COSMOPOLITAN STRANGERS: Globally Conscious Childhood Development, Without Ever Leaving the Country, Leads to Seriously Un-American Americans

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- It's easy to tune out the rest of the world, in a - let's be honest here - rather isolated rural college community surrounded by the college-aged children of some of the wealthiest, most culturally sheltered Americans ten months out of the year.

Within the Oxford Bubble, hell, it's easy to tune out the fact that the median family income for the average Local U. student is estimated to be between three and four times that of the surrounding community, to ignore the economic and societal divides, the extreme wealth in the face of some very impoverished people...

Well, for some people it's easy. For me? Not so much, really.

A simple tour of the campus at three in the morning on a rather frigid Saturday had turned into a rather heated debate.

Personally, I blame the amount of booze we'd both consumed earlier in the night, the lovely bottle of Jack Daniels we were sharing to chase away the Hair of the Dog as we walked.

"Serious, J. - are you sure you're even a fucking American?" The Visitor said. "You don't have cable, don't know who [some pop star] is. AND NO CANDY. And working in this fucking Lalaland... I swear I'd shoot myself..."

Pfft. Struggling actors. Not only do they use me for a floor to crash on, but they just love picking arguments when they're out of work. Something about building up future emotional reserves for casting calls...

"Why do you say that?"

I was still laughing at the fact that it was the fact that I don't have cable television, nor knew who some apparently famous reality television guy was, that set her off.

"Because you don't act American. Not even like Eurotrash wannabes. What the fuck are you?"

* * * *

So here's the deal. I may BE, by birthright, an American, a citizen of the good ol' United States. But I've never really fit into my own country's culture.

In fact, during my formative years, I was relatively sheltered from it, tucked away in a remote corner of the country, surrounded by equally naturalized citizens who didn't exactly fit in, either.

But while I may have grown up isolated on a small family farm in rural Virginia, I was never sheltered from the world. In fact, if there was anything I can be accused of having been sheltered from, it'd be from the culture and customs of Mainstream America.

My father's parents - who technically owned 80 percent of the place - weren't exactly what most folks would associate with a Hillbilly-Cajun union. They'd spent four decades as diplomatic globetrotters, hitting every continent but Antarctica. After spending almost their entire adult lives in mostly developing countries, they really never seemed comfortable in retirement with the often frivolous, shallow culture of the Consumerist Patriotic Motherland.

Yes, I grew up in an isolation tank so much smaller than the societal bubble that surrounds my current home. But I was never sheltered from the greater world - my cosmopolitan kinfolk made sure my sister and I would grow up to be global citizens, without the crushing burden of Post-Industrial United States they themselves didn't fit into perfectly.

I learned to read on a steady diet of newspapers and foreign policy journals, English translations of some of the world's greatest writers, even NATO and United Nations documents. I had toys, sure, but often they were secondary to the 170-acre playground filled with barns to explore, ponds to swim and fish in, fruit trees to climb.

Growing up in the heyday of reckless greed and glut that was Mainstream 1980s America, my sister and I were probably two of the least American children in the country. We learned more about our own country's culture in the same way first-generation immigrant children learn it - in public school classrooms, through making friends with those for whom the culture was natural, through television and radio.

Imagine, if you will, being a man who though born in the United States and having never been off the North American continent, who grew up basically a foreigner in his own land, who matriculated within a culture as a child and teen but who never really was taught to look at it as his own culture.

In all honesty, it's made for some often uncomfortable, heh, assimilation issues for both my sister and myself, growing up surrounded by people who'd spent more time outside of their own country than in it. But, overall, I can't imagine it any other way, and I think I'm a better person for it...

Look at it this way. A retired high-ranking intelligence official once told me that I'd been given one of the greatest gifts any kid in the United States can receive: the freedom to be my own American without my own country's boundaries, cultural pollution, or baggage, to start with a clean slate.

My dad and his brother were given the same amazing gift by my grandparents - while their countrymen were obsessing over the Beatles and Elvis, they were climbing the Pyramids of Giza. While their peers here stateside were obsessing over Cowboys-and-Indians movies, they were running into Big Duke Wayne himself in five-star hotels after being evacuated from war zones.

Of course, well, I'm also a bit of a fuck-up, so I added quite a bit of my own baggage and the slate dirtied up fairly quick...

But, well, for every fuck-up in life, I can honestly say I did it to myself. The violence, the drug abuse, the hoodlum tendencies to gain street cred, the slackertude and solitude, even the occasional dive into either easy women, psychotic women, or, well, sometimes the occasional wife or gangbanger's old lady.

Without a net or a scapegoat.

Hell, I can't even blame the wicked metal, punk, and rap music I discovered as a teenager, the subversive literature I still read, or the fact that the closest thing to an abusive moment in my childhood came in the form of being required to watch the nightly news...

