Don’t Buy Your Adult Kid a Sex Toy

Gonna say at the top of this one that the following tale from my life bears plenty of funny inferences about graphic, adult themes and, in light of those, a significant risk of oversharing on my part. So, I guess what I mean to say is that if you find yourself squeamish about feces in any form, discussions about self-pleasure, awkward encounters with one’s mother (don’t read to far into that one), or other pulpy topics that shake the buckles off a Puritan’s shoes…

Maybe skip this one.

But if what you’re looking for is an NSFW-lite story of all the above elements and more, well then, saddle up, Buttercup.

Now, where to start…?

Really, it’s a story of two parts, so let’s start where most trauma bgins and take a brief trip into my childhood.

My mom is the coolest person on the planet in the best way, that being that she doesn’t try to be cool, she’s just naturally great. That said, there was a hiccup period when I was a teenager where she went a bit out of her way to be The Cool Mom.

What does a stereotypical teenage boy’s room look like? Probably has a bit of mess, a guitar or skateboard leaned against the corner, and posters of swimsuit models on the walls, yeah? If ever we wondered where the hypothetical teenage boy in the given model got these sexy posters from, I can tell you: single mothers making an effort to be The Cool Mom.

And it wasnt just that she got them for me, she also bragged about doing so to my friends (and girlfriends) who came over. “Yeah, you know who got him those?” she would ask. “I did. And it’s, heh, hey man. Whatever, you know? I’m cool.”

A touch awkward, you say? I agree, but I was fifteen with tasteful boobs n’ butts on my wall. I wasn’t going to argue.

Now, let’s fast-forward a few years to Christmas of 2011. I’m eighteen now, have a job, have a car, taking college classes, but do still have those posters up. It’s Christmas morning, and momand I are exchanging fits. In addition to her myriad talents, mom’s an awesome gift giver. And part of that is in how she would disguise said gift in its packaging. Once, as a kid, she got me a Game Boy Advance game (which weighs about 0.0002 oz) put it in a box the size of a small dog, and weighed it down with four jugs of vegetable stock. Suffice to say, I was well surprised – the box sloshed! But part of the genius is that other times, she wouldn’t disguise something at all, just wrap it messily in paper to keep you on your toes. Is this disguised to look like something else, or is it exactly what it looks like? I dunno! Part of the fun!

Anyway, Christmas. 2011. Job. Gifts.

So we’re exchanging presents, and she grabs one in particular from under the tree with a knowing, mischieveous grin. A thing about mom’s humor: it’s not terribly sophisticated. Loud farts, poop jokes, people getting hit in the balls, and plain idiocy are all guaranteed hitters. I say all this as context for my concern when, as she hands me this…object, she says, “Heehee, I think you’re gonna have some fun with this one.”

The object in question was shaped like a cylinder, about eight inches long, narrowing slightly toward one end while being soft and squishy on the other, about as wide around as an adult fist.

Does…?

Is there anything that maybe…?

Do those dimensions remind anyone else of something like-

Okay. Yes. I was terrified in that moment just thinking, “Oh my God, don’t be a Fleshlight. Christ Almighty don’t be a Fleshlight. Just, Jesus please God don’t be a Fleshlight.”

And back me up, you can understand my logic, right? I’ve never owned one, but dammit if it didn’t look like the pictures. And that would be the escalation of the swimsuit poster principle. It’s what you’re supposed to do at eighteen in the States: buy a cigar, a lottery ticket or scratcher, and some pornography, all because you can now. You’re an adult in the law’s eyes. Flex your newfound power. Hoorah!

So it was while these thoughts raced in my mind and I broke out in a cold sweat that I shakily unwrapped my gift…

It was a thermos.

It was a plastic coffee cup with a lid. It was colored a light brown with white lettering that read, “Coffee Makes Me Poop!”

Mom bursts out in proud laughter at her own gag gift, and I loudly match with laughter that’s laced in profound relief. I just stare at it, eternally grateful that I ended up in the Good Timeline where my mother DIDN’T buy me a sex toy. Because that sh*t would change you as a person.

Anyway, a couple of years on, I’m still using the cup on a regular basis. I’m 22 now, my birthday having been maybe a week or two prior, and I’m at work during a standard morning meeting. We’re going over the day’s expectations and such when my manager looks over at me and, in front of the whole group goes, “You’re rocking a bit of a theme today, eh Evan?”

