Um, okay, I know the site’s called Ugly People and all, but, well, is it just me or it there something oddly fascinating about this one? Like if Sissy Spacek were a little more ethereal? Maybe?

Or maybe not. Jonno has always said I have weird tastes–except, of course, for my choice in boyfiends.

My ass hurts. (No, you filthy-minded harridan, it has nothing to do with that.)

Okay, at the request of David Byrne, I have officially stopped making sense.

Bloggity blog blog blog. This salad is really delicious boyfriend. You’re aces in the kitchen! Blog Blog.

[ Which reminds me: I started getting wise to the teaching racket in about fifth grade. My teacher and her husband were best friends with my aunt and uncle, and they spent nearly every weekend camping and canoeing together, so I knew she couldn’t possibly have time to read my homework. One day in the middle of this essay on Mississippi history (zzzzzz), I wrote out a couple of verses of “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” and it came back with an “A.” It was kinda like learning the truth about Santa Claus, but more liberating.

On an unrelated note, now that I think about it, that teacher strikes me as a bit of a loose woman. I bet she and my uncle et al. were the pot-smokin’, wife-swappin’ type. That’s kinda hot, huh? (My uncle’s pretty hunky.) I should ask my aunt one day….

There I go again: showing my thoroughly Southern penchant for incest. ]

Whee! A tech day! We just got a kick-ass G4 lab for the students, so in an effort to give each faculty member her own computer, I’ve spent the entire morning and the better part of the afternoon hooking up some very weird looking G3s that were made for about a day and a half back in 1998 (the top of the all-in-one unit looks like the small of someone’s back–if someone’s back happened to be perforated opaque plastic) and a few LCIIIs with some very old StyleWriters and DeskJets and whatever else I could find lying around the school’s computer graveyard. I’m not the world’s best when it comes to doing hardware things like that; in fact, it can get pretty damn irritating. But once I demonstrated the ability to hook up a mouse, suddenly everyone else around me became helpless.

I mean, yeah, I like feeling needed (if not loved), but having to run across campus to fix a paper jam isn’t the kinda love I need.

Another day of work and domesticity. But instead of speaking about that special frisson I get running in and out of Robert’s (pronounced RO-bears–tell ’em, Jay) in under 30 minutes with a two-week supply of groceries in my basket, I think I’ll post something else…

About two years after leaving Millsaps, I experienced a nagging concern: I’d had so many good times in college, what if I forgot them all? So for x-mas that year, I bought each of my college chums a pen and a fancy notebook and asked them to write down their favorite Millsaps stories. Of course, in the end no one bothered to send me a damn thing, and I had to rely solely on my own foggy recollections.

[I try to reconcile this urge to remember with my equally strong resentment of nostalgia, and all I can come up with is that writing something down isn’t quite the same as reliving it. Like, when the written word became a widespread phenomenon several centuries BC, Greek philosphers lamented the death of memory, their logic being that once a story is written down, there’s no reason to remember it anymore. Translation: with my past written down, I can leave it there, not get bogged down in it. I think. Or maybe I’m just full of it.]

Gradually I pieced together a sort of history, fraught with drugs and sexcapades and hooliganism. I hope soon to surprise my buddies with a nice, clean hard copy of it all. (If any of you are reading this–and I don’t think you are–stop now.)

So, this is one of the silliest pieces from that work, but I kinda like it because I was reading Gertrude and Alice at the time I wrote it and I felt like I was channelling that deco-lesbo-lit vibe. Anyway, enjoy. Don’t worry: it’s short.

Ann Is Not a Vet

(after Ms. Stein)

I had a tarantula. It’s name was Arachne. “How original,” you say. It died. I put it inside the refrigerator. Later I took it back. I wanted my money back. They would not give me my money back, they would only give me more doomed pets. I chose guinea pigs.

I had to leave. My roommate Frank had to leave. We both had to leave to go other places. Ann was not my roommate. She did not have to leave. Ann would stay in Jackson. Ann said she would come by my apartment to look after my pet guinea pigs. I forget what their names were, the guinea pigs.

I came back from where I had been and my pets were in the refrigerator again. They were wrapped in foil. Ann was not to be seen. I called Ann at her apartment. “Ann, my pets are in the refrigerator,” I said. She said, “I know.” “Why are my guinea pigs in the refrigerator?” I said. She said, “Because they are dead.” I had assumed that. I assumed I would not get another refund on pets. The shopgirl would think I was an abusive parent and would give me no more animals.

“How did they die?” “Well, you see, I got here one day and one of them was dead and the other one didn’t look too good so I called the vet and he said that it was probably just constipated and that I should give it some roughage, lettuce or something, so I do and then it has diarrhea, and so I call the vet again and he says that a little Pepto Bismol should fix things, so I go out and I buy a bottle of Pepto and I feed it to the hamster—”

“Guinea pig.”

