Anya sleeps like a Marine. If she is still for more than 15 seconds she is dead to the world. She slips off in the bathtub soaking in “Madagascar Vanilla Bean” scented bubbles so often I won’t let her lock the bathroom door anymore. Someone I know drowned. Madagascar is where the lemurs live. Monekycats. Wonder if they make good pets. Could I get one at Petsmart? Right now she is off in dreamland happily ripping men’s eyes out and penises off. Thinking of the ripped off penises and empty eye-sockets leaves me a little sketchy most of the time. If we broke up, would that be the event that allows her to get her powers back? I mean, would that get the Rules Committee in Hell back on side with her? Dating someone who used to be a demon, a vengeance demon, a man eviscerating vengeance demon, boggles the mind. Is that kind of boggle the same as the word jumble game? Why does it have that name? The stupidity boggled someone? The test audience was made up of chimpanzees and the rules boggled them? Ok, chimps playing boardgames was not the original station this thought train was pulling into. Thinking about Anya and how lucky I am to have her--even if she doesn’t understand why threatening 80 year old women who take the last package of Charmin on sale for half off gets you thrown out of Safeway. Definitely not thinking nighttime, Anya asleep, naughty thoughts. Dirty, * wrong* thinking. Dirty like grit, not the fine, silty dirty * Buffy dirty* that’ll just wash off in the shower, gone until next time. Dirty like grit and gravel scraping off a few layers of skin and embedding cinders under the layers left, pebbles under the fingernails that bruise and get so far up you can’t get them with your teeth. *Angel dirty* No, not gonna go there. Still asleep. Good. Psychotic to think she can really still read minds and she is lying to me about it. Woulda been caught by now. What if she has a secret sensor in her brain that buzzes if I think no-no thoughts about someone else? Would she stand over my puss-filled body winning sympathy from Tara and Willow: “And you know the thing that made me HAVE to kill him? He wasn’t imagining you two doing naked spells this time.” Death isn’t really the turn-off it should be; even visions of my desecrated corpse and posthumous humiliation doesn’t seem to be lessening the cottonmouth and hotflashes I am getting thinking about Deadboy. The “Scissors Are For Foreplay” one, not the “Spilling Semen Would Deplete My Life-force” one. If Anya got her powers back, would she be able to do the revenge gig for a man? If it is against another man, is that allowed in the Demon Handbook? Vengeance on Angel would have to be something extra juicy and involving of the bodily organs exploding. What could I come up with? Thinking, thinking…wait, he has the best punishment of all right there in his office: Cordelia. HE has to listen to her bitch and moan all the time, and I know he has to kick the bitchometer up even higher than I ever did. So pathetic. There isn’t anyone here in my mind but me—as far as I know—so I am thinking those thoughts just to myself. Why do I keep doing it? Because Anya is right here and she loves me, loves all of me, snot and sweat-smell and off-key singing and even accepted the syphilis, and it is wrong to miss Cordelia everyday, to have a special Cordelia shaped hole right in the middle of my chest that Anya fell into but doesn’t fit quite right. It is also so twisted to wonder which of the new fall colors she likes the best or if she ever found the *perfect * shade of pink lipstick…if she thinks about me, The Original Ass Monkey, Xander Harris. I come in two varieties, Scooby Flavor and People (non-people) Who Moved To LA and Left Me flavor. The Wrongness of the universe quadrupling when I remember WESLEY is there now. Hate him, hate him. Pansy-ass, scone chompin’…why do I even care? She was just using him, and he must be feeling like a fool over his Humbert Humbert act. Behind door number three is your prize Mr. Harris: the ocean of anger and jealousy directed at Wesley is washing away thoughts of one of Angelus’s hands increasing the force from caress to constricting my windpipe and the other inside my jeans for the last time “Tell me how much you want me, Alexander.” And it comes down to that, like it does almost every night of my meaningless existence, why couldn’t I have just said it?