"Whutcha Readin' For?"

I meant for my first entry on here to be angry and sarcastic, not boring and informative. I’ll try harder next time.

I have been reading more than ever lately. Along with new books, I’ve been rereading books that I previously read and loved. I wish I started reading my books with a highlighter long ago. It’s quite frustrating to me when I can’t quite remember a great idea or line from a book, with no way to find it short of reading the entire book over for that one thing on that one page. Now it’s easy. Like Mr. Butcher, I also spent a number of years surrounded by books. Through the years, I came across many interesting books, and I would always write the title and ISBN on a post-it and stick it in my wallet. Every couple of months, I would just throw the post-its away, because, like most of you, I’m lazy with certain things. I always wished that there was an electronic way to keep track of the books I’d read and the books I would eventually like to read. I also tried to get my friends to all read and discuss the same book, but it would never work. Strangely enough, I was the only one who would actually read the shit they picked, and I was always the busiest of the group. I then thought that it would be nice if the organizational tool would somehow give me the chance to talk to other people who might happen to be reading the same book as me at a given time. Many virgins and goats later, my wish was granted. I came across a site called Goodreads.com. Basically, it’s myspace for book lovers. It goes beyond what I wanted as well. You can write reviews on books and even publish your own, right through the site. I also like that you can only post one picture at a time, meaning that it’s actually about the books and what people write and not about how attractive you think you are. The site also has a place for published authors, so if you’re obsessed with, say, Danielle Steel or whomever, you can look to see what they’re reading. I haven’t explored the site fully, but I must say that it beats the hell out of myspace and facebook in my eyes.

Have fun quadrupling your daily caloric intake.

Metal Up Your Ass

I have never wanted a specific dog so much in my entire life...

heavy metal pooch

Nobody Died That Night.

Okay. So, this likely won't be the best post, but since I called the bank twice, worked on my pathetically useless-in-Texas resume, vented about the insensitive wang I work for, talked to my ex-husband about an LLC, went shopping at the world's most fashion challenged Walmart, friended ancient peoples who mean fuck all to me on facebook, smoked the cheapest cigarette in the Universe, drank some timeless Miller Lite and talked to my schizo-affected kid-glove brother... I feel as if I have accomplished enough to write a quick post about the past weekend's camping trip.

We went to Lake Livingston. I haven't been there in 20 years. I remember it being a really great park. I remember hanging my feet off of the small dock, breaking moonlight in the lapping water with my pre-teen toes and catching perch in a large hand held net. It seemed busy with people but not chaotic. I don't remember there being an equestrian stable and trails back then, and I am pretty sure there was wildlife wandering through the campsites.

This time around, Lake Livingston might as well have been Jones lake and I mean that in the harshest sense. It was thrashed from Ike and no real effort had been made to clean up camp sites. Our tent spot was 40 feet from a road, where cars careened along all night disrupting our sense of "getting away." There was no wildlife at all except a black and white housecat, one squirrel, one lizard and a white pomeranian. There was no fish to be seen, except for one fat carp who sucked on a dock piling while all of us losers tried to bait him with worms and plastic fantasy-looking neon creatures. It was sort of like ten fat but somehow still hungry bruiser cosmetologists- desperate to lay their magic on an unlipsticked up Gar, because they were starving for protein and had something to prove, all swinging their lipstick over the side of an abyss from strings that had no future in success as far as dolling up some protein... I didn't see anyone catch a thing and this included people with 10 ton tackle boxes in lawn chairs who probably lived on the lake. Every ten minutes we heard what sounded like a peacock having an orgasm, and never actually identified the creature making the sound, but suspect it was a slave girl being held by the Mooks over at less primitive camp sites. Less... primitive... sites.

You can't really choose who your camp neighbors are going to be, and I guess this is always a gamble. We didn't have to deal with truckloads of high school losers enjoying their first beers. There weren't children fighting over things. There weren't loud belt tugging veterans speaking over each other with greater stories... But there was a strange group of men who set up camp shortly after we did. At first brushings, I thought that there were two leaders in a group of adult-disability-veteran-community little brothers program. Half of their camp seemed awkward and the other half seemed almost obnoxious in their know-how.



Nothing seemed special about them the first night. We made jokes that they were homosexual-as you would expect of us- and there was little fanfare. The next morning, we awoke to what we thought was a message. Someone had placed a burnt human limb in the driveway entrance to our site. Later, as we were sitting around having dinner at our campfire (looking sideways at the charred limb a few feet away) John was playing some fine acoustic metal songs, and the man-group camping across from us started playing a goat horn and singing in hebrew. yes. They did. So, I had to sing my Amy Grant "El Shadai" which I learned in vocal training to be obnoxious.... I don't think that really did much for me or anyone else for that matter. Learning that song or vocal training that is. Nobody died that night.



We left camp early on Sunday, with no luck at fishing, and no groovy wildlife experiences to take home with us. We decided to do some small town off-roading and check out Swartwout, which was a Ghost town down the road. Nothing too special there. It was meant to be Polk County's original county seat- but Livingston somehow won that deal. The history involves a somewhat interesting tale of the settlers and developers and their political schemes and failures. The church is the coolest building that we saw, and it was pretty neglected even though services were being held in an adjacent structure by a local Methodist? group. Back woods effort to take care of that historical marker sucked polar dick to be sure. Sad.




