THE OXFORD (FUCKING OHIO) DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS: Summer, Sleep, and Other Sordid Things...

I have a sixth sense for drama. One would think that means I'm good at avoiding it.

Trouble is? I'm a fucking idiot.

- The Wombat, Ramblings of an Idle Insomniac,
" Drama, of Varying Scales," BOSTON, Mass., Aug. 17

Preach on, Brother Wombat.

Sums up the final days of Summer 2007 for a whole hell of a lot of folks, I think.

* * * *

I trust you. Besides, _____ says you're, like, completely dense and that I'd have to, like, be really obvious or something if I wanted to hook up. Like say 'Jason, I'm in your bed and naked and I want to fuck.'

- Woman No. 1, who crashed at my apartment,
In bed with me last week.

Kinda true, actually. Extremely hot 21-year-old, friend of an ex, who needed a place to stay until she moved back home. I don't use air conditioning, so we both slept pretty much completely naked.

And, nope, nothing happened. The only thing she asked for was for an extra pillow. She did, however, ask me to post something about it the next morning.

Just to piss off her ex-boyfriend. He apparently fuckin' hates me.

Heh.

* * * *

Three words.

Midget. Monkey. Wrestling.

- Local bar manager and friend,
discussing not-so-serious
ideas for school year promotions.

Trust me. You don't want to know.

But I will recommend the Orange Jell-O shots to local readers who know where I drink. Stiffer than a four-day-old corpse in a meat locker.

* * * *

No sweats? You don't own ANY sweats? Fuck it. I'll sleep in my underwear.

- Woman No. 2, who crashed at my apartment,
In bed with me last week.

Extremely hot 22-year-old, two nights later. And, nope, nothing happened. Just nice to sleep beside someone sometimes. I probably need to apologize for getting a little too touchy-feely, but, well, it's been ages since I last did the whole just curl up beside me so I can sleep thing. Not sure how those sorts of deals work these days...

* * * *

_______is like such a whore... does she, like, know about B___ and me last year?...They were, like, fighting, and he was, like, cute and I was, like, really trashed that night and...

- Local U. female undergraduate,
cell phone conversation,
outside of the ZenFo Pro Library, 7:42 AM ET

* * * *

When people suggest that men are more promiscuous than women, I always wonder how this is possible unless the men are having sex with each other.

- Liz, The LibraryTavern Wench,
"I'm Not a Mathematician, But...," Ohio, Aug. 14

There's a reason I'm throwing in this stellar quote from Liz, one of my favorite feminist colleagues and fellow bloggers, after the overheard mobile conversation quotation. I'll let readers draw their own conclusions about the nature of womanhood and internal gender conflict, human sexuality, and the complex, almost incomprehensible eccentricities of life in a sex-negative, secretive society...

Okay. That's way too deep for a Monday. Moving on...

* * * *

The only thing I learned as a sports reporter was how to hate the fanboy shit that goes along with men's college and professional sports. I love the competition, but hate the celebrity worship.

- The ZenFo Pro, to a guy who thought it
was so cool that I used to be a sportswriter.

First time in months I've had a conversation with anybody about my sportswriter days. Most folks are shocked to learn that, no, it wasn't a dream job or a chance to just talk about sports all day. It was hard, grueling work, keeping up with beats, tracking down leads, and meeting tight deadlines.

Don't miss it one bit.

* * * *

So. I guess we're not talking anymore, 'cause ____ says she saw you talking to a bunch of girls outside of M____& J_____'s Saturday night. And some tall girl kissed you. You are such a fucking bastard!

- Voicemail, one of five, from a very creepy woman.

I met the caller only last week, gave her my number, and told her to give me a call if she wanted to hang out sometime. Number now blocked.

Look, I'm almost 30. I'd like to say that the last time I played the talking to game was in high school, but I didn't do it then, either. I tend to hang out and socialize with more women than men, especially when I'm out on the town. I'm not too awfully interested in talking to a woman who obviously read way too much into me giving her my number.

And the girl who kissed me? Just a friend. She pecked my cheek as she and her boyfriend headed home for the night.

Drama.

Ugh.

- # # # -

OXFORD CONFIDENTIAL: I Never Learned to Play Lead as a Kid, But I Sure Figured Out How to Destroy Guitars

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- As a guitarist, I readily admit that I suck serious ass.

Always have. Always will.

I've sucked serious ass, proudly, since my first band, since the Unus Marx (short for Unusual Marxist - I was 15) days, since I figured out that I really have no need for that bottom E string, gave up on trying to play glam rock, and learned to love the good ol' Power Chord.

* * * *

I was 14 when I tore apart my old starter electric, one of those suckers with a cheap, flat tremolo bar and an amplified speaker built right into the body. My parents paid a whopping $50 for a guitar with one working pickup and rust on the tuning pins.

First, I pitched the goddamn whammy bar, gutted that three-inch speaker and replaced it with the severed head of a teddy bear.

Yes, a teddy bear head was my first guitar accessory. It seemed logical at the time, almost abstract art.

And then came the ritualistic mutilation, the tagging. I stripped off the shiny black finish with a belt sander, painted the thing primer gray. With a blank canvas, I used industrial spray paint and black lacquer to add texture.

A skull and crossbones carved here and there, with a dull chisel. BLACK FLAG and SOCIAL DISTORTION and NIRVANA and MELVINS written on with Sharpies, a huge anarchy symbol carved into the neck with a pocket knife.

