Halloween is my all-time favorite holiday, but I think this is the most lethargy I’ve ever displayed. My head was full of big ideas, like maybe I’d have a costume party this year and actually put some gusto into decorating the yard (as Chooch sits on the couch, watching “Goonies” and spitting out “Oh shit!

“s every two seconds – real time play-by-play). I managed (with the aid of Henry power) to erect a slipshod cemetery against the front of the house, and I scribbled generic faces onto pumpkins which Henry then spent an hour carving, only to have the crazy Indian Summer-turned-snowstorm shrivel and mottle the fucking bastards. Then I thought it would be fun to dress Chooch up as David from The Lost Boys but only felt inspired to spend 20 minutes scouring the Internet for a toddler-sized trench coat before abandoning my search in favor of downloading some metalcore. Instead, I waited until the last minute before clicking a button, and a plastic-packaged Frankenstein costume arrived on my doorstop yesterday. Maybe Henry will at least paint Chooch’s face green to pull the costume together, but I won’t know since I WILL BE WORKING.

I always start thinking about Halloween in July, but then I get side-tracked by the forty-seven OTHER things I want to work on, and then guess what – nothing gets done. Halloween becomes half-baked just like the thirty books I’ve said I was going to write, the trip to Romania I said I was going to save up for, the kickball tourny I wanted to arrange, and the scavenger hunt I said I was going to organize. Henry keeps lecturing me, telling me I need to pick ONE THING and go from there, but instead, I have to do things my way and dabble in three different mediums on any given day and then I wonder why I can’t fucking sleep at night and why I find myself missing half of whatever TV show Henry and I are watching together because I’m staring at the wall, completely zoned out.

I think I need to spend one weekend alone, in a cabin somewhere.

Preferrably one that includes in its itinerary:

• a suspicious and unsettling gas station attendant a mile down the road
• a curious phone-line disconnnect
• a bear trap meet-n-greet for my feet while fleeing a murderous rapist
• an evening in front of a crackling fire,  full of psycho semen with an axe protruding from scalp

Last night, Henry and I were supposed to go to a haunted house when I was done working, but my mom and aunt (the begrudging babysitters) were already at my house when I came home, acting like it was second only to Hell as the last place they’d want to be so I was all, “You know, I guess we just won’t go then” so they flew out of my house with an eagerness typically reserved for a copraphagist in the midst of having a giant scat loaf churned out into his salivating maw.

So instead of being chased by chainsaws, Henry, Chooch and I went to the grocery store where we saw several shoppers clad in slutty witch costumes, clearly on their way to a party. I stared after them longingly, wishing I was going to a party too. I haven’t been to a Halloween party in years. I haven’t worn a costume in years.  I don’t care if I have to sit alone in a cemetery, dressed as Raggedy Ann, I should be doing something tonight and aside from working, I’m just not.

Chooch better get A LOT of Reese’s Cups tonight. Mommy needs something to eat while drinking herself into a stupor.

Urgent. Will die without reading.

• 15:17 Oh thank fuck, I won the ebay auction for a Canadian-made gas mask. CLOSE ONE. #
• 20:10 Coming home to the Chiodos re-issue and a Lubitel temporarily made me hate life a little less. But tomorrow’s a new day!!! #
• 11:12 I want a nanny for xmas. Or my own apartment where I can live alone. I might even consider a jail cell. #
• 15:23 According to a one “Hammerin’ Hank,” I am a bitch of the highest order. And he disagrees with the title of my blog. #
• 21:39 twitpic.com/iozy – “Ma, I color’d yous a pitchur oh yes I did” #
• 21:47 twitpic.com/ip1b – “I sell this on Etsy now, mommy?” #
• 
  

