WORLDS AREN'T BUILT BY GAME CONSOLES & TV SHOWS: Of Skilled Labor, Technology, and America's Drive Towards a White-Collar Oblivion

And you tell me, over and over and over again my friend -
Ah, you don't believe we're on the eve of destruction.

- From the protest song "Eve of Destruction,"
As sung by Barry McGuire (Dunhill Records, 1965)
Words and music written by P.F. Sloan

HAMILTON, Ohio (ZP) -- His hands have witnessed their share of pain, of toil and labor.

Those hands of his have scrubbed brushes down to nothing more than a few stubbled bristles. They've painted homes and painted churches, I'm certain, mixed glossy coats for bathrooms in fine restaurants and applied satin finishes to schoolhouse ceilings. And each one of his fingers has pushed putty into nail holes, has been rubbed raw by sandpaper and then bleached by turpentine and mineral spirits.

I can't help but look at my own hands, the blisters and callouses of hard labor beneath a skin-killing sun long gone. I sit myself down on the curb, directly across the street from the bricks-and-sticks canvas upon which the painter works. Maybe it's just the midday sun, or the angles and intersecting lines of his scaffolding, or maybe simply the starched white coveralls, but for some reason I feel as if I'm witnessing the arcane magic that was once called The American Way.

And up on that scaffolding, he is the epitome of the American Man, the Workingman of Lady Liberty's precious womb, builder of the Great Republic's imperial palace ...

It is a grand sight, watching those hands move rollers across brick, witnessing those fingers working fresh paint into an old building, watching the rebirth of something ugly into something alive and glorious.

* * * *

It's what made this country of mine what it is, you know. That old American Way. It's almost extinct now.

All that toil, the hard work, through war and peacetime, through evils like slavery and indigenous genocide, through miraculous things like the drafting of the first great Bill of Rights, through universal suffrage, even the invention of the light bulb. It's how a nation of farmers and trappers, of pulpit-shaking preachers and warrior frontiersmen and gunslinging cowboys, rose up from our fields and factories to harness the power of the atom, to put men on the moon.

Ah, the last dinosaur of a simpler world. Who needs labor when it can be outsourced, imported, or simply invented by a reality TV producer? Survival is no longer a skill; it's a prime-time game show.

For a brief period, in the 20th century, the people of these United States were able to call themselves, as arrogant as it sounds, the Leaders of the so-called Free World. Now, well, we've become nothing more than followers of our own self-importance, trapped in a vicious loop of consumption and glut and greed.

That last dinosaur is all that remains of the hope of a nation. And when the value of a hard day's work finally dies on this continent, in this culture, our children and grandchildren will inherit nothing more than a Land of the Fat, Lazy, and Vain.

* * * *

That old American Way. It's almost extinct now.

Shed no tears, friends, for it was our so-called progress that killed our drive as a nation. We grew fat off of fast food and video game consoles from China. We liberated Europe from Nazi hegemony and Soviet communism and then came home to build our suburbs of conformity, our own race-baiting, class-divisive political machines, our own reflection in a pool of nation-hating terrorists and third-world enemies.

We did it to ourselves, in less than a century, unraveled the fabric of an entire nation's drive and respun it into nothing more than a security blanket of products and pop culture references. We tied capitalism to freedom, married that bastard called the Status Quo to individualistic expression, stitched the ownership of things into concepts like success, happiness, even love ...

It's a marvel that there are still men, in a world of digital workflow and corporate, cubicle-filled bread-and-circuses, who can do such things as simply apply paint to a dillapidated brick facade in the middle of a bustling downtown city.

* * * *

I smoke my cigarette, silent, look back up as my painter, this Laborous, Liberated God amongst the office-bound masses, my tanned reflection of a nation almost gone, directs his crew with those marvelously weathered hands.

"No! You get wrong paint! Go now get me... right color... out... truck."

His English is poor; his swearing, in Mexican Spanish, is perfect. And such a wondrous sound, the profanity of a tongue other than one's own! It's been a while since I've heard the word Gabacho (n., Spanish slang - dirty foreigner) used to refer to my own countrymen by a foreigner, in my own country.

He shakes his head and returns to trimming out windows. His apprentices, his very American laborforce, mumble to themselves as they climb back down the scaffolding. I'm not sure, so far away, if their bitching and moaning has to do with their error, or if these white boys are merely upset that a man with brown skin...

If it weren't for the trickle of immigrants we still allow into this country, we'd be dead by now. If it weren't for those who bring their skin tones and cultures and skills, their brains and reasoning and religion, with them when they come, hell, we'd still be a nation of fur traders, pilgrims, and prostitutes...

... And those scrawny peckerwoods would be flipping burgers for some clown in a suit, instead of learning a trade from a Chicano painter, too.

* * * *

I crush out my Marlboro, stand up and dust myself off. My jeans, I notice, don't get as beat up as they used to when I was a kid, my back doesn't ache as much as it did, and the dust, well, the dust on my jeans almost bothers me.

I was a stonemason's teenage apprentice once, and a carpenter, too. I learned to frame up load-bearing walls with my father and his crews, roasted beneath a molten Virgina sun in red-clay fields where homes were being built, family dwellings created, lives and landscape changed by the very hands of men and women.

But now...

I continue down the sidewalk I hear two middle-aged men, dressed in matching polos, khaki shorts, arguing over some season finale of some network television drama. I pass a woman yelling into a cell phone about how her laptop crashed, home she hasn't been able to check her MySpace page in days. I overhear a young boy begging some distant parent, again via cell phone, for money to buy some new video game.

Ah, the new, supposedly improved American Way.

Labor is to be done by migrant laborers, by those from trailer parks and impoverished rural areas, school districts almost intentionally left behind in the Information Age to allow for a whole class of people, separate from the rest of us and beneath our computerized abilities, to become our redneck slaves, our Mestizo scapegoats, and our broadcast media punchlines.

I was once a stonemason's apprentice, a carpenter-in-training. And if I hadn't gone to college, hadn't been one of the lucky ones with an escape route and a gift for passing the required courses in a bullshit college curricula...

* * * *

I will spend a minimum of forty hours next week, I tell myself, staring into an LCD screen and pretending that data I put into a little black box, that the information I transmit across fiber-optic lines and servers, really means something, that my hands are contributing to the world in the same way as the painters of buildings.

