Dearest One Economy Corporation,

I am very pleased to be accepting the position as a producer for your company. I believe in what you do and am looking forward to kicking some ass and creating content which is fresh, fun, and helps provide the community with the tools it needs to thrive.

So, thanks for letting me do that.

Since my official start date is July 1st, I wanted to clear a few things up. First there is the matter of the job title itself. “Producer” is a very nice title. Don’t get me wrong. It’s awfully tits to be able to call up my family and say, “Family, I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is I’m a producer. The bad news involves my lemonade stand. We can skip that.” However, I am concerned that “Producer” is an old fashioned term. In an effort to launch forward, I am requesting that my official title be “Producer of Cool As Fuck Content”. Understanding that you are a reputable company, I offer the alternative of replacing Fuck with Shit. You don’t have to decide today. Mull this one over. I have ordered boxes of business cards with both titles, so, really, you have until July 1st to make that call.

Now on to the matter of I’m broke and would really like a boat. As you may or may not know, I purchased a beautiful white 93 Dodge Ram Cargo van quite recently. I knew I could afford exactly 1K on a vehicle, and perhaps I should have made a better choice. To date, this van has cost me $2,476.72.

It’s put me in a bit of a lurch, as you can imagine. But I’ve gotten creative. I’m resourceful. You’ll like that about me. A fine example is that I found a hamburger today. It was only a little bit eaten. By George, it was tasty, too. Whoever abandoned that hamburger was a fool.

In any case, I got to thinking about this whole salary thing. Since you already know exactly how much you’ll be paying me, why not just hand it all over at once? I don’t want to complicate things by asking for an advance. That involves math and we’re not math people. It would make the most sense to just fork the year’s worth over. This is also brilliant because I live very close to Las Vegas and, after the amazing luck of having found a burger, I am pretty sure I could double my money in no time.

As mentioned above, I would also like a boat. I could buy one if you give me all of that money. Then I don’t ever need to drive again.

My final order of business is my love life. It’s not going very well right now, and my therapist has assured me that it is not my fault. This means it is someone else’s fault. Since I view you all as my new family, I think it would be most prudent to use the company’s resources to get to the bottom of this. I think I’d be much more productive at the producing if we could find whatever Love Noid is fucking up my shit and have them punished.

Again, I am very excited to be working with you and I feel that you’ll see in no time at all that you’ve backed the right horse. I will send my courier immediately to collect the salary check and let’s meet Monday morning regarding those other issues.

Huge hugs,

Nikol

A few years ago, one darlin lil writer on the big ol’ internet sent me an email. That was back before I had that tragic carcrashhousefirevolvanohurricanecancerirritableblowelsynromeashtmacaraccident which prevented me from answering emails in a timely fashion. (I’m sticking to that story.)

All I did was write back to Jenny, The Bloggess and all of a sudden I was alerted that I had won the internet. Seriously. I had no idea that I was talking to a person who was able to give that prize, but she posted it in her blog. That post has since disappeared. Very suspicious that I never got to cash in, but sometimes it’s best to just let things go. The Bloggess has also offered me a trophy made of pudding, and I will be saving copies of those emails on several hard drives that I will hide in protected and secret locations around the world. (Or Los Angeles)

I have to admit that being told I had won the internet mostly made me happy because I thought it meant I could delete iJustine.

iJustine claims, as you can see (if you can read, which we’ll assume is the case because you’re reading this right now) that she is the internet. So, I win it. My rules. I do smell a bit of a conspiracy when it comes to the disappearance of that post, but I still love The Bloggess and I am certain that if she got involved in any such conspiracy, it was against her will. Or she got paid a lot for it.

In any case, I am so in awe of The Bloggess that I regularly need to remind her of why she should be my friend. Mostly this involves looking really great in tight jeans and name dropping a lot. But now that I have a REALLY IMPRESSIVE BOOK for sale, I thought it wise to let her know.

And it seems letting her know was a brilliant idea, because she decided to interview me and I have to say, she did a good job. Not once did she ask me how to make teens stop getting pregnant.

So, let this be a lesson to all of us that we should always reply to every email anyone ever sends us because one day several years from the day you answer that email someone way more popular than you are might interview you about the book you wrote about sex. With cows on the cover. (If you write a book about sex with cows on the cover, Imuh be pissed.)

So, normally my advice column is a bit on the goofy side. This week, however, I got really pissed off when I was replyingto a guy who was complaining about his girlfriend. Read it. You’ll find out why.

She was tidy. I’ll give her that. If anything was important to my mother, it was semblance of tidy, neat and proper. It made little sense to me, because I had gone for so long without being bathed that I once had a splinter in my bottom for several weeks (from the see-saw) that I could no longer sit down, it hurt so bad. It hadn’t been noticed because no adult had asked me to bathed or bathed me. Her cleanliness always came in sprees, and always with blame laid on everyone around her. But my mother wanted people to know that we were important because she kept things clean.

