Booxieland Customer Profile #1

I have a fantastic job. I get to root around in the printed word for fun and profit, day in and day out. It's a sweet gig, in part because of the books and also because of the magnificent specimens of humanity I work with. Booxieland is truly a dream wrapped in a wish dipped in Elton John's golden colostomy bag. Life is gooood.

And then, there are the customers.

These are not your garden-variety homeless war vets and sycophantic homeschool moms that loiter about in the public library asking annoying questions and making BM in the "public" toilet. Our customers are a gnarley lot of confused, genetically challenged inbreds with dubious sphincter control and the occasional bad debit card. They shop in fuck-tard posses generally, bolstered by the comforting nest of stupidity.
We have a few regulars, people who trot in time after time to annoy or frighten the hell out of us with no regard for the restrictions of their probation or the life of their oxygen tank. They acquire nick-names for the same reason children or prisoners do; they are horribly mutilated in some way ("Burned-With-Acid-Single-Mom"), or they have a particular freakish nuance ("Audio Thief", "Home-School Mom", "The Angry Jew").

The only deviants from this group are the singles. Lil' ole' ladies who come in to buy soft-core porn; the greasy "older" men who come in for the hard-core, and the occasional rare socio-pathic possibly homicidal lunatic. These are the loners who drive very clean cars and who say things like "Pardon me, but do you have any true crime books with color photographs?"

For these reasons and more, working in a used bookstore is like working in an Emergency Room. You dress everyday expecting that you may possibly get pissed or shat upon, yet still somehow manage to summon basic human surprise when someone mixes it up and vomits blood on you instead. No matter how many days or weeks on end you work, you just never fucking know WHAT is going to walk in that door next.

Unless you do.

Today is dedicated to you, Skin Suit.

Skin Suit is one serious Doogie Houser looking motherfucker. He's got a satiny blonde pompadour, the kind of glasses Molly Ringwald wears in Roman Polanski's wet dreams, and a genuine passion for genteel creepiness.

He comes in nearly every Monday or Tuesday night, parking right outside the door so we can just make out the orderly row of clean shirts he keeps hanging in his back seat. (Blood spatter is unpredictable and vulgar. Best be prepared.) And with the quiet, subversive air of a surgeon, he moves around us, watching, waiting, and speaking only after he's determined an appropriately fucked up thing to say.

"So do you write? Well I do! I love to write. I'm working on a book now. It's going to be a Horror story. It's not finished yet though. I'm sure the ending will come to me one day... I just have so many IDEAS, you know?"

It's all pretty harmless on the surface, but coming from a guy whom you've already decided has a body in the trunk of his car and who probably makes his own condoms from the discarded inner ear canal of his previous "dates," it can be unfathomably weird.

I asked Ha'pint to offer a quote in regards to the Skin Suit situation. She said "I'm pretty sure that he's going to be the last thing I see before I die. On the other hand, his teeth are pretty amazing."

The Best Christmas Story Ever!

The Laird is a Highland Warrior, skilled in the use of war-making tools such as the cock and balls. The Laird is also a Pagan, and as such, was unprepared for the demands of the tools of the average Anglo-Saxon Protestant Christmas. Namely, the box-cutter.

Thanks to his noble sacrifice of dignity and flesh, Ha'pint and I had the Best. Christmas. Ever.

Me: I really should read my text messages more at night... Did you suck all the way to the completion of the treasure hunt or did Rooster** "find" her prize under your unconcious body in the front lawn this morning?

Ha'pint: Worse. I'm wearing a red flannel nightgown with sock monkeys all over it from my mommy dearest with red hiking socks and a Christmas apron. Sipping Amaretto and coffee. All I wanted for Christmas was a gift card for a tattoo from them....... The treasure hunt is postponed for New Years Eve. The Lairds's finger! Aaaagh!!!!! Amazingly awesome!!!

Me: Have you looked at the "full view?" Epic. Does Rooster know the treasure hunt is post-poned? ;) That would be awesome.... just keep feeding her lies for a week.

