Strange things will happen if you let them.

A pictorial essay of things that happened yesterday:

Got waited on by Grizzly Adams.

Oh, Texas.

Stuck my finger in (what I hope was) an alligator vagina.

Also, no. I can't tell you what possessed me to stick my finger in a sketchy alligator orifice but it's probably the same compulsion that makes me unable to not touch all the satin in fabric stores or to not try on old hats that belong to people who may have died in them.

Contemplated how odd that last statement was.

Contemplation face:
"WTF, me?"

Considered buying a human skull in an antique shop.

Surprisingly, I don't have a caption for this.

Watched my daughter ride a giant banana

I just want to clarify that this was in the middle of a serious art gallery and I was all "No, Hailey. You can't ride the banana" and the lady at the counter was all "Oh hell. Girl, you ride that damn banana. Art is for living, not for looking at." I'm pretty sure she was high. And awesome.

Bought a vampiric doll which will eventually be used to create dioramas of creepy Blythe doll death scenes.

All in all, it was a good day.

******************************************

And now, time for the weekly wrap-up:

Last week on Ask the Bloggess:

  • I got fired.  But first I quit after publicly posting my resignation letter which included threats of setting fire to my desk and ended with “Thus I tender my resignation.  Yippee Ki-Ay, motherfuckers“.  Then they said there had been a terrible mistake offered me my job back and I briefly considered it because I do actually really like the website that hosted it and I hold no grudge but I decided to pass because it was probably the most bad-ass exit I’ll ever make and you need to treasure that shit when it happens.  So Ask the Bloggess is now deleted (at my request) and I’m sure it’ll still pop up here from time to time and eventually when I’m homeless and need drug money I’ll xerox all of it and sell it to the people who pass by the bridge I live under.  It’ll be like a book signing except someone’s probably gonna get hepatitis.

What you missed on my sex column (which is satirical and vaguely safe for work if your boss isn’t a douche-canoe):

What you missed on Good Mom/Bad Mom on the Houston Chronicle:

What you missed on the internets:

Shit-I-didn’t-come-up-with-but-wish-I-did-because-it’s-kind-of-awesome:

116 thoughts on “Strange things will happen if you let them.

Read comments below or add one.

  1. You crack me up! This looks like an awesome time…
    And I would’ve probably put my finger in the alligator vagina, too. Who can resist weird moments like that?

  2. That giant banana is AWESOME.

    The giant pear (?) I can just see in the bottom corner doesn’t look like as much fun to ride.

    Actually, ouch. I really shouldn’t have imagined that. My imagination is VIVID.

  3. the definition of a bad week is when I don’t have the option/opportunity to buy human bones/organs and watch my children ride fruit. I like quirky and unusual and damn if that doesn’t qualify.

  4. What *I* want to know is: what in the *heck* did you eat at the “Nutty Brown Cafe” that cost $44.50!? Hopefully you got to expense it… to PNN!

    ~EdT.

  5. OMG I totally missed that giant pear! Good thing Hailey chose to ride the banana, the pear would have been a real pain in the ***!

    ~EdT.

  6. I find your logic flummoxing, Jenny. If you were a serial killer, you’d have more than one skull to sell. Dealing exclusively with antique shops would flood the market, and then how would your co-workers(or competition, depending on how you view them) earn their living? Think of the other serial killers out there, and do what’s right. Consider diversifying, really.

  7. Now I want to ride a banana.
    I’ve already said this once today, but it warrants saying again: Your posts always cheer me up.
    Thanks.

  8. Can I have your old job? Because as it is I *am* homeless and begging on the street.

    We could call my column “Don’t Ask The Bloggess” because obviously you’re no longer there to answer.

  9. Do you think that the creepy man waving at you as you pull into Nutty Brown is a zombie? He’s like a cowboy zombie. Waiting to lasso you into the apocalypse of Texas.

