Hi, welcome. To myself.
I am Baby Genius.
Bruce’s “apprentice” as he and I are affectionately calling me. Bruce has not yet approved my naming myself after him, but isn’t it he who says that everyone steals art from everyone else and I think no one deserves to be stolen from more than our favorite aged erudite mister sir.
Bruce has allowed me an audition blog. A tryout to see if I am worthy enough to be a guest blogger, on this, the most beloved and visited blog in our nation. The hope here being that one day I can start my own blog, get billions of followers, attract advertisers of reusable tampons and CBD oil, and never work a day of my young life, just as the Genius claims to have done.
When I tell people around the Ale House that I’m Bruce’s new apprentice, everyone’s first question is am I going to pose nude for the Genius. This is a little jolt to my sensitive system. No one seems to trust his character from potentially spoiling my pristine reputation, nor give credit to my steel morality. Bruce insists that this posing is a possibility that lay in my subconscious as a consideration to which I haven’t yet arrived. I think this will never happen, due to my respect for our professional relationship and my little round belly, but life is awash in possibilities, isn’t it???
I was supposed to have made this first blog attempt earlier this week but my period is here, slowing my obligations that already exist at a snail’s pace to slower still. I love being sick. Having cramps. The excuse of moving languidly and taking baths semi-hourly and complaining to anyone who would hear me fuels my spirit. I am a hedonist surely, but a masochist first and foremost, thank you! I suppose, this in some ways, explains my late blooming, career wise and my almost always choosing of the wrong partner. But who’s keeping score.
It is becoming harder for me not to keep score as I watch my former peers climb the ranks of the comedy and late night worlds. They keep climbing the stair and I keep wondering where to put my little shoed foot. And if I am doing any thing at all right, anywhere, at any time.
I recently returned from a bridlette’s trip to New Orleans with a pack of female writers who are all so hilarious and successful and generous that they paid for most of my dinners and drinks and good times. We had an absolute blast. In general large groups of people scare me, as I am deaf in one ear and simultaneously bitterly afraid of missing out on anything. But this group was the exception, since most of us are cut from the same form, fast talking and loud and neurotic.
Turns out New Orleans appeals to my dark black soul. So many curiosities! So many nightmarish nooks and cranies! Its so refreshing to see suntanned druggies strung out on the sun dappled, jazz filled streets there! As opposed to here, I guess, where our crack heads huddle under constricting layers of putrid blankets.
New Orleans is truly alive. You can feel it! All this vivacity unlocked my steel cage heart. So many times on the trip I was sure I was going to fall in love with our ghost tour guide or the street jazz drummer with filthy hands or the handsome barkeep whom I’m sure was overpouring hurricanes for only me. With practically any of these guys I could promptly become pregnant and never come home again. I am in a relationship, at current, but that doesn’t stop my interludes of dreaming up different sexual situations with any interesting stranger we come in contact with.
At one point we found ourselves on a swamp tour, led by a pregnant looking pontoon boat captain. The tour at first felt monotonous. Our giddy interest in life by the swamp was fading by the fiftieth mention of swamp critters that we MIGHT see, since all we had seen, an hour in, was ten or twenty snakes wrapped around tree branches a little too close to our heads. But what a miracle we were in for when, all at once, we turned around a bend, down a little swamp alley, just as the sun was beginning to descend. OOOO boy! Magic was afoot!
Suddenly a petite alligator appeared, friendly as can be, swimming right up to the boat.
What a treat! Real gator action! This is what we hoped for!
Our previously know-it-all captain instantly morphed into an indispensable hero as he tossed marshmallows off the boat and attracted two then three, then four alligators! Each one bigger than the next!
Now, I grew up in the redneck woods of South Carolina, and so have developed the true eye of a hawk, able to find any coin of value on any fairgrounds lot or easily detect subtle hints of movement in the deep and wild woods. So it didn’t really surprise me when I was the first to notice a rustle up ahead.
Something scraped against a tree off the port bow! Something clumsy and gliding!
A bear? No!
A pig?
A. PIG. ! Covered in hair!
“Swamp hog!” I cried, pointing with a trembling arm. The boat screamed with 12 successful comedy writer cries!
“Feral pigs,” our calm and patient hero corrected, steering the boat closer to the movement.
We saw another and another and another until there were five swamps pigs surrounding the boat, begging for marshmallows, little tongues pushing from jutting incisors, astride alligators and then fucking raccoons came out of nowhere, greedy for sweet treats.
A lowlands menagerie! Hog snapping at coon! Gator smoothly circling around feral pig body! Never ever would I have ever imagined this kind of interspecies interaction on such a trip. We were in disbelief, in a state of total joy.