* * * *

I tried my best to explain, well, where I think the origins of my supposed American Un-Americanisms lie, how growing up in a secluded environment surrounded more by global culture than my own country's culture essentially made me a de facto Military Brat without the moving from base to base, country to country...

Sadly, I was fairly drunk by the time we made it back to my place, and my childhood tale ended up coming out a lot more rambling and long-winded than this writing.

"That's hella fucked up... so basically..." The Visitor laughed, throwing herself down on her sleeping bag on the living room floor, "... You were fucked up by your fam and you're still fucked up... but in a good way?!?"

I poured coffee into the auto-drip, flipped the switch, emptied out the rest of the bottle in the kitchen sink. (I don't keep booze in the house - and I don't like backwash liquor shots, either.) When I turned the corner, The Visitor was digging through my movie collection for a DVD to sober up to.

"Dude, you have no chick movies. This is why you're single."

"I dunno..." I reached over her shoulder and grabbed a film out of my Classics section. "How about this? The Italian chick sent it to me last year-"

" - Still single because you're nice to fucking ex-girlfriends, too."

"LOVERS. Or flings. Let's be classy here. Anyway, read the back of the case..."

Bertolucci's classic. The Conformist. Sex, death and a Fascist State.

The Visitor fell asleep 20 minutes into the film - subtitles, dammit. And too complex, I guess. No CGI, no overly choreographed action scenes, lots of talk.

I watched the film, sipped coffee, and waited for the sunrise. And afterwards, I put an indie rap mixtape playlist on repeat on the netbook, puked, had another cup of joe and a fried egg, and passed out myself.

A perfectly normal all-nighter for me.

I like being a fucking weird Un-American American.

- # # # -

OF SEXY BEASTS & IVORY TOWERS...:Female Readers Share Some of Their Own Erotic Tales from the Higher Education Underground

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- A few years ago, I discovered that, yes, the vast majority of visitors to this site are women - by an almost 2:1 margin. Most, too, are either enrolled in college or college graduates.

And there's a reason, sure, that this here online homestead gained its reputation amongst college students, graduates, or even lifelong learner types of gals.

Integrity? Honesty? Heartfelt writing and amazing storytelling?

Heh. I wish.

Believe it or not, but I may just be the one librarian who, consistently, since 2005, has posted more about his often fucked-up sex life than he has about any other subject.

And there are more women who've never even met me in person, in all honesty, who have a better idea of my libidinous habits than most of the people I work with.

Kinda creepy at times. But, well, I do have my narcissistic exhibitionist streak, just like every other blogger... kinda fucking badass...

I made the female readership/librarian sex life connection a few years ago, ironically enough, while going through a rather nasty breakup I was specifically asked not to discuss online.

After the end of a really bad fling, particularly one where the ending involves a cornucopia of completely contradictory, malevolent emotions, well, I'm man enough to admit I'm one of those pace-around-all-night-and-sulk guys - I can't remember the time frame exactly, but I think I spent a month posting nothing but links to articles or playlists from the music I was listening to at the time.

And, well, I was spending a shitload of time in my underwear, online and chatting with pretty much anybody who stopped by this here site and added me as a chat "buddy." All hours of the night, days on end. My weekends were governed by visions of pop-up ads and online notification pings dancing in my head.

And then, well, I had a selfish idea - why not, in an effort to remind myself that all human beings have shitty relationship moments, ask some of these really cool chicks for their funniest, most embarrassing fling stories? I sent out a quick email, received about a hundred or so responses...

...And then I fucking lost the folder containing all of these wonderful pieces originally meant for a post two years ago.

Recently unearthed on an old flash drive found in a storage unit, I thought, Well, shit... what better way to return to the ol' Zenformation Professional? Let readers tell their sex stories for a change, pick out the best and most cringe-worthy and humorous...

* * * *

"When a girl's in your apartment and tells you she wants you to rip off her panties, it doesn't mean keep drooling and licking her tits like a fucking idiot. Tear those fuckers off, shut up, and get working. If not, she's gonna be faking it because you obviously, duh, can't follow fucking instructions..."

- MADISON, Wisconsin

"...I went home with this guy once who just didn't get that he was a bootycall and couldn't spend the night. Worst lay ever! Anyway he wanted to stay and cuddle. He smelled like fucking ass - missed that when I was wasted but when I sobered up he was, OMG, a fucking little troll... He just couldn't deal and missed all the hints, so I got up and told him I wanted to go get a frozen pizza or something. This dude got up... put his clothes on and like ran out the door - he was gonna get me the pizza. I locked the door when he left and turned the radio on real loud...Don't think he came back with haha the fucking pizza..."

