Nude Underwear!

I remember going to my junior high prom more than any other dance of my scholastic career. It may have been because it was the first dance I'd ever gone to. Or that I loved every song and danced to every one. Even when none of my friends would dance the one slow dance with me, so I asked the amazingly hoTT (with two capital T's) DJ to dance with me instead. (Good gawd he was cute, and a good dancer.) But what I remember even more than the dance itself was getting ready for it.

I wasn't going to go when I'd first heard about it. I didn't even go to that school anymore, my ex was going to be there with his new girlfriend. I'd never been interested in going to school dances before. It wasn't even something I'd contemplated. But then my best friend's boyfriend couldn't go, and she'd already bought two tickets. She cried, and I caved.

My mom, Opera Mom, was stoked. The dance started in three hours, and we rushed to the mall to get me a dress, shoes, the works. In just and hour and a half, we'd bought me the cutest red dress and strappy red heels. I was going to look hotter than any of the other girls there (just to make my ex jealous). 'Cept there was one problem.

My dress was entirely see-through.

Opera Mom had a solution though. Flesh-colored underwear! Genius! A ninth grader in see-through dress wearing flesh-colored underwear looks a lot like a ninth grader in a see-through dress wearing no underwear. Looking back on it, I can see why the DJ danced with me.... and I did make my ex-boyfriend jealous!

What would Don Tolman say about this?

Because this blog doesn't load slow enough for dial-up users.



What could these strange ingredients be used for, I wonder.



That's where I keep my shoes.



Some sort of medieval torture device?



Samonela! Call the paramedics!



Good Morning little boy! What would you like to have to eat while you watch your Saturday morning cartoons?



"Cupcakes please!"



Wash your hands first!



Read the directions and preheat the oven. (Take out the shoes first!!!)



Do these paper baking cups make me look fat?


Add all the wet ingredients...



And it will look like this. Do not drink.

How's that oven doing? Preheated yet?



Add the dry ingredents...

Perhaps we should have used a bigger bowl.



I didnt' spill a drop!

Now that it's all mixed together, we can separate the goo into cupcake sized cups.



I did this all left-handed, so you could see what I was doing in each photo. I'm right-handed, so please excuse the mess.

Into the oven! Who left my flip flops in there?!

It may not look like it, but it's hot in there.

While the cupcakes bake...



Not yet Mr. J!

White icing tastes gross.



But colored icing tastes fantastic! (That was not meant to sound racist, I swear!)



Pink icing, yum.

The cupcakes have finished baking.. and it looks like they got fat in there. Are they pregnant perhaps?



Naked cupcakes... put some icing on.



Naked cupcakes are an affront against God.



And we don't want to piss the big guy off.

Breakfast's ready!

Seven Dead Babies

Losing things

I lost my phone this weekend. Don't worry, I found it.. in my car. But probably the suckiest part of losing your only phone, is how often you think to yourself, I'll just call my phone and follow the ringtone! That's a great idea, I'll just use my phone to call... my... phone... and wait a minute.... I'm an idiot.

And that was my weekend folks. This post was brought to you by:

Stem Cell Research

Finding a cure for Alzheimer's one dead baby at a time.

When did I start knowing how to do this stuff?

It's coming, oh yes, it's coming. My first ever vlog. (Video Blog... c'mon Mom, keep up!) Are you excited? Scared? Perhaps you should be.

Don't put these on your resume.

Things I have said in the past 24 hours that made sense at the time:

If I were a monkey, I'd throw poo at you.

Hooray for herpes!

Ex-Circus Performer Seeking Desk Job - can type 128 wpm with toes!

You did not write "The Stinky Cheese Man."

To all the strawberry-flavored pirates out there.

This weekend, I wrote about going to see a show that I had been waiting a long time to see. Now I want to tell you another story about a show that I had been waiting a long time to see. (I also wrote about this on Linda Strawberry's Strawberry-Flavored Blog, a collaborative blog that I'm moonlighting on. I'll post a link once it's a little less green.)

