I'm Not Herbert Lom

But, these days, I look like him.

Of course, I don't look like him, really. I look more like Chief Inspector Charles Dreyfuss, the character he made famous in the "Pink Panther" films, being tortured into madness by the ineptitude of Peter Sellers' Inspector Jacques Clouseau. Clouseau's rampant and limitless bumbling, paired with his inexplicable and accidental good luck at solving the most complex heist cases, grated on Lom's character, who developed a tell-tale eye twitch whenever in the presence of Clouseau, or even just when his name was mentioned.

"CLOUSEAU!" a psychiatrist yells at the supposedly-healed Dreyfuss during a session at a mental hospital-- to assess Dreyfuss's response. The patient reacts with perfect calm and ease. Until, less than 10 minutes later, he has several unfortunate encounters with a pond because of his nemesis, the moustachioed and impossible to understand Clouseau.

It would seem that Lom's character Dreyfuss and I are kindred spirits, as I have developed a twitch under my left eye. It first appeared perhaps a year ago, stuck around for a few days, and went away-- whatever little muscle it was, I guess, no longer felt the need to assert itself and make its presence known so insistently. This time, though, it has come back with a passion. The twitch re-emerged early in June and it's been hanging around pretty consistently. Sometimes it's a quick pulsation, going up and down with great energy and verve, other times it's slow and faint. No matter the rate or force, I've got to tell you, it's fucking annoying.

And I feel kind of silly writing about it, because it seems like it's the kind of thing one might choose to write about if one were grasping at straws for something to write about, and if that's what it seems like to you, that's because that's true. I was rather stuck, actually, for a topic today, and I felt like asking someone for advice-- a friend or a wife or whatever-- but then I usually end up not using that person's suggested topic, and that probably makes them feel like monkey vom, and it makes me feel guilty for soliciting an idea that I'm most likely just going to shitcan anyway.

But I suppose you're supposed to write about what's on your mind, and what's on my mind most frequently is breasts, but I wasn't really in the mood to write about breasts, although I did recently have an illuminating conversation about breasts a couple days ago-- maybe that's why I don't feel the need to write about them-- and so I thought I would go to a topic that really can't help but be on my radar, and that's this ceaseless twitching below my left eye.

I wonder what people think when they talk to me for any length of time. If they're making any reasonable attempt at eye-contact, they've got to notice it. It must be very unsettling to look at. Most people are probably too polite to say anything about it. Anyway, what would they say?

"Jesus, how about that nasty-ass twitch you've got there, fella! What's the matter-- your eye have Parkinsons?"

I'm not terribly polite, at least, not with people I know well. A friend of mine is pregnant and I haven't seen her in a few months. She's going to pop next week. Anyway, I saw her for the first time in months last weekend and she is so fucking pregnant it's not even funny. And she's growing out-- straight out. It looks like her baby is wearing a hoop-skirt, for Christ's sake. She was wearing a size 2-XL t-shirt. And she was trying to talk to me and my eyes kept going, quite unabashedly, I might add, to her belly.

"I'm sorry, Amy," I said, "I'm just not even listening to you-- I can't stop staring at your fucking belly!"

Which, in a way, was probably a good thing, because she probably didn't notice my eye-twitch that way.

I'm thinking of naming my twitch "Herbert" after Herbert Lom. Since we found out that we're having twins, we've been talking a lot about names. Everything's a name thing now. We were watching Michael Palin's "The Missionary" last night, and one of the actor's names is Denholm Elliott.

"What about 'Denholm'?" I said to my wife.

"That's funny," she said to me. And I presume it wasn't about the movie. In reading up about Denholm Elliott for this post (yeah, I do research. Sort of.) I learned that he was diagnosed with HIV in 1987, and died of AIDS-related tuberculosis in 1992. That made me sad. Herbert Lom, however, who was born five years before Denholm Elliott, is still living, apparently. Lom is ninety-four, if you can believe that. I don't think Mrs. Apron will let me name the kid "Herbert" either.

Lom, originally from Prague, was born Herbert Charles Angelo Kuchacevich ze Schluderpacheru.

Now that's something to twitch about.

O.M.G., L.M.T.!

So, not to embarrass her or anything, but my sister-in-law reads Cosmo.

