I heard that the world’s oldest profession is affected by the rise in gas prices. Really.
I heard the story on CNN yesterday and immediately ran to the website to see if it was online. There is a God in Heaven. You can read the article entitled “Brothels ‘double your stimulus’ plan fights fuel crisis.”
Reading it, I knew it was serious. But it was almost something that I would expect The Onion to come up with. But even then, they couldn’t come up with something this good. The highlights (read: points where I would have spit milk through my nose if I had been drinking milk and reading the article at the same time) of the article include:
- The fact that business is hurting from rising fuel costs
- The brothels are offering gas cards and other promotional incentives to drum up business (apparently sex is not the incentive it once was).
- Business has been down 25% in the last year (that struck me as funny).
- My favorite quotation from the article: “Times are tougher … and truckers have less money to spend. They’re not high-rollers anymore.” They’re. Not. High. Rollers. Anymore. Truckers. High Rollers. Wow.
- One brothel is offering the “double your stimulus” package: the first 100 customers who arrive with government stimulus checks receive twice the services for the same regular price. (Seriously. Think about this. Follow me here. How many of the male customers are really going to get their money’s worth here? Twice? Clearly, this works to the brothels advantage.)
One industry analyst predicts that the industry will weather this economic slowdown.
I’m speechless. Ain’t nothing more to say. Except, that it’s a damn shame that truckers aren’t the high rollers they used to be. It really is the end of an era…
I heard a commotion in the courtyard on Friday night. The same courtyard that served as (apparently) the most appropriate venue for my downstairs neighbors to engage in a late-night verbal battle.
But this was commotion. You know, that strange disturbance in the force; that split second before an earthquake hits when you can hear the air move and when you feel the atmosphere lunge forward. Commotion.
There was noise and a scuffle and activity that sprung from nothingness. Voices in fluent Russian and broken English trying to call for help. By the time I put my clothes on and opened the door, neighbors had crowded around the victim. A middle-aged Russian man tightly grasped his wrist to stop the blood that gushed and glistened from his hand. He had been mugged and stabbed.
I called the police and discovered that other neighbors already had. The sheriff deputies came and took statements. The chaos and commotion turned to silence and stillness.
I heard the perpetrators tried to rob and mug others that night. They were from Pomona, a city 30 miles away. Police finally pulled them over less than a half an hour later because they were driving a vehicle that a family member had reported as stolen.
Turns out, their own aunt turned them in.
Yesterday, I heard a woman call in to a radio show discussing yesterday’s Supreme Court decision related to gun rights. Conversation paraphased below.
Caller: I support today’s decision. And I remember that I read in Freakenomics that more people die in backyard swimming pools than from guns? So, therefore shouldn’t we legislate pools?
Lawyer that actually defended gun rights and won: (Remember, he’s on her side) Ma’am that’s an erroneous statistic because those writers were talking about accidental deaths. But intentional deaths at the hands of guns are actually much much higher. Not even a comparison.
(He didn’t mention the fact that we do actually legislate backyard pool construction, either.)
I found these on a website that popped up in the search engine. I thought they were too funny to pass up. In keeping with the policy of this site, these are actual questions, written by actual internet teens from 2003. Kind of makes you wonder what kind of adult sexual beings they turned into.
I heard that if a guy pees before sex he won’t get a girl pregnant, is that true? Does pee kill the sperm?
–breean
It gets better.
I heard that if you have sex in a pool or hot tub, or any water, that it can damage a girl or even kill her because the water gets inside of her. Is this true? Or is it just a myth?
–seabreeze8
Because some of you might actually not know the answers, you can find them here:
The answer to Breean’s question.
The answer to Seabreeze8’s question.
I heard my neighbors arguing late last night. The fight started in the courtyard of my apartment complex and spilled into the driveway. There was silence. And then it started again. She yelled at him from their apartment door and he yelled at her from the middle of the courtyard. I tried to understand what they were fighting about. But it was clear that they were fighting about everything and nothing at the same time.
I wonder if anyone else was awake. I can’t imagine others could have slept through the argument.
There was a second bout of silence. And then I heard the screaming and the yelling, blunt and muffled, coming from inside their own unit.
It reminded me of when I was a kid and would will myself to sleep, praying that my parents would stop and praying that they wouldn’t get a divorce.
I heard the sirens bleed through the air five or six minutes after I first smelled the hint of a fire. I smelled the fire 30 seconds after my roommate asked me if I smelled something burning. Originally, I thought it was the overheated, burnt coffee that festered in the bottom of the pot for a couple minutes too long. I tend to leave my coffee pot on for a couple of hours when I am home.
You know that moment when the late night turns into the early morning? It is a moment taht has no “in between.” The transition is whole, complete, and instant. That was the same experience when I first had the sensation of smelling the smoke. All of a suddent, there was a heavy scent of smoke and fire, where the was only the nothing scent of normal urban air an instant before. The air now smelled electrical, of melting plastic, and of burnign wood.
