Bloody well right

Last night, Debutaunt mentioned a site called Menstrual Poetry, and said she was afeared to click on it to see what the poems might say. If you know anything at all about me, then you know that I had to go over there posthaste so that I could revel in the delicious squickery of it all. Squickery Dickory Doc. To my eternal disappointment, there was no poetry, no monthly whimsy; instead of "that time" rhymes, I found an utterly humorless political blog about feminism. Don't misunderstand me - I'm all for being given the same opportunities as penis wielders, but I have little patience for a site where a story about a carload of men who fired a gunshot into a car full of women is equated with catcalling construction workers. Catcalling = annoying. Gunfire = deadly. See the difference? Yeah, well, the people who write for that site don't. I dared not read any more, lest I come across the word "womyn" and completely lose my barely together shit.

So there I sat, unsatisfied in my lust for verse of a completely wrong nature, feeling like I'd just bought a bitch dinner and then found her hoo-hoo sealed over with pink papier mache. (Ooooh, if the wimmyn from MP happen to see that, it's sure to raise some blood pressure, don'tcha think?) There is only one way to deal constructively with that kind of disappointment, those raised and dashed hopes: DIY.

Henceforth, I will periodically feature my own menstrual poetry here. I mean poetry inspired by menstruation, and not verse written on the wall with...well, you get the idea.

Here are my first ovulary offerings.

High-stress haiku

It's that time again:
Sugar, cramps, and cotton plugs;
Butcher knife in hand.


I'm a week early!
Damned if I didn't wreck my
First-date underwear.


Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck
With a side of goddammit;
Cramps? They piss me off.

What a way to wake up

In the mid-1980s, Tardist and I both lived with our parents in their Flint apartment. It was kind of a tight squeeze, as you might imagine, and there was only one bathroom for the five of us (Tardist's then-wife lived there also). As families do, though, we managed to work around the toilet shortage in a fairly civilized manner, with very little bloodshed and only a bit of cross-legged dancing.

I was working at 7-Eleven then, pouring Slurpees, selling noxious coffee, and wishing disfiguring diseases on difficult customers, and I generally worked second shift. That left me wide awake late into the night, with plenty of time by myself to drink beer and think awful thoughts, and I took full advantage of those opportunities.

Tardist, on the other hand, had a first-shift factory job that required him to be on the road by 5:30 a.m., a cruel, cruel hour of the day, so I was often just going to sleep as he was stumbling out of his room in the morning. Being the thoughtful little sister that I am, I took it upon myself to brighten his dreary ass-crack-of-dawn experience by leaving him the occasional rude note or drawing, since I was up until 3 or 4 in the morning, buzzed and bored.

Out of all the obnoxious wake-up notes I left for my brother, I can only remember one of them, and I really wish I still had a copy of it. After I giggled my silly ass into tears drawing it, I taped it up over the toilet so it would be the first thing his bleary eyes beheld that morning. The picture was of a group of men in military garb, all bent over, pants down, with funnels in their asses. Their eyes were all on their commander, who stood by with a raised sword, ready to send them into action. The caption read:

The Diarrhea Squad had their orders: Shit to kill.

Oh, I can offer the excuse that I was 20 years old when I created that monstrosity, but then again, that does nothing to make up for the fact that I'm still laughing about it. Because I am so sophisticated and mature. Damn, I miss that cartoon.

Maybe I should recreate it in a painting. That'll get me a gallery show.

Please Hammer. don't hurt 'em

Perhaps I've mentioned before that there are too many trees on my lot. In case I haven't, let me just say: Curse you, towering giants who drop your barren leftovers on my lawn! The amount of leavage is seriously staggering, in a "How the fuck will I ever keep up with this shit on my own?" kind of way. I've always been a bit of a tree humper hugger, but this year, I must admit that I've had more than one fantasy about a mad lumberjack having his way with these bastardly maples that have made my life more difficult than it needs to be. He'd clear cut my yard, and I'd appear on the porch with gratitude in my eyes and a pitcher of Logger lager for him to swill in his sweaty flannel. Hell, I'd even blow the guy if he'd promise not to yell "TIMBER!" when the sap started to run.

Alas, the man with the axe to grind never graced my yard, and I was left with enough dead leaves to hide the corpses of several dozen telemarketers. Unfortunately, the park frowns on impromptu backyard cemeteries, so I set about the task of raking and bagging. Now, let's be honest here: I'm not young anymore; I'm not in the best physical shape of my life. So I can generally fill about three or four of those big paper bags at a time; at that point, my back and my knees are whining like little bitches, crying like schoolgirls with burlap training bras. I'm working at it steadily, but it's not a quick process.

