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Blister
Date	Author	Headline
11/18/2009	Billy Manes	Blister	The light just went off, that old major airline seatbelt signifier of settling down, of woes left behind like microscopic dust particles in an imagined inner-eyelid rearview mirror
11/11/2009	Billy Manes	Blister	I don’t know what it is, but tonight’s straitjacket of social obligation resignation seems to have a sandspur stuck in its armpit.
11/4/2009	Billy Manes	Blister	There’s a special place in the dog-eared American socioeconomic TripTik where men are men and women are
10/28/2009	Billy Manes	Blister	Sometimes you get caught in a moment, whether it’s yours to embody or not
10/21/2009	Billy Manes	Blister	And so it begins: the saccharine squeaks and irreverence of giggling girls gaggled together in the name of last labia rites
10/14/2009	Billy Manes	Blister	It isn’t as easy as it seems. Those adhesive Arthur Murray footprints trod trillions
10/7/2009	Billy Manes	Blister	Time, time, time. See what’s become of me. Gone are the binary gender tumbles through fiberglass geometrics
9/30/2009	Billy Manes	Blister	God, I’m ugly naked. Wincing back from the reflective glass on the back of a dusty closet door, there’s this sad patchwork of cartoonish distortion
9/24/2009	Billy Manes	Blister	It’s as if this is how it was always meant to be, only with marinara on the side.
9/17/2009	Billy Manes	Blister	In a perfect world, there would be ropes of costume pearls wrapped around flowing
9/10/2009	Billy Manes	Blister	It’s these little things, the floorboard creaks and air-conditioner whispers, the chatter of raindrops on dirt puddles mingling with the syncopated crazy baby voices
9/3/2009	Billy Manes	Blister	This is a random Monday moment. One of those tick-to-tocks of disengaged eye-blinking that doesn’t carry any estimable direction of its own beyond the props
8/27/2009	Billy Manes	Blister	The previously rattling nerves so often publicly dismissed as a hyperawareness – or the unstable cuteness of a cold Chihuahua
8/20/2009	Billy Manes	Blister	It starts like this, the fourth drink, the fifth drink, the minor fall and the major lift drink, and then, somehow, minus gravity or sense of place
8/13/2009	Billy Manes	Blister	Citing collateral damages incurred due to certain lifestyle choices, Billy Manes and his pancreas checked into the hospital last week and were unable to go out and do more of the usual alchemical nonsense for Blister this week
8/6/2009	Billy Manes	Blister	Wow. This is better than a movie. One minute I’m sitting Monday-night solo in the quiet of the
7/30/2009	Billy Manes	Blister	It all started with a tiny prick, so small you couldn’t even see it, much less sit on it.
7/23/2009	Billy Manes	Blister	The world is a bitter, deep-fried cocktail onion layered in pathos and prejudice
7/16/2009	Billy Manes	Blister	It’s the quiet pedestrian vacuum of the in-between that always gets me: the half-eaten can of lukewarm
7/9/2009	Billy Manes	Blister	Sometimes life really is just the sum of its parts. A pre-pagination glue stick wrestling with a penknife to cobble
7/2/2009	Billy Manes	Blister	There is a blur, a dirty yellow sunshine explosion surrounded by a rainbow halo of Kodachrome focus shifting
6/25/2009	Billy Manes	Blister	No preview available.
6/11/2009	Billy Manes	Blister	Before the first fingernail snags on a fishnet stocking, before the first armpit ring forms on a red T-shirt covered in oversized ears and unappealing fonts, before the first bitch-fight
6/4/2009	Billy Manes	Blister	That was my husband’s inexplicable reaction to the friend-created poster advertising tonight’s proceedings
5/28/2009	Billy Manes	Blister	Is this the end? There are shrill, minor-key soundtrack descents swelling into odd question-mark crescendos
5/21/2009	Billy Manes	Blister	The Orlando Weekly is notoriously creative in its choice of team-building scenarios, almost always opting for the ball-to-pin inclusiveness of sissy-can-do bowling
5/14/2009	Billy Manes	Blister	There was an early moment there in this Saturday-night flow-chart process of keeping up appearances where I almost turned into a social clot
5/7/2009	Billy Manes	Blister	The skeletal steel rafters that suspend the disbelief of corporate rock’s grand illusion, the lighting trusses and pyrotechnics rigging are rendered
4/30/2009	Billy Manes	Blister	Sometimes you have to combine two ridiculous tasks into one ridiculous outfit
4/23/2009	Billy Manes	Blister	Everything is unraveling in a most inglorious fashion
4/16/2009	Billy Manes	Blister	Flicks of streaked hair glisten almost symphonically in a flirtation dance that, from a distance, must look like an errant power grid to those calling the shots
4/9/2009	Billy Manes	Blister	It’s been a long life of mixing the brights with the whites in the agitating tub of self-consciousness
4/2/2009	Billy Manes	Blister	My life is passing me by. While illegally gesticulating through the wither and dither of my daily unofficial autobiography
3/26/2009	Billy Manes	Blister	No preview available.
3/19/2009	Billy Manes	Blister	Sometimes, you’re better off dead when you’re staring at an ice cube reflecting at your head
3/12/2009	Billy Manes	Blister	There would be roses. Giant velvety petals in deep crimson swept cyclonically into an immersive symphony of misery.
3/5/2009	Billy Manes	Blister	No preview available.
2/26/2009	Billy Manes	Blister	Way back in the ’90s, I remember strolling the sickly lit aisles of a small town West Virginia porn shop with a tinge of trepidation in my gut
2/19/2009	Billy Manes	Blister	“I figured it out!” comes the cigarette-weary radio voice of Savannah through my cellular tin can...
2/12/2009	Bill Manes	Blister	Ah, the smell of pigskin. The grunting rush of man-meat pounding together while joints crack and cartilage oozes, bodies thrown against the ground, grass-stained asses and Gatorade hair...
2/5/2009	Billy Manes	BLISTER	It used to be that by the time the palpable effervescence of a Saturday sundown rolled past my nose, I was already 10 feet into the closet and buried in the cupcake sprinkles of rhinestones...