At some point among the grunts and splashes and hisses and giggles, my attention turned to our now handsome captain, the dazzling setting swamp sun sending slivers of light across his round tum tum.
My imagination is vivid and my lust for love and affection neverending and soon I was imagining a life with my swamp boat husband in our little hovel, me cutting vegetables in a slip dress, as he told us that he caught and killed nutrirats in the dead of the night for $10 a pop. Have you ever seen one of those enormous fuckers? They certainly deserve to die. Nevertheless, as you might expect, our romance was never to be. We said goodbye thirty minutes later back on land, and he never even caught my eye, despite my constant angling to get his attention.
Probably the most important part of this trip is what was formed by me, baby genius, on the hour long trip back from the swamp during which, it became clear, that there was certainly to be a punishing ceremony for our bride to be and it was even more abundantly clear that no one was going to take charge of this with the courageous will and creative complexity of moi. So I stepped in.
Jenny’s humor is dark, and the witchy mood of New Orleans was influencing me so the plan took a twisted vibe.
Jenny was told to meet us on the veranda at 9:30 for drinks. I quickly informed the rest of the pack to convene at 9:05 in order to catch her off guard. While Jenny bathed upstairs in her mansion boudoir, I prepared a mock menstral blood concoction of coconut oil and paprika, warmed it over the stove top, like the true artist I am, and poured it quickly into a CHALICE that I happened to find in the Air B and B’s “wet bar area.”
At 9:20, I gathered the girls outside Jenny’s doorway and told them to split up and begin a great yowl and a chant “like natives howling from the four corners of the earth,” to which these enchantresses abided with stunning recall. I told them to “be as the earth gods, groaning to scare.” I started at the bottom of the steps by concentrating for a minute, to get into character, then threw my head back and let go a demon’s call. The girls down the hall were stomping in unison, growling and yipping. Jenny, terrified and glee filled, stuck only her head out of her bedroom door to see what was going on. At once we attacked her, lifting her and spanking her, as she struggled, down the stairs to the candelit foyer. I shouted out orders in my best impression of that guy who puts his penis between his legs in Silence of the Lambs. I was really excellent, I confess. I didn’t know I had it me!
While Jenny sat obediently blindfolded on a stool, I passed the chalice around. Each of us chanting, “This is the blood of the lamb,” as we streaked our cheeks with the menstral blood and then streaked Jenny too, head to toe. I was struggling to remain in character because I was absolutely so impressed with these women in the candlelight. They were doing everything I ordered them to! They looked, in the light, like hot witches from another time. What joy!
At my command, everyone lined up as I led Jenny to her first witch.
The first in line, a handsome girl who writes for a prominent late night host, lifted her shirt as she had been instructed. “Identify me!” We yelled this in unison, so Jen couldn’t get vocal hints to who she was identifying. I placed Jenny’s hands on her friend’s bare boobs. Jenny sheepishly guessed.
“Jocelyn?” she asked.
“Wrong answer, bitch!” I said, as penis in between legs guy.
Jenny, almost collapsing from laughter guessed again. This time she was right and we moved down to the next in line.
“Identify me!” we screamed as the second witch raised her shirt high. This time Jenny guessed right. And she did so for every girl in line. I was impressed by her ability to know her friend from the feel of their tits only. I wondered how many of us possess this, this gift that we will never know. And what fun to see each of your friends bare boobed in front of you, totally committing to this sick game. Wonder! and Surprise!
When this was finished, we pushed her to the ground, belly first, and flung her robe over her shoulder.
“Bare down!” I barked, shoving a kitchen rag into her mouth.
Weeks earlier, another genius in the group had a temporary tattoo made in the likeness of Jen’s fiance’s face. Now, she pressed it in Jen’s lower back as I whispered in her ear,
“You are eternally marred.”
I was afraid, at points, that Jenny would pee herself. But strangely, I was never afraid that we were taking it too far.
We stood Jenny up and led her to the porch and then gently took her blindfold off and told her how much we loved her and gave her a bunch of presents and little teas and snacks.
I know how it must sound to the average 9-5er. And really, writing it down does cheapen the whole experience. It feels more like some fundraising event put on by fraternity douchebags- that’s what fraternities do, right? But this was real! Magic! and Delight!
Anyway, I don’t have to explain my sick sense of humor to you! Or to anyone! Not ever!
I hope this is enough for now. I have a meeting with my landlady in hopes that she will lower my rent. Say a little prayer for me, will you? I’m saying mine for you.
Can you feel them?
Amen.
for losers still clinging 