Last Friday, there was a little note on my door from the park, a cheerful missive reminding me that it would be awfully nice if I took pride in my home and pity on my neighbors and cleared my yard waste. I assume this meant leaves and branches, as I don't think anyone's caught me in the act of taking a crap on the porch (which I manage to do, by the way, with the utmost dignity and grace). So I kept at it all weekend, four bags at a time, with what I saw as steady progress from front to back of the lawn. When Monday rolled around, I was perturbed to find a new note from the park tucked into the handle of my door, a more formally stated Reminder of Rules, Motherfucker. At this point, I was being given until the 22nd to finish the job. Say what? As if I was supposed to have the whole job done in one weekend? Please line up to suck my spastic pucker. If they couldn't see that I was working on it and clearly making progress, then perhaps a slight draw on my sphincter could open their weaselly little eyes.

Tuesday morning, I was in the yard dancing the dance of passion with my rake when my next-door neighbor wandered over and asked if I'd heard what happened over the weekend. I had not, in fact, as I tend to keep my head up my own ass most of the time. As it turns out, early on Saturday morning, two guests of a neighbor right around the corner from my place had quarreled, and another neighbor drove past and spied one of the gentlemen knocking on doors with a hammer in his hand, and the other gentleman sitting on a porch with blood gushing out of his head. The police were called, and the hammer-wielding crackhead was tracked down by the K-9 unit, twitching in the woods behind the park. I have to say, I'm not usually freaked out about the idea of living alone, but I'll tell you one thing: from now on, if some guy I don't know knocks on my door and is carrying a hammer, I'm not going to assume that he's a handyman who's come to fix my garbage disposal.

As of now, I've racked up 30 giant bags of leaves from my yard, and there are still more where those came from (from those wretched trees). I seriously doubt I will have the lawn spotless by tomorrow, and I'm sure someone from the park office will be by to shake a fist at me and leave an even nastier note. At this point, though, I don't feel half bad about the yard debris. I am no longer The Biggest Scumbag in the Park. Thanks to MC Hammer's little performance last weekend, I can now point my finger down the street and say, with as much righteous indignation as I can muster, "Don't you people have something a little bigger to worry about right now?" Oh, I'm sure the fuckers will still fine me, but sometimes smugness is its own reward.

Cooking with pussy

I got hungry, okay? There was no protein in the fridge, and the noodles alone weren't gonna cut it. As the rumble in my tummy drowned out the sound of the recession sucking the fighting spirit out of the unemployed, I spied a volunteer main course.




Sure, there's not much meat on Thirteen, but I knew Friday would never put up with being marinated in cheap wine, so Thirteen au Vin it was.

Just as I was ready to add ingredients, I saw what his true motive was.




The little bastard was making off with my pasta!



He was not only stealing my pasta, he was making a moustache out of it. A moustache and a mockery.



It's a damned good thing I can live off my body fat for up to six months.

ePerfidy.com

After Susie wrote about her experiment with an online dating site, curiosity got the best of me and I decided to check it out for myself. I was, at the time, freshly single after months of a "What the fuck is actually happening here?" relationship with a nutjob blonde, and I wanted to find a low-impact way to meet new, and possibly even more unbalanced, women.

My first stop was the heavily advertised eHarmony, where I quickly found out that I wasn't allowed past the gate unless I opted to search for a partner of the opposite sex. Therefore, Dr. Neil Clark Warren can put on lipstick and go fuck himself.

I then found Match.com, which was gracious enough to allow me to look for broads, even though I am one myself. Kudos to them for not trying to force tab A into slot B. I filled out a fairly detailed profile (don't go looking for me there, by the way; I took down my information when it became clear I wasn't going to be employed any time soon; pussy ain't free, people!), and when I was finished, a message appeared telling me that my profile would be available after it was screened for content. True enough, my information wasn't available for several days, so I assume someone actually looked through everything I had submitted and had pronounced it fit for human consumption.

Being the cheap-ass bitch that I am, I only signed up for the free version of the site. In short order, I found out that this allowed me to look at other profiles, but I could in no way contact these women to beg for sex. Only paying customers can message other users, so I was basically allowed to look in the window of the candy store, but I couldn't inquire about the lemon drops. Also, the inclusion of personal email addresses is strictly forbidden, so it was really just a vagina on a string, dangled in front of my face, taunting me, "Subscribe, you horny, loveless bitch, subscriiiiiiiibe!"

