Magic Stoner Bars

There will be no Lucky Halftime Ritual tonight. Too much work, too much midnight oil to be burned at the office. Instead, Rachel dropped off my mother's famous Magic Cookie Bars (now known as Magic Stoner Bars, for reasons I promise I had nothing to do with... yeah... I really need something to give me a few more panic attacks).

She and I sat on the deck and said a fond farewell to the Hot Sorority Visigoth and her boyfriend Tommy Boy, as moving day crawls nearer. We reminisced about the time their their roommate mistakenly broke into my second floor window... the Muffins of Attrition that followed.... and all the times we'd used the breezeway between our two places when we end up locked out or the Fed Ex guy drops stuff off.

You can't imagine how much it pains me to admit that these girls are every bit as nice and sweet as they are hot. As we were discussing the no-locks habits today, the tall willowy volleyball blonde said, "oh gosh, I hope I haven't been a bother... sometimes I just run up and down those stairs in my underwear doing laundry."

"Oh," I told her, "Not to worry," (as I envisioned my RingToss classmate's head exploding just six blocks away.) The very prospect is the only thing in the world the men in my life live for. Or as I told him the other night when he asked about putting a robe on to get something out of the downstairs fridge, "Don't worry honey, you don't have anything those girls want." He's a dog chasing a car, he wouldn't know what to do when he got it.  The neighbor laughed good-naturedly, in her sweet, sing-songy, blonde voice. The siren's laugh of the Young. The Hot. The Oblivious. My boys will miss my girls though.

As we discussed at Easter brunch yesterday, no one's even figured out how to fit a man in the upstairs at the new place, with all the crazy dormer angles. Two have already almost knocked themselves senseless. "Here's what you don't want," Chef Dave said, "a sign that says 'watch your head.'" Where would you even put it, they wondered. The floor? Or the ceiling? Our excommunicated priest suggested maybe we could rig up chains, the kind truck drivers use. Crime tape was suggested as a possibility.

I hate the thought of downsizing boyfriends, but I hate the thought of closed-head-injury (so to speak) even more. Rachel advised I should go ahead and stick with my usual type, and hope they'd have enough sense to duck. "Hell," she said, "for the Lucky Halftime Ritual? They'll crawl."

My new neighbor is Ben. Ben has one ample sized dog. He appears to be a Young Republican, and yet he has a Jimi Hendrix poster in one window, which clearly indicates a deeply conflicted philosophical bent. A few weeks in, and I believe I can make him vote Democrat, and Call. Me. Ma'am.