About the Time I Was A Hunter

"Ah, so a bear does shit in the woods. Oh, wait, that's me."

When I was young, my father forced me to engage in several activities that were supposed to make a man out of me. Little League and Boy Scouts and karate lessons were all things I had to do to ensure my father that I would grow up to be a strong, responsible adult with zero desire to put any kind of penis inside my mouth.  My recent marriage to a live female human has been the latest attempt to prove this once more to the old man.  Around the time I was twelve (12) or thirteen (13) my father decided that my brother Dale and I were to become hunters.  I'm not exactly sure where this came from.  I had never shown any interest in hunting, in fact, the very idea of hunting appalled me, as it went against all of my principles.  Not so much the stalking and killing of innocent animals, but the having to get up early and walk and walk and walk, were things I was genuinely opposed to.  I'm sure that somewhere along the line my older, much-heralded brother showed some kind of mild interest in wanting to hunt, and my father, taking note of my growing number of Batman action figures and video games decided that, yes, I too shall become a hunter.  So, before I had time to futilely protest, wail and gnash my teeth, and cry to my mother, "Please save me!" I was whisked away, along with my brother Dale, to a hunter safety course far off in another town.  This hunter safety course was an eight hour, two-day course, spread over a Saturday and Sunday.  My weekend had been completely ripped away from me.  Every once in a while you'll hear a gruesome story in the news about a pregnant mother being attacked by a psychopath and having her baby cut out and stolen, while she is left to bleed to death.  Well, that is EXACTLY how I felt having to take this damn course.  I had never once shown any desire whatsoever to be a hunter, and up to this point in my life had already proven that I could not be trusted with a BB gun or a pocket knife.  Now, apart from myself, the class was packed with kids who did want to be hunters.  Their dads were hunters, and these kids were excited to finally be allowed to go out with Dad, learn the ins and outs, wear the gear, stalk the prey, bond with their fathers, kill, skin, cook, all that bullshit.  By this time I understood that Dale was the runaway favorite, and my father perhaps felt the need to mold me into my brother's image, as Dale enjoyed sports and the outdoors, and I did not.  Now, I would also like to say, that I did not oppose hunting on moral grounds.  To this day I am a proud meat-eater and am friends with avid hunters.  Sometimes I hear liberal arguments against hunting.  That it is cruel and unfair and why should these animals have to die, and all this bullshit.  Well, the truth is, Mankind has not needed to hunt since the first person planted the first seed tens of thousands of years ago and the first farm was created.  But as a species we continue to hunt and kill wild animals.  For what purpose?  Well, for food, to form bonds with one another, for the sport of it, for money (selling meat and pelts), and for population control.  In a state like Iowa that is dependent on agriculture, it's good to be able to control the populations of certain animals who would otherwise run rampant.  Plus, some animals, are just made to die.  Like cows.  Cows are so stupid their only purpose in life is to be eaten.  They can't survive in the wild, so why not kill them and eat them and keep humans alive?  I have no issue with vegans or vegetarians, but those animals are still going to be killed, might as well make their deaths relevant by enjoying a nice T-Bone on the grill.  See cattle are like the supermodels of the animal kingdom.  Cows are bred for food, supermodels bred to wear designer clothes.  Sure, we can just hang our designer clothes on mannequins and show them off that way, but then what would the supermodels do?  They don't know how to do anything else.  I highly doubt that the only thing holding Kate Upton back from writing the next great American novel is that pesky modeling career.  Why take away something's sole purpose in life just to make yourself feel better.  Now you're just being selfish.  And you know who else was selfish?  Hitler.  OK, what was I talking about?  Bewbs? No. Hunting!  So instead of getting to spend my weekend writing my Angela's Ashes fan fiction, my brother and I are in this class filled with other boys who are actually excited about the prospect walking through the cold woods at ungodly hours like a goddam pedophile (You think you're scared, I have to walk out of here alone! You know that joke?).  This is like a vacation for these kids, this is something they've been looking forward to for years.  Going hunting with Dad!  But for me it was hell. Sitting at a cafeteria table, on a hard seat with no back, hunched over, listening to a fat walrus of a man go on and on about shells and guns and gauges and technique and this season and that season and Jesus H. Christ when do we get to hold the fucking guns already????  It was an endless barrage of poorly produced videos, quizzes, demonstrations.  I feigned having to take a shit just so I could stand in the bathroom and stare at the tiled floor.  By the second day I was positive that this class was being taught in some kind of parallel dimension where time had no meaning.  Or perhaps I had died a long time ago, and this was hell: an endless lecture on how to hold a rifle if you are the second person walking in a straight line.  Is the gun the instructor is using loaded, I wondered.  Maybe I should try to grab it.  Maybe he'll kill me if he thought I was psychotic.  That would be one way to make this end.  But then, suddenly, it was over.  The nightmare was over!  I had managed to survive being taught all there is to know about something I had absolutely no interest in! And what was my reward for such a useless and time-consuming endeavor?  A little orange card to keep in my pocket.  A nice little go-fuck-yourself for my troubles.  OK, so Step Two in How To Be a Man is get a gun, which my father had plenty of.  He gave my brother a .22 and me .410, a gun which you might give a kid with Down Syndrome if you needed him to protect the short bus from a horde of zombies.  