You just won 10 million dollars, how will you spend it?

Honestly I’d do the most boring shit imaginable, which is invest it for a 2 per cent return and live high off the hog with half that, a hundred grand a year. The other half I would give to foster kids. The group home Nikol works with. I would give them books and computers and a pool. The pool would never be used because all the foster kids are black. FUCK YOU FOR CALLING ME RACIST I GIVE HALF MY INCOME TO GOD DAMN FOSTER KIDS.

When I fantasize about having money it’s never about boats and cars and whores. I like my car, which cost me $1200. It’s a 1979 diesel Mercedes just like my last one and if it breaks I will buy another 1979 diesel Mercedes. The fucking thing just looks cool. New cars are stupid. They lack character.

If I had a boat I would just sink and die. Probably I’d capsize in the middle of a swarm of angry jellyfish. Or even if you don’t get stung to death you have to drive to the marina and sit in traffic and park and it’s a pain in the ass. Everyone thinks they’re gonna have fun on a boat but they just puke. Any girl who would come with me on my boat would probably have gone back to my apartment anyway. And once you fuck her you’re stuck on a boat with this person talking about her friend’s fucking Kickstarter. Maybe I would buy a captain’s hat and a double breasted blue blazer with anchors on the buttons just to look like I have a boat, but I don’t need the actual boat.

Women, you know, that seems like a nice part about having money but, I’m tall and not ugly and I can talk, which basically gives me a pussy value of ten million dollars anyway. Plus I feel like having money would actually make women slower to fuck you. They’d be trying to figure out an angle, how to stay in your life so you can buy their dad a liver transplant or whateverthefuck, and the way women think they can stay in your life is to drag out fucking you. Me, they can take a slip ‘n’ dip in a bar bathroom and if I don’t call the next day it’s no great loss.

So yeah, I never think about helicopters and hot tubs. I imagine instead that I’m buying some land outside LA, maybe a farm. Then taking dozens of kids who are wards of the state and letting them live with donkeys and goats and adults who won’t beat or rape them. I fantasize about a little kid’s eyes bugging out when they see that goats can climb trees. I fantasize about paying the kind of money that swanky PhD’s got paid to teach kids at my fancy New England boarding school, getting the best educators in the world to come teach wards of the state. Kids who spent their first ten years getting burned with cigarettes and fucked in the mouth, pussy and asshole by their grandfather. Taking human lives that we are throwing away and turning them around.

There’s a kid Nikol hangs out with who came out to LA from that group home. He’s going to law school now. With his law degree he is going to help other kids who went through third world poverty and horrific abuse like he did. He is doing this because one person, somewhere, said: hey, I give a shit what happens to you. That is seriously all it took. There are millions of people for whom no one ever does that; they age out of the child welfare system and end up hooking or in jail or dead.

So that’s what I’d do with my ten million, actually– I’d build a big farm where kids with shitty lives can live. I’d endow scholarships so they could go to good schools and I’d hire people who seem non-molesty to show them that someone gives a shit. And then I’d never visit because if I did I’d end up fucking some fifteen year old and getting arrested.

Nikol and I invented a sport where we battle with our families’ facebook statuses to see who’s bigger white trash.

When my cousin was told by her pastor that facebook was the devil’s work and left, I thought my career was over. No more would I see a picture of an Orang Utan palming its face accompanied by a quote from Ecclisiastes.  But my other cousin who became a grandmother at 28 stepped up:

ROUND 1

The Haslers

Welp…the kids and I have been doin’ yard pickup…while as usual the hub has been in his usual place on the couch tipping his best friend and favorite beverage back. I’ve had enough of him, his lies, his tipping back…if he does not make changes in a week, I see him on his own and the kiddos and me making a whole new world for ourselves. Enough is enough, yep I keep it real and that’s where I’m at; any questions

The Tacos

for all you nosey no life of ur own idiots that live on here to gossip… i was set up last night and refused to sell people out so i was arrested. the charges are crap and from my stand point if you have nothing better to do then recommend trash and post it about me then go fuck yourselves and each other !!!!!!! too bad you have nothing better to do or to worry about. but god dont like ugly and neither do i so best of luck to you all. this karma will bite your asses…. i promise

2 people like this.
(REDACTED) You go girl! People need to mind there own fucken business and worry about the shit in their own back yard…. To everyone out there remember the saying “If you aint got anything good to say, dont say anything at all” And another thing (REDACTED) is innocent un-till proven guilty….

