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Charlie Hatton
Brookline, MA
Okay, I have a question.
Not an important question, true — but a serious question, nonetheless. It involves my showers, somewhat indirectly. And my ass — much less indirectly, as it happens.
(Yeah, yeah, go ahead — run away screaming. That’s fine — get it out of your system. I’ll be here when you get back, and you’ll still have to read what comes next. ‘Cause I know you’ll come back. They always come back.)
Okay, here’s the thing. Sometimes in the shower, as I’m washing, I notice these little blue fuzzy things on my washcloth. I’m pretty sure they come from my jeans, somehow. And I’m fairly certain that they show up after I’ve wiped down my backside. I don’t know exactly where back there they come from, mind you — maybe on the periphery, or maybe right on the edge of Old Brown Canyon; I couldn’t say for sure, without a more flexible neck and a series of mirrors.
(Or a shower buddy. A very understanding — or a very drunk shower buddy. And really, if I had one of those, would I really still care what sort of fuzz happens to be on my ass? I’m gonna say, ‘no’.)
Anyway, here’s what I don’t get: assuming that I’m right on both counts — the fuzz starts out on my jeans, and ends up on my ass — then how, for the love of Levi Strauss, does it get there?
Because there is zero contact between the two, as far as I know. I’m not running around commando-style, sans undies, with my jeans and ass spending the day rubbing up against each other like a couple of dry-humping teenie boppers. I always put on underwear before jeans, for two very good reasons: first, if I don’t wear undies at all, there’s all that icky ‘beans ‘n’ franks‘ paranoia to deal with.
(And thank you, Something About Mary. Bastards.)
And second, if I put the underpants on after the overpants, then I get snickered at by the people at work. Even more than usual, which I didn’t think was possible. But oh yes, it is — some peoples’ snickering knows no bounds, apparently.
Anyway, back to the point — I still don’t see how those little fuzzies manage to migrate from pants to ass. It’s not like my boxers have that little ass-flap that you used to see on the old pajamas.
(Well, except for that day when I accidentally wore them backwards. Which I might not have noticed, except I had to pee while I was at the office. And there was no ‘access port’ in the front. They found me twenty minutes later, standing in front of the urinal with both hands in my zipperhole, yelling, ‘I can’t get to my penis! I can’t get to my penis! Call 9-1-1 — my penis is trapped!‘
They gave me a Valium, a glass of water, and a box cutter, and told me to figure it out for myself. Man, that’s the worst Tuesday afternoon I’ve ever had.)
So, is it just me? Am I wrong about this phenomenon, somehow? I’d really hate to think that my ass is somehow manufacturing blue fuzz, somehow. Sure, that’d explain how they’re getting there, but I really think it would raise more questions than it would answer. And I’d have to take a good, hard look at my diet, too, I suppose. I don’t remember eating Grover, but hell — some of those comedy after-show parties get pretty wild; anything’s possible.
Permalink | 3 CommentsFolks, you know you’re desperate for a meal when you’re making a sandwich, and have the following thought process:
‘Wow… this meat has been in the fridge for a while. It’s proooobably not good any more, but let’s see…
Well, it smells… kind of okay. Lunchmeat is supposed to smell like battery acid just a little bit, right?
Wait, what’s the ‘sell by’ date? Oh. Hmmm. Well, if I put a ‘1’ in front of the day… yeah, that’s still last week sometime. Damn.
Eh, screw it — it’s not gonna kill me, right?‘
So, I spent the better part of the night fully expecting to projectile-hurl smoked turkey all over the room. Which, as I understand it, is usually seen as some sort of faux pas in most social circles. The ones where they don’t keep plastic tarps on the floor, anyway.
Which is not to say that I don’t travel in circles that require plastic on the floor, from time to time. But last night, I was in more polite company. Well, maybe not ‘polite’, exactly — it was a bunch of comics, after all — but neater, at least. Hoagie-hurling is still frowned upon, even in that crowd. Apparently, blowing chunks is only funny from a distance. Hey, I saw Meaning of Life; who would have guessed?
Anyway, the night was a good time — a few of us standups got together to critique ourselves and each other on a tape of a show we’d done earlier in the month. Constructively, of course — always constructively. It was helpful, too — and nice. There were only a couple of times when someone looked at me and said:
‘You know — every time you tell a joke, God kills a baby seal.‘
So yeah, it was a good night. It didn’t help much with the writing — considering that I’m writing this fourteen hours later and backdating it to Friday night — but hey, we can’t be Hemmingway every night, can we?
