bad sandwich chronicles

moving day!!!!

2011-11-30T06:36:00.000-08:00

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

www.badsandwichchronicles.net

See you fucks over there!

Plum Island

2011-11-28T09:51:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2011-11-22T09:45:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

xoxoxoxox

Here he is! Your new American Idol!!!

2011-11-21T10:21:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or not. Fuck it. Who cares?

Sweet, what's mine say?

2011-11-18T07:29:00.001-08:00

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

Thanks. We now return to our prepared program:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have a good weekend.

rambling incoherence

2011-11-17T10:10:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don't tell me how to raise MY kids!

2011-11-14T08:40:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

xoxoxoxo

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

2011-11-09T14:43:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh jesus...

2011-11-08T09:21:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Killing mofos.

2011-11-07T10:40:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Doin' Crimes

2011-11-03T08:35:00.001-07:00

So, today I’m going into the studio to do an exclusive demo for a 7” that I’m trying to get out this year (before my record comes out, which, thanks to circumstances beyond the control of anyone isn’t gonna be out ‘til 2012) and I’m pretty excited. I wrote the song yesterday as a sort of exclusive B-side which will also attempt to bridge the gap, soundwise, between what this new record is about and the stuff I’ve done in the past, while also serving as a bit of a quick, dirty microcosm of the whole new project. The song is about crimes, which is fitting because my whole new record is about crime. In honor of this excitement, I thought today I’d go over a few crimes and talk a little about them. You guys in? Cool. Let’s get started.

Drunk In Public- Being drunk in public is awesome, but the actual crime ‘drunk in public’ sucks. Here’s why: If you’re getting arrested for being drunk in public one of two things is happening. Either you’re so drunk that you’re completely shitty to be around or some asshole cop is thumping his dick all over you for no good reason. For these reasons and more, drunk in public is a shitty crime. However, there is a silver lining: Dudes like the Situation tend to get a lot more drunk in publics than dudes like, er, say me and once you’ve seen the hottest, sluttiest chick in the place creep to the bathroom to suck off the Situation-esque dude (thereby ruining both of them forever) it’s kind of nice to see that dude get hauled off screaming, makeup smeared, sparkly shirt all twisted around, into a squad car for one too many vodka redbulls. Call it gioia maligna if you must, but whatever. Fuck em.

Breaking and entering- This is a good, classic crime. It’s scary as shit and it has the advantage of being violent and emotionally traumatic even if the victim isn’t there and you don’t ever actually touch anyone, which is a nice touch. Of course in pretty much all circumstances, you’re a HUGE cocksucker if you break and enter. My friend had someone break into her house and the person or people who did it just smoked her weed and took a dump without flushing. They didn’t steal anything. The cops said that it’s extremely common for break-ins to culminate in a left behind dump. Which, eeew. Pretty much the only way breaking and entering is cool is if you’re young, attractive and desperate and you’re looking to get revenge on, say an evil drug dealer or something. Which brings us to:

Drug Warehousing: This one’s weird because it’s the kind of crime you’ll go to jail for the rest of your life for, but it’s so benign it’s not even REALLY a crime, except that it involves knowing criminals. Essentially, you just have to have a place where the bad guys (dealers, producers) store the shit in the meantime. So if you’ve got a big garage, you can fill it with bricks of cocaine and be a drug warehouser and then go about your day being the kind of guy who waits for stop lights to turn green and donates to the church and stuff. You’re a law abiding citizen with a storage space. You don’t sell or produce drugs, but man…if they find that shit, you’re NEVER gonna wear anything but a jumpsuit for the rest of your life. One time, Chris and I were in NYC at this random party and after a while, it came out that we were at the house of a drug warehouser. We were also high and some guy just came up and said, ‘did you guys smoke that shit downstairs?’ and we were like ‘uh…yeah?’ thinking he meant the weed. But then this other guy said ‘no, not them…they didn’t smoke THAT shit’ and gave first dude a really weird, stern look, at which point Chris and I completely lost our shit and took off running. We caught a cab and cried all the way back to our hotel. True story.

Drug Dealing: Well, this one’s weird, because dealing supports cartels and murder and the breakdown of society and all that, but a good drug dealer provides a service that a HUGE percentage of people are interested in and if you’re doing it well, you’re really taking on a lot of risk so you can get other people (including very good people) things they desperately want. Now, keep in mind I’m not talking about drug PUSHING, which I don’t actually know anything about beyond what I’ve seen on really hamfisted shows for kids. Does drug pushing exist? I’ve been around some drugs in my time and while I’ve been pressured by peers to try things they were trying, I’ve never in my life come across anyone from above trying to force me or encourage me to do any drugs. No one’s ever given me the old “hey bro, the first one’s free” routine. Does that happen? I kind of doubt it. I’d say the only situation where a drug dealer becomes a pusher is when he’s trying to get into a girl’s pants and he uses the drugs as a bit of a gift because he’s got nothing else going for him, so he’s like “come on baby, take a hit. It’ll get you real high and loosen your inhibitions” just because it’s only if she LIKES the drugs that she’ll like him. Otherwise, uh…he’s just a creepy pud with a shoulder bag full of jail time.
I doubt SERIOUSLY that anyone is so motivated as to attempt to get people hooked on drugs just for the profitable months that will come their way before everything goes to shit and the cheeseburgers and dicksucking bartering starts, but I don’t doubt even for a moment that people are so evil that they’ll get someone super fucked up and do anything necessary, regardless of morality in order to fuck them. Which leads us to:

Rape- Bad crime. There’s no way around this one. It’s always, always bad. Even when they got Gaddafi, who’s a despot to be sure, I was okay with the killing and the swarming, but when they stuck the knife up his ass, I was like “ugh…that sucks.” If what you’re doing makes me feel bad for Gaddafi, well, it’s a bad crime. It’s no less bad if it’s your wang and it’s a passed out person who’s just barfed on the floor or someone who’s too fucked up or small to fight back, by the way. Jesus…this is depressing. Let’s move on to murder and lighten the mood.

Murder- Murder is like the Michael Jordan of crime. It’s THE crime. There’s no crime more definitively ingrained in our mind as Crime than murder. Murder, in some circles, makes you cool. Fuck, in TONS of circles it makes you cool. Strangely, murder is so ubiquitous that we give it different names depending on how much we want to celebrate it. Really bad murders are ‘slayings’ or ‘murders’ or ‘assassinations’ but really great killings are ‘take downs’ or ‘critical hits.’ Unlike rape, murder isn’t always bad (or even crime). It’s probably always bad to watch, but it’s easy to see a circumstance where a murderer (say, a billy the kid type or even a combat veteran), can be seen as a hero or a good guy, but you don’t ever see a Hollywood movie where they attempt to get you to root for the rapist.

Mugging- Mugging sucks ass, especially if it’s violent, but in a technical sense it’s a pretty good crime. It’s got all the trappings. You get out there and assault and steal and maybe wear a mask and you run from cops and you make property values plummet and so on and so forth. If you’re into the art of Crime, then you can’t go wrong with mugging. In conclusion, mugging, bad time, good crime.

Shooting the shanty towns full of nerve gas- Who among us hasn’t gotten drunk and fired off canisters of nerve gas at the unwashed hordes and their dumb tents made out of old boxes and diapers just for kicks? I mean, what the fuck, right? Don’t be such a mom.

Jaywalking- Stupid crime. I hate jaywalkers, but I do it too and I hate cops that fuck with jaywalkers even more. When I first met my wife, she had just gotten a jaywalking ticket in LA. I found myself strangely attracted to her outlaw ways. Heh.

Anyway, there are a lot more crimes. I didn’t even get to sodomy (awesome when consensual), mailing scabs over state lines (despicable in almost every circumstance) or flashing (eh, depends on who you are and who your victim is) but I’ve got lots and lots of songs about all kinds of crimes. I can’t wait for you to hear em.

Be safe out there! This world is crawling with assholes.

xoxoxoxox

apologies!

2011-11-02T08:34:00.000-07:00

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

hallowwwwwwwwwweeeeeeeeeeeeeeen

2011-10-31T09:47:00.000-07:00

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

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

Or

What are you, fucking retarded?

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

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

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

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

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

they sounded....asian.

2011-10-28T08:21:00.001-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s all. Have a good weekend.

a harrowing tale of adventure and thrills

2011-10-27T08:21:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Life’s really mysterious.

I know kung fu!

2011-10-24T10:09:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2011-10-21T06:39:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

Ahem.

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

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

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

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

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

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

xxoxoxo

TL;DR

2011-10-19T14:09:00.001-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

better late than never, eh?

2011-10-17T09:51:00.001-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wooooohooo.

The one where I fuck Brad Pitt

2011-10-13T09:39:00.000-07:00

Last night I was entertaining some guests and the subject of Brad Pitt’s star power came up in response to what I believe was a poorly phrased statement made by Robin Quivers, the news person on the Howard Stern show. She essentially said that Brad Pitt isn’t a movie star because his films tank and he can’t open a successful movie. At best he succeeds as part of an ensemble (like in the Oceans series), or when someone with a tried and true sense of vision is doing the heavy lifting (Inglorious Basterds) but for the most part, his movies completely flop.

And she’s right about that. Brad Pitt does not bring people to the theaters in droves. There’s a ton of evidence that backs this up. However, to say he’s not a movie star is absolutely fucking crazy. He’s a HUGE star. Everybody knows him and everyone can name his movies, whether or not they’ve seen them. That makes him a movie star. Yes, his private life is more interesting than his career, but the amount of bullshit mental gymnastics you have to do in order to exclude Brad Pitt from movie stardom is indicative of the fact that anyone making that argument is just an antagonistic cocksucker. He’s a movie star. He may not be great at the ‘getting motherfuckers to watch the movie in the theaters’ part, but he’s got the general ‘being a movie star’ thing down. Angelina is the same way. She’s been in exactly one movie that wasn’t a bomb and that was based on a fucking video game. Pretty impressive cults of personality those two have, you gotta admit.

One of the young ladies at my house last night suggested that this weird dichotomy between the Jolie-Pitt sardom vs success was particularly weird now that they’re “both not even that good looking anymore,” which prompted everyone in the room to groan loudly “oh, right. Like you wouldn’t fuck Brad Pitt if you had the chance!” She quickly capitulated and admitted that of course she would (citing the old “you HAVE to fuck a famous person if you get the chance, just for the story” theory). I opined that I would even fuck Brad Pitt if I had the chance, although as my reasoning through the situation progressed lots of interesting things were revealed and ultimately, I don’t know if I could go through with it. You guys want to hear about this? If so, read on. If not, see you tomorrow.

Okay, I’m a heterosexual male. I’m not physically attracted to Brad Pitt at all. I find him about as fuckable as a pig or a dog or a baby, which is to say the thought of fucking him revolts me. So why, oh why, gentle reader, would I offer to my peers that given the chance, I would have sex with Brad Pitt? Well, it’s simple: Because it would bum so many people out so badly (and unlike the other things on my “it’s revolting to fuck” list, there’s nothing morally wrong with fucking Brad Pitt). I’m kind of an antagonist by nature and I can think of very few things that would make a large swath of people so immediately and awesomely bummed out as if I was the person that fucked Brad Pitt. Women: devastated. Gay guys: Furious. People who read Us Weekly and love Brangelina: Heartbroken, Punks: Er…I don’t know, but that’s a reaction I’m dying to see. It seems like a no brainer: I fuck Brad Pitt really quickly and suddenly the entire stupid celebrity obsessed world is bummed out beyond belief and I’m (most likely) making money on some shitty interview circuit where I hold up my hand to mime the size of his dong to Wendy Williams and say things like “he was actually very tender.” That’s funny. No two ways about it. It’s funny.

But then, I thought about it and some more practical concerns came into play. For example, as I just mentioned above, I’m not in any way attracted to Brad Pitt. This would make it pretty difficult for me to get an erection and fuck him. This means that most likely the only way I could have sex with Brad Pitt is if he fucked me (because, have you seen me? There’s no doubt that he’d have no trouble pushin’ steel for a hunk like me), and that sounds a lot less appealing to me for some reason. Intellectually, it shouldn’t, since there’s nothing really sexual about me fucking Brad Pitt, and associating it with the way that I’m used to having sex (being the person doing the fucking) shouldn’t make it any easier, but you know what? It does. I don’t like the idea of Brad Pitt fucking me. I don’t know if I think it’s worth it to bum out a bunch of people. I’m not ruling it out, just saying it’s not as cut and dry as it is the other way. So what’s my move? Viagra?

This raises some more questions. Namely, how big is Brad Pitt? A quick googling reveals his height to be about the same as mine. He’s undoubtedly in better shape than I am, which means, pound for pound he’s bigger and more masculine than me, which is good because (in what’s surely a twisted, inverse version of the psychology above in which I discussed how I didn’t want him to fuck me) the more masculine, the better. I don’t want to be fuckng a tiny, hairless, smooth bottomed Brad Pitt that could kind of be a lady but who’s actually got a dong and balls and Brad Pitt’s head. I don’t like that proximity to my ideal type of sex partner. It’s better if the whole thing is just completely out of my comfort zone. No peas in the mashed potatoes, and so forth. And this is where shit gets weird(er):

Does Brad Pitt wax his asshole? I think the smart money is on ‘yes.’ I can’t picture that dapper father of six with a big, hairy ass crack, can you? But here’s the thing: Does that make him more or less fuckable? The knee jerk reaction is to say more, because hairy assholes, eeeeew. However, a very quick trip through my actual notion of what makes straight, male human beings cool reveals that it’s not so cut and dry. Think about this: If I were to wax my asshole, does that make me more attractive or less attractive? Picture your best straight guy friend: What does the notion that he waxes his asshole do to his sex appeal? I kind of think it makes it go down. (It bears mentioning that this is a crazy grey area because I know lots of gay dudes wax their assholes and totally dig it and I fully see why gay guys waxing their assholes is the way to go, and I AM talking about gay sex, although kind of not really, so we’re in a very odd corner of the ‘when’s a waxed asshole better than an unwaxed one’ protocol, and I don’t want to offend my happily waxed gay readers out there [and ladies, of COURSE waxing your asshole is totally fine {and much appreesh}]. Keep waxing those assholes!!!!)

So that creates a weird double edged sword where it’s either the more acceptable (but vastly grosser) hairy asshole or the more appealing (but icky) waxed asshole. That’s not exactly Sophie’s choice, but I’m not crazy about it.

So, I guess I don’t know. Maybe I wouldn’t have sex with Brad Pitt just to bum everyone out.

But I’d definitely suck his dick. That would be a stone cold groove.

See you tomorrow at the HOB!

I HATE this stuff!

2011-10-11T13:32:00.001-07:00

Today I don’t have a lot of time. I have to go pick up my kid at school and then we have to have a rollicking good time so I can feel like a decent dad and not a gross, lazy pile of shit. It’s a delicate balance, because lord knows I don’t want to put TOO much effort into anything and make my kids think they’re ‘special’ or something. That’s a recipe for uppity kids. That’s some free advice, new parents. Anyway, since I’m gonna be flying free and easy today, I figured I’d just make a list of some stuff I really don’t like. I used to do lists here all the time, but for some reason it’s been a while. So, all you old timey Dogs Of War, get on your nostalgia glasses and get ready to party, eh? Without any further ado, here’s some stuff I hate:

Crystal Meth- I know what you’re thinking: Beex, what’s wrong with meth? It’s pretty much the ONLY way to roll if you need to stay up for four straight days and not eat anything. Also, if you’ve got a tooth that’s bugging you, meth will melt that pesky little fucker in no time! And yeah, you’re right. This is all true, but I miss the old days when I could go into Walgreens and by ten packs of batteries, a case of Sudafed, a large bottle of ammonia and a bunch of rubber tubes without the man getting all up in my business. Also, and maybe this is just me, but I get a little uncomfortable being around people covered in sores who have obviously just pissed their pants. Call me a princess if you must.

Child Pornography- Now, don’t get me wrong, I LOVE regular old pornography, but child porn seems like a whole different kind of thing to me. Maybe it’s just my old fashioned ways, but I’d say that when it comes to children, I think it’s stepping over a line to have them in porn. Honestly, I’ve never seen any kiddie porn and I really don’t even ever want to, because it sounds pretty uncool to me. Again, maybe I’m just a prude or some kind of draconian weirdo, but for whatever reason, I feel like people who make or consume child pornography should be uh….slowly and painfully destroyed? Is that fair? I know that may sound out there, but SOMEONE has to take a stand against that sort of thing. At the very least I think it should be illegal. Child porn, that is. Regular porn, to reiterate, the kind with NO kids in it, is good stuff.

Police Brutality- This one’s a bit of a grey area because I think that there’s lots of times that cops use excessive force and it’s just awesome, like when they burned those people in Waco or when they beat up Rodney King or yanked off that grandma’s diaper, but not long ago (fifteen years ago), I was being helped into a squad car (public urination) and the cop bumped my head against the door frame. AND he had the cuffs on so tight that I had creases in my wrists the next morning. That kind of shit is unnecessary, man. You know who else pisses in your precious park, Corning, NYPD? Hobos and dogs. Do you treat them that way too? Because that’s animal cruelty and/or hobophobia. Speaking of:

Bums- I can’t stand them. They’re always pissing in the parks and asking me for change or to help them out with some money to get their “lives” on “track” or to get their disgusting lip infections patched up. Listen, if I wanted to hang out with a helpless, stinky, illiterate, selfish asshole who shits their pants and sits around in the resulting filth demanding things from me, I’d hang out with my children.

Farting- I love it when I fart. It’s a dream come true. Not only does it smell great to me, but it bums out everyone else so instantly. It’s funny. But when you fart? Come on. Nobody wants to deal with your disgusting farts, man. And there you are just loving it! Scooping it up to your nose from your asshole with your cupped hand. It’s revolting. It makes me want to vomit, frankly.

Black People- KIDDING!

Hippies/Crusties- You’re the same. You both have dreadlocks and bugs living in your vest and you’ve got that dog on a rope and you stink and you cry about assholes not giving you things for free while you, in fact, give nothing to anyone at all (your dog would be much better off if he wasn’t tied to you, by the way). You spout high minded rhetoric and eat garbage. You HATE being called hippies when you’re a crusty, and you REALLY hate when people call crusties hippies when you’re a hippy, but guess what assholes? You just have dreads in different places and different shitty patches on your shitty jackets. If I wanted to sit next to someone that smelled like shit and wanted to steal my lunch, I’d hang out with bums. At least they’ve got no choice. Being a hippy or a crusty is like slumming in the world of mental illness. It’s the cerebral equivalent of cruising around in a wheelchair for fun.

Curtains/blinds- Um, excuse me curtains. I was trying to watch the young lady inside get undressed. Do you mind?

I dunno. This list could go on for a while. Maybe it’s time to quit while I’m behind. Oh, I’m playing with NOFX this weekend. Come witness the magic.

Marketing! Rock! Marketing! Rock!

2011-10-06T10:45:00.001-07:00

Every band needs publicity. Labels and independent bands spend most of their time hiring publicists, writers, designers, and so forth. These people have, essentially one job and that job is to market the band to not only you: the dipshit out there in the world who may buy a record or go to a show someday, but also to the ‘tastemakers’ (which is a shitty, stupid, self-aggrandizing word that nerds with strong opinions who influence other nerds made up for themselves long ago) and the other people in the business. The reasons why are obvious, but maybe not as obvious as you might think. Of course these publicists, writers and designers want to rally behind a package that gets good reviews and is acclaimed, but that’s hardly the endgame with all this fluff. The ACTUAL endgame, stated or otherwise, is just to simply get the band’s name out there.

Fifty bad reviews are better than one good review, because no one gives a shit about reviews when push really comes to shove. Oh, there are a few people who may, for example, not go see a movie if Ebert says it’s bad, but almost no one is swayed towards trying something they’re naturally predisposed to disliking on first contact (some band with a shitty name or dumb bunch of faces or a movie about wacky black guys in drag and fat suits) just because someone they don’t know writes a few paragraphs about why it’s good.

