Of course! Why had it taken him so long to see what now was so clear.
“I’m sorry if it hurt.”
The laughter would surprise even her. It’s loudness. It’s forcefulness. It’s immediacy. A sudden, rapid chugga-chugga burst of a chortle-filled magazine from her diaphragm. No. She wouldn’t do that. Would she? Couldn’t do that. Could she? She loved him, least of all for his anatomy. It was his quick wit and easy smile that had surely won her over. At least that’s what she told him, that she wanted to grow old with him, no matter what. He had no valid ideas about size. He had no way to truly know whether or not he was this size or that. He suspected he was, at very least, average-sized.
Average. There’s another word for the list. It’s such an average word, really. Was anyone ever unbridled in their averageness? It pained him to even contemplate.
He never took measurements. That seemed egotistical in a very, truly perverse way. The mere process of measuring would either turn out good or bad, but what was the threshold from one to the other? And also, where do you start and where do you end? Even forgoing length, how does one estimate girth? A quick Google search would suffice. In Incognito Window mode, no doubt. But then, he would know. And was knowing worse than not-knowing?
He also neglected glimpsing comparisons at the gym. He considered himself a very enlightened soul not prone to the trappings of homophobia, but the act of stealing glances at other men’s ‘equipment’ did make him quiver a bit.
No matter what? Had she actually said “no matter what?”
What exactly did “no matter what” mean? Perhaps it was his lack of pedigree. Duke was as far away an educational empire as one could get at Wayne State in the slowly-eroding modern hell of Detroit, Michigan. Wayne State. Wayne. State. A state university named for a guy named Wayne. A name slightly less interesting than Dewayne. A shallow depression crept in as he re-absorbed his own lackluster educational journey. At the State School named after Wayne, he was a C student.
An AVERAGE student. Damn it.
Maybe ‘no matter what’ had more to do with their future than his past. No matter what the world may bring, it is you, Mr. Wayne Average-Sized Average Student that I seek to shelter with until I succumb to death’s sweet release.
Yes. That’s how he would take it. That Hannah chose him over innumerable other suitors despite his lack of anything remarkable in either his ancestry or ambition. Scratch innumerable. He dared not turn Hannah into an imaginary slut. There were maybe one, two other guys serious enough to contend for the title of Mr. Future Hannah’s Husband.
Suitors? Really? He was once a suitor. As a sophomore in a high school production of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. The suitors … were the losers. They lost the eponymous brides to the amazing, dynamic, hale and hearty, clearly better-than-Wayne-State-material brotherhood. Through song and dance, and some lumberjackesque competition, they swept the brides off their feet and into their robust, testosterone-toned arms. The suitors, went back to their sullen suiting. Defeated. Dejected. Alone. It was less a stage performance and more a disappearing act.
No matter what.
No matter the mindless genericism of modern suburban existence, or no matter what nuclear holocausts, illegal immigrant invasions or zombie apocalypses to come, Hannah would be his, at the very least. Eternally betrothed until the bitter end. ‘Til death and dismemberment do us part.
He did, however, periodically succumb to sudden impulses of vast inadequacy. She had hitched her wagon to his dimming star. He was, now at 36.61 years of age, a white dwarf of humanity. His molten helium core cooling, his outer layers (and waist size) slowly expanding. One who had never done “the thing” that was destined to lead to his alternate life’s more interesting obituary. Sadly, he never had an inclination of what “the thing” was. He never excelled at sports, nor at art. In more primitive societies in which children are branded with destiny long before they reach puberty, his name would have been He Who Middle Manages.
However, she was on, after the MBA, to assuredly bigger and better things. New people. New, maybe longer hours. New everything.
The potential newness frightened him. She would wear new clothes. New shoes. New perfumes? She would meet new men. New non-Wayne State men. Who drove new cars and wore new watches. And said new things. Used new words. New charm. New energy. New potential. New stars. New protostars and main sequence stars, shining brightly in her night sky. Her new night sky with longer hours poring over new financial disclosure forms for new case studies and new presentations with new computers and new conference rooms in a new building with new coffee makers and new desks and new filing systems and new elevators and new parking lots and new whatevers.
