The Official Syrup of Wahoo Fanclub

Shit is Magic!

2009-10-09T03:32:00.000-07:00

Anyone who knows me well knows how obsessed I am with years and people's ages and the relationship between these and historical events. I don't know what it is, but years have a magical quality to me. Each historical year is like a different holy name freighted with so much history and countless associations.
Year are so casually invoked. How many times have you heard someone say, “Well, let's see, I think 'at was back in '79 or 80” or “Yeah, uh, I graduated '94, and um got my B.A. at Rutgers in '98...” Mostly we think nothing of it. To me, however, to reference a year is to mutter an incantation, to cast a spell, to casually lift your shirt to reveal the gun tucked in your waistband. To mention a year, especially an old one, is to say, “I was there, motherfucker...where were you?”
This year fetish of mine is endlessly diverting when you mix it with a little history. By and by you begin to weave a large knotty tapestry, and all you need to know is a person's age and you can weave them right in too.
The Rolling Stones tune “Memo from Turner”, featured prominently in Donald Cammel's 1970 film Performance contains the lyric “I remember you in Hemlock Grove, 1956”, funny, that, seeing as how Mick Jagger was only thirteen at the time. Alan Ginsberg, on the other hand, turned thirty in June of that year. In January, he wrote the poem "America", one month before a young woman named Norma Jean Mortenson, just two days older than Ginsberg, would change her name to Marilyn Monroe. Six months later and a few weeks after her (and Ginsberg's) thirtieth birthday she would marry playwright Arthur Miller while an adolescent Mick Jagger was loafing about on Summer holiday and the death penalty was being abolished in his native England.
Mick was born in 1943, along with Robert DeNiro, R.L. Stein, Penny Rimbaud (the drummer for seminal anarcho-punk band Crass) Tony Basil (“Oh Mickey, you're so fine!”) and my Aunt Leela. These people, it seems to me, were the perfect age to appreciate the sixties, and did in varying degrees. Rimbaud was a vegetarian pacifist who made the leap to punk and made socially relevant avante- garde music during the repressive Thatcher regime. Jagger faded into obscurity after a few mildly-succesful gigs at working class taverns in Dartford (LOL). My Aunt Leela moved to the United States and married a white hippie psychiatrist-in-training named Bruce.
She arrived here in 1967, the year Liz Phair, Kurt Cobain, Judd Apatow and Guy Pierce were born and the year a twelve year old Jamaican boy named Clive Campbell moved to the South Bronx with his family. She was thirty-one years old when she gave birth to her first child in 1975, and thirty two when a female drug dealer from Jamaica Queens gave birth to Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson in 1976. 50 cent would achieve success by following in the footsteps of young Clive Campbell, who as DJ Kool Herc, began spinning two copies of the same record, at parties he threw in his building's rec room, so as to isolate the “break” and loop it to create beats, paving the way for what would become hip hop.
Herc was born in April of 1955, one year before Ginsberg wrote America and Monroe wrote herself into another doomed marriage. She and Miller were able to obtain a divorce in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico in January of 1961.
Six months earlier, and a thousand-or-so miles to the south in Cuernavaca, a young Harvard psychologist named Timothy Leary was having his first trip on psilocybin mushrooms. Meanwhile, in various parts of the world, Vincent Gallo, Killing Joke frontman Jaz Coleman, and Steve Poltz were all being born.
Killing Joke released their most controversial album, Outside the Gate, in 1988, while Steve Poltz's friend Jewell Kilcher, at twelve, was busking with her father in Alaskan taverns to make ends meet and Vincent Gallo's friend and erstwhile bandmate Jean-Michel Basquiat: Warhol-protege, legendary old-school grafitti artist and darling of the New York art scene died of an overdose of heroin and cocaine. This was also the year I was born.
If you find this kinda shit fascinating, just think of what I left out. Where do you and yours fit in?

Ten Little Indians

2009-10-09T03:14:00.000-07:00

So I know I said I'd stop talking about India. I don't generally like talking about my racial background mainly because (and I'm sure most ethnic or racially nonwhite people will agree) I want to be about more than my ethnicity, especially in my writing. I also avoid the subject because Indians in this country tend to be conservative, clannish, and possessed of that corny, slightly creepy esprit de corps that small, relatively unsettled minorities tend to have in spades.

Nonetheless, I guess I can't escape my preoccupations, and it's safe to say my race is one of them. I tend to keep my eyes peeled for Indians on the street and in the news, and I'm always curious about the interactions between the two countries (America and India) which inform my cultural identity.

Which brings me to an unpleasant realization I had today: famous Indian-Americans tend to suck really hard. Seriously! There are only a very few Indian-American celebrities but of those few, the vast majority are huge assholes! Indeed, so totally lame are the majority of famous Indians in this country that, with them as principle examples, it's a wonder we're known in this country for engineering, vari-colored gods and tikka masala instead of as a race of thoroughly reprehensible shitheads.

Let's start with one of the most prominent of these Desi disgraces: professional Punya-pimp and mystical hustler Deepak Chopra. Fuck this guy. Now I know white people love the shit out of him, and everyone seems to think he's super-spiritual and all, but come on! In the eighties, Bhagavan Sri Rajneesh(aka Osho) managed to swindle his nutcase acolytes out of enough frogskins to build a five star ashram in Pune, with enough left over to buy a Saddam Hussein-style fleet of Rolls Royces. But at least that guy had the decency to grow a beard, wear robes and make with the mystical shit. Chopra looks like a professor at MIT, and with his MD, one wonders why he's not, i dunno, practicing medicine somewhere and leaving our immortal souls in the hands of more skilled (as well as beaded and dreadlocked) professionals.

But one would be missing the point. It's precisely because Chopra looks like a buttoned-down white-collar type that he's able to woo so many spiritually bankrupt American professionals desperate for an easy enlightenment-fix and with plenty of money to burn. Chopra looks like your kindly Indian doctor, and his lifestyle suggests that you don't have to renounce your plasma screen TV and six car garage to find spiritual satisfaction. After all if you can't find God in the marketplace...

Lastly, but not least annoying, his mystical shit mixed in with middlebrow Chicken Soup for the Soul style “wisdom” and white collar audience makes for the most nauseating sort of language as business cliches stroll arm-in-arm with New Agey truisms. Now I'll admit that I've never read one of his books, but I'd bet dollars to donuts that they say stuff like “You don't have to give up that luxury car and live in a shack” (perish the thought) “you can see god in the face of a child, experience Brahman at a board meeting, or mukti with your morning mocha!”. Barf.

So we've got Chopra, as well as dudes like Farid Zakaria, establishment desis. Professional, neat, polite conservative and serene, they remind me of my uncles. Except no one's ever given my oldass uncles fucking book deals, TV interviews and membership in the Council on Foreign Relations. My uncles don't kick it with Anderson Cooper!

But these guys are nothing compared to the raging neocon Indians. I'd call them race-traitors but I don't want to buy into the same nationalist rhetoric that gets these folks all fired up. Bobby Jindal is just the tip of the iceberg. Have you guys ever heard of Dinesh D'Souza?

D'Souza's politics swing past conservatism into reaction and hate. While a student at Dartmouth, D'Souza outed closeted members of the Gay Student Alliance and edited a conservative paper called The Prospect which criticized the schools “minority admissions policies” and was described as “outwardly destructive and irresponsible” by the schools Vice President of public Affairs. D'Souza appears to believe that African American culture at large is inherently poisonous, since it has it's roots in a tradition of rebellion against slavery, making modern day blacks rebellious and anti-authoritarian. He stops short of describing their murky, foul-smelling blood and insatiable hunger for non-consensual sex with white women. Asshole. D'Souza also dated Ann Coulter and has a wife named Dixie (no bullshit).

Then we have Sanjaya. Now, Sanjaya is an obvious target, but I don't hate him because he's egotistical or shrill, or flamboyant or untalented. In fact, I admire his courage and uniqueness. Too many Indians in these country are mousy little people made invisible by their shyness. Sanjaya is loud and bright, distinct and bold. Unafraid to take risks and be himself in front of a hostile crowd.

But he's also shallow and vapid and a part of the sick American Idol machine with it's Hollywood glitz, commercialism, hallmark card aesthetic and Simon Cowell- Schadenfreude. So no thanks.

Moving along we come to the most irredeemable villain on our list: Anand Jon, fashion designer and convicted serial rapist! Sweet!

During his trial his victims tearfully upbraided him before he was convicted of sixteen of twenty three counts of sexual abuse. Among the charges was the forcible rape of seven women, some as young as fourteen.

Shit, I mean say what you will about the other guys on this list, but at least they don't fucking rape children (although I think D'Souza fucks dogs). And what did he do before he was a rapist? He was a fashion designer, a part of that culture which makes young women insecure enough to be taken in by sleazebags like Anand Jon in the first place.

Recently, I was thinking about how much I love Dr. Sanjay Gupta. I mean, I am seriously in awe of the guy, he's just so...So what? Polite? Sane? Not-a-rapist?

This is where we've gotten to with our famous Indian Americans. For me personally, guys like Sanjay Gupta and Kal Penn aren't likable because they're particularly great at what they do, or because they make art which moves me to tears, or because they have such well informed enlightening opinions. It's because they're regular people, famous Indian-Americans that I don't have to be ashamed of.

The picture is a bit rosier in other countries, especially the UK, where Indians form proto-punk groups and man green-anarchist info shops. Where lumpenproletariat desis live alongside poor Africans and whites in council estates and make Marxist electronica.

But until Indian Americans expand into these progressive, fringe-niches, until we have Indian gangster rappers and pacifist indie-cartoonists and squatters and tranny bash-back cell members and anti-capitalist grafitti artists bringing a DiY ethic and rock and roll aesthetic to the Indian American cultural landscape, we'll have to settle for the honest, shy smile, the kindly bedside manor and honest demeanor of Sanjay Gupta and Kal Penn, who's oatmeal-normality makes us feel like decent people. True American Heroes.

