Liz’s Advice Blog

Dear Friend,

Happy 4/20, toker. A long-forgotten pioneer of fatty-sucking is a man known as Bob, but wait, I know you’re thinking Bob Marley.  No.  This kid is a different guy.  When I was in high school, my high school boyfriend played guitar for a rap/rock trio.  Bob was their Wordsworth. 

As I am huge fan of lyricism and poetics, I’m sad I never did see them perform.  However, history has brought to light some lyrics from Bob which are really something.  Please take at least the 15 minutes required to decipher this song and an extra 5 to let it all sink in.

Then give me some advice. 

Untitled?

Dear Friend,

You are aware that I, Liz, text expert, have a problem I’m trying to get in check.  It’s called "Angry Letters to Bad Writers."  In the past, I’ve been set off by the San Diego Union-Tribune and their incessant bad puns.  Their woman editor came from a womens magazine, which is where this back-story starts to become sufficient.  I have been alarmed by fraudulent claims to uplifting "Anti-Gravity" in Scientific American’s supposedly lighter-fare column, sparking this fire-fight:

Steve Mirsky’s ‘Anti-Gravity’ column is neither humorous nor interesting.  Please replace it. 

It never goes well. I end up arguing with the writer and other third parties, and then it goes the way of all industry feuds.  One day, I found myself having to follow through when I said I would decline to renew my subscription to Scientific American…  So this is where the advice comes in.  I think I would like to be talked out of sending this:

Dear Boston’s Weekly Dig,

Have you ever wondered why you attractive avant-garde gentlemen of belles-lettres feel the need to use profanity like fledgling female-to-male trannies?  Is it because you’re so limp-dicked from writing for a free-n-fun provincial uselesssploitation rag, and, by the way, own up - your limp dick is actually a veggie-butchered, clit-lipped Pygmalion, so why are you post-politically insulting people just because they want to go find some fistfucking motherfather Things To Do at Night? 

Stop telling me about how I masturbate in my mom’s basement and how much I should wash up and go see grindcore scenestars Twodeadsluts Onegoodfuck at T.T.’s with Texas teabaggers Anal Headlock.  Why don’t you write yourselves up in [your free zine cum waste of everyone's time]’s newly aptly named section Fun People to Ironically Eye Rape this Work Week (which already includes every man woman and child in Boston who picks up the Dig).  Just stop for two seconds and wonder why you want to priggishly alienate Allsyourgrammas in Onefreepaper for Nogoodreason.

You are not bad writers, so, what’s all the wide-stanced strut about hack bands and nightlife about?  Is it just that you know in the heart of your Prinzmetal Anginas that being a good writer is always pretty hj and fully blown GAY?  OMG sorry, but one of my cats is licking the other one right now and it’s really adorable. 

Eat a "fuck you", Weekly Dig, you are quite pointless, and I mean impotent.  Maybe Yankees suck, but so too does your balls-to-the-wall-need-to-protect-your-ass-woundable-inner-child, til-the-sweat-drips-down-your-afterthought-preference-to-be-"The Small Apple" scene you pander to with reach-around mocking.  Grow a set of self-control around your gaping amoral center, and get a stress ball, "dude."  Don’t you have a couple lying around post-op?  Post… Pre… Pre-op.  Sorry.

-Liz Vice N. Andover, MA

Dear Friend,
Early this morning when I was brushing my teeth, I found something, what looked like the remnants of another toothbrush behind my left maxilliary first primary molar, 15D.  Next to it was a piece of oatmeal from the day before, and behind that, another molar I had never seen before facing in the opposite direction one would expect a newly minted molar.  Some minutes later, I found another mirror.  It was much deeper than the other ghosts, which was what I determined them to be at the most excellent of my reasoning, or else perhaps another world simulated by a third (two way ?) mirror I could not in fact see.  What?  I don’t want to change any of this, but it’d be nice to understand it.
-Me’s Advice B. Nathandover, MA

Dear Liz, 
If someone saw me naked, and then I didn’t call again, is he within his rights to unbefriend me on a social networking website such as friendster or facebook?  Why would he unbefriend me on one network but not the other?  I feel that my signal was very clear, so why is he being so ambiguous?
-(Please Help) Lost in Louisville, RI

Ok "Berg",

Questions, questions, questions.  Men and women alike love to be drawn out from their selves with QUESTIONS.  I keep a file of questions ready for occasions like this.  Send this email out to the ambiguous emailabler to feel out the waters.

fileOfQuestions.txt

1. What did you want to be when you grew up? 

2. What city were you born in, supposedly?

3. What was your most memorable childhood mammary?

4. Do you identify more with Generation X or Generation Explains-Your-Wearing-Stupid-Clothes?

5. Did you have an imaginary friend?  What was he like, was he like seeing me naked?  I didn’t call you?  I didn’t?!

6. Did you have stupid baby sitters growing up? 

7. Who’s your hottest underage relative?

8. Can you think about your childhood for a minute while I hold my flaccid own hand?

9. Have you accepted anyone special as your savior?

10. How do you ignore homeless panhandlers?

11. Why don’t you care about your health or put any effort into it?

12. What would you do if you got pregnant today… with a person?

13. Whose is your hair hero?  Do they know it?  Whose else?

14. What’s the most important ingredient of human taste in your philosophy of beauty (of pleasure cannibalism)?

15. When’s your birthday?  What’s your favorite kind of transvestite hooker?  Oh, I am?  Shut up.  You’re not funny?  I’m flirting with you.  So you think?  Am I. 

