The past few years have been surreal. 2018 is just fucking bizarre.
As I write this, I am watching breaking news that Michael Avenatti has been arrested for domestic abuse. Which doesn’t shock me or anything. The fact that our reality includes an attorney who is defending a porn star’s right to discuss having sex with the current president just a few months after his son was born is fucking weird. Well, and all the treason. That’s pretty fucking weird, too.
Watergate almost seems quaint.
Life is weird now and I don’t think that is going to change any time soon, so we might as well embrace it. But all the weirdness doesn’t have to stem from US politics. We need some balance. I need some balance.
So, this is what I want to do. I want you to tell me a fucked up story. Maybe, not your most fucked up because I know how fucked up my most fucked up story is and I’m not telling you that shit.
I will, however, tell you a completely fucked up story.
I was 14 years old in 1977. There was a 16 year old boy named James who I loved. He had wavy hair like Robert Palmer, a wispy little mustache and a tattoo of a panther on his forearm because of course he did.
I was friends with his younger sister, Margie.
James and Margie had the party house.
In the year that I lived in that neighborhood, I never once saw their mother. I think she worked double shifts as a truck stop waitress, but that’s probably not right, because if you asked me what any of my childhood friend’s mother did for a living, I would answer “truck stop waitress”. Either way, I never saw her.
The living room was usually filled with kids smoking cigarettes and weed while listening to music. I loved hanging out there.
It was a little dangerous. They had no supervision at all. The bad kids hung out there. Robbie, Richie and Rodney Harrington hung out there. They made John 
Bender from The Breakfast Club look like an Amish kid. The real draw though was James.
As much as I loved being there, there was a drawback.
There was an adult in the house.
James and Margie had an aunt who lived with them. Their Aunt Shirley.
I have no idea what their aunt’s ailment was, but she was bed ridden and nearly catatonic.
I would say completely catatonic, but she did communicate.
When Aunt Shirley wanted a cigarette, she would call out. Not words or anything, just a series of sounds.
The rule of the house was, we took turns. Everyone had to take a turn feeding Aunt Shirley her Kools.
Aunt Shirley’s room was at the front of the house. Her room was dark with just a hospital bed, night stand and lacy crocheted curtains.
I hated taking my turn. I found the experience to be profoundly disturbing. Aunt Shirley couldn’t light or hold her own cigarette, so you would have to light her Kool for her and then hold the cigarette to her lips.
I will never, as long as I live, forget how it felt to feel my fingers pull slightly toward her face when she would draw on the cigarette.
I used to have nightmares about it but they stopped over 20 years ago. Thank the stars.
Unfortunately, that isn’t as weird as this story gets.
So, this one time, when it was my turn, I fed aunt Shirley her cigarette, but wasn’t paying attention and the ash dropped off the edge of the cigarette right between her nose and her upper lip. I watched for a second, mesmerized and horrified, watching little bits up ash go up her nose as she breathed in. Then, I leaned over and blew the ash from her face.
Of course, at that precise moment, James walked in and started laughing. “Michelle’s trying to kiss Aunt Shirley.”
This was over 40 years ago, so my memory is somewhat hazy, but I am pretty sure that was the last time I gave Aunt Shirley a cigarette and I’m pretty sure that is what squashed my crush on James.
So, there you go. Don’t you feel better now? Not a goddamn thing about politics, but still, terribly fucked up.
It’s all about balance.
Hit me. Tell me your weird stories. I have got to think about something else for a while.
Photo courtesy of realworkhard.
That is seriously creepy! I don’t have a fucked up story right now but I certainly appreciate yours!
It really was creepy. Enough that I can still recall how the room looked.
My brother and I were James and Margie.
We had no aunt but we had a dog that always had a beer with his Thai food once a week. The dog lived for 16 years.
My parents were not poor, my mother was just drunk all the time.
I never had to go to school if I did’nt want to.
But the most weard thing: I am a fairly normal person nowadays! People who don’t know my story would say I am a fucking boring person.
It’s funny, the way we end up as adults. My two younger sisters and I had the same parents, but we ended up so very different.
