Every now and then I trip over some ballbag that has big goddamned plans for the new year. They will become like some sort of trim, chemically abstaining jesus figure. They will not smoke weed to get through the work day, run 8,000 miles and eat hand crafted, locally produced, tofu sculptures of the Dalai Lama so as to become a better human being. This year! This year they will cut the bad habits and care about their nieces karate belts! This year they will finally sign the divorce papers because you do want to get on with your new life with Megan in Reno don’t you, Bradley.

Those people will fail. After the hangover that renders them too sick to do anything they would normally clears they’ll go right back to hitting the bong before clocking in at Radio Shack.

Aim low, is what I’m telling you. If a lifetime of experience has taught me anything it’s that if you set the bar of others expectations for you low then even tieing your shoes without knotting your own thumb into the laces will garner you high, satisfying praise.

Here is a list of Resolutions for the disaffected, the indolent and the can’t-be-fucked. Feel free to enact them as you see fit.

1: Eat a sandwich with a condiment on it you don’t care for. Just once, just to say you did.

2: Stop doing whipits from the whipped cream can. 

3: Stop stealing toilet paper from your place of employment. 

4: Admit out loud that you only started playing ukulele to increase your whimsical, hipster girl appeal.

5: Delete the photos of your ex from your hard drive. After point it’s just unseemly to masturbate to someone married with four kids.

6: Don’t say you are “Being bad” when you order deserts at restaurants. Say instead, “I’m a grown man/woman and I will excercise my right to eat whatever the fuck I want.” Then flip the table.

7:  Dress as a parrot mid march. Go to the supermarket, buy a bag of oranges. Pay with a personal check.

8: Spend less time with your family and more playing  Skyrim.

9: Admit the dental floss in your medicine cabinet is seven years old and just for show. Then throw it away and not buy more.

10: Throw away the dead potted plant that’s been hanging from your shower rod for the past month.

11: Recycle?

12: When problem drinking, try throwing up on a car as opposed to in one. 

From me to you, Happy New Year.

Dawn Taylor is someone I got to meet here in Portland. She is super nice, super funny and does a really entertaining podcast. Her and her husband Patrick are getting reamed with medical issues right now and could really use some help.

I know a lot of you  are artists or otherwise creative types. Most of us are uninsured and skating by on luck alone that one of our organs hasn’t told us to eat a dick and failed. This could very, very, terrifyingly easily be and one of us. If you have any ability please donate to these people. 

What could be better than telling a bullshit kidney to STFU this holiday season?  With a donation you are basically doing just that, right to its stupid kidney face.

A list of foods that can only be enjoyed alone because they are embarrassing:

Doritos

If you are going to eat these you are going to want to eat the entire family size bag and wipe the flavor dust on your jeans. Or suck it off of your fingers. Either way you will reek of zesty ranch and you’ll need a shower. Just stay home.

Any cheeseburger that has more than one beef patty

I don’t know about you guys but that second patty doubles as an edible tissue  because I don’t know if I’ve ever bought one when not in a fit of self loathing. I wept in to a Wendy’s double stack burger this year at PDX because I was sad I had to leave. I both want and don’t want to eat huge cheeseburgers all at once and will power and self respect never win out.

Inevitably I wind up with ketchup grease dripping from my fingers and shoving the last bite into my face with a penitent eyeroll towards heaven.

Frito pie

Frito Pie is comprised of the following: Fritos, chili, four cups of grated cheese. Directions: Put that shit in a bowl. Microwave. Eat with a spoon, alone, in the dormitory you share with a coke hungry kleptomaniac and stare listlessly at your unfinished color theory homework and listen to the sound of the locked door handle rattling because motherfuckers think they can just walk up ins and download Petey Pablo on your computer.

The best pie for desperately missing your parents.

Macaroni and cheese…piled on top of mashed potatoes

Don’t you look at me I SAID DON’T YOU FUCKING LOOK AT ME.

