10 steps to saying goodnight to a girl:

Step 1: Sway closer and further away from her with your arms somewhat extended so that you are ready for any hugging that might occur.

Step 2: Keep talking. Talk about anything. Talk about what happened today. Talk about your dreams for the future. Talk about why you don’t believe in John McCain’s tax cuts. Talk about how disgusted you are with gender-norms. Continue on that subject; hoping that she’ll get the hint that you probably won’t make the first move. Talk about other girls you find attractive. Try to stop talking about that, but continue to. Dig yourself a deeper and deeper grave for your slow and painful death by foot-in-mouth disease. Say things like “She’s really cool. I mean she’s alright. She’s doable. I’m just saying she’s a fun person. We’re gonna hang out in LA. Maybe I can get some. Just kidding. Sort of.” Wish you hadn’t started speaking. Wish you hadn’t started living.

Step 3: Start to suggest something that the two of you can do so that your night together won’t end. Don’t think about what you are going to suggest before you start your sentence though. Just start with: “Hey, we should…” and hope that the rest of the sentence will come to you. It won’t, but it will provide an excellent back and forth that involves a lot of “What’s?” and “What do you mean?'s” Remember English isn’t her first language and it’s four in the morning, it is very difficult for her to understand your mumbling ramblings about how you’re sorry for not thinking of something to do before speaking. Think about what would happen if you just made a dash for your room. You are leaving tomorrow, so you probably won’t have to see her again. Decide that you should stick around because if you run, there is no way she Facebook friends you, and then how would you show pictures of her to your friends?

Step 4: Make sure she catches you staring at her breasts. If possible make it look like you are zoning out with your eyes completely focused on her cleavage. Let a pleasant smile creep over your face. While you’re at it, register yourself as a sex-offender.

Step 5: Go in for a hug in the middle of one of her sentences. Nothing says “I am listening” more than interrupting her story with a physical attack. Realize that her breasts are pressing up against your chest. Realize that everything is okay.

Step 6: Ask her to continue her story after you finish hugging. Nothing is less awkward than extending a conversation after both parties say good bye. After she initially refuses, insist that she finishes what she was saying in order to prove you are a decent guy who is interested in the things she has to say, not just the things she has protruding from her chest. Keep trying to convince yourself of this while she is talking so that you don’t hear a word of her story.

Step 7: Tell her all the French you know. This consists of the words, hello, yes, and shit. This does not extend the conversation in any way.

Step 8: Say good bye again and go in for another hug. While holding the hug think about how you could physically maneuver your bodies so that they are kissing. Find no way that this is possible. Hold the hug longer, thinking that there may be a way that you just haven’t thought of yet. Realize she is trying to push away. Apologize and turn in shame.

Step 9: Go to your room only to realize that you have to go to the bathroom. Go back to bathroom - take a long piss. Look in the mirror. Tell yourself that that was the last time that you won’t make a move when you’ve had so many opportunities. You just needed to take one of them. You were in the kitchen cooking together. You even fed her pasta sauce on one of those big wooden spoon. You could have easily took a sip off the other side, and then pulled a lady and the tramp with the wooden spoon. You were in the Sauna together. Just the two of you in a locked wooden room where the purpose is getting sweaty. All the other members of your group had either gone to sleep or started hooking up – hooking up being the only reason they didn’t come to the sauna. When you got to the sauna two people were hooking up in there. When you were walking up the stairs, two people were hooking up in the stairwell. Hooking up was happening all around you, so you just needed to extend the hooking up to yourself. You could have even just made a funny kidding-on-the-square comment about how she should hook up with you so that you two could fit in. The guy walking down the hall who saw us going to the sauna had made one. He had said “Looks like love is in the air.” To you. To you and the hot French Canadian girl in the short booty shorts and skimpy lacey top who had changed specifically to go hang out with you in a sauna. A sauna that was known as the place to hook up. Though, you had been in the sauna five times now and not ever hooked up. Why not make it six? Flip off the mirror and walk out the door resolving that if you see her again in the morning before you leave, or whatever, that you will just take her to a private area and dip her down and start making out with her all romantic-like, and then say “Just thought we should get that over with before I leave. I know we’ve both wanted it.” Then leave. You will be soooo bad-ass.

Step 10: See her coming out of another bathroom at the same time as you get out of yours. She doesn’t see you and turns away to go to her room. Pretend not to see her and walk back to your room. Wish that you weren’t staying in a hostel so that you could have some private time before going to bed.