ROUND 2

The Haslers

“Justin” writes:

Suggestion: One super-power you could have for 24 hours. What would it be, and why? What would you do with it? etc.

Well.

I remember my buddy, my best friend from like 13 to 15, telling me a fantasy he had. He had just seen Superman 2. He would jerk off thinking that he was General Zod. A guy from another planet walking around in a black pleather jumpsuit who could just point at anyone he wanted and demand that they fuck him. Or else he would throw a car at their grandmother or something.

And I laughed because I jerked off to the exact same thing. Being General Zod. Wearing the same black getup and walking the Earth with my sinister British accent, and pointing at girls, like, my classmates on the field hockey field, and just beckoning them to the side of some building where they’d have to bend over and I’d penetrate them on the mulch and rhododendrons. Probably the school groundskeeper would mutter and shake his head, having to rerake the peat moss he’d just smoothed over that morning.

There’s something so erotic about that idea. I know, it’s rape, but let’s admit that we all jerk off to rape. And this is not crudely pinning some drunk college girl’s wrists behind her head on a mildewy fraternity basement couch. You picture the girl’s loins getting all juicy just out of fear and awe of you. Wanting you in spite of herself. Her own traitor womb commanding her to take your seed. Allison from algebra not looking at you as the dork you were, but as some kind of god.

Later he revealed he was gay and I was actually the person getting bent over in his reverie. The whole thing  became really weird. So, I choose invisibility.

I know, I know. I haven’t posted in five days.

I’m not dead.  I am simply out of ideas. I have been living a clean and productive life, which means I think and feel nothing.

If you have ideas you would like to see fleshed out in an essay filled with the word “fuck,” or if you want advice from broke, unemployed person incapable of human relationships, or if you have a short story idea or something, please post in the comments or email me from the “Contact” sidebar.

Otherwise normal programming will resume as soon as I relapse into whoring and hard drug abuse.

No they won’t, liar

I’m in the waiting room. Waiting to get my STD test results. The clinic door is open to Echo Park Avenue and someone is blasting Eminem at the stop light. Shut the fuck up, Eminem. Can’t you see I have AIDS?

I have AIDS and herpes and syphilis and HPV and gonorrhea and chlamydia and non gonococcal urethritis (unspecified) and hepatitis C and probably A, B, and D through J as well, and dick cancer and brain damaging spirochetes and crabs and whateverthefuck else, I must have it all. My appointment was for 3:30 but they flat out told me to come late, that’s when the doctor takes lunch. Why did I come at 3:30. I am a fucking idiot. I should have stayed home where there’s youtube videos to distract me and not just this blank document and my gnawing thoughts of all the dick eating infections I have. All the people I’ve killed, girls I fucked whose ovaries will get chewed into dust because of me. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, whateverthefuck your name is. The Chinese chick with the purple toenail polish. You didn’t deserve this.

Except I’m fine and this is just a pain in the ass. The two week waiting period, the paranoia, this is the only bad consequence to unprotected sex. The fear and not the thing you fear. What people really mean when they want you to put a condom on is, they want to avoid this experience. The waiting, the praying, the agitation. Drawing blood. Pissing in a cup. They used to put a wooden Q tip in your dick hole, I’m told, which if that were still the case I would just not find out whether I had that disease. But STD tests are a penance. They are modern day self-flagellation. And just like a wrathful God, STD’s are much feared but never show up.

But to feed my paranoia I was looking through my OKCupid messages, looking at faces that I only then remembered fucking. Used to be getting laid was an occasion. I used to keep track of my “notch co– CAN YOU TURN OFF YOUR FUCKING TEN SECOND LOOP OF GOD DAMN CELL PHONE MUSIC PLEASE, STRETCH PANTS AZTEC WOMAN WITH HER STUPID BABY

Oh, she’s playing Angry Birds or something. At the absolute maximum volume the device will allow. Because why not. Why use earbuds or play the game at a reasonable volume when you could blast your Android up to 11 in this room covered with ceramic tile. Play a loop of electronic music which seems to take on words–

You have AIDS AIDS AIDS,

You have AIDS AIDS AIDS,

AIDSY AIDSY AIDS

The mom’s kind of cute though. In a third world way. I imagine impregnating her in a palm hut somewhere while revolutionaries with helmets and AK’s are carted past in a diesel flatbed, on their way to incinerate her cousin. He was rumored to be sympathetic to the wrong acronym.