All this made him decide newness was evil. All this was a conspiracy of newness against him.
He was no longer new.
He was familiar. Ugh. Another weird word, especially when used in this context. I am familiar with him. He is very familiar to me. The root of this stupid word? Family. He was slowly morphing into just family. Like a benign uncle. People get used to the familiar. The lack of excitement in these words — familiar, used to — was palpable.
At least he hadn’t become furniture. Not yet.
This struggle was becoming a mental marathon dance with no judges to come along and tap you when you stopped for a moment or two. He wondered: would he spend this and all future anniversaries of this near-mythical, semi-regrettable event engaged in endless mental and emotional navel-gazing?
He had decided that approaching the subject with her was reaching Tolkien-like proportions. An overly-strung-out-and-slowly-attenuating-finger-quoted-epic. A bloated sojourn, thick with torpor and rife with non-importance. A slog. He also realized he lacked the machina-like convenience of giant eagles to whisk him onward to Solution Mountain. It remained to be seen if this tale, spun largely in the Middle Earth of his nervousness, would have eleven or more endings. Would Peter Jackson oblige? And who would play him? Who in Hollywood was even average enough?
Jesus, Tim, get a hold of yourself, you’re making this incredibly onerous and arduous and laborious and well, serious.
Too serious.
A light bulb dawned above his head as he opened the door to his 2015 Camry. A literal dome-light light bulb. Accompanied with a distant but persistent DING DING DING. He looked around and sighed at the intense averageness of the car. That word again. So horrible, but so APT. He faintly remembered that the interior color he chose from the slightly-rolled up Toyota Camry glossy brochure jammed into his Dockers back pocket was the generically generic VERY BEIGE. Good Christmas. Dockers? The Camry of pants. Or were Camrys the Dockers of cars? Maybe it’s all a colorless commercial continuum. A long, winding road of blandness. A near-endless desert tableau sans rock formations, cow skulls and Joshua trees or anything that could gain one’s attention for more than thirteen seconds. A hollow landscape littered with Panera Breads, Olive Gardens, Chili’s, Jos. A Banks’s’s’s’s, and Gaps. A mall. A mall of life. A serious non-place.
Too serious.
A more figurative lantern above sputtered to life and gave birth to an idea. He fished through the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out his phone. He made a call.
And there it was.
Flesh-colored buttercream frosting. A delicate but playfully-scripted “Happy Analversary” in teal icing spread across smooth, slightly arched buttocks. An even more playful winking emoticon sign-off. Beneath the sugar-spun skin lay a fine marbling of moist chocolate and vanilla.
A cake.
An ass cake.
A joke.
It was funny.
Of course it was funny. It was downright hilarious when you think about it, which he did sincerely too much. A man harboring a deeply repressed admiration for a one-off flight of inebriated fancy. A man afraid to challenge his other half (his better half as we’ve already determined.)
A man afraid to make fun of himself.
He beheld the ass cake with curious awe as his Camry lurched and unlurched and lurched again in throes of everyday commuter traffic.
A funny smile crossed his face, and he turned back to the road before him.
WHAM!
Suddenly shattered glass. Crunched and buckled metal. His head jerked violently forward, narrowly missing the steering wheel. His knuckles scraped the dashboard.
What the hell?
He turned his eyes to the rearview mirror filled with steam and the rearranged black bumper of a much-larger SUV. He struggled with his seatbelt and finally wrestled himself free.
The Cake! Shit. The Cake.
He slid a dizzied sideways glance to the empty passenger seat. A cakeless seat.
The obliterated remains of flour and sugar and eggs and butter derriere painted the footwell beyond. Gone. The joke, ruined. The way in, destroyed. His brise-glace, démantelé — like the homely and unsatisfactory on suite (sic) in the demolition days sequence of one of the aforementioned home-improvement shows. His puerile peace offering was now nothing more than a messy memory.
