Cracking the code
William H. Maybe
Nothing is digesting. I looked in the toilet and saw a paperclip— just what has been going on? I had to stop writing this to run to the bathroom in hopes that I would not shit my pants. Not quite a “William H. Maybe”* as Don used to call it— I honest to goodness shit my pants. This event I can ad to the heap of other minor disasters that have colorized this day in particular and this week in general. Last night, around 2:00AM I heard L. screaming “Fuck! He’s fucked! This is so fucked!” in endless and varied combinations, but didn’t get up to investigate because this is not so unusual and anyway my shirt was off. After a nondescript, greasy breakfast at nondescript, greasy Cornerstone…oh, it looks like the mystery of troubled bowels begins to solve itself just sentences later.
July 5th, 2009
*a William H. Maybe is when you fart and then can’t tell if you have shit your pants or not
I suddenly felt a rush of autumn-night nostalgia. In that moment, I was catapulted back to age 13, lips puffy from braces and smeared with rose colored lipstick, getting ready for an 8th grade cotillion. I’d be blow drying my hair with the clock radio on, in constant cord-phone contact with Kim Danko. All the (unpopular) girls met up at my house to take flash photos in front of our television set and be jettisoned to the event in Kim’s mom’s minivan with KWOD 106.5 on the radio. We’d have on hideous dark lipsticks and frosty pastel eyeshadows because we didn’t wear makeup and didn’t know how, except in those cases where we let my mom do our makeup and we’d all emerge from her vanity chair as junior Joan Collinses with sculpted, smokey lids. We all had curled, “peicey” bangs and sparkle butterfly clips holding back twisted sections of hair, or setting of a zig-zag part. Our attire, by and large, was either goth business casual with a clunky shoe or, as we grew more bold, velvet on bottom, sparkly on top, and a choker (with a clunky shoe).
Invariably we’d be biding our time during the faster songs, sort of half-heartedly “gettin’ jiggy wit it” in a giant, intimidating girl circle using feeble dance moves we picked up from Melisa Claridad, the only girl from our clique coordinated enough to be a cheerleader. We lived for a KC & JoJo song to come on, so we could slow dance. I could look forward to a young man of extreme height incompatibility exerting pressure on my rib cage or shoulders or anywhere other than where hands might logically go, guiding me around in a dizzying mini circle, his hair shellacked with gel so as to slope ever forward in an unmoving toothpaste shape, ill-fitting state worker attire artlessly draped on a scrawny frame. He’d ask me in a breath that was pure Banaca about what sort of music I liked and I’d shout the reply in his ear—punk—a lie—I liked 70s soft rock even then. Then it would be over but his Adidas cologne would linger on my sparkle top. After a few more successes and failures of this nature, after the Aerosmith song from Armaggedon played, we’d pile back into the van, “hyper” being the only word to describe our collective state. We’d end the night at Leatherby’s Creamery, where all the schools went for post-cotillion sundaes, and we’d eye the boys we danced with warily under the flourescent lighting. 
October 24th, 2009
offerings brought to gain an audience with Tulku Tsewang
(Source: kicker-of-elves, via fernsandmoss)
Learning to drive at age 27 in Winters, CA is bringing out my sentimental side.
Don’t Make Me Say Please
It was J’s first crab feed, but he was prepared, as I’d been enticing him with talk of crab feeds early on. Aunt Judy said, “The crab feeds have their own culture, kind of like the bingo hall.” I ate more crab than Uncle Ron, and am both impressed and disgusted by myself.
My crab-induced dreams were vivid and unusual and almost totally forgotten. I only remember some teen girls saying, “There’s that bitch from earlier,” and I was heavily made up, wearing lingerie, and strapped to a bed as Bryan Ferry hovered over me in a tuxedo, serenading me with a song he’d just written about me called “Don’t Make Me Say Please.”
Signposts on the way to a mild shellfish allergy?
January 15th, 2012
“I’m not in the market for a boy who wants to love only me…”
Fear of Intimacy Oldies— my favorite musical genre for obvious reasons
