But she says this while she’s high. Really, really, high. Too high, you could say, because it’s exactly what the paramedics said before strapping her into a gurney and delivering her here to the 7th floor mental ward of St. Joseph’s Health Centre. Out on the porch of a vacant house, they gave her a look over and said, to paraphrase, “You, sweetheart, are too high to be left here. You are in fact so tremendously too high that we will baby talk you in order to keep you calm, and then suddenly strap your limbs into this gurney and take you to a tremendously old hospital on the west end of the city that was once a fort that protected our city at the shore. There are concrete walls that have been reinforced many times over and are inescapable – although you wouldn’t even make it past the Filipino night-shift nurse, anyway – and so that is how too high you are, that we’re bringing you to a tremendously terrible place such as this.”

I don’t believe her, but I choose to believe her, because that’s what you do when you’re in love with a girl who never loved you back: you force yourself to believe the things she says when she’s too high, you distort reality to what you need it to be. After weeks of methodically plotting the impossible – how am I going to get her to love me? – she just handed it to me on a fucking platter. Of course I’m going to believe it.

“And remember: this Tuesday, October 14th, Tom Cruise is going to destroy the planet.”

I choose to believe this, too, for the same reasons as the I Love You thing. I can’t be a hypocrite; if I want to believe the good, I have to also believe the bad, and, more apt, any other inane monkey shit that spills from her mouth. Although I see the flawed logic behind this, and that when a girl says, “I love you,” followed by a doomsday premonition involving a short celebrity with a perfectly symmetrical face and a creepy director who isn’t dead yet, the odds are good that the latter half of the speech effectively voids the former.

Oh, right. “I know this because the ghost of Tim Burton told me so,” she continues.

But, like when you watch a movie or play a video game, you suspend reality and embed yourself into the storyline. Otherwise, life really is just about molecules arbitrarily bumping into each other. Meaningless, until you add the meaning yourself. So I believe it all, because I’m really not doing anything interesting for the rest of the week.

Two things I learned on a recent trip to San Francisco:

ONE:
Schick Intuition is the most tremendous pubic-area shaving apparatus I have ever used. It is like taking a white, furry rabbit and rubbing it onto your nether regions and magically – through the power of rainbows, possibly – eradicating all of your unwanted curlies. Because of its self-lathering feature (aloe! Vitamin E!), it doesn’t even feel like you’re shaving, but like you’re fake-shaving, like when you were a 7-year old boy watching your dad shave his pubes over the toilet and you’d sit there in the corner of the washroom with a fake Fisher-Price pube-shaver, following his movements and pretending you were ten years hairier.

(This was a review unit found on the bed in my hotel room, not personally purchased, although the marketing geniuses at Schick were correct in assuming that even men would become so enamored with this product that they would be forced against their better judgment to personally purchase this pink contraption solely constructed for women’s legs for years to come, and with it a package of tampons to further cement the red herring that I’m buying it for my girlfriend, god, she makes me run these fucking errands all the time. Christ, I am a wicked-awesome boyfriend.)

TWO:
Fleshlight? Really?

We were browsing through a sex shop in the Mission where a friend was looking for a portable, subtle vibrator that she could take on her travels and that wouldn’t alert customs to think that it was a bomb or, even more tragic, to snicker at her. We browsed for an embarrassing amount of time, and in two visits (punctuated with my gleeful visit to Dave Eggers’ Pirate Store), enough for me to realize that, holy shit, I masturbate all of the time! Why don’t I have a device that will both save time and elevate my masturbatory experience?  And now I do. Or did, before I tossed it into the recycling bin in half a session after deducing that I couldn’t craigslist the $100 fucker.

