Thanksgiving with a bang

It's difficult for me to pick just one post from Thanksgiving now that I'm back in the land of internet connectivity. It was a great 2-1/2 days.

I never used to care much one way or the other for Thanksgiving, being wedged in between my favorite holiday (Halloween), my birthday, and Christmas. But the past couple of years, it's worked its way up the list, maybe because my family dinner is always "if you're not doing anything else, stop on by" casual, or maybe because it's the only time I ever get a 4-day weekend to do whatever the hell I want without burning precious vacation days.

I think, though, that my favorite picture of many from the holiday is from the shopping excursion my sister and I made. Neither of us care much for shopping, and we sure as hell weren't going anywhere near Wal-mart on the day after Thanksgiving, but nonetheless, I had a few things to pick up, namely, RV antifreeze (to winterize the farmhouse) and firestarters (also for the farmhouse). (To start a fire in the wood stove, not to light the house itself on fire.)

So, after we burned off about 1/2 piece of pumpkin pie at the Y, we crossed the street to the liquor store for a 6-pack, then went to Tractor Supply Co. Words can scarcely describe my love for that store, but this should help:



That's right, 8 feet of empty (I think) Winchester shotgun shells, all festive and lit up for the holly-days! It's gonna be a helluva Christmas!

i had a ball!

If you've stopped by Chez Pez lately, you know that Friday night was Tonic Ball.

The night went great. I poured wine at Tonic Gallery before the show and raked in $74 in tips to donate, which made me feel better since I couldn't afford to bid on the art. The music, as Jerry said, rawked. (It was great to meet you, Jerry!) I could do a post just on the music, but I suspect Nora will do a better job of covering that.

What I will cover is the men. Good god, they were everywhere. Deputy Joe, Bob Sanders, Dead-to-Me, plus a multitude of minor characters and some really great guys that I am lucky to call my friends.

One guy I'd never seen before walked up to me and started dancing with me (it wasn't even Drinky Bear), and--get this--could actually dance! Before I knew it I was being whirled, spun, and dipped all over the place. Then he bought me a Jagerbomb. With surprising clarity, I guessed where that whole scene was headed (nowhere good), and fled. After I drank the Jagerbomb, of course.

Deputy Joe looked super-hot with freshly grown stubble, but was in full self-absorption mode. Dead-to-Me was wearing a sling from having shoulder surgery. Nora accidentally hit him on his bad arm. Thanks, Nora!

And Bob Sanders fell down at my feet. Literally.

I first saw him outside Radio Radio waiting in line. He explained he was limping because he'd had an accident. Pressing further, I determined that "accident" was actually a euphemism for "bar fight."

The next time I saw him he was fubar. His friends, no doubt with a wisdom born of experience, had abandoned him. He said something, the exact memory of which was erased by what happened next, and I gave him a playful shove.

Possibly due to the injury from his "accident," but more likely due to mass quantities of alcohol, he fell on the floor in the bar. Nora moved in to see if it was time to kick him out. I helped him up and apologized. "My bad leg!" he shouted. "You owe me a blow job for that!"

Oh-kayyy...

Now, I stopped falling for the "you owe me a blow job" line sometime around 1988. That also might be the last time I heard it. Bob Sanders gets this month's "these people can't be serious" gold medal for shocking me to the point of speechlessness.

This morning I ignored a 9 a.m. (4 hours after I got home) text from him offering to make some "killer pancakes."

Let's take a moment to review what I now know about Bob Sanders: he desperately wants to marry and breed, he is "accident" prone, and he loudly demands blow jobs when he's really drunk. It's clear that any smart woman would stay far, far away from him. But me, well, I'd say odds are better than even that sooner or later I will sample those killer pancakes.

But back to last night. After the music wrapped up, I closed down a saloon in the bad part of town with some of Dead-to-Me's friends. Then I gave Dead-to-Me's neighbor (who also happens to be his best friend) a ride home, and a cop caught us making out in the alley in back of his house.

