In some families, pulling out the old Christmas tree and decorating it together is like, how you say? Tradition? A Hallmark memory? An evening to pretend to give a shit about your siblings as you sip egg nog while “accidentally” breaking their baby ornaments? When I was younger, I always tried to convince myself that it was a big deal. I’d try to give my mom helpful suggestions when we’d shop for lights. You know, maybe do it all one color instead of mixing strands of skinny lights with those gigantic bulbous ones. Themes have always been important to me. I wanted an elegant tree, not the agglomeration of chipped Hallmark ornaments that adorned the tree year after year. Always the same batch.

We’d go to the holiday store and no matter whether it was 1986 or 1996, I’d try to sway her to the tinsel side of tree decorating.

“No.” She wouldn’t even look at the luxurious strand of sparkling metallic riches I’d have draped around my neck, showcasing it like Zsa Zsa modeling an ostrich-feathered boa. Suggesting the loose tinsel would inspire looks better reserved for gender reassignment announcements.

“Well, then how about these fine-looking crystal bulbs?” I’d been punished with enough QVC to know exactly how to hold them in one hand and feign molestion with the other.

“No.”
“Or what about–”
“No.”

Oh, but she’d have no compunction when it came to hanging my brother Ryan’s Elmer’s glue-covered construction paper shit-houses all over the boughs. And it was always, “Oh my god, look at what that precious boy made in art class! He’s a prodigy!” while ignoring the fact that it was leper’ding  loose fragments to the floor below.

My fondest memory of our tree was when Ryan was about a year old or so and crawling around beneath the boughs. I was six and even then I knew it was a precarious route for him to take, but he used to punch me and pull my hair. So I sat and watched as he crawled with too much moxie over top of the metal base, goo-goo’ing and ga-ga’ing that tree right the fuck into a toppling situation. Unfortunately, Ryan was saved when the tree landed against the nearby coffee table, and found himself crouched underneath a tent of artificial branches. The impact of the land busted off the top section of our tree. My mother remedied this by purchasing a miniature tree and adhering it to the top.

We used that dilapidated tree every year until I was in high school.

I think the moment when I officially gave up on the decorating and family bonding was in tenth grade when my mom banished my black angel ornament from the tree. One lousy symbol of my faux-heritage was all I asked, but the angel and I were discriminated against. I hung her up on a shelf in my bedroom, where she watched over me every night, making sure my mom didn’t try and pour bleach into my mouth while I slept. Later, I bought my own white-branched miniature tree and my black guardian angel was the lone ornamentation, a beacon reminding me to keep it real.

And then there was the pet ornament snafu. Who knew that dog ornaments made from milk bones would cause a stampede into the tree?

Maybe my mom was onto something by not letting me pick out the decorations.

Meanwhile, my grandparents’ tree looked like Martha Stewart projectile vomited her entire collection upon the branches. My aunt Sharon would always say, “No no no!” if any of us came within twenty yards of it. Before I was born, they used to hire someone from Kauffman’s to decorate it for them. (I’m sure that was more my grandma’s idea than my grandfather’s.

)

I’ve lived on my own since 1998 (fine, Henry’s been around for eight of those, but considering how he’s a professional ignorer, one could still argue that I live alone), and still never splurged on a tree. Not even a miniature. And Chooch is nearly 4 now so I began to think that maybe it’s high time to do something about this.

Of course, I’m not one for normalcy, but I’d like to give my child some sort of static tradition. Sure, the magic wasn’t there for me when I was young, but surely I can try and make it right for my kid. You know, slap on a hard core Christmas carol album. Light a fire in my decorative fireplace. Tell Jesus jokes. All the things I missed out on as a kid.

Henry and I discussed it once when I was pregnant. I told him that I didn’t want our child to grow up and go to school and then come home and say, “All these kids think I’m weird because we don’t put up a Christmas tree.”

He agreed that having a Christmas tree around again would be fun. (Maybe I fabricated that part, as I often do when it comes to Henry’s involvement in things. I know, spoiler alert!) Every year I suggest that we forgo the actual tree and instead make my fifteen-year-old vision of an alternative Christmas tree come true. That is, buy a mannequin and solder extra hands, feet, legs and arms all around its head, torso and appendages. Like branches, see. And then I would make ornaments out of Homies. Maybe craft a little crack house and glue a few Homies milling around out front, listening to NWA on their ghetto blasters while waiting for Whitney Houston.

“Oh, because that won’t make kids think our child is weird,” Henry said, wiping the sarcasm from his moustache.

But in the meantime, my mom bought us a live tree. I’ve never had a real, straight-from-the-earth tree before. It came from Home Depot, my least favorite place in the world, tied with Wal-Mart, but in my imagination we went to a hobo-run tree farm in Minnesota and, with the help of the mom from “Bobby’s World,” adopted a sprightly spruce self-adorned with gilded candlesticks and all the effervescent verve of  Cyndi Lauper visiting Big Top Pee Wee. And it bowed and introduced itself as Francois Twinkletoes of the Expensive Chocolate Tribe and began dispensing calorie-free truffles right straight in my gyrating maw, ya’ll.

You know.

For the time being, we only have a few Target-procured bulbs (which will soon have the names of my crew on them, a la Days of Our Lives, though I might do Janna’s for her so she doesn’t break it or misspell her name) and a small selection of ornaments my mom handed down to me probably because they hold no sentiment for her (LIKE MY FIRST XMAS ORNAMENT CIRCA 1979). She also came calling with no less than eight packs of tinsel.

The loose kind that I always wished for as a child. I may have had a quick flashback of Henry firmly stating, “No tinsel, you can put anything you want on this tree, but please – no tinsel” as I draped seductive clumps of that sexy shit all up on my branches.

“That looks really nice, but you need more,” my mom said, supervising from the couch.

“I thought you hated tinsel?” I asked, ripping into another box.

“I do, because that shit gets everywhere. But this is your house, so whatever.”

When Henry came home, the obnoxious shimmer of the tinsel made him pause for a second. He scowled and then walked away. “I’m not picking that shit up when it starts migrating,” he muttered. “And believe me, it WILL.”

So far, I’ve pulled it out of the car and the fridge, and accidentally decorated the booth at Donut Connection with a rogue strand. When I catch the migrators around the house, I try to eliminate the evidence as fast as I can before Henry can stumble upon it. I get all panicked about it, like the runaway tinsel is a piece of my lover’s DNA and Henry has a gun collection.

It’s a fun game.

“I just want it to look fun and festive,” I explained to Alisha when she was over yesterday. (Henry made us soup and I think it should become a standing tradition.) “Do you think it looks fun and festive?”

“Oh…um, yeah. That’s exactly what I thought when I walked in the house. How fun and….festive,” Alisha deadpanned as she watched me (WATCHED, not HELPED) fluff branches and redistribute tinsel.

This was honestly the only ornament I cared about getting. I’m not ashamed.

My friend Sarah made Chooch several eyeballs during the height of his optical mania, so I shoved a hook in one to give it a greater purpose. I like to believe it’s watching over the tinsel, but considering I just pulled a strand out of my underwear, I guess that’s naive. (Oh, please, like you don’t masturbate on Christmas trees. Just please.)

A Penguins bulb, enough tinsel to inspire the tree to belt out a Cher medley, and an eyeball – what more could Alisha need to feel fun and festive in the tree’s presence? A tree topper. We didn’t have a tree topper and it was really bothering me last night. I kept trying to watch TV, I mean, retain interest in Alisha’s drivel,  but my eyes would magnetize right back to the bare twig protruding from the pinnacle. It looked so Charlie Brownish and I knew I had to do something, and FAST.

I tried to prepare my army for crafting war, but Alisha and Henry were all, “No, we’re good right here, watching TV” and Chooch was too busy calling everyone a bitch. I didn’t need them anyway. Storming into the kitchen, I grabbed an Xacto knife on the way and in my search for foil, I found something better: an aluminum baking pan. I sketched a scribble of a star in the middle and even in my haste it was far superior to anything Alisha or Henry could have shat out. They would have gone to the store for a stencil. The next part was very hard and I wouldn’t suggest that anyone reading this try it unless they have all the courage and ability to be a hero under pressure as one Erin Rachelle Kelly. Could that be you? I didn’t think so.

Oh, it was a tough and trying time, sawing away at this curling sheath of deadly metal, deftly swinging my wrists out of the way as shrapnel exploded through the air with the aim of a skilled marksman and the blueprint for staged-suicide etched out in its head.

Anyway, once it was cut out to perfection, all I needed was packing tape and something wand-like to shove it into the tree. God shone down his celestial spotlight which landed in a pool of righteousness on top of the refridgerator, which is where I found an unopened McDonald’s straw. Now it’s all a matter of sitting back and waiting for that broad on She’s Crafty to invite me on her show.

If that’s not the poster child for all that is majestic, then I don’t want to live in this shitty, uncultured world anymore.

It’s no mannequin, but it’ll do.

And that is the story of how the Liberatree was born. Hopefully it will be even more magical next year, provided some of that tinsel doesn’t find its way into my bedroom one night to recreate a horror movie strangulation scene.

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Before eating dinner on Thursday, Henry and I hung out in the living room while my brother Corey and Chooch hung ornaments on the tree. Corey took a break and acted like it had been decades since he moved out of our mom’s house (and not just barely over a year) by rifling through all the drawers and cabinets.

“I forgot I used to hide stuff in here,” Corey giggled as he pulled out two photographs from the old roll-top desk that my mom uses more as an aesthetic piece of rustic art than functional furniture. “I used to take horrible pictures of you and then hide them, haha.”

I vaguely remember being bombarded by surreptitious  camera flashes. I do not remember ever seeing this pictures*** though, but I suppose that’s the point.

The sad thing is, while I’m sure I would have hated them then, now I’m wistfully thinking, “Aw, before pregnancy morphed my body into a fleshy bag of potatoes.”

My eyebrow was pierced in the hair-dye one, so that means these are from 1998.

Baked beans?

I still enjoy a good catalogue.

Corey also unearthed my old summer health class folder, the same one you’ll not remember I used as an instructional manual on resuscitating my dead rabbit, Rudy.

The front of the folder informs the reader that “Erin <3’s Andy” though it is suspiciously penned in boyish handwriting.

