Susie Bright tagged me in one of these damn online tag games. Actually, I kind like these blog tag games — they get me thinking in different ways, and they give me something to blog about when I’m running dry. This one is peculiarly intense, though, and took a fair amount of work.

Here are the rules:

1. We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
2. Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
3. People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
4. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
5. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

So here are my eight things. They’re obviously not random in any literal sense — it’s not like I put every fact about myself into a paper bag and pulled out eight. So I’m interpreting “random” to mean “things that people
who read my blog might not know about me, on a variety of topics, most of which I wouldn’t normally blog about.”

They are:

1. I once dated a guy who was about ten years younger than me, and it turned out that we had briefly gone to the same school — him when he was in kindergarden, me when I was in high school. I didn’t have a problem being in my thirties dating a guy in his twenties; but when it occurred to me that I probably saw this kid playing on the jungle gym when I was sneaking off behind Rockefeller Chapel to get stoned — and was now fucking him — it was a little weird.

2. When Ingrid and I were in the midst of planning our wedding, I became briefly obsessed with the TV show “Bridezillas.” I stopped watching when I realized that I was becoming increasingly sympathetic with the women on the show.

3. When I’m on the bus and I hear people laughing, my first reaction is to assume that they’re laughing at me.

4. In 1992 I won the use of a billboard for a month. (Context: I was a mildly rabid baseball fan in the late ’80s and early ’90s, and for a couple of years I was a mini-season-ticket holder for the Oakland A’s. I won the billboard in a 25th anniversary sweepstakes they had for season ticket holders.) I think they assumed the winner would have their billboard say “Happy Birthday Mom” or “I Love You, Sheila, Will You Marry Me?” But it was an election year, so I had my billboard run in October, and I had it say:

Over 45,000 Americans have died of AIDS.
One of them was my friend Rob Tyler.
Who are you voting for?

5. I first saw “Pink Flamingos” my freshman year in college, and was so upset and outraged that I walked out after 20 minutes — and wrote an outraged letter to the editor of the college newspaper, lambasting my fellow students for laughing. (I should have known that, poetic justice being what it is, I’d grow up to be a perverted porn writer, not to mention a John Waters fan.)

6. Ingrid is not the first person in my life to tell me, “If you’re upset with me, I want to know about it.” But she is the first person in my life to make me believe that she meant it.

7. I once had an LSD trip in which I hallucinated that my self — my consciousness — had somehow gotten separated from my bank of memories and feelings and ideas. It felt very real and was extremely frightening, and I spent the rest of the trip — several hours — painstakingly picking through this enormous body of stuff that seemed to be floating around underneath me, and trying to decide which of them were really me, and which were just flotsam. (“Do I really feel that way? No, that’s just something my mother used to frighen me with.” “Do I really believe that? Yes, I think I do. I’ll hang on to that.”) It was an exhausting emotional wringer… but at the end of it, I felt incredibly liberated, like I’d lightened myself of a huge load of useless crap that had just been gumming up the works.

8. One the best Halloween costumes I ever did was the year I dressed as a Magritte painting. I wore a double-breasted suit and a bowler hat, and painted my face sky blue with clouds.

And finally, a bonus round:

9. I like big butts, and I cannot lie.

And now for my tagees. I cheated here and emailed people beforehand asking if they wanted to be tagged, but I could only round up seven players. I feel a bit like the girl in that fairy tale who knitted shirts out of nettles for her seven brothers to turn them back from swans to people, but didn’t have time to finish the last one, so the youngest brother was stuck with one swan’s wing. But I’m tired of asking around, and I want to play this damn game and get it over with. So if you want to be the eighth blogger in this game, holler. First come first served. Thanks to the excellent bloggers who said they’d play! They are, in alphabetical order:

C4bl3Fl4m3

Friendly Atheist

Letters From a Broad

Literate Perversions

Lusty Lady (Rachel Kramer Bussel)

Reverse Cowgirl

truthpleasuretikkun