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

Pet Peeves

I can haz Nazi sympatheez

If you want me to give you an honest answer, yeah, ok, I'll fucking admit it. I did have a sex dream about my one-year-old Puggle, Wyatt. Now, that may sound gross or disturbing or borderline psychotic, but I assure you, within the context of the dream the sex was a completely normal and natural occurrence. In the dreamworld that I created, everyone has sex with their pets. In college I took a semester of Freudian psychology, so after I woke up from the dream I analyzed it pretty quick. I'm sure the reason I had a sex dream about my dog is because deep down I really, truly love the little guy (the severe beatings are just an extension of that love). When my fiance and I first purchased the dog, I was hesitant. I never had a true pet before, and certainly never a dog. But over time I grew to love Wyatt, as a parent loves his child. "So, you love your dog and that's why you had a sex dream about him. If you have a kid, are you going to have a sex dream about him too?" Yes. Wyatt probably snuck into my subconscious because he spends so much time with me. At night, he sleeps next to me, during the day, he sleeps on the couch next to me, when I'm on the shitter, he sleeps behind the toilet on the urine-stained floor, when I masturbate, he sleeps under my computer desk. Actually, he used to watch me jerk off, but I put a stop to that. He would just sit there and look up at me with these huge, accusing eyes, as if it was my 85-year-old Catholic grandma watching me jerk off (though if that was the case I would probably come faster). Like I said, I never had a pet before, so now that I do, I just have all this pent up love for it. Well, I guess I did have a cat once. When I was in the first grade, my family rented a farmhouse outside of Treynor, Iowa. And one day our landlord brought over a box of kittens, four of them, for me and my siblings. My cat was all black and I named him Spike, Dale's cat was a multi-colored thing named Gizmo, because Dale is queer. Now, these cats were pets the same way Nat Turner was a slave. Their leader was a feral farm cat named Rambo, who possessed all the charm and friendliness of Christopher Walken in The Deer Hunter. Rambo was a big, orange sumbitch with a chunk of fur missing from its back leg. The only time I really saw Spike or any of the other cats was when my dad put out a bowl of food on our back porch. The cats came and went as they pleased, guided only by basic instincts, like a retarded southerner, which is getting redundant, I know. Our neighbors across the gravel lane also had some cats. Their eldest daughter Jessie, who was in Dale's class, named hers Princess. It was white and gray (grey?). One day Princess went missing. After being gone for about a week, we went out searching for it. I was the one who found it. It was in an abandoned barn, laying on its side with a pool of blood around its head. I nudged it with my foot and the whole cat moved it was so stiff. That was my first encounter with a blood-drenched pussy, and lord knows, certainly not my last. Anyway, when my family moved away from the farm Spike and his friends were left behind. After that I never really had a pet again. Sure their was your run-of-the-mill fish, but a fish hardly can count as a pet. My pet fish died because I didn't feed it for a long time. I fucking forgot I owned a fish, so it died. In fifth grade I had a pet hamster named Dion, but that guy died too. I'm not sure how. Dale and I fed it and cleaned its cage and gave it fresh water. Then one day I came downstairs and noticed the gray furball legs up. Dad said, "Get rid of it." So Dale and I took it over to an abandoned lot near our house and Dale said, "You think I can chuck him over the road?" And I said, "No way." Well, ol' Dale reached back and heaved the motherfucker as hard as he could. It flew through the air, this dead, furry thing, and landed with an anticlimactic thud well short of the road. "If he was bigger I would have made it," Dale reasoned. Dion's fate didn't exactly have the pageantry of a Viking funeral, but I think Dale put a lot of love into that throw. If only we could have kept him alive longer...he would have made it over the road. And that was pretty much it for pets. My sister brought home a couple of kittens out of the blue one day, but I hated those things. She still owns them, these two conceited felines that do nothing but shit, eat, and shed. I'm not a big fan of cats. They're all just furry, mobile plants. They contribute nothing to the conversation. No, I'm just happy with my dog, Wyatt. Which is nice, because I didn't think of myself as a dog person. When I was in the third grade my grandma's Schnauzer bit me in the crotch because I was teasing it. It would have gotten my dick, too. The only thing that saved me was my dick was massively undersized. So I'll just go on with Wyatt, my best friend, my little guy...you can cut the sexual tension with a knife.

The Moore You Know: I think I would dress nicer if it was easier to try on dress clothes at JCPenney's. The thing is I can't stand buying dress shirts. They come perfectly and obsessively folded to make you feel guilty about trying them on. And then they are stuffed full of slips of cardboard and several hundred needles. Seriously, trying on a dress shirt is like trying to negotiate one of Jigsaw's fucking morality traps. Well, no thank you. I'll stick to my sweat pants and my t-shirt that says, "I was at the Million Man March and all I got was this lousy t-shirt! And Sickle-Cell..."

© Eric Moore - 2011

You Cynical Bastard!

"Gimme my soul back you goddam camera!"

Cynical, pessimistic, hypochondriac, insecure, fatalist...these are the words that probably best describe me. At a certain point in my life I just stopped striving for perfection. I stopped hoping for the best. I just relegated myself to a certain amount of misery. Now, that is not to say that I am not a content person, I am, but in the game of life I have unceremoniously accepted defeat. This is an article about why creativity and intellectualism is dead and why most of us are so up our fucking asses with political correctness that the dystopian future predicted by so many authors is practically right around the corner. I'd like to tell you all about a few of the moments in my life that made me realize my generation is one ignorant kamikaze nosediving into oblivion.

