Last Wednesday night, the immortal words of Grandpa Simpson kept ringing through my head..."I can finally get me a crazy stripper wife!" This while watching women undressing in a bar in Osbourne Village.

It was The R-Unit's 30th birthday, an evening he had variously been referring to as "the night of ridiculous drinking" and "alochol poisoning evening." His mighty plan was to go drinking at every bar in Osbourne Village in the same evening. Well, we made it through 4 of them anyway. It's not like we'd leave the fourth one, knowing we'd be missing strippers if we did.

Despite being no less of a pervert than any other guy my age, my life had been remarkably stripper-free up to this point. Sure, there's always cable TV and the internet. Both had taken the novelty and mystery out of the female form years ago. But live naked women were still a rarity. It's a little harder to watch something so intimate and sexual when the viewing is no longer a one-way street. While you watch strippers, they can watch back. Or do they? I was curious if I could get any of them to make eye contact, and they never seemed to. Not that they were oblivious of the audience; one of them even made a smart remark as me and my group switched chairs several times, moving ever closer to the stage. Not that there even was much of an audience. 10, maybe 12 people...is it even worth taking it all off for just them?

Apparently it is. A documentary I had seen on the W Network years ago (which curiously seemed to often feature content more appealing to men than women, in my opinion) revealed that many women who do strip are actually in it for more than the money (one woman mentioned she realized she'd liked it a lot more than any other of numerous jobs she'd had over the years).

And while it was hard to watch at first, eventually it was hard not to. When the R-Unit got up to use the washroom in the middle of the show, I couldn't help but scold him. Perhaps the copy of The Alphabet of Manliness which I gave him as a birthday gift will help him better re-evaluate his priorities.

The thing I find ironic about the whole experience is...the natural state of any person is naked. I mean, it's not like people are born wearing clothes. So why is the act of undressing so compelling to watch?

Nevertheless...it's still fascinating, in any case... And addictive; I may have to cancel my plans for next Wednesday night. Or would have to, if I had made any.

So I finally gave in to the peer non-pressure to start a blog. I've blogged before; I've always liked the idea but gave it up for various reasons. But now that friends have blogs on this site, I feel compelled to fit in. I say "peer non-pressure" because the peers in question didn't actually pressure me to start one. Sort of like in school, when no one pressured me to try drugs. I sure felt left out. I mean, what was wrong with me? Why didn't anyone force me to do things that were stupid but ostensibly cool? But I digress.

About the blog...this blog is named, in a convoluted way, after a woman from my past. We'll call her Anne, which is actually her real name, because I'm too lazy to come up with a clever pseudonym to preserve her anonymity. Oh wait! I could call her Enna. Okay I will. Okay, forget that I said her name was Anne.

But here's the creepy and ironic twist, because anyone who knows me knows there's always a creepy twist: I never actually did get to meet Enna. Many years ago, I was spending far too much time online and not nearly enough in reality. Sure, that sounds fun in a William Gibson-esque kind of way, but the truth is, I was addicted, and depressed. Enna, it turns out, was my ticket out...

She was the one who convinced me there was life outside of the internet, and it could be a pretty good life, if you were willing to work at it. Needless to say, I was in love with Enna, at least insofar as anyone can be in love with someone they've never met. I always promised myself I'd meet her in person someday, but the years have been flying by and there's no hope of that in sight. Of course the fact that she lived thousands of miles away, was married, had five children and was 15 years older than me were complications I couldn't quite find a way around.

These days, it would be even a bit of a stretch to say that we're still friends. It's been over a year since we last spoke. Still...the impact she had on my life is undeniable even to this day.

Anyway...as for the blog. One day I tried to put into words how I felt about Enna and wrote a poem about her. The very last line of it was, "You were the brightest spot in an otherwise grey existance." Because at the time, that was a pretty accurate description of how I felt about her relative to the rest of my life.

Things you can expect to see in this blog:

-complaints about my miniature painting work
-updates on my game design work
-scandalous gossip about people I know
-clever and insightful (read: dorky and inane) observations on every day life
-obscure and not-so-obscure references to Enna
-fiction I've written