  ---

• 15:10 Just the other day, I wrote in my diary how I couldn’t wait to drive to work in a snowstorm. My diary, the genie. #
• 19:12 Me: “I like creepy stuff.” My boss, double-fisting the sarcasm: “Orly? Because I couldn’t tell.” #
• 09:07 Sitting next to my son as he wails I HAVE THAT??? I HAVE THAT! HERE PLZ at every commercial on Nickelodeon is better than breakfast. #
• 09:11 YES CHOOCH you can have the Hannah Montana Stylin’ Head. I’ll even throw in a training bra, I’m so nice. #
• 11:28 Thank you, Jerry Maguire, for lassoing my child’s attention long enough for my stress level to drop a point. #
• 11:32 Thank you, Jerry Maguire, for teaching my son to chant I’M FUCKED. #

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Julio loves jelly. The only thing Julio loves more than jelly is his mother who died tragically three years ago in a circus train derailment. Luckily, Julio and his knapsack of Mason jars were on the scene. After several hours of working deftly with a melon baller, Julio went home with a sloshing arsenal filled with the salvaged fruits of his mother’s mutilated corpse.

Julio’s jelly was about to have a very delicious secret ingredient.

One morning last week, Julio had just finished adding a generous heap of apricots and sugar to a mixing bowl of pureed spleen. He was just slathering a greedy helping of the oozy jelly onto freshly sliced bread when he heard the sound of footsteps crunching along his walk. And then, an earnest rap at the door.

“Good morning, just us Witnesses passing by, thought you might like to chit chat with us about our Lord Jesus Christ,” said the elderly woman at the head of the religious trio. She donned varying shades of gray and soot, and her bony fingers clutched pamphlets depicting Jesus with wind-blown hair. Julio was glad it was not the crucified Jesus; those pictures always agitated his Stigmata.

Julio considered this invitation. He hadn’t had company in many months, not since the encyclopedia peddler asked to use the john. And Julio did so much like to share his jelly.

“You know,” Julio mused aloud, “that sounds like a mighty fine way to spend a Sunday morning. Say, would you like some jelly sandwiches?”

And that is how Julio found himself in his breakfast nook with three Church people, sharing sandwiches flavored with his mother’s sugared spleen.

————————————-

5.5″x5.5″ thick canvas.

Sally should not have been surprised when she was turned away at the door.

“But I was invited!” she insisted, coffee-stained invitation curved around the womb of her hands. She held it up to the man’s face, pulling it taut so he could see that her name, in adolescent lower-case, was penciled in at the top. Her name, it was there! Her name was right there next to the day-old coffee splash that looked like Hitler; right there, preceeding the typed words IS INVITED.

Laughter flitted from the bowels of the banquet hall. He flicked the invitation, knocking it loose from Sally’s grip and slamming the door in her snout. “No pigs invited!” she heard several revelers shout in unison, followed by more hideous laughter. “Pig’ll eat all the food!” The cruel heckling made the bile effervesce within Sally. For a brief moment, she could taste its sour flavor as it burned against her uvula. She swallowed it.

She tried to swallow the hideous laughter, too.

Fifty-three minutes later, Sally sat in her parked car at a truck stop just a few miles outside of town. She numbly nibbled on the sandwich that was handed to her through a window by an androgynous teen with a snarled upper lip, Sally’s own pout puckering involuntarily as her tongue moved over a spot of bread, moist from pickle sweat. Choking back a sloppy slurp of lemonade, Sally cried out bitterly, “I belong no where!” She groped in the darkness of her car, until her fingers eventually came up with a pen.

You might not know it yet but you will be sorry. Sorry for slamming doors in my face, for flushing my poems down the commode. You will be sorry for not letting me carole with you that one Christmas in 1987.

As a child, Sally was invited to parties only because her father was the principal; parents used her spot on birthday guest lists to keep their own slovenly spawn from flunking out of third grade. And Sally, so full of jubilance, would put on her best Laura Ashley, and she would step into her best Mary Janes, and she would wrap the present in the best foiled paper. And last, she would pull on her rubber pig mask.

In front of her father, all the kids would chant “Oh Sally’s here!

Oh, Sally, Sally, Sally!” But then the door would shut behind her and her father and his little green car would be a dot on the horizon.

You might not know it yet, but you will see that my headgear did not define me; that my stutter was not a reason to make me a cafeteria pariah. You might not know it yet, but my halitosis was bearable under the supervision of Altoids.

