moving day!!!!

I've moved. You can now find this amazing compendium of dickjokes and ill thought out rants over at the vastly more fashionable

www.badsandwichchronicles.net


See you fucks over there!

Plum Island

Well, I hope all you lard-asses had a nice Thanksgiving! Me? Oh, I ate until mashed potatoes leaked out of my dickhole like some kind of slow trickle, really tasty gonorrhea and I drank my fill of beer and wine and whiskey, all while watching vastly more football than I could ever hope to give a fuck about. It was a tri-generational affair that was, overall, a great success. I particularly enjoyed the fact that, with my whole family stuffed into my house and nowhere to go and nothing to do but sit around in our slovenly cycle of compulsively gorging and passing out, I was able to watch a few movies that I really like.

There was absolutely nothing on that fit the criteria of being both A) interesting looking and B) something I’d never seen before so I settled on some of my old faves like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (one of the most fun movies of all time) Private Parts (actually not that great overall when you really dissect it, but a great portrait of a pretty spectacular career and personality nonetheless) and finally, Silence Of the Lambs, which is totally terrific in every way.

While watching Silence of the Lambs in my near comatose state I was struck by a thought: Namely, that I will never be brutally or senselessly murdered. This is, obviously, not a rational thought at all, but as I was sitting there watching Buffalo Bill get that woman to help him get his mattress or whatever into his van, I found myself thinking “that kind of shit will never happen to me.” Several reasons why not instantly came to mind.

Firstly and mostly, I’m not the kind of person that gets senselessly murdered. I don’t live in a bad neighborhood, I’m a fairly large male, I’m not wealthy, I’m not often out late, I’m almost never completely alone, and most importantly, I’m not a prostitute. The kinds of people who get senselessly, brutally murdered are usually women, kids, prostitutes of all kinds, hobos and people who go around with lots of drugs or money on them. I don’t do any of that stuff.

For another thing, it just seems unfathomable that I’d find myself in that kind of situation where I’d be helping someone get something into their van or get outsmarted and wind up trapped in some kind of torture pit or whatever. I think I’m a little too paranoid for that kind of thing. And finally, it just seems unfathomable. That kind of stuff, while widely sensationalized, is pretty uncommon. Most people don’t like killing other people and of those very few that do, they don’t end up killing THAT many people in the great scheme of things (regime leaders and bigtime gangsters notwithstanding) and I just think the odds are in my favor to the point where I don’t have to worry about psychopaths any more than I have to worry about, say, nukes or leprosy.

But you know what? NOBODY thinks they’re gonna be savagely murdered, even the people who end up as nothing more than a cock and balls in the crisper of Dahmer’s fridge. Those guys didn’t think they’d get savagely and senselessly tortured and murdered. That chick helping Buffalo Bill get the mattress into his van didn’t think she was doing one of the last things she’d ever do (I realize the two major flaws in this example…just bear with me here). To use some slightly different examples that are all over the news, Joe Paterno didn’t think his legacy was gonna be ‘pederast sympathizer’ and back when she was just partying and getting pregnant and being pregnant and having kids Casey Anthony didn’t think she was gonna be known to the world as the worst, luckiest mom of all time.

I have an acquaintance in Germany (the guy who had all the Iranian fighting cocks in his living room for those of you long time BSC readers) who’s ex father in law was so fed up with his wife’s shitty attitude that one day he went into her supermarket, blew off both her legs with a shotgun while she was working and then killed himself. He’d never been even remotely violent or hot headed before. There was no indication he was gonna snap. I bet NEITHER of them thought that’s how they’d go out, but uh…whoa.

Similarly, that lady with the chimp that ate her face, she had a whole life made up of little accomplishments, hopes, dreams, fears and noteworthy moments that, until that chimp ripped her face off, were gonna be the sum of her existence. She wasn’t thinking that she was gonna be torn apart and given one of the first face transplants and live out the rest of her days blind and crippled because her shitty choice in pets went crazy and pulled her into pieces.

Do you see my point? I don’t THINK I’m gonna be savagely murdered, but John Lennon’s last thoughts were probably ‘hey, this dude’s reading Catcher In The Rye’ and I’m almost positive that those Ed Gein dead skin mask girls didn’t think they’d end up as lampshades.

Life is fucking WEEEEEEEEEIRD, man. You really never, ever know what’s gonna happen next. One day you’re just rolling around, being awesome and the next day a bunch of weirdos are cutting off your tits for hats while you’re forced to listen to someone read a TV guide in the back of a body shop.

My point is, be careful out there. This place is full of dicks.

a foreign national's guide to the traditional american thanksgiving feast

Well, international readers of BSC, thanksgiving is upon us and as always it’s this time of year when depressed American losers such as myself sit around and listen to everyone carrying on and on about what they’re thankful for. In just two short days, we’ll all come together and stuff ourselves full of shitty foods that we seem to recognize aren’t that good 364 days of the year. The object (and I’m not making this up) is to make yourself so full that you become hugely uncomfortable and eventually pass out in the vapor of your own gluttonous sloth. A true thanksgiving victory is only achieved if, after your nap, you go back and pack more food into yourself. The farting gets pretty atrocious, honestly.

The food, it should be noted, is not only unhealthy but also prepared in such a way that encourages rabid gluttony. This is particularly interesting because the ACTUAL items being prepared (let’s just go with the basics: turkey, potatoes, sweet potatoes, green beans and cranberries) are extremely healthy (the exception being potatoes which are neither healthy nor bad for you in their natural state…like brandy). HOWEVER, these items, once thanksgivinged become some of the most deviant monuments to slothful corpulence ever assembled on one table. Let’s examine, eh?

The turkey: Turkey (no skin!) is one of the healthiest meats out there. It’s lean, it’s packed with protein, it’s gross so you can’t eat too much of it. It’s practically a superfood. On thanksgiving this cannot stand, so what do we do? Well, we stuff an entire turkey with a mixture of bread, eggs and meat and then smear butter all over the skin so the skin itself becomes crispy and even MORE deliciously bad for us (Some Americans, not content to stuff the turkey with such mundane items actually stuff the turkey with a duck that’s been stuffed with a hen that’s been stuffed with ham [I am not making this up]) . We cover the turkey with various fatty drools (gravy!) and shovel it down by the bucketful. But hey, if you’re gonna go crazy on something on thanksgiving, make it turkey. It’s still healthier than everything else on the table and it won’t be as awkward as going crazy on your creepy uncle that used to make you shower with him.

Potatoes: Potatoes are so often made into unhealthy treats that it’s tempting to suggest that the potato itself is unhealthy. It’s not. It just tastes terrible unless you smear it with grease and butter and lard. On thanksgiving, America has taken it a step further by not only mixing potatoes with insane amounts of heavy cream and butter, but also liquefying the mixture into a smooth consistency that could be consumed with a straw. There is nothing as completely emblematic of the fallacy of the healthy American diet as a gigantic pile of buttery mashed potatoes covered in gravy being greedily inhaled through a straw by an obese four year old boy. I don’t know if that happens (it probably does) but it’s not a stretch to imagine it, is it? That means we’re doomed.

Sweet Potatoes: These are a real genuine superfood. Good thing we cover them with butter, sugar, honey, cinnamon and a fucking LAYER OF MARSHMELLOWS before we serve them. Yes, this shit is delicious. It’s the best vegetable preparation ever. But when this is the healthiest thing on the table, it’s a lot like looking around at your new roommates and deciding to share a room with the rapist because he seems the most sane and at least he seems to shower every once in a while.

Green Beans: We put the green beans into a casserole dish. We cover the greenbeans with cream of mushroom soup (cream, mushrooms). We cover that with some indeterminate little deep fried crispy things that can’t possibly have anything to do with the natural world. This is technically eating greenbeans. It’s also technically picking around greenbeans to eat mouthfuls of heavy cream-soaked little crispy things.

Cranberries: another ‘superfood’ (I hate that term by the way. Broccoli used to just be something you should eat because it’s a green vegetable. Now, we spend so many meals eating flaming hot cheetos and twix bars and shit that the natural benefits of a regular old vegetable have been somehow elevated to super human. Nice. [I love flaming hot cheetos and twix by the way]). However, you won’t really recognize your little buddy the round, berry-esque cranberry on the thanksgiving table. No. In fact, all that’s left of the cranberry is a gelatinous mass that is shaped exactly like the tin can it came in and sliced into discs. This is another one of those items that could be readily consumed with a straw if you felt that lifting and lowering the fork was too much work.

Of course, after all this come the pies. Pies are SUPPOSED to be bad for you, so I’m not gonna really waste time admonishing everyone for having pies. Pies are okay. My wife makes a pumpkin cheesecake that will melt your dick right off. It’s so spectacularly good. One slice contains the annual caloric intake of a typical Darfurian too, so it’s PACKED with energy. In fact, if you don’t go run like, seventeen miles (or hectares or whatever) right after you have a slice, you can actually sit there and watch your dick disappear into your expanding abdomen.

Well, that’s all, internationals! I hope this little breakdown was enlightening. You all have a happy, regular old ho-hum Thursday while we here in America prove, once again, that as long as we’re the fattest we are the best. USA! USA!

xoxoxoxox

Here he is! Your new American Idol!!!