That guitar even survived this one night in high school when my friends and I, in our infinite need to prove our machismo, decided to hang the damned thing from a tree, use it for target practice.

I played my first gig ever, in front of an audience of three girls and a Dead Head stoner, with that Chinese-made Silvertone, the .22 rounds still buried in the plywood body. The sound was horrible and self-loathing and implosive, a barbaric YAWP! for the waning years of my teens.

I realized, a while back, that I was never asked to join bands because some group of guys need a rhythm guitarist or bassist anyway. I was asked, usually, because, well, I used to be a big dude and I liked to drink, do all sorts of nasty drugs, and fight.

But how I loved that damned, piece o' shit guitar. Bullet holes and all.

* * * *

Some guitarists are all about the finesse, about the rhythm and meter and form. Even the best solos are, to some degree, nothing more than formulaic and repetitive exercises in scale. I've never bothered to learn a lead or solo part in my life - that's for musicians.

Me? I maul at the fretboard like a retarded orangutan, with just about as much charisma and skill as one would find in your average drive-by shooting. Strictly a chord strummer, a rhythm hunter in the darkness, tone-deaf and uncoordinated.

That original electric is long gone, the teddy bear head and neck and body and pickups carried to Heaven, as smoke from a burn barrel. And the drugs are gone, the unchecked juvenile rage subsided.

Despite my ass-sucking levels of musicianship, I still enjoy playing every once and a while.

* * * *

As the rain came down a few nights ago, as it poured off the roof and the box fans rattled in the window sills, I picked up my old acoustic, this shitty Korean 3/4 size I've owned for more than a decade.

When that old Silvertone died, the Korean acoustic became the eldest son, left the farm with me, transversed the United States. Given what the acoustic's been through, I'd have to say that Koreans make some pretty durable cheap guitars.

It's been spit on by two fiancees, puked on and threatened by numerous women, borrowed by skinhead drug dealers and black strippers and roommates and recovering addicts, fondled by poets and former prostitutes and soldiers and migrant laborers, dropped in the Pacific from a fishing trawler.

I like durable guitars. They live forever and, well, tell better stories than I do.

* * * *

I sat on a stool in my apartment, that folding two-foot ladder I call a stool, and I played classic punk songs, rebellious American folk songs, outlaw country - unplugged and barely in tune.

The Misfits' Bullet. Social D.'s Bad Luck and Story of My Life. John Anderson's Seminole Wind. Hank Williams' Angel of Death and Lefty Frizzell's Long Black Veil. Even Tom Waits' Jockey Full of Bourbon.

Not exactly covers. More like abstract, interpretive art. The kind of art one makes in spite of their humanity, when they're all alone and can get away with it.

Spontaneous and humorous and askew and downright perverse. Like taking a shit and seeing the face of the Virgin Mary in a turd.

And I played like I always have, like a retarded orangutan, with just about as much charisma and skill as one would find in your average drive-by shooting. I tried to sing, in that old gravelly baritone, the one I used to use when, well, I thought I could actually sing like a rock star.

And the neighbors above me stomped on the floor. And someone yelled from outside in the rain.

And I just wished I still had that old bullet-ridden carcass of a guitar, just to plug it in, to just bang away with blunt force, just to piss off the neighbors.

- # # # -

A PUBLIC SERVICE MESSAGE: Welcome to the Higher Education Underground, Kids.It Cares Less about High School Cheerleading Stories Than I Do.

BACK TO SCHOOL SPECIAL!

FAR BEHIND (LIVE) [VIDEO]
Social Distortion
Greatest Hits
(Time Bomb, 2007)
@ The 2007 KROQ Weenie Roast,
A Southern California Tradition

Mike Ness is the only punk legend I've ever met who's left me completely speechless. Seriously. Like a giddy schoolgirl. Very embarrassing.

But I quite literally lived off of the Somewhere Between Heaven and Hell and Prison Bound albums when I was a dumb teenager myself. Who can blame me?

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- The 18-year-old woman tried her best to stare me down, to win the contest of wills, to use every bit of the so-called sophistication she'd learned as, like, an All - Whatever cheer squad captain at Whogivesafuck Memorial High School.

With one hand wrapped around her bottle of cheap beer and the other hand on her hip, the teenager tried to convince me that I had no right to break up her group's impromptu parking lot beerfest, that it was none of my business, really, and that I needed to just chill out.

Her guy friends knew better. The older, supposedly more mature guys who'd been trying to get a group of four first-year female students intoxicated enough to just chill out bailed. They drove off the moment they saw me step out of the back door of my library, as soon as they heard my cowboy boots clacking against the pavement towards them.

Their taillights were just out of sight as I reached the remaining female members of the party. One girl tossed her beer bottle, sending glass everywhere, and two dropped them to their side, as if I were both stupid and blind.

All first-year students. Classes haven't even started yet, and already they're facing alcohol violations. One phone call, and they're telling their story to some seriously overworked, underpaid cops.

Seriously, I'm starting to think 18-year-olds are getting dumber with each passing generation. To be fair, I'm not talking about all 18-year-olds. I'm talking about some 18-year-olds. But those somes seem to be overtaking the rest.

Still, I'm starting to think wealthy, white and suburban really should be considered a form of cultural retardation.

* * * *

It's 11 o'clock at night, a Friday. I just happened to swing by, to check on the overnight repair of an HVAC unit. I'd gone into my office, the last man standing in a four-story library, waited for an update from the powers that be on the Graveyard Shift (the repair had to be rescheduled, according to the technician, because of overtime restrictions).