And then it was, “Oops, Sally, I didn’t mean to tear your dress” [as Mary Misslegap swiped at the silken floral with a boxcutter] and “Uh oh, Sally’s having her period!” [courtesy of Agatha Angelfuck pollacking her with Heinz] and “Sorry, Sally, there’s no cake left for you” [as Tommy Wettail smeared it on her face like paste, snapping her bra for the cherry on top]. And there would be that hideous laughter again. Sally would swallow that hideous laughter and go home.

You might not know it yet, but you will realize that I had things to say, ideas to share, if you could have only seen past my muffin top, past my cleft palate. You will realize that the brown stain on my white trousers in Spanish class senior year was mud, not shit from my own self.

And even after all of that, Sally was willing to give her old peers a second chance when the invitation arrived that day. YARDLY GREEN HIGH SCHOOL’S TENTH REUNION it said in an elegant script. Sally, who had too much hope for humanity, was anxious to show off her poker straight teeth and Kathy Lee knock-off. But Sally, whose better judgement raped her thoughts with reality, couldn’t help but falter in her step when she arrived at the hotel that night.

You might not know it yet, but I don’t care about your Better Homes and Garden wedding. And I don’t care your child was born with Downs Syndrome. And I don’t care about how you feel about me. Not anymore.

Sally should have known she was only invited as entertainment, one more lashing for the social reject. It was just like grade school, only now the cruelty was liquor-enhanced. Sally should have known there would be no punch-drinking and name tag-wearing for her that night. But now, parked next to a rocking eighteen-wheeler with frosted windows, Sally knew; and soon they would too.

You might not know it yet, but I am unable to swallow that hideous laughter.You might not know it yet, but I was really fucking good at Chemistry.

Sally had just added the final flourish to her signature when her pen bled its last drop of ink. Sally folded the coarse brown napkin she had been writing on and, peeled off the pig mask, and with a forceful stab to her carotid, she used the sanguine ink to scrawl ATTENTION: ALL OF MY WORST CRITICS on the top of the note.

And that is exactly what a mulletted trucker in a camo vest was reading, coagulated in blood and pickle juice from a half-eaten Hoagie Hocker sub, when the bomb went off at that hotel with the hideous laughter.

Urgent. Will die without reading.

• 17:07 My boss just noticed my Michael Myers ring, stepped back and said “girl, ur scaring me. Like, I’m afraid ur gonna chop me up or something.” #
• 17:18 Do not list new items on etsy & type descriptions w/ a toddler on your lap, lest u want ppl to think English is ur 2nd language. #
• 20:09 My co-worker suzette said I’m too sweet to be a whip-cracker and I said “yes ma’am u sure is right. I is an angel.” #
• 21:08 Henrys bitching bc our waitress is doting on me and ignoring him. “She probably thinks I’m a celebrity,” I said. “It happens.” #

• 13:45 Me, upon Henry’s arrival: “Chooch is in the land where assholes lie.” Henry: “Oh, in your room?” #
• 16:33 Just yesterday I was like “you know, I could go for a nice paper cut on the knuckle.” Today, God answered my prayer. Blessed be. #
• 18:11 It smells like a scene kid sleepover is a’brew!! #
• 19:59 Perhaps if my co-biller wasn’t on the phone so much, this wouldn’t be taking “so long.” #
• 12:33 Sometimes I feel that if not for Henry, I’d be comatose behind a dive bar w/ a needle sticking out of my arm, like, every Friday nite. #

• 13:00 me: “are all kids this whiney and insistent?” Henry: “Yes, and so are 29-year-olds who sit beside me.” #
• 16:11 Took Chooch to the Castle Blood no-scare walk thru where a 60+ vampire blatantly stared at my chest. Wanted: shower & antiseptic soap. #
• 17:01 Erin’s living hell defined: sitting next to HENRY at King’s with a fucking FOOTBALLl game blaring above my head. #
• 17:02 Chooch just called it “shitball”. Yes, son. That is correct. #
• 18:53 About to get massacred on the hill and no one else is here. #
• 19:15 This place is run by very scary people, including a shrill ticket lady named Vicky. #
• 20:29 Just witnessed a trucker saying goodbye to his woman and Henry mumbled “wish that was me” #
• 20:52 I feel like I survived a bus-tipping with the other six ppl who stood in line for an hour with us. #
• 20:54 Henry gave me a hairy eye-balling for my interpretative dancing to 3oh3. IT WAS HOTTTT tho. Dancey dancey whut. #

