Lessons I've Learned, Part 11

Boobs have many uses.

I've cried on your shoulder(s) before about my dental hygienist. I love my dentist, and have been going to the same one for about 11 years. And for 11 years, I've had the same deep and abiding distaste for his dental hygienist. She's a very nice lady, but one I find so irritating I've often considered biting her and then fleeing the scene. What can I say? Sometimes incredibly nice people inspire me to bite. This is why it's much safer for me to hang out with total assholes. But seriously, is it necessary to talk to me in the same high-pitched squeal you'd use for a toddler? It it necessary to press your face right up against mine when you patronize me with goofy questions about my Christmas plans? And must you ask the same boring chit-chat questions every time I come in, and always when my mouth is open and I can't reply? All I've ever wanted from a dental hygienist is for her to be very, very quiet while she does her work, but this one doesn't shut up for one minute.

By some stroke of luck, though (hmmm...that's a weird phrase, isn't it? I know some stroke victims who would object to such careless use of the word "luck") that particular dental hygienist is now gone from my dentist's office! Did she retire? Was she fired? Did she die? Is she on the run from the law? Was she exiled to Romania? Was she kidnapped by a holdover Black Panther group? Who cares. All I know is when I went to my dentist for a cleaning yesterday, she had been replaced by a very nice, and very unirritating, lady. Yay me!

All was well and good til the sexual assault.

As she was hacking away at my gums with a tiny pick axe, I felt something soft and comfy pressing up against my shoulder. Her boob! My natural instinct would have been to shift slightly over to make room for these massive, bullying beasts, but when you're being stabbed in the gums with an ice pick, you tend to think differently. I felt I had no option but to remain snuggled against her mammaries, at least until the hacking stopped. That was probably her plan all along--to trap me at pick-point and then force her sizable boobs on me while I was frozen in fear. Luckily for me, the situation resolved itself when she moved away to fetch that little suction hose to vacuum the blood out of my gore-soaked mouth. During the Wetvac process, the menacing boobs kept their distance.

But then! Just when I thought my virtue was safe, the woman began flossing my teeth. Flossing is a process which demands close proximity, and, as you can imagine, those ample boobs wedged their way right into the middle of the procedure. This time one of them planted itself firmly against my head.

What would you do if this happened to you?

Right! You'd begin formulating a blog post. So, sprawled out in my dentist's chair, that's what I did. But when I got to the part where I imagined describing myself laying in the dentist's chair with a middle-aged boob mashed up against my skull, I snorted with laughter. You try laughing while your mouth is split open like the Grand Canyon, and a pair of hands are crammed in there, sawing a string back and forth between your teeth. No, really. Go ahead, open your mouth as wide as you can and stuff both your hands in there. Now laugh. It doesn't exactly look like laughter, does it? It looks like the onset of a heart attack, or maybe an asthma attack. And it happened three times, because each time I composed myself, I went back to formulating my blog post, and the seizure came on again. I'm not sure what the well-endowed hygienist thought was happening to me, but she ignored it and went about her business, finally removing her hands from my mouth and her boob from my head, and sending me on my way, feeling violated.

Now, don't get me wrong; I'm not anti-boob. I'm totally pro-boob! There are definitely some boobs I wouldn't mind having on my head:

However, the boob I was brow-beaten with in my dentist's office yesterday isn't exactly what I had in mind during my extensive boob-on-my-head fantasies.

All in all, despite the rape, I still vastly prefer this dental hygienist over the last one. And for all I know, maybe she is just as irritating as the last one, but the boob-beating distracted me from that. Maybe she asked all the same dumb questions and prattled on in a condescending voice as if I were a little kid, but I was too preoccupied with the inappropriate touching to take note of it.

And I guess that's the moral of the story: If you want to distract someone, press a sexual organ against their head.

Lessons I've Learned, Part 10

Let your underwear be a camouflage for your ass.

I don't have time to recount here the many and various times I've made a fool of myself, nor do you have enough years left to read them all before you die. But I'll tell you about one of them, and I'll leave you to speculate how many hundreds more exist in the record books.

Have you ever looked at yourself in the mirror about two hours after a meal and noticed you had some huge, incredibly eye-catching, uniquely disgusting bit of food stuck in your teeth? Or maybe a couple hours after your last lipstick application, you notice a big smear of lipstick across your chin, or maybe a couple hours after your last killing spree you notice an unsightly streak of blood across your forehead? Whatever the faux-pas, your reaction is always basically the same: Once you realize how goofy you look, your mind starts reeling back over the previous few hours as you wonder how many people saw you in this condition. Suddenly those just-slightly "off" looks people were giving you make sense. First, you're embarrassed for yourself, and then your embarrassment turns to anger at the parade of people who obviously took note of your appearance and didn't say a thing to alert you that something was amiss.

At my previous job we used a parking garage with valet parking. We had no choice--it was the only parking available downtown, so our company paid for us to valet park there. This might sound like a perk to you, but it sucked. I prefer to drive vehicles with a standard transmission, and at the time I drove an Isuzu Rodeo with a stick shift. As it happened, only one of the parking garage attendants knew how to drive a stick, so sometimes I had to wait 20 minutes for that one yahoo to become available to get my car. And their so-called safety rules prevented me from being able to get the thing myself, despite the fact that I was often able to see it from where I stood fuming. How can it be that a person who is hired to park cars only knows how to drive half the cars out there? Shouldn't that be a job requirement for a guy who valet parks? Eventually when it was time to trade my car in, I went against my preference and bought a vehicle with an automatic transmission just so I could get my car from the stupid parking garage without having to wait forever. That's neither here nor there, I just wanted to bitch about that. At any rate, I liked all the guys who worked at the parking garage and they liked me, and we often exchanged pleasantries while I waited for my car.

One day Mike, one of the attendants, was acting a little bit "off" while I was babbling to him about God-knows-what. He just kind of gazed at me with this glassy look in his eyes and didn't have much to say, which was unusual for him. Normally, he chatted away and flirted, but today there was clearly something wrong. I'm incredibly self-critical, so I assumed I had said something to offend him--which wouldn't be unusual for me, since I often yap before I think, and then am later aghast when it suddenly hits me how insensitive/retarded/high-on-PCP I must have sounded. So on my drive home, after taking note of Mike's strange gaze following me as I got into my car and drove away, I mulled over our past few conversations in my mind, picking them apart to find the offending barb. I couldn't pinpoint anything, but then again, the truly insensitive/retarded/high-on-PCP aren't always cognizant of their blunders, even when they try to be, so the fact that I couldn't think of what I'd done wrong certainly didn't mean I hadn't done anything wrong. I pondered it for awhile, eventually giving up and moving on to other thoughts. I went home home to relax for the evening.

