I'll warn you now: once I get started, it's hard to get me to shut the fuck up.  Especially if
it's a good story I'm going to tell.  Anyone mind if I smoke?  Tough shit, I'm going to anyway.  I
can see you're giving me strange looks.  Go ahead and look.  I'm used to it.  Maybe you can
tell that my favorite color is black: black clothes, black fingernails, black hair.  Would you
believe I was once a blonde?  Black is great.  For one thing, I never have to worry about whether
or not my clothes match.  Besides, there's something dark and mysterious about being cloaked in
perpetual night, like you can't see who I really am underneath.  See this left ear?  Twenty
piercings, fifteen in my right; I do them all myself, whenever I feel like it.  Got one in my right
nostril and nasal septum, one in my bottom lip, one in my tongue--listen, you can hear the neat
clicking sound it makes against my teeth!  I've also got them between my lip and my chin, in my
eyebrow, in my navel, and in the left nip.  There's only one spot I absolutely refuse to pierce, and
that's down on the clit.  I've got guts, but even that makes me squeamish.  Besides, I've gotta
keep something sacred.
     It's hard for me to find anything sacred anymore.  I grew up going to a Protestant church,
because my happily married parents, who have never had any reason to question anything in
their happy little lives, always made me go.  I sat through countless meaningless services,
listening to pointless sermons nobody else listened to because the only reason anyone went to
church was because it was a social gathering for the old people, or because they were kids whose
parents made them.  I always wondered why God would bother coming to our church at all,
since no one seemed to give a fuck about him in there.  At least, if God thinks any way like me, I
bet he would have been pissed off by all the fucking hypocrisy that was going on, and annoyed
by all those stupid fucking "praise songs" they sang into mikes with digital tape recordings
aimed at attracting the younger crowd, that never said anything more like "I like Jesus" and all
that fucking puke.  To me, that's not religion.  But what the fuck do I know about it?  As if I
gave a fuck about God.  If God had any taste in music, he would smite them all with bolts of
lightning--right in the middle of the service--every time they started to sing one of those damn
annoying songs.  Then I would go to church more.  As it is, I haven’t gone since I went away to
college and escaped my parents' jurisdiction.
     Christian philosophy contradicts my preferred lifestyle, anyway.  I mean, supposedly you
have to lead this pure, good life free from all the really fun shit, like sex, drinking, drugs, and
having a really kick-ass fucking good time.  Now what's up with that?  If God wants me to be so
boring, without all that shit, I think I'd rather be fucking damned.  Hey, don't turn up your
fucking Bible thumping nose at me like that.  If your life is too Goddamn fucking boring, it's not
my fault.  Besides, I already know I'm gonna burn, so what the hell does it matter anymore what
I do?  They say that you go to heaven for the atmosphere and hell for the conversation.  And in
case you can't tell, I like to talk.  I plan on spending my time here getting drunk and getting laid.
Life makes more sense when I'm drunk, which is all weekend and most weekdays.
     As for the getting laid part, I'll warn you now that I don't look for any kind of a
relationship.  Use ‘em and lose ‘em, that's my philosophy!  Men are great.  Well, most of them
anyway.  But after I have sex with them they get all weird on me, thinking I'm suddenly "their"
girl and I'm gonna love them.  Hey, I'm gonna play the field, whether they like it or not.  I used
to think of it like the quest for the holy grail: When I found the perfect man, I'd settle down with
him and stop fucking around with anyone else.  But there are no perfect men out there.  They all
seem to have some fucking flaw or another.
     So I've gone around from man to man, and I've come to the conclusion that I need to
search for one true, holy, perfect shot glass.  Fuck men!  Well, I do that too.  But I can live
without the idea of a perfect man if only I can believe that somewhere out there is a perfect shot
glass, touched by the lips of someone perfect, and that if I took a shot out of it my life would
somehow be complete.  So I'm still looking for a shot glass, a better quest than for some fucking
grail or some fucking guy.  My friends help me look, and they keep giving me shot glasses, so I
have quite a collection—I think it was my friend Matthew who gave me my 2,628th, more or less--Damn straight that's a lot!  I'm proud of them, too, but none of them are THE shot glass.  But I will never again try to find perfection in a man.  I have a friend who tried and thought she DID find him, but the whole thing was a grand fucking failure.  I'm not going to put up with that shit.  If you want I'll tell you what happened to her, and maybe you'll see what a fucking mess it was, and then you won't try to do the same thing.  Oh, fuck what you want, I'll tell it regardless.  Hold on, lemme get another smoke.

     Leidah and I used to go bar-hopping together.  We scoped out all the guys in the local
bars, but while I was just looking for a good fuck she wanted something more:  a religious
experience.
