pheromones

melissa and shoo have been talking about their scary workouts for the last month. i haven't been scared of a gym for two years or so, but if you remember me 40 lbs ago, you can bet i know a little about being intimidated. i definitely remember benching about 105 lbs without a spot one day and getting the bar stuck on my chest. i had to roll the thing down my chest, across my stomach, over my junk, and onto my knees before i could get up. free weights don't come with instructions, and they never will, because meatheads like watching ordinary people struggle. a weak or confused guy is the object of the regulars' unspoken scorn, but a woman is always safe. if a guy sees a woman struggling, he offers her pointers. it makes his balls feel big when he guides her arms up to show her the proper form for a military press. hotter girls sometimes make a game out of struggling on the free weights to get men to fawn over them. but those are the brave girls. usually there's a clear separation of the sexes: men on our weights, women and their boyfriends on the machines. if a man has to wait for a girl to finish with a bench, it's a territorial invasion. that's just what i think though. is it the same for you?

three weeks ago all our weights and cardio equipment were moved to a new area and combined. we don't even have a room. it's just one end of a gymnasium. from our squat racks and pec decks, we look right and see basketball games, and left to see stairclimbers, tvs, and asses. someone had the foresight to group treadmills, weights, and machines into their own contiguous areas, but there are no boundaries. they invade our turf with their distracting short shorts and inappropriate irreverence for the seriousness of our rituals. we invade theirs with lewd stares and lewder talk. machines have even been arranged to give the most sexual exercises a modicum of privacy. the inner thigh machines that look like stirrups in an obgyn office are probably the worst. they have to face the wall, so close to it that there's no room to walk in front on your way to the cable crossovers. we're slowly learning to tolerate each other, but the shift has everyone on edge - and turned on.

it always reminds me of that song, worked up so sexual. i guess you guys don't know indie loser dance-rock songs. download that one, by the faint. it's about strippers.

v-day (the born romantic)

you remember jenny? when my brother met her, he took me aside and whispered, "hey phil, she's got nice gazongas" and he hit me on the arm, like "attaboy". i broke up with her on valentine's day last year.

there was a longer post where this one is now, but when i wrote it i realized how much it still bothers me. when you hear the story, it doesn't sound quite so bad, but then you hear more, and it sounds a lot worse. i'll tell you in person sometime.

old roommates

shoo is sad he doesn't come home to three day old tv dinners. looking back, i've had some filthy places and a lot of roommates. here they are:

tom
francisco
jude and sato
andy and sato
will and absent matt
will and jay
will and darrel (they fought over how many different animals they killed)
will (now willy) and tony
emily o, lisa, toomey, and emily w
frank, matt, rory, and bert

and if everything goes my way, next year it'll be just me, dan, the dog, and you fuckers sleeping on my couch. some of you will try to sleep in my bed, but the dog will get upset. he likes you, but don't fuck with him.

homesick

this one's a weekend recap. you won't know the names, so let's make it a game. you try to guess which of these people are hippies.

friday was murphy's with british matt. frank came out because his sworn enemy demian was coming over to our house. matt's friend maureen brought out some friends, and they brought their boyfriends. i was charming and polite. an ethnomusicology major dug it. i told her where i'm from and she said it's better down here than a lot of suburban kids think. i said shit yeah, and told her about some rosalies-type places at the edge of town. she told me how underappreciated the local jazz/funk scene is.

back to maureen's place for beers. the jazz girl wanted to smoke. the prettiest girl's boyfriend passed out. frank and i said it didn't make sense, but i bet you five bucks to a stale donut he makes her breakfast in the morning and she doesn't have to worry about him sleeping around.

saturday was remarkably similar, but with more germans. sunday i went to bloomington and took sam and his new girl of two months out to dinner. he wants to marry her. so do i. but he needs to stop talking about it.

matt and anna were having a shot contest when i got back. matt almost lost on oatmeal, but somehow it was saltwater that did him in. anna took it all like a champ, so i made her house sweetheart.

now the payoff: which of these people are hippies?

happy new year

The fashion is to be both racy and cryptic.

Last year I spent new year's eve in urbana with Dan and Jenny and Dan's friend Jesse. When you spend a year drinking nothing but cold duck and forties, you have to end the year with something special. So we each drank two bottles of cold duck, it being a holiday.

This year Ed and Phil and I went to new orleans. Farah and Shoo both backed out, on account of having shrivelly little balls. This year's theme was burning yourself. We mixed fireworks and lighter fluid with beer and liquor to get started, and I burned my face a little. Then it was off to city park for the christmas tree bonfire. There were house parties on every block, and the street was choked with people lighting off all kinds of fireworks. The smoke was so thick that at 11:45 when the bonfire was lit, we could barely see its 30-foot flames from two blocks away. Nick told us beforehand that he heard there might be naked hippies there dancing around the fire, like burning man or something. As it turns out, he was talking about us. There was someone there with bongos, and there were a few people prancing around the fire, but most of them were with us. This lead to a discussion later about whether it was more gay to skip or to prance. People were throwing bottle rockets into the fire, so the whole crowd was actually being attacked by the fire. As the fire died down and we drained our champagne, Ed decided we either weren't in enough danger or didn't look enough like hippies. So he took off his shirt and ran through the fire. Then Philly got pressured into it. Guess who was next? No, you're way off! It was me! Then the girls took their turns. Allana ran through in her sandals and got second-degree burns. Riley and I carried her back to her car. As this story comes to a close, you might find yourself wondering "why the hell would you get into a car with someone who couldn't even walk on her own?". Well, I thought it was blisters and not booze that made her a gimp. As it turned out, I was wrong. She drove toward Bourbon Street (I say "toward" loosely, meaning only that Bourbon street was our destination, not that we were really headed in that direction) like a bat out of hell. She ran up on a curb going fifty, lost control, started laughing and lost even more control, blew a stop sign, and ramped a curb to go flying into a park. And did she stop? No, it didn't even phase her. She went tearing through the park and got back out onto the street. I jumped out and yelled at her. Riley said "oh, no, she's fine. does this all the time." I took this to mean that I had met a man who, like a lemur, had absolutely no survival instinct. I did get her to stop driving, but that meant we didn't make it to bourbon street. I'm the only one who remembers the drive that night, so it seems fitting that I should write it down here to remember it.

That night Ed got slapped in the face, and I got punched. He deserved it. I didn't. But I sure had a cool shiner the next day when we finally went to bourbon street and saw breasteses and girls making out.

On the drive back home we fell in love with top 40 country music. I've had the stereo in my pickup tuned to WIXY 100.3 today's top country ever since.