  10. Jenny Jenny Jenny, you can’t bury JUST a skull in your yard unless you want the rest of the remains to come to life and lurch towards your home and tap its bony fingers on your windows until you exhume the skull so the body can be whole again and finally move on to the afterlife. Actually maybe you do want that, it’s kind of a nice gesture.

  11. Love the alligator chair dilemma bit. So much of life is like that; a natural desire or curiosity pitted against a taboo like “don’t stick your finger into a vagina you’re not married to”. You totally should’ve gone for it. I don’t think Victor would have considered it cheating. A) it’s not a live able-to-reciprocate other, and B) it’s intraspecies therefore it’s outside the box (so-to-speak; I know, I know) AND if that’s not enough to satisfy any detractors you can always take the position that it’s a gesture of goodwill towards the dead, who may well become the undead, and put you a prime position to be the living’s chief negotiator in the event of the (inevitable) zombie apocalypse. If you can keep a straight face while stating the above nobody can really prove otherwise. So the question becomes, as so many in life do, ‘can you sell it’? So blogess baby, can you?

  12. I’ll trade your alligator orifice for the dead rabbit I keep throwing outside and the dog keeps bringing back inside.

    Also, first time ever I’ve been able to see the babble lists – normally they redirect to the .com.au version and I can never see them.

  13. That crocodile guy would tell you that the alligator vagina is a cloaca. (Clo-wacka) A new word for you. It’s the vagina/poop chute/ pee hole doohickey. Talk about your multitasking hole, eh?

  14. The vampiric doll on the far left made me think you should get all can-can dancers and put them in *exact* sync and with that vampiric expression on their faces, 30 of them would be really creepy.

    (spell-check suggests “empirical vampire campfire” for “vampiric” and I now I am visualizing vampires with guitars doing complex math problems)

  15. 45 bucks for breakfast in this tiny little town you live in? I pay $3.99 for a breakfast special in NY. You’re getting ripped off! Or do they charge you extra for exotic waiter names? Was Gentle Ben the bus boy?

  16. Dude, Jenny, you left Ask the Bloggess two days before I realized that I have a very important question. Now I will never know why I sometimes sneeze when I pluck my eyebrows.

    Whitney

  17. I’m pretty sure that skull carries with it a horrible curse (but it probably also comes with a free fro-yo, which is good).

    And that is the awesomest art exhibit ever. When you told others you let your daughter ride a giant banana, did they laugh? Or shun? Screw the shunners – you don’t want to be their friend anyways.

  18. Sounds like an epic day but what would really have made it awesome would be if you could have stuck the giant banana in the alligator vagina.

  19. Now I’m glad I PDF’d your resignation so I could have it on file as a guide for writing my own resignation some day. Except I’m self-employed, so I’ll probably know if I’m going to quit, and just fire myself instead. Nice to have, though, just in case.

  20. I am pretty sure that I have waited my whole freakin’ life to be told “Oh hell. Girl you ride that damn banana”. Sigh. I’m so jealous now.

  21. You let your daughter ride the giant banana?…personally, I would have been like, “Mom over cutie pie, mommy wants a piece of that banana action!”
    As for the compulsion to put your finger into odd orifices, I totally get it! I do that too. that’s probably why I’m always telling people before they touch food or me, “I don’t know where your fingers have been!”

  22. What was the alligator skin? A rug? A chair? I would have put my finger in the hole too. Then I would have had to pry my children away from the hole, hoping they wouldn’t rip the whole thing to shreds.

    Awesome banana rocking horse. All of the rocking horse type rides should look so cool.

  23. After Neil, I think you should interview David Sedaris. You can totally discuss the purchase of human skulls and even skeletons with him.

    By the way, my husb and I had a spirited discussion wrt. Unicorns vs. Zombies. Him being an avid Neil fan (ok, ok, you are a BIGGER fan. There, happy now?!) so he 100% agreed with Neil on the Unicorn win. I mentioned something about unicorns putting their horns together and a golden shower appearing, but he pointed out that I did not understand this American idiom “golden shower”… I wonder whether it means the same thing in British?