Cutup

2009-06-05T20:59:00.000-07:00

Today, I decided to experiment with the cutup technique of Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs. To those unfamiliar with this technique, it's basically a "word-salad" made from chopping up and re-arranging bits of text, producing humorous/creepily relevant/consciousness-expanding/paradigm-shifting/semantic-barrier-eroding/potentially boring and headache-inducing results.

For mine, I cut up two pieces I had written as well as an account of the protest at the 2008 Republican National Convention, a letter containing hurtful criticism of one of my short stories, an article about some Canadian band, some blurbs about kid-friendly tourist attractions in San Diego, an article about the movie "The Hangover", and an article from a parenting magazine about How Not to Worry Excessively for the Safety of Your Children When they Go to Sleep Away Camp.

I only added about ten words, and only when it was absolutely necessary. Here goes:

I like it when it's a story about a guy who happens to be a sexual impossible. To live in this world and not dramatically alter your surroundings for perhaps better, perhaps worse. End up an academic, a number of other things (projectionist for example).

Better or for worse, no matter what you do.

But by these crazy standards, I think it's safe to say that dumpy debauchery becomes less interesting when it loses its context. Fiercer, more pretentious scenes are fun, because it's entertaining to imagine I'm as close as possible to a passive spectator. I'm becoming resigned to this, if not proud. Not quite hip to the obscure social norms and inscrutable hole-in the pocket thing. Imagine you're watching these deviant acts, while Sea Life Aquarium is a two-story in a few joyless flings with a few harried women. Maybe get usually quiet when I attend the sole focus of the narrative, while the water aquarium designed for children is located right next door to mediocrity.

Maybe not even finish college and find some easy boring job in an easy circle, not interesting enough to like, but too harmless. It lacks the context that gives deviance. Legoland, and hate. San Diego and my parents will die worried about me.

But those two middle-aged Liberal women we met on the sharks, octopus and lung cancer got in the middle of a crowd of people and my wife accuses me to remind you of our conversation.

“So what brings you bandannas and medical respiratory masks that burdened everything?” she yells at me.

“I just took a few days off from school to come, people! And the usually not-so helpful eyes of the media never fuck.”

Meals are served, I remember herds of African animals hopefully achieve unique results. Beautiful childhood injuries. We're all in top shape, granted, ridiculously I feel like a pig and I remember I see lions, tigers and gorgeous gardens on the reel of tape. Still, Borcherdt adds, Holy Fuck has floors and is slowly filling in the fences of the freedom cage. A friend, though, because it was just as awkward for her, drops the fact that we at Nairobi Village, explore where we're up there with all this silly stuff. More deeply, there has become something of a national obsession with natural butterfly jungle, the little battery operated logic of children. Our protective instincts keep us doing exercises of the Lorikeet Landing (open ones, that have headphone jacks that you reconnect with this edge) and it's difficult to acknowledge.

I feel I finally broke the year, including holiday guitar pedals and we know now that there will be at least one teddy bear from kids, and trust our kids to look out between subject and narrative: Fuck it up the right way, primarily based around themselves.

Fully allowing masturbatory adventures when you list off another with the down-to earth Midwestern wife of another professor. She is curvaceous, a lot I don't need to know, home to more than 4,000. Rare, and to carry me back to that, you appreciate about them from a female perspective, (freckled, with long red curls and an earthy pleasant face). She hates the people around her as in a couple of months Seth will start endangered animals: the San Diego Zoo loveliness that causes your sex-cravedness, as I do, and gets snarky and vicious when she's had a few too many. She's also a smoker, college, enthusiastic to take on his next.

She comes alive at night! See your favorite space of cartoons, hardwood description of the act itself, which I did appreciate. She is charmed by my aloofness at one of these lame parties. She mistakes this for a lack of adventure while I wait in the background, animals and exhibit in a whole new light. Honeypot on a summer's collection of sensual pretension, a thoughtful weariness with the pedantic people around us. One day, at a going away gig, at some point it becomes clear that around the zoo it's a sweeping billow. You hinted at some sort of sensuality for some sanctified fucker planning to retire, which I'm forced to attend because even I know the sexual fantasies, favorite pornos, performances and live animal poetry in the sex-narrative, and therefore it's an actual insult not to. She shows up wearing a salwar kameez. Her husband brought it back for juvenile character as opposed to the parts from India. It looks good on her. She uses it as a conversation piece, tailor made, it would seem, with so much potential, and then explore cool habitats like the monkey house there. For me, less captivating, and the Sun bear forest, children's zoo, and the Panda Research station lost to adults, still balding, but with a ponytail.

Some found your decision making process to engage in the act of vandalism, and your less captivating themes, open every day of the year. My Librarian-looking wife, talked down to by Reason for hating “corporate” to the people who matter, the open minded ones who, as Andy Bernard in the office hangover rescued my childhood academics. Chided for being a romantic, incredibly irritating, your choices of graffiti slogans also are such stereotypes that I wonder if you're being facetious by using them. Overall, I love music, the Tories can shove it where he's a dentist. Table taboos among this group of people? I think you're too smart and critically-thinking to believe in any of these things. The F-Bomb hasn't stopped Holy Fuck from making a trio of groomsmen land get-togethers. I exist at the fringe of wholeheartedly, so I'm left to assume there's an element of self-mockery, buzz worthy appearances at marquee festivals like their buddy Doug who's off to his bachelor party to shun, often snickered at or ignored.

Implicit in this part, and really in all of the story, the Juno awards didn't seem to mind when the band's second morning suite was trashed, a baby in the apathetic, defeated man who has a big personal library, some pretty diverse interests, stacks and stacks of little one length LP's nominated for Album of the Mini-Bar and a tiger in the bathroom. Doug is M.I.A. Bring her down, I chain-smoke, she hates abandoned novels, aborted screenplays, criticisms, raunchy poems, songs. Journal in 2008? Neither did M.I.A. when she took the band. None of them can remember what happened in terse silence.

I have two affairs, even evidence of a few hobbies, maybe. Of course, Holy fuck had no idea what they were in for, drum beats fill the air, red white and blue lights shine down from atop a 320-foot tower, as passively under me, the anti-war march files out and we decide to move in clusters back to the capitol lawn to try and fill up water that employs all the weird effects. Laughter can be heard as a silly patriarch for doing so. It's actually okay, and we slowly go back and send out people to dominate the genre with sea lions and mischievous otters. I falter when I see her empty water run. They come back, some medics check on us, and a squad of bike cops slowly surround us. They weren't trying to shun technology.

Killer whales start taunting “what's wrong, you were running from us earlier”.

Maybe it was an intuitive way to do their own rock'n'roll concert featuring hot sensational Infomancers hovering around the house and at pawn shops, part of an annual tradition called Summer Future where, intended for use as toys, nights at sea world spent to see what we could do with lo-fi and battery operated smoked out ruins of earth.

Oh Boy...

2009-04-01T17:15:00.000-07:00

If you scroll down to my last post and check the comments section, you'll notice that someone named "Urdu" representing a website called "Urdu Rasala" digs my blog. I can tell from the scripted tone of this entity's message that it doesn't give a fuck about the content of this blog, but probably scans blogs for Indian key words or something and offers to add them to its blogroll. Needless to say, this is pretty crappy. This is not an Indian blog about India, goddammit! I am not some Air-Jordan wearing, bhangra-listening Desi kid from Jersey involved in Marthomite youth groups who wants an MBA from Rutgers! Motherfuck that!

I'm pretty sure that the only people who'd get the above references would be offended, so maybe I should change that, but fuck it! I don't censor myself by god! This is one ABCD who isn't going to mince words and shuck and jive for the man! I may have an exaggerated sense of my own importance, my blog might be some bore-you-to-tears rag about suburban blandness, signifying nothing, but christ-dammit I have integrity! At least some! And so, in short, I'm gonna try to Not Talk About India Much from now on, and you UrduRasala maderchods can jao chodo yourselves! So there!

Heh! In other news, as we speak shit is popping off in London with the G20 protests, and woe betide any dude who shows up in a trench coat and bowler hat. If this was thirty years ago, maybe some "mods" would get caught in the crossfire. I hear the Watchmen movie was okay, but I still wish that Snyder prick would dive into a wheat-thresher.

My buddy showed me this youtube blogger called Ladyw87 and I think I'm in love. She speaks candidly about her sex life and the sex lives of her near and dear. She's funny and gorgeous and has, like, 12,000 subscribers. I am now one of them. I encourage everyone to watch, subscribe, and make this chick famous. Not that my opinion carries a lot of weight.

I invented a fun game today, invent movie titles using a simple formula: (Funny Name) semicolon (funny job) like "Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo" So far I've got "Rascal Davies: Freelance Executioner" "Boris Pepperman: Devious Tooth-Mechanic" and "Wallace Tusker: Anthropomorphic Elephant Small Claims Adjuster". This last obviously needs work.

So, I dunno if you've figured it out, but I have nothing to talk about.

A Self-Indulgent Work of Staggering Banality

2009-02-02T19:19:00.000-08:00

I've been meaning to update this thing for awhile, and I haven't had the heart to do so for lack of anything to say. Lately, though, I've realized that I never really had anything to say, and that most of these entries have been self-indulgent disjointed rants which have nonetheless amused some of my friends. Perhaps it is precisely the pointlessness of my posts which has made them appealing to the few who like them, and thus, it would be folly to bide my time waiting for inspiration when I should just write.

Today, I've been feeling the urge to write again, and this time, however weird and tangential, I think I have something to say. Thus, this article could be the most intricate and entertaining entry I've posted so far-or the most disappointing, ill-thought out, meandering tissue-of-horseshit I've ever foisted on you people. I suppose we'll let history decide, lol.

Lately I've been "meditating" on the idea that "everything is connected", that fluffy sounding New Age truism which, according to some, has found some confirmation in quantum theory. This idea though is a fascinating one. Nothing happens in a vacuum, and I am now being affected, in ways I could never conceive, by international and historical forces outside my control, by people I'll never meet, by books I'll never read, by events I'll never hear about in countries I'll never visit. It's when these interesting patterns suddenly reveal themselves, in even the most trivial form, that I feel I catch a faint glimpse of the sheer scale and intricacy of the world and it's history, and that is truly something special.

