Sexual satisfaction and discount prices abound at the Lawrenceville Goodwill

Yesterday I dropped my kid off at my mother's while I toodled around town and enjoyed some alone time. I have lived in the same suburb of Atlanta now for almost 30 years, so I have seen Lawrenceville, GA transform from a sleepy one-horse town known mainly for being the place where Penthouse magazine publisher Larry Flint got shot to being the county seat of one of the fastest growing counties in the U.S. throughout the Reagan years. When I get in my car I can't help but to play the I-remember-when game and point out how things used to be as opposed to how they are now.

One of Lawrenceville's strip malls that used to house a Food Giant, drug store, furniture rental joint and a barber shop among other things has made a 180-degree turn several times over. Food Giant apparently went belly-up some time in the early 80s and while it was briefly replaced by a mom-and-pop pseudo-equivalent named Quality Foods, and then that store also bailed out and the anchor unit in the strip mall has long since been the site of a Goodwill. Where there once was a drug store there now is a Latin American movie rental place. The furniture rental place is now a Cambianos Cheques and the barber shop remains the same, complete with confederate flag hanging on the wall.

I ventured into the Goodwill mainly out of curiosity to see what I could find. The clientele there is an interesting mix of immigres looking to furnish their homes, Middle American Anglos looking for some trinket they collect and hope to resell on eBay, and grungy high schoolers hoping to replenish their Spring wardrobe a la cheap and esoteric. The area where I live was once a major site for Bosnian refugee relocation after the war and it's not uncommon in the Goodwill to hear employees banter back and forth to each other in Croatian. Incidentally my next-door neighbors are also Bosnian and whenever they have company over, my wife and I enjoy overhearing their music from the Old Country.

Most of what you find at a Goodwill is a combination of acid washed jeans, dated tablewear and lots of Barbie dolls in various stages of undress and dismemberment. Worth a look-see though in my book is the corner all the way in the back where they hide the cassette tapes, books and LPs. Some of the album covers don't even have records in them anymore, but the picture on the cover alone might make the purchase worthwhile. As for me, I spent a good hour in the book section.

I have purchased books from the Goodwill before. You don't find broken Barbies in the book corner like you do in other areas of the store, but you do find their literary equivalent. I spent ten minutes for instance thumbing through Dr. Laura's The Ten Commandments and, had I been interested in continuing my psycho-babble self-help education, which I wasn't, I could have picked up a copy of Men are from Mars; Women are from Venus. Also available was just about anything written by Deepak Chopra.

There are occasionally a few treasures to be found there though. In my personal library is a small paperback I picked up from the Goodwill a few years ago. It's a 1968 edition of Boys & Sex by Wardell B. Pomeroy, Ph.D. It's basically a primer written for teenage boys to enlighten them in the ways of their post-pubescent development. My favorite line is on page 36 in the chapter on masturbation. It reads, "At some time or other it occurs to most boys to try to put their own penises into their mouths." If after reading that you feel frustrated, don't. The good doctor goes on to say that only about one in a hundred boys can perform this iniquitous act and of those who can, very few actually go on to adopt it as their major method of masturbation. Aren't you glad I shared? The book retails used on Amazon for the exhorbitant price of $1.13, but you're not getting my copy. I still haven't read the chapter on petting.

Just kidding.

I've read it.

Okay . . . more than once.

Anyway, on my most recent trip I found a somewhat less lewd but certainly more practical book from the godly people at Reader's Digest entitled Practical Problem Solver: Substitutes, shortcuts, and ingenious solutions for making life easier, published circa 1991. The book is just a treasure trove of hints from Heloise, only it's not just Heloise handing out hints in this oeuvre. It's all kinds of people with all kinds of professional backgrounds. This way the reader is sure to get the information he needs.

The tome is arranged like an encyclopedia with topics ranging in alphabetical order from abdominal flab to zucchini bread. Sure it's chocked full of the more prudent topics like foot odor and brake drums but shortly after discovering the book, I found myself standing in the Goodwill searching for those topics that satiated my more carnal interests. This is due largely to the fact that discount and second-hand stores for some reason bring out the giddy twelve-year-old in me. Go figure.

Unlike Dr. Pomeroy's book, this one offers no tips on masturbation (entries jump from marshmalows to matches with no onanism in between) but there is a diagram of a bra-bearing woman who has ingeniously used a shoelace to tie her bra straps together in order to keep them from falling. Isn't that something?

There isn't an entry for sex unless you count sex education or sexual harassment. For sex education the book advises you talk to kids on their level blah blah blah and for sexual harassment it says suck it up, Toots. Just kidding. It doesn't really say Toots.

Some of the more enlightening and entertaining tips though are about things that, had you not found them in this book, frankly wouldn't have occurred to you. One blurb in the Common Things with Uncommon Uses chapter talks about how to take a plastic bottle and make it into a drill holster to wear on your tool belt. I'm not sure if I like their design though. The accompanying picure shows a guy whose holster allows the entire drill bit to poke out and point directly at his unmentionables. Ouch.

Or get a load of this:

Halloween costume. Turn your youngster into a spaceman or Mr. Bubble by wrapping bubble pack around her arms, legs and trunk.

