V Day and some rambling

Valentine's Day exists to remind us how much happy couples suck. Hand-holding, kissy-facing, baby-talking, movie-watching, toothbrush-sharing, fart-in-fronting, inside joke-having, no rubber-wearing, "together forever" motherfuckers who are comfortable with the asshole they lucked into finding.

(Comfort + Having shit in common + a shred of attraction) x Time = Love

I'm sure my ex-girlfriend will spend at least some of her Valentine's Day with Muggsy Bogues' dick in her mouth. I wonder if she gives him the same "my jaw hurts" excuse she gave me. 'Twas bullshit. She just sucked dick at sucking dick. Mine at least. Maybe she would've done a better job if she pretended it was somebody else's.

I'm sorry, but I have this rage/sadness hybrid inside of me that bubbles like the slime in Ghostbusters 2. I don't know why it won't go away. It's like initials carved into a tree. Every time I start to forget I've been replaced and move on, the scab reopens and I have to start all over again. Nights are tough when you know she's not alone. Tonight won't be any easier. Someone suggested I go to one of those oh-so-fucking-clever Valentine's Day "Singles Awareness" functions where mediocre-looking drunk chicks with daddy issues and weight problems hoot and holler and shout edgy shit like, "Love sucks!" while they try to muster the courage to dance on the bar. I'd probably spontaneously combust from attending such a trite little get-together. Then again, this is a trite, anti-Valentine's Day post and I'm still here.

I really hate that fucking show Friends. That has nothing to do with this, by the way.

I wrote something clever the other day:

thinking, feeling
triste at a bar in los feliz
took my insight outside
to hold on to my release

I fear I may work at the gym forever. And yes, I know how crazy I sound, but I'm not writing with my brain right now. I'm writing with that feeling in my stomach.

Time for bed.

Nadir

Washing a plastic spoon for reuse.

Drunk

Home alone
like Macaulay Culkin
dick pointy like ears on a Vulcan
with these foolish words spoken
to a brown-haired girl
I could see the fear in her eyes
when I asked for her number
what a blunder
"Alexis has it," she said
you know life sucks when
alcohol can't numb the rejection
the ejection of my heart
I should expect it
protect it
but I put it out there like
a retard in little league
a tourist in Italy
spit on me
I'm pathetic
depress-ed
how I miss her flat face
like a bullet meant for a president
I'm a resident in this lonely world
lifetime lease
I'm a homely squirrel
staring down the barrel
of failure's shotgun
should I run or should I not run?
A life with words
is a life with your hand
you're your own number one fan
And life tends to happen in this whirlwind
around you
it surrounds you
confounds you
pounds you
you're all by yourself
a cheap bottle of whatever
on
the
bottom
shelf

Post-relationship

I didn't really expand on my current state in the last blog because the title was Pauly Shore's Birthday Party, not Jeff Grapples With Single Life and His Insecurities. So that's what this entry is going to be about.

Right now I'm stuck in that post-relationship period where you begin to realize you're not as appealing as you thought you were, where all the girls you thought you could get turn out to be girls that don't exist. See, when you're in a relationship, every girl that smiles at you, that touches you, that laughs at something you say, is a girl that wants to sleep with you. A could've-had. You tally them up in your head like an invoice and you resent your girlfriend for the ass she's costing you.

When you're free, you realize that a lot of the could've-hads are never-hads. Figments of a well-nourished, pussy-driven imagination. We're all pimps when we're getting laid.

Being in Los Angeles doesn't make things easier. All the money, cars, fame -- they wear you down. After a while you start to feel like Turtle on Entourage. If he wasn't friends with Vinny Chase. The gym is packed with light-eyed, perfect-jawed guys who get paid for being born that way. Yes, most of them are probably gay, but it doesn't matter because women don't default to normal-looking straight guys when faced with handsome gayness. They just lament the gayness.

Some of these guys are straight though, and oh how it hurts when they are.

"Oh, he's beautiful! He is SO beautiful."

Translation: You are not beautiful.

I like to tell myself that these guys have nothing upstairs, no substance, but somehow I think that's a plus in this city. Who needs brains when you can eat sushi and have sex? Possibly without taking your sunglasses off.

Sometimes I catch myself looking in the mirror.

