Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Nice board/moves, bro.

On this one episode of Miami Ink, this slightly tubby girl gets to live out her “dream” of being tattooed by Chris Nunez, whom she refers to as the sexiest man alive. In attempting to put her best foot forward, she wears her favorite lip ring to her appointment. The ring in question is basically a Christmas ornament, in that it’s a hook with a ball hanging off her lip. It’s one of the most unflattering, fucked up pieces of facial adornment I’ve ever seen (and that’s saying something, since poking holes in your face tends to just make you uglier as a general rule [sorry, but it’s true]) and Chris Nunez, the sexiest man alive, cannot conceal his revulsion in the face of this hideous thing dangling off this woman’s lip. She becomes so self conscious that she eventually removes the thing, thereby finally approximating something resembling a dignified appearance and the show moved on. But I’ve never forgotten that lip ring.

This is a big problem for people, especially young people, namely: doing things that are actively terrible under the mistaken impression that they’re kick ass. I’d like to visit a couple of these moves this afternoon. Now, this list is by no means exhaustive and of course, if you find yourself to be someone that’s doing something on this list, well, oops for you. Let’s begin:

Riding Longboards around Chicago (or any city without hills): Now, I’m not trying to suggest that the longboard isn’t cool. Well, that’s not entirely true. If we’re being really honest, the longboard ISN’T cool, but it’s got its place and that place is carving down hills and generally being kind of under awesome old dudes who are just cruising around, probably somewhere with hills that’s kind of unpopulated. That’s pretty acceptable. However, when you’re some dickneck with flipflops cruising down clark street, you aren’t acceptable at all. You’re a dingus and you’ve got the wrong tools for the job at hand. You can’t do a kickturn on a longboard. You can’t go up and down curbs on a longboard. You look like a dildo on your longboard in Chicago, where there are no hills and you cant really carve due to traffic and narrow bike lanes. Riding the longboard around Chicago is like wearing a helmet to your job as a barista. it’s inappropriate, unnecessary and dumb lookin. unless you’re retarded, in which case, nice one.

Tattoos of tattoos or piercings- This should really kind of go without saying, but structuralist postmodernism doesn’t work everywhere, so your tattoo of the cool dude with the tribal armband, it’s wack, bro. Sorry. Similarly, I know a dude who’s got a full sleeve of tattoos of various piercing barbells. It’s lame. no. it’s worse than lame. it’s icky. aren’t all the piercings you’ve got enough evidence that you’re into “body mod” (nice term, by the way), without getting the drawings of all that shit that’s hanging out of your face on your arm? Now, I would have included massive facial piercings and ear-pussying (or stretching) on this list too, but there are people who legitimately dig this for some crazy reason, and therefore, that would have to be part of another list that I’d call something like “shit that is gross but still inexplicably popular among weirdos” or something like that.

Being a guy and telling girls that you’re into pussy eating as a way of making yourself seem more sexually attractive to them- Have I written about this before? I think I have. This is actually a move that dudes tend to think will work on women though, so this bears repeating: This will NEVER work on a human woman. EVER. I know, there’s this thing in guys where, when a woman talks about how she likes to give head, we find her instantly more attractive. It doesn’t work the other way. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Talking casually about how much you like to eat pussy is up there on the pussy repellant scale with wearing sandals or just kicking it with an open sore on your face. It just is. Sorry.

Telling people to their face what you don’t like about them (unsolicited) because you think it will make you seem ‘real’- Come on. No one likes being insulted. There’s no time when unsolicited criticism is gonna come across as anything other than a dick move, every time. Oh, you don’t like Wayne’s new girlfriend? Well, shut up about it. You think that your buddy’s band sucks? Keep it to yourself (or better yet, talk about it with your friends behind his back). The new sweater your homegirl really likes that makes her look wide? Tell her you love it. Honesty as a relationship strengthener is a myth put forth by movies, similar to the Terminator and Jesus (which would make a great buddy film, actually). In reality, when your roommate cooks for you, you say it’s good. When your friend’s band sucks ass, you go to the shows and you cheer and say nice things. When you catch your wife drooling over christiano Ronaldo and she quickly composes herself and assures you that you’re better looking than he is, you just pretend that you believe her even though her lies are terrible and insulting. Anything else is just tearing away at the tiny little modicum of civilized decency we still have here, folks.

Look, late start today and I gotta go. More on this later.

Tuesday, June 29, 2010

shock the monkey

Tonight, ladies and gentlemen, is punk night at the Risque Café at clark and sheffield. We’re gonna have good tunes, cheap cans of cheap beer, four dollar whiskey lemonades, dollar tacos and a chance to win the last couple of guest list spots to see against me! in the studio at JBTV on Saturday afternoon. Is that generous of me or what? Oh yeah. Let’s say, uh, tenish? Good deal. See you there. In the words of Will. I. Am. tonight’s gonna be a good night. Also in the words of Will. I. Am. “boomboompow” or something. Oh, and I’ll be there. There will be that. So yeah.

So, I don’t really get what happened to people who wind up worshiping feet. I’ve heard the stuff about being a kid and being under the bed and seeing your mom walking around and kind of associating her bare feet with nudity and things kind of spiraling from there, but is that really the deal? A quick google search reveals that approximately seventy nine percent of the internet is devoted to websites that feature feet and dongs in some sort of perverse dance, and I just can’t imagine that the percentage of guys who wound up under the bed associating feet with sex is really high enough to keep up with this kind of output.

Now, this is a common and pretty mild kink, right? Sure. It’s weird though, because I don’t ever hear about people who have fetishes for male feet. This could be because male feet are disgusting. In fact, I’d guess that probably sums it up right there. BUT, poo is disgusting and if my trips through german/Austrian sex shops have taught me anything, it’s that poo play is alive and well in the western world of porn consumption. So is the gigantic latex body stocking and gas mask situation and so is electrically stimulating your wiener. And that’s just the stuff I can think of off the top of my head. I mean, I’m not judging at all. Lord knows there’s lots of exciting ways to get excited. But man.

How does that kind of thing develop in someone? What’s the Freudian catalyst that leads to shit play or needing to wear a gasmask or wanting to watch an extremely old woman get gangbanged? It’s just gotta be complicated and while I know that it happens on a fairly regular basis, I’m so confounded as to what the possible series of events could be.

Let’s take shocking your wiener (or Estim [my understanding is that it’s short for ‘electric stimulation’] as it’s known in the world of kinks). How do you get there from here? What’s the gateway into shocking your penis for pleasure. Again, I’m not opposed to people doing it. I think it’s great. Yay for shocking the shit out of Wieners! But, uh…how did you figure out that you liked that? How did you try it first? How did your life experience lead you to the place where that notion sounds even remotely appealing?

Okay, I’m about to embark on an undoubtedly a shitty comparison that will liken Estim to depraved anti-social behavior, and I apologize in advance, but keep in mind that I’m just trying to find motive and not compare the acts per se…here we go: When someone first hears about smoking PCP, they tend to hear the stories about crazy inner city black dudes that are jacked up and freaking out and jump out windows and break their legs and keep running and the cops beat them or shoot them and nothing happens and it’s this crazy drug that makes you depraved and fucked up and when you finally see the dude on the news, he looks like he’s been wearing that tee shirt and gym shorts combo for about seventeen weeks (this was my first memory of hearing about PCP at least and I’ve seen several very similar newscasts since. Is PCP exclusively the domain of inner city black dudes in filthy tee shirts and gym shorts? Of course not. I knew a guy in highschool who had a crappy mustache and long, flowing hair who dusted his weed with PCP [he also dipped his joints in embalming fluid, this is called a ‘wicky stick’]. I’m sure there are people who own the very yachts that Lindsay Lohan can no longer go on because of her massive wastedness that are smoking PCP below the deck as we speak. But you never hear about wealthy industrialists smoking PCP on their yachts. It’s almost exclusively, if you believe the news, the drug that’s smoked by poor black guys right in those final moments before they’re beaten by the police…which is kind of my point here) and the result is, presumably, no matter what your life is like, no matter where you grew up or what you’re into, your thoughts regarding PCP, at least at first, are something along the lines of “man, that is a FUCKED UP drug. I don’t want to try that shit ever”.

But people do PCP. Today, a whole shit ton of people will try PCP for the first time and lots of them will probably like it and wind up using it again. How does that happen when the overwhelming common sense suggests that PCP is a ‘bad time’?

Here’s what happens: someone already does PCP and they do it in front of someone else, and they don’t have a ‘bad time’, and they don’t end up getting beaten by the cops or getting pulled naked from a dumpster and it’s a little demystified. AND since there’s SOMETHING wired into human brains that makes the idea of taking drugs interesting (or else the entire world wouldn’t do it. Yes, yes, you’re straight edge. Good for you. That’s excellent [and I mean that sincerely. Clean living is a good thing, folks]. BUT, if humanity didn’t have an inherent desire to get fucked up, being straight edge wouldn’t even be a label or something to consciously acknowledge. Right? You’d be like all the people out there who casually drink/smoke a little Angel dust here and there. You wouldn’t identify yourself as anything. Not clean, not a wastoid, just a regular joe/jane. Regardless, this isn’t the point), the person who was curious enough to be in the room while someone smoked their PCP decides that hey, maybe I should try PCP. Looks fun, and voila. There’s a new person using PCP. Pretty simple.

With shocking your dick for pleasure, though, it’s gotta be different. I mean, I get that maybe you’re somewhere and you’re gonna have sex and someone hooks a bunch of cables up to their balls or whatever and it seems like they love it and maybe they encourage you to try it, but I don’t see it playing out like the above PCP example for one or several kind of convoluted reasons, depending on how you think about things.

