Tomorrow night I'll be performing at Seattle's own Union Garage theater (the venue for bipolars! It's either blazing hot or colder than Neptune!) doing a little thing called XTL: eXtreme Theater League. It's a one-night event that I've done before; basically, the idea is a sketch comedy beatdown night a la the WWF, where sketches or performers are pitted against one another to the audience's pitiless boos or riotous accolades, sometimes in the same sketch, and the point of most of the sketches is that they be wretched. Deliberately wretched, so the contest is: who can suck the most the fastest and the funniest? It's all in good fun, and since the thing starts at eleven, you're basically guaranteed actors who have been drinking, adding to the general atmosphere of teetering mayhem. Sort of like Guy Fawkes directing Paul Lynde in Star Spangled Girl: unthinkably terrible, but certainly mesmerizing.

I (and the wife) are teamed up with my friend V. (the same V. who routinely perpetrates shattering horrors on innocent karaoke songs); she has gamely dug up a 10-minute show she wrote in college about her sexual issues, and if that doesn't already have you reaching for the Vicodin, let me just tell you: you have no idea. It's simply incredible, and it's a testament to V.'s good sense of humor that she is allowing this horror to be unleashed, because when I say it is bad, I mean it is Bad; Badness permeates its every line, its every page; it is End of Days Bad; it is apocalyptically bad. What I'm trying to say is, it's pretty bad.

(In the unlikely event that some of my tens of readers are XTL participants, you might want to read this later, but I'm not really spoiling anything. I just couldn't wait to get this down.)

Like I said, it was V. "working through" some sexual issues at the time--that hazy-dazy college time where boys discovered Better Falling Down Through Chemistry and girls discovered that they Had Issues. Hence, it has no less than 4 (four) gratuitous menstrual references. It has Barbie Allegories. It has Horrible Windy Monologues. And, my favorite, it has a character named Skeeter.

But there's no way I can do it justice by just describing it . . . for one thing, the thing possesses a kind of multivariate badness: it is bad on so many levels and in so many different ways . . . Christ, I don't know. It's like a colony of badness, all living there desolately on the page.

Hopeless woman-bonding-with-her-body prose?

Ow ow ow cramp! Bad cramp. Bad! Ea-sy . . . easy does it. Ahhh, good cramp. I will end the desire to make a [booty] run with a period. It will flow out of me by way of vagina.

Check! Incomprehensible purple imagery?

I am lying with an android. I will peel off his flesh-colored fake mechanical arm and slink back home.

Check! Hilariously clanking "natural" dialogue?

Kyle: Wanda, I hope you don't mind that I am indulging in some of your Apple Jacks.

Kyle: These Apple Jacks are crunchy and delicious.

Holy fuck you better say Check!

And honestly, this is only the merest of sips from these brackish waters, and those waters run very, very deep, and tomorrow night, I'll be drowning in it.

Should be fun.