Ha'pint: She knows its postponed. I wasn't clever enough to keep stringing her along. That would have been nice..... I saw two pics front and palm side. Were there more? I want to print and frame it. So you made it to your folks what with no snow and all? Anything awesome happen yet?

Me: I was supposed to go to my folks tomorrow. No driving there yet... I'm in Lowlyville. Celebrated with Phineas T. Groundhog's parents, which was great. What's your highlight reel? I saw the pic with the chunky towell and a pic of it bandaged. Epic.

Ha'pint: I got both where it looks like he's in the ER with blue surgical cloth on the table he's holding it over. The palm view is bloody with some iodine. Well probably good you stayed, its a crazy blizzard outside. Not much other than the outfit I wore and playing Pictionary drunk and having my dad wrote "Cow dick" for "udder" to my daughter.

Me: I haven't seen the e.r. bloody palm! Send! And if you don't mind, send that "stitches" pic to my email? I just accidentally erased it.

Ha'pint: Will do. Gmail or aol? Which one is the good one now?

Me: Gmail all the way. WOW. What ones did you get?

Ha'pint: It's like we are comparing Christmas presents. And personally, it WAS my best Christmas present.

Me: Close... my best has been the boots Phineas T. Groundhog's mom gave me. They are black and Victorian. And swell. I got the "stitches" pic, which i sent to you an hour ago, and the "sliced finger over chunky towel" which came in at about 12:30 last night.

Ha'pint: Man those pics rock. It looks like its coated in fetus cheese. It also looks like it just may fall off soon.

Me: I know! It looks like someone ran a lawnmower over a corpse that was covered by a flesh-colored tarp.

Ha'pint: *smiling* you give the best visuals. I'm happy now.

Me: Can you email me our text conversations for the past two days?

Ha'pint: I'm jumping in the shower and I will soon sort and send while listening to The Oakridge Boys. Gotta love Elvira. Giddy up-uh oom boppa oom boppa mouw mouw.

Me: Heigh-ho Silver! Away!

Thanks, Laird.

** Okay, so I am a kind person. I gave Ha'pint the chance to pick her daughter's moniker. Apparently, just the once was enough for her in this life. A concise sampling of Ha'pint's suggestions:
Fannie
Lucinda
Elvira (Oak Ridge Boys reference I assumed)
Cora
Ramona
Lowly (Richard Scarry? Deep emotional scars??)
Orly (Fuck I don't know)
Jolene (Jolene?)
Dottie
Shania
Dolly (She was on a country kick after "Jolene" I guess.)
Fern
TinaMarie
Savannah
At which point I suggested "Mackayla" and she started screaming "No! Too white and snobby!" (see above for irony) and immediately regressed back to the "soiled dove" names.
Maxine
Matilda
Daisy
Violet
Sage (She was getting hungry I think)
Cinnamon
Pepper
aaaaaand her final offering, "Pippa."

The child got "Rooster." I feel strongly that I have done a good deed this day.

The Bride is Dead

This is a dead bride. Dead dead dead.

Think about all the things that might have been.

Think about all the jokes that never got told, and all the phone conversations that will never be had.

Think about how no matter what anybody says or does, The Bride is dead.

Part of me doesn't want to see the sparkly dress get zipped up in that bag because that means that it's over, for sure.

But then, I think of how wonderfully she died, how she took her own life (no autopsy necessary!), and how much less it will hurt now that I don't have to think about her future anymore.
I don't want to know that she's in the ground, in the dark...

But the alternative is having her propped up in the living room, stinking up the place. And who needs that? Not me. I am relieved, just a little already. The wait is over. The Bride is dead. I don't ever have to think about her again.

I don't ever have to learn to touch her.

I don't ever have to save her life.

Because The Bride is dead.


11.11.11:This little bit of pedantic meandering is the result of the dissolution of my fuckship with The Bride. Since this was originally posted, she's no longer a bride and I still think she's a selfish cunt. So I guess that makes us even?

Suprise! It's a Birthday!

