Lerning Kerve

Hot teacher + boredom = painful 3rd period erection... MATH!

The 17th century Scottish general Hugh Mackay once said that there is nothing more tedious than a perfect person. If this is true, than I am quite possibly the most exciting man in the world. I am sure that in some cultures more advanced than ours, stunted fingers and absent jawlines are symbols of masculinity, yet physical defects aside, I have a number of emotional and social blemishes that have hindered most of my adult life. For instance, I am not exactly sure how to play Monopoly, nor do I understand what a monopoly actually is. Sometimes I make up my own racial slurs and yell them at black people ("Go back to Africa you goddam googapet!"). I originally mistook the Penn State grand jury report as a letter to the Penthouse Forum. And I once danced with my mother to Marvin Gaye's classic "Let's Get It On." So where do my imperfections come from. I can blame my physical flaws on that unfair bitch Hereditary. But what about my emotional and social shortcomings? Why is my brother outgoing and charming, and I have a personality that my grandmother described as "Gollum-like?" It would be easy to blame any mental imbalance on my upbringing, such as the way my father used to make me perform Jodie Foster's scenes from Taxi Driver when I was little. But I believe there is a much more sinister entity at play, a dark and secretive place built upon exclusion, paranoia and subtle threats. I am talking, of course, about skool. For everything that has gone wrong in my life, I can trace its roots back to my years in skool. All of my cynicism, self-doubt, neurosis, and chalk addiction can be directly linked to the gloomy period of my life known as my skool-years. I'm not talking about pre-skool and kindergarten, that shit was easy. Nap time, milk breaks, recess, The Hungry Caterpillar...I rode that shit hard and put it away wet. I'm talking about elementary skool, junior high, high skool, even college. Those formative years when a boy starts to learn what to do with an erection, and why red-headed kids make shitty math partners. The sixteen years I spent in skool were painful experiments in social interaction and broad human conditioning. To this day I can't pick up a calculator without having violent Vietnam-like flashbacks where my Geometry teacher is screaming, "Use the Pythagorean theorem to tell me how much of a whore you are!" Elementary skool was probably the worst for me. Based on my looks and physical abilities, if I had lived fifty years earlier and in Poland, I would have been final solutioned in a heartbeat. Plus, kids have absolutely no sense of decency or moral etiquette. If you were fat, the kids in your class would let you know. My elementary skool was a small Dickensian building set in the middle of town. The Lower Pod contained grades one through three, and the Upper Pod contained grades four through six. I hated skool right from the start. For one, seven hours a day was way too long when it came to a six-year-old. At that age I had no sense of time, so seven hours may as well have been twelve hours. To this day I still have trouble judging the passage of time. What I think lasts a solid eight minutes, is actually about forty-three seconds, according to my fiance. In my first grade class we had our own bathroom right in the room. No need to go down the hall, just take a shit right here, three feet away from the desks. I hated that, as bathroom breaks and visits to the nurse were the perfect time-wasters. But with a bathroom right there in the classroom, not only did it not waste time, it also provided nonstop opportunities for utter humiliation. As I said, the toilet was literally three feet from the nearest desk, so if a kid went in there and unleashed that day's bowl of chili, the smell would waft through the entire room. That's some serious Oliver Twist shit. Yet, bathroom privileges were short-lived. One day a kid went into the bathroom and took a dump. He then proceeded to smear his own feces (shit) all over the walls and floor. That is true. A little kid with deep scatological issues, smeared poop all over the bathroom. It happened during a recess break, so no one actually knew who did it, but we all blamed a member of the poor section of kids. In skool I was a solid B student. If I really applied myself, I could get As, but rarely did I apply myself. Because I hated skool. I hated that these teachers could make me do things. I hated that I had to be in my desk for seven hours. I hated that most of the kids in my class were complete jag-offs. I was terrible at sports, terrible at math and science, and got shoved into fences by older kids at recess. I did have a crush on my second grade teacher but she yelled at me after I got caught trying to look up her dress. She scolded me in front of the whole class, I called her a "brainy dyke" and it turned into the whole ordeal. Somewhere around fifth or sixth grade I had to be put into a special reading class because I was not comprehending the work as well as the other students. This is the closest I ever came to being retarded, other than that time I injected myself with the human papillomavirus. By the time I was twelve and finishing up sixth grade, I was of average intelligence, socially awkward, prone to random erections several times a day, and eating my feelings. In the fall of 1997 I started seventh grade. What made junior high so terrifying is that grades seven through twelve were in the same building. So even though I was being placed in close proximity to rapidly developing girls, the chances of being picked on increased greatly. Another thing that started in seventh grade was football. I had never played organized football before, so I was equal parts excited and pants-shittingly nervous. I was made an offensive and defensive lineman. I thought that this were perfect, because I thought on offense all I had to do was stand in front of the quarterback and make sure he didn't get hit, and on defense, just try to get to the quarterback. I had no idea that for each play I had a specific duty and that just closing my eyes and wildly flailing my arms about would not be sufficient. There was also the whole thing about showering with my teammates after practice. I had never showered in front of anyone before, other than my scout master, who said it would earn me my Soup Bubbles merit badge. Of course, when a group of seventh grade boys shower together it's an unhealthy mix of homoeroticism and acts of pure disgust. We all stared at each others' dicks, how much pubes we had, one kid wasn't circumcised so everyone said he had alien dick. We threw soap on each other, pissed on each other, towel-snapped each other. Overall, it was super, super gay. In seventh grade I was at the bottom of the food chain, so I made an artform out of keeping my head down, not looking anyone older than me in the eye, and remaining completely anonymous. The one shining glory I had in junior high came during the Homecoming dance when I was still in seventh grade. I went to the dance with my best friend Matt...I mean, I didn't go-go to the dance with him, we weren't a couple. It was strictly platonic. Anyway, that night, as I peered out over the crowd, trying to take in as much cleavage as I could, Molly, the senior-fucking-prom-queen asked me to dance. No shit. I'm sure for her it was just a moment of wouldn't-it-be-funny-if-I-danced-with-the-biggest-dipshit-here, but for me it was transcendent. It was like reaching nirvana, or finding the nudity code on N64's Conker's Bad Fur Day. Molly was wearing a sleek black dress that fit tightly against her body. She had straight brown hair that fell to her shoulders, gorgeous blue eyes, and a nose that would have landed her on any endangered species list for birds...seriously, she had a huge nose. But more importantly, she was a senior and she had breasts and she was popular and she was asking me to dance with her. My height put me exactly at level with her chest, and I stared at them bewbs every chance I got, memorizing every bump of gooseflesh, every freckle. My hands just barely touched her hips, and they trembled with the ferocity of Michael J. Fox being electrocuted. The dance was brisk, and afterwards I never had any other contact with an older girl, but to this day, Molly remains a special part of my spank bank. By the end of junior high I had cut out a fairly secure niche for myself. I wasn't popular, but I was well-liked, I had friends, and was altogether average. But high skool shook everything up. The pressures of junior high were nothing compared to the pressures of high skool. Everything took on a much more serious and foreboding tone. I half-expected to see wrought-iron gates with the words ARBEIT MACHT FREI formed into them at the skool entrance. If elementary skool can be compared to a depressing Charles Dickens novel (i.e. every Charles Dickens novel), and junior high can be compared to a coming-of-age J.D. Salinger novel, than high skool can effectively be compared to the dystopian novels of George Orwell and Ayn Rand (if I don't make as many literary references as possible than I begin to feel that my English degree was a waste of time and money...Mark Twain, Moby Dick, Hemingway's simplistic prose...there). High skool definitely had the feel of a military dictatorship. The most popular seniors obviously held sway over the student body. These were the handsome and developed athletes and the girls that had transformed from being cute to honest-to-goodness jailbait. These young men and women answered only to Big Brother, the class made up of teachers, councilors and the Principal. As a freshman I was a nobody. At football practice, under the guise of being told I was now a part of something special, I was basically just tackle-fodder, a chubby piece of meat used in hitting drills. I was also subjected to the grueling high skool version of the Bataan Death March known as wrestling practice. Again, my lack of athletic prowess made me an excellent meatbag to practice moves on. During the wrestling season my freshman year, I went from 172 lbs. to 150 lbs. and racked up an impressive 0-6 record. I only wrestled in one J.V. tournament, where I lost all my matches, and I wrestled for the varsity team once. It was a dual against a hated rival, and through a series of circumstances I had to wrestle in the 162 lb. weight class. Now, I hated sports and did not take wrestling seriously, because I knew that I would never have to wrestle in a real match. There were two other kids on the team in my weight class. They were older than me, loved the sport, and where I was 150 lbs. of pure atrophied muscle and lingering baby fat, these two guys were chiseled outta marble. But on this one occasion, one of the wrestlers missed weigh-in and the other moved up a weight class, so I was selected as the team's 162 lb. wrestler. The dual worked itself out where, had I won my match, the team would have won the dual. As my match approached, my brother Dale and the other wrestlers were giving me advice, practicing moves, and building my confidence. By the time I stepped out onto the mat, I felt like I could actually win. Then I saw the guy I had to face. The dude looked like fucking Batman! Muscles, whiskers, and because singlets left nothing to the imagination, I could see his dick was way bigger than mine. The referee blew the whistle and I was on my back faster than a ten-year-old in a Penn State locker room. I decided one year of wrestling was enough, telling my parents that I would excel at football if that was my sole extracurricular focus. Football lasted only two years, after I finally came to the realization that my love of torturing animals was the only thing I had in common with Michael Vick. My skool work fared slightly better than my athletic attempts, but as with the rest of my skool career, I remained a solid B to B- student. Abject boredom was the most stimulating emotion skoolwork could arouse. Every once in a while a girl's nipples would poke through her shirt, or a fight would break out, or someone would cuss out a teacher, but really skool became nothing more than a monotonous necessity built around conformity and ridicule. Those that did rebel did so usually through sex or partying. My high skool sex life consisted of jerking off to late night airings of Silk Stalkings. I went to prom twice in high skool, and both times with girls that can accurately be described as meh...I also began to refine my taste in alcohol, preferring Hawkeye vodka and warm Natty Light as the fastest means of getting shithammered. By the time I became a senior I had already met the requirements to get into my college of choice, and so I took the bare minimum of classes that I could take and still be considered a functioning student. These classes consisted of an English course, three Home Ec. classes and two study halls. In the book Nineteen Eighty-four, Winston Smith had his little alcove where Big Brother's cameras could not see him. And I had my backrow seat in Stinkfinger's study hall. Stinkfinger was without a doubt the hottest teacher in skool. She was fortyish, divorced, and going through a post-marriage whore phase. She got her lower back pierced, and one day during English my friend uncovered an email from Stinkfinger on the teacher's computer in which Stinkfinger stated plainly that all she wants is a man with a huge dick. This, of course, sent our young minds, insane with teenage hormones, into a fucking tailspin. But the closest any of us got to hooking up with Stinkfinger came one day in study hall in which she repeatedly tongued her inside cheek. I said she probably had a canker sore on the side of her mouth, but allusions to dick-suckery were too much for us. That moment became the highlight of my senior year. I graduated from high skool in 2003 and eventually went on to a completely uneventful and regretful college career in which I strove for nothing and attained nothing. In most dystopian novels the hero usually dies, succumbing to the death knell of mass conformity and repression. But I didn't die. Skool did not kill me. I lived to fight another day...fight another day of crushing student loan debt to pay for a degree that makes me virtually unemployable...Viva la revolucion!