A Thai food eating dog…with beer. Yeah, that’s odd. 🙂 xo
I don’t know if this qualifies, but I still shudder to remember it.
I am older than you, so this would have been in maybe 1954, 4th grade. The gym uniform for girls was white blouse, navy shorts. All the girls just wore a skirt to school over the shorts, then slipped out of the skirt to go to gym. Leaving their skirts at their desks.
I was always kind of elsewhere, dreamy, so on this occasion when all the girls took off their skirts, I promptly took off my dress. I had forgotten it was gym day and that I wasn’t wearing shorts. So there I stood, surprised, in my underwear & slip, while the class hooted and laughed around me.
I was sent to the principal’s office, where I waited, shivering, in my slip for what seemed a very long time. I expected to be punished, but eventually the principal came in, bringing my dress, and just said, “Don’t do that again.” (I enjoy wondering what they were discussing. By now I was known as a space-head.)
Some months later I was chatting with a new kid at the Conservatory, where we both had music classes. When I told him which elementary school I went to, he said, “Oh, you must know all about that girl who…”. I shook my head & said I had never heard such a thing.
HAHAHAH omg that is funny that it became legend! And yes, that qualifies.
“Cool” older guys are always the thing aren’t they – until they aren’t. I was 12 (looked like I was 16) and my friend was 14 (and also looked at least 16). My friend lived next door to a girl who had some sort of hippy/cool/older guy friends. One drove a blue van with an American flag hanging behind the front seats. Occasionally we would be at the girl’s house when the guys would come over; occasionally the guys would stop on their way to her house and chat with us as we walked the never-ending loop around our subdivision. We thought we were so cool because these 20 year old guys even noticed us. Then one day the girl next door told us that the one with the blue van was arrested for raping a girl and murdering two guys. He was convicted and received the death penalty (later rescinded). That was fucked up.
Holy shit, that is completely fucked up.
I have a fucked-up recurring theme in my life – suicide. I won’t get into the successful exits from the world, as that is not the kind of distraction anyone needs. But the friend who failed is worth talking about. When I was a teen, my dad invited a writer friend over to dinner. He was only about eight years older than me. He had a deep, sexy voice, long hair and a face like Alan Rickman. He was also brilliant and witty, in a dark, sarcastic way. Of course, I was smitten. We maintained contact over the years. Skip ahead fifteen years or so and we connect via an AOL chatroom. He’s on the east coast and I’m in LA. We’re both single and lonely. Online flirting leads to long phone calls and then a few visits. It’s hot and fun. The next move would have had to be someone moving somewhere. I wasn’t leaving LA and he had just bought a house back east, so that was that. I broke it off and got the best breakup letter ever. It said simply, “Fuck you. You swine.” We lost contact after that, and I met my husband. Fast forward again. I get a phone call that he had attempted suicide (not because of me). He had always been dark and fragile, so this news was not a complete surprise. He had shot himself in the temple. But he didn’t die. The bullet took out one eye and his optical center. He had blinded himself. When he regained consciousness, he no longer wanted to die (fun fact: most people who survive jumps from bridges, etc, report that they regretted it instantly). He now lives in a nursing care facility and we talk about once a month about movies, politics and writing. He’s still funny, annoyed at living in a nursing care facility, but glad to be alive. I guess the point of the story is, as bad as it gets, as much as it seems like a good idea, don’t check out.
I’ve read that about suicide survivors. I’m glad your friend is still around.
Cancer is fucked up.
That it is. I hope you are well.
Chemo is also fucked up.
There was a smiley face on that last one there. 🙂
One day at a time.
I am pulling for you. xoxoxoxox
Chemo is fucked up. Chemo is also fucking BORING. I don’t mean the side effects or the actual drugs–I mean sitting there and letting poison drip into your veins. And chemo brain is fucked up. Once when I was getting treatment I had to go to the bathroom and then couldn’t find my way back. A nurse recognized me and scolded me (jokingly) then led me back to my room.
Good luck.
Warning if you’re homophobic please don’t read.
