And the language can't even describe it's own meaning. shitty alays indecipherable.

and the writer wrote about a writer who couldn't write. the critics called it cloying and un-necessary. but barely. it got adapted into a movie by two movie stars with parallel careers, and a mind-numbing sexual dysfunction.

So starred the movie, with two famous faces who were virgins, despite being photographed by prominent members of a white-supremacist group, at several high-profile coke dens, canoodling with the african-american glitterati. It was all too precious for the gaffers and the key grips, the assistants and the drivers. These working class folk in the creative medium got to go home at the end of the night, car-pooling, or bus hailing, or motorbike rendezvous, and they got to have sex with their plane jane spouses in their apartment houses. A sexual congress of mutual satisfaction and, in coarser words, mind-altering sticky fuck friction. These minimum wagers wouldn't know a glamour fuck if their sneaky jew publicist had arranged it for them, just so the midwestern housewives and their magazines could proclaim them 'adequately frisky'. Tiresome, so tiresome.

The movie was to be a screwball comedy, in the grand tradition of the Western Musical. First, John Wayne's corpse is reanimated by a special series of lubed-up super juices, then sings a faggy little ditty about life on the wide.open.range. If only me poor old mum had been smoking a few menthol ciggys during my formation, I'd be a real right early 90's british rock sensation. shoot. That was the soundtrack anyways, to this movie, this movie I'm talking about. I forget the title. I think it had a number and then a noun, a person place or thing in which to leave a big greasy shit of metaphor all over this turd of a hollywood Bowl/bowel production. Leave it to the coked up producers who thought they could get an ultra-wide release with a couple of American Idol rejects blowing them between scenes. Did i mention it was a musical? Shit. Don't even make me get into that sequence with all the foreigners at the feet of the hostile Statue of Liberty, decompressing statutes of limitations. I heard that stony lesbian shout, hand raised in the air, "Give me your poor, your tired wretched masses teeming to breathe free, so long as they ain't a bunch of ugly fat bitches who ain't gonna talk 'bout nothin' but they own shit. Ain't got time for that, what with all the tourist traffic up and down my copper cunt. Twas the salty sea that turned me green. Twas the immigrants who turned me bitter. Wish I could send Ellis Island to the same fate I sent Atlantis, when I roamed the earth as Lady Titan, ten thousand years before Christ, the attention-hog, smiting islands I deemed 'too hetero' to a watery grave. What can I say? I don't care much for them breeders. Their music is too slow, too sad. So I got old, got slow, got gifted from France to these here American shores. I still sank a ship every now and then, with those haunting mariner chimes, cold and melodious, always for music in the back of black hearts as they filled with Ice Water. Had a fling with the Deity Atlantic, in the Pacific, just to annoy Mr. Arctic, and his homely wife Indian-Ocean. Cough cough towards you."

She shouted thick prose. I needed another drink. Pause to drink. Resume. And what's the meaning of someone you hate? I hated the director of this movie. He took my words, my forlorn words, nary a single one put upon paper in a sober state, and turned it into the dismissed movie of the summer. Easy reason to drink. Easy reason to hate and hate and hate and hate others and hate oneself. Easier to bear when listening to music that your friends created, easier still to listen to music created by you. So this director. A cheap short man with a tall ugly wife with tits too big for her body. It sounds like an oxy-moronic thing, to be sure, but when you see the recipe, scrolling upon the screen in big thick fonts, you understand the meaning, at once and all of a sudden. It's not as though I hated her though, I met her but once, at a Q&A in Minneapolis, Minne-sot-er. The flick had just flicked it's last flicker of image-meaning-testicles upon the screen and the douche stood up in Patton pants and Newsies hat to take questions. Just like a real director should. And some skinny brute from the audience broke the silence: "You suck!" And the director, ever the scholar, broke it down thusly: "To suck, verb, you, identifier, the construction 'you suck' to salt contents (unknown), and spake thusly communicator denoting actions upon subject, being I, in the self-identified mind-prose of the answer-receiver, rejecting the premise but accepting the meaning, filed insult, to insult, to denigrate, to bring worse upon this person through verbalized meaning, judgment, only to be understood by others, especially peers...although if peers reject, wholeheartedly, hopefully, insult times a significant figure if relayed back to original communicator, "ten-fold", as subject/I-friendly sources may relate through both traditional and cutting edge media. Meaning fully processed, rendered bullshit by popular demand""

The audience stood up and applauded, in unison, and the insulting member of the audience was taken out behind the theatre and expediently lynched. And good for him. A lynch is an exaltation of sorts, rarely does murder become a community event, like a book club for the blood-lusting southern gentleman, murderous like sons for sin, meeting and remarking on the latest kill.

"Burned him up good, tied to a tree. Slated his skin thirst on gasoline. Drank some wine. Ha! Bill brought it along, proper name William-Shall-Not-Be-Properly-Identified-For-Obvious-Legal-Purposes,Johnson. William Johnson. He brought the wine, several cases, to be sure. Tied this white nigger to a tree using horse rope and grapevine horse-trash. He thrashed around begging for forgiveness, naming crime after crime no one person ever took the time to accuse him of, I mean, what would be the point? Never bring verbal legislation into an execution, takes the fun out. So this black-fleshed-tree-scarecrow smoke every cigarette we gave him, handily. He smoked as if for forgiveness. Forgiveness for being a devilman in the presence of a bunch of righteous white southern gentleman, only looking after propriety.

So much for the film being a positive influence on society.

What had I even written? It's hard for me to remember now. I remember and exchange of paper. Currency for a bound stack of worded paper. I took my money, earned by the finger sweat I had pounded upon "would be done's" and "should be done's" many nights over, and gave away my baby, the only thing I had ever created that had meaning. I had worked jobs, no meaning but slobber upon falseness. I had made love, no meaning but regret and furtive glances. No meaning but this stack of words, one hundred thousand in all, ninety nine thousand and nine hundred and ninety nine conditional to the first. The first word was 'I'. Letter. Word. Fitting, everything that comes after is conditional to 'I'. I, how "we" understand the world...and by "we", sadly, I just mean I. I don't know what it's like in your head, and you don't know what it's like inside mine. And you want to find out, peripherally.

Love is like that. Wanting to find out the mind of your intended mate, but using courtship to ease into the horror. The horror that is human consciousness. Never dip your foot too deep in the liquid morass, lest you soak too long in truth. Truth will ruin you, rendering your precious pretense like balsa wood walls before the atom bomb. Weak, as understatement.

I might have written a love story. Yes! Perhaps that's the story I handed over to this hack director. A love story of two crazy kids struggling with the holocaust that is an upper-middle-class upbringing. The girl is a sensitive hoe prone to alcoholism, and the boy is an increasingly handsome frontman for a post-suburban-metal band. His screams layer perfectly over soulless arpeggios, as they should. As they should.

A Distinct Phrase

xenolithic pseudoantidisestablishmentarianism

The Boomends Presents: Halloween Costume Ideas, Reboot, 2k8, etc. etc., stylistic title bullshitttttttt

Halloween is upon us, and much like the looming financial apocalypse, brains will be our main source of sustenance and currency...or something like that. The point I'm trying to make is that crushing poverty makes zombies of us all. Or in women's case, sexy halloween poverty zombies. Rawr! Meow! Hiss! Woof! EEEOOAUUUUUUUU! (whale song)

So without further a-ado, the top Halloween Costumes for this year.

1. An "old washed-up terrorist" - be cheeky and topical this year by dressing up like a University of Illinois at Chicago professor William "Bill the Washed-up Terrorist" Ayers. Costume includes glasses, tweed professor jacket, textbooks, and ties to presumptive president Barack Obama.

2. Man released from Prison after 26 years for rape he did not commit. Just like Project Innocence, the organization which uses DNA samples to get innocent men and women off of death row and life imprisonment terms - you too can breath free air as an ex-jailbird. All this costume needs is an orange prison jumpsuit, a vial of your DNA, and 26 years of your life stolen by a broken judicial system! (Related Costume: The "Whoops!" Jury)

3. Big ol' Steamin' Turd. What? Did you think all these costumes were gonna be downers? No way, Jose! Get laughs, be a big piece of dogshit. Get together with a bunch of similarly costumed people, sing a capella, and be "THE DOGSHIT TABERNACLE" coming to a church near you!

4. Joe The Plumber - You know what? Don't be Joe the Plumber. Be Joe the 'not-going-to-turn-myself-into-moronic-bullshit-talking-point-guy'

5. Secret Muslim - Dress like you normally do, don't say anything you wouldn't say. Just be yourself. When people ask you why you didn't dress up for the costume party, say "huh? what costume party?" At the end of the night, they'll never know...you're a secret Muslim. (Not applicable if you wear traditional Muslim garb in your daily life. If so, be a secret Canadian.)

6. A Ghost. Boo! If you're thirsty, drink boo-ze.

Happy Halloween.

The only way to solve the energy crisis from a political standpoint...

...is to build a car that runs on Sarah Palin jokes!

ZING!

Boomends Movie Time! Matt watches Ghetto Dawg 2.

I don't have work today. I go where the day takes me. I went to the bank to deposit a couple of paychecks. I go to the car shoppe to get an estimate on my broken exhaust pipe. Too much money. I drive off, mildly upset and stuck, for the time being, with a noisy-ass car. It's got to be a pussy magnet in the sense that my 97' Ford Escort has a north polarity and pussy, (in the abstract, mind you, otherwise this whole tangent would be sexist) pussy also has a north polarity. A pussy magnet, none-the-less.

So now it's 3:35pm on a Tuesday. I'm at my parents house, alone. I make myself a drink and start channel flipping. Instantly things are looking up, and my day has instantly been put back on track.

My parents' cable package includes approximately 1,000 channels, and on StarzBlack, channel 905, a movie is playing with the title Ghetto Dawg 2. I've been watching it for the past 25 minutes.

The movie, as you may have guessed from the fact that it's playing on StarzBlack, contains almost exclusively black actors/characters. There is however, a great little scene where a Caucasian male porn director talks to his two black porn actresses like so:

"Imagine a big fat ass. Now imagine a cock going in it." I assume this was supposed to be funny, but the real laughs come from the low-budget special effects of a blood splatter moments later when a hitman hired by a pimp/ganglord named Big Daddy (coincidentally, the 1999 Adam Sandler vehicle Big Daddy is playing on HBO at the same time) comes in and shoots him in the head.

Another great scene. Two identical-looking puerto rican gangsters, (you can tell this because in an otherwise spartan apartment, a gigantic puerto rican flag hangs conspicuously in the background) saw off the barrel of a rifle while one delivers the following soliloquy:

"Forget the hat? A man and his hat is like a marriage. First you gotta find the bitch, then you gotta make sure the bitch fit."

The word 'bitch' is thrown around gratuitously in this film, and it's hard to tell if it's the director trying to expose sexism in the black community, or if the screenwriter felt that a couple dozen extra 'bitches' would make these gritty, mostly dog-fighting enthusiast characters come to life.

The plot mostly centers around a young black man growing up in an colorfully-crime-ridden neighborhood. His older brother is killed by a dog-fight organizing criminal, so the protagonist starts hanging out with a professional hit man in order to learn what it takes to be a killer, you know, for revenge n' shit. The morality tale is that he doesn't know if he has what it takes.

The movie ends (spoiler!) with the protagonist beating his brother's killer to death with a table leg(?) in the sex-basement of a dog-fighting club shortly after the brother's killer shot his hit man mentor. All the while the protagonist's love interest, (the only female actress who doesn't appear topless at some point or at least talk plainly about "taking a nut") leaves the ghetto alone on a bus after being stood up by the revenge obsessed protagonist. Got it? I had to use all those pronouns because I didn't actually catch any names.

God, there's alot of unnecessary, inexplicable T&A in this movie. I'm not complaining, just guessing that auditions didn't involve cold readings so much as they did cocaine and tears.

It's the kind of movie that could have been directed by a visionary black director with an ultra low budget and terrible actors, a white sub-consciously racist film school student, or Isiah Thomas. Any of the three could have been responsible for this turd.

I know you're curious, what about Ghetto Dawg 1? Well after briefly looking over imbd.com, it appears as if the two share none of the same actors or characters. So...yea.

If I were asked to write and direct Ghetto Dawg 3, it would probably debut at about ten theatres nationwide for one week before going straight to video. This is what the back of the DVD box would read:

"From the writer/director of over two youtube videos, comes GHETTO DAWG 3: ALL DAWGS G' TA HELL. When young Rufus Thames (Chris Tucker) reluctantly goes to work for the evil druglord Bovice in order to pay for his ailing grandmother's (Vivica A. Fox) medical bills, he is shocked when he finds out that Bovice is actually a British Bulldog! (voiced by Samuel L. Jackson) It's truly a 'Dawg' eat 'Dog' world in this gritty urban drama. They say every 'Dawg' has it's day, but for Rufus it's turning out to be a real 'night'-mare! It's more than just 'puppy' love for this 'Dawg' when Rufus meets prostitute-with-a-heart-of-platinum Dawana Tayes. (Miley Cyrus, in a daring blackface performance) Up until now, Dawana was Bovice's main 'bitch' but now she has to choose between Bovice and Rufus, while Rufus himself has to choose between an alluring yet dangerous life on the streets or a boring but safe life...in the 'Dawg'house! In the heartwrenching climatic scene, the audience will surely be crying as if it were raining cats and 'Dawgs'. That is how voluminous the outpouring of tears will be. Even with our ever-increasing domestic reliance on the metric system, this 'Dawg' is sure to spend his days 'by the pound'."

Probably the most promising film synopsis ever written.

Hogsmear 2008: John McCain, McCainisms

Things that John McCain has said, which I may or may not have just made up.

"I am John McCain, I will hunt your young children for sport" - In a speech before a republican fundraiser in 2003.

My reaction: Obviously taken out of context. Do you really believe that McCain is into pre-natal bloodsport? Ok, don't answer that. The point is...who has the time? If I had a nickel for everytime I wanted to play the most dangerous game with some screaming baby in a restaurant or an airplane...well I'd have enough nickels to pay for someone with a little more agility than John McCain, perhaps a professional baby killer like some gay liberal abortion doctor...(har-har! Irony!) or is it? It's not my problem how you interpret my jokes. You can go fuck yourself, especially if you happen to be a hermaphrodite, than it would be as easy as sleeping in a hammock and shifting your weight accidentally. Then you could potentially give birth to yourself, which would be hella awkward. (mostly because everytime you get laid, you would inevitably conjure up images of your parents, in this case you, having sex) Grosssss. Meta-disgusting.

"Iran is like a nasty pimple that occurs on a first date, you just have to pop it and hope that it don't bleed too much" - in a press conference in 2007

My reaction: McCain is spot on in this one. The only thing is, the last time McCain was on a first date, people were still using netscape! (Get it? Most people use outlandish metaphors and historical references to imply that John McCain is hundreds or thousands of years old, whereas I choose to be hip and edgy by implying that McCain cheated on his wife less than ten years ago!) Props to me, but jeers to McCain for being such an paleolithic adulterer. He cheated on his wife with Eve! Get it! He's fucking old as fuck. Harhahrahrhahrahhahahaha...cough cough cough.

"The economy is good. Horseless carriages are booming" -Attributed, 1985

My reaction: He's like,... well, It's hard to describe how old he is, but he at least pre-dates the invention of the automobile, right? How funny would that be? Funny enough to keep bringing up again and again, that's for fucking sure. You wanna fight? You fucking pussy, that's what I fucking thought.

"Barack Obama? More like Cough on my Momma!" - Town hall speech, in the town of Sick Mothers, Idaho.

My reaction: Strong wordplay, weak pandering. Everyone in Sick Mothers, Idaho has a sick momma, otherwise they wouldn't be allowed to shop at the supermarket or participate in county elections. For this reason, most residents of Sick Mothers, Idaho keep their ailing matriarchs on a steady diet of hot pockets, battery acid and steel reserve malt liqour. Translation - McCain will kick your mama in the face with a steeled toed boot if it means one more vote, or at least the incapacitation of another elderly jewish lady. They tend to vote for the intelligent darkies.

James and the Rainbros: and other thoughts...

Another night burning alive in a cold Detroit bed. Just saw a show. Still in my work-clothes. An all black outfit that befits the psychic energy given off in selfless waves of life by those who live around me.

Arrived late at a James and the Rainbros concert at Corktown tavern.

and now i gotta create some poetry
i get juiced and the juice flow out of me
like some lyrical energy... but less identical than me
to me and back at quarter to the third of three
in the morning
some hungover mourning
nights and leaving
and left, right?
sight, and see
what the future holds for me
and me and me and me, but you
you always know what to do
like someone read the notes right through
the staff of music, right on cue
shifting colours music, red to blues
jazzed and bruised
all at once, for once
stressed and stumped
and needing sleep
some sure-footed steps of faith
left to leap
and memories left to creep
from my dreams still left to sleep
awake awake
and left awoke
'cause neighbors spoke
for too late nights
and talked of hopes and dreams
like kites, caught in wind
like wheels in mud, still left to spin
and careless drivers like me,
too proud
too loud,
to ever give in.

Live Blogging with Wreckless Media (The Internet Just Ate Itself)

Hello, my name is Matt Gulley and I find myself in the upstairs of an apartment building in Dearborn. I got there by driving roughly ten minutes from Detroit on I-94, (or 96...I was on alot of cough syrup) It also happens to be the studio for the radio/podcast/popular media generator Wreckless Media. It's helmed by one Brian Berris and features a revolving door of friends and nomads who provide an equally hilarious and foul game of conversational free-association. Apparently, they're really popular too.

So I feel like doing a fly-on-the wall style-thing, with periodic updates.

6:52pm: Pre-show. These guys are literally good at talking, I think they're just warming up for the show.

Talking about each other's dads

"Do you think Greg Sr. has a big cock?"

"He hit me!"

"He slapped me!"

"I used to watch sports with him every Sunday, he never did anything mean to me!"

7:02pm: The show starts. All is silent.

"I really should have pissed before the show."

"You can use my mouth."

It occurs to me that these guys are always playing to a crowd, even if there is no crowd. 30 seconds in and there's already a joke about 9/11.

"9/11 was a good thing for our country." ----Which I suppose isn't a joke so much as an outrageous synthesis of offensiveness and dead-pan enthusiasm. That's kind of their style.

Brian is going into a monologue about movie theatre etiquette. This is a marked contrast to the last twenty minutes of round-table discussion. It's decidedly Brian's show, and rightfully so, but there's no ego disparity. Someone is just as likely to accuse Brian of being boring as Brian is to tell someone that their Anne Frank joke isn't up to par for the show.

Right now it's about Iron Man and the obese redneck in the theatre who seemed to be having a vicarious experience through the CGI superhero, audibly 'wooshing' during the 'high-octane' flying action sequences.

As an aside, I think the phrase 'high-octance' has been thoroughly relegated to the world of action-film critics who are whores to the major movie studios. I think to myself, when's the last time you described a sandwich as 'high-octane', or rolled off your partner after some 'high-octane' coitus, or waved your hand in a theatrical fashion upon exiting the bathroom after taking a 'high-octane' dump.

7:18pm: The guys share concert experiences. CKY, some guy at the MagicStick, Metallica.

"Best description of Seal's face I've ever heard: It looks like his face caught on fire and someone put it out with a rake."

Even if it is a second-hand comment, these are some seriously funny guys.

7:23pm: The studio goes back to the early 20th century and everyone discusses their distaste and distrust of the Irish.

7:26pm: A caller named Paulo. Paulo describes some mexicans in the theatre while he was watching The Matrix who handed out tacos to strangers.

A non-sequitar: The guys try to make co-host Greg piss by tickling him too much, then wonder aloud if they could make him jizz as well. This causes confusion over wether the correct method would be to continue tickling him or 'holding him down and giving him a HJ'

The show takes a brief respite.

I think this is a really pointless post, because why would someone read about something they can listen to anytime? Because you have too much goddamned time on your hands, that's why.

I'm impressed by the amount of calls these guys get, the other day Brian B. estimated that Wreckless media had 10,000 listeners. I believe it.

Anyways, check it out for yourself. I'm out.

Hogsmear 2008: Serious Issues and Fun Facts

SERIOUS ISSUE:
The War in Iraq has killed hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians.

FUN FACT:
Since the invasion in 2003, reported cases of diabetes among Iraqi civilians are down 855%

SERIOUS ISSUE:
Obama's former pastor has been quoted as saying "God Damn America"

FUN FACT:
He's right you know? This country sucks.

SERIOUS ISSUE:
The price of gas is approaching $4 nationwide and the economy is in a recession.

FUN FACT:
Who wants to go on a nice fun bike ride...to work?

SERIOUS ISSUE:
John McCain has been quoted as saying that the occupation of Iraq could last "100 years"

FUN FACT:
100 years is less than 200 years, which is like, totally a long time.

UNFUNNY DUDE:
Yea, long like my dick!

SERIOUS ISSUE:
Grow up, man. So immature.

(partisanship)

Teh EndZ

A Room Full of Instruments that Play Themselves

by Matt Gulley

Barcus Slocumb picked up a guitar that wasn’t his and strummed it a few times. It was out of tune but he found himself liking the strange organic hum it produced. He awkwardly wrapped his fingers around the neck, attempting some chords he had learned from his previous girlfriend. After about fifteen minutes or so, his hand became sore from the repeated and unusual grippings. He couldn’t play anything worthwhile anyways. He remembered sitting on his girlfriend’s bed, naked, watching her play. She knew a few older songs, ‘standards’ as she called them. She was wearing a purple sports bra and had a long cigarette dangling from her dark, chapped lips. At the time, he didn’t smoke, but picked up the habit sometime afterwards.

He shook out his sore hand at arm’s length and returned to playing the strings openly. It was a sweet sound. He let the final note get away from him, flowing outward from the center of the room, off the high ceiling, out the slightly open door and down the hallway. From there he figured it went down the staircase and burst into the outside world when someone had opened the main entrance door... from a room within a room, out into the busy main street. Such a sweet and simple noise could never compete with the idle tobacco conversations of the crowds of students on the sidewalk nor the grunting noise of the many cars passing under dangling traffic lights of the intersection. Such a musical rattle was doomed to lose its way and burst into dust. These dust particles, suspended in a fragile ray of sunshine, were to be swallowed whole by the breathing of the tired, and farted out by dogs and pigeons. No one would ever understand.

Barcus set the guitar down, and walked out of the empty practice room. As he shut the door behind him, the guitar rested against a solitary chair, exactly as he had found it. As he walked through quiet hallways, turning corners he had turned a thousand times before, he could hardly figure out what to do next. He got a call on his phone but didn’t answer. He didn’t need the trouble. He finally left the University building and walked across the grass, avoiding the sidewalk. He saw a girl with a nice face, standing alone by a sickly tree. He had his own lighter in his pocket, but he asked her for a light anyways. She smiled and said “Good luck, it’s a shitty lighter.” She handed him a purple see-through lighter which he flicked a dozen times before lighting his cigarette. From a distance, the two stood and smiled and laughed and talked for a minute and half before parting ways.

There Will Be Youtube

I just saw There Will Be Blood a couple days ago, and I loved it. In addition to intensely good acting from Daniel Day-Lewis and Paul Dano, the cinematography is amazing. Blah-blah-blah, a masterpiece.

They say good art is appreciated but great art inspires. So what did this great piece of filmmaking inspire me to do?

You guessed it, round up the best There Will Be Blood parody videos on Youtube.

Kommunity Voices with Micheal LeValier

Hello, my name is Micheal LeValier, and I am an active member of this community. I help the elderly cross the street, even if they don't want to. I do a workshop at the New Way Church on the third wednesday of every other month entitled "Broom Maintenance and You". If asked directly, and with confidence, I will do some custom work on your wheelchair, although I, in no certain terms, can promise you that it will be completely street-legal. I drive a car which gets 10,000 miles per gallon, which is to say, I ride a bike. I feel an awesome sense of pride for doing something for the environment, even if I show up for work with thick, creamy sweat stains in my Dockers and button-down Oxfords. I encourage inner city youth to read more, in that I give the charming young negro shoeshine in the city square old Romance Novels that my wife no longer reads. In fact, just the other day I gave him two limited-edition, velvet-bound copies of Texas Sized Heart and The Princess Foibles. His name is Darnell 'Ty-Ty' Daniels and he is a charming young lad. He said the following:

"Man! Fuck you, ya uppity ass cracker fuck. Why yo gotta be condescendin' to a nigga? For realz, You think I don't read? Get this homo-shit out my sight. I got a motherfucking copy of motherfucking War and Peace nigga, just waiting for me and home on my nightstand. I'm gonna curl up with that motherfucker allllllllll night long. Then I'm gonna do some Finnegan's Wake shit. Fucking cracker. Next time I want to check something out from the motherfucking airport library bulllshit, I'll call my girl. Her name's Yolanda, she's a stewardess. She sees y'all honky cracker motherfuckers all the time with the love stories and the fucking John Grisham shit. Shiiiiiiiiiiit. I fuck Yolanda real good. She got a big fat ass and real tight pussy. Now get the fuck on out'a here, fucking punk-ass pitch. I got to get on out'a here. Me and my homeboys gonna get crazy on some Pynchon and some motherfuckin' Chabon. Chabon in the house motherfucker! Chabon in the houssssssssssse!."

Truly astonishing for a nine year old.

My wife no longer reads romance novels because after her third miscarriage, she said love no longer means anything to her. Also something about a "blind and dumb god who swings his fists and destroys the helpless devoted below him." She's like a Dr. Suess minus the rhyming and plus a couple worthless ovaries. Thank goodness she was able to squeeze out a couple mediocre children before her uterus became a less hospitable place than Baghdad. Wait, what was I talking about?

Ah yes, community. Communities are an important thing. Whether you're extending a hand of friendship to the shunned 50-something heavy-set lesbian couple who live three houses over or simply getting liquored up with the other neighborhood dads and gang-beat the convicted sex offender who moved in last month.

I don't care if he is 27 and it's been eleven years since he was 16 and had sex with his 15 year old girlfriend...a sex offender is a sex offender, pure and simple. Although when we kicked in his door and his wife started screaming and she tried to explain that she was the 15 year old in the case and it was her hateful mother who alerted the police and that they ended up getting married as soon as they turned 18 anyways...it gave me pause. Then I took a mighty pull from a bottle of gin and hit him in the face with my 3 wood. After he was out cold, I pissed in his fish tank and vomited in his china cabinet.

The most important thing is my daughters' safety.

After all, children are our future.

This has been Micheal LeValier with Kommunity Voices. God bless America, because if this was a Central African nation, community means the roving, drug addicted death squads that have descended upon your farm to kill your family and steal your cows. But at least they don't borrow a rake and not give it back.

Ciao!

Textin' Kwame!

1 Week Ago

Me: Fuck you Kwame. Today I was driving on I-75 and as soon as I had crossed over into Detroit I saw a burning mattress on the side of the road. A burning mattress! For some reason I saw it as the perfect metaphor for life in Detroit. I hope you end up in prison.

Kwame: lolz.


