GIRLS ARE PRETTY

How The Mechanic Lost His Left Hand Day!

A sign is posted in the waiting room of the garage that reads as follows:

How the Mechanic Lost His Left Hand

The mechanic lost his left hand to try and frighten a woman he loved into not walking out on him. She had threatened to walk out on him before, but normally when he’d burst into tears and promise to drink less and work more she’d go along with it. This time she’d had enough, so in a panic, the mechanic turned on the blender and threatened to maim himself if she left. She dared him to go through with it, so he did. It took all of his fingers and most of the meat of his palm off. She ended up staying and drove him to the hospital, but then she left anyway six months later. The mechanic did not lose his hand while fixing a car. He’s a good mechanic and your car is in good hands.

When the mechanic comes out to tell you about his car, try not to look at his hook. He’ll notice you looking away and he’ll say, “I put that sign up a long time ago. She and I are on good terms now. She remarried and so have I.”

Let him see you cry, it’s okay. Let him see you cry, because as the bottom of the sign says, you’ll get 10% off if you cry for the love he lost and learned from.

Happy How The Mechanic Lost His Left Hand Day!

Be A More Depressed, Less Hairy You Day!

Today you got word of a new prescription drug that makes you more depressed but less hairy. You decided getting rid of all your dark brown arm-fuzz was worth the yawning chasm of misery you’d be throwing yourself into, so you ran out to your doc and demanded the pill immediately.

After three months on the pills, all your body hair will almost magically disappear, turning you into a smooth, sleek, pretty creature who can barely summon the energy to get out of bed in the morning. You’ll get a thrill out of moving your hand over your own skin, sliding it like an ice cube across a counter-top, and when you finally do get out of bed you’ll spend every minute bloated with dread at the thought of somehow finding a way to climb under the covers to get back into bed again. Your boyfriend says he loves it too, though you can’t understand how he could possibly find anything to love about you. You can’t understand how anyone could ever love anything. How?

After about a year you’ll stop taking the pills, not because you’ll be sick of being depressed, but because hairy will be in again.

Happy Be A More Depressed, Less Hairy You Day!

Part It Down The Middle Day!

Part your hair down the middle today for the very first time in your life and you’ll walk outside to find a Mercedes in your driveway instead of a Hyundai. Drive it to work where you’ll find you’re the President of the company instead of a middle-management toadie. Check your bank account and instead of a negative balance there will be a very positive one, like seven figures positive. Check your response to alcohol and discover it to be moderate and controllable. Check your demeanor at parties and find it to be gregarious. Ingest dairy and discover that you appear to be tolerant. You’ve disrupted the order of things. You’ve changed the part of your hair at age 46 and really turned things around for yourself while triggering a ripple effect that will engulf the planet in pestilence and rogue waves within as little as three months time. Why couldn’t you have just been happy with the way things were?

Happy Part It Down The Middle Day!

She Found Out You’re One Of Those Guys Who Throws A Ball Around The Office At Work Day!

You came home and half the closet was empty, nothing but bare hangers swinging on the rod. Her drawers had been ransacked. Her suitcases were gone. She clearly either took off in a hurry or someone made it look like she did. Part of you wants to call the police to report an abduction, but you’re worried that she simply found out that you’ve been cheating on her. Read the note she left on the fridge:

Cameron,

I’m sorry but I can’t do this anymore. It’s not because I don’t love you, I do. Or at least I did. It’s not because I’m scared of getting too committed. It’s not even because I found out that you cheat on me sometimes. I’ve known that for close to a year now and it’s something I think I can live with. What happened was today I was bored and I found myself perusing your work website, and I checked out the “Staff” link to see if there were any photos of you. I found one. Such a nightmarish one. One of you in your desk chair with your shirt sleeves rolled up, tossing a Nerf football to one of your co-workers. The caption read “Blowing off some of that 4 PM steam.”

I hope you’ll understand that I had to go. This isn’t the kind of image that one can sweep under the rug. Had I walked in on you cheating on me with one of my relatives, or murdering a small animal, or shaking hands with Karl Rove and then stuffing some bills into your pocket that he clearly slipped you during the handshake, I might be able to chalk it off as “just one of those things.” But not this. Had you told me when we meant that you were one of those guys who throws a ball around the office at work, I could have saved us both a lot of time by ending it immediately. At least I found out before we got married.

I hope you have a nice life and you won’t come looking for me. You should really stop throwing a football around the office by the way. It makes you look like you love, and I mean like really cherish, rape.