When you're in a relationship it doesn't matter what you look like. Your imperfections are embraced, appreciated. When you're single you feel like your imperfections are holding you back. The same nose that my girlfriend loved is the same nose that may prevent me from meeting the next one.

We're amicable, by the way. Most days we talk. Some days we don't. Some days I'm tempted to delete her number from my phone and never talk to her again. Other days I want to tell her how much I miss her. Sometimes I do.

"I wish you wouldn't say that..."

Me too.

For now I'm the guy at the bar. I aim low for the most part. I hear that I need to be more confident.

"Be like Nathan."
"Nate used to model. His girlfriend is on Nip/Tuck."
"Then be like Nick."
"Nick used to bang his girlfriends' mothers back in high school."

I didn't feel a vagina until 11th grade.

I find myself overanalyzing women. Did she smile to be friendly or did she smile because she's attracted to me and can see herself with me and wants me to engage her in conversation? Did she touch my arm because she likes me or did she touch it because I have a big arm? I'm looking for signals in every look, scratch, blink. She looked at me for a second longer than she needed to. That means she wants sex, right?

I've been told I'm too goofy, too nice. I'm strongly considering not smiling for a week just to see how things go. Maybe I won't say hi to anyone either. Make myself mysterious, you know? Or is that too much? Maybe I'll say hi to every third person. Or just nod at them.

Maybe I should not be myself for awhile.

Pauly Shore's Birthday Party

“Are you Kitty?” I ask, double-fisting a Miller Lite and margarita.
“Yeah!”
“No! I jerked off to one of your scenes the other day!”

I’ve never talked to a pornstar before, so I’m not sure if this compliment is appropriate or out of line. I know I’d be flattered if somebody told me that they jerked off to me:

“Are you Granite Wall?”
“Yeah.”
“Dude, I totally came to one of your scenes the other day!”
“Thanks, man. That means a lot to me. Want me to sign the napkin you blew in?”

Kitty squeals with laughter and covers her face, embarrassed. I think this is funny considering she routinely takes foot-long black cocks in her ass on camera. She’s about 4’11. Tiny, Asian, and looks like a twelve-year-old girl. If you have a dick and internet access you’ve probably seen her. I tell her that I’m a fan and that she’s one of my favorite actresses, even though I don’t have her freeones.com page bookmarked. She giggles and blushes and we take a picture together.

For the next thirty minutes I tell everyone I met an Asian pornstar.

“Who?” Brian, the PT manager, asks. Brian’s tall and reminds me of a cool math teacher (“Bro, I wanna bisect her vertex”). He and I kind of have a friendly, unspoken Asian-getting competition going on. Not because we objectify Asian women, but because we objectify all women.

I point Kitty out.

“You would break her,” Brian says.
“You wouldn’t say that if you saw her movies.”

The Comedy Store is a quiet black building in the heart of the Sunset Strip. It stands out by not trying to stand out. You want to see Dane Cook dance around and shout overly-enunciated words? Go down the street to the Laugh Factory. This place is for people who tell jokes. An indie theater. Not a multiplex.

Pauly Shore’s party is in the main room. The crowd is composed mostly of comedian-looking schlubs (“Hey, have you heard the one about the guy who didn’t get laid…”) and plastic-surgeried bimbos who can barely see over their cartoonish chests. Your standard party songs from your standard rappers boom from tall speakers while overmakeupped barely-legals in slutty black dresses crank and shake and dip onstage like they’re auditioning for “America’s Next Rape Victim”.

Needless to say, I’m digging the motherfucking scene.

I spend most of the night drinking free beer and trying to dance. I feel inadequate in the shadow of Aaron, my light-skinned black friend with a poofy firework ‘fro. Unlike me, he’s able to dance without attaching himself to a girl’s ass. All I can do when I’m alone is hold my drink up, bob my head, and say “Yeah!” I also do something with my fists and shoulders, but I’m not quite sure what the fuck that is.

After I scare off a couple of girls that are feeling Aaron’s infinitely feelable moves, he tells Patrick that I need to work on my game, which is very very true. But Aaron is black. Game-spitting is in his blood. Him telling me I need to work on my skills is like Superman criticizing Joe Public for not being able to burn shit with his eyes.

