Too Drunk To Fork

There I go again with remembering shit.

After mentioning JD yesterday, I realized...he was my first guy friend who I was not attracted to. And I know I talk a lot about the past and people I knew in school, but it's this area. You never really leave high school even though you think you have because everyone you graduated with still lives here, and also I'm still fairly young. All of this stuff happened in the not too distant past. Plus you all know how exciting my adult life is.

Anyway JD and I were friends from middle school on up until like 10th grade when he got all cool with his leather jacket and his pot smoking and his rock music. We were best friends. We lived not too far from each other and we were allowed to be home alone together. He was also a pretty boy, tan with green eyes and dark hair...not as pretty as Steppy though, but still very pretty.

And I did not want him in any way, other than as a bestest bestie.

He though? Wanted me.

I think I've told this story before, about how after being best friends for two years he asked me in 8th grade if I thought it would be weird if we had sex in this abandoned house on Douglas St. between the block that we lived on. I'm like yeah, that would be totally weird. Even with all the hormones, even with creepy little Jessie writing bad erotica stories in a secret file on my computer that involved the characters licking brownie batter off one another, I did not jump at the chance to have sex with a pretty boy. Not even just to "try it out," as he suggested.

"It wont mean anything, it's just something that we could do so that we can see what it's like."

Ja sure. His motives were all in the name of science and exploration.

He tried very hard though. He would come to my brother's house in the summer which was across town and we would play with my dog Rusty. We'd walk to Bakers to get lunch. I went into his Jacuzzi with him at his house and I kept my shirt on over my bathing suit. It wasn't because I had boobies, everyone knew I had boobies, by 6th grade I was pushing out of a C cup. I dont know why I left my shirt on. I could tell he wanted to make out with me, but I just wasn't down with that idea.

Now all these years later I have this new/old guy friend who I occasionally go sit in the spa with at night with all of my loose skin and flubby midsection from havin' me up some babies couple years ago. I dont wear a shirt over my tankini because I dont really give a fuck. At least my stretch marks have gone away, or faded to little white lines. They were never that bad to begin with. Not like David. David is covered in stretch marks from all this transforming he's doing. Stretchmarks and bodyhair and muscles, and he looks nothing like the 270 pound kid on his drivers license.

Steppy's pretty without his shirt. Sort of defined muscles. Not a lot of chest hair. David is becoming one of them, except that he's more handsome than pretty. Perhaps that's why I was never attracted to JD. He was too pretty.

Like, would you ever seriously consider Fabio?

I wouldn't, at least.

My boobs float for some reason, and the bubbles run up between them for some other reason...or maybe the same reason. I always put my hair up when I go down there because I dont want it to get wet. I look stupid with my hair up but I dont really care. Not getting it wet is more important. He sits across from me, and there's too much water in the thing so we're up to our necks. I'm telling him about how I'm scheduled to appear on a few blogs, one for romance novel writers, and I've been getting some yes's over on Goodreads from people who say they'll read Bombshell when it comes out. He asks me if it's a romance novel, and I tell him yes and no. He tells me that he still has money for me if I change my mind.

And again I remind him that I'm not changing my mind. I have a new agent and everything I am doing is free. I have a Twitter account now also that is gaining followers daily. Whatever that means.

He comes across the spa like he's going to kiss me, but I'm mistaken because he just sits down next to me. Then he goes under water. When he comes back up I ask him if he still has feelings for me. "I always will," he tells me. He shrugs and tells me that it doesn't mean anything really, it's just that it's hard to just stop feeling something for a person. I can relate to that, it is hard. Emotions are horrible things, they pop up in the darndest of places. Like after all these years of feeling nothing but apathy and contempt for my ex, he dies and I suddenly feel sad and lonely and broken and like something in me died as well because I spent three years of my young life with that person not being able to stop having feelings for him even though I knew at some point that he wasn't good for me, and it wasn't until this one big horrible incident that I was finally able to switch it off and tell him not to call me ever again. And yet I cried at his funeral. I didn't cry when either of my parents died and yet, there I was, here I am, still all fucked up from his death. Emotions suck.

There's a jet shooting water right hard into my back and Steppy asks me if I could ever find him attractive.

"Yeah, in your uniform? Smokin' hot. Otherwise...you're just...pretty. Like a unicorn or a rainbow." He should seriously be covered in glitter. Seriously. He's like Legolas from Lord Of The Rings (that guy on the right incase you have forgotten.) And I tell him not to torture himself over it because his wife is really starting to open up.

He talks about how his wife kissed him the other day with no prompting, she just...kissed him. I tell him good for him, and that he should stick it in her pooper. And then I tell him not to stick it in her pooper for real. Baby steps. He asked if he could stick it in my pooper, and I say "dude, you do realize that my poop comes out of there, right?" But it's good that his wife kissed him. How sweet.

He went and bought Chinese food to bribe me to finish reading Bombshell to him. I ended up eating way too much because it was so good, the rice, the orange chicken, the sweet and sour some kind of animal meat, and my tummy got too full and I got all sickie. It was like being drunk on food, and it was way uncomfortable. The other night when he was here I got all dizzy and had to take a bath. He stayed. He did my dishes for me (yay!) But now I was all food drunk and moaning and stumbling around. I told him I had to go lay down.

He walked me into my room. My bed was made but there's still laundry all over the place. My underwear drawer is hanging open. I kind of just throw myself on the bed and dont even bother to get in the covers, I just lay there half dead like an eel or something.

"Kay...well you want me to go then?" he asks.

I groan. "No damnit you have to be the spoon. The other spoon."

"What? Really?"

"It can be this time now yes?" I say and bend my legs at the correct spooning angle and hold my arm out like I'm cuddling an invisible person.

"...okay..." and he goes to get in behind me.

"No Steppy, you have to be the front spoon, not the back spoon."

"Why?"

"Because I said spoon, not fork."

"No forking then..."

"I'm too food drunk to fork. You or anybody. And I know that you're just going to try to stick it in my pooper. No pooper. Just get over here."

And so Steppy was the front spoon. My knees were in his butt and all. We fell asleep I guess because David comes home and is all "What's all this then?"

"Spooooooooooooons" I moaned groggily.

"Awesome! I get to be the fork!" and he jumped in behind me. Then he said something about letting Steppy and me switch places so he can fork him, something about "just the tip Steppy, come on, just the tip," and Steppy politely declined, stating some kind of bullshit "I dont spoon that way" reasons.

These pretty boys and their morals...

Soundboard

I used to get these calls from my guy friends when I was in jr high.

JD'd call me and say, "Don't tell anyone I told you this."

It's now 11 or 12 years later, I dont think he'd mind if I told you.

"Do you know what jacking off is?"

I'd go "yeah."

"Okay...well...like I did it, and it's awesome. Like I just figured it out in the bathroom this morning. This is like...the coolest thing on the planet. And I made cum and everything too."

"Well that's just aces! Thanks for telling me that! WHY did you tell me that?"

"I dunno...because you're like...the only one I can talk to. Do you hate me? Do you think I'm a pervert?"

"Not really. Just dont get any on me I guess, ur um...yeah so that's great."

He'd say "hold on." The phone would be put down and there would be panting and some kind of struggle. Someone would whisper the word "shit!" and I'd be left in radio silence for the next few moments. JD'd come back and say "Hey sorry it was my um...dog...yeah."

His dog. lol.

The girl JD's dating now as an adult, she showed me her scars from where she would burn and cut herself. As I recall I ratted her out to her mom, and as I recall she didn't get mad. Jessica told me when her boyfriend hit her. She wouldn't admit to blowing Scott on the band bus, even though we all saw her head under that blanket, but she did tell me when her boyfriend hit her.

Remember the episode from like the 1st or 2nd season of Grey's Anatomy where what's her face, the Asian one, is going to get an abortion and she wants Meredith to be her contact person on the forms? I was the contact person on one of those forms for someone once, and no, I wont name names here. Not even first names.

It doesn't always involve sex or masturbation, particularly "I masturbate three times a day, do you think that's okay?" I've had people bounce all kinds of concerns off of me. Now that I'm somewhat of a public figure on the internet and I share so much, I get emails from people wanting my opinion on various things. A job offer they're unsure of taking because it's less pay and farther away. How to handle your abusive ex. How to not sleep with a bunch of guys in order to get over the one you love (yes, the neighbor emails me even though we share a god damned wall.)

There was a boy who was in band and also my math class even though he was a year younger, that damn prodigy kid who I had a crush on since 7th grade, and after school before pit band practice for the high school musical production of Bye Bye Birdie he and I would go sit at the Donut Shop (which Victor once stole an armful of donuts from when the lady went to the bathroom) or Del Taco and he would tutor me in math because I didn't want to fail the class. But I just didn't get math at all, I still dont, it's something that I cannot grasp. I count on my fingers to this day. But he was really nice and he tried to teach me about two to the second power and what that equals and all, and then he would say, "if I put my finger in my butt hole does that mean that I'm gay?" I assured him that he wasn't. He just likes things in his butt hole. Plenty of people like things in their butt hole.

I know that because I've been asked that question by many people who found me as somewhat of a comfortable soundboard.

"I'm just going to throw this out there...shemales. Is that...weird? Wrong?"

"My dad's growing pot again out behind the shed. You think I should tell mom?"

"I dont believe in god. I'm pretty sure my family is going to disown me for this."

And now I'm playing marriage fixer upper for Steppy and his wife. Don't get me wrong, I like being everyone's favorite thing to talk at, I really do. But these crazy kids are looking to me for help and I'm trying my damndest. I just...I find it so weird that anyone my age...or almost my age since she's a few years younger, could know so little about sex. What in the name of Joseph Smith is the Mormon church teaching these kids if they aren't teaching them what sex is? I'm not talking KIDS kids, I'm talking 20 year olds who are going to get married and have no idea what to expect or are too sheltered to know how it is really done. It's amazing. It is.

I threw the porn watching idea out there, like the tamest, whitest shit I could find, and she was still weirded out. That's okay and all, but she wouldn't even watch an instructional guide video. However, she has given him permission to watch those when she's not around so he can learn and then teach her. Great! A step forward! Perhaps that's romantic for the man to know all the tricks and for him to go home and be all "let me show you my magic." I found a very clinical series on female orgasm, including the squirting g-spot kind (note: it is not pee, it is actually made up of sucrose and glucose and a few other chemicals that are produced by a gland that is very similar to the male prostate, making the liquid essentially semen but without the sperm.) Now I'm not going to watch those with him, I just emailed some links. Actually we have found it better for us to have the "sessions" over the phone, those two on their landline using two different phones to call me, because I guess it's easier on her to not get all red faced and embarrassed because I'm not actually there.

I listen to their problems, I offer solutions, I try to fix things.

She didn't even realize that women could jill. No, I haven't shown her the website with all the butt plugs and vibrating dolphins and shit. I know that she knows those kinds of things exist but I think she might think they're only used in pornos. Progress is slow, but worth it.

Comment question of the day, how did you learn about sex? Because nobody ever really told me, I just kind of figured it out. I mean I picked up on the terminology through friends, like hand job, or 69 (which I was perplexed over until 8th grade when my friend saw her babysitter doing it with her boyfriend and told me.) Did you have a sex talk? Have you ever given a sex talk? Do you think it's easier to give a sex talk to an ill informed adult as opposed to a child?

I'd Give You Everything I've Got For A Little Peace Of Mind

The second interview was a no-go today, it's been rescheduled for Monday. Also it's gone from "suit and tie" to "conservative" and it sounded perhaps like there were going to be more Davids there...so...analyzing this is just hard because it could mean anything.

Why dress down?

Why might there be other applicants there?

Why would he make him drive all the way out to Temecula if he was just going to tell him it was the end of the line? Couldn't he just send him a letter?

You'd say I'm putting you on
But it's no joke, it's doing me harm
You know I can't sleep, I can't stop my brain
You know it's three weeks, I'm going insane
You know I'd give you everything I've got
for a little peace of mind

And me, I've been plugging away, getting myself out there, even doing some freelance writing on the side for reporters who need help with their articles, not just to possibly get myself out there even more but also to pad my savings account a little. When June comes and I have no income for a month while he's in academy, presuming he goes, I don't want to have to worry about money. In fact it looks like all of my royalties will be put into savings as well. I am done with worrying about money, fucking done. We got the Mazda so that we would have a bill rather than a bunch of unexpected and very expensive repairs to make on the Oldsmocrap, and this is because predictability is a lot better than fucking around with Murphy's Law shit.

I'm going to be taking my first book out of print. The one I wrote before Golden Dawn, Eat Your Colors. The book was good but it bombed, and seeing as how it ended up not being as original as I planned it to be since two other books on the same exact subject came out in the same exact month, that book is like stuck spinning its tires in the mud. If you want a copy of it get it now because it will be officially out of print as of 2/10. Also your best bet is to just download the e-book because my publisher's pricing for full color books like that one is went up a shit load so the price is a little outrageous for what it is. The revenue to me is the same, so don't worry about getting cheap on me.

I also kind of feel like Golden Dawn didn't get the attention it deserved because I didn't have internet access in my apartment last year when it came out so I couldnt do the amount of marketing that I am doing now for Bombshell. But, in my own opinion, Bombshell is the way better of the two books. It's not as emotionally disturbing as Golden Dawn, but rather goes with more of an entertainment angle with the lessons being subtle. You'll take something away from it but it wont punch you in the stomach.

I have not jumped the shark, for those of you who are thinking that or who have thought that. I cant have jumped the shark because I accept my mediocrity and embrace it. Like David said, I will probably only have a small but loyal cultish-like following for quite some time or maybe even forever, and that's more awesome than being on billboards or whatever. Plus it makes you guys look all pretentious and shit for reading an underground author. Fuck the mainstream media, THIS is what truly delivers because it's not made to be "marketable," it's made to be what it is.

Plus one day I could be big, and you could all say that you knew me when. You could be on this bandwagon before it even has wheels and a cool little cover thing and spraypainted cusswords on the sides. And flames. Gotta have flames on our wagon. One of you with artistic talent needs to get on that.

I read 164 pages out loud to Steppy last night, having to take a break in the middle because I was getting all dizzy and light headed and headachy. Possibly because I like wasn't breathing enough or something. I took an Excedrin and a tubby and I was fine. He said that the new sex scene that I rewrote was pretty hot, he liked the first one but then again I think he just likes anything that has to do with sex. He and his Mrs. have learned a thing or two thanks to their excellent therapist so he didn't get all awkward and horny like you might think that he did. That's not to say that he didn't get a semi, as he reports.

I love that my writing can give people semis.

By the end of the night my weird "don't fucking touch me" thing went away enough that I hugged David when he got home, and Steppy gave me a tentative peck on the cheek before he left and told me that I did a great job with the book and he wants me to finish reading it to him. He also suggested that I do an audio book...that is a possibility. I just need a quiet place without my birds screeching or my kids being all "what happens when the sea freezes? Do the fish dig through the ice and then get out and swim somewhere else?" Damn Ty, with his damn questions. How does he think of this shit?

And when David was shivering under the blankets some time in the night I hugged him to make him warm. Poor fellow.

Liz in Seattle Haiti suggested that maybe my mood was caused by the wind, but I live in Blowmont so we're all just kind of used to the wind by now. You cant blame things on the wind here, it's just like a built in thing that you deal with.

I have knitting to finish, this blanket. See how almost done it is? If you cant tell, it's about the length of my arm on all sides. It's taking more and more yarn to finish the stripes as it increases in size and I only have one skein left of each color, so it might only get a little bigger, maybe one or two more stripes of each color. But some damn baby is going to wrap up in that and be all "sweet."

I originally wanted to learn how to knit or crochet so I could make things for my own babies, and I ended up making a yellow blob for Wade. I made a blanket for my great-nephew Aiden, remember the black and white ducky quilt?

We aint had no babies up in here since Wade was a pup so I've got the time to be knitting blankets for other people's loinfruit.

I haven't used birth control in like years and years and I have no new crotchnuggets to speak of.

Perhaps because I refer to them as crotchnuggets.

I am also going to be making a sort of "behind the scenes" documentary on Bombshell that I'm hoping will be at least 30 minutes long, something that will give you more insight into the setting and the characters, the inspiration and all that, plus a random reading. It wont just be me talking, it will be a little more in depth than in my living room. Perhaps a meet and greet with the real Bombshell?

I've been promised gambling and lobster this weekend by my ex-agent/full time bestest bestie. Yeah, the restaurant on the 26th floor of the hotel or whatever it is again. The kobe beef and the $90 lobster plate. Shit, if he's buying...

The neighbor has also promised that she is at my beck and call to flash her tits just in case I want to do a signing somewhere and the owner of the business is reluctant.

I'm not entirely sure what to think of that, but things are slowly moving along.

It's A Book

My proof copy of Bombshell arrived in the mail today via FedEx. David was here, because he got called in for jury duty but they dismissed him at about 11:00, so when the box got here he sat next to me as I opened it.

It's beautiful.

There are a few typos that I have to fix, which I expected and that is why it is standard to order a "proof copy" that you can check and make sure all the font sizes and spacing is correct, or any forgotten " marks at the end of some dialogue, things that didn't stand out in electronic form but when you're reading in print are ever so distracting. Those things will get fixed and then I'll approve the book and then it's off to the distributors.

