"Heh. Farted in the bathroom, smelled like tuna. Don't know why."
"I think I know why," I said.
"There's a vagina in my ass?"

Matt and are on the same page so often it's scary.

I am very sun burned. Joanna and I went to the beach the other day. Apparently neither of us know how to properly apply sunblock to my body. I did my lower body, chest, and stomach, while she applied it to my back. My chest is fine, while my belly is horribly burned, along with the backs of my knees and my shoulderblades. This leather chair is comfy-cool when I sit on it initially, but then I get warm, begin to sweat, and even the slightest adjustment brings excruciating pain; I now know what it is like to be a zested drupe. (I realize I could have said orange or lemon, but then I would have had to have opted for the word hesperidium. No, it's more important to me that people start using this word, because pronouncing it amuses me.)

Matt has spent the day home from work studying for his Mac certification. Apparently learning computers that only use one button is a tricky business. It has been an intense few hours. First we had beers and burgers at Boomerang's. I had a burger with jalapenos, horseradish, and garlic mixed into the beef, and topped with gorgonzola cheese; I will be digesting it for the remainder of the day. We then spent forty minutes tracking down an obscure comic book shop, tucked away in an industrial park. It turned out to be closed on Mondays, yet somehow not Sunday. This does make some sense to me, however, because if I ran a business I would have an arbitrary day of the week off, rather than a weekend. Working in a bar has taught me that having weekends off means having to deal with the rest of the majority populace that also have weekends off. Days off during the week cuts down on needless interactions with stupid people, and seeing people going about with their daily drudgery fills one with a unique sense of liberation; I feel like an invisible voyeur in a zombie movie.

After not being able to purchase either my copies of Top Ten Volume 2, or Alan Moore's re-visioning of Swamp Thing, we headed back home. Later Matt would shout at me from the couch: "BUY ME ICE CREAM." So I walked to our local Keg & Bottle liquor store, and bought some ice cream and gin; the fellow with the lazy eye and gangsta mien seemed in better spirits today than usual, which made me happier too. We are now watching many episodes of the Simpsons.

"I believe Freddy Quimby should walk away a free hotel."

Not much new to report. I've been sweating a lot. Joanna has convinced me to help her study for, and study for myself, the GRE and consider going back to get a master's or a doctorate. There isn't really a doubt in my mind that I can accomplish this, and I think studying for it will teach me whether or not my passion is strong enough for me to make a move into a career in this area.

Matt is snoring with his mac resting on his chest. I'm going to throw a remote at his crotch and yell: "DRINK YOUR GIN, SLEEPYTWAT!" If for no other reason, I'd like to be called "doctor" and still disperse these kind of violent, juvenile, and meanspirited ejaculations.

It's been a productive day. I purchased the following: new sheets, new pillow cases, a new flashlight, a new creme brulee torch, various cleaning chemicals, and a kind of cheese I've never tasted before called Cambozola. I did the dishes, did some laundry, and plan on doing more cleaning tomorrow.

I blogged awhile back saying that I didn't believe in "happiness," and the maximum elevation of mood I could ever feel is an advanced sense of intrigue, interest, and contentedness. If my mood as of late persists, I may have to rescind that post. I'm practically euphoric with the state of my life right now.

I got on the bus today in a chipper mood, embarking on errands that would end in my arms being sore from carrying 100lbs worth of bedding, juices, eggs and flammable devices. I brought my knitting with me, because knitting on public transportation is fun. You get to watch the little asian girls giggle and chatter about you, while older, southern or midwestern men tell people next to them in gravely voices "where I come from he'd be more than laughed at." Now, I've found that while I become a topic of conversation, I'm rarely engaged in conversation  in regards to what I'm doing. This is good. This is what we want.

As I boarded, I noticed that a chinese woman was talking at a quietly agitated man in the seat in front of her. I thought I was only getting fragments of the conversation, because the words I heard didn't make sense--although I had a hard time reconciling that with my belief that she was talking loud enough for me to hear everything. The man in front of her was behaving as most people do on buses who are being talked at: avoiding eye contact, touching the bridge of his nose exhaustedly, nodding respectfully so as not to incite frustration but absently enough so as not to invite more incessant chatter. Eventually, she stopped talking, and things returned to that noisy variety of quietude. The motor whirred, my needles made tink-tink-tink noises as I purled a row, and the girls who were giggling at me earlier were busily texting their friends.

