JOHNNY REB ONLY SINGS DIXIE FROM THE GRAVE: The Confederate Dead Still Haunt Virginia's Capital, But Nobody in Richmond Seems to Notice

NOTE: This is the first of several posts intended for last week, but, well, rural Southside Virginia ain't exactly a Public Wi-Fi kinda place. - Jason

RICHMOND, Va. (ZP) -- Two women turned the corner of 12^th Street, began heading east down Clay Street, towards the Medical College of Virginia Hospital parking garage.

The pair stopped at the front steps of the White House of the Confederacy, dug into their respective purses for cell phones and cigarettes, chatting away a beautiful Downtown afternoon.

One woman was an African immigrant, her outfit placing her country of origin somewhere along the Atlantic coast between Senegal and Ghana. Her accent was thick and pronounced as she spoke, English clearly her second or third language.

The other, a light-skinned black woman, clearly a lifelong U.S. citizen with her thick Piedmont accent, had with her a little girl, a small child who looked exactly like Norman Rockwell's famous portrait of Ruby Bridges, the little girl who U.S. Marshals had to escort to her first day of integrated Kindergarten in 1960s New Orleans.

The two women briskly laughed and bantered and swapped stories. I could hear every high-pitched exclamation of joy and shock, every sigh of the workday grind.

I leaned against an anchor of the C.S.S. Virginia, the famous long-gone ironclad, an outdoor exhibit at the entrance to the Museum of the Confederacy, less than 30 feet away.

I lit another cigarette and listened as the pair's chatter welcomed the afternoon rush hour.

* * * *

I looked back at the museum's entrance, blowing smoke from my nose as the sounds of cityscape filled my brain with all sorts of pleasant memories.

My grandmother and sister were still perched on a park bench near the memorial garden, my father was still inside wandering the exhibits, and my cousin from Louisiana was snapping tourist-perfect pictures of just about everything in sight.

I looked back down Clay Street, back towards the heart of the onetime Capital City of the Confederate States of America.

The rest of the 21^st century had already joined the women on the sidewalks and streets, and the rogue government's executive mansion melted into a sea of today's Richmonders.

A group of Mexican men, construction workers, strolled the workingman's stroll back towards the parking garage, lunch boxes swaying at the ends of tired brown arms. A group of Korean and Chinese medical students hurried towards North 10th Street, towards their momentary freedom from residencies and hospital rounds.

And no one seemed to pay any mind to the fact that they walked beneath the long shadow cast by a relic of the Lost Cause.

Only the tourists. And the pigeons.

* * * *

A white man in a suit strolled down the sidewalk, a black woman at his side. The woman put her hand in his back pocket as he gabbed away into his wireless Bluetooth headset. She grinned and tugged him towards a food vendor's cart just outside the Confederate White House, kissed him on the cheek beneath the windows of Jefferson Davis's former study.

And the man wrapped his arm around the woman's waist as he ended his call, returned her kiss, and bought a couple of hot dogs - just outside the room Abraham Lincoln is said to have used immediately after the city rejoined the United States in 1865.

It took more than a century after the Great Emancipator visited that building, a mere week before his assassination, for such a display of public affection to be decriminalized in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

And now, 40 years after the landmark Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court ruling, a black woman and white man can share an intimate moment on a bustling sidewalk, in plain view of immigrants and businessmen and doctors and tourists, people of every ethnicity.

What a strange sensation – to witness two people in love and to feel somehow patriotic, to feel as if the whole of Freedom can be sealed with a kiss.

* * * *

There are people who visit this town only to marvel at its statues of dead rebel soldiers, to visit its monuments to a lost war, to revel in only one part of the history of the American South. But it's surprising how easy it is to forget Richmond's naked now and future, the true legacy of the American Civil War.

The ghosts of the Confederacy don't speak with African or Asian or Mexican accents, don't embrace while buying hot dogs, or even lean against the old scuttled anchors of sunken warships. Johnny Reb died a long time ago, his bastard son Jim Crow put down like a rabid dog in the streets. They rule nothing but the memories on the nostalgic.

But the living sing Richmond and Virginia electric, every day in the naked now, somewhere along the stony banks of the James River.

- # # # -

SOME THINGS YOU JUST SHOULDN'T READ (WHILE ON COLD MEDICATION): Nuclear Winter, Buck Rogers, and the Not So Purple Haze All in My Brain...

NyQuil, NyQuil, NyQuil, we love you, you giant fucking Q!

- Denis Leary,
Actor and Comedian, c. 1992

* * * *

Freedom of thought is the only guarantee against an infection of people by mass myths, which, in the hands of treacherous hypocrites and demagogues, can be transformed into bloody dictatorships.

- Andrei Sakharov,
Soviet Nuclear Physicist & Human Rights Activist, c. 1968

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- The walls explode into a billion points of light, white flame melting away the paint and the drywall and the studs, an entire apartment building gone in an instant.