The pages are cream, and they dont have the same weird spacing issues that Golden Dawn had for those of you who noticed gaps. I blame that on the master document being partially written in Word and partially written in Google Docs. A few of the drop caps at the beginning of the chapters are larger than the majority of the chapters, so I'll fix that, and also my picture on the back cover was like really high contrast or something and it looked weird, so I changed it to black and white. You wont see my red hair, but damnit you'll know it's me.

And it's a book.

Today wasn't the best day to get my book though. Hugs were bound to happen and I am in one of those moods. One of those "nobody fucking touch me" moods, and I do mean nobody. I can feel each individual strand of hair on my head, every fiber of my clothing. I hate these days. Usually at least David can touch me but I cant let him. I'm all grossed out or something. This is how I am with other people, but not him.

And even though he knows that I get like this sometimes, he still gets butthurt. I dont know what to say to him, other than sorry. David is very affectionate and when I reject him he gets his feelings all hurt.

So you can imagine how reluctant I was to call Steppy, because I want Steppy touching me even LESS than I want David touching me, and I dont even want David touching me at all. But I did call him, because I knew that he knew I was expecting the package. He came over just before David left for his night job. David says to him, "Watch out, she's on a rampage."

GASP! "I am NOT on a rampage David!"

"You are too, with you 'eee dont look at me, dont breathe on me, eeeee--'"

"Quiet you! I said no such thing!"

"You cant even sit by her," he says.

"I never said you couldn't sit by me!" I counter.

"Okay, maybe not but when I did you're all 'eee stop gulping eee--'"

"You GULP when you DRINK David, it's disgusting. That has nothing to do with my not wanting you to touch me!"

"She's all yours Step, good luck," he says as he's leaving.

And there I am just scowling in front of my computer. "It's over there," I said and pointed to where the book was. He's been reading through it for the past half hour or so, skipping through the sections. He asked me if I would read it to him, and I need to read it out loud anyway just to make sure that I catch every little possible error there could be, so he can be my audience.

Did I mention that he's being a good little miserable pretty boy and staying on the other couch like I asked him to? Bitch knows his place.

David wants to read it himself, and is even giving up the book he's currently reading (part of the Clan of the Cave Bear series) so he can read it, since he hasn't read the final product. Nobody has. That's what makes it so special. This book is going to be fucking awesome, and it's the closest thing to a romance novel I'll ever write. In fact, it IS sort of a romance novel but both sexes can enjoy it, it's not just for mommy's bubble bath time, but daddy's sobbing in the garage time too. It's actually kind of a play on the traditional romance novel, a few of the regular cliche's used but to an extreme.

He's offering me hot tea, he must think I'm menstruating. I'm not though. Just weirded out.

Pretty Chill

I took this picture with my cell phone on Sunday at Target. Welcome to California.

Yes, umbrellas being sold next to bikinis in January. Juxtaposition isnt the right word, but it's the first word that comes to mind.

It's cold here again. Last week it was shorts weather, then last night we went to Wal Mart and freezing rain was coming down. Fucking snowing in the fucking Beaumont, I couldn't believe that shit. Other than that we had a good weekend.

He's not working Monday nights anymore so we have a little more time to spend together on his two days off. We're hanging out like friends again, and I've missed that. When he took on Monday nights in order to bring in some extra cash for Christmas it was like we had to rush to get things done, and he was only having dinner with us the one night. The extra time now is giving us a little more legroom and we can spend time doing fun things or doing not fun things, it's up to us.

He scrubbed the shit out of the entire house yesterday. Top to bottom. He just wanted to, and I just let him. He got this burst of energy or something and bleached the floors and counters, and the result is spectacular. I asked if he wanted help and he told me "No, just go do your womanly things."

"...have a period and read a Cosmo?"

"No, just sittin' and knittin'."

Sittin' and knittin', right. I've been working on a baby blanket for one of the Bitches in Eastwick who need it for a gift to give at a baby shower. She's paying me in books, so I'm trying to get it done because one of my resolutions is to not buy any more books until I've cleared my to be read pile, but it doesn't count if I have someone else buy them for me. Also, I promised I wouldn't buy any more yarn until I knit every skein I had (not counting the random balls of things in the closet) but buying yarn for a commissioned project also does not count as buying yarn. Even if I did it to underhandedly obtain more books. Also I am going to have to buy another bookshelf very soon.

David has been buying me Starbucks and trying to distance me from the kids a little bit while he's here too. I think he feels guilty. He's leaving, or at least we will know on Thursday if he's one step closer to leaving. He's been really pushing himself hard lately with running, and he's now doing three real pull ups. Pull ups are really really hard. Every day he calls me into the bathroom, and I'll find him standing there in front of the mirror flexing or something. He points to some bulge on his arms or something and says "That wasn't there last week" and then winks at me all proud like.

He's also excited about this new secret writing gig that I've got going on that involves interesting packages arriving at my house. I mean, who wouldn't be? One came yesterday and I pulled it out of the box and slapped him in the face with it.

"What in the hell was that for?"

"You always see guys doing that in videos. Thought I'd try."

He's actually really stoked about my writing in general, and he keeps pointing out that I should look how far I've gotten. He keeps telling me to look what I've done with it. He points out that he himself cannot actually finish reading Golden Dawn because it pisses him off so much and makes him feel like he's literally got a knot in his stomach when he tries. He's the one who came up with the ending, by the way. He cant even read it.

He says "look at what you've done with Bombshell. Look at the effect it had on Steppy. What do you think it's going to do to the rest of the world?"

I'm drinking this berry chai tea that he insisted that I try and he says, "You might not have anything bigger than a small but loyal cult-like following for a long time, but so did Chuck Palahniuk. Dont you love that?"

"Is it illegal to give your urine to someone so they'll pass a drug test?" I ask.

"Yes. Quite illegal. Who wants your pee?"

"Sally."

"Sally?"

"Yah."

"Dont give Sally your pee."

"Kay."

It's been more of a hang-outish type atmosphere since he's not all depressed about going to work. It's amazing how just a few hours off can make his spirits go up. Plus he's been taste testing Belgian ales every Sunday as a reward for running all week. He went to the liquor store even though his homeless buddy told him it was too expensive there, even though the two beers he bought were $1.50 each. His bum friend is about quantity more than quality, so anything over $1.20 is too much to pay. So David kicks back and has a beer and I work on schmoozing with people on the internet so they'll take interest in my book.

"Imagine if they all understood your message," he said.

Mad

This is probably not going to make sense to a lot of you because it isnt as big of a deal as it once was and I'm not sure if this is still national news, but in 2006 a mad man set the mountain ablaze and killed five fire fighters who were trying desperately to battle the fire as it threatened homes. One of those fire fighters was Jess McLean, who is my sister in law's nephew.

Don't leave your sympathy for me, I'm not the one who needs it. I met Jess a few times when I was a tween, it's not like I knew him well. But he and I did play Nintendo64 for a few hours one time when my sister in law (who I was living with at the time) and her sister (his mom) went shopping or something and we didn't want to go.

The Esperanza fire was something that I blogged about as it was happening because it was right here, I mean right here. I actually lived on the mountain where it had done the most damage for a time when I was a child, and as the smoke made everyone cough and hack down here in the valley, people up there that I went to school with lost their homes and horses. My ex-foster parents, by the way, lost nothing thankfully because "those guys did an awesome job," according to them about the fire fighters. It's a very tight knit community up there, lots of people with livestock and little homes that they built themselves. The street signs are all woodburned instead of the metal green ones you usually see. It was always so safe up there, and the only thing I ever had to worry about walking around through the little dirt or sometimes paved roads was cougars and rattlesnakes. It was an awesome time and it gave me a love for mountain living.

But of course, three Octobers ago when five men were killed trying to protect it, it struck us hard. This was arson and someone was going to have to pay.

Five men. Countless structures. Livestock. Who would have the audacity to do this?

That's when they found Raymond Lee Oyler, a Mechanic living here in Beaumont. On the night of the Esperanza fire, a witness says that a man was milling around the gas pumps at a Shell Station at around 2:00 in the morning, and when the witness commented on the magnitude of the fire, the man said "The fire is acting just how I thought it would." The witness said that the man seemed to know a lot about fires, and that he thought the guy was an off duty fire fighter, but then a few days later when Oyler's picture appeared on TV, the man knew that this was the guy who had been at the gas station. He told police to look at the surveillance video from the gas station, which did show this suspicious guy out in the distance.

The going theory is that this was Oyler.

Oyler's a guy who had a shitload of incendiary devices and a head full of mad. His own cousin said that days before the fire was set Oyler said that he wanted to "set the mountain on fire." The defense's answer to this is "Well he didn't say which mountain, and when, so there."

He's not only being charged with the deaths of the fire fighters, but with 22 counts of arson as well, including the 2006 Old Fire and several small fires that were lit throughout the pass area, including the one that burned down historic Gilman Ranch. Now the defense is saying that Oyler had nothing to do with any of the fires, especially not the smaller ones because it could have been anyone who set those. They could have set themselves!

I dont live on the mountain anymore, I live down here in the pass, which is sort of like living in a wind tunnel 365 days a year. Wind and fires are a dangerous combination, and since this area is pretty much just made of fields and fields of dry brush, this is a perfect little area to go lighting fires if you're crazy. Yes, fires do happen here all the time on their own or from carelessly flicked cigarette butts, but in the summer of 2006 when I started seeing smoke just about every other day coming from a different spot around my little plot of land here, I knew that someone was behind it.

I document any fire that happens near my house on my blog. They happen a lot, but I remember that in the summer of 2006, they were happening a lot more. I remember thinking that even though they weren't officially putting out a reason why the fire was started, I remember thinking, knowing, that someone had started them. They were arson. And it was the same person or group of people who was doing it. And I remember thinking that they were trying to perfect something. Like they were practicing and honing in on their skills so that they could do something bigger.

Like I said, head full'a mad.

I've lived here my whole life. Fires aren't uncommon, in fact there are more fires than significant earthquakes, and I've always been somewhat fascinated by them. Not in the head full of mad kind of way, but in the same kind of way that you watch a televised police chase, and your adrenaline pumps when you realize that you know exactly what intersection they're blowing through and you realize that it's right by your house or right by someone you know's house. Right by your hangout.

Or maybe that only happens when you live in California.

I'm fascinated because these are my mountains. I've looked at these same mountains my whole damn life, and when I travel somewhere far from home I always know that I'm almost home because I recognize the hills. I couldn't live in flatlands, I would feel so exposed. When the mountains catch on fire, it's personal. And it's dangerous, especially when the smoke is billowing from Cherry Valley. Will they put it out in time? Will it come here? Is it possible that I could end up in a makeshift shelter in the high school gym tonight, sleeping on cots with my family?

Is it possible that someone could be thinking of death and displacement when they start a fire? Or is it just destruction?

I am very interested in Raymond Lee Oyler's trial, and I am subscribed to the live blog feed of one Inland reporter who sits in the courtroom and tells us what is going on.

I am also very interested in the trial of Joseph Edward Duncan, who kidnapped and killed a boy from Beaumont back in 1997, a crime that frightened everyone here. There is such a low crime rate here, and when someone does something that despicable it really knocks small towns like this off our hinges. Kids were scared to walk home, it wasn't just another lovely day in paradise, it was serious and a kid ended up dead. There were posters all over the neighborhoods, even in Yucaipa. They only recently caught this guy. All those years, we didn't know who had done it and we all figured the guy had gotten away with it. Now he's being charged. After all this time, we have answers. Or we will have them, that is to say. But I think this guy's got a head full of mad too, so the answers might be all fucked and word saladed. The guy rapes children and murders their families. Fucked-Up. And what's so fucking fantastic is that he turned down a public appointed lawyer and is representing himself.

That's the thing that I like about this area. Crimes here are so uncommon that they automatically become heinous, no ifs, ands, or buts.

And Oyler, man...head full of mad, that's all I gotta say. Head full of mad.

Melodic Chainsaw

Metallica made a comeback. So did ACDC. So...can Jessie make a comeback?

Not bloody likely. But it was fun trying.

Also, if you are at all interested in Bombshell even in the very least, you must read this review. This is a god's honest review of a book from a stranger, and it is awesome. It even contains a little bitty spoiler ;)

Jazz Running

Okay, so you want a video of me screaming along to some music in the car. I will do that, but I have to get this other thing out of the way first because Liz in Seattle is going to some foreign country for a week and she cant wait any longer to learn about what jazz running is. So I am delivering.

It's really no secret, I've mentioned this a million times, but I was the band geek in high school. I mean full on. I had buttons and pins from marching band competitions (yes they exist, asshole) all over my backpack, I fell into step with whoever I was walking with, and I carried around my four foot long hard plastic trombone case throughout all of my classes. It was large and awkward but it got me through crowds pretty easily because it did the bumping and shoving for me.

One time I was walking through the crowded gym with it in Jr. High, and this boy goes "Holy Christ, I almost lost my virginity to that thing!"

I lol'd.

I wasn't very popular, but I didn't get into trouble with like drugs or anything. Sex though, oh man, that appealed to me. Not that I was out fucking anyone, but I dabbled in the occasional hand job or whatever, and even that stuff was few and far between.

Band is of course also how I met David. People ask sometimes "But howcome you guys were dating if you were a senior and he was a freshman?" Well first of all we didn't even get together until I was almost graduating, and second of all when you're in band it's not like other classes. It's not like "eew, there's a fucking sophomore in my trig class." Rather than being segregated by grades, you're segregated by instrument, and we had a small band so all the low brass hung out together. I was trombone, he was tuba. Stephanie also played a mediocre tuba, and Scott of course blew everyone out of the water because he was one of those prodigy fuckers who could pick up any instrument and have it sound like the voices of angels or something. There was Mormon Mike who pissed me the fuck off, of course Nick Terwilliger who also pissed me off and who is now my god damned cousin. Fucking Yucaipa, everyone is related.

And it's not like a regular class in the sense that you do a lot of overtime. Thursday night practices. Friday night football games. Saturdays at some other school for a competition. Overnight trips to San Francisco for festivals. You're together a lot, and there is a lot of down time, because it's not like you can be constantly playing your instrument, so you talk, you schmooze, and you get to know each other better.

It's not that I was ever all that good at my instrument, but I did get decent enough. I could handle the first chair parts. I could hit the high notes. But I guess if it wasn't as social as it was, I might not have stayed. The only thing that intrigued me into staying in when I was leaving middle school to go to the jr. high (yes they are two different schools in Yucaipa) is that the jr. high band teacher told us that we would be going to Six Flags Magic Mountain for a festival and we would get to play in the park all day.

Not that my trombone skills have ever translated to real life, and not that I've played the thing in six or seven years, but maybe I'll play it for you sometime.

Now, I know this video is way late, but it's here, so let's just get to it.

So in order to explain what jazz running is I need to first explain a few things about field marching. I'm talking about the little half time shows that the marching bands put on, you know, where they move about the football field and make all kinds of crazy shapes while playing Earth, Wind and Fire songs.

Oh god. The year we did Earth, Wind and Fire...try to imagine 60 white kids who all live in tract housing trying to play funk. EPIC FAIL, but we had fun doing it. I always had an idea for a Vietnam show that included Paint It Black but they said there were too many vets in the community and we would probably just offend them rather than pay honor to them. My other idea was to play songs from the Titanic sound track, then end it up with "Under The Sea" from Little Mermaid. Why does nobody like my ideas? That would have been awesome!

Anyway, so how they make those formations is either a computer or a mad man will create a chart, and on that chart will be dots. Lots and lots of dots. Those dots would all be numbered. The chart will be made into a series of pages, and on each page, the dots move around a little bit, changing shapes.

Let's just say dot #37 is standing on the 50 yard line, 10 steps back from the sideline for 12 counts, or 12 beats of the song. The next page of the chart shows #37 on the 45 yard line, three steps from the side line, and has four counts to do it in. So let's figure out how to move our #37 and how to make #37 learn her place. So you drill. You have #37 throw down a pencil or some keys or something on the spot on the 45 that she's supposed to be at, the drum major hits a wood block to the tempo of the song (because you don't learn with instruments at first) and #37 marches to hr place on the 45. Then reset on the 50, do it again going to the 45, etc.

#37 looks around and notices how the other band members are aligned. #38 is slightly in front of her diagonally, #36 is diagonally behind her. Easy enough.

But sometimes these crackheads who design the shows will request the impossible from #37. #37's next move from the 45 is the fucking 10 yard line and she has six counts to do this in. This is not a comfortable move, but in order to complete the magical chart, she must do it.

So you book it, right?

Well, not exactly. See, if you're running, and you have your instrument in your mouth, your head is bobbing and bouncing all over and your tone quality is either very poor or just plain interrupted. Plus, running when everyone else is marching uniformly, it just doesn't look right. Well, then there's the scatter drill, where the band turns into cockroaches and they just start doing whatever the fuck they want, and this is usually because there is 52 counts of drum solo and you only have to move five yards, so have at it kids! Do whatever the fuck you want for the next six minutes!