Let’s say you got onto American Idol. What would you do? We are gonna have to make a few assumptions, and here they are: 1) you can sing well enough that you got on the show and 2) you enjoy singing. That’s all. Essentially, you’re just like you now, only instead of being untalented and full of spite and bile, you’re a good singer with an enjoyment of something, dig? Okay. Oh, we need to make one more assumption and that’s that this new season of American Idol, the one you’re on, is somehow still relevant and if you win, you WILL become a very successful recording artist, albeit one that works with Coca Cola and Ford and all that shit, but hey, you’re gonna be singing for a living and that’s better than the shitty job you have now.

Yes, the whole thing is perhaps a little unsavory. While getting onto American Idol is a great opportunity, there’s no doubt that it’s pretty brutal in a lot of ways. You’ll be scrutinized by the world, your appearance will be ridiculed (probably, look at yourself for fucks sake!), your singing will be criticized harshly, you’ll be forced to sing dorky songs with horrendous arrangements and you’ll be constantly judged by three complete dipshits. You’ll have to publically beg America to like you and you’ll be forced into the indentured servitude of doing shitty commercials for the aforementioned Ford Scion and various Coke products. People will speculate that you’re gay, or a little bit too fat. They will, if you proceed onwards, interview your horribly embarrassing parents and your friends and they’ll take a camera crew to the house where you grew up and they’ll exploit every inch of everything that you feel is true and good and genuine about yourself all in the name of revenue. You’ll have to talk to Ryan Seacrest. You’ll watch as the person you’ve always prided yourself on being is reduced to an archetype with questionable (at best) taste in music as you belt out shit like Heard It Through The Grapevine or The Lady In Red. It will not be entirely pleasant.

BUT! You’ll be in LA living in a nice hotel. You’ll be famous. People will want to do nice things for you. Your selection of dicks/vaginas on demand will greatly increase. You’ll have the chance to show the world your talent. You’ll get shit for free. You’ll potentially step ever closer to living the dream of just doing something you like, seeing the world and getting paid for doing nothing more than you’d already do in the shower every day. If you win, or even just do well, you’ll be able to tell everyone in your life that you don’t like to go fuck themselves. You can make as much or as little of your fame as you want once the show is over, meaning that if you decide the limelight’s not for you, you can just not do any touring or recording and you’ll eventually fade back into obscurity. OR you can tour and make records and wind up in crazy hot tub parties with Diddy and Ke$ha and piles and piles of strawberry cocaine. It’s your choice.

So what do you do? Do you try as hard as you can? Do you play the game? Do you show people a really palatable version of yourself and do the interviews and jump through the hoops? Do you really take the criticism to heart and go for it with everything you’ve got? Do you forego sleep and leisure to do everything you can to insure that you’re gonna move forward and give it the best possible try you can?

Or do you just act like yourself, wear the clothes you normally wear, show up, sing the songs you want to sing, not putting any more effort into it than you do with your regular day to day life in the hopes that your “realness” will win over the hearts and minds of America, and generally treat the whole thing like a game?

Or perhaps you actively try to subvert the entire thing, doing things so outrageous, picking such bizarre songs, acting like such a maniac that the show has no choice but to deal with your shenanigans, perhaps forcibly removing you or asking the audience to vote you off? What’s your move? Do you squander the chance of a lifetime because it’s not ideal or do you bust your dick/clam to make the most of it because the ultimate result would be better than right now?

Because when you consider the amount of eggs in your mom’s uterus and the zillions of loads in your dad’s balls (eeew), just getting here, getting born, is like winning the lottery and this place that we all occupy does, indeed feature avenues by which, if you bust your ass, can end in mind boggling success and a life of doing exactly what you want to do. There’s essentially no difference between getting born and going to LA with American Idol. Both offer the chance of insane success and morbid embarrassment and both can be subverted, ignored or squeezed for every precious opportunity. Just being here is pretty fucking exciting. Sure, it’s scary and it sucks a lot of the time and people are cruel and confusion and shittiness abounds on a massive scale. Dickheads like Ryan Seacrest are around every corner being vapidly awesome at collecting money for nothing discernable and self doubt is pervasive and there’s always someone younger, better looking and more talented than you doing exactly what you’re trying to do but just so much better.

But man, what the fuck is the point if you don’t try to give it every single bit of energy you have? This is the only chance you’re ever gonna get at this, this one life, right here that you’re living in. While you sit there in the dark, slowly whacking off over the course of 4 straight hours, you’re literally the youngest and most dynamic that you’ll EVER be again. You’ll be dead soon, and you can definitely subvert existence or ignore it and look back on a life full of bong hits, internet porn, texting and a zillion endless days feeling like a useless shithead. You can. A lot of us will. But that’s gonna be depressing. When you die, wouldn’t it be nice to remember that even if you fucked it all up, at least you did your best to do SOMETHING?

Of course there’s also the argument that if you’re just destined to be a shithead failure, it’s much nicer to just let the current carry you. Fighting only gets you tired, and makes your meat tough and stringy.

Eh, I dunno. I just thought maybe you’d like a little motivation on a blue Monday.

Or not. Fuck it. Who cares?

Sweet, what's mine say?

GO SEE THE FALCON WITH NAKED RAYGUN NEXT WEDNESDAY (THE DAY BEFORE THANKSGIVING) AT METRO!!!! TIX ALMOST GONE!

Thanks. We now return to our prepared program:

How fucking stoked is Ashton Kutcher today? He’s getting divorced. He’s fucking STOKED!!!! Think about this: he’s been married to an older (admittedly smoking hot) woman with three kids for the past six years. He’s a ‘beautiful drifter’ millionaire who’s been playing dad and house and acting like it’s okay that his wife goes to bed at 8 and gives him two blowjobs every quarter and generally, shit’s probably been good (sixth anniversary hot tub infidelity fuckfest notwithstanding). Fuck, man. That marriage rocketed him into the land of the superstar.

Obviously, though, he’s a guy and a desirable one at that (not to me, I find him to be a little too feminine and doughy, but still) and the notion of how many awesome, wanton, under the table/in the hallway/up against the speaker in the club/six faced blowjobs he could be getting from hot, enthusiastic women every single minute of every single day has not been lost on him. For six plus years he’s watched his mom-wife work up the nerve to stay awake late enough to bone him and now, now he’s free. What a day it must be to be Ashton Kutcher. It’s like waking up and realizing you no longer have acid reflux or Chron’s disease. The world is suddenly your oyster, and this has GOT to be made even sweeter because in Ashton’s case, the Chron’s disease made him rich and famous beyond his wildest dreams.

In fact, a more accurate assessment of what’s gotta be happening in Ashton’s life would be if we correlate him with Midas. He went for it, found out that his wish wasn’t all it seemed, then somehow parlayed that into being able to turn shit to gold whenever he wants (of course the gold in this case is hot anal sex with anonymous stewardesses on sexy international flights) without any of the ‘prisoner in my own wish’ elements at play. He’s beaten the system and here’s the best part:

Most people get divorced and they’ve got kids and it’s shitty and it makes you sad and poor and you get spit out on the other side and you’re old and you’re out of the game and you don’t know what the fuck to do or how to get laid or even talk to single people and you’re surrounded by all the weirdos who are single and everyone seems like a loser and you’re not even interested and the people you’re interested in aren’t interested in you and you miss your kids and you cry and you eat dogfood right out of the can in your shitty one bedroom ‘bachelor pad’ because you can’t even afford off brand spaghetti-o’s and you don’t shave and you get fat and your wife starts fucking someone that you just KNOW is not only giving it to her better than you did, but ALSO getting blowjobs from her and that burns you up inside and again, you cry and you realize that you can’t go home again. For better or for worse you’ve been domesticated and turdified and the you that was out there contemplating getting married vs ‘all the pussy I could get if I don’t’ get married’ is long dead and all that’s left is you, your dogfood breath and your porn collection for the rest of your sad, armpit stained days.

But that’s not Ashton, man. Those kids weren’t even his!!!!!!! He’s skipping out of those privacy gates like someone who just took a six years in the making, six foot long impacted dump. He’s only what? Thirty two? He’s one of the most well paid dudes in Hollywood and the people that are interested in fucking him? Well, if you lined them up, they’d stretch to the sun and back sixteen times. In fact, he’s got, by my count, about fifteen years of just fucking everything under the stars and sleeping in and not giving a fuck before he Demi Moore’s some young starlet, knocks her up and maybe marries her.

At that point, he should have it all figured out. Although he seems like he’s terribly stupid. Maybe he’ll just hop right into another tired old bag who’s already been there and blown that, and he’ll fuck up THIS beautiful rebirth as bad as he fucked up The Butterfly Effect (which was a genius piece of cinema ruined by Ashton’s over the top performance [I can’t even bullshit this…that was one of the most uniquely shitty movies I’ve ever seen…his name was Chris Treborn?!!? That’s some heavy handed shit, folks]).

Ah, I dunno. Maybe he’ll fuck it up eventually, but for now, what I wouldn’t give to be a fly on the wall of the room that contains his disgusting, herpes and syphilis laden petri dish of a hot tub. I bet the party is just getting started.

Have a good weekend.

rambling incoherence

It’s a busy day. I’ve got some meetings and then I’ve got Falcon practice because we’re playing a show with the mighty Naked Raygun at Metro next Wednesday. Bring your grandmas folks, because this amazing performance by the Falcon is sure to drench the panties bunched around even the most ancient and desiccated vaginas. That’s a moneyback guarantee folks (not valid). So come out to the Metro on the day before thanksgiving and throw your bras and dickslings, eh?