We hit the road and had to stop when we saw a beautiful cat perched upon a rotted pole at a Goodrich, Tx "intersection" across from "City hall". John said, " Look. Cat." and since I am an animal lover without animals-- I forced John at gun point to stop so I could pet that cat. The cat wasn't having any of me, and it ran into a dilapidated building with a sign above it. "J.A.Young & Sons Grocery and Market". I took off my flip flops, put on my muddy boots and made my way through the brush to look into the busted windows, while John parked the car.






I had a moment to myself to look inside the property, before I beckoned John to join me. It was crazy. The cat had disappeared somewhere into a mess of abandoned organic squalor. The floor was covered in trash. There were cat prints on the wall next to a last supper print. A miniature christmas tree sat on top of a bird cage stand in a corner, but center stage to it all, was a piano that had been neglected.

I took some photos and we jetted before having dogs loosed upon us from a neighbor.

About ten or twenty minutes later, we saw another house that needed inspection. I call it inspection. You call it trespassing. We all benefit. This property speaks for itself when you look at the exterior. You have to look inside right? You can't just drive by a place like this that has open doors and no windows and not look. You can't. Well, I can't. Here's the pictures.






After stopping and spending about 1/2 an hour here, we hit the road only stopping twice more on the way home. We stopped at Buster McNutty's for shitty food- when we had expected so much more, and we stopped at Huntsville State Park which was very nice. All I could think of was getting home though so I could research the two properties that I had taken pictures of.

What I learned about the Grocer/Market, was that the original owner was a grandson of one of Livingston's founding members who was a Methodist minister. The original owner had passed away, as had likely his sons, and I found a record of his grandson having passed away in 1998. Who owns that property now, is a mystery to me. Who owned that piano.. a bigger one.

The small homestead we stopped and took pictures of off of hwy190, belonged to William Hillhouse. I believe he was born in December 1927, and passed away in January of 2000. He was a disabled veteran and from what we could gather based off of information we unearthed-- was that he was in the air force's 30th communications squadron and worked with code breakers in Omaha Nebraska in the 1950's. I think he has at least one surviving son in Goodrich of the same name, but his house sure did indicate that no one in his family cared.

I failed to mention that before we made it home, we stopped at the carnival on I-45 so I could take some pictures. If we hadn't of stopped, we wouldn't have discovered where Stacey (the singer from The Cows) was now working.



I think he may even be this lady's BRUSBAND.




I have additional photos and brief stories to share in an additional post, about our excursions into the realm of shitty resale shops and more.

TOMORROW=BUTTERNUT SQUASH SOUP, but what did I learn on this trip?

Trespass.

Two Finger'd Scroll

Got immersed in iPhone technology on account that I got hired to "fix" somebody's web app so that it worked on one of them things. Turned out the user just needed to know how to two finger scroll but he didn't like the sound of that so he had me redesign the app in such a way that only a one finger scroll is needed. So I made some trips to the Apple store, played around with my friend's iPhone and threw the app at this site a few times. Strange to work with a fellow who is up on the times enough to have a web app designed for smartphones but he himself doesn't want to learn something new. I'm kinky. I hear two finger'd scroll I'm there.

Spinning

I accidentally watched Who the #$&% Is Jackson Pollock? and Boogie Man back to back the other day. I say accidentally because I hadn't planned to watch Boogie Man; it just showed up onFrontline while I was staring at the boob tube. Turns out these two flicks make a great package deal.

WtFIJP? is about a coarse talking trucker lady trying to get her thrift score find validated as an authentic Pollock. Boogie Man is about the legendary Republican campaign manager, Lee Atwater. Both are about spin; and after watching them both you'll have fun thinking about: who was spinning who? who got spun? who is spinning the viewer directly? who is spinning the viewer indirectly? who is just now realizing they were previously spun? who is spinning the film maker? what's the film maker's spin? How many spins can you catch? Who have I spun lately? Who spun me? Am I a good spinner? Or am I usually getting my spin spun back? Is it possible to spin back a spun spin?

Game On

While reading over my previous post, I found it kind of comical that I pretty much used the Bon Jovi “I've seen a million faces and I've rocked them all” analogy when describing my love of books. So, kudos to myself for that one.

I had to explain the concept of Manga to the new lady at work today, and soon after that I had to explain what an RPG novel is. I name checked Warcraft as an example of a role playing game. I loved the blank face of disinterest I received in return. That's the stuff of dreams when you are trying to find out if a new hire is going to shit on your entire work world or whether they are going to actually help you get things done. Soon after the Warcraft reference I got in a few copies of the Warcraft video game guide and it's the sort of near synchronous event that happens fairly often at work for some reason. I love that stuff.

I can't tell you how many times I have thought of some obscure book or author only to pull that very book out of the next box. I swear I must be like some sort of totally useless book clairvoyant or some such shit. Uncanny.

As I am wont to do at my intellectually unstimulating job, my mind was wandering about over the topic of video gaming and I realized at that moment just how much of a dork I have been over the years.

So in the spirit of full disclosure I am now going to give a brief, tortuous, and purely pointless rundown of my history with video games over the years.

