Like a Good Neighbor: The 10th Day of Giftmas 2009

Like a Good Neighbor: The 10th Day of Giftmas 2009

My life has been fairly blessed over the past five to ten years with one very obvious and distinct exception: my Sisyphean automotive life. The car gods have been making me roll a Buick up a hill, only to forget to set the emergency brake and watch it roll back down again every night. So maybe they’ve had a change of heart. Or maybe the god of the law of averages finally took over. Either way, I was just given a huge gift in the form of a fender bender last month.

Now I realize a car accident typically doesn’t qualify as a gift. It was the first thing in the morning, I was confused, and it wasn’t even a hot chick that hit me. It was some old guy in an Explorer used the front end of my Civic like a ramp. He was backing into a parking spot with apparently no knowledge that I was just sitting behind him, desperately trying to find my horn. On a 1994 Civic, the horn is located in two small buttons by the thumbs. I spent way too long desperately beating the air bag hoping it would honk, as I was not practiced in activating the stupidly-placed horn strips. By the time I looked down at the gear shift, the Explorer had already explored the hood of my car.

No one was hurt as this all happened at about 2 MPH. In fact, very little damage was actually done. My headlight was scuffed up a bit and the fiberglass was cracked. After a couple days of talking to the other guy’s insurance, an agent came out to inspect it. He left saying simply “We’ll mail you a check next week.” That was it. No mechanics, no lawyers and no bullshit.

I had completely forgot about it until I got the check a couple weeks afterwards. I figured on about a couple hundred bucks. $1004.46! Thank you, State Farm! And there’s no way I’m going to ever need that for the car. A little windex and a green sharpie and you can’t even tell anything happened. I figure that it knocks the resale value down a bit, but that doesn’t matter with me. I’ve run every car I’ve ever owned right into the ground, most of them literally. I’ve owned 5 cars before this one and I haven’t sold any of them. Unless you count scrap heaps. So this is basically free money. I’m going to start to look for people in tall cars and follow them around the city until they need to park. I figure if I can do this once a week, I can make a decent living and finally afford to quit my day job. I don’t know why more people don’t do this.

Cat Scratch Fever: The 9th Day of Giftmas 2009

Cat Scratch Fever: The 9th Day of Giftmas 2009

If wearing my kitten's collar as a bracelet to remind me of her while she gets her kitty surgery makes me less of a man, well then I don't want to be right.

Poe is fine. And I did wear her collar around all day, partly as a reminder, but almost entirely for the sake of telling this story to people. I’ve given away all my man cards already, no point in hiding my hand. And as I found out when I went to pick her up, she learned how to hiss at no extra charge.

I had this same surgery done with Clementine, my Ohio cat. And the greatest part of it was seeing her wake from her anesthetic-induced haze. She pushed open the rest of the kitty door, wobbled the 7 inches to the kitty box I had placed in front of her, and laid down with her head and one paw in the sand and the rest of her, complete with newly shaved belly, on the rug, tail still in the cage. After fighting with gravity for a few minutes , she then regained her balance and, much like a sorority girl in heels after a couple Water Towers at Brick Street on a Thursday night, fell back the other way. Like the good father I was, I made sure she didn’t hit anything as she fell and managed to take a lot of pictures of the event to eventually show to her boyfriends when she brought them back to the house to watch a movie in her room with the door open. This continued with varying levels of pleasure for me for a couple hours.

However, this time Poe was kept to be monitored overnight, depriving me of the one minor pleasure that came out of shelling out $200 and admitting to myself and the cute girl at the counter, who noticed my collar/bracelet, that I was now a cat owner. That sucked. They wouldn’t even take pictures for me. And when I showed up to pick her up, they said that Poe was “being fussy” and I would have to take her hospital collar off when I got home because they refused to do it. This wasn’t a good sign. The next sign that wasn’t good was the one where the first thing Poe said to me when I got her back, was “HHHHHHHH.” I don’t know how to spell the violent, cobra-esque hiss that came out of her mouth for the first time ever, but that’s how it sounded.

I felt horrible. I’d just taken away her spirit. Not to mention her woman parts. I wanted to assure her that we were going back home to mommy and the fat kitty, but sticking my hands in that cage seemed to have the same effect of that time I managed to take the safeguard off the pencil sharpener back in 5th grade. So I put on her favorite CD, the Bangles. Not even that made her feel better. I told her how sexy the lead singer was, but then I figured she probably didn’t even like girls. Or humans. Or sex. So I put on Air Supply, the most asexual band I had. Same disgruntled meow. I started to realize it had nothing to do with the musical selection. After about 20 minutes of meowing, she started at the cage like the wood-chipper again. At least this was a familiar response. Maybe she’d go back to her old Poeness after all.