One day I will find a way to upload my band videos to the internet. Anyone got a VCR and a TV I can borrow?

Okay, so as I was saying. #37 has only got a few counts to move pretty far, and she can't exactly put her trombone under her arm and just run for it, and so was created the Jazz Run. Jazz running is drilled into your brain, and you are made to practice it for several hours throughout your career in marching band. This is because it is fairly unnatural feeling to do, but once you get the hang of it you'll never stop doing it.

I no longer try to fall in step with the person next to me, and I've stopped roll-stepping my way through Wal Mart, but I do still jazz run. And I look like a damn fool. DAMN fool.

And no, it is not "running with jazz hands" as I think Miss suggested. I would not be running with jazz hands through a cemetery to get away from goons who were going to smash my camera because they thought I took pictures of the exploded dead body goo that the hazmat team was trying to clean up.

Jazz running is sort of like a prance, a leap, a bound, without moving your head or bending your knees.

Are you ready for the unnecessarily extended video with hyperspeed and Yakity Sax?

Lovin You Isn't The Right Thing To Do

The fingers of a peace sign are hanging out the window of a car in response to my music as I round the corner. The windows are down because it's cloudy and 70 out and I'm taking Steppy to go pick up his car at the shop because his wife is off with her mom or something, and we are blasting "You Can Go Your Own Way" by Fleetwood Mac and I am singing along at the top of my lungs. For some reason, that song is funner than shit to just scream along with. Of all the random songs, that's the one. And of all the random CD's to have in my car, I have two, count them TWO Fleetwood Mac albums, along with a Jackson Brown, a Beatles, a Nouvelle Vague, and The Cure.

Eclectic isnt the right word, but it's the first word that comes to mind.

Ever since playing Guitar Hero on Christmas at my family's house I've been digging this song, as it's one of the ones that I half-assedly performed.

At first it's just me singing. But then I hit the repeat and make the song go again and again, telling him how great it is and punching him in the thigh, much like my sister does to me whenever she wants me to sing along with her in the car. I can tell that he's fighting back a smile. You cant act all proper and normal with ME, pretty boy...

"YOU CAN GO YOUR OWN WAAAAAAAAAY!" I yell, and then finally by the grace of god he yells "YOU CAN GO YOUR OWN WA-A-AAY!" And it was win. "YOU CAN CALL IT ANOOOOTHER LONELY DAY!" and from then on he sang along with me. It was like the scene in Wayne's World with Bohemian Rhapsody, only 10 times better.

Singing at the top of your lungs like that and having someone join in with you is probably the funnest thing you can do while driving a car...well...besides road head, but that shit is dangerous. You should never ever do that. You'll drive your Mazda straight into a tree.

I witnessed road head once. They just about drove their Mazda straight into a tree.

That's just irresponsible. Even I know not to do that.

You know how in Fight Club when Tyler Durden kisses the narrator's hand and then dumps chemical lye all over it, and as the narrator tries to block out the pain through meditation and Tyler tells him "Dont shut this out, stay with the pain. This is your burning hand, THIS is your searing flesh."

Forcing someone to scream along with you at the music is a less violent version of that. This music is just going to keep getting louder and louder, and I am just going to keep punching you in the leg until you just give in and do it. The words aren't hard. It's not even that great of a song. But the song is playing and I am singing, and I'm inviting you to shout, shout, shout your crazies out along with me. The chorus is coming up. Can you hear how passionate they sound, telling this person they can "go their own way," telling them to politely fuck off through song? Match that as best as you can. No, you dont sound as good as them, no, you'll never have a career in music, but mother fucker just SING something.

Music is a wonderful thing. People can build up walls and the music can still get through them. A hippie gave me a peace sign because of the music I was blasting. Ty's favorite song to this day is Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds.

You hear songs and they relate to you. Or they relate to something or someone, and you dont necessarily have to relate back. You can skip to the next one. You can let this person, this artist or whatever, yell their words at you over repetitive baselines and cymbal crashes and that person wont judge you for screaming along. And that is synergy. Or maybe I have the definition of that word wrong. But it sounds good there, doesn't it?

And it's interesting how we tie memories to songs. To this day I swell with pride when I hear First Suite in E-flat by Gustav Holst, because I played that song my freshman year, and it was beautiful. I remember the brass section showing off by taking the third movement at an incredibly fast tempo, when it was actually supposed to be a very grandiose British march, slow, or what you'd call adagio. Not quite largo, but adagio.

In front of us suddenly is a funeral procession, not an uncommon occurrence in a town with two cemeteries, well...three if you count Desert Lawn since it's in that weird jagged puzzle piece annex of Beaumont/Calimesa...and yet we have no hospital. Slowing down, he tells me the names of the bike cops, and out of respect we turn off the music.

One time I was coming down a really narrow mountain road with no shoulder and this huge RV came up the other way, taking up most of my side of the road. I thought that was it right there, I would be forced off the road, rolling down the mountain to my death. I turned off the music then too. Lucky for me I was in a Toyota Tercel so even with less space on the road I still had plenty of clearing, as it turns out. It's easy to forget how small those cars are until it either kills you or saves your life.

When I was trying to decide whether or not to pursue David and end my relationship with Victor, I drove from here to San Bernardino and back, just getting on the freeways. Taking the 10 to the 30 (now the 210) and then the 215 back to the 10 in a big loop, and all the while I put the song "Where Is My Mind" by the Pixies on repeat and I listened to it over and over again until I had an answer. To this day, that is our song.

Victor and I never had a song. But I've forever burned the song "Dani California" by the Chili Peppers as the song I'll remember him by because they played it at his funeral.

My favorite song? Oh, Darlin! by The Beatles. Also exciting to scream to.

My voice range? Tenor. Really, I really am tenor. That's low for a girl.

I dont sing well in higher ranges, and that's fine. I dont sing well when I'm yelling either, but it's the energy exerted that counts.

I want you to do this with me. Imagine that you're in the passenger seat of my car, my little red Mazda3 Veruka, which smells like pizza and Vanillaroma Pine Tree Freshener. We're driving on the back road between Beaumont and Yucaipa, not another car around for miles and everything is green again even though it's January. If it helps, imagine that you're trying to give me road head. Get out of there damnit, that's not for you!

Now, I punch you in the thigh and say, "You have to sing this with me, it's fun."

Take a deep breath, and now sing along. Follow the bouncing doll.

Go Your Own Way - Fleetwood Mac

And then, tell me in the comments section if you did, where you did it, or why you're chickening out. How many times do I have to punch you in the leg before you fucking do this?

And if you want to see me scream along to something via video, rate this post 5 stars.

I Laugh And Laugh

When David tells me pizza boy stories. Don't get me wrong, I love the cop stories too that both he and Step feed me, but of course I cant really share them. For one, I'm trying to ween you from the idea that this will become a "cop blog" because I will never be able to share with you the things that he does when he is an officer, and there's absolutely no way that I can tell you Step's stories because if I write about Officer Somebody who pulled over the red Taurus for ABXY and the driver pulled a blank and the officer ended up blanking him, we run the risk of not only the red Taurus driver who got blanked possibly recognizing themselves here, but other officers might go, "oh hey, wasn't that..."

Yeah.

If you want cop stories you'll have to read the books. They're all used in the books, Bombshell's sequel especially.

But I have no qualms about sharing lulzy pizza stories.

So he gets to this place that's like a place for taking care of adults with special needs. It's a residence, so I guess you could call it like a "foster home" for invalid adults. He rings the doorbell, and a man answers the door wearing a helmet and a bib, and he is eating a bowl of ketchup with a spoon.

"Hi...uh...I have a delivery for--"

"Ketchup's gooooooooood."

"Kay. Did someone--"

"Mmmm...ketchup..." burbles, noises, etc.

"Is there someone I could--"

"I liiiiiiiiiiiiiiiike ketchup."

David stares blankly at the man, and then rings the doorbell again. Eventually the caregiver comes and deals with the pizza situation.

"Sorry about Joe over there. He likes ketchup."

"Ya I gathered."

So then he goes to this party...well, he doesn't GO to a party, he's there to deliver some pizza. Turns out it's pretty much a drunken orgy, which he's dealt with before. I still swear that he would make an excellent city cop here because he knows where every party house is, and if you recycle he knows your name and how much beer you drink, plus he notices when the shit comes in smelling like pot, etc. Now this is nothing compared to the time that the man answered the door wearing a leather getup and a woman screamed from the back bedroom about how fucking worthless he was and how he needed to give the pizza man his money because the pizza man is a REAL MAN with a JOB unlike that sorry piece of shit. Scan the archives for that story, I'm too lazy to link.

Anyway, so he's in this party and there are girls hanging on him, people are naked, and he's just trying to put the pizza on the table. This is nothing out of the ordinary, he gets a lot of hugs, one woman made out with him (the rum lady.) From behind he hears a male voice say, "And here's your tip," and David's ass is goosed. Goosed in such a way that they got the ball jiggle involved in the act as well. He got the mother eff out of there.

So then they get this complaint called in from a customer. Wait, hold on. Let me first tell you about Cosmin (name changed.) Cosmin was born in Romania, or so he claims, and he's been living in America since he was four. So, he's not really Romanian so much as he is American, even though he speaks both languages, where as my neighbor Sally IS Romanian in the sense that the only English she knows is what she has learned from reading subtitles of movies and getting into adult chatrooms. That's authentic, my friends.

So Cosmin is the biggest douchebag you know. Biggest. He wants to "throw down" with everyone, he doesn't actually do any work, he blames people for his mistakes, and he might be possibly stealing from the register, though I dont want to throw out any wild accusations, that's just heresy. He yells at the high schoolers who work there, and is super proud of this fact. And it's for stupid things too. Example:

Kid: "Hey did anyone make that large pepperoni black olive yet?"

Cosmin: "FUCK YOU YOU STUPID KID! YOU CAN FUCKING MAKE THAT SHIT YOURSELF YOU LITTLE COCKSUCKER! OOOOOOOH DUDE I JUST TOTALLY PWNED YOUR ASS! JJJEEEEAH!"

No joke. Just to give you an even bigger dose, he was in trouble a while back for not being able to control the amount of "n-words" that came out of his mouth when Obama was elected. Ja he's one of those.

So anyway, they get this complaint called in from a customer. It was about a menu they received on their box that said "Cosmin sucks" all over it. Whoopsie doodle (he he he.) At any rate, they apologized to the customer and it was over with. Except that Cosmin was RAGING MAD and wrote a sign that instructed everyone to write their names on this piece of paper on the wall so that he could match up the handwriting or whatever. Nobody took it seriously and management brushed it off and told everyone that they wouldn't have to do it, and the owner eventually came in and ripped down the sign.

Guy, you're a douchebag. Take a hint.

Speaking of douchebaggery, his boss, who is basically David's Steppy without all the groping (but the love is there,) comes up with this great idea and says "I want to be a pimp soul artist, my name will be Cadillac."

Right.

Track number one on his album goes something like "Betta' treat yo' lady right or Cadillac will treat'er all night." In a moment of whimsey, he sang this lyric to Cosmin's wife who came in to order pizza, for some reason Cosmin caught wind of it and wants to kick Cadillac's ass now because he thinks Cadillac was hitting on his girl.

To make this even better, Cadillac decided that David needs a nick name too, and so David, who was formerly known as Dirk Diggler and even has that as his official name on his locker (dont ask) is now known as "Juicy." Why? Because a guy called in one night and said "I want me up a sausage pizza. And make them sausages JA-EUSYY!" So now David is Juicy.

And there was a point system assigned to the names. You would gain a point every time you answer the phone with your nick name. Thank you for choosing our Pizza Place, this is Juicy. Do you want the Juicy special? David is too chicken to mess with people like that, but Cadillac did it once. It was a wrong number though.

And on that note, let's end with prank calls. I'm not talking about the girls orgasming into the phone saying how they'll show David their titties if he gives them free hotwings (which turned out to be an order for Yucaipa so he totally missed out on that one,) I mean damn kids playing on the damn phone. Last night they were pranked for like three hours straight.

"Thank you for choosing our Pizza Place, this is--"

"BUTTPLUG!" *click*

"Yeeeeeokay?"

...

"Thank you for choosing our Pizza Pl--"

"Be sure to bring your dog with you so he can LICK MY BALLS!" *click.*

Etc. etc. etc. for the next three hours. The problem is that they cant NOT answer the phone because it might be a real customer, so they're stuck.

Cadillac goes, "You know what? What if it's the owner? Because I told him that I'm dog sitting again so maybe...maybe it's like his kid or something. He's stoned and having his kid prank our pizza place for shits and giggles."

"Or maybe they're just psychic," David suggests. "How else could they have known about my butt plug?"

Cadillac looks at him. David shrugs. Exit stage right to go make a pizza.

Your Dysfunctional Tongue

He comes here and it's like something just crackles between us. All feelings aside, whatever it is, it's magic. Friendship is what really resolves and mitigates loneliness while not compromising the self in the way that love does, romantic love does.

The neighbor has been forwarding me messages from a girl on the dating website who is interested in a girl-on-girl encounter. She's thinking about doing it. I told her to because I want to see how this will turn out.

"Everyone needs at least one lesbian encounter. At least one."

"Did you had one? Or are you planning on?" she asks. I tell her I've kissed girls back in high school and it was more of a joke than anything more, and she was confused as to how I could kiss someone without feeling something, because to her and the way she was taught in her culture kissing is the most passionate beautiful thing two people can do. Besides bloodsucking. Stupid vampires.

"I turn it off," I tell her. I have no further explanation. I really envy the way she views kissing, because other than these certain kisses that David gives me I really don't connect. Possibly because of my standoffishness. But those certain ones make me burn, and I love it. But sometimes? When I plant one on David or he plants one on me? If I'm not paying attention I'll forget to feel anything. Then the moment is gone and I either have to remedy it by trying again or just feel guilty about letting it pass.

"Is called Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve," she tells me.

"Well you're not Adam nor Steve so what do you care?"

"I kiss a girl before too you know. Two years ago. Then she try to date my ex and I tell her 'if you want to know how I taste come here and I show you, you don't have to take it second hand.'"

I encourage her again to hook up with the girl from the website because I'm a shit-stirrer and I like to see things go down. Meanwhile I can feel Steppy not so subtly breathing on my neck. On the left side of my neck. The side that David just blurts out is "the good side" the other night while he was having his Sunday beer. David's such a lightweight that one beer gets him buzzed and talky. "And if you lick her earlobe, she twitches."

Because why not just tell everyone this so they can use it against me? Including the blogosphere. Let's meet up!

Steppy knows that I know exactly what he's doing. It's not so much subtle flirting as it is outright messing with my brain. It doesn't really bother me. I turn my head and smile. He smiles at me like he's thinking about something naughty and I look into his eyes.

"Have you ever seen a man take a shit while running full speed?" I ask him.

"Do you have a video to show me?" he asks with confusion.

"Of course not. I promised your wife that I wouldn't let you watch that kind of thing when you come over here."

"You said you wouldn't let me watch porn," he counters.

"Yeah well, to some people, including your wife, that is porn. Sorry. No video."

"Then why bring it up?"

"Distraction," I say. "More tea?"

"Sure," he says with his miserable pretty boy voice. He gets close sometimes. He doesn't see me as often anymore and it's like he's trying to get his fill when he's over here. Sometimes he looks at me with this sort of...desperation, and I tell him that when I was a paper boy I was reprimanded by the police once for throwing Sunday papers at crackheads walking down the street, but that I weasled my way out of it because it was my word against the crackhead's.

"God," he says. "We're supposed to be open and honest with each other, right?"

I go yeah.

"I want to kiss you when you talk all dysfunctional like that."

I had another epiphany. It struck me like a bolt of lightning. Steppy's already said a few times that the main reason he fell in love with me is because of Bombshell, sort of in the same way that when I read Fight Club all those years ago my mind opened up to a world of unconventional writing, how I was introduced to the concept that you can write incredibly disgusting and pain inducing stories and that it was okay to do that. I found somewhere that I could be exactly who I was. I could let the awful and poignant things inside of me out through a medium that would produce a 6x9 stack of bound paper that would sit on people's shelves.

The point isnt to live forever, it's to create something that will.

Steppy, born and raised in a strict conservative church, made now to be the voice of reason for the screaming, crack smoking masses, a gun on his hip and hiding inside of a clean pressed uniform that is not unlike the clean pressed shirts and pants he wore all his life until adulthood, craves the sort of disorder and moxy and old fashioned spunk and filth that he has never been able to smile upon because of how wrong he was taught that it all is.

Men fall all over my hot Romanian neighbor because of her accent and because of the fact that she comes from a completely different land. She's new. You've dated blacks, Mexicans, even people outside of your own league before, but have you ever had the chance to date something so very rare and exotic as the girl from Transylvania? An orchid as opposed to a daisy. Rain in the desert instead of blistering heat.

Steppy says he loves his wife but that he cant shake the feelings he has for me. Perhaps if his shiny happy bride with her shiny happy hair and shiny happy sandwiches with their shiny happy crusts cut off could fall from grace, even just for a little while to say something despicable like "Brazilian fart porn" or refer to a vagina as a "snatch" or something worse like "meat curtains," or even something non sexual like whispering "cutting makes me feel" in his ear, Steppy could find exactly what he's looking for in the woman who he needs to be looking for it in. Maybe if she just used the word bitch. I noticed how titillated he was a while back when I referred to him as my bitch and I started taking charge and telling him how it was gonna be etc. etc..