16. So don’t take this the wrong way, but what do you do all day? 

17. How do you keep yourself from dwelling on question number one?

18. Do you need any advice?

Dan, my "Liz" second-tier advice is bifurcated or twofold and double-pronged.  First, it doesn’t matter what this guy means online.  It’s none of our business.  Twoly, the Internet is not real.  People say it’s hyperreal, that it prescribes reality.  Like "America’s Next Top Model" or DeLillo’s "The World’s Most Photographed Barn" and Paris Hilton.  But they’re wrong.  It’s not real.

It’s really awesome,
-Me

Dear Liz,
My boyfriend’s parents are friends with a prominent literary figure that I want to meet. How do I weasel my way into said literary figure’s home and her good graces?
-Jess G. Brooklyn, NY

Dear Jess,

This is an easy one.  You’re already in.  As soon as you please, have a shotgun wedding with your boyfriend.  Lock that down!  Reload.  Lock down the spawn.  Reload…  Walk down the hotel stairs with a warm hand on the rail.  Never look down.  326.  Look at your boyfriend’s father squarely.  Look at his wife, passed out on top of the hotel topspread.  They’ve had one year of bliss together.  Happy 25th Anniversary.  She doesn’t even dream the bed is humbly oozing blood.  Still, you put a pillow over her face, take the pillow she’s clutching like a child or bear out of her tenure, and shim it under her lumbar.  "Shhh…" you whisper, "Silent birth."

Go back to your room and change as any other night, it’s your night.  Leave the Where’s Waldo revelries behind.  Tip the valet.  Drive back into the parking garage.  Run over anyone there, but if anyone happens to be a valet, get out and take his tips.  Open the door like you think you’re Jack Nicholson’s character in real life.  OneStar, how do I get to 12 High Street?  You have a window here of about an hour until she goes to bed.  Don’t fuck around with shortcuts.  Drive on curbs all the way.  Doesn’t matter now.  The passenger lying next to you doesn’t care. 

Said literary figure’s home: get out to weasel your way in.  Kill someone, doesn’t matter who, just not her.  Let her feel her life is worth nothing.  Let her feel the barrel.  Tell her you want her to feel your heartpain and novelize it.

Also, I was thinking… buy an antique cane?  I have a 35 inch cane with a little head on it.  Mahogany.  Eccentric types can’t get enough of it.  Some are jealous, but jealousy soon turns to uneasy kinship with eccentric types.

There’s just something about Ironwood,
-Me

Dear Liz,
Ok, hypothetically, two people on the rebound who have never met each other are going to meet.  Is that a dangerous scene?
-Matt Chelsea, MA

Op-Ed Question-the-Man-on-the-Street-and-Get-Opinions from Everyday People Feature

• Xstina Fakenamex
  Timecop
  North Andover
  "I only cried after sex once.  It was a few weeks after a breakup, and I was drunk.  My brain made me."

• Germany McTime
  World’s Bigger Idiot
  North Andover
  "I freaked out and started crying the first time I had sex.  The person I was with was offensive to look at.  I cry every time I have sex.  Just ignore it."

• Xfake Timegermina
  Elected Supernintendent of Schools
  North Andover
  "Actually, I’m a gentleman, and I’ve never had sex.  Except once, I did have sex with a doughnut.  Afterwards I ate the doughnut.  Then I felt so guilty, I threw up, and I was crying, but not because of the sex.  I did go back for seconds.  With the sex, not with the eating.  Same doughnut.  A carrot watched."

Dear Liz,
I am so bored at work. I read McSweeneys.net, Salon.com, your blog, the Times, the Onion — anything to pass the day. But I am afraid they’re catching on to me. I think I have to find a new time-killer, but keep in mind, I need to APPEAR busy while actually not using my mind at all. What should I do?
-Dan Illegal Immigrant Central, CA

Dear Dan,

Get some software for the handicapped.  I have the perfect product(s) for you.  It takes the internet, strips sites of all pictures and multimedia, and turns it all into audio for the blind.  My brother works for a company that makes voice recognition software for paraplegics.  You just need to hook these up, and it’s pilot light, gas stove, bam.  What you’ll have is a text file with all your favorite internet sites, without anything identifying it as non-work-related. 

Now for the laughing (for when you read the Times).  What you need to do is get noise-canceling speakers pointed at your own laughter.  I consulted MacGuiver: the technology exists, in the form of office supplies, and so now you just need go down to Staples and pump that Easy Button. 

But the noise canceling might not be necessary.  Consider: The end result of this hard work will probably be something like the email you forwarded me yesterday ("In-Progress Ideas for New Yorker Cartoons"), like describing Calvin & Hobbes cartoons to a blind CEO if you’re not Bob Odenkirk.  Funny!  But not funny ha-ha.  Funny hmmm… thinks. 