At first I raise my eyebrow, but then quickly see what he’s talking about.

I like to keep my birthdays pretty low-key, something I learned from my uncle. One year after his birthday I asked him what he got up to, and he said, “Oh, slept in a little bit. Then I tidied up the house, took myself out to lunch, got a haircut, and went a saw a movie. Nothing crazy.” And it was simple, but wow did that ever become my model for the perfect birthday.

So that week prior when I turned 22, I did damned near the same thing, but also went to a flea market that was going on a town over and picked up a few quirky things for really cheap, one item being the shirt I was wearing in this morning meeting during the call-out.

It was black with white lettering and a stick figure that was holding its arms up in celebration. It read, “I Pooped Today!”

I look at my shirt, then to my coffee cup, and realize my mistake. So I grabbed a piece of masking tape, put it over the “Poop!” part of “Coffee Makes Me Poop!” on my cup, and scribbled in marker “Smile!” instead. It was great. It cleaned up the message, but if you looked carefully through the tape you could still read the Poop! part of the cup, and there was this funny anecdote out of it now.

So, there you have it. A true coming-of-age tale with feces, sex toys, and light workplace scandals.

I Don’t Get Sick Anymore

Alright, as of a couple weeks ago, the title isn’t exactly, totally true anymore, but the spirit of the statement remains. I turned 29 back in August, and in preparation for meeting my thirties, I took a step towards taking better care of myself. Not to say that I trash my mortal coil, or that it was the beginning of a great big health kick, but I did seek out and start taking once-daily multivitamins.

And much to the amusement (or dismay) of my friends and coworkers, I haven’t shut up about it since.

You’re feeling a little slow and sluggish? Want to try a once-daily multivitamin by Nature Made?

You got the sniffles? How about a once-daily?

You sprained your ankle after falling off your mountain bike yesterday? Have you heard of Nature Made once-daily multi- you get it.

Also, to be clear, I’m not talking about the gummies or chewables. I’m talkin’ the big honkin’ horse pills that have edges and taste like grass if you don’t get them down quickly enough. It’s how you know it’s medicine that works. Anything else is just candy and it’s cheating.

And while it certainly just sounds like a joke, I’ve been pretty serious about it. Since taking them on a mostly-regular basis, I made it through Cold Season, Flu Season, and the general Winter Blues all virtually unscathed. Not chalking it up to luck, either. I was surrounded by sickies, and I could very much feel when my body was fighting something off, it’s just that every defense my body mounted was super successful.

In fact, that little disclaimer up at the top about being sick a few weeks ago only further cements my confidence in my Nature Made multivitamin theory. I spent a weekend drinking with friends, not sleeping a wink, and skipping my vitamins – boom, sick. I start taking them again the next day – bam, sickness clears up with a quickness.

Now, all of this certainly has the bones of an advertisement, but it isn’t.

Yet.

I’ve been so chatty at work about this miracle pill that is a simple multivitamin, that the idea sprouted to pursue a sponsorship from the vitamin company, and I currently have a background bet going with a coworker which gives me pretty serious bragging rights if I ever show up with confirmation of said sponsorship.

Fun fact: I have a Twitter account that I’ve used maybe two or three times ever, but one of those times was to tweet at Nicolas Cage asking him to send me five dollars for all of the word-of-mouth advertising I did for his movie “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent”. I told him I would frame the five dollar bill to use as a conversation starter at dinner parties, but he never got back to me.

But as they say, “If you fail, try, try again.”

I think 2023’s my year. When I’m feeling confident, I’m probably going to start taking proper confessionals from those around me about all the preaching I’ve been doing and how it’s affected their lives, then sending that to Nature Made to see about a sponsorship. And I don’t need anything huge, this is for bragging rights remember, but it does need to be official. So just $1 and a certificate will do the job.

Failing even that, though, I have a contingency.

This coworker and I agreed that even if I can’t snag a proper sponsorship, if I get an official Cease & Desist from Nature Made for how much I start harrassing them in my pursuit of one, that will count for similar street cred. Maybe even more.

In the end, all I want to say, really, is this: Take your vitamins, mind your health, chewables are for cheaters, and if you eventually see an affiliate link to Nature Made products on this blog, please bear in mind proudly how much I had to annoy their company to make that a reality.

Ciao for now, y’all.

Belated Happy New Year

Woof. It’s been a second, huh?

