Answers

Dear Braxton,

How do I propose to my girlfriend? Like, what's the right way to do it? Her name is Florence.

Sincerely,
Anonymous


Dear Anonymous,

First off, thank you for including her name. That does so much for me in terms of information that is important and relevant to my response.

This is how I got my wife (whose name is also Florence) to say yes:


I took her out to a movie and let her pick. I bought her popcorn, but only a small, and under the condition that if she was all right with that I wouldn't hit her in front of people. I managed to stay awake for most of the movie, which thrilled her to death. Oops, I forgot to mention, make sure she wears a skirt (it's vital to the plan). So anyway, after the movie I took her to an Eat'N'Park. After we stuffed ourselves full of shitty food and I didn't say anything to make her start that annoying crying thing she does, I followed her into the bathroom without her knowing.

When she got out of the stall and was washing her hands, I crawled up behind her and ripped her panties off. At first she screamed but when she saw that it was me she went with it. Long story short, I went down on her like crazy and pretended I found the ring in her lady parts. Then I popped the question.

Damn near charmed her to bits.

Go get 'em,

Braxton





Dear Braxton,

Im in 9th grade and I've been dating this guy for three weeks and he doesn't have time for me like 2 hang out with me. I told him if he isn't going 2 put in time 2 the relationship the relationship won't work but he still just lets me down. Im starting 2 feel embarassed 2 ask him because I know what the answer is going 2 be I really like him what should I do?

Charli, MA



Charli,

Don't be such a little bitch. You're barely in high school, of course he doesn't have time for you. You can't cook yet, and I'll bet you don't even know how to curl your lips over your teeth so they don't cut him. Relax, you have a whole life of disappointment ahead of you.

Get a vibrator,

Braxton




Dear Braxton,

Does my ex still like me? We r both in tenth grade n I m a girl. He lives next to my gmas n I went over there for her birthday. He came over n kept tryin to tickle me n stuff. He asked if he could carry me. what does this mean?

jEnNiFeR OK




Dear TYPE YOUR FUCKING NAME RIGHT,

He doesn't still like you. Actually, he probably never liked you to begin with. He just wants to pork you into oblivion.


Read Twilight,

Braxton



hunny nigga Braxton,

i hungry fo a man kno wut i mean? i want sum up in herr i need it like 3-4 time a DAY. Listen he got been had money bringin in them stacks a chee$e fa his gurl. How do i find it i aint plaiyn no mo ya hurr



Dear fellow "hunny nigga,"

I'm not one to stereotype but after reading that I can only assume that you're either black or one of those lower middle class girls that wear the pastel sweatpants with easily pronounced, sexually connotative adjectives emblazoned on the ass. Given that, I would still be willing to provide you some advice were I able to locate your fucking question. Did you graduate from high school? You know, it's legal for you people to learn to read and write now, and I suggest you fully exercise that freedom.

Tell your baby daddy I said hey,

Braxton




Dear Braxton,

I'm going to the beach next week. I'm pretty muscular. No six pack, but I have good biceps and I am attractive. I'm 16 years old. How do I talk to girls and have girls like me?

Toby FL


Toby,

First, don't be afraid of showing a little scrotum, especially if it's a different color than the rest of you. Just watch the stubble.

The second key thing is to use pheromones to your advantage as much as possible. Procure some of your own semen by whatever means you deem necessary, then divide it up among your palms and slap it under your chin like aftershave. This will throw a scent in the ladies' directions that they won't totally be aware of, but it will drive them crazy just the same.

That should get you a fair number of takers, so whenever you get a girl to actually talk to you, here's what you do: Make sure you mention her vagina as much as possible, but don't use the actual word vagina, make up some colorful euphemisms that you can insert into all sorts of scenarios. Also, never say more than ten words without one of them being "titties." Girls are often confused, and don't wield language very well, so it's important to be constantly reminding them why you're there.


Do these things, and you should have not only an excellent vacation, but life as well.

High five,

Braxton



Dear Braxton,

How do guys typically choose to show girls their interest in them? You're a guy. Do they just talk to them when they feel like it and not other times? Please help, I really like this guy and I want to know if he really likes me too. Also, do guys like it when a girl plays hard to get? Or do you think he will get bored? Please respond, he could be the one.

