I assume I'm not the only one who attended a Fourth of July party where "America: Fuck Yeah!" was played this last Friday. Sigh. More on musical crimes later.

The wife and I attended a perfectly lovely party on the Fourth, which featured some things like fifteen pounds of barbecued spareribs (rapidly consumed) and dogs! dogs! dogs! I may have mentioned before my love of these beasts/evolutionary opportunists.

Kuma was the name of our favorite dog; he was a German Shepherd/Shar-Pei mix, and he sported a really fetching blue bandana around his neck. Kuma was the sort of dog who shamelessly gets you to interact with him; he had this dumb little purple dog toy that he'd plop at your feet and then make hilariously weird faces at, crinkling up his lips at it in anticipation of . . . what? Its utter demise at his finding skills, I guess. The dog would sit there making faces at it until you couldn't stand it any more, and then you'd fling the thing into the blackberry bushes, hoping never to see it again, and Kuma would tirelessly go out an find the damn thing and return to drop it at your feet again and scowl at it some more. If it weren't so charming, it would have been annoying. Then again, I'm the kind of guy who doesn't mind eating his ribs even when his hands have been thoroughly coated in dog saliva, so.

Kuma was unstoppable, really, and is evidently smarter than most of my friends. On one occasion, when the purple weird toy had been flung into some seriously dense undergrowth, Kuma hunted around for a good while; the brambles in which it had been lost encircled a large tree. Thwarted (briefly), Kuma then proceeded to spend a good fifteen seconds looking up into the tree branches to make sure it hadn't landed above his head. This caused me to stand up and applaud and yell, "You are an awesome dog!" which made Kuma stare at me and shake his head.

When the fireworks started later, Kuma disappeared, causing a bit of a concerned fuss. He turned up later at his owner's home, patiently waiting. When the dipshits started throwing firecrackers and so forth, Kuma obviously thought, "You know, this hurts my ears, and these guys are noisy dipshits. I'm going home." I love this dog.

During respites between meat assaults, one of the chefs (there were four different professional chefs there barbecuing, so . . . I love everything) kept passing around Jell-O shots. "These are Incredible Hulks," he said enigmatically as he held out the tray of green gelatins. "These are Yellow Fever," he said of the yellow offerings. I don't remember what the red things were called. Blood clots? Hellboys? Republicans? I don't know. The fireworks were starting anyway, and I was having a bleary revelation.

That revelation was: I don't give a goddamn fucking shit about fireworks. They are dull and predictable; fireworks are only marginally more interesting than "Two and a Half Men," a show I've never watched and never need to, much like, well, fireworks.

"CUBES!" people screamed. "SMILEY FACE!" Neat. Firework technology has finally caught up to what I used to doodle on my Pee-Chees. But can fireworks depict 70s basketball players with their penises hanging out of their shorts? Not that I saw. I smoked gloomily, staring occasionally with wonder at the cascading fireworks that looked sort of like Tina Turner's hair in 1987. "IT'S TINA TURNER'S HAIR FROM 1987!" I screamed. The only people that heard me either gave me glares or kind of sagged a little bit.

One guy was way too into it; he was drunk out of his mind, drunk to the horrible point where you are convinced that if you're loud enough and repeat yourself enough, you're funny. It was awful. "MANIFEST DESTINY!" he hollered, over and over, for no reason. People began to clear away from his weird, unsteady ambit.

At one point during the hopeless fireworks, the labored stereo system started oozing the doleful strains of Whitesnake's "Here I Go Again." The loud pud went nuts again. "THIS IS AMERICA, YOU FUCKERS!" he howled, thrusting his goatee towards the clouds. "THIS IS AMERICA!"

I was standing next to my friend W. "Whitesnake is a British band," I sighed, taking another pull on a nearly depleted Incredible Hulk. I was watching the one other dog at the party--now that Kuma had taken his leave--trying to burrow his way into his owner's abdomen in wretched despair over the incredible tumult. I remember thinking that the poor creature looked sort of like Bonnie Franklin trying to get away from Schneider.

W. wheeled on me. "Whitesnake is British? I didn't know that!" W., who has a keen sense of propriety and an allergy to bullshit, chewed on this for a few seconds before turning to the loud guy and yelling, "Whitesnake is British, man!" Loud guy flapped his meaty arms dismissively and then settled further into his seat, refusing to acknowledge our stinging criticisms. He glassily gnawed on a cold chicken leg, giving him the appearance of the world's laziest ogre.

A few moments later, when the strains of Europe's "The Final Countdown" started to play, he cried "AMERICA!" again. I closed my eyes.

We can all learn from Kuma.

Another strange weekend spent hanging out with other humans! Most unusual. You will be relieved to learn, however, that we did fit in time to watch Jumper, a film that dares to ask the question, "Wouldn't it be awesome if you could hang out with a deck chair and a cooler on the Sphinx's head?" The answer, of course, is "No." It's really the least awesome thing ever, and since the Sphinx-hanger-outer is also Hayden Christiansen, the answer is further modified to "Jesus fucking Christ, no, just . . . holy shit, what the fuck?"

In life, some answers just lead to more questions.

Which was brought to me even more forcefully on Saturday, when we traveled up to Shoreline to attend C.'s birthday party. C. is forever fond of making me travel places; he lives in Shoreline, for one thing, and we invariably get lost when we drive up to that baffling little area. C. is also the one responsible for dragging us all to Las Vegas in the fall so we can blearily watch him get married. The bastard.

On the other hand, C. knows how to make with the barbecue. He was preparing fajitas that day, and made sure to include as many dead animals as possible: pork, beef and chicken were all represented, and at one point I saw him getting interesting ideas in his head as he eyed Charlie, a friend's little Scotty dog in attendance. He also had prepared mojitos, iced up a giant bucket of Red Stripes, and had a full bar to boot. As if all this magnificence weren't enough, he had set up a badminton court in his pocked, uneven, ankle-breaking hellscape of a back yard. Badminton, people.

While C. slaved red-faced over the various barbecues, occasionally immolating the odd tortilla here and there, the rest of the guests traded stories, mostly about--my favorite, as my tens of readers know--horrible movies. I got into a spirited discussion about In the Name of the King, and was pleased when someone perked up when I mentioned Burt Reynolds. "What?" said D. "I am a devotee of the films of Burt Reynolds." He gave every appearance of being perfectly serious about this.

The conversation meandered along this way for a while--"I'm still angry that I watched Alone in the Dark," said someone. "I think about it all the time."--when K. thoughtfully recalled her time as a young aspiring actress when she lived in LA. "I had an audition for this movie, and I either had to be topless or I had to agree to get pissed on by an evil demon dog." I did not question the oddly specific duality of this rather stark set of choices. "I didn't want to be topless, really, but then I wondered: did it have to be real urine? Did it have to be dog urine? Could I use my own urine?" She stared pensively at the overcast sky, caught up in the memory. "Then I realized I didn't feel like driving into the Valley."

Life is full of these choices and the questions we ask in making these choices. Then we realize that there is always a third option: "Fuck all that."

Well, drinks were had and meat was fajitaed and badminton was played--horrendously, of course. There's nothing like a bunch of meat-crazed half-in-the-bag thirtysomethings staggering around playing a racket-based game that they've only played before when C. has these ridiculous gatherings. C. himself was particularly putrid, continually calling "Yours!" to me while I was being battered terribly with shuttlecocks aimed mercilessly at me by the 5' 6" girl across the net from me. Under one of these withering assaults, I tore off half my big toenail; I noticed this later in post-defeat body examination. I proceeded to trim the other untorn half, and C. commented, "So this is what you do at parties? You trim your toenails?" "This is what I do at your parties," I replied. "I think everyone will be doing it soon."

In other game related shenanigans, K. was upstairs in C.'s game room--he has a game room--laying waste to all comers with her preternatural ping-pong skills. K. is a tiny little woman and she just strafed everybody stupid enough to take her on, yours truly included (no real feat, since I know I stink). Guys are often really terrible at ping-pong, and I think I know why: guys, when given the chance, love to hit the everloving shit out of things. So you see dudes trying to lay these incredible roundhouse smashes on a ping-pong ball, but really, there's a low limit to a ping-pong ball's max velocity. Strength means absolutely nothing; it's a finesse game. It's the same deal with pool: guys love to slamball every shot, just for the manly CRASH of the cue hitting shit. But it's just as stupid and counterproductive. You can see these meatheads in any bar at all, stinking up a perfectly good table. You saw the same sort of dumb flailing at the ping-pong table, and meanwhile, K. was making all these ninja precision shots without breaking a sweat.

Guys are stupid.

It was, of course, a good time. I wish C. a happy birthday again, and I thank him for his generosity and willingness to put up with a pack of half-mad raving wise-asses swanning around his pad all damn day, ruining the august tradition of good badminton play and trimming their toenails and other various violations of common decorum.

And what do you know? In mere minutes from now--at midnight--it will be my birthday. Thirty-nine damn years old. Which raises its own set of questions. Such as: why am I going to work, anyway? Will I get in trouble if I bring whiskey into the office? Will anyone notice? Will I find myself topless, or being urinated on by evil demon dogs?

It's possible! I don't have the answers, you know. Well, I have one.

Fuck all that. Happy birthday to me.

Say! Took a week off there, didn't I? Fortunately, nobody noticed.

The wife and I have been trying this new thing. Instead of holing up in the apartment to watch terrible, mirth-strangling DVDs and occasionally breaking out in mournful sobs at unpredictable intervals, we've been spending time with other people over food and drinks! It's pretty fucked up, but we're into it; we're talking with CBS about a possible reality show that we like to call (in the planning stages) "Socializing"! Sumner Redstone called us the other day and said, "Your idea--interacting with other people in familiar social situations--really makes me almost feel my skin again. This could be bigger than buttfucking." So we're pretty excited.

On Memorial Day, for example, we had sent out a little email to fifty or so of our closest uneasy, distant, faltering relationship entities inviting them to come over and spend some quality time remembering the fallen warriors of our past and eating pork tacos. "Nobody will come," we told each other, "because we are strange hermits who never talk to other humans any more."

Nearly everybody on the invite showed up, grimly marching through our door like and endless stream of disgruntled Huns, demanding tacos. We didn't underestimate our popularity; we underestimated our friends' botomless capacity for free pork. The tacos were gone in mere instants, forcing the wife to improvise, which she did with aplomb, quickly whipping up a batch of taco meat salvaged from some discarded turkey and stretching it with several past issues of the New York Times, which we have neatly piled in several six-foot stacks that creatively delineate the mazelike contours of our living space. Some of the dozens of hamsters that reside in our place loudly squeaked their outrage, and into the spicy pot they were swept as well, and all were sated.

When the freeloaders began to overstay their welcome, I simply put on a 1985 cover of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band" by a long-forgotten/never-remembered rap group named the Three Wize Men, and that started clearing the room nicely; the song sounds not unlike a roomful of Juggalos sodomizing a parliament of unlucky barn owls. It is unearthly, and I'm proud to own the recording; it's like owning Ed Gein's big toe, or a theremin. It just doesn't make sense.

