My Lunatic Diva Journey

For Nichole, on her birthday

Have you ever set a major goal for yourself and then spent months working toward the achievement? Have you gotten your car washed then immediately had it shit on by a bird? Have you microwaved some food, tasted it, and then realized it needed another dozen seconds to rotate in the electronic heat while you stared at it? Have you begun pondering how these three things relate to one another? It’s alarming you wouldn’t know the common thread because the word in question is used to describe every single thing we do nowadays, and that is how we are all on a journey. The journey is macro with each step of the way its own micro journey, all of them unique tests to guide us on our long and winding path to enlightenment, or whatever surprise(s) may arrive at the terminus.

It used to be that going on a journey meant battling cancer or doing time in prison or traveling around the world, but such severe circumstances lacked inclusivity. Couldn’t people other than those endeavoring to conquer looming death or seeking parole or visiting Machu Pichu be on a life-changing pathway? Going to the strip mall walk-in clinic or being legally mandated by a judge to do community service or traveling out of one’s home state on a day trip were kind of amazing, too, sophists postulated. Our current moment is built on, at some core level, a data-mined (“market-researched”) grifting of humanity’s self-validating desire to feel special as a means of fitting in, emboldening people to convince themselves that their ordinary affairs are extraordinary journeys. The subtext is that we all matter, and that we all share universal, dumbed down phrasing with one another to explain how and why we matter, unable to be content with merely doing stuff we care about or must endure — life promises problems, of course — due in part to the allure of social (and social media) sinecures.

The New Agey, extremely branding-centric, post-Covid world ramped up the significance of the contemporary journey, an ipso facto statement requiring no evidence since blaming Covid for our problems is one of our greatest shared modern bonding journeys. For a long time the only “special” people were extremely wealthy (aka powerful), intellectually or physically gifted, or mentally retarded. That was it. You could display your specialness by redirecting the course of humanity, awing your fellow humans with delightful inventions and spectacles, or eating a lollipop without dropping it on the ground, but if those characteristics failed to define your actions, they were not all that meaningful. In 2020, when people were trapped inside, antsy looking for fun new pursuits and ways to spend money, the comprehensive sense of journeying happened in full force. Vasco da Gama had journeyed, T.E. Lawrence had too. Maybe your great-grandparents had taken a less historically noteworthy journey, but a consequential one of self-preservation to build new lives for future generations in a foreign land, the one you squandered by pretending you cared about anything as much as they did about their freedom. And there you were quarantined collecting baseball cards and trying to master air frying chicken wings while your “partner” — not to be confused with a law firm journey — became enamored with scrimshaw and feng shui. Who could say that they weren’t all equally valid journeys? Da Gama’s discovery of maritime routes mattered, but so did implementing an Old Bay dry rub while inhaling the bergamot cedar aroma permeating the kitchen due to Heather’s latest rushed delivery from UPS. As the saying goes, Da Gama sailed so we could swim.

A key element of the linguistic goal in modern journeying is to eliminate judgment. A friend of mine quit drinking last year and told me how several friends had become weirded out by her refusal to consume whiskey in their presence anymore. “Listen, I’m on my own journey here and nothing you or anyone else does is going to ruin it for me,” she messaged me about her haters. When I questioned the noun, she said, “I mean, what else would you call it? Hit me with new words.” I argued that she was simply entering a different iteration of being herself, a new chapter as self-help gurus might classify it, the way life has long been lived: created in phases and stages, a term Willie Nelson once used to detail divorce, an unfortunate milestone documenting a journey’s conclusion, because yes, the journey has to end somewhere. Although these days it ends solely because a new journey is ready for one’s fresh embarkment. Divorce’s attorney journey must beget the gift of the cleansing rebirth journey to ensue.

My friend Mooch recently sent me a fluff article she wrote about First Dog Day, a celebration honoring canines at the college where she works, which was nothing more than a way to massage the dog owners’ tailbones right above the asshole home to the vagus nerve where they bury their heads each day for pleasure before running around in ecstatically egomaniacal circles. In the piece, Mooch categorized one dog as an enjoyer of glamping, a portmanteau for glamorous camping, as I noted in response how a few more Palestinian children had just been massacred. It prompted her reply imploring me to “STFU” followed by sharing her belief “that there is something inherently wrong with people who don’t like dogs.”