Everything for miles is illuminated, irradiated, decimated.

The attack could've come from anywhere - from the former Soviet Union, from China or Israel, from Iran or North Korea. Or maybe it wasn't an attack, merely a friendly mistake, an accidental discharge of warheads, an error by NATO or the Air Force or NORAD.

I heard the air raid sirens, the old Civil Defense horns that almost everyone had forgotten, wail moments before detonation. I was still in my bed, no time to react, the alarm clock chirping along to the sounds of a Cold War death knell.

In the infinite nanoseconds between the time the searing radiation melts my flesh and the time my nerve endings register momentary pain, I remember making fun of the old Duck and Cover drills my parents were forced to endure during their childhood.

I think about all of those 1950s post-apocalyptic science fiction movies, the ones where giant cockroaches and one-eyed mutants inherit a scorched, glowing Earth. I wonder, in my final moments, what those mutants and cockroaches will do with their new kingdom -

Suddenly, I'm nothing more than a disembodied wraith, ripped apart atom by atom, radioactive snowfall in one hell of a Nuclear Winter...

Regardless, this the way the world ends.

T.S. Eliot, that old Benedict Arnold of an American poet, had it all wrong. The world does, indeed, end with a bang. Hiroshima and Nagasaki made going out with a whimper an impossibility decades ago.

* * * *

"It's the NyQuil. Goddamn shit always makes me hallucinate."

NyQuil, the Green Death in a Bottle illness killer, one of the great pharmaceutical marvels of the 20th century.

While it certainly helps relieve the symptoms of the flu, it does so at the expense of one's sense of reality.

A copy of Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom, Andrei Sakharov's 1968 treatise on the dangers of the nuclear arms race, rests underneath my left hand, on top of the bedspread.

"Way to go, genius! Pass out reading about the goddamn threat of nuclear war!"

I awake to a world that has yet to be annihilated in a nuclear war. My flesh is still attached to my bones, my atoms still in place, the giant cockroaches and mutants nowhere to be found.

NyQuil and Sakharov's writings fueled my catatonic nightmare, danced together in my brain as I lay unconscious, fed lies into a thousand neurons and fragmented thoughts...

One should never read about the insanity of a world filled Mutual Assured Destruction and anti-ballistic defense systems while on cold medication.

Trust me.

* * * *

I stare up at the ceiling, trying to focus on something other than my nuclear holocaust of a nightmare. The mucus starts to wake from its drug-induced slumber, too, starts to creep back into my nostrils and sinus cavities as I regain consciousness.

Ten whole hours of uninterrupted rest.

An over-the-counter, drug-induced coma of a slumber.

And all I can think about is the end of the world.

"Well," I tell myself, "At least the fever's gone...

"Maybe you can get through a whole day at the office today..."

Jesus fucking Christ.

What a hell of a way to start the day.

* * * *

I, of course, couldn't make it through a solid workday.

I went home at lunchtime, on a Tuesday, and sprawled out on the living room floor. Another vial of magical Green Death melted away the mucus and body aches, melted away reality once more.

I flipped on the television, popped in a DVD copy of an old television series, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.

I haphazardly watch as a fictional 20th century astronaut adjusts to life on a fictional 25th century Earth - a post-apocalyptic future where talking robots dance to futuristic disco and all of the women wear skintight jumpsuits.

Science fact doesn't mix well reality-altering cold medications.

But science fiction, on the other hand...

* * * *

Erin Gray in the Famous Blue Catsuit, waiting on the other side of a fictional Nuclear War?

Or Sakharov-inspired visions of one-eyed mutants and killer cockroaches?

C'mon, now.

Not a hard choice.

- # # # -

AT WORK WITH OHIO'S SCANDALOUS BLOGGING LIBRARIAN: Blending Professional and Online Activites Normal Around These Parts

DISCLAIMER:

Pursuant with my interpretation of the American Library Association Code of Ethics, particularly the sections that outline patron confidentiality and professional conduct, permission was received from the client prior to posting. Actually... it was offered, and I accepted.

This post is a reminder, to at least local readers, that, well, I don't bite and that helping you is what I get paid to do. Anything discussed within the confines of professional librarianship stays PRIVATE, unless permission is otherwise given.

Nope. You're not bothering me. It's my job. ~ Jason

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- Her iPhone chirped 20 times in under ten minutes, an average of one text message received every 30 seconds.

Nobody gets that many text messages in ten minutes. Or, at least, nobody should.

She answered each one, a few quick flicks of the thumbs, simple kilobytes' worth of data about nothin' transmitted instantly towards Columbus and Dayton and Chicago, towards local dorm rooms and apartments and lecture halls.

I waited, patiently, on the client's dime. She's the one, after all, who wanted to meet outside of my library, the one who was worried about unnecessary distractions. I studied the syllabus silently, occasionally grunting and coughing and sighing and swearing, as she answered her texts.