At some point, I went to the bathroom at home--which is where everything suddenly snapped unhappily into focus. I was wearing a cute pair of black dress pants with an unusual design--they zipped up the back rather than the front or side, and were fastened above the zipper with a single button. I reached behind me and unbuttoned them, then went to unzip them--and realized they were already unzipped. They had been unzipped for hours. Stricken, I buttoned them back up again and left them unzipped, twisting in front of the mirror to see what I had looked like for the past few hours. This was not the kind of unzipped fly that you barely notice--I was wearing black slacks, a black, short-waisted sweater, and the whitest panties money could buy. With the button fastened and the zipper unzipped, my virginal white panties presented themselves in a huge, gaping 4-inch long oval that seemed to start at my waist and run halfway down my butt. To top it off, my panties weren't cotton, but kind of a sheer material, in spite of their glaring whiteness. I had truly made an ass out of myself. The only thing I was grateful for was that I hadn't been wearing a thong.

Naturally I did that thing I mentioned above--I stood there in my bathroom, mind racing back over the last few hours to determine who had seen my big white ass and cheerfully declined to alert me to the fact that I was strolling about half-nude. By my calculations, it had been probably about three hours since my last trip to the bathroom, which must have been where the problem originated, and in that span of time I had interacted with probably 15 people or more. All of them wretched, disease-riddled, soulless weasels without the slightest remorse for letting me sashay around town with my hiney on display. I wished them all a painful death by fire.

The next day I accosted each one of the gutless swine who had been with me in the midst of my previous day's streaking incident, and demanded to know why they hadn't said anything. My coworkers claimed not to have noticed, which was bad on two fronts: Either it meant they were all big fat liars, or, considering they were all men, it meant that apparently not one of them ever took an interest in looking at my ass. So either I was working with a pack of lying scumbags, or worse, I was an unattractive toad who my male coworkers did not readily identify as "female" in any way. When I interrogated Mike, the parking garage traitor, he paled at the mention of my panties and began to stammer and wet himself, offering me no explanation for why he had allowed me to humiliate myself.

So I learned a lesson that day. No, not "zip up your pants," goofball. I learned that one right about the time my mom potty trained me. This was an accident, and there's no way to guarantee I'll never again have another wardrobe malfunction after using the bathroom. No, the lesson is to wear panties similar in color to my clothes. Not matching--that's a little overboard. But if I'm wearing dark colored pants, I wear dark colored panties, just in case my ass ever makes another public appearance without my consent. I'll still look like a dumbshit, but hopefully only the very alert few will notice it this time. And the extra bonus is that if fewer people notice me making a fool of myself, I'll have fewer people to wish cancer upon later when I count up how many people could have bailed me out and chose not to.

Lessons I've Learned, Part 9

Keep your hands out of your crotch unless you're absolutely positive you're alone.

Knowing most of my readers have drug and alcohol abuse problems, I realize most of you have already forgotten the valuable wisdom I've tried to impart to you in Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 of Lessons I've Learned, but that won't stop me from trying to educate you once again.

When I was in college, I did a brief and unglamourous stint in a kitchen store in the mall. This was one of those stores that sells whisks and crock pots and all that super weird stuff that people (I am told) make use of in kitchens when they do something I've heard referred to as "cooking." I'd expand on that term for the curious among you, but I don't know much about it except that it involves a long, complicated, somewhat acrobatic process of mixing and tossing and mashing different food items and so-called "seasonings," heating them to ridiculously hot temperatures, only to then allow them to cool enough to consume them. It's apparently an arduous process that results in big piles of dirty dishes, and usually the end result is a small amount of finished product, hardly worth all the sweat and aggravation and time. A silly pastime that's totally unnecessary, since everyone knows there are plenty of places to purchase food that's ready-to-eat without going through these strenuous kitchen acrobatics.

In spite of my confusion regarding the whole concept of cooking, I took this job because, well, beer and concert tickets aren't free. It was a crappy job because the owner of the store was a jackass, and because it was an ungodly boring environment. While the clothes and shoes stores in the mall were hopping with business, the kitchen store was as dead as Corey Feldman's career. There were always two employees per shift, and the two of us would just stand there, minute after minute, hour after hour, trying to invent reasons not to disembowel ourselves with a potato peeler before the end of our shift.

One of my coworkers there was a man in his late 60s, a very nice, very distinguished gentleman named Bob. A likeable fellow, proper and polite. Bob and I had little in common, and would do our best to scrape up some small talk between us, never really getting very far with it. But our coexistence was comfortable enough... at least until "the incident."

I was wearing a skirt and blazer one day, rather professional-looking attire, especially considering the head-pounding hangover I probably had. The shirt I had on under the blazer was one of those that kept a girl from having to fuss over making sure it stayed tucked in. It was a kind of bodysuit design, so that it snapped between the legs, sort of like a giant version of the onesie my infant son is wearing right now. Of course, I trust you to assume that it didn't look like a onesie. It looked like a regular shirt, and no one would suspect that it wasn't just your average tucked-in shirt. Here's a picture I found on the internet of the kind of shirt I'm referring to.

These things were popular at the time, though I don't know if people still wear them, and of course, in hindsight I don't understand why they were invented in the first place. Can it really be that there are scores of frustrated women out there having an incredibly hard time keeping their shirts tucked in? But it seemed like a good idea when I bought it, and back then there was certainly no harm in investing in new and innovative ways to keep my clothes from slipping off at odd times. I only ended up wearing it one time, and you're about to find out why.

There was a tiny little unisex bathroom back in the storeroom, which was located in the rear of the store, and the entire time I worked there, the lock on the bathroom door was broken. Industrious employees tried different methods of making it known when the bathroom was occupied, to include a sheet of paper taped to the door with "Occupied" scrawled on it. The problem with such methods is they're not very reliable. Over time people would get lazy and just leave the "occupied" sign on the door regardless of whether the restroom was occupied or not, which caused a "The Boy Who Cried Occupied" scenario. A person might see the sign, and then patiently wait for the occupant to finish his business, only to eventually reach the point of near bladder explosion before realizing that there was no one inside after all, and the sign had simply been left up from last time.

I would have been mortified to be caught peeing by anyone, but really, the chances of it happening were pretty slim. For one thing, I'm a speed pee-er. I hop on and hop off the potty like a Jack In The Box popping up, and the odds of someone invading during those few "on" seconds were slim to none. Plus, there were generally just two of us in the store, and a good employee would make sure, before slipping back to the stockroom, that the other employee was minding the store, and perhaps even give them a courteous heads up with a quick, "Um, hey, I'm gonna pee" warning. Apparently I forgot to do that on the day in question.

As was my custom, I finished my business quickly and then stood up to reassemble my clothing. Had it been a regular tuck-in shirt I was wearing, I would have first repositioned my skirt up to its proper spot on my hips, and then proceeded to tuck my shirt in, and that's how I would have been found when my elderly gentleman coworker walked in on me: Fully dressed with my hands dipping demurely into the waistband of my skirt. He would have blushed and said "Oh! Excuse me," and closed the door, and I would have finished up, and sailed out of the restroom gaily, reassuring him that no harm was done.

If only.