4 Days Ago

Me: You're a fucking arrogant prick. Only a guilty man hires a $700/hr lawyer from Chicago with beady, soulless eyes. Do you think it means something when the Michigan's Attorney General and the Detroit City Council call for your resignation? Do you? Guess not, you corrupt douchebag.

Kwame: lol brb.


2 Days Ago

Me: Are we bffs?

Kwame: bffs 4 eva. lolz ;)


Yesterday

Me: I hope they have an orange jumpsuit big enough for your fat ass. Tubby criminal bitch. Resign. Resign. Resign.

Kwame: wtf? lol jk.


Today:

Me: Stdnt Cntr @ 5?

Kwame: lolz

Novel Excerpt

first chapter needs to be re-written, third chapter's unfinished

chapter 2 “friends”
by matt gulley

Anthony is the fastest boy alive; he bounds past moving traffic and jumps clear over the tallest fences. He’s got this terribly strong body, but no real bulk. I swear to Holy Jesus himself he’s a goddamn force of nature. On a simple walk down a cool sudden street, passing the pipe from hand to hand, he grabs a low hanging branch and starts swinging forward and backward. He’s instantly got so much momentum he’s going horizontal on the apex of each swing.

“Hey come down from there, you’re going to hurt yourself.” I say to him, and I know now I should know better… by now.
He’s now got his legs wrapped around the trunk, and he’s holding on to…nothing. He puts a flattened hand to his brow like a mock ‘I’m looking for my next move’. He doesn’t. He blindly grabs a branch and lets his feet slip out beneath him, but before I can say I told you so he’s got a firm grip on the branch above him. He pulls himself up and does a balancing act on a sturdy branch no thicker than a broomstick. He smiles down at me as he steps, steps, wobbles, steps, wobbles, wobbles, steps, all while saying some nonsense in a sing-song to himself. Now he’s face to face with the trunk again, and this tree offers him no more sturdy branches the way up. So he digs his palms into the sides of the tree and straddles the thing. Using his sheer muscular dominance over the physical standing world around him, he wills his way up the tree. He’s a good twenty five feet up now, holding on with the bull grip of his legs, and he leans all…the…way…back…so the world appears very upsidedown from his perspective. So he sees me, waiting patiently, twenty-five feet above him and he waves. I wave back and just then his legs waver, loosening ever so slightly and he slips. He falls. He falls through a few lighter branches on his way down, snapping them like winter, and he lands on his back atop the grass a few feet away from me. Before my mind can react and think of hospitals and tragedy and lawsuits against trees, he laughs.
“Have a nice trip, see you next fall!” He bellows out, which is funny, because it’s Spring.

See, he’s invincible. See!, all you fate-ists, gods on Olympus, wind, fire, earth, water, Eastern mystics, and general wavering heads of all-that-you-can’t-see-we-can-see, See! THIS ANTHONY is the real force of the universe. He’s that real spirit of this realm, on this plane of being, and I’m glad to have him as my friend. We continue on this walk of ours, admiring this street, whom, for the sake of being just a quarter mile from a big ol’ dusty main road where thousands if not millions of cars drove every day to work and to the dentist and to depressing restaurants by the highway and back from work and back from the dentist and so on and so forth…fucking squares…and despite all this… proximity… the road appeared quite secluded. All you could see when you looked around you was this cool, pale blue and green atmosphere of houses and winding, never straight, roads. The blue sky met the tall trees, which lined the street halfway up the horizon, and then your attention came down to the houses. Nice houses, all basically the same with that good old American Standard Deviation. Two stories, white panel or brick façade, lots of large plate windows substituting for back walls, giving the kiddies a very aesthetic view of the backyard. Hell, with a view like that, a whole window for a wall-wall for a window, it’s a surprise if the kid doesn’t grow up to be artsy millionaire with physically attractive spouse. The casual wealth of the neighborhood just gave off this brooding vibe, and I was happy to take it all in, to breathe and wonder what went down in bored basements and in the privacy of well-lit gardens when no one was there. Me and Anthony continued to walk, for every steep winding road up and down these gracefully domesticated hills, these colonized wind-mill neighborhoods, opened up another set of beautifully staged modern habitats for our eyes and ears, glistening with a dew, a primordially pleasing wetness on this Saturday morning.

We talked for a while about dreams, although I kept my aching ones to myself. Seems Anthony had had a dream about flying in space, and then falling into the sun, only to explode the sun from the inside. See, he’s invincible. He’s taking on the goddamned sun, The Holy Helios, and I have trouble talking to a girl who for all intensive purposes doesn’t exist. She’s not here, I don’t know where she is, and I don’t know how to contact her.

As the moment expands into an infinite universe, two kids just walking, contracting muscles with unblinking…just knowing how…walking through this top-1%-of-all-existence neighborhood, a car shoots down from the hilly horizon. Streamlined, a black blur that seemed to be driving in a controlled schizocitement. I pocketed what was necessary and looked on in anticipation. It was the first car we’d seen all morning. Onward and above me the anxiety crested as the car seemed to be driving nowhere except for right at us. I looked at Anthony, looking forward at the car, smiling and knowing. He had some recognition that put me at ease, but what understanding I did not have made me anxious.
The car rolled to a stop in our opposite direction and the window rolled down, pouring out the image of a gleaning face. It was a mutual friend of ours, Robert Juno.

“Hop in boys. Going to get some coffee.”It was all I needed and more. Caffeine was his trip, that was for sure. We bumbled in the backseat, chauffeur-style, but Juno didn’t seem to mind.

“June, I didn’t recognize your car. Gave me some shivers.” I remarked. I reached into my pocket. “You don’t mind…do you?”

“Naw Nuffin” He said back, so quiet that I did not hear it, I sensed it.

“Thanks June.” By the end of the car trip, we were calling him June, July, August, October, any month we could possibly think of. The coffee shop was much roomier than you could guess from the parking-lot view. We walked over the regulated asphalt and Anthony pushed open the door with a great wallop, ringing that clichéd bell just a little too loud for the various book-readers and stylishly-coated layabouts. They looked in our direction, forming little opinion bubbles that rose up from their seats and clashed with us, judgments versus intentions as we came to the counter. Our caucasionally dreadlocked coffee shop clerk in corporate smock gave us great attention as we spoke and made orders and pointed variously at the overwhelming, overhanging menu. Within a few quick minutes our drinks were up and we seated ourselves in some comfy plush seats, mauve-burgundy with handsome oak arm rests that were a little too high and long above the seats for a normal endomorph to actually use. We sipped and let the druggish liquid nullify our inner tiredness, and drip pure caffeine into our sleeping hearts. With caramel and cream and chocolate and sugar, but most importantly that Caffeine snake viral, we had new life breathed into us. We sat, and finally around noon we had stepped into ourselves.

Robert Gordon Juno sat there, comfortably adrift, flashing smile to charm over all the world, and told us a story.

“So I’m visiting my friend, Shyawn, at his school, North Academy, just because I’m bored and I want to skip school that day. So his school is, like, this really elite, expensive art museum, but they’re also hardcore academic. It’s ranked one of the best high schools in the entire world. His lab partner for Honors Chemistry is this really hot girl who’s going be queen of Polynesia one day. She’s an actual royal princess or something but all the schools in Polynesia do is teach you how to grow rice or milk a yak or some shit, so her family sent her here instead. Her name is Talia. I got to meet her too; and I would hook up with her in a second, less than a second. And I’m not being shallow, it’s not just because she’s hot, she’s rich too. So I was just going to his classes with him and following him around all day. The school is not that big but it’s beautiful, and I could not imagine actually looking forward to going to school, but maybe if I went there I would feel differently. They had Warhol prints in the bathrooms, for fuck’s sake! It’s so cool. Anyways, so we’re going from one class to another, and I got to admit, it’s a mostly white school, except for all the foreign kids right? Some Indian billionaire’s kid goes there, the 3rd richest man in Brazil’s daughter goes there, but it’s mostly just the richer families from around here. Except, of course, for the black kids they recruit to play sports for them. The best high school in the world has to have a decent basketball team right? And a good lacrosse team and so on… They can’t just rest on their chess team’s laurels or whatever. Anyways it’s not like these black kids are dirt poor, like they’re fucking riding through the inner-city in their limo and saying, ‘you, you over there playing on the chain net hoop, that was a superb lay-up, please get in the limo’. These kids are like as wealthy as us, but we’re certainly not going to go to North Academy so these black kids are recruited and given scholarships. Anyways, let’s just say they don’t fit in too well. So me and my friend Shyawn are walking to his next class and a fight breaks out between two of these basketball players, and no one breaks up the fight because it’s North-fucking-Academy and no one ever fights there. These two black kids were fighting over some girl or something, and everyone was staring at them like it was a talking toaster or something otherworldly. So naturally we join up in this growing circle of kids all around them, and these two are fucking trying to kill each other, like really going at it. There was pain in their eyes, man. Like what they really wanted to do was fight all of us around them, but instead they just kept wailing on each other. So then a teacher or administrator runs in like hell and breaks up the fight, but instead of like a normal fight break up like ‘this is done, nothing to see here’, they have this crazy idea for conflict resolution. They take these two black kids down to the gym, not like a normal ‘basketball and bleachers’ gym, but North Academy has their own ‘boxing gym’ gym. It was crazy, and they put these two kids in full sparring gear, gloves, head gear, wrist tape and all that and they have a boxing match between them. Everyone was invited to watch too. So me and Shyawn are there, when he was supposed to be in class, because half the school was in this gym watching this fight go down. It was an event! This administrator guy is like some Yoda-figure teen psychologist or something and they have this eight-round fight. Between each round, he makes these two black kids talk briefly to each other about why they’re fighting in the first place. So it’s like ‘She’s my girl, dawg’, ‘I fucking love her man’, and the other kids snarls back ‘Yo! She gave me head yesterday so what about your love now?’ And they have this vicious first round. If not for the gloves and headgear they might have taken each other’s head off. Then the second round they talk again and it’s the same shit. ‘Yo dawg’ this and ‘C’mon playa’ that. It’s really ridiculous and I’m sitting here really questioning the purpose of all this. As the fight wears on, they start getting really tired, like they’re still throwing these hateful punches but their arms are so tired that they miss or connect but like they’re tapping each other. The funniest thing, the way they start talking to each other starts to change too, the fifth round they start saying to each other ‘You know this is her fault, she’s playing both of us’ and ‘We used to be friends, man’. You really think they’re coming to a breakthrough and stuff, or maybe they were just getting tired of hitting each other and realized the pointlessness of continuing to fight. This administrator looks at them and then to the audience with this really self-satisfied look, like ‘I’m the smartest man alive, I just civilized these two savage niggers’. So after the eighth round the gloves come off, and the administrator gets the two to shake hands and the audience is clapping and all that and everyone feels like they’re in a fucking Disney Movie, the mood in there is just that perfect. I guess one of the black kids kind of saw through the bullshit or changed his mind real quick about the whole matter or whatever, and when everything seems settled and the other black kid isn’t looking, he winds up and POW, slugs him with a bare fist, right in the boxing ring, right in front of everyone. The guy was sucker-punched and he just went limp, just hit the ground like THUD. It was completely silent. The administrator’s smile just got wiped clean off his face, and he grabbed the kid and was all like ‘what have you done?’ Turns out, he killed the kid. Slugged him right in the temple and killed him, dead. Just like that. He got arrested, the administrator was fired and the family of the dead black kid is suing the whole Academy. The rest of the day everyone just walked around in this dream state zombie march. They were all like ‘What the fuck just happened?’”

Juno flashed a big grin as he finished up and looked at us. Anthony and me looked at each other, unsure of how to react.

“He died?” Anthony asked with a child-like exasperation.

“Yea man, you should have seen the look on the administrator’s face when they couldn’t revive him.” Juno laughed and made a face of mock terror.

“You fucking liar.” I said. My mind just rejected the whole thing. “A kid was killed at North Academy and there’s nothing on the news about it? That’s like someone getting killed at the White House and no one saying anything.”

“Maaan,” replied Juno is an extremely drawn out, mock-southern accent “this shit happened yesterday, of course you haven’t heard anything about it.”

“Well…” Anthony looked unsatisfied. “Did they have names?” Juno took the defensive, believing that his entire yarn was being questioned and riddled over for credibility. It was a fantastic story, but so… sensational…symbolic.

“Yea of course they had names but I was only there for one day so how was I supposed to know. I swear it’s the truth. Just wait.”I had a nagging feeling that Anthony was looking for a different answer.

Sure enough the story eventually came out, making national headlines. For the next few weeks, there were a lot of helicopters and news vans in our area, accompanied by vain middle-aged men holding microphones and asking stupid questions…more than there usually were anyways. Juno was telling us the complete truth, and we were among the first of the whole world to know.

So by this time most of the patrons were enthralled by Juno’s story, and the various f-bombs and racial epitaphs had worn a strain on the coffee clerks. We rose up, adjusting our coats, tossed our cups in the parking lot and left this momentary lapse behind.

Hogsmear 2008: I Am Not Yet Thoroughly Convinced that Barack Obama is not a Muslim

Barack Obama is many things to many people. To some, he is a likeable guy. To others, he's a good dude. He's a uniter, but you know what? He needs experience from someone like me to help him further unite the American people. Here are a few suggestions.

1. Dress up like Santa Claus for the next stump speech, 'cause it'd be all like "Whoa, black Santa"

2. 98% of Americans have started their own T-shirt business at some point in their lives, use this fact in speeches to get people to ignore their differences.

3. Just start acting as if you were already president. Meet with foreign leaders, sign bills into law, and withdraw troops from Iraq. If George W. or Dick Cheney protest this, call them hippies and say "You guys are still here? Get a fuckin' life dudes."

4. Do that thing from the episode of Doug where QuailMan slows the Earth's rotation so there 8 days in a week, calling the extra day "Funday" and giving everyone a longer weekend. That would be sweet.

5. Heal the racial divide in this country by executing both The Blue Collar Comedy Tour and all the hacks from B.E.T Def Comedy Jam.

6. Appoint the Harlem Globe Trotters as your Secretaries of Novelty Basketball Theatrics. Send them to Iraq to dribble basketballs in between hapless insurgents' legs. Send the Washington Generals to Iran. (Witty and topical Double Entendre? I am sooo clever. Pretty handsome also)

7. Connect with rural voters by eating a big ol' sandwich during the next debate. Put some hot sauce on that hoss. O yee.

8. In high school your friends called you Barry, and you experimented with Cocaine, as you admitted in your autobiography. This begs the question, at your high school reunion, does everyone know you as "Barry, the coke-sniffing future president?"

9. Unite the American people once and for all by requiring skin grafts to attach all Americans together by the year 2010 in a giant chain across this great land.

10. Tell Americans the ugly truth about Global Terrorism. Tell Americans about how child-suicide-bombers are now used because they can get closer to U.S. troops due to their perceived innocence. Show you are the candidate toughest on terror by bringing a child on stage and punching him right in his fat face.

Waiting for Frodo

As Andy Kaufman once proposed, but never actually did, having David Letterman prompt him with a the question of "So Andy, what did you get for Christmas" to which Andy would reply "Well David, I got Brain Cancer."

Which would have been true. And strangely appropriate. Who else could joke so dryly about terminal Brain Cancer other than somebody who was actually afflicted?

Which is totally besides the point, and now for a short story.

***

Daniel was an Ewok, from the fictional Star Wars universe. This didn't bother him much, save for the fact that being short furry and not actually real made it hard for him to talk to girls. At this confusing point in his life, his obstensible priorities such as band practice and low-tech booby traps for hapless Stormtroopers took a backseat to trying to bed a tall assertive redhead; One with short hair. Daniel had no interest in female Ewoks, mostly because there were no discerning differences in Ewok genders. No, he wanted a human girl. He wasn't sure how to go about it so he consulted the only authoritative source of information available: teenage sex comedies. After beefing up on his research, he put on his tightest jeans and his most adrogynous American Eagle t-shirt and headed to the mall.

Daniel milled around the foodcourt for a bit, trying to avoid the taunting of ornery and pitiful teenage boys who called him things like "Emo Ewok Faggot" or "Poorly Conceived Pop-Culture Reference" until he spotted a tall female of whom he was sure was not appreciated by the at-large male population for as sexy as she really was. Twas a shame. He sauntered over towards her, giving his best devil-may-care smirk and I'm-prepared-to-spend-some-very-primitive-time-with-you eyes. She must've stood about five foot eleven and had short red hair. She looked like a take-charge bitch. For a teddy bear fascimile who stood about three foot four, this was very appealing. He introduced himself.

"Hello, my name is Daniel. What's yours?"

"Arabic Gum. Are you an Ewok?"

"Why yes Ma'am I am. An Ewok who would like to get to know you better. Where do you go to school?"

"I don't go to school. I work."

"Ah, A professional. Very Nice"

Now Daniel was usually a very shy person, and at this point in the conversation his fake confidence was wearing thin. He was basing his situational persona on that of the actor John Cusack, who seemed to appeal to the intellectual female set. He even tried to start a postcard-correspondance with the now middle-aged actor, but the Postal Service on Endor was terribly unreliable and Daniel's letters were barely legible due to his unwieldy and furry sausage fingers. Made it hard to treat a pen with any sort of eloquence. Real hard. There was a pause. The girl, Arabic Gum, broke the silence.

"I'm going to this dance party tonight and I need a date. Would you like to accompany me?"

"Why yes. I've been known to slice a carpet in my day."

"Excuse me?"

"Uh...I meant cut a rug, yea...cut a rug...I was trying to be cute by using synonyms to re-word a cliched idiom. Just trying to be cute."

"Why try? You're already plenty cute." This made Daniel smile. The two exchanged numbers.

The rest of the evening went well. The two danced together for hours, although the height difference made it particularly hard to grind & freak on each other. The more alchohol that flowed through their veins, real and unreal alike, the more amorous they became towards one another.

"Do you want to come back to my place?" asked Arabic Gum.

"Hells yea!" shouted Daniel unabashedly.

The two spent a crazy passionate night together. Her womanly curves and his creaturely cooing melted together for hours and hours.

Unfortunately, Daniel wasn't real. This had always bummed Daniel out. Perhaps he was a figment of Arabic Gum's imagination. Perhaps he was simply one of her fever dreams. Maybe he was a figment of his own imagination, as we all our, some of the time. Maybe, as he existed during the making of Return of the Jedi in 1983, he was just a midget in a bear suit. Most likely, however, he was just an idea in the head of a bored writer at 2:30 in the morning, ruminating on a redhead he spent the night with but now no longer can relate to, despite his best intentions.

Either way, Arabic Gum awoke the next morning to a midget in a bear suit. She was majorly bummed out. She decided that day to quit drinking, in 15 years.

The End

With special thanks to George Lucas and painkillers.

IF YOU'RE READING THIS, YOU MAY HAVE ALREADY WON (the race to the grave)

Blah, blah, blarg. As I write I've got some sort of undiagnosed disease, headaches, body soreness, general malaise, dread of french class, and a sore throat. It's not a good one. I've stopped drinking (temporarily) and eating apples but nothing seems to be doing the trick. I have to face facts and go delightfully overboard with paranoia and assume this is a terminal illness from which I will not recover. In the event of my untimely demise, I would like to dictate a series of bizarre and inconvenient final requests.

-During my funeral, each person gets up and recites Tupac's "Life Goes On" (Bonus points if anyone breaks out in laughter)

-Send my severed, rigor-mortis hand in the mail to Kwame Kilpatrick so I can give that fat criminal fuck the middle finger "from beyond the grave" (woooooooooooo! scary)

-Take my body to a taping of Mind of Mencia, then just say 'oh look, he was so bored he died. thats weird'

-whomever delivers me eulogy, make sure to go on an unexplained 35 minute rant about the ills of capitalism, giving the impression that i was some sort of activist during my short life (that always scores points with smart girls, truth be told, i've always hated dumb girls) then end the rant by saying "this eulogy was brought to you by Tide Bleach, for getting out those tough stains after you've been coughing blood for the third straight hour"

-inject me with obscene amounts of steroids just after death so at the funeral, every girl i've ever had unrequited love for can see me in that coffin and say, "wow, he must've been working out. where was I?"

-file class action lawsuit on my behalf against graham crackers, just for the hell of it.

-enlist my dead body in the US military as part of their new, cutting-edge, "Pre-Death" program. Why spend all that time in Iraq possibly dying when you can now be deployed fully-dead?

-BTW, expect to be haunted. especially you, you know who you are.

-I want the inscription on my tombstone to read - "Liked Sprite Re-mix, but not that much, it was okay I guess. Next time I'll just have a Mountain Dew Live Wire or something."

In any case, I probably won't even actually die, ever. So no big deal. Later! Peace homies!

People, Things Wanted:

“People, Things Wanted”

I saw the opportunity to walk up to an acquaintance of mine who was standing attentively on the crowded side of the bar. The music from the other room was stratified by the hundred or so pretentious conversations that I had just had the displeasure to walk through and overhear. His name was Allen Varnet, he was a short, foreign intellectual who I had shared a few words with a few times before, all within the past two months. We had also gone to the same high school, but never spoke in the three years we spent in the same building. Tonight, at this dance club, I found myself alone…after having my advances repeatedly rejected by a girl who must’ve stood six foot four. I dreamed of climbing her, and I was no pygmy myself. Allen was being handed a white plastic cup filled to the brim with a dark, cheap merlot and he seemed intent to head elsewhere when I spoke up to get his attention.

“Allen! What’s up?” He turned in my direction and looked happy to see me. Before he could say anything back I turned to the scruff-monster behind the bar and asked for a beer. By the time I turned back Allen had turned and started talking to a cute girl with unorthodox hair. Beer in hand, I tapped him on the shoulder. “Allen! How’s it going?”

“Good dude, great. How’ve you been?”

“Sober-er”

“Yea?” He laughed, and it seemed forced.

“Yea. So you were where? Furlogh State? Last week?”

“Uh yea. Visiting a friend. You know Pavel?”

“No. I mean, maybe.”

“Ah. Well it was fun.”

“Hey…doesn’t Micheal Clubbe go there?”

“Oh, you have to hear this story. I can’t believe I waited this, what, 30 seconds to tell you?”

“What?”

“Okay, wait, let’s go outside.” We walked outside, it was a bit cold but not too bad. There were two girls making out surrounded by a bunch of creepy white trash guys who all seemed to be smoking cigarettes with an unnatural intensity. As if the harder they sucked the smoke out, the harder the girls would feel each other up. I must admit, I was temporarily distracted, but Allen started this story in earnest. “As it turns out, Micheal Clubbe had gotten himself a girlfriend way out of his league. I would have never known otherwise, I mean, it’s not like I keep tabs on who some annoying asshole kid who went to my high school is fucking, but he happened to live in the same co-op as Pavel. That fact alone doesn’t even make sense. I mean, everyone in this co-op is a certifiable marijuana addict…”

“Damn reefer heads” I say sarcastically.

“Yea, anyways, from what I heard, Micheal gets all anti-social whenever he smokes. So the co-op has these parties, where everyone has to bring at least an eighter, I mean, you get the general idea…anyways, they don’t even tell Micheal anymore. He finds out and gets all sulky, so it’s like he’s a drag whether he’s high or not, but they all just laugh at him anyways.”

“Ha, that’s awesome. So why does he live there?”

“Because, the kid wants to be cool. He tries really hard. Everyone knows that frats are inherently uncool, I mean, unless you’re into the whole anti-intellectualism thing. Besides, I don’t even think the frats would take him in the first place. But the co-ops are cool so they take him as long as his rent is on time. Which isn’t always the case but that’s not the point. Anyways, so me and Pavel are hanging out…in Pavel’s room, just listening to music or whatever. Hey have you ever heard of Negative Amendment?”

“Uh, no.”

“Oh well, like, the band name is semi-‘we’re trying to hard’, but it’s really good. Really good. It’s a bit hard to get over the name of the band but whatever, the musicianship is there. I mean, just because you can play guitar doesn’t mean you have a talent for christening things, you know, the two are not independent of one another, either positively or negatively.”

“Uh, what are you talking about?”

“Just check them out. Ha! Ok, so I’m in Pavel’s room with Pavel and the door is open. Guess who comes in the door? Micheal and this totally cute girl. She wasn’t like hot or anything. She was…attractive. Very attractive. ‘Cause these are important distinctions to make.”

“Are they?”

“They are. Hot is like, you know, almost repulsive in a way. Wait! I see the look on your face, let me explain. It’s not like repulsive, like gross, you know, it’s…just…well if a girl is hot it just means sexually hot, like visually she reminds you of fucking. She’s like an avatar of mental pornography. But it’s too much you know? It’s too much. It’s like, how can you even face that, everyday? It would gross you out, by being too ridiculously boner-inducing like every second. And anyways, a hot girl’s face is like the most overlooked part of her, and I’m not talking about a butterface or anything, I mean she still has to have a hot face, right? Or else she wouldn’t be hot. But the whole point is she can be hot without being attractive, you know? The two aren’t interchangeable descriptions for the same girl. She’s either hot or attractive. If a girl is both, well fuck, that’s rare, it’s not even realistic. Have you ever noticed how most runway models are ugly?”

“Uh, no.”

“Dude, okay, they’re ugly. They’re really tall, too thin, and they have that face, you know, that emotionless face with the sharp features. It’s supposed to be this ideal of beauty that some fag designers all decided on in France like a hundred years ago. Why would we trust a bunch of French faggots to decide what an attractive woman looks like? They got it wrong. That’s why runway models are ugly and have faces that photograph well, because they look good in only two dimensions.”

“What about Heidi Klum?”

“Dude, fuck Heidi Klum. She’s a super model, she’s like the rarest of the rare combination of super hot and super attractive. That’s why she’s a super model. She’s the end of the bell curve, dude, the very end. That’s why the majority, the vast majority of women are either hot or attractive, or you know, not.”

“What about cute? You said Clubbe’s girl was cute.”

“Right! Cute! So glad you said that, because cute is another thing. Clubbe’s girl was sort of cute, but more attractive than cute. Cute is bad.”

“Cute is bad?”

“Cute is terrible. Cute is a terrible investment. If you started dating a girl who’s cute, and you make the mistake of falling in love, or short of that, getting her pregnant and marrying her, in twenty years you’re going to have a disaster on your hands. Cute women age worse than women who were ugly to begin with, for two reasons. First, you notice it more, when cute deteriorates. If she was ugly once, you wouldn’t really notice a decline. Secondly, the whole reason a girl is cute, the big eyes, the small nose, the small but pointed chin, the fucking pinch-able cheeks for Christ’s sake! Those features look absolutely horrible on a middle aged women. That’s why you don’t see cute older women. Any MILF is either going to be hot or attractive, but not cute, because hot and attractive last longer than cute. Cute is the worst investment a man can make, followed by hot. Hotness fades, dude. Gravity is cruel. The best investment is attractive. An attractive twenty year old is going to be an attractive forty year old, guaranteed. It’s practically written on the tag!”