Last year Pirates of the Caribbean 3: At World's End came out and everyone was fighting for opening night tickets. By using bribes, sexual favors and a cunning use of Fandango, I managed to get my hands on five tickets. It was my friend, Bethamphetamine's birthday, and I was going to take her and three other friends to the movie. But first, we decided to party like true pirates, with lots and lots of rum.

Actually, no one else had any rum, we all had to drive to the theater, but I was Bethamphetamine's ride, so she drank rum, lots and lots of rum. She drank at my apartment, she snuck a flask in the car, and she even filled a liter of rum into a Coca-Cola bottle to sneak into the movie theater.

At exactly the hour-mark of the movie, Bethamphetamine was asleep. Passed out, slouched down in her seat, and missing the most popular movie of the summer. The night would have ended well, if she had stayed asleep. But I am sad to say that she didn't.

About an hour and fifteen minutes into the movie, she woke up. And as many people who have experienced a night of alcohol bingeing know, her stomach was turning itself inside trying to figure out how to rid itself of the poison flooding all the organs.

She started puking. I don't mean just head-between-the-knees, vomiting-on-the-floor either. She threw up all over the two rows of seats directly in front of her.

We left immediately, I'm sure even if we hadn't the management would have asked us to leave. I still feel horribly for the people she hit. Two of our friends stayed, they weren't hit, had brought their own cars so stayed to see the end of the movie. They reported that no one but us left the theater. The victims stayed, sticky and smelly through the rest of the movie.

That's dedication to being a true pirate.

Like I needed an excuse for a sing-a-long.

It's no secret. I like musicals. Rodgers & Hammerstein. Gilbert & Sullivan. I adored them in the same way kids adored Bert & Ernie. (I love them too, but they have fewer songs on my iPod.) I don't care if it's a new musical, an old musical, a new version of an old musical; if it's about romance, comedy, horror, a human-eating plant, ancient mummies, or a cashier at the grocery store. A world where people can spontaneously burst into song and dance is a world I would like to live in.

That being said, yesterday, joined by my family, Mr. J, and two almost-strangers who wanted the two extra tickets I bought, I finally got to see Spamalot. Silly men, dancing 'round in tights with Spamalot showgirls, excellent family viewing.

Happy Baby's Daddy Day!

SPAM is a registered trademark of Hormel Food Corporation.

Lizard Tails

It figures that right before the Duke City's big Gay Pride weekend, my girlfriend would pack up and move to Denver.


Selfish, SELFISH!

As I've told her before, it feels a lot like I've had my left arm amputated. Not my right arm, because I can still wield a pencil just fine. I keep thinking I can just walk across the hall at work and talk to her at her desk. It's an phantom itch I can't scratch, because the limb isn't even there anymore.

It's tough when people move, the adjustment period is unsettling. I haven't pooed since Thursday, not as unsettling as it is uncomfortable. Not that i ever poo, that's gross. Girls don't do that.

Lizards can grow their tails back if it gets lost. So if your friend, named Lizard, removes your arm when she moves, will it grow back?

Being antisocial is hydrating.

I am antisocial. Yes, I have friends, a few chosen few. But in general, I don't interaction with flesh and blood people. Give them a screen name, a crappy self-taken picture and I can be best buds with anyone. But surrounded by a group of strangers out in the real world, I will dutifully ignore them. (Didn't your mother ever teach you, not to talk to strangers?)

And for the most part, ignoring them works well for me. Usually they are doing the same thing to me. It's almost as we are ghost from an alternate dimension and the areas we are both respectively occupying are overlapped universes. But occasionally I end up meeting one of these strangers. (Can you ever really meet a stranger? Because once you meet them, they're not a stranger. Perhaps strange, but not a stranger.)

Once you've met, you become "acquaintances". Not strangers, not friends, but something in between. This is much, much worse in my opinion. You can't ignore an acquaintance. That would be rude. If you see them in the hallway, you have to acknowledge that you see the, that you are aware of their existence. But what if the acquaintance takes your acknowledgement (be it be a nod, a wave, a butt sniff, a smile, a hello, whatever) as an invitation to start a conversation.

Good gawd, why would they do that? You don't know them well enough to talk to them. You don't know how well they will react to all the weird bile that spurts out of your mouth in the form of words, sentences and small talk. What will they say to your question, "Have you seen the ass cannon on YouTube?" Acquaintances are much more dangerous than strangers.