I am genuinely ashamed that I didn't post for the entire month of October. September can go fuck itself. October's where it's at.


October has my heart. It's warm and cool. The month starts with the last of the summer thunderstorms and ends with the potential for a faint flurry of translucent snow. It's the ulitmate foliage tipping point between the gentle ebb of the pale green and the onset of Autumnal burlesque. The air gets spicey with apples and the vomit of south-bound hoboes. The world undergoes a strange crackle of energy that seems to simultaneously wake things up, and dull their senses with too much color and air-born mold.
I was truly convinced, as the month creaked and eeked along, that I would make time to post something before the end, because BY GOD it's my Birthday Month. And maybe I would have made time if the whole month of October hadn't been so incredibly excellent. Seriously, it was like everyone but me knew I was dying! I kept getting great shit. People of varying degrees of hotness wrote long emails and made me feel special. Friends and loved ones made magnificent promises of goods and services to be bestowed on amorphous future occasions.

Good shit, like I said. The birthday haul this year was impressive. Sigoth came through like a champ, despite being heavily involved in moving to a new place. Which is a gift in and of itself. A girl likes to know where she'll be making the walk of shame from. The Bride secured amazingly specific candies from far-away lands and thus, managed to conquer the "sweet spot" on the vinn-diagram of my many fetishes. (It's English! It's Henry and the 6 bitches! It's CHOCOLATE for crissakes! It came from a far-away land in a British Envelope.)

And from here, I could go on to either list everyone in turn who gave me something I actually remember and can use (fuck you whoever gave me "world peace.") or I can trail off with the Cheat. You know, sort of suggest that there are just too, too many people to thank and so I'll thank ALL of you and blahbittyblah.

Instead, I'm going to hedge the gap and say THANK YOU to the 8 of you who did such fucking phenomenal, generous things for me for my birthday. These things ranged from getting up off their asses for five goddamn minutes, all the way to dedicating entire days to making me happy.


Furthermore, it's one of those birthdays that are supposed to strike fear and regret and vague sexual confusion in the hearts of women. And it maybe kind of did. I'm getting olderish. It's not about looks (yet) or wet farts or strange tufts of hair or orthopedic jock straps. It's mostly a matter of time and place. Am I where I wanted to be at this age? Well, not really. But damn, that's kind of a good thing. Depending on which Blogerella from which age you interview, that answer's gonna change. At one point I would have said "a Vet!" (Animal, not War.) A few years later the answer would have been "Dead! Be still my heart!" But as we all know, whatever the story is there, it didn't pan out according to plan. So mostly, I am just happy to BE.

Which is also totally a cheat, but since I don't know how else to be, it's also the right answer.


Nightly News:

I'd like to extend a Shaddout to my friend She-Randall's main man, Klrosksey. He somehow managed to talk her into a wager involving Camel Menthols and her virginal asshole. In summation, he totally won and she's gotta ride the bike with no seat at some point in the future. Ha'pint insists that such a wager would never have been made unless She-Randall had the faint hope that Klrosksey would follow through. I would like to point out that the only reason Ha'pint would think such a thing is if she too harbors the quiet, unspecified hope that someday someone will find a way to trick her out of her fanny cherry.

Man up, bitches. I can't be the only chick in the world who wants to occasionally look around and find a cock in her ass.

Girls Who Can Take Four (4) Fingers In Their Snatch

OR MORE!!!!


I asked The Laird what would make an excellent choice for a new blog post, and this is what he suggested.


Without betraying a whole lot of confidences, I can't possibly write a whole blog about this....

Or can I?!

Here it is! Based on superstition and fear, I hereby present:
Girls Who Can Take Four (4) Fingers In Their Snatch or History's Whores; a Celebration of What Were Almost Certainly Very, Very Sloppy Slits.