I’m reading a pamphlet in Spanish called Ser Padres. I am learning the symptoms for if my hijo has Apendicitis. Dolor fuerte si se presiona el abdomen. This will be useful to me some day. I will diagnose a small Central American boy with Apendicitis. The village will proclaim me a hero. The revolutionaries will fire their guns in the air in my honor. The squat Aztec woman will lie back awaiting my seed…

OK, time to go in.

Survey SAYS…

Nothing. I have nothing. I would feel like I dodged a bullet but I knew the fucking gun was empty. All the fearmongering is puritanical bullshit. Don’t use condoms, kids.

I’m gonna be honest with you. I’m pissed that I don’t have an STD. It would have been great material. People want to torture themselves reading about STD’s. They must google that shit constantly. If I had caught something and written honestly about this thing that everyone obsesses over and fears, you know… think of the page views. I would have become fucking famous.

What does a guy have to do to catch a break around here.

image stolen from j.p. sims consulting

You’re sitting there in a tiny cubicle in a moldy beige room with acoustical tile and you are separated from a bear sized homeless man with a loud booming voice by what is basically urinal divider. You have a headset on, an old one with one foam earphone and a curly wire going into a battered phone. You are listening to a cavernous hiss. And then it beeps and your back tenses and it’s showtime.

“…. Hello? HELLO!!???!!!”

The person on the other end of the line has been listening to silence and clicks for five seconds. They are tipped off to what you are. Because the autodialer waits for what it thinks is a human voice to connect you. The person is already pissed off. You have a dumb terminal in front of you. It’s the 21^st century but you have a monitor with green block letters on black from the 70′s with what is putatively the person’s name and address, but a lot of times it’s empty or some guy who was about to get fired had put in “Harry Stiffey, 69 Cumshot Drive.”

“HELLO??!???” WHO IS THIS??!!??”

“Good evening sir, is this Mr. Sti– uh, are you the head of the household?”

“WHAT ARE YOU SELLING?”

“I’m not, I’m not selling anything sir, this is Cornelius calling on behalf of the Firefighter Charitable Organization, we’re asking for your support in helping the Fi-”

“PUT ME ON YOUR ‘DO NOT CALL’ LIST AND NEVER EVER CONTACT ME AGAIN” (slam.)

And then the hiss again. Select “DNC” on your dumb terminal. “Do Not Call.” As mandated by law we will mail a mimeograph of our “Do Not Call” Policy to what we think is his address and take him out of the system. Wait for the next beep. If you get five human beings in a row you’re doing all right. The dialer waits until it thinks it hears a person but a lot of the time it’ll give you that three tone disconnect sound ten times in a row. DOO DOO DEEEEHHHH and you have your headset turned all the way up because the fucking old ladies all gargle softly around fifty years worth of Pall Malls and they’re impossible to hear except at top volume. This means the “we’re sorry, the number you’re calling has been disconnected” sound is like sticking your head in one of those horns that a lighthouse blows in the fog. Mark that one as a “Telco.”

Or you get fifteen minutes of no English. We would call through San Francisco and some number exchanges are nothing but Chinese fresh off the boat, or Chinese who’d been here for years but never got off the boat in their minds, or Chinese who probably spoke English like they were hosting Masterpiece Theatre but had a handy excuse not to talk to us. “WEI? BING WA?” “Do you speak English, ma’am? Are you the head of household? “BING WA YA?”

But these things were still better than getting an actual English speaking human being who was head of household. Because they all hate you. Every single person you talk to hates you and thinks you’re a piece of shit and wishes you were dead and even when they’re polite you can feel it. “HELLO???!!!?? HELLO??!!?? “Good evening, this is Cornelius calling on behalf of the Firefighter Charitable Organization, may I speak with the head of household?”

“Do you know you called me DURING DINNER?”