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My mom has always abhorred the idea of being immortalized in a photo. Most of the pictures I have of her from my childhood feature an arm splayed across her cheek, or her face obscured by her drape-like hair. But occasionally, a photo will surface of my mom actually smiling. Maybe the camera-holder caught her after she downed an extra glass of Sangria, who knows.

I could never understand my mom’s camera-shyness, because I always thought she was so pretty. Maybe if I looked even half as good as she did at my age, the act of having my photo taken wouldn’t give me indigestion and cold sweats. I hate having my picture taken so much, that I don’t even have the obligatory mother-holding-slimey-baby shot after I gave birth. If I ever get married, I suppose a stand-in will be in need.

P.S. That’s my step-dad with her. Back then, he wore shirts tighter than my mom’s and shorts shorter than Freddy Mercury’s, and also he was really into his Soloflex.

Every October, my Girl Scout Troop (we were the laziest troop ever and never really earned any badges. Though I did earn one for making up a pelvic-thrusting dance to NKOTB’s sensational holiday hit “Have a Funky, Funky Christmas”) would hit up a local farm, where we would be set loose to paw at the bountiful mounds of pumpkins and fight mercilessly with each other (young girls are so charmingly bellicose). And apparently, slap fruity bows atop our pates.

A few weeks ago, we took Chooch out to that same farm and the first thing we saw was a sea of cars shimmering in the fucking hot ass sun. (Seriously, it was nearly ninety that day which kind of confuses the brain to believe you’re setting out to pick seashells, not goddamn autumn farm-fruit. My feet were screaming, “WHY NO FLIP FLOPS??”)

Triple B has long sold out in the name of sweet, sweet commercialism, like so many other of our local farms. (One of which is owned by my relatives and I have boycotted it for the past eight or so years because fuck you, money-hunrgy hoes, for turning a place that owned such a quaint spot in my childhood memories into a mecca that would have Martha Stewart fingering herself through her fucking chinos upon arrival. Plus, they think their apple cider is God’s fucking jizz and it IS NOT ALL THAT.)

Bitterness aside, we paid the exorbitant fee for an all-access neon green wristband to hump our wrists and then wove our way through the overly-excited urban dwellers who ambled around like ricoceting pinballs, unable to comprehend the clear country air and the absence of the highway’s obnoxious heavy metal.

From the onset, my motto of the afternoon became, “Where are all the fucking pumpkins?” Sure, there was a very small clearing near the entrance of the rip-off carnival, where several stalls were semi-filled with Halloween’s official gourd. It was almost an afterthought, like the head farmer briefly stopped swimming in his money vault long enough to point to the sky and declare, “I reckon we oughtta have some pun’kins for the city folk to be buyin’ up. Mabel, go scatter some out thar’ next to the shanty filled with granny’s overpriced apple butter.” Honest to god, these pumpkins were frozen mid-lull, looking so pathetic and dejected that I was afraid to look too closely, for fear of projecting them with anthropomorphic sympathy and winding up with a cornucopia of adopted outcasts.

We skirted past the pumpkins and flashed our wristbands at some blase woman guarding the entrance to a fence, beyond which was a hill bustling with activity and screaming children.

Try to look past the frozen proof of Henry’s Neanderthalian gait, if you can, and marvel with me over the wasted earth that could have been better suited for pumpkin hills, which I would then climb like a giddy child, only to have that fun adventure end with anal violation via pumpkin stem. (A true account that happened to me when I was a youngun.) Instead, it appears the farm’s pumpkin crop went into the ingenius creation of corny diaramas. An acre’s worth.

I almost burst vessels trying to figure this one out. Then I was all, “Oh, it’s fucking Harry Potter” and moved on.

