Bunnies, boobs, and broadcast media.

Once upon a time, in the rural hallows of Virginia’s Eastern Shore, lived a lot of abandoned old houses left to ruin that farmers just plowed around. The KKK was also very alive and well, as were people living in such abject poverty that they still have to pee in outhouses. (I had a second cousin or somebody who married into a family of undertakers, but we’ll fry that flounder at another time.)

And sometimes, between the haze of endless rounds of the Super Mario Brothers and the adult females’ endless rounds of margarita binges on the beach, I had some cousins just a hair older than me.

(Two of them actually played 95% of the Mario Brothers, and the rest of us just sat around and watched. (Because they wouldn’t let us play. And we didn’t have much else to do.) It is even less interesting than it sounds, but we had to kill time till the boys who worked at the farm stand, plus their grown father figure, got home to pump us full of Zima and nicotine.) In the later days, there was the awkward haze of marijuana and puberty, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

And most of the time, for me there was unceasing depression and social anxiety, punctuated periodically by swaths of jellyfish stings and episodes of I Love Lucy, if we could turn the antenna above the one story cottage just right to get a signal. Um, sometimes, also, we went walking around. I mean, before the drugs. And around was this one abandoned house with plenty of broken windows and a singular a filthy dirty mattress in the room.

And emerging from a hole in the mattress was hundreds of bees, strewn about as if they’d all died at the start of an outward swarm, just lying about hither and yon.

And around the insect carnage were some spent condoms.

And around the house with the mattress with bees and the condoms and the pervasively blatant racism of white Southeners were me and my cousins.

And one of those cousins won a national fire safety contest once. Which is remarkable, because he performed slightly below par in one of those public experimental elementary schools, and by this point was already smoking cigarettes part time.

In adolescence, all dreams must die. And dreams are all that are left of the house with the mattress with bees and condoms. Do you see where all this is going?

(I’d like to take a moment to say that attempts to find appropriate images for this post have failed wildly.)

A juvenile delinquent can only find solace in Super Mario Brothers for so many years. And when you are too young to get a driver’s license, and your mother is an alcoholic on the beach, you are stuck most of the summer in a place so fucking rural that you have to drive your trash to the dump to hang out with all of the abandoned kittens and puppies and migrant workers trying to salvage some smattering of quality of life, burning shit up starts to sound plenty fine.

And so incinerate he did, like so many joints we rolled that night on my second hand copy of Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” before I saw a girl with a bicycle pedaling in one of the woody formations of a single slat separating my shared bedroom with the living room that night,* and before Z104 switched to a top 40 format.

And the fire burned the place to the ground. Not that I was there to witness the event. By that time I was a goody two shoes, and they were busy rebelling and listening to Alice in Chains.

After that house was gone, the Eastern Shore lost its one interesting thing to me.

In conclusion, my mother always used to claim that I had a blast at the Eastern Shore when I was a small girl, but I never fucking bought that. And, so, yeah, maybe my cousins did more explicitly illegal things in their youth, and I bet they dreaded the Eastern Shore less than me, but I have plenty enough retained cognition to find a dead 2.5 foot dead shark on the beach yesterday and dissect it with exacting detail, all the while learning about anatomy. And I don’t have, like, a criminal record.

*It was pretty nifty, but I really don’t think drugs are worth their cognitive toll.

Regular readers (of which I have a negative number, because I talk way too much about smuggling diamonds in one’s nose) know that I really get a lot of quality one on one time with my nostrils and beyond

I recently discovered that q-tips make a perfect tool for nasal investigation. It is like a mini version of when I went to the hospital after getting the swine flu on a Fung Wah bus that managed not to crash on the way from Manhattan to Boston, but did nevertheless manage to get me almost dead. And at the ER, the doctor said, “to test for swine flu, I’m going to have to stick this giant swab up your nose, and you’ll feel it up to about your eye,” and I responded, “actually, I’ve always wanted to get something that far up there.” And I was afraid, because an elementary school friend got a pussy willow stuck up there and had to go to the doctor. But adults have more fine motor coordination than the kinderset, and that experience taught me I can do all sorts of things up in there without much worry.