People know this. That’s why, despite being critically acclaimed, nobody gives a shit about American Steel’s amazing, truly weird album ‘Jagged Thoughts.’ There just wasn’t enough noise surrounding it. Meanwhile, a band like Brokencyde, who NOBODY has EVER said a nice thing about, has been checked out by all of you, simply because EVERYONE talks about them, even though it’s 100% negative. The results of this is that Brokencyde videos get tons of plays, which translates to evidence for big guarantees, good spots at festivals, radio play and attention paid by everyone whether anyone likes it or not, and at some point, someone who actually likes that shit is gonna stumble across them because it’s reached a tipping point where Brokencyde has turned into the kind of thing that people just stumble across, due to massive word of mouth saturation.

So you see, there’s no inherent benefit in something actually being good. Good reviews are nice. They’re great. But they’re not gonna do anything for a band. If they did, the Smoking Popes would be huge thanks to Destination Failure. Instead, bands that get visibility become big, which is why publicists and agents and management can seem so important. They’re the gatekeepers who can call Chuck Klosterman and cash in a favor to get him to review this new record by this new band (let’s call them the Shitty Cheeses for the sake of ease). Then, they can leverage the fact that Klosterman reviewed the new record to get other people to review it. Then they can talk to people at magazines and bargain for the back cover adspace for the month when Brokencyde (a major influence of the Shitty Cheeses) is the cover band with a featured article. They can call their friends who service videos to gyms and Journey’s and shit and get the Shitty Cheeses video up in those spots, not so people will see them and LIKE them, but so they will see them at all. Just the act of them existing in as many places as possible will hopefully create conversations that will lead to the Brokencyde-esque tipping point where quality is completely irrelevant, which, unfortunately, happens after the very first step of being a band.

The thing is, this is all marketing and innovatively presenting new bands in 2011 is like trying to shoot a porn that’s new and interesting. It’s not gonna happen. There have been so many bands who have tried so many angles that there’s literally nothing new you can say about a band that hasn’t been said a zillion times before. The upshot of this is that there’s exactly 3 ways of marketing a new band. And here they are:

1) The Shitty Cheeses are playing something truly new and innovative! You’ve never heard anything like this genre-defying mindfuck!

2) The Shitty Cheeses are taking (genre of music) back to its roots, they’re not new jack trend hoppers. They’re GENUINE!

And finally

3) Do you like Brokencyde? Well the Shitty Cheeses are carrying the torch first lit by those trailblazing pioneers! They sound just like your favorite band WITHOUT BEING DERIVITIVE!!!!

That’s pretty much it. You can have subtle variants on these, but that’s all you’re really gonna get. It bears repeating that I’m talking about new bands here, where no journalist alive gives a fuck about reading their bio or listening to their record. The challenge is to make it interesting.

Now, you’d think in this world of twitter and email and facebook, where everyone is so connected that someone would, at some point think “gee, we need to start to approach band bios in a very different way because just stuffing effusive praise up the asses of a bunch of nobodies and presenting it to a bunch of jaded old shitty music journalists who barely get paid and have nothing but cynicism to keep them afloat is a pretty useless waste of time.” But let me tell you something: people RARELY think that way when it comes time to launch a band.

I know this because I write bios for bands. I try, with limited success, to make the bios something that people would be interested in reading, for the exact reasons I spelled out at the top of this page. To me, the band is secondary. Just getting someone to READ a bio is a victory, and I like to stay away from the three above methods of pitching bands. I like to tell stories, bullshit, joke, do things that could be easily described as BSC blogs about whatever band I’m dealing with. That’s what I think the world of indie band marketing is missing. But while that may be the breath of fresh air that a journalist, dj or other (shudder) tastemaker is dying for amongst their stack of bios, it’s almost never what a band or a manager wants to see.

Bands are obsessed with the record and the lyrics and the subtle influences and, in short, all the things that NO ONE who’s not in the band actually gives a fuck about. Yes, once someone is a fan, these details become the cherry on top of the fan experience, but do YOU give a fuck about what records the Stinky Cheeses listened to while crafting “Space Station Twister”? Not yet, you don’t. You don’t care about reading their out-of-context lyrics or the paragraph on their “dynamic, unclassifiable guitar sound.” You just don’t, because when it’s just words describing music, music sounds stupid. This is a universal truth.

Management is even worse because they want (without exception) the following: name dropping, superlative accolades, name dropping, superlative accolades, no mention of anything at all that could possibly be construed as negative or humorous, more name dropping.

This is weird because the human element (ie the actual ugly, weird, warty lives of the people in the band) are the ONLY aspects of a bio that could possibly EVER be interesting (especially to a jaded dipshit journalist who gets one hundred versions of bios 1, 2 and 3 every day) but there’s no room for that in the minds of the band or the Manager. Humor, likewise, is something that could, at the very least, get someone to read to the end of the bio, but for some reason too dumb for me to understand, people (musicians and management alike, actually) think that if something’s funny, it’s making fun…and Music Is Serious Business and My Art and How Dare This Dipshit Bio Writer Joke About ME/my boys??????? This Band Is Not A Joke To ME!!!! which is a humorless and shitty attitude and a huge part of the reason that most bands and most managers have no fucking idea what they’re talking about and are rewarded with a corresponding amount of success.

Anyway, I don’t care. I’m not famous, and I obviously don’t know what I’m talking about, or I’d be living out the rest of my days in gold-plated luxury, so take all this with a grain of salt. I just wanted to share some notes from the other side of the curtain.
I’m gonna go hang with the Holy Mess and the Menzingers now.

Later dildos.

Movie Reviews for Movies I Haven't Seen: That Dumb One About The Fighting Robots

2011-10-04T08:47:00.001-07:00

This movie that’s coming out (I believe it’s called Real Steel but I could be wrong and I refuse to look the title up) that’s about the fighting robots looks absolutely terrible. Essentially the plot is something like this: it’s the future and giant fighting robots have somehow become interesting to watch. Apparently Wolverine gets involved and by figuring out how to link this one, highly special (I’m assuming) robot up to his own movements, a la some kind of motion capture technology, he not only goes on to win whatever stupid fucking competition he and his robot are involved in (I’m assuming here that the stakes are extremely high, like maybe it’s a dystopian future where your robot’s fate determines your own [which would make the whole let’s-link-the-robot’s-motion-to-my-motion angle highly reflective and, if you’re a fucking idiot, poignant]) but he also apparently becomes a great role model for/restores faith in humanity for/saves the life of some little boy who’s probably his son or his stepson but may just be a ragamuffin-y, spunky orphan with an aptitude that other adults have chosen not to notice because they’re too busy scoffing at his social status/dorky demeanor.

This is just what I can glean from the trailer. I’m filling in the details with guesses based on what I know about terrible movies in general, and I bet I’m at least 80% right. This is possibly the absolutely dumbest looking movie I’ve EVER seen an advertisement for. Let’s break down why briefly, shall we?

The movie is about robots fighting. That’s at the heart of the film, right? Right. Well, that’s not interesting. Remember the show Battle Bots? That show was one of the most uniquely dull programs ever forced into my home. And it failed spectacularly, which makes me wonder why on earth some studio person would go so far out on a limb as to make a large budget motion picture out of its horrible premise. Fighting robots aren’t interesting for the same reason that two robots fucking aren’t interesting. There’s absolutely no tension there. There’s no sense of sympathy, empathy or verisimilitude engendered by two machines just performing functions. If there were, then cogs in a gigantic clock or a functioning oil derrick could conceivably get us in the mood to fight or make our dicks hard but, with the exception of a few pretty awesome perverts that I’m just guessing probably exist, that shit’s not even anywhere NEAR anybody’s reality. People care about machines, but they care about machines that are THEIRS and they care about them like this: “fuck! I lost my phone. Now I’ve gotta get a new one!” That’s less than people care about their fucking goldfish and a movie about fighting goldfish would be…well, nevermind. That would be awesome.

You know what would be a better premise? People fighting. Or dogs. Or anything but robots. But you know what? Fuck it. If you MUST have robots make at least make it interesting. Like, if the robots controlled the people and it was the people who were in the ring. Do you see why that would be better? Because then there would be a visceral issue at stake. I’m sure, in fact I’d bet anything that in some way the fate of the robot is tied to the fate of Wolverine and the boy that he cares for like a father, and that they’ll either die or be sent to some terrible place if the robot loses, but the thing is, I can tell from the trailer that the robot wins. SO, that’s pretty much the whole thing. The guy stands on the sidelines and ‘fights’ while the robot takes the hits, so the guy’s not even in any real danger at any time. I know that without knowing anything about the movie. It’s fucking stupid.

Now, revealing the whole movie in the trailer isn’t always bad. Free Willy, which was geared to kids, kind of needed to show everyone the “hey, not only does this movie have a happy ending, but this whale jumps OVER THIS FUCKING KID!!!!!” scene in the preview to let people know that an upbeat payoff existed (because seriously, a live action movie about a whale and a boy and their friendship? Puh-lease). Similarly, that movie 50/50 that’s out right now is a comedy about cancer. The guy who the movie’s based on is one of the writers and he’s doing publicity tours now, which means, obviously, that his character doesn’t die in the movie, but that’s a very important fact to have out there when you’re trying to make a feel good comedy about one of the darkest subjects humanity will ever face.

When it comes to a bunch of stupid fighting robots, however, you can’t even leave a shred of mystery? Really? So there’s nothing at stake, but it’s okay because the good guys win, right? Whew. Sign me up for the 3D experience and the Blu Ray. What a fucking turd.

Now, in closing, I’m sure this movie is intended to be a gateway film for 8-12 year old boys, ushering them into the world of action movies with a low-stakes Transformers-meets-karate-kid mashup, but here’s the thing: I watched Karate Kid, where Ralph Macchio gets pushed down the hill on his bike and gets his ass whupped by skeletons. In the original Transformers, Optimus Prime, the protagonist of the whole movie, DIES half way through! I watched the Goonies where pervy old men were after young kids and wanted them dead. If this is, as I expect it is, a lazy example of the softening of the edges of the cultural and psychological landscape for not only our children but also to spare our OWN wimpy little feelings, well, then this movie isn’t just stupid, it’s dangerous.

But one thing is for sure, it’s fucking stupid.

The secret of flying as explained through wieners.

2011-10-03T09:41:00.001-07:00

There’s no quicker way to make a woman not want to have sex with you than for her to think that you’re trying to have sex with her. This is such a crazily universal maxim that it not only applies to complete strangers, it also applies to people who have been in committed, monogamous relationships for years. In fact, even in those cases where it seems like this doesn’t hold true (you are a famous star and a woman comes right up to you and asks to suck your dick, you’re newly dating/married and you just reach under the table at brunch and grab her vagina and she responds positively) it’s all just a holdover from that moment when she first decided she wanted to bang you but decided in her mind that you weren’t gonna be interested. That’s a powerful moment and it can last a long time, but mark my words, it will wear off. Whether you’re dealing with a young Katie Holmes who first looked at your posters and thought “wow, he’s so gorgeous! Too bad he’s famous and gay and I’m just a nine year old girl” or you’re a guy at a bar who just seemed fascinating one particular night, that sheen of seeming like you weren’t gonna bone whoever it is that you currently bone will wear off. And where will you be after it’s all said and done? Playing the weirdest game in the world where you use all your will to try and not do the one thing that you want to do in hopes that by not doing it, you’ll be allowed to do it. It’s like the way Douglas Adams describes how to fly in his amazing Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. “The secret to flying is to fall at the ground and miss.” To do this, you must, at the very moment you’re falling, completely and without guile, not be aware that you’re falling. This is a lot like getting laid, and it’s amazingly complicated. If god had any kind of heart he’d just give us longer necks and let us be done with the whole thing.

The thing is, men, almost without fail, have zero ability to just leave a woman alone. This probably accounts for about 90% of why this entire crazy catch 22 of a rule is in place. If you come up to your girlfriend/wife/beautiful stranger and kind of casually hint that you’d maybe like a blowjob, she knows what you’re hinting at. This is always true. She rebuffs you and you feel rejected and in an amazing feat of misguided super-confidence-in-the-face-of-rejection the male brain works out this thought process that goes something like this:

“Man, I REALLY would like a blowjob and it seems like it would be a great time for everyone. Why can’t she see that? Oh, I get it…She didn’t get my subtle advance. She probably DOES want to give me a blowjob but doesn’t realize that I’m interested. Fuck. I don’t want to miss out on a blowjob just because of my subtlety. I’d better make it a little more obvious.”

Of course, this leads down a slope of increasingly mongoloidian advances that ultimately culminate in the boner being grinded into the thigh/buttocks or the wolf-whistle out the window of the moving car (that’s in the case where you’re dealing with “women at large” instead of just one particular woman) and while these types of moves probably HAVE worked at some point in history, they’re not gonna work for you. They’re just not. Again, maybe if your relationship is still in a honeymoon type phase where you’ve already sealed the deal and haven’t yet become the non-dynamic dullard that you’ll ultimately become in her eyes, you can pull this type of shit off, but for everyone else, casual dudes in bars, cohabitators, even long term friends with benefits (what a dumb phrase) nah…not gonna happen. But it makes a lot of sense. The desperation builds, and though you know “Man, I gotta stop constantly pressuring her to bone” the worry grows that if you DON’T pressure her then she’s gonna think you don’t care and you’re cool with not boning, which is unacceptable, so you put on the pressure more, which makes her withdraw more, which makes the advances more blatant and shitty and on and on like this until you’re sitting there one day and you say “Hey, wanna go screw? It’s been like a month” and she says “you gotta stop that shit” and then you feel like a dick, but you’ve made her feel like a dick too, because it didn’t need to come to that. But it always does, and here’s why:

Men and women have some fundamental differences. One of the biggest ones is, obviously, our genitalia. Consider this: for a man to have an orgasm, he doesn’t need to be thinking about it at all. He can literally be asleep. He can just be sitting there and blow a load in his pants at the SIGHT of the right set of cans without any physical stimulation whatsoever. In short, it’s completely mindless. It requires no effort and it’s SO out of our control that it’s a source of pride to have control over your orgasms (Ron Jeremy, Sting) and a source of shame to be at the mercy of them (almost every male on earth at some time or other). Compare that to women, who need to concentrate, need specific stimulation, which varies not only from woman to woman, but from day to day. It’s hard. It can be a frustrating chore. And while everyone can probably think of a time that a woman has tried to come and failed, it’s no secret that some women never EVER have orgasms at all. Of course the end can be totally worth the effort, that is IF you can come to a happy resolution, though there’s no promise of that. It’s like having your kitchen remodeled. It’s a lot of work, a gigantic pain in the balls, it requires patience, concentration and dealing with clumsy dudes that seem to be intent on fucking things up and getting in the way as much as they’re trying to help and at the end, there’s absolutely no guarantee that you’re gonna be satisfied with the results.

And this brings me to my point: Women tend to LOVE to remodel their kitchens, but they don’t want to do it every day. For men, getting off is like taking a dump. The longer you put it off, the more it’s gonna occupy all your thoughts until eventually it just happens in your pants. I was taught by my dad at a young age that I should ALWAYS go to the bathroom every chance I get because you never know when you’re gonna get another chance. I hope this analogy is perfectly clear.

This is why men will absolutely jump at the chance to do it any time it comes up, and to a greater extent why they’re constantly hounding all women, and why it’s such a completely unappealing thing to do. This explains why men are pigs, but also while they’ll bone when you’re/they’re sick, if you wake them when they’re sleeping, when they’re at work and busy, while they’re dying/at a funeral/getting cross examined for a serious crime. I mean, that’s a MAIN plotline of everything from sitcoms and porn to the funny pages: the busy husband who despises the idea of banging his horny wife. You know why that’s such a popular trope? Because it DOESN’T HAPPEN (porn addicts, closeted gays, medicated manic depressives and people harboring huge amounts of guilt notwithstanding). It’s a fantasy. People watched Al on Married With Children turn down the vastly out of his league Peg every week not because they could relate to it, but because the WISH they could relate to it. Al’s a slob, more of a slob than our viewer at home, but he’s got a vastly more beautiful wife, one who constantly wants to fuck him and he’s turning her down. That’s strangely satisfying for a guy with an average wife who constantly has to pretend he DOESN’T want to fuck his wife in order to sneak across the border, because he gets rebuffed every time he makes one of his increasingly less confident and clumsy advances.

It’s a real dance, this getting laid business. Fortunately for me, I’m amazing at the dance. I should be on the goddamned Dancing with the Stars, alongside fellow total studs and lady-slayers Rob Kardashian and Chaz Bono. The point here is not that women hate boning, it’s that men are slobs. And yes, I’m keenly aware that this is broad stroke “Late Friday Nite Comedy Jam” type generalization. It’s also remarkably true, so throw your stones. For those of you out there saying “this is complete bullshit. This is not how it is at all,” let me close with a warning. For maximum effect, imagine it said in a hollow, Vincent Price-y echoing voice with chains rattling and screams in the background.

It will happen to yooooooooooooooou.

It will.

It will happen to yoooooooooou.

Unread Messages

2011-09-30T08:43:00.001-07:00

Last night I went to meet my friend Hiro at a bar and I got there a little bit before him, so I found myself just sitting alone, waiting. This was weird for a few reasons. Firstly, I’m almost never in bars at night anymore. I like to be in bed by ten and since my kids fall asleep between 8 and 830 and I usually have to wait until they’re asleep to eat dinner, and since I can’t very well just go out once they fall asleep because that shit’s irresponsible/illegal, I cook and eat at home and that’s pretty much all the time I have. There’s just no time for going to bars at night. Sometimes if I’m out for the day, away from my kids and working on stuff I’ll go get a beer in the afternoon just to kind of change up the atmosphere, but for the most part being in a bar in the day is totally different than being in a bar at night.

In the day, people are either old and wasted or they’re just having one or two beers. Restraint is exercised, strangers may casually bullshit, but usually in the day the bar is fairly empty and the regulars and the bartenders sit there and watch television and loudly banter about whatever the fuck is going on. At night, people are trying to get drunk, people are trying to get laid and people are generally suited up, both mentally and physically to get out there and be seen. I haven’t done this in a while (notable exceptions are when my friends play shows and I can get out to see them), and last night I realized that I now completely suck at being at a bar.

Firstly, I no longer want to or am able to just bullshit with strangers. That used to be my thing. I used to go to bars and just strike up conversations with crazy old men/pretty girls/scott ian from anthrax/whoever. Now I don’t. The reasons are several. Firstly, I’m an old, married guy with two kids. That means that I automatically kind of don’t know what’s going on with the scene and as a result I kind of feel like I’ve got very little in the way of cultural currency with which to barter in a conversation with a random person. I’m also not gonna strike up conversations with random pretty girls because, well, come on. I ALSO just am not really ever in the nighttime-barroom situation, so I’m out of practice at being social, though interestingly, I don’t care about that anymore. I don’t want to talk to anyone. I can remember being young and seeing guys like me just sitting there alone and silent until their friends came by and thinking “wow, that guy has a lot of confidence. I’m out here just trying to talk to everyone because I’m desperately insecure and want the validation of A) getting a good story out of the night and B) making strangers interested in me/like me but that dude over there doesn’t give a FUCK. That’s pretty cool.

But now I’m old and I realize that it’s just a different kind of insecurity. No one I’d be interested in talking to is gonna be interested in what I have to say because frankly, I don’t have shit to say anymore. I found myself gripped with minor-league stagefright when a woman across the bar started talking to me (she was just asking the bartender’s name, by the way). I don’t want to talk to strangers in that setting anymore because I don’t have shit to talk about and it makes me feel awkward and I hate feeling awkward so I just kind of retreat…and this is where I realized that bar culture is being irreparably damaged by technology.