Caroline of Brunswick:

Sweet Caroline...
Pretty much the only man in Europe who didn't get a piece of this shit was her husband, England's George IV. George was so repulsed by her that he began drinking immediately after their first meeting 3 days prior to their wedding, and didn't stop til he woke up face-down in the fireplace grate... the wedding night. He managed to rise to the occasion just once, apparently that very night. 9 months after the wedding, Caroline gave birth to their only child (England's heir, the doomed Princess Charlotte). George sent a letter saying thanks, that was really great, but let's see other people, and not each other, ever again.

The other people George wanted to see was his "real" wife, Maria Fitzherbert to whom he'd already been married 8 years when he wed Caroline.

The other people Caroline wanted to see was... everyone.

Caroline packed her unwashed panties and moved onto "The Continent." She became famous for her dinner parties and especially the after-dinner entertainment, which usually included lots of topless dancing. Performed by her. She would proudly show "special" guests her wind-up oriental sex doll, and occasionally dance naked on the pier when she grew bored with doing it at home.
She fucked Napoleon's brother, a slew of footmen in her employ, stable hands, any number of lesser Nobles, and possibly the oriental doll. Times were fast and fun 'til the Old King died and George's number came up for duty. Caroline traveled to England fully expecting to be crowned Queen alongside him. Instead, Parliament offered her a fortune to leave and never, ever come back. She didn't take the subtle hint, and showed up at his coronation, crown in hand, only to be summarily locked out of the church. Being a lady and a Queen and all, she did the only thing she could do. She screamed obscenities at the door until she grew tired, then she went home and died.

Fing-O-Meter: A solid 4, because she may have had a bastard or two after birthing the Princess Royal, and because she didn't mind the occaisional low-born brute.


Maria-Theresa of Austria:

(Empress Maria Theresia Walburga Amalia Christina... we got nuthin' but time and names, bitches.)

It's not so much that she whored her way to a gaping gash; no, she was above reproach. (At least in the bedroom.) What gets Maria-Theresa on our enviable list isn't her in-put, but her out-put. She had 16 mother-fucking kids in 20 years, a feat that would blow anyone's vag out. And she didn't pull any of that Catherine of Aragon cheater-pants stuff; they were all full-term and live. For a while at least. 13 of the original 16 lived to be diplomatic pawns, so that's good.
She was married to a paragon of manliness named Francis Joseph of Lorraine (sexy), who somehow managed to find time to fuck other women despite the demanding schedule of Maria Theresa's ovulation cycles.

Their last daughter grew up to be Marie Antionette. Prior to Marie's marriage and unfortunate remarks about diamond necklaces and cake (didn't happen!!) she was famous first for walking out of her mother's womb while hula-hooping and using pantomime instead of crying. Because that shit was HUGE. These weren't normal babies. These were fucking AUSTRIAN babies. They were goggle-eyed and had massive Ha'pint-sized foreheads and paniers and powdered wigs. Probably 10 pounds a piece. So you know that the panty-pudding must've looked like a deflated inner-tube at the end of summer.

By the time she shat out the ninth or tenth, Maria Theresa stopped even taking bed-rest on the day off birth. She literally got up out of her bed and went to a meeting with her ministers immediately after delivery the day Marie Antionette was born. A woman's gotta have hobbies. Besides riding Francis raw every night.

Fing-O-Meter: At least 5. Not only did she pop out babies like an 18th century human salad-shooter, but you have to spot her points for ease of insertion. After-birth makes good lube.


Catherine the Great:

Catherine really WAS great, if for no other reason than her passion for knowing how to solve problems like nation-wide slavery without actually doing anything about it. (Serf's up.) But we're here to talk about her twat. Catherine started slow, building both her character and sexual frustration over the course of the first 10 years of her marriage to the idiot Grand Duke Peter of Holstein. (Yes.. like the cow.) He would set up army men on their bed and demand that she play with him into the night. He would capture and hang the Palace mice for misconduct. He also drooled. Catherine put up with this shit just long enough to figure out what a penis was and how to use it, then devoted herself to happily popping out a couple of heirs to the Russian throne. Concieved, of course, through the assistance of people other than Peter, who was still working through complex maneuvers on the four-poster.
Meat-work done, Catherine set out to have some real fun. She took over the throne of Russia, and collected a series of lovers and paramours from all stations of life. She was Empress and all, so she implemented a handy-dandy free-clinic style STD screening process. She had her potential lovers fuck her handmaids first. If the girls didn't get freckles on their ass, then Catherine would take the new boy for a spin.
But what makes her a 4-finger champion? She eventually got tired of all the effort she was putting into recruiting her new pieces of ass, and so she sub-contracted that part out to her former lover (and possible secret husband), Gregory Potemkin.
Gregory stank, had rotten teeth and was missing an eye. He could throw some mean dick, though, so even after the spark of romance dissipated, she kept him around as the imperial pimp. Sweeeet.