Then, of course, the Chinese woman moved across the aisle and plopped down right in front of me. She'd found someone new to talk at. It's kind of hard for me to remember even bits of what she said verbatim, because they made no sense. It's like trying to remember a series of numbers that hold no pattern. Here's an attempt at reconstruction anyways: "You hear about earthquake in China today? Yes, big earthquake. My uncle is very nice man. He saved me. In school, it is not his fault. It is the teacher's fault. Not all teachers bad. I learn with hair on my face. I hope to get a job soon." And it went on like that, an avalanche of vague comments, assertions, and sometimes purely incomprehensible noun-verb-noun combinations, all having seemingly no relation to one another. Actually, it got even weirder when she started saying black people are apathetic "but that's ok," and for some reason started talking about the JFK assassination. This woman was very well dressed and groomed, yet smelled like burnt hair and coconut.

As she was talking to me and after I realized she was speaking nonsense, I started wondering what she was getting out of this exercise. I tried to piece together fragments of what she was saying to contextualize them in some larger narrative that explained her presence and wildly talkative nature. My theory is this: her uncle played some major role in getting her out of China, where I suspect she went to school pretending to be a man (explaining that comment about the hair on her face). I'm not sure where she picked up the stuff about the blacks and the Kennedy assassination or what relevance that had to an earthquake in China; some things in life remain mysteries and we have to accept that. Now, I'm guessing her talking to everyone she can on these bus rides is a means of language acquisition and reinforcing listening comprehension. I suspect whoever she is living with has suggested this kind of behavior for speedy assimilation. It's a shame, though, that none of these ultimate goals are met during these conversations, since people like myself and the fellow on the other side of the aisle are without ability or inclination to engage this person in an actual conversation. This explains why her accent wasn't that thick, though she spoke complete nonsense. I got off the bus feeling relieved that I didn't have to keep nodding anymore, but genuinely hoping she'd find some other, more productive way to learn how to communicate.

I'll be watching Iron Man on Wednesday and will thus catch up with the rest of the American movie-going populace. I'm going to try to write a review for it, but we all know how good I've been at doing that lately. Hopefully, now that I'm out of my 4 week illness, and am full of positivity, I can get started on some good behavior patterns, keep the ol' synapses firing, and start flooding the internet with my irrelevant opinions again.

Edit: Joanna just posted a blog entry about people using some of that yummy tax stimulus to help victims of the aforementioned earthquake in China. I know we've been told that using that money outside of the consumer market here in the US is vaguely unpatriotic, but why not donate 10 bucks anyways and feel like an upstanding global citizen for the day, eh?

Doctors Without Borders
Red Cross

Spent a lot of today in a dissociated haze. It was a return to old school Adam depression. I spent an hour today sitting in a parking lot and staring at a brick building. It was a dentist's office. After an hour, it was still a dentist's office and my knowledge of it reached no greater depth.

It was my day off but I went to work anyways, since some of our walls and furniture needed painting. This is the perfect thing to do for people who are depressed because it basically amounts to sitting around and staring off into space, except you get to move your arms a little and are filled with a sense of accomplishment afterwards. While painting I listened to Bach, whose music is also perfect for a person who is depressed, because it doesn't move on an emotional plane of sadness or happiness. One does not entertain desires of lovemaking, nor entertain violent impulses, nor feel like jiggling about all dancy-like while listening to Bach. One simply feels awe. It's an awe you feel when you learn about the complexities of the human eye, the magnitude of a volcanic eruption, or the parabollic travels of celestial bodies. There are mental conditions that can prevent you from beholding or understanding these concepts, but if you've a mind nimble enough to absorb them, then you can't help but put petty emotions aside and experience wonderment.

Then I got home, ignoring my roommate's usual greetings: "FAG!" and "Faaaaaag!" He likes to draw out that "a" sound; I like to draw it out too, when I'm feeling responsive. But I was not. I was feeling like a drink, especially since my ipod was dead and I ended up "feeling things" again. Bah.

*sip*

Well friends, I have become addicted to craigslist. I kinda was before, but I'm really hooked on it now. I have a tendency not to read the women-seeking-men personals, because they are generally filled with fairly uninteresting lists of requirements. I feel sorry for a lot of the guys that do. Take this one, for instance:


Seriously, my head hurts after reading this shit. From what I've learned about what women want, is a man must know how to dance and present himself as a walking contradiction. Whatever.