Namely: If you belive Freud, which I don’t know if I do, sexual proclivities stem from past experiences/early associations with pleasure and sex and I cannot imagine the situation where electricity is involved. What’s happening? Young Gary is holding the very cheap toaster that malfunctions, sending a small shock through him right as his mom gets out of the shower? He had a hot babysitter who flouted the laws of the Geneva convention and used to strap him down and shock him while she made out with her boyfriend? Nah. You know what? Fuck my very simplistic and probably totally wrong devolution into Freudian theory. How bout this:

Getting out a bunch of gear during sex is kind of a speed bump, right? And it’s not like it’s dildos or some nipple clamps or a butt plug or something that just comes out, looks like what it is and is either introduced or put back away. I mean, I don’t know what a dick shocker looks like, but I bet that it’s not intuitive when you see it that it’s a dick shocker. So, yeah, maybe you push through and you decide, sure, I’ll take a ride on the dick shocker and it’s great and you go buy one and you impress all your friends with the pleasures of the dick shocker (which, by the way, I’d like to posit, don’t sound like fun to me. I’ve been shocked on the arm and I hated that, so I don’t see why moving that sensation to my penis would suddenly make it awesome…but that’s just me, of course. There are people who like hammering nails into their dicks too…check out the documentary “sick” if you want to see that. AND, of course, like PCP, maybe it’s not at all like what it seems [not that I’ve ever tried PCP, mind you. That sounds about as fun to me as shocking your dick]) and it just kind of grows organically like that. But man, I still don’t get how you wind up with the first dick shocker in the first place.

I mean, I guess someone wanted pain, and there’s that whole thing with attaching car batteries to genitals in torture rooms and as we all know torture and sex are closely related (that’s not a snide joke. It’s really true. Both can involve restraint, helplessness, denial of needs and of course both can involve sex [which is a real bummer if you’re talking about torture, but then again, torture is one of those bummer subjects, innit? Always a bummer]) and maybe it started there, but I don’t know…it seems like a lot of shit to go through to get off.

Although, I guess that’s a lot of the appeal a lot of the time, isn’t it? Those crazy bondage knots that people tie or the skydiving and fucking or the crazy latex gasmask with the tube that goes straight to the other guy’s ass and stuff. That stuff is all complicated. I guess that’s in the appeal, huh?

Well, I wasted a lot of time and didn’t really figure anything out today. Every journey can’t end with throwing the ring into Mount Doom though, kids. Sometimes you just wander around and end up where you started, but more tired. I guess if I can leave you all with two things it’s these:

1. Stay away from PCP and

2. get out there and shock those gentials.

See you tonight.

Monday, June 28, 2010

fuck you rudie!

When I was about twelve and my best friend Chris was sleeping over, we decided to sneak out and go see what the city at night had to offer. I lived in lakeview, which is a neighborhood in Chicago closely flanked by boystown, which is exactly what it sounds like. Anyway, back in those days, the neighborhood was very different. What’s now a very nice family neighborhood flanked by an extremely affluent gay neighborhood was at the time a large developing hodge-podge of young families, bohemian hipster dildos, an embryonic, sporadic and not-yet-wealthy or centralized gay scene, a bunch of really seedy peep shows and porn shops (located on broadway between Belmont and diversey), absolutely a zillion homeless people, and a few various roving gangs.

Now, these weren’t gangs in the regular sense of the term. There weren’t packs of Vice Lords or Gangster Disciples walking around (though I did know a few kids who claimed to be either GD’s or Latin Kings…One of them was a fat Mexican kid with red hair named Alfredo who went to Sunday school with me. I have no idea if he was really a latin King, but uh…he was too fat to run, so I hope he had a desk job in the organization); No, I’m talking about style type gangs that are more closely represented by the ideology put forth in the movie The Warriors than anything you’d see on Gangland or in Boys in the Hood or Colors or any shit like that.

Here’s what I mean: There were punks. These punks had Mohawks and all the spikes and straps and shit hanging off them. Now, keep in mind, we’re talking late 80’s here, so there was no hot topic and stuff, so they had to actually make or scavenge their crazy outfits. These punks, as I recall, were legitimately dirty and scary, although I was twelve and it’s probably just as likely that they were all about as intimidating as Justin Sane but I was young and excitable.

The punks had a headquarters in the Dunkin Donuts parking lot (nicknamed Punkin Donuts [I know…I didn’t name it] on the corner of Clark and Belmont. They hung out there and smoked and drank beer and just generally caused a ruckus. This is now a very nice, clean intersection. To think back to all those punks in that lot , I hardly believe it’s the same place.

The next gang, the gang with the most visibility and the only one that you still see in the neighborhood today, is the gigantic, mean-as-shit black trannies. These ladies used to rove in packs, sometimes as hookers down by the peep shows, but often just kind of running shit and hanging around talking loudly and making their presence known. They were and are still very scary. They’re muscular as shit and you need only to see one of them beat the snot out of some poor unsuspecting dingus one time in order to realize that these ladies are not to be trifled with. Like I said, they still roam the streets over there a little bit, but not like they did back then. They were definitely the dominant force of the whole zone.

Finally there were the skinheads and the rude boys. Now, I know what you’re thinking: “Rude boys? the pudgy guys in their grampas fedoras and slip ons that play in highschool jazz bands all over the country? That’s what you’re calling a ‘gang?’

Well, see, the rude boys of today are like the modern housecat, harmless and docile, but descended from something vastly more dangerous and wild. We’ll get to the rudeboys in a bit, but first, the skinheads.

They were all over the place in this era. I remember going to shows as a little kid and just being terrified of the hordes of skinheads everywhere. There were the racist ones and the anti racist ones and the really vaguely affiliated ones that didn’t really make their position on race the crux of what they were doing. The one thing they all had in common was their dumb uniform and their willingness to be on the winning side of a six on one beatdown. They also used to like to stand near the back of the dancefloor at a concert, link hands and run forward, smashing everyone in the place up against the stage. This was called the ‘wall of death’ and it was terrifying. These dudes, much like the black trannies, were absolutely EVERYWHERE in my neighborhood when I was twelve.

Thankfully, these dopey deesh are all but gone now. Anyway, Chris and I snuck out of my mom’s apartment and cruised up to the Dunkin Donuts to see what we could see. I think our motivation was loosely tied to ‘trying to meet girls’ and/or ‘scoring some cigarettes,’ but there was a strong anthropological motive as well.

So, here’s how it went: We took off west, up Briar until we got to Broadway, where the Lakeview bar was located. This place was always overflowing with drunks as it had hours from 6am to 4am every day (six to five on Saturdays) and who preyed on these drunks? The trannies. The peepshows and little ‘red light’ district was just south up broadway, and boystown was just north, so this was sort of the natural confluence of the hookers (who tended to work by the peeps) and the civilian tranny scene from boystown. Also, nothing like someone who’s been drinking all day in the Lakeview to maybe pay a tranny for some services, or be drunk enough to easily roll or something. I dunno. When I got older and started going to the lakeview, I realized that there was always at least one tranny in there at absolutely all times. Same goes for creepy drunk pervs. So yeah. The drunk pervs and the trannies, like the noble Rhino and the wee birds on his back, had a deeply symbiotic relationship that even now I can barely speculate on.

Anyway, we made our way through the drunks and the trannies and over to Belmont. We walked up past the church where I went to Sunday school with Alfredo the fat Latin King and up past the house where legend has it Naked Raygun lived during their heyday. We cruised up and down Belmont and Clark for a while, probably bumming smokes from randoms and kind of circling the parking lot, which was full of undesirable types. We were curious, yet afraid.

A quick assessment revealed that the lot was mostly punks and Goths (yes, the Goths were big too, and also roved in packs. I should have included them in my primer. Quickly: these were late 80’s/early 90’s Goths. All black clad, cure/morrisey/ministry fans who roved with the punks. They all shared the same nightclub [Medusas, which was an all ages juice bar that had three different floors of dancing and shenanigans. Chris and I saw Bad Religion there around this same time. “Walls of Death” abounded at that show.] Goths were about 80% women, which, looking back made the goth dudes far and away the smartest folks around] and were also welcome at the Dunkin Donuts parking lot. I think there was a lot of punk/goth interbreeding, but this is pure speculation).

Chris and I finally braved the inner parking lot and sat on a curb by what I remember as a vaguely attractive older (probably sixteen) goth girl with short hair. There were punks everywhere, notably one dude with a rather large Mohawk that for the purposes of recreation we’ll say was green and fanned out (as opposed to the four or five spikes look).

Soooo, we’re sitting there, pretending to smoke, pretending not to be scared shitless, and probably entertaining the shit out of this girl who could easily see through our little ruse, when somebody yells (and yes, this really happened) “oh shit, it’s the rude boys!”

So, there’s chaos. Chris and I stand up and back away quickly as the punks and Goths scatter. We had never heard the term “rude boy” before at this point and really didn’t know what was going on, but suddenly three or four guys all dressed in very nice three piece suits with cream vests and nice, polished saddle shoes, watch chains and bowler hats came running into the parking lot swinging their gold headed canes and proceeded to absolutely mash the shit out of this guy with the green mowhawk. Forties were strewn everywhere and chris and I looked on in terror at these guys in suits (!?!?!?!??!!) who didn’t seem like they’d just come from an event with their parents at all, and who were suddenly vastly more scary than the skinheads, just completely pudding-afied this poor punk dude all in the span of about 26 seconds.

They finished the beating and took off as quickly as they’d come. I don’t remember what happened to the guy with the Mohawk, but I’m sure someone helped him up and handed him his teeth.