And I know, instantly, that I'm lying to myself. I'm just another dirty, lazy gabacho these days. My hands are as soft as a young woman's cheek, my body weakened by librarian's meetings and the World Wide Web, my soul tainted by the lack of manual labor's intellectual sunburn.

What world is this that we're making for ourselves, anyway?

- # # # -

INTIMATE EVENINGS ALONE WITH THE ZENFO PRO: Some of Ohio's Most Fashionable College Women Think I'm the Cat's Meow. What the Fuck?!?

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- I waited patiently for some sort of explanation, part of me insulted and the rest in awe of the strangeness of the compliment.

I was, in her assessment, hip and with a style all my own, classy and sophisticated and, well, cool as shit to hang out with. And she laughed, yes, laughed when I asked for an apology, when I asked if she was deranged or insane or had spent her college years living in some other college town...

If I'm the heppest of the hepcats here in trendy Oxford Fucking Ohio, well, for fuck's sakes, some Scenester version of the Apocalypse must indeed be upon us.

Her roommate, this quiet little thing with a pixie cut, clad in skinny jeans and those ballerina shoes that tend to make women's feet look enormously long and narrow, a self-described fashionista, concurred.

The evidence, Miss Pixie claimed, was the originality of my rather talentless paintings, my collection of strange and curious DVDs and books, and, well, the fact that my apartment is apparently decorated in a postindustrial minimalist fashion...

Part of me was insulted and, yes, part of me was dreadfully awestruck. To be talked about like some sort of online sex symbol in one's own apartment, by two very fashionable women, is abso-fucking-lutely disturbing.

Me.

Now that fucking creeps me out.

* * * *

I sat on my living room floor late Tuesday night, dealt out the cards, and listened as two college seniors, two women who were in the know about the latest Panic! at the Disco albums and the latest Rufus Wainwright tracks, called me, quite possibly, the hippest, suavest motherfucker in all of Ohio.

After dealing out the last card, a King of Coins that followed The Devil, I grunted something about the girls both being full of shit, that I needed to concentrate to do the reading.

I proceeded to explain to my lovely young reader that she may want to indeed reevaluate her current relationship with the cat from Dayton - the cards revealed an unhealthy, codependent pattern and a lust more about maintaining image than actual love.

Little Miss Pixie grabbed her arm as I spoke, gasped about how, yes, that guy was indeed a cocky jock chump, and that, yes, the cards were indeed tapping into some esoteric medium...

* * * *

"This is so weird. I feel like I know you, but I don't. So you let random people who IM you...?"

"Naw. Figured ya'll were safe. Hell, we've spent two years IMing back and forth about all sorts of shit - this town's small enough that I figure you'd have stabbed me by now if you were one of the crazy ones..."

"So you've really had blog stalkers?"

"Let's put it this way - I'm getting fucking tired of cleaning lipstick off of my fucking truck and replacing the fucking mirrors..."

The reader seemed shocked. I explained that, well, there are prices to pay when one writes about things that involve somebody else's potential scandal or excuse for histrionic melodrama.

Writing, after all, ain't easy - or necessarily hip, suave, or sexy. Actually, writing online nonfiction is probably one of the most dangerous hobbies in all of Oxford Fucking Ohio.

* * * *

Miss Pixie was staring me down for some reason, eyebrows scrunched up, forehead crinkled like a tossed-off dress shirt.

"Are you sure we haven't met before?"

"Pretty sure. You've prob'ly seen me at work."

"Wait. Didn't I interview you once...?"

"Maybe. If it dealt with library renovation or some event or -"

The reader interrupted the exchange, hushed the roommate with a friendly Shut the fuck up! He's reading my cards!

The two women, the savvy, hip chicks who'd shown up late and were disappointed in the fact that the hardest booze I keep in my apartment is herbal tea, listened contently as I finished reading the spread.

I'd have made a fairly decent fortuneteller in another life, believe it or not...

* * * *

Through tiny desktop speakers, the Mp3 player let loose a fierce, full-bend acoustic guitar riff - French songstress SoKo's "I'll Kill Her."

Both women seemed fascinated by the worldliness of the songs on my playlist - everything from South American baile funk to French pop, from Palestinian hip-hop to Ratatat's latest remixes, from, yes, American bands like the Meat Puppets and the Melvins to Australian and European downbeat music...

Hey, who is this? seemed to be a common refrain voiced over nearly every song. In Oxford Fucking Ohio and in many American college towns, popular music is often defined by what's played in iTunes commercials, what's peddled by television execs on network dramas and comedies.

Even the highly fashionable, I explained, even young women who think they're pushing boundaries in terms of art and music, are usually just regurgitating somebody else's marketing. If one's sense of style can be boiled down into a bumper sticker or some quirky image on a retro teeshirt, well, one's style is nothing more than hollow capitalistic vanity masked as a creative, independent statement.

The fact that being true to one's artistic tastes and pleasures, true to oneself, has become nothing more than selective corporate branding supports the theory that, yes, we are at the end of that era that held 20th Century Western Pop Culture up as one of history's great creative benchmarks.

There will never be, ladies, I stated, another Great American Novel, another Great British Romantic Comedy, another French Literary Renaissance ... The Developing World has been out-imagining us whilst we play Guitar Fucking Hero and fiddle with our DVRs...

... Being sexy or fashionable is about giving meaning to insignificance and irrelevance ...

As I finished reading Miss Pixie's cards, continued intermingling my cartomantic interpretations with my pop culture rantings, I felt like my words were being interpreted as some sort of stupid Hipster version of the Sermon on the Mount. To say it was an awkward, downright uncomfortable feeling would be an understatement.

At least, well, SoKo now has two new fans here in Oxford Fucking Ohio. Baile funk? Not so much.

The American Millennials Rising Generation, that fantastic illusion of a perfect generation that's been pitched by academic hucksters and public radio poseurs for almost a decade now, just isn't ready for Brazilian women singing songs in Portuguese about fucking random guys on the dance floor.

One day, maybe. But only after those same young liberated Americans realize that nobody gives a shit about our reality television, our celebutante cuntflashing, or our steroid-filled athletes anymore...

Until that shit's well behind us all, ain't nobody bringing sexy back to this continent.

* * * *

Miss Pixie suddenly remembered how she knew me. The sounds of music so, well, foreign, freed up a bit of memory.