Best Friends

Who has been my best friend on this trip? Is it the British blonde who I went to a Maceo Parker concert with? Is it the bickering couple that is not going out that I got lost in the outskirts of Seattle with? Is it the two guys who I went around San Francisco with at night while they played guitar and harmonica and drums on street corners? One of whose name was Starshine, but I kept calling either Moonburst, Sunstroke, Applesauce, or Slave-driver. The two guys that helped me convince some guy in a suit going into a bar to rap over our beat. The beat was similar to that song “I steal all my kisses from you,” but he changed the lyrics to “I get all my bitches from you” and changed the song into one about talking to pimps. Is my best friend the guy who took mushrooms as we were going to the science museum? The same guy I later almost convinced to attempt to eat a woman’s hair because it resembled cotton candy. Are my best friends the bearded woman I met in the park and her friend who she was filming who was eating bananas? Maybe it’s the two college students who I went hunting for Nutria – giant semi-aquatic rats – with. Maybe it’s Emma’s mom. Is my best friend the dude who, when I got up at 7 am to go to the bathroom and accidentally locked myself out of my room, grabbed me, screamed “MINNESOTA!!” and proceed to attempt to pluck out my chest hairs? Is it the dude from Atlanta who looks just like Nash Cummins who went for a 3 am donut run with me and shared a dozen donuts? Is it the guy who told me his concept for a reality show about philanthropy, and then took me to pinball bar where we played pinball for 3 hours? Is it the guy who was at my side as a bald 45 year old hit on us at a bar and then started an argument with us about gun control? Is it the older guy who told me that he likes to pretend he’s OCD at grocery stores and make the cashiers face all the labels the same way? Maybe it's the Australian punk who helped me come up with the lyrics to our new B-52s song: "Welcome to the Sauna!" while in the sauna. Is it the guy who is living with an ex-girlfriend who put up all of their old emails on her door? Emails that said things like “I love you.” And “I want to be with you always. Maybe it’s the other people that lived there, who I felt bad for. It could be the adorable Swede who I convinced his pool cue was called his rod, so that he said “How do I aim my rod to get my balls into the hole?” Or is it the guy who pointed out to me the old Chinese man trying to make a salad out of the baked potato toppings we had prepped by piling handfuls and handfuls of pepperoncini peppers on to his plate, onto which he dumped mushroom gravy. The same old man later taste-tested the salsa by taking a sip from the bowl it was sitting in. Maybe it’s the guy in the Golden Gate Park who was screaming “I represent the lollipop guild, the lollipop guild, the lollipop guild, and I want to welcome you to fucking munchkin land.”

Maybe it's me. I'm the only one who has been there the entire time.

Maybe I just really like myself. I do. I love me. I'm pretty awesome. I do cool things. I'm a cool guy.

But what I realize about all of these stories is that I'm more excited to tell these stories in full to all the people back in Minnesota, Maine, or wherever than I am to experience them in the first place. So maybe those are my best friends. The people who can help me realize my future-past.

The Truth

Introductions for me are always awkward. I don’t know what interests I might share with the person I’m talking to - I don’t know what issues I might disagree with them on. Most of the time, I don’t even remember their name. So a series of questions that have been determined by the gods of our culture to be just vague and bland enough to be socially acceptable and inoffensive by all are bounced back and forth between me and … whomever I’m talking to.

My most hated of these predetermined vanilla queries is “What do you do?”

What do I “do?” Well, I play fantasy football. I go to the movies. I take public transportation. I dress myself. I watch TV shows on the internet the day after they appear on television. I read lists of quotes from my favorite people. I sit around. I try to find free hors devours at art galleries for dinner. What do I “do?”

Fuck you. You just want me to ask you what you “do” so that you can tell me the amazing way you’ve managed to make this world a better place and make money.

I know my real problem with the question is that I have no good answer. I used to be a student. I could say that’s what I “do.” That was a noble “doing.”

I’m no longer a student. I’m very glad I am no longer a student because I no longer want to go to school, but, man, it was easier to say I was a student than saying; “uhh. Y’know. Nothing really. I worked. Previously. That job is done. I’m traveling.” Then they give the condescending; “ohhh”. They might as well say; “Oh, you’re lazy. You were born into decent wealth and are using it as an excuse to not have to be a productive member of society.” So I started saying that I was an actor/comedian.

That was a dumb decision. Every time I say something funny (which is all the time), I now get told; “You should use that as a ‘bit.’” Or worse, they decide that’s the time when they should give me something funny they once said so that I can use it in my next "bit." I’m so glad I have such a helpful, supportive world surrounding me that they can tell me how to do what I “do” better.