- OXFORD FUCKING OHIO

"You know what I hate dude? I hate when guys who think they fucking PWN U the second they get laid. I dated this guy once who was completely cool until we hooked up. After he just turned into this ridiculous chachasaurus... no space ever... always wanting pussy... he would like cling onto me at EVERY party EVERY bar whenever I was talking to guy friends... but when his female friends were around, oh, THAT's when I'd get some fucking space..."

- COLUMBUS, Ohio

"Won't ever ever ever fuck a guy taller than 6'5 again. Long story but not long anywhere else :)"

- ATHENS, Georgia

"...Anal. I don't know why some girls don't like it. I'm like ur ex man... in the butt and I'm like good to go for hrs... sadly have you ever noticed there are guys more scared of being seen as like gay just b/c they like it? Not you but guys in general...?"

- VANCOUVER, British Columbia

...In all honesty, the best sex I had when I was in college was with myself. It's funny but I quit going [to Oxford's] Uptown right after I turned 21. Lost all interest in drunken idiots. Just me, my showerhead, and, LOL, lots of Cabernet . God, I miss that massage setting..."

- CHICAGO

"...I don't know if this is what you mean by erotic and embarrassing but I've been caught heh diddling the magic button by every roommate I've had since Freshman year... Every woman masturbates everywhere..."

- ANN ARBOR, Michigan

"...Worst funny or best funny? Both would be - plz no names - with my husband when we were dating. In Fort Collins [Colorado] there used to be this great burrito place right near campus... I dunno but for some reason Roberto's used to just make me horny... We used to go there in between classes but for some reason - ____'s so gonna kill me - we'd never make it to those afternoon classes. Don't know how we both graduated..."

- BOSTON

"...I think all of them were funny embarrassing and erotic. Dooders, that's the point of college. To learn. Put that in there..."

- CLEVELAND

"...Tried this melted chocolate thing on my partner once... ah yeah... ever seen an angry dyke rushed to the hospital with burns on her tits? Not cool but she forgave me eventually and she'll kill me if you use my name..."

- TEMPE, Arizona

"...In a tube [ London subway] once after drinking. Worst bloody lay of my life. Guy looked like [David] Bowie while rumbling south... the next morning I awakened to a guy who looked so dandy, like Tony Blair or an electro deejay..."

OXFORD, Oxfordshire, UK

"The Fat Man in Canberra... not because he was huge but because he ate at the clammie like a Chinese buffet... God the slurping still gives me nightmares...Worst naughty I have ever had..."

- NEWCASTLE, New South Wales, Australia

"... I was in graduate school... I was exchanging fruitcake sex (best Zenfopro-ism EVER btw) with another TA in our office. I don't know about M____, but our TA offices are tiny, filthy holes not fit for human occupancy. He was every bit the self-absorbed, stereotypical Jewish mama's boy... a great lay but paranoid she'd find out I was Korean... We were going at it like cats and dogs, just crazy. I was about to come when his cell phone rang... he stopped and answered his fucking mother's phonecall. I pushed him off me and told him he could fuck his mother the next time... while he was still on the phone with her."

- PRINCETON, New Jersey

"Library school. I didn't sleep alone for five semesters. I was queen of the cougars. Or my ex-husband. Which was awesome. My kids were disgusted. Graduated with a 4.0."

- [Location withheld by request]

"...Okay, well, this guy from where I work on campus. I was trolling for twinks at this queer club near where I live and I had such a crush on this guy... such a HOTTIE omg... I thought he was into the scene... GAY bar, DRAG SHOW NIGHT, PRIDE flags everywhere... anyway we hung out all night, got completely shitfaced, hooked up... OMGOMGOMG the next morning fucking sucked. He thought it was a trendy metro club or something. that I was born a fem (hope that doesn't creep you out) His first trans experience btw..."

- SAN JOSE, California

[* NOTE: And no, I've not 'creeped out' by transwomen.]

"In the alley next to - don't kill me - the library during first-year. I faked it for all 20 seconds. Fucking shit, did I just say that???? "

- OXFORD FUCKING OHIO

* * * *

Now THAT'S the most woman-friendly post I think I've written in months.

Oh wait. Correction.

Now THAT'S the most woman-friendly, first-ever "guest post" the very readers of this here site have ever told in their own words.

And yeppers, I'm back.

- # # # -

CALIFORNIA CONFESSIONAL: EXTRA! Librarian Visits Magazine Photo Shoot, Kidnaps Model with Loaded Wine Bottle, Mocks Stupid Celebrity Worship!

When I die, my epitaph should read: 'She paid the bills.' That's the story of my private life.

- GLORIA SWANSON

SOMEWHERE IN CALIFORNIA (ZP) -- "Liza" (not her real name) brushes aside her rather over-the-top, every - negative - stereotype - imaginable, flaming queen of a make-up artist/stylist with a shrug of her shoulders and a quick hand gesture.

The stylist doesn't even look up. He stops momentarily, rolls his eyes. He tells his canvas that, well, he just needs to finish her eyes and he'll leave us alone.

