Oh, except for that “recorded” part.

You see, Bill and I spent an hour or so before the show talking and cajoling, making sure everything was working and sounding good.  It was.  Our conversation was being recorded with great clarity and everything seemed great.  We both recorded the chat so that there would be a backup in case of any problems, because we’re a couple smarties.  When Charlotte came on, we kept talking and had a rip-roaring time.

After we finished, we checked the playback.

On my end, I sounded fantastic.

Nobody else sounded like anything.

On Bill’s end, he sounded fantastic.

Charlotte and I sounded like we were eight miles away talking with soup cans and string.  We hadn’t changed any settings since our trial runs, so we weren’t sure how that happened.

tl;dr we think we have it under control now and will have to try again.  I blame the Internet and its blasted technological gizmogadgets.  I was very upset about this earlier today.  Now I don’t really care.  I didn’t expect this to go off without a hitch.

In the end we still win, because now we get to spend another hour bullshitting with Charlotte.  And as horrible as she is, she’s very entertaining.

The first episode of Things People Do should be available for downloadable joy next Friday, the 25th.  That’s also the day of the month my mortgage is due, so feel free to Paypal us money if you’re impressed.

In the meantime, watch this:

Here’s a quick and silly trailer for my upcoming podcast, Things People Do.  Give it a listen, and while you’re doing that, get your little kicks all pumped up for its majesty that will soon be coming your way.

Things People Do: Episode 1/2: The Trailer

Oh – and the really bad song I sing at the beginning of the show will change with each episode.  I look forward to introducing/insulting the show with many badly-sung musical styles.

I have plenty of fun and exciting news to tell you in mere moments.  Actually it’s just one fun and exciting thing, but I think it’s so super fun and so super exciting and so grand and dandy that it counts for at least six or seven regular, everyday-sized fun and exciting things.  So that makes it hold the water weight of lots of things.  I’ll tell you what it is now.

I’m starting a podcast.

Soon.

I’ve had the desire to do a podcast for a while but I’m too scatterbrained to come up with something that is focused on a particular subject or theme.  I’m not a niche guy and targeting a specific group or idea isn’t something I can mentally handle.  So after months of deliberation and debating whether a podcast was actually a good idea that people would enjoy or just something I’d start and quickly hate and fail to do, I came up with an idea for a show that has structure and focus, but allows for a completely different show and varied subject matter with each episode.  It’s pure groove, and it’s going to be in your heart.

With my proposed format, every episode will be so fresh and beautiful, butterflies will shoot out of its anus and white lacy linen will drape everything it touches.

If you Google Image Search “butterflies shooting from an anus,” the above is one of the first results.  That’s the visual representation of what this podcast will be.  And you, internet people, are that gorgeous field of flowers waiting for me to come suck your blooming stamens with my magic MP3 mouth.

So what is the title of this absolutely incredible-sounding audio experience?  Things People Do.

Here’s why:  Each episode, I will introduce the  show with a unique recorded audio bit, talk about some various things that I’ve been doing (and my co-host, if he ever stops playing Skyrim and making Borderlands cosplay masks so that he can be a co-host), then bring in a special guest.  The special guest will be someone from Twitter or elsewhere on the Internet that I have recently found interesting for one reason or another.  They don’t have to be anyone special or famous or all that unique, but they will be someone who engages in some sort of uniquely interesting hobby or activity or job in their life that they enjoy and want to talk about.  Whether it’s knitting or Minecraft or German board games or cheese making, I’ll have them on for the show and talk about what it is they do.  Since I won’t know anything about most of these subjects, I feel some pretty entertaining banter will occur.  Also, it will make for a unique and fresh and exciting show each week with a different guest talking about a completely different thing.  We can all learn, meet people and be entertained at once.

New episodes will be posted on Fridays.  Not every Friday, because if I intend to do this weekly it probably won’t happen.  But when new shows are recorded, they will go up on Fridays.  It’s a prime day, both because you’re going to just be sitting around at work not doing anything and will need something to listen to, and because the show can dual-purpose as a #FollowFriday for the special guest.  Since I thought they were interesting enough to talk to, you may want to follow them because they are neat.

As Toby Keith and Ben Affleck would say “How do you like me now?”

Actually I don’t think that phrase has much relevance here.

So that’s that.  If you do something unique or fun and want to be a guest on one of the first episodes, drop me an email at saporito [at] gmail.  Don’t be bashful.  And please, don’t think your hobby or job or talent or thing you do isn’t interesting enough for the show.  You like it, others will too.  Give yourself some credit and let’s have a chat.

From grade school through early college, I had a best friend named Scott. We don’t speak anymore due to an argument in 2004 that was mutually stupid and ruined our friendship, but from 1994-2004 we spent almost all of our time together. A real set of chums. I have vastly fewer memories during those years that don’t include him than those that do.

On the weekend of my 18th birthday (July 24, 2003), we took a trip to Ohio. The plans for the weekend were two-fold; meet his then-girlfriend for a day at Cedar Point, and buy a bunch of fireworks since Pennsylvania is lame and doesn’t allow anyone to buy anything bigger than those little chalkdust snakes that creep around and leave black marks on your driveway.

The idea of the trip was totally exciting. This was our first real man-pal voyage to another state on our own. Back then we both worked at a local dollar store, had lots of money because we didn’t have anything to pay for, and gas was $1.17. The trip would be totally unpredictable and uninhibited. The music would be loud. The Arby’s would be eaten. No cares would be had.