But let me tell you this, when it comes to guns, I get it.  I fucking get it.  Holding a gun was like someone handing me the keys to the entire universe and unlocking all its secrets.  It's such a powerful feeling to hold that metal in your hands like it's a magic wand that performs only a single spell: DEATH!  So I got the certification, which I didn't want, I got the gun, which I didn't know how bad I needed, the only thing left was to go out a kill a bunch of things.  So over the next few weeks, my father would come down to the basement where my brother and I had our rooms, turn on the light switch and bellow "Rise and shine!"  It would be early Saturday morning and still dark outside.  POWs were treated better than this.  I would rifle through my drawers putting on an assortment of clothing designed to keep me warm, giving no thought to the idea that maybe I should wear something that blends me into my surroundings, that's what a good hunter would do.  But if the jacket that kept me the warmest was bright red, then that's what I was wearing.  The three of us, Dale, Dad, and I would pile into the Chevy Lumina in the wee hours of the morning, set the guns in the backseat with me and drive off to the hunting grounds.  My dad knew a few people who owned land that we could hunt on, but they lived over an hour away, so while my dad sipped his coffee and talked with my brother in the front seat, I was relegated to sitting in the back and staring out into the darkness thinking up ways to make it look like an accident.  As we neared the farmland, my father began traversing the gravel roads instructing my brother and I to keep a look out for pheasants.  Pheasants?  Pheasants?  What the fuck was a pheasant?  My dad had made me sit in the back passenger side of the car so he could easily turn around to check if I was sleeping or not.  If he would have caught me falling asleep he would threaten me with more hours of hunting, so I tried desperately to keep my eyes open, or I would try to position my head a certain way against the window so that he wouldn't know if I was shutting my eyes or not.  Eventually we would pull into a field and park.  We would take the guns out, put on our safety vests, and load the guns.  Before me lay what seemed like an endless countryside of timber, fields, tall grass, creeks.  Or as I saw it: walking, walking, walking, walking, and just to catch our breath lets just walk for awhile.  As soon as our march began everything I might have learned in the hunter safety course flew right out of my brain.  It didn't take long for the gun to feel like a barbell in my hands, its weight forcing me to accept comfort over safety.  I began to use the gun like a cane, smartly putting the barrel end up in my hands to mud wouldn't get into hole.  After that grew tiresome I threw the gun over my shoulder and held it the way a ball player might hold a bat walking to the field.  It was a very unsafe way to hold a gun, and may have killed me, but at least I would have died comfortably.  We would approach the timber and Dad would send Dale off some other direction to try to scare up the birds.  I often volunteered to go off on my own, but Dad made it quite clear that I couldn't be trusted.  Instead I tried to make a game out of it.  I would maybe pretend that I was a Nazi American soldier scouring the French countryside looking for the enemy.  Or maybe I was Edward Delacroix, owner of the finest plantation in Louisiana, in search of a runaway slave.  I would tromp through the snow and the mud, really not giving a shit how much noise I was making.  I don't have any recollection of actually shooting anything, which is probably a good thing.  Like I said, any safety lessons that I once learned were completely gone, and had a pheasant, or anything else for that matter, flown out of its hiding place or scampered across the ground in front of me I would have had no choice but to begin firing blindly into the general location of the wild beast.  To this day I am sure that neither Dale nor my father actually know how close they came to death.  Obviously the best part of the day for me was getting back into the Lumina and leaving.  Before this, though, Dad usually let Dale and I fire our guns into the distance or at a lonely tree.  My chubby thirteen (13)-year-old self would walk up to a tree and say something badass like, "Let's see if your bark is worse than your bite." And I would blow that motherfucker away.  Now, on occasion, getting back into the Lumina was just a plow.  Sometimes we would just leave one hunting area only to have to scour the back roads and gravel roads in the car, looking in the ditches for these pheasants, which at this point I was convinced didn't even exist.  At one point my father saw a prime spot for hunting, but didn't know who owned the land, so he pulled the car into the driveway of a nearby house.  There were two or three cars in the driveway so it appeared that someone was home.  While my father went up to the house to see if the owner knew who owned the farmland, I in the backseat, pulled my stocking cap down over my face in order to block out the sun so I could fall asleep.  Dad returned a minute later saying that nobody came to the door.  "Probably because they saw the fucking psycho with the mask on in the back seat," he lamented.  Luckily, my hunting career didn't last long.  By employing a strategy of being so shitty that eventually I was allowed to quit, my father let me enjoy my Saturdays and just took Dale with him instead.  This tactic would be something I would employ throughout my life, from getting out of lawn work, football practice, to not exploiting the best deals at the grocery store and my wife insisting she do all the shopping.  I still love holding and firing guns, but mostly at imaginary targets which some psychologists might insist are stand-ins for my father.  And I still love to eat meat, so I guess my father was unable to keep the sausage out of my mouth in that regard.  Though I will occasionally go fishing because I find that the sedentary nature of fishing outweighs the mind-numbing boredom, I will let the real hunting be left to the experts.  But any time I read in the paper about a hunting "accident", I can't help but wonder, you must have been forced into this as well.