     What the fuck does that mean?  I'm not really sure I understand it all the way, but the
way she described it was a search for the perfect man.  Personally, I think she had been watching
too many stupid fucking romantic comedies, the ones that say it's possible to find our "one true
love" and live happily ever after.  She said she wanted to find her soul mate.  She wanted
someone to make her feel pure, a relationship that would be sacred, a divine experience,
something bringing her closer to God.  And I guess since she couldn't get a hold of Trent
Reznor, she was on the quest for her own perfect man.
     One day she finally found him--so she said--not in any of the bars around campus, but at
a comic book store.  I'll warn you now, this should be the first clue to let you know that this
whole thing was destined to be a pathetic failure.  Now neither of us have really been into comic
books, but we have a few friends who are into that sort of stuff.  But they're into the darker
graphic novels, though, so it's not like they're a bunch of stupid Superman wannabe's.  We went in one afternoon to look for a birthday present for our friend John, who had asked for the 317th  issue of some series or another.  There he was, Leidah's pure, sacred man, kneeling in front of the Japanese animation section.  His head was bent down to read the labels on the bottom shelf, so I didn't get a good look at his face, once Leidah pointed him out to me.  She said that she had seen in him a beautiful swan in human form; she always did have a weird imagination.  But to humor her I looked his way, and he had one of those long, thin bodies with a pale, creamy complexion topped with short black hair and dark eyes, and since he was crouching down on the floor with his neck stretched out, I guess he could have looked like a swan.  But I wouldn't have seen it.  Not my type, I guess.  However, after we left Leidah said that she felt like she had been struck by a white-hot thunderbolt.
     Apparently this guy never noticed the lightning that had struck her down in the comic
book store.  Leidah tried in every way conceivable to her to get closer to him, though.  She began
to hang out more with our friends who watch anime--that's what they call Japanese animation--especially those who happened to vaguely know this guy.  She found out that his name was Tim--still is, I guess.  She went to the same fucking comic book store every day in hopes of seeing him; when she did, she always walked up to him to ask him about whatever anime he happened to be looking at.  That's how she found out what were his favorites, and she watched them religiously.  She even borrowed my VCR to tape some of them for herself.  I felt like telling her to get her own fucking life and stop copying his, but Leidah's one of those pathetic people who sometimes forgets what it's like to have a personality of her own.
     After I told her that Tim was in one of my classes she arranged to "bump" into me after
each class period, bumping into him at the same time.  Hello!  Can we say "stalker"?  It was kind
of sad, seeing her chase after him like that, and he barely responded to her flirtatiousness.
When they talked I could pick up some hints of flirting from his side, but it never compared to
the extent to which she practically threw herself at him.  Now, my friend Leidah is no dog, but
she's no Winona Ryder either.  At least, she's not nearly as hot as me!  That's one of the reasons
I miss bar-hopping with her now, ‘cuz she made me look so damn sexy in comparison!  But
don't you tell HER that.  Anyway, then she started wearing those slutty T-shirts all the time, you
know, the ones that are so tight they practically scream, "Hey, look at my tits, why don't you?!"
THAT got his attention, at least for a while.  It was sort of a relief to me, because I was thinking
he was gay.
     I told Leidah she was obsessed.  She told me that she was SURE she could see something
in his eyes when they talked, some spark to prove that he felt the same way about her.  I tried to
tell her that obviously he DIDN'T, or else wouldn't he be a little more interested in chasing after
her, too, instead of the other way around?  She was making herself look like Wiley fucking
Coyote chasing the roadrunner.  Everyone who knew what was going on thought Leidah was
looking really pathetic, trying so hard to win this "perfect soul mate" of hers, when apparently he
didn't give a flying rat's ass.  And the rest of us didn't think he was all that anyway.  Tim's looks
weren't so bad, but from what I could tell he just had the personality of a loser.  His life revolved
around anime and video games, and he didn't socialize with that many people outside of his
friends on the internet.  He simply didn't care about hanging out with people, or having a good
time, or getting laid, or drunk, or ANYTHING--anything important, that is.  And to think Leidah
was making a fucking fool of herself over this ass monkey!  Maybe it's something in the name--I've known too many Tims who have turned out to be complete fucking ass monkeys, and every fucking last one of them had at least one girl who has totally head over heels in love with him. Goddamn!  I need another smoke.
     Tim's apathy did more than just encourage Leidah's crush.  His "pure" lifestyle, far
removed from her nights of bar-hopping and guy-chasing in drunken revelry, hit this massive
blow to her self-esteem.  She told me that she saw herself kinda like some kind of whore, or
some fucking swamp thing, and that she was so below him that she was beginning to think that
she could never hope to deserve him.  Whoa!  This was getting serious.  I said that first of all,
she never was and never would be a whore or a swamp thing, and that most guys like a girl
who's been around, and if Tim couldn't appreciate her for who she was, then he could just go
fuck himself.  Besides, shouldn't she be old enough not to have these freakish mental problems?
