"What are you going to do for me for Valentine’s Day?" Lady Brown Pants asked her skinny long-legged partner. "Will you drape beautiful icees around my turkey neck like you did in 1986?"

Skinny Long-Legs considered climbing over the railing for a second or two before answering. "No, I think I’ll torture you with some nipple clamps and bang your sister. She’s not dead yet, is she?"

"I want an egg cream," offered Feeble Cane User.

——————————————————————————————

This is Henry’s final year to do something amazing for Valentine’s Day. I don’t care much for expensive gifts and French dinners, but I’d like something more than, oh I don’t know, nothing. I feel like he gave me a Hershey’s bar last year which was kind of insulting, but the fact that I can’t remember probably means he didn’t get me anything at all. Maybe if he had stopped by Walgreens and picked up some foo-foo old lady perfume to go with the imaginary chocolate bar, it would have been a different story.

Since I work nights, I think we’re going to try and get someone to babysit for us this weekend and I swear to god if he takes me to fucking Denny’s, he’s a dead man.

I want to do something wild and erotic, like hide in a trench with aborigine blow darts (the solution to everything) and shoot city cops in the neck as retribution for all the times they violate traffic laws.

Henry said he’ll care more when I finally grow up, whatever that means.

It was a mild Sunday evening when Henry and I decided to take the kid for a leisurely after dinner stroll around the neighborhood. We managed to make it three blocks before colliding with a pair of Mormon elders, looking especially clean cut and dashing in their dress shirts and meticulously parted hair.

My eyes connect with one of them for a brief moment, and in an instant the solicitation floodgates have been opened.

"Would you like to take one of these cards for a free DVD?" he inquires, arm extended with a card in between his fingers.

Oh, you bet I would.

As I quicken my pace to catch up with Henry, who does not brake for religious solicitors, I examine the card in my hand, which is not unlike that of a prayer card. The back informs one how to send away for a free Jesus Saves DVD. The front though, that’s another story.

There have been many faces of Jesus shoved at me in my twenty-seven years. Some depict him as your average working class, Henry-type of guy; someone you can depend on when your shower needs re-caulked or a floor board needs replaced. He can probably direct you to the nearest baptismal pool with a few flicks of his arm. Other Jesuses are horrifying, with sorrowful eyes and rivulets of blood curling down from a crown of thorns.

Those Jesuses just don’t do it for me.

But the one on this card? This was one Hot Christ.

The rest of the walk was spent in near-orgasm, exalting over Christ’s sex appeal and delighting in Henry’s discomfort. But when we returned home, I discarded the card atop the dining room table, where it would be forgotten for the next thirty-six hours.

The next thing I knew, my dreams of punishing Henry by glazing him with buckets of molten plastic like he’s been a bad donut were replaced with curious scenes of Hot Christ escorting me on a series of dates.

The Courtship of Hot Christ and Erin

Christ and I take in a viewing of The Exorcist, where he snorts and makes snide remarks about how they got it "all wrong" and "demon possessions are so 15th century." He smacks his lips while voraciously masticating every last butter-drenched kernel of popcorn, which would be a deal-breaker if this was a date with a mortal, but since it’s Hot Christ, I’m only mildly turned off.

A spectacle brews as Jesus guffaws like he’s taking in a Dave Chapelle performance. Theater patrons swivel in their seats and ogle as his laughter causes him to choke on Milk Duds; I sink down to avoid eye contact.

"What?" Jesus incredulously asks. "It’s funny! I guess you have to know Pazuzu. He’s a fucking card, yo! That green vomit stunt is his oldest trick. I’ve seen him perform it thousands of times over the centuries. It never gets old!"

As we leave the theater, he remarks that he’s going to keep the 3D shades for our Relationship Scrapbook, as he tenderly tucks it into his hemp satchel. My Gaydar crackles and pops briefly, but then he boisterously yells, "Who wants to play mini golf?!" and I answer with an enthusiastic "I do, I do!" and forget all about his alarming display of fruitiness.
 

Hot Christ gallantly springs for my entrance at Family Fun Land, which is reassuring considering he ran off to the arcade after telling the person in the box office that he only needed one movie ticket.