Tubes that pierce and plow through soil make me nervous so I let Henry havethe pleasure of accompanying Chooch down the Liberty Tubeslide. What if some asshole kid shat himself and smeared it all over on his trip down? YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT’S IN THERE. Better that Henry and Chooch find out for me.

I noticed that there was a continuous succession of wagons pulling along chattering loads of assholes. Of course, the hayride was NOT included in the price of admission.

I was tempted to shell out the extra cash just to see if the tractor was transporting them to some secret arsenal of pumpkins, glistening with the magic crack cocaine of Eden and ripe for picking. But then I was distracted by a penful of baby chicks.

“Would you like  to pet one?” a young farmhand asked Chooch. Chooch’s “It’s Animal Abuse Time!!” alarm sounded and he sweetly said, “K!” Immediately, his fist of torture tightened around the chick’s neck and we all screamed, “No, no, no!” in terrified unison. Then Henry and I laughed nervously and quickly dragged Chooch away.

Triple B turned an entire barn into a walk-through haunted house. While there were no live actors, the scenes they set up through-out were decent and effective, enhanced by sensor-triggered air jets and a creepy soundtrack. “They must have put so much money into this,” I said, using my best “I am capable of showing respect” tone. Suddenly, I wasn’t so bitter about paying so much to get in.

In the end, we left there with two cookies and a jar of mustard. The next day, we got our pumpkins from a small, roadside nursery which had a bigger selection and cheaper prices. So there, commercial farms of America.

Urgent. Will die without reading.

• 15:16 i made a new etsy shop just for my dumb peetchurs. A sign that i should reconsider college. tinyurl.com/6f4h6t #
• 17:51 If I was a dog, I’d be tenderly licking my balls right now. #
• 22:46 twitpic.com/hijk – Being overly dramatic about the cold weather. #
• 23:46 Henry has secret hooker case studies. #
• 23:57 Me: “where do u masturbate?” Henry: “in the front yard. STOP TWEETING ABOUT ME.” #
• 11:33 Today, chooch learned the detrimental consequences of ricochet. #
• 12:58 twitpic.com/hkzj – Watching Lost Boys sans vampires, aka License to Drive. #
• 16:48 Henry had scissors in his hands today and I honest to god flinched. Never start a fight w/ a man holding scissors, brainiac. #
• 17:15 I’m going to be in Buffalo in two weeks and I need to find some shit to desecrate. Or at least, a good vegetarian restaurant. #
• 00:22 tonite i managed to walk up my pitch-black driveway to the house w/o socializing w/ any roaming cracked-out “neighbors.” Henry was proud. #
• 00:27 when i reference hookers, i’m merely referring to myself. #

• 08:40 I really want the next High School Musical to be Trade School Opera. #
• 09:12 I wonder how difficult it would be to book Laurie Berkner for my funeral. #
• 10:15 I’m paralyzed by the blood of Christ. And all that cat urine I shot into my veins this morning. #
• 11:17 If I start now, I might be able to get Chooch to speak with a natural, yet subtle, Slovak accent. #
• 11:18 It’ll make my adoption via gypsy caravan story more believable. That and the tambourine I’ll glue to his hand. #

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One day last week, the day manager accosted me as I walked into work.

“Do you have artistic skills?” he asked earnestly, eyebrows cocked slightly in anticipation of the Right Answer.

I hesitated. I stuttered. I backed up a little into my work area. “I don’t know, sort of. It depends. Is my life on the line? Then I can draw a fine set of tits if pressed to. No really, I suck.”

“Great, here’s some Sharpies and poster board.” And that is how (more or less) I walked right into the great important task of birthing a Diversity Chart for the company.

I had briefly pissed around with it earlier in the week, but then my cat Marcy and her fat ass slept on it and maimed the poster board with irreversible crinkles and war wounds. Hoping that avoidance and a dark corner would remedy it, I stowed the sheets behind my dresser and forgot about it. Until 10pm Sunday night, a day before it was due. and Henry was chased out the door by a lashing tongue to procure fresh poster board. An hour later, five desecrated sheets of poster board were strewn carelessly onto the floor, mingling with clumps of my hair; and the feelings of Henry sobbed in the shower, post-rape. But there was one mighty fine diveristy-in-the-workplace project – in the stylings of Erin – to show for it.

