Single Life is Fantastic (will somebody please take me out back and shoot me)

So I was in the grocery store yesterday. I may not have mentioned this before, but perhaps you may have picked up on a slight touch of neuroticism in my voice throughout my blog. And by slight touch, I mean that I was dipped in a batter of neuroticism as a child and left there for several hours to bask before being taken out and sent to Catholic school for nine of my formative years.

Anyways, back to the grocery store. I was there because I was picking up some 2006 Castlerock Pinot Noir and Chef Boyardee’s Beefaroni. I really wish I was joking right now. But I’m not. Unfortunately, I have done this before. In fact, this has become a Saturday night ritual.

Wine.

And Beefaroni.

All by myself. Watching the film Wall-E.



Don’t worry, I’ll say it for you:

Holy. Fuck.

I’m 28 years old, unmarried, sans girlfriend, living in a home that I own; and I’m drinking by myself. Watching Wall-E and eating – like a four year old.

I mean if drinking a bottle of wine by myself isn’t a cry for help, the Chef Boyardee should at least lay out the breadcrumb trail that leads to the “Single for the REST of your LIFE” house. I mean, where did it all go wrong? Where did I get the impression that this would be an attractive quality in the least bit? Why do I think that Chef Boyardee, wine, and Wall-E are even remotely acceptable ways to spend a Saturday evening?

But the worst part of this (in my mind at least) is having to buy these items at the grocery store. And the even more worse part of this, is what I have to do every time I go to a grocery store - pick a lane. I had to a make a decision between two open lanes. I pulled to the front of the store, and made eye contact with two different check out girls in two lanes that had nobody in them. One girl had a light complexion, blue eyes with glasses, ravishing curly dark hair, and a slim figure. The other, likely hatched from an egg somewhere under a bridge near an offramp in North Dakota. Both looked at me. I looked at them, Chef Boyardee in one hand, Castlerock Pinot in the other.

Most guys my age wouldn’t give this a second thought, much less a first thought. Ravishing hottie it is, and they would probably get a phone number.

But this decision is so much more complex. I mean, lets say I chose the lane with the hot checkout girl. This will likely validate the sense of entitlement that she already probably has having grown up hot and being hot. At the same time, the offramp bridge girl will probably have her feelings of inadequacy validated as well. And really, at what cost? So some dude can buy his beefaroni and wine and go back to watching cartoons in his pajamas and diapers. (Seriously girls, I'm still completely single)

So then the thought is this. Okay, I will choose the lane with hatched bridge girl. This way, she can beat out hot girl just ONCE, and take that with her, throughout her gremlin life – when she will remember that one day, a long time ago, a functioning alcoholic, beefaroni addict, dragon-monkey hybrid chose her over hot girl. She could tell her gremlin children.

Also, if I chose egg girl, in a way, it would be karmic, like if a really nice girl that I would want to mate with had to make a decision as to whether she would date some guy with chiseled facial features and muscles (not me), or a guy with athletes foot and subscription to the website www.womenpeeingincups.com. (there I am)

Also, I have to take note of what I’m buying. Even egg girl wouldn’t find attractive a guy buying what I was holding.

Then there’s the defining reason of why I would even consider going into hot girls lane. What am I gonna do, try to pick up on this woman? I can barely ask my grandmother what she is going to be doing later, much less ask out hot woman. And lets say by some random miracle that she was heavily sedated on narcotics and said “yes” to me asking if she would give me her phone number. I would likely just stare at the piece of paper for the next five days, drive myself fucking crazy as to when an appropriate time to call and an appropriate thing to say would be, then after numerous bottles of wine, and several hours of sobbing uncontrollably on the floor of my bathroom, would flush the phone number down the toilet, never to be used, then avoid going into that particular grocery store forever – and by god, I’m RUNNING OUT OF FUCKING GROCERY STORES HERE. (This has happened more than once)

So then I might go into gremlin girls lane. She will likely have a stellar personality (to make up for the lack of the things that would normally make a person human). And being the ghettosexual homeslice I seem to be, I will probably try (emphasize the word try) to flirt with her. She will likely have none of it, and then I’m left with a Saturday night of wine, beefaroni, and a sense of total dejection, when I could have at least had a Saturday night of wine, beefaroni, a sense of total dejection, and ten whole seconds of a real life hot woman saying things to me without having the offer of money or the use of my ether soaked rag that I keep in my trunk.

And why should grocery stores hire people of such differing character. I blame grocery stores, for forcing us customers to have to grapple with such issues that perhaps we don't want to face. How unfair is that, pitting young attractive women against the monsters that are hiding under my bed. I mean all I want is my Chef Boyardee and wine so I can forget about world, and here they force me into making full blown dissertations on philosophical thought and reasoning under the auspices of a country obsessed with beauty. What was I supposed to do?

So, I got in the third lane with the line of three people and an old man doing the checkout.

Wow. This post makes me seem really creepy.

A drunken Account of Matt and Ali's Wedding - from really really far away

Recently, two of my friends got married and I attended their wedding. My good friends Matt and Allison tied the knot after being together for something like eight or nine years. Attending weddings used to be sort of a fun thing for me, but then I became single. Instead of drinking myself into oblivion and dancing around on the dance floor like a drunken buffoon making sure to dance with every single person at the wedding, I now just drink myself into oblivion, sit in a chair, and cry.

Of course this sort of thing is highly unattractive, so I try to make it look cool. I do this by finding a chair in the corner reserved for the physically deformed and mentally challenged, and I sit there. I also face the wall, so nobody makes eye contact with me.

All I need to do now is start flirting with the bride, make non-sequitur comments to people I just met, and avoid nearly every single guest at the wedding by hanging out with the band the entire night – and I will have rounded out the evening by winning the award for “Most Socially Awkward Person On Earth EVER TO EXIST”

Oh hey! Guess who did all of those things?

Lets start with the bride flirting thing. Allison is a very attractive woman. So when she came over and spoke to me, I did what I always do when an attractive woman approaches me and starts talking. I hold on to my penis.