I offer a handshake; he declines.

"Oh my gosh! I'm being rude!" Liza says. " ______, this is Jason, the guy from Ohio with the web site I was telling you about. Jason, this is ______, the one man on this planet who can make me look gorgeous in ten minutes or less."

The stylist's been buzzing about her like a starving mosquito for a good thirty minutes, ever since the guy who met me at the front gate - a BIG guy - escorted me first to the set to watch the end of the shoot, then past the lights, the diffusers, cords, the crew, through the house, and into the impromptu dressing room.

Liza and I have, up until this point, been making small-talk, catching up. And suddenly, it hits me like a two-by-four to the testicles.

* * * *

Ya know, Queen Skeeter here's sure been taking his sweet-ass time with the skin toner, I say to myself. And look at those eyes! He's trying to look like he's NOT paying attention to every word...

Like the parasitic insect he reminds me of, he's waiting for his bloody treat, some juicy morsel of free-flowing information.

And he's not looking to feast upon stories of my drunken debauchery at my sister's wedding last weekend, either.

* * * *

Information gleaned from eavesdropped conversations, you see, happens to be an important commodity in certain entertainment industries, the gray market sustenance of the set jockey and the shoot servant and other hangers-on, a veritable free lunch full of "a source close to..." payoffs.

Don't believe me? Well, run down to the goddamn grocery store and pick up a copy of whatever gutter-born literary syphilis the print infotainment rags are pushing to the Desperate Fucking Housewives demographic these days. Where do you think they get those juicy stories, the train wreck tales of drug abuse and break-ups and baby-mama matras, anyway?

And what's a nosy stylist, to me? He won't be getting anything of importance from me or my conversation, not one tabloid meal ticket. What good are the details of some boring ol' librarian's love life in Oxford Fucking Ohio to him? Who gives a shit about funny college town quotations, or thinks the terms Chachball, Snake Brother, or Fruitcake Sex have a price tag on the infotainment market?

Not only is the Zenformation Professional a collection of tales full of vague true stories, anonymous protagonists and antagonists, but the site's author, in person, really lives up to his Man of Fucking Mystery reputation. It's part of the inside joke of it all, really - and a safety net of common courtesy for all parties involved.

And Liza knows this game better than I do, obviously - hell, it goes with the territory.

There's a time for discretion. And there's a time for open conversation.

* * * *

Queen Skeeter finally gets the idea and makes his way towards the door. He doesn't even acknowledge my existence as he leaves because he finally figured out that I'm not famous, I'm not part of the entourage of anybody famous, and, well, I'm too quiet and polite to be an agent or talent rep.

"I'm gonna get some Fiji and a bagel, girl. If you need anything, you just text me. I'll be RIGHT in the next room."

And with that, without so much as an acknowledgment that there was another honest-to-God human being in the tiny guest room, the Gayest Gnat sashayed his skinny-jeaned ass right out the door.

Who the fuck would ever want to waste time text-messaging somebody in the next room, a mere fifteen steps, crank of a door knob, and a holler away?

How can anyone enjoy what bit of success they have in an environment where the envious simply wait for a slip-up or faux-pas upon which to crucify that success for profit?

Jesus Fucking Christ.

* * * *

So here I am, a guest on a photo shoot, complete with closed-door, behind-the-scenes access to the photog's target, trapped between a very annoying stylist and a camera crew, with a very BIG dude right outside waiting to walk me back out to the Jeep.

And I'm just some guy, seriously, she knows only through a friend of a friend of an ex's former publicist (head hurt yet?), a few emails and online chats, a quick lunch in Pismo Beach last summer - and from a frigging blog.

She's the one who came up with the whole "Why don't you bring that Gonzo web self to the shoot and we'll grab lunch afterwards?" idea.

And I guess I should be filling this dispatch with all sorts of juicy details. Things like the magazine that was flipping the bill for the shoot, the rather brutal stylings of the rather brilliant photographer, even the uncensored name of Liza herself - after all, some of you on the other side of the Electronic Fourth Wall probably would recognize her instantly and the rest would simply use a search engine to fill in the void.

And I could tell you all about her break-ups and relationship mistakes, how she feels she has to force herself to eat in public, her newfound love of the Los Angeles Dodgers and loathing of the Boston Celtics. I could write all about those, too, in gory detail.

But do you know what was on my mind, the whole time, once the door was closed?

The same random-ass, unassuming things that go through my mind when I write about anybody else. You know, the sorts of batshit ideas that go through my mind when I'm helping aspiring schoolteachers write educational stories in the basement of an Ohio bar, or when I'm trying to sort out the remnants of a fling, or...