The girl was disgusted. We asked what the fuck rude boys were and were told that they’re kind of like real specific skinheads that are notable in that they wear nice suits and like ‘ska’ which was another word I’d never heard before. I didn’t bother to ask what ska was, as it seemed real scary at the time.

The girl left and Chris and I hung out for a little while longer. About ten minutes went by before a shitfaced old man walked by. He had a hole in the crotch of his overalls and his balls were hanging through, just dangling there like a hood ornament. They were right at my eye level and impossible to miss. It was awesome.

That’s the last thing I remember. I dunno. Bad story? Not much happened, but shit…that was a different time, kids.

Be safe out there, and don’t fuck with the rudies or the trannies. They’ll pummel you.

Friday, June 25, 2010

as promised!

People like to fuck all sorts of different ways and they like to fuck all sorts of different things. Sometimes this is the result of not having something that you actually want to fuck nearby, and sometimes it’s something else. I’ve told you before about my friend who used to heat up baloney in the microwave and then line the hole in his couch with it. Remember?

Now, this DOES sound totally awesome, but I’d bet any amount of money that if there was a regular, even marginally attractive human woman nearby who was ready and willing to bone/be boned, he wouldn’t have wasted all his time/baloney creating this highly kick ass, highly complex vaginal Golem.

Likewise, those shepherds that end up having relations with their sheep out there on the lonely plains, are they doing it because there are no women around? Are they doing it because of some bizarre reverse Stockholm syndrome type deal or are they doing it because they really love sheep more than they love women? I actually think any of these answers make sense.

I mean, if you really REALLY want to bang sheep and you’ve known about this desire since you were young, what better career to get into than lonely shepherd, right? It’s a no brainer. Similarly, the personification of animals is so common even with pets, even with zoo animals that you don’t know at all, that when you’re out there under the new Zealand sky with no one around for miles, damn straight you’re gonna assign personalities and develop close relationsheeps, and those could, over time, due to massive loneliness, eventually turn romantic, I suppose.

And finally, of course, there’s almost no stretch of the imagination at all needed to understand that once a guy’s been standing out in the middle of nowhere with no decent looking women around, he may just eventually fuck the closest approximation to a decent looking woman, be she the kind of sloppy girl at the end of the hotel bar, the gender bending tranny in your office or even, in extreme cases, the sheep you’ve hung out with for the past few weeks. I dunno, man. I’m just saying, people end up fucking weird things for a variety of reasons, not all of which are really fetishes, per se.

Now, the other day I was listening to Howard Stern and there was a woman and her boyfriend on who were ‘working together’ towards the goal of her weighing one thousand pounds. Apparently, he’s a fat fetishist and a feeder, which is something we’ll get to in a minute, and she’s already really fat and kind of likes the challenge of becoming gigantic I guess. I don’t really clearly understand the whole thing. It was VERY disturbing, to put it mildly.

Okay, so firstly, feeders: these are guys (I guess they could be girls too) who love fat and keep feeding and feeding their uh…what do you call them, receptacle partners? That’ll do. So they feed these people and care for them and the goal, ostensibly, from what these people were kind of hinting at, is that eventually the receptacle will be too fat to do anything and the feeder will have to bathe them, wipe their asses, go out to the store, and do everything for them, as the extreme fatness will render them totally helpless.

This, to me, mind you, and I’m not trying to shit on people’s choices here, but this is so fucked up to me that I can’t even really process it.

I mean, infantilism is a big thing (well, it’s probably not that big of a thing…but it’s out there) and that’s kind of similar, but it’s all simulated. Infantilism, for you squares out there, is when you get off on wearing a diaper and being a baby. Your ‘caregiver’ has to do everything for you and you’re pretty helpless. Now, again, this is a much easier thing to wake up one morning and decide you don’t want to do anymore than being so obese that you can’t even get to the kitchen to make yourself a feedbag of pancakes.

I dunno, as I think about it, helplessness and control are two really, really common aspects of fetishism, aren’t they? That’s BDSM in a nutshell, and slave play and all that stuff. Lots of people like to be locked in cages like dogs, kept in the closets and stuff. I actually know a full time slave (I’m not kidding, believe it or not) and she seems totally stoked. Once I watched her kneel down with her mouth open while her mistress (referred to as “the goddess”) used her mouth/face area as an ashtray. And hey! That’s great! If that’s the shit that gets yer crank turning, good on ya. Lord knows that anything that both people can agree is okay is a lot better than (for example) the guy that tries out the surprise facial blast on his unsuspecting partner because in his porn collection it seems like the girls like it (they do not, by the way). But the feeding thing seems icky to me for whatever reason. It’s fucking up her health and i dunno…it seems like mind control or something.

I guess maybe I’m just a square. I mean, I have no fetishes to speak of. I guess I could be classified as a pictophiliac, which is, according to definition, someone who is aroused by watching x rated films, but that’s kind of a half stepping version of a fetish, innit? I mean, I’m also aroused by naked women’s butts and boobs and vaginas and the notion that I may be about to have sex. Are those fetishes? I don’t really think so.

Just for fun, here are some good fetishes I came across today, just snooping around the interweb:

Formicophilia is arousal by bugs and insects crawling on your vagina/wang. That’s pretty cool.

Apotemonofilia- this is arousal by amputation either of ones self or someone else. Apparently, you get your arm hacked off and the memory of it is enough to keep you whacking off for years to come. I guess when the excitement wears off, you have to hack off the other arm and learn to jack yourself off with your feet.

There were those guys in Germany who met via some kind of craigslist deal where the one guy wanted the other guy to eat him and they videoed the whole thing. Remember that? The first thing they did was hack off the one dude’s wang and fry it in butter and eat it together. That’s so gnarly. I mean, eating human dick is unappetizing to me, sure. But that’s not the part of this that really gets my stomach turning. The notion that these guys are there, eating this dick, talking about the weather or the stock market or whatever you talk about while you’re eating your own (or a strangers) sautéed penis; all the while there’s gotta be BLOOD EVERYWHERE! I mean, all over the frying pan and the kitchen tiles and then there’s this guy at the table who’s got a hole where his dick was about ten minutes ago, and that’s gotta be bleeding like crazy. it’s so fucking gross to me, but again…different strokes for different folks I guess. but still, ew.
I dunno. This topic is rich for exploration. Let’s not call this goodbye, just bye for now, eh? Good.

xoxoxox

Thursday, June 24, 2010

men drive like this, but women drive like this. Am I right?

So, shit’s been slipping around here. There was no post yesterday and no post Friday due mostly to my new duties as a parent for two. For those of you just tuning into Bad Sandwich Chronicles, allow me to quickly clue you in as to what we’re about here.

This place was originally designed as a forge where I was to smithy out all the finest, newest and most cutting edge fart jokes and dick euphemisms on the entire internet. Quickly we became obsessed with popular culture, talking shit about various things that drive us nuts (people who say ‘supposably’ or point out casual hypocrisy in others for no reason other than to shit on whatever they’re trying to do) and we subsequently devolved into a stream-of-consciousness entertainment vortex where advice was dispensed, the world at large was discussed and of course, new exciting terms for ballsacks were bandied about like so many balls of string in a house full of cats. We also refer to ourselves in the royal first person (which is to say the plural) when really we’re only one very stinky, farty man. Oh, and I talk about my kids some, because, well…I’m like all parents in that I inexplicably think that you’ll be interested in my kids even though even I only find them interesting when it’s convenient and I’ve never met anyone on the earth who’s genuinely interested in someone else’s random little shits. Never mind that precedent! I’ll continue to talk about the kids as though you care.

I’ve got two of them. A boy who’s 2 and a girl who’s six weeks. They’re cool. The girl still looks a lot like Winston Churchill, but she’s coming around more and more every day. The boy, as we speak is standing on the back of our couch, jumping off all the while screaming the word “Elmo” over and over again. This could be a reference to his elbows, which he refers to as his elmos, or it could be a reference to the ubiquitous, super duper stoned red monster that’s currently on the television and leaking into my dreams. It’s really anyone’s guess.

Watching little tiny people get old is fascinating for a lot of reasons, but one of the things that’s really fascinating is watching them grow from essentially wild animals into things that are somewhat cognizant and reasonable. You see a lot of unbridled human nature in babies and toddlers. Sometimes it’s really scary, but more often than not it becomes a really interesting view into what people are about. For example, just by observing the differences between my son and my daughter, I’ve realized some pretty interesting key differences in the way men and women work, stuff that I guess I’ve been subconsciously gathering data on for a while…it just took comparing these two little gremlins to really cement it in my mind. Here’s what I’ve noticed:

When my son was a baby, he needed a lot of attention. He’d cry, or fuss. Sometimes he’d be happy, sometimes he’d be sad. He’d get tired and get kind of whiny, whatever. Usual shit. With this girl though, it’s a little different. She is just calm and peaceful until she’s not and then she goes absolutely apeshit. And that was the catalyst for my latest poorly thought out generalization about women and men. Namely, men are ego driven assholes who need a wide range of emotions in order to deal with their self-importance; emotions that can be subtly different and most of which we attempt to conceal as we get older. Women, however are capable of only various degrees of “happiness” (used here to mean any feeling of general well being, be it ‘mellow’ or ‘happy’ or just ‘content’) and rage. This rage, however, is expressed in myriad ways and is often very confusing.

Okay, I know what you’re thinking: either A) I’m being a total chauvinist dick or B) I’m completely wrong about this as women are obviously more emotional than men or C) some combination therein. However, I submit that this is only as chauvinist as any blanket generalization, and it actually makes a lot of sense if you think about it.