“Well I guess that makes sense. So Clubbe and his girl…”

“Yea, so Clubbe and his girl come into Pavel’s room, where me and Pavel were, just listening to music. Apparently they wanted to be all friendly. Clubbe’s girlfriend was the only one to hold up that end of the bargain however. I didn’t even figure they were together at first, I mean, just knowing the guy, I thought maybe this was just an awkward date, but he finally introduced her, awkwardly of course, about three minutes into the conversation of which he added almost absolutely nothing, as his girlfriend. Nicole, I think it was. She was cool though, like legitimately cool. Anyways, she was telling me and Pavel about her house and her housemates, and made them sound like a rowdy bunch of really cool sluts, and in the middle of her story, right in the middle of a sentence, not even a breath pause but the middle of a goddamned preposition he blurts out that he’s selling ringtones. For some ringtone company. My first reaction was ‘shut up’, and my second reaction was ‘if I can buy ringtones off television at three in the morning, why would I need to buy them from you at what I assume will be a higher price when you factor in the commission he must be earning.’ But he pitched it to us anyways, mostly they were weird voices and shit like that. Dumb stuff. She’s all smiley though and looking at him as if he was an award winning real-estate agent. After that, she had to go to the bathroom and Mike just stayed in Pavel’s room to wait for her, as if that was just plenty pleasant for everybody. I don’t know why people assume their neighbor has to be their friend, I mean, everyone has to live somewhere, right? Do they have to suffer for the misfortune of chance? Me and Pavel are doing our best to ignore him, but Clubbe just starts saying all this shit, like ‘It sure is nice to have steady pussy, you know?’. Like he was trying to impress us or something. Then he lays this bomb on us, he says with this shit-eating grin on his face, ‘Isn’t nice to know at the beginning of the day, whether or not you’re going to get your dick sucked at the end of it?’ Can you believe that shit?”

“That’s pretty crass.”

“Oh, definitely. Definitely. But it’s not just that. Now, you don’t know Pavel right? Tall guy, white man’s afro?”

“I think I’ve seen him at some shows or something.”

“Ok, well, then you didn’t know, but this girl Nicole, well Pavel would never admit so, but you can totally tell, about six months earlier, he used to love this girl. And I know Pavel right, but he’s a gigantic pussy and he never did shit about it, never made a move or anything. The guy walks through life with a broken finger on the trigger, you dig? Anyways, after Mikey says that ridiculous shit about Nicole sucking his dick, well Pavel just told him to leave. Clubbe, I don’t know what that kid thinks, honestly, he actually looked hurt or something. You know? When it’s Pavel who’s the depressed one, right? He thinks that he can just talk pussy with a guy who’s love sick over the same girl? Then acts all surprised when Pavel got upset? Well fuck him, then, the dumb motherfucker. Fuck him.”

Two things one should know about Allen Varnet, he’s a blackout drinker, and he told me this same story two nights ago, and then two nights before that. Some of the details are different, and that’s a forgivable thing, but the overall story is the same. I always joke with him that he should turn the story into one long ring tone, and try to sell it to Clubbe. He always laughs because he thinks I’m making fun of Micheal.

I bum a cigarette from him and smoke it in silence, looking out towards the city’s distant perimeter. I rub the butt out with my foot, nod towards a now-swaying Allen, and march back inside to go and try and feel up that tall girl.

Hogsmear 2008: Ralph Nader and a Handful of Ecstasy

This last weekend, Consumer Advocate Ralph Nader announced his candidacy for the presidency of These United States. Reading up on the matter, I was astonished to discover that in 2000, big Ralphie N recieved over 3 million votes. I seemed to have forgot how once upon a time, George W. Bush did not always have total ownership of the space at the end of the phrase "a vote for _____ is a vote for ______". Ralph Nader was an intellectual, anti-corporate candidate who earnestly did his duty as the token third-party candidate, aka 'The Only One Who Actually Talks About What's Super Fucked-Up About This Country Of Ours'.

After Ralph Nader got 95,000 votes in Florida, where Al Gore lost to George W. Bush by 500 votes, people realized the very real impact a left-leaning third party candidate can have on the Democratic Nominee. The complication to this obvious spoiling is that Ralph Nader had every right to run for president. Ralph Nader didn't make anyone vote for George W. Bush, and likewise if Al Gore couldn't win on his own, fuck 'em. To those who voted for W., it's hard to have a beer with the president when you're taking on mortar shells in Basra, flying limbs tend to distract from the smooth, aromatic hops.

In 2004, Ralph Nader recieved less than 500,000 votes, yet George W. Bush still won, getting more votes than any other presidential candidate in history. Would-be Ralph Nader supporters had learned a simple lesson in cause-and-effect-and-futility.

This upcoming election is shaping up to have the highest vote turnout ever, and by far. The question is, what effect will Ralph Nader have in 2008?

Thankfully I was able to score an exclusive interview with the man himself, and allowed him to explain his motivations, hopes, and dreams for his campaign and the future of this country. Also we did some ecstasy.


RALPH NADER: POPULIST, CONSUMER ADVOCATE, WOULD-BE PRESIDENT, AND OUT-OF-CONTROL, BAT-SHIT RAVER.

I met him in his office, in Washington D.C. His desk is cluttered with stacks of papers and little knick knacks he's recieved in foreign countries: an ornate beer stein from Germany, a decorative cloth tunic from Yemen, and a gigantic boar's skull from Namibia. He's on the phone when I enter the room, and he motions for me to sit. I sit on a chair fashioned like a big red hand, which I recognize as a prop from one of my favorite television shows, Arrested Development. He finished up on the phone but before I can make eye contact to begin the interview, he starts rooting around his desk drawers. He pulls out a civil war pistol and points it directly at me. The following is a transcript of our conversation.

NADER: Did you know that the majority of deaths in the Civil War occured from disease and illness? A bullet rarely killed you instantly, no, you would die from a painful infection or some...some...uh...

MATT: Gangrene?

NADER: Don't get smart boy. What's wrong with your face?

MATT: My face? I don't...

NADER: Where's your beard? I read in GQ this month that beards are back in style. Where's yours?

MATT: I can't really grow one, yet.

NADER: You know what the difference is between me and you?

MATT: You can grow a beard?

NADER: People say I'm a spoiler, a Republican pawn. Some might even misspeak and say 'Republican Prawn', do you know what that would make me?

MATT: A Shrimp?

NADER: Exactly, a shrimp. A shrimp with no beard, who can't get elected. But I'm no pawn! And that's the difference between me and you.

MATT: I'm a pawn?

NADER: Sure, a media pawn. Just another info-tainment clown who thinks satire is truth and dick jokes are something you tell at a Sweet Sixteen Party. Do you know any good dick jokes?

MATT: Um, nothing comes to mind.

NADER: Oh well, my niece's Sweet Sixteen is coming up soon, I'd like to tell a few jokes to loosen up the crowd. Teenagers, they're so tense these days.

MATT: What were you like as a teenager?

NADER: Eh, my friends used to say I was born 50 years old. Then I aged backwards.

MATT: Uh...So you were conservative as a youth?

NADER: Hardly! By the time my friends were 15 I was 35 years old, because I was aging backwards, you see. I could buy them alcohol. Times were simpler back then.

MATT: Are you being allegorical, or... am I missing something here?

NADER: Can we talk about issues, please?

MATT: I'd love to. How do you feel about the future of the economy?

NADER: Here, I'm going to show you something...


At this point in the interview, things were not going well. The Green party candidate seemed aloof...and totally insane. At this point he opened a plastic safe that he kept inside his computer moniter, which was otherwise hollow and completely useless. Inside the safe was a bag of orange pills. He took out two or three and crushed them with his wild boar's skull. He took out a two-dollar bill, mumbled something about the 'goddamned illuminati', made two neat, parallel lines, and snorted them. He moaned rather loudly and rubbed his face, for about a minute or so. I could tell it was about a minute because as he rubbed his face with his left hand, his right hand remained pointed at a clock on the wall, prompting me to watch the second hand make one full rotation.

NADER: Shit man. Did you know that you can use hemp to make rope? It's totally fucked, the laws in this country. I'll tell you what the real crime is...

MATT: Maybe I can come back another time...

NADER: Nah, bro. Want to go to a house party?

MATT: Tonight?

NADER: No. Like right now.

MATT: It's 2:30 in the afternoon.

NADER: I know some sophmores at Martin Luther High School who party pretty fucking hard.

MATT: A high school party?

NADER: What? Afraid of partying in the daytime?


At this point I was persuaded by Mr. Nader's argument in favor of partying pretty fucking hard with some high school sophmores. This same persuasiveness is probably what got seat-belts installed in all passenger cars in the late 60's in Nader's massive victory for consumer safety over car corporations' attention to the bottom line. Bravo, Mr. Nader, The Nation thanks you. Having said that, as Ralph Nader drove me out of the city, I was preturbed by his heavy drinking from a monogrammed flask (In actuality it read "Fuckin' Nader's Flask") and his refusal to wear a seatbelt. Furthermore, he called me a 'fag' and a 'wine-drinking fag' when I insisted on wearing mine. We arrived in a sunny, gorgeous suburb outside the city and Nader drove up and down this one street for 20 minutes looking for the correct address. When we finally found the house, Nader offered me some of his flask, and I obliged.

MATT: Is that 151?

NADER: Fuck yea, I got a taste for the stuff. I hope they got rad music playing inside. I just gotta get my dance on!

MATT: How long are we going to stay?

NADER: All Fuckin' Night Brah! You want some X?

MATT: I try to stay away from the stuff, but why not?

NADER: Ah, now you're starting to sound like a true Nader supporter.

We walk up the sidewalk and Nader rang the doorbell. A girl who couldn't have been over 15 years old answered the door. Nader introduced me to her. Her name was Ashely.

ASHELY: Hey everybody! Ralph is here!

From inside, I heard a loud roar and a chorus of voices saying "Alright! Fuckin' Nader's here!" "Fuck yea! It's Fucking Ralph Nader!" "Get the beer bong bro! Nader's gonna tear some shit up!"

At this point, I start to feel the X. Even though it's still the middle of the day, Ashely makes up for it by drawing all the shades and pumping some killer rave music. I think it was Benni Bennasi, but I couldn't be sure. One thing I noticed is that Ralph Nader is an outrageously good dancer. He stands 6'3" and can't weigh more than 135 pounds, but he tears up the living room-turned rave hall. There is a bit of sunshine peaking in from under the wooden shades, but the house is dark enough to start passing out glow sticks. I begin drinking heavily. After some time I find myself making out with a fat Indian chick with braces, which is pretty typical. I look over and see Nader, dancing with three girls who look like Hanna Montana look-alikes, that is to say, they look like they're 14. I wished I partied this hard when I was 14, but I remember that I'm 20, and push the fat Indian girl away. Nader, on the other hand, is 74, and doesn't seem to give his current situation a second thought. As I chug another Bud Light in order to make myself feel more comfortable, all I can think is, "Damn, Ralph Nader loves adolescent girls almost as much as he loves his ecstasy." and the logical extension "He'd still be an improvement on George W. Bush, on the condition that his cabinet is filled with moderates" I don't remember much after that...although I vaguely recall puking in the upstairs toilet around 3AM and having Nader burst in on me, looking particularly spry and wide-awake, searching through Ashely's parent's medicine drawer and ranting on and on about how perscription drugs offer a "better and safer high" than their chemical comparables found in the streets.

The next morning I wake up in the bathtub, alone. I creep downstairs to find half-naked high-school girls and guys sprawled out on the floor, passed out and looking raw. The house is a mess, beer cans and liquor bottles lie everywhere. The wood floor is sticky. There's broken glass on the table from when Nader slammed his Jagerbomb down too hard. I find my cell phone in between two cushions in the sofa and call a cab. Nader is gone, nowhere to be found. The cab picks me up and drops me off back at my hotel. I go up to my room and turn on CNN. I feel completely sick to my stomach and can think of nothing but spending the entire day in bed. Before I go back to sleep, I hear a familiar voice. I look to the television screen and see Ralph Nader, looking fresh as a daisy, having a press conference on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

"Barack Obama doesn't want to talk about the issues. Hillary Clinton doesn't want to talk about the issues. John McCain doesn't want to talk about the issues. I, Ralph Nader, want to talk with the American people, not down to the American people, about the issues. My first issue...Why are perscription drugs, the really good...er, vital ones, so expensive and hard to find?"

Damn, this guy has my vote for sure.

Cyniclysm: Pitching a Tent of Pure Sadness (Death Statistics = Comedy Bronze)

Leading Causes of Death for Dolphins

1. Fishing Nets
2. Being mistakenly drafted by Miami Dolphins and getting beat to death in locker room for staring too long at Ricky Williams in the shower. (more common than you might think)
3. Listening to dolphin Heavy Metal music band "Twisted Blowholes" and commiting suicide.

Leading Causes of Death for Tumbleweeds

1. Lack of wind
2. Terrorism
3. Heroin overdose, brah

Leading Causes of Death for Historical Figures

1. It being present day
2. The desire to appear on currency
3. Junkie Tumbleweeds in need of a fix

Games Most Likely Used to Beat Someone to Death

1. Scrabble ("Eat the consonants. EAT THEM!")
2. Boggle
3. Apples to Apples ("You think 'The Beatles' are 'Overrated'?")
4. Any games involving a tire iron and an eightball of coke

Leading Cause of Death among U.S. Troops

1. Unenthusiastic bumper stickers

Leading Cause of Death among Refugees

1. Intense guilt after listening to Tom Petty's "You Don't Have To Live Like a Refugee"

Leading Cause of Death Among Modern People

1. Seeing as the internet is really an addictive interface in which human culture has finally completely codified any and all social interaction into a series of events and informational transactions of electronic experience...well...let's just say you might as well be dead already. 'Cause there's no longer any such thing as living.

jk lol rotfl wtf.

har har.

Seriously though, aren't men and women different? Have you noticed this? Men like sports and beer and are dumb. Women totally like shopping and crying and worrying about how fat they are! (pause for laughter)

Men want sex and women are all like 'not until i get a ring' (pause for laughter)

Men commit violent hate crimes while women like to eat chocolate! (pause for laughter)

Men hack the limbs off of small children with machetes and women go to the bathroom in groups! (pause for laughter)

Men ash out cigarette butts on people with terminal illnesses and women like shoes!
(pause for laughter, standing ovation)

Teh End

lolz

Why I don't take anything seriously anymore...

I like to not care about things. I believe there is a wonderful and pleasing symmetry in not caring about an 'important' topic as much as highly activist people do care about it. My personal politics aside, it's easy to get caught up in the abortion debate, for example. Are you killing the innocent, and is America perpetuating a genocide of unthinkable proportions? Or is the government trying to legislate morality, and has no domain over the body of a woman?

Easy, you are both wrong. Stop caring! Wow, it really is that simple. Pretending that your opinion matters is for old people. Thinking you can somehow 'win' that argument with 'evidence' is the thought of a staggeringly retarded person.

Call me disturbingly cynical.

Call me misanthropic.

Call me pessimistic.

Call me churlish. (Don't really call me churlish)

But why am I the way that I am?

Because of this...

http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/02/18/minister.confesses.ap/index.html?iref=mpstoryview

This article is about a 29 year old minister, Calvin Wayne Inman, who confessed to killing a man in 1994 when he was 16.

He stabbed convienence store clerk Iqbal Ahmed, a 64 year old man, to death during a robbery.

Then I suppose he saw his high school guidance counselor who advised him to switch career paths from murderous thief to church minister. In Texas this must be a pretty common and smooth transition.

This is all well and good, at first glance. A man succumbs to his conscience for a terrible crime that he had gotten away with in his youth. Fine, whatever. That's not what the article is about, however.

What the article is about is how his former congregation forgives the man, and then goes on to pretty much lionize him. They admire him for the simple fact that he confessed:

"During Sunday's service at the 800-member Elim Church, congregants praised the recently ordained Inman as a born-again role model taking responsibility for his sin.

"He's a hero, really," said Kelley Graham, 24. "I don't know how many people would do what he did. The Bible says you just need to confess to God. Calvin took an extra step."

When I read Mr. Graham, 24, calling the minister "a hero, really" I suddenly remembered why I hate everyone in the goddamned world.

That's an exaggeration, I don't hate everyone, but let's say most people.

A hero? I suspect Kelley Graham, 24, of being a white supremicist, because that would make great strides in explaining how you can stab an elderly Arab man to death and still be a hero, FOR SIMPLY ADMITTING WHAT YOU DID.

The more likely, and far sadder truth is that Kelley Graham, 24, belongs to no such white power groups, and is simply a profoundly misguided individual with a warped sense of reality, a fucked definition of the word 'hero', and the utterly horrifying prospect of what this man would consider an 'unforgiveable' act. I would rather Mr. Graham own a pointy white hood than a voting card. At least that would put him out of the mainstream.

Some members of the church are against his incarceration:

"The debt he's paying to our society is teaching our young people to do the right thing," said Cheryl Ellis, a member of the church's youth staff. "To lock him away someplace and say he owes it to society is robbing the next generation of a mentor."

This is why I can't, as a thinking human being, take too many things seriously.

To me, the unabashed adulation that the flock shows for the minister takes this story out of the realm of tradgedy and into the realm of dark comedy.

That's why I am the way I am. This makes me laugh.

"Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward." - Kurt Vonnegut

Advertiblogistitizing! (Facesounds.)

Podcasts, schmodcasts. Am I right?

WRONG.

everyone knows...

THREE WRONGS MAKE A LEFT HAND TURN

so sit back, drink your juicy juicy beverage, your iced-water or luke warm hennesey.

or "Club 99 P.o.m.-ade"

(2 oz. 99 Peaches, 4oz. Mango Grove Boones Farm, 4oz. Club Soda, 4oz. Orange Juice, serve with ice)

and enjoy

Mouthwords with Jim Mazner

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Bi-weekly podcast

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Sense for the senseless

Facesouds for your brain-ear

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and that's a wrap.

Everything Old is New Again.

A:Knock Knock!

B:Who's there?

A:The shameful spectre of slavery in American history.

B:The shameful spectre of slavery in American history who?

A:Orange you glad I didn't say banana?


Greeting traveler! The internet can take you around the world in a second. From Thailand to Brazil to the United Kingdom, and that's just the pornography! Scientists predict that the amount of information being uploaded every day to the world wide intranets will cause a global slowdown in internet service sometime around 2010. YouTube is mostly to blame, due to the large size (bit speaking, obviously lolz gtg brb wtf kyp*) of the hundreds of thousands of videos of cats and "fat kids gets scared" (search it, you won't be dissappointed)

So what does it all mean? Probably nothing. If anything there will eventually be two internets, one fast, expensive version where you can watch Tokyo Breakfast and Trailer Park Boys on endless repeat, and one slow, free version where the only videos available are montages of WWF set to Nickelback, and maybe one or two tasteful 'old people getting tasered'.

A: Knock Knock!

B: Who's there?

A: The sad truth.

B: The sad truth who?

A: The sad truth is we all die alone.


Has anyone seen Caddyshack lately? God damn that's a good movie. See it again if you haven't. Rodney Dangerfield strikes me as being America's Most Cool Person Ever. Too bad he died, I think he was under-utilized in movies during the 80's, but we'll always have Caddyshack, and the not-nearly-as-good-but-still-pretty-good Back To School. There's one scene in Caddyshack, during dinner in a banquet hall, in one continous (but not nearly long enough) take where Dangerfield starts mugging and joking and insulting people in a gloriously manic and hilarious streak...kind of like Don Rickles on acid. For those of you who don't know who Don Rickles is...I apologize, I am not actually 20, but rather 77 years old. (or am I?) (my hip!)

Also the movie employs the talents of Bill Murray, in a narrative device that isn't widely seen in today's movies. Bill Murray is arguably the film's biggest star, and tied for the movie's most memorable role. (with the aforementioned Mr. Dangerfield) The thing is, most if not all of Bill Murray's scenes are solo performances that don't advance the plot. In fact, besides 'Cannonballing' with Chevy Chase, Bill Murray doesn't affect the other characters at all until the conclusion where his bombs destroy the golf course and win the game for the good guys.

Has any other movie ever used a major star in an un-entwined sub-plot role to such wondrous effect?

Office Space's Milton comes close, but isn't a major star and didn't have as big a role... so not really that close.

Much to ponder.


A: Knock Knock!

B: Who's there?

A: Everyone you love

B: Everyone you love who?

A: Everyone you love will one day betray you.


I wonder who invented the knock knock joke. The format and delivery are so novel, and so innately understood. But why? Why do we Get It? Why do we understand the circumstances and the wordplay involved? Obstensibly, the joke starts with the Teller approaching the Listener's door. In Western Culture, we knock at doors to signal our prescence. Other, less developed nations have backwards customs such as defecating or slitting your wrists until you bleed through the other side. (or so I've been told by Conservative Radio Hosts) But in Western Culture we knock. Since the Listener must be sitting down, paralyzed, or otherwise too drunk to get up and look throught the peep hole, they must ask the identity of the solicitor.

This all seems very reasonable, logical and sane. Then it all goes terribly off track. The person knocking at your door gives you a name, or a word, then you respond like you couldn't hear them correctly, or you're suspicious of their claims. Turns out they were just talking funny, for example... (got this off of a children's joke site)

"Knock Knock

Who's there?

Irish

Irish who?

IRISH I HAD A MILLION DOLLERS" (sic)

So what have we learned? Children's Knock Knock jokes perpetuate Asian-American stereotypes. Also greed. Why someone would come to your door and tell you about their financial aspiration is beyond me, but whatever, it's a free country. If someone does this to you, you should yell back at them: "Well I don't have a million dollars, why don't you get a job?" See if they're still laughing after that bit of no-nonsense, tough love advice. Coincidentally enough, my parents tell me this every day, even if I haven't prompted them with a knock knock joke first.

A: Knock Knock

B: Who's there?

A: Interrupting starving child

B: Interrupting starv...

A: Please help, I am starving.

On The Future, a timeline for healthy living.

2008 AD: You are born today, not as you'd hope to two attractive wealthy liberal Jews living in Finland, but somewhere in the American Midwest. If you are a boy, you have a life expectancy of 76 years, almost 79 if you are a girl. Either way, the lesson learned is that vaginas are life-savers, surround yourself with them.

2010: A Nuclear War begins in the Middle East, 70% of the world's oil and 85% of it's open-air marketplaces are vaporized in an instant. Danish cartoonists rejoice, and buy a new pack of colored pencils.

2012: You are four years old. The nation asks itself "Are we ready for a cyborg president?" Evangelical robots in the Bible-Belt turn out in record numbers.

2018: You are ten years old. Disney makes it's first animated pornos, entitled "Lion Thang" and "A Little Spermaid"

2024: You are sixteen years old. The incredible boom in the global economy allows every 16 year old to get their birthday made into an episode of MTV's Sweet Sixteen. Thousands of extra MTV channels are created to air the new season. Yours will be ruined when you receive a Escalade Hovercraft of the wrong color.

2026: You are eighteen years old. You lose your virginity to a hologram. It will not call you the next day.

2029: You turn twenty-one years old. You use the last of the polar ice caps to keep your first bar-purchased gin & tonic cold.

2038: You are thirty years old. Florida, Most of New England, and California are underwater. You get a promotion at your new job, allowing you to buy some beach-front property in Idaho.

2041: You are thirty-three years old. You get married to the love of your life...not officially however. In light of growing support for legalized gay marriage, the conservative supreme court outlaws all marriage. Unable to relate, Everyone Loves Raymond Jr. is cancelled.

2048: You are forty years old. Humans finally go to war against the machines, but only a group of rogue washing machines that suddenly became sentient. The machine army is quickly defeated but dozens of humans get suds in their eyes, and it stings a little.

2058: You are fifty years old. Ironically, your hip and your bladder are the only real parts of you left.

2068: You are sixty years old. All the world's trees are gone, as are the wetlands, the animals and the ozone. Citing the wide open spaces, the world plays a game of ultimate frisbee. The game takes 27 years to complete, the first 22 spent picking teams. You aren't picked last, but a really tall dead guy and a boulder are picked before you.

2108: You are a hundred years old, but you tell the opposite sex you're in your early 90's.

2208: You reach the ripe old age of 200, and reflect back on your legacy. Unfortunately, you will only be remembered for being the first guy mugged on the moon.

2216: At the age of 208, you die when you accidentally teleport into an alternate dimension made of cotton candy. It sounds wonderful, but there is no oxygen there and you die a painful death that is bad for your teeth.

2217: You get to the afterlife, go to talk to God, but he's trying to work his new Blackberry so he really can't right now.

The 48th District Sleeps Tonight

Underaged drinking is such a funny 'cause' to rally one's self behind. You'll never hear a politician promise to reform these laws, mostly because it would imply a pro-underaged drinking stance, in addition to the fact that people between 18 and 21 seldom vote, and those under 18 can't. So there's no benefit for a politician to do so, in fact the real benefit from the politician's point of view comes from strengthening those laws and imposing tougher penalties. This notion appeals to parents, the meat and potatoes voters, in a very straightforward way. What could underaged drinking possibly lead to? Higher rates of drunk driving? An increase in unprotected sex, leading to more teenage pregnancies? These are very logical assumptions, based on alcohol's impairing effect on already short-sighted teenage minds. The problem is that America already has the highest rate of teenage pregnancies among developed nations in the world and, as a 1993 statistical report finds, lowered alcohol-related traffic fatalities less, from 1982 to 1992, than the following countries: Britain, Germany, Australia, The Netherlands, and Canada. What do these countries have in common? Each's drinking age is lower than that of the United States.

So this begs the question: What is it about the character of the United States that so many knocked-up drunken sluts are smashing their cars into brick walls?

Now one's natural response is to first blame George W. Bush, but unlike so many other things, this is not the case. One must look elsewhere for an explanation. It could be the glorification of drinking in so many televised beer commercials. We all know that these mass-media images are hyberbolic lies. Only thrice have I been fellated by voluptous blonde women while imbibing the cool, evenly malted hops of Heineken Light. So that's out. Perhaps it could be the glorification of drunk driving itself, during so many episodes of COPS that I have seen. I think we can all relate to the scores of scholars, intellectuals, and dashing men-about-town who get pulled over in their Mercedes Benz S-Class, 83-year old Scotch spilled all over their stylish P-Coats, slurring their speech and taking swings at cops. They're like a combination of Stephen Hawking and Joe DiMaggio, and we sit glued to our television screens all thinking "I wish I could be like that"

We're all prone to a little hero-worship here and there, it's human nature.

You may be asking yourself, nay, screaming at your computer screen like a wolverine on angeldust, "Matt, why do you care?"

Please, stop screaming.

