once weekly,
usually on Saturdays
Let’s see what happens when your host (me) has nothing to say, and instead it’s open mike night. Step right up, speak your mind, tell a story, sing a song, whatever.
8/30/2025
Anything Goes #43
24 responses to “Anything Goes #43”
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Can I Change?
As some of you may have noticed I have few if any boundaries in what I write about and I’m considering reevaluating my position of sharing practically any or every personal experience regardless of social decorum. I started this the other day when I censored a few words in a piece I was reading to my mother out in the garden at her nursing home. It was an essay about aging, about going from exuberant hippies in our twenties to trudging oldsters with our pains and ailments. The sentence I censored was: “Remember when we were vibrant fresh-faced young people with perky breasts and hard cocks?”
That’s the kind of crude stuff I love, the “dirty” lines I enjoy spewing, but someone pointed out that just because it’s true doesn’t mean I have to say it. (In response to her comment I’ve written a thousand word piece about what is crude, though I may not belabor the point by editing and typing it up.)
Another example of attempting to reform my wicked ways was in a short piece I wrote recently about meeting an old woman in her wheelchair suffering from dementia. She wanted me to take her along with me down the antiseptic halls of the nursing home and when I wrote up the short essay later I pondered elder sex, like what it would be like to get a hand job from a ninety-one year old woman. I did not put that thought into my story.
I’m trying to behave, be good. Just because I have a thought doesn’t mean I have to express it, right? Just because I have a fantasy doesn’t mean I have to share it, right? Just because I have an interesting, possibly dirty, experience doesn’t mean I have to write it down, right?
It might be too late to trade in authenticity for good manners. My rep is made and there’s no undoing it. In my quest to not be boring I’m out of control and it might be a bankrupt personal philosophy.
Some of you may have noticed that in my efforts to come clean I have ejaculated my usual off-color phrases into this report today. So be it, it won’t happen again.
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> The sentence I censored was: “Remember when we were vibrant fresh-faced young people with perky breasts and hard cocks?”
> That’s the kind of crude stuff I love, the “dirty” lines I enjoy spewing, but someone pointed out that just because it’s true doesn’t mean I have to say it.Writing that snips the bluntest truth is the very definition of journalism — it’s polite, and boring, and less informative because of the snipping. To my personal shame, sometimes I also succumb to good taste, but I prefer and try not to.
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I don’t see how someone could have both. I mean I see it but I’m not that interested. I suppose I had semi-perky breasts until I lost 75 pounds after my heart attack. OK, they weren’t perky, but they’re pretty much gone. If I lose another 25 I think I win a ham, which seems to defeat the purpose. It’s possible my cardiologist was kidding if cardiologists can kid. I missed Burning Man again this year because I’m among the unhip. We don’t have membership cards or slogans. We just separately avoid the tragically hip. But live and be well. Life is short.
John
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Coolness and Burning Man
Burning Man is for the people who like to party, have always partied, and were the people around here who always knew where the good parties were. I never got invited to the cool parties, with all the girls and drugs, so I wasn’t a partier and therefore had no urge to up my game and graduate to the biggest party of them all, Burning Man.
I wasn’t cool enough to be invited to the cool parties, twenty, thirty, and forty years ago, and I wonder if they’re still happening today? Are there still all those “happening” private parties or did all the insiders get old, boring, grew up, died off, or just graduated to Burning Man? (By definition, if I had been cool enough to figure out where the cool parties were then I could have, would have, gone, right? Not cool enough to know, not cool enough to go.)
The key to getting invited to parties was probably who you knew, how many friends you had, and if they were willing to invite you. (I once asked a good friend why he never invited me along to parties he went to and he said he’d be worried I’d say some provocative thing and embarrass him. Hmm, okay, well there is that.)
I probably didn’t deserve to be invited, my un-coolness preceding me, and if I had actually been invited to a cool party I wouldn’t have known what to say or do, and would have depended on weed and booze to change me into a temporary party animal, ie, pathetic drunk. (I finally broke through when someone invited me to a cool party back in 2009: my date and I got drunk, took over the stage singing and Daryl Cherney, that rat bastard, tried to make us tone it down and stop having fun.)
