Funhouse Mirror Mazes Of A Dying Spirit

SAN FRANCISCO, CA

Excelsior, 9:31am

Studio sessions usually last about 11.5-12 hours a day.  This includes all three meals, so it's not as brutal as it sounds.  But come 7:30pm, I would take a few nights here and there to explore (and quietly observe) Portland.  I've been hanging out with friends here and there, but being by myself in the city is where the social litmus test comes out in its most primeval colors.  

So far, Portland is still distinct, slightly eccentric, sleepy and bizarre in the right context.  But it is certainly becoming a boomtown, FAST.  The usual overheard dialogue in bars and waffleshacks and greasy dollar mess halls has shifted from lax and cultural, and now shares verbal real estate with a simmering brew of fear and resentment:  gentrification, rent increase, the disappearance of said culture and laid back attitude, rich man rolling thunder from every corner of earth, particularly California.  The resentment towards Californians is laughable, to be honest.  Half the time I just snidely respond in kind.

 "If you're shitting on all the cool people who got kicked out of Cali, wait 'til all the billionaire assholes come rolling through!"

"Thank God you guys thought ahead and have the best rent control laws in the country.  RIght?  Hello?  Guys?"  

The Spirit of San Francisco The Spirit of the West Coast

From my skewed and clearly insulated perspective, everyone was coming to San Francisco in search of their own personal experiences with The Spirit of The City, as I called it.  People flocking from all over the country, from sexual and religious oppression, looking to go a little buck wild and free themselves of their former shells.  

What exactly is "The Spirit"?  It's probably a lot like the Spirit of the 90's®.  And I am sure everyone has a different name for it.  But The Spirit works for me. 


The Spirit is sitting down in a noisy bar, being warmly greeted by random strangers about half a nose down your glass of beer, and then watching that conversation expand and pull a few more strangers immediately surrounding you into a giant mutant social gathering of ridiculous proportions.  

The Spirit is wandering onto a desolate beach only to be greeted by a flock of nudists who all want to share a joint with you.  Or walking in on a couple having sex behind a decommissioned gun turret, and them inviting you to watch.  Or accidentally booking a hotel at a hippie retreat center and spending half the weekend naked in the pool with elderly lesbians and Santa Cruz neo-FlowerPower couples. 

The Spirit is being invited by your upstairs neighbor to a suspect strip club for his rapper boss's album release party, chickening out at the last minute, but ending up at a rooftop party across town after losing at dice to a couple of drunk riot girls who then "kidnap" you to try and find good acid in ANOTHER corner of town.  

The Spirit is random people showing up to your bonfire at 3am on a Tuesday night with a case of shitty beer and a good attitude.  (Check the CA Park Laws to see when they banned bonfires after 1030pm in San Francisco.  Yep, I'm old.)

The Spirit is going to your favorite record store, reading a book on a bench or drawing in your sketchbook in the park and then getting approached by a street teamster with a flier to a show, ending up AT that show, and then getting burritos afterward with the friends of the guy (or gal) who handed you that original flier.  

The Spirit is a celebration of rhythmic propinquity, of people yearning with all their hearts to try and find all the kindness in others, and inviting them to indulge in their senses of adventure.   And for the record, all of those examples that I just listed have, in actuality, happened to me.   

The Spirit is not dead, by a longshot.  If you do not want it to be.  But that Spirit as a whole, due to whatever reasons we all want to attribute it to: technology, changing of the guard, gentrification, etc.... is in a dormant, defeated stasis all over the West Coast.  

For a good while now I had come to believe that The Spirit of The City was exclusive to San Francisco.  I experienced it, however, in Seattle earlier in the 2000s, and definitely in Portland. And for this reason, I now call it The Spirit of the West Coast.  Genuine moments with genuine strangers who just want to invite you into the world of random and excitement.

Of all these cities, Portland's was easily the most genuine.  But in the two weeks I had been here, I was beginning to feel a creeping sensation that all those scary change factors were starting to mutate PDX into something else, something less friendly, less genuine and authentic.  In some places it was totally gone.  "Fuck, it's like I'm back in San Francisco", I would scowl, and move on.  

But in other places, The Spirit was back in small doses.  I was writing the last of the script one night at a bar blaring speed metal, a fair trade considering how "expensive" the beer was.  Before I knew it, the entire table was full of random strangers, a couple on a failing date, a lone Hawaiian gal with a prosthetic leg covered in beer stickers, and two older guys who just wanted to relax after a day of work.  

