So I nominated What Ladder? for the rofl awards for October, but I accidentally submitted a September post. I was allowed to slide. I imagine the blog equivalent of my glasses are on my head, usually.

Here’s the post. It made me roffle. Rofflings will be had or I will turn this internets around.

Okay, so it’s old, but it’s STILL AWESOME. I love this week almost more than my birthday.

Hey. Heeey. How’s it going? Nice chin zit. Whatever, I hate small talk. Strudel’s dad and I broke up. All I have to say about it is that it was amicable, and that if you know me at all by now, you know that a) it was a while ago and b) I’m okay, STFU. The reason I am telling you is that my writing is/has been changing on this joint. We’re not going to have long walks by the railyard where I cry, we’re going to keep making butt jokes, UNDERSTAND?

US Weekly should have a section of people with more ordinary occupations for that “Stars, they’re just like us” bullshit. I want to see a week of writers who have made agonizing messes of their lives and are now passed out in their own sick. I’ll buy that issue.

Against my better judgment, I am leaving comments open for this entry. Whenever I see emo posts on the internets I like to give a bingo to the person who goes most off-topic. So, bring it on. Tell me about your weekend! Did you have a dream involving cream soda? Was there a bathtub full of it, and we were taking a bath in it, except this shouldn’t freak me out because you don’t like me that way, that cream soda way? Did you see a movie once about cream soda and there was a wolf in it wearing underpants?

OH YEAH, that’s some good off-topic. I cut my finger on a can of pork brains and it is sort of turning green in one place. What should I do? Also, please send links, the more raunchdiculous the better.

My titles lately are like bad spam. I gotta work harder to incorporate the words “Peinors” or “ViONEgra.” Then, good spam ensues.

So, I am now upped with temp agency number two. I hate to go all Seinfeld on you, but what is the DEAL with the four thousand tests to make a certain rate at the temp agency, and then at the contract agency you can make twice that and you just hand over your resume? Yesterday I had a typing test (again), a grammar test, an error spotting test, and a spelling test, and a long wait in a lobby with a dog that was defying gravity like it was the spider from Centipede. I think if I worked there I would have to put out traps like buckets of water, just to see the dog go down sometimes.

After daily crying during comb time, and crusty food dreadlocks of doom, I chopped off Strudel’s hair and now she looks like Ramona Quimby, age three and a half.

SNIP! As usual, the child can barely appear human for pictures. She has eyes, I swear. You tell her to smile, and it’s like she sucked a lemon.

It is also important for you to know that while I was in bed this morning, unable to sleep, convinced it was later than it is and still refusing to get up, I was feeling myself up. I haven’t been running for very long now, but I forgot that feeling of your body changing a little bit under the insulating layer of mocha lattes and phad thai. Not bad, self. I was getting pretty Gold Jumpsuit Elvis at the end of the summer there.

And I am having fun plodding along at my snail’s pace. I think it says something about how slow I go when What I’m listening to is either Marketplace or the first Belle and Sebastian album. I’ll let you know when I’m ready for DJ Assault like I was a couple of summers ago. That was a faster SJ.

There’s good news over here, too. An awesome internets acquaintance offered me a column on a relaunch of a sex blog. I decided to go pseudonymous there so I can be candid and talk about real life experience, so I won’t be linking it anywhere. But it’s more paid freelance work and gets me one step closer to feeling like I can claim I’m a writer.

Finally, I am a Heroes fan, or I was (not sure what happened with episode number one there. I feel a little betrayed by what they did with Mohinder, but maybe this is just another parallel reality or whatever?). Anyway, Jack Coleman is writing a funny fucking blog where he not once but twice talks about gunning down Hayden Pantymare or whatever her name is.

Also, does anyone know how to change the text in the title image thingie at the top of yon page up there? Much like the sexy, I need to bring rotating taglines back. Thanks.

So, I got old and died. It’s cool, these things happen. I found myself in the woods, beautiful woods like when I was a child. I am guessing that at this point they don’t even have woods like that anymore, since I lived a long time in cities and pretty much stopped paying attention to what was going on outside of them. I reckon it’s all wall-to-wall coffee hut by now. But here was a wild place with dappled sunlight and other crap that makes poets fap like crazy.

I walked up a riverbed on the rocks and the water gently flowed past my ankles. I could see the water skimmers and the shimmering just underneath the surface. I should have been surprised to see that there were no condoms or coffee lids, but I wasn’t. I thought it was maybe that river of forgetfulness…what is that thing called? But I didn’t forget what was behind me. I was dead and I wanted to get back, or get somewhere. I could remember my life, but it was like it didn’t matter.

