For some reason that now eludes me I decided to max out my Capitalone credit card with a trip to New Zealand.  I couldn’t afford it; there was no overpowering urge to go; I didn’t need to throw a omnipotent ring into a lava pit; and I certainly didn’t know anyone there, except for one ex-pat Kiwi who sort of hated my guts.

The sheer irresponsibility/stupidity of it all became the single most viable reason for the trip.  Every time I told someone that I wanted to go to New Zealand, they always had the same question:  “Why would you go to New Zealand?”  My standard reply was “I’ve always wanted to fuck a Hobbit.”  The REAL answer from the bottom of my soul (which I never told anyone) seemed almost more embarrassing:  “No good reason.”

“Hey, this makes no goddamn sense… so what am I waiting for?”

The one thing in my favor was the fact that one of the biggest comedy bookers in New Zealand, Scott Banks, seemed to think that my specific brand of dick jokes would work amongst a group of drunk Kiwis.  The money that I made with him would pay me just enough to keep my “No Hassles” card under the limit (hopefully).  That is, unless I wanted to buy something extravagant in Auckland, like meals.

Before I could live like a shitty homeless person in the NZ, I had to be in the air for 12 shitty hours on an economy middle seat sandwiched between a young “aromatic” German and Jabba-the-Hut’ian Kansan, baby attached.  As the Kraut was wafting new, yet undiscovered strains of body odor into my trenchant nostrils, the infant looked at his mother and wailed.  I can’t say I blame him. (note to reader: During the flight, I did discover something worse than my predicament, and that was the movie “Cop Out.”  If you haven’t seen it, I recommend taking a dump and staring at it for 90 minutes instead.)

I had grandiose plans to read and write on the flight but the dulcet hum of the 747 engine lulled my brain waves into a frequency capable of only three things:  watching crappy movies, eating, and farting uncontrollably.  On occasion, I was able to manipulate my sphincter muscles well enough to fart silently, but for the most part, I just let ‘em rip.  I even alternated which butt cheek I would elevate just to be fair to my adoring fans.  Take that, Wichita!  Take that, Hitler Youth!

Even though the ginormous Kansan immediately to my right keep putting her pink polyester turtleneck sweater over her chins and nose to avoid the stench, she was, alas, left without any empirical evidence that my colon was the culprit.  Blended with the smell of wool blankets and cheap coffee, the smell almost hybridized into something possibly… good?  Mmmm, is it lunch time already, Air New Zealand?!

I landed safely in a fog-laden Auckland and found myself out by the taxi stand a mere 2 and a half hours later.  You wouldn’t think that immigration and customs would be such a rigamarole in New Zealand, but apparently the Kiwis are deathly afraid Yankees are going to smuggle in a banana that will fuck up the entire eco-system of the North Island.  There were cryptic questions and searches and bio-scans and many threatening signs around the airport implying that a fruit and vegetable in your luggage will get you in serious trouble. One illustrated panel might show a hapless Yankee nonchalantly bouncing along with a rutabaga in his rucksack, and the next might show a half-naked Maori snapping his neck.

I finally got into a taxi, and traveled to my hotel in Ponsonby, a quaint neighborhood that looks like a midwestern American town in the 50’s.  And by that, I mean, not crowded and not a black person in sight. Even my non-homegrown presence didn’t go unnoticed. I felt like DiCaprio’s subconscious in “Inception.” Everywhere I went, people looked at me with quizzical or slightly annoyed expressions, particularly when I talked or screamed “Yeehaw! I’m from the States, bitches!”

My first set in New Zealand was straight away that night and I was in panic mode.  I hadn’t come up with ONE local joke and apparently all my fun stereotypes about being Down Under applied to Aussies, not Kiwis.  Boomerangs, Koalas, fighting, even baby-snatching dingos.

I knew I could pull out something cheap like, “I hear you guys don’t count sheep to go to sleep because it’s way too expensive to clean down comforters,” but I really wanted to immerse myself in the actual Kiwi culture.  So I found a Starbucks, pulled out my iPad and Googled “Pop Culture New Zealand.” Google responded with “DID YOU MEAN Pop Culture United States?”  Google can be such a dick sometimes.

For some reason, I couldn’t seem to find anything funny enough to put in my act.  Hmmm… I noticed that the buses said, “Sorry, not in service,” which I found hysterical in that the buses were actually apologizing to people.  In New York City, I believe the digital readout would read “Shit ain’t working, mothafucka, so suck my mothafucking bus-dick” or  something along those lines.  Not funny enough.

I sat and looked at people and imagined but I was drawing a blank.  A midget waddled by and I realized that in a town this tiny, he was probably known simply as “The Midget.”  Not funny enough to bring up, was it?  The insecurities crept in and perched their silent haunches on my shoulders.  Bill, maybe you’re just not funny enough…

Come showtime, I found myself inordinately nervous.  This gig was, by no means, a gig that would further my career.  As a matter of fact, it was antithetical to anything career-oriented.  Unlike the Los Angeles Laugh Factory, there wasn’t the possibility that Adam Sandler was there looking for someone to join the Happy Madison team.  Most of the comics at the club didn’t know my name or care, and I didn’t have a single person I knew in the burgeoning crowd of 200 to watch potential demise.  Still, my hand was shaking as I sipped my vodka.

The 7 other comics crowding the green room all seemed cordial enough, although I couldn’t help but feel a little of the “who the fuck is this asshole?” vibe despite the broad smiles and lilting accent.

Another aspect of the night rattling my nerves was the fact that I was the emcee, so I had to start the show and establish a rapport with the audience before anyone else.  And sober Kiwis can be a brutal bunch, I’d heard.

I sat down, took a deep exhale, and decided to go out and let the audience dictate the direction of my set.  It would be just like home, just like –

“Welcome everybody! And here’s your host, Bill Dawes!”

WTF?! THAT WAS MY INTRO?!  I almost spit out my Absolut.

In New Zealand, there is something called the “Tall Poppy Syndrome.”  Although it’s universally a pejorative term to describe the bizarre way Kiwis and Aussies punish the successful, they have sort of co-opted it into a positive mantra about staying modest.

But, for me, on my first night in Auckland, this modest intro meant was I was sitting on a couch with my hand down my underpants adjusting my ballsack and I was supposed to be onstage.  No house rules, no announcement about a drink minimum, no “Sex and the City” reference, and no hullaballoo about an “international headliner” coming to the stage.  It was simply “Welcome everybody! And here’s your host, Bill Dawes!”

By the time I removed my hand from my drawers (nuts still askew), got up from the couch, put down my drink, raced down the steps and then onto the stage to the location of the mic stand, the smattering of applause had already petered down to one sarcastic slow clap by a Neil Young-looking old dude in the corner by the toilets.  His syncopated clap seemed to serve, already, as the first heckle of the night.

Because life is hilarious, I went to the mic stand to adjust it, and it separated into two pieces.  More specifically, it became undone at the middle hinge, so I had to focus and guide it back in the bottom half of the stand…. at which point, the top part began to slowly sank down until it stopped at crotch level.  It looked like my twisted up testes were about to make a speech.  (“Get better underwear!” they would have screamed).

I decided to run with it:  “My balls will now sing the national anthem.”  Cricket.  Luckily, I wasn’t on the microphone, so not many people were able to hear my first dud of a joke.

I quickly pulled up on the mic stand to my face, and it slowly slid back down.

“It’s like a…. bike pump or something,” I said, hoping to elicit a knowing and commiserative laugh from the crowd.  Instead, there was silence and a lonely man fumbling with a mike stand onstage.  Cricket riding a tumbleweed.

I pumped the stand up and down a couple of times, positive that the utter lack of response to my comment was a lack of strong visual. I even pushed up and down harder to show them that, hey, look guys, It really looks like I’m trying to inflate a bicycle tire, doesn’t it?!  The tumbleweed-riding cricket was now coming through a creaky western door into an empty bar.

I looked up and smiled.

“Hi!”

Usually, my dimply face can elicit a few chuckles of pity or isn’t-he-cuteness or something, but all I could see was a sea of folded arms and blank expressions.  That, and the glow from the bar in the back illuminating the face of Scott Banks, the owner of the Classic and the Godfather of all stand-up in New Zealand.  He booked me having never seen me perform live before.  And here I was, destroying his mic stand and making a large group of paying customers comically uncomfortable.

“So… he didn’t give me an intro or anything… but I’m from the United States!”  That was my first sentence to a New Zealand crowd.   I’m not sure what I was expecting, but I CAN say I was expecting… something.  Anything.  Even a jovial “boo!”  The shrill silence and awkward apathy, I must say, threw me.  A distant vulture was now circling over the cricket, which has now died of boredom.

“Well… I guess fuck me, huh?” I said, my catawampus testicles growing a little.

Then I heard it.  The faintest of chuckles.  One person in the back, then a few more.  Uncomfortable, yes, but it was all that I needed.  I just need to know that someone in the audience would laugh.  That’s it.

“It’s good to be here in Southern Australia,” I said, having never said or thought the sentence before.  The chuckles merged with some moans and “ooooohs.”  Perfect.

“What’s wrong?  Should I have said Southeastern Australia?  Sorry, I’m American, I’m not very good at geography.  But who cares, we make cool shit — enjoy your iPhones. And yes I mean you, hot Kiwi texting with one right now in the front row.”

“I’m not Kiwi, I’m from the Philippines.”

“Well, you’re still hot.  As a matter of fact, I think the best looking women in the planet are Philippina women.  They’re gorgeous… but they have huge cocks.”

The girl immediately put down her iPhone and stared at me, slack-jawed.  Who cares?  Because the few chuckles and moans were replaced with and topped by a small amount of gut laughs.  The collective audience reaction hovered precariously between amused and offended.

“Don’t be offended, men like prostitutes.  Hookers and sluts, they love ‘em.  You didn’t get the memo?  They do.  But I’m not here to talk about Australian girls….”

The chuckles and gut laughs coalesced into some claps.  The jokes were cheap and easy, and I was maybe pandering a bit.  But some arms unfolded, some smiles cracked, and I hadn’t even said a word of my act.

“So, yeah, I’m from America, and I’m about to do a show on Broadway….”

Sometimes, after 7 and a half years, your mouth can bullshit it’s way into a room and charm the silence.

Sometimes, after all that time honing a skill, you are holding a microphone on a foreign stage in front of 200 strangers and you sort of realize that you have become pretty good at this thing, this strange thing, which is your job.

Sometimes, you discover there IS a reason you are there.  That it is, indeed, a good reason.