"Hey, this is kinda weird, but did you have an Italian girl living with you, like, two years ago? Like Italian Italian? Like not American? Like my age?"

"Um... yeah.... for 'bout a week..."

"Oh shit! You're that guy! I guess I have read your blog before. For a class, dude! Yeah, we were supposed to do a blog and...yeah... that was fucking hot!"

"Well shit, chica..."

You know, everybody still asks where I got the Liverpool jersey...

- EPILOGUE -

The agreement at the end of Tuesday night was, well, that I was to write something about spending yet another pleasant evening alone with two very attractive young Local U. women, reading tarot cards, discussing pop culture, and drinking herbal tea.

I told them that, yes, as always, no names would be used and that, yes, I would include something, somewhere, about how both women have boyfriends and that it was - in case anybody asks or it turns out we know some of the same people - completely platonic and innocent.

And, for the record, this has been one of the hardest posts I've felt obligated to write in a long fucking time. Obligated, because, well, I was asked to document something that's really quite a normal evening alone for me - save for the sexy/suave/cool talk.

I'm not hip, nowhere near being suave or as sophisticated, and, well, the sexy ship left my port a long time ago. I am, however, comfortable enough with who I am not to give a flying monkeyfuck about any of it.

To write about certain normal things, it turns out, is sometimes a lot harder than simply making a promise. By Saturday afternoon, I'd cranked out four very different drafts, the ZenFo Pro / Real World Jason personae painfully clipped and chopped down to tepid puddings full of random fragments thoughts.

I just don't handle being called a sex symbol well. If I've become a sex symbol because of a stupid blog, some fashionable demigod of Ohioana Web lore, then I can't help but think the whole world's gone fucking insane.

Saturday night, frustrated, I hit up my favorite watering hole to help cure me of my tragically un-hip writer's block. A good, peaceful night surrounded by the drunken chest-beating chatter of fratboy cliches and shallow College Girl stereotypes was just what the doctor ordered...

I knew that, yes, the mental blockage was about melt away like dirty snow the moment I ran into a cheerily intoxicated, newly mustachioed Mr. Chops.

Discussions about exes and anal sex and bawdy texts in the middle of the night were amongst the first signs that, yes, there may still be some writing left in me after all, that I'm just a normal, rather boring dude pushing 30 who writes as a fucking hobby.

Look... I have no fucking desire to bring sexy back. Hell, I think it's high time mainstream culture took that puppy out back and shot it, point-blank, in its pampered, Let Them Eat Tabloids face...

And I'm certainly no sex symbol. I'm a librarian.

* * * *

It was at the downstairs bar, huddled in a corner and after my first Long Island and my second pint of beer, that my Fuck that Shit! confidence was restored.

An aspiring novelist buddy and I sparked up a very manly, borderline shitshow conversation about the trueness of writing about truth and beauty, that wondrously sexy ideal pitched by the poet John Keats...

... You know, one of those I would so fuck the shit outta that... conversations that drunk writers have at times, those sophisticated I dunno, something about the way her shirt just clings... sorts of oh-so-sexy, intellectual debates only fucking writers and sex symbols have in crowded college bars...

Both of us, well, had hit some serious roadblocks in our extracurricular creative endeavors - and we were both trying to drink and think our way back into that groove, that splendid amalgam of imagination and invention. We both tried, in vain, to maintain some level of academic critique, to commiserate, but, well, too many cute girls kept flowing through the door, kept pushing their breasts together and out of their too-tight tops...

And for some reason, over the course of way-too-many drinks, over a night's worth of intoxicated promises of dinner-and-a-movie dates with a sorta shy, Girl Next Door bartender, after being briefly molested by a marvelously intoxicated gay man who just loves him some Britney and Xtina...

... My writer's block, thank the gods, cured itself! Go figure.

A normal, boring Saturday night out on the town was all it took!

Now that's fucking sexy and suave and cool as shit.

- # # # -

ONLY WOMEN BLEED (AND OTHER LIES ALICE COOPER TOLD ME):Sometimes, Image is, Indeed, Everything. But What's Really Being Communicated, Well...

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson,
from Self-Reliance, 1841

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- He told her, bluntly, that he'd slept with her first-year roommate as well as her best friend, two women mere days apart back in November, because she'd got kind of fat. He didn't care what she thought, didn't care that she loved him, he was going to spend his last semester in college sowing his oats and seeing women who wouldn't damage his rep.

I read the email, aloud, and tell her that, yes, obviously, her ex-boyfriend is one of those goddamn collar-popping, limp-dicked, pieces of motherfucking catshit chachballs I've often written about here in Oxford Fucking Ohio.

I declined her offer to show me his picture. Frankly, the guy's email turned my stomach to the point where I was ready to quite literally beat the living shit out of him.

I hand the very pretty, healthy-looking sophomore another wad of toilet tissue. She points out that she did, in fact, gain eight and a half pounds during a rather rough Fall Semester. When he quit calling her at home over Winter Break, she knew their relationship was in trouble. The strain of it all pushed her weight up a bit farther - she gained another ghastly, obscene pound and a quarter.

The poor woman's been sobbing for a week, off and on, depressed not only over a failed relationship, but over the fact that she'd ballooned to a beastly 126 pounds.

She goes on to explain that she hasn't been able to eat, sleep, or think clearly for seven days - she's terrified that, well, maybe every guy's noticed how much weight she's gained. She's been taking so much Adderall that one of her professors actually pulled her aside after class to inquire about her emotional and physical well-being.

She took her first shower in more than three days moments after I'd confirmed our "appointment" an hour earlier. She apologized profusely for not shaving her legs, for not drying her hair, or for putting on much makeup. She barely remembered to pull on her lucky track pants and Uggs boots when she exited her room for the first time all day, just long enough to sneak me into her residence hall.

For ten minutes, she tells me about all about how she managed her weight like a sadistic nutritional accountant, how she'd counted every single gram of fat and every single calorie for most of her high school career. But no matter how hard she tried...

* * * *

She jumped up off of the corner of her bottom bunk, bent over, and pointed at why, exactly, she thought she'd been dumped by a rather-worthless sounding prick.

"Look. My ass is fucking HUGE! I got cellulite every-WHERE! Who would want that?"