There comes a time in a young woman’s life when she must really go for the gold to feel like a self actualized person. And by going for the gold, I mean excavating really huge boogers out of her sniffer.

If you feel the love of Jesus in your life, and you went to a born again Christian summer camp in high school and woke up in the middle of the night and see a shadow in the haze of humidity and self righteousness and think that the J Bro is about to stab your best friend, then you jump off of the third bunk bed in haste to save your friend. But after, you decide to tell the counselors that you decided to take Jesus into your heart, and they are all proud of the decision you think it’ll increase your chances of making out with counselor who is hot and apparently awesome because he gives out free cigarettes to the kids.

There’s a theme here. And the theme is that even if you feel somewhat uneasy about an idea or practice, you should still evangelize about the process if you think it will cement social bonds, by which I mean you get to fuck.

So of course after several successful forays past the first ridge of nose that usually stops one’s pinky finger, you decide to share with your friends. Or, that is what I would do. Actually, it is what I DID do. I sent out the following message:

“Using q-tips 4 whole new world of mucus eviction. Feeling places I didn’t know I had. If I shrink Magic Schoolbus style, can I go spelunking in your nose?”

Weirdly, I didn’t get a reply from anybody. I can only presume their lack of response means that I have an open invitation to explore.

*******************************************

I’m going on a date tonight. I go on a lot of first dates with some pretty interesting characters. The last two involved a former zookeeper and a dude who hurt his back picking up an anvil. Or maybe that was the same person. I’m not sure. They or he haven’t called me back. I think it is because I’m probably Too Famous To Date.

But I have a date with somebody else tonight, and I like to fill the hours before my romantic forays with Fantasy and Intrigue, so I sent the fellow an enticing come hither:

I’m wearing pink panties tonight, just for you. They are decorated with sexy roaches. If you play nice, you might get to touch them. Or maybe I’m too afraid to go searching for invertebrate freeloaders all by myself. That’s for me to know, and you to fantasize about.

I think I can pretty much count on getting felt up tonight. By cockroaches, most likely.

Some people like long walks on the beach. I prefer squirming over my friends as I reenact some prehensile whale penis action before they tell me to not get too comfortable.

It is these special moments that help friendships stand the test of time.

The great thing about modern technology is that there is no longer a character limit on text messages. That means you can drone on about naturally occurring mucous sculptural formations and dirty talk without worrying about message brevity, which inhibits the True Meaning of what I want to convey to the intended recipient.

As a final au revoir, I leave you the following MTV image of a girl sticking 10 roaches in her gstring by the beach.

And no, you don’t have to thank me. The satisfaction of spreading Knowledge and Truth is its own reward.

Oh wait, no, I have a swan song. It bridges the themes of nasal foreign bodies and roaches. We all learned in high school that making connections between ideas is a great way to Impress Your Friends.

PS - There is a great description on the webpage with the nose roach about a Chinese zoo dolphin getting a foreign body stuck in a stomach, and the World’s Tallest Man reaching down the critter’s throat to pull it out. You can’t make this shit up.

Cordyceps ignota on a Tarauntula in Ecuador by Bryce Kendrick

Cordyceps militaris by Daniel Winkler

Cordyceps Upper Amazon by Daniel Winkler

Here is a picture of my main man Daniel Winkler holding the model of some bug infested with his favorite entomopathogenic fungi.

Ophiocordyceps pentatomae from some Korean website

Ophiocordyceps formicarum from the Plant Worm Diary. This used to be … some sort of insect. But those four stroma sure are nifty looking!

Ophiocordyceps amazonica on some sort of friggin cricket. From a website whose alphabet I do not recognize, because I am a dumb monolingual American.

