Status Updates From Random Acts of Crazy (Rando...

“How much peyote did you eat?”

“I’m not high on peyote, Darla. I’m high on you.”

Is it mooning if you’re already naked?

if we weren’t meant to be together, I had Josie as a fallback.

If she didn’t work out—I had myself as a fallback. Always.

My breathing slowed as I willed it to behave, breathing in and out like a woman in labor. Which was apt—I was birthing a new life, right?

(I never thought about that … that a threesome didn’t need to have all three climaxing @ the same time. In this case, Trevor came first, and then he and Joe worked in tandem (Trevor strumming Darla’s clit as Joe penetrated her vaginally) so that Joe and Darla could finish too.)

“Charlie always said that instruments are like people. They need to be a part of the action to be useful,”

Those guys were hot, too—the cover showed abs so tight you could put a piece of coal on them and have them do five hundred crunches and get a diamond.

It was as if standing here, the three of us touching, were creating an entity more powerful than each of us separated, individuals who were lesser when we weren’t connected and together.

Mom and Dad had spent so much time and money on tutoring and lessons and music appreciation and cultivating two languages, but as I sat here watching Trevor joke with this guy, the two talking football now, I felt like the uneducated one.

If he’d snarled while chewing he couldn’t have appeared more beast-like.

The problem with boundaries, though — you have to hit them to know whether they’re really there.

Some of the best gigs were done in places like this, where people just came together to drink and hang out and have fun and listen to music. In Sudborough you went to a music performance to be seen, or to listen to the ‘right’ music, or for a charity event.

“What’s Truro?” Darla asked.

“A town on Cape Cod.”

what they didn’t want was for us to apply that to facing down authority, to questioning whether following what our parents always told us really was in our best interests.

“If we always do what you tell us to do then we’ll always get what you want.”

Accepting things the way they are won’t ever get you anywhere.

If you always do what you’ve always done you’ll always get what you always got,

“You can freak yourself out about the way things should be or you can accept them as they are,”

here we have our own set of rules. One of them is: don’t make too many plans, because people who don’t have money don’t get to have that kind of control over their life.

Trevor had something I lacked and frankly that I didn’t really want because it was a bit too untamed.

None of them actually wanted to be licked by the flames of the fire in Trevor’s belly. Darla looked like she wanted to be slow roasted in it.

this wasn’t someone you fucked and left. This was the kind of person that made you stay.

Snobbery seemed so ridiculous to me because unless you earned the money yourself you were just piggybacking off of someone else’s luck or fortune and looking down on other people. To me, that just made you a douchebag.

Now, twenty, around here, is actually pretty old for getting pregnant with your first kid.

She said, “Just be careful.”

“I’m always careful, Mama,” I joked.

“You’re always somethin’,” she teased back.

somehow in the mail there was always a drinking cup with a logo on it, a hat, and so many t-shirts she started just donating them to the local domestic violence shelter.

a night’s hotel stay—we never used those because none of the hotels were nearby but she’d often barter them and get on these forums and get a little bit of cash in return.

Mama discovered online sweepstakes five years ago when she bought some book off internet for $19.95 that said she could find way to make $1,000/month from ease of home. Anything was bigger than disability check so Mama went for it

Mama did that, all day, every day. She spent 5 or 6 hours doing nothing but entering name, address, phone number, and submitting. Her fellow sweepstakers (they call themselves sweepers),

The hardest part would be giving her a coherent explanation for the brand new BMW, a car that cost more than probably three or four of our trailers combined.

sometimes when you give to someone it really isn’t selfless. It’s selfish. You find joy in it because you’re giving freely.

I had a feeling that out here they didn’t need to preserve twenty or fifty or a hundred acres of wetlands because land was about the only thing they seemed to have in abundance.

I didn’t do serious well. The wisecracks poured out, trying to cover emotions that I didn’t process properly, either. Maybe I needed to think of Trevor as practice—a guy I could practice these deeper feelings on, someone who understood nuance, who even gave a shit about it. Then again, maybe that would be like exercising a muscle that I’d never use again, the energy a waste.

it turns out when you win things in a sweepstakes you have to pay the taxes on the value of the thing or trip and we couldn’t afford it.