I looked. I saw nothing but a very nice ass attached to rather attractive girl, a very pretty face staring back at me from over a shoulder. She tugged down one side of her track pants, pulled up the leg of her boxers, showed me the four dimples at the crease between her ass and thigh.

Here is this emotionally wrecked, tired, angry woman, with quite possibly one of the greatest asses in the history of college sophomoredom here in Oxford Fucking Ohio, and she's telling a 29-year-old single librarian about how gaining less than ten pounds has ruined her, driven her rather wretched-sounding boyfriend into the arms of other women, and how this one electronic voice in the wilderness just must agree with her thigh-cheese-equals-troll assessment.

"Chica, I probably shouldn't say this, but I think you know you're not fat, know this cat was a cocksucker, and that this Ms. Perfect shit just makes you look like a dumbass."

There is no way to describe the looks some very pretty sophomores can give a guy when they know, deep down, that that guy may have a point.

"Huh?"

"Well... this ain't really about getting dumped by a douche. Sounds to me like this is about how you see yourself as a person..."

It's amazing, sometimes, the sheer maturity and wisdom I'm able to demonstrate, even with a nice ass in my face.

* * * *

She sat back down on the bed.

I waited for her to call me what blog readers who've mistaken me for some College Girl Crusader or Small Town Defamer often call me - a fraud, a huckster, or, usually, a fucking creepy asshole. Worse, there are some folks who are just appalled - downright DISGUSTED - to learn that, well, being a blogger makes one more of a village idiot than any sort of role model.

When I display the same sort of honesty offline as I often display online, many folks are taken aback, shocked. Yes, I swear like a drunken sailor, say completely inappropriate, insensitive, very un-PC things.

What one reads is what one gets - and if a reader asks a certain blogger to make a housecall to talk, that reader isn't in for any sort of bullshit Blogebrity routine. In all honesty, I don't have time for that ego-stroking, narcissistic horseshit - I work too hard at my day job and know too many good people in this town to behave so, well, stupidly.

She didn't say a word.

Instead, she sat cross-legged, picked at the lint and blackened dust bunnies that had defiled the fur tops of her Uggs. She stared down towards the hornet's nest of sports bras, crumpled jeans, coats, comforters, and sheets that we were both sitting on - she mumbled an apology for not tidying up before I'd stopped by.

I figured that was my cue. I said I'd leave her alone, thanked her for, well, keeping me entertained via her intoxicated late-night instant messages, and reminded her that, well, my office door at the library, is almost always open.

Without looking up, she reached up and grabbed my arm, squeezed. I sat back down, put my hand on her shoulder. She asked me to stay. So I did.

And, once the emotional hysterics that go along with being jilted were well out of sight, we had a nice, brutally honest conversation about why one doesn't take time off from college because of a douchebag, how one sucks up that rage and turns it into scholarly fuel, and the importance of never, ever letting something as trivial as a temporary low self-image get in the way of making good, emotion-free decisions.

I even recommended that she start a blog about her experiences under a pseudonym, document her struggles so that maybe, sometime in the future, some other sophomore in her position might find it and go, Holy fucking shit! This girl really knows what I'm feeling!

Hell, blogging has done wonders for my own concept of self-worth and self-esteem issues - why not pass on that experience to others? College women need to get online, need to share not just their musical tastes or fashion tips or bullshit political ideologies but personal experiences as well. Venting does a body good - and sometimes it's equally rewarding to simply read about an experience that let's a random stranger know that they're not alone in this world.

As we talked, she held onto my arm for dear life. I was the first person not a mutual friend or family member she'd spilled her guts to in a long, long time. She told me why she reads this silly web site has more to do with how I handle certain information more like a priest taking confession than a blogger - I don't use names and carefully conceal identities, so, therefore, spilling one's guts is less of a risk than, say, posting something to a MySpace or Facebook account.

That's why she asked me to stop by, made an afternoon appointment. She needed to confess her sins - and my openness about my own, batshit insane personal life made me sound like the perfect holy man.

In all honesty, I showed up only because I was terrified that I may be asked to administer Last Rites.

* * * *

Suddenly, mid-sentence, she asked me if I was hungry. I lied and said that, well, a nice hot toasted roll - one of the Local U.'s signature culinary treats - sounded abso-fucking-lutely scrumptious. Actually, the very smell of those things makes me nauseous, but, well, I was just on my game enough to realize the question about hunger was more self-directed.

Getting a Local U. girl who's been starving herself for a week may, in fact, be the single-most important contribution I've made to the Oxford community, professionally or as an everyday citizen, in more than a year.

As we hiked down towards the student union - she was craving a slice of pizza - she stopped me with an Ugh! Hold on. That's so annoying..., turned me on my heels like a wayward toddler, and started adjusting my cockeyed stocking cap and tangled mess the hood on my sweatshirt had become. She went so maternal on me, this woman barely out of her teens, that she even licked her thumb before she slicked down my disheveled eyebrows.

"You know, you have gorgeous eyelashes. There was this girl in my history class last semester who told me that she had a crush on this guy who worked at King..."

Suddenly, she stopped cold, pulled herself into me. The first-year roommate, one of the two boyfriend-fucking Jezebels, was on her cell phone, pacing, right in front of the student union doors, a mere thirty feet away. I started to turn and look, but, well, serving as a human shield left me with only the risk of sweatshirt strangulation as the very pretty, image-conscious sophomore clung onto my collar for dear life.

"Ohmygodohmygod... if she sees us together she's gonna think... she's gonna tell everybody... fucking whore!...God, she's s'posed to be in Cincinnati ... don't DON'T look... she's looking... FUCK!"

It took me, in my so not an undergrad mindset, a good thirty seconds to figure out what, exactly, that ferret-faced Ms. Thang, clad in her trendy North Face jacket and skintight black pants, guarding the entrance to a student union food court could possibly assume, or who the everybody was she'd possibly tell.

I laughed. Hard.

You know, the sight of a cute girl ducking into the chest of a 29-year-old librarian with supposedly gorgeous eyelashes probably is something to gossip about - if you're a catty, rodent-looking Cincinnati rich girl with nothing better to do than to fuck my blog readers' boyfriends because you were, like, soooooo wasted at beer pong parties, like, two or three times, accidentally.