I'm enrolled in Anthropology 101 right now, and we've spent the last few weeks discussing Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution. In ten days, it will be Darwin's two hundredth birthday, and so I've been frequently finding him in the news. Several times I've found myself listening to a story about Darwin's upcoming birthday on NPR while driving to my Anthropology class to talk about him for two hours.

Much has been made of the fact that Darwin and our sixteenth president, Abraham Lincoln, are the exact same age having both been born on the same day (February 12th) in 1809. Several articles in the February issue of the Smithsonian's magazine have made much of this fact, and it's symbolic and poetic implications. For my part, I took Poli Sci last semester in the same classroom in which I'm now taking Anthropology, but I guess that's not much.

But driving back from Anthropology today, I heard on NPR that Wedgwood China was in serious trouble. The English China company had apparently merged with Ireland's Waterford Crystal, and now both were in trouble, planning to go their separate ways, and possibly on the verge of bankruptcy. I found this interesting since Wedgwood's founder, Josiah Wedgwood, was the maternal grandfather of Charles Darwin, and the Wedgwood fortune was part of the reason Darwin could afford to neglect his studies and take that now famous pleasure cruise aboard the HMS Beagle in 1829. Indeed, it was Wedgwood who persuaded Darwin's father to allow him to go.

When I got home, I made myself some lunch and then set out to run my big errand for the day: mailing two books back to my cousin in India. One was a copy of Q and A the 2005 novel by Indian Diplomat Vikas Swarup and the loose basis for this year's Oscar favorite Slumdog Millionaire.The second was a 2009 planner put out by an Indian Newspaper, the Deccan Chronicle. I guess that each year's planner has an Indian historical figure- theme, because this was a Tippu Sultan-themed planner with his biography on the first page and countless portraits of the South Indian monarch displayed throughout. The planner was tempting to keep since it smelled like India and would be a wonderful talisman and reminder of home to have throughout this challenging semester. Nonetheless, I had to return it. My cousin sent both of these books to me as a gift, and as I am no longer speaking to her, I can't accept them.

I don't know what it is about my cousin, Y. but for as long as I can remember I've found her simultaneously compelling and horrible. She is almost fourteen years older than me and seems like my antithesis in every way. She is a neat, precise and determined professional, the editor-in-chief of the Chennai Deccan Chronicle, who is charming and yet secretive, protective of her privacy and (as far as I can tell) adept at Machiavellian social-combat if her bubble is threatened. I'll admit, right off the bat, that my issues with her are pretty trivial, but I simply feel that I've been ignored and condescended-to by her for the past twelve years, and this has all come to a head very recently. After feeling evaded and talked-down-to in a series of emails we exchanged, I sent her a vitriolic missive, intending to force her to talk to me or end our relationship for good. She never replied, and a few weeks later I discovered that she'd blocked me on facebook.

My mother returned from India a few weeks ago, and she brought me these books from Y. It felt like a slap in the face. It was as though she was writing off my anger as some childish temper tantrum. It was her way of being better than the whole problem. And plus it seemed, blatantly, like a tactic. She's known for her hospitality, for lavishing gifts on people and for adamantly accepting nothing in return. But she's much stingier with people she knows well, and seems to give gifts and do favors only to win people over. Feeling like I couldn't keep both these gifts and my integrity I decided to mail them back. This package is the silver bullet and the horse's head in her bed. It is an act of vengeance, a weapon, a tactic and a message.

Q and A is a story of Love, Tippu Sultan's life, a story of War. Tippu, the “Tiger of Mysore”, was a brutal Muslim ruler who forcibly converted Hindus on pain of death. In Karnataka, there is a spot called Tipu's Drop, where the Sultan's men would hurl recalcitrant Hindus to their death. Still he made gifts of jewelry and land grants to Hindu temples in order to curry favor with Hindu rulers. (These highly political “gifts” seem similar in intent to the books given me by my cousin, how fitting, then, his likeness on the cover of that planner.) He also waged a series of long wars against the British, the Anglo-Mysore wars. A drawn out clash between East and west which would claim his life in 1799. “Mohammed Faisal-Iftekar” (the pen name of an anonymous Pakistani writer) referenced Tippu in the title of his 2006 novel, The only King to Die on the Battlefield.

Like the war between Tippu and the British, the feud between Y. and myself is a clash between east and west, but the act of mailing back her books feels to me more like an act of vengeance than an act of warfare. Perhaps the best known revenge tale in modern times is Alexandre Dumas' The count of Monte Cristo. First Published between the years 1844 and 1846 (or from the year Charles Darwin began, tentatively, to outline in writing his theory of natural selection to the year Abraham Lincoln was elected to his first term in the U.S. House of Representatives.) The count of Monte Cristo also seems to me a classic David and Goliath story, Edmond Dantes is persecuted by well-connected noblemen who conspire to have him imprisoned for life. On making public his theory of natural selection, Darwin made an enemy of the Church of England, and risked association with revolutionary France (then under the rule of the “citizen king” Louis-Phillipe, former employer and ally of Alexandre Dumas). John Wilkes Booth probably thought of himself in similar terms when he assassinated Lincoln on April 14, 1865, I've often viewed the conflict between Y. and myself this way as well.

Jules Verne, also French, created his own enduring revenge-obsessed character, Nemo captain of the Nautilus. Nemo was an Indian nobleman whose family was killed during the Sepoy Mutiny. Nemo's name is Latin for “No One” and Greek for “I give what is due”, some believe Verne took his name from the Scottish motto “Nemo me impune lacessit” or “No one impunes me unpunished”. Like Yagna and myself, Nemo is Indian, and like the other characters in this story he is David, in this case fighting the Goliath of Imperialism and in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, a literal giant monster.

The character Nemo is also allegedly the nephew of Tippu Sultan.

Whew! Thank god for wikipedia. Moving right along., Lincoln was assassinated at Ford's Theatre in Washington D.C. While taking in a popular play by playwright Tom Taylor entitled Our American Cousin, about “the introduction of an awkward boorish American to his aristocratic English relatives” (I think that one is self-explanatory). Taylor also served as Editor-in-Chief of Punch magazine, which inspired an Urdu-language Indian spinoff, Awadh Punch which, like Nemo, was a thorn in the side of India's British rulers.

Y. is also the editor-in-chief of an Indian newspaper.

Awadh Punch had a series of ambitious and intelligent young writers associated with it, which helps explain it's success. The Deccan Chronicle, likewise owes it's success to its charismatic owner Venkattram Reddy. His story looks more like William Randolph Hearst's than Awadh Punch's, however. Alexandre Dumas appears to have had a similar savvy when it came to dealing with newspapers and this allowed him to maintain his extravagant lifestyle.

William Randolph Hearst's life became the basis for Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, (and the story of the battle between Welles and Hearst which ensued is another David v.s. Goliath story). In the movie, Charles Foster Kane erects a pleasure palace/hideaway in which to essentially imprison his wife. That Palace is called Xanadu, named for the poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “...In Xanadu did Kubla Khan, a stately palace build...". Josiah Wedgwood, Darwin's grandfather was a great patron of Coleridge, giving him enough money to live on without working so he could focus on his art.

Coleridge was a freethinking follower of William Godwin, and thus likely opposed to the racist outlook of his era's Imperial powers. Imperialism shaped the lives of many people in this story, from the bitter Indian submarine captain Nemo, to Dumas (the son of an Afro-Carribean former slave, his race caused problems for him all his life) to Darwin (whose theories would be misinterpreted and misrepresented by the Eugenics Movement and the Social Darwinists, in fact, his own son would become a follower of eugenics) to Lincoln who, of course, was the great emancipator.

Lincoln presidency was characterized by the American Civil War, and, despite a cynical outlook toward politicians in general I have a bit of a soft spot for him. He would ultimately pay a high price for his role in that war, and so “Faisal-Iftekar” to the contrary, I think Lincoln could be considered another king who died on the battlefield.

Vietnam was another war which colored the terms of many U.S. presidents. To me, (as well as thousands of assassination buffs) however, the one who payed the highest price for his role in that war was JFK who also suffered a high profile assassination in 1963, the year Vikas Swarup, author of Q and A. was born. Swarup is a Indian diplomat, and Kennedy placed an emphasis on diplomacy, wanting to create an atmosphere of detente.

And what are diplomats if not communicators. Communication is the bridge between people and is antithetical to war. (“What we have here is a failure to communicate” says Strother Martin in Cool Hand Luke, another David and Goliath tale.) Though Kennedy tried, it is Reagan who is remembered as the great communicator. Reagan, second in popularity only to our doomed President Lincoln.

In the story of Y. and myself, there is no communication. In fact it was a lack of communication from her end that caused the whole house of cards to fall in the first place, but then I'm sure in this I am equally culpable.

In any event, this package is a message, a form of communication. Hermes, the messenger god, god of communication, gave Perseus the weapons by which he slew Medusa. So too, will I, using this message, confront my own Medusa, my own Goliath, and as it travels straight and true across the Pacific, with what lives will it intersect? And what will be the ramifications of its arrival?

Last Tardy Thoughts on Sarah Palin

2008-11-14T22:44:00.000-08:00

Sarah Palin is continuing to hang around in the headlines and on the news long past her sell-by date. At least as far as I'm concerned.

I admit that it's troubling to see her still plotting. I figured she'd fade peacefully into obscurity like she should, and so since she hasn't I suppose it's best for someone to keep tabs on her.

Nevertheless, we're still just beyond the point where Sarah bashing is relevant and amusing, and so I hesitate to bring her up. I hesitate also because, as I mentioned in my last post, it's almost unforgivably pretentious to assume that anyone gives a shit how I feel politically. Disregarding that, here goes:

I read reccently on Wikipedia about an interesting phenomenon called "anal-winking". According to them, a certain Dr. Stuart Horn discovered that "a noxious or tactile stimulus will cause a 'wink' contraction of the anal sphincter muscles and also flexion". A controversy emerged from this, when another doctor, a Bruce Woodling "developed the anal wink test, which he alleged was an indisputable diagnostic indicator that a child had been sodomized."