And it now appears as though she has. She’s back up on the counter breaking wine glasses and Sweetie is shitting on the rug again. Poe, it’s good to have you back. Kinda.

Kitty Climax: The 8th Day of Giftmas 2009

Kitty Climax: The 8th Day of Giftmas 2009

I’m not a big fan of Drew Carey, but I’m not going to leave my cat unspayed just to spite him. So I scheduled Poe’s little kitty surgery for this Wednesday. Unfortunately, due to a poor miscalculation based on data I just kinda made up, my cat went into heat a month before I figured she would. So now I have a poor horny kitty struggling through her transformation into adolescence as I type. And if you’ve never seen a cat in heat, it’s unbearable both for her and her owners. It’s like she’s on ecstasy. She rolls around on the rug and the bathmat and rubs her head on everything she walks by – the table leg, the TV stand, the sharp corner of a bike pedal. Everything just feels sooooo gooood. And she walks around sticking her ass up in the air looking around for boy kitties to come up behind her. She’s scratching at our cabinets looking for them too. And she meows all the time, calling out to these boy kitties to come beat down the door and satisfy her newly discovered womanly needs.

I’ve been telling people she went into heat already and about 37 people said “Yeah, I know how she feels, heh heh.” No you don’t. And if you were thinking that same thought as I was typing, you can either feel bad that you’re as predictable as everyone else, or you can be excited you’re just like everyone else, depending on your own self-worth. Also, some people tried to compare it to when dogs go into heat. Though I appreciate you trying to sympathize, you can stop. Dogs in heat and cats in heat is as different as getting out-of-a-bad-relationship horny and getting-out-of-a-20-year-prison-sentence horny. Now you show me a dog in heat who just spent a hair shy of 3 years in jail, and I’ll give you that one.

The last cat I had in Ohio was in a really bad way, as they say. Like a life-sentence-with-no-conjugal-visits bad way. She was to the point where if she didn’t get her kitty surgery soon, she was going to die. Not because of that, but because Seth was going to kill her. But really, it was incredibly annoying. It was to the point where I was about to take care of it myself just to shut her up. Kill two birds with one stone if you know what I’m sayin. You don’t have to tell me. I know how wrong that is. But really, I was thinking about going out to find a boy kitty for her, but I’m not that generous of a wing man. If anybody was getting pussy in that house, it was going to be me. Relax, that one wasn’t as bad.

So I dropped Poe off at the Kitty Hospital today and I am picking her up tomorrow. And I caught a stroke of luck. On the way there, Poe was stuck in the kitty carrier. She hates the kitty carrier. After about 20 minutes of meowing and trying to dig out of the plastic bottom of the carrier, she went to work at the metal gate. Like a crack addict trying to get to her crack. Her claws were flying off her paws like a tree-shredder. That horrifying experience was apparently enough to snap her out of heat. I guess if you were thrown into a cage that you could barely turn around in and thrown in a van for an hour, you’d probably forget how horny you were too. Even after a 20-year jail sentence. So the surgery went fine and I am going to pick her up tomorrow. Looks like I don’t have to have that father/daughter talk after all. Maybe a different one. About how I took out her uterus just when she finally wanted to use it.

The Hierarchy of Dorkdom: The 7th Day of Giftmas 2009

The Hierarchy of Dorkdom: The 7th Day of Giftmas 2009

So I feel I need to make a small addendum to my recent post about fantasy football. See, I started playing Magic the Gathering in college. I understand that some people thought it was dorky and I was willing to accept that. After all, I also played football and talked to girls. Of course I did wear a pink hat and didn’t drink. I can understand why I confused a lot of people.

So anyway, I played Magic in college. My friends who played Magic also played Dungeons & Dragons, known in and out of the dork world as D&D. I was willing to sacrifice the social status that I would lose playing Magic because I liked it. I did not have the same passion for the much dorkier D&D. After all, I also played football and talked to girls and I could ill afford the D&D hit to Social Dustin status. Let’s just forget for the moment about that pink hat thing again.