Anyway, last time I rapped at you I was talking about parent/teacher conferences and I was feeling pretty good about the whole thing. Of course, it’s short sighted to feel too good about anything that’s going on in schools when congress is declaring that pizza is a vegetable and making sure that our kids get plenty of delicious fries with every lunch. Not to mention, it seems like there’s been a real spate of child buttrapes in the news lately, which is disheartening, to put it mildly. I mean, don’t get me wrong, whenever I’m showering with a bunch of kids just going about the ins and outs of regular old naked, sudsed up horseplay, a penis can sometimes up and slip right inside someone, (who HASN’T had that awkward experience? Am I right?) but this isn’t about who raped whom or who’s pawning off horrific monstrosities as ‘towel snapping’ (though it bears mentioning that one of the big defenses for Sandusky’s actions is something along the lines of [and I’m paraphrasing his pedophile lawyer here] ‘He’s a big kid, a jock. That’s what jocks do, they take showers after practice and they roughhouse and stuff.” Okay, firstly, I was involved in various organized team sports from the time I was 4 until I was sixteen. In all that time, I NEVER once experienced a team shower. The notion seemed and still seems weird, and no one wanted [wants] to get naked around each other and well, I can’t be alone on this one. I’m pretty sure that the team shower is the stuff of movies. I remember that sophomore year we were ordered to shower after swimming class in gym but realistically only about 2 dudes did it and even then it was in their swimsuits [and they were the dweebs].

(But fine, I’ll accept that maybe it happens. I never played organized football. Maybe team showers are the holy communion of football practice. Maybe [and I’m doubting this seriously] everyone positively LIVES for the team showers afterwards. BUT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The coach is NOT EXERCISING DURING PRACTICE, and therefore DOESN’T REALISTICALLY NEED A SHOWER AT THE END OF PRACTICE [I am, for the sake of giving the benefit of the doubt {barf} ignoring the completely inappropriate nature of being a grown man and jumping into a shower with someone else’s kids]. I don’t think that there’s any way to spin that one. If you’re showering with my son, sorry. I’d like to see you in jail if you’re not my wife or someone age appropriate that he’s dating or at the very least someone he very much wants to bang [you know, once he’s old enough for that kind of thing to become a non-creepy, reasonable idea.] There’s just no reasonable excuse that places a naked old man in a shower with naked kids, right? Right? Okay. Good. Glad we had this talk).

No, my concern is with the fact that they’re beginning to phase out cursive in schools!!!!! Can you believe it! An outmoded, nigh unreadable style of writing that only serves to confound and annoy and then be suddenly forgotten is being phased out of curriculum! What the fuck? But I learned cursive! So did my mom and dad! Holy fucking SHIT!!!! NO CURSIVE? What’s next? Rape showers and force feeding our kids plastic garbage? Oh. Okay, let’s keep some things in perspective, eh?

Cursive is useless. Well, I guess it’s not ENTIRELY useless. Women continue to write in some form of bastardized cursive their entire lives. I suppose it’s technically important to have an exercise that forces children to correctly manipulate their fine motor skills in unplanned ways, but cursive is hardly necessary these days, what with all the typing that people do. I mean, I hardly write shit down at all anymore (and when I do, its not in cursive) but fine. I’ll admit that my ‘cursive is useless’ statement is kind of harsh, but you know what? There are other ways to teach fine motor development. How about a regimented art class? How about music classes with instruments? How about fucking knitting? People make LIVINGS making music and art and scarves, but there’s not a fucking person on the earth who’s paying the bills by writing cursive.

It just infuriates me. Our nation is fat and slovenly, lazy and riddled with diabetes. We construct nothing in this country. Yet we shave off art and gym and shop classes like it’s no big deal at all and then something completely outmoded and antiquated gets put on the chopping block and people lose their fucking minds. I mean, I don’t fucking understand. We had plenty of time to learn cursive along with everything else and now that there’s no gym or art or music, it seems like there’s PLENTY of time for cursive, but whatever. I don’t think it’s worth getting pissy about.

In fact, I think the whole thing is fucking stupid, but you know what? This is what we’ve sown. The last forty years has been a systematic pillaging of the social and physical infrastructure that the ‘greatest generation’ (an infuriating but shockingly apt moniker, at least in terms of what I’ve seen) by my parents’ generation. And the worst part is that they didn’t even raise us well enough to give a fuck or fix it. Look around. We’re all visionary geniuses now, myself included. Everyone’s great and no one fails and OUR kids are EVEN WORSE. We’re fucked, people. They’re dumping mercury in lake Michigan and running out of money in Detroit. Prisons are now legal slave labor camps that have created a powerful slavery lobby (in the name of the drug war) and nobody has a job and the only fuckers getting rich are the same dicks that got us into this mess in the first place.

Fucking cursive. Fuck cursive. I’m moving to Uruguay.

Don't tell me how to raise MY kids!

Last week I attended my very first parent/teacher conference as a parent. For some reason I feel like I used to go to the parent/teacher conferences when they were about me, but that could be wrong. No matter. The point here is that I went in there, listened to a very nice older woman talk about my kid, who she told me, as nicely as possible, is an utter spaz. He can’t sit still and he likes climbing and running and when he has to sit still, it’s pretty much an impossible task. He’s no longer allowed to sit next to his best friend because together they’re an unholy menace.

I don’t really care about that shit. I mean, sure, I’d like him to be well behaved and not be disruptive, but he’s a three year old boy and I’ve got what I believe are fairly realistic expectations of what is to be expected of him. As far as I’m concerned, all that shit will fall into place, and there is really only one thing I want him to take away from preschool: the ability to make and maintain friendships (this includes big, important intangibles like socialization and also simple pragmatic things like not just being a dick and punching someone in the face because you feel like it), and it seems like he’s doing that just fine, so whatever.

However, I also know that it’s a teacher’s job to assess and communicate any issues that could potentially be concerns and that the absolutely shittiest part of a teacher’s job is dealing with parents who are inclined to argue with the teacher’s assessment or dismiss it as shortsighted, prejudiced or in some cases an outright attack. Teachers have a shitty, hard job. I deal with two kids that I love more than anything on earth and after about two hours I am completely at the end of my rope. Teachers deal with dozens of little shits every day who they have no genetic imperative to love or nurture, and kids, when put into groups, go fucking bonkers. I can’t imgine how shitty it must be to endure day after day and then, when the teacher finally sees the malicious, shitty, dumb kid’s parents and expresses concern, the parents say things like “you just don’t like our son. He’s plenty smart” or whatever the fuck it is they say. The upshot of this is that although I’m not overtly concerned about my son’s designation as a spaz (and I’m completely stoked that he’s made a bunch of friends and seems to be popular) I listened and talked through it with his teacher and I’m gonna be sure to work on helping focus his energy at home to hopefully make the teacher’s life easier.

I talked to a few other parents in my kid’s class though, and I was amazed at how defensive and shitty they got when relaying to me the minor issues (because these kids are so small, it’s all minor issues) that the teacher said their kids have. One parent was mad that the teacher said that their kid wasn’t developing skipping skills (which is admittedly kind of stupid), apparently and another parent was livid that the teacher suggested that their child was an aggressive kid who was prone to getting up in people’s faces. These people were kind of mad, but what the fuck? Those are things that could, potentially be concerns. Gross motor skills and socialization. That’s the bread and butter of preschool assessment, man.

How the fuck can you get upset about that shit? What is the endgame? You can’t possibly imagine that the teacher would just create a hostile parent/teacher conference just out of the ether for no reason other than she dislikes your child. That’s just inviting a fight for no reason. It seems to me, that, were I a teacher, when the really shitty, hopeless kid’s parents came in, I’d say “eh, he seems fine” and be done with it. But that’s because I’m lazy and really not cut out to be a teacher.

And yes, I DO realize that especially as kids get older, there are shitty, vindictive, completely fucked up teachers out there and that they may in fact hold grudges and throw little petty hissyfits about my child even if he’s an absolute angel (ha!) and that will be something to navigate and deal with as the situation arises, AND I guess that I can think of some three year olds that really, truly rub me the wrong way, so I guess it’s not a TOTAL stretch to say that perhaps these parents are not just bent out of shape for no reason, but fuck me, man. This is a sweet little old lady preschool teacher we’re talking about here (and YES, I’m aware that sweet old lady preschool teachers can be terrible people when the parents aren’t around too) and it’s not like any of it matters.

Look around at all the people around you right now. Notice anything about them? They’re all completely demented and fucked up and gross and rude and unbelievable. At best they’re dorks and at worst they’re YOUR disgusting friends and family. Everyone in this place ends up fucking crazy and bizarre. There’s no way out. Somebody calling your child an absolute angel and blowing platitudes up your ass isn’t gonna save ‘em, and their inability to skip or keep their hands to themselves, (while they are things you should work on with your child), isn’t gonna be the fault that tips them into the depravity they’re eventually destined to inhabit. The only thing to do is just get out there and try to encourage your kids not to punch or kick or choke. And hope they make some good friends, because nothing will fuck up a kid so fast as bad friends or a bad girlfriend/boyfriend situation. That’s how you get into TROUBLE.

But my kid is 3. So I’m not too worried about that yet. Besides, the only way to combat bad friends/boyfriends/girlfriends is to be a good example yourself, so well, chances are, you’re either completely fucked or all set from day one.

xoxoxoxo

It was all yellow (and tubby from sitting on planes)

My son, who’s 3.5, my daughter, 1.5 and I all went to the Art Institute of Chicago today. When we walked in, my son was pretty impressed with the lobby of the new modern wing. I believe he referred to it as ‘really cool’ (though he could have said it was “fuckin tits” or “sweeter than the dick on a dog”…I can’t be sure) and even asked me how in the world they’d gotten a rather large statue into the lobby, a question that stumped the shit out of me, though I didn’t honestly give it a ton of thought. I was just happy he was engaged in what was going on. When you’re a kid, museums tend to be either full of dinosaurs and cool machines or totally shitty, and this museum is definitely not full of dinosaurs or cool machines.