Next time I ask somebody what they “do” and they say something shitty and mundane like social work, I’m going to say; “Hey, you should try helping the kids with their drug problems by telling the kids that drugs give them hemorrhoids, and hay fever. Then they wouldn’t do drugs. Nobody likes hay fever. It’s so icky.” Then they’d laugh and say I should use that in my next “bit.”

That’s why I started lying.

What do I “do?” Well, I plan recreational parks in impoverished neighborhoods. I’m an extreme athlete - mostly I do the sky stuff. I write for New Republic. I’m a photo journalist for the brail institute of Mississippi. Right now I’m just trying to stay on the wagon (or is it off the wagon). I bootleg DVDs. I impregnate young women. I’m a financial analyst for a non-profit. Heroin. I do Heroin. I work in accounting. I play lead guitar for a Canadian rock band called the IronDukes. I’m running the Ron Paul ’08 campaign in Eastern Oregon’s urban areas. I’m a poet. I took over my parents’ collectible items business. I scent candles. What do I “do?”

Fuck you. You don’t deserve to know. Now we’re talking about me, and me is anything I want me to be.

Peace out,

Humphrey Irving Walshowitz

My Immortal Enemy

Silence.

I hate silence. It scares the shit out of me.

I sit there. The Australian girl who’s 25, and was surprised and disappointed when the bouncer asked when I was born, and I had to say 1986, is sitting on my left. On my right is the five foot tall New Hampshirite who talked to me about the guy she was dating right before she left on this trip the whole way to the bar.

Each of our beers is nearly full. Alcohol is supposed to be a social lubricant, but it doesn’t work if you all just nurse one beer the whole night. The Aussie said something. I can’t hear over the blaring reggae music. I just nod and smile. Maybe a Rastafarian bar was not the best choice for an Australian, and two hicks from the Northeast.

Five footer wipes a drop of dew off her glass. Twenty-five and aging uncrosses her legs and crosses them again. I dart my eyes back and forth, trying to find something to say.

“The music’s loud.”

Where does that lead? Maybe somebody agrees, then we’re right back where we started.

“Man, who likes silence?”

Yeah, make fun of the situation, that’ll go real well. You definitely know these people that you met two hours ago well enough to start making fun of their social ineptitude.

“Which one of you would like to sleep with me tonight?”

That’s what I’m gonna go with. Luckily neither of them hear. The blaring beats of the reggaetón saved me.

BATHROOM!

I can go to the one place where silence is not only acceptable, but preferred: The row of urinals in the men’s restroom. I do some pointing to places and leave for the washcloset. A safe haven of comfortable quiet awaits me as I walk into the… why is there a woman in the… oh. I back out gently and turn towards the other bathroom. The one where the bathroom mascot on the door has no skirt.

Bathrooms have mirrors. I look alright. I’m glad I showered earlier. I like this new facial hair. It makes me look older. I have some old man lines around my nose. They’ll look cool when I’m older. I’ll look like one of those crazy old guys on the rocking chair who yells at the passerbys. Except I won’t be on the rocking chair, I’ll just be in the street yelling at people I’m walking with.

I have to go back to the table. Back to the hell that is silence with two women you want to sleep with. (Want is a strong word in this context.) I sit down. Nobody says anything. Dew wiping and leg crossing ensues. AWESOME!!

We all take a small sip of our beer. It passes through the mouth. It sits in the belly. That was fun; to think the way that dude in Silence of the Lambs talks.

How do you start a conversation with two people you don’t know well enough to talk about anything interesting, but know well enough to not to need to go over the formal small talk? SILENCE.

Should I acknowledge the fact that I went to the wrong bathroom? Maybe that’s a good conversation piece. They don’t seem that interested. In anything.

Oldie-but-goodie gets up and moves toward the dance floor. Do we follow? Short-but-shaggable follows. I do to. Finally we’re dancing. Nobody has to talk during dancing. Silence is okay.

Dancing is okay. I realize that Down Under is down with dancing, and even if it was Shawty’s birthday, I don’t think she’d be comfortable in da club. Nobody seems ready to make the move to dance with each other. I would have been comfortable with any two of us pairing up. Maybe most comfortable if the other two had started getting down together. At least I’d have some material to end the night.

We leave the bar without a word. Big surprise. We walk the ten blocks back home in less than ten words. Goodbyes break the silence.

Silence made that night a failure. But silence isn’t the only way a night can fail.

The next night I went out to this half bar/ half art museum. In one room they're showing this training video of how to use different Samurai Swords. It consists mainly of guys chopping hanging pig and chicken corpses in half. To my left is a scrawny hipster Australian shocked and awed by the videoed activities. I'm not letting silence ruin this night.