So… can we be Hemmingway just one night? Is that too much to ask?
Permalink | 1 CommentFolks, I was just doing something tonight. I can’t tell you what, exactly — you’ll just have to use your imagination.
(Or better yet, don’t use your imagination, and just let the story wash over you. Which means that you’d especially better not use your imaginateion, because the combination of what you’re probably about to be thinking, and the ‘wash over you’ comment… not good. We’ll all lose some sleep over that one, if we’re not careful.)
Anyway, I was just doing something. And the last time I did this unspecified, completely innocent thing, I came out of it with six. Or ‘six’, if you prefer, but I’m pretty sure those quotes are going to lead to the imagining thing, and it’s all downhill from there. But, if we must, I did this thing a while back, and got ‘six’ out of it.
So, tonight? I did it again. And what did I get — six? Or even ‘six’? No. Not quite. No, this time, much to my wide-eyed delight, I got ten. Not ten, or even ‘ten’ — which would be lurid enough, mind you — but ten. I went from ‘six’ to ten. Maybe even TEN, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. Let the smoke and confetti clear, and we’ll determine exactly what’s what later on, with a clearer perspective.
And really, all I can tell you is… it’s got nothing to do with my penis. Really. I know that if it did, I’d have some miracle story to tell about a wonder cream, or amazing exercises, or the importance of living right, eating healthy, and stretching daily — or maybe that’s ‘stretching’ daily — but honestly, this is so not about my penis. Promise.
(On the other hand… in the thing that it is about? I just went from ‘six’ to ten. It’s not about my penis, per se, but yeah — the room’s feeling a little woodier right now, if you smell what I’m cooking. I’m all jazz hands and hard-on right now.)
So, unfortunately, that’s all I can tell you right now. I can’t share any details, but I did want you to feel my excitement. In an entirely non-creepy, penis-free, leg-humping-less kind of way, of course. Let’s keep this tasteful — or as tasteful as we can, after seven paragraphs of penis enlargement euphemisms, anyway.
(And I repeat — it’s so not about my penis. I can’t possibly stress this enough. I may have to hire a skywriter, in fact, just to be certain. My penis? Not the thing. Scout’s honor.)
Anyway, there you go. Last time: ‘six’. This time: ten. Sure, you know nothing else about what’s going on, but still, just aak yourself — if it happened to you, how happy would you be right now, eh? I think we should all take a deep breath and smoke an afterglow cigarette, just to commemorate the occasion. I’m talkin’ ten, people. That ain’t chopped liver, no matter what you’re talking about. Booyah.
Permalink | 9 CommentsSo… new pope, eh?
You know — maybe I’ve been in Boston a little too long, but doesn’t the new guy look just a little like Cliffy, the mailman from Cheers? Is it just me? His name is even close to the actor’s; maybe they’re related, or something. I think I might be a little anxious, if I were Catholic. Cliffy’s a nice guy, and all, but ‘leader of the faith’? Hoo boy.
But enough about shit I know nothing about — let’s talk about my world for a while. As is my involuntary custom on Tuesdays, I spent most of the day in meetings at work. Today was a doozy, though — from eleven to seven, straight through. Ten minutes to grab lunch, but that was it; apart from that, it was eight straight hours of full-on meeting mania. I can’t tell you how much fun that is, people.
(Why not? Because it isn’t. Eight solid hours of anything is too much. I can’t even sleep that fricking long any more. That shit is wrong. I should file for employee abuse, or something.)
Anyway, when you’re stuck in as many meetings as I am, you eventually work out ways to entertain yourself. It’s not like you’re actually going to sit there and listen, right? But you can’t blow your cover, either — you’ve got to be cool. If you spontaneously break into song in the middle of a PowerPoint presentation, or hump the boss’ chair during a status report, they’re probably going to figure out that you’re doing the ‘rich inner life’ thing. Again.
Still, there are only so many times you can count the number of tiles on the ceiling, or balance a pen on each finger. If you want to put a spark into your cockamamie conferences at the office, you’ve got to be creative. Personally, I’ve started playing a little game in meetings — I call it, ‘Who’s Got the…?‘ Let me explain.