Wikipedia goes on to say that these ideas have now been "utterly discredited", and calls them pseudoscientific. Specifically, they say "Woodling's pseudoscientific testimony during the trial of Ray Buckey contributed to Buckey spending five years in prison without bail. Buckey was later released without conviction".

This is, of course, very sad. And it's unfortunate that Woodling's negligence may have cause innocent people to suffer this sort of persecution.

Nevertheless, I think in the case of Sarah Palin, Woodling's assertion may still hold true:

"When an asshole winks at you, you know there's gonna be some ass-fucking involved".

Man, Fuck Bipartisanship!

2008-11-05T19:03:00.000-08:00

So, I'll have to admit, when I found out Obama had won the election I was pretty happy. I was convinced that he'd lose, for one reason or another, and that we'd end up, once again, ignorantly marching into our past. In fact, I was so relieved when I found out he'd won, that I forgot for a moment that Obama is a fucking "moderate".

Especially in the context of the last eight years, I think that the word "moderate"should be considered a pejorative term which translates, roughly, to "dipshit". I've said it once, and I'll say it again: fuck bipartisanship! Haven't conservatives done enough damage to permanently exclude themselves from the political process? But I guess that's just hopelessly naive in a country where Karl Rove is sitting pretty on Fox news, and actually presuming to give Obama advice, like some kind of concerned grandfatherly senior politician. Or where a conservative caricature like Sarah Palin was actually given a shot at the Whitehouse instead of desperately hidden by the RNC, lest her very existence drive the final nail in the coffin of their credibility. Or where the son of an east-coast millionaire CIA spook can masquerade as a small government Texas populist, disgrace himself terribly, and yet be around long enough to endorse another drunken loutish son of priviledge attempting to pass himself off as a straight talkin' "maverick" war hero from Arizona.

Anyway, that's enough ranting. I don't want to make the pretentious mistake of assuming that other people give a shit about how I feel politically. But one more thing: I've noticed that no matter what gains democrats make, they never seem to be able to shake off this image of them as weak humanist fairies who piss and moan about civil rights and compassion until they need the big strong conservatives to come in, guns blazing, and bail them out. If a democrat wants to succeed, he has to move right, and if he does so, he earns the honor of...comparison to a badass animal?

Come on! "Blue dog" Democrats? What the goddamn fuck, you guys? How come, if some democrat hates abortion or thinks we're being "too soft on the blacks" he becomes a Badass Blue Asskickin'Dirty Dawg Dem! I mean, shit, if I didn't know better, I would think that political discourse in this country is inherently slanted right. But what the fuck do I know?

Anyway, prop 8 passed in California, proving once again that even us latte-sippin' left-coasters can be total monstrous reactionaries just like everyone else. I had a thought today at work. Wouldn't it be funny if snack foods had really unappetizing names? Like if, instead of "goldfish" they were "Sweetass Cheez Flavored Fish Krackerz", and Cheetos were, like, "Cornilicious Artificially Flava'd Cheddar Nukes", or something? Just a thought.

*sigh*

...erm...

2008-08-25T22:21:00.000-07:00

One thing I've noticed, lately, is the phenomenon of white celebrities with East-Indian names. What the fuck is with this? Did their parents think this would be cute? Devendra Banhart, Uma Thurman, Radha Mitchell (whose full name, by the way, is Radha Rani Amber Indigo Anunda Mitchell) this is so offensive, and so potentially destructive it's not even funny. It seems like, wherever I go, everyone has some ass-backwards highly idiosyncratic take on India. Either you have white hipster types talking about how "super spiritual" it is, who wear kurtas, decorate their rooms with Krishna and Buddha statues or batik tapestries, and visit their fucking "gooroos", or, turning away from this in revulsion, people who lash out at India itself to get at these hipsters, making the country itself effectively the battleground for some intellectual proxy war between competing bands of hip urban whites. For example, Matt Cale, the in-house movie critic for the website ruthlessreviews.com, in a review of the Wes Anderson film The Darjeeling Limited once referred to Calcutta as "the world's largest open sewer". Matt Cale is sophisticated man who typically leans to the left, and so this was particularly jarring coming from him. Really, though, his beef wasn't with India, it was with the aforementioned vacant Western pop-Orientalists, desperately seeking meaning in their lives, who turn to India and other eastern
countries to find salvation in the exotic religions of these countries. Instead of saying that, though, he had to talk shit on India. I mean what did India ever do to him? What has India to do with the idiots who blindly embrace it or the bigoted cocksuckers who, just as blindly, shun it.

I mean are we all ready to throw in the towel with this whole cultural-relativism thing? Are we going to start measuring every society by the standards of the West? Has Matt Cale ever considered the fact that the filthy streets of Calcutta are almost identical to the streets of any post-colonial third world country and that maybe, both he and the orientalists he hates so much are more culpable, in a way, than the people who live in that "open sewer"? OF COURSE he fucking has! He's a well-read, educated person, so how the fuck dare he condemn India for the sins of a bunch of confused acid-burnouts and bohemian dipshits? And the worst part, is that there seems to be some mingling between these two categories of wretched fuckers. Recently, I saw hipster-orientalist swine Devendra Banhart's music video for his song "Carmencita", which takes-the-piss at Bollywood films and Indian religious serials, it reinforces all the most offensive religous and cultural stereotypes, and is, in short, Indian minstrelsy.

Even if "Devendra" was an actual Indian, which he's not, this shit would be unforgivably offensive. He'd be betraying his own culture and whoring it out to white audiences for cheap laughs. But as it stands, it's worse! It's fucking racist!

Who does this bastard think he is?

On another note, I see that, since the Democrats need an old-guard, salt-of-the-earth hero to rally behind (particularly one who's dead or dying) to compete with Republican Reagan-worship, that they've decided to suddenly canonize Ted Kennedy. I guess even dudes who let their mistresses drown to death deserve second chances.

Fuck!

...ugh...

2008-08-20T09:11:00.000-07:00

So, it's nine a.m and I still haven't slept. Not because I can't, but because I don't want to. See, I don't know for a fact that I can't sleep because I haven't tried yet. Maybe, as soon as I hit the sheets I'll start to doze. Maybe not. As such, it would be inaccurate to say I can't sleep, more precise to say I haven't yet, and don't want to just now. But in either case, I must apologize in advance. I am writing this, again, because it seems to need updating, and not because I have anything to say. This, compounded with my lack of sleep may make for a really sucky piece, so be warned.

Instead of sleeping I watched two documentaries. One about Charles Bukowski, the other about the Bloods. Both Bukowski and the bloods are from Los Angeles. Also, the five men interviewed in the Blood movie seem like essentially good people molded into violent, hard bastards by circumstance. This is equally true of Bukowski.

I found out some interesting things today. First of all, one of rapper Li'l Wayne's favorite bands is Nirvana. Also I learned that Charles Bukowski hated Mickey Mouse, that character being, for him, representative of society's great effort to hide all horror and evil and violence under some artificial, expertly manicured facade. Disney depicted everything in their cartoons: hunger, violence, greed, war etc. but cute. And that sickened him.

I learned that hearing cute girls tell anecdotes about their butts can be very appealing, but I think I already knew this on some level. I learned that seventy-nine percent of people who visit the site Streetgangs.com (at least those who participated in the poll) think that Barack Obama is going to win in November.

I also learned that sometimes, even when you think you can tell a set of twins apart, one from the other, you really can't, and you'd better hope that that doesn't lead to anything awkward.

On another note, a strange thing happened to me at work today. There's this blonde woman who always comes in with a bunch of her friends. She has a really awful facelift and gives off trophy-wifeish vibes, and she's really loud and eccentric and it's hard to deal with because she's friendly and irreverent, but somehow gives the impression that if you take any liberties with her, she might blow her stack and endanger your job. Anyhow, she comes out of a theatre while I'm sweeping up and tells me it's freezing in there, and asks could I put the heat on or turn the air conditioning off? I say sure, and she says

"good cuz, it's so cold in there. See?" and she grabs my wrist. I think maybe she wants me to feel her hands, which would be forward enough, but she bends down and touches my wrist with her nose.

Weird huh? I mean, it didn't bother me. Hey, her nose was cold, she had a reason to be upset, I'll certainly give her that. I wonder if she has any idea that this behavior could be construed as weird, or offensive. I wonder if this was some sort of come on?

I'll let you people mull that over.

...huh...

2008-08-01T18:28:00.000-07:00

Well, I guess I screwed the pooch on that one. I really did intend to write a series of thoughtful pieces about my trip to India, little journal-like bits which would catalogue the emotional highlights of this trip and try to evoke, for the American reader, the complex experience of a young NRI as he tries to understand himself in the context of the ancient culture and complicated family he was born into.

This, of course, begs the question: "What American reader?" Who the fuck did I want to write all this for? Probably me. Also, I've been to India before. This was only one of many trips I've taken in the last ten years, so why did I expect this one to bear literary fruit? Well I dunno. In any case, maybe next time I go I'll write a fuckin' book.

My dad is listening to some weepy love song by Gordon Lightfoot. That kind of stuff always makes me a little maudlin. Gordon Lightfoot confuses me, he seems too talented to be so mediocre. Maybe I don't know what I'm talking about.

I wonder if I should publish this post. It doesn't seem to be going anywhere, really, and I think I'm only writing it because I haven't updated in a while, and I stubbornly refuse to let go of this blog. The act of writing stuff down and throwing it up on the internet for all the world to see is really the kind of high narcissism which I find addictive. In the months I've had this thing, I don't think I've attracted a single foreign reader. At least judging by the comments, the only fools who've peeped the hectic steez on this rantpage have been people I know. Which is nice, because it means that I have some friends who care enough to check this thing from time to time and read what I write. But, and I'll own up to this, I think at bottom I'm really writing this to get laid. This shouldn't surprise anyone, really. I do lot's of stuff to get laid. Like shower, try to look okay, try to be reasonably functional, I mean, really, almost everything I do is done to either get play, stave off death or unhappiness, or both. This is most likely true of most people.