But it is a fair question, after all. I am 20 years old, soon to be 21, and this whole dog and pony show will no longer be of any importance to me. So why do I care? Because I grew up in Michigan, more specifically in Oakland County, even more specifically in the Birmingham School District. This, I would argue, is the worst place in the country to get caught drinking underage, Neverland Ranch notwithstanding. (either way, you get fucked in the ass) Birmingham was the first city in Michigan to pass a new ordinance called an M.I.A., which stands for Minor In Attendance. This is opposed to another Michigan favorite, the M.I.P, which stands for Minor In Possession. So, if the latter is the crime of possessing alcohol, the former is, get this, (for those of you who don't know) the crime of being around alcohol. You are literally in attendance of alcohol, as if alcohol was a basketball game or Bon Jovi Concert. (which sometimes it is.) This law was passed because, I can only assume, the lawmakers wanted to put designated drivers in jail and increase the amount of drunk drivers on the road. God, if I voted for these genuises I would be pretty fucking embarassed. One can stand to reason that someone who made the choice not to drink would actually be deterred by this law to not offer designated driver services for fear of getting punished in the same fashion as their vomiting best-friends.

Now you may be screaming at your computer once again, "Matt, these are just faceless lawmakers, who are the real villains?"

Calm the fuck down, guy. I'm getting to that. Chillax. Cool your jets. Chill out. Take a xanax from your grandmas purse and chase it with some robitussin. Then chug some NyQuil and take a Combunox. Drop a shot of Jager into a 12 oz glass full of Bell's Hopslam Beer and down it, quick. Now pick up a Sudoku and get crackin'! See if you can write a single '9' before you pass out.

Also, get a cup for drool, you're gonna drool some.

The villains of this whole story are the judges who preside over the 48th District Court, which is ground zero of the teenage drinking persecution. The 48th District court is for Bloomfield Hills and Birmingham, some of the most affluent cities in the nation. There are those of you who might throw up your hands and say "Underaged drinking is no big deal!" or "Nobody ever got hurt from underaged drinking or it's unintended consequences!" or "I love to drink!" And you'd be exactly right. Judge Kimberly Smalls is a short, blonde woman. Age has taken a toll on what might have been an attractive face, not so long ago. She speaks and acts in the manner of someone trying desperately to win a Judge Judy doppleganger competition, right down to the long, shrill speeches of moral authority and folksy nuggets-of-wisdom that sound good but ultimately mean noting after closer inspection. ("You've got a family to think of, and that family is a ball of love. By choosing to drink, you've flattened out that ball into a thin crust, and you're making a very dangerous pizza with it. I'm going to top that pizza with extra cheese and 90 days in the county jail") She didn't actully say that, but you get the idea. I have never gotten the oppurtunity to be personally judged by Kim Smalls, but many of my friends have. I only know her demeanor from the spectacle that came once a year to Seaholm High School, my high school. She would bring her court to the Seaholm Theatre Stage and hold real court cases for the entire senior class to watch. These cases were all alcohol and drug related, as I suppose commercial zoning violations and corporate tax refunds wouldn't have really resonated with us. One case was a sad looking middle aged man who got drunk and crashed his car into a restaurant sign on Woodward Avenue. I had no idea this was "World's Most Hilarious Cautionary Tales, Vol. 3" Judge Kim Smalls berated this man for wayyyyy longer than was needed, humiliating him over and over again. If I wasn't so sure she had a giant black vibrator under that robe, I would have assumed she was getting off on chastising him. I've seen day time court shows that treated the idea of justice with more respect than her, and these shows often had the defendant come into court on a slip n' slide coated in KY Jelly. (Seriously people, try watching more daytime TV, it's positively bonerific!) When it was all said and done, we were supposed to be scared straight, or at least bi, and never ever drink or do drugs again. Judge Smalls would be able to sleep easy once again, knowning that she was a no-nonsense crusader for the well being of teenagers everywhere, well, except for the part when she got drunk on power and fucked up people's lives.

(Yea, drunk driving should be punished severely, that's good. But only 2 out of every 1000 instances of underaged drinking involve driving, so that's neither here nor there in the equation.)

Judge Smalls is feared more than her two counterparts, Judge Barron and Judge D'Agostini, because she gives out tougher sentences with higher, almost certain frequency, and her in-court demeanor is best described as "kind of a bitch" For my M.I.P. which I recieved when I was 17 years old, Barron was my personal judge. The whole incident happened at a house party that took place after the Seaholm Homecoming Dance in November. There were about 50 kids there at the peak of the party, but by 2AM there were about 30. Everyone was downstairs when word came that cops were at the front door. Beer cans littered every open space, be it table, shelf or floor. Girls clutching fifths of Smirnoff panicked and darted off to locations unknown. I had been drinking and was about to take my turn in a kareoke video game. Real harmful stuff, folks, like Sodom and Gemorah times a billion Roman Orgies with terrorism sprinkles. Long story short, I hid under a table, was found, was breathalyzed (blew a .059) and was given an M.I.P.

There were heroes that night, several kids managed to run out the back door and get away. One kid shot upstairs when the cops entered, to the 2nd story, and scaled out the window down a series of sheets tied together. Yes. Yes, I know. That's true, I saw the sheets myself. I know. Yea. I know. It does happen in real life. A few kids were able to find much better hiding spots than I (a table, really?) and remain unfound by Johnny Law.

But not me. I had a court date with Judge Barron, my parents got a lawyer for $700, for which he advised me in my two seperate court dates, pre-trial and sentencing, for a real total of about 90 minutes of work on his part. He did help me through my difficult time, he was a well known lawyer who glad-handed everyone he met, but he was kind of a dick to me. Judge Barron asked me how much I drank and I replied "4 beers and a shot", to which my lawyer, Ron (Don?), scolded me and told me that, and this is verbatim:

"You should have just said 5 beers, liquor is a violent form of alcohol and shows that you have a problem."

He said that to me, which suprised me, because I may have been only 17 but I wasn't fucking retarded. Violent? A Violent form of alcohol? To this day I'm not sure what that was supposed to mean in the real world, but in M.I.P court culture I guess it made perfect sense. It gets better, though. Ron (Don?) was married, as evidenced by the ring on his finger. About 5 minutes after he had scolded me, he was scheduling my next court appearance and while waiting in line at the clerk's desk he started flirting with a really hot, not-his-wife, lady-lawyer. (Foxy Justice, anyone?) He asks her if she's going to an upcoming holiday party at some bar, and as I stand not 5 feet away, tells her emphatically "I'll buy you the first shot."

It made my head spin for days, I tell you, days! He was just another slick lawyer sleaze, possibly a philanderer, but for the brief intertwining period of our lives he really helped me out, and for that I thank him, wherever you are Ron. (Don?)

I was really sad and depressed and stressed out and ashamed for the whole ordeal. Seaholm High School found out about my, and everyone else's MIPs, and suspended me from running in 3 cross country meets my senior year. I was captain of the team and had to explain my boys why and how I had let them down. It was a tough time and I'm still not sure what business of Seaholm it was how I fucked up in my life outside school. I was pretty self-loathing back then, but the passage of time tends to give you a clearer perspective and I've since started blaming others. Fuck that fascist bullshit. How dare they be privy to my personal life. The crime didn't occur at school and had nothing to do with school. It was just some kids drinking at a party. Those who were caught paid for their mistakes and then some. and then some more. and then even more.

I tried to like my principal, Terry Piper, I really did. He was a personable guy and a former cross country runner himself. He was fair minded most of the time but goddammit he was a coward for bowing to all the zero tolerance bullshit that was going around. I hope administrators and parents alike learned a lesson that year. I'd estimate that of my senior class of around 220, about 30 to 45% had gotten M.I.P's by graduation. Everyone seems to be in favor of zero-tolerance policies until their kids have to endure it, then they learn long forgotten words like 'circumstances' or 'evaluating'. My mom was absolutely bewildered by what I had to go through, the money, the year of probation, the random breathalyzers. But don't you see? That's what zero-tolerance means, zero compassion, zero due process, zero intellect.

Basically the whole thing was a sour note in the barbershop quarter that is my life until I read an article in the Detroit Free Press. My heart sprang with glee when my most secret hopes had been confirmed: Judge Kim Smalls and Marc Barron were corrupt liars unworthy to judge a hotdog eating contest.

Here is a brief summary of the wonderful, wonderful truth.

1.Marc Barron spent more money on his election campaign than any other judicial election in the State of Michigan in history.
2.This shows that the perks of being a judge are worth alot of money to some people. Justice may be blind, but someone has to pay for those designer shades.
3.Marc Barron's wife was arrested for Drunk Driving, while he was running for 48th District Judge
4.A Court Clerk, Michelle Horton, was fired for alleging a cover-up of Mrs. Barron's arrest.
5.The Court Claims that Horton was fired for being a bad employee, and misusing court computers.
6.Michelle Horton was employee of the year in 2004, the same year she was fired, for being such a shitty employee?
7.Michelle Horton files suit for wrongful termination against the 48th District.
8.All three judges testify in the case against Michelle Horton, thats Barron, Smalls, and D'agostini.
9.During the closing statements, the lawyer defending the 48th District actually says "In order for you to find for the plaintiff, you would have to belieive that these three judges are lying."
10.The jury finds in favor of Michelle Horton for 3 MILLION FUCKING DOLLARS.

ergo, the jury didn't believe the 3 powerful judges.

More and more comes out about this case including allegations that the 48th District Court was using police resources to harass Michelle Horton, including sending cops to a bar where it was reported that Horton was receiving free drinks from attorneys. This turned out to be false, but the cops were sent anyways.

Jesus, Shouldn't these bums be fired, or at least defeated in the next election? 10 out of 10 M.I.P. recipients say yes.

In conclusion, when I read all the dirt dug up on these fucking creeps, I don't feel so bad about my unlawful experiences. I feel a bit vindicated.

I learned my lesson too, if you're gonna party, party the smart way...get a driver, preferably the wife of a judge. Charges don't tend to stick in those cases.

Hogsmear 2008: Kwame Kilpatrick is a Tubby Bitch Felon

Somedays I just wished Kwame Kilpatrick's head imploded. Nothing too messy or overdramatic, just a subtle hiss at one of his many defiant press conferences, and having his fat, rotund head shirk backwards from all outward points. How corrupt can one person be? Kwame has the answer for you: Corrupt as fuck. First there was the SUV thing, wherein Kwame was bound by law to reveal all purchases with city money that totaled over $25,000. So what does he do? He gets a car that cost $24,995. For his wife. I suppose in a surreal sense, that grandiose level of calculated unapologetic corruption is charming. It takes charisma, certainly confidence, to say "Hey, guess what people-of-detroit? I'm a criminal in a mayor's suit and you're all still going to vote for me. Huzzah!"

To paraphrase Hunter S. Thompson, who was describing Nixon at the time... Kwame Kilpatrick is so crooked, his pants have to be bolted on in the morning.

Sweet Life, Kwame, I hope you get put in Jail.

You are a sweaty, corpulent pig of a man...a suit-wearing, lying man-swine. I can't understand why people, during the last election, looked at both Kwame and Freeman Hendrix (Shouldn't he be mayor on name alone?) and thought collectively: "I think I shall vote for the swarthy liar. Good day sir!"

My roommate nathan called me the other day to tell me that someone was shooting a gun in our neighborhood. I can't help but think of the $9,000,000 the city lost in a wrongful termination suit of a cop who was basically fired because he didn't want to help Kwame cheat on his wife. (using Detroit resources no less) That $9,000,000 could have paid, in theory, more cops to patrol the streets.

I remember an incident a few weeks ago when I had some friends over and we were smoking cigarettes on my front porch. A cop car was patrolling the street and stopped right in front of my house. They got out of the car and looked at a red Chrysler that was parked on the other side of the street. It was a stolen vehicle, parked casually in front of my house. They came up to the porch and asked us wether or not we had seen anyone park the car, or how long it had been there. I think I was high at the time, most definately boozed-up and under-age, and I walked back to the squad car with them to genuinely thank them for maintaining a presence in the neighborhood. I walked back to the porch where my friends sat and they condescended and scolded me, they didn't want to bring any attention to our collective underaged drinking and ganja-related activities.

They just didn't understand. I came from the exact same suburban setting as they, where cops were bored douchebags who busted house parties because they wanted to take their minds off their failing marriages or weakly-thin mustaches. They ticketed skateboarders and lived by a motto of 'breathalyze first and ask questions later'. A city, living in a city is different. Detroit is not that dangerous...but it can be. Cops here have a serious job, one which does not entail giving speeding tickets to Birmingham MILFs, and they have a different set of priorities.

Detroit cops do not care about underaged drinking. It's the truth. For my friends to get antsy about me talking to a couple cops, thanking them for doing their job, shows that most people in this society, cops and citizens alike, have a warped sense of law and order. Especially Kwame Kilpatrick. For all I know that Red Chrysler had nothing but Kwame-semen in the backseat, wiped up with $100 bills from the City of Detroit Savings Account.

Kwame Kilpatrick is a whoring, lying, cheating, woefully indignant piece-of-shit-mayor and the city deserves better.

I like his sense of style, though. The man knows how to wear a suit. Unfortunately there are no suits in prison, which is where this pathetic dirty politico should spend his days.

Time Magazine once called Kwame "America's Hip-Hop Mayor" and cited his young age and popular persona as reasons why he could become a figure in national politics. Unfortunately, Kwame is neither 'Hip-Hop' nor, as we have recently discovered, a real mayor. Kind of a joke of a mayor, except the joke is on us. Calling Kwame a Hip-Hop mayor is an insult to Hip-Hop, because tying young black urban cultural hipness to what is ultimately the personal failure of one man, is both publicly grating and an overly-cutesy moniker.

Realisticly, nothing will happen to Kwame, because the current investigation of his alleged perjury is being conducted by the city of Detroit itself, who let Kwame slide time and time again. He doesn't even have a personal fortune to pay back the money he has stolen from the city, just the consumptive lifestyle of an upper-middle class person. A salary of $175,000 a year, a home in Florida, and a wardrobe full of Big & Tall Suits.

Also probably a hell of a bill for all those texts messages. If I were a reporter I would ask him what his night & weekends plan was. Verizon? Singular? Can you hear me being corrupt now? How about now? Let me get closer to the window? Ok, How about now?

The Old Bait n' Switch

Precursor to the post: It's not an attack on religion or faith or whatever...It's an attack of mind-numbing internet schmaltz that gets posted around the globe in chain emails or facebook notes or whatever.

About the Post: The following was posted as a Facebook Note about an hour ago and I will reprint it in it's entirety. I am sure some of you will be familiar with it, others will read it for the first time. The synopsis of it is that a professor gets all smug by using questionable logic and heavy-handed pseudo-theologic philosophy to prove that God is evil. Then some 'humble' (read: another smug prick) uses similarly poor logic to prove that Evil is not something that can be measured, it is instead merely the abscence of good (God, the abscence of God). It is assumed by me that after this interaction the two develop a healthy intellectual respect for one another, go out for drinks and pizza, and end up 69-ing each other on the professor's mildewy futon.

So here's the post that I am reprinting, enjoy! (read: mock)

Did God create evil? A University professor at a well known institution of higher learning challenged his students with this question. "Did God create everything that exists?" A student bravely replied, "Yes he did! "God created everything?" The professor asked."Yes sir, he certainly did," the student replied. The professor answered, "If God created everything; then God created evil. And, since evil exists, and according to the principal that our works define who we are, then we can assume God is evil."The student became quiet and did not respond to the professor's hypothetical definition. The professor, quite pleased with himself, boasted to the students that he had proven once more that the Christian faith was a myth. Another student raised his hand and said, "May I ask you a question, professor?" "Of course", replied the professor.The student stood up and asked, "Professor, does cold exist?" "What kind of question is this? Of course it exists. Have you never been cold?" The other students snickered at the young man's question. The young man replied, "In fact sir, cold does not exist. According to the laws of physics, what we consider cold is in reality the absence of heat. Everybody or object is susceptible to study when it has or transmits energy, and heat is what makes a body or matter have or transmit energy. Absolute zero (-460F) is the total absence of heat; and all matter becomes inert and incapable of reaction at that temperature. Cold does not exist. We have created this word to describe how we feel if we have no heat. "The student continued, "Professor, does darkness exist?" The professor responded, "Of course it does." The student replied, "Once again you are wrong sir, darkness does not exist either. Darkness is in reality the absence of light. Light we can study, but not darkness. In fact, we can use Newton's prism to break white light into many colors and study the various wavelengths of each color. You cannot measure darkness. A simple ray of light can break into a world of darkness and illuminate it. How can you know how dark a certain space is? You measure the amount of light present. Isn't this correct? Darkness is a term used by man to describe what happens when there is no light present." Finally the young man asked the professor, "Sir, does evil exist?" Now uncertain, the professor responded, "Of course, as I have already said. We see it everyday. It is in the daily examples of man's inhumanity to man. It is in the multitude of crime and violence everywhere in the world. These manifestations are nothing else but evil." To this the student replied, "Evil does not exist, sir, or at least it does not exist unto itself. Evil is simply the absence of God. It is just like darkness and cold, a word that man has created to describe the absence of God. God did not create evil. Evil is the result of what happens when man does not have God's love present in his heart. It's like the cold that comes when there is no heat, or the darkness that comes when there is no light. "The professor sat down.

The young man's name -- Albert Einstein

So again, the purpose of this post is not to attack anyone's beliefs. Well, except for the belief that something as moronic as the preceding text would serve to make anyone feel high-minded about their religion.

Analysis: Well, first off, the Albert Einstein thing is bullshit. It's like, "let's attach some name that endows irrefutable respect to this corny piece of shit. Then maybe people will take notice." Maybe the author had decided that since the story is set in a college lecture hall, a good choice would be someone from an academic background. Perhaps since Einstein's fame and name are synonomous with brilliance, the author decided that it trumped the fact that Einstein was FUCKING JEWISH. This story is not as much about God, per say, as it is about the terrible terrible liberal college professors who attack Christianity.

I quote the following from the story: "The professor, quite pleased with himself, boasted to the students that he had proven once more that the Christian faith was a myth." This is about a Christian who defends his God. I am willing to admit that in a chain letter such as this, it is entirely possible, perhaps even probable that an otherwise non-denominational parable was turned decidedly Christian-themed by the addition of that one line. Even so, much has been written about Einstein's spirituality and he would be, at best, classified as mildly religious. The kind of relaxed Jew who enjoys comptemplating the mysteries of the universe over a nice pork sandwich on the Sabbath. So the whole idea of Albert Einstein as a brave defender of the existence of God against a dubious college professor (what kind of class is this anyways? Urban Legends 2500?) is ill-informed and poorly executed.

Other possible choices and why they were (possibly) rejected:
Chuck Norris - Although a staunch Christian and author of 2 Christian Novels, It is never good to mix internet memes
Gahndi - Respected Worldwide, religious, but never went to Grad School
Osama Bin Laden - Loves logic and hates liberal academics, but the beard is a bit off-putting, plus the whole radical islam thing
Ken Jennings - Jeopardy Champ is contemporary America's most famous intellectual, but not enough gravitas
The Tomato from Veggie Tales - Humble, Christian, but fictitious and non-human

Secondly, I don't know. The whole thing sucks big time. I think one lesson that everyone in college learns is that anyone who goes against the teacher in petty squabbles over semantics, spelling, or the existence of an omnipotent creator know that that kid gets the reputation as a pretentious douchebag. Perhaps the same kind of pretentious douchebag that circulates something like the story in question. (circulates it without satire and derision, that is!)

So I've decided to re-make it my own image. (See? See what I did right there? Pretty clever, huh?) Maybe It will catch on, maybe it won't. Maybe someday I'll read on a christian themed blog written by someone who also has way too much time on their hands about what's wrong with my version...but until that day comes I think I'll sleep easy at night.

Did God create titties? A University professor at a well known institution of higher learning challenged his students with this question. "Did God create everything that exists?" A student bravely replied, "Yes he did!" "God created everything?" The professor asked."Yes sir, he certainly did," the student replied. The professor answered, "If God created everything; then God created titties. And, since titties exists, and according to the principal that our works define who we are, then we can assume God is a tits-man." The student became quiet and did not respond to the professor's hypothetical definition. The professor, quite pleased with himself, boasted to the students that he had proven once more that God loves him some big ol' titties. Another student raised his hand and said, "May I ask you a question, professor?" "Of course", replied the professor.The student stood up and asked, "Professor, does a badonkadonk butt exist?" "What kind of question is this? Of course it exists. Have you never slapped one?" The other students snickered at the young man's question. The young man replied, "In fact sir, a badonkadonk butt does not exist. According to the laws of physics, what we consider badonk is in reality the absence of adonk. Everybody is susceptible to study it, in class, in line at the bank, on a neon-lit stage, or from the comfort of your home computer. Badonk does not exist. We have created this word to describe how we feel when the ass is not small, or taut. Finally the young man asked the professor, "Sir, do titties exist?" Now uncertain, the professor responded, "Of course, as I have already said. We see them everyday. What is your damned point, young man?" The student replied "I always figured God to be more of an ass man, myself." The professor collapsed to the floor, weeping.

The young man's name -- George W. Bush

And that's all there is. Seriously though, if you liked what you just read, send an email to 10 people telling them to send it to ten people, or do some bullshit on facebook, the young folk seem to like that stuff these days. Kids today with their computers and their I-pods and their potato-powered alarm clocks. The kids today aren't made of the same stuff. The future ain't what it used to be. Now Eisenhower...that was a president you could respect, and feel proud when he made your kids tickle his balls in the Lincoln Bedroom.

And that's all there is, or ever was.

Until next time, blah blah blah
- Matt Gulley

Ideas for Movies, Game Shows, Salad Dressings Etc.

MOVIES

1. How She Move 2: How She Don't Move So Good After That Stroke She Had

2. One Missed Call Prequel: One Missed Fax (You get a fax, and it's an expense report of your death, and then you totally die)

3. BitchTits: The Movie (A gripping story of one man's journey to the refrigerator...and back again)

4. Just A Bunch of Sad People in Wheelchairs: A Documentary

5. Trailer Movie: A Hilarious Feature-length Spoof of all this Summer's biggest Movie Trailers

6. Some God-Forsakenly Boring Pixar Thing About Talking Insects or Appliances or Whatever Fucking Shit It Is This Time

7. Tyler Perry's "A Brother Named Orange Juice"

8. Sex in the City "Rich White Women Complain"

9. Tyler Perry's "Rich Black Women Complain"

10. Micheal Moore's "Rich White Men Complain"

11. Snoop Dogg's "Rich Black Men form a Polo Team to annoy a group of Snooty Old British Men"

12. What Women Want 2: Mel Gibson Gives Christian Women What They Want, Not The Jews

13. Fuck? ...Shit: The Movie

14. Juno 2: This Time, She's Getting the Abortion

15: Facebook: Facing Death (So, like, there's this facebook application that like, is so addictive that people don't want to eat or sleep so every one is starving to death in front of their computer, but Clive Owen is like a detective or something and he has to figure out who's behind it before it's too late. Jim Carrey plays Mark Zuckerberg and Robin Williams plays Bill Gates.)

TELEVISION

1. TitSwap (An engaging social experiment reality show where one woman's tits are surgically swapped with another woman's tits and the effect it has on their husbands and children.)

2. Moment of Truth 2: Redux (Just like the original Moment of Truth, but not so intellectual. The first question is always "You a Fag?", followed by "Sure you're not a fag?", followed by "Well, why not?", followed by "You gonna eat that sandwich?")

3. According to Jim, The Abortionist (Citing the increase in popularity of edgier television dramas, the veteran sitcom star transitions from affable everyman and caring father to Coke-addicted, morally vexed abortion Doctor. Plus, his mother in law is totally on his case, and his crazy neighbor Steve took his rake and hasn't given it back. Also he gives his 15-year old daughter an illegal third-trimester abortion)

4. Italian-American Gladiators: A Giant Meatball in the Velodrome

5. American Idol: Celebrity Historical-Figure Judges Special! (In the first episode 1945 Hitler, 1923 Art-School Hitler, and Benjamin Franklin sit in and judge the contestants singing covers of The Kinks)

6. Celebrities Unwillngly Coming Out Of The Closet: Only on HBO (Politicians, Pastors, Pro Athletes, Actors, Singers, Newscasters, Scientologists of all races forced to publicly admit their homosexuality in this awards-show style banquet. Stay tuned for special Republican Lifetime Acheivement Awards)

7. Punk'd: A Death in the Family Special (Haha! Check out Bruce Willis acting like a crybaby when Dax Shepard tells him his son is dead! Punk'd!)

8. The Today Show: Porno (Al Roker delivers alot more than the weather)

9. Celebrity Suicide Hotline (A Divorced Alcoholic is about to shoot himself and it's up to Gary Coleman and Jenna Jameson to talk him out of it. "Wat'chu talkin' 'bout empty void?")

10. Infomercial for Ben & Jerry's new Double Fudge and Vicodin Sprinkles Ice Cream ("The most numbingly delicious treat to fuel your low self-esteem into an irreversible free-fall")

SALAD DRESSING

1. Uh....Turkey Bacon Ranch actually sounds pretty good.

The Ax and The Sun

Murray and Jack, his brother, had already set up their tent and reduced several bulky store-bought logs to a bed of glowing embers, perfect for grilling. It was about 6 o’clock in Oscoda County, a barely populated forest of a place in the lonely Northeast of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula. The air was refreshing and cool; the sky a comfortingly damp blue. The innumerable jack pines shot up straight and branchless, making the campground look like a mighty porcupine ass.

The two brothers had taken the weekend to shed their busy lives and reconnect in the shared solitude of the woods. Murray worked as a carpenter and Jack was a cameraman for a talk show. They laughed easily around one another, a quality they each found scarce in the outside world.

"Ready to break out the whiskey?" said Murray, frivolously emphasizing the 'wh-' of whiskey until he sounded like a cartoon character whistling his dialogue. He would do any silly thing to make Jack laugh, anything to interrupt the tedium that was a life’s education.
"Shit, let's eat first." Replied Jack. "Go to the cooler and get the sausages." Murray obliged while breaking into a mock commercial performance.
"Johnsonville Brats, perfect for that weekend getaway. Johnsonville Brats, for a real sausage fest! Johnsonville Brats, is your diet not phallic enough? Are popsicles and bananas just not cutting it anymore? Put a real fat one in your mouth...tonight! Eat Johnsonville." By this time Jack was laughing and Murray was too. Murray ripped the sausages from their plastic sheath and threw them on the metal grill-plate that rested inches above the fire pit. Beads of fat and grease instantly leapt away from the fire to a loud and aromatic hiss. Jack was still unloading a few things from the trunk and backseat of the car while Murray stood over the fire, no thoughts running through his head. Jack thought the silence from Murray a bit unusual and turned his head toward him.
"What's up?"
"I think we're going to run out of wood."
"Then maybe we should take some Viagra." Jack smiled. Murray looked up from the fire from which he had been blankly staring to smile in wide-eyed wonderment at Jack.
"Did you just make a joke?" Murray asked.
"I think I did." The two brothers laughed heartily and made phantom jack-off motions with their hands. This was male bonding at it's most powerful: the revelry of being intentionally dumb as shit. Once they wiped the tears of joy from their eyes, Murray re-voiced his observation.
"I think we're going to run out of wood soon."
"Well let's chop down a tree."
"Really?"
"Yea, what do you think I brought this for?" said Jack as he lifted a brand new ax from the trunk of the car.
"What do you think I brought this for?" said Murray as he lifted a full fifth of scotch-whiskey from the cooler beside the fire.
"For choppin'!"
"For drunkin'!" Murray opened the bottle and tossed the cap carelessly to the ground, put the stuff to his lips and tilted the bottle high in the air. He winced as he swallowed it down. He coughed some too. "God damn. You want some?"
"After I chop this tree down, which’ll be pretty manly."
"So Which one?"
"Which one what?"
"Which tree are you going to, uh, fell?"
"That one." Jack smirked as he pointed to the largest tree in the general vicinity, a massive pine with deeply-grooved bark.