Cadbury Creme Eggs

I don’t know how you people eat these things but the way I do it, it’s less “eating” and more “sensuous oral pleasuring.” I will hoard the creme eggs and find a quiet secluded spot and oh! so tenderly nibble the top bit of chocolate off. Then comes the best part, the most erotic part. I spend about 20 minutes per egg licking the cream out of the center….just…just really getting in there. No one wants to see me get saucy with the easter candy. I didn’t really want to admit to it on the internet, but whatever.

Also I never want to eat the chocolate shell. I just huck that bullshit over my shoulder when I’m done. Mom used to hate that so that’s another reason Creme eggs are a dirty, secret thing that must be hidden.

Like sodomy in Texas. It happens but you don’t want the authorities finding out.

Corn on the cob

This food is basically a buttery blowjob that fills in a serving of vegetables. Melted butter all running down your chin and husk in your teeth.

A block of cheese

This is a favorite snack for when I’ve stumbled out of bed, managed to put on my bra but not fasten it. Once getting into the kitchen I squint at the dishes in the sink and say “fuck a bunch of chores” and unwrap a block of Tillamook and eat it with one hand while inking a comic page with the other.

Then I stuff the wrapper under the cushion of my office chair because the trash can is out of arms reach and I don’t want to wheel myself over to it.

I was graciously put up by Erika, who is a cartoonist I very deliberately had been stalking for the past several years of convention appearances with the sole intent of making my friend and I always get what I want.

In the two transfers we had to make to get back from the airport to her house in SE I also got to learn something new about my favorite Portlandian. In our previous get together I was somehow never made aware of the fact that Erika is the fastest little girl on the earth. When faced with the possibility of missing a bus this bitch hauls ass like she owe her pimp money. I have never seen anyone move this fucking fast who isn’t a Kenyan athlete in a dead run.

I don’t like to move at anything over a shamble but I clearly am not given any other choice on this trip. I have to run after her or I would be left behind on the streets of Portland and I would die there because even with a phone that has GPS on it I could not understand the layout of this city.

My left lung exploded but I managed to make it.

It was good to see her refined european mail-order husband, Matt, again.

“Oh, Potential stick friends.”He said, pulling a square blue piece of foil from a crevice in the sofa where we sat, chatting.

“What?”

Matt leaned over and snatched up a jar full of multicolored foil sticks. He opened it and shook it at me.

“This is what I do now. When I’m watching TV I make stick friends. I’m giving Erikar a Stargate education but the first season is a bit boring so I started making stick friends.”

Erika picked up an other jar from a bookshelf that was full of dove chocolates.

“I’ve gotten super good at taking the wrappers off in one piece.” Erika said and handed me one.

“I just make stick friends all the time when I’m watching tv.” Matt folded the foil wrapper into a tight little tooth pick. “I can’t stop.”

Erika peeled the foil wrapper off of a chocolate, smoothed the foil on her knee and handed it to Matt.

“Look, another potential stick friend! I like to call them potential stick friends because it sounds quite nice doesn’t it. Every piece of foil is full of friendship potential. We had all of these chocolates and these pieces of foil kept piling up and I didn’t want to just bin them. I mean look, they are so pretty!” He checked his finished stick friend into the stick friend jar and began work on the next. ” So stick friends. And the thing is it actually really hurts my fingers to make them because I have to twist them so tightly?  It actively harms me to make them but I must keep making stick friends. I can’t stop. I can never stop.”

I ate the chocolate Erika gave me and handed this poor, obsessed man my gold foil for him to twist. True we may laugh at this anecdote now but when Matthew finishes his fully operational tinfoil Deathbot and he incinerates our American cities there won’t me much laughter then, huh assholes?

I know I have spoken unkindly of you in the past. That wasn’t fair. See, let me explain:

At the time I first tried you I had not yet come to terms with the fact that I was entirely incompatible with almost all forms of birth control. True, I was having a fair amount of success with the Nuvaring, but due to a shitty insurance plan I was forced to go off of it for a while. It was during those few months that I realized that I felt way better. Much more sane, shall we say. That was when I finally admitted to myself that all of the hormonal birth controls, even the low dose, localized types, would turn me into a stark- raving madwoman to one degree or another and I was worn out loosing months of my life at a time to side effects.