I guess Alan Cassidy gets credit for documenting stroma growing out of the wing origins and back end of a flying insect. I found the image on the same website as the one above, however.

My man Joey Spatafora documents a fungus double fisting two spore capsules on one stroma, which grew out of a now deceased ant.

Cordyceps on the job like woah (Erich G. Vallery, USDA Forest Service - SRS-4552, United States). Found on Wikipedia via MycoRant.

The fungus on this insect looks like it oozed out between the plates of exoskeleton and then sent the stroma upwards. The stroma here look like some sort of drying foam material you’d buy at the hardware store. Photo by Jean-Louis Cheype. Found on Cordyceps.us.

I’m at Diesel, in a booth, with an electric outlet, listening to Michael Jackson. All term papers, all day. I am a woman who knows how to party. You should come for a serious productivity party.

Oh wait, maybe I’m leaving. I’m getting totally bloodthirsty because of the dude sitting at the other side of the booth who looks up and stares every time ladeez walk by. I feel awkward on his behalf. Yo boyfriend, women hate that watch her tits and ass gaze.

I know where we are in Diesel is sort of a revolving tits and ass show, but at least look down at that book you have open every now and again so the females think you might be interested in the parts of them that aren’t emphasized in Playboy.

Sure, some of us women don’t mind feeling like sexy pieces of meat now and again. I love tits and ass as much as the next girl. Hey, who doesn’t want Lady Gaga’s meat dress? But we usually prefer to consent to the experience. I might have checked out the bulge between your legs when you sat down to see if you had a sizeable shlong,* but I sure as hell made sure I did it fast enough that you didn’t notice.

Tick tock, motherfucker.

When a woman like me needs to school your ass in subitly, you should take a long moment to reflect on the severity of your deviation from expected behavior.

*Actually, I didn’t. This is a theoretical case.

My days in Brooklyn passed quite nicely, with the exception of witnessing the Monstrosity of Evil that is the new Muppet Movie. Like, seriously, Disney, maybe you should have put the whole production to sleep ten years after Hensen bit the bullet. Just take the eyes off of those poor ole critters. Please don’t make them do Broadway style musicals and constantly apologize for no longer being cool.

I will write more about it tomorrow. At 5am. Because, right now, I’m suffering from kind of a bad caffeine crash.

There was that woman in Singles, a 90’s Generation X romantic comedy I saw way too many times in Middle school, and I was probably that woman. It wasn’t the lady who watched the ant documentary on the couch with Eddie Vedder, or the one who decided not to date the public transit engineer. Nope, I would be the one who, upon being accused of “making popcorn with half this city,” retorted that “Look, Debbie, I’m kind of having a bad sugar crash. Do you think you could just, you know, hold it down?” The rest of what I would say wasn’t in the script, but it would go something like, “I’m too absorbed in this me time of mine to talk about what you need, mmmk? Why don’t you just go headbanging in a club and get tinnitus? Also, can you had me that bowl of popcorn?”

Yeah, I got a soda after I hauled all my shit a quarter of a mile in Manhattan this morning. Then I got a coffee when we stopped for fast food & nicotine refreshments in Sudbury. It was all dangerous stunts, high flying, and trash talk.

I felt like I could fly! Like an eagle! Soaring above our collective trauma of 9-11! Until I got shot in the leg and needed surgery!

Then I could not move.

Then I had a coffee crash. Secret Agent Ruckus has actually spent the last few hours since I got back chewing on computer cords. And possibly the tail of Secret Agent Mz. Kitty, but she gets off on that sort of thing so I’m cool with the activity as long as it is consensual. I’m just gonna lay here for about nine more hours, ok y’all?

Most of my time with chosen family involved fear of rats emerging from toilets, regrettable snow globes, and pumpkin pie. And terrorism. The main theme was definitely terrorism.

