Today, I’d like to talk about little people, big people and the word midget. Right up front, I should clarify that like roughly thirty percent of the world, I’m keenly aware that little people aren’t, as a general rule, too terribly stoked to be referred to as midgets. In fact, some little people will tell you that calling a little person a midget is akin to calling a black guy a nigger. This has been fodder for lots and lots of pretty hilarious stand up, including Artie Lang saying, “Uh,no. It’s quite different. Go up to a group of each and try yelling their respective slurs. I promise you the results will be very different.” This is A) pretty funny and B) totally shitty. The implication here is clearly that the taboo of an offensive word is directly correlated to how likely it is that one of the offended would be able to pummel you within an inch of your life.
Even as words like chink or spic or even retard become more and more taboo, even as people become so uptight about how they refer to people that perfectly reasonable words become confusing (someone grimaced at me recently for calling my friend a Mexican, which, well…he’s from Mexico. It’s perfectly okay to call someone from Mexico a Mexican. We all understand that, right? Good), motherfuckers still don’t care about the word midget or its effect on the psyche of a little person. Part of this is actually because of what I was just talking about, the way that perfectly good, reasonable descriptors are being thrown out with the bathwater in a massive and unreasonable sweeping language raid, and to a lot of people who aren’t *ahem* midgets, midget is the word that was, just a few short years ago the popular and seemingly medical term for how you describe what being a midget is. This is not the only instance of this.
My friend Mike has a brother with Downs’ Syndrome. These days, as everyone knows, you don’t call someone with Downs’ retarded. Do you know what you call them? Consumers. That’s right. Now, I’m not an advocate for special needs people or anything and aside from giving money to the special Olympics, which I think is a pretty cool thing, I have nothing whatsoever to do with mental disability, BUT the term “consumer” strikes me as completely fucking asinine for quite a few reasons. The big implication inherent in the moniker is that these people don’t really give back to society, they’re merely consumers. That seems like a shitty thing to point out right there in a groups name, for one thing and for another, that doesn’t really work as a blanket for highly functioning folks who say, work at McDonalds or at the grocery store. That’s just how I see it. I’m sure that the name “consumers” has been thoroughly vetted and focus grouped and I’ve got the whole thing wrong, but that’s how it comes across to me. The OTHER, CLOSELY RELATED reason I don’t like this word is because it’s taking something that’s a problem and treating it like it’s fine when it’s not.
I don’t understand when it became a reasonable thing to do to pretend that defects were just a perfectly reasonable alternative. Motherfuckers born with no legs are handicapped. They’re at a distinct disadvantage and I’d be willing to bet that given the choice, the legless folks, their parents and all their friends would pick “born with legs” 100% of the time if they could. Ditto for Downs Syndrome. To pretend that it’s not a handicap is just fucking twisted. Life is hard and shit is BRUTAL on this earth. Pretending it’s not by using pussified language that doesn’t do anything but confuse everybody isn’t solving any problems nor is it doing anyone any favors. It’s shitty and condescending, and that’s all. That’s why, when my friend Mike brings his brother around to his school or his athletic activities and they refer to him as a consumer, Mike says, “well, those guys over there may be consumers or whatever, but my brother is retarded.” He says this because he grew up with his brother being called retarded. He’s cared for his brother and he feels that it’s a more accurate description of the issue. I would PERSONALLY not get so balls deep in the argument as Mike for several reasons (as I said, I’m no special needs advocate, I have no personal stake in the issue, I don’t want to offend well meaning caregivers, When I write, I enjoy using the decontextualized word “retarded” because it’s become a little taboo and it’s very effective as a descriptor, and that makes me kind of a hypocrite I suppose?) but I’m not going to argue against his right to call his brother retarded if he wants to. That’s what he was when they were kids.
And that brings me back to midgets.
Oh, okay…before we get to midgets, let’s address the elephant in the room, which of course is the word nigger. Yes, there was a time when, just like being retarded, being a nigger was something quasi socially acceptable that black people just were called, and it wasn’t widely considered to be offensive in the way it is now. It was just the vernacular of the time. Well, time has passed, people have used the word disparagingly for a long-ass time, it’s become extremely loaded and as a result, it’s offensive as shit and just typing it out makes me a little nervous. The same could be said for the word retard. It’s been turned pejorative by people attempting to hurt a group and as a result, since it’s patently repurposed as an offensive term, well, that makes it offensive, regardless of how recently it was socially acceptable.
But that’s the thing with the word midget. That’s not really a word that people toss at little people like people call black guys niggers or Asian guys gooks or kids with Downs’ retards. It’s pretty simply descriptive, and for little people to say “hey, that’s just like calling a black guy nigger” is to misrepresent and miss the point and kind of undermine the argument, because hilarious jokes aside, it’s not the same.
Little people obviously deal with bullshit on a level that I can hardly imagine. There’s probably not a single social situation in which they’re not whispered about, stared at, openly ridiculed, questioned, fetishized, repurposed as elves or cast members in a wacky dream etc. BUT, and maybe I’m way off here, but getting taunted with cries of ‘midget’ is not really a thing, is it? That’s nothing I’ve ever even heard of. There are undoubtedly lots of cruel and hurtful things said to little people by assholes who want to make them feel *ahem* small (sorry), and I bet from the VERY first thing that anyone can think of or hear, the FIRST pejorative thing that people toss at little people is more offensive and cutting than the word midget. I mean, it’s just simply gotta be the case.
Now, that being said, as David Foster Wallace once wrote, (and I’m paraphrasing pretty hard here) ‘it seems that if someone doesn’t like being called something, not calling them that is a very basic level of politeness’ and that’s 100% true. I’m not suggesting that little people should suck it up and enjoy being referred to as midgets, because fuck that. That’s obviously not my place, nor is it even close to my agenda. I mean, fuck. I can’t STAND it when people refer to me as “big guy” (something I bet most people, little people included, really can’t stand either) and therefore, I can, and often will say ‘don’t call me that, you fucking asshole.’ BUT, I’m not gonna sit here and pretend that calling me big guy is akin to calling a black guy a nigger because that’s just plain old fucking stupid. It undermines the whole thing, it’s obviously not true, and besides, for fucks sake, can we all stop with the “that’s like saying nigger” reference, because it just simply NEVER is.
There’s no word out there that’s as loaded and shitty as nigger. Not cunt, not faggot, not midget, not retard, not spic, not any of it. Those are all shitty words, but check out society and reality and just use the tiniest bit of common sense and it becomes pretty obvious pretty quickly that there’s really no word as shitty as nigger. If there was, people would be saying “oh, man, calling a black guy a nigger is like, as bad as calling a French Canadian a beaver beater (for example)” and that’s obviously just stupid. No one is ever going to reverse this phrase to exemplify out how offensive nigger is to black people, so if it’s the go-to, then it’s the worst by definition and example, and EVERYONE should stop saying that shit, because nobody’s gonna follow that logic and quit being an asshole and calling you a midget or a retard or a beaver beater because of it.
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Monday, August 29, 2011
addendum to the Nader post from last week
You have to be signed into facebook or the links to Nader's art don't work. Come on, what is this, the 80's? Facebook facilitated a revolution or two and won an oscar this year. It's here. Get used to it. Kids these days don't even use email anymore. You pretending you're too cool or 'oldschool' for it is kind of like the way your grandpa doesn't watch basketball if there's nothing but black guys out there. The world has turned, old man. Get with it or prepare to miss out on the good shit.
Also, there's a monday post right below this. it's about whores, so that's pretty cool.
Also, there's a monday post right below this. it's about whores, so that's pretty cool.
Hooker content!
Here’s a query for you: When streetwalking hookers are out there on the track, waving at cars and sticking their asses in the street and all that, what’s the endgame in terms of job satisfaction? Presumably, they’re out there to make money and in order to make money they need to have a lot of customers. Equally presumably, the customers are probably not the most pleasant people to be around for several reasons including any combination of the following: they’re sociopaths, they’re ugly, they’re mean, they have zero respect for women, they’re extremely fucked up on drugs, they’re filthy, they smell like shit, they want to do something that is extremely gross, they’re the kinds of guys who cut up women and dump their corpses on the beach, they have rotten teeth, they have a feeling of creepy ownership towards the women that they’re paying for their services/time, they refuse to wear rubbers, they blow nasty loads on the girls’ last clean bikini top, they’re racist, they’re violent, they have leaky sores on their faces/dicks, etc.
Now, I’d like to pause here to point out that I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with prostitution and it’s a no brainer that it should be legal. I further think that in a safe, sane environment where prostitutes and sex work in general isn’t highly stigmatized (like what exists in Germany and Holland and probably a lot of other places in the world), that the exchange can often be much less fucked up than what I’m proposing is going on above on my theoretical hooker track. I mean, to fully digress here, there are lots of totally valid reasons to visit a prostitute, and once you take notions like deistic morality out of the equation, being a sex worker is really not all that different from being a masseuse (in fact, in the Thai spa down the street from my house they’re exactly the same, but that’s another story entirely). If you’re the kind of person that rejects puritanical sexual mores, enjoys (or at least doesn’t despise) sex and you’re comfortable with strangers and not skeeved out by bodies and fluids and shit, it’s really not a stretch to imagine being a happily employed sex worker.
At this point I could go into why that’s the case, but I think you get the idea, right? For someone like a widower, or someone who’s handicapped or cripplingly shy, for someone who’s insanely busy, for someone who’s terribly lonely, for someone with children who can no longer get sex in their marriage but doesn’t want to get a divorce or go through the mess of having an affair, visiting a hooker is probably a fucking lifesaver. I’m not trying to be shocking or gen-x cavalier here. Being a sex worker is a compassionate profession on the level of being a nurse and really should be treated as such. Now, that being said, we live in a world where we talk about god on our money and treat sex like it’s the domain of perverts, junkies and felons, so it’s unlikely that we’re gonna see a huge attitudinal shift towards hooker compassion any time in the near future.
So anyway, back to my hypothetical hooker on her hypothetical track. The people that an American streetwalker is going to attract are not, as a rule going to be the compassionate widower or the shy, wheelchair bound sufferer of multiple sclerosis. Due to the genuinely sketchy nature of the independent contracting that accompanies street hooking, and the neighborhoods where this business tends to thrive, due to the weird notions about sex that we have in this country and the ways that the shitty conditions of street hooking seem to confirm these weird notions, the kinds of people who visit street hookers probably tend to be pretty depraved and gross. Of course, this is speculation. I’ve never been a streetwalker so I’m basing this mostly on a pretty armchair theory, so let’s get back to my original question before I fly completely off the rails and into a sea of shit I have no authority to talk about.
What’s the hooker want? Does she want the car to stop? When she waves and whistles and the brake lights swell, does she get a feeling in the pit of her stomach like “ah, fuck” or is she stoked because she’s getting an opportunity to, at the very least attempt to make some money? I mean, everyone hates their job at times and I can’t think of a worse job to have to get up the nerve to put on a smile and go do than hooking, but I’m not even talking about the bad days here. I’m talking about the average days and even the good days. What’s that like? Where does the desire REALLY net out on a job by job basis for the average street hooker?
Of course, as the reductive poster in the Sock Drawer is about to point out, the answer is complicated. It’s a mixture of fear, revulsion, and survivalism, potentially sometimes coupled with excitement, thrillseeking, pragmatic acomplihment and/or genuine curiosity. But here’s the thing: I’m not really looking for the answer that some middle-class guy who has nothing better to do than read blogs on his smart phone on the shitter has to say about what he THINKS is going on. For the purposes of the exchange-of-information parameters that we have here at BSC, this is a rhetorical essay, as are most of the posts here. For reasons I’m sure you can fathom, I’ve got the middle class white guy perspective on this issue pretty comfortably in hand, so I don’t need to really have it explained to me, thanks. However, hookers! I’d love to hear from you. I don’t know how many hookers actually read this blog. I’m guessing a ton. Can’t wait to read your insights.
Enjoy your day everyone. I’m heading out to get a massage.
