My Life as a Swinger

I was skeptical at first that this place even existed. Is there really a business model that can keep a juggling and trapeze university on the outskirts of Phoenix solvent? Apparently so, as the place was still open for class on the Saturday morning I went. Granted, the term “university” has to be applied loosely – the “campus” is just a house, a dirt lot with the trapeze apparatus, and a dog named Bentley barking at intruders.  Although the experience was quite fun, I’m still not sure why there is a year-round demand by the citizens of Arizona for this kind of thing.

Furthermore, from the random sampling I took, the ratio of females to males was 20-1. Everyone including the trainers were quite nice though, so I can say with some certainty that the operation is gay-friendly. I am not counting the one other dude who looked like he had grudgingly taken an hour off from the internet to learn how to juggle over in the corner. Other than him, it was just me, the ladies (my friend Kristen and a group of mothers celebrating one’s 50^th birthday), and a few shirtless instructors. The fact they all eventually out-peezed me would not bother me (much).

I jumped right in with the rest of them – there was no preparation video or much instruction, really. Dylan the trapeze professor just gave a quick speech and did a quick demonstration of the tricks – leg hangs and back flips! The hardest part was climbing the tiny, steel ladder up to the platform (the rungs hurt my feet). The easiest part was crawling off the net (even though the rope hurt my feet). Indeed, swinging through the air was quite exhilarating and easy to pick up. I never got caught by one of the instructors, and I did not earn the diploma at the end of the session. Luckily, Kristen did, and thus we avoided the double shaming we would have suffered.

Of course, at the beginning of the day, visions of joining the circus were running through our heads. By the end, I was at having second thoughts. By the next day, sore and hungover, I was ready to return to normal life (note: being hungover was probably more related to a bender the night before than the trapeze). My friend, intoxicated by the weightless freedom of flying, or perhaps just convinced by the hunky teachers, wanted to continue. She is ready to drop out of school and hit the road! If I ever join her, though, it will probably be as a juggler… assuming I can find some time off from the internet.

Alaska Vacation Diary: Putting The AK Back in Hanakkah

I am not travelling to Alaska on assignment to experience Christmas with people who use the term “Baby Jesus” without irony or sarcasm. Or people who line their staircases with nutcrackers. I am here to spend it with friends, though I am surprised to find that I could easily write that piece. If anyone is reading this who is in the position to handout “assignments” please contact me, especially if it is paid.

One of my friends here is named Sara and she named her first baby after me – or, at least, the middle name. She swears it wasn’t a coincidence. Strange, since my only accomplishments of note I can think of are this blog and acing the “All The Countries in the World” test in 8th grade. I cannot get advertising for either.

The plane ride is good – I spend most of my time watching the season finale of Survivor on my phone. The older gentleman two seats away asks if I am watching Lost. His daughter in between us sighs that they are totally different, dad. I point out that they do both take place on an island and capture the human endeavor in the face of communal isolation… and in the case of Survivor’s season 19, Russell might equally embody corporeal evil as well as Lost’s Man in Black. This is the worst conversation starter ever.

The last plane hop from Anchorage to Kodiak is in something called a Turboprop and has no security procedure, no TSA, no body scanners. I post a status update that it would be incredibly easy to hijack this thing so the jihadists should look into it. Apparently the FBI Facebook word flagger has a serious delay because I am not pulled off the tarmac. I make it to Kodiak on the shaking, tiny plane, even though one friend, unlike others who pretended to envy my vacation, had only two words for me: Ted Stevens!

I don’t want to magnify the prosaic existence of everyone else but me, but it’s the first morning here and I’m about to hot tub outside while watching the snow drift down lazily and the deer eat soy nuts from my hand. UPDATE: The hot tub was still cold and there were no deer. Maybe their frozen carcasses are hidden just out of view. There is a blizzard warning.

Having never done any research on the subject, circumstances demand an entire day to be spent pondering, “Why the hell, when a baby is tired, why don’t they fall asleep instead of cry up in your ear?” It seems like once they finally fall asleep the first time the most basic of synaptic connections should have been sewn, and they should know the element of tiredness should be met with the element of sleep from there on out in life. Instead, the opposite seems to happen.

