My Korean friend Cathy from college. She’s pushing forty but her meaty rippling thoroughbred ass makes me want to murder children. I want to wake up in a Twilight Zone episode where everyone’s face is Cathy’s ass because of some wish I made to an evil genie. Or no– I’ve told the genie: I want to have that ass forever. As you wish, he says. Cut to our wedding day. You may now kiss the bride. I lift the veil. Instead of a face it’s Cathy’s ass. Her crusty roadworn 40 year old asshole puckers for a kiss. In the pews the genie rubs his hands together, cackling. But I shoot him the double guns and smile. Thank you, I tell him. This is exactly what I wanted.
Letter to My 20 Year Old Self
It never ends. Just so you know. You’re almost forty now. Yesterday you nearly cried as you unfriended a college girl on facebook.* She wasn’t returning your texts.** She had a toad face and she was a shitty poet but she was the last girl who will ever like you. You still masturbate ten times a day and then go out and look at girls like they’re the last clean water after the nukes hit. They look at you like you’re an insect. It never ends. Text a girl to confirm a date and only then does she tell you OMG*** I’m stuck at work! Her friend has a concert she forgot about, or some shit, and you still think: I will be stupid and awkward and ugly forever. Or if the planets line up and you get her back to your house, you come too fast. Still.
You’ll be a hundred twenty years old getting sad from dumb girls on OKCupid.**** You could be Emperor of the planet with a fifteen inch dick and you’d still be ugly in the mirror. You depend on woman for happiness and woman is a treacherous beast. But what else are you going to reach for. Job, money, a nice hairstyle– all bullshit. There’s nothing but girls and girls are cunts from having it too easy, until they get old and turn invisible. It’s still like this 20 years later. On the plus side you’re not bald.
* an internet rolodex
** email you send on your phone
*** “omigod” abbreviated. People often abbreviate in texts.
**** personal ads on the internet
Her
She had a flappy pussy and her face was like a baby bird. Her teeth. The incisors pinched in. Modern people have too many teeth for the jaw. We’re meant to lose them. Get clocked by some other proto-hominid or drop one gnawing a hyena bone. The teeth get crowded; some of them fold in and go half sideways. With her it was the incisors. She let the cat in the bedroom when we fucked. She wasn’t that funny. She was on hormonal birth control and never felt anything. I love her I miss her. She is a cunt with no soul. Come back to me.
She was a yuppie whose job was her life; she was hired by an old perv to be a hot woman and her hotness was waning; she had good skin but you found out later it was because she sandblasted it; you caught her talking once with a coven of other girls about Retin-A, abrasives, lotions you have to get from overseas. She would come in in the morning and her face smelled like fruit. She was always putting something on her face, trying to hold it back.
She had a funny ass and she wore stupid pants and you were so unsure of yourself you could never relax around her. She was a cunt with no soul and come back to me come back to me. Come back to me.
Now these other girls, fucking them in my apartment and it’s too hot, they all have shaved cunts with three days stubble and weird razor marks. The sounds they make, not like her. Her little moans. Her eyes, concentrating.
The last time you fucked you saw she trimmed her pussy for him. She was lying the whole time. I should have lied to her. I should have fucked other girls. That would mean I killed it by my own hand, instead of: you are a worthless loser with no direction in life and of course a girl like her wouldn’t love you.
Come back to me, come back to me… if you did I’d just be scared again. Thinking the whole time how I’m going to lose you. I’d be right.
Be grateful for what it taught you, you think. You can feel something after all this. But for that to happen now you have to find someone else like her. What was it that made her like that. What was it. I only know when it’s not there.
OKCupid: What I’m Doing with My Life Part 2
I was unemployed for a while. Now I’m a gray corporate worm. I have a 401(k). I wear loafers. I use Powerpoint; Excel. Advanced proficiency in Microsoft Office Suite.
I’m in a small branch office of a large corporation. We share a bathroom. This means that the 4 times a day I piss, which should be a respite– 3 of those 4 times a man from another company will piss next to me. Often it’s a particular bear of a man. Six foot eight, fat, bearded, sweat along his widow’s peak from walking to the restroom. There are 2 urinals. I must stand right by him. The heat from his fat arms noticeable. One side of my face hotter. Unbuckle my reversible genuine leather belt, black on one side brown on the other. Unclasp my pressed business slacks which have a metal tab as well as a button. Withdraw my penis. Which had begun to recoil, already, upon seeing this man from 50 feet down the hall as he keyed in the bathroom door code. By the time I get it out it’s a shrunken acorn head. The other man is slow with his pants. He has only now released his member as he’s heard me keying in the code. His penis too has recoiled.
Your dick fights you. It gets hard in class but not when a girl you like kisses you. It yearns forcefully to spray hot gouts of piss when you’re in a meeting. But when you’re there at the pisser, and a man is standing next to you who you know will note silence instead of the music of fluid tinkling on porcelain– when your penis can hurt you by making it clear to another man that you’re a little girl chickenshit who can’t piss in public– it will. The petty cruelty of your dick proves God is wicked.
Eventually I go in the stall. I don’t want people to think I shit at work, but it’s the lesser evil.
Back to my cubicle. It looks like a cartoon of an office. Like an office from Staples commercials where it’s clear no one involved has had a real job. The walls are beige and the guy next to me has a poster that explains ATTITUDE. Black phone, black computer. With these tools I create Data Driven Solutions for Market Leading Brands. On Halloween, fake police tape proclaims my space a “Zombie Zone.” I am drug tested. I’m too uncool to do drugs so I pass. A portion of my check is withheld into a retirement account. This helps avoid taxes. By consenting to this I am consenting to a slow subtle scam to eliminate social programs. Turn the country into Ayn Rand anarcho-capitalism. When enough people have 401(k)’s they’ll take back old people’s government money because if I don’t need it fuck you. I am contributing to evil. But I want to avoid taxes.
These activities, and my commute, take up 12 of my 16 waking hours.
I don’t have a dating friendly lifestyle, is what I’m saying. No one who works does. First dates are OK. Maybe a new person will fuck you. A relationship is OK. Come over at 9:30, eat, watch a movie, fuck, pass out. Wake up at 6:45. I want those things. But to get from one to the other there’s the crucial burden of getting to know you. I have no energy for this. You don’t either. We’ll meet. I’ll pour cheap wine down your gullet and you’ll fuck me or you won’t. Next day, the better looking one won’t return the other’s text. We’re doomed to do this dance until we get so old we’re too ugly. At which point– what? What happens? I don’t know, but I bet it’s terrifying. In my leisure time I enjoy hiking.