Poppin' the cherry...

I popped my cherry in front of a live audience last night, and it didn't ooze nor leave a crater in my cock, unlike dougie.

I actually pulled a few minutes of comedy together, while drunk, and hosted the E3 playhouse's comedy night last night, after the poetry reading.

I'd talked myself into it a couple of weeks ago with the guy who runs the comedy night.

See, after we do the poetry thing (Thursdays, 6-8 pm and make yourself a new friend - myspace.com/2ndary), there's a comedy night.

Only problem has been that no one has really stayed for the comedy night. After we pack the place with the poetry reading, it empties pretty quick and pretty much stays that way through the comedy. Whereas poetry gets anywhere from 40-60 people in this tiny place, the comedy gets a dozen on a GOOD night.

So, I talked to Shawn, the comedy promoter, and told him I wanted to do both poetry and comedy. An added bonus would be the carryover from the poetry night (cuz those kids love to show support).

He said that's fine, cuz he wanted to stop hosting it anyways...

Add in that the owner of the club, Wes, has been kind enough to let any poetry readers stay for free instead of the $7 cover charge they usually get, and bam, I talked myself into my first comedy gig.

However, I didn't exchange numbers with Shawn, and had no idea last night whether or not he remembered our conversation (cuz I BARELY remembered it). I'd brought a couple of notebooks, in the vain hopes that there was something funny enough out of all the random shit I've written and said over the years.

My main goal was: DO NOT SUCK!!!

The poetry night went long (cuz comics were cancelling or something), and no sign of Shawn. The poetry night stops, and I go outside for a cigarette.

Shawn appears from nowhere and says, "Do you still wanna do it?"

"Yeah. How much time do I have?" I said, playing it cool.

"5 or 7 minutes. Can you do it?"

"Sure," I slurred through the two Irish coffees, two Jamisons on the rocks and 1 beer I'd drank over the course of two hours.

I ran outside and started telling people to stay cuz it was me and this could be good or I could bomb, but either way, it was going to be interesting.

And surprisingly, quite a few people stayed.

And even more surprisingly: I not only didn't suck, I actually got good words from both the comics and my fellow poets.

One guy asked me how long I'd been doing it.

"First time."

He got a look on his face like "Shit."

I'll have video up at some point. Nici, who's been taping the last week or two of shows, hung around and taped me going up first. I was surprised at how comfortable I was. I told the only three bits I could think of (and probably the only three bits I have, right now).

That first laugh was so goddamn good. Better than coke, better than the booze I was drinking. My first bit didn't go over so well, but the second bit (boobs, which is more visual), I heard people laughing pretty hard. My favorite joke (Cats & Ketamine, which I might post at some point) went over really well, and even though I lost the punch line, I didn't panic and instead talked my way out of it and back to laughter again.

I still can't believe I did it, and people laughed.

Tap that vein, fuckers, tap that vein.

Now that the cherry's popped, time to start the fuckin'...

in the drive thru.

--Meatsticks

PS Many thanks to those of you who stayed last night, and to all the funny fuckers I know and have learned from watching.

Taking a flying leap (or not)...

I was 5 or six years old, living in Dam-B, TX. We lived at the tail end of a long dirt road.

Dam-B's a small town, population around 600 or so. One gas station with a restaurant, one more restaurant, a washeteria (laundromat to Yanks), and a post office, all surrounding the big intersection where cars drove to more interesting and populated places where cousins didn't fuck each other.

I was the youngest child in a family of seven. My oldest sister had gotten married earlier that year, the next oldest sister was shacking up with her boyfriend, so now there were five. My brothers and sisters were all in their teens, except Ann, who was 10 or 11.

Daddy wasn't there, then. Daddy was in a place called prison and wouldn't be back for a few more years.

So our caretakers were Mom and the church..

Mom was working a double that day as the cook in the restaurant at the gas station. Since it was Saturday, there was no church.

So the oldest were left in charge to keep the young'uns from getting in trouble.

My brothers, Charles and David, had gotten new mattresses a couple of days before. We'd taken the old ones out to the car port on the side of the house.

Yeah.

Cuz we were the troublemakers.

David or Chuck came up with the idea.

It seemed simple enough.

Pull the mattresses to the other side of the house, stack them up, put the ladder on the side, climb up to the roof, jump off, land on the mattresses, repeat.

I was 5 or 6. And this seemed like a really good idea.

I liked climbing. I've always been a climber. I am great at getting myself up to places.