The clearest memory that I have of when I first thought, "Wow, the future is fucked," is when I was a college freshman at the University of Iowa. One of the required classes was Rhetoric. There were three levels of Rhetoric: Rhetoric, Advanced Rhetoric, and Speaking and Reading. Now, because I'm so fucking smart and well-read and scored a 32 on the English section of my ACTs, I was placed in the Speaking and Reading class. The class was made up of mostly Liberal Arts majors, specifically English majors, like myself. Those of you who are in college or went to college probably know that the realm of higher learning is filled with self-congratulating, pretentious dick burgers. These dick burgers probably exist at every college and in every major, but they are most prominent in Liberal Arts, and most specifically in the English department. The English department is filled with kids who want to be called artists, and style themselves after those famous bohemian behemoths like the writers of the Beat generation, or they want to be viewed as uber-intellectual, so they write wordy, over the top bullshit and say they were inspired by Thomas Pynchon. At least one of these assholes was in every fucking English class I took. You know the type: the douche nozzle that has to raise his fucking hand every two seconds to go off on some tangent that has nothing to do with what the professor was talking about. The skinny jeans-wearing motherfucker with the huge stocking cap over his head, editing his manuscript over a black coffee and a cigarette. Hipsters, I think they're called. My sophomore roommate was a hipster. He would often go out and drink Port wine with his friends and discuss Naked Lunch and On the Road. He said his favorite book was Madam Bovary and his favorite writer was Vladimir Nabokov. And to top it all off he was a fucking Red Sox fan. But, listen, no one fucking drinks Port wine. Have you had it? It's nasty. No one just picks up a bottle of Port, because they love the taste. If you drink Port you are making a conscious decision to look like an asshole. And no one discusses William S. Burroughs for the fun of it. Naked Lunch is possibly one of the most complex books ever written. It's like a David Lynch movie, an M.C. Escher drawing, and a Led Zepplin song all smashed into book form. No one knows what Naked Lunch is about. But this scrotum taco roommate of mine, oh shit, he loved the book! One day a friend of his came over and said, "I've read Naked Lunch eight times. Every time I read it I find something new." Fuuuuuck yooooouuuu.....Anyway, I should have known this guy was gonna be a hipster douche, because we met in Speaking and Reading, which was full of hipster douches. So, the point of the class was to basically read a bunch of books, then eventually pick out a random topic, then give a speech on it. My speech was on patriotism in America, an extremely safe, risk-free topic. But the speech that basically stole a bit of my will to live came from this girl. Obviously she was smart. And she was pretty, soft-spoken, and I guess just an all-around normal human being. Her speech was on the conflict in Darfur, and it was all about the suffering of the people, the genocide taking place, and how many Western governments are ignoring it. But here's the problem, this dumb bitch giving her speech kept on referring to the people of Darfur as "African Americans." I was so blown away by how insanely stupid this was that I completely stopped listening to her speech and started looking around the room to see if anyone was picking up on this. "Are you serious? Did you hear her! She just said black people that live in Africa are called African Americans!" And no one said anything! Not me, not a classmate and not the professor. Maybe people were just being nice, but she said African Americans more than once in her speech. This girl was fucking gang raped by political correctness. Based on her speech I surmised that every black person in the world must be considered an African American, no matter where the fuck they live. The comic Louis C.K. does a bit where he says a white guy could be dropped in the middle of Africa, and the guy would say, "Jesus Christ, look at all the minorities around here." This girl might be a teacher now. A little piece of me died that day, after listening to five minutes of an upper-class white girl referring to native Africans as African Americans.

One time I was at a bar in college with my hipster roommate and some of his friends (for I had none of my own), and they were all talking and I was more or less bored out of my mind, because I had really nothing in common with the people I was with. Anyway, I am not sure what the topic of conversation was, or how it led me to say what I said, but at some point in the night, probably after a few beers, I said the following: "You know, guys, I have never seen a black person with Down Syndrome." OK, cue the needle scratching the record, cue the crickets...all the air went out of the room and an oppressive silence just filled the group like a thick syrup. Finally it was broken by a girl at the table casually lifting her glass and saying to no one in particular, "Wow, that was racist." Which of course pissed me off to no end, because I didn't say anything racist. I simply said that of all the people that I have seen with Down Syndrome, none of them had been black. Which, if anything, speaks highly of the genetics of African Americans.

When I was in kindergarten in Columbia, Illinois, my class would always take "milk count." Milk count was the time of day when when the teacher would ask who all wanted a small carton of milk for a snack, and a certain number of students would raise their hands. Then the teacher would ask who wants chocolate and who wants white, and students would raise their hands to signal their preference. One day the milk count was something like 7 for white and 5 for chocolate. Now, those are not the exact numbers, but I remember that a certain number wanted white, and certain number wanted chocolate, but it was not the same amount. But after the teacher said, "7 for white and 5 for chocolate" a girl next to me said, "All right! It's a tie!" And I looked up from my construction paper and safety scissors and protested, "No, it's not!" And the girl replied, "Yes it is!" That's probably the first time I thought to myself, "Christ, it's gonna be a long fuckin life."

The Moore You Know: The wire hanger was invented in 1892 when Sally Ralston, an infamous nurse who performed back alley abortions said, "Hey, if you take the wires we use and bend them into the proper shape, you can hang your knickers from them."

© Eric Moore - 2011

Lil Chubbs: My Time As A Pillar Of The Hip Hop Community

"Man, doze ain't stab wounds, daze stretch marks."

