Everybody Outta the Pool

Today is the final day of spring break week from the big obnoxious university. I'm in Phoenix with my fiance Scott, and this is my last visit. Because next time I come here, I won't be a visitor. I'll be moving in. This is the weirdest feeling in the world. I truly feel as though I'm in full jettison mode from one planet to another. More on that as the panic ripens.

The point right now is, the pool has been too damned cold to swim in all week. I've done my best. The water temperature, to be really comfortable and cool and refreshing and delicious is 86 degrees. On the hottest day this week that I tried, tried to get into the water, it was 70 degrees. But I desperately wanted to swim.

I stepped cautiously onto the first concrete step in the pool. This means that only my feet were in the water. At least they had been my feet 5 seconds before. Now they were frozen fish fillets turning vein-blue and pulsating like the penises of madmen. I don't know how those particular penises pulsate. I just wanted to say "the penises of madmen." It's been a dream of mine.

No big deal. I was still gutsy. I wanted to swim. Swimming would perhaps offset the 7 billion calories I'd taken in from the masterful cooking Scott does for the wretch that is me. The wretch who enters her own kitchen only to feed the cat but is quick to gobble up any scrumptious treat the fiance slaps on the table.

I was going to the next step down. Ready, ready...GO.

I did it. I was in up to the knees. My breathing was rapid and LaMaze-like. The penises of the madmen were flailing for life in the arctic acid bath. I started to hallucinate. I saw a legion of mutated fruit flies lined up on the edge of the pool. They were the size of cantaloupes and rubbing their hairy fly-paws together in grim mockery of me. I was freezing, freezing, freezing. I saw the spirit of Nell Carter step out from behind the poolhouse. "Get on in dat water, girlfriend! Don't you be no baby-ass!" I started to compliment her on her attractive muu-muu but just then my ovaries launched up from my pelvis and ricocheted off my brain-pan before they shot out of my nostrils and into the water, slicing through the yellow blow-up raft and leaving two puncture wounds that may as well have come from a Loch Nessian sea snake.

It occurred to me that the water was too cold.

Scott, brave guy that he is, decided to be a man and jump into the deep end. I have never heard the howl of a bludgeoned coyote, but the sound that seeped from his mouth must have been very close. We are still waiting for his testicles to return home. They sent a postcard from the high desert mountains where they landed. It said (they are fond of Pig Latin) "Uck-fay ou-yay, astard-bay!" I just love getting postcards.

They're Breeding

I travelled today. A long, frightfully unpleasant mixture of psychotic cab drivers and missed flights. After 16 hours of sojourning, finally my plane landed in Phoenix. I had noticed two pregnant women sitting in front of me, both maybe 25-ish, both looking 5 or 6 months bulbous. Both were wearing pink T-shirts. On one shirt: "Make mine a girl!"

I had not heard them speak during the flight, because of the noise of the jet. I now thank God for that. Because when we were waiting for the plane doors to open and release us, PFSG (Pregant Former Sorority Girl) #1 asked PFSG#2

"So, like, what do you think of Lily" (pronounced Leh-leeeee) "for a name?"

#2: "Oh, that's like so cuuuute!"

#1: "It was my grandma's name, but I can't remember if it was her first name or her middle one."

#2: "Oh."

silence

#1: "But it's like, waaaay too popular..."

silence

#1: "But then, maybe my baby will be popular!"


I don't know what came after that, because I was using a fire extinguisher as a battering ram against the tiny innocent oval window of the jet, seat 26A.

Another Mensa Vote for Sorority Girls

On our giant campus, you can almost always locate a couple of sorority girls shaking their donation cans, piercing the ozone with their shrill, nasally, needle-y, cheese-grater-on-the-eardrum voices, begging for change for some wonderful philanthropic cause that will look like a sweet glistening bon-bon on their surfacey, meaningless resumes.

This is what I heard coming out of the glittery, lip-glossed, overlicked mouth today:

[shake shake shake, sound of coins in a can]

"Help support cancer!!!!!"

[shake shake shake]

"Help support can--- um, I mean, Give money to cancer!"


I am forming a plan to leave the planet.

Candy's Gotta Rant Now

I've been gone awhile. No particular reason.

OK, that's a lie. I had a deep meltdown and turned into a giant pinata to be beaten by the unholy bat of the world. The world of too damned much to do and no time to take a deep breath. The kind of breath that pre-teen girls take when they focus on the frail whispers of brown fuzz gracing the weak chin of Justin Timberlake. Who, by the way, is not "bringing sexy back." But he is effectively representing wussyboys who don't get what sexy is to begin with.

Which brings me to another little nugget I've happened upon in the grim back alleys of cable TV. (The E! Network to be precise.) It has affected me as much as Meerkat Manor did, but not in a good way.

The show is called "Girls Next Door" and is a "reality" TV show about what really goes on inside the holy sanctity of the Playboy Mansion. Hugh Hefner. He is, to be frank, a festering concoction of bubbling pus and all things foul in the dampness of the solar system.

Perhaps I judge him too harshly. I should be more accepting of a self-absorbed 80-year-old man living with 3 girlfriends, all in their 20's. Actually, one of them is 20. All three are bleached blond, the kind of alarming, flaxen, cornea-blasting Barbie doll platinum that says "No, as a matter of fact I can't read."

The three Hefner babes are named Holly, Bridget and Kendra. I hate that I know this. I hate that my memory was instantly seared with this information the very first time I happened onto "Girls Next Door" when I was trying to find Comedy Central.

I also hate that Hugh Hefner smirks with confidence that these three women would still be living with him, putting up with his demand for multiple girlfriends, and willfully mounting the brittle pile of gag-tastic sticks that he is even if he weren't a multi-multi-millionaire and letting them live in a giant mansion with round-the-clock servants. Of course they would. How do I know this? Because when I was 20 it was my dream to someday be fondled each morning by a snaggletoothed old bastard in a chintzy satin smoking jacket, and to end my days listening to the creaking of his hip joints just before he slumped toward a money shot that emitted a sad puff of prehistoric dust-mites into my nether regions. I would then rest my head on his concave chest, that sexy old saucer sled of pruny flesh made even more delectable by the gray hairs curling around the chain of his gold necklace.

This is every 20-year-old girl's dream. Ask them.

I hate that enough people are intrigued by Hugh Hefner that this show is now in its third season. But then, there is the intellectual facet of the show. When Hef took "the girls" to New York City, the trio of them stood staring in amazement at the Statue of Liberty, and one of them asked "Was the Statue of Liberty a real person?" Yes, bitch, she was. This is actually her. She was homely and big-boned and no suitable coffin could be found, so they dipped her in metal and stood her ass up right here.

When Kendra's mother and grandmother came to visit her at the mansion, even her damned grandmother was too young for Hef. But oh how grandma likes him. "He treats us just like family," she says. Of course he treats you well. It is only good form to be kind to a woman in her 60s when you're utilizing her nubile granddaughter's various orifices for your Uncle Badtouch spittle-drenched pleasure.

The rumor now is that Hef might settle down and marry the most devoted of the three: Holly. She wants to have his baby. More than anything in the world. It would be sweet. When little Hef or Heffie, Jr. comes home from kindergarten, they can go visit Daddy's freeze-dried head in the jar on the coffee table. Hef, Sr. will lick his dehydrated, burlap lips and ask if there will be any little school friends coming by to visit.

When I told my 84-year-old mother about this show and about Hefner's girlfriends, she said "I'll bet his old dinger's rotted off by now." A fitting end for an overused old dipstick that should've been retired with mirror balls. Which I hear is his latest prosthestic device.