Yes, I'm afraid it's true. Despite my innate proclivity for moral priggery, lack of rhythm and loathing for all things skank, I once stripped off my bikini for cash.

Yup.

Moi.

Granted, I was wearing a full-body gorilla suit underneith and I only made two bucks, but still the shame of it haunts me.

Okay, not really the "shame" so much as the pictures of buzzed gorillame and my banana dancing, which despite many attempts I was never able to successfully destroy all copies of. Let's just say I wasn't the most graceful of women-posing-as-a-man-posing-as-a-gorillas. I may or may not have been doing the worm, even. That's some haunting shit, there.

*shivers*

~Backstory (aka Why I Picked Up Smoking and Drinking After a Ten-year Nunlike Haitus)

After my divorce I knew I needed to make drastic changes. I knew part of my problem, a big part, was that self-defeatist slacker perfectionism thing I’d always had going on. That part of myself that was so petrified of failing that I never tried to do anything. I wanted to get over that. I wanted to learn to do things I wasn’t good at.

But I wanted to learn to do them without any risk of failure, of course.

It seems impossible but I found a loophole—if I tried to conjure up the biggest, showiest failure I could, every little failure along the way was success. That’s how it became my plan to fail.

That’s also how I started calling myself an imperfectionist and embarked myself on an obsessive year-long quest for complete and total imperfection. This brought me (initially) to my aunt’s breakfast table, brought me in the midst of a choking cloud of cigrette smoke and herd of my screaming second cousins. A crucial component to the art of becoming a good failure meant being homeless and jobless and penniless. Check, check and check.

I was in a haze of cigarette smoke at that breakfast table because my aunt smoked but also because I’d picked up smoking again, which I hadn’t done since my long-gone Marine Corps days.

Now don’t be too impressed--I only made it up to one pack of Marlboro Lights a day, nowhere near my goal of being one of those people who chain-smoked three packs a day through a hole in their cancer-ridden throats. After a year of hard work my lungs are barely tinging toward gray and my smoker’s cough still gets overshadowed by the chirping of the crickets but I work on undoing my rabid perfectionism bit by bit just as my Doc had advised me to do.

Every drag of rank, poisoned air brought me closer to the shriveled up black lungs and wrinkled yellow skin and teeth I dreamed of. Every stubbed out butt was a reminder that I am not perfect, never will be perfect and no longer even wanted to be perfect.

Oh no, not me. I wanted to be imperfect. At everything. I wanted to perfect the art of imperfection. I wanted to be the most gloriously imperfect creature to ever walk the face of the earth.

Back then, couch-sufing and freshly divorced at my Aunt's, I embraced a new motto, “bit by bit.” That was how my psychiatrist told me I could cure my perfectionism, bit by bit. It wasn’t as catchy as some of my earlier mottos---‘the world is a steaming dung pile and we are all just dungbeetles carrying our shit around on our backs’ and ‘If it moves, shoot it’ spring to mind-- but it helped me recover from my divorce.

So I sat at the breakfast table and smoked and drank and got crappy jobs and went on bad dates. Those were the kinds of things I imagined imperfectionists would do and I wanted to do them up right.

I had no signature drink in my hand at that sunny breakfast table because I hadn’t found one yet. This pissed me off. Nothing was more key to becoming a perfect failure than alcoholism. I intended to knock that one out ASAP. I studied bartending manuals and articles on the symptoms of alcoholism and drunks and the Conshy bar scene. I plumbed the depths of Union Mike's expertise and made him take me to dive bars I was afraid to go into myself.

I started to drink merlot or cabs with dinner and Guinness instead of lunch. I was getting pretty proud of how imperfect I was except that I didn’t have a signature drink.

NOTE: The fact that I can’t drink a toddler under the table without wanting to take a nap or puke all over my sleeves probably permanently hinders me from true alcoholism, but it didn’t stop me trying.

I worked at it, bit by bit. I kept smoking even though it made me dizzy. I kept drinking even though no matter how hard I tried I couldn't do more than three drinks. I knew that one day I’d wake up down by the docks or passed out in some godforsaken dumpster with my skirt over my head, lungs riddled with cancer, reeking like an ashtray full of that signature drink and know that I’d accomplished something, but until then all I could do was try. And so I did. And did. And did again.

