Jinx

Over tea on her parents' back porch, we ask Jinx whether she had any romances in Deutschland, where she spent a semester studying. She admits that there was one, though it hardly ranked as torrid. He was in his early thirties and found on the dating site we all visit. He was a seven minute walk from her flat and she figured that she might as well try a foreign fling, if just for the novelty of having done it. She ended it when she ...

What happiness looks like

Immediately upon seeing Hannah at Kyoto Sushi, I remark how well she looks. It isn't fair to judge her by how last I saw her - hair still severe from basic training, in her dress uniform, nervous for her town hall wedding to Arthur - but I did anyway. I glance about to see whether the changes are cosmetic, but her wellness derives from an inner fullness. Her body is lean and muscled, no longer waifish. The Navy seems to suit her, at least when she can escape it for a week ...

See? Not clones.

We pick her up outside a club I frequented in my teen years, one next to a brick factory that boasts of making office furniture. At this hour, the area seems more intimidating than it ought given that I know the names and GPAs of the local thugs. I keep the engine running and Melanie dashes out to retrieve our quarry, Jenna. I feel uncomfortably like someone's dad as I watch a woman in mom jeans hop out of her mini-van and call to a gaggle of kids to pile in, fresh ...

Like fireflies to wanton gods

A woman with the spiky, blonde hair introduces herself as Sue and sits on the log next to me. "So, how did you get here?"

"Oh, I have GPS," I reply instantly, looking up from the orange of the fire. For a moment, I think she believes I am serious, so I amend that I knew Rhianna - her partner and the hostess - fourteen years ago, when she ran the shop Call of the Wild in Beacon and I assumed it was fate that there was a witchcraft store so near to my high school. To Sue, this is a satisfactory ...

Dancing is a gateway drug

My friend was inebriated, despite her claim to only be on her second drink of the night. (Her name will not be provided, since this is only about her as a catalyst and she doesn't deserve embarrassment for something I am certain she doesn't recall the next day and which was harmless outside my overanalysis.) In the midst of her drunkenness, she said something that transcended flirtation and became an overt come-on, albeit one that acknowledged Melanie's existence, awesomeness, and ...

Peachy!

I remember turning 21 as a non-event. I went to a bar to see Dave's band Bone and had my first legal drink, some alcopop that caused me to puff out my cheeks in distaste just as my picture was taken. Zack finished it, since my enjoyment was secondary to the milestone of buying it. Beyond legal alcohol, what good is 21 in America?

Of course, we will grant you a biff in the snoot if you vex us.

There is not someone for everyone, but that's far from a curse. It's almost a blessing, to breaststroke through of the dating pool, to be a carbon atom in the social experiment. While one's partner is not precisely fungible, one knows that one needn't be unattached for any longer than it takes to encounter a similarly-minded singleton and find an empty room.

Then there are people who catalyze with only a few others and are otherwise inert.

Dawn rose after noon the day she died. You've known her since kindergarten, when she stole your fire truck during recess and you socked her in the arm. You'd been inseparable since, once she contented herself to take no more than much of your time and the only pain you caused her involved pointed questions.

You watched as she side-stepped the homeless woman begging change on the corner. From across the street, you saw the truck hit her, your arm caught in mid-wave. You rushed to her, but the damage was too severe, too unquestionably fatal. You've heard that quick deaths are supposed to be a comfort because the deceased didn't suffer.

Dawn disagrees. Once you were home again, after answering the questions from the police, once you were back in your apartment with the tension and fear leaking from your eyes, your phone rang. Dawn asked you to swing by the hospital and pick her up. She hung up and didn't answer when you called back. So you went to pick ...

Jamie

One of Melanie's associates - not the sort of person who was a friend, but someone with whom she had partied - turned up dead for reasons unknown. Melanie guesses an overdose. Jinx wondered if it might have been a car accident. I've heard whispers of suicide. This marked the first death of a peer that Melanie has experienced in a while and possibly the closest. It is a situation that cannot help but shake one's certainty ...

The dinosaur doesn't get that I don't want to flirt!

There was a time not long ago when I was, by my own description, an ungodly flirt. At the time, I played it off as innocent, as letting someone know that I did care about them in the most convenient language I had available.

But it wasn't wholly innocent. At that time, I was in a relationship. She had a busy schedule that did not involve me. Even when she was ...

She does it right.

Readings, like poems themselves, should go on only as long as they absolutely must and not a word longer. They always do exceed, though, so I forget what I thought I liked initially, because a most poet's egos have no sense of time or caliber.

I want to like poetry because it is erudite to enjoy it, but I generally do not. If someone says they have a poem they want to share, I have to restrain my eyes from rolling. There is a story - possibly apocryphal - of some Vassarite informing her professor Xenology: Not Garth 06/15/2010

I have no idea who this is supposed to be.

I don't know what to say. There was a time where, if it wasn't fair to say I knew them beyond the superficial, I was at least known by them to some degree. I was their mascot, the brother of their ostensible leader, the one who had clean urine were there to be a need to pass a drug test (this never came up). I was the one who they joked they would corrupt, though they never tried very hard since making me one of them would defeat their fun.

As one of them - Chris, I ...

"Bok?"

"...So the chicken hands the frog a book and says 'bok?'," Dawn finishes, "and the frog says 'Readit.'"

This is, inexplicably, the third joke of our frog theme. From this, we will transition to Maine, Finnish, German, Trotsky, lesbian (at least two of us have queer cred enough to get away with this), and - improbably - Emilio Estevez jokes (What do you call Emilio Estevez after a sex change? Emilio Breastavez). We didn't plan on this, it just evolved because chairs were in a circle and someone laughed.

It should begin, "Hey Straw Man. Got a question for you." At no point was the author acting as though this were addressed to a human being. Instead, he puts ridiculous words and thoughts into the opponent he creates so we will all assume that he must be so noble for fighting the cardboard dragon he holds up. Bah.

So, am I given to understand that BP hopes to win the hearts and minds of the populous by sponsoring links on StumbleUpon?

NAACP, this is NOT what you should be focusing your energy on.

Abortion stops a beating.

Oh, I support health care reform. I just hate email forwards in the place of original content.

While far from being such a well-known writer, I have been solicited to more than give away my writing for someone else to profit over. I've helped out a couple of friends (which has often been something I've regretted given the hassle it has ended up being), but I applaud standing up to strangers who profit off the labor of others like this.

I hate that you apparently asked this interesting person THREE questions. Could you not think of anything else that might be worth asking?

When my niece was two, she swore she saw God leaning against a wall. I was not aware this was expert testimony.

The Cloverfield monster wants to make a date with me?

According to http://whois.domaintools.com/thisman.org this site was registered to a.natelle@guerillamarketing.it. Nothing fishy about that.