I once had a weird relationship with the alternative weekly magazines in Seattle.  I read them front to back every week, including the advertisements and personal ads at the end.  It’s a compulsion and a procrastination thing; better that than doing my school work.  Because of this habit, I’d sometimes show up in the letters sections, embarrassing myself.  I got to know the personalities of the writers.  I spent more time in the shared world they created than they did.  The Alt Weekly Cinematic Universe, before those were a thing.

So.  I was feelin lonesome and adventurous one time and submitted a kinky personal ad.  They give you a number where you can check messages for responses to it, and I promptly lost the number and forgot about it for weeks.  A few years later, I randomly met an old friend on Broadway and she said she recognized my personal ad from the way I wrote it.

Now is it possible I’m such an eccentric writer that I could be clocked and remembered in this way, or did I actually share with her the fantasy I was describing, back when we were hanging out, singing along to Pepper in her jalopy, or watching horrible hentai on VHS, or seeing the news reveal of the Heaven’s Gate Cult in the wee hours of the morning, thinking of the same nike slogan everybody else thought of simultaneously?  Just do it?  I must have told her about the fantasy.  Shame I lost track of the ad and missed my chance to live it.  I’m sure that the very specific person I described was out there for me somewhere, and ready to rock.

My last girlfriend ever was hot to trot.  Different lady, different topic, but adjacent.  We had killer foreplay, tho I flamed out when it was time to bone down.  Reasons.  The important thing here is the foreplay.  I did something to her kinda random and specific that she liked a lot.  There was a section in one of those alt weeklies where people sent anonymous requests for sex advice, and I recognized myself in this.  She, or somebody with the same experience, wrote a letter asking “how do I get the nerve to ask new partners for this specific kind of foreplay?”

Was it her?  I don’t know.  But since I graduated from art school, I have not returned to this habit.  The reading, not the foreplay.  Well, that specific thing surely would not work on my husband, so not that either.

Those papers got cheaper and worse, with more ads and less content as the years wore on.  I don’t even know what they’re like now.  At least one of them still exists, but what does it even have to offer anymore?  That world is behind me now, ink stained pulp sheets drifting through wind-swept gutters.

Have I mentioned these things before?  At some point you will have read the entire contents of my brain.  The repetition will set in, and then it’s over for me.

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