I decided that we’d just go for the modern wing since it’s the most well lit, it offers a nice sense of movement between galleries and it was what I wanted to see the most. The collection in Chicago is really world class, but don’t ask my kids about it. The older one decided shit was scary right off the bat when the first canvas was larger than he could reasonably comprehend and all my daughter did was say hi to all the different black ladies in blue blazers that stood in every room and made sure people like me with parasitic, dirty loud children like mine didn’t have a momentary lapse of concentration resulting in dirty little hands all over various masterpieces.

All in all, my daughter said hello to every single security guard in the modern wing and my son said “I want to go home” in every single room. It was a gas. The above picture, it was agreed, was of Lady Gaga. Ah, kids. They can be so whimsically clueless sometimes.

Anyway, on the way home I was catching the replay of this morning’s Stern show where Howard interviewed Chris “I’ve got a humongously wide ass” Martin of Coldplay (I know this because I was a stagehand when Coldplay performed at Metro about four years ago and I was absolutely blown away by his chunky rump. Well, not chunky. It was wide and pancakey, kind of like I’d expect Kenny Powers’ ass to be in real life) and Howard asked a question that I didn’t really think was very interesting, but the response was fascinating.

The question was something to the effect of “when you guys were on the bus did you end up doing that thing where you were all getting blowjobs right in front of one another?” Here’s why I find this question to be dull: What the fuck is Chris Martin gonna say about that? He’s married to America’s sweetheart. He writes songs specifically about monogamy and he’s essentially the Lloyd Dobbler of rock and roll in that all white girls of a certain age kind of love him a little. He’s not Nikki Sixx or Kid Rock or any number of people whose cachet is advanced by not giving a fuck. Giving a fuck is precisely what gives Chris Martin cachet. He’s particular and brooding and obsessive and gets it just right with a simple melody and a haircut that looks like the product of shaving your head about six weeks ago and then just jumping out of bed, but which probably cost two hundred pounds at the finest salon (pronounced SA-lon) to get right. Chris Martin could have been getting blowjobs from Herman Cain, Pamela Anderson, Justin Bieber, that chick from Modern Family and Megan Fox all at the same time and he wouldn’t talk about it publically. He’s too much of a monogamy guy tabloid fixture. Too much is expected of him. The only answer to that question, if you’re Chris Martin, is to chuckle and say something like “oh Howard, you always go there. Come on. Of course not. We’re good lads, really.” Or some shit like that.
And Chris Martin did kind of sidestep the question, but with one of the most overwhelmingly mind boggling responses I’ve ever heard. He said, and I’m paraphrasing here, “well, we got really lucky in that we didn’t really have to travel on busses for very long.”

I don’t even totally know what that means. I’m assuming it means that Coldplay fly to all their shows but that’s FUCKING INSANE. When bands first start touring, almost without fail, they travel in a car or a few cars. At my first on-the-road show ever, we arrived in one of those jeeps that is just a cage with a soft top and has four seats (a Wrangler, I believe?) and a GMC Jimmy packed with amps. Some bands tour like this. Some bands forego bringing their gear at all and tour in a car. Crimpshrine, a hugely influential band for me and lots of my friends/musical peers, famously(?) toured in a Pinto.

At a certain point, if you want to really make a go of being in a band, you get a shitty van. This is the point most bands stay at for the entirety of their existence. If you’re a really lucky band, eventually you’ll graduate from the shitty van to the good (or really practical) fifteen passenger van. From there, you’ll get a trailer. If you’ve made it this far, this is where it usually ends for you. Even if you go up to the big leagues and get a bus, even if you’re on a bus for years, or decades, eventually you’ll cash out in the old fifteen passenger with the trailer (and if you ARE coming back from being a bus band, you’ll probably feel like a shitty failure but delude yourself and your sympathetic friends [‘aw shit bro, last time I saw you, you dudes were in a bus and the place was sold out! Rough times, huh?’] by telling yourself it’s so great to be able to drive again and see the open road again and get back to how it used to be and be able to take the van to go get food or drive to wherever you want at any old time and stay in town if the mood strikes you instead of dealing with that shitty bus call…but you’re not fooling anyone, least of all yourself).

A few bands end up doing bus tours. This is a very small percentage of all the bands in the world. I don’t know how many luxury coaches (what those busses are called) are currently operating in North America, but it’s not a lot, and those things take Sarah Palin and Guy Fieri around too. It’s not just bands and shithead DJ’s that roll around in busses. John Madden and your rich uncle are also living the luxury nightliner life. Busses are nice. They’re extremely luxurious. Will Smith tours in a bus. So does Ozzy. So does pretty much everyone.

Which is exactly why it’s so crazy that the dude from Coldplay said “we were really lucky because we didn’t have to be in a bus for very long.” That’s (again) INSANE! I mean, I recognize that they’re one of the biggest bands in the world and they blew up fast, but fuck, man. The Gaslight Anthem blew up fast and they still did years and years of touring in a shitty van. Who the fuck just jumps straight to airplanes? I mean, obviously Coldplay does, but wow. That’s just mind blowing.

In conclusion, next time you see your friends shitty band blowing up faster than yours or you hear their new record and get jealous and snarky and shitty because it’s better than anything you could ever hope to do, and soon they’ll be somebodies and you and your dipshit chums are gonna be stuck in your crappy lives, remember this: Coldplay didn’t even have to get used to the discomfort of a luxury nightliner coach. That’s how quickly their star rose. All the rest of us are back in vans, or will be. And me? Shit, last show the Lawrence Arms played we didn’t even bring cables because we don’t even have enough cars between us all to get our shit anywhere.

We’re on the bus, all right. The fucking city bus. How’s that for rock and roll?

Oh jesus...

This weekend, when asked if he rehearses his actors before he shoots a scene, director Brett Ratner said ‘rehearsals are for fags’ and now he’s in a whole lot of trouble for it. For those of you who don’t know, Brett Ratner is a pudgy, untalented little turd of a man who somehow stumbles into making some of the biggest (and shittiest) movies in Hollywood. Most recently he made the film Tower Heist, and though I haven’t seen it, it stars Ben Stiller as a black building manager and Eddie Murphy as someone who used to be good at something but hasn’t done it in a long time, so it’s probably pretty good.

Ratner, despite his lack of physical charm or discernable talent has managed to carve out a really great career for himself which includes banging my dear Lindsay Lohan and several Victoria Secret models (this weekend he also said he banged Olivia Munn and then admitted he was lying in what’s gotta be the weirdest, most age/career inappropriate way to make yourself look like an asshole I’ve seen since I was about fifteen). He’s also now in a ton of hot water for casually bandying about the word ‘fag’ or specifically ‘fags’.

Ratner’s since apologized, and the response from GLAAD was something along the lines of ‘Well, that apology is a good start but we need to see him take more steps towards really exemplifying that it’s never okay to use these hateful….” It went on and on like this and eventually, I stopped reading. It’s not that I totally disagree with GLAAD or that I think that the word fag should be casually used all the time or anything. It’s more that the whole construct of Brett Ratner apologizing to the world and GLAAD kind of accepting his apology but not really is such a fucked up, stupid social construct that it completely sickens me. Forget the word fag for a second. What the fuck is going on in our universe?

As per my understanding, there’s a guy or a gal or a group of guys and gals (or guy or gal identified) who essentially have the job of being watchdogs over the public sphere at large and who decide when something has crossed the line (motherfuckers are constantly crossing the line) and how much retribution needs to be doled out in the case of each incident. Now they’re laying out hoops for Brett Ratner, which he can either ignore and look like a dick, or jump through and look like a dick. Nothing, whatsoever can come of this but a bunch of indignant assholes on either side of the issue working each other up with a bunch of yelling. There’s no endgame, just dickthumping for the benefit of the converted. This is fucking insane.

Now, don’t misunderstand me. People who are gay and transgendered and sexually confused (or any combination therein) have a tough, shitty uphill struggle through the world of idiots and bigots that we live in. People who despise gay people tend to use words like faggot and fag to denigrate them. It’s generally not a polite thing to do to use these words in any context at all. This is all completely 100% true. It’s also true that Brett Ratner saying that rehearsal is for fags isn’t gonna make anyone start hating gays, and his apology isn’t going to change anyone’s vocabulary. But this isn’t really even the point.

The point is that if I was with a friend or acquaintance of mine and they used a word that I found to be offensive, I’d say something like “hey asshole, watch your fucking language” and if they said “hey, sorry” that would really be the end of it. I wouldn’t have to like this person’s attitude. I could fucking hate their guts directly in response to their stupid, cavalier use of offensive language, but at no point would I feel that it was my place to press for anything beyond an acknowledgement that they’d said something that bummed me out. Who the fuck is this brain trust at GLAAD that have decided that an apology for a casual shitty soundbyte isn’t enough? They weren’t elected. They don’t represent gays or transgendered people at large any more than I represent the whole of the Lawrence Arms and we’re only three guys! “It’s a good start but we’d like to see…” Fuck you. That’s just self righteous dramatic hissy fit offense taking that really, truly hurts more than it helps.