Imagine you’re sitting around a conference room table, surrounded by a dozen or more suits, all blabbering on about third-quarter revenues and project management seminars and TPS reports, blabbity blabbety blah. That’s ‘Who’s Got the…?‘ time. I like to start off with something simple — like, maybe, ‘Who’s got the biggest nose?‘
So, while I’m looking around the room, nodding and pretending to be interested, I’ll size up the schnozzes pointing back at me. Usually there are two or three honkers bigger than the rest, and I’ll have to make a second round to really study them. And finally, after careful consideration, I’ll crown the champion, and declare someone as the Big Nose King or Queen of the meeting. In my head — always in my head, only. And hey, look at that — I just killed five minutes of boring meeting time! Score, baby.
And there are so many games to play! There’s ‘Who’s got the beadiest eyes?‘, or ‘Who’s got the ass-ugliest shirt?‘ Ooh, ooh, or my favorite, ‘Who’s got the biggest boobs?‘ That’s always a good time. Except when it’s me, of course. That hurts a little. You probably want to leave yourself out of the games, actually — crying in the middle of a meeting is another giveaway.
So, there you go — another way to have a little fun around the office. And just try not thinking of this game next time you’re in a long meeting at work. You’ll be right there with me, playing ‘Who’s got the porn-starriest sideburns?‘ or ‘Who’s got the saggiest arm flab‘, whether you really want to or not. Welcome to my nightmare, people. And try not to giggle while the boss is reading the agenda. Heh.
Permalink | 5 CommentsThey say you shouldn’t shop for groceries when you’re hungry. And I believe that — I’ve done it, and it never really goes well. I always end up coming home with three hundred dollars worth of food that ‘only looked good in the store’.
Which puzzles me a little bit, I have to admit. See, as a rule, I don’t get all that excited about food — sure, I eat it, and I like a lot of it. And I wrote fifteen hundred words, right here, about a sandwich the other day.
Okay, okay, so apparently I do get excited about food, sometimes. But I certainly don’t get my flagpole in a tizzy over making food. And that’s what you go to the grocery store for, generally — ‘meal parts’, that you can mix and match and chop up to make actual, edible food. That’s why it’s so weird that I come home with such nonsense sometimes — I know that I’m never, ever going to do anything useful with ginger root, or lentils, or a pomegranate, for chrissakes. I don’t even know what a pomegranate is, really — is it an apple on steroids? A mutated orange? Some hideous cran-pear-cherry Frankensteinian concoction? I don’t know. All I know is that I’ve got no business buying one. I’m an idiot.
But you know — I don’t have this problem in other stores. I don’t buy more booze at the liquor store, if I go in there hammered. Or stock up on new goodies at the bookstore, if I’ve been reading lots of cereal boxes. And I don’t come home with piles of clothes from American Eagle, when I go to the mall naked.
(Okay, okay… so, for the record, I only went to the mall naked once. And they sent me home before I could buy any clothes, actually. Hell, you’d think they’d realize when they’ve got an easy sale, right? I mean, hell-oooo — winkie hanging out over here by the underwear aisle!
But no. They just escorted me out, and turned me over to security. At least they gave me a blanket to wear. And for free, too. So at least one of us got a good deal that day.)
Anyway, back to the food. Right, like you want to think about food, after picturing me cavorting around the mall pantsless. And there was cavorting. Oh yes — I cavorted. I may have even skipped, just a little.
Okay, enough of that. My point was just this — if it’s no good to shop while you’re hungry, then it’s just as bad to help putting the groceries away when your tummy is grumbling. My wife came home earlier, with a dozen bags of yummies (not a euphemism, folks; move along), and it was all I could do not to eat something out of each one. Pickles, lunchmeat, juice, canned asparagus… it all looked good, baby. Separately, all at once — I didn’t care. I almost stuck my face in her yogurt, and snurfed up a big snootful.
Which actually may be a euphemism; I’m not at all sure. Suddenly, my flagpole is all atizzy, and I’m thinking seriously of getting pantsless again. And I’m still hungry. Eh. I think I’ll go cut open a pomegranate, and see what’s going on in my wife’s yummy bags. So to speak. Ahem. Anyway, happy Sunday! I’m out.
Permalink | 3 Comments
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