Also on the occasion that my partners could feel the Nuvaring during intercourse they would get excited that maybe there was a surprise toy inside for when they finished the box and I was just so tired of seeing those disappointed faces.

"This isn't a secret decoder ring AT ALL. "

So back to the barrier method for me!

I’ve gotten used to the prepubescent Romanian gymnast maneuvers I have to perform to insert/remove your product and the indignity inherent in wedging a pillow top mattress into myself up to the cervix. There are also many fine points to your brand. It’s nice that your pregnancy prevention rate is so high and that it’s effective for 24 hours. It’s nice not suffering from unexpected mood shifts that alienate loved ones and potential employers.

Yet, I have one, small quibble. Why are the individual packages so goddamned difficult to open?

Obviously I want my contraceptive method to be impervious to tampering or inadvertent damage but there is fucking limit. The little notch in the corner that helpfully directs me to “tear here” has never one torn there and allowed me to remove the sponge with ease. Instead I find my self gnawing desperately at the corner, manhandling the plastic casing and causing me concern that I will some how shred the sponge itself and render it ineffective and unusable. Eventually I wind up stumbling, cursing and naked, into my kitchen for a pair of scissors to carefully snip the packaging away while from the bedroom my boyfriend asks me what’s taking so long. I know that the 24 hours of effectiveness is conducive to spontaneity but once my man hits the door of my apartment I want to use that 24 hours to the fullest, so inevitably the fumbling ensues.

Keep in mind that I already go into bathroom to perform these contraceptive acrobatics as I’m unwilling to ruin the scant mystique of my body by inserting your product in front of my partner. This means that I am doing an angry, jiggling lap around my apartment before I get to the fun part of putting the Today Sponge into use. It’s like the worst opening ceremony ever.

As a loyal customer all I’m asking is for is a package that opens in the fashion it’s supposed to, that when I go to tear here it will actually tear there.Barring that, would you consider at the very least including a small pair of sewing scissors in every box and maybe a fun, surprise toy at the bottom for when I’m done with it.

It's a purchase incentive for a lot of things is all I'm saying.

Because they seem to be growing in number.

Now it’s just the one space in my kitchen, the counter facing the window specifically. When I first moved in and got my pad in order I noticed a few of them skittering around near the coffee maker and the sink. Little, tiny black ants.

I pointed them out to my Dad who was in town to help me move and after we checked the cabinets and drawers without finding a seething mass of life, he remarked that it was probably nothing to worry about.

But the number seems to be growing and now I’m worried.

One Saturday afternoon when hanging out with Allen and Mikey in my apartment after our podcast I went into the kitchen to crush three of them under my pointer finger while pouring a cup of coffee.

“Hey, Mikey?” I asked. “Yeah?” “How many ants must one have before one is considered to have a problem with ants?” He leaned over on the futon and squinted over his Ultimate Spiderman issue. “Why? How many ants are you seeing?”

I squished another one that had tried to dart from the safety of the sink to hide under my salt pig.

“It’s just like, between four and six everyday but it’s not something I want to get out of hand.” “Nah.” he turned back to his comic. “They’re just a reality here in the summer. Don’t worry about it. They’ll go away once the weather gets colder.”

It’s now September and things have only escalated. Incrementally, true, but now instead of my once a day finger inflicted murder spree before I start the coffee maker I’m seeing a new batch every time I go into the kitchen. A bigger batch.

It’s like they are respawing when my back is turned, like some kind of teeny weeny, mundane game of halo played on the Formica field of my counter top. Just a couple days ago I found that they had broken into my sugar bowl. My vacuum sealed with a rubber stopper sugar bowl.

I peered into it drunkenly when I came into the apartment to fetch another beer. I was drinking with my neighbor, Rachel at the time.

