My Funeral/Job Interview Outfit is Getting Tired.

I never know what to say when people die. I suck at anything that requires some other response than sarcasm. Luckily, Younger Amy (when she was Amy and not “evil,”) bailed me out on this one. She never said much of anything to anybody, but she has a tendency to sit in a coffee shop and write poetry with a Pilot V5. We all kind of took ourselves too seriously then. We ALL wrote poetry.

Anyway, I wrote this (completely friend-wise, might I add), for Kris Bristow. I’m guessing I’m about to witness the world’s best-dressed memorial service. There will be goth folk and roller girls. The place is going to be packed.

Grey

Gun metal grey, his eyes reached into me
Looking for understanding
His curled smile spoke truth
Of my walls
Which, til now, have served me well.
After months of braind ead comfort
His words have shaken me awake
To look up at the angel before me
To hear this song
Of words
Which lodge in my rib cage
Inches from my skittish heart
Two inches more…
And the bullet would have claimed me
He would hold my reluctant heart
Thus adding another to his collection.
What is one heart to him, but a drop in the ocean?
Yet, still, he has reached me
Though my heart is still my own,
A chip has fallen from its wall
Shaken loose by the force
Of ammunition words
From a curled smile
And gun metal grey eyes.

——————————————————
** Note to $_Deity: While you seem to be amused by killing my friends and family members lately, I appreciate letting my aunt and her friend survive that badass car wreck. Don’t think this gets you completely off the hook, though.

“But how will it play in Nebraska?”

I have spent the last 13 years of my life hearing from various people that I’m “not for everyone.” I understand that not everybody thinks “ooh, shiny!” when seeing a spiked bracelet. I understand that not everybody appreciates a good meth joke or a blog about the terrors of Green Hills. However, I think where “various people” and I differ are percentages. They think 70% of America would hate me, but I think it’s more like 17%.

I joined Fabulously40.com because I thought it might be a good way to market the company I work for (designhergals.com, plug plug), but I also started cross-posting my blogs there. I never miss an opportunity to post a blog, you know. I braced myself for a tidal wave of soccer mom hate, but forgot a couple things:

1. The internet isn’t short on trolls, but most normal people will just ignore you if they disagree with you. It’s easier and less time-consuming.

2. It was stupid and naive of me to assume that, just because someone turns 40 and has a couple kids, they automatically stop having pet peeves, goals and bouts of cynicism. Such an assumption is similar to people in L.A. thinking that no one in the south wears shoes, or that we’re all going to freak out if they make a movie about gay people in love.

People think that women become grayed-out versions of themselves once they crank out a couple kids and sprout some gray hair. I don’t dispute that having a toddler gives a woman a certain sense of zen; it takes a lot to piss off someone who has been thrown up on repeatedly. However, I now have friends who have kids, and having kids hasn’t turned them into mindless van-driving mombots. My own mom may look like a stereotypical middle-aged, middle-class white lady, and in a lot of ways she is. She has a billion purses, gets manicures and has a fetish for clean kitchen counters. Hell, she even drives a BMW. She thinks “a nice pair of flats” goes with everything. She owns at least one Christmas-themed vest and, yes, she wears it with a turtleneck.

Is she easily offended? Is she freaked out by my clothes? Does she burst into flames at the mere mention of the f-bomb?

No. My 60 year-old, BMW-driving, purse-loving mom watches Fox News solely for comedic value, buys me Halloween fabric on clearance, and thought Tropic Thunder was funny.

I may mellow with age, but I’m only 8 years away from 40. Do you really think I’m not still going to be cantankerous eight years from now? Me neither.

I made the mistake of assuming that women over forty wouldn’t “get” me. My bad, y’all. The women at fabulously40.com are pretty much just like the younger people on MySpace and Facebook, but older. There are probably some people who are offended by me, but there are more who are just as ornery as I am. Check back when I’m 40. I’ll probably tell you this:

How dare you make me a caricature just because of my age. You will not put me in some quiet little box, shove me to the side, and pretend I don’t exist. Don’t assume that I can’t handle the truth. Don’t assume a damn thing.

PS: My mom also loves David Sedaris, who should watch his back. When he dies, I’m coming after his book deal with guns blazing.

A&E: Making Monday Suck Less

Once upon a time, Mondays were thing to be dreaded. They marked a return to work (or school), put an end to the fun of the weekend and, for most people, meant that drunken fun was over for another five days. Then, A&E gave us Intervention, Obsessed and (starting August 17th) Hoarders. Monday changed completely.

