The following is a true story. The names have not been changed. Fuck the innocent.

I promised a while ago that I'd tell the story about the time my friend and I were accused of running an actual mafia at school. This is that story. [Law & Order clang]

"Introduction"

It was probably 6 months after Columbine, in a school of about 330—that's K-12. If you've ever lived in a small town, you already understand that the primary form of entertainment is talking about other people because there's shit-all to do there. It's sort of like TMZ, but with people you've never heard of. Basically, what happened was that some asshat kid said something to his girlfriend about my friend and I being "crazy," and "like those Columbine kids." She told her mom, who worked at the elementary school. Her mom then told the high school counselor, who told EVERYONE HE ENCOUNTERED. Seriously, this douchecanoe ran around like some asshat Chicken Little warning everybody about the Richland Mafia, because two 17-year-olds in rural North Dakota (yes, that is redundant) somehow constitute an organized crime family.

"Because of reasons"

The whole thing somehow blew up into this grandiose story about how the two of us were plotting to show up with an arsenal and carry out a hit on...well, everybody, apparently. Nobody actually talked to us about it, but suddenly all but maybe three of the teachers were adding their own observations to the heap of bullshit collection of totally credible evidence, such as:

Exhibit A: "They dress in black a lot."
This was actually half true. My friend dressed in black a lot. I dressed in white a lot. This was mainly because my friend owned a lot of black shirts, and I owned a lot of white ones. I also dressed in orange fairly frequently, which was mainly because no one had ever explained to me that the fact that you really like a color does not necessarily mean that you should wear it. Ever.

As long as you're wearing bright, cheery colors, the world is a playground of fucking happiness.

Wearing black makes you summon Satan to shoot drugs up your asshole and murder everyone forever.

Exhibit 2: "They write in 'gang symbols.'"
If "gang symbols" means "anything other than the Latin alphabet," then this is true. Otherwise, it's just a bunch of douchenozzles running around inciting moral panic because they don't know that there are other languages, but the TV told them about these "gangs" in big cities where you have to kill people just to get in, and they identify themselves by writing weird. Actually, we were both very into language, and experimented a lot with creating languages and alphabets, which is exactly the kind of thing you do before you go out and murder everyone. By that logic, Tolkien was the fucking Godfather.

Yes, I know it's actually called "Quenya." You're missing the point.

Exhibit The Third: "They're not in any sports."

Anymore. We were in all the sports, but we were never popular enough to be given any playing time, so we said "fuck this shit" and quit wasting our time. Instead, we joined other activities where our talents would be appreciated. [Note: in small towns, this is how team tryouts work: years before you are born, when your parents are still in high school, everyone is divided into cliques. They all finish or quit school, move nowhere, and start having babies who, to save time, are divided into the same cliques. If you're in the popular clique, you get to be on the team and actually play.]

Exhibit Fuck You: "They get bullied, just like those Columbine kids."
Who the actual fuck looks at this situation and goes: "Wow, quite a few of our students are inexcusable pricks. We'd better consider suspending the people they're bullying in order to protect their God-given right to be assholes."?

Exhibit I Don't I Can't Even: "They locked everyone in the computer lab, turned out all the lights, and walked from person to person pointing a gun at everybody's heads, apparently as some kind of 'preview' of what they were planning to do later."
OK, so this one actually sounds pretty fucking serious because of the locking people in a room and, y'know, the bringing fucking weaponry into the school. Except that a) that room only locked from the outside, b) neither of us even owned a fucking gun of any kind, much less brought them to school and pointed them at people, c) what kind of fucking moron brings a gun to school and points it at people in order to tell them that they're planning to bring a gun to school and point it at people sometime in the future, and d) of the probably twelve or so people who were actually present at the time this allegedly occurred, not fucking one of them had the slightest clue what the hell anyone was talking about when asked about it later on.

Fortunately for us, the principal was not an asshat, douchenozzle, or any other form of dumb motherfucker. He had actually lent me his book on Norwegian runes after seeing some similarities in my invented scripts, so he was disinclined to acquiesce to anybody's request to suspend us for no fucking reason. Apparently, he believed that students maintain some level of actual rights at school. Pretty much, he asked us one time, for the sake of ritual, if any of this was remotely true. We, of course, said "no." He replied (paraphrased): "no shit." Then he told us that it probably wouldn't be a good idea to be seen wearing a trenchcoat to school any time soon, and let us go.

"Aftermath" (You can insert a curriculum-based pun here if you want)

During the course of this ridiculous drama, my mom (who worked at the school at the time) of course asked me what the hell this was all about and why somebody would just make up some story like this. When she saw how close I was to an aneurysm of confusion, she also called several of the people who were there at the time. When they had the exact same reaction, she wrote an open letter to the entire staff, which basically said "what the actual fuck is wrong with all of you? You owe my son and his friend a huge fucking apology."