Now, I’d like to pause here to point out that I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with prostitution and it’s a no brainer that it should be legal. I further think that in a safe, sane environment where prostitutes and sex work in general isn’t highly stigmatized (like what exists in Germany and Holland and probably a lot of other places in the world), that the exchange can often be much less fucked up than what I’m proposing is going on above on my theoretical hooker track. I mean, to fully digress here, there are lots of totally valid reasons to visit a prostitute, and once you take notions like deistic morality out of the equation, being a sex worker is really not all that different from being a masseuse (in fact, in the Thai spa down the street from my house they’re exactly the same, but that’s another story entirely). If you’re the kind of person that rejects puritanical sexual mores, enjoys (or at least doesn’t despise) sex and you’re comfortable with strangers and not skeeved out by bodies and fluids and shit, it’s really not a stretch to imagine being a happily employed sex worker.
At this point I could go into why that’s the case, but I think you get the idea, right? For someone like a widower, or someone who’s handicapped or cripplingly shy, for someone who’s insanely busy, for someone who’s terribly lonely, for someone with children who can no longer get sex in their marriage but doesn’t want to get a divorce or go through the mess of having an affair, visiting a hooker is probably a fucking lifesaver. I’m not trying to be shocking or gen-x cavalier here. Being a sex worker is a compassionate profession on the level of being a nurse and really should be treated as such. Now, that being said, we live in a world where we talk about god on our money and treat sex like it’s the domain of perverts, junkies and felons, so it’s unlikely that we’re gonna see a huge attitudinal shift towards hooker compassion any time in the near future.
So anyway, back to my hypothetical hooker on her hypothetical track. The people that an American streetwalker is going to attract are not, as a rule going to be the compassionate widower or the shy, wheelchair bound sufferer of multiple sclerosis. Due to the genuinely sketchy nature of the independent contracting that accompanies street hooking, and the neighborhoods where this business tends to thrive, due to the weird notions about sex that we have in this country and the ways that the shitty conditions of street hooking seem to confirm these weird notions, the kinds of people who visit street hookers probably tend to be pretty depraved and gross. Of course, this is speculation. I’ve never been a streetwalker so I’m basing this mostly on a pretty armchair theory, so let’s get back to my original question before I fly completely off the rails and into a sea of shit I have no authority to talk about.
What’s the hooker want? Does she want the car to stop? When she waves and whistles and the brake lights swell, does she get a feeling in the pit of her stomach like “ah, fuck” or is she stoked because she’s getting an opportunity to, at the very least attempt to make some money? I mean, everyone hates their job at times and I can’t think of a worse job to have to get up the nerve to put on a smile and go do than hooking, but I’m not even talking about the bad days here. I’m talking about the average days and even the good days. What’s that like? Where does the desire REALLY net out on a job by job basis for the average street hooker?
Of course, as the reductive poster in the Sock Drawer is about to point out, the answer is complicated. It’s a mixture of fear, revulsion, and survivalism, potentially sometimes coupled with excitement, thrillseeking, pragmatic acomplihment and/or genuine curiosity. But here’s the thing: I’m not really looking for the answer that some middle-class guy who has nothing better to do than read blogs on his smart phone on the shitter has to say about what he THINKS is going on. For the purposes of the exchange-of-information parameters that we have here at BSC, this is a rhetorical essay, as are most of the posts here. For reasons I’m sure you can fathom, I’ve got the middle class white guy perspective on this issue pretty comfortably in hand, so I don’t need to really have it explained to me, thanks. However, hookers! I’d love to hear from you. I don’t know how many hookers actually read this blog. I’m guessing a ton. Can’t wait to read your insights.
Enjoy your day everyone. I’m heading out to get a massage.
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Everyone do the Jerry Lee!
I’ve got two kids. I have a boy who’s 3 and a little girl who’s just over the age of ‘baby’ and on to toddler. What I mean by this is that she walks and she can say some shit, and perhaps most significantly, she’s just gotten to the point where there’s no mistaking that she’s female. She doesn’t look like a baby as much as she looks like a very small little girl. She’s also almost supernaturally cute. Now, I know this sounds like bullshit. Every parent loves their kids and thinks they’re beautiful, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, but this little girl is actually quite cute. I get stopped on the street by people all the time just so they can go on and on about how cute she is. As someone who already walked around with one baby just a few years ago, I can tell you in no uncertain terms that this particular child, this little girl, gets an unusual amount of attention due to the fact that she’s pretty remarkably cute looking. Maybe she’ll grow up to be hideously ugly, maybe she’ll grow out of her cuteness by the time she gets into first grade. I don’t know. I’m not claiming anything except for the simple empirical fact that right now, motherfuckers will risk talking to a surly, heavily tattooed strange man to get a good look at this kid.
One extremely common way this manifests is people going “oh, man…she’s pretty. When she turns 13, watch out, papa!” or something like this and then having a laugh. This laugh is often accompanied by a knowing wink and then a resigned sigh. The implication here, obviously is that if she maintains her current level of attractiveness, once she goes through puberty, there are gonna be a flock of teenaged boys buzzing around her, presumably all attempting to fuck her, which is gonna be hell for me because I’m her father and well, no father likes to see a bunch of dipshit teenagers trying to fuck their daughter. This will further manifest in her being crazy, because no thirteen year old on earth is ready for the kind of attention being an attractive female brings. I mean, I think this is the main thrust of the joke/cautionary warning, right?
Okay, so first of all, thanks a lot, random stranger for sexualizing my fucking toddler. That’s great. I’m thrilled that the first conversation you want to have upon seeing a cute baby is the amount of people that are gonna want to fuck her some day. That’s just wonderful. Secondly, yes, sure she’s gonna be a crazy bitch, but in what universe is EVERY SINGLE TEENAGED GIRL not a completely crazy bitch, at the very least to their parents, if not the world at large? And finally, no. I don’t care about things like shitty teenaged boys flocking around. Everyone that goes through puberty (that doesn’t have some weird damage) comes out the other side with uh…physical needs, and my children are gonna be no exception to that and that’s fine with me. Am I gonna like the dudes she ‘dates (provided that she even is interested in dudes)? Probably not all of them. Just like I probably won’t like the dipshit friends that my son brings around and emulates either. In fact, I bet there’s even gonna be some crossover there, and the dude that my son most idolizes, who I most think is a dildo, will maybe end up buzzing around my daughter, and maybe she’ll absolutely love him. That shit happens all the time.
No, I don’t have a problem with any of that. Everyone needs to find their sexual identity and it’s never an easy thing for anyone, but it’s an important part of growing up, and I have no more a problem with my daughter going through that than I do my son, which is to say it’s not my favorite topic of conversation, but what the fuck am I gonna do? That’s how life works.
What I DO have a problem with is the first part of this…the part where strangers feel comfortable casually sexualizing my small child. The part I have a much bigger problem with is the part where she gets to be about thirteen and dudes MY age start ogling her. This, obviously, is face punching territory.
I have an acquaintance who’s in his 40’s who’s supposedly dating an 18-19 year old girl. I haven’t seen this dude in years and I don’t talk to him, but he’s definitely the kind of guy who would be in his 40’s and date a teenager. Apparently, he recently went to her house to meet her parents and when her dad opened the door, the dad looked out, quickly punched this acquaintance of mine in the nose, breaking it, and then shut the door. I think this is a pretty good move.
It’s hard though, because I know that I’ve been guilty of finding myself staring at women that are too young for me to be staring at, simply because well…they possess the features that were designed to attract the attention of men. I know that a lot of dudes, no matter how stand up and righteous they are have found themselves in that situation. It’s an unconscious thing that just sort of happens, and if you’re the kind of human being that’s worth a shit, you realize what’s going on, quickly admonish yourself and then move on with your day. The problem is that most human beings aren’t worth a shit, particularly the males. Most men are gross shitheads who don’t give two fucks about anything besides the happiness of their own dongs. In fact most men, even the good ones, find themselves tempted and taunted by their dicks pretty constantly, and sometimes good men succumb to the taunting of their own dicks. Now, obviously being a grownup and banging a thirteen year old is horrifically wrong, and it’s a pretty character-defining move. There’s no argument that goes “oh, he’s a good guy, but he just found himself in that situation where one thing led to another and suddenly BOOM, he’s fucking that thirteen year old girl.” It just doesn’t EVER work that way, because that’s a fucked up, wrong thing to do. It’s more likely that you could explain away a murder.
HOWEVER, dudes aren’t supposed to cheat on their wives or hit their wives or hit their kids or sit around and do meth all day while there’s no food in the fridge and motherfuckers do that shit all the time. ALL THE TIME. It’s creepy. That’s what it is. This species, human beings, with insanely horny men and females that start to look like women when they’re still children…it’s a fucked up combination that probably worked really well back in the cave days and shit, but now there are just too many dementos walking around. I dunno. I shouldn’t have started this train of thought…sheesh.
Anyway, yeah, when my kid becomes a teenager I’m in for a real shit sandwich buffet. Thanks for reminding me.
One extremely common way this manifests is people going “oh, man…she’s pretty. When she turns 13, watch out, papa!” or something like this and then having a laugh. This laugh is often accompanied by a knowing wink and then a resigned sigh. The implication here, obviously is that if she maintains her current level of attractiveness, once she goes through puberty, there are gonna be a flock of teenaged boys buzzing around her, presumably all attempting to fuck her, which is gonna be hell for me because I’m her father and well, no father likes to see a bunch of dipshit teenagers trying to fuck their daughter. This will further manifest in her being crazy, because no thirteen year old on earth is ready for the kind of attention being an attractive female brings. I mean, I think this is the main thrust of the joke/cautionary warning, right?
Okay, so first of all, thanks a lot, random stranger for sexualizing my fucking toddler. That’s great. I’m thrilled that the first conversation you want to have upon seeing a cute baby is the amount of people that are gonna want to fuck her some day. That’s just wonderful. Secondly, yes, sure she’s gonna be a crazy bitch, but in what universe is EVERY SINGLE TEENAGED GIRL not a completely crazy bitch, at the very least to their parents, if not the world at large? And finally, no. I don’t care about things like shitty teenaged boys flocking around. Everyone that goes through puberty (that doesn’t have some weird damage) comes out the other side with uh…physical needs, and my children are gonna be no exception to that and that’s fine with me. Am I gonna like the dudes she ‘dates (provided that she even is interested in dudes)? Probably not all of them. Just like I probably won’t like the dipshit friends that my son brings around and emulates either. In fact, I bet there’s even gonna be some crossover there, and the dude that my son most idolizes, who I most think is a dildo, will maybe end up buzzing around my daughter, and maybe she’ll absolutely love him. That shit happens all the time.
No, I don’t have a problem with any of that. Everyone needs to find their sexual identity and it’s never an easy thing for anyone, but it’s an important part of growing up, and I have no more a problem with my daughter going through that than I do my son, which is to say it’s not my favorite topic of conversation, but what the fuck am I gonna do? That’s how life works.
What I DO have a problem with is the first part of this…the part where strangers feel comfortable casually sexualizing my small child. The part I have a much bigger problem with is the part where she gets to be about thirteen and dudes MY age start ogling her. This, obviously, is face punching territory.
I have an acquaintance who’s in his 40’s who’s supposedly dating an 18-19 year old girl. I haven’t seen this dude in years and I don’t talk to him, but he’s definitely the kind of guy who would be in his 40’s and date a teenager. Apparently, he recently went to her house to meet her parents and when her dad opened the door, the dad looked out, quickly punched this acquaintance of mine in the nose, breaking it, and then shut the door. I think this is a pretty good move.
It’s hard though, because I know that I’ve been guilty of finding myself staring at women that are too young for me to be staring at, simply because well…they possess the features that were designed to attract the attention of men. I know that a lot of dudes, no matter how stand up and righteous they are have found themselves in that situation. It’s an unconscious thing that just sort of happens, and if you’re the kind of human being that’s worth a shit, you realize what’s going on, quickly admonish yourself and then move on with your day. The problem is that most human beings aren’t worth a shit, particularly the males. Most men are gross shitheads who don’t give two fucks about anything besides the happiness of their own dongs. In fact most men, even the good ones, find themselves tempted and taunted by their dicks pretty constantly, and sometimes good men succumb to the taunting of their own dicks. Now, obviously being a grownup and banging a thirteen year old is horrifically wrong, and it’s a pretty character-defining move. There’s no argument that goes “oh, he’s a good guy, but he just found himself in that situation where one thing led to another and suddenly BOOM, he’s fucking that thirteen year old girl.” It just doesn’t EVER work that way, because that’s a fucked up, wrong thing to do. It’s more likely that you could explain away a murder.