The past twenty days have been a conflicting bunch. I’ve spouted for years that my two favorite holidays, as a devoted contrarian to the Christmas Crowd, are Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day, in that order. And I think it’s in no small part, if I check the depths of my soul, because they’re holidays that most folks kind of hate.

With Thanksgiving, people dislike needing to get dressed up in their starched Sunday Best for the sole purpose of eating a dry bird and navigating a fight with their uncle over politics; and a lot of folks seem to like making fun of New Year’s for the resolution aspect, pointing out folks running or going to the gym and preaching about how the commitment will only last a couple of weeks.

Well, I say poo-on-you to both of those opinions. Thanksgiving is great (genocide notwithstanding) for the simple fact that it’s a holiday boiled down to its base and most important aspects: togetherness and feasting. Boom. It’s a classic combination, and you don’t mess with a classic. Of course here in the States, I observe the irony that Thanksgiving, a holiday meant for appreciating what we already have, comes mere hours before Black Friday, an annual excuse for the public to stampede over strangers for a deal on a television they never needed.

And if you’re going to crap on someone’s resolutions, wafer-thin commitment or not, I say you’re just projecting your own fear of failure. Allow yourself the wiggle room to try something new, the opportunity to fail, the exercise of discipline and see what comes of it. Sheesh.

Anyway, my 2022 holiday season was great. Halloween saw an awesome house party take place, and Thanksgiving and Christmas both were terrifically cozy, intimate, and memorable affairs, they way they ought to be done, in my opinion. But New Year’s…

2023 ain’t that great yet.

I know this is way too easy to say in retrospect if I didn’t record myself for posterity’s sake, but when all the “2023 is going to be my year, I can feel it” talk started going around a few months ago, I won’t lie, my gut reaction was a little, “I don’t know…kinda feeling 2024 is really going to be what’s better.” And so far, I haven’t been wrong.

I woke up on the 1st of January with a monstrous cramp in my back, and it took me almost two weeks for it to get right. I’m sort of a caveman when it comes to self-care, meaning my first line of defense when it comes to fixing health problems is to just isolate in a cave until the problem goes away. Worked great for the pandemic, not so much for dental issues, vision problems, a hernia, this back thing, etc.

My usual New Year’s tradition is to buy a calendar and start off on some of the resolutions I’ve written, but hot damn have I not been able to giddy-up for much anything yet. Here in California it’s been raining heaps, which further incentivized that “hole up in a cave” tactic, but lot of good that does when the muscles in your back feel like someone mistook you for Dracula and rammed a stake through your chest.

What the time inside did afford us here in the Davis household was some TV time (just what we need), and we finally checked out the Wednesday Addams Family series on Netflix. It was good. Didn’t love it, maybe, but liked it a lot. For some reason, my main takeaway was the episode featuring Wednesday’s birthday, and she refers to birthdays as “another year closer to the yawning oblivion of death” or something. For some reason, I set aside my usual curmudgeonly old man pants and fought that sentiment.

As opposed to another year closer to the grave, I thought, I like to think of each new year as another collection of memoires to cherish when I’m old – if I get old, you never know. Even the bad stuff, the struggles, the loss, you wind up thinking back on those times when you’re past them as notches in your belt, things you overcame or survived, things that added to your story; and I think that’s increasingly important to hold onto, as sentiments go.

Something else I’ve tried in the numbing excitement that’s been my life since last writing was that I tried out Kingdom Come: Deliverance.

For the uninitiated, Kingdom Come is a roleplaying video game that places you in the role of Hal, a peasant boy in 1405 Bohemia. And you know what I’ve found?

I suck at life as a peasant boy in 1405 Bohemia.

In the tutorial town alone, I was: beaten up, berated, covered in shit, and killed, mostly in that order. In the TUTORIAL. I eventually started it up again after some time away, hoping to gain some new ground after learning from my failures, only to find that I can add “ability to eat correctly” to my list of failures. When I wasn’t starving, I was apparently making my character overeat to the point of dizziness.

Dude, f*ck life in medieval Europe. That sucked.

Like, I applaud the game’s commitment to realism or whatever, but dang that was rough.

Anyway, back-ish into the swing of things here, and life is truly good enough that the complaining I do is just for fun. I’m currently taking part in NYC Midnight’s Microfiction Challenge 2022, and while I’m sure my second round submission has a good chance of flopping, I did come in 1st place in my heat in round one. So that was cool. Otherwise, I have some stuff coming out later this month I should probably announce on the day of…so I will, I guess. (I’m not even trying to be funny, the words you just read was my train of thought as it happened. Just felt like being honest with you.)