"Who the flying fuck wrote this goddamn syllabus?"

I excused myself to have a cigarette outside of the student union, alone, while she answered an actual phone call back inside the Local U.'s rather pathetic excuse for a food court.

"Hell, which curriculum review signed off on this class as meeting a sequence requirement? This thing reeks of Piled High and Deeper bullshit.

"What the hell do I tell this chick?"

* * * *

I finished the cigarette and returned to the student union. The client, a blog reader, had her laptop out and was waving me back over to the table.

She grinned from ear to ear. That I know a secret about you grin, a smile that, well, I'm accustomed to these days.

While I'd been sweating ways to even approach developing a research strategy, Undergrad X had been reading up on my personal life.

Reading up on my guitar skills, on my impromptu lip-orgy in the basement of a certain bar, reading about my hike through the Not-So-Wild Wilderness.

"Any luck?"

"Oh... with looking for articles? Naw. Just reading your blog."

She then asked me, as a lot of local readers have asked recently, if it's true that the sorority girl who'd shoved her tongue down my throat in Uptown Oxford was a member of ____ sorority - the client's particular sisterhood.

I dodged the question. Not confirming or denying a thing. I keep my writing as vague as possible for a reason. I'm very good at dodging these sorts of questions at work.

"Heh, alright. Blog talk later. Look, chica, pulling books will be the easy part. Now, the source from an anthology might be tricky, if I'm reading this right-- "

I pointed to some phrases I'd underlined in the section outlining her first paper assignment. Undergrad X scrunched up her nose, apparently upset that I'd marked up her crisp Blackboard printout.

"You've had librarians come to class before, right? Show you this shit?"

"Yeah, but I never go to those classes. Boring as- "

"-- FUCK. S'okay. I swear like a fucking sailor. What about English 111? Remember..."

I asked the woman for a piece of paper. We laid out her search strategy, old school, with scribbles and lines and brainstormed controlled vocabulary for searching databases, building upon her existing knowledge of the subject with each new idea.

At one point, she looked down at the paper, smacked her hand hard onto her forehead and spouted out her own, unique thesis. Her eyes changed color. Her brain crackled with the electric formation and absorption of new information, the very mechanics of information-seeking played out in a thousand subtle expressions across her tanned face.

She hit her laptop with a passion, the keyboard taking all sorts of abuse as she hammered in keywords into the web interface of the library system's online catalog. She asked questions about that OhioLINK thing and this AltPressIndex thing...

I leaned back in my chair, offered only words of encouragement and direction. This is what used to be called teaching in Higher Education. Now, this sort of instruction is reserved only for students brave enough to disturb their so-called teachers beyond the credit-hours' worth of lectures and assigned readings.

Within 30 minutes of our scheduled hour appointment, the research portion of a completely pointless upper-division elective assignment died a quick death, executed to perfection. Twenty minutes of actual work. Ten minutes dedicated to setting text-message speed records.

And the assignment's not due for another week.

* * * *

I told the woman that, well, we had 30 minutes remaining on our appointment, and that she owned my ass for another half hour, if she wanted it. We could, indeed, talk about whatever she wanted to talk about, once the research consultation ended.

Rather than wait for her to get back to that drunken sorority member ambush question, I threw out my own question:

"So why do you read that silly thing, anyway? You've met me. I'm not as cute as people think."

Undergrad X laughed out loud, reduced all of the open browser windows on her laptop, down to a single cobalt and creme web page. She scrolled down the screen, down to a section listing older blog posts in a left-hand column.

"You're a cutie. You know it, too. Don't lie."

For the record, I am not a cutie. Especially when I'm on the job.

* * * *

She clicked on a link and, instantly, my face popped up on the screen, just to the right of a cropped screenshot of one of my childhood inspirations.

Me. And Mike Ness, the Social Distortion frontman.

"I've listened to that song, like, a million times."

A link to a YouTube clip had caught her attention, of Social Distortion playing their new song, "Far Behind," live at the KROQ Weenie Roast.

For the client, it'd been a monumental discovery. She'd downloaded just about every Social D. track she could find, the entire Greatest Hits album.

A local undergrad who, from head to toe, fits every physical stereotype used to describe the female student body of the Local U. Blonde. Beautiful. Smelling of expensive haircare products and tanning oil.

She even had a copy of Vogue tucked into her backpack. Next to the iPod full of...

Southern California punk music?

Talk about surreal.

But, well, the Local U. folks who read this blog never cease to amaze me.

They're a dynamic, eclectic group, people who defy the J. Crew U. stereotypes silently, who are well-aware that playing dumb in public allows for more intellectual and social freedom when it counts, who understand that, well, having an esoteric, hidden side stirs curiosity and intrigue in a way no Hollywood blockbuster ever could.

And they tend to be just my favorite kind of library patrons - they're willing to experiment, push boundaries, and they're trend-setters, whether or not they admit it to themselves, in a world increasingly filled with informatic sheep.