She looked up when I burst out of the front door with the bowl clutched in my hand.”Godfuckingdamnit!” I swore and upended the bowl over the second story railing. She took a drag on her cigarette and looked at me questioningly.

“The ants! The ants got into my sugar! How…how could they break the freshness seal! It’s a seal that implies ant-free freshness!”

“Oh, yeah. This complex get weird ant explosions sometimes.” She remarked as I banged the last sugared ant out on the rail and recapped the lid. “I get them in my place too. It seems to help if you vacuum a lot.”

But I do that. I’m not a slob. I’m not leaving food out. I’m not setting out a nightly potion of thawed meat covered in sugar with a sign on it that says, ‘Ants, please make yourselves at home and feast upon this delicacy I’ve prepared just for you!‘

I’ve checked high and low for where they could be coming from and to no avail. I grew briefly concerned that they had built their colony in the underside of my coffee maker,as that’s where many of them seem to be congregating but it looks like they are just using it as a secret bunker, or perhaps a gentleman’s club.

Things came to a head a few nights ago when once again I was sitting outside in the humid night air with Ben Coleman drinking PBR. I’d come in for another beer to find a scattered mass of widdle, yet threatening, black specks swarming my counter.

“No!” I howled. ” No!! Where are you coming from?!”

I then proceeded to pull out both the 409 kitchen cleaner and the Windex and nuke the countertop. I wiped the corpses with their twitching legs up with a paper towel. I turned to throw it in the trash, turned back and…

MORE ANTS.

Only three, but that was becoming way above the acceptable number of ants.

I sprayed them, then set to work spraying the borders of the counter, the underneath, the side near the butchers block. I must have been at it for a little while because Ben Coleman stuck his head in the door to let me know he would be taking off.

“Huh? Oh, yeah that’s good that’s….I just have a thing I have to…Oh, what the fuuuuck?”

I had spotted an ant making it’s frantic way across the floor. I dropped to my knees and spritzed him with a righteous violence, whipped my head around to see another one waving his antennae at me from the inch long strip that runs along the counter. We stared at one another for a minute, then he too, fell to the fury of my Windex.

Now what I do is go into my kitchen, spray the ants on the counter and leave the small inert forms in puddles of caustic blue as a warning to the rest of the colony. Although I had to stop doing that because apparently once Windex dries it turns into a tasty sugar coating for ant corpses. I can’t say this for sure, but I think the live ants were snacking on the asphyxiated Windexed ones, which, super ew. I make salads on that countertop.

The weather is cooling down now so I’ve been seeing less and less of them. Maybe they are just getting seasonally sleepy or perhaps the constant blue murder rain has made its point.

I hope it’s the murder rain.

Chinese buffets, the Golden Corral, Ponderosa. Every occasion is met with unrestrained excitement at paying a flat fee to gorge myself at whim. For eight of my american dollars I can literally eat a bucket of fried chicken and then ladle macaroni and cheese on top of that, add a slice of ham onto it and make it into a sort of diabetes pie? And I can do that as many times as I’m physically able? God bless us everyone!

Of course after plate three I’m always ready to drown myself in the soup tureens. I go into a black out and wake up an hour later on the toilet with tears in my eyes and a meat sweat soaking my clothes.

But do I learn?

“Jane wants to go to Hometown Buffet for her birthday.” Sadie said last week.

“What’s Hometown Buffet?”

“It’s… a buffet.”

“Sweet.”

Fuck no, I don’t learn.

Jane and Sadie made my ass wait until 3:00 in the afternoon for the dinner buffet to start. I hadn’t eaten anything so I was ravenous and in no mood to pace myself. When we pulled into the parking lot Sadie had to ask me top stop licking the window so she could roll it up all the way.

Hometown Buffet has that innocuous, middle american look to it. You can picture it in any oversized strip mall parking lot in any state in the country. It’s the sort of restaurant that you can take the whole family to after church and it no one would think of bringing up politics, or batting an eyelash when little Timmy smears his mashed potatoes on the seat.