When the last few obstinate stragglers proved immune to the terrible song, I simply retrieved my well-thumbed copy of the Planet Hulk trade paperback and began reading it aloud using the voice of Fannie Flagg, and the rest reeled out into the streets clutching their ears.

Then, more recently, we found ourselves at a birthday party for our friend S., a geriatric bank worker who mysteriously has been tasked with learning about infectious disease vectors. (Really. Except for the geriatric part. I think she's like 34. It's confusing.) They recently bought a house out in Greenwood or some such--fuck neighborhoods located more than six blocks from mine--and so we drove out there for a barbecue! This being Seattle, it of course rained, and this being again Seattle, nobody really gave a shit.

S.'s husband J., who is the walking embodiment of "jovial," manned the damp grill while swigging from his finest cans of Hamm's beer. J. is a confusing fellow, a pastry chef with a taste for the finer things--bleu cheese was one of the options for burger toppings--and yet he is content to drink radioactive brine such as Hamm's and PBR. It wasn't until I saw his garage that I understood; inside I found two scooters that he apparently tinkers with obsessively. "Oh, I get it!" I exclaimed. "You're deranged and twee!" "I am, sir!" he cried, and attempted to crush an empty against his skull, but the empty was, regrettably, full--in fact unopened--and he collapsed to the ground in a mighty, unconscious heap.

The rain had driven a few of us to the garage; all men. The reasoning being, I suppose, that that's where men go when the weather turns to shit. Some of the men for the occasion had brought cigars, which were passed around. I demurred, content to smoke my regular cigarettes, and was briefly derided: "Sure, you stick with your little cigarettes, Skot." I declined to point out the various underlying psychological rationales that might be responsible for their enthusiasm for putting the largest possible cylindrical objects into their mouths, mainly because we were also playing a manly game of darts and I didn't want to get punctured. Also, J. was starting to stir, and he could have easily harmed me rather badly had he felt like driving over me several hundred times with one of his scooters, had they been in working order, which they weren't. They simply stared at us balefully, like lazy, one-eyed candy apple red heifers.

I am unnerved by scooters, I think.

We were, it must be said, laughably wretched at darts. We were--manfully--playing a game called Cricket, where the simple object is to hit the numbers 15 through 20 (and the bullseye) three times each; first player to do this (including credit for doubles and triples) wins. In addition to the dartboard, I also hit: the wall, the ceiling, my shoe, someone's piece of birthday cake, a wayward scrivener, Jupiter, and, happily, a colicky baby, the last of which raised cheers from everyone. The tiny garage continued to fill with the unholy fug of accumulated cigar smoke, and as the game continued ineptly--to be fair, nobody was striving too terribly for anything resembling eptness--and I was moved by our close camaraderie, the social inroads I had made that day that I had been neglecting for so wrong.

"It's so good to hang with you guys," I said to the group. "Do you guys know when Jumper comes out on DVD? We could totally watch that some time."

There was a long, dreadful silence, punctuated only by mournful sucking noises as they worked the cigars in their mouths.

Baby steps. I'll get there.

No, no, my droogs! I did not abandon you again! I did not! Rather, I was cruelly withheld from you, held in a prison not of my making!

(Who makes their own prison? Foolish people. Don't make your own prison, folks. Unless you're the Saw guy, in which case: totally make your own prison, because if you don't, those people will fucking run like crazy, and you won't be able to play with their bones like Tinkertoys after you pull their spines out. But you probably knew that.)

No, what happened was: I got fucking levelled by the flu. I mean, I got crushed. Here's a direct quote from the wife: "I've never seen you this sick." Here's another: "I guess I'll go to work again while you lie there, not making any money." And another: "Do you plan on wearing pants at all this week?"

Last Sunday it all began when I woke up and realized that someone--possibly the wife--had replaced all the bones in my body with magnesium rods. I hunched around the house in a misery, looking like Early Man, and marveled at certain phenomena such as feeling a ripping pain across my forehead when I moved my eyeballs to the side too quickly. I settled in my big-ass leather chair and prepared for a long week full of low moaning.

I had no idea what was in store for me. I called in sick on Monday, still feeling achey and horrible; the fever was starting to cycle up in intensity. This, of course led to Phase II: Chills. Chills are sort of fantastically schizophrenic in that even when you are certain that you are going to burst into flames, you can still be sitting there merrily shaking away and teeth a-chatter. When you combine this sort of thing with, say, diarrhea--though you might not have had anything to eat in 24 hours--it gets even better; for nothing pleases the terrified, vibrating buttocks like the cold kiss of plastic, and then you get to clatter around pathetically atop the toilet, sweating and shaking as your afflicted bowels feebly spit into the bowl in some sort of cheerless parody of defecation.

Then, if you're classy, you write about it on the internet!

I called in sick on Tuesday as well after a vivid night of fever dreams; in one, I was attempting to solve an intractable math problem (for me, that's something like a "How many red socks does Jerry have if he mends 3/5 of a red sock every eighth week, and shops at Threadbaresocks.com during Lent?" kind of thing), and then suddenly I was a member of the Roman senate and the senators were all screaming solutions at me.

Tuesday also brought The Cough. Thus far, I had avoided any kind of congestion or respiratory hijinks. That was all over. It has inspired a short poem, in fact.

O cough! Rage o'th' lungs!
Wake the wife!
Shake the rafters!
I beseech thee--
Bring up no phlegm at all.

Thanks, lungs!
You fuckers.

The thing about being sick and being a smoker is, you don't get to choose to just be one or the other for a while. You get to be both. And so, try as one might to wait as long as possible, there you find yourself, wrapped up in a knit blanket, standing outside, shivering with the chills--exacerbated by the fact that you're outside--and grimly trying to manage a few pitiable puffs in between wracking, gut-ripping coughs. It's pretty much the most pathetic thing you can imagine.

I had made the decision before the awful vapors that I describe, but having the sickness cemented it for me: I have gone out and got a prescription for Chantix. Chantix is some new hot-shit drug that is a smoking cessation aid; I got it from my dentist, who is nothing if not enthused about having to chisel the fucking garbage off my teeth so much. He might also be interested in my not dying, but I don't know him that well to claim that. I started this stuff a week ago.

It has interesting side effects! A lot of them are gastrointestinal, so I'm still getting some prime nervy moments in the bathroom, such as last night, when I suddenly and quite unexpectedly vomited up an entire bowl of soup. So I still get to experience these peristaltic cataclysms without having to be sick! Chantix also has a host of neurological side effects that are possible: "vivid dreaming" is one, and if I can survive being screamed at by Roman senators about story problems, I guess I can handle that. Some of the more serious ones now being reported are things like "suicidal ideation," which frankly? Not that surprising. "I'm going to fucking kill myself if I don't have a cigarette in five seconds" is hardly a new thought for the dedicated smoker.

So I'm feeling a lot better. I'm looking forward to Chantix and not smoking to make me feel worse. Somewhere in the middle I expect to find normal. Right?

Ah, to be back from vacation! Back to work!

Fuck work. Today's big achievement: deleting 1.5 GB of ancient, hoary emails, many of which bore subject lines such as "What's wrong, tiny penis?"

At least today at work was just about as productive as our entire vacation, in which we did basically nothing. Well, not entirely accurate; we did do one important thing: we wore pajamas. We wore the fuck out of our pajamas. Sometimes we wore our pajamas all damn day long; at least, that is, until our favorite bar opened. Then, of course, we put on our best muumuus.

(Now, listen, seriously, though. I don't wear pajamas to bed. I'm not a fucking freak. I sleep in a safe, secure bathysphere like any sensible person who is concerned about nocturnal gar attacks. I don't know how I'm gonna go out, but Skot Kurruk isn't about to get his junk eaten by ravenous Lepisosteidae is all I'm saying. You all are on your own, but I say: bathysphere.)

One fine day last week, I was enjoying hanging out in my damn pajamas right out on my deck, which for weird architectural reasons happens to directly overlook our building's front door. Normally, this isn't really a deal, but on this day, some dude was trying to gain entrance.

"HEY! HEY! CAN YOU HEAR ME!" He was screaming into our little crappy intercom at the front entrance below me. I scratched unconcernedly at my flannel-clad balls and serenely smoked.

"GUNT!" yelled the intercom at the guy, who was kind of beating on the little metal faceplate near our door. "DEAN!" continued the intercom.

"JESUS FUCKING CHRIST!" screamed the guy. "I'M DOWN HERE!" This killed me. Where else would he be? Suspended in midair? Traversing the luminiferous aether? "CAN YOU HEAR ME?" he screamed again.

"NITS," said the intercom, which caused the angry guy to sink his neck down into his collar and moan. Then I must have laughed or farted or audibly scratched myself again, because the poor bastard looked up at me, standing above him. Which must, I suppose, have caused him to lose his final grasp upon sanity, because he yelled up at me, "CAN YOU HEAR ME? Can you let me IN?"

Now, really. Leaving aside the wonderful query "CAN YOU HEAR ME," is this a solid gambit? Here I was, a hobo in heart-embossed pajama pants (oh, shut the fuck up) with hair that looked like crib death had occurred on top of my skull, smoking, and I'm going to dash down to help out some angry crank who's screaming into tin? Please. People who are wearing pajamas at two in the afternoon are not ready to help anybody, even themselves. I smiled at him and hooked my thumbs into my pajama elastic and rocked placidly on my heels; I'm sure I looked more or less like a disheveled, gay Jed Clampett.

Right at that moment, the front door opened, and the ostensible host peeked out at the screamer. Hilariously, he said, "Hey, was that you?" No, you've had several strangers all clamoring for entrance to your apartment in the past ten minutes. They finally glumly trod inside, commiserating about the lousy intercom system, and throwing me a few choice glances as I continued to smoke and insouciantly pajama around.

Is this all we did on our damn vacation? Pretty much. We had some plans to go down to the Oregon coast--because where better to travel in December?--but those were kind of scotched when all of our roadways were suddenly lightly coated with several feet of water and most of the Oregon coastline was blown into the sea anyway.

We also got to know our newest friend, who occasionally hangs out on the deck with me! He's a rat. And you know what? He's adorable. I like to call him "Rat." The wife has noticed me peering out the windows lately and plaintively hooting, "Where's my rat?" Or, when I'm feeling affectionate, I might coo, "Where's my ratter?"

"You're spending too much time in your pajamas," said my wife. "And he tried to eat our brined turkey." (This is true.) More on my rat later, that gorgeous little fucker. I'm kind of in love with him.

It's probably best that I had to go back to work.

So I don't think I told you guys that I'm on vacation. I'M ON VACATION! And now you know. Not that we're doing anything much; the recent move and also some goddamn fucking leftover medical bills from my recent firestorm of scans, proddings, biopsies, eye-grams, butt-cards and skin harvests have left us a bit skint. We may go down to Cannon Beach for a few days, but other than that, well, we're watching an awful lot of bad movies. Yay!