And if there is any question about Cathy's capacity, consider the fact that IN HER OWN LIFETIME, the Russian people had already started circulating stories about her sexual appetite. She was rumored to have fucked her way through most of the standing Russian army and a few visiting delegations as well. And then there is the Horse. Mr. Ed supposedly crushed her to death in coitus.

Fing-O-Meter: 10. Totally. Bitch had to knock the cock out of her ass just to take a dump. I doubt the horse story only because there's no way the horse would have been able to find a hole on her that was tight enough to offer a little friction.

Horses have standards.


Aperitif:
Napoleon wasn't quite the sad little dwarf of legend. He stood at about 5 feet, 7 inches tall. This was a skooge above average male height for the time. To clarify, he wasn't 4 feet tall. That is erroneous. His cock was 4 feet tall.
Napoleon: 5' 7". Josephine's Tube Steak: 4'.
Get it right.

Pop Goes the Damsel

So I've popped a few zits in my day. It comes with the territory. In addition to feeding me fat-back (a substance only really poor white trash eat and then only as a "garnish") as a main-dish with the nightly meat-n-three as a child, the parents also passed on to me a digestive system marked by the ability to shoot lava-hot acidic bile out of either my ass OR mouth, and the sort of skin that Ukrainian orphans who work in sulphur mines would describe as "rough."

My brother had it first, which, in addition to priming my taste for popping zits and excavating pimples, served as a sort of warning shot for the perils of continuing life into adolescence. My brother, "Leslie," had cystic acne starting from his hairline and continuing all the way down to his ass. Back, chest and various crevices were not spared. I spent some of the happiest hours of my life as a child, (there was a decade age gap) huddled next to him on a floor, with a bobby-pin, upholstery needle and nail clippers in rotation as I gouged at his cratered carcass like a turkey vulture with a swiss-army-knife for a beak. Leslie's moans of anguish as I tapped the upholstery needle into assorted infected pores with a heavy book were soothing, sort of like Enya for hill-billies.
Which brings us to the point, which is that I LIKE to pop zits. It's not just the popping itself with its heady mixture of pain and pleasure, anticipation and release. Sort of like masturbating with a penis instead of the usual equipment, if you're a girl. It's also the endless possibilities after the thing has shot it's load, and you're standing there in the bathroom, holding this slightly damp, elegantly curled albino fairy-turd on your finger and wonder what life will be like from now on. Now the REAL magic happens. You wipe it on the mirror.

I call this "frosting the frame" and it's a must-do for any arts and crafts fan, or just the recreational face picker. You start low, usually the bottom of the frame, as it's convenient to the finger and face, post-pop. With careful planning and a little imagination, you can create miniature macrame works of art using only facial effluvium and creativity. My roommate, for instance, only recently discovered that our bathroom mirror frame did not in fact have a paisley pattern worked upon it in low relief. Or rather, that it DID, but simply had not been that way at the moment of purchase. He still gags when he thinks about the gently curdled and yellowed pile of minute maggots nestled in the tissue after I made a wipe across the frame with it. Sure, it upset 6 months of work, but there will be more.

There are always more.