Making out with the neighbor/friend of a guy I dated for 5 months may seem like an odd thing to do, but a) he's hot, and b) it furthers my mission to prove that Dead-to-Me is an idiot. You see, his friends already like me a lot, and must suspect that Dead-to-Me was stupid to dump me, but now...well, now at least one of them has some idea of the full scope of reasons why Dead-to-Me will never do better than me.

all by myself

One of these days I'm gonna have to figure out how to do all this fancy Internets stuff so I can pimp my blog.

Today, for instance, I'd hunt down an audio clip of that godawful song in the title.

You see, my house is empty today. The ex called while I was working my weekend gig Friday night to see if he could have Big Head Dog and the Monster for a few days. It took every ounce of self-restraint I have (which is about 4 ounces anyway) to not say, would it have killed you to ask me that a couple of weeks ago when the Greek refused to come to my house because my "vee-cious 10-headed beast" (that would be Big Head Dog) would've tried to attack him when he got within 10 feet of my bedroom?

And he's not even the guy who Big Head Dog bit in the ass.

Anyhoo, I kept my mouth shut, packed the boys' suitcase (actually an empty Trader Joe's bag) and took them to their dad's for a long weekend yesterday. And the roommate's gone for the weekend, too.

I'm shocked to find I'm completely discombobulated by all this. I don't know what to do with myself. There are no furry creatures interrupting me every 5 minutes for their favorite game, Inside Vs. Outside, and there's no one sitting on my sofa watching television and distracting me with valuable insights into the latest episode of America's Next Top Model. It's going to drive me to do something completely wacky, like clean.

I planned to get an early start on the day, but of course I didn't come straight home after work last night, like I'd planned to. I stopped by the friendly neighborhood tavern (it is, after all, on the way home), and it's a good thing I did. Otherwise, I would have missed the first meeting of the Crabby Club.

I also would have missed important discourse on topics such as programming home thermostats and whether or not the theme song to Baywatch had words, and if so, did David Hasselhoff sing them?

I also would have missed the Marines birthday party, where a bunch of ex-Marines, average age 68.2, drank a lot and periodically broke into increasingly distressed versions of "Halls of Montezuma." You couldn't miss 'em--they were the big group with the big red USMC flag duct-taped to the wall (Crabby Club--do we need a flag?). I actually got saluted on my way to pee.

warning: introspection ahead

This morning I heard a poem on Writer's Almanac that sums up so much of what I feel like I'm going through, and what I'm hearing so much of from my friends.

There's more to it, but this is the part that nearly had me driving into the back of parked cars on my way to work this morning. It's called "The Necessary Brevity of Pleasures," and it's by by Samuel Hazo.

Prolonged, they slacken into pain
or sadness in accordance with the law
of apples.
One apple satisfies.
Two apples cloy.
Three apples
glut.
Call it a tug-of-war between enough and more
than enough, between sufficiency
and greed, between the stay-at-homers
and globe-trotting see-the-worlders.
Like lovers seeking heaven in excess,
the hopelessly insatiable forget
how passion sharpens appetites
that gross indulgence numbs.
Result?
The haves have not
what all the have-nots have
since much of having is the need
to have.

It gets at what I've been struggling with for the past two years, on and off (mostly on). All-consuming fire vs. numbing ice. Too much vs. not enough. The unsustainability of passion, vs. a total absence thereof.

I spent much of the last weekend remembering what I had forgotten, all the things I really liked about my previous life, when I was Good. There was a lot to like. Stability, peace, calmness. But when you're being Bad, it's no surprise when things go wrong and tears flow and hearts break. When you're Good and things go wrong anyway, it hurts much more.

oh, what a night

Yesterday was Election Day. And while I don't want to get all preachy and shit, suffice to say things did not turn out as I hoped they would here in Naptown.

What made it ever so slightly better is that I ended up spending the evening with people of like mind. The friendly neighborhood tavern turned into the midtown satellite office of the county party HQ. As despondent as I was, there were people there with a whole lot more to lose than my tenuous connections in the administration.

With each glass of wine, someone would bring up something else.

"What about the arts? What will happen to the murals downtown?"

"Forget about ever getting the SuperBowl."

"What's going to happen with the stadium and convention center expansion?"

"Who the hell is going to run the city???"