It won't quite be chronological because, well, my memory isn't even vaguely linear. So bear with me. Here we go.

1979(ish): Coming back to the states from a five-year stint in gay Paris, my parents take a month long sabbatical to Tokyo to visit friends leaving my brother and I to fend for ourselves with my Aunt in the insanely American town of Louisville, Ohio.

(As a side note – In Marilyn Manson's autobiography he describes an incident during which he apparently has sex with some local Louisville girl who by his account is way out of his league, which is forcing me to admit that I at least read part of that book.)

My Aunt has this crazy box that you plug into the TV. This box is called Pong. I am a duck to water. A duck who plays Pong by himself for many hours, and a duck who literally takes to water during swim lessons at the Y (yes, for those who actually read my shit, the same Y at which I am mistaken for a girl.)

1980(ish): My dad gets a bug up his ass in his new bachelor pad and decides on an apparent whim to buy a Radio Shack TRS80 home computer. The damn thing uses a tape deck for memory. We discover Pyramid, a text-based game, and waste countless hours dying in a verbal wonderland.

My dad shakily enters the world of cooking with his now infamous concoction: the mac-n-chee-pinto-bean-tuna-fish casserole. His well-deserved ridicule has begun. It takes many years for him to exonerate himself by becoming a virtual genius when it comes to cooking on a grill (seriously, the guy is a real talent).

1981(ish): Atari is the shit in console form. There are two camps in middle school: those with Atari and those without. Care to guess our side of the fence?

1982(ish): In an anticlimactic but no less welcomed turn of events, the Cramer family acquires it's first Atari 2600 console. With the console is the ridiculous game Combat, which while advertising as having 27 different games in it, is really just 27 versions of the same monocolored shitty game. No matter, in our house there is a new king and his name is Atari.

In the next couple of years the spirit of aggressive hostility that is borne between my brother and me is honed to a razor sharpness. This will later culminate in his putting a box of thumbtacks under my bedside rug as a good morning gift which I return in kind with a face punch.

We acquire more stunners like Frogger, Soccer, Missile Command (which I fall asleep playing and wake up two hours later having scored a million-plus points), Space Invaders, Defender, Centipede, and one of the world's greatest all-time games – Asteroids. Woo-baby. The hours I've burned on that game alone. Terrifying.

Game rooms pop up everywhere. It's hard to imagine how many quarters are stolen from the world as kids lose their mind to go to the arcade and rock out on Defender and Donkey Kong and the like. The arcade by my house was called Ice Cream and Games, and the dude that ran the place was a Polish immigrant who looked almost exactly like Klause Meine from the Scorpions. It is at this arcade that the dickhead bully down the street taunts me for awkwardly bending my wrist while we play air hockey. I respond decades later by outing him as a friend of Ted Nugent and a closet homosexual (which he is, and which he is).

1982-3(ish): We visit my friend Daniel in San Antonio. Dan has a freestanding system called Vectrex. Vectrex is like porn for teens. The system is comprised entirely of vector graphics based games, which basically means games like Asteroids, or Battlezone, or Tempest. Vector graphics games are all comprised of points connected by lines on a black background. The different games come with overlays that mimic the look of their arcade counterparts. That so much was created with so little is a testament to the creativity of gaming designers of this era.

Around this time, while languishing in a bowling alley known for a murder, I also discover a game called Pick-Up. Pick-Up was a Vector game and it was the shit. Dan's Vectrex has Pick-Up.

For the record, Dan had the entire Micronauts comics series and I read the whole damn thing. I love Dan forever for this alone. I also hate his sister forever for playing the Genesis album Abacab on replay the entire stay. Demon bitch.

She also tried to walk in on me while I was shitting, something that couldn't possibly be pleasurable to anyone.

Still, Dan also has assloads of X-Men comics, so all is forgiven. Besides, she was adopted so I can't blame Dan.

Back home, this guy down the street keeps a real cougar in his backyard. I am not making this up. The cougar is called Ripides and the guy lets the thing walk around in the living room. While this is pretty cool, it's the row of pinball games that he has in the loft that keeps us coming over. Despite the obvious creep factor involved, the guy never tries to ass fuck any of us.

Intellivision is now making kids want to stab each other over which console is the king.

My friend John has the Intellivision, and he and my other friend, Matt, are moths to a flame with the damn thing. Me, I feel disloyal to my 2600 and rebel. It's all those damn buttons. If I want to push that many buttons I'll go back to my dad's TRS80. Fuck that noise. Okay, I'll admit that Pitfall ruled. I'll give John that one. Bastard. But he will never be able to explain his love of Night Ranger and Yngwie Malmsteen. Never.

Still in the early to mid 80s here: My friend _____'s dad is a doctor, and as such feels the need to let everyone know how little of a burden it is for him to throw money at his kids. Thankfully his misguided generosity puts a full-sized arcade version of the game Battlezone in their TV room.

That's what I'm talking about.

Not so thankfully, his mom decides to share with me that she wishes she were "only ten years younger."

I immediately stop going over to the dragon lady's house. 

Even Battlezone isn't that cool.

The late 80s/early 90s find me turning my back on video games. Too busy getting loaded, I suppose. Too busy playing in bands. Too busy being broke.