Right, like that's not an invitation to getting beat up on the playground.

Another suggestion is that several layers of bubble wrap be used on the floor as a guest bed. Please, if I come over to your house and I see you've made my bed out of leftover packing materials you used during your move, I'm just going to assume you'd rather I hole up somewhere else. How makeshifty! And that raucous twelve year old in me that I mentioned earlier wonders what would happen if you and someone you loved were cavorting on this substitute bedding. Can't you just hear it?

Pop . . . Pop . . . Pop pop . . . and then eventually pop pop pop pop pop.

I can't wait to see how my life improves thanks to this book. My plants will be greener, my skin will be softer and my meringues will be fluffier. That stuff is far more practical than what I ever learned from that Dr. Polmeroy.

Well, he did have a good tip on helping people fall asleep faster.

Metroblogging is a cult

Atlanta Metblogs is anyway. I don't know about the other thousand and one cities out there with a local blog site. I joined Metroblogging Atlanta several months ago with the best of intentions. I wanted to write for a wider audience. I wanted a place to post with other local bloggers. Oh, what the hell. I'll say it. I just wanted to direct more traffic to my own site with minimal effort.

When Blackgayblogger, one of Atlanta's most sardonic and skilled blog writers, left the Atlanta MetBlogs site to go write for 9rules, that should have been a clue for me that the former was but a subpar venue for my infinite and humble wisdom. Being the attention whore that I am though I jumped at the chance to write for a more heavily trafficked site. Little did I know what was in store.

For starters, atlanta metblogs (I've just decided they no longer merit capitalization in my book) requests that contributers post three times a week, a rather hefty goal seeing as how they also ask that you not simply copy and paste something from your own blog. As it turns out the three-posts-a-week rule is only vaguely monitored by an automaton post bot who sends you a gentle reminder that you haven't posted in some time if in fact you haven't. After I got the first one, I had future reminders go direct to my junk mail.

What irritated me most about it though were the slew of listserve emails I started getting whenever one of the cult leaders would send out a group email requesting filler material. I'm sure to be blacklisted after writing this because a footer at the bottom of every email sent through the site requests that "like Vegas, what happens in metblogs stays in metblogs." Whatever! Why they think their shit is worth my confidentiality is beyond me. For the most part, their ad nauseum emails are slightly less poignant than this:

Cult Leader: Anyone wanna write about traffic in the A-T-L?
Cult Follower 1: Ooh, I will. I love traffic and I love writing about it. LOL.
Cult Follower 2: Great, Cult Follower 1, you might want to include the names of some major expressways in your post. Just an idea.
Cult Follower 1: Gee, thanks, Cult Follower 2. I'll do that. I love I-85 and I live inside the perimeter so that makes me superior and more knowledgable than most.
Cult Follower 3: Wait a minute. I haven't written anything in a while. How 'bout if I write on traffic too?
Cult Leader: Well, we've already got someone writing about taffic. Maybe you can write about the high occupancy lanes? Sound good?
Cult Follower 3: Thanks again, Cult Leader. I'm glad you're here to guide us and tell us all that is good about you and the site.
Cult Follower 2: Ditto that. LOL. Just want you all to know I love all you guys.
Cult Follwer 1: Word!

It goes on from there but I'll spare you the mindless details. Did I mention that a similar exchange like the one above might litter my inbox for days at a time as it slowly aggrandizes and then fizzles out? The saddest part is that when the aforementioned cult follower does go on to write about Atlanta traffic or whatever other blase topic has been handed out to him, the post will often read like a fifth-grade writing sample.

Don't get me wrong. There are some good writers on the site, but somehow when people write on shit they couldn't care less about, their writing sucks. It's as though they're just doing it to meet their ambitious quota or worse yet, please the leader.

Leader by the way is not my word; it's theirs. The metblog guru (who incidentally somehow warrants his own Wikipedia entry) is often referred to in the emails as "our leader." The people in charge of the various cities' blogs are called the captains. Again, whatever! I have enough going on in my blog life that I don't need to worry about answering to blog middle management, much less whether my writing and the pictures I attach to it meet their pisspoor pedantic guidelines.

Also get this. When a new site is started for yet another metroblogging city, we are all encouraged to pop over to the new site and say hello like it's some big love bomb festival or something. Somehow the Reverend Sun Myung Moon is behind all this. I just hope those remaining metbloggers don't taunt my family with spam as some sort of retribution for me leaving the group.

I've recently started reading Extraneous Kickassery who, after joining the group indie blogs, readily and jokingly admitted that he joined a cult. He also claims to be "making the internet a dumber place since 2006." I like people who put it to you straight. Not to mention the fact that his shit is funny. Maybe it's just 'cause I have some compunction for humorous smartasses who can swill hard liquor and down all-beef Koshers for hours at a time. OK, he never really said that, but read some of his stuff and you'll get the idea. Anyway, I'm not the only person out there who recognizes the blog cults out there.

Blog Antagonist used to use her blog postings to point out stupid things about blogging, and in fact she calls her blog Blogs are Stupid. She since has seen the light or been blog-saved or was struck blind but then could see and changed her name from Saul to Paul or something like that, but anyway I do wonder what she would say about these blog cults.