The big event happening in town right now is the city league basketball tournament. The local paper reports the statistics right above the NBA numbers. My friend Pete plays the position of Monster Forward on one team, the prohibitive favorite, at least for the games their Fleet-Footed Point Guard is in town visiting family. I am present for their first game, which pits them against members of the Coastguard, which is entirely confusing, as every person is hairy, overweight, and wears goggles. Things are cleared up when I’m told they all work at a place called Coastguard Computers.

I am sledding for the first time I can remember.  It is in a small playground instead of places called “Cocaine Hill” and “Gravel Pit”, which is where the high schoolers go. I am also wishing I was a high schooler for the first time I can remember. I am guessing there would be a lot more booze and a lot less small children to keep avoiding at the end of a run.

Near the place where I am staying, there is a sign beneath the speed limit advising motorists to “Keep a Kid Alive. Slow down when you drive”. I am informed that it is placed, unintentionally, in front of a house where a 5-year old was killed while sledding by a driver. Apparently, the father will drink out on the patio at nights, sometimes shooting a rifle into the air. I am a little sad no one even came close to dying while we were sledding.

It is day 5 and I have contracted the Kodiak Stomach Flu. Everyone in the family I’m visiting has had it the past month. By extension, the entire town has had it too. Why I was not told of this or why the town had not been quarantined I am not sure.  It is one of my biggest fears in life to be aboard an airplane with the stomach flu. So, I hole up until my flight back watching movies. My friend rents “Some Like it Hot” from the video store because she knows I liked “Tootsie”… and you know… the whole cross-dressing thing.

I make it home with only mild discomfort and 2 hours of total delays on the trip home. I wish the main thing I took from the whole affair was something more than a mundane observation of how cold it was… but it was goddamn cold. I promise if this was a paid assignment, I would come up with something more.

Observations From An Hour in the Seattle Airport Bookstore

I guess the Seattle airport is one of the best to spend three hours. Not  because my phone failed to update its time display, thus fooling me to believe I only had two hours left, right up until I was standing quite alone in gate N3. That could have happened in any airport. The Seattle airport had a violinist in the lunch court and a hundred retailers!

But 90% of them were restaurants which would only have serviced about 20% of my time, even if I ate slowly. I had been reading David Foster Wallace on the flight there…  one of his essays that makes me feel dumber and smarter for reading it, but mostly  dumber. There was also a good looking guy across the aisle reading Atlas Shrugged (I got it, asshole, you’ve got the brain and the look!). No – it was time for some easy reading. Time for the airport book store:

I know more than one stand-up comedian has riffed tiredly on this, but I am still amazed they sell pornography in these places… Yet I am still disappointed / relieved I have never seen any on the airplane… Do other people think like this? Should I buy some to make/ break someone  else’s day sitting next to me? this would be the only reason for such a purchase… Regardless, this book store redeems itself by offering six Kurt Vonnegut books on sale…

There are way more heavy metal bands/ lead singers from the eighties with autobiographies than I ever could have realized or wanted… the fifteen I’ve read tell the same story and I haven’t scratched the lacquered surface…

There are a shit load of good books I will never read… This makes me sad… It makes me happy there is a whole stanchion of Tom Clancy books I will never even pick up…

Enough people have read about “Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat to Change the World” to make it a bestseller…

It is still hard to type on a phone… TE.

Theme Party Games

Theme parties and party games have been around forever, or at least as long as humans didn’t have to worry about where the next meal would come from. So with the rise of convenience stores came inventive new ways for people to amuse themselves by gathering together and dressing up in 80’s spandex. I’ve been to a few of these in the past, and when I had three in three consecutive weekends, I felt that I should try to add a little to the festivities – but not by doing an especially good job of representing the premise. I’m too lazy at costumes – be it a Rock Star Party or Death Party – I don’t make a very good Fred Durst (please no e-mails… I know he’s not dead -  it was a “Dress As Someone You Would Beat to Death Party”).  So I thought I would make some party games based on the party themes.  And since none of them got used, I also thought I would share them on the internet.

At the Pimps & Ho’s Party, everyone got too drunk to play Pimp & Madam Boticelli. Considering this is a game that “requires the players to have a good knowledge of biographical details of famous people,” proceed with caution. If you don’t know that Sally Stanford was a 1940’s San Franciscan madam, then this may not be the game for you.

Despite the flannel, it was too cold to play Grunge Charades. Also, everyone got too drunk. And someone threw the paper slips in the fire pit.

