Underpants On The Outside

I have to admit that I’m not a huge fan of Halloween. When I was a kid it was all about the pursuit of candy and not getting beaten up, which I was really good at. I was adorable and small, which provided me with above average candy yields as well as a high power-to-weight ratio for increased acceleration (away from attackers). But at some point Halloween became focused on the pursuit of sex, right around the time when I became significantly less adorable while remaining just as small – not an advantageous combination when one is Trick or Treating for loin candy.

Now I’m not such a fan of Halloween. Don’t get me wrong; any time a vast number of women want to dress up as a Sexy Fill-in-the-Blank, I’m all for it. But the expectations are just too high. Costumes have to be clever and artistic, but I am clever or artistic too infrequently to ever be both at the same time. And if you go by the liquor ads, the only good Halloween party is one where swimsuit models dressed as nurses and kittens throw you (and your Bacardi Silver) into a pool.* Anything less and you might as well have stayed home, loser.

That being said… Halloween 2007 is going to be a good one. That’s because today I’ve been published on McSweeney’s. (You can find the article here.) I’ve already mentioned in this space how much I enjoy and respect McSweeney’s, and even though they’ve been rejecting my submissions for about two years now, my respect wasn’t in a Groucho Marx / “I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member” sort of way. No, McSweeney’s is awesome because they’re, like, all literary ‘n’ stuff.

What that means is that by being published there I am hereby officially “smart.” RECOGNIZE MY BRAIN SKILLS, BITCHES!***

*Later to have sex with you.**

**and your Bacardi Silver

***Sorry for using the b-word, Mom.

For the past nine or ten years, I’ve had a bad run of Halloween costumes, so this year I wanted to be something safe; something universally likeable.  I thought it would be cool to go as Kermit the Frog.  Naturally this led to several people asking me: doesn’t that make Wonder Woman Ms. Piggy? 

Answer: What???  No!  I only asked her if she wants to go the gym because we’re wasting our money on membership fees if we don’t use them!   Ah, fuck.

Actually, (FALSE) implications of huskiness aside, Wonder Woman wouldn’t want to be Ms. Piggy even if she was Ms…um…thin animal.*  Apparently, WW’s favorite Muppet is Janice. 

Who???  First of all, kudos to WW for what could be the most obscure pop culture reference I’ve ever heard.  I spent fifteen minutes trying to confirm that there actually WAS a Muppet named Janice.  (My search ended here: http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~csilvers/muppet-characters.html#muppshow.  Note the domain… Stanford, everyone!  A tree for a mascot and fifty grand per year for classes on Muppets.**)

Now I find myself at a turning point: I’m thinking about proposing to Wonder Woman soon, but first I want to make sure that we really are right for each other.  My method for that is to freak out at everything.  Observe as my stages of anxiety advance, quickly making a mountain out of a fuzzy-puppet-mole hill.

Stage 1: Practical.  Janice is, at best, a bit player.  Doesn’t WW’s affinity for her therefore imply an overall lack of ambition?  It’s like hearing someone say that their dream job is to be an astronaut’s dry cleaner. 

Stage 2: Long-term.  The compatibility issues are obvious.  If I had to classify my friends as Muppets, trends would suggest I prefer the company of Gonzos, Animals, Rolphs, Kermits, and Fozzies.  Not only is WW a Janice by choice, but her favorite Huxtable is Sondra, and she dislikes Bill Murray movies with a particular hatred for Groundhog Day.  If it were anyone else, I would suggest that people like her shouldn’t be protected by the First Amendment.  I don’t ever want to have to tell my kids that there mother is a godless communist, but it would be irresponsible of me as a parent if I allowed her to promote her twisted value system.

Stage 3: Full-fledged paranoia.  What if she’s an alien?  Or a robot, designed to replace her while the real Wonder Woman uses her video game prowess to combat an alien threat in a distant galaxy?  (How’s THAT for an obscure reference!***) While she slept last night, I searched areas around her central nervous system for signs of some sort of alien or high-tech mind control device.  No dice.  But she might have some bug in her stomach, Matrix-style.  More info to come.

Of course, when I ran this past Roscoe P. Coltrane and his wife, he immediately replied, “Janice?  The blond muppet with the long hair?  That’d be pretty cool!”  Once again I find myself screaming in alarm at the freakish creature in front of me, and then someone informs me that it’s a mirror. 

Now I find myself in a state of acceptance, and I realize that in my zeal to crush all opinions other than my own, I’ve overlooked some things.  After all, uncovering all of Wonder Woman’s quirks will take a lifetime, if I’m lucky, because it’s those differences that give us stuff to talk about, argue over and laugh at. 

I also see how foolish it was for me to overlook the possibility that my girlfriend is actually a foreigner, hiding her background for immigration purposes.   Her misplaced attachments probably come from her initial difficulty with the English language.  (This could also be why she doesn’t laugh at many of my jokes, which are HILARIOUS.)  I wonder what sort of customs they have in her home country, and I hope it’s one of those European regions where women are always making out with each other.  France, I think.  In any case, I can probably get a bunch of backrubs if I threaten to have her deported.

*What the hell thin animals are there?  I keep thinking of different birds, but I don’t want it to seem like I promote bulimia, even if it is for altruistic, child-rearing purposes.

**Note that there are only five Muppets with “normal” names, and all of them are women.  Does this reveal misogynistic undertones in what was thought to be innocent children’s entertainment?  I don’t know, but I DO know that that’s the kind of paper that could get a guy magna cum laude at Stanford.