  24. I am driven to touch other people’s fur coats. While they are wearing them. Sort of a stealth touch thing. I’m very good at doing it without them noticing.

  25. When I waited tables my manager updated my receipts to show my name as Dead Judi… long story, but most customers don’t notice. One of the observant ones asked me if my last name was French :/

  26. You didn’t give us a link to your resignation post. Boo hoo. Care to post a reprise here?
    I wouldn’t have gone near that alligator’s asshole/vagina/urinary tract. I guess after you dig up dead dogs, anything is fair game. And I totally think the shopkeeper should have given you a discount on the skull. $250 is a ripoff! BTW, those are totally creepy dolls.

  27. Hey, being homeless isn’t so bad. Actually it kinda makes you wish that you were dead, but at least you had a bad ass exit. We just had assholes beating on our door, trying to throw us out of our home and accusing us of shit that we didn’t do to get rid of us.

  28. I know you’re talking about the doll, I am WELL AWARE that you are talking about the doll, but my name actually is Blythe, so your mentions of death scenes in regard to Blythe are getting quite disturbing to me. Just sayin’.
    Why do you hate me when all I do is love you?! I say this is as Blythe the person, not the doll, though both may be as disturbing to you as the repeated tweets of my bloody death were to me.

  29. I found this site after Googling “daughter riding a banana.” Sadly, this picture was not what I was expecting.

    Sincerely,

    Roman Polanski

  30. So, I’m just writing to say that #7 is in my head *pretty much all the time* now. I have started to sing it at all kinds of inappropriate times and places. Which is OK, because so far I haven’t done it so audibly that anyone could tell what I was saying, like for example my 6-year-old. Also it’s OK because it makes me crack up laughing at moments when otherwise I would be bored and sleepy. Therefore, I no longer need to drink as much coffee.
    You never know what public services you will render by sharing a link to a rap about vaginas.

  31. Are you sure… that’s not a crocodile vagina? I’d Google the differences for you, but I’m afraid the reptile porn police might track me down.

    Again.

  32. Those Blythe dolls are kinda creepy all by themselves. They remind me of those pictures/paintings in the 70’s of the “big-eyed girl”. But here is a question for you…are they as creepy as the “Chrissy” doll in the orange dress with the hair that you would yank out of her head to grow but would get tangled and never go back in her head?

  33. when i waitress at ruby tuesdays i was only known by mouse, so it was always fun for people to come in and ask, “is mouse working tonight?”

  34. My question is what would you have named the skull? I can still sing the US presidents song that I learned in the forth grade (and it is obviously taking up valuable brain space) so I’ll be glad to help if you decide to carry on the tradition of James Garfield.

    My vote is Grover Cleveland…. because HELLO, Grover is a badass name.

  35. Dear Bloggess,
    1) I totally would have bought the skull and buried it in my backyard. Unfortunately, I am lucky enough that the skull would have belonged to a serial killer’s victim and would be discovered after I move by the new owners of my home, thus causing me a great deal of time explaining my stabby tendencies did not result in this poor skull’s death.
    2) I cried when I read this, as I was just attacked by a squirrel and after googling squirrel attacks, came across this question
    { Squirrel Scratches – Need rabies shots?
    I got scratched up good this morning by a baby gone wild when I went to fill the munch box. I held out a peanut, and instead of taking it, she grabbed my hand with both of hers, bit my finger (but did not draw blood) and then ran up my arm, across my face (!), over my head and down my back, around a tree, back up on my back and back onto the fence. She scratched my nose, forehead and maybe scalp. And generally flew around me through the air like Spiderman. I think she would have done it again, but I threw a handful of peanuts on the ground, which distracted her, and she settled down to eat these quite peacefully.
    I do not know what she meant by doing this, and you should have seen the look on the face of a nearby adult squirrel.
    But what I want to know is, should I go get rabies shots?
    So I need to know, do I rush to the doctor to get rabies shots. }
    And this answer
    {Hubby always comments that I look like I have “played in a blender” after playing with Keebler!
    I too, researched the whole rabies thing after I got Keebler and even called the CDC. I was told (and I quote), “you are more likely to wake up with your head sewn to your carpet than you are to get rabies from a squirrel!” }