Then you smile at the uncomfortable relationship between a man onstage with a microphone and a random group of fellow travelers.  And when you do, you show your dimply face.  And they laugh at it.

Because, now, and finally, they are on your side.

Hamsters.

There is a part of me that thinks “fuck hamsters.”  They’re frail, they don’t give a shit about you and you can’t really pet them.  They’re hair balls with lungs.  And their death permutations are more intricate than a museum of Medieval torture dungeons.

Hamsters teach us about loving, but, more importantly, they teach us about loss.  With each fateful trip to the mall pet shop, it begins with a fluttering heart and promises of grown-up responsibility;  and it ends, inevitably, with a furry bite-size tragedy on your hands.  In the case of Mary, that was quite literally the case.

Mary was my favorite hamster.  She was a shock of white and butterscotch, with a little detail of dark brown by her haunches.  To me, she was fluffier than the rest.  But, even better, she was a total bad-ass.  She was the alpha hamster, snapping her teeth into the necks of any other hamster, male or female, that dare get in her fuckin’ way in the Habi-trail.  I remember being mesmerized watching other hamsters flee in the other direction when they met her beady little eyes on the other end of the tube.

The only other hamster that was cuter was Ted, who was a puffy gray thing with little white ringlets around his eyes.  Ted was more docile and you could actually pick him up and he would sit there in the nook of your hand, like “What’s up?  Check out my nose wiggle!” without moving.  That was my brother Jim’s hamster.  I pretended, as well as I could, not to be jealous about how super cute Ted was.

One day, Jim took Ted outside to show a friend and, on the way back, he dropped the gray poofball on the red brick walkway leading to our front door.  Oops.  He quickly scooped Ted back up, escorted him back inside, plopped him onto the cedar chips inside the aquarium, and Ted feebly knocked about for a few minutes in the rodent turds and alfalfa pellets.  Then Ted went to stare into the corner like the Blair Witch Project, his nose went still, and he never moved again.

I wanted to be sad, but my jealousy gene has always been in a battle with my compassionate nature for dominion of my soul. So I cycled from feeling sad to “hahaha” to feeling guilty about the perverted triumph I felt to reveling in the triumph to double sadness of my feeling of ironic triumph.

Luckily, guilt has mostly been a prison bitch to my to ego, so after about 5 hours I landed safely and squarely on “Fuck you, Jim, Mary is alive!  She will never die! HAHAHAHAHA!”

In my head, Mary WAS immortal.  Other shitty hamsters and guinea pigs would run around like cracked-out dipshits and keel over in a coupla months, but Mary was a solider.  She was already over a year old and she would bite the furry fuck out of anything in her way.  I was convinced that I could release her into the wild and she would find a way to forage for her own food, rats be damned!

One time, I was playing with Mary in my deluxe Fisher Price duplex housing unit with Roger Daniero, the neighborhood douchenozzle.

For some reason, I wanted to pretend that Mary lived inside the house and I wanted to look in through the window on the second floor and see her doing seemingly human things.  Yes, in my 6 year old head, that struck me as inordinately cool and YES, it IS remarkable I didn’t turn out to be gay.

Roger wanted to keep the Fisher Price house wide open at the hinge and just have Mary chill out in the kitchen on the ground floor.  Fuck no, Mary ain’t no typical woman!  She’s already barefoot, she doesn’t have to be in the kitchen, Roger, you sexist prick!

An argument ensued about where and how Mary should be located, but she was my fuckin’ hamster, so I picked up her fluffy lil gangster torso and placed her on the second floor, right on top of the cartoon illustrated rug.

I began to close the unit, so I could peep Mary through the window looking eerily human.  “Look, she’s standing by a dresser, just like a person!” I imagined myself saying.  My mind was brimming with the voyeuristic possibilities.

As I was shutting the house, Roger made a last ditch effort to thwart my awesome plan.  He thrust his arm between the two halves so they wouldn’t come together.  Mary skidded into the corner with the jolt.

“Cut it out, Roger!”  I said.

“That’s stupid to have her upstairs like that!”  Roger contended.

“No, it’s not!  It’s stupid to have her just sitting there with the house open on the bottom floor.  We can look at her through the window!”

“It’s just a window.”

“You’re the window!”

(I was 6, fuckfaces, that was cutting-edge insult technology at the time).

I pushed Roger away and shut the house with a crisp plastic snap.  I won.  Finally.

“Now the cool part, Roger, we can look through the window and see what she does.”  I guess at 6 I was just in the inchoate stages of discovering my inner peeping Tom.  I peered in and saw Mary on the rug — just like I had expected!  How cool is that!  People can ALSO be found on rugs, I thought triumphantly!

I looked closer and noticed that Mary’s shock of white fluff didn’t appear to have the same markings I was used to….

I looked through the kitchen window on the first floor…. No….

Calmly, I stood up, briskly walked up the stairs from the basement to the bathroom on the upper floor, rolled a swath of toilet paper around my fist and slowly marched back down.

With the calm precision of a military surgeon, I unclasped the house and spread its halves back to its original open position.  With one the hand swaddled in Charmin, I picked up Mary’s head, which had left a red stamp on the cartoon illustrated brown ceramic kitchen tile on the bottom floor.  With the other hand, I rolled Mary’s torso from the second floor onto the mass of white tissue.

Somehow, the Fisher Price property had managed to fully decapitate Mary.  It was like some perverse magic trick.

Tada.

Using the full extent of my medical expertise, I again picked up her little head and tried to mash it up against the body, hoping that her very existence might snap back into place like a jigsaw puzzle.  Maybe the blood would stick her parts back together somehow, I thought.  It was logical to my 1st grade brain.

Roger stared at me slack-jawed as I expeditiously took  the reconstituted hamster up two flights of stairs to my father, who was in the process of running a bridge tourney with a large group of friends.

“Dad… Dad…” I said quietly.

I wasn’t crying or screaming.  I had a sense of purpose and, like all medical dramas on TV, time was of the essence, man!

My dad turned to me with a beer in his hand, looking askance at the bloody, white, and tan rodent composite in my open palms.

“Dad…”

At this point, my composure melted and I shuddered out what I wanted to say through a soggy burst of anime-style cartoon tears.  My shoulders violently heaved in a way that only a 6 year old’s can, the rhythm of my soft bones shaking the snot out of my glistening nostrils.

“Dad… can you fix her?”

I don’t remember how my dad looked or what he said.  I was hyperventilating and 6 and my dad was Superman and gave me food whenever my stomach growled and I never saw him swear or fall down or get mad.  He was tall and had thick oily brown hair that always smelled like Brut and leather goods.  He was a freakin’ superhero… as dads mostly are when you’re 6, I guess.

It never occurred to me, for a second, that my dad wouldn’t be able to fix Mary.

Playing along (in retrospect), he took the makeshift operating table from my supinated palms, and said “Everything is going to be okay.”

He was, as he has always been in my life, calm and gentle, as put his hand on my shoulder and walked away, presumably to find more space to “fix” Mary.

Later, he told me that there was nothing he could do, but that we should give her a proper burial to honor her.  In other words, for once we weren’t gonna flush a hamster down the toilet.  We had a proper burial, with a little shovel and a flower and everything.  I think my dad, never the talker, even said a prayer.  I remember looking at him with a mixture of thankfulness for such a beautiful service, and suspicion, for not being cool enough to save Mary.

Recently, I had to make the decision to move back to NYC from LA.  It was a daunting task that was stressing the shit out of me, and my dad — at almost 70 years old — drove up to the Hollywood hills to help me move.

His hair is near-white now.  He has a bad back and is still hunched.  Instead of cologne and cowhide, my dad now smells mostly like museum dust and fart.  He is clearly many years removed from my childhood image of him as some sort of Superman.

But again, in a moment of crisis, he was there for me, calm and gentle as he has always been in my life, cleaning up after my shit, telling me in my panic that “Everything is going to be okay.”

So, thanks dad, I know you read this.  And I want you to know that despite your inability to fix my fuckin’ hamster almost 3 decades ago, I actually do think that you’re a superhero.

I love you.

Happy Father’s Day.

Sometimes you get on stage and you become Buddha.

You become 100 percent, completely ensconced in the present. You are acutely aware of your senses. You are alive.

In short, you go blank.

You only notice the bright lights, the unique pastiche of audience members — the biracial couple on your left, the old man with the arms folded and catawampus toupee on your right. The smell of the room, like museum dust. The part of your brain that schemes and formulates collapses in on itself like the edge of some Einsteinian Universe, and what remains is some sort of cerebral dial-up modem whirr.

You become completely fuckin’ lost and clueless. You are having this moment during a packed show with a skeptical booker boring holes into your face…

You are breathing, Budda-like, in silence…

This sort of thing happens to everybody, doesn’t it?

It happened to me as an actor once.

I was doing a hit Off-Broadway show, the second act of which began with a lengthy monologue by my character that was ostensibly supposed to fill the audience in on what has transpired over the course of the past 6 months, when they were, in fact, whimsically pissing and powdering in the bathrooms during the 15 minute intermission.

Act 2 began with all of the actors at the foot of the stage looking out into the audience in a solemn row, hands formally in front of their balls, in what I like to call the “fig leaf” position. Starting at the front lip of the stage staring into the audience always made me think of the musical “Rent” (and no, not because it was unrealistic and stupid) because the second act of that show began in a similar fashion, except instead of a monologue about things Victorian and British, they all wore uber-hip, multi-colored scarfs and tried to sing to like black people. Unless they were already black, then they tried to sing like “REAL” black people. (sorry Jesse Martin).

Jokingly, and only during rehearsals, I would bust out with a shitaceous vibrato: “525,600 miiiiiiinutes, 525,000 moments of joy!” (If you don’t know this song from “Rent,” congratulations on not being gay).

Not unlike “Rent,” my play (called “Gross Indecency” and about Oscar Wilde, the Michael Jordan of fags) became a huge, and surprising, hit. So much so that we got into the routine of nightly scrutinizing the audience to see if we could spot the inevitable Celebrity Du Jour.

It was a veritable Who’s Who of What the Fucks? Faye Dunaway would be in the same audience as Marilyn Manson. Natasha Richardson and Liam Neeson came the same night as sweet and horny Dr. Ruth. Howard Stern and either Carol Channing or a cardboard cut-out of Carol Channing showed up. David Mamet was there one night one row away from David Bowie.