I really just wanted to go out myself, have a few drinks with some friends, to have a good time before Uptown Oxford once again reverts into Club Booze-N-Fuck. And, well, it felt so wrong not to give out my only second chance of the year, for doing something fucking batshit outside of my library.

I gave the young women a lecture on responsibility and on how utterly stupid it is for young women, in this town, to sneak off to a dark corner of a parking lot with older guys they'd just met, older guys offering up lots of free beer. I also promised them that I wouldn't call the cops if they agreed to sweep up the broken glass.

If the cops came by while they were cleaning, I'd explain that, yeah, they knew they were being stupid, and, yeah, these three young women in designer clothes were pushing brooms to make up for it.

Three of the women, the ones who'd tried to dispose of their illegal brewskis before I arrived, agreed to the deal instantly. Two of the women were on scholarships, and the other's parents were still in town.

But this one woman wasn't going anywhere, wouldn't budge. The Cheerleader.

The whole time I was talking, she held onto that beer for dear life, rolled her eyes, and smoked Parliament Ultra Lights. After I'd pitched what almost everyone seemed to think was a rather square deal, after her newfound dorm friends had agreed to manual labor in exchange for First-Year Freedom, the woman went ballistic.

Well, rah-rah. And all of that shit.

Obviously, I had no authority to make such a deal, she claimed. I was a stupid library employee who just wanted to ruin their last weekend of freedom before they became bona fide Local U. students.

And, she reminded me, her parents paid good money for her to go to school, paid my salary with their taxes, and she could get me fired if she wanted...

"Fired? I don't think you really understand how this whole "gettin' caught for underage drinking" thing works, chica."

* * * *

I ended the war of wills with one very manipulative, downright sinister outflanking maneuver.

"Either you all clean, or the deal's off, ladies. I'm trying to be reasonable. I hate to be a bitch, but I think you all had better chat before I lose my patience."

I walked back towards my library's loading dock, lit a cigarette, and pulled out my cell phone. I opened it up, dialed, put the Speakerphone volume up as loud as it could go, hit the Send button.

Ring. Ring. Ring.

Ms. Pom-Pom yelled for me to hang up. She emptied her bottle and tossed it softly into the grass nearby.

Ring. Ring. Ring.

The woman kept yelling. All four women started picking up the broken glass.

Click.

* * * *

"Hi sexy! Where ya at?"

"Oxford. Got stuck at the office."

"Bullshit. I figured you weren't coming down to Newport. Is she hot?"

"Um, no. Hey. Did you ever drink in the _____ Lot when you were a student here? I just ran into - "

"Who the fuck would be stupid enough to drink in that parking lot? God, that's like asking to get raped."

I finished the call, looked over at the young women. They'd all stopped to listen. The voice on the other end, of course, wasn't the local police dispatcher. And a female friend, a Local U. alum, delivered the goods without even knowing she was doing it.

In information science, this may best be described as the strategic deployment of outside, indirect disinformation into an information ecosystem. Or, to put it another way, I'm smarter than a first-year college student.

The deck was stacked from the moment I made the offer. One choice, however, offered the opportunity for all players to walk away from the table, unharmed.

I just made sure the choice I preferred was the only one left for anyone to logically choose.

* * * *

I went to my truck, pulled a broom and dustpan from the bed, and gave it to one of the women.

I don't think I've ever seen that parking lot so glass-free before. They picked it clean. And no cops rolled by, so there was no need to have to defend my less-the-traditional response to the problem of underage binge drinking.

Not one of them complained after that.

I guess cleaning up a little bit of broken glass may be humbling, but it can, hopefully, be a good introduction into the world of the Higher Education Underground.

* * * *

I'm hoping the women figured out that, given the noise from the frat parties across the street, the fact that no cruisers rolled by the lot for an hour, and the dark, hidden corner their older guy friends had chosen, any one of them could've ended up, possibly, a victim of sexual assault.

Oxford Fucking Ohio doesn't need anymore sexual assault victims. It doesn't need older undergraduate guys, legally able to purchase alcohol, buying 18-year-old women booze in some dark corner in an attempt to get laid, by either force or drunken coercion. We don't need any more pointless stupidity, or women who binge-drink to the point that they piss themselves, or young men who place their cocks before their honor.

Maybe those guys were just trying to find a nice, quiet place to talk and have a few beers, with some very nice young women, where no one could distract them. And maybe it was unfair, downright cruel, of me to make a group of women clean up broken beer bottles.

And maybe I'm really Coco the Waltzing Chimpanzee, too.

Trust me. I've worked around college students long enough to realize that, well, if a dude takes off running at the sight of someone who even resembles an authority figure, it usually means something more than that. Guy friends don't drive off and leave four women, four women new to a strange, unsafe area, alone in a parking lot.

* * * *

So, welcome back, Local U. folks. Welcome back, and be fucking safe for me, will ya? I know you're gonna drink, get blasted every once and a while, even hook up with people I wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole. You're gonna make stupid choices, fall asleep in classes, maybe even flunk out or fall in love.

But, well, be safe. And be good to one another.

Surviving the undergraduate experience means just that.

And, well, drink your drugs, don't do milk, and...

Wait.

That doesn't sound right, does it?

- # # # -

SEX, BLOGS, AND DRAMA: My Libido and I Really Need to Have a Serious Talk One Day...

- ACT I -

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- Watching drunk college students fuck in public is not very entertaining. Startling, but not entertaining.