If my head didn't still hurt, I'd be even more despondent today.

them's my people

Saturday was my birthday. The first phone call was at 9 a.m., from my brother-in-law. I figured he was calling to wake me up and wish me a happy birthday. I didn't answer it, as I was still in bed and in no mood to converse.

Instead of birthday greetings, however, I had the following message. How could I not be in a good mood the rest of the day?

(delivered in a thick Southern Indiana drawl)
"This is your favorite brother-in-law. I don't know if your sister told you she broke my rib. She ran over me with the golf cart on Halloween night. I figured she might be too embarrassed to tell you. You should give her a call later today and ask her about it. Bye."

Wha? Hooo hooo ha haaaaa!

un-fucking-believable

Mother of god.

To recap the past 24 hours:

The Greek and I did indeed get to share a glass of wine before he left, along with friends who were in a Halloweenie festive mood. The "and....um....uh" turned out to be some really great conversation after the friends moved on for the night, about art and life and our personal demons--all the good shit that makes me want to move somewhere like, oh, I dunno, Seattle and spend my days at a cafe drinking wine and smoking cigarettes and writing great literature.

Not that he didn't try to talk me into fucking him in the parking lot behind the friendly neighborhood tavern, but hey, I live here, he doesn't. I'm in that place waaayyy too much to have that kind of story floating around.

Wow, I DO have inhibitions! Who knew?

Anyhoo, what with the Greek hangover and all, I decided to blow off responsibility for at least another day and skip tonight's meeting of the group I volunteer in with Bob Sanders. I wasn't really in the mood to deal with that.

Of course, the group called me to see if I was going to be there. Dammit.

As I pulled into the parking lot, I remembered that I was supposed to be bringing minutes from the last meeting to discuss, the ones with, oh, the group's mission statement and goals and objectives, you know, mildly important things like that.

I went in and sat down. Someone asked about the goals from the last meeting, then everyone looked at me.

I searched my mind frantically for a plausible and rock-solid excuse. Something like, "I've been called in by the head of the C.I.A. to work on a top-secret project. I'd love to tell you more, but I'd have to kill you. I'm fresh from a meeting with several heads of state, and that's why I don't have the minutes."

Nope. "I.....uhh.....I've had...um...... *sigh*.... I've had my head up my ass."

I'm pretty sure when they form the board, they will create a "Court Jester" position just for me.

As I was suffering through the rest of the meeting, I got a text message. From V.P. That's right, Pregnant Girlfriend Guy.

At least he texted. If he'd called, my phone (which I of course forgot to turn off) would have blared "Let's Get It On" at top volume, and I would have had to resign from the group immediately.

"Hey...I sent out a press release today...it should be big tomorrow...need some feedback...this is V. The one you had the most ridiculous sex with."

WTF? Seriously?? Does he have some kind of fucking radar? He entered my life last spring within days of when the Greek did. One week I was being wholly indecent in the front seat of PGG's SUV in a bar parking lot, the next week I was spending the most mind-blowing 24 hours of my life at the farm with the Greek. Is my life on some kind of fucked-up, twisted loop of foreign men with sexy bodies and the minds of 14-year-olds?

So I responded, "Why yes, I remember you...Looking forward to seeing the big news."

And then, "Is it good memories?"

Well, let's see. Good memories of what? The admittedly ridiculously good sex, or of the screaming matches in the parking lot of his apartment? The smooth, brown, sculpted chest, or the jealousy and possessiveness? The Sunday afternoons playing tennis and eating sushi, or the buckets of tears?

I opted for honesty. "Of the ridiculously good sex, yes."

Mistake. Subtlety is obviously not his strong suit.

PGG: "Where are you? Want some fun?"

No fucking way. I don't need this shit.

B.I.G.: "Fun for me tonight is jammies and puppies. I'm sure you'll find something to do."

PGG: "Like you?"

Mother fucker, he's persistent! Like a goddamn yapping chihuahua!

B.I.G. "Probably not a good idea."

Finally, silence. Sweet Jesus, it's been 14 months since I dumped him! Since then I've run into him exactly 3 times, once with a perky brunette on his arm. Isn't there some sort of statute of limitations on a booty call??

In addition to inhibitions, I apparently also have some brains. It's just been a regular fucking day of mother fucking self-discovery.