There was really no point to this other than to remind myself that life is too short not to laugh at ourselves.

[*** “This pictures” –  I love how stress makes me type like English is my second language. Or maybe that’s more retardation than stress. Who cares at this point.]

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My grandma fell last week. She lives with my mom’s older sister, Sharon and that in itself is a very storied history that would exhaust me to try to type out. But I will say that in the years since my pappap’s passing, Sharon has grown increasingly damaged. In a nutshell, I tend to liken the situation to Grey Gardens.

Rather than call 911, Sharon called Henry who proceeded to go to my grandmother’s house at 10:00pm, pick her up from the floor and put her back into bed. When he came home, he told me that my grandma’s legs looked very swollen, like she has no use of them. “I don’t mind going over there and helping out, but I really think Sharon should call the paramedics.”

This happened a year ago. My grandma wound up in the hospital and from there she was placed in a nursing home for two months, where she received physical therapy and had the opportunity to interact with people not named Sharon. (Sharon doesn’t let anyone come over to see her. I saw my grandma more when she was in the nursing home than when she lives at home, because Sharon can’t LOCK ME OUT of a nursing home.) She was happy, more vibrant than I had seen her in years. Then she was released and Sharon went back to her old ways of not taking her anywhere and forcing my grandma to a life that consists of shuffling back and forth between her bed and a chair in the den. My mom has barely even seen her.

Last Thursday, less then 12 hours after Henry picked her up, she fell again. Sharon called me, panicking, asking when Henry got home from work. I lost it; convinced her to call the fucking paramedics. What if she was hurting herself every time she fell? This isn’t something for Henry to detect. So Sharon called 911, the paramedics came and left, saying she was fine.

That night, my grandma started having hallucinations, and seemed convinced she was studying her English. Sharon took her to the hospital, which actually made me feel relieved rather than upset, because I know that if she’s at least in a hospital, she’s going to get proper care.

(Well, best case scenario, anyway.)

I went to see her on Sunday, after hearing stories from Sharon about how my grandma had lost her mind. Sharon swore my grandma had suddenly “come down with” Alzheimer’s, but my mom and I weren’t so sure, since it seemed like the onset was essentially an overnight process. She was sitting in a chair, tray of stinky hospital food in front of her, most of it stirred into ecru puddles of ambiguous sludge.

“Mom, do you know who this is?” Sharon wheedled in the most obnoxiously condescending tone.

“Of course I know who that is, it’s Erin,” my grandma snapped.

My mom told me that the night before, Sharon kept speaking for my grandma, who eventually lashed out.

“You have to excuse my mother,” Sharon explained to the nurse. “She has a very quick temper.”

To which my grandma spat, “It’s because you piss me off!” My mom said Sharon called her crying, but really, when the only form of human contact you get each day is that from your eldest daughter who has NEVER MOVED OUT, wouldn’t you be a little temperamental too?

During the visit, my grandma kept bobbing in and out of coherency, weaving between reality and her supposed trip to Hawaii she took on Saturday. “And I never expected the meatloaf to be so good,” she enthused. “In the hospital?” Sharon asked. “No, in Hawaii!” she said.

The nurse came in while I was there and informed us that her MRI came back negative, and that the doctor deduced it was the Vicodin that Sharon had given her Thursday night after she last fell. Typically my grandmother gets half, but Sharon gave her a whole one since she was in so much pain. The nurse said that once it left her system, the weird waking dreams should subside, and then they’d move her into the rehab unit to work on her legs.

Walking down the hall with my mom and Sharon, I said, “It must run in the family. Don’t you remember when I got my wisdom teeth out and I totally went crazy?”

My mom looked at me blankly.

“Don’t you remember? I was so suicidal!”

“Yeah, but you always were suicidal,” my mom laughed. Oh yes, ha-ha, memories.

Henry and Chooch were waiting in the lobby, casually eating candy shat from a vending machine.

“Don’t ever give Erin Vicodin!” my mom joked.

“I already knew that,” Henry muttered.

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

Henry, Chooch and I met my brother Corey at the hospital on Thanksgiving. We thought it would be nice to spend some time with her before going to my mom’s for dinner. She was sitting awkwardly in a chair, slumped over slightly to the side, and seemed to be in a restless sleep; her body was twitching and she just didn’t look very swell at all.

The she woke up, saw Chooch, and promptly started to sob. I mean, she was so distraught that she covered her face and wept into her hand.

Not the reaction I was hoping for. Maybe a little more bells and whistles; praise for being such an outstanding grandchild?

Henry pulled Chooch out of the room; Corey and I, being the awkward species that we are, stood in our best awkward regalia. I kept nervously asking, “Grandma are you OK? Are you alright?” and Corey was in a speechless stupor.

A nurse came in. She had on a set of those god awful wearable studies in abstract art, presented in varying hues of Pepto Bismol and Nyquil. (If I was a nurse, I’d have to find a way to get a customized scrub set. Maybe something black, with random Cure lyrics in red.) In an abrasive, no-nonsense tone, she looked at me through lens-magnified eyes and asked, “What’s wrong?” In my head, I heard, “What the fuck did you do?”

I explained that we had just walked in as she was starting to awaken, and that’s when she began sobbing.

“Jeannie, what’s wrong? These kids came to see you.”

“I can’t. Not tonight. It’s been a really bad year,” my grandma moaned. I’m not sure if she meant to say “day” or if she was being profound. Because yes, it’s been a really bad year.

All this time, Corey had been clutching a card he made her; a Thanksgiving turkey card made the old school way – from his handprint. (“And in true Kelly household fashion, I had to use Scotch tape covered in dog hair,” he explained moments earlier in an elevator.) He slid it into her hands before we left, and she moaned, “Oh Corey, thank you,” and then cried some more.

On a positive note, she at least knew who Corey was.

On a negative note, that was the single most depressing moment of my adult life. And the worst part is that since I’ve always had a tumultuous relationship with her, all I could do was stand there with a worried expression and arms crossed protectively (and insecurely) under my chest.

I’m not sure if I’ve ever hugged my grandma. I know that she’s always loved me, I do believe that, but I also know that of anyone in the family, I’ve been the biggest disappointment to her. Chubby as a pre-teen, a yo-girl in high school instead of a billboard for equestrian couture like she’d have preferred, a high school dropout, a black sheep having a baby out of wedlock. I was just never what she wanted me to be, and she proved that by lying to her friends, telling them that instead of not finishing high school, I had graduated and gone on to study journalism at Kent State.

She berated me when I got pregnant, yelling that I “wasn’t meant to have children.”

She never asked me if I was happy, though.

This blog? It’s called Oh Honestly, Erin because that’s what she’s always said to me. “Oh honestly, Erin” –  every time I let her down. “Oh honestly, Erin” – every time I did something imaginably stupid. “Oh honestly, Erin” – every time I tarnished the family name a little more.

And I’m not sure if I ever told her I loved her before last night, when I said it as we flitted from the room; but it was only because Corey had said it first and I coattailed him.

I do love her. I just don’t know how to say it. When it comes to my family, there is this fucking force field barricading the entrance of emotions, and any sign of weakness or utterance of honest endearments will be zapped dead like a mosquito poking around a bug lamp. So I just stand there stupidly and useless while my grandma is entering an existential crisis in the hospital.

It wasn’t until later  tonight, after Chooch and Henry went to sleep and I was left completely alone on the couch, that my emotions had the upperhand advantage. And it hit me, hard.

It doesn’t seem that long ago that I was taking my Pitt course guide over to her house, poring over it excitedly while she made me a cheese sandwich, finally feeling like she was proud of me. Now, college is just one more thing that I quit, she doesn’t even go in the kitchen anymore, and somewhere along the way I went back to feeling like a fuck up.

In this photo, she’s judging me. But I still love her.

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The beginning of November always weighs heavily on me because it’s when my pappap’s birthday falls. I try not to let it bother me, but it’s like his ghost is always there, hovering. It’s not like I don’t want it to be, though, but that doesn’t make me feel any less sad. Part of me doesn’t want to “get over it”, no matter how many “friends,” family members, or therapists tell me to, because the hurt in my heart reminds me of who I am and where I came from.

I had wanted to post this photo last week on his proper birthday, but I couldn’t find it.

I tore through all of my photo albums, to the point where I started to think that I had constructed the photo in my subconscious, and started to panic because I’m afraid to start forgetting things about him, like his loud laugh, or the way he would tap his pinky ring off the church pew and say, “One day this will be yours” (for the record, it’s not mine). I don’t want to forget about the time he got pickpocketed in Rome and remained so calm, yet lost his shit when some asshole grabbed the cab we were waiting for.  How we would go on family vacations to Wildwood, NJ and he and I would sneak out for ice cream after everyone else went to bed. How he would listen to his Mike and the Mechanics tape in his truck and say, “This song reminds me of my father” every time “Living Years” came on.

And my photos of him, don’t even get me started on my photos of him. My aunt is so afraid I’m going to raid my grandma’s house of all the Lalique and jewelry when all I would actually take is every photo album I could carry in a potato sack. OK fine, and there’s the fucking fantastic sculpture of Marquis de Sade that I have always had my greedy eye on. I recently asked my aunt Sharon for the purple heart that he earned in WW2 and she got completely spastic on me.

I don’t have anything of his. I don’t want it for materialistic reasons, for greed, I just want to have something that he once held. I don’t care at this point if it’s a scrap of a shirt. My family won’t let me have anything and that’s a hard pill to swallow sometimes. I guess it’s my punishment for being the black sheep.

But I finally found the birthday photo the other night, in this big red velvet album full of my baby pictures. I’m guessing from the not-yet jaded look in my eyes that this was back in 1980. Chooch and I sat on the couch and pawed through the album and every time we turned a page to find his face perma-glued onto the yellowed backing. I would proudly say, “That’s my PAPPAP,” like a kid boasting the best toy ever during show and tell. And that’s what makes it suck even harder lately, not the fact that I don’t have that shiny toy to brag about anymore, but that Chooch never got to know him. And those two would have been crazy about each other.