I never got one. The closest thing I got was the day the counselor walked into my study hall on a day where I happened to be the only student in the room. He sat down backwards in the desk in front of me and started spouting some bullshit about responsibilities and safety or something. I'm not actually sure, because I wasn't fucking listening. I didn't even look at him; I just waited until he stopped talking, then waited a couple more minutes until I could tell he was getting really uncomfortable that I hadn't kissed his ass and forgiven everything yet. Then I just said "are we done here? I'm kind of busy," and he got up and left. I'm pretty sure I never talked to him again.

That's pretty much the end of the story. I don't know if there's a moral or anything. I think this is the part where the screen just fades to "DICK WOLF," and you have to decide for yourself what the fuck it all means. The best I've got is that some people are assholes, so fuck 'em. Leave. Do awesome shit. Don't look back, until it somehow comes up that you were once accused of running a mafia, and everybody in the room is like "you have to tell that story!"

Cats are terrible editors.

So, I had this great idea that I was going to try to write this morning, since I finally got a chair so I could sit at my actual desk that is not a coffee table at the couch in front of the TV because apparently that is a recipe for watching a shit-ton of Adventure Time, but absolutely no productivity.

Sana wrote the original caption for this picture, but I had to move it because it went right the fuck of f the edge of the screen.
Also—not pictured? The chair that the whole first sentence was about.

Of course, this morning, my actual view looked more like this:

This was actually the best view I had while trying to write this morning.

After I told Sana that she couldn't just stand there and be in the way, she decided to help* me write**. Here are some of her suggestions for another post I was trying to work on (they're all additions, as apparently she never managed to step on the backspace key hasn't quite grasped how to suggest deletions or substitutions yet):

• -0
• gt3weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
• 0------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ (apparently I don't use nearly enough zeroes or hyphens when I write, which I really need to work on, or I'm going to alienate my entire feline audience)
• vfggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggc

For this post, though, she only had one suggestion, which she used to try to caption that first picture of the desk:

ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

I think she was trying to transcribe the lyrics to the Doctor Who theme. Or maybe she was just excited that Ten was on the screen, because she's totally a Tennant fangirl:

Gwen helped by making sure none of the sunlight in the room went to waste.

Anyway, obviously this isn't a real post. Hopefully I'll have one soon, as long as my editors don't suggest too many aws2weihgasssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssi890 major changes.

*stand
**on my keyboard

Librarians are probably the most polite paparazzi ever. Or the politest. I don't know, I'm not Merriam-Fucking-Webster.

So, I had this whole post ready to go about how I broke my ankle at roller derby practice a few weeks ago where I was going to complain about how I always have to have people carry stuff for me and how I can't skate again until probably June, or how fucking exhausting it is to have to do a thousand miniature pole-vaults just to get anywhere, but then something happened on Saturday that made it totally worth it, so I had to rewrite the whole fucking post. Thanks a lot, one of the most amazing things that has ever happened to me.

In an effort to make being stuck in a cast for weeks suck less, I got a blue one, and I painted a TARDIS on it (which I'll admit was a bit of a challenge to do upside-down at 2AM):

Yes, it is bigger on the inside. Y'know, to allow for the swelling.

Then I went to the Texas Library Association Annual Conference, where Neil Gaiman happened to be speaking on Saturday. At first, they told me he was just going to be speaking, since he's coming back on a book tour in a couple of months, but then he apparently decided to do an incredibly limited signing that you had to have a ticket to get into. There were 100 tickets—total—for like 7000 librarians, but I totally got the second-to-last one. WHICH LED TO THIS:

Neil Fucking Gaiman signed my cast. Also, yes, I'm pretty sure he took his wife's middle name.

After he signed it, he pulled out his phone and took a picture of it...which he then tweeted and posted on his Facebook page. Then he retweeted my reply to him (about a minute before he came on stage to speak). I posted a couple pictures of it to snark the tumblr. I also tweeted the pictures at The Bloggess and she told me I win the internets AND THEN SHE FOLLOWED ME!

So, for the rest of the afternoon, I'm having some kind of aneurysm of awesome, which is still going on when I go to watch my wife destroy everyone on the track and win Best Blocker in her roller derby bout. While I'm there, she skates over to me and tells me that another girl on her team follows the Doctor Who Official tumblr. Who fucking reblogged my post. And then so did Neil, who added "I was impressed." And Amanda Fucking Palmer. And about 7000 other people. And then I passed out because I couldn't fucking handle the amount of awesome that was happening all in one day.

Also, pretty much the entire conference knew who I was in the span of about 2 hours, and suddenly everybody wanted a picture. It was like the politest paparazzi ever. "Can I take a picture? Do you mind? Is it OK? Oh, thank you SO much! I/my daughter/son/coworker/friend/neighbor is SUCH a fan." Of Doctor Who, that is. Or Neil Gaiman. Probably not of me. Yet.

Hello, Sexy.