Wet Chickens are Unhappy Chickens

If you ask almost any guy in the entire universe about a story involving him and small furry animals when he was very young, you will get a horror tale, probably involving death and mutilation.

Unless you’re a pretty girl that he’s trying to impress, in which case you’ll hear about that one time he nursed a baby squirrel back to life, which, by the way, will be an outright lie. Unless you’re talking to me. I totally nursed a baby squirrel back to life. I nursed thousands of baby squirrels back to life. Hundreds of thousands, even.

Now, cruelty to small animals is one of the early warning signs that correlate with psychopathic (sociopathic? Get your crap straight, scientists! I don’t want nit pickers all over ambiguous word choice in my posts. They should be able to call me a horrible human being without having to split hairs between similar words.) behavior, but we are, at heart, animals, and animals kill other animals.

But before we get into that, I’ve got to tell you about this. And this… is downright adorable.

I used to have two imaginary friends. They were both alligators (because giant amphibious lizards figured prominently in my formative years for some reason. Maybe I was destined to be the next crocodile hunter!) and one of them was named Jackie and one of them was named Beauford.

That’s right. I named one of my imaginary friends Beauford. Or he named himself that. I’m still not quite sure.

I do remember feeling a little confused, because one of my mother’s good friends was named Jackie, and every time she visited Jackie would disappear for a bit and I was left to play with just Beauford, which was annoying, because Beauford was kind of dull.

By the way, and I know this is barely relevant, but Jackie and Beauford lived on the roof.

There are loads of stories about Jackie and Beauford, but I’m only making this one post about them, so I’ll try to fit as many in as possible. Basically, I used them as my scapegoats.

The San Jose airport had a playground that I randomly wanted to play on one day, so I attempted to convince my mother to drive Jackie and Beauford to the airport because they had to catch a plane to Florida to visit their family because they were alligators, and that’s where alligators lived and while we were there could I please play on the playground. My mother said no.

I once had a tea party with Jackie and Beauford, but it was a disaster. Tea was everywhere. Everything was soaking wet, because alligators are freaking TERRIBLE at drinking tea.

I once asked my REAL friend Jackie if she would ever date a guy named Beauford. She said that she would, but only if it were pronounced Byoo-ferd (which it was) and not Bow-ferd (which it wasn’t.) Jackie and Beauford weren’t dating. I think they had an on and off marriage, if I remember correctly.

Anyway, on to the title story. We had a batch of adorable chickens. I can only remember two of their names. Brynn and Goldie. Goldie was the hands down favorite, although she was hilariously weird. She laid green eggs (seriously. Green eggs. I didn’t know it was possible.) routinely flew out of the pen to mess with the dogs, and, in the morning, she would crow. Goldie was a lesbian chicken.

Wow.

That actually just occurred to me. Right then, when I wrote it. All these years, and I never realized…

Mind = Blown.

Where was I?

Oh yes! We had a cute little barn in which they all slept and laid their eggs and generally had a good time until one horrendous day, from which they would probably never recover (although it’s difficult to tell, with chickens.)

It was the day I discovered the hose could reach their barn.

It was like a video game! I could spray one chicken and it would squawk and jump up and then I’d turn the hose on the other. I’d try to get them all into the air at once. I’d make them switch roosts back and forth. I’d follow one around for a bit until it collapsed from exhaustion and then move onto the next one.

My mother found me after I don’t know how long. She was livid. She asked me what I was doing, and, to this day, I can remember what I told her to try to get out of it.

“Jackie told me to.”

Not “I was cleaning the pen!” or “I was trying to chase away the rats!” (and there <i>were</i> rats) or even “I dunno.”

“Jackie told me to.”

I was in therapy the very next day, working out some “issues.” It didn’t really go anywhere. I wasn’t broken, or psychopathic, or even scared. I was just a kid, being stupid.

Jackie and Beauford eventually left my life. Violently. I still remember the day that I beat them to death with a stick in the back yard, so I could make “alligator soup.”

The soup wasn’t very good, and my mother had a FIT about her rose bushes.

Hats I have Owned

I spend far too much money on hats. It’s a fault of mine that I find difficult to steer away from, partly because it’s not all that terrible, as far as faults go, and partly because I don’t actually want to stop.

I’ve received several hats as gifts, two of which have been from my Aunt Denice. Both were brown, one of my favorite colors to wear for reasons that I won’t get into now but which I can basically sum up with the phrase “I’m duller than a tenured college professor who hasn’t actually attended his classes in five years.”

The first was a hat that looked like she had built a time machine, zapped back to the nineteenth century, and ripped a hat off of a (probably loudly protesting) newspaper boy. I like to think he was a tabloid seller, and the next issue had all of his esteemed colleagues shouting “Extra! Extra! Time Travelling Tart Takes Tom’s Top, Probably For Use in Some Strange Future Sex Ritual!” She probably just bought it in a hat store named something clever, but I have my dreams.