Ciao, beautiful people.

Like What You Like, a Pirate Taught me That

I don’t know why I was thinking of this earlier today, but I’m glad I was. And don’t get ahead of me thinking there was some clutch moment where that life lesson of self-acceptance saved the day. Nope, just a mundane day at work where the thought caught me and it made me smile. In fact, with this lengthy preamble, I’m already treating this nugget of life advice like it’s some unknowable secret I’ve mastered that you probably haven’t figured out yet. Psh.

It was a scholastic book faire, circa 2006. I’m in middle school, and I should preface (some more) that I went to a tiny, tiny Lutheran private school – and yes, it was about as cool as that sounds. It wasn’t because of any sort of privileged position, either. Just that it was right by our house and my mom wanted to do her best as a parent. In truth, I would now as I would have then traded in my time for the same years spent at a public school where I could have begun cultivating meaningful friendships sooner.

At the Lutheran school I attended, it was Kindergarten through 8th Grade with around 120 kids – total. TOTAL. That meant that if you didn’t fit in with your 15 or so classmates, it was tough nuts, because you were stuck with those same 15 kids your entire time there.

I did not fit in with my classmates.

By my memory, their interests largely ranged between baseball, horror movies, Top-40 pop music, none of which interested me. Baseball? Not a sports guy. Horror movies? I’ll take a comedy, thank you. Pop music? I like Metallica. And I played D&D and read manga, things that only nowadays are sniffing “cool” territory (except you, manga, you’re still a pariah from what I hear).

So yeah, book faire.

We peruse the pencils, browse the books, and excavate the piles of colorful erasers looking for favorites, and exit into the gymnasium. Two other boys, we’ll call them Jimmy and Timmy, are poring over their haul, namely a couple of sports magazines. They ask what I came out with, and I show them: an issue of Shonen Jump with Monkey D. Luffy on the cover.

For those not in The Know, One Piece was a cartoony pirate adventure, and that grinning doof in the middle is Luffy, the happy-go-lucky pirate captain protagonist

I still remember the looks on their faces and the sound of them laughing at me. And especially as an eleven-year-old, I’d been defensive and embarrassed before. I knew the reflex to hide it in my backpack and say, “Yeah, no, it’s kinda dumb. It’s for my-” blah blah blah.

But today was different.

I don’t know where it came from or why, but a muse of some kind came out of the ether, broke into my thoughts, and said, “You know what? No. Fuck these guys. One Piece is cool, and I like this.”

It wasn’t anger behind the thought, either, just complete and total dismissal. Their thoughts and opinions on my interests could NOT bother me one bit. And I credit Luffy’s dorky grin, now that I think back on it. He felt like backup, telling me it was totally alright to enjoy the things I found enjoyable, other people’s thoughts on the matter be damned.

And good goddamn am I ever grateful that lesson occurred to me as a kid. I think we all know someone who – or maybe ourselves struggle with this – lets the opinions of others dictate their interests and pastimes.

Bottom line is this: Like what you like, be secure in your opinions because your the one who they’re for. Try new things, sure. And if someone wants to disparage your interests, like your an adult who likes video games and cartoons or someone in a biker gang that enjoys crochet, just realize it’s the limitation of that person’s worldview. Take pleasure in the things you like.

Or else, hell, what else are we even here for?

Ciao for now.

Icebreakers

Y’know, I didn’t plan the title to be quite this appropriate, but after a quiet hiatus of two-ish months, it’s actually kind of fitting. I think of good icebreakers as fun little questions, or questions you ask “because why not?” And really good ones both break the ice and tell you something about the person you’re asking them of while they commence with said breaking of ice. Not totally sure why, but I’ve caught myself asking these kinds of things of my coworkers a lot more often lately – not because dialogue with them is awkward or anything, quite the opposite; I think it’s just because they’re sort of fun.

And why make it more complicated than that?

So without further adieu, Icebreaker #1: “If you were going to become an animal, what animal would you become and why?”

My favorite part to that one is actually all of the qualifying questions that usually follow it. “Like, at will, or forever moving forward?” “Right now, or is going to happen in a week or something?” “Will I keep my human intelligence, or just- poof! You’re a jaguar now?” And to answer those, the house rules we’ve been running with have essentially been “No, it isn’t an at-will kind of thing. It’s a permanent change. No, you don’t get a week to prep for it, it just happens here as soon as you answer – go with your gut. Yes, you keep your human intelligence.”