One of the things that sucks about getting out of a long term relationship is your inability to talk to girls. Once I get past “What’s your name?” and “What do you do?” I’m pretty much fucked. I’m not used to the bullshit-for-pussy barter system. I’ve been getting a free ride for the past five years. And suddenly I’m expected to pay? What the fuck? Where’s the manager?

My friend Annarose tells me the trick is to act like you don’t care, but how are you supposed to do that when your dick is leading the way?

This is something Clarissa never explained.

As the night presses on, I gawk at more girls. Some smile. Some don’t. I overanalyze everything and my insecurities eventually consume me. Living/working/partying in the vapid part of LA doesn’t help things when you’re a semi-attractive gym employee with no money who drives a ’92 Subaru with close to 230,000 miles on it. How can that compete with an ‘08 Bentley? How can my unpartitioned nook in a tiny one bedroom compete with a house in the hills?

You can charm your way into lives out here, but you won’t be taken seriously until there’s something in your wallet.

I see Pauly making the requisite birthday rounds, getting kisses, shaking hands. I hang around his general area until he sees me.

“But Jeff, how the fuck do you know Pauly Shore?”

Well I don’t, really. He’s in and out of the gym all the time and I say hi. The only conversation we’ve ever had was about Wes Craven suing him for water runoff or something (they’re neighbors). I think I called Wes Craven a prick, although I’m sure if I was having the conversation with Wes Craven I would’ve called Pauly Shore a prick. That’s the thing about me: as much as I try not to kiss a celebrity’s ass I always end up doing it.

Pauly recognizes me and gives me an extended, reach-over-a-couple-of-people high-five and a bro-ish hug. I wish him a happy birthday and the party photographers snap a couple pictures of us. Then I get my own picture:


Kiki, a trainer from Northern VA, has a friend that I actually went to high school with. Kiki’s friend tells me that she hears Pauly’s an asshole. I nod and shrug – one of those I-respect-your-opinion-and-semi-agree-with-it gestures that you do when you don’t respect somebody’s opinion or agree with it. But she’s cute and I feel like I have a chance working the nostalgia angle (“Hey, remember when…”). What bothers me about her, other than her sour demeanor and constantly-judging-everything-you-say personality, is her lips. They don’t exist. I have this fear that I’ll fall in love with a girl who doesn’t know how to kiss, who doesn’t have the equipment to kiss. I’m fucking packing in the lip department and don’t want to feel like I’m making out with my palm.

But it ends up not mattering like I thought it wouldn’t because I’m drunk and say this to her:

“You’re my nigga.”
“What?”
“You’re my nig-ga!”

She gets this disgusted look on her face like I just said her breath smelled like a thousand Mexican farts and backs away from me.

“No I’m not.”
“Don’t get mad. I listen to enough rap music where I can say that.”

I then tell her to chill out and not get like the movie Crash on me. I emphasized the “uh” sound. I was friendly when I said it. I may as well have been singing a Tupac lyric. Show me the fucking cross I burned, you know? Later, Patrick makes a good point and says that maybe she’s upset because she thought I was calling her black. Maybe she’s the racist. This is why Patrick is my best friend.

Kitty is on the dance floor with a couple of her friends. I approach her again now that I’m running on fewer inhibitions:

“Kitty!”
Giggles.
“Come dance on stage with me!”

Louder giggles. She covers her face and shakes her head. Keep in mind this is someone who has been videotaped swapping cum. So I pick her up with one arm (about 80 lbs) instead and we take another picture.


I feel powerful holding her, like King Kong. It’s nice when you feel like you can manhandle someone you’d like to fuck.

I think I recognize one of her equally small friends:

“Are you Tia Tanaka?”
“No no no no.” Head shakes.
“Yes she is!” Kitty squeals.

Since I’m kind of fucked up, I don’t know who to believe. On one hand, this girl looks a lot like hot Asian porn starlet Tia Tanaka and she’s hanging out with Kitty fucking Jung, one of my go-to creamers (along with Evelyn Lin). On the other hand, lots of other hot Asian girls look like Tia Tanaka, even a few at the party. She’s off the assembly line, a prototype: beautiful but unremarkable. No flaws, nothing that stands out. I’m sure I could dip inside any given Hollywood club on aZn night and point out twenty Tia Tanakas. I want to call her a liar in a jocular, drunken fashion, but I decide against it because lately I haven’t been watching as much Asian porn as I should. My ex-girlfriend is SoKo and I still get kind of sad when I see petite brown lips being impaled by dicks that don’t belong to me. For all I know, this girl could just be a Fast and the Furious extra. (note: after much early afternoon “research”, I have since discovered it was Tia Tanaka.)