Then don’t answer the phone, you fucking chump. Let the machine get it and savor your fish sticks in peace. “I’m awfully sorry to disturb you sir, but I’ll only need a minute of your time. Would it be better to call back another night?”

“Well, I don’t know. Let me ask you something– WHAT PER CENT OF MY DONATION GOES TO THE ACTUAL CHARITY??”

Stossel had fucked us, right before I got hired. Blown the lid off the whole operation. We called for police and firefighter charities, which sell boiler rooms the right to raise funds in their name. Basically the cops in your town get ten or fifteen grand to help schools or disabled kids or whatever and the company that I worked for gets eighty grand for the people who own it to buy small airplanes and strippers for wives. The cops know it works like this. But it’s still more money than they’d get sitting in front of Safeway selling cupcakes. And it’s good PR for everyone in town to get a call telling them your friendly police force is dedicated to keeping troubled teens active playing tennis in the Police Athletic League or whateverthefuck. The company puts on a variety show, or a rodeo, or a charity basketball game or something and what you’re selling is a pack of five tickets to this event for 35 bucks. You can go yourself, but, as the script says, most people opt to donate the tickets so local disadvantaged youth can attend. Lots of the word “youth” getting thrown around, so much that it becomes hard to say. Most people donate the tickets and keep the sticker they think will keep them from getting pulled over.

“Well, sir, after the costs of talent for the show, lighting, renting the venue, postage, phone bills, and paying the fine people such as myself who are out here every day making these calls, there’s a profit of about fifteen per cent left over that goes to the charity. We-”

“I THOUGHT AS MUCH. This is a SCAM. I would like to be put on your Do Not Call list, and have a copy of your Do Not Call policy sent to me–”

“Of course, sir, if you’ll let me confirm your address…”

“WHY ON EARTH WOULD I GIVE YOU MY ADDRESS?”

Stossel had fucked us, and congress had fucked us, because like the day before I started telemarketing they passed a law mandating a Do Not Call registry. You have the legal right to be removed from a telemarketer’s call list and to have proof of this mailed to you. And good old John “The Stache” Stossel had hammered this fact into the minds of every schlub in America in a series of hard hitting investigative pieces that also highlighted what a huge scam every single telemarketing charity is. We were already hated, so much so that a legislative body in America was moved to pass a law making life easier on individual human beings rather than businesses. Perhaps the only time this has ever happened. We were already somewhere between the Gestapo and NAMBLA in the national esteem and suddenly this Do Not Call law gave everyone magic words to name the demon and Make It Stop. The Do Not Call request was always colored with triumph, delivered like they’d finally tracked down the murderer of their kids wand were finishing him off with a shovel to the head.

Select “DNC.” Wait for the beep.

Meanwhile all around you loud booming voices are making sales pitches. People who telemarket are not normal people. The guy next to me is homeless, by choice; he lives at a campsite by the train tracks. He spends his check on bourbon and then once a week goes over the hill to San Jose to buy hookers. He has been in San Quentin, in Santa Rita; he once saw a man get his innards cut out and his gut filled with toilet paper and his still warm corpse tossed off a high catwalk to create the effect of streamers. He tells me that a Mexican ain’t nothin but a high yella nigger with an accent, that you can cry all you want in jail but don’t take nothing from nobody, that the Woods shot caller in Rita ain’t too hard. But he has been doing this so long that he sounds like the Frontline narrator or Walter Cronkite. He has the booming gravelly baritone and perfect Ivy League diction you want the president to have. When he tells you the black streetwalkers are down to fifty bucks for an around the world you can almost hear an orchestra behind him. Later he’ll get arrested for shooting a man in the face with a pellet gun in a bar fight. He will be looking at life in prison due to his record, and his own mother will fly out from Georgia to testify against him. He is actually a sweet man and does not deserve this.

Down the row is a man who tells you he is an ordained Eastern Orthodox priest, who won’t shut the fuck up about what Alcoholics Anonymous has done for him. Like everyone whom Alcoholics Anonymous has done so much for he is thin skinned and the smallest slight sends him into slavering rage. He is of Serbian extraction, and will go into a long loud litany of every grievance against the Serbs, if anything even remotely germane to Serbia is mentioned during smoke break. The Muslims cut off our skins and used them as drums! He says. Later when Wikipedia is invented I learn that he was talking about the Field of Blackbirds, which happened in 1389. The Croats were Nazis! We learned to avoid discussing Serbia but you’d be amazed at the Kevin Bacon game of things that can be connected to Serbia. He was an aspiring standup comedian.