What made the celebrity sightings extra surreal was the fact that, as cast members, much of our material was direct address, meaning we didn’t have the typical fourth wall. That is, we looked directly into the eyeballs of our audience members to talk about whatever shit was going down in Merry ol’ England as well as whatever our respective characters were thinking or feeling (kind of like “Jersey Shore” talking head confessionals but live and with more brain cells). We had literally gotten used to the idea of staring into famous faces and saying our script.

One night, someone took a pre-peek into the crowd and saw that Meryl Streep, the legend herself, was in attendance. She was a definite personal upgrade for me, but consciously I really didn’t care that much. (Foreshadowing alert: notice my use of the phrase “consciously.”)

At one point that evening, putting on my eye-liner and staring into the mirror for the 259th time before the curtain opened, I remember joking to my fellow cast members, “How funny would it be if I opened the 2nd act with the song from “Rent” in front of Dame Streep?” Everyone chuckled slightly, seemingly not as bemused by the idea as I was.

Then I said something odd. Something that has, on some level, begun an excavation of the intricacies of my own neural wiring that exists even today.

“What if I just totally forgot my lines!” I said. I laughed hysterically at the idea. What a silly thought. That’s impossible. I could say these lines backwards. Ha!

Foreshadowing alert #2.

I wasn’t really aware of it at the time, but, as I am now FULLY and completely aware, the subconscious brain is an evil bitch. And it loves nothing more than to fuck up your life.

Don’t believe it?

Next time you want to delete the phone number of someone you have recently decided you hate (a liar, an ex, your grandmother), take a quick peeksie at the number before you do it. Your brain will industrial-strength laser tattoo those 9 digits into the forefront of your frontal lobe — GUARANTEED!!!

SUBCONSCIOUS: “You want to forget your ex, Bill? Of couse you do! Well, don’t think of the number 2134531882. Don’t! Just don’t think of 2134531882. I mean, why the fuck would you ever think of 2134531882 ever? That’s retarded! Let’s make a Schoolhouse Rock rhyme of the number in order to remind you of the number you need to forget….”

To point, your brain is a fucking asshole.

Ergo, if you throw down the gauntlet on your subconscious mind and say “You will never forget your lines,” it will indubitably try (subconsciously… confusing, huh?) to prove you wrong.

The house lights began to dim as the stage lights brightened.

We walked out to our marks downstage to begin the 2nd act. The lights — SHOMP — came up to full intensity until their buzzy white noise filled the 400-seat theatre. I was at my mark, fig-leafed. I was healthy, I was cute and 24 years old. I was word-perfect with the monologue…

I opened my mouth and couldn’t remember the very first word for some reason.

What’s that first word?… If I could only remember THAT, I thought, then I could do the rest no problem….

I stood there and stared out into the bright Off-Broadway lights, which then seemed excessively harsh, like Gestapo FIND-A-JEW spotlights. I could see particles of dust floating in the photons like living things traveling home. They were methodical in their state of entropy. The first person coughed, his body wordlessly asking if there has been some mistake. The only other sound, the hum of the AC.

In my silence, the vague blonde aura and hawkish nose of Streep was hazily edging itself in around the periphery of my sight line. A pair of fat legs under a red skirt in the 2nd row aisle crossed and uncrossed. The distinct crinkle of a yellow Playbill sounded like the explosion of a banned 4th of July firework in Church. Subtly, my cast members started to get restless….

I opened my mouth to speak and closed it again.

I stood there frigid, jaw clenching reflexively, wondering just one thing. Just one… What the fuck is the very first word of the second fucking act….

“525,600?” No, that’s not it.

The second cough erupted from a man with two chins fighting for supremacy.

A mysterious part of my body suddenly awoke and injected a shot of pure adrenaline into my bloodstream, dilating my eyes, quickening my heart rate. Sheer panic was beginning it’s descent into every fiber of my being.

The third cough.

Finally, a deeper, more Delphian part of my soul told me to “Just breathe.” This esoteric part assured me “If you just breathe Bill, your consciousness will unfurl again and simple Newtonian Physics will take over your universe again. Oh yeah, and don’t be such a bitch, Bill!”

So I began to breathe deep tantric breaths. At this point, I noticed two things: one, that CLEARLY, I had not been breathing at all and may brain was enjoying the fresh supply of oxygen. Number two, the cast members immediately to my left and right had frozen in a bizarre mirror exercise of terror. Clearly, they could sense my psychological demise and they were ransacking archives of their brains for escape routes or a way to save the night.

Farther down the flank, the actors seemed just curious. One of them casually turned to his right with a casual look of “Uh, hey, yeah, what the everliving fucktits is goin’ on centerstage?”

I took another breath, waiting for the world to come into crystalline and pristine focus, wherein the monologue would wend itself fluidly through my lips. Instead, in the moment as Buddha… lights. Crinkles. Crossing and uncrossing. Coughing fits and murmurs now…

“Oscar,” I began, stating the name of the protagonist, hoping it would spark everything else. Nope.

So I began to paraphrase. For those of you not familiar with the term, I just began to say shit that sort of made sense about what may or may not have happened in those 6 hypothetical months that needed to be covered.

I started again, “Oscar was a mess…. He was being sued left and right and his creditors were simply not…. not having it…. at all!”

What the fuck was I even saying?!

Everyone in the cast looked at me like I just peeled my face off and I was now Nicholas Cage instead of John Travolta (horrible John Woo movie reference? check!)

And like day 2 of a herpes outbreak… It got worse.

Not only was I speaking words that were supposed to make sense to the audience, but my speech also had verbal cues for the other actors’ lines and actions as well. In other words, my lines were supposed to be used as choreography for the other 6 actors’ interweaving motions onstage.

So my metaphysical meltdown meant that the audience didn’t know what story was being told, and the other actors had no idea what to say or where to move. Even the lighting cues were screwed. My semi-panic attack turned a high-profile Off-Broadway show with Meryl Streep in the audience into a sloppy “Duck Soup” Marx Brothers’ routine. We just needed a banana peel onstage to make my life complete.

We all looked at each other saucer-eyed with terror as I stumbled around like a marionette with a broken string. Somehow, amazingly, I garbled through some consonant clusterfucks until I recognize what could be landing point, at which point I exited the stage, beet-red and buzzing like I had just chugged a pint of viagra-laced vodka. When I got offstage, I laughed and presented my shaking and open palms to the gods, as if to say “How the fuck did that happen to my mind!”

I recovered and finished the play with great aplomb and composure. I was back on track. It was just a temporary brain abeyance.

Not so fast. The 2nd act brain fart, nay, brain diarrhea, continued for 3 more shows. And then, as quickly and as mysteriously as it started, it stopped. I did the play for another 5 months and never had that parietal paralysis happened again. Ever.

Until tonight at this gig in Hawaii…..

I’m only noticing the bright lights, the unique pastiche of audience members — the biracial couple on your left, the old man with the arms folded and catawampus toupee on your right. The smell of the room, like museum dust. The part of my brain that schemes and formulates is collapsing in on itself like the edge of some Einsteinian Universe, and what remains seems to be some sort of cerebal dial-up modem whirr.

I become completely fuckin’ lost and clueless. I am having this moment during a packed show with a skeptical booker boring holes into my face… I am breathing, Budda-like, in silence…

This bitchy, stern-faced booker at SHARKY’S in Honolulu had given me shit about my time slot earlier and now I see her hawkish nose edging into my periphery. I had done 90 minutes the night before, but I can’t remember my first fucking joke.

What’s just one joke I know?

Then I remember… that I am now a comic. I can say whatever the fuck I want.

“Wow, these lights are bright. These are like Gestapo, FIND-A-JEW spotlights! I can’t see shit!”

I’m telling the truth, but people are laughing. I’m lost, though….

“I don’t know what the fuck to talk about right now.”

I am utterly confused. And people see that. They are laughing hysterically.

One mean-looking guy with a bald head and flowery shirt is guffawing exceptionally hard.

“Wow, you look brutal, but your shirt is so flowery. It’s like your face is saying “FUCK YOU!” but your shirt is saying “FUCK ME!”

The laughs double in intensity.

I am still lost. I still don’t have a plan. But, as I begin to breathe normally, I realize my “lines” don’t matter. At all.

Because, now, I am a comic.

Now, I am a fucking Buddhist.

So suck it, Meryl.

Skydiving has never been on my “bucket list.” If anything, it’s been on my “shit list,” since I’m so sick of friends of mine prescribing it as some sort of magical cure-all for all of life’s woes.

Whenever I meet some faux-alpha male who smirks about his 1,000th jump, I can’t help but wishing a tree branch snags his nylon and he partially splatters on his 1,001 drop. “Whatever, you trust fund baby! You pay people to jump out of a plane! Big deal! Just because I don’t do it, doesn’t make me a fucking pussy! IT DOESN’T!”

At about the point when I was starting to question whether or not I was, indeed, vagina-laden, my friend Rita Roy — who would wax like Walk Whitman about the miraculous, universe expanding, mushroom trip of a “life-changer” skydiving is — had a horrendous, bone-splintering accident and almost died doing it.

Apparently, Rita was on her 15th jump or something and got caught up in the beauty of planet Earth that was hurtling towards her, and so — with a big, blissed-out smile on her face — she missed the checkpoint to pull the cord. Awwwww, she thought, look at the glorious bounty of Mother Nature!…. Whoops!

I asked her how that was possible. She said it was actually quite easy, that it was “the equivalent of spacing out and running a stop sign.” I thought about it for a moment and then assured her that no, she was just retarded. (I strongly suspect Rita had been texting during it, but I digress).

Rita lived because of some new fancy failsafe that automatically opens the chute if you “forget” to do it manually. Basically, it was invented for pantywaists who pass out, not spiritual thrill junkies who think each dive is a tantric fuck session with the essence of Krishna, but all the same, it saved Rita’s life. Now, despite severe injuries, she’s fine. Well, at least fine enough with the help of multiple pain pills and booze — the breakfast of champions!

I mean, it sucks for her, but it reaffirmed my belief that skydiving is a stupid activity for bored, white adrenaline-whores who need something absurd to fill up the void in their souls.

“I’m perfectly fine with the gaping hole in my soul, thank you very much!” I said to the mirror during my daily affirmations.

Two weeks ago, my good friend Cat was in town for a day. We were thinking of things to do and I flippantly mentioned skydiving. Surprisingly, she took to the idea like a teen to bj’s. Like most ideas that involve effort, I said “I’ll look into it” and then proceeded not to. This time, however, Cat followed up and forced a list of phone numbers on me.