What do we do when we have nothing to do? We retreat to our phones. As I looked around this bar at night, a zone that used to be where I felt more at home and “among the people” than anywhere else on earth, I was struck by the fact that EVERY SINGLE PERSON that was there alone was dicking around on their smartphones, myself included. That’s pretty fucking lame. I think the guy that goes to the bar to read is lame. The theory behind that is that if you really want to read, a dim bar with drunk people all around is hardly a good place to do it. Reading at the bar has much more to do with having a really bad idea of how to market yourself. If you’re reading at a bar, you may think you’re putting out there that you’re a sophisticated guy who also knows how to have a good time, and right now, you’re engrossed in your tome, but what you’re ACTUALLY putting out there is “I’m a dildo with no friends and this is, believe it or not, the best idea I could come up with.” (It bears mentioning that reading at a bar in the daytime is absolutely fine. That’s a totally different move. At night, however, it’s radioactive dildonium.)

The phone though, is completely different. It’s not a ‘move’ or an affectation anymore. I think it used to be. I think that when people first got cellphones it was cool to be on it all the time and seem important, but now they’re so ubiquitous that there’s no way that anyone at the bar or perhaps on the earth, is gonna think I’m important just because I’ve got my face buried in an iPhone at eleven thirty Thursday night. It’s almost involuntary. It’s a compulsion. It just looks like an awkward crutch that I can’t give up. It’s like smoking if smoking made you look less cool instead of more cool. At least smoking is dangerous in an exciting way. Dicking around on your phone is dangerous because it hurts your eyes and you’ll probably crash your car or walk into the street while you’re doing it (and it probably gives you cancer too, but it doesn’t have the same reckless cache of cigarettes).

Anyway, yeah. Bars are being ruined by smart phones. And so is conversation, eye contact and general humanness in public spaces. On the upside, it’s way easier to take a picture of your cock and send it to people than it used to be.

Have a good weekend, yall.

quitcher cryin!

2011-09-27T08:39:00.001-07:00

My baby is crying. It’s been a while since I sat down to write a blog only to discover that my brain was being hijacked by my young offspring’s incessant wail. It’s a fucking bummer is what it is. Kids are, as a rule, selfish and kind of shitty to their parents. This becomes completely obvious during teen years when I can’t remember a friend or acquaintance that wasn’t a complete turd to their parents. My kids now are great. They’re nice and they genuinely want to be around me, but they’re demanding and capricious and have no fucking concept of patience or allowing someone else to enjoy something. Take right now for example. My baby could very easily be lying quietly in her crib thereby allowing me a little fucking peace and quiet, but instead she feels it’s her duty to register her disdain for what’s going on here at the top of her lungs. No one’s happy about it. It’s a lose/lose situation, but what the fuck are you gonna do?

The funny thing is that even though everyone has an idea of what a pain in the ass they were to their parents, no one REALLY gets it until they have kids of their own. However, by then they’re too constantly pissed off and sleep deprived and on the ropes to really give a shit that they were assholes to their parents. It’s one of the many ultimate dick punches that life doles out to us sentient beings. But it’s funny, the second you have kids, the relationship with your parents flips completely upside down. Here’s what I mean.

It was not long ago at all that the notion of my parents coming to town signified a major pain in my ass. I was gonna have to put my plans of going out every night and sleeping all day and having tons of fun on hold to go to boring dinners or breakfasts where my accomplishments would be scrutinized. I was gonna have to clean my house and take showers and generally pull it together and though I love my parents, this was, to a young and unencumbered man, a complete pain in the nuts.

Now, it’s the opposite. My parents come to town and I suddenly CAN take a shower and go to dinner and breakfast and I sometimes even get to go out at night and my accomplishments are now these little people running around and my parents can scrutinize the shit out of them while I take a nap or run to the store. In short, what used to be the yoke that marked the one weekend a month when I couldn’t just fuck off and act like an asshole is now my tiny, spindly little lifeline to normalcy. To put it another way, my social life now sucks so badly that what used to be the worst part of my month is now the absolute best. What the fuck does that tell you?

I don’t want you guys to misunderstand me here. I love having kids and I truly appreciate the changes they’ve brought about in my lifestyle. I don’t want to be the old guy at the bar until 2 every night. It’s gross. However, I’m not rich. I can’t afford babysitters all the time and shit like running to the grocery store to get a jar of pickles that used to be something so easy that it wasn’t even a blip now involves packing a diaper bag, getting six shoes and three coats on and herding all these monsters into a car, strapping them in, and then doing it all in reverse once we get to the store, then putting them BACK in the car, then pulling them out of the car again and back up the stairs where I suddenly have to get all their shit off and put away before I can even open the fucking refrigerator to put the pickles where they belong.
That’s why there are no pickles in this house.

God. I’m sweating.

So! Many! Juggalo! Pictures!

2011-09-26T09:35:00.000-07:00

Okay, this really pains me to say because I feel like I was sort of a pioneer in this movement and it’s making me retroactively feel like a dick, but man…enough with the culture slumming ‘embedded’ photo essays, articles and documentaries about the fucking Gathering of the Juggalos, okay? It’s too much. At this rate, by next year the entire juggalo gathering is just gonna be disguised hipsters ironically spraying each other with faygo and taking photos of one another for their various disaffected blogs. It’s too much. What a bummer.

I don’t want to overstate this: I understand and subscribe fully to the fascination with Juggalo culture. It’s been an obsession of mine for years, but it’s becoming too fetishized, and a lot of the joy of observing Juggalos is unfortunately being compromised by the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, which states, as we all know, that the act of observing something changes that which is observed. In this case, I’m not suggesting that the actual Juggalos are operating on an empirically different level. They’re still saying Whoop Whoop and asking to see tits and braiding their goatees and loving corn dogs and Charlie Sheen and all that. It’s more that all this newly generated web content from this last Gathering Of the Juggalos is starting to seem kind of crappy and exploitive. And yes, I’m aware that I’ve been a fan of crappy exploitation of Juggalos for a long time. I don’t, as a rule have anything against observing wasted people barter for tit views and klonipin, but these days the webs of hipsters and assholes like me that unequivocally look down upon the Juggalo culture but hope to exploit its foibles for the amusement of other people deemed cool enough to see how bizarre the whole movement is, are starting to connect, and the result is that what was once akin to going into the great unknown rainforest to try and get a glimpse of a crazy society of people who may or may not be friendly, is now starting to seem more like a shitty day trip safari (which, by the way would be a GREAT name for a band. “Shitty Safari” you can go ahead and use it).

And the real thing is, there’s nothing to be done about it because it IS fascinating stuff, but the novelty of embedding oneself within the sticky, shitstainy culture of the juggalos has completely worn off. The sheer numbers of embedded journalists and their unanimously condescending point of view (which is, ‘wow, this shit is fucked up, but you know what? These people are really nice and they’re having a great time down here on their little drug and titty bender…maybe we, as a culture could learn something from the proud, resplendent silverback juggalo and his mighty pride of Juggalettes and skinny, beef jerky-esque beta juggalos) is making the whole thing bullyish and exploitive. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m down with laughing at big fat gross wierdos who consider spraying soda on one another to be an acceptable form of social discourse, but I’m not so into the whole of postmodern, super cool, tastefully jaded 20-40 year olds just all pointing and laughing as though it’s something that they’ve (we’ve) all just discovered. Juggalo slideshows are up there with the ‘lined, wizened face of the grizzled hobo’ photos and the ‘plastic bag caught in the wind’ short films. It’s been fucking done to death and your version of it isn’t gonna be good. It’s just not. Sorry. Your investigative juggalo photo essay is nothing more than an ironic rite of passage at this point. Sorry.

And yes, of COURSE I wanted to go to the gathering and embed myself and be disguised as a Juggalo and come home with all sorts of crazy stories and photos and a movie, and I’m sore that the entire world jumped at the chance and I didn’t get to do it and now it’s oversaturated and as a result I’m never gonna be able to get the experience. Of course. But that changes nothing. If I’d gone to the gathering this year, I’d just be sitting here now coming to the shitty realization that I’d just gone on the same hipster safari that everyone else went on and sure, I’ve got a great picture of that guy with the ‘it ain’t rape if it’s dead’ shirt standing out by the porta potties rolling a joint laced with xanax, but so does everyone else.

Finally, something should be said for the fact that although I like to identify myself with punks and outcasts and ‘fringe culture’ (whatever the fuck that’s supposed to mean), the truth is that Juggalos are the real outcasts, they’re the no-bullshit, real deal, persecuted losers that made a culture that no one is supposed to understand based on their desire to belong to a family of misfits. I think the music sucks, the clothes are retarded and the rituals are lame. It also strikes me as more than a little dangerous. That’s what my dad said about my music/ideas when I was a kid. That’s what we all pretend punk was, that’s what we pretended gangster rap was, but the truth is that those genres were all, to the last, pioneered by smart, cool, good looking people who were obsessed with image and marketing. The juggalos are a bunch of slobs. They’re the real thing. And that’s pretty cool. We could learn a thing from the resplendent silverbacked juggalo and his mighty pride of Juggalettes and skinny, beef jerky-esque beta juggalos.

xoxoxoxo

RIP

2011-09-22T08:02:00.000-07:00

In what I’m guessing was about 2004, my band was on tour with our friends in Hot Water Music. Our roadie for this tour was one of my best friends, wealthy international playboy Sean Nader. The entire tour was a massive whirlwind of great times, and a lot of the shows were absolutely spectacular. One show that shit the bed, however, was in Athens, Ga. at the legendary 40 Watt club.

For those of you who don’t know, essentially the entire reason you know of Athens as an arty little liberal enclave in the middle of a hugely conservative state were because of a few pioneering bands that came out right around 1980 and received a lot of international attention after getting their start playing at the 40 Watt club. It’s a cool place. It’s big for a club and it’s HUGE when the promoter has dropped the ball and no one knows that Hot Water Music and the Lawrence Arms are showing up and as a result only about 30 people come to the show.

Okay, so you get the idea, right? We’re at the 40 Watt in Athens. We can tell we’re in for a rough night. We have seen the presales and we are witnessing the emptiness unfold before us. Jason Black of Hot Water Music is turning red and freaking out. He’s going into cardiac arrest. He’s talking really fast and nervously laughing about how the show’s gonna bomb. Everyone feels it. It just happens sometimes to smaller bands. Regardless of how dedicated of a fanbase you have, sometimes shows slip through the cracks and you end up sitting there backstage looking out at six weirdos just going “Really? This is what I’ve dedicated my life to? This is the worst. This is the actual manifestation of what my parents’ friends must imagine my life to be like when they ask me at cocktail parties if my band actually plays shows in clubs or if we just set up on the street. Time to go to electrician school. Sigh.”

So anyway, Nader and I bailed and went to a bar where we decided to do a bunch of whiskey shots and drink a lot of beers. We found ourselves wasted before we knew it and right around the time that shit started getting kind of sideways, Nader looked at the clock and said, “dude, we gotta get back. You go on in about ten minutes.”

We stagger out into the afternoon dusk of Athens and first thing we see is an old black guy in an amazing brown and yellow suit. He had that air of being impeccably dressed that somehow didn’t preclude the notion that he may ask for some spare change, and in fact, that’s exactly what he did. When we mentioned that we didn’t have any change, he asked Nader for a smoke, which Nader happily gave to him.

Then he said “hey, you all goin to the 40 Watt? Yeah? You working there? Man, lemme tell you guys a story…”

We were in a hurry, but we weren’t going anywhere. The guy pulled out a little flask and took a sip.

“One day I was out here just hangin out like I am right now, and this dude came running out of the 40 Watt club. He was panicking. He said ‘oh man, I need a guitar! I got a show, I’m in trouble!’ So I said, hold up, I got a guitar back at my house. I ran back, got him my guitar and brought it back to the guy and he ran inside and played. Afterwards he came out and hugged me and said it was the best guitar he ever played.”

The old guy paused and took a drag of his cigarette. His eyes got wide and when he next spoke it was in a near whisper.

“and that man’s name…was R.E.M.”

It was awesome. We high fived the guy and then went back and played a sloppy show to no one. Now REM is dead. I don’t believe it. I bet there are some teary eyes in Athens this morning.

I’m going to Colorado right now. See you fucks later.

a pirate's life for meeeeeee

2011-09-19T09:46:00.000-07:00

I don’t have much of a relationship with boating. I have never been on a cruise. I’ve never slept at sea except for when I went to visit my friend Eric in Key West and slept in his docked 17 ft. sailboat. That vacation was pretty weird. I was about 21 and Eric had moved to Key West to become the first mate on the biggest schooner on the island the year before. He and his buddy, who I believe was named Chris, were both heavily bearded sailor types who lived on tiny boats in the harbor and worked on gigantic boats that were moored right next door. Essentially, their lives consisted of taking tourists out to sea for 2 approximately 3 hour excursions each day and spending the rest of the day keeping their various crafts (the ones they worked on and the ones they lived on) er…shipshape.

The entire thing reeked of an awesomely reckless abandon that I can’t even comprehend now. This was clearly way before the ubiquity of the cel phone, and down on these boats, there was literally nothing. You probably remember living in (or are currently living in) a crappy apartment that didn’t have, say, hot water, or a working stove. These guys lived in boats. They didn’t have stoves or beds or toilets or sinks or anything. These boats were, as I said before, approximately 17 feet long. That’s roughly three adult males head to toe. They were each maybe 6 feet wide at the absolute max. The cabin, where I slept was exactly big enough for two people side by side to squeeze into. In short, it was the bare minimum amount of space a single human being could exist in and still be considered “living conditions.” It got extremely hot in the cabin starting at about 530 am and by 7 it was completely unbearable. As such, the days were long and involved a lot of dicking around and drinking beer and stuff of that nature.

One of the main things that Eric and Chris would occupy themselves with was painting fiberglass onto the hulls of their various boats. This was significant to my trip to Key West for a few reasons. Firstly, the day before I got there, Chris and Eric had decided to play a joke on one of the younger dudes in the crew of Eric’s boat named Nick. Nick was the second mate if memory serves. Anyway, Nick was off dicking around and Eric and Chris took his bike, held it up to the wall of the marina and fiberglassed it to the wall. It was a diabolical prank in that a bike is a crucial device on a small island like Key West, especially if you’re a seafaring dude that lives in a marina and sleeps on a small sailboat. Fiberglassing a bike to a wall is not only hilarious, it’s also the kind of thing that can’t be easily undone and it’s ALSO the kind of thing that completely destroys the bike in question.

When I showed up in Key West, it was late at night and everyone was completely hammered. I got to the marina around 1 am. I was to stay for 2 weeks. Eric was, after all, one of my closest and oldest friends and we hadn’t seen each other for a while. Eric and Chris were in blind stagger mode laughing about fiberglassing Nick’s bike to the wall. I sat down and grabbed the rum that they were drinking straight from the bottle (I know. It’s always funny when someone lives up to the most stereotypical possibility that exists, and for these two modern pirates, being blind drunk on rum from the bottle and cackling about mischief could only have been topped if one of em had an hook hand or a parrot) and that’s when I noticed that Eric’s finger was looking totally weird.

He showed it to me and there was no doubt that something was wrong. His index finger had swollen up to the size of a hot dog. It was extremely fat and long. He said he couldn’t really touch it because it was so painful. He suspected that in the course of spackling Nick’s bike to the wall, he’d gotten a piece of fiberglass in his finger and he was suffering from an infection that he was gonna cure with rum and sleep. I suggested that he may want to go to the doctor. He agreed and after a sweaty and highly erotic night of boat sleep, he took off for the doctor first thing in the morning so he could be back in time for work.

By about noon I was pretty bored. I couldn’t sit on the boat because the water was rough and it turns out I’m a pussy landlubber. I couldn’t really just lounge anywhere because I was on a dock and there was no place to lounge. I didn’t really have enough money to go to a bar or a restaurant and Eric was still not back from the doctor. A girl walked up to me and said, ‘hey, Brendan? I’m Jaime, I’m Eric’s girlfriend. He’s in emergency surgery right now. Apparently he had severe blood poisoning and the doctors said that he’d have been dead by the end of the day if he hadn’t come in. He wanted me to give you this (key to the boat’s cabin) and tell you that you’re free to stay. He’s gonna be in the hospital for the next 2 to 3 weeks though.”

This was the day after I showed up. I was there for 2 weeks, living on a boat with no toilet, an unwavering 7am wakeup call, barely any money and no real way to change my flight and no place to hang out and nothing to do. It was fucking weird. So, what’s a boy to do in situations like that? There was only one move. I took the tiny pile of money I had and went looking for a beer. The section of Key West that Eric’s boat was located in (and I think the whole island, honestly) was the gay zone. I went to the nearest bar, which was a gay bar where I met lots of people who, to my delight, wanted nothing more than to buy me beers. I was upfront about my position and my lack of desire to blow anyone, but my not being gay didn’t slow any of those boys down. They were nice and inclusive to the last. They just wanted to party, and as a result I ended up hanging out with a lot of awesomely weird people and seeing a pretty kooky side of Key West.

I remember, for example, being with a group of German guys who were all wearing extremely short shorts. They brought me to a ‘party’ at this hotel bar, which I discovered once I got there was going to eventually unravel into some kind of all-dude orgy on the beach. It was apparently a somewhat regular thing at that hotel. SO, I’m standing there with these Germans, and they’re saying things like “You sure you don’t want stay for orgies? It’s going to be GREAT” and I’m politely declining, getting ready to finish my beer and make myself scarce before the whole scene changes, when all of a sudden this naked man comes staggering out of the sea making zombie noises. He’s super hairy and eventually I recognize him as Eric’s buddy Chris. He was just being a goofball and I guess trying to wig out the gay hotel beach orgy by staggering out of the sea naked (which doesn’t seem like it would be particularly effective, but it was hilarious at the time).

Anyway, he and I took off and after that I hung out with him the whole time I was there. He told me about how he and Eric had taken his little boat down to central or south America, just the two of them, sailing all night and day for months, stopping at ports to get fruit and stuff. He told me that there is no sensation so freeing as leaning off the side of a small sailboat at full sail in the middle of the night and shitting into the sea. I think about that a lot. It sounds like it’s probably pretty awesome but it also sounds like something I’m not ever gonna do any time soon. He also told me that after about a month they had a frank talk and just started whacking off in front of each other because well, what the fuck are you gonna do? That part didn’t sound as cool to me. Still, I think back about that, especially now that I’m a pretty domestic person and I reel at the amount of freedom that those guys were navigating. Crazy.

Eric ended up being fine and I even saw him for about 2 hours on the last night I was there. I have since seen him maybe 4 times. It’s a bummer because he’s one of my favorite people in the world. But that’s what happens. The world gets bigger and people spread out and huge gaps develop and next thing you know, a guy you’d sleep on a 17 ft boat with for 2 weeks is someone you haven’t talked to in almost a decade. And that’s shitty.

SO, moral for today: hug your friends and don’t fuck with fiberglass.

Bye.

I'm sorry baby!

2011-09-15T09:08:00.000-07:00

Wow. So, this is awkward. I woke up yesterday and just kind of went about my business like everything was cool. I wrote about my experiences with DMX (see the entry below). I sent some emails. I took my kids on the train. I had some lunch and then, when I got home and put the kids down for a nap I opened my computer and BOOM! It hit me like a ton of bricks. There, on pretty much every website that caters to the destruction of innocent celebrities, were the intimate photos that Scarlett Johansen sent to me that I PROMISED, over and over again, to never show anyone!!!!! I’m bummed. Shit, I’M bummed? She’s bummed. She won’t return my calls now, and her IM icon is saying she’s “away” even though I KNOW she’s there. I KNOW YOU’RE THERE, SCARLETT!!!! I’m sorry. Gimme a minute…

Sigh….Okay.