Behind him is a jockey-sized man with cystic acne in a purple velvet waistcoat. He moves like a muppet and his sales calls are long rambling off-script improvisations. You talk to him a couple times and he reveals that he was kidnapped by the CIA as a baby, spent his childhood in a prison camp where they injected him directly in the spine every day with LSD. He says it gave him spinal meningitis. At some point two angels disguised as men came to him and told him he was the orphan prince of a galaxy called Lucifer 666 million light years away. He’d spent some time there vanquishing various evils on behalf of his subjects before returning to help the people of Earth. He felt he wouldn’t last long because the government was on to him. I visited his trailer once, was stunned to see that he had a beautiful nineteen year old wife. All you have to do is believe in yourself.

Everyone was fucked up, everyone had a drug problem or was in recovery or had a record too long and crazy for them to ever have hope of getting another job. So they had to come in night after night and listen to old people sneer that you’d called them during dinner, rack up three bucks a sale.

I got good at it. My voice got deeper. I started booming from the diaphragm, laughing off their perturbed “hello… hello’s” and connecting with them. Flirt with the old women. Joke with the men. You get on a roll and you get so much confidence going that the person who faithfully watches John Stossel and is ready to give you an earful of Do Not Call just gets hypnotized. You can’t fake this. You can go in with the same meter and the same pitch and the same words but there is something they can smell on you if you’re not confident, if you’re afraid. If you need the three bucks they’ll snarl at you and slam the phone down. But you get hypnotized yourself, when you get good. You are genuinely connecting with people and gliding seamlessly into the best way you can help is with our ten-pack for three hundred fifty dollars and your voice is saying I am so good at this I don’t need you to buy this, I don’t want you to, I am walking out of here into a gold Rolls Royce bought three dollars at a time and it’s just you and me talking on a lark here; it’s no big deal. If you need something, people will never give it to you. If you are weak, people will never want to help you. People are animals, they are evil, every single thing you ever learned about compassion is a lie and when the end of this filthy soulless sewer of a world comes I will stand outside and dance in the hellfire, the small part of me that was still human was thinking. I am a lying sack of shit selling you a scam but because I sound like I don’t want your money you will give it to me. When you are on that roll you could sell stickers that say “Fuck You Cop Pull Me Over” to the Chief of Police. The substance has nothing to do with it. It’s in your voice.

I became their top salesman. I beat homeless Cronkite and Alcoholic priest and a bunch of other guys who’d been in boiler rooms all their adult lives, always for companies with three letter names: BTS productions, CBL productions. Selling the chance to send five retarded kids to the Vaudeville Variety Follies in Oregon and Texas and Arizona. I locked on to something and walked in knowing I would kill and so I did. A woman gave a thousand dollars because she was mad at her husband and I was a man to talk to. A man started out screaming at me out for screwing real charities out of money and when I gave him the voice he calmed down and bought. The old codgers showed me respect. I started to think of myself as a salesman. I can close anything, anyone, I thought. Then some girl would ask “what do you do” in a bar and I would cringe. This was before I knew how to lie to girls. “I’m a telemarketer,” I would say. “Oh fuck, I hate you guys.”

No matter how good you are most of them hate you. Once in a while one of them will get through to whatever tender spot you have left. There are still two people, twelve years later, whose names, numbers and addresses I could recite for you. I’ve taken care to remember because I still might want to kill them some day. Do you know what a waste of a human life you are, one of them told me. At the time I didn’t, although I’ve since been briefed. No matter how good you are, and even if you act like a human being to them, every night there are enough of them being cruel to make you cry. I could stay on the phone with you and make you kill yourself, you think. Or at least tell you to go fuck yourself, but, the boss was very clear. They can say these things. You can’t. That’s what a job is. They can say you’re a waste of human life and you can’t say fuck off.