The Moore You Know:  It's official, I am addicted to YouTube.  Some people have drugs, or booze, or sex, or shopping, but my vice is YouTube all the way.  I've heard that if you try crack once you are immediately addicted, or that doing meth once causes permanent brain damage, but those effects are nothing to what I experienced the first time I saw a nut-shot compilation on YouTube.  I watched that video and it was like the drug-taking montage from Requiem for a Dream: video loading, pressing play, eyes dilating, guy on the monitor doubling over in pain.  It wasn't long before I stopped showering and shaving, using any free time to waste on that precious YouTube.  Whether it was skateboarders biting it, people fucking up the National Anthem, returning soldiers surprising their families, I was watching.  I would spend hours typing random keywords into the search box: fail, blooper, nuts, tits.  It didn't matter.  Every day I'm chasing that dragon, searching for that high, that one YouTube clip worthy to be posted on Facebook and Twitter.  My YouTube addiction has gotten so bad pretty soon you'll find next to the dumpster behind your local Casey's blowing guys for clips.  "Hey man, I'll suck your dick for K-Mart's Big Gas Discounts commercial.  I'll swallow for the Top Ten Pixar Easter Eggs of All Time."  Somebody please help me.

© Eric Moore - 2013   

Bored Games

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Mother Nature Is A Five Dollar Hooker