Here I discover that Hot Christ’s line-waiting patience matches mine, which surprises me considering this is the person who slows down his pace to amble with the crippled. He sways back and forth, taking turns putting his weight on each foot, and sighs in frustration. "Good God, we’re going to be here all night," he hisses, saliva droplets collecting in his unruly beard, while the young boy in front of us takes his time lining up his shot. "Noah could have built the ark and set sail by now," he spits, knocking back an angry chug of his Big Gulp. I’m silently grateful that his cup holds only Dr. Pepper and not vodka.

"Mmmm-miss it!" Hot Christ heckles, masking it as a cough. The boy stops mid-swing and nervously tugs at his collar.

Finally unable to withstand the wait any longer, Hot Christ makes idle threats involving a Sunday school teacher, a confessional, and rubber-banded ballsacks, causing the boy’s father to hurriedly lead him away from us.

Hot Christ rejoices and places his feet on the mat, wiggling his ass as he prepares to take his shot. We will be the stars of Putt-Putt, I think smugly, tossing taunting glances over my shoulder at the growing line behind us.

Twenty-eight miss-putts later, and the man who has walked on water and cured lepers still can’t manage to land his ball in the hole. I worry about what our sex will be like. We flee the scene.

Hot Christ, living on a meager carpenter’s salary, has enough cash left over to buy himself a meal at Taco Bell. He offers me a bite of his taco, but I remind him that I don’t eat meat. I’m annoyed that he’ll remember all of my sins and driver’s seat fellatio parties, which he has chosen to chastise me for and name drop various prayers for penance throughout the night, but he can’t remember my eating preferences? He thoughtfully chucks a packet of Fire Sauce at me, and I hungrily scrape out the contents with my teeth. We share his Mountain Dew, but I opt to use my own straw since he’s made a habit of kissing diseased people.

The night ends and while I still find Hot Christ extremely hot and Christ-y, we decide we’re better off as friends. I think his flatulence is so powerful that it, combined with his acerbic temper, could be bottled and used as a genocide aid to obliterate a medium-sized village, and he thinks I’m a big fat whore who needs to make friends with the Rosary. At least we’ll always have the scrapbook.

Only four of us were brave (stupid) enough to fight our way past the hundred-foot snow drifts and barrell across the sprawling and frozen tundras, just for the opportunity to sit in our swivel chairs and stare at the computer screen for eight hours tonight. We have no supervision, so look out.

I heard Collin tell Bob he brought some date rape lollipops to dole out to the cleaning women here tonight.

Bob is listening to Spoon. As he was putting the CD on, he asked me if I had heard of them. I have, in fact, but saying yes is never enough because I’m kind of musically psycho so I quickly added, "They’re from Texas" to further prove that I know who they are. Just in case my initial "yes" wasn’t enough to have Bob sold. Why do I do that? Sometimes I hate myself.

I often mistype Bob’s name as ‘Bon." Eventually, I’m just going to start leaving it like that.

I plan on staying until 8 before getting all Drama Club about the weather and then working from home. Henry told me to let him know ahead of time so he can get his girlfriend dressed and out of the house. That card.

Tomorrow I’m going to pursue a new career in bread baking. Data processing is for the birds.

It starts out slow, always slow, the thrum thrum thrum pulses rhythmically. A wrong turn, thrum thrum thrum. A gaggle of jaywalkers, thrum thrum thrum. A traffic jam en route to work and the gentle thrumming has exploded into a pounding heavy metal opera just inside the forehead. The vein swells and pulsates with aggressive vigor. Sweat glands along the hairline join hands and the forehead now glistens as it pulses. 

Around his stout neck, Benny’s date wears a paisley ascot in muted earth tones to hide the ligature marks. His thing, his dirty little secret, is auto-erotic asphyxiation. A coiled telephone cord usually does the trick. He speaks animately of summers in Bristol and his parent’s mattress factory and the titillating sensation of wearing pants too tight.

His name is Ponce.

Ponce does not notice that Benny’s temper is about to flare worse than the pants he used to wear in the fall of 1972 and Benny hopes to make it through at least one cup of orange tea before Ponce starts to realize that behind Benny’s flaccid stature is a writhing sociopath ready to blow over brick houses.