It didn’t fit, by the way. I have an unusually large head. My mother cut a slice out of the back and sewed some weird fabric into it so I could actually get it on my noggin.

The second hat my Aunt bought for me was weird. It was basically a fur lined baseball cap, with shades of Guevara in the design. I have no idea where she found it. It’s a good hat for summer.

Another excellent summer hat I obtained by providing my extensive acting experience (HAH!) to a promotional video advertising a book. It’s a white hat of the sort golfers wear, where (where, wear, whatever) the top merges with the bill. Typically I put it on when I feel like being pretentious.

I have a purple headband, too. I don’t usually wear that one in public.

Oh! Speaking of pretentious hats… I was on a band trip in Canada at one point when I found just the greatest hat. It is a classical felt top hat, of the original style. It is a thing of beauty, but the price was… on the high side. I agonized about it for a while, debating whether to purchase it or a bright pink tuxedo shirt with a black lace ruff. I think I made the right decision. Even if it was eighty dollars.

But that’s not my most expensive hat! That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, I once purchased a hat that was over one hundred dollars. And I don’t regret it the tiniest bit. It’s a reddish brown, molded leather wizard hat with the shape of a skull pressed into it. Imagine the sorting hat if it died and then decomposed.

My most recent hat was a christmas present from my dear sister. It’s a wool cap with tassels hanging down to the chest. It has ears, eyes, a nose, and (seriously) teeth, all along the rim. It’s one of my favorites.

I have others, but I’m too tired to list them right now, and this post hasn’t been particularly amusing anyway, so I’ll just end with this:

I own not a single baseball cap.

So this is kind of late,

but I totally wrote a guest blog over at this wonderful, awesome place, and if you happen to be poking around in that corner of the internet, take a look. Leave a comment. Buy a shirt.

Also in this post, THIS BOOK! which I wrote and published for YOOOUUUU! It says so, right there in the dedication. Yes you. Holding onto the mouse!

So buy it, give me money, and I will keep busily lying to you like I have this past week.

Speaking of lies, and it's a short one today, but around the fourth of July a fellow waltzed into the toy store I own... well, work at, and asked if we had model rocket engines.

On the fourth of July. Model rocket engines. I wanted to ask for his address so I could stay far, far away from that house forever, but that wouldn't have been socially acceptable. So I spent the evening cowering under my bed (which is kind of impressive, considering that my mattress is on the floor) and HOPING that he didn't live next door to me. He didn't, and I made it through the night alive, although lacking any faith in humanity I had managed to grow since the mascot incident, which is on my tumblr, so you don't know about it because I STILL haven't migrated those stories over to here. Next week. I promise.

My book is about to be published!

Now, you don't HAVE to like it, and I will totally understand if you don't, but for every person that likes it, I kill one fewer kitten.

And I'm not going to tell you how many kittens I have.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Locksmith/102799679818759

On a happier note, I hate facebook with a burning passion and I'm only doing this because, hey, FREE ADVERTISING AMIRITE? I'll have a link to the actual book up tomorrow.

The best lies are the most simple ones

Hey, remember that time when I said I'd post later that evening and then I DIDN'T POST LATER THAT EVENING?!

Good times.

But I'm back now. I moved into a new apartment, and fun things happened during the move, which I will relate to you now.

I have a dresser, you see. It's a fairly large dresser, and it happens to be extraordinarily heavy. Since my roommate decided of his own accord that we'd be taking the upstairs apartment and didn't think I had an opinion on the matter, (news flash I TOTALLY DID AND IT WASN'T THE SAME AS HIS OPINION) I decided that it would only be fair to let him take it up the stairs. Not by himself, naturally. He had a dolly to help him along.

Has anybody ever heard the tale of Sisyphus? Fellow who did something stupid, got punished by the gods to push a rock halfway up a hill, and then it would roll back down and he would have to start all over? Personally, if it were me, at around the third time it rolled down I would say FUCK THIS and go to Chevy's for a margarita, but for some reason he does it for eternity.

This story is nothing like what happened to my dresser and the dolly. Well, it is a little bit like it.

My dresser made it halfway up the stairs before it overbalanced and began rolling down the hill.

I happened to be underneath it, carrying a box of my roommate's (fragile) valuables. The move I pulled next was inspired by Indiana Jones and twelve ninjas I once saw in a cheesy movie in Vietnam. I dropped the box and vaulted over the handrail into the bushes, while my dresser clattered down the stairs in a cloud of cardboard and very valuable shrapnel. It landed perfectly upright, with hardly any more scratches on it than it had started with, because when I buy furniture, I have the fucking apocalypse in mind.

My roommate was unhappy, but I drove him to work at six in the fucking morning the next day, and everything was forgiven.

He has too much crap, anyway.