~ ~ ~ ~


That year has passed, I found my signature drink (Dogfishhead 60 mintute IPA) and it's time to be a grown up again, which means it is long past time for me to quit smoking.

I can't flat-out force myself to quit cold turkey because I loathe being bossed around and strong-arming myself into compliance will just make me want to smoke even more, if only to prove that nobody puts this baby in the corner.

So with that in mind six days ago I instated a new smoking law--I can smoke as much as I want only I have to pay for all my smokes in change.

No bills, no debit. All change. At five dollars and eight cents a pack I am pissing a whole lotta people at 7-11 off, including but not limited to the snaggle-toothed hispanic woman behind the register who can't do math.

I'm getting a lot of support in my endevors from the locals who offer helpful, encouraging comments like "Get a job, gringa." and "Aye, chingosa! Not you again."

Things are looking up!

Been thinking about Union Mike. He's the odd little dude in some of my pictures who looks kinda like me with a 'stache.

He also sometimes goes by "Moe, The Neighborhood Halloween Nutzo", and "Jesus Christ, if you read my mail one more time before forwarding it I am going to unleash holy hell upon you and your descendants for all eternity. Only less the descendants because I happen to be rather fond of them even though this morning they ran around the house with underpants on their heads screaming about sweet freedom when I was trying to work."

In some circles he is also known as my dad.

Been thinking of my decrepit ol' Pappy (he's 48) today ever since I recieved a message likening myself to a car wreck. This might be the first message I've gotten of which he would wholeheartedly approve, although the one telling me I was ab-obsessed and full of myself ran a close second.

See, his thing is...well, IPAs and the occasional Jamisons, but besides that his thing is he'd like to see me conquer the world, perhaps by becoming a captain of industry, curing cancer, slingin shit with a flock of politicos, or by marrying money.

*sigh*

Since I am ALL about makin' the old man proud I tried marrying money once, but that nickel took himself WAY too seriously and never put out so I had to seek an annulment.

So anyways, here I am -- destitute, unemployed, ambitionless. I am a big-time loser, seriously. I don't even want play the game. I don't even want to find a job, let alone a career.

I did try once. I wrote me up a nice resume and bought a suit and everything.

Since I had nothing interesting to write under education I wrote that I had graduated diva cum caelum from Mel's University O' Ferocious Autodidacticism. A friend who works at UPENN said her bosses would never get the joke and would be pissed off at having to look up caelum and autodidactic. Since I only wanted to work there to be around smart people I subsequently lost all interest and took a job selling motorcycle parts instead.

Instead of free ivy league education I got a pair of fox dirtbike socks and a ballcap with Woody Woodpecker on it. I like Woody Woodpecker so I was happy until Union Mike spit on it and threw it into the backyard firepit.

I think he has issues with woodpeckers.

But in my defense it's 4:35 am and I have now been awake for precisely 25 hours and 35 minutes. If this goes on much longer I will most likely enter into a state of acute psychosis during the course of which I will mistake myself for a tastycake butterscotch krimpet and hurl myself into the trash in disgust at my own perniciously addictive transfatty deliciousness.

Now in most cases me being all hopped up like this at this time of day would be a very good thing, being as how it usually indicates I am either Writing with a capital W or tearing into one or another of my questionably creative "side ventures", but in this case merely indicates that I for some ungodly reason can not go the fuck to sleep no matter how hard I try.


UPDATE

~ 5:00 am. It took me ten times longer than it usually does to say absolutely nothing worthwile. On the upside I am that much closer to hallucinating now, so it's all good.

~ 5:15 am. No hallucinations as of yet, but I think that's cuz Elvis and Jesus won't shut the fuck up.

~5:18 am. Big arguement raging about sideburns vs. beards

~5:20 am. beards wins. New argument ensues over whether tis better to be King of Jews or Rock N Roll. Still no hallucinations. Insomnia blows.

~5:34 am. Elvis claims superiority as according to him nobody even likes the Jews, and besides they're the ones who "killed your nondancin' punkass". Jesus bends over, lifts his robe and says, "How's that for turnin' the other cheek, fatboy?!"