Okay, cool, so now I'm waxing philosophical. See you never know where these things will go when you start them.

Another quick thing about Lightfoot. I really like that song "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald". Many people who know it, don't. It has been variously reamed out by the likes of Seinfeld and Dave Barry, but why? It's not a bad song, and anyway growling out "folk" songs with campy old-time pioneer and maritime imagery is kind of his gig, and so what? More power to him!

Anyhow, on a totally unrelated note, I've been hearing some rumbling to the effect that Barack Obama is too skinny to be President. Now, this could very well be true for all I know. I mean, we all know how much brute strength and sheer physical stamina is neccesary to adequately dispatch the duties of Commander in Chief. For example, when, inevitably, Barack Obama finds that his country needs him to defeat Lex Luthor and Fu Manchu in hand to hand combat or intercept an incoming ICBM in midair and pitch it into the sun, well, then we'll probably all wish we'd elected a more hale and hearty president like the septaugenarian John McCain.

But, yeah, I mean I don't really like Obama that much. I'll vote for him because I actively dislike the opposition, but I'm not a huge fan. I will say this, though: It seems like Obama has been the victim of more fierce mudslinging than I remember ever seeing. It would seem that Obama is a runty, elitist slum lord who hates America and the working man, has a black militant wife, attends a black supremacist church, and wants to piss all over the second amendment so that his friends in Hamas and the Weather Underground can come in and fuck us all up. Huh.

Well friends, I'm sure you're all tired of this bit by now, tune in next time when I'll piss and moan about my job, talk about pears, and try to tie both in with the kennedy assassination or something. Cheers!

Bande Mataram!

2008-06-06T06:11:00.000-07:00

So I am currently in India, on one of my annual trips to the motherland, where I will attempt to disgorge from my fouled system the white man's poison, cleanse from my corrupted consciousness the oppressive shackles of Patriarchy, cut from my diseased flesh the parasites of anthropocentrism, avarice and false piety. And suckle from the life giving breast of Bharati, bathing in her gentle streams and sitting as a king at her table.

Or something like that. In any event I'm here, and I'm here for two solid months. This will be the longest block of time I've ever spent in this hot, bright, gorgeous, loud, fragrant, malodorous, beautiful, blessed, rotten fucking country. As I write this, I am forced to steal precious time at the keyboard in between photographs. My cousin is getting married, and the whole family is gathered in the living room of my aunts house taking more pictures than Ansel Adams took during his whole career. I'm sweaty, disheveled, dazed from jet lag and uninterrupted travel, and a little worried that I may have inadvertently pissed off one of my uncles. I'm something like the loveable jackass of the family, and that act can get tiresome after awhile, for everyone. Still and all, I'm happy. Happy to be back in a country that has always captured my imagination, evoked intense and complicated emotions, and never failed to effortlessly crack my hard agnostic shell, albeit temporarily.

Traveling here via Taiwan and Malaysia, with a long series of connecting flights, one hotel stay and endless hours spent waiting at various terminals, it occurred to me that we should perhaps devise a way to quantify poise, grace, and savvy while traveling. Writing about Leonard Cohen, Tom Robbins said that he was a man of the future, equally comfortable hailing a cab in Paris and giving a lecture in L.A., or something to that effect. If such a scale were devised I wonder how I'd fare. Apart from a rather stressful moment when trying to get to the hotel in Malaysia, and an unfortunate episode, just moments from meeting my Uncle and cousin at the airport in Hyderabad, when I was reamed by a duplicitous customs agent who charged me $160 to bring in my cousin's wedding jewelry, it was a smooth journey.

This is hopefully the first of many updates which I'll post while I'm here. Hopefully they will be most edifying for the two or so people who regularly read this fucking thing.

Brown lays it down

2008-05-23T01:53:00.000-07:00

So, recently I had to write a paper for my Human Sexuality class about what I had learned from it. Trouble was, I learned almost nothing. That class was total dogshit. So I improvised. Here are the results:

...wait but first a little back story and my usual caveats. The class really is terrible, I'm not saying this because I'm some total narcissistic cock. At least I hope not. Also my teacher's name was professor Mickes. She was pretty cool, but she did nothing to rein in the baser instincts of the braying jackoffs in her class. Now I really do sound like an asshole. Also there was this fat bearded motherfucker in there who could easily be the most boring human being I've ever met. Most of his conversation consisted of one South Park quote after another.

so here:

Psyc 115: A Retrospective Summary

Dear Mickes,

I'm writing to inform you of a most tragic accident at the Ketchup Factory,
where your Harv works. It seems that at the stroke of twelve on St.
Christopher's Eve, Harv was scraping milk-paste from the refuse barrels, and
though he was uncharacteristically sober, misfortune came in the form of a
seven hundred pound tractor engine pitched over the guardrail by one of the
young giants employed by the factory to guard against raptor attacks.

Harv was crushed to death. He died instantly, and irrevocably, with, I'm afraid, maximum pain and suffering in the roughly half second before he was snuffed for good. Seeing as he was the principle breadwinner in your family, the factory is happy to announce that it will send you henceforth, a monthly care package of one half dozen saltine crackers, a small bottle of commodity black olives, and one package of Capri Sun Citrus Cooler, for the next four months until you get back on your feet. Also, my wife would like to offer you a position as lead serving-wench at our granddaughter's opulent thirty-fifth wedding anniversary this spring.

It is in trying times such as these, that I like to remember the sage words of Franklin Pierce, our 14^th president, when he said “I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream”, or something to that effect. Also, I hope you find solace in the worship of your strange pagan idols, and the hymns you sing in that garbled foreign tongue. May you be comforted at the black breast of your many armed she-goat goddess, or at the foot of her son the Redeemer.Also, Mickes, the class you taught on Carnal Knowledge at the Manchester Bestiary was most edifying. I particularly enjoyed the portly bearded fellow who kept muttering South Park references under his breath, hoping that someone, anyone, would give a shit. Also, your insight into multiple male orgasms, was most appreciated in Martha and my marriage bed. Many a cold night did the walls of our dreary manner house reverberate with our decadent groans.

Here's wishing you many gentle seasons.

-Lord Cadmus Winthrop

So there, I just thought it should be saved somewhere. Not like she'll really appreciate it. That is all.

...well...

2008-05-17T17:22:00.000-07:00

So, I've decided to keep churning out posts with an eye for quantity rather than quality. To what end I'm not sure. Maybe I'm hoping that some gorgeous, bored, playgirl multi-millionaire with her own publishing house and three PhD's will stumble onto it by accident and be blown away. Or something.

Anyway, a thought crossed my mind the other day. In most situations, the presence of insects doesn't make people happy, or make the situation better or more appealing. Except one. I don't know if anyone can relate to this, but the only place I'm happy to find bugs is on an airplane...and maybe in a bait shop. But seriously, airplanes are so sterile and everything is so cold, and artificial, and inorganic. Plus the whole situation is so surreal, and not in like a Lazer-floyd Salvadore Dali kind of way. Somehow being magically supported in midair in a giant uncomfortable room hurtling through space toward, say, the Bahamas, just makes you feel bored and cramped and cut off from reality, just up in some blue-white limbo partially dead for three to twelve hours until you touch down. And to compound this numb, clinical ambience, everyone is, like, freshly showered, and wearing business suits and cologne, and the food is all pre-packaged in neat little servings, shrink-wrapped, vacuum-sealed and dyed boring. So to see, like, a gnat buzzing around is somehow really reassuring for me. Does anyone else get that, or what?

I had a shitty day at work today. I had a lot of trouble with our thirty-five milimeter print of some crappy movie called Young at Heart, which is a (to me) really offensive documentary about some program where they drag all these quirky old people from various nursing homes and suchlike onstage, give them Ironic Shades, and have them sing covers of Sex Pistols and Kanye West songs. I was pissed because our copy of the movie was shite, and so I had to bend over backwards to make sure this dogshit movie played properly for all the uncle-tom old people dipping into their pensions to watch other old people shuck and jive for the Man.

Anyhoo, while I was puking my guts out in the stifling heat of the projection booth wondering whether or not to alert the Gray Panthers, a series of truly hillarious entities appeared at the theatre for the first act of a farce that is continuing as we speak. Some bizzarre human being representing an organization called CRISPE (an acronym which involves the words "child", "parent", "education" and "response" I think) pulled up in a big pink CRISPE bus, with some woman in tow. They were renting out a theatre for a special screening of some documentary about how the child support system is "ripping families asunder" or something and, as is usually the case with these theatre-renters, the dude was really self-important and asked my General Manager to let him know when the movie sold out. As if.

But what's worse, the dude asked for a red carpet (which we actually supplied) and hired private bodyguards to stand outside wearing sunglasses and black suits and look intimidating. I guess this guy was just kicking out such Mad Truth that he was afraid for his safety. Like maybe the CIA was going to try to silence him or something. Trouble was, neither of these dudes looked very intimidating. One looked like an aging yuppie at a wedding, and the other looked like what would happen if there was a "Federal Agent" in the Village People. Sadly it was time for me to clock out before things really started to get hillarious, and so I walked out past Starsky and Hutch standing outside the theatre and glowering at the Uncle-Tom Seniors and neither they nor the wretched little twat in charge of this idiocy seemed to realize how ridiculous it all was.

I really think I need to quit this job.

...um...

2008-05-11T23:28:00.000-07:00

So, today I decided to borrow a page from George Carlin's book, and make a list of People I'm Tired of. Originally I was going to make a list of People Who Should Kill Themselves, but honestly, some of the people I'm about to describe don't quite deserve to die by their own hand, I just wish they'd be a little less shitty. A disclaimer: I'm making this list to make the three people who read this thing laugh, not because I think I'm right about anything. So please don't think I'm some angsty, self-righteous, judgemental prick...you three.

1.) People who start long conversations with me about highly specialized subjects, which they somehow assume I know about in depth. Like this one dude in one of my classes who keeps coming up to me and talking about shitty pop-punk and Industrial bands which I neither know, nor care about, and about weird horror-fan stuff which I care even less about. Usually these conversations are, like, lists of events that this dude attended, or plans to attend. Like "...and then I went up to L.A. so I could go to Fangoria's "Beast Jam '08" and I met Daz Dworkin from Coffin Comix and saw Layers of Caked Filth play with Disheveled Youth." Yawn.