Obviously my second-favorite part are the answers themselves and their justification. That jaguar one was a real answer, and the given reason was that he wanted to be a house cat, but if he gets to keep his human intelligence, then a jaguar is like that but a bit more badass. Plus, if you’re going to answer the question and introduce a scenario wherein you’re now suddenly a giant cat, there are some follow-up questions that beg answers: How do you tell your family? Do you tell your family? Where do you set up your new home if so, or if not? If you’re a predator now, then what/where/how do you hunt?

The possibilities are ENDLESS!

Personally, I chose becoming a hedgehog; but truthfully, that was just a gut-reaction and I don’t think it was really a smart choice. I’d become super cute, sure, but I think, like, anything that lives outdoors can and would happily eat me. Or at least brutalize me.

Lookin’ at you, stray cats.

The other classic is “If you could have a super power, which one would you have and why?”

This one everybody has heard and/or given an answer to. Mine is pretty easy: telekinesis. It’s subtle enough that most times nobody ever has to know you can do it, but it can also get powerful enough that you’re a goddamn Jedi, plus there’s plenty of room for creativity with it. But you also run the gambit of Usual Suspects:

Invisibility – Ugh, says everyone. Though, credit where it’s due, one of my friends did say that she’d use it defensively instead of to be a creep. She’d just go invisible when she didn’t want people to talk to her, and I can respect that.

Flight – Sure, but how, wings or thought? And how fast? Either way, you’re going to need goggles or something, plus it’s going to get cold. That and a slew of other problems come along with choosing to fly. ALSO, it’s one of those powers where if you suddenly stop using it while you’re using it – you die.

Teleportation – See this one’s also problematic. Is it short-distance, Nightcrawler style? Or is it like in Jumper where you can just pop across the planet? And do you think you can focus enough and picture your destination clearly enough, honestly, to be able to not end up glitching into a wall somewhere?

This last one is a little niche, but I still think it can be pretty telling of the person who answers it: “What’s your favorite D&D class, and why?”

Naturally, this will be a little limited to tabletop gamers being the only ones who can give you informed answers, but we are a growing breed, and it can be a chance to introduce newbies. Also, it can be a good way to be surprised. One friend who I was sure would swing either for ‘stalwart paladin’ or ‘playful rogue’ hit me out of left field with “I think being a druid is cool. Taming beasts and kicking ass as a bear, or something. Rad.”

Rad indeed, Robert. Rad indeed.

Personally, my favorite class is and always will be the Ranger, even if they get a little screwed over by Wizards of the Coast in the stats department. But even if their class features receive lesser support than others, it isn’t really what they can do that makes Rangers the best, it’s…well, what they are. They are so freakin’ versatile – ranged support, melee damage dealers, exploration/expedition heads, utility spellcasting, animal companions if you lean that way, etc. I get that this statement is true for plenty of classes, but I feel it in my heart the most for the Ranger: you can build it so many different ways. System-wise, Pathfinder may have done it the best, with the inclusion of “Urban” environments as a possible Favored Terrain. One of my favorite Ranger builds was making an urban explorer that was a treasure hunter, with Constructs as his favored enemy.

Taking silver is sort of a two-way tie between Bards and Monks, but that’s a separate discussion.

Anyway, so, yeah.

Circus Throws and the Value of Perception

Being a kid in high school means being an idiot, or at least it did in my case. You do dumb stuff, and you’re supposed to. Most will say that it’s because it’s for the experience of growing and becoming wiser, but that’s only about half of it. The main reason is because, if you survive it, you should come out of it with some funny stories to tell people later. Yes, of course, you should learn from them too, but they should also be good at parties.

This one was sort of a lesson in what happens when you give power to those who aren’t ready for it, kind of like teaching an unstable person forbidden martial arts. You’re arming them with an ability they aren’t otherwise fit to use. Such was the case when some poor idiot taught two other poor idiots how to perform what they called a “circus lift.”

Basically, you grab your left wrist with your right hand while standing opposite someone else doing the same, and then you each grab the other persons right wrist with your open left hand. What you should have between you when you’re done is basically a net of your arms. We were told – unwisely, as time would show – is that you can toss willing participants really, really high when you have them sit on your newfound arm-net. Just bend with the knees, count to three, and launch them.

