Dear Messy: Entry #1

I’m trying something new at the request of a reader: A messy advice column! I’ve done a few O.H.M. parody advice columns before, but never “real” ones. Let me know what you think of the idea in general, and feel free to weigh in with your thoughts on the reader’s question, too! (This is a real question I received, but some details have been changed to protect the innocent).

Dear Messy,

My partner and I are in our 40’s and planning a wedding. We have both been married before, and we both have school-aged children from our first marriages. Our kids get along well with each other, and we get along well with each other’s kids. They all want us to get married. However, we do not want to include any of our kids in our actual wedding ceremony. When we told our kids this, they were very upset. I have always thought it was weird when people get remarried and have their kids from previous marriages in the wedding party. I’m not sure kids should participate in a new marriage when the prior, failed marriages were the whole reason the kids exist to begin with. I worry about how other people will view our kids’ participation in the ceremony, and I also don’t want the kids to dictate our wedding plans. What do you think?

Sincerely,

Ceremonial in Soldotna

Dear Ceremonial in Soldotna,

In my opinion, you and your partner should do whatever makes you comfortable in terms of a wedding, be it just the two of you on a bluff somewhere, a courthouse administrative job, or a big to-do involving all of your extended families and children. So I agree that you should not let anyone else, including your kids, dictate your wedding plans.

However, I do not think it is "weird"—nor do I think it will be perceived as weird—to have your kids be part of your wedding ceremony. The fact that your kids “would not exist but for prior failed marriages” has nothing to do with the fact that everyone is moving forward in a new joint life together. Not that anyone else’s opinion matters (it doesn’t), but it strikes me as very normal and almost expected to have your kids—who will be part of a blended family—be part of the ceremony that actually blends that family together.

Good Morning, Dear Leader!

Good Morning, Dear Leader!

Your most excellent and beneficent leadership is on full display this morning on Twitter once again!

Those of us who love and adore Your Excellency and Highness know better than to ever EVER call into question your wisdom; your vast knowledge of everything in the universe; your stunning handsomeness; your enormous wealth; the gigantic size of your penis, hands, and crowds; your industriousness; the number of JOBS JOBS JOBS you have created; the future of your big, beautiful wall paid for by Mexico; and so much more.

Indeed, your brilliance and golden towers shine brighter than all the stars ever to adorn the firmament!

Respectfully, I do not mean to second guess your below accounting of all the MANY MANY FAKE NEWS outlets that dare to challenge the extent of your accomplishments, but I believe you have omitted FAILING GOLF.COM, which just last week LIED that you called the White House a "dump."

Thank the Lord and Divine Providence for Twitter, your unsecured Galaxy Note 7, and your "base." For you do not in fact represent all of America, including the majority of citizens who voted against you. 

You are accountable only to the people--especially (and exclusively!) the Good White Christian Men of This Great Nation--who attend your Hitler-esque rallies, which are without precedent in modern democracy, so you know they are good and just.

Dearly Beloved Supreme and Most Excellent King of America: We are Devoted to You and You Alone! You have been treated MOST UNFAIRLY by all except your most devoted followers and subjects.

THANK YOU FOR MAKING AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! THE SWAMP SHALL BE DRAINED! WE GENUFLECT BEFORE THINE MAJESTY!

Too Easy

It's almost too easy to make fun of Phish and everyone who listens to them and goes to their shows. 

That's just fine with me, because my absolute favorite hobby is making fun of myself. And I can fully make fun of myself for how much I love seeing Phish play live, especially in my little hometown of 11 million souls.

I think of Phish like Dungeons & Dragons or cilantro. Unless you like it--a lot--you can't possibly understand why anyone would. But if you do like it, well, you are fucking INTO that shit!

Phish is like cilantro, in that people who like it like it on everything, and people who don't have a visceral reaction to how bad it tastes. 

A Phish show is also like a game of D&D, in that when you're playing, you're immersed in the adventure of it. There are four dungeon masters on stage and it's a roll of the dice where you're going next. You're transported to a world with its own subculture, costumes, and lingo. You know it's silly and make-believe, and that the rest of the world thinks it's stupid and ridiculous. Yet you're not quitting that shit or skipping hippie-con for anything.

There is also, of course, an element of nostalgia to anything you've liked for so long and that you associate with youthful exuberance. I have too many responsibilities to just travel around the country seeing Phish like I used to in the 1990s, and I don't have the mental real estate to dork out on all their stats and whereabouts anymore.

But for a few hours a year, it's still fun to travel back to that time and place, only now without the emotional baggage of my largely miserable late teens and early 20s. 

The band has grown up too, and if you've seen them a lot over the years you can tell. They're confident and clean, with a bit less frenetic energy, but with a certain unbridled self-possession that accompanies the shedding of fucks that comes with age. 

Although Phish has never played in Alaska (fingers crossed), they played their song Alaska last night, in the same venue where I saw my first arena rock concert--Guns n' Roses--when I was 14. It was almost perfect that a fellow Alaskan and O.H.M. reader tracked me down to say hi at his first show at the Garden.

MSG used to be a shithole in a gritty part of the city. It only sold popcorn, peanuts, Kosher hot dogs, and shitty beer like a Little League concession. Times have changed. Last night I found myself eating a Greek salad in the equivalent of an immaculate airport concourse. 

I wish I could express in words the shade and side-eye on the face of the guy who sold that Greek salad to me. He looked at me and rolled his eyes contemptuously at my very existence. I wanted to explain that my failure to understand the new weird credit card machine and ordering process was an issue of Alaska-based technology incompetency, and not only dumb hippie-hood, but I didn't have the energy to mount a defense of myself.