Pictured: Earth's gaping vagina

As I have mentioned before, sports and I go together about as good as black kids and neighborhood watches. So I always enjoyed the fact that my family always went camping for a few days during the first week of August, which was also when two-a-days began for football practice (football was again a failed attempt on my part to convince my father that I was not a homosexual; my upcoming marriage to a woman is yet another). The six of us: mom, dad, my two little sisters, myself, and my older brother Dale, would pile into our 1990 Chevy Lumina with coolers and fishing poles jammed between our legs. The trunk would be stuffed full of camping necessities, tents, grill, clothing, shower supplies, food, swim gear, sanitation items, pop, and copious, copious amounts of alcohol, which my old man referred to as his "suicide hotline." Our lake of choice was Viking Lake, a small body of water about an hour away and just on the outskirts of Red Oak, IA. The drive to the lake felt as though it was modeled after the Spanish Inquisition. Because of all the gear in the car, my young body would be smashed against the car door while the cooler at my feet forced me to contort my legs into a position that would make a pedophile blush. The long, unkempt fishing poles were of much distress, as each of them was still outfitted with an old hook, the crusty remains of baited worms still clinging to the metal. These fishhooks swung like Poe's immortal pendulum, threatening to puncture my skin, or at the very least get stale worm guts on me. The only distraction on that long drive to the lake was staring out the window at the endless desert of agriculture that was so ubiquitous to Iowa, or I could turn on my Nintendo GameBoy, a clunky piece of plastic about the size of a brick, and play Mortal Kombat or Super Mario Bros. or Tetris. Of course, I could only play for so long before the sister at my side would begin to complain that she wanted to play the GameBoy, and even though I would be balls deep in Warioland, my father, whose only goal in life was for people to shut the fuck up, would inevitably demand that I give up the toy and hand it to my sister. Of course she was much too young to actually know how to play any of the games, and every time Wario's death music beeped and booped through the GameBoy I would become filled with such rage. Dale never had to relinquish his GameBoy. As firstborn son, he was allowed such privileges. I would often glare across the seat at him. At that age, Dale was partial to acid-washed jean shorts, Seattle Mariners t-shirts that he always tucked in, and stiff, awkward ball caps that he wore over a dumb-looking bowl-cut that he always parted to one side. I didn't know the term then, but nowadays Dale would be called a "douche." My father, youngest sister, and mother sat in the front seat of the car, which meant that they had a monopoly on the air conditioning. Those in the back were left to sweat and gasp for air, and any attempt for water or pop to quench my thirst would only bring sharp rebukes from my father, insisting that I "stop complaining." Though, every once in a while he would pass me back the beer he was drinking and let me take a swig. After that unbearable hour, Viking Lake would eventually come into view, and seeing it would bring about a wave of relief, like that feeling when a black person passes you on the sidewalk and you don't get mugged. My dad would pull the car through the campground and we would park in a spot under the shade of some trees that was right next to the lake and had an electrical outlet. But as happy as I was to just arrive at Viking Lake, I realized that getting there was only half the battle. Setting everything up was a completely different set of horrors. Now, from the very start and no matter where we were at, going on vacation with my family was like the final ten minutes of The Shining, and everyone was Jack Nicholson. We all piled out of the car and spent a few moments stretching our legs. My sisters were allowed to go down to the playground, and my parents and their sons were left to get everything ready. While my mom unpacked the food and cooking supplies, the men-and I use that term loosely-set up the tent. Our tent was a large, nylon structure that contained three separate rooms and could sleep six. What began as an opportunity for a father to bond with his sons would quickly spiral into a three-hour obscenity carnival in which my father ordered my brother and I what to do with the stakes and poles. Any deviance from my father's instructions would be met by his insistence that my brother and I "stop acting like retards." Together, the three of us, or rather in spite of the three of us, we slowly but surely raised the tent into a livable structure. By that time my father might have drank four or five beers just to dull the disappointment. Next, we would have to build the large screen tent over the picnic table that we used to keep the bugs out as we ate. Then we unloaded the rest of the car. My brother and I slept at one end of the tent, my sisters slept in the middle, and my parents slept at the other end. Surprisingly, the thin layers of nylon were not enough to shield my ears from the suppressed moans of parental sex. Anyway. My brother Dale, he of the socks with sandals, loved to fish. He absolutely relished it. He would stand with the family or just take off to his own secluded spot with his pole and his prized tacklebox and fish for hours on end. And the many compartments of his tacklebox would be full of a multitude of hooks and lures that he couldn't wait to try out. I envied my brother for having a fun hobby that he actually