My date with a small plastic cup.

(Gentle reader: This entry is about an intimate medical procedure that was performed on me and the even more intimate follow up. Nothing too gross, but you may learn more about the Mills family’s family planning strategy than you necessarily want to. I’ve tried to make it cute and light. Thank you.)

Many moons ago, under my wife’s suggestion, I went under the knife. More specifically, my netherbits went under the knife, so as not to bring anymore innocent souls into the veil of tears that is life.

(I got my balls cut into so as to not make babies, in other words.)

The procedure was surprisingly uneventful, other than the jolly male nurse carting in what looked like a lesser droid and cackling “This is the machine they gonna fry your balls with” and the tense business of shaving that morning. Shaving, like, not my face, right? With a razor?

I have only total respect for porn actors now.

Actually, the weirdest thing about it was the banality of the event.

Having a man handle my gear while asking me “So, what line of work are you in, Mr. Mills” is odd, especially since I am straight man.

Local anesthesia, disassociated tugging, a burning smell. Done. (Obviously, the burn smell rang some deep lizard brain bell, but my Model 21st Century Man brain did its job and I did not attempt to choke the doctor.)

Going to the dentist is much worse and I’m proud to say I am carrying two tiny titanium clamps around with me. I feel like Darth Vader!

After a week or so of walking very, very carefully, I took my sample in. By sample, I mean my… sample.

(Note to any gentlemen considering this procedure: materials are not provided by the clinic to aid in the collection of the sample. And don’t bother asking. It might lead to uncomfortable silence and wild, recriminating stares.)

I did the deed, and may it clear across town with a small plastic cup… but forgot my paperwork. The woman at the lab was not impressed, and all that driving and collecting was for naught.

I don’t do well with clerks, bureaucrats and lab people. I get nervous in lines. Especially when I'm carrying a tub of stuff around.

So, months went by.

Finally, I took the matter to hand, as it were, once again and called the Urology department.

The clerk: “Come on down! We’ll take care of this once and for all.”

I like this guy. I can do business with this guy.

So I go. I get my cup AND the proper paperwork and this time, I do it right.

So as not to let the pressures of cross town traffic prevent me from getting this done once and for all, I decided to get it done in situ.

So I went to the mens toilets, eager to get to work. Now, if I were sixteen, this would have been an easier piece of work. I probably would have gotten extra-credit for sheer enthusiasm. (“You want me to what? And as a medical professional, you condone that sort of thing? Thank you. Thank YOU! Give me two cups! I’ll make you proud of me!”)

But now, as a more seasoned man of 37, I require a romantic atmosphere, like not having a man in serious GI distress trumpeting in the stall next to me. Things didn’t go well at first. There were issues with the corpus cavernosa not being team players, using this moment to detumescent when the opposite state was more conducive to the desired outcome.

After much mental fight, the tides turned and I was able to reach fruition. The man next to me still stuggled on, alas. Include him in your prayers.

The clerk this time was a man, and he was even less impressed with me than the woman who sent me away for the want of paperwork so many months before. He peeked in the bag that contained the product of my hard work very tentatively, then scowled at me.
“Call you in two days.” His eyes narrowed. “Pervert.”

So, that was a Friday. My wife had me call on Saturday night, but the nurse couldn’t read the chart. So Monday morning, I call.

From the sound of the woman on the phone, being a Urology nurse is a great job to have. It’s like being the person that calls people who have won the lottery, but this prize isn’t money… it’s SEX!

Here’s what she said: “Mr. Mills, congratulations! There are no sperm present in the sample! And I bet tonight you’re going to have A LOT OF FUN!”

And she really said that.

Nice lady.

6 word stories

Ripped off from an offhand comment made here.

Found the hive. Am I dying?

She left. I followed. We married.

The waxing went wrong. Solo eyebrow.

I think I found the trigger.

My date had herpes. It’s love!

Trashman, video clerk, hobo. Bad CV.

Ninjas ring doorbell. I ignore it.

Doctor, your glove is fur-lined. Malpractice!

Lonely truck driver, don’t park here.

“Bring the saw. Legs won’t bend.”

Run! Ants! Big ones! With lasers!

Priest wanders to the red light.

He stayed. I stopped bathing. Peace.

I blogged. No one read it.

The new neighbor belched loudly. Welcome!

The philosopher read, got flabby, died.

15 fun facts about teen dream Mark E. Smith!

Love comes in many shapes and colors. But true love comes in the shape of the fella that tops every teen’s list of Celebrity Cuddle Bugs, Mr. Mark E. Smith!