It bears mentioning that Brett Ratner doesn’t have any fans. He’s got ‘celebrity’ in the most literal sense, but he’s got no more fans than the guy who lit Transformers or the team that made the fat suit for Big Momma’s House. He’s just a cog. He’s not an artistic force of any kind and his attitude and personality sucks, so what’s going on here? If this is the case of a bunch of people jumping all over this asshole because no one likes him just because they can totally get away with making him look like the dick that he undeniably is, well, I dunno…that seems a little cross-purposed with the purported goal of GLAAD, but GLAAD is cooler than Brett Ratner any day, so whatever. If it’s really, truly an attempt to drum up outrage, I’ve got news for you GLAAD: Everyone worth a shit on this earth knows that assholes say shitty things from time to time. Everyone who’s NOT worth a shit isn’t paying attention to your outrage anyway. I understand that this planet has a long way to go before we get to a point where sexuality and sexual identity aren’t big issues, but this ain’t the way to roll. Would you like to see a sample press release that I’d like to see you copy the next time someone like Brett Ratner says something stupid in public? Okay, good. Here it is:

“Wow. That guy’s a real asshole. I thought he was smarter than that. It’s a shame he’s not, but when you look at his shitty canon of work, it seems sort of obvious in retrospect, doesn’t it? Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some rehearsing to do.”

I don’t know, people. I get the indignation and I get that shit has been ignored for so long that it’s gotta be dealt with now at every turn and all that, but again, it’s a fucked up social construct that some group of people in some organization are demanding retribution for words on behalf of a large group of extremely disparate individuals. None of it matters. Public apologies are contrived PR stunts and so is everything that follows them. This is true 100% of the time, regardless of sincerity. It’s just a shame that the response of GLAAD seems to be like a shitty contrived PR stunt too.

Finally, if, in fact, rehearsal is for fags, then maybe Brett Ratner needs to get some more fags into his shitty movies, because frankly, this non-fag methodology isn’t working out too well for him.
Xoxoxo

Killing mofos.

If you could shoot someone, who would it be? Bear with me. The theory we’re working with here is that you are given a gun and a bullet and it’s understood that at that point you'll be allowed to shoot one single person and there will be no repercussions. Furthermore, the person will be brought to you, or you will be brought to the person (depending on your preference) and you can shoot them in any way you see fit. So, if you want the person to see you and be scared and know exactly who’s killing them and why (if you choose to disclose that information) you can do it that way. BUT if you’re kind of squeamish about the whole thing, you can do it from a distance or from a window or from behind (heyo!). What? Oh, don’t worry about missing the person if you shoot from a distance. This is a hypothetical situation and in this situation, you’ll be a guaranteed sure shot. You can kill one person on the earth. Who’s it gonna be?

Really? Nobody? Well, obviously your uncle never snuck into your room and blew you as a child. Come on! Killing is our most exalted and exciting from of crime. It’s capriciously taking someone else’s life, and then continuing to live as they die. You can pick Amadinejad if you want. You can pick that pervy football coach that just got arrested fro fucking the ten year old, at-risk youths in the Penn State showers (who’s autobiography is called [and I’m not shitting you, folks] “Touched” by Jerry Sandusky, which is laugh out loud funny if he HADN’T been actually fucking little boys, but as is…yipes) or you can pick the guy who’s currently fucking your ex girlfriend much better than you ever fucked her. Anyone! So who is it?

Look, I get it. Killing is gruesome and mean and even George W Bush has daughters and people who love him and Casey Anthony is still pretty hot and she hasn’t done porn yet. Fred Phelps is really a pretty ineffectual old man that ultimately is living in a fate worse than death as a closeted, cock starved self loathing queer. I’ve thought of all this. That’s why I’m prepared to suggest that maybe you should consider killing a hobo. Think about it. He’s old, he’s drunk as shit. He’s unhappy. No one’s gonna miss him. Kill the hobo. Go ahead. Just kill him. You CAN’T tell me that you’re just gonna pass up this once in a lifetime opportunity to kill someone and walk away scot free, are you? Seriously? That’s fucking stupid.

Nah. I couldn’t do it either. I’ve thought about this a little since the blog last Thursday where we discussed how murder is sometimes totally okay and celebrated…(dig the Osama/team 6 duality, doubly interesting because Osama was ALSO celebrated in certain circles for killing people). Based on a few arbitrary circumstances, the exact same act, snuffing someone’s life out of them, can be something that will get you hunted down, tortured and killed, or a seat in the head float at a parade that’s being conducted in your honor. Killing’s a weird thing. I can’t imagine what it’s gotta be like to see someone get killed…although, I DID see someone get killed once.

It was like ’93 and I was walking with some people from a minivan that we were drinking 40’s inside of back to the Fireside Bowl where my band, Slapstick was set to play a show with Paul Think and the Bad Kids. Across the street a crackhead type was approaching what appeared to be a gangbanger. They had an extremely short conversation which culminated in the gangbanger type guy knocking over the crackhead, jumping up and landing with both feet on his face over and over and over and over again. The gangbanger guy then ran off. A girl, I believe her name was Michelle, ran over to see if the guy was okay (he was not) and I ran back to the Fireside to call the cops.

The whole thing was a complete fucking donkey show after that. Michelle was (understandably) pissed off that no one went with her to see if the guy was okay (the neighborhood was apparently a little dangerous, as evidenced by the murder we’d witnessed just seconds before) and I was pissed that she went over there at all and didn’t run back and call the cops, as the dude was obviously very dead. Looking back, she was probably right, although I was sixteen and probably 115 pounds and scared shitless. I wasn’t thinking about anything other than “oh fuck. Oh fuck ohfuckohfuck!” It was a quick reaction that I remember thinking was the most responsible thing to do at the time. Whatever. Probably not my finest hour, but I wasn’t the only other person there anyway. I don’t know. This was fucking decades ago.

Anyway, I called the cops, which led to Paul Think getting pissed and going on a rant on stage about the inequity of the police state or something and me sarcastically yelling “fuck the system” and him getting furious with me and almost jumping off the stage and the whole evening was generally a huge series of cock slaps front to back. I don’t even remember if we played.

The moral? I don’t want to be around people when they depart the coil, bros. It’s stressful. And I DEFINITELY don’t want to be the person responsible for their demise. That’s heavy. No matter how evil they are. Well, I guess if someone had harmed my family I’d want them to die and/or suffer, but I don’t know that I’ve got the constitution to be the person that doles out retribution. Besides, those pasty, shirtless, hooded guys with the danzig bodies and the axes need jobs and I don’t want to be just running around executing people and fucking up their economy more than it already is, you know?

In conclusion, I’d kill that woman who is trying to sully the good name of Justin Bieber. What a monster.

Doin' Crimes

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apologies!

I was all set to write something really great here today, but the remote for my car just died and I've gotta get it fixed right now, so that's not gonna happen. Instead, I'm just gonna tell you that the new menzingers record is gonna blow all your minds right out through your gaping assholes. Truth.

hallowwwwwwwwwweeeeeeeeeeeeeeen

Do you guys believe in ghosts? It’s kind of a stupid question, because it seems like there are two schools of thought regarding ghosts and they’re this:

Uh, totally. (this one stupid place) is totally haunted and I’ve seen that shit with my own eyes/(some asshole) swears up and down that he’s seen (some weirdly specific ghost, usually female) and you KNOW that he’s not the kind of person that goes for that shit.

Or

What are you, fucking retarded?

I’ve personally never seen a ghost but I have a lot of friends and family that have claimed to have seen them, including my stepdad, who’s a chemist and generally not the kind of person that goes for bullshit like that (although, to be fair, he’s got some ideas about the bible that fall in line with er…’going for bullshit like that,’ I suppose) and he’s DEFINITELY not the kind of guy who’d do drugs or in any way be discombobulated enough that his ‘ghost encounter’ could be blamed on his perception.

According to him, he saw a female by the bookcase in the upstairs hallway of the house I lived in in 1993. I guess she was kind of transparent and she had no feet, although as I type that I’m not sure if he said that or if that’s just how I pictured it. Whatever. That’s not the point. The point is that sober, intelligent chemists don’t tend to just walk over to their stepsons and make up bullshit stories about their experiences of seeing women in their house just because it seems like a funny thing to do. It’s weird. I don’t think I believe in ghosts, but whatever caused him to relay that story to me is at LEAST as unexplainable as the idea that the spirit of a dead woman is floating around checking out our books.

My mom always says shit like ‘that owl that was outside last night, I think it was your grandmother’ which is patently lame. A ‘gut feeling’ ghost sighting is, first of all, ENTIRELY the realm of females and total dipshitty turd guys. There’s no man worth a shit out there who’s ever said anything like that to anyone ever. For whatever reason, on females it’s whimsical and quasi acceptable as long as you’re not bringing it up all the time or blending it with other forms of mysticism crap (an entirely irritating set of interests). Secondly, it cheapens the entire notion of supernatural phenomena in the same way that dumb kooks who don’t want to listen to science because they willfully choose to be stupid cheapen the intellect of conservatives by and large. (at this point it should be overtly noted that ‘cheapening the entire notion of supernatural phenomena’ is a hilarious thing to be concerned about. It’s like saying that the guy that’s going weeks without showering is cheapening the reputation of all the known sex offenders at the halfway house).