Now, while men often fall into a boring trap of boasting about their cars, income, and sex organs, they can still be surprisingly interesting:


No, "27 year old white bare boy," thank you. Really, I don't want to meet this guy, so much as I want to meet the older couple that houses him, and ask them if the rule they had to lay down about his "comfort level" throughout the rest of the house had to be instituted after an unpleasant incident.

Here's another, titled "Uneducated, Fat, and Ugly" he has listed his location as a homeless shelter:


This guy probably would have failed if he hadn't finished with the heart of gold line. Classic. I'm discovering that women typically don't write fake ads unless they are geared at making an ex-boyfriend feel like shit (which is kinda weird; I always wonder if they e-mail their former beau the link or just assume he'll run across it and know). The typical girl in this type of post especially enjoys explaining how they either cheated on him or were subsequently jackhammered by some thug who finally pleasured her the way she'd been wanting all those years she was stuck in her LTR. They always come off a little pathetic, though occasionally humorous. Frankly, if I was the guy in such a scenario I think I'd get over the sting of my former beloved being penetrated by the simple thought that I wasted so much of her time, while her paragon of manliness was waiting to sweep her off her feet at the local AAMCO garage, searching all the while for the right woman to respond to his suggestive whistle.

If you'll permit me to unfairly generalize further, I also find it interesting that men typically don't feel the need to tell their ex-girlfriends that they're banging lots of new girls. This reaction doesn't fully compute to me as a cultural phenomenon. The general notion is that women are harder to get in bed than men are. Therefore, if a man were to provide demonstrable evidence that he was sleeping with lots of women, that would suggest that he was, in fact, being held back by the relationship, and was in fact quite the under appreciated, hot item. That is, he would have reason to gloat and prop up his own ego with such pronouncements. Women, on the otherhand, since they possess all the sexual power in the first place, would be inherently proving nothing about themselves by getting laid, unless perhaps the ex boyfriend claimed they were undesirable. Ultimately, I see the big revenge there for women being implicit in the idea that their bodies once belonged to their boyfriends, and this cherished object is now being deliberately devalued, and probably demeaned.

Anyways, I think most men do end up doing a lot of similar sport fucking after their long term relationships die, but they generally don't use this as a weapon against their ex. I don't know if it's because we don't understand that that's an option or if our brains just aren't interested in that kind of acting out. It's more of a consciously sad attempt to fill in some of the empty spaces left in our lives. You walk around your house or apartment feeling a little displaced, it feels a little emptier but you can't quite put your finger on it; perhaps it's the absence of a blow dryer's whirr, or the tiny sounds of tweezing. Then you open up the medicine cabinet and shed a little tear when you see a box of tampax is still in it. Time to go to the club and make a series of bad decisions.

Men have a very charming way of putting things bluntly:


I read another ad earlier today where a gentleman described himself as "very social" boasting "I could have convo with a rock!" I'm sure whoever replies to his ad will put that proclamation to the test.


Some of these are sad in a way that everyone can identify is pathetic, but I think it'd take a person familiar with rhetoric and grammatical snobbery to really explain to you the cues that you are picking up on. I guarantee you I could write an ad that would reference all those movies and shows, and even identify myself as a "Ron Weasley" type guy, yet come off only as pathetic as any other ad posted on craigslist, not the worst of the worst like this guy's ad might find itself in.

The lesson is that some people just don't translate well to the written medium. I know plenty of people who are stunningly beautiful and have plenty of interesting things to say, yet would surely write ads so bad that... oh God, now I want to write ads pretending to be my friends in the casual encounters section.

Anyways, my addiction to Craigslist isn't just for the freaks, although there are those in spades. I think it's actually more for people people that imbue some of the qualities this Ron Weasley type does, and fuck up their ad enough to never get responses, but fuck it up through the fault of their ability to communicate through the written word.

Michelangelo had a grip of unfinished statues partially carved out of stone. His approach to sculpting was that he'd envision the form within the granite, and merely have to chisel away the excess. This approach is stunningly represented in those unfinished works, and remain some of the most haunting forms of art I've ever seen. Whenever I think about a person who cannot write effectively, yet has a mind I appreciate, I always think of them as similarly trapped within rough excesses of granite. I think of myself as often bound up and trapped by the blunt instrument of language as well. I do my best to chisel out the form I feel best suits me, but I can never escape feeling either too detached or too maudlin.