At the Quentin Tarantino Character Party, no one was really in the mood to play Tarantino Celebrity after everyone showed up as The Gimp.  Reasonably, everyone got too drunk. Things kind of went down hill from there…

www.lovecrumb.org

“Drunk Registering” – it is a bit like drunk dialing, but instead of calling people and saying you love them, you register a  domain name and tell it you love it so much and you will never let it go. If you’re drunk for a long time, you actually make a website for your precious new domain. This may have been what happened with www.lovecrumb.org, a tribute to crumb donuts. UPDATE: Now Offline. Sorry.

The First Sentence (or so) of Books I Plan to Write

The wedding went relatively well – it didn’t rain, two people had gotten married, and only two corpses were found the following morning, their mouths stuffed full of rice and flowers. Luckily, the best man was a detective- J. B. Wright. That’s me, and I’m hardly ever wrong. (Maybe a mystery novel?)

April showers bring May flowers, and in the year 2011, the beginning of the Zombie Flu (it’s just like it sounds) – I’d settle for a few more rainy days if I didn’t have to decapitate the re-animated bodies of my friends, neighbors, and co-workers almost every day.

Pete always found it odd that once the existence of Bigfoot was confirmed, the incidents of drunken rednecks in monkey suits being shot actually increased – and even odder that Peter himself became one of them shortly after his 32nd birthday. (likely historical fiction)

My name is Madison Towne, and these are my chunnels, or so the bumper sticker reads.

I was too drunk to decide between queso & chips or oatmeal cream pies – the occasion probably called for both – and so I began the long walk. (probably an autobiography)

He thought he saw the laundry pile in the middle of his room move (indeed, as if there was something alive underneath it, but that seemed highly unlikely), so when he kicked at the dirty clothes and heard a the cry of a baby, it was quite a shock. No clean underwear and a mysterious baby?! This was going to be quite a Monday!

He’d slept with almost all of his classmates, including all of the phonies and all of the muggles… at 12 he was already the most well renowned boy-wizard in Georgia, and if you asked the dudes in his P.E. class, the gayest as well.

Call me Ishtar.

Even as little Tom Swanson was getting trampled to death on the dance floor, glo-stick juice seeping up his nostrils with each tortured breath, he still thought to himself, “I am at a Rave, and this is the best I’ve ever felt!”

To My Home Owners Association…

Over the last few weeks, I have received several letters from the HOA president, Timothy, complaining about how he was being “unfairly” removed from his office. Today I received one from the board complaining about those letters, and these depicted his removal somewhat differently… as “fair”. Fascinating.

I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, but the HOA should go completely unnoticed for those of us (99% of the residents) who would like to ignore it. I would compare it to Herpes – you just pay your bills and hope you never hear from it. Please don’t be offended, I am not equating any specific board member with genital warts… except for one – specifically, the one who called into question Tim’s actions regarding his use of unapproved gopher poison to deal with our pigeon problem. How dare you.  As you noted, it may have killed “15 pigeons, some smaller birds, one cat, and a squirrel (that we know of)”, but what exactly was your solution? I know Tim is an ex-cop – I just hope he possessed the same regard for life and levels of excessive overreaction he does now.

While I did find your letter completely unprofessional and overwhelmingly annoying, there were a couple parts that made me giggle: implying Tim destroyed ballots of an amendment vote to serve his own interests, implying Tim fired property mangers because of personal vendettas, admonishing Tim for taking credit for how nice the property looked when it is the result of maintenance staff, and finally thanking Tim for still serving on the board.

To sum up, will you please stop sending me these letters and do something about the people who live below me and constantly have a trash bag beside their front door? I used to live in an apartment complex where lots of people did this, but it didn’t matter because everyone was much more concerned with their underwear getting stolen out of the washing machines or being murdered in the middle of the night.  Your letter goes through great pains to emphasize the beauty of our condominiums and your yeoman’s effort to keep them that way, so c’mon…

“No Poop on the Front Stoop (not literally… but please take it literally, too)!”

Please don’t make me start stapling that message to all our palm trees.

Sincerely,
Anonymous

(FYI, the reason I sent this anonymously so when you send a 5-page rebuttal to the entire complex I won’t get the blame, ok? Thanks.)