When men get angry, it’s very different than when women get angry. Usually, they get quiet for a while then as it builds it finally explodes into some sort of orgy of punching or cursing or kicking, followed by a quick cool down period at which point the anger is kind of abated. Now, this is the long form. Often, anger can be pacified during any point in this process with say, a beej, a beer, some magazine, or any other distraction, but you get the idea. From your dad to your English professor to your three year old cousin, men tend to get angry the same way. Women, however do this very differently.

Women will cry, and say they’ve got hurt feelings. Women will pout and say they’re sad. Women will remain distant and aloof and claim that they’re ‘fine’ but digging deeper reveals something about one hundred percent of the time. They’re not sad. They’re not hurt. They’re super duper pissed off. Every time.

Now, don’t misunderstand me here. I’m not saying men are less angry than women. That’s crazy talk. I’m just saying that I’ve seen women around. I’ve tried to figure out what’s bothering them and I’ve been consistently confused from the earliest days of dealing with my mother, to various clumsy entendres with highschool girls to sitting in the kitchen wondering how I’m gonna talk my way into not sleeping on the couch, to just dealing with this six week baby. But she has become my female rosetta stone.

She just gets angry. She’s very mellow. She’s slow to stir emotionally, and generally she’s patient, but once she’s set off, there’s no ancillary negative emotions there, it’s just unbridled rage. And in her, it’s easy to recognize because, to go back to an earlier paragraph, she’s still a wild animal and she hasn’t yet learned the unspoken (and I think before now undiscovered by non-women) code, namely, that there are many ways to couch rage in various other emotional garments.

Men are the idiots who just get angry and act angry. Women are hurt, or confused, or conflicted or sad, but really when the rubber hits the road, if they’re going so far as to give it a name, the truth is that they’re furious, and that’s that.

This is particularly confusing to men for several reasons. 1) It often seems as though the anger, once finally unsheathed, comes out of nowhere, since it takes a long time to cultivate, and it was previously being called “tired” or “not happy” or something, and B) men have a decidedly more simplistic emotional range, in that they often get sad without being angry, but that’s because it takes less.

Men deal in ego and any slight, any belittling, any sense of confusion produces some small emotion. This is often perceived as “gay” or mistakenly as “womanly” and since these are small level emotions, it’s easy to shelve them and pretend they aren’t there. Consequently, men tend to stifle almost all emotion until they get to the point where they can’t anymore (the aforementioned punching, panting cursing rage), which makes most men seem like they only ever get angry and when they do, watch the fuck out. And lots of men are very, very angry. Anger is the stock in trade of men, to be sure.

Women on the other hand, are (as a rule, [and yes, yes, this is just a generalization and no, you’re not like this at all, individual woman/man. Sheesh, relax. This is written by and for idiots as a way to pass the time on dump breaks at work, you know]) not as self absorbed and therefore have little need for the small level bullshit emotions that come with penishood. Here’s a quick example of what I’m talking about:

You go out with your friend and his girlfriend. She’s kind of nice you think, but at the end of the night, you’re struck by the fact that you and your buddy talked the whole time and she hardly said anything. Did this woman have a bad time? The answer is not necessarily. Of course it’s possible that she hated every second of it, but it’s also possible that you and your buddy were perfectly entertaining and she was comfortable just sitting there and hanging out, not compelled to always be the center of attention (now, in fairness, this is often a situation that ends badly. I think everyone I know, man or woman, has had the fight about being ignored by the group and just having to sit there. But I’m not talking about being ignored here. I’m talking about a fairly innocuous hour and a half or so of light conversation with, let’s say, someone you haven’t seen in a while and their girlfriend who, for whatever reason, doesn’t say much). Now, if you reverse the situation, and you’re suddenly a woman out to see your homegirl at the bar, and her new boyfriend is there, what changes?

Well, a few things. Firstly, (and this is a little off topic, but it really can’t be ignored) women are so used to dealing with dumb male ego that they will, consciously or not, usually include the boyfriend in the conversation more than men would do for the visiting girlfriend. Secondly, if that did not happen, and the boyfriend ended up sitting there all night not really saying much, he’d be bored. He’d be slightly stung that he was ignored, but the overwhelming emotion would be boredom, every time, for every man. EVERY TIME. EVERY MAN. He would never be content to sit there and just hang while the girls talk, like the girlfriend potentially could. There would be no anger, there would just be a smug feeling of “This shit is dull. Stupid sex and the city movie. Stupid conversation about handbags. I wonder what Neil is up to”.

Women don’t need all that shit though. They’re good until they aren’t any more, which is to say that they’ve got a high threshold for bullshit, but once it’s passed, the emotion you’re dealing with isn’t gonna be boredom, it’s gonna be a super pissed off girl who patiently waited for you to not make her angry, which you failed to do. The results? Confused man, who is thinking “what’s the big deal? I’ve been ignored before. It’s just kind of boring. Why’s she so fucking angry?” followed by shock that the man could not understand why the woman is pissed off, followed by yelling, smug dismissal, more yelling, maybe some tears, a tense walk up the stairs and then some angry sleep or some computer porn, depending on if you’re the man or the woman.

I dunno. Maybe I’m wrong, but looking at these babies and their behavior, and retroactively applying this theory to every situation I’ve ever been in, it seems kind of right.

Come back tomorrow where I’ll explain all fetishes (except feet, which is kind of dull). Yay!

xoxoxo

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Ah shit! Almost forgot!

Risque Cafe tonight- Punk Rock Tuesdays hosted by me! Good tunes, cheap cans and dollar tacos! Hope to see you there!

There's a real entry below.

"I don't watch TV. It's for idiots."

Good morning queefs. It’s Tuesday and I’m about to hit the farmers market and get me some fresh bacon and some blackberries and shit. Nothing punker than a few fresh berries, am I right folks? Fuck yeah. Maybe a homemade perogi or a fresh scone? Fuck yeah. Up the scones, brah. Anyway…

Our generation has this strange dyslexia when it comes to hardline emotions, specifically stubbornness and ‘integrity’. Now, these are different things in one hundred percent of situations, but you’d never know it to talk to anyone under the age of…no. You know what? I’m wrong. It’s not a generational thing. At the very least, it’s an American thing, but I suspect it’s just a human thing, and it is, to be sure, one of the worst personality traits in almost all humans. AND we all exhibit it at least a little. Is this too ethereal right now? Okay, here’s what I mean:

We’ve kind of romanticized this notion of the stubborn grump who won’t move when the hurricane blows ashore or won’t change his mind and bend with the times even though it seems like the obvious way to go, who knows what he knows and sticks with it to the bitter end. We’ve romanticized it because it’s an easy story to tell, and an easy way to inject emotion into a series of events.

Nothing like getting that feeling at the end of a movie, that “oh man, that dude was right all along! Those handsome strangers are actually soul sucking vampires!” or “Man, his adherence to the old school ways of doing things really showed these new jack dildos a thing or two about tried and true methodology!” (this is a common theme in films and, as we’ll see later in this essay, this general theme is the essence of history being rewritten by the losers).

Likewise, the tough-as-nails humanity that is manifest in being an old man riding out a storm because you ain’t a-leavin yer home is just the emotional hook that weathermen live for. It ain’t easy doing an emotional piece on the weather, kids.

The problem is, stubbornness isn’t inherently good at all. You don’t hear about the dozen old men who were too stubborn to move and so they were crushed beneath their taxidermied boar heads when their shacks collapsed, and frankly, the guy in the movie who didn’t trust the dark and mysterious strangers is the same guy who votes through Arizona immigration laws in real life. Real life is not simple, and there’s no way to go through it with firm, unbending parameters about what you’re gonna like or not like, and yet people foolishly think that this methodology is not only possible, but actually somehow praiseworthy, when it’s actually short sighted and dumb.

What’s the point in refusing to ask for help when you need it? Even kick ass dudes like Sherlock Holmes and Ted Theodore Logan have sidekicks to help out when shit gets hairy. Sure, doing shit yourself against insurmountable odds is cool, but getting help and still doing it beats the shit out of failing completely because you were too much of an asshole to ask for a hand. Hell, even when we’re not talking about insurmountable odds, stubbornness is still completely ridiculous.

I’ve got a buddy who has all sorts of hardline stances about life. For example, he hates coffee. I don’t know why this is. Perhaps he had some dumped on him as a kid or perhaps a highschool girlfriend broke his heart over coffee. He’s never said, (and honestly, I seriously doubt that even he knows why [I bet he’s got some prepackaged answer like ‘I just think it’s gross and I don’t like caffeine’ but that doesn’t even go halfway towards explaining his aversion]) but the results are ridiculous. He won’t so much as enter into a coffee shop under any circumstances. He distrusts the brew and its dealers to a point where if his choices were to eat lunch with his friends at a restaurant that had a full kitchen and table service, yet identified itself as a coffee place, or eat at a gas station or burger king alone, he’d pick the gas station or burger king every time (never mind that those places sell coffee too. It’s complicated). This is not speculation. I’ve seen it happen on several occasions

I know that a lot of people have this same problem with culture. People decry and dismiss something as ‘shitty’ because it fits into a genre that they don’t currently appreciate, and they completely quarantine themselves from all forms of said genre as a result of their dumb stubborn guidelines. This is actually quite common, and we all are guilty of this to an extent. The thought process is the following: “I’ve never heard any dance music that I like, therefore there’s no reason to listen to any more dance music, because my sampling has determined that it’s not for me. It’s all crappy.”