Jane peered around the dining room and remarked that we had to be the only people in our twenties in the whole establishment that weren’t actually employed there.

I let Jane pay first, because it was the girls birthday after all, but was levitating on the balls of my feet by the time i got close enough to thrust my ten dollar bill into the face of the girl at the counter.

“Okay. Now remember, the trick is to pace yourse-” Sadie started.

I let out a guttural war cry that sounded a bit like: “SAHHLAAAAAAAHD BAAAAAAAAHHHHHR!” and rushed past her.

I’m going to do my best to relate to you, succulent readers, what we ate and said after I loosed that scream and terrified the octogenarian trying to get to the bathroom, but in all honesty it’s an unhappy blur after that first plate of an excuse to eat ranch dressing.

Jane had a very demure looking salad on her plate by the time I returned with my own mound of toppings, sans lettuce and extra bacon crumbles. She apparently thought to interject some somber dignity into this occasion. Sadie, meanwhile had either disregarded her advice about pacing oneself or just had different views on what “pacing” entailed, had a plate of maccaroni and cheese with a side of fried I-wasn’t-sure-yet.

“What’s that, Sadie?” Asked Jane.

Sadie picked it up and examined it. “I don’t…” She took an experimental bite. I leaned over to look at it.

“Chicken fried steak.” I said with authority.

“Ugh. I don’t eat beef. Do you want it?” She thrust it away in disgust. I snatched it from her hand and stuffed it, whole into my mouth.

Now at this point I was satisfied. I’d had a bowl of soup, salad and the suspect chicken fried steak. I could have stopped eating, so I got up and fetched a scoop of pasta Primavera made from over done noodles and two handfuls of pop corn shrimp. Then a chunk of leathery calzone.

I shoved the detritus on the plastic plate away from myself and just…Just sat there for a minute. Jane stared at me from over her second macaroni and cheese.

“You aren’t done. You can’t be done.”

“I don’t know if I can keep doing this, you guys.”

Sadie grabbed my jaw and glared into my face.

“Well you fucking find a way. Now get back out there.” She stood to let me out of the booth which is how the ham, the mashed potatoes and all that gravy happened.

I couldn’t finish all the ham. I slumped in the booth, falling asleep and wanting to vomit all at once. Sadie was starting to look a little green herself and Jane set her fork down and asked what we all were thinking.

“Why are we doing this to ourselves?”

“I don’t know.” Said Sadie. She looked at me with glassy eyes. “Leia. Leia, get up there.”

“Noooo, pleeeease, no…”

So there was another salad, another attempt at soup. I figured vegetables would fix the way I felt inside but I was wrong.

I shoved all of it towards Jane when I hit maximum capacity and she groaned and pushed it away towards the window our booth sat by. I slurred a thank you at the waiter when he came to pick up our sorry state of affairs.

“Leia…” Sadie started.

“Fuck off, Sadie.”

“Hey. I don’t want to fight with you. I just want to know if you want to go check out the deserts.”

With tears welling in my eyes I said, “Yes. Yes I do.”

We got lucky with parking. Insanely lucky. Dad had managed to parallel park the behemoth Budget truck in front of the basement door of my apartment building. All of Saturday my Mom, Dad, friend Peter, neighbors Chloe and Teri had been funneling my worldly possessions down the tiny, ancient elevator and out into the street.

Peter and my dad had shoe horned the last of boxes into the truck and the one remaining piece was the coffee table. Chloe and I levered that faux teak bastard out the door, onto the sidewalk and as we approached the truck who should I see? Who was standing in front of the truck, Peering into it like some mystic abyss?

“A WHORE LIVES HERE” Sybil.

“Ugh. Jesus” I swore to Chloe over the table. “There she is. Look at her. Just standing there.”

Chloe and I went to lift the table up into the truck as Sybil just stood in the oddly hot San Franciscan sun, watching. My father tried pulling the table into the truck but Sybil was in the way. It’s because I’m a huge pussy all I said was: “Hey. Sybil. You’re kinda blocking us. Can you…Y’know…?”