“You have these DVDs at home?”

“No.”

Maybe my creative writing teacher was right when she said sarcasm doesn’t work 98% of the time. Maybe humans just shouldn't have the ability to communicate.

From the Makers of Dab'n'Go: It's Sex'n'Jokes

I stood awkwardly against the corner of the stairwell. My left leg was pointed out to flee, my right leg was sitting steady ready to follow. My hands were in constant motion, each finger cracking as the opposing hand pulled it, pushed it, or bopped it. My eyes darted from the floor to my directions of escape to her eyes to the ceiling to inappropriate parts of her body and back to the floor. My mouth … words would be a compliment to the sounds that fell out of my mouth.

Her feet were just as indecisive. Her hands were luckily occupied with her laundry. Her eyes were… god knows what they were doing. Her breasts were sturdy. That’s maybe not the most attractive way to describe a pair of breasts, but they were the rock of our conversation - the only thing keeping us from jiggling off like two balls of flubber flicked from a slingshot.

Her mouth formed words faster than I could comprehend them. Her British accent, that once seemed cute and exotic, now was frustrating because speed had made it impossible to understand.

We had finished stalling the inevitable end of our socialization with a best of five match of foosball. We had even managed to push it to the fifth game. I had made some very clever revolutionary war jokes that went over her head, and she laughed anyway. (The fact that she played with the red guys and I with the blue was a source of much humor for one of us.) But now, bored with a game neither of us was good at, we struggled to find a follow up activity. The bumbling conversation seemed to last for minutes, if not hours, though I still cannot recall the words that were said. Except one sentence. One horrible sentence that managed to sneak its way through everyone of my filters and hang gently in the ether like a pair of testicles booby-trapped with razor sharp pubes.

“If you want to do something, I could use the company.”

Maybe it’s the fact that I’d just finished “The Catcher in the Rye,” so talking like Holden Caulfield didn’t seem that weird. Maybe it was that I had no idea what I was saying and words were just forming and finding there way into the world. Maybe I am a numbnuts, piece of shit, dumbass, clit-licking, twittering, mother-fucking pussy who was lonely - who wouldn’t have minded the company of a little blonde, boobed, British babe, but had no appealing offer besides myself.

“I’m gonna put my laundry away, then I’ll come back and maybe I’ll have thought of something interesting to do.”

Yeah right. I’ll see you never.

“Sounds good.”

I have many abilities. The ability to compute very difficult math problems in my head. The ability to juggle and strip at the same time. The ability to cry tears on command. The ability to masturbate successfully with my off-hand. But the most important ability I have right now is my ability to hold out hope. I held out hope that she would come back and say “hey, I thought of something very interesting for us to do, and afterward we will go somewhere private and do a little lite fucking.”

The problem was we had departed ways at the top of the stairwell. There was a couch next to the stairwell that faced towards a wall that I could wait in, but sitting in a high-traffic area by myself staring at a wall was even too desperate for me. I could go to the TV room, but that’s a closed room, and she wouldn’t be able to find me. I went back up to my locker, but I had just finished my book, so that wasn't really an option. I did have four books I had bought at the library for a quarter a piece. There was “Tim Allen’s: Never Stand Next to a Naked Man.” While I also feel uncomfortable standing next to naked men, I think my reasons and Tim Allen’s reasons are probably different, and I wasn’t in the mood for a diatribe on homophobia. My next choice was a book by Jerry Falwell. Once again, I wasn’t in the mood for a diatribe on homophobia. The next book was “Magic for Non-Magicians.” How do I explain that choice to the British blondie? “Hey, thanks for coming back so we could do our super-interesting activity. Do we need any money for it? Because there’s a whole wad of it behind your ear! Now for my final trick, I make you regret you ever found me mildly attractive!” My last option was “The Art of Japanese Management.” While the book is a fantastic read, I realized at this point that I am way too into irony.

I walked back down to the common room, hoping nobody realized that I just walked into the dorm room with nothing and left with nothing. I looked through the books in the common room, finding some sci-fi books on whales, and a James Bond rip-off, but I couldn’t bring myself to read again. I could have gotten my laptop, but then everyone would see me walking back and forth between common room and dorm again.

Then I remembered, I still do have my Andy Rooney book. And I realized, I had to wait somewhere where she would find me because we didn’t really set a meeting place. Well I thought of the perfect solution. Irony be damned, I’m reading Andy Rooney down in the dining hall, which she’ll have to pass if she is going anywhere, and she’ll see me, and she’ll not know who Andy Rooney is so she’ll think I’m reading something intelligent, and she’ll have something really interesting to do, and we’ll do it, and then we’ll do it. It’ll be brilliant. Back up the stairs to get my Andy Rooney book, back down the stairs to the smallest table in the dining hall so that no one could talk to me and make BriTanya think I was busy, and down into the seat I sat. And I waited. And waited. I waited for a while. A long while. I started to lose hope.