Benny’s cheese danish has still not arrived and he feels the old familiar thrum strum-strum-strumming of impatience’s gnarled fingers against his angry vein. He blots with the back of his thick and hairy palm, fans his neck with his thick hand-sausages.

I should get one of those to wrap around my head, hide the angry worm that undulates beneath my skin, Benny thinks as he eyes up Ponce’s silken ascot. With a quick flit of his hand, he self-consciously paws at the rivulets of perspiration sopping down his temples. Benny hopes Ponce won’t suspect that behind his nervously smiling countenance lies a percolating human decanter of vitriol and acidic impatience, a real hot head, they call him.

The last time Benny didn’t get the proper danish at a cafe, he tossed the waitress onto the grill and gave the owner a Mexican necktie. Not today, not today, I’m on a date. Benny coaxed himself silently, breathing evenly past his thickly capped teeth.

But the sizzling track light, paired with the tardy danish, has quickly turned Benny’s face into a flush sheath of moist flesh. Benny swats at the drizzling sweat with his napkin. No one knows, he encourages himself. No one knows I’m a hot head.

Ponce talks about his chess club and his favorite mug crafted from hardened lava and is that your sweat plunking onto the table?

No, it’s coming from the waterlogged tile in the ceiling. And Ponce resumes talking about riding bareback on his prized gelding.

Benny hates the way Ponce’s tongue darts across his lips each time he pauses between sentences. Benny strains to maintain aloof. Don’t let him see you’re a hot head, Benny. Don’t let anyone see. Benny quickly glances around the room. No one is looking at him. No one knows.

Where’s that fucking danish? Thrum thrum thrum.

Ponce tugs at his ascot. It’s stuffy in here, let’s leave, he suggests. Benny blows a tuft of sweaty hair away from his brow and his chest caves with relief. Another minute under that track light waiting for his cheese danish and a gasket would have been blown.

No one here has to know I’m short-fused, Benny is happy to think.

At a nearby table, two women giggle at the sight of Benny’s broiling dome, not yet cooled from the harrowing brush with bad lighting and bad service. "He must be a real hot head," the one woman chortles to the other in a thick Southern drawl. Benny hears this as he and Ponce loop arms and walk past. Benny slows to a halt and stares at the women. His left nostril flares slightly.

But Benny leaves the coffee shop still thinking no one knows —  Benny only speaks French.

When you’re a little kid, the smallest happenings can seem like these life-stopping newsworthy events and you sit there with your mouth agape and your eyes so wide and grip the edge of your seat, waiting with bated breath to see what will happen.

Everything is a big deal when you’re a kid.

I was probably around four or five when my Pappap came home from work with the mail. It was a summer afternoon, so I was on the back patio, probably with either my grandma or my aunt Sharon. My Pappap rifled through the mail and noticed that his youngest daughter Susie had a letter.

He called up to her on the sunroof, and she shouted for him to try and toss it up. I remember sitting on a lawn chair, their lawn chairs had these taut vinyl slats in varying shades of green and white but sometimes the skin on my thighs would graze the scalding metal of the frame in between the slats and I would get tiny welts. I’m sitting on this lawn chair, playing chicken with the fiery metal, and thinking, just knowing, that this wasn’t going to pan out the way Susie would have liked.

I watched as my Pappap tried to toss the letter against the wind, hoping to get enough momentum that it would skim the top of the ledge, but instead it fell back and skidded straight into the gutter.

My Pappap had to throw himself into full MacGyver throttle  in order to rescue her precious letter, subscription notice, credit card bill. Who knows what it was. But even after he mounted a patio table and used the aid of scissors to guide the envelope from the dastardly clutches of the gutter, Susie still had to exert a modicum of energy to lean down and grab it.