We pulled up at the Sandusky, Ohio Red Roof Inn on a sunny Friday afternoon. The 1-story motel’s entrance was in the front near the highway, and the parking areas went thinly across the front and down the sides of the building in a U-shape.

This is it.

We parked the car, a Subaru Impreza hatchback, in a spot along the left side of the building and made our ways inside. The bags were packed light, of course. 18 year-olds don’t require a lot going to an amusement park in Ohio for a weekend. Some shorts, a nerdy t-shirt, clean socks and underpants, deodorant and a toothbrush. Maybe. I like to think I was practicing good oral hygiene then, but really, who can be sure? We dumped all the stuff in the room and since we weren’t going to Cedar Point until the next day, decided we’d go take care of the fireworks aspect of the trip right away.

We didn’t know where a fireworks store was. GPS wasn’t really around yet, and every hotel didn’t offer free wi-fi back then. We were too bashful to ask the desk person where a shop was, but hey, we had all night and gas was $1.17. The decision to drive around aimlessly until we found one seemed like a pretty good plan. Because it was.

Turns out finding a fireworks store in proximity to a major amusement park isn’t much of a challenge. After no more than a few miles, we came upon a massive warehouse of fireworks. A Best Buy-sized structure full of things that go boom. To Pennsylvanians, this is like pulling up to The Sphynx. Except located along a highway in the shadow of the insect and nasty-shit-filled Lake Erie.

We purchased many items, took them back to the car and headed back to Red Roof Inn.

Side note: The irony here is that since “real” fireworks are so unavailable in Pennsylvania, we never wanted to use any of them, because then they’d be gone. I know for a fact right now there is a Rubbermaid bin in my shed with a Saturn Battery inside that I bought on this trip, still unused, 9 years later.

When we got back to the motel, we again parked along the side of the building, right outside our room’s window. We walked around to the front, through the door and down the long hall to our room. I have a few motions I do habitually when coming from/going anywhere, and when we got inside and put all our junk down, I did the rapid ass-pocket-tap of extreme terror as I realized my wallet was missing.

“Please tell me I didn’t leave my wallet at that fireworks store,” I said to Scott. “That would be 100% not where I want it to be.”
He started looking around.
“Maybe it’s in the car,” he suggested.

Since the car was right outside the room window, I instinctively ran over and pulled apart the drapes. There it was, sitting on the pavement outside the passenger door. It must have wiggled out of my pocket when I got out.

Then I noticed the motel garbage man coming up the sidewalk.

“Oh no,” I said. “The garbage man is coming. He is going to steal my wallet if he sees it. Why wouldn’t he? He’s a garbage man.”

I had a very narrow worldview at this point, I’ll tell ya.

I decided at that moment that I needed to get my wallet immediately or the rubbish disposal gentleman would certainly be on his way with it. But with the layout of the motel being how it was, I didn’t have time to go all the way down the hall, out the front door, and around the side of the building before he got there.

Side note: I’m not sure where I thought the motel guy was going to go with my wallet, even if he took it. I don’t believe he’d just abandon his job and trollop off with the $47 I had inside. I was stereotyping this man because of his job and his physical appearance. And that, kids, is wrong.

With no time to get to the car, there was only one decision: climb out the window.

I yanked the cord to get the curtains out of the way and lifted the window. It was about six feet off the ground. The plan was simple and completely logical to the barely 18-year-old mind – jump out the window, get the wallet, come back inside. I stuck my head through and saw the trash man. He was maybe 20 feet away. This had to be done quickly.

I lifted my right leg and put it on the edge of the window frame. Then, somehow, as I moved up my left leg, it got caught on the edge of the window and I started to feel myself lose my grasp. A moment later, I was on my back in the little flower bed underneath the window – which was mulched with lava rocks, by the way.

But that’s not the best part. The best part is that upon impact, as soon as my body contacted the lava rock-covered ground, I pooped my pants.

Pooped them.

Pooped them good.

I started laughing hysterically, somewhat from pain, somewhat from disorientation as I wasn’t sure how I managed to stumble and fall from a first-floor window, and completely from my awareness that I’d just shat myself in the flower bed of a Red Roof Inn in Sandusky, Ohio to try and rescue my wallet from a trash man.

A trash man who, I must add, walked right past this entire scene, my wallet, and the shrieks of uncontrollable laughter coming from Scott in the room without acknowledging any of it. He was totally zen with his waste removal.

After I was done being blindsided by what just happened, I picked my squishy self up and grabbed my wallet. I tried to act as comfortable and normal as possible as I re-entered the motel and passed the front desk. I smiled awkwardly while still laughing at myself, pretending to adjust something in my pocket to disguise the weird way I was walking.

When I returned to the room, I was surprised Scott hadn’t shit himself with how maniacally he was laughing. He didn’t stop for a solid two hours, long after I cleaned up. Good thing clean underpants were part of what I packed. Otherwise our next trip would have been to find an underwear store. And that’s not nearly as fun, because we have those in Pennsylvania.

Either this picture is old, or they still have the same comforters they had in 2003. *gross*

I sometimes like to refer to this story as “Two guys check into a motel in the middle of the afternoon and leave a pair of poop-covered underwear in the trash.” I enjoy thinking about what that was like for the cleaning crew the next day. Unless they were zen like the trash man and didn’t even notice.

So that’s how I spent my first day as a legal adult – taking a road trip, buying fireworks, and pooping my pants falling out of a six-foot-high window.

How was your 18th birthday?

Then we do this and everything is okay.