Instead, I had the snap-crotch onesie to contend with. Therefore, upon standing up after finishing my business, I had to hike my skirt all the way up around my waist, leaving my pantyhose still pulled down just above my knees, while I hunched forward and struggled with the crotch snaps. There were three, and I got them snapped, but then two came instantly unsnapped, thanks to the sloppy work ethic of the 9-year old Cambodian sweat shop employee who engineered my blouse. I remained hunched over, hands buried in crotch, pantyhose around the knees and skirt up around the waist, when Bob opened the door and took a step into the restroom. Our eyes locked, and looks of mutual horror were briefly exchanged before Bob fled like O.J Simpson, minus the white Ford Bronco.

Here was my dilemma. No way would a 60-some year old guy know about ladies' shirts with crotch snaps. The only conclusion he could draw from what he had just witnessed was that I had been doing something involving a tampon. The only thing I could imagine that was more embarrassing than being caught mid-pee was being caught mid-tampon retrieval. I had to explain to him that I had merely been innocently buttoning my shirt up, not, I repeat NOT engaging in any type of tampon placement or tampon removal.

When I came out of the bathroom, I tried to explain to the embarrassed Bob that my shirt had snaps at the crotch, some new-fangled invention, you see, and that's why my hands were busily rummaging around in my nether regions, but Bob would have none of it. He shushed me and waved me off with an embarrassed "No explanation necessary" attitude and scuttled away like a frightened squirrel, unaware of how desperately important it was to me to explain why my hands had been ferreting around in my naughties.

The lesson? Whatever the reason you have for engaging in any kind of crotch exploration, for the love of God, make sure you only do it behind a locked door.

Unless, of course, you work for tips, or there's a webcam involved.

Lessons I've learned, Part 8

I should never, ever be allowed to speak.

It would be difficult to convey to you how many times I have opened my big, dumb mouth and said something so retarded, so mortifying, that I lay awake the next several nights wishing for my own death. I'd blog about them so you could get your jollies laughing at my stupidity, but the internet isn't big enough to hold them all. However, one particularly unfortunate boo-boo was so traumatizing to me that it's never far from my mind, in spite of the years that have passed since it occurred. Every once in a while I notice it feels like there's something in my throat, and eventually I realize it's my foot, where it's still permanently lodged after this one particularly heinous faux pas.

I live in Texas, but still have some family and friends in my hometown in Missouri, so I go back from time to time. On one particular visit, I was in the lone drugstore of that incredibly tiny town when a man who looked to be in his seventies spotted me and was very excited to see me. He was so sweet, so kind and so enthusiastic, it was as if seeing me had made his day.

You'd have to understand my hometown; it is very, very small. I can hear some of you now--"I come from a small town, too!" No, you don't. Not like this. There were 38 kids in my senior class in high school. There is one street light in town, and it's on the main street, a flashing yellow. Everyone knows everyone. This is the kind of town where, when a car shows up in town with out-of-state plates, it's news. "Who is that? The car has Idaho plates." " I think it's Kitty's cousin." No, you're wrong--I think Bob has a sister from Idaho, though, it could be her." Etcetera. There's a little old lady in town who has a police scanner in her home, which she sits by all day long, enraptured, as if she's watching TV. The moment anyone gets stopped or arrested, she's on the phone to anyone and everyone she knows to report the news. She actually gossips about what she sees in other peoples' shopping carts at the grocery store, as in, "I guess Jackie's husband is making some good money now, I saw her buying steaks." Growing up, I used to hate the total lack of privacy that comes from small town life. I probably only went to the doctor once a year or less, but still, if I called the only clinic in town to make a doctor's appointment, the office worker who answered the phone would say, "Can I help you?" and I'd say, "I'd like to make an appointment," and she'd say, "Oh, hi, Karla." And this was before our town got caller ID.

There were only a handful of businesses in town--one grocery store, two gas stations, one hardware store, one florist, etc. My mom happened to own one of the two restaurants in town, which made her high profile, as in, everyone knew her. And by extension, it seemed like everyone knew me, even though I didn't necessarily know all of them. I was probably introduced to them all at some point, but forgot lots of names, partly because I was a kid, and partly because I was (and still am) fairly self-absorbed. This is why it came as no surprise to me that this very kind elderly man knew me and knew all about me, while I could not, for the life of me, guess who in hell he might be.

This happens to me a lot when I'm back for a visit, and usually I can play it off because the exchanges are fairly short. Someone will call out, "Hi Karla!" and I will answer as if I know them. We will exchange the briefest of pleasantries, and both be on our way, with the other person naturally assuming I knew exactly who they were. I hoped to be able to pull off the same scam with this man, because the alternative--letting him know I didn't remember him--was out of the question. He was just so glad to see me--how could I tell him that I didn't even remember him? So I played along, hoping his identity would come to me at some point. The thing that haunts me even now is that he gave me an out--he actually said to me at the start of the conversation, "You probably don't remember me, do you?" And God help me, he was just so sweet and cheerful that I didn't have the heart to say no, so I said, "Yeah, of course I do!"

I'm actually a pretty skillful bullshitter, so I thought I could pull this off. Plus, I know that the key to getting away with any kind of lie is to keep the exchange brief, try to make your escape before being caught. With this man, however, it was not so easy to extricate myself from the situation. He wanted details about my life, and asked me very specific questions. "How's your mom? I know her health hasn't been so great lately." "I hear you moved to Texas--what part? Do you like it there?" "What brings you to town? How long are you here for?" This went on and on. This guy was clearly retired, and seemed to be someone who perhaps didn't have a lot to do in his day-to-day life--why else would he be so thrilled to see me, someone who he probably hadn't seen in 10 years? I wanted to turn the conversation back toward him before I blew my cover--plus, it would have been incredibly rude to answer all his questions about me and never ask one about him. So I took the first opportunity to ask, "So what have you been up to?" As he opened his mouth to answer, I was wracking my brain--who IS this guy? I was desperately hoping to mine his responses for clues. Here's the sad saga of how it went down:

Me: So what have you been up to?
Him: Oh, well, not too much...you heard about my wife.
Me: (Nodding solemnly) Yeah, I did.
Him: Yeah, so I'm living by myself now, which is hard.

At this point I was thinking, Ah-ha! His wife left him! This gives me a clue. But he kind of had that hangdog attitude about it, like he'd been dumped by her, so in an effort to put a more positive spin on it, I brightened and said:

Me: Hey, you're back on the market!
Him: Well...I don't know if I'd put it that way...(trails off)

Suddenly, total recall hit me like a bucket of cold water. I knew exactly who this guy was: It was Mr. J, the father of a kid I went to school with, and longtime patron of my mom's restaurant. His wife died about a year before; I remembered my mom mentioning it to me.

Holy.

Shit.

Did I just tell a man whose wife died that he's back on the fucking market??!

Can't...breathe....Foot jammed in mouth just past the knee....

I don't remember what happened after that. I have no idea how the conversation ended, or if I was in any way able to recover from that. (Is that possible!?) It's like I blacked out from the mortifying horror I felt. The next thing I remember is practically racing across the street to meet up with Brian, who had been in the grocery store picking up some food. I breathlessly recapped the scene, gushing miserably about what a goddamn idiot I was.

