ON THE ROAD 2008: Welcome Back to Caliporn...Er...California! May I Crush You with my Boobs?

PASO ROBLES, Calif. (ZP) -- I didn't think anything of it at first.

A group of very drunk women in the midst of a pub crawl, eight in all, with one hollering something about knowing me from somewhere, staggered past me as I pulled cash from an ATM.

These things happen. Particularly when there's drunk women involved.

I look like a lot of people. Sometimes famous, sometimes high school boyfriends, and once - from the mouth of an ex - I was told that I resembled a favorite coach at a Catholic school at the worst possible time a woman could bring such a thing up.

Rarely does anybody ever tell me that I look like, well, me.

I laughed as the women passed. One woman - the one who claimed to her friends that she knew me - reached out and grabbed my shoulder.

"YOU! I knew it!" the strange creepy gal yelled. "Oh Gosh... did you used to date _____?"

Her English was accented, northern European. An appropriate voice, too, given the fact the woman slurring into my face looked like Thor and Barbie's lovechild - luscious blond hair, full red lips, fair and spotless complexion, and enough surgically enhanced boobage to keep custom bra manufacturers in business for years to come.

Funny thing. Though a few years older, she looked familiar to me, too. I must've stared for a good twenty seconds, without blinking and head cocked to the side, like some Cocker Spaniel watching its master shit for the first time.

And, well, I did once date somebody with the name she'd given me...

* * * *

Wait! I think I know this drunk chick! my neurons screamed. Hmmm... ____'s friend? Name?

Think! DAMMIT!

Okay... breathe... I'm thinking Vegas... 2005... The Venetian's pool ... Don Julio shots... jumping jacks...

Yeah, now that was a fun morning swim.

...Got IT!

* * * *

I shoved my forty bucks in my pocket and smiled back. I had a name, dammit. Even if, well, I couldn't figure out why a SoCal-based actress just happened to be in Paso Fucking Robles, California, two days into the New Year.

"Well, look at this shit! _____ ______, in the motherfucking flesh! How are the fuck are ya, honey?"

The tall blonde not-so-stranger shimmied towards me, skirt riding up her thighs, an army of latex marching across battlefields of porcelain leg. A quick hug and a peck on the cheek, artificial double-Ds crushing my ribcage, holiday greetings exchanged with all the honesty and sincerity of a faked orgasm on a junior high prom night.

Seriously.

Few things outside of organized religion are as plastic and ritualistic as the Los Angeles Hug-Kiss-Kiss.

* * * *

"Wow! I almost didn't recognize you! Cheri, hey, this guy used to date ______. And he lives in Cleveland..."

"Um, well, Cleveland's on the far side of the Ohi-"

"Oh gosh, you just look AMAZING! How ARE YOU? I heard you were, like, dead or something."

"Gee, thanks, chica. Looking pretty hot yourself. So you're still in the adult busin-"

"Oh my God! You remember? Wow! Gosh, like, you probably don't know this but..."

She went on for twenty minutes without pausing for a breath, oblivious to the fact that we only hung out one night, years ago, in Las Vegas. I now know more about her career, sex life, her dogs and cats, and her ex-boyfriend's little premature ejaculation/fidelity problem than I ever wanted to know, really.

In the one place in the world I generally expect to NOT run into THAT ex's friends...

Wow, I thought as she pecked my other cheek, The Central Coast really is looking a lot more like the San Fernando Valley every fucking year.

* * * *

I'd been on my way out for the night; the group of women were done for the night, headed back to their hotel. And they were all pretty much too drunk, by their own admission, to head back out to the few bars Paso Robles has to offer.

Thank God. No offense, ladies.

Last time I hung out with Ms. Double-D, I woke up in bed next to four women, complete with a Nordic-pale leg wrapped around my neck, somebody's ass beneath my head, and the then-girlfriend's passing out with her twat in my slumbering face.

Long night. And equally long story. These things happen. Especially when there's drunk women involved.

But, well, there's a reason I have no desire to ever return to Las Vegas.

- # # # -

THE OXFORD (FUCKING OHIO) DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS: Of Voter Choice, Crab Fries, Murder Rap, and Staring at a Woman's Nests in Private

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

OXFORD CONFIDENTIAL: On Writing, Drinking, and Writing about Drinking with a Writer who Drinks PBR from an Ancient Plastic Pitcher...

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) – There he was, this marvelous young writer, this future ringmaster of the American Literary circus, sitting on the other side of the table, chatting away with his siblings about everything but his writing.

No writer, you see, wants to discuss writing or literature after a reading. Most of the time, readings leave writers on edge, or leave the writer contemplative and waiting, patiently, for some armchair critic to skewer his or her art.

Public readings of your work, of your poetry and prose before a group of mostly faculty and friends, can sure take the fun out of writing. And we'd come to the bar afterwards not to offer up critiques, not to celebrate, but to unwind. Poetry and prose readings, well, take an emotional toll on a writer's friends and family, too.

His father squinted in the bar's orange glow, reading the dedication in his son's masterpiece. His mother glanced around the bar in near silence, radiating her satisfaction at having raised such an asshole of a child. His girlfriend sat across from me, and we did the smalltalk thing, and she rolled her eyes when I rambled on about something she clearly wasn't interested in discussing.

Nobody else at our table was drinking, save for Fatsuit McUmmings, his parents, and myself. And while his parents drank their beers with the class and dignity that comes from having put a son successfully through college, the pair of us writers drank in that great Oxford Fucking Ohio tradition --

Cold cheap beer, straight from ancient plastic pitchers.

* * * *

You see, in the Land o' the Buckeye, from the banks of the Ohio River to the dirty waters of Lake Erie, from James Thurber to Rita Dove to Sherwood Anderson, poetry and prose readings are best followed up with Pabst Blue Ribbon and the best onion rings in town.

Places that serve nice sipping wine after a reading, complete with plates of expensive cheese and crackers and hors d'oeuvre platters, are reserved for literary critics, pompous novelists, and the young twinks and college girls they pay to suck them off in between lectures and workshops. Writers, artists, and scholars should, at all costs, avoid such high-and-mighty events. Blowjobs mean nothing anyway, other than an excuse to keep on a-pounding away on writing and drinking.

Why waste a good bottle of wine recovering from a reading anyway? Who wastes good booze on artists? A good Merlot is best held for private moments with lovers, for a rainy evening alone with just a copy of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal or while dreaming about Chicanas, reading José Antonio Burciaga's essays aloud in the dark.

No, after a reading, after any performance, one should hit up a saloon and drink until the madness of literature is gone. Trust me. I'm a librarian. And librarians know (or should know) these things.

* * * *

Whitman never did this, here in Oxford Fucking Ohio. He died a century too early, without ever having -- GASP! -- heard of that academically-neutered beast we now call Comparative Literature. Ginsberg never sat in this tavern, never stared into the rafters filled with hockey sticks and old jerseys. Allen never howled in the men's room, never gargled semen in the dark corners of the alley outside.

...Well, dude, it's not hard to imagine either man drinking away a Wednesday night with us. And, well, they probably would've been awestruck by Fatsuit McUmmings' reading, too, would've been honored to drink cheap beer, to swap stories...

