately and ran away, babbling imprecations in her native tongue. i went to see what had spooked her.

a mold has been growing in there for awhile, but everytime i told chowder to clean it out he said he'd get to it, then play another game of Madden on the rookie level after trading both pro bowl teams onto the 49ers and turning down all the difficulty sliders. that's not so bad in and of itself, but Major Blood swore off killing after her honorable discharge from the Army, and i certainly can't kill the mold. it has grown strong, and become sentient.

the mold knows.

we've crossed a bridge today. a bridge too far, to my thinking. not only do i not have anywhere to keep my leftover chinese food, but by inadvertently striking the spark of life, chowder has rendered either evolutionary theory or creationism moot. what's worse, i'm sure there isn't even a branch of metaphysics capable of dealing with this situation, so all the religious studies majors i know have wasted their lives. chowder's ineptitude has officially become dangerous, if it wasn't already. God save the mayor of Japan's wife.

incognito

i got busy with the wedding, and then since i'm moving to seattle at the end of august with my predilection for speed (!!!), i've decided that in exchange for years of selfless public service, the grateful taxpayers should cover my relocation costs. i decided to step up my public service this past month, so i took a leave of absence from my rather unfulfilling job curing cancer and concentrated on infiltrating the russian mafia on behalf of the department of homeland security. needless to say, my work as a deep mole precluded me from updating this blog for awhile, lest i blow my cover. i know this has caused many of you some distress, especially all the ladies, but everything's back in order for the time being.

today was my last day of sworn testimony before the grand jury, so the russian mafia's pretty much out of business thanks to me. the Witness Protection people will pay for me to relocate to seattle, but we've had some arguements as to what behaviors are and are not permissible for an undercover operative to engage in while in the field, so while i'm immune from future prosecution i must never use a computer or date john ashcroft's daughter again. that guy totally hates me now. should i fail to comply, an anonymous informant will tip off the BMG music people as to my current whereabouts. i can't let those bastards find me. they cannot be bargained with, they cannot be reasoned with, they don't feel remorse, or pity, or fear. and they absolutely wil not stop, ever, until i'm dead. or pay my bill for that hootie & the blowfish cd. whatever. i've been on the running for years now, and i'm tired. someday i'd like to wake up from the unrelenting nightmare that my life has become ever since i bought those twelve CDs for 1 cent (And didn't there used to be a cent symbol on keyboards? I mean, seriously, what the fuck.). for now i'm sort of like forrest gump, just a renegade cop curing cancer and living on adrenaline, dispensing frontier justice from a post-apocalyptic dune buggy.

since i'm not allowed to use a computer, i have to type all this up on a manual Smith-Corona typewriter. i hired a Secretary-type girl to do the transcribing for me, and that's where the trouble started. she'd been leafing through The Late Major Sebastian Bludd's novel, and commented that my blog "is so much better than that novel." chowder momentarily snapped out of the alcoholic haze he's been content to pass his life in the last few years and helpfully chirped: "You never insult a man's penis. Or a novel written by a notoriously high-strung monkey."

precisely.

first, i had to give the Secretary-type girl her walking papers and, let me tell you, i'm never using that temp agency again. of infinitely more consequence to my adoring readers, however, The Late Major Sebastian Bludd went predictably apeshit upon hearing the Secretary-type girl's criticism and took over the Smith-Corona. i mean, totally monopolized it. didn't help that Silent J, the serbo-croatian down the hall, started selling amphetamines to my helpmonkey so i could hardly infiltrate the russian mafia with all that racket. anyway, i can use the typewriter again now because The Late Major Sebastian Bludd is dead now, killed by chowder's stupidity. now i need to go clean the mess in the parking lot.

oh, yeah: the marriage is fucking on.

memorium

oh. about that last post. i should elaborate.

the Late Major Sebastian Bludd has passed on, i'm afraid. the day had started promisingly enough when i decided to get serious at my job, where i cure cancer, so i came in for the first time in over a month. "Where have you been?" they asked. "Stomping out the russian mafia," i responded, then scheduled an afternoon presentation on my latest research grant proposal. it's very technical and there's a lot of tricky math involved, but it mostly involves further desecration of the late Ted Williams' body, specifically his decapitated, frozen head.