Now, any responsible person would have agreed with me that I was, indeed, a goddamn idiot, or at the very least, that I had stuck my foot in my mouth. (If only I had stuck in in there sooner, before I got a chance to speak.) But my husband loves me a little too much for total honesty, and can't stand to see me in such a fervor. He actually tried to convince me that it wasn't that big a deal, that Mr. J. probably hadn't noticed, etc. In spite of my protests and retelling of the story to be SURE he understood exactly how thoughtless and stupid I had actually been, he stuck to his reassurances that I had behaved in a perfectly acceptable manner. You've got to love a man who will flat-out lie to try make you feel better.

I have to tell you, this story still horrifies me to this day. I managed to surpass even my own expectations of exactly how stupid I'm capable of being. I learned a very important lesson that day: I should never, ever speak unless I'm reading from a script that someone else wrote.

Lessons I've learned Part 7

Sex toys go in the trunk, not the back seat.

Man, I'm going to get some frightening Google searches after this.

This story is about my gay friend Tommy. That's not his real name, although I'm not sure why I'm protecting his privacy. I think he'd be flattered to have his story showcased here, and will probably pout when he finds out I used a fake name. But since I'm too lazy to call him and ask how he'd feel about having the story told, he's getting a fake name.

Tommy got an unusual gift from one of his ambiguously gay friends--a big, black rubbery dildo. I say "ambiguously gay" because this friend of his was one of those gorgeous, studly athlete types who plays on a semi-pro sports team, and gives the appearance of being straight, but Tommy knows better. This particular item was (hopefully) the kind of thing purchased more commonly for comedic effect than for actual use--it was incredibly big, ridiculously long, and very rubbery. Novelty-like, really. Tommy named it Clifford--because the only thing funnier than being the owner of one of these doohickeys is being the owner of one that you've named, which you then can presumably refer to as if it's an actual person. As in, "Clifford hates rainy days," or "Don't talk like that in front of Clifford."

Tommy was on his way to Austin (a few hours' drive) one weekend to see some friends, and was speeding along in the little grey chick car he drives. I'm not a car person, but I think it's like a grey 1990 Cutlass or something--I always associate that kind of car with something a mom would drive, which is why I think of it as a chick car. Don't ask me what he was in such a godawful hurry for, but when the cop pulled him over, he was clocked at 100. I've known Tommy for years, and he's always driven this same old Cutlass, and the most shocking part of this story, to me, is that the car was able to achieve that kind of speed. I have to believe this story because I have no reason not to trust my friend, but really...100 mph? Anyway.

The cop marched up to Tommy's driver's side window and issued the standard, "Do you realize you're endangering the lives of everyone on this road" speech, with the standard daddy-yelling-at-his-little-boy attitude, while Tommy acted appropriately remorseful, hoping he could somehow get out of this ticket. No dice--because of the excessive speed, the cop said he'd have to arrest him. Arrangements were quickly made for a tow truck to come fetch the little grey chick car, and the cop continued to admonish Tommy. He handcuffed him and made him stand aside as he proceeded to inspect the car for potential evil. He began rifling through the overnight bag in the back seat, pulling out clothes, shaving kit, shoes...and Clifford.

In all the commotion of first being pulled over for speeding, then learning he'd be arrested and his car towed, Tommy had forgotten all about Clifford. The cop froze in place, uncomprehending at first, holding Clifford by the base as the upper 10 inches of Clifford lazily swayed back and forth in a rubbery fashion. Tommy, handcuffed, stood there horrified and mortally embarrassed, mouth agape, staring at the motionless police officer and Clifford, still swaying like a metronome. I imagine this moment happening in slow-motion, with the cop's first thought, "What is this? What IS this? What the...no. No. NO!" And his second thought, "God knows where this thing has been! I've got to wash my hands right now." The cop dropped Clifford like a lit match, clearly disgusted, and continued to sift through the bag, while Tommy thought to himself, "Well, the worst has happened, there's nothing more in there for him to find." Then the cop pulled out two gay porno tapes.

Tommy had no idea those were in there. He had only brought Clifford along as a joke to show to his friends in Austin. He had no idea how the tapes got in there--although he discovered later that his gay friend Chris (or Gay Chris, as he was cleverly referred to) threw them in there when Tommy wasn't looking, just to be funny. So by now the cop must have thought Tommy was some kind of deranged pervert on his way to a big gay orgy of some kind. If you knew my sweet, innocent little Tommy, you'd know this is far from the truth. Tommy hung on to his virginity a ridiculously long time, way longer than anyone else I know, and even now just seems too sweet and pure to be up to any shenanigans, much less on his way to a big gay orgy. I think of him as pure as the driven snow, if the driven snow were gay.

Then the cop got a call about an even more sinister law-breaker than the dildo-wielding Tommy--a female driving erratically, in excess of 100 mph, out-running several pursuing cop cars. She was believed to be armed and on amphetamines. All units were called to respond--including, apparently, Tommy's captor. To his shock, Tommy was hastily un-cuffed and told he was free to go! The cop tossed Tommy's filthy bag of orgy paraphernalia unceremoniously onto the roadside pavement and sped away. Tommy and Clifford were left to continue on with their weekend plans.

The lesson? It's along the same lines as "Always wear clean underwear, just in case you're ever in a car wreck." Always put your sex toys in the trunk of your car, not the back seat, just in case you're ever pulled over and searched by a homophobic cop.

Lessons I've Learned, Part 6

It's not enough to simply lock your bedroom door.

The story I told you about my 4 ridiculously messy roommates got me reminiscing about that (incredibly filthy, roach-infested) year we lived together. There was yet another lesson I learned from that time.

My roommates and I were all in ROTC...which might lead you to believe I'm a military chick, but that would only be true in the sketchiest sense. I was only in the Reserves, never the active Army, and I did it because it was either that or drop out of school after my sophomore year, since my mom could no longer afford my tuition, and the Army would pay it for those remaining two years. So I was in the Reserves and ROTC for my last two years of college, and after college I fulfilled my Reserve obligation and then got out. It was a great experience, and I had a lot of fun and learned a whole lot, but if you knew me you'd know that I am just not the military type. So I got out when my obligation was up, and went back to being the person of questionable morals and behavior that you've grown to love.

The ROTC department at my university was small--maybe 40 students in all, with only 4 or 5 instructors. The instructors were active Army people, not college professors. While the 7 or 8 seniors in my ROTC class did attend classes taught by the other ROTC instructors, we were primarily assigned to Cpt. Mitchell, while the juniors in ROTC had their own instructor, as did the sophomores and the freshmen. So the 7 or 8 of us seniors (including my roommates) spent the majority of our ROTC class time with Cpt. Mitchell, and we became very familiar with him. Maybe too familiar, as my story will illustrate.