If you have a soul, there is a vessel inside of you that gets filled up with all the hate you take in. About a year in it hit the meniscus for me and I had to quit. I got a job selling ads for a newspaper. The same shit, really, but I was dialing the phone with my fingers rather than a machine and could tell girls I worked for something they’d heard of.

But I remember the lessons that job taught me. Because there are only two jobs in the world: “making shit,” and “selling shit.” Every white collar job I’ve had since is “selling shit.” Picking up the phone and asking people for money. Whether they give it to you depends on what’s in your voice. What’s in your voice depends on whether the last guy gave you money.

The world only rewards hustlers and liars. People will be cruel to the weak whenever they get a chance. Then they will roll over mesmerized for anyone who doesn’t appear to give a fuck. They’ll trip over themselves to give you anything as long as you don’t need it. As long as they’re not helping you. The job taught me that we are essentially evil. That every nice thing you’ve ever thought about humankind is a flaming crock of shit. That if a righteous God existed we would have been destroyed long ago.

There were, however, free doughnuts on Saturdays.

I get my STD test results tomorrow. I’m such an old hack at this that I feel no fear. Used to be, I’m sure you know the feeling– you go over and over in your head all the filthy holes you plumbed with your scabrous open cut laden dick, all the men these girls had been with that you’ve now been with too. They give you that demonstration the first week of college– they bring tons of people onstage to show that you’re fucking everyone who the person you’re fucking fucked and whoever those people fucked and etc. Then when you’re finally with a girl, if your dick goes in a millimeter past the condom ring you feel like you tripped and landed on the button that launches the nukes. Years go by and, tentatively at first, you begin rawdogging in the morning when you’ve been grinding each other naked all night. And you are stunned.  You learn that what you were doing with condoms isn’t fucking at all, more like a puppet show about fucking. Later you get to the point where you’re rawdogging everyone all the time. The type of girl you pick up in an afterhours party at a freeway underpass. You would rawdog hookers if they’d let you. You even ask them. You just stop giving a shit.

Well maybe now is when it gets me. Now that I’m complacent. God loves irony; maybe now that I’m not suspecting it I’ll have syphilis and have to make a bunch of calls. Even that doesn’t scare me. Hey, I have syphilis, I will text. Simple declarative sentence. Like Hemingway would have done. Hey, I have HIV. We have HIV. Now we have to subscribe to stupid magazines with names like “POZ,” smiling people on the cover kayaking and shit, read editorials encouraging us to keep up hope. We have to become ambassadors, communicate to others that it’s not just a gay disease. Except I won’t have it because it is just a gay disease.

Maybe I’ll have one of the sleeper ones. Hep C or something. That will suck, because I will have to explain it. Hep C? Yeah, it’s, uh… it’s a new one. Pam Anderson has it. What a shitty celebrity to share a disease with. Hep C would be like graduating from a second tier college in Missouri somewhere; every time it comes up you have to spend five minutes explaining what it is. Yeah, they have a really good hotel management school. Give me HIV every time. The Harvard of STD’s.

Hep C? What’s that? It’s a virus that slowly eats away at your liver until you turn yellow and die. How do you get it? From fucking. Or from needles. I probably got it from fucking someone who fucked someone who used needles or fucked a gay person. What if the person you fucked just got it from needles? No, it doesn’t go that way. Degenerate girls only fuck guys more degenerate than themselves. A chick who smokes black tar fucks a guy who bangs a quarter ounce a day, not the other way around. Just like a girl painter dates a better, better known painter, just like a woman professor dates a more famous professor, a girl junkie only dates a bigger junkie. They date someone who can lead them further into whatever they are. They don’t have the patience for it to be otherwise.

Now I am getting all worked up over this; thinking that I have hepatitis C. When it is impossible, as a dude, to get diseases form heterosexual sex. Impossible. Or, it’s like your dick is the presidential limo. Someone could get in there but it’s gonna take more than just firing a shoulder mounted rocket at it. You need Tom Clancy level shit. You could get a disease as a straight dude but you’d have to be Wilt Chamberlain, or in a band. You’d have to basically be trying.

Anyway. Who cares now. I’m done fucking. Or rather, I’m done drinking to excess for a while which means I’m done fucking. Because no man ever got laid sober. I’ll take my lethal suppurating cock and sit home and crochet.