1996(ish): The guy at my new job rants and raves about the Playstation he put on his plastic just so he could play the new game called Tomb Raider. I act interested while secretly thinking the guy has taken leave of his senses for wasting money he doesn't have on a fucking video game.

About three weeks later I do the exact same thing.

Without exaggerating, over the next couple of weeks, and whenever I am free (which I make sure is every night), I play Tomb Raider until I have literally finished the entire game. I am now lost in a pixellated world of narcotic joy. All hope is lost.

For brevity's sake I will give you a brief summary of the next few years as it relates to video games: I play them with a renewed vigor. I am at this point a total gaming dork and I am even proud of it.

There come times during which I have played Grand Theft Auto so much that when I go driving afterwards it takes several minutes to not look at the environment as a place to exploit as I am running from the cops and trying to collect money from my whores.

For the record, I pride myself on not gaining any police attention whenever I am collecting from my ladies.

And then...

Burnout.

Other than the Silent Hill series and the occasional Tomb Raider reissue and the rare adventure with my kid, it is over.

Now, video gaming for me means Spider Solitaire, or this new one on my home page called Flood-it!.

Pretty high-tech stuff.

I got totally burned out on the same four or five ideas played out in higher and higher levels of graphic resolution and lower and lower levels of creative intelligence.

That is, until my brother scored The Wii.

Shit.

Wither and Wane

I was at work today and I kind of had a moment. I've been in the bookselling business for many years now, too many to mention, and I and not only familiar with books, I live them.

I have probably touched literally millions of books in my day and honestly speaking, despite all the issues that go with working retail – and god knows there are plenty – at the end of the day, like say today, I still like what I do.

That is to say, I still like the actual doing part. All the politics, the ass kissing, the back stabbing, the lies, the laziness, the incompetence, that stuff is for the birds. Yeah, that stuff can go jump a cliff. What I dig is being surrounded by books.

I love books.

I love fiction, literature, history, sociology, science, comics, art, cooking, bargain, poetry, kids, philosophy, the occult, fuck, I even love bestsellers and all their vapid glory.

It's boner city for me to be surrounded by books.

The store I work in is a landmark in Houston. It's a landmark, but don't tell the property management company because they seem intent on making a buck and tearing the thing down once my home office moves the program and closes our store for one that actually might turn a profit.

Once upon a time, in true storybook fashion, our store was the biggest bookstore in all the land (or at least in all of Houston). No one could even hope to unseat us as the book buying center of the Houston universe.

We anchored our little shopping center. Hell, when our building was built in the late 30s, we were the center. Back then, on opening night, crowds gathered to watch the Jack Benny film and taste a small sample of America at its finest.

The movies stopped running eventually, and before you knew it some investors had turned our building into an independent bookstore.

Unfortunately what they had in vision was not matched in their business acumen and before long they had to sell out to the world's largest bookseller.

A few years later I entered this picture and except for an 8 month stint refining my hatred for hippies, I have been there ever since.

As for the business, well, over the years the suits envisioned a future of huge and profitable megastores. Our poor little converted art deco theater, all clunky and retrofitted, didn't match up. Sure, for years we did fine what with the giant health food store being in the center and really no competition to speak of, but once they moved down the street leaving their old spot empty for several years, and then once our only actual competitor erected one of their own huge anchor stores right on the same corner we were doomed. Suddenly the tables were turned.

Me? I'll keep my job, will move to another store and will keep doing this work for the foreseeable future.

So anyway, at this rate, yeah, financially speaking I will die an indentured servant, so to speak. I will be working until I can't work any more and then, for all I know, I will move under the nicest bridge I can find and take shelter from the weather while I wait to die.

Good solid fun.

But you know what? I don't suck devil cock and I don't bend over and take it too far up the ass. Oh sure, I might dally, but I never go full hog.

So do I have dignity?

Fuck you for asking. I smoke meerschaum and let my team of afghans pull my gilded chariot through the streets because I am a god among men.

And tomorrow, when you are at your job, massaging the ego of your Napoleonic gastrointestinal expulsion of a boss, offering your sphincter up to the gods of commerce, while you are signing every contract old Mr. Scratch shoves beneath your nose, long since immune to the smell of sulfur, I will be at the bookstore reading the Walking Dead series, eating leftovers, and only being nice to the people who deserve it.

Just do me one favor in my waning years.

Come say hello when you come to pick up the new Danielle Steel, okay? Deal?

The Whiteout

I live in a very populated area of Houston, Texas just west of the Galleria. In case you are unfamiliar with Houston, the Galleria is a gargantuan mall that is known for drawing people from all over the world, who, it would appear, can't resist our overpriced crap. If you were into demographics this would be your part of town. We've got it all around here. In fact, this apartment complex alone is an international, intercultural, and interracial wonderland. Whenever I go for a walk around the (massive) property I encounter Africans, the Hungarians downstairs, Latinos, Caribbeans, and that damn French guy.

Okay, there's no French guy.

Also cross-represented is damn near the entire economic strata. There are the ubiquitous homeless, there are folks like us - the working poor as they say, there are whatever is left of the middle class, the measurably affluent, and then there are the folks like George Bush senior. Yeah, that douchenozzle lives here too.

So we just had a little election, maybe you've heard about it. I don't know. I guess people are talking about it.

