In the process of telling you this story I have been reminded of so many anecdotes that could easily be overlooked, not falling neatly into the framework of another overarching bit of narrative. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that it upsets me to know that there will always be stories that I’ve forgotten to tell, no matter how concise I manage to be. This is my attempt to share a few things that might otherwise have been overlooked.

I could tell you about how I used to roll my flaccid penis into a ball within the loose skin of my testicles and parade it around as if I had three testicles but no actual penis, in public and in private with about even distribution. I referred to this creation as the mollusk for whatever arbitrary reason, and I was happy to introduce people to the mollusk whenever the urge to do so arose. I had no sense of shame interfering with these actions.

Similarly there was an almost complete and total lack of shame involved when I would casually draw a face on the head of my penis and use it as a puppet to communicate with people regardless of who was present, barring my children. I suspect that my kids are grateful that I did happen to draw a line somewhere.

There should have been shame though, not because those behaviors merit some degree of shame in and of themselves, but because my penis is nothing to write home about (not that I would be inclined to write home about my penis under any circumstances), even with a massive piece of jewelry dangling from it, and no one should proudly show such a pathetic thing off like that.

Yes, that last part was meant to be a bit of a joke, in poor taste, of course…but a joke, just the same. The behavior itself should have been a source of shame or discomfort in addition to the penis itself being inherently shameful. I’m not entirely serious where this self-deprecation is concerned, but I’m not entirely joking either…a lot of my jokes end up like that.

I should take the time to tell you about the incident when my co-musician began having sex with a girl he was seeing in the landing of a stairwell in one of the apartment buildings downtown and I entertained myself during their intercourse by tossing jellybeans at them, trying to lodge them in his ass crack while he was thrusting and reversing. I don’t think I managed to succeed with a single one, and that was a terrible waste of delicious candy.

Speaking of him, there was a night when he and I were getting drunk at a party in someone’s house, I can’t recall who, if I even knew at the time. There was a girl there who had been wanting to sleep with me and she decided she was going to take advantage of my inebriation. My fellow musician decided that this was a good thing, so he was full of encouragement. The problem was that I had no interest in the girl at the time (though she and I did eventually end up sleeping together at a later date), no matter how hard she tried to spark that interest. In the ultimate example of adding insult to injury, I wasn’t anywhere near obtaining an erection until my fellow musician began massaging my genitals in her place. Things were getting uncomfortable for me pretty quickly at that point, less because of his attempt to jerk me off than because the girl in question was becoming annoyingly desperate and clingy in her attempts to make me sleep with her. The fact of the matter was that, as little interest as I had in sleeping with my friend, he was a great deal more appealing to me than she was that night. I decided that I needed to leave, so I walked to Perkin’s for some coffee and to wait until I was sober enough to make my way home from there.

It wasn’t all sex and deforming my genitals for the purpose of entertainment though, as much as I’m sure you wish it was…maybe I’m not the one who should be ashamed here.

I had a friend, the same one who stayed on my sofa after he couldn’t live with his girlfriend anymore, I mentioned him briefly a short while ago. He insisted on carrying around this stupid pager that didn’t work and served no function whatsoever aside from making him look like a jackass. He insisted he was going to fix it or some such nonsense, for whatever imaginary use that might have provided him. One afternoon I asked him to let me see it because maybe I could fix it, and he handed it to me happily. I didn’t know what I was going to do in advance, but there wasn’t a moment of hesitation before I flung it as hard as I could at the far wall of the living room, or did I throw it all the way into the kitchen at the far wall there, I can’t recall that particular detail…but the important part is that I threw it against the wall.

He looked like he was going to cry as he asked me why I did that and all I could think to reply was that I hated that stupid fucking pager and now he was free to throw it into the garbage where it belonged. The way he looked at me you would have thought I had just strangled his favorite puppy and iced the cake by violating the corpse.

Hopping into the Way Back machine, during my freshman year of high school I briefly dated a basket case girl who wasn’t a half bad poet who had a reputation for being easy, not that I cared altogether too much about that rumor, I was still a virgin at the time. I don’t remember what led to my breaking up with her, but it became quite a spectacle thanks to her melodramatic reaction. She made some stupid comment about how she was going to just jump in front of a car to make me happy, and all I could say in response was, “Wait. No. Don’t do that. I’ll push you.”

She ran away crying and my friend who was the fantastic dungeon master I previously talked about went chasing after her, hoping to maneuver his way from a shoulder to cry on to a penis she could seek comfort from. I don’t think it worked out quite that well for him, but maybe it did…I never cared to find out.

I have a long and well documented history of saying and doing the wrong thing essentially every time the chance arises…and I can’t even pretend that I actively attempt to curb that peculiar little quirk of my personality, even going so far as to minimize it like I just did in order to downplay how bad it really is.

The mother of my older children and I took a brief vacation to Minneapolis/Saint Paul in order to visit a friend who had moved there (that friend being the girlfriend I had abandoned before she and I got together). While we were there we ended up in one of the less pleasant neighborhoods of Minneapolis late at night. As we were turning around in the darkened parking lot of a grocery store I saw a rather large group of what appeared to be exclusively African American teens and young adults just a short distance from where we were changing direction and my first impulse was to put down the window and shout, “What’s up niggas?” Don’t worry; I placed emphasis on the less racially insensitive final syllable of the word. MY ex, who was not my ex at the time, asked me if I was out of my fucking mind or trying to get us killed…and I had to admit that she had a good question.

My common sense is a fairly uncommon thing for me to exhibit, especially when I lack adequate time to really think about what I’m going to say or do…though, even then, I leave something to be desired in that department. That’s the story of my life though; the same could probably be said about me in general as well, that I simply leave something to be desired.

My judgment isn’t always questionable, but where my impulsive actions are concerned, I am perfectly willing to concur with that assessment being entirely correct. To showcase this piss poor judgment, as if I haven’t done enough of that already, there was an incident during my teenage years when I leaped from the bed of a friend’s truck where I had been riding and onto the hood of another friend’s car while we were in motion. No one knew that I was going to attempt something so unbelievably stupid, even I had no idea it was going to happen until I did it. If this idiotic stunt had been something we’d planned, it would be something altogether different, but I could have easily caused an accident or simply gone careening from the hood of the car and ended up seriously injured or dead. At the time, none of those concerns crossed my mind at all, and I think that might be precisely why I’ve had a lot of the problems that I get myself into…no recognition of, or interest in, consequences.

I have two ways of doing things, I either act without thinking or I over think what I’m doing to such an extreme that I think without acting. There is very little middle ground for me, as I tend to bounce back and forth between those two extreme ends of the spectrum without warning. The times when I over think things aren’t of any real importance here, as they don’t lead to any interesting stories, only a form of indecisive paralysis.