New Thing #69, dudes!

I suppose, since this is New Thing #69, it should be something sexual, but since I ain't gettin' any, y'all are gonna have to make do with a non-sixty-nine-ish New Thing.

But my Sixty-ninth New Thing is still pretty cool:

I met a fan.

Yes, you read that right:

I MET A FAN! How cool, right?

Okay, here's how it went down. Last night, I went to a party at my second (and last) ex-girlfriend Gina's house. It was another High School Friends reunion, except now that we're hanging out again more frequently I suppose we can't really call these get-togethers reunions anymore, and it wasn't just old friends from high school, there were new peeps there last night as well. Anyway, this was our second Game Night. I was kind of late (kind of? okay, try: last to arrive) and people were, um, buzzed by the time I got there. Which explains the "raising of the roof" hollas (is that a word) (I'm trying to be gangsta, but I'm not sure if "hollas" is a word) (but would gangstas worry if it was a word? hells, no--they would just use) (therefore, fuck that worrying shit, these bitches was hollasing) when I arrived.

Okay, so, before I met my fan, actually, well, the first thing I did when I got to the party, was eat about seven deviled eggs (made by my second [and last] ex-girlfriend Gina's fiance Matt) because deviled eggs are perhaps the most delicious fucking thing ever invented.

(They're so delicious that I had a seriously difficult time spelling "delicious" just now. I was all "delishious?" Um, no. Then I was like "delishus?" Way wrong. And then I was like, "delitious?" And then I was like, "dude, seriously?" And then I was totally, "am I having a stroke right motherfucking now?" And then I was like, "delicious!" And then, I swear, I was like, "wait, delicious with a 'c'?" And then there was this other part of me that was all, "dude, delicious with a 'c.'" And then I resisted the urge to check dictionary.com because I wanted to trust that other part of me. And then I spent a few moments being sad that I don't ever use a real dictionary anymore, I just use the cyber one. And then I wondered how long it would be before computers took over the world with their superior brain power and turned all of us puny little humans into slaves. But then I took solace in the fact that cockroaches are going to outlast us all and manymany years [manymany beats] after we're all gone and the computers are all gone, there will be giant cockroaches roaming the planet, which is kinda cool if you think about it. I mean, sad that humans won't be around any more, but this is a couple of million years from now and just think about a cockroach the size of an SUV and you've gotta admit it's pretty dang cool. And then I thought about our eventual extinction a little bit more, except I actually [honestly!] just typed the word "distinction" just now instead of the word "extinction," which is further proof that I recently had an undiagnosed stroke in the middle of the night, but then I realized that "distinction" was completely not the word I meant and I went back and replaced it with "extinction," so, anyway, back to what I was thinking about before I was thinking about my undiagnosed stroke, I was thinking about our eventual extinction and that made me think about all of the kids in our world that need parents and it made me mad that gay couples can't get married and therefore have such a hard time adopting, and that made me wish that people would stop having so many dang babies and that they would adopt more [because we've got so many dang babies that need you!], and then I was mad at Britney Spears for about thirty seconds, I was mad at her and Kevin's apparent inability to recognize [1] the need to take their child to the hospital when he has a motherfucking skull fracture and [2] the need to wear condoms in order to lesson the likelihood of any more Spears-Federlines running around our fine city eating Doritos and drinking Jack and Coke, and then [after thirty seconds] I decided to let go of my anger at Britney and to fantasize some more about adopting lots of Chinese babies with my own Harry Greenblatt, and then, suddenly, every single word in this paragraph looked like it was spelled wrong except for "delicious." Finally, now, after all of these words, "delicious" looks right, yes, motherfucking right.)

So after I ate seven of these de-lish-eeee-ous (I don't mind spelling it wrong when it's a choice) deviled eggs, I ate a couple of theses scrumdiddleiumptious (spelled correctly) cherry tart thingies (they were really good) (I love maraschino cherries)

(if I could get all of my daily vitamins and nutrients from maraschino cherries, I'd be a happy man) that my friend Lane (who I've known since I was fifteen, but whom I've never dated) (and who's going to be mad at me for spelling her name "Lane" and for not spelling it "Lanie," which is how it's pronounced, but it is spelled Lane on her driver's license and I have always thought that Lane is a super cool name and that Lane without the "i" is a super cool spelling of said super cool name and that you can still say it with the "ee" sound at the end even if you don't spell it with the "i") made.

(That's Lane on the right, Gina on the left.)

So after I ate the scrumdiddleiumptious cherry tart thingies, Fiona, one of Gina's friends who I've never met before, comes up to me and says, "I never leave comments."

And I'm like, "huh? what?"

And then she continued: "You wouldn't know me because I never leave comments, but I read your blog and when you walked in I immediately recognized you and I've never met anyone before who I already knew from a blog before meeting them. I'm your number one fan. You're like a celebrity."