Well, okay, I don't have evidence that she reads it, but it does come to her apartment, addressed to her. I mean, I get lots of things at my house that are addressed to me that I don't read, principally alumni notices/money beggings from my college and reminder postcards from my dentist.

Leafing through the magazine out of a morbid curiosity that haunts all men, lured into the depths of banality on the pages inside by the seductive actress or songstress or starlet or harlot on the cover, posing alluringly (Question: why do women's magazines have hot women on their covers?) and I was pretty entertained by what I found in there.

"Hey," I asked my sister-in-law and wife, "do they have those... those moronic stories in here, like-- what are they called... 'trauma-ramas?'"

They looked at me.

"You know, like, 'OMG, I was sitting in the hottub with my friends and some guys and I farted so hard my tampon flew out!' You know, those?"

"Well," my sister-in-law said, "those are more "Seventeen" magazine, but they have things like those in here."

She also told us about the website fmylife where people write in embarrassing stories that make you want to stick your head in a blender. Example:

"I saw this Caucasian woman and she dropped her purse. I went to pick it up to help her and she hit me with her umbrella. When I gave it back to her, she hit me again and said, "Get away from me, you yellow crook!" I'm Asian. F my life."

I presume that these are heavily edited if not entirely fabricated, because she read us maybe fifteen of them and they all sounded like they were written in exactly the same voice. Oh, and why did you have to wire "I'm Asian." Of course you're fucking Asian-- she called you a little yellow bastard or whatever. Everyone who's ever watched a "Pink Panther" film knows that Asians are correctly referred to as "yellow."

Anyway, this past weekend there were a lot of jokes swapped back and forth about Trauma-Ramas and F My Lifes. I think it was my sister-in-law who came up with the "F My Life"-like catchphrase "LMT!" (Lost My Tampon) as the perfect summation to an embarrassing trauma-rama story. I, having the mental age of 12, thought this was hilarious, and the mere mention of the catchphrase this weekend would send me into hysterical, gasping spasms of laughter.

Because I am 12, I thought it would be a funny idea to make one of these stories up myself, and then encourage all of my blog readers to make up their own Trauma-Rama or F My Life story. Remember, lovies, we're making things up. If you want to share a true one, Cosmo, Post Secret, F My Life, and Seventeen all await with reckless, schadenfreude abandon.

Okay? Here's mine:

"So, this one time, like, me and my crush were at an amusement park. Like, he was sooooo cute! And, like, we went on the ferris wheel together, even though I had just eaten, like, a thousand pounds of cotton candy. Well, we were up on the ferris wheel and, all of a sudden, it just stopped, right as me and my crush were right at the top.

"So, as we were sitting there, we totally started making out (EEEP!) He wanted to do more, but I was totally getting visited by Aunt Flow (that means I was having my period!) and so I kept pushing his hand away from, you know, down there, but he kept putting his hand there and he was, like, "Oh, I think your skirt has a thread that's coming loose, and he tugged on it, and I LMT'd! OMG, I was so embarrassed! And my crush threw the tampon out the side of the ferris wheel cart and it landed in some fat guy's cup of Coke three carts below us! He started screaming and his kid started crying, and the fat guy actually punched his kid in the face and started hitting the kid with my gorey tampon!

Sicknasty, right?

Then, my crush threw up in my face and I was so surprised that he did that, I farted so hard I shat myself. Then he was like, "Uh, I don't wanna hook up with you anymore," and he pushed me out of the ferris wheel cart and I fell out, but my underwear got caught on the edge of the ferris wheel cart, saving my life. But I was hanging there upsidedown getting the biggest frontal wedgie ever and my shit was all over the place and everybody in the amusement park was standing around watching me and the fat guy was now strangling his son with my tampon cord.

I totally threw up cotton candy vom all over the fat guy's head. He was so mad that he pulled out a bow and arrow and he shot me. The arrow went right through my underwear and I fell on top of a bunch of Japanese tourists in Members Only jackets who were filming the whole thing!

It's up on YouTube with over 4 million hits since Sunday.

L.M.T."

Okay! Now it's your turn, readers! In the comment box, go ahead and exercise your creativity and pen your own L.M.T. inspired tale! Don't forget to incorporate the catchphrase, and start using it in your writing/daily lives.

Have fun!