Turns out we were all Bay Area exiles.  And it was in that moment that I realized this "creeping sensation" I was talking about was a slightly modified variant of GUILT.  I coudn't quite put my finger on it at the moment.  

Clinton & SE 26th

9:45pm

I was told that Dot's Cafe was a good decent place for everything that I in particular am looking for in a bar... atmosphere, crowd, price, whatever.  It was all right on the Dot (Sorry, bad pun, had to do it).  So i decided to venture over to Clinton, armed with a sketchbook and new shoes. 

Never made it to Dot's.  On my way crossing the street, a voice beckoned me and there was a finger in my chest.  

"MELVINS!  See, now THERE's a good jump-off point. MELVINS." 

My uniform for going out usually (and almost always) consists of that two-headed dog Melvins shirt.  This was what I was wearing yesterday night.   People fucking LOVE that shirt.  I just don't even understand it, to be honest with you.  Doesn't matter if I am in Belltown Seattle, or Outer Sunset San Francisco.  It's always an enthusiastic guy (and occasional woman) who just bellows "MELVINS HELL YAH"  and then the conversation starts from there.  

THIS particular guy, though, had other ideas.  

"Yeah, look I get why people like the Melvins, but you'd have to suck my dick and give me a free ticket to go see them again."  

This man instantly had my attention.  Nobody has ever talked smack about them before, especially not in a tacked-on lead-in manner to a conversation that was already ongoing.  The other end of the battery was a Hapa Japanese guy and what I thought was his girlfriend, and they greeted me.  

"Becca!  Hi!"  


"Kentaro!  Nice to meet you!" 


"MARSHALL.  HOW YOU DOIN, MAN!  Hey, cool shirt though, but yeah, Melvins aint my bag of tea."  

He had a glint in his eye and a swagger to his step.  His beer cap barely covered his enormous dome; he was dressed in all black and looked like if Isaac Hayes had skateboarded across town to his Black Flag audition.  Soon we were all awkwardly standing around as Marshall continued to ramble, dropping some knowledge about music.  So i decided to walk into the pub and order a beer.  

I figured that was the end of that interaction at that point.  I sat down and ordered randomly off a tap, and grimaced when it turned out to be a sour beer.  

"Fuck.  Goddamn millenials and your sour be---"  

Suddenly, that same finger that had been pressed into My Melvins logo was suddenly a paw on my shoulder. 

"Hey dude!  I am so sorry if I offended you.  I dig your swag man, I don't really like the Melvins but I think its cool that you're into that shit I was just talkin out of my ass."

"No worries man!" 

"You wanna come play pool with us [Kentaro and Becca]?  It's free." 

"Yes. Yes I do." 

Marshall reintroduced me and we all reintroduced ourselves.  Suddenly, The Spirit had hit me square in the jaw and I fucking loved it.  Suddenly I was in Drawing Flies (1996), Clerks (1994), Reality Bites (1994) and Singles (1992).  

After a couple of rounds, The Spirit was alive and well, and Marshall was leading the charge.  He smacked my phone away in between cue shots as I was trying to text my mom, telling her I'd be home late.  He dictated all the pooltable rules out of thin air, with some hilarious arguments occuring with Becca.  He would dole out cigarettes to whoever wanted one on the street, and talked trash at an Uber driver for parking in front of the bar and then wandering in.  
Through this "altercation", we come to discover that he works for the local cab company, and astonishingly, was a born-raised Portland native.  In the course of an hour I had come to know exactly who Marshall is.  He made it very plain and obvious that the facets of his personality were vehemently rooted in his origins, his vocation and his cultural palette.  He was proud of his rare breed status. Quite honestly, I would have been too.  

Marshall was a crazy cat and he owned it.  We smoked a tiny bowl around the corner, and he just had this edge that I hadn't seen or felt in a long, long time.  

"SNAPPERS. Fuck yeah." 

"Wut?"

"SNAPPER.  C'mon, you know what a fuckin snapper is.  You're from the Bay Area don't TELL me you don't know what a fuckin' snapper is." 

"I..." 

He points at the tiny bowl he had packed into his one-hitter.  

"Snapper!  Takes the edge right off!  Snaps ya BACK! Shit, man, I thought you were HIP, what with your fucking SOCKS."