Ha'pint brought up the "pock-marked" reference from an earlier post, and felt like I must be describing her. To be fair, she cultivates an admirable crop of diminuitive and deep pimples with every cycle of panty-plague and school, work and home related stress. But it was not her I referred to, but myself. The craters on my face will become, like my mother's, more pronounced with age and misjudgement, but for now, both Ha'pint and myself are more or less "passing" in the world of lesser-blighted people. It is entirely due to inspired application of cosmetics and advantageous light.

Plus, she's got this thing going on with her bangs... If her forehead was the Titanic, which it almost is, then imagine the hair she has combed over one side of it at a jaunty angle to be the deluge of passengers jockeying for position to get the hell off the ship before it sinks. These are the sort of bangs which provide very particular and effective pimple cover all on their own. I've never seen a zit under them (who could?) but I imagine it would be like stumbling upon a small but fiercely independent group of refugees hiding in a tent from immigration officials.

The Money Shot:
Women and men in 17th and 18th century France used little black pieces of felt cut into whimsical shapes to cover their facial imperfections. They would paste them onto whatever they didn't feel like was up to the sexy standard the rest of their "look" set, which usually included a shit-ton of powder, wigs, hideous lip-paint, mouthwash made from human piss (Portugese was best!) and cosmetics made from arsenic.
This is what you looked like if you had money to really fix yourself up.

Always Bring a Friend

"A..........un? Th.. --- ur Mother! Ca...-------- me?"

"Mom? Is that you? What?"

"Ah....... un!! D....----...(sounds not unlike those of a masticating lion if it had a microphone shoved up its ass to record the chewing noises) ... !!!"

"Mom, I don't know where you are, or what the fuck you're doing, but I can't hear you. Or at least, I hope I can't. I'm hanging up. Love you. Bye."

I returned to what I was doing, which if memory serves me correctly, comprised of organizing my collection of comic book trading cards according to "coolness." The reprieve was short-lived, however.

"Can you ...--..-...--- now?"

"No, not really. Where are you?"

"...---.....--- HEAR ME?!"

"NO. I CAN NOT. GO AWAY UNTIL YOU HAVE SOME DECENT RECEPTION!"

"I SAID, CAN YOU HEAR ME?!"

"That's better. Mom, it's.. (Holy Hell!! It was solidly 11:45! And it was a Saturday night! My Mother usually goes to bed at times that the Amish consider excessively early!) it's 11:45! Jesus, Mom what the crap are you doing up? And why is your reception so shitty? Are you at Berle's? Is everything okay?"

**Background.... My Mother at this point in her life, spent her weekends as the primary caregiver for an octegenerian half-uncle named Berle, called "Berlie." He was a parsimonious hoarder who lived alone after the death of his morbidly obese diabetic daughter, "Morlene". Morlene, called "Reener" from birth, had also been a hoarder, and had amassed an astonishing and horrific collection of Ashton-Drake porcelain dolls, even as she'd sloughed off a succession of neither-limbs and appendages as offerings to the Diabetic Dieties. Added to these was Berle's stash of rotted pecans, canned goods that spanned 5 different presidential administrations and small plastic baggies of his own bloody toenail clippings. He lived next door to the church he'd attended all his life, so being a shut-in (except on Sundays) really suited him. What he saw of the world came through his television set, the bits of trash his homeless VFW buddy, Robert brought in for him to hoard, and my Mother, whose main functions were to carefully document his bowel movements using the traditional "gold star" method, take him to the grocery store, and by stealth and cunning, to carry the trash Robert brought in, back out.


"Mom? Can you hear me?"

"I can hear you fine! You're never going to believe where I am!"

"Okay, where are you?"

"I'm driving with Berle up and down Catfish Country Road, trying to get away from Drugs Pirates!"

"...What?"

"Wooooooo!!! Ain't this fun, Berlie? (Muffled sounds of my elderly Great-Uncle, obviously not having fun.)"

"Mom? Are you okay?"

"Oh, we just had the best time! We went to the grocery store and got us a can of sausage for in the morning, and some of those frozen biscuits I like, and some grape jelly and a pack of gold stickers for Berlie's calender."

"So why are you out driving at midnight? Are you lost?"

"No! I told you we're on.."

