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)

If you’ve been wondering where the Underpants have been all this time, they’ve been on fire.  I went to Burning Man last week, along with Big Brother, OG and Mo (AKA, the Witty Comment All-Stars, minus starting point guard Wonder Woman, who has a thing against a week without showering.)  For those of you who don’t know what Burning Man is, let me try and describe it:

Imagine a small city, 40,000 people large, in the middle of a desert.  Perhaps they’re nomads, judging from the tents, RV’s, and portable domes made from pipes.  They are peaceful and cooperative despite the harsh environment: in-between the 100-degree heat and zero-visibility dust storms, they share their resources and walk around naked, dirty, and unashamed.  (Although they seem to recognize the importance of defending themselves, because in the horizon is what looks like a tremendously large trebuchet constructed out of industrial steel.)

Then the sun goes down, and a whole new crowd comes out.  The guys wear outlandish costumes, and the women have somehow become exponentially sexier by putting ON clothes.  (Tight, shiny articles of clothing that were apparently made during war-time fabric shortages.)

If the daytime atmosphere is peace, generosity, community and environmentalism, at night that sentiment becomes “Fuck that; let’s light shit on fire.”   Anything that can be accessorized by flame is done so.  I saw people with fuel tanks in backpacks and open flame six inches over their heads…bike riding.  I saw a chick with a flame thrower…on stilts.  Dance parties rage all night long as computer-controlled flames blast in intricately timed patterns.  Buses roam the playa; most are randomly armored and feature large propane jets wherever they could be strapped on, but some are more artistic, retrofitted to look like giant animals (with jet-based self-defense mechanisms), or the inside of a boudoir, albeit one that’s very well-lit and would never pass safety inspections.

Oh yeah, and that trebuchet?  It’s throwing cars a couple hundred feet, for the same reason a dog licks its balls.  Because it motherfucking CAN.

It might sound a bit like Mad Max, and it ought to; there’s actually a camp that builds a Thunderdome every year, where people dangle precariously to watch two people in bungee harnesses fight with clubs.  If you’ve ever wanted to see your office’s IT guy get kicked in the face by a chick in a tutu and combat boots, Burning Man is your best opportunity.

For a whole week, you spend each night dancing, you barely eat, and you sleep two or three hours a night because that’s how much time you have between sunrise and the point where it gets so hot that your teeth are sweating.   Yet you keep going, drawing energy from the people around you, the frenetic beat of music, the surreal environment, and the shitload of energy drinks you consume every evening*.   By the end of the week your body, mind and soul are spent, and you’ve probably lost five pounds.  In other words, it’s like a marathon without all the tedious jogging.

All in all, it’s not quite my mom’s worst nightmare, but the only thing that’s missing is a camp where I could run the 200m hurdles with a pair of scissors in each hand.

There are pictures to come and many awesome things to describe.  Perhaps I’ll intersperse upcoming posts with them, but in the meantime, I’ve got some serious business to discuss, and at this point my Burning Man intro is so long I’ll have to put it in a different post entirely.  Expect another post to come post haste.

The Underpants are back, baby!  (and significantly dirtier than when we left)

*It’s possible that just people in relationships need the caffeine - single people could be fueled by the hope of oral sex.  It certainly helps me get through the work day…

When I was a kid, one of my favorite books was Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. For those of you who haven’t read it, don’t be put off by the abstract title; see, it’s about a kid named Alexander who has a really shitty day (you can read the full text of it here.)

As I looked it up for this post, I was surprised because I never before realized how much of his bad day is his own fault. For instance, he wakes up with gum in his hair, but that’s the reason you don’t go to sleep chewing gum. Of all the consequences of going to sleep with gum in your mouth, it’s actually one of the more benign, unlike, say, choking to death. Later he’s upset because his mom didn’t put a dessert in his lunch. Then he’s pissy because he goes to the dentist and they find a cavity, which is pretty understandable given the kid sleeps with gum in his mouth and pouts whenever he doesn’t get his noontime cupcake. It also suggests his mom didn’t “forget” to pack him a dessert, but instead was looking out for his oral hygiene.

Since it’s a kid’s book, you might assume that at the last minute, something really good happens to Alexander, serving as a reminder that everything works out in the end. NOPE. He has a crummy morning, a rotten afternoon, and a shitty night, and before he goes to bed, his mom tells him (and similarly the reader) “That shit HAPPENS. Deal with it, you fucking baby, and be glad you’re not an orphan starving in Ethiopia.” (I’m paraphrasing.)

I was reminded of the book in particular Monday.