I also have many pseudo-garbage cans all stuffed with stiff booger paper constructs. The floor of my car. The empty paint can in the garage. The pockets of the jeans I wore last Sunday and will forget to empty so the tissues shred into 15,000 pieces in the laundry. The end of April is a privilege all allergy sufferers get to endure annually. It kicks off a season of thorough snot-soaked living. Folks like me are never without a season where our allergies suck, but springtime offers a special kind of suck. Especially when it’s 74 outside one day and 31 the next, as has been the case in Pittsburgh.

I started getting allergy shots at the ripe age of 3. The only effect they had making me look like I had incredible triceps for a preschooler as my arms were continually swollen from being poked with an allergen needle. When I finally punched someone and they thought they had been graced by a gentle breeze, my secret was out and everyone realized my muscles were nothing but inflamed body parts. I got the shots for two years and we decided they were proving ineffective. I had amassed a pretty good collection of stickers and lollipops by then, but that was all the trips were good for.

Move forward 22 years to winter 2010. I’d taken every medicine available, used every nosespray, tried every herbal remedy and magic potion. Benny Hinn hit me on the forehead and Miss Cleo told me to become one with the plants. Nothing worked. I decided to try allergy shots again. An appointment was made with a doctor who looks like a sloppy Joe Manganiello.

“I figured it’s been over 20 years, there must be some advancements in allergy shot technology by now,” I said to him.
“Not really. They’re still pretty much the same idea,” he said. “But you may be more responsive to them now.”

Oh good. They did the prick test for 36 different allergens. I responded to 34 of them. Everything but dogs and one variety of mold. And the dog thing isn’t even true, because I have a real hard time asthma-wise in the presence of dogs aside from the few breeds on the allergy-friendly list, like my poodle and schnauzer.

Obviously it didn’t work this time either. I started coming for injections twice a week. They had to do two vials since they can’t fit all the things I’m allergic to into one. I did this through the end of July (about 8 months) and only felt worse. I didn’t receive a single sticker or lollipop. The summer was horrendous. The day I stopped coming was the best I’d felt in 2011.

I think what they inject you with is just pee.  Then the doctor giggles in his office and eats lunch with your co-pay.

I just realized I don’t really have an ending for all this. The point is that there’s not much I can do about it, and I’m filled with boogers. You probably are too, so maybe I’m hoping you read this as you sneeze or wipe your nose on the underside of your t-shirt when you think nobody is looking.

Because you do that. I know you do.

Keep on blowin’.

If you didn’t yet read Part I, here you go.
Then read Part II.

In 2008, I wrote a mini story inspired by a kid I used to know named Keith.  He was really odd, would spit on himself during study hall, had very strange views of the world and America, was generally gross and unappealing and said his greatest ambition in life was to become homeless.  I considered myself his friend and talked to him regularly, but wasn’t unaware of his quirks and the impressions of him held by most of the student body.  What I wrote was largely fabricated, but it actually was inspired by a real-life guy who really did spit on his trousers during school and dream about being a hobo.

“Keith, good to see you. Take a seat, “ said the school guidance counselor. He was your typical guidance slack, unfit to pilot his own life let alone anyone else’s. Mid thirties, a painting of some dinghy at sea, a wooden plaque telling humankind he has a Master’s degree in being as useless as a bent umbrella at a mid-Atlantic shipwreck.

“I’m sure it’s good to see me,” I said.

“Keith, I have heard some things,” he began. “I’ve been informed of some rather unusual behavior you’ve been exhibiting during your study hall period.”

I told him I promise to stop throwing pencils at the ceiling.

“Not that,” he said.

“Oh, oh, oh, I won’t bring my jar of jelly there anymore either. Sorry. I wasn’t aware it bothered anyone. It’s just I get so hungry and it’s so…”

“Not that either,” he corrected me a second time.

I guess he means the other thing.

“The spitting.”

Yep, he meant the other thing. And here I thought maybe we could end this with a misdemeanor charge of out-of-bounds jelly.

“Why do you do that?” he asked.

A good question with a good answer.

“I want to be homeless,” I said to him.

“That’s not a good answer.”

His unibrow arced toward his nose, shapedlike a breadstick with a bite out of the center.

“Why would you want to be homeless?” he said.

I assumed he doesn’t often deal with students who engage in orally soiling their own clothes.

“I just want to live for myself,” I said.

“How does spitting on yourself and being homeless get you to that end?” he said. “You have many more opportunities, many more, by being successful, having a job, living in a home, and being with your family.”

I told him that isn’t true.

I told him his idea of success is material. It’s stuff. It’s fabricated. It’s plastic and wood and made in China.
I told him homelessness is freedom and fight.
I told him homelessness is sovereignty of man.
I felt like I was quoting someone to sound intelligent. I probably was.

“Success is being proud of each day. Proud of yourself, not proud of how others see you.” I said to him. “To you, your job, your bank account, your picture of a boat, that’s success. If someone else wakes up and says ‘today I want to eat a cupcake and pick a dandelion’ and they do it, that’s success to them.”

“True, but cupcakes and dandelions don’t give you the necessities of life,” he said. “Society doesn’t care if you eat cupcakes or pick dandelions.”

“I don’t want society to care,” I said. “I want to live for myself, not for society. Homeless people only have one thing to worry about – fending for themselves. Where to eat? Where to sleep? It It changes necessity. It takes all the crap we think we need and returns it to what’s literal. How can you live for yourself more than that?” That’s what I argue. He buys it like a broken lamp.