I finish my beer and head outside to shoot the shit with Chris, a trainer (and former Wall Street powerhouse) and Dawn, a membership advisor. She tells me they just saw Dave Chappelle and I immediately head back into Pauly’s party to look for him. Pathetic, right? By no means am I a star-chaser. I’m pretty desensitized, actually. I don’t hound celebrities or ask for autographs or harbor delusions that we will one day be BFFs. I just want to get my picture taken with them so all of my friends back home think I’m the man. I want to be a celebrity by proxy – that guy that gets talked about when a bunch of people are sitting around smoking weed:

“Yeah, my boy Jeff is living out in Cali doing his writing thing. Motherfucker was chillin’ with Jeremy Piven the other night.”
“Who?”
“Dude on Entourage that’s the agent and shit.”
“Ohhh… that’s so cool!”
“I know, right?”
“Let’s go in your room.”

A celebrity-by-proxy proxy hook up. Those probably only happen if Brad Pitt is the lead off.

But I do chill with Piven. Well, not chill. He just comes into the gym sometimes when I’m working and I scan his card and validate his parking and ask the occasional question about Entourage and whatever movie he’s working on.

I see him at the party and wrap my arm around him:

“Jeremy!”
A “who the fuck are you?” look.
“I’m the front desk guy at your gym!”

After a moment, recognition registers. I’m not sure if it’s real recognition or polite, fake recognition, but as long as I can pretend it’s the former I’m cool.

“Oh… Hey.”

I tell him it’s good to see him and let him get back to the girls who want to take celebrity-by-proxy to the next step and fellate his fame staff. I run into him outside half an hour later and he’s nice enough to indulge me and snap a couple pictures. He’s looking away in the first one because my camera is old and takes forever.



I strike up a conversation with the prettiest Piven hanger-on while he chats with comedian Dom Irrera and the good-looking guy from Mad TV.

“Watch out for this guy. He’s an Emmy Award winner.”
“That’s what I hear.”
“What’s your name?”
“(I don’t remember what she said)”.
“I’m Jeff.”
“Nice to meet you.”
“Likewise. What do you do?”
“I’m an entertainment reporter for KTLA. Channel 5.”
“Cool… Are you gonna get a ‘scoop’?”

Thank you. I’ll be here all week.

Dumped

Being in a long-term relationship is like being a passenger on the Titanic. You think of it as this big, indestructible force that's going to sail forever. But all it takes is one crack to bring the whole thing down. While it's filling up with water, you're busy listening to the reassuring words and fancy music. You pay no attention the tilting, the creaking, the rushing sound from below. Things will be okay. They have to be. This is the Titanic. The greatest ship ever.

Bullshit.

The ship is going down. And you're motherfucking Leo.

Five years is a long time to spend with someone, especially when a relationship was never the goal in the first place. But relationships tend to sneak up on you when you think you're just fucking and making jokes. Before you know it, you realize you'd rather have her head on your chest than your dick in her pussy. You care if she comes. Genuinely care. Not because you think your sexual reputation is at stake. You notice her flaws and find her more endearing for them. You want to take care of her and make out with her in the rain, because as shitty as those movies and song lyrics are, they're not so shitty when you have someone you can reenact them with.

Sappy becomes good. When you're in private, at least.

Relationships aren't defined by the big moments, but by the small moments in between. The days spent laying around. The trips to the grocery store. Giving up your last french fry. Her drool on your pillow. The things you take for granted -- the mundane, the inconsequential. Those are the things you miss the most. It sucks when you realize you'll never hear her mumble about work in her sleep again.

Distance does things to relationships. Stretches them. Like a thread of gum clinging to the sidewalk and a shoe-bottom. Everyone told me it wouldn't work, but most people are idiots. Assholes. If you can play to the assholes in this world, if you can lower yourself down to entertain them, then you stand to make millions. Dane Cook is living proof of this, although I'm not sure he's lowering himself.

