My New Best Friends

Well, there's, uh, Jamison, a 500 pound Guatemalan who used to own a, uh, body piercing parlor. He specialized in subcutaneous implants simulating saurian ridges and amphibial nodes. He's much fatter than anyone else I've ever met. Anyone else who presumes to fatness is a mere sylph, the fatness of whom becomes in comparison as tall grass before a driving wind. He has memorized the internet, if you get what I mean.

Then there's Khareem, a slender man of indeterminate ethnicity, perhaps from the Kalahari, who must be the smoothest criminal I've ever even heard about. He is an expert in the folklore of the American southwest, and owns all the Zane Gray novels, in first editions. He is addicted to chocolate éclairs.

There's Jan, too subtle for words to characterize, but who seems to be a chi master and initiate in some arcane body-distorting discipline involving long staves of yew. I only know about it because someone whispered it into my ear. I was asleep at the time, so maybe I dreamed it.

Davis is an enfant terrible who has taken the evangelical world by storm, having earned his D.Div at Fuller Theological Seminary as a teenager and is now publishing revolutionary work on nomothetic heuristics. He saved me from being raped, for which he has earned my eternal admiration. He saved me from being raped when he didn't rape me.

There's the occasional Jenkins, whom nobody has ever heard speak. He communicates through a series of intuitively grasped gestures and expressions, mostly involving finger twitches and eyebrow motions. There's a rumor that he once killed a dog by hypnotizing it into thinking it was on fire. We're all a little afraid of him.

Ron is so pretty I want to have his babies.

There's Devon, who brings a harp to class and accompanies the rolling with the most heavenly glissandos. He's an expert in Balinese dance, and often interrupts himself to perform spontaneous turns on the mat. He holds the San Gabriel Valley speed record for toe-raises -- on a par with hummingbird wings.

Enormous Lenny suffered a tragic ripsaw accident some years ago, and was a multiple self-amputee until he was reconstructed out of legs and torsoes. He is incapable of bending at the waist, since he has no waist, but he has the strength of six ordinary men, or eleven really weak men. He once devoured, in one sitting, a Shetland pony.

Yep. I'm so happy now. These dudes are much better than those other dudes that I used to hang with, back when I was all lame and stuff. I don't know why I bothered wasting all that time caring about those other dudes. I'm so much happier now. It's great. I must have been crazy. I'm so happy. These dudes are the bomb. I'll never have to care about anyone ever again. I've learned my lesson. Screw them all. Nobody cares about me, and I don't care about anyone. Yep. Heh heh. I'm so happy.


J