Kat VA



Dearest Kat,

I don't want to sound like a dick (yes I do) but chances are the simple fact that you're a girl with regular girl concerns means you're an irreconcilable bore. Most girls are boring. Most people are boring. That is why so many human bonds are dependent on sex for survival. He'll likely get tired of you even if you don't play hard to get.

That said, playing hard to get in terms of physicality is sometimes a good way to turn a guy on, or a good way to get raped to death under the bleachers at an away game (I haven't decided yet). Playing hard to get in terms of emotional connection is...well that just doesn't happen. Actually, if you are the type of person who makes a deliberate game of playing hard to get, you're not mature or smart enough to keep a fish alive, let alone kindle and maintain the type of relationship you think you're talking about.


Learn to love fisting,

Braxton

I Think It Was Supposed to Rhyme

Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear. Fuzzy Wuzzy had no KY Touch. He masturbated and it killed him. Motherfucker.

A Girl at the Mall One Afternoon

She stands before the pretzel place,
Perched on an ephemeral pedestal
Pretended in the peripheral of every male passerby,
One hand affixed to where her hips should be.

Her lips,
Two carmine collagen blimps
Pursed in pained selection,
A calorie-counting cacophony
Of muddled brain chemistry.

Onyx dusted eyelashes
Bat idly at the boy behind the counter
And somewhere a rabbit is tied down,
Eyelids clamped open,
A chemical administered,
Inconsolable squeaking
And a wretched pop
As its spinal cord is torn asunder
In the want of an escape.

She blinks triethanolamine stearate.
She blinks hydrophobically modified cellulose.
The pretzel boy wants her number.

He thinks of kissing her cheek,
His lips lifting traces
Of the phenyl trimethicone
That gives her face pigment,
Of holding her bronzed hand,
Running his fingers over
The Erythrulose and dihydroxyacetone
That brown the cell-thin deadness
Encapsulating her.

In a building full of cages
A dog in a gas mask,
Un-anaesthetized,
Coercively huffing
A contained cloud of experimentation
Until the poison takes it
Or its stomach ruptures,
Muffled yelping
Crumpling in a dead heap on the floor,
And she’s so sexy.

There is a World

I have a friend who can play anything on the acoustic guitar if you give him a minute, and if you think he is cute he's a great singer too. Every week night he'll sit on the porch of his fraternity house playing until it gets too dark to see, and on the weekends he takes a picture every time a girl hugs him. I looked through all of them the other day, but I'm funny with stuff like that. Can never figure out why they always stand so close, blocking out everything beyond them.

Easter

"Some mornings it's all I can do to get out of bed," God says.

"There's a day coming and I'm not ready for it and sometimes I think they can sense that, but then look at the ones who believe in me now who think they aren't a part of the planet I put them on, and I'm going to have to show them, I mean really show them. It's all very tiring. I never stop being tired."

Status

Ready for my ideal social networking site? You sign up, make a profile, upload all of your photos. You search and search for other people's pages but no matter how long you spend posting surveys and doing quizzes, nobody else is out there. Your internet self just drifts, and every time you log off after checking just in case, there is a weight in your heart that is easily understood.

Weekend

When the world ends
Will it be like just another party?
Your ex girlfriend is there
And you worry for a second
About having to talk to her.
The noise is stifling,
A bubble of vibration,
And your friends are lost in the bodies,
Pressed together
Shifting like tall grass caught in wind.

When the world ends
You will be there just because it’s Friday.
Desperate drunk in everyone’s faces,
Following that girl to her car,
Careening into the neon-threaded black,
Howling at the stumblers on the sidewalk
Where you’re going next.

When you awake in a stranger’s bathroom
Vexed
Perplexed
Wearing only a song stuck in your skull since Monday,
If the sun has disappeared,
Just wrap yourself in the shower curtain and go home.

Frequent Moderation

If I matched gin and tonics for sneers that are as petty as they are laughable, you would be entitled to make those barbed observations about the fact that I drink every day. If I guzzled a scotch and soda for every failure to understand having a drink because it tastes good, I'd lose sight of how that makes you the alcoholic. What about the fact that you despise yourself so vehemently that your body rejects it, pouring on others your repugnant and manifold inadequacies enough to fill more tumblers than I will ever touch?

Friend, I don't drink to solve my problems, I do it to create yours.