Or, that is how my loved ones characterize the experience of hosting me. They call it going to extraordinary means to achieve goals about which I refuse to negotiate. I call it gracing their household with my presence. Really, it is a matter of semantics, but I’m pretty sure that I’ll get a warm welcome next time.

But for now, I haz to take a nap. I’m tired. Bloodthirsty and insatiably craving fame, but mostly tired.

I’m quite sleepy. Dead tired, even.

This is what I wanted to say to the parking permit lady, as may car sputtered in the death throes of a nearly empty tank while I waited to gain access to a commuter parking lot in the corpulent spewed entrails of yuppie dystopia that is Greater Newton. She said I was breaking the law by moving the “Parking lot temporarly full” sign that stood between me and where I needed to leave the Grime Ride so I could get my ass on a bus to New York City. But I was in a rush, because I was running out of gas.

And I was running out of gas, because last night I had to assault a vending machine at UMass that wouldn’t cough up my bag of Sun Chips after I fed it a dollar fifty. Remedial technology or not, I refused to be messed with on a Tuesday night after an unproductive class where my PowerPoint presentation didn’t work, when I had a hankerin for some MSG goodness.

And after I finally got my MSG fix, I was late getting out of the UMass parking lot, and when that happened I knew there would be little time for me to get to Target for a $10 crock pot offer.

In this case, the fool would have been myself stopping to get gas, and maybe having Target lock me the fuck out, and that was a possibility that I just could not allow to happen. I think we all know I had my priorities in order.

So I didn’t stop to get gas. This crock pot offer wasn’t going to last. So I got my fucking crock pot, but not before hitting a lady in a wheelchair with my cart. (I apologized, but did not offer to buy her a crock pot.) And after I got my new cooking device, I had Emergency Sleeping Plans, so there wasn’t time to get gas after Target either. And after Emergency Sleeping came Emergency Work Arrival (I have to call it that, or else I don’t get there on time), and after that I had to drive to the bus station to get to New York City.

Oh, you silly thing, New York City. Where, if the experiences of everybody I know who has ever lived there (reality tv bitches aside), dreams go to die. But you know who thrives in New York City? Pigeons with attitudes that poop a lot on coffins on their way to a grave. And bedbugs immune to bedbug killing pesticides, which, by the way, you can’t even get a person with a special permit to apply till you pay them to have their bedbug sniffing dog sniff around when it knows it doesn’t get fed unless it finds the little fuckers. And rats that are so malicious that they chew holes in your roof while their cousins swim through the motherfucking sewer pipes to come out through the toilet to lap up some peanut butter you thought was all safe and sound in some miniature New York City sized cabinet.

Knock, knock motherfucker. Your dreams just signed a Do Not Resuscitate order, and mailed your ass off to New York City.

You know what puts me in a bad mood? Not being a smoker. Those smokers always look so calm, cool, and collected. I am pretty sure this is how I looked back in the day. Crock pots help me feel like I have two birds my hand and lots of eggs in my basket, but they are banned from use on this bus. I know because they always announce that you may not use the power outlets for toaster ovens, hair dryers, and crock pots. Seriously, some people just do not know how to party.

Oh look, here we are in Manhattan. I feel like 10 million amoebas could have decayed in a vial during the time it took for this trip. I’m looking forward to seeing my chosen family, and quite grateful that I didn’t have to sit next to anybody on the bus. I’m headed to Brooklyn to be social with about seven people I know, but everybody in between? Let’s just not say anything to one another, alright?

The problem with making a passing thought reference to a runny nose at 5:22am is that by 5:22am I also start thinking about nasal cavities. I mean, there is a sizeable amount of wasted space in there. You always hear about people trying to smuggle stuff into prison or across international borders in less polite parts of the body, but what about the nose? What if you just stuffed your nose full of diamonds, and just made the decision to not really swallow or sneeze for the next 24 hours?