The first number I called, some older woman with a twang answered. It sounded like I was inadvertently patched through to a double-wide in the Appalachian mountains. You could feel the lack of teeth in the timbre of her voice. She mentioned a reasonable price and offered a time that fit perfectly with my schedule. FUCK! …. Okay, fine, I’ll make a reservation, but that’s okay, it’ll be too windy or something else will come up. I mean, it’s just a reservation. Nothing solid. Right?

The next afternoon, I found myself driving to Camarillo Airport, wondering what the bejesus I was doing.

When we arrived to the address at the diminutive airport, it seemed barren. Nobody was around and all the planes appeared to be grounded. I meandered around and yelled “Hello” a lot, like I was in some bad 80’s horror flick and there was a heavy-breathing POV shot through some nearby bushes. It was windy so they closed it down, I thought triumphantly.

Finally, a cop appeared on the premises.

“Excuse me, do you know where the skydiving is?” I asked.

“Sure. It’s right there!” he said, as he pointed up to the sky.

I looked up for a nanosecond until I realized I was a fucking moron. He stood smiling with the success of his joke for about 3 seconds too long before he finally offered:

“Just kidding. Haha. Yeah, just cut through that restaurant and you can find it on the far end of the tarmac. It’s a brown plane.”

Cut through the restaurant? That sounds really on the up and up. At one point Cat remarked that I was “unusally quiet.” I told her it was because she’s a shitty female driver and that she made me car sick. In truth, I usually get “unusually quiet” when I’m contemplating my imminent death.

We cut through the cafe and looked around at all the pristine white planes on the tarmac. I couldn’t locate a “brown” one, so I asked a Mexican mechanic tinkering on a nearby cessna.

“Do you know donde the skydiving facility is?” I said, in perfect Spanglish.

The Mexican pointed towards the opposite end of the tarmac and then chuckled. Why the hell are you laughing, Jorge? I was too nervous to ask, so I crossed the runway, crossing myself the whole time.

And then I saw it. The plane I was going to jump out of.

The Carlos Mencia hack joke response to someone’s declaration of wishing to sky dive is often the following:

“Why would you ever jump out of a perfectly good plane?”

That’s a cute response. Unfortunately, it seemed frighteningly in apropos after I got a peeksie at the mottled brown Cracker Jack toy of a plane that lay on the lot in front of me like a giant turd. It looked like an evil Transformer had taken a dump on the runway. And now this Decepticon doo-doo was beginning to rust.

I crept up to the taped-on windows and peered inside. The silvery duct tape was frayed wherever it was applied, giving the impression that the whole contraption was going to precipitously unfurl and collapse like some ACME product Wile E. Coyote might get hoodwinked into purchasing. The chocolate pleather seats inside were ripped and creme-colored foam stuffing seemed to be squeezing out at every right angle. The interior beige paint was chipped and everything smelled like spiders, kerosene, and old pennies.

It was like a rape dungeon with wings.

I half-expected to see a naked girl in the corner of the cockpit shivering and crying for “mommy.”

I looked towards the entrance to the office near the plane and couldn’t help but notice that the “Skydiving facility” was actually an “UPHOLSTERY STORE/SKYDIVING” facility. I’m not precisely sure why that freaked me the fuck out, but it most definitely did.

Undaunted, I walked in, announced my arrival to the crew, and plunked down my Capitalone “NO HASSLES” card like I was ordering a cheesecake. I was surprisingly halycon… well, except for one strange development….

I had been home for hours, feeling fine. But, for some reason, the second I walked into the UPHOLSTERY/SKYDIVING facilty, my ass launched into protest. Although my digestive tract had been perfectly content all day, suddenly my sphincter started spurting out staccato farts. It was as if my asshole was desperately trying to tell me something.

Even in the strict onomatopoeic sense, the flatulence sounded like my asshole had launched into an angry litany of blubbery “Noooo’s” that wouldn’t stop. I found myself wandering around the small building, trying to adroitly boomerang the farts far away from me every time I made a swift 180 degree turn.

Brandon, one of the ‘jumpers’ — a jovial, heavyset, frat-guy type — got my gear and put me in a crotch harness that felt like a summer camp Atomic Wedgie. It compacted my balls and taint, which unfortunately, did nothing to stem the sputter of methane rocketing out of my bowels; which, in turn, caused Brandon to give me a sideways look that implied, “Bro, I know what’s going on and I won’t bring it up, but fuuuuuuck, get a grip.” Brandon opted to take Cat up instead (later admitting he knew I was ‘busting ass’ and wanted to avoid it by taking her).

Before I could say “Rolaids,” I was strapped and brought back outside to board the alleged “plane.” Brandon proudly announced that the nickname of the plane was the “TURD BIRD.” Everyone seemed to find that hilarious…. except me, of course.

The pilot came out of the office and boarded the plane with Chuck Taylors, baggy corduroys, and a Shaggy-from-Scooby Doo hairdo. ZOINKS, our pilot is A FUCKING STONER, my head screamed! It didn’t help my confidence that our jump was occurring only slightly after 4:20pm.

I instantly thought of the movie “Fandango,” when Judd Nelson goes up in a similarly slipshod prop/death-trap plane and the burnout pilot says “It’s better to die like this than in some senseless tragedy!” and proffers Judd a joint at 10 thousand feet. When Judd jumps, it turns out the stoner pilot had inadvertently packed Judd’s bag with dirty laundry instead of an actual parachute. The first cord Judd pulls releases a stream of soiled t-shirts and underwear. I couldn’t help but picture some mix-up in the “UPHOLSTERY/SKY DIVING” facility wherein my cord is tugged and out floats rich Corinthean leather all around me as I plummet to my demise, sheer terror making me unable to enjoy the delicious irony of my death.

Suddnely, my jumper appeared next to the plane with a crisp smack on the shoulder. He was stretching and trim and wearing pipe-lined short shorts, like he had just jogged a 10K in 1978. He smiled broadly, seeming smugly Evangelical. We then all crawled into the turd, Cat and I both cuddling up against our respective jumpers. Short shorts sidled up behind me and engaged straps and clips until we were connected like “Avatar” smurfs.

“Back up against me!” short shorts said in my ear as the “TURD BIRD” stubbornly sputtered to life. You could hear the rubber bands groan as the propeller beat against the choppy air. I tried to back up, but apparently it wasn’t good enough.

“NO, REALLY BACK UP ALL THE WAY AGAINST ME!!!” he yelled louder as the rattling increased and the plane began to take flight.

It suddenly dawned on me that “TANDEM SKYDIVE” is basically the “PRISON RAPE” of sky dive! And, of course, I would be playing the role of the Rapee. I had no choice in the matter. As prison bitch from the top bunk, I had to do everything he told me. I felt like screaming, “Just take the cigarettes!”

Finally, we spooned in a way that was satisfying with short shorts, and we sat in stony silence as the plane bumpily began its climb to 10,000 feet. He lazily draped an arm around my waist at one point. Ugh. I looked at his macho altimeter. He was the alpha male here, in control of everything. All I could do was breathe and try my best not to fart into his balls.

My face must have looked like I just had a staring contest with a Gorgon, because Brandon, strapped up with Cat, pointed and laughed at me and asked me, too loudly, if I was “okay.”

I nodded but found that my Adam’s Apple had temporarily disconnected from my voice box, so any sound I wished to emit was still buffering….

I guess Brandon found my state of paralysis hilarious, because he then decided it was time to try his hand at some standup comedy.

“Hey Bill,” Brandon said, “Whatever you do, just don’t fuck with the duct tape.” Brandon then began fucking with the duct tape. “Bro, if you pull too hard, the wings will come off… AGAIN! Hahahaha! We don’t call this piece of shit the TURD BIRD for nothing!”

I nodded and grinned toothlessly. For some reason, Brandon thought this was an invitation for more psychological torture.

“Hey, Bill,” Brandon started again, with his disarmingly jovial demeanor, “What’s the difference between a golfer and a sky diver?”

He then looked at me for an answer to, what I assumed, was a rhetorical question. My Adam’s Apple tried to shimmy down my neck to allow a modicum of air to vibrate my constricted vocals into phonation, but to no avail.

Instead, I just gaped silently like a carp to cue Brandon to continue.

“A GOLFER GOES ‘THWACK!’… ‘SHIT!’…. AND A SKYDIVER GOES ‘SHIT!’… ‘THWACK!’”

He then guffawed, his amiable face caked in flaky wind burn.

Fuck, that’s a good joke, I thought. A grammatical mirror reverse that is still dark and funny. I realized then that I will never be able to write as good as a joke book in the 80’s. Damn.

The plane began to level out, and, with only a nudge of warning, my jumper began to open the door…. and my world became very present….

WHOOOOOOOSH! Suddenly, the door opens, shattering the stillness of the sacrophagus. It feels like smelling salts or an injection of pure adrenaline in my Achilles’ Tendon, Keith Moon style. The wind fills my nostrils. I slide the goggles down over my eyes and feel a confusing chemical cocktail coursing through my veins.

Unlike most people, I don’t shake or hyperventilate or talk like at coked-out Persian in a night club when I’m terror-stricken. My reaction is quite the antithesis. I find that my body and thoughts go into some slo-mo Matrix “bullet speed” realm. It’s almost like I step a half-foot away and look at everything with a sort of Taoist neutrality.

I hold up my hand and look at it. It is surprisingly still. There’s the duct tape curling around the edges of the open door like a wild loose comma. There’s a man behind me rattling off a safety harnass checklist. The sky is blue behind us. The plane motor sounds dry and angry, like an octegenarian farting as he runs down stairs. The pilot wears corduroys. The sky is blue with smears of white. Duct tape peeling off. My hand is still.

“It’s better to die like this than in some senseless tragedy!” I think to myself. I know I am nervous, but only as a concept. I don’t really feel much.

I feel myself, without any effort on my part, moving to the open door. The wind funneling into my ears is drowning out any reflexive part of me that might resist the puppeteering of my limbs I am experiencing.

“THROW YOUR LEGS OUT!” short shorts screams.

Like a crippled war vet, I yank at my pants to move my legs to the edge. I look down and notice one of my shoelaces is unlaced and flapping. I rack focus to the earth about 10,000 feet below, gridded up like a gray electronic circuit with buttons.

The man, once effeminate, is steering and pushing me with steadfast assurance. I exhale consciously and look at the maze-like squares and silos on earth. And then another slight push. We are in free fall. Tumbling in the sky. I am clueless as I flip and trust this man with short shorts, who literally has my life in his hands.