I guess the whole thing is my own fault even though people are blaming Scarlett and saying things like “hey, if you don’t want nude photos of yourself out there, then don’t take ‘em” but that’s fucking CRUEL! How the fuck are you supposed to walk around with an appearance like Scarlett Johansen has and not take pictures of it? Let me phrase this slightly differently as to engender a little bit more empathy: YOU wanted to see nude pictures of Scarlett Johansen, right? Of course you do/did. Whether you’re into dicks or clams or dogs or melons with holes cut out of them that have been warmed in the microwave for (roughly) twenty nine seconds, you’ve got enough of a passing interest that you’d like to see her naked pictures, right? Of course. So does she! What do you think, that she’s the only person on the world who DOESN’T want to see naked pictures of Scarlett Johansen? She’s just a simple girl, folks. She’s not immune to that most basic of desires, that desire to see Scarlett Johansen’s jugs and ass photographed, and unlike most of us, she’s in the unique position of being able to just produce naked Scarlett Johansen pictures out of the ether using nothing more than a phone. If YOU could just produce naked pictures of Scarlett Johansen, wouldn’t you do it? Of course you would.

Which is exactly why I’m in all this trouble right now. I’m too eager to please and it bites me in the dick every time. See, humanity is, at its core, very interested in making other people happy, or getting a favorable reaction. Actually, most mammals in general are this way. A puppy and a baby both want to please. They’re born with that desire. It’s pretty much what they live for until your shitty parenting gets in the way and they start to resent you and decide to just make you as miserable as you’ve made them. That reaction of excitement from another person is something we’re hardwired to crave, so keep that in mind next time you’re in a position where you’ve got a situation that you must keep secret.

Let’s say, for example, that you’ve fucked your friend’s dad. It was a bad move. You were drunk. He was drunk. It was super late, one thing led to another and boom! Next thing you know he’s sucking your dick under the table. And it was AWESOME!!!! And, for obvious reasons, NOBODY can know. BUT! You’re dying to get it off your chest. You’ve gotta tell someone. So, you find your most trusted friend who’s as far from the social circle as the friend of the dad you fucked as possible, someone who wouldn’t even know who to tell if he decided to tell, and you spill the juicy news. Well, firstly, of course your friend is going to be stoked. For one thing, everyone likes to be confided in. It’s an affirmation of character. For another thing, he’s gonna be stoked (though this may also be mixed liberally with revulsion/disappointment) at how completely salacious this secret is. He promises up and down not to say anything. “Who the fuck would I tell?” he says, over and over again and you say things like “yeah dude, but SERIOUSLY. If this ever got back to Neil, I’d be FUCKED!” and your buddy says “yeah, yeah. I get it. But seriously, who the fuck would I tell?” and you walk away/ hang up feeling that you’ve unburdened yourself and that your secret is safe.

But the fallacy of logic there is HUGE. If this secret is so juicy that YOU, who stands to lose everything if it’s exposed, can’t even keep it a secret, what fucking chance does your friend have? If YOU gotta tell, it’s a promise, and it may be months or years down the line, but mark my words, your friend will be at a bar somewhere and that shit’s gonna come out as casually as a dick out of the mouth of a guy casually picking his teeth with a disembodied dick after eating a hooker’s face.

Think about the trust you’ve betrayed in your lifetime, however slightly, however innocently or inadvertently, however after the fact. There’s a hole in the soul of humanity and it’s built by that innate desire to please one another and because we’re cocksuckers en masse, one thing that greatly pleases us is schadenfreude, so your secret is TRIPLY delicious, because it affirms, it exposes AND just the act of telling it is a betrayal that creates a tiny conspiracy of schadenfreuede. In short, you and your secret are fucked.

Your secret is never safe. Your nudes are the same. Your nudes are just pictures of secrets. The only way not to have everyone not see you naked is to have been born, at the latest, in the early 80’s so you got out of the phase of taking pictures of your tits before everyone had cameras on their phones that went straight to the internet. Otherwise, yeah. Suck it up, turds. That’s gonna be your dick out there before you can say ‘cease and desist.’ It’s a sad truth. OR, and this is worse, it’s gonna be the pictures that someone sent you that were stolen and leaked onto the internet because you just HAD to mention that you had them, and you’re gonna just feel like an asshole. Just like how I feel with ScarJo.

I mean, after all, she only sent me those pictures because she said that my dong was the greatest earthly delight of all time and this is how I return the favor. Curse me and my amazing dong.

The Losing Of One's Mind (Up In Here)

2011-09-14T08:53:00.000-07:00

A few years ago I was standing in the Sydney airport preparing to clear customs. It was a typical affair with those seatbelty ropes corralling everyone into a long, snaking, back and forth line that moved as slowly as government lines tend to move. In the line directly in front of me was a young family featuring a mom, a dad and a boy who wasn’t more than 2. The direct flight from Chicago to Sydney is a long one and as such, everyone was pretty grumpy. The boy was particularly fed up. He had been good on the whole plane ride and yet here we were, practically a full 24 hours after we had boarded and we were being forced to stand in yet another line???? To a 2 year old (I would come to learn in the subsequent years following these recounted events) there is no greater injustice than not being dutifully rewarded immediately after going above and beyond the call of duty. To put this another way, you really can’t push your luck with a toddler. They have nothing to lose and they can and will snap at any moment. This long, bureaucratic line, necessary as it may be for the safety of Australia’s citizenry and ecology, was pushing luck bigtime.

(At this point I’d like to pause and reflect that actually, there’s often no bigger affront to humanity than feeling like one has gone above and beyond the call of duty and rather than being rewarded or even thanked, whatever powers that be simply demand more. That’s not really unique to being two at all. For example, let’s say you work late, finishing a project that you despise for your employer at the expense of seeing your family, eating dinner, getting a blowjob from that delicious boy from Shreveport who’s only in town for one night, what have you, and then once you finally see your boss, after sleeping on your desk, after giving your all and making it as perfect a project as you could, there at 9am when he shows up, fresh and chipper, and stands above your drool-lined, exhausted unshaven face, if he neglects to say, ‘great job! Go home! You’ve done a good job” or even say so much as thank you, but instead just points out the things you’ve fucked up and demands that you fix it because at this point it’s late…well, you’re gonna be pissed. Now, overwhelmingly, this IS the course that life takes, don’t misunderstand me. But it sucks. That’s why the older you become, the shittier you become. Once this happens to you enough it creates scar tissue all over your empathy glands and you just become another shithead who’s constantly scared and therefore constantly aggressive and angry or meek and distrustful. Anyway…)

The parents, for their part, were doing their best. The kid was crying and frustrated and they were trying to get him to ‘use his words’ which is not only a great way to help ease a child’s frustration (as so much of early life’s frustration comes from not being able to effectively communicate ones needs) but also serves as a great distracter, because frankly, two year olds have to concentrate pretty hard to say anything that makes any fucking sense at all. The parents were obviously tired, so was the kid. What are you gonna do? He’s two and the situation is pretty sucky, no matter how old and mature you may be.

Also standing in this line, and also at the end of his rope was hip hop superstar DMX. Now, DMX was about twenty points in the line ahead of me, so we ended up standing next to each other right in the middle of the line each time we snaked up a new layer. He was, in my memory, wearing a very cozy looking yellow and white track suit (though human memory is notoriously unreliable and as such, these kinds of details are almost always wrong. If you asked anyone else in that line they probably all remember him wearing something different [if they noticed him at all, which they almost certainly did, as you’re about to learn] and it’s quite possible that no one would be correct, were the Australian equivalent of TSA to check the security footage to see what, in fact, DMX was wearing that fateful day) and he was surrounded by an entourage that contained at least one fat guy in golden glasses and one woman. DMX was, to put it mildly, unhappy.

At one point, he approached from one side of the snaking line as I approached from the other and we end up mere inches from each other. He furrowed his brow, looked at the family in front of me and proclaimed (rather loudly) “Someone needs to beat that child’s ass and shut him up!” to which the father, visibly pretty shaken, replied “erm, excuse me?” to which DMX replied (even more loudly) “I’m not talking to you. I’m talking to that bitch!” and pointed to the mother. “You need to beat that child’s ass and shut him up.” The mom looked up and, in a remarkably calm voice said “Wow. Looks like my 2 year old isn’t the only one who’s crabby after an 18 hour flight.” DMX muttered some things about how his mom would never allow this or that, but the death blow had been struck by the mom. DMX was a little vanquished at that point, which only made him kind of stew more.

Needless to say, the line got pretty weird after that. No more barbs were exchanged, save some of the dirtiest looks I’ve ever been privy to. The DMX entourage calmed him down, or at the very least convinced him not to flip out anymore and that was pretty much the end of it. Next thing I know, I’m through customs and on a shuttle bus from the international terminal to the main terminal and I’m sitting across from the nerdy, suburban family that had just battled (and bested) DMX.

“Uh, excuse me, ” I said after about 2 minutes. “I just want to let you know something. When you go home, and you tell that story to your friends about what just happened back there in that line, you should include the detail that the guy that was yelling at you was DMX. He’s a REALLY famous rapper.”

“I don’t care who he is,” the wife said, “IfhesgonnatalktomeandmychildlikethatthenI’mgonnagivehimapieceofmymindand… a’
“Whoa, whoa. I know. I get it. I’m not saying anything about that. I’m simply telling you that by including that detail, that story goes from mildly interesting to really, really interesting pretty fast. That’s DMX that just berated your child. He’s been nominated for Grammys and shit!”
The dad, at this point, kind of comes to life and says “That was DMX?”
“Yup.” I said, pleased that this was kind of starting to sink in.
“Well,” he harrumphed “that’s the last time I ever listen to any of his music!”
“You! Own! His! Music?” the wife spun around on her husband angrily.
“erm…huh, well…I’ve illegally downloaded a couple of his songs.”

This seemed to satisfy the wife and shortly thereafter we went our separate ways. Since then, DMX has faced felony charges in something like 5 states. He’s been transported directly from one prison to another to serve out his various sentences for his various crimes. In short, whatever the fuck his mom was doing beating his ass turned out a fucking asshole that yells at kids and women, carries guns and commits crimes with the wanton abandon of a teenager playing GTA3. I think about this a lot when my kids are freaking out. I try to get them to use their words and calm them down without resorting to beating their asses. It’s a maxim I really try to live by as a parent.

Though I do love that song about him acting the fool up in here. I wonder who’s kids he wrote that shit about?

nerd shit

2011-09-13T08:58:00.001-07:00

As some of you may know, I’m making a record right now. Well, that’s actually not entirely accurate. I am finished with my record. This weekend my friend Eric came to town and, as he is the person that’s gonna be mixing the record, he took all the files with him back to Colorado where the lab is. It’s crazy how different the experience of making this record has been from any record I’ve made before, and not just because it’s a different project and it’s involving different players. The entire world has changed so much just since the recording of the last EP I did with the Lawrence Arms, which was itself way different from the last Lawrence Arms full length, Oh! Calcutta!

Oh! Calcutta! Was recorded to 2 inch tape over the span of about 3 months for a successful, cool label with offices around the world and a bunch of employees. Before going into the studio, we took about a month to pre-produce the record which is essentially a fancy way of saying we practiced the shit out of the songs, tweaked the arrangements and generally spent every single day, all day in a practice space (which had no windows and was above a pet groomer and next to the el tracks….the stench/heat was unbearable). Lots of you (eh, some of you) have seen the pictures from this preproduction in the liner notes of Oh! Calcutta! It’s a brick/drywall room covered in butcher paper on which we had written the lyrics really big so we could play the songs and sing them without fumbling as to better fine tune the way Chris and I were gonna sing everything.

What you can’t see in those pictures is that I’d snapped my left patella (kneecap) a few weeks earlier and was wearing a humongous plaster cast that extended from my foot right below the ankle all the way up on my thigh past my nutsack. In that hot, wet dog air, I was up there every day in a 20 pound thing that trapped sweat and smells and made it impossible for me to shower. It was not fun and contributed greatly to how angry I ended up sounding on that record. In fact, we were ready to go into record when I broke my knee, and it was during the month of complete immobility leading up to and immediately following the surgery (where I just COULDN’T move at all) that I wrote what ended up being some of the more definitive tracks, rage wise, on that record, including Devil’s Takin’ Names, Recovering, Key To The City, and Cut It Up. That’s neither here nor there, but it’s interesting how that shitty situation ended up completely changing the record and subjugating four other now long forgotten songs to obscurity (well, all of this is obscure. Those songs are just even MORE obscure, if not downright gone forever).

The point here is that we had to practice and fine tune everything as much as we could back then. We had to know the songs back and forth and we had to know our amps and our voices and instruments because we were putting that shit on expensive tape and we were planning something that was already gonna take a long time and we COULD NOT afford to fuck around. In the studio, everything had to be played and sung as perfectly as possible and that was because we were making something that would be purchased if people liked it enough and that was the only way to do it.

By the time we made the next ep, things were being recorded differently for two reasons: the first is the advent of pro-tools, which had made a lot of strides in terms of sonic reproduction in the years since we tracked Oh! Calcutta! To tape. The other thing was that the music industry had taken such a dump that our formerly international, multi HQ’d label was now run out of one small office and had only three employees. This made for a totally different experience. We were kind of in and out, things were less planned and more spontaneous, but we were still well practiced and we still brought the best gear we could find and aside from the speed and relative recklessness of things, we were still operating somewhat the same. The main difference was that we were free to take as many stabs at a performance as we wanted. The tape was gone and the freedom to try everything had arrived.

For this record, shit’s completely out the window. Protools and other digital platforms are now so good at what they do, and offer such extensive and specific plug ins that it’s literally not worth it to try and do it analog anymore. What was once a process involving a carefully selected instrument with the right components installed, pairing it with the right re-tubed amp and appropriate speaker has become just plugging into a fucking mac and making those selections digitally. If something is slightly out of time, you just move it. It’s insane. It’s not insane because I pine for the old days of honest to god gear (though part of me totally does) and it’s not insane because we’ve cheapened recording and now we’re settling for such a lesser final product, it’s insane because we’re really NOT settling for a lesser product. This shit sounds amazing and it blows my mind how easy it is.

We used to consider rooms, baffling that we’d hang on the walls, alternate reflective surfaces to put near the amps and some of that stuff still happens, but so much of it is just straight into some sort of interface where it’s manipulated for a second and then ready to go onto a computer as an MP3. I mean, I’ve got rough mixes of this record from every step of the way, something that would have been time consuming and irritating to demand or produce just 5 years ago. I have final mixes that sound amazing that were literally recorded in a pantry of my friend’s parents’ house onto a PC. THE ENTIRE SONG. It’s crazy to me how far this technology has come and how I’ve sort of missed it just by taking a break from recording for a few short years.

It’s a good thing too, because this record has a lot of crazy instrumentation and wacky tries on it and I don’t think that I would have been able to do it with the limited time and resources I have if it wasn’t for the nerds out there making everything so easy.

Well, easy for them. I have no fucking idea how to do any of it.

scat is also another word for poo. that's an interesting coincidence.

2011-09-12T09:43:00.000-07:00

I’m currently sitting in a ‘euro’ café where I’ve been for the past several hours. I’m not ENTIRELY sure what I’ve been doing but I’ve applied for some jobs and I’ve written some stuff and I’ve researched steampunk a little, which has to be one of the more confusing subcultures I’ve ever encountered. It’s confusing because it’s some serious dork bullshit and it resembles that movie Wild Wild West with all the old timey-modern era mashup weirdness, but the actual things that the steampunk designers make look pretty awesome. It’s kind of Jeunet/Gilliam-esque, and I like those dudes. I don’t know. I’m not gonna explain/ figure out my complex feelings regarding Steampunk beyond I think it’s dorky to dress up in costumes every day, but those dorks seem to make some cool stuff. The real issue at hand is that this café is playing jazz and it’s bumming me out on an almost cosmic level.

I used to like jazz. When I was a kid, I thought that the saxophone was, hands down, the coolest instrument on the earth. In fairness to me, I was extremely young and it was the early 80s and saxophones were enjoying real moment in the spotlight. These days, pretty much the only way to look cool with a saxophone is to be a really skinny black guy leaning against something in a poorly lit subway station, playing some really soft, dark sounding shit. I’d hate to discourage anyone from making music, so I’m gonna stop short of saying anything like ‘the sax is the dorkiest instrument on the earth’ but well, let’s just say that you’re gonna have to really reinvent that thing to impress me too much.

Now jazz is, in theory, unbelievably cool. Born in America, a loose confederation of black guys who were super fucked up on heroin cruised around to illegal clubs to play illegal music that they just made up on the spot while playing together (often for the first time) based on a few conventions of style. That’s fucking AWESOME. Except for one thing: the actual music. Now, I was in a jazz band in highschool just like everyone else and at the time, I kind of was able to fool myself into thinking that jazz was pretty cool, but that didn’t last/stick/hold any water because there was no point ever when I was sitting around putting on jazz albums. Jazz radio stations stink, jazz djs are the WORST and any perversion of jazz, like vocal jazz, smooth jazz, modern jazz, deconstructed jazz, scat, that shit is just completely unacceptable.

I don’t think it’s out of line to say that scat vocals make up the most offensive music I’ve ever heard. It combines the cocksure retardation of speaking in tongues with the shittiness of jazz. There is NOTHING worse than listening to a bunch of wide assed white ladies with Han Solo haircuts barbershopping senseless bullshit over a bunch of electric pianos and saxophones. It’s infuriating. Well, actually no. Speaking in tongues is actually much worse, but that’s because speaking in tongues is just jazz for non musical, humorless white religious nuts and that’s shitty on a level that can’t really even be easily measured.

The theory behind speaking in tongues is that an angel, or the holy spirit, depending on who’s making the shit up, is taking possession of your body and speaking to you in the pure language of gods love. The way you speak in tongues is to stand there, wait for the spirit/angel to take you over and then loudly start just jib-jabbin nonsense phonemes until you’re plumb tuckered out. This is, obviously, one of the stupidest things you can possibly imagine trying to convince anyone of, but wide eyed mongoloids seem to absolutely lap that shit up for some reason. I mean, if those kooks can talk themselves into babbling like assholes in public, why can’t they just talk themselves into being allowed to have a little fun the rest of the time? At least the people playing jazz were high on drugs. There’s NOTHING cool about speaking in tongues except for that since you’re already a complete religious weirdo that’s afraid of sex if you do it, then you’re at least not getting laid any LESS by doing it, which is an impressive outcome of babbling like an idiot in front of your whole community.

Speaking of babbling like an idiot in front of everyone, thanks to all y’all who came out to the Double Door on Friday. What a great time. Thanks for the beers and cheers. I had an awesome birthday! You guys are all right.
Okay, I gotta get out of this fucking place with its fucking jazz. I can’t stand no more. It’s making me furious. Ta.

FRI SEPT 09 @ DOUBLE DOOR IN CHICAGO: BRENDAN KELLY, THE SWAYBACK AND RATASUCIA! DON'T BE A BUNCHA DICKS!

2011-09-08T08:11:00.000-07:00

Well, let’s get this shit out of the way right now: it’s my birthday, so far so good. I feel slightly more out of touch and confused than ever before. My joints don’t work, my wang’s a flaccid, dying worm twitching in a garden of decaying grey pubes and I can’t hear shit. Music these days sounds like noise to me, women look like whores and the men dress like sissies and clowns. I can’t stand the weather or the politics and everybody’s missing a little something that we used to call gumption back in my day.

Today’s restaurants don’t know shit about service or food. The bars are just drug dens, the immigrants are crawling all over everything like an army of swarming locusts on the crops of a sinful town of homosexual communists. In fact, the ONLY thing that is getting me through this writhing, fetid existence of sin and stench is the fact that:

TOMORROW, SEPTEMBER 9TH, I WILL BE CELEBRATING MY BIRTHDAY BY APPEARING AT THE DOUBLE DOOR ON DAMEN AND NORTH AVENUE WITH THE SWAYBACK AND RATASUCIA AND ALL YOU ASSHOLES SHOULD COME! BRING YOUR FRIENDS AND YOUR MOMS AND YOUR GRANDPARENTS!