“That’s one way of looking at things, and it’s all well and good to say that. But it’s not realistic, and it’s bullcrap.” Years later, he’d end up being right.

I told him I disagreed.

A crisp spit spot on my pants where I recently dazzled an audience caught his eye. I gazed, somewhat transfixed, at the blue betta fish swimming laps around the three-inch plastic bowl on his desk.

“Keith,” he said, breaking my stare, “what do you do for fun?”

I told him I spit on myself, and the conversation circled around a few more times. Banter around and around for the sake of argument. Just like that fish on his desk.
I thought, he’s supposed to make a difference in people’s lives, but he doesn’t want to listen.
I thought, he doesn’t want to understand.
I thought, he doesn’t actually want to help.

“Keith,” he said.
His betta fish swam to the top of the bowl.

“Keith,” he said.
I realize it’s not simply a blue fish, but it has red on its underneath.

“Keith,” he said.
“Are you planning to go to college?”

As I always say, wiener science is interesting science!

Well, I don’t always say that. I might start.

There are a lot of preconceptions about male fertility tests. Everyone wonders what goes on in those mysterious little rooms. What sort of stuff do they have in there? Is there really stuff in there at all? Let me tell you, internet people. Let me tell you about my experiences with wiener science.

Side note: Back in high school, my friends and I used to challenge each other to sneak little “easter eggs” into our papers on Homer or Twain or whatever. We’d try to do things like use the word “doobie” four times in a paper about the blindness motif in the Oedipus plays, or see how many times we could call Tituba “buxom” when discussing The Crucible. Today’s game: keep repeating “wiener science.”  It’s the most adult way to talk about the subject anyway.

Laura and I haven’t succeeded at making baby people, so we’ve both been put through the battery of tests to figure out what’s going on. After soiling two plastic cups, having my blood extracted and receiving a finger in the bum, I’m more or less cleared of terrible issues.

The first test didn’t involve a lot of mystery. It was done at a hospital not too far from home, so I was able to bring my sample to the office, drop it off, and leave. That analysis was followed up by an appointment with a urologist who decided I’d get my first prostate exam early in life, then ordered me to get some blood taken and do a second swimfan analysis. This one would be done at a bigger, baby-making hospital and they’d collect on-site.

On-site?! How exciting this news was! I’d get to find out the truth of what goes on in those little rooms. I was jazzed. Even though I had to leave work early for the appointment, drive all the way into the city, get out of the city and hopefully not get lost or stabbed or mugged in the process, I was excited to find out how this really went down.

My co-workers had plenty of questions and comments, which they verbalized with a great deal of reluctance:
“I’ve always wondered what was in those rooms.”
“How long will you, you know, stay in there?”
“Do they give you… materials?”
“Won’t it be weird knowing that the nurses know you’re in there, you know…”

Most ideas people have about these facilities are based on TV or movies, which are seldom accurate representations of anything. Turns out, this time they weren’t too far off.

I arrived at the fertility office, checked in and sat down. After a couple minutes of being forced to watch The Doctors on TV perform some sort of weird eye surgery, which grossed me out completely, they called my name and I was supposed to go get aroused.

“You’ll fill this out once you’re done. You’ll put your collection cup in the bag. One label on the cup, one on the bag. Turn the light off and leave everything in there. All you’ll bring back to the front is this.”

She handed me a key.

“Go down the hall. Make a right at the end, it will be the second door on the left. It’s labeled Private A.”

The hallway was about a mile long. There was office after office and exam room after exam room. There is a lot that can go wrong with a lady’s baby-making bits, and they had enough rooms here to check two dozen women at once. As I walked down, the only man in sight, I knew that every person there was aware of where I was headed.  Finally I made it to the end of the hall and made a right. This hall was also long, and the second door on the left was another 50 steps. They really tuck us gents away to do our thing.

I visually checked Private B to see if the light was on. It wasn’t. This made me happy. I didn’t want to be that close to another… occupied room. A nurse was coming down the hall just as I was keying my way into Private A. I looked at her and half-smiled a friendly acknowledgment, unsure of what facial expression was appropriate to don as my mind scrolled lighted banners of “SHE KNOWS WHAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO DO IN THERE.” I decided to focus my attention on the door handle instead. Unlock, turn, enter, close, lock.

And then all questions about wiener science were answered.

There’s a sink and a toilet, like any room in a hospital. Then there’s a small couch, a table with a clock, a television, and a stack of not-so-literary publications. Also, a semi-erotic painting hung on the main wall for men most aroused by restaurant-quality acrylic art prints.

The idea of touching any of these items was horrendous. Who knows how many wiggle-covered fingers had made contact everything in there. A giant couch-sized paper towel was provided for me to cover the seat, but the previous visitor’s cover was still in the garbage can. This disturbed me further. The rest of the room looked appropriately turned-over since the last guest checked-out, but I didn’t understand why that was still there. Despite not wanting to touch anything or breathe too deeply, I touched everything. I decided it was all important to the experience. And for the blog. That’s right. I’m a germophobe and I touched lots of stuff with penis all over it just for you. YOU. And wiener science. (Getting tired of it yet?)

After taking the lid off the cup, I turned on the television. A DVD immediately started spinning but nothing appeared on-screen. I realized the last user was TV illiterate and had it on the wrong input source. I changed it to DVD input and quickly saw several individuals copulating with rather audible vigor in what looked like an industrial warehouse with lots of yellow and pink lighting. At this point I heard talking coming through the wall and realized I wasn’t in the most soundproof of rooms. The volume was turned down.