got to buy things to promote. I didn't have anything like that, except for maybe the creams and special shampoos my mom bought for my sensitive skin. But while Dale ran off on his own to revel in the tranquil solitude of the lake and his thoughts, I had a very different relationship with nature. Even then, at that young age, I knew that I wanted to be a writer. I'd been writing short stories for myself since before I was ten and I loved to read, so from an early age I felt artistically inclined. Over the past several decades their have been a plethora of famous and talented writers who have expressed in literature the strange oneness that a person should have with nature. Literary giants like Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway have all commented on mankind's intimate relationship and appreciation of the wild world around him. And I think that their works have largely influenced this idea that artists are almost genetically inclined to love the peaceful respite that nature's bosom provided. Now, in no way can I compare myself to those great authors that I mentioned, but only because I fucking hate nature. From a very early age I came to love the calming effects of ice-cold Kool-Aid and central air conditioning. In an uncanny feat of Darwinism in action, as I grew from toddler to adolescence my body adapted a thick coat of flesh that suited me perfectly for long hours spent in front of the television and furtive trips to the fridge when everyone else had gone to bed. While a genuine, albeit misplaced, love of sports, hunting, and fishing kept my brother's body slim and wiry, my appreciation for being still gave my body a dignified, bourgeoisie portliness. So even though I liked to go swimming, drink pop after pop, eat snacks all day, and read my book, camping was really anathema to me. In early August the weather was unbearable hot, the air sticky, mosquitoes were prevalent, and stimulation was scarce. My mother insisted that I was getting "in touch" with nature, but really I was getting "fingered violently" by nature. Looking for any excuse to retreat into the loving confines of an air conditioned environment, I happily accompanied my dad to a local bait shop where he said he needed to get some live bait. I never really cared to fish, as I thought the practice to be incredibly boring, and before long my tactic for reeling in the big one became nothing more than casting, reeling in the line, casting, reeling in the line, casting, reeling in the line, and so on, and so on. When we got to the bait shop I wandered around while my dad looked for the things he needed. I would go through all the different lures they had, pick up a fancy pole here and there, look through t-shirts and various tchotchkes that were spread all over the place. As my dad paid for his items at the front of the store, I was suddenly confronted by a man who worked at the store. He must have been watching me as I mindlessly handled all sorts of the bait shop's offerings. "You got anything in your pocket?" he asked me. I shook my head feverishly, convinced he was going to start yelling at me for some phantom crime. "All right then," he said languidly, and passed by me. My father must have noticed the exchange, because in the car ride back to the campground he asked me what the man had said to me. I replied that the man asked if I had anything in my pocket. "What? Did he think you were stealing from him?" "I guess so," I said humbly, afraid that my father was going to renew the other man's theory. "Listen," he began, "the next time someone asks you if you have something in your pocket you say, 'Yeah, I got nine inches of swingin dick, a bucket of balls, and enough hair on my ass to weave a rug. Wanna look?' OK?" I nodded and said that I would, though sadly I can't recall a time when I got to use the expression. Most of my days were spent sitting in a chair away from the rest of my family either reading a book or playing my GameBoy. I would eventually join the family at my father's behest, and I would bait a hook (something I took sadistic, godlike pleasure in and something my brother thought was disgusting) and cast a line. Then, I would sit there dumbly, bored out of my mind, as I waited for a fish to fall for the oldest trick in the book. As much as I hated fishing, I couldn't hide my joy when I finally did get a bite, and would have to reel in the line furiously as I wrested the beast to the shore. In my mind visions of marlins and sharks and whales or some other great leviathan of the sea leapt through my mind. This mighty creature fights me so ferociously, I would think. I wouldn't be surprised if I have caught the legendary Cthulhu! But even though my imagination would take me to Lovecraftian levels of terror beneath the surface of the lake, when I finally did manage to bring in a fish it was always a small bluegill only the size of a person's hand. But where fishing was an exercise in monotony, I loved going to the beach. It was only a short drive from our camping spot, and even though it was pretty small and doubled as a broken glass factory, I couldn't wait to get there. My family would pick out a picnic table under a shade tree and that would become our clusterfuck for the next few hours. My dad would put one foot up on the bench and drink a beer while his balls dangled precipitously close to the edges of his trunks. My mom would begin the violent and humiliating ritual of rubbing sunscreen over every nook and cranny of her children's exposed flesh. When we were finally greased up, my brother and I would tear through the grass and onto the beach, which had roughly the same surface temperature as the sun, and finally