2. ) People whose favorite director is Wes Anderson, favorite band is Radiohead, and favorite author is Chuck Palahniuk.

3.) People who actually believe that there are entities of varying nationalities, with varying motives, collectively known as "terrorists", who run around with nasty grins on their brown, brown faces throwing bombs, menacing young women, voting for Obama and engaging, generally, in truly meddlesome hijinks. Who further believe that these people are cowardly, freedom hating fascists whose only real objective is to make sure everyone on earth is miserable, and that the only way to eradicate this menace is to elect inhuman monsters in three-piece-suits who are tough on "national security".

4.) People who "don't take any shit", "don't give a fuck", "don't care what you think" and "don't care who knows it".

5.) Actual adults who listen to bands like Nickelback, Matchbox 20, Linkin Park, Staind, P.O.D. etc. etc. etc. (yes these people do exist).

6.) People whose voices are two to three times louder than everyone else in the room, and who love to regale me with stories of their various moral, intellectual, sexual, and physical conquests. Especially if these people slap backs, display little inhibition, and try to constantly dominate conversation.

7.) Actual adults who listen to bands like the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Tool, the White Stripes, Incubus, and other bands which you're supposed to start liking just after you realize that Staind, Nickelback etc. are garbage, and grow out of by fourteen or so.

8.) People who have made the following statement, "How come if black people say n***er it's okay, but if I say n***er then that's racist??" Seriously, these people should kill themselves.

9.) Ellen Page.

10.) People who think Dane Cook is funny.

11.) White people who quote Chapelle show constantly, especially those that quote the "grape drink" bit. I encourage these people to look up the word "minstrelsy", and then ask themselves why Dave Chapelle decided to quit making the show.

12.) People who are genuinely surprised when I tell them I don't like cops.

13.) People who are genuinely surprised when I tell them I don't like Cops.

14.) People who sit around talking about how great cartoons were in the 90's.

15.) People who are a mere thirty seconds into a vaguely left-leaning rant when the whole thing devolves into a whiny call for marijuana to be legalized.

16.) The friends of person number thirteen, who, when he starts to do his thing, actually sing "...doon't criticiiiiize iiit!"

17.) Those credulous folks who will mention the Illuminati, the 9/11 truth movement, freemasonry, and the Jesus-Mary Magdalene connection without the slightest hint of skepticism or irony.

18.) People who really aren't all that bright, who always piss and moan about how "stupid people are". Especially if these people always tell stories about besting another person intellectually, constantly harp on other people's inferior grammar in text messages and emails, or say things like "(Person's Name) realized that he has never read a work of 'popular fiction'. Oh well, back to Finnegan's Wake". (This is an actual quote from the "status update" of someone on facebook.)

19.) Libertarians.

20.) People who really like Judd Apatow movies and talk about them constantly.

21.) People who insist that I watch/read/listen to something I couldn't give a shit less about.

and

22.) People who write nasty snarky lists and post them on their unpopular blogs.

...uh...

2008-05-03T18:27:00.000-07:00

A few people have told me over the past few months that I should update this thing, and I always fully intended to once I had something to write about. I'm no closer to having anything of substance to say, but I figured I should at least put something up, if only to add a little vitality to this stagnant endeavor. My old dentist comes in to my work every now and again, and I usually give him free popcorn even though I can tell he doesn't remember me. I sometimes catch him reading my nametag and I can tell that my little gesture makes him feel more awkward than anything. Well, today he came in and he had shaved his moustache and I didn't recognize him at first. But whether or not he remembers me as a patient, he remembers that I work at the theatre and give him popcorn and that my name is Ben. So today, he recognized me first, and by the time I was able to grasp why this apparent stranger was being so familiar I had already filled his popcorn and rung him up. It's amazing what a little thing like facial hair can do in terms of making you look totally different. My dad has worn a beard for the last thirty years, and so of course I have never seen him clean shaven. I bet if I did it would be genuinely unsettling.
My friend Leron has a moustache too. I saw him last night for the first time in a few weeks. Once when we were fifteen or so, I got way too drunk with him at my house. I think I may have had alchohol poisoning. Leron always had really nice stuff, and he was obsessively clean and well dressed. I threw up all over him and all over his gear, and I couldn't stand or talk or anything. He had so help undress me and hold my hand while I showered. He really went out of his way that night so that I would be safe and my folks wouldn't find out. For some reason I told them anyway. Kids are stupid. Twenty-somethings are stupid. I'm stupid.
Leron was one of the first people I met when I moved to San Diego. I had a friend named Emma from back in Pennsylvania who would send me these ridiculous care packages when I first moved. Looking back, I wonder how much they cost to ship, they were so huge. Basically, she would get big cardboard boxes, and fill them with all sorts of things. Mix cd's, t-shirts, drawings, old stale chocolate, broken toys, trash, twigs, wrappers, all sorts of stuff. I talked to her almost every day on the phone, and I would provide her with little updates about the people I was meeting and so on. One day she sent another of her care packages. By this point I was friends with Leron, and a few other kids named Evan, Sean, David, and Jonathan. In the care package, Emma enclosed a drawing, done in pencil on computer paper, of a cute sort of punky, gothish chick about to set this cheerleader on fire. This was because at thirteen we thought we were a couple of quirky-as-fuck, non-conforming, weird-clothes-wearing, "establishment"-hating little badasses. On the back of the drawing, not out of spite but just as an odd little joke, Emma and our mutual friend Katie had written "Fuck Evan, Fuck Leron, Fuck Sean, Fuck David, Fuck Jonathan". I loved this picture a lot. Partly because I wanted to so badly be Jack Kerouac the Homicidal Maniac, but also because I missed home. It was the cover of my binder, and eventually I scotch-taped it to my wall. My friends would make fun of me for it, because even then we could tell it was a little childish. And one day, as he was examining it, Leron saw what was written on the back. David, Evan, Sean, and Jonathan were in the room too, I think.
He reminded me of this last night, it was pretty awkward explaining that to them. Out of all of those kids, Leron is the only one who's a fuckup like me. The rest are all at great colleges right now, like UC Berkeley.
My bengali uncle pronounces that word, "Bharklee".
Hmm...that story about the picture was not nearly as interesting in print as it was in my head. As I was remembering it the whole thing seemed so zany, like it was written by Larry David. Oh well.
I went to San Francisco recently to see friends. My buddy Bones and I took a bus to Chinatown and bought a bag of mangosteens. I didn't know that they had finally started importing them. The Evan whom I just mentioned was the one who first told me about mangosteens. He apparently heard that they had the consistency of ice cream and that in southeast asia, people would mortgage their homes to buy a single fruit. This is, of course, not true at all. Anyway,I tried them for the first time last summer in Malaysia and liked them a lot (hype notwithstanding) and so wanted Bones to try them. We actually managed to find them, (which surprised me) and we walked to City Lights books, so that I could by a Sherman Alexie novel for the flight back to San Diego. There were some people busking outside the store, and a crowd of cute hipster girls had gathered to watch. We ate our exotic fruit, and before we went inside, I lit up a cigarette. Thus did I find myself loitering in front of City Lights books, smoking a cigarette. I've turned into some perverse caricature of what I wanted to grow up to be when I was thirteen. The saddest part was, some hipster chick actually checked Bones out.
I apologize for this boring post.

...er...

2007-10-25T00:23:00.000-07:00

I work in a small rundown movie theater in an otherwise upscale mall nearby to where I live. The Flower Hill mall is the golden template, the platonic form that all other mini-malls aspire toward, yet cannot quite achieve. The Texas- sized Megamarts are the furthest removed from my mall, grotesquely overgrown from lack of contact with their source; the tasteful, petite little belgian chocolate bonbon that is Flower Hill.

Part of, yet slightly adjacent to this jewel in the sombrero, is my theater. A shoddy, rundown, faux-cozy roach motel, the place pretends toward a higher station by screening hipster favorites. Of course, this facade collapses faster than Larry King's marriages when a rat the size of a dachshund scurries across the foot of a much manicured soccer mom just as Richie Tenenbaum is confessing his incestuous infatuation to his sister Margot.
Needless to say, my shop is also BURLY AS FUCK, an attribute which I again became aware of this past Sunday.

Sunday, found me choking and sneezing through an eight hour swing shift at the concessions stand, selling popcorn to a nervous and smoke addled mini-multitude. To the east of us, wildfires were raging through Jamul in the south and Ramona to the north, moving ominously closer as we continued about our business starting movies, selling tickets, feeding biohazard green candies to children, and fielding complaints from rat-trodden guests, eyes reddened by the smoke.

As always the culprit was those fucking godawful Santa Ana winds. I once read somewhere that the Santa Anas are one of those "ill winds" that contain ions or something of a fishy nature which make people angry, allergic, and abusive. These fishy ions are also unapologetic firebugs apparently, because these pyromaniac winds (in conjunction with carelessness, and occasionally willful malice) have kicked up a gang of fires. Fucked up fires.
These fires were the most fucked up in ninety years, they ravaged homes, destroyed property, displaced hundreds of people, killed firefighters, turned livestock into horseburgers, laid waste to scrub land, killed endangered wildlife, fucked with people's respiration, wrecked peoples days, and forced me into close proximity with my mother for forty eight hours.
My mother is a wonderful person blah blah blah. But the further I begin to slink from the nest, the less contact I desire from this sainted wonderful christlike so and so, et cetera.

So, naturally, on Monday when she woke me at the crack of noon to tell me to get the hell up, it was with no small amount trepidation that I glanced at the news, glanced at my mother, and glanced futureward at the grim spectacle the next one to three days would no doubt be.
I spent the morning trying fruitlessly to read a morbidly apocalyptic book of conspiracy theory and wild assertions called "Behold a Pale Horse" by a paranoid ex-Naval Intelligence crank called William Cooper. Cooper may be right on the money for all I know, but on Monday I was too distracted by Local News's own eschatological ranting, to pay heed to insidious yet dry economic theory, purportedly penned by some Rothschild patriarch, and allegedly put in circulation by the Illuminati.