He rubbed his neck. It was sore. Of course it was. He threw open the door. It rang a unworldly, metallic howl. He eased out into the sweaty Carolina air and hobbled to his feet.
A frantic, sobbing woman scurried to him, presumably the driver of the big black behemoth half-lodged in the trunk of his tepid transport. She crunched over fragments of tail light, her hands quivering like two oscillating fans. He fixed his gaze on her—a blurry, sobby shambles. She was nothing but whine and slobber. His eyes adjusted slowly, taking her in. All of her. All one hundred and seventy-seven pounds of her.
Holy shit.
Elaine Pomeroy. He had been rear-ended by the socially-advanced financially-superior unfortunately-paunchy not-really-ever-pregnant star witness Elaine Pomeroy. Butt fucked, automotively speaking, in a spectacular display of pseudo irony. An average man with an ass cake stranded on a literal Hershey Highway with his neighbor—not his peer. For a moment he thought his next call shouldn’t be to the boys in blue, or his beloved Hannah, but to a certain Canadian well-versed in pseudo irony.
The only problem?
He didn’t have Alanis Morissette’s number.
Pomeroy jabbered at him in a semi-unintelligible warbling.
“ImsosorryohmygodIcantbelieveitIthoughtohmygodohjesusareyouokayohmygoodnessIknowyouIthinkyouaredownthestreetI’msosorry”
He straightened his stance, winced, and refocused his eyes on Elaine’s semi-meaty legs tightly swaddled in black spandexy curve-hugging fabric.
One thought pushed out everything else. Everything that had tortured his psyche for so long. All of the masturbatory mental gymnastics of the past three years seemed to vanish from his temporal lobe.
“Are those Lululemon?”
Firsts are not like anal fissures, to set the record straight.
“Are those Lululemon?”
This guy knows how to set up a joke.
+1
Fucking a.
A very good pay-off.
sudden impulses of vast inadequacy
Sudden? impulses? When the hell isn’t he contemplating his inadequacy?
It’s the Toyota Camry. God’s name trade that car in. Get a Charger and a mullet. Or a BMW coupe and poofy hair. Something different.
I have never owned a Camry.
It’s the Toyota Camry. God’s name trade that car in. Get a Charger and a mullet. Or a BMW coupe and poofy hair. Something different.
Shit. The duplex curse is back.
Did you remember to give Glibby, the head squirrel, his vig?
No one wants head from a squirrel.
What about another squirrel?
Squirrel anal? Goes with the story,
Gotta get a nut
It ebbs and flows. Sometimes you get a riptide.
Ask me how I know.
Well I was speaking to the protagonist[?].
Great story!
That’s all I have to say for now. I’m off duty this week. Looking forward to the next episode.
Ooh! Forgot about this one!
*clicks play*
Somehow, this fits in comfortably with SugarFree.
I feel weird writing that.
Don’t. You’re right.
An OT huh.
So I was doing a web search for a solution to a technical (programming) matter tonight. MS had installed Bing’s chat AI earlier, and it offered to answer the question for me so I was like, uh, OK. It immediately gave me a working answer that I couldn’t find via web search.
I’m still going to give it a side-eye.
Maybe they are (or will) deprecate the web search to drive traffic to the AI?
That thought occurred to me, but I’ve been in similar situations so often for many years that I already had little hope of finding the answer I needed to this particular question via a normal search, from any search engine.
The top search results are invariably hits on a couple key words in my search, giving very basic info for dummies. Maybe the answer was buried pages later, I dunno. But this thing gave me the answer right away – after a traditional search. Maybe using them in combo is the key. But I’m impressed enough to try it again in the future.
As long as it doesn’t turn creeper or something.
I’m sorry. I can’t do that Dave.
