Like, everything. For example.

There’s this commercial for contact lenses. And the guy is like “Ohhh, eyeball doctor person, I didn’t mean to, but I fell asleep with my contacts in.”
And the guy, he looks scared. Like, for real. He looks like he should be saying “I didn’t mean to get high and put my baby in that oven.”
And the eye doctor, who, come the fuck on, eye doctors don’t look like her, even if you live in LA. She’s this lithe-bodied long haired hotness in a lab coat. So, stupid fakey eye doc lady says “Relax! There are whatever the fuck brand of contacts I’m talking about. You can wear them all month long.”
And. Great. That’s fine. Commercial over.
But, come ON! Why is this guy seeing his eye doctor so he can confess to leaving in his contact lenses? Is he mentally challenged? Does he have some weird phobia? Would he contact his balls doctor if he slept in tight underpants?
And, couldn’t this have been handled over the phone? And wouldn’t hotstuff glasses face have been like, “You’re wasting my time for this?”
But, most importantly, how did he not know he was wearing continuous wear contact lenses? Did this not come up when he was making his lens choices? Did someone forget to mention to him that he could leave the contact lenses in?

Anyway, yeah. Everything is making me mad lately. I am going to wait until that commercial comes on so I can pay attention to the brand so I can never buy that brand. Never. Take that, stupid marketing people who write shitty commercials that make me mad.

I’ve just found the lyrics my dear son was working so very hard on today. He wrote his first song. How charming. It says,

I Am Awesome
by Trast

I am awesome/ I am so awesome
I eat a lot of fruit snacks
I piss my mom off
She can’t accept the fact
that I love sugar smacks.

I am awesome.
Awesome as can be.
Floating like a bee.

She says I’m lazy.
I say It’s ProTRASTination
She thinks I’m irritating
I say it’s TRASTurbation

I am awesome/ I am so awesome
I love to watch t.v.
it’s mostly NBC
I fart in my mom’s tea.

I am awesome.
More awesome than you are.
More awesome than your car.

She says I’m lazy.
I say It’s ProTRASTination
She thinks I’m irritating
I say it’s TRASTurbation.
So join my Traster-nation.
Then you can be awesome, too.

Trast is headed out to New York tomorrow. It’s totally nuts, but whenever I am away from him for more than two days, I get really sad about it.

I suppose that’s because we spend so much time together. We cook dinner together nearly every night. We go to events together. We watch shows together. One of our favorite ways to pass time is to talk about music history and make music.

Lately, he has been completely Asperger’s about playing guitar. He plays guitar every second he can, relates every conversation to guitar, and even practices chords when he’s not holding a guitar.

Today we recorded ourselves covering one of the songs he remembers me singing to him when he was a little kiddo. Hopefully having this video around will help me not miss him so much over the next four days while he’s in New York without me.

I don’t deal well with weakness, especially in adults, and especially in men. And specifically with men I am dating.

Should a man I’m dating display signs of depression, or lack of motivation, or lack of follow-through, or addiction, it makes me feel like spitting on them.

I once watched this Doberman eat all of her puppies as soon as they came out of her. I stood at the screen door, pressing my face into the rust, looking out over the green paint peeling off the porch and I watched her lay on her side, watched the puppies drop out from her hips. She kept her nose down between those hips and just as soon as a puppy came out, she ate it.

I’d sat with her a few days before this and rubbed her belly and talked, and told stories, and even sang Wham! songs to the puppies inside of her. I was afraid that she was eating them because of something I’d said.

“Nope.” the adults explained, not bothered at all, “There’s something wrong with the babies. She knows they’re weak, so she’s eating them.”

I hated that dog after that. It seemed pretty damn selfish that the mother of anything would reject it just because it was weak. I was also pretty pissed because I was sure that she didn’t have to eat them. If she hadn’t, I would have taken care of them. I felt that she should have known that, based on me singing songs and talking to them while they were still inside her.

Once, when M and I were married, he told me he wanted to kill himself. Shit was really hard right then. Our kids were in foster care, I was smoking crack, and he was regularly failing drug tests because of weed. That’s the sort of stuff that will cause a bit of depression, and by a bit of depression, I mean, holy shit, just thinking about it makes me feel like I have a backhoe running over my chest.

He told me he wanted to kill himself, and he was crying in the bathtub. He had long hair back then, and a tiny, hairy body, and I looked at him in that bath water and even though he’d seen me in much worse condition, I found him repulsive. “Well, go to the hospital then.” I told him before leaving the apartment to try to score some E.