For those of you unfamiliar, Intervention is pretty much what the name implies: forty minutes of “documenting the addiction,” also known as “showing someone doing crazy shit,” followed by an intervention. The last five minutes always tell what happened after the intervention while some annoying song performed by “public domain Jayhawks” plays.

Obsessed chronicles people who have OCD, trichotillomania and panic anxiety; people usually exhibit a trick-or-treat bag of crazy. Anxiety disorders usually travel in packs, so it’s not unusual for one person to start off with anxiety, move on to hoarding things, and then develop agoraphobia and depression caused by their shame of said hoarding. The people on the show volunteer for cognitive behavioral therapy, which involves exposing people to the very things they fear in order for them to build up a tolerance. Inevitably, the people freak out, and “good tv” is made.

So, what’s another circus sideshow? This isn’t all about people getting drunk on mouthwash or pulling their hairs out one by one. These days, sideshows are a dime a dozen and A&E’s lineup would really have to amp up the crazy to compete with…well, just about anything on Vh1. (Sidebar: when did Vh-1 become Vh1? Did the hyphen contain all of the music videos?)

The real draws behind A&E’s lineup are the people behind the stories. “Lady is an alcoholic” isn’t nearly as interesting as “lady is the perfect PTA mom who snaps, can’t handle it, and becomes an alcoholic.” It’s interesting because, on some level, we can see ourselves or our friends. We see the impact that unattainable expectations of perfection have on women. The aforementioned alcoholic lady says “I’m beautiful and happy, I’m beautiful and happy!” everytime she leaves the house. The drunk guy next door drinks because he watched his father figure die in Afghanistan. The anorexic girl at school is punishing herself because she’s reliving guilt she feels about being molested. I’m not saying that having “issues” makes it OK to sell your kid for crack. I’m saying that the story of addiction is much more interesting when you can look at a crackhead and see somebody’s sister. Intervention makes the addicts human rather than just a sideshow.

Most of the people on Obsessed are portraits of what can happen to any of us if blindsided by the unforeseen. The sky over all of our heads is filled with pianos. Every second of every day, your phone could ring and you could be notified of someone’s death. You could be permanently disabled every time you get in a car. North Korea could finally decide to nuke us.

What happens when one of those sky-pianos falls on someone who is blindsided or a little short on coping mechanisms? They develop little habits. They check locks. They tap things three times. While they know in their rational minds that tapping things isn’t going to stop the sky-pianos, something in them says “you’d better tap this, just in case.” While most of us can avoid becoming a crackhead by just not doing crack, the “oh my God, I can’t control life and that scares the crap out of me” misfire in your brain could happen any time. We watch Obsessed because we can see our past selves, our possible future selves. If nothing else, we can understand why the people on the show do what they do. As hard as it is to feel empathy for someone who could sell her own kid for crack, it’s that easy to feel empathy for the lady who is psychotic about baby-proofing her house after losing a child to SIDS.

By paying attention to people we don’t know, people on tv, we can better understand the people we DO know. Watching other people is a huge part of how we learn, even if it’s usually along the lines of “do we pay at the table, or go to the cash register?” Watching people around us connects us. It makes us more empathetic. It keeps us human.

Twitter: Ur Doin It Rong.

I am not a social media expert. I did not major in marketing. I didn’t even have an account on LinkedIn until just a couple weeks ago. However, I do use Twitter. I know what I like. Like everybody else on the internet, I think my opinion is more important than yours. Seeing as how you people keep trying to woo me (and everyone else on Twitter), I’ll do you a favor and tell you why it’s not working.

Social media had good intentions. All of the socially awkward programmers and web dorks could pretend to have social skills by setting up accounts on MySpace and Facebook filling out surveys about whether or not “they’ve ever…”

Twitter, at its best, can be wonderful, random and comedic. Complete strangers tell me hilarious things all day long, and I get to filter out people who bore me. Famous people can give their fans what fans have wanted since the dawn of fandom: a direct link. I’m never going to hang out with anybody from Fall Out Boy, but it’s bizarrely interesting that, even if you’re famous, everything boils down to whether the waitress at Chili’s Too remembers to bring your extra mayo. It’s like there’s a party where everybody’s got a blindfold on, but people can still mingle and talk without the threat of someone getting drunk and having awkward booze sex.