They had the Lindsay Lohan issue of Playboy and a couple Penthouses.

Here are some photos I probably wasn’t legally allowed to take:

When the wiener science is done, you’re instructed to put your collection cup in the provided paper bag like you’re preparing a field trip lunch for a cervix. You leave everything in the room and bring only the key back to the main desk. Once I made it back through the labyrinth of rooms to return the key, as my luck would have it, there were about 15 women all standing in the reception area having a staff meeting. They stopped their discussions when I walked up to return my key to Private A, and my mind began scrolling lighted banners of “THEY KNOW WHAT YOU JUST DID IN THERE.”

I set the key on the counter and tapped it with my fingers, hoping I didn’t have to say anything.
“Thank you!” the girl said cordially, firing the key into a little box as if I’d just done her a favor. Oh, you’re welcome darling. You’re welcome.

You be good to my children now, ya hear?

So that’s the reality of wiener science. I took the elevator back to the first floor with a mixed sense of shame and pride, validated my parking garage ticket, went back to the car and headed home. Now I wait for results.

Oh, and if you’re ever in the area and have some free time, it costs $4 to masturbate into a cup in Pittsburgh hospitals, provided you’re in and out in less than an hour. A little tip from your friend Jeff Saporito.

In 2008, I wrote a mini story inspired by a kid I used to know named Keith.  He was really odd, would spit on himself during study hall, had very strange views of the world and America, was generally gross and unappealing and said his greatest ambition in life was to become homeless.  I considered myself his friend and talked to him regularly, but wasn’t unaware of his quirks and the impressions of him held by most of the student body.  What I wrote was largely fabricated, but it actually was inspired by a real-life guy who really did spit on his trousers during school and dream about being a hobo.

Walk past red lockers, up some steps, past more red lockers, make a right. Eighth period was English. Pick a chair. Sit down. Await the arrival of The Conch, the million-year-old genius of a teacher, unfailingly accompanied by his trusty aluminum flask buried in the breast pocket of his primordial plaid shirt. First things first, he would reach for a sip.

“What do you have in there every day, Conch?”

“It’s tea,” he’d say. “Don’t ask again.”

Named after the shell of the same name, Conch’s favorite literary character was Piggy from Lord of the Flies. He loved this book so much he read it aloud, in its entirety, to his classes of 12th grade AP English students each year as if they were kindergartners. And without juice boxes and sugar cookies, everyone slept, letting Conch wax idiotic and entertain himself in an alcoholic stupor at the front of the room. He also had an extraordinary affection for the work of Geoffrey Chaucer and the heroic tales of 14th-century Middle English combatant Sir Gawain. It was believed that he lived alone in a small house with minimal lighting, one aging cat, and approximately three hundred infinity zillion hardback books.

“We have a partner exercise to do today…” he started, a whispering symphony of “crap” following from the students. “The goal is to sum up your personality, your essence, the way you see the world, in three sentences. The second goal is to sum up how you see those same things in your partner in three sentences.”

These were the clever in-class assignments Conch let loose once a week to give the impression he cared so he can get back to reading to himself.

Conch let us know he was taking the liberty of picking our partners. Most students hated when teachers did this, as it forced them to participate with people outside their comfy little cliques. I didn’t normally care, as I didn’t particularly like anyone, making it all the same. On this particular occasion, as luck, or uninhibited wickedness would have it, I got paired up with Citrus girl, the fruit-scented cousin of the pencil throwing bronze medalist from study hall.

She walked over to my desk smacking the blue gum in her mouth like those little white teardrop sacks of gunpowder you throw around on the Fourth of July. I already wanted to punch her in the ear.

“Hi again. If we’re doing this, I’m gonna need to borrow a pencil or pen or something,” she said.

“Big Boy get all yours stuck in the ceiling?” I asked, knowing full well he did.

“Yeah, actually,” she said, shocking me to the core.

I handed her a Bic and pulled out a ragged slip of yellow legal pad paper, the closest thing to a notebook I carried. I didn’t see a great deal of importance in taking notes. Just about everyone took them, and just about everyone never looked at them again once they crossed the threshold of the classroom door a handful of minutes later. I figured I’d save my wrists.

Three concise sentences to describe Citrus.

The paper I handed her had dried jelly on the corner.

I wrote with less readability than a Pakistani doctor lying on the roof of a moving train. Only a pharmacist or a Navajo windtalker could read my scribble.

Three concise sentences to describe myself.

Done. Exchanged.

I told her to not get too excited and self-indulgent, as I didn’t bother to write anything about her, aside from the word “boob” three times.

“Why not?” she asked.

I explained to her it’s because we didn’t need to dance with superficial compliments. She didn’t need her ego fueled through classroom exercise. She got enough of that on a regular basis from everyone else.

“Whatever,” she said and her attention to the rest of the sheet. “Um…”

Her eyebrows snaked into a peculiar shape of curiosity. Apparently she reached the three sentences describing myself. And managed to read it, no less.

1. Homelessness   
2. American   
3. Dream

If it hasn’t been made obvious by now, I was actually quite shy. When I walked through the halls, I bonded with the wall, drawn by a magnet of timidity. I slipped past the gangs of people, talking about hair gel and boys and girls and math tests.

My pants were long and you couldn’t see my shoes. I kept my head down. I was a shadow.

Normally I didn’t talk very much. Normally nobody wanted to hear from me anyway. But for some reason, Citrus wanted to pry.

“You want to be homeless?” she asked.