i propose taking the late Ted Williams' headsickle and building a newer, better Ted Williams body out of stem cells, then plugging the old Ted Williams brain into the new Ted Williams Monster Body, which leaves new england with an unstoppable outfield featuring an unfrozen Teddy Ballgame, the Unfrozen Caveman Centerfielder, and Rainman Ramirez in right (he won't notice; put manny at catcher, and the man would still hit the snot out of the ball). Sulkypants at short and maybe the now expendable Trot Nixon could be packaged for pitching, although i can't imagine anybody getting past El Diva, the Shill, and Knuckles in a best of seven. you can imagine the excitement a pennant would bring New England, which in turn would generate silly money for The Jimmy Fund. and thusly would cancer be cured.

of course, stem cell research is illegal, so i proposed unveiling the Ted Williams Monster at the DNC, where his appearance would propel native son John Kerry to the white house, at which time he'd lift the stem cell research ban and we'd escape prosecution. the guys at the office were so impressed by my presentation that they told me i could take the rest of the day off, so i did.

needless to say, i felt pretty good about myself, until i remembered that the remains of my faithful helper monkey, The Late Major Sebastian Bludd, lay splashed about the parking lot. i spent most of the day picking bits of monkey fur and giblets off the hot asphalt of the parking lot adjacent to the residential hotel i live in, cursing chowder under my breath for being such a moron and murdering my helpmonkey. chowder didn't help me, because he threw himself a going away bowling party that i wasn't invited to. our friend The Love Doctor is an astronomer, so to impress her, chowder had been secretly training The Late Major Sebastian Bludd to repair the hubble space telescope. his impending departure for japan sped up the timetable and, as with the real NASA, this led to tragedy. instead of seeking private funding, chowder decided to send the doomed monkey into space wrapped in aluminum foil, strapped to a thousand bottle rockets. since i was working long hours bringing down the russian mafia and spending all my spare time in the Science Room on my research grant proposal, this all happened without my knowledge.

i was inconsolable when i realized that the mess in the parking lot had been my trusted companion, and i was inconsolable until refridgerator monster told said "Such a thing was bound to happen, with stupid friends such as yours." as i dropped the garbage bag with most of her remains by the curbside to be picked up later this week, i shed a tear for The Late Major Sebastian Bludd, and cursed the day i met chowder.

he leaves for japan tomorrow morning. good riddance, i say. now i need some new friends.

going to the chapel

so i got married this weekend. it went pretty well. we rented a boat because our wedding license wasn't technically valid anywhere save International Waters, plus everything else went to shit when The Late Major Sebastian Bludd shuffled off this mortal coil and onto the asphalt.

when the moment finally arrived, The Late Major Sebastian Bludd's inability to bend people to my will didn't help. well, not the kind of people i know, quality people with taste and refinement. also the thing in the refridgerator, who is the wisest of all the friends i have. i thought we were going to have problems with the boat, because i'd taken the trouble to rent out a luxury yacht and we'd booked UB40 for the week, so the potential for egg on my face was high. on our way out the harbor, my best friend--i'll call her chinchilla because she looks really skinny, soaking wet--got drunk and the swell rose up to knock her into the bay.

"I'm still mad at you," she called out, because she always is, but i've never been able to figure out the why of it exactly. on the one hand, i looked forward to having a wedding that didn't feature chinchillla heckling me and squeezing my nipples, but on the other hand seeing her get swept out to sea didn't do anything good for morale.

"Tis awful bad luck, having a lass swept to sea," said the crusty sailerman, and i wasn't inclined to disagree with him, although i understand he got into it with the cruise's naturalist, who doesn't believe in luck.

not even a little.

you can imagine the dawning sense of panic i was feeling, having this yacht that would only go as far as i could push the crew before breaking them, and yet being unable to bend their will to my design. as we wheeled out the cupcake mountain that passed for a wedding cake, i was excited to hear the familiar sound of rotor blades cutting the already crisp morning air. it was my old business associate vlade divac, his helocopter sent Mount Cupcake tunbling in the drink along with my friend chinchilla, who i noticed just then was being dragged behind the yacht by a towing cable and had been yelling at me the entire time.

vlade divac walked across the helipad as hundreds of paparazzi bulbs flashed all around him, and signed some autographs. i can't really say what he does, i mean except play basketball for the sacramento kings, but once he arrived i knew everything would be alright. i extended my hand in greeting, and pulled me close to say something meant for my ears only. "If you ever disobey me again I will break you," he hissed. i didn't know what the hell vlade divac meant, but i felt it, inside, in a secret place. i understood.

and that's what i whispered to my predilection for speed (!!!) when we tied the knot. we're going to live forever and so happiness isn't really a concern when there's no after, ever.