It all felt familiar to me, though.  He would go around being super nice to people one minute, and then walking away talking a bunch of trash.  He would say something sarcastically, but then say that he meant it seriously.  And then double back and say he was just talking out of his ass and that he's a dirty old man with nothing left in his life to do except drive a cab and get fucked up and masturbate.  He was 60% Chill, 35% Dick, and about 5% "Miscellaneous".  He just carried himself in a way that was a proverbial neon arrow pointed straight at him that said "FOLLOW ME TO FUN AND ADVENTURE AND MAYBE SOMETHING FUCKED UP"..... I couldn't have asked for a better Spirit embodiment.  

We drank a round of shit beers in shiny cans and ran the pool table into the damn ground.  And THEN, he wrangled up me, Kentaro and Becca and convinced us to head to his favorite dive bar around the corner, where there was apparently a pool table that was superior in positioning (he was wrong).  And again, The Spirit did not disappoint.  Suddenly I am walking three blocks down with 3 complete strangers, tagging along on some lost expedition to find the next moment of entertainment.  The whole time Marshall is just being Marshall. One minute he'll be telling us we're the greatest, the next minute he'll be mocking us incessantly for being too serious or wound up, or too deliberate and stuffy.

He relished being a broken shard, an old guard, a joker card.  Underneath the attitude, though, was the blueprint of a really, really genuinely nice guy who just wanted to recapture that Spirit I keep talking about, even if it meant having to recruit a bunch of out of town douchebags like me and Becca and Kentaro (they had just bought a house around the corner, freshly moved in from Boise).  
 

Marshall's dive did not disappoint.  The Keno arcade machines were populated by some greasy looking neighorhood kids, the entire bar reeked of refried dough and stale beer (their kitchen was infamous for its fried chicken), and the bartenders had this old school attitude that was a cross between LunchLady Doris® and Tom Waits.  The rafters, made of old lumber, were covered in chalk graffiti.  Buncha swear words, thankfully no racial slurs. 
Eventually Becca and Kentaro tapped out.  Marshall, ever the Indiana Jones type,  implores me to take a cab with him over to Belmont. 

"You're a cool-ass dude, man.  You up for some fun?  I'll show you the best fuckin' parts of town man.  C'mon man, I'll spot your cab.  Let's GO let's GO!"  

I saw two ways this night would play out.  I could hop in this cab with this dude, go tear a hole in the space fucking time continuum across all of Portland and end up on some fucking stranger's couch clear across town, with a pocket full of coasters and phone numbers and maybe a bunch of dirt clods.... OR, I could go to Plaid Pantry across the street, buy a couple of hero sandwiches, soak up the 1.5 pints of beer I had, and go home.  
 

"Thanks so much for showing us around, man.  But I really should go home." 

"....It's fucking 1145 dude.  The fuck you gotta do tomorrow?" 

"....Fly back to SF."

A look of anger, disappointment, resentment and then apathy flashed across Marshall's rugged face.  I will never forget that fucking look.  I will never forget that fucking look on his sad, angry face.  Because that is the EXACT SAME LOOK I have made millions and millions of times in the last few years, when I come to discover that the Spirit had faded.  The Spirit was gone, the Spirit was dead, and the whole world has let me down.  THAT look.  The way he acted after that, was one where I might as well have robbed him and then smacked him across the lips. 

Suddenly that pang of guilt I had felt earlier in the week with all those Bay Area exiles made sense to me.  


San Francisco was once FULL of guys like Marshall.  It can be said, then, that there is a massive population of Marshalls right here in PDX as well.  Seattle too, but I'll get to Seattle later.  You are a Marshall if you are weathered, if you are bold.  If you are crazy, subterranean, hospitable to a fault and ready to show everyone who came through a grand ol' time.  Good, old fashioned, random hilarious fun.  I will say it loud, and I will say it proud.  I know this, because I was one of those guys.  Just like Marshall, wanting the profane and random, seeker of urban safaris.  Bar hopping across the universe on a $20 stipend written by The Devil, resentful of the life ahead and only wanting to turn the volume down by cranking it all the way up...

And deeply heartbroken whenever the people around you fail to live up to your expectations, to the great splendor and potential that was once the human spirit.  

I saw the light of the Spirit fade from his eyes in that moment, because he had put himself out there, only to be let down by some outsider asshole in brand new shoes that his dad bought him, wearing the shirt of a band he fucking hates. 

