The Daily Weirdness

I was a high school sophomore. I watched a flying discus strike Principal Wible and slice a quarter of his ear. A doctor stitched that purple piece back together. The rest of his ear remained pink. Wible sued the parents for thousands of dollars. He permanently wore a bandage over his left ear to hide it. But I digress. Ray Fleming and I had stayed friends for thirteen years. He went through a rough divorce. It was caused by his love affair with XXX pornstar Kitty Pumpkins. His wife set his MacBook on fire. Kitty danced at a club called…

I fell asleep in class. Mother McCarthy called my name to write a proverb on the chalkboard: Do not withhold discipline from a child; if you strike him with a rod, he will not die. I'd avoided chalkboards. A boy once scraped one with his braces in elementary school. It sent electric shocks through my skull. "No," I said. "What did you say?" "No." "Defy me again, and you will see me after class." She forced me to write that proverb repeatedly on the chalkboard after class. I can still hear the screeching of the chalkboard. I can…

I lost my virginity in the summer of 1998. I was twenty-one. We met on AOL chat before we met at a coffee house. I was a college student, broke on Prozac. Meg was thirty and an auditor for gas stations. She belched at the patio table. She spread her legs apart with her jeans on. She snuffed Parliament after Parliament in an ashtray and lit another. She also called herself a libertarian, whatever that meant. "I was possessed by the soul of Jack Kerouac at fourteen," she said. "It happened in Algebra class when I had my period. You know…

My girlfriend Sarah wanted to surprise me for my thirty-sixth birthday. It was during her menopausal years. We were eight years apart. She was secretive. I believe she worked for the CIA. When we first had sex, she said: “You give me herpes, and I’ll break your kneecaps. I know people who can do it.” After she’d said that, I had trouble finishing with her. Sarah used to lie there like a dead fish. Despite that, I’d fallen madly in love with her and her sophistication. “Can you promise me something?” she asked. I would’ve promised her anything. “Please don’t…

I tried to reserve a table, but it was too late. The other customers had run ahead of me. They sat at the windows to have a view of the bay. It wasn't that I was too slow. I was too poor. They were wealthier by far. They were crafty enough to reserve those tables ahead of time. I settled for one in the corner. I felt like the restaurant dunce, a loser. But what had I lost besides the chance to sit at a better table? People have called me a nerd, an asshole, a cheater, a liar, a…

Anyway, we both moved away to college. Drew went on a full-ride scholarship to USC. I couldn't decide on a major. My plan was fifty years at college. I wanted to take classes for degrees for the next fifty years. I never wanted a job. "Welcome back," he said.  "Is everything all right?" I asked. "I dropped out," he said. "I'm back in with my parents."  "Oh." I didn't ask him why. He never explained it.  "What do you want to do today?" I asked. "Like six o'clock. Why?" He pulled out a Phillies blunt. "Let's sit by the pool…

I was a high school freshman. My English teacher Mrs. Martin made us write an essay on what we wanted to be when we grew up. I wanted to do standup comedy, so I wrote that down. Students stood at the front of the class one at a time. Most boys wanted to fight fires, while most girls wanted to nurse people. “Mr. Talisman," she said, "please come up.” As I read mine, the students began to giggle. They probably thought I was joking about being a standup comic. They probably thought Paul Talisman was trying to rile Mrs. Martin…

I heard about my reunion through Facebook. I rolled there in the dead of winter to see Lisa Gehrig. They held it on the hotel rooftop in downtown Los Angeles. Lisa greeted me at a table full of name tags. We were alone in the hallway, just me and her. Her girlish figure had blossomed into a woman's. She was dangerously slender in a leafy gown. “May I help you?” she asked. "Well well well. Lisa Gehrig," I said. "Twenty years have sure flown by, haven't they?" “I'm sorry, but you went to my high school?” She'd insulted me, but…

I sat at a Starbucks on a June afternoon. Bakersfield was over a hundred degrees. I would turn twenty-seven in a week. The barista had put only three ice cubes in my iced coffee. They'd melted by the time I sat under a green canopy. I chain-smoked. I read The Brothers Karamazov. I wrote proposals to literary agents about my novel. Don't ask what it's about because even I don't know. A beatnik joined me out there with a skateboard. He was a young scrawny dude who wore a black Ramones t-shirt. He represented a small ilk of that red…