* * * *

She laughed telling me about her hatred of Natty Light - most of her friends drink it, and her ex even collects Natty paraphernalia.

"Only Bengals fans would drink Natty," she explained, one hand patting the lettering on her Cleveland Browns tee-shirt, more a statement of wishful thinking than actual reality (I've seen all sorts of football fans suck down the grotesque stuff).

Her ex, she adds, comes from a long line of Cincinnati football fans - her first warning sign that their relationship was doomed. I tried to point out that, well, football is not exactly a great relationship indicator, but she silenced me with a roll of the eyes.

She herself acquired a taste for whiskey sours during her internship - the older women she'd worked with were tough old birds, drank their sours double stiff after work as they talked about mortgages and grandkids and worthless ex-husbands.

"I probably could've gone to somebody else, but I kinda wanted to see if you were all that. Not a stalker - swear."

She crossed her heart, swore threats of needles through her piercing blue eyes, fluttering her eyelashes as she talked.

A whiskey-swillin' Cleveland Browns fan, with a copy of Vogue in a backpack, who's in a sorority and who listens to Social Distortion.

And people call me weird.

Weird, in this case, translates into, roughly, totally fucking astounding.

* * * *

She added that she hoped I didn't take her interest in getting my help with research as anything but sincere, that there was no ulterior motive behind her wanting to meet away from the office.

"Chica, if you read my blog, you're way too smart to even think about getting involved with me."

Sad, but true. Trust me. Besides, there are so many rumors floating around Oxford Fucking Ohio involving me that it's become comical.

And what the hell would a 21-year-old want with a guy pushing 30, anyway? Seriously.

* * * *

Before we parted ways, she asked if she could ever stop by my office, to just hang out. In my most authoritarian voice, I explained that she was more than welcome to swing by the ____ Library for research assistance.

"Everything else, well... best save it for Uptown. Or lunch."

Undergrad X laughed a true Cleveland Girl laugh, eyes ablaze with life on a Friday afternoon.

On the job means on the job. And I only tell the cool-as-shit patrons where I just hang out, should they desire to have a blog-related discussion.

And trust me, if she ever walks into the bar where I just hang out after work, the bartenders will know instantly - she's hard to miss.

Hot sorority sisters who read Vogue don't usually play "Story of My Life" or "Ball and Chain" [VIDEO] or "I Was Wrong"[VIDEO] on the juke box.

But, well, the blog lurkers at The Zenformation Professional are just cool like that.

* * * *

In theory, professionally, this is known as taking a holistic, user-centered approach towards librarianship. In grad school (Geaux Tigers, btw), I learned this concept from my major professor, a pioneering giant, internationally, in user-centered studies, in Information Science.

But, in practice, I'd like to think that I raise the bar a bit, kick that concept into overdrive - I take a holistic, user-centered approach towards life itself, never forgetting that holistic means holistic, that information fluency doesn't just apply to libraries, research, or even formal education.

Life is more than a journey. Life is about learning by doing, trial and error, the formation of hypothesis and testing towards a conclusion.

And, yes, sometimes life, as Ohio's Scandalous Librarian, requires an overlap between the online and offline world, the job and the not-so-job.

- # # # -

IT'S OKAY TO HAVE SQUASH ON YOUR MIND, EVEN WHEN YOU'RE NAKED: Having a Head Like a Slingshot Can Lead to a Different Sort of Question

BUTLER COUNTY, Ohio (ZP) -- I planted my Doc Martens into the muddy bottom of Four Mile Creek, water up past my thighs, the smell of rotting woodland flora drifting up with the water.

Just past dawn on a Sunday morning. I ate about a dozen spiders on the trails out to the creek, their overnight works unseen as I walked, the first hiker of the day accidentally ending both arachnid lives and perfect architecture.

I loved every moment of my ten-mile hike, a veritable pig in the pokeberries, but I really came to just wallow away in the mud.

Even the leeches that fed off my legs, the ones who were probably left drunk from a holiday weekend's worth of Jello Shots and Irish Car Bombs and Cuervo, were tolerated.

The mushy mush at the bottom of the creek, at least, washes away easily, and won't require a long shower afterwards, just to get the stink of its perfume out of my nostrils.

No laptop. No cell phone. No MySpace or Facebook profile messages to sweat.

No text messages or voicemails or IMs.

And no weird looks from guys I don't know, no looks from strange drunk women who think they know me, or from younger women who read me, who thought I was something that I'm not...

Just me, baby. Just me.

* * * *

I must've been smiling. I don't smile much, but I think I felt those muscles a-twitchin' and strainin', the laugh-lines filling in the crow's feet.

I hate my smile, think its one of my least charming features. I only smile, usually when nobody else is around, when I can get away with it. And I usually smile the most when I can get away from everyone but myself.