So I have used ChatGPT to write some code…mundane stuff and it does a decent job even with comments
This was my favorite part:
“He was, now at 36.61 years of age, a white dwarf of humanity. His molten helium core cooling, his outer layers (and waist size) slowly expanding.”
[Holds up “Nerds” sign.]
I was not expecting that ending.
The ass cake is a good idea.
Everybody knows you measure from the asshole to the tip.
Just like a cat’s tail.
Tres gets it.
As it hangs, stretched out, or . . . fired up?
After you get out of a cold body of water
This is just great stuff, Michael. You have real talent.
loo-loo-mahn
loo-lemon
loo-loo-lemon…..
Cant I get some help here?
The last one is correct.
You should google image search for the party they have. The lemon party, they call it.
That was great. Thanks for a fun story.
The white dwarf reference was a great analogy.
To be continued?
No. But I have something else I am working on. Thank you.
Oh, look at the little tease, here.
Great story but uncomfortably too close to home.
Aren’t we all average in some respects? Thanks, MM
I’ve read this tail before about two or three years ago. Pretty sure that it wasn’t from this site. Nice work, Michael!
Festus! Good to see you around buddy
I keep telling Festus that his best First is still in him, but he doesn’t listen.
He doesn’t listen to you, you mean. Festus is way to smart for that
Im awake and reasonably sober to catch a glimpse of a Canuckistani!
Hail Festus!
Aww you guys… Thanks for that. I haven’t been around much lately because Eeyore is a drag. Maybe I’ll start horning in on The Pope’s territory and post nothing but cat videos. Things are not going well but you help me everyday.
Screw that. Eeyore is as much part of the 100 Acre Wood as the rest. And less annoying than Roo.
Or Tigger.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/03/08/phone-data-surveillance-used-to-monitor-san-jose-church-that-violated-covid-rules/
And nothing will happen
Ew icky church people. They deserve what they get.
The Murdaugh trial was eye opening for the amount of trivial data that is being logged. Stuff that has no real reason for being so such as screen on and off or orientation changes. Yet there it is.
That really caught my eye too
I am grossly undercharging my fans for the Firsts I give them if these sorts of services are going for $800 a hour.
Outside the covid aspect of all this and it being a church being investigated, I’m not sure why I’m supposed to be outraged.
People knowingly use tracking devices that they keep on themselves at all times and in which their data is sucked up by large corporations and in some cases made publicly available. I don’t see what reasonable argument there is for saying that cops/”investigators” can’t look at it.
I am of the same opinion when it comes to catching rapists and serial killers on genealogy websites, though in those cases cops are often times paying for the services and misleading the companies as to why they want access to it. But that doesn’t make it unconstitutional. It sucks that you have idiot family members that willingly submitted their DNA to third parties and that you decided to rape and murder like 12 people so they are still looking for you 50 years later. But tough luck.
These aren’t pro-government positions in my view. It’s just the reality that you don’t get to control data that is released to third parties, at least when you have agreed to the public sharing of that data.
Depends on what language is buried on page 49 of the data privacy agreement you consented to.
I doubt anyone is willingly doing that.
Being an ignorant consumer is not an excuse in my book. The fact that we’re this far along after the adoption of smartphones and that there are still people who are clueless as to what their phones are being used for and what they are set up to do out of the box is a pretty pathetic indictment of us as a culture. But it isn’t a fourth amendment issue when the cops access publicly available data that people either willfully or ignorantly make available to them.
This case should be thrown out on first amendment grounds. It won’t. There was no unreasonable search here.
You just actually committed a first, I agree entirely with you for once.
The business records and third party exceptions are bullshit.
You just need to figure out how to charge your services to the taxpayer. The sky’s the limit.
And have a deep desire to violate laws and Constitutionally protected liberties.
They were paying $250 a hour to some guys to sit in a parking lot to stare out a window in a van at another lot across the street coming and going publicly.
It was Cake. They all wanted Cake.
“A bloated sojourn, thick with torpor and rife with non importance.” Oh My Fucking God… You have divorced!