*sigh*

Men!

See Above.

While in the throes of my divorce with the much-maligned El Tigre I began seeing a psychiatrist. I spent a whole lot of time telling him how insane I was and he spent a whole lot of time talking about Star Wars and laughing at me. Needless to say he was a pretty badass shrink.

I later turned him into a character so I could continue our conversations inside my head.

Here for your reading (dis?)pleasure is an actual excerpt from my manuscript. I felt this was appropriate today since I've been up since four am ferociously ruminating on the losing battle I've been fighting with my own arrogance (In docspeak, I've taken my powers to the darkside).

**begin excerpt**
“And now I want to stick my head in a blender.”

“No you don’t.”

“Yes I really do want to commit suicide,” she said. “I’m just lazy. I want someone else to come and do it for me.”

The Doc chuckled, shook his head.

“What now? Do you laugh at all your suicidal patients like that? What kind of psychiatrist are you?”

“I would if they were all as funny as you.”

“Well, we both know that’ll never happen. I’m definitely funnier than any of them. I mean seriously. I’m pretty much the funniest person ever.”

“Ah, there’s that grandiosity again.”

“Damn straight.” she smiled. “Actually, I was just kidding. I mean, I’m sure I’m the funniest patient you’ve got going, but that’s not really saying much. I mean, this isn’t exactly the Groundlings. But I wasn’t joking about the suicide, though. I was serious then.”

“You’re not suicidal.”

“Am so.”

“Not even close.”

She sighed again. She does that a lot if you haven’t noticed.

“Isn’t there some sort of rule about psychiatrists not being able to laugh at their insane and suicidally depressed patients? Or at least a policy against guffawing like a drunk hyena? If there isn’t, there should be. I mean laughing at insane people who want to kill themselves isn’t the best bedside manner in the world.”

“No, it’s not. But you are not suicidal or crazy.”

“Am too.”

“Not even close.”

She huffed, rolled her hazel-gray eyes and waved her hand imperiously. She did that a lot too. “Elaborate, please.”

“People who are suicidal kill themselves. Then they die. That’s how suicide works. You aren’t looking for death--you’re looking for a plot twist, an escape hatch. You’ve read too many books.”

“An escape hatch from life, maybe.”

“Correction-- from your life.”

“No shit, Doc. If I had someone else’s life I wouldn’t need to die to escape from it, duh.”

“Exactly. You’re way too smart to not be dead if you wanted to be and you know it.” He wheeled his chair around to face her. “And what’s with the dramatic look today? You’re like a walking myth.”

She wore a stretchy and plain long-sleeved black shirt (it was so tight you might say it was wearing her), the tailored black trouser jeans from Banana Republic she’d worn in Connecticut and high-heeled black sandals. She had small platinum hoops in her ears and her ultra-long hair was tousled, eyes lined in teal. She’d lost her glasses and never bothered buying new ones.

He probably meant to allude to the fact that she was dressed in all black for her weekly visit to the shrink. It was interesting, though, because she was a walking myth. Are you familiar with the myth of Narcissus? You know-- that handsome Greek fellow who fell in love with his reflection in the water and wasted away gazing at it in a coma of awe until he croaked?
She’d lived inside that myth. She lost ten pounds pining for that lost reflection, but somehow stopped short of the actual croaking. That was the part that pissed her off.

She wasn’t in love with herself--what she fell in love with, lost, and mourned was the idealized version of herself she’d created and forced herself to live in -- her reflection, her shell. That almost-perfect mother she’d never had and obsessively tried to become. She’d liked her, and she really, really liked pretending to be her. All that was of that reflection was the ripple of the empty water and her despondent self, that quirky woman sitting cross-legged like a pretzel on the shoreline, hair falling around her, eyes swarming with tears as she waited with breathless hope for a tidal wave to crush over her and end the torment.

Unless she was about to win an ass-load of money or become famous or something-- in that case she was willing to wait it out and see what happened.

He wore the new digital-patterned desert army fatigues, her doc, but I’m not sure what the retarded army calls them.

