It was my father's birthday today, so I gave the cantankerous old bastard a phone call. I asked how his day was going. "I went to Ernie's and had a hamburger," he said. "Now I'm playing with my guns." Golden years! Actually, he does have his fun, of a sort--he spent a few minutes explaining that even though the economy is falling into the septic tank, he's still making money. I didn't bother to tell him that I couldn't tell a money market from a cheese market, and anyway, he lost no time making it clear that I will never have to: he enjoys, in every conversation, explaining to me the various ways he is burning through any meager inheritance I might think of looking forward to. This time, it's a fishing trip that he's taking in July. He and a buddy are taking a seaplane flight somewhere into B.C. to stay in a lodge and fish the inlets. "It's going to set me back four thousand bucks!" he crowed. "So you're not getting that."

His birthday is the opposite of my birthday! I thought. It really makes me laugh, because I hate myself. And really, it is kind of funny. Anyway, we chatted about the trip a bit; he's very excited. "So you're not ocean fishing, then?" I asked. "Oh, fuck no. I'd rather fish than puke." Eminently sensible. Words of wisdom! In fact, that's what I'm putting on the grasping bastard's tombstone: "DISPLAYED INDIFFERENCE TO ESTATE PLANNING; OPPOSED TO VOMITING."

Then he mock-threatened that if the economy really tanked that he and Mom would move in with us. This was so comically inconceivable that we both shared a laugh. This is how you grow closer together with your parents: you gracefully accept the fact that as the years continue, it becomes clearer and clearer that you find each other alien and weird. It's funny!

I'm with him on the ocean fishing thing, though. Not that I've ever been ocean fishing. But I did once go whale-watching.

It was back in '94 or so that a bunch of us computer buddies--oh, all right, if you must know, there was a period in my life that I was an AOL user, and I frequented the trivia games--decided to "meet up," as we youngsters liked to call it, in "real life." And so the lot of us found ourselves all together at a hotel in San Jose.

I was working retail at the time, and it took my last cent to even get there in the first place, so when the whale-watching expedition got put together, I demurred. But a bunch of us had already gotten drunk together the night before, and, inexplicably, the others decided against all reason that they liked me, and so they paid my way--generous friends! I will never forgive you--and so I was suddenly in too.

No matter how much I might want to, I will never forget this trip. The boat was about 30 feet long or so, and the sky was slate-gray as we TOOK TO THE WAVES! And it was fun! For about fifteen minutes. P. was the first to fall as we met the swells. You all know the common theme of stories like these: Uuuuup, dooooowwwn, uuuuup, dooowwn. P. went down almost instantly; he retired to the meager little cabin and lay on a bench like a discarded valise. He was about the same color, too; he moaned like an old door.

I assumed I was made of sterner stuff than that, and jauntily strode the pitching deck, occasionally jauntily falling down to relieve the growing mood of unease. M., a vivacious blonde, was the next to succumb, and she daintily donated her lunch over the side of the boat. "I feel a lot better!" she exclaimed, which earned her some glares from other passengers. I was still doing okay, but I must say I was feeling . . . off.

M.'s yarking had, of course, moved others to similar reactions, and the dominoes were now starting to fall; temporary friendships were formed among the side-by-side vomiters, with much earnest back-clapping and shoulder-massaging amongst former strangers who found sudden solidarity with the people emptying their stomachs right next to them. The passengers were also beginning to unite in the feeling that this sucked.

We hadn't seen any whales at all. The crew clearly didn't give a shit; this was par for the course.

By now, I couldn't ignore that I was being affected. It wasn't nausea, really--I'll go ahead and let you know now that I did not throw up on this trip. It was more like an all-consuming awfulness of the entire body. My head felt swollen and ached, my skin felt taut and uncomfortable, and I had an uncomfortable feeling of dissociation from my legs, as if they existed independently of my upper body. I had no idea what to do about this. I quickly realized what not to do, which was to look at anybody else. By this point, fully four-fifths of the passengers were the color of dingy underwear; many were creeping around the deck on hands and knees, supplicants to a God that either wasn't listening or, alternatively, was hugely entertained. One woman, who herself seemed to be immune to the pitching seas, was shouting at any crew member who would listen (zero) to turn the boat around, this on behalf of her stricken husband, who was red-facedly vomiting nearly continually, because of his "bad heart."

Can you puke to death? I wondered. I figured we were going to find out. Some middle-aged fellow pitched forward with such force that his eyeglasses leapt off his face and joined his last meal into the waves; he waved at them weakly and forlornly. He helplessly and touchingly rubbed his unhappy face for a moment, feeling the unfamiliar nakedness briefly, before once again leaning over to unmaw. Closest to me was another guy who wore a khaki-green rain slicker, and it wasn't until that moment that I fully realized the meaning of the phrase "turning green." He was almost literally the same color as his jacket. He looked like the villain from I Know What You Did Last Summer if here were the Gorton Fisherman and also a face-painting fan of Army football.

For my part, I had my own strategy. I couldn't stare at the waves; they just made me vertiginous. I couldn't look at anyone else; that just made me invent strained, ridiculous comparisons. Plus, they looked worse than I felt, at least the sufferers. Worse were the smug fuckers who were feeling no effects at all. They strode proudly around the deck, and we were all too weak and miserable to do the right thing, which would have been to throw them screaming overboard. So I did this: I stared.

I found a distant set of hills on the horizon from which we had set from (I told you it didn't take long for us all to go wobbly). I fixed on that set of hills. And I stared at it, and stared at it, and stared at it. I could probably draw the precise shape of that set of hills from memory to this day. Those hills were my referent for sanity. I didn't feel better for doing this; the point was, I didn't feel worse.

Eventually--we never saw any fucking whales, of course, unless someone barfed up just the right undigested Animal Cracker--the crew relented in the face of our wretched faces, and they turned back. It took us six days to return to the shore. By which I mean probably forty-five minutes. I maintained my bug-eyed watch on the hills the entire time, clutching a post on the deck like a strangler. The next day, my nerveless fingers could barely pick up a pen, not even to stab the people who had kindly paid for my whale-watching ticket.

It's helped me out a lot writing this. It really has. For one thing, I now know what I'll be putting on my father's headstone. And even better, I know what I'm putting on mine.

NEVER ONCE SAW ONE FUCKING WHALE
OPPOSED TO VOMITING
ENJOYED REFERENCES TO GORTON'S FISHERMAN

This was the weekend of a monumental annual event! The child care center that the wife works at--and has for some time--held its annual fundraising evening, with several silent auctions, a raffle, and one live auction, complete with actual auctioneer. It's a massive affair, and almost all the parents show up (not to mention the large number of them who help set the thing up), and it's very important.

Naturally, over the past six or so years, I've never attended a single one. Until this year! This year, I felt I had to attend, mainly because the wife asked me to. "Some parents are starting to joke, I think, that you don't really exist," she explained.

Well, I won't stand still for accusations of nonexistence, as many state jurisdictions have come to learn. Fucking Utah. I may have done my bit for obstruction, but those fuckers damn well know I'm no bigamist. Also, that I exist. Sneaky Mormon DA. Don't get me started. (Future Skot: I just reread this paragraph, and I'm not going to delete it, even though it's a weird joke that doesn't work and doesn't make much sense. I just wanted to put that out there. Just move along.)

Anyway, so the thing was a big rubber chicken dinner affair for those stuck for the long haul; I was only expected to show up for the cocktail hour, which, you know, I'm always grudgingly up for. Also, even for Very Important Spouses of the staff, non-employees wanting catered dinners were charged $40, so fuck that. I traded in a drink ticket--because apparently, nonprofit fundraisers are run exactly like Bingo Blackout Bonanza down at the Elk's Club--for an IPA and perused the hundreds and hundreds of items up for glomming on the silent auction tables. They ranged from the sublime (6 weeks of intensive language lessons) to the ridiculous (Zune--my friend J. excitedly asked, "Was it a brown Zune?!") to the simply confusing ("Paint your own plates set!").

(Seriously, though. Paint my own plates? Who wants to do this? To what purpose? You're just going to get food all over them and then have to wash them to enjoy their pristine, painted state again, so what's the net here? You might as well auction off a piece of paper saying "Make your own bed!" There's crafts where you do things for fun and you wind up with pretty or interesting or useful things, like say knitting, and there's crafts that are simply crafts for crafts' sake, things you do to help ignore the vast existential angst that would otherwise consume your mind, like painting plates. It might have been the most depressing thing out there, except maybe for the case full of fortune cookies and the fortunes all said "You should go to the dentist.")

The live auction stuff was more interesting to read about--again, I went home long before that shit started. One family offered their coastal Spanish villa for a week to the highest bidder; all you had to do was get to Spain. The wife reports that that little dilly went for around $2500. A tidy sum! No report as to what the hopefully brown Zune went for. I assume: one hundred million dollars. It was 8 gigs! You can almost fit a Built To Spill song on there.)

So while I was there, I mostly prowled around the place trying not to look like too much of a shambling fuck. I wore some natty jeans--NATTY!--along with a velvet jacket that I got at a Huggy Bear Tribute Sale down in the hobo district a couple years ago. I was gladhanded by any number of nice people, most of them women, for some reason. The dads might have all been getting crocked in preparation for some very male bidding wars and the attendant cock-waving at all. At any rate, I've never been good with names anyway, and I was soon lost among the dozens of hi-howareya-nicetameetchas and what Tom Wolfe indelibly described as "boiling teeth."

I met other people too, who were not Lemon Tarts or Social X-Rays, and whose teeth did not boil. One of those was the auctioneer. The wife introduced me to him, and he exclaimed, "Of course! I remember you from last year!"

"I thought you looked familiar!" I exclaimed. As I mentioned before, I've never gone to one of these events. There's no point in even trying to set this sort of thing right.

"He's high, right?" I whispered to the wife after he wandered off.

"I think so," she replied.

And I met someone else. I met a man . . . I wondered if I should even use his name here, because when you write a blog that is read by tens of people, you should be a little careful, you know? But then I realized that if that certain somebody has his own Wikipedia page, his personal info is already kind of out there, so what's the point? And so I can reveal this.

It TURNS OUT . . . that one of the wife's co-workers is dating a certain Mr. Garrett Wang, aka Ensign Harry Kim from the TV series "Star Trek: Voyager," possibly the least-loved entrant in the Star Trek franchise, although I have to say I'd watch it over "Enterprise," but I may have Scott Bakula issues after realizing partway through the run of "Quantum Leap" that that show was, in fact, insultingly horrible.

Anyway, as much as I wanted to give him the whole "DUDE YOU ARE HARRY KIM" business, I didn't have the heart; I just didn't want to be that guy. He seemed like a perfectly nice fellow, and I figured he had a long three hours or so of half-drunk dads strolling up to him asking if he ever got to fuck Jeri Ryan, so he didn't need any shit from me.

Besides, what could I say? How would he respond?

"DUDE YOU ARE HARRY KIM."
"Sigh. Yeah. But I never got to fuck Seven of Nine."

"So, Kate Mulgrew."
"STOP. Ugh. Let's go get some more beer."

"Let's free-associate. Tell me how you feel when I say 'CHAK-O-TAY!' "
"I . . . it was nice to meet you, but I have to go bid on a brown Zune."

I think we could have been close. I really do. Or he might have been high.

The first couple years I was in college, I would come home in the summers. I had two jobs waiting for me those years: one was doing p-line surveying for the Forest Service (don't ask--it's more boring than public television), and the other was doing the clean-up shift at the local sawmill. That was once a week, on Saturday mornings. Occasionally, as I was told by Gary, the foreman. "Occasionally I'll call you for some help," Gary told me when we first met. "It probably won't be every Saturday."