The windows were down as I walked by the car, a little sports car that I assumed, given the Greek sorority letters in the back glass, belonged to the female participant.

A white male ass, whiter than mine, bounced up and down inside, male grunts and female sighs and Oh Gods and Fuck yeses.

"I'm coming! Shit!"

In the time it took me to first notice the college romp, walk past, and get almost out of earshot, the whole thing was over.

I had to bite my tongue, had to keep from turning around, from being tempted to try to put a face to the white ass.

"A new speed record," I said to myself.

As I climbed into my truck, less than 10 feet away from the vehicular love nest, I looked back. The guy had pulled himself out of the tiny little car, was down to one lone flip-flop for his feet and an inside-out shirt across his back.

Didn't know the guy. Thank God.

But I did, however, recognize the young woman.

She climbed out of the car, too, gave the guy one of those staged, I'll call you embraces, and then scurried off into an alley to continue adjusting the remnants of her skirt.

"Oh for fuck's sake. If you're gonna crashfuck, at least get something out of it!"

Crashfuck. As in, find some random unlocked car, climb in, and get busy. These sorts of PDA fetishes are supposed to be executed quickly - but not that quickly. It's the adrenaline rush that goes along with the possibility of getting caught. Adds to the excitement, the drama, the sheer eroticism.

Tried it myself when I was younger. Still prefer the simplicity of the hood of my truck. At least, then, all of the heavens can watch, can judge.

I only thought I shared my unsolicited criticism with myself, quietly.

Nope. Said it out loud, through my pickup's open window, 10 feet from the uni-sandaled Quick Dick.

Hit the gas. Squealed the tires, in fact. At two in the morning, 100 feet from the police station.

And I was back to my apartment in less time than it took Mr. Missing Flip-Flop to realize that he'd risked jail time for a rather pointless ejaculation exercise.

I feel sorry for the young woman.

Especially for having the misfortune of being spotted, by a certain blogger, in Oxford Fucking Ohio.

- ACT II -

Which, while on the subject of friends and lovers, bizarre sexual fetishes, the overlap between offline and online lives, and other normal, everyday clusterfucks in the world of The Zenformation Professional...

For the first time ever, I have four very different women (three former lovers and one female friend) pissed off at me, simultaneously, for - Gasp! - either posting or not posting certain events in my sexual history, about not sharing certain intimate details.

Great way to check up on me, this ol' blog. Or so some folks think.

For the first time ever, I've had women who used to be very good friends, two very different pairs of women in two very different American cities, fight over me - and this stupid blog.

Long story. I've spent days trying to figure a way around the fact that all four women are going to read whatever I post, each one expecting me to trash the other, each pair just now learning that I'm experiencing, er, double the so-called fun.

And I'm NOT flattered. I'm NOT amused. And I'm so far from anything even remotely resembling pride, arrogance, or other stereotypically male emotional responses to such things that it's almost comical.

I am, however, annoyed, angry, and fed up.

I fucking hate pointless displays of melodrama, hate worthless petty bickering, and I hate being objectified down to nothing more than an excuse for friends to fight.

* * * *

In GirlFight No. 1:

An ex, an adult entertainer with whom I had an open relationship, just figured out that one of the women I've recently posted about just happens to be a former best friend of hers.

This woman was on the ex-lover's so-called "safe list" when we were together, a friend of hers that she would've had no problems (so she said) with me sleeping with in the event that I suddenly felt the need to exercise the my end of the open relationship. She had the other boyfriend, plus a few women to satisfy that side of her bisexuality.

And occasionally, there were a few extra women in my bed, friends of hers, to satisfy her bisexuality - just to set the record straight. I'm no boy scout. I tried to have some fun with it. But I still don't get why, exactly, heterosexual guys get so worked up about threesomes and foursomes and sex with multiple women at once. Damned tiring.

Why one of her best friends, you ask?

Well... this ex was convinced that I'd eventually cheat on her with a Local U. student, catch one of those dick-rotting STIs that undergrads tend to carry like badges of fucking honor, was convinced that I'd eventually get tired of the openness. And she had another boyfriend and other lovers, so why shouldn't I have someone to fuck on the other guy's weekends?

But here's the thing. I didn't want to continue the open relationship. I wanted to move on. And the best friend was cleaning up her shit after years of self-abuse. Neither of us wanted, necessarily, to be on the "safe-list." She even turned down a threesome with a certain whiny fuckhead librarian from Ohio.

So we hung out, once, in Santa Monica. I left it off the blog, because, well, for a woman who thought I was a whiny fuckhead, and a guy who thought the woman was a narcissistic skank, we did seem to have a lot in common. Both former addicts, both into zombie movies, and both fans of obscure 80s cartoons. We spent a whole afternoon...talking.

And then she flew into Cincinnati one weekend, after the ex and I broke things off.

And she ended up staying for a whole week.

And free of the dreaded "safe-list," we both went a little crazy. And we broke my last headboard, almost got arrested for lewd behavior in public, and we utterly destroyed the hood of some poor Trustafarian undergrad's Hummer. I cooked these amazing Vegan dishes, she made me do Yoga with her in the mornings (a born-again morning person, like myself.)

And we left it at that.

And again, I didn't blog about it. Instead, I blogged about (I think) politics and all sorts of things. And she left cute little comments anonymously, posted from my laptop, an inside joke. She even suggested that I date other bloggers...

Years pass.

And then, sometime last week, the two ex-lovers of mine accidentally ended up in the same little diner in Ventura. One was wearing a Local U. sports tee shirt that I'd bought her. The other went ballistic, threw a glass of wine, and, according to witnesses, started yelling something about...