I can’t promise that it will be good, but I CAN promise that it will be bad. Ha! I’m fucking around. Shit’s gonna be radical. I’ve been working on a shockingly awesome cover tune and generally, I’m pretty stoked to share my birthday with all of you. Okay, Im having some serious issues with getting a tiny run of DVD’s burned affordably so I gotta go figure some shit out. What? You didn’t think I was gonna sit here and bullshit with you guys on my birthday, did you? Fuck no. I’m keeping you all lean and mean so you all show up tomorrow night.

See you there!
Xoxoxoxo

I

farewell to #34 the best ever (eh, not really even in the top 10, actually)

2011-09-07T08:43:00.000-07:00

Today is the last day of my 35th year, which means tomorrow I will turn 35. That’s confusing but it makes sense if you go all the way back to getting born and beginning your first year right there in the hospital/on the floor of the cab/in the tub while you’re still all gooey. Once you finish that first year, you become one. That’s what I’m doing 34 years later. 35 is not a very cool age to be unless you’re a hotshot politician or a very accomplished doctor. If you’re a woman 35 is good because while lots of girls peak at like 20, a whole bunch of them actually peak, appearance wise, somewhere in their 30’s. A great (and highly nerdy) example of this is the cast of Friends. They were in their 20’s in the beginning of that show and by the time the show was over the women were all vastly hotter and in their mid 30’s. In that regard, it’s gotta be kind of nice to be a 35 year old woman, because, well, who expected you to be this hot at 35? Not me. But there you are, hot. Surprise, assholes.

Me, I’m not a surprisingly hot woman or a surgeon or even a hotshot politician. I’m just a guy dropping my kid off at school, looking at all the parents who are also there (who are also not bigshot politicians or rockstar surgeons) and going ‘wow. I’m one of these fucking people, eh?’ I’ve hit the long, shitty, dull, soul crushing pedestrian walkway of middle age that spits you out on the other side all grey and bitter and just barely remembering what it was like to get a blowjob in an alley or sneak into the park with some beer or ambush and kill a unit of German stormtroopers and drink mead from their still-warm skulls or anything fun like that. Pretty weird.

I’m planning on some good times though. I’m having a show over at the Double Door in Wicker Park where I’m gonna play some hits and some new shits on my acoustic guitar and the always amazing Ratasucia and the equally amazing Swayback will be playing as well. Come for the birthday celebration, stay for the part where I make dick jokes and stagger around with my guitar for the amusement of all in the general zone. It’s gonna be a fucking gas, because I may be old, but this old man still knows how to rock n roll, kids! Believe that! Watch this!

…..at this point, you’ll have to imagine that I’m doing the splits, jumping into the air, landing on my groin, jumping right back up, back into the splits. Over and over again. I’m also screaming. Okay, got it? Good.

Yeah. See that shit? This old man knows how to ROCK! Boy. Who said they can’t teach an old dog some tricks, eh? You think you’re so tough? Boy, I used to hammer nails through metal two by fours with my dick when you were still just a stain in your momma’s panties! I used to fuck a room full of women and then walk across the street and fuck a roomful of men and THEN eat breakfast! I used to…

Shit. See, that’s the thing. There’s nothing to be done. The choice is, get older, have a little dignity, stop with the bullshit and the fun, become awkward, because you’re suddenly in a whole new situation where you’re acting like someone you’ve never really been before and you’re hanging out with the people your kids pick for you to play with, and they’re acting all weird too, or, you can act like you’ve ‘still got it’ which is just grosser than anything on the earth, OR you can wither and die, defeated by your descent into lameness. You can start fucking young girls or bleach your hair, you can sit there and bitterly decry all the new shit that’s happening. You can vanish into sports and intellectual interests, you can be the soft spoken erudite professorial type who listens to NPR and just kind of smugly knows what’s going on because you’re kind of tuned in, but aloof to it all even though everyone secretly thinks you’re kind of a smug dildo.

I’m none of those things. I’m just the same old asshole I was ten years ago but with an earlier curfew, less ability to take shots and a show on Friday night. I’d love to see you there. Come on down. I really like you guys.

xoxoxoxoxoxo

god hates you. just know it.

2011-09-06T10:36:00.000-07:00

This weekend I was inadvertently drawn into a fun little twitter war and called a demon by a woman from the Westboro Baptist Church. For those of you who don’t know or just haven’t put the name with the kooks, the Westboro Baptist Church are the “god hates fags” guys that protest soldiers’ funerals and gleefully remind us that we’re all doomed and going to hell and it’s pretty much all because of the wanton gayness of the gays. It’s worth mentioning that the god that the WBC worships is not a nice god at all. He lays down ‘godsmacks’ which encompass everything from 9-11 to tornadoes to little kids getting killed by drunk drivers. Whenever something bad happens, the WBC show up with their signs, which are profoundly offensive, and their beaming smiles to tell the devastated mothers of the recently deceased about how it’s our nation’s tolerance of the sodomite lifestyle that has caused god to smack them. They’re STOKED on people having their lives ruined. They’re excited for the anniversary of 9-11 which they refer to as some sort of ultimate godsmack. (It should be mentioned at this point that I REALLY like the fact that they use the name of that horrible band to promote their shitty agenda. That said, Godsmack the band is about a million times more acceptable than the Westboro Baptists, and that’s really saying something because Godsmack effortlessly coaxes the jizz from dog balls). That makes a lot of sense, when you consider that as religious wackos, they’re probably pretty attuned to the ravings and actions of other religious wackos. They have gone on record as saying that Osama is A) in hell but B) someone who was sent by god to send a message about doom, which seems to imply that getting into the WBC heaven is probably harder than getting into a tight, young teen butthole. They’ve got pretty advanced and detailed ideas of hell and in general, but you never ever hear them talk about heaven as far as I can tell.

The big thing about the WBC is that they’re pretty much just one family, helmed by patriarch Fred Phelps, who’s presumably the one behind all the awesome signs and the lunatic ravings. In the eyes of Phelps, the America is doomed. There’s no repenting at this point. We’re fucked, and we’re gonna be getting sucked into a dungeons and dragonsy version of Hades’ where it’s gonna be painful and cold and full of demons who eat your tongue and peel the skin from your face. Why? Because you don’t hate gays enough. Even if you hate them, you’re not REALLY hating them like you mean it. Sorry. You’re doomed. You’ll see.

This guy spends so much time thinking about gayness and sodomy and cock that there’s really only one (not too taxing on the imagination) conclusion to draw. He’s gayer than Christmas, he is too cowardly to be gay. He’s jealous of those people brave enough to get out there and suck cocks. He’s angry with himself, he’s angry with everyone who gets to have their needs met in the way they most desire. As a result, his brain has rotted a little and next thing you know, he’s wearing Oakley blades and standing down the road from a dead soldier’s funeral with his kids and grandkids wildly screaming about fags while people throw things at them from moving cars.

The thing is, the WBC is so universally despised that they literally get protested by the Klan. The Klan, it’s worth noting, is a patriot organization and while they hate gays as much as the next guy, they’re not gonna back the picketing of dead soldiers and patriots. I didn’t really think that the Klan and I had ANY mutual enemies or similar notions about who is/isn’t an asshole. But that’s what’s so great about the WBC. They’re so completely down the road and around the corner from sanity that EVERYONE hates them and they just hate the shit out of everyone in return. Pretty wild stuff. I mean, when you’re too far out for the Klan AND you’re too far out for people that anonymously participate in bathhouse orgies, you’ve pretty much covered the spectrum. And so yeah. I’m stoked as shit that this lady called me a demon.

Twitter is great for this very reason: people you only read about and/or see on tv are right there and sometimes they talk to you. And every once in a while they may even call you a demon if you’re truly wicked enough. That’s pretty rad.

a new chapter begins.

2011-09-01T08:22:00.000-07:00

My kid started school this week, which is a weird thing to deal with. I, like probably every adult in the history of the world, consider myself to be much more ‘young at heart’ or whatever the dipshitty phrase is, than I actually am. In my mind I’m still a messy kid who won’t ever grow up and the ravages of time only serve to somewhat camouflage/highlight my whimsy/arrested development in the face of my aging exterior. The reality is that I just dress like an asshole and I’m not very good at some things that I thought that all adult men are good at. Like, I can’t fix a car or paint stuff well or really understand things like stocks and money and mortgages. This doesn’t mean I’ve retained any of my childlike youthful exuberance, it just means I’m kind of a moron in a lot of aspects of life and now it’s become kind of obvious that I’m not gonna just ‘grow into’ any sort of knowledge. If I want to (for example) fix the leaky radiator in my car, or examine my investment portfolio (whatever the fuck that means) well, I’m gonna have to really steer my life in the direction of learning that shit in order to do so. The notion that some day everything will all just come together is out the window at this point. I’m just kind of dumb, and being ‘forever young’ has nothing to do with it.

That’s obvious when I do things like go out to a bar and want to leave at eleven thirty because I’m exhausted or when I end up talking to a hot 22 year old girl and all I can think is “god, you’re stupid” or when I look at my skateboard and know for a fact that I’m not riding it anytime in the foreseeable future. I’ve maintained none of the trappings of youth (save creative output I guess, but that’s really not the domain of the young. It starts when you’re young, but people that are dull adults usually weren’t creative kids and lots of people who ARE creative adults weren’t creative as kids) and despite what I believe, deep down I know the truth, which is that this is it. Life is a big game of bullshit fakery and nobody has any fucking idea what’s going on or how they’re supposed to behave except for people between the ages of 20-32, who for a brief, fleeting moment in life may just have it all figured out.

Now, that’s not to say that I really mind being a grown up. I think it’s cool. I just find it crazy that I’m now the person picking up another person from their school, where they meet people and make friends and have a social life and I’m just one of the dull pods back at home that sits around doing work and reading the paper like THAT shit could possibly be even remotely interesting when there are overgrown vacant lots to run through and cases of beer to steal and bugs to squash and pretty girls to try to talk out of their bras and so on and so forth. It’s a little odd to realize that I’m firmly, two feet planted on the ‘adult parent’ side of things. But that’s what my kid going to school has really exemplified.

Although, it must be said that I’m a bit like the black-punk-rock kid in that the other parents don’t REALLY fully just accept me as one of their own, but I don’t have the time or energy to really run with the non-parents either. Not that I want to hang out with the dork parents of the shitty kids my kid is in class with, mind you. I could really give a fuck about that, but see, that’s disingenuous too because at some point if my kid wants to play with another kid, it’ll be nice if I can get along with the parents because (and this is the dick punch to eternally flatten all dicks) his friends’ parents are now my fucking acquaintances, and my last chance at new friends unless I somehow end up in some field with a high turnover and an open-floor office plan (not bloody likely).

Whatever. My kid seems to be handling school well. He’s apparently not really listening much and when I asked him what he did on his first day he sighed and said “dad, I didn’t do ANYTHING in school.” He says he doesn’t like his teacher’s face, which is mean, but a respectable position to have and he says that despite all that, he likes it there a lot. I mean, fuck. He goes three hours a day, three days a week. How fucking brutal could it be? I asked the teacher how he was on the first day and she sighed and said, ‘eh, he was pretty good.’ Pretty hilarious.

Anyway, tonight and tomorrow night I go back into the studio to sing and do some final percussion and guitar stuff and then this shit is getting shipped off to Colorado to be mixed. I’m fucking STOKED on how this shit is turning out. Lots of keyboards, actually. More than I had initially thought, but it’s really ending up cool. The rough mixes of Suffer the Children Come Unto Me and East St. Louis are really great so far. I can’t wait to hear how Covered In Flies turns out.

xoxoxoxoxox

Sluuuuuuuuuurs!

2011-08-31T08:34:00.000-07:00

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.

addendum to the Nader post from last week

2011-08-29T14:44:00.000-07:00

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.

Hooker content!

2011-08-29T08:35:00.000-07:00

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.

Everyone do the Jerry Lee!

2011-08-24T08:38:00.000-07:00

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.

Sean Nader and the Abortion

2011-08-22T07:54:00.000-07:00

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

brain drain

2011-08-19T08:10:00.001-07:00

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!

Oh no you DI-int!

2011-08-16T08:36:00.000-07:00

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

hey, bro, that's a pretty cool wall.

2011-08-11T08:08:00.000-07:00

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.

Das Rapping

2011-08-10T08:47:00.000-07:00

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?

Reruns!

2011-08-09T07:22:00.001-07:00

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?

update! Update!

2011-08-05T07:50:00.000-07:00

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.

happy friday? Oh fuck, it's thursday.

2011-08-04T07:35:00.000-07:00

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!

let's go dii-iiicks let's go!

2011-08-02T09:16:00.000-07:00

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?

Dicks!!!!! No...wait. Not today.

2011-08-01T07:31:00.001-07:00

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.

Why do you hate fun?

2011-07-29T09:35:00.001-07:00

Human beings hate fun. That’s pretty obvious. There’s absolutely no place on this earth where fun takes precedence over toil and sadness and self deprivation. A lot of that has to do with the fact that life is hard and it sucks and in order for us to have things like pants and vibrators and corn, somebody has to bust their ass to make sure it gets produced and so we, as people that want to make sure that the vibrators keep getting produced, have to compensate the vibrator-monger properly and so we need to do things so we can have means to compensate him and next thing you know, boom! We’re living in a society and we have money and jobs and everyone is fucking bummed because Hey! Didn’t we just start this so we could all have dildos? Now I’m spending all day in this fucking fry station at this Burger King and I don’t have hardly any time to play with my asshole anymore! Life sucks.

And that’s part of it. Life is just hard. It’s funny to say that because life for us is immensely easier than it’s ever been for anyone in the history of the world, but that doesn’t make it easy. The smallest dick in the interracial gangbang movie is still a huge dick, to paraphrase Mark Twain, and the easiest life in history is still fraught with injustice and bullshit on an epic scale that dare not be observed for fear of fully recognizing the agonizing dickpunch-soup that we, as sentient beings, are eternally mired in.

So it seems that since we’re all here in the same boat, and we all generally like the same things (to a point) that we’d be cool with the notion of each other having fun, you know, just to while away the time between the dual stretches of eternal blackness that bookend our shitty, tiny, futile little lives. But alas, that’s not the way it is at all. The most obvious culprit here is fucking. People just don’t like the way you fuck, man. It’s their business, they MAKE it their business to make sure that your shenanigans aren’t any better than theirs, and if they suspect that you’re having more fun than them, well, then you’re disgusting, you’re depraved. They will literally shame you and make laws to make sure that you can’t experience your fun.

I liken this to the way people treat food. People look at fat folks sitting around a table dipping their meat lovers pizzas in ranch dressing and call them disgusting, but they’re just going for it, man. Lighten up. It’s not your problem that they’re fat. Your problems are that A) you don’t like fat people B) You’re too hung up on how you look to really let shit roar and C) You can’t STAND that these fuckers can just sit there and eat whatever they want and feel fine with it, that they aren’t consumed by the guilt that you’re consumed by (to be clear, I’m not suggesting that YOU want pizza dipped in ranch [though that shit is GOOOOD], only that you recognize in the pizza/ranch eating fatties the wanton abandon that comes with doing exactly what your id craves and since you don’t have the balls to get YOUR version of dressing slathered pizza [whatever that is for you, maybe a cheeseburger on a donut bun or sixteen scoops of icecream] rather than confront your own guilt/prudeness [which, let’s be honest, provides an important ‘survive and thrive’ function in your psyche] you choose to look at those people without your hangups as depraved beasts).

This can’t be more clear than in the world of homophobia. The most vocal homophobes are, without fail, deeply closeted cock enthusiasts who just don’t have the balls to come out and go for what they want. The notion that other people could be SO MUCH BRAVER than them makes them feel so ashamed that they lash out at those brave men out there, giving anonymous blowjobs in bathroom stalls, and call them depraved beasts and vote through legislation that would aim to make the very act of them sucking each other off illegal. That’s fucking INSANE. How in the world does one guy’s dick in another guy’s mouth do ANYTHING but stoke out the two guys in question. On what plane of existence is that a relevant act to anyone else anywhere, ever? Only a plane where someone wants with the passionate fire of instinct based need to suck a dick themselves, but for convoluted reasons of self loathing and fear and confusion, find themselves unable. That’s where Fred Phelps and Michelle Bachman’s husband (marcus…btw, if you google ‘michelle Bachmann g’ google completes it with ‘gay husband’ which is pretty rad) and Larry Craig and Ted Haggard and your shitty uncle get all their hate.

But it’s the same for slutty chicks or asshole men. Everyone hates the fun they’re having and shames ‘em for it. The truth, folks, is that we’re wired to crave sex on the level of sleep and shitting (we’ve been down this road before) and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with anyone banging anyone else who’s down to get banged. To make this totally uncomfortable, I’d say that on paper, I should have no problem with my wife getting railed by a random roomful of dudes if the mood strikes her, provided of course that they use protection, but of course, I don’t really love the idea of that at all. In fact, it bums me out to even consider. But why? I love my wife. If she wants to fuck a room of strangers, why would I want to deny her that experience? It seems that I should actively pursue making sure that she’s happy. It can only work out in everyone’s best interest, right?

Well, no. Because I’m a human being too, and just like the rest of you dicks, I hate fun too. This starts at an early age. When my baby girl starts playing with too many toys or drinking too much milk, my son hits the fucking roof and starts punching her and shaming her. He’s 3. He didn’t learn that from me or his mom or anyone. He’s a human being wired to get super fucking pissed the second someone else decides ‘fuck it! I’m gonna have more fun than the rest of these assholes’ and he responds accordingly.

Eh, I dunno…I guess if my wife REALLY wanted to bang a room of strange dongs I’d be okay with it, but I wouldn’t want to be there. I’d probably rather be in my own room of strange dongs, er….chicks! Women! Tits! People with pussies! Uh…shit. Er….What?

Never mind.

Have a good weekend.

upcoming recording for my solo record. if you're not a fan of the lawrence arms you will NOT care about the below post

2011-07-27T08:17:00.000-07:00

This weekend I’m going into the studio to make a record. I’m excited and a little bit nervous. My drummer has a fucked up hand (it’s creepy, it looks like a baby tyrannosaurus arm) and that’s gonna make shit difficult. Ha! No. He’s not actually deformed. He fell off his motorcycle and his hand puffed up like a baby hand and the recovery has been slow and stupid. Take note, children. Once you get to be about thirty, the pain, when it arrives, hangs around for aeons longer than it used to. I mean, fuck. I slept on my arm funny about a week ago and it’s STILL driving me insane.

Anyway, I’ve gotten all my instruments set up, I’ve borrowed good gear from folks and tonight and tomorrow are the last nights to put the lube on the tips of about 2 or 3 more demos and then it’s time to party. Matt Alison will be at the controls and Justin Yates (of Dec. ’09 ‘Young and Hung’ centerfold fame) will be assisting. Should be cool. As of right now I have four songs already completely recorded and mixed and I’m planning on getting 8 or 9 done in Atlas over the course of the weekend and a few subsequent follow up days. If everything goes well at the end of this will be a record that I’ve been writing and demoing and even recording for over a year, that I’ve re-arranged my whole life to record (in 2 different states with a rotating cast of the best, most appropriate musicians for each song) that you guys can illegally burn, listen to once, cavalierly dismiss as shitty about ten minutes into it, and move on to whatever dumb shit is coming down the pipe next. It’s the most wonderful thing in the world, the public consumption of the creative process.

Nah, I’m pretty excited because I’ve got a real different endgame with this record than I’ve ever had before. Before, I’ve always had a competitive streak when it comes to making records. This is true in a few ways. Chris and I always pushed each other during the songwriting process to go to weirder and tougher places whenever we were putting together any Lawrence Arms release. This was ‘competitive’ technically, but it was more of a friendly tension where the results came not from a desire to crush each other or anything but rather a desire to not end up looking like a total asshole.