***The correct answer is The Last Starfighter, which is also the reason I think of my flatulence as “Death Blossoms”. 

(Here is the Muppet of Interest)

Just by living there, Los Angelenos have implicitly agreed to accept earthquakes and fires in exchange for disproportional amounts of beautiful women and never needing snow tires.   As such, growing up there gives one a fairly high acceptance for acts of God.   When you wake up and the ground is shaking like the Earth suffers from some galactic epilepsy, it can be a bit disorienting, but you need to keep your wits about you if you’re going to find a way out of that waterbed.

Apparently Los Angeles went to sleep with a lit cigarette again – half the state is on fire. My sympathies and best wishes go out to anyone affected by this*, though personally I’m not too nervous about my own family and friends.  I probably should be: after all, I have a friend, a grandmother, an uncle and my father who all live close to at least one of the fires.  Worse, my dad lives in a trailer, which don’t have the best success record against mother nature; their reactivity to fire and wind leads me to believe that they’re made of two parts tumbleweed and one part propane. 

But like I said, these fires happen, so I’m not getting upset until I hear something.  Plus, I’m confident everyone’s okay at the moment; if you look at the Google Map below, you can see that there’s no way my that fire’s getting to my dad’s place.

I mean, do you know how bad traffic’s gotta be on PCH right now?  That fire’s looking at a three, four hour drive.  At least.  It’ll take twenty minutes just to make the left onto Temescal Canyon Rd.  And if that fire thinks it’s faster to take Sunset…well, we’ve all made that mistake once.

There’s even a Google map tracing all of the fires. 

I know there are legitimate uses for this, but I can’t help but wonder: do you think that the inventor of the modem ever imagined that we’d one day be able to (or want to, for that matter) look up driving directions to a fire?  Or nearby places to eat (e.g., “pizza”)?  Hell, I can look up some local movie times if I feel like making a day of it.   It’s like if the inventor of sliced bread were to find out that it’s good for both sandwiches and roofing insulation.

*For serious.  Particularly firefighters.  They’re fuckin’ rad.

Two weeks ago, friend and Underpants commenter Roscoe P. Coltrane found out that his wife is pregnant with a son.  I’m sure he would have been thrilled to find out he’s having a daughter, but you can tell he was rooting for a boy – he’s still walking around with this smug smile like he’s hiring his dick out for Bar Mitzvahs and weddings.   

I want to be happy for him; I really do.  And I know it says a lot about me (nothing good), but I can’t shake the fear that my first child is going to be a girl and his son is going to have sex with her.  See, we like to kid each other, and of all the things you can’t REALLY get mad about, that might be the worst.  What possible comeback is there?

“Hey, your mom’s so fat, that-”

“My son fucked your daughter.”

“…Dang.”

Unless I was somehow able to have sex with his mom, in his car, while lying on his television, I think I’d have to move.

Yes.  These are the things I think about.

Not that you’re watching it, but one of the actresses on “Journeyman” is named Moon Bloodgood, and I’m fascinated by her.  First of all, she’s hot – I recommend looking her up, but budget some time for it.   But as hot as she is (very), that’s not why I feel compelled to write about her.  Also, my Spidey-Sense tells me it wouldn’t be so smart to write about random hot women while I’m sleeping with my landlord. 

There’s something incredible about that name.  It’s a turbo boost of sexy appealing to the dorky side of me.  It takes an already hot woman and makes her sound like some kind of sex-Jedi.  To my inner nerd, she’s like an action figure…with a vagina.

At the same time, I imagine a teenage girl somewhere with pasty skin and Magic Marker pentagrams in her notebooks.  She too is known as MoonBloodGood (on AOL Instant Messenger).  She thought she was being so original; so unique, but soon people will think she’s a poser.  Now she’s gotta find a new Wicca name, just when she’d finally convinced her parents to stop calling her Katherine.  Poor, poor Kath- um, Moon.

Yes, it’s time once again for another demonstration of how I am the bestest boyfriend ever*.

Oh, also, if you’re Wonder Woman’s parents, please stop reading right now. Your daughter is a woman of boundless virtue. I swear. She never lets me do any of the things that I want to do to her.

On a typical Saturday morning, I wake up before Wonder Woman. I look to my left, see her there, stretched languorously on our bed, her head turned away so that I’m staring at the perfect curve of her neck. I lean over, and kiss her once just above the shoulder; delicately. Then, with the romance taken care of, I see if she wants to hump by poking her with my finger and/or erection and whispering, “Baby? …You up?…Baby? …Wanna hump?” Then one thing leads to another. (By “one thing”, I mean being told to go away, and by “another”, I mean, I get up and have a bowl of cereal.)

But apparently I didn’t check my calendar last Saturday, because it was “Role Reversal Day.” I woke up to find myself being taken advantage of; I felt cheap and dirty. Okay, that’s not true, but I DID feel really confused. My mind isn’t as quick on the uptake as it used to be, and it can take me a while to get my bearings in the morning. I can only imagine what it was like for my penis, who has essentially spent the last fifteen years in hard labor. That’s why I don’t blame it for what happened. Now, I don’t mean to say that NOTHING happened – you better believe SOMETHING happened. But “something” is about the best that I can describe it. She might as well have woken me up and challenged me to a game of mah-jong.

Later, we were sitting around and she asked me if anything had been wrong. I tried to tell her that everything was fine, I just hadn’t been able to get all the way up to speed. She was confused. After all, I had been…at this point she made sort of a shrugging gesture, which I took to mean that I had been majestically erect; as irresistible as a Thanksgiving Turkey (and just about as large), and as visually stunning as Fantasia. (I’m lucky that we have such a close connection where such things don’t even need to be said.) So I looked her in the eye, and said,

“Christ, it happens all the time. Don’t take it so personally.”

Let’s see you beat that, Hallmark.

*For the complete list of reasons, please see any of the lengthy letters I wrote to all those girls in high school. And for the record, I realize that this more demonstrates how Wonder Woman is the bestest girlfriend ever. But, y’know…whatever.