She used to call them cammies when she was just a wee brainwashed lass in a minidress and tiara drinking massive quantities of Bacardi and puking out of taxi windows in her Marine Corps days, but the army called them BDUs or ACLs or STDs or something equally lame. In the Army the name of everything got changed into an acronym and they changed those acronyms every couple of months to newer and gayer acronyms.

The precise nomenclature isn’t important; anyhow, you know what GI Joe 2007’s fatigues are supposed to look like, right? I shouldn’t need to describe the exact nature and coloration of every pixilated brown and cream splotch on the man’s trousers to give you a passable mental image of them.

Doc’s office was plastered in ivy and near-ivy bedecked degrees and a three and a half inch of abbreviations trailed after his name. He was a lawyer in addition to being a psychiatrist. A sci-fi geek. Oh yeah, and a Major in the army.

All that from a humble black kid from Jersey.

He looked a little like Urkel, if Urkel was huskier and older and a UPENN alum.

He was also unsettlingly jolly and non-neurotic for a shrink and overfond of chortling and/or nibbling pretzel sticks during sessions. He was an interesting guy, her Doc.

He wheeled back over to face his computer again, where he probably typed 543 pages worth of high praise for her intelligence and sparkling wit and disappointing lack of true insanity. Either that or played minesweeper, maybe.

“What’re you reading today, more Dalai Lama?”

She nodded. “But this one’s different, it’s about the convergence of science and spirituality. It’s got an assload of quantum mechanics but he dumbs it down enough for me to follow and blends it with metaphysics, good stuff. But really I was going to finish reading Isle of the Sequinned Love Nun but I couldn’t find it. Oh, but you’ve distracted me again, we were talking about my suicidal ideations. Aren’t you going to hospitalize me?”

“Why would I do that?”

She shot him an incredulous look. “Duh…because I’m crazy! And besides don’t you have to once I mention suicide? Isn’t there like some sort of checklist that you have to—“

“It’s called clinical judgment. And in my clinical judgment you aren’t crazy or suicidal. Sure, you are neurotic as hell and have some life issues at the moment, but you are far too coherent and aware to be crazy.”

“Are you totally sure that I’m not insane? Sometimes I think I might be schizophrenic but I’m just good at hiding it, you know? I come from a long line of crazy people and I have so many personalities my personalities have personalities of their own and if I stare at something for a long time it looks like it moves, and I could swear that the world does revolve around me, or at least it sort of hovers around me and never moves much. And I have very strange ideas about the nature of time and sometimes I think I can smell gas when it isn’t there and I—“

“That’s not crazy. Crazy is ‘What kind of doctor are you, why won’t you save me from the monsters sitting on this chair next to me?’”

“Ah, but I could argue that isn’t crazy either since that chair is covered with germs and under a microscope they’d look monstrous and they can kill you, especially in a hospital like this. And it is your job to save people from them.”

He shook his head. “Again. Not crazy.”

“I could act crazier, if you like. It’s just that I usually suppress it. I’m very good at controlling myself it just takes tremendous effort and I’m sick to death of doing it. But I’ve always been eccentric and thought differently from other people, and I could, like, go buy some peahens and dress them up in sailor suits and start singing The Good Ship Lollypop—“

“Now that’s crazy.”

“See--told ya so!”

“You can act as crazy as you like but that won’t make you crazy. There’s no disordered thinking; you’re remarkably clear and sometimes surprisingly insightful. Besides, this isn’t the seventies and we don’t hospitalize people for no reason, even if they are crazy. It has to be an acute episode, which this isn’t. It has to be a life or death situation. And you’re not really suicidal.” He kept clacking at his keyboard as he said, “And what’s more, you know you aren’t. After all, you didn’t go get a gun.”

“I didn’t know where to get a gun.”

“This is an army post in rural Louisiana, Elisabeth. An illiterate ten year old with five cents and one tooth could get hold of a gun.”

“But that’s just not me. I knew this guy once tried to blow his brains out, he put a rifle in his mouth and pulled the trigger and all he did was blow off his jaw. So now not only does he have the shame of everyone knowing he is yet another failed suicide but he doesn’t have an effing jaw anymore. I mean, Jesus, just imagine that. And anyway, gunshot wounds are so…masculine."