Lee Blanchard. A fucking character from a fucking James Ellroy novel. And from a blog post.

I now understand the comparison, having finally finished reading The Black Dahlia. Trust me. Partly flattering, but, well, mostly not.

Small world.

* * * *

And in GirlFight No. 2:

Two college roommates from a certain Great Basin University were having their final post-graduation, off-to-the-real-world party, in good ol' Sin City, before their lease expired.

One of the women, the baby sister of an ex from my own undergrad days, was apparently drinking heavier than the rest of the folks at the small get-together, drinking and completely ignoring her best friend and roommate.

The roommate, upset that her best friend in the whole world was ignoring her, pulled my ex's baby sister aside. She figured that it was a guy, or just post-college depression, or...

It was, in fact, a guy.

"Did you fuck Jason ________ when you were in Indianapolis at that fucking conference?"

The roommate, from what my Colorado ex tells me, denied it at first, then copped to it when her best friend, a woman I've known since she was 15, threatened to call me.

For two years, I'd assumed that, well, when _____ and I not-so-accidentally happened to be in the same hotel in Downtown Indy, then accidentally ended up drinking too much wine and dancing a little too slow and close...

Well.

____ had said she would tell her, be honest about it. And I believed her. I actually was naive enough, at 27, to believe a 21-year-old when she told me that she'd take care of breaking it to her best friend in the whole wide world.

______ never did it, figured she'd let a silly one-weekend thing go, one of those don't ask, don't tell moments for the good of both of us. But her best friend was my ex's baby sister, my almost sister-in-law. I held up my end of the post-fling damage control, told my ex about it, just in case baby sister needed some support, a surprisingly neutral party.

My ex, herself struggling to stay out of harm's way, apparently told her mother in confidence.

Dear ol' sexually-liberated Madre then, at the party, made a comment about how she and I had had dinner in Cincinnati a few weeks ago, how she was surprised at how well her youngest daughter had maturely accepted the fact that the boy she'd once had a crush on had slept with her best friend in the whole wide world.

Everyone but Baby Girl knew.

The result?

A very nasty public shouting match. Hair, yes, pulled. One woman has a black eye, the other required stitches.

And apparently, it's all my fault.

If it'll stop the stupidity, then, well, I'll take the full blame. Hell, at this point, I'll cop to just about anything.

- ACT III -

Back in Oxford, I was feeling like a man out of time, the universe having cast me out unto the plane of Bad Fucking Timing.

As I was walking back to my pickup from the Uptown clubs and bars, on the last weekend before the kiddies arrived back from their summer vacations, I was in anything but what most folks would consider a festive mood.

I was brooding. Brooding over things that I cannot change, perceptions I cannot change...

"One day, my libido and I are gonna have a nice, long talk. Might be time for a divorce."

And then I see a bare white ass bouncing up and down inside of a car, the faint sounds of probably the quickest quickie in Ohio undergrad history.

And I laughed the moment I realized who the woman was, didn't even think about why.

* * * *

I started writing the first part of this blog post in the truck, mentally, mapping out ways to tell a true story, a common but sorta uncommon sight here in Oxford Fucking Ohio. And, at the same time, I was trying to figure out creative ways to hide a person's identity within the narrative.

I write the first draft on the ol' laptop. _______ becomes the woman and some probably very embarrassed guy becomes Mr. Missing Flip-Flop. I take out as many physical references as possible, without cutting into the meat of the story, to specific alleys, nearby businesses, and even the make of the sports car.

And as I get ready to hit that Publish Post button, my brain freezes up. My fingers twitch.

"Dude, why the fuck are you blogging about seeing to drunken undergrads crashfucking in some stranger's car? Man, you've got all of this drama surrounding you, eating your goddamn soul with every goddamn angry voicemail, text message, and IM. You're even screening your work calls. Are you that much of a goddamn pussy?

"Are you too afraid to say what you really need to say? Isn't that the point of a blog?"

So I start adding a center to the post, something completely unrelated, stream - of - consciousness sutras and space cadet librarian fluff. I wanted, in the event that the woman from the car should read this, to let her know that there's no way in hell I could blame her for hooking up with...

And it hits me, why I found the whole drunken car sex thing both humorous and tragic.

I'm That Woman. And Mr. Missing Flip-Flop. All rolled into one, with additional fuck-ups, mistakes, flings, and bad fucking luck thrown in for good measure by Satan himself.

John Fucking Milton ain't got shit on me - I built my own Hell with only my brain, my penis, and a keyboard, once or twice a week, on average.

And I don't have to wait for somebody else to gossip about it, to load it onto a MurdockSpace page, to add the photos to a Facebook account.

I'll end up, regardless, doing it myself.

Tragic, but funny.

- # # # -

BOXING AWAY A FEW MOMENTS OF A SATURDAY: How to Get Your Ass Kicked and Love Humanity at the Same Time

Another glorious chapter of Klingon history. Tell me, do they still sing songs of the great Tribble hunt?

- Odo [Rene Auberjonois]
From the episode "Trails and Tribble-ations,"
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, 1996

HAMILTON, Ohio (ZP) -- The sound of Mexican Spanish and playing children and giggling cholas rang throughout my pounding skull as my knees buckled, my dancing done for the day.

Gossip about some female lead in a telenovela, Destilando Amor, from a group of chirping young women, sang through my body with every punch that made contact, with every point my opponent took from me.