The guy in the starched shirt wants to frolic on the beach and see if he can fit his entire fist into a vagina while drinking a bitter ale with his other hand.

The man in the uniform who prides himself in his job to serve and protect wants to rob a liquor store...or at the very least, steal a few candy bars and a porno mag and then shoot off illegal fireworks in the back of his pristine pretty little house on the corner of McMansionville Avenue.

"Steppy," I said. "When you were just a skinny lad, never knew no good from bad, what was it like emotionally for you the first time that you masturbated?"

He looked at me crookedly, then sort of scratched his chin thoughtfully to think. "I felt like it was wrong, I guess."

"So it wasn't an accidental discovery, you knew what you were doing and you had been taught that it was wrong," I said.

"I thought God was going to punish me," he admitted. David says this exact same thing. Fucking religion. If masturbation is wrong, I don't want to be right.

"You believed that it was sinful...and yet...I assume that you did it anyway?"

"Of course...I just never admitted to doing it or anything, and I was really careful to hide it because I didn't want my parents to know at all, for a lot more than just the normal reasons. Then again, it was around that time that I stopped believing in God and I just started going through the motions of being Mormon when in actuality--"

"In actuality you were doing things that you knew you weren't supposed to do. And you liked it."

"What are you getting at?"

"You say you get all hot and bothered when I say all these rotten and fucked up things, things that I know your wife would never say since I'm pretty sure she still watches the Care Bears and her only swear word is taking god's name in vain compulsively, and the fact that she doesn't even know what a real hand job is really...I think you just want to loosen up a little and because of the world that you're in you simply cant, and when you hear me talking about it or see me doing something delightfully unconventional--"

"It makes me hard?"

I put my hand on his shoulder. "Kay. Wasn't what I was going to say there but, yeah, essentially...like what I meant was that you see something that you want and that you can never have. You, my friend, want to smoke pot just once to say that you did."

"I cant do that--"

"I'm not saying you will. I'm saying that you want to."

"...Sort of how you want to get in a fight, just to say that you did. Oh my god...I see exactly what you're saying. All right, come on, I'm in the mood now so let's start throwing punches, just like you wanted," he says and stands up. "I'll teach you a thing or two."

"Nah," I say. "I don't want to break your pretty pretty face. But I do want for you and your wife to start watching porn. Lots and lots of porn. I'll try to find some tame, non offensive, white on white hetero missionary stuff and send you some links. I'll give them to you next time you guys are over for your counseling session."

"You're prescribing porn?"

"I'm prescribing sin," I tell him. I think he shuddered on the inside with pleasure. These suppressed pretty boys. I just cant wait to corrupt the ever living fuck out of them. I nibbled the tip of his thumb and he might have creamed his pants. I'm the devil in disguise, y'all.

"Can we still make out?" he asks.

"I'm not really down with that. How about we share some Flamin Hot Cheetoes soaked in Squirt instead?"

"...Okay."

"And Step, maybe you shouldn't come over here when you're horny anymore."

"...Okay."

Competition And Hand Jobs

I think the bitchiest response is to simply hit "ignore." I can understand a flat out "no" or a hopeful "maybe," but simply ignore? Like you can't be bothered with my asking?

I've been marketing heavily over the past week and a half or so, especially on Goodreads. I've been maxing out my friend requests for the day and I've been leaving kind comments on people's profiles, accepting their book recommendations, comparing books with them, all while avoiding being a spam robot because I am not a robot, I am an anatomically correct silicone doll with real human hair. It's called networking. I send out invites everyday for people to join my "book release event." I get "yes" responses, I get "no" responses. I even get "maybe" responses.

But when I get "ignores?" That's just rude, especially if the person who hit "ignore" asked ME to be added as MY friend. If I had asked them, that's one thing, but for them to ask me, and then ignore me?

I've been spending way too much time on this.

But it's working.

In the mean time, I've become anti social IRL.

I haven't talked about Sally much lately because I haven't been hanging with her. Partially because I'm really busy trying to promote my book and everything, but partially because...I don't know...she wants to make everything into a competition?

It started back before we were friends, when she would see my holiday display and then go balls to the wall with her decorations to out do mine. Then of course now that we are friends, she admits to what she is doing, all the while she says "I shouldn't be spending this money like this, I just spend $50 on lights. That is too much, no?" And when I was painting my house to get ready for David's meeting with the background investigator, well, we all saw what she did to her bedroom sex chamber. And again with "I don't have the money to be doing this, I shouldn't. Maybe when there was no man at the paint counter at Wal Mart it was a sign from God that I should not be spending the money, but then I just went to Home Depot and someones was there and I did got my paint after all that."

I was knitting things to give as Christmas gifts, and she went out and bought yarn to make things too. That's fine, we share a talent and it's really cool that she did that. But when I gave her a scarf that I made specifically for her for Christmas and she went out and bought the materials, made one just like it, and then announced that she would be selling them at work for $20 a piece?

*smiles uncomfortably*

There's a delicious Romanian thing that she taught me to make one night called conopidă, which is just boiled mashed cauliflower, mayo, and fresh garlic. It's like a spread, and you eat it on bread. She did teach me but I can't make mine nearly as good as hers...and she thinks this is delightful. This is because David is loving the Romanian food (the way to his heart really IS through his stomach) and so she makes tubs and tubs of this stuff and brings it over. One time she actually said to me that the only reason why she made it is because David likes it and she knows I cant make it as good as her. She knows she cant have David, but that she can tease him with foods and emailing me naked pictures that she knows he will end up seeing.

And now? God, I cant believe I'm writing this, I sound like such a girl...she's trying to take Steppy away from me. *facepalm*

It went from "he's in love for you" to "why is he not in love for me?"

"Your saying that there is no that you are attracted with him? In any way?" she asks me.

"He's pretty," I tell her. "But I'm not attracted to him. I don't like my boys to be pretty I like them to be handsome and kind of doughie and pale."

"WASTEFUL!" she shouts at me. I have no idea what that means. All I know is when she knows he's here, she brings over food knowing that he'll be lured into eating it, hoping that he'll be lured into going over for more. And I think she might be using witchcraft.

"Isn't my dress too short?" she comes over and asks him. And Steppy, he's such a good husband that he averts his eyes. Well...a good husband who is in love with someone else...besides that whole mess. Otherwise, he's resisting the temptations of the Sally and that's impressive. She doesn't like that Steppy doesn't give her attention though, so she gets kind of drastic at times and really lays it on thick. She sat on his lap one time and he totally pushed her off.

"That is not right! If she would sits on your lap you would do nothing about!" and she storms home all butt hurt and muttering things in unintelligible Romanian speak.

I think part of the appeal is that she knows that he doles out money, and I found out recently that her two books that were published were funded by men that she dated in Romania who had "connections." Connections and spare BMW's. She tells me still that I'm a fool not to take the money, even though I've justified myself to her by explaining that it has to do with the fact that I think he needs to concentrate on fixing his marriage before he starts trying to be my agent, and that in lieu of him trying to help me I'm actually now trying to help him by being their "marriage councilor" one night a week, and that it's not about money it's about loyalty and friendship.

I like Sally, I do, and I find her imaginary competition charming. It gets irritating at times, but it's not horribly offensive. I laugh at it mostly. It's painful to watch her spend all of her money on shit she cant afford just to compete with me, or compete with what she believes she SHOULD be, but the girl's gotta learn. And she's gotta not take offense when I tell her I'm seriously too busy to come over and sit with her because I'm marketing my book and she's just going to have to accept that I'm not going to bang Steppy and she isnt either. He's saving his marriage from divorce. Nobody is banging Steppy.

That also goes to his groupies here on the blog who offered. Sorry, champs.

How is he doing by the way? Meh? I cant go into too much detail other than it's been established that he loves her but he still loves me and she's I think okay with that...which is also painful to watch...but it has something to do with him not being able to act on his feelings for me that makes it somehow "okay." There's also a stack of Dr. Ruth books that I've been thumbing through and I've bookmarked a few how-to videos. Also I would just like to voice my upset with a certain religion that makes learning about sexuality fairly taboo.

We're starting all over with the very basics, my friends. The good old classic American hand job.

I'm surprised that there is someone over the age of 16 who still doesn't know how this thing works. Then again, all the Mormons I knew were sluts.

A Truck Came Roaring Past...

We drove up to the mountains today to our favorite little getaway spot, Forest Falls. I brought my camera, but I didn't take many pictures since I have so many already. There's still snow up there, but it's really icy and all full of dirt and sticks, though it didn't stop the boys from having at it.

We were up there to collect driftwood because David got a Dremel for Christmas and he wants to use it to make pipes...even though we don't smoke anything, but he's friends with a lot of bums who do, so he'll give the pipes to them. He also collected a number of larger pieces that we call "bongwood" (even though I don't think a wooden bong would work out very well) that he actually intends to use to make candle holders out of.

I told him that it's fun and all to try, but really a Dremel is the type of tool that you just put away until one day when you come across a project or some kind of situation and go "Hey! I can use my Dremel for this!" and be ever so grateful that you have one. He's still convinced that he can make an elaborate tobacco pipe. More practically, he also picked up a number of "walking sticks" and I think that those might work best for just a guy fucking around with a Dremel.

We went to lunch while we were up there at the Mexican restaurant with a B-grade from the health department. It's basically one guy who plays hostess, server, and cook all at once, but he's friendly and the food is really good and authentic.

But even the delicious floutas were not the best part of the trip. I saw something up there that inspired me. Though it is bittersweet, it's neat enough to share on my blog.

As we drove on Valley Of The Falls Rd. I noticed a series of signs. I told David to slow down, and on the way back down the mountain I had him slow down again so I could read the ones that I missed. They were all white with red lettering, and they were posted every 200 feet or so, stapled onto telephone poles and trees.

The first sign simply read, "A truck came roaring past..."

The next one said, "Five dogs were barking."

"The bottom of my cage fell out."

"Now I'm cold, hungry, and scared."

Down the road from that the next sign read "My name is Garfield and I am an orange cat."

After that, there was a sign with a phone number.

Attention grabbing? Very. Now it's nothing compared to the family friend of ours who posted a $10,000 reward for the return of her two missing cats (and had the money to back it up, no joke) but it does show creativity and damn if it didn't work on me at least, and probably a lot of people in the little mountain community.

But then I had an epiphany. As much as I hope that Garfield finds his way back, it struck me that the idea was completely and utterly genius and I could use it to advertise my book.

Imagine. "She wants to quit dancing."

"He wants to help her."

"Can he be trusted?"

"Jessie-Terwilliger.com"

But then I wondered if it's even legal to post signs in Beaumont (which according to The Heat it's not, though I beg to differ because I always see a lot of "lose weight now, ask me how!" signs and nobody gives a shit about those.) Furthermore, I wondered if anyone in Beaumont would even pay attention to a clever marketing campaign like that. I mean, they pay attention to the "Run in the name of Jesus" sign over by the sports park, and some asshole just spray painted that on a piece of cardboard and stuck it to a barbed wire fence. Still, it's been there for two years!

David says that people won't read the signs though. He says that the only signs people in this town read are signs that say "Yard Sale Saturday."

I've said before how weird the people here are, how they're all stupid and defensive and that it doesn't really surprise me that we don't even have a bookstore, not even a used one.

Beaumont...the only city where if McDonnald's gets your order wrong they scream at you and then throw your money back at you.

Beaumont...the only city where jaywalkers will cuss at cars who have to swerve or break to avoid hitting them.

So I'm throwing this idea with the signs to you guys in the form of another contest, this time with a t-shirt thrown in. But if you live in a city where it's illegal to pull this kind of tomfoolery, there's yet another option. Go check it out.

And pray for the lost little kitty. :(

A Girl And Her Pig

No, I don't mean me and David, though I might could use this title again when we he graduates as a ha-ha kind of thing. But no. I mean that my niece Nina got a freakin' pet pig for the love of god...

His name is Grub. I love taking pictures of Nina because I think she photographs well, possibly because of her glasses, but she randomly dropped by today with her mom to say "Look Jessie, I have a pig."

Piggy Grub said "WHEEEEEET WHEEEEET RNK RNK WHEEEEE NOK NOK NOK RNK NOK RRR RR RRRR RRRRR WEE BR BR RNK WEEEEE!"

It was awesome. What in the hell is she doing with a goddam pig?

I've had my fair share of weird animals throughout the years. Mostly I had cats, but I did adopt Victor's ferret after he couldn't take care of her anymore for some unknown reason, which I found out later was because she was what they call a "Gary Coleman" ferret, which is a rare condition that happens in 1 out of every 100 ferrets where they're mean and bitter little assholes. The thing bit, would not play, it was just a tube of hatred. I ended up giving her away too when I moved out. The smell was not worth being bit and scowled at every time I went to change its damn litter.

I had a chinchilla too at one point who I ended up giving to a pet shop owner to breed because I was moving. I guess chinchillas and ferrets aren't weird but they're not pigs. Pigs! That's so random! And it lives in their house, which is also weird because I don't think it's one of those micro-mini ones, I think he's a full sized one. It eats people food. LOL! My sister in law must be nuts!

The neighbor said that she kept pigs as pets growing up in Romania. Then her dad would have her go out and slit its throat and they would have meat for a few months. "I killed lots of pigs," she tells me. She tells me this because pigs are the only pets she's ever had, and someone gave her a fish recently and she didn't know how to take care of it. "I only ever have pigs," she says, "and I killed every single one of them...with my bare hands and also the knife."

Culture clash for sure.

I think I'll stick to my parakeets.

Comment question of the day, what was your weirdest pet?

Hardcore

This is my official challenge to you. Can you beat it? Video responses of your best food combinations PRONTO people.

How Not To Suck

Okay, okay, so let's remedy all this bullshit we've got going on by giving out some awards. I received this adorable little lemonade stand a while back from two people, and I am going to bestow it onto some other people to show that I am not bitter or angry at anyone.

Yes I have unsubscribed from some feeds. Possibly YOURS. Do not take offense to this. Maybe just start posting original content again and let me know when you're back. It isn't personal, it doesn't mean that we aren't friends, it's just a blog...and perhaps because your blog isn't that personal because it's just memes and blog carnivals, it's definitely not a personal thing.

But I have also subscribed to a number of new feeds, and I haven't shown any linky love in a while, so tonight I am going to pass on this lemonade stand here to show that I am paying attention and I like your shit. Also I am trying to get back into posting at night instead of the morning, because the weekend is coming up and I won't be able to do it Sunday morning and people will start hunting me down. It has happened before.

Okay, so on with the blogs.

All right, so Lexie has a ton of friends...well, sometimes she does. She's pretty smart, she's liberal but she is in love with a republican, she knows good music, but she feels like her life is falling apart as the people around her make selfish decisions and leave her out in the cold. Get this, her councilor actually broke the confidentiality agreement. Her goal is to start a revolution to change the world.

Lexie? Is 13 years old.

Normally I don't mess around with kids when they approach me online. I ask them where their parents are and if they know that they're online. But there's something about Lexie that reminds me of a younger me, and reading her blog takes us back to a different time that I think all of us can relate to. Sometimes you'll bite your fist in misery for this poor girl after the boy she likes snubs her to be with another girl or when she writes about her parent's turbulent divorce, and you'll try to tell her that it's okay, she's a kid, she'll grow out of it...but...Lexie is strangely not just another kid. She's easy to relate to. Go read through her posts and you'll see what I mean.

Not to suck up to this person or anything, but I think Leah needs some lemonade too. There was a whole lot of mixed up frizzle frazzle and that often happens on the interwebs, doesn't it? Yeah. So she's Canadian, she scrapbooks and makes all of these cool layouts, which interest me and at the same time they don't because I no longer scrapbook, but you know what? It's her layouts that keep me from scrapbooking, and I don't mean that in a bad way, I mean that my squiggly scissors and cute sheets of stickers look like shit on a page next to the things that she does.

We all have our talents, right? People look at my knitting or they read my books and go WTF I WISH I COULD DO THAT! and I look at scrapbooking and go "god damn, god motherfucking damn." I lack the skills for that art, which is why Ty has a halfassed album of his first year and Wade has like half a page done. I fail in comparison. But Leah has a way of making her pictures pop off the page with the unique way that she does her scrapping, and it's neat. If that's your bag, go check it out.

Kelly's blog is called Kelly Kelly Kelly. I think she likes her name, you think? Kelly is newly divorced with a little bitty child, and her ex likes to come over and pass out drunk on her floor. Poor thing lets him because she misses the crap out of him and as she knows she shouldn't give in to him and let him use her like that, it's hard to mend a broken heart, you know? Plus she's got the kid, and it's a very sticky situation. I feel for her. But at the same time she is going to school right now and writing about everyday sort of things, which I like in a blog. Finding non coin items in your coin jar might not be exciting to YOU, but it beats post after post of memes and blog carnivals. Beats them by a long shot.