Of course I do.

——————————————————

The average lifespan of a school cafeteria lunch sack is 1.1 days. Most people trash their bags every day, while a handful may have taken it home for one refill before basketball tossing it into the large grey cylinder of death. Not me, no sir. Thursday was day four for one particular sack, as it started to show its age. Why throw away a perfectly strong bag? Surviving day after day is not easy, even for a bag – especially for a bag – and for that reason, I helped it out. Tape over the rips and holes, help to keep the thing together. Sure, bags wear out eventually… but it’s worth forcing them to hold on as long as possible.

Why? It was a metaphor.

It’s life, and it’s ripping faster than you can tape it.

Lunch was an illustrious event. Jelly on bread. Grape jelly is the best flavor of all the jelly options available. In my opinion, there is a damn good reason it is the customary jelly flavor. That is not to take anything away from strawberry, raspberry, and all the other fantastic choices. It’s just that grape is the standard. It’s orthodox. And it’s just swell. And all jelly is superior to jam. I’m not even sure why jam exists. It’s that whole capitalist mentality – selling the same thing twice in two different fashions to make double the money. Like when you order pizza and they offer you breadsticks with marinara sauce as a side dish. That’s a goddamn pizza, separated. And as for preserves and fruit spreads… don’t even get me going. That’s pushing it.

As I ate, my peers stared at my taped bag, plain bread and jelly sandwich and made their assumptions. They all wondered why I ate alone. They all wondered why I was so creepy. They all wondered why I didn’t mind being dirty. And they each cast their stones. It didn’t help that a few minutes prior I provided them a vehicle with which they could drive their jeers.

What happened before lunch is I rather cogently plowed into a fat girl clonking down the building’s main staircase. Albeit an unintentional act, I slammed into her with a fine bit of gusto, somehow peripherally missing her mattress-sized book bag that could have been transporting a family of Nicaraguans, only to have her shout “fuck off, druggie!” for the nearby gaggle of fellow students to witness.

I’d never done drugs in my life.

Citrus had also asked if I was a druggie after I told her I wanted to be homeless. Apparently if you’re not spending every waking hour playing with laptops, buying new jeans, listening to hip hop or throwing footballs, you are a druggie. These things made the other people better. It made them superior. It gave them the ability to keep pretending they had no problems. They didn’t have to try and understand me or think for themselves. I was just just the queer. The radical. The witch in the village.

Lunch ended. The bag didn’t. After a few pieces of tape, it would be ready for another day.

I suppose that up to this point, I’ve been ignoring a handful of rather crucial facts about my behavior. Earlier I promised to address the presence of stains on my pants.  Let me fill in some big gaps in my character with one all-encompassing statement:

When I was young, at the time we’re examining right now, I used to spit on myself.

Hence the grossness. Hence the crusty pant stains. Hence the people thinking I was on drugs, the self-inflicted solitude, and the three personal essay sentences.

I would spit on myself.

I did have a rationale, a raison d’être, well, at least I did at the time… and I’ll tell you what it was.

I didn’t want to find myself a materialistic glutton, chained to a kitchen table, limp, my lifeless face masked by a plate of moldy spaghetti, with Morgan Freeman tisk-tisking over my rotting shoulder. People are forced into doing work they don’t want to do just so they can buy all the same garbage and wait for the next advertisement to tell them what they want. I wanted to be the one guy with the decisive goal to become homeless. A revolutionary anarchist. Becoming voluntarily homeless is the best way possible to stick it to everyone.

Sticking it. What a concept.

So they saw me as a freak, a crazy person, a radical, a slob… and that was all very well. Not only were my pants from a second-hand store, they were unwashed, stained and stinky. And for all the above is why, on every normal day, I heard these shouts echoing off the jagged red brick study hall wall every ten minutes or so, passing through the teacher’s looming cloud of authoritative indifference, parking itself safely in my obedient ear.

Freedom time for the slaves.

They’d say, “Hey Keith, spit on yourself!”

They’d say, “Spit on your pants!”

And I’d always be happy to oblige. I did spit on my pants. And I did it well.

My saliva was the Gettysburg Address.

They thought I was a freak show. But getting off on me spitting on myself means they enjoyed it, and they wish they had the stones to do the same. That’s what I thought. Obviously. A freak became God. Everyone spends their high school years troubling over their image, figuring out who they are, trying to categorize himself or herself, trying to invent a person they can tolerate. I was doing the opposite.

“Come on, spit on your pants!” They’d ask for it.

Every time, the room fell silent. The giggling gang of giddy girls turned to hush. I couldn’t help but contort my face into a wicked smile when I looked at them, their eyes set on me as if transfixed, waiting, watching, wondering. I was Hannibal Lecter before munching a guy’s eyeball like a cheese cube. The longer I stared at them, the longer they’d presume about how insane I was.

I procrastinated. They got antsy.

Antsies in their pantsies.

And then, at the crescendo of my perverted performance, I would send a long bubbling saliva noodle flowing down to the thigh of my already spit-stained-four-sizes-too-big corduroys.

It was Juneteenth in study hall.

I brought them into my world, and they didn’t even know it.

I was a hero.

I was Moses.

We all briefly escaped this place, and I showed them the way. I transformed from a depraved boy to a spiritual leader. I had rewritten history, redefined the laws separating civility and depravity, and it all passed by.

You must admit, though – it had its sick respectability. The freedom to live one’s life the way one wants. To do the things one wants to do without fear of persecution, without judgment, without ignominy or lament. The ability to choose every action and be proud of the consequence, because it’s what you wanted to do. That’s the idea behind life, right? That’s why we’re all here?