1. Mr. Smith wears Drakkar Noir exclusively, in exchange for a small promotional consideration from the fine people at Guy LaRouche.

2. Mark E. Smith is generally considered the greatest French kisser in the world, and has a UNESCO certificate to prove it.

3. The only Thomas Pynchon novel Mark E. Smith has attempted is
Gravity’s Rainbow (he has only made it page 53), even though he’s been playing chess by mail with Thomas Pynchon for years.

4. Mark E. Smith runs a finishing school for girls called Mrs-uh. Havesham’s-uh Finishing-uh School-uh for Girls School-um.

5. Mark E. Smith is partial to big bottoms.

6. Mark E. Smith is a world ranked orienteer.

7. Mark E. Smith was briefly considered for Burt Reynolds’s porn impresario character in Boogie Nights

8. Mark E. Smith is mentioned by name in the Tibetan Book of the Dead and the Popul Vuh, the sacred text of the Kiche people of Central America. Ironically, the Jazz Butcher song, “Southern Mark Smith” is entirely about some other dude.

9. Mark E. Smith played rhythm guitar on James Brown’s hit, “Lickin’ Stick”.

10. Mark E. Smith lives on the entire ninth floor of the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas, where he has special dispensation from the management to slap any guest that annoys him.

11. Mark E. Smith appear as James Bond in the film “On Her Majesty's Secret Service” under the screen name George Lazenby.

12. Mark E. Smith has a vestigial tail.

13. Mark E. Smith has Lemmy’s kidney, while Lemmy has Mr. Smith’s bone marrow.Thing is, neither were ill when the transplants happened. Hardcore!

14. Mark E. Smith insists that, while on tour, his band the Fall eat dinner together – WITH THE TV OFF -- like a normal goddamn family.

15. While you read this at work, Mark E. Smith is at your house, reading all your books and using your dirty clothes hamper as an ashtray.

Hicksion hits paydirt.

Blogfriend Hicksion, the dirty rotten imbecile that runs Close But No Cigar has been invited to produce a 15 minute radio show for the BBC. A 15 minute comedy radio show for the BBC. Or he's been invited to develop one, or he can sit in the lobby and an sit in the lobby and quietly color with crayons for awhile while listening to a
radio,, or he does make-up for a radio show, or he makes explosion sounds with his mouth for a radio version of Captain Scarlet. I'm not entirely certain.

What I can say certainly is this:

Hicksion is an absolute shithead.

The only comedy radio we get in the US is bearded middle-aged men punning about Broadway musicals on NPR.

Hicksion tried to corral a bunch of tardos, me included, to produce a comedy podcast, but we all kept getting distracted by colorful string and shiney bottle caps. So he "applied" himself and "bathed often" and "got off his pasty ass", and now he's all that. Dirtbag. I happen to know for a fact that Hicksion traffics in Japanese pig spanking videos. Be a damn shame if his masters at the bbc found out about it. A goddamn shame.

Congrats, goon.

Questions. From New York City.

Why do New Yorkers tolerate such swillish coffee? Can everyone in one of the largest cities in the world be better dressed than me, including small children? Is the shambling comic book dork community that attractive women go to comic book shops in New York City? How is it that every neighborhood in New York is the NEXT BIG THING? You are playing music at a venue in Williamsburg where I have paid five dollars to listen to you play music, why do you have to be such a whining pile of suck ass? (That’s just the first “band”, Falcon and English Department were really, super good.)Could the main branch of the New York Public Library be somehow baked into a pie so I can eat the fucking thing? Could we just get some more goddamn parks in here? Huh? Do hotel maids sense nudity? If you are the cab driver that drove me in from JFK, could you send me the phone number of your dealer? Because you were in a place that I’d like to visit one day. If I go to an 11:45 pm showing of “The Departed” in Times Square on a Sunday night, how can the next showing be sold out? I mean what do these people do during the day? How many suicides have been attempted by employees of the Times Square Toys R Us? That place is a goddamn nightmare! It’s a smurf’s BDSM dungeon. Why, at one point, did I freakily and involuntarily pronounce “hot dog” as “Hooawt Dawg” to a startled vendor? Is it possible I am a New Yorker trapped in a Californian’s body? How long can the “Lion King” possibly run?

These are my questions. Puzzling.

Postscript -- Am annoyed I didn't get a chance to meet up with blog friend Walking Spanish. It would have been my first blog-meatspace crossover. Dammit. I've heard your first time is magical.