I'll tell you what attracts me to a blog, it's writing about the mundane everyday stuff that attracts me to a blog. I'm Scottish, I'm a peeping tom by nature. If I could look into your windows I would...in fact, sometimes I do. Even if you just write about washing dishes, dude, I've written blogs like that. We all have those days. But someone somewhere will still find it entertaining. Hell, I find what Kelly writes to be very entertaining. It's like a journal, which is exactly what a blog should be!

Now Helena, this is a really weird one and you'll think I'm nuts because she rarely posts anything, but there's something special going on here. Back when I was about Lexie's age I was into poetry and all that jazz, and back when the internet was a little more than a Yahoo search engine and a bunch of Geocities pages, I used to look up people's poetry online. I read some poems by this woman, one that I remember distinctly, called "Diamond Days," which I still mostly have memorized. Well, since I knew a few lines of it I googled it a while back and found that she keeps a blog now. Blast from the past for sure...my past anyway. Rare posts are okay, as long as they end up being good, and they are, even if they're just thought provoking.

Next at the Muffin Top we have Haley who is in culinary school. You all might remember KZ who quit the blogging after pawning her laptop to pay rent (hardcore) and how we all used to drool at her cake designs? Dude, Haley makes Mr. Potato Head cakes. AND I'M PRETTY SURE SHE GETS TO EAT THEM! For the love of god, I think I'm actually jealous. She's also a fairly rare poster but now that I'm linking to her I'm hoping that she'll update us more. It's like Food Network but better...and actually I think she has been on Food Network. I know she was talking about a lady named Bronwyn from the great Gingerbread Mansion challenge and how she went to the school or something, and I recall who Bronwyn was, I don't know, check her archives. Cool stuff though, and delicious cake.

Last but not least...well I have few words for this one because words are rare on this blog. Pictures And Such is just a photoblog, but she posts every day, even if she doesn't have a "quality" picture to post. Just go check it out.

Okay so to recap, I'm not a grinch, I'm not a bitch, I don't hate anyone, I'm just tired of your crappy blogs. Kay? Kay. Love yuns.

The Kindness Of Minions

It ends tonight! You must do it now! NOW I SAY!

I've had tiffs before on the interbutts, I think just about everyone has at one time or another. Of course when I first came blinking and shielding my eyes at the brightness of the Blogosphere almost four years ago, I reveled in the awesome new form of friendmaking by doing very little. In fact I giggled and rolled around in it like a 12 year old in his sister's bra drawer.

Back when I was new to this, when blogs were somewhat still new to this too, if you disagreed with something someone wrote it meant that you would be confirmed for brawl, you'd leave nasty comments at each other, and you would encourage your readers to bash them as well. I know because I have been on both ends of those tiffs.

But see, now I know better. All these years later, I can disagree with someone, even argue back and forth with them and nobody has to unsubscribe or anything. A few years ago one of the Bitches of Eastwick pointed out that the Red Cross centers set up in California for the wildfires (and I think this may have been during Esperanza which was right where I lived which killed five firefighters, one of which was related to me) had things like yoga and palates going on, and she compared it to the deplorable mishandling of Katrina. In not so many words, she was calling us all snobby bitches over here, or that's how I took it anyway. I was like "Hold on there, when the Katrina folks finally did get set up, I saw news footage of the Red Cross serving gumbo and crayfish and little jazz quartets and shit, it's a regional thing! We like our yoga and bottled dog water, and they like their cajun shit, it's regional! REGIONAL!"
Anyway, we argued back and forth about it for a few days or maybe less than that, but then we were cool and we still are. Nobody usubscribed in a huff or anything, we just moved on to the next thing.

Well see, I haven't had internet drama for at least a few years...that is until recently when my Scandalous Legs were being Scandalous and it caused a lot of cat fighting in my comments section. Oh man, there was name calling, "that's not your real name" accusing, "why are you anonymous" yelling, I mean it was classic female oriented blog drama amongst the key demographic group. After two posts, things simmered down, and I went back to normal. Actually, I got confused on one person's blog and thought that they had deleted my comment that I had left earlier in the day, when actually it was just that I was on a blog with a similar layout that did the exact same meme and I was like "WTF?" But I was wrong, and I apologized, and everything turned out to be okay...or so I thought.

The Photo Challenge Blog is no longer a blog, I guess due to high numbers or something they turned it into a forum. Whatever, I'll still play, but I did apparantly make the mistake of suggesting that I didn't like the new format because I woke up to an email this morning from Leah who was like "Why don't you like the Photo Challenge? Too afraid to tell us? Eh? Eh?" (sorry, she's Canadian Eh...which is also the clever title of her blog.)

This is really stupid. I have no ill will toward anyone, and I thought that we were all adults or whatever. Meaning like, unsubscribe from my feed because you disagree with what I write, just like I unsubscribed from a number of blogs this past weekend for being boring (mostly ones who basically do a blog carnival every day of the week and post no original content whatsoever.) I didn't know that this carried over into unrelated things like the freaking Photo Challenge which is simply just a photography thing that I like to participate in for fun and practicality.

I know when I'm wanted, I'll leave if you ask me to. Mind my own business and speak when I'm spoken to. If for whatever reason it will make them feel better to evict me from the Photo Challenge, then just fucking do it! I'll laugh my ass off because I still think this is stupid and unrelated but if we're going to act like my legs propped up on a friend is somehow going to affect my ability to do the Challenges, then whatever. You can have it. Otherwise, I'm staying because I like to do the challenge every week, it gives me something to do and sometimes it inspires out of the way trips to places.

On the other hand, I would like to give a shout out to minions everywhere. Hat tips to the friends who have stood by me since I was 21 and still growing, and a nod to the ones who I have picked up along the way. I bring this up because I got this email last night, it was an entry for the contest and I had no idea who the person was who sent it, but I shot a thank you email back. It turns out she found me through Goodreads.com, where I have been focusing my attention on marketing and buzz about Bombshell's upcoming release. I'm back to a shoestring budget now, even though Steppy said that the offer still stands. I turned it down. He needs to concentrate on fixing his marriage, and as he might be like a guard dog if I make it to a signing at Barnes and Noble, I can do this by myself. I have the internet and oodles upon oodles of time.

Anyway, this woman, Sheri, she found me through Goodreads, read about my book, and fell in love with it. She and I shot emails back and forth for two hours, and she was just ass over teakettle excited about this book and Golden Dawn. She read the sample chapters and started emailing her aunt, her sister, her niece, everyone she could bloody think of telling them to buy my book.

For an underground indy author to see that many sales in an hour? That was nuts. NUTS.

She left eventually telling me that she was going to "spread the word" and promised to promote the hell out of me on Goodreads and wherever else she could plaster my name around.

I ended up promising her a free copy based on her spunk and enthusiasm.

People on the internets can still be awesome.

By the way, I gave in and now I am on the Twitter. Follow me.

Socked In The Jaw

It's funny. Someday I'll be on my death bed and I'll realize that I've only ever lived through the characters I've put on paper. Thank god I keep a public journal that allows for comments, or else I would just be the people that I have created...only I haven't created them. I've noticed them from somewhere and I've recorded them, perhaps not in their purest form, and perhaps a bit twisted from their original existence, but they were all inspired by something, someone, somewhere.

People tell me a lot that the reason they read my blog is because I can "turn anything into a story." That's right. I can. The reason is because I have trained myself to observe things in rich detail. I remember names, accents, facial expressions, conversations, stories, carpet colors, smells, I remember all of these things because I will most likely use them later. You may not remember the conversation you had with your checkout girl last week, but I remember when my checkout girl asked if I really wrote a book, and when I gave her my business card she asked me to sign the back of it. And I remember that the kind checkout man I had today calls the receipt "paperwork." Don't forget your paperwork.

The series of events in my life and in the lives around me have practically been set up so that they could be written about. I do things like go to strip clubs and visit crime scenes so that I can experience what other people experience. So that I can write about other people's tragedies. So that I can create characters that seem real, because they are real. I've created nothing, I've just swapped names and altered the stories a bit. It's called fictionalizing. I've taken something that is not mine and made it into something that is because I've combined the past of one person with the face and hair of another, and attached the fate of some third person story I was told by someone else to the end of the character.

I actually lead a fairly boring life. You probably dont think so, because you're probably subscribed to my feed and perhaps you have been for the past four years. I wonder if I live vicariously through my characters. I cant write great sex scenes about a first encounter with two consenting adults because I've never had sex with another adult besides my husband, and that is way different than just a one night stand or anything like it. I cant write about what goes on at church because I dont go. I do write about these things, but it takes a lot of research. Research of course being out in the field or just googling the hell out of a bunch of blogs until you get a pretty good idea of what being shot feels like.

I've never been shot.

I've never almost died.

Here are all these other people living interesting lives. The rest of the world is fighting and kissing, and here I am writing about it all in my yellow living room basically jacking off to it all while raking in some dough.

Sometimes I find that deplorable.

Sometimes I decide to do research. Real research.

I'm not talking about how I occasionally troll a forum to get material, I'm talking about the strip clubs. Or the naked Marine. Sitting in Starbucks so I can overhear something I can use. Going to an antique store and acting like I know a thing or two about milk glass. There are a lot of things that I haven't done yet but should in the name of research, like try to make it out of Staters with a huge jug of bourbon and letting the security guard tackle me (they tackle there over booze, I've seen it done) and then going nuts in the back of the police car by kicking at the windows and shouting all kinds of obscenities.

Well...perhaps I shouldn't do that. Perhaps I should just watch a few episodes of COPS next time I'm at my sister's. That's research enough.

I wanted to do some research for the second two books of the Bombshell (Green) series. I needed to learn how to fight. There's a lot of fighting in these books, and I'm kind of hopped up on Fight Club right now so I convinced Steppy to teach me a few things. "How much can you really know about yourself if you've never been in a fight?" I asked him, because I, my friends, have never been in a fight. When writing Bombshell I asked David for some "Quick! There's a gun pointed at your head! What do you do?" moves, he showed me. But he did it gently.

All I wanted to learn from Steppy was how to fight. How to defend myself. How to take somebody's shit down even though I lack upper body strength. 10th grade self defense class all over again except with real punches...or so I thought. He wouldn't fight me. He wouldn't teach me anything. He said he wasn't in the mood. He just wanted to knit. He hasn't seen me all week. Cant we just sit on the couch and knit together?

NO! I wont have it! Fuck you, fuck this, I'm going to ignore you and I need to vacuum.

So I did. I got out the vacuum, the little one that I bought for $28 the day after Thanksgiving at Wal Mart. It's kind of dinky and cheap but it's surprisingly powerful and loud.

I do this. I act up like this. Soon I'll be running the garbage disposal and going "la la la la la la la la cant hear you la la la la la la la la"

I'm vacuuming, accentuating my push/stride and jerking the thing back to me, when all of the sudden the handle pulls off and I punch myself in the jaw. Hard. Number one, I did not know that the handle did that, number two I have no idea why the handle just randomly does that, and number three I totally just socked myself in the face. There were a few embarrassing painful tears welling as he ran over to me to inspect the damage while trying to hold back laughter.

"Are you okay? Let me see..." he sucks in air through his teeth. "That? Might leave a mark."

I tell him that it hurts more on the inside than the outside, like I somehow bothered a nerve or something in one of my troubled teeth, or perhaps I clenched down on it or something. I also told him that the vacuum came disassembled and part of the assembly was putting the handle on. He takes the handle and puts it back on the vacuum, and shows me where there are little nubs for it to catch on to lock it in place, which I had obviously not done.

Well sure I got punched but I didn't learn anything from that, other than the vacuum has little nubs on the handle part to lock the handle into place.

The red mark lingered for a while and I wondered if there would be bruising. Inside my mouth still feels weird, I might have damaged something, but it's nothing worse than what was already there. I'm all damaged though, so I sit on the other couch all curled up writing more sex toy reviews. Sadly there are still quite a few to go. Neither one of us talk about what happened. The neighbor brings over pork stuffed with ground turkey, peas, and carrots (crazy Romanian food) and doesn't notice the mark, and I'm glad because she would probably just be titillated by it. "You let him to choke you, huh? That really what you do, huh?"

I can hear it now.

David eventually comes home with $12 in tips because it was dead and he sits down next to me, on the other side of the mark. I'm still on the sex toy site and David's like "Awesome! What the fuck is that thing?" he says and points to something off to the side with all kinds of twists and curves and spiky jelly things.

"Shhhhhhhh" I tell him and point to the miserable pretty boy.

"I read your blog now," Steppy reminds me.

Oh. Right. How long had he been sitting there knowing what I was doing?

"Steppy hit me," I tell David in a tattle-tell voice.

"I did not! She hit herself!"

"You sound just like my brother!"

It was all very lulzy. I explained about how I wanted to fight Steppy but he wouldn't do it so I vacuumed in protest and ended up socking myself in the jaw. David tells me that I dont need to learn to fight. He says now that the vacuum handle is locked on, I should just keep the vacuum out and if someone comes in I should just use it as a weapon. It's lightweight, full of dust...hey, could you imagine breaking into my house and just getting whacked upside the head with a vacuum which then explodes with dust all over your face and into your lungs?

Sweet. Back the fuck up, bitches!

You Want Thingamabobs? I've Got 20!

You still haven't gone over here? What's the matter with you???

Miss posted a whole entry about jilling with some product that she got for free in exchange for review, and I was like whaaaaat?

So I looked into it, and it turns out that the site, which is nothing but an online adult store (convenient in the sense that you don't have to walk into the really pervy ones they have IRL around here) and as it turns out this place "pays" reviewers of their products in free merch. in exchange for more reviews.

Hawt.

I'm into programs like that, where I use my talents to collect chump change. I used to make videos for money until the site that did that closed, but I made like $60 a month doing that even though video making is not my forte. When David broke his clavicle and was out of work last winter I made some money posting reviews on my blog here and making anywhere from $5-$30 a post to do so. I write articles on eHow and I made $4.78 in ad revenue last month. Plus royalties from my book sales, you know, I make like $8 a month. Hey, that's four gallons of gas!

So I read up on the review program on this site. You have to post some reviews to begin with of some stuff that you already have, and the reviews have to be at least 300 words long. You have to discuss feel, how it worked, how to clean it, how you used it, etc. You rate the "vroom" which refers to strength of vibration, and the "bee" which is the noise level. Now I use a fake name there and it's not because I'm embarrassed because if I was I certainly wouldn't be telling you about this, but it's because I'm easy to google and I don't want this particular thing to pop up in my googles.

"Oh I'm going to google my favorite author...oh what is this? A review she posted for a $150 sex toy? I'm not going to buy her book! All she uses her money on is sex toys!" and then it will lead to people posting angry blogs about how every dollar you spend on Golden Dawn goes straight up my cunt.

Basically what they'll do is after they approve you for an advanced account after writing a few reviews and they see that you're there for serious business and not just to write "it feels good in my pussy!" they'll let you pick any toy under $30, which in this world will not get you much. Very basic things, we're talking. They say it takes a few weeks for the products to get to you (and they make it very clear that they cannot speed up the process and they are very sorry) and then once you review that one they'll let you "go shopping" for a toy up to the $150 range.

Now the toys in the $150 range? Serious business. Probably the most serious of business there is.

It says after you've reviewed that toy that you can review any toy on the site, and the most expensive thing I've seen so far is a metal cockandballs for like $200 but I'm sure there are way more expensive things. There are like wooden ones and glass ones, for the love of god.

Oh you want to see now don't you? Well get a load of this shit!

Crazy wooden thing
Bumpy glass one
LOL!
$263.99

Yeah, for real.

I don't know, free stuff is free stuff. A publishing house used to send me free books to review on my blog, but I didn't like the last one they sent so I haven't heard from them in a year. Hey, if my writing talents can get me a free robopeen that most people would never buy because who seriously spends that much on sex toys? Why NOT go for it? Hey, maybe you should too, they'll even let you post the reviews to your blog, which I will not be doing for the reasons stated above. All you need to know is that I am somewhere on that site giving reviews under a clever nick name.

Well, I'm off to go buy a new belt. I Hulked-out yesterday and ripped the one I had in half. I only had it for like two weeks. WTF?

Prisoner

OH FUCK! You have to click right here RIGHT NOW! HURRY! (Not a Rickroll)

In other news, I missed the crap out of David all day yesterday. He was gone for 12 hours. I still missed the crap out of him. How the hell am I going to get through six months?

I didn't end up grilling anything, but I did pan fry some organic chicken breasts from Fresh and Easy in olive oil and lemon juice. It was kind of nice to eat at 6:30 at night instead of the usual midnight pizza or possibly 11:00 home cooked meal. I think we're both kind of burnt out on his current working situation and have been for a while, plus to add the anxiety of waiting for him to move to the next step then the next step with CHP is just making us roll our eyes more when he doesn't get out of the cans till 15 after and he doesn't even have time to nuke a Budget Gourmet.

Eating dinner as a family every night of the week? Now that's something.

Instead of coming home and then rushing to get ready for another couple hours of work, he was home at 6:00 for good and we ate chicken. He was gone before the sun was up but 12 hours later he was home for the night. We marveled when we looked at the clock and said "Whoa, it's only 8:30?" I think we went to bed at 10.

