cauliflower

I'm much, much better now, honestly, but when I was in Jr. High School my dick was the boss. Everything was prioritized according to the strict demands and arbitrary intensity of its hunger. I had absolutely no qualms about going to outlandish measures to ensure that I would spend a semester sitting one seat behind and one row over from Jill Tallison, just so I could stare at her ass while people tried feverishly to thump the importance of geometry into my insolent brain. I could tear through a magazine with the speed and precision of a samurai swordsman, extracting even the tiniest bits of delectable female flesh, and the minute I found myself in a dark room, hidden by foliage or obscured by even moderate cloud cover I was workin' the schminky.

Somehow, someone got the idea into their head to take my bizerk obsessions and frustrations and channel them into the bidding of the wrestling team. I immediately saw the wisdom in this wholesome suggestion as soon as my friend informed me that all practices took place simultaneously with the girls gymnastics team. If you lit my eyelashes on fire I wouldn't have turned away from the uneven bars, the floor exercises, THE VAULT............and then some doofus is smooshing my face into the mat.

So I paid attention, learned some moves, and found myself enjoying the sport some (with an Olympic swimming pool's worth of testosterone pulsing through your veines, those muscles tend to develop pretty quickly.) Don't get me wrong, I sucked pretty bad.

Oh, I forgot to tell you about this girl that I was far more infatuated with than almost all the others. She was blond and had a body that made denim and cotton perform in a way that sent train-whistles screaming through my consciousness. PLUS she had a locker right next to mine. PLUUUUS she knew that when she "inadvertently" brushed against me I was left in a tongue wagging stupor for the rest of the day. And she liked that.

So the next thing I know I'm dressed in this ridiculous sing-let getting waved into a match. There's a whistle, then the usual wrong kind of grunting and sweatiness, when something inside me says "Todd, you can take this MF". He reached back when he really shouldn't of, and just as he did I got him by the neck and a leg and got his back on the mat. I'm puttin' all I have into holding him down, and when I turn a bit, there's Marylyn (you know, the one with the locker) in the second row. So I just burn and jam this guy down, and it's over. That's that.

The next day I duck through a utility door to sneak a smoke and there she is. (we both came from messed up families, and we're always the first ones to start smoking) She just turns those bright greens on me and says "you won yesterday, didn't you?" And I beamed and said yes as she went in. I have got to tell you, I was walking on air just to think that she knew and remembered, I felt like the world tuned under my step.

So I went back to study-hall and sat with my friends, and they started giving me crap about smoking as usual, so I say SHUT UP SHUT UP, let me tell you what just happened. And I did and they just loose it laughing. It seemed to be contagious because everyone else started dong so.

Then Rob Loyt goes "Man, right before you pinned that Stuart guy you let one rip that rattled the windows."

My embarrassment became a dirigible enveloping the classroom, all hope for happiness shattered. For only a second though, because there was this brunette sitting in front of me, and........

YMCA

When my brother and I were little our family would often take trips into the city. Beforehand, though, we would always drop by to visit my father's friend in the Lower West Side. As we rolled through the streets at around 9am, about the hour that the neighborhood's residents are usually departing from local bars, we would see some extremely wild stuff going on. The place was swarming with leather queens, dominitrixi, transvestites and euphoric, virtually nude homosexuals snapping their fingers, yelling across the streets and expressing their affability in no uncertain terms.

Every time we got off the West Side Drive at that exit my mother would quietly hit my dad's leg in retribution for taking the short-cut. In the beginning my brother and I just sat in the back seat slack-jawed. But we caught on pretty soon, and began looking forward to the cast of characters. We wanted to make base-ball style trading cards, there where even a few that we came to see every weekend.

But the biggest kick we got out of the whole scenario was torturing my parents with their Victorian sensibilities. We would ask "Mom, why is that man wearing leather pants without a behind"?, or "if they are trying to kiss, why is one facing the wrong way"? All in very innocent tones.

Once my brother pointed out this monstrous 7 foot tall drag queen and asked "Mom, why is that man wearing make-up and women's clothes", and my mother, in her typical caustic way, just explained "it's laundry day, he had to borrow something to wear".

For some odd reason they found it necessary to take us to a show afterwards. Go figure.

Whirling

What if every single word you needed to hear where to be spoken to you
All the answers and mysteries solved
That harping lesson you yearn for imparted

Though, each word was to be separated by this:
four hours of droning, the kind you'll hear if you sit there in front of your monitor and listen to the whirling machine
Four hours between each word
And a busy week ahead of you
With bills and work and family and worries

And only four or five arbitrary hours of droning between each word

Would you sit and listen?