Whump. Whump.

"Oscar" landed two solid right jabs into the headgear, enough to wobble the brain within my skull, enough to start spinning the world.

I easily blocked the third punch, but my almost child-like attempt at a comeback, a series of left crosses and right-left jabs, a last-ditch right hook, signaled the end.

My out-of-shape, winded body gave up after a phantom left popped the mouthguard halfway across the yard, a simple reminder that the summer's woes had left me nothing more than a shitbag full of sloth.

The skin-sheering heat and humidity choked me as I spun, my last view as a boxer the urban decay of a migrant neighborhood in east Hamilton, a few miles away from Pershing Avenue.

* * * *

Pershing, as in ol' General Black Jack himself, the legendary U.S. military commander during the First World War, savior of Europe.

A man better known, in Mexico and the Southwestern United States, as the Big Bad Gringo who'd once been dumb enough to pursue Pancho Villa, the Mexican legend, across the border, back in 1916.

As the Mexican freedom fighters triumphed in the only successful military attack on the continental States in the 20th Century, yet another Gringo had failed to keep a Chicano from winning a fight.

* * * *

I could've, possibly, made one last stand, could've played Davy Fucking Crockett against the one-one-two-one barrage of Santa Ana punches, but the sight of a four-year-old girl slapping the dirt with both hands, counting me out as I tried to get back to my feet, her face smeared with ice cream, finally brought the sparring match to a close.

Two and a half rounds against a welterweight Mexicano, a born citizen of the Estados Unidos, son of an Illegal Migrante Father and a Texan Mother.

The Rio Grande Kid, not even old enough to vote but counting down the weeks until his military enlistment, waiting to build a future for himself and his immigrant girlfriend, the teenage mother of that little chica, had KOed his big brother's former sparring partner.

* * * *

Hard to believe there are dumbass peckerwoods throughout Butler County, self-righteous rednecks throughout the U.S., who think "Oscar" and his young family don't belong in this country.

No one asks my opponent where he was born, if he's a U.S. citizen by birth - every job the kid's had, he's had to prove his birthright based solely on the fact that his skin is brown and he speaks Spanish.

Why aren't these assholes talking about building a fence along the Canadian border? I mean, we've had friggin' terrorists sneak across that side of North America.

Hell, we had a U.S. citizen carrying a highly contagious strain of friggin' tuberculosis fly into Canada, then drive on over, Border Patrol failing to detain him because, well, he was coming in from Canada.

Oh yeah. The majority of Canadians have white skin and speak English.

And I'm sure that fueled some rage inside him, the anger of any teenage father told that the mother of his child doesn't have the skills to be a U.S. citizen, a woman who wants to open a beauty salon one day, who told me he once lost his temper at a Germanic shopping mall clerk in Colerain for calling his daughter illegal, even though she's just as Ohio as the next kid born in this state.

With that much pent-up fury, I'm lucky my head stayed attached to my body during the bout. Fortunately for me, "Oscar" is a gentle soul, a true boxing artist and gentleman.

A good fighter turns rage into fuel, never wastes that fuel on something as stupid as uncontrolled violence.

Especially on an innocent older guy, a friggin' librarian with a blind spot on his right, with lead footwork and who drops his guard to talk smack.

Why waste the energy?

* * * *

No permanent damage.

I stayed on the ground, tossed off the gloves, and stared at a convoy of ants dragging the carcass of a beetle through the dust. Oceans of sweat poured from my head, turning the convoy's path into a muddy trap.

I could feel my left hand swelling, the knuckles gnarling up from my miserable showing. I spat pink, salty saliva - no loosened teeth but a few open wounds bleeding behind the molars. And, though my nose cartilage was intact, untouched in fact, I was certain that if we'd been sparring without headgear I would've been on my way to the emergency room.

* * * *

To be quite honest, I don't think I've ever enjoyed getting my ass kicked so much in my entire life.

Some lessons are best relearned, textbook free, in a notoriously bad neighborhood in the middle of goddamn nowhere Ohio.

And sometimes, the only way to relearn what makes a man a man is to play Black Jack Pershing to another's Pancho Villa, to swing for flesh and gasp for breath as one makes contact with nothing, to hit the dirt like a comic strip Palooka and accept that the world sometimes beats a man down just to teach that man how to get back onto his feet.

Oscar's girl brought me a bag of frozen mixed vegetables. For the hands. And a handful of Motrin and iced tea, as requested, for everything else. In broken English, the Indio-featured teen, large hoop earrings swinging behind jet-black Indio hair, told me that I fight good, fight good.

She took the victor his cold glass of sweet tea, helped him out of his gloves and tape and wraps, gave the victor his victory kiss long and hard. The winner's daughter sat in the dirt next to me, singing songs in gibberish, in that universal language only other little girls can understand.

"I think ya'll are gonna be alright, kiddo."

The child doesn't speak English, save for a few phrases picked up from Sesame Street and Dora the Explorer and other kids' TV shows. She cocked her head, giggled, and went back to tormenting the ants beneath a scorching sun.

* * * *

And I think I'm gonna be alright, too, actually.

It's good for the soul, really, to lose some fights. Reminds a person of the importance of being alive, of watching the sun rise over the horizon, of the sheer positive energy that lights up across the cosmos like fireflies in a jar.

So what if I ended up spitting out a chunk of filling from my teeth a few hours later? Or if my already pulled groin feels worse, or if my south paw aches from the work my right should've done? And who cares about a damned headache, a jarred sense of self?