Maybe you yourself live under a rock. If so, let me just let you know that here in Texas we loves us some GOP action. If it's right of center then buddy bring it on.

We have brought you such moral stalwarts like Karl Rove and Tom Delay and of course, George Bush (lesser and greater). We pack a right-wing wallop and we are proud of it.

Dandy.

Unfortunately for Texas, this was not her year at the polls. John McCain got bitchslapped this go-round.

Thing is, you'd never know it if you were to measure the pulse of American presidential politics from the polling station at which I waited in line to vote last Tuesday.

Those same sons-of-bitches I wrote about the other day were out at Briargrove Elementary in full force.

As I entered the school I came face to face with a huge line. While it may be true that only 40% of Texas voters went to the polls, it was clear that nobody told the yup-monsters in line to stay home.

It took us a solid hour to make our way into the polling room. Usually that would be just fine with me. I am not too civic minded; voting pretty much does it for me. Plus, I sort of get a little moved whenever I go and vote. I don't know why. In the last several elections I have either voted for Obama or Ralph Nader or whoever it was that ran Green the last presidential election. So my voting record has been a wee shoddy.

Yeah, Obama won, but he sure as fuck didn't win Texas. And as for those other jokers, none of them ever had a snowball's chance in hell of winning; so basically for me voting is kind of like pissing in the wind.

Whatever. I still get tingly inside when I do it.

This time it was sort of different.

This time I was going into the polls knowing that the guy I was voting for was going to win the whole deal. I knew that this was an historic election and I was acutely aware of its importance as I stood there.

The line wound its way around the front entrance to the school, and as this was happening the last students to arrive were filtering in. This little boy strode in, maybe Indian, and loudly asks the general throng, “Wow, what are all these people doing here”?

No one says a word for a moment, maybe out of surprise, but more likely out of a desire for anonymity from our fellow line-waiters. Finally I and one other woman responded almost in unison. “Voting.”

“Oh yeah,” he said, “I hope everyone votes for Barack Obama, I would love that.”

There are a couple snickers, mine included.

And then the woman directly behind me says, “Oh great, another brainwashing.”

Loudly.

To a fucking elementary student.

Now this whore is on my radar.

Look, if you don't know about me yet because, I don't know, your head is totally up your ass, or you were Google-ing “scrotum” or whatever and somehow landed here by accident it might help you to know that I hate people.

Yeah, I'm a grade-A misanthrope. You may have read about us in college. During your frat-boy youth, your beer-bong haze, your cheerleading pompom practices, your pleated skirt tennis lessons, perhaps you heard about the people who fucking hate people.

I'm one of them.

So it doesn't take a lot to tip my repulsion of humanity over the edge, and that goes especially for public places like lines.

At that point I am no longer relishing those rare moments when I am not not ashamed to be American (or human for that matter), I am now focused entirely on how I will make it through the line without gut punching this satanic minion in her kidneys. I am no longer flush with patriotic duty, I am now engorged with a bloodlust.

Joining Ilsa the She-Wolf in line is her tragically stupid eunuch of a husband and her catastrophically-cursed poor little daughter named Sarah-Kate.

Jesus H. Christ in a chicken basket how I fucking loathe hyphenated first names.
Why, for the love of god, why, would you think your kid needs two first names? Is this little homunculus twice as wonderful as the rest of us? Or wait, I know this one... Or, is it that you are a pompous white snob with a chip on her should as big as her sense of entitlement?

“Ding!”

We have a winner!!

For the remaining 45 minutes it becomes like the Bataan Death March for me as I endure this woman as she regales all of us poor bastards around her with tales of her daughter's wonderfulness.

And for all her snide talk of brainwashing she is quick to let us all know who her daughter voted for in her school's mock election.

Once the woman finds out the guy in front of me looks Hispanic she immediately has her daughter recite her 1 to 10s in Spanish.

Oh joy! The little white girl is already being used to patronize brown people! And all before her first ballet lesson!

Then it hits me.

This is the election that belongs to the brown people. And for all the years that I rubbed shoulders with the progeny of pathetic wastes of life like this woman and her soon to be Hitler Youth daughter, come January, this terrible, terrible woman and her crushing ugliness will finally be in the minority.

National pride restored I enter the booth, punch in my little number, and proceed to side with the underestimated brown man who will forever change what it means to be American for us all.

And best of all, it comes to me like a freight train of glee. This woman, this woman who is desperate to hold on to all that has cornered her in her little world of shame, is now in the minority.

Let freedom ring.

And fuck you, lady.

Hope you enjoyed the ride, now, step aside and shut up.

Everyone loves me in a paper hat

15 years ago or so, I was working one of 3 jobs in Portland Oregon on my way to the final frontier. I carved roast at table side, and pushed an enormous silver coffin around a dark dining room wearing a ridiculous paper hat and was subjected to the stupid questioning of those with fat wallets out to diminish the fact that their day to day sucked as much as mine. I worked there for two weeks, amidst young chicks in full Dance Party USA regalia, until I called in sick one day. "I can't come to work. I have diarrhea." They wished me well and said they would see me when I felt better. I told them that I was going to always have diarrhea, and would never see them again.

