Once My Looks Go, I've Got Nothing

I've been trying to eat less red meat lately. Not because of its potentially detrimental effect on my health, but because red is the color of Communism, and Lord knows I don't want to get blacklisted. Then again, a friend of mine lives in a Communist country (China), and seems to enjoy the hell out of it, so who am I to judge? I suppose having to use a proxy server to log into Facebook has its own unique charms. Regardless, I was feeling like steak today, and I don't mean the steak they serve at Taco Bell. Not that I want Taco Bell anyway, after the Five Layer Burrito took my digestive system through the Nine Circles of Hell. So I ventured to the grocery store and bought a steak, some salad and a Sapporo Reserve (it was on sale). Upon my return home, I slapped the steak on the old George Foreman Grill-still going strong seven years later-and poured my Sapporo into the only glass that could contain it, the Samuel Adams Octoberfest beer stein that I fought valiantly with B

When I was a teenager (a time period that has shifted in classification from recent past to quaint, nausea-inducing memory), I was involved in quite a string of malicious acts. Some were perpetrated by me, others against me. There's a reason, for example, that I don't particularly care for situations in which people sit directly behind me...I'm no longer actively nervous during these situations, but there is always a shred of paranoia in my mind. Some of these incidents taught me valuable lessons about my fellow man. Other just reinforced certain anxieties I had. One such incident occurred on what I remember as a warm spring day. I was washing the dishes, as was my daily duty at the time, when my father sidled up beside me with an odd request. Before I go any further, you should know that I am no stranger to the machinations of the drunken mind (for example, I am two glasses of scotch in right now), but there are some thoughts/behaviors that even my mild psychosis can

Maybe it's just me, but for some reason I am unreasonably irritated when I see stupid things on display while I'm driving. Perhaps the fact that the stupidity is linked to travel causes me to make the assumption that it will be more widespread than traditional, sedentary stupidity. I don't know; trying to figure out the whys and hows of my psyche is like trying to do a Sudoku puzzle immediately after being stabbed 23 times. For a while, the object of my ire was a license plate that I saw during my travels (to the liquor store). It was attached to a hybrid car (maybe a Prius , I'm not sure), and it said, "MPG X 2." Now, I'm as liberal as the next UC Santa Cruz graduate, so if you're driving a hybrid, more power to you. But the fact that this guy, after purchasing his hybrid, was so enamored by his miles per gallon that he had to go out and spend extra money to trumpet to the world "I DON'T HAVE TO BUY GAS AS OFTEN AS I USED TO!" reeks o

Well, this is it...the last chapter of my long and winding tale. I suppose I should just get right into it. “And that was that,” I said to Garrett Steel. “I changed Friendly Tony’s birth certificate too, so he was back to being himself again.” We were sitting at a beige picnic table at Falafel Drive-In. I had gotten a falafel lunch special, which came with a banana shake; Garrett had gotten a falafel and fries, but no shake. “Did he ever try to come back to your apartment?” said Garrett. “He was living there, after all.” “Nope,” I said. “I guess he figured it out. Anyway, I made a few changes with the white out pen as retribution, so I think he got the message pretty quickly.” “Changes?” said Garrett through a mouthful of falafel and spicy sauce. “Like what?” “Well, as it turns out, Friendly Tony left a few other documents in the desk. I found his resume in there, and I whited out his ‘current job’ and replaced it with ‘Jizz Mopper’ at Sinnaman Erotica Outlet in

Hmm...this was supposed to be up yesterday, but in all honestly, I forgot about it until I got to work, by which point it was too late. My apologies for that. Anyway, without further ado, let's get back to the story. I was slowly adjusting to my role as Friendly Tony. I had taken to wearing sweater vests and eating bologna sandwiches, and had gotten a job as a file clerk in a small law office. “That’s funny,” my boss, Jeff, had said during the interview, “You don’t look Mexican.” It seemed like an odd thing for a lawyer to say, but I kept my mouth shut and was hired. I rented out a room in an elderly couple’s house, and spent my free time writing a sprawling historical fiction epic and participating in the occasional paid clinical study. It was a quiet existence, but I felt that was for the best as I adapted to my new persona. Some days, if I kept myself busy enough, I could forget entirely about Joey Marsilio. Every once in a while, during my weaker moments, I would c

You may have noticed that there was no intro/outro as usual for my last installment. Or maybe not. Either way, there's no grand reason for it; I simply forgot. Anyway, thanks for sticking around, and here's part 8: Vengeance consumed my mind as I drove the old van back home. I was wearing a slightly too large white shirt with a picture of the Golden Gate bridge on it, and a pair of blue shorts that said “Yay Area” across the ass. I was fairly certain they were girl’s shorts, but they were the best option I had at the time save my soggy pajama bottoms, and there was no way I was climbing back into those things. Despite my new clothes, I was still cold and wet, and I shivered as I cranked up the heat. I dropped off the van at Prosciuttscio’s newsstand, and at my request he gave me some old magazines he was going to toss anyway. I walked over to an alleyway a few blocks away and tossed my soggy pajamas into a banged-up steel garbage can. I then tossed in the old magazines on

Welcome back. We're up to part 6 and things are really heating up! What awaits me in this next chapter? Well, come on, you're going to have to read it if you want to know. I'm not going to summarize it for you, for Pete's sake. If someone would have told me before I walked into that hotel room that my evening would be even worse than my morning, I would have scoffed at them and perhaps insultingly tossed some old grains of rice at them. The idea was too far-fetched, my misery too complete, for anything of the sort to be possible. Yet they would have been right, and shown the foresight of George Orwell, as my evening became a smoking ruin the instant I laid eyes upon the three corpses lying within a hotel room that was reserved under my name. Well, lying may not be the proper word here. They were in fact sitting, the three of them posed in a macabre diorama that indicated a sort of undead love triangle. A gypsy woman, who resembled a more ethnic Bret Butler, s