SEATTLE, WASHINGTON -

It’s part of the core American mythology that the bigger the balls, the bigger the man.

Balls, as in grit, guts, willingness to push too hard and move too fast, and to defy decorum (decorum is, needless to say, for pussies) in order to achieve the aim. It’s how America was founded. How the West was won. It’s how every movie in which a badass conquers the badguys ends. Why does the hero win?

He’s got big balls.

Let me just say it: We are Americans, and we are totally obsessed by the concept of balls.

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SEATTLE, WA-

Despite that title, which could mean any number of things, and could easily head up a posting about people like Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan, in this case, I am, and I know this is a shocker, writing about my own self.

Here’s a piece out of my book-in-progress. It’s relatively standalone, a little story about being a teenage girl in the middle of nowhere, working on her outlaw status. It’s a true story. Names have been changed at random, to protect the Google-able.

Things to know: just prior to this, I dropped totally out of 9th grade, because I got juvenile diabetes and my family and I embarked on an odyssey of various faith healing/herbal medicine/psychic techniques, which ultimately did not cure me in the least of diabetes, but did cause me to have a near death experience, during which I met two hallucinated guys named Howard and Ed. I returned to school at the top of 10th grade, and really, really, did not fit in. Not that I really ever had, but this made things much worse. It’s hard to die and then come back the same person you were before it happened.

So, onward.

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