I walked away into the night, letting that guilt sink in.  And I apologized to him as I went to sleep.  I apologized because I am not him anymore, because I am not staying in the town I thought I would die in.  I apologized to him because I am evolving, and as I watch the entire coast become consumed by the new boom, I no longer fear the change and I no longer hate it, as the Marshalls of the world still do.  The Spirit is still alive, but it too, needs to evolve.  It too, needs to wake up and adapt to the way that humans now socialize.  Nonconformity and cultural preservation still have their place, but it is up to us to figure out how.  

If guys like Marshall are the old souls, the ones who cannot evolve quickly enough, the ones who fade away into irrelevance, then there must be some equilibrium that is attainable, some sweet spot on the pendulum where I do not have to be just another cumstain with wireless headphones and a Snapchat account.  

I walked away into the night, and on the sidewalk, walking in the opposite direction, I saw a flock of 20something women, happily strolling home, with smiles that shone in the dark, waiting for eye contact. 


"Good evening!  How was your night?"  I asked them, as gently and as sweetly as I could. 

As they crossed over, their eyes twinkled in the midnight blue, over their shoulders and they responded in kind. 

"We had a great time!  Thank you!  Have a good night!"  





 

Life Lessons From Sex Workers, III

Lesson #1:  You Are Who You Are.

 

2000:  

Death, Taxes, Republican GloryHoles, Race Relations

For whatever reason, I was raised in an environment where racial discrimination was largely a non-issue.... As in, I never got beaten, harassed, insulted (maliciously) for being a darker shade of something.   Growing up as a First Generation Taiwanese American in the San Francisco Bay Area was complicated in different ways.  For one, I never felt any sense of connection to the Asian youth community when I came of age.  All the Asian kids I ever ran into, particularly in Suck-A-Con Valley, were these pompous rich kids who all dressed super preppy, drove "rice rockets", and listened to two things:  Rap and R&B.  Oh!  Sorry wait.  I forgot J Pop and K Pop.  This is of course a gross exaggeration, but for the purposes of creating fringe contrasts, my blog will focus on the groups that made me feel the most ostracized.  

[by the way, race is a thing in this entry, so if you don't have the stomach for it I'd strap in or move on.]

I always felt out of step, being middle class but not "upper" middle class enough with these other kids.  

So I went the other way.  I decided to fit in with "the rest".  I went to punk shows, did half-assed ollies on a skateboard I didn't own, watched movies that weren't just full of hip hop and martial arts stars, and  I hung out with an enormous range of people of all races and colors, although my friends, even to this day, are largely white.  

One day, while at lunch somewhere in high school, someone made a pretty racist (albeit slightly funny) Asian joke.  To which I tersely said "HEY", and pointed at myself. 

"Whatever Jon, you're basically white."  


Whether or not that was racist (it kind of was, in retrospect)... His point was that I had so seamlessly fit in with "white" culture that people had forgotten what color I was.  At the time I remember taking that as a compliment.  I had drawn the EPITAPH RECORDS® logo on enough surfaces,  quoted Simpsons and Jay + Silent Bob, and re-enacted Jackass enough times to fool these guys into thinking I was one of them!  Huzzah!!!  I would NEVER be caught dead as one of those Polo Sport Ralph Lauren dip shits hangin out in their Honda Accords with the 40" spoilers! 

It wasn't until I started dating a Chinese American girl that I became ACUTELY aware of the color of my skin.   She, too, was playing the "I'm white enough to not be Asian" game.  It was rare to see two "Twinkies®" (Bananas®, WhiteWashed®) dating each other back then.  It still kind of is now, probably. I wouldn't know. She hit me square in the face with my race.... a 1st Gen HK girl who was stuck in the 'burbs of Sunnyvale, telling me, another Asian guy, that he will never be good enough for her based solely on the grounds that he did not, and WILL NEVER, look like Brad Pitt, or Colin Farell, or Freddie Prinze Junior, or Matt Damon, or whoever the fuck other white guys were big at the time.
  She dumped me on the grounds of "not being white", despite "having all the qualities of a white guy".  Who could blame her, really?  You watch Clueless and 10 Things I Hate About You and Never Been Kissed and Sixteen Candles 100 times each of COURSE you're going to want a tall dopey blue eyed white guy to go to prom with!!  Of COURSE you would want an "All American" high school experience! 

What happened after that was pretty tragic.  As a natural and definitely unfair reaction, I swore off Asian women altogether for years.  I mean YEARS.  A projection of self loathing, self hatred and roiling in something I was born into, something I could not ever change, no matter how hard I tried.  Some people out there are just always running away from something.  
 