Tonight, I worked at a wedding party carving station as a favor for my employer. It is almost one year to the day that I pretty much decided I would be terminating my marriage, and so I can't exactly say that working the event was easy. The funny thing about me is that, if you put me in a completely compromising or humiliating scenario- I will decidedly turn it around and somehow make myself the champion of a terrible snapshot. I can walk the aisles in Walmart with eyes full of tears, knowing I will miss my daughter's birthday and 4th Christmas, listening to this year's first constipated strains of Christmas music and survive, albeit battered and feeling ill. But I will survive.

The wedding party was normal for wealthy people. 100 in attendance. Everyone wore a suit or some black dress and reflected light unflatteringly about their faces by teasing their hair into believing that it was somehow independent from the individual and had some risk management issues with other planets, but got the memo at the hundredth hour.

People ate. People got drunk.. The dj suddenly started to be louder and played more energetic music. He made a point of deafening everyone in the room to introduce a Fergie song. The bride made her way onto the dancefloor as did her tipsy bridesmaids, and they started to dance. I don't want to describe the dancing because it was terrible. I am sure that they were all thrilled to be part of something very special... but what the fuck with the fucking Fergie? It almost overshadowed the moment when friend and family took the mic to talk about bride and groom and some guido from the Vietnam War told everyone, "When you go to sleep at night and you pull that blanket up over your head and are warm... that's what freedom is.... etc etc."

His speech was made worse by the fact that he thanked the bride for "her service to the marines" ( which people laughed at). Her brother took the mic and made jokes about not being woken up during the coup in Baghdad because his sister was watching some sitcom with friends, and he went on to say that they shared time at Guantanamo... Neither of which was likely true but was meant to highlight the fact that they were patriots.

I felt like I was that person who would emerge from genocide with heirlooms, and not children, by being a party to this event.

That's what freedom is? Having some fat drunk guy at a ritzy boutique hotel suggest that anything you might enjoy as a basic right is something you should feel tremendous guilt for and really not deserve at all-- because so many people died to give it to you? As a soldier, who lived, are you not ashamed that violence was the answer yet you stitch your wounds together in an effort to honor humanity during a wedding? What kind of science fiction is this?

You know what? Thousands of people die every day who pull blankets over their heads. Millions more are full of anger and fear that they can't provide basic necessities to family who have no way to care for themselves. Millions of people are afraid that their family will be shot to death in the next hour. So here's to you, mr fat veteran, for really letting me know what I have been taking for granted as you stand in all of your glowing patriotic splendor, sucking on a rack of lamb and feeling so proud of yourself. I hate that soldiers died for our freedom, but more than that-- I hate that freedom died with each and every one of them. Freedom doesn't live because people die. Freedom is ill-defined. Its sad that veterans choose to make themselves out as under appreciated heroes in a way that glorifies current war. Yes, you faced odds. Yes your time on Earth was horrific. Fight against it instead of promoting it, so that more young men will have to try to live up to your suffering to be called men.

Freedom shouldn't involve being baited and trapped into donating piece after piece of your soul toward a cause that is a necessary evil. Freedom is an effect and a belief and a fantasy. Freedom should never be a punishment. Did I feel fortunate as I carved for a group of 100 lavishly dressed guests during our global recession? fortunate to be employed? I thought about if this hotel was under siege and my family was hiding in its belly as I would try to please the enemy who had destroyed the perimeter and needed more... Because that was exactly how it felt to me. I wasn't celebrating a union, I was decompressing, and in my mind I felt like a trapped participant to a viewing of the world going mad.

Freedom to act as if nothing in the world needs your civic sacrifice isn't freedom at all... It's horror, and I have been serving for 35 years to fight terror at home.

As I left the event, several people thought I looked neat and cute in my 14" tall paper chef hat. I was invited to party with everyone afterward where we would no doubt talk shit on the chef and the hotel and everything in general. I told them all that I couldn't make it because I had a date to shit the bed.

And so I retire, to soil my Egyptian cotton... you fucking demon keepers of my freedom.

Slightly Well Known, Totally Blowing Himself

Back when I was regularly selling myself out to the wasteland of the Nonalignment Pact, I made a couple of attempts to appeal to the vanity of a one Mr. Eugene Robinson, who, in case you are unfamiliar, is the front man of the San Francisco based band, Oxbow. I won't bother to go into why they rock. Check them out on your own, I've waxed rhapsodic long enough on them in the past. Dig it up and draw your own opinions.

I've held off posting the small piece he finally ended up sending me for many months now as I found it to be both written more for his own vanity than anyone else's interest, and also written from the point of view of a very threatening man with something to prove to no one in particular save perhaps himself.

Basically, I wasn't interested in in posting the piece because he is capable of much more as a writer. His book, which I might add was the only reason he agreed to follow through with me, is a great read on the subject of fighting and why he is so into it. I highly recommend the book, and I also highly recommend you don't take this following bit as a litmus test to his worth as a writer.

The male ego is often something much like a drunk behind the wheel of a train going downhill in total darkness, which it so say that the male ego unhinged is as terrifying as it is pathetic.

Stumbling across the back and forth between us over this, I figured what the hell. It's just languishing in my inbox, collecting dust. Why not air it out and move on?

Here I am, moving on.

Enjoy.