Make no mistake, there’s weird shit out there. Like I was saying with regards to my step dad. I tend to think he didn’t see a ghost, but fuck me if SOMETHING weird didn’t go down, right? And that shit happens all the time. There are things that cannot be explained and that fall under the category of ghosty supernaturalist shit and perhaps it IS ghosts, but maybe ghosts aren’t actually the wandering souls of the departed, but they’re something else entirely, like cosmic energy waves or some other such bullshit that’s impossible to talk about without sounding like a fruitcake.

Anyway, my point is that the world is weird and there is shit out there that can’t be explained, and if that all falls under the category of ‘ghosts’ then fuck it, I guess I believe in that, but I don’t think my grandpa is in the attic or in the dog or any of that shit, and I don’t think the dali lama is the same guy and I am vastly more afraid of living people than I am of the dead, so I dunno…am I repurposing the word or just prattling on like a dipshit? Whatever. Happy Halloween. My kid was a butterfly/Olivia Newton john and the other one was a dinosaur/Dash from the incredibles. And the shit’s mind meltingly cute.
xoxoxo

they sounded....asian.

I’m waiting for the cable guy right now. It sucks. I know this kid named Nate, and he’s kind of a weird, greasy haired little Mitch Hedberg disciple (though that sounds like a shitty description. He’s a good guy) and one of the jokes in his routine is “I was fucking the cable guy the other day, and it was a real bummer, because you know how long it takes for the cable guy to come.”

It’s okay. It’s pretty good. It would be a lot better if the cable guy was fucking him, because let’s be honest, if you’re fucking the cable guy do you REALLY care if he comes? But if he’s fucking you, I’d imagine that he couldn’t come fast enough. If there’s one thing that I don’t think of when I think of cable guys it’s that they’re attentive lovers. Which brings me to my point:

Do people really end up fucking their cable guys and plumbers and pizza boys and shit? Does that really happen? Okay, I’ve GOT to imagine that there’s a situation, say in Boystown or Manhattan or the Castro where there’s an everyone’s-gay-at-every-stage-in-the-life-of-the-pizza situation and that occasionally, or even often, leads to blowjobs, but that’s a fairly unique situation, and really it’s not at all what I’m talking about.

I’m referring to the standard trope where someone is home in a regular neighborhood, waiting for a regular pizza guy or cable guy in skimpy clothes and with a little hinting and seduction Boom! Free HBO! Does that happen? It seems like something drummed up by either cable guys or porn directors because man, it just seems a little too good to be true. I’d think bored, sexy housewives (or houseboys in the case of gay guys) would be able to bang someone a little bit more exciting than the cable guy, if for no other reason than because in my experience, by the time the cable guy shows up I’m fucking pissed off and tired of waiting. I’m definitely not horny. Usually, I’m staring at the clock, pissed off that they gave me a four hour window of time and managed to show up either half an hour early or an hour late. Usually I’m noticing that they smell significantly worse than my house and usually I’m incredibly frustrated by their lack of interest in fixing my problems or even really identifying them beyond, “well, yeah. You’ll probably have to get an electrician in here or something. I don’t know.”

But hey, I’m kind of an asshole, and I can imagine that if I was single and a hot female cable girl came over and was somewhat helpful that I’d probably try to put the moves on her. But that’s because I’m a guy and the hot female cable guy does not exist. It’s like saying I’d attempt to fuck a unicorn or a gorgon, and besides, her entire life would be just a series of creepy dudes hitting on her mercilessly. “Hot cable girl” is up there with embedded female journalist in the supermax prison shower room in terms of rapey potential because, well, it just is. If you’re a hot woman, as a general rule, having a job where you go into the houses of strangers by yourself is a pretty bad idea. It’s an unfortunate truth. Just like short guys don’t tend to get jobs in the NBA and guys are rarely Hooters girls (and yeah, working at hooters is ‘exploitive’ I guess, but I’d WAY rather be a hooters girl than a cable guy).

That said, do you think it EVER happens? Do you cable guys/pizza guys/plumbers/poolboys out there ever actually get seduced by women (or dudes) in their homes? It seems really, really unlikely that it ever happens, but fuck, that one guy in Germany found someone who wanted to cook and eat his penis with him and if you were gonna ask me to bet on which is the more likely situation, I’d say the cable guy blowjob WAY before the mutual cannibalism (although when you factor German weirdness into the whole thing I guess it becomes slightly more even in terms of odds). Only one thing is for sure: When this guy shows up, I’m gonna suck his dick, whether he likes it or not. Maybe I’ll answer the door naked and wet and tell him my lock is malfunctioning.

That’s all. Have a good weekend.

a harrowing tale of adventure and thrills

This is weird. I go to the gym three to five times a week. I know pretty much everyone there, at least by face and they know me and my kids and overall, it’s a pretty nice place. Lately, there’s this dude who’s there and although I’ve never seen him actually working out, he’s completely ripped. Not an ounce of fat on the guy. How do I know this? Because he’s ALWAYS completely buck naked, just hanging out in the locker room. I’ve never seen him go for his clothes, I’ve never seen him in underwear or holding a towel. He’s just down there, super ripped and super naked.

Now, logic dictates that based on his physique and his constantly being at the gym that he’s exercising like crazy, but again, I’ve never seen him up in the gym, even when I come down from working out and he’s sitting there naked and wet with no towel, just SITTING there. You’d think that over the course of the previous hour I’d have at least glimpsed this dude amongst the weights and medicine balls, but no. I can’t overstate this point: this guy is just naked in the locker room all the time. I don’t know what’s going on, but it’s kind of bugging me out.

ANYWAY, yesterday I was taking my sweaty gym clothes off and naked locker room dude pops his head around the corner real quick then vanishes. About ten seconds later I remove my earphones and he pops back around the corner, again, completely naked.

“Hey.” He says. “I borrowed a lock from the guys at the desk out there and now it won’t open and I’m stuck. Can you go tell them so they can help me get to my stuff?”

Now, this seems pretty reasonable, but because it’s naked lurker lockerroom guy, I’m a little taken aback. Again, it bears mentioning that as usual, the dude is completely naked and wet. I recover, walk out and say to the young black guy at the check in desk “hey, there’s a dude in there who borrowed a lock and now it won’t open and he’s naked, so he can’t come out here. Have fun!” and my deed good deed was done for the day.

But as I’m going to my car, some questions emerge. Like, firstly, WHAT THE FUCK? Where were the clothes that he had, the ones that weren’t in his locker? Did he perhaps lock ALL his clothes in his locker? That seems crazy. Where are his gym shorts? Where is his swimming suit (I’ve come to the conclusion that he’s gotta be spending his time at the pool. It’s the only explanation unless he’s doing spin classes or something)? In short, what happened to his clothes? It bears mentioning that yes, a locker room is a place where people go to get naked. Being naked in a locker room is normal. It’s not a big deal, but engaging a stranger in conversation while naked is a little bit weird, and making some dude come in and cut off your lock while naked is pretty fucking uncomfortable for everyone involved, right? I mean, it would stand to reason that even if his shorts were soaking wet (there are dryers in the locker room, so this is pretty invalid anyway) he’d at least put them on to ask me to go talk to the guy, or he’d put them on and just go ask the dude himself, right? I mean, right? Am I nuts?

I suppose that the following could be an explanation: He got done with his spin class (heh), came to the locker room to take a shower and sit around naked all morning like he does, put all his stuff into his locker before his shower, locked the locker, went to the shower, came back to find everything was locked up and boom! He’s stuck (there are no towels available in the locker room. That’s a significant point, I guess) and he’s got no choice the one he made. In that circumstance, I guess it’s reasonable, BUT, what kind of fucking move is that? Who locks up their dirty gym clothes or goes to the shower without a towel or clothes? This guy, recall, is in this locker room every day, so he’s presumably keenly aware of the towel situation.

My friend thinks I got cruised. I told her the story and she was instantly positive that I had been cruised. To this I can only say, well, it IS a YMCA, and the guy obviously has a real love of the male form (in order to be a really ripped dude, you need to have a hilarious passion for the look of dude torso) AND hanging out in the locker room naked seems like a pretty trademark move if you’re looking to randomly exchange dick tastes with someone, so I guess that’s a pretty decent theory, although it doesn’t really add up to me. “Hey, my shit’s stuck in my locker, can you do me a solid and go get an employee” isn’t exactly the most sensual pick up line I’ve ever received, and while he may just be testing the water so to speak, you gotta figure that if you’re at that level where you’re lurking nude in the locker room, you’ve probably developed a smooth intro or two, right? You HAVE to have workshopped something better than “can you get a janitor in here.”

I don’t know. The whole thing is weird. I mean, I blew him, but I’m still not sure if that’s what he was hinting at.

Life’s really mysterious.

I know kung fu!

Remember the Matrix? Of course you do. The Matrix, the original one, is a great movie with an extremely compelling and thought provoking script. The next couple were absolutely terrible (as is everything that Jada Pinkett Smith is involved in) but that first one, man. It’s good, and it’s more of a zippy, apt metaphor for sentient existence than almost anything else I’ve ever consumed intellectually.

There’s one part that particularly sticks out to me and it’s the scene where Morpheus offers Neo the two pills. The red pill, Morpheus explains, will cause Neo to wake up in his bed as though nothing has ever happened. The blue pill, on the other hand, will show him the world as it truly is, though once he sees it, he can never unsee it. He’ll never be able to return to his world of blissful ignorance once he sees what the blue pill illuminates.