"I heard that part. WHY are you still out driving?"

"Because those Drugs Pirates* saw me with their Drugs."
*seriously, the term she used throughout the conversation.

"Mom, I love you. I don't know what you're talking about, and I have a feeling I'd like to. So what the fuck are you doing and WHY are you doing it? And what do you mean 'drugs?'"

"Don't say "fuck!" It sounds like trash."

"Right. 'Drugs.' Explain."

"....------...awenooidn......"

"Mom? What? HELLO?"

"...------ FUCK THIS GODDAMN PIECE OF SHIT PHONE!"

"Mom... maybe you should stop driving."

"It's not the driving it this piece of shit phone. And I can't stop here."

"Why can't you pull over? Are you sure you're not lost?"

(Sound of Berle furiously mumbling from the passenger seat of my Mother's Mercedes.)

"Berlie doesn't want us to stop here. We're in nigger-town."

"Jesus fucking CHRIST just tell me why you called?!"

"That's what I'm trying to do. Berle and me were at the grocery over in Boger City. We don't like that new place."

"Of course you don't. Why should you? It's clean and well-stocked. So you drove 10 minutes out of your way to go to the shittiest grocery store in town and..."

"Berlie had a coupon."

"Fine. Please continue."

"So we get there and it's late, and dark and we were gonna go in and out reeeeal quick. We got us a buggy and went to the doors and that's when I found the brick of Marra-wanna. It looked just like a green brick, didn't it Berlie?"
(Muffled screams from the passenger seat.)

"OH, SHIT! Me and Berlie almost hit one of them!"

"One of what? A black person?"

"No! A possum."

"Okay... seriously, please start driving back to Berle's house. You're scaring him and me, and I'm not even in the car."

"I'm driving back, but I've gotta tell you this! So we found the brick of Marra-wanna, and I put it in the baby-seat on my buggy and pushed it around the store. I knew it was Marra-wanna because it smelled like my brother. I remember that smell... anyway, so I pushed it around and around while we shopped and pretty soon, all them boys that works there was followin' us around just like a parade! They all wanted to look at my green grass baby in it's seat!"
(Mom guffaws and hoots.)

"You've got to be kidding. You seriously found a fucking SLAB of weed at a grocery store and you pushed it around like a baby? For how long?!"

"Until we checked out. That's when the manager came up and said that we couldn't buy it and he took it. All them boys was sad. They bagged my sausage and the biscuits and the jelly and the stickers and OH! I also got some of that spicy mustard. They bagged it and we were going to leave, but then I looked out the windows and saw a bunch of flashlights just a'FLASHIN. Right out in the parking lot! So that's when I knew me and Berlie was in danger. So I asked them boys to escort us out and they did, and then I pulled out of the parkinglot reeeeeal sneaky like, and got about half-way home. We were almost at the Court House and I saw the lights in my mirror!"

"Like, a cars' headlights?"

"Yes! Right behind us! So I knew we'd been followed! So I decided those Drugs Pirates weren't going to take me and Berlie without a fight! He cooked on a battleship in the War! He's a soldier! So I took off and whipped around the court-square 7 or 8 good times til I got my speed up and threw them off... then I took off and we've been driving all around to confuse them ever since."


I'll skip ahead to the part where my Mother, finally at Berle's house, safe and hyper from her brush with the Pirates, continued her conversation with me regarding the evening's fun. It was the end of the conversation and she'd re-hashed (pun intended) the events gleefully several times. These were her parting words to me.

"I'll tell you what... I've never done anything so brave. But I wish I'd kept the Marra-wanna. I kind of want to take some after all I went through for it."


Post-script panoply:
Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia never fucked a horse. She did, however, keep a gnarly, unwashed, one-eyed retired Military Man named Grigory Potemkin around for a few years as her principle lover. When they got tired of each other, he naturally moved into the vacant post of "Royal Pimp," spending the remainder of his grungy years hand-picking Catherine's lovers.

I don't want to think about the screening process.

Hurry up, Ha'pint! We miss you!