Anyway, this time the assholes were right. It didn't work. But what surprised me is she ended it. I thought that if anybody was going to end it, it would be me or my ever-curious dick. Not the big-headed Asian girl who paid for everything. I miss her big head. I can't blame her, though. I mean how would you feel if your boyfriend abandoned you for a dream? What if the only time you saw him was when you had enough money to buy him a plane ticket? And you still had to convince him to come see you? And he's got all these pictures of him up on his Myspace dancing and drinking with pretty blonde girls and you're at home in the Tennessee woods eating spaghetti and doing crossword puzzles and falling asleep by ten o'clock on Saturday nights. How would that make you feel?

Yeah. I know.

But this is my blog and I have to say, in my defense, I make eight dollars an hour and pay twice the rent she does and have to work as much as possible to stay afloat. My nights out are earned. And I never ever ever forgot to call.

But distance does things to relationships...

I won't go into details (I know a lot of them), but he was 5'6. Five. Six. His dick was somewhere in between. Physically (and mentally, I'm sure), he's an inferior male, which is a huuuuuuuuge blow to my ego. Take how much the average person with a brain hates Oprah and multiply that by ten. That's a big fucking blow.

The problem with inferior people is they're not so inferior when they're around. They're substitutes. Rental cars. Utilitarian entities. She was lonely and he was in the lab next to hers. He showed her attention and that's what she needed. That's what we all need. She told me she likes him, but when we're lonely we'll like anybody who likes us, as long as they're reasonably attractive and don't smell like shit.

Plus I was the only guy she'd ever been with. That's like eating filet mignon all the time. As good as it is, you get tired of it. Used to it. After a while, you want to know what taco meat tastes like.

I'm not looking forward to hitting the reset button on my sex life. I have to start all over. Test the freak waters again. What if the next girl's not a good kisser? What if she doesn't like to be choked out? What if she's not down to put a finger in my ass? What if she doesn't swallow? And how the fuck am I going to find all of this out without her thinking I'm a fucking pervert? Shit.

Still, sex is ultimately sex. Love is not ultimately love. You can't get the same things back with different people. And it makes me sick to think of trying. Maybe it's still too soon. I don't know. All I know is, my girlfriend and I, we hated the same people. We made made fun of retards together. I could fart in front of her, forbid her to do the same in front of me. We could watch each other sleep. Kiss each other with morning breath. Fuck each other with no condom on and without showering beforehand. I could make the odd slur and not worry about her branding me a racist or leaking a tape to the media.

I could talk to her about anything. And I can't imagine, not in a million years, doing that with someone else. And it feeling the same. Or even near the same. No.

If you read my giving-beer-to-the-homeless blog, you may remember James (my homeless friend) saying that if he could do it all over again he wouldn't give his love to nobody. That way they couldn't put a foot up his ass. I disagree. But then again he's black and homeless and I'm just a white guy who thinks way too much of himself. But still...

One of my coworkers is afraid that her burgeoning relationship is going to end in pain. She's thinking of pulling the plug before she gets in too deep. So I asked her this:

"Would you not get a puppy knowing that it would die someday?"

She said she'd get the puppy. So I told her okay then. Don't pull the plug. Because in essence, that's what relationships are: pets. They start out small and untrained and unbelievably happy, and then they grow and get bigger and wiser and older. They slow down. Stay in a lot. But the love is still there. And there's no need to prove that love because of everything that's come before it. The joy, the pain, the laughter. Times have been had, memories have been made, stories will be told. And you've grown as a person. You're better. Stronger.

And that's why it's so hard to say goodbye. To lay with it for the last time and hold onto it. To wish you could go back in time to when it was a puppy and make things that way forever. But you can't. And those tears flow and burn when you wrap it in a blanket and put it in the ground and shovel dirt on top of it. And you stare at that mound and you make sure it's perfect. You put flowers on it. You visit it every day. And you promise to remember and hold onto the pain.

But the pain eases.

The grave gets dirty. You visit less. The weather beats the mound into flat earth again. And as hard as you try to recall the pain, to make yourself cry, you can only squeeze out a couple of tears.

All you remember are the happy times.

Firsts

My first true love dumped me and I bought antibacterial hand soap for the first time. I never thought either of these would happen.