“Oh!” She said in her tiny mousey voice. “Oh! Ummm…I’m sorry!” And then she vanished inside the wedged open basement door.

All I did was huff a sigh, sweating and heaving, wedge the table into the truck. That was the last of it. All of a life I’d lived for the past nine years jammed inside a mid-sized truck.

I clambered inside the rickety ass elevator of my now former complex and took it up to the third floor to help my mother clean out the one bedroom  apartment I’d lived in and found Sybil standing in the hallway with a disposable camera clenched in her nervous hands. I’d found her like that two years ago, but at that time it was a roll of packaging tape she held after she posted a rather unkind sign on my unit door.

I stalled. She stared, I stared back. I looked at this little brunette woman who was my favorite story to tell at bars.

“Umm…” She paused and rolled the next slide into the camera nervously with a loud sliding ‘click;. “So you’re moving. And…Um…I’m not going to see you again…Can I take your picture?”

And because I’m a huge pussy I didn’t say: “You called me a whore! And then you forgot my name!“

All I said was: “Sure, Sybil.”  And I folded my hands behind my back and offered my most sweetest of smiles.

“CLICK” Went the  camera and she said “thank you!” and went back into her apartment number 36.

I retired from my pose and looked at Chloe.

“Christ. Is that for her ‘secret friends’ scrapbook? What the hell was that?”

I went into good old unit 33 where my mom was scrubbing the counters in the kitchen in a last-ditch effort to get the majority of the security deposit back.

“Your neighbor Sybil was here.” She said, amicably.

“Yes, she was in the hallway.” I said.

“No, she was here.” My mother said.

“Eh?”

“Yeah.” Mom scrubbed hard at a red wine stain on the counter top. I heard a noise coming from the bedroom and I think I surprised her.”

“You mean she just walked up in my house?” I was offended that she just came into my apartment that, even though recently vacated I still regarded as mine.

“Well, I found her in your old bedroom.” Mom said.” She was standing there looking at the wall and I introduced myself and se said who she was. I knew immediately of course that she was that neighbor but I just said I was your mom…”

I was too hot and too tired and in no mood for bullshit.

“Uh huh. And she said?”

Mom flopped the towel down on the countertop. “Well, I said ‘hello’ and she was startled. But then she said that she didn’t know that I’d painted the wall in my bedroom red and I said ‘Yes, she and I painted that together’ and she just said ‘It’s pretty. Can I take a picture?’ I said ‘Yes’ And she did.”

“Uh huh.” I said.

“She said she was sorry she wouldn’t see you again and that she was sad you were moving.” Mom rinsed the rag in the sink and wrung it out.

I made a bunch of jokes then. I made jokes about how she was crazy, how she had to take pictures of people and pretend she had some sort of relationship with them. I retold the story of the time she put that ‘A WHORE LIVES HERE‘ sign on my door and rolled my eyes.

But who were you, Sybil? Who were you?

I saw the self-help books you left in the hallway in garbage bags. The ones about alcohol abuse and childhood trauma. What made you so fucked up that you put that sign on my door? What made you get that subscription to Bitch magazine, whose letter I found addressed to you in my mailbox that one day? Why did you leave a postcard taped to my door (The art on it was by Chagall, who is incidentally one of my favorite painters) inviting me  to a passover potluck after I gave you that mis-delivered piece of mail?

I Ignored that invitation.

What made you the way you were? Did I fall down on the job of being a decent person in not finding out? Did I do wrong by not taking an interest in you and asking if you were doing alright and if you wouldn’t maybe like to come over for dinner?

We talked about you in that apartment building. About how crazy you were. All of your episodes.

In my time since leaving San Francisco I’ve thought about Sybil’s final snapshot of me. Of her saying she never knew I’d painted my wall red and telling my mother that she thought it was pretty.