Best,

Lucille.

Happy She Found Out You’re One Of Those Guys Who Throws A Ball Around The Office At Work Day!

Kill The Boy Day!

Don’t just break up with the boy, end his life. Stick a knife in his voicebox and be sure he’ll never use it to call you in the middle of the night and trick you into sneaking away with him for another long weekend of forgetting all about the life you’re trying to make for yourself. You’re a professional lady, career-minded and a smart-dresser, and you don’t need a lowlife popping by and convincing you that 72 hours in his arms is more important than the rest of your 72 or so years on this earth.  Cut off his hands and throw them in the river so he can never use them to brush your hair away from your forehead again. Slice out his eyes and crush them under your business heels; they’ve hypnotized their last unwitting victim into getting naked at the slightest hint of a wink. Let him keep his penis because you’re not some kind of monster, but set his hair on fire, sand down his lips with a power sander and carve into his chest and stomach to rip out the muscles filling his pecs and abs with so much rock-hard steel. Once he’s in pieces and the pieces are nothing but slippery, ruddy mud, spend an evening remembering the good times. You’re not likely to find someone who so makes it happen for you again, not likely to find another Derrick again.

Happy Kill The Boy Day!

Dad’s Affair Day!

Leave your dad alone today. He’s sad because the woman he used to cheat on your mom with died. She was diagnosed two years ago. She called him last Spring and asked him if she could see him once more before she dies, but your dad refused. Even your mom said it’d be cool if he went and saw her. After all, they had a nine-year affair. Your dad was a big part of this woman’s life and she should get the chance to say goodbye, was your mom’s reasoning. But the revelation of the affair caused such a rift in their marriage that your dad just didn’t want to have any contact with her. Didn’t want to risk opening old wounds. Now she’s dead and not only is your dad in mourning, but your mom thinks less of him than ever, letting that woman die without saying goodbye like that. She’s not proud of the man she married today.

Happy Dad’s Affair Day!

Stop Her Day!

She’s about to choose something besides spending the rest of her life with you because she wants to be practical so race to the airport or death cult orientation or whatever and tell her she’s making a mistake. She’ll decide you’re right and she should be with you because you made her laugh once. Within two weeks of the two of you being a couple start acting really cold toward her. When she asks if you regret winning her back tell her no but continue to be cold and curt. You’ll never say it out loud but deep down you’ll know that you only fought to get her back because you didn’t want anyone else to have her. Now that she’s yours, you don’t remember why you wanted her so badly. In 18 months she’ll leave you for someone else. Play the victim.

Happy Stop Her Day!

Psychosexual Thriller Day!

Meet someone who may or may not be a killer but you don’t care because sex. When more bodies start popping up, get worried but also confused because is the sex getting better? Start to wonder if you’re the next body that’s going to be killed, or maybe you’ve been the one killing the bodies all along, though it really doesn’t matter either way because wow this sex is just really something. When you decide that maybe it’s time for you two to take a break, find yourself staring at your own reflection stretched along the broad side of a kitchen knife. Aroused but fighting it, manage to wriggle away but just barely, then at just the right moment get the upper hand. You’ll find yourself on top, in a position you two know very well except never before with a knife in the mix and does that make it hotter (yes)? You’ll be about to toss the knife away and leave it to the police when one last threatening gesture makes you bring the knife down in self-defense. Blood everywhere and no more sex but you discovered scary things about yourself so hooray for learning!

Happy Psychosexual Thriller Day!

Ski Weekend Day!

You’re really excited to have been invited to go on a ski weekend with your friends Jeff, Sally, Maurice and Paula because you’re pretty sure that ski weekends involve everyone gathered around in a cabin exposing their deep emotional core to each other just like in the Alan Alda movie The Four Seasons.

“Awwwww God sometimes I wonder if I ever felt a single thing,” you’ll scream as soon as you get inside the cabin, just before placing your suitcase on the ground.

“Jesus,” Jeff will say.

“Dude, are you all right?” Maurice will ask, hovering over you as you lay on your back with your legs up in the air like a baby.

“I need to be swaddled! I need to be swaddled in your friendship!”

Maurice and Paula will try to drag you up from the ground. Don’t let them.

“Swaddle me! People have given their love to me and I’ve rejected it. I just want to accept for once. Swaddle me in your emotional warmth!”

They’ll all go to the closet to take off their coats and discuss what to do.

Stand up and scream at the top of your lungs, “I HAVE NEEEEEEDS!!!”

