BOULDER, CO-

This year, being the proud Obamabot that I am, I eagerly followed the left wing conspiracy all the way to my garden. Never mind the fact that I live at 9000 ft in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado and get exactly 11.3 weeks of contiguous summer. The White House grounds currently survive an inordinate measure of chill under the scrutiny of the GOP. If Michelle could do it, I reasoned, so could I.

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LOS ANGELES, CA—

I left home when I was in high school without a diploma and shacked up with a floozie. I call her a floozie not just because my mother called her that, but because she was a floozie. She was a floozie to end all floozies. If being a floozie was anything like being in the Army she’d have been a general. And instead of painting skulls on her helmet to represent vanquished opponents, she’d have painted dicks, to represent vanquished dicks. And to accommodate all the dicks she’d need something like a million helmets and a whole convoy just to transport them.

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SEATTLE, WA-

The Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, I covered Hot for Teacher Night at a craptastic sports bar in Seattle’s historic Pioneer Square district for sexual anthropologist, Susie Bright (Esquire, Rolling Stone, Salon), of whom I’ve long been an admirer.

Said night featured the infamous Mary Kay Letourneau and Vili Fualaau and its announcement received nationwide attention. Bright and I are Facebook friends and she asked if any of her Seattle compadres would be willing to attend and report for her blog; I tossed my hat in the ring and was one of two she chose.

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BOULDER, CO-

So, I was doing a little “online shopping” the other day when I came upon a Christian Sex Toy site. [Uncertain intention of pun.] Now, I’m as adventurous as the next Sally, so I have to admit I was curious. What could the boudoir of the believer offer to spice up my marriage? What Would Jesus Do?

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LOWER EAST SIDE, MANHATTAN-

I recently finished The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead, by David Schields. As the title suggests, it’s a kind of essay/meditation/memoir about getting old. What the title doesn’t tell you is that in it, Schields addresses at length his relationship with his father.

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GULF BREEZE, FL -

When I got home from the hospital, where I spent approx. five hours wrestling with my grandmother so that she would not either:

1) Rip out her catheter; or

2) Climb out of bed and break her other hip

I found this notice waiting for me on the front door:

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WILMINGTON, DE-

For several years in the early ’90s, Lifetime aired reruns of “thirtysomething.” A relic of this happy time can be found on the Entertainment Weekly website. The article dates from March of 1992 and is titled, “Hope (and Co.) Springs Eternal.”

“It was Monday night,” writer Kelli Pryor began, “and ‘Murphy Brown’ was a rerun. But I was happy anyway. We had ‘thirtysomething.’”

I was seven in 1992. Too young for such sentiments.

But by the time 1995 rolled around, I too had become a “thirtysomething” devotee. At the tender age of nine, I found myself totally engrossed in lives of Hope and Michael and their crew of good-hearted-but-hapless yuppie friends and relations. I also caught “Sisters” in syndication and consequently began a lifelong love affair with Swoosie Kurtz.

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SEATTLE, WA -

I have written small reflections on most of the people I know on the internet. Most of the people are associated with the “Internet Literary Scene”. I didn’t use the internet while writing this. People are listed alphabetically.

ADAM J. MAYNARD: Runs “My Name Is Mud”. Continually slightly confused about his age. Like the design of his website. Seems to like me.

ADAM ROBINSON: Feel like he edits Publishing Genius but also feel unsure. Have “kind of no idea” of his opinion of me while worrying, slightly, that he dislikes me. Watched a video of him singing and felt really confused.

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DAEGU, KOREA -

There may be some eyebrows raised by those of you who’ve never been to Korea, but what I’m about to tell you is true. It may also seem like it is exaggerated, or in need of censorship, but this is a serious anthropological study.

In Korea, humour often pertains to the anus, much like in the West. Penises aren’t as funny here, and we NEVER speak about breasts or vaginas. Everything revolves around the ass – from childhood to old age, everyone laughs at a cartoon piece of poop, or a man being raped by a large spear.

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LOS ANGELES, CA-

10. Inappropriate

Here’s the email I got from Genevre.

“Ok, I first thought you were creepy in the bar when you tried to kiss my neck and told me I smelled like blue toilet water. But now I get it that someone told you about my being attracted mainly to Jewish men. Facebooking me and asking if I’m a Hitler sympathizer confirms the creepy part I mentioned earlier. I understand your ploy. I do not find you attractive. In fact, your even writing me when you have a very lovely wife is wildly inappropriate. Please leave me alone?”

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LAS VEGAS, NV -

I’m a night person. I pull all-nighters. No, I don’t do speed (although I might as well). I simply hit an hour of no return and there I am watching the clock roll into the future. Bringing in the next day. Telling me I made one more.

2am.

4:30am.