My current solution is this.

A one gallon water bottle. I carry it with me everywhere, making sure to keep it full by refilling it constantly. What to know how it works? Here's an example:

I'm walking through the hallway at work. I see someone I know, just a little, approaching. I wave and immediately take a swig of water.

That way, they don't say a word to me, because my mouth is full and I can't reply. They just return the wave and keep on walking.

Sure it makes me seem like some sort of water obsessed freak. But I'm okay with that. And at least I'm staying hydrated.

Things to mention if I ever have to give my brother's eulogy

When I was a little kid, Radio Active Slog (my twin brother) and I once had a huge argument about cookies. They were chocolate chip, we had a huge plate of them and we were sharing them. Oh, and they were imaginary.

We got into a fight about the imaginary chocolate chip cookies, because it took me three bites to eat each cookie, while it only took him one. I don't remember who started the fight, and why. Was it that my cookies were bigger? Was it that Radio Active Slog was eating more cookies? I may never know. But the way the story goes is that after hearing my brother and I fighting Opera Mom, our mother, took away the imaginary cookies, and the imaginary plate they were on, threw the imaginary cookies in the trash and put the imaginary plate in the sink to be washed later.

Ode to Zuppa Toscana

This is the Zuppa Toscana soup from Olive Garden. The picture may not seem that impressive, but this soup is a God in my country. I want to marry this soup. If I could figure out how, I would make love to this soup. Given enough time, I would eat nothing but this soup for hours. This soup is what inspired the Romans to create vomitoria. Just so they could eat the soup until they got sick, puke, and go back to the dinner table and eat more soup. Since I know I someday have to die, I hope that it's because I have drowned in a large vat of this soup. I want an Olympic sized swimming pool full of this soup. Giving the Grim Reaper his chance, I know, but it's worth the risk. I would walk 5000 miles, or buy 5000 miles worth of gas for any one's car, for this soup. If I ever find myself on death row, hours before execution, I want my last meal to be this soup. I wish I could eat nothing but this soup for the rest of my life.

You, reading this, right now. I don't care if you're not hungry, or if you just had this soup for lunch. Go out, right now, and get yourself a bowl of this soup. Preferably a gallon-sized bowl of this soup. This potato-sausage-kale soup is a gift from the heavens, and will bring about world peace. Go eat some. Tell your friends and family to go eat some too. And we'll all be able to get along finally.

I'd like to buy the world a home and furnish it with love
Grow apple trees and honey bees, and snow white turtle doves
I'd like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony
I'd like to buy the world a bowl of Zuppa Toscana and keep it company
It's the real thing, Zuppa Toscana is what the world wants today.

Suicidal EXCLUSIVE

I am still sick, but luckily for you all, I still have things to share. This time, I have to shine the spotlight not on myself, but my father. Nameless Dad has his own blog. (It's mostly a political blog.) I would like to think that after reading a few entries in his, any reader of mine would quickly see the similarities in our humor, writing style, and general attitudes towards life. But that would be giving me way too much credit. Sure he refuses to post a measly link to my blog on his (he has standards), but he is a pretty rad dude. And he recently gave up his "hippie lifestyle" in an effort to support the Barrett House Foundation. Check it out below, or go directly to his blog: Nameless Cynic (I didn't ask for permission to copy his post, but maybe he won't notice.)

Bald? Not really.

You know, it's strange. I seem to have started shaving my head.

Now, let me be clear about one thing. I'm not going bald. (Wow. That really sounds like somebody going bald trying to justify their decision, doesn't it?)

But I'm not. I still have a full head of hair. If anything, it grows too well. You see, I normally don't pay attention to my hair. It's that stuff on top of my head that I ignore, for the most part. I wash it in the morning, I brush it, and then I leave it alone.

But now I'm shaving it. Plus, I got an earring. So either I'm not comfortable with my masculinity, or I'm going through a midlife crisis. Which means that next, I've got to buy a sports car and start picking up women in bars.

Christ, I don't want a sports car! Lousy mileage, and I can only imagine how much my insurance would go up.