I am alive.

And if the body does not do fully as much as the soul? Walt Whitman once asked, And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?

Hell.

If ol' Pershing hadn't gotten his ass handed to him in Mexico, that White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant illusion of the United States would be just about as American as Kaiser Wilhelm II.

- # # # -

SEX, LIES, & MISTAKEN TATTOOS: Waking Up (Next to the Wrong Person) is So Hard to Do...

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- So... ahem.

Where do I even begin?

When I fuck up, I fuck up.

* * * *

Last Saturday, I awoke to my first weekend sunrise back in Oxford Fucking Ohio.

Fresh from vacation, rested, feeling like my old, youthful self - cockhard reckless, in fact - the way I used to feel before the librarian days.

The first thing I noticed, opening my eyes, was the four-alarm hangover. And then came the fuzzy memory, the conscious awareness of cottonmouth and the lingering taste of jello shots 'til Last Call.

It's been a while since I just let loose on the ol' college town, in any one-horse town for that matter, east of the Mississippi. Out west, despite ending a relationship, I realized that, well, I'm still under 30, still in my prime, and, well, I really need to just let work stay at work, chill out a bit.

Almost all of my furniture shipped off to the new apartment, everything save for the bed and a lamp and a desk, the lack of any kind of window covering lit up my bedroom like a thousand fireworks. The room glowed yellow and hot, the sounds of High Street traffic and bustling car show attendees echoing off the bare walls and the freshly puttied nail holes.

Despite the slight headache, there seemed to be no harm done. The world had still spun on its axis, the sun still ready and willing to bitchslap the drunkenness right out of me.

And then I stretched.

As soon as I felt the naked body in bed next to me, I knew I'd done something very, very stupid.

A quick lift of a sheet, a hand slid carefully along the mattress, confirmed the sex part.

That, and the three polyurethane condoms hanging off the lamp.

* * * *

A quick pick of the alcohol-impaired brain revealed that there were four possible suspects.

No. 1 , a woman I'd been sorta seeing before I'd gotten ill, a woman who'd just broken up with the guy she'd been seeing after I went AWOL. I remembered that I'd spent four or five hours hanging out with her, taking shots, and chatting it up.

But she probably knows better. And, nope, no latex allergy.

Suspect No. 2, a waitress from a restaurant I frequent for lunch. I'd run into her on my way to a bar, gave her my number. Once, she and I almost had an oops experience, the time I gave her a ride back to her apartment and we sorta started slow dancing. Every time she went through a nasty break-up, she turned extra flirty, laid it on so thick that Ray Charles could spot her interest from outer space.

Checked the cell phone. No random text messages, no Dayton area code in the recent calls list. So... No. 2 became a long shot.

No. 3? A recent high school graduate who, while taking a smoke break from the non-smoking pubs, gave me a hug, one of those drunken gropes that many younger women think conveys some sort of sexuality. I used to tutor her best friend, and she, like so many 18-year-olds right before college, was both heavily intoxicated and overly flirtatious.

Hell, there's not enough booze in the world for me to accidentally go home with someone that young and inexperienced. I may be a bastard, at times, but I'm not a total fucking bastard. Seriously. I'm too old to fake an orgasm while worrying about permanently scarring some fragile, naive ego.

The fourth candidate, a dead-ringer for Suspect No. 1, physically, was a stretch. I almost laughed out loud for even considering it. At some point, well past legal and physical sobriety limits, I thought I'd run into a sorta ex of mine from nearby Hamilton, a woman with a kid, an ex-con boyfriend, and more than a few problems with Adderall and... er ... sanity.

"Pfft. Nah. I'm not that stupid."

My imagination had gone apeshit, too, because I remembered talking to her, outside of my apartment, inviting her in to keep her histrionics out of plain view of the old neighbors and...

"Tequila's playing tricks on ya, Dude. "Chase" lives in Kentucky. It's been more than a year.

"And she's, like, married now."

I finally gave up on the guessing game, rolled over, gingerly, to try to find some answers. I carefully lifted the arm draped across me, untangled my legs from hers, eased my thigh from beneath her hips.

* * * *

Mystery Woman had scored both pillows, thus explaining at least the physical pain in my neck. Her face was partially wedged between the two, raven hair obscuring the remainder of her exposed face.

The list of suspects was, however, cut in half.

No teenagers and no waitress. A wonderful relief.

Gingerly, I parted the hair on the woman's face, hoping that I'd find some unknown variable, some fifth candidate.

Nope.

I checked for ink. Both remaining suspects sport visible tattoos of the same type of reptile, but only one has matching artwork, by the same skin artist, on her lower back.

"Oh fuck. I know that tramp stamp."

With one peak beneath the sheets, my heart collapsed, an emotional aneurysm tearing through my gut, drunken one-night shame making the whole thing a ménage à trois.

"Aw, goddammit."

Nothing screams a Grade-A Fuck-Up quite like waking up next to a psychotic (meds and all) woman, almost two years between conversations, recently married to the ex-con father of her child.

The only relief?

As I slowly pieced together the remnants of the previous night, I remembered a conversation about their open marriage, the fact that their relationship was Jerry Springer perfect in its layers of all sorts of deviancy.

At least I won't have to worry about going toe-to-toe with a guy with five years of prison under his belt.

* * * *

I knew returning to Ohio would be difficult. I knew I'd be depressed for a week or so, bummed out by the fact that my family's on the other side of the country, the whole "Tonya" thing ending, even the lack of, well, diversified scenery.

