Does This Meat Tenderizer Come With Lubricant?

Pampered Chef ... you guys ever heard of it? It's like Tupperware on steroids. And it's ridiculously expensive, unless you think $13 is reasonable for a spatula.

Maybe you're asking yourself, "How did Miss Spoken find herself at a Pampered Chef party of all places?" I'll tell you. It's because my brother, Puppet Boy, works in retail. He'll talk to anybody about anything. So when this woman walked into his job looking for (insert random item), they naturally got to talking. Thirty minutes later she walked away with (insert random item) in her hand and with one more sucker to add to her rolodex of Pampered Chef hostesses. She claims she didn't know he was gay but come on, he just signed up to host a Pampered Chef party and is so gay he can put a lisp in any word in the English language. Whore Mouth, Legal and I called him late one night just to hear him say "crackers."

*Ring .... Ring .....*

"Hello."

"Hey Will, say crackers and cheese."

*Insert muffled sounds of three grown women giggling*

"Huh? What? Why?"

"Just fucking say it."

"Crackerths and Cheesth."

"Bwahahahaha! Shit, I gotta go. I think Mom just pissed herself."

And so it was that Whore Mouth, Miss Perceived and I found ourselves at his Pampered Chef party. We don't get out much, so it was inevitable that we filled the first hour with drinks and the second hour drinking and cracking vagina jokes and assaulting this poor woman with our tasteless humor.

And we were especially full of the filth that night.

But it was her fault for passing around a meat tenderizer with removable parts. If you say things like "toothed side," "pound your chicken" and "cracking nuts" we have no choice but to ask if this thing comes with a suction cup base and whether or not it's seeing anyone at the moment. Because if you're going to spend almost $30 on a meat tenderizer, shouldn't it tenderize my meat? *wink, wink*

I think Miss Perceived tried to smuggle the meat tenderizer out of the house using just her pelvic floor muscles. She's kind of brilliantly criminal like that.

By the end of the night, I dropped a vodka soaked check on a gravy separator (who doesn't want their gravy separated?) and a pie plate. I also got to feel up Miss Perceived and dust off some old pedophile jokes that had been sitting on my shelf for a few years.

And I'm pretty sure Puppet Boy is the new face of Pampered Chef. Hope that works out better than his attempts at selling Girl Scout cookies on the side of the road in rural Alabama.

Christmas Letters Are Stupid (I Know This Because I Used To Be Gifted)

We're standing in the middle of an indoor fun zone. We've all gathered here to celebrate The Regulator's birthday and pray at this temple of inflatable obstacle courses and all things bouncy. Even the floor has springs in it. The only thing missing is a few hits of Ecstasy, the repetitive thump of overly mixed House music and a bunch of almost-adults with pacifiers in their mouths and synthetic wings on their backs.

I remind myself that this is a birthday party for a four year old. This is not a warehouse in SOMA. It is not 1995.

With a literal spring in my step, I walk into a conversation about Christmas. Christmas correspondence, to be exact. The Keynote Speaker is The Regulator's mother herself, Miss Perceived.

"I'm doing a Christmas Letter this year," she says with a roll of her eyes.

By now I should expect her to do or say whatever it is that I don't expect her to do or say. Like talking about her drawer of sex toys with my father-in-law sitting at the table beside her. There is a reason she is dubbed Miss Perceived. But I cannot hide the what-the-fuck expression smeared all over my face. Nor can I stop myself from speaking, and by speaking I of course mean laughing.

"You don't even talk on the phone! Why would you send a Christmas Letter and what the fuck is a Christmas Letter anyway?" 

I'm not completely dense. I understand the word Christmas (def: a day when it's okay to sip alcohol in the morning as long as it has bubbles or is an appropriate mixer in coffee) and I know what a letter is (def: something one writes when one is incarcerated). But what, Sweet Jesus, does one have to do with the other?

I scan my memory card for things I know nothing about and couldn't care less about and that's where I find it: a long forgotten memory of finding a Christmas Letter written by my Grandma's sister. In a beautiful longhand of swirls and loops, Great Aunt Katherine set about describing her year of family happenings on a farm in Missouri. I recall that something animal died and something human lived. Somebody gained a husband. Somebody lost a finger. Merry Christmas.