In university my TA invited me out on a date. Me. Ok. So cool meal in a cool place.
Him? Want to go to a gay bar? Me? Sure. Btw. Always the best dance music.
Date night ended in him picking up a man and me picking up a woman.
Went back to new boy’s place. We tripped over his hanging plant. Killed it. And tried to cover up the evidence.
Every time we were single we would hook up. The woman not the man. Lol. We always knew we wouldn’t be together. But when we were? Epic.
Not sure if it counts. And glad FB didn’t exist back in the 80’s
That, or I’m glad I’m not in politics.
Hugs to all the people that have stupid stories.
Well, my feeling is if someone is homophobic, they should just keep that shit to yourself. I LOVE your story. xo
I feel like this could pretty much apply to any situation going on these days…
https://twitter.com/Pottell/status/1063057301635059717
(watch with sound off)
THat is awesome!! HAHAHA..OMG her expressions.
I just told my grown daughter this story, and she’s 33, so it must be a fucked up story. It’s about the night I went partying, creating havoc and eluding the cops and having a grand time.
My boyfriend at the time lived off campus and on the way to his house for a party, I asked him to stop to get some M&M’s because I had the munchies. He had to pee and couldn’t wait, and 7-11 wasn’t big on sharing the facilities, so he went around back and before he could get it back in his pants, he got a ticket for indecent exposure.
We get to the party, which is spilling onto the front porch and the street. After about an hour, the cops show up. I answer the door, and go to get the boyfriend’s roommate, a former bouncer from NJ. Bad idea. He gets in the cop’s face, I sneak out the back door and start walking the two miles back to campus. I heard later, the bouncer got a ticket for noise, or disturbing the peace or some such nonsense.
On the way, a guy on a motorcycle whom I recognized from campus asks if I want a ride. Sure. What could possibly go wrong? Not a half a mile down the road, we get pulled over for me not wearing a helmet. I slip away while the cop is talking to the driver, and pick my way through the dark shadows in people’s yards, stopping to pee against a tree. The cop who pulled over the motorcycle drives by and I slide behind the tree just in time to avoid detection. I was a fucking ninja.
A few weeks later, all three guys wound up in court the same day. I felt responsible for their troubles, so baked them some cookies.
HAHAHAHA THAT is an amazing story. You hoodlum, you.
My weird stories are all too long. I’ll try one.
I was walking the dogs when we turned to go behind the pool. They both sat down because in front of the was a translucent globe about four feet across floating 18-24 inches above the grass, looking like a most glode colored soap bubble that was round and motionless.
The dogs weren’t afraid and neither was I. The ball opened wide like Pac-Man but wider, silently and I could see through to the grass on the inside. Then the “mouth” closed and I could still make out the grass because it grew less substantial, dimmer and dimmer until it disappeared like it was never there.
True story. I WAS awake when it happened. Lol. We finished our walk, went back in the house and I didn’t say a word about any of it to anyone.
Okay, THAT is freaking weird, man.
Well, let’s see: How about the time I started smoking again? I never smoked a cigarette until I was in my thirties, when I got a job driving a delivery truck and was living with my retired friend who smoked Winstons and drank coffee a lot.
I grew up in Humboldt County, so I did smoke other things.
I was working at a natural foods warehouse when I started having pains in my side that didn’t seem muscle-related and wouldn’t go away.
So I stopped smoking, and they went away.
Then one day we visited our friend Glenn, and when we got home the front door had been kicked in and my electric guitars (a thinline hollowbody Yamaha SA2100 and a ’67 SG) were gone, along with Briana’s Fender Jazz bass and our computer.
While we were sitting around waiting for the cops to show up, Briana lit up a Camel, and I said, “Can I have one of those?”
And just like that, I was smoking again.
I finally did quit, after the pains showed up again and my liver swelled up and kept me from working for three days.
Haven’t wanted a cigarette since, and that was 2007, so it’s been 11 years. And yes, it was Kools that I smoked, 100s to be specific.
Did you recover your stuff?