I opened the front door to my apartment. A thin veil of brown smoke dominated the air but, at the same time, was barely distinguishable from it. I placed a call to 911, bot knowing where the fire was, only know that a fire was.
Others had already called.
Each moment of controlled chaos fell into the next. The momentum of each urgent moment propelled time forward into the next moment of quiet panic. We heard the sirens in the distance. By now, I discovered the fire. It was burning the far corner of the apartment complex next door. As I left the house, I did not grab anything–I did not think to. I thought we would be allowed to return to our own building. I remember being concerned that an ember could float from the burning roof to ours.
I remember thinking that this could be bad. I remember thinking, “Everything does not always end well.”
Fire trucks arrived. Five of them A news chopper circled overhead. Sheriffs evacuated our apartment and cordonered off an area. We, neighbors, stood from behind the yellow plastic tape, wondering what had happened, wondering what would happen.
And then, for us, for those who lived next door, the excitement and anxiety left as quickly as it arrived. Shrug. An unwritten law of nature, I guess.
Everything does not always end well. That’s true. But, most of the time and for most of the people, this is also true: everything usually ends well.
And so it did.
I heard my neighbor vomiting.
There’s a woman that lives in the complex across the alley. Multiple times a week, I hear her hurl into the toilet. Two or three times a week, she gets on her knees and prays to the Porcelain God.
Hearing a person vomit is an odd experience. At the very least, it is uncomfortable, and unpleasant. But usually–at the very least–its contextual. The inflicted is a friend or a family member and you know he is sick or she is hung over. Hell, you’re usually holding the hair, while you’re looking away. Hearing a neighbor vomit is just downright unpleasant and unexpected.
And that’s what happens to me, multiple times a week.
I admit, I thought nothing of it at first. I considered them isolated incidents, unfortunate bouts of botulism. The result of a long, crazy night that one must ultimately repent for via a long, hard hangover.
One day, as I heard her spew forth the contents of her gastric pouch, it dawned on me what could very likely be occurring across the alley. This woman, my neighbor (the one who fucks a lot), suffers from an eating disorder. She suffers from bulimia, hyperphagia, binge-and-purge syndrome, bulimia nervosa. Whatever you want to call it, I realized that she’s got it.
And then the story that I used to think changed. Instead of this woman–if it is the same woman–who spend her mornings, afternoons, and evenings having active, verbal sex became complex and injured. A nymphomaniac. A bulimic. I start thinking about her life and her world. Do her partners know the price she pays for having such a hot body? Do her partners know the price they are paying? I wonder if her partners are the ones who inflicted the initial damage, or if it was her parents or her brother or her boyfriend from an earlier age?
But I admire her, too. You see, I have spent a few nights sprawled on my bathroom floor, comforted by the smooth coolness of the tiles, with my arms half-wrapped around the toilet waiting for the next bout of gastrointestinal distress to take hold. And when I vomit, I am loud. In that bathroom, in that apartment, I can hear my own abdominal contractions and guttural gags echo off the white, narrow space between the two apartment buildings. I have oftened wondered if my neighbors have worried about me in the way that I have worried about them.
She threw up again today.
I heard a racial slur. It was directed at me.
There’s this taco restaurant that my partner and I frequent in Los Angeles. Some nights, when we walk to a bar and walk home, we’ll stop in and have a late night snack. (Of course, this “snack” involves burritos the size of a grown man’s forearms, with a side of rice and refried beans.) A couple weeks ago, we stopped in and sitting there was Carlos Mencia. After losing David Chappelle to his apparent mental illness and subsequent internal collapse, Comedy Central hired Carlos Mencia to be the “new” equal-opportunity comedic offender of all races. Great. So, he was there, slumped in a chair, his eyes glazed over from a late Saturday night. His wife or girlfriend or friend–I don’t know who she was–was with him.
We walk in, I see him, and–in the style of a season Angeleno–I take a mental note, but do not betray my knowledge of his celebrity status with any outward signs of overenthusiastic recognition. My partner and I order our food and directly proceed to inhale it.
Upon leaving, Latino fans of the show have stumbled into the restaurant or have noticed that that is–in fact–Carlos Mencia. They’re fawning over him and taking pictures of him on their cell phone. He is politely posing, but his eyes told a different story. It looked like he wanted to be saved.
We walk towards the door. The moment I pass in front of the fan, the flash goes off. I walked in front of the camera. A mistake. No big deal.
The fan says, “Sigh. White people.”
I immediately turn, “Why do you have to be racist?” I ask.
The fan doesn’t respond.
I take two steps and turn towards the door. I turn to Carlos and look directly at him. Referencing the racial slur, I say, “I’m not a racist. Why do you put up with it? See that African American? My partner of over five years. This fan? This must be a great legacy to have. This is what you produce.”
I know it’s not his fault that a fan of his is an asshole.