It was every Saturday. Every fucking Saturday at six AM the phone would ring, and Gary's funereal voice would march implacably down the phone lines, through the receiver and into my ear, where it would then start brushing its voice-teeth with steel wool right there in my fucking ear canal. If it sounds deranged and kind of complicated, remember that it was SIX AM ON A SATURDAY.

"Skot. Need ya today," he'd invariably say. Now the voice was taking a bone saw to its voice-ankles. "I'm pretty tired, Gary," I'd say every time.

"I'm fuckin' tired too," Gary would reply flatly. "Tough old world. Need ya today." Then he'd patiently wait while I hopped up and down silently, waving the phone around in a fury. He knew I wouldn't hang up or snap back, because Gary had that quiet sort of demeanor that had a tendency to scare the living shit out of everybody.

"All right, I'll be there in half an hour," I'd always say. "See you in a few," Gary would say, and hang up, and as the phone line clicked into silence, his voice would die in my ear and start to rot there, macerating my brain with its fetid echo.

The Bible tells us that God rested on the seventh day, and I can tell you why: it's because on the sixth day, the exhausted Motherfucker had to clean out His divine sawmill. He looked at this enormous fucking building, the Silver City's stinking, clanking, yammering machinery, littered with animal shavings, shattered soul-fragments, discarded jackalopes, an entire room filled with excess night, etc. etc., and He thought: Fuck.

Cleaning up a sawmill is not without its excitement. For one, there's the unavoidable fact that not all of the machinery is shut down when it's being cleaned, so there's always the off chance of being sucked into some shrieking geartoothed leviathan. Or there's an even better chance that one of the (exhausted, idiotic) burnouts that you work with will simply turn on a machine at the wrong time, such as when you're standing on it. Or in it. That's what happened to a fellow known only as Jerry, who some years ago was cleaning the innards of some gigantic piece of infernal destruction--I've long forgotten the names of most of these things--when someone for unclear reasons turned it on. The device in question resembled a six-foot tall mixing bowl, and had two-foot long metal blades that whirled at the bottom, and that's how the legendary Jerry was turned into tapioca one lonely Saturday afternoon while the horrified workers unlucky enough to be present were treated to the unforgettable sight of Jerry's upper torso bouncing merrily and leglessy above the rim of the death bowl until someone unscrambled his nerves long enough to shut the man-mixer off.

So there was a certain brain-tingling sense of adventure when one found himself wedging himself into the narrow space between two four-foot tall circular blades to brush the conveyor belt free of sawdust. I got jobs like that because I was skinny, or so I was told. A darker voice inside my head told me, It's because they hate you and they are going to turn you into thinly-sliced chum. Which may have been true, but I was not murdered, probably because everyone realized that someone would just have to go in afterwards and clean all the me out of the blades.

The debarker was another crowd favorite. The debarker is just what it sounds like: it's a giant structure that violently bullies all the bark off of logs before they enter the sawmill. It's so giant, of course, that it is outside. Which further means that cleaning the thing means climbing around on the thing clearing it of enormous strips of bark. Which further means that the task becomes exponentially more horrible when the bark happens to be soaking wet, which it always was, because the powers that were always decided that the debarker needed to be cleaned right after a punishing rainstorm--or, better, during a punishing rainstorm.

I never did see someone turned to a paste at the sawmill, but I did see one unfortunate fellow take a slip on the wet debarker chain and have one of the sharpened cleats that grab the logs go right into his ass; he howled like silverback and wriggled while we all stared at him until someone vaguely in charge told us to "unstick that boy." It was horrifying, to be sure, but slightly mitigated in my mind by the convenient fact that I thought the guy was an asshole anyway.

But really, the job was mostly dreary. Mountains of sawdust that needed moving from here to there; tiny little flywheels bearded with filaments of wood that needed brushing; magnetic plates on conveyors that needed clearing lest nails, spikes, wristwatches or severed boot-clad feet gum up the valuable sawblades. The dreaded Saturdays were, if truth be told, hated mostly for their endless grey tedium and numbing ennui, only occasionally shot through with electrifying moments of grave, pointless and stupid bodily damage. Sort of like a Uwe Boll film, but with shovels.

After my second summer of this nonsense, I told Gary that I'd had enough; the next year I wouldn't be coming back home. He chewed his mustache for a moment, regarding me with unsurprise.

"Well, that's too bad. You were a pretty good worker, even if you are a dinky little shit," he said. I regarded this as high praise. "You could really get in those tight spots 'tween the blades," he continued with a sigh. I felt the previous compliment shrivel up a bit as his voice shimmied up my brainstem and started doing a hornpipe on my medulla; I wanted to get the fuck out of there and go home and shower for six days and be done with the place.

"Well," he said, readying his final benediction to me. "You won't believe me now, but you're going to miss this job some day." Now the voice was doing half-pipe stunts in the buttcrack of my brain that leads down to the corpus callosum, and getting some pretty sweet air.

"You ain't never gonna have another job that gives you so much wood," he deadpanned.

Gary's been dead for years after succumbing to a typically awful and futile bout with cancer, but his voice lives on inside my head to this day.

Right now it's singing "Sussudio."

The other night, while at the Bar That Shall Not Be Named with the wife, we had the following exchange. See if you can tell where it all went wrong!

I was asking the wife about work--day care--and led off with an innocuous gambit: "So, how were the little douchebags today?"

She assured me that they were no more monstrous than usual, and related a few short anecdotes. One involved a child who enjoys sandwiches more than anything in the world, and when eating one, further enjoys occasionally hoisting it into the air like a victory flag. Another child evidently derives glee from launching himself off the top of staircases; another is only content when gnawing on a particular endtable in the room. In other words, nothing new: we are ruining our children and turning them into the next generation of psychopaths, depressives and otherwise damaged revenants.

I already like them better than the Boomers.

Then talk turned to her staff. I always like hearing about them, for it seems that the only people more fucked up than our society's children are the ridiculously underpaid wraiths that we barely pay to take care of them. Plus, I am acquainted with many of them, so I always get a little frisson of self-satisfaction in hearing of their varied plights. It's like watching "COPS," only every time someone gets punched in the neck, you get to yell something like, "Hey, that's Donny! Ha ha! Right in the neck! Oh, Donny! I never liked you."

Eventually, the conversation turned to Miss X, an employee of the wife whose misadventures are storied and invariably hilarious, usually due to her curious worldview-slash-psyche--which may be described as one part palsied libertarianism, one part hurtling-through-space brio and perhaps just a splash of pure, distilled run, you fools, run! I'm always pleased to hear of her hijinks, because they usually involve some flavor of unadulterated human pain.

A question suddenly occurred to me. "Does Miss X ever have boyfriends?" I asked.

[NOTE FOR THE STUPID: This is where it all went wrong.]

"Sure," said the wife. She proceeded to tell me about one fellow in particular who endured no less than three or so separate dates where Miss X showed up forty-five minutes late each time because she was spending time filing her teeth or ironing her ears or some such. She was apparently quite surprised when he stopped showing up for their dates, and promptly would call to berate him. From what we know, he has since moved to Tobago and has filters on all incoming media to block anything that contains the alpha string "ayn rand."

Well, I just had to laugh.

"Oh, sure," said the wife, giving me a little elbow jab to the ribs. "You think she's cute."

All my blood ran into my ass and my breathing became shallow; I gawped like a flounder and farted nervously through my suddenly engorged cheeks. Never has a trap been so casually sprung; never has one been so ineptly responded to. "What!" I cried. "Why I! What!" I dived for my Manhattan like a raptor spying a fish. The wife stared bemusedly at me as I tried to calm myself.

Now, the thing is, Miss X is indeed cute. Anyone would say so. I attempted to explain this.

"Sure, I guess," I said, adopting a speculative tone, as if I were discussing landfill conditions in Omaha. "But she's not the kind of girl I'd go for." (This is true! I know: it doesn't matter. I'm a fool.) I mentally dusted off my hands here in a satisfied "case closed!" way.

"That's good," said the wife acidly. "Since you're MARRIED!"

And there I sat, pinioned, and I had brought all the cutting instruments myself and handed them over with an eager smile. The wife seemed to be enjoying this with a grimness that you'd normally expect to find in some children's story that involves someone getting burned alive at the end.

There was only one remedy to this situation, and of course it involved tacos. Happy endings always do, which is why they served tacos at Pol Pot's funeral. The wife was of course having me on a bit, but that didn't mean that I was going to get out of buying some tacos in the bargain.

And this taco place SHALL BE NAMED! For it is magnificent, and everyone should visit this place. It is called Tacos Gringos, and it is a tiny little place on Olive Ave. E. in Seattle, and if you live in Seattle, you're a fool for not going there. If you don't live in Seattle, you should fly here to eat their tacos. Moreover, you should commit a felony here and then flee the state so you can get extradited back to Seattle on the state's dime to eat some more of these fucking tacos.

There is nowhere to sit in Tacos Gringos. In fact, there's no tables either. There's barely room to stand. And they're only open Tuesday-Saturday from 8:00 PM to 3:00 AM, which might tell you what sort of crowd they're after: drunks! Everyone needs tacos, but particularly drunks and idiotic dupes who have been baited by their wives, and Tacos Gringos provides them. They are two dollars apiece, just the right size, and served only with onions and cilantro, with a selection of three hot sauces. That's it. Eat and get out, fuckers!

But you won't get out. Not for long, anyway; you'll just go back. When we were there, I had two shredded pork tacos. Then two more, followed by one last taco. Previously, I had eaten their goat tacos--goat!--which tasted like angels had spat in them. I have seen on the menu--but when they were closed, so I could not sample these--chorizo tacos.

From what I understand, the guy who makes these incredible things used to be a chef at Campagne (non-Seattleites: a high-toned schmancy restaurant) and he just got tired of working for other people, which hey: awesome. Go. Just go. Even if you're not a drunk or a desperate dipshit of a husband caught on a rack of wifely sado-humorism. Go because the tacos are good, and who doesn't like tacos? They bring us together. Let us unite, my friends. Let the juices of bonhomie drip down our wrists and soak into the shirtcuffs of our loving souls. Tacos improve our lives and mollify our wives.

Good tacos make good neighbors.

It was our year to host. And so on Christmas Eve the wife's clan of gap-toothed hillbillies descended on our home like a swarm of fire ants. The father-in-law pulled up in his 1972 van with the rusted-out floor panels and importuned us to help unload the beast, which was filled to bursting with all manner of odd items. His pet armadillo snapped at me threateningly as I unloaded a case of Duraflames.

"Don't let Mocha bother you none," he grinned. "Git those upstairs so's we can git 'em goin' in you'rn fancy firing-place!"

He had also brought an old fake-wood-paneled fourteen inch television with a kicked-in screen. "Outsider art!" he hollered insanely as the wife's mom struggled to put a leash on the recalcitrant armadillo. She kicked it into a daze, and the creature hobbled unsteadily on the sidewalk before releasing a hot jet of urine onto my shoes. I started lugging the astounding welter of junk and nonsense upstairs to our apartment.

Eventually we got the shipwreck of a vehicle unloaded and the holiday festivities began in earnest. The wife had pulled out all the stops and prepared roast beef sandwiches and nothing else; her brother and his wife brought meatballs; the folks had brought a battered tin filled with cold chili. Ah, Christmas! I immediately poured everyone some wine, which was immediately rejected by the father-in-law: "Aw, git that frog juice away! I got my cough syrup."