1/29/2009	Billy Manes	BLISTER	Do you feel that? It’s that prickly-skinned smack feeling of zeitgeist deflation, the odd swinging chandelier-heads mouthing along some hazy mantra of change, change...
1/22/2009	Billy Manes	BLISTER	Do you remember the future?
1/15/2009	Billy Manes	BLISTER	I had this dream, see. There was your standard Adventures in Babysitting blond suspense arc populated by single moms...
1/8/2009	Billy Manes	BLISTER	I want to go back. Because everything is awful for everybody forever, the only thing I really requested from the Santa with whom I sleep this holiday season was everything that I cannot have...
1/1/2009	Billy Manes	BLISTER	Back in the sepia-hued olden times of downtown’s meager nightlife push-along, nary a crack in the sidewalk went unscuffed by some sole-less Chuck Taylor swinging from a hip with a wallet chain attached to it...
12/25/2008	Billy Manes	BLISTER	Like a diseased fly rolled up into the cheese log or a healthy squirt of cyanide shot into the nearest fruitcake, I’m suffocating my way through the pathetic cycle of Christmas cheer and waiting until my mere presence kills somebody...
12/18/2008	Billy Manes	BLISTER	Here in the gaping void between fame and infamy, talent and talk, notability and notoriety, tic and tock, is the spin of my own pink emotional funnel cloud pushing everything swiftly down...
12/11/2008	Billy Manes	BLISTER	There are a number of mangled thoughts that crash through your head when suspended 3,000 feet over the clear blue waters of the Bermuda Triangle in a single engine prop plane ...
12/4/2008	Billy Manes	BLISTER	Because every pixel on the television is a screaming molecule of financial doubt, because Orlando is a dive bar ...
11/27/2008	Billy Manes	BLISTER	I’m not sure how this happened ...
11/20/2008	Billy Manes	BLISTER	“I’ve been thinking,” Jessica pipes in a sniffle through an affected cough. “I’ve been thinking about considering the possibility of not going.”
11/13/2008	Billy Manes	BLISTER	I don’t even know who I am today ...
11/6/2008	Billy Manes	BLISTER	There’s a crack in my cup, just the tiniest little thread of imperfection creeping down from the lip of the good china, and the longer I stare at it the more it consumes me ...
10/30/2008	Billy Manes	BLISTER	We could have done so much better than this ...
10/23/2008	Billy Manes	BLISTER	I know where this is going ...
10/16/2008	Billy Manes	BLISTER	So this is what it’s all come down to. The plate tectonics of our oversized socioeconomic structure have screeched and scratched against each other one too many times ...
10/9/2008	Billy Manes	BLISTER	Sometimes I wish everything could go a little more smoothly.
10/2/2008	Billy Manes	BLISTER	The sky is falling, numbers are crunching, cancer is growing, mouths are lying, campaigns are tanking, banks are crumbling, stockbrokers are snorting, homes are foreclosing and I am dying ...
9/25/2008	Billy Manes	BLISTER	“Can you hold back my pubes?” Taylor conjures a nauseous cheerleader’s scrunchy whilst marveling at his follicular fantastic. “I’ve got to pee.”
9/18/2008	Billy Manes	BLISTER	There is this vast, echoing hall of muted beats and floating particles – a warehouse of sorts ...
9/11/2008	Billy Manes	BLISTER	“Abandon hope all ye who enter here” is not scrawled in blood on the side of the Waverly condo at Lake Eola
9/4/2008	Billy Manes	BLISTER	No preview available.
8/28/2008	Billy Manes	BLISTER	Sometimes a moment snaps its own picture and just stays there, a shadow of life in a still frame from The Day After ...
8/21/2008	Billy Manes	BLISTER	Remember when fun used to be all freckles and chewing gum in summer short-shorts?
8/14/2008	Billy Manes	BLISTER	Sometimes it takes a little more than a swig of hooch and a Google map to catalyze this weathered Q-Tip ...
8/7/2008	Billy Manes	BLISTER	I should have known. Glaring wanly into my evening mirror face, fingers twisty-twirling directional volume into my mat of hair as if to say “anywhere but here ...”
7/31/2008	Billy Manes	BLISTER	Tonight, everything is in glossy shades of black and white, with only tasteful clots of red and glassy green peppered throughout to give the social illusion of healing or growing or anything, really ...
7/24/2008	Billy Manes	BLISTER	What is this odd absence? A ringing echo between the ears, a puff of hot air where the heart used to be, that awful pain that magically appears ...
7/17/2008	Billy Manes	BLISTER	Vacations are all about avoidance. Back at home a mold spore is forming in a half-drunk bedside cocktail, a deadline is tightening around the neck of my byline, and ...
7/10/2008	Billy Manes	BLISTER	Strolling through the sugar walls of Fairvilla Adult Megastore's skewed voyeur sexuality, it's sometimes hard not to lose oneself in a warbly, vicarious yelp.
7/3/2008	Billy Manes	BLISTER	It all starts with a crack. Just when you think you're swimming through life without a care in the world, beams of refracted light bathing your very being in an expressionistic blur of slow-motion weightlessness, bam!
6/26/2008	Billy Manes	BLISTER	It wasn't always this way. A hot-ticket night out used to be just that - a whirligig of wide-eyed spontaneity laced with the pixie dust of giggle fits and carefree crescendos...
6/19/2008	Billy Manes	BLISTER	I don't know whether it's the end times or if indeed I've just tripped over a red sequin and fallen into The Wizard of Oz, but somebody has flipped the switch to black-and-white...
6/12/2008	Billy Manes	BLISTER	I've often wondered out loud to myself while naked and submerged in the warmth of my bubbly decompression chamber, “Self, how many times does the shampoo mean when it says in somewhat uncertain terms, ‘Lather. Rinse. Repeat’?”
6/5/2008	Billy Manes	BLISTER	Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve gathered you here today to witness an execution, or a persecution, or an exorcism bathed in candle wax...
5/29/2008	Billy Manes	BLISTER	Long gone are the days of Saturday mall mornings swirling in the fiber-optic electro symphony of tuneless bleeps that smelled like burning plastic ..