I hold on to it because I’m scared to talk to attractive women. And when I get scared, I start urinating all over the place, and I mean… I just dry-cleaned these pants.

Anyhow, she approached me and the following conversation took place:

Alison: “Hey there pie man, did you bring any pies for the dessert.”
Me: “Oh, Allison, I’m so sorry. I didn’t. I didn’t know. I can, um, I can bring some by when you get back, I mean, when the honeymoon is over and you get back from the place that you are going, I’ll stop by the house and then – then I can brin.…..”
Alison: “Joseph, I’m joking….”
Me: “Oh, sorry, beautiful women make me nervous.”

Then she looked at me funny. Not like “oh that was sweet” funny; but more like “why is he holding his penis like that” funny. Anyways, it was weird.

I proceeded from that moment to continue drinking unapologetically until I spontaneously combusted…

Then the non-sequitur thing happened. This guy approached me, and mentioned that our parents knew each other. I knew who his parents were and in fact, was surprised that I had never met him, despite having gone to high school with him. We engaged in a very brief conversation and I really kept my awkwardness at bay, until this little nugget of fun happened:

Me: “So, um what do you do for a living?”
Him: “Oh, I’m a Geologist.”
Me: “Oh cool man. That’s awesome. How is that?
Him: “Its great, I really like it.”
Me: “I know the three types of geological rocks.”
Him: (pause) “Oh, um, cool.”

Cool indeed. For some reason, I always feel the need to tell the people that I have met who are geologists that I know the three types of geological rocks. The sad part is, I try to turn the part of the conversation that is focused on him, onto me with really obtuse information that is impossible to follow up with conversationally. The even more sad part is that, really… I only know two.

After that, his words were something like, “Okay, well I’m gonna go get a drink now, I’ll see you around.” At least, I think that is what he said. I stopped paying attention at this point because I was too busy trying to stop my right hand from inserting the dinner knife into my aorta.

Lastly, I ended up being THAT GUY that hangs out with the band the entire time. Luckily, I didn’t give a shit because I was good friends with one of them, and had hung out with the rest of them before. Also, I didn’t know but two people at the wedding, and yet, I knew the entire band. Actually, somebody came up to me and asked me how long we (the band) had been together. I told her that we (the band) had been together for about seven years now, going on eight, but that we had briefly split up when I went to rehab for my addiction to heroin and hookers. I didn’t care. Also, she didn’t seem to notice that I didn’t sing or play an instrument, so if she was too stupid to realize that I wasn’t in the band, then she was too stupid to be given a truthful explanation.

All in all, I had a pretty good time at the wedding. I got properly sloshy. The one thing I can say, though, is that a wedding where good-looking, young people are getting married is tough on me. They tend to have good-looking friends and family, and this makes me very uneasy, being part rhesus monkey, part dragon child hybrid.

News Flash!! - I’m different.

I’m a little weird. And for those that know me, or have met me, or that have not met me but stalk me nonetheless, you know enough about me to know that if we were all driving, and everybody was making a right turn, I’m the one who is probably going backward. Actually, I wouldn’t even be driving. I’d be at home with a bottle of wine watching a show about people who are making a right turn while driving. Actually, when is Oprah on? This show is getting really boring.

Anyhow, I digress. What I mean is that I’m a bit different. I mean, I’m not different different. I don’t make my own underwear, touch myself in public, and piss into the wind while arguing with the voices in my head. I only do three of the four above, and I do them separately. (Can somebody teach me how to sew?) Also, can somebody tell me why three and a half of the four above items involve my crotchal region?

While there are far too many things that make me different from many of my friends to recount (including phobias related to things that have more than 4 legs and people with vitiligo), one of those things is coping mechanisms. I never learned how to cope. For example, when I was in elementary school, one of the sports I played was golf. Okay, okay, that was the only sport I played because when I played sports, it was NOT like watching a girl throw a baseball overhand, it was like watching an elephant do organic chemistry.

Anyhow, I would be playing golf with my brothers and/or friends. We would set up and tee off. When we were 10 years old, if our thought processes were audible, they would probably be something akin to this:

Friend #1: (tees off – the ball goes perfectly straight) Wow! I’m the best. I’m so good at this game. I’m going to turn pro. Also, I wonder if anybody else in my group likes the Care Bear’s? I’m going to go eat ice cream.

Brother #2 – (tees off – the ball slices right and out of bounds) Gee whiz! That’s too bad. Oh well, better luck next time. Once I practice, my tee shots will improve. I hope I can still find it because that was an expensive ball though. If not, no big deal. I’ll just steal them for Joe later. He has thousands.

Brother #3 – (tees off – the ball goes perfectly straight) Wow! My hard work and practice has been paying off. At least I don’t have to steal any of Joe’s balls. I mean, I’ll probably do it anyways, just to piss him off, but it’s not like I need them. It’s a pretty day out.

Joseph – (tees off – the ball falls off the tee from a stream of air coming from a club head that screamed by it) – don’t cry don’t cry don’t cry don’t cry don’t…….. Fuck – that’s a tear. Oh God no, there’s another one. I want a gun.

Brother #2 – (rifling through Joseph's bag) is he crying?

Anyways, at least now, I have a metal in marksmanship for negative self talk.

The good news is that I’m slowly working on this. I’m trying to reprogram my brain to say “its okay Joseph, it happens to every guy at some point and you’ll be ready to go again in about ten minutes and hopefully she’ll still be awake” vs. “don’t cry don’t cry don’t cry don’t cry…. Fuck! That’s a tear. I hope she isn’t looking at me right now. Oh God she is. I need to change my underwear.”

How to Thai a noose

I went out on an "official" date Friday night. I use the word "official" in this case because, while I have been out before, it has been quite a long time since I asked a woman out to dinner and had it end the way a normal date would. Most of the dates I have been on in the previous few years have involved:

(in no particular order)

- lunch with a woman who had recently been released from prison

- after dinner drink that turned into a slosh-fest and included laying down on a sidewalk, Jack-in-the-Box restrooms, and crying (her, not me).