Why The Fleshlight Is A Piece Of Fucking Shit:
1:  The way it works is like this: you warm it up in a sink of warm – not hot – water, lube it up, insert your penis, extract your penis, lube it up, insert your penis, extract your penis, lube it up, repeat. The lubricant soaks through the rubber and collects somewhere within the handle (I’m supposing, because I refused to look before tossing it). It’s very much unlike a youthful, perky vagina that is always self-lubing and more akin to having intercourse with a dehydrated octogenarian (supposing, again), or, more aptly, like you’re FUCKING A RUBBER VAGINA (sadly, I’m not supposing this one anymore).

2: Besides the continual extraction of your penis for lubrication obligations (lubrigations?), to simulate sex you lie on your back, insert your penis, and then pump the Fleshlight in a jacking-off motion. So really, it’s still jacking off in the same old-fashioned way, although it takes more time and effort when you count the amount of Lube Duty involved. Dig? It takes more time and effort. It’s not at all automated or handsfree. And, also, you are FUCKING A RUBBER VAGINA.

3: Now to counter the last argument, the website suggests that you place the Fleshlight under your mattress so that the handle is sturdily buried. Then you slide to your knees and onto the floor, grab a hold of the top of your mattress, insert your penis into the Fleshlight, and hammer away. Sure, this takes care of the problematic methodology of redundantly jacking off and teeters you closer to the hip-thrusting action of authentic sex, but once in awhile (every 3 seconds or so) you will pop out of your masturbatory euphoria and realize – and there’s no denying or repressing this, you will in fact be very, very aware – that you are now FUCKING A MATTRESS.

4:  The website also suggests an alternate: “The "shoe method" is a style of hands-free Fleshlighting. Stick the narrow end of the Fleshlight into a shoe, on a flat surface. [And then fuck it.]”  I haven’t tried this, but I’d imagine this would feel only sort of like a vagina and even more like you’re FUCKING A GODDAMN SHOE NOW, YOU SICK FUCK.

5:  No boobs to grab or throats to choke.

6: When capped, it looks like a flashlight, natch. This might’ve been a Eureka, Q-of-James-Bond-lore moment for the engineers, but I suspect it was more along the vein of, “This sort of looks like a flashlight, let’s just roll with that. Who’s up for Counterstrike?” I live in a turn-of-the-century (read: run down) joint in the Annex that, while looks awesomely pretentious from the outside, is prone to black outs. Pathetically, in my low-rent existence, a flashlight isn’t a safety measure used in rare emergencies as it is a necessity used monthly to swap out fuses and toggle breaker switches.

Inevitably, in an urgent, frequent, highly irritating moment of need of artificial light, I, or an incredibly beautiful and naked woman in my bed (with bangs), will instead grab the Fleshlight, point it at the fuse box, notice no beam of light, flip it over, and stare right into the mouth of a rubber vagina instead of a burnt-out bulb. Neither of us would be startled; it’d be one of those moments where we’d sigh heavily, slumped over, and I’d say, “Sorry, it’s just my fucking rubber vagina again,” like our numbers didn’t come up in the lottery.

If they’re going to disguise it as a rarely-used piece of safety equipment, they need to go all the way and fashion it as a defibrillator.

But then you’d be FUCKING A DIFBRILLATOR.

7: Asian genitalia are brown, assholes.

SEE-YA (2/2)

18 months passed.

“Why are you breaking up with me? Why are you doing this?” she asked.
“I don’t know.” I said.
“So you can’t even give me closure.”
“The only closure I can give you is that you’ll get over me quicker than I’ll get over you, and I’ll still be confused by the time you’re sleeping happily with your next guy, dreaming about him while forgetting about me.”
“Deal.”

HI-YA (1/2)

(From the archives.)

We met at a lounge on the east side of Yonge Street, which is to say, on another fucking planet. I didn’t know it at the time, but she was going through an illness that caused her weight to plummet down into the double-digits. I just saw a slim, pretty girl with bangs and a superb waist-to-hip ratio wearing black pants that were so loose that they hung off of her sharp hips. She kept pulling them up before they sank right back down and I found it adorable, like, “Aww, pretty girl doesn’t know how to purchase proper clothing!”