Will Disparage for Food

"Hey lady, I'll finger ya for a sandwich, ya slinky cougar!"

No one knows why he dresses like that, hands tucked into the quintessential fingerless gloves and holding a cardboard sign, naked fuzzy legs jutting out from a wounded, sodden trench coat, feet in filthy Ugg boots that smell like sour milk and the washed up piscine entrails of the riverside. Jerry isn't homeless, not even close, so people just think he's got something wrong in his head, but I don't know. All people spend most of their lives experimenting with veiled, elaborate ways to tell everyone exactly how much they should fuck off.

Time Passing Without Us

The stairs have rubber mats laid over them that make it easy to descend in silence if one treads softly. At the bottom, a thick metal door will open relatively soundlessly, but the lock clicking into place always echoes down the dormitory hall regardless of how gingerly it is shut. I walk heel first, laying down the soles of my shoes gradually on the dirty tile, passing every numbered door with nearly surgical care. In the dank grayness of Mary Beach’s first floor, it is vital that I am not heard.
Slowly, with measured breaths, I drag my keys from the front pocket of my asphalt colored jacket. I can see my door’s handle up ahead, almost shimmering in the sparse, sterile washes of light that have managed to crawl in from the fluorescents in the stairwell. This is the farthest I’ve ever gotten. This time, I may have just done it.
There’s only so much I can do to minimize the soft tinkling sound my keys make when they collide as I sort through the ring in muted haste. Then a soft grinding as the key enters my lock. Then, a vociferous whir as the door next to mine is flung open and Chandler Wittel slides into the hall, clad only in blue green boxer briefs, eyes already fixed on me.
I’m not sure what I was expecting from college life, exactly. Poorly written, gimmicky teen movies and failed-journalists-turned-traveling-motivational-speakers had me at the ready for adventures in glorified debauchery perpetrated by hosts of stereotypes wielding benevolent but unapologetic eccentricity. Nobody ever said anything about being charged nearly every evening by a mostly naked, Transformers obsessed product of American homeschooling that, if he caught me, would proceed to hump my leg with gusto. Neighborly? Not hardly.

“Whoa whoa whoa! Chandler stop! Chandler, no. No!”