I remember rather well a conversation that soon followed. It is the conversation that eventually led to my departure from my home. The conversation that would encourage me to become homeless for real. At least for a little while…

The first episode of any program is a little awkward.  It introduces characters, plots, attempts to summarize what the show is going to be about, sets up the feel and style it will have, and has to do all these things with interesting and captivating writing so you’ll be entertained enough to stick around for more.  It doesn’t always work out.  Mad Men did a pretty swell job.  Show me Draper, show me Sally.  Bring in Peggy, bring in Pete.  Let me stare at Joan.

A little bit into the pilot, we were introduced to the character of Ken Cosgrove.  When this human came onto my television, I found myself staring at him with question in my mind.  Who is this fellow, I kept asking myself?  At first I thought he was Teddy Sears (the big tall blonde fellow from Torchwood, Raising the Bar, Dollhouse).  But he wasn’t.  His face was completely recognizable to me, but I couldn’t place him or figure out why.  Despite the fact not being able to come up with his identity was driving me mad, I prefer to force my brain synapses to fire and scuffle through the back rooms of my mind before I settle on IMDB and look them up the easy way.  Such practice may be like digging a hole with a spoon when you have a shovel, but it increases the sense of accomplishment in the end.

Then I figured it out.

Anyone who watches Mad Men and is familiar with Xbox gaming knows where I’m going here…

He’s f’in Cole Phelps from LA Noire!  I’ve never seen anything else he’s done, but that was the thing that made this realization so different and rad.

A real digital person!

I spent a lot of hours driving around the streets of L.A. in the 1940s with this guy, thwarting criminals all the way from traffic to homicide and back again.  And the fact that I was able to recognize the real-life man (Aaron Staton) after only ever seeing a video game rendering of his person is something that is totally awesome to me.  LA Noire’s gameplay puts tremendous focus on facial features and representation, and my experience only proved what a success it was at that.  It made me realize really just how far we’ve come with graphics and rendering, and made me even more excited to see how far we’ll be able to go.

Thanks, technology. You’re neat!

Twice since then, I’ve started translating that very short third-person piece into a longer first-person story.  Twice I’ve failed to get past what looks to be about 10,000 words done before running out of direction.  Despite that, I’ve always found the character of Keith to be very interesting and have enjoyed how I started his tale.  It’s never been publicized anywhere, so maybe with some feedback from others I’ll gain some new inspiration.

So here we go – the first of a few hunks of one of the versions (I think this is the 3rd rewrite) of Homelessness and Spitting.  It’s rough and mildly edited, so don’t be a grammar douche.  And sorry, you’ll have to wait until the next bit before he starts sending the long, bubbly saliva noodles to his knee.

High school was an interesting time.

One morning, the famous sign in front of the Methodist church by my house said “Hot out there? Come on in. We’re prayer conditioned.”

An hour later, broadcasting from the steel wall-mounted open mouth of the school PA system, a tinny voice told the school’s morning announcements and informed the student body the assistant principal would be out all week suffering from heat stroke.

Four grueling hours later, I found myself in seventh period study hall. This was the crown jewel of my day.

A high school study hall is the exact opposite of its name. Studying is the last thing you’ll find anyone doing. It is a boiler room, metallic and rigid, pipes and pistons moving, steaming from its joints with controlled mischief. This particular study hall, which operated every day from 12:30-1:11pm, took place in the school’s only auditorium-shaped room with stadium seating and a movable wall.

All the kids sat on one half of the room. The loudmouthed boys tried to impress the girls by flipping pencils at the ceiling and hoping they stick, while the girls tried to impress the boys by not giving a shit.

The ceiling was yellowed and tacky. The air ducts were dirty. There were red brick walls.  This is all endlessly fascinating, no doubt, but are actually the only few scarce details I remember about the setting.  Aside from how the bottoms of the chairs held secret canvases, concealing years of multi-colored chewing gum art, like a gallery of oil paintings easily hidden beneath the anuses of indifferent teenagers. All shapes and sizes of gum, with varying degrees of softness and hardness, fading and consistency, chew patterns, teeth marks, points and valleys, based on a combination of both the length of chewing the gum underwent before sticking and the age of the particular piece. Van Gogh’s lilies, Degas’s ballerinas, they were all there, chewed up and spit out with perfection.

Everyone sat on one side of the room.  I sat on the other, pressed up against the wall with a lap-mounted textbook  Back then, I was a hunched-over, slippery, blue-eyed kid with an Amish woman’s skin color, a crooked mouth and a mane the color of muddy Pepto Bismol. On Thursday, I’d still wearing Monday’s clothes… crummy Airwalks, an oversized plain black, non-branded hoodie and old jeans.

My pants were always covered in a cocktail of stains.

One day, a badly-flung standard wooden pencil piloted itself in my direction, striking me tip-down near the temple. Some girl came over to pick it up, bending at the waist and reaching down by my side where the instrument ended its expedition. She smelled of fruit and wore pink. Her hair was a blonde mess, a puddle of spaghetti with two plastic clips in the back, her butt too big for her height. She was plastered with that shimmering, glittery lip gloss girls slather on their mouths like they’re prepping to hang wallpaper. I slouched.

 “Sorry,” she said, as I glared at her like a hawk watches trout swimming in clear water.

“Oh, I didn’t throw this,” she said. “My cousin did. Over there. He’s an idiot.”