And I’m watching this, from the green and white vinyl slats of the lawn chair, thinking that I’m a part of something big, something huge, a memory that we’ll all share together and laugh about at holidays. And everyone else went about their day, because things like this, they’re not enough to fill an adult with giddiness. They’re glitches in regularly scheduled programs, they’re "oopsies" moments that evoke a few chuckles but then get lost in the back of the mind while bills are being paid and the news is being watched, until the memory is eventually eradicated altogether. But not kids. Kids retain these things and latch on to them and call upon these tiny moments when they need something to smile about. Kids revel in it and wish everyone had seen it and kids inflate it into something so much bigger, larger than life. It becomes real life Saturday morning cartoons.

I don’t remember what the damn letter ended up being, or who it was that shared enough of my sentiments to treat this as the Kodak moment it truly was, and I don’t think we ever reminisced and hyucked about it over turkey legs and sweet potato pie, but I know that every time I see this picture, I laugh and remember being so small and watching something so big.

 This was my absolute favorite dress when I was a kid. It represented a golden age in my life: collecting My Little Ponies, lazy Sunday afternoons in my Pappap’s pool, watching The Smurfs while eating Sharon’s Saturday morning French toast, Disney World, Shirley Temples and lobster dinners, my last year as an only child.

I still really love the green/pink color combination because it reminds me of candy and this dress.

Game Night should officially be renamed Catchphrase Night, since that’s the only game we ever end up playing. Hopefully someday we’ll play Last Word, which was my big fantastic Christmas present to myself. And no one ever wants to play it. But the box is green! And "Last Word" is embellished in beautiful glitter!

This was the first time that Christina, her sister Cynthia, and Cynthia’s boyfriend Joey were able to make the trek from Cincinnati to partake in game night. My brother Corey brought his friend KC who was super sweet and now I want them to get married. Plus, KC was on my Catchphrase team and we had a good rapport. Corey texted me earlier, begging me not to embarrass him (which translates into: "Hey, I like this girl and would appreciate if she didn’t think I’m a prat") but I think I might have reneged when I passed around a picture of the haircut he gave himself the night before he started pre-school. And maybe I might have accidentally mentioned that he reenacted the Britney Spears’ "Stronger" video a few years ago.

The theme of this game night was ‘cereal,’ as suggested by Collin. I feel a little embarrassed that I used his suggestion, but it was appealing to me. Janna brought some kind of delicious chocolate powdery Chex concoction that Christina and Cynthia kept calling Puppy Chow and Corey was calling Poppycock, but I think he really just wanted a reason to say Poppycock. Chooch was up on his tiptoes taking generous fistfuls of that all night. Brenna and Liz brought their own variation of Chex Mix, which was some kind of Chai orgasm with dried bananas; it was so good but I barely got to enjoy any of it.

Henry acted like a baby because he had to use pumpernickel rolls for his spinach dip because the rounds were sold out everywhere. I thought maybe there was some sort of spinach dip festival going on until Joey reminded me that the Superbowl was the next day.

My contribution to the cereal vittles was a delightful peanut butter cookie with just the perfect smattering of Cap’n Crunch crumbles intermixed. Granted, my hands never actually touched any slimy gritty batter — my Henry implemented my brilliant idea into a realistic recipe.

I was really anticipating Collin’s arrival because he and Christina had been sharing some hostility with each other via comments on my blog. I had hopes for an old school street fight complete with some curb stomping and protruding bones, but they ended up liking each other.

Bob from work came with his friend Dan, who joined me in "getting drunk and ruining everyone’s night." Christina favored Dan because she sells windows and he used to install them.

It wouldn’t be game night without Kara and her donations of tubbed frostings. This time she brought vanilla cheesecake filling and a box of Cookie Crisp for a delicious win. She was in high competitive spirits though, and acted like the Catchphrase gestapo. I was afraid she was going to flash her fiancé Chris the secret signal to send him off breaking kneecaps, but it turned out he was too caught up in a heated debate with my work friend Lindsay over gelatin.

My favorite moment was when Catchphrase was in Janna’s hands:

"Oh, OK — what does Erin get every time we go out to eat?" (Unfortunately, there was only one person on her team who would know — Christina.)

"Grilled cheese!"

"No, the other thing."

"French fries!"

"No, the other thing."

"…………………………"

"The thing on the bun."

"Oh….VEGGIE BURGER!"