Nope. I miss the fuck out of that SG, too. About a month later my friend John brought over a weird guitar that I bought off of him for a hundred bucks. It’s a Yamaha nylon string electric, and I still have it. Then my friend Rob showed up with two guitars, a Les Paul copy and a Jay Turser hollowbody, and just gave them to me.
After I bought the black Les Paul which is my main guitar now (with the money I took in lieu of a vacation) I gave the Les Paul copy to a girl who had her guitar stolen, and last year when Sara moved back to Alabama I gave her the Turser hollowbody. She is a symphony-level violinist and had some nerve damage to her right wrist, and needed a stringed instrument to play that didn’t need to be bowed.
Those were the second set of guitars I lost to burglaries, both in the nicer neighborhoods I’ve lived in. I’ve since adopted a “get to know your neighbors” policy, and it seems to be working. So far.
But I obsessively looked for that SG on Ebay for years…
Wow. Too bad it never showed up.
In high school I was at a party with my boyfriend. We wanted some intimate time and the house we were at had a camper, so…. ( You know how in high school everyone was indiscriminate about where to do “it”? Well some of us were…….. well I was). Anyhoo we snuck out to the camper and there was a fold out bed conveniently folded out. So right after we were done we sort of both leaned towards the wall. Not good. You know what happened next. The bed, of course, flipped towards the wall trapping us like a sandwich. Luckily or unluckily we we both skinny and my boyfriend was tall and lanky. He was able to work the bed upright again and we didn’t have to call for help. It was kind of horrifying for a bit.
HAHAHA omg that is hilarious.
One day while cleaning the bathtub, I ran out of cleaner so used 2 different kinds, I know I know. I walk back in the bathroom and my tub is the color of rust. It took me two hours of scrubbing to get it clean. The fumes were fucking great! So I take a shower. I drop my razor, so I jump and slip [because, you know that plastic disposable Bic could have cut an artery!]. I fall out of the tub taking the shower curtain with me, slide on my bare ass on the cold linoleum and hit my head on the sink. Then, I open my front door, yes I’m dressed, to get a rug I was airing out. A fucking cute as hell, it really was, baby opossum is sitting on the bush right outside my door and he/she hisses and charges at me! That was a fucked up day! I discovered bourbon that night.
HOLY HELL!!! I don’t know what you did in your last life…but Karma came calling, didn’t it?
Now this one about had me piss myself , laughing so hard .
Hahahah YAY for laughing!
I have so many f’d up stories but since yours involved cigarettes I’ll tell this one. My brother and I hung out up the street at Cathy’s house because her mother basically didn’t give a F what we did. We would go there before school, drink coffee, smoke cigarettes and get high. Crazy to think I was an honor student since I got high every morning but that’s another story. Anyway, Cathy’s mother constantly had a cigarette hanging out of her mouth and NEVER flicked the ashes off. I don’t know how she did it but she would cook dinner and move around the kitchen with three+ inches of ash just dangling there but never falling off. We would sit there stoned and mesmerised just waiting for the ashes to fall into the eggs or whatever she was cooking but they never did. That’s the tamest f’d up story ever but it still makes me laugh when I think about it.
BTW, I saw a statement from the lawyer’s ex wife saying he never threatened or put a hand on anyone in his life. If his ex wife says that I find it hard to believe he did anything. Sounds like a set up to me but who really knows. It’s a crazy world we’re living in. I have had to limit my exposure to the news because it makes me sick to hear the things going on. I just can’t take it. Stay safe and think happy thoughts. Cheers!
Haha, that’s a great story! Yeah, I read that about Avenatti as well. I also read that the little douche bag who tried to frame Mueller for sexual assault is involved. Jacob Wohl. That little asshole belongs in prison.
My story begins with a single life-long friend (I mean … our great grandfathers started a church together 100+ years ago), co-worker and next door neighbor. Yes, she is one person.
She, along with my then husband (my second) and I all worked together. You know where this is going.
She has a Type 1 Diabetic child who was an adorable 5-year-old little girl at the time. Her family was all out of town for Thanksgiving so I offered to babysit her the Wednesday night before. This involved me counting carbs, checking her sugar levels and injecting her insulin. This was happening the first week we had moved into our brand new home next door to her.
