What Am I Full Of, Exactly?

I have a friend who, every time he calls me, shouts my old nickname into my ear as loud as humanly possible. This is weird to me for 2 reasons: 1) I am not a frat boy and, 2) we're not, like, 21. Nevertheless, he never fails to deafen me for one blindingly embarrassing moment when he screams, "A**** VODKASON!" obnoxiously loud into my ear upon my 'hello?'

First off, no, my real last name is not Vodkason. If it were...hell...that would have been a horrible omen, huh? Although that would explain quite a bit.

But I digress.

When I was in college, even as a 27-year old (LOL!), I still partied every night. I mean, 750ML Bottle of Vodka kind of partied. I challenged myself to see how many orgasms I could get the Guy of the Night to help me out with. It was crazy, stupid, self-destructive, expensive, but holy mother of god...it was fun. And I still made the dean's list every blasted quarter, because I worked my little hungover ass off like crazy to make the grades. Somehow, it worked.

But my deal was vodka. I liked Absolut Mandarin, Smirnoff or Stoli in either regular or vanilla, or Tito's Handmade. It was just part of who I was, kind of like the Marlboro menthols whose stench I carried with me everywhere.

So, anyway, there was this English class I was taking at my university (i believe it was a grammar class, to be specific), and the silly little handouts the teacher gave us used really fucked up shit as sample names. For instance, if the story was about a shopkeeper who was sacrificing quality for a profit, the guy's name would be Guy Greedson. And, if there was a kid who was happy and jovial in the story, his name might be Les Laughson. The teacher in the story might be Terry Teachson. You get it, right? Regular name + relevant character trait + 'son.'

So, one night I was sitting up at the bar with my friend King, and I was working on this homework that included people with the names like 'Fanny Friendson' and the like. King leaned over and said, "What the FUCK is that you're working on? Lesson plans for your field work or something?" (ahh, the good ol' days prior to teaching...)

"No. It's work for a regular class. Stupid gerunds and weird Salvador Dali-esque crutch-looking sticks for words. Damn, I can't get this diagramming shit."

King made some more fun of my assignment, and then began making comments on the people's names. "How did they come up with this ridiculous BS?"

"I don't know for sure because, you know, I'm not a publisher of educational materials, but it looks like they just paired up a first name with some words expressing character and added a 'son' to the end of it."

"Huh?"

"Okay. Look. Fanny here has lots of friends, so the publishers gave her the last name 'Friendson.' Vinnie is full of virtue, so his name is Vincent Virtueson. Get it?"

King says, "Oh, yeah. I get it. Kinda like you're A**** Vodkason, because you're always full of vodka..."

You can't argue with that kind of logic. And the name stuck. I've had lots of nicknames from other people that either didn't last very long or I refused to allow to be repeated. "Scooter" was one. "Ralph" was another. "Queen A****" was one I could kind of rally behind, alas, it didn't stick. But A**** Vodkason...now I could totally see that on a personalized license plate.

Or maybe not. Texas ain't too hip to the Driving While Intoxicated thing. But you get my point.

Why I didn't just convert all my "iamstillbroken" stuff over to the A**** Vodkason name, I'll never know. I think I was trying to keep my very real life very separate from my blogging life. They shared subject matter and stories, but I really didn't want to be discovered. Too many people knew about the Vodkason thing.

The whole Still Broken thing is an entirely different story, though. Definitely for another day.