    So my questions are – WTF ? I need your advice on this . How likely am I to wake up with my head sewn to the carpet ? Also, should we not be worried that someone who answered the question this way is working for our government with access to majour infectious diseases ?
    Love you !
    Naviit

  36. Totally didn’t know that Barack Obama was a fan. It makes me think a little more of myself for loving your work and a little less of Barack Obama. No offense to you but I have a hard time respecting a President who has the same interests as I do. After all, I just realized in writing this comment that I didn’t even know how to spell “Barack” properly without Google.

  37. I missed the resignation letter post and I can’t find it cached or copied anywhere! Tell me I can’t read something and it makes me crazy wanting to read it. Seriously, I now have to read that letter. Help!

  38. A little advice on the alligator skin thing: An old monk told me once, “Never stick your cock anywhere you wouldn’t want to leave it.” Good advice around farm machinery, too.

  39. Thank you for that dose of awesome to aid me with what is starting out to be a spectacularly suck-tastic monday.

  40. I’m still contemplating the alligator vagina hole…it’s not something we in the east see much of…hmmm. Um…your dolls are kind of scary but only in a Flowers in the Attic haven’t seen any sun so I have a giant head kind of way. Which come to think of it…isn’t really that bad after all 🙂

  41. I know that banana! Seen it so many times and didn’t get on it because it’s art! Good to know I can ride that banana all day the next time….I…

    Hey look! Grizzly Adams has jalapeno poppers!

  42. I’m a little morbid.. but I so would have bought the skull and painted it wild colors .. yeah I’m warped like that.

  43. Your contemplation face – so beautiful.

    And I sympathize (with Victor) about the human skull thing. My wife wants a whole skeleton (she teaches figure drawing), and the plastic ones we have in the Halloween bin just aren’t anatomically accurate enough. I swear if she asks me if I can get hold of about 20 gallons of sulfuric acid I’m just gonna leave town.

  44. I thoroughly enjoyed the fact that taking a picture of a skull was too much, but fingering the gator was totally cool 🙂 You make me laugh – thank you.

  45. I’m glad you included a pic of Hailey and the actual banana; for a minute I thought you were pimping out your kid.

  46. Mmmmmm . . . . Nutty Brown.

    Did you sit on the deck? Love the deck.

    Always good to get a big breakfast in before riding bananas and fingering alligators.

  47. I like the phrase “vaguely naked,” it either makes me think..

    A. of you wandering in a room, mind firmly set on other matters, and then it’s all Emperor’s New Clothes, like, WHOOPS! Didn’t even notice! Picture! Calender!

    B. you standing behind one of those thin thin fabrics, naked. Like cheesecloth. Which I like the idea because it involves cheese.

  48. @Fred
    An old monk told me once, “Never stick your cock anywhere you wouldn’t want to leave it.” ??
    I hope this isn’t an Oprah ‘repressed memory’ thingy, where the monk was actually a priest, you were an alter boy and I’m going to have nightmares tonight.

    Bloggess, make him stop. He’s scaring the …everybody.

  49. I’m so glad Hailey has your same sense of joi de vivre and total disregard for “the norm”! It sounds like an awesome day. Still working through an antique store selling a human skull, maybe it was a famous person like George Washington but you would think they would advertise it as George Washington’s skull.

  50. Can’t believe I’m critiquing grammar on The Bloggess, but I do it because I love you. In the following sentence:

    Pre-orders started for the Blogger Body Calendar. I ordered one. You should to. All proceeds go to the National Eating Disorder Association. Plus, I’m vaguely naked in it.

    [You should to.] should actually be [You should, too.] Poor grammar is the downfall of society.