I could get used to this. Granted he will probably be forced into graveyard shifts for quite some time, the 6AM-6PM shift is fucking fantastic.

Right now it's sort of like being prisoner to his current schedule. I only have certain hours where the car is available, and I have to be back at certain times for pickup and dropoff so that everyone is where they should be at whatever time. Of course by the time he's a cop we'll have another car so it won't be that much of an issue, but still. I liked having him home at 6:00 to stay. It put me in the mood to cook chicken with lemon.

We've planned a few tactical moves for the future. If he gets sent to LA for his first year then we will stay right where we are and he will commute in a little putt-putt car. Obviously if he gets put up north for his first year then you'll get to read of my neurotic adventures of living in a place that I shouldn't be that's way too far away from home and does not contain a Stater Bros. After his first year when he can transfer, he's going to try to transfer to Banning because he knows this area really well and...well, it's home. After two years he's going to apply for K-9 and go up to Sacramento for a few weeks to get his dog and learn German because they're real German Shepards from Germany and they only speak German. As much as I hate them, we'll probably buy a McMansion on a golf course, like the one on the PGA course on the other side of the freeway and live in that till the children are no longer children but still not old enough to really deal with their shit without our help. Then we will buy a cabin near Arrowhead and he will work at the Arrowhead station, where he will retire at 52 (ja really, for serious 52) while the kids hold down the fort back down at the golf course while they go to college as long as they're not making sex videos, with intermittent surprise visits from our police dog who will sniff out their drugs. I'll continue to write my under appreciated novels for my small but loyal following of fans, and David will learn to play the pan flute and possibly whittle little knick knacks to sell at the little shop up the road.

And I'll owe it all to Radio Shack.

Grilling With Lime And Nightmares

This weather is weird...or...not really for Southern California, you know, when the grass is already green and the temps are in the 70's possibly 80's two weeks into January. It's windy, but nice still, and it makes me want to grill something with limes. Except that I don't have limes, I have a bag of lemons that I stole from my sister's tree, so I'll have to grill something with lemon. Except that we aren't allowed to have grills here and I don't like using the community grill because I see kids put Power Rangers and shit in there all day. I have an indoor grill thing that I suppose I can use, but I think my chicken may be frozen.

I have salmon, but it's frozen too.

All the fucking cops are gone. David's on a ride along and wont be back until tonight and Steppy is currently protecting and serving and wont be coming over as often as it is. I finally gathered the balls to message Victor's step mom to tell her that I made her a scarf though. It's been kind of hard for me to decide when to contact them because I'm not good at this grieving thing, and I don't know if they eventually decided that involving me was a bad idea, I mean I'm pretty sure they didn't but I did slink out of the reception pretty much right after the widow spoke to me and perhaps that offended them. I don't fucking know. But I think I need to talk to someone.

I had a pretty weird...nightmare...I'll call it this morning while David was stumbling around in the dark to get ready for his ride along. This is pretty gnarly so don't read it if you're easily grossed out.

I was at the funeral, and there were a lot of young people there, young people like my age. Same funeral home and all, but I didn't see any of the family there or anything, it just seemed to be a bunch of young people I didn't know. Because not a whole lot of people showed up they had us all scoot in and sit together, and they pulled the casket closer and everything. And oh yeah, the body was under water. Like they filled the casket with water for whatever reason. Anyway, they were making us read the eulogies instead of having someone speak them, and for once in my life I could actually read in a dream, I always seem to forget how to read in my dreams. And then there was a terrible yet familiar smell, somewhat sweet but at the same time stingingly pungent, and the body was bloating rapidly and going all eew, you know. Several of us tried to leave, and when I tried looking back to see what the hell was going on, there was a guy blocking my view, which was probably a good thing. Just as I was leaving out the door David woke me up to say goodbye.

Ja, so...

Nooooooot really something that I expected to dream after I had finally stopped "grieving" or whatever I was doing where I've been thinking about Victor every day and chickening out every time I got close to sending a message to his step mom. Is that grieving or is that just obsessing? Okay, well whatever it is, I didn't like it and I was glad when it finally stopped. It stopped, by the way, when Steppy came back.

Now let me tell you how I recognize that particular smell. This is also going to be pretty gross and even worse is that it's a true story, but nonetheless it's a story that I haven't even told David so if you can stomach your way through this you're in for a treat...if you could call it that.

So you might remember that I used to go graving. Graving is where you visit cemeteries and photograph headstones and graves, then post them to FindAGrave.com for genealogy purposes. This is my graving set on Flickr. Something happened that made me stop going graving, and I'll tell you what that was. I was on an assignment for a requested photo of a grave out in San Bernardino. I went alone, and I wont say which cemetery it was due to fear. This gets gnarly, just to remind you.

I'm walking around with my camera snapping pictures and such, and I look over toward the mausoleum and I see like a Hazmat crew or something, and there's all this caution tape. Hmm. Perhaps I should go investigate.

Biggest mistake of my life.

As I get closer, I see chunks of marble on the ground and this greenish moss crap. I didn't get too close, but I was trying to peer into the building from my distance. Shouldn't have done that. There's a hole in the wall that's all blasted out and there's green mossy crap everywhere, and the Hazmat dudes are not pleased at all. Then of course I sniffed the air which I had been kind of noticing was not smelling so good that day, and I realized what it was. Oooooh shiznit. Yeah. And then the Hazmat guys turned around and looked at me. Me, with my camera hanging from my neck. I see them say something into something black, and then some guys from the office come out and start heading my direction. I swear I didn't take any pictures, and they probably thought I did, which is why they sent out the goons. I wasn't about to get my camera smashed so I jazz-ran (10 points if you know what jazz-running is) to my car and got the hell out of Dodge.

I was followed by a sedan that was marked with the cemetery's name on the doors till Redlands.

So I don't go tromping through cemeteries anymore without a reason.

Right, so there might be something wrong with my brain now. Any thoughts? Perhaps I'll go defrost some chicken now and count my blessings.

Donuts And Chimay

We drove



to Mana Donuts



to buy Sunday donuts



so we could bring them when we visited my sister who has Google socks.



But she went golfing so we went to visit Presley



and then go to the bird farm to pick up my friend



Chimay.



And that was what I did today.

Also, scandal.



Bye.

Carpe Noctem

Now it's not everyday that I call a 10 year old kid a little fucker, but this little fucker deserves it.

Some boys the other day were having a Nerf gun battle outside so Ty ran up to get one of his guns. They were all very impressed with this gun, as it's a pretty cool gun. It's a $40 jobby, it converts three different ways, it is a really cool gun. Well in all the mix of calling the boys home for dinner, telling Wade to go back several times for his jacket and all that, I never noticed that the gun never came back inside. Neither did Ty.

That is until the next day when he saw a group of kids with his gun.

Ty is five. These kids are 10+, so of course when he asked for the gun back they told him that it wasn't his, to go away, etc. Ty tried to solve the crime by himself to no avail, so he came to an adult. That would be me.

He tells me "Those big kids stole the gun that Santa brought me and they wont give it back." Nearest we can figure is that he left it on the ground and went to play on the playground and they snatched it while he wasn't paying attention.

Regardless, that aint cool. No sir. So Mommy went to go take care of business.

The kids and I walked around the complex hunting for these little fuckers, who made it quite clear that they had no intention of giving the gun back. Finally we spotted them by the black top.

"HEY YOU," I yell, "IN THE BLACK HOODIE, STOP RIGHT WHERE YOU ARE." The kids all look at me, and realize who the kid is that I have with me, their expressions changed when they realized that they had been caught. "DOES THAT BELONG TO YOU?" I yell, and the kid holding the gun tries to pass it off to a friend, who pushes it back. Realizing that he had no other options, he dropped the gun and ran. A third boy picks it up and nervously walks it over to me.

"What is the matter with you?" I yell not as loud as he approaches. "You stole this from a five year old."

"I didn't! I didn't! My friend did!"

"You were right there when my son asked for his gun back and your so called friend denied that it was his."

"I--"

"You're a thief. You stole his Christmas present. He's in kindergarten, does that make you feel good?"

"Okay Jeez," he says and starts to pad away. I follow him. Not to talk to the parents, because I know the parents around here don't give a fucking shit, plus they obviously didn't notice their kid coming home with a huge elaborate gun that didn't belong to him, so I doubt it would have done anything. I followed him to where his friends were hiding behind the building, and they froze when they saw me.

"Why didn't you give him his gun back when he asked for it?"

They just stood there, they couldn't even make excuses. I think this is the first time anyone has ever tried to parent these little fuckers because they were completely terrified of me, and I wasn't even swearing at them or anything. At this point I wasn't even yelling, I was using a stern voice but I was not yelling.

"You should all be ashamed of yourselves. Stay the hell away from my kids you little thieves."

"Okay!" they all said in whiny about-to-cry voices.

This isn't about choosing your battles or not interfering when kids have issues because they need to learn to resolve them on their own. Ty tried to solve the problem as best as he could, but he was up against three kids who were twice his age. The gun never would have come back if I hadn't gone after those kids because it's pretty clear that they had absolutely no intentions of giving it back. And hey, as I try not to be too much of a helicopter mom, I don't mind scaring the shit out of some punk ass 10 year olds.

That's me during the day. In the day time I'm all peanut butter sandwiches and pulling apart stuck legos and rides to school, crayons, 10 year old pwning, all singing all dancing scrubbing cooking homework checking Mommy, but at night is when I am truly me. My kids have a 6:00 bed time because I am not at all like some of these mommybloggers who can spend every waking moment of every single day playing mommy, I just cant. I'm there when they need me to be, and they go to bed when I need to be me. It's simple, if Mommy doesn't get her me time, she goes crazy, and nobody wants a crazy Mommy, right kids?

I mean I'm still an endless slave, because no matter what I'm doing if one of them wakes up with a fever or a wet bed or a bad dream, what have you, I have to drop what I'm doing and deal with it. But I'm still an adult and I like to do somewhat adult things after hours when the kids are in bed.

• I have friends over
• I go to the neighbor's house
• I write
• I listen to my music with questionable lyrics
• I sing along
• I take long hot showers
• I make phone calls and use a lot of swears
• I cook steaks and other adult oriented food
• I watch anime porns (for lulz, seriously that shit is pretty funny sometimes)
• I hook up the baby monitor and head to the spa
• I sometimes take people with me to the spa
• I watch people get drunk/naked on my couch

I don't think it's inappropriate to do these things. My apartment comes to life at night with the kind of things that I want to do. I'm chained to these quarters because I'm certainly not careless enough to be one of those parents who leaves their sleeping kids in the house to go gamble or something, which is actually quite common in this area. And when I do leave, it's really more like going outside because it's not like I leave in my car to go somewhere. I lock my door behind me and take one end of the baby monitor and walk either down to the laundry room, spa, or mailbox. All within a 50 yard radius.

I've said before that I have a pretty hard time getting along with the other moms at Ty's school because I just don't fall into their stroller club clique. They talk about c-section scars and medicating their kids for autism just because the kid is particular about socks, they subscribe to Parenting Magazine and most likely they go to church. None of those things apply to me so I cant really join in the conversation. All of the friends that I've picked up are either kidless or on the same page as me with the practice of when they go to bed it's time to turn to the person to your left and prop your legs up on them.

There's still laundry to catch up on and I occasionally go to the kitchen to run another load of dishes through, but there are friendships to be mended as well. And scarves to be knit (this one's for you Liz in Seattle.) I plunk a couple of needles in my best buddy's hands and I say "let's try purling." The pizza guy shows up with a large half pepperoni black olive half sausage and he doesn't even knock because he lives here. They nod to one another and say something manly like "hey how's it goin' bro?"

If I ever plot some kind of revolution or massive plan to dominate the world/city, it would most likely be masterminded over a series of several night times.

After dealing with spilled pomegranate juice and thieving 10 year olds all day, it's different here during the night time and I rather like it that way.

Pots And Teakettles And Scandals

Want to know what it's like to live in California with all these gal dern earthquakes? Okay, I'll tell you, as lifelong resident of San Bernardino and Riverside Counties, which are nestled right fucking on top of the San Andreas fault line in the San Gorgonio Pass. FYI, "the big one" is going to come from this very fault line. Did I mention that the nearly as angry San Jacinto fault line is just right over there thataways? This area is basically a deathtrap, and a wee little bird once told me that after they plugged up Lake Inland by parking a mall on top of it, San Bernardino's water table is too high and when "the big one" strikes it may literally sink.

Well thank god I live in Riverside. I may have dodged a bullet here.

So this is basically how it goes. I stand up to go put my sweater on to go switch the laundry over, and I hear the pot on my stove start to rattle. I stop. Is it my heavy footfall?

Pot continues to rattle and the teakettle slides around a bit on the electric coil thing. I hear popping and cracking sounds on my roof and there is a bit of a jolting wave beneath my feet, making the building feel like it is bouncing up and down. I stand very very still for a few seconds longer, watching the things on my stove kind of dance in place, thankful that they aren't dancing around because that would indicate a pretty violent earthquake. And then it stops. It's over. The cracks and snaps and tinks fall silent, and I open my front door to leave.

The neighbor throws open her door and stares at me coldly. "I did not sign up for this!" she yells at me.

"Ja well you moved to California, YOU SIGNED UP FOR THIS."

"Fucking this shit," she tells me. "Send David over to help me fix the mirrors on the ceiling. I'm afraid if they come loose. I would be cut all up."

I text Liz in Seattle with the word "Earthquake!" because she always texts me with "SNOW!" It's like, no duh Liz, snow in Seattle? Well, earthquake in California...really no different. After switching the laundry over I check my favorite earthquake map site and see that we just experienced ourselves a 5.0 4.5

I go fill out the "did you feel it" report. It asks my zipcode, then goes on with a series of questions.

Did you feel it? Yes.

What was your physical situation? Inside a building

What type of building? Apartment

Were you asleep? No.

Did everyone feel it? Yes (because the neighbor was pissed, so that counts.)

Shaking strength: Mild

Shaking length: 15 seconds

Your reaction: Very little reaction (I wavered between this and excitement)

Your response: None. (as opposed to heading for a doorway)

Stand or walk? Yes

Free hanging objects? Slight swinging

Sounds: Yes, slight noise

Hanging pictures: Rattled but did not fall

Was there any damage to the building? No.

It then asked me to leave my name and phone number. They never call me, but just in case I'd like to help my geologist brothers and sisters in any way that I can. I used to like geology in school. It was my second favorite weird subject besides circuitry. Both left brained nerdy subjects that I understood very well, and when you just suddenly understand something that would usually be hard to understand it's hard not to remember how much you once liked it.

Then I just go on with my evening like there never even was an earthquake. It's no biggie.

Of course when it IS a biggie I'll have a different story to tell.

Speaking of biggies, David thought that it would be clever if I take a series of pictures of my scandalous legs on various objects due to the big deal that was made over them being on Steppy. I took this for my 365 picture to commemorate the epic battle of right vs. wrong. I'm thinking maybe we could do an IRL blogger meet up and we can take pictures of me with my legs on people. Maybe we can even create a trendy blogger sidebar thingy with the pictures.

Think of it! You can have your picture in your sidebar with my legs intruding your lap, and we can put text on it like "Jessie put her scandalous legs all over my shit, WTF"

You know, David also (and he really did say this, I'm not misquoting him or anything) said that everyone is going batshit because y'all think I'm going to fuck this guy. He's not stuck on stupid, he knows what you all are thinking, he also knows that I'm just not going to.

How does he know? Because he understands what kind of feelings I have for Steppy and he knows that they aren't sexual or romantic or anything of that nature, and he also knows that I have never been a slut; slut being defined here as someone who will have random sex with someone they don't love or aren't involved with.

Let me tell you a little story. Back right after I graduated and I had just barely broken up with Victor and David and I had just barely started dating, my friend Kristie and I were spending the night at Sara's house, and for whatever reason Justin came along. Kristie and Justin had a thing, whatever it was, like they had dated for a while and slept together and all that, and Sara was just kind of willing to give hand/blowjobs to anyone who wanted one for whatever reason. So somewhere around 3 AM Kristie pulls down her pants and is like, "do you guys mind if I have Justin give me face?" and it's like, whatever. I don't know. If you're willing to get face in front of other people, more power to you. Anyway, I guess she ended up not being able to concentrate or something, because she just told him to stop, and asked Sara if she wanted to help suck him off. No joke! They went tandem on him, even experimenting with ice cubes and cinnamon Altoids. Now I was invited to join in as well, and I politely declined.

Why? Because I'm not the girl you think I am.

I just kind of sat there and made commentary, but I didn't join in. I had a boyfriend.

Now later on, I moved into my first apartment with Justin. He was a band boy, and as it turned out he was also fairly gay. He was a really good friend of mine for many years and neither of us were attracted to one another, and I had an extra bedroom in my apartment and he needed a place to stay so I started charging him rent and cooking him dinner. All the while, I was dating David.

Justin also, as I've mentioned before in blogs, was not fond of wearing clothes. He was naked...pretty much 90% of the time he was at home. His flaccid penor would be flopping as he worked under the sink to fix a leak, and he would leave sweaty ball prints on our leather bean bag chair that I would have to ask him to clean with Windex. The other 10% of the time by the way? He was wearing girls clothing. I swear to god. He stole my panties.