William Carlos Williams would've been content, to set his Modernist doctor's bag at the end of the peeling hardwood bar for a bourbon. Carl Sandburg would've felt at home singing folk songs, performing Good Morning America into the wee hours of the morning. The floorboards reek of Bukowski and Céline, Albert Camus prowls the shadows. I can smell Steinbeck in the hair of the women from the trailer parks and the flophouses, smell Mark Twain on the college girls and alumni...

When in bars, all men are writers and all writers end up drunk off realistic daydreams of the everyday world...

* * * *

I was, obviously, still lost in that madness of language, still trapped inside the insanity of wordsmithing, storytelling, and other everyday nonsense.

Thank you, cold cheap beer. Seven dollars and fifty cents for one whole pitcher of some bland ambrosia called Bud Light.

“Okay now,” the shift manager hollers at me from behind the bar, “You're drinking that pitcher way too fast. Don't make me cut you off...”

"Wha...? Uh...why, hon?"

"Because you look seriously drunk."

She wouldn't have cut me off, of course. Though the sight of me, the Cuervo-guzzling librarian, drinking beer is about as rare as seeing the face of the Virgin Mary in a lump of dogshit.

* * * *

“Why the fuck do you drink so much in that place?” many folks have asked me here in Oxford.

“It's so... weird in there, the people are weird, they let in scary people...”

Well, maybe it has to do with the fact that some of those guys cooking in the kitchen sometimes graduate, sometimes write grand novellas and poetry and short stories, those guys who represent the best the ol' Local U has to offer, men who understand that art is made through the toils of the everyday and not through the whimsical nostalgia of the Academy.

Or maybe it's guys working at the door, spinning yarns about hot women and police raids, maybe it's the hot female bartenders who, well, tell stories about trips to China or about catfights in redneck saloons or who, well, occasionally play grab-ass with certain librarians of ill repute.

Hell, I could write a novel myself about last Saturday night alone, about being felt up by a gay man, about being told that, wow, I'm apparently pretty well-proportioned in certain places, about whispering into one sister's ear, half-joking, that I'd love to take her home and break her in half and whispering into the other sister's ear some drunken nonsense about taking her home, too...

Yes, I behaved very badly last Saturday. But it'd make a great story someday. Maybe I'll write about it...

Daydreams whilst drinking cold, cheap beer, straight from the goddamn pitcher. How sweet it is, sometimes, to be free to dream, to write, to think.

Shit, dude, you do get a lot of decent essays outta this fucking place, don't you?

* * * *

I stared down into my almost empty pitcher. Lost. My mind, lost.

I'd been hitting the Bud Light just a little too quick. For all the liquor I can drink, beer is my kryptonite.

“Hey! You're usually not this quiet!” Fatsuit McUmmings' girlfriend says. “So what did you think of ____'s reading?”

I really didn't know how to answer the question. My mind, lost...

I'd been thinking again, daydreaming within the madness. Singing the body electric within my own mind, absorbing both my song and my surroundings like a sponge.

And I was praying that, yes, by having helped Fatsuit McUmmings edit his work before its final presentation, by showing up to bear witness to his artistry, I'd helped keep the world from having to see another greatest mind of our generation destroyed by madness...

* * * *

“So how do you think your image around town as a 'playa'... not 'player' but 'playa' ... librarian,” a colleague recently asked, “...reflects upon your colleagues and this institution...?”

Well, somebody's gotta do it.

What do I think? Hey, don't hate the playa, hate the game. Blame Archibald MacLeish, too, for setting such a miserable example as to the risks librarians are supposed to take, the games they're supposed to play with writers, artists, researchers, and other madmen of knowledge.

He's the former Librarian of Congress, the one who cleaned up that bureaucratic clusterfuck back in the 1940s, the one who won all of those Pulitzer Prizes as a poet, the guy who hung out with the likes of Hemingway and FDR yet never went to Library School, the one who, well, tried to make modern librarianship a part of the modern literary establishment...

MacLeish wasn't much of a drinker. And, well, I do have an ALA-accredited master's degree, which makes me, technically, a librarian. MacLeish never bothered to waste thousands of bucks on the parchment...

MacLeish never lived in Oxford Fucking Ohio or worked with its hard-drinking patrons, either. He's also been dead since the 1980s...

And I don't see too many other librarians – we, the supposed gatekeepers of literature, of the various records of humanity and society – out at 11 o'clock on a Wednesday night, drinking with the folks who will one day produce our next great wave of great books.

All library usage is, at the end of the day, a local phenomenon. How better to understand the natives than to simply embrace them as friends, compatriots, even, at times, lovers? Why hide behind something as silly as a degree and a job title, when it's just as easy to wade into the jungle, to ravage the tender brains and bodies and souls of those asking to be played or who beg for the sweet, satisfying release of knowledge, accomplishment?

* * * *

The party broke up with a whimper and a few hugs. Fatsuit McUmmings and I were the only two left, so we moved our discussion to the bar. The shift manager had just punched out for the night, was just beginning to nurse her first drink.

She joined us, stirred her cocktail, and, as usual, giggled for no reason whatsoever.

I wonder if she was thinking about how much of a fucktard some librarians can be sometimes, especially when drunk on beer? Or if she was thinking about Fatsuit McUmmings, how unliterary he can be when he's got a few pitchers in him, about how, well, he never seems to forget that writing's his real job and that working his way through college as a cook is just, well, a research grant with a bit of beer money thrown in for good measure...

She does this often, just gets these sparkles in her eyes and laughs at the strangest things. Her full-time job, besides working at a bar to pay for school, is as a visual artist.

Pfft. Artists. And their sparkling giggles, their whiskey-cokes, their smiles and their art.

Madness. Sheer madness, built upon the insane foundations of knowledge...

* * * *

“So what'd you think? Holy shit, dude, you wouldn't believe how nervous I fucking was...”

“You did great, man! Now, it's smooth sailing until graduation. And I loved how the e.e. cummings - influenced poem turned out...”

“Fuck! I'm just glad it's over. Man, I'm so ready to graduate it's not even funny.”

And then, after the booze kicked in, after our egos had been greased down to an honest purr, then could we discuss writing and literature. And, yes, it was intermixed with crude comments about women's breasts, with references to the overrated genius of guys like Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, critiqued some of the mixed-media, post-modernist absurdism that's blanketed the literary landscape for the last few years...

Mostly, however, we talked tits.

Tits are wondrous things. There isn't a straight man in the world who doesn't marvel at both their purpose and their aesthetics.

Yes, motherfucker, yes! We can, yes, still write about tits in this grand Information Age! We can sculpt them from paper and clay, from stone and atop a laptop keyboard! We can drink and be merry and puke in the alleys, be failures and martyrs and cocksuckers. We can do lines off our cable modems, carve sonnets and sestinas and novels into the backs of the spiders of our World Wide Web...

What good is information technology, after all, if we forget that knowledge itself is the key to our own madness, to building our beautiful creations of song and word, that all else is gimmickry and whiz-bang farts into the bedsheets of humanity?

"Hah. Uh, yeah. The librarian's fucking wasted!"

Goddamn writers, librarians, and their swinging cocks full of jism, knowledge, Carl Sandburg's “The Fog,” and jokes about fucking your mother in the ass. Just keep the pitcher's flowing, and neither will have anything to bitch about...

Hey, don't hate the playa. Hate the game, baby, THE GAME!