When I was a young boy-mostly around the ages of eight, nine and ten-I was terrified of black people. You see, folks, I grew up in the Midwest in a variety of white bread, culturally mute towns: Fremont, Nebraska, Treynor, Iowa, Columbia, Illinois. These towns were all predominately white, predominately protestant, predominately conservative. There wasn't a whole lot of variety when it came to race or ethnicity, which probably accounts for so many girls from my school currently in the grips of jungle fever. It's that whole "forbidden fruit" thing. Though it is hard for anyone to truly rebel against conformity, since odds are there are a million people just like you, I don't really think it can be called conformity if there are not any alternatives. Growing up, I didn't have any alternatives. I was like Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four (the movie version or the book version, whichever you are most familiar with), mechanically moving in unison with the tide of people that I was surrounded by, careful not to step outside the lines, meticulous about not drawing attention to myself, greatly desirous of maintaining absolute and total anonymity. In other words, I just wanted to be like everyone else, which was easy, because everyone was the same. Yet, like that doomed herald of progress, Winston Smith, I too felt like something was missing from my life...options namely. I mean, I sometimes wondered if it always had to be the same people, the same places, the same routine day in and day out. Something needed to change. I needed a certain, indefinable stimulus to make me realize that there was more to the world than the town I lived in and the people that inhabited it. The catalyst that finally shook me from the dull meanderings of my Midwest existence came in the form of rap music. Now, it wasn't like I heard Biggie or Tupac and thought, "Yeah, fuck the Man!" It was a slow process. I heard a rap song for the first time, and gradually, over time, listened to the music more and more before I realized I needed to cut a demo. The original turning point came in roughly 1990-91. My older brother, Dale, owned a cassette tape titled On the Rap Tip, a mix tape of contemporary hits by artists like Tone-Loc, Kid 'n Play, N.W.A., Awesome Dre' and the Hardcore Committee, and De La Soul. Together we would sit in our basement in Fremont and listen to the tape on our parents old stereo. The problem was the tape was actually edited for content, so N.W.A.'s "Straight Outta Compton" was mostly just white noise. But I do remember liking Cash Money and Marvelous's "Find An Ugly Woman" and Vanilla Ice's "Ice, Ice, Baby." As far as I can tell, that was my first introduction to rap music. I know it wasn't exactly Public Enemy, Naughty By Nature, or Fresh Prince and DJ Jazzy Jeff, but it was a start. My brother and I wore that cassette out. By the time I was in first grade I was living on a farm in Treynor, Iowa. My friend next door had an older brother who owned a few rap CDs. So by the age of seven, I was listening, awestruck, to Snoop Doggy Dogg's Doggystyle. "Ain't No Fun" was like porno for my ears. And I also got acquainted with 2 Live Crew, specifically their song "Dirty Nursery Rhymes." Man, I tell ya, when Fresh Kid Ice raps "Little Jack Horner sat in a corner, fucking this cutie pie, stuck in his thumb, made the bitch cum said 'hell of a nigga am I'," it was like my Beatles moment. I wasn't completely sure what I was hearing. In fact, I think I was in disbelief for the most part. I didn't realize that all those words could actually be said on CDs. My parents listened to Bruce Springsteen and Black Oak Arkansas, so when I heard Snoop say, "Guess who's back in the motherfuckin house with a fat dick for your mother fuckin mouth," I thought, "Huh...this is different. Different is good." In 1994, my family moved to Columbia, Illinois, and it was here that my rap career was finally ready to take off. By this time, I was watching MTV on a regular basis, and my brother was starting to purchase rap albums more and more often. The two that stood out to me the most were Bone Thugs-N-Harmony's E 1999 Eternal and Warren G's Regulate...G Funk Era. Dale also owned the album Very Necessary by Salt-N-Pepa, but I only listened to this PSA at the end of the album about AIDs awareness...I thought it was hilarious. Anyway, by the age of ten rap music had pretty much become my favorite genre, and I had even manged to see movies like Boyz N the Hood and New Jack City that further initiated me into the world of hip hop. Now, that being said, I was still terrified of black people. I didn't actually know any black people, had never really even spoken to a black person, and not by choice, they simply were not a part of my little world back then. So everything I knew about black people and black culture I happened to learn from rap music and movies, and according to those two sources I thought that all black people sold and/or smoked crack, owned