Weird, but I sat down to write out a long list of horrible dates over the past few years, and it turns out, that those are the only two I’ve been on. Believe it or not, but the last date on the very short list above was with a person whose name begins with “Dr.”

Let me first say this – if you are ever at a Thai restaurant, and you are given the choice of ordering TomYum soup, do not let the name of the soup fool you into thinking that it is going to be “yum” or “yummy” or “have pieces of your friend Tom in it,” as the name may suggest.

So what was wrong with the soup? Well, it was hot. Not hot in the “hey we boiled up some chili pepper sauce and called it soup,” kind of way. More in the “hey we boiled up some hot magma and hope you don’t mind that when you wake up tomorrow morning, you will no longer have any internal organs” kind of a way.

I got about three sips into this soup before I realized that it had dissolved my tongue away.

Also, my body, in an arbitrary attempt to save the lining of my esophagus, decided that it would be okay with me if it started sending soup down my trachea and into my lungs. I was coughing like I had been chain smoking in Bakersfield for the last thirty years. And while it really isn’t up there with, say, “sharting” while waiting on dessert***, it is definitely on par with getting a bloody nose during dinner, or ordering milk and spilling it all over your date, as well as sneezing while chewing resulting in a shotgun blast of half digested couscous all over your dates wine glass and utensils. (Hey girls, did I mention I’m single?)

***This has actually never happened to me, but I’m certainly not willing to discount the fact that it could.

The other, and much more pleasant thing I noticed was when we both sat down. It turns out, that she must have accidentally said yes to going out with me because as soon as we were seated I noticed something very significant about her. She’s funny. A smart, gorgeous, woman with a sense of humor laced with a tinge of sarcasm.

She is exactly the type of woman that I want to be when I become a woman.

Finding that in California is similar to me going out and digging in my backyard and instead of striking gold, I dug up a brand new Ferrari.

Of course, I had been up for a solid 36 hours at the time that I had picked her up, so really, things had begun to blend together. It is highly possible that I had gone on a date with Wilfred Brimley and not realized it, until his mustache tickled the upper part of my lip when I kissed him goodnight. Isn’t that every 27 year old man’s fantasy?

Should have stayed in closet

Way back, when I was about 11 years old, my mom and dad decided that it would be fun to go on a little trip up to San Francisco. We didn’t travel that much as kids because, as I’ve mentioned before, my dad didn’t take any time off when he was building out the bakery.

So going on a vacation was especially fun for us as children. However, as I look through pictures, I realize that perhaps my father could have taken more days off of the bakery had he wanted to. The reason that he declined so often to take us on vacations was probably due to this:





I know that if I had a family at home that dressed like this, I would likely keep them in the basement locked away, vehemently in defense of going on vacations or even out of the house to go to the store – mostly for fear that those pants - would alter the very nature of atomic structure altogether, shifting spacetime as we strolled down aisle 3 in search of Hamburger Helper.

Seriously though, does anybody else find it fitting that we would take a trip. A trip - to San Francisco. Look at us. We could have led political campaigns for Harvey Milk.

I’m the one on the far left. Those glasses could very well have been used to study bacteria found in termite intestines.

And my poor sister. She is so disgusted, she can’t even look at the camera. I’m trying to figure out if we were taking a trip to San Francisco, or escaping from Barnum and Bailey’s.

And my mom. Holy Christ. They may have used those exact sunglasses to block the sun’s powerful light rays aboard the Hubble Telescope. Perhaps James Cameron was inspired to write and direct Terminator 2 upon seeing my mom. She’s her own satellite dish. In a way, I guess I could understand wearing sunglasses that large. It does highly limit the powerful light rays being emitted from our jackets, which have since been used to power the Large Hadron Collider built under CERN laboratories.

What baffles me the most is why the hell we are all wearing the exact same jacket. There must have been a four for one special at the Salvation Army - Crack Addict Section.

Demon children?

This picture was taken immediately after the casting call for Damien - Omen II.

I'm the stone sober one on the right. My brother, the one whose eyes are out to lunch, may have unintentionally ingested Ecstasy. Exorcise regularly.

I have a box

So I was at the Anus of Satan U.S. Post Office today, like I am everyday to pick up mail for the bakery. We have three post office boxes there, one is small, for letters, bills, and my personal favorite – checks declaring a monetary value that will soon be deposited into my nose.

The second is for the Wall Street Journal and various Bakery Magazine’s n’ shit. Most of everything that is put in this box goes directly into a collection bin marked “Trash and The Souls of Innocent Children.”

The third is for an entirely separate bakery, established by my grandfather when he was alive, and which we choose to keep in operation today. I have just been too lazy to go close down that box and reroute my coke addiction to the first box.

One of the things I’ve noticed about people who have Post Office boxes is they don’t look at all like they would have a P.O. Box. I guess I really don’t either, but I use ours for business. Most of the people that walk in to retrieve their mail look as though they just left their first A.A. meeting, have Lyme Disease, and horde foods high in carbohydrates and fat. The joke is on them though, I only suffer from two of the previous three malignity’s.

Every so often, I receive a Postal note informing me that they have a package that is “too large” for the post office box and that I must bring this note to the counter in order to retrieve it. My heart always fluttered a bit when this would happen as I used to think it was a big present waiting for me to open. Maybe it was a remote control plane or a large tub of macaroni and cheese or the big black dildo I ordered from www.feedmybehind.com

Slowly, this fluttering heart situation went away when I began to realize that they were just even larger magazines or catalogs that were slinging shit like towels or bandanas or sex slaves (true story – sorta).

So today, I got that same note in the mail, and I got in the same line of people trying out for the Decrepit-a-thon. Then the lady with the lazy eye called me over and I gave her the slip. She went back to retreive it and while I was waiting, I saw this:







That’s right. It is a postcard. It is a postcard that is meant to warn someone of their sickle-celled child.

I’m not sure, perhaps it was the coke, but this struck me as really odd. First, most people sending postcards are:

a) not vacationing here in Colton, the O.G. industrial park of America
b) would probably like to send a postcard showing the beautiful places that they have visited that say “Wish you were here!”