- # # # -

SHORT TAKES AND SUCH: Mau-Mauing the Bodywash BourgeoisieAnd Other Sorted Tales

AND BEING WELL-READ
SOMETIMES MEANS A GUY'S
BETTER ENDOWED ELSEWHERE,TOO...

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- She wasn't going to respond because the guy was, well, a Grade-A douchebag of a chachball, primped and waxed and reeking of overpriced cologne.

"I dunno. I guess I'm just into, ya know, more real guys now... like waking up from a bad dream or something..."

She'd met the caller through a friend of a friend. They hooked up once, junior year. And recently he'd tried to kiss her at an Oxford bar, grabbed her ass and asked her to go home with him one last time...

And she went home alone. Yes, she is so hot - guys tell her that all the time. But it takes a whole hell of a lot more than bourbon on a guy's breath to get into her pants these days.

"I guess that's why I'm ready to get the fuck outta here, ya know?"

Unfortunately, he still had her number. When she was much younger, back when she was much less sure of herself, she would've hooked up with the guy in a heartbeat. Back then, super-preppy guys were her type. When they flattered her and bought her drinks, she'd spread her legs at the end of the night, pass out, and hope to God the condom didn't break...

She looked at the text message for a few seconds, deleted it, and turned off her cellphone.

"Anyway... what was I saying... Oh! This guy I've been seeing up in Columbus... we were talking last weekend, about punk music..."

Her new guy is about my age, 30ish. And he, too, grew up listening to a lot of hardcore punk music, enjoys reading the most obscure things, and, much to the embarrassment of her well-to-do family, is unrepentant when it comes to his militant, individualistic political views.

"It's weird, ya know? You remember talking online, what you said about guys who declare their independence just by being themselves? He's like..."

The new beau even comes complete with piercings and real (not bullshit emo, she adds) tats, as well a fondness for David Lynch films and Walt Whitman. And over the last few months, he's introduced her to all sorts of interesting people -- aspiring artists and poets, musicians and writers and even a chess-playing truck driver.

He even took her on a midnight picnic -- complete with wine and cheese!

There's just something breathtaking about her story, beautiful and simple -- the stereotypical former high school cheerleader finding her Prince Charming in the form of a tattooed punk who works in a warehouse...

"As the saying goes, well... just because I dress like this doesn't mean I'm a communist."

"Um... okay. Kinda weird, there. What the fuck?"

"It's a quote. Sorry, random."

"Oh. A poem or something?"

"Sorta. Billy Bragg. Or Lars Frederiksen, depending on who ya ask. Ask your boy. He might know it..."

And for some reason, I'm sure that, well, even if he didn't know the source of the quotation, he knows it now.

There's nothing in the world like a good love story, nothing like a tale of chess-playing truckers and moonlit picnics to leave me, well, without anything original to say.

A CHAW OF LEVI GARRETT, A LOAD OF POSTS
(AND EQUAL PARTS BULLSHIT):

HAMILTON, Ohio (ZP) -- A sentence or two, a laugh, and a quick, black spit onto the parking lot.

I'd seen the old man pushing his loaded lumberyard cart across the lot as I pulled into the hardware store. I offered, with a holler, to give him a hand before he killed himself.

Well into his eighties, and, well, he'd promised the Missus a new fence. And, goddammit, that's just what he was going to give her.

The steel plant retiree, round as a pumpkin and just as sunburnt orange, tossed the five 80-pound bags of quick-setting concrete into the back of the old station wagon while I loaded his pressure-treated fence posts onto the roof. I'd offered to do it all, but he insisted that he was still just as strong as he was when he'd retired back in the 1980s.

He offered me twenty bucks for my trouble. I declined. He offered me a six-pack of beer, the one sitting on the passenger seat. I explained that I was on a work errand and couldn't, well, drink on the job.

But the old man was a pillar of conviction - he would not take charity. Finally, we struck a deal. I'd run out of cigarettes, and he had a brand new pouch of chewing tobacco poking out of the pocket of his overalls...

Talk a bit, laugh, spit. A dirty joke here, a woman story there, and black juice shot forth into the air like cannon fire. Our conversation must've been a thing of beauty, a marvel to watch and to overhear. Carl Sandburg and Woodie Guthrie couldn't have done the workingman's lament any better.

And our lack of, well, urban sophistication must've driven the weekend warriors back into the safety of their gleaming SUVs, probably sent the soccer moms shopping for lawn chairs and garden fountains running for the nearest bottle of gin at the goddamn garden club.

"All these goddamn rich bastards," the retiree said, "Wouldn't know shit 'bout how to build their own goddamn fence..."

"Ain't that the truth, man? Up in Oxford, we've got em everywhere."

If there were such a thing as a repellent for the American Bourgeoisie, it'd come bottled as a few minutes' worth of hard, manual labor for no pay other than a chew of Levi Garrett.


SOMETIMES, MATTRESSES COME
WITH CUNTS AND POINT SPREADS...

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- I took a large gulp of my drink, almost choked on it, as one of the women seated on the other side of the booth attempted to shove her high-heeled foot into my crotch.

I looked down between my legs -- gold hot pants! My God! Will somebody shoot whoever decided to resurrect that 1980s fashion nightmare?

I'd returned to the table too early. The two drinking companions I actually liked were still outside, still smoking their cigarettes. Sucks serious ass, sometimes, being the nicotine speed freak...

"So... hehe... you still wanna know? Okay... you get so many points for 18-year-olds, 19-year-olds... all the way up to, like, seniors and, like, grad students..."

I couldn't help but stare. Bright pink -- PINK! -- lipstick, lime green polo, spray-on tanned with the collar popped, trendy bobbed haircut styled in such a way as to cover one eye. And there she sat, this petite little woman, perched on the lap of an Amazonian blonde.

They were giggling, drunkenly fondling each other. It would've made for one hell of a sapphic tale had the conversation been different and the bar less crowded...

The Amazonian, for the record, was the owner of the crotch-violating golden leg. And, for some odd reason, I felt like I was trapped in a goddamn John Hughes flick.

"Okay, I got that. So... how many points do you get for librarians? Or faculty? What about, like, a lawyer or doctor?"

The Amazonian answered. Faculty, she said, were extra points in the game, rated based on hotness and age. Librarians? Well, librarians were of a point value that had yet to be determined.

Both women claimed to have already earned their faculty bonuses. Little Ms. Pepto was up a few points on Ms. Hot Pants.

Or...wait... No. I may have that backwards. Dammit. They just kept giggling, fondling each other, speaking in strange, tipsy Ohio Girl squeaks...

As I inquired about their points-for-sex game, I prayed that neither woman took my curiosity as an attempt to flirt, hoped that it didn't indicate any desire to become the sexual equivalent of a basketball free throw.

"So you're, like, really a librarian, right? Like, that's like really big here, huh?"

"Yep."

"Like, do you, like, enjoy reading?"

"Yep."

"Oh. My. God. Really? You don't look like you read a lot."

"Hooked on Phonics worked for me."

"What? Oh. Never mind. Did I tell you I, like, LOVE your hair... OhmyGod... it's, like, PERFECT!"

"Yep."

And with that, my friends returned from their slow-ass smoke. I jumped out of the booth, let the golden Amazonian leg fall to the floor as my compatriots slid back into their seats.

Thank you, Jesus. Saved by the buzzer.

