Nothing Corrodes Skin Like Radioactive Hamster Slime ... Or Sibling Rivalry

Dear cute boy who for whatever reason is at least trying to engage me in light, platonic, but nonetheless nerve-wracking discourse on Facebook,

No, I’m not taking forever to get back to you because my head fucking explodes when I even start to try to figure out how to talk to you, which therefore requires extensive internal persuasion and possible ingestion of illicit substances to get me to accomplish, like, finishing a sentence.

I’m taking forever to get back to you because I’ve been in Aruba. It’s in, um, Russia. I met up with my sister Stephanie there because she’s on a speaking tour for her new book I Became A Nun And All I Got Was This Bag Of Cheetos and she forgot her fake-mink coat at home. Fake-mink is commonly mistaken for real-hamster pelts, but my sister doesn’t think these things through. Being the devoted, dutiful and pathologically passive-aggressive sibling that I am, I went forth posthaste at great inconvenience to fetch it from her tent in Mount Shasta and deliver it to her in Aruba, Russia. I stalled, of course, because (1) Stephanie’s landlord is a bad ass who made Cherry-Chocolate Upside Down Cake, and (2) I didn’t want to miss the roller derby bout that was going down just a block away from their residence.

Yes, being a block away from a venue of roller derby bouts and practices is one of many reasons why I hate Stephanie, but we can’t win them all. (Neither can the derby girls, you should have seen the bruises on them…not that bruises are any indicator of winning or losing.)

Aaaaanyhizzle, after the bout, I took Stephanie’s secret passageway that links her tent to her in-progress mansion in Colorado, for the sole purpose of spray-painting profanity all over her tres chic, hot pink granite paneling. I then hitchhiked to Aruba by means of a large, glow-in-the-dark opposable thumb, which was sighted by a clinically depressed helicopter pilot named 9-Volt Reuben the Third. 9-Volt’s life, allegedly, had no meaning for him anymore now that the local coffee place near his house closed and the only java available to him in the locale were Starbucks and burnt, generic gas station brew. I don’t think Starbucks is bad, but that’s not a bone I was going to pick. This coffee-themed desperation was the reason why he really didn’t mind taking me halfway around the world to see my klepto-nympho narcissist of an identical twin. You know, the kind of twin who wears fake mink even though it looks like hamster pelts and has a history of trying to burn down school libraries.

To pass the time, 9-Volt and I regarded the clouds and told each other what we thought they looked like. One cloud looked like a bruise one of the derby girls had on her thigh. I could see it through her fishnets and it reminded me of a bruise I once had on my hip. I miss that bruise. Putting on my pants has never been the same since it faded away. Another cloud looked like a coffee cup, and 9-Volt started to cry. Then I pointed at another one, said it looked like Prozac, and that 9-Volt should go swallow it. He said I was being a little insensitive, but didn’t follow up on threats to push me out of the helicopter.

No one said anything for a while. Then 9-Volt pointed out a cloud that looked like a guinea pig. “It’s actually a hamster,” I said.

Someone sitting next to me at Stephanie’s Cheeto symposium later asked me how I knew the clouds were hamster shaped and not guinea pig shaped. At which point a shadow serendipitously descended upon them and I pointed to the offending figure and screamed, “BECAUSE THERE’S ONE NOW!” The symposium exploded into chaos, not unlike how I once saw a bowl of cat food explode into maggots. That’s another story. I took pictures, but I’m not going to post them here because I’M A FUCKING LADY.

Anyway, this is the part where my generous jaunt to the other side of the world turned into a touching, Lifetime-channel-esque story, as my sister and I were reunited (like we were united ever in the first place…?) in the cause of saving the world from these giant mutant hamsters, who, as it turns out, wouldn’t have given two shits about the Saint Thecla’s University satellite campus in Aruba, Russia if the leader didn’t mistake Stephanie’s fake mink for his mother’s fur. Despite my sister being a flaming nebbish who no one should miss when she’s gone (did I mention that she once tried to burn down a library?), in that moment we knew there were more important things than age-old family feuds. We knew there was more to life than even Cheetos. We knew that we had to SAVE THE WORLD, and we took those rodent motherfuckers down. Or we thought we did. Despite our delusions of grandeur, most of them got away.

But the cause wasn’t completely lost because the hamsters do spew hyper-acidic slime, so half of my sister’s face did get corroded. She wasn’t super-seriously hurt, only disfigured, so I don’t think I should feel guilty about the billowing sense of satisfaction I get every time I look at her. The sentiment might be ugly, but now her face is uglier. Amirite?

So… that’s why I haven’t responded to your FB message. I would have gotten you a hamster tail as a token of my… what? Hormonal, might-as-well-be-adolescent, terrifying admiration?… but the only hamster who had a tail was the Boss Hamster, and that one got away first.

Which is why I have to end this blogpost – which you will NEVER EVER SEE I HOPE – with a warning that we are looking at a certain hamster apocalypse. What can I say? I tried. When it came down to it, stopping to laugh at my sister’s misfortune (see: her new face) felt far more important than, you know, saving the world. Well, I gotta go beta-read the aforementioned bad ass’s landlord’s novel now (a sequel to this), because it’s a good yarn and I’d like to see it published before we all die.

Catch ya on the whenever-side!