This postcard is more for people saying:

“Hey, we made it, and on our way here we saw fields of rye and wheat, and thought about how people used to harvest it, you know, before machinery, and so, um, maybe you should get that sickle-cell thing looked at…. Wish you were here! Love, John and Susan. P.S. Your black!”

Needless to say, I bought a few of them and will be distributing them at Christmas next year.

Joseph's Love Life

Time of death: 5:45 pm on a Wednesday afternoon.

Already suffering from a rare strain of cancer, inabilitytotalktowomenperiod carcinoma, Joseph's love life suffered a fatal and final blow. It was taken to the Emergency Room and after several rounds of medication and cardioversion with a defibrillator, it was pronounced dead. Most people in the ER stood up and cheered.

"Thank God we don't have to listen to its incessant whining and complaining...." was voiced by one stander-by.

Witness reports explain that he was in the middle of making a call to a girl he met once at a party, trying desperately to set up a date by voicemail, when he randomly shrieked, began repeating the same phrase over and over, and then later apologized for repeating himself.

"It was tough to watch," said God as looked over the lifeless body.

According to Dr. Nepal, "It was a nice love life, but it just didn't understand womens wants and needs, and with what little self-esteem being diverted to its use of red wine and porn, the pressures were simply to great."

Friends and family will be gathering at the love lifes former home this upcoming Valentines day to show support, before they go out to dinner and fuck each others brains out.

Letters from Allah (Part I)

I have recently fallen in love. And being the smooth talking, uncomplicated, non-awkward, convivial, amiable, everybody-loves-me-immediately-upon-meeting-me, type of person I am… she has no idea who I am.

Well that’s not entirely true. She’s my lab partner in biology.

Its odd because I’m 27, and the previous paragraph looks and sounds like it was written by an angst-ridden 13 year old high school girl. Its nice to know that the previous 14 years have taught me a volume of knowledge equal to that of a fly testicle. Not only that, I haven’t learned how to be my own gender yet.

Speaking of the volume of a fly testicle, that is also equal to how much ability I have in asking a member of the opposite sex out, or flirting with the opposite gender, or even holding a brief conversation with another woman without it coming out as a series of grunts and high pitched shrieks similar to Morse code.

My latest attempt to ask a woman out was so disturbing, that I haven’t been back to the place of “The Incident” since, and it has now been going on for close to 4 months. My last attempt was actually to ask out a deaf woman. I’ll save you the entirety of the story, but it pretty much came down to the following series of thoughts.

1) Wow, that woman over there is mighty beautiful.

2) Wait a minute, she’s deaf.

3) Wait a minute, this might work in my favor. She’s handicapped, and I’m normal. That brings her desirability number down and mine increases – a rare diamond in the Sahara desert that is my dating career.

4) Dating a deaf woman would be AWESOME. No nagging. No awkward silent moments that have to be filled with mindless conversation. Everything that woman has to say MUST be meaningful in some way because she is very VERY limited in her ability to communicate to the outside world. Instead of conversing about some lame new plot twist on Grey’s Anatomy, she would talk about the amazing universe and Einsteins theory of relativity, and how we actually came to be as humans evolving on Earth.

5) I need to increase my text messaging plan.

6) Okay, I’m gonna ask her out… I’m gonna do it. I’m going to take this pencil and paper that the deaf people (there was a party of like 50 in the bar that night) are using to order drinks with and ask her if I can buy her a drink.

And then I did it. And the response. She shook her head and mouthed the word “NO!” then pounded her chest with her right hand twice and made a gesture pointing to the door, as though she wanted me to leave.

The entire bar fell silent. (Okay, well most of them were deaf, so there wasn’t that much sound to begin with, but still!!!) I felt the eyes of about 20 people around her fall on my back. I swear to God I almost threw up all over her.

That response was so horrific, so mind bendingly painful, I just left my credit card with the bartender and picked it up the next day. I actually think that situation gave my E.D. (erectile dysfunction). Seriously, my penis is like, “alright, man, you… you remember what happened last time kiddo… you sure ya wanna start that again?....”

Anyhow,

So the object of my affection… Well, she’s Indian – the forehead dot kind, not Thankgiving and animal slaughter kind. And if we were to marry, I will have accomplished my two main goals of life which are:

1) to find a person who will cook me an endless supply of curry, and

2) to have milk chocolate children.

I can’t imagine anything more romantic than asking her out while we are focusing in on microscope slides of E. coli and Gonorrhea, can you?

The funny thing about this, and something that I notice about my whole demeanor, is that I get on my best behavior after I meet somebody that I would like to date. I may only see them once and the next time I see them will be in a week, but during that entire week, I do things like go to bed early, do my homework, exercise, eat healthy, and I do this because I think that if I do this, then God will look down on me and think,

“well, he may be an idiot, and I wish I’d been paying attention when I was handing out good looks and social skills that one day 27 years ago, but at least he tries….maybe I’ll give him some encouragement and let him lick the spoon before I pull it away and stab him in the pancreas with it….”

At least that’s what I hope.

Goodbye Letter #1:

Dear Burger King French Fries,

I would like to begin by saying that you are one of my very favorite friends.  I love the way that you taste, I love how you are nice and crunchy on the outside, with a pleasantly creamy potato mash on the inside.  The salt of your skin only enhances the taste and creates an aroma of supreme satisfaction.

With this said, I am afraid that I am going to have to finally end our torrid affair, once and for all. 

Now, we have been through a lot together.  I remember first meeting you when I was about 11 years old, and mom would bring me over to your house after school.  From those first few meetings together, our friendship developed over time, and we became good friends, partners, and eventually, lovers.  And we have been through a lot together.  Whoppers, Diet Cokes, the occasional Sprite, and every once and awhile, a chocolate shake.  We have had beers together on Friday nights and red wine together on Saturday nights.  We’ve shared fulfilling conversations in the car, on the road, at home, while playing poker with our other friends.  And we have met a lot of new people together, like Akina’s Beef Bowl and Chipotle’s Chicken Burrito, and more recently, Chicken Fries.