- # # # -

DEEJAYS OF THE DEAD: Kick Out the Jams, Motherfucker... And Don't Touch the Casket...

After your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live.

- Hamlet, Act II, Sc. II, c. 1600 A.D. (Really Old School)

Hey deejay, just play that song. Keep me dancin', all night long.

- World's Famous Supreme Team, c. 1984 A.D. (Not-So-Old School)

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- The tale began as such...

Two men in suits walked into a local electronics store, asked the salesclerk for help locating a replacement P.A. system. Theirs, they claimed, had burned out and they were on a tight deadline. The clerk, in an effort to make a quick sale, proceeded to show off the electronic store's wares...

Sounds pretty, well, normal, right?

The storyteller, the salesclerk, stared down into his fresh drink as if waiting for that next word, for the bourbon to free his tongue. Suddenly, like the blowing of a fuse or the sputtering of an old engine, his tongue caught up to his brain.

Dude wait! he said. No, this is weird. Dude! Shut up for a minute. It gets better...

* * * *

The guys weren't Men in Black, weren't extras from some lost episode of the X-Files, or Mormon missionaries looking to start a rock band. No, the suits were from a local funeral home, and were on a deadline to get a memorial service set up in time...

The salesclerk notified the pair that, well, to get such a P.A. on such short notice would be highly expensive and, more than likely, pure overkill for the mundane task of amplifying eulogies and graveside sermons. Instead, he suggested, he could do them a favor, loan them his personal amplifier rather than sell them something they really didn't need.

In his spare time, you see, the clerk also deejays at various bars and house parties in and around Oxford Fucking Ohio. And, being that there really hasn't been much work for a deejay in recent weeks, and his equipment's just been sitting around...

Fuck it. Why the hell not?

It was, after all, somebody's funeral. And, well, if it were his relative lying in state, he'd have wanted his departed loved one to have the best audio equipment possible, to be able to go out in style, with every eulogy and tearful remembrance heard by all, loud and clear.

Wait! he exclaimed as he sipped on his bourbon. NOW it gets creepy, dude...

* * * *

After work, the suits picked him up in their corpsemobile, loaded his precious deejaying equipment up like some cold old widow from the nursing home.

No, not a hearse. A corpsemobile.

Corpsemobiles are basically modified cargo vans, used by funeral homes to retrieve bodies from homes and morgues. Hearses are generally used for ceremony, limousines of the Dead built for those one-way trips to the graveyard. Corpsemobiles, on the other hand, do most of the day-to-day work, veritable garbage trucks built plain and rugged, built solely to move our Mortal Remains out of the way as quickly as possible.

Corpsemobiles are for pick-ups. Hearses are for deliveries. The Death Business is more complicated that it seems.

Dying's easy for those doing the dying. For all of the tragedy and sadness, well, death really does equate more with eternal rest. Actually working with the dead, however, is the responsibility of the living. It requires a dedicated efficiency, meticulous timing, an understanding that corpses, at the end of the day, are nothing more than the scraps left over from life's assembly line.

Once, I myself hitched a ride in the back of a corpsemobile, sharing space with the paid passenger, a teenager who'd been killed by a drunk driver. Her beer-swilling friend, the driver told me, had promised to get her home safe. Instead, she'd ended her prom night as nothing more than coroner-released cargo in a bloody prom dress...

Quite comfortable. Good suspension on those corpsemobiles. Almost overkill, really. It's not like most of the cargo will ever complain. But, well, deejaying equipment is, sadly, lmore fragile than your average dead body -- sometimes, those marvelous shocks and struts come in handy.

* * * *

Dude, that fucking stretcher was creepy! the clerk continued. Just thinking about dead people makes me... you know...

...Fucking weird shit, dude...

He shuddered, sipped his bourbon, ended his story.

At the funeral home, he sat up his loaned equipment in silence, with no audience other than the body of his benefactor. He didn't even do a proper sound check - none of the music he normally queued up in his sets seemed appropriate for the stage the mortuary staff had set...

He tossed back the last of his whiskey and ordered another.

There's something disturbing about, you know, being the Deejay of the Dead, dude.

I doubt any deejay would disagree with that assessment, actually.

- # # # -

WINE COUNTRY CONFIDENTIAL: Bizarre Cocktails and Nostalgia, Not So Classic Beauty, and the Ohio Library Veterans Association

SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. (ZP) -- The bartender looked at me as if I were crazy, downright fucking nuts, bonkers, completely off my rocker.

"Yeah, it's called a Napa Valley Handjob. I learned to drink 'em from older Poly alums back in the day."

It's one of the most insane undergraduate cocktails of all time, a perfect mixture of the often unrealistic perception of life in California Wine Country, of 1980s Falcon Crest pipe dreams, and the typical American college kid's very real need to get completely shitfaced.

Basically, the cocktail is merely a high octane version of a wine spritzer, the kind of pussy cocktail served at teetotaler weddings, Rich White People (RWP) parties in places like the Hamptons and Connecticut, and artsy-fartsy gallery openings along the East Coast.

Instead of the stereotypical white-and-club mixture, however, one adds a shot of vodka and a dash of black pepper to cheap Cabernet, gently mixes with ice, pours the whole thing into a highball glass.

In college, the wine was, well, usually a jug of Carlo Rossi, and vodka usually referred to any cheap, clear liquor, usually with that cheap-booze rubbing alcohol flavor.

Even better with Everclear.

"The drink's a Myra without the vermouth, dude. Calling it a Napa Valley Handjob used to make the Aggie girls laugh, think you were high class and crude simultaneously.

"Much more appropriate name. And sometimes, guys did actually get handjobs from girls from Napa, especially the sorority chicks..."

The doubting barkeep laughed, saying he had no idea how to ring up a Napa Valley Handjob. But, well, a Poly student himself, he made a point of writing down the drink recipe.

Older alumni know best, after all.

An older couple at the bar, yuppie tourist types, probably from wherever Land's End actually ends, some plane of hell reserved for old men in penny loafers and tennis shorts, got up and left.

They didn't even finish their bottle of Zinfandel.

Oh well. Can't blame 'em. They chose a shitty vintage. Horrible bouquet. One of those fly-by-night retiree wineries. Smelled like rancid goat semen.

Like Carlo Rossi, except for the $40, tourist-ready price tag and $20 corking fee.

Would've been perfect Napa Valley Handjob wine.

* * * *

ATASCADERO, Calif. (ZP) -- Busted lip and all, the young girl picked herself up and brushed the dust off her baggy shorts.

Even from 20 feet away, along El Camino Real, I could make out the road rash from her failed feeble grind, the ground-in concrete from the sidewalk buried in her shins. She'd landed almost face first; if her knees and palms hadn't absorbed the brunt of the impact, her bloody lip probably would've been a busted nose or worse.

The skater shoved a finger into her mouth, checking for missing teeth or loosened fillings. Satisfied, she kicked her board back up to her side and sat down on a bench, right in the heart of Sunken Gardens park.

She peered from side to side, watching cars as they passed, looking out for the dreaded Po-Po, the ones who, sadly, are now responsible for citing those who refuse to practice the California State Sport within the sanitized confines of the local skate park.

The young fugitive from city-ordinance justice gingerly picked stone from her knees, spitting on her hands to wipe away the blood.