There's just something seductive about solitude in a wilderness that makes trudging through the mud just so much fun.

* * * *

I crank out two hundred push-ups, four sets of 50, as Captain Marvel and Superman battle above Metropolis, as the pair fought over Lex Luthor's supposed turn into a legitimate presidential candidate.

Yup.

It's 5:07 a.m. on a Sunday, and I'm watching Justice League Unlimited Season 1 DVDs while I sweat and groan and stretch.

The scene hits at Push-up No. 74. One of the greatest battles in the history of animated comic book adaptations.

Captain Marvel, the World's Mightiest Mortal. Once more popular than the Man of Steel himself, back in the 1940s, the Captain gets suckered by Big Blue, chumped in anticlimactic fashion, reverted to Billy Batson with one of Marvel's own mystical lightning bolts.

"Dude, Supes is vulnerable to magic, " I say out loud. "Marvel's a kid empowered by magic."

"That's so... unrealistic."

I flip over on my back as the episode credits roll and the theme music plays. I start my crunches, slow and painful, the ol' groin strained once more from one worthless night of sex - with someone I don't even like.

"I'm either the world's nerdiest chach, or the chachiest nerd," a stray thought bellows. "I re-pulled my groin in a spite fuck, and now I'm watching cartoons and thinking about the Power of Shazam!"

* * * *

I start laughing, distracted by another singular thought bouncing around my mind like a supervillian from the Dark Knight's fist. It involves The Question, an old Charlton Comics character sucked up by DC when it acquired the line back in the 1980s.

Comics legend Steve Ditko may be best known as the co-creator of the Spider-Man mythos, but The Question has always been a personal favorite of mine. Alan Moore supposedly based his Rorschach character, in the classic Watchmen limited series, off of Ditko's Question.

"Hmmm. Rorschach.

"Rors-CHACH. Heh. Now that's fucking funny. Never noticed that."

I stop at Crunch No. 42, get up, put on another episode of JLU, one of my favorites. I start laughing again, hit the deck, and start another set of crunches, as the Jeffrey Combs - voiced version of the Question spins conspiracy theories to another character, the Huntress.

A different sort of question pops into my mind, an ancient question that carries my brain back to Moore's limited series, back into ancient Rome, back into...

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

"Fuck, dude. Who really does watch the watchmen?

"Hell, I don't think Mrs. Perfect would know Alan Moore from Mandy Moore...

"What the fuck was I thinking?"

The same guys, I assume, who do crunches as the asscrack of dawn while watching superhero cartoons, thinking about bad sex and Alan Moore and Captain Marvel's decline into obscurity since the 1940s.

The same guys, I assume, who like to get up before sunrise just to hump like Jarhead Infantry through a nature reserve, who take a digital camera to snap photos of flora and fauna, who're just looking to get all down and dirty in a creek.

Hell. Four Mile Creek's been better to me than most of the women I've been involved with.

* * * *

Yep.

I'm a strange one.

A social butterfly of a loner, a hermit who loves disappearing into crowds of people, who occasionally has to remind himself that humanity does indeed have some worth as a species beyond the abstract.

When I was a kid, I used to hate the way my mind works - I always felt ashamed that my brain, with its supposedly High IQ and damned - near - photographic long-term recall, made me a freak of nature.

Growing up in virtual isolation on a Virginia farm, with grandparents whose library collection included hundreds of foreign language dictionaries, NATO manuals, and UN and State Dept. publications, probably didn't help that feeling much.

But now I embrace my eccentricity like a warm blanket on a cold night. I'm constantly fascinated by how my own thought processes work, how my neurons fire inside of my skull, and by the way those abstract visions interact with my surroundings.

As I waded through the muddy water of Four Mile Creek, I suddenly remembered what it was like, for example, to do the same thing when I was a kid, how simple of a pleasure playing in dirty water is, how much energy crackles up from dark water.

I found a deep spot in the creek, and, fully clothed, fell back into the murky depths, the water sucking me down into its bosom, the guppies and tadpoles parting to accept my body into their commune.

As I fell, I noticed that I had an audience.

I caught a glimpse of a woman clad in a black micro-mini and white knee-high stockings ducking behind a tree as I hit the water. My heart raced, and only instinct reminded me to close my eyes or risk losing yet another pair of pricey, disposable contact lenses.

"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? The goddamn mosquitoes and some emo chick. Who the fuck goes hiking in a skirt and knee-highs?"

I sank to the bottom and thought about DJ Shadow's "Midnight in a Perfect World [VIDEO]," a song off of his Endtroducing... album, for some reason.

Don't ask me. No clue where that one came from. Probably something about the flow of the beats he sampled and the feel of the water and the sight of a scenester - looking chick hiding behind a tree.

I think about the weirdest shit sometimes.

Think. It's what I do best, really.

And sometimes, I even scare myself.

* * * *

One of the most intriguing things I've ever been told, by anybody, occurred a dozen or so months ago, just a few miles from my mud hole along Four Mile Creek, during a full moon.