The Moore You Know: A few weeks ago I went to a Halloween Party (topical!) I dressed in my shabby black suit, my gray vest, my derby hat and a thin, frail walking stick. A little mustache under my nose. After about the tenth person commented on what a great Charlie Chaplin costume I had on I finally had to shout, "I'm not Charlie Chaplin goddamit! I'm business-casual Hitler!"

© Eric Moore - 2011

All My Children

Behind those soulless eyes is a mind plotting feverishly to kill you.

In a little less than a year, I will officially be a severely depressed married man. The days of marathon sessions of masturbatory depravity will be at an end. Long nights spent huddled over a pile of scribbled papers, desperately and obsessively editing my Boys Don't Cry fan fiction will also become a thing of the past. Those fleeting, yet brilliantly hilarious impressions of a Ken doll (in which I pull the loose flesh of my scrotum up and over my penis, creating an androgynous lump betwixt my legs) will have to be put on the back burner. For on that severely depressing glorious day, I will have to do that which I have been dreading and seemingly incapable of on a basic genetic level: grow-the-fuck-up. I'm going to be someone's husband for Chrissake! It's going to be time for me to put the Playstation controller down, shut the comic book, take the batteries out of the Fleshlight. I'm going to have to start taking on some pretty serious responsibilities. Marriage will have it's perks-I'll finally be allowed to legally hit a woman-but it also comes with some pretty big challenges, and I'm going to be forced to confront a plethora of serious questions. Where do I want to live? Should I take that new job? How long into the marriage do I bring up that whole herpes fiasco? But beyond those inexorable questions, one rises above all others. One single question stands tall and prominent, like a psychological monolith: Do I want to have kids? It is a question I have asked myself time and time again. More than "Lotion or bare-handed?" More than "Shit first or shave first?" More than "If I drop this on my face do you think it will hurt?" Now, I'm sure that most couples will have this question answered before their wedding. I'm sure that a lot of couples sit down and have long, complicated discussions about when and if children are wanted, when the right time will be, how much of a financial burden will it be. Other couples, suffice it to say, leave it up to a busted condom or a guy who won't pull out because it feels too damn good. If that's the case you better hope the girl has been staying on those kegel exercises and can push that shit out, otherwise you'll be down there with a straw telling yourself it's just warm orange juice you're sucking out. Anyway, children and marriage go hand-in-hand, so I have to figure out if after becoming a husband, am I ready to become a father too? For years I have had to listen to my own parents say to me, "Eric, I hope you have a kid just like you!" See, I was always crying when I was little, so much so that my mom refused to let my dad into my bedroom at night for fear he might straight up murder my ass. So basically, all the hell that my parents went through raising me, they now are wishing that upon me. So what don't I think I can handle about having kids? For one, I'm always dropping stuff. High school taught me that I can't catch a football or a baseball for shit. Even Nerf slid through my grip. Fuckin Theresa Uchytil could catch Nerf. And I'm dropping dishes all the time. My fiance still hasn't forgiven me for letting a Fiestaware plate slip through my fingers. What would happen if I dropped my baby? "Nice hands, Feet!" I doubt I could just pick up the shards and dump it in the trash and hope Steph doesn't notice that the red one is missing. Plus, you gotta understand, I'm an incredibly shallow person. I'm so consumed by this grating self-loathing that I have to cast immediate judgement on other people just to transfer the hate somewhere. The only reason I'm on Facebook is so I can make snide remarks under my breath about a person's status update. So I have this almost paralyzing fear that my children might be ugly. It could happen, and I think genes have little to do with it. I mean, my older brother Dale looks like the result of a three-way between Adonis, Casanova and a goddam Aston Martin. And me? I have a body that a school nurse described as "pretty fleshy" during a scoliosis screening. So, part of me is concerned with what my children will look like. Another part is how they will behave. I wore sweatpants to school until I was in the ninth grade. I bought White Town's Women in Technology CD, and listened to it religiously! I was the kid who sneezed and farted simultaneously in grade school. I've come to terms with the fact that I'm probably the reason my old man came home from work every night with a fresh twelve pack. I'm not sure I could take having an asshole for a kid. What would I do if my son becomes one of those guys who tucks in a t-shirt! A t-shirt for fuck's sake! What if I have a daughter? The thought terrifies me. How the hell does one make certain that his little girl won't develop "daddy issues." What if I hug her too much? Or too little? Will that send her into porn? I have a retarded World of Warcraft player's understanding of women, so how the fuck can I create and maintain a healthy father-daughter relationship that won't send her flying spread-eagle to the champagne room? What if she's a slut? God, could I ever be so oblivious? I mean, I knew loads and loads and loads of sluts in high school, small towns are ripe with em...sluts are a small town's main export. Every once in a while I would see a father of one of these sluts, and I would think to myself, "Does he even know? Does he even know that his daughter gives head in the parking lot before school? Does he even know she took on three guys at a party last week?" I doubt it. The one thing all these sluts have in common, other than crotch itch, is ignorant fathers, and no amount of soul-raping John Mayer songs can fix a man's head after realizing his daughter is the football team's official sperm bank. You know what? I wish I could just lease a kid. Try one out for a few years and then decide if I want him or not. Why shouldn't you be allowed to swing through an orphanage a pick one out, like a fresh black one, and take it on a test drive. After about five or six years you can either keep it or trade it in. "You know what, I think we'll stick with the African. He's already on his way to becoming our little athlete." Or, "Gosh, you know, I thought I would get along with the female model, but she started developing this nagging...I think I want to try the African." Or how about, "Yeah, it's great. It handles well, barely cries, and cleans up after itself. But it's going on eight and still hasn't got the training wheels off the bike. I think it might be a lemon." Of course, if such a thing existed there would have to be rules, like if the kid comes back to the orphanage molested then you have to buy it...something like that. You see, I think the thing that scares me the most about having children is the permanence of them. Once you have them, they're your responsibility for, like, ten- fifteen years. Christ, I've got tattoos that I regret! What am I gonna do if five years down the line I think, "Ah, why did I get that? It looks like shit. Isn't there some way to remove it?" Also, I'm a projector. I project my neurosis onto other people, especially my fiance. Pregnancy is a serious medical condition, so I know that for nine months I am going to be freaking out about the health of the woman and the health of the baby...smoking and drinking and listening to Tim McGraw's "Don't Take the Girl" on repeat with all the lights shut off. Then the Big Day will come, and I'll have to watch in pure horror jubilation as my wife pisses and shits everywhere (which won't be so bad, as this behavior falls well within my umbrella of sexual fetishes) until a baby does to her vagina what the fucking Cenobites do to a guy who solves the Lament Configuration puzzlebox. Of course, it won't be as bad as I think, after all, a baby will only be the second biggest thing to pass through my wife's vagina. Of course if some type of medical condition arises, or Steph decides she doesn't want her clam to look like a monster in an H.P. Lovecraft story, she might opt for the C-section. But is that any better? All I can picture is Tom Skerrit holding onto John Hurt's hand as a pink and bloody alien rips its way out of the latter's stomach. I assume the comparison is fairly accurate. There is also the possibility that I might not even be able to have kids biologically. I mean, as much as I jerk off, I gotta believe the well is gonna dry up at some point. Hell, a few future presidents and starting Yankee shortstops probably found their way into more than a few pieces of tissue paper. If sterility is a factor, I guess adoption is always an option (Ah, mad rhyming skillz. I still got it!). They say variety is the spice of life, and with adoption you can mix it up a little. Maybe I won't even want a plain ol white baby. With adoption I can get an Asian, a Hispanic, a black, an Indian, a construction worker, a biker, a cop...the combinations are endless! But there is something special about having a son, a real son, not a fake adopted one, that I can pass my name onto, a little slice of myself that will ensure my immortality, at least for another generation. But that's a romantic notion. Back in the day, say four hundred (400) years ago, having sons was a necessity. Back then, women were essentially just pods to grow people in, Matrix-style, so a man needed sons so they could inherit his land and his money. In fact, because the survival rate for infants was so tiny, a man would give his sons all the same name, because he didn't know which one, if any, would survive. God, I couldn't imagine that. Me and six brothers, all named Eric, poised in some drawn out Darwinian battle of survival of the fittest. Thank heaven it's not like that anymore, otherwise I would have died of starvation years ago after discovering the most effective way to get rid of an erection, which is manually. Plus, I really don't have a legacy to pass on to my children, other than a pair of disturbingly small hands and a more-than-slight drinking problem. And do I really want a little baby crying, pissing and shitting, breaking things and monopolizing my wife's nipples? Everyone has heard the cynical legend that after marriage your sex drive decreases, after children you might as well be castrated. "Excuse me, Eric Jr., have you seen my libido?" And my dear son will say, "Actually, Dad, the last time I saw your libido I was strangling it to death with a pair of soiled panties. It's buried in the backyard somewhere." Thanks, son. I guess I have to ask myself if my life will be less enjoyable, unfulfilled, if I don't have children. When I'm seventy, will I look back on my life and wonder, "All those tranquil years of exotic travel and spontaneous sex with the wife, what a waste!" Now, I don't mean to beat a dead horse (A Dead Horse is the name of my penis), but I just rack my brain back and forth over these questions. Kids, no kids. I dunno. Not now anyway. I guess I'll know when I know. With my luck, Steph will get pregnant with triplets on our wedding night. Jesus. Remind me to keep a wire hanger handy.