Pics or it didn't happen, you say?

Right there, that's Justin licking his nipple and wearing my panties in the hallway. There's a lot more where this came from, but I cant post them to my blog because they're a little obscene. Email me for more.

Anyway, the point of it all is that one day I asked David what he thought about my naked room mate, because David never once questioned if there was something going on between us. And in all of his teenager wisdom he shrugged and said "Dude doesn't like to wear clothes. I cant say that I blame him."

By the way, I never ever even felt a slight bit of attraction for the naked man, never in my life.

And if you want to really stick this to a "how would I feel if David" thing, and I'm only circling back to this because I want to brag to you all about how I am the most awesome wife in the universe, the neighbor is often sending me naked pictures through email. She takes slutty pictures like weekly and she's always wearing like fur bikinis and boots and shit and asking me "this makes me look fat yes?"

I hear the little chime of the Gmail, I check and it's a message from her is how it usually goes. I see that there are picture attachments and some kind of message that feigns insecurity, and I say "David, the neighbor woman sent more naked pictures." And he plops down and looks at them as I open them.

"Nice," he says.

Remember this is my neighbor, who lives on the other side of our kitchen wall. Our neighbor Mustang Sally who is Romanian Sex On A Stick as he calls her. The woman who tells me a few weeks ago, "I don't know what to do! I was at work putting things into a closet and my boss, he shove me into wall and starting to make out with me! He grab my ass and spank it, and he continue through the day to make me go to where there are no cameras so he can do it again and again." I tell her, "Sally, that's sexual harassment and you don't have to take it! Tell someone," and she replied, "But...is kind of hot, don't you think?"

And so she didn't tell on him, because she liked it. Sally, the only woman who would probably try to send flowers to a rapist. Sally who lives next door and asks David's opinion on her outfits.

I guess my conclusion to all of this is that things like this are a non-issue for us, and I think if it had been I wouldn't have mentioned it in my blog so casual like. This is how our marriage is, and it works. Key word being works. Come see for yourself some time, I have plenty of tea.

Answer, Question, Answer

Let's all take in a collective sigh...okay, now exhale slowly. There you go.

Answer:

David wont be leaving till June 1st. The shrink is backed up and there was no way that they could get him an appointment in time for him to leave in February, so we can all relax. Or I can at least. He has a final interview at the end of this month, then who knows when he'll see the doc and the shrink, but the point is that we have more time now. More time is good. This gives us a chance to for sure for sure get our tax return and pad our savings enough so that I can survive without income for a month. Plus now I know I wont be kicked out of my cheap apartment because they reevaluate us in May and they'll go by his current income. This had me worried because I thought that maybe his new income might push us over. And no, we are not scamming the system. His academy pay is only something like $1800 more than what he makes now, but just in case, you know. I just don't want to have to worry about moving while he's gone.

And no, I wont be going with him up there because what if on the off chance he breaks his clavicle or something and has to leave academy? Then we'd be stuck trying to find jobs, where as if something happens and I'm still in Beaumont, he can just slip back into place and sulk. It's not great, but it's practical, and it has to be thought about.

The important part is that he is one step closer, he's still in it to win it, and I can stop feeling bad if I happen to spend a few hours somewhere else instead of with him, because now we have another few months of quality time to spend together.

And thankfully, he's leaving in June. That means he wont have to sit through another hot summer in that damn metal box.

Question:

Did Santa write your kids letters too? Because we got letters from Santa yesterday, I'm talking hand addressed with a calligraphy pen and all that is post marked from North Pole, Alaska. It's also post marked the 29th so it got out a little late, but I demand an explanation. We wrote Santa letters this year but we didn't mail them. These letters are addressed to the kids, and the letter head says "from the desk of Saint Nicholas." The letter is typed in a handwriting font but it says "Wade you've been such a good boy this year and my elves told me what you want, so keep being a good boy and I will see what I can do! Mrs. Claus is also very proud of you." It closes by saying that he has to go polish the sleigh so that it's sparkly when he flies out on Christmas Eve.

Again, we didn't do anything to provoke this, so I want to know how in the hell Ty and Wade got letters from Santa.

Did one of you do this?

Does Santa really exist?

If not, then how did whoever send this get my dox?

Answer:

This one starts with a question, and even though I already answered it in my comments section I do want to elaborate on it further. I love it when you guys ask questions, because then I get to answer them. Please ask more of these, it helps me to know that you are paying attention. So the question was from Anonymous, no big surprise, and it was: "Would you want David going to another woman's house and her putting her legs on him?"

I'll show you my response, but I have more to add.

Well Anon, I cant say that I'd get butt hurt about it, considering I'm not the jealous type, and if they're not fucking then what's the harm?

If we were to reverse this exact situation, and a good female friend of David's, say maybe up at academy or something, did something like rested her legs on them while they were watching TV on the couch, it doesn't really strike me as something to be upset over, in fact, getting upset over that would seem rather stupid, don't you think?

Was he rubbing her legs or sticking his hands up between them to touch her goods? Did they end up fucking 20 minutes later? Well yeah, then it's something to talk about, but that's not what happened in my case, and I know David well enough that it wouldn't happen in his.
Get a grip, know what I mean? It's just legs, it's not like I was sitting on his lap and grinding him.

Right, and what I have to add to this is that it is not in my nature to be upset over something so stupid. David has told me worse. Much worse.

Did I make him quit his job at the cans when he said there was a girl in a short skirt and no underwear bending over to do her cans and he was able to catch a glimpse in the reflection of her twat on the fender of her truck?

Did I make him quit his job at the pizza place when that drunk old cougar made out with him on the front porch? Furthermore, do you think I got all bent out of shape and accusatory or did I laugh with him? I laughed, of course, because it's funny!

How about when the girl invited him into the house and she was wearing a silk robe and there was booze and candles everywhere, and when she came back into the room with her money she had removed the robe and was wearing something that Mustang Sally probably has in her closet, and she tipped him like $25 or something and said "see you later tonight," did I fly into a jealous rage then? No. I laughed. And I think I wrote a blog about it.

So then the question was reiterated by another Anon, but brought up the fact that I know how Steppy feels about me, so it was inappropriate. Well, let's call it what it is, it was a cock tease. Was it though? Well it certainly wasn't my intention. I certainly wasn't like "If I just slip these right here, a heh heh heh, he'll go batshit insane and I will have caused erection! MY PLAN IS COMPLETE!" when I did it. I just stretched my legs out and rested them across his lap was all, and if he saw it as a cock tease then it just is what it is.

But again this goes back to how do I feel about this scenario happening with David.

Let's just say this. We were going to go to a strip club for his birthday, but he opted not to go because he called it a waste of money. In David's words, "I'm going to give some girl $20 to sit on my lap and bounce around, and I don't get any sex or anything out of it? That's just a waste of money."

It's true, I mean, when you think about it. A place like Club 215 which is the bar that "Whispers" is based off of in Bombshell is just more of a hangout than anything. It's like "Hey I've got a beer. Oh look that girl has her clothes off. Mmm hotwings. Hey let's go sit on the balcony for a while." If a really hot chick is like "Gimme $20 and I'll wiggle my but on you without actually touching you because we aren't allowed to grind at this club," I mean, it's kind of up to David if he wants to spend that $20 or not.

We're talking about sitting together on the couch, me in my flannel jammy pants with my legs stretched out across his lower thighs. We aren't talking about a backrub and a blow. We aren't even talking about anything sexually suggestive. It's not like I'm all "smell my pagyma Officer Steppy."

Regardless, discuss in the comments below how you feel about this.

Rebuild

It was sort of poetic really. I had just finished up with the final re-read of Bombshell via electronic format before uploading it to the publisher's website to retrieve my ISBN (978-0-557-03983-8) and order a proof copy, which you have to do to make sure the formatting and spacing is all correct and also because mistakes and errors tend to pop out at you when they're in print as opposed to blinking on your computer screen.

My door opens.

Ja.

Nothing was said. He just came and sat by me. He watched me continue doing what I was doing and didn't say a damn single word. I texted David and said to bring a pizza because we have company. He wouldn't be home for hours, but that would maybe give Steppy and I time to talk...or just sit there in silence. Which is what we did for a good long time. That is until I finally broke the ice.

"Fancy seeing you here."

It was like he was waiting till I spoke to vomit out his words, because I barely finished my sentence before he blurted out "I'd rather have you as a friend than not have you at all."

Okay then. Let's start there.

I said that to fix this he has to understand that I am not his surrogate wife and that when David leaves he will not be my surrogate husband. He is a friend, a best friend. Not a lover. Maybe like a 12 year old boyfriend who wont really look you in the eye but will play Nintendo64 with you and drink Diet Pepsi, then go home and fap/cry.

It's hard to stay mad at him when I've missed him so much. Until David got home there was nothing really to do, so I stretched my legs across his lap and we watched YouTube. That was my olive branch. I offer you a subtle and miniscule bit of affection by resting my legs on you. Steppy is one of the rare people who somehow eventually made it into my personal space without me ducking away or yelling at him. It took time. Months. Fingers were bitten, and for that I am not sorry. But somehow, someway, he grew on me and I let him in. I liked letting him in, I forgot how good it feels for people to just hug you or rub your back every now and then without it being an obligation or it ending up totally awkward and unwanted. It's someone being nice to you.

Steppy reacted by putting his arm around me and giving me a half-hug, just kind of pulling me closer, and I swear to mother fucking Joseph Smith, he said "I'm never gonna give you up."

My eyes widened. You have to remember that Steppy isn't on the internets much. So I said, "Never gonna let you down, never gonna run around and desert you. Never gonna make you cry, never gonna SAY GOODBYE never gonna tell a lie, and HURT YOU!"

He goes, "hey, like the song you have on your phone." Yes I have the Rickroll as my text message alert. No, he has no idea what a Rickroll is.

Also, don't let the arm and leg hair fool you. Now Pico, Pico is hairy everywhere. Steppy's fairly clean or he like gets that shit waxed. I've seen him in the spa, he's not an ape like Pico, who has hair growing all over his ass and back like a monkey.

And then came the Good Long Talk, which was ever so much like the Barenaked Ladies song that I posted, oddly enough. I think its getting to the point where I can be myself again. I think its getting to the point where we have almost made amends. I think its the getting to the point that is the hardest part. Steppy thinks I'm only here to witness the remains of love exhumed. Steppy thinks were here to play a game of who loves more than whom.

But I'm warning you, don't ever do those crazy, messed up things that you do. If you ever do, I promise you I'll be the first to crucify you. Now its time to prove that you've come back here to rebuild.

And so, the rules as discussed are as follows:

1. No surrogates. Friends only.
2. No creepy Mormon "sisterwife" invites.
3. Kissing: Not in the face. Or the boobs. Or the yeah. Butt and/or shoulder is fine.
4. It can be cuddle time now plz? yes. kthxbai.
5. No more tarps. Plans must be made in advance with both parties aware of what the hell is going on.
6. No more throwing money around to make up for not being able to stick your cock into things.
7. No putting your peen up through a hole in the bottom of the tub of popcorn and being all "stick your hand in here, my pet."
8. Don't expect that I am going to cover myself with leaves in hopes that you will fall in.

I don't think we've completely worked it all out, as there's all this business about him in his loveless marriage and them thinking that's okay, and how I don't necessarily care because it's none of my business but then again it is some of my business but we'll get into that later.

The kiss was as I called it. Less of an impulsive "I cant control myself around you" move and more like "I am proving my point." And he's sorry. I'm not the only one he said sorry to. Punches were not thrown.

Furthermore, he sort of explained about the funeral. It was around the same time that Victor died that Step began to contemplate ending our friendship. Then when it turned out to be a thing, and I was invited to go and all of this stuff, it ruined his plan. He said it was really hard on him and he didn't want to "break up with me" at a funeral, and if he had gone it would have made things even harder, because obviously he was determined to do this because he did end up doing it, only much later than planned because I guess he's been reading my blog since that time and he read about what happened at the funeral, and it made him feel like an ass, and he figured that I hated him for not going, which I don't. But it's still bullshit. Like I said, we haven't worked out all the kinks.

You can love a person without ever having to touch their popcorn covered peen or forgive them for making you look like an ass for knitting a scarf precisely 25 feet from a dead body out of sheer nervousness from being stared at.

I'm all in for fixing this. But I only have so much patience, hope, and forgiveness. Hopefully things will work out. If not, I will buy a bird and teach it to say my name so that I will have a friend till the end.

But it would be nice to have a friend who wouldn't just love me because I provide it with food...

A Good Long Talk

Over pizza and decaffeinated soda. Will order be restored?

Call And Answer - Barenaked Ladies

On Kissin'

"Girls have softer lips," I tell David as we're sitting at a railroad crossing waiting for a train to pass. "And it's slimier. You should kiss a dude some time and see for yourself. It's way different."

"Your lips are cold whenever I kiss you," he tells me.

"Is that hot? Is it like making out with a dead chick?"

"What? Stop being emo."

"I'm not being emo. And you always taste like pizza."

We didn't say anything after that, not on that subject anyway.

I got my manuscript back and as I haven't done a full read through I have gone and skipped to all of the edits and worked with some of the notes that were given. I changed about 95% of what I was told to, and the things that I didn't were not changed because they were either a part of my original vision or they meant something to me. One of my editors had a problem with Mr. Doolittle's name, and indicated this by pointing to the word Doolittle and writing really? Ja really.

My fiction is just real life put into prose to some degree, so Doolittle wasn't just a name I pulled out of my ass. Back when I worked at the little produce market, my last "real job" ever, there was this little old man who came in every few weeks. His name was Doolittle but he looked like Mr. Magoo. I know his name because he paid with a card once.

"Doolittle?" I asked, probably in the same tone as whoever wrote really? had.

He laughed and showed me his drivers license and everything else in his wallet that had his name on it. He was incredibly proud of his name and tickled that I noticed. He told me, "A long long time ago it used to be spelled Dulittle, but somebody sneaky," he said while wagging his finger, "changed it up on us."

He would always forget his groceries after paying, and I would have to call him back. "Oh," he'd say, "my wife used to always get the bags while I paid. I guess it's still hard to remember that I'm doing things without her now." How he ended up as a named character in my strip club was simply because I remembered him, plus the girl that I based Silver off of worked at the produce market with me, and one day after Doolittle left she said "I'd pity fuck him." I lol'd.

One of the notes had to do with a kissing scene, where Marina and Graham are making out behind a building, and she's up against a wall so she wraps her legs around him. The note was like "that's too much, more like hooked a leg around his thigh." But I remember back in high school when I was like 140 pounds, at least 15 of that being boob, I totally jumped up on boys like that. This Marina, she's like 90 pounds and barely five feet. If I were that small, I'd be jumping up and humping people's heads at random. I changed it to her leg hooking around his thigh though. Mostly because I'm not Marina, and Marina's not me.

Do you remember your first kiss? Mine was, as I recall, minty. We were in seventh grade and we had both been sucking on candy canes, and someone sitting in front of us on the bus was like "if you two are really boyfriend and girlfriend then kiss." So we did. And it was minty. That's all I really remember about it. I think my first tongue kiss was with my first boyfriend Steve, who had a tongue like Gene Simmons, which as I could see being useful for some things, it was really weird with kissing. Especially since he didn't respect his boundaries. You don't go stomping around in the neighbors yard, you just kind of lean over the fence, you know? Creepy.

The first time Victor kissed me I remember that he tasted like dog food or possibly refried beans. David didn't taste like anything, but it was--and I've always wanted to use this word--electrifying. Steppy kisses like a girl, and the only reason why I know how girls kiss is because I kissed a few band girls for the lulz. In fact...??...yep, yep, there are pictures.

Why did I do this? Just to do it. Why are there pictures? I think the intention was to send them to the band boys to make them cry because we were trying to fool them into thinking that we had all gone gay for each other since they had taken their sweet time asking us out. It was all a clever ruse, some of the girls like Stephanie and Bee took it way way way too far, but in the end I know that girl kisses are slimy.

I tried to make the kissing scenes in the book good without it being sappy. I tried to make the sex scenes believable, and in that I screwed up the first one fixed with halp. It's a lovestory but the lovestory isn't the main theme, and the funny thing is that this book was never meant to be a lovestory.

Sometimes that happens though. What was supposed to be a girl trying to reach her goals ended up being a little more, but it ended up making the story better. At the end of the day the book could not exist without everything that created it. The little old man at the produce store, my best friend from childhood, and all of the thoughts and people and things that I have collected along the way. I just call it research.

Chairman Mao Tried To Eat Me

Luckily Peggy was nice enough to meet me for coffee this evening. We met at the Yucaipa Starbucks though because I'm avoiding the one by me like the plague. Cops are in and out of that place like every 12 minutes, and I can just see the slow motion scene of Steppy coming in with some kind of cheesy music like Wind Beneath My Wings coming on. I've had enough drama, and I hear that the Yucaipa Starbucks lacks the cop drop-ins so it was a better place to meet.