Miraculously, I remained sober that night because I was nursing a 24-hour hangover. If I were typically drunk, nothing would’ve occurred, and I wouldn’t have been able to land a girl like her. I would’ve approached her with something like, “Hey, lucky girl, wanna hizzat the skizass with the A-Man tonight?” and she wouldn’t have had any of it. So because I had a rare, uncharacteristic off-night, she came into my life, and hung around for almost two years.

We emailed back and forth, and she was impressed that I used the right form of “complementary” in a sentence. She was equally unimpressed when she discovered that I thought “sparingly” meant “liberally” and when she corrected my incorrect definition with, “No, that means liberally,” I stood there, thought for a moment, and then said, “What the fuck is liberally? That’s really a word?”

I write for an alt-weekly, man, not the fucking Times.

Our first date was in late August, and Blue Rodeo was playing at the Molson Amphitheatre. She was from a small town that listened to bands like Blue Rodeo growing up, and I somehow discovered them during my high school years when it was dangerously uncool to like anyone but KRS-One and Das EFX. We sat on the grass and sang along to Five Days In May and Hasn’t Hit Me Yet. Kris Kristofferson made a surprise appearance. When Whistler shows up with a goddamn harmonica, the date becomes instantly, officially magical, you know.

We left early and hit up a Guns N’ Roses cover band singing on an open-air stage. We drank Pabst on plastic lawn furniture and laughed at the sort of people that came out to see them alone. She dropped me off at home, and I walked right to Pauper’s Pub where my friends were drinking. “I’m going to marry this girl, or come very fucking close to it.”

So it started with her loose pants. Then it developed into a crush on her snappy intellect. Then her musical tastes hooked me. And then I found her bookshelf and became fully enamored. And finally, two months later, I lay on her bed and told her that I was in love, and I fought it all the way, because it’s never a good place for me to be, and I knew what would happen, that the act of professing love itself would be the peak. But I saw her every day and it was never fucking enough. What else could I do? What else could it be?

She volunteered, and I had no idea for quite a time. I’ve had girlfriends who volunteered on the odd Easter or Christmas, but I would know, because they would ask me to go fifty fucking times, and then bring a crowd of their friends, and then take photos, and then post them onto MySpace. This girl was different; she didn’t care. She didn’t give me any reason, and almost seemed to be hiding it from me.

“How come you’re always busy on Wednesdays? What are you doing?”
“Oh. I make sandwiches,” she’d reply, without averting her eyes from the TV.
“You make what? Sandwiches? What the hell for?”
“Hmm?” She wasn’t interested in talking.
“Why?”
“Oh, you know…”
“Why?”
“For whoever needs them.”
“Why?”
“Because they’re hungry, stupid.”

“Is that what you do every Sunday morning, too?”
“No, I sit in a converted bus and homeless people come in and we dress their wounds and give them medicine.”
“Why?”
“Because they’re hurt and sick. Just shut up.”

And I’d stop digging, because she’d be too involved in a rerun of My So-Called Life to respond any longer, and I’d sit there with my mouth agape, thinking, Who am I dating, fucking Batman?

So it wasn’t that she volunteered that was important; that sort of thing doesn’t do anything for me (and I’m not against it – I’d rather people do it than not – it’s just a personal call, all surface, and I lack the interest to find out why).

It’s that she didn’t tell me, didn’t care to tell me, and didn’t care if I shared that. She didn’t mind having separate lives, and not in a secretive way but in a sort of, “You have your life, I have my life, and we have our life together. No need to go and mix them all up.” It was the most psychotic thing I’d ever experienced in a woman, because women don’t tend to think like that. The norm is for them to absorb their relationship expectations from television dramas and not from anything remotely rational or realistic or what they’ve decided for themselves to believe. Hence, she was fucking crazy, compared to the average woman, and it completely worked for me and she became at once a breath of fresh air and a sigh of relief.

We also loved the same things, but more importantly, we hated the same people.