Consider how stupid this really is: This is akin to hating all Mexicans because Carlos in your 8th grade class was a nose picking pervert. The notion that you can reduce a whole category to your limited experience with it is absurd. It’s a snap judgment based on almost nothing. There are so many different people in this world and some of them probably make dance music that absolutely blows your mind (and some of them are probably Mexican). BUT, thanks to this dumb notion of stubbornness=integrity, people feel absolutely justified and even smug and superior trapping themselves in these stringent guidelines for what is and isn’t acceptable. (If this still seems a little disconnected, consider your most dismissive hipster friend hating on something if you need a quick illustration of this stubbornness being passed off as integrity)

Think about it, nothing has ever been accomplished by stubborn refusal to take in what’s going on and recapitulate the scope of one’s ideas. There’s a famous fable about this: John Henry and the steam engine. It’s not pretty, but life’s not pretty. Shit changes all the time and you can either change with it (even though change is terrifying and hard to deal with and it fucks up everything) or you can stay rooted in your convictions, ones you put in place when you were younger and dumber and had less information, and get left in the dirt.

Then you can complain about how it was better back in the day when people had conviction and all that, but you’ll only be talking to the rest of the losers who were too cowardly to change too. Because, folks, that IS loser talk. Anyone who longs for the old days is really saying this: “I fucked up. Now my life sucks because I’m a stubborn dumbass who didn’t change with the times, didn’t alter my world view and shit on everything that I felt was out of line. Now, the world has passed me by. My smarter friends are all successful and happy and I’m stuck here on these docks with you fucking losers. I miss the old days when the people I admired hadn’t yet figured out that they were better than me and moved on.”

Or they’re old and they can’t get boners anymore. But that’s a whole different story, folks.

Oh, and as a quick response to the Germans who have inexplicably galvanized around the idea of me hating Germans and Germany: I love Germany. I’ve had great times there, and I count a German born, German raised dude who lives in Berlin to be among my very favorite people on the earth. Likewise, my trusty interpreter toby is a first generation German American. I don’t think I’ve EVER had a bad time in Munchen. I like sausages and kraut and beer. There’s nothing wrong with Germany but the compliments…well, I guess while we’re on the subject, there is one other thing: Namely that you guys are pretty quick to whip out the criticism and negativity, but god forbid someone call you on it. Then it’s nothing but tears and hurt feelings. Jesus. You’re never gonna take over the world with that kind of pussified attitude. Seriously. Okay. that’s settled then? Good.

Later.

Monday, June 21, 2010

gone daddy gone

Father’s day has come and gone like Haley’s comet; wonderful to behold, definitely worthy of having a beer in the wee hours and not due to return again for what seems like forever. It was wonderful, to put it mildly. A birthday is okay, Christmas is equal parts suck and blow but fathers day, sheeeeeit, man. It’s literally a holiday that’s specifically devoted to beer and televised sports, at least for now.

Some father’s day soon, I’m sure I’ll be greeted at five thirty in the morning by two little well meaning gremlins carrying a tray of what can only be barely described as ‘breakfast’ and I’ll be expected to eat the burnt toast smeared with mayonnaise and jam, the underscrambled eggs and the snickers bar mini that they’ve slaved over as thanks for all the butt wiping I’ve provided during the last calendar year. And it will be (again) five thirty in the morning. Then they’ll give me a tie or a golf club coozie. That’s the father’s day of the future, but my father’s day yesterday was a stone groove, bros. A little world cup, a little beer, a steak for dinner. Some pancakes for breakfast after sleeping in to the ungodly late hour of TEN AM!!! Not bad, folks. Not bad at all.

It’s funny, being a parent; just today I found myself thinking a thought that I never ever thought would warrant my cognition. That thought was “man, it’s really hard to clean this feces out of these wrinkly balls”. That’s being a dad. One second your life is all wide open and in front of you and you’re banging this hot chick unabashedly after a night of being out late before a day of sleeping and brain dead lounging, the next moment you’re scrubbing the poo out of a two year old boy’s ballsack in a bathroom stall at the local YMCA with a wet nap. What’s next? Sticking my head in an elephant’s ass? Damn straight I should be allowed to sleep in and eat pancakes and steaks one day a year! Fuck. The funny thing is, this year, right-RIGHT before father’s day (Friday, to be exact) I really had my first day of hardcore parenting, and it was brutal.

would you like to hear about it?

Okay, well, I don’t care. I’m gonna tell you anyway. Here’s the scene: It’s six PM. I’m about to leave for work. My kid, the old one, the boy, is on his little ottoman at my bathroom sink brushing his teeth (which is code for eating toothpaste, splashing water everywhere, and hiding anything unlucky enough to be left on the counter [nail clippers and wallets are good examples of these things] someplace where it will never, ever be found). I go to get some socks. When I return after about a minute, he’s got his hand in this jar of iron supplements. He’s soaking wet from the tooth brushing and the green coating on these pills bleeds like crazy, so his hands are green and his mouth is green. I ask him “hey, did you eat any of these?” and he says “yup.”

So, I look at the jar. It’s just a vitamin, right? No big deal. Well, here’s what it says on the jar: ‘iron poisoning is the leading cause of death among children under the age of six’.

That’s the kind of thing that wakes you up. So we call poison control and they tell us to go to the closest emergency room. When we ask if we should just go to the children’s hospital, they say no, they’re already on the phone with our local ER and they’ve told ‘em we’re coming. So we freak out, dive in the car and drive down to the ER where they take his blood and Xray his stomach. We sit there for three hours before an ambulance comes and drives my kid and I to the Children’s hospital for an overnight stay. My wife and the baby take off to get us food and vow to meet us at the next hospital. Everyone is losing their mind. Well, my kid was stoked on the ambulance and all the attention, but the rest of us were fucking basket cases.

The dude that drove the ambulance was a magician. He also answered his cel at one point and said “yeah. Yeah, I can do that, but it’s gonna cost you fifty bucks. If you don’t have it, I’m gonna take it home with me. Okay, bye”. I don’t know what that was about, but it struck me as a pretty awesome exchange under the circumstances.

Anyway, we get to the children’s hospital and we’re sharing a room with a mom and a kid who looks like he’s been knocked around pretty good, possible broken arm at least, and sounds like he’s got respatory problems. The cops are in there interviewing the mom, who’s beside herself. She’s also, for some reason that’s blowing my mind even now, watching “worlds wildest police videos” that’s featuring all sorts of people bleeding from the head and getting their teeth knocked out and shit. Anyway, my kid’s losing his mind, crying, kicking, screaming, and at this point it’s about ten at night. He’s usually asleep at 8 and he’s usually not got a needle and IV attachment in his arm and he’s usually been fed and he’s usually not in a cagelike contraption at the children’s hospital surrounded by cops and cute little mangled babies and he’s wondering where his mom is and why all these diodes and stickers and wires are being attached to him. I’m very little comfort during all this. The nurse got me a chair to sleep in next to his cage/crib, which was nice in the same way that when the amazon tribe gives you the eyeballs of the monkey to eat it’s ‘nice’ because it’s obviously the best they can do, but it’s not exactly what you were hoping for.

Well, his mom showed up with the baby and some mcnuggets and pretty much saved the day. We were told that things were looking good but we’d need to wait a few hours for more tests.

My wife and baby eventually left and my boy fell asleep and I walked around the unit up there on the ninth floor and came to a shocking conclusion: A children’s hospital may sound like a fun time, but it’s easily the most depressing place on earth. I’ve had more fun at church, honestly. I’ve had more fun on road trips with just my mom. I’ve had more fun being punished by those guys who say “wow. I really thought there would be more people here. Guess you guys aren’t that popular, huh (said usually in german accent)?”

In short, it really sucked. BUT, at 2 AM they did the second round of tests, determined that he’d probably not eaten more than one pill at most (a suspicion/hope that I had from the beginning due to the roughly one minute period of time he had been left unsupervised), and we were allowed to go home.

This was Friday. My wife had friends in town for one night only. We had a sitter. All that fell by the wayside. I just didn’t show up to work. I may be fired. All so we could do what? Pay something like forty five thousand dollars for an ER visit, an ambulance ride and a semi overnight stay in a second hospital. Cooooooool.

Now, of course all that is fine since he turned out to be okay. It’s just probably the biggest emotional rollercoaster I’ve ever been on. Thank god father’s day was right around the corner to soften the landing, right?

That’s being a parent folks. Don’t even think about getting your fucking socks. It’ll cost you.

Thursday, June 17, 2010

get momma's pryin' bar

Man, so these kids, they’re smoking, they’re drinking beers at baseball games, they’re growing up so fast, right?

I mean, I just watched that smoking toddler video and the accompanying news report about his mother’s concerns over his addiction and a few things crossed my mind instantly:

1. Um, that kid is super fat. What about that? He’s two? He’s got the body of an iowa sow. He looks like a zeppelin. He probably doesn’t need to deal with the subsequent weight gain that accompanies quitting smoking. ever consider that, cruel media pundits?

2. he’s two. How bout this for a way to get him to stop smoking: Quit giving him cigarettes. I mean, I know that over in Indonesia cigarettes are just on the ground and in the trees and right there next to the lollipops and fleshlights in the convenience stores, but this might be one of those times when you’ve gotta take a brave stand and just stop buying your two year old packs of smokes.

(During the course of the newscast I saw, this dude came up to the kid and started taunting him with cigarettes at the airport. Now, that’s a rough situation. Here you are, a mom with your two year old who’s addicted to cigarettes, and you’ve got some asshole taunting him and trying to get him to smoke. That sucks for sure, but keep in mind, mom of smoking toddler, you’re dealing with the kind of dude that taunts toddlers and thinks that smoking kids are funny, so you probably just want to get your kid away from him asap. I mean, giving a strange kid cigarettes is creepy on more than a few levels. Definitely ‘windowless van’ level stuff, if you know what I’m saying.

3. All these people who are so hyper outraged over the smoking toddler in Indonesia and the other one in China are forgetting that those kids both work in canneries. Who are you, western world, to deny a little boy a few cigarettes after a nineteen hour shift in a dangerous factory?