Another kid, a raven-haired Lancelot on his own banned wooden horse, pulled up beside her. He whipped off his shirt, stripped down to his own over-sized Dickies and his Vans and his broad, studded leather belt and his wallet chain. He tossed it at the young skater's lean, bloody shins, striking his best teenage, cock-sure skatepunk pose as the wifebeater fell into the girl's waiting hands.

And then he sat down beside her, put his arm around her, wiped the blood away from her busted lip. He kissed her gently on the cheek, and she put her head on his shoulder, pink liquid dripping onto his chest, their sweat and blood and teenage love perfect.

And to think - a woman recently told me, back in Oxford Fucking Ohio, that I wouldn't know true beauty if it stared me in the face.

* * * *

PASO ROBLES, Calif. (ZP) -- War stories.

That's the best way to describe conversations with "El Guapo," my former Oxford Fucking Ohio colleague.

We bellied up to the bar at the Crooked Kilt, right off the town square, less than a hundred yards away from one of the old Carnegie Library, the one the 2003 San Simeon earthquake didn't have the heart to bring down with many of the other historic downtown structures.

Eight drinks into our Association of Badass Fucking Librarians Conference, I realized something.

One does not simply leave Oxford Fucking Ohio.

One escapes.

Looking around the crowded bar, I also noticed something else, something that I've been missing for going on three full years.

Diversity. Real, organic diversity.

And we're not talking the complete horseshit, let's - substitute - Affirmative - Action - with - politically - correct - statistical - quota- building, either.

Blonde Barbie-doll looking women, hanging off the arms of tattooed Latino bikers. Goth girl waitresses getting hit on by middle-aged golfers. Bodybuilder bouncers discussing ska concerts with skinny dudes, popped-collars mingling with plaid pants and straw fedoras. Old alkies at the bar, too, ogling the Asian girl in the micro-mini, the probably fifth - generation Japanese - American woman whispering to friends.

And two gay guys on a date, out in the open, holding hands, next to the old rancher-looking guy. I know gay men and women in Ohio who can't get a date, who can't go anywhere, even when attached, in the NeoCon Disneyland that is the Greater Cincinnati Area, without worrying about some Bible-thumping zealot or some homophobic idiot ruining their evening.

"El Guapo" just bought a house, moved his family here, into the heart of Wine Country.

And I'm so jealous I could scream, downright envious.

"You know, California is really full of a lot of cool people," El Guapo said, as he returned from the pisser. "A lot of arrogant assholes, but, yeah, cool people."

After I dropped El Guapo off back at his house, I returned to downtown Paso Robles, a town I once called home, a hick town I once despised, back when all the old buildings were still standing and before the wrecked Carnegie was closed to visitors.

I wanted to cry.

Instead, I pissed through the safety fence, right into the manicured landscape surrounding the busted ol' Carnegie Library.

A young woman who I'd seen at the Crooked Kilt earlier in the evening, a woman El Guapo thought I was talking up every time he got up to hit the head, walked past, said hi, and asked if I had an extra cigarette - while I'm taking a piss.

"I heard you talking at the bar. You guys were cracking me up."

"Really?"

"Yeah. I was born in Cincinnati. I thought it was so funny, because I probably know people that go to [Local U.]."

We spent two hours talking in that downtown park.

And her advice?

"Run."

- # # # -

SHORT TAKES AND SUCH: On Being Mean and Green, Dinners with Cougars, and Other Pointless Things

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- Saving the planet isn't rocket science.

It's not something that other people need to do, not something any activist is going to accomplish with anything even remotely resembling a protest. Activism requires action, actual measurable movement.

Quite a few folks understand that concept. Every day, more and more Americans - the single group that wastes more of the world's resources than it actually produces - are switching to alternative energy sources to heat their homes, to run their vehicles, and to, well, try to save the world.

So why aren't more people, well, taking the next step, simply changing how they actually live on a day-to-day basis? Really changing how they live, redefining their levels of comfort and lifestyle?

It's called Global Climate Change, people. And if we all don't really change how we live, we're all gonna be in some seriously deep shit. It's time to just, well, cowboy the fuck up.

Last year, I decided to quit being one of those stereotypical, organic-food eating, tofu loving hypocrites and to turn myself into a bit of an environmental science project.

And the result? After one whole year?

According to my calculations, I cut my annual energy costs by almost 70 percent.

That's right. Seventy fucking percent.

And it wasn't rocket science. It wasn't even information science. Sadly, no hippies were killed in the process.

I gave up a three-bedroom, two-bath townhouse and moved into a more bachelor-friendly loft apartment near work. I sacrificed the peace and tranquility offered by a more family-friendly neighborhood to live in the belly of the Local U. Beast.

And I intentionally moved into a place with no central air. The cost of running five old-fashioned box fans, year-round, has proven to be the equivalent of running the AC in my old place for two weeks.

During the winter, my new apartment is heated by a communal radiated steam system, fed by a primary boiler that also heats the building's water supply - still one of the most efficient means of warming a home. The result? My winter heating expenses were cut in half.

I leave my truck parked at work, only operating the rather fuel-efficient Ford Ranger approx. three to four times a week, an average of about 50 miles monthly usage. I hump 12 blocks a day to work, round trip, at my normal brisk pace, rain or shine.

And back in 1999, during California's rolling blackouts, my immediate family started to adopt compact fluorescent bulbs to help conserve energy. I completed the switch first. I light my entire apartment with the roughly the same amount of juice used by one 100-watt incandescent bulb.

Hmmm.

I wonder how I managed to put a dent into my student debt last year? Or how I was able to up my charitable donations?

I mean, where did that extra money come from? It's not like I'm rolling in the dough here...

Could it be... ?

Pfft. Nah. It couldn't be that simple.

Saving the environment couldn't really be tied to saving money, could it?

- MORE -

CINCINNATI (ZP) -- I sat in the hotel lobby, staring like an idiot, just like every other guy with a pulse, as a lone woman crossed the floor towards me.

Her cowboy boots clicked against the tile as she walked. Her jeans were just about as tight as humanly possible, every inch of Texas Chicana protruding from beneath the dark denim, in all the right places.

I almost laughed out loud as two guys admired her ass, staring at the damned-near-perfect thing with glares that could cut through steel.

Well, there are worse women to spend an evening with, I guess.

Her death-black hair hung over her shoulders and down over her breasts, her western blouse unbuttoned below her bra line, well outside the bounds of what's considered proper Sunday dress in the Queen City.

I stood so she'd recognize me. The last time she'd seen me in person, I was sporting a shaved head, a long goatee, and nine earrings, not to mention the additional 75 pounds of flesh. I'd sent her a photo to help her pick me out, but, well, part of the reason she wanted to have dinner in the first place was she was worried I wasn't eating right, like a man, and that she was afraid that I'd become unrecognizable.

Still babying me, treating me like a stupid 19-year-old. But as we embraced, I could've cared less; I put my hands on her hips, kissed her right on the mouth, suggested we just go right back up to her room and make love like animals.

She giggled like a high school kid, winked, and slapped me (gently) for still being so fresh, so downright wetto vulgar in public. She reminded me that if her husband had been there, he would've beaten me to a pulp for even touching her hips.

Ten years, I said to myself. In ten fucking years, I've aged more than she has.

One of the most sensual women in the world got off a 757 at the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky airport last week, instantly improving the scenery for at least a thousand miles.