I thought about it for a moment, pondered and weighed the potential risks to both my professional credibility and, well, my fine, upstanding reputation (go ahead and laugh, dammit!) as an online writer. I then strategically twisted in such a way as to position my mouth at the ear of the very pretty, way-too-young sophomore, twisted in such a way that Ms. Rodent Face would have a clear view of both her former roommate's face and my constantly graying stubble.

I whispered, slowly, into my chestwarmer's ear that she had nothing to worry about, said sweet nothings about how learning to tune out gossip comes with maturity, and told her, well, that she shouldn't give a flying fuck what others may think.

She giggled at my use of the phrase flying fuck (she didn't believe anybody actually spoke such things so casually) and whispered something back about not wanting people to ask questions. Again, she played right into my not-so-sinister plan of attack.

I could feel the stare. Just the type of stare I'd counted on, one of those soul-rupturing glares that catty gossipwhores tend to give people when they think certain things, when they assume that they are now entitled to do whatever they want with certain information, regardless of courtesy or consequences.

So, like clockwork, I pushed the very pretty sophomore back into an upright, chin-up position, told her that the time had come to say Fuck it and to march right past Jezebel No. 1. She sighed, agreed, and we double-timed it past the loose-lipped (in more ways than one, apparently) sentry. My blog reader, the trooper that she was, shoved her hands into her pockets and stared at the ground.

I just grinned a very stupid-looking grin. My plan was working.

I stood as straight as I could, puffed out my chest, and did my best Dirty Old Man impression, acknowledged the gawker with a well-timed, jaw-shattering S'up.

And how that other woman stared. She even had the beady little brown eyes of a ferret.

* * * *

Over a quick bite, I let my very pretty, supposedly hefty, 126-pound dinner date in on the intricacies of my, well, strategically placed movements, mannerisms, and whispers, on the use of a quick and controlled burn to manage someone else's need to perpetuate rumor and disinformation.

It took her a bit of time to grasp the concept. After she'd pondered it over the remainder of her very bad cappuccino...

* * * *

"So what you're saying is that she's gonna tell him and his ego's gonna be smashed?"

"Yup."

"That's weird."

"Okay, lemme put it this way: how do you think most guys react when they're hearing rumors that their ex is potentially fucking an older guy?"

"I'd be fucking pissed."

"How would you feel, in his shoes, if one of your gossipy mutual acquaintances was spreading rumors ..."

Silence. And then, the wondrous Eureka! moment.

"Oh shit. So he's gonna look like a total ass and I'm the mature one, right?"

"Yup."

"Really?"

As I walked her back to her dorm, we discussed all sorts of things, ranging from other forms of data manipulation in interpersonal relationships to her new-found obsession with G.I. Joe comic books and online poker.

A guy she knew, too, grad student, had invited her over to hang out, watch a couple of old 1980s movies. She wasn't sure about his motives, but, well... she wasn't ready ... she didn't really like him that way...

"Well, sounds like you're getting ready to upgrade to business-class there, chica."

She didn't seem to get what I was getting at. I let it drop, wished her a great weekend, and promised I'd have something new for her to read sometime Saturday afternoon.

She reminded me that I don't use real names and that she'd be really mad if I slipped up. I reminded her that, well, I really didn't need to be reminded of anything.

* * * *

I'm supposed to mention, somewhere, that Mr. Super-Prep was born blessed - I am sorta like a priest, after all - with a really, really tiny...

Er.

Would anybody believe me if I swore she asked me to include something about how his imagination resembles a Vienna Sausage?

Length and width, apparently. That's a serious lack of imagination.

And to think...

There are people who ask me how, exactly, my not-so-secret life as a blogger has helped build up my own self-confidence and sense of personal image.

I'm completely comfortable with my imagination, actually. Way overactive at times, but, well, I'm working on that...

Seriously.

- # # # -

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

Only the tourists. And the pigeons.

* * * *

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

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

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

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

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

* * * *

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

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

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

- # # # -

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

- ACT I -

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

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

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

"I'm coming! Shit!"

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

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

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

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

Didn't know the guy. Thank God.

But I did, however, recognize the young woman.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I feel sorry for the young woman.

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

- ACT II -

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * *

In GirlFight No. 1:

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

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

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

Why one of her best friends, you ask?

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

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

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

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

And she ended up staying for a whole week.

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

And we left it at that.

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

Years pass.

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

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

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

Small world.

* * * *

And in GirlFight No. 2:

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

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

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

It was, in fact, a guy.

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

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

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

Well.

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

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

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

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

Everyone but Baby Girl knew.

The result?

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

And apparently, it's all my fault.

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

- ACT III -

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tragic, but funny.

- # # # -

DISPATCHES FROM THE ROAD: Of Navajo Girls and the Great White Wannabes, Sixty Acres in Paradise, I-40's Culinary Treasures, and Other Things

PINE HILL, RAMAH NAVAJO RESERVATION, NM (ZP) -- It took me a few seconds to figure out who, exactly, was yelling at me, a few seconds longer to figure out why they were yelling in the first place.

A young Navajo woman, a Ramah Band local, wanted to know if I had an extra cigarette. As I sat on the hood of my mother's jeep, waiting for my father to return from the inside of the reservation market (yes, a regular ol' quickie market, smack dab in the middle of one of the most independent states in the Navajo Nation), the woman waved me over to what was apparently her older brother's pickup.

At the window, she said that Big Brother didn't mind her smoking, but, well, he didn't like her talking to Anglo boys.

And she didn't want just a cigarette - she wanted information. I was a strange, white face in a land reserved, in theory, for her people - she just wanted to know if I was new to the area, if I was looking for things to do...

Besides, she added, I somehow looked cool, in cowboy boots, Levi's, and my white tee shirt, almost like a character from Grease - Grease, as in the John Travolta film, her favorite movie...

...And she wanted to know what the hell I was doing in the middle of nowhere New Mexico, on a tiny little reservation, far from anything remotely cool.

I bummed her a fresh Marlboro, lit the tobacco for her, and asked her what she did for fun, what local folks her age (we're talking high school kid here) did during the summer, while school was out and the New Mexico sun burned holes into the asphalt.

Just hang out, She said. We, ya know, watch movies, play video games, go to parties, drive to Gallup (70 miles away, the closest town of more than 20,000 people)...