But those were the good times.  Lately, I’ve been starting to feel a little used by you.  I mean, look at me.  Since college, I’ve gained 10 pounds.  Because of you, I have to deal with certain insecurities that you will never understand, like an ever expanding waist size, a bubbly butt, and bitch tit man boobs.  I mean, what the f?  Man boobs!  I just can’t take walking into a grocery store, and seeing people look at me through inquisitive eyes, wondering if I’m a 27 year old man, or if I’m a 27 year old man going through estrogen hormone replacement therapy.  You just don’t know what that is like.  And lately, our time together has been getting shorter and shorter.  I mean, I realize that we agreed to an open relationship and that you were probably going to see other people, but lately, we see each other for about five minutes, and then you are gone, leaving me to wipe up barbeque sauce or ranch dressing from my upper lip.  

I feel like a prostitute.

You will always be my little frenchy.  I mean it.  But I think I deserve better, and I think you do to.  And, I don’t want this to sting you at all, so don’t let it.  But I’ve been seeing someone behind your back.  Her name is Bok Choy, and I think we just have more in common, and similar goals in life.  And she has really good friends, like shitake mushroom, and spaghetti squash.   

This is harder on me that it is on you.  Be well my love, I will always have a special place in my heart for you.

Eye have a life!!!

So, after a firestorm of Friday and Saturday nights, locked up in my house, watching an endless string of John Hughes films, drinking red wine, and slowly watching my penis shrivel into a vagina, I made a decisive effort to reconnect with the world.

Being the shut-in that I am, this was going to require some serious deliberation and work on my part.

It is more or less a matter of remembering the basic social status quo’s of my youth, such as not eating with your mouth open, and being interesting by being interested, and always, always remembering that when you are done coating somebody’s family room table with a layer of drool, to offer to help clean it up. This specifically carried over from when I was an infant, and remains to be a problem to this day. Do you think there is medication out there for excessive drooling? I looked up droolologist in the phone book. Nothing.

So what inspired this little episode of reconnection with the outside world? It was really a combination of things. I ran out of picking cotton from my belly button, a chore that was immediately followed by biting off my toenails, and finally going to visit an optometrist.

Notice in the last sentence that I used the word “visit” an optometrist rather than went and “saw” an optometrist. I used the word visit because upon wrapping up the two previous chores of nonsterile cleansing of myself, I noticed that my glasses are really getting old and shitty. There is also this fiber scratch right across the right lens that has been bothering me for a little over a year and a half. One would think that I should have gotten this taken care of the day after I noticed it, but if your health insurance doesn’t cover optometry, one tends to limit visits to such a person, much the way I limit my visits to restaurants with a food rating of “D,” or to beehives.

My optometrist, just so happens to be a good friend of mine from high school. Angela. Angela is Chinese by default, but could not tell you the first thing about chow mein, Tibet, and being a commie bastard. She was an army brat, living in Germany, Korea, an underwater oil rig in the Atlantic Ocean, Venus, Alpha Centauri, and finally ending up in California, where we met my freshman year.

We became pretty fast friends in high school because we both LOVE alternative music, and also, she felt bad for me, being the friendless, acne-ridden, misanthrope with a penchant for hiding in dark corners during passing period to avoid communication with most forms of life, type of person I seemed to be back then. She was much more friendly, but like me, was also very shy, and at the same time, whimsical and brilliant.

Flash forward about 10 years.

She’s basically a shadow of her former self. Grown up, mature, with a tendency to be alcoholic in nature.

The best thing I’ve ever heard her say in a conversation:

“So how do you like being an optometrist?”

“Its okay.”

“Don’t you get satisfaction from helping people?”

“Yeah, I mean I guess I do.”

(sarcastic) “You sound enthused.”

“Oh no, I mean, I like what I do, but if I had to do it all over again, I don’t think I would have chosen to become an optometrist.”

“Wow. Really? Because that is a lot of money and time that you put into getting a degree in optometry. If you had to do it over again, what would you have chosen to do.”

“I dunno. I really like to dance. Maybe a dancer.”

After this startling revelation, I thought it only appropriate to take her out dancing, really just to see if she HAS thrown her entire life away by becoming a doctor and caring for people… when she could very easily be making $12K per year backing up Britney Spears.

Turns out the girl can move. I’m still oafish on the dance floor, waving my arms around like I’m having a grand mal epileptic moment, and bopping up and down as though I were the only person on the dance floor with a built in trampoline instead of a pair of legs.

So out we went to “The Air Conditioner” in Venice. Really cool place with modern décor, a really good DJ, and a pretty cool vibe from the patrons. Here, we met up with a plethora of people who were all celebrating one of her friends’ birthdays. Most, if not all of her friends, are optometrists.

So there I am, pudgy, drinking a vodka tonic, surrounded by about 10 optometrists. This is on one side, frightening, and at the exact same time, equally comforting. It’s like being surrounded by a bunch of cardiac surgeons, who would resuscitate me back to life when I fall into an alcohol induced coma. You know. Like, if I were out on the dance floor and I suddenly got a cataract, or I was going to the bathroom, and the shock of unzipping my pants forced my retina to detach from my eye. Macular degeneration? Ha. I spit in thee face… Lose a contact? They can just pull out there laser pens and go to work. Astigmatism? Two is always better than one, right… even when it comes to focal points!!! (This last sentence was intended as a joke for optometrists everywhere to enjoy!)

So back to Angela and her dancing. I spent much of the night trying to keep up, both energy-wise and alcohol-wise. But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. Its like if there were a rematch between Mohammed Ali and Joe Frazer, and then Joe Frazer were replaced by, say… a garden lily. In this last analogy, I’m the garden lily.

But we had a good time. Well, she had a good time. I spent most of my time trying not to look like my awkward self:





Mission UN-Accomplished.

it still hurts a latte

So I was hanging out with one of my celebrity friends, Maria, the other weekend.