SOMETHING ABOUT A BOOK ON FIGHTING. AND FUCKING. AND THE INELUCTABLE DIFFICULTY OF DOING BOTH AT THE SAME TIME.


"And if there's anything I can do to make you feel better, Eugene, please just let me know."

Yes. The ol' "I'll do anything gambit". The ways in which I had been snookered, snaked, and otherwise pulled around the maypole are too extensive to go into here and are off of the point besides which was, as I saw it, and to quote ODB: how to buy pussy I could not afford.

"...anything at all to make you feel better."

And in a 100-foot Charlie Brown-cliff dive of total stupidity I say:

"Your pussy. And me in it."

And she laughed and laughed, a light trilling thing teetering dangerously close to a guffaw before it resolved itself into a "No. But, really...."

So, there you have it.

What I did next I am not particularly proud of but the way I see it there was no other way: I called Homeland Security.

Yes. I figure they will know what to do and at the very least a few weeks in Gitmo while they try to figure out the mix up should help her align her priorities in way that much better accords with mine.

So it is done. The functional equivalent of a TKO. All in the name of love.

Have I mentioned the book I've written on fighting or my great and uncanny craft with segues?

Fight: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Ass-Kicking but Were Afraid You'd Get Your Ass Kicked for Asking [www.amazon.com/Fight-Everything-Wanted-Ass-Kicking-Afraid/dp/0061189227]

....while it is unlikely to rescue me from a life of continued penury it comes as close to anything to explaining why I am smiling when I am fighting. Or calling Homeland Security.

And for this reason you should buy it. If you, and your relatives who don't live anywhere near Gitmo, know what's good for you.


--Eugene S. Robinson

Oh, That the Sun Might Rise Again

I have always had a thing for Halloween. And, we're talking for what has become a whole host of reasons over the years. As a very young American expatriate, my earliest memories of America were practically more myth than reality, and Halloween might as well go ahead and be added to that mix. I first went trick-or-treating in Paris, France, with friends from A.S.P., otherwise known as the American School of Paris. A lovely place, really, and a great place to get a first-rate elementary education. If I have half a brain, I owe a great deal of it to A.S.P. and its progressive curriculum.

I am not a big holiday guy when it comes right down to it. As cynical as I am, it is more than a little difficult for me to admit to myself that the holidays are little more than an excuse for people to spend money and propagate some form of diluted tradition all in the eventual name of commerce.

Fuck that.

But, still, I have always enjoyed Halloween.

I dug John Carpenter's movie (still do), have loved the pagan implications, have enjoyed any holiday that is centered around deception and masking who it is we really are. It's rudimentary and juvenile, but it still works for me.

But if we flash-forward to now, to me being forty motherfucking years old, to me being divorced, a father of two, a man who is tormented by demons (too much?) then maybe Halloween takes on a new, less important significance.

Maybe All Hallows Day is little more than a chance to make my kids smile.

Hell, you know what? That's more than enough.

We have battles to fight in this life. We have hills to climb and wars to wage. And most importantly, we have an obligation to take our middle finger and wave it directly in the face of anyone who dares cross our path.

But back to Halloween, back to this Halloween.

This Halloween was a bittersweet one. It has been a year since I left my ex-wife, and it has been a tough year by all accounts. So much pain for so many people, and at the core of it all the decisions I have been a party to, I have been a prime motivator in executing.

So we have the kids this weekend and they are hungry for candy.

It is my plan to drag them over to the semi-affluent neighborhood a few streets over and badger folks for candy.

But it all comes unglued when I realize just who these people actually are.

America has a very ugly underbelly.

We are a nation of repressed humans, needing to find a berth in which to land our anxieties and our fears. This neighborhood, this enclave of white, this enclave of white bread America with their dull, pasty skinned children, with their Hummers, and Land Rovers, with their stucco mansions and manicured lawns and bay windows and custom mailboxes and luxurious earrings and their silent rapes and their late night abuses and their substances and their suicide and their race rage and their entitlement, rampant, a disease, a blight, a stain on who it is we actually strive to be.

where is the heart of this country? Who is it we wish to be? Who is it we have presented ourselves to be in the morass of contemporary life?

In line at the grocery store, righteous and indignant, boutique honey and artisanal breads, olive bar tubs and organic milks, smug self-satisfaction and all the lot... it is all too much to bear.

There is no struggle save this struggle, and at the heart of it is this small family, desperate to tread water, to find a solution to this, and then this, and then this...

And all the while, our heads held high, our battles being fought moment by moment, and our vitriol being refined to an exponential degree...

Make no mistake.

I hate you all.

As I lead my children through your streets, ashamed of who I've become, and you, clad in your polo shirts, to the one, collar upturned, hair so elaborately gelled, wife so carefully chosen to enhance your illusion of control...

Know that I am here to tear it all down.

That, and eat your candy.

Oh yeah, and shit on your lawn.

What a dream,

What a life,

What a world to which we are forced to adapt.

And still, I wouldn't stop for a single second because it's still, in all its agony, in all its confusion, in all my rage, all my sadness, all my guilt, all my doubts...

Despite it all, I am still better than you.

Trick-or-treat.

Lighter please...

Called out.

Okay, Cramer. Here it is. You want a contribution? I'll give you one. 