I hope we can all be a little more open minded in the future, when it comes to smoking toddlers in the far east. And that’s all I’ll say about that.

Now, the kid at the baseball game, he’s just awesome. For those of you who haven’t seen it, there’s some little kid out there who’s parents like the Phillies and he’s getting a lot of attention (and requisite media outrage) because he’s been caught on tape drinking a beer in the stands at the game. It’s a miller light, so well, I don’t know what I’m really trying to say here. Bad beer? Sure, but it’s the ballpark. That’s what you drink at the ballpark, so I don’t think that’s what’s got everyone so upset. He’s really chugging too, and there doesn’t seem to be any sense that anyone around him is surprised, or even there with him. It’s a pretty good video. Man, if I ever see that kid at the airport, I’m gonna buy him a beer. That’s for sure.

I don’t know, folks. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. This manufactured media outrage is so asinine that it’s actually dangerous. Sure, kids aren’t supposed to smoke. Sure, kids aren’t supposed to have beers. But kids aren’t supposed to do a lot of things. Neither are adults. The problem is that every time anything at all happens all these nitwit newscasters throw up their hands and start freaking out like a bunch of outraged senior citizens.
Well, guess what, folks. The world IS going to hell in a handbasket. It’s the fucking end of days. No two ways about it. There’s smoking toddlers and kid touching priests and oily birds and fish and some kardashian sister you’ve never heard of staring in some show you’ve never heard of that’s being watched by millions. There’s no more Gary Coleman. Betty White has won the Golden Girls endurance race. God is dead, they’re talking about putting Ronald Reagan on money and man, the fact that there’s such a market for outrage tells you something about our world:

namely, that everyone wants to be pissed off themselves, but can’t be bothered. If outrage was common among your friends and neighbors, you wouldn’t want to watch Hannity on television. You’d be up to your dick in people complaining and raising a stink and all that. You can’t sell people something that’s free and plentiful already…except water, I guess. Huh. Maybe I’m missing the point here.

Maybe the point is this: we’re so dumb as a nation (not as individuals, so relax) that we’ll sit around and pay for anything at all. We’ve completely shirked the idea of accountability to the point where we don’t even think twice about just forking over money to make things easier. It starts with things like ecological disasters being handled with cash and it ends with things like people being a little thirsty and rather than bringing water from home in a reusable bottle, they just buy a plastic bottle of water at the store. That’s like buying air, people. It’s fucking duuuuuuuuumb. Now, I do it too, so don’t think I’m trying to be smug here. I’m also lazy and entitled and about the only thing I’ve done lately, in terms of venting any outrage is write this series of paragraphs. I’m no better than anyone else out there with their plastic burrito on their lawn chair with their feet in the kiddie pool watching Maury. And that’s kind of the thing too.

Ah, I can’t get into it now…my kid (the second one) seems to be all out of vodka, so I gotta run.

xoxoxo

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

titty residue

About three weeks ago my computer crashed and died. I brought it into a mac surgeon but it was too late. He used the term ‘paper weight’ as he handed it back to me, letting me know that if one day I’d like to sell him the screen, he may be interested, as it wasn’t too jizz encrusted.

Hey! Speaking of jizz encrusted, head down to punk rock night at the risqué café on Clark and Sheffield tonight. I’ll be your host for punk rock, dollar tacos and super cheap cans, plus, a special so radical I CANT even tell you about it in print! Oh, and I think there’s some bands playing tonight too. Could be cool. I don’t know much about ‘em, but they’re apparently on tour. Come on down. Free admission. Stripper pole.

What was I saying? Oh yeah, my computer died. The result is that I have to use my wife’s computer, which thankfully is here due to her being home for maternity leave. The big point here is that sometimes she’s on this thing, and I end up unable to post my blog until four in the afternoon (that’s after some of you have already left work!) So, sorry about the delayed state of affairs here. My mainframe is down. I’ve got the very best people in the BSC I.T. department working on it, but for now I’m bumming this computer like it was smokes outside the denny’s after goth night at the youth center. You know what I’m sayin, right?

So what do you guys think about fake cans? I think they’re all right, personally. I know, I know. It’s surgery that pretty much plays into the phallocentric hegemony and exists to satisfy men’s unrealistic ideals of blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. I get it. You don’t like ‘em. Well, I like ‘em just fine. How bout that? Oh, go ahead and throw your stones. I’m sure you’re just perfect. Jeez.

Now, I’d never encourage anyone to get fake boobs out of the blue, pretty much because it’s just a rude and fucked up thing to do. I mean, the deal is pretty much as follows when it comes to people’s appearance: don’t tell someone they need surgery to fix it. Period. It’s not cool to say “hey, you could use some hair plugs” or “have you ever thought about stomach stapling?” or “holy shit, if you got your jawbone filed down a little you’d be a stone cold fox!” That’s not polite. Under any circumstances. I don’t think that really needs to be said, right? Only the spencer pratts of the world would invent, prey on and goad someone’s insecurities like that (and those creepy Hollywood doctors who say shit like “babe, you’re a ten. Buuuuut, I could make you an eleven[what a dick])

However!!!!!!!!! if someone you know is real fat and they’ve tried lots of things and they’re at the end of their rope and they say “I’m thinking about the bariatric surgery,” I don’t think it’s out of line to be supportive. I mean, sure, there are lots of way better ways to lose weight and I think that surgery is often abused and it really sets a wacky precedent in this country when you’ve got people getting gigantically obese due to just cashing in and indulging every single urge for dingdongs and judge Mathis that they’ve ever had and then using surgery to “get out of it” BUT being fat is really unhealthy, and if you think that’s your answer, well, nothing motivates like success, and fuck, I dunno. I’m not gonna shame you. Being fat is rough and getting skinny ain’t easy.

“but we’re not talking about fat people, Beex! (not that I agree with your totally bullshit lazy American stance on bariatric surgery either, by the way!) We’re talking about women augmenting their tits in order to satisfy some unnatural ideal!”

Sure we are. Here’s the thing: tits are important. You can pretend all you want that tits are nothing but potential food sacks that ride around on the front of women and there’s a few gross men here and there that leer at them but otherwise they’re just a part of the body and beautiful no matter what and blah blah blah, but the truth is much MUCH different than that and you know that it’s true. Yes you do. Now who’s being naïve?

Women obsess over tits as much as, if not significantly more than men. Women check out each others tits and probably are more catty and tit-fascinated than guys for this simple reason: guys pretty much like tits. Big tits, small tits, fat tits, pointy tits whatever the tits, we’re okay with them in general. Oh sure, there are ‘big tit guys’ and ‘small tit guys’ but really, in the great scheme of things, tits are pretty cool. We’re okay with them. Women on the other hand will judge the shit out of some tits. “Too big! Too pointy! Wear a bra! Those things are sloppy/floppy/uneven!” And they know what they’re talking about. Tits make or ruin many an outfit, many an evening and many an impression. Tits are, like it or not, very, very important.

There are some tits, however that just defy all laws and are gross. These are the really bad tits brought about by I dunno what, but you know the ones I’m talking about- The wrinkly droopers, the veiny white electric bags, the French toast slabs et al; these are tits that even men can’t deal with and guess what? Walking around with these kind of tits tends to be devastating on the psyche. Result: unhappy woman with gross tits and confidence issues so severe that a tit job is the least of her worries.

And when you’re unhappy with your tits, it’s like being unhappy with your haircut. It’s gotta be humiliating just walking around with tits you can’t really stand behind. Appearance is closely tied self esteem and to happiness, and that’s not to say that you need to obsess over your looks, but if you’re not happy with your looks, it’s very easy to be unhappy in general, and that’s where can enhancement (or Canhancement) comes into play.

(and before you get all excited, I’m not saying there’s any idealized standard for how someone has to or should look in order to be happy. I’m simply saying that in a subjective world, if you are cool with being fifty pounds over weight, and suddenly you’re seventy five, or if you’re cool with having a Kevin spacey type widows peak, but suddenly you find that you’re doing the Ed Harris toilet seat look, well, that’s not easy to deal with. This isn’t about crazy ideals. this is about personal happiness and standards, folks.)

Sure, there are terrible boobjobs out there. There are also great ones. There are people who regret getting new boobs terribly. There are also scores of women who say it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to them, and you know what? That might sound shallow, but I don’t think it is. Yes, it’s surgery. Yes it’s cosmetic, but to pretend that the way you’re born has to be satisfactory to you is to kind of be a hardline asshole. She just wants some tits. He just wants a full head of hair. Give ‘em a fucking break. Life is cold and scary. Let ‘em fix it if they don’t like it, you cruel appearance-ists!.

Finally, there’s the whole thing about them ‘looking fake’ or ‘feeling fake’ or whatever and let me tell you, that’s just the last cry of the self righteous dipshit. If your tits are saggy and gross and you hate them, looking a little fake is better than looking the way you’ve grown to despise over time so much that you’ve arrived at toying with the idea of surgical enhancement. Feeling fake? Who’s that a problem for? Show me a guy who’s feeling tits and I’ll show you a happy guy. Period. He’s not bummed about the way they feel. He’s so stoked he doesn’t care. It’s true. I’ve touched both kinds of tits, and they’re both great, folks. No complaints.

I dunno. Again, I’m not one for encouraging surgery, but I’m sick of people talking about fake tits like they’re this horrible indicator of a sick depraved soulless bimbo. Sometimes a girl just wants her dress to hang awesome and have some tits that go with her shoes.

Is that so wrong?
See you tonight.

Monday, June 14, 2010

sakka!!!!!

A few months ago, I was hanging out with a friend’s parents. The dad is vaguely Italian American and was talking about italy. I mentioned that I have family in italy and have an Italian middle name. When I told him my name, he kind of scoffed and told me I was pronouncing it wrong.