(NOTE: Transformers is a horrible movie, and not in a good way. This movie will cause your disbelieving mind to prolapse and fall into your GI tract. Don't watch it. And if you're not going to take my word for it, think on this: You might have, at some dark period in your life, actually wished for a giant robot to take a piss all over John Turturro, but strangely, it's just depressing when it actually happens.)

So I'll be a little (read: probably entirely) scarce until December. And speaking of December, did you know that it will mark my five-year anniversary of writing for you, my tens of readers? You know what this milestone calls for? Laziness. And so, in my absence, I present to you some of my old favorites. They weren't necessarily the most popular pieces I ever wrote, but for whatever reasons, they stick in my mind. Enjoy, if possible, and if not, I will be back in a couple weeks to disappoint you afresh.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at Valentine's Day
Elementary School
Andy
The Evening Boringness in the West
The Sounds of Violence
Drink Me
Things I Have Shouted in Belgium
At The River
I, Caregiver
My Bother The Car

A couple kind souls have contacted me to make sure I'm okay in the unexplained long absence of new posts. And I am! I've got a second bedroom full of boxes of comic books that I can't bear to bother with, but apart from that, nothing is wrong. (Welll, maybe Season 2 of Heroes. What the fuck?)

No, the real reason is this: in our old place, there were scads of people who simply didn't bother to secure their wireless signal. So I cheerfully stole from them for about two years. Yay!

Our new apartment--which is wonderful--does not have this useful feature. Boo! So I have been forced to actually pay for my own wireless, which, oh well. And I have all the gear! It's sitting in my house, ready to go! Yee haw!

Yeah, I'm not setting up any of this shit. I've got a non-stupid buddy coming by soon to give me a hand (code for "do everything"), so soon I should be back up and running and boring the living shit out of you as per usual. I've got a reputation to uphold.

I took Friday off so I could go to a WHOLE NEW MEDICAL FACILITY to get my LIVER ULTRASOUND! It was a BANNER DAY! They put out a REAL BANNER, and it flapped GAILY IN THE WIND! It said "SKOT'S BIG LIVER DAY! BRING ONIONS!"

When I got to the waiting room to . . . wait, I was confronted with one of those "take a number" little displays, complete with little plastic numbered tabs. Hanh? Take a number? I hope I come out of this with either some corned beef or a new driver's license, I thought.

After my "intake interview," which sounded wonderfully ominous, but wasn't, someone showed up more or less instantly to escort me to my room, which was moodily lit in a Blade Runner-ish way. Maybe I was going to get fucked by Daryl Hannah! Or killed by Roy Batty!

Or, more likely, an unremarkable tech was going to slather my thorax with surprisingly warm goo and then jam a little robo-phallus into my ribs for about forty minutes, which is somewhere in between. "It's kind of like a formula warmer," said Pat, my tech, of said warm goo, apropos of not much.

I asked Pat if she was allowed to let me know if she saw anything worth screaming about on my scan, and she stuttered. "I, I--I only take pictures. Doctor Marx will take a look and let you know what he sees. My job is to take the best pictures I can." There was silence for a moment. "No," she said in a small voice.

"It's cool," I said. "I'm a pain in the ass," I explained further.

"We're going to look at your pancreas and gall bladder too," she said in reply. She gouged me again, and I didn't say anything.

"I never think about my gall bladder," I said, witlessly. "That's good," she cooed. You're a pain in the ass, I assume she thought.

Our porny adventure continued on for a while, complete with sentences like, "Let's roll you over so we can get a side view." Also: "Oh, don't worry, I see pubic hair all the time."

BOM CHICKA WOW

After a while of this, she gave me a towel to wipe up all the goo, which, really, if I'm wiping up goo? It would have been nice to have a decent reason for. In this case, I was just goo-covered for unpleasant reasons. Wiping up sticky residue should always be after an orgasm, frankly. But I was neither motivated nor confident in my ability to talk my way into a handjob at this point anyway. I glumly toweled off my fish-white gut.

Presently the terrifying Dr. Marx was escorted in. Here's a rough approximation of what he said, in utter machine-gun cadence:

"I have looked at your films and I do not see scary things like cancer or robots or dog faces [I actually have no idea what he said at this point, so I'm filling in] and I will talk to your doctor about this but there are maybe some fatty deposits but you can have a good day."

He stood stoically after that while I processed that whole bit.

"I . . . that sounds like good news!" I stammered.

"You have a good day!" he yelled again. Then he left.

I stared at the tech. "He's very . . . succinct," I said. "He sure is!" replied the goo-tech. Then she showed me out.

Good Lord, fuck all this. I'm happy to live with my neuropathic silliness if I don't have to confront any more terrifying Politburo doctors.

I have trouble eating soup, for God's sake. None of this is worth it. YOU HEAR ME, SOUP? YOU DON'T FREAK ME OUT.

I have watched Viva Laughlin. I will not be intimidated by soup.

Next entry: Viva Laughlin. It was like soup, only one thousand maniacs came in it. Also, it's cancelled. Yay!

Next entry: Holy fucking hell, did anyone else see Viva Laughlin?

I've sure been bitching a lot lately, huh? Well, I'M NOT DONE! I'm sorry, but the latter half of this year is really starting to blow.

Dr. Hair wants me to come in for an ultrasound to rule out "anything scary," which is of course terrifying. I put off calling him today because . . . of the terror. (Yeah, yeah, I'm calling him tomorrow, don't nag me.) In the good news department, I don't have hemochromatosis, probably; in the possibly bad news department, I may have something scary, such as . . . oh, the thinks you can think! Right now, I am infested with malign nanobots, I imagine. You know, that or something really shitty, like . . . oh, I can't stand to think about it. I might have Good Luck Chuck syndrome, which causes your brain to liquefy and run out your ears and ruin your shirt and kill you.

But on Friday, we got some more good news! We're moving! Involuntarily! And I'm not talking about my tremor. The owner of the condo we rent has decided to move back to Seattle, so he's giving us the boot the first week of November. We have to move out. In November.

JESUS FUCKIN' BEEKEEPING CHRIST

It's not even like he's pulling any kind of extralegal shenanigans. He's perfectly within his rights to kick us out; we're month-to-month, so we've got all kinds of nothing here, legally. What's just irritating is that he's a fucking prick who easily could have let us know about this some time ago, but no, he didn't at all. (I suppose I'm going to get a lot of blowback from people arguing that I was a bonehead for letting this be a possibility, and maybe that's true, but really? Fuck this dude. November? Thanks a ton, asshole.) This is a guy, actually, who I have directly spoken to on the phone exactly once, when we moved in, the day we moved in, who seemed disbelieving of my wholly truthful claim that the toilet had chosen that day to die. Since then, there has been no direct contact.

And if you already thought I was stupid, buckle up! It just occurred to me that it gets better: when we do apply to some new place, we get to inform the renters that our current apartment manager does not have a phone number. In fact, he doesn't even have an email address that we're aware of. He takes messages--and uses the email account of--someone we've never met named B. People are going to stare at us like we have three necks, and they should.

It's such a long, dull story about how this situation came to pass that I cannot even bear to try to relate it. But it's been reality for a few years. ("Hi, uh, B., this is a message for W., and our tub drain is backed up. Uh, if he could call us . . . if that's possible . . . uh, that would be great.")

Sigh.

Three-plus years of looking at the Caller ID and seeing "Pay Phone" whenever that guy would call us. Earlier this year, he presented us with a used vacuum cleaner. For some reason. Thanks! He called on Friday to (1) give us our eviction notice, and (2) ask if he could have that vacuum cleaner back. Classy!

Is there any upside here? Oh, it's hard to say right now. We're too close to the horror of having to pack up all of our shit again--moving always sucks hard. I mean, I have no intention of moving all my stuff again--we'll pay movers, but still. And it also occurs to me that we paid a nonrefundable cleaning deposit when we moved in, so someone else can scrub the fucking walls, and if he tries to dick me on the security deposit, I'll do everything in my power to eat his lunch over it.

Next time, I'll try not to bitch. Unless I'm infected with the nanobots, in which case I'm just going to post something like FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!!!!1010101110100010
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you are stupid

Sigh.

Today was my follow-up visit with Dr. Hair! I expected excitement! Edification! Other things that begin with "E" that are not enemas!

What's the opposite of edification?

I'll say this for my Scandinavian-themed health provider: they are time-efficient. (E!) There's a sign in the lobby: "If you have been waiting for longer than 15 minutes, please speak to the front desk." FUCK THAT! Five minutes after I got there, the delightful plump little gnome LPN who greeted me last time called my name. "How are ya, buddy?" she chirped, and warmly shook my hand. I sort of love her in the same way I love turtles. I don't really want to touch her or anything creepy; I'm just a happier person because she is in the world.

She weighed me again--I'd gained a pound, and she crowed, "Good job!" I felt weirdly proud for a moment for gaining one pound, and then she told me to turn a corner, and when I did she cried, "Good job!" Oh, I have nothing to be proud of, I thought bitterly. She's a liar. But then I didn't care, because my gnome was so adorable, and she sphygmomamamanometered me again, read the results and yelled "Good job!" again, and I was charmed once more, even though my blood pressure and heart rate are still pretty high. I have done a good job, I told myself. The gnome says so.

Then it was time for Dr. Hair again, and again, I think I only waited for five minutes before he showed. The Scandinavians continued to impress, time-wise. He stared at the gnome's notes for a bit and asked me how I was doing.

"The same," I said flatly. I still have tremors and funky parasthesias.

"[The gnome] says your cough is gone!" he said, raising his eyebrows. This was true, actually. I remembered on my intake form that they put "cough" as Reason for Visit, and I was all, That's really not the salient thing going on here, but whatever. But I couldn't argue the point.

"That's true. My cough is gone." Then I kind of ruined the moment by coughing. "That was a smoking cough," I said, feeling like an asshole.

"Okay!" Dr. Hair agreed brightly. He listened to my lungs to make sure. "Sounds good! I guess you're not the same, then! We got rid of the cough!"

Well, he had me there. "Yeah, that's cool," I said in the same tones that you might say "So, potato salad."

Then he asked me about the beta blockers. "I literally cannot tell any difference at all," I replied. I had been warned about various reactions to these things, but I honestly couldn't ever recall any emotional or physical effect at all. I might as well have been eating lettuce.

"Hmmm," said Dr. Hair. "Did I give you the 25 milligram dose?" Like I paid attention.

"If you say so," I said.

"Let's double that," he replied, writing a new prescription. "Just take two pills tonight instead of one." Oh, do let's!

(I did; in fact a couple hours ago. You might be interested to learn: I cannot tell any difference at all. I just took my pulse, and it's as hummingbirdish as it's always been.)

He went on to talk about my last blood panel, which he had told me earlier was only of concern because of the high level of iron in my blood, raising the specter of something called hemochromatosis, which you have to admit, is kind of an awesome name for . . . well, a crappy thing, I guess.