See, I left the military right after John Kerry admitted defeat. Since then, I think I've gotten two haircuts. My wife, as it turns out, grew up on a college campus in the Sixties and Seventies, and prefers longer hair. So I, being the dutiful husband that I am, let my hair grow out. You might or might not know, but the Air Force insisted that I get it cut roughly every month or so, to keep it from looking shaggy. So I did. I never really thought about it. It was just something I did. Since I left the military and now work in a hospital, I didn't have to get my hair cut every eight weeks, like clockwork. In fact, maybe I let it grow a little too long.

And from what I can tell, I'm the only person who doesn't pay attention to my hair.

So, almost two months ago, one of my co-workers asked a question that would prove to be important. Ericka Acosta, one of our Human Resources ladies, asked "So what's the deal with the hair? Are you protesting something?"

I'd never thought about it like that. I mean, I saw Hair. I've heard the title song from that play (umm... for those of you who didn't work that one out on your own, that would be "Hair," which was a hit for the Cowsills in 1969). I remember at least two versions of the song "Signs," (the original, by the Five Man Electrical Band, and later by Tesla, for their Five Man Acoustical Jam) where the first verse goes:

And the sign said "Long-haired freaky people need not apply"
So I tucked my hair up under my hat and I went in to ask him why
He said "You look like a fine upstanding young man, I think you'll do"
So I took off my hat, I said "Imagine that. Me! Workin' for you!"

But I never thought of growing my hair as a protest to anything. (Except maybe the price of haircuts. That seems pretty obvious.)

But I filed my retirement papers in early 2004. And I've had a couple of haircuts since then, but in the last two years, I think I've only had one. Not because I didn't need one, but because I just don't think about it. At least, not my own: I'll admire a nice head of hair on somebody else, I'll make fun of a stupid hairstyle, but for the most part, I don't think about the unshorn shrubbery on top of my own skull. It just doesn't interest me that much.

But "are you protesting something?" was exactly the question asked by Ms. Acosta. I hadn't thought about it like that. And it seemed like a good opportunity. So I decided to make a fund-raiser out of it. I set up a quick flyer: the first attempt had a tie-dyed background and read:

Shave the hippie!
Let your inner 1960’s Young Republican run free!
You’ve seen him wandering the halls with his unshorn locks, and you know you want to teach him a lesson!
For every $1 donated, you get one chance to be the one to run the clippers over his patchouli-scented head!
If you don’t want to do it yourself, you can either volunteer another barber, or you can have our handy staff of Chief Administrators do it (and trust me, they’ve been waiting for this moment for far too long).
See ___people__ to buy a chance to run the clippers
The ceremonial shaving will be held at ___time__ on ___date__ in the cafeteria

That didn't go over too well. Basically, we have this doctor who's got fairly long hair, and some concern was expressed that people might think that we were talking about him. So that one went down in flames.

My next choice was more obviously not about Dr Dorf (yes, that's his name). I took pictures of myself, and went with a more self-deprecating attitude. (I won't even try to format the thing - it was a letter-sized poster with the pictures down one side, if you're seriously into layouts.)

No sense of style

No fashion sense

No peripheral vision

You’ve seen him wandering the halls.

You’ve asked "What’s the deal with the hair?"

BUT IF WE CAN RAISE AT LEAST $100 IN THREE DAYS TO HELP BARRETT HOUSE, HE WILL SHAVE HIS HEAD!

For every $1 donated, you get one chance to be the one to run the clippers over his head!

If you don’t want to do it yourself, you can either volunteer another barber, or you can have the handy staff from administration do it (and trust me, they’ve been waiting for this moment for a long time).

See ___people__ to buy a chance to run the clippers

(or to admire his fine head of hair for the last time)

The ceremonial shaving will be held in the cafeteria

at 2:30 p.m.

Friday, 16 May

All proceeds will be donated to the Barrett House, providing emergency and short-term shelter to homeless women and children.

At first, that had read "if we can raise $100 in a week" - then it read "less than a week." Finally, when I was starting to think that our CEO preferred the long-haired look, the approval came down. So I changed it to "in three days," and we went with it.

