This is old but I really like it.  Also, in case you forgot why P is a ba-jillionaire: BAM.

1. “I was pretty jacked up on marijuana”=classic.

2. I have tapped into a cultural zeitgeist!

3. OR I’m a hack!

If you want to make an audience laugh, you dress a man up like an old lady and push her down the stairs. If you want to make comedy writers laugh, you push an actual old lady down the stairs.

Thanks to the oft hilarious Sarah Johnson for pointing this out

The next few weeks were amazing.  I’ve gotta say, as nutty as it sounds, my relationship with the Hot Dog was probably the best relationship I’d ever had.  Everything was so easy.  I mean, first of all, me and the Hot Dog or “Debbie” as I later started calling it, had so much in common.  We both liked laying around, going to ball games, and just generally shooting the shit.  All of my other girlfriends seemed so needy in comparison.  If I wanted to watch television, Debbie was into that.  If I wanted to go to park, Debbie was down.  There wasn’t a single thing I could think of that Debbie didn’t want to do.  Well, save for go to the butcher, but that had more to do with fidelity issues.

We got along really well, but then after about a week, I noticed that we weren’t really talking as much.  You’d have probably imagined that dating a talking hot dog would be non-stop chatter.  And there were definitely moments of that.  But I was always cautious to ask to much, to talk too much, fearful of what I might actually hear I guess.  At one point I thought to ask Debbie about her background, you know, where she was from, which is pretty routine stuff for first dating talk, but when I started to begin the sentence, I could already see that she was about to stone wall me, grimacing with that cold stare she could give.

Truth be told, I called her Debbie, but had no idea if Debbie was a woman.  In fact, the one time we sort of attempted to be intimate, it…well it was awkward to say the least.  I could tell Debbie was sort of into it, but I was really skeeved out.  First of all, “she” smelled terrible at this point, I mean, we are talking about a week old hot dog.  And as much as there was definitely some sort of chemistry going on, I don’t think, at the time, I was man enough to look beyond my own inhibitions.

I told myself, that I was just being chaste, or better, that I had a love that wasn’t predicated on physical attraction, which was a first for me.  I thought, in some weird way, that I was evolving, becoming a better person, one who wasn’t so superficial.  But after a few days out, seeing other couples, really in love, canoodling, being so overtly lovey-dovey and intimate, made me sick to my stomach.

In short, I started to resent the Hot Dog.

After the second week, Debbie could tell something was wrong.  She tried to overcompensate, becoming more sexual, talking dirty at night, trying to get a rise out of me.  But it was no use.  I found, very quickly, that I was avoiding going to bed with her, always staying up late to jack off to porn.  At first it was regular stuff, girl on girl, threeways, but then after stumbling onto a fetish site, where girls put random stuff into their…you know, and it was all I could watch.  Cucumber, carrots, any food item really did it for me.  I would stay up ’til all hours until my dick was sore from jerking it.  Eventually even seeing a coupon clipper for the supermarket was enough to get me hard.

But still, I couldn’t find a way to bring myself to touch Debbie.

I’d hear her crying in the bedroom some nights, but I was too pre-occupied, and in all actuality, too callous to try to comfort her.  What would I have done?  It was like being caught between a rock and a hard place, except I was caught between a bun and a pickle.

Oh, yeah, I forgot to say, she got all done up, with relish, and whatnot, to I don’t know, I guess try to save what we had.  But it just pushed me further away from her.  I thought, God, this is so tacky of her.  But when she asked me how it looked, I lied.

-You look great!

-Really?  You really think so?

-Yeah!  Of course, the green really accentuates your shape.

-Oh, thank you Peter!  I’m so glad you like it.  Some people don’t like pickles, or-

-No, no, I’ve always been a pickle guy.  You can ask anyone.

During that conversation, she got really quiet for a moment, before asking me:

-Do you…do you think it’d be possible…when can I meet your friends?

-I told you a hundred times!!!  It’s just not…

And that set off the next of our big fights.  She was always trying to meet my friends, wanted to “get to know another side of me”  but how could I possibly do that?  She accused me of being embarrassed of her, and I would always try to deflect it, saying that “no, I just need to find the right way to do it” but really I was embarrassed.  I was in love with a hot dog, and no matter how I phrased it, it was crazy…

(to be continued 3.9.10)

I felt like I was sitting there forever, I had no idea what to do.  So when I heard the familiar clip clop back into the men’s room, I figured it was just time to leave.  I got up and walked out of the stall and made eye contact with Martin for a second.  He looked at me, the stall and then the hot dog, and thought to say something about it, but I guess he was so confused or embarrassed he let it pass.

When I went back to my desk, I had been gone for a really long time.  Glinda asked if I was feeling well, which at this point, I wasn’t.  I knew she meant if I was sick, but rather than explain (where would I have started?), I just said no.  So in an extreme moment of kindness on her part, or just basic germaphobia, she let me go home early.  I grabbed my jacket, and gingerly put the hot dog in my messenger bag and took off.

As soon as we got out the door to the building, I took the hot dog out of the bag. By this point, I was crying.  I don’t know if I can explain it, but I really wanted this…this thing to work out.  I mean, the hot dog really had a point, I had felt something, and yet I didn’t know what to do with that information.  So as I’m holding the hot dog, walking down the street, it says to me:

-Why are you crying?

and I go:

-I don’t know!  I just feel bad!

-Look, Peter, this isn’t supposed to be complicated.  I’m not trying to hurt you or make you feel bad, I just want to have a chance, to…well to give us a chance to just see what happens.

I looked around for a second, suddenly worried that someone would see us talking but I apparently was just lost amongst the crowd.  I suppose I looked normal enough, like maybe I just had one of those hands free headsets.  Also, I’ve found people in cities don’t like to approach strangers crying.  I once was on the train and saw a girl balling her eyes out, like she maybe just got hit by a car, or lost a baby or something, and no one said anything to her.  So I reached out and as I was leaving, gently patted her on the shoulder and said:

-It’s gonna be ok.

And she looked back up at me and smiled.  I guess I was hoping that would happen to me.

I wiped my tears away, and said to the hot dog, maybe we can just keep talking for awhile, at home, and the hot dog said “ok” and I headed down the stairs of the subway platform and got on the train.

It was an excruciatingly long ride to my apartment in Long Island City.  We didn’t talk, but there was a lot of tension.  At one point I saw an older business man, who was probably just really hungry, staring at the hot dog which I had perched on my lap.  Out of no where I suddenly became very jealous, and shifted position, trying to hide the hot dog from his gaze.  I know it sounds irrational, but at the time, with things happening as fast as they were it made sense to me.

By the time we got to my house I was spent.  I realized by this point, I hadn’t really eaten anything all day.  Even though I had a fridge full of food, I couldn’t figure out what was appropriate to eat in front of a hot dog, so I just sat down at the kitchen table and took off my coat.  The room was eerily quiet, and it felt like we were at a standstill, until finally I said:

-Ok.  What if we were going to try this?  How would it even work?

to be continued  on 3.5.10

UPDATE!  Continued here!

This is old, but I re-watched it the other day.  Also: “I love you, Hot Dog part 3″ is comin’ manana!  Sorry for the delay!

Naoko Ito’s urban nature series is pretty great.  

I want these!

(found via the awesome colectiva blog.)