Well, sort of. Drunken, regretted-in-the-morning Twittering is quickly becoming a rite of passage.

The problem is that Twitter has become “the next big thing.” Companies assume that joining Twitter will be some kind of short cut, allowing them to stop buying advertising and thinking about being in the first page of results on Google. What they’re not getting is that, for Twitter to work, you have to Tweet something that someone would actually WANT to read. Showing up at a party solely to hand out your business card is considered douchey, so why haven’t people realized that the rule applies to Twitter?

“Hey, how are you?”
“Have you seen my business’s website?”
“No, dude. Really. What’s going on?”
“Have you seen my business’s website?”

Businesses, let me break this down for you: if you add me, prompting me to look at your profile, and I see that the only thing you ever say is “here’s my company…here’s my company again…” I’m not going to add you. I’m going to leave the virtual party and let you sit alone in your living room, showing virtual vacation slides.

So, what works?

Amuse me. Tell me something fun. Talk about something other than your company’s products. If you can’t do this, hire somebody who can. Find someone who seems to embody what you company is, then hire them. (PS: if you don’t know what kind of person would embody your company’s tone and image, your Twitter is NOT your biggest problem.)

For example, the guy who does Clandestine Industries’ Twitter (@jensenclan88) mainly makes snarky comments about sports figures and pop culture. I know who he works for, I looked at the site and I even know the name of his art gallery and what it’s showing right now. Only 10% of his posts are about his businesses, but I know the names of them because I’ve stuck around long enough, and I stuck around because he’s hilarious. The trick is to be a real person, with something real, random or amusing to say. It’s a leap of faith to say “represent us, but be yourself.” Most businesses usually go for the “no, really, we CAN please all of the people all of the time” strategy. As a result, they end up afraid to say anything interesting. A knife that isn’t sharp is just a piece of metal. You have to have an edge to get anything done. Is JensenClan88 a happy accident or a brilliant marketing plan? I don’t know, but I suspect it’s working.

Have some balls. Say something worthwhile. If you don’t, nobody’s going to listen to you anyway.

Whine and Cheese

*I will preface this post by saying that some cases I’m dealing with may be just misunderstandings and mistakes. However, I will also preface this post by saying that it really does piss me off when I have to beg and plead with someone to get them to pony up the money they were supposed to pay me. It is degrading and stupid. For the blog readers who have been listening to me whine for three months, it’ll be over soon. Continuing on.

Everyday, I check my mail, hoping that the check you owe me will be there. I sidle out to the mailbox in my flip-flops and pajama pants, saying a quick prayer before opening it.

“Please God, let the check be here. Let me keep a good relationship with this person. Let me not have to resort to bitchy behavior, bitchy phone calls, and threats to have a sit-in in someone’s office. Let me not have to say to this person ‘you will never get more work from me because you don’t pay your bills.’”

It’s so much easier to just be nice. Being bitchy is time-consuming, tiring and makes me feel icky. Unless it’s bitchiness for the sake of comedy, and then it’s hilarious.

The only thing my mailbox has brought me is bills. I don’t have the luxury of not paying Verizon, Regions, Bank of America, NES, and Metro Water. When I miss due dates, they charge me extra.

Thanks to you, I owe Citicard an extra 80 bucks. Because you haven’t paid me and I couldn’t pay them. That bill sits on my nightstand, looking at me each morning. Things like that are what keep me up at night and wake me from sleep. Last night, I had full-body restless leg syndrome wake me up at 3am. While I stood in my bedroom waiting for Nytols number 3 and 4 to kick in, I thought of you.

Each morning, you wake up in a house nicer than mine, put on shoes nicer than mine, and walk out the door with a Coach purse in your hand.

While you are walking around with your Coach purse, think of me. Each day, as my frustration builds, I come in from the mailbox and sit on my living room floor and cry. I cry because I can’t do anything else. There is no one to punch, no car to key. After I cry, I write. It’s better than getting drunk and it keeps me from throwing things.

While you slather yourself with Clinique products, I’m trapped in my house nursing stress breakouts and looking like a troll. While you grill up a steak, I eat Ramen. While you go get highlights, I watching my hair come out in handfulls in the shower.

It’s not even all about the money. It’s about me wondering how someone can look me in the eye and make a deal and then completely renege on it.