* * * *

"Chica, tell you what," I tell my somewhat well-known host once Queen Skeeter was gone, "Let's skip the fine dining shit, go grab some turkey sammiches at this market I know up in Templeton, drive down a dirt road and kill off a bottle of wine I got rolling around in the back of the Jeep."

Liza's eyes lit up. I remembered the important parts, you see - the paranoia at eating in public, the fact that last time we met for lunch she ended up being so afraid that she'd recognize somebody or get recognized. And she's, well, still a bit of a good ol' fashioned country tomboy at heart...

"Hmmm."

"Hmmm? As in yes?"

"I dunno. I read your blog, you know."

"Yeah, and so do people I know and work with in Oxford."

I wasn't thinking celebrity. I could give a shit, really - modeling's a job, just like any other job. I wasn't thinking about Queenie or about the BIG guy waiting to escort me back through the Gates of Tartarus for the Slovenly and Unfashionable.

And, no, I wasn't trying to get laid, either. Though, well, Christian Lazo's 2005 Petite Sirah is probably the closest thing to a goddamn aphrodisiac this side of a plate of raw oysters on the Central Coast.

I don't really plan ahead. I'm a live-in-the-moment kinda guy in my personal life, most of the time.

Wanna know what I really found to write about on a photo shoot, with no-holds-barred access to a, OMG, professional model?

You know, it must really suck to be stuck around gossipwhores and egomaniacs all fucking day. How can anybody grow in a world like this without some open sky, room to breathe...

...It's downright suffocating...

Wait! Heh, I've gots some good wine past the gates...

- EPILOGUE -

It's hard, you know, to type a draft of a blog post into a laptop - into somebody else's wireless-broadband enabled laptop, mind you - while lounging beneath a live oak, distracted by a stellar view of the Santa Lucia Range.

It's damned near impossible to write anything, too, with a third of a bottle of leftover wedding wine and a turkey pesto sandwich nuzzled in one's stomach, with a car radio whispering Tejano Top 40 music into a hot breeze...

Liza and another chick, this kid who she'd met at her hotel a few nights prior, were picking - poaching, actually - not-yet-ripe grapes from a vineyard nearby.

The world felt good. Fit like a warm glove on a snowy morning. And the soul, yep, was at peace but, alas, the brain was a goner.

I saved the draft, closed the laptop.

Dude, you're the only guy for miles. You've got two hot women - one, a professional model and the other, a clerk at some boutique - at play in fields of fruit and vine. You're buzzed, fed just right, and ya got a stressed-out chick to get out and be the Girl Next Door, not just play one at a casting call or in a head shot.

Enjoy it first. And then write about it. What'd that dude in Cincinnati call you last year? The "Chillebrity Librarian Blogger?"

Well then, chill, goddammit. Ya gotta be back at the folks' place for supper in a few hours.

Everybody needs a break from the everyday routine. And it usually helps to practice what one preaches, too.

- # # # -

FOUR STATES, THREE THOUSAND MILES, TWO LITERS OF COFFEE, ONE DAY: Of Airport Love, Divorce, and Big College Football

PHOENIX (ZP) -- I was in love.

Instantly.

The Oh my dear God! Those eyes could melt titanium! kinda love that one finds in places like airports, retail stores and gas stations. The sort of youthful, downright childish lust that perpetually reminds all human beings that, well, our bodies were meant to respond to stimuli beyond the realm of the rational mind.

She handed me my coffee, smiled, and asked if I could wait a few seconds. She was about to take her break and asked if I had time to talk, split a muffin.

Of the tens of thousands of weary, caffeine-deprived travelers who'd passed through that Sky Harbor terminal Monday morning, I was the only one who'd pointed out that she had the most enchanting eyes.

Nobody had ever, EVER just randomly said that to her, and, well, my compliment made her smile more than the pushy New Yorker who, moments before, had insisted that her iced mocha was too cold and who wanted to complain to the corporate office...

Most guys, you see, don't use words like enchanting, to airport baristas or to any other woman, for that matter. Hell, I rarely use the damned word in casual conversation. Fucking hot is usually the most a guy - any guy - can muster from behind the veil of instantaneous libido.

I don't know why I said it, actually. The phrasing just spilled over my teeth and past my lips, into the air and through her hair, into her ears and brain.

And no, I wasn't the first guy to compliment her. I was, however, the first male under the age of 65, completely sober, to compliment her on something other than tits or ass - very few male customers had ever so much as talked to her face as she served up their lattes and cappuccinos.

I was in love, instantly, for a whopping 15 minutes. Knowing it wouldn't last, I tried to make the most of it, to cram the whole ritualistic courtship bullshit down into a lusty affair of casual conversation. We chatted, split a low-fat blueberry muffin, and then, like that, she took her enchanting eyes back behind the counter and went back to work.

C'est la vie, my friends. C'est la motherfucking vie.