When I took it to work on Monday, my manager was already gone for the day. But my boss, Dave, stopped me as I walked through dispatch, the poster banging off my knees like a sandwich board.

“What the fuck is that?” Dave asked, pulling up the poster to read it.

“It’s that thing Vince asked me to do,” I explained.

Dave laughed and rolled his eyes. “Vince is so gay. I can’t believe he got you to do this.”

“Oh, but how I love to make magic with Sharpies,” I mumbled, moving the poster into the office. The A/P lady and the other biller who was scheduled to work with me that night (my favorite one, Diane) gathered around to extoll the virtues of my grade school science fair knock off.

I stood there awkwardly, confused and slightly embarrassed. It was a sign. It said “Getting To Know You: Diversity Week 2008” along the top, with a list of employee names going down the left hand side, and a few personality-defining questions along the top under the title. It wasn’t some magnificant pie chart made of edible ink and sprinkled with crack cocaine. It was a poster. It was blue, black and green. It had lines. Oooh, the ingenuity of it all.

“This must have taken you HOURS!” Diane exclaimed.

“No, not really.” Please stop talking about it. You’re embarrassing yourself.

The sign stayed on my desk all night, therefore managing to stay out of any ensuing limelight. But before we left, I pleaded with Diane to fill out her answers. “I’ll be damned if I’m going to be the only dork on here.

” She laughed and filled out the answers to questions like “Favorite food,” “Favorite music” (you can imagine mine) and “Hobbies and Interests.” I played it sage and put writing, horror movies and going to concerts. I’ve only been there a month. They don’t need to know that I fill empty chunks of my life with stalking my neighbors and making serial killer Christmas cards. Please. I like this job. Keeping it would be great.

By yesterday, Vince had unveiled it to most of the employees. I noticed, as I walked through the breakroom at the start of my shift, that several other people had added their survey answers.

An hour later, I heard one man say to another, “Hey, I didn’t know you went to South Park High School!”, leading into a heartfelt bonding session of shared memories.

But then a few minutes late, I heard raucous laughter from the breakroom.

“You like JAZZ?” one of the drivers instigated.

“Who the fuck would put SUSHI as their favorite food? That’s disgusting,” a dock worker barked.

One of the dock workers came up to me when I was chilling in the dispatch room and yelled, very quizically, “What the fuck is an INDIE ROCK?

” while a driver (who also happened to see me at the flea market on Sunday, how fabulous) felt a bond with me because my favorite vacation spot is the same place he goes every summer. (I played it safe and put Wildwood NJ instead of Morocco because it’s too early for my co-workers to know that I’m a pretentious snob.)

But by the end of the night, as more drivers returned from their routes, my poor poster had become a breeding ground for judgemental finger-wagging and insincere answers. Someone put “San Francisco” as his favorite vacation spot and then paraded around saying, “You know why, DON’T YOU?” because for some lame reason, he tries to make the other drivers (firmly planted in their hetero heels) uncomfortable by pretending to be gay. Oh, how I missed working around truck drivers.

“This poster isn’t bringing any diversity into THIS workplace,” I laughed to Diane as I returned to my desk.

“Oh, I know! It’s just giving them new ways to make fun of each other.”

Dave said he was surprised that the first eight people actually filled it out appropriately. “Yeah,” I said, laughing. “I didn’t think Pauls’ favorite food was ‘geese’.”

“No, I think it really is,” he said, and we laughed. “That’s why I’m not filling it out. I just can’t take it seriously.”

And why my manager ever thought that a bunch of men in the transportation industry WOULD take it seriously is beyond me. But it sure is funny watching grown men wheedle away at each other’s dignity. Maybe next month, Vince can have them all write an essay about their feelings.

Urgent. Will die without reading.