But Leidah wouldn't listen.  She said that she had to clean up her lifestyle if she was ever going
to raise herself up to his Catholic standards.  I knew better than to ask her how she knew that
Tim was Catholic, or if she even knew what Catholic values were; she was brought up Atheist.
     She gave me all but one or her packs of Marlboro Lights and said she was going to just
smoke one a day until she ran out, and then she was going cold turkey.  She also said she wasn't
going to go to the bars with me anymore.  Things were getting way too fucking out of hand.  I
didn't want to stick my nose in the business more than it already was, but I didn't want to see her
throwing away her life over this ass monkey, either.  I either had to push them together or pull
her away from him.  The tension was actually getting to me, and that has to say a lot right there.
     I decided to throw a huge party at my apartment and invite Leidah, Tim, the anime
friends who knew him so he wouldn't feel too out of place, and a few dozen other close friends
to make the whole thing a little more private.  My roommate went home for the weekend, which
was all for the best.  It turned out to be a wild fucking night.  I was having a grand old
fucking time--one of my friends had brought a bottle of Midori and after the first few shots I was
in a very good mood.  Someone brought me a silver shot glass to add to my collection; it wasn't
THE one I've been looking for, but it was still a fine-looking vessel.  The anime crowd gave up their sobriety early into the night, and became the loudest and the rowdiest of anyone, which was funny to me because they're all usually so quiet and reserved.  I dug out this old cigarette holder that used to belong to my great-aunt--you know, those long tubular things you stick cigarettes in to make them really fucking long?  Does anyone really know what they're called?  Anyway, I wandered around my apartment with my extra-long cigarette, blasting Goth music on the stereo and mingling with all my strange friends, like some kind of punk-ass Holly Golightly, occasionally checking in on Leidah and Tim.
     They were the only two at the party not wearing all black.  Leidah was wearing this
bright red, shiny, skintight shirt and a red satin skirt, her hair half pulled up and half down, so
that her face was framed with a thick mane of long, curly brown hair.  She looked so damn hot, I
thought that if Tim wasn't going to touch her I'd fuck her myself, rather than let the night go to
waste.  Tim was dressed up in sweats and a white T-shirt that had something written in Japanese
on the back.  He had brought is Sega system and hooked it up to my TV, to show Leidah and
whoever else this new game he had just gotten in the mail all the way from Japan.  His distant
gaze into the screen, amidst all these people having a good time in the company of other living
people in the same room, make me see how foreign he was to everyone else in this
environment.  He was as far away as Japan to the rest of us, or as far away as heaven to Leidah.
     Leidah wasn't going to just sit there without putting up a good fight, though.  After she
had had an few Jell-o shots she got up some courage and turned up the flirtation level several
more notches, skootching closer and closer to him on the sofa, laughing louder at his occasional
jokes, and practically breathing down his neck.  I was almost surprised she didn't tackle him
then and there.
     Tim had not been drinking all night, and I could see he was a little reluctant when she
offered him the 32-ounce slurpie cup of Sex on the Beach.  But someone was mixing the drinks
up for everyone, and what fun would it be if he didn't join in, I heard her say to him.  So much
for living up to his pure Catholic values.  But I knew that part couldn't last long.  She offered to
share it with him, so he wouldn't have to drink that much, and he finally consented.  Maybe he
was human after all.
     I lost track of what happened after that.  I was having my own drunken revelry.  Besides,
I figured, why fuck around with them anymore, since they seem to be doing good now?  As the night dragged on everyone was having a great time, though the apartment was looking like a disaster area.  I guess people left eventually; I escaped into my bedroom at some point with someone I don't ever remember now who he was.
     The next morning I woke up early, not out of choice, oh God no.  The phone rang at a
quarter to eight.  I had to climb out from under what's-his-face, and picked it up on the fifteenth
ring, after wading through a roomful of post-party trash.  It was Leidah.  I was hung over, so she
had to repeat herself a few times before I understood what she was saying.
     She was at a fucking church--some Catholic church about ten miles away.  She needed a
ride home.  I comatosely asked her how she ended up there.  She explained that after the party
was over she walked all the way out there to make a confession.  I had no idea what the fuck she
was talking about, but I agreed to pick her up and put down the phone.