And you know what? It works. It really, really works.

My buddy Peter and I became a regular sideshow attraction most lunch periods by the Senior Steps, taking volunteers and hucking them up into the air. We got good at it and an eensy, teensy bit famous for it. So it just became what we did for a few weeks. Then we had That Day happen. You know the one, the one that earns those capital letters, and the fateful dun-dun-duuuun piano bass.

It had rained pretty heavily the night before, and our usual launch pad was the grassy slope next to the Steps. As you could imagine, it was still slick and muddy by the time lunch came around, and that should have given our regularly schedule launches cause for postponement. But this wouldn’t be the Tale of Two Idiots if we did that. So of course we kept throwing people that day. (And in our defense, it should be The Tale of About a Dozen Idiots given how people kept stepping up, despite the slippery conditions.)

It comes to our last throw of the day, and a friend of ours steps up – we’ll call her Ana, for the sake of this. So Ana sheds her backpack, takes a seat, we do our countdown, we launch her, and…well, you know those times you get a feeling? A Bad Feeling? It’s the moment directly after doing some irrevocable that forces you to raise your eyebrow a bit and think, “Uh-oh. That might have been a bad idea.”

Right away, you can see that Ana’s trajectory and mid-air balance are off. She went pretty high, too. The way she hit her arc and is on her way down doesn’t look too promising, but there’s nothing to do but cringe and see how she ultimately sticks the landing.

She does not stick the landing.

What happens is she breaks her damn ankle. It was a loud, pretty sickening cracking sound that I can still hear pretty clearly in my head when I think about it. I remain pretty proud of my instincts, because I didn’t waste any time in acting. It was pretty clear precisely what had happened, and I’m off to the nurse like a lightning bolt. I’ve always been a tall kid, and as a seventeen-year-old Energizer Bunny, I made really good time. I get to the nurse, quickly explain what’s happened, and lead her to the site of the accident.

The only problem is that I didn’t tell anyone I was doing that. So to everyone else, I just threw this girl in the air, heard her ankle break, and Usain-Bolt’d out of the scene like a complete a**hole.

Things wound up alright in the end, and I’m a lot better at communication nowadays.

Little Surprises

Who doesn’t like little surprises now and then? They’re good for a little spice to keep life interesting, to break routine, or to provide a serendipitous little boost when you might not have known you needed it. It can happen when you see a friend you weren’t expecting to, get some good news, find those five dollars in your wallet you forgot about, or happen to come across a box of .45 calibur magnum rounds of ammunition in your mother’s kitchen cupboard.

Yeah, that sh*t happened as we moved her out of her last house, the one she’d lived in for sixteen years. Turns out we’d been keeping the plates and cups within inches of what is technically a tiny box of controlled explosives for almost two decades.

Got them turned in/disposed of at the nearest police station, but just…damn. It’s food for thought, you know? Never know what’s in the walls, n’ stuff.

My First Encounter with Cannabis

I’ve become a pretty reliable user of edibles at this point in my life. Not constantly, or even really all too often, but I do enjoy that it’s a regular, easy part of life now. And, as with anything, everyone has their first time with it – “it” being whatever is in question, not just cannabis. Mine was in probably the best of all possible circumstances: it was Game Night at my aunt and uncle’s house, and it was enchilada night. D&D was the game, and Grognak, the Ghostblade was my name.

To that point, I’d never tried cannabis, period; and I think this was within a year of its full legalization in California, so dispensaries were popping up all over the place. My aunt Steph had come home with a number of baggies of cannabis cookies which was, just as a concept, entirely new to me. I didn’t even know you could do that sort of thing with weed. Cookies? F**kin’ love cookies.

So at some point in the night, I wander into the kitchen to re-up on enchiladas, and Steph enters to walk over to the refrigerator. I look over to see her grab the baggy, take out a cookie, nom on said cookie, and then look over to make eye contact with me. Without saying a word, she holds the bag out to me by way of offer. I’ll be honest, I don’t have any heavenly idea why, but I took it as a challenge. There in that moment, she didn’t actually think I’d accept a cookie and she was betting on it. (She totally wasn’t, but that’s how my brain chose to interpret the moment.) So, while maintaining eye contact and just as wordless, I reach my hand into the bag and draw out a cookie. Her eyebrows shoot up (which is the lone thing supporting my it-was-a-challenge theory), and she watches intently as I pop it into my mouth and chew. Then, still a mute, she shrugs her shoulders and leaves the kitchen.