• 13:58 I will never understand why some ppl bother to have cell phones when they NEVER answer them. #
• 13:58 Yes, I’m talking about YOU, you douche whistler. #
• 16:28 Visiting my g-ma at the nursing home. In the fish tank, there are 2 fish eating a dead fish. Morbidly awesome. #
• 16:46 Visiting grandma = incredibly awkward. If it wasn’t for Chooch, I don’t think she would have wanted me to come. #
• 00:27 I guess I’m just not living unless I’m tearing out hair in frustration. #

• 12:07 Chooch acts like he’s going to kiss me but really he just wants to use my cheek as a napkin. Fucking precious. And syrupy. #
• 12:45 Corporal Cusser just fed himself soap. #
• 17:04 One of the drivers said he saw me at the flea market. Fucking fabulous. Hopefully it was one of the 3963 times I was being a queerbo. #
• 20:52 I hope that lady isn’t going into the craft store. They close at NINE! She’s going to get reamed. #
• 21:13 twitpic.com/hcob – Henry is a professional gift wrapper. He can tie bows with his tongue. No, he really can’t. #
• 21:18 But he can curl ribbon with his weener. #

I think I finally have all the film processed and scanned now from last MAY (LAST MAY!!) when Blake and Sarah did that photoshoot with me. I hate that I get so gung-ho over projects and then laziness is so quick to take over. And of course, here I am already in the throes of another one: a legitimate photo essay of scene kids which I need to complete for my own personal fulfillment. Henry actually didn’t laugh when I explained the deets to him. It’s going to be a coffee table book. Just for my coffee table.

Anyhow, this is my favorite from the b&w roll.

Goldbricking Giraffe.

Blake should be digging ditches with the chain gang, but instead he’s goldbricking in the arms of a delightful floral chair. If the warden finds him, he won’t be digging a ditch so much as decomposing in one.

Urgent. Will die without reading.

• 16:44 I just sold my first photo! Now I will quit my job and travel the world in a beret. Literally, in a beret with a paddle. #
• 20:37 My boss discovered how easily scared I am. “Its fun all day” he said. #
• 10:46 Walked in on Chooch in his pooping corner and he yelled MOMMY GO! and then literally snarled, “Asshole.” #
• 14:13 Chooch wants to be David from Lost Boys. He already has natural fangs but finding a trench coat is futile. #
• 21:13 Today on my commute, I spied a man standing in front of a portajohn next to the baitshop, fiddling with his fly. It was hot. #
• 23:30 Blake and I attempted to sculpt henrys hair into a hott scene coif while he was engrossed in computer stuff. #
• 22:27 Tonite I learned that janna is not my bff, female chainsaw wielders are the meanest, & using a fake name doesn’t fly in haunted houses. #
• 11:19 I should have emancipated myself when I had the chance. #
• 11:30 I think some guy just pointed a bazooka at me. #
• 11:55 Chooch found the Hotwheels motherlode at the flea market. #
• 12:10 One of these days I’ll remember to bring enuf $ to the flea market to get me a sword. #

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All was calm Friday night, exactly how Henry likes it, until Blake arrived and suddenly Henry had two ornery kids in his presence. We decided to give Henry a scene makeover while he was busily working at the computer on something gay.

He was partially aware of what was happening, but too concerned with Photoshop to do anything more than limply swat at us.

Unfortunately, this was the best we could do because Henry’s locks are degenerate.

Possibly, we could have whipped up a real follicular wonderwall of asymmetric proportions had we had the foresight to add scissors to our hairspray-brush powerhouse, but I think that adventure might have ended with some broken wrists.

Urgent. Will die without reading.

• 13:57 Picking pumpkins is perplexing. #
• 14:43 Chooch woke up in the middle of the nite, pointing at the attic door & saying SCARY SCARY! I KNEW there was something sinister up there. #
• 16:06 I’m always scared when the first thing my boss says to me is “hi do u have artistic abilities?” #
• 16:24 Its like ppl look at me and declare: Now THAT girl likes poster board. Give her some Sharpies! #
• 17:29 The Republicans at work are talking about how they survived 8 yrs of Clinton. LOLSIES. #
• 21:38 I’m learning how to do things without Henry’s aid. Such as boxing my leftovers without dumping it all in my lap. Its a long road. # 
  