A woman and I were sprawled out on a blanket, mostly covered by this ratty comforter I used to carry in the back of my pickup. We'd just finished off a bottle of iced tea, a midnight picnic of vegan eggplant wraps and roasted squash.

I smelled like, well, one would expect a librarian to smell like after spending all day moving dozens of pallets of steel shelving back and forth across a construction site.

But my fellow moonwatcher smelled perfect.

She smelled of every mile of air she'd just traveled, smelled of the rental SUV, smelled of JFK International in New York and a connection in Reagan National in Washington and of leather luggage...

And the smell of squash and eggplant was on her breath, too, rich in onions and fresh basil and citrus aromas.

I'd looked up at the moon and told her that she smelled wonderful.

There is no way to describe the face she made. Even the moon seemed to read disgust in her face, disappearing behind black clouds to hide from an outburst from a very passionate woman.

"Man, you're just fucking insane sometimes. Man of fucking mystery."

And then she told me to never change. And all was good with the world. Hadn't really figured on hooking up with a friend that night. That's what we were - just friends. Just happened.

Sometimes, knowing how to cook for a vegan can get a guy into trouble.

Now, every time I smell squash and eggplant together, I think about being naked, beneath a full moon, covered in a ratty comforter that fell apart three months ago.

And every time I see or hear a reference to Ditko's The Question, one of my favorite men of fucking mystery, I think of feature dancers and showgirls and burlesque performers.

If there are bigger comic nerds to be found outside of librarianship, they'll almost certainly be found taking their clothes off inside of strip clubs.

* * * *

As I came back up from my impromptu bath in the creek, memories of her face that night mingled with the lingering beats of DJ Shadow, the visions of Captain Marvel and Superman duking it out, and the taste of polluted creek water.

I took a deep breath and kept on grinning my normally hidden smile.

Ain't nothing wrong with being a Man of Fucking Mystery. Just ask anybody who grew up reading comic books. I felt just like The Question Sunday morning, hidden behind a faceless mask, clad in matching blue fedora and trench coat.

The woman in the black mini had come from behind the tree, was hollering something from the bank and pointing at the ground.

After pounding the water from my ear canals, I learned that she was trying to tell me that my cell phone had been vibrating, that she'd stopped it from slipping off of the rock and into the water, and that she wanted to know if she could bum one of my Marlboro Mediums.

Yes, I'm a chain smoker. And I hike ten miles, bring along my cell even when there's barely a signal. Do push-ups and chin-ups and sometimes dig homemade vegan food.

I'm weird, a Man of Fucking Mystery, even to myself.

I wade back to the young woman, the Watcher's watcher. She perches herself on a stump, facing me, knees drawn up to her chin.

I offered her a cigarette, introduced myself, lit the cigarette for her. I told her that she didn't have to hide behind trees or fee bad for just watching.

She smiled and blew smoke from her nose, down across her knees. Said she hadn't meant to watch, but, well, the sight of some random guy falling backwards into a creek reminded her of something from a movie.

It was weird. So she watched. My phone rang and she saw smokes on the shore. Gave her an opportunity to say something, to spark a conversation.

And then she told me her story.

* * * *

A second-year undergrad, 20-years-old, hung over from drinking in her dorm room with another second-year undergrad. The guy had wanted to fuck - hence the free jug of wine he'd brought to her room. Not really that attracted to the guy, she blew him instead, spit the semen into her roommate's empty bottom bunk.

She blew the guy to get him to leave her alone, to simply get him to leave her space and to never come back. She'd only asked him over out of boredom - and nothing screams boredom to a 20-year-old dorm rat like a Labor Day Weekend with no money to travel.

She tells me that she came out to the nature reserve to think, to recover. She'd been drinking bottles of Fiji to get the taste out of her mouth. She didn't know if she should feel bad or not. She'd blown guys in high school, gone down on frat boys at parties, but she'd never blown a guy just to get him to go away.

She stopped, looked at me.

I have no clue why I'm telling you this. I don't even know you.

To ease her embarrassment, I tell her a story. I tell her about The Man of Fucking Mystery legend, the hook-up with Mrs. Perfect who was anything but, of watching Justice League Unlimited and doing 200 push-ups.

"You're weird. Weirder than me."

She clarified - I was kinda creepy weird and kinda intriguing weird, a good mix that often inspires her to walk up to random people and strike up conversations.

She took off her little backpack, opened it up, and pulled out two big plastic containers of overpriced mineral water. And I drank one to wash away the taste of dirty creek water. She drank the other to wash away the semen taste.

Ritual cleansing sometimes requires strange conversations, where answers sometimes involve a different sort of Question.

- # # # -

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN EX-OTHER MAN II: Tasting Kentucky, Payback as a Blogging Bitch, and Other Crazy Things

ACT I:
"DUDE. SHE TASTES LIKE KENTUCKY."