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Hey there, long time no see!  It’s been a while since I posted.  Me and Wonder Woman just went on a trip to Miami, where I didn’t have easy access to a computer or my bitter sarcasm.

We went to South Beach.  If you haven’t been and you’re single, you should go.  Actually, let me amend that.  You should go, as long as you’re really really attractive.  I definitely got the sense that the Miami Board of Tourism has not done a good job of making that clear, seeing as how they let me in.

That’s not to say you can’t go to South Beach if you’re in a relationship.  I just wouldn’t advise it.  At least, not to celebrate your anniversary, honeymoon, your girlfriend/wife’s birthday, or anything that involves honoring her or your relationship.  Because if it’s true what they say and it’s the thought that counts, then I cheated on Wonder Woman.  A lot.

I grew up in Los Angeles, I live in New York, and I watch a lot of TV.  I am highly experienced in the field of looking at hot, unobtainable ass from afar.    So I believe I am qualified to say that South Beach has the most incredible collection of the human aesthetic that I have ever HOLY FUCK DID YOU SEE THE TITS ON THAT ONE????

Actually, I would need eight or nine more puberties to handle another trip to South Beach with composure or dignity.  Even the mannequins there have breasts the size of hoagies.  I telepathically dry-humped eighteen women on our ride from the airport.   They were so hot I couldn’t even imagine having actual sex with them; anything beyond a drunken handjob because they owed me money was too far outside of plausibility.  I had to punch myself in the nads just so I could think clearly enough to decide where to eat.  It got so bad I’d be halfway through psychically plowing one lady when some new chick would show up.  (Luckily South Beach women tend to be very open-minded about that sort of thing, and are always game for some old fashioned multiple-partner intercourse.  At least, that’s how they are in my head.)

Even the guys were insanely good-looking.  I can admit that from an intellectual, I-sure-don’t-look-like-that standpoint.  Going to South Beach is like going to the gym on Olympus: if you’re not Hercules, you’re probably supposed to be picking up towels.

I don’t even have a point to any of this (other than that I probably owe Wonder Woman an apology or two.  Or eighty.)  I just feel the need to say something.

Oh yeah; I also saw a nurse shark.  I can only assume that it was incredibly hot (as nurse sharks go), with very big versions of whatever body parts nurse sharks find attractive.

I like to change my look up every few months (yes, I’ll have that turd gift-wrapped, please). My behavior suggests that I think I’m only an outfit and a haircut away from looking like Johnny Depp, even though I’m limited in what I can actually improve - I have no sense of fashion, no desire to buy new clothes, and my hair is falling out. Changing my look mostly consists of me growing a beard.

Currently I’m going with ol’ reliable: the goatee. I think it adds an element of badassery that I otherwise lack; Wonder Woman thinks that it looks “stupid” and “ugly” and makes my nose “look like a clitoris.” (That last one might not have been her exact wording.)

I counter that I’ve worn my goatee for most of my adult life, and that every time I’ve slept with someone new the goatee was riding upper-lip shotgun*. Then I remember how rare of an occurrence it was for me to sleep with new people; Wonder Woman still doesn’t know why every discussion of my facial hair ends with me crying.

Well, it’s time I settled this once and for all, so like I do with any serious relationship problem, I’m turning to the Internet for solutions. I want you, the reader, to be involved in my Underpants.

The following are photos of my three standard facial hair styles, along with pros and cons of each. Despite the fact that this is one of the most inane polls of all time, please read and vote in the comments section. Female voters may vote on a scale from one to ten, indicating how many times you’d like to do it with me**. Recent appearances in a Victoria’s Secret catalog and/or a ginormous rack will also be taken into consideration, so please make sure to mention either of those.

#1: The Goatee, aka “The Ring of Desire” or “The One Ring to rule them all and in the darkness- ah fuck, I’m a nerd.”

Pros:

• Clearly, I’m popular.
• Bad-assishness – I have never been mugged while wearing a goatee. Then again, that could be related to my tiger repellant, which seems to be working like a charm.
• Razor Burn: minimal
• Previous Vaginas (actualized; see above…I mean what I wrote, not the Asian girl. She had better things to do.)
• Saves Flavors: Tomato-based sauces, cheese-based sauces, soups, vagina (see above. No, still not the Asian girl.)
• No longer need alarm clock; can wake up to girlfriend telling me I look awful.

Cons:

• Girlfriend’s Sexual Desire: minimal
• Unrealized Vaginas: Theoretical, though I’m starting to suspect it’s a significant figure. Like…two…maybe even THREE!
• Insufficient refrigeration for the proper storage of perishable foodstuffs, particularly dairy products.
• Girlfriend does not have snooze button; does not appreciate being poked in the face while I confirm lack of snooze button.