Christmas Letters, I told myself, were stupid. I was in the gifted program at school so I knew that I could not be wrong. Today, although no longer thought of as gifted (unless you consider the ability to give two kids a complete bath in under six minutes "gifted"), I still think Christmas Letters are stupid.

First of all, I have a blog. If you want to know how my year went, spend some time in Miss Spoken's archives. Bring alcohol and a Snuggie.

And what could I possibly say in a Christmas Letter? Legal is eighteen now and still spends her days social networking; The Boy turned six and graduated to wiping his own ass effectively; Boss Lady is five and started composing the soundtrack of my life on her new Kawasaki (thanks Miss Dee). Yes it sounds like popcorn kernels in the garbage disposal but it's a wonderful start to her future career as somebody way more awesome than her mother.

Miss Perceived defends herself. Kind of.

"I know, I know. If you want to get ahold of me, text me. If you call me, I'll just text you back. I'm a texter. Text, text, text. But I haven't sent out Christmas cards in years!"

Miss Perceived is a huge supporter of this blog and the written word of she who is Miss Spoken. Because of this (and the fact that she lives next door and could babysit in case I have one of those Ambien blackouts), I will support her Christmas Letter.

And if it is blog-worthy, God help her.

One Lucky Bastard Am I

Miss Spoken is Irish. Not completely, but she's more Irish than she is Greek. More Irish than she is Portuguese. And more Irish than she is German.

Let's see just how Irish she is. To do this, we shall start with (and end with) Irish stereotypes:

1. Yes, she's Catholic. No, she's not a practicing Catholic, unless you count the religious art hanging in her house ('cause she thinks it's cool) or the neck-weary crucifixes she wore in the 80s or the time(s) she actually did go to church but told her mother that the holy water burned. Which reminds me ... Miss Spoken's sister, Miss Led,  thinks her bedroom is haunted and therefore has asked her mother to send her holy water. Miss Spoken has suggested to said mother that she instead send toilet water. Sort of like a placebo. This proves that not only is Miss Spoken a certified genius, but she is also funny(ish).
   
2. Yes, she loves the Kennedy Family. Once upon a time, Miss Spoken was the proud owner of a gorgeous black dining room table that was supposedly owned by a Kennedy. Which Kennedy, you ask? Who cares. Any Kennedy. And because the owner before Miss Spoken bought this table at Christie's, she believed it with all her heart and would spend weekends loving this table, polishing this table and totally making out with this table (which is a reoccurring theme for Miss Spoken).
3. Yes, she loves potatoes! She loves them fried, mashed, baked, baked again and stuffed with wonderful things like cheese and onion. God help her, she's even had them on her pizza.
4. Yes, she's a brawler? No, she's not a brawler? Miss Spoken refuses to answer, citing some bullshit excuse about self-incrimination and outstanding warrants. Blah-blah.
5. No, she's not an alcoholic ... per se. Aren't Sundays supposed to be about drinking? And so what if she relies on her 4:00 glass of Chardonnay (stop yelling at her 'cause it used to be 3:00) and Miss Perceived is the one who told her to take a shot of vodka in the morning ... just to settle down when life throws a big pile of shit at your already shit-coated extremities.
6. No, she does not have the Luck of the Irish. She has the Potato Famine Raped By Vikings kind of Irish luck. The kind of luck that delivers your menstrual cycle like a tsunami while you're in the middle of the woods camping. The kind of luck that always finds you in a Wal*Mart line where a price check needs to be done and the person doing the checking is fucking brainless. The kind of luck that shapes itself into a virus resting in Miss Spoken's chest and sinuses the day before she is to host a dozen people in her house for Thanksgiving. 

Conclusion:  Miss Spoken is too Irish for her own good and should consider being more Greek or maybe more German. More Greek/German stereotype tests to follow.

There's a cat in a bag in a hole in the ground and the green grass grows all around, all around...

Once upon a time, there was a boy cat named Dingy. Dingy was loved very much by his family, Miss Perceived and The Regulator. Dingy loved them, too. But Dingy had room in his heart ... he had more love to give.