Once I was in one of my moods, the frequent existential crisis I’d hit every few months – and still do – and I shouted, “What am I doing here! What! I need to go and farm mushrooms! Research moray eels! I need to get the fuck out of here! I’m crawling out of my skin! This life sucks! It’s fucking senseless! I should be out there! What am I doing in here!”

As I hyperventilated, she responded, calm and lucid, “Yeah, you should do it. If that’s what you need, then go, really. Go and I’ll support you. I’ll be here.”

She understood me so well that she knew that it wasn’t an attack on her, that it in fact had nothing to do with her at all, that sometimes I just needed to go. And she took it all in, held it all back, and articulated the most selfless words ever spoken to me, and gave me the one fucking thing I’ve ever wanted from a woman, which is also the one fucking thing you’re never allowed to ask for, rightfully.

And she meant it, I could see that she clearly meant it, and hearing something like that, being around someone who could say that, it brought me out of the crisis and into clarity, and made me think, “Fuck the mushrooms and the moray eels, I’m not going to get more complete than this.”

GOODBYE (2/2)

(From the archives.)

She just broke it off with me.

That is to say, broke off whatever tiny, iota of a mock-relationship we shared; three months often punctuated with her crying about her ex-boyfriend. It was a very strange thing, to be the guy that she fucked and simultaneously the friend that she would call when her heart was aching. Sometimes in the same night.

Last Saturday after a night of drinking and finally trying the spaghetti at Mel’s Diner, we lay in my bed and she began to sob. “I’m whiney and needy, and you don’t want a girl like me! Why do you like me! I’m so bad and you just take it!”

“If you want to break up, then just do it, man. I’m not going to do it for you, you’re not taking the fucking easy way out.”

And so tonight, a week later, she did.

She cried and I held her, told her it’s okay, everything’s fine, it’s understandable. And it all was, and I suppose it was because it was inevitable and I just hung around, waiting for the axe to drop. Different goals, different lives, different galaxies. It was doomed to fail from the beginning, but I like the journey of it. I made it the easiest break-up she’d ever have to do.

I studied her face. “Is that what I look like? What I say?” I thought. I’ve only been on the other side of the break-up coin, so it became a very interesting sociological incident that I needed to analyze and study. I congratulated her afterwards on a job well done. She thought I was being facetious. “No, no, I mean it. I’m proud of you. I know how hard it is to do, and you did great, really.”

“You are so fucking weird.”

Once her eyes dried I suggested sushi, to replenish her energy. We walked down to New Generation Sushi and I held her clutch purse so she could pocket her hands. I had a teriyaki bento and she ate a salmon roll. We talked and laughed; everything was okay, fine, understandable.

Afterwards we were back at my place, on my bed. She gave me a massage, and then we fucked. I drank in everything, her face, her orgasm. I memorized it all, sounds, smells, the shadows licking her body in motion, the order in which she undressed.

When we were finished she began to cry again. Not about us – that quickly became a non-issue thrown out the window. It was such a tumultuous time in her life and I felt so very sorry for her as her voice cracked and she held back her tears. When she smiled, she smiled with her entire face, especially with her eyes, you see. So seeing her cry wasn’t natural; she was built to smile.

I walked her to Spadina Station. “Alright, I’ll see ya.”

I’m relieved. I might’ve been scared of it, of being broken-up with, since I wasn’t desensitized to that experience. But it seems that any of the thousands of instances that I’d been outright rejected were worse. Makes sense since I’m all love-at-first-sight, and then it would only diminish from there. The 2^nd law of thermodynamics governs my love life. A dumping at five minutes to five weeks is downright earth-shattering; a break-up at five years? Fucking yawn.

And I think I need for that to happen, the worst-case scenario. I need to be ruined and have no control over it and hit rock fucking bottom because how else can you really know love otherwise? I need a girl to say, “I don’t like you for who you are. I am better than you, and you bring me down. I despise your very being,” rather than, “I need to figure things out with the ex-boyfriend. This is hard because I really like you.”