That felt weird, to feel like I won a chemical game of chicken without even a word between us, but I took it as a win, gathered my enchiladas, and went back to the gaming table.

Here was where I began to really draw on what knowledge I had of cannabis experience from the things I’d heard. I was sitting there, hacking apart harpies or whatever our monster of the evening was, when I had the passing thought that maybe I was immune to THC, because I wasn’t feeling anything. So then, naturally, it was precisely then that I noticed the leg warmers I had on my calves.

For the record, I wasn’t actually wearing leg warmers (duh). But it felt like my legs below the knee felt slightly, comfortably compressed, like I was wearing socks made of Heaven’s light; which, actually, is how I picture it too, like my calves were glowing a pale golden color. At the same time, I fell the halo that’s formed around my head, like I’m wearing a headband of the same light, and a number of other sensations all hit my perception at once.

First, do me a favor, and think about where in your mouth your tongue is right now. You know how when you think about it, you can suddenly feel the boundries of your tongue? The grooves of the roof of your mouth, the edges of your teeth, and all that. Mmhm, I had that with my brain. I suddenly felt, in strange detail, the boundary of my brain within my skull. And as I noticed that, it felt like it was subtly waving or pulsing, like a fish splashing out of water, but in super slow-mo.

There was also a bit of sensory overload besides my sense of feel. Colors seemed brighter and more vibrant, smells and tastes were deeper, and I felt like my range of earshot had gained ten or so feet to its radius. It was like my perceptions had all gone up a tick on their respective dials.

But the “paranoia” was where I was glad to have heard about it before. My breathing had quickened and my heart rate was noticeably up, and I could feel all the physical sensations of a mild panic attack, though none of the associated panic or thoughts. It was like my mind was taking a back seat to my body freaking out a bit and thinking, “Huh, is this what people mean when they say they get paranoid?” Some self-conscious thoughts hit me too, like what I must be looking like and a pressure to act normal; but it was like my awareness watched those thoughts float by from an exterior point of view.

By the end of the night, the sensations calmed down and everybody made it home safe, but I always kind of relish that that was my first encounter with the Devil’s Lettuce.

In freakin’ cookies!

Why I Can’t Watch Hockey

Unlike what the misleading title might have you believe, I have an enormous respect for hockey athletes, and this story has almost nothing to do with that anyway. In fact, I don’t even write that “enormous respect” thing lightly, either. I mean it. It’s mind-boggling to me the way they can coordinate movement on the ice and the incredible dexterity of handling the puck all with the tactics of play with their teammates and opponents.

Insane.

ANYWAY, I know a bit of this because of one time Amanda, Pierre, and I went to a hockey game being hosted at an ice skating rink near us. It wasn’t a pro league, obviously, and in fact it was a bunch of seniors – which made for a really easy sell even to me, a non-hockey fan.

“Hey,” Pierre pitched, “you want to watch a bunch of old guys play hockey? There might be a fight.”

I was in.

So we’re sitting there, watching the game, when I try to point out something regarding one of the players. I think he’d done some fancy skating I wanted to call out, I don’t remember- doesn’t matter. The point is his jersey number was #78, and I tell them this to try and identify him, to which they say, “Who?”

“He’s number seventy-eight.”

“Where?”

“Right there.”

“Where? I can’t get a clear look at his jersey.”

“He’s number seventy-eight,” I say, beginning to get exasperated. “There, by the other goal. He’s wearing a green jersey and red shorts.”

“Who?” says Pierre.

“The motherf**ker in red shorts, by the opposite f**king gate now,” is my reply.

He looks at me, confused. “Evan, they’re all in black. No one’s wearing red.”

I’m shocked. Never before in my life did I think my eyes would deceive me such that I confused black fabric with bright-ass, unmistakeable red. I look back to the players.

“He’s…he’s in a green jersey…”

“Yeah, I see the green jersey, but his shorts are black, dude.” He taps Amanda on the shoulder for back-up. She nods and reinforces his assertion that Red Shorts was, indeed, wearing black shorts.

I stammer, watching the players now with a bit of existential dread. Is this what color-blindness is? I thought. That is so surely scarlet red, how am I seeing that if it’s black? Uh-oh. I don’t know all how, but this will definitely affect a bunch of things in life. Ink choices, traffic signals maybe, for sure my fashion sense. Am I-

Then I see them snickering, and I’m finally allowed to have it dawn on me: I’m being gaslit, and my gullible ass bought that fable hook, line, sinker, the pole, the fisherman, and the whole damned boat.