You see kids, when Dingy was a kitten, he discovered his very own nipple. Dingy fell in love with this nipple and would spend entire afternoons sucking his nipple, laughing at its jokes and calling it sweetheart. Dingy's nipple grew and grew from the love. Like an inch. Miss Perceived was proud of this love and shared it with the world. When friends came to visit, she would greet them with her Cheshire smile and say, "Come in ya'll! Come see my cat suck his own nipple!" And there in the corner of this love shack, Dingy could be found, curled into a ball and loving his nipple; curled into a ball because his nipple was placed in a not so convenient place which made loving it hard. But relationships take work, right? "Isn't he just the cat's meow?" she would say. 

Like the flocks of zealots who travel to see the image of Jesus Christ in the shadows of a tree trunk, people came from far and wide to see for themselves this cat named Dingy who loved his nipple. 

But then something terrible happened.

One day when Miss Spoken was drinking beer making sand castles in Santa Barbara, Miss Perceived heard a howl and then watched as Dingy seized up and died. This left Miss Perceived sad. The kind of sad that makes you not wear makeup which is a big deal for Miss Perceived who likes makeup very much. And this wasn't a good time for Miss Perceived to be sad because her mother was moving out of state and Miss Perceived was busy packing. And Miss Perceived's mom had a lot of collections to be packed. Like her collection of Kleenex, lamps, suckers, canned goods from 1991 and pens with no ink. I'm not saying she was a hoarder or anything, I'm just sayin' ...

Anyway, Miss Perceived hadn't sold any of her panties online yet and so she was strapped for cash and didn't have the means to give Dingy and his nipple a proper burial. So she called Puppet Boy and together they put Dingy in a bag and put him in a hole in the ground. In the front yard. Which is by no means private. Not even a fence.

Then late last night, with a storm raging and the winds blowing, there was a knock at my door. And there they were ... Miss Perceived and The Regulator. But why did she look so crazed? And why was she holding a shovel? And why was she wearing a cloak?

"Will you watch The Regulator for a few minutes?"

"Sure! Is everything okay?"

"Huh? Oh ... yeah. I just gotta go dig up Dingy."

**Thunder cracks and lightening splits the sky**

Okay, maybe it was four o'clock in the afternoon  and 69 degrees outside. And maybe she didn't have a shovel. And it might not have been a cloak but a pink t-shirt that said Princess. But she was going to go dig up her dead cat.

Prior to the excavation, aka grave digging, Miss Perceived called the Kitty Crematorium and explained her situation. Which now has made her the most popular girl there and everybody knows her by name. And Miss Spoken never knows when she might have to move a body and it's good to know that Miss Perceived can help her. Because, as Dionne Warwick would say, that's what friends are for.

But hold on to your crackers kiddies because here's the best part of this tale.

Miss Perceived is a busy lady. She has things to do. So before she goes to the Kitty Crematorium, she has to stop by Wal*Mart, go to the post office and of course, The Regulator needs to go to Jump Man Jump for an hour or so.

Where is Dingy and his nipple, you ask?

Oh .... in the back of her mini van.

RIP Dingy ... I mean, you know... as soon as you're buried again and all.

The End.

Babbleville's Town Trollop

Did I ever tell you guys that Babbleville has a Town Trollop? And did I mention that she lives just a couple of houses down from Miss Perceived and I? She sure does. And guess what?

We hate her. And it's a Fill a Sock With Quarters and Beat the Slut Out of Her kind of hate.

Here's the back story. Town Trollop is somewhere in her 20s and has three kids - Blondie (10), Punk Ass (11?) and the Girl Who Never Wears Shoes (2). Miss Perceived and I got to know them over the summer because Blondie and Punk Ass were left alone all day to wander the streets of Babbleville looking for food, friends and in Punk Ass's case, things to burn.

Punk Ass looks like he came from the Village of the Damned, is supposed to be medicated for ADHD and has some "anger management" issues which seem to increase the longer he goes without meds which is always because Town Trollop doesn't see to it that he takes them. She admittedly "gave him" to his Dad because he's so out of control. Oh, and did I mention that I walked in on Punk Ass taking a shit in my personal bathroom? Uggh....

The Girl Who Never Wears Shoes is dirty, whiny and always on Blondie's hip. I saw Blondie once strolling her sister at 7:30 in the morning by herself. I suppose it's good practice for Blondie because once she hits puberty and the boys start to pay her some much craved attention, I'm betting Town Trollop won't be there to help her and she'll find herself knocked up and waiting in line to redeem her WIC vouchers. I hope not, but you know how it goes.