Besides, how often would anyone let you play on the roof of a house?

Of course, I didn't think this all the way through.

To the jumping part.

I'd never jumped from anything higher than the roof of a Chevy four door station wagon.

And even that was on a dare.

Our house was a single story house with a low attic / crawlspace. Maybe 12 or 15 feet high. The ceilings were slightly slanted, with those cheap tar paper shingles with gravel. Crappy for the long term sealing of your house, but great for traction.

I liked the climbing up part.

I really liked scampering around the roof for a little while.

I watched David go off and scream with glee, like Goofy in the old Disney cartoons when he falls.

"WHAAAA HOO HOO HOOOOEEEEY!!"

And then I crept up slowly to the edge, and looked...

down.

When you're six, the roof of a car was really high. And that's only 4 feet or so.

When you're six and looking at 12 or 15 fifteen feet, staring down at two double bed sized mattresses that looked like postage stamps, well...

I panicked.

No.

I freaked the fuck out.

Suddenly, I didn't wanna do it.

Suddenly, I felt like a bad boy.

Suddenly, I really, really, really just needed my mommy.

And my brother Chuck grabbed me, looked me in the eyes and said, "Look, I'll go. You'll see. It'll be alright."

Chuck and I shared a bond, then. We were born ten years and nine days apart. We were also the only two that weren't born in the hospital. We were connected.

I trusted him above all others.

He was older.

And with Daddy in prison, Chuck was the man in the house.

He knew MORE than I did.

I crept back from the edge, any sense of fun I had disappearing and watched as Chuck winked, turned, spread his arms and leapt off the edge. I heard him yell all the way down, heard a "thoomp!"

and then something coming up the ladder.

Chuck's head pops over, and he creeps over to me.

"See?"

I wiped my tears away.

"You wanna do it?"

I shook my head, yes.

I walked to the edge with Chuck, looked down at the postage stamp, and took a deep breath.

"On the count of three, okay?" said Chuck.

I nodded.

"One, two..."

And Chuck pushed me hard in the back...

and for a second, I enjoyed the sensation of falling...

But the postage stamp was in the wrong place for the proper receipt.

Had I jumped, I could have made it safely into the middle.

Had I understood the concept of aiming a leap, I could have aimed.

Instead, I landed face down, with the lower half of my legs and feet off the mattress.

My legs snapped back, rubber band style, and my own feet kicked my own ass for being such a bad, sad little boy.

I rolled off the mattress, almost trying to catch my breath.

Chuck scrambled down the ladder after me.

"See, that wasn't so bad. Wanna do it again?"

--Meatsticks

Cuz you're working for the maaaa-aaaaan.....

Jobs.

I fucking hate jobs.

So the nagging parent voice in me says, "So, find some job you like and do that."

There isn't one.

I've looked.

I've worked construction, a corporate office, a Taco Bell drive-thru at 2 a.m. in a small town in Texas on the local high school's homecoming night, convenience stores, video stores, waiting tables, bartending, DJing, bussing tables in a truck stop in the middle of no and where, Ohio, working as a trap loader at a gun club in a concrete bunker, a clerk at a bad store in a worse mall in a stupid fucking town, and slinging expensive shit to people with too much money and too much fucking time on their hands.

What's left? Whoring, being a caretaker for retarded people, owning an oil company and being rich enough to snort good blow off a fat free stripper tit on my private yacht in Cancun, Mehico, going in the Armed Forces, being a cop / sherriff / douchebadge, and working at Panamint Springs Resort in Death Valley.

So fuck the work force.

I'm working up to something and have no idea what.

Well, I have a couple of ideas, but I'm such a sponge that I have to wonder sometimes if my ideas are really my own or just the regurgitation of all the shit I've listened to over the years.

The poetry's been helping, but the past week, I've been blocked or something.

More like regressing, really.

Probably just a delayed aftermath of the depression that sets in after Panamint, but with Vegas.

But that's another story.

So, any suggestions?

Serial killing isn't really an option, though it's got its bonuses. My problem is I have a guilty conscience and would probably confess in a heartbeat to shit I didn't even do, but I'd thought about doing it, so obviously I had it in me to do something like that and felt that I'd better go ahead and get locked up before I finally snapped and became Meatsticks the Ripper, so yes, officer, I did it.

So, that's out.

I've thought about glass blowing, but that whole heat thing really bothers me. I'm pasty skinned, so I'm pretty flame-sensitive. But I'm sure I could make some cool shit if I just did it.