HOWEVER, dudes aren’t supposed to cheat on their wives or hit their wives or hit their kids or sit around and do meth all day while there’s no food in the fridge and motherfuckers do that shit all the time. ALL THE TIME. It’s creepy. That’s what it is. This species, human beings, with insanely horny men and females that start to look like women when they’re still children…it’s a fucked up combination that probably worked really well back in the cave days and shit, but now there are just too many dementos walking around. I dunno. I shouldn’t have started this train of thought…sheesh.
Anyway, yeah, when my kid becomes a teenager I’m in for a real shit sandwich buffet. Thanks for reminding me.
Monday, August 22, 2011
Sean Nader and the Abortion
I’ve written a little about Sean Nader in this space before. For those of you who are new or usually read this while you’re drunk, or if you’re that guy from Memento or something, let me refresh your memory. Sean Nader is one of my best friends. He used to be a roadie for the Lawrence Arms for a long time. He drinks shots of whiskey, sweats when he craps, eats while crapping/sweating, and has an almost preternatural sense of how to destroy things. I wrote a song called “Demons” loosely based on Sean Nader’s antics at his buddy’s wedding reception, which involved an intoxicated Nader being the first person to arrive at the party. By the time the bride, groom and everyone else showed up, he and his buddy were shirtless, wasted and rowdy. Punches were thrown. Were things destroyed? Oh, you’d better believe things were destroyed. Sean is an unbridled shockwave of messy good times and one of the few people I know that seems to live his life in a completely honest way, squeezing out the most joy and sugarcoating the least amount of the bullshit despair of anyone I know. He’s known to cry, get enraged or just throw a cake against a wall because it seems like a fun thing to do.
Sean Nader is also my favorite living visual artist. He’s my favorite artist not just because I love his work, which we’ll get to in a sec, but because he lives his life like an artist should, without any brakes and pushing to the absolute maximum of happiness/dogshit depression almost every day. His workshop/gallery is in an abandoned wing of the fairly dilapidated church rectory he used to live in, in a shitty, completely bombed out ‘neighborhood’ in Detroit. He sells his shit for cheap because in his words (and I’m paraphrasing, but this is pretty close) “what’s the fucking point of selling this shit if only a few assholes can afford to buy them? I want them to live and exist and be part of conversations and thoughts, and that’s not gonna happen if people don’t buy ‘em and hang ‘em up.” He also uses the shit that actually makes up his day to day existence as his raw materials, which is how it should be. There’s this unspoken rule these days (actually, it’s not really unspoken) that visual art is automatically pretentious. Maybe the single best thing about Nader’s shit is that it’s viciously unpretentious.
Nader works in a brewery in Detroit where he loads kegs onto palates and off of forklifts and shit. The job is shitty on his back and generally kind of soul crushing. One of the good things about the job (besides the fact that it’s working with beer, which is cool), is that Sean gets to take some palates home. Lots of his paintings are done on these palates, which are approximately 3x3 feet. His paintings are, as a rule, huge, bold, hilarious, dark and tinged with multiple mediums, usually involving acrylic, sharpie and magazine cut-out collage. Nader’s work is highly visceral and definitely evokes a response. Lots of people see these gigantic paintings of twisted people glaring out at them from inside a distorted world of perversions and go ‘wow, that’s incredible’ but others get incredibly, incredibly skeeved out. This is a story about those second kind of people.
So, Sean lives in Detroit where the gallery circuit isn’t quite what it is in, say Manhattan or Milan. So, when Sean got the opportunity to hang somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 pieces in a bar/gallery space downtown for the entire month of August, it was a big deal. Sean has had shows in the rectory, which, as I mentioned, is in a completely fucked up zone and is generally creepy, and he’s done pretty well, so this show was to be a big step with potential for some more recognition, at least locally, and Nader was stoked. He hyped up the show for a month, inviting his friends from all over the country to come to the opening night party and generally getting stoked. The night before the opening, he hung his pieces in the gallery space after the bar was closed and then the next morning at 930 he got a call.
The show was cancelled. He had to come get his 40+ pieces right away. What happened? Well, the owner arrived in the morning, saw the show and was (and I’m quoting here) “sickened” by the work. He immediately yelled at the curator to get the shit off the walls and into the basement. Nader had to leave the brewery and get someone to drive him down to the gallery space (Nader has never been able to drive) to get his pieces out of the basement, just hours after he’d hung them, just hours before his big opening, all because someone who in theory supports and enjoys contemporary art was made physically ill by Nader’s show.
When pressed, the owner stammered before finally mentioning that there were just too many cocks in the paintings. There were curse words here and there, which is kind of a no-no, but all the cocks, oh! The COCKS! Were simply too. Fucking. Much. And the plug had to be pulled. Nader went home, super pissed off, super disappointed and after some thought, went through his “show” to count the cocks that were on the wall at this bar/gallery and the total was…..
Zero.
There were zero cocks. Something about Nader’s work just evoked cocks in this dude’s mind, and honestly, I understand why. It’s a twisted canon of work for sure. So, he called me up, bummed out and told me the story and my response was, “Holy shit! That’s amazing! Your art made someone physically ill???? That’s fucking awesome!” But he didn’t really see it that way. He saw a big waste of time and energy for nothing. Later, I was hanging out with Matt Skiba (my famous friend who’s name I like to constantly drop) and I told him the story of Nader’s aborted show and he said “wow! That’s amazing! That’s the whole point of art,” and it is. It totally is. Making someone feel so strongly that it becomes a physical sensation IS the point of art (or A point of art) and Nader didn’t even have to dunk jesus into a tub of piss or anything (or even use cocks!) to cull this reaction.
Nader’s art evokes a response that can’t be overstated. He’s had his fucking show pulled, he’ been banned, he’s implanted thoughts of dicks in timid, pussy ass gallery owners and he’s shrugged and gone back to work at the brewery and put his paintings back in his workshop in the weird rectory in the DMZ in detroit. He’s also put his some of his paintings up on facebook here. Go check it out. It’s just like that asshole to take a bunch of pictures of gigantic pieces and not put anything into the frame to show their size, but those shits are all HUGE. These pieces are like, on average, half the size of a queensize bed. They’re enormous. Be careful though. If you’re a total pussy they may make you barf/see dongs in your dreams.
xoxoxoxoxo
Sean Nader is also my favorite living visual artist. He’s my favorite artist not just because I love his work, which we’ll get to in a sec, but because he lives his life like an artist should, without any brakes and pushing to the absolute maximum of happiness/dogshit depression almost every day. His workshop/gallery is in an abandoned wing of the fairly dilapidated church rectory he used to live in, in a shitty, completely bombed out ‘neighborhood’ in Detroit. He sells his shit for cheap because in his words (and I’m paraphrasing, but this is pretty close) “what’s the fucking point of selling this shit if only a few assholes can afford to buy them? I want them to live and exist and be part of conversations and thoughts, and that’s not gonna happen if people don’t buy ‘em and hang ‘em up.” He also uses the shit that actually makes up his day to day existence as his raw materials, which is how it should be. There’s this unspoken rule these days (actually, it’s not really unspoken) that visual art is automatically pretentious. Maybe the single best thing about Nader’s shit is that it’s viciously unpretentious.
Nader works in a brewery in Detroit where he loads kegs onto palates and off of forklifts and shit. The job is shitty on his back and generally kind of soul crushing. One of the good things about the job (besides the fact that it’s working with beer, which is cool), is that Sean gets to take some palates home. Lots of his paintings are done on these palates, which are approximately 3x3 feet. His paintings are, as a rule, huge, bold, hilarious, dark and tinged with multiple mediums, usually involving acrylic, sharpie and magazine cut-out collage. Nader’s work is highly visceral and definitely evokes a response. Lots of people see these gigantic paintings of twisted people glaring out at them from inside a distorted world of perversions and go ‘wow, that’s incredible’ but others get incredibly, incredibly skeeved out. This is a story about those second kind of people.
So, Sean lives in Detroit where the gallery circuit isn’t quite what it is in, say Manhattan or Milan. So, when Sean got the opportunity to hang somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 pieces in a bar/gallery space downtown for the entire month of August, it was a big deal. Sean has had shows in the rectory, which, as I mentioned, is in a completely fucked up zone and is generally creepy, and he’s done pretty well, so this show was to be a big step with potential for some more recognition, at least locally, and Nader was stoked. He hyped up the show for a month, inviting his friends from all over the country to come to the opening night party and generally getting stoked. The night before the opening, he hung his pieces in the gallery space after the bar was closed and then the next morning at 930 he got a call.
The show was cancelled. He had to come get his 40+ pieces right away. What happened? Well, the owner arrived in the morning, saw the show and was (and I’m quoting here) “sickened” by the work. He immediately yelled at the curator to get the shit off the walls and into the basement. Nader had to leave the brewery and get someone to drive him down to the gallery space (Nader has never been able to drive) to get his pieces out of the basement, just hours after he’d hung them, just hours before his big opening, all because someone who in theory supports and enjoys contemporary art was made physically ill by Nader’s show.
When pressed, the owner stammered before finally mentioning that there were just too many cocks in the paintings. There were curse words here and there, which is kind of a no-no, but all the cocks, oh! The COCKS! Were simply too. Fucking. Much. And the plug had to be pulled. Nader went home, super pissed off, super disappointed and after some thought, went through his “show” to count the cocks that were on the wall at this bar/gallery and the total was…..
Zero.
There were zero cocks. Something about Nader’s work just evoked cocks in this dude’s mind, and honestly, I understand why. It’s a twisted canon of work for sure. So, he called me up, bummed out and told me the story and my response was, “Holy shit! That’s amazing! Your art made someone physically ill???? That’s fucking awesome!” But he didn’t really see it that way. He saw a big waste of time and energy for nothing. Later, I was hanging out with Matt Skiba (my famous friend who’s name I like to constantly drop) and I told him the story of Nader’s aborted show and he said “wow! That’s amazing! That’s the whole point of art,” and it is. It totally is. Making someone feel so strongly that it becomes a physical sensation IS the point of art (or A point of art) and Nader didn’t even have to dunk jesus into a tub of piss or anything (or even use cocks!) to cull this reaction.
Nader’s art evokes a response that can’t be overstated. He’s had his fucking show pulled, he’ been banned, he’s implanted thoughts of dicks in timid, pussy ass gallery owners and he’s shrugged and gone back to work at the brewery and put his paintings back in his workshop in the weird rectory in the DMZ in detroit. He’s also put his some of his paintings up on facebook here. Go check it out. It’s just like that asshole to take a bunch of pictures of gigantic pieces and not put anything into the frame to show their size, but those shits are all HUGE. These pieces are like, on average, half the size of a queensize bed. They’re enormous. Be careful though. If you’re a total pussy they may make you barf/see dongs in your dreams.
xoxoxoxoxo
Friday, August 19, 2011
brain drain
First up, Advertising: September 9th is the day after my birthday and I’m playing at the Double Door with Ratasucia and the Swayback from Denver. Come out and let’s party, as it will be my birthday party. You guys are all invited. Don’t be a dildo, come hang. Okay, back to the ‘prepared’ remarks.
Hey yall. It’s been a busy week for me. I started off in the studio with a photographer who was documenting some of the recording process and staying on my couch. He left and about 2 hours later a different photographer showed up to stay on my couch and shoot my promo shots and album cover. I’ve also been up to my dick in getting this goddamned movie up and running (for those of you not aware, I wrote and directed this movie a couple of summers ago and it’s finally getting up to speed to be sold, trotted around to festivals and ultimately ignored), I had to go deal with my kid’s new school (nothing weirder than going to a school event as a parent. It’s vastly more pressurized than going as a kid), the muffler fell off my car, I got a blowout outside the place that sells the three-holed skimasks I needed for my photoshoot, and I changed a tire on the street, only to show up to the photo shoot covered in sweaty grime. A hobo sat at my table at the coffee place. I couldn’t find a model to help realize the vision of the album cover until about fifteen minutes before the shoot started, I haven’t slept in years, my wife got captured by pirates Wednesday night and I’m kind of panicking about if I can, in fact get this record recorded and mixed and up to speed before its imminent and quickly approaching release date. I’ve been inundated with writing projects (which is WAY better than not having any work, but still…makes for a busy week) And my daughter has stopped napping entirely and she’s only 1. That’s bullshit on a grand scale, folks.