Oh, and they have a black cat named Jig. Which is short for Jiggaboo. Which makes Town Trollop a slut and an asshole.

So, Miss Perceived and I were sort of forced to keep and eye on and feed Blondie and Punk Ass over the summer because they'd show up at the pool, and they'd come over when we weren't at the pool and because we like Blondie and because we are responsible adults when we're not sipping vodka in the morning. Fortunately, Punk Ass is now back with his Dad for the school year so I can stop hiding the matches and taking inventory after he leaves my house. And I can use my bathroom without the fear of walking in on some pale, demonic looking kid cupping his penis and crapping in my toilet.

But the drama continues. Because Town Trollop likes to tell stories about the men she meets online. Like the guy who pretended to get a call from his father and then pretended he was at the hospital and then left her at his house hoping she would leave. Which she didn't do until many, many hours later. After she took a nap. And when I joked about whether or not she went through his drawers to "look for a pen," she laughed and said, "I know, right?! Like, I found a bunch of money! I could have totally taken in. And I've been calling him all morning but he hasn't called me back. Crazy, right?!" Riiigghht.

And how she sometimes puts her kids to bed and then leaves to go to the gym. At ten o'clock at night.

And would I like to watch her kids for $100 a week. Ummm..... hell no. And aren't Miss Perceived and I already doing it for free?

And our hate for this chick escalates as Blondie explains that her mom has said that she's going to start food shopping so Blondie can have a fucking Pop Tart for breakfast before school. And because Knock, Knock .... Can I borrow a pencil because my mom didn't buy me any and I need to do my homework. Blondie also comes to my house every morning before school and walks with the kids and I which is fine by me. Except that I have to hear stories about her fucking mother. Like the time I was dressing the kids and she asked to use a hairbrush because Town Trollop and her stayed at her boyfriend's house overnight which is about two hours away and Blondie had to get up at 5:30 and didn't have time to do her hair.

But what's really got me pissed, is that Blondie has been asking me to sign her homework for her. Because her mother doesn't have time. And today, she asked me to sign her Progress Report. JeezusChrist!  After I inhaled deeply, bit a hole in my cheek and then pressed  the heels of my hands into my eyes so as not to tell this little girl that I thought her mother should have a hysterectomy; that I thought her mother was setting her up for total failure; that when I saw her mother I was going to pull out that sock full of quarters.

But I didn't say any of that out loud. What I said was that I was uncomfortable signing the report. That her grades were awesome (all As and Bs) and that her mom should really see this to which she replied once again that her mom was busy. So I signed it. 

But I'll be stopping by Town Trollop's house tonight. I'll leave that sock full of quarters home because as far as I know, there's no Wi-Fi in county jail. 

What Do Cannibalism and Miss Spoken Have In Common?

Donner Memorial State Park

Where else would the residents of Babbleville decide to pitch tents and expose themselves to the elements? Ya'll know your history, right? Here are Miss Spoken's cliff notes for those who were smoking pot in the sixth grade:

It was the winter of 1846 when some hardboiled emigrants tried to make their way to California via the Sierra Nevada mountains. Cue blizzards, human suffering, exhaustion, starvation, frostbite and cannibalization of the dead. Forty-one deaths, forty-six survivors.

Alright. Now that that's out of the way let's cut to modern day times where Miss Spoken and Miss Perceived, along with our party of thrill-seeking campers, are making our way to the very spot where this great American tragedy occurred.

That's when all hell breaks lose in my covered wagon.

With Johnny Boy at the reins, I'm looking over our reservations when it occurs to me that our reservations are for September 11 which means today is September 11 which means that I made a Gigantic Fuck Up when I booked two rooms at the Days Inn in Santa Barbara for September 11 when they should have been for September 18! Ugh!! I could vomit, I might vomit but either way I'm certainly going to cry or punch myself in the face because those rooms cost me almost $400 and I missed the 48 hour cancellation time and I'm freaking the fuckmesideways out when Legal alerts me to the fact that The Boy has a bloody nose. I look in the backseat and there is blood everywhere. It's a hyrdrant. Legal deftly whips the cover off her pillow and stops the river that is my son's blood. One disaster averted, I make about 40 desperate calls to my mom who is always home but for some reason isn't today but needs to be so she can call the Days Inn, pretend to be me and weave some bullshit story that gets me my money back.