Sally will come to you and she’ll hug you gently. Then she’ll ask if maybe this can wait until later in the evening.

“Alda didn’t pull this kind of crap until late Act 2 of Four Seasons. Think we can at least get some dinner in us first?”

Apologize and explain that you’ve never been on a ski weekend before, and tell them that you’re just so excited and oh God you’re going to let it fly again.

“NEEEEEEEEEEEDS!!!!!!”

Happy Ski Weekend Day!

Crossing Guard Who Can Tell When You’re Going To Die Day!

The reason the crossing guard cries every time you cross the street is because you’re going to die before you turn 26 and she knows it. She gets visions of when and how people are going to die when they step into her cross-walk. Something about surrendering your safety into her hands gives her a window into your future to the moment when not even she can protect you. She knows you’re going to die when you fall in the shower of a hotel room in Chicago where you’ll be staying for business. You’ll be found by a maid.

Today when you see her, tell her, “It’s not your fault. Fate is fate.”

She’ll wheel around on you and hiss, “But what if it wasn’t your fate until I saw it? What if my seeing it is what caused it? What if I’m taking years off the people I’m supposed to be protecting?”

You won’t know how to comfort her, which is too bad because she’ll just then jump in front of a bus whose driver won’t know to stop because she won’t have held up the sign telling him to stop. She didn’t want to go on living with the possibility that she was shortening the lives she was supposed to be guarding. If you’re thinking that this isn’t your fault, just know that she never would have felt so distraught if people like you, who are fated to die an early death, didn’t go crossing in her crosswalk forcing her to wrestle with the implications of her seeing your moment of passing. Way to make the crossing guard kill herself, clumsy.

Happy Crossing Guard Who Can Tell When You’re Going To Die Day!

Looks Like They Found Your Papier-Mâché Sculptures Of The Family Next Door Day!

When you pull onto your block you’ll see two police cars waiting outside your house. Your front door will be open and Kevin, your next-door neighbor, will be standing on your lawn, pointing at your house, irate.

Looks like they found your papier-mâché sculptures of the family next door.

Drive slow and savor these final few seconds of peace before you have to get out of your car and begin trying to explain yourself. You’ll have to detail to them who you were when you lived in Russia, how you were celebrated for your shocking papier-mâché representations of the life you and your fellow countrymen were living, how it became a common occurrence to spot yourself on the cover of a magazine for an interview you would have forgotten having given.

But after moving to America, you found yourself completely uninspired. Nothing about the suburban landscapes in which you passed your days seemed worthy of your artistic interpretation. Until Kevin and Mary and Lewis, Pamela and little Georgette Tohlmacher. moved in next door. Suddenly you couldn’t sculpt quickly enough. That family demanded your eye, your passion, and your skill. That family has inspired you to stay awake for 72 hours at a time, panicked that you might die or the world might end before you manage to channel your vision of the Tohlmacher family’s essence onto the chicken wire.

You know it will be difficult to explain to a man just trying to give his wife and children a good life why the house next door to his is filled to a room with dozens of sculptures of his flesh and blood. Especially difficult to explain will be the nudes. Though you used as your source only your imagination (except for the weekends in the summer when Kevin mowed his lawn shirtless), you are certain they won’t be very appreciative of the artist’s need to let his muse guide him where it will.

You’re at the house now. Time to get out of your car and make an appearance at your latest exhibition.

Happy Looks Like They Found Your Papier-Mâché Sculptures Of The Family Next Door Day!

Mary Jane Day!

You and your friends like to smoke Mary Jane. At first it was just to be cool, then you started to get addicted. One thing led to another, and now you’re running a human trafficking ring solely to get your next fix.

“I used to dream of growing up to become a great man. Instead I became a guy who forces innocent women into prostitution.”

Take another hit of Mary Jane, then try to bargain the Russian down to $12,000 per girl.

“Thirteen,” the Russian will say. “You wouldn’t be so short on money if you didn’t smoke so much Mary Jane.”

“If I didn’t smoke so much Mary Jane I wouldn’t be involved in this game at all. I would have been the president of the United States.”

You’ll start to cry, but the Russian won’t blink an eye. He’ll just take your money and load the girls onto your truck while you sob. He’s used to people crying while he does business with them, because he does a lot of business with people who smoke a lot of Mary Jane.

“It inspires sudden attacks of crippling regret in the people who smoke it,” the Russian will say to you as he pats you on the shoulder. “You should quit.”