Like a choreographed dance, our bodies suddenly catch the air like a wind sock. A tap on the shoulder cues me to stretch my arms wide. I see the earth coming at me quickly, yet seemingly and remarkably stagnant. It’s the mythical moment of Terminal velocity. My face surely is flapping around like a Shar Pei puppy, but all I am aware of is wind and distant grids and white noise. He takes my arm and moves it a little, causing us to horizontally pirouette. I feel like Lois Lane to his Superman….

Then SHOOOOOOP! The chute opens abruptly and the moment of disconnect is over. We are now sinking slowly down as the harness tugs at my armpits. Ahhhh, I sigh a breath of relief… It is over… or so I thought….

For some reason that utterly baffles me, my jumper feels that I want to twirl and twirl like a ballet dancer now. He keeps telling me to pull down on the opposing levers in order to cantilever the chute in different directions. My colon is about to declare jihad on and through my asshole, so I stop pulling, opting for a quiet descent instead.

But my jumper decides he wants to spin more. I forgot to tell him earlier to not to fucking do that because spinning around like a retard in a rumpus room makes me projectile vomit. He starts yelling “WHEEEEEEE!” as he wheels the chute around more and more.

I connect my voice box back together long enough to scream, “I’m going to PUKE!”

“YOU LIKE THE VIEW?” he shoots back, misunderstanding me. “WHEEEEEEE!!!!”

“NO, DUDE, I’M GOING TO FUCKIN’ PUKE!!! PUKE, not VIEW!”

“Ohhh,” he says, seemingly crestfallen. “Well, bro, if you puke, please puke on your shirt. I don’t want to get any on me! Seriously!” he says.

“I won’t puke if you go down gently,” I manage. I am not puking, but I KNOW that if I do puke, I will most certainly do my best to puke upwards into this face and nostrils.

We sway down, pukeless, and I land hard in a grass field with completely uninterested migrant workers only a few yards away. “Crazy gringos!” they are probably thinking as they pick away….

And they would be right….

************************************

POSTSCRIPT

A couple of weeks have passed since my sky diving experience.

Am I glad I did it?

Of course. It was cool and unique and I highly recommend it. Despite the ribbing in the blog, the people at the Camarillo SKYDIVING/UPHOLSTERY facility were amazing, and I wouldn’t have wanted to have my first jump with anybody else (short shorts included).

Brandon has come to see me perform at the Laugh Factory twice already, and, in exchange, I’ll get a discount when, and if, I go back. I might even fix the interior of my Honda Civic while I’m at it.

The thing that is nagging me is all the stuff I had heard leading up to the dive….

Am I a new man now?

Am I now one of those annoying converts that preaches that the miracle of existence can only truly be experienced through the wonders of free fall? Did it change my life?

Well… fuck no.

I still have taxes, I still have annoying text-fights with girls I know in LA (what did she write? CAPS LOCK! IT’S ON NOW, BITCH!), and my penis is stubbornly holding at its locked-in size. My mind doesn’t seem more open … nor have I been gifted with extra powers or experience points like it’s some RPG video game.

In retrospect, It’s just a thing to do in life. Like other things.

Big deal….

That being said, if you don’t do it, guess what:

you’re a fucking pussy.

A few years ago, my friend Jamie Kennedy made a cool documentary called “Heckler.” One of the major tenets of the movie is that the internet has basically become a conduit for hateful Asperger’s syndrome-y misanthropes to biliously and anonymously trash comics/writers/actors/filmmakers from the safety of their mom’s basement.

There IS a certain sanctity in the form of “heckle” where you have the ability to confront your nemesis. For example, if you’re performing in Tennessee and some fat drunk in the back yells “You suck!”, you can say something clever in return like “I don’t go to where you work and knock the cock out of your mouth!” which, in turn, might make the redneck next to that person say something like “Don’t you talk to my sister like that, you son of a bitch!” at which point you could say something erudite such as “Sorry if I offended your girlfriend, you toothless bucket of rancid trailer meat!”

It’s not an IDEAL set, by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s real and visceral and very present whenever a heckle happens live and in person. However, the brand of critique bred by the internet most closely resembles the splenetic scrawlings of public-bathroom-crappers who etch their hatred into walls for any and all anonymous future crappers. Hateful and pointless.

Even if you can accept the fact that many critics feel that their role as a social arbiter helps steer the cultural dialogue in a more positive direction, I’m hard pressed to find the reason why some e-critique would call Jamie Kennedy “a rape baby” based on one of his movies.

Beyond this, it is no small coincidence that the dipshit calling him a “rape baby” is at his Mac, not in his face.

Recently, I found myself attacked in much the same way: personally, unprovoked, and without the capability of being able to punch him in the face holes. He remained and remains an Internet Cipher… well, until I found him on Facebook….

As a gmail email account holder (don’t be jealous, people), Google has been trying to push different social networking opportunities on me. First they inundated me with Google Wave (pun alert!) and recently, without asking, they made me a member of Google Buzz.

I noticed that about 8 or 9 friends of mine were on Google Buzz, but I never thought about it. It just seemed like it wasn’t getting any traction as a “social networking” tool.

So, I wrote the following fake letter for my Google Buzz friends to see:

“Dear Google Buzz,

I’m sorry that you have failed.

Nobody really gives a shit about you, Google Buzz. They just don’t. I don’t know why, but the whole Buzz thing isn’t working. My advice would be to stick with your day job, Google. Buzz? It’s like giving Clay Aiken a hip, spiky hairdo — he’s still a gay hick.

Just stick to being Google, dude! I mean you’re already a fucking verb, bro, don’t overreach. A verb. Stop and smell the e-roses I guess is my point.

Bill

1 person liked this - Chris Griffin”

Oh well, 1 person, my friend Chris Griffin, liked it. I only had a few friends so any response was fine.

However, an employee of “Google Buzz” named Corey Russell somehow had access to my Buzz (creepy as shit) and wrote the following:

“Corey Russell:

Google Buzz actually has nothing to do with Google Wave FYI. Also, the slang ‘improper’ use of the word google is actually a verb, but the proper usage of the word Google, is a noun. But be ignorant if you want, bro.”

Uh… who is this guy and how/why the fuck is he reading what I wrote to my friends on Google Buzz? I decided to pursue a bit further…

“Bill Dawes:

“Bro”…. no shit Google is a noun. A proper noun, at that. You can even use it for Scrabble now!

I just meant to say that it’s so huge it has actually become a verb. I was making a joke. Basically saying you’re like the “Kleenex” to every other search engine’s “facial tissue.” I mean, I would die happy if people said, “I Bill Dawes’d this girl last night…”

If you didn’t get that joke, then you need a humor chip lodged into your cerebellum… and please don’t come back and tell me the cerebellum isn’t the “proper” part of the brain responsible for discerning the nature of funny.

p.s. I know I have two NAZI references in these messages, but I assure you some of my best friends are black.”

“Corey Russell:

Facebook is okay, and so is twitter, but this is our approach at Google. Nothing wrong with trying! We’re not successful yet, but soon it will be.

Maybe you should educate yourself a bit more for what Google Buzz is before you talk about it.” (and then he posted a link to some great article about the wonders of Google Buzz)

Oh, and as a side note. I have invites left for Google Wave. I’d be more than happy to give you one so you could try it out, bro.

“Bill Dawes:

Bro again?  Really?

Honestly, I can’t wait to NOT try Google Wave. Please send me the invite so I can proceed to NOT open it!

And the link to the Google Buzz info is irrelevant. I think the name “Google Buzz” is the problem. It’s like “I went drinking at an internet cafe and got a total Google Buzz!” Eh.

Bill”

“Corey Russell:

Wow, that’s stupid. What is your argument? You state that you want Google to stay the same, but then in the next sentence, you also told it not to be another Hitler. Well… Which is it, you idiot?!”

“Bill Dawes:

Before we go any further and I get mad…. Do you have Aspergers? It ties into the humor chip question. I’m seriously asking.”

“Corey Russell:

Jesus, the point I was trying to make is, you need to actually give something like this a shot before you start to compare it to ‘Facebook’, or ‘Twitter’.

Google Buzz is not meant to be, in any way shape or form, another twitter. I agree that Google is kind of monopolizing the whole entire internet as we know it, but they’re only doing this because they want to make the internet a better place for receiving and sharing information. There is nothing evil about that. (By the way, thats what Google Buzz is for. Not posting 160 character ‘I just took a shit’ posts.)

As far as the whole Google being a verb joke. That was stupid. Wasn’t funny, and just made you look like an uneducated prick. You seem to be quite insistent that I get some chip implanted in my brain to help me recognize your shitty, non-humourous jokes. Why should I? So I can be just like you? Wow, my life dream. You’ve discovered it. Congrats mate. Maybe you should just focus on getting your very own brain, asshole!”

NOW: If you notice, Corey Russell has called me an “uneducated prick,” an “idiot,” and “an asshole.” It seems to me that he’s not really getting my humor….

So I decide to redouble my efforts in the yuk-yuk department.

“Bill Dawes:

You’re right, scratch the humor chip implant. That was dumb. YOU need to get off the computer and get laid.

Calling me an “uneducated prick” for saying Google is a “verb” doesn’t even make sense, Corey Russell. I’m not even sure why your panties keep twisting up into your balloon knot over that one. I mean, were you molested by a “verb” as a young child? Was your Priest’s name a verb?

I mean, I simply say “Hey Google, you’re a verb,” and you go, “HOW THE FUCK DARE YOU CALL GOOGLE A VERB! GOOGLE IS A FUCKING NOUN GODDAMMIT! YOU IGNORANT MOTHERFUCKER! AHHHHH! IF WE WERE IN A VIRTUAL FANTASY WORLD LIKE ‘WORLD OF WARCRAFT’ I WOULD FUCKING SMITE YOU WITH THE SWORD OF 1000 DEATHS! YOU MAKE ME SO GODDAMN ANGRY, HUMAN!!!!!”

Bill Dawes”

“Corey Russell:

Mr. Dawes, you are once again showing me how completely stupid you are. You are taking this discussion way too seriously. You can’t come up with an argument, and assume I live in a fantasy world and play ‘world of warcraft’. Never once touched the game! In fact, I don’t even really like video games that much! Way to go buddy! Judging someone that you haven’t even met!

I’ll have you know that most of my time is spent with multiple friends, and actually working to earn my money and not leaching off of my parents like you do! See how that sounds when I throw out an assumption based on the little information I actually know about you? Pretty stupid right? Ha!

You seem like an uneducated fool, and unless you can come up with an actual argument that makes sense, you shouldn’t talk. As far as the comments about my father never loving me… really brilliant. Trust me, he loves me! Wow, you’ve really tugged on my emotional strings…How will I ever recover!?