The problem with 5:22am is that when 5:23am rolls around, I am ready to party. I rouse myself from bed and put on my boots, because they are easier to find than my slippers. And then I go in search of Secret Agent Squeaky Wheel, becuase he is usually the easiest to convince that it is PARTY TIME!!!!!

By 5:24am, sound starts happening. Now, I don’t intentionally cause this sound. I am not a kitchen cabinet. I am not a potted plant. But somehow everything I touch at 5:24am on must be out to get me, because it all makes sound.

My housemates don’t like sound at 5:24am, and I’ve had to accept the fact that they are ultimately in charge of their own major life decisions. And if those major life decisions exclude all the action we have going on before 6am, then I’ll just have to let them experience the natural consequences of staying asleep. Which are basically missing out on my party.

When you kill a man (I mean the royal “you,” as I’ve never killed myself, and want to remove myself from all suspicions, but also don’t want to use a passive verb), it makes a difference if you meant to do it or not. Morally, it matters if you thought there might somebody underneath that 7 ton piniata before you went at it with an AK-47.

In the spirit of honesty, this is not a picture of a person hitting a 7 ton pinata with some bullets that came out of an AK-47. But it has ladies and pinatas, and that is 2/3 of my requisite for a good time. The other 1/3 of my requirement for fun involves face masks, which Lucha Va Voom, which heralds it has “Mexican Masked Wrestling & Saucy Striptease,” presumably has well under control.

(Criminals are always leaving their gun at crime scenes. I read on the Explainer that’s cuz the gun already has the serial number filed off, and if you keep the gun you used as a suvenoir, it might be used as evidence later on.

I’m making an effort to overcome my chronic disorganization, though, so I bought dozens of these stickers at Target with my name on them. I put them on everything.

Q: Whose s’more is this?

 A: The label on the graham cracker part is burned, but you can still make out my name.

Q: Whose female condom is this?

A: Check the rim. I’m pretty sure there is a decorative adhesive with Roman letters on there.

Q: Whose gun is this?

A: Turn it over and reexamine the barrel. The name is of the lady standing next to you.

All those examples were theoretical, though. I would never own a female condom.)

And we reflect that moral by giving people a lesser jail sentence for involuntary vs. voluntary manslaughter.

Really, I think my housemates should hear the noise less I didn’t mean to make it. At least before 6am. I mean, come on people. Be reasonable.

Okay, maybe not? Okay, I’ll try to really, really hard to not utter a peep.

Q: What is the best way to bid adieu to fellow church goers?
A: Wait for a polite lull in the conversation, then say, “As we both know, Jesus is coming. I need to go home and look busy by writing some term papers.”

But then I go home and all those cupcakes and coffee from after the service get me a’thinkin, which as we know is the root of all evil.

And then I think about how much I like hip hop, and costumes, and I wonder what Dangermouse is up to these days.

I mean, boyfriend wrote a hole album about Adult Swim and has a superhero persona.

I end up at Broken Bells, which is a more recent music project of his. Things devolve from there. Which means I end up playing music and not writing term papers.

If Jesus were to come down now, I’d be all dancing to hip hop by Dangermouse with my bunny. And Jesus would be all, “I’ve been planning for 32 years to catch you looking busy, because I know you have the potential to overcome this ADHD.” And then I’d have to be all, “Sorry, Jesus, but I had to bust a move, and you are so old that I bet if we had a race I would win, and besides my rabbit is the Queen of the Universe, and you are like the British monarchy with very little power and king only in name.

AND ALSO, IT WAS A VERY IMPORTANT DANCE PARTY.”

And then Jesus would probably take a breath to speak. The polite thing to do might be to shut up and listen to Jesus, but, as the United Church of Christ claims, “God is still speaking.”

Basically, that dude has been talking for a long ass time. Way over two thousand years? If I dealt with numbers greater than 9, I bet I could estimate how long that is. Like, maybe God was speaking when there were velocipedes around, but god was speaking through a T Rex, and sadly none of the critters alive at the time had the cognitive capacity to process speech.