AK-47s, killed people, hated white people, smacked their bitches, and were more or less poor, but if they were rich, they probably got their money illegally. Keep in mind also that at this time I was not familiar with Spike Lee's work, and therefore unaccustomed with the societal prejudices that held the black man down. So, my view of black people at the age of ten was kinda warped, I admit. When I go to the zoo I like to watch the lions and the tigers, but I don't want to stand right beside them. That's how I felt about black people at the time. I loved rap music, but I just knew that any one of these rappers would smoke my ass if given the chance. Fourth grade rolled on, my brother bought some Notorious B.I.G. and some Tupac, and soon it was almost time for school to get out. I was going to a Catholic school called Immaculate Conception, and my class was broken up into pairs, and each group was supposed to come up with a fake business, and then advertise that business to the rest of the class. I teamed up with my best friend MM, and we decided that our fake business would be a record store. So we got some particle board, glued some old CDs to it, came up with a name for the store and when the time came we presented our idea to the class. Now, as part of our advertisement, MM and I wrote a little jingle for the business. We each wore black jackets, dark sunglasses over our eyes and slicked back our hair. The two of us pranced around the room singing, "Buy our CDs, buy our CDs. We need money like bears need honey. Buy our CDs." Technically, it was my first performance as a rapper and my first shot at songwriting, and I must say it was pretty successful, because throughout the day people would be muttering my song under their breath. I had written a hit. It wasn't too long after that that I decided I needed to make a demo tape to show all these big time hip hop producers my skill(s/z). The previous November my parents bought me a karaoke machine for my birthday, which I took as a sign of their unconditional support. So one summer day in 1995, I stood in my room and rapped into a shitty plastic microphone while my karaoke machine recorded my every word. I guess back then you could compare my process to Jay Z, in that I didn't write any of my lyrics down, it all just flowed out from memory. And much like Eminem, much of what I was saying I was just making up on the spot, which was easy since "fuck" and "bitch" made up ninety percent of what I was saying. After I was done, I took the tape out, listened to it, and, satisfied, tucked it away in a dresser drawer. A few days later I came home from baseball practice, only to be met by my old man glowering at me from the kitchen. "Eric," he said sternly, "follow me." He led me into my bedroom and told me to sit on my bed. He reached his hand in his pocket and pulled out a cassette tape. "Probably just a coincidence," I assured myself. "Your mom found this when she was cleaning," my old man said. Now, my mother's definition of cleaning is pretty liberal. I had that tape hidden pretty well, so I'm pretty sure the whole thing was a sting operation. Anyway, my old man hands me the tape and tells me to stick it in my karaoke machine. I took the tape in my trembling hands, utterly mortified, not because I was afraid of getting in trouble, but because I was nervous about another person hearing me rap. I thought he was going to be too judgemental. I put the tape in my machine, sat on my bed next to my dad, and pressed play. A brief sound of static, a mic being shifted around, and then my voice. It was soft, monotone, clumsy and completely without rhythm. Unfortunately, my lyrics are all lost to me now, but I distinctly remember my ten-year-old self singing, "Goddam, I hate to take my bitch to the mall." Out of context that lyric loses some of its punch, but I'm sure the song it came from made a pretty heavy political statement. For close to five minutes I sat on that bed with the old man listening to the blur of obscenities coming out of the speakers. Finally, mercifully, my old man took the cassette out of the machine and held it up. "Eric, this is trash! This is garbage!" He yelled at me. "You made your mother cry!" A phrase often repeated during my childhood. Then, in a more subdued tone, he said, "Women don't like to be called bitches, Eric." Then he set the tape on the ground and smashed it with his foot. Well, the reviews were in...the world just wasn't ready for me, I guess. I never made another rap tape after that. My message was too controversial, and the music business was too corrupt. I am twenty-six now, and currently balls deep in adapting Strunk and White's The Elements of Style into an erotic thriller screenplay, but I look back on my rap career with fondness, and sometimes, on those sleepless nice where the moon is hidden and the light of the stars is lost amongst the street lamps, I find myself, ever so briefly, thinking of how many words I can rhyme with fuck.