Imagine trying to run away from the color of your own skin for 10 years.

Brad

San Francisco, 2011

Brad grew up in Los Angeles to a Purple Heart Navy pilot father and a stern Jewish mother.  He came out to his parents immediately after his oldest sister came out also, and in an era where homosexuality was considered an abomination by just about everyone everywhere, Adam's parents were surprisingly open minded and supportive.  It probably helped that his youngest brother carried the gene pool forward and took in a wife, but I digress.  

Brad was a happy, healthy, strapping young gay man living a happy, healthy strapping gay lifestyle.  Throughout the 80's and 90's, he did just about everything with everybody.  So he says, at least.  

And then one day, he woke up (and went to the doctor and got a blood test) to find that he was HIV+.  He was devastated at first. Oh no, he thought initially, his world was coming to an end life as he knew it was over.  He, like so many during the height of the AIDS crisis, was now stuck with this bug, uncurable and draconian in nature.  It had almost taken on this mythical slant to it.

I learned a lot from just living with him.  I asked him if he ever felt suicidal.  

"All the time, back then.  I cried rivers worth of tears.  But at the end of the day, why cry over spilled milk?  It's a part of me now.  It's who I am, even when a cure comes around and I get to exit that stage of my life."  It gave me a very brief moment of reflection on my own struggles with identity and with feeling "trapped" by things that were beyond my control: Race, Age, the Economic crash, etc.    

He wore his status with an ownership that was humbling and inspiring at the same time.  I mean, of course, when he wasn't being a total pain in the ass about leaving dishes in the sink and whatnot.  But he carried on in his life, living his days the best he could, the happiest he could be.  Partners and lovers came and went; I am sure there is a brotherhood of solidarity out there for stuff like that.  

2016:  

Soft Patches, Steeples And Lost Shephards

Portland, OR

"You know, Jon, I often feel like I was a lousy mother to you." 

Ever since I moved in with my folks to finish the book, my mother and I have been having some very wistful and super fucking intense conversations about our past nuclear family history.  She and Dad became Christians when they were in grad school.  Imagine that, right?  Two college educated, extremely hard working and intelligent adults, successfully proselytized by some dopey blue eyed kid jockeying a burger patty Bible in some college town in Taiwan.  

"Well, you were and are definitely not a lousy mother.  I've been around long enough in the dregs of reality to know that there are some really fucking shitty parents out there.  And you definitely do not qualify as a lousy mother. Not even close."  

"I just sincerely regret all the things that happened to you in your experiences with Christianity.  Half of the things you told me about I did not even know.  I wish I could have helped you." 

"Look, I get it.  You guys grew up in Cold War Era Taiwan, when poverty and famine were probably a bad dream away from becoming reality at any given moment... you had Chiang Kai Shak running a leaking ship that was slowly being plugged up, and electricity and running water were considered luxury items.  

And gee, guess what?  All those old idols you used to worship just weren't cutting it for you.  So when someone offers you a new Brand of spiritual detergent, of course you would buy into it 100%." 

There are some really fucked up things that have happened to me in my experiences with Christianity that I cannot really share at this point in time with anybody in the general public.  Don't worry I didn't get touched by a priest.  But I've seen enough hypocrisy from just about every corner that a church has to offer for me to just look at the proverbial Kool-Aid® and realize that it's been cut with piss.  

My mom knows that I had been in therapy for the last year, and that I was able to resolve a lot of those anger and rage issues, most of which were largely rooted in Christianity.  Even still to this day, she will go into spats of profuse apologizing to me, for "screwing up" really bad.  

I always just tell her the same thing, that I forgive her, and that even though there is a giant hole where my spiritual identity once stood, that I am content with letting that giant vacancy stand for a little bit longer before I even attempt at filling it with anything else.  If anything, I will tell her on those occasions, I am grateful.  Because of my experiences in religion, I simply do not feel the need to fill some gap or void, because it has largely been closed off.  Imagine a summer lake that is celebrated as a childhood vacation spot, suddenly polluted by the local Coca Cola® plant, and condemned forever with diabetic fish and radioactive time travelling bears.  Free story idea, go ahead and steal it. 

And that's just it. Religion is a giant identity medallion for some.  It certainly was (and definitely still is) for my parents.  I would go so far as to say that in my youth, my parents were not really parents.

 They were Christians who happened to be parents.