(clearly shows signs of a slight social disorder with potential for violence)

Or rather, she was hanging out with me. It just so happened that we would end up in the same French restaurant and coffee bars in L.A., so out of pity, I decided she could tag along with me because she had nothing else to do that day and I was in the middle of a very VERY busy schedule of staring off into space and drinking large amounts of water.

Anyhow. I digress.

Maria’s celebrity-ness, aside from knowing me, comes from winning a VH1 show called “The Shot.” Now I never actually saw the show, but seeing as how it comes from VH1 and it involves the word “shot”, I have deduced that it is some sort of game show about being some kind of really good sniper or something. I think she won the game show by shooting Tia Tequila to death thereby subsequently ending the outbreak of herpes in L.A. Then again, I might not have the premise of the show down correctly (I was drunk when she was explaining it to me). But I think I’m close.

So how on Earth do I know this girl. Well, I think that this is a very legitimate question seeing as how most women I know and with whom I am friends are usually accustomed to me putting $1 bills in their g-strings.

It’s kind of a long story but the gist of it is that we met in church during our high school years, my best friend S, dated her for about 3 seconds, and I had what could be construed as a slight crush on her sister, A…….

way back when I was ghettosexual.

So Maria and I lost contact some time after high school and I really didn’t think much of her, nor did she of me. Then randomly, we got a hold of each other through a social networking site…. A website that rhymes with “pie-face”. We agreed to meet up next time I was in L.A. ...... which just so happens to be a surprise birthday party for my best friend S, planned by his wife.

So I’m like:

“hey come on down. It’s S’s b-day, and we’re all having fun at the bars.”

“You sure it’s okay. It won’t be weird?”

“Yeah, why would it be weird? 10 years…. Come down… I’ll see you in a few.”

And then Maria shows up.

And I can only describe what happened in the bar that night as what it would be like if I had invited the Prime Minister of Israel and the head of the Palestinian Hamas to join hands and sing “we are the world” around a campfire.

Sadly, neither of them brought uzi’s, or a handgun, or at least a Gillette Mach 5 so I could slit my own damn wrists….

I felt a tension and sense of anxiety, that was similar to what I would feel like if somebody had shot me in a rocket from the planet earth, and landed me on the planet Jupiter, a planet equal to about 3000 times that of the gravitational pull of the earth.

Now, I’ll agree, it probably wasn’t the most intelligent thing on earth to do, you know… inviting your best friends ex-girlfriend to his surprise birthday party that his wife had spent so much time planning. I mean, something like that requires an explanation, like…. My mom spent too much time in front of the microwave when she was pregnant with me, or the candy I ate as a child was made of paint thinner…

The honest truth is, I really was curious to hang out with this woman. I mean, people change after 10 years, and in those 10 years, at least one of my testicles has dropped and I just can’t wait until my 10 year high school reunion to show off this recent development.

And hanging out with her was a blast. We caught up on old times, laughed about things we had done, told stories about what we had been up too. I showed her my new testicle.





We drank latte’s shaped like vagina’s. I met a really cool friend of hers named Albert, a guy who has lived in every country on earth as well as manned a space flight to an asteroid where he used nuclear explosives to break it apart and save the earth from a devastating…

oh wait, different guy….

Anyways, things were cool and she has a really cool boyfriend named something or other. I don’t remember his name because even though he was Maria’s boyfriend, hanging out with him was about as much fun as learning multi-dimensional calculus. And it wasn’t that he was a bad guy by any means, we shared laughs a plenty. It mostly had to do with the fact that he is a photographer, and he was really proud that he took 27 gigabytes of pictures that day of some girl trying to make it as a model and he really wanted to show these off. I liken looking at 27 gigabytes of pictures of the same girl (fully clothed) in different locations, to expanding on Einsteins theory of relativity, because really – time DOES become a variable the further from Earth that one gets.

All in all, it was a fun birthday weekend for the guys!! And hanging out with Maria and company, was of course fun, and I, naturally, exaggerate many things and there really are no hard feelings.


But seriously though.

My testicle did drop.

Anatomy of a Crime: The little hit n' run that could

Okay, okay, this has been going on long enough.

I’ll freely admit right now that I’m the asshole. And not just any asshole, but rather, one that hasn’t been cleaned with toilet paper in quite some time.

My posts have been so infrequent lately that I feel the readers have gotten together and banished me from the blogosphere. And rightfully so.

Plus, so many things have happened and so many awkward circumstances have occurred, that I’m not sure even where to begin.

I guess I could start with my car accident. The one where it involved me, a cat, rain slick wet streets, a brick pillar holding up a fence, a plethora of police officers with nothing better to do, and me running down the street drinking mouthwash, drunk, running away from cops chasing me. Well, the first part of that was true and the second part of that was a rumor that I heard about what happened to me.

Okay so here’s the thing. When you run into an inanimate object at night, remember that you have to report it. Especially if you started giving that inanimate object CPR, and then later found out that it died on the table after being taken to the hospital and most especially if that thing is made up of things most readily found in the periodic table of the elements in the heavy metals section and not made up of salacious little biological organisms us smart folk call “cells.”

I will put this story in the context from which I remember, which is in units of time, on a Friday night.

7:00 pm – meet Jeff and Brian for dinner and beer (beer plays a negligible factor here as I only had one.

8:30 pm – leave the teppan bar full and with a blood alcohol level of .01.

8:45 pm – arrive home and watch “Sunshine” – an amazing film.

8:45-10:45 pm – exchange text messages with my friend charity while watching film about meeting up and going out that night.

10:45 pm – shower, shave, brush teeth, comb hair, take an ostensibly large shit.

11:00 pm – get in my truck to pick up my friend Charity, who lives about 7 minutes away.

11:03:00 pm – (please note the use of seconds in the time) see a black cat dart from out of the bushes on the right side.

11:03:01 pm – depress brakes and swerve to miss the black cat

11:03:02 – 11:03:04 pm – truck proceeds to do a 200 degree circle in the middle of the street.

11:03:04:21 pm – (note the use of milliseconds in the time) truck proceeds to hit the curb while a tree cracks my windshield. I think, at this specific time, “this isn’t so bad, I can probably replace that for a few hundred and hammer out the dent in my hood by myself..”