Of course, Neo takes the blue pill and he quickly comes to learn that where he once thought he was strong, he is actually weak. His safe world is actually full of danger and terror. Food is no longer delicious. Sleep is fleeting and elusive and fraught with nightmares. Happiness exists only in a different world populated by ignorant fools who don’t know how hard and scary life really is and he, Neo, though discombobulated, weak and confused, is the person that must take command and push against all hope and logic towards a brighter tomorrow.

This is exactly what having kids is like. Kids are the real blue pill in the Matrix. I used to think that life existed pretty much between five pm and five am. I subsisted on beer and taco bell and slept late and was extremely happy and carefree. My neighborhood was safe, my wife was attentive and great, my body was resilient and strong, I had everything completely figured out. I never worried about anything and I felt very strongly that all the typical shitty trappings of adult life, the financial worries, the worries about physical deterioration, the marital spats, the concerns about how people perceive one another just straight up didn’t apply to my life. I had no frame of reference for relating to comedians (for example) because their tropes were all about things that were completely foreign to me. “I’m fat,” “I’m broke,” “I haven’t gotten a blowjob in six months!” Whatever! I’m not ever gonna be fat, I don’t need any money! I am positively SWIMMING in blowjobs! Everyone else’s life may suck balls, but somehow (despite the fact that I’m really not that spectacular of a human being and I haven’t worked particularly hard) mine is amazing. I have a cool job where I travel the world and I go out every night and sleep all day. It’s a perfect existence!

So, yeah. Then I took the blue pill and a few things became abundantly clear: the world is fucking dark and terrifying. Kids are so sweet and perfect and cute and the world, in stark contrast to them, is ugly, exploitive, dangerous, poisonous and generally horrific. The world actually exists from five AM to about ten PM. Anything that happens after ten is just drunken blur shit that, while it may end up with you punching someone in the face or getting laid or sealing some sort of deal over cocktails and blow, it’s not the real world. There’s no way to explain this until you see it from the other side. People tried to say this to me and I’d say shit like “well, it’s the real world to me, man.” HA! No fucking way. I was living in a dream, cocooned in blissful ignorance, but now I’m awake. I can’t unsee it. The world is terrifying, and even the things that I thought I’d bested, the bullets I thought I’d dodged are back and they’re scarier than ever because I’m not even driving the car this time.

For example, I got through my youth without ever fucking myself up on drugs. I mean, I definitely got drunk and hurt myself or smoked some weed and acted like an asshole or whatever, but I never wound up toothless in a meth house. I never sucked a dick for crack. I never pissed myself in an alleyway with a needle in my arm. I never sniffed glue or lost a septum to cocaine or went to jail or any of that shit. I beat the ‘temptation’ of drugs, right?

Well, not really. Now my kids exist, and what if all of a sudden they’re over at their best friends house taking oxycontins every day after school? I can’t stop that! I mean, I can encourage open dialogue and hopefully raise responsible people who won’t get into really dangerous situations, but at a certain point it’s kind of out of your hands as a parent. Drunk driving, stupid drugs, reckless mischief that’s seriously illegal. KNOCKING SOMEONE UP (or GETTING knocked up!) or getting herpes or HIV or any of that shit, this is shit I thought I was absolutely done worrying about, written off as ‘kid shit’ but NOOOOOOOOOOO fucking way, man. It’s all back and it’s worse than ever.

Now the world is a place where I need money, not for my needs but for the needs of people who depend on me. I eat over the fucking sink, and it’s leftovers of what my kids stubbornly refuse. Food is no longer delicious, sleep is fleeting and elusive an fraught with nightmares, I actually become too tired to want to even attempt to receive blowjobs and my wife is definitely too tired to just pass them out for no reason other than ‘hey, how bout a blowjob?’ That’s the shit of distant dreams and distant shores, bro.

And here’s the thing: I can NEVER unsee it. I can NEVER go back to how it was before. Even if I just left this stupid, shitty café I’m sitting in right now and went straight to the airport and flew to Uruguay and never came back, I’d be haunted by the dangers of the world, and my family that I abandoned (!!!!!) and that would be an even darker world than this one. Even if I became a zillionaire, there would still be a dark world around me. I’m not saying that my life is gloomy and depressing (although I know it sounds like I am), because kids bring a TON of joy into your life, just as Neo was ultimately stoked to be living in the real world battling computers and plugging his brain into that cord and seeing the world in code and all that, I’m exactly the same way in that…no. No. The analogy breaks down pretty badly at that point.

I’m fucking starving. Gotta run. Later, dildos.

I used to eat a little but a little wouldn't do it so the little got more and more

You guys have all seen Axl in Rio, right? No? Oh, shit. Well, you should really google it. For those of you who are too lazy to go and see for yourself, let me paint a picture, if I may. Axl is in Rio with a band that he’s calling Guns n Roses, but who is VERY clearly not Guns n Roses (the drummer, according to my sources is a black Cuban guy, just for example), and he’s playing a humongous outdoor concert with these guys, and they’re playing Guns N Roses songs (or approximations of them, but we’ll get to that in a sec) and it’s raining. That’s pretty much the clip…

Except for a couple of details. First detail: Axl is clearly fat as shit now. He looks, to quote my friend Summer, like he’s slowly turning into Mario Batali. Next detail: because of the rain, he’s wearing a bright yellow, knee length rain slicker, a la Paddington Bear. Third detail: He comes out, and before launching into what would be a pretty passable version of Mr. Brownstone were it being performed by a band that wasn’t supposed to be Guns N Roses (say, in Baraboo, Wisconsin on a Tuesday night at the Larue Tavern and Dance Hall), he announces to the massive crowd of Brazilians that due to the rain and the slipperyness of the stage, he’s gonna go ahead and forego the dancing and instead just concentrate on singing and hitting the notes. In his yellow rain slicker. And Cab Calloway style pimp hat. Did I mention that? No? Okay, detail four: Axl is wearing, besides the knee length, bright yellow rain slicker, a big, stupid Cab Calloway hat and some sunglasses. That’s pretty much all you could ever need to know about this whole deal. Well, except for detail five, which is that Axl’s voice sounded like complete dogshit. It was pretty fucking disgusting, honestly.

Now, I know, that sounds harsh. Axl is fifty for fucks sake! He’s allowed to get fat! Who cares if he’s got a different band? What the fuck is wrong with wearing weather appropriate gear or not wanting to fuck yourself up in slippery conditions? Well, I’ll tell you exactly what’s wrong with that, mother:

Ahem.

I’m gonna leave the fatness aside for now because I’ve got a different problem with the fatness than I do with the rest of it. I’m gonna start with detail two: He’s wearing a rain slicker. Sure, what the fuck? No big deal? The man doesn’t want to get wet! That’s practicality, brah. You wear raincoats and hats in the rain! Get off Axl’s cloud, captain businessman! No. No. No. No. He looks like a pud. He looks like a squeezebottle of mustard. Look, if he’s gonna take every other person out of Guns N Roses and replace them with weird Cubans, a dude from the Replacements (who is cool but who also wore PAJAMAS when they made their legendarily crappy reappearance on some pointless, jerka--thon awards show when Axl first unveiled his new band and his Terence Trent D’arby braids) and a Slash impersonator who wanks his way through a BluesHammer-esque approximation of the (traditionally AMAZING) main riff in Mr Brownstone, the least we can ask for is a little genuine Axl at the helm, right? And you know what Axl Rose is NOT known for: dressing appropriately. This motherfucker used to wear nothing but American flag spandex and a cropped top mink fur coat! He used to wear boxer briefs and an umpire chest pad! In the Estranged video where he’s swimming with Dolphins, he’s wearing jeans and a flannel in THE GODDAMNED WATER!!!!! Don’t tell me you need a fucking slicker. It will not fly.

That leaves only one, very obvious explanation, namely, he’s ashamed of his fatness and he’s hiding behind all sorts of hats and coats and excuses not to dance (which, by the way, since when are we concerned with Axl dancing? I know he does the awesome Serpentine and all that, but we love him for his amazing voice and his reckless, ‘fuck em all’ attitude, which…well, eschewing the dance portion due to slippery conditions ain’t reckless, bro. That’s like the announcement on the deck of a cruise liner, not a Guns N Roses show) so we won’t all make fun of him for being fat.

But guess what, David Blaine! You didn’t make your fatness disappear. You just put a big yellow circle around it and then announced that you weren’t gonna do any cardio before wheezing your way through what should be a low-mid-level song in terms of the vocal difficulty of your cannon. That’s highlighting your fatness, not hiding it. And here’s the biggest thing: YOU’RE FIFTY!!! YOU ARE ALLOWED TO BE FATTER THAN YOU WERE WHEN YOU WERE 22!!!! Fuck, you can even have a different band and not dance and all that, but what we really, really want is that same ‘go fuck all y’all’ attitude. That’s what makes the whole thing such a travesty. Axl is a meek, apologetic, shy little fat boy who feels bad that he’s past his prime.

Fortunately, Axl, if you’re reading this (and I know you are) I’ve got the solution. And it’s easy. Read on:

Fuck, look, if Christina Aguliera can do it, so can you: Get out there in the fucking spandex American flag shorts and the harley suspenders and be fat and gross, for fucks sake! Can you imagine how rad that would be? There’s no dignity in gracefully (?) trotting out songs that made you famous with the kinds of people that participated in gangbangs 20 years ago, so fucking go for it, Axl! Be fat and gross and show us your belly and get down on your knees and act like an asshole and sneer and serpentine with all your sloppy glory and kick ass like the aging miscreant that you are. Don’t apologize! Revel in your current look, because really, if you take away all the bullshit (raincoat, lame hat, dorky band) you still look AWESOME. You don’t look like young Axl anymore, but guess what? You wouldn’t look like young axl even if you were still in good shape.

