Kleenex Brand Issues

You.

You have your own opinions and tastes and quirks. You are not me and I am not you. We are separate from each other. Eventually, we might become one if we're buried next to each other in the same cemetery and our flabby bodies decompose and get absorbed into the Earth and then we help an apple tree grow. Then we'll be one. Our carbons and calciums (and mercury, if you ate a lot of sushi during your life) will intermingle and we won't be able to tell where you end and I begin.

But, for now, we are separate entities. My calciums won't mix with your carbons and autolysis has yet to begin in our digestive systems. You have your own experiences and memories and I have mine. There are several experiences that are shared by a huge portion of the population. Waking up in the middle of the night and not being able to fall back asleep. Sweating on a hot day. Pooping. General experiences that nearly everyone can read about and say "Hey, I can relate to that!"

Then there are the experiences that a very small portion of the population can say they've gone through. Like waking up in the middle of the night and not being able to fall back asleep because you had your first wet dream and you're sharing a hotel room with your cousins in Mexico so you don't know whether you should get up and risk everyone asking what you're doing up at 2AM or go back to sleep and try to ignore the dampness in your tighty-whities. Or sweating on a hot day and stuffing Bounty paper towels into your armpits to prevent any pit stains from showing so you won't disgust the girl you're about to have gelato with. Or pooping into a Kleenex box in the backseat of a '98 Lincoln Navigator. I'm sure most of you have not been in any of those three situations.

I'm going somewhere with this. Pinky promise.

I read Sloane Crosley's Up the Down Volcano a couple of weeks ago. It's a Kindle Single which means it's like getting one slice of Kraft American cheese instead of the whole package. Her last book, How Did You Get This Number?, was a great package of cheese. I unwrapped every slice and cut each one into fourths and stuffed each piece of American cheese into my pie hole. It's fun and tasty. You should read it. Up the Down Volcano is that slice of Kraft cheese that fell to the bottom of the fridge and you forgot about it until you were about to move out, but then you found it and it was still wrapped, but you didn't know if it was still good or not, but it's wrapped so it must be good, right? So you ate it. And that may or may not have led to the Kleenex box pooping incident.

That metaphor may be a little forced, but the point still stands. Up the Down Volcano isn't very good. It's about her time visiting Ecuador and climbing a volcano and then getting sick and then going home. The end. She has some funny lines, but for the most part, it's like reading the diary of some rando who just joined Zeta Tau Alpha. And there's no point. The whole time, I was thinking "Why am I reading this?" But that might be a problem with me not being able to enjoy the ride and always focusing on when we're getting to the destination. I don't care about savoring that slice of cheese. I just want it in my stomach, swimming around in my gastric acids.

The point of all this is that I want my books to have points. Thus, my posts should have points too. So, that's the point of this post. To have a point. Which it now does. So...

Here, have a stretchy hand:

http://astretchyhand.com/

I'm working on it. I don't want people to read my stuff and be all like "Oh. Well. That was a waste of time." I want them to be all like "Haha! I'm glad I read that. I'm going to give this guy some money."

I'm working on the Kleenex poop story. I've been working on it for the past ten years or so, to be honest. I've started writing it (and I've stopped writing it) over a dozen times now. I can describe the situation and make it funny because I can mention the word "poop" in nearly every paragraph, but I've yet to find out its purpose. What it says about... Anything, really.

That's what I'm going to be working on over the next few weeks. A story about poop. I don't know why I want to write it, but I know that I do. Maybe by writing about it and having everyone laugh along, I can get over the embarrassment of having pooped in a fucking Kleenex box.

But whatever. I'll work on it and get back to y'all once it's done. Or once I've figured out what the hell it's about. And maybe there won't be a point to the story aside from just being an entertaining anecdote.

If that's the case, I'm going to release it as a Kindle Single and you can all purchase it and give me some money so I can buy Creationary for Kayla's birthday. Creationary is like Pictionary. But with Legos.

Awwwwww, yeah.