One weekend there was a party at our house. I was not in attendance, since I had driven home for the weekend to see some friends, but apparently this was a hell of a party. Cpt. Mitchell was there, and had appointed himself bartender. He stationed himself by an open window and used a table as his bartop, where he poured tequila shots and basically badgered people into taking them. Every so often he would stick his head out the window and puke into our hapless bushes, then pour himself another shot and carry on, like a true soldier. By everyone's account, this was apparently a great party, probably largely due to the tequila shot pouring prowess of Cpt. Mitchell. When I returned on Sunday, my roommates looked like something that had crawled out of the sewer--each of them was sprawled on various pieces of furniture, moaning and squinting and retching and cursing God. I went into my room to drop my bags, and noticed my bed had been made--which was odd, since I hadn't made it before I left. In fact, I had locked my bedroom door before I'd left. I peered out my bedroom door into the adjacent room, addressed the crew of living dead and asked, "Who slept in my room?" Suddenly, life crept into the eyes of the roommates, who instantly looked guilty. They fumbled. "Um. Well.... Uh," looking from one to the other and back at the floor. I went back into my room and took the sheets and blankets off the bed, thinking the guilty looks of my roommates surely meant that someone had not just slept in there, but possibly banged a hooker or a farm animal, so I might as well wash sheets now and ask questions later.

That's when I saw the tighty whities.

The only thing worse than discovering that some unidentified couple had sex in your bed is discovering that they left their vile little undergarments there. And am I crazy, or would it have been better if it had been the girl that had left her underoos there? Somehow it was worse that it was men's underwear than women's. I wanted to burn my bed to the ground.

Now they had no choice but to tell me the story. Here are the incredibly seedy details:

Party ends at our place, guests crawl home. Cpt. Mitchell remains, and in spite of being so drunk that he has puked several times and looks like Charles Manson instead of the clean-cut Top Gun he had resembled at the start of the evening, he wants to go barhopping. Drunk roommates actually try to resist, but Mitchell insists--and he was, after all, our superior officer, and we were accustomed to taking orders from him. They go to a place so seedy that it actually has big, dark blue sheets thumbtacked up to cover the windows so that you can't see into it from the street. It looks like something you'd find in a warehouse district. Once inside, Cpt. Mitchell picks up some skank. He defiles the skank in my bed after picking the lock to get in, while my roommates stare wide-eyed at each other in the living room, unable to believe this turn of events.

But here's where the story gets even more madcap, more zany.

Our fearless leader and his skank fall asleep in my formerly bacteria-free bed. Just as daylight begins to break, there's a knock at the door. A hungover roommate peers out the window and realizes it's Cpt. Mitchell's wife! Everyone tries to ignore the knocking. She persists, then leaves--but returns again a few minutes later, banging even harder, crying, and calling "I know he's there! His car is parked right here!" Cpt. Mitchell scrambles into his clothes--most of them, anyway--instructs the girl to stay put and not make a sound, then sheepishly answers the door. His crying wife has the baby in her car; the family retreats to the Mitchell household, for what must surely have been a daylong crying and fighting session. (Let me also note that Mitchell had brought his wife to the states from Germany where he'd met her a few years before. She still had a thick accent and had no family here in the states.)

My roommates are then left with Cpt. Mitchell's...friend. Eventually someone takes her home, and soon I arrive to find the filthy evidence at the crime scene.

Naturally it would have made sense to throw his filthy little panties away. But I found his behavior nauseating, particularly since a big portion of his time spent training us to be leaders involved instructing us to behave with strong moral character. So I didn't want to let him off the hook so easily. I picked up his putrid little bloomers by hooking them onto the end of a pen (which I promptly disposed of) and put them into a paper bag, and delivered them to him as he sat at his desk Monday morning. He was embarrassed, horrified, ashamed, etc. I can't imagine a bigger scandal that could have rocked our small ROTC department. He had crossed a boundary by even attending the party--and then, of course, he bludgeoned several other boundaries plum to death. (And no, Cpt. Mitchell isn't his real name.)

The lesson: Locking your bedroom door is never enough when you live with a house full of guys. Someone will get resourceful and find a way to degrade themselves and someone else in your bed. Consider sprinkling glass shards in your bed before you leave for the weekend, or perhaps leaving a wolverine with newborn cubs under the comforter.

Lessons I've Learned, Part 5

Beware the horror lurking in your microwave

This edition of Lessons I've Learned will shock you, if only for the fact that, unlike my previous Lessons, it does not involve copious alcohol consumption.

For a period of time in college, I lived with 4 guys. Yeah, I know--that's a recipe for disaster. Of course, I knew they'd be slobs, since, well, they were guys--but naivete prevented me from understanding or predicting the unbelievable extent to which their slobdom would spiral. How can men live like that? These normal-looking, well-behaved, reasonably attractive guys blithely strolled from room to room in our cute little off-campus dwelling, kicking litter hither and yon as they went, sidestepping piles of clothing, stacks of dishes, and food items that had fossilized weeks before. I had two choices: To become Snow White to their 4 Dwarfs, thanklessly cleaning up after them day in and day out, or to stubbornly ignore it, hoping beyond common sense that they'd eventually muster up enough pride to tidy up after themselves. I knew it was the longest shot conceivable, but I'm an optimist, so I chose the latter. Who knew--perhaps eventually they'd grow ashamed of the filth, and each would start to pick up after himself just enough that the house would begin to exist in a general state of, if not cleanliness, then at least acceptable clutter.

This shows how dumb I was.

Time went by and the filth reached epic proportions. I can tolerate constant disarray, if I must, but what I can't tolerate are cockroaches. I can't stand insects of any kind, but roaches are an unspeakable horror. I cannot sleep if I've seen one in my home. I will perch in a crouching position on the center of my bed, holding a shoe in one hand and a can of Raid in the other, head swiveling from side to side, on the alert for anything that might resemble scurrying. I had signed a lease with these zoo animals, and had no place to move to in the middle of the semester, and yet I could not sleep at night if there was even the remotest chance that a roach might amble across the bridge of my nose as I slumbered. And our tiny kitchen was home to, seemingly, about 40% of the US population of roaches. I couldn't move a coffee cup for fear of igniting a storm of activity that would cause me leap 3 feet in the air and shriek like chimpanzee on fire. In fact, once when I got up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, I screeched like banshee when I saw a huge roach sitting comfortably on the bristles of Sid's toothbrush. On the bristles! His big, disgusting body covered the whole head of the toothbrush. This was not an acceptable living situation. I needed a solution.

Here's the best I was able to come up with: I moved into the basement room. The house had four bedrooms upstairs and one downstairs in the basement. I traded with one of my filthy cohorts, who was glad to get an upstairs room. My hope was that my room was far enough removed from the kitchen that the roaches would be too lazy to make the trek, especially considering my room was also scrupulously absent of any food items or even a sweet-smelling, potentially roach-attracting candle or tube of lip gloss. For good measure, I also kept a towel stuffed under my bedroom door to ensure that the crack that an insect might potentially enter through no longer existed. And, for my final display of genius, I kept a can of Raid handy, which I used every single night to spray the entire perimeter of my room before I went to sleep. The nightly inhalation of insecticide fumes lo those many nights may explain some of the questionable things you've read on this site, and which, if you know me, you've heard me say on a regular basis. But far more important than the health of my brain is the fact that I never once saw a roach in my pristine basement hideaway, so my plan worked. But that's not where the lesson comes in. Are you ready for the lesson? I don't think you are, but you wanted something to read today, so basically you're asking for this. You're going to be sorry, though.