You also might love the kind-of--depending on who you talk to--standard treatment for hemochromatosis: you get a pint or so of blood removed. Hey, I was using that! That sounds fun.

"Some doctors don't do that, though," he also explained.

"Why not?" I asked.

"There are some studies," he said cryptically. Hey, can I choose? Because I enjoy my blood, mostly so I can live.

I asked Dr. Hair how this still theoretical hemochromatosis was affecting my primary symptoms.

"Oh, God, it has nothing to do with that," he said. "I have no idea about that." He took out a business card and began writing down phone numbers. "I'm not really worried." I sat there, because I'm apparently really good at that.

"This is a hematologist, if it turns out that liver function is the problem. And this is a neurologist, since with the tremor thing, if you want," he explained as he wrote. I have no idea what's going on, I thought, but I said nothing, because . . . I guess I'm stupid. I stared mutely at the business card and then pocketed it.

Then I got another blood draw and I left. I passed the gnome's workstation on my way out, and she looked up at me and waved happily. "I'll see you next time, okay?" she called.

I love turtles, I thought. I felt a little better. And I suppose that's why you go to the doctor.

DirecTV NFL runs ads for its "Sunday Ticket" package; many of them feature what is supposed to be a caricature of a crusty old prick who crabs at the viewers over the new-fangled DirecTV NFL Sunday Ticket and how ridiculous the whole concept is, and, by extension, the incredibly pussy sense of entitlement that the viewer must feel over having access to DirecTV's absurdly wussified Sunday Ticket package.

The idea is that these play as parody: nobody takes this horrible dumbfuck seriously, right? You totally want Sunday Ticket! Except I don't--this decision is made easier by the fact that I'm stuck with my building's cable package--and I emphatically don't, because I resent DirecTV for subjecting me to this fucking creep in the first place.

The actor playing the fucking asshole is obviously talented (hopefully at playing things other than a repellent assole); I really believe him, because he's really irritating to me. These ads irritate me so much that I take secret glee in noting that in virtually every spot, he is shown alone: his estranged family has left him, his co-workers pay no attention to him, nobody at the Shriner's dinner will sit with him. He's just this awful old man making fun of you, the viewer, for exhibiting interest in the product being advertised.

Frankly, I think these ads are what are making me sick. I'm being consumed by loathing for this poor actor--who has become sort of real to me, to the extent that I derive schadenfreude from his clearly unhappy life--and also with cognitive dissonance over a series of ads that routinely dump loads of feculent sarcasm over its own product.

(Yeah, I'm still sick, and it fucking sucks. Happily, my doctor has no idea what's going on! Good thing I'm going in again on Thursday so he can continue to not know! I'm ready for him to fondle my balls now if it will lead to some conclusive diagnosis. He'll probably tell me to try getting a haircut.)

My father called the other day to ask how I was doing, and we had a chat about that--he's experienced some of these fucking neuropathies before, but I'll be damned if I can figure on a genetic explanation--and then moved on in the conversation. My folks visited recently, and they made a stop at Trader Joe's. I don't think they have Trader Joe's in Idaho, and they certainly don't have one in my hometown. They had bought some canned tuna in oil.

My father really loved this tuna. I mean, he loved it. He loved it like a mother loves Velamints. (Your mom didn't love Velamints? Your mother must have been defective, or possibly not trying to give up smoking during pregnancy.) He asked me if I would go back to Trader Joe's and pick up some of this tuna for him. I told him it was no problem, because really, it wasn't, and we needed to do some shopping anyway.

We went, and I found the tuna. (Things that are weird? Typing "tuna" over and over. Sucks to be you, ichthyologists!) I asked an employee to check on how much of the stuff they had, and she went into the back to look, and returned to tell me. I called my father.

"They have three cases of your tuna," I said. "How much do you want?"

There was no pause. "All of it!" he cried. Three cases.

I went to the cashier. "Whoa! You got a lotta tuna, buster!" Yes. Yes, I do. I felt the tremors coming. I was actually buying close to three hundred dollars of canned tuna. For my parents, who live by themselves in Idaho, and who I guess are joining a militia.

On Wednesday, I will take 144 cans of tuna to UPS and find out how much, exactly, it costs to ship same to Idaho. I'm going to have to fill out that fucking lading form and in the "contents" field write in "tuna." This is going to be disturbing, of course, and probably my arms will start tingling and I'll probably have a TIA right there when the UPS guy goes, "Whoa! That's a shitload of tuna!"

I'm expecting a call next week where my mom furtively asks me if I can score six cases of Velamints, and my entire nervous system will burst into flames, and that crusty DirecTV bastard will stand over my twitching body and call me a pampered pussybaby while he chews his sandwich, and I will know satori.

"Samadhi alone is not enough, you must come out of that state, be awakened from it, and that awakening is Prajna. That movement of coming out of samadhi, and seeing it for what it is, that is one hundred and forty-four cans of tuna."

HEY, I'M NOT DYING! Maybe. Nobody knows.

I went to the doctor today. He actually said to me: "Well, you've got me." Excellent.

I was a little late getting out of the office, so I was busting my ass walking to the office. Also, know that I suffer from white jacket syndrome--I get totally skeezed out going to the doctor. The nurse weighed me, heighted me, and then sphygmanometered me. "Whoa!" she said, and then gave me a look as if I might die on the spot. "170 over 90!" she crowed. "I've always been an overachiever," I said drily. "I think that's swell," she replied. (She really did. She was frankly kind of awesome.)

(When the doc sphygged me ten minutes later, my systolic had already dropped twenty points, which was still horrible, but he was moved to put away the casket brochure.)

The doc was a nice guy; I liked him. Are they required as part of their doctory banter to ask you things like where you went to college? Who gives a fuck? Dr. Hair did! He was really interested. (I call him Dr. Hair to protect his privacy; I came up with this nickname because he had hair.)

Presently, I explained to Dr. Hair all about my confusing problems--the lingering flu symptoms, the bizarre performative neuropathies, the six hairy eyes growing out of my knees--and he "Hmmmm"ed and "Huh"ed appropriately. He took several notes, or possibly made amusing pornographic sketches in my chart.

"Has the internet turned your job to shit? Does everyone wander in going, 'Hey, I've got Baker's Vein and Vermicious Knids!' " I asked at one point, and he barked with laughter. "Lay it on me," he said. "What have you got, doc?"

"I've been picking and choosing between lymphoma and MS," I said.

"Sure!" he said. "I'm not ruling anything out." Say, about that. Can we?

He had me take off my shirt and he had a listen at my lung talents. "It's not flaky," he said at one point. I resisted the urge to mention that my lungs were not pastries, but I figured that they covered that in med school. He mentioned some other crap about my thyroid, but then he gave my neck a grope and seemed to immediately dismiss the idea.

He had me perform some outstretched-hands exercises, trying to get a handle on the whole neuropathy situation. "You're tremulous!" he exclaimed when my outstretched hands shook. "For how long?" he demanded. "I don't know. 1974?" I guessed. He beamed at me; he really seemed excited about this tremor thing.

Finally, he decided to "take a picture": that is, get a chest x-ray. I've never had a chest x-ray. In fact, apart from dental exams, I've never had an x-ray of anything not mouth-related. I simultaneously anticipated and dreaded this, not because it would hurt, but mainly because: what if there is some melon-sized nightmare in my chest?

So I had to go over to some other nurses and wait for the chest x-ray. I also had to get my blood drawn for a CBC and chemical panel, for which I was characteristically totally brave: "Don't ask me to watch this shit," I informed the nurse. I'm so lame. She was a pro, and it was fine.

Waiting for the x-ray nurse, I sat in the waiting room, not far from the vampire who had just drained me for a few cc's. A young blonde woman came up and spoke to her, and the next thing I heard was the nurse saying brightly, "All right! Have you ever given a stool sample before?"

My head automatically shot up at this unexpected series of words, and I caught the blonde woman's stricken eyes. I felt horrible, and looked back at the awful carpet.

"No," said the woman with more aplomb than I would have ever summoned.

The extremely Teutonic x-ray tech gal called me in for the x-ray. I stood against a metal plate, and she shouted at me, through a crook in the door, "BREATHE IN DEEP AND HOLD IT!" I did, and she slammed the door. The machine went BLAH at me, and then she opened the door again. "YOU CAN BREATHE NOW!" she howled. She terrified me.

"I have to develop these," she said. "Go get dressed!" She has a totally unrealized career in BDSM. Well, she would if she weren't terrifically ugly, so everything is probably as it should be.

The bullet: my chest x-ray was clean. ("It'll be reviewed, but it's clean," said Dr. Hair. I think my blood pressure dropped another twenty points right then.)

So I still don't know what the fuck is going on, but I'm immensely cheered that Dr. Hair doesn't really seem too concerned about anything. (Then again, my bloodwork could come back with the thrilling news that all my lymphocytes have turned into tiny plastic bananas or something. Exciting!) He gave me an ADVAIR DISKUS for my intermittent dry cough--I guess--and I kind of already hate it, mainly for the bullshit term "DISKUS." On the other hand, I can't ever have enough corticosteroids. But for God's sake . . . DISKUS. Fuck you, Advair.

He also gave me a prescription for some antibiotics--Z-pack--and a beta blocker for the freaky-deaky blood pressure. So now I feel like an old man. "Mother, can you cut up my steak for me? I've got to go take my beta blockers and hobble around feebly for a while."

While I was waiting to get out of there, the stool sample blonde came walking down the hall again; I caught her eye again. She was gingerly holding a plastic container at arm's length. She looked stricken again, and I looked at the carpet again. I am so sorry I saw you carrying your stool sample, I thought to myself, and herself mentally thought to myself, Boy, me too.

I posed a gedankenexperiment to myself at that moment: If I were single, could I ever date a woman who I had first encountered while she was submitting a stool sample for the first time? I came to the conclusion that I am a huge dumbfuck.

After all that--it's been a lousy week--I reflected for a bit. And then I remembered something important. Dr. Hair never once tried to touch my balls.

At age four, I contracted a nasty ear infection. Two of them, actually! One for each ear. I remember we were on some road trip--my childhood consisted of any number of ill-remembered road trips, suggesting that my parents were, for a while, rootless hippies, which they were, sort of--and I was lying in the back seat of the car, moaning softly, by which I mean loudly.

At some point, I was taken to the hospital, where it was discovered that my ears were, thanks to the infection, filled with compacted dried blood. This was excellent news to hear as a small child, and I soberly responded by immediately making a Barry Sandersesque break for the door, figuring that nothing good was going to happen next. However, as my legs were 18" long, I was easily intercepted.

When the docs held me down and vacuumed out the muck from my ear canals, my mother heard my screams all the way down the hall. This was, by her report, my very first post-innocent-repeating-babytalk utterance of the phrase "fuck you." I think Dad got a talking to.

---

I have a very clear memory, I think age five or six, of being at the doctor's office, and for whatever reason, they deemed it necessary to take my temperature . . . the bad way. I thrashed like the world's tiniest professional wrestler on fire, screaming--let me see if I can remember . . . oh, yes!--"NO! NO! NO! NO!" I do not remember if I deployed a few "fuck you"s this time around, and my mom has no memory of this particular violation.

