Five Hundred Words That Began In Jest

I Want A Dumpster Baby wanted 500 hundred words about her by the time her plane touches down.  She asked for the short essay in joking dismay that some people didn't seem to get the point of her blogging, her niche, her shtick, her back story amazing story true story.  Maybe they did get it, but maybe in their haste to be helpful or droll they forgot, maybe they remembered but were being ironic.  I bet she didn't expect that anyone would write it, but I did.  Maybe others did, as well (but not as well, see what I did there?).  We shall see.

Every day in every way.

I Want A Dumpster Baby and I cyber-met in the summer of 2011.  I'm trying to pinpoint exactly how it went down.  I had started the Klonopin Chronicles page in a burst of manic test-prep-avoidance.  Somehow I saw a blog IWADB had posted about quitting smoking.  I wrote to her because I had quit smoking too and I knew she was going to need a lot of support.  Then it turned out that not only was she quitting smoking, but she was ten years sober and wrote a gut-wrenchingly funny blog.   I knew we had lots in common and lots of things to talk about and a pretty similar outlook on life;  Although she is a fair bit sunnier than I am, we are both lavish with gratitude.  We both have been in the looney bin.  Doubtless on 72-hour holds.  Doubtless buying enthusiastic rounds when we were flush and accepting without shame the proffered drink when we were not.  

And of course she wanted to find a Dumpster Baby.  By now I hope that everyone realizes that the Dumpster Baby is a hyperbole, "which is a rhetorical device and not literal so suck it," as I like to say, so often that I quote myself.  No doubt IWADB would welcome a Dumpster Baby if she found one, but I see now that there more to it than that.  To show what lengths she is willing to go to bring a child in her life.  To quit smoking for God sakes, to appeal to adoption agencies or potential birth mothers, to be as healthy as possible to encourage baby-making in its most basic biologic terms.  I can only surmise.  I’m intuitive like that.

Two things called to me in deciding to write this. One is to promote my gal, whom I love like a sister. even though that might seem scary.  And two is to talk about the dismay you feel as a writer when people don't remember who you are when they read your posts.  They miss the point, they don't get your joke, they want to make it about them in their comments.  Sometimes they want to pick fights or scare you with their disjointed obsessions, almost pitiable if they weren't so terrifying.

She likes owls

Blogging and running interactive Facebook pages is so different from other kinds of writing we do.  Where else do you get to respond to the writer right away, have dialogues, meaningful exchanges?   Where else can you do a sniper assault and slink off into cyberspace, never to be heard from again, until you invent the next persona, or wander off, getting weirder with every day that goes by without your meds?

All I meant to say with all this is that please don't offer IWADB alcohol.  Please don't make your response to my status updates all about you.  Please don't contradict my OPINIONS or criticize the thing I JUST GOT DONE TELLING YOU I LIKED.  Not stabby, no blame or shame.  Just that sometimes I wish I could redirect the conversation back to the original intent.  It helps to make the connection.  It helps to feel the reinforcement that people out there "get us."  

Namaste, you crazy bitches. 

[Ed. note:  the piece came to 800 words, but technically only 500 of them were really about IWADB and the rest tangential musing, so we’ll let it stand.  Plus you should have seen how much TKC cut it down.  It was easily over a thousand words at one point.]