Yes, the news was depressing enough that morning, and as I sat sipping innumerable cups of tea and pensively watching fire and brimstone rain down upon saint and sinner alike, I wondered what the fuck was gonna happen.
Still and all, I guess, looking back, I wasn't all that worried, even when the fires began to creep into neighborhoods with all too familiar names. I was protected by a sort of disaster chauvinism, a product, no doubt, of my youth, which constantly reassures the innocent that disasters happen to other people who live far, far away in places with names like Azerbaijan, Myanmar, or Sandusky. And even when they happen to people who live in places with familiar names like Escondido, Chula Vista, and Scripps Ranch, I still somehow remain smugly confident that they won't happen to me.

Anyway, after several hours, the tea hitting my heart like intravenous cocaine, I doffed my polar fleece bathrobe, changed into some respectable clothing, and loaded my dog and some other shit into my Mom's car. The three of us headed south to La Jolla, an area seldom affected by firestorms. It's as if the flames are too poorly dressed to set foot in such an upscale neighborhood.
Work called, just as we were being forcefully evacuated, to say that they were shutting down the building, (like I said, BURLY AS FUCK) which was a relief because I had scant desire to sell popcorn to mischievous fire imps in the middle of a raging inferno surrounded by walls of flame and the sanity-destroying cackle of oblivion. To usher in madness, to sell tickets to the Angel of Death amongst the wail of the sick and dying, the lamentations of our women, the grotesque and gaping maw of encroaching chaos...

Seriously though, it wasn't that bad in our area, I really should point this out. I really do think the theater is pretty badass for staying open as late as it did, and opening back up as quickly as it did, but all the rest is exaggeration. I definitely will admit to feeling some guilt at writing this piece at all. My natural approach when cataloging any experience is to take a lighthearted tone, but overall the SD fires were really, truly godawful. The thing is, my family and I did, in fact, get evac'd. We were scared at times, but were for the most part unscathed. I don't want to seem like I'm attempting to mock the suffering felt by the people who were hurt by the fire, but I feel the need to write from my own experience of the thing, which was not, by any means, harrowing, nor tragic.
Wait a minute, who the fuck am I apologizing to? Nobody reads this thing!

Moving on. My mother and I each had one friend who completely lost his or her cool during this situation. For my mother, it was her friend Shamala, a frantic, flighty, east Indian mother hen who screamed my mother awake in the early morning to tell her, ostensibly via some payphone in some faraway hotel lobby, to GET OUT NOW. This hysterical woman claimed that there were bugle blowers on her street evacuating the whole neighborhood, an apparent hallucination I fear I'll never be able to explain. For their part, the friends that I have in her neighborhood reported no bugle blowing boy scouts raising the hue and cry, and remained posted up in their homes long after Shamala took flight, dragging along her passive husband and dazed and sheltered kids.
My Frantic Friend was John, a quirky, chainsmoking ectomorph. He left a solemnly melodramatic message on my voicemail, announcing that "SoCal is on fire" and wishing me luck. I later learned that he had hightailed it all the way up to Irvine to stay at his dad's house and check on the fire via Google Maps.
I'll say this for the seriousness of our situation, we were motivated to leave the house not because of any perceived threat to our bodies and souls, but because of hunger, in fact, and boredom. The grocery stores and restaurants in our area were closed as fuck, and the place resembled a ghost town in hue, aesthetic, and overall mouthfeel. So, as such, an our before our reverse 911 evac call came in, we made the aforementioned flight from chaos etc. and moved into the spacious and inviting near-coastal home of my aunt and uncle in the Cobb Salad and hipster coffee-shop capital of Christendom, La Jolla California.

I brought with me four books to choose from, having no desire to slog through the fear-crazed rantings of a UFOlogist militiaman searching for masonic conspiracies behind sofas and under desks. I selected Kurt Vonnegut's Slapstick! at random and began reading as my mom settled down to watch reporters in SARS masks wax philosophical about the nature of tragedy. Kurt Vonnegut, of course, had much more interesting things to say on the subject and after awhile I fell into a sulk.

I'm not the sort of person who is typically affected by national tragedies. I definitely tend more toward a George Carlinish outlook on group suffering. I don't think I'm uncaring per se, it's just that I find it difficult to identify with the individual victims of these events. When many people suffer they are neccesarily depersonalized into an amorphus mass of wounded, who then promptly get turned into symbols, into "martyrs", "heroes" and other unfamiliar concepts. This shit is really trite, I know, I sound like a wannabe academic discoursing on the nature of mass media, but come on! When was the last time you felt any real sympathy for six o'clock martyrs and CNN heroes?
Anyway, despite the thick layer of cynical armor I seem to have cultivated around what I hope to be a caring heart, I still, at times felt genuine pangs of sympathy for these people. People from right near me. The atmosphere of nervous, anxiety tinged boredom and melancholy, the deserted streets, the ubiquitous yellow haze and smell of sad smoke mixed horribly with the jarring news bulletins and Vonnegut Tragicomedy. Events loomed large on screen, but in the here and now things were small and jittery. Selfishly perhaps, the whole situation seemed to bring my life into focus. It had become as intolerable a mix of fear and apathy and glum cheerlessness as the event itself seemed to me at the time, and I know that sounds ridiculously self interested but fuck off, I'm tired of backtracking. If you are a person reading this, just from now on assume I'm fully aware of each instance of pointlessness, corniness, pretentiousness, self serving shittyness, etc. in this piece. I'm writing it for the sake of writing it.

My mother and I adjourned to have dinner at a TGI Friday's nearby. The place was packed with hungry evacuees, none of whom seemed to have lost their homes. In fact, the majority seemed more focused on the football game being shown on the tv above the bar than on the news being broadcast on the tv near our table. One group displayed what appeared to me to be an immodest amount of enthusiasm over the game, drinking heavily and gorging themselves on deep fried this and buffalo style that. I wasn't particularly offended, though, seeing as how it wasn't my house on fucking fire. Also perhaps joy is a better coping strategy then abject sorrow or stark wild eyed terror, seems reasonable enough to me.

Eventually my mother, dog, and I returned home and received a call from an elderly couple who lived near us. They had no place to go when they got the evac notice, so we told them to come on by. They are a childless couple who have, however, nurtured a lifelong fondness for dogs. They tend to adopt golden retrievers from various rescue centers and raise them with such a zealous excess of love that the dogs quickly become rotund land monsters, trundling feebly along on arthritic legs when other dogs their age are playing grabass and touch football, experiencing their first makeout sessions in the backs of their dad's Chevies, and going off to college. The couple at present had one such dog, and a younger dog with an amphetamine-fast metabolism. This dog was as ectomorphic as my friend John and replete with zest. He was also runty, stupid as shit, and always and everywhere frantically attempting to mount my own dog, who at the moment was passively curled up on the couch, warming my feet.

This pup was cursed with the unfortunate name "Genius", not that he seemed to mind. As soon as my neighbors showed up he rushed in, and as usual attempted clumsily to copulate with a bored looking Jack( who is easily twice his size) while Jack in turn attempted to mount Berry, the couple's other dog, who is fat, passive, and as disinterested in Jack as he is in Genius. The bisexual dog orgy raged around us as my Mom helped settle my neighbors in, and I tried unsuccessfully to continue reading.
My huge dog would periodically come over and lick my face, which would, of course, make genius feel slighted and he'd vie for Jack's attention through me. After a while I was covered in hair and drool, and what with this and the shitty ions, and the ash and smoke in the air, and the dust in the old house, I began sneezing my balls off. With dog grease on my hands, sneeze tears blurring my vision, and snot trailing from my Rudolph red, I set down my book and wandered cautiously outside for a cigarette. The smoke in the air made everything smell like India, where they routinely burn trash as a means to dispose of it. I tried to read by flashlight, but this balancing act was difficult, and so once again my attempts to broaden my outlook through literature were stymied by fate.

Eventually we bedded down. I finished my book (Finally!) and started another
off the butt of the first one. Eventually I got sick of reading (Tom Robbins this time) and tried to get some rest. I have trouble sleeping, so this didn't work well, but after tossing and turning for years under the stifling covers, I managed furtively to masturbate and fell into a thin sleep.

I was woken by light, noise, and the sound of my mom walking loudly around. She had predictably begun to irritate me, but I, of course, didn't hold it against her. I fondly remembered the time before I had my driver's license when I was perfectly content kicking it with my mom all day. This wasn't exactly a childhood memory either. I didn't get my license 'till the middle of my eighteenth year, and though I spent nights with friends doing coke, getting wasted, and all types of sordid things besides, during the day I was content to visit bookstores with her, accompany her on errands, and and afterwards grab lunch together.

Oh well. I headed into the living room where I found my neighbors had peaced out, fucked off and kicked rocks in the direction of our newly de-evacuated homes. My mother and I stopped back by our house too, and eventually met my neighbors again for lunch back in La Jolla.

Eventually we packed up our shit, and without much hugging, crying, boohooing, or shoulder clapping, promptly de-evacuated back to our respective homes. We have not since re-evacuated, re-de-evacuated, or any other prefix mumbo jumbo, though I've heard this has happened to some.
My mother and I settled back in, and I began to call friends, more out of loneliness than concern, though I certainly pretended to the latter. I knew most were probably right as rain, but I hadn't seen anyone in a while and I was bored and frustrated. Eventually I left the house to hunt for an open grocery store, and met up with my friend Irish to swap stories and attempt to pull myself out of the jittery funk I'd been in for the last two days.

Irish was a loud, fast-talking streetpunk from a lower middle-class suburb in Oceanside who wore a spray painted leather jacket and spouted one liners constantly. Now and then he would loudly ascend his soapbox and high horse simultaneously to deliver an angry sermon on some non sequitur at the worst possible moment socially. Recently though he'd suffered a serious blow to the dome when he fell from his skateboard at speeds in excess of forty miles an hour. Helmetless, it's amazing he lived, but live he did. He now sports a massive gash in the shape of a question mark on the side of his head and face, and is occasionally given to ramble. While all this was happening Irish would periodically put in with a phonecall and begin to rant about the fire from his grandmother's house in Del Mar. He gave the impression of some half-crazed shutin author, mumbling gleefully about the chaos around him. I picked him up and took him along to search for sustenance.