Somehow, even though I live all the way on the other side of the continent, I ended up with a phone number and an email address scribbled onto a dirty napkin - in case, she said, I want to hang out or something next time I fly through Phoenix.

Go fucking me.

I spent the remainder of my hour-and-a-half layover wandering around the terminal, feeling like, well, a complete stud, shooting complete strangers the How you doin', baby?, the look so many guys tend to give off at times of personal satisfaction.

I made a complete ass of myself, I'm sure.

Pays to give a woman a compliment, though.

I've been digging through every crevice and crease in my laptop case since I flew out of Sky Harbor, hoping beyond all hope I didn't throw away that goddamn napkin.

I fly through Phoenix often, actually. And I've been known to accidentally miss connecting flights, simply to hang out or something.

- MORE -

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (ZP) -- He fidgeted with his boarding pass and passport as she explained the situation.

They'd taken one final holiday together, a trip to Florida and Georgia to visit friends. They broke up, officially, in Atlanta on New Year's Day, an amicable and supposedly mutual split after ten years of dating. It wasn't working for either of them and, well, they both knew it.

She took a drag off of her cigarette as we chatted, just outside of Douglas International Airport, hunkered down for our long layovers with cups of three-dollar coffee and our smuggled fire and tobacco. And he stood there, listening, hardly saying a word.

She added that she'd already moved into her own flat back in London, where they both worked, and that, well, she held know animosity towards the fact that he'd been sleeping with an Ethiopian/Briton colleague - she'd been seeing someone else, too.

Stereotypical Frenchwoman - cold and blunt in casual conversation like a German, nonchalant and whimsical like an Italian. Her English was more Canadian than British or American, a fact that she attributed to her years as a college student in Montreal.

The ex-boyfriend, a perfectly bronze Duala, originally from Cameroon, added that he, too, had studied in Montreal, that they had started dating in college and that, yes, it was a mutual breakup. He rolled his eyes and dug through his pockets for chewing gum - he was, he said, trying to quit smoking.

He seemed more than a little annoyed by the fact that she'd brought up his relationship with the Ethio-British coworker, that they'd broken up while on holiday, and that, well, everything was just peachy now that they were just good friends.

She and I talked for a good hour, until the time came for the pair to board their next flight - they were heading to up to New England to visit his brother, who she had also once dated...

And people say my love life is strange.

- MORE -

DAYTON, Ohio (ZP) -- For some Americans, college football is a religion.

And for some, that religion reaches well beyond the frontiers of faith, well into the realm of puritanical insanity.

"OH MY GOD! WHAT'S THE SCORE?!? ANYBODY KNOW THE SCORE?!? ARE THE BUCKS STILL LEADIN'?"

There is nothing quite like watching a very large man sprint across an airport terminal, sprinting for dear life and risking a massive coronary, the cold steel blue industrial carpeting slowing down every step with its damned gravitational friction.

And, no, by the time our plane had landed, the Buckeyes weren't still leadin'. They were headed, in fact, to that wretched little place, to where every overrated football team ends up, where the hype and fanaticism ends and the gridiron starts - a solid, painfully embarrassing loss.

A mere five minutes behind the Ohio State football maniac, a certain Louisiana State University alum, tired as he was, stopped to ask a lone custodian about the score of a certain national championship game.

And that LSU-educated librarian sighed when he heard the score, 24-10 at halftime. He really didn't give a shit about a silly football game. He was tired, still had an hour drive back to his Oxford Fucking Ohio apartment, and wasn't sure, exactly, where he'd left his pickup. When he got back into town, he planned on swinging by a pub to catch the last few minutes - if he wasn't too tired.

For those unfamiliar with the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) or American football, just think - Big Brother meets World Cup. It's less about true competition than your average pie-eating contest, a live-action role-playing game for the benefit of an army of obsessed fanboys and fangirls, a handful of overzealous boosters, and a few university financial planners.

Big Time College Football's "national championship" is nothing more than two teams playing in a game because several supercomputers and less-than-objective polls declared them worthy of a shot at a championship. One shouldn't put too much stock in a system designed around making sure the popular, well-funded schools get to sell more merchandise or to earn millions in television revenue.

Or, to put it another way, the BCS National Championship Game is nothing more than one big, sick joke, a disgrace to the spirit of athletic competition. And, well, the LSU Tigers would go on to wallop THE Ohio State University Buckeyes 38-24, becoming the first two-time big, sick joke BCS champion of the new century.

Yay. Geaux Tigers. Too bad there's not a playoff system beyond a few polls and a couple of statistical algorithms to back up that championship.

As the tired librarian made his way towards the baggage claim, he wondered aloud if the man realized how downright strange he looked, with his laptop case slapping against his girth, sweat pouring off his brow, as he raced towards an update and into the realm of hype addiction.

The woman next to the librarian laughed.

The fat man who'd just set a new Dayton International land-speed record was her husband.