I’ve wondered what Sybil’s favorite color was and if maybe I should have seen past my own self involved bullshit long enough to have asked.

“Yeah. I can’t sleep with that thing up there. Where’s your shoe?” I asked.

David pointed wordlessly to the space under the coffee table and didn’t break eye contact with the fat black speck. I snatched up his worn Ked and climbed up on to the table. I raised my self up on to one foot and took careful aim, then wobbled precariously.

“You want me to do that?”

“Naw, I got this.” I pulled my arm back for the killing strike. “I…got…this!”

I slammed the shoe down exactly one inch to the left of the spider which served only to startle it and send it into a frenzied circling.

“Shit! Shit!!!” I began hammering the shoe desperately against the plaster, each successive blow driving me, the spider and David closer to totally loosing our shit.

“You’re missing it! How are you missing it?!”

“Shut the fuck up! Just shut up! I’ll get it!”

“Well, you’re not fucking getting it!”

“Well, just give me a fucking minute and I’ll fucking get it!”

“It shouldn’t take a fucking minute to kill a fucking spider!”

Meanwhile I’d like to think the spider, in its terrified scuttle for quarter, was thinking in its little spider brain: ‘What the hell?!?! What the absolute hell?!?! Why are you doing this?!”

I gave it one more go with the shoe, smashing it a hairbreadth away from the spider. That was the last straw for him. The spider dropped like a tiny, venomous pebble into the dark lake of my futon.

David and I both screamed like bitches at the same time.

“Oh,god. Oh, god where did it go?!” I asked as I clambered off the coffee table.

“I don’t know!” David turned this way and that looking for the fallen yet still mobile spider.

That’s when I saw the miniscule waving of two furry legs on his shoulder. Davids shoulder, David who, have I mentioned? Loathes spiders. That was the whole reason I was the one to get up on the coffee table in the first place, misplaced chivalry.

I tried to break the news that his life long nemesis was perch on his shoulder gently but failed utterly.

“Heeeeeeey, baby…” I started and he knew immediately.

“It’s on me. It’s on me isn’t it oh god it’s on me isn’t it?!”

David whipped his head around and came face to multi-eyed face with his blackest fear. He loosed a noise that didn’t fully escape his chest, a guttural panic noise and began slapping at himself like he was trying to dismantle his own shoulders with his own arms.

If that sounds undignified I invite you to also imagine me doing a useless little foot to foot dance and flapping my hands while that happened.

His slapping stopped. My hand flapping stopped. We stared at each other, glassy-eyed and panting.

“Is it off of me?” He asked.

“Yes?” I craned to look at his back. “Yes.”

“Okay. Okay. I’m going to…go pee.” David levered himself off the futon and wobbled to the bathroom. I presume to be alone for a second. I couldn’t really blame the guy.

I spent that second vigorously sweeping the entire futon down with my hand. If the spider was on there and still somehow alive I was not going to put my favorite and only face close enough for it to access with its angry mandibles.

Satisfied I plopped back down and turned to get my beer off of the windowsill. There, with it’s eight legs folded over in a death rictus, was the spider.

What I’m trying to relate to you with this anecdote is that we really didn’t have insects in San Francisco but Portland clearly has a shit ton. I’m trying to adjust to this as quickly as possible. I can handle the tiny ants that seem to like chilling near my coffee maker but the spiders are really fucking with me.

I have a hard and fast rule about spiders. They are more than welcome to be in my home so long as they are not where I sleep or where I shit.

Oregonian spiders have consistently violated this edict.

The second day in my new apartment as I took a pee in my new toilet a big, sickly green one scuttled out from under the door mid-stream. There is nothing quite like diving to the floor with a wad of toilet paper to snuff the life out of a creature both absurdly small and yet somehow absurdly threatening while half peeing down your own leg. It’s an experience full of triumph, drama and then a quiet, embarrassed shower afterwards.