So I had a conversation with my old roommate, John, about how I met somebody who did this live role playing thing. Instantly, he and all of his entire campaign of fictitious elves and wizards laughed a loud chuckle and told me that LARPers, or Live Action Role Players, were dorks. It was amusing to me to hear someone I considered a dork calling another group of people dorks. And I was telling this to a friend of mine who I play fantasy football with, who started laughing at this Magic-playing dork talking about these other dorks. The argument that Magic is a strategy game and in no way do I ever pretend to be a fire-breathing goblin was lost on him. And I’m sure somewhere, there’s a poker player laughing at that dork. And this is when I realized there aren’t just dorks and cool people. There are levels to dorkdom and a hierarchy to which we perceive each other as dorks based on our gaming preferences (the fact that I even used the word “gaming” bumps me up to a 3 on a dork scale from 1-10).

So there is a dork hierarchy and at the top of this hierarchy, we have professional lumberjacks and Bear Grylls. And at the bottom, we have Furries. For those of you that don’t know – first of all, congratulations. That makes you that much cooler. But Furries are people who dress up like animals and go into a park at night and all have sex with each other. I know what you’re thinking. Dorks.

So provided that you don’t go into the park at night dressed like Fozzy the Bear looking to do it prairie dog style and you also don’t skydive onto glaciers in your boxers, you likely fall somewhere between 1 and 9 on the dork chart. Where exactly that is likely is exactly where you think it is. Plus 2 or 3. And maybe one day, I’ll make that chart. But that would add another level of dorkiness I can ill afford, as I’m currently planning a date to play Munchkin with a couple 30-year-old men.

4/11ths Life Crisis: The 6th Day of Giftmas 2009

4/11ths Life Crisis: The 6th Day of Giftmas 2009

I’ll be honest. I woke up crying today. Apparently that’s natural for people who turn 35. It’s also natural at this age to, no matter how long you shake it out at the end, have a little bit of pee drip out when you pull your pants up at the urinal. Don’t fight it; embrace it. Fall in love with denim. But anyway, I did a little research yesterday and found out that Paul Reiser was 35 when he came out with Mad About You. Now I know this is just the first day of the year, but I don’t think I’m on pace to even have a pilot episode of my sitcom ready by the end of 2010. I’m probably more likely to get my pilot license.

So I started to think about how I meant to do something with my life by now. I should have been Paul Reiser by now. Even just his earlier stuff from Aliens and Beverly Hills Cop would have sufficed by 35. Heck, I’d even settle for Greg Evigan’s career (the other father from 2 ½ Dads). But instead, I’m toiling around in the obscurity of the Greater Columbia Stand-up scene at best, forcing intellectual humor on people who want dick jokes 5 minutes at a time. So what the hell happened?

Well, in the midst of my crying fit a couple hours ago, I figured something out. I don’t know Paul Reiser. I don’t know his life. The real guy I fell in love with was Paul Buchman, his character on Mad About You. The one married to Helen Hunt (or I should say Jamie Buchman). That’s the guy I am. Every day. And Jen is my Jamie Buchman. I briefly fell victim to the Reiser/Buchman Inversion. This is what I aspired to be back in high school and college, Paul Buchman. That was my dream. Not Paul Reiser. That was a fantasy, and one I don’t even know that I’d want to live out. Though it would be nice to bang a young Helen Hunt. I still hold on to that fantasy.

So I controlled my uncontrollable sobbing with the realization that I am living out my fantasy. One of them at least. The one that involved two cats, not two hot college chicks dressed like them. And I’m not blind to the fact that this could all be justification and a poorly disguised coping mechanism, but I’m OK with that. The reality is that the alternative is spending 10-15 years of my life in poverty dedicated to busting my ass just to possibly make it in a world I’m not sure I’d enjoy – with no guarantee of success. And that’s just to give myself the best chance at success in the entertainment world. I could live out my happy Paul Buchman life and accidentally backdoor my way in anyway, maybe through this blog or forcing intellectual humor on people who want dick jokes. Who knows? And in case you didn’t recognize it, that’s the hope portion of the coping mechanism, necessary for survival at my age. That and denim.

Quote of the Day 1/1/10

“In show business, it takes 10 years to create an overnight success. You’ve heard that, right? But what you don’t hear is that that’s the exact same amount of time it takes to create a bitter failure.”

- Marc Maron

It only took me 2 years. Think of all the time I saved.

I don’t have the answers, I don’t have a plan,

Dustin Buchman.


Still Standing Right Here…