“I detest them,” I said. “Shit and piss noise machines. Like having a toddler for a dozen years. The worst. Go meet a person and find real unconditional love, you fucking sad cunts.”

“That’s because you’re a lunatic diva,” Mooch said.

Living alone and working from home ramped up my journey into severe dog contempt. The homeowners to my left and directly behind me both have beagles, an animal whose lone purpose when outside is to bark endlessly until it is brought back inside. When the neighboring beagles do this, the incessant ululations heard over my headphones grip me with uncontrollable rage. In between yelling “Shut the fuck up!” as loudly as I can then muttering to myself (and the ghost of Sue, a woman who deeply disliked dogs due to multiple childhood biting incidents), I concocted the idea to blast death metal and free jazz from my CD player out the kitchen window as payback. Then the childless thirty-something neighbors to my right added a second dog to their “family,” triggering more barking, especially when both beagles were within earshot, as I kept hoping to talk to the man, owner of the feeblest handshake I’d ever gripped during our one encounter two years ago, so I could inquire, “You and your sister got a new dog, huh?” Not because I was curious, obviously, but because my irritability made me want to ruin him by planting the idea that he and his girlfriend seemed like siblings. Nobody should feel compelled to intervene in my journey through psychosis and borderline sociopathology, nor should they be busy worrying that the dogs’ fragility might have been harmed by the sporadic bad actors provoking my imagination’s dark side. Dog? More like doggone nuisance. “We’re gonna need a cleanup on aisle dad jokes!” Why? A “service animal” shat on the floor.

Thankfully, I try to control my dog hate via my marijuana journey, one that took its own turn on a few jaunts to the dispensary by the Basketball Hall of Fame, just like the game’s founder, James Naismith, intended. The curly-haired cashier asked me on one visit, “How are you today, Poppa?” He didn’t say papi, and contrary to my usual quick-witted retorts, I was too confused to volley back a zinger. When he did it again weeks later, I told my buddy waiting in the car — after I pantomimed giving a blowjob to embarrass him during my defeated walk back — that for my next visit I would be ready. As I approached the register, my curly-haired nemesis was gone, a cute brunette girl with shiny pink fingernail polish in his place.

“Where’s the guy who calls everyone Poppa?” I asked her.

“Carlos?” she said. “He’s on break right now. What about him?”

“Why does he do that?”

“I think it’s just part of his culture. Like saying ‘sir.’”

“Oh, so it’s not because I look like Hemingway or had the barrel of a shotgun in my mouth before I drove here?”

I know what you’re thinking: “You sarcasm mogged the dispensary lady? You were joke-maxxing an innocent bystander? You rage baited to aura farm, unc?” Chopped, cooked, et cetera. It’s undeniable that we’re all on a slang journey, one where apps like Instagram and TikTok allow most modern colloquialisms to pass the time-honored Gramma(r) Test far sooner than they ever have, yielding a subsequent societal obligation to keep inventing new idiotic jargon that everyone picks up on rapidly as our elders use social media with higher frequency. Plus, the Internet itself keeps proffering new words for the e-lexicon, our acquiescence inexorable. Corporations have cottoned to the terminological takeover astutely: it’s low-key lit if Big Business robs us as long as they’re pretending to play along when selling the latest technological miracle. (“Stop the cap!” a real one just shouted.) If it all feels meaningless it might be because we’re on a bit of a nihilism journey, which is still a journey, nonetheless. As Pyrrhic victories go, you will probably be able to purchase bespoke journey memorabilia at some point, and I recommend in advance the “I went on a [Your Journey Here] journey and all I got was this shirt” journey shirt. [Editor’s Note: That’s correct. I swear.]