Thanksgiving day happened with my in-laws all here.
The Saturday after, my now ex and I were looking for a storage unit and I had left my phone at home. I asked to use his to call around and he reluctantly handed it to me. When I was done, instead of leaving in the console as he always did, he put it back in his pocket. I thought to myself that it was weird.
Later that day he had to go cover a football game. He went next door to “check the weather” (before we all had smart phones and our internet had not been set up for our home computer). When he came back, he was getting ready and got in the shower.
I could hear his phone going off and thought it could be his folks who were going to go with him. I couldn’t find his phone. It was always on a stand next to his wallet etc. When I found it, it was underneath his socks inside a bin. I then saw the messages from my friend/neighbor/co-worker. Not good.
I flung open the shower and told him to “Get the fuck out of my house!” while showing him his phone. He swore nothing was going on. I told him that I would find out and walked out of the house. I calmly knocked on her door and her daughter answered. Again, I calmly asked if I could speak to her mom. We went to a room and closed the door. I asked what was going on and she said “Nothing. Nothing is going on. And it stops now.” (Hmmmm…if nothing is going on, then why does it stop? But I digress.) I
asked her to please explain that to my husband and she came over. He was dressed and waiting. Crying, apologies ensued. We moved on. Then I get a call from our office manager the next week. Seems there were over 5,000 texts in one month for EACH of them. This was before unlimited texting – about $900 of texts between them … on the company phones! They did not get fired. They paid back the fees and we moved on. Sort of.
She left the company after almost two years.
About 4 years later I’m needing our phone info to set up something and asked our manager to see the bill for the i.d. Unlimited texting was now on the plan, but they were still itemizing the calls/texts. And – since we had been friends before we worked together – I had her other phone number. Yep. The texting had begun or quite possibly never ended. I didn’t have to go back to check the past two years to know. I asked him about all the texts again and he finally admitted that he loved her and not me. He moved out and as soon as the divorce was final – he moved in with her. Right. Next. Door.
Now, that isn’t even the most fucked up thing about this long post.
What is, you ask? I still miss her friendship more than I’ll ever miss my ex!
That is super fucked up and I totally get you missing the friendship! I mean, that is a loooooong friendship right there. I’m sorry that happened to you. 🙁
Hey! new to your blog. Fun first day of reading. haha. I have a pretty fucked up story but not enough room here and I can’t edit myself enough. Let’s just say this. It involved the most bizarre, huge, olddddd af and haunted hotel I ever stayed in somewhere in Indiana. Weirdest named place – French Lick. seriously. And I was scared. I mean I was SCARED by stuff that happened there. I had no idea the place was haunted when I checked in and I ended up staying on the phone all night with my husband back at home after I stupidly fell asleep. That’s when things got weird.
Wanna hear something funny? I’ve stayed at French Lick. It was in the 80s. I thought the hallways looked like they were from the Shining
OMG You are the first person who’s ever heard of it much less stayed there too. Is that place not the CREEPIEST you have ever seen outside of The Stanley Hotel where The Shining was filmed?! I refuse to ever go back there again after that crazy crazy night. yuck.
It was so long ago, over 30 years ago. I do remember it being super creepy, though.
Must say this post has been a hoot to lurk! I’ve been refreshing the page for a couple days now. Those are some great stories right there. Thanks / commiserations.
There are some great stories!
This isn’t that fucked up and I’m late to the party anyway, but here goes: one night I drank an entire bottle of Jack Daniel’s. There are various reasons for this–it was partly intentional, partly not paying attention, which is fucked up in its own way.
Fortunately I was surrounded by good friends and twenty-five years later I’d thank them again and add that, given my behavior that night, I deeply appreciated the fact that they still wanted me to live.
This was in college and the next morning a couple of my friends were sitting in the dining hall when I strolled in, smiling and whistling, filled a plate with a mountain of scrambled eggs, and left.
I have no memory of that. And I have no idea what became of the scrambled eggs.
Yep, that’s fucked up. I think I was at that party.