“Whatever, and I feed it, and it must have been too late because it died. Sorry.”

I doubted that. I doubted that a doctor had said to feed a guinea pig Pepto Bismol. I made her take me to dinner. And I kept the bottle of Pepto until it was empty. Ann is not a vet.

I came home and began scrubbing the kitchen floor on my hands and knees. That obsessive/compulsive thing, I guess. It was the perfect end to my workday: tactile, humbling, and somehow authentic. Like touching the arm of your closest friend when he’s telling you how bad things really are.

I took extreme delight in the fact that I was able to marry an old bottle of Windex with a new one without spilling a drop.

Sounds like I’ve got a Mammy Complex. What, exactly does that imply?

Must work. Must finish writing grant proposal begun three weeks ago. Must not succumb to the alluring scribblings of a freekalicious goddess, who, incidentally, created the unquestionably fabulous “Winter Steel” series for MTV’s Liquid Television.

I tried to be all cute and clever (well, maybe not so clever) by posting some fathers’ day love to my dad

and my daddy

on a super-duper daddy page, but it wasn’t working–probably for a number of reasons. Notably: 1) it’s a sickeningly cutesy pun, confusing my dad and my daddy, when, truth be told, they’re completely different people and play very different roles in my life; and 2) I don’t think I’ve ever had a picture taken in which my father and I are embracing, and it looked so lopsided–it still does–with Jonno and I showing obvious love on a ritzy red background, and my dad just sort of standing there, alone in a field up at the farm (actually, my brother’s in the pic too, but I cropped him out since he doesn’t make sense, visual or otherwise).

[ Side note: Part of this dilemma has to do with a weird sense of empathy my mom instilled in me as a kid–one of my personality traits with which I’m most happy. Specifially–and this is going to sound silly to most of you–I feel sorry for my father, just because he looks so alone in the pic. These feelings have nothing to do with real life (my dad’s hardly ever alone these days, and when he is, he really relishes it), it’s just something about the sight of him that makes me feel sad. It’s as if the picture is actually him and he’s looking at me and saying, “Why haven’t you called? Why haven’t you visited? Are you doing okay?”

This kind of empathizing (psychoanalysts would probably call it a sort of displacement) often gets me into trouble. Case in point: once, when I was a kid, we’d gone fishing up at the farm and caught about a dozen bream. My granddaddy ran a general store in this tiny, tiny town of 200 or so (where I was related to just about everybody–very Eudora-Welty-“Why I Live at the P.O.”), and while my daddy and my brothers went inside to grab a coke for the half-hour trip home, I couldn’t stop looking at the fish. They were in a bucket of water back in the truck bed, still swimming. I felt so sorry for them, when in fact they probably weren’t feeling too bad about life in their new-found home. Their thoughts were probably more like, “Smaller, okay. Crowded, yes. But no snakes or beavers. That’s a plus.”

Almost without thinking, I grabbed the bucket, ran across the road, over a really treacherous cattle-gap, and across a quarter-mile of pasture to a small pond. I got right up to the edge and dumped the bucket out, and some of the fish wound up floating upside down, but I think most lived to see another day. Then I raced back to the store, threw the bucket in the truck bed, and sat down in the cab, waiting for everybody to finish up inside (why they hadn’t already come out and discoverered my treachery, I don’t know). When they finally emerged, there seemed to be some real confusion, especially on David’s part (he who was cropped) about what could have possibly happened to the fish. Of course, all the details eventually came to light and my brothers were furious but my daddy and granddaddy just kinda laughed at my chutzpah (they would have called it gumption). Besides, bream are pretty bony anyway.]

So, somehow all this has led me to the realization that even though I’ve scanned and posted quite a few pics recently, I don’t have nearly enough photos of the people I love. That’s not to say I haven’t tried. Every January 1, I promise myself I’m going to do two things: a) I’m not going to avoid people I know when I see them on the street or at the grocery store just because I don’t wanna get bogged down in conversation, and b) I’m going to take more pictures. I’ve failed miserably at both.

Grab your digital cameras now, guys.

I love you dad. I love you Jonno. I love you granddaddy, wherever you are.

Get back! Touch myself! Ungh! Ungh! Owww! I love the ambient shit (courtesy of mr. pants). If it didn’t irritate the hell out of that guy on the other side of my living room (and most of our guests), I’d be listening to this 24/7. Frankly, I think they should all be glad I’m not partial to that hi-NRG-techno-bubblegum-retro-disco- Nicki-French-Abagail-bullshit–the stuff that’s been keeping me and some homies out of homo bars for the past several years.

Hey, wait a minute! Was that anti-gay rhetoric I was just spewing? Was I dissing my rainbow brothers? Was I speaking from a privileged position within the gay ghetto that allows me to sneer at queer culcha? Wow. I’m sounding like a bitter queen, ain’t I? I agree with Steve: too much sissyfighting can make ya’ mean.