For example, when writing Oh! Calcutta! I had written a bunch of songs and so had Chris. Suddenly, Chris brought in Great Lakes/Great Escapes and played me the acoustic demo, and my first thought was ‘wow…I’m gonna have to write some new, highly awesome songs if I’m gonna put them on a record next to that song.’ It wasn’t that I wanted to be the best, I just didn’t want to look like the dipshit that sullied the vibe of that song with some tossed off turd. This definitely went both ways for us and it was and is a super healthy collaborative uh…’competition’ I guess, but that’s not the competition that REALLY drove me. The one that really drove me was the one that featured Chris and Neil and me on one side and everyone else in the world on the other side.

Whenever the Lawrence Arms would make a record (and I can only speak for myself here, though I suspect that Chris and Neil would be at least a little bit familiar with the perspective I’m about to describe) it came from a place of feeling desperate, alone, marginalized and…I don’t want to say underRATED, but maybe underestimated. We started out as a crappy 3 piece that wasn’t as cool as the broadways (Chris’s and my previous band, who weren’t that cool to begin with) and, apparently tried too much to sound like Jawbreaker. Then we became the band that was just like the Alkaline Trio in that we came from the same town and had the same general line up, but we weren’t as good/cool/dynamic. Then we became the (tubbier, older) band with punk songs and guitar solos on tour with Taking Back Sunday and Yellowcard during the explosion of the pop-emo craze Then we became the new band on Fat, alongside cool, credible bands with already growing (and more importantly to the notion of my perspective) ‘cool’ fanbases, like Against Me! and D4. THEN we became a band that had been around for a while but hadn’t blown up and we were suddenly the new kids in the Hot Water Music pool, where the fans are great and dedicated but there’s still a spot here and there where only ten kids show up and no show is ever as big as the kids that attend think it’s gonna be (this, remember was before the miracle, David Blaine-esque move of Hot Water Music breaking up for a week and then getting back together to find themselves six times bigger). And throughout all this we’ve been consistently compared to every single one of the bands that I mentioned and described as an inferior version.

Now, far be it from me to complain about or even disagree with this comparison. Alkaline Trio, Against Me!, D4, Hot Water Music….shit, as far as my tastes go, these are some of the best bands around, and well, we definitely AREN’T as good at entertaining the TBS or Yellowcard crowd as those guys are. These are all reasonable bands to compare us to and I can understand, very, very clearly why we would be considered inferior to all these bands.

What that has done though, is that it’s made me (and PROBABLY Neil and Chris, though we’ve never discussed it overtly) hungry to stuff every record we ever made up everybody’s ass. The whole goal of our band has always been to subvert expectations within the very small wiggle room of our sound. I mean, I’m no dummy. The Lawrence Arms aren’t revolutionizing anything at all, (even though some of those bands I mentioned above may have been) but we tried to make a pop record when we’d never previously written a song with a chorus, then a weird, weird record that would shock the shit out of anyone who thought that we didn’t think things through or pay attention to craft, and then we decided to make a super jagged punk record that embodied everything we’d ever stored up about loving punk rock once we'd been written off as pussies. Then we made a record called Buttsweat and Tears. Ha!

Anyway, I’m not saying that any of these records were necessarily great (though, come on. They totally are), and I’m definitely not suggesting that my competitive streak was aimed at those above-mentioned bands. It wasn’t. It was aimed at the faceless world at large that unfavorably compared us to everyone. Those records all came from a hunger to show the world that we were the best, and fuck everyone else (fans, journalists, bands, punishers, indifferents, haters, label heads, promoters, roadies, everyone) entirely. Did they do that? Of course not, but that’s the MOTIVATION, which, if you’re a regular reader of this blog you would recognize as something that I think is completely irrelevant when it comes to discussing the merits of art. SO, what’s my point?

My point is that right now my new record isn’t made yet, but the time draws near and as such, I’m pretty fucking excited and all I have to talk about is motivation because that’s what’s coursing through me right now. And I don’t really have the desire to stuff this record up anyone’s ass. That’s not to say that I don’t think that you all are even remotely close to expecting what’s gonna be on it, I don’t think you are. BUT, I’m not looking to make a name for myself as some sort of iconoclast, I’m not struggling to push my sound and I’m not worried about how it’s received. I’m back to square one where I’m just making a record that I spent forever writing because I finally scraped together the resources to lay it down. That’s my motivation. I’ve got some songs I like and I think I’m finally ready to record them. This is the first time I’ve done that since I was a teenager. And shit, for a lot of bands, that first record is the best. Well, this is as close to a ‘first record’ as I’ll have done since I was fifteen. And I’m stoked. And if you don’t like it, well, I’m not gonna be surprised or care.

Woooooooohoooo.

And there she is, let's all turn around and laugh at her!

2011-07-25T09:38:00.000-07:00

Okay, so Amy Winehouse is dead. That’s something I guess. I’ve read every opinion on this subject from ‘fuck her I’m glad she’s finally dead’ to ‘what a tragedy…so young’ and while I guess I tend to side with the latter opinion, human beings are really, really ghoulish when they’re dealing with the abstractions of celebrity life and/or things that go on far away from them, so I’m not even remotely surprised by the former opinion.

Lots of people this weekend were saddened by what happened in Norway, which is, no two ways about it, a senseless tragedy. Lots of people in America, and presumably all over the world also said things like “who gives a fuck if some asshole in Norway blew up a couple of Norwegians.” I get that mentality. I do. I don’t agree with it, but I get it. In the day to day of waking up, working some shitty job, eating some crappy lunch, going back to the shitty job, crapping out some greasy turd in some filthy, sweaty bathroom cube, taking the train to the check cashing place, waiting in line, dealing with some onion-smelling lard ass, shoveling down some shitty dinner, making conversation with someone you foolishly ended up living with because A) you were dumb enough to fuck them one too many times or B) you seemed like a couple of dudes who wouldn’t bum each other out too badly, drinking yourself into oblivion, passing out on top of your sweaty, swirled up sheets and then waking up to “I Got You Babe” on the clock radio and doing it all again, yeah, what the fuck does some group of dead assholes in Norway have to do with anything? Who cares about some dead junkie? My life sucks ass and nothing’s gonna change that. People die all the time. I’ve gotta fucking stop and take stock of the universe every time someone dies? Fuck that. I’ll keep my sympathies local.

I get that, but it’s (of course) an unbelievably selfish and myopic point of view, one that we really love to cultivate here in the US (and now, here in the future, where everyone has a portal to the universe and a point of view and a viewable opinion, we’ve taken myopic selfishness to the level of art-form, but anyway). The thing that’s so funny about the people that tend to be the most staunchly ‘fuck strangers’ is that they’re the same people that (in my experience) bitch the loudest about stubbed toes, shitty bosses, fat wives, limp dicked husbands and other things that are (really, truly) interesting/important to nobody but themselves. It’s kind of reductive to simply call it childish, since there’s a level of xenophobia and pro-idiocy-agenda that’s also part of it, but since I deal with two little monsters every day who truly, honestly have no conception that there are other people in the world who also hurt and want and miss and all that, and that’s what all this reminds me of the most closely, I’m gonna go ahead and just call it childish.

(I know, ‘childish’ is reductive and not quite right. It’s like when someone says that Cameron Diaz is “hot.” Of course she’s not hot. She looks like Yoda, stretched, tanned, taxidermied and disgraced with a hideous wig/makeup drag situation, but due to her richness, her relative fitness, the way she carries herself, the fact that most dudes are dong-powered-hogs that would fuck anything that moves and her fame, we understand that she’s SUPPOSED to be hot. There’s no real word for that, so ‘hot’ is what we’re left with. It’s cultural shorthand).

The thing that I find somewhat fascinating in both these cases is the way that people are using sudden deaths to push agendas. This is hardly new, as nothing motivates like a corpse, (ask all those people who are suddenly slathering at the bit for arbitrary time limits put on how long you can wait before you report a child’s death) but for whatever reason it seems super overt and gleeful right now. The people who are “glad” Amy Winehouse is dead are SO stoked. People are thrilled to be throwing around words like ‘dumb junkie hack’ and so forth, as though she’s really ever done anything but sing some songs and get fucked up. That’s hardly a personal affront to anyone except for maybe her parents. I mean, at the risk of bumming people out, Kurt Cobain couldn’t hold it together any better than she could. They both died at 27 and he had a fucking kid! That’s about a zillion times more irresponsible. But THAT was a tragedy. This time it’s a junkie getting what they deserve, which is interesting enough, but even the JOKES I see about this Amy Winehouse death are just mean spirited. I’ve seen exactly one funny joke, which I’ll attribute to my buddy Rich Gill who posted it on facebook and that was “congratulations to Lilly Allen on a long, hard fought victory.” The reason that’s funny is because while it comes quickly on the heels of death (making it seem tabooish) it’s really not mean spirited, except that it openly mocks Lilly Allen’s dumb sense of egomaniacal competition with Winehouse, who honestly didn’t seem all that aware of Lilly Allen (or much else, I guess).

But see, the point is, that’s how you joke about dead folks. You have to make it FUNNY. Mean isn’t funny and funny isn’t mean, because funny trumps everything. If a joke is truly, TRULY funny, it’s not mean, racist, sexist, homophobic or any of that. It’s funny. If it’s mean, then chances are (100% in fact) that it’s not funny. That’s because meanness isn’t really humorous. It’s shocking, which is an ELEMENT of good humor, but that’s just one element. Funny things have to be relatable and there’s nothing relatable about dancing around the corpse of someone you don’t know because you’re suddenly morally superior because they wound up dead. That’s what Pat Robertson and Osama Bin Laden and other ideological zealots do. And there’s NOTHING less funny than ideological zealotry.

Now, to get back to Norway, the GLEE with which leftist types are reporting that this nut that blew all this shit up and shot all those people was a fundamentalist Christian, right wing conservative honky is a little bit shitty too. “Here’s the new face of terror, Republicans! It’s YOU!!!!!” The left seems pretty stoked on that. I think it’s fucked up. I mean, sure, yeah. The dude’s a white Christian but SO WHAT? He’s also a mass murderer and those dudes are pretty much ALWAYS white Christians. Isn’t John Wayne Gacy a terrorist, or the Son of Sam?, Dahmer, Bundy, Gein, David Berkowitz (what do you mean he’s jewish?), Dick Ramirez (Mexican? Really?) these dudes terrorized the shit out of people, and just because they’re only tangentially tied to any sort of ideological agenda doesn’t mean that they’re not exactly the same as this dude in Norway or Osama. Shit man, those two guys are only tangentially tied to their purported larger agendas, as no matter what the very vocal and visible zealots and/or opposition may have you believe, neither Islam nor Christianity promotes mass murder.

The notion that this is some kind of blow for ANYTHING (moderate Islam, those opposed to the ongoing wars, anti-racial profiling folks, people who generally hate republicans) is completely fucking asinine. It’s just a bunch of dead people and twisted girders and a huge fucking mess and that shit is never a blow FOR anything, much in the same way that meanness is never funny. It’s a bunch of dead people, a terrible mess to clean up and a metric dickton of bullshit left behind, and assholes going on about how retroactively, they were right and everyone else was wrong and so on and so forth. Nice. It’s real nice. It’s like a complete vulture culture of smug Dr. Drews just vampirically using tragedy to further agendas.

And that shit’s just dark people.

RIP all around.

dynamite.

2011-07-20T13:55:00.001-07:00

Lady Gaga was on Howard Stern the other day and she was just awesome. Not only did she handle all Howard’s questions and come across as driven and eccentric without sounding like a total shithead, she also is one of the only people I’ve ever heard skate the line between answering the more titillating questions and saying “I don’t really think that’s appropriate” without sounding like a complete turd/prude/person with something weird to hide.

To top it off, she performed two songs, “Hair” and “Edge Of Glory” with just vocals and a piano and both songs were absolutely unbelievable. It’s not often that I listen to ANY music and have to consciously think to myself “uh, dude, you may potentially start crying right now if you’re not careful” unless I’m super-duper wasted/hungover/emotionally vulnerable, but yesterday I was just driving along and boom, I was about one click away from being Spade and Farley listening to the Carpenters in Tommy Boy.

Now, there are a lot of issues to address here, most of them involving me being a total pansy for A) having any respect for Lady Gaga or worse, B) being the kind of aging hipster douche that PRETENDS to like Lady Gaga because it’s eccentric and shows a breadth of taste and the sophistication to see the masterful simplicity of the songcraft in the vapid pop machine and blah blah blah. There’s of course C) Only total homos cry, except for at your army buddy’s funeral or at the ceremony where your son receives the medal after getting Osama.

Other issues include the fact that these renditions of “Hair” and “Edge of Glory” sound a LOT alike and that she’s making some pretty weird faces, playing piano with talon-like nails and generally the whole thing is rife with easy-to-mock trappings. There are long responses to all these issues but the quick answer to all of them is pretty much this: Hey man, whatever. I thought she was great.

There’s this pervasive notion in the mainstream and counterculture alike that as a collective, humanity is nothing but a mad grip of buffoons and we heap all this praise on these talentless hacks just because they’re beautiful and have access to the studio wizardry of Wil.I.Am. We all get furious because these shitheads don’t deserve it. They’re ciphers. They stink. What ever happened to talent? To substance over style? To artists like Phil fucking Collins! That motherfucker may not have been beautiful, but he could sing the dick right off a dog, boy. But this new batch of shit…Who likes this shit? Pre teen girls? Fuck. Hell in a handbasket. That’s where we’re headed with this bullshit.

And on and on like this.

It’s funny because (and this is getting dangerously close to ‘leave Britney alone’ territory) Lady Gaga is a great singer and a great songwriter and she’s kind of funny looking and finally, after a decade plus of mindless pop and boybands and Svengali-pupeteered dipshit pigs we finally really, truly do have a megastar that’s actually a great musician, talented songwriter, gifted vocalist, weird iconoclast, who’s also odd looking, and yet when you look up and go, ‘man, lady gaga is just fucking incredible’ people smirk and go, “Oh man, I didn’t think you went for that pop bullshit” or worse “oh, look at you with your shitty, ironic hipster praise of another pop turd. You’re essentially Pitchfork sucking off the Carter 3” all the while ignoring that this woman is actually the real deal that deserves the praise she’s getting because she’s done all the things you need to do to earn said praise and she did it while being weird looking in a VERY superficial industry and in front of an increasingly fickle public.

It goes back to enthusiasm and being a poser and the way that everyone is afraid to show any interest in anything at all because we live in a poisoned culture of cynical dicks, but this time the teenaged girls and the homos were right. Lady Gaga’s piano performances on Stern were truly powerful and touching and sure, maybe all you like is Slayer and it seems mad gay to you, maybe you just listen to Eminem and the Geto Boyz and that weird-chick-on-a-piano shit has nothing to do with your tastes. But me, I’m an old shitty man who has very little faith in anything and who decided to get into punk rock because I thought polish and stadium seating and virtuosity were overrated non-necessities that only got in the way of the visceral impact of the shared experience of music, and this shit floors me. Go ahead and call me a pussy.

I think Lady Gaga is fucking incredible.

Uh, dude?

2011-07-18T07:42:00.001-07:00

Well, I had quite a weekend. It started out with a bang when I went into a walgreens and passed the pharmacist a note that said I had a bomb and needed a few bottles of Oxycontin or else I’d detonate said bomb. Then I caught a cab to the show, and right before Soundgarden busted into Rusty Cage (one of my all time favorite classic jams!) the pigs showed up and hauled my super wicked high ass to jail. Major anti-stokage bro.

That whole story is a bummer. For those of you who don’t know, the Level 9 elf that plays bass for Coheed and Cambria fell into the dank pits of despair that only watching Soundgarden every night can induce and subsequently went ahead and committed the very deeds outlined in the opening paragraph. I mean, seriously? I fucking HATE Soundgarden. What the fuck are they doing touring? They stink. They are the suckiest bunch of sucks to ever suck and if I was on tour with Soundgarden I’d probably figure out a way to get super high and then physically removed from the tour myself. In the context of having to hear a zillion dildos warbling along to Black Hole Sun every night for a month, threatening to blow a Walgreens back into the stone age if they don’t make with the oxys seems like a fairly reasonable thing to do.

I recently asked (via my favorite social media platform, twitter) if there was a worse band in the history of music than soundgarden, and the answers were many splendored, though the big winner was Audioslave. I don’t think I agree with that assessment though. Now, don’t get me wrong, I think Audioslave sucks. I think they’re terrible and have pretty unredeemable songs but I find audioslave to be about ten buhzillion times more palatable than Soundgarden. Here’s why: Audioslave is a complete fucking mess. On paper, they’re the worst idea of all time. It’s the irritating screecher from Soundgarden fronting the hopelessly dated electro-grunge-guitar-wank groove of rage against the machine. Terrible. On paper, Soundgarden is actually a kind of a good idea. They’re a cock rock missing link between Motley Crue and Nirvana. That’s got some serious potential, don’tcha think?

Well, sadly, instead of being raucous and full of swagger, turns out Soundgarden is pretty much the dreariest shit out there, topped with ridiculous howling and featuring the Kriss Angel of rock and roll up there just twisting around like such a punchable douche while the rest of those dudes...ugh. I don’t know. They don’t do shit. The whole thing sucks.

Audioslave fares a little better just because the expectations are SO AMAZINGLY LOW, and they’re so completely unremarkable that it doesn’t really offend beyond the general “who the fuck thought this was a good idea” knee jerk that pretty much everyone but your bald, bemulletted uncle that ‘still parties’ instantly has when confronted with the band’s concept.

Tom Morello plays some fairly interesting shit and generally, Cornell’s shrill bullshit is a toned down to the point where it’s just crappy rather than offensive. At this point, I’d like to restate that I’m not endorsing Audioslave here, merely pointing out that in the choice between douche and turd sandwich, I’ll take the turd sandwich, thank you very much.

But man, the dude from Coheed and Cambria must have thought that holding up a Walgreens was preferable to 1) not being able to take Oxycontin and 2) Telling his buddies that he was really, really interested in getting high. This kind of blew up all over his dick because number one is a crime and because of that everyone knows that he really likes getting high. So, uh, oops. Now you’re not high and you’re in jail. Bad combo.

Now, I’m no big city rockstar and I don’t know all that much about how to get drugs like that, but I gotta imagine that when you’re in a band that has a gold record there’s a slightly more convenient way to score than threatening to blow up the Walgreens. Ask the drum tech or the local promoter or that creep that’s been to every show since Syracuse, right? Fuck, go on stage and ask for pills from the crowd, ask one of the crew dipshits that’s walking around wiping Chris Cornell’s ass every night. Lord knows those dudes have to have heavy narcotics on them to be able to deal with being responsible for setting up and enabling Soundgarden’s painful stink. One would think, at least.

I mean, it’s probably kind of a no-brainer, but here’s the take away: if you’ve got serious issues with drugs, like I’m-gonna-flip-out-if-I-don’t-get-some-drugs issues, but you’re not interested in seeking help, for fucks sake, make sure you’ve got at least one homie nearby who knows what you’re doing, if for no other reason than so when you get that look in your eye and say ‘uh, I’m gonna head down to the drug store and go completely berserk until I get my drugs’ he can talk some sense into you and point you in the direction of the nearest degenerate, help you beat up said degenerate and take HIS drugs. I mean, god. How hard is that?

Sheesh.

Dinosaur content!

2011-07-14T06:31:00.001-07:00

My house is a fucking insane asylum right now. Two days ago I was told that my wife’s best friend from highschool would be coming to town. This, it turns out was only part of the story. The whole story goes something like this: She was coming to town Wednesday (yesterday) and bringing her husband and two kids and they were all staying here in our apartment, which is nice, but relatively small even for my own family of four and two dogs. Now that there are eight humans and two canines, shit’s pretty Chinese up in here (not because we’re gonna eat the dogs, just because of the crowding).