Eventually I moved out of that litter box and into a house with my nice, clean boyfriend. I was careful to clean the hell out of everything I owned before bringing it into my new pad, and my boyfriend helped out in this task. As it happened, he was the one who cleaned out the microwave, and he was incredibly thorough, even taking apart the housing so he could get to the fan part. That's where he found the roach graveyard.

A nice little pile of dust had accumulated back there, and it wasn't hard to determine what that dust was made of, when you took note of the fact that there were also the dried husks of roaches in various stages of pre-dustification. Roaches would get in that little fan compartment and die, the heat would dry them out and over time, turn them to dust, and then the little dust particles would presumably FLY AROUND INSIDE MY MICROWAVE while my food heated up! I had often contemplated the security of my microwave from roaches, and considered the inside of that appliance to be a safe zone. After all, bugs can't get in there unless you leave the door open, right? Who the hell would think about them turning to dust and getting sucked up through the f!&*@ing fan? Oh, the cruel, Godless irony--I had been tediously soaking the carpet around the periphery of my room with Raid every night to ward off the roaches who might or might not wish to crawl, relatively harmlessly, about in my room, when in fact, I was even then digesting the roach dust that had coated the pizza I had reaheated and eaten earlier that day! I have been reeling from this revelation for years, my friends.

The lesson? GOD IS CRUEL! No, that's too simple. The lesson is this: Cover every single thing you heat in a microwave. If it's a bowl of soup, put a lid on it. If it's a burrito, put it inside a Tupperware container and put a lid on it. Even if you don't live with 4 of the filthiest jackasses to ever walk the earth, and even if you don't have a roach in your house--there's just no way of knowing what dead things might be, even now, decomposing in the depths of your appliances.

I have to go kill myself now.

Lessons I've Learned, Part 4

Not all butt rashes are obtained through sexual contact

So I've had a rash on my butt. Don't jump to conclusions and assume that I blacked out at a frat party and woke up wearing only one sock and someone else's puke. Likewise, don't assume that I like to hang out on the docks, looking for sailors ready for a party. (I mean, I do like doing that, but still, don't assume.) There's a perfectly innocent explanation.

My friend Mick and I graduated from college together. As a little graduation gift to himself, he decided to take 2 weeks and drive to California to visit his dad. He'd be driving his motorcycle, and wanted some company, so he asked me to go.

If you've ever lived in Missouri, you know this is a very silly question. The answer to "Do you want to leave the state," no matter where to, or for how long, or by what means, is always yes. If you were due to start your new job tomorrow, or get married this evening, and someone asked you, "Do you want to take a road trip to Illinois with me right now to transport some used kitty litter to my ex-convict cousin Switchblade to use to bury a corpse with?" the answer would be yes. When you live in Missouri, you occupy a large portion of your time dreaming up scenarios which might take you out of the state, for any reason at all. I had ridden a motorcycle only once before, and it was a big comfy Honda Gold Wing driven very slowly by a responsible retired man of 56 around the block in my small hometown. The trip probably took 4 minutes. Mick's bike was a very small Honda something-or-other, no luxury bike, and Mick was no retiree; he was 22. But I didn't even blink before shouting, "Yes, I'll go!" It's just lucky for me he had asked me to go someplace interesting and beachy like California, because I'd have said yes to a trip to Kansas.

The trip took us 3 days to get there and 4 days to get back, with a week spent in California. The trip highlights:

--It rained on us as we drove through the mountains in Colorado, and we stopped at a laundromat in Salida to dry our clothes. While waiting for them to dry, I walked across the street to a Wal-Mart, the only business in sight. Somehow, because God is a jokester, I ran into my ex-boyfriend--who I had recently broken up with and now loathed--and who, of course, like me, lived in Missouri. How we happened to meet up in Colorado at that moment, when neither of us had any idea the other would be in Colorado, is beyond me. Small, cruel world.

--While on the road, we slept wherever we happened to be. We had sleeping bags, and would sleep wherever we found a spot most of the time. Outside Vegas, in fact, we just slept not too far off the side of the road. If you knew what a prissy little princess I am, this would impress you, but actually, I didn't even mind it; it was an adventure, and as I said, I was out of Missouri. And then sometimes, for a break from roughing it, we'd get a hotel room. (Nothing funny happened, I can assure you. Not only did I have a new guy I was seeing back home--who was none-too-pleased about this trip, by the way--but Mick had recently gifted a friend of mine with chlamydia--after I set the two of them up. She thought he was very cute and very smart and very witty til the communicable disease portion of the relationship. That can be a real downer in a budding love story, apparently. I suppose that could be my Lessons I've Learned Part 5: Don't play cupid to people who may have STDs. And yes, I've changed his name for this story, just in case he ever finds my blog and decides to hunt me down and kill me for revealing his seedy sexual history.)

--We planned the Mojave desert portion of the trip so that we'd be going through in the middle of the night, and hopefully therefore not scald our skin right off our bodies. A wise move, but you'd be surprised--driving through, it still felt like we were driving around in a very big oven. And it's not hard imagining why there are emergency telephones all along the highway at regular intervals, because if your car happened to crap out on you in the middle of the day, it would take about 14 seconds for you to die of exposure. So yes, for the curious among you, the desert is indeed one hot mother.

--A creepy moment occurred in Vegas, moments after Mick and I had been talking about The Doors. He was saying he loved them, I was saying I hated them. Then we stopped at a gas station, where we found an abandoned Doors CD sitting on our gas pump. Creepy.

--When we arrived in California, I learned we'd be staying on his dad's houseboat. That was actually kind of cool--we had the place to ourselves, and it was small but had separate sleeping quarters. It was neat to stay on a boat for a week...except for the fact that I discovered on that trip that I get sick on boats. When we were docked it was okay, but when we went out into the open water, I got green. Nice. Still, I got to do a lot of sunbathing, and really, we didn't spend much time on the boat anyway, but instead visited various beaches and touristy spots while we were in town.

--Oh yeah, the rash part. So it turns out that a tender, delicate booty like my own doesn't necessarily take easily to sitting on a bike for days on end. I had acquired a minor rash by the time we arrived in California. Then I sunbathed almost every day, because, well, I'm an idiot. I'm also a very white, very pale idiot, so I burned. Then after a week of cooking my rashy behind in the sun, I hopped back on the bike for the return trip home. Rash stacked on top of burn stacked on top of rash. Ow. Not a very Jack Kerouac scene.