But he was already barreling towards me, focused in sick determination. This is the part where I always panic and my hands shake too violently to get the door unlocked in time, so I have to try to run to the other end of the hall or duck under him. It never works. Despite being shaped like a pear, he’s surprisingly spry, and he has considerable upper body strength from all of the racquetball he plays. I could always throw a punch to spare myself, but I try my best to be a pacifist, and I also don’t really want to touch him. I shouldn’t even have to put up with this. Yeah, maybe it was a bit much to break up a bagel into fifteen pieces and hide all of them in different parts of his room, and I may have gone a little over the line when I tricked him into downloading naked pictures of Daniel Radcliffe, but nothing I’d done in the first three months of our freshman fall semester could possibly warrant retribution this heinous.
I’d always wondered why people in movies had to scream like they did in times of crisis that weren’t even necessarily surprising. Experiences like this resolved that query. Apparently mortified squealing is just something your body does for you, like sneezing or remembering to breathe. I wish my body could have come up with something more useful to do as Chandler bear hugs me and I am helplessly bludgeoned by his pelvis into the painted cinder block wall with enough force for the sleeve of my jacket to erase everything on the small white board outside my room.
These exchanges always end the same way: I pretend not to be unequivocally violated, talking briefly with him about the classes we share or the latest fake news story he’s read, and then escape into my room to sink into a chair and bask in scarred relief. I often try to console myself by thinking that, should I want to join a fraternity in the future, I’ll likely have an advantage.
Really, these attacks are not instances of sexual assault as much as his newest manifestation of aggravated retaliation. We’ve been going back and forth since day one. I’d steal his cell phone, he’d steal my laptop. He’d make off with my shower caddy, I’d spray shave gel all over him at four in the morning and watch him roll in it, still asleep. I would get on his computer while he was in the bathroom, changing important settings and all of his Facebook information so that everyone could read about his affinity for pedophilia. He would write “Who is the Asian chick you were showering with earlier?” on my dry erase board so that I would invariably be awoken in the middle of the night by the chastising knocks of an RA. Now, somewhere along the line of the myriad personal inconveniences we so loved exacting on each other, Chandler had discovered the effectiveness of genital intimidation.
Forcibly repressing the thought that I was just grinded by a dude, I let myself fall into the wobbly chair at my sickly wooden desk. It seems awfully paradoxical that my family had just spent the price of a new car on me living in what amounted to a baseball dugout full of furniture likely carpentered by a friendly retarded man. The walls of the place are the same cinder block as the hall, painted the muffled color of dirty eggshells. The floor exudes a blank sloppiness that makes me think of wet cement, and drawing the blinds means jettisoning the observance of night and day. The encroaching silence of the surrounding stone waits for me to sit alone like this, to catch me in between bouts of busied scurrying to remind me why I’m here. For me, this life wasn’t so much a choice as it was the dictation of circumstance, of necessity. Marietta did not belong to a lengthy list of hopeful possibilities, surviving to the end by bedazzling me with all its promise. In fact, no such list ever existed. I never got the chance to make it.
In a way, the decision that I would be attending Marietta College was made before I was even born, and in the time it took my grandmother to postulate that problems she didn’t acknowledge were problems she didn’t have. My future was sealed in something that that poor, stubborn old woman crinkled up in the back of her mind and left there, and I’d known it since an evening in the December before my arrival at Marietta when she stopped breathing and my mother came down to the basement to tell me she’d called an ambulance.
Time has a way of passing without us, and the causal pivot points of our lives seem to connect only when our backs are turned. Joellen Fury’s misstep was that she never turned back around to see what her life looked like all strung together, and for that she would pay dearly. She’d always been a bit of a naive recluse, perpetually planted in a recliner in her part of our house, sequestered in a burrow of books and forgotten newspapers, watching Judge Judy, but my mother and I had begun to notice an ever-expanding dullness creeping over her that we both agreed was just her old age as we pushed down a secret anxiety.
She repeated herself more and no longer spoke deliberately, but rather her words billowed faintly from her like thin smoke from a jammed machine. The already obese woman started swelling, started hating everyone she could no longer remember, started falling and remaining cursed to the floor until one of us would rush from work or school to come help her up. Her bullheadedness rivaled her decay. She hadn’t been to the doctor since my uncle was born, no reason to start now. But there was a reason, and it had risen from a sea of willful self neglect that winter night as the sirens wound their way up the hills and my girlfriend squeezed my hand and mom did her best to cry softly.
It was congestive heart failure, an adorably amiable doctor told us at the hospital, and it would have taken her had we not convinced her, for our sake, to come that night. Two valves in her heart had given up, letting fluid collect in her body, causing the swelling and suffocating her from the inside. The fuzzy senility was her brain screaming for oxygen, letting go of her memories and thoughts in its struggle to stay afloat.

“So, what can we do?” my mother pleaded, a week at the hospital and a hundred plus pounds of drained fluid later.