My pal Dry Biscuit has begun sending me photos of bikini clad dwarfs, the man mildly obsessed with the idea of taking a cervix journey inside a little person. Despite my initial reluctance to indulge him — “Find me an attractive one and we’ll talk” — I thought, rather than defaulting to my longstanding cynicism journey, that I’d attempt to find one of society’s alternate outcasts to love. One day, I reacted to his latest pint-sized inamorata with a photo of the Victoria’s Secret model who has Down’s Syndrome, a journey an old co-worker had literally gone on when marrying a woman with an extra chromosome. Nobody should protest true love, yet I couldn’t imagine having a child with the model, our spawn not befallen by the same trait as his or her mother picking a prime moment to prod me: “So, uh, Dad, is it, like…okay that you and Mom are together? I mean…” A journey into confusion and mistrust for the poor fake kiddo. One could pursue an alternative — going gaga for amputees — but then we all know how that ended for Mrs. Pistorius. When one little leman with bangs resembling the gymnast Livvy Dunne intrigued me enough to nickname her Livvy Half-Dunne on a phone call, Dry Biscuit perked up at my interest while he shopped for a new vape flavor. “You gonna get a beef stroganoff with pistachio ice cream this time?” I asked. “Or thinking more bacon cheddar scallion omelette with iced coffee?” “Dude, a bacon cheddar scallion vape would go dummy hard right now,” he said. Surely not harder than me while hearing the graphic secondhand details from him on my new vicarious midget journey.

There’s also been my Sarah journey, hanging out with two twenty-six-year-olds who share the same first name. A couple weeks ago I visited one Sarah at her new apartment where she made us a delicious gluten-free and vegan taco dinner as I basked in the tranquil dogless neighborhood outside her kitchen windows. In between devouring tortilla chips, I mentioned the song “Sara Smile” as she sang, “DEH-NEH-NEH-NEH, DEH-NEH-NEH-NEH” prior to reciting the entire first verse of “You Can Call Me Al” from memory, unaware she was singing the wrong song. “What does he mean he’s ‘soft in the middle now’?” she asked afterward like a television executive rhetorically devising a new series about an anthropomorphized Blow Pop. Later, she methodically carved up strawberries for a drink she made us — one I made four more times afterward on my strawberry coconut mint lime journey — acknowledging how her thoroughness consistently causes her to lose time, the cost of “doing everything perfectly” her way of delineating a respectable commitment to excellence, one she quizzically doesn’t enforce when belting out the great American popular songbook. Sarah, a stand-up comic, invited me to attend an upcoming show she was producing, an hour which would feature her not telling a single joke, a confusing premise she entitled For Whom the Cuckoo Clucks, the Hemingway wordplay now scanning to you like it’s my callback journey. You can call her Momma.

The other Sarah, a woman I nicknamed Pumpkin (she calls me Puddin’ in return), offered to drive us around in her stepdad’s orange Camaro, a ride I designated the Cum Arrow, a piece of my punning journey, for an afternoon of record shopping. Pumpkin opted to wear a Canadian tuxedo, the jeans thankfully not the same pair that had previously led to me additionally nicknaming her Sarah Cameltoglia, the double entendre with her last name alluding to an outing where her lower torso’s pelvis-centric denim had crammed itself into her labia. “I see you brought your tits with you today,” I said to address her abundant cleavage as I greeted her in my driveway, and when some scattered pesky raindrops, nature’s pointillism, decorated her exposed bosom later, I first politely announced my forthcoming act then dabbed them dry in accordance with my ongoing gentleman safari. While we were eating dinner following our record voyage, I felt the sudden urge to shit myself. On my walk to the restroom, I texted her, “Didn’t make it.” Mother to a three-year-old, Pumpkin replied, “You’ve got to be kidding me. Shall I come clean up your poop?” It was a reference to her son defecating on the floor a few nights prior, a mishap in his potty-training journey, one of the earliest journeys all humans must familiarize themselves with, my pretend one not her concern as she disconsolately suggested I “thug it out.” To exact my revenge, I let her borrow one of Sue’s old sweatshirts surreptitiously covered in cat hair, Pumpkin’s allergies putting her in a deceased feline’s chokehold. Even friendly revenge can be its own retribution journey.

I’ve been on a particularly thrilling journey since mid-April when I began watching New York Knicks playoff games. Another friend and co-worker, Dustin, had reactivated my NBA fandom last spring, the man convincing me by repeatedly by saying how he thought I’d find this ‘Bockers team quite likable. He was right. In return, I’d gotten my open-minded, sporadic bitch session cohort who playfully calls me Cuh, to begin snacking on baby carrots each afternoon, me sending him a rabbit and carrot emoji as a reminder whenever I began digging into my daily bowlful. “Today’s babies are wetter than my stepsister after our last tickle fight,” I texted him one day, turning our mutual love of all things orange (see: half the Knicks) into a running gag. Future iterations would be wetter than the babysitter I invited over for role playing and more saturated than my neighbor’s college-age daughter perspiring while doing yard work across the street, Dustin consistently laughing at our joint journey through making the mundane momentous (and a bit lascivious owing to my puerile peregrinations). I won’t say much about the Knicks’ historic heater until their journey concludes other than that my journey to find a new favorite athlete finally ended with Jalen Brunson(-Burner). I was also fond of when one opposing team’s coach said that his team had “analytically won” a couple games they lost by double digits to the Knicks, the absurd logic proof that I am now analytically a lagomorph, huge news for a bald man who had long ago abandoned his hare journey. Now emphasized by an eye-roll journey.