I hope, while you fall asleep at night with the help of neither Nytol nor vodka, you think of me. I am not a faceless corporation. I am a person. When you don’t pay your bills, you tell me that my work is good enough to use but not good enough to pay for. You tell me that everything you said when we met meant nothing. You tell me that you don’t care about doing what you said you would do. You tell me that you don’t have the character to honor your commitments. In my world, a person’s word is still worth something. The population keeps shrinking.

“Who ARE You?”

“Who ARE You?”

The subject line refers to the title of a Facebook message sent to me by someone I hadn’t talked to since roughly 1993, the year I left the suburbs of southern Atlanta for Kentucky. With apologies to the Kentucky friends, that place was never my home. From the first morning I woke, startled, in my new bedroom (having the “where the fuck am I?!” thought usually gotten at slumber parties), I had a single-minded focus on getting the hell out of there.

Get good grades, get scholarships, get out of town.

Sixteen years went by, and now the internet is bringing you all back, one friend request at a time. In light of this, I thought it might be time to get the recent additions up to speed.

After high school, I ended up as a Sound Engineering major at Belmont University. It turned out not to be the creative fun that I thought, given that I don’t enjoy having entire conversations about milliseconds of delay and analog vs digital. My refusal to listen to Steeley Dan was also frowned upon. I finished the degree, but got out and realized I was only qualified to write papers.

I came THIS close to going to FIT in New York to get a master’s in History of Dress, but ended up going to study graphic design at Watkins College. As college majors go, it was kind of an impulse buy; I made the fall deadline by about two days. Eight years later, I’m still designing stuff. My favorite things are Flash, multimedia, and illustration. My portfolio is at www.evilamy.com (plug, plug) and I’m generally always looking for freelance work. I’m pretty sure I’m going back to school (AGAIN) in the fall to become a web developer. I have a college problem; I can’t seem to stay out. Wtf.

This isn’t to say that I think design is my “gift.” I do OK and I’m better at meeting a deadline than a lot of other people, but it’s not the thing I do with a little more magic than everybody else. Or maybe it is. I can look at a person for five seconds and tell them what their magic is, but I don’t know what mine would be. What I DO know is that I’d leave design tomorrow for a book deal. In the tradition of Oprah, I have started using the phrase, “when I get my book deal…” as some form of fucked-up positive visualization. She says you have to name it to claim it. Well, I’m naming it ad nauseum. “Stay tuned for my book! It’s being published by Kinkos!” It’s gonna be spiral-bound and buy-one-get-one-free, so you can give a copy to a friend. Said friend will love it and promptly cyberstalk me, adding me on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and whatever the hell else some developer invents to make me have to crosspost my blogs. Cyberstalk me. Google me. Just don’t show up on my porch or send me naked pictures.

OK, fine. Send naked pictures. Whatever.

“But, Amy, haven’t you devoted yourself to washing the socks of a man who will be the only person you ever have sex with for the rest of your life?”

No. While I’m open to the idea of living in sin with the right person, I have not yet met someone who would be consistently allowed to be IN MY HOUSE every time I come home. Unless you count my cat and, yes, I realize how crazy that sounds. You haven’t met my cat. He is KICK ASS.

“But, Amy, haven’t you forced a human body through your vagina?”

No. Not today, not tomorrow, not next week. Hell, if I had a surgeon sitting next to me right now, I’d be talking said surgeon into tying my tubes instead of writing this blog. If I ever have time and money that would be spent on a child, I would go volunteer somewhere and help raise somebody else’s kids, or at least try to teach them to play the piano.

“What’s with the (evil) moniker?”
Oh yeah. I came out of the coffin sometime in late 1997 or early 1998. I was always kind of weird, but it didn’t show on the outside until college, when I realized that there was an entire genre of music that sounded like Depeche Mode. Goth has a dark sense of humor, a punkish sensibility, and good hair. I couldn’t resist. I am fully aware that I own pink clothing. It’s ironic. For serious.

Answers to other popular questions:

1. I’ve been in Nashville since 1996. I’m not “from” here, but 13 years is a long enough time for me to be tired of dating dudes who are in bands though, horribly, I still totally do it. Will I ever learn? (In my defense, if I swore off musicians, I would never date again. EVERYONE is in a band here. Then again…I kind of never date as it is. Cue the tiny violins.)