The Moore You Know: I think of all the fictional celluloid universes that exist in the movies, the most terrifying has to be the one that Steven Seagal's characters inhabit. This is because, at any given moment, Mason Storm or Nico Toscani or Gino Felino, might find themselves in a fight for his life. Nowhere is safe for these men. At least Batman has a cave. Harry Potter has Hogwarts. But these men, these immortal characters created by the equally immortal Steven Seagal, they have no haven, no refuge from the endless parade of short-tempered psychopaths that exist everywhere John Hatcher or Casey Ryback goes. There is a reason, of course, that these men live in a world where every background character is just itching to pull out a switch blade or throw a painfully inept punch. Steven Seagul has the acting ability of a turd sliding slowing against a porcelain landscape into the waiting waters. No one watches a Steven Seagal movie for the emotional depth of his characters, or to see the man put on a motherfucking acting clinic. You watch a Steven Seagal moving because you want to see some goddam Jamaican thugs get their asses kicked, or Tommy Lee Jones get a knife put through his fucking skull. So in order to fill the void that exists between the beginning credits and the part at the end where Michael Caine gets thrown off a building, Forrest Taft and Orin Boyd need an excuse to snap some necks drop some great one-goddam-liners ("I'll take you to the bank...the blood bank."). In order to accomplish this feat, the director has no choice but to make every single character that isn't played by Steven Seagal a potential threat. Think of all the meaningless, arbitrary and totally random fight scenes in a Steven Seagal movie...They're all the same. Jack Cole or Frank Glass is minding his own business, walking the dog, heading to the bank, and while performing these completely normal tasks, he accidentally bumps into a random guy on the street, or maybe he intervenes on a man who is threatening to beat the shit out of his girlfriend way too loudly for being in a public park. Steven's character might say something like, "Excuse me, sir. I didn't mean to bump into you." Or, "Excuse me, sir, but you shouldn't speak to your girlfriend like that." And then, for no apparent reason other than the fact that everyone in a Steven Seagal movie is a bipolar steroid junkie, the stranger will respond with, "WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU SAY TO ME! YOU'RE A FUCKING DEAD MAN!" And then Austin Travis or Jonathon Cold will have to put down the situation with a karate chop to the neck, a kick to the balls, or some cut-the-shit murder. That's what is so scary about the Steven Seagal universe: he has to leave his house every morning not knowing how many people are going to want to kill him for no goddam reason, but he knows that someone is going to want to kill him for no goddam reason.