Texican women from the Rio Grande Badlands tend to do that.

You are simply ravishing, lady. Muy, muy, caliente. I just couldn't control myself.

You know, I still can't think of a better compliment to give a 64-year-old grandmother of five, a woman for whom the biological clock seems to have stopped somewhere in the 1970s.

And my advances? Dear lord, I was only half-joking. They just don't build women like that east of the Mississippi or north of Tennessee. Here in Ohio, I think women like her are actually banned by some ancient and antiquated state law.

In the sea of Germanic-looking sameness, her flawless, ageless Mestizo features simply fractured reality in that pricey hotel lobby. It reminded me of a theory of mine, that there are American women who secretly want to lock down the Mexican border not to save jobs but to keep women like her, women born somewhere between Texas and Chihuahua, from ever being allowed to become sex symbols.

M____, at one time, was a candidate to be my mother-in-law. Her daughter, an ex of mine, has the same blessed genetics, that damned curse of the women from northern Old Mexico. I call it a curse, of course, because to look that good from cradle to grave must hurt like hell.

Over dinner, in between her virtually demanding that I give up on this silly librarian foolishness and discussing my seemingly perpetual ability to make some women laugh, when she wasn't nagging me about my still being single (she tried to set me up with our waitress) or trying to get me to take her out dancing, I realized why I quit taking relationships seriously.

Holy hell, this woman has me pegged. She knows every damned stupid thing I'm doing with my life, every mistake I've made in ten years. And she's just so damned chill about it.

Fucking creepy. Like ... oh God ... like my mother.

At one point she asked me about this slang term she'd heard recently, somewhere along her multi-state business trip.

"Honey, I keep hearing people talk about these cougars running around, eating up men. You know slang - is this something new? J____ [the woman's 40ish second hubby] won't tell me, and the kids all think its just funny."

It was three in the afternoon.

I flagged down the waiter, ordered a second bottle of wine. M_____, still treating me like one of hers, didn't want me to pay for anything, so I slipped the woman a pair of 20s to bring the second bottle out as quickly as possible.

And a double of whatever Scotch she could find, no water or ice.

Something, anything, to kill the pain.

- MORE -

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- The words just came out. From where, I'm not sure, just random unsolicited commentary offered to a complete stranger on a balmy afternoon.

Yup. There's not much to do in this town besides drink and fuck. Only college town I've ever lived in where the two have become the only sports anybody seems to wanna play.

Standing on the concrete stairs outside of a watering hole, just smoking away in the heat, I felt as if my sense of basic decency had suddenly flown out of the window.

I don't know what inspired the phrasing. I wasn't trying to shock the woman I was talking to, wasn't even trying to suggest that there was anything wrong with that sort of thing.

The words just came out. And it caught the poor woman, who'd been scratching at her probation-mandated anklet contently, by complete surprise.

The sad part is the fact that there's too much truth in that statement about everyday life in Oxford Fucking Ohio, the unspoken horror that goes along with being lost between 20 and 30, without the excuse that you're just here to earn a damned degree, here instead to live like an adult and find adult things to do.

Drink and fuck. Go camping, read a book, attend a Bible Study, watch a movie, or... drink and fuck. That, well, just about sums up Oxford Fucking Ohio nightlife.

Could be worse. I've heard stories about places like Casper Fucking Wyoming, seen the reckless tedium that is Green River Fucking Utah. In places out west, like Green River, some towns have only a Watermelon Festival and a prayer to keep their single 20-somethings from screwing and boozing away a summer.

At least Keysville, Virginia, had its annual Dixie Days festival, and in Plaquemine, Lousiana, they hop the ferry to cross the Mississippi, bound for Baton Rouge or Gonzales or New Orleans, or stand out in front of the Dollar General and drink cheap wine.

Oxford? We get tons of artsy-fartsy shit, but nothing, nothing, that would appeal to anyone who thinks classical music boring or folk art shows repetitive. There's only so many times one can stare at the same faces at the farmer's market, or listen to jam bands in the city parks.

The blonde, instead of being shocked and dismayed by my vulgarity, simply shrugged.

Yup. This town sucks. Fucking, drinking... fuck it, dude. I'm getting the fuck outta here as soon as I can.

What the hell am I still doing here, anyway?

- # # # -

LONG NIGHTS WITH THE ZENFO PRO: Defying Librarian Stereotypes, One RenFest-Hating Shot at a Time

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- For the record, nobody I hang out with on a regular basis ever calls me The ZenFo Pro.

Hell, I'm lucky if anybody I know even bothers to call me Jason.

The night this photo (at left) was taken, months ago, the women who requested I join them for one of just about every damned shot at a certain Oxford bar simply referred to me as that guy.

According to my staff, colleagues, and friends, there are several others floating around Oxford Fucking Ohio.

Some of the nicknames are flattering; some are probably meant to somehow piss me off.

To many folks, I'm known simply as The Librarian. I'm also known as The Cowboy, Tex, Boots, Drunken Master, Brokeback Librarian, The Motherfucking Asshole Who Slept with My Girlfriend / Ex-girlfriend / Friend's Girlfriend, Professor Punker, Old School, Peaches (no clue on that one), the Hot Librarian, The Chach Hunter, and, of course, That Weird Guy from the Library with the Blog.

But there's one nickname that only friends are allowed to call me here in Oxford, particularly in bars, taverns, or, well, wherever fine libations are served.

Church Lady.

Does the picture above make anybody think of church?

* * * *

Yes, Church Lady.

As in The Church Lady, a recurring Saturday Night Live character from the 80s and 90s.

A buddy of mine gave me that unusual nickname a few months back.

Whenever he thinks of librarians, or people who work in libraries, he usually thinks of Dana Carvey's legendary Bible-thumping, uptight, crotchety prude.

I'm sure the fact that my buddy thinks of Dana Carvey's character as being symbolic of the physical appearance of librarians just pisses the hell out of a lot of folks.

C'mon people. Lighten the fuck up.

Have you ever seen that stupid Librarian Action Figure? The outfits, stiff movements, and glasses are virtually identical. Who the fuck do you think most people think of when they hear the word Librarian? Winston Churchill? Cameron Diaz? Roger Clemens? Betty Paige?

Please.

Give Mr. Carvey's character 700 cats (20 of which are named after Jane Austen characters), a stack of genre fiction on the night stand and an overworked vibrator in a drawer, and, well, you've created the Perfect Librarian Stereotype...

* * * *

This morning, I had one of those oh-so-awkward run-ins with a woman I briefly dated (i.e., a fling) at the grocery store. She was back in town, helping a friend move.

She told me she'd dated another librarian, in the city she currently calls home, a few months ago. It didn't last long, apparently.

Jason, I never thought of you as a librarian. You're more like going home with a cop or a construction worker or something...

...Oh my God. He took me to a RenFest. A RenFest! And he recommended that I dress like an elf or hobbit or some shit. The dude was fucking weird, like serial killer nerd weird...

...I mean, you're weird but not like scary homeless guy weird...

You know, I've only been to one Renaissance Festival, ever.

I ended up puking in a porta-john for 20 minutes. I was seventeen. The bellyful of Thunderbird, combined with an overabundance of guys who reminded me of more obnoxious, armored versions of The Simpsons' Comic Book Guy, drove me to purge away a perfectly good afternoon.