Midlife crisis ahoy! Shades of Walter Mitty before he went all imaginary and stuff. I’m not sure that butt stuff is going to cure his insecurities.
8 inches. Because penis math!
Like Ashley Wilkes.
LOL! (I mean, suburbia, she could also be wine and slobber.)
I am highly entertained.
Unsurprised if they were knock-offs. Wouldn’t surprise me that women like that sew their own.
While sewing has become a trendy hobby, therefore making it an expensive one, I doubt some suburban Karen is going to make her own especially when she’d need a serger and quite a lot of skill to do it. She’s driving a big-ass black SUV, so I’m going to guess that they’re brand name.
Festus, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to come off all snotty and whatnot.
None taken.
Extra thanks to whomever posted “The Winery Dogs”. I heard of the bass player before. They are very good.
That was Ron(series of numbers) in Friday’s stoic post.
That’s Billy Sheehan. He used to be in DLR’s band. He first appears about 2 minutes in.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=RgLWTrWgDTI&feature=shares
Heard a new term tonight that I love. Describes what’s going on in blue cities across the country perfectly. The “Homeless Industrial Complex.”
That’s a rather good term.
Good mornin y’all.
🐸
Morning.
Feelin’ Froggy?
Good morning, U, Sean, and ‘bodru!
Before I could sit down to enjoy my coffee, I had to clean up a cat’s hairball. The day has to go uphill from there, right? Right??
Well, it certainly has that option. It’s not quite been two weeks since I was in the office.
It’s nice before the people in the next group over show up to work. (Normally Thursdays are remote, but I switched wednesday and thursday.)
What time do those folks come in? Do you have a nice long stretch of quiet until, say, 8:00?
Somewhere around then. I haven’t paid close enough attention to the exact time.
I left off the “so I hope it begins its upward trajectory” part of the first sentence.
Where’s my caffiene.
::hands U a 2-liter bottle of Diet Dew::
Thank you, that’s my life’s blood.
Mornin’, reprobates!
Good morning, ‘patzie! How are you today?
*looks in mirror*
Who is that old man?
Might as well embrace it- happy birthday?
This is what would result if J. Alfred Prufrock managed to get married.
Morning cuteness.
https://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2023/03/15/Potter-Park-Zoo-Lansing-Michigan-bong-calf/3161678909541/
Next up: conga kitty?
::dons black beret and shades, snaps fingers in approval::
Lansing’s not exactly a hotbed of coolness, but there are small pockets here and there.
https://nypost.com/2023/03/15/gen-z-and-millennial-drivers-rewriting-rules-of-road-rage/
Nope.
No one does that.
pathetic
“News”
So the thumbs-down is supposedly a more brutal way to insult someone, and she switched to it to set a better example for her young impressionable child. I suppose not letting other drivers get to you is just out of the question.
“I am Hunter Biden!” he announced in a 7/11 and bought all the Takis. He threw them over the fence of a grade school until he heard sirens approaching and zoomed away.”
This was my fav. from yesterday.
We really do need some enterprising soul to print up a small run of Hunter 2024 bumper stickers. It would be a near perfect commentary on the Biden regime.
“Donning elaborate dresses, fastening an apron around their waist, and popping in their finest pearl earrings (or at least some iteration of pearls) for another round of household chores or cooking, more and more young women are following in the footsteps of the quintessential mid-century housewife thanks to the latest TikTok trend.”
Stop, I can only get so based.
““The new trend for submissive women has a dark heart and history,” reads one headline from The Guardian.
An article from Hypebae slapped the videos as “disturbing,” writing “[they] typically feature a cis straight white women, longing for the ’50s – an era where some women could opt out of participate in the corporate working world and be stay-at-home mothers instead.””
Oh no, women are realizing working 9-5 for the man isn’t anything great, whereas raising a family is a transcendental expression of divine femininity.
They seem to be objecting to even having the option to do so.