 They saw everything through that filter and it was largely irrelevant to many of the psychological problems that were slowly brewing within both me and my brother from childhood to adolescence.  Anger, rage, depression, these things that were very clearly problems Tim and I had that neither of my parents ever wanted to actually address with actual help... PHYSIOLOGICAL problems, part of our inevitable traits relating to brain chemistry and physical health, put to the wayside because Church and God And Jesus and the Holy Spirit were sufficient enough solutions, via lots of prayer and group Bible studies.  


As it currently applies to my life nowadays, Adam was a salient checkpoint. He became a segue into some very important identity and emotional ownership exercises that would I would come to learn further down the line.  These lessons are starting to come full circle, particularly in constant unearthing and realization excavations conducted with my parents.

 I have made some decisions in my career that are now yielding consequences I need to own.  It's one thing to act on a feeling, or jump when an impulse tells you to jump.  But it is accepting where you land and where to go next is what is key. 

 

 

  

Life Lessons From Sex Workers, II

Lesson #9: Be Open To Learning Things In Unusual Ways

Previous Sex Worker Life Lessons here

2002

I came home from work one day to find Lynette wrapped in a blanket and smoking a large spliff.  Standard Operations.  The joint was passed to me for a hit, which I gladly took.  She involuntarily massaged her rugose neckline.  Offput by her uncharacteristically somber silence, I decided to unthaw the air a bit and start filling out the roommate dynamic a little. 
 

“What’s up? You alright?”

She let out an annoyed but relieved sigh.   Clearly she'd wanted to get this off her chest.  

“Shit ain’t great. My homie’s comin’ over. You get to meet Rhee-Rhee.”
“Yeah? What’d she do?” ”

 I took my second hit off her BlueBerries® and waved, indicating a finished session, and waited on her to elaborate.

“ She wanted to talk to me today about somethin’ but wouldn’t say what over the phone. ”
“Is she.....”
“Yeah. A whore, like me. ”

I opted not to press her in favor of letting this bit of theater played out.  So I stepped out onto the balcony, smoked a couple of cigarettes, lazily wandered back in and did the XBOX® thing.  Lynette normally liked to poke fun at me for "being such a boy" with my video games.  Not a peep in that moment.  Man, I thought, this MUST be serious if she's not even going out of her way to recycle her usual swipes at me. 

About a quarterway back to sober, a knock finally rapped on our front door.  Entered Rhee, in a bare mid riffed top and acid washed booty shorts.  She couldn't have been older than 25, and had beautiful ebony skin that wrapped her features in this glow I had rarely seen in any woman ever.  Just a pretty, brown eyed black woman with a sweet and sour attitude. 

“Rhee, this is Jon. ”
“Hi! ‘Nette told me you were a sweetheart. Nice to meet you.”

Hookers are always so nice and cordial and polite.  I assume it's probably due to the fact that they kind of have to be given their profession.  If you think about it, prostitution is the purest form of customer service there is.  I paused Halo® to engage with them.  As she sat up, she gave Rhee a look that I will never be able to replicate as hard as I try.  She yanked Rhee by the belt loops in a downward and lurching motion, essentially exposing her entire lower abdomen and mons pubis.  She began feeling her belly.  

I wasn’t sure if she was about to beat the shit out of her or start eating her pussy, but either way my fascination had piqued.  

“PLEASE tell me you ain’t about to tell me what you about to tell me.”

 

Rhee had "hand caught in the cookie jar" tattooed on her lower lip and the bridge of her nose.  Lynette repeated her line.  

Rhee finally eeked out hers. 

 

“I’m late.”
“COME OOOOOO-ON, RHEE. COME OOOOOO-ON. ”

Listening to a prostitute lecture a colleague on the importance of keeping on top of her birth control game is easily in the Top 10 weirdest fly on the wall moments I think have ever had.  Isabel's stoner personality was pretty catatonic, so the whole thing just sounded like yelling in slow motion.  Eventually Rhee had felt she was properly admonished, so she cut to the chase and asked to borrow a couple hundred bucks for an abortion.  

This then lead her down another slo-mo shoutfest.  They were threesome partners, which always paid more, and with her "out of commission", Lynette was pretty pissed off that her orgy slots were all of a sudden empty. Never in my life had I considered the loss and opportunity costs of terminating a pregnancy.  

The whole time I am listening to this go down, I just drooped my upper lip and nodded here and there.  I was miles away from Sunday School and Youth Group Bible Studies of yesteryear, stuck on a couch getting a free lesson in Prostitute Politics 101.