into the water. We would wade through the murky, bleak water, thick with green algal sploog, as the slimy lake bottom squished between our toes. Equipped with a pair of goggles for each of us, we would set about exploring the haunting depths of Viking Lake. Our exploring usually devolved into piling large quantities of sand onto one of our heads (usually mine) and my brother Dale explaining, "I'm gonna see how long you can hold your breath under water." Every so often a pretty girl or girls would show up and strip down to their bikinis. Dale and I would stand in the lake, the water safely past our waists, and clandestinely watch girls as they swam or sunbathed, praying all the while for a rogue breast to bust through the confines of their tops. After a few hours, the fun began to wind down. My sisters would begin to whine, my brother would start acting like a dick, and no matter how much sunscreen my mother hand put on me, I always ended up with a searing red sunburn all over my body. The hours of drinking beer would erode any patience my father had, and as conversation became nothing more than snide remarks and passive aggressive threats, we packed up our stuff and left. Dinner quickly became the highlight of the camping trips for me. As more and more creature comforts were taken away, I filled the ever-growing void with food, and my father can cook better than a Mojave sun. Our nights were filled with the scents of grilled burgers, steaks, chicken, brats and hotdogs, fries, tater tots, baked beans. We all huddled around the enclosed picnic table while my dad took our plates one at a time and decorated them with red meat and accessories. I gorged myself like a Roman emperor for nearly a week. Which, of course, led to the biological necessity of having to shit...a lot. I'm the type who can only take a dump either in my own home, or my grandma's house. Otherwise I just hold it in until the buildup of solid waste just melts a hole through my intestinal wall. Ideally, I would have liked to have possessed the will power to hold off a shit for the entire time I went camping, but this would only result in me shitting myself after a hard sneeze. So generally I just held it in until it became an emergency, then I hustled to the bathroom and shot it out in one quick push, like a baby born on prom night. The reason I hated shitting at Viking Lake, was because the bathroom facilities were little more than shacks whose floors served as petrie dishes for all manner of living filth: snakes, spiders, crickets...The idea of putting my bare ass against a jaundiced porcelain toilet while my dick and balls hung haphazardly into the dank bowl terrified me. But the last event of the night was taking a shower. I would have loved nothing more than to go a week without a shower, but my father wouldn't have it. "You smell like shit," he would let me know. Clear on the other side of the campground, where there were no electrical outlets, there was a decent showering facility. Clean cement floors, nice wooden benches inside, and spacious showering areas. The only issue was only one shower was isolated to itself, the other two showers were in the same space together. My father took the single shower by himself so as not to expose my brother and I to what my father called "penis envy," and Dale and I showered in the double. While two males showering together in the wilderness would no doubt be considered homoerotic or downright pornographic, at that young age, showering with my brother was a masters class in immaturity, the zenith of which was me turning around to find Dale aiming the tiny proboscis between his legs up into the air and pissing in a wide arch right onto my stomach. Feeling clean, but never truly clean, the three of us would march back to the campsite together. The night would usually end by my sisters falling asleep in the tent and the four remainders sitting around the dying flames of a bonfire. The nocturnal cacophony of crickets acted as a zeitgeber that signaled bedtime. My parents would go to one side of the tent and my brother and I to the other, where Dale would educate me on some of the more mysterious aspects of humanity, like when he explained to me what sixty-nining was and that sometimes girls like to get shit on, or he would subject me to a severe assault of Dutch ovens. At home, in the comfort of my own bed, I could easily sleep twelve hours if left alone, but in the hot-as-hell incubator that was the tent, I would be up around seven in the morning. When I woke up, the first thing that greeted me in the morning was the sun beating down through the nylon fabric, and revealing a kaleidoscope of insect shadows, as the silhouettes of an army of bugs that had taken up residence on the roof of the tent could be seen from the inside. Leaving the tent had to be done quickly as to not allow any bug to penetrate the tent's nylon defences, and then the morning would start with some eggs and bacon, and the process of fishing, swimming, eating, shitting, and showering would repeat itself for the next few days. By the time the camping trip would come to an end, the entire family was ready to leave. We'd send my sisters off to the playground while everything got torn down and loaded into the car, again loud cursing being my father's most effective tool for this process. Then, the six of us would smash our bodies into the car and begin the long trek back home. Always accompanying me home on these trips was an undeniable sense of sadness. A melancholy that only young boys realize at the close of summer, because no matter how much I hated camping, abhorred the outdoors, and loathed nature...I fucking hated school even more.