This is, I’m acutely aware, a long-winded list of ‘first world’ or ‘white people’ problems. I didn’t at any point this week have to drink water that was full of dysentery because I was so thirsty. I didn’t have to choose which of my children would live and which would die. I didn’t lose my possessions in a methlab explosion and I didn’t accidentally shoot of my toe in a drunken celebration of the dog days of summer (though meth explosions and toe shooting are decidedly ‘white guy’ problems if we’re being honest). No one is threatening to kill or imprison anyone I love and even at the lowest point of the week I have a family and friends and all of you, my lovely Dogs of War to keep me company. That’s pretty cool. As my daughter sits in the back room just skwawking away like some kind of caged pteranodon, (something that usually drives me absolutely up the fucking wall) I’m pretty stoked. Today is Friday, there’s nothing goin on this weekend, I did all my work for the week and I’m ready to chill. It seems like it’s been forever since I just had a quiet weekend at home, which is shockingly lame when you consider that I don’t hardly do shit that’s even remotely interesting that doesn’t take place on the internet…sigh.
In fact, that’s a weird thing. I’ve been dreaming on the internet lately. Like, my dreams are of me looking at websites. That’s probably a sign that it’s time to stop with the internet a little, eh? I mean, I’ve read all the articles about ‘tech addiction’ and I don’t think it’s any stretch to say I fall into that category. It’s hilarious though, because it’s like being an alcoholic that only drinks wine coolers. I don’t really know how to use the internet but I compulsively check my email and look at like 4 websites that I know about. Then I put my phone down for about five minutes and then I do the whole thing again. This goes on all day and when I’m done, I go to bed and dream about doing it some more. What a pathetic existence my life has deteriorated into. I used to talk to people face to face that weren’t three or the tired, wary parent of a three year old. I used to be able to sit and wait for the bus without compulsively surfing the internet or talking on the phone. Ditto for taking a dump, walking to the liquor store, making it through a lull in conversation at the lunch table, eating breakfast, standing in line at the butcher, and even typing this. As I sit here and type this rambling stream of consciousness that’s pretty much an unreadable apology for why I haven’t posted more this week, I’m STILL surfing the internet (or the tiny little cove of the internet that I know about) and carrying on shitty IM conversations and generally acting like a fucking mental patient. It’s not enough for me to type up a soliloquy with the 2 distractions of my yelping daughter and the blasting cartoons that my son is watching. No, I need to have three vacuous conversations going and pore over a bunch of different news outlets and twitter feeds too. What the fuck?
Does anyone remember silence or meditation or not having any sort of connection to anything and not feeling weird about that? I kind of want to get rid of my cel phone and throw this computer into the sea, BUT then all the things that I’m ‘working towards’ kind of dry up and die. The internet has made it possible for me to work closely with experts and specialists that I wouldn’t otherwise have access to and (for example) package, market and sell a movie without living in NYC or LA. It would be pretty fucking stupid to stop that shit now, right? Now that everything is done and pretty much ready to go? That’s the addiction. That’s like when you say “well, I’m gonna quit smoking, but I’m not quitting until after my sister comes next month. That’s just stupid self-sabotage because I’m definitely gonna smoke then” as though there’s EVER gonna be a time when you, an addicted smoker, aren’t gonna be tempted to smoke. There’s ALWAYS something on the horizon that makes for an easy excuse as to why you’d stay complacent. There’s no way out except getting scared and yanking the band aid off and just walking the fuck away. It’s the only way out of EVERYTHING.
Anyway, I’m not gonna figure this all out today. But seriously, come to that show. It’s the day after my birthday. I’m gonna be 22. Come party!
Hey yall. It’s been a busy week for me. I started off in the studio with a photographer who was documenting some of the recording process and staying on my couch. He left and about 2 hours later a different photographer showed up to stay on my couch and shoot my promo shots and album cover. I’ve also been up to my dick in getting this goddamned movie up and running (for those of you not aware, I wrote and directed this movie a couple of summers ago and it’s finally getting up to speed to be sold, trotted around to festivals and ultimately ignored), I had to go deal with my kid’s new school (nothing weirder than going to a school event as a parent. It’s vastly more pressurized than going as a kid), the muffler fell off my car, I got a blowout outside the place that sells the three-holed skimasks I needed for my photoshoot, and I changed a tire on the street, only to show up to the photo shoot covered in sweaty grime. A hobo sat at my table at the coffee place. I couldn’t find a model to help realize the vision of the album cover until about fifteen minutes before the shoot started, I haven’t slept in years, my wife got captured by pirates Wednesday night and I’m kind of panicking about if I can, in fact get this record recorded and mixed and up to speed before its imminent and quickly approaching release date. I’ve been inundated with writing projects (which is WAY better than not having any work, but still…makes for a busy week) And my daughter has stopped napping entirely and she’s only 1. That’s bullshit on a grand scale, folks.
This is, I’m acutely aware, a long-winded list of ‘first world’ or ‘white people’ problems. I didn’t at any point this week have to drink water that was full of dysentery because I was so thirsty. I didn’t have to choose which of my children would live and which would die. I didn’t lose my possessions in a methlab explosion and I didn’t accidentally shoot of my toe in a drunken celebration of the dog days of summer (though meth explosions and toe shooting are decidedly ‘white guy’ problems if we’re being honest). No one is threatening to kill or imprison anyone I love and even at the lowest point of the week I have a family and friends and all of you, my lovely Dogs of War to keep me company. That’s pretty cool. As my daughter sits in the back room just skwawking away like some kind of caged pteranodon, (something that usually drives me absolutely up the fucking wall) I’m pretty stoked. Today is Friday, there’s nothing goin on this weekend, I did all my work for the week and I’m ready to chill. It seems like it’s been forever since I just had a quiet weekend at home, which is shockingly lame when you consider that I don’t hardly do shit that’s even remotely interesting that doesn’t take place on the internet…sigh.
In fact, that’s a weird thing. I’ve been dreaming on the internet lately. Like, my dreams are of me looking at websites. That’s probably a sign that it’s time to stop with the internet a little, eh? I mean, I’ve read all the articles about ‘tech addiction’ and I don’t think it’s any stretch to say I fall into that category. It’s hilarious though, because it’s like being an alcoholic that only drinks wine coolers. I don’t really know how to use the internet but I compulsively check my email and look at like 4 websites that I know about. Then I put my phone down for about five minutes and then I do the whole thing again. This goes on all day and when I’m done, I go to bed and dream about doing it some more. What a pathetic existence my life has deteriorated into. I used to talk to people face to face that weren’t three or the tired, wary parent of a three year old. I used to be able to sit and wait for the bus without compulsively surfing the internet or talking on the phone. Ditto for taking a dump, walking to the liquor store, making it through a lull in conversation at the lunch table, eating breakfast, standing in line at the butcher, and even typing this. As I sit here and type this rambling stream of consciousness that’s pretty much an unreadable apology for why I haven’t posted more this week, I’m STILL surfing the internet (or the tiny little cove of the internet that I know about) and carrying on shitty IM conversations and generally acting like a fucking mental patient. It’s not enough for me to type up a soliloquy with the 2 distractions of my yelping daughter and the blasting cartoons that my son is watching. No, I need to have three vacuous conversations going and pore over a bunch of different news outlets and twitter feeds too. What the fuck?
Does anyone remember silence or meditation or not having any sort of connection to anything and not feeling weird about that? I kind of want to get rid of my cel phone and throw this computer into the sea, BUT then all the things that I’m ‘working towards’ kind of dry up and die. The internet has made it possible for me to work closely with experts and specialists that I wouldn’t otherwise have access to and (for example) package, market and sell a movie without living in NYC or LA. It would be pretty fucking stupid to stop that shit now, right? Now that everything is done and pretty much ready to go? That’s the addiction. That’s like when you say “well, I’m gonna quit smoking, but I’m not quitting until after my sister comes next month. That’s just stupid self-sabotage because I’m definitely gonna smoke then” as though there’s EVER gonna be a time when you, an addicted smoker, aren’t gonna be tempted to smoke. There’s ALWAYS something on the horizon that makes for an easy excuse as to why you’d stay complacent. There’s no way out except getting scared and yanking the band aid off and just walking the fuck away. It’s the only way out of EVERYTHING.
Anyway, I’m not gonna figure this all out today. But seriously, come to that show. It’s the day after my birthday. I’m gonna be 22. Come party!
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
Oh no you DI-int!
So, where do we stand on Casey Anthony and her obvious ability to pump a wang? I broached this subject on Twitter yesterday, but I think it merits a long form discussion as well. So, first let’s get the disclaimers out of the way: Casey Anthony is the most hated person in America for good reason. She really seems like the kind of person who kills toddlers, she’s accused all the males her own family of fucking her (which, well, if they did that’s absolutely despicable, but if they didn’t then well, that’s a super fucked up thing to accuse your own dad and brother of. That’s terrible. Not ‘kill-your-daughter-and-toss-her-duct-taped-corpse-in-the-woods terrible, but pretty goddamned terrible all the same). She’s definitely a shitty person, she’s gross, she’s been in jail and she’s at the very least a sociopath if not an outright psychopath, BUT I was scrolling through her candid photos yesterday and one thing was abundantly clear to me: She’d be a pretty fierce lay, no two ways about it.
Is she attractive? Eh…yeah? I guess. At the time of writing this I think it’s safe to say she’s definitely not a pig…again it bears mentioning that this is a purely physical assessment and in no way an endorsement of her despicable behavior. That said, she’s pretty well put together. She’s obviously very fit. I don’t know. I’m uncomfortable heaping too much praise on her for obvious reasons, but in a vacuum, I’d say she’s attractive. Now, as this is the internet and everyone’s a contrarian and an opinionated naysayer, I’d like to just stop you right now and tell you that I’m aware of your opinion: she’s a greasy chipmunk, she’s a sinewy white trash juggalo jizzbox, she looks like a teenage boy in drag. I don’t entirely disagree with any of this, but in the name of respectable journalism, I feel compelled to throw in that she’s also undeniably bangable, if for no other reason than because you men out there (all men) have extremely low standards 100% of the time whether you admit it to me, your friends or yourself, and I’m about as sure as anything I’ve ever been sure of that you’ve ALL boned a chick that’s physically more repellant than Casey Anthony, right? I thought so. So anyway, moving on…
Here’s what Casey Anthony brings to the table: She’s a party girl, a boozer, very likely a user of drugs and generally uninhibited (this is exhaustively documented in all the candid photos of her in bars getting her tits grabbed, her in a flag toga in what looks like the ‘before’ shot of an extremely patriotic orgy and just generally in her lax brand of parenting). She’s also fucking insane. These are bad traits to have in a friend, a wife, a mother or a girlfriend, but when it comes down to pure unbridled boning, they’re AWESOME traits. She’s also (obviously) desperately insecure and starved for validation, and now as the most hated woman in the entire world she’s probably about ten times as clamorous for approval. This is a recipe for a penis job the likes of which haven’t been seen on this mortal coil in ages. If you’re the kind of desperate sack of shit that’s willing to give some loving to a reprehensible probable-child-murderer, (and deep down most of you are) well, bro, you’re in for a hell of a ride.