5/22/2008	Billy Manes	BLISTER	There’s a black fly in my chardonnay ...
5/15/2008	Billy Manes	BLISTER	Way back when I was but a pale flicker only occasionally set alight by the backseat huffs of leaded gasoline, the mere mention of “ladies night” was enough to transform my cranium into a pink-and-yellow lava lamp ...
5/8/2008	Billy Manes	BLISTER	“You better not make me cry,” Savannah feigns the presence of actual tear ducts beneath her eyes. “I cannot cry tonight ...”
5/1/2008	Billy Manes	BLISTER	It’s as if the sky just cracked open, unleashing torrents of soul-cleansing, liver-licking top-shelf liquor; a figurative gullywasher of new beginnings ...
4/24/2008	Billy Manes	BLISTER	So Art walks into a bar, and before he can even order an overpriced cocktail with his paint-drizzled hand, he snatches a glimpse of Commerce over in the corner, and Commerce is totally macking on Art’s bitch ...
4/17/2008	Billy Manes	BLISTER	There was this minor explosion, see, and from it blew this insignificant twig with three naturally blond leaves barely hanging from its top ...
4/10/2008	Billy Manes	BLISTER	It used to seem so glamorous then: an ingrown glitter-eyelash fusing a cranial combustion to last precisely three days ...
4/3/2008	Billy Manes	BLISTER	Between the clink-and-twinkle crystal chandelier of Orlando’s fictitious art-istocracy and the fluid-stained, rope-lined mat that catches the painful crushes of America’s most obnoxious and fictitious pastime, there exists a reasonable gulf ..
3/27/2008	Billy Manes	BLISTER	You can never go back, but you can certainly die trying ...
3/20/2008	Billy Manes	BLISTER	Everything looks better when it’s not yours ...
3/13/2008	Billy Manes	BLISTER	“You cannot smoke for two hours,” Jessica slaps my emotional crutch out from under me. “They’ll smell it on you and turn you away with their cruel glances of judgment.”
3/6/2008	Billy Manes	BLISTER	So this is one way to go out, and one bedazzled nightcap I’d rather not wear ...
2/28/2008	Billy Manes	BLISTER	Two scorching-hot, rod-iron pokers tipped with Vienna sausages to shove up my ass, please, and maybe another caustic drink to further blunt my numb-down-theres ...
2/21/2008	Billy Manes	BLISTER	There would be no outrageous rose bouquets, no heart-shaped chocolate smears on candlelit walls and no gloved hands shoving diamonds into my sexual core this Valentine’s Day ...
2/14/2008	Billy Manes	BLISTER	A sad cigarette droops from my cracked mouth like a fuse attached to a dud bomb ...
2/7/2008	Billy Manes	BLISTER	Like a tree that just fell in my pants and went unnoticed by anyone but that ingrown hair on my left thigh, tonight promises to be full of insignificance ...
1/31/2008	Billy Manes	BLISTER	I’m hoping for a happy ending tonight ...
1/17/2008	Billy Manes	BLISTER	I am never drinking again. Suitably sloshed up by the post–New Year’s digestive mop, a cold-compressed fetal position is just about the only posture my imaginary doctor – the one who writes my imaginary prescriptions – will allow.
1/10/2008	Billy Manes	BLISTER	“No more champagne, and the fireworks are through,” wisps a flyback from the side of Agnetha Falstogk’s post-party eye shadow exercise, playing out its divorce demise from YouTube laptop infamy ...
1/3/2008	Billy Manes	BLISTER	This is how it happens. A fat drunk man with a white beard swoops in at the end of December and takes a razor to the already thin surface of emotional stability ...
12/27/2007	Billy Manes	BLISTER	From all the little bits of misshapen debris lining the canyon between man’s Mars and woman’s Venus, I’ve managed to craft a fairly convincing pearl necklace of relative androgyny...
12/20/2007	Billy Manes	BLISTER	“I just backed over something,”Jessica’s teeth grit through her portable pod of cellular communication. “And it wasn’t good.”
12/13/2007	Billy Manes	BLISTER	Like so many rhinestones tumbling from so many costume-jewelry clusters dangling from so many saggy earlobes, Orlando’s once glorified sense of megalomaniacal celebrity – no matter how artificial it was – has lost its luster ...
12/6/2007	Billy Manes	BLISTER	“When are people going to realize,” Tony lights a mind match in between anti-social grunts from the love seat to my right, “that we’re just making up stories to have something to talk about?”
11/29/2007	Billy Manes	BLISTER	I am not having sex tonight, but I am doing it.
11/22/2007	Billy Manes	BLISTER	Tonight is a suspicious package...
11/15/2007	Billy Manes	BLISTER	I will not be moved ...
11/8/2007	Billy Manes	BLISTER	Are we living in a world where sex and horror are the new gods? No, it’s just Halloween ...
11/1/2007	Billy Manes	BLISTER	No preview available.
10/25/2007	Billy Manes	BLISTER	Sometimes pride takes a backseat; sometimes it’s lost up the backside ...
10/18/2007	Billy Manes	BLISTER	Somewhere between sex and beauty lies the absurdity that is life itself ...
10/11/2007	Billy Manes	BLISTER	There’s been a rip in the matrix, and I mean it this time. The sky is gray, then the sky is blue, then the sky is gray again; tiny razor-like drops pelt my cottony head ...
10/4/2007	Billy Manes	BLISTER	On any given Monday afternoon, there exists within my aching connective tissue a divine, unique cocktail, the likes of which would likely burn the tongues off a rabid flock of alcoholic attack Chihuahuas...
9/27/2007	Billy Manes	BLISTER	Sometimes you don’t need the whole manually labored roll out of a red carpet to get the comfort you crave in your imaginary living room. Sometimes just a swatch will do ...
9/20/2007	Billy Manes	BLISTER	What’s the matter here? Well, for starters in the squint-to-stop-sleeping automotive process that is the never-ending Interstate 75 trek to Atlanta, I’m burn-throating booze howls ...
9/13/2007	Billy Manes	BLISTER	I think I just dropped my property value ...
9/6/2007	Billy Manes	BLISTER	Today my head explodes.