Oh, if only...

See how easy it is to talk yourself out of things?

I've got years of experience.

Learn how, ask me now, for only 14.95 per session!

Call RIGHT NOW!

You need to make me rich so I don't ever have to wake up and leave my bed or my woman before 3 pm EVER AGAIN!!!

CALL NOW!!!

But not in the drive thru...

--Meatsticks

Even a Dog Needs a Bone...

(I've told this story a few times over the years. Working on the poetry night I've been a part of (www.myspace.com/2ndary), I finally wrote it down in a cohesive form. Thanks to Danny D for helping me see that I came too soon in the first draft...

so to speak.

--Meatsticks)

"It was like having a dog pee on your leg,"
she says, in her cutest voice ever.

Where we are is
the house she and her parents are moving out of.

What she's doing is
answering my question.

What I was doing,
until just THAT moment,
was basking in the glow of my first orgasm with her present.

This was then,
when I was 19 and she was 18.

We were in love
from across the two sides of the tracks.j

She, a virginal Jehovah's Witness from a middle class family
and I,
a poor white trash agnostic,
not sure of anything except
not being sure of anything.

We saw our love as the
BIG L
love.

The kind that crossed those boundaries
that religions, cultures, and creeds
set up to keep the non-believers,
the undesirables,
the Me's,
away from Them.

It didn't work.

We fell in love
and we sinned a glorious kind of sin for the both of us.

Well,
except for the S I N
of S E X.

That was still a no no,
can't pass go,
can't collect the prize
behind the zipper...

Oh, we fooled around,
'our young crotches dry humping against each other
giving our groins the worst case of denim burn that you've never felt.

Then came
that one night
when she came
for her first time.

Ever.

We were still strictly clothes on,
grinding away,
when she lets out an
"Oooooh,"
and a shake
and a shiver,
and she jumped away from me.

We talked for the rest of the night
about what we both knew it was.

After that,
things got
heated, heavier, grindier,
and she had another,
then another
and another
and well...

All from dry-humping.

We thought it was beautiful that we could do that without penetration.

And it was
beautiful.

But it was also...

Frustrating.j

She racked up big O after big O,
while I played the martyr,
my balls growing heavier,
my nethers getting rawer
with each
new grinding session.

Came the day I was helping her move out of her old house.
Her parents had gone to the new house that day,
in another town,
far away from where we were.

Us.

Alone.

It starts again.

We're grinding our young bodies away,
kissing furiously,
hands are going up shirts now,
nipples tweaked and pinched,
savaging each othe rin the most mediocre of ways that a 19 year old can imagine
when suddenly...

I felt something
I hadn't felt
in a long long time.

And I finally got mine.

Right into my boxers.

Of course,
she knew.

Kinda hard to hide it when you collapse shudderin gin a puddle on top of the woman you love.

I go into the bathroom and clean myself up
as best I can,
excited and embarrassed and somewhat
exhausted.

I go outside for a cigarette and she joins me to second hand smoke.j

We start talking,
y'know,
about that
Thing
that had just happened.

And I lookeda t the woman I loved,
and I asked her what
She
thought of it.

And she said,
"I don't want to tell you..."

And I said
"No, baby, it' s okay, tell me,"
my face and eyes still
post-coitally glowing.

And looked at me,
and said,
in her cutest voice ever...

Cut and paste...

http://movies.crooksandliars.com/Countdown-SC-GOP-Fear1.mov

Watch this.

Olbermann is THE man. Not one fucking person besides Stewart, Colbert, and Maher have dared say anything of this magnitude.

But Olbermann tops them out, because they can always hide behind the comedy aspect.

As in, "We're just kidding."

Olbermann, on the other hand, says it without a smile. And it doesn't look stupid.

Enjoy...

--Meatsticks

A Strange Confession...

I used to write like an addict. I loved words flowing out of the head and into the pages in my notebooks, computers, whatever.

And then....

one night...

a few years ago...

We were in San Francisco. We'd driven up there in my car for a leather / vinyl ball at the DNA lounge. And we were planning on staying the night, so we'd brought my large black overnight back, and as usual, my backpack.

We parked on Bryant street, and went to the club about two blocks away.

My car, it was a 2-door Mazda MX-6, bright fuckin' red. I'd bought it for a pittance in Texas right after I moved back from LA. Lots of miles, but ran like a dream. It was how I moved out here to Santa Cruz from Texas.

I loved that car.