In the end--oh, shut up--it was really kind of dumb. They finally got me to stop shouting long enough to inform me that they were done. "You are?" I said, totally confounded. In the tumult, I hadn't felt a thing. "That's good," I said. I felt a little victorious about the whole thing.

---

A year or so later, my parents were concerned because of weird cold-like symptoms that would not go away. Wheezing, runny nose, sneezing, the whole bit. Back to the doctor, who figured it out more or less instantly:

"Does he sleep with a feather pillow?" My mom the nurse hadn't thought of the obvious: I had allergies. "Let's find out what he's allergic to," said the doctor.

Do they still do this shit? Because if so, fuck you, medicine. Here's what they did in my day: I took off my shirt and laid down on my stomach while the doctor cut my bare fucking back with a bunch of histological provocateurs. He cut me over and over. Doctors are sadists. Anyway, whatever got red and angry and itchy, I was allergic to!

I was allergic to goddamn fucking everything, and now my back looked like a Stratego board. "He's allergic to," said the doctor, staring dubiously at this incredible litany of everything, "most grasses, hay, straw, animal dander, pollen, Delaware, school sports, human contact, combs, the works of Immanuel Kant, floors, walls, phone books, the concept of emotional blackmail, and house dust." He smiled pleasantly while I thought, house dust? Living as we did in, you know, a house, this sounded like the shits.

We got rid of the feather pillows. The house dust, not so much. It's dust. I spent a good portion of my childhood getting halfway up the stairs in the spring and then having to stop to catch my breath before I could finish the job. One flight of stairs. It would make my mother cry. To this day, I can't look at cottonwood trees without feelings of naked loathing. Happily, Seattle has no cottonwood trees. In fact, Seattle has apparently no allergens at all, as I haven't had an allergy attack in twelve years here.

"Oh, he's also asthmatic," the doctor explained to us. For a period of a year or so, I had to have a weekly shot to control this delightful condition.

So it's only natural that I grew up and became a smoker. I hope that doctor is dead.

---

In fifth grade, my teacher asked me to read something off the blackboard. I squinted, and couldn't make it out. He contacted my parents, who took me to an optometrist. My eyesight was truly horrible, and I was fitted with glasses. We were not a rich family, so I got to choose from the delightful array of horrific plastic glasses frames that are made by shaky buskers in Poland. I looked like an Aryan Henry Kissinger, I wore clothes from Goodwill, and I couldn't walk up a flight of stairs without my alveoli sending up rescue flares.

"I think you need to take a school sport," my father informed me around this time.

---

When I got my physical in order to qualify for school sports--required--the kindly old doctor totally fondled my balls. This was horrifying. Clinical, professional and horrifying.

"You're fine," he said at the end of it all.

I'm allergic to the world, asthmatic, blind and I look like a junior war criminal, I thought. Doctors are fucking stupid. Plus, he touched my balls.

---

I have since had my balls groped many other times, in strange contexts, by doctors. This despite my total reluctance to visit doctors at all. Doctors are all ball fetishists. "I have this thing with my arm hair," you might say. "I'd better feel your balls!" the doctor will say.

---

I forgot to tell you about when I was hospitalized when I was four--allergies? It's lost to me--where I was horribly thirsty, but I was not allowed liquids except for ice chips wrapped in a damp washcloth, which I desperately sucked on for hours. Or when my eyes swelled shut on multiple occasions, generally due to the existence of cats. Doctors were summoned, and when they weren't slicing up my back, they were giving me ice chips in washcloths, and then were probably reaching down to cup my balls.

---

I think I might have to go to the doctor. I don't have a regular doctor, so I assume that this will be a total nightmare, paperwork-wise. I've had this fucking cold--if it is a cold--that simply won't go away, and so I suppose I need to go to a professional ball-handler to tell me, "Oh, God, you're stupid, here's some antibiotics, get lost," right after he clinically and professionally hefts my sack.

I swear to God, if I see a cat that day, I'm going to kick it to death.

Saturday! Was! Another! Day! In! Our! Lives!

Only this Saturday we had a party to go to. Our friends C. and L. decided to throw a party, and so we traveled up to Shoreline--you may remember me writing about this neighborhood before, but if not, all you need to know is that there are lots of cars and boats sitting on dead lawns--to partake of PORK! As C.'s invitation indicated.

Now, I like to rag on C.--it's what guys do--but he and his wife-to-be really do have a perfectly fine house, and C. does make a damn fine pulled pork shoulder sandwich. (This phrase always makes me think of some anthropomorphic pig athlete yelling, "Oh, fuck, I pulled my shoulder on that play!" and then Darkseid shows up and is all like, "I enjoy strained pig muscle!" and he tears off the pig's shoulder and shreds it with the Omega effect and puts it on bread, and everyone says "Darkseid makes one hell of a sandwich, boy." I'm sure you've heard this before. Anyway: thanks, dead pig! Granny Goodness and I really enjoyed eating you.)

When we arrived at Chez C., there was a lively round of Drunk Croquet being played, but it was really too early for anyone to be drunk yet, so they were just playing croquet. Croquet, of course, is a deeply stupid game when played properly but somehow manages to be ridiculous fun when played by ticcy beer-swillers on a lunar-inspired grass-scape. C. naturally recognized that his terrible lawn--tilty and pitted and ravaged (he pointed out some footstep-shaped dead grass spots where his fiancee had trod on the lawn after accidentally soaking her feet with herbicide)--was perfect for this sort of thing, and then did the smart thing and placed the bent, dented wickets thirty feet away from each other, causing the players to take monstrous, Andruw Jonesish wild swings at the balls, and occasionally sending the mallets flying through the aether to maybe cave in someone's windshield. I kept hoping.

Then we ate, and it was pork, and it was good. C., who happily also hates other mammals, also made some jerk chicken drumsticks and some beef chili and some deep-fried turkey heads and a batch of candied bat eyes and a plate of undifferentiated scalded ears. I think I ate Macaulay Culkin's!

Then we got down to what actors and sketch comedians do best: chaotic drinking, look-at-me preposterousness and relentless dismantling of whoever happens to be close enough to you to focus on. We got started with drunk badminton.

There's not much to say about drunk badminton, except maybe to point out that we got sort of fanatical about it to the degree that one of the participants left the party to go to some fucking place to get more shuttlecocks after we destroyed the two that we had. "Where is S. with those fucking shuttlecocks?" we screamed while duct-taping up the wretched shuttlecorpses. Then we would spend ten minutes making cock jokes. "That cock was totally in your face!" Some of my friends work at banks; others at hospitals. I work in cancer research. The next time you wonder why commerce is failing us and science is a stagnant force in our society, you can go ahead and blame us.

During all this, C. would occasionally appear, chewing on a cigar, and would yell incomprehensible things at us. We would typically respond by hurling terrible imprecations at C., because that's how we treat our good friend who fed us free mammals and let us ruin his house; it's just the way we are. Actually, it's easy to explain: we're assholes.

(My favorite was when C. or T. or someone would appear in the second-story window of the garage--the game room, actually--to yell shit at us, because it made me feel like I was on Laugh-In. Then someone would throw a shuttlecorpse or a soccer ball into the window.)

Eventually we all went inside to the upstairs-from-the-garage game room, because it got cold outside and there was a pool table and a poker table in there and also the whiskey. (We had since received and destroyed the new shuttlecocks and made ten thousand more cock jokes, and one guy fell asleep in the hammock, and then on the lawn, but you know: I'm condensing here.)

I got dragooned into playing a doubles pool game; I kicked ass. (Really!) This is because I was drunk. I'm a horrible pool player, but when I've been drinking, I can kill. It also helped when I conked out the other team by smashing in their teeth with my cue; then I herded the balls into the pockets with my hands. Suck on that, gummers! (No, seriously, I did kick ass, because I was sort of drunk.)

Then C. opened up the CASINO TABLE. Which is this little half-sized blackjack foldout table that he has. I promptly tripled up my fake chips (C. has real casino chips) before instantly losing them all on one bet, and so I offered to deal. Emulating C., I would wish the recipient of a leading ace "Good luck!" but then varied my patter by telling people who got nightmare hands like queen-four things like "Say, you're fucked!" or "Nice one, dog's ass!" I was a very popular dealer, as far as I know. It should be mentioned that I was within reaching distance of a giant bottle of Jack Daniels, so I'm sort of assuming here.

I love these assholes. I can only hope that they feel the same way.

Some of my tens of readers may have noticed a drop in posts lately. The reason for this is simple: my life is almost supernaturally dull. This is not to say that I don't enjoy my life--I do! I have a decent job, a wonderful marriage, any number of fairly non-dipshit friends . . . I can't complain. But it isn't very interesting, least of all for anyone else to read about. There's only so many posts I could write where I come home from and watch the game and moan to the wife about Papi's declining stats this season.

I have to watch myself, because when I get nervous about not posting enough, I start to press. I start looking for things to write about, which is a danger, and I start to think about embellishing, which is another danger. I like best the ideas that come to me out of the blue, but when your life is as ordinary as mine, they don't necessarily always flow.

The embellishment thing, for instance. All writers embellish; anyone who thinks they don't are seriously deluded or stupid or nuts. Every writer--says I--fixes things up. (I hope it's obvious here that I'm talking about writing about actual events.) Every writer alters timelines to suit the narrative; we all clean up sorta-remembered verbiage (or substitute reasonably sane facsimiles); we all condense and distill and filter, all verbs which helpfully remind me that most writers also drink.

This normally isn't a problem, at least not for me. This is a stupid blog, and so I am held to no standards whatever, though I like to think I hew to the few I keep. I try not to lie. And when I do lie, I try to lie in such a hyperbolic, overblown fashion that I hope that it is patently obvious that I'm just making shit up.

I probably fail at this, though. It's just too easy to lie. Writers lie all the time, because most of the time, life is just fucking dull. So we pull out our little tricks, and we lie. We insert or import in false details to serve an anecdote. We pretend to remember things that nobody could possibly remember, except for some bedridden mutant like Proust, but does anyone trust Proust?

Writers are liars. Don't trust them.

And especially don't trust me, assuming that you even consider me a writer, as opposed to some twitchy dilettante. I'm also an actor, so I'm also trained in lying. I think I'm pretty good at it. I (read: my parents) spent a lot of money to make sure I got trained very well to lie to you, right to your face. It's no good protesting that when people go to the theater (and nobody does any more, but never mind), that the audience is damn well expecting that I lie to them: it's my job. It's no good because we are delighted to take those very same skills and exploit them for our own base wants and needs.

I have been taught to lie, we realize at some point. This could be awesome.