It’s just a matter of seconds until someone finds this out first hand. In fact, I’m sure she’s been wantonly skiing down a mountain of dicks ever since she got released from jail, wherever she is. She’s ALSO obviously a contrarian and with everyone on earth condemning her parenting (again, with extremely good reason) you know that her crazy, crazy, contrary ass is just burning up with baby fever. Even if you ignore the fact that she’s been sequestered from the general dong population for the last three years, there’s probably not someone on earth more desperate for some wangs than crazy old Casey Anthony (all gay dudes notwithstanding). Just throwing it out there. She’s a horrible person and I’d rather have my prostate pulled out of my dickhole with a fondue fork than sit in a room with her, but some lucky trucker/meth dealer/dude with a case of Natty Lite hanging out in the econolodge parking lot/etc is probably having the kind of sex that would make pornstars blush as we speak.
Uh…I don’t really know just how to feel about all this. It’s obviously reductive and sexist and all that. BUT it’s also all totally true. And, (and I discussed this on Twitter yesterday a bit too) is it okay to acknowledge that someone who’s obviously a shithead is also probably good at something too? I think so. I can say that Michael Vick is a good quarterback or Hitler was a great delegator, right? It doesn’t change the fact that I find dogfighting and genocide to be terrible, despicable acts, but I mean, fuck…is that okay? I don’t know. I think so? Maybe? Eh, who knows? I’m gonna go take a cry-shower now.
See you dipshits in a few.
xoxoxoxo
Is she attractive? Eh…yeah? I guess. At the time of writing this I think it’s safe to say she’s definitely not a pig…again it bears mentioning that this is a purely physical assessment and in no way an endorsement of her despicable behavior. That said, she’s pretty well put together. She’s obviously very fit. I don’t know. I’m uncomfortable heaping too much praise on her for obvious reasons, but in a vacuum, I’d say she’s attractive. Now, as this is the internet and everyone’s a contrarian and an opinionated naysayer, I’d like to just stop you right now and tell you that I’m aware of your opinion: she’s a greasy chipmunk, she’s a sinewy white trash juggalo jizzbox, she looks like a teenage boy in drag. I don’t entirely disagree with any of this, but in the name of respectable journalism, I feel compelled to throw in that she’s also undeniably bangable, if for no other reason than because you men out there (all men) have extremely low standards 100% of the time whether you admit it to me, your friends or yourself, and I’m about as sure as anything I’ve ever been sure of that you’ve ALL boned a chick that’s physically more repellant than Casey Anthony, right? I thought so. So anyway, moving on…
Here’s what Casey Anthony brings to the table: She’s a party girl, a boozer, very likely a user of drugs and generally uninhibited (this is exhaustively documented in all the candid photos of her in bars getting her tits grabbed, her in a flag toga in what looks like the ‘before’ shot of an extremely patriotic orgy and just generally in her lax brand of parenting). She’s also fucking insane. These are bad traits to have in a friend, a wife, a mother or a girlfriend, but when it comes down to pure unbridled boning, they’re AWESOME traits. She’s also (obviously) desperately insecure and starved for validation, and now as the most hated woman in the entire world she’s probably about ten times as clamorous for approval. This is a recipe for a penis job the likes of which haven’t been seen on this mortal coil in ages. If you’re the kind of desperate sack of shit that’s willing to give some loving to a reprehensible probable-child-murderer, (and deep down most of you are) well, bro, you’re in for a hell of a ride.
It’s just a matter of seconds until someone finds this out first hand. In fact, I’m sure she’s been wantonly skiing down a mountain of dicks ever since she got released from jail, wherever she is. She’s ALSO obviously a contrarian and with everyone on earth condemning her parenting (again, with extremely good reason) you know that her crazy, crazy, contrary ass is just burning up with baby fever. Even if you ignore the fact that she’s been sequestered from the general dong population for the last three years, there’s probably not someone on earth more desperate for some wangs than crazy old Casey Anthony (all gay dudes notwithstanding). Just throwing it out there. She’s a horrible person and I’d rather have my prostate pulled out of my dickhole with a fondue fork than sit in a room with her, but some lucky trucker/meth dealer/dude with a case of Natty Lite hanging out in the econolodge parking lot/etc is probably having the kind of sex that would make pornstars blush as we speak.
Uh…I don’t really know just how to feel about all this. It’s obviously reductive and sexist and all that. BUT it’s also all totally true. And, (and I discussed this on Twitter yesterday a bit too) is it okay to acknowledge that someone who’s obviously a shithead is also probably good at something too? I think so. I can say that Michael Vick is a good quarterback or Hitler was a great delegator, right? It doesn’t change the fact that I find dogfighting and genocide to be terrible, despicable acts, but I mean, fuck…is that okay? I don’t know. I think so? Maybe? Eh, who knows? I’m gonna go take a cry-shower now.
See you dipshits in a few.
xoxoxoxo
Thursday, August 11, 2011
hey, bro, that's a pretty cool wall.
I never did acid as a youth (or ever) even though I was around it all the time in high school. In fact, when I started hanging out in the suburbs, I got to meet people who did acid more or less every day, which was pretty weird. They seemed to be having fun, but clearly it wasn’t a very good ad for taking acid, because to this day the shit kind of creeps me out.
In the city, where I grew up, there were not that many drugs around. I mean, yeah, there were a couple of guys I knew who had weed but that was really it. In the suburbs however, once we got out to Oak Park, Barrington or Elgin (which were the three suburbs I hung out in the most…oak park because I had a band there, Barrington because I lived there for a year or two and Elgin because I had another, vastly better band there) the shit was everywhere. It wasn’t uncommon at any moment for someone to pull out some acid and ask if anyone wanted any. I never did it, I think, because this happened to me for the first time when I was still very young and innocent and the idea of fucking with my brain really, really wigged me out. This feeling, with regards to acid, has imprinted on me, even as I’ve gotten older and uh, braver, I guess.
I’d liken this to the way behaviorists talk about how if you grow up in the same house as your sibling, you become sexually revolted by them, but if you don’t you’ve got a very VERY good chance of at least considering wanting to bang them. OR, how they’ve got when puppies bond with their owners down to like, a span of three days in like the third or fourth week they’re alive. If you’re the person taking care of that puppy on those days, that puppy is gonna think of you as its’ #1 forever. It’s called imprinting, and that’s what happened to me with my aversion to acid.
I don’t remember any specifics, but I know that when I was young, people were always tripping around me and the way they acted seemed pretty stupid, but more to the point, every single one of them would say the same thing after their first trip, which was “whoa, I’ll never be the same after that,” and THAT freaked me the fuck out, since, like most humans, I’m inherently resistant to change, but also because I was young and myopic enough that I already thought I was awesome and that any change I could go through would automatically be for the worse. I couldn’t fathom that they meant change for the better. Also, there was this:
I’d grown up, like many of you, hearing the bullshit stories of acid casualties like the guy that your buddy’s friend knows who thinks he’s an orange, and he just sits in a room (hospital or childhood, depending on the version) and says something like “squeeze me, I’m so juicy” over and over again (by the way, just so we’re clear, this is a completely made up, fake story. If that dude really existed he’d be the posterboy for the war on drugs and he’d be constantly broadcast to impressionable teens. So I don’t care how much your brother swears up and down that his friend visited the dude once, he’s not real. Just like that girl in your highschool who got the hotdog stuck in her pussy isn’t real, just like the guy from the Lawrence Arms and the Falcon who puts peanut butter on his dick and has his dogs lick it off isn’t real either. Er…um…anyway) and so the idea that something like acid would change me forever didn’t sound like something that I wanted to have anything to do with.
This was a decision I’d made when I was just barely old enough to start thinking that maybe the bill of goods I’d been sold regarding the total, irredeemable evil of drugs was not entirely 100% true, but still young enough to get easily scared and still bombarded enough to kind of buy it a little. Now, I’m older and I have an entirely different view on drugs (‘don’t be an idiot with drugs’ is my view, by the way) but my feeling about acid is still imprinted. The shit seems creepy to me.
I mean, it sounds cool. I like the idea of talking dogs and pictures coming to life and a bowl of pudding telling my fortune and shit like that, but there seems to be some soul searching involved that I think, at this point in my existence, I’m a little too old and road weary for. I’ve found that the amount of introspection a person can handle is completely inversely proportional to how old you are OR how completely un-self aware you are. I think, as of right now, I can handle the regular amount, no more. That seems okay to me. I have some self awareness and that’s fine. I’m not trying to get to nirvana over here. Just trying to make it through the day.
Back when I was young, I hadn’t really ever lived, so I could peer into the deep recesses of my soul and it was all, ‘wow, I walk my dog, I like my mom, doing okay in school, saw some tits the other day and that was AMAZING! And that’s pretty much it. Let’s get back to listening to Ween.’ But life is hard, full of bad decisions, hard decisions, compromise, broken promises (to yourself and to others) and the act of just being alive kind of runs your soul through the gutter a little. I mean, just to type this I have to ignore my kids, even if it is for fifteen minutes and I can see them the whole time, and that can, in a moment of quiet reflection, make me feel incredibly guilty. It’s not even the bad shit like when I beat up that old lady or pissed on the sleeping homeless guy, it’s the day to day minutiae that builds and builds and eventually bows and breaks your soul, and the results are that I don’t want to get in there and look TOO terribly closely, and since that’s what acid kind of makes you do, no thanks.
I’ll take beer, which does the complete opposite, thank you very much. Uh, plus, if acid makes Jefferson Airplane sound like a decent band, well, no. No thank you. That shit’s terrible.
As you were.
In the city, where I grew up, there were not that many drugs around. I mean, yeah, there were a couple of guys I knew who had weed but that was really it. In the suburbs however, once we got out to Oak Park, Barrington or Elgin (which were the three suburbs I hung out in the most…oak park because I had a band there, Barrington because I lived there for a year or two and Elgin because I had another, vastly better band there) the shit was everywhere. It wasn’t uncommon at any moment for someone to pull out some acid and ask if anyone wanted any. I never did it, I think, because this happened to me for the first time when I was still very young and innocent and the idea of fucking with my brain really, really wigged me out. This feeling, with regards to acid, has imprinted on me, even as I’ve gotten older and uh, braver, I guess.
I’d liken this to the way behaviorists talk about how if you grow up in the same house as your sibling, you become sexually revolted by them, but if you don’t you’ve got a very VERY good chance of at least considering wanting to bang them. OR, how they’ve got when puppies bond with their owners down to like, a span of three days in like the third or fourth week they’re alive. If you’re the person taking care of that puppy on those days, that puppy is gonna think of you as its’ #1 forever. It’s called imprinting, and that’s what happened to me with my aversion to acid.
I don’t remember any specifics, but I know that when I was young, people were always tripping around me and the way they acted seemed pretty stupid, but more to the point, every single one of them would say the same thing after their first trip, which was “whoa, I’ll never be the same after that,” and THAT freaked me the fuck out, since, like most humans, I’m inherently resistant to change, but also because I was young and myopic enough that I already thought I was awesome and that any change I could go through would automatically be for the worse. I couldn’t fathom that they meant change for the better. Also, there was this:
I’d grown up, like many of you, hearing the bullshit stories of acid casualties like the guy that your buddy’s friend knows who thinks he’s an orange, and he just sits in a room (hospital or childhood, depending on the version) and says something like “squeeze me, I’m so juicy” over and over again (by the way, just so we’re clear, this is a completely made up, fake story. If that dude really existed he’d be the posterboy for the war on drugs and he’d be constantly broadcast to impressionable teens. So I don’t care how much your brother swears up and down that his friend visited the dude once, he’s not real. Just like that girl in your highschool who got the hotdog stuck in her pussy isn’t real, just like the guy from the Lawrence Arms and the Falcon who puts peanut butter on his dick and has his dogs lick it off isn’t real either. Er…um…anyway) and so the idea that something like acid would change me forever didn’t sound like something that I wanted to have anything to do with.
This was a decision I’d made when I was just barely old enough to start thinking that maybe the bill of goods I’d been sold regarding the total, irredeemable evil of drugs was not entirely 100% true, but still young enough to get easily scared and still bombarded enough to kind of buy it a little. Now, I’m older and I have an entirely different view on drugs (‘don’t be an idiot with drugs’ is my view, by the way) but my feeling about acid is still imprinted. The shit seems creepy to me.