Finally I woke up and learned the art of conversation: you say something, then ask a question, listen to the response, then react to what was said with actual interest. Yet my hermit life, by definition, limits the amount of friends, connection to events, and other social activities and I still feel relatively uncool because I say what I think and don’t tell white lies. (Though now I do pause half a second before saying, or not saying, something hurtfully honest, unlike my previously unfiltered persona.)
I still believe honesty is always the best policy but if all the cool people, as well as all the rest of the people, tell white lies does that make me uncool for not telling them?
My old line has always been “I’m waiting for uncool to be cool again” which brings me to the question: Are there any cool people around anymore and how would we know?
Oh right, they all went to Burning Man.
(PS: On my 70th birthday I realized that I might finally be cool, the best present of all.)
hillmuffin@gmail.com
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> I once asked a good friend why he never invited me along to parties he went to and he said he’d be worried I’d say some provocative thing and embarrass him. Hmm, okay, well there is that.
Sorry, but that seems a worthwhile worry. I stay away from parties because I’m not invited, of course, but also because they’re boring, nothing but empty chitchat and heavy drinking. You seem like the person who’d say something provocative, and make a boring social event interesting. Very awkward for the host.
Burning Man’s first incarnation in San Francisco might’ve been fun. What it’s become in Nevada is a grand poobah’s convention of kooks with money. The only upside of Burning Man is that attracting so many monied idiots to the desert makes the rest of the world a better place for a few days.
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oh shit, double trouble, can you take that double off and make it single?
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Make it so.
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Natalya
There’s this local woman on facebook who you might want to check out, for laughs. Her name is Natalya Verona and the heading on her page says “Wet, hot, and juicy as fuck!”
She used to be a barista at Signature in Redway and I remember her pleasant face, friendly personality, and cute tits, you know, the size you can get your whole mouth around, should you be so lucky.
Then recently I saw her at Chautauqua and what a goddess: tall amazon woman with the kind of ass you’d just like to follow around, well if you were like me, an appreciator of fine female figures, (ie, creepy geezer.)
She runs a kind of advice page and fancies herself as some new-age guru, like a cheerleader generating hundreds of words everyday, inspirational thoughts imploring people to break out of their malaise and rock their worlds! Each day she posts a picture of herself more revealing than the last. She seems like the kind of woman who would really like to just bare it all, you know, in her search for truth.
I think she’s trying to make money offering periodic specials, a bundle of self-help services for $444, like she came to trim and stayed to preach. (I doubt if any of my boomer friends would be interested, we pretty much know who we are, so maybe she’s aiming for the lost millennials.)
She also has lottery Fridays where for a dollar you can enter a drawing to win a chapter of her e-book or something like that. No, you don’t get a chapter for a dollar, just the chance to win the thing.
The other day she said she was queer or gay but as she’s probably a millennial it doesn’t matter what she says. (The M’s don’t care what body parts you have—you can still be anything you say you are. Like what the deplorables say in the voting booth: “Goddamn liberals! At least Trump knows the difference between a cock and a pussy!”)
I’d like to interview her, find out if she writes all that rah! rah! self-help stuff everyday herself, and who is her target audience. It sounds like a lot of snake oil hooey but she might actually have some paying clients?
In the meantime: Take it all off Natalya! (I know you want to.)
(Photo: Natalya’s ass)
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Ghosted?
Do you have a friend who rarely answers your calls, never calls you back, and you’re starting to wonder if you’re even friends anymore?
Well, maybe the problem is you, maybe you’re not interesting or stimulating enough and need to up your game?
Here are some talking points and questions you can use the next time you get ahold of him/her:
So tell me something new.
Do you ever ponder the past and relive experiences you have had?
What three words do you want on your tombstone?
How are you feeling these days?
What is it about you that you think people don’t get?
Would you ever consider suicide?
How would you do it?