“Right. I can just see Death with his clipboard, ‘Hmm, a self-inflicted gunshot to the brain in a female? Oh dear, that won’t work at all, back to life for her.’ Besides, aren’t you a former Marine?!’”

“But it’s so messy and...overt. I want something poetic. I’m not into pain, and I don’t enjoy hurting myself, I’m not that breed of crazy. It’s just that I’m not very good at this sort of thing, I guess; I over think it.” she groaned. “I need euthanasia. I should be put out of my misery, I really should. I need to be struck by lightning or put to sleep like a rabid puppy.”

She leaned over and cradled her head in her lap and let her hair wave down over her face and arms and trickle over her knees and to the floor. She imagined she looked quite unbalanced and suitably insane in that posture.

“Maybe instead of killing the puppy we could just try treating the rabies?”

She rolled her eyes. “I suppose you could,” she said. “If you were into that sort of thing.”

Really, it ain't.

What many of you are smitten with is called a 'literary voice' and I have been blessed/cursed with having developed one that sounds like a precocious expletive-obsessed adolescent with rampant ADD. This appeals to many of you because many of you were, in fact, precocious expletive-obsessed adolescents with rampant ADD.

I dig that and am having all sorts of fun chatting with all of you, getting to know you. This does not mean I fell down from Valhalla to love you until the end of time, so you'd best get that shit out of your lovable eggheads this instant. The very last thing I want is to hurt anyone's feelings. It pains me to even think of it. Seriously, it hurts.

Yes, my voice comes from my personality, but it's concentrated, distilled, amped up. This makes it kinda potent sometimes, I guess. Fight that shit off like the plague, boys, cuz odds are I am NOT the one you are looking for, I'm just kinda sorta maybe good at writing asinine stuff to make you laugh.

Let that be enough, at least for now, okay? This isn't a competition. There is no prize. I'm not culling wheat from chaff or judging you for your lack of abs. I am very much a monogomous woman and when/if the time comes that I feel that spark I don't want to leave a trail of broken hearts behind me.

A PARODY
BY
MEL



Ivory LaLamore sat at her dressing table brushing her floor-length flowing copper tresses-- tresses which were suspiciously uncontaminated by lice and lusciously silky and clean despite the fact that she lived in an era without shampoo, conditioner, or even running water-- her voluptuously enticing body clad in only her tightly cinched corset and white linen chemise.
Her maidservant, Grunhilda, entered the chamber, her obligatory and emblematically peasantish apple-cheeks flushed with excitement.

“Get ye dressed yer ladyship. The master has a most noble and virile visitor; tis rumored it is yet another suitor come to beg your fair and dainty hand, I wonder twill your lordly father deny you yet another one? Your ladyship is nearly eight years old, after all, and if your father keeps this up you’ll become a wretched old spinster like your pitifully unfortunate Aunt Clara.”

If I could only be so fortunate, Ivory thought silently inside her head without making any external noise or sound of any sort. Her pouty lips moved a little, but that was only because she was rather intellectually simple and not because she was speaking aloud.

Because she was not.
Speaking out loud, that is.
She was quite quietly silent and noiseless in her thinking.

“You’re to appear below stairs at once, milady! Wear your saffron velvet; it highlights the glistening beauty of your sapphire eyes and the bodice does render your ladyship’s décolletage quite wickedly delightful to the eye.”

“No, Methinks I shall remain clothed only in this revealing corset and chemise so the reader can have the leisure of noting the ripe womanly beauty of my body for at least two to three more pages to better appreciate the depth and three-dimensional quality of my character.”

“As you wish, mistress.” Grunhilda curtsied and bobbed back out the door.

A visitor? Ivory thought thoughtfully and with the deepest thoughtfulness her shallow puddle of a mind could muster, smoothing the expensively perfumed French cream on the tempting swells of her succulent orblike breasts as they spilled from the top of her corset.

Better it be another toothless old leper come to court my money than that rapscallion, The Duke of Saytan, Deville Lucipher!

Not that I have ever met him, but his reputation is infamous amongst the ton. If he should ask I would surely refuse so ill tempered a cad, no matter how fine his manly thighs and tumescent manhood are rumored to appear incased in tight breeches!