My pappap was the one who made all of my birthdays amazing. He raised the bar so high that sometimes, in his death, I don’t even want to bother to celebrate my big day. And looking back, I realize that aside from a lousy birthday cake, no one ever really did anything for his birthday. If I could have one last chance, one last opportunity to light up some trick candles, I’d make sure he knew for real how much everyone loved him. I guess he did know, even in the absence of actions, but still. He deserved a party. A really fucking lavish party. With clowns and twenty bottles of Dom. Or, at the very least, a card with all these sentiments scrawled in ink.

He never expected anything from any of us: my brothers, my mom, my aunts, or my grandma. All he wanted was happiness for everyone, and it seemed like so much of the time, someone was always mad at him, always for materialistic bullshit.

This was Halloween, 1983. I found it during my search for the birthday cake photo. I can guarentee that whoever took this photo, whether it was my mom or grandma, someone was pissed that my pappap was walking past in the background. I’m certain there was an annoyed hiss of, “You ruined the picture, John!” but for me, I look at this and think, “Oh good, another picture of my pappap,” and I bet the rest of them would think the same thing.

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I went to a haunted house in Donora, PA last Saturday with my friend Cinn and her boyfriend Bill. I don’t get to see Cinn very often but she’s always been the big sister I never had, so when I do get to hang out with her, it never feels like a ton of time has passed. Every October reminds me of when we met in 1998, and we reminisced about that plenty in the car Saturday night (much to Bill’s chagrin, I’m sure, as he’s heard the story a thousand times by now).

Two years ago, I wrote an essay for a writing class about the event that solidified our friendship, and I guess because it shines a big, embarrassing spotlight on my softer, more sentimental side, I never posted it here.  But I don’t know, who cares. Here it is.

————————————————-

       “Stop, you’re making me choke on Skittle juice!” Cinn screamed from behind the steering wheel. A long ribbon of highway unraveled in front of us and I grimaced when Cinn said we had at least two hours left in our journey. I tickled our ennui by flirting with the driver of every vehicle that had the misfortune of passing us, only exciting the burly and unwashed-looking men manning the gigantic semis that made compact cars like Cinn’s sway perilously.         

       Two days earlier, I was meeting Cinn in person for the first time after several encounters in a gothic chat room called DarkChat. She arrived at my apartment, her shocking red locks were closely shorn to her pate and jutted out in spikes here and there, and we went off to buy our costumes for the upcoming Type O Negative show and Dracula’s Ball in Philadelphia. I knew nothing about her but that she was twenty-eight to my nineteen and lived only a short jaunt away from me. I didn’t even know she was married until that weekend, when I arrived at her house at the designated departure time, but somehow the particulars didn’t seem to apply to this friendship – we had somehow managed to connect based on something entirely more intrinsic than a/s/l.

       Agreeing to go on this trip was just what I needed, coming off the heels of a tumultuous summer filled with break-ins, having my wallet pilfered and car stolen (and then ever-so-thoughtfully returned hours later) by people I thought were friends.  It was a summer that started off strong, full of parties and crushes and a bounty of alcohol, but by the end, it had become a twirling tailspin of depression, loneliness and the stark reality that 99% of the people with whom I shared my apartment weren’t going to be there when I needed them. I had taken to living as a near-recluse, keeping my heavy curtains perpetually drawn, even on sunny-skied days. During this self-imprisonment was when I stumbled across the chat room. At first it was nothing more than a release for my pent up aggression, a place admittedly to flame and mock the suicidal Goth kids; but then I began noticing that there was interesting conversation scrolling past the screen, people gushing about bands that I liked. Before I realized what was happening, I was being sucked in to this strange realm of pale-faced misfits. And I fit in because I was a misfit too.

                                                   ***

       Our dresses hung like black-laced shrouds from the garment hooks in the back of Cinn’s car. The plan was to check into a hotel when we arrived in Philadelphia, change into our off-the-Hot Topic-rack gowns and meet up with another DarkChat user, Your Druidess. I had never chatted with this lady before, but Cinn confidently assured me that she would be standing outside of the Trocadero with our free tickets to the Type O show. Here I was, recuperating from a summerful of broken trust, only to turn around and hand over what little left I was able to scrape up  to this strange woman who I essentially knew nothing about. However, I would be lying if I said I didn’t consider, at least once, that this woman with her Simon LeBon coif was a real vampire, luring me to a sinister abattoir for Internet chat room newbies under the guise of some gothic jamboree. Maybe I might have second guessed some of her innocent sidelong glances, seeing them instead as the shifty glance of a nervous Internet predator.  I would later learn that she was nervous – of what I was furiously scribbling in my vacation journal.

       Her real name was Allison, but she preferred to be called by her online moniker – Cinnamon Girl — and preferred to call me by my chat handle, too – Ruby. Conversation flowed easily between us, even though we had engaged in minimal chat room interaction, and I diligently noted in my journal that she kept count of every cemetery we passed, had an eye for spotting majestic trees, and churned out a myriad of cheesy one-liners, such as “Call me a bitch, but call me” and “Boobage is like mileage,” which I still don’t really understand even a decade later.

       My friends thought I was making a mistake by coming on this trip. Meeting people on the Internet is bad idea, some of them said, trying to deter me. This isn’t going to end well. You don’t even know her. Do you even like Type O Negative? Aside from a cover of “Summer Breeze,” I knew little about Type O Negative, but Cinn changed that with a nonstop Type O curriculum in the car. I’ve been a fan ever since, though it’s a wonder I didn’t wind up abhorring them.

         But that wasn’t the point. It could have been any band, it could have been Anal Cunt, and I still would have said yes. It was something that at nineteen years old, after the reality of the summer’s end had set in, I felt I really needed to do. It would be an experience, something to write about, a story to tell.  I wasn’t in college; I wasn’t living in a dorm and going to frat parties or spending semesters abroad. It may have been just a trip to Philly, but it was more than that to me.

                                                   ***

       “We’re not going to have time to find a hotel,” Cinn said, exhaling a heavy sigh of defeat. We had finally reached the city only to be met with gridlocked traffic. “Start putting your makeup on.” She tossed me my bag from the back seat and I bedaubed my eyelids with a layer of glitter thick enough to make a drag queen proud and possibly get some change tossed at me if I stood on a corner.

       “Do I have to wear these fake eyelashes?” I groaned, tumbling the plastic package over in my palm, in search of instructions. I had already managed to squirt glue in my eye before she had a chance to say anything, but in my journal I wrote that she physically forced me to adhere them to my eyelids else I’d sleep on the streets that night.

       We squeezed into our slutty Morticia dresses in the tight confines of a dingy gas station bathroom. The fluorescent white track lighting made my normal complexion look legitimately sallow and I wished I could achieve that look at the ball. Cinn made that wish her own reality by heavily coating her entire face with white powder, a measure I was unwilling to take. Cinn accidentally dropped a ten dollar bill in the commode.

                                                   ***

       Your Druidess never showed up.

       We stood dejectedly outside the Trocadero for an hour, watching hordes of Type O fans bustling into the sold out show, clutching onto hope so fleeting, it was like cocaine sifting through our fingers. I silently breathed a sign of relief though, because I wasn’t 100% on board with donning my ridiculous Goth uniform anywhere other than Dracula’s Ball. Cinn was openly weeping over this  imbroglio when a big-wheeled pick-up truck sped past, Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror” blasting ironically at high volumes from the windows. I shot my fist into the air and saluted.

       Your Druidess is a stupid name, anyway.

                                              ***

       Refusing to let Your Druidess’s blunder ruin our trip (she was probably a fifty-year-old fisherman, anyway), we decided to make the best of it and seek out the Dracula’s Ball, which we had planned to attend after the show. Driving through Central City on Halloween night, past loading docks and alleys full of shadowed forms, I began to understand why the Fresh Prince’s mom made him move to Bel Air. It didn’t seem like we were in the right place and my old friend Panic began to rise again up my esophagus, like a recently ingested model’s salad. It burned.

       She’s going to stab me with her fake fangs and roll my body into the river. But before I let my paranoia get the best of me by hurling myself from the moving car, I spotted an undulating line of poorly dyed raven locks, billowing capes, and sparkling neck-bound crucifixes. We had found the Dracula’s Ball. In my head, I rejoiced with the Tabernacle Choir.

                                                   ***

       This is high school all over again, I thought as I came precariously close to being engulfed by the obnoxiously large black velvet couch on which I sat, like a shell-shocked Alice at a tenebrous tea party, while Cinn was over at the bar getting refreshments. My feet dangled inches from the floor, the chair was that ludicrously oversized. Cinn came back with a beer, which I grabbed for desperately (and I don’t even like beer), but she handed me a glass of Coke instead, mouthing off some spiel about not contributing to minors.  And here I thought we were bros.     

       We were the first people to be let in, having been hand-picked in front of everyone by Malachi, Philadelphia’s Baron of Goth. I never did find out who he was supposed to be, but I know that girls swooned when he neared them and men shook his hand with great respect shining in their eyes. A top hat nestled stately upon the carefully tousled kohl hair framing an alabaster face; a tailed tuxedo suitable for Marilyn Manson to wear to the market and a cane imprisoned within the grip of a white-gloved hand finished off his meticulous look.  He could be a vampire. He could really be a vampire. When he approached us with an extended palm, every girl gasped in envy. Murmurs of our luck resounded around us as we advanced to the doors, leaving everyone to reapply their black eyeliner in disgust.

       It smelled like a clove and anise cocktail inside the Ball, with a slight trace of sweat and smoke coalescing to provide an acrid after-scent.  Black velvet and gossamer draped from rafters, chandeliers, and limbs, like gauze on an unraveling mummy.                                                                                                                   

       Tall, emaciated boys in high-collared shirts with frilly sleeves strutted to and fro, arms akimbo, feet stuffed into thick-soled black Creepers, while girls spiraled dream-like around the dance floor, giving off the illusion that they were floating above the ground as they skipped in staccato patterns, yet managed to retain their fluidity; cupping their hands into cordate offerings, they contorted their arms in hypnotic patterns which a friend would later tell me he dubbed “Passing the Ball of Energy.” Every third girl had some variation of fairy wings clipped to her back and none returned my smiles.

       You know those stares you get when you leave the house accidentally still wearing the skin-suit you fashioned from your last murder victim? It was like that.