I went to work today even though I was running a fever and had a throat so raw and tattered it was bleeding My voice was entirely lost until this afternoon, but the bleeding continues. I feel like Doc Holiday during his final years; eerie that there's been a strain of TB ravaging the San Diego area lately....

On the trolley to work today I saw a bookish looking girl with wavy dark hair. She was looking at me a lot. I pretended not to notice, while looking at her a lot. I was listening to Andrew Bird and clutching a copy of Top Ten by Alan Moore to my chest, and would have been reading it if my cough medicine had left me lucid. As we both were about to leave the trolley she walked up to me, pointed toward my book, stuttered a few syllables that didn't form words, blushed, and awkwardly scuttled off.

Why'd I have to lose my voice on this morning? I could have asked her what she was going to say; I could have said something about Alan Moore; I could have said something nice about her hair or glasses. If I could have spoken at all, then our travels might have been worth it. I recounted this story to my roommate Zach, and he said: "Dude, a girl that loves graphic novels, and moreover Alan Moore? That could have been your soulmate."

"I know," I said, and sipped more gin.

I was out in my backyard this morning, enjoying the fact that I have a backyard now and contemplating the sunlight. We have some overactive automatic sprinklers that none of my roommates and I have learned how to reign in into a more sensible lawn watering schedule; we don't pay for the water here, so none of us feels particularly driven to troubleshoot. Local insects are thriving on our lethargy. A massive cloud of fruit flies sloppily danced all along our garden today in a curiously chosen strip. It was apparently decided that they would only fly to an altitude of one foot above ground. They caught the crisp golden sunlight with the  queer perfection that only nature can produce, and I watched as they whirled in and out of shapes: into symphonic waves, conical tornadoes, and then back into amorphous clouds. It was a vision filled of unheard music.

I've been wanting to have a Peter Weller movie night. I caught the last half of RoboCop on Encore a few days ago, and was taken aback by its semi-prophetic nature. Not that I think cyborg policeman will soon be considered the norm, but the corporate entity, OCP, that created poor Alex J. Murphy v2.0 demonstrates so many similarities to Blackwater that it left my jaw gaping. I don't think people really appreciate the gravity of what an international security agency run by the private sector represents, but a time is coming soon when a corporation will have the power, both economically and militarily, to overthrow if not outright crush a nation. It's pretty exciting.

After talking to my friend about RoboCop and the parallels between OCP and Blackwater, he'd asked me if I'd read about the new anti-personnel mines that are being developed. These new age land mines are networked together via radio signals and communicate to each other their locations. They compute as collective what the best possible laying pattern is for all of them. Should one of them blow up, they then re-compute the pattern and will jump to their new location. Imagine this creepy scene: your army buddy has just walked onto a land mine and no longer has a lower torso. As you are grappling your mind away from the horror of this moment, you then see fifty landmines leap high into the air like little metal bugs all across the landscape, all around you, finding new anonymous places to hide themselves. You are dully aware that a computer has decided that these new positions provide the greatest possibility of removing your own lower torso. You know what that is (aside from reality)? That's a prequel to the movie Screamers, starring mother fucking Peter Weller.

Watching these two movies back-to-back would make for a fun night in the right company, methinks. I think we'd finish the night off with The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, just to cleanse the palate and also because that movie is the best thing to ever come out of the 80s and possibly the last century as a whole.

I haven’t posted a blog in awhile, despite promising myself I’d stay on top of it. Weird things have been happening. People have been getting assaulted, getting robbed, their cars crashed into, their cars breaking down, and other various tragic happenings. I’ve got my own problems to boot.

I’ve been wanting to recoil a bit. To live the eremitic life and be housed in the same cloister of vast brick buildings alongside other anonymous, voiceless, sad and solitary erudites. I crave quiet simplicity and focus.