Embrace it. You’ve got a fanbase that would love it, and I for one need to see that kilt and catcher’s mask setup again. I think it would look even better now. In closing, (and these are words that I didn’t think would ever need to be written) Axl Rose, quit being such a goddamned pussy.

xxoxoxo

TL;DR

“The terrorists hate our freedom” is a phrase that’s bandied about pretty casually these days. For people with one kind of ideology, it’s a reminder that we’ve got it pretty good, and some people who don’t have it so good really don’t like that, and through no fault of our own, mind you(!), our way of life, one blessed with opulence, choices, and the ability to act how we want when we want even if it’s not completely appropriate at all times (god bless America), has created a tension between us and some of the world (the parts with less freedom, god bless ‘em) and they hate us. Not because we’re dicks, but because those people, those spoil sports, are jealous of the freedom we enjoy.

To another group of ideologues, “the terrorists hate our freedom” is something that idiots say to avoid looking in the mirror and recognizing that many complex issues are on the table when it comes to a global economy and people on the bottom are gonna tend to be pissed at the people on the top. People who have it easy as a result of other people having it bad tend to not be the favorites of those who have it bad.

In an America that’s really not too old, we (white people [high five!]) owned slaves. I wasn’t around for any of that, but I have been privy to some of the aftermath and it seems like “the slaves hate our freedom” could very well have been a slogan. What I mean is, there’s still obviously a little racial tension here and there lingering in this country, right? There are (get this!) black people who have grown up in generations, legacies of poverty ever since the days of emancipation where they walked away from their former masters free, penniless, uneducated, without any direction, home or understanding of what was going on, all while being obviously black, into a world that didn’t want to help them get jobs, educate them or do anything but sit around and stew because suddenly everyone needed to PAY for the work once done by slaves. (In fact, it could be said by ex slaves that “those ex-slaveowners hate our freedom” and it would probably be the most accurate application of this type of maxim in the history of language). And it seems like there are still white people out there who are terrified of black people, who fetishize them, who think they’re dumb or inferior or any number of things that dominant cultures tend to think about subjugated ones. Cuh-razy. You gotta imagine this all started with the slave thing, right? Because before that…well, I don’t think that white guys and black guys really hung out at all.

My point here is that yes, slaves undoubtedly hated the ‘freedom’ of the white folks, but my guess is that they hated that freedom in a large part because they were the ones who were providing it at the expense of their own freedom. Anyone can say “man, the slaves hate our freedom” and it’s true, but it’s also shortsighted, shitty and really, really, really condescending, innit? The slaves hate our freedom! What a bunch of selfish slaves!

Now, I’m not likening Bin Laden to Frederick Douglass by any means, but I am saying that the notion of someone just blindly hating someone else’s freedom usually comes from a pretty rational place. Nobody just hates the freedom of someone without reason. If they did, then there would be a spate of people hating freedom in every single microcosmic community in the world. It’s not a thing. It doesn’t exist without a context that puts the hater in a position of subjugation, which, in turn, makes them feel bitter and shitty towards whoever they think is shitting on them.

I’m not saying this is always justified by any means, but man, if you live in (for example) an oppressive theocracy, you’ve got essentially two ideological choices (neither one of which are really relevant to the notion of hating someone far away):

1) be religious and not notice that your choices are being oppressed or
2) recognize that you’d like to do things that aren’t allowed and proceed to be scared shitless of what’s going on.

There’s no point where in either of those persepctives just randomly hating someone halfway around the world comes into play at all. In situation 1, you’re essentially a born again grandpa living in Texas (which is, let’s be honest, a bit of an oppressive theocracy with a scary tendency to kill people). You’ve got all the freedom you want because your idea of freedom is lock step with the freedoms provided by your state. You may look at ‘hollywood queers’ and find them to be gross, but it’s fairly abstract. You really don’t find a lot of born again Texas grandpas plotting to kill Brad Pitt (or even RuPaul). If anything, they impose the rules of their own community (which could be totally uncool, as in ‘no fags,’ ‘no coons’ type stuff) but that’s a local thing based in a pragmatism about a day to day lifestyle you (as a close minded dick) would like to maintain (still shitty! But not at all the same as the idea of hating “freedom” remotely). In 2, you’re terrified of your government (you’re the gay black guy in Texas from hypothetical situation 1, perhaps) and you’re not trying to do anything but avoid having your nose chopped off or your ass dragged behind a truck til you die. You probably don’t give two shits about anything except for the people who are persecuting you. Again, there’s no real hatred of freedom that’s coming into play there.

In fact, I can think of only one instance where people, from a distance, remotely, absolutely hate the freedom of someone despite the fact that it has no bearing on their lives. And that’s the case of my beloved (and increasingly disgusting) Lindsay Lohan. She does blow and blows off court appearances. Big fucking deal. Who cares? “I fucking care! If I did that, they’d lock my ass up!!!” Yeah, sure. But you don’t even WANT to do that shit (or maybe you do, but she’s not stopping you, and she’s certainly not making it harder for you to do it). It doesn’t apply to you. She has more freedom than you based on circumstances that, depending on your ideology are either because of her hard work, or because of the person that she was born as. Either way, you hate her freedom and she’s NEVER done anything to you. At least the US maintains a military base on holy lands and fucks with the notion of a Palestinian state. What the fuck did Lindsay’s coke habit ever do to you? So why are you so happy now that her probation’s revoked and she’s going to jail. There’s only one answer: You hate her freedom.

Now who’s the terorist?
Seriously though, her teeth are getting pretty disgusting.

better late than never, eh?

Steve Jobs is dead. I know you’ve all heard about that. It was big news. Nerds cried, people who maybe didn’t even know they were nerds cried, the Onion had a headline that said “Last American Who Knew What the Fuck He Was Doing Dies” and generally, the whole thing was very sad. In what’s gotta be the most brilliant crosspurposing of a death ever, the new iPhone also just shipped, and it actually speaks to you, which, well, if you were the kind of person that thought of Steve Jobs as a father figure, there’s gotta be some sort of creepy comfort that you get from his last great gift to the world having a personality and voice. I heard Howard Stern this morning asking the new iPhone where he could get a handjob in Manhattan and the phone seemed to be happy to help him figure out where to go. That’s a good final bit of a legacy: a handjob providing, talking phone.

There’s no doubt about it, Steve Jobs was an important dude. Even if you dislike him or apple his footprint is gigantic. Ambitious people often set out to change the world, completely change an industry, and most of them don’t end up doing that at all. Steve Jobs revolutionized not only personal computing but also telecommunication, the music industry, the retail industry, publishing, turtlenecks, the whole deal. Like him or not, he was a visionary guy who shaped the world he lived in and it will likely be quite a while before someone else with that kind of vision and acumen comes along.

I have an iPhone. It’s got a broken screen. It’s kind of slow and it has, in no uncertain terms, destroyed my ability to just sit there and relax. I can’t just sit (or walk or even [and this is totally fucked up] drive or be on my computer) without having my phone right there just in case I need to check Twitter or get an email or a text or read an article or avoid doing pretty much anything that doesn’t involve staring into a tiny cracked screen. I no longer need to remember directions, phone numbers or to grab a camera, notebook, walkman, a watch or a personal gaming system (not that I fuck with video games, but you get the idea). I don’t need to talk to my friends because texting is so much more direct and requires less commitment. I’ve been in full on fights via text messaging, just because it’s less emotionally draining than talking on the phone to someone (and WAY less taxing than standing in a room together, yelling and punching walls and shit). You’ve got to imagine that the emotional numbing that these little devices provide is gonna have some twisted ramifications on humanity, right?

And that’s also the legacy of Steve Jobs. The personal phoneputer thingy that he so brilliantly put together is a marvel of human isolation. It’s also (and this is something that people tend to never discuss when they talk about the Steve Jobs legacy of invention, though it’s one of his most profitable ideas) built to break after a little while.

When the apple store in Chicago first opened I remember being shocked that they had recycling bins for ipods. Signs above the bins said something to the effect of “it’s been good to you, recycle it.” This was at a point where the oldest iPods in existence were about 2 years old. That’s fucking INSANE! I don’t want to sound like a grandpa or anything, but it used to be that if you paid hundreds of dollars for a device, that shit would last your lifetime. That was sort of WHY you paid that much for it. The notion that someone would sell you something designed to break after about two or three years (which is what iPods were [are] designed to do) so you, as an addicted consumer would have no choice but to upgrade to the newer version, is an insidiously brilliant strategy. And it’s no accident. We’re talking about a brilliant businessman and strategist and inventor. He invented disposable technology and, just to make sure that really careful people didn’t slip through the cracks, he built obsolescence into his devices as newer models appeared (changing the interface for the laptop power cable, for example).

So there you go. Before Apple, and the ipod and all these amazing, life changing devices, I believed that if I bought something for a lot of money, it would last forever. I also used to just sit there and look out the window of the bus. I don’t know if I was happier because I was just younger and more excited to exist than I am now, or if my new life full of things that are designed immerse me in a culture of information overload and ultimately to just up and break is just a darker, slightly sadder place, but one thing’s for sure. Things done changed. And until the Chuds come out of the sewers and/or the earth cleanses humans from its skin and we’re reduced to nomadic cannibal tribes (and that’s gonna suck balls), this is the life we got.

Wooooohooo.