I thought Cynthia called Janna "Vagisil" at one point (I think she was really saying that Janna was full of fail though), so ‘vagisil’ became Cynthia’s fall back answer every time the buzzer would run out on the opposing team. It was a welcome change from the usual ‘blow job.’ I have a skewered recollection of shouting "formica!!" over and over until Joey refused to take any more guesses from me and turned to our other team members, of which one was Collin. I don’t know how I let that happen, but I’ll chalk it up to the Woodchuck and poorly structured seating arrangement.

Sometime after I busted Christina cheating, she went outside and sprayed my street with vomit. To the unsuspecting eyes of my neighbors, it probably looked like I was hosting a wild kegger at my house. She came back inside and I told Henry to take her up to our room. "And do what with her?" he asked with mock alarm. Evidently, two or three people laughed at this, so he was riding on a comedic high for the rest of the evening. And at one point, he told me I flirt like a three-year-old and shoved me away.

Cynthia had some verbal vomiting that I spent the next two days cleaning up, but I think all is well now. It’s just that not everyone enjoys being called a dumbass over a game. I know I don’t.

My chest feels like it’s been shot three times while wearing a bullet proof vest, so you’ll understand if I cop out and say that it was a rad night and can’t wait for the next one.

I think this is what polio maybe felt like. Tuberculosis? Can I feel better yet? I would like to rejoin my upright-standing citizens. Also I want ice cream.

I do not handle "sick" well. At all. Chooch does this super sweet thing where he wakes up once an hour during the night. It’s a new trend, I guess. So that does wonders for my recovery time. Wish I had shotgun. (For me, not Chooch! God.)

Chooch saw me blow my nose once and now he’s taken to dramatic reenactments of my plight.

Now I barely have a voice, which is probably a development that could inspire cheers in some parts.

Please tell me good things. I  might be sick, but I’m still just as bored as always.

This is how desolate I feel. Wah, right?

Henry found his old Pentax camera in the attic so we took it out on Sunday to see what kind of photos it would produce. I am now in love with this camera, and not just because imagining Henry using it to take pictures of his SERVICE buddies makes me laugh.

I like how the only bursts of color in the photo come from garbage, so even while it’s gross and full of litter, it’s still kind of pretty, like flowers in its own right.

This is also a good portrait of how I’ve been feeling for the past two days. I had to call off work yesterday because I felt real crappy, like my allergies were acting up. But today, my face feels like its being chiseled in a thousand pieces and my muscles feel petrified. I can never really pinpoint what my symptoms are, which makes it a real treat for Henry when he’s trying to buy me medicine. I’m sick, isn’t that specific enough? I called off work for tonight too and I feel guilty but oh well.

Since Henry was a dear and preparing all the food for game night, I agreed to make the journey to the grocery market to get the stuff he needed. All by myself. Alone. Me, in a grocery store. Solo.

To make my trip easier, Henry was nice (smart) enough to make me a list. (He spelled ‘vegetable’ wrong.) But at the last minute, I panicked and begged Christina to come with me.

And thank god. She showed me how to choose good peppers. "Ew, no, that one’s bad." I’d pick another. "Um, no, that one’s bad too." I’d pick another. "OK look — when there’s mushy spots, that means they’re bad."

Christina picked the peppers.

Giant Eagle was out of pumpernickel rounds (I kept calling them boats?). I panicked, but Christina assured me that we would get the damn pumpernickel somewhere else.

I made friends with an old lady. Her cart was jutting out in the middle of a very critical thoroughfare, blocking my advances. We made eye contact and she threw her head back in joyful old woman laughter, pulling her cart back for me. I saw her a few minutes later as I was bounding out of an aisle acting like my cart was a plow, and nearly collided with her. I pulled back and let her pass. Her face moved into an exaggerated expression of relief and we laughed. I kept talking about her after that and Christina had no idea what was going on. I think she thought I had an imaginary friend. I wish.