I'm not knocking real-life Comic Book Guys here. Comic book conventions? I can deal with Comic Cons, no problem. Get me into a good debate about the DC Universe, about how Ted Kord was a much better Blue Beetle than either Dan Garrett or the new kid, and I'm set for an afternoon.

Hell, there are more hot women working in comic book stores than in most strip clubs. I quit collecting comic books because, well, I tend to get into quite a bit of trouble when there's a fangirl involved.

But RenFests? Nope. It's psychosomatic.

Fake broadswords and Highlander wannabes? Well, even writing about them now makes my stomach churn.

* * * *

So Friday night, a couple of friends of mine, including the guy who named me Church Lady, turned their garage into a concert venue, a celebration of Oxford Fucking Ohio's biggest holiday - the annual Running (Away) of the Local U. Kiddies.

Two local punk bands, no cover. Enough booze and cheap beer to deliver Boris Yeltsin unto Russian Alcoholic Valhalla in working-class style.

It reminded me of, well, my high school days - a bit of soothing balm for the ol' Quarter-Life Crisis. I'm fairly certain that I was the oldest guy at the party, actually.

With age comes a lower alcohol tolerance and, well, by midnight I was already nursing a pending hangover from earlier in the evening, dulling the pain with a second round of intoxication.

Let's put it this way. I'm going to be 29 next year. I've been attending impromptu garage rock-outs in college towns since I was 13 years old. It is probably not the best idea to leave me alone for too long near the keg.

One of the nasty little reminders that I'm, well, approaching the beginning of my fourth decade on this planet is the fact that my poor ears are a bit sensitive to prolonged concert-volume music. I've already sustained some hearing loss, thanks to my own years playing in various punk and hardcore bands back in the day, so I'm extra careful about spending too much time in small, reverberating pits o' sound.

At one point, I stepped out of the garage to let my ears rest and to get some fresh air. The bands were breathtaking, but the large crowd was downright suffocating.

A pair of intoxicated women huddled together against the building, arguing about whether to continue drinking my friends' free beer or move on to the next party.

I lit a cigarette. One of the women, mid-sentence, turned to me and asked if I'd be willing to bum her a cancer stick. I obliged and, well, being a bit too tipsy to be better behaved, I butted into their conversation. The smoking girl, my tobacco thief, seemed to appreciate the male attention.

"So do you live here?"

"Nope. But I know the hosts. Name's Jason, by the way."

"I'm _______.So what do you do? Do you go here?"

"Nope. I'm a librarian."

"Nuh-uh."

"Yep."

"Nuh-uh. Where?"

"______ Library."

"Nuh-uh. You're too young."

"How old do you think I am?"

"Um... 23?"

Bless you, my child. Nice to know that I won't be mistaken for a stupid librarian action figure anytime in the near future.

* * * *

I was almost willing to forgive the fact that one of her friends ended up puking all over me and one of the party's hosts.

Definitely not the kind of women I'd ever allow to call me Church Lady, much less allow the chance to develop their own pet names in more, er, intimate settings.

Ugh. Regurgitated corn and rum. My jeans were covered in the stuff. I simply scraped the kernels off with a stick and kept on going.

The smell reminded me of that RenFest porta-john. And I haven't even seen the bottom of a bottle of Thunderbird in more than a decade.

* * * *

I managed to make my way home by four o'clock in the morning. I grabbed a quick slice of cold pita bread from the fridge, put some Magic Sam on the stereo, and tossed my vomit-covered jeans in the shower to further ripen.

I stretched out, butt-naked on the bed, reading the same line from Ginsberg's "Howl" over and over until I finally crashed:

...they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy...

No, I wasn't thinking about something literary or snobbishly intelligent.

I was thinking about the Orioles being in second place in the American League East, despite going winless against Oakland and Boston last week. I was hoping, somewhere in my half-sober superstitious state, that somehow reading the line over and over, here in Ohio, would jinx Cleveland for the weekend series.

* * * *

I think I passed out at five or five-thirty. I awoke at 9:30, fight as a fiddle, with only the smell of corn and rum soup to remind me of the previous night.

The compact disc changer had played through all five CDs in the stereo - the sounds of Tom Waits, Nick Cave, the Wu-Tang Clan, KMFDM, and, of course, Magic Sam drifting through the apartment.

Well now ...

Isn't that special?

- # # # -

HEY, UM, DIDN'T JOANIE LOVE CHACHES?: Notes From Conversations About Jack and Shit, Chin-Up Bars, and Sexual Cockroaches

CHACH (alt. sp. CHATCH) - n. A younger American male who overly relies on shallow and often superficial things to compensate for intellectual deficiencies, sexual inadequacies, basic dignity, socially acceptable etiquette, and/or understanding of human interpersonal relationships.

For better, more creative definitions, check out the various entries at Urban Dictionary or this stellar commentary from an Ohio campus newspaper, The Independent Collegian.

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- I'm not a college student anymore. I haven't been one for many years. And I never attended the Local U., never experienced many of the things students here experience as part of their development from children into men and women.

I moved to Oxford Fucking Ohio not from my parents' house or some boarding school but from a tiny little apartment in Baton Rouge, one with a stellar view of both Tiger Stadium and the State Capitol Building.

I left behind the last of my college years back in the Pelican State. The days of tailgating, of running over to Ichabods for shots after - and often immediately before - Thursday evening classes. I experienced the crawfish boils, the pink flamingos of the Spanish Town Mardi Gras.

I left behind those downtown trips to Tabby's Blues Box (No. 2) and Red Star to drink cheap beer and party 'til Last Call, the ones made while everyone else was cramming for their comprehensive exams, pretending like those silly reference and cataloging classes were actually challenging.

And there was this one very hot waitress from Lake Charles at that sports bar across the street from my apartment, the one with the shirts cut so low you could see her...

Er....yeah.

And that was graduate school. There are days I'm grateful that I didn't start blogging in college.

Needless to say, I have really no idea about what it feels like to be a student here in Oxford, beyond what I've witnessed or what I've been told.

Hell, I just work here, folks. No ties whatsoever, other than the ol' job. I'm a transcontinental foreigner, a single guy who, through some quirk of fate, ended up accepting a position in this little town.

It's not a bad little town, really. Never once worried about getting mugged, never once have I worried about rush hour traffic, and I really enjoy the nice, peaceful summers.

But I've never given a shit about Green Beer Day, a once-a-year annoyance that leaves my facility's plumbing fixtures clogged with vomit and beer shits. I've never celebrated Ghetto Fest, never experienced one of the famed Toasted Rolls in a dining hall, never had to suffer through perhaps one of the most tedious general education schemes known to Man.

I've never even thrown up in The Alley, never worn a Muck Farshall tee to the football stadium, and I've yet to log a single hour passed out on the couches in the ZenFo Pro Library - all seen as benchmarks of the Local U. Experience. I've never cried over rotting water towers or whined to city council about outdoor drinking game bans, either.

Without having been a student here, well, there are several local phenomena for which I have no frame of reference. There are concepts that I can't seem to grasp, no matter how hard I try.

Sadly, the chach concept isn't one of them.

* * * *

The first time I heard the term chach, "Britney" and I were sitting in my new apartment, back in late November (when I began writing this damned post), chatting away about her experiences transitioning from undergraduate to alumna.