Do you feel fulfilled on personal and creative levels or is there something you could do to realize your goals? What is that?
When are you happiest?
What do you worry about?
When did you see your first naked woman?
When you first had sex did you know about foreplay?
How did you know?
Which past lover would you like to find and talk to?
What do you want to do before you die?
What are you afraid of?
What was your first job as a kid?
Would you say you had a happy childhood? Why or why not?
Did you have a memorable birthday when a kid?
Do you think you’re an interesting person? Why or why not?
Do you think I’m an interesting person? Why or why not?
Did you have someone you would call “the love of your life”? Who? Was the feeling mutual?
Have you ever been in jail? When was the first time? Why?-
People tell me I’m abnormal and I concede the point, but there’s no kind of ass I’d just like to follow around. Asses don’t interest me, except as fodder for jokes. Physical sex-appeal, for me, is an envy for things I don’t have, but I have an ass, so there’s no allure in someone else’s. Everything I’d like to squeeze is up front.
Natalya sounds intriguing, so I searched but found nothing, before remembering that Facebook is blocked from my search results, same as a baseball team benches a batter who goes 2-for-200. If she’s written an especially interesting post, though, plz send a link!
By nature of my hermitage, ghosting is usually something I do, not something done to me, but there are occasionally (very occasionally) people I’d like to connect with, and these are terrific questions for that purpose. Kinda reminds me of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends & Influence People, which I read many, many years ago when I still gave a damn about winning friends and influencing people, only his couple of hundred pages are 99% flotsam and filler, while your suggestions are direct and to the point. I am saving your “Ghosted?” for further reference, and everybody on my contact list is going to get one of these questions. Srsly, thanks for this.
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try Natalya Verona
when i called her publicly on her snake oil tactics
she blocked me from Facebook…
I didn’t become an ass man until relative recently, last 15 years…
here’s a fun one, my jokes all come from real life:Scrabble Fleshback
I was playing online Scrabble with a married woman and realized I could spell “vagina.” I wasn’t sure we wanted to stare at vagina all game long, but since she had already spelled “yoni” I figured it was probably alright. Before putting down the word I wrote in the chat box by the game board: “If I spell vagina will you hold it against me?”
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I would’ve challenged Qis, and lost.
On-line chess is more fun for me. You make a move when you’re ready, no clock, and I usually win, not because I’m good at chess but because I *want* to win, so I spend inordinate amounts of time studying the board and plotting my next move. If we had a timer, I’d lose.
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good for you, i don’t have the brains or patience (or desire)
for chess, it’s just word games for me, but not for years since my
scrabble buddy was murdered 9 years ago…
here’s the letter i sent to the detective doing nothing:I knew Hugh Duggins and his roommate Hope, Matti, Aurora, very well.
Hope is a pathological liar; did you interview her? If so I could tell you the obvious
lies she said if I could see what she said—you want me to?
You never know with a crazy person, and she is certifiable, but she is exhibiting some, to me, suspicious behavior. She is going around spreading the lie that Hugh molested her kid. No less than four people have mentioned to me recently that she is saying that.
Last year she told Hugh, “If you try to kick me out I’ll tell the cops that you were molesting Jade.” (her kid) He told me the next day and I reported the threat to Elder Protective Services later. Its all on record there, the second time I went.
So I ask myself, “Why would Matti be persisting in telling these lies even now, long after Hugh’s death?”
# She’s trying to build up a case for herself, for when her kid turns out really bad? Something she can blame instead of herself?
#Or???
I’ve never thought that Mati was involved with Hugh’s death, because once he dies she loses her home, it didn’t make sense, but now I’m wondering. She might have been raving to other people before his death her suspicions and accusations, maybe to some friend of hers who had been abused and is going to take care of Hugh, one less child molester. (He wasn’t)
So that’s a possibility. (Remote?)
More likely it was a random event, as Hugh picked up all the hitchhikers, but it just seems suspicious to me that Matti would persist in these post-mortem accusations, that anyone who knew Hugh would say are bullshit.