Spent most of the week in the wilderness, drinking only detox levels of alcohol. The amount it would take to stop me from shaking and hallucinating giant worms chewing their way out of my body, etc. I haven’t actually tried not drinking. I am probably not at the level where I’d have any real effects, I’d probably just be crabby. But I read somewhere that you can’t just stop drinking, that it could kill you. So I use this as an excuse to drink. I am “tapering off.”

After this, who knows. Maybe I’ll join Alcoholics Anonymous. Except every person I’ve ever known in Alcoholics Anonymous sucks. They’re either a sanctimonious pain in the ass who can’t shut the fuck up about “the program” or they’re just– you sit in a room with them and you feel the waves of misery shimmering off them. They broadcast unhappiness. They are touchy, sensitive to slight, humorless, cruel when they have a chance. I don’t want to be one of these people.

They tell you you can get laid in Alcoholics Anonymous, but of course, like all the other places they tell you you can get laid it’s bullshit. I’ve been to a couple meetings and it’s a sausage fest. 8 to 1, 9 to 1. About a Los Angeles bar ratio in other words, and the guys who are pulling ass are probably the long haulers, the experienced AA guys who can reassuringly quote the Big Book to the girl bass player who just got her third DUI. Like any cult, the new guy doesn’t get pussy. You probably have to spend years horning your way in to some social scene of people who drink coffee in diners at 1am and trade stories about relatives they ran over. Shaky failed comedians who sit around and one up each other with stories of how bad they once were.

And who wants to hear about shit like that.

I’ve been out in the desert for a few days getting over my head injury, and haven’t written shit. Instead here’s a video of a puppet reading this week’s search terms. I left the kitchen window open while taping and my neighbor’s visiting family walked past.

As always, hat tip to UTB, the originator of search term mayhem.

image stolen from hotnerdgirl.com

Various readers write:

I’m concerned about your head injury. I’m not normally the kind of person who freaks out over this shit, but you really need to see a doctor. You could die or be retarded, etc.

As always, thank you for your sweet concern. But it’s nothing. It hurts like a bitch, but I’m only cognitively impaired insofar as I’m distracted by pain. It’s just a knot on the head. It’s on the right side right on top of my occipital lobe so if there were brain damage it would be evident in my eyesight. Left side. Because of the optic chiasm– the nerves that read from your eyes cross over in an X and run to the back of your head, for some reason. Meaning your left eye transmits to the back right side of your head. See? I remember all that shit from class, that was almost 20 years ago. No brain damaged person can say shit like “optic chiasm.” I bet it’s even called that because it’s shaped like the Greek letter “chi.” See? I remember the Greek alphabet.

I didn’t remember whether I’d brushed my teeth this morning though. I had to deduce that I hadn’t, like Sherlock Holmes. I didn’t remember listening to a Patrice O’Neal youtube video after taking a shit. Which I would have done. Gotta listen to some Patrice whilst brushing your teeth. I was still thinking about the agony of work and the emptiness of human life in the shower, since I had been reading poems by Charles Bukowski on the toilet. If I had brushed my teeth I would have listened to a couple minutes of Patrice and would have been thinking about women, how the best women in my life are “generals.” How lucky I am to have MacArthur and fucking Eisenhower in my corner– this is what I’m usually thinking as I dry out the crack of my ass. I wasn’t thinking those things so I must have forgotten to brush my teeth.

Fine. I’ll take it. I chew Nicorette® constantly so my breath is always fresh and if my incisors turn yellow I can always throw a little Plus White® in. Smear it in that weird rubbery mouthguard that gets melted by the bleach halfway through the life of the Plus White® tube, so it has the consistency of a dead nightcrawler and you’re trying to form it back into the shape of your mouth and stiffen it up by running cold water over it because you’re too cheap to go buy another kit for six bucks. Fine. I don’t mind this. If you’re gonna take a chuink out of my brain take away the lowest bits and not the highest bits. Make it so I forget to wipe my ass once in a while, don’t make me forget Proust.