I mean, it sounds cool. I like the idea of talking dogs and pictures coming to life and a bowl of pudding telling my fortune and shit like that, but there seems to be some soul searching involved that I think, at this point in my existence, I’m a little too old and road weary for. I’ve found that the amount of introspection a person can handle is completely inversely proportional to how old you are OR how completely un-self aware you are. I think, as of right now, I can handle the regular amount, no more. That seems okay to me. I have some self awareness and that’s fine. I’m not trying to get to nirvana over here. Just trying to make it through the day.
Back when I was young, I hadn’t really ever lived, so I could peer into the deep recesses of my soul and it was all, ‘wow, I walk my dog, I like my mom, doing okay in school, saw some tits the other day and that was AMAZING! And that’s pretty much it. Let’s get back to listening to Ween.’ But life is hard, full of bad decisions, hard decisions, compromise, broken promises (to yourself and to others) and the act of just being alive kind of runs your soul through the gutter a little. I mean, just to type this I have to ignore my kids, even if it is for fifteen minutes and I can see them the whole time, and that can, in a moment of quiet reflection, make me feel incredibly guilty. It’s not even the bad shit like when I beat up that old lady or pissed on the sleeping homeless guy, it’s the day to day minutiae that builds and builds and eventually bows and breaks your soul, and the results are that I don’t want to get in there and look TOO terribly closely, and since that’s what acid kind of makes you do, no thanks.
I’ll take beer, which does the complete opposite, thank you very much. Uh, plus, if acid makes Jefferson Airplane sound like a decent band, well, no. No thank you. That shit’s terrible.
As you were.
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
Das Rapping
In preparation for feeling good about yourself today, (or maybe I’ve got this completely backwards) I want you to bust a quick google image search for Sido.
I’ll wait right here.
…man, it’s hot today. Maybe I’ll go to the gym. I’m tired this morning…
Oh, you back? Good. How about that shit, eh? He’s German, by the way. And that gold skull mask, well, back in the day rumor has it that he wore that shit ALL the time. Like, that was his thing. Remember how we had Kriss Kross? No? You don’t? Jesus…Okay, back when I was a kid there was a rap group called Kriss Kross. They were completely puppeteered by Jermaine Dupri, if memory serves (though I distinctly remember that he referred to himself as “Chris” in interviews) and they were two kids that called themselves Daddy Mac and Mac Daddy. Their thing was reflectiveness. Their MC names were reflections of one another, their real names were Chris and Chris and they topped all this wild reflexivity off by wearing all their clothes backwards.
No, for real. They wore their shit so they’d have to button their pants right above their asscrack and zip up each other’s hoodies, which is even more hilarious when you consider that wearing a hoodie backwards puts the hood completely over your face, or at the very least, irritatingly bunched up at your neck and chin. Everyone my age remembers Kriss Kross and their massive hit ‘Jump’ but I’m guessing that the Totally Krossed Out krew didn’t have much of a shelf life. I’m further guessing a lot of the younger people reading this are thinking things to themselves like “why the FUCK would you wear your clothes backwards?” And that’s a great, great question.
The funny thing about Kriss Kross and their radical style is that they were fairly particular about how you could ‘totally kross out’ your wardrobe. You had to do everything opposite or whatever, but they specifically spelled out in the opening verse of “Jump” that ‘everything is to the back, with a little slack, cuz inside out is wickidy, wickidy wickidy wack!’ and well, they’re correct. Wearing your clothes inside out is kind of a cultural memo that says “I got chased out of an apartment by the girl who I was fucking’s dad/husband” or “I’m brutally HUNG OVER.” It’s certainly not the coolest thing in the world to do. BUT, if I’m in a situation where I want to wear a certain item (a tee shirt is a good example here) because I like the cut or the color, but I’m not terribly interested in the print, I’ll wear that shit inside out in a heartbeat. Hell, I do that all the time. You know what I’ll never do though? Wear gigantic neon yellow jeans backwards, with the ass pockets phalanxing my dick. That’s never, ever gonna happen. What’s so wickidy wack now, Chris’s?
Eh, I’m being reductive and culturally dishonest, because Kriss Kross represented something of a youth movement and came about when hip hop was still kind of finding its footing and all the rules weren’t quite set in stone, so people were trying to pull off all sorts of crazy shit. It’s like back in the day, before everyone got the punk rulebook, and people were showing up to Clash shows dressed in Garbage bags or going to CBGB’s with tv’s on their heads and shit. Kriss Kross was just trying bullshit out, and lord knows that what looks completely stupid one decade makes a whole dick-ton of sense in the next, time and time again.
Which is why Sido is such a hilarious dude. He wears a gold skull mask and raps in German. These are all terrible ideas, and more to the point, they’re terrible ideas that are coming at a time when it’s pretty safe to say that all the shit that’s not just totally visionary has been tried. But the Germans love him. They LOVE him. A few years ago, he took off the skull and WOW! He’s a fucking geek! Has that affected his popularity? Germans, I’m asking you. Is Sido still huge now that everyone knows what a total Greg he is under the golden skull?
Well, once again I’m being a little culturally dishonest because if I’m looking for a rapper to like, and my choices are handed to me in the form of two photographs, one being Sido with the skull mask and one being Sido without the skull mask, if I had to choose which rapper I’d like to be the fan of, without ever hearing any music, I’d pick no skull every time. The upshot is that I suppose that taking off the skull must have helped his popularity, but I guess I don’t know. Germans rock a kooky style. Sometimes it’s about the coolest looking style ever (some of the most attractive, well put together women I’ve ever seen have been krauts) and sometimes it’s completely off the charts, out of the ballpark fucked up. I’m talking Crocodile Dundee hat, sleeveless skin tight shiny shirt (all colors acceptable) oversized watch, silver hinged belt, orange cargo shorts, black mesh(!) socks to the knees, bright red croc-like shoes fucked up. It’s a real scene. And it’s obviously at least somewhat agreed upon by everyone, so who am I to say that the gold skull mask is hilarious and not an overtly rad (perhaps even, dare I say ironic) homage to the unique German fashion sense, and perhaps the rapping in German is another manifestation of that?
I mean, that’s an argument, but to paraphrase a pretty great pundit interviewed on a pretty great segment on a pretty great show, uh, whatever. The dude wears a skull on his face.
That’s all. Oh, and I guess there’s all sorts of wild rumors going around that Jermaine Dupri used to bang the kids from Kriss Kross. News to me. That’s really taking that “everything is to the back” shit to a whole new level, folks! Heyooooo! Maybe him and Sido are doing bold new, highly artistic things that I dare not attempt to comprehend, bro. That’s probably the case, right?
I’ll wait right here.
…man, it’s hot today. Maybe I’ll go to the gym. I’m tired this morning…
Oh, you back? Good. How about that shit, eh? He’s German, by the way. And that gold skull mask, well, back in the day rumor has it that he wore that shit ALL the time. Like, that was his thing. Remember how we had Kriss Kross? No? You don’t? Jesus…Okay, back when I was a kid there was a rap group called Kriss Kross. They were completely puppeteered by Jermaine Dupri, if memory serves (though I distinctly remember that he referred to himself as “Chris” in interviews) and they were two kids that called themselves Daddy Mac and Mac Daddy. Their thing was reflectiveness. Their MC names were reflections of one another, their real names were Chris and Chris and they topped all this wild reflexivity off by wearing all their clothes backwards.
No, for real. They wore their shit so they’d have to button their pants right above their asscrack and zip up each other’s hoodies, which is even more hilarious when you consider that wearing a hoodie backwards puts the hood completely over your face, or at the very least, irritatingly bunched up at your neck and chin. Everyone my age remembers Kriss Kross and their massive hit ‘Jump’ but I’m guessing that the Totally Krossed Out krew didn’t have much of a shelf life. I’m further guessing a lot of the younger people reading this are thinking things to themselves like “why the FUCK would you wear your clothes backwards?” And that’s a great, great question.
The funny thing about Kriss Kross and their radical style is that they were fairly particular about how you could ‘totally kross out’ your wardrobe. You had to do everything opposite or whatever, but they specifically spelled out in the opening verse of “Jump” that ‘everything is to the back, with a little slack, cuz inside out is wickidy, wickidy wickidy wack!’ and well, they’re correct. Wearing your clothes inside out is kind of a cultural memo that says “I got chased out of an apartment by the girl who I was fucking’s dad/husband” or “I’m brutally HUNG OVER.” It’s certainly not the coolest thing in the world to do. BUT, if I’m in a situation where I want to wear a certain item (a tee shirt is a good example here) because I like the cut or the color, but I’m not terribly interested in the print, I’ll wear that shit inside out in a heartbeat. Hell, I do that all the time. You know what I’ll never do though? Wear gigantic neon yellow jeans backwards, with the ass pockets phalanxing my dick. That’s never, ever gonna happen. What’s so wickidy wack now, Chris’s?
Eh, I’m being reductive and culturally dishonest, because Kriss Kross represented something of a youth movement and came about when hip hop was still kind of finding its footing and all the rules weren’t quite set in stone, so people were trying to pull off all sorts of crazy shit. It’s like back in the day, before everyone got the punk rulebook, and people were showing up to Clash shows dressed in Garbage bags or going to CBGB’s with tv’s on their heads and shit. Kriss Kross was just trying bullshit out, and lord knows that what looks completely stupid one decade makes a whole dick-ton of sense in the next, time and time again.
Which is why Sido is such a hilarious dude. He wears a gold skull mask and raps in German. These are all terrible ideas, and more to the point, they’re terrible ideas that are coming at a time when it’s pretty safe to say that all the shit that’s not just totally visionary has been tried. But the Germans love him. They LOVE him. A few years ago, he took off the skull and WOW! He’s a fucking geek! Has that affected his popularity? Germans, I’m asking you. Is Sido still huge now that everyone knows what a total Greg he is under the golden skull?
Well, once again I’m being a little culturally dishonest because if I’m looking for a rapper to like, and my choices are handed to me in the form of two photographs, one being Sido with the skull mask and one being Sido without the skull mask, if I had to choose which rapper I’d like to be the fan of, without ever hearing any music, I’d pick no skull every time. The upshot is that I suppose that taking off the skull must have helped his popularity, but I guess I don’t know. Germans rock a kooky style. Sometimes it’s about the coolest looking style ever (some of the most attractive, well put together women I’ve ever seen have been krauts) and sometimes it’s completely off the charts, out of the ballpark fucked up. I’m talking Crocodile Dundee hat, sleeveless skin tight shiny shirt (all colors acceptable) oversized watch, silver hinged belt, orange cargo shorts, black mesh(!) socks to the knees, bright red croc-like shoes fucked up. It’s a real scene. And it’s obviously at least somewhat agreed upon by everyone, so who am I to say that the gold skull mask is hilarious and not an overtly rad (perhaps even, dare I say ironic) homage to the unique German fashion sense, and perhaps the rapping in German is another manifestation of that?
I mean, that’s an argument, but to paraphrase a pretty great pundit interviewed on a pretty great segment on a pretty great show, uh, whatever. The dude wears a skull on his face.
That’s all. Oh, and I guess there’s all sorts of wild rumors going around that Jermaine Dupri used to bang the kids from Kriss Kross. News to me. That’s really taking that “everything is to the back” shit to a whole new level, folks! Heyooooo! Maybe him and Sido are doing bold new, highly artistic things that I dare not attempt to comprehend, bro. That’s probably the case, right?
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
Reruns!
Sorry y’all, my dad and brother were in town this weekend. I played a show and generally lived the life that a man of my limited sleep schedule should dare not dream of. I haven’t been back in the studio but I’m going back tomorrow. I’m running around like a poor Londoner not really sure of which shop to loot first and frankly, something’s gotta give. Unfortunately for you, my loyal Dogs Of War, for the last couple, it’s been this blog.
Right now, I’m attempting to do something rad for my kids, so I’m not gonna type this shit today either. However, I’m gonna leave you with a classic BSC from the archives of yesteryear. This one originally appeared 2 days before the 2010 Halloween. Enjoy!
Original title: How To Get Famous!