“I’m going to frame all of these and show them to the room at your retirement party in twenty years,” I told my friend O’Connor as he finished his latest drawing for me. On days he’s visiting, I leave a sketchpad and mechanical pencil on the basement coffee table. The tradition began after Sue died, O’Connor and I listening to records when he asked me if I’d like something drawn: “A gay vampire.” His objection-less compliance led to the rapid genesis of Cock Sucker, who was replaced by Count Orcock then, prior to last November’s World Series game seven, Vlad the Impaler, Jr., the fanged first baseman’s massive penis skewering an opponent who drifted too far off the base. Can’t forget the etching of Transylvania’s favorite son sodomizing yours truly as my tongue hangs on my chin. A Celtics fan, my considerate pal lauded the Knicks by documenting a newly introduced character’s climactic moment, the penis in each of his hands ejaculating into his mouth with a tiny basketball hoop in the corner of the page to append context to the reanimated corpse’s nickname: Double Dribble Drac. “Don’t worry,” I told O’Connor as I taped up his latest masterstroke behind the bar. “I’ll defend this to anyone who asks as being important to my grieving journey. ‘Sue died and I needed gay vampires for solace.’ They’ll understand. And fuck ’em if they don’t!”

It was a passage about O’Connor in this year’s Masterspiece that led to more of Mooch’s acerbic feedback: “You need to be reined in. First-amendment rights should not apply to you.” I had not stopped at discussing Fleshlights at the dinner table; while O’Connor talked local politics on a phone call, I joked to his two teenage sons how I’d considered designing a Haley Joel Osment sex doll, specifically of his character in The Sixth Sense, when the actor was a child. “It’s not a crime, guys,” I said to the horrified duo. “The doll is real, but it’s not real real, ya know?” I’d mistakenly believed Gen Z-ers couldn’t get offended until one of them said “Dude!” and nothing else while the other stared in wide-eyed disquietude, causing me to pause my journey in antagonistic assholery, at least as it impacted the man and his sons whom I’d chosen to inherit my record collection when I die. Could the one true journey be seeking discipline, eschewing the temptation to regularly indulge outrageous whims and instead work to be stoic and self-contained? All are behaviors I’m not particularly well-versed at practicing, as befits a lunatic diva, but for as much as I ridicule religion, there are few people in this world whose comportment I revere more than monks, men who set their egos aside from the one life they’re given (allegedly, they’d claim) to take a journey free from anything except devotion to a higher purpose. Any of us can do the same, and not necessarily with fidelity to a particular lord, rather in pure humility. What we worship is a choice; being alive is the supreme journey. Be kind and respectful, do whatever makes you happy, and let your journey speak for itself. Sounds a helluva lot like a “maybe someday” journey, huh?

It’s Mooch’s own love of her best friend that’s led to more frequent texting, her soliciting my input on decisions she’s made about a woman whose name in her contact card is preceded by “ICE,” not because she’s employed by the federal government to deport illegal immigrants, but to denote how she should be contacted In Case of Emergency. Having traversed my own, ahem, odyssey with my best friend’s two stints in prison, I told Mooch nothing she didn’t already know: that she could not change Stef. “Don’t let her take advantage of you again. And it’s not your problem to keep fixing. You have to take an extreme action as the catalyst for the change. Otherwise, you punish yourself, let her off the hook, and complain to people who can’t help. She’ll only learn when she doesn’t have you.”