Well actually there was one cop, he was Sheriff's deputy. He was handsome, I guess, but I think I'd rather he be my dad than my boyfriend. The boyfriend cops are all over in Beaumont, so as it turns out Yucaipa is safer.

Peggy is on the anti-Steppy brigade, as opposed to the sympathetic-to-Steppy-club and the I'll-fuck-him-for-you-if-
you-want-dance-troop. I'm still on the sympathy brigade, I know it's stupid but I happen to like the guy. But that doesn't go without ass kickings in the future, mind you.

As usual when we meet we stay till closing time, talking about nothing at all really. She talked a little about New York and like usual most of what was discussed was my shit, which makes me feel weird because I feel like maybe I might be one of those annoying blogger fucks with the me me me my my my, but then she's into really nerdy intelligent stuff that goes way way over my head because it's all sciencie and crap. We've tried talking about her stuff before and I just end up confused. My blog is a safe ground, I guess.

Anyway, on the way home I stopped by the store because we're pretty much out of snacks and lunch stuff. Going to the store late at night is always weird. There's nobody there except for people in their pajama bottoms buying six packs and dumb fucks like me strolling in there like "I just need a few things, la la la." The security guard followed me around the store, he must have been cold. He stayed at the front of the store, but he was on the end of every aisle I was on. Weird fuck. Why do I keep calling people fucks? Anyway, David requested Sloppy Joe's but there weren't any hamburger buns because it's 10:00 at night and I don't know what that has to do with anything. I ended up buying hot dog buns, which therefore gives me the right to not call them Sloppy Joe's but Sloppy Peter's instead, just for the hell of it.

Anyway, I get outside, and the parking lot is mostly empty. I'm under a street light and I'm cautious as I put my stuff in my trunk, not that Beaumont is all that dangerous but still, goons are goons, amiright? I finish up, and I turn around with the cart to go put it in the cart thingy, and Chairman Mao is right there, I swear to god, maybe six inches from me, and I have no idea how long he had been standing there. Chairman Mao is one of the Stater Bros. characters who I haven't mentioned in a very long time, along with Word Salad, Staring Girl (fired for staring,) and Mr. Sexy Kielbasa Nova. He's about 3 1/2 feet tall, old, and Asian. I feel sorry for the little fellow but I think he might be a vampire. He was IN MY ARMPIT people, I swear to god. It scared the ever living shit out of me. Just how long had he been standing there?

Anyway, that's my story for the evening, sorry this wasn't incredibly exciting but it's late and I'm correcting my manuscript and also I am waiting for Sloppy Peter's.

KIloveyoubuhbye.

Sadly There Is Hope

An area code 951 flashes on the screen and I answer it because I figure it might be someone I know.

"Jess? It's OMG."

OMG.

"Hey, what did you do to Steppy? He's been all depressed since he went over to your house the other night, and I found your Starbucks card and the key we gave you on our front porch, what's going on?"

"You...you mean he didn't tell you or--"

"No, he hasn't told me anything, what happened?"

"Steppy no longer wants my friendship," I told her.

"Oh my god, yeah he does! Why would he tell you something like that?"

"Maybe...he though that our friendship was upsetting you?" I suggested, not fully knowing what she knows but realizing that whatever she does know is little to nothing.

"What? No, why would it upset me?"

"Cuz...you guys are...trying to reconcile?"

She laughed nervously and was all like "tee hee, reconcile? That's silly, ha ha ha," which tells me that he wasnt lying about their relationship problems, but she is, because she's trying to laugh it off to make it seem like there's no problem.

"OMG he told me everything." She got quiet. "In fact he came here to hang out at night after your kids went to bed to be away from you. He said he loves you and he doesn't want to lose you or the kids but, you know...like you guys were having problems and stuff, and he needed someone to talk to." I could tell that the girl was embarrassed. "He wants to work things out with you, and if I'm there he thinks that for some reason-" which I wasnt going to explain to her because I didn't feel like being screamed at through the phone "-he feels that I'm a distraction to all of that. He just needs to concentrate on you."

"So...you know then," she said, and she sounded serious for once instead of light and bouncy.

"I know what he's told me and I don't judge you or anything OMG. I think you're really nice and I think you two make awesome parents, but...if I can? Okay, Steppy...has not been Mormon for years. He's acted the role but he just isn't. But that doesn't mean that he's not a good person. You can be spiritual without being religious, and I know that's probably confusing because of what you were taught, but it's true just the same, and you shouldn't punish him for it. People are what they are."

She was quiet again for a while. She says, "I don't love him Jessie. But he's my husband and the father of my children..."

"Then stay in a loveless marriage, I don't know what to tell you."

"Well we talked about it, and we kind of agreed to just go through the motions. It's not like we hate each other, I mean with the kids we are great, as a family we are great, but I know that he doesn't love me."

"He does," I told her, "because if he didn't then he wouldn't have bothered to try...which brings us back to the fact that he no longer wants my friendship because he wants to concentrate on fixing things with you."

"Fix? It's already fixed. He's going to church again and we're both perfectly content with the way things are."

"I thought you guys were going to counseling?"

"We canceled. We don't want anyone in the church to think something's up, we just want to keep doing this how we are. Which means you two have to make up because God knows he doesn't have any other friends."

"What about his cop buddies?"

"Oh my god, they like to party too much, you're safer." Safer.

"I don't know that I am though OMG, Steppy's developed feelings for me, and last time he was over here he was...pretty cordial."

"Yeah but you're happily married, you wont do anything back, and that's what's so safe about it. Besides, you know he's affectionate."

"Ja, I know, totally, but look I do hope he calls me at some point so we can work things out because there's a lot left to talk about still. I'd like to be his friend, especially now since...well actually it kind of sucks that you're unhappy and all..."

"I'm not unhappy, I have my kids, and he's a good guy. That's all I can really hope for."

"Yeah but you guys aren't in love..."

"But I think we've reached the point where we're happy with that."

"You're friends."

"Yeah, exactly."

"You know what, I don't understand that, but whatever. I commend you for sticking it out, whether you're trying to do right by your church or whatever it is. Tell Steppy to call me, please. I want to talk to him."

I cant say that this doesn't shock me at all that they'd stay in a loveless relationship, because almost every married person I know is in one of these. I grew up around them. You're probably in one or you know someone who is in one. It's only obvious that the world is like that these days. The most critical advice I get on my blog is to change my title because it makes me sound like a Stepford wife or something. Someone even said "Be your own doll, sweetie." Well what's the fun in that? It's nice to be someone's doll, and apparently it's rare. Hell, I'm pretty sure that some marriages last as long as they do because there's no feelings to hurt or anything, it's just a room mate situation and little more.

What I don't understand is this. How hard is it to not fucking marry someone when you do not fucking love them? I'm not being small minded or shouting at you from any kind of high horse here, I mean that I am really asking, because if we're all adults, then why are we doing this to ourselves? What drives a person to stay somewhere when they're not wanted? Obviously in this situation it's kids, and maybe that's what it is in a lot of situations, but seriously, if you have nothing together to bond you, then why bother? It just seems stupid to me.

So there is hope for Steppy and I, in a sick sad sort of way. Should he call, and we work things out, how is this supposed to go? We spend the rest of our lives with boundaries and awkward tension?

David says it could be like when you have a boyfriend when you're 12. You just say "hey" and sit on the couch together and drink diet Pepsi and play Nintendo 64, and you try not to look each other in the eye. Then he goes home and faps/cries, and she calls up her girl friends and goes "oh my god he totally has like a totally cute butt" and they giggle and eventually change to conversation to their current flavor of lipgloss.

I said I wouldn't use my blog as a platform for communication but STEPPY! Call me! THIS COULD BE AWESOME! Nintendo64? Fapping? Lipgloss? This just spells WIN to me.

25 Scarves

So I've decided to commit myself to a project this year, and it's not because I am big on resolutions or anything like that, but I will be spending six months alone for the first time in 10 years, that is to say that I will be without a male companion and I need a way to keep my sanity. And no, I am not talking about buying a dildo. I like to have goals to reach toward so I'm not just swimming out in the middle of the ocean. For example, NaNoWriMo, which is writing 50,000 words of a novel in 30 days, or blogging every single day of my life, even if I just post a picture or a video. Setting the release date for Bombshell only nine months after Golden Dawn came out, knowing that as soon as my manuscript gets here I have to do a full rewrite of it, and I have about five weeks to do that in, plus approve the final printed copy, and do all of this alone because yeah, I wont have anyone here to help. David will most likely leave on the 1st.

I like working on my own, doing my own thing, because I like to set my own deadlines and not have someone breathing down my neck to get things done. I reach personal goals instead of working my ass off to make someone else happy. I lost the funding for Bombshell, but that will not stop me from putting it out there. Golden Dawn did not bomb, because I keep finding it on all of these "most overlooked books of 2008" lists and it is being bought in small numbers. It's out there. In fact, go request a copy at your local library.

My project isn't writing, even though I will be doing a hell of a lot of that as usual. I considered briefly the 100 Strangers Project, which is literally photographing 100 strangers, but you have to talk to them all and I am not very good at that, so instead I decided that this year I am going to knit 25 scarves, and I am going to give all of them away. This one up here is scarf number one, and she is called Sage. I am going to give it to Victor's step mom, partially because the color reminds me of her but also because I need an excuse to go talk to her...well I don't really need an excuse, I'm welcome at their house and all, but you know. The thing is that I don't know 25 people so most likely I will be giving them away on my blog. I'll make them, post them, and you guys will claim them and I will send them to you.

Next year will I make 26 scarves? Hell no. 26 is a stupid number. 25 is a quarter century. When I'm 50 it will be too much damn work, so 25 is a good number of scarves to make. It's a once in a life time project, and it might save my sanity.

Ladies and gentlemen I think I am depressed at this point and I am not entirely sure what that means. I'm not suicidal, thank you, it's just that the numbness finally wore off. This of course means that David's upcoming departure is hitting me, how much the kids stress me out and drive me nuts is hitting me, and being a mostly friendless loser is hitting me. Not that I'm all that social, but I am. I like it when there's someone to hang out with or someone calling me on the phone. I like when I eventually get used to someone enough that I want to be hugged or petted. And that is special because I don't like people to touch me, EVER.

It's a good thing that this is a small town...I think it's a good thing anyway. I realized that my schedule will change when David leaves because I will no longer be confined to home because he's using the car for work or I I have to stay home so we can hang out when he gets here. I still have to take Ty to school and take care of the kids in general, but I can go anywhere I want at any time that I want practically. Truth be told, I'm not really a homebody, I do like to go places it's just that I don't get that opportunity a lot and it has made me weird and bitter. But I just imagine how I can go to Wal Mart at 7:00 at night on a Wednesday and buy something random like shoes. I totally don't have to sit here and mope at home, I can go mope somewhere else. But then I imagine myself walking down the aisles at Stater's pushing a lonely shopping cart full of kid food and dinners for one, or avoiding the video store because I don't like to watch movies alone, or going on walks by myself, and it all seems very empty.

I will not go to therapy at any point even when I have the money to because that does not help me. It's hard for me to give backstory and reasons to someone when they're paid to analyze everything you say. I know because I've been there before, three times actually, and all they do is try to apply to you what they know of everyone else who has come in with a similar sob story. This here is my therapist, doing exactly this. If you want backstory it's there in the archives, and if you're analyzing every word I say, I probably don't know about it and I really don't care because I'm not paying you a dime.

I am probably going to mope here a lot and be the annoying jaded Olive Oil yelling "Save me Popeye, save me save me save me!" and you'll all tisk tisk at me but I am not flame retardant. The fact of the matter is that I am butt hurt and I am still waiting for my buddy to show up. You don't have to like that. I don't either. But then Liz in Seattle sent me this picture and I was heartbroken and laughing my ass off all at once. You don't have to, but I sure miss the fellah.

Check em out with their little bitty guns. They're all "STORM THE FRONT!" Peew peew peew

I'm just warning you that I might be whiny, but I'm not stupid. Don't you think there was more to me not going up to the tarp in the mountains than just me wanting to spend time with David? If he was going to hurt my feelings I wasn't going to let him have the glory of having done it right. That's also why I returned the Starbucks gift card along with his house key in an envelope on his porch. If he's not helping then he is NOT helping, that's just the way it is.

Not that I intend to write about this every god damned day, but who knows where this will lead, and if that annoys you then unsubscribe. I officially uninvite you from this little pity party. And if you're willing to stick it out and see how this whole thing turns out, then there may be a scarf in it for you. Or at the very least, something to make fun of with your nasty little back and fourth emails between each other.

That's right. Things get forwarded to me. Yeah, I said it.

On to scarf #2...

Unresolved

Alcohol is clearly not my thing. That champagne tasted horrible, and not just because it was cheap, but because it tasted like all other alcohol that I've tried. Vodka, rum, beer, wine, fancy liquors, it all just tastes like rubber and badness. I ended up dumping my champagne into a highball of orange juice only to let it sit for so long that it went warm while we lulzed around on Fail Blog. David finished the champagne but only because we paid for it and he felt that somebody here had to get our money's worth. I only had a little and I felt funny, not funny ha-ha, but sort of like the same way that I do when I wake up from a couch nap, and that feeling is not good. I feel like time has been wasted and my head and eyes feel all heavy and off kilter, and that's how I felt. David's eyes were all bloodshot and glassy, and he wanted to drink my warm mimosa when the bottle was finished, but I wouldn't let him. He's better than that.

Shortly after watching a little countdown widget with one eye while making out, we went to bed at 12:15. No sex? No. We did that the night before because we couldn't wait for that shit. Plus David was too drunk to fuck, not unlike the song by the same name.

And now we get to that other thing that happened.

There was a little more to it than just "I'm-a-gonna-kiss-ya," and it wasn't a lack of self control, or some kind of assertion of power. I know exactly what the hell that was, that was an "I'm going to shut this bitch up." And it wouldn't have happened if I hadn't have been trying to keep him from leaving, which does not excuse what he did because he is an adult, but so am I. I should have just let him leave, but I didn't. I made a mistake.

The way he was operating was like he was in cop mode. Cold, emotionless, sarcastic, "you're a civilian and I'm the one with a gun." Pretty sure he didn't have his gun though, but you know what I mean. It's all an act, it's what they have to do to get their job done. He was like that up until I made him laugh, but then he kind of looked like he was going to cry. But imagine me grabbing hold of his hand with my legs on either side of the doorway as he's pulling with all his might to get away. That's not a literal interpretation of what happened, but I practically begged. I do not want to lose Steppy. I need Steppy. Steppy has become family to me, something that even the neighbor hasn't become and probably never will because I'm frightened of her. I get all of these emails and comments saying "Just fucking kiss him already, you know you want to!" and "You guys are gonna fuck when David leaves," and I've told you that this is not the case because I so do NOT see this man in that way. I never have, and I never will, and what just happened proves it. I felt nothing, just like when we were in high school, and nothing will ever change about that. Steppy is like a brother, and I need that sense of family right now more than I need a miserable pretty boy's tongue down my throat.

This is exactly what happened before. "I like a-you, do you like a-me? It can be sexy time now, yes?" and when I say no, there's the "okay, then I'm going to kiss the hell out of you to change your mind," and when it doesn't, he saunters off but stays bitter. But as I recall from last time, we still ran into each other every now and then and we were friendly. We had classes together. He used to pet my hair while taking notes because I sat in front of him. He signed my yearbook and everything. Some of you asked, what now? I dont know, I assume this will work its self out, though I've been warned by a few to just stay away and let it go. And the funny thing is that he's reading this now, and that he has gone back and read through the archives. I know this because I tracked him on my Statcounter, not something that I do regularly unless I'm looking for someone in particular, but he's here. And unlike what I've done in the past, I wont use my blog as a platform for communication. He has my email address, phone number, and every other way of getting ahold of me if he has something to say. But it's not going to stop me from writing what I need to here.

I guess what now is that I keep doing what I've been doing, I probably go through a weird emo period in my blog for a time, and I try not to get pulled over. If anything this will make the rewrite of Bombshell better. Like Liz said, I haven't had any great tragedies happen recently for me to really be able to write about emotions. Ha, yeah, until December happened. To be honest Victor's death isn't as cut and dry as you'd think it would be, and it's not so much his death entirely, it's that his family went out of their way to find me and tell me. Would my family have done the same? I sincerely doubt it. What's messed me up is sitting there in the pews being stared at because they all knew who I was, and I got mixed reactions. Some people were sympathetic but unable to be too sympathetic because his widow was marching around with her black vail and there was quite a bit of a chill coming from her and her family toward my being there. His friends all knew who I was, but they totally detested that I was there because I'm the girl who broke his heart. Not to speak ill of the dead, but I'm not the one that's crazy.

What's messed me up is that I called Steppy that Saturday morning. I said "Look, I know you didn't like this guy, and I didn't either but his family really needs me to be there and David is working and my sister is watching my kids. I'm going to be there alone, the neighbor will do something embarrassing or offensive if I bring her, so please come with me to this. I need a hand to hold and yours is one of the only ones I'll touch. I need you to be there with me."

And after a long silence, he just said no, and hung up.

Victor's wife's teenage sister was there with her teddy bear, and there I was without mine.