Eventually it was time to exchange gifts. I had already put one of the Duraflames in the fireplace; I noticed that the case box had a large sticker on it that said "RECALL ITEM--DO NOT USE. DANGER OF NOXIOUS OR LETHAL FUMES." The apartment was filling with an odd grey smoke that seemed to cling to one's scalp, but the in-laws didn't notice. "It's real warm, that fire is," ventured the wife's brother. "Powerful hot!" I nodded wearily and pawed at my head, noticing a deep itch beginning to set in as the fumes intensified.

"So y'already got yore burny-logs," said Pa. I pondered the queasy double-entendre: For Christmas, you gave me wood. "But there's more a-comin'!" He then produced a plastic-wrapped package of 48 rolls of toilet paper. "It's single ply!" he cried. "So's you just wind it all around yore whole hand." Then with a flourish he brought out a gallon jar filled with dill pickles.

"It just ain't a proper shit without a pickle to munch on," he said sagely. I glanced at the wife, who was turning the package of toilet paper over in her hands in wonderment. I silently accepted the monstrous bottle and stared at its contents; the pickles looked like enormous gangrenous penises.

"But I ain't done even yet," said my father-in-law, leaning back to light a misshapen cigarello with a wooden match that he scratched on his grizzled beard; his wife paid him no attention as she greedily fished out a pickle from our jar. I was reeling slightly from the ever-increasing fug that was permeating the room.

"I got you all high-definition tellyvisions!" he howled, sweeping his one non-hook arm at two large, sagging packages. This got the wife's attention, and she looked at me with a glimmer of hope. We tore into the dubious-looking packages, which appeared to have been wrapped by juvenile delinquents with some sort of unspecified but dangerous grudge. In some places, the wrapping was held on with tenpenny nails.

In the end, what we discovered was . . . actual hi-def televisions, 32-inchers, one for the wife and I and the other for her brother and his latest wife, who honked appreciatively from within her oxygen tent and waved her edema-ravaged hands in a gruesome approximation of gratitude.

For our part, we couldn't believe what we were seeing--least of all the wife, who wasn't seeing anything at the moment, as the ever-gathering smoke had rendered her momentarily unable to open her eyes, and was busily applying a rather nasty-looking unguent to her face that had been supplied by her mother.

"Where did you get these?" I yelled at the father-in-law, who rocked happily as he witnessed my astonishment.

"Stole 'em from yore neighbors!" he cried happily. "Kilt 'em and stole their tellyvisions! Your'n gonna start smellin' 'em in about three days, I s'pose."

"That is fucking awesome," I told him sincerely. "Thank you."

"You are surely welcome," he replied, pleased. "Now hand me them pickles. I feel a powerful shit comin' on."

A short time later, it was time for everyone to go home. We walked people out to their cars; the in-laws climbed into their emphysematous van.

"You guys have a good Christmas Day, okay?" I told them warmly. I couldn't wait to get my hands on that television; I fairly twitched with anticipation of being able to not know how to hook it up properly.

"What are you guys doing for your proper Christmas dinner?" I asked as they prepared to make the eleven-point turn that would direct them on their way home.

The father-in-law grinned at me happily. "Why, what do you suppose, boy?" He used his hook to tap clinically on the gas gauge for a moment, noting with solemnity the lack of a needle indicator before turning back to me.

"It ain't Christmas if you ain't eatin' armadillo."

For two years in college--my junior and senior years--J. was my stalwart roommate. J. and I made a good pair: we were both skinny little art twinks, and we got along together. More importantly, I could usually get J. to do whatever I asked. This was important, as J., who had a modest trust fund to get him by, also had a Corgi-sized PC loaded with hot-shit WordPerfect, a gas card at his disposal, and a Mitsubishi, which came in handy when my girlfriend at the time graduated and moved to Portland. J. was remarkably sympathetic to my pleas to borrow his car for the drive up from Salem, probably because he then got to fuck his girlfriend at the time in relative peace, which is to say without me clawing at his bedroom door asking if I could use his computer.

J. did love that car, and of course, so did I. So did his good friend M., who shared J.'s penchant for Euroweenie 12" singles by the likes of entities such as Clan of Xymox and Tin Tin and Front 242; M. particularly enjoyed the time-honored art of tracing horrible things into J.'s car dust. I fondly remember the two weeks J. drove around with the bold legend "RICE DICK" blazing from the passenger window. J., for some reason, did not notice; he might have been transported with rapture by the newest Malcolm McLaren and His Bootzilla Orchestra release.

I mustn't be too hard on J. College is, after all, a weird time for anybody. J.--ever fashion-conscious--took to wearing his hair (or his hair took to wearing him) in a sort of Eraserhead/Lyle Lovett coif that sat atop his skull like brown popcorn erupting from his brainpan. (For my part, I spent a brief period dressing as if Siouxsie Sioux had wandered into an exploding Jay Jacob's outlet.) Being in Salem, Oregon, of course, we looked patently ridiculous, but we would never have known it, and we strutted around campus, obliviously clad in purest grief.

J. did love his things. He had that little trust fund cash every month, and he'd generally blow it immediately (forcing us to then use his gas card for the rest of the month; the bills conveniently went to his mother). J. was a tremendous fan of computer games, all of which he was unremittingly hopeless at. I would accompany him to the game shop and handle these mysterious games with wonder: What in the hell was "Leisure Suit Larry" and why would anyone want to play it? Because of the horrible, pixilated boobs that the cover seemed to promise? The thing cost fifty dollars. You could get a Hustler for six bucks, I thought.

It shouldn't have come as a surprise later on, given J.'s hunger for trinkets and baubles--things--that I discovered that he had bought a gun. A nine millimeter Glock, to be exact. I came across this knowledge one night when J. waved it crazily in my face.

"Check it out, man!" he crowed. He was taking aim at my forehead.

"HEY, THE FUCK!" I screamed, ducking madly. J. cackled.

"I got a gun!" he cried, quite unnecessarily. He drew fresh aim at the television. Now, I grew up with guns. I saw that he had his fucking finger on the trigger.

"Put that fucking thing down!" I howled, deftly rolling under our crumbling particleboard coffee table. "Don't shoot our fucking television!" Note my keen sense of priority. Shoot me, not the TV!

He lowered the gun. "It's not even loaded," he said calmly, fumbling out the magazine. "See?" He showed me the empty clip.

I learned later on that J. liked to sleep with the thing under his pillow. I learned this from his girlfriend at the time.

"Does he keep it loaded?" I asked incredulously.

"I assume so," she yawned. "He says there's no point in keeping an unloaded gun around."

Swell!

"He's got dick issues," said my girlfriend a little nervously.

"I don't think so," replied J.'s girlfriend. "He's got a huge dick."

I didn't say anything. I already knew that. Hey, you live with a guy for two years, you're probably going to see his dick. J. really did have a goddamn hose. I figured he had to thread it between his legs and tape it up against his back.

J.'s girlfriend yawned again, and I said, "I guess it's bedtime, huh?" I was still stewing over the whole weird gun thing.

"I don't know," she said tiredly. She looked down at her lap and sighed. "Sometimes I can't even face it." There was a silence, because everyone knew she was talking about J.'s monstrous penis again. I helplessly wrestled against the barrage of double-entendre images brought to mind with her unfortunate phrasing about having to "face it," and realized I would sleep uneasily that night.

No wonder he never got that upset when he found that "RICE DICK" carved into the dust of his car.

That girlfriend really didn't last all that long--God only knows what sort of dong-y horrors drove her out--but she was soon replaced by the Pod. The Pod was, in retrospect, a clearly depressed young woman. Not because she dated J., but, well, she just was. We--my other roommate N. and I--called her the Pod because 1. she seemed to lie around all day on the couch hunkered under a green blanket, and 2. because she had magical powers, as long as one followed the ritual.

N. and I had a saying. "If you caress the Pod and care for her," we would say to each other, "wondrous things will happen."

N. and I would make sure every morning, on our way to class, to stroke the Pod's hair gently--for she was always there on the couch--and she would tiredly murmur her thanks and shimmy dolefully under her blanket. Then, in the afternoon, when we came home from class--

MAGIC!

The apartment would be clean. (As clean as it ever got. This was, of course, a place where during one party, someone took a shit on the floor over by the phone.) There would be beer in the fridge. The noisome carpet of dead flies would be skimmed from the sink, and the dishes cleaned. And the Pod would be there, on the couch, beneath her blanket, as if she had never moved.

We would lavish praise on the Pod, once again patting her head. "This place looks great! Oh, man!" The Pod would smile wanly and continue watching The Abyss. (I'm pretty sure that during those two years in college, the only thing on television was The Abyss. At the end of the movie, the credits would roll, and then some announcer would yell, "Coming up next, don't miss . . . The Abyss!" We never did.)

We never quite understood J.'s relationship with the Pod, and nor did we dare inquire. We weren't even sure if they had sex. Perhaps the Pod employed blanket-y pseudopods to creep up the stairs and ravish J.'s tremendous penis in the night while he rapturously held his pistol in his mouth. It was best not to think about the whole thing.

Eventually, graduation rolled around, and we packed up our miserable bunches of crap. Crowbarred from her perch on the couch, the Pod looked naked and exposed. She blinked in the sunlight as we stood on the porch, getting ready to go our separate ways. The Pod sloped over to the Mitsubishi and listlessly tumbled in.

"I guess this is it," I said. I had no fucking idea what I was going to do next. I wondered if J. felt as unmoored as I did. "So what's next for you?" I asked.

J. scratched the back of his neck. "I don't know," he confessed. Another moment passed. "I've been thinking about converting the Glock to full auto, though."

I have some sort of crazy shit going on these days involving my parents being in town, having to go to the doctor for some truly weird paresthesias and neuropathies--like some essential tremor-ish stuff when reaching for a glass of wine, and believe me when I say I'm a pro at reaching for wine--so I'm a little distracted. So the posting has been a little erratic to say the least, and then I get agitated when I do some reasonable thing like reach for my glass of Malbec and my arm decides to disagree with me.

So, sorry. Hey, maybe I have lupus! On the other hand, repeated viewings of House have cheered me in that it is never lupus.

Anyway.

So, T. was my roommate for a year or so in college. T. was from Boston; once I called him on some damn break and his mother answered the phone. "Is T. there?" I asked. To my delight, she responded--I AM NOT KIDDING--"T.? Nahh. I think he took the cahh to Bahhstan Yahhd."

T. once decided to homebrew some beer. He bought that homebrewing bible--its name is lost to me, and I don't care--and a carboy and a giant steel containerstein and some other bubbletastic doodads. He collected dozens of Grolsch bottles--don't ask me where he found them--and other 22 oz. containers, and a bottlecapper and went to town. The apartment smelled like low tide at Coney Island for a week as he cooked his hideous mash; finally he bottled, and waited for weeks.

He was brewing an IPA, a particularly hoppy sort of beer. At the end of the process, which we were pretty excited about (despite the incredible odors, I had fun helping out), he finally decanted his first brew one morning right before he had to go to class.

"This tastes really good!" he cried, and it did. It was ten in the morning, the best time for any college student to dig into a fresh batch of beer. "Help yourself" he yelled delightedly as he left.

I did. I had no classes that day, or at least no classes that I was interested in attending. I drank six 22 ounce bottles of beer while T. was away at class.

"Is it good?" T. panted when he came home at four o'clock PM.

"It's delicious," I replied. I had drank six bottles of the stuff. "It's the best near beer I've ever had."

T.'s face dropped like the Hindenburg. "No!" he said. But it was true. T. had somehow, despite his bubble thingies and total adherence to homebrewing recipes, managed to produce a delicious beer with apparently no alcohol content whatsoever. At that point in the afternoon, I should have been trying to eat the sofa. Instead, I hopped up and gave him a few smart jumping jacks instead to prove my sobriety. (Note: this is a terrible way to demonstrate sobriety.)