We like to think of ourselves as mentally secure, most days. We may have our baggage, sure. It comes with life. But we see or hear stories of people that believe outlandish things, simpletons that throw in behind transparently deceitful cult figures. They’re like goldfish, with the sphere of their beliefs visible from the outside in its entirity, and we can laugh at how foolish the fish must be fore believing their bowl to be the extent the world.

But really, these situations deserve more empathy. They ought to be approached with a mindset of “There but for the grace of God go I,” for any one of us is capable – within the right circumstances, upbringing, environments, or pressures – of believing what is antethetical to that which is before our very eyes. It should be a lesson of how malleable we can be, how vulnerable even the sanctity of our own minds can be, of fatefully temporary we all ar-

…

Ahem. Yeah. Anyway, um, yeah. I don’t really watch a lot of hockey. Cool sport, though.

A Real Love Story

You know those dreams where you’re fall or trip, and the shock of that is enough to jolt you awake so you wind up really trying to catch your balance? Yeah, I’m pretty sure most of us have.

But have you ever hurt someone doing that?

Technically I did, when I was nine. I was travelling up to Oregon with my uncle, aunt, and two cousins. I was the runt while they were both teenagers, so I sat in the bucket seat. I had some sort of falling dream, woke up flailing, and smacked them both symmetrically in their respective groins. I still remember my cousin Kacy’s response, a remarkably calm, “Okay, man. You alright?”

<sigh> Good role model, that man.

But that’s not really the thrust of our anecdote here today. This one is goofy, not really something anyone should be proud of, but also one of my favorites. For it, we hearken back to circa 2012, Amanda and I are early-twenty-something’s that have just started dating, and after a month or two start regularly sharing a bed most nights.

When you start sleeping next to another body for the first time when you never in your young life have before, some funny things happen. All that rolling around you’re used to just doing without knowing you do it suddenly encounters obstacles, like odd elbows and knees. I’m a sturdy Stomach Sleeper, but more than once inside our first couple of weeks sleeping beside one another, we’d bumped foreheads and woken up from it.

Why do I bring this up? After all, these things happen.

Simple: context.

So, I’m having this dream, right? I’m a counselor at some kind of summer camp for young tykes, and for unknown dream reasons, I get into a fight with another counselor. Obviously, it’s my dream, I’m on Home Turf, so I’m going to kick his ass. But our fight takes place next to a set of stairs, and I guess my subconscious was more accurately in-tune with my real world Dexterity Score than I am, because I go to throw a punch with my back to the stairs and my foot slips off that top step.

Cue muscle impulses to punch- oh, and now you’re falling.

So I wake up mid-punch.

Remember how I mentioned I’m a Stomach Sleeper? Well that means I sleep with one arm under my pillow to support my big-ass head, and this particular night, that happened to be my left arm. That left it perfectly cocked back when the Whoopsie Signal left my dreaming brain to punch poor Amanda squarely on the forehead, who was asleep facing me on my right.

Poor thing. She trusted me, and she never stood a chance.

Now, hear me out, I knew right away what I’d done. I was wide awake the instant my knuckles connected between her sweet, innocent eyes. But when she sniffed loudly, demonstrating she’d come to a bare, drowsy sort of consciousness, I absolutely squinted my eyes and strained my voice like I was in the same way.

“Oof, are you okay?” I half-chuckle, half-whisper. “I think we bumped heads,” I lie.

“Oom,” she replies sleepily. “Sorry. You okay?”

We trade tired yes’s and goodnight’s, and lay our heads back down on our pillows, me pretending to fall “back” asleep. But make no mistake, my eyes are wide open, fixed on her, watching her reaction. When she settles back into softly snoring, I doze off too, grateful to have gotten away with it scott free.

The next morning, I come clean. I ask if she remembers anything from last night and she sheepishly goes, “What’d I do?” because normally that’s how I would introduce telling her she snored or tooted or something. When I tell her that what she thought was a bump of heads was actually me punching her in the face, she – shockingly – was less than thrilled with it.

“You let me fall back asleep??” she chided. “I could have had a concussion.”

Weirdly, one of the best compliments I’ve been given, to think I’m strong enough to deliver a zero-wind-up knockout punch in my sleep.

That’s love.