Word to my gays, my bookish conservos, my ranty centrists, my progressives fightin' the man. Oh, and an English guy. And another Canadian.

Here are some loverly blog people, who I'd like to go on a cross-country bus trip with. Hopefully with a shitload of shrooms.

The gays:

Gay Sex and Advanced Calculus is run by a gentleman in Philly who is in vastly better shape than I am.

The Gay Agenda is manned by one Pursey Tittwiller, a person of great wealth and taste, among others.

The conservative:
Progressive Consevatism is run by a self-described "Punk Rock Conservative", who reads a shitload of books. Goddamn! Word up for books, y'all!

The cranky centrist:
Ranando Report is the home of a bona fide specimen of the semi-legendary species, The Western Democrat. Scrappy and opinionated.

The progressive:
Fighting Injustice and War belongs to a fellow who is medical marijuana legalization advocate. I say legalize it because, because, well, WHAT THE FUCK?

The English guy:
St. Custard’s is a nice, quiet blog of an odd disposition. Numbers his entries. I like that.

And, of course, another Canadian:
Here I Go Again belongs to Cathy, a woman from the Best Place in North America. And who am I to argue?

So, there you are. Keep the noise down, you goddamn freaks.

Me and the Common Man. Working things on out.

Here I am, bitching and moaning about being unable to think of anything to write about, WHEN FATE THROWS ME A DOUGHNUT!

It's out among the common people, the working man, the 9-5 schlub in the steel-toed boots -- that's where the action is!

I drove to work today, something I am normally loathe to do, but my bride has an appointment in the early evening, so I took the car that I may beat a hasty early exit, so to provide parental care to the wee ones.

Got to the parking garage, after a forty drive that scarily I remember little about (morning commute zen). Get out to shut the door, then watch in a disassociated state as I lock the door and slam it shut with the keys on the front seat.

Brain: "I am locking the door. There are the keys. Must get to the keys. Before I shut the door. SHUT THE DOOR. I MUST SHUT THE DOOR. THE KEYS! THE DOOR! I am shutting the door, there are my keys. Oh, my keys. No. No. No. Dear god. I have shut the door."

So I call the road service guys and stand for 45 minutes staring at my office from across the street in the fall air, discovering a small hole in the ass of my pants thanks to the off-shore breezes finding a snug little cul de sac in my glutteal fold.

The guy shows up: sort of a bright-eyed young chap, neatly groomed in that cheery sort of service guy way. Ahhh, the salt of the earth.

Me: "Morning"

He: "What happened? Was you thinking about some snatch and got distracted?"

Me: Silence.

(For non-North American English speakers, snatch means... well, you know what it means.)

Co-worker Dylan had the best response: "No. Thinking about hot young locksmiths, actually."

Ah, fuck it.

Somebody assign me a something. Anything. I will write about anything. I am your little typing ape.

Am taking requests. Use me.

Whipped like a donkey's ass. As a pig.

Ooo, arrr. I've been working like a pig. A strangely motivated pig. But a pig, no the less.

Where's my forty-acres and where is my goddamn mule?

Anyway, I'm stuck. Can't think.

Some topics I propose to relate.

1) My trip to New York

2) My adventures dropping a sperm sample off at the lab.

3) My plea for new music ideas from all of you lovely violets. (Actually, that one is now technically done. I'm looking for some new music. I like most anything, besides cloying whiney songwriters. Last purchases: Jurasic 5, Tin Machine (!), Mastodon, TV On Radio, Lamb of God, "Black Secular Vocal Groups: 1923 - 1940", Earl Hines, Robert Palmer (!!!!), Growing. I'm looking for love in all the wrong places.

4) My wife's renewed rauchiness and foul-mouth'edness, which is actually kind of endearing.

5) Requests from you, dear hearts.

So let's set that shit up.

I used to really want to be this guy.

Parliament's "Give Up the Funk" translated from English to German and back, on Babelfish

If you tear the roof up away, we will tear the roof away from the nut/mother, tear violently tear up the roof away from the mother sucker violently

you to have a material kind, thing down going and down received there,
are a complete the matter rhythm over going

Ow, wish we the enormous fear give the enormous fear
Ow, we above need the enormous fear, which we received, this enormous fear to have

Lalalalala Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo, owww!

They have a material kind of thing down going and down received
There are a complete lot rhythm over going

Ow, wish we the enormous fear give above the enormous fear
Ow, we need the enormous fear, which we received, this enormous fear to have
Lalalalala Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo, owww!