The Moore You Know: Jesus Christ, I'm fat. That was a statement, not a prayer. I'm fat and I know exactly why: I'm completely addicted to food. I have zero will power and self-control when it comes to eating. Of course I get depressed after a binge, but fuck, I get depressed before a binge, just knowing I'm gonna do it. Eventually my body will just grow around and absorb my couch the same way a tree can consume a fence. Every day its just the nonstop ritual of sad and shameful digestive masturbation, stuffing my face with whatever unhealthy food I can get my hands on. It's just an endless slog of shit and chemicals being pushed down my gullet. But don't worry, I have a plan. It's called insanity, and it involves doing boatloads of heroin. If heroin caused man-tits, no one would do it, but it doesn't. You eat a large pepperoni pizza you get stretch marks and a gut, but you do heroin and you get a body like motherfucking Robert Pattinson. I'll probably be able to play the guitar too...

© Eric Moore - 2012

A Tale of Two Parents

One day, when I was about ten or eleven, I was riding in the car with my mother. We were in the family's 1990 Chevy Lumina Euro driving along Highway 92 towards home. I can't remember exactly where we were coming from, but I can recall how boring the trip was. The drive between my rural hometown of Treynor and the more condensed city of Council Bluffs, which rested on the bank of the Missouri River the same way a greasy turd rests in toilet water, was one of utter dullness. Terraced fields of corn and soy beans stretched to the horizon a full three hundred sixty degrees. Small farms dotted the landscape like pockmarks on the face of the terrain. Unless one could be completely enraptured by the sight of an ocean of blue sky, perhaps with a few clouds sailing along with it, or view the slow, mechanized movements of a lumbering combine stripping through stalks of corn with prehistoric tyranny with utter amazement, the ten mile trip was terribly boring. Although there was only a fifteen minute pause between civilizations, to my adolescent mind this seemed like hours. I had made this trip countless times before, and usually spent the time in the back seat with my brother and sister staring hopelessly out the window into a nothingness much too stylized by Grant Wood. Sometimes I was blessed with the ability to sleep through the monotony and be given a brief respite from the ceaseless timidity. My father was not a fan of the radio, so the car was mostly filled with silence, especially if I knew that some kind of punishment awaited me at home, as was often the case. But usually there were only sounds of breathing, minor commentaries, a protest from my mother if my father happen to curse at a fellow driver. Things were a little better when there were less people in the car. This afforded me the opportunity to sit in the front seat, which provided a much fuller view of the bland surface that surrounded me. My mother was much less conservative with the car, and would allow the radio to be played, albeit only on one of her preferred stations. I'm not sure if the radio was on on this particular day, but I do remember staring listlessly out the window while my mother talked into her cell phone. Now, this would have been about 1995, so it's important to remember that this cell phone was roughly the size of a brick, and came in a box as big as a cinder block. The phone was a large gray mass of plastic, with a mouth piece that flipped out and a long black antenna that pulled out from the top. The buttons on the face were large and rubbery, and the screen was a small strip where numbers showed up as ugly orange digits. If my brother and I wanted to walk around the mall by ourselves, my parents forced this monstrosity upon us, and Dale would make me carry it in my pocket, which most likely made me look like a shop-lifter wherever we went. And although my family thought this cell phone was the height of mid-nineties technology, I was sure it wasn't. My family, much to my chagrin, always came late to the electronics party. When most of my friends were getting Sega Genisisesesses, I was getting Nintendo. When my friends got portable CD players, I got a cassette player. We didn't have a personal computer until I was in junior high and we didn't convert to DVD until I was in high school. Even that Chevy Lumina lasted up to 200,000 miles. So there I am, strapped into the passenger seat, the blue belt resting over my pudgy belly, and my mom driving mindlessly towards home. I wasn't paying attention to her conversation. As with most adults at the time, if they went on for too long I had a tendency to drown them out with my own thoughts. Unless the conversation pertained to me exclusively, most adults sounded like the stuttering trumpets of Charlie Brown's teachers. At some point, though, my mother ended the conversation and dropped her cell phone into her purse, which sank immediately to the bottom like an adventurer in quick sand. "Eric, honey," my mother said to me, pulling me out of whatever prepubescent reverie I used to occupy my time. "Get in my purse and pull out my calender." By "calender" my mother meant her small date book with the flowery plastic cover. I hated going into my mother's purse. I had to sometimes to get things like car keys, money, gum, but I hated it. A woman's purse can be a veritable minefield of privacy that I always thought was too intimate to explore. I can recall one time going through my mother's purse and finding a loose group of tampons. At first I thought they were intricately wrapped cigars, until it slowly dawned on me what I was really holding. On that day a gulf between mother and son had been irrevocably breached, and no matter how many times I wiped my palms on my shorts, it still felt like I was holding those tampons. So when my mother told me to go fishing into her purse for her calender, a small window of dread began to open within me. I gently peeled open the zipper and gazed inside. Gingerly, I moved the different items around in her purse, hoping I would not have to catch a glimpse of anything that might forever alter my already fragile psyche and bend me to a Norman Bates-like route the rest of my life. Fortunately I retrieved the small date book without incident. "Get a pen," my mother told me when I showed her I had fulfilled my duty. Once more into the breach, my fingers searched until finding a blue ball point in one of the many pockets of the purse. I remember sitting there stupidly as I was wont to do. I was the type of child who only responded to explicit step-by-step directions, falling into idleness if not given a specific task. When my mother saw that I had completed her tasks, rising pridefully to the herculean occasion, she told me to find a specific date. I can't recall the date, but I remember flipping through the calendar and seeing how busy and organized my mother was. There was something written on nearly every page, in every square box that represented a day. Finally, I found the correct date. "Now," she said when she saw that I had gotten to her day, "write in two P M, Dr. Black, pap smear." At first I hesitated, not entirely sure what she had said. I got the time, and I got the name, it was that last thing that was bothering me. Pap smear? I wasn't sure I had heard her correctly, but somewhere within the deepest recesses of my brain I also knew not to have her repeat herself. Because somehow, some way, I managed to realize just what in the fuck a pap smear was. Well, not entirely I suppose. Being ten years old, I was starting to become grossly enamored with the female body, and with no formal training I relied mainly on my older brother and friends for information, not to