8/30/2007	Billy Manes	BLISTER	As someone who spends a good portion of his waking hours trying to spin around in various vacuums fast enough to force the pigment, marrow and drink mixers from my body and onto the walls ...
8/23/2007	Billy Manes	BLISTER	There exists a certain alchemy betwixt my ears that, when splashed into a spinning pink centrifuge, would likely reveal elements of midshelf alcohol, a squawking rasp of unintentionally annoying vocal affectations, a shoe, a backup drink and ...
8/16/2007	Billy Manes	BLISTER	Is it possible that time has forgotten me, or is it that I have forgotten time?
8/9/2007	Billy Manes	BLISTER	“You need to learn C.P.T.,” Eddie late-drips in the drizzle of another trivial Wednesday night ...
8/2/2007	Billy Manes	BLISTER	“If you don’t get here soon, I’m carving your name into my arm!” I sniffle, paranoid-peeking through the blinds. I hate my parents. I hate my parents. I hate my parents ...
7/26/2007	Billy Manes	BLISTER	Somebody punch me. This can't be real ...
7/19/2007	Billy Manes	BLISTER	“I was thinking you might want to use this trip to Costa Rica to dry out,” Alan speaks the unspeakable through an ironic mouthful of airport Skoal. “You know, clean up your act a little bit ...”
7/12/2007	Billy Manes	BLISTER	“Oh my gawd!” comes the clacking of gums from just outside the Parliament House’s Footlight Theater. “Have you traaahd the green Jell-O mold?”
7/5/2007	Billy Manes	BLISTER	If there are better ways of being seen than face-down, ass-up on the hood of a Jeep in the cobblestone queer starch of Lake Eola Heights, then I cannot even begin to get my hair around them ...
6/28/2007	Billy Manes	BLISTER	As we are on most Thursday nights of hapless downtown drunkitude, Tony and I are squinting at the walls in search of a sign to tell us just when we are. Fortunately, on this occasion there’s a poster ...
6/21/2007	Billy Manes	BLISTER	What if it had never happened at all? What if a slightly less mucus-drenched take on Jabba the Hutt was never able to land his blimp-like personality square inside the Orlando consciousness to corporatize pedophilia?
6/14/2007	Billy Manes	BLISTER	There’s a filthy carnal mist emanating from greater Orlando’s gay pavement this week, and I’m determined not to inhale ...
6/7/2007	Billy Manes	BLISTER	“I should have shaved my pussy for this! The stubble is sticking to my dress.”
5/31/2007	Billy Manes	BLISTER	‘R we going out tonight,” I thumb text into my pocket life leash, “or r we going to be lame?” As if those two things are mutually exclusive ...
5/24/2007	Billy Manes	BLISTER	Perhaps because it’s Thursday, or more likely because I always am, tonight I’m swimming around in a cauldron of narcotic metaphor...
5/17/2007	Billy Manes	BLISTER	If there are indeed two sides to every story, then why am I always stuck underneath a mound of pubic hair on the dark one like a bed penny on a fat trick?
5/10/2007	Billy Manes	BLISTER	There are certain scenes in certain dreams that involve animated versions of my own internal organs devouring themselves, emptying out a large white hollow for the staging of dead air dancing on nothingness ...
5/3/2007	Billy Manes	BLISTER	Is that the ghost of Paris Hilton I smell?
4/26/2007	Billy Manes	BLISTER	I get the strangest feeling that I’ve been here before. Is this Groundfag Day?
4/19/2007	Billy Manes	BLISTER	“Wait a minute!” I slam my head against my steering wheel. “Isn’t Good Friday the day that scraggle-hunk Willem Dafoe was nine-inch-nailed to the cross?
4/12/2007	Billy Manes	BLISTER	When I was prepubescent twig with hair issues, the term “buddy” was typically reserved for less-likable rerun comic foils named “Boner,” “Clyde” or, worse still, “Buddy...”
4/5/2007	Billy Manes	BLISTER	I may not have invented Post-it notes, but I’ve sniffed some glue that somebody invented in my time, so for that reason alone Tony and I have decided to embark on what can only be called Tony and Billchelle’s High School Reunion...
3/29/2007	Billy Manes	BLISTER	Love on the rocks, clearly no surprise. But barring the immediate availability of a white patent-leather straitjacket with rhinestones — and a padded room with padded cocktails — I’m going the more obvious route...
3/22/2007	Billy Manes	BLISTER	Oh, so em>this is how it feels. Having spent the better part of my liquored life coercing fidgety straights into obnoxious gay bars, buttering them up with assurances that “Nobody will even notice you”...
3/15/2007	Billy Manes	BLISTER	Here it comes again. No sooner has my dirty cohabitational coffee table recovered from the spit-sparring of the last tedious election cycle than twat-twig Ann Coulter pops up on the flat-screen calling hottie John Edwards a “faggot” at CPAC....
3/8/2007	Billy Manes	BLISTER	I’m running again. “Are you running again?” grills the reasonably cute goatee vacuuming his car next to my Chevron diesel pump, before adhering to the adhesive of his anti-Bush “01-20-09” bumper sticker, which he totally knows that I should appreciate...
3/1/2007	Billy Manes	BLISTER	“I’ve just done the dumbest thing in the world!”
2/22/2007	Billy Manes	BLISTER	And we’re just so busy. Busy, busy. Busy scissors, oh-oh, oh-oh. “You’re a hairdresser on fire!” Taylor snips and swishes as we gather in anticipation of what might just be the best, most ridiculous night ever...
2/15/2007	Billy Manes	BLISTER	Way back when I was a broken straw in plastic pants digging with my pinkie nail for the meaning of life at the bottom of dollhouse-sized Ziploc bags...
2/8/2007	Billy Manes	BLISTER	“You look like somebody,” Miss Sammy of the Singhauses purses cracks into her lipstick. “Hmmm, somebody famous. Is it Monica Lewinsky?
2/1/2007	Billy Manes	BLISTER	Digestively speaking, if somebody told me that I’d be whiling away my Sunday afternoon hangover at a posh recreation of an Iron Chef scenario — people actually competing … with food …
1/25/2007	Billy Manes	BLISTER	“Hold on,” Tony game-faces his cigarette. “Let’s finish these while cleverly measuring up the competition.”