©Eric Moore - 2011

Where It All Went Wrong

The year I spent in the fourth grade was probably one of the most important times in my life. It was a transitional period for me, in which I moved away from the lackadaisical freedoms of childhood and into the rigid seriousness of prepubescent adolescence. In the summer of 1994 my family was living in the town of Columbia, Illinois, and in the fall I would be starting school at Immaculate Conception School, which was the extravagantly named Catholic school in town. Since I was the new kid in town my parents thought it imperative that I assimilate with other youths as quickly as possible. In order to accomplish this my brother and I were quickly enrolled in an organized soccer league. Now, in previous summers I had to suffer the humiliations of Little League baseball, so I was used to having my summers interrupted by the vicious demands of Sport. However, this was the first time that I entered a competitive soccer league. One thing I realized very quickly is with soccer you have to run...a lot. I would have to say that 100% of the time a player is either running or moving at some kind of accelerated pace. Now, I have mentioned in the past that at age ten (10) my body was not built for any form of physical activity. I was a great sitter and an even better recliner, and I could watch the hell out of a TV, but running? Michael J. Fox has a better chance of earning a degree in calligraphy than I had at running. Soccer practice became hour long endurance tests in which my only motivation was to not be the shittiest player on the field. Games were obviously worse, because the thing I hated more than running was competition. I have found that there is a very strong correlation between how good I am at something and how much I give a shit. I have no doubt in my mind that had I been a soccer prodigy I would have relished the competition, but I wasn't a prodigy, although my old man did refer to me sometimes as the Garbage Disposal, because of how much food I could put down. Anyway, the natural drive that an athlete has to win had died inside me long ago. It was buried under the bra and underwear section of the JCPenney catalog and countless episodes of Ren & Stimpy. I was forced to play soccer, I hated it, and simply didn't care if we won or lost. My whole philosophy on the sport was Stay Away From The Ball. I hated playing the forward position because that meant I had to run the entire length of the field, and I had the lung capacity of an aborted fetus with a pack-a-day habit. On occasions I would be selected to play goalie. I assumed that it wasn't for my insanity-inducing reflexes, but was more for the fact that the goalie is the position that can always be furthest from the ball while still considered an actual player. But the goalie position was a two-sided coin. I like playing goalie, because I didn't have to run. I could usually lean against a post and get some good counting done. On the other hand, I was the last line of defense. The entire game could rest on my shoulders. Move this way and we lose, move that way and we win. I couldn't take the pressure. My defense consisted only of praying that my teammates would not let the ball get to me. If that failed then I would occasionally flail a hopeless limb, most of the time in the opposite direction of the careening ball. My only true victory in the sport came during a Saturday tournament. Before our game was scheduled to start, my mom gave me some money to get some food and pop at the concession stand. As I was returning to my teammates, who were stationed at the bottom of a hill by the fields, I noticed that the game was about ready to start and I wasn't there. So, against all my instincts, I began to run down the hill. Walking a few yards in front of me was a boy who looked a couple years younger than me. He must have heard me lumbering towards him, because he looked back at me and I saw his eyes widen in fear. He let out a yell and began sprinting down the hill in front of me. It was the only time in my life I have been able to intimidate someone. The only good thing to come out of soccer was that I got to meet the boys that would become my friends during the school year. The boy I became best friends with was a lanky red-haired kid named Matt. He was rail-thin, had perpetually uncombed hair, and a set of wild blue eyes that would haunt Charles Manson's dreams. Matt may have suffered from some form of A.D.D., because the kid was very smart, but he was fucking nuts. I remember being at an arcade with him once and he actually said, "I'm gonna fight this guy." And then he walked up to a kid playing a game and started talking shit until a fist fight erupted. I maintained my usual safe-distance. I thought maybe Matt had some kind of emotional problems, stemming from what I have no theory. His dad might have pissed in his mom's pussy while he was being conceived. That's one way to dilute the quality of the sperm [citation needed]. Although I considered Matt to be my best friend that year, we had a sort of love-hate relationship. We were friends, but we fought all the time. Matt could be very mean-spirited, a trait shared amongst the gingers. There were times when I would show up to school not knowing if Matt would be my friend that day or not. But more often than not we got along fine. We did sleepovers, birthday parties, all the stuff normal boyhood friends do. And if I'm being honest, I brought a lot of Matt's ire on myself. You see, in fourth grade I was a pathological liar of Casey Anthony proportions. I lied about everything to everyone. And it was always the most pointless shit. I mean, I lied to cover my ass when I was in trouble, but I also lied about movies I saw, books I read, presents I received. And a lot of my lies were aimed at Matt. One time I told Matt that my family was going to Busch Stadium that night to watch a Cardinals game and we had an extra ticket. "Do you want to go?" Matt was so excited. I told him I would call him that night and my family would pick him up to take him to the game...But it was all bullshit. My family did have tickets to a Cardinals game, but no extra ticket. I'm not sure why I lied, but if I had to venture a guess I would say it was because between the time I asked Matt to the game and when he figured out he wasn't going to be picked up, I was his fucking hero. I came through! For that brief window of time I was the man. The anger he felt towards me later on was worth the time he spent thrilled that I had asked him to go to a ball game. When my family got back from the game Matt had left multiple messages on our answering machine asking if everything was OK. I wasn't sure what I was going to say to Matt the next day, but I figured I would wing it. Turns out I didn't have to say anything. When I approached him, he simply turned towards me and spit a loogie right in my face. That was the gist of our relationship. It was built on lies and insults and suspicions with moments of genuine friendship. Fourth grade was also an important year for me, because it was the year that my brother Dale had completed his Homeric quest to find my father's porn stash. This quest was all predicated on a hunch we had that our dad just looked like he was the type to own porn. After two years of searching, Dale discovered a large stack of Playboys stuffed inside a Xerox box that was marked "Easter." Those Playboys, which covered the 1986-87 season, were my first real introduction to sex. I believe that sexual orientation in genetic and unchangeable, because at 10 I had no concept of what it actually meant to be gay. Gay was just a concept, an insult. It was looking at those pictures and centerfolds of fully nude women that I moved from being an asexual child to a fervent heterosexual. I was fucking mesmerised by those magazines. Dale and I looked at them whenever we had free time. We would stash a few in our room, then switch them out with a new batch when our erections had grown immune. The thing about naked women in the 1980s is there was always a lot of hair...gallons and gallons of hair. Most of the women in the Playboys I was looking at could wear their pubic hair in a ponytail. And of course the idea that a woman could shave her pubic hair was nowhere near my thoughts, so I was forced to look at beautiful women with enough hair between their legs to weave a rug. And since the vagina itself was hidden behind this fucking eagle's nest, it really didn't do anything for me. I had no idea what a vagina looked like, and all I saw in those magazines was just the absence of a penis. So I became obsessed with breasts. I would go crazy thinking about them. Since I went to a Catholic school it was mandatory to attend church as a school during the week. Every once in a while I would sit behind a seventh or eighth grade girl whose bra straps were visible through her shirt. At that point my mind would shut off and I would just fucking stare at these straps for a whole hour. Dale had a girlfriend that he brought over to our house every now and then, but she was so flat I think her chest was actually concave. The gods are cruel. So in fourth grade I discovered I sucked at soccer, I was terrible at lying but didn't care, and I discovered bewbs. Fourth grade was also the year I found out I sucked at math. Elementary school math was generally easy for me. It was simple adding and subtracting, multiplying and dividing, no big deal. But in fourth grade they introduce equations. They put goddam letters into the problems. I absolutely hated math class. It was my worst subject. And as with soccer, since I sucked at math, I didn't care about math. The teacher would assign a section of our math workbook and then give us some time to get started on it, and I was shut that motherfucking book right then and there and shove it into my desk. I truly never did the assignments. I handed in so many papers where only one or two of the problems were even attempted. Of course my apathy caught up to me at the end of the year. I passed math class with a D-, but was also given a letter that said if I did not maintain a certain grade in fifth grade math, I would have to take fourth grade math over again. But for some reason Fate keeps saving my ass from true humiliation. That summer, my dad was once again transferred from Illinois back to Omaha, so by fifth grade I was back in my hometown of Treynor, Iowa, with all my old friends. And the issue of nearly failing math never came up at school. My year of fourth grade will always hold a special place in my heart, because that was when I began my journey into the man I am today, a man who is kinda a dick, kinda not.