That’s why she decided that all of the carnies needed a bath. And that was why she covered the seats of Honda’s camper with plastic bags. She was taking us all to the lake and we were going to “skinny dip” ourselves clean. A skinny dip made me think of Lick’Em Sticks. Those sticks were vanilla flavored, and any time I got the honor of buying them I’d suck the sticks and let my baby brother eat the colored sugar packets.

I was expecting something wonderful and vanilla the day that we went skinny dipping in the lake with the carnies. My mother had worked so hard to keep everything clean that I expected she was in a good phase right then. Even when Danny had begged to stop to pee, she had told him to hold it in and he had listened. This was serious. Obviously. Danny never listened, always just doing what he wanted. This time, though, he held it. We both knew that if she was doing right, it was time to be proper.

The lake itself stunk like cabbage. I dipped a toe in and was laughed at for being “dainty”. At age five I still thought that being laughed at was all wrong. The only people who had laughed at me were the ones who snuck into my room late at night. Sometimes they laughed at my brother, then hit him.The shame of laughter was the same as the shame of pain. So I wanted to stop anything bad that may come and I swam in that cabbage stinking lake.

I had heard about people getting worms. Getting was still my word for acquiring. But I had heard that some people got worms from lakes, so I was suspicious of the people around me, as if they had come to this spot to acquire the worms. Instead we acquired their dinner.

It happened like so: Mom and Honda, they were swimming. Mom and Honda, they were kissing. They were close. They were naked. I was naked. She was far way. Mom and Honda had their eyes closed. Everyone was screaming and Mom was screaming and Honda had his tongue in her mouth. Mom and. Mom. Mom looked like she was hurt and I tried to go help her. Someone grabbed my arm. Someone else made a joke. Everyone laughed, but I was afraid. She said, “She can’t see nothing” And then my mom was mad. And then someone screamed and held something in the air.

That’s how I came to know about turtles.

This was a snapping turtle, I was told. Could bite my toe clean off.

On the way home, my brother Danny peed in a puddle on the floor of Honda’s camper. We went back to where we had set up and I stayed a while with the carousel horses, looking at their teeth and wondering if they could bite my toes clean off. At one point my mother stepped out, calling the others to join them for dinner. I was hungry, but I felt old right then. Too old to go chewing at a thing that might find me under the water and be interested in my toes.

It didn’t matter, though. When Danny went running to the camper door to eat some of that snapping turtle (they all came out saying it was like sausage) they just smacked him in the face so he came crying to me, anyway.

That’s when I told him what I told him about the clouds.

When I was a little girl my mother shacked up with a dude who managed a carnival. I remember that his name was John Honda, but he went simply by his last name, causing me great confusion because he didn’t ride a motorcycle at all. Honda had himself a camper and it was bursting with sacks full of penny toys. Keeping my eyes on those toys I decided it wasn’t in my favor to make any arguments toward him changing his name to John Winnabego.

The summer after I turned 5, when my brother Danny was almost 4, we hit the road with Honda and my mother to become carnie kids. My brother was to run the goldfish bowl booth with mom, but they decided that I was old enough to run my own game. While Danny seemed fairly thrilled to be the caretaker of all of those fish, I worked my stomach into knots over the thought of such responsibility.

My game, The Toss Until You Win (you can’t lose, only a dollar, step right up) was constructed in under a day out of some raw 2x4s we’d found along the highway. Honda, shirtless with a tool belt and a beer, explained the intricate genius of the game, with the crappiest toys on the easiest pegs to circle with the plastic rings. People would toss rings until they won. They’d pay a dollar. We’d make a fortune. All I had to do was get them to play. I hated everything about it.

Days would start in Honda’s camper, my brother and I pouring Sugar Smacks and Frosted Flakes from individual boxes straight into our mouths, further coating our unbrushed teeth. If we’d just hit the town, there was set up. If we’d already set up, it was straight to work. We always left a town at night, so we never needed to worry about breaking a site down when the sun was up.

Days at the carnival were boring and blurry, deep fried and stinking of WD40. My Toss Until You Win booth didn’t make the fortune that Honda had predicted, and he was always on my case to lure more paying customers in. I’m the kind of woman who feels bad about summoning a waiter at a restaurant. I was the kind of child who felt terrible about summoning seemingly nice people to waste their money on a game I knew was all a scam. Plus, I was pretty sure I wasn’t supposed to talk to strangers, yet there I was all day long in new small towns across the midwest trying to get strangers to talk to me. Backwards shit.

My most memorable customers were a man and his son. I was standing, quietly, watching people walk past and hoping they thought I was just a statue. When this man saw me he stopped too fast and his son ran into him. I wanted to laugh, but I knew it would be rude. Plus I was pretty sure he thought I was a statue and that was why he was starting, so I held very still. They approached, and once he asked me about my game I figured the statue gig was up, and ran through my rehearsed lines.

As an adult, I think about that moment a lot, trying to place myself into the role of that father. My child and I are out for a night of fun, and a little girl no bigger than my son stands in a booth that all of a sudden seems bigger than the whole world and in her lispy five year old should be playing fairy princess right now voice, she recites “Toss Until You Win. You can’t lose. Only a dollar, and You can’t lose.” And maybe I’m reading that situation wrong, and maybe that man felt nothing. But I choose to believe and hope that he was one of the good fathers and that seeing me made him feel more protective of his son. I hope that each time I said, “You can’t lose” it was like a gypsy blessing to both of them, and I guess I hope that because at least then I wouldn’t feel like such a jerk for taking their money.