Later, when I asked T. what, if he had one free wish to be granted on Earth, he would wish for, he said, "A pallet of beer. I want to put it in the living room, and when people come over and ask me what that is, I could say 'A pallet of beer.' "

I thought that that would be pretty cool. Of course, at that time, we were drinking Rainier.

One night, I went to a party, and when I came home, T. was slumped over our coffee table. His hand was on his checkbook, and the check's subject was DOMINO'S PIZZA, and the dollar amount was filled in. What wasn't filled in was the signature. T. was out cold.

Bummer.

Half an hour later, incredibly, there came a knock at the door; this must have been close to one AM. It was the Domino's guy. "I tried to deliver this an hour ago," he said, "but there wasn't no answer. You want this pizza?"

"Yes," I said, and quickly filled in T.'s name on his check's signature field. "Thank you so fucking much."

"Yeah," said the pizza guy. The pizza was of course dead cold, and I devoured it. I apologized to T. the next day, and he scoffed. "I would have done the same thing."

Then he played Gish. I hate that album and stopped feeling bad about eating his pizza.

When we left that place--we were more or less evicted--we squirted tubes of toothpaste all over the parking lot.

When T. attended my first wedding, I asked him if he was still smoking his signature Marlboro Reds. "I'm smoking MOAH!" he enthusiastically replied, and held out a freshly burning cigarette as example.

Oh, T., have moah of everything.

Sunday was a big day for us with a lot on the schedule. The wife's father has recently retired (involuntarily due to some crappy health problems, but happily not due to any morbid health problems), and so there was a surprise party being thrown for him. Kind of a big deal. Also kind of a big deal was later that day the funeral for an old friend of the wife's who had finally succumbed after a long and fairly gruesome battle with cancer.

I was getting dressed after showering when the wife materialized before me. "I'm sick, my boy!" she wailed, and then dissolved into huge sobs.

Now, I am not a strong man under normal circumstances. I am exponentially less strong when my wife is in tears; it completely hollows out my heart to see her cry. I know this was not about me, at the time--I'm just saying. I will put on an Insane Clown Posse CD and fuck a monkey in a tutu if I think it will cheer her out of tears. (So maybe I'm not always weak and ineffectual. Just mostly. Good to know!) But there was nothing to be done here, really--she was sick.

"I almost passed out in the shower," she snuffled into my shoulder. "And then I threw up! I threw up twice!" Then she pulled herself away from me to go throw up. I couldn't help but notice that she was fully dressed, and also that she was throwing up, since the bathroom door was still open. "I'm sorry," she said miserably. "I could have shut the door."

There's a lot going on here, so let's take a moment to consider a few things. First of all, she nearly passed out in the shower. (She had showered first; when I got out of bed, she was sitting on the floor of our bedroom, rooting around in the closet. I didn't know then that she was sick, and dimly dismissed the kind of weird fact that she was sitting on the floor. Because she was dizzy.) (In fact, she later told me that she had basically crawled to get to the shower for fear of falling down.) After that, she threw up a couple times. Most people would be calling the fight at this point--God knows I would be. However, after nearly passing out a couple times, heaving a few times, she then--after rooting around in the closet (on the floor), managed to go ahead and get completely dressed for the day. Then--then!--she apologized to me, her husband for inconsiderately forgetting to shut the bathroom door.

It wasn't until she realized that she possibly couldn't walk without falling down--and, you know, the uncontrollable vomiting--that maybe she didn't have it in her to go anywhere that day, and she cried, because not only did she feel bad, now she felt really bad.

So I did my part: I held her and said meaningless things. "What can you do?" I said. "It's not your fault!" I cried. I'll cut off my arm with a chopsaw if you want! I thought. "I have the baclava!" she sobbed into my shirt. (Explanation: she was bringing the baclava.) "Fuck the baclava!" I declared.

I still think this was the right thing to say, but I can't really be sure, since that's when she vomited again. I ran around in circles for a while, babbling things like "call!" and "your mother!" and "your brother!" and "Insane Clown Posse!" and "baclava!" while she reclined grayly on our bathroom floor, looking truly horrible and spent. I did finally manage to get her brother on the phone to explain the situation. "I've got this baclava!" I screamed frantically. (I don't know why this became such a focus.) But he was already miles away. I hooted like an insensate asshole for a while longer before hanging up, figuring that once again, I had sounded kind of like a dipshit in a conversation with her family members. (This is not about me, I thought again.)

I took care of her the rest of the day, if you can define "taking care of" as "fetching 7-Up and avoiding making loud noises." She returned to bed and slept until 3:00, finally emerging with a noticeably ginger step. I piled blankets on her so that she looked like a miserable fungus.

At 5:00 she sent me off to my favorite bar that I mention too often--I think she wanted to moan plangently to herself for a while and maybe catch some more sleep. I vowed to also procure chicken soup.

I think we can agree that I am a hero.

At the bar, the regulars all greeted me and asked about the wife. "She has a stomach virus," I said. "Or maybe food poisoning." (It's not food poisoning.) "Or a Gypsy curse. I don't fucking know."

"Does she need pot?" asked O., one of the regulars. I blinked at him. "For the nausea. It helps me when I'm sick. I can go home and get some!"

W., the wonderful bartender, offered to send me home with a "to-go cup" of Fernet Blanca, a noted digestif (it is also notably fucking disgusting, but his heart was certainly in the right place; Fernet Blanca tastes like Azazel's filthy choad). Note that this is terrifically illegal.

O. was still pressing. "Do you want my phone number? I'll bring you some pot." He thought for another moment. "By the way, we should go out to dinner together." I declined the pot, but said we'd love to go to dinner sometime, probably when the wife wasn't vomiting. There's nothing the wife and I enjoy more than going out to dinner with gay interracial couples we don't know that well, but seem harmless, and hey, they are moving anyway. And really--he was offering to deliver some antiemetic pot to us.

This is why I talk about this bar so much.

I procured the soup. The wife is feeling much better today.

I assume this is due to my not playing any Insane Clown Posse.

(This is not about me.)

This is a loser's tale. Refreshingly, this time it isn't me! Sort of. I'm not the main loser.

When I graduated from college, I immediately put my theater degree to good use by getting a warehouse job in my roommate's dad's paint sundries company. It was there that I met Mick and Mike. (I'm abandoning my usual policy of masking people's names for this one, since I'm pretty sure these guys are both either dead or incarcerated.)

Mick was--of course--a hard-drinking Irish guy who was given to quoting Castaneda at me, for some reason. Mike was this little guy--I'm not quite five ten and weigh in at a whole 150 lbs., and I had fifteen pounds on Mike--who was . . . how to put this? Mike was pretty stupid.

Mike once filed an invoice for a GI Joe's store under "E."

"Mike!" screamed Gary, our boss, once he found it. "Why the fuck was this invoice filed under E, for Christ's sake?"

Mike looked genuinely puzzled. "E. E for invoice," he said.

That was Mike.

Another day, "You Can't Always Get What You Want" was playing on the always-on classic rock station. I encountered Mike in one of the warehouse aisles, and he lifted his head up to the ceiling quizzically.

"Who in the hell are these guys?" he asked. I stared at him.

"Ahh, kind of a one-hit wonder band called the Rolling Stones," I said.

"Huh," said Mike.

(The classic rock thing was a near constant until a few of us bitched about it enough that on Fridays we could turn the fucking radio to another station. One Friday, while "Call Me" was playing, Mick approached me and accusingly barked, "Is this Blondie?"

"Yeah," I replied.

"If I wanted to listen to a white junkie bitch scream at me, I'd go home," he said flatly, and stalked off.)

I've told that story before, but frankly, I never get tired of thinking about it.

But anyway. We drank a lot, us warehouse guys. Usually three days out of the week, we'd go out for beers after work. Mike came along sometimes, and we'd beat him stupid at pool, because most of the time Mike was attempting triple bank shots and in general just playing slamball in the hopes that something, anything would fall in, only to be crushed when something did, since he routinely forgot that we didn't allow slop shots.

One day at work--and I'm unclear what sort of terrible events led up to this--Mike decided to issue a challenge to Mick. Mike declared that he could out-drink Mick. I think we were on lunch break. Anyway, I do remember this odd combination of feelings rushing through me when he said that; it was some strange mixture of electrification and utter dread. Mick squinted at Mike.

"Are you fucking stupid?" asked Mick. Before a reply could be made, Mick continued: "No, I know you're fucking stupid. E for fucking invoice." (This by now had become warehouse legend, which are of course the finest legends to be found anywhere.) "Are you serious? I'll fucking kill you."

Mike stood his ground. "I can take you, man! I can drink a fucking lot."

The rest of us just sort of looked at each other. Mick was a guy who, when a doctor told him that he was a little worried about Mick's slight liver enlargement, said, "Look at my fucking name, man. My name is Mick." Then he demanded to know where the closest bar was.

(And he really did have a junkie wife. He also had a little girl who was four years old. Mick occasionally confessed to me that everyone was kind of worried that the child refused--or was incapable of--speaking. She was always going to speech therapy. Once when I had had one too many, I suggested that maybe they should try silence therapy, which Mick roared at, thankfully, since he might as well have cheerfully torn off my head.)

So that Friday was set as the date. Mike vs. Mick. We all had to watch this.

We went to the Black Cat, the closest horrible dive bar to the warehouse, and the festivities commenced. Mike and Mick would match each other, beer for beer, and in between beers, a whiskey shot apiece would be administered. They went to it. We watched, fascinated, and drinking.

You would expect that Mick--ropy, grizzled Mick, no-collar anti-hero--would dominate this poor chimp with the unfortunate pussy-tickling moustache that surely would never tickle an unpaid-for pussy; that Mick would so thoroughly destroy this hopeless homunculus that he'd likely be left in some truly dire state of vomit encrustation and renal failure that he would require hospitalization, dialysis and a long stint inside an autoclave; that Mick would cheerfully be tossing back shots while Mike was owlishly trying to urinate into a pool pocket.

That's basically how it all turned out. I don't even think it lasted two hours. Mick looked as alert as a Hollywood divorce lawyer--well, one with greasy, shoulder-length hair and Coke-bottle glasses--while Mike looked as if someone had gotten halfway through with installing a spinal block before distractedly wandering away. In fact, the dedicated staff at the Black Cat--flinty-eyed women with alarming tattoos--refused to serve him.

"Are you kidding? He looks like a trout. He's cut off." Mike's eyeballs drifted independently of one another; I wondered if he could see his own brain. I hope not, I thought. Mike really doesn't need to see that. I bet it looks like a dead, hairless Tribble.

What could we do? Well, for one thing, we could unceremoniously dump Mike into the back of a pickup, which we did. We could also go to another bar, which we also did.

We went to the Yukon Tavern, another favorite of ours, mainly for the owner, Viv, a dyed redhead who was also half-deaf and approximately the same age as the Magellanic Clouds. We of course dragged the thoroughly miserable Mike in with us and propped him up on a barstool. Barely hanging onto consciousness, Mike's head dipped and bobbed towards the bar as if dowsing for the used chewing gum concealed underneath. Viv eyed him contemptuously.

"I ain't serving him!" she hollered. She hollered everything. We nodded and ordered beers. Viv poured them and served us, giving poor Mike another poisonous look. Then she went over to him; Mike did his unlevel best to meet her gaze, and was intermittently successful.

