Homeless and Hurt Downtown

Dear Maija,

I’m homeless, but I’ve been working really hard on trying to get my life back together. (I used to play a trumpet outside of sporting events because people really like that sort of thing but some kids stole it one night after the Reds lost.) Lately I’ve been writing a lot, but I can’t get my work published in the local homeless newspaper because all they seem to write about is how offensive you are. Now, no offense, but I don’t really give a shit about you. You’re probably a total bitch, but I don’t care about that either. I have rewritten the first part of Gulliver’s Travels and set it in Cincinnati over by Procter & Gamble. No one’s going to read it because of your stupid STD joke controversy. Thanks for nothing.

— Homeless and Hurt Downtown

The important thing to remember about writing is that people hate to read, unless your story is about dead people, bodily functions, fights or celebrities (specifically their weight gains, breakups or what they buy at the grocery store). People magazine, the weekly gossip rag, sells almost three times as many copies as the Sunday New York Times (whose crossword is much harder). And even though Cincinnati’s homeless newspaper has Sudoku, sometimes you need controversy to get those things to move (maybe clown noses aren’t enough?). By using their first inside page to talk shit about long-past events in other papers, they might actually be increasing your chance of being read. If they hook new readers with stories about how old guys misconstrue satire and then exploit the private, horrifying events of the lives of their friends, then maybe your more relevant and moving story about living on the streets of Atlanta or the effect of local human trafficking can get moved up from page 11.

And if that doesn’t work, go for The Soloist save, where you befriend a struggling journalist and surprise them with your prodigious trumpeting skills. They’ll write a bunch of stories about you because talented homeless people are generally overlooked, and then you’ll finally have an in with the newspapers. Also, Gulliver’s Travels. That’s about midgets, right? That’s almost as offensive as eating your children instead of spending a bunch of money on Pampers. I know somebody that happened to.

Streetvibes is the new Page Six,
Maija

Dear Maija,

— Dizzy and Dickfaced in Delhi

Roofie roulette, played by willing participants, is a bit of tomfoolery, as innocent as joking with a waitress at Applebee’s. Think of it like beer pong, but instead of a Ping-Pong ball you throw a little Rohypnol into one of the drinks and see who drinks it. Because adults lead really boring lives, it’s a way to add an exciting element of controlled danger to a night in (better than strip Apples to Apples).

So relax. It’s totally safe. In fact, I’ve been playing a version this game since I was in eighth grade (sans roofies). When I was 14, my parents threw a big party and all the adults from my suburban neighborhood went. With limited adult supervision (all of the parents were in one place), my friends and I stole a bunch of beer from the coolers on my parents’ deck and ran. Then we went to someone’s house and got “drunk” for the first time.

We all hated the taste of beer, so it’s questionable how much we actually drank, but we were “drunk” enough to get stupid, so we dared one of our friends to drink pee. The way it worked was that one of the girls would go into the bathroom with three Budweiser cans, pee into one of them and then put them on the counter, not revealing which one was actually full of urine. Then the dared girl had to pick one to chug. If she picked the wrong one, she’d be chugging piss (that’s the roulette part). But, because my friends back then were hilarious, the girl chugged the contents of all three of the cans, screamed “It’s warm!” and totally freaked us out.

God. That was so great. Sometimes I wish I still had friends like this. My friends today would never drink my pee.

Open your mouth and close your eyes,
Maija

This article appears in Sep 9-15, 2009.