Mind Your Own God Damn Business

I’ve done my best to keep this blog anonymous.

I try not to use my real name, or address, or contact information. I’ve slipped a couple of times, and my friends have been nice enough to let me know right away that I’ve screwed up again and accidentally posted a scan of my birth certificate or put up a naked picture of myself showing off the birthmark on my inner thigh that also happens to be my checking account number.

Unfortunately, I had another slip up.

Sort of.

When I was in Jr. High, there was this girl that I knew. She sat near me in one of my classes, I think, which was really our only connection.

At first, I just thought that she was fun to talk to in class. Then, one day, her ex-boyfriend was talking to me about her and said that I should try and date her. The thought had never occurred to me before, but once it did, my tiny, partially-developed brain started fixating on that idea.

At the end of the school year, we signed each other’s yearbooks, and she put her phone number and told me to call her sometime.

As a 29 year old, I think I would have proceeded from that point something like this: Burn the yearbook, never call her and run like hell, because 14 year olds are minors and I’m no fan of statutory rape. Just for the hell of it, I’ll also tell you what I would do if we were BOTH 29 and I got her phone number: Call her and then wait for her to call back.

Unfortunately, a move like that requires the kind of nuance and savvy that I wasn’t capable of mustering at that age.

Oh, Robert Downey Jr. in blackface makeup, where were you in the mid-90's when I needed you most?

Instead, I did what I do best: I went retard.

…FULL retard.

I would call, and then call again, and then, for good measure, call some more. I don’t even remember how many times I would dial that number in a day – 10? 20? One million times? Hard to say. I don’t have a photographic memory of that summer, but I would guess that I called at least ten times a day, every day.

At first, she tried to be polite about it, and even talked to me once or twice. Unfortunately, I’m guessing that by day three of summer vacation, she was creeped out enough that she was probably tempted to take out a restraining order. After, I don’t know, three months of harassment, a switch in my head flipped, and the part of my brain that tells me “You’re being incredibly creepy. Cut it out.” finally turned on.

It’s a pretty uncomfortable memory. Just typing it out is making me cringe. Whenever I have free time, my brain usually defaults to categorizing all of the stupid things that I’ve ever done. I’ll be spacing out in the shower, or trying to fall asleep, and I’ll suddenly remember the time that I was trying out for a school play and completely blanked out every line of my audition piece, or when I backed my car into a fire hydrant and tried to tell my dad that I was in a parking lot and apparently a neon orange car that was two feet tall and roughly fire hydrant-shaped had done a hit-and-run on me.

I can come up with seven or eight or fifty more pages of stories like that. I can’t remember to take out my contacts, how to get to 80% of the locations in the town I live or how long it’s been since I’ve eaten, but I can easily recall every even vaguely humiliating moment of my life, no matter how minor it was or how long ago it happened, so I have a pretty big supply of things to be embarrassed about. Despite that, I would say that being a creeper that summer is somewhere in the top five of those random memories that makes me slap my forehead and yell “fuck!”.

As I’m sure you know, my normal reaction when I do something embarrassing is to put it on my blog as fast as I possibly can so it will be on the Internet forever. In this case, however, I’d rather not remember that it ever happened.

So imagine my surprise when the girl in question’s name showed up as a search term directing people to my blog.

You nailed my heart right in the balls with a cream pie, 'Ouiseey. Right in the balls.

I was digging through all of my search terms to see how many ways someone could search for the word “butthole” and end up on my blog when there it was, staring back at me. Since I’m not QUITE stupid enough to put her name in this post too and “that girl” seems too impersonal, let’s just call her “Dom Delouise”.

I don’t know how many of you keep blogs, but keeping one has helped me realize something about myself: about two weeks after I say something or write something down, I completely forget that it ever happened. More frequently than I’d like to admit, I’ll come up with what I think is an original idea for a post, only to realize that not only am I reiterating something that somebody has already said, the person who said it before was me. I’m sure that I’ve done this all of my life, but now I have a place where it’s all carefully stored and cataloged so I can get a more accurate picture of just how bad my dementia is.

Because of this, my blog terrifies me. I’ve kept it for two years, and I can only remember the last two weeks of content, so whenever someone new starts reading my blog, or I see that I’m inexplicably getting far more hits than usual, or I see the name of a girl that I showed remarkably poor judgment with fifteen years ago show up in my search terms, I shit my pants, because I have literally no idea what sort of crazy, stupid things I’ve put up. Did I just accurately retell the story of my 9th grade stupidity? Did I get all sour-grapes and accuse Dom of being a Nazi sympathizer? Did I lie and claim that we’re married now? Who knows? Don’t ask me! All I do is think up the posts, write them out, edit them and publish them on the Internet!

I searched for Dom’s name on my website, and, lo and behold, there it was.

And what did I say, exactly?

My entire summer before starting high school was spent in the basement, dicking around with BASIC on my sweet ass C64, trying to trick [a lithe, blond, 13 year old Dom Delouise] into letting me do it on her face, and listening to KTCL.

Classy, Johnny. Classy.

I suppose it could be worse – there were better ways to describe what was going on that summer, and I suppose I’m not painting a completely accurate picture – I don’t remember exactly what I was thinking at 14, but it wasn’t quite that vulgar. It was more “Maybe we can hold hands and go to first base!” than “She’s coming over in 30 minutes. I have some candles, silk sheets, a Kenny G cd and this ether-soaked rag. The trap is set! She’ll come in the door, I’ll tackle her, and then BAM! Pearl necklace, pearl goggles, and a dapper pearl hat. There’s just one thing that she wasn’t counting on – when I say ‘pearl’, it’s actually a metaphor for semen! My semen! It’s almost too easy!”

I know that. Now you know that. You know who DOESN’T know that, though? The 31 people who have googled her name and then visited my site. Now, 31 different people (or one incredibly dilligent person) think(s) that not only did I call lady Delouise that summer the way Daryl Strawberry did cocaine, I was doing it because I was planning to go full bukkake on her.

What I’ve done here is taken an embarrassing situation from my past and found a way to squeeze even more shame out of it.

Either way, I just got back from a trip to Chicago. It was a lot of fun, but my flight back was at 6AM, so I’m pretty sleepy.

I’ll see you all on Friday. Get ready for a great post, too! It’s this doozy about Jay Cutler playing for the Bears! I don’t want to spoil it for you, but it turns out that I’m pissed off that he doesn’t play for the Broncos any more! I hope you brought your laughing shoes, because it’s going to be like nothing you’ve ever seen!

See you then!