       I tried to tell a girl I thought she danced beautifully and she all but hissed in my face while dripping gobs of glitter much like the molten blobs of wax that plop from tilted taper candles. And here I thought I had escaped the Prom two years before; this must have been Thomas Jefferson High School’s revenge. The girls could see right through my façade, sniffing the scent of my dress’s cheap threads and knowing that it wasn’t purchased in some Elizabethan boutique, branding me a poseur. The acceptance I once felt in the Goth chat room was all but shattered when I was forced to stare this culture in the face, without the shield of a computer monitor.

       Feeling safe with my roots in the wall, my aphasia and I remained sidelined for most of the evening.                                                    

                                                   ***

       “What’s an egg cream?” I asked Cinn, scanning the menu at Silk City Diner.

It was 11:30PM and the diner was sprinkled with several other Ball escapees. Cinn said that we would see how we were feeling after we got some food in our stomachs, that we’d decide then if we were going to go back to the Ball. Under the table, I crossed my fingers for a vomitous outburst, an exploding appendix, an arm severing spontaneously.

       Minutes later, the waitress had convinced me that egg creams were quite possibly the most delicious refreshments one could ever want to flow down their gullet; I imagined Jesus ripping himself from the cross and striding purposefully into the nearest diner and ordering a tall glass of creamed eggs. “What’s the first thing you’ll do when you get down from that cross, Jesus?” “Get myself a nice cold egg cream, friend.” And how could Jesus be wrong?

       The waitress slid a tall glass of egg cream along the Formica table top. I should have known I couldn’t ever agree with Jesus. It was disgusting. A foaming cylinder of soda water and chocolate syrup, essentially. I didn’t know what eggs had to do with it, but there must have been a lot of courage infused into that vile libation, because I felt recharged and feisty, like the Erin I was before my generosity and effervesence had been wringed dry like an old ratty dish rag. Mounting the sparky-vinyl booth, I shouted, “Can I have your attention? We’re from Pittsburgh and I’d like to take your picture!”

        In a surprising twist, everyone graciously obliged. It was like an awakening for me, a reclaiming of that spark that had been robbed from me that summer, the lack of which had quickly shoved me into a shell. I felt rejuvenated from my moment of bravery and decided that I wanted to go back to the Ball.

        But first I had to wait for Cinn to emerge from under the table.

                                                   ***

       She introduced me to the man with red irises, long and slick black hair, and two sets of fangs, saying his name was Tom and that she had met him earlier in the night, during her quest for beverage which should have taken five minutes, not thirty. Suddenly oblivious to my presence, they began making out and I had a feeling this wasn’t the first time their tongues met that evening. I rolled my eyes and wandered around the building, curious what I might find on the other floors.

       The basement was a crypt for kegs and an astringent aroma of cloves and mildew which made my nasal passages feel unwelcome. The second floor seemed dandy until I entered a room that was like walking into a bathroom at Studio 54. Sickly Goths lounged languidly around tables of blow. I had a feeling that probably wasn’t the best room for me to be loitering. I’m a very addiction-prone girl.

       Not really feeling comfortable anywhere inside (except Vendor Alley, where I threw down fifty dollars on a red leather bat choker with wings so salient they bore small holes into the skin of my throat while I wore it), I relocated to a stoop outside, taking solace in my pack of Camels and scribbled furiously in my journal. I began panicking about where I was going to sleep and how I was going to get home, because I realized I had no idea of Cinn’s intentions.  I felt threatened by this man Tom. Women get weird when men enter the picture. I hoped that I wasn’t about to get ditched, although it wouldn’t be the first time.

       I returned the raucous salutations of inebriated passers-by, declined offers of rides and wild nights, and accepted a stamp pad which I promptly tossed to the side, afraid it might be laced with acid or whatever hallucinogenic was popular on the streets of Philly. A homeless man sang in my face until I silenced him with a crumpled dollar.

       As I lit my fifth cigarette with cold-shook hands, I heard a shrill voice reverberating down the sidewalk on a wave of the pulsating beat of Electric Hellfire Club.

                                                   ***

       Every October, I feel nostalgic for that music. I fill my autumns with a rotation of goth-rock bands like Sisters of Mercy and Christian Death; I remember the way those people danced and looked so free, and still wish I could fit in with them. But instead, I listen to this music alone, this time in the warmth of my house, and not from a curb outside of a club, on a cold hemorrhoid-incubating slab of city concrete. Not only am I fake Goth, but a seasonal one at that.

                                                   ***

       “Jesus Christ, I’ve been looking all over for you! I thought you had been stolen, and I was so scared. And then I kept thinking about your damn journal and all the made-up stuff you were writing about me, and what would the cops think—-” She roughly pulled me into her, hugging me tight and petting my hair. It was a scene straight out of a crowded department store at Christmastime, except that I wasn’t a crying child silently thanking Santa for helping her Mommy find her, but a nineteen year old girl with rogue specks of glitter scraping her eyes and a sleep-deprived surliness.

       Tom was still saddled protectively to her side.

                                                   ***

       “Are you sure you’re not hungry? We can stop there,” Carl said, jabbing a finger out the car window at some fast food chain. “Or there.” It was the third time he suggested this supposed good intentioned pit stop. I was seated awkwardly in the passenger seat of his truck, my dread-filled eyes staring straight ahead, glued to the back of Cinn’s car.

       Tom had invited us back to his apartment and devised a brilliant plan which put him in the driver’s seat of Cinn’s car, while I was pawned off on his friend Carl, who appeared to be an amalgamation of Ozzy Osbourne’s and Michael Bolton’s genetic markers. Translating this to mean that Tom and Cinn wanted to spend time alone, I acquiesced – but not without a loud, throat-scraping exhale, the kind that every teenager perfects, to illustrate my annoyance — and joined the lascivious Carl, who was desperate for an excuse to stall our reunion with the others.

       “No, really. I’m not hungry. I just ate two hours ago. A lot. I ate a lot. Four courses, at least.”  My gaze remained indestructible, refusing to let Cinn’s car out of my sight.  “Maybe even eight,” I mumbled in an undertone. I’m going to be so pissed off if I get raped tonight, I thought bitterly.

                                                   ***

       Tom’s apartment was what you’d expect for a man convinced he was a vampire: no matter where you placed your ass, an animal print of some sort was promised to be underneath; black pillar candles occupied every free surface area; Egyptian relics and religious tchotschkes gave the room a very underground Pier 1 ambiance.

       I was trapped on Tom’s couch for three hours, during which I suffered through a painfully awful vampire movie (Vampire Journals), and even worse, Tom’s lame attempt at humorous commentary; a photo op for Carl, in which I appeared to be shrinking back inside of myself while Carl ravenously leered over my shoulder (a photograph I treasure to this day); and Tom’s guided tour through the technological wonderments of WebTV.

       While Tom was searching for a better ankh image to embed in his email signature, I slipped out to Cinn’s car where I proceeded to collapse into frustrated tears in the passenger seat. It was 6AM and I wanted to sleep, but not in Tom’s perverse lair. Cinn came after me, and I sobbed about not knowing what Tom keeps under his floorboards and not wanting to sleep in the same room, building, state as Carl, and I complained of the searing pain I was feeling in my eyebrow. I had just had a new ring put in days before, by a husky goliath in a piercing parlor who looked like he could have just shimmied down Jack’s beanstalk. The gauge was all wrong, but he forced the purple hoop through the miniscule holes in my brow. When I awoke, I was supine and groggy on a couch, and he showed me the paper towel drenched with my blood.

        “I need to wash my face,” I wailed, hiccupping on tears. “This glitter is really making my piercing hurt.”

         Probably scared of what fabricated tale I was bound to weave inside the purple cover of my vacation journal, Cinn placed her hands on my shoulders and promised we would leave right then. She was true to her word. She drove all morning, stopping near Hershey to feed me a nutritious breakfast of raspberry Danish and strawberry muffin.

                                                   ***

        After that weekend, Cinn and I forged a sisterly relationship, which isn’t always a good thing, but I know that she would save my life if she could. We’ll go for months, sometimes years, without speaking, but underneath it all, it was like we survived a train wreck together, a Gothic train wreck of spider-webbed carnage and fish netted limbs, anise smoke and novelty fangs, and that alone bounds us together, no matter our differences or penchants for running off with mysterious strangers. I still haven’t found my place in life, an accepted membership into some snobby subculture, but I’m OK with that. I like being the girl with a cover no one can judge.

                                                   ***

              The night after I returned home found me in the emergency room, with a doctor surgically extracting my eye brow ring, barely visible amongst the swollen patch of eyelid that caused people to mistake me for a mongoloid.  “Look at all the puss that came out!” he lectured me, while two nurses vowed to never let their daughters get pierced.

                       I still have a scar.

12 comments

• First October in Brookline
• Big-headed Internet boyfriend from Vancouver
• Ceramic pumpkin full of black and orange cello-wrapped peanut butter chews
• Just two cats
• Black Bible shrine; purple hand chair
• Week-long telemarketing jobs
• Middle of the night jaunts to A-Plus; procuring calling cards
• (World Famous) Grasshoppers. served in antique blue stemware

1 comment

Hi. I’ve posted this on LiveJournal before, but never here on Oh Honestly, Erin.

**********

There are some standard cultural traditions that I avoid like the plague. For example, having ‘Happy Birthday’ serenaded to me.

It makes me want to unzip my skin and climb inside my body cavity. I never know what to do with myself while locked in this thirty second predicament. Where do I focus my eyes? Do I mouth the words along with everyone? Do I laugh, smile, cry, fellate a candle? Where do I put my hands!? I cannot explain this phobia, but my mom is clearly to blame for the one regarding dressing up for Halloween.

It wasn’t always a disaster. In fact, I used to enjoy it.

Exhibit A: Erin as a bunny in Kindergarten:

Notice how carefree I was. I’m undeniably thrilled that it’s Halloween and I get to dress up and be pretty. But this was back when Halloween was pure and simple—before my mom caught wind of the costume contest at my elementary school. Children from each grade can win a prize for the most creative costume? Who knew?