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• 11:28 @buenomexicana I’m pretty sure that was in a poem I wrote in 7th grade. #
• 21:47 Pubic plantation. #
• 01:53 I’m glad customers are so thoughtful to leave the bass bumping in their idling cars as they go into my neighbor’s house to buy drugs. #

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• 11:24 Today I will walk around making melodious fellatio sound effects #
• 13:48 Breaking News: Marriage Fails Madonna. Dow what? War huh? Election who? #
• 01:13 shouldn’t be writing things at 1am when i’m giddy and sleep-deprived. should be prank calling ppl instead. #
• 01:17 is vic there? #

Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter Now you can rest easy, knowing my inner most thoughts and movements.

My brother Corey was home from college over the weekend and we had hi-falutin’ plans to get crunk, slap some bare asses, prance under a shower of Benjamins. In other words, we had tentative plans to go to a haunted house.

I met him at our mom’s house Sunday night, and he informed me that his friend Dave was on his way. In waiting, we stood in the doorway of the garage while my mom blabbered on about BlogTV, MySpace, tarot card readings and her spiritual advisors. “They want to have tea parties!” she giggled, joy-riding on the crazy train like she so often does. And then, “Oh, my favorite knife!” as she plucked a paring knife from the garage wall. True story. (Listen, I grew up in this house so a random wall-wedged knife isn’t too shocking.)

Ignoring her attention-deficient outburst, Corey chose that moment to tell me that he wasn’t driving. This did not make me a happy muffin. I whined things like, I have a car seat in there!, and But I always have to drive!, and But I’m really fucking drunk from huffing formaldehyde! Corey shrugged and stood his ground.

Dave arrived and Corey began walking over to my car. “I was serious about the car seat, dude. I don’t know how to take it out,” I called after him. (This is not a lie. I fail at motherhood.) Corey, remaining undeterred, jutted his lower lip and made his eyes have the pleading look of an orphan begging for more crust. So I batted at the damn car seat two or four times, and Corey and Dave both made feeble attempts, but even Henry blathering instructions via speaker phone proved to be about as helpful as a retard reciting the Kama Sutra in Swahili to a eunuch. Meanwhile, my mom just stood around and laughed, hiccuping on her psychosis.

“Dave, it’s not so bad, right? You can sit next to it, right?” The car seat is smack dab in the middle of the backseat, so no matter which side you sit on, you’re getting a hard plastic hug to your ribs. Dave was all, “Whatever, it’s ok. Let’s just go.”

So then we picked up their friend K.C., who sweetly lied and said she was so cozy back there, like it was an arm rest made from cotton candy and clouds. Dave chimed in that he had even forgotten it was there. I have sat back there before. Granted, it’s much worse and way more painful when the seat’s keeper is strapped in, but even when Chooch is being docile (yeah, that’s never), it is not a comfortable traveling condition.

Anyway, I tried to let it go and have a good time when we arrived at Demon House. Since it was a Sunday, there was hardly any wait at all and we ended up being the last group to go through. There were some legitimate scares, K.C. accidentally smacked my boob and then talked about it for a full five minutes, and I coveted all the Satanic art work. Some dude with a hooded face kept droning, “Igor wants your soulllll!” all up in my thang but I just laughed and said, “Yeah good one. The devil already has my soul.” Stupid ass.

But still, I feel like I would have had more fun if Corey had driven!

Of course I refused to let it go. I was intoxicated off annoyance. I’m Erin Appledale (Corey ridiculed my name choice, by the way, during the drive to Demon House. The drive in which he did not drive, but rode comfortably in the passenger seat. It reminded me of another bonus of the name change: lengthening the distance from my family.) and everyone knows that Appledales like to drunk rollerskate, fellate exotic things, and dwell on every small bump in the road. Sometimes we go hog wild and drunk rollerskate over those bumps while doing the fellating.

After I came home that night, I was recounting the horror of the car seat to Henry. “I can’t believe he made them ride like that, he’s so mean to his friends,” I scoffed.

Henry laughed. I mean he LAUGHED, and then said, “Wow, sounds like someone else I know.”