If this doesn't make your blog, I'm going to kick you in the fucking balls.

- Mister Chops

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- Hairdressers can be quite entertaining.

Especially in gangs of four, when they've all had way too much to drink, when you're the only relatively sober guy at the bar.

Quite entertaining. And rather good kissers, too. Even if they taste like Kentucky, smell like generic body spray, and manhandle your junk like a plumber working over a rusted valve.

* * * *

Mister Chops? The guy behind the bar?

Chops was molested by three of the four women, forced to bare his shoulder and chest tattoos for all the world to see, to strip down to his A-frame tee for tips and wages, forced to be told that, well, even married women to get off every once and a while, forced to witness flashes of ass tats and tits and...

Me? Lucky ol' me?

I went four-for-four on the night. And all four claimed that there was no way in hell I could be a librarian, that librarians can't kiss like that, that they'd all like to share me for a few minutes, to spank me, to do very naughty things to me in bar bathrooms and on books and...

* * * *

One woman, a recent divorcée, ended up getting a little too excited. I guess I stirred up some biochemical response, caused quite a bit of, er, moisture build-up, which ended up seeping through the back of her jeans and onto my hand...

Hell. I'd almost forgotten what it felt like to give a woman an orgasm, fully-clothed and without any sort of intention, in front of a live studio audience, with just a kiss and a few well-placed flicks of the tongue, a squeeze of a breast and stroke of the ass and...

I even earned a round of applause.

Hairdressers aren't the only ones who are good kissers.

* * * *

Actually, I went five-for-five if you count the blonde undergrad who'd witnessed the whole thing as her party entered the downstairs pub.

She followed me out to my truck and, right on High Street in Uptown Oxford, told me, exactly, just what she'd like to do to me.

Sounded like she had some fun things in mind.

Too bad she was 3,000 sheets to the wind and barely able to stand up straight.

She had to settle for, well, pushing me into my pick-up and shoving what felt like four inches of sorority girl down my throat. Tasted like Jägermeister and fifth-year desperation, like she hadn't had the guts to just walk up to a random guy and kiss him in years.

But still - not bad. For a 22-year-old from Dayton. She'd probably be a nice person to hang out with sometime - if she's ever sober.

But not as fun to make out with as the four 30-40ish hairdressers.

* * * *

I don't do drunk women.

Make out? Sure. But sex?

Honestly, it's not only dangerous; it's also boring and pointless.

Sure, I sometimes falter on that guiding principle. But, well, while I can no longer remember the number of women, total, that I've been involved with, I can count the number of drunken mistakes on my fingers.

Less than 10. And I'm proud of that. More important, I'm just glad I survived them.

I may fuck up, but, well, I prefer to fuck up almost completely sober. Blindfolds and cigarettes may provide the illusion of safety, but the firing squad will still pull their triggers the same, either way. Best to just face one's fate, sexual or otherwise, with both eyes square on the assassin.

* * * *

Who says Happy Hours aren't fun anymore?

Happy was me Thursday. But, by Saturday...

ACT II:
"YOU KNOW, I'M NOT AS DENSE AS YOU THINK..."

I knew exactly what I was doing.

Knew from the moment I paid for her late-night slice of pizza at Brunos. Knew as I suggested that, at 23 and 29, respectively, we were much too old, as working professionals, to be out past last call.

And, yep, I had a good idea what she was thinking when her heel snapped and she fell into me, commenting on the fact that I seem to have bulked up a bit since she last saw me. And I knew, exactly, what I was doing when she told me that she wanted to go back to my apartment, to just chill and catch up, as if we'd ever been friends.

And I knew she was married, too, married to a man who once got off on slipping an ex-girlfriend of his Special K during his Local U. undergrad days, married to a man whose ex-girlfriend ...

... ended up having a rather quick, torrid fling with a certain local blogger to get over the fact that, yeah, her best friend 4eva had been screwing her drug-slipping boyfriend for most of their relationship.

And I even had this lurking feeling I was being used to get back at that ex-fling of mine, for some unknown reason. Maybe, just maybe, it has something to do with the fact that my ex-fling dared to fall in love with this amazing man who doesn't slip her ketamine as an aphrodisiac, for leaving her best friend 4eva (and Mr. Big Man and yours truly, for that matter) behind.

* * * *

As I lay in bed Saturday morning, staring at the ceiling and listening to the sound of some not-so-random woman singing bad pop music in my shower, I tried to make myself feel guilty, tried to find it in my soul, somewhere, to reprimand myself.

But I couldn't.

That best friend 4eva had just spent the night with a guy she'd once called the ugliest guy in Oxford, while her beloved cokehead of a hubby, the former Mr. Big Man on Campus, was spending the weekend drinking and clubbing back in the city Carl Sandburg once called the City of Big Shoulders.