 There was an older couple in the beverage aisle and I hated them immensely but I’m still not sure why. Christina said they weren’t that bad. Oh, they were in my way, that’s why. But then I forgot about them when we approached the snack aisle and I realized with great excitement that Kenny Rogers’ "You Decorated My Life" was plunking away quietly on the sound system overhead. I lifted my arms in graceful ballerina motions and, in my signature "I’m Excited" fast talk, rambled, "I used to make up ballet routines to this song and dance on my mom’s front porch when I was little!" Christina, distracted by a Wise potato chip sale, mumbled that she knew, I had already told her, and that I made her listen to that song once in the car because it was on one of my Greatest Lite FM Hits mixed CDs. She threw two bags of chips in the cart and we moved on. 

At the check out, I started to feel nervous. I’m a notorious tight wad, and the thought of spending money on all that food frightened me. But then I realized that my purse was at the bottom of the cart, giving the illusion of a full load. "Oh thank god, it only just looked like a lot of food," I sigh, hand on chest. My purse is super gigantic. I could be Mary Poppins. If I liked kids.

We loaded all the bags in the car. Well, Christina loaded all the bags in the car while I played on my Blackberry. At the end of the parking lot is a beer distributor that my dad’s family once owned, so because I’m always using my brains, I suggested that we just walk down there and take care of the alcohol acquisition while we were out.

"My dad used to bring me here when I was little," I told Christina as we crossed the parking lot. "I’d have a fucking field day climbing atop all of the stacked beer cases and crawling through the tunnels that the tight aisles made. I’d have so much fun there." When we walked in, I wondered if my dad’s brothers would be working. I thought my dad had mentioned recently that they still work on weekends, just for the fun of it. But I only saw some middle aged man that I didn’t recognize.

We grabbed a case of Woodchuck. Well, I pointed to a case of Woodchuck and then Christina hoisted it up. As we neared the register, the customer in front of us turned to leave, revealing another man behind the counter. It was my dad’s dad.

My dad, though he adopted me when I was nine, is essentially my step-dad, and if you want to get nit-picky, he’s not even that anymore because my mom divorced him back in 2001. But we get along, not so much that I could legitimately say we’re close, but he’s a nice guy and I enjoy seeing him.

His dad, however, is another story. I haven’t seen my Grandpa Kelly in about ten years or so. He has an extreme case of OCD — he’s been hospitalized for it and he pretty much thinks he has AIDs anytime he uses a public restroom. The last time I went over his house, my dad met me outside and gave me a refresher course. "Don’t talk about your cats! Oh my god, he’ll have a fit. And don’t let him know you smoke! Just…don’t talk. Don’t talk, OK? And don’t pick up things from the floor." It was Father’s Day, I believe, and he didn’t even come out of his room anyway.

Christina dropped the Woodchuck on the counter. And I’m standing there, just standing there awkwardly with my arm extended limply, credit card and ID cinched between my thumb and forefinger, and he’s staring at me. I wasn’t sure if he recognized me, was trying to place my face, or was just zoned out because let’s face it the dude’s about eighty-five years old now.

I cleared my throat. "I don’t know if you remember me, but I’m…" Crap, what’s my dad’s name? "D-Denny’s ….. stepdaughter. Erin? I haven’t seen you in many many years."

He continued to stare at me, his eyes were pearly and milky behind large glasses. Something registered and he gave his head a sharp shake. "Erin! Oh, Erin, why, how are you? What are you doing buying beer, young lady? You’re supposed to be this big!" He held his hand out by his thigh, indicating the height of a child. He flicked his eyes toward Christina and I introduced her. He took her hand and held it in a lingering clasp. I was shocked that he was touching a stranger’s hand. Especially Christina’s, that dirty Mexican.

"So, where are all the contestants?" he asked, looking behind us. We shrugged and look at him confusedly. "All the contestants….in the beauty pageant."

This was a line right up Christina’s alley and she played him like putty from that moment on. It’s kind of sickening how she has the ability to flirt with old people. She’s like the physical embodiment of "wink wink, nudge nudge" and her cheesiness makes me uneasy sometimes. While they bantered, I grabbed a handful of jerky for Bob. I wasn’t sure what kind he was always dyking out over at work, but I knew it wasn’t Slim Jims, because the kind that MSA offers in the vending machine "blows Slim-Jims away."