(Okay, she didn't say the "I'm your number one fan" thing, and she didn't say that "you're like a celebrity" thing either, but I'm allowed to embellish because I'm not talking about having half of my teeth pulled out of my mouth without novocaine and I'm admitting my embellishments.)

But she still acted like she was meeting a celebrity, and even though I was beginning to feel slightly nauseous (which I want to spell "naucious") after having eaten so many dang deviled eggs and cherry tarts, it was still pretty cool to have a stranger come up to me and be like "I know you from your blog!"

(That's Fiona, my #1 Fan, in the center of the picture. That's Gina on the right, and that's Gina's friend Moe, who I also met last night, but who [as far as I know] doesn't read my blog, on the left.)

Oh, and (since BonBon McBonBon and Babes McPhee have started calling me Kiki Longpost, I figure I might as well really embrace the name), one last thing: Gina gave me the most awesomest gift last night. Check it out:

"The Best of Gilda Radner: SNL" on DVD. I had "The Best of Gilda Radner: SNL" on VHS when I was a kid and whenever I felt down about something, I always knew that watching "The Best of Gilda Radner: SNL" (henceforth TBOGR:SNL) would make all of my troubles go away. And it always worked. No matter what. If I didn't get cast in a play and I was upset about it, I would put TBOGR: SNL into the tape player and I suddenly didn't care about that play anymore because I knew there would always be more plays to audition for. If it started raining and I couldn't play outside anymore, it didn't matter because I knew I had TBOGR: SNL. If one of the school bullies decided to chase me around the playground for the entire lunch period, threatening to beat me up (and, to be honest, this only happened once) I knew that, whether I got beaten up or not (and I didn't), at least I could go home and watch TBOGR: SNL afterwards.

She's brilliant, she's funny, and she makes me cry (in the La Dolce Gilda sketch, which isn't really a sketch, it's actually a mini-movie, and it's perfect).

(The caption in the above photo, from La Dolce Gilda, reads: "Leave me my dreams. Dreams are like paper, they tear so easily.")

So I would watch TBOGR: SNL all the freaking time when I was a kid. Like, all the dang time. I watched it hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times. It entered my life in elementary school, it was (pretty much) my only friend in junior high school, it stayed with me through thick and thin in high school (BFF! KIT!), and it was one of the first things I packed when I went off to college.

Flash forward a couple of years to 2004, or thereabouts. I was living with Urp and Eleanor. Eleanor and I were hanging out and I forget what was bothering her, but Eleanor was really upset about something, and I told her I had the perfect solution. I knew what would get her out of her funk, out of her depression, out of her doldrums, or upsettedness. I knew EXACTLY how to turn her frown upside down. GILDA.

I ran to my room and grabbed my trusty old VHS copy of TBOGR: SNL. I put it into the VCR. I told Eleanor to prepare for brilliance and sunny days. And then a terrible thing happened. The VCR played fuzz. Nothing but fuzz. FUZZ. And there was this weird sound coming from the machine. This weird whirring sound.

I hit "eject." I looked at my tape, my old friend, my TBOGR: SNL. And she was broken. After so much play, the (apparently) flimsy film was loose. It was no longer connected to that plastic circle thing. (Look, people, I'm a writer! I use descriptive words like "thing!") It wouldn't play anymore.

My TBOGR:SNL was dead.

So then I was thrust into a depression of my own and Eleanor and I sat around the living room eating pints of Chocolate Chocolate Chip Haagan Daz ice cream and cursing the universe. It was a really sad day.

Flash forward a couple of months. Eleanor told me she had a surprise for me. She told me to close my eyes. When I opened them again, I found a new copy of TBOGR: SNL in my hands. On DVD! Oh my god, awesome. The world is good again. The world is right.

Except it wasn't. It wasn't a DVD. It was some sort of weird computer disc that wasn't a DVD and so it wouldn't play on our DVD player and there were even instructions on how to download the program thing that would allow us to thing the thing that we would need to thing if we wanted to watch our new copy of TBOGR: SNL. (I used the word "thing" so many times in this paragraph in order to illustrate how useless and frustrating this computer disc's instructions were.)

So now we had a copy of TBOGR: SNL on a disc that we weren't able to play and we were thrust into even deeper doldrums.

This was, like, a year ago. No, wait: two years ago! I finally stopped eating Haagen Daz ice cream and moved on with my life, but there has always been a part of me that has been upset that whenever I've needed any sort of pick-me-up, I haven't been able to go home to my TBOGR: SNL. If I was a weaker man, I would have resorted to a whole slew of drugs by now. Thankfully, I'm strong. Thankfully, a part of me knew that Gilda would one day come back into my life, and thanks to Gina (who succeeded where Eleanor failed) (sorry Eleanor), I now have TBOGR: SNL on DVD and this is one of the happiest days of my freaking life.

It's like I've been missing a chunk of my mojo for the last few years and I just got it back and now I'm ready to take over. So watch the freak out, world.

Word.