By the time second grade rolled around, my mom had morphed into Pageant Mother:  Halloween Edition. Choosing my own costume was no longer in the cards. While all my friends were running amok in Kmart, fingering racks of synthetic Snow White capes and vinyl witch masks and probably inhaling 567,872,536 incubating germs left behind by the hundreds of people before them who breathed inside the masks, my role was to sit idly on my ass while my mom tapped into her creative genius for the perfect costume, year after year. I wanted to contract viruses, too, goddammit. But my mom would remind me that there was real life fame and fortune on the line, and since I was only eight, I still had faith in her.

My first homemade costume wasn’t all that sufferable. I have a vague recollection of wanting to help and having my fingers slapped. (Oh my god, I totally do this to my kid now. I have become my mother.)

Though I was shy, I secretly gloated behind my crayon tophat as everyone shrieked about the coolness of my costume. Other kids paraded around the elementary’s parking lot wearing their generic Made in Taiwan costumes, but I was the real deal, yo.

That year gave me my first taste of Halloween costume greatness. I was the winner from my grade, hands down. I remember clutching my prize (a real life silver dollar!) to my heart and beaming knowingly at my mom—we were on our way to big things, I could feel it in my immobile torso. If we had been given the opportunity to recite an acceptance speech, I would have dedicated my winnings to her.

The excitement of the costume contest came to a crashing halt that evening. It was nearly time for Trick or Treating, and I realized that I didn’t have a real costume. You know, real as in ‘practical.’ Real as in ‘I will be traversing great lengths for the sake of candy and this fucking mummifying cardboard box is slightly invasive, can I get a leotard and some mother bitchin’ fairy wings?’  My mom, when I brought this to her attention, scoffed at me and said, “Yes, you do have a real costume!” Next thing I know, my arms are in the air and she’s shoving the Crayola box over my body. This is not the sort of costume that a child wants to wear while on a hunt for candy; my range of motion was limited. My step-dad rose to the occasion and pleaded with my mom that it was going to be a serious buzz kill for me. But don’t get it twisted, this isn’t the heart-warming moment of the story where the girl realizes that her step-dad loves her and decides to call him “daddy” for the first time. His concern was thinly veiled selfishness; he was attempting to save himself from the inevitable whining in which I was about to unleash like tiny verbal firecrackers. I remember hearing my mom respond with, “Yeah, but I want the neighbors to see.”

My shuffling got me down half of a block before I had to head back home, thanks due to cardboard chafing. That was the lightest load of candy any child over the age of five has ever obtained in history, with the exception of those getting hit by a car, kidnapped or only having a palm  to put it in. And it was all my mom’s fault.

By the time third grade rolled around, the Crayola catastrophe was a far off memory. Figuring the ambitions of my mother was a one time deal, I asked her to take me to the mall so I could pick out my next costume. My request was greeted by a look of horror, and she said, “I’ve already started working on your costume.” Oh. We’re doing this again, are we? Goodie.

One would think I would have a say in my own ghouly accoutrement, but all of my ideas and helpful suggestions of butterfly wings and fake blood were shot down. I was, after all, only a kid. And it was only my costume. This one would prove to be the single most over the top costume of my elementary school’s history. (I did extensive research. And by that, I mean I assumed.)

Notice how I’m gazing longingly off in the distance. I think I was devising a plan to steal He-Man’s sword and slash my way out of the sandwich board costume.

The traditional parade was a bitch, as this latest costume proved to be a proverbial thorn in my side. I had to take tiny baby steps, because walking with too much zest caused the cardboard to bounce off of my knees, running the risk of dislodging some of the game pieces. It was during this panoply that I discovered what it’s like to be chased down by the paparazzi. Not that I knew what paparazzi was back then. I had cameras being shoved in my face by a bevy of soccer moms and lunch ladies.

I won again, this time grudgingly. Another silver dollar. That novelty was being stretched thin. My strongest memory of that day was being divided: on one hand, I was elated and lapped up every last drop of attention that was tossed my way because I was no longer an only child and had to resort to destructive behavior to get even a glance in my general direction back at home; but on the other hand, I was embarrassed and wanted to go home and cry in bed.

I returned to my classroom after enduring another photo-op with the principal, and I couldn’t help but sense resentment from some of my peers. A handful of them had even retired their standard super hero costume fare for the likes of Coke cans, a skyscraper, and french fries. They were all clustered together on one side of room, sulking over their failed efforts. But then there was the other half of my classmates who were happier of my win than I was, and wouldn’t cease pawing at my costume. Here, have it. It’s all yours.

By the time I got home, I had put the horrors of Monopoly behind me. This time, my mom relented and I had a backup costume for Trick or Treating. I had to make up for the last year’s debacle, and the painful memory of it made possible my desire to cover extra territory. It was at this young age when I grasped the concept of heaping large amounts of chocolate and caramel into my system to temporarily numb depression.

Apparently I was doing too much indulging, because I became fat. Fortunately, by the next year, I was too busy worrying about weighing more than 85% of my class than stressing over my stupid grandfather clock costume. Suspiciously, there’s no picture of that year’s effort, and I think the fact that I was trumped by my classmate Mike’s grape guise may have something to do with it. To this day, my mom insists that it was about (PTA) politics.  I was relieved to have the heat taken off me. Mike’s costume was killer, yet oh-so simple. A purple sweat suit with purple balloons pinned to it. Genius. My mom still goes off about how he didn’t deserve it. “What did that take? Like, five minutes to pull off? I had worked on that fucking clock for a week!” The grandfather clock really was a crappy costume, though, and I didn’t know the meaning of constricting until that year’s sheath of cardboard was shoved over the shaft of my newly plump body. Divine would have had an easier time sausaging into her evening gowns.

Oh, how I longed for a drug store costume. Imagining how comfortable a plastic Rainbow Brite smock would be was the only thing that held my sanity in place during the ritual romp around the parking lot.

My mom, still feeling the blow of defeat from the previous year, pulled a “phoenix rising” and came back with this one:

It would turn out to be her swan song, and she was rewarded handsomely when I reclaimed my title. I won a real dollar bill that time, which I believe went right into my mom’s purse.

Of course, people who didn’t know me then always express genuine concern with the fact that I’m so into October and all of its creepy overtones yet so blase about dressing up.  Well, NOW THEY KNOW.

10 comments

We spent the afternoon at Henry’s sister Kelly’s house yesterday.

It was a nice time, for sure, but when Kelly pulled out some old photo albums, it was ON. Typically, I can go hogwild making fun of a gawky teen Henry wearing bitchin’ shades, high-waisted pants, and steepling his fingers. (Seriously, he steeples his fingers more than sinister cartoon crime lords.)

But then Kelly slipped me a strip of photobooth pics taken at Kennywood in 1974.

(For those of you who are bad at math, that is FIVE YEARS before I was born.

To spell that out: HENRY IS WAY OLDER THAN ME.

)

And aside from the idiotic gaping maw pose he’s got going in the last photo (he claims this was back when an actual person was in there taking the pictures and telling you how to pose), there wasn’t much I could say other than “OMG aw” and “SWOON.”

I also want to add that I’m thankful he doesn’t still have the pervy beer-drinkin’ molester look he had going on in his twenties.

7 comments

For the longest time, I didn’t have my high school listed on Facebook because I just flat out did not want to be found. The only reason I used Facebook at all was to keep in touch with recent friends, not reunite with old ones. But eventually, people started finding me and friend requests began to stockpile. I’d stare at them, hover the cursor over “Accept,” then veer it over to “Decline.” Then back again. Over and over until I would eventually just log out altogether.

It’s like a phobia, not wanting all those people to know who I am now and what I’ve been doing and have done and am planning to do.

Because of the way I bowed out back then, I had harbored some uneasy feelings about my high school years and instead of remembering the good points, I’ve mostly just dwelled on the confused decisions I’d made.

But then I saw this one girl on there, and I thought, “Aw, she and I were close at one time.” We had a story-writing club in middle school. It was pretty lame, but thinking about it made something tug at me. And so I friended her, and she seemed genuinely happy to reconnect with me. From there, people started finding me. And while I only declined one request so far (for very good reasons and I have no idea why this broad would even WANT to feign affectations toward me), it has gotten easier each time, and I’ve been reminded that I’m not as horrible as my insecurities, issues and failed friendships have fooled me into believing. It’s helped me see that maybe I didn’t finish high school, maybe I didn’t finish college, maybe I don’t have a job right now (OK, this seems much worse now that I’m typing it out), but there are still things that I am doing with my life and have some cool shit that I’ve already accomplished, so maybe I’m not too much of a failure.

Coming to terms with this is a really big deal for me!

(As I’m typing this, Chooch is standing next to me, persistently chanting, “Are you done?

Are you done?” because he wants to play puzzles on jigzone.

com and let me just tell you, I rue the day I showed him that site.)

So in honor of high school memories, I’m sharing these scanned excerpts from my (9th?) 10th grade yearbook that I found in my old LiveJournal photo folder. They make me LOL.

So, judging by these, we learn that in high school I was: loud, annoying, mean and sometimes broke out into disco dance numbers. Sadly, it appears that I haven’t changed much, except in lieu of disco, my only dance moves on the current are raising the roof and sometimes a very lazy shimmy.

I want to know what you guys were like in high school. Tell me, tell me now!

6 comments

Sometimes, when I stupidly have an urge to procreate again, I go back and read some of my pregnancy posts on LiveJournal, wherein I am quickly reminded to close them legs up, close ’em up tight, ya’ll.

Today, I had a fleeting desire to try and birth a creature that might actually enjoy to cuddle with its mother, unlike Chooch who might as well just start pulling a switchblade out of his underroos and rolling cigarettes in his shirt sleeve. So to LiveJournal I went, and I found this lovely memory of Ponderosa and realized that hey, I still haven’t been to a buffet since then. This grudge thing, it comes easy to me.

---

Originally written January 13, 2006

It was all Henry’s bright idea, really. While idling around the house, wondering what to do for dinner (I was content extending my breakfast and lunch of gummies into the evening), Henry suggested Ponderosa. I quickly thought back upon my last trip to a buffet and decided that I wasn’t living life to the fullest unless I gave it another go. Besides, my mom used to take me to Ponderosa when I was a wee chitlin’, and if memory served me right, I believe I liked it.