© Eric Moore - 2011

A Merit Badge In Failure

And this is before shit gets weird

When I was a little boy I was both an alter boy and a Boy Scout, which made me a prime candidate to join the ranks of America's molested. Unfortunately for my sense of self-worth, I was never inappropriately touched by a lecherous priest, or had my kid-bits fondled by an enthusiastic Scout Master. And though I remained an alter boy until my early teens (I did not want to quit a virgin), my time in the venerable Boy Scouts of America ended all too soon. As I mentioned before, I grew up in the small town of Treynor, Iowa, a rural oasis set amidst the seemingly endless acres of corn fields. As with most small towns in Iowa, conformity was the unspoken rule: your skin should be white, your religion should be protestant, your penis should only enter a vagina. When you are a little kid in such a town, you are also expected to take up certain extracurricular activities such as sports or a job. I was only six (6) when my father sternly informed me how much I wanted to be in the Boy Scouts. And so, with a veneer of synthetic pride to mask my crippling gloom, I enrolled in Cub Scouts, which is basically a negative one-level Boy Scout. My uniform was only a plain white t-shirt with an ironed-on visage of a tiger nestled next to a baby tiger, or "cub." I was also provided with a few iron-on paw prints that could only be applied when I achieved something significant. One night a week, I would reluctantly pull my Tiger Cub uniform on, grab my unread handbook and sulk to the car with my dad, steeling my nerves for another pitiful night of feigned interest and paralyzing boredom. These early Tiger Cub meetings were like Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, if at the beginning of the AA meeting the group was told that Terry, the rambunctious member who inspired hope in the others had died the night before of a massive cocaine heart attack. There were five of us kids, all first-graders, shuffled into the back room of someone's house, so as not to disturb the rest of the family. Fathers and step-fathers all exchanging awkward greetings, introducing themselves and introducing their sons. Us boys worried about being embarrassed, worried what the other boys might think of our fathers. What would be said at school the next day? "Brad's dad smells like shit!" "Joe's dad had a fucking boner the whole time!" "Mat's dad was taking pulls from a flask all goddam night!" The host-father (which sounds extremely cult-like) would set up snacks, read something from the Tiger Cub handbook that no one paid attention to, and then announce the night's activities. Usually it was something incredibly childish and physically undemanding: paint a picture, play a board game (more like bored game, am I right?!), design something with yarn. The early blunderings of greetings and announcements would soon melt away into passive aggression and thinly-veiled competition. Despite random claims of, "It's not a competition," everyone in the room on any given night knew it exactly was a fucking competition. Whether we had to sew a specific pattern into something, sketch a certain scene, paint something, design something, everyone wanted to be the first done and everyone wanted theirs to be the best. The fathers would stand anxiously behind their boys, grinding their teeth and biting their tongues until they could taste blood so as not to let forth a streaming torrent of violent obscenities any time their child made a mistake. Words of encouragement were actually not-so-subtle threats. "Eric? Hey, bud...Let me ask you something. Why would you draw an alligator in that creek, huh? Have you ever seen an alligator in a creek? Why would an alligator be living in a small Iowa creek? Don't get me wrong, it's a great looking alligator. I just have no clue why you would draw it." "Brad, why did you paint a blue jay and a cardinal in the same nest together? Why would two completely different species of birds share the same nest? Does that make sense to you?" Our fathers watched us work with ever-increasing suspense. If one boy's work was deemed the best, than vicariously he had the best father that night. If one boy's work was so terrible that no one spoke of it, then that night his father was also a failure. At six, I thought I could draw as good as anyone. I had spent countless hours tracing underwear models from my mom's JCPenney catalogs, but used artistic license to remove those pesky bras with a couple giant curves of a pencil. So arts never bothered me, but crafts did. Attached to my fleshy, tea cup saucer-like palms, are fingers that resemble a pink-hued monarch caterpillar. They are most adept at nose-picking, burger-gripping, and prepubescent penis-fondling (mostly my own). Yet when it came to sewing, sculpting and building, they were perfectly maladroit. My dioramas and toothpick models usually resembled something that had been dropped down a flight of stairs, and my anguish over not being able to form with hands what was so clear in my mind's eye was only exacerbated by the spark of disappointment that always crept into my father's eyes. Fortunately for my father, I had not yet entered into organized sports, so there was still time before all hope for me was completely shattered. But I still manufactured small victories for myself. One night when the Tiger Cubs met at my house, the activity was to put together a 500-piece Where's Waldo puzzle. As my chubby, inarticulate fingers fumbled through the various pieces, I happened across the Holy Grail: Waldo's smug, bespectacled face. I quickly palmed the piece and furtively dropped it by my shoe, where I stepped on it, saving it until the puzzle was nearly complete, then I could heroically present the last piece and put Waldo in his final place. My diabolical plan worked perfectly. Over the course of an hour, 499 pieces were put into place. At one point my first grade nemesis Brad, proclaimed, "Done!" For a moment all gazed upon the completed puzzle until someone pointed out, "No, there's a piece missing." At this point, I casually bent down, removed the hidden piece from beneath my shoe, and proudly exclaimed, "Here it is!" And in an Arthurian twist, I returned the puzzle piece, my Excalibur, to its rightful spot. "Great job, bud!" My dad said. I beamed with pride. Machiavelli could not have planned it better. Though the majority of our time was spent wasting an hour in each other's houses, occasionally we would venture outdoors on some weekends. On one such occasion our little group was accompanied by a professional bird-watcher out to the middle of a recently-harvested cornfield to identify birds and their calls. I'm not sure how one becomes a bird-watching professional, but I assume it takes years of unemployment. Now, in the prodigious pantheon of living things, I have to say that birds, especially native Midwest birds, are probably the most mind-numbingly boring. I stood in the middle of this field, my toes and cheeks freezing, listening to this old man prattle on and on about birds and nests and what the birds sounded like. If he thought his vast knowledge of birds was impressive, he was sadly, sadly mistaken. By this time in my life I had already seen bare breasts, so any topic other than bewbs did not hold my attention for long. Every so often the man would stop talking, hold up a hand as if to tell us to be still, and say, "Hear that? Do you hear that?" And us boys would listen as best as we could, until finally a bird would chirp or a crow would caw, and the old man would get this real pleased look on his face and say, "That's a robin," or, "That was a sparrow." We were each given a small handbook on Iowa birds and told to go out and write down any birds we could identify and try to imitate their calls. I made my way to the woods alone and got behind the first large tree I found and sat down. Every so often I would let out my own version of a bird call, just to say that I was actually trying. At one point the old man gathered us up and said, "Do you hear that? That's a Bob White calling. Do you know why it's called a Bob White?" Because you just fucking made it up? "It's called a Bob White, because it sounds like he is calling Booooobwhiiiiiiite. Can you hear it?" I listened as this particular bird made its call again. I suppose it did sound like it was saying the name Bob White, but that may have just been a placebo effect working on me. After all, I was expecting the fucking bird to say Bob White, so that's what I heard. Another weekend the Tiger Cubs went camping at Viking Lake in Red Oak, Iowa. The entire weekend was cold and gray and rainy. My older brother, Dale, had decided to tag along as well. Dale was in the Boy Scouts, so the other boys looked up to him. My brother used his new-found influence to poison the rest of the Cubs against me. When they went into the camper to play cards and drink sodas, Dale said I wasn't allowed in. When I wanted to walk the trails with them, Dale said no. I said, "Fine! I'll just walk them myself." "Good! I hope a coyote fucking eats you!" Dale would say. I ended up not walking the trails. Instead, I spent most of the weekend hanging out with my dad and fishing. I hated fishing. I would rather be out watching birds with Bob White-fucking-asshole, than have to fish. At one point I came across my pole, which I had cast out into the lake hours ago just to be able to say I was "fishing." I noticed that the line was pulled taut, directly into the water. "Great," I thought. "Fuckin thing is probably broken." I picked up the fishing pole and began to reel it in. To my surprise, though, the line wasn't broke, it was attached to a fish. After a few minutes of what probably looked like a retarded boy poking at the water with a stick, I pulled in a beautiful sixteen inch bass. My dad was very impressed, and took my picture with my catch. Of course, he made me set the fish free after the picture, and since I was alone when I caught it, my brother and the other boys refused to believe that I had caught anything. By Sunday morning I was ready to go home. The other boys were pissing me off in their allegiance to my nefarious older brother. But things somehow managed to turn in my favor. At some point in the morning, one of the boys, Joe, couldn't find his dad. None of the other fathers knew where he was, so Joe wanted to go looking for him. He gathered all of us kids up and we started walking the trails. When we exhausted the trails, Joe insisted we walk around the entire lake. About halfway through our journey, the other kids, myself included, were beginning to get annoyed at Joe's constant whimpering. Out of frustration and anger at being picked on all weekend, I suddenly said, "You're dad's dead, Joe." To my surprise, the other kids started to laugh, especially Dale. Well, this only encouraged me. "He probably fell into the lake and drowned." The howls of laughter grew and grew, and soon the other boys joined in, coming up with ever more gruesome ways that Joe's missing father met his demise: "A bear tore him in half!" "He smashed his head against a rock!" "Some psycho murdered him!" We all laughed and cheered at our grisly imaginations...well, everyone but Joe. He was nearly in hysterics as he imagined all the horrible ways we were describing his dad's death. It felt so good to be a part of the group again. Bullying is a tremendous unifier. Joe eventually did find his dad, who had found a hidden alcove near the lake to fish at. Joe ran up to him and gave him a huge hug with tears running down his face. I couldn't help but smile. Not because Joe had been reunited with his father, but because I knew I caused those tears. "What a baby," I said. "Yeah, what a fag," another boy seconded. Eventually, when our Tiger Cub handbook had been covered front to back, and a series of black paw prints had been ironed on to my shirt, it was time to move up in the world. My brother moved from a Bear to a Webelos, and I moved up from a Tiger to a Wolf. I got a crisp new handbook, and a sharp navy blue uniform, complete with a little yellow scarf. This was the big time now. No more bullshit puzzle-solving. No more faggoty arts and crafts. We left our fathers behind, and began to meet at the local church, St. Paul's Lutheran Church, every Wednesday night. Our new pack leader was a mother of one of the boys. Her name was Mrs. Coop. Before the first meeting, my own mother informed me that Mrs. Coop had a glass eye. COOOOL! I showed up that night expecting to see someone who looked like Kano from Mortal Kombat. But instead I was greeted by this June Cleaver-looking woman, who had a pair of disappointingly normal eyes. Each meeting I prayed to God that her glass eye (I couldn't tell which one was fake, they both looked soulless) would pop out of her head. But it never did. So for months and months I went to the meetings and half-heartily studied my handbook, partially memorizing passages and going over merit badge requirements, of which there were a fuck-ton. Mostly, I just read issues of Boys Life and laughed at the comics on the back page. Somehow, through sheer force of will, I guess, I managed to start getting some merit badges. Also, I had to start to actively participate in the group. One day my pack had to go all over town selling popcorn door-to-door. I knocked on one door, and a rickety old man answered. "Would you like to buy some popcorn for the Boy Scouts?" I asked in my most please-rape-me voice. "Hell no," the man replied. "I ain't got no teeth." And he grinned a big toothless grin for me. The Boy Scouts also put on a bake sale, where we would bring homemade treats to the school gymnasium, and the public would bid on the different cakes and pies. My mother insisted we make pineapple-upside-down cake, which I vehemently protested. "Pineapple is gross!" I insisted. But seeing that she could bake (being a woman) and I couldn't (being incompetent), my mother won out. Well, of course, no one wanted to eat a disgusting pineapple cake, so my mom ended up bidding on her own cake at the auction. My final humiliation in Scouts came at the Pinewood Derby. A few weeks before the big race, each kid was sent a block of wood, some wheels, some paint, and some stickers to decorate our cars with. Now, my grandfather was an expert woodsmith, who offered to carve my derby car for me. But my father, drunk on power, told me that I had to carve the thing myself. I had a pocket knife when I was six, but my mom took it away because I pretended to rob my little sister at knifepoint with it, so I was not to be trusted with anything sharp. Also, my fingers took to woodworking like Helen Keller took to speech. I basically hacked and sliced at the wood until something vaguely resembling a car took shape. I painted it red, hoping the color would increase its speed, and then added some wavy racing stripes. The Pinewood Derby was held at the school's gymnasium, and the place was packed for the big event. Because there were so many kids participating, it would be a single-elimination tournament. As soon as I arrived in the gym, I knew I was doomed to failure. All the other kids were holding perfectly manicured cars in their hands. All were better painted and better carved than mine. Clearly, I was the only one who carved my own car. I watched race after race, car after car zoom down the inclined track. It was amazing how fast some of the cars could go. Eventually, my name was called. I approached the race track like a condemned man walking to the gallows. A feeling of uncompromising dread washed over me as my eyes took in the other boy's car. It looked like it was designed by fucking General Electric, and was painted a sleek black and silver. We put our cars at the starting line and waited for the signal to let go. When the word came, the other boy's car took off like a bullet. Mine just rumbled forward pathetically. It didn't even catch enough speed on the incline to make it the entire length of the track. As the other boy's car glided smoothly to victory, my car came to a paltry stop about seven feet from the finish line. As people all around me cheered the victor, I humbly approached my car and removed it from the track in disgrace. Years later, in high school, my shop class held its own Pinewood Derby. I didn't fare any better then either. My second attempt at fashioning a car out of wood ended up looking like something Michael J. Fox would make in a full-on Parkinson's seizure. Anyway, when it came to being a Wolf, I stuck it out until the end, and eventually became a Bear. Another handbook. Another uniform. Another fucking Pinewood Derby. Yet, my time as a Bear was practically nonexistent. Fate, it seemed, had other ideas. The summer I became a Bear, my father got transferred to Columbia, Illinois, and by August, we were living in a new town, and I would be going into a new school. I never took up Boy Scouts again. At our new town, no one in my family even brought up the Scouts. I thought I was spared further humiliation, but my father, the sadist that he is, decided to sign my up for soccer. Like, I said, he still had hope for me, sadly.