And so we do. But it's more sinister than even that. It's more sinister because actors aren't just trained to lie, they are trained to lie with the unshakable conviction that they are not lying at all. Bad actors are people who are unconvincing liars. Every time you've ever stared hopelessly at a movie screen and thought, "That is a shitty actor," you have essentially deemed that person a terrible liar. This is doubly insulting because 1. being lied to poorly is exasperating enough in everyday life, and 2. it's even worse that this incompetent got paid money to fail to lie to you, the viewer. Being lied to excellently is one of life's great joys, which is why actors continue to draw paychecks, much like astrologers, psychics and Republicans. (Ohhhhh! I couldn't resist.)

Don't ever listen to actors or writers, or worse, some unholy combination of both. They are liars and aren't to be trusted.

Here's a true story.

Sunday night, the wife went out of town to visit an old girlfriend of hers. So that evening I went down to my cherished neighborhood bar. W. was bartending; W. is my very favorite bartender ever. W. was playing The Who's Who's Next, an album which in my opinion is the finest studio rock album ever recorded.

"I knew you were coming in," said W. "And I like The Who, so we both win." This is only a fraction of why this bar is so goddamn great. W. also knew--because he knows us well--that the wife was out of town for the night. "What do you have going on tonight?"

I looked around. "Apparently the same damn thing I have planned for most nights," I deadpanned. We laughed, and then, as the just-opened place was pretty empty, we shot the shit.

We talked about: the awesomeness of The Who; the various musical plagiarisms of Led Zeppelin; the manic qualities of various other bartenders; the ontological importance of bar backs; the weird dearth of decent Mexican restaurants in Seattle; this time when W. accidentally sucker-punched a stranger in the kidney at a bowling alley; and (of course) the relative awfulness of the current political scene.

This is why bar talk exists: to solve all the problems in the world. If W. and I ruled the world, the world would be just fucking fine. At the end of every conversation in a bar, the world is saved. That, or someone is going to get dumped, which is saving someone's world, probably.

You see how this anecdote really isn't very interesting? It's because it's true. Sort of. It's not all true, but it's mostly true. Does it matter? Do you even believe me? I told you not to. I told you twice.

It's true and it's not true; it's false and it happened to me. I arranged words on a page, you read them, and now you're involved in the lie, too, but you're also stuck with the true parts. You just don't know what they are.

Is it interesting? This is what I always come back to. I don't know. It's interesting to me, but then it happened to me, except for the parts that didn't, but I'm reasonably sure they did. I remember them. You don't, because they didn't happen to you, (shut up, W., if you're reading this [he's not]) but I'm guessing you assumed they were true, despite my desperate urgings not to.

I told you not to listen to me. I gave you good reasons not to. You read this anyway. And I thank you, because if you didn't . . . well . . . what good is an old liar if there's nobody around to listen?

Postscript: Later on that night, I fucked a million hookers, and they all insisted on paying me. No lie.

When I was a tinier tot, I think, oh, six or seven or so, my mother started giving me piano lessons. Now, my mom isn't really a very good piano player--and she'll readily admit this--but she can play, and she thought it would be a good idea to introduce me to the wonderful world of music.

I love music to this day. God, I love it. I know this is not really a very revelatory thing to say: everyone likes music, it moves souls, you remember what was playing when you lost your virginity, blah blah. But hey, I liked music. My mom used to play "The Entertainer" on the piano and I would race manically around the house; not dancing at all, but the sheer delight of moving to this wonderful music. I could not stay still while those sounds were thrumming the air in my ears.

So I took piano lessons from my mother. I did that whole thing where I painfully banged out rudimentary tunes into a tape recorder to send to my grandparents--lucky them! Horrible gonging noise perpetrated by a little fingerless ogre child who couldn't find a tune or a rhythm hidden in a broken hammock! O happy day, grandparents! Listen to your fumbling genetic disaster haltingly plonk out eerie semblences of actual music while stopping midway to holler, "Hold on! I messed that up! Let me go back!" And then it all starts over again.

After only a few months of piano lessons, I quit. It was glorious to quit. It was so glorious, I made quitting a large part of the rest of my life.

Again, as everyone does, I love music. I wanted to create it. And maybe, with a lot of practice and hard work, I could have. But that's the point. I didn't want to practice, and I didn't enjoy hard work. Or, for that matter, easy work. Or anything that rhymed with "work." Even at that early age, I knew about Mozart, for example, and prodigies. That's what I dreamed of: talent without work. I loved playing the piano: I fantasized about pulling a prodigy card out of my horrible ear and playing masterfully just by hearing things played for me. But when confronted with the awful reality that I was emphatically not a prodigy, and that years of hard work would be required, I quit.

Later in life, my father decided, as fathers do, that sports built character in a young boy. And so in junior high, I went out for the football team. (You can imagine how excited my coach was when he encountered me: by all appearances, I resembled nothing so much as a juvenile Marsh-Wiggle.) I lasted one season, playing--of all things--second string defensive tackle before quitting the next year, citing my asthma.

I remember confronting the coach. "I have asthma," I said. (True.)

"Huh." he said.

"I kind of pass out sometimes," I said. (False.)

"Okay," he said.

I also remember confronting my father. "I have asthma," I said.

He didn't say anything. For three days. I didn't care much, really, because frankly, little kids are lying douchebags, and while they know it, they don't mind.

Later, when I got into high school, my father still insisted I play a sport--at least one per year. For unclear reasons, I chose baseball, a game I had manifested absolutely no interest in and had no definable talent for.

I rode the bench for two years, and deservedly so. "Can of corn!" someone would holler after a weak fly ball was hit . . . over there. What the fuck are these guys talking about? I asked myself.

Once I got to start in right field--once--when the coach got pissed off at the normal right fielder for missing a practice. I even got to field a ball when a lefty came up to bat. "It's a lefty!" my teammates cried. "It's coming to you, Skot!" Okay, I thought. I wonder why?

Then in my sophomore year, some of the older guys on the team bus pissed into a 7-Up can and gave it to me on the bus ride home, and I drank some of it, and I knew it was time to do what I knew best: it was time to quit.

And quit I did! (I also learned to my relief, thanks to some ancillary research, that urine is actually sterile.)

I was getting good at this quitting thing. But not good enough. My father still insisted that I participate in some damn sport, so I promptly and cruelly managed to disappoint him by choosing that least masculine of sports: tennis. I didn't even have a racket.

Once again, he didn't speak to me for three days, but this time I think it was less out of disappointment than just utter confusion. It really was a perverse choice, considering that I'd never swung at anything other than a pinata about nine years previously. For my part, I had surveyed the field and figured None of these guys look like they're going to piss into a fucking pop can and hand it to me, anyway. So I was aiming high.

The amazing thing was, I didn't quit tennis. I was terrible at it, but I didn't quit, and in fact, I was on the varsity team my senior year. (This is frankly incredible, but less so in the context of the fact that my high school had less than 400 people in it. But still.)

So the tennis thing is kind of an outlier in terms of quitting. I don't know even why I mention it. I did think of quitting, actually, once, when Carol racked me in the balls with her tennis racket, but I didn't.

But I quit so many things afterwards. I became a quitting gourmet: I quit: pre-law, because of all the fucking assholes; a KFC, because, Jesus Christ, removing chicken livers and a woman with "COLIN JAMES HAY" carved into her arm; and retail.

It's hard for me to believe that I spent five solid years in retail, fielding penetrating questions such as "Is that a clock?" (She was pointing at an ordinary clock.) And "Is that a couch?" (He was pointing at a couch.) I quit that too, without any sort of backup job or source of income lined up at all, because I couldn't take it any more, and it wasn't until I was done, free and clear that I realized: I had no idea, no idea at all, how miserable I was for all that time. It's amazing what your brain will conceal from you if it thinks it's best to do so for your overall mental health.

Five years. I still can't quite believe it.

I finally quit, and shortly afterwards, I talked to my father. It didn't take three days this time. "It's about fucking time you quit," he said.

Indeed.

For Christ's sake, I wasn't sure my erratic host--for which I should say for the last five years I have paid nothing, thanks to the generosity--was going to let me post anything. Finally it relented. I just wish that in the middle of the night it wouldn't get all funky and be like, "Hey! You know what? I'm not going to load this page. I'm beating off to Tiffany Mynx. She's over forty, and looks kind of like a lizard, but what a rack!"

Anyway. You're on your own for a little while. See, the thing is, tomorrow the wife and I are flying to deepest, darkest, rodeoest Idaho for my 20th high school reunion. Yes, proud bulls will get their nuts tied up purely so we can drink beer and cheer them on to stomp on some insane cowboys. Perhaps one of those cowboys will get headcrushed in the ring and they'll audibly shoot him out of mercy in the parking lot. You never know!

The whole thing promises to be a complete clusterfuck. (Note to self: spellchecker does not like "clusterfuck." Other note: spellchecker also does not like "spellchecker.")

For one thing, we're all pushing forty. Which means that it's a bunch of people all standing around talking about things like weight gain, hair loss and prescription medication. I'm not sure why we even bother. We might as well just send in representative samples from our pillboxes. "Doug wins. He's got Paxil, Viagra, Wellbutrin, Propecia, Clugnubber and Magic Boot Root McSmoot Toot, which is illegal in Tennessee. Also, he weighs six hundred pounds and would have been here, but there weren't any winches available."

We might even have a float in the terrible parade, which means that they give you a case of beer and a bunch of Super Soakers to douse the children. I don't really fucking know. I don't know anything.

Can you tell I'm a little freaked out? Christ. Look, I'll see you next week. I'm guessing I'll have tons to write about.

Well, Sunday was my birthday, and I DIDN'T SEE YOUR GIFTS ANYWHERE, my tens of readers! You freeloading bunch of devil turkeys from Devilonia. Wait! Before I go there, maybe I should just assume that all of your gifts are in the mail. Much like my parents' gift was IN THE MAIL, and they TRIED TO DELIVER IT on FRIDAY, but I was AT WORK like the red-blooded American that I am, and so the box full of cobras they intended to deliver to me resulted in a box full of dead cobras, and so now I have several dozen new dead meaty scarves. HA HA, murderous parents!

Please don't send me any more deadly snakes. I have plenty of scarves.

We went to our favorite bar for my birthday, which is is not the bar I have written about in the past--that glorious dive--because that bar has been sold and is being converted to a Mexican restaurant. No, we have a new favorite bar, and it is . . . it is something that is perfect. This bar is different from our old dives--for one thing, they wash the stains off of the walls, and for another, they are steadfast in their refusal to serve me martinis with dead fruit flies in them, no matter how much I plead--in that it is spectacular. It's a scratch bar of the highest order, with a fruit press right there on the bartop, and I do enjoy it every time when some new idiot wanders in and gives it a glance and asks, "So, what's on tap?" Here, finally, is a place near my home (two blocks away, in fact) where I can order a Salty Dog that will actually contain real grapefruit juice. Here is a bar where they have genuine Pimm's cups on the menu. Here is a place that doesn't stare at me blankly when I order a Gibson and then serve me a gimlet.

(If it's not clear already, I have no intention of naming this place because too many people have already discovered it, and we don't need anyone else coming in to piss in our astonishing drinks.)