11:03:04:45 pm – truck proceeds into a brick pillar. I think “okay, maybe not.”

11:03:05:00 pm – My glasses are knocked off my face.

11:03:05:20 pm – the truck has stopped moving and I think “I really have to get new glasses, these things are seriously getting looser on my face, and if I don’t, I might lose them in an accident or something… wait, hold on just a second here….. accident….. accident….. yes, I believe I just survived one of those.


11:03:06:00 pm – I begin the daunting task to find my glasses in my truck.

11:03:07:00 pm – I find my glasses and think, “I wonder if anybody saw me. This is really embarrassing and I don’t like people looking me like some weirdo and I’m embarrassed right now and I’m gonna leave because I don’t like people and they might think I’m weird for skidding into a brick pillar and I really should get home so I can write on my calendar that I need to make an appointment to get new glasses because seriously, this is getting annoying, and what if somebody heard the crash and comes out to talk to me and calls an ambulance and they have to take me to the hospital because that is protocol for all accidents even though I’m not visibly bleeding or anything. I really hate cats.”

11:03:07:01 pm – I start my truck.

11:03:08 pm – To my surprise it starts. I put it in drive and go home, very slowly and without power steering and the ability to make left and right turns. I felt like I was driving a motorized sleigh, leaning left and right to make it turn in those directions.

11:06 pm – I arrive home, shaking, pissed, confused, fearful, jumpy, scattered, and basically the opposite of everything associated with the word, comfort.

11:07 pm – I call my dad and brother and explain the whole ordeal to them.

11:17 pm – The Riverside Police Department arrive in the driveway as I’m talking to my dad on the phone.

A special side note to the wondrously irresponsible and downright neandertholithic people that make up the Riverside Police Department, a department of australopithicine children with the average intelligence of a small tulip.

They are dicks.

And not just high school bully dicks, as they exhibit the sort of dickishness and public douchery that lines the inner part of ones scrotum.

Sadly, my family has RPD ties, and our company donates money to the RPD. Well, at least, we USED to donate to the RPD. They can suck a fat one now.

So why all of this anger and resentment? Because the first question that I get when they see me, in MY driveway, is “Is this your car?”

That’s a fair question.

“Yes,” I reply.

“Have you been drinking?”

“No.”

“Okay, what happened.”

I proceed to tell the story. I don’t finish because he interrupts me with:

“Alright, hold on, as you are talking, I’m smelling something on you and your eyes are bloodshot.”

Side note: This may seem, on the surface, like an innocent observation, but the guy interrupted me as I was getting to the good part of the story, and by God, THIS JUST HAPPENED AND BY GOD, I’M GONNA FUCKING TELL IT… Also, he was implying that I was drunk (smelling my breath) and had also been smoking pot (bloodshot eyes)… which is just plain bullshit. I mean, I’m 26. That shit is way too high school and early college. Coke is ten times more fun, especially when mixing animal tranquilizers with some barbiturates, and an occasional snort of ground up oxycontin… now if he had implied that, I would have been a little less offended. But he didn’t, he zeroed in my look of youth and went with alcohol and pot. What a load of shit.

So I reply with…

“Well I’m not sure what you smell aside from me having just brushed my teeth (keep in mind I was picking up Charity – a girl) and I’m not sure why my eyes would be bloodshot other than maybe that I was just in a FUCKING CAR WRECK.”

“Okay, well, lets go get your license, registration, and insurance.” I go to do this, along with him, and I can’t find it. The reason I can’t find it, and to my utter shock, is that everything in the center console of my truck as well as everything in my truck (including my Macbook Pro) flew out the back drivers side window of my truck. I also take note of the fact that the passenger side floor mat is upside down on the passenger seat. At about this time, another cop, carrying a flashlight pointed right at me (our driveway is completely lit up), comes up to the other cop. He asks me,

“did you work for the Salinas Californian newspaper?”

Now, nothing really prepares you for a question like that in circumstances such as this. My thoughts went something like this:

I pissed some local gangbanger in Salinas off while writing movie reviews for the paper, and made some derogatory remark about Mission Impossible III, and now his cop brother in Riverside is confirming, that I, in fact, am Joseph the Movie Guy and is going to proceed to off me.

As the words, “yes, how did you know” are coming out of my mouth, the first cop (the one assuming I’m an alcoholic pot head) says to other one,

“He seems a little high and I smell something on him.”

Well thank you Officer Testicleshaventdroppedyet for such a brilliant conclusion using the scientific method of “say whatever the hell I want cuz the state of California licensed me to be an officer of the law, bitches!!!!” deduction. And what’s with interrupting me when I’m just about to get to the part of the story that’s good.

So from this, I enter into an agreement to take a field sobriety test.

Again, more cyclical reasoning, since, “if he can walk in a straight line, he clearly must not have been drinking.”

I asked for the breathalyzer to make sure, but they were far to lazy to go up and haul that large piece of equipment and spend the time to set it all up and I’m getting tired just thinking about it.

So the cops frisk me, then take me to the scene of the crime where I meet Officer Testicleshaventdroppedyeteither. There are five cop cars surrounding a downed brick pillar.

He asks me,

“did you do this.”

“yes.”

“Why didn’t you report it to anybody.”

“Um, who.”

“The Police Department, the owners of the property. Why’d you leave. This is a hit n’ run and is very serious.”

Oh yes, I can just see the conversation between me and the police department.

“Hi yes, I know its Friday night and all, but anyhoo, I just called to say hey, so heeeeeey, and um I just ran over a brick pillar, and I’m fine, but I don’t think brick pillar made it. So can you send a squadron of police cars to make a big deal about nothing. Also, are you busy later, cuz I was thinking we could get together later on… and maybe I can show you my little brick pillar if you know what I mean, OW!”

As for the owners of the property, well, it just so happened I ran into our local country club/golf course, privately own by 455 people, two of whom happen to be my dad and brother.

And as for a hit n’ run, doesn’t that involve people?