The Moore You Know: Tell me if I'm racist. The other day my girlfriend and I were at the grocery store picking up some things for the Superbowl. We each were bundled up and we each had on our New York Jets stocking caps. Mine is the official sideline cap of the NFL and my girlfriend's is a grey and green retro cap that says Jets across the front in cursive. As I am taking my set of groceries through the checkout line I notice another cashier, a young black man, talking to my girlfriend and smiling. The talk is brief, and soon the two of us are walking through the parking lot to her car. "What did that guy say to you?" I asked. "He said my stocking cap was hot." "Really?" I asked. She nodded and said, "He said, 'That hat is old school. It's hot.'" I was suddenly filled with an immeasurable sense of pride, because a black person liked my girlfriend's hat. Is that racist? Yeah, probably. I mean, I wouldn't have cared so much if it was a white guy saying it, and compliments from Mexicans don't really count, but this was a black guy, a bastion of style and fashion saying it. I dunno. It just seems like a black guy saying you have style just kinda validates it. Now, if you will excuse me, I need to go get my white hood out of the dryer.

© Eric Moore - 2011

When Doves Cry...And Shit All Over You

"If I keep smiling he won't know that I'm completely dead inside."

When I was sixteen (16) I worked at a Hy Vee grocery store in Council Bluffs, IA. It was my first real job. I had to dress nice (tie and slacks), converse with customers, associate with co-workers, and in return I was awarded a pretty solid paycheck...well, as solid as fifteen (15) hours a week at six (6) dollars an hour can be. I remember my first paycheck was actually for seventeen (17) dollars. I left the store that night thinking, "It feels like it should be more." Working for Hy Vee was probably one of the worst jobs I have ever had. Sacking groceries and ringing up customers at the check-out line is usually not a good environment for someone who has an innate aversion to other human beings. My tenure was a little less than a year, but in that time I never bothered to learn where things were, so when a customer asked me where the chili powder was I told her it was my first day. At drive-up one night I misread the number on a woman's receipt and actually put the wrong groceries in her car, knowing full well that I might have the wrong cart. Once a young boy came through my line and bought a small basket of food and paid with food stamps. Of course I short-changed him, believing that anyone who paid with food stamps obviously could not comprehend simple mathematics. But I got mine when the boy returned later in the day with his irate and terribly overweight mother. Needless-to-say, the boy fingered me (heh-heh) and my manager came over and gave me a stern talking to. Another time, the store's director, a chubby prick named Moon, came through my line, bought a fucking candy bar, paid with a fiver, and then told the shift manager that I did not count out his change back to him. So, the fucking shift manager took me to where Hy Vee does dry cleaning, and yelled at me for not taking my job seriously. And I didn't take my job seriously. I hated working at Hy Vee. I fucking hated it. Honestly, I gave people free stuff all the time when they came through my line just because I was too much of a lazy asshole to ring it up. "I also have a sack of dog food in the bottom of the cart. Did you ring that up?" I would just lithely dance my fingers across the keypad like I was typing. "Yep. Got it." Or I would over-charge people on fruits and vegetables because I didn't care about how much something weighed or was supposed to cost per pound. One time I charged a guy eight (8) bucks for a tomato. "Christ, that's a lot of money for one tomato." I shrugged my shoulders. "They're in season," I said dully, not even sure what I meant by that. I dreaded going to work, I hated every second I was at work, and when my shift was over I felt like that dude from Midnight Express when he busts out of that Turkish prison (except no one ever rubbed their tits in my face). The only saving grace, the only thing that made work bearable was the fact that a few kids from my school worked at the store with me: Jordan, Andy, Eric, Tony, Josh...so there were some mild distractions. Even though these kids were older than me, and we only hung out peripherally at school, when I was at work with them they talked to me and brightened my day a bit. One day at work I was behind my register and two (2) absolutely gorgeous girls came to my line with a few items. They talking between themselves and not really paying attention to me, as I mechanically scanned item after item. Suddenly, I hear, "Eric Moore red line. Eric Moore red line," come over the loud speaker. So I pick up the phone next to my register and say, "This is Eric." "Dude," a voice says. "How bad do you want to fuck those girls?" A sharp grin immediately cracks my face, and I start looking around the store, as nonchalantly as possible. "Uh, yeah," I say into the phone, cupping it between my head my shoulder while I continue to scan the pretty girls' things, "that would be great." Finally, I look to far end of the store and see Tony, an older kid from my school who worked with me, standing next to a closed checkout lane with a phone to his ear, staring at me with a big smile on his face. "I bet you got a fuckin boner right now." I smiled and nodded. "Yep. Yep. It's good. OK, buddy. Thanks for the call." Little things like Tony's phone call or stealing a can of pop from the stock room, tiny moments of subversion, is what got me by. Secret "fuck yous" that we sent to managers and dickhead customers could really turn the day around. But it wasn't just working with kids from my school that got me through the day. There was one other thing: an angelic angel (angle?) draped in blond hair and big blue eyes. Her name was Shayla (pronounced SHAY-la), and after one brief conversation with her, I was instantly smitten. Shayla was my age, but went to a school in Council Bluffs, whereas I commuted the ten (10) miles from Treynor in my parent's Chevy Lumina, which even that food stamp kind told me was a piece of shit. Anyway, Shayla was short, barely cresting at five-two or -three. But, like I said, she had long blond hair, giant blue Disney princess eyes, and a healthy serving of bewb up top. And her voice...she had such a sweet and tranquil voice, like flowers queefing on a pond under a still summer's eve. At 16, I fell madly in love with her, and eventually looked forward to going to work in hopes that she would be there. If she did work the same shift as me, it was like getting an old-fashioned while watching Care Bears fuck. But, if I arrived to work and found that she was not there, the depression was terrible, like the Lust perv from Se7en skull-fucked my heart with that leather knife strap-on. Now, I had noticed Shayla around the store before, thought she was pretty, but really never dwelt on her too much. I mean, I was 16, and Hy Vee hired lots of cute girls, not to mention all the pretty ones that came into the store every day. I had to prioritize my spank bank a little. The turning point with Shayla came one night at work when we were both in the break room together. At that age I was more concerned with hanging out with friends, and all of my friends were dudes. I never really talked to girls except when I was at school, and that was all strictly classroom related and mundane. I think, psychologically speaking, I was so used to my older brother Dale getting the girls that I just naturally assumed that I did not appeal to the opposite sex. Plus, I really didn't think I was good looking. Maybe a 6 outta 10...7 when I had my makeup on. Anyway, I didn't have a lot of experience talking to