The distance across which these beasts can sling their webs is astonishing. Every time I leave the house I’ve adopted a dodging, weaving motion, squinting into the air trying to anticipate the unseen web with its fat builder crouched in the center. I’m reasonably certain that the fact that I look like a fucking mental case while doing this is why I haven’t met more of my neighbors yet. I’ve only walked directly into one so far but one is enough and as god it my witness there will not be a second.

I’m typing this on the sofa. Behind me is the wide living room window. I happened to look behind me a moment ago to see one of them with his face (and I’m being generous in calling what spiders have a “face”.) pressed to the glass, just looking in at me.

He knows. He knows what I did to the others. He’s waiting for his chance to avenge his people on my bitable fleshy bits.

Do you think if I let him in and offered him the tiny ants near the coffee maker as tribute we could put this silly feud to rest and he could let his brethren know that as long as I don’t see them in the bathroom we are cool?

Well, to be brief I’ve been getting ready to uproot my life here in San Francisco and transplant it to Portland, Oregon. This process is making me feel…things.

Things that when I tried to write about them initially came out in whimsical, poetic ways. Dramatic ways, overblown ways. I’m not really comfortable expressing my actual serious business feelings in public and this is a blog mainly for detailing the horrible things that have come out of my body. You come here for stories about secretions not for heartfelt, trite musings on Life And What It Means.

What’s a little odd for me is that San Francisco was the first place I regarded as solidly and completely as home. I’ve lived in four different states and traveled widely and every locale I’ve ever been to never lost an alien feeling. No matter how long I lived anywhere I couldn’t shake the sensation of hostility, anxiousness and discomfort. When I came here, running from Ohio like my ass was on fire, that all fell away. After the initial uncertainty of being a teenager from a small suburb come to a large urban area wore off San Francisco seemed to become the only place I could actually just be myself and figure shit out. There was no condescension, no expectation. No one condemned the millions of mistakes I would make in the almost decade I’ve lived out here as harshly because here is the thing about this city:

Almost everyone who I’ve met here is an expatiate of something. I can count on one hand the number of people I’ve met here that were born and raised in San Francisco. The majority came from somewhere else and they came for the simple reason that everyone here is in some way a fucking weirdo.

Here I could say to someone: “You know. Sometimes I think there are people hiding in my curtains when I wake up at night and when things don’t happen in increments of ten I feel terribly afraid.” and they’d be fine with that because they like to throw away whole sticks of gum and chew the wrappers and couldn’t function without hot boxing the bathroom every morning.

Everyone seemed to be a refugee and a cast off. All of us intolerable in some way and a little head fucked to one degree or another, sometimes tragic sometimes comical. People may roll their eyes at your idiosyncrasies, but they couldn’t really judge you for them because they were just as bad.

There is a lot of comfort in that actually.

This city is who I am and what made me. Being here was the only thing that formed me into a reasonably functioning non-jerkoff,  but if there was one natural gift my fairy godmother leaned over my cradle and bestowed upon me at birth it’s to know when things have reached their terminus. I’ve gotten really good at being able to tell when things have run their course, and I’m done here.

My options for where to be next were split between New Orleans, where my family is and Portland, where a bulk of the comics industry centers.

I spent and extra few days in Portland for the Stumptown Comics Fest, half drunk with some of the sweetest and most talented people I’ve ever had the pleasure of being around and learned they were all paying about 300 dollars less a month on rent in places with hardwood floors.

Then I remembered New Orleans doesn’t have any good Indian food and that pretty much made my mind right the hell up.

So excuse my absence from this blog with no warning. I’ve been pulling as many shifts for Das Hotelenstien to save for the move and putting my affairs in order before my August 1st moving date. I go to work, have beer, wake up, work, throw away things, work, beer, wash my underwear in the sink, work and then work. I’m slightly distracted and then like I said, just so many feelings that bore everyone except for my mom.

Well, she’s probably tired of hearing about it too but she bore me so you do the crime you do the time.

I’ll be back on a more regular schedule soon, in August. It should be a wordy wonderland of new experiences and new curbs to fall off of.

Sniff you jerks then.