Today I quit my job to finish the book and write full-time. Which is my greatest dream and a huge life goal accomplished and all, but I’m not sure how I feel about the fact that the son from For Better or For Worse and I are starting to live parallel lives.
Last night I somehow managed to walk into a snow drift deep enough that the snow went inside the top of my knee-high boots and then slid right down into the foot. This happened because I wasn’t really paying attention to where I was going, due to the fact that I was zoned out thinking about Jon Arbuckle’s creepy brother who lived on the farm. Do you remember that guy? Doc Boy? He looked like a chicken, sort of, with a giant puffy man butt? What was wrong with him? Because there was obviously supposed to be something wrong with him. Like, Jon Arbuckle, that guy had issues, but his brother was a creepy balding big-butted farm retard. That was a fucked up comic.
When I was a kid, I used to borrow Garfield books from my friend Tricia and take them to the pool with us. After we’d scored good chairs and marked them clearly with our unicorn towels, she’d say, “Come on, let’s get in the water now,” and I’d be like, sure, yeah, definitely, just five more pages and I’ll meet you there. And then half an hour later she’d splash me to get my attention, and my first response was rage that she’d gotten her own Garfield book wet. WHAT IF IT HAD SMUDGED! This was nine-year old Sarah Brown: too busy reading about a horribly unfunny cat to join your game of Marco Polo. Sometimes I am late to work because I read my shampoo bottle in the shower. Why? Because it is there. There are words on it. The same words as yesterday morning, but that really can’t be helped. If I don’t read them, who will?
So last night after my Arbuckle-induced snow dunking, I stopped at the liquor store to buy a bottle of wine. I shuffled in there with my one cold wet foot, and then promptly bit it on their slick marble floors. At that exact moment, some guy was setting up a tasting table in the back of the store, and he called out to me, “You! Do you want some vodka?”
I bet this guy is knee-deep in third-rate trim if he goes out to clubs, which, judging from his hair gel, he does. You, madam! The one who cannot stand up! Let’s get you some alcohol!
I pulled myself to my feet and said, like any smart person at 6:30 on a week night, “Yes, I would like some vodka.” So he poured me a cough syrup dosage cup full of something pink. “This is a vodka liqueur,” he said, watching me drink it. “You can mix it with lots of things, like… regular vodka, or… use it to make a cosmo… what do you think? How does it taste?”
I said, “It, uh, tastes pink. It tastes like college.”
“It’s the first vodka made expressly for women,” he replied, like this was an answer, to which I couldn’t help it, and I laughed out loud, in his face. He was unfazed.
“What kind of alcohol do you usually drink?”
In my head, where I spend my days contemplating Arbuckles, I said, “I drink bull semen, son! I’m from the plains!” but out loud I said, “Whiskey.”
He did not miss a beat. “Maybe a bottle of this would liven up the ladies’ night tonight, huh?”
Ladies’ night? How wha? Dude has decided that I am either one of those girls who has to spend Valentine’s Day with a gaggle of ladyfriends to ward off the ghosts trying to snatch her withering ovaries, or that I drink whiskey and therefore love other ladies. Apparently they now teach you profiling in your bitch-liqueur pouring seminar at Shiny Shirt College.
I should have said bull semen, and told him I’d take two bottles, both for my man D.B.A.
Did you know that you only have three more days to submit to the Cringe book? Seriously: two days, that’s it. I would hate to leave you on the shore. The shore of private humiliation, I suppose. Come Thursday, things around here are going to be thrown into high gear. Well. Maybe not high. A slightly more labor-intensive gear, at least. I’ve been this girl lately. It ain’t bad. Not really helping my to-do list at all, but eh, smoke 'em if you got 'em, right?
Hey did you hear it’s really cold out or something.
Cringe gets a mention in the Freddy’s write-up in the Village Voice. That right there is why Cringe will be at Freddy’s so long as Freddy’s is at Freddy’s. An escalator? Say it ain’t so.
Anyway, you should come out to Cringe this Wednesday night. It might not top Sunday night, but I’m willing to give it my all.