I was pouring a group of seven shots last Saturday, Georgia Peaches. As I was shaking them I had an epiphany: I really love my job. I’ve had jobs that I hated, jobs that I tolerated, and jobs that I believed were worth the effort I put into them so I could climb the company ladder. Never have I had a job that I really just enjoyed doing for its own sake, sought out knowledge about it just for my own interest and desire to get better at it, and also been so well compensated for it. This summer looks good for me both financially and just in terms of fun, on and off the job. All the same, I still feel like my problems haven’t gotten much better. I think it’s because the summer hasn’t started yet, and I’m in a limbo where I’m still not making quite enough money or getting enough shifts to feel secure.

Last night I did some random google search and amidst the results I caught a snippet of someone’s blog or profile saying he was 20 years-old and born in 1988. I guess it didn’t really dawn on me that the day is rapidly approaching where kids born in the ’90s are going to be of legal drinking age. I think sometime in 2012 I’ll shit a brick and realize I’m an old man who doesn’t understand the generation replacing his.

Like every generation before me, I see the following generation as largely doomed. They’ve not been taught how to manage debt because their parents weren’t either, and the debt market has much larger fangs than it ever used to. They’ve been marketed to commercially since the cradle, and while this phenomenon was around when I was growing up, the psychological warfare that they are dealing with through the commercial media is far more sophisticated now than it was when I was a child. I was talking with my friend Ian about how remarkable it is that kids are buying so-called "subversive" clothing, mostly from giant companies that view them as just one more niche market. Provocative slogans to one group of people are now amounting to little else than what brand names represent to another people. I don’t know the difference between a Tommy Hilfiger tag and an image of Che Guevara anymore and I’m not sure the folks buying them do either.

Mike Judge’s Idiocracy was pretty dead on about the progression of mass media’s influence on IQ entropy, but there are more subtle things going on than people being tickled by dumb catchphrases and scatological humor. When you watch Idiocracy it’s important to note that there is no organized rebel force, no subversive movement that lionizes reading, math, and science. And if I were to hypothesize on why, it would be that the market found a way to sell people on commercial subversion, which is as provocative as it is meaningless. If you reduce all movements to being markets of "coolness" then they don’t have to put forth any complicated or nuanced ideals. The rules are simple: play similar language and fashion games and you’re "in." It’s the equivalent to selling a person a social ideology with the same value as advertisements exclaiming that Coke is proven better than Pepsi. It’s really quite brilliant and I suspect the next generation is going to fall into an even larger lifestyle trap than mine did and have far less an awareness of it.

I was lamenting horrors of this google search with my friend Jarod, who then requested I stop with the whole "doomed" talk, as he was already trudging through the sticky tar of his own daily gloom. But I said to him that there is a great deal of fun to be had for us still as simple observers. I’ve got a three year plan to pull myself out of debt, and if I’m able to do it then I see it as an even greater accomplishment than graduating college. I said that there’s just enough possibility left for our generation to manipulate our way into maintaining the middle class quality of life, and with sensible purchasing practices even go on exotic vacations. It is possible for the American to still afford to culture himself. He just has to be even smarter than the previous cultured Americans in order to obtain it.

Additionally, I’m not entirely sure that a subversive group won’t show up on the scene in the following generation, I just don’t know how it will find a foothold. I think the average person is fucked, but there are always brilliant people being born. The question is whether or not the latter will ally themselves with the machine that keeps stupid people being stupid consumers, or if they’ll try to find a divergent path and attempt to disrupt that stranglehold. The thought is pretty exciting to me: think of the level of genius that will be required to observe and avoid all the trappings that have been laid out for their generation. You have to avoid being a consumer whore, you have to avoid the stupid trappings of a counter culture that thinks doing drugs and wearing  ironic T-shirts amounts to "free thinking," you have to avoid the appeal of religious and political shame and fear mongers, and you have to avoid a level of cynicism and apathy that encourages all clever people to play the regrettable game well and get theirs at the expense of others.

Trying to thread yourself through that needle often lands you in a life of quiet desperation, and not attempting to do it usually lands you in a state of identity confusion around your mid forties to early fifties, which transforms into sad regret by your retirement. I’ve been wanting to ask people what their reaction would be if someone from the future traveled back and told them that either their worst fears for themselves and where their lives would go came true, or that their wildest fantasies were actualized.

I think my reaction would be the same in either scenario: "Mmn, I see." Just a mild difference in inflection depending upon the news, because what I think most people forget is how interesting your life will be either way. I try to live in the moment as much as I can and not get too preoccupied on shit I cannot immediately control. This makes me a big fan of drinking with friends and the second act of movies and plays.