This was also when I carried a backpack with me everywhere. I always had writing equipment. 10 pens, 2-3 notebooks, a book to read in case I got bored and various pack-ratty things I'd picked up over the years.

Literally, anywhere I was, my bag was somewhere to be found around me.

Anyway...

We're at the club, havin' a ball at the Ball all night. Monkey and I had taken a half hit of ecstasy we'd had left over from a month before. Nothing spectacular, but enough to make you go....

Ohmmmmmmmm....

The club was closing and Monkey had to go to the car to get our change of clothes from the ridiculously hot and sweaty shit we'd been wearing.

She came back to me a few minutes later.

"How are you feeling?"

"Why?"

"How are you feeling?"

"I'm fine. What's up?"

She took my hand.

"Your car was broken into. They got everything."

"Even my backpack?" I asked, hoping without a hope.

"Yes."

See, a Mazda MX-6, the '91 model in particular, had a convenient lever for everything you hate to do manually. You could pop the hood, the gas tank cover, and yes, the trunk. And all you had to do was break a window, open the door, and pull a little two inch lever.

And you, too, could have a big duffle bag full of clothes, a half-empty purse, and a backpack full of notebooks, pencils, pens, erasers, a sketchpad, and a ton of fucking memories.

What upset me most was the whole idea of someone stealing the bag and just chucking it once they realized there was nothing of any value to THEM in it.

What upset me most was knowing they wouldn't appreciate any of it enough to read it.

What upset me most was some things I'd written about Monkey and never shared with her.

So I cried and kind of fell into her arms.

I can replace the shoes and clothes (well, not all of 'em).

But I can't get those words back. And some of them were really fuckin' good.

We closed the club, had a fun little afterhours party, and a couple of hours later, one of the girls mentioned the possibility of trying to look for my backpack.

And the few people who were left agreed and the next thing I know, we're all wandering out into the early morning light of San Francisco, with the most colorful people wearing the weirdest shit from the night before, looking desperately for a black backpack that may or may not have been in a trash-bin cuz it didn't have anything a crack head could really use.

We searched for blocks and blocks. The sun got higher, and finally, we just gave up.

After that, Barry and Casey took me and the girl to breakfast, where we ate well and I cried a little more, and they made me laugh...

But that was then.

And I've moped for a couple of years about it.

It's really hard, like someone got in and stole some things directly out of my head. Like a block you put in your mind to not deal with whatever horrible old memory is making you crazy.

Writing is my life. Has been for a long time.

And when I do it, it's lovely and I have a good time with it.

But I keep getting brain farty-about the whole thing.

However, I'm glad I shared. Maybe this'll help.

Either that, or I'm just a whining cunt who needs to get over it.

Either way...

drive thru, bitches.

--Meatsticks

Abort Mission!

Side note: This piece is a mish mash of three different things I wrote. For those who don't know, on my 30th birthday my true love gave to me my first abortion. She took the RU-486 actually ON my b-day. Most of this comes from when we were sitting in the clinic a couple of days before that, with a few extra lines / ideas from a couple of other things I wrote. I actually read this at a poetry reading the other night, and am pretty proud of the piece itself.

Special thanks to Dave Perez, who helped me rearrage and get it to flow really well.

--Meatsticks)

Should we put it in a jar?
And if we do, should we name it?
Sitting in the planned parenthood clinic...
My eyes scanning the room...
You can tell the girls who are afraid they're preggers.
Arms crossed,
eyes with that distant
"Oh dear God,
No,
Please,
No.
Make the test be wrong, just this once."
No boyfriend, husband, job or hope,
except this one offered here,
for a fee...
Over there, in the corner,
2 girls, side by side, arms folded, girls who can't be much older than 17,
they've got that 100-yard abortion stare,
their eyes struggling to not see
that cute little four year old on her mommy's lap,
right there,
in front of them.
In the other corner, a mother and her 14 year old daughter...
the mom can't look at anything but that child.
da Monkey and I, we're here for a test,
the test,
to see if she is pregnant.
A few weeks ago, we had a rare slip, her pulling me in as I spurted out.
Now...
her boobs are swollen
she's getting chubby,
and she's two weeks late.
If she is, the hardest part is gonna be the waiting
to have the abortion.
The thing that should have been hardest about this,
THE conversation,
wasn't even a question.
No "Should we keep it?"
No "Well, honey, what do YOU think?"
No "We'd make GREAT parents?"
Just "How soon do we get it sucked out?"
And maybe, you think this is a little sociopathic.
After all, it is a "life."
So's the bacteria I scrub off when I shower.
So's the bacteria that forms in my urine when it's left my body.
The cancer forming in someone you may or may no know...
that's alive, too.
Doesn't change our dislike and disposal of those things.
Doesn't change how we feel about this.
I can see
how some would be queasy.
But they're not us.
And we're not them.
This
is
about
choice.
We choose, wholeheartedly,
to stop the growth of the thing inside her belly.
And my mother's voice,
and your mother's voice,
and all the parental voices I've ever heard,
they all crowd my mind.
"That's so selfish."
And MY voice says...
What's selfish is spamming the environment w/ carbon copy mini-you's in the vain hopes that your precious widdle child will make the world a better place than you did while you were here.
Cuz, y'see folks,
abortions are NOT the problem.
The people who aren't aborted ARE.