I'm not anti-cult necessarily. I just am not big on any cult that doesn't have me as its leader. People, I am the way.

Me.

Kevin. Of cocktailswithkevin.com.

Beware the leaven of these blog Pharisees.

I'm just saying, ya'll.

Bringing you up to date

I have this unspoken rule that if I link to your blog and you go more than a month without updating it, I typically just cut you from my list o' blogs. It's nothing personal; it's just that my blog roll is there mainly for me to scroll down and check out people whose stuff I enjoy reading. If you haven't put up anything new to read in a while, I give you the pink slip so I can keep my list fresh.

Now I'm the one who's about to hit the one-month mark, so for those of you out there who still check in occasionally to cocktailswithkevin.com to see what's going on (I think now my readership is up to four -- count them FOUR -- family members and the occasional misguided googler) here's a brief update.

Christmas came and went, and while I had counted on fatherhood meaning I had seen the last of gifts that were purchased for me excusively, I really cleaned up this Christmas. As a rule, I'm not good at coming up with things on the spot when you ask me what I want for a gift. My theory is that if I want it, I buy it. If I haven't bought it, it's because I can't afford to buy it, and if I can't afford to buy it, I really wouldn't feel comfortable asking you to buy it for me. Sometimes I might want something but I don't trust someone else to go buy it so I don't put that on a wish list either.

Speaking of wish lists, the concept of making a list online of things I want but don't have sounds more depressing to me than it does intriguing, but for those of you who got a little extra Christmas monies don't know how to spend it, feel free to check out and purchase something from my wife's Amazon greed list. If she hasn't added them yet, we also need four new tires for one of the cars and maybe a couple of months mortgage payment. Thanks for giving.

Anyway, topping the list of wonderful gifties I got this Christmas was a Zen mp3 player. The thing's got 30 gigs worth of memory which easily should allow me to transfer my entire music collection from CD's and a computer hard drive to the unit itself. Because one gadget isn't enough for me, I then went to purchase additional gadgets for my new gadget. I wanted something to play the music on my car stereo so I spent $20 on an FM transmitter from Brookstone. It works like a Mr. Microphone so all I have to do is plug it into the headphone jack of he mp3 player and then tune a nearby radio to the same station it broadcasts out on.

Interestingly enough the same gadget can be used to listen to international radio on my home stereo system if I plug the gadget into the computer speakers and then point my browser to whatever radio station I want to listen to. Right now it's France Bleu Provence which is what my wife and I woud listen to on our first anniversary as we toodled around the south of France in a rented Peugeot. Let me just say that France Bleu rocks almost as much as my new mp3 player, and as geeky as it sounds, I like listening to the weather and traffic report en français. They also do this bit occasionally where someone calls in to offer something to sell. These brave souls give out their phone number to everyone on the planet with the hopes of selling some old laptop or a car or something. I want to ring them up just to chat, but I can't afford the overseas call. Lucky for them.

Between Christmas and the New Year the world watched as Hussein was executed for committing crimes against humantiy. I don't know which is more disturbing: that one person could do such horrible things and still look at himself in the mirror the next day or that the whole world salivated over his hanging. Gross on so many different levels I don't like to think about it.

My wife and I threw a party New Year's day and invited friends to help us ring in the new year. Our friends, like us, have for the most part followed the same general path in life. We've all gone from sinful cohabitators to married twenty-somethings to married thirty-somethings to married thirty-somethings with kids. Now that Elaine and I have a kid of our own, we didn't want anyone to feel left out, kids included, so we opened up the invite to everyone who was old enough to show off their new toy, laugh hysterically at a movie they had already seen, or crap their diaper. Kids, I mean. To my knowledge none of our adult guests crapped his diaper.

Elaine and I always say that if we throw a party and she and I don't see each other until the party's over, that usually means it was a good shindig. That's kind of how this one went. There was plenty of food and drink, great cameraderie and nothing got broken. We resolved to make this our new annual event.

My new year is off to a new exciting twist as I start a part-time gig in the evenings teaching English to non-native speakers through a nearby community college. Additionally I've decided to try and drum up some more real estate business. I had a recent closing with a dear client this past Chrismukah season and while the transaction had headaches galore, I realized how much I miss the rigamarole of marketing a home and getting it sold. The stress a real estate agent can go through is frankly unimaginable to some, but somehow shaking a new homeowner's hand across the closing table makes it all worth it.

A year ago I wrote about how I spent the last work day of 2005 knee-deep in Kleenex soaked in my own snot. If that's not enough detail, you can read more about it here. This must be an annual thing for me because once again I seem to be fighting off some mung-ridden typhoid. I also wrote about how I don't generally make resolutions for the new year. That's true for the most part, but I've decided to make a few this time around. Here they are so you can hold me to them:

I will be better about thanking the people I need to thank whether it be through an email or a mailed thank-you card or a phone call. Everyone appreciates being appreciated. The intricacies of my busy life are no excuse to avoid being kind to those who deserve my gratitude.

I had more but as today is January 2, I've already forgotten them.