1/18/2007	Billy Manes	BLISTER	Ready? OK. When I was a little god-fearing girl with grocery-cart legs and Hershey’s on my face, I knew but one rhythm, and one only.....
1/11/2007	Billy Manes	BLISTER	“I can’t believe my teeth and gums!” Doug Ba’aser Water-Piks as we splash ourselves up to Pom Pom’s Sandwicheria. “Billy Manes!”
1/4/2007	Billy Manes	BLISTER	“Boy George, I think I’ve got it!” I lipstick-slur into my cell phone. “Let’s go out a few days early and pretend it’s New Year’s Eve...
12/28/2006	Billy Manes	BLISTER	“Don’t threaten me. DON’T YOU THREATEN ME!”
12/21/2006	Billy Manes	BLISTER	I’m in the drowning pool...
12/14/2006	Billy Manes	BLISTER	"Hello death, goodbye Avenue A,” Ann Magnuson, of early-’90s Bongwater, spits her performance art out of my sunroof and into the night sky.
12/7/2006	Billy Manes	BLISTER	“I hate you,” I clench my teeth around my steering wheel. “You are dead to me."
11/30/2006	Billy Manes	BLISTER	The last thing on my mind right now is sex...
11/23/2006	Billy Manes	BLISTER	“Gawd,” I suck three dollars out of my $15 cocktail and slide down in my seat. “Why is Ben Stein so trying to get with me?”
11/16/2006	Billy Manes	BLISTER	“He’s mine!” swishes my dear old friend Colleen, splashing up to the I-Bar corner of Jefferson and Orange after a few select elixirs on Hard Rocks. “You can’t havvvve him.”
11/9/2006	Billy Manes	BLISTER	“Oooh, cheap shot,” I cringe, as Chris Matthews belabors Kerrygate into the stiffness of three-day-old bread...
11/2/2006	Billy Manes	BLISTER	“I just ate a Mexican pizza while watching Tootie spew all over Mrs. Garrett about Jermaine Jackson’s stuffed, purple-sequined package!” I toot...
10/26/2006	Billy Manes	BLISTER	After a long, blurry week of Mama’s Vicodin-’n’-vodka super toothache remedy, the last thing I’m feeling right now is pride...
10/19/2006	Billy Manes	BLISTER	"I just want to feel warm inside,” pisses Savannah, who is peeing right in front of me and contemplating a heroin relapse (which makes you not pee, mind you). “I want to be slung up on the couch, numb and beautiful..."
10/12/2006	Billy Manes	BLISTER	I am getting more than a little bit horny. Having just one-hand scrolled through a thrillingly un-(copy)edited transcript of Maf54’s surly texting with 16-year-old “xxxxxx”...
10/5/2006	Billy Manes	BLISTER	At that fractured instant dangling in between “I’m an idiot” and “I’m going nowhere,” like a choking participle or a day-old dingleberry, a light flashes over my corneas in such a way that it cannot be ignored...
9/28/2006	Billy Manes	BLISTER	Once, upon the glittering occasion of my 5th birthday party, way back when bumblebees were pinned to butter lids...
9/21/2006	Billy Manes	BLISTER	I’m bringing sexy back, or at least dragging my be-suited sexy backside across a limousine wet bar, (thereby desanitizing it) to the bumping bleat of Justin Timberlake....
9/14/2006	Billy Manes	BLISTER	Here comes that indie sinking feeling...
9/7/2006	Billy Manes	BLISTER	There are certain pink flags each and every smaller blond half should pick up in the behavior patterns of their larger half: the anger twitch, the collar lipstick, the balled-up credit card receipts...
8/31/2006	Billy Manes	BLISTER	“I’ve finally decided that what I really need is …,” Savannah surveys the color-coordinated QVC showcase that constantly twirls in her head, “… a large black man with gold all up in his grill to stand next to me.”
8/24/2006	Billy Manes	BLISTER	Who the hell am I?
8/17/2006	Billy Manes	BLISTER	Today my life began....
8/17/2006	Dan Savage	SAVAGE LOVE	Don’t ya think last week’s column was maybe a bit … bitter?
8/10/2006	Billy Manes	BLISTER	Sometimes circumstances instantly redefine themselves without so much as a cock of the brow...
8/3/2006	Billy Manes	BLISTER	“Man-Up!” the billboard overhead emasculates while I tug at a cigarette and crouch down in my car to the soundtrack of Madonna’s “Die Another Day” as mashed up with “London” by the Pet Shop Boys.
7/27/2006	Billy Manes	BLISTER	I love Pabst...
7/20/2006	Billy Manes	BLISTER	“What’s his name?” Jessica clenches her movie brain. “There’s Big Daddy, Big Mama and Gooper …”
7/13/2006	Billy Manes	BLISTER	I oughta be in pictures. I’m wonderful to see...
7/6/2006	Billy Manes	BLISTER	OK, so it finally happened....
6/29/2006	Billy Manes	BLISTER	My lips are not like sugar right now...
6/22/2006	Billy Manes	BLISTER	“We don’t need people tonight,” I swing open the Sushi Hatsu door with some divine sense of chopstick authority, one probably not appropriate for my own personal Ultimate Yellowtail...
6/15/2006	Billy Manes	BLISTER	Some jokes are only funny told once...
6/8/2006	Billy Manes	BLISTER	“We are going to throw down at the club 2 nite!” blings my texted cell phone from a pocket near my genitals...
6/1/2006	Billy Manes	BLISTER	Yay, me. Not only did I just survive my drunken-backyard-baby-pool-barbecue, super-sweet-16 birthday party, but I’ve also got the weeklong headache that a 34-year-old who is pretending he’s super, sweet and 16 deserves...
5/25/2006	Billy Manes	BLISTER	“I guess this is the part where I ask you,” I tilt my head shyly towards my bent knees. “Will you marry me?”
5/18/2006	Billy Manes	BLISTER	Tamiflu. It shouldn’t be hard to pronounce, just three syllables rolling off of the tongue like so much other phonetic medical doublespeak...