Who knows about those puppies, though. It turns out that they may have been born dead, and that’s why she ate them. Sometimes that happens, too.

When I was very young I saw my mother in a bathtub, drinking out of a bottle and moving her body and eyes too slow, like when Teddy Ruxpin’s batteries start to die. Sometimes she forgot to blink with both eyes. I was standing with my step-dad, who’d packed suitcases for my brother, sister and me. I remember him throwing a pack of leg shavers at her, and saying something about how if she wanted to kill herself to just do it already.

On the phone with him this morning (name withheld) said that I shouldn’t yell at him, because he doesn’t respond to being yelled at. He’d made a bunch of promises the night before about how hard he was going to try. And yet again, he’d broken his word, and here he was freaking out at me again and making me think of those puppies.

I told him I was pretty sure he was going to kill himself or at least ruin his life, and he said “Good. That’s what I want.”

And I thought of my mom in that tub, opened my mouth to say as much. Then I remembered that the last time I’d told him anything about my life he’d used it against me when he was angry. I didn’t need to tell him about my mom in the tub because it became pretty clear that my stories weren’t all that interesting to him anyway.

So, I told him what I’d heard my step dad say to my mother. I told him that if he wanted to kill himself, to go ahead and do it.

But, I added my own bit of advice on the end of that, maybe the bit of advice I’d have wanted to add to my own mother.
“Just try to do it quickly, because it’s no fun to watch.”

Let’s start simple. Here’s something we can all do.

1. Stop pronouncing Target like it’s french. Please. No. Just stop it. It’s not. Same goes for white trash. Don’t call it garbage blanc. These things aren’t made cute by your dumb ass pronouncing them wrong. I get it. It’s funny because these things aren’t classy and you are ironicly pronouncing them in the classiest way- the french way. And now that I get it, and everyone else gets it, stop it. And especially don’t look at me and smile and make sure I heard you. I did. I’m trying not to hit you.
2. This one is for the gents. I’m going to need you to stop emailing me months after we stopped seeing each other to check in on how I’m doing and then maneuver the topic around to blow jobs and how wonderful mine are. Please. Don’t do that. Part one is okay. You can email me to see how it’s going. Sometimes we wonder, and we want to know, and if we didn’t stay friendly immediately after, I understand putting a few months between contact. But, those blow jobs you got? They are never to be spoken of again unless you’re talking to your family on your death bead about the most magical moments of your life. Furthermore, don’t go on to sheepishly ask if I might give you one, for old time’s sake. Move on to other mouths.


I hate your stupid tattoo

 

3. Stop getting fingerstache tattoos. Please. Hey, everyone, remember like, 15 years ago when the term “tramp stamp” didn’t exist. You probably don’t. But I do. I remember because I thought it was a really great idea to have the face of a kitty tattooed on my lower back. That day wasn’t exactly wrought with great ideas. That was the same day my cousin and I ate a bunch of mushrooms and went to see an Austin Powers movie. I don’t want to defend that choice. I’m not equating the fingerstache with the tramp stamp. Don’t get me wrong. In fact, I think it’s more respectable to have a lower back tattoo (0r upper butt, if you’re a glass half full kind of person) than to get a stupid fucking mustache tattooed on your index finger so you can take cool instagram shots of you making adorable faces with your stupid finger in front of your face.

and not in the fun Beastie Boys way.

Nope. In the much less fun, don’t want to leave the house, feeling like I have bugs crawling on me (which is called formication), avoiding your phone calls, can’t sleep at night, always half asleep, obsessively anxious over everything way.

In choir he used to sing all of the songs in the voice of Bob Dylan. Only I didn’t know who Bob Dylan was, then, so I just thought he was doing a funny voice. Before choir we used to get really high, Steph and Buckshot and this guy I dated for about ten seconds and me. So, then, when he was singing all the songs like Bob Dylan, it was the funniest thing I’d ever heard.

I never understood the nickname Buckshot, but there was a thing we all called “Buckshot’s Disease”, which was a hacking kind of cough you’d get from smoking too much weed.

One night we all said we’d give him $50 to drink 6 month old bong water. He drank it, said it tasted like really strong coffee, and we gave him $6 and told him it was fifty.