Suddenly Viv screamed, "ARE YA TIRED? WHAT'S 'A MATTER? YOU TIRED?" Mike flinched at this assault, and spun around on his stool spasmodically. Then he fell off his stool in a noisy, boneful clatter. He wheezed on the floor while everyone laughed.

"I hate amateurs," Viv yelled to nobody at all, turning away from the awful spectacle of writhing Mike. "Who wants Li'l Smokies?" she screamed. The only food Viv served was cold sandwiches and Li'l Smokies.

Eventually we left, once again pitching the now-consciousness-free Mike into the bed of the pickup. Viv glared at us the whole time. "Don't you boys be bringing in that kid any more! He ain't fit to drink with you all!" Here she pointedly jerked a thumb at Mick, who grinned widely. "Is he even of age?" she wondered loudly to the aether. Viv had a fairly cavalier attitude about serving minors. Or anybody.

"That boy is a shithead," was Viv's final benediction on the evening.

He sure was! Here's to you, Mike. Or, better yet . . . maybe you should just have a soda.

And so thus armed with beer and Super Soakers, we were underway. We began our creep down Main Street, all three pickups of us with our meager signage (our class was indeed a lazy class; I consider myself to be their God) flapping from the pickup windows.

It was, I must confess, kind of fun. Throngs of people lined the street for mile. Because that's about how long the route was. But throng they did! Little kids ran out towards us and screamed, "Shoot me! Shoot me!" Either it was intolerably hot, or these children do not bespeak well of our future military resources. We shot them stupid, and they screamed rapturously, which rapidly became irritating, so to shut them up, we then pelted them with hard candy. They shrieked even louder, so we stepped up our beer drinking.

One of our group, T., armed as she was with her water weapon, rather quickly adopted an alarming thirst for blood. She would douse fucking anything that moved, including us, when she would whoop with a squirting victory and wave her weapon over our heads and the thing would drip all over us. T. would also shoot at anything that didn't move, such as fire hydrants and dead dogs. T. was a little out of control. At one point, I saw her take steely aim at three geriatrics who were gnawing on some fried chicken; they saw her too, drawing a bead, and they made warding gestures and shook their wattles at her fearfully. "Jesus Christ, T., lay off. They're old people and they have food."

T. flashed me a wild, angry glare, looking very much like C. Thomas Howell after a deer's-blood cocktail, and then relented. She settled instead for knocking out a little kid's front teeth with a brutal barrage of green apple Jolly Ranchers. The rest of us continued our H2O assault on the parade-watchers unhindered.

At least until we got to the fire station, where a bunch of guerilla warriors lashed back. They had filled tubs and buckets full of water, and they ran out into the road and simply creamed us. We filled the air with harpy screams and thrashed like the double-damned as they drenched us mercilessly. By the time we were out of range (or they were out of water), we were wetter than a lesbian erotic book club. Thinking way too late, I pulled my cell phone and cigarettes out of my sodden shorts, stared at them hopelessly (both miraculously survived), and then weirdly transferred them into my equally soaked back pocket. Why? I don't know.

Out of danger, we laughed at the affair (during the exchange, I was pleased to note that we nailed my dad pretty good, for all that) and resumed our attacks.

That's when the water balloon hit M. in the face. What the fuck? Cruising up the final parade hill, we jerked our necks around and beheld three little preteens with a cooler full of water balloons, and they were hailing them on us with an accuracy that was simply hellish. Those little fuckers were way out of range of our pathetic pistols, and the little bastards' arms were unbelievable. It was like a filming of Honey, I Shrunk Easy Company! We couldn't do anything about it, so we simply and adultly returned fire with a sailor's smorgasbord of the vilest profanity that we could summon. The children danced with glee (literally--they had a fucking boom box) and redoubled their efforts.

Finally, we were done. The parade was over. S. guided us off the route over to her house, where we dismounted the pickups (I fell flat on my ass, to general cheering). Why were we at S.'s house? we wondered. S. answered that question by running inside and grabbing a case of beer. Oh. It was now about 3:30 in the afternoon, and most of us had been drinking since noon.

The parade was over. All that was left was the dinner. The wife and I elected to limp home, towel off, and take a nap in preparation. Not everyone was this sensible, and elected to keep drinking.

So, a nap, a shower, a change of clothes, and we felt ready for round 2. Cocktail hour began at 6:30--because we needed more of those--before dinner at 8:00. This was at the Elk's Club, which, really? Kind of awesome.

If I've been exhibiting an uncharacteristic unwillingness to rip these people up and just be my normal turd self, well, I can't really bear to. The whole thing was kind of cool and unexpectedly really fun, and really, everyone was pretty great. It was also pleasingly free of extraneous crap like slide shows or "Remember When?" presentations or any of that fun-killing kind of regimented hoo-ha: we simply had some drinks, ate dinner, shot the shit, laughed at Oh my God, twenty years! things, had some more drinks, and that sort of thing. You know: the things that people aged 38 find really fun and enjoyable. The things that tell you, "Well, you're getting old."

Not that there was a complete dearth of YAY! behavior. I define YAY! behavior as: embarrassing things that other people do that make me go YAY! because I did not do those things. For instance, A., a lovely brunette who I suspected of Failure-to-Nap Syndrome, held up a silly little survey thing that was at every table and screamed at the assembled crowd, "Okay, you fuckers, you fucking fill these out, all right?" She wobbled cutely, and then joined us at the smoker's table where she informed my wife that she was "fucking beautiful, really fucking beautiful" before retiring to the parking lot to pass out in her car. YAY!

There was also N.--the "handsy" one I mentioned in a previous post--who definitely did not do the nap thing. N. lasted long enough to eat some chicken-fried blobs before definitively glazing over and slumping into his chair with his similarly inert girlfriend, forming a kind of corrupt American Pieta.

I'm pleased to say that we made it pretty much to the end. We walked my old friend R. home, who hilariously complained, "I wish it wasn't so uphill." Like the wife and I are Sherpas. It's like a .5% grade. We were all terribly drunk, but in that nice way that's so far off from that really terrible way that most of us are acquainted with.

We got back to my place, where we were startled to find my father still awake, watching TV. "What the hell are you guys doing home so soon?" he asked, equally surprised. It was like 11:30.

"We're old," I explained. "And everyone else took off." My father looked at me, at first curiously, as if I had grown a second ass on my chest. Then with a look like Yeah, you're ancient. Give me a break. "Whoo!" I clarified. "Whoo!"

"You can have my chair," he said, getting up to go to bed. I thankfully settled into it.

My parents drove us to the airport the next day. I had really messed up my quads with my precarious perch on the pickup float, and I walked like a doddering old man. My mother, the RN observed: "You really fucked up your quads, didn't you?" I moaned.

The reunion was over. Like I said before, I'm not going to rip anybody. We had a very good time. And here's the best part: you don't ever have to read anything about it ever again.

But I can, any time I want, and surprisingly, that makes me kind of happy.

Monday was the big day, when we all came together as 20-year reunionites to show our proud town what we were made of.

Naturally, this meant gathering en masse at a bar. At noon.

You see, traditionally, our reunions take place during something called Border Days, which is one of the oldest rodeo celebrations going. So there is, of course, a parade, and every year, the twenty-years all ride a float. The parade was at two o'clock on Monday.

Remember, we were at the bar at noon. Because another tradition is that everyone loads up on beer for a couple hours before we climb onto the float, which is--can you guess?--also stocked with coolers full of beer. Oh, and Super Soakers for tormenting the crowd, particularly the very young (who love getting squirted with water on a hot day) and the very old (who are slow and make excellent targets and who also cringe entertainingly).

But first things first! The drinking. My friends W. and R. showed up to cart me down to the bar promptly at . . . 10:30 AM, mainly because, as far as I could tell, W. was anxious to begin drinking. But we made some small talk with my folks for a while, for which my liver thanked me meekly from inside his cage.

However, we were still down there by noon. Four minutes before noon, actually, which is why it puzzled us when T.--an excitable woman from our class, already there--shrieked, "Where have you been?!" It was going to be a long day, so it only made sense to order a beer from the bartender, a pleasant fellow named (I think) "Fish," who really put the "grizz" in "grizzled." We began drinking in earnest, and I couldn't help but note that W. and T.--again, both women, so this puzzled me--cut their beers with Clamato. There is a thesis to be written about the gender identification issues surrounding this conundrum, but I left that to future scholars and simply dug into a two-dollar Bud.

Shortly, W. was ordering another from apparently-Fish. "Slow down, W.!" he bellowed. "It's a long day." He paused to take in the rest of us. "I can say that to her because I know her. I don't know any of you, so I don't care what you do," he told us. My father, seated behind me at a table, laughed.

This is where we spent the next two hours: the Triangle Tavern, a place the size of Carlos Mencia's talent, and, also like Carlos Mencia, a similarly gas-station-bathroom amount of charm. Improbably, it does have a pool table, perfect for receiving clouts to the skull via errant cue shots. Also, a bartender named Fish. (There really was a seedy, Abe Vigoda-ish cast to Fish, but again, I'm not even sure that's what people were calling him. But let's say they were. Then I got into some reverie about Fish being not only Abe Vigoda-ish but also having some sinister Lovecraftian features, but by this point I was on my third Bud.)

After a little bit, my mom and the wife intelligently showed up bearing some burgers for us to consume, as we were all drinking on empty stomachs. (T. screamed on their arrival, "Who is this? I don't know them!" "One of them is my mother," I said, "and one of them is my wife." T. stared wordlessly. My father laughed again.) We devoured the food with the feverish intensity of a group of people who had dedicated an entire day to drunken mayhem. My mom, wonderfully uncertain about people's condiment preferences, had even persuaded the burger vendor to wrap up a bunch of pickles in paper, just in case. We devoured those too.

That's when W. loudly informed us that she had broken one of her artificial nails--painted, of course. She had to go get it fixed, because when you're in a parade, you want your pinkies to look their best. She ordered Fish to get her a "to-go cup," which Fish dutifully did, and W. poured her beermato into it, and she was off to some apparently underemployed beautician. Open container laws are unofficially but nearly unilaterally relaxed during Border Days, unless you're a fucking moron, who are, naturally, legion.

More people were showing up by this time, quite a lot of them, actually, and it was around 1:15 that we noticed that we did not have the flatbed pickup that we had been promised by a classmate. In fact--we learned mere minutes later--that said classmate was not only not even attending the parade, but his flatbed was not forthcoming, as he was in a town some miles away. We had no float.

We discussed this with some intensity while ordering more beers with somewhat more intensity. A couple of the girls were dispatched to try and sweet-talk a fresh flatbed out of a nearby trucking company--so nearby, in fact, that it was across the street. They returned flatbedless. "If you had come one hour ago . . . " said the guy, whose name, let's pretend, must have also been Fish. We fretted about this and ordered more beer. W. returned around this time and ordered a beer. Her nails were perfect. D., the class president, wondered about filling up the water buckets for recharging our Super Soakers, seemingly unconcerned with the fact that we had no vehicle that would actually carry said buckets, or our beer coolers, or our Super Soakers, or us. Well, whatever. We crossed the street to a (closed) business of some sort, and stole about fifty gallons of water.

Others milled about in the sun drinking beer, while others milled about in the bar drinking beer. Fish ran out of Clamato, and there was a minor flurry of dismay among some of the women, but it then subsided after they glumly ordered some more beer.

It was about twenty minutes to two, and nobody had any idea what was going on, until someone happened to notice the incredible fact that we--the assembled class of '87--had no less than three pickups in our possession, right there at the bar! Right in the parking lot!