Learning every song, including the intro, to every Megaman 3 stage will be my endgame. I'm pleased (and admittedly somewhat relieved) that someone else shares my obsession and has undertaken acting it out. I don't care what people might say, this shit rocks:

Top Man:


Snake Man:

(Don't you love his shorts in this one?)

I don't think you'd ever be able to reproduce and make cooler the theme song to Megaman III, however, in anything but its natural midi environment. It looks like it'd be fun to play on Stepmania/DDR though:

I have been stricken down with the vapors of hell. The Black Death, Malaria, and The Bird Flu (I knew my goddamn roommate's bird had it in for me!), have combined into a viro-bacterial compound here-to-fore not know by man. I would travel to a local diagnostician, healer, and maker of tonics, but I fear the journey would cost me my life given my current, fragile condition. I have taken a green substance that makes me very sleepy and reduces my coughing, but my temperature remains at 102-point-4. Despite the apparent heat my body is producing, I only experience myself radiating it one quarter of the time; the majority of my languishing is spent in what feels like sub-zero temperatures. I have a little oil heater that I curl up next to, wrapped in the softest blanket I own, which still feels like burlap.(As soon as I recover I am going to knit myself a blanket made of the softest material ever to grace the spinning jenny.) With my heater, I can warm one part of my body at a time during these fierce chills; I generally rotate my face, then bare ass, then back. Without warning, though, it will feel as if I've undergone significant climate change. The heat of a thousand Saharan suns beats down on me currently. Occasionally T.E. Lawrence's visage appears in my room like a mirage, shouting "NO PRISONERS! NO PRISONERS!" I would open my window to shoo him away and invite a breeze, but my feet are wobbly and the heater was tragically positioned under the window and a cramped bookshelf. So, I sit, I lie, and when I feel a phantom of virility caress my withered frame, I writhe.

I can hear the thump of Death's scythe being used as a walking stick. I hear bones creak, and I am not certain they are my own. Death approaches slow. I have instructed my roommate to try to dissuade Him from entering my room for four days. On the fifth day I have instructed him to let Death in, as my peace will have been made by then.

Going to work today was a challenge of monumental proportions. Once I arrived, I shuffled behind the bar, grabbed a water glass, filled it with water, and plopped in a tablet of airborne. I laid my arm and head on the bar and morosely watched it fizz into a piss yellow concoction, forming a blistery skin at the top. I sighed, quaffed. My manager looked back at me.

"What is that?" She said.
"Airborne, and my hopes for a better life. I'm in a bad way this morning."
"Go home."
Another of my coworkers piped in: "And wipe down and sanitize everything you touched on the way in."

The way home took me 2 hours today because the buses and trolleys were on holiday schedules, running every half hour. A man was sitting across from me on the bus after a fit of violent coughing, slumped over and drooled all over himself. He tried to lift his hand to wipe his mouth, but his hand only made half the journey before wilting back into his lap. I wondered, is this my future?

"I've often thought about naming my balls John Candy and Chris Farley,"  I said.
"Because they're fat?"
"That would be accurate too, but, no, mostly because they sweat a lot."
"It'd be even funnier if you were sterile, too. You'd have fat, dead, sweaty balls with the perfect nicknames."

I don't often hide the fact that I get bad swamp ass during a hard day's work. My perspective is that if I have to deal with "swass," other people should have to share in the discomfort by knowing that I'm dealing with it. It's like when I caught the flu and wrote about pooping. Bodily illnesses and effluvia are one thing I can't abide feeling shame about; I feel shame about too many other things already.

I do try to maintain a good level of hygiene despite this issue, showering usually twice a day. Since I go to the gym a lot I am occasionally blighted with jock itch, and it's absolutely fucking hell to get rid of. Recently, getting rid of it was harder than before, and I couldn't really determine why. Being a hypochondriac, I'm prone to fits of "studying" diseases on wikipedia, medical websites, and various ask-a-doc forums where people like me write shrill and terrified questions asking if the oddly shaped pimple on their collarbone is cancer. While on one such site I read the story of a fellow who thought he had a nasty case of jock itch, but really turned out to have herpes.

