2003 / 2004 / 2005 / 2006 / 2009
Imaginary Lover
A few years ago when I started losing my mind (as if I wanted to keep it), I started creating a romantic history for myself more prodigious, more varied, and more fulfilling that the series of one-night stands, half-life stands, Potemkin relationships, and vigorous masturbation that comprised my schlong's biography. The substandardness of my life, particularly my sex life, had grown so intolerable and so insurmountable that I had to do something; at the time, historical revisionism seemed preferable to attempting suicide again. I'd convince myself and others that I'd been involved with certain women, usually women I've known throughout my life, sometimes totally fictitious women, sometimes women who were more-or-less equal parts fact and fiction...such as (in the third category) the girl to whom I'd allegedly lost my virginity, my very first faux fuck partner, whom I created one night sitting alone in my apartment, watching Daliesque distended body parts on a scrambled porn channel, downing a six-pack of Rolling Rock and (out of some obligation I felt I had as a loser) trying to cry, not having fucked anyone in real life in eight months, if you count that handjob behind Chubsterz Bar from a bored yuppie woman I'd never see again.
Anyway, I allegedly lost my virginity in 1988 at age 15 to Hala Clemons, a black girl the same age who shared my fourth-period Classic American Literature class in high school. She had dark skin, an hourglass figure and the largest, deepest brown eyes ever; during the requisite loss-of-virginity stories women and I would swap after our first hump sessions, I'd say that her eyes were like powerful magnets that attracted me to her, that I had to grasp onto the sides of my desk or I'd float over to her, the toes of my sneakers scraping the ground. Plus she was the only person in school, other than me, who wore You Meddling Kids! T-shirts, YMK! being a sarcastic, pseudointellectual, pseudorock band from Spokane popular at the time among sarcastic, pseudointellectual, pseudorock fans.
A black girl named Hala Clemons really did share that class with me, but she had light skin, a boyish figure, and eyes the size of Xanax (the first substance I would ever intentionally overdose on ten years later, by the way, and the first I would ever unintentionally puke up all over my vintage Donkey Kong Jr. bedspread--never mix pills and cheap Mexican takeout). Plus she wore Eddie Teddie T-shirts, Eddie Teddie being a rosy-cheeked cartoon teddy bear whose stomach sported a lopsided crucifix design. The real Hala was a Jesus freak who was almost expelled from school for distributing Eddie Teddie religious tracts (with titles such as EVOLUTION: TOO MUCH MONKEY BUSINESS?) to the heathens in her home-ec class.
Despite all that, I still wanted to fuck her, just as I wanted to fuck every other not-too-hideous girl with a pulse.
November 29, 2004
My Actual Dream Last Night
Winter day. I work for some sort of publication. My boss, whom I never see in the dream, has locked the back door to my office and left. I have to write and draw a two-page comic-book story about the comic-book artist Daniel Clowes. I stare at the pages with their rows of empty panels on my drawing board. I can't think of any ideas, so I decide to leave. My POV: as I try sneaking out the front of the building (the same building where I work in real life), a dalmatian runs toward me and puts its front paws on me and sticks its tongue in my ear. The dream goes black, then my friend Lauren speaks in a voice not really hers: "You're going with me to that occupational therapy seminar. I'm going to stick with you all week. I can be demented, delirious, and casual. And a woman."
November 24, 2004--previously unposted
Stink, Stank, Stunk: Actual E-mail Exchange Today between DVM and His Friend Gordon
DVM: "Quick survey: Why do comic strips stink, and how can we improve them?"
Gordon: "i prefer cinnamon for odor cover-ups. yes. cook them in cinnamon until they are a pulpy mush. then hurl the molten gob out the window."
October 24, 2004
Now He Tells Us!
On October 19, Pat Robertson said on the CNN show Paula Zahn Now that he had talked with George W. Bush before the U.S. invasion of Iraq last year.
"I had deep misgivings about this war, deep misgivings," Robertson said. "And I was trying to say 'Mr. President, you had better prepare the American people for casualties.'"
According to Robertson, Bush had replied "Oh, no, we're not going to have any casualties."
Referring to the war, Robertson said "[T]he Lord told me it was going to be (a) a disaster and (b) messy."
Nevertheless, Robertson thought Bush would win the November 2 election because "the blessing of heaven is on Bush."
Some 1,100-plus dead American soldiers and thousands of dead Iraqis later, Robertson reveals his prewar "deep misgivings." What a brave, moral, honest man. What if he had recounted before the war his conversation with Bush, and Bush's clueless response?
What if Robertson had revealed before the war the Lord's misgivings?
And why would the Lord tell this to Robertson and not to Bush?
And why would the Lord still support Bush, the creator of such a messy disaster?
The above entry first appeared, in slightly different form, as a letter in the Beaver County Times on October 24, 2004. Reprinted by permission.
Octoberish 2004
Answer This, Anti-Semites:
If the Jews control the world, then why hasn't the United Nations honored Jewish actor/director Ron Jeremy for his humanitarian work in Uzbekistan teaching impoverished young men and women the finer points of snowballing, an actual sexual practive involving two partners (at least one of them male), semen, saliva, and nothing very entertaining on TV?