* * * *

I knew why, exactly, she'd come back to Oxford Fucking Ohio - she wanted revenge on Mr. Big Man, a notoriously unfaithful guy who, from what she told me, spent more time groping interns than he did groping her. I knew from the first lie that she wasn't interested in planned giving to my library, knew she really didn't want my help researching something for work at 4 in the morning.

And, yes, I figured out quickly that she wasn't offering to rub my shoulders because I looked stressed, that she wasn't capable of sincere compassion. And, yes, I knew exactly what I was doing when she leaned against that door jamb and brought her knee up to her nose, when she insisted on demonstrating how flexible she'd become thanks to her yoga instructor.

I wasn't anywhere near drunk, yet, somehow, I tripped. Fell right up against her, catching that flexible thigh to mysteriously restore my balance. And when I smiled and raised my eyebrow, I lied and feigned innocence, just so she'd make the first move.

And she did. Even broke one of my favorite belts.

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, Sandburg wrote, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.

Well, Mr. Sandburg. Some of us farm boys may be dense, may have no fucking clue how to flirt or date nice girls or even behave like rational adults, but those painted women from The City of Big Shoulders are sometimes easy to lure away from beneath those lamps.

Some of us were just born with big shoulders. It's a curse.

* * * *

Spite is a curious bedfellow.

When I'd left the bar scene behind Friday night, I was annoyed, angry.

A female friend of mine, well past intoxicated, was literally throwing herself at a male friend of mine, whispering all sorts of drunken things into his ear. The female friend has been in a bad way for months, since she went through a nasty break-up with a guy. And the male friend, recently relocated back to Oxford, seemed to be deep in the kind of buzzed enlightenment that comes with having to choose between getting laid and being a good friend.

And, no, it wasn't jealousy. Not even close.

It was memories, memories of some of my own experiences with the self-destructive chaos that fuels all drunken hook-ups and one-night stands, the sort of forewarned regret and friendship - altering choices that, in general, rarely lead to anything productive.

Just hate to see people having to wade through shit. It's really, really painful for me to watch.

I used to be good at those sorts of things, a virtual maestro of drunken hook-ups, seductive womanizing and manwhoredom. But as I've gotten older...

And I thought about "Tonya," too, about how that friends - and - lovers choice had ended. Two weeks earlier, she'd FedExed me my lucky ring - I told her to ship the thing back if she felt that we couldn't salvage the friendship out of the clusterfuck it'd become. When I opened the parcel, my heart imploded; it was the first time in months that I'd been forced to admit that, yes, I had been falling hard for her when things went sour.

And I thought about other drama, too, with other former lovers and flings and girlfriends...

My cell vibrated in my pocket, snapped me out of my deep brooding and self-reflection.

DUDE! Hey! It's me, went the voicemail. You're not going to believe this, but _____ just tried to kiss me. Apparently Mrs. Perfect is down in fucking Oxford and he really thinks I'm going to get back together with him! Seriously. Fuck em! And watch out, dude. She reads your web site, so if you go home with anybody, that bitch is gonna tell everybody up here in Chi-Town.

I laughed. As if I was planning to go home with anybody.

And then, less than five minutes later, I'm standing at the door of my pickup, turning the key in the lock.

I feel a pair of woman's hands on my back, the sound of that high-pitched, stereotypical sorority alum voice, that Heeyyy Jay-sin!!! Loong Tiiime no seeeee!

Some women are as transparent as Waterford Crystal.

* * * *

Yes, spite is indeed a curious bedfellow. But, then again, so is fate. Makes for one hell of an orgy.

And, trust me, there are now quite a few folks up in the City of Big Shoulders who now know who I hooked up with last night.

Tell your husband I said hello.

I'm dense, but I'm not naive. I read your mind, hon.

You figured that you could get back at your husband by going home with the one guy he hates, that you could play me like a fiddle because, well, you'd been reading about my problems and relationship woes, and that you could just waltz right in, use me, and gloat.

And too bad you were singing in the shower. You would've realized that I rarely, if ever, walk into an ambush - I called your former best friend 4eva and told her everything.

She's now in a healthy relationship, doesn't care about who you, your hubby, or even I fuck. But she did think it was funny that you really thought you were getting away with anything.

And, actually, I'm not that easy to seduce. Bit of an urban legend, actually. Think you had it backwards, there, hon.

Can't really play the guy who just served you with the rule book.

* * * *

Oh, and by the way...

No worries about returning the tee shirt. Looked great on you as you went through security at the Cincinnati airport this morning.

It belonged to your former BFF. Butt-ugly thing, that shirt. She always looked horrible in yellow.

I am curious about one thing, however.

How did your husband react when he read Librarians Do It By the Book printed across your chest when he picked you up at O'Hare this morning?

Just curious.

And thanks for reaffirming my enduring belief that, no matter how physically attractive, sex with dumb women is just about as exciting as staring at my bedroom ceiling, waiting for somebody else to finish...

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