5/11/2006	Billy Manes	BLISTER	I’m knee-deep in creamy, thematic double-stuff.
5/4/2006	Billy Manes	BLISTER	I’m crying. It would be far too embarrassing to say just why I’m crying, but suffice it to say that I am.
4/27/2006	Billy Manes	Blister	“I think you should wear the cowboy hat that I just ought for you...."
4/20/2006	Billy Manes	Blister	Oh. My. God. Tonight is going to be so much fun...
4/13/2006	Billy Manes	Blister	“Um, I used to love these,” Tony thumbs through the surprise collection of Choose Your Own Adventure books littering the backseat of my car.
4/6/2006	Billy Manes	Blister	Ten years ago, in the eye-twitch midst of my 19th nervous breakdown, a spoon bent inside my brain and I completely crossed over.
3/30/2006	Billy Manes	Blister	Something has gone very horribly wrong. Trapped in a shades-drawn, couch-sore tailspin peculiar to drunken housewives with traveling husbands ...
3/23/2006	Billy Manes	Blister	“Angela. It’s Rayanne,” I twirl a DayGlo braid knot just outside of my cell phone....
3/16/2006	Billy Manes	Blister	Nothing is what it seems.....
3/9/2006	Billy Manes	Blister	In the past, when I used to jab pens into my own rib cage for the sake of joking about my aging forehead, there was a palpable air of self-deprecating calculation to it...
3/2/2006	Billy Manes	Blister	My hip hurts. In fact, a fair number of my closest friends crawling through their mid-30s are currently enjoying some degree of dysplasia, hanging a little bit to the left on the concentric circle of life.
2/23/2006	Billy Manes	Blister	“It’s not going to stop. It’s not going to stop. It’s not going to stop ’til you wise up,” wilts severity case Aimee Mann as my worn-out Magnolia DVD comes to its frog-falling crescendo ...
2/16/2006	Billy Manes	Blister	Oh, so this is the way that the world ends: not with bangs but a wig ...
2/9/2006	Billy Manes	Blister	“Come on, Nancy! I think I smell a clue!” At least I hope it’s a clue; Nancy’s been known to leave any flavor of clue in the fabric of my car seat before ...
2/2/2006	Billy Manes	Blister	On the road to self-discovery, one typically encounters any number of liquor-filled potholes ...
1/26/2006	Billy Manes	Blister	And now for something completely different, yet somehow exactly the same ...
1/19/2006	Billy Manes	Blister	“Surely we could find a red pubic hair here,” my friend John regurgitates my now thrice-plucked column premise ...
1/12/2006	Billy Manes	Blister	I wish I knew how to quit me. Tonight I’ve agreed to another bout with my flagrant redneck homosexual tendencies ...
1/5/2006	Billy Manes	Blister	There's a certain flavor of personally realized tragedy that I reserve for this time of year, the taint betwixt the ballsack of Christmas and the bunghole of New Year's ...
12/29/2005	Billy Manes	OPENING MY BOX	I approach this situation with a replica of how I approach all Orlando situations involving overtly demonstrative ornamentation ith Manic Panic ...
12/22/2005	Billy Manes	HOLIDAYPHILE	Not that I’m partial to thinking, but I’d like to think that if I were a thinky-winky ...
12/15/2005	Billy Manes	DEATH BY PARTY	"I just don’t want you to have to go alone,” BlackBerries Savannah from some bleachy perch in Winter Park ...
12/8/2005	Billy Manes	HELLO DOLLY!	Now I'll be the first to admit that I'm not exactly growing old gracefully, and if I for some reason skip the chance at admission, surely the hairline and the crow's-feet will scream it for me ...
12/1/2005	Billy Manes	AND WE BOUNCE	As is standard on days bordering overuse of L-tryptophan and travel, I'm sipping hard at the plastic tumbler of melancholy coffee-tabled before me tonight ...
11/24/2005	Billy Manes	ROOTS AND WIGS	Something's missing. It's not just that typical Orlando left its house with its toupee kind of missing, but something else ...
11/17/2005	Billy Manes	NOTHING HAPPENS	Rather than scrape the bottom of the barrel (or floor beneath a urinal, for that matter), this week, I'm setting my sights on something altogether higher ...
11/10/2005	Billy Manes	PUBELITZER PRIZE	Sometimes ideas come out of nowhere, sure. But sometimes they come out of somewhere ...
11/3/2005	Billy Manes	BOO HUMBUG	I'm sorry. I'm at some Holiday Inn right now. These are the holiday-themed words that seem to bleed from my friend Tony's Halloween mouth ...
10/27/2005	Billy Manes	ANTI-POOP FEST	So, here's the idea, see. Given the current couch-clutching state of my latest physical fallout (and even though I'm not a drama queen ...
10/20/2005	Billy Manes	A COUPLA THUGS	A-wiggity-wiggity-whack. That's precisely the sound that my head makes as my hand slaps against it and, fortunately, also the sound of my soul dying ...
10/13/2005	Billy Manes	GAY ON PARADE	"OK, what are you wearing," beams Sexy Savannah from my Sunday-a.m. cell phone ...
10/6/2005	Billy Manes	HARD ROCKING	Am I dead yet? Well, by all accounts I ought to be balancing eye-pennies and stretching mouth sutures ...
9/29/2005	Billy Manes	HURRICANE BILLY	Far be it from me to equate the regularly scheduled swirls of my own marinated mind with anything that actually kills people ...
9/22/2005	Billy Manes	DRUNK LIBERALS	Like it does with most good drunk liberals, philosophical socialism shoots from my dilated pores faster than you can say "Chappaquiddick" ...
9/15/2005	Billy Manes	THE KARMA BUMS	"I think panty purses are the new cummerbund," stitches my waifish friend Chloe ...
9/8/2005	Billy Manes	CRIME AND PUNISHMENT	I think I've just committed some sort of eighth-grade crime. I just had dinner at an Indian restaurant off I-Drive ...
9/1/2005	Billy Manes	WHAT A DRAG	Like so many other spry bits of queer bait with a propensity for nightlife chumming, I've dropped most of the obvious pretenses of dolled-up, decked-out, program-oriented entertainment ...