And, oh yeah, shut the fuck up. ;)”

OKAY, clearly my attempt at humor failed. It felt sort of like my first 2 years of comedy.

What do I do? Give up? Try a different tack?

I decide to take the high road….

“Bill Dawes:

The reality is, people use the internet mostly to find creative ways to jerk off. Don’t get mad at me! Get mad at God. He gave us pee-pees and boy, do we love to show them to strangers! (p.s. enjoy the attachment on this email. I gotta admit, the angle is flattering!)

That’s why I think, next time at a board meeting, you should pitch “Google Jerk.”

Honestly, I don’t want money for the idea. Like everyone at Google, I’m not remotely interested in money. I just really want the internet to be a better place for receiving and sharing information.

Call me and let me bitch slap like the bitch you are. I’m waiting…”

Alas, Corey never called. And he blocked me on Facebook.  Awwww….Oh well….

Shortly after, I got an email of “sincere apology” from an executive at Google, saying that Corey’s actions were grounds for dismissal. I told him that Corey shouldn’t be fired because, in fact, I got a blog out of it.

Plus, I told the guy, Google Buzz fucking blows, it’d only be doing him a favor.

I can’t tell if dating in your thirties sucks or if dating in Los Angeles sucks.

Or if dating in your thirties in Los Angeles sucks. Or if dating in your thirties in Los Angeles with a facebook account sucks. Or dating just sucks.

Whatever the case may be, elements in my love life seem to be galvanizing into a perfect storm of Hoover-vac suckiness.

When I was in New York in my twenties (in retrospect) my love life was at least interesting. Sometimes, said love life may have bordered on the bipolar, perhaps even psychopathic, but at least there was a modicum of passion.

Don’t get me wrong: there is a whole heap o’ drama to be had dating girls in LA, but it tends to border on the boring.

In short, dating here in La is “dratarded.” It’s dramatic… but retarded. Girls here get hyper-pissed over things like facebook updates and the fact that you didn’t respond properly or enough to a text.

Here’s an ACTUAL STRING OF TEXTS between me and someone I dated briefly:

“Why didn’t u text me back?”

“Uh… because u just texted me that u were going swimming at the beach.”

“Pls just acknowledge my text next time! :(”

“Okay. Next time, when u go swimming, please go out deeper. :)”

What? I wanted to see if she could break her record!

Maybe my memory is sweetened and water-logged with Red Bull/Vodka from those nostalgic New York 9/11 years, but I seem to recall my love life in NYC as active and fun and fertile (oops!) and, dare I say, romantic. It was akin to a 1930’s Errol Flynn swashbuckler, compared to the 1950’s French foreign film marathon of ennui that is ‘Dating in Los Angeles.’

After many dates and near misses, I think I finally figured out the problem. And here it is: women.

Let me explain…

It seems that women in LA fall into only 3 categories. These categories represent the spectrum of dating options; or the types of women that a man such as myself (look who got upgraded from man-boy!) comes across or, rather, comes all over in Los Angeles (forgive me, that last bit was corny and nasty, but it was hovering there like a fluttering toss from a Raiders’ quarterback, I had to knock it down!).

The first type of woman in LA is the one who is in total denial. Over everything, particularly her age.

She shops at FOREVER 21, buys cremes and antioxidants by the wholesale crate, and when the mere subject of age comes up, she says something like, “Age is nothing but a number? Who cares? What difference does my age make? I hate all mention of time and numbers and even clocks!”

Hmmmm…. I feel like I’ve heard that before. Who else I’ve heard that from? Oh yeah, every woman in LA over thirty ever.

I like older women, so I went out with a 38 year old woman who was very beautiful …online.

When she showed up at the sushi restaurant, it appeared as if she had declared JIHAD on facial expression. I can’t say what combo of corrective surgeries she had, but her face began to assume that leonine “THUNDERCATS HO!” countenance that seems to be stuck on the visages of so many of the Hollywood enhanced.

Anyway, this girl was LA fit and tall, but I can’t say she had a “Butterface.” She had a “I CAN’T BELIEVE IT’S NOT BUTTER face.”

Everything was tucked and stapled and peeled. Her face looked like a newborn baby trying to squeeze out of the womb. “Waaaaaaaah!!!! Hey, I’m 29!!! Wahhhhh! I can’t blink, do you have eye drops? Wahhhhh!!!”

She couldn’t even fully close her mouth because her lips were so inflated and stretched back. She had this little roadrunner tongue flicking out every once in a while keeping her lips moist. And then she had these fake, physics-defying cartoon balloon boobies — or, as I call them, BALLOOBIES. These monstrosities would take 2 seconds to follow her. Every time she turned a corner, they would wallop around and seem to chase after her. “MEEP MEEP!”

So I’m putting it in her, right….

Come on, I can’t be too picky — I just moved here!

Anybang, I wasn’t really into it but I was giving it a College try. At one point, I realized her face kind of looked like one of those rubber sex dolls. I couldn’t really tell if she was enjoying herself at all because her expression never changed.

“Is that sound a good “Ooooo”or a bad “Ooooo?” Blink twice for good….”

Every once in a while, just to be safe, I had to put my fingers on her aorta to make sure there was a pulse. (There was.)

The second option for dating are the women who are painfully aware of their age and feel that their biological clock is ticking louder than an egg timer. They are keeping a lid on their obsession (kind of like the Natasha Beddingfield song “Babies”…. so what, I own it on iTUNES, that shit is catchy!), but they are officially, and unequivocally, freaking out about getting older.

When I first moved to Los Angeles, I had my best girl friend Cali (www.calinorton.com) set me up on a blind date. This woman was in her mid-thirties. She was talented and smart and sexy and we hit it off right away. We went to a party, had some drinks, did some dancing. I rocked the ‘Robot.’ So far, so good.

After a break in the music and after one too many cocktails on her part, she said “I have to tell you: I wanna be pregnant by the end of the year!”

First date!?

I took a sip of my drink and said, “Can’t we just enjoy this Christmas party?”

Okay, that last bit was a joke. It was last February, but it may as well have been New Year’s!

Honestly, what did she think my reaction was gonna be?

“What are we doing drinking Appletinis getting to know each other? Let’s go back to your place, take off those granny panties and try to fertilize that dried up egg, Betty White! … what’s your last name again?”

In reality, what I said was, “That’s a beautiful thing.” That’s all my mouth could muster.

Unfortunately my penis heard what she said too. He took that as a cue to retract backwards into my intestines.

He was like, “What the hell did she say? Dude, I’m outta here…. I’ll be hanging out with the colon if you need me - come with me testicles - I’ll see you later on Chatroulette, Bill!” And then he disappeared in a puff of baby powder.

The THIRD option is dating women/girls in their 20’s.

I used to see guys in their thirties dating girls in their early twenties and think “What a ….CREEP!” Now I’m in my thirties, I see it, and I think “What a… GOOD IDEA!”

Young girls are just so easy to please! You can drive ‘em to Tijuana and they’re like “Wow, I’ve never been overseas before!”

Older women are impossible to please.

“Hey, Sally, I really want to make you cum.”

“You do? Well here’s the instruction manual, if you refer to page 347 in the chapter on clitoral stimulation, it will show you the proper rotation and psi needed to please me….”

Plus, young girls can teach me things like how to use a computer and webchat. “Baby, can you help me change my Facebook settings?” And, according to a new book, a ‘blow job is the new good night kiss” with the current generation of young girls. Dr. Phil has a problem with this because, apparently, he isn’t a fan of awesomeness.

Plus, younger women are game for anything. “Hey, Jenna, wanna put on X-MEN outfits and bang in the park tonight?”

“Sure why not? I’ve never done THAT before. Can I be STORM? Just make sure I’m back in time for homeroom!”

Okay, the truth is, despite everything I say and write, I want love and nothing is cooler to me than a long, beautiful relationship like the one my parents, Dave and Suzy Dawes, have. They’ve been together for over 40 years and my mom still looks at my dad and says things like “Isn’t your dad cute?” Awwww.

They have shared everything. And that is love. And that is life.

Honestly, I don’t want to be one of those Hollywood stereotypes. I don’t want to be 60 and marry a 40 year old. That’s so cliche!

No… I wanna be 40 and marry a 20 year old.

That’s much better.

Right?

Am I white trash?

And if so, am I proud?

When you grow up poor and go to public schools, you don’t consider the possibility that you might be white trash.  Mostly because there is always someone white trashier than you.  

I’d like to think I’m NOT actually white trash. I’m mixed: half-white, half-trash — my mom is from the South and my dad has teeth. But looking back at my childhood, I realize much of it had some dubious trash trappings.

Yes, I dipped occasionally, but I never had the worn white denim ring on the outside of my back jeans pocket from the perpetual Skoal can.

Yes, it was public school, but it was also very PROGRESSIVE — we were mainlining retards in my high school by the meaty fistful.

As a matter of fact, Virginia public schools were teeming with retards when I was there. Listen: I know “retards” isn’t PC, but I’m talking “Down’s Syndrome” kids — if anyone can truly capture the comic essence of the word “retard,” it’s these drooling, straight-banged bastards (why do they ALWAYS have the same haircut?).

Like most Down’s Syndrome kids, I never once got my hair cut by a ‘professional’ until my senior year of high school (in this case, a ‘Supercuts’ technician). Up until then, my dad cut my hair. “Bowl cut” isn’t a figure of speech, people– a “bowl cut” is when someone puts a bowl on the head and cuts the hair around it.

Unfortunately for me, my dad would put the bowl on my head facing up, so all I’d have would be a little tuft of hair sticking out the top of my skull like a “Freaks” pinhead. (That last bit was a joke).

Shopping with my dad was another cue that perhaps I was trash or at least trash-adjacent. Department stores were the worst — not because dad was poor, but because he was poor AND tried to play it off like he was ‘frugal.’ I literally thought that there was a brand name called “SLIGHTLY IRREGULAR.” My dad would buy my SI underpants (we called them SI’s for short) by the bulk. And then I’d have to wear imitation corduroy jeans called TUFFSKINS that felt like polyester cardboard which was being continually lit on fire right in the vicinity of the scrotal sac.

Between the TS’s (as I called them) and the slightly irregular undies, I’d spend the entire day doing the “work the wedgie out” walk. People at school thought I had scoliosis. Or spina bifida, if the TS’s were freshly out of the laundry.