Before she could finish, the sound of Brad Paisley's hit song, "Ticks," bellowed from inside her shirt. She politely excused herself, reached down the front of her white tank top, and pulled a mobile phone from between her breasts.

The sucker was held in place by the tautness of cotton stretched across boobs - an ancient Navajo trick.

God. It's _____. I don't want to talk to him right now. He's, oh my God, such a hick...

The Ramah Navajo teenager hit the End button on her mobile, sending the caller, poor Hick Boy, plummeting towards Voicemail Oblivion.

Another ancient Navajo trick.

The woman thanked me for the tobacco, wished me well on the rest of my trip, and politely excused herself once again, this time to call some female friend and to tell her that, yes, the Hick Boy had just called her and left a voicemail...

And, yes, some Navajo teenagers have cell phones, just like their non-Navajo counterparts.

* * * *

I returned to my perch on the jeep, watching as others, mostly tourists like myself, entered and exited the mini-mart.

An older white woman, clad in a monstrosity of a Easter-style hat, climbed out of an SUV with a Kokopelli bumper sticker in the back glass. A sandal-clad, bearded gentleman strolled the parking lot on WASPish white legs, truckstop turquoise dangling from his neck, along with one of those "Made in China" medicine bags, the kind more likely to be found in a Head Shop than around the neck of an actual shaman.

I even spotted one of those notorious Fake Indians, a regular Ward Churchill type, sunburned lobster pink, obviously dyed black hair, reading some guide to Navajo spirituality.

The bumper sticker on the back of his sedan? Yep. Another Kokopelli, this one blowing its flute next to a marijuana leaf and "tribal" artwork, inscribed with the phrase Rocking Primitive. And beside it? An Ivy League window decal.

Fascinating, this Native American magic.

A whole group of white people, through some sort of sorcery, turned into Indians - just like the ones they'd seen in the movies, the ones played by all of those Italian and Greek actors in all of those John Ford westerns, like ol' Sicilian-American Iron Eyes Cody, the famed "Crying Indian" anti-litter pitchman.

I'll bet dollars to donuts that I was the only Anglo tourist to talk to an honest-to-God, bona fide American Indian at that mini-mart that day, to ask about things more substantial than Do you have any organic cornmeal? or Do you know where I can get buy real Navajo blankets? or Do you sell magic crystals like they do out in Sedona?, to simply have a conversation with a actual Ramah Navajo teenager about nothing in particular.

The mysticism just doesn't seem to work on me. I was just glad to see a Navajo-owned business thriving, to see a rural teen with access to mobile technology and being, well, a teenager and not some Hollywood stereotype.

I dunno. Maybe I've just known too many Indians, good people from all sorts of tribal backgrounds.

Nothing in the United States screams Culture War quite like a trip to an Indian Reservation.

- MORE -

NEAR EL MALPAIS NATIONAL MONUMENT, NM (ZP) -- I flew into Albuquerque on the Fourth of July, at my parents' request, to visit their piece of paradise.

My father picked me up that afternoon, and we traveled long and hard across New Mexico, drove for three hours, down Interstate 40, down winding state highways, down red dust county roads, across cattle guards and over ancient, tire-shredding lava flows.

All so I could see sixty acres of land, sixty acres of paradise that my parents recently purchased, sixty acres that I may one day inherit.

Sixty below endless Western sky, land enveloped by fire ants and high desert fauna, bright red dust everywhere, nothing but the pines and afternoon thunderstorms to keep you entertained in the evening. Sixty below the stars and loaded with antelope and elk, home to a reclusive badger and a pair of wild horses.

And that sixty acres is, indeed, paradise.

- MORE -

SELIGMAN, Ariz. (ZP) -- Westside Lilo's Cafe is one of those hidden treasures of the Not-So-Old West, a throwback to the days when getting from almost anywhere in America to Los Angeles meant a trip down old U.S. Route 66.

A German-American diner in the middle of goddamn nowhere Arizona, in a town of less than 500 people, a place where even the BLT sandwiches surpass most urban five-star restaurants in terms of excellence.

I've stopped in every time I've passed through Seligman - I've sucked down gallons of coffee there, put down at least a farm's worth of bacon-and-egg breakfasts, and savored every bite of their authentic, homemade German potato salad. The roadside diner has probably taken years off of my life, simply by offering delicious, artery-clogging fare.

For some reason, Lilo's makes just about any trip down I-40 bearable, more homey and hospitable.

And it's strange, too, the number of folks I've met in my life, from all parts of the country, who've savored the pancakes, who've chowed down on the biscuits and gravy or the bratwurst.

There's a secret society of us out there, the Lilo's Faithful, folks who'd rather drop a few extra dollars in a tiny, rural town than wait for the whizzbang discounts offered by the fast-food chains in cities like Kingman or Flagstaff. And there's a rival group out there, somewhere, tourist regulars of the cross-the-road competition - the original, almost infamous Roadkill Cafe.

One day, we'll have to rumble, old school, right in the middle of o' Route 66, getting our kicks in below the belt and above the knees, once-a-year road trippers and senior citizen RVers, truckers and bus passengers and occasional celebrities. It'll be a ferocious battle, I'm sure, a western Arizona version of West Side Story...

There's a reason folks are willing to pull off a desolate stretch of interstate and wait, at times, as long as 20 minutes for a table.

And I think it has something to do with what the folks at Lilo's (and, yes, the Roadkill folks, too) put into the food, their secret, addictive preservative -

Love.

- MORE... LATER... -

OXFORD CONFIDENTIAL: On Being One of Those Guys

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- I'm one of those guys. I readily admit it.

Not that I really give a shit. Hell, it's my life and, well, I'll do with it what I please. I'm not much for doing things the proper way, anyway.

It's much more entertaining, actually, to be a complete and utter fuck-up.

* * * *

I fall in and out of love six or seven times a day, 365 days a year, seven days a week.

I can pass a woman on the sidewalk and fall madly for her in under 10 seconds, breaking myself free in under five. I can make eye contact, debate asking someone out, plan a seduction in my head, and then call the whole thing off without ever saying a single friggin' word.

There's that cashier at the Wally World, the one with the nice smile. She's probably no older than 22, probably a completely shallow girl with a mean-ass boyfriend, a closet full of skeletons and assault weapons under the bed.

But, well, she has this enchanting smile, this slightly asymmetrical way of acknowledging a man - her subtlety could melt the Devil's pitchfork.