Ivory exhaled noisily in piqued disappointment at the dearth of rambling purple prose justly detailing the enticing feminine loveliness of her shapely hips and well-turned ankles and at last, sighing and pouting her moist, rosy lips in displeasure, she called for her maidservant to dress her.
Once her toilette was complete, she walked below stairs to greet her father’s guest.

She stood frozen in the doorway to her father’s salon, entranced by an unfamiliar and deep yet seductively melodious voice.

The voice spoke ten or possibly twelve pages worth of mind-numbingly tiresome but meticulously researched historically accurate current affairs and politics in a thinly veiled effort by the authoress to clearly define the time period, setting, and external conflict of this story.

Unfortunately all that significant research was wasted on Ivory, since she was rather slow and dull-witted and disinterested in politics and so she ignored those crucial pages of discourse and instead indulged herself in an extensive virginally lustful glance at the speaker’s back, which was turned towards the doorway displaying his broad well-muscled shoulders and long, lean torso. Her sapphire eyes glazed vacantly as she gazed in stupefied awe at those taut hips encased in butter-suede breeches and a delicate line of drool hung pendulously from her dainty chin.

He was dressed expensively, but without ostentation, of course.

Ivory lost herself in the firm twin mounds of his masculine and mannishly manly buttocks and became aware of the fact that she was most definitively in the presence of an alpha male, and in all likelihood the one who was soon to become her passionate love interest and simultaneous nemesis.

The whole of the conversation, however, was lost upon her, and so we shall never know if they were discussing Colonial upstarts, bloodthirsty Indians, marauding Scots, barbarous Vikings, the dangerous but necessary trade with the East, or those damned bloody pirates.

But hopefully, for the reader’s sake, the next time Ivory will be more attentive to her requirements as the heroine of this story and actually listen to the pertinent dialogue.
The strange and enthralling man turned and Ivory was caught in his heated green gaze, a gaze so intensely intense her very loins began to quiver like a blood pudding fresh from the ovens.

The blood pudding reference in tandem with later references to London may or may not indicate Ivory was British. At the very least the discerning reader can ascertain with reasonable certainty that Ivory was currently (whatever vague time period it may or may not have been) residing in England.

“And this is my daughter, Ivory.” Her father intoned intonedly, motioning for her to enter the room.

Ivory stepped in, heart beating furiously in her heaving breast. She tore her gaze away from the green fire and walked over to her father, shyly gazing at the floor underneath her silk-slippered feet.

Since she wasn’t looking directly at her father we can’t be sure what he looked like, but presumably he was a rather plump and squat balding man with a firm demeanor, good intentions, keen intelligence, and superb breeding.

Oh yeah, and a veritable shitload of money.

“My dear, may I present Deville Lucifer, the Duke of Saytan... your betrothed.”

Ivory swiftly and with strenuous and unaccustomed mental effort considered her options. However shall I react to this most shockingly shocking of news? She pondered ponderously.

Should she suffer a fit of temper at the news of her betrothal and run from the chamber in righteous virginal horror while Deville’s green eyes followed her in sardonic amusement and uninhibited animal appreciation?

Or perhaps she should hatch a plot to make Deville hate her and call off the match without disappointing her father by causing a scene?

In the end Ivory decided to pretend a calm she didn’t feel but immediately she began to plan a daringly daring escape into London to live in hiding with her eccentric and anachronistically independent and bookish maiden aunt to avoid the match.

She was, of course, unaware of the fact that abovesaid allegedly ‘bookish’ maiden aunt was in actuality the mysterious veiled madam of the most infamous brothel in London catering to the aristocracy, Silken Sin & Sundries.

One assumes Ivory would have chosen differently had she known this, but then again Ivory was not the sharpest beak in the henhouse, and also might have a secret kinky side as yet unrevealed.

In the meantime, the reader should watch her closely for further development of her character one way or the other.

(There's a lot more to this hunk of feces. If I get enough comments I'll put the rest up.)


***NOTE: This is drivel, and No, this drivel isn't part of my novel. Egads, no.***

But thanks for reminding me with your uplifting comments, dude with the smokin' hot back who's name I've forgotten. I hope next someone writes, "You are going to die alone in a dumpster as a penniless and bitter old hag." that'll just make my day.