Author Archives: Joel Derfner

I am turning thirty in less than four months.

All my friends who are over thirty tell me that the thirties are (or were, as the case may be) much better than the twenties.

I am full of hope that this is true. I mean, they could hardly be worse, could they?

Could they?

I know it’s wrong. I know it’s a clear indication of a deep and insidious character flaw. Reason and duty cry out against it.

But I am in love with Peter Bacanovic and I want to bear his children.

Please forgive me if you can.

My friends B.N., D.R., and I are inventing a game.

It’s called Off the List; or, Judging Harshly in Secret.

We’re still working on the specifics, but here are some general principles:

Each player will be dealt a hand of cards that will say things like “Can you believe what he’s wearing?” and “Don’t say anything, but I slept with her boyfriend.” At each turn, a player will select one card from his or her hand to compare with one card from another player’s hand. If the players have matching cards (two “That haircut is a Hallowe’en costume, right?” cards, for example), then they can take points away from a third player without that player’s knowing it. So you have no idea how many points you actually have and how many have been maliciously taken away from you until the end of the game.

There will also be cards that players will be forced to select at various points throughout the game that will say things like “Your second-best friend overhears the nasty story you tell about her to your best friend. Lose 50 points,” and “You manage to swallow the note you wrote about your boss’s personal hygiene just before she enters the room. Get 100 points.”

None of this will distract me, of course, from the other game I’m working on, which is a Golden Girls version of Clue.

I am wildly excited.

I have found a web site through which one can buy titles of nobility.

For less than the price of a cup of coffee a day for a year, I am going to become a viscount.

It’s unclear to me whether this title is hereditary, but since the odds against my having any children are quite high, I’m not going to worry about it.

Once I have my title, I will force all my friends and sexual partners to address me as “My Lord.”

Oh, wait, I already do.

For those of you who were frustrated in your attempts to view the pictures of the sock I posted on September 26, please try again. Something strange was happening with the hosting site; I think I may have fixed it.

In other news, this may be the funniest thing I have ever seen.

I’m not quite sure how to tell the story I’m about to tell. In fact, I’m not at all sure I should be telling it in the first place. In any case, please forgive its length.

In an attempt to drown my sorrows (W.F., for example, has failed to call me this week as he promised), I decided to throw myself back into the life of the mind. I briefly considered becoming a monk and moving to a medieval castle to illustrate manuscripts, but then it occurred to me that the whole Jewish thing would probably get in the way.

Plus, there’s an orgy scheduled for Thursday night, and I don’t want to miss it.

So I did the next best thing, which in this case was to go out and buy a textbook on Middle Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Put this part of the story on hold for a moment and move with me to the present day. My friend D.R. and I spent this evening at Drip. (For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, Drip is a cafe on 84th and Amsterdam that sells delicious Oreo milkshakes and has books full of personal ads.) There are four books of Men 4 Men ads, in which I have found exactly one ad to which I want to reply. But in order to reply to an ad, you have to leave one yourself. So D.R. and I sat there, trying to write an ad for me based on what we thought this one guy (about whom we knew nothing except what he put in his ad) would like.

The thing is, his ad is extraordinary. It has taken D.R. and me three visits to Drip to write an ad for me that’s at the level of this guy’s.

By the end of this go-round, we’d come up with answers to all the questions except “looking for.” Everything we thought of was either inferior to his answer or already in my ad somewhere else.

So we decided to answer in hieroglyphs.

I have spent the last two hours in my kitchen (the only room in my apartment with decent light) poring over An Egyptian Grammar trying to figure out how to say “somebody who’s cute, smart, funny, compassionate, stimulating, and a top” in Middle Egyptian.

I think I have finally figured it out.

Now I just have to practice drawing the damn things so it doesn’t look as if they were done by a developmentally disabled child.

The Middle Egyptian is, as far as I can tell, grammatically correct, though probably stylistically and idiomatically atrocious. A literal translation would read “man beautiful clever, he brings to me amusement, he cries out for justice, he causes to rejoice my spirit.”

“And a top” will have to be in English. I’m sure the Egyptians did that sort of thing, but they don’t seem to have carved it on their funerary architecture.

Yesterday I passed a sign in the west village that advertised “Tator Cards and Plam Reading.”

I wish I had a plam, so that I could get it read. Maybe then I would find out the answers to all my questions and the solutions to all my problems.

Of course, if I had a plam, maybe I wouldn’t have any questions or problems in the first place.

If anybody knows where I can get a good plam for not too much money, please let me know.

Used is fine.

Today’s orgy has, alas, been called off due to scheduling conflicts.

My problem is that, since I was the only one with no scheduling conflicts, the hosts have invited me to have a 3-way with them, and I do not wish to do so.

I have no idea how to get out of this gracefully.

“I was fine using you to have a sordid experience such as fantasies and porn movies are made of, but when it comes to spending an afternoon in your company being friendly and affectionate, no thanks, you’re too old” seems a little de trop.

There’s also the unforgivable rudeness of reneging on an invitation already accepted.

And yet having group sex simply to be polite seems somehow a little excessive.

I got an e-mail from E.S. with the subject heading “I want my sock!” It was an extraordinary piece of writing, full of forgiveness and warmth and wit. If anything could make me fall in love with him, it would be this e-mail.

Unfortunately, it couldn’t.

My friend L.N. pointed out that if this were a novel, I would end up marrying him.

Would that things were that simple.

Clearly, what’s called for is an orgy.

So I’m going to one tomorrow.

I was so full of anxiety and indecision about the lone sock that I just kept knitting, failing to notice (until it was too late) that it had gotten so big it could only fit E.S.

Now I have to figure out how to get it to him. I don’t have his address in Boston. I could send it to his sister, who lives in the same building he lived in here, but that would mean I’d have to send a note along with it; a single sock showing up in the mail with no explanation would be too sinister for words. And what could a note possibly say? “Sorry I dumped your brother, this is his if he wants it.”

Here, in any case, is a picture of the sock.

Here is a picture of the sock close up.

Here is a picture of the sock probably just having done something it would prefer to keep to itself.

Maybe I should just frame the damn thing and leave well enough alone.