This, folks, drives me up the fucking wall.

We’ve talked recently about pronunciation and how bad conversational pronunciation tends to bum me out, but there’s a whole other side of this argument that seems to be tangentially cropping up in the shadow of the world cup and I’d like to address it as best I can right now.

My mom lives in Missouri in the middle of nowhere. The closest town has maybe two hundred people in it and is called Versailles. It’s pronounced ver-sales. When I tell people this, or generally when people hear this, they jump into a smug, self righteous pitying head shake and weep for the ‘poor dumb hillbillies who don’t even know how to properly say the name of their own town,’ which, let me tell you right now, is extremely obnoxious.

See, here’s the deal: That’s what they named their town. If I have a cat, and I name it Lemon, but I pronounce it luh-MOAN, that’s not wrong, that’s what the name is. It’s MY cat. You can’t and wouldn’t ever presume to come up to me and say “well, the name of that cat is supposed to be pronounced ‘LE-mon,’ you poor uneducated slob” but that’s exactly what people are doing with this town. A town and a cat aren’t all that different when it comes to naming them, after all. You pick a name, settle on a spelling and pronunciation and bingo; shit’s named.

In New York, there’s a street called Houston, pronounced House-ton. Is that stupid? It’s their fucking street. The people who live there get to say it however they want. There’s no precedent for this kind of thing that’s really appropriate. If there was, there would be no heteronyms, for one thing, and for another thing, it’s all fucking just condescension anyway. Here’s what I mean:

A person from france (to borrow a scene from the Simpsons) pronounces the word chowder differently than we do due to his accent. He’s not saying it ‘wrong,’ he’s saying it using the filter of language that he understands, with a silent consonant and inflection that he grew up with. For a Midwestern American to interpret the letters that make up ‘versailles’ as ver-SALES seems to me to be the exact same thing. However making fun of the French guy is xenophobic and boneheaded, but making fun of the hillbillies is somehow sophisticated cocktail party fodder.

The most important point here, people (and it’s a point I have just barely touched on) is finally that words DO have proper pronunciations but when those words are names of things, the people that named them are ultimately right, regardless of what the letters look like. THEY INVENTED THE FUCKING NAME!!!! That’s it. The way my family has been pronouncing my middle name for centuries is the way that my family’s name is properly pronounced. I don’t care what you think you know, or what your level of sophistication is. My name. My family. That’s how we say it. This pronunciation denotes this strain of bloodline, and that’s all there is to it. Similarly, THIS pronunciation does NOT mean a church in france, it means a town in Missouri. This is NOT a town in texas named for a civil war era politician. It’s a street in New York, because practically, if you’re walking around manhattan asking people for where “Houston” (town pronunciation) is, they’re gonna say “texas” and that’s not productive. And if your ‘proper’ pronunciation gets you headed to the completely wrong place, while everyone who’s pronouncing it ‘wrong’ gets to where they’re trying to go just fine, who’s the asshole? Who’s actually wrong?

Now, finally, I’m not suggesting descriptivism over prescription when it comes to pronunciation or definition generally, that would be dumb. I’m just saying that when it comes to proper names, there’s nothing so shitty as being both elitist, smug and wrong all at once.

What does this have to do with the world cup? Well, assholes, denoted language is denoted language and fighting it because of some archaic and unquantifiable idea about propriety is shitty, one hundred percent of the time. Here in America, the shit’s called soccer. In most other places it’s called football. That makes sense, football is a good name for the game. But listen up, penis holes: In England they call fries chips and chips crisps. They call cookies biscuits and use the slang term ‘bird’ to refer to women, while we use the more Americanized ‘hoes.’
We have different words for all this. Is that wrong? Fuck no. It’s the evolution of language in different parts of the world. In Australia they use English differently than we do here OR there, likewise in South Africa, and it’s fine. The notion that I can’t call soccer ‘soccer’ because you call it something else, even though I grew up in a world where it’s called soccer, well, that’s pretty fucked up, right? I grew up somewhere else. Shit’s got different names. In different parts of America hoagies, grinders and heroes are all different names for the same sub sandwich, but nobody’s wrong, it’s regional diversity.

SO, before you get your panties in a bunch about people saying ‘soccer’ instead of football, how about you take a second and think about what the world cup is supposed to be about in the first place and appreciate the different things that the whole world brings to the table. I bet the Japanese don’t call it football. Are they wrong too, or are you, smug dick?

In conclusion, go Cameroon!

Friday, June 11, 2010

doooooom!

It’s Friday. This weekend is ribfest, which is exactly what it sounds like, and I’m pretty excited. I have to work tonight, and the bar I bartend at (risqué café at clark and Sheffield) is right down the road from Wrigley field where the sox/cubs game is taking place this afternoon. Should be a rollicking good time. Come say hi if you’re not drunk enough from the Blackhawks parade.

Okay, so I was just sitting here, surfing the internet mindlessly when I came across Perez Hilton’s new website (how new is it? I couldn’t tell you. It could be two years old for all I know) that’s just entirely devoted to cunt flashing and tits. It’s not really all that cool, but it’s deeply engrossing. Anyway, as I was sitting here, checking out Peaches Geldof’s naked cans, I began to think a little about the state of our fine nation, our western world, if you will.

I mean, what kind of people are we that we willingly just waste our time clicking on images of Lindsay Lohan getting out of cars for hours on end? Do you think they’re doing this in China? No way, man. And yeah, it’s because the internet there is censored, but there’s something bigger going on here, and I dunno…America’s doomed, right? We all know that, don’t we? I don’t like it any more than you, but look at this trajectory we’ve made in the last hundred or so years:

Our great grandparents grew up in a world that was changing, a lot like our world is changing now. Cars, refrigerators, uh…I dunno, electric xylophones and motion pictures and shit like that. They were living in a huge, vastly spaced out world, hearing about all sorts of technology that people had dared not dream of a generation before. Motherfuckers were getting houses fitted with lightbulbs and there were cars coming through now and then and the world was CHANGING, and it was never gonna be the same. Some ohio hillbillies went out to the coast and built a goddamned flying machine, for fucks sake!

You get the idea. All of a sudden the game was getting changed and it wasn’t just suddenly being able to settle the argument about how much the fattest guy ever weighed by using your phone. It wasn’t just a faster way to get mcnuggets. It was like one second you’re churning your own butter in the dark, the next second you’re in a fucking machine that takes you places, drinking carbonated beverages with ice from a machine in it, all for the first time ever. This had to have been an exciting and scary time.

Anyway, our grandparents, or ‘the greatest generation’ as they’re referred to by Tom Brokaw (and themselves) came along and pretty much spruced up the place using the technology that was becoming more readily available. And sure, they often did it by employing some variation of feudalism and they wound up in a shitty depression even worse than the one that we’re in now, but when the war (the Big One part deux, folks) came along, they went off and fought and came home and settled into jobs so they could get their piece of the pie.

This was the ‘american dream;’ getting a job, didn’t have to be glamorous, but a job, a decent job, and putting a dishwasher in the house and a television and being able to get a nice car and working your dick off and taking care of folks and then boom! You retire and your kids take care of you, heaven, Valhalla, yadda yadda yadda. This is why, for a lot of you, your grandparents, even if they were never rich, have some money. They, as a generation knew how to save and they had clear goals and saw concrete and pragmatic ways of achieving them.

Then our parents came along and brought this new and kind of poisonous attitude into the equation. Now, it wasn’t their fault, per se. You can’t help when you’re born and social evolution is just that, and in the gene pool that is ‘america’ or even ‘western society’ or whatever, we’re all just parts of the helix, so it’s not individuals I’m talking about here, but just the way things went. Human beings as a group are like water, and they flow to the easiest possible solution 100% of the time and they also kind of tend to hate their parents, so coming out of all that hard work and pragmatism, there’s gonna be some devastating effects on the horizon.

Suddenly, the ideal of a safe home and creature comforts and stuff were standard. Therefore there was no reason to aspire to that, per se. Instead we got this generation of people cruising around like a bunch of completely selfish dickbags, chasing ‘self actualization’ and bullshit ideas like that; fucking, fighting, dicking people over, just flaunting their brazen disregard for shit all over the place. Keep in mind, folks, this is the generation that essentially invented divorce. These folks so despised the generation above them, (who, let’s be frank, got pretty fucking smug out there in the burbs after WWII, and then sent them into viet nam and well, I’m not trying to be a ‘greatest generation’ apologist or shit on our parents generation. They also did some great shit. They finally made some decent rock music, got some cool haircuts and popularized the orgy and pornography. Also, they did a lot for the rights of marginalized individuals, and generally hooked up the rights of humanity and all that. I can get behind all that stuff. And it’s all at LEAST as important as anything the folks before them did) that they dismantled the notion of stability and reimagined the American Dream as the individual setting off as a venture capitalist or as a bold new thinker. If the generation before valued working your way to the top, our parents generation valued starting at the top, even if it was a small top and growing something underneath them.

Take Ben and Jerry. They were the presidents of a gourmet ice cream franchise way before it was anything more than two gay hippies jacking each other off with cherry Garcia-lubed hands in their bathtubs, but the shit expanded and suddenly: woah! Who knew that you could become a huge CEO just by doing what you love, no matter how obscure! This became a huge move for these folks. Then we got born.

Now we’re born into this world where it seems like any asinine notion is possible, not because it is, mind you, but because our parents, rather than extolling the value of hard work, have extolled the dumb virtues of ‘everyone being good at something’ and have beat into all of our heads that we’re special. Never mind that we’re a generation that’s gigantic and there’s NO fucking way that most of us are anything that even remotely approximates special. Look at us. We’re mongoloids.