For the first two days, money rolled in relatively well. Along with a lot of people asking, "are you really going to do that?" I pulled in almost $90. And I had a lot of people who made snide little comments like "Hey, I'm going to make sure you're bald by tomorrow." The word "scalp" kept getting used - I'm not sure that everybody had my best interests at heart. But I even went out and bought a pair of clippers (here's one place where I cheated a little - I took $20 from the donations and paid for the clippers that way; hey, I may not be in a minimum-wage job, but I ain't rich, either).

On Friday morning, I sent out an email to all the department managers.

As I’ve been asked this question several times, I suppose an update is in order.

The challenge has been out for two days. At this point, we have not averaged fifty dollars per day. By all appearances, I will be going home tonight with the same amount of hair I came to work with.

Barrett House will still be getting the money. (Here’s a link to the Barrett House website.) And they may get the unopened clippers I bought last night, since I apparently won’t need them.

And perhaps in a month or two, somebody could teach me to braid my hair. That’s not a skill I ever needed before.

That worked moderately well in getting me some donations, but I thought I'd spend a little while drumming up business. I went to every person who'd made some kind of joke at my expense (OK, at the expense of my hair), and said "You know, you talked a lot of trash, but it's strange - there hasn't been a lot of money coming out of your department. I guess you like the long-haired look, don't you?"

This worked even better - I had a lot of people writing me checks on the spot. (OK, technically I had them write the checks to "Barrett House" - that seemed like the right way to deal with it.) And by a little after noon, I had over $300, all given by people hoping to see me go bald by the end of the day. And for every dollar donated, I had a roll of two-part tickets - one half went to the person as kind of a receipt that they couldn't use for their taxes (but we could do a manual recount later of anybody suspected wrongdoing - hey, we aren't Florida), and the other half went into a bowl, so we could draw the name of our lucky barber.

The stunning part happened around one o'clock. One of the anesthetists who works for the hospital (he actually commutes from his home in another state, so he's doing pretty well, I'm thinking) was waiting for me when I came back from lunch. He handed me a check, and said, "I just want to make sure that you get a haircut. I don't really want to cut it myself, though." And he walked away. Leaving me looking at a check for a thousand dollars.

I didn't know what to say. I was stunned. (I was also a little bit thankful that he didn't want tickets, because there weren't a thousand left on the roll.) I spent the next hour almost in shock, getting everything ready for end of the day.

At 2:15, I dialed the number to make an overhead announcement to the entire hospital. "Ladies and gentlemen, the barber will be in, in the smoking area, in fifteen minutes." (Technically, I was supposed to get permission from the boss before I used the overhead - I didn't. Feel free to arrest me. I have to admit, I still wasn't thinking clearly.)

All told, we raised $1,333 for the Barrett House.



Since then, I've had a surprisingly large number of women tell me I look good like this. Unfortunately for them, my wife doesn't like the shaved head look. And I have to admit, I don't think much of it either. I've had 2 weeks now, and still don't like the way it looks. Part of that might be psychological, of course: particularly in the military, most of the people who shaved their heads came in two categories:

1. Men who were going bald and weren't honest enough to admit it, and


2. Closet homosexuals who worked out way too much, flexed whenever they passed a mirror, and were generally setting themselves up to be dragged out of an airport restroom, loudly proclaiming how they just had a "wide stance."

So I'm most likely not going to be continuing to shave my head.



But my CEO, after she announced the final total, said to me, "So, you're going to let it grow back so we can do this again next year?"

Well, two things. First, I'm thinking that it might take two years to get to a length that people will pay to see cut off.

And second, I don't see how I'm ever going to be able to match one-and-a-third thousand dollars.

And, if you read this post on my blog instead of my father's, here's an "after" picture that he didn't include on his.

Super Awesome

I was going to tell you all about the super awesome time I had at the Isotopes game this Saturday. But then I was struck with a crippling disease called a... "cold"? So here's what I did last Saturday. I gardened in my back yard.

I found the head of a one-eyed doll. Which was weird.

Some kid had tossed a show into my yard too.



There were all kinds of bugs, ewww.

Even Vixen helped me clean up the yard.





Isn't it just beautiful?