More Traveling Underpants

Even though the site is dead, the dream lives on…

The Painted Desert, Arizona

My Friendly ‘Chops

Last week I went to a beer festival, one that pretends to be about costumes and bluegrass instead of getting drunk. I like to play along though and decided to bring the facial hair in full force. But of what design? A quick trip to www.beards.org and I decide to go with the “friendly muttonchops”. I assume its name was derived by the affable union of cheek hair the mustache provides. Here it is:

I have no explanation for the purple doo-rag other than I had a purple shirt and it seemed to match pretty well. While my full intention was to shave this thing after the beer festival , it became immediately clear some things are just too amazing to die.  Most reactions could be summarized by a girl at my school who was sprinting down a hallway. Before I could tell her to stop the running she haulted and stared at me for ten straight seconds with a look of bewilderment and confusion. She eventually managed to say, “Awesome beard!” before she scampered away. I feel like this scenario takes place in the head of everyone who sees me, including mine. It is very hard to walk by a mirror without pausing for an extended period of time.

The Best Man Speaks

These are the several versions of the speech I wrote as the best man for my friend Robert’s wedding. Six hasty glasses of wine prevents me from recalling what I actually said, only the evil eye his mom was giving me the entire time:

Robert  – married – I never thought I’d see the day.  Then again, I never thought I’d see him lose his virginity. And let’s just say, not only did I actually see him lose his virginity, I had a hand in it. And when I say, “I had a hand in it,” let’s just say I really mean it.… OK, if you didn’t like that joke people you’re really not going to like the rest, so… Congratulations to Robert and Kristen!

OR

First, I’d like to say thanks to Robert for making me the best man. Iroooonic, since I’m probably the worst man here tonight. Seriously, I’m depressed, bitter, and if I had the chance to meet most of you for more than 5 minutes, I’d probably hate you… OK, if you miserable fucks didn’t like that quote, joke, unquote, you’re really not going to like the rest, so… Congratulations to Robert and Kristen!

OR

When I think about Robert, I think about this time in high school we were going out one Friday night (probably to see a movie) and he joked to his mom that we were going “cruising for chicks”. According to mom, who for some reason was telling the story at the dinner table the next night, I responded with a facial expression that said, “What the hell?! Chicks?!” The inference, of course, was that I might be gay and, who knows, I might have been trying to swing Robert in that direction. Of course, as we can see tonight, looking at Robert and his beautiful bride, he is definitely not gay. And all the sex we had in college can be safely labeled as experimental… Zing! OK, if you didn’t like that joke people you’re really not going to like the rest, so… Congratulations to Robert and Kristen!

OR

When I moved to Arizona in 7^th grade I actually stole Robert’s best friend and we were enemies. In high school that guy started wearing eyeliner, so somehow Robert and I became friends. We played video games on Friday nights, had pathetic jobs, no girlfriends… then Robert got engaged last year and changed everything. Congratulations to Robert and Kristen!

OR

As long as I have known Robert, he has only had 3 loves: basketball, video games and sweaty men rubbing against each other.. I’m talking about professional wrestling, of course! I guess Kristin is now on the list, but I’m not sure where she falls. He is marrying her, and even though one night in college when we were drinking he went on for a while how he wished he could “marry video games” – I don’t even how that would work… I think this is a bit more serious, anyway. Besides, this is kind of the same thing… I know Kristin really “pushes his buttons”… get it?! Just like a video game controller or something! Ba-Bing!

OR

As long as I have known Robert, he has only had 3 loves: basketball, video games and sweaty men rubbing against each other.. I’m talking about professional wrestling, of course.  I guess Kristin is now on the list, but I’m not sure where she falls. He is marrying her, I remember the first night in college he ever drank he went on for a while how he wished he could “marry video games”, then this girl named Star took him into his bed and started yanking on his balls. The next morning he was like, “I don’t care who I marry, as long as she doesn’t yank on my balls – that fuckin’ hurt.” So… I guess we all know a little something about Kristin, and why it’s the stuff she doesn’t do, that makes her so special! [note to self: if that goes over badly, just stand up and say "Holy shit, dude, this isn't the latest draft! I cut all that inappropriate stuff out... the fact he watches professional wrestling is embarrassing... that ball-yanking material is still fuckin' gold though! [high five person sitting next me]“]