((a toilet flushes in the background))

Drive thru...

Meatsticks

Raping Fish In a Barrel...

They just keep makin' it easier, don't they? Not a lot of creativity anymore, but when it bursts through, DAMN!!!

Amish schoolkids getting shot down by a random fucking guy with an arsenal.

Regular schools are so passe.

No, today's discerning killer KNOWS to go after the esteemed endangered species, the hard to reach kind, like...AMISH!

Amish are the most non-offensive religion you can get in this shitty, pushy world. They shun all the shit I like, and the kids get the chance to go into the world, and most of 'em turn around and go right back to their little old farm...cuz they can't think of anything better to do with the shit we've got out here.

But, then, one day...

along comes psycho guy, runnin' through the hillside...

And how long did he plan this? There's no WAY this was just random.

It's not like there's Amish schools in cities. This guy drove all the way out to BFAmish Paradise, just to gun down some mother fuckers.

Why the Amish? What the fuck have they ever done to anyone besides other Amish? They don't fight anyone, they're just closed off and probably a little repressed.

Why not take out a Scientology Sector, or a few Catholic churches, or the Crawford Ranch of our esteemed President?

Why the fuckin' Amish?

But the psycho gun-totin' school shooters aren't the only ones up to some new twists on old-shenanigans.

Our Congressmen are catching up to 'em.

Rep. Mark Foley and the Republican leadership who helped cover his ass are all up for "Three Card Pedophilia Monty Awards" this year, a much coveted title that has been dominated by the Catholic diocese for the past 23 years.

Granted, Foley was just a voyeur who liked to ask supple 16-year old boys for photos of themselves, ask 'em to measure their big guns with a ruler, and occasionally request a face to ass meeting.

But it got covered up. And unlike the weapons of mass destruction, these e-mails EXIST.

AND they've been authenticated. It isn't like these kids made this up (that we know of, with presuming innocence till bobloblaw gets 'em off).

Keeping in mind, these are the same guys trying to ban gay marriage, saying gays are all but unnatural beasts put upon this earth to be made fun of, just like the nigras, chinks, gooks, spics, and wetbacks before them...

This is also the party of "moral values," where a woman's not really really brain-dead till Bill Frist SAYS she is...

The party of tax relief, 500-mile Mexican fences that they hope doesn't interfere with their ability to have a cleaned mansion at a discount rate from the third worlder they forgot to give a tax ID number to, the anti-abortion-WE LOVE JESUS-and-ain't-America the Beautiful Under God just the GREATEST damn gift god has put on this Earth...

this...this Party of AAAAALLLL THAAAT IIIIISSS RIIIIIGHT!!!!

((echo, echo))

they

were

covering up for creepy uncle Mark writing dirty IM's and e-mails to underage boys in his no-pay employ.

Ahahahahaaaaa.....

how do you not just smile at that?

Yes, it's heart wrenching, yes, it's heart-breaking, yes, it's sad those kids had to go through that, and where the hell were the parents...?

Oh, right. They were complaining to the Repuplican leadership about Creepy Uncle Mark!

Creepiest thing about it all?

He's the co-chair of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children.

Oh....damn.

It just confirms what the Repub's motto would be if they were honest....

when you consider the war in Iraq, the national deficit, global warming, the assault on free speech, the debt, gas prices, medicine costing more than street drugs for half the effect, tax cuts while we're in debt, Abu Ghraib, Afghanistan, our relations with majority of the world, and Mark Foley...?

Vote Republican!!!

Cuz really...

FUCK YOUR KIDS!!!

--Meatsticks