COLUMNS
| Date | Author | Headline | |
| 2/3/2010 | Billy Manes | Blister | If this particular wrung-out rag of a Monday night were something more than a reverse howl of sleep apnea |
| 1/27/2010 | Billy Manes | Blister | It’s gray outside. Blustery billows of dank fat-man breath blow down from the sky and up pleated man-skirts, chilling freckles |
| 1/20/2010 | Billy Manes | Blister | Now that all of the teacups have followed their flying saucers from the cupboard to the shattering floor |
| 1/13/2010 | Billy Manes | Blister | ‘You guys need to have babies!’ |
| 1/6/2010 | Billy Manes | Blister | It’s like a candy-coated war zone. The stuttering gridlock of westbound I-4 traffic the Monday after Christmas hiccups in tryptophan-laced |
| 12/24/2009 | Billy Manes | Blister | Twinkle, twinkle, twinkle go the lights attached to wires attached to plugs wedged into drywall sockets, and the process of illumination |
| 12/17/2009 | Billy Manes | Blister | There are things whizzing around – misshapen puzzle pieces from old grandma Milton Bradley bridge portraits never completed |
| 12/9/2009 | Billy Manes | Blister | Through the refracted blue-neon reflection of nightlife’s anthropological looking glass, time has a way of bending in on itself, rendering context useless |
| 12/2/2009 | Billy Manes | Blister | Beyond good and evil, there is marriage: that antiquated social contract disguised as a torn page from a glossy magazine full of tampon ads |
| 11/25/2009 | Billy Manes | Blister | Taylor’s wheezing limbs, glued together by divine phlegmatic cohesion, crop up on a corner of the bar at Revolution |
| 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... |