#2: The Mountain Man

Pros:

• Still, obviously, popular.
• People seem to think I know how to fix cars.
• Razor Burn: none
• Girlfriend’s Sexual Desire: moderate; clouds in the afternoon, slight chance of humping.
• Scratching it makes me appear contemplative, therefore smart.

Cons:

• A contemplative appearance is remarkably similar to that of having several contagious rashes.
• I don’t know how to fix cars. When I think about the problem I scratch my beard, then people think I have eczema.

#3: The Baby’s Bottom

Pros:

• If only posing with your arm around someone were equivalent to sex. I’d be a porn star.
• Girlfriend’s Sexual Desire: Wink Wink, Nudge Nudge.
• Allow me to reiterate: we hump like dragons.

Cons:

• I’m not a machine, woman!
• Razor Burn: constant

Let the voting BEGIN!

*There’s been one exception, who likes to remind me of that whenever she’s telling me to shave.

**Note: “I’m tired,” “I don’t want to ruin our friendship,” and “Oh, dear God, NO!” are no longer acceptable answers.

I’ve done my share of illegal narcotics (Mom, you should probably just skip this one). I’ve spent a night in absolute terror because mushrooms made me think my best friend was the devil, based on the fact that his teeth are jacked up and every time he smiled he looked positively terrifying. (Of course, he thought it was funny that I was pointing at him and calling him the devil, so the problem perpetuated itself a bit.) I’ve spent hours watching lint under a couch, then gone off to write the greatest poem mankind has ever produced, though the next morning there was only one semi-legible word and I’m pretty sure it was ‘cat’.

I don’t say that to brag or anything; I just want to establish that I am familiar with the sense of exhaustion that comes from a night or four of being propped up by exotic chemicals while you fail to find the words to describe the boundless love you have for your friends, loved ones, and gummi worms. I just never expected to wake up with that empty paper bag feeling after a weekend of Magic: The Gathering.

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Do you know what Saturday is?  That’s right, hermanos, it’s Cinco De Mayo, which I think is how you say “The Fourth of July” in Spanish.  I’m a big fan of Cinco de Mayo, and not just because of the ceremonial four cups of tequila*.  Mostly I enjoy foods that have been set on fire stacked on top of foods that taste like fire and then wrapped in a tortilla.  

If I was back in L.A. I would spend the day at Big Brother’s in-laws, and I’m pretty sad to miss it.   Those of you who know his in-laws know how awesome they are, and those of you who don’t, well, if you ever meet them your lives will be better for it.  As an added bonus, they’re actually Mexican, so their party has more gravitas than down at Muldoon’s, where Cinco de Mayo consists of 2-for-1 Coronas and corned beef with salsa.

Even my Brooklyn friends are getting into the swing of things and planning a party.  Unfortunately, I’m going to have to miss that too, because months ago I apparently agreed to accompany Wonder Woman to St. Louis, where a friend of hers is getting married.  In case you’re wondering, in 2005, St. Louis’s population was 1.8% Hispanic.  (Read: hard to find a good tamale)

Any other day, I’d be 100% fine with going, but I’m disappointed to miss Cinco de Mayo. And while I’m trying my damnedest to blame WW, this one really is my fault.  I’m willing to bet the conversation went like this:

WW:  Z, would you come to St. Lou-
Z: Enough with all the yak-yak, woman!  This X-box isn’t gonna play itself, you know!
WW:  Wanna go to a wedding?
Z:  Is it ours?
WW:  ….No.
Z:  Sure, I’ll go.

Then she probably said some other stuff.  This is our routine, and it works well except for occasional collisions like this.  What kills me about this weekend is that since I forgot this wedding was coming up, I had already started planning our Brooklyn party, and it was going to be amazing.  We’d already agreed to a Carne Asada competition, and I would make many batches of my delicious Rainbow Sherbet Margueritas (patent pending); all that was left was for me to figure out some way to get a piñata in there.  

An aside: piñatas are the coolest thing ever** – violence followed by sudden candy.   I like them so much I even dressed up as one for Halloween a couple years ago.

This picture was taken right before Big Brother hit me with a stick.  Very, very hard.  Then his wife hit me with the stick, even harder.

Then I came up with what was quite possibly my best idea ever: a piñata joust.  I didn’t have all the details worked out, but it involved grocery carts, trash can lids, broomsticks and plenty of mouth guards.  I imagined all of Brooklyn coming to witness the spectacle and to gather the candy spilled into the streets like so much blood.  There would probably be a good deal of actual blood as well, but certain bodily harm aside, I was bouncing in my seat with anticipation.  An hour later, Wonder Woman reminded me that my presence was required elsewhere, and now I’m bummed because as I imagined it, a pinata joust would just about have been the pinnacle of rad.