I could go to the doctor but any time I’ve ever been to the doctor for anything they just tell me what I already know: it’s nothing. Get an STD test, a stern billboard tells you. And then you go and they ask you about your sexual history, and you think you’re the John Rambo of pussy recollecting it. Did you have multiple partners? Oh yeah. How many? I uh, I don’t know. Any rough idea? No, not really. A bunch. Did you use condoms every time? No. Any anal sex? Yeah, a little. How often did you not use condoms? Pretty much, I pretty much never used condoms. Oh yeah, I’m a bad, bad boy… also, can I get a secret high five, medical professional? LOOK HOW MUCH I GET LAID! SMELL MY FINGER, DR. LILY F. NGUYEN!

Just girls?

Yeah, just girls.

And their eyebrows kind of sink and they look at the floor, almost as though they were disappointed. They tell you to come back in a week but you can hear in their voice it’s gonna be nothing. And it always is. There’s the weird sense, in both you and the health professional, of an anticlimax. You can sense that she wanted to tell you: look, just stay home next time. Stop cluttering up my office with this bullshit.

And the free HIV test at the gay charity thrift store, forget it. Impressing that guy with how much pussy you get is like impressing a guy who’s been in Russian prison with your college fight story.

Same with the flu, same with your “irregular” mole, same with everything. The flu just goes away, but if it hangs on for a week everyone tells you you better go see a doctor. And the doctor sells you a repackaged free sample of “Zpac” as a placebo to get you the fuck out of his face. He knows that the flu is a viral infection and the anti-bacterial Zpac does nothing. But he had so many malingerers demand some totem of treatment that he just caved and gives them all bullshit to shut them up. And I bet every dermatologist just wants to scream to every hypochondriac white person: “hey dipshit, all moles are ‘irregular.’ None of them is shaped like an equilateral triangle. Use sunblock. Now get the fuck out of my office.”

If I go to the doctor for this shit they’ll look at my perfectly proportional pupils, ask me to move my tongue around, ask me if I’m seeing any weird shit out of my left eye. Then they’ll tell me to ice it and not hit my head again. I’ll have to butt in with but I forgot to brush my teeth as they rush out to see their 10,000 other patients and they’ll say: call for another appointment if it happens ten more times.

Still. I get being scared about it. Now every time I have some mental tic that is exactly like the million others I had before the head injury, I think: what if there’s a blood clot in my brain? What if some brain scab was jarred loose and working its way to some big artery and I drop on the sidewalk and wake up having to blow myself around in a wheelchair and have some poor Guatemalan lady wipe my ass? I better get a CT scan for this shit. An MRI. Whatever other Star Trek shit they have now.

Here’s a million dollar idea. You set up a franchise. Get a bunch of shit doctors who didn’t get into domestic med schools and so got certified in Haiti. Set them up in storefronts on streets where people under 50 live. Twenty bucks for a fifteen minute visit, and his job is basically to tell you that it’s nothing. You sign a paper absolving him of all liability and then show him your head knot or your mole and he looks at it and says “oh yeah, it’s nothing. It’ll go away.” Obviously if it isn’t nothing he tells you, but 99.999 per cent of the time all maladies are nothing. If it’s an obvious bacterial infection he can give you penicillin. In the .0001 per cent of cases, he’ll say “yeah, you better go to a real doctor.”

This is basically what a general practitioner is anyway. A guy who tells you either “it’s nothing” or “you better see a specialist.” Let’s take away the insurance and the fifty dollar tongue depressor and the office staff and the files and all the other hassle and expense and just make it: twenty bucks to tell you it’s nothing.

Because if you don’t have that, it’s: wait in line for six hours and pay a grand out of your deductible to get in an MRI that’s gonna suck the childhood BB you forgot about out of your calf at three thousand miles per hour. Or don’t do that, and just torture yourself with horror stories on the internet about how insidious brain damage crept up on a guy just like you who fell over drunk and now he’s fucking My Left Foot because he didn’t see a doctor. It comes down to the hassle versus the fear. I have a very small fear that I have incurred insidious brain damage. But there is a very huge hassle to find out it’s not true. You weigh those things on a balance. It’s about twenty bucks and fifteen minutes worth of fear. It’s about six hours and a grand worth of hassle.

But why even go down that road, it’s fucking nothing. Don’t worry. I’m resting and taking care of myself and so far I show no real signs of cognitive impairmeasdfghjkl