Years ago I wrote a gag for a film I never shot because I smoked too much pot. It was about a little boy who wondered why you should never look a gift horse in the mouth. The boy was given a pony as a gift for his birthday, and while no one was looking, he lured the pony closer with a sugar cube, pried its little jaws open and stared deep into it's maw. Suddenly, a second set of jaws (ala Alien) snapped out of the pony's throat and into the little boy's face. I have bad ideas when I get stoned.

Now, I'm a person who puts a lot of thought into the gifts I give the people I care about. If the gift has no meaning to the receiver then it is a meaningless gift, and who wants those? I like taking the time to really think about what to give someone, because I'm an obsessive nutcase and it distracts me from all of the things I really should be doing, like cleaning the apartment or finishing the book I've writing all year. For instance, my friend Jessi's favorite show was The Golden Girls, so I spent days hunting down an old VHS of Estelle Getty's workout video for her. My other friend was going through a divorce, so I bought him a set of ninja throwing stars. You get the idea.

So, last year I was sitting in my Los Angeles apartment smoking my medicinal marijuana and racking my brain over what to give my good friend Aaron, the designer I used on Augusten's website, for his birthday. The two of us met at a party ten years ago and I immediately recruited him for a sketch comedy team I was putting together. He's one of the funniest people I've ever met, and over the years we've had a friendship so impossibly gay you need special goggles to shield yourself from all the rainbows. He's one of my favorite people on earth, and every year we give each other the dumbest gifts possible on our birthdays - such as bacon flavored jellybeans, or a framed print of Christopher Walken building a robot in his garage.

I was living 3,000 miles away at the time and was excruciatingly bored, so I hit eBay to look for something good. Aaron is the biggest sci-fi nerd in the world, so I remember looking at a set of TRON action figures to buy him, when - somehow - within two clicks I found myself in an auction for a dozen dried raccoon penises (God bless eBay). The seller referred to them as "Prairie Toothpicks". I stared at the screen for a good long while contemplating a purchase and ultimately thought what any sane, rational person would think: nothing says "happy birthday" like a box of dicks. So, I clicked the BUY NOW button and fired off a quick email to Bubba's House of Wangs (or whatever the eBay store was called) asking him to ship the box of Prairie Toothpicks to my good friend Aaron in time for his birthday and, most importantly, to include a little birthday note in there for me. I got an email back from Bubba himself saying "No problem."

In the days running up to Aaron's birthday I think I must have asked him if he'd gotten anything cool about seven hundred times. Each time the answer was "no" and I was beginning to think I'd gotten stiffed on the raccoon penises (have fun with that sentence). What a brilliant racket that would be -- who on Earth is going to write eBay to complain that the dozen penises they ordered never arrived? I was starting to think old Bubba was a brilliant criminal mastermind. As it turns out, he was just one lazy redneck.

The day after Aaron's birthday I asked him one final time: did you receive any cool gifts in the mail? "No," he said. "But something seriously messed-up happened."

As it turns out, Aaron's new girlfriend arrived at his apartment before he did on the evening of his birthday to find a shoebox wrapped in brown paper on the doorstep. There was no return address on the package, and without giving it much notice, she had torn the paper from the box, opened the lid and immediately went into hysterics. Apparently, Old Bubba had neglected to leave my note.

"Someone sent us a sandwich bag of bones," he said. "She freaked the fuck out."

Aaron got home to find his girlfriend shrieking "Where are the cats! Find the cats!" thinking some psychotic person had murdered and de-boned his little tangerine kittens Odie and Q*Bert, who were no doubt crouched somewhere, hiding from the screams.

I wasn't really sure what to say, but it wound up being a shaky, sing-songy "Haaaaaaaappy Birthdaaaaay... it's a box of raccoon penises."

"You asshole! What's wrong with you?", he said. Then added: "She was about to call Homeland Security!"

Aaron and his girlfriend were married two weeks ago at a beautiful ceremony in New Jersey. It was an honor to be invited and to see one of my best friends in the world walk down the aisle with the woman of his dreams.

I did not show up to the wedding with a gift. I'm told I have a full year after the wedding to find them the perfect present.

I think I'm going to have to sit and think on this one for a good, long while.