ALL I wanted in life was to be rich — and that meant having a real designer shirt! Like Izod or Polo. I’d get polo-’style’ shirts instead — which would be shit like a horse with no one on it. My mom got the clever idea to sew Alligators on Izod-style shirts. The first time I donned one, I went to school all arrogant until someone pointed out that the Alligator was facing the wrong way. I tried to convince people it was their new “greater than” line, but it was actually “equal to” beatings on the playground.

Remarkably, despite this, my parents successfully tricked me and my two brothers into thinking that we were middle class.   When your high school experience involves — at least bi-weekly — watching big black ballers get in fistfights with “Joey the Retard” in the cafeteria and LOSE (DS kids are as strong as PCP-addled Orangutans), it’s easy to forget about mundane things like exactly what rung you are on the socioeconomic ladder.

One day, I finally saved up enough money to buy my own designer piece and I got a “members only” jacket. It was like summer and hot, but I still wore that thing to class every day for a week. I would hear things like: “Dude, that style is so dead,” “More like ‘Only Member’” and “Fag.” I cried and cried. I’m telling you, kids can be so mean in college. 
 
As it turns out, it wasn’t until I became ensconced in the Ivory towers of Princeton University that I learned I was, in fact, poor white trash from Virginia.  
 
My freshman year at Princeton is when I first found out how completely uncouth, unfashionable, uncultured, and unPRINCETONy I actually was.  At first, I was angry at my parents for not teaching me how to be refined and shit — like what a hand towel is; which are the proper utensils to use for eatin’; and what ‘manners’ are.

But after 4 years of going there and after 3 subsequent years of dating a trust fund girl from the LIPPER financial family,  I finally got my chance to be RICH… by proxy, at least.

And I realized something profound that changed my life: rich people, in general, suck enormous amounts of cock — figuratively speaking, of course. Specifically, the East-Hampton-wall-street-posing-$5000-worth-of-makeup-nose-job-for-their-sweet-sixteen-having-to-cover-up-their-genetic-inbreeding-spoiled-acting-Prozac-gulping-therapist-obsessing-breakfast nook-eating-deluded-wrongly-entitled-group-of-talentless-and-stupid-bratty-fucknut TYPES.

Wow, did I type that out loud? I seem bitter, huh? Well, for the record, I dumped her. White trash - 1. Legacy family - 0.

So I guess maybe in retrospect, I am White Trash and Proud.

When I was a kid, I would bug my dad relentlessly about the possibility of going to “summer camp.”

I would tell him that all my cool friends went to overnight camp during the summer… on account of the fact that THEIR dads actually loved them. Because two of the defining aspects of my dad’s personality are his Scottish frugality and his emotional Asperger’s, he never budged a bit.

One day, without any reason given, he submitted, and told me that he was going to send me off to “CAMP HIGHROAD” in the mountains of western Virginia. For a full week! I was so excited, I almost pee’d my hand me-down Garanimals.

Inside this trojan horse of summer water sports was a bunch of Bible-wielding rednecks itching for a Holy war.

Because “CAMP HIGHROAD” was, in fact, Jesus Camp.

See, the THIRD defining aspect of my dad’s personality is his religious fundamentalism. I guess he figured that if he was going to waste his hard earned government employee money on a camp, his children better get some eternal salvation in the process.

I’m not sure why, at age 8, my dad thought I needed to be saved. Perhaps he was aware of my FUN DIP addiction. Perhaps he knew that I was up to 6 Oreos a day and dangerously beginning to move into Doublestuff. Or possibly, since I had a terrible and lateral lisp that no speech therapist could seem to lick, he suspected something more Satanically systemic….

The logo of ‘Camp Highroad’ was a black cross with a serpentine red flame curling perilously close to it…. Hmmmm, wooden cross… about to be on fire… hills of Virginia?… In retrospect, the calculus was pretty easy.

The camp (like my dad) Trojan-horsed their religious agenda inside a zippity-do-dah “ADVENTURELAND.” We did the same outdoorsy activities that everybody else did everywhere else. The only difference was that we did every camp activity for the glory of Jesus: canoeing, ziplines, and, often, atomic wedgies, for Jesus.

The highlight of camp had to be the campfire. Every night, we sat around a huge bonfire, read sermons, and sang terrifying songs about the second coming of Jesus Christ in the imminent “rapture” as we roasted marshmallows — or as the counselors jokingly called them, “Sinners.” It was a regular Jesus Jamboree with splashes of fear and xenophobia thrown in.

I imagine Camp Highroad had the same type of kids as a regular sleepaway camp. The only difference, I later realized, was that a lot of the kids at Highroad were clearly there to learn how to let Jesus, the Son of God, enter into their young hearts so that they wouldn’t be tempted to let Hay-soos, the Poolboy, enter into their young buttholes. Maybe my lazy and sloppy “esses” had made my father wonder about my sexuality because it seemed that an unspoken mission of Camp Highroad was to exorcise “faggotry” whenever it reared its ugly head…. or whenever a kid’s head was on rears.

Any institution THAT anti-gay was, not surprisingly, chockful o’ gay. But enough about the Republican Party.

It shouldn’t shock you then that my second strongest memory from Camp Highroad involves being constantly exposed to peni. After daily swimming classes, all the kids AND counselors would hop in the communal showers together. The adults would casually walk around the changing room naked like it was some ancient Greek mentorship program. Some of the counselors even did the overtly homosexual maneuver (as seen at “CRUNCH” fitness) of putting on every single bit of clothing, even socks and watch, before finally, and begrudgingly, shimmying into their tight briefs.

Even at that young age, I knew something was fucked up about that. Tube socks, a wristwatch, and a cock should never, ever be seen at the exact same time. I think that is actually a subset of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

I also knew there was something VERY wrong about the sight of a 12 year-old kid with a two inch hairless acorn standing next to a 25 year-old counselor lathering his hair — arms up in a Calvin Klein billboard pose — as shampoo froth funneled down through his butt cheeks. I seemed to be the only person who was freaked out by the “openness” of it all. I never showered once. I would just sit there, mouth agape, looking at all the different dicks like bizarre fish in an aquarium, feeling like Darwin probably did after his first trip to the Galapagos.

Having only seen my own kit and caboodle previously, I was shell-shocked. I remember, at one point, staring at this southern kid Jake’s penis. He was a pale kid and his penis looked painfully purple and diminutive. It was like someone had sewn a maroon button into the seam of his crotch. I gazed, slack-jawed in astonishment. All of a sudden, he shouted across the locker room in a squeaky Huckleberry Hound accent: “Hey, what are you lookin’ at? We all got one!”

I wanted to say, “Yeah, but not a purple one like THAT, E.T.! It looks like it got burned in a space fire!”

The worst part about class with the NAMBLA synchronized swim team was the fact that I was a crappy swimmer. To get around the swim test towards the end of week, I gave myself “the flu” by asking to see the nurse and putting the thermometer against a desk lamp bulb when she wasn’t looking. My temperature came out to 120 degrees. I exclaimed, “Wow, I didn’t realize I was that sick!” The nurse gave me a knowing smirk and wrote a pass to excuse me.

Thankfully, I wouldn’t have to do the backstroke for Jesus.

I did, however, have my first fight for Jesus.

I don’t remember exactly why I got into a fight with this particular kid. I just remember that he baby talked a lot. Many of the kids there baby talked about the Bible, and it irked the everliving fuck out of me. I would look around when the kid was doing it, like “Is it just me!?” I felt like the protagonist in one of those Michael Bay films where you have to convince the President’s cabinet that the world is going to end unless they do something immediately, and they just look at you like you’re smoking a crack pipe.

Much like this President and his Cabinet, I found a lousy pretense other than the truth (the baby talk) to attack, and I preemptively pushed the kid. I don’t think punches were thrown. I just remember him pinning my head against the dusty wood slats of the cabin floor and saying, in the baby talkiest of baby talk patois: “Okay, aw you weady to quit now? Can’t we be fwiends?” He won. I guess God was on his side. It was beyond humiliating.

I will say this about Camp Highroad: that place works!

First of all, by the end of camp, any latent gay I might have had in me was wiped completely out thanks to baby talking quasi-fags and ugly purple cocks burning indelible scars into the parts of my brain responsible for shame, sexual gratification, and long-term memory.

Second of all, I DID have a born-again moment at that camp where I asked Jesus to enter into my heart.

I vividly remember when it happened, and it was also probably the FIRST time I sincerely prayed to Jesus. After the fight, I was uncertain of who to turn to, or where to go to share my pain, I humblydropped to my knees by my short-sheeted cot and prayed:

“Dear Jesus. . . . Please get me the fuck out of Jesus Camp . . . in Jesus’ name I pray. . . . Amen. ”

The next day, I called my dad at the camp office and told him to pick me up. Two days early.

I thought he would be furious with me for not finishing the program, but, as he has my entire life, he surprised me with his kind and gentle nature. He didn’t tell me I was a disappointment to him or say one stern word. He even took me to Arby’s, my favorite restaurant, for lunch. He didn’t ask me about God, and he didn’t make me talk about the fight, the forfeited swim test, or the purple-penised fag and Jew haters.

Despite his Republican fundamentalism, I think he knew that, more than a soul that needed saving, I was his confused and scared son.

So . . . we just sat there, father and son, eating America’s roast beef in silent communion.

I’m in an airport right now watching Tiger Woods recite a scripted, stilted apology to the world on CNN.

Apparently, he is sorry for “being selfish.” I guess “being selfish” is shorthand for “banging a boatload of bitches.” He looks pallid, almost wan, like he’s been taking Michael Jackson black-be-gone pills. His mom is sitting there, arms staunchly folded, looking sternly Phillipino.

Among other things, he says that he had felt entitled, after working so hard in life, to give in to all the “temptation” around him.

By a strange bit of serendipity, I am eating an Apple, bite marks skirting around the edge of the sticker….

Tiger keeps reading as if an automaton, apologizing to the golf community, the children of the world, unborn fetuses, and everyone else whose world view has been totally subverted by the sloppy swinging of Woods’ wood.

Now Wolf and the Situation Room are having a ‘Brady Bunch’-style panel of talking heads discussing the whys and the whatnots. Pat “O’Let’s Get Crazy” Brian is one of the “experts,” which is hilarious and depressing.

The panel is discussing the sincerity of the apology and whether or not Tiger has changed. I, for one, truly believe that Tiger has changed. As a matter of fact, I would bet my life that Tiger Woods will NEVER, EVER cheat on his wife with a Chili’s waitress again.

He will probably upgrade to an Applebee’s hostess.

I mean, he is DEFINITELY going to cheat again. Let’s face it, the course of the history of politics, art, and war has been chartered by powerful men sticking their peepees — or attempting to stick their peepees — into forbidden fruit.