You’ll be stunned that he could be so stupid. “No one can quit Mary Jane. One puff and you’re addicted for life. The only way I could ever quit is—”

The Russian will give you a look that says, “Yes, that’s what I mean. You should kill yourself. That’s what I mean by quit.”

“It is the only way to get out from under the weight of addiction to Mary Jane.”

Tonight, after the girls you bought are all safely chained up in a basement, you’ll finally, and for eternity, kick the habit.

Happy Mary Jane Day!

Travel Across The Country With Someone You Would Never In A Million Years Travel Across The Country With Day!

Whether it’s because the airport got snowed in or you got robbed and don’t have any ID or credit cards or just because you have trauma induced amnesia after being in one of those New York City elevators when it ate somebody, today you’re going to travel across the country with someone you would never in a million years travel across the country with. Here are your options:

The man who pushed the button on your father’s lethal injection: you’ll recognize him when he steals your cab, but you won’t be able to remember from where at first. Then it’ll come to you. You were eight and your father was strapped into the lethal injection machine and this is the guy who pushed the button. You remember his blank look directly into your eyes when your father (he murdered his boss) finally went still. Now he’s offering to share that cab he stole, and you do need to get going in a hurry…

The 50-year-old woman who has been bullying your daughter on Facebook: She’s clearly unhinged. She randomly picked your daughter as the target of an endless series of hateful Facebook wall posts, encouraging your daughter to commit suicide because according to her, your daughter would be doing everyone a favor by dying. You’ve involved the police and you’ve even appeared on television to discuss whether your high-profile civil lawsuit against her is viable. But right now she managed to flag down a fruit truck and there’s room for one more in the flatbed…

A man who looks exactly like you and, impossibly, is you: He’s you. But you’re staring at him and he’s physically occupying space right next to you outside of your body. But he’s you. There’s no need to even ask questions. There are duplicates for all of us and you’ve met yours. Now to decide whether wrapping your arms around his waist and riding all the way to California on the back of his motorcycle will cause the tapestry of commonly accepted reality to unravel…

Happy Travel Across The Country With Someone You Would Never In A Million Years Travel Across The Country With Day!

Plants And Rags Day!

Everything’s in boxes on a truck but you want to leave some evidence behind. She bought the ficus tree, the one you let die after she left. It looks like a stripped bicycle chained to a sidewalk signpost for five seasons, all spokes, rust brown and weaker than wind, filling the corner of the apartment with ruin.

Leave it for the new tenants to find so they can register a complaint with the landlord. “You said the apartment would be clean and ready for our move-in date but there is a corpse in the corner, a body left to rot.” Let them know that this is hallowed ground, a battlefield where a brave boy and girl fought for a love they once believed in, fought way beyond the point when the war was over.

Let them complain. Let them call the landlord to come and clean up the body. Someone needs to know that something died within these walls. Your love was too big, its destruction too important to be swept under the rug. There should be an inquiry. The people need to know.

Happy Plants And Rags Day!

Kevin And Lucy Day!

Today everyone named Kevin was meant to be with someone named Lucy, but the Kevins all chose to marry someone named Sabrina instead, just because the Sabrinas had fun underpants.

Everyone named Lucy sometimes think about everyone named Kevin, and they want to kill all the Sabrinas.

Everyone named Lucy will take a glance down at their own underpants, and they’ll see it fraying at the waist-line, and the elastic around the thighs will be a little looser than when they bought them.

Everyone named Lucy will say, “That’s it!” Then everyone named Lucy will rush out to an underpants store and buy new pairs of very sexy underpants that are nothing but fun.

When they get home, everyone named Lucy will gather all their old underpants into a brown paper bag and get ready to incinerate them. Staring into the bag, everyone named Lucy will realize that buying new underpants isn’t the solution.

“New underpants fray,” everyone named Lucy will whisper into their bags of old underpants. “Mine always do. Sabrina’s surely did too.”

Everyone named Lucy will realize that everyone named Kevin probably watched the underpants worn by everyone named Sabrina turn to so much ratty ruined rags within months of getting married.

“Now he’s stuck with her,” everyone named Lucy will say.

The Lucys will feel sorry for the Kevins. The Lucys will feel sorry for the Sabrinas too. The Lucys will try to feel sorry for themselves, but they’ll be too overwhelmed with sadness for the Kevins and the Sabrinas.

“He just wanted to marry someone with fun underwear, and she just wanted someone to find a reason to marry her,” all the Lucys in the world will say. If you’re outside and it’s windy, you’ll probably hear some of them.

Happy Kevin And Lucy Day!