At the age of 4, I fell in love. I knew it was love, too, not just some fleeting moment of fanciful desire. I was acutely aware that anyone I thought of so often that I couldn’t even make myself take a nap was a pretty special person, indeed. How could I nap? I was planning our future and naming our 12 children.

He was easy to love, too. He was lanky, shy, and without even trying he made me laugh. When he got picked on I wanted to wallop any smack talkers. When he was frightened, which was fairly often, I wanted to hold his hand and tell him that everything would work out; he’d see. It always worked out.

It became apparent through the years that it wouldn’t work out for us- he was a dog person, I prefer turtles; once school started I was busy whenever he was around; he was a cartoon, I was…not a cartoon. Despite this I will always remember Shaggy as my first love.

As cartoons progressed, everything changed. These days I can easily love a cartoon, but I have never been able to find one single character who gives me the tingles because of his innocence and beauty in the same way Shaggy had done.

Until today.

Today I watched The Velvet Mouse Show, a cartoon that takes me back to what cartoons used to be, back to a time when kids were supposed to watch them and adults might find themselves drawn in as well. And as I watched, that no-nap-time feeling crept back into my heart as the dreamy newly ordained wizard, Luck E. Charm entered the frame, bespeckled and slightly nervous. And just in case you didn’t know, he’s Merlin’s nephew. I’m not name dropping, just stating a fact.

This time, I’m going to be better at keeping the flame alive. Time is on our side. I can spend time with Lucky on the Velvet Mouse site. I can download him so that he’ll never leave me. I’ll even back up the file, that’s how devoted I am. And maybe one day, I will find a way to become a cartoon and join him. (I was just reading in Time magazine that scientist have created a reasonably textured chicken substitute, so I bet within three years they’ll have the technology to turn me into a cartoon. I’ve done crazier things for less worthy men.)

So, I recommend you check out the Velvet Mouse Show. Have a giggle. Get that old childhood feeling back for just a minute. Sing along to the happy music.  But stay away from my Luck E. Charm, or I’ll have to kick your ass.

Trast is 12. There are things about the age of 12 which need to be discussed.

Twelve is a bad year, in general. It’s like preadolescent 30. You’re no longer a kid, but you’re not a teen. You’re a fucking tween. Even the word used to describe you sucks. Tween. Like some long forgotten line of furry, singing toys that the dollar stores of America can’t schlep off, even on the poor kids, because nobody wants to own a Tween. And living with one isn’t much fun, either.

Twelve is a year of ugly, stinky, know it all, sarcastic, argumentative butt-holery; a moment in time when they realize adults can’t make them do anything; the moment in time before they realize that it’s easier for them to do it anyway. A twelve year old boy will complain about everything, eat everything, have a comeback for everything, and yet hear nothing.

So, now that I’ve summed up year 12 for you, let’s talk about Trast. Trast is my oldest son. At age six, Trast was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome. Undetterred by any limitations this may have caused the child, he instead wrote a song about it. The words were,
(ahem)
I have Asperger’s Syndrome
I have Asperger’s Syndrome
I have Asperger’s Syndrome
I have Asperger’s Syndrome

With the frequency and volume at which Trast would sing his song, especially in any public place, I was shocked that it didn’t hit the mainstream. Sadly, Trast got my hair, and enjoys wearing short shorts, socks pulled up to his thighs, wingtips and a camouflage shirt. Any dreams I have of his reaching Bieber-like status could never work out.

The thing about the Aspie stuff is, we never let it become an excuse or setback. We can laugh about it, he knows what it means, and when we have some sort of “melt-down” moment, we examine it after and find ways of dealing with those situations in daily life. Yeah, I’m pretty much saying that I’m like, the world’s greatest mom. Except…

Except I can’t help fucking with Trast. He’s just too fun to scare, dare, and bet. The kid will do anything to get out of cleaning his room.

And, when he’s scared of something, he has hilarious freak outs. (Kind of like me and bugs)

And over the years, I have had some real fun with the kid. He loves it, really. I can hear it in his girly screams. And so this summer, it is time to step up the game to a new level.
Trast is done with school tomorrow. He’s traveling to Los Angeles from Wisconsin on a plane by himself. We discussed a lot of things about how to spend the summer, and in his sassy, finger snapping way, Trast told me that “It’s On.” We’re going to try to out-prank each other this summer.
Keep your eyes on the Mom vs Boy section of this site for updates.

I’m doing this for parents of 12 year olds everywhere. That butthole is going down!

******NOTE: Just to lay a few very insane people’s minds to rest, I’m not talking about causing physical or mental harm to the kid. Trust me, he’s safe. We have a rapport that involves giving each other shit. He’s a pretty smart kid and he is totally 100% down with this idea. So shut up, dork faces.

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