She didn't see what the big deal was - her alma mater, Michigan, had won its bowl game the previous week - she liked football, sure, but forgot to watch her team's 41-35 win over the University of Florida. Instead, she'd spent New Year's Day shopping for new clothes for their grandchildren.

And for those who don't know, or who don't care, his Ohio State and her Michigan football squads have been duking it out since 1897, making the now annual meeting one of the oldest and most storied rivalries in North American sports history.

"Oh, this is mild. You should see him when Wolverines are in it. We don't speak for weeks. I can't even watch the game with him anymore..."

The librarian laughed nervously, grabbed his leather bag from the turnstile.

For some reason, as he drove home, he couldn't help but feel sorry for that poor woman.

- # # # -

OXFORD CONFIDENTIAL: Vignettes from a Nowhere College Village:Of Townies, Students, and Cultural Divides

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- The small cafe fills with undergrads and grad students, visiting scholars and faculty. I'm gnawing, slowly, on a soft, chewy brownie, sipping cool coffee.

There's a younger woman staring at me. The cowboy hat. Must be the hat. Or maybe the swollen face. Or the strange pile of books. She's wearing a gray sweatshirt and those painted-on black workout pants undergraduate females seem to wear like a uniform.

I try not to notice, try to ignore it. But, well, she looks like Audrey Hepburn, circa 1967's Two for the Road. And I see no boyfriend built like Albert Finney, no guy who may or may not get upset at me for, well, checking out my watcher.

And then I give up, quit everything I'd planned on doing that Saturday night.

I push the books piled up on the cafe table aside, push aside the brownie and the mug of Java, and open up the laptop case.

There are stories to tell, fragments of legends and folktales, things I've witnessed in this town worth writing about. There are vignettes of beauty and mystery along the spine of every small college town's Book of Life.

And if I'm being watched in a one-horse Midwestern town, by a woman who looks like Audrey Hepburn, from across a crowded coffee shop at five o'clock on an overcast Saturday, I should at least try to document some of the paradoxical dynamic that makes Oxford Fucking Ohio an interesting place to call home...

* * * *

Off came the wifebeater.

And then another tee-shirt hit the breeze, adrift and ripe, like a wet fart through cheap underwear.

Two drunken men, covered in jailhouse ink, were ready to man dance in the middle of the goddamn alley over something imbecilic and petty.

Both twenty somethings had been scorned by the same 16-year-old trailer park Lolita. And both men forgot all about the statutory rape and disturbing the peace raps that often follow fights over underage sex partners.

Cheap ink, tattoos meant to convey toughness in a small town where hard is defined by the ability to survive a few months locked up on a drug charge. Necks aflame with gothic fonts, shoulders sprouting naked women, lost girlfriends' names scarring flesh like bullets.

One man took a swing. His scrawny tat-covered arm shot through the night like a wingless lawn dart. The other cat took it in the jaw, then lurched forward, an attack more akin to a fat man at a buffet than a street brawl. More broken lawn darts flew through the twilight, the shadows cast by sodium vapor streetlights distorted and mean.

College girls, all dressed up and pretending to be urban sophisticates, watched and crowed and whispered and gasped, unaware that, should the cops arrive, they could be detained as witnesses, could be carded for underage drinking.

In the Hamptons, or out on the Cape, or on the banks of Lakes Michigan and Erie, in gated communities and other picture-perfect suburban brainfucks, Daddy's little princesses aren't exposed to this sort of skulduggery – they treat the fight as something for their entertainment, some freakshow put on by Townies for their amusement alone.

Both fighters were skinny and drunk. Fortunately, nobody expected a title fight. With all the grace and delicacy of an exploding car bomb, the whole physical outburst was reduced to smoldering screams from opposite ends of an alley in under a minute.

And the college girls blinked behind their out-of-place cocktail dresses and expensive high heels and designer handbags. There was, good Lord, blood coming from gaping head wounds and busted lips! The wifebeaters and tee-shirts were streaked with crimson as their owners pulled their clothing back on afterwards.

Must be nice to be shocked at the sight of two rednecks fighting over a trailer park Lolita.

* * * *

They tell me he overdosed, years ago. Heavy drug use turned a once gifted local child, a certifiable genius, into a cocaine-retarded blight upon the face of Oxford Fucking Ohio.

Instead of curing diseases or writing manifestos or building the damned world a better fucking mousetrap, he now wanders the streets as a zombified simpleton. He picks up work wherever he can find it, manual labor his destiny until death brings sweet liberation.

They tell me he's tried to kill himself, too, but the good people of Oxford Fucking Ohio just keep saving him.

I watch from a park bench as he lumbers by, quietly, his face obscured by an oversize hoodie.

And the Campus Crusaders and Soccer Moms, the men in white khakis and leather penny loafers, all seem to ignore him, an unfortunate blight on a college town Robert Frost once called one of the most beautiful college towns in the world.