Not too long ago I heard a famous model/musician/actress type talking about when they first came to New York to make it in the world of whatever it is that they do (this story is kind of light on details as I’ve since forgotten who the person was) and she said that one of the big things that she and her roommate would do was buy a couple of ham sandwiches and put them on the window sill. They would leave them there for weeks until they were literally crawling with maggots and then they’d eat them.
They did this with the intention of getting food poisoning so that they could quickly shed multiple pounds. Apparently they always had a ham sandwich or two going, and this was a regular thing. Pretty radical, eh?
Now, it’s been said over and over again that Hollywood promotes a body image that’s just unattainable and blah blah blah, but obviously it’s not. I mean, look at the evidence here, folks. You don’t have to starve yourself. You just need to eat food that almost kills you on a regular basis and you’re there. Take that, hippy dipshits and your fat, tubby ungroomed vulvae!
I thought about this ham sandwich diet several times in the night two nights ago as I was barfing and shitting simultaneously and it kind of blew my mind. I mean, food poisoning, the real kind that has you shitting and barfing and with the sweats and shit, is no joke. It’s one of the absolute worst feelings that you can ever have. Every description I’ve read of heroin junkies going through withdrawals indicates that the symptoms are identical to those that I was experiencing due to the results of my little brief love affair with grocery store sushi. Violent and unexpected shitting and barfing? check. Shooting pains into the nuts? Check. Neck and back pain? Check. Sweats? Cold and hot flashes? Dizziness? Complete disorientation? Oh yeah. Check on all of those.
That whole deal was a bad time. And there’s no doubt about it. I can SEE the difference that night made on my body. I’ve visibly lost weight. And I guess if I did it again tomorrow, I’d really be in fighting shape (although, last night I was so weak that I couldn’t even hold my kid with both arms. He’s only about thirty five pounds, folks), and I gotta say good for this girl and her roommate for going through all that to get skinny. It’s more drive than I have. Maybe that’s why my “fame” will peter out on the internet in the form of a highly engaging blog for people with nothing to do and firewalls up that prevent them from looking at porn, and her fame will (presumably…I can’t remember who she was) you know, continue to thrive, like maggots on a ham sandwich in the sun.
If you think about it, the Ham Sandwich Diet is pretty great. It’s quicker than starving, it’s more of a ‘go get em’ move than bulimia and it’s less life damaging than heroin. After all, it’s not illegal and it’s not gonna make you suddenly like Lou Reed or just sit there with drool hanging off your face (there’s no way you could be hydrated enough to drool while grappling with food poisoning). It probably doesn’t give you all the bad skin that meth does. No…whoever this vapid idiot was had it exactly right…Eating rotten food is the absolute BEST way to get famous. You heard it here first folks.
Ah, but the thing is, if we’re really being honest, with heroin, you at least get to get high. You presumably can enjoy a few parts of your life, like that moment after you get high, for example. With this food poisoning, you’re miserable 100% of the time. You could, at any moment, shit your pants. That’s gonna kill a modeling gig quicker than you can say Howard K Stern, Attorney at Law (not to be confused with the king of all media). And with heroin, at least you can sleep and you can zone out and you can probably get laid a little bit when all the other disgusting dregs of society that want a little of your heroin come by to say hi.
With food poisoning, there’s no getting laid. There’s no getting off the shitter, honestly. Well, I guess in that recovery day you could get laid and zone out and even get high if you wanted to.
Huh…this is a hard call folks. What’s the best way into showbiz? Heroin or food poisoning? Both seem like good choices. What say you?
Right now, I’m attempting to do something rad for my kids, so I’m not gonna type this shit today either. However, I’m gonna leave you with a classic BSC from the archives of yesteryear. This one originally appeared 2 days before the 2010 Halloween. Enjoy!
Original title: How To Get Famous!
Not too long ago I heard a famous model/musician/actress type talking about when they first came to New York to make it in the world of whatever it is that they do (this story is kind of light on details as I’ve since forgotten who the person was) and she said that one of the big things that she and her roommate would do was buy a couple of ham sandwiches and put them on the window sill. They would leave them there for weeks until they were literally crawling with maggots and then they’d eat them.
They did this with the intention of getting food poisoning so that they could quickly shed multiple pounds. Apparently they always had a ham sandwich or two going, and this was a regular thing. Pretty radical, eh?
Now, it’s been said over and over again that Hollywood promotes a body image that’s just unattainable and blah blah blah, but obviously it’s not. I mean, look at the evidence here, folks. You don’t have to starve yourself. You just need to eat food that almost kills you on a regular basis and you’re there. Take that, hippy dipshits and your fat, tubby ungroomed vulvae!
I thought about this ham sandwich diet several times in the night two nights ago as I was barfing and shitting simultaneously and it kind of blew my mind. I mean, food poisoning, the real kind that has you shitting and barfing and with the sweats and shit, is no joke. It’s one of the absolute worst feelings that you can ever have. Every description I’ve read of heroin junkies going through withdrawals indicates that the symptoms are identical to those that I was experiencing due to the results of my little brief love affair with grocery store sushi. Violent and unexpected shitting and barfing? check. Shooting pains into the nuts? Check. Neck and back pain? Check. Sweats? Cold and hot flashes? Dizziness? Complete disorientation? Oh yeah. Check on all of those.
That whole deal was a bad time. And there’s no doubt about it. I can SEE the difference that night made on my body. I’ve visibly lost weight. And I guess if I did it again tomorrow, I’d really be in fighting shape (although, last night I was so weak that I couldn’t even hold my kid with both arms. He’s only about thirty five pounds, folks), and I gotta say good for this girl and her roommate for going through all that to get skinny. It’s more drive than I have. Maybe that’s why my “fame” will peter out on the internet in the form of a highly engaging blog for people with nothing to do and firewalls up that prevent them from looking at porn, and her fame will (presumably…I can’t remember who she was) you know, continue to thrive, like maggots on a ham sandwich in the sun.
If you think about it, the Ham Sandwich Diet is pretty great. It’s quicker than starving, it’s more of a ‘go get em’ move than bulimia and it’s less life damaging than heroin. After all, it’s not illegal and it’s not gonna make you suddenly like Lou Reed or just sit there with drool hanging off your face (there’s no way you could be hydrated enough to drool while grappling with food poisoning). It probably doesn’t give you all the bad skin that meth does. No…whoever this vapid idiot was had it exactly right…Eating rotten food is the absolute BEST way to get famous. You heard it here first folks.
Ah, but the thing is, if we’re really being honest, with heroin, you at least get to get high. You presumably can enjoy a few parts of your life, like that moment after you get high, for example. With this food poisoning, you’re miserable 100% of the time. You could, at any moment, shit your pants. That’s gonna kill a modeling gig quicker than you can say Howard K Stern, Attorney at Law (not to be confused with the king of all media). And with heroin, at least you can sleep and you can zone out and you can probably get laid a little bit when all the other disgusting dregs of society that want a little of your heroin come by to say hi.
With food poisoning, there’s no getting laid. There’s no getting off the shitter, honestly. Well, I guess in that recovery day you could get laid and zone out and even get high if you wanted to.
Huh…this is a hard call folks. What’s the best way into showbiz? Heroin or food poisoning? Both seem like good choices. What say you?
Friday, August 5, 2011
update! Update!
What? You guys want updates from what’s going on in the studio as I record what is turning out to be a very strange, potentially divisive and offensive record? Well, sure. I got nothing better to do (except take care of my kids, but they’re practically raising themselves over there in that TV room. Thanks technology!)
Last night I was in the studio til about 230. Nick and I finished up the bass and we got to work on vocals. I sang three songs and then the inevitable doom that accompanies the knowledge that both myself and Matt Allison were gonna have to get up with tiny kids in just a couple of hours set in and we decided to call it a night. As of right now, of the 8 full band songs I’m doing in this studio (that’s not counting four others that I did elsewhere that are already fully done) bass, rhythm guitar and drums are done and vocals are over a third of the way there. Pretty exciting, folks. The fact that the record is turning out even weirder than I thought it was gonna be is a testament to something. Last night upon completing a vocal take, I looked into the control room, where Matt, Justin and Nick were sitting and said, ‘wow, this record is really the suicide letter of my musical career, eh?’ It’s quite possible that’s the case.
It’s funny, ambition is an interesting thing. It’s one of the more lauded character traits, but it can manifest as being disgusting, cruel, stupid, ugly, lame or laughable. In art, if you go for something that’s ambitious, you absolutely MUST pull it off or it’s just the dumbest, shittiest fucking thing of all time. Concept records are great examples of the two ways that ambition can play out. On one hand, you’ve got a concept record like, uh, I dunno, that thing that Fucked Up just did. People listen to that and it just blows their minds. That Good Life record, Album of the Year, it’s pretty dick/soul melting in its cohesiveness. On the other hand, you’ve got that Yellowcard album about the girl named Holly Wood who goes to (wait for it) Hollywood to seek her fortune a la Mama’s Fallen Angel. That one didn’t get quite as much acclaim as David Comes To Life. In fact, because Yellowcard was so ambitious, but (according to a lot of people) missed the mark, falling short of pulling off the lofty, very difficult task of putting together a cohesive and cool concept record, they actually felt the need to come out and apologize for it in a press release!!! And while it seems crazy to me that an artist would ever apologize for their art, in a case like this, I almost kind of get it (even though I’ve never listened to that record and don’t have an opinion on it one way or the other).
There’s nothing so brutally embarrassing as trying something and failing. The more preparation that’s involved, the more chances you take, the more you attempt to make something that really truly stands out, the more likely it is that the final product WILL stand out, BUT, if you don’t do an awesome job, there it all is, your shortcomings, your lack of true vision, your physical limitations, your foolhardiness, your hubris, and most crushingly, your big, stupid idea up there writ large for the world to scoff at and casually dismiss. That sucks. That’s why something is ‘ambitious.’ Because it’s gonna be embarrassing as shit if you fuck it up.
Now, I’m not making a concept album. I’m making a record that’s different from shit I’ve done before and as it stands, there’s gonna be people who are gonna say shit like “man, wow, this sucks, go back to the shit you actually know how to do.” There will be people who feel that they know my capabilities and limitations and if what I do, in their opinion, doesn’t rock like the shit I’ve done that they like, they’re gonna be angry and feel betrayed, or worse, they’re gonna be smug and dismissive and make comments about how I’m out of it, or irrelevant, or desperate or whatever.
But those are the exact people that I’m looking to alienate with this record. I’m done being ruled by other people’s opinions regarding how I should create things (not that I spent a lot of time worrying about that before). This record is a weird batch of songs, and I’m nervous about how it’s all gonna come together (though I’m cautiously stoked out of my mind so far) and how it’s all gonna end up working. I know that it’s gonna bum some people out, but I guess I hope it doesn’t bum EVERYONE out. Eh, actually, that’s not true. If it bums out absolutely everyone, that’s probably a job well done, right? If the visceral experience is universal, unequivocal hatred and disgust, I’ve completely succeeded, haven’t I? Okay, good talk. Let’s hit the showers.
I’m playing a show tonight at the Underground Lounge. Come say hi. Turns out my dad may be there. Weird.
Last night I was in the studio til about 230. Nick and I finished up the bass and we got to work on vocals. I sang three songs and then the inevitable doom that accompanies the knowledge that both myself and Matt Allison were gonna have to get up with tiny kids in just a couple of hours set in and we decided to call it a night. As of right now, of the 8 full band songs I’m doing in this studio (that’s not counting four others that I did elsewhere that are already fully done) bass, rhythm guitar and drums are done and vocals are over a third of the way there. Pretty exciting, folks. The fact that the record is turning out even weirder than I thought it was gonna be is a testament to something. Last night upon completing a vocal take, I looked into the control room, where Matt, Justin and Nick were sitting and said, ‘wow, this record is really the suicide letter of my musical career, eh?’ It’s quite possible that’s the case.