I'll think about her as I drive home, wonder what's behind that smile, what's really underneath that blue department store apron, and... completely forget about her by the time I'm putting the frozen veggie burritos and the sugar-free cranberry juice cocktail into the fridge.

And then there's that skinny little thing I seem to always pass on the sidewalk as I stroll home after work.

It's the green eyes and the way her eyeshadow glistens in the sunlight, the way her bangs just cover that left eye slightly. She looks down every time I make eye contact, and, instantly, I begin wondering what her bedroom smells like, what kinds of things we may have in common, whether or not she could tolerate my obscure musical tastes.

And then I pass her, get to the door of my apartment, and forget the whole thing, only to be reminded of it the following workday.

And those are just the ones I remember.

Yup.

I'm one of those guys.

And it's not pretty.

* * * *

A server down at one of the ol' local watering holes grinned this impish grin as I closed out my tab.

She'd been observing my behavior as I sat at this table, surrounded by a group of unemployed aspiring high school teachers, all heavily intoxicated women, in Oxford Fucking Ohio for a statewide job fair at the Local U.

Every time she'd pass by, the server would shoot me the most curious looks as I tried to be polite to this one woman, a short brunette from Akron, who'd asked me to join the post-interview party.

At one point, the server even came over, bumped my shoulder with her hip, and made some reference to the fact that I'm often seen around Oxford in a cowboy hat. The intoxicated brunette then proceeded to ask me if this was true, if I was an actual cowboy, if I owned a horse, or if I'd ever been to a rodeo.

Annoying to no fucking end.

After the group left, I sat back down at the bar, went back to watching Jeopardy! and chatting away with some of the other regulars. When I got up to pay, my Cuervo - to - blood ratio thoroughly satisfied for the evening, I asked the server why she'd been shooting me the bizarre looks all night.

"I just dig your style. Very smooth."

"I have a style?"

"C'mon. Every guy has a style. Yours is just more entertaining. And that chick was totally into you."

I remember wandering down the alley, towards High Street, smiling probably the dumbest smile imaginable, my mind full of such strange, stupid thoughts.

"I have a style! And it's smooth! Holy fucking shit, dude!"

It's amazing how one remembers such things, even after several shots and about a half-dozen mixed drinks. And it hadn't even occurred to me to get that aspiring teacher's phone number, much less ask her name.

Yup. One of those guys.

Dense as a brick on the surface of Jupiter, as clueless and mysterious as the Bermuda Fucking Triangle.

* * * *

The Italian backpacker and I were sitting upright, naked and cross-legged, in the middle of the bed.

As she flipped through old copies of Esquire, asking me questions about George Clooney's personal life, about my opinion of America's Oxycontin epidemic and the Iraq War, I studied the mechanical and architectural renderings of my library renovation project, scribbling notes about camera placement, smoke detectors, and anticipated shelving problems.

Despite the lust and raw passion, I still had meetings to attend and deadlines to meet that week. My ultimate employer, the Ohio Taxpayer, wouldn't accept well, gee, I was in the middle of a damned tryst as an excuse for further delays, and my immediate supervisors probably wouldn't, either.

I was trying to balance way too many things at one time, on very little sleep. I had no desire to quit my job or give up on playing that Ugly American fling. Every afternoon I brought my work home with me, had sex with a wonderful woman, studied blueprints, and then fell asleep in between Southern European flesh and rolls of cold, heartless paper. My work - play - work routine apparently annoyed my free-spirited house guest.

Rather than just say something, she stretched out across the blueprints, back arched and yawning, and sprawled her nude body across my paperwork like some spoiled house cat.

In six hours, I was to attend an important meeting, to use those same blueprints, to pitch a security plan, one to help insure that my institution's patrons and collections would have some level of systematic protection.

And there was a naked body crinkling the broadsheets, covering the new private research rooms with breasts, scrunching up the main corridors with elbows and ribs.

She was, in the end, just being a 19-year-old on holiday, in some strange guy's house in some strange country, looking for attention. And I was just being, well, a guy.

At first, I protested. And then she did that swirling finger thing on my cheek. I tried to resist, to be serious, to be professional and responsible...

Quite embarrassing. And even then, well, I was too old for that shit.

Oh, for fuck's sake.

Who am I kidding?

You know, I still don't care that there's some guy in Europe, some race car jockey, who may read this one day, put a "nice librarian I met in Ohio" story together with a relationship's ending a few months later, and want to blow my damned head off.

Hell, if he'd known how to read blueprints, had suffered through grad school, and had really neat old black-and-white movies in his villa, they may very well have stayed together...

* * * *

Yep.

I'm one of those guys.

And from what I've been told, only an idiot would ever expect me to grow out of it.

Any idiot, of course, includes myself.

- # # # -

STEEL OF THE SOUTH: More Scary Virginia Stories to Blog in the Dark...

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- Recently, while stuck on bed rest, I had the opportunity to get some pleasure reading done. At one point, I unearthed my old high school yearbooks.

Flipping through the vulgar comments and past pictures of people I've long forgotten actually brought back some interesting memories.

I found a photograph stuck between a few pages, a photograph of this frightening brute of a kid. He had a sneer on his face that could kill weaker men, eyes full of all sorts of illicit substances, hair parted straight down the middle, bandages covering gashes over his eye and across his nose.

Man, I'd almost forgotten what a hoodlum I was when I was 17. Scared the shit out of me.

And some people wonder why I consider myself fortunate to have survived high school. But I think I turned out just fine. Wouldn't change a thing.

- Jason

* * * *

The machete was brand new, fresh from the Rose's five-and-dime, plastic shrink wrap dangling from the handle.

I heard one of the school's vice-principals shout into his two-way radio as he chased after “Muhammad,” ordering the school's receptionist tell the sheriff's deputies that the “suspect” was armed and dangerous.

Muhammad was normally a peaceful kid, a Black Muslim whose parents had sent him down to Farmville to live with his grandmother. Muhammad had spent his early childhood being instructed in the ways of the Five Percent Nation.

Though a man of peace, who had many friends of many races, he readily admitted to distrusting white people, to being convinced that the FBI had killed Brother Malcolm and Dr. King, to believing that the federal government was pushing crack in housing projects across America.