The preppy students ignore him, as do the campus radicals who're busy preparing their latest bullshit protest. The campus liberals are all fired up about poverty, about wars on terror and crimes against the working class; the campus conservatives are demanding concealed weapons and curriculum oversight.

But everybody just forgets about the local kid in the hoodie, as soon as he moves out of sight. Just like the liberals ignore the poverty in this community, just like the conservatives blame locals for their need to carry weapons, he's just Static in the way of The Message, another local to call irrelevant for the sake of that grad school application.

He moves like a phantom, a tragic ghost that everybody secretly wishes would disappear, a brain-damaged Druid who scares the college kids and makes the alumni uneasy and who doesn't fit into an imaginary world based on a quotation by a dead New England poet.

In all honesty, I can see why the good people of Oxford Fucking Ohio want to keep him around, bum him cigarettes and give him the occasional free beer or sandwich.

The illusion of a perfect little college town, where the red-brick nostalgia of university recruitment often drowns out the harshness of reality, needs to be kept in check by somebody.

Robert Frost loved small town life too much to be just another bullshit quotation in a rich university's handouts.

Does anybody really think that ol' Yankee wordsmith, if he were still alive today, would've given a flying ratfuck about a college town where students are taught to ignore the people in front of their very eyes?

* * * *

She punches buttons on the cash register as she tells me about her one day off this week, about how she plans to spend the day with her son, to go catch a movie in nearby Hamilton.

As the cashier talks, I can feel the pair of sorority girls behind me, staring daggers through the back of my Stetson. It was my fault, obviously, for asking the middle-aged woman how life was treating her and her son, my fault for supposedly slowing down their quest to purchase a shopping cart full of Michelob Ultra – that lime-flavored shit that seems to be perpetually on sale and ripe for the undergrad consumer's picking.

The cashier and I are chatting, sure, but she's moving as fast as she can, running items over the scanner as she talks. And I'm a-swiping my debit card through the reader, answering omnipotent survey questions and navigating past the Cash Back? prompts and requests for a PIN number as efficiently as possible.

The stares seem to intensify when I respond to the cashier's plans, when I wish her well and express my hope that her son enjoys the day with ol' Mom. I can hear the sighs behind me, feel the daggers roll inside their eyesocket scabbards.

Never mind that the cashier is still ringing up my purchases, that my debit purchase is still processing across the untold millions of miles of Big Box retailer fiber-optic cable.

Simply being friendly is not something one does when other people are in a hurry to binge drink away a weekend. There are, after all, wealthy trustafarian boys to seduce, popped-collar poppycocks and pastel-colored preppy nincompoops to impress with tales of wild ski trips to exotic New Hampshire and Aspen, tales of daddy's time as member of some Ivy League crew team.

I listened, over my shoulder, as the two debutantes vented their frustrations over being forced to wait in line while their very important lives passed them by – mumbled and whispered and sighed, as if protecting their sheltered upbringing meant more to me than my bags full of smoked oysters, potato salad, and free-range eggs.

And to think, yes, there are single moms who work two jobs, who get only one full day off, once in a blue moon, who dare disrupt their precious routine with smalltalk about their children and kids' movies.

The audacity of some people.

Those women shouldn't have to wait in line, anyway.

After all, Daddy rowed a motherfucking boat all through college.

* * * *

I finish writing. Look up from the laptop, only to discover that Audrey Hepburn has left the building. I stand up, stretch, hit the head for a quick, caffeine-filled piss.

Wandering outside, I light cigarette and look off into space. Having stared at a laptop screen for hours, my eyes were having trouble adjusting to the dim light of early evening.

Two walk by on the sidewalk - more female undergrads. Undergrads, even in college towns, are easy to distinguish from full-time residents. Townie women stand out a bit more, carry themselves with more confidence and comfort, the streets of Oxford more of a childhood playground than some mythical Public Ivy holding tank.

One of the women exclaims that she wants to do some work in the coffee shop. The other states that she'll finish her cigarette, come in for a few minutes to warm up, and then head towards the bars.

Soon, I'm standing on a lonely sidewalk and staring off into space, in front of a crowded cafe, with a woman who looks like Sophie Marceau puffing away and staring, five feet away.

She didn't say a word. Just stood there, smoking, until I finished my cigarette. Maybe Sophie just wanted some company. Or maybe it was the cowboy hat. A lot of undergrads see the hat and think that, somehow, that automatically makes me one of those no-good, unsophisticated Townies. In a way, they're right - I grew up in a tiny college town, like Oxford Fucking Ohio, where undergrads thought we were all ig'nant hicks.

Yup.

Oxford really is full of interesting stories. And sometimes, it's good to be an ig'nant hick storyteller.

- # # # -

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.

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