Fluffybutt: Now, those were the days

Me as a half-angel, circa 2000. This won't make any more sense later.

Have you ever done that thing where you pretend you don't hear someone who insists on dredging up painful, damning stories from your past life? That is, your Life Before Kids (LBK)?

"Hmm? Who? No, sorry. I don't recall that time you, me and someone called, what was it - Pube Ball? - ate hallucinogenic mushrooms and then went to the drive-in to see E.T. You must be thinking of someone else."

 or

"Yeah, that does look like me in the background of that picture backstage at the Ratt concert in 1996, but obviously it's not me. I was in college then. Studying."

Well, for me, my LBK was not often comprised of illicit activities or exotic, picture-worthy escapades with heavy metal bands, but there have been moments I have happily let quietly live in the past, lest my new mommy friends find out about them. Until now.

Today, I'm coming clean.

Today, I present to you a chapter from my life called Fluffybutt.

Fluffybutt: Serious News for Serious Lives... or Not

There was a time, not all that long ago, when you might have come across my husband as a young, sandal-wearing guy in Chicago, passing out flyers emblazoned with a rotund rodent affectionately dubbed Fluffybutt. This was early days when it came to the internet, and it was actually more effective for us to stand around in the blazing sun telling strangers to go to our awesome website than it was to pay good money to advertise online. Crazy.

Anyway, so as a busy city-dweller, you'd get this neon pink flyer with this fat guinea pig on it and while you were pretty sure it wasn't porn, it couldn't hurt to check. Or that's how the theory went, anyway. Those who came for porn left unsatisfied for hopefully completely different pastures, but those who stayed were treated (?) to, well, it's probably best I provide some photographic explanation here.

Fluffybutt was this:

And it was this:

And sometimes, it was even this:

Primarily we wrote satirical news stories in the style of The Onion, but our favorite times in Chicago were spent making photo essays. Like the time we staged the Kitty Cat Olympics (prompting many email complaints about our alleged animal cruelty):

Or the worldwide adventures of the ill-fated Creamy the Creamsicle:

Oh, there's more. So much more. But I'm going to dole this out gradually. In my upcoming series about our Fluffybutt past, I'll post lots of excerpts from our stories, audio files of our awesome news show, share stories of stalkers, book deal offers, our unique version of brainstorming that almost burnt down our apartment block, and how this unlikely experience cemented the fact that when it comes to compatibility, I can't imagine sharing my life with anybody but Kurt. While a normal person's early relationship memories might be tinged with amber nostalgia, ours involve stuffing blankets and towels into an adult-size set of zipper jammies so Kurt could pretend to be a sumo wrestler for a Fluffybutt photo essay. And I wouldn't have it any other way.