Anyways. Clearly the police officers on the scene were doucherous. Meanwhile I proceeded to clean up about 1000 of my business cards off the street as well as my laptop (which was dent free and in perfect working order) as they looked on filling out reports and wasting time doing nothing. My brother came and picked me up and I had only a bruise on my right leg and very sore back for about two weeks. But nothing debilitating.

Here is what the truck looks like:






Pretty intense for the dual airbags that never deployed. Also, it was cool that I wasn’t charged for the crime that I didn’t commit, which is a nice change of pace for the RPD.

And for those curious, the cat survived the ordeal.

My truck, nor the brick pillar, did not however.

New Years Resolution #343 - abolished

Damn you cheesy gordita crunch...





Damn you and your succulent cheesy goodness.

A new low, while high...

I’m not dead! Actually, I take that back. In the physical sense, I’m still here, living and breathing. In the physical sense, I’m not dead.

In the emotional and spiritual sense, I die a little each day.

So where the fuck have I been?

Many things have happened, and it would be oh so much more dramatic if I was writing this high on opiates, with a towel around my body, a turban, and precious stones encrusted into various organs of my body, while spouting religious sermons and eating boiled bald eagle eggs atop a bed of quinoa.

Sadly, none of the above has happened. I’m still fighting the same fight, running the endless maze that is dating, and wearing the same clothing as when I last left you, except now, I’ve upgraded at the behest of my ex-girlfriend, to designer jeans.

Designer jeans. From Nordstroms. Full Retail Price.

And when my book comes out, it will be titled, “From Joseph T. to Lance Bass: Knocking on the Closet Door.”

She actually sold me on getting designer jeans because it would “help me with the ladies.” This has never been further from the truth.

When I last left you, I mentioned that my ex would hopefully write a few pages about what it was like to date me, so that every one of you out there could get a full understanding of just how much the flowers bloom and brighten when I’m around, how the fresh breeze blows the smell of delicious orange blossoms when I’m around, and how I can completely think it is fine to get your girlfriend a coffee maker for her birthday. Let me tell you something, that last one took some serious nut sackage.

And that nut sackage has completely dwindled in size… from sausage and eggs… to something along the lines of peas and carrots… the frozen kind that you can buy in the store… the really small packages.

My confidence level has completely fallen to pretty much just above absolute zero – which happens to be around -273°C.

My best conversation starter: “Soooo, what’s your favorite color?”

My worst conversation starter: “Soooo, what’s your favourite colour?”

Note the accent differences.

I have found that in a social setting, like at a bar, I don’t like to make a move. I could be stone sober or laying on the ground drunk, I have absolutely no ability to approach another woman and even pretend to have some semblance of likeability.

Once upon a time, I had more conversationalist ability. Now, I can barely look anybody in the eye, before excusing myself to throw up in nervous anticipation.
So I’m assuming that at least one reader out there has to be a physician or psychologist, right?

Would a massive amount of xanax help this? Or should I go straight to black tar heroin? I’m opposed to neither.

Sadly, this little downswing has sneaked its way into my everyday life. And so for the last three months, I have had little to say or talk about because everything I wrote out, was just not good enough. I’ve been blocked. I’ve been blocked by own negative self talk.

Slowly, however, it is creeping its way back. I have found a new deep admiration for bloggers who write everyday. I hope you haven’t forgotten about me.

On an upbeat note, I do have a story.

This last Saturday, I called my hair stylist. Now, I look forward to getting my hair styled every month or so. Not in the sense that I’m gay. But more in the sense that my hair stylist is pretty much gorgeous and she is only a few years younger than me and she is single. Like, single single. That’s the good news. The bad news is that I haven’t asked her out because, okay well, first off, she is way to hot, and second of all, she seems like the type of girl that is looking for some beefy guy with lightning bolt tattoos crawling down both arms. I’m more of a doughy guy with a farmers tan and a couple of moles crawling down my arms. But if I walked into Chemistry Club with her on my arm, I’d at least be the fourth or maybe even third coolest guy there.

So I called her and asked if she was available to give me a haircut. We agreed on a time and I showed up. Now when I’m there, we tend to be bit flirty towards each other. She gets flirty first. Like, when she washes my hair, she’ll use both shampoo AND conditioner, so that she gets to rub my head twice rather than once. I take this as a sign and become flirty myself, by staring at her boobs for a gynormous amount of time, before she says “um, are you staring at my chest,” and I’m awoken from some daytime fantasy I was having.

Anyways, the last few times I’ve been in, she keeps hinting that she will be over at Kilarney’s Irish Pub on a certain night. The last time I was there, as I was leaving, she said, “hey text me if you are going out, maybe we can meet up.”

Taking this as a sure sign of matrimony in our near future, I chickened out every week.

So here I am. I’m going to have to bring this whole thing up again. I ask, “so are you planning on being at Kilarney’s anytime soon?” She says, “yeah, actually some friends and I are going tonight.” I said something that involved the words, “me” “friends” “see you tonight” and “possibly,” as well as the words “horny” “drunk” “lube” and “spermicidal condoms.” The response was mixed.

Nevertheless, I showed up that night with a good friend of mine, Keith, and sure enough, I did run into her and her entourage of hot friends. I introduced her to Keith, and she introduced me to her friends as “her client.”

If you can imagine this, here we are, two fat guys and three blond women who look semi-stripperish.

You see, the earth is divided into the North and the South Pole. At Kilarney’s that night, the poles met.

And they weren’t stripper poles.

Her friends met us, then left her there to fend for herself. Poor thing. I felt bad for her. I bought her a drink. We took a few sips together, then her friend came back after her, and she disappeared into the crowd of tattoos, muscle shirts, and basic good looking-ness.

So Keith and I shared a few brews together, talked to two women who were completely uninterested in me despite having accomplished more than either of them combined, one being a cocktail waitress and the other being, um, I think she might have been a whore. So somebody who, by technical default, is looking to party, found me less interesting than some guy with 30 whole dollars to his name.

All time low…. Has. Been. Hit.