So, to understand Tiger and his skank-fetish, it might help to look at some of the causes of male infidelity in general…..

There is a universe of notions about ‘Why men cheat.‘

Inside this giant circle are the different permutations of cheater. There are theories on ‘Why married men cheat,’ with more specific explanations of ‘Why wealthy, successful married men cheat’ and ‘Why black men cheat,’ AND, in a tiny subset of venn diagram, there exists ‘Why the fuck did Tiger Woods cheat on his hot supermodel wife with a bunch of dumb white trash?!’

Does Tiger’s lonely sliver hold the key to all the outlying circles of the kingdom of infidelity? Why did this man, who has everything, bone a Chili’s waitress in the back of a Buick? And then sundry sluts everywhere else? Is there a hole this golfer won’t play? When he gave in to “temptation,” did he eat too much of the Apple from the Tree of Knowledge and now nothing can sate his appetite?

In the ongoing maelstrom, the women wonder ‘Why the fuck did he cheat?,‘ while most men only think ‘Why the fuck did he get married?’

The reason the Tiger drama has struck such a chord with America is because it taps into every woman’s fear that her man may, in fact, be a cheater.

So… Is he?

Well, the good news is that men don’t always cheat. The bad news is that men almost always want to cheat.

However, the problem with all these easy statements — including the nauseatingly popular “Men are as available as their options!” axiom — is that they don’t offer the reason why.

So, if we accept that all men do, indeed, WANT to cheat, we can start to hone in on the genesis of why.

For some cheaters, maybe the ‘why’ seems obvious.

Like one-balled wonder Lance Armstrong: “I have one testicle so I’ll show you a man!”

Typical Hollywood actor: “My mom was a drunk and I fear abandonment so let me spork you… and you… and you!”

Tiger Woods: “I was an OCD golfer in high school and longingly short-stroked to tit-laden blondes who thought I was nerdish and blackish.”

But, alas, these could just be excuses. Maybe Lance would have been a prick with three balls. Plus, Hitler allegedly had one ball and he exterminated the Jews — he didn’t hump Hollywood starlets. Clearly, these reasons are anecdotal. Something MORE must be at the cheating core of the mass of men, right?

Is it, as some “Iron John” followers believe, that modern men are so removed from their macho saber-tooth-hunting ways that plowing women is the only way, in today’s world, to assert masculinity? These neo-masculinists believe that the urge is curbed by doing manly man shit, but it seems that men with six-packs who go on warrior weekends and build stone houses are still mostly assholes. Ernest Hemmingway tough-guy’ed his turkey neck into most any supple “v” that was willing.

So, are men just psychologically damaged by the pressures of society? Well sure, the neural highway connecting a man’s cerebellum to his celery stick is full of fucked-up potholes, detours, and Mexicans on the off ramp selling oranges, but, again, these explanations becomes way too varied and anecdotal. The reason for rampant male infidelity throughout the history of the world MUST be more systemic, right?

Ok, let’s start at the beginning. Adam and Eve.

Adam was a man. He lived in paradise. He was safe. Completely. With a push, Eve introduced him into the “world” which is harsh and violent and begins and ends in suffering. She betrayed him. As a former mayor of D.C. might say, “The bitch set him up!”

Of course, there was no actual Adam and Eve. It’s a myth. But the true meaning of the ‘Garden of Eden’ is rarely expanded upon.

The real metaphor of Genesis, at once obvious and obscure, is childbirth.

The ‘Garden of Eden‘ is the womb. ‘Eve‘ is mother.

After nine months in a womb of Eden, a woman betrays man by pushing him out into mortality. Harsh lights, cold steel, shrill screams. His connection to God, his paradise, is lost with the snip of a cord.

This woman is now a con artist, holding him and saying, ‘This whole umbilical thing was a set-up. It was always meant to end. You’re on your own now! So go to that Tree, take that Apple, and cut your teeth on it, boy.’

Birth. The first and ultimate betrayal by a woman.

We never forget it and, because of that, we never, ever, fully trust. And we silly men can never understand the fathomless, unconditional love of birthing another person. Of creating life. We can only understand protecting it for reasons that we don’t fully comprehend. So we are left with that paradoxical, initial trauma of birth. And then a life of vigilance and being hard, and fighting wars, and defending what is ours.

Yet underneath that armor, we have a vague memory. It is antithetical to this truculent existence. It is our alpha and omega. Inside of a woman. It is the lure of the womb, the Garden of Eden. Mysterious, unseen, calling to us like Sirens from salty cliffs.

And once we arrive, the deceptive opiates of our orgasm create, however briefly, a snapshot of amniotic oblivion. The unbearable lightness of being. For a moment, we are engulfed and surrounded in safe and unconditional love. The flatlined thoughts and the pounding blood in our ears mimic that liquid sarcophagus whose benevolent whooshing tricked us into believing that once, in the beginning, life actually WAS a paradise.

And then, we collapse into you…. After a few seconds of vulnerability, too soon, we are back.

We open our eyes.

And all we see is Apples.

Happy ‘Valentine’s Day’ everybody!   In honor of this holiday, may I express my befuddled amazement at the fact that “Romance” hasn’t yet been outed as the cheap street crack that it is.

Because, let’s face it, romance is essentially crack cocaine for chicks. And much like crack, It creates an addiction that makes living simply day to day virtually unbearable. Watch any lonely woman on a Friday night desperately browsing the shelves of a video store; she may as well be saying to the cashier: “Hey, baby, I’ll suck your dick for a Twilight DVD….I WILL SUCK YOUR DICK!!!”

It always amazes me how women fall hook, line, and sinker for the whole notion of “Romance.” It’s like Charlie Brown and his sisyphean challenge of trying to kick that fucking football. He (as well as the viewing audience) strongly suspects that Lucy is going to pull the pigskin away, but the “blockhead” charges full steam ahead in his awful brown shoes, visions of glorious victory dancing inside his stupid, bald cranium.

Inevitably, Lucy snatches the ball and Charlie Brown sails through the air. His line lips shake and vibrate as he lets forth a blood-curdling scream of existential pain and disappointment until he crashes to earth with a brutal and onomatopoeic “THUNK!”

Much like Charlie Brown keeps trusting that Lucy won’t be a fucking bitch, millions of women congregate every monday to watch “The Bachelor” with hope in their hearts, although the sad reality is that — after 13 seasons — NONE of the Bachelors are currently married to any of the women they chose as the “the ONE.”

Partially because the whole conceit of “the ONE” person that can make you happy is Trigger-Palin-retarded!  My mom has been happily married for 40 years and she told me, “Relationships are WORK, not soul-mates and sparkly vampires. Love is when you can take a Clorox Bleach Pen to your man’s tighty-whities and erase a skidmark without batting an eyelash.” Amen, mom, amen.

Still, almost every woman in the history of foreverness has uttered the ubiquitous phrase “I think he just might be the one.” Although that sentence is at once a modern and progressively strong expression of woman’s ability to choose, it is also completely fucking TPR (i.e., Trigger-Palin-Retarded).

Concepts like “THE ONE” don’t actually mean anything substantive; well, other than whatever unicorn-laden-Narnia-like world they conjure up in the romantic’s mind. The phrase is an expression of science fiction and nothing else.

A woman, upon having intense eye contact with some hunky new prospect, might actually think: “I hope he’s the one!” Unbeknownst to her, that same prospect is probably thinking, “I hope she swallows!”

When men use the phrase “the ONE” regarding women, it usually goes something like, “She’s the ONE woman I worry might say something to my wife…” OR “Wow, you know, I think she just might be the ONNNNE MINUTE — WHO’S THAT BITCH THAT JUST WALKED IN THE ROOM?!”

Through some strange cosmic tear in the space-time continuum, this overarching cognitive dissonance doesn’t stop hordes of women from weekly making popcorn and snuggling and imagining themselves getting handed the final rose at the ceremony. And for some bizarre reason, they look at shows like “The Bachelor” as viable paradigms for what love is and can’t believe it when their own relationships fail miserably.

“He was sooo amazing in the beginning!”

Yeah, well, that’s because he was FAKING it, sweetheart.

Look, ladies, it crushed us as well when we learned that you faked orgasms. You fake coming, we fake carats. We both do it for the sole purpose of making the other person feel better, but both sexes are equally counterproductive and TPR in this regard.

Now this is all not to say that, as a guy, you should pin your girlfriend down and fart on her face to quell any and all sense of romance. You don’t need to purposely and violently squash any idea she might have that you’re a romantic character in a Nicolas Sparks novel, but you also don’t need to pretend that you like Walt Whitman and glittery Cullens in order to maintain a relationship with her.

And you definitely don’t need to take her to some epicene movie like “Valentine’s Day,” particularly when you could be supporting your country by masturbating to the Olympic female mogul skiiers. God Bless America…. and Canada too…. and, oooooh, some of the Ukrainians….

Here’s the great PARADOX of the female obsession with romance: as much as women believe in romance and worship at the chintzy-smelling altar of all things fairy tale and epic, they actually have a greater capacity for real love than we silly men will ever have. They are compassionate and take care of us in ways that we can barely appreciate and rarely reciprocate. For as long as their entire lifetime, they can file away their swashbuckling image of you and, most of the time, completely accept you for the schleppy fuck-up that you actually turned out to be.

As my mom said, women have the type of compassion and love where they can pick up their lovers’ ratty underpants and erase skidmarks and STILL think he’s “THE ONE.” Although men aren’t ‘romantic’ at all, do you think they have the capacity to love like that … at all?

Men are much more prone to say something akin to the following: “I loved her sooo much…. But then she FARTED in front of me! I mean, what the hell is that?!!! I didn’t hear her fart or anything but I could smell it, and, even though I was farting around the same time, I knew she farted because it had a completely different odor. It was disgusting! It was just SUCH a turn-off that I had to immediately break up with her by email.”

In truth, we GUYS are the hopeless romantics. We are the ones who can’t imagine our ladies being anything but perfect and angelic, while at the same time we deride them for their sappy movies, books and “foolish” ideas about love and romance. Guys, let’s be honest, we kind of suck and we’re kind of hypocrites regarding this.

So, for Valentine’s Day, if you see your girl getting all twitterpated by concepts like love and trust and ‘HE WENT TO JARED’S,” just give her a break. She’s still gonna take care of you. She will always have the magic ability to juggle the Clorox Bleach Pen and the Edward obsession.

But, ladies, I hope that this day at least is sans skidmarks.

As for what happens tonight, well to each their own….