It is only fair for him to let me catch up, really. But social niceties have never been a stumbling block for my rambling in the past, and surely I wouldn’t stop because Jesus knows the Real Me, and the Real Me really really wants to interrupt what you are saying. And so I would continue, “You came from heaven to visit, I would expect you to have the forethought to bring me a hot sweet date, since you apparently don’t have ADHD cuz you’ve been staring at me continuously for 32 fucking years.”

And then Jesus would be, like, “Oh, that date thing sounds too hard because it involves other of people.”

And then I think about my other wishes and dreams. There is the one with thousands of pounds of liquid mercury. There is the one about microscopic squash. I decide not to go too large, nor too small. I look over at the orchid that hasn’t fucking bloomed since I rescued it from the side of some road in Chinatown during the dead of winter three fucking years ago.

“So J Bro,” I begin, in attempt to butter the man up with my familiarity, “I’d like that orchid to bloom.”

J Bro squints, then puts out a microexpression that leads me to believe that I’ve won. He begins, “I th …

I’m winning, so I interrupt the dude. Don’t blame me, I’m from the South. We can have conversations with three people talking at once.

“Yeah, and I want you to make that elephant humidifier blowing steam over my plant to turn into a real elephant.”

Jesus starts waving around all magical like. My reading of social cues tells me that maybe Jesus likes me after all. I figure in I should get in a final request before he completes the magic.

“And see Adam and Eve over there? Yeah, okay, so Adam turned into a lady. Its Massachusetts, we do queer real well here.”

“Their palms fists are up in revolution. Against the garden of Eden. Cuz there’s no s’mores there. They want s’mores. And they want to be real live queers.”

And then J Bro is all, “Actually, I think this might work, if you promise to finish your term papers.”

And I’m about to tell my man that I promise to do it, as long as I have a miniature elephant and people to keep my company. And Jesus starts making those magic finger gestures super big, and I have a twinkle in my eye, and I think all is going to go well, when I hear a blood curdling scream.

And where Jesus once stood, there is now a bunch of little crackers and a bottle of cheap wine. And Secret Agent Ruckus is nomming on her carbohydrates. My attack did what attack rabbits do, and transmuted my magician from wish granter to French prison dinner fare. And then I cry, until Secret Agent Mz. Kitty presses the space bar on my computer, and the Dangermouse music comes on again, and we all start to dance.

I was antsy to get out of the house and not go crazy without a computer. So I took my buddy out for a ride on the town. We went to see Puss in Boots.

It was like a really good acid trip, except I’ve never had a really good acid trip, and also without the brain damage. I would just like to say that the way they do the egg’s face is something amazing. Amy Sedaris did one of the voices. And at the end, there is a Lady Gaga song. Just, holy shit.

Then my friend and I rolled into Savers Thrift Store on the VFW parkway. I suggest that if you have ambitions to appear on Hoarders that you go there. I consider my role model to be the self righteous Bunny guy.

The problem with being me is that you want to start a collection of Jesus statues. The problem with being my friend is that she doesn’t quite understand the concept of money as a limited resources, and she really, really like red t-shirts. So walking into Savers together felt like being a pair of anacondas in an orphanage with no adult supervision.

I got so many pretty, pretty things.

I got a dinosaur board game that will hopefully keep a houseplant company. I got fingerless gloves to wear under other gloves so that I hopefully never loose any of my metatarsals to frostbite. I got a microscope, which will hopefully help me take over the world. And come on, the brand of the microscope is VIVITAR. That sounds like my idea of a party.