The bartenders there, of course, are also spectacular, not only for their craft, which is impeccable, but also for their professionalism. For instance, when on Sunday night I asked E., the head bartender, about a drink called a Vieux Carre, which I said another bartender had fixed for me, E. cried "I showed him that drink! Fuck him!" This at full volume at the bar, to which everyone cheered. Fuck him, indeed! I appreciate a bar where the bartenders feel obliged to swear freely, e.g. "Hey, Skot, thanks for fucking me so grandly on that tip last night. What happened, did you get too drunk to add?"

E. also very kindly offered to have a drink special in my honor for the night, and I took him up on it, selecting a peculiar Manhattan variant called a Red Hook, which featured rye whiskey, maraschino liqueur, punt e mes (a sort of Italian vermouth) and orange bitters. I availed myself of several of these during the evening, and upon ordering my ninetieth or so, asked how it was going. "Your drink is taking over the fucking bar," said E. Startled, I surveyed the rest of the barsitters, and sure enough, at least half of them had Red Hooks sitting in front of them. "Every time you guys order one, someone asks me what the hell I'm making. I tell them, and then they want to try one." He paused for a moment--unusual for E., who is a dynamo of a bartender who is only happy when he is behaving like a man whose nuts are on fire--and exclaimed, "Jesus Christ, I have to start doing drink specials!"

This can only be news of the most awesome kind, since the bar in question already has the world's greatest happy hour: 5-7, every day of the week, two dollars off all liquor, no matter what kind or variant, and one dollar off beer. Only wine drinkers lose out, but why go to a bar like this to drink wine?

It was a fantastically good birthday experience. The wife got me a bottle of Redbreast whiskey, DVDs of "Deadwood" (season 3) as well as The Descent AND Dog Soldiers! Holy crap.

Other people gave me cards. You know what? Fuck cards. You know what cards say? I don't buy things for assholes like you. Which, as an asshole, I understand. But honestly? I'd rather have nothing. Nothing is somehow less insulting than a card.

(EXCEPTION TO THIS RULE: A card that features Frog and Toad. Because Frog and Toad are not only friends, they are also AWESOME. Therefore, I am really tickled by my Frog and Toad card. Still friends! It's been like a hundred years! If I had a sister, I would happily let Frog and Toad fuck her. My notional sister would totally pull that amphibian train.)

(DISCLAIMER: Cards are actually fine. God, I'm a tool.)

You're totally welcome to my next birthday party, provided that my cherished bar remains mostly undiscovered. And I'm happy to come to yours! I'll totally buy you a card.

(I swear I was just being a dick about the card thing. I'll probably buy you one. Especially if I can find one with Frog and Toad. Because? They are friends.)

The wife's play has opened, and so I continue to enjoy some private time on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights. This is ostensibly a good thing--it does one good to spend some time every now and then by oneself. Or so I'm told.

The real truth? I fucking bore myself silly.

It's an odd thing. When I've been spending time alone at home when she's off performing, I've been doing the same things I do when she's here: watching piteously bad police procedurals; watching woeful, dreary horror movies; reading my idiotic comic books; reading dreadful novels. (I just tonight finished up Hannibal Rising. Why? Because I read all the other ones, for Christ's sake, yes, even Harris' spirited "fuck you, nagging fans!" that was the rapturously stupid Hannibal. Anyway, as you can guess, it stinks.)

So I'm not doing anything different while the wife is off being the artiste. So why am I so fucking bored with myself? Why do I sit here with the blood roaring in my temples, staring at yet another "Law & Order" rerun or a copy of Iron Man Vs. Chemoglobin and think, Hey, me? You are fucking boring.

I could call friends. I do have them, and I love them. But I don't call them. Normally, I don't have to. I have my wife! (My friends don't call me, either, and I wouldn't if I were them. After all, fuck me: I never call. I have a cell phone that exists solely for me to be able to say, "I have a cell phone." It literally serves no other purpose.)

The thing is, I like being able to watch terrible visual media or read insulting literary refuse while my wife is with me. I'm not sure why, and I don't mean to sound corny or sappy about it. But it makes a difference. Maybe it's just the simple animal comfort of proximity; maybe it's the knowledge that at any time, I can turn to her and say something like "Iron Man is an irritating choad," and be met with a polite, "Well, all right."; or being able to share giggles over astonishing and confusing entities such as David Caruso and the Seattle Mariners.

(Now I kind of want David Caruso to coach the Mariners. He can stare at Adrian Beltre with those dead-reptile eyes of his and whip off his sunglasses to croak, "Let's see some hustle out there, Adrian," and Beltre will jovially blap, "Sure thing, skip!" right before he strikes out swinging and loses control of his bat and it sails into the stands and kills a mother of three, and then David Caruso stonily arrests him with some pithy quip like, "Sometime, coaching can be murder." YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHH!)

On Friday night, I had had enough of me. Me, I said, for God's sake, let's just go to the bar. Me and me had a deal, and so I went down to my new favorite bar, which is helpfully a block away from my apartment. It's about a year old, and I love it; I am sad to say that it has replaced my former favorite place, a faceless thing of a place that charmingly refused to do things like wash its walls. The first straw was when they removed the awful Megatouch machines; the second was when I was recently served a martini with tiny winged insects in it and was told, "They must be in the olives." Must they? Say, I think I'll have a beer.

The new place is much more upscale, done in dark wood tones, dim lighting and a somewhat forced Asian feel. It is a scratch bar, which I love ("We have a cranberry moat out back! Let me go stomp you some juice!"), and their drinks are refreshingly creature-free. They also feature wonderful bartenders who are not at all reluctant to tell you entertaining stories about how last night they got ripped up on some horrific Cambodian whiskey that was laced with methamphetamine and then discovered cellphone evidence of a late-night call to a sex line.

They also enjoy coming up with fanciful drinks with names like Bit of Guv'nor's Time?, Teenager's Lament and Ina Garten's Self-Satisfied Chuckle, and these drinks, though typically Baroque in construction, are unfailingly delicious, and usually feature unusual elements such as port, or Chartreuse, or Xylene. It all sounds very fussy and too-much, but it is not, and I adore this place. So I went.

I seated myself at the bar and fiddled momentarily with my cell phone, making sure that it still was in good useless working order: this is the lonely dance of the unaccompanied person at a bar. Fuck with your cellphone, make it look like you're staring at text messages or something, so you don't look so pathetic. Meanwhile, you are doing something pathetic like playing Canal Control. Which I was.

The other thing the unaccompanied person at a bar does: people-watch. After E., my good bartender, brought me my delicious Thicket of Dense Reasoning (gin, muddled dill, cucumber garnish), I began scoping out my companions at the bar. I was seated near two young ladies enjoying a night on the town; whenever E. would inquire if their drinks were okay, did they need another round, etc., they would titter and coo at him shamelessly. "Would you date him?" one asked the other while E. made their drinks. "I'd fuck him," replied the other, and they broke into laughter that rose to the ceiling like flushed, terrified birds. I stared into my drink and then fumbled with my cell phone again, pretending it was doing something of interest.

A few minutes later, the ladies ordered two shots of something that they called "Killer Bees," and I noticed with clinical detachment that they involved Jagermeister and some other hellbrew that I couldn't identify. By this time, I was working on another house drink called One Thousand Tears of a Tarantula (12-year rum, blood orange, flensed whale blubber, bitters), so maybe I can't say anything, but an icy shudder ran down my spine. After these nightmares, they finally called for E. to settle up. As they regarded their bill with fixed concentration, one clawed at her purse and produced a pen.

"I love these pens. They are so inky."
"They are awesomely inky. They're the inkiest."
The first girl then tunelessly sang: "IIIIIIIIIINKYYYYYYYY PEEEEEEEEEEEENS!"

I finished my drink, and settled up with E., tipping him well, of course. (You don't take care of your bartender? You're a fool.) It was time to go. My girl was coming home soon, and I didn't have to be bored any more.

My recent exploits up in the mountains have caused me to remember the source of my love for snowplay: I used to be a skier. It was a long time ago--junior high through high school--but for a time, I was a serious ski nut.

Don't get me wrong: I wasn't ever very good. I was competent, maybe even better than average, but I never had a shining career in front of me or anything. I competed in a slalom race once; I came in third. I got destroyed by D., a classmate of mine who later went on to grow a rat-tail mullet and got on the fast track in the barfly industry. And some other guy who I don't remember, so . . . eat it, other guy!

I got started when I helped out my father at a part-time job at the ski rental place on our local ski hill. Snowhaven, as it is called, is possibly one of America's most hilariously rinky-dink ski hills. It is by any standard unbelievably tiny; if one chooses to take off at top speed from leaving the t-bar (yes, t-bar--or rope tow, if it's running! Which is never), one can easily get to the lodge within two minutes, easy. When God was leaning over to sculpt Sun Valley, Snowhaven fell lintily out of his pants pocket and drifted to Earth up north as Snowhaven. Snowhaven is to skiing as lost keys are to NASCAR. When the miniature people from the bottle city of Kandor want to go skiing, they come to Snowhaven, and are served hot chocolates and cheeseburgers by Dufflepuds.

Think I'm kidding? Have a look. A full day lift ticket is thirteen bucks. Anyone who has gone to a typical ski resort knows that the employees all wear ski masks and are accompanied by gorilla-like brutes whose job is to seize your ankles and shake you upside-down vigorously until all your money is on the floor. Then they take your credit cards, jewelry and dignity before turning you over to the attendant surgical team, who promptly remove a kidney. Getting charged thirteen dollars for a lift ticket is, in the skiing world, a lot like finding a unicorn eating a leprechaun.

Not that it mattered. As a worker at the place, I got to ski for free, once I was done helping out my dad with the rentals. After that, I was free to suit up and go ski my feet off, run after glorious two-minute run after another. At first, I wore stuff from the rental shop, but soon, as a Christmas present, my folks got me real gear of my own: namely, Atomic "Red Sleds," which I prized; these were moderately famous skis because they were worn by Bill Johnson when he won the 1984 downhill gold in Sarajevo. I cherished them beyond all measure, basking in how pristine they were for a little while--about a week--before some guy skiied right over them and laid a gash down to the metal.

My dad got me lessons to get me started; Snowhaven had a ridiculous little bunny hill with a tiny rope tow. My instructor taught me how to snow plow, and I immediately demonstrated a flair for the sport when on my first successful vertical run, I instantly forgot to put my skis in the V position and skiied off of the bottom of the hill into the parking lot. My instructor wearily took out a hip flask while the poor bastard in the Lilliputian rope tow cockpit sighed and fired up a tinfoil pipe.

I got better, of course, and eventually developed into that pestilence of the ski course, the Boy. Boys don't much give a shit about schussing back and forth in elegant arcs, enjoying the snowscape and nature's beauty. Frankly, fuck nature, fuck beauty and fuck you. Boys are interested in two things: speed and jumps. Either a run was a kamikaze dive straight down to the t-bar line (capped off, of course, with a supremely irritating last-minute stop where your skis throw an icy fantail of skidded snow all over everybody else) or it was a looping, cross-lane adventure where jump was followed by jump, young boys flinging themselves into space for ridiculous distances and attempting to perform ski tricks with exotically dumb names, like a "mule kick" or a "daffy" or a "spread-eagle" or a "helicopter" or any combination that one cared to attempt, so long as one was always, always making sure to maximize the possibility that, upon landing, one was most likely to snap a femur.