I'm almost 40, and I've surrendered to the flow of dorkiness forever.

Things You Notice on the East Coast When You Live in Alaska

1. The volume of traffic.

2. The great tomatoes. 

3. How dressed up eveyone is all the time.

4. The heat and humidity.

5. The crowds.

6. The bad salmon.

7. The amazing pizza.

8. The sheer number of stores.

9. All the shit you can now do from your phone.

10. Some new website or technology that hasn't made its way to us yet.

11. How weird it is that we still don't really have Uber or Lyft.

12. The haze.

13. Luke warm tap water.

14. Generalized culture shock.

Hustling for an Answer

"What's 'Hustler?'" Paige asked with a markedly innocent curiosity as we were driving up the West Side Highway from Brooklyn last night. 

It was past 10:00 p.m., and we'd been visiting friends in Sunset Park. Paige had been happily playing with dolls and making rainbow loom bracelets all evening with the couple's five year-old daughter while our boys practiced sliding into home plate on the smooth living room floor, and the adults drank beer and chatted in the backyard garden.

"Uhhhhh...," I stammered, buying time while I came up with a good explanation. 

Knowing that adults are often more uncomfortable with awkward topics than children are, I relied on my usual unorthodox tactic of frank directness in parenting.

Two beats, three.

"It's a grownup magazine with naked pictures of women and this building here is a place where people go to watch women dance without their clothes on."

"EW! That's gross!" Paige said. "Why would people want to do that?" 

"Well," I continued, "some people think it's sexy. You're supposed to think it's gross because you're a kid and it's not for you. It's not for kids. It's like alcohol or pot or R-rated movies. It's something for grownups."

I decided to leave judgment out of it. Through the process of writing this blog, I have met and learned a lot from adult entertainers. I don't pretend to have a morally absolutist point of view about stripping or exotic dancing. People have different motivations for doing that work, and I don't believe in judging it with the sanctimony that maybe I once did.

Instead I just adopted a flat affect and let Paige take from my tone and response whatever she would.

Paige will be 10 this year, and is highly gender-conforming so far. It was at about that age, I remember, when the onion layers of a buoyant girlhood began to peel back one by one, revealing a stinging rawness and rot in the way society treats girls and women. 

I know from the near universal American female experience that the next 10 years will include battling erosion of the self confidence I have tried to instill and promote in Paige. 

Slowly it will dawn on her that the world has designs on and expectations of her identity, body, mind, and future. She will undoubtedly and by turns come to see her femininity as a liability, a blessing, a weapon, a tool. She will inevitably struggle with feelings of inadequacy amid a cacophony of mixed messages, and all I can do is to try to help her cut through the noise to find the signal.

So what's Hustler? I'm not sure. I guess it depends on your perspective.

Let Me Explain What Would Happen to Me Sitting Here in This Outfit

Sure, I would try to look all casual and chic. But we all know this chair would go flying out from under my ass the instant I applied any weight to it. In the process, the other two chairs behind it would fall like dominoes, clattering loudly as they tumbled end-over-end on the tile floor.

While that was happening, the cup and saucer in my right hand would fly across the marble bar and shatter into 26 pieces as coffee splattered all over the front of these gleaming white pants.

Then there's the shirt. Good Lord, the shirt. It's missing the top half, and yet it still somehow has armpits, which is a problem because the material is ground zero for pit stains. Also the style is incompatible with big saggy titties since you can't wear a bra with it. So that's a dealbreaker right there.

Also, I can guarantee that the space between my belly button and vajayjay would not be a flat expanse of perfectly pressed cloth. Finally, if it was hot enough to wear nothing but a silk ruffle around my boobs and a major period risk on my ass, there's no way my hair would be down on my neck.

Basically, what I'm trying to say is thiis: the difference between the outfit as featured on the model in this Ann Taylor ad and the real life manifestation of this outfit on me is big. Bigger than the violation of gravity and several other laws of physics that would have to occur for a woman to sit like this in the first place.

Maybe Don't Krazy Glue Your Dick Hole Shut, K? Thx Bye!

Technically, it's called a urinary meatus. You didn't know that, did you? Well I did, and I don't even OWN a dick hole! I have seen "Meatus in St. Louis," though, the porn-adapted Broadway musical. 

JK!

Meatus in St. Louis doesn't really exist, but I really wish it did, and someone should make it. 

You're welcome B'way!

In the meantime, dudebros, maybe don't Krazy Glue your dick hole shut during sex with the "Jiftip" sticker? Just a suggestion from someone who doesn't have the equipment. 

One visit to the website of this controversial contraceptive, and you'll wish there was an unclick function on the Internet.

Jiffy Pop posts a bunch of disclaimers that say this pee-hole latte-sticker is really just a "novelty" that isn't actually supposed to prevent STDs or preggos, which begs the question: WHYWHYWHYWHY? 

The physics of it make no sense. If plugging your dill-holio up with adhesive doesn't improve your odds on the tried and true pull n' pray method, why in the ever loving fuck would you use this? Afterall, the website makes the rather obvious point that busting a nut with this thing on feels . . . um . . . bad.

I love the step-by-step pictoral diagram though. Especially the "bond" step. It looks like the cartoon peen is getting an encouraging pat on the head before the "enjoy" step. Sort of like an atta boy, good job, you can do this type thing.

But just because you can do something doesn't mean you should, and the Jifftip peen sticker is the embodiment of that axiom.