It’s funny, ambition is an interesting thing. It’s one of the more lauded character traits, but it can manifest as being disgusting, cruel, stupid, ugly, lame or laughable. In art, if you go for something that’s ambitious, you absolutely MUST pull it off or it’s just the dumbest, shittiest fucking thing of all time. Concept records are great examples of the two ways that ambition can play out. On one hand, you’ve got a concept record like, uh, I dunno, that thing that Fucked Up just did. People listen to that and it just blows their minds. That Good Life record, Album of the Year, it’s pretty dick/soul melting in its cohesiveness. On the other hand, you’ve got that Yellowcard album about the girl named Holly Wood who goes to (wait for it) Hollywood to seek her fortune a la Mama’s Fallen Angel. That one didn’t get quite as much acclaim as David Comes To Life. In fact, because Yellowcard was so ambitious, but (according to a lot of people) missed the mark, falling short of pulling off the lofty, very difficult task of putting together a cohesive and cool concept record, they actually felt the need to come out and apologize for it in a press release!!! And while it seems crazy to me that an artist would ever apologize for their art, in a case like this, I almost kind of get it (even though I’ve never listened to that record and don’t have an opinion on it one way or the other).
There’s nothing so brutally embarrassing as trying something and failing. The more preparation that’s involved, the more chances you take, the more you attempt to make something that really truly stands out, the more likely it is that the final product WILL stand out, BUT, if you don’t do an awesome job, there it all is, your shortcomings, your lack of true vision, your physical limitations, your foolhardiness, your hubris, and most crushingly, your big, stupid idea up there writ large for the world to scoff at and casually dismiss. That sucks. That’s why something is ‘ambitious.’ Because it’s gonna be embarrassing as shit if you fuck it up.
Now, I’m not making a concept album. I’m making a record that’s different from shit I’ve done before and as it stands, there’s gonna be people who are gonna say shit like “man, wow, this sucks, go back to the shit you actually know how to do.” There will be people who feel that they know my capabilities and limitations and if what I do, in their opinion, doesn’t rock like the shit I’ve done that they like, they’re gonna be angry and feel betrayed, or worse, they’re gonna be smug and dismissive and make comments about how I’m out of it, or irrelevant, or desperate or whatever.
But those are the exact people that I’m looking to alienate with this record. I’m done being ruled by other people’s opinions regarding how I should create things (not that I spent a lot of time worrying about that before). This record is a weird batch of songs, and I’m nervous about how it’s all gonna come together (though I’m cautiously stoked out of my mind so far) and how it’s all gonna end up working. I know that it’s gonna bum some people out, but I guess I hope it doesn’t bum EVERYONE out. Eh, actually, that’s not true. If it bums out absolutely everyone, that’s probably a job well done, right? If the visceral experience is universal, unequivocal hatred and disgust, I’ve completely succeeded, haven’t I? Okay, good talk. Let’s hit the showers.
I’m playing a show tonight at the Underground Lounge. Come say hi. Turns out my dad may be there. Weird.
Thursday, August 4, 2011
happy friday? Oh fuck, it's thursday.
Weeesh, I am fucking exhausted. It’s been a constant thrill train over here between late nights at the studio, early mornings with my kids, Alkaline Trio shows and long, brutal days of trying to figure out how to do something that a 3 year old can enjoy that an exhausted man can also suffer through that doesn’t involve being in the disgusting heat.
I go back into the studio tonight where I think we may finish bass and keys and start vocals. I guess that means we’ll probably do the acoustic guitars too, which should be nice and fun since I put a new pickup in my guitar just a week ago. I’m stoked for the results.
I’m also playing a show tomorrow night at the Underground Lounge on Newport and Clark with the Copyrights. My brother will be there, so come for the music and stay for the perverse majesty that it Ryan Kelly.
So, like I was saying, I’m pretty tired and I don’t have too much to say right now, so uh…Bye?
If you guys are bored go check out the song “fear of China” by the old Chicago band Oblivion. It’s really great and it’s been in my head for some reason all morning though I haven’t heard it in probably a decade.
Eh, here are some companies that I think would benefit greatly by having me as a celebrity spokesperson. If you work for any of these companies, let’s rap.
KY
Taco Johns
BP
Vivid
Louisville Slugger
All Bran
Frigo String Cheese
Marvel
Miller High Life
Coors
Canadian Club
Redi Whip
Les Paul
Fender
Dogfart inc
Smuckers
Chili’s
Hungry Man
Levis
Oh, and if you’re a banker, I have a banking question. Please email me if you’re a person who works kind of high up in a bank. I need a wee bit of guidance. Thanks, yo!
I go back into the studio tonight where I think we may finish bass and keys and start vocals. I guess that means we’ll probably do the acoustic guitars too, which should be nice and fun since I put a new pickup in my guitar just a week ago. I’m stoked for the results.
I’m also playing a show tomorrow night at the Underground Lounge on Newport and Clark with the Copyrights. My brother will be there, so come for the music and stay for the perverse majesty that it Ryan Kelly.
So, like I was saying, I’m pretty tired and I don’t have too much to say right now, so uh…Bye?
If you guys are bored go check out the song “fear of China” by the old Chicago band Oblivion. It’s really great and it’s been in my head for some reason all morning though I haven’t heard it in probably a decade.
Eh, here are some companies that I think would benefit greatly by having me as a celebrity spokesperson. If you work for any of these companies, let’s rap.
KY
Taco Johns
BP
Vivid
Louisville Slugger
All Bran
Frigo String Cheese
Marvel
Miller High Life
Coors
Canadian Club
Redi Whip
Les Paul
Fender
Dogfart inc
Smuckers
Chili’s
Hungry Man
Levis
Oh, and if you’re a banker, I have a banking question. Please email me if you’re a person who works kind of high up in a bank. I need a wee bit of guidance. Thanks, yo!
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
let's go dii-iiicks let's go!
So, as promised, today’s entry will deal with dicks. Dicks are funny. They’re not particularly attractive, but they have a certain je ne sais quoi that makes people think about and with them all the time. Dudes, in particular are infatuated with dicks. People will sit there and tell you that men only think about pussy, but that’s really not true at all. Even when men are thinking about pussy, they’re just thinking about how great a dick housing whatever pussy they’re thinking about would be. Don’t believe me? If you’re a dude, imagine your dick is cut off. Gone, never to return. Now, do you still want pussy? Or is it entirely contingent on having a dick? See. It’s dicks. You’re thinking about dicks. (ha ha! You’re thinking about di-icks!)
Size of dicks is an issue and again, it’s one that is REALLY only important to men. Women pragmatically assess a dick’s worth in much the same way that someone will determine (for example) how much potato salad to buy based on what they could reasonably consume before it goes bad. ‘That particular dick is too big to ever go in my ass” is something that women of a certain awesomeness think on occasion when confronted with a new dick. (of course women are happy to laugh at small dicks, but only if the dick in question is REALLY small, [like, the size of an eraser] or if they hate the dude the dick’s attached to and the thought of shaming him and his puny dong is recapitulated as some sort of move towards empowerment).
Men, however, exist in a strange world of black and white where big dicks are important and better than smaller dicks. You know who complains about/makes fun of/obsesses over small dicks? Dudes. Not women. I mean, sure, women maybe DO have something to say on the subject now and again, but not on even remotely the scale of dudes. Dudes are disproportionately obsessed with dick size which, if you’re not gay (and honestly, gay dudes really, truly have the right, if not the duty to be somewhat obsessed with dicks. They’ve got em, the people they want to fuck have them. Everyone has them. They’re a big deal. In a world where everyone’s a dude, the dick is crucial, bro) seems like a strange thing to be obsessed with. It becomes disturbing pretty fast when you really stop to consider the amount of daily thought that men give to dicks. But HERE’S the funny part:
What other measurement on the entire earth is tallied, recorded and deemed acceptable/shitty completely exclusive of the surrounding environment? If I said my house had a five foot long back deck, that doesn’t mean much. You need to see the room it comes off of, the outside area it opens onto etc. If I said you had ten minutes to wait, if that’s at the doctor’s office, no big deal. If it’s to get a nine piece mcnugget, that’s a long time, if it’s before this gang of dudes stops beating the shit out of you, that’s an eternity. But with dicksize, it’s just straight up, uh…is it at least 6 inches? No? then it’s small. Doesn’t matter if you’re Shaq or Tom Cruise or Meatloaf or Peter Dinklage. Doesn't matter how deep or shallow the accompanying vagina is. Dicks have a cosmic measuring scale which surroundings have no bearing on. Behold, the mystery of dicks.
What a hilarious weirdness. To summarize, with a few exceptions, women don’t even really truly care much about dicksize, but men are obsessed. The best part is that most men don’t have big dicks. That’s just the way it works by definition. The adjective “big” is specifically designated to denote dicks that are more than average. Average is, again, by definition, not big but for some reason having a big dick is a big deal. It's odd. As someone with a giant dick, I can’t begin to fathom why anyone else would desire this curse. Whenever I bang my wife it’s nothing but teary eyed orgasms and entreaties to stop, no, keep going…You guys out there with your pin dicks are lucky.
Uh, wait…is this thing on?
Size of dicks is an issue and again, it’s one that is REALLY only important to men. Women pragmatically assess a dick’s worth in much the same way that someone will determine (for example) how much potato salad to buy based on what they could reasonably consume before it goes bad. ‘That particular dick is too big to ever go in my ass” is something that women of a certain awesomeness think on occasion when confronted with a new dick. (of course women are happy to laugh at small dicks, but only if the dick in question is REALLY small, [like, the size of an eraser] or if they hate the dude the dick’s attached to and the thought of shaming him and his puny dong is recapitulated as some sort of move towards empowerment).
Men, however, exist in a strange world of black and white where big dicks are important and better than smaller dicks. You know who complains about/makes fun of/obsesses over small dicks? Dudes. Not women. I mean, sure, women maybe DO have something to say on the subject now and again, but not on even remotely the scale of dudes. Dudes are disproportionately obsessed with dick size which, if you’re not gay (and honestly, gay dudes really, truly have the right, if not the duty to be somewhat obsessed with dicks. They’ve got em, the people they want to fuck have them. Everyone has them. They’re a big deal. In a world where everyone’s a dude, the dick is crucial, bro) seems like a strange thing to be obsessed with. It becomes disturbing pretty fast when you really stop to consider the amount of daily thought that men give to dicks. But HERE’S the funny part:
What other measurement on the entire earth is tallied, recorded and deemed acceptable/shitty completely exclusive of the surrounding environment? If I said my house had a five foot long back deck, that doesn’t mean much. You need to see the room it comes off of, the outside area it opens onto etc. If I said you had ten minutes to wait, if that’s at the doctor’s office, no big deal. If it’s to get a nine piece mcnugget, that’s a long time, if it’s before this gang of dudes stops beating the shit out of you, that’s an eternity. But with dicksize, it’s just straight up, uh…is it at least 6 inches? No? then it’s small. Doesn’t matter if you’re Shaq or Tom Cruise or Meatloaf or Peter Dinklage. Doesn't matter how deep or shallow the accompanying vagina is. Dicks have a cosmic measuring scale which surroundings have no bearing on. Behold, the mystery of dicks.
What a hilarious weirdness. To summarize, with a few exceptions, women don’t even really truly care much about dicksize, but men are obsessed. The best part is that most men don’t have big dicks. That’s just the way it works by definition. The adjective “big” is specifically designated to denote dicks that are more than average. Average is, again, by definition, not big but for some reason having a big dick is a big deal. It's odd. As someone with a giant dick, I can’t begin to fathom why anyone else would desire this curse. Whenever I bang my wife it’s nothing but teary eyed orgasms and entreaties to stop, no, keep going…You guys out there with your pin dicks are lucky.
Uh, wait…is this thing on?
Monday, August 1, 2011
Dicks!!!!! No...wait. Not today.
You guys, I had this idea for a column about dicks and I was gonna write it up and it was gonna be terrific. The thing is, I'm so fucking tired I can barely see. I was in the studio til 330 this morning and I had to get up at 7 to take care of these kids. SO, the upshot is that I'm way too braindead to wittily espouse any sort of coherent philosophy regarding why dicks are hilarious. Maybe I'll try again later if I start to feel better. As it stands, I'm just gonna try to stay awake and keep my kids out of the street.
Sorry. Hopefully the record we're making will be entertaining enough that this lapse in dick-reporting will be overlookable.
Sorry. Hopefully the record we're making will be entertaining enough that this lapse in dick-reporting will be overlookable.
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