We will turn this nut/mother, out, which we will turn out this nut/mother

A milestone of great pride for fat men everywhere

Today I visited a fake blog that I stopped updating long ago, nudefatman.blogspot.com. It follows the life and loves of the Nude Fat Man Eating Cookie Dough, a barely-to-not-even veiled rip-off of Ignatius O'Reilly from "Confederacy of Dunces". Imagine my surprise to see that, according to visit counter, The Nude Fat Man is 12 souls away from cracking the 10,000 mark. I guess never underestimate the public's hunger for Nude Fat Men.

It has served me well, to be sure.

Me, talking about the Gays.

Today, I would like to talk about gay culture. Like, seriously. Sort of.

It’s a subject that I’ve been thinking about recently, thanks to to passage in the musician John Cale’s
autobiography, “What’s Welsh for Zen?”, a book I re-read recently.

Cale, of course, made up the nucleus of the Velvet Underground with Lou Reed, and so was part of the Factory scene in
the late Sixties. In writing about the Factory, he notes that the gay men that populated Warhol’s world
took to using “her” or “she” to refer to each other.

And I thought, how quaint! It also struck me that the sanctions against gays (just as it would for any group
of people) forced gay men and women of that era into the very marginality that the forces of cultural
conservatism accused them of embracing. The Shibboleths take on the fallacies of the prevailing convention wisdom.

The greatest freedom that gays have won is the right to call themselves gay – and have that be just one
part of the whole of the individual. It’s the right NOT to have a culture, or maybe it’s being able to
choose the culture you wish to embrace.

So, to round up today's lesson: marginal groups are often made marginal by outside prejudices. This happens partially as a survival technique to identify and connect with one's peers. So, in that way what was Gay culture is a lot like gaming culture, or Hip Hop culture, or Amish culture. It's a response to outside pressures.

Fucking a. I think I solved everything... through the application of the bleedin' obvious.

A message from the future.

It's quite dire. And odd.

My wife is good. I have a good wife.

My wife Paula is one of the funniest people I know. We laugh a lot, mostly about stupid stuff that no one else (or at least very few people) would find remotely funny.

She has a blog, heretofore super secret, wear she writes about her travails as a professional woman and mom. It's a funny site, but it deals with some personal stuff, so I'll wait until she gives me the go ahead to share the URL with my massive audience of seven regular visitors.

I will, however, re-post one of her posts here, because it made me laugh. It also makes me look good, which helps.

Nerd-babes

Since I am relatively caught-up with deadlines and have told most of my clients I will be out of the office today and tommorrow (which is true, I have to get my butt in gear and get in the shower because I have a meeting at CI offices soon) I decided to fool with the podcasting thing for a bit this morning.

I was driving home from dropping the kids off this morning, and I was listening to the CD Greg made me (it's great, please make more!) and my mind drifted off to Zach Galifianakis:





who is my latest celebrity crush. Which is amusing, because he has terrible personal hygiene and is overweight. But it just proves the point that *funny* rules. Funny is the new sexy. I thought about doing yet another blog (Geez, that would make 5 total) that we could call "Nerd-babes". The gal pals and I could post pictures of these nerd-babes and gush about them.

Here is a picture of another "hot" comedian that I'm am digging these days:




And why is he so hot, you ask? Because he has memorized every line from the movie Jaws, that's why! Hot!

To all you guys out there that think women love studly-manly-men, listen to this mp3 that proves that it is not true. Notice no one says "a muscular guy" or "good body" or even classic good looks for that matter.

Funny and smart rocks our world. Which is exactly why I am the luckiest woman in the world. This is who I am married to.

Sherri told me the other day that it's laugh-a-minute at our house. It's true. The other day I was reading a story to the kids and Greg was making tiny sound effects and comments that the kids didn't hear, but made me almost piss my pants. This morning I said he smelled good (deodorant) and he oh-so-cleverly replied "It's L'air Du Temps".

**

PS -- My wife also has a public blog, Discount Army. It's about web discounts, sales in the Bay Area, and other girlie stuff.

A heartwarming variety of screeds.

Breakfast Today for breakfast I a 50 gallon drum of fresh squeezed orange juice: an entire stand of orange shrubs or trees or whatever were pulped and put into an EXTRUDER for me by a squinty-eyed marble mouthed teen. Rather being called “Extra-Fucking Huge”, the size was called something like “Power” or “Turgid” or “Extremely Masculine”. In Tokyo something like this would have $75, but here in this great land of large juices, it was merely $15.