  51. Actually, I’m pretty sure that a progressivly steady decline in common human decency is the downfall of society, not poor grammar. While as a former editor, I have a great appreciation for good grammar, I also know that blogging is about expression. Which is why my blog is filled with typos, run-on sentences, sentence fragments, and many other grammar faux pas. Blogging is an art, which as we all know is for living!

  52. Goddamn it, I was going to be all cutting edge and relevent and point out the whole cloacha thing, but there are obviously smarter people than me about.
    I’d never thought of you as controversial. Then again a student told me he was gping to shoot me inn the head yesterday so I’ve got a pretty high bar of controversy.
    Thank god I live in Australia where no one has firearms except the federal police.
    Then I came home and had to dig a hole in the bathroom to rescue an escaped duckling.

    I think I’ll start a blog. No, really.

  53. @ If I were God. Yes, he was a priest, but he was my World Civ professor in college. And a helluva vodka drinker, too. He liked grown up ladies. Very cool monk.

  54. I love that cat note. We had a cat that hung out in a our yard whom we called Charlie. One day we noticed that Charlie had a new collar that had like a little feline message in a bottle thing. Charlie stood still long enough for us to open up his little bottle (ew) and we found a little scroll with a note on it. it said:

    My name is Mister “I am on a diet” Woo. oops, he ate an entire sausage before we read this!

  55. Damnit. That’s way better than the way I quit and then got fired. I shoulda went with the fire to my desk instead of the “I will fucking cut you twatwaffle!” Oh well, next time I guess.

  56. Umm, isn’t it illegal to sell/possess human bones unless you’re a doctor or medical school or something?

    I could be wrong. It wouldn’t be the first time.

    I’d be too creeped out to have a skull in my house. I think the juju or essence of the once-live owner would haunt me.

  57. I’m inexpressibly sad that your advise column is no more! *Moment of silence* Aaaaand I’m over it. No, but I might need your number because you almost always answered a question I didn’t even know I had so now I feel like I have no one to turn to.

  58. “Oh hell. Girl, you ride that damn banana. Art is for living, not for looking at.” is my new favourite quote.

  59. Now THAT’S a gallery owner. “Ride that banana, girl!” Love it.

    I rode a hot chili pepper in Milwaukee and a mechanical bull in Zumbrota. No bananas, though.

  60. You should probably be more careful when sticking your fingers into animal vaginas. They might all have vampire vaginas like cats do and then you’ll be sorry.

    ♥Spot

  61. Where am I going to get all my advice from now?!!?
    OH GOD I THINK MY HEAD WILL EXPLODE WITHOUT YOUR WISDOM.
    Or my life will become a small black hole and will suck me and my 3 cats into like a vortex because I can no longer see you answers to ever important life questions.
    Sucks you got fired and it was deleted. So was not finished reading it. Hope somehow you continue it somewhere so all of us people will less wisdom can learn from your greatness. xo

  62. Please don’t put notes on the cat? Why the hell not? I would rather have a cat letter carrier than a pidgeon any day – at least cats crap in a box and not on your head.

  63. I’m devastated your advice column is over — I loved what you said about the Marie Claire hoo-ha. (That sounds like a euphemism, but isn’t!) I also wish I’d seen your resignation letter. I mean, I’m sure it was no big banana, but it sounds awesome.

  64. Holly Shitballs!! How did I miss this the first time?? Ask The Bloggess is no more?? aw shit spanky, now I’ll never get the answer to question I sent in.

  65. Um…you ate at a place called ‘Nutty Brown Cafe?!’

    That’s classic.

    Lovely.
    Kinda weird.

    Oh, how I heart you. : )

  66. Late on this, but I just got around to the Sex Column stuff. OMG, I love My Puss. “My puss is decorated with jewels. Your puss runs on fossil fuels.” Thanks. I would honestly never ever ever see any of this stuff if it weren’t for you, Jenny. You’re corrupting us all. Kisses.

  67. In that doll line up – d’ya think they’re plotting on how to get their tiny hands on that “Men” book (video?) in the upper left corner of the picture?