girls; certainly not ones as pretty as Shayla. Well, on this particular night, I found myself in the break room with this girl. I was sitting at the table, watching an XFL game on TV, with a hot microwavable dinner in front of me. As soon as Shayla sat down I stopped eating, even though I was starving. I thought too many things could go wrong: I could get something stuck in my teeth, I could drop a piece of food down my shirt, I could sneeze a whole mouthful of mashed potatoes across the room. I better just not eat, play it cool. Plus, I honestly thought she would get disgusted seeing me eat. Not that I'm a fuckin slob or anything like that, I just didn't want her to look at me while I was spooning food into my mouth, because I was afraid she might catch a glimpse of some unswallowed mush on my tongue. Shayla sat down across the table and began to munch on a sandwich. I thought my heart was going to punch outta my chest and land on my salisbury steak. I couldn't even look at Shayla, could not even move. I just stared at the TV like I was trying to perform a goddam Jedi mind trick. Shayla would say a few words to me, just some small talk, and I would reply in breathless exasperations of, "Yeah" and "No." I mean, I had no fuckin game whatsoever. I felt like a tool. But over the course of our break, I guess I lightened up. Shayla was very nice, talkative, and really just made me feel comfortable. And by the time our break was over I was hooked. I know that sounds like the confession of a serial killer. Most of you are probably saying, "Jesus Christ, Eric. It was a polite conversation, and she was probably like that with everyone. Get the fuck over it." Ok, ok. I understand that. But when I was 16 I had never had a girlfriend, never really talked to girls, and really no girl ever paid me much attention. So here I am, a teenage boy, sperm coming out of my fucking hair follicles, and I have this girl actually paying attention to me. Now, in hindsight, yes, I had made some...miscalculations, the major one being that I mistook her natural kindness for genuine affection, I'm just pathetic like that. Over the next few weeks I never had another chance to talk to Shayla one-on-one, and after a couple of casual nods at work, I realized that I was in danger of being relegated to just another random face at work--no one special. I had to act, so I did what most insecure boys do when they like a girl: have a friend talk to her. My buddy Josh, who I went to school with and also worked at Hy Vee with Shayla and I, became my official mediator. I told him about Shayla, and our night of passionate small talk, and that I really wanted to ask her out. Josh did his part, and did it masterfully to his credit. He talked to Shayla, about nothing in particular at first, then slowly brought up the fact that he had this friend who wanted to ask her out, but he couldn't say who, but it was someone from work. Finally, the big day came when Josh was to tell Shayla that I, the random dude from that one night in the break room, was her stalker secret admirer. I wasn't working the night Josh told Shayla that I wanted to ask her out, so he told me about it the next day. We were sitting across from one another at the lunch table, and Josh told me how he talked to Shayla on her break, and said that his friend was "Eric Moore, and he wants to ask you out." "What did she say," I asked, simultaneously happy and terrified. "She said, 'really'." Now, 'really' is not really an answer. It's more of an uttering of mild, if not meaningless, surprise. But it was in the way that Josh related Shayla's response to me that made me optimistic. Josh said that when told about my intentions, Shayla replied, "Reeeally." It's hard to get the feeling across with a limited number of buttons and font manipulations, but the point is, Josh made it sound like Shayla was happy I wanted to ask her out. So, I asked Josh, "Did you ask her if she would go out with me if I asked?" Josh nodded. "She said she would, dude." Cue choir of harmonizing angels and a heavenly spotlight. Already my mind began to work out all the sonnets I would write her. With Josh's reconnaissance mission complete, the work now fell to Yours Truly. Josh set 'em up, now I gotta knock 'em down. I finally asked Shayla out on a warm April night. I had planned out what I was going to say and how I was going to say it. I even checked her schedule at work so I could do it on a night where I wasn't working and she ways. I also brought Josh along with me, since he had done most of the work for me. Also, I think Josh wanted to see what I would do if she said no. We walked into Hy Vee and scanned the cashiers. Shayla was working at a middle register with a line full of customers checking out. Seeing her and knowing what I was about to do suddenly became too much. I started breathing heavy and I thought for a moment I might lapse into a panic attack. I realized I needed to steel my courage, so I told Josh that maybe we should walk around a bit until I was ready. So we walked around the store a bit, even catching Shayla's eye and waving to her. She waved back, which I took as a good sign. Josh and I ended up over by the magazines, flipping through bullshit articles, while I spied Shayla's line from the top of the pages. As her line of customers slowly extinguished I asked Josh to repeat everything Shayla had said to him so I could over-analyze it again and again. Finally, Josh exclaimed, "She'll say yes!" Shayla had only one customer in line...this was it. I put the magazine on the rack and Josh and I each grabbed a pop from the little cooler at the start of her line. "Hey guys. What's up!" Shayla said in her normal jovial way. "Nothing," Josh said. He could barely keep a straight face. It was like he was in on some great practical joke that was finally going to come to fruition. "Hey, Shayla," I said, my words coming out in short rapid bursts. I thought, I have to do this before I pass out or shit my pants. "Hey," Shayla said. She quickly dragged my bottle of pop across the scanner and told me the cost. It felt like all of my innards were fighting to climb out my throat. Now-or-fuckin-never. I handed her a five. As she was counting out my change (a real pro) I said to her, "Would you like to see a movie with me?" It felt more like I was vomiting than actually talking, and for a brief hideous moment I thought I saw Shayla react to my words as if they were vomit. It felt too long. It felt like she was thinking too hard about it. It felt like she was being put on the spot. "Yeah," she said with a smile, and suddenly a wave of relief washed over me. It was like a devil had been exorcised from my body, and I was finally myself again. It was the most beautiful word I had ever heard. Shayla looked to Josh and said, "So, this is the friend who wanted to ask me out? I thought you were talking about someone else." Well, at that the devil came back and repeatedly kicked me in the balls over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over...It felt like an anvil had been tied around my insides and dropped. Her words sounded unnatural and repulsive, like a Maroon 5 album. It was like I was hearing backwards Latin devil language. I thought you meant someone else. I wanted to fucking kill myself. I wanted to walk out into the street and step into oncoming traffic. I wanted my head to cave in. I wanted to be crushed out of existence. I was so fucking mortified, so humiliated, so goddam deflated. It was like that old joke where the doctor tells the new dad, "Your baby is doing great!" "That's wonderful, Doctor! When can I see him?" "Just kidding," the doctor replies, "your baby has brain damage and your wife died in child birth!" It was the most exhilarating thing I had ever felt, followed by the worst fucking feeling in the world. I had no idea how to respond! I just looked at