He drove a Chevy impala and we were always digging up change for gas, driving that thing out in the country, parking and having sex next to old barns or these tiny little houses all over the ice. I asked him about those houses. It was crazy that people would live out in a tiny house on the ice. I couldn’t see how they’d even lay down at night. Buckshot kissed me and told me those were ice shanties. Those weren’t for living, they were for fishing. That was even more confusing to me, sitting there in red panties and a leather jacket in the back seat of the impala, wondering why people needed a house to go fishing.

He had a job at the local pizza place, Paul Revere’s pizza. I would just sit at the pizza place and wait for his shift to end so we could drive out to his buddy’s house and buy some weed.

I wasn’t allowed to go in his buddy’s house after the first time, because the first time I’d taken off all my clothes. He was really patient with me about how often I was taking off all my clothes. He’d tell me, “Sit here, in the car. And don’t take off your clothes.” But, then I’d sit there and drink or smoke and it just made more sense to take my clothes off. He never yelled at me about it, though. He’d find me wandering around, naked, and he’d throw me over his shoulder and put me back in the car.

Buckshot and I used to talk about our future like it was a sure thing. We were going to live in the car. I didn’t like the idea at first, but he made it sound pretty, and he promised he was going to build me a closet in his trunk, and fill it up with all sorts of clothes. We were going to have one kid, and we were going to smoke weed with our kid when he was 14.

Buckshot said he’d take our son out on the boat, and he’d pull out a bowl and he’d pack it and smoke it with our son. And that way, if our son ever had any weed, he’d share it with us, too. I loved the idea so much that for the rest of my teen-hood I told everyone I met that I was going to do that.

He came over to my house right after my mother married my step-dad. There was a reception in a church basement, then I got stoned with some cousins and went back to my house and called him. I thought my mother and step-dad were going to be away for a while, so we got high and naked in my bedroom. When I heard them pull up in the driveway, I threw some clothes on and ran to the kitchen to wash dishes.

You know in cartoons when you see someone trying to act not-guilty and they’re whistling and going out of their way to pull a nothing-to-see-here? Well, that was me. They stopped long enough to look at me, then Bill went back to my room. I heard him say “I think you should be going.”

Later, Buckshot told me that he’d gotten dressed but forgot to put his boxers on, then hid in my closet. When Bill opened the closet door, Buckshot was standing there holding his boxers and wondering if he was about to get his ass kicked.

A few days later I told Bill that I was going to marry Buckshot. I told him we had it all planned out and I just wanted to have his blessing. I said this with a certainly only a teenager could have. He looked at me and said “Well, best of luck to you.”, and I thought he was as serious as I was.

The night I ran away from home, I hitchhiked into town wearing shorts and a t-shirt in a snow storm. I called Buckshot, who called Wigger Bill, and they picked me up and drove me out to some house half-way to Madison, WI. The snow storm got pretty bad, and it took us three hours to get there, and I kept telling Buckshot that I’d never see him again.

When he dropped me off, he gave this guy a bag of weed, and he said “That’s my girl in there. Don’t do anything stupid, and don’t let her smoke any of this.” But, of course, we smoked it. And of course, we did plenty of stupid things.

Four years later, when I came back to that small town with my baby, I looked him up. I was engaged to Mitch, I told him over the phone, and we were going to live in Whitewater, I told him over the phone, and what ever happened to you?, I asked him over the phone, talking the way I’d seen grown ups in movies talk to people they reconnected with.

He and his sister were living in a trailer in Janesville. He was working, I think at a factory, and no, he didn’t still have the Impala. But, what about my closet? What about us living there? He put on a big act about being heart broken, saying I was supposed to have married him.

According to Facebook, he’s married now. Looks like he has a kid, too. He looks the same as he did when we were in high school, and I wonder if anyone still calls him Buckshot. I don’t know why I need to hear from him, or why it matters to me that he remember anything we used to do.

I guess it’s that I was mostly unhappy, both in a typical angsty teenager way, and in a more specific rough-past way. I guess when I think about any of the friendships or boyfreindships I had growing up, they were all wrought with melodrama, fights, me overdosing, them having to chase me down and stop me from doing crazy shit. So, he stands out, because he was the one person I never had any of that with.

He rolled with it in an easy way, and we never fought, and he never made a big deal out of the shit I did that was stupid. So, I suppose, to date, Buckshot has been the only guy who really had what it took to handle me, because he never made me feel like I needed to be handled.