I had mixed feelings about the scowling teen. I like that he hates his job and is kind of surly about. I just wish he had waited until the next costumer to engage in class warfare.


The Bastards at Work Some art directors at work came over to my cube, bearing a digital camera. Never a good sign.

“Greg, need you to model for a layout.”

I hate being photographed, as I am of a gruesome countenance, but apparently that’s what they were looking for.

“You’re perfect! We need someone who looks like an IT guy.”

Yeah and fuck you, too.


New York City I’ll be in NYC for a week and a half, starting. I love NYC for many reason, one of which it is not LA. Not that I don’t like LA. I love LA. But NYC suits me more.

If you haven’t been, you should go. You’re first couple of hours you float about 3 inches above the ground. Not from glee or because you’ve met the girl that has all that something special you’ve been filling pages of your diary about. Nope, you’ll float because the place is fucking insane. Everyone walks like they’re on their way to nailing some douchebag to the wall.

Of course, if you live there, it probably turns into the generic everyday hell we all live in, but for me it’ll be a newer, fresher, hell.

What annoys me is there are tons of people that I’d love visit to with, people with wee children I’ve yet to meet, people that are enjoyable to drink with, people who fit inside their skins in a pleasing way. But, no, I’ll be working like a shmoe. Maybe if I’m lucky I can go see Cats!


More dumb, asshole shithead evil at work.

The people who approached me about taking the photo are not dumb, asshole shitheads, and they are certainly not evil. What is evil, O Best Beloved, are fucking monolithic bureaucracies that prevent you from doing your GODDAMN JOB.

Yesterday, I was a cheery little tugboat, with a merry toot-toot and a shiny fresh coat of cherry red paint, dreaming my dreamy little dreams and getting my work done, all cheerily and adorably, out among the other cheery red tugboats. Toot-toot, I say!

Toot-fucking-toot, indeed. You see, that’s when the Universe picked my ticket, and suddenly I was transformed for a mere tugboat, to AN OLD TESTAMENT TUGBOAT, the kind that gets picked on by an angry and fickle TUGBOAT GOD.

The menu of my vexations is thus:

a) My largish company is owned by an even largerish company, a shadowy empire headquartered out beyond the Van Allen Belt. If one requires, say, a square of toilet tissue, one must launch a small messenger drone across the eternal cosmic night to the Jovian orbital requisitions and sundries platform. I am only slightly exaggerating. Well, I needed a laptop for this trip, so a month back, I thought “Fuckin’ a, I’ll send in my request to our shadowy overlords NOW and they will have plenty of time to do things correctly. Guess what? WRONG AGAIN, SHITHEAD. They fucked everything, providing a laptop to some other, no doubt bewildered Greg Mills in some other vassal company.
b) I’ve been waiting on a mortgage payment worth of expenses for two months. Endless unanswered emails to the finance people went unanswered, yet the same people sent a stream of hectoring emails my way about my time sheets. Strange. So I finally approached a sympathetic ear in upper management, and magically, my expenses are approved. It’s a happy ending, true, but in made me shudder at the arbitrariness of the universe. Okay, I admit I stare into the abyss, like, a lot, but I had thought I had reached the daily limits of my horror earlier in the day when I saw a pigeon with one foot eating garbage.
c) The thread of the day finally slipped into a singularity when trying to book my travel for this little trip. To control costs, the client wants us to use their travel service, but OUR travel service can get us better rates in NYC. After a fucking tesseract of phone calls, I managed to find airline tickets, a hotel room, and I think a she-goat. I know someone’s travel policy has been violated. If it was yours, I apologize.

The Tonsils The boy had them out. And his adenoids. And to date, the streptococci has been banished from out home. You see, we, La Famiglia, have been collectively been infected with Strep of various orifices something like 12 times in the past month. Seems the lad had preternaturally massive tonsils. They were big. All you had to do was look to the back of his throat, and there were what looked like two AA-size batteries wrapped in bubble gum.

That’s just not right. It’s freakish, really. And those bastard Steptococci LOVED ‘em.

So we had them sliced out like so much gristle, and subsequently we are pinkish in glow and robust in our general constitution. Owen’s speech is also easier to understand. It’s much less gloopy.

Wife is a lot calmer now, because in the past Owen has had fever-induced seizures, which, while not dangerous, are not fun.

I think the plan now is to glide into Christmas.

So how are you?