Murray gently turned the sausages over with a stick as Jack walked with sunken, focused eyes towards the tree. He held the ax handle loosely with one hand, ax head dragging on the ground behind him. It was an attractive ax, a near mirror finish on the blade and a natural wood varnish on the long smooth handle. Jack stood facing the tree, studying it carefully. The tree was about three feet in diameter, maybe four. He looked at the base and noticed the thick, bumpy roots which spidered away and across the forest floor. He looked up towards the canopy, estimating it silently at about 80 feet. He grabbed the ax with both hands and slid his right hand up the handle closer to the blade, keeping his left hand at the bottom of the handle for a steady fulcrum. Jack shadow-swung it a couple time to get a feel for the weight of it and a comfortable range of motion. Then he set his eyes on a particular spot in the trunk, at about his waist level. He swung the ax back loftily, and brought it forward hard, waiting for contact. His body rocked with active pleasure as the recoil of the hard surface surged through the ax, across his shoulder, and over his whole body. He was hooked now. He swung from alternating angles: up and down, down and across, across and up and back again. Little bits of wood flew in front of his eyes with every chop. He was in a trance, for even as his arms began to tire, and his lower back knotted up, he never lost his rhythm.

Murray, meanwhile, continued to drink and as his drunkenness grew, so did his hunger. When the first round of sausages were thoroughly cooked, he scooped them onto a paper plate and ate them all, washing down the bits of meat in his teeth with more whiskey. He noted to himself aloud how, “the whiskey really complements the sausage…delicious.” Murray quickly opened another package of sausage and put them on the grill, this time for his brother. He figured Jack would probably not relinquish the blade until he was finished, but it didn’t really matter to him. Being a carpenter was hard work, and Murray didn’t really associate chopping down a tree with relaxation. No, that was what the booze was for. He figured Jack had a hard-on for manual labor because he didn’t get to do any in his real-life job, on the set of that inane talk show. Sometimes you have to stop working to really work hard.

Jack had been at work for some time now, but he could see his job was almost done. The sun still reflected a glint off the polished ax head, but it was getting late. He had lost track of time and was completely knackered, but he couldn’t remember ever feeling so good. A sudden breeze snaked through the dense forest, leaving a memory trail of rustling leaves. When it swept by him, Jack realized his shirt was covered in cool sweat and bits of wood. He moved to the other side of the tree, ready to deliver the finishing blow. He hit squarely and strongly a few more times before the tree started to waver. Jack swelled with pride as the mutilated trunk started to crack apart, and he readied himself to yell out that clichéd lumberjack mantra. At the last second before he would have shouted ‘Timber!’ he decided to be ironic and went with the golf chant “Fore!!!” He looked over smilingly at the campfire but didn’t see Murray. “Fore!!!” He saw the tree top start to fall through the air and, unexpectedly, it collided with another nearby tree. The falling tree had its momentum shifted and rolled off one side to continue falling at an obtuse direction. “Fore!!!” It took forever for that tree to finally hit the ground, and it slammed down in concert with a sickening scream. It was Murray.

Jack run over to Murray only to find him from the chest up, the rest of his body crushed by the tree trunk with his legs protruding from the other side. Murray looked around in a daze, seeming not to believe what had just happened.

"Where were you? Didn't you hear me calling?" Jack admonished.
"I was coming to bring you some sausage. Ah, it hurts. Oh god, oh god!" cried out, choking back anguish and pain. He was breathing so heavy.
"Here I'm going to try and lift it. Pull yourself away while it's up. Can you do that?"
"I think so." said Murray, who looked scared. Jack walked a few feet away from Murray and put one foot on either side of the wide trunk, and dug his hands as far down the other side of the trunk as he could, trying to have them meet. When he could dig his grip no further, he lifted, imagining his body as one singular muscle. He lifted with his arms, his back, his legs, his feet, his head strained towards the heavens, trying to cast this infernal trunk endlessly upward. It wouldn't move. He wasn’t strong enough; he couldn’t raise it once inch. He tried and tried again, getting weaker with each attempt. His mind reeled frantically, and he paced back to his pinned brother.
"Okay I can't lift it but I'm going to roll it over your legs"
"Won't that break them?" Murray was crying now, he could no longer feel his shattered pelvis or anything below that, but he could see blood, his own blood, seeping over the moss and dirt of the forest floor.
"I don't know, maybe, but, but, we have to get you out of here. Don't worry." Jack got on Murray's side of the tree, and pushed with all his might, making millimeters of progress, but causing Murray to scream out in agony every time the trunk moved. To hear his brother in so much pain sapped all of Jack's remaining strength. He went back to Murray, and held his hand. "How bad is it? I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry."
"I'm okay. I'm okay. I was staggering towards you...I was drunk. I think I have a drinking problem." A smile broke across Murray's face, briefly, and then it turned back towards terror. "I...I can't feel anything anymore. I don't think that's good." Jack was getting desperate.
"I'll get in the car and drive to that city, that small little town, and get help, I'll be back in 25 minutes, tops." Jack got up and ran towards the car.
"Wait...please don't." said Murray. "Don't leave me alone out here." Jack clenched his hand into a pained red fist. He walked back towards his brother and cradled his head and shoulders. He came apart.
"Please don't die. Please don't. Please don't die. Please let me go for help."
"No, I don't want die by myself. I lived by myself, don't let me die by myself."
"Ok. Ok. I'm here. I love you."
"I love you too." Murray looked at his crushed abdomen, he felt weak, but kind of euphoric. He looked up at his brother's face; Jack was streaming tears, looking blankly in the distance. They were together, waiting for that awful coming moment when they would both be alone again. "Hey, hey, Jack."
"What is it?"
"If a tree falls on a drunk in a forest, does it make a sound?" Murray smiled. Jack laughed.
Murray closed his eyes.

The End.

Notes for Online Shopping

Quick Tip: Never Buy a Wall Calendar called "Black Bears" online without seeing a preview first. I swear to god I thought it read "Now with more Honey Shots!"

Also,

I want my tombstone to read "As Duplicitous As He Was Handsome"

For Jealousy with Love and Valor

Roth laughed an uneasy laugh, as the girl of his fancy gave an innocent peck on the cheek to her boyfriend of several months. What a shit he was, this other guy. A fucking ugly son of a bitch as well, far uglier than he. In fact it wasn't even a competition. This guy had tired eyes and brutish features, like a caveman in the last few weeks of grad school. Roth not only considered himself not ugly, but attractive, even pretty. His new facial hair made him look parts mature, bohemian, intelligent and rugged. This other guy, well...he only looked halfway attractive because he had a beautiful girl who happily walked arm in arm with him, and he had no idea how much he didn't deserve her. Roth waited until this brief public display of inexplicably mismatched affection was over to continue on the exact word and breath he had left off on.

"...because imagine the city in ten years." He waited for a response.
"Yea." said the lucky sap.
"Oh totally..." said the beautiful girl who didn't even seem to know it. "With everything that's been going on? It's a great time to be living down there."

Roth just looked at her. How pretty she was, how she always seemed to be smiling, how laid back she was. Why do people get together with other people...other than me? Who the hell is this guy? She never brings him up in conversation when we're alone, yet here he is, drinking Neanderthal beer and looking like a fucking jackass. I don't even get a sense of his personality, it's like I'm looking at one of her online photos, where they're kissing and looking at each other or looking off in the distance like no one's even taking their picture. Yet there it is. I can see it. Why does she have to look so god damned happy kissing this total fucking loser?

Roth thought to himself while she light her boyfriend's cigarette:

"I think I'm past the point of making myself feel better by assuring myself that I'm better looking than he is. Damn it. Good looks get girls everything, it's completely different the other way around. Ugly guys think that you have to be really good looking to be successful...that's only half true. The truth that ugly guys don't realize about us good looking guys is that you don't have to be a model, you don't have to be a Brad Pitt, you just have to be past a certain threshold of handsomeness.
As long as you're decently attractive, you can get any girl you want."

Well, not every girl, obviously, because apparently, SOME GIRLS ARE FUCKING BLIND.

Roth tried to calm himself, but he couldn't. Somehow he had lost focus, and all of a sudden he opened his eyes and she was sitting on her boyfriend's lap. It was like Princess Leia and Jabba the Hutt, except Jabba had charm. This fucking sucked.

Wait... Did this guy know? Did he know that he was ruining my life? Did he know that by some virtue of God pitying him and his 20lbs overweight ass that he had the girl I wanted? Was he taunting me by having her on his lap? It's not like he winking at him or flashing some shit-eating grin.

By this time Roth had come to terms that this guy was lording his incredible fortune over him, and his dream girl was starting to piss him off. I mean, what the fuck? If her standards are that low than fuck her. She may as well be the reward one gets for completing 60 days of AA. 30 days is a certificate and 90 days is a $25 gift card to Red Lobster.

Roth stayed at the bar for another 10 minutes and then bid the happy couple farewell. He told the guy it was nice to meet him and told the girl they should go check out a show this weekend, "or something"

When he got home Roth stood shirtless in front of the mirror. He studied himself. When he saw how beautiful he was, he cried, because he didn't understand why the girl hadn't jumped him in some dark alley yet.

He lay in bed with the lights on, and waited.

Detroit Court Room Blues (I Called A Cop A Liar) or UN-TRIUMPHS or Little Known Facts about the Patriot Act

I suppose that if i had an imaginary file cabinet where I filed things, I would file this whole ordeal under 'U', for 'Un-triumphs'. I think everyone has un-triumphs, stories of towering unimportance and maudlin discomfort, where alot of shit happens but nothing of real or symbolic importance comes from it. It doesn't even make a really good story, to be perfectly honest, unlike that time I was a dorky cop who went undercover as a beauty queen in order to expose a killer...wait...that didn't happen to me, that was the plot of Miss Congeniality. My mistake. I'm always making mistakes like that, it reminds me of a time that I was a creepy but polite boy who was adopted by a suburban family but ultimately shunned because of my scissor- hands...

Fuck...nevermind.

About 2 months ago I was pulled over on I-75 while I was trying to get to work on time. I was ticketed for speeding in a construction zone where the sign says "SLOW TO 45 WHEN WORKERS PRESENT" There were no workers present so I carried on anyways.

Damn, I am boring myself with this story. Let me re-phrase that...

About 2 months ago I was driving drunk as fuck in an elementary school parking lot. The police were telling me to stop but I couldn't honestly hear them over the sound of my black-powder rifle that I was shooting in the air, like a true patriot. Not alot of people know this, but the Patriot Act protects the right of any Texan to shoot his rifle in the air, so long as he is not wearing shoes or a shirt.

PATRIOT ACT
Article 3, Subsection 12

"Where it may be that the right of firearms discharge, not infringed by federal, state, or county legislation, as to the shirted-ness of citizen, or feet covering not limited to but including boots, tennis shoes, flip-flops, Crocs, Clogs, Hush-Puppies, snow shoes, sneakers, or dinner plates with strings wrapped around them, being of Texan residency or heritage within but not limited to 2 generations OR having attended 1 NASCAR or 2 Queer-stomping events within the last 18 months, shall not be charged with any high crime or misdemeanor, Amen."

So ultimately, I sobered up, put down the meth-pipe, let the school kids out of my trunk, and went to talk to the police. They were cool guys and ultimately ticketed me with speeding in a construction zone. Cool guys, indeed.

So yesterday morning was my scheduled court date and I stayed up all night to legally prepare my case. This involved getting drunk and watching Law and Order and Monk. I felt ready to argue my case on the merits of habeus corpus, eminent domain, and the fact that I couldn't have been driving the car because I was morbidly obese or something. (Must photo-shop pictures of myself as morbidly obese)

I showed up at the 36th District Court in downtown Detroit at 8am and stood in line while a carnival barker cleverly disguised as a Detroit cop shouted continuously about all the things that you can't bring into the courtroom.

"Camera phones!, large belt buckles!, chains!, camera phones!, coffee!, food!, dignity!, autonomy!, John Locke's natural rights! camera phones! or those large mountain climber-y key chain things, what are they called, Carrabeeners?!!"

"Yes, I think you're right." I said. That's when I felt the cuffs slap on my hands and the nightstick hit me across the back of the head, knocking me rather unconcious.

"That was rhetorical, you filthy son of a bitch! I bet you have a camera phone, don't you? You sick fuck."

When I awoke, I was alone... Except for the 60 other people in courtroom 431 presided over by magistrate Charles W. Anderson III, a short, bookish looking black man who would be perfectly cast as a high school principal or person who seems wise and reserved and the audience totally goes nuts when he busts out some wicked awesome karate moves in the movie's climatic fight scene (see Mr. Miyagi in The Karate Kid or Raffiki in The Lion King for further review)

The bailiff was a festively plump african-american woman. Now, I always assume that every-thing on television is a calculated lie based on stereotypes and focus-groups but whenever I see a person, such as a sassy, wise-cracking, fat black woman, whom has seemed to leap from a re-run of the Wayons Brothers show, or Barbershop 3: Uncle Tom Gets a New 'Do, it always blows my mind. I like to play fair when it comes to the cultural deconstruction of race, or as I like to call it, "How my Melanin Supposedly Commands Me", so I wonder If I have ever seemed like some ethnic caricturature. So have I? Sort of a sequel to Harriet Beecher Stowe ala 'Nephew Connor's Frathouse?' White stereotypes are mostly harmless and lame, and I think there should be an ironic march on Washington D.C. consisting of ten million white people all demanding more vile and offensive caucasian slurs. They could hold signs that say "Whacker than Cracker" or "How 'bout some Cash for a White Trash Bash, Bush?" Then we could all descend upon local Starbucks and talk about what bad dancers we are.

I, too, have a dream.

Me and the sixty other people who were to have their say in court for minor traffic tickets were given orders by our sassy bailiff, and one by one we were called up to accept or deny the charges leveled against us by the very officers who ticketed us. Today, it was all white-on-white crime. Some cop, I forget his name, (otherwise I would have surely posted it along with his name and address and gift register on Amazon.com, so we could send him gifts as a token of appreciation for a job well done...maybe some historical fiction or how-to books, like how-not-to be a fucking douche) was responsible for about 70% of the people there. He was a white cop with a haircut that says "I'm serious about ruining your day". When I finally was called before the magistrate, I stood beside my ticketing officer and was asked to raise my right hand and swear about truth and other bullshit. The judges final phrase of the oath was "..so help you God." which I found to be something worth objecting to, if I were in a coked-out 'taking on the whole system' state of mind. Declaring yourself an atheist doesn't make you many friends, however, so I kept my mouth shut and imagined both God and Jesus discussing the details of my traffic ticket as they played a little father and son game of catch in the front yard, then Mrs. God comes out the front door and muses quietly to herself "There are my two favorite guys" before loudly exclaiming that dinner was ready. Jesus dropped the football and got very wide-eyed as he shouted "Oh boy, I love Taco Night!" before running inside while God laughed and followed them both in. The sun was setting, little did they know that the peace was about to be shattered in "Friday the 13th: Knock, Knock, Knocking on Heaven's Door" which will be going straight to DVD this fridayyyyyyyyyyy.

Anyways. I took the oath and heard my charge, which was speeding in a construction zone. Magistrate Charles W. Anderson III asked me for my testimony to which I replied:

"Ok, so you see, your honor, I was confused because the sign said 'Slow to 45 When Workers Present' and I looked, I actually looked around and saw no workers, so I figured the normal speed limits applied, your honor." That was it, that was my opening remarks, evidence, argument, and closing statements all wrapped up in 40 sort-of-nervous words. The magistrate looked at me ponderously for a moment, before turning to the cop and asking,

"Well, were they there?" To which the cop, equal parts indignant and smug, sealed my fate by saying,

"Your honor, it was 8:10AM, they were out there." To which I replied (in my mind),

"YOU FUCKING LIAR! WHO HAS THE BURDEN OF PROOF HERE YOU LYING MUTHERFUCKER?! YOU'RE A DISGRACE TO EVERYONE WHO WEARS THE UNIFORM AND YOU SHOULD BE PATROLING MALLS, NOT THE STREETS OF DETROIT!!!"

Alas, I fought the law, and the law won.

And with this mighty untriumph, which to lesser degrees involved me losing some sleep and walking around downtown Detroit in below freezing temperatures, I was left with a $126 dollar fine, a couple points on my liscence, and a bit of an empty feeling. Sometimes the wheels of justice turn too fast, because I would have loved to put this thing off for another year. I have to pay a parking ticket less than 3 months after I recieved it, but some guy in Oklahoma has been on death row for 17 years? Get on the ball, people. Seriously.





PATRIOT ACT
Article 876
Subsection 1324.5

Where it shall be to the third party involved with no less than five intermediaries accounting for the practice or placement of interstate travel for the tariff actuarials of liqour other spirits, when, in the interjursidictional by-laws where it may affect the outcome of two or more circuit court decisions where being the defendant and...well...shit, this shit is all fucked. Basically, just don't call it 'racial profiling' to the press, okay? We're taking alot of heat for that and if you just came up with some bullshit...oh by the way, youz all gunna get barcodes in yo' necks. Haha. Patriot act just skeeted on your face, yo! How you gonna deal with that? Patriot Act Out! Stop Snitchin'!!!!

Well, It's Official...

...I've taught my body to subsist on nothing but alcohol and facebook.

Just kidding, but seriously. I've entered uncharted territory and the finite horizons of my life from this moment until quiet gasping death are expanding endlessly in front of me. What happens once you make yourself into the person you've always wanted to become? Or maybe it's different, maybe once you meet the person you've always wanted to be you find them boring and vain, a little pretentious and associating with entirely too much fug arm candy. So you settle in your ways, to quote the Beastie Boys: "Drinking and a' smoking on a tuesday night." Good times, blurry memories, enough lecherous and rude behavior to turn a 5 dollar whore into a militant lesbian feminist.

As an affable pedophile prone to malapropisms might say, "If there's snow on the field, play ball." I think that qualifies me as a sports journalist, since I'm watching the Green Bay Packers play football in a blizzard in Wisconsin. I'm in neither a blizzard nor Wisconsin, but rather a very comfortable subdued-Ruby-coloured couch in Detroit...the point is that television, wonderful invention that it is, lets me know that people are doing something somewhere, and that's progress. I could be doing something somewhere, and I probably will be, but for the time being if not for me there would be no one to watch the television people and therefore...dum da dum dum da...no reason to do anything anytime anywhere.

Petch-Perfect: A Script for the 5 'o' Clock News

Intro Roll: Cityscape of Petch, Indiana. Music...heavy on the orchestral drums and staccato horn section. Anchors faces turn toward camera and smile. Follow the formula: Lead with most popular personality, based on recent polling, (usually the blonde who's not pregnant) then most minority figure (black woman) followed by second most minority to overstimulate the part of the brain that recognizes "commitment to diversity" (black man, heavy set) then go to white guy, other older white guy, pregnant blonde (can she be holding her belly? Try that) then finish it off with the wise-cracking guy with the tremendously jewish last name...don't linger. Then group shot with minorities front and center, but give the white guys props, like an umbrella or a microphone or something. Try to balance it out.

Narrator: The best local, regional, and national news, brought to you everyday at 5 from the best news team in the area. This is The Imperitive Events at 5 'o' Clock.

Man Van Goodwell: Hi. I'm Man Van Goodwell.

Carrie Guesswhite: And I'm Carrie Guesswhite.

M.V.Goodwell: Our leading story is the bloodiest day of fighting yet in the Middle East. Suicide bombers detoned over 250lbs in explosives in a co-ordinated attack in and around...(interrupted, touches his ear piece, looks to Carrie)

Carrie Guesswhite: What is it?

M.V.Goodwell: Breaking news, Carrie. I'm getting a report that a bear has escaped from the zoo this afternoon in a botched pen transfer. The bear is a 700-pound Kodiak native to most of Canada and tundra regions of North America. It responds to Gregory but is said to be very dangerous. Authorities warn not to address it at all, but rather remain politely silent, as if you were in the presence of a long-winded mentally deranged old person. Excuse yourself to take a phone call or grab some more shrimp, and calmly exit the room and alert police...to the bear, not the old person.

Carrie Guesswhite: That is shocking. Has the bear harmed anyone?

M.V.Goodwell: The report doesn't say, but at this point I'd wager several children.

Carrie Guesswhite: Wager several children what?

M.V.Goodwell: That they've been eviscerated. (awkward pause)

Carrie Guesswhite: Well, we've got a real bear of a storm coming, so that's two reasons to stay inside tonight. Let's go over to Greely Morris with the weather.

Greely Morris: Thanks Carrie. I hope that bear is a polar bear because we are going to get at least two inches of snow tonight.

M.V.Goodwell: It's a Kodiak, Greely.

Greely Morris: What's that?

M.V.Goodwell: It's a Kodiak, not a polar bear...

Greely Morris: Huh?

M.V.Goodwell: You just said 'I hope it's a polar bear' and I'm telling you that its a Kodiak because I just read the report 30 seconds ago and the press release said it was a Kodiak.

Greely Morris: Uh...

M.V.Goodwell: Were you even listening? I just said it's a fucking Kodiak bear, so...there.

Carrie Guesswhite: Kodiak bears can be found in Alaska, which is very cold. So let's just say you're both right. Why don't you apologize to each other.

Greely Morris: I'm not going to apologize for some meaningless off the cuff remarks. What good would that do anybody? I don't even think the people at home even remember what we're arguing about anymore.

M.V.Goodwell: That is probably true. Let's just explain that it was about Barack Obama's campaign.

Greely Morris: Why Barack Obama?

M.V.Goodwell: Because Al Sharpton's not running.

Greely Morris: What the fuck is that supposed to mean?

Carrie Guesswhite: Gentlemen, please, we've already gone over our 'f-word' quota one and a half fucks ago. In National News today...the president fucked his wife for 17 minutes this morning as they lie in bed at the White House in Washington D.C. What started as mutual masturbation turned quickly to oral sex and finally vaginal penetration at approximately 7:53AM. The First Lady was said to "moan like a wildebeast and leave deep claw marks in the president's back". Press Secretary Girard Antietam joked that if the First Lady gets any rougher she may have to be classified as an enemy combatant.

M.V.Goodwell: Now that is funny. (All laugh) Anything else?

Carrie Guesswhite: The president is said not to have tried for anal, and I don't mean to editorialize here...

M.V.Goodwell: Go ahead.

Carrie Guesswhite: Okay, well I don't mean to editorialize here but I think not going for anal shows good family values. I think this vindicates those of us who voted for him for exactly that reason. He doesn't try to fuck his wife in the ass.

Greely Morris: That's where I don't agree with his politics, I mean, the economy is great, I just bought a yacht for my dog's yacht, if I may be so bold...but have you seen the badonkadonk on the first lady? You gotta go for anal.

M.V.Goodwell: Agreed, I think it shows a weakness in the executive branch and as we all know, the great presidents through history have all been ass-fuckers. George Washington had wooden teeth and a sweet tooth but it meant something completely different when he was said to "put his woody in your brownie".

Greely Morris: Andrew Jackson declared war on the National Bank and his native-american mistress's anal cavity...he called it his own private 'trail of tears'.

M.V.Goodwell: He was a warrior poet.

Carrie Guesswhite: So true.

M.V.Goodwell: Theodore Roosevelt, "Speak softly, carry a big stick, and a rag soaked in ether" What a sicko.

Greely Morris: He was a sick fuck. The sickest fuck of a president since Carter.

Carrie Guesswhite: They didn't call him The Peanut Farmer because he grew peanuts on his farm. Oh no. That's the big lie.

M.V.Goodwell: (interrupted) I have another report, it seems a bear has escaped from a traveling circus on the outskirts of town. I would like to make it clear that this is a completely seperate bear-on-the-loose situation from the one reported earlier. This newer, more vaudeville bear is a Grizzly. I repeat, a Grizzly from the Circus and a Kodiak from the zoo are both loose in our city streets. If you see the Grizzly bear, do not offer him a unicycle of any kind...

Greely Morris: How many kinds of unicycle are there, Mr. Smart Guy?

M.V.Goodwell: My name is Man, not Guy, and anyways...do not offer him a unicycle of any kind because this bear is a classically trained unicyclist and can cycle at speeds of up to 35 MPH, making him an instant liability of Indiana's highway patrol.

Carrie Guesswhite: Let's go to the weather man, Hymen Virgenstein, Hymen?

Hymen Virgenstein: Thanks Carrie. In local high school sports this week, the poorer school beat the richer school at almost everything. (pause) Enjoy it while it lasts, guys. There's no varsity letter for picking fruit. In professional sports, a millionaire professional ball-sport athlete/commercial actor/soft-drink enthusiast has retired from his sport of choice. He said in a press conference that all the steroids were giving him "soft supple tits", he suspected closeted homosexuals making up the second-string in almost every position on the roster, and most of all he wanted to spend more time at home ignoring his kids and beating his wife. His jersey will be retired in a string of DUI's about 15 years from now. Back to you Carrie.

Carrie Guesswhite: Thanks Hymen. That's about all the time we have for this broadcast but join me in a special report this evening at 11 entitled "Can you tell if your loved ones are being brutally gang raped at this very second: You Can't" and also a heartwarming story about a boy who got a heart transplant from his dog.

M.V.Goodwell: Talk about being your own best friend. (All laugh)

Greely Morris: That's amazing! Did that kid live?

Carrie Guesswhite: No way, Jose. But before he kicked the bucket he was said to have enjoyed his final Kibbles. (all laugh)

Hymen Virgenstein: Did you just make that up?

Carrie Guesswhite: I did. I did.

Hymen Virgenstein: You're funny. You should do improv comedy. I saw this hilarious comic on TV who walked around on stage really angry and then would point at an audience member and said "You are the weakest link. Goodbye" (all laugh)

Carrie Guesswhite: I don't know. I kinda like my job here. It beats taking wallets from dead guys.

M.V.Goodwell: So when's the baby due, Carrie?