I slept in a room with my baby last night and she’s pretty chill, but she beeps and squeaks all night long and the results are not good for a person with my sensitive sleep habits. My bigger kid got up at six and (to borrow a phrase from the pornography industry) I’m bushed. I’ve had a whole pot of coffee and seen all the buttholes on Isanyoneup and it’s not even 8. The real dickpunch is that our guests, who are sleeping in my room, are still asleep even as my own children rove the halls and bathrooms like stray, screaming gremlins. My jealousy knows no bounds.

Today, I’ll go to the museum and show some kids some dinosaurs. Those little motherfuckers love them some dinosaurs, boy. It’s astounding how much kids give a shit about history when that history involves this entire planet being overrun with gigantic lizard/bird monsters. However, I don’t understand what the fascination is, or more to the point, why the fascination is ALWAYS dinosaurs. Don’t get me wrong, as a kid, dinosaurs were my favorite historical personages too. But why?

Let’s take my three year old kid as a case study. He loves dinosaurs. Some of his favorites are the T-rex, the spinosaurus and the stygimoloch (I know! What the fuck? They came out with new dinosaurs? How the fuck does that happen [Ugh…I know how it happens, so please, nerds with interests in paleontology and a lack of ability to understand rhetorical questions posed only for the sake of highlighting seeming absurdity, please stand down {funny, completely unrelated side note: we were on tour with American Steel and Rory was getting all pissy about the amount of guestlist spots that they were gonna have in their hometown of SF. We were splitting the spots right down the middle, as that’s where our record label is and we have lots of friends, but we dig that it’s home for them, so we gave them half the total spots even though we were technically ¾ of the show and the headliners and blah blah blah. Pretty nice, right? Well, Rory wasn’t having it and he was kind of throwing a fit, so Buttcheeks, American Steel’s guitarist, busted in and said “Rory, what don’t you understand? These are how many spots we get, and it’s fine” to which Rory replied, in an extremely loud and frustrated voice, “Ryan! Stand down!” Now, I’m no expert on interpersonal communication, but uh…’stand down’? That’s the kind of shit you say to an uppity slave or a misbehaving dog, not a peer. Needless to say, we died laughing and now tell each other to ‘stand down’ all the time}]).

I understand that the idea of dinosaurs is crazy. I mean if someone from space looked objectively at the earth in the context of galactic history, they would undoubtedly refer to it as “that one gigantic lizard planet that had those monkeys come out and destroy it right there at the end” and that kind of boggles the mind. We’re living in the remnants of a very successful society of lizards and that is an unusual reality to come to grips with.

But see, that’s because I’ve got a relatively huge amount of perspective when it comes to the expectations of what this planet is. My kid has no real notions about pandas or WWII memorabilia or a chimichanga or skeleton keys or a double rainbow or mushroom clouds or naked boobs or hockey or mazes or lobsters or France or anything and frankly I don’t understand why dinosaurs are the things that stuck so instantly. Couldn’t, theoretically, anything be that fascinating if you’ve never seen it before? Why is it always dinosaurs for these kids? I mean, I guess the easy answer is that there aren’t shows about mushroom clouds that are aimed at entertaining them, but there was a time when there weren’t shows about dinosaurs either. That developed in response to a groundswell of interest from the under-ten set. Pretty fucking weird, right? Right? No? Yes? Hellooooooo?

Oh, just stand down everyone. It’s gonna be a long day.

wait, you're telling me why your favorite band is terrible?

2011-07-13T08:07:00.001-07:00

Okay, once again I’m gonna complain about music. Well, no. I’m not gonna complain about music but rather about how people, listeners I guess, ingest music. I’d like to preface this by saying that I’m a music lover and a music hater and a musician and as such, I find myself on a lot of different sides of very heated debates about music. Depending on what side I’m on, I find myself completely baffled and disgusted with opposing arguments. It’s fucked up, because music is SUCH an easy thing to ignore and it’s such an easy thing to love in a vacuum. Here’s what I mean:

Just because you liked the first couple of Bad Religion albums doesn’t mean that you have to like them now. It’s been twenty five years since some of those records came out. There’s no real reason that you should hold anything new up to the standards of anything old. Shit changes. Sometimes it gets better, sometimes it gets worse, but it ALWAYS changes. In the words of Tupac (via Steve Windwood), that’s the way it is.

Think about this: when I was younger I had a girlfriend that I was pretty sure was the hottest woman I had ever seen. I can think back and remember her now and even if we include everyone I’ve ever seen in magazines or on television, this girl was competitive in the very top one percent of the most stunningly ball-meltingly hot chicks ever. No doubt about it.

Well, it’s been a while, and now she’s older and she’s still good looking by the vast standards of the world (as in, there are a TON of people who are vastly uglier than her out there) but generally, I wouldn’t say she’s hot anymore. Yes, if push comes to shove, she’s cuter than the vast majority of uggos, but she’s no longer even in my top 100 by any means. Here’s how that makes me feel: fairly indifferent. It’s not a big deal at all. We were close for a while, I really, really liked her and thought she was the best, the absolute BEST thing on the planet for a sec, but shit done changed and now she’s just a woman who’s out there doing her thing. I’m glad she’s still alive and kicking and I’m sure she’s still nice and has people around her that love her and think she’s great and beautiful and all that, but I’m no longer one of them and that’s just fine.

I guess there’s a small bit of nostalgia for when she was just the hottest girl on earth, but that kind of thing never lasts forever. That’s the beauty of perfection: it’s so fleeting. It’s the pinnacle when the glider stops and the world gets silent before the great descent back towards the ground. That’s WHY her beauty was so astounding back when I knew her: precisely because nothing can be THAT beautiful for very long. It’s a huge part of why we consider THAT to be beauty, it’s because it’s so unstable.

Now, do you see where I’m going with this? You loved a band when YOU were a kid and they were kids. Now you’re a grown woman and they’re grown men and the record comes out and (fart noise) it sucks to you. Why is the result of that assessment anger? People that listen to music operate in this fucked up universe of expectation. Once someone delivers you something that you enjoy, something you enjoy so much that you make it part of the very fiber of your being and dedicate a bit of your soul to it, that if they ever produce something else that doesn’t live up to the thrill of their old offering, it enrages you and makes you kind of hate things, even if, in the great scheme of shit, this newer offering is better than 90% of the shit out there. Can you imagine operating like this in ANY other situation and what a total cocksucker you’d seem to be?

You have sex with a dude and it blows your mind. It’s the best sex you’ve ever had. You even have sex for a straight month and it’s just mind boggling. After a while, you do it and it’s just okay. It’s still better than most of the other sex you’ve ever had with other dudes, but it’s not as good as when he was rocking your world. Is the appropriate response to be pissed off? That’s fucking crazy AND that’s an even more excusable situation, because to translate this back to music, you can ALWAYS go back and put on the old album that you love, but you can’t go back and get buttfucked so generously and tenderly, you can only remember it, and that fades.

Of course, that old record has been listened to into the ground and as such you can’t still squeeze the same endorphin-blasting pleasure from it as you once did. You’ve been hoping for a new fix and it comes up short and so you throw a tantrum. It’s fucking silly is what it is. But I do it too.

Well, I don’t do this so much anymore simply because I don’t have too many bands that I care about that much anymore. I remember being furious at the Bad Religion album Recipe For Hate when it came out. I thought it was a shitty cashgrab and a complete dismantling of everything I held dear about Bad Religion. I’ve since come to realize that my obsession with Bad Religion was pretty unhealthy in terms of them living up to my expectations for any period of time. I got Against the Grain and thought it was too produced. I got Generator and thought that it had some stinkers and I got real worried, however I still probably played both these records a zillion times. I got Recipe For Hate the day it came out (just like I had with all the BR records) and was BUMMED. Eddie Vedder was singing on it? Weird guitar sounds? Bullshit mid tempo shit that tried to wax poetic rather than furious? What the fuck? This is not what I want my Bad Religion to be.

That last sentence is true. It also makes me sound like a petulant baby. MY Bad Religion? They’re making THEIR music to the best of THEIR ability and trying to keep shit interesting as best they can. If it doesn’t always connect with me, fuck…They’ve provided me with some of the best music I’ve EVER heard. I should be able to cut them a break, or at the very least not just start HATING them because of it, right? Especially now that records are free, the notion that someone works hard on a record that I take for free (despite the fact that it costs a lot of money to make) and then get ANGRY with the person who worked hard to provide this entertainment to me because it doesn’t live up to MY idea of what THEY should do is fucking asinine, childish and shitty, and yet anyone who truly loves music does this, because you can’t love something without hating it just as much.

Slight variation: I remember talking to my friend Chris after he played a show with his band, Sundowner about a year ago. He’d taken a chance and changed it up. He usually played an acoustic guitar, but for this show, he’d brought out his electric and a small amp and played that way. He felt the crowd response was lackluster. He got some people approaching him, questioning why he’d switch up the formula. He sat backstage and was a little bummed out, second guessing his decision. My response was this: That was a great show (and it was. He sounded great). People as a general rule have no vision at all. No human accepts change or new things very easily. You are the person who figured out what Sundowner is and how it should evolve. Of COURSE people will be slow to follow your progress. That’s because they’re boring and so far they’ve only accepted what you’ve already done. If they REALLY knew what the next step was for Sundowner, if they really knew how to push forward and make a better version of what you’ve done that they love so much, then THEY would be doing it, and there would be a crowd of people there to see them.

Does this make sense? I’m not saying that artists don’t make missteps. They do (this Sundowner show was not an example of that, however, just so we’re clear). Of course they do. But the thing is that every step is part of that artist’s best attempts to do something good and keep it interesting. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, but it’s their deal, not ours. If I really had known what the next Bad Religion record should sound like, I would have made it myself and presumably it would have been my favorite record since they were my favorite band, but I never could do that. At best, I could start my own band and do my best Bad Religion impersonation, which would be terrible.

Bad Religion has a classic song that builds to an explosive outro (which fades out!) where Greg Graffin screams “everybody knows what’s best for you!” over and over again. This is never more true than when you’re a child, underemployed, or when you’re a musician that people enjoy. Don’t change! Don’t stay the same! That sucks! Be more like that! How dare you invoke this iconography!? This is all said by people who sit there and wait to be entertained by you, people who will readily admit that they’re not creative, not musically inclined, people that aren’t adept at expressing themselves emotionally. Lazy people who are sitting there like cowboys shooting at your boots, demanding to be entertained will tell you exactly where you fucked up or what you should have done as though their hindsight/armchair ‘producing’ is somehow as valid as the vision that created the music that brought them to the table in the first place. It’s fucking ridiculous.

Now, finally I’m not suggesting that you have to be able to do something in order to say that someone else doing that same thing stinks at it. For example, I can’t do surgery, but I can spot bad surgery no problem. I can’t take good photographs but I recognize bad ones. This is all fine. People don’t have to like shit. That’s not the issue. The issue here is the rage, the smug disappointment and the cocksure notion that the person creating the shit is the one who got it wrong, ignoring that the whole reason we care is because they were the ones who invented what was right.

Fucking A.

Baby Guide: What to Expect

2011-07-12T07:09:00.001-07:00

The problem with having kids is that they start out helpless and demanding. They just lay there and shit and scream. They can’t communicate effectively because shit, they can’t do anything. Once they finally get going enough that they’re not just noisy defecating blobs, their arms and legs just kind of spazz around and they punch themselves in the face involuntarily and generally are constantly freaking themselves out. This makes them hard to live with. It also makes them extremely boring.

The only thing interesting about a new baby is that it exists at all. People say things like “oooooh, look at her, just taking everything in. It’s amazing” but that’s a bunch of horseshit. Really new babies can’t see a fucking thing. They’re definitely not focusing on anything specific. They’re just laying there in a state of utter confusion, for the most part cut off from the rest of the living world, sending out poop communiqués every couple of hours as evidence that shit’s going somewhat according to plan. In the beginning, they’re not even really that cute. They’re so small and breakable and goopy that they’re fascinating to look at, but I don’t know if anyone that’s not a parent or grandparent has looked at a newborn and really, genuinely thought they were, you know, attractive. It’s just not how the shit works, man. Everyone is born a gooey, pinched little troll-let and it’s only the inexorable passage of time that ripens us into swingin dicked macho he-men like yours truly.

Until these beasts are about three months old, they live their lives in thirty minute cycles. Fifteen minutes of this cycle is sleep, the other fifteen minutes is screaming, shitting, eating, barfing, gagging. There’s nothing else. I’m not trying to complain or sound negative when I relay this information to you. It’s the facts. This is ALL these new humans do. They can’t roll over, sit up, turn their heads, smile without farting. NOTHING ELSE. People are always so quick to interrupt whatever interesting conversation is going on with some trivial bullshit story about something that their kids do, or how their child is completely amazing, and when the child in question is under three months old, you’ve gotta imagine they’re saying this because they’re sleep deprived and delirious. Because there’s almost nothing interesting about an alarm that’s set to go off every fifteen minutes and spray your existence with shit and barf, besides the fact that it exists at all and that someday you’ll be sitting there and it will tell you to fuck off and then take your car and drive away.

At about three months, the baby begins to focus. They can kind of sit up a little, they’re getting chubby, and at this point it’s safe to say some babies start looking pretty cute. If you’re a ruthless shithead, this is where you can sleep train them. I sleep trained both of my kids pretty much right when they turned three months. This means you put them in their room at bedtime and just let them scream until way after you can’t take it any more and they finally shut down. In the morning you get them, when they wake up for the day. This is a horrible process that wreaks havoc on your nervous system and makes you feel cruel and absolutely goes against the DNA coding or whatever that orders you (from inside your cels!) to protect and care for your child. It’s the kind of thing that will make you cry even if you’re a heartless cocksucker, but that fourth day, when you put them down at 7 and then go to bed at 710 and you all sleep til six or seven the next morning is better than the day you first got a blowjob. It’s better than prom or winning the state championship or landing a job or any of that shit. Because at this point you haven’t slept for more than little catnaps for 3 months (and this is if you go for the sleep training RIGHT at the 3 month mark) and now, to get that sleep…hoooooooo shit. It’s amazing. It’s a full body blowjob wrapped in a chocolate crepe. You WILL definitely wake up on this day, look at the clock, be positive your child has died in the night and run in to its room in a panic only to realize that d’oh! You just woke them up. Ha ha. Stupid fucking love-panicked parent. Couldn’t just let a good thing happen, could you?

Six months is when you finally, FINALLY start getting a little return on your investment. The baby will smile when it sees you. You start to get the distinct impression that it likes you more than it likes other people. It looks around. It smiles. There’s a tiny bit of interaction. It’s not great, but after that shitty first six months, you’re broken in the soul and you’ll take what you can get. This is the entire secret of children as far as I can tell. They shit on you so much that you come to expect the worst from life, then when they make you a shitty ashtray that looks like an abortion, you’re so relieved that they’re not just pissing on the floor or sticking their fingers in the toaster that you literally receive the ashtray as one of the greatest miracles of human creation in the history of time. Never mind that you don’t smoke and it’s completely fucked up and wouldn’t hold ashes in a fucking vacuum. But I’m getting ahead of myself. That’s when they get to be, like 6 or something. At this point, they’re six months and they’re just smiling at you and you’re sitting there in your sweatpants (because you long ago gave up putting on decent clothes because you already look like shit, you go to bed at 7 and everything you wear ends up with barf stains all over it anyway) going ‘wow. That’s great! I love this thing and it loves me. The miracle of life! I’ve never been so happy!’ ignoring the fact that you are, empirically, a broken soul.

By a year, babies are legitimately interesting. They’ve got ideas and they’re starting to talk a bit and you can see their personalities. They’re starting to become pretty cute (unless you and your spouse are ugly, in which case what did you expect?) and you’re probably no longer terrified of letting a babysitter care for them for an hour or two. If you’re not a total pussy, at this point your kid sleeps through the night and you’re getting somewhat back on track in terms of having a crippled but bearable existence.

Skipping ahead a bit, at 3 they want to do everything, and this is where I am now. My oldest kid is three and my youngest is 1. The three year old puts in dvds, he takes out dvds. As a result, he breaks dvds and dvd players constantly. He lifts and puts down the toilet seat when he pees, breaking those too. He gets gallons of milk out of the fridge when he wants a drink. He drops those gallons of milk on the ground, covering the entire kitchen with said milk. He pulls things off shelves. He insists on walking the dogs. In short, he wants to do everything that a regular person can do, but he’s clumsy, weak and has no sense of consequence or precaution and so all he ends up doing is fucking up everything. I don’t condone ANY of the above activities, but I only have the one set of eyes and god help me if I have to take a dump or answer the phone. He’s turning on tvs, putting in dvds, getting some milk, yanking the box of bisquick out of the pantry, scattering it all over the floor (because he thinks that there are just pancakes right in the box) and of course, headlocking his sister and tossing her off the couch and into the corner of the coffee table. He’s a tornado of destruction, but at 3 he’s so completely cute and awesome and funny and fun to be around that I have to kind of let it go. Once your kid tells you a joke and it’s legitimately funny, well, it’s over. You’re fucked. Someday he’s gonna say something to me that’s gonna be so mean it’ll make my hair curl. Someday he’s gonna be 13, just locked in the bathroom whacking off a thousand times a day and telling me to leave him alone every chance he gets. Someday he’s gonna be a shitty old man just like his old man, so I gotta take this pile of bisquick on the ground in stride. These are the really, really good days I guess. For now, he still likes me, and his sister is cute and interesting. Fuck. I don’t even want to think about the bullshit SHE’S gonna pull in a few years.

This all goes out to my two lovely dogs of war who just had a baby, I believe in the northwest. Apparently, they met here in the Sock Drawer (which is the comments section below each entry, so named for the heavy jizz content). If you didn’t name your kid Sammy in honor of the blog, well, you guys are heartless mongos. Anyway, good work, good luck! Keep the clones coming folks! Without the repopulation we’d be a dying world, and that sounds depressing too.

Seriously though. Congratulations to (god, I hope I got this right) Bert and Sheila and yer new monster!

xoooxoxox

these dreams go on when i close my eyes! Every second of the night!

2011-07-11T06:53:00.000-07:00

Dreams are pretty weird. They seem important but in fact there’s nothing so dull as listening to another person’s dream. A particularly weird dream is impossible to not relay to your friends but they don’t care. No one cares about other people’s dreams even in the slightest, and that’s because dreams, while vividly real (truly, a dream is EVERY bit as much of a brain’s ‘reality’ as any waking life, except for the lack of consequences) are real ONLY in the realm of one brain. To all other brains it’s just a bunch of completely meaningless bullshit.

Yeah, there are people, psychiatrists, therapists and irritating hippy types mostly, who claim that they can interpret dreams, to which I reply: no, you can’t. Dreams may have a meaning but to interpret them as symbolic of anything universal (as in, Oh, you’re dreaming about your teeth falling out? That’s really about money) is a bunch of bullshit. There’s no way that different brains operate under the same umbrella of esoteric symbolism. That’s a pretty asinine thought. When you consider that one person could look at a steaming pile of shit covered in bloody vomit and want to barf and cry and another person could look at the same pile of bloody bile-poo and get a glass-cutting boner, it becomes pretty crystal clear that brains function in completely unique ways and that there’s absolutely no way that something like subconscious symbolic imagery could possibly have any sort of universal semblance. I mean, fuck, just the idea of actually losing your teeth means different things to different people. For some, it’s primarily a vanity issue, for others it’s a health issue, for others it’s more of a practical irritation and so on. So how come suddenly when we’re asleep, losing teeth suddenly always means the same thing? It’s fucking dumb.