Funny. I had spent my sophomore year of high school having people apologize for my father’s cancer, then my junior year sharing the house with a paranoid schizophrenic stranger, each beginning and ending with my mother or me proffering that very same question. You’d think we’d have learned by now that the answer is always the same.
Our options were to go forward with a surgery she wouldn’t survive, or put her on a strict diet that would involve more pills than food and administer frequent breathing treatments. Even with the medication, the physician told us, she would slowly fade over the next year or so, but it would at least give us more days to remain a family. I liked the word he used: fade. I pictured my grandmother growing infinitesimally more translucent with each day, until at last we came home to nothing. I thought of yelling across a still lake at night, the sound waning as it sailed, losing itself peacefully against the tree line. If only. Knowing her, we’d find her at the bottom of the driveway, spread eagle on the pavement, frozen in the spiteful act of trying to get the mail just to show us all she still could. Or maybe she’d stand on tradition. I could see a familiar Thanksgiving dinner, the three of us sitting down to a meal that mom spent all day on in our poorly lit kitchen. My grandmother would complain about the food and jab my mother with false inadequacies in a confused effort to be part of the dinner conversation, then instead of retreating back to her den mid-forkful to catch Survivor and forget what she said to upset everyone, she would pass quietly while mom sobbed over the stove and I feebly tried to compliment her in between confounded bites of stuffing.
Toggling through these scenarios in my mind, I knew there was no way around it. While everyone else in my senior class had conniptions over getting accepted into choice schools that would get them good jobs, my criteria revolved simply around my being able to make a frantic drive home after a phone call that was certainly coming. If I couldn’t be there, my mom would have to deal with everything alone. That put my choices at either Marietta College or West Virginia University at Parkersburg, a local community college which, while I’m sure at one time it offered a quality education, was now more closely representative of a cheap clinic for people born without the parts of their brains that hold aspirations.
So I filled out all of the paperwork, moved in, went to the activities and played the games enthusiastically designed to get scared teenagers to start talking to each other and make the transition into becoming familiar, scared teenagers. I went to my classes. By all appearances, I was a college student, but in my head I wasn’t really anything.
While my mental space didn’t accompany me to Marietta, it didn’t consciously dwell much on all of the last days at home I was missing, either. I could still laugh, make jokes and dear friends, but when all of the white noise this new segment of my life offered died out, I was trapped again in a mental purgatory, in a cognitive destitution that told me I wasn’t in control and that I shouldn’t ever expect to be.
Still at my desk, my phone begins to vibrate, and my heart jumps as the screen comes to life, but it isn’t the call I’ve been expecting. I lean back in my chair, rubbing my neck to warm my hands, unknowingly pricked by the first crippling pangs of what will become a two-year exhaustion. Down the hall, a door closes. The smacking of bare feet grows steadily more audible, cut off by the deadness of a palm thrust firmly into my door.
Chandler’s mousey voice floats in through the cracks, promising he won’t try anything if I open the door, asking me to come with him to the gas station so he can stock up on more chocolate and energy drinks. I crack a smile in spite of myself, thinking of how later this creepy little ingrate will shuffle up to the girl’s dorm and move from door to door, handing out fun-sized bags of M&M’s and asking them how they are. I think of how, later still, he’ll find a way to trick me into downloading those same damn pictures of Daniel Radcliffe. As I tell him to hold on a second, I don’t think about how we so often let life teach us what it is, what it means for us. While I tie my shoes, I wish it would occur to me that we get too comfortable thinking that things have to be a certain way. Leaving my cell phone behind on the desk, I open the door not knowing that every sick surprise Chandler has in store for me is a friendly reminder of how up for grabs everything is.

A Whim to Pass Our Days

The world really is your oyster, child, it's up for grabs and just outside. You can eat cereal whenever you want, drive a truck full of frozen pizzas, have a dog and a woman to keep in your house. You can be a shoe horn maker, fill gumball machines, lie naked on your kitchen floor as you feel the need. You can get on a plane, take control of it with your knife, and run it into whatever your little heart desires.

Fallimur

When the apocalypse came, it was not brought by our advanced robotics or a sudden deluge or ceasing of childbirth, but by our ineptitude at accomplishing anything more than fancy and clever ways of moving stuff around. I figured it's our time, that this was bound to happen eventually, so I'll just putz around in my hometown with my family while we see this thing through. As I listlessly kick pine cones around a plaza parking lot, I watch my little daughter futilely scoop up stray hamsters that amble out of the pet store next to our old favorite Italian restaurant and place them carefully in a dirty suitcase bound with shoestring, humming songs from her favorite musicals, so I yell over to her, "Honey, it's over, there's no point in taking them."

For a moment, she stares pensively at a fuzzy brown lump nestled in her palms, before saying, "But daddy, if this is the end, there's no point in leaving them either."

System

She plods across the midnight pavement in the shadows of skyscrapers laid out in a grid ahead of her. Even at the foot of these dead winter obelisks, filled to the stars with degree-toting throwaways, there is a trustful presumptuousness in her step. I'm going to show her how invisible the world really is. I'm going to show her that civilization is just something we teach ourselves, like wrapping a brick in an old handkerchief to deaden the sound it makes against cheekbones, teeth rolling into the gutter like dice.

Voice of Truth

Stunningly made up teenage girls sing into wireless microphones with their free hands reaching out to something invisible above their heads while parking lot boys bang away on acoustic guitars in name brand hoodies and distressed jeans, all of them careful not to let the electricity of their praise knock over the projector for the PowerPoint presentation the preacher needs to cry in front of later.

Behind the cameramen and hysteric members of the congregation being dunked in hot tubs, God is slumped in one of the perfectly manicured pews, head in His hands, chanting to himself,"I promised not to flood again. I promised not to flood again. I promised..."