her. Then she looked at me and said, "I'll still go out with you." It was such a condescending, patronizing thing to say. "I didn't agree to this, but I'll suck it up." She gave me her number and Josh and I left after I muttered an awkward goodbye. Outside in Josh's car all I could do was cuss. "She didn't even know who the fuck I was! What did you say to her? Did you fuckin tell her it was me? How come she didn't know who the fuck I was? Who the fuck was she expecting to ask her out? Did you see how fuckin disappointed she was?" We drove home without saying much. No matter how long I stayed in the shower, the filth of shame would not come off...But, honestly, I couldn't just sit around moping. After all, she did say she would go out with me. So, after I felt enough time had passed to get over my humiliation, I called her up, and asked if she wanted to go see a movie that Friday night, which she agreed to. We worked out the details, and she told me she had to work Friday night so could I just meet her at work? Sure. Soon, the big night came. I was showered, shaved, feeling refreshed, dressed to the nines (I never thought I would have the chance to use that expression) and actually feeling confident about things. I was going to be taking a pretty girl to the movies, that was the bottom line. My mom spent most of the time giving me advice like, "Be sure to open the door for her." and "Start with two fingers first, and if she is fine with that you can stick in a third." Just kidding about that last one. Anyway, there was a lot of hubbub, because this was my very first date. Then, Dale comes sauntering into the living room, looking every bit the older brother from a shitty '80s movie. "So, ah, what movie you seein?" "Joe Dirt." "Great," Dale replied. "I'll be there." To my horror, Dale had phoned his friend, Nicky B, and told him that the two of them should play chaperon to me and my date. I started to get worked up, but gradually decided that maybe it wouldn't be that bad. I mean, Dale was a dick, but not mean enough to fuck up my date with a girl. And I thought, maybe I'll be more relaxed if I know Dale and Nicky B will be there. Shayla would have no idea who they were anyway. So I hit the road into Council Bluffs, feeling uncharacteristically optimistic about the date. I picked her up from the Hy Vee parking lot, held open the door to the Lumina for her, and headed to the Mall of the Bluffs for some David Spade action. During a lull in the "conversation" on the way to the theater I realized something horrible: the date was absolutely mediocre. I mean, we were barely speaking in the car. You could fill a warehouse with all our awkward pauses. She seemed all together disinterested. And why not? I wasn't they guy she was expecting to ask her out. Disappointment was only a natural human response to your hopes being shattered, something I knew all about. We got to the mall and I opened the door for her and bought her her movie ticket. "You didn't have to do that," she said, which I interpreted as, "I don't want to owe you anything." When we got into the theater I saw Dale and Nicky B sitting near the back, and I gave them a furtive nod of the head. Shayla and I took our seats in the middle of the theater. We talked in little, pointless sentences about absolutely nothing of consequence. Every now and then I could hear Dale or Nicky B laugh behind us and I would cringe with embarrassment. I was thankful when the movie started, just so I had an excuse not to talk to her. It was going terribly, and I sensed that Shayla thought the same. The movie had its moments, but it was clear that she was not impressed. When it was over and we got up to leave, I asked her what she thought. "It was ok." Which was a nice way of saying she fuckin hated it. Thankfully, my two spies had left the theater without any ideas of taunting me. I hustled to the Lumina, wanting to get the passenger door open for her, when she said, pretty curtly, "Eric, I can open the door myself." The tone stung. I was only trying to be nice...When we got into the car I asked if she was hungry, and she demurely said, "I don't know." "Do you want to get something to eat?" Finally she shook her head. "Not really." So I started up the car and drove back to the Hy Vee parking lot to Shayla's car. "Well, I had fun tonight," I said. "Me too. Good night." To this day I remember how fucking fast she got out of my car. She said good night, and the next thing I know the door is slamming in my face. I wasn't going to try to kiss her. I knew that shit went out the window about two minutes into the date. I was upset though. I mean, I really liked this girl, and the whole time she acted like a cunt, and I'm not ashamed or afraid to say that. She was being a total cunt the whole time. She wouldn't talk, wouldn't responde to what I was saying, didn't want to get a bite to eat...she treated the whole fuckin evening like it was a goddam chore. In the end, I think she only agreed to go out with me so as not to hurt my feelings, or so that things wouldn't get awkward at work. Which sucked for me. I woulda just had her tell me no, and save me the 16 fuckin bucks on the movie tickets. Anyway, she gets out and into her car and starts dialing on her phone, no doubt to tell her friend how terrible the night has been. And when I look out my window I see Dale and Nicky B sitting in the latter's green Chevelle. I drive over to them and get out. Dale and his buddy get out, and we're just standing around in between our cars, bullshitting about the date, laughing over how bad it went, and I suddenly felt totally at ease. The whole bad date thing didn't matter...Dale said he and Nicky B were going to get some beers and play Playstation at Nicky B's house all night. I said I was in. And as we were talking, Shayla drove over. I was pretty shocked. I thought she would just start up her car and drive away. But she drove over to us and rolled down the window. "Hey," I said, trying to act cool. "Hey. What are you guys doin?" She said with a smile. "This is my brother and his friend. Probably going to just hang out tonight." Shayla nodded and said, "Well, give me a call, Eric." I said I would and we said goodbye again. Now, here is what I think happened. I think Shayla saw me drive over to this other car, and saw me laughing it up with a couple of guys, saw that I was having a good time, and got a little jealous. I think after our date she wanted me to be fucking crushed and sad and disappointed in the fact that I had blown my chance with her, and when she saw me laughing, saw me happy, she got a little pissed off and drove over to see what was going on. That cunt. So I went over to Nicky B's house with my brother, and we drank and played video games all night, and it was the best fucking part of my day. Over the next few months, Shayla and I hung out some more, but that first date really put things into perspective for me. I was much more casual around her and my heart was not aflutter when she walked by as it had been. In the end she turned out to be a huge cocktease, because it turned out she had a boyfriend this entire time! Eventually I quit Hy Vee. I called in on a Saturday that I was supposed to work and told the manager that I wasn't coming in because I had found a new job. "Don't do this, Eric. Do you know how busy it is today?" I told him not to worry, I had found someone to take over my shift, which was bullshit. So I was done with Hy Vee and done with Shayla. Better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all. Now, some people might think I'm being unfair, talking about a girl that I have not seen in ten years and bascially only telling one side of the story. Well, too-fuckin-bad! I'm the one who took the initiative to write a blog dedicated to talking shit about people who screwed me over. How about a little fuckin credit!