8/25/2005	Billy Manes	STAYIN' ALIVE	While I would like to say that I remember the '70s as some sort of liberating swirl of flared pants and blared psychedelia ...
8/18/2005	Billy Manes	DOODY HUMOR	When an evening starts with yours truly referring to his own aching posterior as a Weekend at Bernie's ...
8/11/2005	Billy Manes	30 QUEER YEARS	There are lines that you cross, and lines that you either ignore or discreetly inhale ...
8/4/2005	Billy Manes	REACH THE BLEACH	I need a fix. Like Diana Ross singing the blues, I'm dangerously devoid of both heroin and sense ...
7/28/2005	Billy Manes	AMONG THE FAITHFUL	I've done some pretty awful things in my life, spinning recklessly through just about every powder, pill and penis ...
7/21/2005	Billy Manes	BEST OF BEST OFS	Hair-flattening humidity? Check. Innate sense of mentally sublime pretentiousness? Check ...
7/14/2005	Billy Manes	GOING NOWHERE	I am so going nowhere. Some 20 years ago this week I was washed up with the rest of the tween millions in front of my television set ...
7/7/2005	Billy Manes	POLITICS AS USUAL	Ah, the political season. Swaying chandeliers casting crystalline glares across the movers and shakers of sound-bite polemics ...
6/30/2005	Billy Manes	FAKE AND SHAKE	Maybe we could just go out to happy hour at Harvey's Bistro and try to overhear stupid conversations ...
6/23/2005	Billy Manes	OLD AND RESTLESS	"I was the first old person here," mopes my friend Shawn, from some few years beneath me ...
6/16/2005	Billy Manes	ALLEY CLASH	There's something about the sweaty sock of an Orlando summer that kicks me over the theoretical locker room bench ...
6/9/2005	Billy Manes	DAYS OF SUNDER	"That figures," figures my friend Anna from the passenger seat, brow furrowed ...
6/2/2005	Billy Manes	DIRTY SOUTH	Here comes the gay again, falling on my head like a memory ...
5/26/2005	Billy Manes	ON THE FRINGE	I've always been a little bit frightened by the Fringe Festival, in kind of the same way that I'm fr...
5/19/2005	Billy Manes	SWANKY PANKY	"It's four dollars tonight," a doorman named Mike rubs his fingers together in my direction. "But fo...
5/12/2005	Billy Manes	BINGO!	I always knew it would come to this, I just didn't know that it would be so soon. Nearly 33 years in...
5/5/2005	Billy Manes	DEM DRINKERS	Don't get me wrong. While I thoroughly enjoyed the clumsy dusting of the campaign trail – mostl...
4/28/2005	Billy Manes	AS EASY AS PIE	Sometimes it feels like you go out just to clumsily trip over your own lower lip. You throw on some ...
4/21/2005	Billy Manes	FINAL FRONTIER	A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, one little towheaded miscreant of mild suburban means fo...
4/14/2005	Billy Manes	THERE'S THE BEEF	In my white-knuckled world of emotional roller coasters and intentional nonprocreativity, there are ...
4/7/2005	Billy Manes	ME, THE PAINTING	If art indeed imitates life, I'm not exactly sure where I fit in. Sure, there are your splashes of P...
3/31/2005	Billy Manes	RUNNING MAN	Editor's note: As Billy Manes is a candidate for the mayor of Orlando, he has been instructed not to...
3/24/2005	Billy Manes	GLORY DAYS	"I'm Chrissy. I'm a little bit Jenny and Terry, but tonight I'm totally Chrissy." "No you're not, be...
3/17/2005	Billy Manes	WHITE FLIGHT	Some days are better than others. The wind whips through your ears at an unidentifiably high pitch, ...
3/10/2005	Billy Manes	I'M NOT THAT GIRL ANYMORE	As hard as it might be to believe, I used to be something of a romantic hazard. Prior to this older-...
3/3/2005	Billy Manes	RETURN TO PARIS	"My va-jay-jay itches," yeasts my friend Anna scratchily into her cell phone. And after a few scream...
2/24/2005	Billy Manes	THE REFLEX	"I just ran into this group of girls," squawks a pudgy wet-curl outside the St. Pete Times Forum, sp...
2/17/2005	Billy Manes	ONE FOR THE KIDS	Prior to Conor Oberst's lanky leap over the fence of underground hipness and onto magazine covers an...
2/10/2005	Billy Manes	CLAP HAPPY	What am I doing with my life? No matter how much freshly-heaved sick I find myself trudging through,...
2/3/2005	Billy Manes	MY BLACK HEART	I don't give a damn about my bad reputation. For some four-and-a-half years, I've broken not just a ...
1/27/2005	Billy Manes	TEABAG FOR TWO	Sometimes this gig involves a little bit more than journalism – although most of the time it in...
1/20/2005	Billy Manes	TEN YEARS AFTER	I used to be somebody. But from this vantage point, pressed up against the disheveled armpit of Orla...
1/13/2005	Billy Manes	BECAUSE I CARE	When the extent of your Tuesday-morning post-tsunami philanthropy is an early chatty lunch at a Thai...
1/6/2005	Billy Manes	CROSSING THE PINK LINE	This is so fucked up. Imagine pressing your thumbnails into your eyes while contorting your limbs in...
12/30/2004	Billy Manes	BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT I DO …	Last Christmas I gave the Orlando Weekly my heart, dragging my drunken lover through the company par...
12/23/2004	Billy Manes	30 GOING ON 13	In another life, this column was the bastion of suicidal fat-girl hipness. We found it kind of funny...
12/16/2004	Billy Manes	BALLS OF SPITFIRE	Morning has broken, and apparently so have I. "Pull down your pants," flirts my doctor, squatting to...
12/9/2004	Billy Manes	BACKFAT!	Eww. To my right are two gentlemen geriatrics sharing a boiled hot dog in meet-you-in-the-middle sty...
12/2/2004	Billy Manes	BARELY A PULSE	Knowing me, knowing you, uh-huh, there is nothing I can do. In between inhaling the brackish red-tid...