We immediately--by which I mean haltingly and fuzzily--composed a complex plan to solve our problem: Let's just ride in pickups! Like, three of them! Instead of one lonely float (unadorned flatbed), we would have three mighty floats (unadorned pickups)! We quickly (slowly) loaded hay bales into the pickup beds for us to perch on, and happily noted that we had just enough time to buy some more beers to take onto the floats . . . er, pickups.

The class of '87 was in the parade, dammit. It was our time to shine. Literally, in the case of the third pickup, since for some really weird reason, that was the one that all of the bald guys piled into. I mean, ALL of them. They gleamed like the sledge of the White Witch. I stared at the hazy heat lines that radiated off of their collected pates and commented to W., "They're going to look like a jar of maraschino cherries after this."

W. laughed and opened a beer gingerly, mindful of her repaired fingernails. We were sitting high and mighty on the first float/pickup, with our asses on the cab of the truck. We had to be mindful of not putting dents into the roof of the cab, and if D. (the driver) heard a "CLUNK!", he'd yell at us. We got waved into our place in the parade line.

The day was just getting started, and it already felt like we'd been at it for hours. But there was plenty more.

IDAHO! The Gem State! My Motherland! The Seat of . . . Trees! And tree-related items! Occasionally wheat!

Not so occasionally, actually. We saw a lot of fucking wheat.

We also saw my old classmates. And, you know, as much as I'd like to slag on the lot of them . . . they were all really pretty nice. Even N., sort of, who didn't display any outward signs of wanting to beat me up like in the old days, but who was described by the wife as "kind of handsy." Good to hear! Anyway, I actually had more fun than I had originally anticipated, if only because I still have hair, and so many of my old classmates do not. This of course says nothing about my classmates, other than that THEY ARE BALD, and volumes about me, namely that I am pathetically shallow.

The wife and I arrived on Friday evening, and spent a pleasant evening with my folks. This was going to be our only moments of peace, as chaos predictably unfolded in the days to come with increasing intensity. Little did I know as we ate dinner that night--a nice light chicken piccata--that in mere hours, I would find myself flossing with the intestines of one of our co-salutatorians, screaming, "I WAS CHEATED, JEZEBEL!"

Saturday night we got a fateful call from W., an unstoppable redhead locomotive of a woman who was a good friend of mine in high school. I remember we hit it off in fourth grade when she wheeled on me--the new kid--and demanded, "Who are you?" W. is essentially a volatile admixture of re-bar, bear pheromones, Super Dave Osborne, blackbody radiation, Tabasco sauce and Sarah Connor.

W. declared that we were going out that night, and by God (and frankly, if God disagreed, he could go fuck himself as far as W. cared), we were going. We decided (it was decided for us) that we would go to the eponymously named establishment, The Establishment. I hoped we could also have some exotic drinks called The Drinks and stand on such thrilling surfaces such as The Floor and perhaps take a piss in The Toilet.

Ordering drinks was actually the first challenge, at least for the wife. Knowing what sort of place the Establishment was--a nightmarishly loud dive--I knew not to deviate from my plan: beers and shots. Unfortunately, the wife did not quite grasp the concept of the place, which is: concepts are fundamentally unwelcome.

"Can I get a red wine?" she shouted over the din of what turned out to be howling country karaoke singers. The attractive little behatted blonde bartender looked at her as if she had ordered lizard gland secretions. "Let's see!" she chirped, and rummaged in the little cooler under the bar. She produced a box of wine that looked like it might have been manufactured for the Russian Spetsnaz sometime during the Reagan administration. "Here we go!"

It was, of course, undrinkable fluid of questionable provenance: we suspected it was simply brake fluid. "It tastes like my cough drops," was the wife's judgment. She tried another tack after failing to choke down the awful brine: she went for whiskey. "Do you have Bushmill's?" she asked the bartendrette, who stared blankly, and then craned her neck at her collection of bottles.

"No. What is that?"

"It's okay," said the wife patiently. "How about Maker's?"

Again the bartender gal made a good show of staring at all the bottles.

"No."

"We don't Maker's that!" exclaimed a fungus-like barfly who was growing into his barstool next to us, and then barked an approximation of laughter that sounded like Silverback apes trying to claw their way out of a gravel pile. He didn't look at us as he said this, but instead stared into his Budweiser bottle intently.

Unnerved, the wife finally ordered a whiskey and soda. She was served a Canadian Royal and Diet Coke. For my part, I took the low road and ordered a Bud and a Jack back.

"A Bud and a shot?" asked the bartendrette, clearly relieved. "You got it!" The wife cut me a glance that said something like, "I'm imagining you being carried off by wraiths now."

We settled into a rhythym, the group of us, and were presently joined by D. and her indefatigable frost-topped mom, who looked like she'd beat anyone to death with a Mike's Hard Lemonade bottle for looking at us wrong; M., the jovial husband of W., whose penchant for buying rounds endeared me to him instantly; by many others, simple denizens of the bar who remembered me, who knew my father, who were complete strangers, who were occasionally "handsy" with the wife, who were simply wondering what the fuck was up with the guy who wore the "fuck you" t-shirt (actually a shirt with drawings of two hands, one giving the middle finger, the other pointing at the viewer) who dared to karaoke John Lennon's "Imagine." He also wore a prominent earring.

"He's a dead man," said, W. as the thirtieth round of drinks appeared unbidden at the table. But nobody seemed to care. At one point, the wife captured a lovely picture of my old friend D.'s mouth and shirt and nothing else. She tried to identify him the next day.

"He had on a checkered shirt and a cowboy hat," she explained to my parents the next day. I had no idea who she was talking about at the time; the evening was a pleasant blur.

"You just described every other guy in Grangeville," said my mother gently. "He has good teeth," I offered, looking at the photo. Happily, everyone ignored this valuable insight. I need to stop saying words, I thought.

I had been home for thirty-six hours. We hadn't even gotten to the reunion part of things, not really. Not officially.

But we were getting close.

When I was in sixth grade, I found myself with my first girlfriend. But we didn't call it that. We called it "going with." As in, "I'm going with [this person]." "Did you hear? Damon is going with Hortense." Going with. We might have been sharing a car ride. It was about as erotic.

I promptly informed my parents of this, possibly because it was novel, and also possibly because I had no firm grasp on what was actually going on. "How was your day?" my mom asked. And for once, I had something other to say than "Nothing." "I'm going with J.," I said.

"What?" asked my mom.

"I'm going with J.," I repeated. Duh.

My mom stared at me as if I had grown a fresh set of ears on my forehead. "What does that mean? Do you mean you have a girlfriend?"

I had no immediate reply. I wasn't sure. I hadn't thought about it that hard. Did I? I decided I did, sort of.

"Sort of," I said. My mom fixed me with a momlook while my dad just sort of smirked and said nothing. He was probably thinking, Oh man! He might not be gay!

"Aren't you a little young for a girlfriend?" my mom said without real force, turning back to doing kitchen stuff. My dad didn't say anything, but retreated to the living room, figuring, I assumed, that there was nothing he could say here that wouldn't get him yelled at or something, and also probably to do a merry little jig.

"Nah," I said confidently. Probably, I thought to myself. The fact was, I didn't have the faintest idea what was going on. I only knew I was going with J. because someone had told me so.

Earlier that day, in class, T., a nice girl, approached me. "Do you like J.?"

I thought about it. J. was a quiet, nice girl. She wasn't like the alarming L., who once said to me in the cafeteria, "You're so into me," and waved a french fry in my face. L. was terrifying, because I was totally into her. J. was about as unterrifying as Switzerland.

"Sure, she's nice," I said.

"Do you want to go with her?" asked T.

I thought about it and resisted the urge to ask, "Do I have to do anything?" I didn't know what that meant, really. I mean, I had some idea--I'd be expected to spend some time with her, of course, and maybe kiss her--maybe?--but would I have to, like, beat up assholes who said stupid shit about her? Because, as a complete pud, I couldn't beat up anything animate. I decided I couldn't ask anything without sounding dumb.

So I said, "Sure."

T. wandered over to J.'s desk and a brief conversational flurry ensued. T. came back to my desk.

"Okay, you're going with J." She walked off, as her job was done. I sat like a mute lump, thinking, I am? I looked over at J. She smiled at me. I smiled back. Hey! She's not terrifying! Not like L. For one thing, she hadn't developed breasts like L. had--go figure why L. figured me out in about thirty seconds--and hence was that much less threatening. My lifelong embrace of utter cowardice seemed validated.

This is going to be easy! This is all I have to do? I was jubilant, sort of, and confused, so confubilant, and I guess that must be why I was eager to tell my parents about this whole strange new thing. I did a thing! Others are doing this thing! Therefore, I'm not the weirdo I assumed I was.

Then that night J. called me, right during dinner. My mom picked up the phone, and said these surprising words: "Skot, it's for you." Huh? Nobody ever called me. I went to the phone and said, "Hello?"

"Hi, it's J. What are you doing?"

This was like getting a phone call from the Marianas Trench. I handled it as such. "Eating," I said. "What are you doing?" A pause.

"I just wanted to talk to you. You want to call me back?"

Not really. But somewhere in my hindbrain, I was starting--incrementally--to see that there was more to this process than I understood when I signed up for it. "Yeah, I'll call you back," I said. "Are you at home?"

Classic. We were in sixth grade. No, she's at the racetrack, or perhaps a group meeting for urine enthusiasts. "I'm at home," she said quietly.

I called her later. "Hey," I said.

"Hey," she said.

We had more than one conversation exactly like this. Our conversations made Waiting for Godot sound positively DieHardian. Another example:

She: "Are you going to Rusty's?"
Me: "Probably."
She: "Me too."
(Silence.)
Me: "I guess I should go."
She: "Me too."
(They do not hang up.)

J. and I went to exactly one party--hosted by the aforementioned Rusty--where it was revealed to one and all that we were dating--no scratch that, going with each other. Rusty immediately ordered us into a dark room.

"When I come back in, you guys better be making out," he declared. He shut the door.

We sat there, not moving, not talking. J. coughed softly. I lifted up my hand tentatively and waved it around uncertainly in the dark. I eventually settled it next to--not on--her knee. I left it there a moment. J. bounced her knee a little bit. I didn't know how to interpret that, so I did nothing.

J. coughed again.

All women are terrifying, I concluded as those moments spun out and exploded into little baby universes of their own. Breasts or not.

Rusty eventually charged back into the room, flicking on the lights suddenly in order to catch in the no-act. His expression immediately fell as he saw us sitting there, doing nothing at all. I put my arm around J., attempting a look of defiance; J. merely hung her head in defeat.

"Jesus Christ," said Rusty. He shook his head.

The next week, T. stopped by my desk. "J. isn't going with you any more," she said in clinical tones, as if she was giving me grave medical information, like I had spine failure or mime's gene.

"I know," I said, feigning sadness.

But I had never been happier in all my life.

After my freshman year in college, I of course returned home to Idaho for the summer break. I worked a couple of jobs; one for the Forest Service doing something called "P-line surveying," which is exactly as exciting as it sounds; and occasionally (read: always) filling in on Saturday morning shifts at the sawmill doing cleanup, which is also thrilling: Oh boy! Several tons of wet bark! Let's . . . pick it up and move it somewhere else!

But I did manage to fit in a little recreation. And this being Idaho, the emphasis there would be on "little." But there were always the dances! Why? Nobody had any idea, but looking back, I would have to guess that it was a safety measure to get all of us desperately bored little assholes rounded up in one easily monitored place rather than have us do the alternative, which was to drive around like maniacs all night while drinking heavily.