She'd come back to visit Oxford for the same reason many recent alumni return to visit their alma maters post-graduation. While out in the working world, adjusting to a 40-hour work schedule, the decreased socialization, an the inability to sleep past the asscrack of dawn, she'd grown a bit nostalgic. Sadly, coming back reminded her of why she'd said she never wanted to return in the first place. Too much drama, bad memories overwhelming the nostalgia.

Over dinner, she even told me that seeing all of the drunk students staggering down High Street, from bar to bar, made her new boring life - up at 5 to go spinning at her gym, in the office by 8, and hanging out at a Barnes & Noble drinking coffee and reading away her evenings - seem like a vacation from the reality she'd once known as a student.

One of her former roommates called while we were sitting at the kitchen table. I laughed as "Britney" made faces and obligatory obscene hand job gestures while she talked, occasionally kicking my leg to remind me that she'd much rather be talking to me.

The two didn't really like each other; they kept in contact, it seemed, primarily out of a sense of obligation. I guess they missed arguing over unpaid utilities and, er, certain former flings who'd once, er, accidentally removed a showerhead with a pair of handcuffs.

Long story.

Yeah, I don't think I'm going out tonight. I'm over at J's apartment right now. No, we're just talking. No, I've got a hotel room....I don't think that's any of your business really anyway. Later babe!

"Britney" hung up her cell and flung it down onto the table.

Can you believe her? She wanted me to come down to Brick Street because she's not sure if she should hook up with some guy. Un-FUCKING-believable. She's 23 and hitting on fucking chaches and thinks YOU were a bad influence on ME!

Having never heard the term Chach before, I asked "Britney" what the term meant. I thought she was talking about Scott Baio's character from Happy Days.

It's one thing when someone laughs with you. It's another thing completely when a former "fruitcake sex" partner laughs at you for being so ignorant of local slang, points and giggles at you like you're the dumbest guy on the planet.

And she absolutely refused to define the term beyond never mind...this is too fucking funny.

"Britney" explained, through the snorts and tears, that, well, the idea of the oh-so-smartypants librarian not knowing the meaning of Chach was one of the funniest things she'd ever seen or heard - especially since I'd been suckered by something called chachbait quite a few times since she'd last seen me (see this post for one example).

Very humbling experience.

We ended up hanging out in my apartment all night, drinking my last very good bottle of Tobin James, a 2004 Estate Private Stash (a $50 bottle of reserve-bottled Bordeaux. I'm not a wine drinker, but, well, I know how to buy the stuff. Great flavor on this one.) and watching Justice League Unlimited on my laptop.

At one point, she excused herself to use my john. Five minutes later, I heard more hysterical laughter from my bathroom. Apparently, the chin-up bar I'd recently installed in the bathroom door frame was chachish - "Britney" even asked if I secretly pop the collars on my polo shirts and flex in the mirror when nobody was looking, a closet chach.

At one point in the evening, she popped her own shirt collar, put on my Stetson, and did her damnedest to convince me that her impression of the Chachformation Professional was as funny as she thought it was.

I walked her back to her hotel at well past three in the morning, unable to pick a meaningful definition of Chach from her oh-so-smartass brain.

As I walked back to my apartment, the only thing I could think of was Charles in Charge, Fonzie jumping the Shark, and Joanie Friggin' Cunningham.

* * * *

I tried researching the origins of this particular, uniquely Midwestern term in a more scholarly fashion. I tried finding an answer in various slang and contemporary language dictionaries during my lunch breaks.

I finally called a language expert, a buddy of mine, who responded by laughing hysterically, questioning my sanity, and suggesting that I ask the locals - something that, well, someone studying regional dialects and its unique identifiers would do.

She did, however, put me on hold while she asked her teaching assistant - an apparently charming 26-year-old who my friend has suggested, in less-than-scholarly IMs, represents the kind of woman I should be dating, should I continue my professional career here in Oxford Fucking Ohio.

The language expert's probably right. I really do prefer educated women who listen to the Clash and the Dropkick Murphys, have a particular fondness for industrial techno but no longer enjoy going to clubs, enjoy hiking and target shooting, and who sport nose rings.

But I digress...

The TA, a Hoosier State native who attended an Ohio university as an undergrad, thought it was, well, fucking hysterical that that blog guy was calling from across the country to learn about Chaches.

After some delay, the faculty finally put her protege on the phone.

According to the Indianan, roughly 60-70 percent of Ohio male college students fall into the chach category - at least the ones she knew when she was an undergrad at her Ohio university.

Here in Oxford Fucking Ohio, at the Local U., she estimated that as many as 90 percent of the male students fit the bill, based on her experiences partying with and dating several Local U. students.

...Basically, chaches are guys women go home with in college because they're cute, frigging adorable, on the outside... Women wake up and literally feel like their IQs have dropped because they've just hooked up with a Metro version of a Neanderthal... Chaches are like the sexual cockroaches of college, they're everywhere and don't ever seem to go away.

Wait...

So I have metrosexual sexual cockroach caveman tendencies?

I explained to the TA how, exactly, I'd become obsessed with the Chach. That only led to more laughter.

Dude, if you have a chin-up bar in your bathroom...yeah, that's kinda chachish. But you don't seem like a Stadium Toad, at least online.

Wait...

Stadium Toad?

* * * *

I finally admitted that I needed, well, a Local U. perspective, a perspective that I could trust to cure my obsession.

So one night, while bar-hopping at way past my normal bedtime, I asked a few male friends - none of whom seemed to be the type to have chin-up bars installed in their bathrooms - for a better explanation.

One guy, a larger guy who I'll call Mr. Molson, laughed as we stood out on the balcony of this one particular bar. Mr. Molson, I knew, used the term frequently.

I'm pretty sure you're not a chach, Mr. Molson said, pointing towards a group of younger bar patrons.

Now that, my friend, is a chachfest.

A group of guys, all dressed in matching neon polos and overpriced jeans, staggered out of the bar, drunk girls in tow. Their hair hardly moved, gelled like mine but...not. Their faces seemed almost waxed, nary an ingrown hair in sight, eyebrows plucked and perfect. The whole group reeked of expensive cologne and Natty Light. The air was filled with the sounds of hey-bras and what sounded like rich white kids who'd heard one too many Dem Franchize Boyz tracks.

And, yes, they looked like the kind of guys who would have chin-up bars installed in their bathrooms.

But unlike the ol' ZenFo Pro, they didn't seem to be the kind of guys who kept Whitman's Leaves of Grass on the nightstand or who'd list The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari as one of their favorite films, or would, well, think twice about whether or not being called a chach was a bad thing.

Oh, so a chach is basically a preppy douchebag? Wow.

Mr. Molson looked up from beneath his ball cap. We were both drunk as skunks, standing in the cold, smoking cigarettes and watching as the chachefest migrated back to whatever horrid, vile place chaches take their chachebait.

Yup.

I guess being a college student in Oxford Fucking Ohio is no different that being a college student anywhere else.

* * * *

While the slang may change, there have always been chaches. We had them at LSU when I was a grad student, at Cal Poly and Northern Colorado when I was an undergrad - we just had different names for them.

Yeah. Chach works. And they really are like sexual cockroaches.

One day, maybe, I'll unearth a good definition for Stadium Toad.

I'll save that one, however, for another post.

- # # # -