11/25/2004	Billy Manes	GIVING, THANKS	This being Thanksgiving (by virtue of deadline-to-print-date lag, mind you), and me being averse to ...
11/18/2004	Billy Manes	LIKE MINDED	In dark times like these – y'know, times of depreciated self-worth created by second-degree cit...
11/11/2004	Billy Manes	ED AND ME	I won't get political here, because I'm still in the midst of celebratory ignorance. Halloween, afte...
11/4/2004	Billy Manes	ONE FAKE QUEEN	If there's anything I adore, it's artifice: artificial insemination, prosthetic limbs, bridgework, p...
10/28/2004	Billy Manes	JELLYFISH KISSES	I've been thinking a lot lately about standing still, about dirt-rooted feet and blossoming hair res...
10/21/2004	Billy Manes	MOISTURE RICH	"This moisture-rich daily conditioner reconstructs and strengthens damaged hair. Detangles and elimi...
10/14/2004	Billy Manes	BITTER OLD QUEEN	Like a wind-beaten gull with tar on its feet and little bits of candy and condom wrappers in its fea...
10/7/2004	Billy Manes	LESBO A GO-GO	Now, I enjoy being a girl as much as the next underpaid effeminate lad, but even I must admit to som...
9/30/2004	Billy Manes	I ♥ JOHNNY	Even the most hardened barhopping barnacle requires the occasional nagging pull of a conscience to r...
9/23/2004	Billy Manes	MOONSTRUCK	Time to pull my expectations off the sole of my shoe again, like so many condom wrappers and trails ...
9/16/2004	Billy Manes	ANYTHING GOES	"Here I am! Rawk you like a hurricane!" blow the anti-irony Scorpions, feeder-banding my left ear an...
9/9/2004	Billy Manes	ROCK DEAD, MALL EMPTY	It used to seem so easy in the '80s: jelly bracelets and gelatinous roles, mall-life transcendence, ...
9/2/2004	Billy Manes	THEY CALL ME MR. DOWNTOWN	Of all of the aspirations on the hasty path to my current perfection – the impeccably frosted s...
8/26/2004	Billy Manes	I HATE CHARLEY	Sometimes hell doesn't seem so far away; like with just one trip of a blistered foot, you could inst...
8/19/2004	Billy Manes	THE FULL MONTY	If I were a betting man, I'd live in another town. I'd walk with purpose through each day, bouncing ...
8/12/2004	Billy Manes	BRAND NEW LOW	I was up above it. Now I'm down in it ... shoulder deep. Anxious to assimilate into the sideburn-a...
8/5/2004	Billy Manes	THIS WAS YOUR LIFE	This is the last thing I need. (Not-so) fresh from a road trip to hell and back, and thoroughly enga...
7/29/2004	Billy Manes	THE BIG EASY	Not to be overly dramatic – because that would be inappropriate in this piece of real estate be...
7/22/2004	Billy Manes	PANNED PARENTHOOD	"Hey Billy, do you wanna get laid?" Do I ever! Only, in this case, the voice ringing to the back of...
7/15/2004	Billy Manes	BIG GAY DAYS	Sometimes you lose your handbag and break a heel, laugh it off and swiftly tuck your tail all the wa...
7/8/2004	Billy Manes	APATHY IN A BENZ	Apathy is everywhere. I mean, who says it's just the snotty-nosed, frosted queers leaning over their...
7/1/2004	Billy Manes	CLINK OF COSMOS	I hate to admit this, but I'm a lying drunk – a flip placebo purveyor in a world of actual scie...
6/24/2004	Billy Manes	TURNING TAIL	Not a big fan of cattle. Hopeless, bulging pounds of bovinity, snorting and rustling their divergent...
6/17/2004	Billy Manes	A ROLLING PARTY	Used to be that heading out for a night on the town meant six hours or so of tedious preparation. Th...
6/10/2004	Billy Manes	THE POET GAME	I should have known it would come to this. The whole child prodigy thing wore out its overdressed ...
6/3/2004	Billy Manes	I HAD A DREAM	I honestly thought that I had already conquered this beast, that I'd already written this column. I ...
5/27/2004	Billy Manes	Trail Breakers	Ever since I was a little girl I've wanted to be a dancer. I've wanted to thud my weatheredtoe-shoes...
5/20/2004	Billy Manes	I got nothing	You stumble out of bed around 10, you fall into the kitchen. You pour yourself a cup of ambition. Th...
5/13/2004	Billy Manes	Supergroup grope	Editor's note: Due to an editing error, last week's Blister was fouled up beyond belief and totally ...
5/6/2004	Billy Manes	We're mean girls	Avenue hipness and the nethers of wretched, double-popped overexposure. Staring down at our earthbou...
4/29/2004	Billy Manes	Hello, my name is Billy .. .	If I could turn back time, if I could find a way, I'd probably be approaching 32 as a quiet, inspiri...
4/22/2004	Billy Manes	Farewell, fight night	OK, so maybe I've finally hit rock bottom. In all of my years of slugging it out in the ring of low-...
4/15/2004	Billy Manes	I am a lesbian	"Long time no see," says the will-call box office lady at Hard Rock Live. You're telling me. Prio...
4/8/2004	Billy Manes	Hold the mayo	It comes as no surprise to me that I'm currently in the business of crafting pilgrimages out of virt...
4/1/2004	Billy Manes	True colors	Just a good ol' boy, never meanin' no harm, who don't beat all you ever saw, though I have been in t...
3/25/2004	Billy Manes	Monday-night quarterbacking	"Tell me why, I don't like Mondays?" once quizzed Bob Geldof, his teeth rotting in his Ratty Boomtow...
3/18/2004	Billy Manes	Naughty girls need dub too	Just ask Paris Hilton, who, with nasty old Carmen Electra in tow, just accepted doe-eyed-sex-princes...
3/11/2004	Billy Manes	Swinger's ball	Swing low, sweet Geritol, someone's gotta carry me home. Or at least so I'm thinking, assigning myse...
3/4/2004	Billy Manes	I Love Crackheads	With the B List fading in the junkyard-Geo mirror, I'm now officially on the prowl for a dirtier, se...