     I threw on some clothes and stumbled through the apartment.  I had to look up the
address of the church in the phone book, and found it lying under the head of some poor slob
who never made it home the night before.  On the way to the church I stopped at Kum and Go—I shit you not--it's a chain of convenience stores in the town where I go to school.  I personally go there over other places just cuz I love the name.  Anyway, I stopped at Kum and Go to pick up some coffees for me and Leidah; I figured we both needed them.
     It's amazing, just who you'll meet in convenience stores at ungodly hours.  I bumped into
Tim himself, getting an industrial-sized Mountain Dew.  We said a passing hello and left it at
that.  I was in no mood to fuck around with his side to any kind of story about whatever the hell
happened.
     When I got there, I felt like I was breaking into a church.  The place was deserted, but the
door was unlocked.  The church I grew up with always kept the doors locked when people
weren't supposed to be there, so it seemed wrong that we should be there at that fucking hour of
the morning.  I found Leidah kneeling in front of one of those altars off to the side of the
sanctuary.  She was still wearing the same outfit as the night before, but the look had lost its
luster.  When I walked up close enough she turned to look at me, and I almost didn't recognize
her face.  She had been crying.  Now, normally when people cry, their eyes swell up a little, you
know.  Her eyes were so swollen, she could barely keep them open.  She literally looked like she
had Downs fucking syndrome or something.
     I wasn't expecting that.  And when she looked at me, her eyes still trickling small
streams of tears, her lips tight, and her clasped hands shaking uncontrollably, I really was
fucking scared shitless.  I don't think I'll be able to forget what she said to me there, alone in the
church:
     "I was afraid to light a candle.  I've seen it done in movies in churches, but-" she
faltered, "it's like I don't belong here.  I-I'm not welcome, I'm not welcome anywhere.  That
sounds dumb, doesn't it?"  She began to sob.  I put my arms around her, not quite sure what to
say.
     "I've been praying, or trying to.  I'm not sure how it's done.  I just wanted to find some
religion--but now it's gone--forever!"  The last few words were hard to make out between sobs.
I smoothed her hair and rubbed her shoulders, trying to take off some of the weight that had
built up there.
     Just then we heard the door open behind us.  There was an elderly man, standing in the
doorway.  I wasn't sure if it was okay for us to be there, but I figured we needed to get out of
there anyway; the karma was way too fucking bad.  I whispered to Leidah, "Leidah, if that's the
way religion's going to be to you, then who needs it?  Same goes for that...jerk.”—Good Lord, can you believe what a retard I must have sounded like?--“Trust me, you are a beautiful human being--seriously.  You are one of the best people I know.  And, well, so this business didn't work out.  There's still all of life to enjoy!  If you keep thinking like you don't deserve anything, life will be a, um, stupid, er, pain in the, uh, neck.  You deserve better.  Enjoy life while you're still young enough!  If God's gonna keep you from doing that, well, he can just go, um, blank himself.  Hey, come on, I'll take you back to my place.  You can sleep in my roommate's bed, and later tonight, we can drop some acid I've been saving for a rainy day.  Heck, I'll even peirce your navel if you want."  God, how I wanted to shoot myself.  I’m surprised I could say even that much without cussing or throwing the fuck up.
     Leidah smiled meekly.  It had been a hard morning.  Fuck, most of them are, for me
anyway.  We got up, walking arm-in-arm down the aisle.  The old man had to move out of the
way for us, but we paid that fucker no attention.
     Lemme tell you about the weather the whole time this had been going on: it had been
cold, snowy, and cloudy for the past couple weeks or so, but as we stepped out of the church we
were bathed in warm sunlight.  Finally things were going to look up.  I took her home, put her to
bed, and that night we did the acid just like I promised.  Leidah was too chicken to let me pierce
her navel, so I dyed her hair instead--bright red.  She looks great with it, too!
     But it took a long-ass time before Leidah got anywhere near being her old normal self
again.  For a long time after that, she was still in love with him, against her better judgement.
He wanted nothing more to do with her, of course, and they didn't speak to each other much, but
she still pined after him, like some fucking far-off dream that she knew would never come true.
I think she knew it would never come true, but she believed that she could at least strive for
something pure and noble by worshiping it from a distance.  Maybe it was just the idea of him
that she was in love with, and not the real him.  Anyway, for a while she had resigned herself to
death--not literally, but she gave up all the things which make life worth living--sex, drinking,
and fun.  She might as well have been dead.
     Gradually, she finally started to come out of her shell and rejoined the world.  She goes
to the bars with me again now, though she doesn't try to get laid nearly as much as I do.  But
that's okay; more men for me!  So I say to you, avoid getting caught up in that shit in the first
place.  God bless the fucking easy life, free from fucking love and dumb fucking God!  Hey, who
wants to fuck me tonight?  Life is a blast if you make it one, baby, so long as you don't piss all
over it.  The party's only just beginning.....