    And I read your resignation letter, then went to find out about PNN. On their “About Us | History” page, Eleanor Roosevelt totally looks like she’s shootin us the bird with both hands. Or maybe shootin’ them. Right on, Eleanor!

    Re the skull. Totally would buy it & give it a place of honor where it could see what’s going on. Fireplace mantel? Corner of the kitchen counter? On a shelf above the desk??? It needs a home.

  68. Wow, what a coincidence! Hey, I’m no expert, but I just saw a thing on T.V. on some channel on some show about alligators and their sexual orifices! I say this because both the female and the male had holes where their alligator privates should be. These guys on a boat were fishing/hunting alligators and caught one and the amateur was all, “Um, how do you tell if it’s a boy or a girl alligator?” because he had it on it’s back and only saw this slit where the privates should be. So he thought he was holding a girl alligator. But, WRONG, according to the alligator expert. He said the guy alligators have their parts inside that hole, too and told the guy to stick his finger in there, cuz that was the only way they could tell if it was male or female. The guy was like, “But how will I know?” The expert answered, “Oh…you’ll know!” (then all the other helper guys on the boat laughed like it was this big joke) So, he sticks his finger in and he says, “I feel something hard, like a bone…” Yea, I’m not kidding you, that’s what he said. (Of course, I’m a big fan of “The Office” so I say to no one because I was alone in the room “That’s what she said!” ba-da-CHING!) Then, it happens. The alligator got some satisfaction and “stuff” came ooozing out everywhere and the boat helpers were all laughing at the guy while the alligator was … well, it was like watching alligator porn or something, basically. (and it was a lot, too, like the alligator hadn’t had any in like…FOREVER…unless they are just like that normally) Then, I had to change the channel and try to find something where little birds were flying around happily in the sky so I wouldn’t be all freaked out by animals anymore.

    So, moral of the story is …if you’re gonna stick your finger in a hole, just make sure the owner of the hole is dead (thank God, your alligator was) or you might just get “oozed” on.

  69. I left you a poem but I see it’s deleted
    I feel so misunderstood, lost, and defeated
    ’twas beauty in laughter I offered you honey
    so don’t kill the messenger who was bringing the funny

  70. Ask The Bloggess included some truly brilliant suggestions for improving the human race.

    Had world leaders and even average citizens heeded the wisdom of The Bloggess’ recommendations ! ! ! ! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..well, it’s hard to say where we’d all be.

    There just aren’t that many jails, or cemetaries.

    I cherish all those suggestions, Bloggess.
    Especially the stabby ones.

  71. There’s a great stabby candidate in the news right now. Some megadouche from Denver wrote and self-published a how-to for pedophiles. You read that right. Amazon was selling it for him until the police got involved -both to investigate him and to protect him. Apparently he’s been getting a lot of threats; stabby, shooty, strangle-y, impale-y…

    Do people not already know this is a no-no? Do we need another commandment to cover this?

  72. My kid collects skulls (she’s 5) wears black ALL the time, has a vampiric and voodoo dolls. I am a former ballerina and cheerleader. I don’t get it.

  73. Dude, are those John Lennon’s glasses? As in the ones he was wearing when he go shot? If so, that’s kind of creepy. And weird. And creepy. And really weird that your image was the last thing he saw. being as how you were either not even born yet or just a baby at the time. I don’t know how old you are, so I can’t make a determination on that statement.

    Again, really creepy.

    Or the cold meds are making me hallucinate, too.

    In which case, never mind and blame the Alka-Seltzer. That shit is like crack.

  74. You ate at Nutty brown? I love that place–it’s in my neighborhood! Did you say hi to the Parrot??

  75. Last week at my favorite pancake house I was waited on by Flamin’ Jenny. It was on the bill and everything!

  76. Haven’t visited in quite some time, so I’m like totally blowing out a couple hours reading past two months of that Bloggess.com and all I want to know is, “You drank $44.50 worth of tequila in one stop??”

    cheerios from Clearwater

    SS

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