"Ruh-oh," I thought. Now, while I don't overindulge in "at risk" behavior, I do like to keep my life interesting. In college we were routinely told that it was practically part of our civic duty to get tested for STIs, but being a pretty responsible guy and given my lack of symptoms, it didn't really seem all that urgent. I've always taken a "if it ain't broke don't fix it" approach to my penis. Nevertheless, now I'd determined that, if for no other reason than for my own peace of mind, I should stroll on down to Planned Parenthood and get tested. There was also some dark part of my brain that I don't fully understand which thought the experience could be fun.

I'd been to a Planned Parenthood once before in Medford, Oregon. It was a place full of sadness, shame, regret, and a surprising amount of large women & white trash men. They all left with big brown bags full of condoms and birth control pills which made me sigh with relief. This one in San Diego was much the same, except the people were decidedly more attractive.

People look seriously bummed out when they have to see a doctor anyways, but when it involves their genitals they look beside themselves with dread. I liked watching people leave. I've never seen people walk with such purpose, and I bet you these are the same people I hate walking behind in malls. It was like once they re-entered the waiting room they practically sprinted for the exit door. I tried to guess what kind of news they got based upon the position of their head and the speed of their stride. That day it looked like quite a few people did not get news they wanted to hear. I wasn't sure if that meant that I'd be statistically more or less likely to get bad news myself.

I think the best thing about the waiting room was the TV. I can totally see the benefit to having a television playing in the waiting room, given the level of emotional strain the people in that room are under. What kind of programming best lightens the mood, you might wonder? According to the woman behind the counter with the remote, the answer is Jerry Springer. No joke. The first thing I heard walking into Planned Parenthood was a crowd chanting "Jerry! Jerry!" This is brilliant. Let's say you're in that waiting room and you may have caught syphilis from some random girl you met at a bar a few weeks back. Now imagine maybe you're also worried that if the test comes back positive, then you may have passed it on to another girl at your work that you actually kinda like. You're consumed with the possibility of guilt and the fear of becoming a persona non grata at your place of work. Well, friend, that's still not as bad as going on national TV to tell your wife you're cheating on her with your cousin. And a goat. And then finding out your wife is cheating on you with that same cousin. And the goat. Indeed, the television was a welcome source of perspective on our collective concerns.

Once I saw the doctor she smiled wanly at me as I described my symptoms and admitted that the main reason I was there was because I'd never been tested before and the internet frightened me (as it often does). She ended up giving me some vaginal cream. I inquired if she'd found a second set of genitals on me that I was unaware of. "No, it's for your athletes foot and jock itch, if you still have it. The active ingredient in Lotrimin and this is the same."

"Oh neat," I said, thinking that it was neat but feeling weird about having said that aloud. Later, I would discover the reason why it was taking forever to get over my case of jock itch was because I acquired an allergic reaction to Miconazole Nitrate, the active ingredient in those treatments. Good times.

The blood testing for HSV-1 and HSV-2 apparently was not covered by state funding, so I was charged 25 dollars for it, which seemed reasonable. However, the nurse informed me that tests for chlamydia, gonorrhea, syphilis and HIV were free, and asked if I would like to "have those done too while we're at it." I said that sounded fine, thinking that it's never all that bad to hear a doctor tell you that you do not have AIDS. The only thing was that according to California state law they cannot tell you your test results for HIV over the phone, so I had to make another trip down to Planned Parenthood two weeks later.

Today is exactly two weeks from that first trip. I woke up this morning with a mental checklist: clean room, take the trashcans off the curb, go to planned parenthood to be told that I do not have AIDS, and then go to Pacific Beach for some new yarn and knitting needles. It all worked out OK. "No surprises for you, all your tests are negative."

"Whew! I can't tell you what a relief that is. I gotta admit I was stressing a little, but now that means I can use all that extra rope I bought to tie down my boat!" I smiled. She paused trying to make the connection, then either coughed or chuckled, then shook her head twice quickly like she was trying to shake my words out of it.

As I walked into the waiting room I was careful to keep a confident stride that wasn't too fast, and to hold my head up high. I briefly contemplated leaping out the door from the offices, holding my fist up in the air and shouting "ALL RIIIIIGHT!" I decided that the poor people inside probably didn't want to see that--although it was what I was hoping to see the entire time I was in that waiting room watching people flee the clinic. It was probably best that I let them continue to watch undisturbed what was on the waiting room TV today: "Days of Our Lives."