Okay, so I know the blog LOOKS a little dead...

And to be fair, it totally is a little dead. But, since I recently received a link from Ovid himself, (the glorious fellow over at this blog) I shall be resuscitating it. I've been using tumblr quite a bit to post dirty, filthy lies, but I think I like this layout better. Tomorrow, there shall be a BRAND NEW, NEVER BEFORE SEEN dirty filthy lie, and it will be about exactly how terrible I am at travelling.

How I got a Free Gift Card to my Book Fair using Humiliation

My mother was chairman (Chairwoman? Chairperson? There was a chair involved, I think.) of the Book Fair at my elementary school. This was slightly inconvenient, since it meant I spent a lot of time after school for a week out of every year sitting around reading.

Come to think of it, it wasn’t that inconvenient. It was actually pretty awesome. But, as mentioned before, I was a weird kid.

It was either fourth or fifth grade that a box appeared with the usual book fair things. Inside the box was a costume.

I shall do my best to describe this costume from memory as closely as I can.

It had an alligator head roughly the size of a VW Bus. What alligators have to do with reading books, I have no idea, but some marketing director had managed to come up with some sort of connection. I like to think he was on heavy hallucinogens at the time.

The alligator was wearing glasses and had lipstick on.

Seriously. An alligator with lipstick.

It was terrifying.

The rest of the outfit looked like what you would get if you put a fabric store in a really big food processor, tossed the remains in the Cave of Nuclear Mutated Moths and then gathered even what they refused to devour and sewed it into a mascot costume.

It had a wire hoop in the shirt to simulate obesity, although the only reason I can come up with for an alligator wearing (horrible) human clothing, glasses, and lipstick to be fat would be due to the incredibly large amounts of screaming human children and souls it had devoured. You know what? I don’t LIKE to think the marketing executive was on heavy hallucinogens… I WANT to think he was on heavy hallucinogens, because if a human being came up with this horror in a normal frame of mind, I no longer want to be human.

Naturally, the first thing through my head when the box gets opened is along the lines of “I want to wear that.”

Weird kid.

My mother turns to me and says “How would you like to drum up some business for the book fair?”

“Sounds good to me!” I reply, knowing exactly where this is going.

I only get into the top half of the costume, because this isn’t a costume made for a child. Come to think of it, it’s not a costume made for a human, but it’s meant even less for a child. I remember wondering if merely the fact that I was inside it meant that it had won, and that I was now a freak human-crocodile hybrid thing, doomed to walk the earth with no hope of love or-

And then they tossed me outside with no chaperone to dance outside in the school’s parking lot trying to either attract visitors to the book fair or devour the bones of the earth and cause an untimely apocalypse.

This was maybe five minutes before school got out.

I danced around a bit, feeling both silly and terrified.

The bell rang.

It is essential at this point in the story for me to reiterate the fact that children are evil. Especially in large groups. The sight presented to them at this point in time was a skinny, clearly not adult thing in half a ridiculous costume, alone, dancing around in a parking lot. The first thought that entered their mind was “attack.”

Due to the layout of the school, the first wave that reached me were kindergarteners and, and posed little threat to my well being other than the fact that they were difficult to wade through and therefore an effective trap. They surrounded me almost immediately and began poking and prodding, asking questions which I refused to answer, because mascots don’t talk.

The second wave was first and second graders. I got a few pushes and tugs and heard a few shouts, but I managed to maintain composure, trying desperately to swim back to the safety of the front office.

The third wave was third and fourth graders, and I knew I was dead. The crowd around me was massive, and here came people who were actually my size, many of whom knew me by name but weren’t sure that the thing in the parking lot was me. At this point, I wasn’t either. They didn’t close in for the kill just yet, preferring to circle and enjoy themselves while the littler ones picked at me some more, but eventually one of the more aggressive ones stepped in and grabbed for the mask.

I still hadn’t made a peep, and I continued to suffer in silence, but I reached up and grabbed the fabric horror and held it on my head as though it were a novelty beer can hat dispensing a vital antidote. Or, I dunno, a space helmet. Basically, I didn’t let anybody take my mask off.

The fifth and sixth graders began arriving, just as somebody threw the first punch that hurt. I think I went down on a knee.

And suddenly, they were gone. Everybody. As though they were never there. I was completely alone, except for a single flustered secretary bustling out the door. She picked me up, brushed me off, and ushered me back inside.

I think I called her Don Quixote or something, because he was the first knight in shining armor that popped into my head, demonstrating clearly that kids in fourth grade can’t understand collegiate level satire. Or at least I couldn’t. I didn’t even pronounce it right.

The costume went back in the box, and I never saw it again.

A week later, a representative from the company who did the book fair asked me a few questions and gave me a fifteen dollar gift card.

I bought a finger scooter you could build and customize yourself.

I think I still have it somewhere.