Things immediately got off to a rocky start when we arrived. I stood in front of the large menu hanging on the wall behind the counter, heart rate increasing from the impending pressure cast onto me from the impatient stares of Henry and the cashier. My only option, of course, was the buffet, as everything else was steak, steak, seafood with a steak smoothie, or super steak. That’s gross for a vegetarian.

We walked over to the secluded booth I chose and it was here when I became arrested by what I affectionately call Fish Out of Water Syndrome. I stood there, next to the table, with one knee on the slippery booth, looking to Papa H for guidance. Do we sit down first? Do we stand here and wait for a signal, a green light or the peal of a dinner bell? Maybe we should just leave; I really wanted to just leave.

“What do we do now?” I whispered. I could feel the anxiety branching its russet fingers across my face, panic wavering from my flesh like heat on the horizon.

“Uh, we go up and get a plate,” Henry chided in the tone he reserves for moments he feels I should be reminded of my fucking retardedness, after which he stood there and stared at me for a second longer, then shook his head and walked away. I quickly ran after him, grasping onto the elbow of his shirt with my sweaty fingers.

I hung back awkwardly, observing Henry’s professional buffet maneuvering. Following his lead, I grabbed a plate, making certain it didn’t come complete with a hair like his selection did, and then I began to tentatively prong clumps of withered lettuce into a small mound on my plate. The lack of fresh spinach among the salad spread had me so bereft that I had to mentally talk myself down from tear-shed. Hormones are a bitch, but to be fair I probably would have stamped my foot even without-child. Two steps down, an employee was coveting the green pepper slices, thereby monopolizing the container from all the paying customers such as myself who really had their hearts set on the addition of the crisp, snappy vegetable to their salad. The peppers were already overflowing! There was no need for restocking at that particular moment, but then I remembered that to me, buffets are  merely an extension of a waking nightmare, so I tried to stop having standards and began to expect typical salad fare to lie in festering clumps, marinating in general buffet splooge and skin flakes from the arms of overreaching salad fixers.

Sans peppers, I moved on to the dressings, which I was delighted to find were not labeled. I blindly added a small dribble to the center of my spinach- and pepper-less crap hill, and shuffled back to our booth with my head down. (I shuffle while pregnant.)

As I pushed the questionable bits of salad around on my plate, I took the time to scope out what nonpareils Henry had acquired. This resulted in an interrogation of how he managed to escape my side long enough to seek out an array of slightly-edible choices. Items such as a golden roll and mac n’ cheese garnished the edges of his plate; things that maybe I would have enjoyed as well.

“If you would have continued along, you would have run right into it,” he explained while tearing chicken off the bone like a caveman, as I whimpered with jealousy.

It’s true, I could have taken more time to explore the depths of the buffet, but not while some old man was breathing down my back, waiting for the right moment to swoop down under the sneeze shield. He was right up against me, tongue wagging and elbows primed and jutted, waiting for the opportunity to start jabbing. I imagined him coating me in the remnants of his impending whirling dervish, and to be honest, I wasn’t trying to stick around for that. Buffets make me feel so rushed as it is, but throw a buffet bully into the mix and watch me freak out like the amazing social abortion that we all know I can be.

After I explained this scene to Henry, while trying to be brave and stifle my tears, he promised to take me back once I picked my way through the salad. Henry’s plate of thoroughly gnashed goods had long since been whisked away by the nicotine-damaged waitress, and still the minutes ticked on. He sat hunched over the table, watching me with his glazed-over eyes as I tediously cut too-large florets of broccoli into bite-sized morsels with his knife.

(My knife was adhered to the napkin it was rolled in, courtesy of an unknown viscous substance, so I wasn’t really anticipating using it on food that would eventually wind up in my mouth.)

By the time I had devoured all parts of the salad that appeared to be health code compliant, there were too many people in line at the buffet, so I made Henry wait some more. It was during this interim that I really got a good look at my fellow diners. Interspersed with folk of Henry’s ilk, and a handful of citizens who looked like they could self-suffice for a few weeks without sustenance, sat:

• (1) man who arrived with his belt already unbuckled;
• a troika of children who had thrown their jackets onto the floor upon arrival and then proceeded to lay on them;
• a group of guys who clearly had just gotten high out in the parking lot

I also finally got to put a face on the noisy nose-blower behind me. And boy I wish I hadn’t, because for that moment in time, I feared that I had somehow wound up in Appalachia.

On my second round of facing the ominous buffet, Henry walked me through and pointed out things that maybe I would enjoy, like cottage cheese, potato salad and macaroni and cheese; it was like having my own guided tour and I felt the need to ask when we were going to see the basement. Little dollops of everything Henry recommended dotted the perimeter of my plate, which I then crowned with a hesitant spoonful of buttered noodles (they looked like worms swimming in snot, you guys) and chocolate pudding (it looked like soft serve poop with a  diarrhea skin, you guys). Henry brought me back a smaller plate featuring a diminutive lump of mashed potatoes (which I took one taste of and gagged back up for added effect), nachos and cheese, and a slice of pizza.

I’m really glad that he had the foresight to include the nachos because otherwise, I wouldn’t have been able to deduce that the cheese sauce festering away in that vat on the buffet was the same exact coagulated concoction used to coat the macaroni. It was disgusting, and it made my face crumple up like an air-filled paper bag being crushed.

I may have struck out with everything on my plates, but I still had the pizza to count on. The cheese was so thick and heavy, congealed with a luminous sheen of grease not unlike a pool of oil in a parking lot or the complexion of an amputee after performing a one-legged fornication obstacle course on the most humid day of the summer while chugging mugs of habanera chili, that I had to use a fork to pry the slice off the plate. Mistaking that I was in a real restaurant, with a real slice of pizza in my paws, I dove right in. And what a shock to the taste buds (whom I have promised to make it up to, by the way) as they drowned in a wad of artery-plugging mush. I managed to lumber through half before the thick tomato paste became too much to bear. And the crust was like no other: A strange hybrid of what one might assume was soggy Ritz crackers crumbled and rolled out with Nilla Wafers on a tray spritzed with Grandma’s Aquanet to form a sad semblance of pizza dough. I was intrigued. Nauseated, yes; but intrigued nonetheless.

Hope blossomed around the ingested sludge in my stomach when Henry suggested that maybe the desserts would be better. He brought back a smörgåsbord of pint-sized confections: A small bowl, which bore a striking resemblance to an ashtray, housed a small portion each of sugar-plated bread pudding and a crumbled mass of what I believe had “apple” in the name. Next to the bowl, he set down a plate which carried a slice of some curious variety of sweet bread and a brownie.

The crap in the bowl was decent, but the brownie was no more than a glorified piece of school cafeteria cake with an APB out on the icing. And the bread! Good Lord, the bread. Having the inferior taste buds that are programmed into your average blue-collar worker, Henry masticated his bite of bread as though it were a caviar-capped truffle, but I droned on and on about how dry it was — I even conducted an experiment using a small sample of bread, a sip of water, and an extended tongue — and oh yeah, what exactly was I eating, anyway? He insisted it was nothing more than nut bread, but halfway through the shared slice, I bit into a mushy mouthful of banana.

“It’s banana bread!” I announced as I pulled the plate away from Henry and happily ate the rest.

“So because you now know it’s banana bread, it’s suddenly good?” A veritable pylon of steam chugged from his ears as Henry wrestled with this concept. I love confusing him with my nonsensical food laws.

Unfortunately, one slice of banana bread is not enough to change my prior conception of the buffet, so from this day forward, the word will be completely obliterated from my vocabulary. Buffets no longer exist in my universe.

The lesson learned is that evidently, my boobs aren’t the only thing that have gone and changed on me since I’ve entered adulthood; my taste buds are no longer the same under-developed specks upon my tongue as I once knew them to be. Which explains why Chuck E. Cheese pizza isn’t exactly a delicacy worth writing home about these days, either.

What bothers me the most is that I still don’t know what dressing I had covering my wilted salad.

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You know how when your neighbor is chasing you around with that fifteen-inch barbed dildo and electrical nipple clamps, your heart swells up with such a rush of adrenaline that you feel like you might die right then and there in a pantsful of terror-based soft-serve shit? That’s how I felt the day when I was fourteen and being hunted by a cannibalistic rabbit.

I was ambivalent when my brother Ryan won the fight against our parents, the one where every seven-year-old begs, pleads, promises, swears that they’re responsible enough, that they’ll feed it, that they’ll scrape the shit off the floor and pet it and hold it and love it forever and forever, until my parents cried uncle and allowed him to bring home a rabbit. He chose a standard black and white cow-spotted one and after quickly conferring with me, the all-knowing Big Sister and thinker of The Best Names EVER, the final choice for the new pet’s name was Rudy, after one of the kids from Monster Squad, a Kelly Family classic.

Rudy was a motherfucker. We kept him in a large cage in the garage, where he would gnaw at the flesh upon our fingers every chance he got. Feeding him was a nightmare, and I began to fear it more than church. My mom, trying to shove a carrot in between the grid of his cage, was left with a shaving of thumb skin dangling in the air, exposing the bright pink under layer of her hand. And that was only a sampling of the damage Rudy could cause.

That summer, my dad bought a hutch for him; we thought perhaps being one with nature would soften his temper, maybe the birds could do some social-workin’ on his dingleberried ass. But evidently, the great outdoors amplified his testosterone level and Rudy just kept growing more violent and more bloodthirsty.

One fateful day, Rudy squeezed his way out of the hutch when I was attempting, nervously. to toss some slop into his bowl. I was almost relieved, figuring instinct would send him hopping for the woods at the edge of our yard. Instead, he set his beady evil eyes hungrily on my legs. His nose twitched devilishly. For one frozen moment, we stood in tense stances: Rudy, hunched over awaiting to pounce; me, half-twisted at my waist, anticipating the start of a chase. Almost as if a gunshot fired, Rudy and I unfroze at the same time and I began sprinting wildly and blindly through the backyard, Rudy hot on my heels. I wasn’t sure if my appendages were going to be used as a humping post or a dinner buffet, but neither sounded very savory to me. I screamed in vain for someone, anyone to come to my aid. Preferably the Crocodile Hunter.

Bring a shotgun! I don’t care!

My dad was in the garage, engaging in a leisurely afternoon phone conversation, when I whizzed past him, followed closely by a black and white streak of unbridled fury.