mention the fact that my mother talked to herself more often than a paranoid schizophrenic I was sure I had at one time or another walked into the middle of a one-woman conversation. At any rate, I realized that I kind of knew what this pap smear thing was. I knew it had something to do with a vagina...more specifically, my mother's vagina. I moved the pen across the page, battling the small borders of the selected day and the jostling of the moving car. Slowly I wrote down my mother's words with the solemnity of one decoding an ancient text. But oh how I hated that word smear. It held such disgusting connotations, and all sorts of horrible images leaped into my mind as I wrote it. Smear, I thought. That's what bugs do on your windshield when you drive. So that was me, still a few years from becoming a teenager, and already working as my mother's personal gynecological secretary. To this day I am repulsed by those biological functions that separate males from females, and the store-bought products related to such issues. And although the memory of that fateful day is still hard to stomach, I'm still unsure of how I was able to escape such an oedipal maelstrom that would have certainly made a believable origin story for a serial killer. Somehow I managed to ward off the majority of the psychological assaults on my normalness...though with my parents, it certainly wasn't for lack of trying. There was a day, a few years before that car ride with Mom, that I went into a pet store with my old man. I was probably seven or eight years old. At this time in my life, trips alone with my dad were special occasions. My father was a much more patient man when not burdened by the incessant demands of all of his children together at once. Now when I say "patient" I mean that his abusive and obscenity-laced rants may not go on for as long as they did when he was with the entire family. I don't know the specifics as to why we were in the pet store. My brother and my sister each had a fish, the only pet my father would allow inside the house, so I am assuming that our expedition to the store was something fish-related, like my mother's doctor appointment. Anyway, as my father marched purposefully through the store in search of whatever ends he sought, I was drawn to a small glass case containing two white mice. At the time, my favorite movie was The Witches, the theatrical version of the Roald Dahl classic. In the movie the main character had a pair of pet mice. So, when I saw these two cute white mice I was immediately drawn to them. I parted from my father's trail and wandered over to the case. These two little fellows were scurrying around in their cage, drinking from a little tube of water or running over a small wire wheel. I watched them run amok in complete awe, so much so that I did not hear my father calling after me. "Eric! Eric!" Finally, my father's angry shouts blared like a trumpet in my ear and I hurried off to find him. He was walking down an aisle with snakes lining both sides of him, making his angry demeanor even scarier. "Where the fuck did you go?" My father was extremely tight with his money, so he made up for it by sharing his swear words generously. In fact, he swore so much that words like "fuck" and "shit" had long since lost their mystical appeal to my adolescent ears. "Dad, can I show you something?" He rolled his eyes. My old man was always in a hurry, no matter where he was or what he was doing, he always acted like he needed to be somewhere else. "Jesus Christ, what is it?" I managed to get him to come to the glass case containing the two white mice. "Can I have these? Please!? I'll take care of them, I promise!" I begged and pleaded for my dad to buy the little guys for me. But to no avail. "Fuck no," my dad insisted. "You don't need any goddamn mice!" My dad said the word "goddamn" so many times I thought it was a brand: we owned a Goddamn stove, a Goddamn fridge, a Goddamn car, a Goddamn T.V. I followed sullenly behind my father as he walked up to the cashier. During the transaction the clerk casually asked, "Is there anything else I can get you?" I remember distinctly my father telling the young clerk, "My son here wants a couple of mice to shove up his ass, but I told him he ain't Richard Gere." At this both the clerk and my dad burst out laughing, while I stood in stunned silence. Not because I was offended or embarrassed, but because I had no idea exactly what my ass, two mice, and Richard Gere had in common. In fact, I don't think I even knew who Richard Gere was. On the way home I asked my father what he had meant, as I had grown genuinely curious. "Richard Gere," he replied, "the actor. He likes to stick mice up his ass." Of course my father was relating to me the fictional story perpetrated by Sylvester Stallone that said the actor Richard Gere had once gotten a gerbil stuck up his ass. At the time, however, my father's explanation only served to further confuse me, and it intrigued me even more when I asked my brother, my own personal oracle, what Dad was talking about, and Dale had no clue. In fact, it wasn't until years later when this episode of South Park aired that things finally became clear. I wanted to relate these two stories to you as a way of explaining what it was like growing up in my household. It was strange, because I seemed to be both underling and peer at the same time. Young enough to make mistakes or misunderstand something, but old enough to take the punishment or realize a harsh truth. I suppose it kept me grounded, which is why when I was a little kid I didn't dream of one day growing up to be a famous athlete or the President, I wanted to be a garbage man. I wanted to ride on the back of one of those big, stinking trucks and handle other people's shit all day. Of course since then, my occupational fantasies have matured, as now I dream of one day becoming a fixer for a shady organization, like George Clooney in Michael Clayton. I want to bribe Supreme Court justices and get rid of dead hookers for U.S. senators. Anyway, if you ever ask me why I have to triple check every lock in the house before I go to bed, or meticulously have to arrange my Blu-Rays by genre, or why I am convinced I have cancer after viewing a rerun of Scrubs, the stories above are your answer.

The Moore You Know: The other day I went to my friend's house and he was washing his car in his driveway. As I approached him, he flipped the hose quickly in my direction and sprayed my shirt and pants with water. And I thought to myself, is there anything more gay than a man spraying another man with a hose? Fuck no! There is something about the jovial frivolity and flirtatious nature of playing with a hose that makes it extremely gay when one man sprays another man. Is it the phallic nature of the hose? The metaphor of ejaculation with the spraying water? The playful yet sexual undertones of the act itself? Probably...I mean, in my mind a dude getting a beej from another dude is somehow less gay than a dude spraying another dude with a hose. I would say that a man getting an army of dicks violently shoved into every single orifice on his body is less of a homo than a man teasingly spraying a hose at another guy. If I had a hose and another dude was walking down the sidewalk, and with a quick flick of my wrist I got him a tiny bit wet, and then I dropped the hose and ran over to him and began to greedily gobble up his dick with my mouth...the blowjob would be the second gayest thing I did to that guy. So, I let my friend know how he just did the gayest thing in the world to me. And since we got past that I jerked him off without feeling weird about it.

© Eric Moore - 2012

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