The service sends weekly emails alerting me about possible matches (more vaginas on more strings). Even after I made my profile unavailable, the emails continued. Out of vague curiosity, I browse through them to see which women who live 500 miles away from me that they've matched me up with this time. Sometimes, though, the pictures are a little...off. Like, facial-hair kind of "off." Now, I understand that some women look closer to men than a lot of men do, but after seeing a few suspicious "she's a man, baby!" pictures, I decided to click on the photos and check out these profiles.

Upon further investigation, I'm slightly relieved to report that these are, indeed, natural-born men. I was confused as to why the site would consider them matches for me, until I looked more closely at these profiles. What I found was a bunch of men who have marked their sex as "Female."

Okay. So...someone is examining our new profiles to make sure that we don't include pornographic pictures, don't solicit sex from minors, and especially don't include an email address in order to bypass the need to pay for contacting other members. But somehow, the fact that men are identifying themselves as women seems to have penised under the radar. Good job there, screeners. Way to keep the fox out of the lesbian coop.

I give up. I'm going back to meeting women the old-fashioned way (waiting for them to pass out in the bathroom at the bar and then copping a feel).

Jumping to Conclusions

I decided I wanted to try my hand at some jump blues, so here's a brand-spankin'-new track, "Jumping to Conclusions."

******************

******************

Mekka lekka hi mekka heinie poke

As far as flamingly gay characters on children's television are concerned, Tinky Winky's got nothing on Jambi. Who'd like to venture a guess as to how many times a wish was granted by holding the box at crotch level?

Also, I'd be willing to bet that, with that turban, Jambi has a bitch of a time with airport security these days.

The earliest known PSA

Say it with me: PEHDTSCHJMBA

Damn, I love this man!

Behind the Playhouse

There was a whole lot more than homemade mayonnaise goin' on at Pee Wee's Playhouse.

A return to audioblogging

mp3 link if the player won't work for you.

The grammar cop has her panties in a bunch

Things that will bother me, to different degrees, until I get this stick dislodged from my ass:

• teh - Yes, I know people are purposely using it to be witty and tongue in cheek, and I do understand that it's a common misspelling. But keep using it, and Webster's will wimp out once again and include it as an accepted alternate spelling of "the"; I hate it when Webster's pussies out and refuses to stand up for the way the language should be spoken and spelled. (Note to Brits and Canadians: this does not apply to Americanizations of your superfluous use of the letter "u" - we are merely conserving keystrokes for the good of all mankind.)
  
  
• pwn, pwned - Please make it stop. I like to game as much as the next geek, but the day I use any variation of this odious term in my writing is the day someone should come and smother me with a pillow. It's also unpronounceable, which is just as irritating as that symbol Prince insisted on using for all those years, but without the added benefit of at least being attached to Prince's music.
  
  
• FTW - When I see this, I don't think "For the Win" - I think "Fuck the World." Or "Feed the Walrus." Or "Finger the Weasel."
  
  
• Pronouncing the "t" in the word "often" - Don't. It's a silent "t" and it has the right to remain silent. The same goes for the first "c" in "arctic." When you say "Ark-tik" all I can think of is a creature that I really wish Noah had skipped when he set sail.
  
  
• "Me" vs. "I" - This is a common one, and if you want to know the truth, I'd much rather hear people misuse the word "me." Hearing someone use "I" incorrectly just makes me think that he or she is trying to sound classy, and it isn't working. If you weren't talking about someone in addition to yourself, it wouldn't be a problem. I don't hear people saying "Me had diarrhea right when the movie got good!" or "Give I the darts before you hurt someone else." Think about that before you say "Paris Hilton and me threw up in the back seat of a squad car" or "Send a dirty postcard to your grandfather and I."
  
  
• "Each other" vs. "One another" - Yes, I'm being totally anal bringing this up. But "each other" is used in the case of two people relating, and "one another" is for three or more participants. As in: "Stacy and I gave each other head until our tongues blistered," and "The members of the orchestra gave one another sly smiles as the unwitting conductor ate the jizz-laden cookie."

I'll let it go at that for now. And I'll be the first to admit that I'm guilty of using slang that's probably highly annoying to other people, so even though I'm not without sin, I'm casting the first stone. How's my aim?