Then I went to the bathroom and realized I was bleeding from the vag. I’m on birth control and never miss a dose. But sometimes periods happen anyway. (Some people at my age think that their bodies will do whatever they want, short of being an Olympic athlete or anything. Some people at my age think that science knows most everything about how our bodies work, and that their bodies will work in predictable ways. Most of these people my age I know are men, and I think this is for a reason. When you get your period even though you are on birth control, or your nipples crack unpredictably as they swell in pregnancy, or you have a serious illness called a syndrome for which there is no known treatment, you feel less like the person in the driver seat and more like a child genius who is watching in horror while strapped to a carseat in the back as the car without a driver you are in spins out of control. You have to be a woman in two out of the three of the above circumstances to experience it personally. We all learn that we are not in control of our bodies in older age, and eventually our bodies betray us and we die. Some of us just know that fact earlier than others. )

In frustration, I exclaimed at my lady parts, “Fine! You wanna have a period? Let’s do a period!” I yelled this out loud, though, because most of my thinking happens out loud. Especially when I’m accosting house rabbits and uteruses. I was pretty pissed off until I realized that I needed to celebrate all my thrift store bounty. To accomplish that, I busted open a pumpkin beer. I had some pumpkin ice cream in the freezer, and so I concocted a very tasty float with the two.

Later in the night I had another pumpkin beer. Then I ate some bananas. I peel them from the end that most poeple would consider the bottom. I saw non-human primates do it in a nature video once, and they are on to something. It is indeed easier.

If you are like me, you spend a lot of time wishing you could stick all kinds of stuff in other peoples’ orifices.

(Also, if you are like me, please get over to where I am right away. I need more than two hands for some secret projects that I’d really prefer to do in the company of myself, but not, like, in front of other people. (Lets just say most of them involve kerosine, duct tape, and cheese in a can.) But then, if you are like me, you probably already have an even radder plan. In which case you should stay the hell away and stop stealing my thunder.)

I’m not sure why, but nobody I know really lets me probe them all that much. Oh, sure, there is that dusty afternoon at the rodeo.

Okay, so it was actually a long series of dusty afternoons at rodeos.

Jitterbug Gal is my new favorite pinup.

But summer has gone.

When I don’t have four hands, kerosine, duct tape, cheese in a can, and/or am also not at a certain dudette ranch, a girl needs to satisfy her curiosity in other ways.

From Pig Rodeo To Weird Science

YouTube videos of surgeries and second hand medical prosthetic can only get a woman so far in this world.

Those days of swine flu swabbing were too long ago past, and gently scraping the mucosa covering the bony parts of my smeller’s interior with the long, think fingernail cleaning part of fingernail clippers just didn’t really satisfy my need.

And in this world, a woman has got to take a long hard look at her resources and figure out what the fuck she is going to do to satisfy some curiosity without killing any cats. For me, that means pressuring most of my friends to have surgeries for conditions which I have diagnosed. And of course they would sign a consent form for me to be in the operating room.

People usually turn me down. But after the sickness I’ve been having, my old hankering for a friend to get nose surgery came a calling. But I asked her too recently about balloon sinuplasty, so I knew I had to get creative.

I’m visiting this friend for Thanksgiving, and tonight I sent her the following text message: “Can I fold a pipecleaner in half & stick nonpointy end up nose behind eye next wk? Would be a great way 2 repay me 4 yrs of friendship on Thanksgiving.”

I waited a hot two minutes, and got no reply. I’d afraid I’d overstepped my bounds. I mean, I DID just put her on the mailing list  to get information for a balloon sinuplasty again. Maybe this time she would say yes. Maybe I shouldn’t go overkill. So I decided to text my friend again, in order to recover our friendship from the faux pas of my most recent request. I chose letter after letter as quickly as I could. I paused only to blow my nose, as sticking the long thin metal end of nail clippers can really loosen things up in there. “Nevermind,” I said, “You don’t have to answer. I’ll just spray some topical anesthetic & do nose stick when ur asleep. Itll b like I was never even there.”

So let’s just hope she relaxes during my visit, and I can get something up there and out before she notices. I’m going to pretend to be asleep and attempt this procedure on myself. Next week is a half work week, so I’ll have some extra time built in before I hit Brooklyn.