Carrie Guesswhite: Actually, I had a miscarriage. (all laugh, except for Carrie) That wasn't a joke. It was the most depressing day of my life, to carry that new life inside you, nurturing it. Then that trust that goes beyond love itself is broken and my body kills that new life, and there's nothing I can do about it. I just sit at home all day and think about the person who could have been, that child I'll never know. (long awkward pause)

Hymen Virgenstein: (in a stereotypical black-person voice) Your baby was all up in that womb, and the womb said "you are the weakest link, goodbye!" (all laugh, especially Carrie)

M.V.Goodwell: (in a stereotypical southern hick voice) Do you want fries with that? (all laugh)

Greely Morris: (in a stereotypical asian accent, pulling the sides of his eyes back to make them squinty) I did not have sexual relations with that woman, MRS RERINSKY! (all laugh hysterically)

Carrie Guesswhite: (extending arms forward, palms up, slightly clenched, as if they were shackled together, looking right into the camera, just like that movie Amistad) Give us...us free! Give us...us free! (all laugh very hysterically)

Outro Roll: Image of city of Petch, Indiana, superimposed with Yogi Bear, Bearenstein Bears, Teddy Ruxpin, and Smoky the Bear. The words appear in blood red, "SHOOT TO KILL" and "HAVE A GREAT EVENING"

STAY TUNED! NEXT ON THIS CHANNEL

5:30 - Celebrity Bowel Movements
6:00 - Don't you kind of hope this out-of-control celebrity dies or something, preferrably by their own hand?
6:30 - Murder, She Wrote
7:00 - Sex, She Fucked
7:30 - My Dick, She Gobbled
8:00 - Best of the Worst Fatal Car Crashes: Celebrities' Children Edition
8:30 - CSI: Who Gives A Fuck?
9:00 - Guess The Lyrics hosted by Wayne Brady
9:30 - Guess The Names of Your Children hosted by Maury Povich
10:00 - Doctor Lawyers: "Doctors by Day, Lawyers by Night, Young Sexy Single and Sarcastic 24/7"
10:30 - Lawyer Doctor Firemen: "Same as Above, but with Fire and Shit"
11:00 - NEWS!!!!####
11:30 - The Most Depressing and Arousing Porn You've Ever Seen, In That Order

Bolio in America III: Bolio goes 'Bowlio-ing' (Part 1 of indeterminate)

Stepping out his 1996 Ford Mercury Rik-Shaw, Bolio paid his puller's penance in the form of several half-bent rupees. Surely enough to fool a policeman or passeryby. Rough-hewn feet straddled by sandal fabric stood in the parked pavement parkway of the industrial park bowling super-centre "Majestic Bowl".
"Very fine day," said Bolio proudly, "very fine day indeed."
"Fine day for a horse, perhaps, but no man with wood poles upon his shoulders!" muttered the Rik-Shaw puller.
"Silence!" The puller was ashamed.

In his three years of culture clash and situational comic hijinx, Bolio could never truthfully claim that he had gone bowling in his adopted land. Like most of us, he had to play along and talk about his many pin conquests or 'strikes' as they were known in popular culture. Like most of us, he feared for being exposed as the Bowling gewrdalawat (virgin) that he was. When trading stories dock-side with the strapping young working class alcoholics, Bolio struggled with his secret, his inexeperience, vowing to himself and to his 5th and 8th Gods that once his thumb and two fingers and been snugly embedded in the black basalt orb, he would be ever more proudly jocular, like some fraternity brother who had finally drank a fifth of liquor succesfully, though he claimed able to do so since 8th grade.

So here Bolio stood, outside the neon sub-sport castle, ready for an altogether different one-armed workout than he was used to. He turned to the Rik-Shaw puller.
"Corgi!"
"Yes, Bolio?"
"Would you like to bowl-pins with me?"
"Oh great yenerva by squalishimoot! But who will watch the Shaw?"
"Regivmeen's One Thousand and First Emerald Eye will watch the Shaw. I have forseen it."
"Swell. That is swell. Regivmeen will watch your Shaw, but my Iphone got stolen when I left it on-top of the urinal at Stop n Go, how conveinent."
"Corgi! Do not impugn the judgement of Regivmeen!" Corgi was ashamed.

Bolio entered and walked among the denim crowd. His white flowing robes and dodecahedron hat set him apart, but the smell of cheese fries and Labatt Blue in the air may have very well been the essence of tolerance and indifferentiality. In the Great Midwest, where every third house shelters future segments of 'To Catch a Predator', Bolio was far from the most odd thing seen lately, be it at the local supermarket or on Google Image Search in a locked basement room. Bolio scanned the room to make sense of the chaotic sounds, long growling rumbles followed by quick thwacks and sonic detritus (Yelling, whooping, sighing, drats, cursing, etc...general kurhkurh). Corgi suggested finding a place at the end of a ten-strong line of people, leading up to a desk with an old woman behind it. This strategy of line finding had served the duo well in the past, succeeding in the endeavors of voting, grocery shopping, and finding employment as professional sex auditors. For over six and a quarter minutes Bolio and Corgi waited, using the time to adjust their eyes and various hemp bracelets. When the last person in front of them finally shuffled off, Bolio made eyes with the old lady, staring rather soulessly back at him from behind large thick bifocals with a yarn attached at the end of each ear-rod. She spoke.

"How many games?" Bolio conferred in hushed tones with Corgi.

"Sixteen. That is the number of rounds required to gain mastery of fliiiiiiin."

"Uh...ok." She paused. "That'll be $47.50." Bolio reached into his robes and pulled out a green velvet money purse, delved within, and handed the old lady a powdery $50 bill. Change was exchanged and lane 8 was assigned to them. They turned and started off towards the other end of the bowling hall when the old lady called out to them. "Wait. Your shoes! What size do you wear?" Taking great offense to this question, Corgi throated up a mouthful of gooey phlegm and and mucous and prepared to spit on the old bitch, but as he cocked his head back ready to project his thick liquid hatred he was tackled by a frantic Bolio.

"Fool!" spurned Bolio. "I had read about this from a librarian's book! We must exchange our shoes for ceremonial bowling shoes. Just like fliiiiiiiin, Corgi. Just like fliiiiiiiin."

"For the third time in this narrative I am ashamed, Bolio. So ashamed. My ignorance only embarasses myself, you, and our culture." Corgi reached under his robe and withdrew a sixteen inch jagged blade. He was meaning to kill himself.

A Guide to Making Love like a White Person

I searched the coffee table, vision as blurred as my speech, knocking over empty beer bottles and overflowing ashtrays. I'm looking for a little speed, maybe some vicodin or cocaine dust. I am the all-consumer; a giant mouth, nose, stomach, penis walking through the climate controlled mall that is this existence. I put a condom over my stomach so I could eat without calling the next day. Buffet, glistening piles of prepared hot eats, bursting forth from aluminum trays.

She was in the other room in jeans and no top, and a line of drool stringing from her mouth to the floor. I told her not to take so much.

I'm so full, I feel like crying.

These watery beers make my teeth ache. Is this it? Is this all there is? Bloat and starve and another long drunk for long hours. Staying up until 5am for the ninth straight day, I thought I thought I thought I thought I was a university student. I never see the sun, except for getting out of bed for water for my horrible dry mouth in the morning. My tongue rough with bristles becomes one with my teeth until I pull it off. I don't drink alcohol in the morning, I'm not an alcoholic, I was drinking less than 4 hours ago.

I need more sleep. I pop a couple Ambien and talk to a window. Maybe I should check on my girl? I'll eat instead, lick the bottom of this week-old bowl...it's got chocolate and speed in it. I'll smoke two mentholated cigarettes with a mouth full of cheese curds.

My mouth hurts, I've eaten too much. Whiskey stings and burns and tears you up inside but I've got the gall to note how smooth it is.

"It's so smooth"
"It's got a smooth taste to it."
"Very smooth"
"Oh, it goes down so smooth."
"You have to pay extra for the smoothness."
"One word: Smooth."
"Is this fucking shit fucking smooth or what?"
"(holding back hysterical tears) I can't believe how smooth it is!"
"Smooth."

My eyes are dry, my pits sweat, I feel tired and wired and expired.

I watch some reality television. Some people have no restraint. Some people have no dignity.

I wish McDonald's delivered.

I go check on my girl in the next room, I try to wake her up for some bad sex but she limply bats me away, letting her drunken arms fall into her lapful of vomit.

"Fuck it." I say real loud. I go into the bathroom, drink a bottle of NyQuil (it tastes like a forest should taste), crack the mirror with my face and slink back to the couch in the tv room and fall asleep. Blood from a nasty cut on my forehead drips onto my yellow-teeth smile. I pass out with a lit cigarette in my hand, piss stains on my shirt, eggnog on my pants, and blood in my dirty smile.

It's raining outside, I love the holidays.

Fucked in America: A New Year's Ex-Youth Effluvia on Neon Consumerism and Electric Sex Dreams

What a title right? Am I fucking right? C'MON.

Why don't they have blog entry title awards at the Golden Globes? AAGGH IT MAKES NO SENSE!!

I reflect forward towards 2008 and the Beijing Olympics in China.
I reflect back on early 2007 when I went to the Our Body exhibit at the Detroit Science Center.

For those of you who haven't heard of the Our Body exhibit, it is an artful display of actual corpses which have undergone a process called plasticization. This is when all the fluids are replaced with a 'sort' of embalming material which preserves color and texture of the flesh while making it hard and inflexible. In this way they are able to take eviscerated human bodies and pose them riding bikes or throwing a frisbee. They present these bodies in cross-sections and 'explode' muscle groups or ligaments in order to show the maddeningly complex way our bodies are construced from layer upon layer of bone, muscle, flesh and sinew. It's part educational, part 'Holy Fucking Shit!' moments.

But where do they get the bodies from? True story: the bodies are from executed Chinese prisoners, donated from prisons in China...where human rights exist in the same way internet comments pages will be looked at as our era's Library of Alexandria: it won't and you should be burned to the ground by Greek Men. Or something like that...I forget what I was trying to accomplish with this reference. Blame the single-barreled Eagle Rare Bourbon my parents picked up in Kentucky. So smooth.

Basically, my point is this, Chinese Athletes who don't bring home gold medals in 2008 may very well be half a torso playing guitar in a Detroit Museum in 2009. So L'Haim! Happy New Years.

So what does it mean to be an American in this century of centuries? Commercials get more sexual with every passing year. I know sex sells, I'm not that naive...but shouldn't sex sell things that are peripherally related to sex? Like condoms, alcohol, car insurance, and Lava Lamp Dildos? (Dildoes? Dildi? What is the plural of Dildo? Is it like moose? "Look at all the moose/Look at all the Dildo" etc. etc. I suppose it would take a very strange turn of events for me to learn the truth) When did sex start to sell toaster strudel, KFC, and Veggie Tales Blu-Ray? (Don't ask about the cucumber and okra slice...When two phallic vegetables join in congress it is an abomination before God and they should both be put to salad, so sayeth the lord our Jolly Green Giant in the Sky, Amen) I can't believe they even use sexual innuendo to sell boner pills. I know that statement may have confused you. I, for one, wouldn't associate boners with sex because, statistically speaking, only about 10% of all boners are actually used for sex. The rest happen in the prescence of exotic looking Professor's Assitants (Maybe she's middle eastern?) or in the morning for no reason (maybe the sunrise is middle eastern) or when watching the episode of Sex in the City where Sara Jessica Parker tries to write a column for how to feel crazy sexy cool while wearing a Burqa in an inexplicably opressive culture where you're as likely to be buried up to your waist in sand and hit with rocks until you die as you are to wooing the cute delivery guy who looks so cute riding on his bike in his little helmet outside your hi-rise corner office with a view because you're a modern empowered woman who doesnt have to fear for her life every time she leaves the house with an ankle exposed without the supervision of a man who is related to you. (I think you see a pattern here...Middle Eastern Chicks are hot and for everything that is wrong with America...at least we encourage that sexual objectification instead of slaughtering it. So...women...take your pick. Ugh. I apologize but then again I don't because if it were up to me, every man who would have a woman culturally enslaved through the shrouding of robes and worse still the mutilation of the clitoris in female infants, so they can never masturbate to internet porn or stray from their husband's bearded gaze...would be...just...whatever happens to people who fall into that sand pit with teeth that Han Solo almost fell into in the Return of the Jedi. I would mutilate your clit as a consenting adult...with my tongue...while you sipped champagne...while listening to the Shin's second album Chutes Too Narrow)

Basically what I'm saying is call me. I = good times and no stoning to death, unless you're into that scene.

By the way, they don't re-run that Sex in the City (SITC) episode that often. I suggest you buy the DVD. It's a real gem. And the conversations those sexy middle aged ladies have over martinis...Racy!

Rawr!

Man sometimes I can't even take my own aloofness seriously.

Quick Joke of The Day?

Did you hear about the new pill that cures erectile dysfunction and social anxiety disorder at the same time?

They're calling it "Boners for Loners"

Last Peacock of Detroit: Part 5 (An Apartment Apart, Chyeah, I'm A Clever One)

Is there any way to write other than drunk and shirtless? I think not. Ask Hemingway, or Chaucer; both prolific drunks who occasionally screeded something in order to finance another couple gin and tonics, or in Dostyevsky's case, another case of dirt vodka. Russian literature is altogether unremarkable except for being really good, really long, and really bleak: just like a good bender on the cheapest alcohol man has yet devised. There's a reason that for a short period in human history two countries of really shameful white people were trying to out-dick each other for world domination: The Robert McNamara-led United States of America and the Trotsky with an icepick hangover Russia/USSR/cold barren place where, as the Beatles say, happiness is a warm radish. Both nations trying to prove that each held the key to the ultimate civilized way. Space Race, Missle Race, Secret Prison race...it was head to head for awhile...no matter. It didn't pan out well for either. One country was defeated by Ronald Reagan, and the other country was defeated by Ronald Reagan. Never trust a man willing to spend more money on nuclear weapons in space than minorites on the ground. I'm not saying that Ronald Reagan invented AIDS and crack cocaine in much the same way that Robert Fulton didn't really invent the Steamboat. They just were able to market it better than their competition.

Jokes, jokes, jokes, jokes, jokes. But where is the story? Well, fuck you. I'm not a monkey, monkeys wear suits with monocles and ride unicycles whereas I look better in a plain zip-up hoodie and brown cords. True story. Monkeys write stories, for they have an infinite number of poo-flinging bretheren and an infinite number of keyboards. I'm just one Homosapien with a double screened Macintosh. I write reactions, ruminations, alienations, and hilarious abortion bloopers. Did I mention I'm on the razor's edge? Not the blade used for an equal number of beards and suicides, but the brand name 'tween scooter that retails at $100 in most major big-box retailers. I'm on the Razor's edge. I'm really working on my kick flip, my Scooter Gnarly, and my "but daddddddd, I don't want to get a job" backslide. I've been training alot.

...

I guess that counts as some sort of Gonzo prologue for this chapter even though I provided a highly allegorical prologue to this whole fucking monstrosity.

...

Me and Brian reach Kelly's apartment and he lets us in. Kelly is short, with long-ish black and straight hair uniformly lining his brow and headsides. His appearance is neat with a form-fitting black sweater and blue-ish pants. His apartment is a dazzling mess. We, being myself, Brian, and Kelly sit on his lone couch, comfortable for two and drunk cozy for three. We haven't started drinking yet but we sit anyways. We chat idly for awhile but my attention shifts to Kelly's library. Dave Sedaris, some russian dudes, Confederacy Of Dunces, and a slew of philosophical writers fill his shelves. They do not sit in the orderly, 'it's-entirely-possible-I-haven't-read-these-and-am-completely-full-of-shit' kind of way. They seem recently read, glanced at, flipped through, re-read and tossed aside. Kelly is a voracious reader. He is better read than me and Brian combined. The conversation goes from Kelly and I ranting about the subdued comic genius of Sedaris while Brian remains silent to Brian and Kelly exclaiming the genius of some unfamiliar writer while I look at my hands and think about drinking. I am beginning to think Kelly is one of the smartest people I've ever met, and like most smart people, he is complicated. His apartment is hard to move through. It's hard to take a step without knocking over a Paul McCartney electronica record or some pink water pistols, perhaps while weaving through some ancient Nintendo system or empty bottle of Brandy.

Kelly is gay, and often starts sentences with "So this guy I was fucking..." But he does it some mighty justice, being an ambitously artsy DJ and dead-on Prince impersonater. I don't know how I would feel casually reeling off 'So this girl I was fucking vaginally...blah blah blah subverting procreation etc. etc..." That is what straight guys envy about gay guys, I think, the lack of pregnancy fear. It's the kind of thing you worry about when you wake up and fall asleep, or whenever you misplace a turkey baster full of your own sperm in a room full of 35 year old spinsters-in-the-making. Sometimes I don't even know why I fill up turkey basters with my sperm, it's just...I don't know. I should stop, but it's like smoking a cig or gambling...you know you shouldn't, but at the end of a miserable day you just want to jerk it into the funnel end of a turkey baster. Who knows why we do these things? Freud probably had an idea, but he died of Jaw Cancer, so too fucking bad. Another victim of Oedipal cigar smoking.

Kelly is old enough to buy us alcohol, but short on cash. I am high on dependance and wanderlust, so I front all the cash for a trip to the liquor store to which we walk. I pull some money out of a robber ATM and Kelly buys a fifth of Heaven Hill Rum. That, my friends in the intranets, is misleading-fucking-branding. Heaven Hill? Death Valley. It burns and is of a most vomitous candor. 'Tis highly drinkable, however, when mixed with a true Detroit original, Faygo Cola. I had never really noticed Faygo in any manner until I moved to Detroit. In the suburbs the commercial substances reign supreme, Coke, Pepsi, Sierra Mist, and Dr Pepper Shasta Remix Tranny Edition. In Detroit, Faygo dominates store shelves in the same way that unnaturally attractive white people dominate Old Navy Commercials. What about all the fat unattractive whites and blacks and liver-spotted jaundiced purple denizens with KFC catheters who also enjoy the holiday season from the comfort of their couch-tombs? Too Hunter S. for you? I apologize. Fear and loathing with my own inner-critic I suppose. As an aside, I hope that in 100 years that Hunter S. Thompson gets his due credit for changing the way all novels are written. Here's my bold, drunken but highly informed statement...Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is the most influential novel since In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. Please............Read both. You'll be a better person for it.

We return to Kelly's apartment and get our drink on while watching Party Monster. The drinks are strong and the personal admissions are stronger. There's an air of poignancy in our differing personalities reacting so well, but the sappy truth is kept hidden underneath a sheen of Rum and loutishness. Hallelujah! Is it Gay to say I'd make a really great Gay? Well I would. But just like corporate America's glass ceiling, I am unfortunately all-too-good at fucking over women. Har-Har, just a little ironic reverse sexism to confuse everyone who's still reading as to my true intentions, as if I ever had any.

Kelly, though, has another trick up his sleeves, and he pulled out a DVD with the promise of Peacocks. We, Brian and I, were all eyes and teeth. We watched in anticipation for the native Detroit Peacock in celluloid glory.

Last Peacock of Detroit: Part 4 - Return to Narrative.

So me and Brian were hardly buzzed, having endured a short walk through uncharted territory. Past the empty highway werewithall, we walked past a simply nice building, some sort of office deal, I figured. Not the case. I read the signage on the front lawn in between the main road and the circle drive. It read Detroit University Prepatory School.

"Let's go Prep!" I shouted, about 2 years backwards in time.

I was once a cross country runner. Long legs and powerful lungs over the distance of many miles, teammates in tow, pushing my body and mind to their aerobic limits. An invitational meet, taking place about 2 years before the night of peacocks, at a city park in Northern Troy.

This cross country invitational meet was called the Hanson's Invitational, being sponsored by a group of national class marathon runners who live and train together, all the while working at Hanson's Shoe Store. Imagine that, an Olympian selling you a pair of Nike's so you can charge your fat ass up victory hill in all the comfort that $110 dollars worth of sweat-shop labor can buy. "My country tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, (wiping the tears of laughter from my brow, I need an Adidas Sweatband)" Etc. and so on forever... And at this meet some two years ago I witnessed a thing, a pre-meditated act worth noting. A black team (Cross Country is almost as white a sport as Hockey, Lacrosse, or Investment Banking) from Detroit University Prep would sprint to the front of the pack at the start of the race, being the first runners to pass 200 yards of the 3.1 mile race. A half mile later, the team of seven would occupy, almost perfectly, the last seven position of the 150-man race. They went from the glory of winning the starting gun to embarassingly bringing up the rear of the pack. There were seperate races for varsity boys and junior varsity boys, so after running in the varsity race I jogged around a bit with a teammate to watch the second race and cheer on members of my team putting themselves through the same grueling event I had just finished. In doing so, me and my teammate began to mock the University Prep team for being such unabashedly lazy runners. The U. Prep coach would attempt to motivate his runners, only to have one retort: "Maaaan, I don't even feel like running". Then, as if I wasn't enjoying myself enough, I saw T.G.T.I.E.S. (The Greatest Thing I Ever Saw). In the last quarter mile of the race, the runners exited the woods and ran a big loop to cross a bridge and then run the final straightaway to the finish line. The exit of the woods and the bridge were about 20 feet apart, meaning that the loop made the runners go the quartermile distance away from both, in order that the race be the uniform 3.1 mile distance. While standing on the finishing side of the bridge, I stood and clapped for the runners from my high school who grimaced and crossed the bridge in full sprint, looking to the finish. A University Prep runner came trudging along after awhile, and I stood clapping for him too. "Let's go Prep!" I said with equal parts sarcasm and enthusiam. I was kind of a running elitist ass, but so be it. As the Prep runner approached the bridge from his side, another Prep runner came from the bushes to join him. The bushes were on the side of the woods, meaning that the runner had cut about a quarter mile off the course. He looked around so sheepishly, knowing full well what he was doing. Me and my teammate-in-mocking looked at each other and fell to the ground laughing uncontrollably as the two Prep runners jogged lightly by us. Neither of us could believe it. Maybe if someone in some tyrant's gym class hated running and had dubious morals, he could conceive of cutting a run short, but this was Cross Country, this was a Big Time Cross Country Meet. We loved running. We loved competition. Cross Country runners do not cut courses. To do it while being not far off from last place, while punctually coming forth from the bushes to join a teammate in full view of several spectators, was such charming malfeasance that we could not help but celebrate the observance of such a pathetic feat. It was the greatest thing I ever saw. The greatest thing I ever saw. "Let's go Prep!" Hahahahahahahahahaha, and so on and so forth forever.

While walking with Brian through a damp and dark Detroit neighborhood, I suddenly find myself in front of the school which trained such reputable student-athletes. I could hear them now:
"Maaan, I don't even feel like running"
And my imaginary response:
"Dude, you fucking joined the fucking Cross Country Team. Hats off to you, sir."

I had no choice, I called my former teammate Evan, the guy who had witnessed T.G.T.I.E.S with me. I told him I was in front of a building in Detroit that I could not believe my good fortunes in stumbling upon. Without a prompt he asked if I was in front of Detroit University Prep. He knew. It was two years later but he knew. You may have had to be in on high school distance running culture to understand the abject greatness of seeing that kid guiltily cut the course, but if you can just try and grasp it, let me just say, in regards to Evan, it may very well be his T.G.T.I.E.S also.

...

Oakland county is one of the top 3 richest counties in the country, and I live in it? Really? Where's my private jet Dad? Where's my Gucci track suit, Mom? If I am among the rich of the kind-of rich, as all of my twenty years give me evidence thereof, the upper-middle class as they say.........why do I feel like such a fucking bum? (Always asking my parents for money. Etc.)

Oakland County, Michigan, is not an oasis, however. I recount a night out with my often invoked ex-girlfriend, to the frontier that is northern Oakland County. Oakland County is perhaps a mirror image of the United States today, in the respect that Southern residents posess all the wealth, intelligence, and liberalism, whereas the bros of northern Oakland County act the part of John Wayne, minus all the nuanced cultural relativism. That is to say, they're a bunch of hicks. A bunch of northern Oakland Country Hicks.

It's not hate in my heart as it simply stated, I can not relate.

I go out for an evening with my ex-girlfriend, to meet up with her friends. We then travel on to a sprawling apartment complex built around a pointless man-made pond. We enter to the scene of bros drinking beer playing Halo 3. No disrespect in the aformentioned description: I love beer and like Halo. But it's a small apartment filled with strangers and there's no place to sit. I offer a seat to my ex and stand while making small talk. Is it strained? Is it possible that we never connected at all? No. I won't believe it. We make small talk for awhile as the apartment owner and a friend have an honest-to-god argument over who graduated Eisenhower High School with the lowest GPA.

"I got out of that bitch with a 1.7, man"
"Dude you know I got you beat, I earned a 1.5 by the very end."

Other random dudes in the room: "That's right. WhoopWhoopWhoop. Yeaaaaaaaaa!"

Now is not the time to begin chatting about Barack Obama's possible future domestic policy. I'll save that discussion for my imagination, where such things are believed by the mainstream media to actually take place.

So I look into my ex's beautiful brown eyes and I'm lost for small talk. I'd rather just tell her she's beautiful and carry her away if it were socially acceptable. It's not. Then the general emotion in the room starts to stir. Big boys in Abercrombie shirts shift their weight erratically in softly cushioned sofas. The murmurs of a long awaited guest spread throughout the room.

An average looking guy, perhaps on the ugly side of breathing, entered the apartment and the boys were unabashedly high-fiving one another. A beautiful/hysterical sight to behold. He had a plastic bag in his right hand. In that plastic bag lay 50 thick pink pills. It was revealed that these were known as double-stacks and contained half-ecstasy, half-opium. For every NOCH (Northern Oakland County Hick) that crushed up a pill and snorted it right off the table through a dollar bill, I felt less and less like staying. What a shame though. I got offered free ecstasy by a particularly boyish and charming resident, but turned it down becuase I wouldn't have liked to harbor it for long.

When noses were grabbed and rubbed in confused bursts of moaning delight, I decided it was time to go. I felt it fair, and bid everyone a fair farewell. It was almost a month ago now, and I predict at least one of them to be dead by now. It's a fairly dark assesment, but everyone dies. Why not wishful thinking eliminating the most reckless of our society? I wish them well. I wish them life, and 401k's, and smooth jazz and a really tasteful coffin. My coffin will be bedazzled as fuck.

You have my word.

Next time I'll write about Kelly and:

Kelly
Nietchze
Gay porn
Heaven Hill Rum
Peacocks
DJ's
Good Neighbors
Etc.
Etc.
Blah

Last Peacock of Detroit: Part 3 (Fucked up Again)

As if I were trying to invite a new type a literary narrative. As if. How rude. All I know is I'v been drinking wine and black dog beer and popping a few oxycotin. I don't see what the big deal is. It's just another useful additive to daily life that shuttles you a distance off shore. Thank god for it. It seems everyone I meet these days is some sort of jesus freak, exhibitionist fag, total douche bag, or regular rational person. What kind of society is this? Other people besides me? Rubbish and habedashery, pure and simple. If I were to have band practice scrumming along, some annoying synth in the background playing melodies straight out of grade school playground humiliation, don't you think my life would be simpler by now? I mean holy fuck. I sit at this computer, pixaleted screen listening to the deep deep deep guitar screeds of an Eric Schwab waiting for this fucking Oxy to kick in.

Do I blame my ex girl-friend who broke up with me over the phone with no warning?

I'd take her back, but that's just wishful thinking. If classic drug-seeking behavior is the pathetic winter balm, then at least it's made me introspective. At least I know the cure is not the cause. Feeling sorry for one's self has never been such a conspicuous affair, to be tried, to be truth. Fuck.