--And for the final trip highlight: The wasp in Mick's pants. We were almost home, maybe an hour away, and I was sitting there admiring the passing scenery, my legs continuing to get pelted with insects and debris, as happens on a bike. I was sitting behind Mick, naturally, but there was no need to hold on to his waist or anything; it was a small bike, but I had a little back rest and I could lean back on that, leaving maybe six inches of space between his body and mine. For no reason I could imagine, he began sort of hopping left to right in his seat while driving, kind of doing a crazy shimmy. I thought he had lost his mind. He then pulled over, leapt off the bike and raced for the ditch, where he was able to quickly drop his shorts out of the sight of passing cars (and me), shrieking the entire time. Turns out a wasp had beaten incredible odds by managing to get between Mick and me at 70 MPH and insert himself into the tiny gap at the top of his shorts, and was apparently then disappointed to find that frolicking in the crack of Mick's butt was not all he had hoped it would be. But the wasp was soon freed, and we were back on our way home.

The lesson: When embarking on a motorcycle trip cross-country, take into consideration the general well-being of your butt. I'm no biker chick, so I still don't know how to properly advise you in avoiding bike-induced butt rashes, but there's got to be a way. Bring along a pillow, maybe--liberally slather your posterior with lotion, perhaps--or at the very least, understand the wisdom of letting irritated skin heal before cooking it in the sun for several days.

Lessons I've Learned, Part 3

Don't lose track of your wooden leg

Okay, some of you are going to call bullshit on this one. But I swear to God it's true.

Many moons ago when I lived in Hicktown, USA, we had to travel to nearby college towns if we wanted to go to any decent bars. Not that there weren't bars in my hometown--in fact, just the opposite. In small yeehaw towns, alcoholism is often the main industry. For instance:
--We had a liquor store with a drive-through window, for the alcoholic on the go.
--You could buy a fifth of of whiskey at the bar to take home with you, in case a trip to the liquor store was out of your way.
--At closing time at the bar, you could get a rum and coke in a big to-go cup...you know, for the drive home.
So certainly, we had bars--but these were the kind of bars where the patrons were in their 50s and up, with names like Bubba and Marvella, the kind of patrons who brought in their own koozie cups with them to house the cans of Milwaukee's Best and Pabst Blue Ribbon they were about to consume. For entertainment, you could choose from the catalogue of decade-old country music on the juke box.

But naturally, we were looking for bars with some live music, a younger crowd, and a little excitement. One bar we sometimes went to was The Paradise Club, an hour away in Warrensburg, MO. On this particular night, the drink specials were thus: 50 cent draws, $1 wells. My friend Travis was with us that night; he took $50 bucks into the bar with him, and spent it all before we left.

Travis had a wooden leg, although to look at him, you wouldn't know it. He had a good prosthetic, and only walked with a slight limp. The walking got harder as he got drunker, though, and he would fall down now and then. He also liked to dance, and if he was very drunk and you were dancing with him, you had to somehow incorporate repeatedly picking him up off the floor into your regular dance moves. He was incredibly good-natured about all this, and as long as you were too, you could dance all night. He was always quick with a wooden leg joke, and if he were wearing shorts, he'd stub out his cigarette on his ankle, amid the gasps of anyone who happened to notice it. He often wore a shoe only on his real foot, leaving the fake one bare; once, at a bonfire, he pretended to be drunker than he was, and kept "accidentally" stumbling into the fire, to see who would gasp in horror as they saw him standing there with his foot in the flames.

The Paradise Club is located up a steep flight of stairs, and some other crappy bar is below it. A group of us went to the Paradise and spent several hours there, during which Travis, as mentioned, emptied his pockets getting drunk. (Yeah, I know--he drank like he had a hollow leg. You've been dying to say it.) When it was time to leave, Travis led the way. He ambled over to the stairs...and then just kept walking, eyes front, taking no note of the sudden change in elevation that the first step presented. I remember the scene unfolding as if in slow-motion: He was looking dead ahead, not downward like a person about to negotiate stairs would. Clearly, he did not remember the stairs were there. He proceeded to tumble down them, loudly, as the crowd leapt out of his flight path. On his way down, you guessed it (or did you?)--he lost his wooden leg. He landed in a heap, right next to the bouncer. Meanwhile, he rest of us who were with Travis were still poised at the top of the stairs, surveying the carnage below. A cluster of shocked people stared at Travis and his now- empty pants leg--his wooden leg had skittered across the floor and come to rest a couple feet away. The onlookers stood frozen, silent. Remember, these people were likely already drunk--it's got to be unsettling to see a guy topple down a flight of steps, period, much less lose an appendage on the way. I've always wondered if some of them thought the fall had been so bad that it had ripped a perfectly healthy leg off this man's formerly intact body. From the horrified looks on their faces, this might well have been what was going through their minds. Travis, on the other hand, looked unphased. This was not the first time he had fallen down, nor the first time he'd had to take inventory of his legs before he could get back up. He immediately set about the task of pulling himself into a sitting position, leaning his back against the wall, and scanning the immediate area for the wayward leg. Spotting it, he asked the girl nearest it, in a tone of voice which suggested he thought this was a reasonable question, "Hey, can you hand me that leg?" The girl just stared at him, speechless. Travis looked around at the gawkers, and back at the girl, and asked, "What's the matter? Haven't you people seen a wooden leg before?" Finally someone recovered and passed him the leg, which he deftly snapped back on, and we were on our way out.

The lesson? When you're leaving the Paradise Club in Warrensburg, Missouri, hang on to your wooden leg.

Lessons I've Learned, Part 2

Never Sit On A Bleeding Man's Shoulders

I'm from a hick town in Missouri, where you have to be creative when it comes to finding something to do on a weekend. Unfortunately, none of us were very creative. Mostly we sat on gravel roads and drank beer. Occasionally we snuck into the swimming pool in the middle of the night for a dip, and once we stole some fire extinguishers and sprayed them, from the back of a pickup truck, on the cars parked on main street in a neighboring town. Once we put a stolen picnic table in the back of my El Camino and had someone drive us around while we sat at the picnic table and played quarters. That's some redneck entertainment for you. But mostly there was just a lot of driving up and down the street looking for someone interesting to stop and talk to. Very boring stuff. So going to concerts in Kansas City was big excitement, and we went every chance we got.

Going to concerts was a big ordeal, because we had to come up with the cash, buy tickets for everyone who wanted to go, drive a couple hours to get there, then presumably get loaded, watch the show, and weave back home without getting arrested. I've seen a lot of bands, but couldn't honestly tell you if most of them were any good or not, because the goal seemed to be more along the lines of getting supremely wasted rather than seeing and appreciating the band. I've diligently kept all my concert ticket stubs, not so much because I'm sentimental, but because otherwise I'd have no idea what bands I've seen.