The Moore You Know: I'm writing a very gripping, very poignant novel. It is a first-person narrative about the human condition and the meaning of life. But halfway through the letter "I" broke off my keyboard, so around page 257, the protagonist suddenly gets very pretentious and only refers to himself in the third person.

© Eric Moore - 2011

Dick Moves

I'm not a fan of confrontation. I try to avoid it at all costs. In doing so, I go through life trying desperately not to ruffle anyone's feathers. The last thing I want to be is an inconvenience. I just want to get through the day without causing anyone to have problems. I don't care if people like me or not, but I don't want people to hate me. I don't want people to think of me as an asshole. So far, I think I have been pretty successful in this. I think I'm amicable, friendly, easy to get along with, albeit a little shy and timid. To date, I really only have a handful of mortal enemies, and I'm engaged to be married, so there are people in this world who can stomach me. But I live my life by a simple credo: be good to people and people will be good to you. So each morning I wake up and repeat my mantra: don't be an asshole today. This has served me well over the years to avoid turning into an arrogant, self-loathing dipshit that likes to harass other people and ruin their day. But every once in awhile, when the moon turns blue and icicles form along the cavernous ceilings of hell, I do in fact act like an asshole. This very morning is a perfect example, but in order to tell the whole story, I need to go back a few months. For all my literary prowess and seduction of words, I lack a lot of basic social and counting skills, which makes me a prime candidate for doing menial and odd manual labor-type jobs. So I got a D in 10th grade Geometry, so what! I still know how to shovel dirt and push a broom, provided it's not one of them fancy brooms. Anyway, a few months ago, one of the jobs I was put in charge of was scrubbing out a large defunct fountain structure that was being closed down for the winter months. So I climbed in the fountain with a hose and a squeegee and proceeded to clean. The job was pretty simple, boring, but simple. Well, imagine my surprise when I came across a handful of coins near a drain in the fountain! It was just a few pennies, a nickle and a dime here and there. I picked the grimy coins up and put them in my pocket. Satisfied with my treasure I continued scrubbing out the fountain. But the more I cleaned, the more coins I found! There were a lot of pennies, but I was finding more dimes and even some quarters. The more I cleaned the more change I found. At the end of the day the fountain was pristine, and I was covered in sludge, but my pockets bulged with all the money that I had been rewarded with for my endeavor. Now, I was not oblivious to the fact that these coins, for all intents and purposes, were people's wishes. It's the only reason people throw coins into fountains. So I realized that I was actually stuffing my pockets with people's wishes, they're hopes and dreams manifested in these small bits of currency. I knew that these coins were not meant for me, but as payment to whatever entity had the power to answer a stranger's prayer. But what was I supposed to do? If I left them in the fountain my boss would have yelled at me for not taking them out. So I took them, smuggling them away from work in a dirty plastic cup. When I got home I poured my findings into a large and ornate green canister that once held a bottle of Glenfiddich scotch whisky. And there they stayed. The coins, though many, were very dirty. All the time spent in the water had given them all a thick coat of algae and filth. I did a little bit of half-assed research on how to clean coins, what chemicals to buy, and so on. But eventually, I just resigned myself to having a can full of shitty coins perched on my desk. Until today. You see, the place that I work at has a pop machine filled with a variety of delicious sodas. Unfortunately, I never have any cash on me, and any time I wanted to quench my thirst on a Dr. Pepper or a Mountain Dew, I was reduced to groveling to my co-workers asking for some spare change to buy a pop. They always obliged, but I felt like an asshole just having to ask. So this morning I actually took some initiative. I told myself, "Eric, you're going to be working outside all day, you're going to get thirsty, you know you are going to want a pop. You should take your own money." I searched my apartment high and low for some loose change, but alas there was none. The only coins I had in my possession were those sickly chuncks of metal within the Glenfiddich can. "Hmmm..." I pondered. "They look like shit, but Coinstar might take them." So I left early for work today so I could swing by the grocery store and test their Coinstar machine. It was early, so the store was pretty much dead, but a few employees busied themselves on preparing for the day, and helping a couple early birds getting groceries. I cradled my canister of misfit coins under my arms and approached the Coinstar machine, glowing with an immaculate green body. Very slowly I began to pour my coins into the tray. Their crusty forms clanged against the metal, knocking dust and dirt off them. Little by little I lifted the tray to guide the coins into the slot. They began to fall through, and a wave of relief hit me as I heard the Coinstar's internal machinations rumble to life. The small screen in front of me began to count the coins I was shuffling in, expertly adding the values up and dividing the coins into categories with the flawless efficiency of a computer. "It's working," I thought happily. I confidently began to pour the coins into the machine at a faster pace, and assisting them into the slot with a free hand. My glee was cut short, however, when the machine emitted a single sharp beep and then stopped it's inner workings. I looked up at the screen. A bright yellow flag was splashed across the monitor with the words: We're Sorry! Coinstar can no longer complete this transaction! Please contact a manager for assistance! Panic began to grow in my stomach, inflating like some horrible balloon. "Shitshitshitshitshitshit," was all I could think. My canister was nearly empty, and faced with the thought of having to tell a manager that I broke the machine, I contemplated just walking out of the store. But I was turned off by the idea of leaving money in the machine, money I was owed. After some hesitation I decided to get an employee to help me. I went to the customer service counter, which was closed, but saw a short, forty-something woman wearing some very trendy glasses punching some keys on a register. "Um, miss," I began. "I'm having an issue with the Coinstar. It stopped counting my change." I was so nervous, a whole mess of arrow's could fit in my voice's quiver. "OK. Let's see what we can do," she said with a helpful smile. I followed her back to the machine and she took a look at the screen. After studying the message she took out a set of keys and opened up the Coinstar. She removed a tray, and flushed some coins out. "Were they all this dirty?" she asked, handing me back the coins. "Uh, yeah. They were pretty bad." She proceeded to brush the components with her fingers, trying anything to get the machine to start back up, but to no avail. So she began to press her fingers to the screen and after following a short series of instructions she came to a section on the monitor that asked her for a password, which she didn't know. As she continued to mess with the screen I could feel the panic balloon swelling. My nerves were only exacerbated when I saw a short blond-haired girl approaching with a plastic bag filled with scintillating coins. Plus, I wasn't sure of the time-I might be late for work. The woman continued to manipulate the screen of the Coinstar, but all paths led her to the password screen, a seemingly insurmountable obstacle for her. Added to this debacle was the girl, who was now standing directly behind me and watching the woman fumble with the machine's controls. Cognizant of the girl's impatience (she was letting out several annoyed, cunty sighs), I thought that maybe I could play the victim here too. Maybe I could make it seem like the damn machine broke while I was innocently depositing my freshly minted change. I turned slightly and met the girl's eyes. I rolled my eyes and smirked, an expression that said, "This machine is a retard and this bitch is worse." The girl nodded politely. "If you're gonna put coins in the machine don't have them be dirty," the woman suddenly said as she closed up the machine. So my cover was blown, I was found out. I was embarrassed that the woman accused me in front of the other girl, and the woman's tone left something to be desired. Besides, I didn't have them be dirty. The things were dirty when I found them. It's not like I