Once this Babbleville Party makes it to Donner, things get better. I'm able to reach my mom and The Boy isn't dead. We unload fourteen days worth of survival goods for our two night stay. This cache of riches includes things like sleeping bags, crayons, bats, Xanax, etc. The tents go up, the beer goes down and the kids already look homeless and hungry.

Always the paradox, Miss Perceived pulls out flavored vodka (girlie, right?) but then drinks it straight out of tin cup (manly, right). Legal probably takes one too many pulls from the bottle because the next morning she is dry heaving behind our tent. And because I'm a caring kind of mom, I pat her on the back before I tell her to take her ass deeper into the woods because the last thing I want is that Thug Gang of Chipmunks, that has been circling our site, to get all crazy drunk with her undigested Smirnoff Citrus Vodka. Nobody wants to see boozy chipmunks fist-fighting their brothers and having regrettable sex. Not only that, but this is Bear Country. Bears. Hence the metal bear-resistant food lockers and the warnings not to keep toothpaste in your tent. 

This second day also brought on a game of hide-and-go-seek in which Johnny Boy got caught like a three-toed sloth half way up a tree and Miss Perceived proved that she could haul ass. My gay brother kept trying to get everybody to go see the beaver dam which of course led to many a joke about beavers of the vagina kind. So much so that Legal declared us disgusting. Cause we are. And we love talking about vaginas.

I continued my trend of fucking up greatly when, as I prepared to make our traditional breakfast of french toast and sausage, I realized that I had forgotten to pack the butter, the sausage and oh yeah, the freakin' eggs. And at dinner, I realized I forgot ketchup and mustard for the hotdogs and hamburgers. Unlike the Donner Party 163 years before us, the Babbleville Party was able to remedy my clusterfuck by saddling up for the Safeway ten minutes away. Plus, we got more of this for Miss Perceived:

Miss Spoken likes her ladies liquored up.

Introducing .... Miss Perceived

Remember when Miss Spoken (that's me) promised to introduce you to my saucy neighbor, Miss Perceived?

Well, wait no longer because Miss Perceived and I, along with Johnny Boy, Puppet Boy, Legal and a small army of children are heading up to Donner Lake for one final farewell to the heat-goddess-bitch Nevada likes to call Summer. I have to make these introductions pre-camping trip because who knows what kind of shenanigans will ensue and I just want to make it clear ahead of time that she is not what she seems.

Oh, Miss Perceived ......

Don't let the blonde hair, the golden tan, the lashes dipped in eight coats of mascara, the sprightly disposition or that Colgate smile fool you.

When I first met Miss Perceived I was sure that she had spent some time at the top of some sophomoric cheerleading pyramid. Did she have jazz hands? Bet she actually had a high school sweetheart and his name was Chad "the Chadster" Bingham. Did she listen to Britney Spears and sip Slim Fast through a straw while cursing her trumpet-tongued Chardonnay slurping neighbor (yours truly)?

Miss Spoken did not want to like Miss Perceived. Miss Perceived appeared to be so good-natured, so nice, so good with her son The Regulator, so ... I don't know ... blonde. But as time trickled on here in Babbleville, Miss Spoken was reminded of one very simple truth:

All blondes are evil.

Miss Perceived is like a carnivorous plant.... gorgeous, but with an arsenal of unexpected traps and rapid movements meant to distract you from her objective -- consumption and survival. 

Miss Perceived was never on top of that cheerleading pyramid but I bet she probably kicked down a formation or two back in the day. It's possible she screwed the quarterback and maybe his girlfriend, too. You're more likely to find a Brown Eyed Girl on her Ipod than a Womanizer and in fact she likes a shot or two of Grey Goose in the morning when Dick Head (also known as her ex-husband) decides to live up to his name and be an actual dick head. Miss Spoken likes that; she likes that a lot.

So in summary, Miss Spoken was in fact completely wrong about Miss Perceived and is now truly, madly, deeply in love with her. Or is at least willing to sneak into her tent and use her portable toilet this weekend.