On one particular occasion, we went to a Monsters of Rock concert. There were 4 or 5 of us in the car, and I was the only girl. The guys were drinking beer, naturally, but had brought along a bottle of Everclear for the sole purpose of taking a shot, then holding their breath until they passed out--they would do this from a standing position, to see if they fell backwards, Nestea Plunge-style, when they passed out. What's that? You say you've never thought of doing anything so stupid? Then you must not be from a redneck town in Missouri. This is the kind of creative thinking that small-town life inspires. Yes, it turns out, you will pass out if you take a shot of pure grain alcohol and then hold your breath long enough. And yes, naturally you will smack your skull on the ground while you're out. You're only out for a second or two, but at least your retarded mission will have been accomplished.

Because this activity calls for the goofball participant to be standing, this was not something that could be accomplished in the car on the way to the show (the way all normal drinking and driving should be done). So every so often, we'd stop somewhere, one or more of the guys would take a shot and smack their skulls on the ground, and we'd continue on. Very normal, very healthy behavior.

We arrived at the concert in the middle of the day. Several bands were to play, so this event, held in an outdoor arena, would last all day and evening. The floor area in front of the stage did not have seating, but was instead a big open area for the crowd to gather and stand, while people who wanted to sit could do so further back. We stood in front of the stage, pretty close, in the tightly-knotted crowd. They guys I was with were all tall, and I'm 5 foot 6. I couldn't see as well as them, and for some period of time I sat on the shoulders of my boyfriend, who was 6-foot-4-inches tall and weighed 190 lbs, perfect for a girl to perch atop and see the show. It was not an easy seat to relax in, however, since he was, shall we say, moved by the music, and continued to jump around to the beat pretty much the same as he would have had he not had a person sitting on his shoulders. Eventually I had enough of the bucking bronco action and got down.

I'm probably kind of self-absorbed, and don't tend to look around much, so it took me awhile to notice that people were staring at me. It was the horrified, gape-mouthed looks that caught my attention. On my way to the bathroom, one girl put her hand on my arm and asked me if I was okay. I gave her a puzzled look, and then suddenly began to take in the stares of lots of other people around us. They were all focused on my crotch area--which to my horror, I realized was covered in blood. Seriously, it looked like I had just given birth. In such a situation, it's natural to take personal inventory: Had I inadvertently stabbed myself? Had I been stabbed by someone else, and been too drunk to feel it? Is that even possible? Had I, indeed, given birth? Had I, earlier in the day, spontaneously given a big bear-hug to someone that, now that I thought back on it, was actually soaked in blood from head to toe? And the unthinkable: Had my monthly rendezvous with "Uncle Freddy" (yes, that's what we called it back then) arrived unexpectedly?
No--
no--
I don't think so--
no--
no--
and thank God, no.
I surmised pretty quickly that my boyfriend must have cut himself upon plummeting backwards to the ground at the last Everclear stop, which had been a gravel road. Sure enough, when I inspected the still-jumping-and-thrashing boyfriend, I found that the back of his neck and head were bloody, and that he had a nice gash on the back of his drunken skull. By then, the bleeding had stopped, though, so he just took his bloody shirt off and threw it away, and looked more or less normal. I, however, did not have a fresh set of clothes to wear, so it was my misfortune to have several hours ahead of me, baking in the hot sun with my dried-blood ensemble. Drunk.

The lesson: Well, it started out to be "Don't sit on the shoulders of a bleeding man," but maybe it should be "Don't socialize with crackpots who look for ways to injure themselves." Or at the very least, "Bring a change of clothes with you when you're socializing with crackpots."

Lessons I've Learned, Part 1

Lesson: It's a bad idea to sleep in a ditch.

I know what you're thinking. "What on earth prompted you to sleep in a ditch?" Let's not delve into the petty details. Suffice it to say that for one thing, there was booze involved, lots of it, and that secondly, there's not much napping room in a Volkswagen van with 7 people passed out inside. Besides that, my friend Mary had previously found herself on the floor of said van for a period of time, and the mysterious yellow, cakey stains had never completely come out of her shirt.

It was not my idea to go to sleep, by the way. But the driver (if what he had been doing could be called "driving") simply pulled over and announced he was too tired to continue, and I was thinking the exact same thing everyone else in the van was thinking--"No way in hell am I going to get a DUI driving this stupid van." The situation called for some quick thinking, and my brainstorming session concluded with me sacked out in the tall grass of the roadside ditch. As you might assume, it turned out to be a very bad idea--but not for the reasons you might think. You might be thinking you'd never even consider sleeping in a ditch because you might get rained on, or because a car might careen off the highway and plow into you, or even because a prison escapee might happen along and rape and rob you, then dismember your body and mail the various parts off to ex-girlfriends and/or local politicians. All valid concerns for the safety-conscious. But no, none of those are the reasons I am now an aggressive proponent of non-ditch napping. It's all about the chiggers.

Every once in awhile I run across someone who doesn't know what a chigger is. ("Humpf," I think to myself. "Smug little hoity-toity prick is clearly too good to sleep in a ditch, I see.") If you're unfamiliar, it's a little insect that a person might think has bitten them--people often say they "got bitten by chiggers" after spending the day at a picnic or some other grassy festivity. Turns out that's the fantasy explanation for what's happened to them. Here's what I found on one website about chiggers:


What a Chigger Is

Chiggers are tiny (most can only be seen with a magnifying glass) and red, and they are a type of mite. Mites aren't insects - they are arachnids and part of the same family as spiders, scorpions, and ticks. Chiggers are found all over the place, including in grassy fields, along lakes and streams, and in forests. There are adult chiggers and baby chiggers (called larvae), but only the baby chiggers bother people and animals.

Chiggers have tiny claws that allow them to attach tightly onto people and animals. Once attached, they are able to pierce the skin and inject their saliva, which contains digestive juices that liquefy skin cells. The chigger then slurps up the liquefied skin cells. To the chigger, this is a tasty meal! Having a chigger do this is very irritating to your skin. After a few days, the chigger will be done feeding and fall off a person's skin, leaving behind a red welt where it had once been.

GAK! This sounds like something out of a bad B movie! More horrifying than the thought of one teensy little chigger doing this to you is what happened in my case--hundreds of these monsters feasted on me. I was covered, head to foot, with red welts. The ensuing itchiness went on for a week or two. Incredibly demoralizing and irritating--and as it turns out, being covered in little red welts is not hot, even when you're young and can afford a blemish or two. Also not hot: Constant, frantic scratching, accomplished while wearing a look of blind desperation.

So let's review: Driving across the highways of Missouri in a Volkswagen van with 7 drunks and no less than 6 cases of Milwaukee's Best Light, 3 bottles of booze and a beer bong (for the booze, not the beer, stupid), is perfectly fine. Reaching a point in such an evening when you have a yen for a little nap is also perfectly fine. In fact, clearly, in such a situation it might be fair to assume that just about anything goes--but beware the parasite-filled ditch that looks so deceptively inviting. Sleep on the top, or at least near the top, of the pile of idiots passed out hither and yon throughout the van. But not, not, NOT in the ditch.

Thank you.

(Oh, and thanks to Undercover Celebrity for reminding me to mention that this didn't just happen yesterday. It was years ago, before I outgrew my "riding around in cars stuffed with drunk people" phase.)