demanded complete ruin of them before cashing them in. Of course, all I could muster was a pathetic, "Yeah." The woman turned from the machine. "I'll get your money from the register." As I followed her back to the customer service counter, the blond girl asked, "So is the machine fixed?" She asked with this real whiny, cunty voice, too. "No," the woman said, turning to address the girl. Then she pointed at me with her technologically inept and password devoid finger, "He put a bunch of dirty coins in the machine, so now the machine is broke and I don't know how to fix it. So now I have to pay him out of my register, because of his dirty coins." Now, what she said was perfectly true, but did she really need to throw me under the bus like that? Yes, I fucked up the machine, I accept that, but did she have to make me look like an asshole in front of a complete stranger? Now, this girl with her bag of change will know me only as the dickbag that clogged the machine and interrupted her day. When she tells her friends this story later I will be referred to as "the loser with the dirty money" or "the homeless man who couldn't figure out the Coinstar." Why couldn't the woman just have said, "No, the machine is not fixed just yet." I'm guessing somebody really did a number on this woman's psyche at some point in her life. To be able to treat me like she did she must have been molested as a child or raped in college. And even if she wasn't, I really hope she was. Anyway, after the woman fingered me as the perp, the girl got this real stupid look on her face and then mumbled something under her breath. I didn't hear what she said, but it was probably racist. So the woman got back behind the counter and opened her register to count out the money that I had successfully deposited into the machine before it broke. She counted out the bills and the change, while the girl stood behind me, drilling holes in my head with her eyes. When my transaction was complete the woman handed me my money and said, "Have a nice day," but she said it in a real cunty way that suggested she actually didn't want me to have a nice day. As I left the store I heard the girl say-with a voice that sounded like razors in a blender-"I don't care if the machine is broke, someone is cashing in these quarters." I didn't look back, I didn't say anything. I kept my head down and walked out of the store clutching a much lighter Glenfiddich can and $2.72 richer. But, I did feel bad. I felt bad for messing up the machine. I felt bad for making the customer service lady have to stop what she was doing and help my idiot self. I felt bad for the blond girl who just wanted to cash in some quarters. This morning I became once again the thing I hate the most: an inconvenience. I put a bunch of shitty coins into a Coinstar machine and broke it, and that was a dick move. Kinda like when I was a sophomore in college. One day I was in a study lounge in my dorm. It was a small, two-window room, that could only fit five tables, and those were pressed close together. I liked it because it was always quiet, and sometimes I could be in there for hours without a single person coming in to join me. I started to think of this particular lounge as mine. One day I was alone in the lounge, hunched over a book I was reading. I was all alone and completely engrossed in my work. Suddenly, I heard the door knob turn. The noise startled me, and I looked up. The knob turned again, but the door didn't move. On the third try the door moved, but only a little. I thought maybe someone was trying to finish a phone conversation before walking into the study lounge. The heavy wooden door had a window, but I couldn't see anyone. I had seen a couple little kids bouncing through the halls, so I thought maybe a little kid was just hanging on the door. Then the door opened in a sudden burst, and I saw where the struggle lay. A young Asian girl was sitting in a wheelchair, balancing a mountain of books on her lap, and trying very hard to keep them from falling while also trying to push the door open. So the door flew open, and I met the girl's eyes, just as she made a quick grab to steady a slipping book, and then the door swung back in a loud CLANG as it collided with her wheelchair. The girl backed up a bit and allowed the door to shut completely. I felt my heartbeat begin to quicken and clear domes of sweat formed on my brow. "Helpherhelpherhelpherhelpher," I thought. The door opened again, and while it was in motion, the girl pushed her wheelchair over the threshold, only to be met all to soon by the heavy, heavy door. It banged against the wheelchair again, pushing her back. "You need some help?" I asked dryly. Of course she needed help you asshole! How many times do you have to idly watch a handicapped person fail before you offer some assistance?! Why did you even ask? A normal human being would have just stood up and opened the door for the girl. She would have said, "Thanks," and you would have said, "You're welcome." End of fucking story. But not me. I asked this person who was having trouble through no fault of her own if she needed help, even though it was obvious she did. "No. I got it," the girl replied. Well, this offended me. You're clearly getting punished by that door, and I offered to open it for you, and you said no. Now it's your fault. I was gracious enough to ask, and you shot me down in cold blood. You got it? You got it? You are sorely mistaken there, dear. Because there are two people in this study lounge, and only one of us can effectively open that fucking door. But oh well. You want to make an ass outta yourself, go right ahead. You're probably one of those self-righteous, holier-than-thou people who get pissed when you call them handicapped. "I'm handicapable," you would probably say. Fuck you! I don't need this shit! I just came down here to read! I didn't know I was going to wind up in a goddam morality play! The next time that door pushes your ass out to the hallway I'm locking the motherfucker! I smiled and went back to my book. And the girl persisted. But try as she might, she could not get through the door, because it wasn't just the weight of the door keeping her out. She had all those books resting precariously on top of one another, she had a wheelchair that seemed like its natural instincts were to go in reverse, and she had to look at this stupid asshole reading his book and trying to ignore her as she battled to get into the study lounge. I sat there, unable to read, unable to concentrate. Every time I heard the door close against her wheelchair I cringed. "Helpherhelpherhelpherhelpher!!!" But I was paralyzed. I just sat, hunched over, thinking that if I stayed still long enough I could just blend into the environment like a chameleon, a shitty, shitty chameleon. I am not exaggerating that it was going on close to three minutes, and this poor girl had made zero progress. And I wasn't even close to just getting up to help when I heard another girl's voice say, "Here, let me get that for you." Another girl appeared. She pushed open the door and stepped into the lounge. She didn't even look at me. She probably would have thrown up if we made eye contact. But she held open that door like a true master, and allowed the girl in the wheelchair to finally pass through into the lounge. "Thank you," the Asian girl said with a smile. "Yep. No problem." And with that the good Samaritan was gone. And when she told that story to her friends later I was known as "this fat fuck that just sat there" or "a jerkoff who just ignored the girl." I wanted to run after the helper. I want to catch up to her and say, "I offered her help! I asked if she needed help, but she said no! Don't you see?! By sitting there and doing nothing I was doing what the girl wanted me to do! I'm not an asshole!" But I just there, staring into my pages, and awkwardly listing to the girl in the wheelchair maneuver into a table and unload her books. I should have just got up and helped her through the door. That would have been the right thing to do. The obvious thing. The normal thing. But I didn't. I didn't help a girl in a wheelchair through a door, and that was a dick move. It was worse when I was younger. I would have to qualms about calling a kid a name, tattle-telling, throwing shit (not literally feces, more like rocks and sticks) at people and cars. One time in kindergarten I poured my chocolate milk on a picture my friend drew because the other kids were all admiring it a bit too much. So yes, I admit, I have been prone to dickish behavior sometimes. But those times are few and far between. And I try to counter the bad stuff with doing good. I let my sister borrow my car. I let my brother crash on my couch when he was in between apartments. I'll buy pops for people at work without them even asking for one. So, I am trying to limit my dick moves, but it can be hard...considering most people are assholes.