Muhammad had been suspended from school for fighting with a white kid earlier that day. The white kid had received a lighter sentence. So Muhammad was sent home, and the white kid was sent to In-School Suspension.

Muhammad had obviously gone shopping for some very mean-looking hardware, purchasing a tool to extract his pound of cracker flesh for what he apparently viewed as a racist conspiracy. As he ran past me, after the white kid who'd passed me only a few seconds earlier, I noticed his eyes were aflame with that lust, that murderous thousand-yard stare of a man consumed by his own hatred.

I learned a long time ago that one does not step in the way of a man wielding a machete, even a normally peaceful man. Machetes do not leave pretty wounds and often sever limbs.

Mr. S., a chisel-faced man in his late fifties, was the senior disciplinary administrator of the school district. He'd survived the 'Nam; he once claimed that maintaining discipline in a rural Virginia high school was nothing compared to dealing with Charlie. But despite his reputation as a harsh man, he was also known to be fair and once, according to legend, had even laughed.

Mr. S. plowed through the throngs of 13-18 year-old kids who clogged the sidewalk as they waited for their afternoon buses. He pushed students to the ground as he ran, hollering ahead for students to get out of his way or risk being run down. Some moved out of the vice-principal's path; most did not.

“Muhammad” apparently did catch up with the white kid, who'd run to the school office for shelter. The principal convinced the Five Percenter, the normally peaceful kid with many friends of many races, to put down his weapon before he ended up doing something he'd later regret.

By the time the county mounties arrived, the incident had been resolved. And "Muhammad" went to jail, never to return as a student.

Later that week, the school yearbooks were distributed to those who'd paid for them. I remember wishing that Muhammad had waited to go crazy, wishing that he'd waited until after the school year ended, so I could've gotten him to sign my freshman yearbook.

After all, he was a peaceful man, most of the time, with many friends of many different races.

* * * *

I don't know what inspired me that night.

Maybe I'd seen too many gang-related films - movies about South Central Los Angeles, Miami drug lords and New York crime kingpins were all the rage in the mid-1990s. Or maybe it was the gangsta rap or the aggressive punk music, the stuff I started to listen to the moment I hit puberty.

For whatever reason, I was inspired, after helping a "Max" jump a guy behind the Food Lion, to piss in a kid's face as he lay on the ground.

We used to call this sort of juvenile code enforcement schoolin' a motherfucker. And, as my friend put it so eloquently that night, if this motherfucker wants to steal shit, he needs to be taken to motherfuckin' school.

Nobody else wanted to help this friend of mine out. None of our mutual friends, who all talked a good game, stepped up to get his back. They were all conveniently busy, had baseball practice or dates. So “Max” and I sat alone in his beat-up yellow tank of a car for two hours, drinking forty after forty of Colt 45 and waiting for this stupid kid to leave a shopping center cineplex.

The poor bastard didn't even see it coming. Walked right out towards his car as if he owned the world.

“Max” did most of the work. It was his stolen property, his lost income. The only thing I did was hit the kid from the back while Max informed him of the charges against him, of why this milder sentence of the Court of Street Justice was better than the alternative.

As the kid lay on the ground, squirming and begging, the 160 ounces of malt liquor filling my bladder suddenly demanded a prompt exit.

It was nothing personal, really. I just had to take a leak.

As Max reminded me afterwards, when I felt guilty about it, that kid probably would've done the same to me if he'd had the chance. And if it'd been other guys jumping him, less civil individuals from Church Hill or Hampton Roads or D.C., then he probably would've endured much, much worse.

An eye for an eye, a piss for a piss.

* * * *

That motherfucker had a .22...

When he first pulled it from the front of his boxers and started waving it around, screaming about how “hard” he was, most people just laughed. And when he fired into the air, bobbing his head up and down, one hand holding up those baggy jeans and the other holding a weapon, people just stood there and stared.

Here is this 16-year-old, skinny-ass white dude, who everybody knew was crazy, save for the court-appointed dumbass who'd let him off probation early. Here's this Crazy-Ass Peckerwood, waving a gun around in a parking lot at two in the morning.

And the only thing anyone could do was laugh, then stare in amazement.

If this kid's parents hadn't been wealthy socialites, I'm fairly certain he wouldn't have been set loose by the correctional system. If he'd been poor, or a minority, or poor and a minority, he would've been rotting in a juvenile prison somewhere.

But because he came from a good family, one where the poor little thing's psychosis was easily blamed on a desire to fit in and his parents' divorce, he was set free to go all apeshit in the middle of the night without so much as an ankle bracelet.

When Mr. Crazy-Ass Peckerwood started beating that tiny handgun upon his tiny chest, screaming about how he was going to bus' a cap on someone if he did'n get respec', people finally began to back away from the scene.

The cops, surely, had been called, and nobody wanted to be around an armed nutcase when the cops showed up. As I ducked down to climb into the driver's seat of the Maroon Doom, my prize Dodge Shadow, the idiot started firing again. But this time, he wasn't firing into the air.

I remember being shoved from behind, with a friendly hand on the back of my neck. My chin caught the shifter and my shin caught the door frame as my body fell into the car. My first reaction was to start laughing. Earlier that night I'd watched a documentary on the Reagan assassination attempt - the idea that my friends would choose to play Secret Service agents to a would-be Hillbilly Hinckley was too absurd not to laugh.

I rolled over and sat up in the driver's seat, still laughing. A hand reached up from the backseat and smacked me upside my skull, with voices screaming for me to drive, motherfucker, drive.

As I started the engine and shifted down into second gear, I looked over at the crazy motherfucker. He was pointing that little pop-gun .22 towards the Maroon Doom, firing away. From the back seat, people were arguing about someone needing to see a doctor, about me needing to drive to the emergency room.

As I drove, the person who'd been grazed climbed into the passenger seat next to me, showed me what looked like a long cigarette burn, and said that, no, he didn't need to go to a doctor – our other friends were just being pussies.

He'd been shot before, so I took his word for it. He smiled and pointed out that getting grazed was a much better alternative than having me get shot in the face.

I laughed at first. And then it hit me like a cinderblock to the chin.

I spent the next few days barely sober and rarely narcotic-free, afraid to face the nature of my own mortality, the fact that, yes, a .22 pistol is a small gun that can still, if someone's shooting at you, end your life if its rounds hit you just right.

... And he just tried to fucking kill me.

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