As we’ve been discussing the increasing subtlety of humor-jokes, Dan, I’m starting to suspect humor will eventually merge with earnest boredom in a few years.  This bodes well for you, because you won’t laugh at work anymore, or at all anywhere for the next 67 years.  Then, on your death bed, it will cumulatively strike you of-a-sudden, and you’ll giggle like a child. 

All your friends and family will gather ’round you.  We’ll look out the window and see some children on a jungle gym.  Gross.  We’ll bury you on a hill by the church.  Apples and oranges will be there, and old people’s pants.  Zombies in hoodies, Chuck Norris, the musicians of Brehmin, Zero, Jesus, the homeless, that one special person that got away who would have made your life complete.  Some annoying banner with a sound effect of a chicken clucking and a clown with a big red nose that’s kind of scary, but kind of funny, but really derivative.  Refresh the page.  Gray horizontal lines.  Sylphaen font size 12.  This is what death is like. 

[Turn off your blind-paraplegic-boredom-circuit software now]

I haven’t been sarcastic in 10 years, and no one has noticed,
-Me

I am a sexpert.  With this in mind, I have set out a helpful guide to pleasuring a human being.

Three of Liz’s Secret Techniques, or How to Make Him/Her So Excited He/She Forgets to Turn Off the Gas, and the House Explodes, Killing All Within and Some Neighbors: What Works, What Doesn’t

• Technique #1
  Have "spider man" sex in a very high place, like in a church on a hill.  Or, try it perched on top a jungle gym or bike rack.  A locale that is higher than the arc of a child’s eyeline will work, too.   
  Does it work?  This one works like blue-collar/no-collar/no-benefits/gangbusters.  I give this a rating of 3-neighbors’-house-radius.

• Technique #2
  Before the encounter, send your partner a suggestive email with lyrics from Paul Simon’s "Call Me Al."  When he/she comes home, have the mood already set with marching band music and a strobelight set to 60 flashes per minute.  This has the same effect as Pachelbel’s Canon in D, calming the body by matching its natural stolid pace.
  Works?  Doesn’t work.  You didn’t connect the stove to the gas main.  What did you connect it to?  You’ll want to get this one on tape.

• Technique #3
  Make a fist.  Now look at where the tip of your middle finger touches your palm.  This is what is known as the third frenulum, and massaging it will stimulate bloodflow to the arousal region of Palestine.  Keep making a fist. 
  Does it work?  Ummm, I’ve tried this.  When this one blows up the house, it really really really really really really HURTS YOUR dad’s pride. 

I’ve had fun here today, (thank you for a nice time) but there’s really only one trick to great sex: look like Paris Hilton, Brittany Spears, me, a thin Anna Nicole Smith, or any one of us individually.  Or, if you are a man, Happy Birthday.  Keep making a fist.

I am a sexpert, my sexpert name is Sexpert Jobsworth, the Churchill of sexperts, because Churchill said "Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm," (of which I am unaware), but (and so) moreso because a churchill is a spire on a mound, and that’s a great place to have sex,
-Me

Dear Liz,
Do snakes fart? Hold on, I already asked that so… Is it worse to be bald or to have daindruffs? How is your social life?  Many men bothering you for phone number? Another question for a blog - does a planner help you being sane? or insane? taaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaak. guess who is dim?
-Eva Brno, Czech Republic

Dear Eva,

Are you just getting used to writing 2006?  Are you buying a lot more DVDs than you used to?  Do crowds annoy you?  If so, chances are… you’re a person. 

You know you’re a person if:

Yeh, well…

You will just know,
-Me.

Dear Liz,
I don’t know why, but I can’t seem to put any effort and/or have any sexual attraction toward a girl if I can’t see myself with her for a very extended amount of time….  Am I crazy?
Matt Palo Alto, CA

Hi Stranger,

Probably.  You may not feel like fraternizing with women who are not keepers, but since when do you get to do only what you feel like?  As we grow up, we of mid-to-late twenty years-or-so learn to sublimate our feelings to the befurtherment of our goals.  Associating with "low" women is just one of the things you, as a man, need to do to attain and maintain honor.

All men of consequence spend time in dive bars with pretty and ugly dive women.  All men: America’s founding fathers, America’s soccer dads, even alcoholic-American paternity-case-losers in rock bands; every man and everyman, and not only as youthful indiscretion.  You will learn a lot about people by these encounters.  Women tend to show their emotions very willingly, and you will learn to read signals previously unintelligible to your eyes and ears.  Plus you need not put in any unwarranted effort.  You can be your own boss.

This is how it is.   I’m personally very excited for you, Matt.  Women have their own cultural imperative to fulfill.  As a lady looking to advance her honor and nobility, I must evade all sexual advances made on my person.  Even by homeless men with pot. 

I should not even be discussing this now.  For the last time, I am not a sexuality expert.  In the future, should you want to ask a question about sex, DON’T. 

If you do not like the rules of the game, you do not have to play fair,
-Me