D-I-V-O-R-C-E

I have neglected to mention my ex-wife, because... well, some people get all uptight and judgmental about it when they discover that you once shared a nuptial bed with, y'know, a sinister lying murdering baby-eating slag. But hey, who hasn't at one time or another, right?

Soooooo... about Margaret. I should preface this by pointing out that there comes a time in every young, free-spirited, thrill-seeking otter's life when he is likely to develop a little "thing" for feral cats. They are the Punk Rock Girls of the animal kingdom... just an irresistible ball of smokin' hot mindfuckery, all disheveled fur, scars, alluring eyes, and hormones. Dear god. Margaret and I met when she was scalping a couple of bogus tickets for Sonic Youth (this fact dates me, I'm aware) and after figuring it out a block away, I went back and threatened to kick her mangy ass, at which point she assured me that if I touched her, she'd yank one of my eyes out and spit in the socket.

It was love at first sight.

Ah, the adventures we shared. The trash cans, the train-hopping, the catalog of petty crime... I felt edgy, inspired, alive. My friends tried to warn me, yes... they said she'd give me distemper or rabies, or that I'd end up being scraped off the road by some fat DOT worker in a reflective vest. But to no avail. I was unstoppable. I blame it on the drugs. Okay, and hormones. And booze. But back to the story.

It is probably no surprise that alcohol fueled the decision to get hitched. I only dimly remember it. A few flashes come back to me: Roadside wedding chapel, a tattooed dwarf and a 100-year-old lady dressed up as Sonny and Cher officiated the ceremony, there was a buffet table draped in a plastic Fourth-of-July-themed tablecloth (though it was October) with a few stale Costco snack foods laid out, our witnesses were the waitress and line cook from the attached diner, "Chubby's," whose mascot was a poorly-drawn bald ChiMo-looking clown.

We attempted to settle down after the wedding, clean up our lives... Margaret got this brilliant idea to start a daycare business to make a little extra money, watching the children of stressed out animals who'd produced particularly large litters. That's when the trouble started. I'd notice that, say, seven kids would come in, six would go out. I asked her about it.

"They'll never notice," she told me offhandedly. "You know most animals are so fucking stupid they can't count higher than four. Really I'm doing them a favor! I'm just, y'know... taking a little off the top. Isn't that what all babysitters do?"

"Sure," I said, "With stuff like the liquor cabinet, or the kid's piggy bank, or grabbing a few condoms or a little weed from the parents' bedside table... but, um... as a general rule, it doesn't extend to snacking on the 'extra' kids."

"Hey, quit pointing fingers, mister. I didn't get all up in your shit for swiping those printer ink cartridges from your work."

"Slight difference. Eating baby gophers is not the same as pocketing office supplies."

"So says you, Mister Morality-Police. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go reduce the noise level in the playroom by about 12%."

You can see my dilemma. Bottom line: the whole thing was kinda disgusting, but mostly I didn't want to be legally attached to her if some animal happened to develop enough grasp of cardinality to complain.

Ah, Margaret. You gorgeous, intoxicating, brutal psycho-bitch-from-hell...

There's Always an Exception

You know that old bit about how anything consumed off the naked back of a hooker is supposed to be automatically more awesome and decadent? Turns out that's not true for penicillin.

MC Stripes in da house

You speciesist bastards probably think "all otters look alike." I'd be offended, but frankly I'm too busy laughing hysterically -- considering that in the absence of clothing and stupid hairdos, humans are about the most embarrassingly generic meat sacks on the planet. Even the help of so-called "fashion" only separates you into about seven categories: suburban church-goers, old people, children, filthy hippies, reality-tv rabble, urban professionals, and the three flavors of young adults (those who wear vintage clothes and think everything is "overrated," those who shop at the mall and fantasize about school shootings, and those who shop at the mall and routinely commit or endure drunken frat-party date-rapes).

At any rate, the one type of creatures who legitimately "all look alike"? That would be garter snakes. Those poor motherfuckers are truly the Wonder Bread of the animal kingdom. Telling them apart -- aside from stripe color -- is like picking out That One Lady in the Denim Jumper at a scrapbooking convention.

Which is why my buddy Steve currently thinks he's a gangsta rapper.

Steve is a garter snake. He has three sorta-bluish stripes. And for most of his life, that's all one could say about him. That fact chafed him more than it did his garter-snake brethren, to say the least. I think maybe he rather romatically felt "oppressed" or something, and translated that into identifying with, say, N.W.A. Because the next thing I knew, Stevo was constantly slithering around talking about how The Man is keeping the garter snakes down. I didn't have the heart to tell him how ridiculous it was, and that his persecution complex was .0001% Rodney King and 99.9999% "middle-class teenager writing shitty vampire poetry."

He got himself some sunglasses and a big dollar-sign necklace (which necessitates a rather odd locomotion, in that he has to keep the leading two inches of himself off the ground when he moves around), and if that wasn't enough to mark him at 20 yards, there was the perpetual beatboxing to clue you in.

I really want to be supportive of Steve and all that... I try to say with a straight face that he is Dope as Shit, and a Straight-Up G. Something about Steve's earnestness won't let me take him down a notch, unlike when Edwin -- who is a possum -- got into rockabilly to an annoying degree and I told him that if I had to hear one more goddamned Reverend Horton Heat song, I would crotch-punch him.

Ah, well. Steve (or MC Stripes, as he's called these days) indisputably always has the best weed now. I'll let it go.