Hysterically, I screeched, “Daddy help me! Before he kills me! Daddy help!”

An outsider might have mistaken my screams for over-dramatics. But my dad was no stranger to the extent of injury we feared Rudy could cause, and so he abandoned the telephone in favor of a broom, then quickly joined the frantic chain of hunter and the hunted.  My dad gained on him and began swatting with frenzied heroics, but it was all for naught: Rudy was too quick and agile for me, his paws powered by the wrath of Hell, and soon had me tackled to the freshly mowed grass.

Rudy’s sharp bucked teeth pierced through the flesh on my ankle. I swung and kicked my leg around, like I was the bull at the rodeo, but his fanged clench abated. My dad finally unlatched him with one hard smack of the broom. I’m against animal cruelty, but Rudy earned no tears from me that day.

Later that summer, even though I vowed to never speak to Rudy again, I didn’t think twice about coming to his aid when our dog, Dazee, chased him into the neighbor’s yard before grabbing his neck with her gnashing jaws. When I reached the scene, Rudy lay unmoving under a pine tree. Luckily, I was in the middle of summer health class, so I grabbed my notes and embarked in a relentless series of CPR attempts.

Sadly, Rudy was a goner. I think of him every time I look at the scar on my ankle.

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The other day, I found this picture of my friend Lisa and me. It’s from 1996, and we were at Denny’s before going to our friend Evan’s art show. I’m not sure why Lisa looks so tired. Maybe she was just feeling psychologically worn knowing that she had like, 5 more hours  to spend with me that day. (I was kind of hyper & annoying back then. I’m totally not like that anymore.)

Lisa was just in town over the weekend, and with her she brought her shiny brand new fiance, Matt. Because Lisa currently lives in Colorado and no one here in Pittsburgh had met Matt, there was a meet and greet at her grandma’s house Saturday afternoon. I wanted to make a good impression on Matt, so I sent Henry to Vanilla Pastry Studio that morning to pick up a quad of Congratulations, You (and everyone else) Got Engaged Before Me cupcakes.

We arrived to find Lisa in the kitchen, where a nice buffet of party food called to me like the fucking Green siren of weight gain. I kept eyeballing it around Lisa’s shoulder, and oh shit was that mango salsa? (It was.)

Lisa introduced me to her future husband by saying, “This is Erin, we’ve been friends ever since I threatened to beat her up in eighth grade.” (True story. It happened at the Halloween dance, because I was being a punk bitch.) And then I presented Lisa with the cupcakes. I was going to say something to the effect of likenening them to God’s wedding cake, because she’s a radical Christian; however, her dad was looming too close for comfort and I’ve always felt he didn’t approve of me (probably because my entire aura flashes HEATHEN in neon) so instead I was like, “Yo, here are the best cupcakes ever.”

And as she lifted the top, I stood there smugly, chest puffed out a little, waiting for her to enthuse about how beautiful they looked, almost too beautiful to eat, and if she could, she would choose one to wear atop her wedding veil.

But instead, she let out her signature goblet-shattering guffaw. (She seriously has the loudest, most startling laugh of anyone I have ever met and I pray someday it’s recorded and used in a cartoon.) And (after recoiling from the sonic blast) I’m all, “What the fuck is so funny about cup—-…..Oh.” Apparently, they had decided to have group sex in one of the corners of the box, presumably to an updated version of an old Spice Girls song,  “4 Become 1.” (That was for you, Alisha.)

And of course, the revelers had paused their conversations long enough to witness this catastrophe. (It was a catastrophe to me, OK?) I heard someone murmur, “Aw, oh no.”

Not really knowing what else to say, and feeling the burn of strange eyeball beams upon my person, I let out a monotone, “Oh, oopsies” which apparently sounded entirely more sarcastic than I intended, because Lisa laughed even harder and said, “Oh, nice reaction!”

Apparently, she thought I had known about it, possibly even done it intentionally. Then she made me say “Oh, oopsies” again and stand there awkwardly displaying the box of car-crashed cupcakes while she took a picture and EVERYONE WATCHED.

I know, I have been writing on the Internet since 2001, but I do NOT LIKE BEING FOCUSED ON IN REAL LIFE. I’m a walking study in contradiction.

Eventually, everyone ripped their eyes off my mangled mess and went back to conversing. I think half of the guest list was engaged. Lots of ring-flashing was going on, which made me glare at Henry with such intensity, I hope he could feel the bamboo sticks with which I was mentally q-tipping his dickhole.

“What?” he said defensively. “I’ll propose! When I find the right girl.” A typical Oh, Henry moment.

Later that night, Lisa called me to thank me for coming. Then she goes, “So Matt and I were reviewing the best moments of the day, and you and the cupcakes win hands down.” More raucous laughter. “What was it that you said again?”

Jesus Christ, Lisa.

To Henry, I was saying, “Why would she think I did that intentionally??” and he goes, “Uh, because she knows you very well and that’s totally something you would do.”

“Well, yeah. But not with her family there!”

Somehow, I’m sure I’ve made worse entrances, at least.

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Today I annoyed hung out with Alisha, who brought up Phipps Conservatory at least fifteen times because she is apparently wildly obsessed with weeds. I let her babble on about all her exciting trips there, and then I remembered the one whole time I went. It was two years ago, and it was with Kara, who doesn’t live her anymore so I feel compelled to repost this since I don’t have any fresh examples of torturing her.

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Learning About Plants & Kara

Originally posted August 21, 2007

There I was on a dreary Sunday, sitting around in just Henry’s underwear and watching instructional knitting videos, when Kara arrived to hang out. I started to get up from my filth to fetch her a particularly swiss-cheesy pair of underroos, when she stopped me. It seemed that in lieu of festering in Henry’s waste and eating freezer-burnt bonbons while watching 70s horror porn, Kara was in favor of actually leaving the house and going to that place where people go — I think it’s called the outside. Outdoors? Public? Slaughterho—no wait, I’m thinking of something else.

She seemed desperate to wile away her afternoon at Phipps Conservatory, where a riveting Chihuly glass exhibit was underway. Not wanting to get in between her and culture, I agreed. It gave me a reason to use my rainbow backpack that I bought specifically for Warped Tour but then left it hanging on the knob of the bathroom door.

Did I mention the adorable unicorn appliqué on the backpack? I hoped people would think I was a lesbian. A lesbian with an enviable collection of black light-sensitive felt unicorn posters in a day-glo array.

Flowers and non-flower plants don’t really get my fancy very tickled, but I was pleasantly pleased to discover some new species that I had never heard of.

1. Creepy Laughing Male:

Balding on the crown of his head and clad in an army jacket, this species will creep up behind you and molest your ear drum with his scandalous laughter, which feels like a big wet tongue and makes your shoulders raise to your earlobes in hopes of acting like a condom, before whipping out his camera and turning his molestational instincts onto the helpless plants. He is accompanied by his presumed paramour in a striped shirt and he will later make you recoil when he appears to be snapping perverse shots of a random baby in a carriage. Later you will learn that the baby is really his and his companion is his father, not paramour. But watching him slouch in his seat in the cafe still doesn’t make you feel like planting his seeds in your garden.

More angles of Creepy Laughing Man:

2. Witch Disguised as Pedestrian:

Slipping into a pink sweater does little to camouflage this white haired witch’s natural aura, especially when she is incapable of denying her vast knowledge of every spice and herb growing in the outside garden. Your first reaction will be to assume she’s planning on making a brew that will eradicate the entire elf population of Western Pennsylvania, and you’re ashamed when you find out that really she’s just planning on whipping up an aromatic stew for her dinner guests that evening. Way to be prejudiced. You’re probably also the kind of person who would slide over a chalice of bat juice to a witch without actually taking their beverage order, when maybe they’d have preferred a nice White Russian in a frosted high ball.

But yeah, you’re right. She does have some magical locks.

3.Thai Food Aficionado:

Can be found predominantly in the tropical gardens of Phipps’ Thailand Section, monopolizing the employee inside a kiosk displaying samples of Thai spices. He will pressure her until her eyes water in fear, demanding to know every last datum of curry until she eventually fakes the need to blow her nose continually, causing him to shrug and leave. If you have the misfortune of finding yourself ogling a lotus while he is within earshot, do not speak poorly of it, for his female companion (wife or mother, relation is unknown) will sneer at you and lambaste you about the sweet, sweet balm the lotus secretes, causing Thai Food Aficionado to radiate death waves from his robotic eyes as he brusquely chimes in that lotus root is best served as a tempura. Interaction with Thai Food Aficionado learns you that it’s about as savory as spending an afternoon under a willow reading Chaucer with some stink weed.

Here, Thai Food Aficionado is deciding if the pond fish would taste delicious with a nice curry. Later, you hear him spinning yarns of pad Thai and lemon grass.

To my delight, I also learned some new things about my friend Kara:

Kara doesn’t like orchids; they are ugly and gross and they scare her.

Kara is scared to death of butterflies and will pull all kinds of exaggerated faces to convey her dismay while trapped in the butterfly room. She explains that it’s “like bugs crawling all over [her].” Hopefully, Kara’s first born will be a butterfly.

Kara thinks star fruit is gross and ugly.

Kara will yell “Ew!” as if she has just put her hand in a jar of eyeballs, when really she has only touched a soft leaf called a Lamb’s Ear.

Kara hates lotuses and they remind her of worms and make her protectively cover her boobs.

I had to double check my ticket to see if I was in Kara’s Haunted House.

Kara was also kind of cranky and surly. She admitted it was probably because she was hungry and in a very strange and disorienting moment, I realized that it was almost like hanging out with myself. If that’s the case, then damn, I’m annoying. Wait, don’t people tell me that all the time?

In typical Erin fashion, I ignored the fact that there was a finger print on the lens. It gives the pictures character. Charm? No? Ok.

Thingies.

Life would be worth living if these were what eyeballs looked like. Or nipples.

When penii party.

Would suck to fall on.

Kara’s fortress will protect her from all the scary flowers and sinister butterflies, but I fear she’s on her own with that foreboding sky.

Afterward, I fed Kara’s face in the cafe, where Creepy Laughing Man had been joined by his wife and kid and that dude we thought was his lover but really was his father. It was kind of comforting, even though I kept hearing him laughing and it was really like having my ear fingered, which kind of made me blush and wish I had a rosary to nuzzle.