I looked over at her easily identifiable meathead of a cousin, laughing like a moron, acting hardy and cool so the girls would still think he’s incredible after such a terrible, reputation-murdering pencil toss. His flexed biceps spilled from the tiny, cuffed sleeves of his yellow douche polo. He pointed at me with insult in his eyes, as if to say, “Sure, I’m such a moron I can’t even throw a pencil. But muscles, man, MUSCLES! And look at that kid!”

“He sure is,” I told her.

The toxic blonde sitting next to him, apparently his girlfriend du jour, giggled like a bimbo and grabbed hold of the bulging bicep of his other arm, as if to say, “Yeah, you showed that kid! You’re so tough and cool and dangerous. I forgive you for that bad pencil throw.” (Later that day they would make out in a car behind K-Mart.)

I turned back to the fruity, short, shiny girl and stared at her awkwardly, allowing the reputations of the king and queen of all awesomeness to live on.

“Anyway… yeahhhh. Bye.” she said, twirling the pencil as she stood to leave, back to her rightful place on the popular side of the room.  Back with Biceps and Toxic Blond and all the other idolized kids who would grow up to define the fields of used car sales and the janitorial arts when their attractiveness turned on them by age 20. I watched her hand the pencil back to her cousin.

As I resumed my usual routine of pretending to look at my school books, my mind started to wander.

Some people’s minds wander with ways to improve our lives, to win awards or to invent marvelous life-saving creations so the world will be a better place. Some people concern themselves with politics and religion, burying themselves in discussion and forming grounded stances on issues that concern society and morality. Some people spend their days buried in the happenings of newspapers or journals, discussing the things that are developing around town and around the world, talking with others about their super important plans or things they could do to lower their carbon footprints. Some people spend all their time figuring out ways to drop a belt size or exercise until they’re the size of a truck.

Some people care about those things.

I think about what type of bread would best be suited to roll down a hill.

I think about the round sourdough white vienna. A spherical loaf with a hard exterior topped with a criss-cross pattern much like a car tire. It’d certainly be a good rolling loaf, well suited for a long journey after a graceful toss down a smooth residential road.

I think about the Jewish challah, a durable exterior spattered with poppy seeds, woven tight like an eight year-old girl’s pony tail, yet long and clumsy. It’s a loaf only good at rolling down the steepest of inclines, it would require enough torque to muscle over its oblong shape, likely rolling much like a human body rolls down a grassy hill.

Dinner biscuits, certainly a fantastic rolling bread. We call them rolls for a reason, and they are well-suited for a bread race.

The poor flat-bottomed ciabatta, I think not. Much too… flat… on the bottom.

Focaccia or Indian naan? Get out of here.  Those are frisbees, not rolling breads.

Some people are concerned with energy or economics. Others with stock portfolios, studying market fluctuations or performing savvy interpretations of financial patterns. The worst are focused on changing others’ opinions, attempting to convince others their point of view is the only point of view. They are the dangerous types.  Not me.  I’m busy picturing bread rolling down the road.

I don’t have the energy or interest to think about the environment, global warming or Al Gore documentaries. I’m not interested in the NBA or MLB or NHL, ESPN or any other athletic acronyms. My mind is busy with bread.

A bagel would certainly roll well, so long as it stays upright like a wheel. Once it falls, it’s over with.

A french boule would be about as practical as the white vienna, with strong rolling characteristics.

Monkey bread looks like it’d work, but its softness may cause problems and force slow acceleration, plus it could pick up stones and other junk, which would lead to an inevitably premature halt.

If you’re in the mood to try rolling a pumpernickel or baguette, well, don’t even waste your time.

 Imagine a bread roll-off competition with a bunch of people hanging out at the top of a street, all about to roll a loaf down the road. Deciding what loaf to bring to ensure a victory would depend on tons of factors: the steepness of the hill, the quality of the pavement, the weather conditions and the freshness of the bread, just to name a few. A less round loaf may be fine on a steep hill, but not if there are a lot of cracks that could throw off its roll and cause it to end up flat in the grass. A soft loaf may tear up if the road is damp, becoming little more than bread shreds well before the finish line. And choosing a bread itself isn’t the whole battle.  Once you decide on a bread, you’d have to think about how to physically throw it to achieve maximum roll distance. Too tough a throw could cause it to skip and run off the street. Too gentle a throw might force an early stop. A side-arm throw could start off well, but add spin that would lead to running off course. Maybe you’d want to pretend you’re in the 1920s and hit a loaf down the road with a stick, much like your grandfather did with a hoop when he was young. Maybe not. It’s just something to consider. Couple bread type with propulsion style and the point is there’s more to everything than its surface implies, and a multitude of combined variables are usually necessary to examine. Even with the seemingly mundane.

These are the thoughts that occupy my mind.

This contemplation was interrupted by a dead-raising scream of pride as Biceps successfully impaled his third yellow, wooden, Scan-Tron certified No. 2 popularity booster in the bull’s-eye of a ceiling water stain directly north of his massive, hollow skull. His accomplishment was followed by “ooohhh yeah, suck a fat one!”

Nice.

Though can I really judge this doofus?  Back then, I never showered because I felt there was something more purifying, more magical, about three-hour baths in luke-warm water.  A ritualistic daily baptism.  This was the same me who kept a jar of jelly in my book bag.  For snacks.  What the hell made my ridiculous ideas any more reasonable than his?  We were all working on figuring out who we were.  We had no right to be criticizing each other when we didn’t even know ourselves.

Study hall ended.