I thought, “why?” Why do I delude myself into thinking that a hot British girl was going to want to screw me after I told her “I could use some company.”? But I knew why. It was because I already had thought of the best revolutionary war joke to use when we were getting jiggy with it: At some well timed moment, I’d get to say: “The British are cumming, the British are cumming!” That would have been worth all the waiting in the world.

Dane Cook's Looking Old

I went to get pasta from the grocery store yesterday. I didn’t get to the grocery store. I got distracted by the movie theater. Before I got to the movie theater, though I ran into a homelessman and he said; “Can you spare a million dollars?” I run into him every time I go down that street now. And every time he says the same thing. And every time I chuckle. Anyway, I got to the movie theater and saw that “Burn After Reading” was playing.

I went and saw it and was supremely impressed. Not by the movie theatre’s ability to show the movie though. They started it 15 minutes early on a stretched screen, changed it to a weirdly tall screen, stopped the movie completely, made us listen to the opening commercials without being able to see them, started the movie again, realized it was partially playing on the ceiling, stopped the movie again, then finally started it 20 minutes late. While this was a horrendous way to start a movie, I had nowhere better to go. Plus, the movie was incredible - I recommend it to everybody. And, the theater gave us a free ticket to be used within the year.

Well I’m only going to be here for two more nights, so what should I do? I could give it to that homeless guy who asks for a million dollars. Or I could go see another movie the next day. I chose option b because I’m selfish and “My Best Friend’s Girl” was playing. How could I pass up watching Dane Cook for an hour and a half? He’s soooo funny. I’m kidding of course. But I’m also selfish, so I did go watch Dane Cook misogynize on the big screen.

After making these plans – not with anybody, just in my head – this nice girl started talking to me while I was on my computer. We found we were on similar paths and were going to be in the same city again a couple of times. Since there is a small, outside chance that she reads this, I will refrain from talking about her and inevitably coming up with something judgmental or misogynist to say. Instead I will talk about myself. Because, once again, I’m selfish.

I think we all see by now that this story is leading to me being late for the show, and I will call it a show. No, fuck it. I’m calling it a piece of cinema. … I think we all see by now that this story is leading to me being late for the piece of cinema, but what I want to talk about is what I realized in my conversation with the young British lass. What I realized is that there is something horribly awkward about, well, talking to me, but also, first conversations. Especially when you have absolutely no common thread – aka friend or organization. I don’t think I’ve really done it since freshman year of college. What we all do, or at least I do, because I’m selfish, is try to cram as much information about ourselves into the conversation as quickly as possible. Any possible transition point is good enough for us to launch into stories explaining our childhood fear of tall people, or long tirades about the necessity for health care reform in the United States, or deep analysis of the differences between the existential philosophies of Camus and Nietzsche. It comes from fear, but it also comes from confidence.

We all believe ourselves to be the most interesting person in the world, so we love to talk about ourselves - especially when you’ve been unable to communicate regularly with friends for over a week. We also are scared of what other people may be. We want to like people. We don’t want to have to hate people. Yet it’s only once we allow others to express themselves that we truly find if we hate or like them. That’s how we create friendships, or relationships, or catamarans. (Good pun, thanks Nisse)

This is essentially the plot of the movie I just saw. Dane Cook loves himself a lot. Dane Cook realizes that he should try listening to someone else. Dane Cook finds himself with a great relationship and friendship only after he has truly listened.

I don’t think what I have realized is profound. I think it is something we all realize at a very young age. Listening is respectful. I’m not saying that all of us follow this simple proverb, but I think we all know it and try to live our life by it. Dane Cook, or Tank, as his character is named, has to go through this realization in the piece of cinema. Good job, Tank!

The whole piece of cinema I kept thinking, Dane Cook’s looking old. So I imdb-ed it. He’s 36. A 36 year old should not need to realize that being selfish is bad.

I found another thing on imdb. Dane Cook made $9 million in 2007. I think he can spare a million dollars. And the homelessman made me laugh more tonight.

also

I went into this place that had 66 flavors of gelato... and I made flavor 67.
Cum.

I thought of that joke when I left the place, but didn't have anybody to tell it to because my hostel is full of boring 40 year old backpackers who go to sleep at 10.

Sorry, you had to read that.