We’ve grown up seeing famous rock stars and famous movie stars (two things that have existed for a while, but haven’t been up in the public’s face every second of the day for long) in huge numbers and we’ve all decided that these kind of crazy pipe dream jobs are not only possible, but pretty much the only way to go. And EVERYBODY thinks their dumb, idiotic, crappy idea is worth a shit, when lemme tell you, it ain’t. Not mine, not yours and definitely not your tubby pal over there.

Everyone’s a fashion designer or in some dumb band or an author or a filmmaker or gonna be in the NBA or gonna write the grand unifying theory of cognitive science (the guy who lived next door to me in the dorms in college was gonna do just that. He also thought I was CRAZY to have an answering machine that was just a crazy preacher chanting ‘thank you jesus’ over and over again. “they’re all gonna think you’re religious, man!” he’d say. Wonder what burger king he’s working at today) and that’s it. Our American Dream is ‘not working at all’ but instead becoming a famous and wealthy success by doing something that we’d pay to be able to do.

And THAT, folks, is why we’re fucked. Who’s gonna step up and do the shit that needs to be done? Not me. Not you. Maybe the Chinese? Not likely either, as they’re burning coal to power their freezers and fucking at a pace that puts rabbits to shame.

The generation above us hasn’t done shit for this place but plunge us into debt and let our infrastructure and environment plunge into disrepair and we’re a WAY more selfish and ‘instant gratification’ oriented group of dildos than they are.

I guess the whole thing, though, is that we’re all apparently doomed by terrorists, plague, war, environmental catastrophe and general depression brought on by only interacting with machines, so whatever, right? Might as well check out unratedperez.com all day. What’s the fucking point in doing anything? Why make your bed? You’re just gonna get into it at night again anyway, right?

Fuck…

Thursday, June 10, 2010

Shades of...uh, wait. This is familiar somehow..

greetings earthbags. It’s finally time for me to discuss Omaha and the grossest places I’ve been while there. I’m not sure how much of this I’ve covered in the past, but I know there’s a lot of new folks out there, so I’m not too concerned about repeating myself a little.

Oh, new folks, how are you? Just to catch you up on the local BSC jargon real fast: you, my readers, are my dogs of war. The comment section at the bottom of each entry is called the Sock Drawer. It is so named due to the preponderance of comments in there that are mostly jizz related in content. The only other place on earth that has so many things that contain that much jizz inside is a teenaged boy’s sock drawer (ladies, that’s beause he’s whacking off into his socks, and he’s doing it somewhere in the neighborhood of five or six times a day[true!).

Those Dogs of War that post in the Sock Drawer are also known as Socks. This, I realize is an imperfectly fashioned metaphor, since the comments really should be socks, not the commenters, but look, you see the problem here, right? What am I gonna call ‘em? Sock Factories? That sucks.

I guess I could call them “Teenaged Boys” since they’re the ones depositing the jizzy socks in the drawer (and because, well, frankly lots of them ARE teenaged boys) but that’s confusing and kind of pervy sounding and anyway, in this litigious day and age, I’m not really into being gender specific about wide swaths of folks, you know? Also, I guess it’s ageist and….look, let’s just say that those ballbags over by the dumpsters handing out garbage masquerading as food to bums ruined all this for everyone. Besides, Socks is good enough for me and I’m usually kind of a stickler for metaphor, so if it bugs you, uh…get the stick out of your ass, man, honestly.

We all caught up now? Good.

Okay, so Omaha is actually a decent little town. It’s got a pretty sweet bar scene (what’s that place called, the 89er? I love that place) and some really cool bands have come out of there. PLUS there’s a real live skyscraper and some really good skateboarders and a thriving gay scene and when the town shuts down at one AM (boo!) you can just drive over the river to Council Bluffs Iowa and party there until two (YAY!).

Now, don’t get me wrong, it’s not the best place in the world or anything, but I’ve had some good times in Omaha. There was this place (I hope to god it’s gone now) called the Cog Factory which was a DIY punk rock club out by what was at the time a fairly questionable neighborhood. I mentioned once in this space a long time ago a story about some friends of mine (Leann and Walter) videotaping a crackhead trying to suck his own dick for ten bucks (“I almost got the tip” he says a few times in the video [so I hear. I politely declined to actually watch the video myself]) in a parking lot. That was right by the Cog Factory.

Yeah, so I guess that paints more of a picture of a town that’s got drug problems and not a lot of shit for people to do than somewhere that’s “actually a decent little town,” but look, take my word for it: Right now, within a few miles of you, there’s something super fucking depraved going on. Something you can’t even imagine. NO MATTER WHERE YOU LIVE!

Don’t believe me? Look, my friend Toby is from Enumclaw Washington. He grew up on a dairy farm in the middle of nowhere, beneath the mountains and above the plains. I don’t know much about Enumclaw besides that it’s got a dairy farm, it’s 100 miles from Seattle, it’s very small, it’s the last town before the mountains and that NASCAR great Kasey Kahne (who’s apparently a very nice guy) is from there. What else? Oh yeah, a few years ago some guy died there, in some kind of shed/stable deal not a mile from Toby’s family dairy farm when the horse he was videotaping himself getting fucked by stuffed his horse dong into him so hard that it ripped up his guts.

I know. Gross. I’m sure you’ve seen the video. I, again, have not. I don’t enjoy watching humans and animals having sex together or killing each other or dying, so that video isn’t my cup of tea for at least a few reasons. However, I know it’s a big hit on the web (which is disgusting, by the way. It makes me weep for humanity) so I’m guessing you all have watched it.
Anyway, not here to judge, just saying gross, depraved, unimaginable shit is happening as we speak within a few scant feet from you, no matter if you live in one of those Bangladesh hooker shanty towns or in a picturesque foothill hamlet in wonderful relative solitude. Someone is fucking a monkey or eating human skin or doing shit with teeth and assholes that we haven’t even heard of yet. It’s out there, so don’t get too bummed on Omaha or Walter and Leeann. They were just kids with a video camera and ten bucks. If that’s the worst thing going on around you, you’re lucky.

Oh, where’s the story about the gross place in Omaha? I already wrote it. It’s an entry entitled ‘Shades of motherfuckin’ greeeeeey!’ from last year. Check it out if you’re so inclined.

Me, I’m off to take a three minute nap before my kids wake up. Toodles.

Tuesday, June 8, 2010

mother! Can you keep 'em in the dark for life?

So yeah. Tonight at Risque Café, I’ll be hosting the third consecutive Punk Rock Tuesday, complete with tacos for a buck and cheap cans of beer, shotgunning contests and the very best music that my ipod knows. You should go. There’s a tv that’s got naked girls on it and my co-bartender, a young and impressionable man named David (who just got in trouble with the law for placing his nekkid junk on the counter of a starbucks and drunkenly requesting some suckage from the barista) will be wearing a vest…at least that’s what he texted me today for some reason. I don’t really know the implications of all of this, but I’ve got high hopes for our young, soon to be sleeveless friend. He’s shown a level of dangerous volatility in the past that’s matched only by his boyish, if-I-ever-go-to-prison-I’m-gonna-be-such-a-penis-receptacle-esque charm. It’s gonna be a good time, that’s what I think. See you tonight.

So, anyway, a few days ago I picked up where I’d left off, telling you guys about the downside of being in a band. I started off about a year ago, talking about some of the worst places I ever stayed and I continued the other day in a little piece about punishers entitled “lemme get your hat, bro,” which I think was misinterpreted by some. Now, I’m not gonna get too far into this, but let me just say for the record that just talking to someone you don’t know doesn’t automatically make you a punisher.

Punishment is usually categorized by the punishee feeling trapped and wanting to not be in the conversation. This isn’t always the fault of the person initiating the conversation, however, like when I have to take a dump or I have to get a beer or I see someone that I know is a punisher approaching and I need to get the fuck out of there. That’s not you being a punisher, that’s just bad timing. Likewise, it’s very common for a group of people to be talking to someone (let’s say Danzig, just to make things short and evil and sweet), and three of them are totally cool and one of them is a terrible punisher. Danzig notes this distinction. Everyone who talks to Danzig is not a punisher. Just the punishers are punishers. I know this is a little confusing, so think about it again inside global/social parameters:

On any given day you interact with lots of people, either on the phone, on the bus, at the McDonalds or at the bar or wherever. Most of these interactions are benign and cool and some of them are even pleasant and you walk away from the dentist’s office thinking ‘that old man mopping the floor was pretty awesome,’ but it’s also pretty common to just be annoyed and think ‘hey dildo, how ‘bout you shut up and let me get on with my business’. That’s a punisher. Like I said, it doesn’t just apply to being in a band. Certain towns are just packed with what Chris and I refer to as ‘life punishers’ who are just walking around everywhere punishing everyone: places like Vegas, New Orleans, LA, SF, Vegas and Amsterdam spring instantly to mind. I guess punishers tend to rally around pleasure zones (which is, conincidentally, the name of the first porn I ever saw. It was about a friendly and mammoth cocked alien named Dork, from the planet Or-gon who was kicking it around earth just uh…fucking chicks, I guess. Highly recommended).

Okay, are we clear on punishers now? You guys aren’t all punishers. That was never my intended message. A thousand apologies for any hurt feelings (except for those of you who are punishers, who, by definition probably don’t know who you are…sigh).

Ah, jesus! I was gonna write about this spot in Omaha…and for the second time it’s been hijacked by punisher theory. Fuck! Dumb punishers are burgling my time even now!

Oh, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the wonderful outpouring of support from a member of the B of A brass after my little tantrum about not being able to retrieve my bank records the other day. Thanks again duder!