(Here is this nice guy Hugh who lets her live at his place for years, spends lots of money on her, and accepted her as a person/room mate even though he knew she was a liar and a thief and what is his thanks? She attempts to besmirch his reputation post-mortem.)
So my offer stands: Do you want me to tell you her lies from your interrogation?
I’ll see it all eventually, when the coroners report becomes public, right?
(Are the interviews and all of the investigation public record?)
Oh, and also, she absconded with the last five years of Hugh’s diaries, journals—why did she take (destroy?) them?
I would like to get them back, as a writer, and friend, I am interested.-
Did the detective continue doing nothing? Was there a reply to your letter?
All most of us know of police work and detectives is what we’ve seen on TV, but that’s fiction. It all looks like a bureaucracy to me, like you’re supposed to trust the investigation of a friend’s murder to the same sort of bored process and just-doing-my-job attitude as when you’re dealing with a warranty claim on your refrigerator.
Was there any resolution to your buddy’s murder?
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No, the cops don’t care about some old guy in Alderpoint,
he told me this story once:Alderpoint Memories (As told by Hugh Duggins, June 6, 2011 at 10:05am)
I came from Wapanuka, Oklahoma and ran the Riverview Inn in Alderpoint, California in the very early 70’s. To control the drunken redneck crowd I had a gun behind the bar and, well, I thought I was pretty clever ‘cos I loaded it up alternating blanks with real bullets. That’s right: one bullet, one blank and so on.
Anyway one night there was another big fight so I took the gun out and fired a real round into the ceiling. Then I turned the gun to the scuffle and fired a blank and, well, that blank hit this chick in the left tit and she set a howling and all hell broke loose: those angry drunk Alderpoint rednecks chased me out of the bar and trashed the place completely.
And that was the end of the Riverview Inn, I went back to Wapanuka promptly.
Jim Dudley
(Photo: Hugh and the girl from before)
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For what little it’s worth, your pal Hugh sounds like a character worth remembering. And fuck the police.
The only person I’ve known who was murdered, the cops got the killers, but they were obvious as fuck. Darn near left their names and addresses at the scene of the crime, so no great detective work was involved. Lesser crimes, good luck even getting a cop to come when you call 9-1-1.
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I was trying to get an old friend/old guy with a disability
(he fell in Alameda last halloween because he just absolutely
had to turn and thank the bus driver, been ailing ever since,
operations etc) to turn around and look at a glorious ass
at the farmer’s market last friday but he was so ailing it wasn’t
worth it to him to slowly turn around and get a look, sad…
it was so amazing it might have been factory-manufactured,
can they do that? butt transplants?
(Glad you got some pointers to up your phone game, ha,
i wonder if my life would have changed in any minute way if you
had been successful making me that blogside a year ago?)i’m thinking now that my comments had maybe disappeared because
i had left the page before they were fully loaded? -
It’s always good to thank the bus driver. They dead with lots of twisted troublemakers, and I like to remind them not all passengers are shit-heads. Turning around to make sure I said thanks is likely how I’ll fabulously wrench my back, too. Something to look forward to.
Definitely, butt implants are a thing, for butts, and people who love butts.
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Maybe I could put my book on line?
How would that work?
200 pages, 100,000 words,
that’s why i was thinking about that failed blog again…-
Publishing online is easy, friend. I wouldn’t recommend any of the free options, but scroll to the bottom of the page and click Lyrical Host; their price is affordable, and the service has been pretty good.
Finding an audience is a different challenge, of course, and I know nothing about that.
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Looks like lyrical host wants money,
you pay them?
me no way…
i had an idea how to sell locally,
i’ll run it by you some time-
If it’s gotta be free, you’re stuck with WordPress or Blogger. Both work, and they’re worth the price.
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Sometimes “free” is more expensive than “moderately priced”. I’m just sayin’.
jtb
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I’m still huffy that Google trusted an algorithm to tell me I’d published something forbidden, several times, but they couldn’t tell me what violated what rule, and there’s no reaching them to discuss it.
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