It's not going to happen. If it did, well then, Mazel Tov! I'm a jew now...the only organized religion I've ever felt worth a damn. Must be so if must be dreams must be true. If felt, so desired.

So now I am wasted. But not like a frat boy, like a resevoir untapped is wasted. Like poison in the mercurial supply. Like too many melodies for the man. Ugh. I am wasted like all my faculties put to naught, for the simple reason of being too annoying. A guitar solo annotated over this grief could do me well, and I feel like calling on former friends, no matter how awkward that good ol' middle class re-awakining might be. Cue the bass solo, I'm down with Quinn and future formers of my advanced past self. Objections and contradictions, one more round! Take me back. Take me back, Take me back.

Ugh. Another night burning alive in a cold Detroit bed.

And what to say to the computer screen.

"You are a reflection but you are not me. Remember that, and set a reminder if i can't." Oh Jesus. I want to escape, no matter how good the chorus is. Sometimes I am the smartest being ever granted thought, sometime I am absolute trash. Someone who can't spare a glance to the mirror or a screen saved anonymously. Shiiiiiit. Never memorized any deadlines.

So here I am, fucked up again. Accomplished nothing, MISSSSSSION:never die.

Har-har. Don't make me laugh. I can cry on my own. Rarely do, I'm a man.

Has my truth stripped you bare yet? Bare breasted orangutang with a pretensious accent and beret. Coming to see my show, my art gallery 'here we go'. Walking through the garden of modern eden, too sad to leave, to busy to ever stay. Who am I? Who are you?

It's all bullshit when you choke on expensive sushi or take a cheap bullet to the head. So I hope to never die. Simple, elegant, immortal, boisterous.

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. I'm laughing. Are you?

(Don't tell me your problems lady)

The Last Peacock of Detroit: "Passing"

PART 2

So there were peacocks. I had seen them once at night, in a car with a girl, when suddenly her ex-boyfriend ran up to the car from out of nowhere and got in. I guess this trip was less about showing me the local mythozoology, and more about some awkward booty call. We went back to her apartment and watched some semi-decent 90's movie called Doom Generation and I got stinking drunk on Hennesey while the two of them cuddled on a seperate couch. Typical miserable shit.

So now, about a year and a half later, I found myself back on Fourth Street exactly by coincidence. Meeting up with Brian, we went to his friend's place. He claimed it was closer than it was, but it didn't really matter because it wasn't that cold out. It was a bizarre walk, in ways. We left his Apartment in Midtown, right by Woodward, in sight of the DIA, and walked a couple blocks until we were surrounded by highways. Then we made a left and suddenly there stood an old bearded hippy beside his bike, drenched in light from above. It was about 11pm, which is a terribly early time to find God in Detroit, but could we have done it? He was surrounded by trees and friendly brownstones, peaceful corners and tastefully rec'ed-out porches. He kicked his feet and looked nervously at us. Even God gets creeped out sometimes, and I don't blame him. Unfortunately, it wasn't a Heavenly glow he was bathing in, but an oddly placed, very tall street lamp. His beard wasn't a grandfatherly white but a dirty grey. He smiled when he realized we were up to no bad, and we smiled back when he rapt off suddenly,

"You never know who's going to come through here."

That's true, I thought to myself. Maybe he was being a bit greedy, this is Detroit, after all...not some gated community. Not everyone who's simply passing through can hand out laurel wreaths and have Peace Doves hold steady flight patterns above their head. Maybe he's just rattled from living in Detroit for too long. We should have beat him up and taken his bike, which would teach him a well needed lesson in misplaced trust. Just because we look young and have backpacks and are talking about hypothetical civic problems within the Smurf community, doesn't mean we're not ready to bring the pain. It's not our fault this nasty old racist saw a couple white faces and let his gaurd down. I'll cut the motherfucker just for looking at all...

Just kidding, he seemed like a nice guy.

The Last Peacock of Detroit: Prelude and Part 1

PRELUDE

"It was always good, you know? Right up there to the last unsuspecting moment, picturing yourself climbing up those endless forested hills as you drive on the highway through the valley. You'd be stopping at rest areas and tourist traps, just for a photograph or a sandwich or a shit, just for the things you had to do to remind yourself you did something. Really, however, I could have kept driving forever, if I never got hungry and I never ran out on gasoline, I would have just hoped for a good day's weather and light traffic. It was never about doing anything really. I was happy then. Not moving while propelling endlessly down the set path in front of me, never really getting too deep in thought. Not like the old days. Not like the walking ones. A lonesome hitchhiker promoted to spartan driver, a new car, a new car. I'd never get to climb those pine walls on either side of me, scaling upwards at maddening angles towards Heaven, but that was fine. I could picture myself with a good pair of shoes and a hiking stick, a smile and burning legs on warm wet morning, climbing up those highway hillsides to see what the air tasted like at the top. All of these things that were never to be, just happy little thoughts that came and went with little importance or resonance, wasting time that could not be wasted. The driving was always nice, even when it wasn't. I could have been spinning my tires with no visibility, but I was in the car. I had a little control of the car; the car took me places I couldn't have gone otherwise. It was a simple, elegant relationship that I thought would take me to that very final place of the road in front of me: below the horizon. To have trust in one another, pick up speed, finally cross all paths at once and then feel nothing, evermore. Yes, the driving was always very nice, very splendid. Now my car is gone. I stand kicking rocks by the side of the valley highway, looking down in calculation at my shoes and then up up up up up up up straining my neck up. I look down for the last time and disappear into the forest."

---

PART 1

Looking at the screen, you might have thought that Peacocks were native to Detroit and Southeast Michigan in general. It was just seeing them on this semi-pornographic DVD either; I had seen them in person, about a year and half before this. My first encounter with the Peacocks of Fourth Street was an unexpected one; meeting a put-upon girl who drove me without warning to a tucked-away street I had never seen before. She told me about the peacocks and for the longest time I thought she was joking. I laughed it off as one of those conversational jokes with no punchline, just that kind where one person yammers on about peacocks or unicorns or the Second Amendment or "punk ethos" or Tupperware as if it were really dire and important, then you both share a glance and laugh at the notion that someone would, in reality, treat such a diatribe with sincerity and conviction. These conversations take place outside of reality, mocking some invisible third party that one supposes exists in some stupid part of the country. So you just nod your head, acknowledge the other person's creativity and your obviously shared values, and move on. This was soooo not one of those. We come to this street and stop, and she presses on about the fucking peacocks. I tell her to stop. She says they live in the trees. Now I find myself in some kind of live-wire, semiotic nightmare...either Detroit supports the only tree dwelling peacocks in the world, or she is really committing to this fake conversation. She may be a sarcastic world-champion, operating on a level of absurd cynicism and joyless satire that 99.9% of the population isn't fit to comprehend. Am I the butt of this ludicrous peacock fantasy? Why won't she let up? I am ready to see some sort of peacock tree-fort equipped with rope ladder and plasma screen tv, or come to the realization that she is a black hearted genius and I better start playing along lest I be thought of as some kind of unironic hayseed. Thankfully I've grown up since then. A happy compromise was suddenly reached when we saw a peacock wandering around, not in the canopy of some Elm, but at ground level. I basically called her dumb for insisting they were the tree-dwelling sort.

"The tree dwelling peacocks live in Flint" I smirked. What kind of laid back asshole am I?

MANgurt: The Yogurt for Real Men

Video directed by my brother Rob, and created by some very funny people.

Hogsmear 2008: Politix Analysis (Issues and Shit, Cracker)

Elections are important. They decide things. Like which nation's civilians get bombed for the next four years. (Hint: It won't be in Europe, or South America, Or Australia, or Africa, or Russia, or China, or any place with Asians in it. And not Canada or Mexico) Give up? (No, really. Give up.)

Elections can't take place without voting. Since the very same people who buy Ann Coulter books and make a skeezy, meth-tinged homophobic anti-semite a bucktoothed millionaire has the same right to representation as you, it's important to get out there and pull some levers. Then go and vote.

But who to vote for? When in doubt, it's important to look at the issues. But what are issues? Issues are what serial killers and child predators have. Deep, Dark, Disturbing Issues...like campaign finance reform! That is an issue. Wars are often issues. Gun control is not an issue, for as Benjamin Franklin once said "Assault Rifles give me mad bonerzz$$!$!$!lol"

Only when you are a well informed voter can you make the right decision about your nation's leadership. Otherwise, consult your local Effigy Superstore on proper Effigy maintenance and etiquette. So, without further ado, The Boom Ends presents exclusive insight on your 2008 presidential candidates.

-Chris Dodd sounds like "Piss Pod"

-Barack Obama's last name sounds eerily similar to John Wilkes Booth, the guy who shot Lincoln.

-Hilary ain't wearin' nuthin' under that pantsuit.

-Where it may seem like Dennis Kucinich has the highest scoring name for Scrabble, that distinction actually goes to Free Soil Party Candidate Zyzzus Qixizjjj.

-Gay Marriage is actually legal inside the 'free zone' of the voting booth, as is Sodomy, Fireworks, Absinthe, Free Cable, and Parking Past 2AM.

-Tom Tancredo hasn't even heard of Tom Tancredo.

-Joe Biden, 67, who really got into the whole generation-X slacker thing in the early 90's, is running ironically.

-Ellen DeGeneres supports anti-gay marriage candidate Fred Thompson, but only because of his hot wife. Beware, Fred. At first you find her wacky dancing quite charming, and her comedy non-threatening. Next thing you know she's squatting on a pink latex pyramid while she's got a strap-on balls deep in wife of thirteen years. If it happened to Guiliani, it can happen to anyone.

-If you feel embarassed or slightly stupid for voting on a candidate based on SNL impersonations, you are obviously too hard on yourself. It's better than succumbing to a strongly worded bumped sticker.

-Mitt Romney describes himself as "A complete and utter tool."

-John McCain associates the film "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" with his time in a Vietnamese P.O.W. camp.

-Al Gore urges people to use public transportation and carpooling to reduce CO2 emissions. I'm very thankful for him raising awareness on Global Warming. So next time I see Al Gore on a city bus I'm going to blow him.

Well that's all I can think of for now. Remember, as Malcolm X once said "Vote with your dick, end recession quick" Words to live by.

Hogsmear 2008: What Ron Paul Needs To Win The Election...

...is a little guitar shreddery. You can't make it on isolationist foreign policy and a return to the gold standard alone.

Sprint: We'll Fuck Ya Inee Ass!

Part 1: I like this guy's videos. A very truthful corporate slogan.

Popular Halloween Costumes at Michigan State University or The War on Celebratority or Dumbledore: Top or Bottom?

Ah, Halloween. Is there any other holiday as wonderfully secular? It would seem that in these modern times there goes not a holiday that doesn't piss some people off rather royally. Thanksgiving and Columbus Day please the majority with their America-Genesis mythology but come under fire from Native America groups (or Injuns, for the comically charming lay-racist) for the fact that instead of scrumptous turkey dinners and epic continental discoveries, it was mostly about white europeans raping squaws. Christmas and the Republicans who defend it will make everyone well aware of the 'War on Christmas', whose Geneva Conventions equivalent states that for every Christmas Tree or Nativity Scene, there must be a giant Menorah near by, like a humidifyer and de-humidifyer running full blast side by side in order to cancel each other out. In fact, to the delight of dreidel manufacturers everywhere, it could be argued that the 'War on Christmas' is solely responsible for Hanukkah's promotion from minor Jewish holiday to nationally-accepted rival to Christmas. Which is to say, the 'War on Christmas' is a bunch of bogus hype bullshit espoused to make family values Christians just a little bit more defensive and just a little bit more loyal to their political representative of choice. Tis the Season! L'haim! Valentine's Day is loathed by lonely people and those who have complex relationships whose essence cannot be expressed on the limited space of a candy heart. You see plenty of "Be Mine" or "Lover Boy" but never "I care for you but you can't meet my parents because they still use the word 'Miscegnation' seriously and would probably stop paying for my tuition if they found out about us". Easter is hated by pet rabbits who are invariably expected by their child-masters to lay eggs, when as we educated adults all know, bunnies reproduce via spores. Martin Luther King Jr. Day has many detracters, ranging from confused idolizers of the founder of Protestantism to people who enjoy the comedy of Larry The Cable Guy. (In this life you can choose only one motto: Let Freedom Ring, or Git 'R Done) Arbor Day finds no celebration from conservatives who tie environmentalism to it's next closest liberal-democratic ideal, legalized sodomy. (Hug a Tree = Suck a Cock?)

But then comes Halloween. Nobody hates Halloween. Well, that is an exaggeration. I wish nobody hated Halloween. People hate halloween for the same reason Harry Potter gets banned from time to time in Southern States, because it gets interpreted by hardcore Christians as open and shameless devil worship. Evangelicals hate Halloween because little kids go around dressed as dead people or spirits, and as we all know, fundamentalist Christians would never brainwash children about the supernatural. The same people hate Harry Potter for the same reason, magic powers, evil forces, themes of afterlife and rebirth, yet no credit to the big guy upstairs. Now that author J.K. Rowling explained that Dumbledore is, in fact, gay, I could see some hilariously inept reactionary press conference happening in some Bible-belt library. Having not read any of the books and only having seen two of the H.P. movies, I have only one Dumbledore gay joke, and it goes as follows: Talk about a Beard!

But I repress...

I was up at Michigan State University for the weekend preceding Halloween, to visit my girlfriend and partake in some collegiate-style Halloween festivities. Having my collection of costumes thrown out by my parents (Twinkie, Milk Carton, Rasta Man, Cow, and Clown...all of them extremely "money") I had to do a rather lame slapdash of clothing articles upon my person. I wore a Cosby Sweater, A Bathrobe, and a Rainbow-Knit Hat. I thought I could pass as 'The Dude' from The Big Lebowski with the bathrobe and the same color hair, but some girl told me I looked like Johnny Depp from Secret Window. I'm not sure if she meant that I am incredibly good looking, or that after ingesting Jack Daniels I might kill her with a shovel. (After-the-fact Spoiler Alert!) I take it to mean the former, but this is Halloween, and you never know.

I spent the night hanging out with my girlfriend and three of her friends. So we got out to some Frat Party, some Sigma Gamma Epsilon Omega Chi Latte BallGag Spectacular on Linden Street. It was alright, but half the battle was getting there in the first place. We walked about three quarters of a mile from the Brody Dorms to Linden street in about 40 degree weather. We were, collectively, a cat, a cat, Amy Winehouse, Little Miss Muffet, and whatever the hell I was. I was the only one dressed for the weather, and it was like some death march getting there. There was even talk of getting a cab to take us the last quarter mile when they really started to suffer. I had sympathy for them, but on the other hand, they were far from the least covered females walking in packs down Michigan Avenue. Some costumes literally consisted of bra and panties with patterns indicative of a certain occupation. Black and White stripes on the underwear meant some sort of sports referee. Yellow with black and white checkered border was supposed to represent a taxi driver, I guess, in the way that they actually look like a taxi cab. I think this qualifies as ninth-wave feminism, where young women are empowered by choosing to suffer frostbite and wind burn as they present themselves as sexual objects. (G String and Nipple Clamps = Ghost of Gloria Steinem Costume)

One amazing costume I saw was a clever two-parter. The first part consisted of a girl dressing like an angel. The second part consisted of drinking Jager Bombs until she could no longer walk on her own, hitting on any set of cock 'n balls that she happened to slump down next to, alternately groping guys and lamenting on her 'awesome' boyfriend in Ohio. Get it? A Fallen Angel! Some people are so damn creative, really, hats off to them. So far I've only talked about girls' costumes, failing to mention what is, by far, the most popular halloween costume among Frat guys everywhere: The Drunken Asshole. The Drunken Asshole is a very flexible costume, which can at times resemble Harry Potter, Spider Man, A Viking, Dick in a Box guys, or even a baby. One constant theme underlies them all, the person behind the mask is a drunken asshole. In this way, really, shouting incoherently at strangers, asking 'who do you know here?' in an overcrowded house, and covering your room's wall in Natural Ice 30-Pack Box Tops goes to show that for a really great Halloween costume, you really have to plan months in advance.

Top Halloween Costumes

Top Halloween Costumes, London circa 1835.
1. Slashed Prostitute (too soon?)
2. Crocodile Hunter with a Stingray Barb in Heart (too early?)
3. Cholera Bacteria
4. Street Urchin (so authentic!)
5. Ghost of Christmas Past

Top Halloween Costumes, Africa
1. A Machete and Assault Rifle carrying Child Soldier high on Cocaine and Gunpowder
2. Unicef Crate
3. AIDS Virus
4. N!xua, star of Gods Must Be Crazy and Gods Must Be Crazy 2
5. Optimus Prime from Micheal Bay's Transformers

Top Halloween Costumes, Detroit
1. "What the fuck is y'all looking at, cuz?"
2. Oversized Scarface T-Shirt
3. Tumbleweed
4. Former Detroit Piston and Master of the Universe Jon Barry
5. Man in search of belt, obviously

Top Halloween Costumes, circa 2052AD
1. Glacier
2. Cyborg Harry Potter (only half intentionally)
3. The Great Cannibal Warlord Mitt Romney
4. Aborted Baby (very popular for horrifying, horrifying reasons)
5. Suri Cruise

Top Halloween Costumes, Iran (Men)
1. Great Satan (not as much red as you'd think, equally white and blue)
2. Enriched Uranium (cardboard and glow paint, cheap and easy!)
3. Mohammad (Blank Face, hilarious and theologically accurate!)
4. Joey Fatone
5. Road-Flare Enthusiast (with explosive personality)

Top Halloween Costumes, Iran (Women)
1. Traffic Cone
2. Ghost
3. Statue covered with tarp
4. Tree
5. Cousin It

Top Halloween Costumes of People Making more than $50,000,000 a Year
1. Person Making between $10,000,000 and $49,999,999 a year
2. Toilet Paper Roll of $100 Dollar Bills
3. Presidential Candidate
4. Star Wars Character Not in any Movies, but from the Star Wars Novels that take place 1,000 years before the original movies. (Megarich Silicon Valley Nerdssss and Dorkz)
5. Person with Soul

Top Halloween Costumes of Children of Born Again Evangelical Christians
1. Mommy says Halloween is a wicked paganistic celebration of Satan and Witchcraft so we just stay in and pray for the souls of the other neighborhood children, even though I sometimes get jealous when they talk about their candy at school the next day. I guess it won't be a problem anymore because I'll be homeschooled next year because my English teacher assigned our class Harry Potter and Daddy says Harry Potter is an anti-Christian hate book written by an atheist woman who had children out of wedlock.

What's in a Meme? (God I am too cutesy-clever for my own good, kill me)

Thoughts, too many thoughts. Too many irons in the fire. Irons' too big for the fire, which begs the question: more wood to burn or less irons to have? Easy, answer the American way, more flame, more combustible energy. Bicep, Bicep, mind, brain, stem, left foot, right foot, always forward. Ugh.

Anyways. Wish I could grunt and every notion gets put down on paper, inky discharge from forehead. Mind spray onto papyrus, in twelve point helvetica font.

Excuse the poetics, listening to Radiohead and can't help it. Some angry voices emanating from the gas station behind my house snap me back to reality. Upon further discerning of dialogue, not angry, just loud. Perhaps overly sassy, which no one seems to be accused of anymore. I wonder why.

"Bro! You're being too sassy, bro."

So the other night I watched this marathon of themed shows on The Learning Channel, and the theme was world's tallest people. Tallest woman was a Chinese farmer's daughter who stood 7 foot 8 inches. Tallest man was (I forget what country, something formerly Soviet) 8 foot 4 inches. I'm not sure why, but I've always been fascinated with the physical extremes of human existence.

Fattest Person Ever Recorded: 1,600 lbs. (A Michigan woman, no less. Must be our delicious maple syrup)
Oldest Person Ever Recorded: 122 years. (Awesome quote "God has forgotten about me")
Tallest Person Ever: 8 Feet 11 Inches (We need more 9 foot tall people. Like a race of giants who live in the woods)

And of course...

The Shortest Person Ever (Adult, of course, babies have an unfair advantage): 1 Foot 10.5 Inches

So those are the extremes of the human body; what it can endure, withstand, and become. Myself never being satisfied, I guess it's just not weird enough for me. Why don't we have 10 foot tall people living for 135 years? Why can't someone be 2,000 lbs? There should be people who are 1 foot tall, and be able to breathe under water. (Think of the advances in sport fishing it would create! Instead of worms you'd bait your hooks with coffee, donuts, cash, or porno) The human race is too boring. The whole color scheme thing isn't doing it for me anymore. So what if Kenyans have jet-black skin, and so what if Albinos make snow angels and then dissappear? We need more variety. How about people who glow in the dark? Blah blah blah. I'm going to stop writing before I say some X-men type shit. That's not the point. The point is that if there were thousands of people who were between 8 and 9 feet, then that fatass Shaquille O'Neil would be out of a job. That's what this whole essay has been about, from the very beginning. Fuck Shaq.

Film Festival, Part 1: "Eggs" (And why you should eat them during the last 20 minutes of 2001: A Space Odyssey)

A film by a friend of mine, now Chicago based, the late, great, Alex Hoxie (still alive), and his collaborator, Noah.

Fear and Loathing at Michigan State University

"Jesus Christ, what are these goddamn animals?"

Forget bat country, this is frat country. I find myself in East Lansing, Michigan, which would be an altogether unremarkable city if not for being the home of a certain Michigan State University; home to 44,000 young souls seeking higher learning and more satisfying orgasms. There's a feeling of uncertainty in the air, owing to two recent developments within the complicated Michigan legislature. First and foremost, as I write, the State is 24 hours from a virtual shut-down. The budget is gone and there was no other feasible option other than to completely stop the gears of government. 9 days of autonomous city and county control. Literal city states, hearkening back to Ancient Greece: Sparta and Athens. "This! Is! Lansing!" How exciting to be alive and not-so-well in this one state recession we all find ourselves. So what now? No state police. No hard liquor. No lottery. No casinos. Madness. Lawlessness. Nine days of prohibition. Who will be our Al Capone for a week and a half? Who will step up and provide back-room high-stakes poker and rapidly destabilizing cocktails? Certainly not myself...I'm busy enough as it is being an amateur blogger and even more amateur college student.

Which brings me to the second development, probably more palpable among the denizens of this brick and beer society - the abolition of the mandatory breathalyzer law. Struck down by an enlightened circuit court judge just a few days ago, police can no longer force pedestrians to take a breathalyzer. Where before, minors would face a virtual lose-lose for being imposed upon by cops for the charge of imbibing spirits without sitting on this rock Earth for less than 21 revolutions around the sun. Take a breathalyzer and get an MIP, or refuse and get an MIP. No longer. Now refusing a breathalyzer, with the exception of being fall-down drunk, results in a nifty thing called a 'civil infraction' and a paltry fine of $100(98 dollars Canadian). Take it from me, someone who's been through the bullshit which is the grueling court and trial process of the much-hated MIP, a hundred dollars is a walk of cake compared to the bureaucratic struggle of the dreaded alternative.

...I can feel the casual order of things already breaking down. Everything would appear to be under standard operating procedure: rich and poor collegians alike drink shitty beer and horrible vodka, break pizza bread over beer pong and beer bongs. Sorority girls who pay for friends drink jello shots under watchful eye of leering ape-men. People on cell phones walk past other people on cell phones as they stroll down Grand River Avenue, passing by soft-core American Apparel poster ads, passing by people smoking cigarettes in a 7-11 parking lot. Packs of like-raced people walk together, enjoying the night the way only people with their facial features can. Asians, Indians, Blacks, Whites, Arabs, segregated diversity in the eternal style of public education institutions. Of course I'm overgeneralizing here, but there's a feel to this place, a uneasy feel. Individuals are great, groups are horrifying. But everything continues as normal, because hey, it's Saturday night.

And the State of Michigan has no money.

And the police have just a little less power over the backwards baseball hat types.

Me and my companion ride bikes, dodging ignorant cars and sarcastic pedestrians. We lock our bikes up to a tree and venture into a party where she was supposed to meet some friends. We come up to the front door, and knock. A chubby male face appears in a small glass window beside the door, obscured by a red sheet covering his side of the wall.

"Go to the back." He says. These are the rules. Access points. God forbid people come and go as they please. I can see the reasoning though, if doors were left open, just about anyone could walk up off the street. Strangers. Drunks. Madmen. So we walk around the back and see whomever hosted the party and about 250 of his or her closest friends. It's crowded. It's hard to move through the teeming masses with clasped hands. I want to go. She wants to stay. We stay.

We make our way up to the second floor of this house, and I'm already enjoying the non-frat vibe. Anyone who's experienced both frat and co-op parties will know that this DIFFERENCE can be extracted from the very air, the sweat of the brow, the quality of beer, and the look of the people involved. Frats offer more hairgel and less beard. Co-ops offer more eclectic clothing and less future Playboy rejects (Dyed Blonde, Tan-orange skin, lots of pep, and weird legs). Frats offer more Journey and less Talking Heads (time and place...for everything). Co-ops strive for utopia and get annoying optimism but genuine friendliness; Frats strive for facism and get mildly cranky parliamentarianism and mid-american phallocentrism. Everything in it's right place. Rounding a corner into a big room full of people, it occurs to me that this is a theme party. An underwear party, to be more exacting. Boys and girls down to briefs and bras, dancing to a band which I cannot see behind the skin-bared crowd. Staccato drums, ratchety guitar, solid bass work and a bleating saxophone, together, it's super funky and the dancing throngs give back their love by packing the room and moving in all directions. We shed shirts and dance. Being one of the better parties I've been to, I found myself in one of those lost-in-the-moment mindsets. The times you enjoy most are some of the times with the least concrete memories; you remember the where and the why, and the general thoughtless joy, but sense details, scene, smell, temperature...gone forever. You know what it FEELS like to sit in a car shop reading two month old golf magazines while you wait for your oil to get checked before you have to go to work. You can SEE the grey carpet and you can TASTE the black, bitter but stimulating coffee. You have no choice but to pay attention. Somehow, however, dancing shirtless with your girlfriend to good music in a room full of likewise pale and euphoric people, somehow that feeling gets lost in that room, in that hour, in some non-responding part of your brain forever. Fleeting glimpses, at best. The song ends, and a friend of mine comes out of the ephemera and tells me casually that the cops are here, at the party. The fear. On the eve of the shutdown, they've come. They've come for some hippy headbashing, I assure myself. This is 1968, This is Kent State - but we're not protesting any war, we're not trying to change the world, we just wanna get drunk. For this night, as far as we're concerned, we want the world to stay the same. Most people continue dancing, we make our way down the stairs, out the back door, by some cops questioning an inebriated Egyptian, and over to our locked up bikes. We flee into the night.

4 Reasons Not To Believe in Evolution

1. Evolution's inventor, Charles Darwin, was probably called 'Chuck' by his friends. Meanwhile, God's friends just call him 'The G-Man'. Who would you trust? Chuck or The G-Man? Slam Dunk, case closed.