The Moore You Know: The other day I told a buddy of mine who is kinda a cheapskate that he was acting 'niggardly' and I was taken aback at how offended he was. "Dude," he said, "that is so racist!" After a bit of confusion, I told him that the word 'niggardly' basically means to be frugal with money. "You still shouldn't say it," he replied. "It sounds like a slur." Yes. It does sound like a slur, a little. But it's not. It's a legitamate word with a definition that has nothing to do with a particular race. But now I can't say it because it sounds like a racial slur. That's bullshit. If I want to buy a top-notch cleaning product I can't buy Spic and Span because it sounds like a racial slur? If I find a particular weakness in something I can't say "chink in the armor" because it sounds like a slur? And if someone is bothering me I can't tell him to "go fly a kike" because it sounds too much like a slur? Gimme a break! You want me to be that politcally correct?! Niggard please.

© Eric Moore - 2011

Confessions of an Eight-Year-Old Deviant

"Well, that sounds just swell, Jimmy. Now, why don't you hop on over here and help me out of this robe."

Ah, to be young and Catholic! Between 1950-2002, 4,392 U.S. Catholic priests have been accused of sexual abuse, which is close to 4% of the entire clergy. It's almost gotten to the point where I have to stop telling people that I am a Catholic. "Oh, you're a Catholic, huh? Fuckin pervert! Fuckin pedophile piece of shit! You were an altar boy, too! How many times were you molested?" Actually, I've decided to just tell people that I'm Muslim to avoid the suspicious looks. It's hard being a Catholic nowadays; sex abuse scandals, right-wing religious nuts are dominating TV, making every Christian look bad, and more and more explanations regarding the nature of the world are getting a bit too sciencey. It's no wonder people are losing their faith. Hell, I said in a previous blog that I stopped attending church because the parking was bad. So on Judgement Day I will have to sit in front of Jesus Christ and explain that I became an atheist because I couldn't find a spot without a meter...and why I'm so into bondage porn...Anyway, my faith may be dangling by a single thread today, but this was not always the case. Back in the day (early nineties) I was right there in church every Sunday and right there in CCD classes after church. Of course, I only went to church because my mom and dad made me go, and I spent most of the hour looking at the asses of girls in front of me, but that's not the point. I liked going to church, I liked the pageantry of mass, the sacred tone of everything, the quietude, the reverence. I dug that shit. Now, I had already completed my First Communion, where all the little Catholic boys and girls are finally allowed to walk down the aisle and officially receive the body and blood of Christ. Now, for all you heathens and nonbelievers, when a Catholic receives communion, he is actually consuming the body and blood of Christ. Literally. There is no symbolism, no pretending, we believe that God changes the substance of the bread and wine into the literal body and blood of Christ. It's called transubstantiation, bitch. Anyway, the next sacrament in line was reconciliation. Reconciliation is the time when the young Catholics must go before a priest and confess their sins, be absolved of all wrong-doing, and say a penance. Now, at the time I was eight-years-old, and very nervous about having to talk with a priest-a stranger-about all the bad things that I have done over my past eight years on earth. I understood the idea of "sin" and had a basic knowledge of "hell", but it was all strictly surface-level knowledge. I knew more about the Land of Oz than hell. Sins were bad things and hell was a big place of fire where bad people went. Now, we could get into this whole existential argument about the nature of good and evil and what constitutes bad behavior, et cetera, et cetera, but that would cut into all the pussy fart jokes I've been saving up. But I digress. Unless your black or Hispanic, you don't get into too much trouble when you're eight, so I was kind of at a loss as to what I needed to tell the priest. Besides, I had no frame of reference, no guidelines to tell me what was a sin and what wasn't. I mean, I knew the ten commandments, but once again, unless your black or Hispanic you probably haven't killed anyone or stolen anything at eight. So really, I had no idea what God considered to be a sin. I horded my sisters' nude Barbie dolls, was that a sin? I humped the cushions on the family sofa, was that a sin? In school I would use opportune moments to bend down to tie my shoe and try to peek up the teacher's skirt, was that a sin? I once took a shit inside my friend's Technodrome that he got for his birthday, was that a sin? I told my older brother Dale that he was born without a penis, was that a sin? I was fretting over what to say, but when the big day came I just decided to stick to the basics: I fought with my mom and dad, I fought with my siblings, I told lies...simple kid bullshit. Also, when one goes to confession, one usually has the option of talking to a priest face-to-face or kneeling behind a grill to remain anonymous. When I started I opted for the grill, which would come in handy when my confessions grew more and more humiliating. Now, for those who don't know, little boys are filthy-mouthed, disgusting human beings, and I was certainly no exception. My only problem was that I was woefully behind when it came to new things for me and my buddies to joke about. In the fifth grade, we always played football on this field next to the school. One day before a game my buddy Joe said, "I say we name this field Field Sixty-nine!" Everyone laughed and cheered, until I said, "Or Field Twenty-five!" My friends just looked at me with their WTF expressions. Twenty-five was my favorite number at the time, and I had absolutely no fucking clue that the number sixty-nine had sexual connotations. There's a scene in the movie Billy Madison where Adam Sandler laughs when his teacher tells the class to turn to page sixty-nine...yeah, that joke went right over my head. What can I say? I had really no experience or knowledge when it came to sex. I was ten. Up to this point I had seen my old man's Playboys from the 80s, so I knew that all women's breasts looked like ski-jump ramps and they had enough hair between their legs to feed a family of lice for years. But my old man never had a sex talk with me, so if it was not explained in the VHS copy of Bachelor Party I had I didn't know about it. Eventually, though, my knowledge of sex began to grow. Once my family got the Internet my brother Dale and I began a quest to build a vast library of porn, the likes of which Southwest Iowa had never seen. By the time I was thirteen most of what I knew about women came from the porn I saw on the family computer. The first time I saw a shaved vagina I went into my room and just stared at my reflection in the TV. Why would a girl do that? I wondered. Now, as it turns out, looking at pornography is considered a mortal sin by the Catholic Church. It's one of those, "do not pass go, but go directly to hell"-type sins. But at the time I had no references, no person or literature to tell me that looking at porn was a sin. So Dale and I just went right on looking at Dad's Playboys, downloading porn, and watching Skinamax at night. My rationalization was, "Looking a naked women makes me happy, and being happy is not a sin." This changed however, when my mother gave me a book that listed out everything or close to everything that could be considered a mortal sin, and sure enough the one I zeroed in on was the one that read "Viewing pornography or sexually explicit material." Well fuck me. This put me in quite the pickle. So now I was officially confronted with the fact that what I was doing was a sin. However, at the time I did not have to confess this to a priest, because if I didn't know it was a sin, then it does not count as a sin. So, from that day on I decided, no more porn! I meticulously deleted all the pictures off the floppy disks my brother and I had, returned my father's Playboys to their rightful xerox box in the furnace room, and made a solemn vow to never look at porn again...that might have lasted about a day. So here I am, on the tail end of puberty, struggling with a borderline addiction to porn, and I have to confess this to a priest. This shit is gonna get weird. I can vividly recall going to church, going to confession, sitting directly in front of the priest this time (I thought maybe he would shame me into never wanting to look at porn again) and confessing to him, "looking at pornography" as one of my sins. He nodded. "What do you do when you look at this stuff?" I just looked at him, horrified. What did I do? Nothing. Just tried to memorize every vagina I had ever seen. "You pull on yourself?" The old priest asked. Pull on myself? What the fuck did that mean? Because at the time, I had not once jerked off to the porn I was looking at. I was just...studying it...Bundy style. I slowly shook my head. "You pull on a friend?" he asked me. Pull on a friend? Who is this guy? I shook my head again. "So it's just you?" I nodded. "OK, that ain't so bad," he assured me. I left the little room trembling. How terrible! How humiliating! That day in church I made a solemn vow to never look at porn again, lest I must shame myself in front of the priest...that vow lasted about a day. Now, as fucked up as my relationship became with my priest from looking at porn, it was nothing compared to what I had to endure when I began jerking off. Now, I knew self-abuse was a sin because of that book my mother gave me, but after the first time I did it at about age 15, I thought, "This is what I want to do with my life." Soon, jerking off became as routine for me as getting the mail, except getting the mail required less Kleenex. But when it came time to confess my sin of self-abuse to the priest, I realized that I could not face him. I could not sit there and tell him I had "pulled" myself. So, when confession time came I decided to kneel behind the grill so he could not see my face. Then I mechanically listed my sins as though I was naming state capitals, and I topped the list off with "committing self-abuse." I got a good talking to, was told to not do it again, was told that people can become slaves to their lust. I then said my Act of Contrition, got absolution, and was about to leave when the priest said, "Be a good boy...You are a boy, right?" "Weh..." I muttered, then left. Apparently as a 15-year-old male, I sounded like a seven-year-old castrato trying to hit the high notes. As time went on I made many a solemn vow to give up porn once and for all, but teenage boys are essentially just vehicles for their dicks to get around, and I always ended up back in confession, behind that grill, saying the same shit I always said. As I got older though, I started going to a church in downtown Omaha, because it only lasted thirty minutes, and you didn't have to sing. They always had confession before each mass, so I attended it regularly. There were three main priests that heard confessions. One priest was really old, and dragged each confession on and on, so only two or three people actually got in before church started. A second priest was a lithe, middle-aged man who went through confession like he was scanning groceries. He could hear ten to fifteen confessions before doing mass, and his penances never varied: two Our Fathers for your sins, three Our Fathers if you killed someone. The third priest that heard confessions at this Omaha church was a short, Filipino priest who looked like he had won runner-up at a Herve Villechaize look-a-like contest. I disliked going to him to most, because his penances were always rosaries. I never liked saying the Rosary because it took forever and it was so boring. If you want to date-rape a chick, fuck the roofies, have her say the Rosary. Anyway, the little old priest always gave out the longest penances, so I never liked going to him. Also, at this church, you had no choice but to use a grill. The confessionals were set up in a very old school manner, so you never had to see the priest. Well, I must have gone to that Filipino priest one too many times with the same bullshit, because after rounding out my confession with "masturbating" he said through the curtain, "You're still doing that?" "Weh..." I muttered. Ahhh, good old confession. I haven't been in a while, but it's good to know that salvation is always a short drive away, if I can get a fucking parking spot. Next time I go I'll still be confessing to the same shit I was doing ten years ago, plus I'll have to add this damn thing (I probably shouldn't have said that stuff about the Rosary).

The Moore You Know: Something has been bothering me lately, and I feel I need to get it off my chest. I really hate Twitter and Facebook condolences. Now, I am sorry if that offends you, but it's true. We have all lost people we have loved, and during those times it is nice to have the support of friends and family, but I cannot stand it when someone dies (usually someone famous) and all of a sudden Twitter is ablaze with assholes writing things like, "U wuz the best...goin 2 miss U 4eva!!!!! RIP!!!" Or, "Sad day 2day. World lost gr8 person. I know UR in heavin right now. LUV U LOTS!!!" Jay-zus Christ. Can you really sum up how you feel about a person in 140 characters or less? Twitter condolences are absolutely the very least you can say about a person, and they honestly just some off as lazy as hell. Send a sympathy card, attend the funeral, make a donation in the deceased person's name, but don't fucking Twitter about it, it will never do the person justice. And honestly, Twitter and Facebook are supposed to be fun places of laughter and revelry. These bleak, half-hearted posts really take the air outta the room. I dunno. That's my two cents.

© Eric Moore - 2011