The above entry was originally more sexually explicit; I toned it down because I didn't know how well certain blog readers could handle the, heh heh, blow-by-blow details. Thanks to my friend Lauren for telling me about snowballing.--DVM, 8/12/05
July 2, 2004--previously unposted
Today, One Minute Before Quitting Time
Kathy: "Why are you always in such a hurry to leave?"
DVM: "I like the job so much, I want to get home to prepare myself for the next day."
--conversation between coworkers, 5:59 PM
February 4, 2004--previously unposted
Salud!
Kathy: "I had a boss who used to have two drinks at once: Rolling Rock and cranberry juice."
Nancy: "Yum."
Kathy: "One day he said 'Hey Kath, make me a drink I haven't had before.' I said 'How abaht a glass of milk?'"
--conversation between two of my coworkers today, 10:52 AM (Kathy has an obvious Pittsburgh accent, hence the "abaht.")
Sometime during 2004--fiction
Bad Writers USA: Kandi Phannenstill
Sophomore business education major at the University of Nebraska at Kearney, whose final project in May 2003 for Expository Writing II, a 59-page paper titled "That Carnival of Concupiscence: The Mid-Twentieth Century Postromantic Voice in Clifford Lee Herbert's White Line Down the Highway (A Sort of Memoir)," caused her to fail the course. She had maintained a hard-fought if tenuous C in it up until then. Her tendency to procrastinate had worsened after her lupus scare a few months earlier; as a result, she had written the paper over the two days before the due date, in a frenzy fueled by Krispy Kreme donuts, Red Bull energy drinks and generic caffeine supplements. Her instructor, Dr. Marsha Randolphs, sent her a 538-word e-mail the day she failed her, calling the paper "the ne plus ultra of academic thievery--an obvious and almost complete plagiarism of Dr. Asa Gilkerson's well-known article of the same title in Text Internationale Quarterly, Fall 1996," an article Ms. Phannenstill could not remember having ever read, at least on-line, where she had done all her research between chuckling over the Rate the Roadkill website. The e-mail went on to list a dozen similarities "out of countless ones" between the two sources--e.g., "Gilkerson, p. 43: 'the underlying significance of Lorna Lou's merkin qua narrative impetus.' You, p. 46: 'the underlying significance of Lorna Lou's merkin que [sic] narrative impetus.'" Ms. Phannenstill left college two days later, moved back into her parents' house in Kearney and started work as a junior executive secretary/fellator at Gelman Feed. In March 2004, her 12-page essay "Red Bull and No Bull" appeared in Generation J: Young Adults Born Again in the Midwest (Omaha: u-print.com), an essay she had intentionally plagiarized in part from Allie Duncan's "Majoring in Sin" in Freshword: Young People Return to Christ (Lincoln: Nimbus House, 1987).
Sometime during 2004--fiction
Bad Writers USA: Scott Sultran
Intranet consultant (age 32) in Olympia, Washington, whose 246-word e-mail to his live-in girlfriend of two years, freelance outsourcing advisor Errin Schur (age 31), proclaiming his "never-ending, never-changing" love for her and "really, really, really" apologizing for having copulated with, and been defecated more or less into his mouth by, her sister, corporate financial overseer Cheryle Schur-Lanthier (age 40), eight Saturday afternoons in a row at the Glass Castle Motel, failed to prevent the demise of his relationship with Ms. Schur four days later, a demise involving screaming on her part, hyperventilating on his part, and regret on Ms. Schur-Lanthier's part over not having had diarrhea when "feeding that shithead, get it?"
Author's note, 8/3/05
On March 14, 2005, my old website Pixel Stupor disappeared after over four years of entertaining its tens of fans with humorous, warmhearted vignettes about the suburban swingers' scene, particularly about the boisterous m�nage � trois involving Morris Bickerton (the local State Farm rep), Jackie Rosenberg (one of Avon's top saleswomen in the tri-state area), Gina Corano (wife of up-and-coming Jennercorp executive Kenneth Corano), and that ten-inch vibrator Gina had borrowed from Father MacKenzie.
My service provider had terminated Pixel Stupor with no warning because I'd allegedly committed some still-unspecified violation of the Terms of Service.
Unfortunately, all of my 2004 blog no longer exists because I'd neglected to create a copy of it. (Several other pages from my site have vanished forever, too, for the same reason.) Though my missing blog counts as no great loss compared to, say, Erma Bombeck's lost essay about that nosepicking mime from Liverpool who anally deflowered Morris Bickerton (using Vaseline) behind the stage during Sha Na Na's set at Woodstock, I still feel as if my children have disappeared--awkward, solipsistic, sometimes barely-coherent children, but children nonetheless whom I spent countless hours raising, as in writing and rewriting and rewriting again in lieu of endlessly rewatching my 4-disc DVD set of the compete run of one of America's most beloved situation comedies, Pinecorner Acres, the show playing in the background when Morris's wife Sheila bit the navel of elderly Tupperware tycoon Hattie Haspel during soixante-neuf.
Anyway, I have attempted to reconstruct my 2004 blog above from memory and from my scattered notes, which I'd often write at work while pretending to devote my undivided attention to completing important banal projects for my employer.
Blog or Home or nonstop pop-culture references.
� 2005 David V. Matthews