Usually, if I get to bed before 10:30 then I’m good. But if I pass that time then who knows what’s going to happen.

1:30am.

3:20am.

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COLDEN, NY-

I kept thinking about having a vasectomy because I had lived in a place where there was a population problem, big-time, and I’d been taught by Paul Ehrlich as an undergraduate. I believed that population control should be everyone’s first priority, and that by foregoing reproduction, I was doing my part.
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SOMEWHERE ABOVE BOULDER, CO-

I must not fear. 
Fear is the mind-killer. 
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. 
I will face my fear. 
I will permit it to pass over me and through me. 
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. 
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. 
Only I will remain.

- The Bene Gesserit Litany against Fear / Frank Herbert’s Dune

It is a couple of days ago. I am driving in my Jeep down the mountain road from my house. The sun is shining. The aspens are twinkling. On the side of the road, little sprigs of wildflowers are glowing yellow and purple in the sun. With the exception of the unfortunate necessity for the use of fossil fuels, it is all very Zen.

I must not fear.

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LOS ANGELES-

When my sister and I were still young, our dad would sometimes take us on a long walk through the woods that started right behind our house in a small industrial suburb in Northern Germany and seemed to stretch forever, even though forever ended at the road to Frankenbostel, a village that was important only to its farmers. I can’t recall how long these walks really lasted, but they seemed dominated by silence and small whispers, so as not to disturb the animals and the overall atmosphere of making our way through brush and over small, secret meadows, where small prints on the ground told stories we were unable to read. We knew they were stories, we’d read all the Wild West novels by Karl May, and were familiar with noble and not so noble Indians reading the ground in front of them, but we could only guess. Still, we didn’t realize how little we knew, and felt just like our heroes Old Shatterhand and Winnetou, the Chief of the Apaches.

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LOS ANGELES, CA-

I am now Lenore Szejn.  That’s my new name.  Or, actually, my name is still the old one, but from now on I will be writing under this name.

I got a call from a very nice professor today.  He thought my (real) name sounded familiar, so he googled me.

“Some, um, very provocative things came up,” he said.

He assured me that he was all for me expressing myself and doing whatever I wanted to do with my free time, but he wanted to let me know that if it was easy for him to find this stuff, it would also be easy for prospective employers to find this stuff, and for clients to find this stuff.  And that, I might not want.  Not after I discussed my use of the Squiggle Wiggle Writer. (more…)

SOUTH COAST, ENGLAND-

It’s around midnight.

It’s a warm night; I’m sitting in my dimly lit bedroom, hearing about how some guy in Mountain got shot by his girlfriend.

And I can’t help but think that’s what happened to Troy McClure.

Deuces are Wild is playing; classic Aerosmith.

I don’t mean Troy McClure, obviously.

I mean Phil Hartman, the voice of Troy McClure and Lionel Hutz on The Simpsons.

His wife shot him in a cocaine fuelled rage.

Say Hello To My Little Friend.

.38 Caliber gun, twice in the head.

Whilst he was sleeping.

Phil Hartman was the guy who designed the Crosby, Stills and Nash logo.

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LAS VEGAS, NV - 

Dude, I’ve Seen Your Balls

I called an old high school buddy to give him my new phone number. It was a business call. In and out. I wasn’t in the talking mood.  

His wife answered the phone. Tammy’s a good woman. Thoughtful. Funny. Pretty good pool player. I met her for the first time last year and we got ripped on margaritas.  (more…)

BOULDER, CO-

A few weeks ago, a Hindu priestess I happen to know walked up to me and said with full conviction, “Oh! You’re having a boy!”

Startled, I raised my eyebrows at her as she proceeded to wave her hands in the vicinity of (but without actually touching) my protruding belly. Just as the news sank in and I began to think it might actually be true—that I was, indeed, going to have a child with a penis (because, really, how many times does person have the opportunity to have a real, live Hindu priestess divine the sex of one’s unborn child – surely, it must carry some weight…), she took a step back, a confused look on her face.

“Or, is it a girl?” she said, somewhat more quietly this time.

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CHICAGO, IL -

My first child is due tomorrow, but who knows if it’ll make an appearance though.

Could see its shadow, could not.

Could be too pleased in its warm liquidy blanket to even make it to the mouth of the cave, to be coerced from its cage, to be held up by the mayor, or to be anything else that’s a terrible metaphor for the baby birthing through Claire’s vagina.

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BEND, OR-

I just licked that big, all-consuming yellow envelope that holds, in its hopefully safe confines, my newest poetry manuscript. To be sent to an interested publisher in New York, a land almost as far, far away as Paris.

These are the first poems I’ve written in seven years. The first poems I’ve written that seem like grown-up, adult poems. (No, not adult in that way.)

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