Wait a second. Did she let me down easy? Did she lie to me like I’ve lied to countless women? Did she save me? Spare me? Pity me?

No! No. She liked me. Called me. Laughed with me. She had fun. She came. Twice. Every time. Right? Right.

“How much do you love me?” Midori asked.
“Enough to melt all the tigers in the world to butter.”

I’ve been dating a girl for two months now, the very same girl that I befriended earlier in the year to reverse my reputation of befriending girls just to sleep with them. So it wasn’t a surprise to anyone but my friends, who know I wouldn’t kick around in the shadows for 8 months to land a girl. Everyone else thought it went according to a non-existent master plan, and you can all go to hell, really.

Anyway, boring.

We jumped on a plane to Thailand for a couple of weeks – right, so I brought sand to the beach. I brought won’t-have-sex-on-my-period sand to a put-it-in-anywhere-and-come-in-my-ear-canal beach – effectively fast-forwarding the relationship right out of the honeymoon phase and into the phase where you want to throttle her, and you’re even comfortable enough to say, I will fucking throttle you, you stupid cunt.

But, hey, I’m maturing, and learned a few tricks. In the past I was the Ivan Drago of premature break-ups, and was all “I must break you,” when a girl was six minutes late, or when she answered a phone during a movie, or when she stupidly permed her hair, which has happened four fucking times in my life, which must be a record, and I want a goddamn trophy for it. All bad things, all annoying habits, but like I said, I’m a mature adult now, and so recognize that they’re not break-up-worthy instances.  Instead I simply picture myself kicking her in the small of her back, then doze off happily after pissing in her walk-in closet.

It isn’t patience or tolerance, mind you, that I’ve picked up, but instead a realization that all women share these irritable, inherent traits, and so there’s no point judging the individual, but rather the entire fucking gender. There’s an astronomical difference now when the girlfriend pisses me off; I assign it to the species, not to her, and move on with things, because it’s like lung cancer now: not worth worrying about, because it’s inevitably coming my way, because fuck if I’m going to smoke less than a pack a day.

Anyway, here you go, don’t say you never learned anything here:

Reasons You Will No Longer Break Up A Relationship Over, Because All Women Possess These Traits And You’re Not Going To Find One That’s Different, Ever, I Don’t Care Who The Hell You Think You Are, Brad Has These Same Issues With Angelina, But Then Again, He Gets To Have Sex With Angelina Jolie:

. frequent phone calls to pass the time, always during Family Guy, somehow

. hates all of your clothes

. silent treatments, and then anger when you don’t even notice that she’s being silent, or that you thought she was silent because it’s your birthday and that that’s your present

. ruining your simple quest for a scarf by taking the day over with her own spontaneous shopping excursion for things she really needs, like shower curtains and goddamn sandals, again

. being slow to get ready, and then you rush her frantically through the front door, to the car, to the airport, through security, and when you make the gate with only seconds to spare before the closing of the cabin door, she says, “See? We made it. The fuck were you all worried about?”

. leaves the toilet seat down

. digs into her little fucking change purse thing for exact change, thereby creating grocery store rush hour

. not getting your hilarious, Grade-A jokes and wasting them, so you scrawl them onto a napkin to recite to your friends who will appreciate your complex, profound sense of humour and quick wit

. gets back up after backhanding her instead of playing dead or pretend-crying, at least

. refuses anal sex

. allows anal sex, but instead using your anus, on any day other than the agreed upon Anal Wednesdays, then forgets the safety word, so as you blurt out, “FIRE ON THE CASPIAN LAKE! THE RED ELEPHANT IS CRYING! JESUS FUCK, WOMAN, STOP!” she continues, but even more maniacally, furiously, until your colon falls out like an inside-out sock hanging from your rectum, ruining your carpet, and there’s no Swiffer for taking blood/shit out of shag

. talking