2. Five foot one
3. Cat person
4. Mauk rhymes with sock
5. Johnny Depp. Or Jack White.
6. Jane Eyre
7. Edward Scissorhands (predictable.)
8. purple
9. vegetarian (I sometimes snap and eat beef jerky. Ew.)
10. one, but I want more

Master Plan #16,352

Tuesday, I got an email in response to the application I filled out at UPS about a month ago. Would I like to work for 8 bucks an hour from 3 to 8 am? Enter dilemma, stage left.

On the one hand, my plate is pretty full at the moment. I’m still working twenty hours a week at my real job, freelancing about twenty hours a week, trying to keep up with blogs, cleaning, piano playing, the lawn, and I’m about to start school in the fall. My life at present reads like a commercial for Sugar-Free Rockstar except that, rather than partying like a rock star (as the label suggests), I am working like a 13 year old Japanese girl. Potayto, potahto.

On the one hand, I don’t want to risk dicking over my freelance clients by starting to miss deadlines because I’m tired from getting up at 2 am to load boxes onto a truck. The freelance clients pay more.

On the other hand, the freelance clients aren’t coming in a steady stream and don’t pay their bills promptly. The freelance clients won’t offer me healthcare once I work for them for a while. The freelance clients don’t offer tuition reimbursement. The freelance clients don’t pay me to work out. If my real job dissolves into the stomach acid of The Recession From Hell, I will need to have been laying a backup plan. If I go load boxes, I may be able to avoid asking mom for money, I may be able to avoid cashing out my other 401k, and I may be able to avoid selling my car. Please note that I will not be selling my piano. I can get another car, but the deal I got on that piano comes but once a lifetime.

Mom has offered to pay for school. Mom has even offered to buy me out of my mortgage, which means I’d pay her instead of Bank of America. I imagine the Bank of Mom would be a lot cooler about me missing a payment. While I’m willing to take her up on the school thing, the mortgage thing is a little beyond the pale for me right now. Life is not about asking your mom for money. I made this situation (sort of…let the record show that I did not sign up to live beyond my means; I had the bills covered when I had my whole pay check) and I’ll deal with it.

Loading boxes will mean going to bed at 6 or 7 each night to get up at 2:30. I will have no life, but this is temporary. Three years from now, I’ll be a developer making twice as much money. My house will have a new fence, my kitchen cabinets will have hardware, and I might just get a haircut that costs more than six bucks. Three years from now, I may just decide to KEEP the job at UPS just for the healthcare. When I’m not there, I’ll freelance as a developer, like, 10 hours a week and spend the rest of my time writing. My master plan, let me show you it.

The master plan is years from today.
Today, I will return that email from UPS.

Hellblinki Sextet Rock My Lame Ass

Oh, Nashville. We can’t have goth night without winding up with a room full of giant chain pants, but if a show is on a Thursday and tornadoes are in the forecast, attendance sucks. Fine, the show was on short notice and, if I had a more Lohanian social calendar, I wouldn’t have made it either. Then again, half the people on my social calendar would have wanted to go to the show and the other half would have been totally cool with me flaking on plans with no more reason than “dude, top hats.”

“Amy, haven’t you been bitching about work hours being cut? Why were YOU going to a SHOW anyway?”

Consult the memento mori ribbon on my wrist. Life is short. Sometimes, you have to eat ramen for a week so you can not sit at home watching So You Think You Can Dance. Besides, the cover was only five bucks. If a bunch of people can drag their asses to Nashville for a last-minute show in a tornado, by God, I can take a shower and slap some makeup on my pasty flesh.

What did most of you you miss? A typically energetic set from everybody’s favorite band of accordion-toting, cymbal-with fist-playing, sideburn-having miscreants. I just like saying miscreants; Hellblinki are actually good kids, but don’t go telling anybody. Reputations, you know.

Since I felt kind of bad for the poor turnout and my own lack of ability to buy merch, I wanted to make up for it by offering up my place as a crash venue. It’s kind of like when you’re the oldest kid in your class Sophomore year; it’s your job to pick up your friends so they don’t have to ride the bus with the freshmen. So it is with crashing space. Now that Company doesn’t have to sleep in my kitchen, I’m able to say to friends, “hey, if you come to town, I have space…just don’t let the cat out.” Besides, people my own age are much more low maintenance than certain older, “gave birth to me” people I could name. When mom comes to my house, she just stares at my array of coffee mugs and points out that there are no glasses to drink from. Being bourgeois is a continuum; compared to mom, I’m punk rock. Compared to my friends, I’m Mariah Carey. How do you expect me to put on my shoes standing up? I need a settee!! Also, people who drive around in a van are usually too tired or polite to ask why the fuck you keep canned goods in your fridge (old habits), why there’s a tripod set up in your bedroom (shooting blogs, not porn) or why there’s a dismantled wire hanger on your bathroom floor (see “Widowmaker: The Horror”).