"Erin was just telling me how she used to come here and climb on the beer cases," Christina schmoozed. Grandpa Kelly waved his arm out toward the store and told us to have at it.

"Eh, I think I’d do quite a bit of damage now," I grimaced, while Christina was yammering on something about "wait until we drink some of this stuff, then we’ll come back and play" and I realized at that point that she should really start wearing leisure suits while trying to pick up helpless women at the gym. I wanted to leave. It was hot in the store and kind of uncomfortable being leered at by this old man that I haven’t seen in ages. He scrutinized my drivers license for too long and he rang us up at a snail’s pace. I’m quite sure his tenure at the beer distributor should have ended ten years ago.

He kept making comments about how I grew up to be such a beautiful woman, and the way the words were passing through his old man lips made my vagina beg for a staple gun. Sleazy. Which is probably why Christina forged such a quick rapport with him.

The middle aged man came back into the store and Grandpa Kelly had him carry out the case to my car. I tried to talk him out of it, insisting that we had parked too far away, but he made it clear that it was his job. So this younger man heaved the case up and Christina fake-flirted with him too, the whole way back to the car. She’s such a sexual predator.

"You having a Super Bowl party?" he asked, with just a touch of Pittsburghese.

"No, we’re having Game Night," I said, opening the car door for him. Christina and I laughed about that later. "He probably thought to himself, ‘Isn’t that what game night is?’" I mocked on the ride home.

The next day, I called my mom and told her of my run-in.

"He still owns that place," she corrected me. "It’s just not called Kelly’s Distributor. It never was, I don’t know why they had all those shirts with that on it."

And that asshole didn’t hook me up! He could have at least thrown in the jerky for free. Bob didn’t even eat any of it.

Boulevard Ice Cream is the best ice cream place in Brookline. Sure, one could argue that it’s because it’s the only ice cream place, but if, say, a Dairy Queen should pop up down  the street, I’d still patronize the good old Boulevard Ice cream shop with the congenial old man behind the counter.

The ice cream shop is close enough to my house to walk to, which always makes me feel less guilty as I’m fellating icy orbs of fat and calories, preferably in chocolate varieties.

I think it might be cheap too but I have no concept of dollar values.

It’s the type of place where the owner will still stuff a fat cone in your hand even if your pockets are penniless. OK, I have no evidence that this is true, but the owner seems like the type of guy who would rather see a runaway teen fill up on cream and sugar instead of robbing a liquor store for some Old Crow. And perhaps he’s gullible enough to buy into empty promises that Mother will stop by tomorrow with the cash.

While the shop’s facade might be in dire need for a signage update, how could you possibly resist the threat of a giant ice cream, smacking its lips hungrily as it sees you walking past, as if it’s sizing you up for this year’s summer pig roast. I know when I see enormous predatory cartoon foods, I want to eat them. Fast and hard, with lots of dripping saliva and projectile crumbs.

It’s conveniently located next to an air brush shop, so you can swing by after you inhale your cone and have them whip up a commemorative t-shirt.

When Christina and I were being chased by the patrons of Gordon’s Lounge in December, we considered for a split second taking refuge there in the Boulevard Ice Cream shop, which was still open at eight o’clock on a Sunday night, but as Christina pointed out, the window front was too big and we’d be sitting ducks. Plus, we didn’t have any money.

But as we ran past, I noticed the owner, sitting at a corner table and reading the paper, and I bet he’d have given two complimentary cones to two girls in distress.

What is angry and makes loud, explosive sounds that the military should implement as sonic weaponage, using nothing but paper and scissors, all while listening to Mary J. Blige?

No, it’s not Collin making strings of paper dolls to drape along his bed post to ensure a night full of rainbow-sparkly dreams (he doesn’t like Mary J. Blige-ish music).

Answer: Eleanore clipping coupons. All night long with the clipping and violent release of scissors onto the desk, pausing here and there to yell into the phone about young people being "STOOPit".

Remember the baker I photographed a few weeks ago? Maybe one day this will be used on billboards promoting the prestigious Bakers Against Cocaine and Porn Coalition. They have bake sales to raise money for their cause. Obviously.