Now, I’m not suggesting that dreams are completely meaningless, just that blanket interpretations (like books called “What do your Dreams Mean”) are the domain of the very dumbest of dummies. But sure, there’s gotta be a connection between me having very stressful dream situations and my life being stressful. There’s gotta be SOME meaning in the dream where I’m banging a woman with a beautiful body and the face of my oldest friend Chris with an Abe Lincoln beard (this is, unfortunately, a real dream I had). The dreams where I write songs and then remember the songs when I wake up (they’re usually terrible) have to have some sort of relation to my life and my general interest in writing music. It’s not just complete random garbage. But it’s not cut and dry either. And as such, it’s pretty hard to be interested in listening to anyone talking about their dreams, unless it’s a dream about them fucking or getting fucked by something really weird, but usually people keep those to themselves.

The one place where I kind of think that dreams become interesting is when they’re recurring dreams. This is kind of a wild phenomenon that’s a little more transcontinental than the one-offs. I have a few recurring dreams. The first one is where I’m incredibly good at jumping. I can jump like princess toadstool in super Mario 2 where once I reach the apex of my jump I can hover for a while. As I jump farther and farther and higher and higher, it eventually becomes a lot like flying, although it’s always based in jumping and never soaring. Pretty fascinating, right?

I also have a recurring dream where I’m perched somewhere that’s really high and precarious. I start out feeling confident that I can go wherever it is and do whatever I’m supposed to do, but once I get out there I’m paralyzed by fear and I end up just crouching, completely white knuckling the shit out of whatever I’m on, frozen and terrified until I wake up. This dream blows. I have one other recurring dream that involves me descending down stairs into underground windowless rooms. Each room is just covered in unpainted white drywall and has a stairwell going up and going down. Once I get to about the tenth level down, I realize that the walls are covered in roaches. The roaches are huge and some of them can fly. I wig out (because I’m no good with roaches) and run back up the stairs only to realize that the room above is even MORE roach infested. Usually at this point I start freaking out so badly that I wake up.

Those are my recurring dreams. Now that I see them written down I’m gonna have to go back and say, nope, Beex, you’re wrong. Recurring dreams are no more interesting than one offs. It’s all gibberish.

On that note, get back to work, slackers! Dreams are for suckers. You’ve been warned.

sunday dumb ideas.

2011-07-10T16:07:00.000-07:00

should I start doing record reviews? Publicists, send me your records and I'll do em. Seems like a good fit. I mean, after all, Im one hell of an overlord and my opinions are cast in iron.

The Trial of the Century!!!!!

2011-07-06T10:33:00.001-07:00

I think that really when it all comes down everyone has the same dream and that dream goes something like this: “Man, when I finally get to a point where I’m set and I don’t need to deal with all the bullshit I’m dealing with today, I’m gonna go tell every last person that ever motherfucked me to go sit on a dick.”

Now, most of the time people never arrive at that point and on the rare occasion that they do, usually they’re so stoked that they don’t waste their energy telling old bosses and naysayers and so forth to go fuck themselves. Which is exactly why watching Casey Anthony’s lawyer’s remarks to the press yesterday was so fucking awesome.

Now, let’s get a few things out of the way: that lawyer dude looks evil as shit. He looks like the kind of guy that sits around and smokes cigars with Dick Cheney and makes jokes about the death toll in Iraq while stoking the fire with his discarded Thai child hookers. He looks like George Lucas and generally does NOT embody my notion of a ‘cool dude’ by pretty much any standards I can come up with except for the fact that he completely fucking went for it and told the world to suck his dick on national tv the first chance he got. I really respect that.

For those of you who missed it, this dude, his name is Cheney Mason (fuck, he’s even got the same name as old Six-Hearts-Dick), went out to confront the press immediately following the Casey Anthony ‘not guilty’ verdict and he essentially walked out, gave everyone a real shitty look and then said (and I’m paraphrasing here) “Fuck all of you. You cocksuckers walk around blabbing like you know what the fuck you’re talking about when you clearly don’t. You’re fucking lawyers for Christ’s sake! You’re supposed to respect the process but instead you spew your ‘expertise’ all over the dumb tards that watch your crappy programming and you condemn the defendant in MY CASE based on evidence that YOU DON’T HAVE ACCESS TO and now look. You dumb cocksuckers were all wrong and I’m right. Go fuck yourselves, I’ll see you in hell. Get fucked. In conclusion, suck my balls.”

It would be easy to dismiss this as the ranting of an evil man who’s constantly shitting on others, making the world generally lamer and constantly droning on to everyone how right he is if not for one simple fact: He’s totally correct. He’s 100% right. Sure, I thought that Casey Anthony was probably guilty, and I was almost sure she was gonna get charged with some form of murder/manslaughter/child abuse/whatever. I also truly believe that from what little I know about this case, she had a pretty rough uphill battle to fight to not end up full of lethal injection. I mean, lack of evidence (notably cause and time of death) notwithstanding, she’s a crazy slut mom that partied for a month after her baby daughter was dead without letting anyone know, made up a nanny that didn’t exist and then eventually wound up face to face with the mutilated and decomposing corpse of her kid that she (or someone she knows) had duct taped up. Pretty fucking weird, man.

That shit is all pretty indisputable. That means that pretty much any jury, any group of even halfway reasonable people are gonna be predisposed to hate her, and with good reason. She’s obviously a nutty bitch and more than a tad insensitive. The fact that the jury is pretty much letting her walk is testament to the effectiveness of the arguments, and like it or not, that’s kind of the way this shit works.

Now, I’m not saying that I think that she’s guilty or innocent. I don’t have any idea. I DO know that I see people on the interwebs saying things like “well, sure helps to be cute and white in America” and well, of course it does. It SURE does always, in pretty much any circumstance you can drum up (barring situations like being in jail or being caught out late in a fucked up neighborhood or being cast in an interracial gangbang) it helps to be cute and white in America. But the thing is, you know who’s cuter and whiter than Casey Anthony? Her daughter. The corpse that’s all decomposed and wrapped up in duct tape. You know who curries sympathy better than anyone in this fucked up land we live in? Little white girls.

I know firsthand the effect that cute white baby girls have on people. They’re room stoppers. It’s mesmerizing, and there’s no way, since the cute white baby girl is gonna stay dead either way, that Casey Anthony’s own cute whiteness trumped her daughter’s and made people just decide that she probably needed to just be free and get on with her partying. It doesn’t make sense. The baby is far and away the sympathetic character here, not the crazy-as-shit slut mom.

So she was acquitted and now everyone is super pissed, talking about how justice wasn’t done and all that. But what I don’t get is how everyone knows. I mean, presumably the jurors were regular people who actually watched the whole trial and didn’t need to rely on the legal versions of Glen Beck or Keith Olbermann to get the synthesis of what was going on. They, like you, like me, probably don’t like Casey Anthony and think that what happened to her daughter is gross. But they were there to hear the whole thing and found her not guilty, so how the fuck does this loudmouth dipshit that I’m friends with on facebook who can’t stop running his mouth about his outrage have some sort of inside information that they don’t have? How the fuck is he so sure that the jurors are dumb and were duped and that the prosecution is corrupt and so on and so forth?

I mean, righteous indignation is an irritating character trait to begin with, and this shit is really bringing it out in motherfuckers and it’s bumming me out. Because here’s the thing: She’s gonna get pregnant again. Give it a year, tops. She’s gonna get pregnant and then this bullshit is gonna start all over again. And you know what? THEN it will be fine, because I think that even if she didn’t, in fact murder her daughter, tape up the eyes and the mouth and dump her in the woods (though, honestly I’m kind of with this asshole on facebook…how exactly did she not do that?) she’s still a crazy unfit mom who should be sterilized (for fucks sake, I need to show ID and answer questions to get into Canada but all this crazy bitch is gonna need to do to have another kid is find a dude who’s just drunk enough to bang her but not so drunk that he can’t blow a load) but she’s gonna have another kid. I would be willing to bet all of you thousands of dollars that within 2 years (max) she will be pregnant and back in the headlines (if she’s not just straight up killed by some angry mob in the next couple of weeks) because people are furious that she’s having another baby. Nancy Grace will explode.

Which is why I don’t want to focus on any of that shit. It’s gross. Party mom is gross. Dead kids as entertainment is gross. Guilty or innocent, it’s all gross. Dumb self righteous assholes getting all pissy all over the internet is gross, but that dude coming out and doing the old upper class professional version of "fuck all you assholes. fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, you're cool, fuck you. Goodnight. Kiss my ass" was pretty awesome, even if he does seem like a cocksucker. He’s living the dream, and today I bet he’s booking a trip to Thailand where he’s gonna drink margaritas and fuck little kids til the cows come home, and then he’ll probably eat those cows and drink their blood.

Ah, I don’t know. Maybe he won’t drink the blood. It’s all idle speculation. I thought that was what we were all doing now, right?

here's a FASCINATING hypothetical for you!

2011-07-05T08:41:00.001-07:00

If you could have dinner with any person, living or dead, who would you choose?

This is probably the most generic “let’s get inside your head” question bandied about in the western, English speaking world. It’s a hypothetical that’s intended to illuminate the personality of the person being asked by highlighting their ultimate choice for companionship in a sophisticated setting (meaning, the question isn’t ‘who would you most like to pummel/fuck/get high with/be trapped on an island with [all of which are vastly more interesting questions requiring much more careful consideration, btw]). It’s just a dinner. That means that the considerations are pretty much limited to conversation and maybe food.

This is the question that your ‘cool’ (creepy) uncle asks your best friend and that every beauty pageant contestant is forced to answer at least once. This question is asked in almost every major media, softball, quasi-in-depth interview with ‘important’ people. It’s the ultimate way to allow people to sculpt their image and freely bullshit without really thinking about it. Watch:

“Oh, Gandhi. I’m fascinated by his ethical stance on revolution. I’d love to get inside his mind and see what can make a man simultaneously break all the rules while creating an extremely prescriptive set of new rules for himself.”

Or

“Genghis Kahn, because he’s simultaneously a brilliant tactician and a barbarian. He’s the first superpower, and a walking id that’s also the father of imperialism. That’s a rare combination of volatile genius that I’d love to experience.”

These are just off the top of my head and I don’t agree with either of these at all, just by the way. Gandhi would probably be a bit out of my league, intellectually and spiritually, and Genghis Kahn would undoubtedly kill me and neither of those situations sound like a good way to spend a dinner (it DOES bear mentioning that these two meals would be entirely opposite, cuisine wise. It’s chickpeas vs. Horse legs). However, it’s all moot because they’re dead. I can SAY that I want to eat with either of these people and, since there’s never a follow up to this question, I can sound like I’m an adherent to nonviolence and fascinated by self discipline or that I’m deeply engrossed in the psyche of highly contradictory, complex individuals; I can seem deep and interested in lots of things (hence interesting) without really being interested OR interesting.

It’s a totally stupid question/exercise. And here’s the thing: it becomes even stupider once you realize that the two answers above are NEVER going to be someone’s answer because EVERYONE answers this question by naming one of four types of people. Those are:

1) someone in their own family who they admire (usually dead)
2) a living celebrity that is extremely famous that they’re obsessed with (like Lady Gaga or Robert Pattinson)
3) Someone that they find to be extremely sexually attractive (Brad Pitt, Lexi Belle)
4) Jesus

In fact, almost EVERYONE says Jesus, and that’s because Jesus is a great answer (actually, this is a lot more complicated than this. Jesus IS a great answer because he’s easily the most polarizing figure that’s ever lived. He obviously had a lot of charisma and besides Ronald McDonald, there’s no one that’s ever been more famous. He’s also worshipped as a god and despite your own opinion on his deism, there’s no doubt that dining with someone that people herald as the walking, talking creator would be pretty fucking wild. The thing is that since so many people say Jesus, it’s become the only answer that anyone looking to curry favor with the masses can say. For example, Obama, when asked this question, HAS to say Jesus because otherwise he looks like a Kenyan Muslim Cigarette Smoking Socialist Infidel [this reminds me, very tangentially and quickly, of the guy working at the fireworks stand in Gravois Mills Missouri who I bought roman candles from this weekend. He was skinny with a mustache and a cigarette in his mouth and another behind his ear. He wore a hat that said “I’ll keep my money, guns and freedom. You keep the change.” The implication here clearly being that Barack is a socialist who wants to redistribute wealth and take away guns and freedom. Hey asshole, you work part time at a fucking FIREWORKS STAND in one of the poorest counties in America. If ANYONE could do with a little socialism, it’s you, you fucking hillbilly dipshit] simply because EVERY other president has already said Jesus, and to NOT jump at the chance to have dinner with Jesus, well, you’re pretty much a terrorist that hates America and freedom. Bush said Jesus. So did Reagan. And Clinton. And well, pretty much everyone. How can you not say Jesus? What are you saying? You hate Jesus? So yeah, Jesus is actually a default answer that’s become bad because it’s so predictable, the fact that he really would be fascinating notwithstanding), and I don’t know if, given the opportunity, I could really handle turning down a dinner with Jesus.

However, as the long and interrupted parenthetical note in the last paragraph spelled out, it’s a pretty stock answer at this point, one that should be eliminated from contention if this question is to ever do anything interesting. So who would it be? Who would it be?

Immediately, the other three categories come to mind. It’s either gonna be someone famous you’re thoroughly fascinated with, someone that you’re dying to bone, or someone from your family. My wife picked her paternal grandmother last night while I was conducting (almost no) research for this column, proving my theory correct. The only people who say someone they want to bang are mongoloid dudes and teenaged girls who get boning and love and celebrity fascination all mixed up into one grand and overwhelming emotion (but that’s a lot of people). Everyone else just knee-jerks to the one interesting turd from the one movie/album/show they’re currently obsessed with. Truly however, even with the restriction, almost everyone says Jesus anway, so this whole exercise is somewhat academic.

Also, (and this is an untested theory, but if I know anything at all about human nature I’d be willing to bet it’s almost 100% accurate) once anyone reads any sort of prediction about what EVERYONE will answer when asked a certain hypothetical question, all of those people will end up answering in such a way that works against the theory at hand just to prove to themselves and the cocksure asshole that went ahead and put words in their mouth that they are, in fact, fascinating individuals with unique opinions. So go ahead and tell me that you’d have dinner with Dustin Diamond or Ed O’neil or Ben Franklin or Hubert Selby Jr. or Charlotte Bronte or Mario Andretti or Johnny Cash or Cliff Burton or Ed Gein if it makes you feel better.

I know you were about to say Megan Fox. Jesus.

I won't be coming home tonight!

2011-06-29T08:35:00.001-07:00

Last night I wrote a song called ‘doin crimes’ which is about chloroforming your kids so you can go out and hit the clubs and break into drug dealers houses and steal their stash/money. At least that’s what it’s about on the surface. Traditionally, when people have asked me about what my songs mean, I’m pretty reluctant to give anything specific away for a simple reason: nothing sucks more than finding out that your perceived meaning of a song that you hold dear is not the meaning that the songwriter intended (and if you’re out there asking a stranger what a song is about, it’s safe to say that the song is at least a song you like, if not something important and personal).

There are a lot of songs out there where the meaning is completely unmistakable. Filler by Minor Threat comes to mind instantly. That song is amazing and there’s no doubt about what Ian is conveying in that song. Similarly, Pull My Strings by DK is not ever gonna be mistaken as a love song, a party song or a sad song about a dead friend or an ode to big, juicy asses. It’s straightforward and that’s great. These are just two examples of zillions of amazing songs where there’s really not a lot of room for lyrical interpretation. Being dense doesn’t automatically make lyrics good and often, it’s a bad thing. The only thing that can truly dictate if lyrics are good or not is if they sound good with the song and don’t detract from the song by being so overtly stupid that the listener has to go “what the fuck did they just say?” That’s really it.

However, that being said, I have a story. I was 18 and on tour with Slapstick. We were in College Station Texas and we were playing in some weird cafeteria. I remember that it was a 21+ show, which was weird since none of us were technically old enough to be there. Our record had just come out not long before the show. I don’t remember if it was weeks or months, but to give you an idea of how long ago this was, it had only come out on cassette. That meant that no lyric sheets were included. You had to write to the label to get one.

ANYWAY, so this guy shows up and he’s, at the time, the oldest fan of any of my music that I’d ever met. He was really old, like 25, and I couldn’t get over that there was a GROWN MAN that liked the music that me and my dumb buddies made in Matt’s basement. He was there with his girlfriend or wife and he was nervous to talk to me. This was mind boggling. I just remember being astounded to hear this dude stammer nervously when he asked me if he could talk to me about a song that really meant a lot to him. The song was called Not Tonight.

Now, I wrote the words to the song Not Tonight when I was sixteen. The words are not great. The emotional resonance of the themes is not high. However, at 18 I’d never had to answer for anything I’d ever created before and I wasn’t thinking in terms of standards or touching someone’s soul with music or anything like that. Honestly, I was just surprised to be having a conversation like this with a person that I perceived as an adult.

So I said, ‘yeah, that song is about being too drunk to drive home from a party and having to call your parents. Ha ha. Pretty fun.’ And the dude’s face just fell.
‘Oh, really? Is that what it’s about?” he asked. He was visibly bummed. “I thought it was about taking off, throwing off the shackles of your shitty town and making your own way, saying goodbye to the bullshit that holds you down and never looking back and seizing the opportunity to make something of your life.”

And, well, yeah. That would have been a better route to go. That’s a good idea for a song. I felt like a complete dipshit and a fraud. The dude’s day was ruined and I learned a few things that day. 1) if I was gonna make something, I should have a purpose behind making it. Not every song has to be profound, but it’s simply not enough to toss off some lyrics because they rhyme and/or kind of relate to the chorus. 2) I’m much better off keeping my mouth shut and letting people hold onto their ideas about what songs that I write are about. I’m not doing anyone any favors by reinterpreting what some piece of music means to someone from on high like a shitty professor. Fuck, I don’t have any authority on this besides what the songs mean to ME, which is totally different than what they would mean to anyone else (much in the same way that my kid means one thing to me, but that doesn’t mean that he should mean the same thing to you, or even that he possibly COULD mean the same thing to you. It’s different perspective vectors. It’s IMPOSSIBLE that you and I have the same idea about any song, especially one that I’m so myopically close to as one that I wrote, and that’s fine. That’s the way it’s gotta be.)

That was the last day I ever told anyone straight up what a song was about. That was also marked the moment where I began taking lyrics extremely seriously. That hasn’t always worked out for me, and of course that doesn’t mean that I haven’t written songs that aren’t ‘serious’ since then. It means, however, that I’ve never since then just tossed off lyrics without really thinking about them.

However, when it’s a song no one has ever heard, and therefore don’t give a fuck about, it’s a whole different thing. So, to get back to my new tune, “Doin Crimes,” it’s inspired by the Casey Anthony trial, some recent break ins at my friend’s weed farm, some of the looting and rioting that’s become so popular around the world this spring and so forth. It’s crimes. Doing crimes.

The song is also about my own crazy paranoia and fear of the world at large. It’s kind of about the way that people self-medicate using things that can destroy them in order to feel safe and invincible. It’s kind of nuts that in a real way something like driving a porche 130 mph down windy roads when you’re piss drunk is a way to armor yourself against a scary world that could kill you at any minute (and for the record, I don’t know that dude at all and I’m not trying to speak for, or ill of the dead). Taking risks is a way of rationalizing the irrational nature of senseless destruction that exists all around us. “If I can jump out of an airplane and live, then cancer doesn’t stand a chance against me.” “if I can drive drunk every night and get away with it, then fuck man…I can do anything. I can live through anything.” These are stupid notions, but anyone who takes risks operates at least a little bit on this level, if not consciously. At least that’s my amateur psychiatric evaluation.

Yeah, so that’s what this song is about. You all can hear it in a few months. Try to forget this by then. It’s better, lyrically at least, than Not Tonight. I can promise that much.