The dances were simple to set up: Find a community center, or an old armory, or a skating rink, or a charnel house, and then play music, and wait for the drunk teens to show up and listlessly shuffle around for a couple hours before shuffling off for a couple hours of (the boys hoped) listless coupling. It was a remarkably successful strategy, if only because--we would never admit it at the time, but it was painfully obvious--that simply driving around on dirt roads and getting loaded is a profoundly depressing thing to do on a Saturday night.

As I said, I was back home from my first year in college, which I had spent madly and determinedly utterly reinventing myself from "pathetic hick geek/unclassifiable pariah" to "manic, mouthy idiot/unclassifiable buttinsky." In this I must say I was remarkably successful. One of the things I had made sure to do while away was take notice of how guys outside of rural areas danced: that is to say, I noticed that these guys actually moved, rather than sullenly shifting from one foot to the other in a circle, which is how all guys danced in Idaho--gloomily orbiting the girls (who cheerfully shimmied all they wanted), doomed electrons unable to de-quantize that one last step and pile into the nucleus of the whole thing.

Fuck that! At college--where nobody knew me or the shambling thing I had formerly been on dance floors since abandoned--I cut loose and really let it loose. I was unstoppable, and threw myself into every beat like a wino throws himself at an unattended beer truck. I was limber and loose-limbed; I vividly remember one night doing an immortal sideways pogo of sorts to "Dancing With Myself" and smacking my skull into a co-ed's nose, resulting in an impressive shower of gore. My friend J. remarked later, "I have to tell you that I love to watch you dance." With all the not-getting-it-ism of the truly stupid, at the time, I thought this was a genuine compliment.

I brought these newfound skills back home with me that summer, and one night in Greenwood, I let it fucking loose. I didn't break anyone's nose that night, but I was on fire. Looking at me at the time, actually, one might reasonably conclude that I really was actually on fire.

You see, I was still a terrible dancer, and I remain so to this day. I move like a duck on a hot plate, but I'm not that tall and pretty skinny, so my limbs fly around like several strands of overcooked pasta caught in a strong crosswind. But that night, I hadn't a care. I flailed around unfunkily to horrors while the rest of the dancers stared at me as if I'd gotten an expired inoculation. I'm different than I was! I thought, and I liked showing it. He's still so lame, but in a much weirder way, everyone else thought.

Then something unprecedented happened. In fact, nothing like it has ever happened to me since. A girl approached me during a break.

A pretty girl. She was leggy and lissome and confident and blonde and why was she talking to me? I wiped sweat off of my brow. "Hi," she said. "You can dance! Nobody else here knows how to dance."

"Thanks," I croaked. I introduced myself and promptly held out my now-sweaty hand, which she shook; it must have been like grabbing a raw chicken leg, and I cursed myself inwardly. But she was still smiling. "My name is N. You want to dance when they start the music again? I'm sick of dancing with these rednecks."

Well.

You have to understand that no woman has ever really approached me in this way, least of all while I've been perpetrating some dance crimes, unless it's to worriedly say, "Oh, I'm sorry, I thought you were being electrocuted" or "Are you a performance artist?" So this was really new. We danced together for pretty much the rest of the night, and I was suddenly getting new looks from everyone else: What in the fuck can possibly be happening over there? Is the world ending? She was beautiful, and we danced on.

At the end of the evening, she pressed a piece of paper into my hand: her phone number, about thirty minutes away in another town. I found out something else: she was also home from school in Eugene, Oregon--not too far away from where I went to school, in Salem. "Call me tomorrow," she purred. "I want to go out. You'll call me?"

Well.

Of course I called her. I may have been an astonishingly awful dancer, but I wasn't insane, and plus, she didn't seem to notice the bizarre carny geek aspect to my dancing, so. Being around this creature--she's in my car!--emboldened me, gave me confidence I'd never felt before, least of all in this town where I had basically grown up, feeling all the time like some fucking gargoyle of Idaho, a medieval thing dropped down somewhere I had never belonged.

"Let's get some beer," she said. I gulped, but pulled into a gas station convenience store. This is never going to fly, I thought as I nervously grabbed a six-pack. I took it to the counter, and the blocklike woman stared flintily at me as I smiled and held out a ten. Then she glanced out at my horrible car parked right out front in the window. N. lazed calmly in the passenger seat. The clerk looked at me again, drawing out her stare. Did a ghost of a smile touch her lips? She took my money and said, "You have a good night now."

"I will!" I practically screamed as I exited triumphantly, and then she did smile.

The rest of the evening unfolded just like you're thinking right now. "I have to go back to Eugene tomorrow," she told me while sipping her beer. She didn't look at me while I drove. She curled her legs under herself in the seat. "Will you call me when you get to Salem?"

"Of course I will," I said, meaning it.

"Take me somewhere to look at the moon."

Well.

So, in a fog, a fog not unlike the fog of uncertainty generated by the dubious heat of my unfortunate dancing, I drove us to the track field at my high school, where, yes, we fucked like only the young can fuck: loudly; vigorously; ineptly; quickly. I noted with some amusement in the morning that my underwear was a violent, rubbed-in green; I also noted with some quick yelps in the shower that N. had mercilessly raked my back with her nails.

I drove her home in the middle of the night, and sure enough, she left the next day. As promised, she had given me her phone number in Eugene. I dreamed of her for days. Being back home was a burden on me anyway, what with the unpleasant jobs and not being able to further reinvent myself back at school. I chafed at being home, and I'm sure I was an intolerable dick the entire summer. Fortunately for everyone, I was working too hard to really bug anybody for too long.

I got back to Salem, finally, that dead turd of a town (though I thought of it as Mecca). And I called N., who picked up on the second ring.

"Oh my God! I wasn't sure you were going to call!"

I puffed out my chest. "Of course I was going to call. I told you."

"I got us Grateful Dead tickets! All you have to do is come down here."

I felt a spear of ice in my chest. I hate the Grateful Dead.

"Oh! Um . . . okay."

"And I've cleared out some room for you."

Alarm bells were ringing.

"What?" The world was tilting dangerously now.

"I cleared out some space. I thought you were coming down. I cleared out some space so you could move in."

Holy fuck.

"N. . . . I can't move in with you. I like you a lot, but . . . N., we spent a couple nights together. This is starting to freak me out. I'd love to see you, but we . . . we're not . . . this is really weird."

(I'm leaving out a bunch of stuff about how I awesomely was starting to get back together with a different girl with whom I had enjoyed a previous relationship with, and so you can see how nightmarish this was getting, and it may have been all my fault.)

I have no finish to this story. Some stories don't. And they're usually awful.

I remember this one as being awful. She hung up on me, in tears. I never heard from her again.

It occurred to me that it had been quite a while since I visited with God, so I recently caught up with him at his place in Sequim for a chat.

Skot: Wow! This is quite a place!

God: I LOVE SEQUIM.

S: Really? Why is that?

G: DUDE. IT'S PRONOUNCED "SQUIM." THAT'S AWESOME.

S: More awesome than "Humptulips"?

G: I LOVE HUMPTULIPS. BUT THEN, I LOVE EVERYTHING.

S: Even David Caruso?

G: OY . . . YEAH. YOU KNOW WHAT I DON'T LOVE? TEQUILA. I DON'T KNOW WHAT I WAS THINKING.

S: This is really pretty music you're playing. Very ethereal. Hey, is this the Cocteau Twins?

G: TREASURE IS A GREAT ALBUM. I PLAY IT ALL THE TIME.

S: That's great. What else do you like to listen to?

G: A LOT OF MOTOWN, REALLY. OH, AND I HAVE TO HEAR "GROOVY TRAIN" PRETTY MUCH ONCE A DAY.

S: "Groovy Train"? By the Farm?

G: TOTALLY. THAT GUITAR FIGURE IS AWESOME. I LOVE IT.

S: You love everything, though.

G: IT'S TRUE, BUT COME ON. YOU GOTTA DANCE!

S: If you say so. I also wanted to compliment you on your place here. It's lovely.

G: OH, THANKS. SORRY FOR THE MESS. I REALLY NEED TO MOP.

S: Oh, it's fine!

G: NO, NO, IT'S EMBARRASSING. I SHOULD HAVE MOPPED, BUT WHO WANTS TO DO THAT? I HATE MOPPING.

S: But you said earlier that you loved everyth--

G: (Sighs heavily) I KNOW WHAT I SAID. LISTEN . . . FUCK MOPPING, ALL RIGHT?

S: Uh, if you say so.

G: I DO.

S: You feel strongly about this, I can see. Never made any mention of it in the bible, though.

G: OH, LIKE I WROTE THAT. YOU GUYS ARE HILARIOUS. I LOVE YOU GUYS. WHEN YOU'RE NOT FUCKING MOPPING, WHICH THANKFULLY NOBODY EVER IS.

S: The . . . the bible isn't the word of God?

G: ARE YOU KIDDING? IT ISN'T EVEN THE WORD OF TODD. UNLESS ONE OF THOSE NUTTY MONKS WAS NAMED TODD. I GUESS IT'S POSSIBLE. ANYWAY, HAVE YOU READ THAT THING?

S: Just the dirty parts.

G: GOOD WORK. ANYWAY, THERE'S WHOLE SECTIONS IN THERE ABOUT THINGS LIKE BARLEY. BARLEY? WHAT THE HELL?

S: So . . . huh, that's weird. Are you saying that you're disavowing that the Good Book isn't really your word?

G: OH, FOR . . . LOOK, I LOVE YOU GUYS, BUT REALLY, CAN YOU LEAVE ME OUT OF IT? JUST DO YOUR THING, ALL RIGHT? I THOUGHT YOU WOULD LIKE THE IDEA: "DO YOUR OWN THING." YOU DRAG ME INTO ALL THIS STUFF . . . I GET SO MANY EMAILS.

The music changes, and the Farm's "Groovy Train" begins playing. God breaks into a sunny smile and shimmies a bit in his chair.

G: SEE? WHY DON'T YOU LISTEN TO THESE GUYS MORE? IT'S ALL RIGHT HERE IN "GROOVY TRAIN."

S: The Word of God is contained in "Groovy Train"? These are your words?

G: DON'T YOU LISTEN? NO, FOR THE LOVE OF PETE. THESE ARE THE FARM'S WORDS. I'M JUST SAYING, LISTEN UP.

S: So . . . you're saying that we should . . . get on the groovy train?

G: DO YOU HAVE A BETTER IDEA?

S: . . .

G: I DIDN'T THINK SO. THOSE AREN'T THE ONLY LYRICS, THOUGH. WHAT ELSE DOES THE SONG SAY?

S: Um . . . "You're so special"?

G: THERE YOU GO. THE IRONIC INTERPRETATION IS THE LAZY ONE.

S: I see.

G: LISTEN, I THINK WE SHOULD DANCE.

S: Right now?

G: CAN YOU THINK OF A BETTER TIME?

S: I honestly can't.

G: LET'S GO.

S: One last thing. If everyone is "special," somehow, doesn't that really mean that nobody is?

G: THAT'S THE STUPIDEST THING I'VE EVER HEARD.

S: . . . I'm sorry.

G: LOOK, DON'T BE. YOU GUYS FUCK THIS UP ALL THE TIME. LISTEN, ALL I'M SAYING IS, YOU FOLKS WOULD BE A LOT HAPPIER IF YOU LISTENED TO THE FARM. YOU WANT THE BIG SECRET? WILL YOU LEAVE ME ALONE IF I JUST COME OUT AND SAY IT? ALL I EVER WANTED TO SAY, THE FARM SAID IT JUST FINE. ALL RIGHT? CAN WE DANCE NOW?

You're so special.
Get on, get on, get on, get on the groovy train

Listen, do you have a minute? I . . . I think I need to talk. I've just gotta get this off my chest. You're the only one I can talk to. It's just you and me here, okay?