For the record, I am happy for her.  She gets to go back home and see her friends, which is important.  I’m also sure we will have a great night, and eat very well (for gringo food).  These are the things you do for someone you love - it’s worth it.  It’s just…well…I can’t help but notice that for all of its strong points, no matter how many times you hit love with a stick, candy is never gonna fall out. 

*It’s possible that I have some of my dates/cultures wrong
**Except for a blow job/grilled cheese sandwich combo platter, of course

When you live with someone, particularly with someone you love, you really get to know them.  It doesn’t work the same way for everyone, but maybe you get a sense of what they’re going to do even before they do it – between his wife and me, Big Brother hasn’t won a game of Rock-Paper-Scissors since ’98.  Or maybe you know what they mean, regardless of how they say it. 

The other day, Wonder Woman asked me if I wanted to have a date night.  It sounds romantic, sure, but by now I know that she really just wanted sushi from the place down the street, and the only way she could convince me to drop forty dollars on a Wednesday night dinner is if something special was going on.  Meanwhile, I know that after date night I can pull out the sex menu and order one of the Market Price items, so I was fine with the arrangement.  I love me some Sex Lobster.

But for some reason I decided to inform Wonder Woman that while dinner sounded good, I saw right through her flimsy “date” scheme, and I already knew exactly where she wanted to go, what she’d want to eat, and what she’d tell me to order so that she could have all the stuff she wanted.

Meanwhile, Wonder Woman perceives herself as a highly evolved mammal whose complex thought processes lie beyond the ability of man to predict.  (Then again, so does Big Brother, AKA, “Scissors, Scissors, Rock”.)  There’s no way I could have known all that about the sushi unless I was some kind of mind-reading superhuman.  She asked me how – HOW - I could possibly know that. 

My reply:  “C’mon.  It’s like predicting the behavior of a toaster.”

Now, I’ll concede that it probably wasn’t a good idea to imply that my girlfriend is simple.  Funny, maybe, but not a good idea.  Before I opened my mouth, she was a little in awe of me – I could have convinced her that our love had given me some sort of sixth sense of her, an empathic bond that I feel even when we are miles apart.   It’s corny, but she would have swooned, and as everyone knows, swooning women become a lot less particular about which of their orifices you can put your penis in.  At the very least I could have told her I was a Jedi; how many times does THAT opportunity come along?  Instead, I pull back the curtain on my own magic trick.  Not very smart at all.

But to choose a kitchen appliance as an illustration… now that was phenomenally dumb.  That took the stupid I already had and simmered it down to moron gravy.  Now I want to say that to her credit, WW didn’t even get mad; we’ve been around this block enough times that we should see if any of the houses are for sale.  But that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t make it up to her.  What about a poem? Here’s what I have so far: “I must come clean; no need to inquire / I love you; you’re my free-standing washer-dryer.”

Word.

The other night, Wonder Woman and I were sitting around in the apartment we now share (we’re smiling, we’re smiling, let’s see those teeth…big smiles…) watching the late-night Cosby Show reruns on TV Land.  Now, I love the Cosby Show, and if you’re the type of person who enjoys this blog then you probably love it too.  I’ve never met a single person who doesn’t get happy when there’s a Cosby Show episode on.  Normally, I’d make some sweeping generalization that everyone loves the Cosby Show, but I’m learning not to do that.  After all, up until the other night, I would have also assumed that no one would say the words Wonder Woman did:

“When I was a kid, I always identified so well with Sondra.”

Sondra.  Buzzkill Huxtable.  The one who never tried to crack a joke, unless those lectures she always used to give on 17th century philosophy were meant to be funny.  (Maybe I just didn’t get them because unlike Sondra, I didn’t go to Princeton, as she reminded everyone constantly.)  It would have been less abhorrent if Wonder Woman had started sprouting mushrooms out of her face.

Everyone knows someone like Sondra.  You went to college with them or you work with them.  The thing about them is they don’t even realize that they are those people.  Most of them, if asked, they would say they hate their own kind of people.  NBC never could have made an enjoyable series about Sondra’s college life.  Yet Wonder Woman “identifies.”  It makes me wonder if she even understood the show at all.  Like if your kid watched G.I. Joe and thought Cobra were the good guys.

Now I’m dating, nay, LIVING WITH Sondra.  What makes it worse is that there were so many other endearing characters WW could have picked from.  Even the dudes.  After the jump, I go down the list.

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