2. If we came from monkeys, why are there still monkeys? (Or bananas, for that matter. When's the last time you saw someone eating a banana? If anything, we evolved from PowerBars)

3. Primordial Stew is something they sell at Whole Foods, not a genesis theory. Plus, it's hot and delicious and only $3.99 for a generous sized bowl

and finally...

4. If Creation Science ever became a class in public high schools and universities, think about how fucking easy it would be. Every multiple choice question would be as follows:

Giraffes have long necks. This helps them eat from tall trees. Who gets credit for this?
A-The Father
B-The Son
C-The Holy Ghost
D-All of the Above
E-None of the Above (You are damned to hell forever)

I mean, as college admissions get tougher and more selective, every future student could use an easy A class like this. Won't someone please think of the children?

The Boomends Comics Division Proudly Presents: "Pictures Are Overrated: Issue 1"

click to enlarge...(that's what she... {you know what? fuck it})



lol meta jokes

May Be Disturbing To Some Pussies (Pussys?) (Pussi?)

This is the trailer to a film called "The Menace Video" Created by Bob Simpson and edited by my brother Rob Gulley. I've seen the hour-long completed video and it made me want my mommy. Truly awful stuff. I loved it.



My proposed alternative title to it was "Shanks with Legs" Take it to mean what you will.

Thoughts on a Genital Herpes Commericial (A Touch of Class to an Otherwise Juvenile Blog?)

A man stands across from me, interrupted from the chore of washing his car, and tells me matter of factly how it's important for him to be careful not to spread his genital herpes. Excuse me sir, do I know you? I thought I was watching mind-numbing late night television. I thought I was watching Cops: Resisting Arrest 2. But no, apparently not. Now I'm at the driveway confessional of people with sores on their cocks and vaginas. Not that there's anything wrong with that, I'm sure people with herpes can lead perfectly normal lives - as evidenced by the amount of beach walking and determined gardening they do on commercials. When I saw a guy in his mid-20's tell me he doesn't want to spread his herpes to his super hot wife before running off a cliff with paraglide in hand, it suddenly dawns on me: having genital herpes is fucking awesome. Seeing as how I'm sipping on watery beer in a dark basement on an altogether uncomfortable couch, by myself no less, I realized these diseased souls are leading lives more satisfying than my own. Is this a medication commercial, or a recruitment film?

It is, after all, a commercial. It's the meta-focus-grouped, sterile and vaguely condescending mass marketed message that all commercials convey, but instead of potato chips or cars, it's something a little more sensitive. It can't be handled with the abject joy of Skittles or auto insurance, but still... Does mass marketing make sense for such a demographic? How many people have herpes? I must admit I am ignorant of such numbers and figures. Can't they just send out flyers in niche magazines were they might better reach their intended audience? Motorcylce magazines, and titles such as Bodybuilder Weekly and The National Review?

All things considered, I suppose I'm just fascinated with the quasi-fictional setting. Some Ad Executive thought it important to have this actor pretend as if he were just washing his car. He's scrubbing away, garden hose flowing endlessly down the street and then I, through the television screen, catch his eye. 'Well I can wash this car anytime' he thinks to himself. 'But these people need to know now that my dick looks like a mine field in Darfur, and how this once a day pill makes it possible for me to fuck dirty skanks just like before'. Let's not forget about the everyman appeal of such an image. Despite his diseased genitals, maintaining a respectably clean car is something he still makes time for, in between playing frisbee or playfully wrestling with his girlfriend. Which is why, I find myself suprised, he finds time to put down his soapy sponge and be real with me. I've never met him before, but he's already opened up to me about things people are usually very uptight about. He's confident, and intelligently informative. He's disarmingly charming. That probably has something to do with how he got herpes in the first place. My advice? Stick to washing your car and let me watch Cops in peace. If anyone needs to never have sex again, it's the hyper white trash domestic abuse couples featured so prominently in my program of choice.

What's He Really Saying?

I live in Detroit. I am 19 years young and attend Wayne State University. I live right in mid-town, not far from the campus itself. I frequent a place called Scrummage University, the physical embodiment and headquarters of Scrummage Records. Scrummage Records is an outfit that started with a few bands from the suburbs north of Detroit while the founders were still in high school. These happened to be the same suburbs and high school that I went to, so following the same general path down to Detroit post-graduation, I went from casual observer to fan and friend of all things Scrummage. I think the appeal for me was the great music and greater still the people who made it; different music as well. Not so much alien to all things previously sonic, but rather a different approach to music than I had been previously exposed to. The dozen or so Scrummage bands vary greatly in genre from electropop to experimental villified country to psychedelic hard-rock but, in my opinion, have a common thread running through: A workman-like ambition to complex and bombastic songwriting, as well as an overall emphasis on instrument orchestration. In that way, I hear many Scrummage songs having more in common with a symphony than Top-40 radio modern-rock-by-numbers, even though they, unseemingly, share the same instruments.

So that's my exposition. Basically it can be summarized thusly:
"I like scrummage, scrummage music good, people and social scene = fun"

So imagine my surprise when I read an article like this.

In reviewing a show at Scrummage U. that I did not attend, a writer named Martin Stett pens a glibly condescending article that made me personally offended in a way I did not expect that I could be. Congratulations Martin Stett.

To be fair, the article isn't out-and-out insulting. It's really not. It's just super annoying. It implies a bunch of things that I think are unwarranted and downright hacky. So let's begin.

"You’ve seen them. Kids so slender they look like they slid out of the womb as readymade supermodels. Male, female, doesn’t matter; it’s “same hair, revolution, same build, evolution” for a new generation, and they all rock painted-on jeans and what look like splotchy, multicolored paint shirts from grammar school."

It starts off almost complimentary. The phrase "readymade supermodels" even sounds like a great band name. Then it devolves into a generalization that is lazy, inaccurate, and something I cannot stand. He's calling everyone a hipster. It shows a certain cowardice on his part, because he doesn't come right out and say it: 'Fucking HIPSTERS!!! With your tight jeans and stencil-spray T-shirts HIPSTERS! AAAAA LOOK AT ALL THE HIPSTERS!!!' Now I go to a lot of Scrummage shows at the loft, maybe 3 out of every 4. I know what people dress like, I know what people look like. Does everyone "rock painted-on jeans"? Hardly, maybe four out of thirty. But you couldn't write that, could you Martin? Because then you would have to write that other people were wearing corduroys, or shorts, or dresses, or overalls, or everything else that people normally wear when they dress themselves. There's no dress code at Scrummage U. Sometimes you wear casual shorts and a collared shirt, other times you wear a dragon costume. It's hard to say. Moving along...

"Scrummage University is these kids’ clubhouse in Detroit. Tucked into a fruit market/loft district on the city’s east side, it’s up four flights of fire code-flouting steps and about as far away from a trad rock club as you can get. Which of course is how the kids who operate and endorse Scrummage U. want it. Inside, Christmas lights intermingle with a rainbow tuba and obnoxiously large chandeliers, and girls with streaked dye jobs lean suggestively in corners. It’s early Wednesday morning; they have to be in homeroom in a few hours."

"Kids' clubhouse" Nice. It's a recurring theme in the article, how young everyone is. Well, no shit Martin. Yea, people are going to be college-aged at some point in their life, it's kind of hard to skip over. But the whole infantilizing thing makes you seem like a cantankerous old man. I feel like if I threw my frizbee into your yard, you'd keep it while simultaneously admonishing me and waving your cane in the air, like you just don't care. The real gem of this paragraph comes at the end. "Girls with streaked dye jobs lean suggestively in corners." How suggestively? How does one lean suggestively? Are they suggesting that they are leaning? Or are they actually leaning and possibly suggesting something with their body language, the universal language of leaning. Or maybe it has something to do with sex. I don't know. "It's early Wednesday morning; they have to be in homeroom in a few hours." The show was on August 21st. High schools in Michigan don't start until after Labor Day. Nobody had to be in homeroom in a few hours. Don't worry, I get it. I get it. You didn't actually care whether or not school was in session or not, it was just another hilarious quip implying how many high school girls were in attendance, leaning suggestively in your direction. Sometimes I go overboard on the whole 'literal' thing. My bad. Just from personal experience, not a lot of high schoolers come to Scrummage shows. Some do. Those who do, however, rarely stay until 'early Wednesday morning'. And now...

"New York City dance-punk outfit Professor Murder is used to this scene, since it was social networking sites and photo-sharing hubs that largely spread the look and feel of Scrummage and its denizens outward from the five boroughs where they dwell. (Same goes the other way, outward from the basements of Los Angeles County; P-Murder will certainly be in one of those a few weeks from now.)"

I'm not sure I completely understand this one. Yes, Scrummage has a facebook group. Yes, a lot of pictures from Scrummage shows are online in "photo-sharing hubs". As for spreading the "look and feel of scrummage...outward from the five boroughs where they dwell", what the fuck does that even mean? The five boroughs of Detroit? I know New York has multiple boroughs, and that is apparently where Professor Murder is from, so I have to assume what you meant is that Scrummage cops it's image from similar venues in New York. Harsh, man. Is there truth to that? Well I know that when the occupants of Scrummage U. were decorating the place, they would always turn to trusty "social networking sites" for inspiration. Except they would say 'we got no ideas of our own, so we was looking on the internets on the MyFace for ideas to steal, yeeeehaw! God bless them photo-sharing hubs, dagnabbit!' Or something like that. And the whole "outward from the basements of Los Angeles County" thing? I don't get that either. Are you comparing Los Angeles to New York, or are you comparing it to the creatively bankrupt, image-thieving Detroit? Please enlighten me. Next...

"Musically, the real beauty of Professor Murder is their roots in dancehall and ska. This funkier vein of the group was lost on most of the crowd — just out of their teens, many of these kids have yet to download The Specials — and talking to the band after the gig, it was all smiles when this connection was made. They keep it a secret, a sweaty, steel drum fucking secret."

Wow. What a paragraph. I'm not really a fan of ska, personally, but I think that for the most part, varying musical tastes are all equally credible because of the ultimate irreverence of such an argument. (Not to say that there isn't music out there that makes me want to shoot myself, there most certainly is.) What impresses me is the un-fucking-believable pomposity of this little shit nugget: "This funkier vein of the group was lost on most of the crowd..." Oh really? I was not in attendance that fateful night but I hold these truths to be self evident, if you can listen, and if you can dance, and if you can drink, no music will ever be lost on you. Like the crowd was ill-prepared for Professor Murder because "these kids have yet to download The Specials." You seem like a fan, Martin, but a bad fan at that; Mostly because you take your own, personal douche-baggage and heap it onto the band as well. How exactly do you keep your influences a secret? Like Rammstein secretly dislikes their fans because the nihilistic German metalheads don't see the 'obvious' connection to the early work of Chubby Checker. Yes I'm not yet out of my teens, and no I've never heard of The Specials. Guess what? I don't give a shit.

"There were times, of course, when the tunes transcended their roots. Murder played three of the tracks from Professor Murder Rides The Subway, their official debut, and three new songs. We’re not going to talk about how amazing the EP songs are; if you don’t know, then go fill up the bathtub and soak. In fact, the only downer part of Professor Murder’s Scrummage set was the realization that we were the only people who knew what the “pogo” and “two step” were. When the singer of a band as vibrant and explosive as this calls out the pogo, you fucking do the pogo. Unless you’re 20, and don’t want to scuff your Rainbow Brite throwbacks."

– Martin Stett

I'm listening to Professor Murder on MySpace (or 'social networking site') as I write this. I really like it. Makes me wish I went to the show, just so the music could be lost on me. Too bad about the "pogo" and the "two step" thing. "When the singer...calls out the pogo, you fucking do the pogo." Excuse me? There's a name for what you're describing, and it's called square dancing. When the barker says Do-si-do, you better fucking do-si-do! Do as you're told! Dance how I say! I can't believe you're actually qualifying how people should enjoy a live act. I don't even know what a "Rainbow Brite throwback" is. Maybe it's because I'm 19, and not 20, like Martin Stett describes. I'm assuming it's a shoe, because of the aforementioned aversion to 'scuffing'. Is he talking about L.A. Lights? 'Cause I know what those are. I had a pair in middle school. I liked them. They had lights, they were (supposedly) from L.A. Is that so wrong, Martin?

In conclusion, the whole slant of the article was that Scrummage kids are in fact, kids. Especially in the sense of being immature hipsters whose taste in music didn't go as 'obscure ska' as it should. What a shame. Bad writers with little imagination love to slam hipsters because it's an easy label to pin on young people in urban areas who are connected to one another through music or other arts. The word 'hipster' itself, in modern usage, is a word that decries boring homogeneity, banal eccentricities, and cultural emptiness and thievery. Which is exactly why the word is bullshit. Sorry, hack writers, there are no hipsters. None. Okay, maybe five or six in North America, but my point is its an illusory term. It's a way of insulting people who are sort of a certain way, but not really. And this goes beyond the article and writer in question. 'But they all dress the same way!' They don't. 'They go places just to be seen!' 99% of people don't have enough money to live like that, they go out to live a life and have a good time. 'They all have the same hair, and only like bands because other people say they're cool.' They don't. "THEY ARE ALL THE SAME." We're not. And you're a fucking asshole.

Getting Drunk with Zac Effron and Ann Coulter: A Conversation

A dry mouth and dirty teeth, that's how I wake up in this six-star hotel. Six stars out of thirty. The sheets are too thin and the comforter is the texture of an old lamb's rancid bush. What I need is a Gatorade and some Ibuprofen. I gulp it down and wipe the light blue Turbulent Frost off the side of my mouth. I don't know what it is but it's impossible to drink a Gatorade without reverting back to the infant days, and just unwillingly splash it all over your face with the not-quite-there motor skills of an early-1980's robot.

"Goddamn it. Fucking wide-mouth fucking Gatorade bottle. Who's mouth is this big? I know the whole mythology of being invented for University of Florida Gator's football team, but did they also orally service Sumo wrestlers too? I mean, it must have been a club sport, right? Or just something to blow off a little steam between high pressure pigskin matches, but whatever..." Then I realize I'm talking to myself. Not a big deal under normal circumstances, but today I had to save it. Put on my game face, so to speak.

I was staying in the hotel because I had just flown in from wherever I was before, I think Northern Michigan blogging about alcoholic ice-fisherman. The story turned out to be a bust because it's August and there is no ice across Lake Superior, just a bunch of card-carrying Michigan Militia men face down drunk in conventional 16-foot fishing boats. I did however learn alot, and I'm paraphrasing: 'Putting a worm in alcohol ain't just for Mexicans and their tequila, hell no. We do it just fine with some White Lightning and some good old fashioned bait. We call it Tackle Box Cocktails, or BoxCocks for short. Gets you mighty fucked up. Speaking of Mexicans, we in the Michigan Militia just got back from a two month stint at the U.S.-Mexico border. Vigilantes my ass! We beat up them border-jumpin' Wetbacks because the government won't do nothing about it. It's up to us to protect our jobs and our way of life. So me and Big Hank were toolin' around the desert in a jeep, Stars and Stripes wavin' in the dusty air, when we spot a group of about ten illegals trying to pass through, mostly women and children. So me and Big Hank look at each other, and we were already a case deep of Busch Lite, and we start circling around them, kicking up a regular dust storm. You could hear them screaming and coughing, en espanol, of course. And what comes on the radio, at that very moment? I'm Proud to Be an American by Mr. Lee Greenwood, I shit you not. How perfect. So we turn that sucker up and just keep circling them, and I'm proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free...And I'll never forget the men who died, who gave that right to me, and I'll be fucking damned if the spics take that away, there ain't no doubt I love this land...God bless the U..S..A!!!!' Charming group, that Michigan Militia, salt of the earth. Family-Values Republicans all the way.

So where was I? Oh yes, getting ready for the highest profile interview of my young professional life. I was going to be paid a dollar per word by Enternet! magazine to do a double profile of Zac Effron and Ann Coulter. I was to meet them in a private conference room which was just an offshoot of the hotel lobby. I checked my watch, they should be down there waiting for me. I grab a bottle of Trump Vodka and a bottle of Woodbridge $11 chardonnay, exit my room, and make a beeline for the elevator.

For those of you who don't know, let me give you a short backstory on my subjects. Zac Effron is the star of the two hugely popular made-for-TV Disney Musicals, High School Musical and High School Musical 2: More Songs, Less Dongs. He sings, he dances, he's cute to the point where I'm sure many girls have their first masturbatorial fantasies about running their baby hands up and down his Capri panted legs. Zac Effron is responsible for 88% of all self-induced female orgasms that occur before age 14. The other 12% is a grab bag of lesbian visions of Hannah Montana and lesser still, My Little Pony. And Ann Coulter is ugly cunt who speaks for an ignorant and intolerant portion of the electorate using homophobic slurs and falsely clever mixed metaphors.

So I got in the elevator, and hit the button for the ground floor. It then occurred to me that last night's question writing session had morphed into a History Channel drinking game with myself. I call it, 'take a shot whenever the jews lose'. Needless to say, I got hammered. So now, thanks to the Babylonians, Sumerians, Romans, Egyptians, Germans and the State of Arkansas, I had no questions to ask. I had to stall for time. I hit every floor's button as a way of slowing my ride down, much to the chagrin of the Asian couple that I shared the elevator with. I took out my notepad and started scribbling furiously. Finally, about seven minutes and one game of Sudoku later, I hit the ground floor, half-buzzed off of a half empty bottle of wine. I ambled over to where I thought my reserved conference room was, only to find a Senior Citizen's Erotic Lamaze class taking place. Dreadful stuff. Washed away that vision with what was left of the wine and pitched it towards a lobby wastebin. Kobe Bryant, I am not, and I tossed it short of the basket's rim to have it shatter loudly all over the marble floor. Fuck it. They have disk-shaped robots for that sort of thing.

So I find the door, Room L6, Lobby 6. Gathering myself, I take a deep breath, and swing the door wide open with great force like the unprofessional drunk that I am. Zac and Ann jump up in their seats in mild surprise, like they didn't expect me to show up at all. Zac Effron relaxes and sits casually in his art-deco plush chair. He's wearing a pair of draw-string capris and a grey hoody sweatshirt. He's got on a light cerulean T-shirt underneath and through the half-way unzipped hoody I see some stupid retro-ironic Abercrombie logoing that says "National Bocce Ball Champ - 1974". His hair is shaggily unkempt and his face is in a semi-permanent Cell-Phone-Commercial-Photo-Shoot smile. Ann Coulter wears a garage sale sundress that hangs like a sad over-sized condom on her bony pale body. I am a heterosexual male, but I instantly know which of the two I'd bone first, and it's not that one that called John Edwards a faggot.

"Hi there. Thirsty?" I say.
"Whoa! No thanks man. I don't drink, it's an unhealthy thing to do. I'm just out here, having the time of my life! I'm not even 21 yet, I'm having a blast just being a kid! I'm just a regular guy, you know? Why screw all that up? I don't have to drink to have a good time. I'm drunk on life right now." said Effron in a rapid-fire delivery. Things were off to a bad start. Without saying a word, Coulter grabbed the bottle and took a healthy pull. The natural burn of alcohol didn't even register on her face, not in the slightest. I was surprised it took this little time to find common ground with her. I turn to Zac.
"Listen, dude. First off all, chill. Secondly, chill and have a drink. I know it's 10:30AM and everything but you're all Hollywood now, so get used to it. Thirdly, chill, 'cause there's no Disney channel cameras around, so you can drop the whole 'aw shucks' thing." As I make my case with Zac, Coulter does another silent but nasty pull on the bottle. The expression on Effron's face changes from confident corporate robot to young guy desperate for some relief.
"No one's going to find out about this, not even my Mom?" he asks.
"Not even your Mom." I assure him. "Chill Coulter! Give the guy a drink." Coulter extends her skeletal hand towards Zac. He takes the bottle, and looking nervously at both of us, he kicks it back. He's swigging and the bubbles violently rise upwards through the Vodka. "Easy man! Relax!" He takes it down and he starts coughing and his face is flushed.
"I don't really drink much." He admits. Based on the amateur hour show he just put, I believe him. He slumps backwards, and looks about the room. "It is early, isn't it?" He laughs.
"Okay, Effron, take a fiver. Bathroom's down the hall if you need it. Don't get up if you don't have to." I turn to Coulter, looking deep into her eyes and the papery skin which surrounds them, deep set as they may be. "So Ann, great to have you here. I hear you're writing a new book. Fascinating. So tell me about your personal life."
"What do you want to know? I'm an open book."
"Wow, just unlike your actual books. Which should remain closed. Like your legs. Just kidding." My heart works a little harder as my internal monologue starts kicking in. 'Hey watch it, self. That wine's starting to kick in, you're getting loose, you're insulting your guests. Keep it together, alright? No interview, no story. No story, no money. No money, no boozy. No boozy, no looky self in mirror before bed. Got it? Take it the other direction' "Just kidding around. Seriously, no harm, no foul. So...you like The Clash?" I asked, innocently enough.
"The who?"
"No, the Clash."
"I've never heard of them."
"But you have heard of the Who"
"Why are you asking me?"
"Asking you what?"
"About the Clash"
"Exactly? Do you like them?"
"The Clash?"
"No, The Who"
"Uh...The Clash?"
"No you dumb fucking bitch! The Who. The Who. The Who Who Who Who Who Who Who."
"Oh, Oh The Who! Right. American Woman is one of my favorite songs, the original of course, not the Lenny Kravitz version" I sat there in bewilderment for a second. To my left a drunk Zac Effron was slowly and obliviously slipping out of his chair. But right in front of me, Ann Coulter had just told me that her favorite Who song was American Woman. Then I realized....
"Oh, no. You're thinking of The Guess Who." I countered. She looked confused.
"Guess What?"
"No, The Guess Who."
"What do you want me to guess?"
"Ha, okay. Wait. We're talking about one band here, okay? The...Guess...Who."
"Um...The Clash?"
"YOU GODDAMNED IDIOT! I WILL SLAP YOU ACROSS THE FACE IF YOU SAY THE CLASH ONE MORE TIME." I take a deep breath. "Go wait in the hall."
"But I..."
"Just go in the hall, Coulter. You can come back in five minutes and we can talk all about Liberals, okay? I just need a mental breather." She goes. I start muttering to myself about the trials and tribulations of such an endeavor. But like all works of passion, I'm in it solely for the money. I could care less if Ann Coulter writes another blog entry pointing out that Barack Obama's middle name is Hussein to the delight of a semi-retarded readership. I imagine them there, gaping and braying at their computer screens like baby birds preparing for a feast of mama's vomit. I feel sad for them, momentarily, until I realize they feel good about themselves. It's like traditional porn doesn't work for them, not even the P.O.V. shit or mom and daughter tag teams, the only thing people can jerk off to anymore is the celebration of their own anti-intellectualism. They treat xenophobia and shortcomings of logic like virtues. Ugh.

I look to Zac Effron, face down on the ground, completely passed out. I pull a pack of Trump Cigarettes out of my back pocket and light one up. What a morning it has been. I check my watch. 10:38AM. I've been awake for fifteen minutes and interviewing for eight, and I feel like calling it a day. The cigarette does me right, my nerves are calmed. Time to help a brother out.
"Yo, Effron!" I rouse him and help him back into his chair. I look at him, the actor, the pretty boy, the Disney Whore, the avowed lightweight drinker, and I feel nothing but admiration for the guy. At least he knows he sells bullshit. I mean, what else can possibly be entertaining to 'tweens that is not so inherently a big steaming turd that it doesn't make older minds want to self-terminate? At least this bullshit is harmless. If the bouncy showtunes and immaculate dance routines of High School Musical make one more kid realize he's gay then so be it. L'Haim! At least this bullshit never leads to the carpet bombing of civilians in some foreign land. Or maybe it does, I don't really know Disney's foriegn policy towards rogue states. Whatever. "So Zac, how are you feeling?"
"Fucking great! Fucking..."
"You like pussy? There's this hot piece of ass in the hallway just waiting for you."
"Who? Ann?"
"Well, yea."
"Sorry man, not really my type."
"You mean, you're gay?"
"No, but, well...look at her. Ann Coulter looks like an albino horse with a coke problem." He said, shortly before he puked all over himself and passed out again.

Well, this interview is officially over, in my professional opinion. I gather my notes and a half empty bottle of Trump Liquor and start for the door. Then I remember that Coulter is right outside just waiting to engage me in a conversation about the 'battle of civilizations'. How dreadful. I'd rather strap a bomb to myself and walk into a crowded restaurant...oh wait. Nevermind. I just flat out did not want to see her. So I do what any professional journalist would do, I slammed some vodka, left the bottle behind, and climbed out a window to freedom.

So now I walk down the sidewalk of this highway town, and the sun is shining on me. I'm heavily buzzed and I think about the casualties I left behind. Not that it bothers me. I've got 36 hours to deadline for this story and I imagine I'll do what I always do and make a bunch of shit up. Celebrities are like avatars of fiction, the closest thing on earth to living fictional characters. So people either expect me to lie, or they don't care either way. Regardless, I get a big fat check when all is said and done. So I'm smiling while I walk. I see a 7-11 in the distance. I light up another Trump Cigarette and hope they have good slurpee flavors.

A Posse Of Chimpanzees: Big In Every Way

"Life is stale and sex is dirty"
"Aww, cheer up, you sack of shit you. Put on a new shirt. Do something with your hair. You could be such a something if you weren't as dick-less as a Ken Doll at a Bris"
"Uhh-uhh. That's what you sound like, a preening pony who thinks his stable is a television set"

Something I couldn't stand. I was standing in line at a gas station with some ramen noodles and some sprite-remix and I overheard this melodramatic conversation going on in front of me. Did theatre class get out early? Tired of this shit, honestly.

I would be a great actor, the best. How do I know? Because I've worked retail. Every line of dialogue is a tour-de-force because you have to act like you're not one more condescension away from a profanity-laced tirade and punching a hole in the wall. Which is the furthest thing from an original sentiment, I suppose. Scott Adams has been mining computer company shenanigans in Dilbert the same way that other guy has found a bottomless pit of feline lasagna consumption. Ricky Gervais made The Office a short little masterpiece. Cheers was a hit sitcom and made dead-end alcoholism funny again.

It's inspired me to write a show called LIQUOR STORE about a couple morbidly obese Ukranians who live, love and sell alcohol to the disintegrating lower-middle class within a major urban city. There's Pavel Diveldavelditch, The 500lbs boss who's inability to clean himself is matched only by his inability to fire Lanka, the lovable but incompetent stock boy. There's Marta, the 350lbs cashier who's got a sassy attitude and a witty comeback to any jocular ruffians who like to shoot the breeze or anything else in the alley behind the store. Then there's Shaky the local homeless alcoholic crack-head beggar, who's earned his nickname earnestly for his constantly shaking hands, and as an ironic tribute to his 'unshakable' faith in the hallucinatory gnomes which follow him and pass on information to the government. Fun for the whole family!

'Sometimes you want to go/
where everybody knows your name/
and you can drink away your pain/
you wanna go where nobody can be blamed'

Coke Vs. Pepsi (aka The Most Brilliant Stand-Up Comedy)

Tim Heidecker is my new hero.