It led to Mooch’s apology for hijacking our chat — I’d contacted her to express how bothered I was by the decline in the quality of the paper used for dust jackets on new hardcover books — which was my cue to tell her, “You do notowe me an apology. The day you ever do, I will let you know.” The most valuable aspect of our journey is the one we have with the people who matter to us, those who add meaning and purpose. Sarah Pumpkin had informed me how she admired my ability to tell people I love to fuck off, a point that hit home when I jokingly called her “my current friend Sarah” to one record store owner we both know, Pumpkin alluding under her beath to our friendship breakup last fall, a seasonal separation that ultimately brought us closer together, the severance reminiscent of my mother’s ability to cut people off without remorse. Mooch told me in partial jest how she was in the market for a new best friend, one that didn’t require requitement, debating retirement from twenty years with ICE to choose a lunatic diva to fill the hole, evidence that the truest journey in this world is with integrity, setting aside the naïve condescension accompanying our newfound etymological obsession for one thing people have done as long as they’ve existed: change. You don’t need to defend your behavior by relegating it to journey status. You do, however, need people who accept it because you’re you, people who will also call you on your bullshit not to hurt you, but to get back to a version of you they can love and value wholeheartedly, and that’s what counts. Like when I told Mooch how I was on my own Stef journey, coming across a pornstar with Mooch’s potentially former best friend’s same name who filmed countless scenes playing both herself and another woman — usually a stepmom, as you already guessed — the elder catching the younger in flagrante delicto in several videos. After the freshly fucked version of herself promptly fell asleep post-cumshot, the second version, wearing an alternate outfit (and quickly a lack thereof), got railed by the same magically rehydrated man. To be my best friend is to be routinely apprised about my favorite way to hear the flute played: on my self-love journey.

Recent conversations with many friends have corralled us all onto a same page journey, one that hinges on our shared hatred of bike riders. They’re in the road, not the bike lane, when we’re driving. They’re on the sidewalk vexing walkers (see: me, often startled as they zip by from behind) when the bike lane’s too small. They will obey traffic laws strictly when it’s convenient for themselves. They, plenty sporting five-pound bag of potato bodies, delusionally wear tight outfits as if they’re preparing for a sponsored ride through the Alps to win the world’s signature two-wheeled race. They turn on flashing lights during the day. They are annoying due to their very existence, and their journey to be healthy and help the environment is loathed by all who are not them. They know this. Our level of undiluted animosity may not be ideal, but it’s the kind of unification that could lead to bigger and better things for humanity in the future. We demand these rallying cries, these reminders that our own individual journeys are inevitable whereas the ones we take together will rid us of something loathsome like our collective cycling menace, bringing us to a more exalted place, one Ralph Waldo Emerson got wrong: it can be about the destination. When you can look back and think, Man, do I feel vindicated about this lifetime of hate. Get fucked, cyclists!

During a chat with my Filipina co-worker Kai (or Miss Kai, as her Pinoy subordinates say), a woman I refer to as Kai my gai (guy) and Kairannosaurus Rex — and when she calls me Adam in a moment of seriousness, I’m fond of addressing her by her full name, Kharynna, mostly because it’s beautiful — I conceded the differences between myself and a more reserved co-worker by invoking Mooch’s poetic phrasing and sending her, “Whereas I’m a lunatic diva.” Kai joyously responded, “Yas and we love you for that king, slay.” She neglected to include the nail polish emoji she’s fond of appending to her occasional usage of “slay,” but I let it slide, a woman half the world away the first one to ever call me neurodivergent, a description I found flattering for her willingness to ignore my inflammatory nature while caring about me enough to lodge the inarguably accurate claim. In between us shit-talking annoying work processes and praising Paramore, I asked her what I believe is a fair question: “Does Microsoft Edge imply the existence of Microsoft Cum?” Her reply? “HAHAHAHAHAHA! BRO!”

Neither of us will likely journey to see the other, but if the day arrives when my now primary best friend forever — aka PBFF, not to be confused with a Peanut Butter & French Fry — Moore, drives a deep enough wedge between us, Kai will be high on my New BFF list much to secondary BFF Mooch’s chagrin. (“Yeah, I’ve never met my best friend cuz she’s nine thousand miles away,” I’ll brag. “She’s mysterious. That’s why she’s cooler than your best friend, loser.”) What might I think of to help traverse such an emotionally taxing time? Advice from the only people who can provide it, natch: “Wheel in the sky keeps on turnin’.” You’re itching to call this antanaclasis my Journey journey even if it’d be more aptly designated a phonetic pilgrimage. Good luck on your next nicknaming journey, though, and don’t forget your pith helmet. Until then, I’m affixing my pithy helmet to declare that this portion of my journey is now adjourned.