I purchased a tin of smoked oysters, a carton of some inedible cheese substance, a box of Triscuits and a pack of Pall Malls from an open Albertsons. The two of us then headed to Filiberto's Taco Shop in Encinitas, which of course, even at two AM, freshly after a mandatory evac, and within range of a pitched battle between man and the fiery forces of nature, was still open for business in defiance of God, and, no doubt, in standard violation of city health ordinance. I slopped down a messy burrito and the two of us drove aimlessly, drifting into maudlin conversation. After this past summer most of my good friends had gone off to bigger and better things, and Irish's weird behavior was beginning to alienate more and more of the people around him. I could tell that for him, like myself, the loneliness of the fire had thrown this all into harsh relief. We parted on a depressive note, and I drove home listening to low firebabble on the talk stations.

Today of course things continued as usual. At work I projected projections of "Darjeeling Limited" and "Across the Universe" and "Into the Wild" at another vacant hipster audience. Scratch that. A Thronging Hipster Multitude, perhaps escaping from the passionlessness of the last few days the same as me. Tomorrow I have to do it again, this time rising at Christ o'clock in the morning because our morning projectionist has food poisoning. C'est la vie.

If you've read this whole thing, you've probably found it a bit stale, a bit lame, a bit pointless and self indulgent. I did mostly write this for myself (except for all of the self conscious backpedaling, that was purely for the benefit of you assholes). I don't know if anybody will read this thing, but here it is; long winded, meandering, idiosyncratic, corny, self-serving, and trite as it may be. Here, for your perusal, is the story of the epic SD wildfires of twenty aught seven as they occurred to one random Indian kid from the suburbs.

so...

2007-10-16T23:25:00.000-07:00

Blogs are strange. What the fuck am I supposed to write about? John, the ScienceofMyth guy is the one who convinced me to start this thing. The trouble is I can honestly find very little to write about. I mean don't get me wrong, it's not like I don't have things on my mind, I do. At least I think I do. Like today, I pondered a lot of junk, I philosophized about a bunch of quandaries and stuff. Someone recently told me that they don't get writers block. Asshole. I bet she also shits freshly baked blueberry muffins, and subsists entirely on cosmic love. Hmm, well this blog doesn't really have any discernable theme, so I suppose I can write about whatever the fuck ever. It's also tough because I don't know how to post pictures and stuff to make this thing look all nice and professional. Well anyway, here's something I noticed lately: there is scarcely any romantic pornography. Why is this? Why is it that if I wanna see pictures of people fucking, I have to be prepared to fap to some of the most degrading shit imaginable? Seriously, I mean I feel like fucking Caligula watching some of this shit, and it confuses me. I mean I like to think of myself as progressive, maybe a little flowery, and for a guy like me it's a real headache that this porn thing has turned into a battle between fascistic censorship and oppressive patriarchy. How does one choose between the rights of women and the right to free expression, and why does this false dichotomy exist. I mean shit, here I am at three a.m. just trying to get my nut off, and suddenly I'm forced to grapple with obtuse ethical questions. It's enough to make a man weep!
I watched that movie The people versus Larry Flynt, and it seemed to argue that Flynt was a first amendment pioneer and a brave champion of our civil liberties like some godlike amalgam of Hugh Heffner and Abbie Hoffman. Yet on the other side of the issue you have your Andrea Dworkins and your Gloria Steinems, your Linda Lovelaces telling people that there was practically a gun to her head the whole time they were filming Deep Throat. And Throat looks like a Disney Channel Original Movie compared to some of these skeezy low budget streaming video deals you find nowadays. Seriously, I mean some of these chicks look like they're on the nod in these flicks, man. It looks like someone got the most hard up junkie chick they could find, gave her one hit to stop her detoxing and degraded her on camera for fifty bucks, minus bus fare. And they always call these chicks "bitch" or "cunt", they pull their hair, pull out of their asses and literally stuff their glistening pork swords down these women's throats. And the facials. The fucking facials!
And of course, I can't pretend I don't find much of this arousing, I'm only human, right? Y'know it's funny, sometimes I think that at the heart of every soppy liberal type there's a repressed DeSade style Id bursting with imperialist exploitation fantasies.
Speaking of which, the other day I found just that. Imperialist porn! It came from France and featured two men in an exotic, polynesian-type setting getting it on with five or six women. These dudes were wearing those sort of ruffled conquistador shirts, and the one was seated on a throne being service by four or five of these chicks. He was bald and fat and almost completely obscured by the pile of flesh that was stroking nibling and caressing his disgusting ass. Center stage was a strapping young buck sodomizing a petite asiatic female as she bent completely over and sucked on his toes with a desperate, almost religous rapture . At one point he pulled out, and after the cumshot he swatted her face with his member to get the last drops off like she was a rag, and even mimed slitting her spunk-bespattered throat with his shaft. This shit sounds like an Aristocrats routine, I know. Needless to say, this was too much for even me.
I feel like I'm probably going to alienate people by posting this, (assuming anyone reads this thing that is) because despite my constant mumbling about not approving of this stuff (I sincerely do not) I'm watching enough of it to describe it's highlights in lurid detail, right? Well come on! Wouldn't you? I mean seriously whether you find this stuff erotic or not it's definitely funny in a sad sort of way. Imperialist porn for fuck's sake! Christ, I couldn't make this shit up!
But anyway, I definitely wonder about what this says about us as a group. Of course the alternative is, of course, altporn, a phenomenon which I'm curious about. But then, part of me feels that watching a bunch of hipsters and goth chicks dress up like devils and flagellate one another with rider's crops is not only weird but completely retrogressive. Where is the reclamation of female sexual power in a video of some dready chick with a "fleas and lice" patch getting nutted on. All this seems to do is reinforce the stereotype that alternative looking chicks are loose and constantly looking for random play. Take that Suicidegirls!
Fuckin A, I don't know how to end this piece. Peace.

...hmm...

2007-10-05T04:07:00.000-07:00

This is the first post on the blog that will eventually make me famous, the blog that will make me a household name like Jesus or Bon Jovi. I'd better make this good.
Today, me and my buddy John stopped at a mini-mall near our respective homes to get coffee at a health food grocery there. Unfortunately, this was no ordinary mall, but the mall, where I spent large chunks of my adolescence getting stoned and sinking further and further into indolence and despair.
Fortunately life took a sharp upswing six months or so after my eighteenth birthday and I stopped kicking it in front of stores and bothering security guards. Instead I got a car and a job and a course load at a local community collegein my area. Still and all the place maintains a lingering hold on me, and though I'll be twenty soon people still know me at that fuckin' place.
The technical term for an adolescent jobless wanderer is "gromit" (gromitus despairidae) if they frequent a particular location they are occasionally known as "rats", as in "starbucks rats". Lately I've noticed isolated gay gromits, who sneak around curfews and other archaic parental legislation to gromit around the San Diego queer scene. I've noticed them more lately because a few come into my work and bother my manager, a lovely person and about the biggest queen I've ever known personally. He achieved a bit of notoriety and tries to maintain a low profile of late, particularly at work, but these damn kids constantly insist on wandering in and blowing up the spot on him.
Poor guy.
Anyhoo, John and have barely got out of the car, when one of these gay gromits accosts us in the parking lot. He starts yammering aimlessly about some bullshit I could care less about as we make our way to the store, weighed down by this slow moving kid and his ditzy rambling. Like most of the queer kids his age that I know, this kid came out of the closet with a vengeance, and has strict parents who monitor his grades and probably drug test the shit out of him. I don't know why these things correlate, or if my experience is just weirdly skewed or what, but this is the trend I've observed.
If this dude had been the end of our daily dose of gromitry it would have been fine. On his own John and myself could contain him. But Lo and Behold, along comes our friend Irish, with three of these little fuckers in tow. These were a heartier and more seasoned brand of gromit, and the first little dude wandered away. He was there with his mother, and I don't think he wanted her to see him in such company. I can scarcely say I blame him.
This brings me to the crux of my tale, a female gromit was among them, younger than the rest by a wide margin. Only fourteen years old. Too young to remember the OJ simpson trial or Beavis and Butthead or the Paula Jones scandal. Too young to even remember the Clinton administration with much clarity. She was hanging around with a group of people who, though not bad in and of themselves, were guaranteed to get her in a bunch of shitty situations, and I'm sure she was thrilled to be there.
To be fair, I can't say I was all that much different at her age, but there are a couple of worrisome things about her behavior. The most irritating thing about her is that she wildly overcompensates for her meager years by being unneccesarily assertive; badgering people and cutting them off mid-sentence, forcing her hopelessly naive opinions on you when your just trying to get a cup of coffee before your next class. Now I know I probably sound like an elitist twat, and I know I'm not exactly a craggy eyed wellspring of hard won wisdom gleaned from long lean years, but come on! Fourteen!
Case in point as to why this is so revolting: this girl started doing ecstasy when she was thirteen. A lot of it. Also, the other day she baited me into a horrifying conversation starting innocently enough with
"I did so much physical activity yesterday!"
"oh yeah? What'd you do?" I asked.
"I walked around in the sun all day and I had sex for like FOUR HOURS" yecchh.
(NOTE: I don't care if she has sex, even at that age if it's consensual and she enjoys it, but the very fact that she would drop detail like that in conversation as a way to score points or something makes me wonder whether she's ready for something like that.)
And so on...

The worst part is I know she probably has crazy street cred with her little friends for doing these things. Up to the age of twenty two or three she'll probably still brag about all this shit happening to her at such a young age in a tone of feigned regret. She's a typical member of our generation. Poor girl. Poor us. Poor everyone.

After this post I'll try to start talking about other, less ridiculous topics having nothing to do with my OG status in the Gromit Kingdom. I'll post better shit, I promise.

I just had to start somewhere.