The Moore You Know: Don't you think it would be hard to be a smurf? Forget about Gargamel and his fucking cat, I'm not talking about the survival aspect of it. I'm talking about the language. Smurfs have so many definitions for the word smurf, it must be fucking impossible to get anything done. What if a smurf was diabetic and he needed his daily insulin injection? He would say, "I need my smurf! I need my smurf right now! Otherwise I'll go into a smurf!" Would the other smurf be able to differentiate between the word smurf for insulin and the word smurf for reading glasses? What if two smurfs were trapped in a house with Azrael the cat trying to bust through the door, and the only way to live was to lock the door. One smurf would be screaming, "Where is the key! Where is the fucking key to the front door!" And the other smurf would be cowering in the corner saying, "It's on the smurf! The smurf is on the smurf!" And the smurf trying to lock the door would scream, "The smurf! The smurf!? What does smurf mean in this situation!? In what fucking context are you using the word smurf!? Does it mean bureau? Table! Jesus Christ, he got in! He's eating my smurf! My smurf is coming out of my smurf!" Anway...I'm high right now.

© Eric Moore - 2011

For The Spandex, If Nothing Else

"Green Arrow, can you lose the hat? It's a bit much."

One of the biggest problems that I have is my inability to properly maintain my finances. I am absolutely terrible with money. Anytime I get a little bit of coin in my pocket I have to go out and spend it on the most pointless things imaginable. Most people do not have, nor would they ever need, a crownless Panama hat...I own two. Once I bought something called an "egg cuber" because I thought the reason that I hated eggs was because of their oval shape, and perhaps squared-shaped eggs tasted better. Indeed, the square eggs did taste better, but I am now willing to admit this may have been only a placebo effect. But the thing I spend most of my unearned, government check on is comic books. I love comic books. I started reading them when I was a little kid, then the habit waned a bit in high school. I started obsessively reading them again in college once I convinced myself that vaginas were probably not all that great. And my favorite superhero has always been Batman. Just a regular guy who uses his vast fortune to fight crime. Pretty cool. Of course, a man like Bruce Wayne could never exist in real life, even though the world is full of wealthy douche bags who possess the resources the become Batman. This article explains that the process of becoming Batman is not so fantastic, but of course, our world would never accept, never allow, a superhero to exist. For one, most of the rich people in this world are, as I mentioned above, douche bags. Second, a lot of them are ugly as shit and out of shape, and no one wants be rescued by fucking Bill Gates, whose hero persona would be something retarded like The Window, or The Human Circuit. And, let's be honest, most of the people who possess the means of becoming a superhero are Arab; rich oil barons living in posh palaces in Saudi Arabia. These are the guys that could really invest in some great superhero gear: lairs, cars, costumes, gadgets, et cetera. But be honest, if a costumed vigilante just saved you from a horde of enthusiastic rapists, wouldn't you be pretty disappointed if you found out he was Arab...Actually, people in general would be pretty unhappy if they found out the superhero running around saving everyone was a minority. Look at The Avengers or Justice League of America. It's all white people, mutants and aliens. Now, I'm not saying that the mutants and aliens in these superhero teams represent minorities, but they probably do. Sure, there have been black superheroes in the past: Black Panther, Luke Cage (who gets points taken away for being Nicolas Cage's namesake), one of the Green Lanterns, Spawn (who is also kinda iffy, since his face is burned off, so he's really more of a skull than a face...a white skull). But more often than not, your hero is gonna be white, and I think I know why. Deciding to become a superhero, coming up with a moniker and a symbol and an outfit, and saying, "I'm going to go outside in this, and I am going to take myself seriously and I am going to try to stop bad people," is totally batshit crazy, and batshit crazy is exactly what white people do best! There is a reason that most serial killers are white, most participants in the X Games are white, most stuntmen are white, most people eaten or attacked by wild animals are white...because all that shit is, to some degree, nuts, and no one does nuts like a fucking Caucasian. It probably has something to do with the fact that white people have been at the top of the racial totem pole for a very long time, and with that comes a dangerous mix of boredom and arrogance. Minorities in America have enough to worry about as it is, so fuck hiking in the woods and fuck jumping across a goddam roof in a cape. Now, crazy does not discriminate. It passes through every nation and race and religion, white people just have more crazy than other races. Crazy for white people is like sickle-cell to black people or taco farts to the Mexicans. So, yeah, there are some black superheroes and there are Latino superheroes and Asian superheroes, but none come close to touching upon the fanatical commitment of white heroes. Another reason why this world could never have a superhero is because asking a being of unlimited power to be a good guy is really just too much to ask. If you had, say, Superman's abilities, would you honestly use it for good? Or would you steal a bunch of money and beat the shit out of people. I mean, I probably would not become a supervillain, killing millions of people and wanting to take over the world, but I would dick with people. However, being the avid comic book fan that I am, I have often wondered what kind of superhero I would be. I definitely would want a cool costume, and although fashionably speaking I am not necessarily drawn to codpieces, I am definitely not going to rule out wearing one. Then there is the whole matter of what powers I would want. Now, quick side note: it is well known that in order to gain superpowers one must expose himself to large amounts of radiation. Yes, you may grow little dicks on your head, but you will also be able to run fast. For me, I have never cared for the power to fly, or superstrength. For me, it would be all about invisibility. That being said, if I did have the power to make myself invisible, I would probably be a villain. Going invisible is essentially wiping yourself off the face of the earth. Like Kevin Bacon said in the sci-fi masterpiece Hollow Man, "You'd be amazed at what you can do when you no longer have to look at yourself in the mirror." You would have no need for morals or ethics. You could pretty much do whatever you wanted. If my superpower was to go invisible I would sit on a bench in a girls locker room somewhere and say, "This is my life now." No saving the world bullshit, just leering...all day...But I would probably die of starvation because I would forget to eat. Anyway, I guess it's just something to think about; that kind of powers would you want to have if you had the choice of becoming a superhero. Really you can't go wrong...except Aquaman...that guy got the fuckin shaft. All the fuckin powers in the universe, and this asshole gets stuck with talking to fish. Superman is pretty much a god, Green Lantern can use his ring to create anything out of thin air, Wonder Woman uses her whip to get people to tell her the truth (little shaky on that one), and fuckin Aquaman has to settle for talking to fish. Why even have a power then? Why even let him into the club!? I cannot think of a single thing that Aquaman brings to the table. What diabolically plan could possibly be thwarted because a goddam fish told Aquaman about it? Unless Al-Queda's headquarters are located under the Arabian Sea, get that guy outta the fuckin group!

The Moore You Know: Lately I have had a lot of Time on my hands (Mallory H. Time is the name of my penis), and I also play a lot of video games. Specifically, I play a lot of Call of Duty: Black Ops. This is a FPS (first person shooter for those with lives), that partially takes place during the Vietnam War, and is also one of the most visually stunning games I have ever played. Remember back in the day how awesome that game Contra was? You and your buddy just going around blasting the shit out enemies...that was fuckin fun. But it's different now. The enemies in Black Ops aren't little multicolored pixels dancing around on the screen. These new enemies have fucking facial expressions, they have artificial intelligence, they have names and human voices, and probably families...little computer families praying for them in some program somewhere. I think kids might start to get PTSD from these games. Can you imagine fat ten-year-olds screaming themselves awake at night, lying a pool of sweat, stammering about what they had to do, "in the shit." Mom comes running in, "It's OK, Billy. It's only a game." And Billy, red-faced and bawling, "A game! A game, you cunt! Tell that to the fuckin gook general I fuckin executed on level 9 today!" Pretty soon we will see thirteen-year-old boys sitting in wheelchairs begging for change outside the drugstore.

© Eric Moore - 2011