I even knew getting back into the grind at work would help feed into my self-wallowing, the lingering demons that haunt the back of my brain, voices that whisper sweet nothings about my need to, possibly, get the fuck out of Oxford Fucking Ohio.

I knew I'd, sure, go on a bender, drink a bit more than usual, enjoy the last vestiges of undergrad-free summer in this college town. I figured I'd slip up, maybe end up accidentally going home with a female friend one night, figured the sense of loneliness and isolation would drive me, momentarily, into the arms of some local 20-something, home for the summer, or some grad student, or possibly even some female faculty member.

But I never, ever thought I'd fuck up like this.

I haven't done something this damned stupid in at least 10 years, since I proposed to my ex-fiancee, the cokehead stripper, while on a bender in 1997.

As soon as I realized who I was sleeping beside me, I quietly slipped out of my own bed, tip-toed across my near-empty bedroom, and puked into a landlord-ready sink.

And jello shots ain't pretty at nine in the morning. There was some hint of Jager in there, too.

* * * *

Rather than link to the half-dozen or so posts I wrote in 2005 and 2006 about my experiences with one of Hamilton Fucking Ohio's Finest, I figure I'll just sum my previous experiences with "Chase" in a few lines:

I hung out with Chase's brother a while back, my last attempt to regain my punker chops, to form a hardcore band. I liked Chase. Chase liked me.

Chase neglected to tell me, well, that she sorta had a kid and the baby's daddy (her new groom) was in jail. She also sorta, kinda forgot to tell me that her Suicide Girl thing wasn't an act (she's on five doctor-prescribed medications) or that she had just a tiny substance abuse problem (Speed and Pot. Great combo.)

Boy tries breaking it off gently. Boy gets blamed for girl's problems by mutual friends. Boy remembers why he quit playing in hardcore bands. Girl then, well, quasi-stalks boy, because boy used to date adult video performer and girl wants to jump her. Boy dodges girl for more than a year, even quits shopping in Hamilton when girl follows boy into store, forgetting her toddler in her car in the middle of summer...

Dear Lord.

Honestly, I don't know what else to write. I could go on, but I'd probably just have to puke again...

* * * *

After vomiting, I cooked up my first post-hookup escape in almost a decade, an escape from my own apartment, the librarian on the run from the psychotic aspiring writer/part-time college student/full-time stripper from Kentucky.

My plan was simple. Keep on moving out of the old apartment, and pray that she'd leave before while I was over at the new place unpacking. Simple, clean, efficient.

I don't think I've loaded so many boxes of clothes, dishes, toiletries, or anything else, so quickly and quietly in my entire life. Almost every remaining box in my old apartment's living room was out the door and into the back of the truck in under an hour.

I left a note on the bed, right next to her, explaining that I had to be out of my apartment by the end of the day (a lie), would be back late that night, (a bold-faced lie) and that I enjoyed seeing her again (holy hell, I used to be so good at this when I was 19.)

Unloaded the boxes slowly, went for coffee, even checked out every vegetable stand alongside every road in Oxford.

Two hours. In two hours' time, she should've been gone, out the door, back towards the ex-con hubby and the Kentucky border.

* * * *

I waited an extra hour.

As opened the door to my apartment, I caught the silhouette of a woman, pulling on her tight skinny jeans.

Aw, Goddammit.

"Chase" had waited. She wanted to talk.

She wanted me to know that the night before had been a huge mistake.

That was true.

She also claimed that, somehow, my lifeforce had drawn her up to a friend's bachelorette party, that I seduced her at the Circle K with black magic, and that I'd taken advantage of her accidental Xanax overdose, told her how much like Winona Ryder she looked to get in her pants, and that I'd somehow used tarot cards to bewitch her.

Aside from the fact that, well, she's addicted to Xanax and does, indeed, look exactly like Beetle Juice era Winona, the rest is completely batshit.

She even pointed out how disgusted she was with herself, not for going home with an almost-blacked-out drunk dude who'd once threatened her with a restraining order, but for having sex with a guy who has also slept with fuckin' Mexicans and black bitches.

Let me say, for the record, that I plan on shooting myself in the face if I ever get so drunk, so stupid, as to go home with a psychotic White Supremacist Wiccan Winona Clone ever again.

Ironically, the numerous jello shots that led to such a revelation were made by a Mexican-American bartender buddy of mine.

* * * *

Despite my supposed unwanted seduction, my alluring chi or whatever else she could could pin on me, "Chase" wanted to go to breakfast. More accurately, she wanted me to take her to breakfast, to pick up the tab, payment for my sins.

And we talked about all sorts of things, important things, like the latest issue of Cosmo and her breast implants, how her husband was almost off the probationary phase of his sentence, how her mother was nailed for dealing meth, how she didn't regret having sex with me because I've had sex with famous people before and...

Did I mention that I plan to go all Ernest Hemingway, plan to suck on buckshot, should I ever, ever do something this stupid again???

... And she even mentioned that we wouldn't be able to hang out anymore once she moved to Nevada to become a famous showgirl.

As "Chase" chattered away on the benches outside Bagel and Deli, knee tucked under her chin, staring off into space, I only paid attention to one phrase.

Moving to Nevada.

Thank you, all that is Holy in the Goddamn Universe.

- # # # -

NOTE - For some reason, I missed an edit earlier. "Chase" is moving to Nevada, not Florida. Male library colleagues in the Sunshine State can breathe easy. Clark County? Sorry. You're fucked.