Of course I fucked up a lot. I really loved to jump, and it was great fun, but not so fun? Landing. Quite often, I would wipe out spectacularly, resulting in what we loved to call--and call we did, when we witnessed it--a "snow sale." The optimal outcome of a snow sale is: poles 10 meters away; skis five meters away, hopefully pointing awkwardly toward the sky at odd angles; hat utterly missing, as if carried of by angry birds; goggles 25 meters away, impacted and invisible into the groomed snow; teeth unrecoverable. Then, if you were very lucky, lying there dazed in the snow, you'd hear that call--"SNOW SALE!"--and then several of your good friends would swoop down on their skis, pick up your shit, and cackle all the way down to dump it outside the lodge, leaving you to trudge dolefully all the way down to retrieve the stuff.

Repeat this for nearly every Saturday night in January for a few winters, and you have reconstructed my time at Snowhaven exactly.

I did get better. I eventually mastered the daffy without exploding on impact; I took on the legendary Jump Hill, Snowhaven's single black diamond run (yes: one), which was right next to the t-bar for maximum showoffiness. I figured out how to ski backwards; I figured out how to ski on one ski with the other cocked behind me at a 90-degree angle, the leading tip of my ski carving a trough in the snow; I figured out how to annoy everyone else on the t-bar by applying drag to the cable, then suddenly releasing the resistance, causing everyone else to ride out the resultant jerk on the line, hopefully resulting in some old people losing their balance and ignominiously falling off the t-bar.

And once, taking my best friend B. up to the hill to learn how to ski, I maliciously took him right to Jump Hill; B. of course, like me once, completely froze, forgot his magical snow-plowing skills, and then parallelled straight down the slope at the speed of sound, his screams Dopplering back to me nicely. At the bottom, terrified beyond rational thought, B. simply elected to fall over on his side to stop himself, and the resulting explosion of powdered snow, B.'s limbs, and every item of clothing and gear resembled nothing so much as those Andy Capp cartoon panels where Andy and Flo indulge themselves in some enthusiastically vigorous domestic violence. I half-expected SFX lettering to float out of the incredible cloud of mayhem: "BOOM!" "THRAKK!" "SNO!"

I doubled over with laughter as B. finally coasted to a stop and lay half-dead on his back, the surrounding landscape littered with the neon Gore-tex of B.'s formerly useful ski gear and clothing. He made croaking noises and experimented with the concept of movement. It was clear that there was only one thing to do.

"SNOW SALE!" I screamed. B. feebly waved at me as I gathered up all his shit and then shouted at me weakly as I glided down the mountain to cheerfully dump it all outside the lodge. I went inside and ordered a cheeseburger and waited for B. to make his lonely, embarrassing trek down the hill. Boy, it was fun. Boy oh boy.

Boys.

HEY EVERYBODY I GOT PUBLISHED YO!

I know that you've been spending time this weekend honoring our presidents, but if you have a minute, check me out at CRAM Magazine! They're a web magazine! And they are totally into . . . cramming! I guess.

Anyway, they asked permission to publish a couple of things I've written, and, astonished by the fact that they actually asked, I told them, YES! Please! I wish to cram and/or be crammed!

In truth, they put out a really nice-looking mag, and there are some very cool things in there, many of which don't feature lots of profanity or cryptic, unsettling references to "spuzz." It's a swell publication, from what I can tell, which means that they are most likely doomed.

Plus, they're liars. I quote from their site: "CRAM is devoted to the author who writes intelligent, engaging articles and just wants a place to publish." Which is nonsense, given that they hit me up, but whatever. Give them a shot anyway. Do it for the presidents. Thomas Jefferson would have wanted you to CRAM it. It's in the constitution.

Every Sunday night, the wife and I have our friend R. over for game night, and we play all kinds of games: Settlers of Catan, Wyatt Earp, Ticket to Ride, etc. We used to play mumbly-peg for a while until R. lost his thumb and stained the shit out of our carpet to boot. Anyway, we usually have a good time, because I always win.

It's not a mystery why I win all the time. For one thing, I'm fucking brilliant. When it comes to strategizing about, say, resource distribution, or planned routing of train tracks, well, I'm basically this century's von Clausewitz. For another thing, I've got heart. My heart? It's fucking huge. I've got a massive heart; it's the size of Secretariat's. You can hear my goddamn heart across the room, and it sounds like someone is playing "Tainted Love" in my fucking chest. That's why I win.

But something curious happened this last Sunday. Something downright perplexing. I lost. I lost at Ticket to Ride, for Christ's sake, and I lost to that ass banana R. I couldn't believe it, but there it was. Impossible but true.

But I figured out why R. won. He cheated.

It's the only possible explanation. R. cheated. I don't know how, but he did. Did he cheat with his brain? I wondered. He must have. He used his stupid cheating brain to beat me, and it really pissed me off.

You ever hear your mom or grandma spout off that ridiculous old saw, "Cheaters never prosper"? Thanks, grandma, you confused goddamn bat. Go back to your half-finished TV Guide crossword puzzle. What a bunch of fucking crap. And I had proof right in front of me, in the form of R., grinning like a macaque, prospering his ass off right in my fucking living room. "Cheaters never prosper"? Right. If you believe that, you probably also believed your grandma when she came up with other winners like "Suck a dick every day!" and "A slice of cheese between your knees will foil the fleas." Thanks, grandma: now my palate has the salinity of the Dead Sea and my body looks like a relief map of Mars thanks to the relentless flea infestations.

My grandmother ruined my life, frankly, until I learned that the world didn't play by her rules. I hate you, grandma, and I'm glad you're dead.

Where were we?

Oh! Right, cheating. That stupid fuck. He had the audacity to cheat me right in my own damn house. I couldn't tell if he was pulling cards off the bottom of the deck, or sneaking game pieces on to the board, or using his brain to play better than me, but he clearly was pulling some monkeyshines.

And you know? This crap has been going on for all of my damn life. I remember playing kickball in elementary school--at which I was, quite honestly, preposterously talented--and my classmates cheated all the fucking time. They weren't even shy about it. "Kurruk's up!" they would cry as I got up to take my kick. "He's asthmatic, so move in!" Goddamn cheating creeps. Insider information passed around the schoolyard like a dazed hooker. I couldn't believe it. And as if that weren't enough, the little bastards would do things like get me out by catching the ball or pegging me on the base path, cheating blatantly with their superior genetics, their stronger muscles, their faster reflexes.

Four Square? Same fucking raw deal. There I was, honestly playing the game in its pure form while the little refugees from a Dickens novel were fucking around breaking the rules. One kid always was like "Bus stops!" and I was like "Hey, no bus stops!" and then the lousy little bastard would go, "SLAM! And you're out!" while smashing a bus-stopped ball into my square and then getting his buddies to hold me down while a dog licked my asshole and I screamed for a teacher, or God, or anybody for help, and they all laughed, they laughed at me, and when they all mysteriously died a few months later after a series of improbable heart attacks--the coroner was puzzled by a spate of eight-year-olds suffering such explosive cardiac events--I didn't even feel bad. They were cheaters, because I didn't win.

I'd like to point out for the record that they never found that dog and nobody can prove anything. The point is, I survived. Me and my horse-sized subwoofer of a heart survived just fine, and those cheating little shits croaked when their hearts turned into shuddering jelly.

I'm still here. And I'm a winner. Even when I lose, I'm a winner. Hell, everyone knows I'm a winner, even when I lose to a dirty cheater, because when I do lose, I make sure to throw a fucking fit about it. When R. won the other night, do you think I congratulated him? I don't think so. "You're a filthy cheating pile of shit," I informed him. He made some idiotic wounded noises, and had the inflamed cojones to accuse me of being a poor loser. What a dick. Like I'm a loser at all. He didn't win! He cheated! "Probably with your fucking brain," I sneered at him, which left him amusingly confused, as if he didn't know how to respond.

"What is your problem?" he asked, playing for time.

"My problem is, you cheated me, you fucking Gypsy cheating wandering hairy mongrel!"

"I'm from Bremerton, you fuckup!" he stammered, trying to maintain the ruse. "I'm Swedish."

I ignored him, and in a fury, wandered out to my deck and began pitching rocks at my neighbors' windows. "CHEATED BY A GYPSY! GYPSY'S USING HIS BRAIN DOWN HERE TO FUCK ME OVER! ATTICA! ATTICA!" The neighbors rained down a hail of garbage on me after a while, as a tribute to my righteous outrage. "Shut the fuck up!" cried one person who threw down a garbage sack full of coffee grounds, presumably intended for me to pour into R.'s cheating goddamn pants. "Thanks!" I cried. I needed the ammunition.

But R. had already fled. His kind always shows yella. Beat me at my own game, will you? I don't think I'm going to sit still for that, Jethro. You fucking hillbilly. Take a hike back to Gypsylanti. My wife stared at me, wide-eyed, in what I assume was naked admiration. I won't stand to be cheated any more. I just won't accept it.

Because I am a winner.

Well, I have to say that 2007 so far has been a REAL PILE OF SHIT, people! Did I not demand not so long ago that the world needed to get better? Well, it hasn't. Stupid world.

Don't get me wrong. Nothing that horrible happened to me or anything. But there was a definite lack of awesomeness this weekend that frankly I resent. It's starting to piss me off.

For one thing, as we often do on Friday evenings, we rented a couple of horrible movies. My tens of faith-ish readers have long known about my near-fetish for appallingly bad movies, and so we figured we were in for a banner night with a double bill consisting of the remake of The Wicker Man and the screamy-meme-y Snakes on a Plane.

Snakes on a Plane featured things like a soon-to-be-dead chick with great big naked tits and a guy getting his dick bit by a reptile.

What does it say about The Wicker Man when I tell you that it could have been vastly improved by both of these things?

I never saw the original Wicker Man, but I am reliably informed that it featured all kinds of gratuitous nudity. WELL, NOT THE REMAKE, BUSTER! And the reason why is clear: director Neil LaBute, famous for such life-affirming works such as In the Company of Men, simply loathes people. All people. Only a colossal misanthrope could take a cult movie noted for its gratuitous nudity and remove all of it in favor of scenes with the ham-scented Nic Cage pointing a gun at a pagan on a bicycle, screaming "STEP AWAY FROM THE BIKE!"

You'll note that I didn't warn you about possible spoilers. That's because I don't want anyone to watch this movie. If you read that and got pissed off, thinking, Well, shit, I'm not going to watch that now, then good. Don't watch it! Nobody should watch it! Ever! It's fucking horrible! It will make you shit out your soul!

Here's another movie-ruining moment! You'll never believ