Right before we left, Thai Food Aficionado stamped in with his mother-figure and proceeded to ask the girl behind the counter what every dessert tasted like. Kara and I tried to hold back squeals when they chose the table next to us. His companion, having fallen in love with her cake, made the life-or-death decision to go back and get another hunk, which she paid for in exact change. She then cut it right down the middle, employing an enviable steady-handed precision. I took it upon myself to imagine the dialogue exchanged was akin to her telling him that he just hadn’t lived until he prayed with the Tibetan monks, but instead it was really, you know, tasting some crappy cafeteria dessert. Thai Food Aficionado, well on his way to becoming Stale Dessert Connoisseur, speared his half with a fork and raised the entire chunk to his mouth. He gnawed off a large portion, swallowed, and then engulfed the rest.

I hope there was at least some coconut milk in it.

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Many moons ago, when I was a spry sixteen year old, I went to my neighbor Jessy’s house to color Easter eggs. Not knowing Jessy very well, I had to censor the ideas I had for my eggs. It’s never wise to draw pictures on the eggs with wax crayon depicting Jesus molesting young boys when you haven’t officially tested the waters surrounding your company. She may have been a Bible jockey – what did I know? So our eggs were your standard fare – brightly colored, some boasting our names and superlatives expressing the magnitude of our undeniable coolness.

As we marveled over our freshly colored eggs, Jessy shared with me a tradition from her childhood. She encouraged me to select my favorite egg from the batch and then told me to take it home, place it somewhere dark and dry, and eventually it would shrivel and become hard as a rock. I would be left with an unbreakable souvenir of that year’s Easter. She said her grandma did it every year, so I had a lot of confidence in her.

I went home and chose a porcelain container situated in the hutch in our dining room. Carefully nestling the egg inside the dark compartment, I gave it one last loving stroke for good measure and replaced the lid.

After an uncertain amount of time, my mom decided that she was going to clean. Typically, when my mom said she was going to clean, it entailed clutter being kicked and shoved under furniture and into drawers that already were resisting closure [note: this is where I learned my housekeeping ethics]. But on that day, something had possessed her to go all out and dust the dining room.

All was calm and quiet in the house; the muted din of cartoons mingled with a cacophony of chirping birds from outside. Suddenly, my mother’s piercing shriek could be heard ’round the neighborhood. I ran into the dining room just in time to witness my former pre-birth vessel, frozen in terror, holding the lid to the porcelain jar while an army of maggots swarmed around it, undulating and looking generally disgusting.

I was in trouble.

Since then, I’ve learned that there’s an entire process that needs to be followed in order to preserve Easter eggs. And it’s too much work for me.

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Four years ago, in an effort to really immerse ourselves in the Easter spirit, Henry and I invited Alisha over to indulge in some adult egg coloring. And by adult, I mean to say none of this wholesome “I Love God” egg-dyeing bullshit. My eggs were billboards for unsavory epithets like Fucknoodle and Dickshitter. This was the way eggs were meant to be. This was art.

I had huge dreams of making a Porno Series, in which we would enhance each egg with paint so that they would depict naked nymphos, ready to get it on. I had this highly ambitious endeavor of creating an entire storyboard from it which would propel me into stardom.

I could sense the fear that Henry was emanating. It smelt of nachos and the Service, circa 1984.

“Um, so what exactly is this going to entail, this porno egg thing?” Henry questioned as he nervously rubbed his arms. I’m afraid that he was picturing some grandiose scene of us shoving freshly-colored eggs into his ass while paying spectators watched from behind a red-velvet rope. So paranoid. But that would make for some classy performance art.

Everything was progressing normally until Alisha plopped an egg into a mug of dye and ogled over the unusual sludgy color. Henry, always needing to stick his nose into everything, came over to inspect it as well.

I haven’t dyed eggs probably since the previous story unfolded, so I assumed that maybe Paas was trying to be all hip by not discriminating against colors and they were maybe slowly introducing ethnic shades into their color line. Personally, I thought it was a huge leap forward for the future of egg-coloring.

Alisha swished and swirled her egg around in the brown dye a few more times before announcing that nothing was happening. That was when we realized it was my coffee. It took three of us to come to this conclusion. College has made a huge impact on me so far!

The eggs turned out splendidly, especially my blue and yellow variation, but unfortunately the eggs in my Porno Series did not come out as expected. The … male genitalia that I drew with tongue-protruding concentration and accuracy dried to resemble a smiley. I remembered that we had glitter egg paint, so I demanded that Henry drop trou and model for me as I attempted to paint over the failed weener. He refused and opted instead to Google images for me. Because I’m Amish.

The result was still terrible and looked more like an elephant. Much respect for Michelangelo. However, the boobs I painted on the female egg came out perky and voluptuous, rivaling any silicone-enhanced pair crafted by the hands of a Beverly Hills surgeon. Well, almost.

And I made a very special, Henrydandy egg that will surely be cherished by a certain someone for years to come.

[Henry used to wear a bandanna and have long hair, FYI. (Not FTW.)]

There was no hiding of eggs in dark, dry places yesterday after Alisha and I painstakingly turned the ordinary stark shells into glorious masterpieces. So this Easter, while some people were in church learning about the Resurrection of Christ, I was learning that coffee does not adhere to eggs and that I shouldn’t go into business painting weeners.

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I’m hoping that tomorrow night, when I try my hand at egg-dyeing once again with Alisha, it will be so much fun that Jesus will rise a day early to dunk his junk in some green Paas. I mean, egg. To dunk his EGG. Oh, and Blake will be here too, so maybe, if all goes well, the night will veer into  STD Cookies: Ovum Edition.

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Thoughts are being gathered over here at 3021 Pioneer, so have an oldie (but probably not really goodie) for today. Originally written August 13th, 2007, and apparently on that day I felt compelled to call Chooch by his actual name.

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I’m not sure Henry’s and my relationship was much stronger the last time we were there , but in an attempt to recapture some of the magic we painted smiles upon our faces and stuffed the child into the car and headed out to the Living Treasures Animal Park. It’s about an hour drive from Pittsburgh, and we managed to arrive without a single episode to cause me to stare out the window in protruding-lipped angst. A good sign.

Of course, with Riley being the wild man that he is, it wasn’t exactly the casual hand-holding stroll beneath Victorian lace parasols in Kensington Park, but more like running a relay race in an attempt to chase around your child in near-90 degree heat, trying to make sure he doesn’t end up leaving with another family, shoveling rogue rooster poop into his mouth, or falling into the duck pond. When you’re drenched in clammy-handed sweat there’s no way do you want to be holding the hand of your partner who just got done feeding a cow and the entire three-ring fly circus he’s hosting upon his back.

For the most part, it was what you would imagine from a small zoo.

Animals shitting, lions sleeping with their backs toward you, asshole kids cutting in front of you while their asshole parents talk on their asshole cell phones like the asshole Ray-Banned yuppies they are. And all my child cared about was this one fucking duck over in a gazebo and finally I was like, “I didn’t just spend $20 for you to sit here and throw shit at a duck when we could have driven five miles from home and done this shit for free so now you’re going to come with me and look at a monkey and fucking like it” and then he melted down into a full-blown display of histrionic fireworks, complete with real, plump tears, and it was a nice little glimpse of the next eighteen years of my life. (And also the last 27 of my own, I guess I should add.)

I splurged on the large bag of feed and of course, with the exit in our sight, half of the bag still remained. Not wanting to waste it, I spent some extra time with the dromedary camels. Henry kept yelling at me to keep my hand flat, and I was getting angry. It was flat! I’m quite capable of reading signs, I’m in college, remember?

So I’m standing there, grimacing and dry heaving over the thick and sticky saliva being lacquered onto my hand, when suddenly the one camel started to inhale my entire palm into its large vacuum of a mouth. I was so horrified that I actually choked on my scream. I was wrist-deep in this motherfucker’s jaws and it was starting to apply pressure with its flat teeth. I tried to yank myself back out, but the camel clamped down harder.

Hysteria renders it impossible for me to relay every detail, but I’m fairly sure I roared something to the effect of, “Get it the fuck OFF OF ME!“

You know the situation has reached emergency status when Henry forgoes the eye-rolling and nearly drops our child to come to my aid. I had to squint to see it, but I do believe I detected a trace of panic filling in the lines of Henry’s weathered face. But by this point, I was losing consciousness, so what do I know.

Great, soon I’ll be attending tea parties on a cloud with Steve Irwin, I thought pitifully.

Luckily, Henry used his big manly muscles to rip out my arm with force, postponing my tete-a-tete with the Crocodile Hunter.

It was the closest we came to hand-holding all day. Aw, thanks camel.

I was afraid to look at what mangled flesh and bone remained. I held it up, with my non camel-molested hand wrapped around it, stroking it lovingly and swearing to never place it in such compromising situations again. When I finally peeked at it, there were red splotches here and there, presumably broken blood vessels, and my one fingernail was black underneath.

I shoved my camel-battered hand in Henry’s face and screamed, “Look at what that asshole has done! He’s murdered my hand!” Henry seemed alarmed at the blackness of my nail and urged me to show it to one of the staff members. I inwardly gloated at the fact that the son of a bitch actually gave a shit, waited a bit for his concern to balloon into hospital bill horror, and then admitted that it was really just paint souvenirs from my weekend of furious and maniacal art therapy.

Apparently, by ‘flat,’ what the signs really meant is “Don’t feed these fuckers, else you’ll be devoured up to your elbow until you’re fisting this Satan-spawned beast’s hay-stuffed colon. And if, by chance, you’re still conscious when that happens, grope around a bit and see if you can find my wedding band.  – The Handless Management.”

All of the fond memories I harbored of riding camels in Morocco have flown out the window. Ahoy, Aversion Island.

And thus, the tone of the day was set. We went to lunch after we left the farm of maim, where we ate to the tune of my whines. “It’s growing worse by the minute!” I’d sob. Henry would make exaggerated efforts to lovingly squeeze my hand from across the table; I’d scream out in pain.

Feigning concern, he would ask, “Oh, was that your camel hand?”

I really wished he would stop calling it that because it made me feel like I was wearing an ill-fitting glove.

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