Rambling must stop.

Hellblinki will be at Dragon Con; say hi and buy some merch, for God’s sake.

(Sidebar: did you know there’s a “Juggalo Convention” every year? Somebody pay for me to go so I can write about it. Nothing says “comedic potential” quite like a hotel lobby filled with Insane Clown Posse enthusiasts.)

(Sidebar 2: After getting badgered about it, Andrew Hellblinki apparently set up a Twitter account, but it never really took off because, as he says “I do not text.” I cannot wrap my head around such a concept. It’s like when a friend in high school told me that he’d never eaten fish. “What do you do? TALK to people? WTF?!”)

Just Sayin.

Widowmaker: The Horror

Some people have bad hair days. Thus far, I’ve been having a bad hair lifetime. We’ve been at odds for over thirty years now, with my hair being full of cow licks yet devoid of body, and me punishing it for just being itself. It has survived being permed, colored, and put into ponytails of all sizes and configurations. As my mom would say, “fried, dyed, up and tied.” My hair even survived middle school mall bangs. That the picture is from DANCE team, not cheerleading. I will admit to being the co-captain but will point out that I wanted to dance to Prince and not Vanilla Ice. We spelled out “ICE” with our pompoms at the end. Shoot me in the face.

Anyway, I can understand why my hair would hold a little ill will toward me. It has devoted its life to burning out vacuum cleaners and clogging shower drains, when not sticking to the insides of my shirts and tickling me. When shopping for vacuums, I refer to my hair as The Widowmaker. Last night, it went too far.

I had already cleaned out the part of the shower drain that I could reach, and the shower was still draining slowly. I emptied a bottle of Drano into it with no luck. In a moment of insanity, I reached out of the shower and grabbed the plunger. This accomplished nothing, aside from shoving the clog further into the pipes and filling the water pooled at my ankles with chunks of tried rubber and microscopic, mentally horrifying fecal matter.

“What have I done? I might as well have just stuck my feet in the toilet.” HORROR.

So, I stepped out of the shower (washing the lower half of my legs AFTER stepping out of The Horror, as if that would help) and went to Home Depot to seek out Red Devil Lye.

I strongly suspect that Red Devil is illegal or out of business, because it’s hard to find now. Instead, I got Drano “Kitchen Crystals,” which I took for a good substitute because they come in a metal can which yells “DO NOT INDUCE VOMITING.” A good life strategy in general, especially if you’ve just swallowed lye and value your esophagus.

When the kitchen crystals didn’t work after I poured them into the regular drain, I took off the cover to the overflow trap and poured some in there. Toxic vapors? Yes. Draining tub? No.

So, I went to the ghetto hardware store close to my house and got a hand crank snake, per Google. While this gave me a good workout and allowed me to stick my hands into water swimming with lye, it only produced one small bit of hair. One pipe hasn’t produced this much frustration since Baby Jessica. Before I called a plumber, I’d try one more thing. Liquid Fire.

This was what the salesman tried to sell me the FIRST time I went to the hardware store, but I wanted to try the snake because the bottle of Liquid Fire kind of scared the shit out of me. You can pour an entire can of Kitchen Crystals in a tub and (apparently) wade around in it. The Liquid Fire bottle pretty much said that my legs would be reduced to oozing stumps the very millisecond they came in contact with Liquid Fire. The warnings read like the Happy Fun Ball commercial from SNL. DO NOT LOOK DIRECTLY AT LIQUID FIRE. DO NOT TAUNT LIQUID FIRE.

It took two rounds, but the Liquid Fire eventually cleared the clog. I thoroughly cleaned the shower, giving it an extra spray of bleach, just to ease my mind about the whole “might as well stick my foot in the toilet” thing.

Side bar: Liquid Fire AND Kitchen Crystals smell like perm solution, which should definitely make you never want to get a perm. If nothing else, perming will make your hair angry. You do NOT want to make your hair angry. Trust me on this.