I found a map on the edge of the stream (level up!) and tried to make sense of it. The land as it was rendered had a rough outline and looked something like an oatmeal cookie a child had taken a bite out of. There were three or four outbuildings with yards or plazas in the middle, and a bunch of areas that were marked off limits somehow. “Here there be dragons and shit.” Well, who cares? Is a dragon going to eat a dead person? I wondered if they had dead dragons for eating dead people, but couldn’t conjure up any kind of fear either way. That was nice. I can’t tell you how many hours I spent being fearful in life—it was endless, really. Get one thing licked, and here comes something new and terrifying, with the old stuff stretched out behind you, no longer scary. You’d think I would have figured out that the stuff I was afraid of in life ahead of me would someday be behind me, but it took til now.

I reflected on the possibility that a map with warnings, a map that was meant to instill fear, well, maybe it wasn’t for someone like me, someone fearless. Or maybe I was reading it wrong.

The riverbed I was walking up widened into a pond about the size of your average backyard swimming pool, except the water looked pure black and I couldn’t see the bottom. In life I had always been afraid of a body of water without a visible bottom. Here, I shrugged. Being dead was empowering. I probably should have tried this eons ago, it would have made life easier. There was probably a catch there somehow, but damned if I could figure it out. After walking up the river, thinking about my life made my brain kind of lock up like when someone started saying something horrible like “a train leaves Boston going forty miles per hour. At the same time a train leaves Chicago…” Actually, it wasn’t so much that my brain would lock as up it was the mental abstruseness that comes with homicidal rage.

I put the map in my pocket and kicked off where the river ended. It was an abrupt drop off and the water was colder here, and quieter. It was like something was coming out of the pond that hushed the noise all around and above.

Then I did hear a noise. A staticky hissing sound from someplace up ahead. I was sort of moving forward without doing anything, kind of how you see crocodiles do—none of that pathetic flailing around I would have to do in life. I was never much of a swimmer. If I was still alive, one, I would never be in this creepy-ass pond thing, and two, I would be doing a sad frog stroke and getting really tired.

Ahead of me was some kind of stone lip that led into a cave or crevice in a rock face, and this was where the noise was emanating from. I pulled myself up onto the rock lip and saw the waterfall inside the crevice. I did not look behind me, and I did not fear what was ahead.

A voice came from the waterfall, or somewhere behind it.

“Hello, and welcome to the afterlife! This is God speaking to you now via this natural wonder known as a waterfall.”

“Bull FUCKING shit,” I said.

“This is a service message to expedite the long lines and amount of waiting ahead. Please follow these instructions carefully so that you and your fellow passengers will have an enjoyable trip with the least amount of delay.”

I looked around again. There were no fellow passengers ahead of or behind me, or anywhere. The pond had disappeared, and I was surrounded by philodendrons in their natural environment. When I was alive I never traveled to a jungle, but I had philodendrons in my house, and I spent a fair amount of time thinking about them, and what they would look like as wild free things that had not been captured and tamed by the hand of man. “Philodendron” is Latin or something for “tree-loving.”

The voice droned on about removing my shoes, and I could only think, am I even wearing shoes? They seemed to be part of my feet somehow. If this was some kind of stupid test about metaphorical shoes, then, well, I was probably going to start having those special feelings I have relating to story problems again.

I had a memory then. I thought about when I was alive and in the drug house, and we had forgotten about the philodendron the bathroom, and when we had to flee I tried to take the plant but it had eaten its way into the wallpaper and wall. Chunks of plaster fell past me as I tried to pull the vines down. Did the scientist who named it mean “loving” or “smothering”? Was I seeing this because my definition of jungle meant “philodendron,” a boring plant ubiquitous to every home and office in my part of the world? Did etymology and natural history matter in the afterlife? I didn’t know if I wanted to be part of an afterlife that had no pompous etymological discussions.

I had associated tropical places with paradise when I was alive, so maybe I wasn’t in hell. But then there was the airport wait message. I would have to see what was coming, I suppose.

The message ended, and I had missed most of it, probably because I had always had some kind of block against authority, or at least pointless authority-for-the-sake-of. There was a part of me when I was alive that always enjoyed tuning out in school and then waking up to discover I had drawn penises all over the margins of my algebra homework. Let’s see if I could teach myself the quadratic equation now.

I glanced to my right and saw that a cut-stone stairway had appeared next to the waterfall, innocently ascending at me as if it had always been there, all covered with moss and looking just the tiniest bit treacherous and slippery. Well-played, prop department. I wondered if I would fall and bash my teeth out, another fear which had plagued me constantly but didn’t seem to matter here. I think I was in that denial where way down deep you know something is true, like in high school when you know that the too-good-for-your-sorry-goth-ass JV quarterback is going to dump you, and your best friend Tronda McVey is consoling you at your locker with, “He just gave you a note last period, of course he likes you. Look, it’s folded into a heart.” You are single by lunchtime.

Tronda was there with me for a moment on the stairs, and angel with a Cure teeshirt jammed over her fucking choir robe or whatever, and too much eyeliner going “Hark, it is possible you could knock all your fucking teeth out of your head.” But way down in that deep place, I knew, I was dead. She was just trying to make me feel better. I began to climb the stairs.