It's been eating me up lately . . . I've been having trouble sleeping. And I know I can trust you. Just--just keep it between us, okay?

I mean, it's nothing really bad. Not that bad. It's nothing to do with you, and if you were me, you'd, you'd have done the same thing, I think. I mean, you know Ra--you know what? No names. No fucking names. It's just--you know that guy, that guy everyone knows, who just--you're oil and water, right? Everyone knows that guy. Maybe he's a nice guy, you don't know, I don't know, maybe, but . . . it's always something, right? It's always something with that guy. It's that guy.

You'd laugh, really, how this all got started. We were at a friend's place, at a party, and you know, people are drinking and all, and then, well, all of a sudden I make this joke, and this guy is all up in my grill about it, and how it's disrespectful to women and all this, and I'm like, "It's what? You're nuts, and people laughed," but he's not having any of it and it turns into this big thing and the whole party grinds to a halt because now we're just screaming at each other, horrible crap and stuff, and the whole time there's still this part of my brain that's going, "But the whole joke was about fish." It was so stupid, but it got out of hand, and finally I just left. I told him, "Have some more Malibu, douche," and he turned red and opened his mouth, but I slammed the door before he could say anything.

It's so stupid. Shit like this. I mean . . . seriously? It's embarrassing to even tell you this. But it's been fucking bugging me all the time, after. After the . . . just after. How can you even talk about something this stupid? But it's been affecting me. I mean, I barely have seen the guy since then, just a . . . I guess a couple times or once or whatever.

I can't sleep. It's fucking me up. I wake up and I take these walks out into the woods . . . for hours, like, just walking around, 'cause I can't sleep. And you know me! I sleep like Coma Baby. But these days . . .

I don't know. It's dumb to even tell you all this. It's a big nothing. What, I had a fight with this asshole, and then later on--a stupid fight over a stupid joke?--and then later on, we have words about it again, the asshole shows up at my place to bitch and moan about this fucking thing again? What's that about?

It's actually kind of funny. He shows up at my place again, and rags on me some more about this woman joke--it was a fish joke, but he still isn't getting it--isn't that just funny? I mean, it wasn't funny at the time; I was pretty hot, but looking back, it's kind of funny. Funny-stupid. Heh. Mostly stupid. We were both sort of out of control after a while.

I don't know why this is still bugging the shit out of me, but it is. Listen, I know I'm talking your ear off--I'm sorry, but Jesus--it's bugging the hell out of me. I don't even know why I'm boring you with this.

You want to know a weird thing? I can't shower any more. I mean, yeah, I can shower, it's not like I'm physically incapable of showering, but I don't shower any more. I don't. I take these baths. I hate baths! Lying there in this you-soup. I always think about how many skin cells I'm sloughing off into the water. How is that clean? Then I think, "I'm sitting here in all this water that my balls and asshole are soaking in. In a shower, the water all runs off you, but here in a bath, I'm just brining away in asshole and ball water." It's disgusting.

But I keep taking baths! And--dude--it's not just that. They--it's kind of fucked up. They're cold baths. I run cold water and take a bath in that shit. Ice cold baths. What the hell, yeah, I know, way to be, loony bee, but I take these fucked up cold baths.

This is so stupid.

I like to dip under the water. I mean, I don't like it, so much, but I do it, for some reason. I slip under that cold water and try not to move. I know. I slip under and I lie there, and I let my mind just kind of go free and not move--not shiver or anything. Just lie there, under.

You can see why I've been kind of freaking out. I mean, all of this big nothing happened, and all of a sudden I'm behaving like . . . I don't even know who. Who does this? I don't. Or I didn't used to. But now here I am, not sleeping, taking these fucking walks out into nowhere, getting all riled up over this idiot, taking these creepy-ass baths in cold water where I'm just lying there, under the water, thinking about the calm about the under, thinking how this is cold, this is under, this is . . .

It reminds me of my walks out into the woods, too, the cold. The under. And I can't tell you how it feels when I finally run out of breath, and I break the surface of the water, gasping, up from the cold depths. It just feels . . . I don't know. It's hard to explain. Lots of times after the baths, I warm up by the fire, and then I take one of my brand-new fucked up strolls into the woods. I don't know why I feel better after all this crap. But I do.

You know what, though? Even the nighttime strolls in the forest are all the same. Two miles out, two miles back, every time, to the same spot, every time. It's cold at night, and kind of creepy and shit, but it relaxes me, two miles out, two miles back, packing down that cold humus and loam. I guess it's another ritual. I don't fucking need it, frankly, but there it is. And after all that's done, I can finally sleep for a couple hours. Better than nothing, I guess.

Man, I really went on there, didn't I? Thanks for listening, seriously. I really appreciate it. I don't think there's anyone else I could have talked to like this. So, thanks again. Christ, you know what? I feel a lot better telling you all this crap. I think I'm actually getting tired for the first time in weeks. I can't believe I let this dumb situation get so out of hand. It's really been great getting this all off my chest.

All right, I'll see you later, man. Thanks again. I think it's really helped me out. I'm looking forward to a good night's sleep. And I know I don't have to say this to you, but I'd really appreciate it, you know, if you kept this just between you and me.

The names in the following post have all been changed. Except for mine. I tried to write myself as "Kirby the Rad," but it didn't take.

Everyone remembers his or her freshman year of college, except for the really drunk parts. I remember mine chiefly for my massive and embarrassing efforts to utterly remake myself--to transform from an Idaho hick into a worldly sort of guy with lots of life experience. This illusion was immediately smashed when I met one of my dorm-mates, a very wealthy guy named Rick from southern California, who was Jewish, and another guy from the east coast named David, who was also Jewish, but not wealthy at all. Growing up in Idaho, I knew nothing about the Jews, and was puzzled by the exchange between them when Rick and David met. They shook hands, and then David exclaimed, "Nice Jew ring!" Rick stared thoughtfully at this big gold thing on his finger and said nothing. For my part, I was just confused.

They have rings? That's kind of cool, I guess.

I was an irritating little shit, of course, and was still trying to find my way, hyperactively describing anything within a sightline as "cheesy" and wearing aggressively horrible things like shark-emblazoned LA Gear shorts and bright red Ray-Bans. I also frankly had no idea what I wanted to study at school, apart from what I hoped were girls with impossibly lax standards. I was, naturally, a virgin. I did harbor vague ideas of entering pre-law programs, but that idea got dumped within a couple weeks, when no less than four people asked me, "Are you an actor?"

Sure! Why not? I signed up for a beginning acting class. Obviously, it took.

The professor was one of those guys who insisted that everyone call him by his first name, not "Professor Whatever." No, he was "Bob." Bob was a grinning little bearded thing, quick of tongue and obviously not quite grown up--and he regaled us endlessly about his acting exploits and his many near-misses on the big stage. He was charming in his rodentlike way, at the time . . . at the time.

Bob took an immediate shine to me in class, mainly because I was not untalented, and also because I was more than willing to take his smart-ass remarks and give them back to him; he was, in retrospect, dismissive and taunting towards the shyer, more tentative students. You see these kids in acting classes, stammer-mouthed and uncomfortable in their own skins, and wonder if taking an acting class is some sort of self-help regimen. But I wasn't tentative at all. We were all remaking ourselves, and I was gung-ho about the whole project. One of the requirements of the course was to audition for every show that was put on--you didn't have to accept a role, but you did have to audition. For my own part, I treated my very first audition as the most important thing in my life, and would have probably considered suicide if I did not get cast.

But I did, a couple very minor roles in As You Like It. Bob cast me after essentially deconstructing my initial disastrous audition read and telling me exactly what to do. Bob was on my side, and I felt that Bob was making me into the sort of person I imagined: someone who was nothing like the dipshit who didn't even know what the hell a "Jew ring" was. I was doing Shakespeare.

Bob drove a Grand Am, at least until he trashed it in some sort of accident. Then he bought himself a slick BMW motorcycle and leather riding gear. He had a blandly pretty wife at home, and midway through the year, they had a baby. Reportedly. We never saw a picture of the baby. His wife would occasionally show up at the theater building, but not often. Bob tended to his flock, and that was us. Me.

Bob was pretty fucking cool.

He was so cool, in fact, that he blew my tiny little Idaho mind in rehearsals by saying things like "I think it's pretty clear that Audrey has been sport-fucking William." Naughty! Also: "Skot, you know that William is a total pencil dick, right?" I laughed. We all laughed.

I lived for rehearsals, and I lived for acting class with Bob. He was a Stanislavsky freak (sigh), and so we'd have long discussions about "circles of intention" and then have exercises where we would cross the room, with our "energies" focused into our left knees, our foreheads, our right wrists and left ankles. Bob paid attention to posture, to alignment, to our bodies. He would think nothing of striding over to someone and massaging her shoulders, her calves, her arms. He never felt the need to adjust my position or gait, though; I interpreted this as natural talent on my part--I didn't need adjustment. I was just fine! The girls, however, needed a lot of help.

Bob had a generous open-door office policy. If you were stressed, or had some questions, or needed guidance about something, you could always find him in his office. I didn't really feel the need. Anything I needed to know, I could just ask him in class. He seemed to encourage it, and I was the brilliant student, showing off to everyone: I know how to ask the smart stuff. I positively shone.

Some of the girls didn't have it so good. Kelly in particular seemed to be enjoying the course, but she was getting moodier. She was one of the shy ones, a pretty girl, but short and short on self-esteem. She spoke her lines in a tiny voice, and seemed embarrassed bout her height as well as her zaftig figure, which she insisted on hiding with an assortment of sweaters.

I was doing excellently in the class, and got near-daily praise from Bob. I never felt the urge to visit him in his office, and continued to rise in his estimation in class; I was frequently praised, and glowed as Bob informed my classmates that I was "the guy to watch." On the other hand, poor Kelly seemed to be withdrawing more and more, and consequently was seen entering Bob's office more and more for help. I thought it was pretty cool of the guy to spend so much time helping out a girl who was having a hard time of it in a beginning acting class.

I have a very clear memory of hanging out in the theater office with my fellow actors, most of whom were smoking--this was still no problem in 1987--and watching Kelly knock nervously on Bob's door. "Kelly!" he boomed. "Come on in!" Then the door would close.

A little less than a year later, I was meeting with the Dean, who professed an interest in linguistics. "Can you tell me what 'sport-fucking' is?" she inquired. "And 'pencil dick?'" Am I being filmed for a comedy program? I wondered. For my own part, I had managed to persuade a couple of doubtlessly unsatisfied women to have sex with me. I stammered out some bunch of horrible garble along the lines of "Um, I guess it means having a really thin penis, like, unsatisfying," while the Dean nodded at me. I couldn't stop my mind from imagining what had been going on in that terrible, sterile office, with posters of Bob glaring down from the walls.

Kelly had filed formal charges. Bob was almost certainly going to be canned, and there were other murky legal issues twitching in the shadows. But Bob was going to fight this all the way, or so we heard.

I was told that I would need to testify in front of the disciplinary board. I would have to tell them about stuff like "sport fucking" and "needle dick" and classroom massages. I had to tell them all of it, about Bob, the guy who liked me, who challenged me and cast me and practically beat me with a tire iron to make me abandon the hideous fake British accent that I lapsed into when reciting Shakespeare. And the guy who, oh, right, screwed the hell out of Kelly on his awful gray office carpet.

I didn't want to testify against Bob. He had championed me and made me believe I had promise and talent. He was funny (though maybe not so much to others). I couldn't bear to think of crucifying him right to his face. There was some part of me that still considered him