Here�s what I�m going to say.
2006-01-12, 2:33 p.m.

Here�s what I�m going to say. I practice this in the car, and I�m afraid I�ll start saying it in my sleep, and DW will slink away to the living room to sleep on the couch with the dog. But it is starting to roll off my tongue, and saying it doesn�t cause my heart to race anymore like it was. This is a hybrid of two comebacks that were offered to me (for free!), and it goes thusly:

�This is the third time you have asked me out on a date. It is inappropriate and it makes me uncomfortable. Don�t do it again.�

Hopefully I can muster up the icy tone of voice I use when DW tries to coach me during our morning workouts: �It is not necessary to coach me. I have been doing living room aerobics since 1983.�

It�s tempting to say that I would add, �If you do it again, I will help your sweet wife beat you to death with a club made of YOUR DICK,� but we all know that I would remember to say this 3 days later, and in the meantime I would stare Death Rays of Hate, and mutter �motherfucker� under my breath, and otherwise passive-aggressively avoid any kind of contact.

Onward!

I went to Target today at lunch, and I perused the throw pillows on clearance, because you can never too many little pillows to throw around the house, and for the dog to lay her head upon during her marathon naps. I noticed that they had amusing shorthand names like �Chunky Boucle Throw� and �Kidney Throw�. And I thought, well, you might as well just add the word �Up� to each one, and be done with it. The Kidney one really confused me, as it was neither kidney shaped, nor kidney colored (to my knowledge), nor did it have any pictures of little kidneys on it. Hell, it didn�t even smell like a kidney. But, I thought that little throw pillows in the shapes of various internal organs would be kind of cool, and this inexplicably reminds me of a craft project that my mom and I contemplated back in the 70s, but never carried through, that was a little clutch purse that looked like a big sandwich.

On my Target trip, I saw two women who made me wish that I had little cameras implanted in my eyeballs, so that I could surreptitiously take pictures of the freaks I see without arousing their suspicion or wrath. They weren�t together, and they were also not women, but were clearly vampires disguised as mortal humans. The disguises were not working.

These weren�t any lame poser Goths, no. These were vampires who were making a concerted effort to pass as human, but they just don�t have it down yet. Heavy makeup, drawn-on eyebrows, ultra-black scary looking hair�and the smirk. The smirk of a vampire who knows it�s been spotted, and knows it�s safe anyway. What they were doing out in broad daylight, walking around in completely normal street clothes with their scary vampire faces, I have no idea. And they weren�t together, so that means that this wasn�t just a coincidental spotting of a couple of vampires, but perhaps a scouting expedition.

You KNOW if you were a vampire, trying to infiltrate mortal human society, you would start with a trip to Target.