As we settle in to the semi-Great White North, and it snows a week before Halloween, I shift gears due to cold and the undertaking of dormancy of the foliage from summery pop and colorful images to the grey, cold, mechanical machinations of intricate, studied musics. Why? Have you tried listening to Prog on a hot day? It doesn't fucking work. You need cold, you need to be inside, wearing many layers, sipping tea or smoking illegal, secure in a artificially heated cocoon that will allow you to full digest the notes and the movements. Whilst in the heat, you can let go, and succumb to the 'groove.' Let yourself go, and just 'feel the beat.' 

Nuts to that. Fuck the groove. I want to be overwhelmed by detail. I want to swim in notes and layers, lost in multi-layered melodies that spiral and careen into poly-rhythms and breakdowns that have no direction and leave no indication of where they're headed. 

Why? What's the fucking purpose of this? Huh? Where am I heading? What the fuck am I ranting about? Is it the two VERY strong stouts I've just had? (Well, yeah, maybe.) It could be anything, but it's really about the feeling I've been lucky enough to experience (and actually noticing it due to its infrequency) four times over the last four years. That is to say, from christmases (I don't capitalize because I don't thing the so-called deity and all its so called days should be. I don't capitalize its name, either.)  2004-2007, I left the confines of the "wackjob" state  to spend the last week (or so) of one year and the first (or so) in the chilled landscape of the nicest goddamn people in the upper midwest (and that is saying a HELL of a lot.) 

And when I've come up on those holiday excursions, I've had uncontrollable urges -- not the kinds that 14 year olds get, pervert -- no... Urges to listen to progressive music. Music that takes all the details and explodes them to an nth degree. And none do that better than the one job that not only gives my chills up my spine but (live) will bring a slight tear to my eye. 

OPETH. 

I've been plotting and scheming (and so has Cramey) for ages on writing a post about this particular Swedish megalith, and -- since the aformentioned beard has called me out (in a way) and I've had (now 1 1/2) a good amount of stout, I figured, what the hell? 

Take your mind back to 1999. I, to put it mildly, was having a bad year. (I think academically when it comes to time, so more like 1998-1999 school year.) My mom had passed away in Sept of 1998, my grandfather a month or so later, and my uncle, who was (and still is, I'm sure) a sever alcoholic and raging idiot, got hit by a car, taking out the family dog and one of his legs. Awesome. Needless to say, I didn't need the additional stress of full time college, a part time job, the annoyingness of getting over the "big college EX", and a lawsuit filed by the D-Bag who sued my mom the day she got her fatal stroke, that was also a part of semester one of year 6 at anonymous state university, Michigan. But what kept me going -- aside from drinking and cigarettes -- was the music I loved. Yes, the music that took me away from it all, the music that made me feel like a 100 bucks. 

Opeth? Metal? 

Nope. Not EVEN close. 

You see, back in those days, I was mad for one thing: Oasis. Granted, I still like 'em, but back then, it was all I could see. I tried to wear the clothes, tried to act like the biggest douchebag to come out of England since... Well, England's had a LOT of douchebags over the years. And I defended Liam Gallagher til I was blue in the face. Seriously. 

But on the periphery, there was a friend of mine that quietly bided his time. He worked at the local quasi-indie record shop with all of his friends, and due to his proximity to a friend of mine, we became friends. He was into -- like a rather large number of kids who went to high school in the Mountain Town -- EXTREME metal. I spotted him in a class wearing a Hammerfall shirt and snickered to myself. "Just another townie into bad metal," I thought to myself. But truth was, he had a pretty wide berth in taste. I was able to turn him onto The Holy Bible by Manic Street Preachers, Ray of Light, and Sleater-Kinney's Dig Me Out. He (and his friend Chris Dick) did their best to steer me in the direction of long hair and long sleeve black t-shirts with silly logos, but I resisted. Until one day, Italy Jason -- as he came to be known -- did the math, and sent me home with a few artists that Chris Dick hadn't thought of. For some reason. Truth is, I'm surprised because Chris Dick was and is quite a force in metal journalism. 

What did the Jason give me that day?  Well, to freak me out, Arcturus. To lull me in, the Gathering (Nighttime Birds), and to really give me something to think about, Opeth's Morningrise. It would be that last disc that would stick in my head. Time after time, that became the template for what I was looking for in new, modern, extreme metal. Techincal ability, power, melody, the ability and courage to let it all soften a bit, it was all there. But, since it wasn't Oasis, I kept it at distance and spent my time trying to -- ahem -- 'live forever.' Get it?

Cut to a few years later, and I'm no longer that alcohol soaked idiot with terrible luck. It's 2006(ish), and I'm coming into work on a day off to drop off a pair of CD mixes for a friend who wants to hear what this Akerfeldt fellow and his Opeth band are all about. Now, this friend is someone who I instantly (who? whom?) respected.  A good musician with a damn good ear, I was hesitant about suggesting something that I felt really wasn't 'mine' to give. I sort of wished that Italy Jason had been around to make the suggestions for the mixes for me. But the pair of discs -- apparently -- went over well. So well, in fact, that ol' Johnny Cramer's interest in the Swedish wall of music only served to rekindle my love for them. And on and on it went. It was official: Opeth was now a band I could love. I had passed it on, I had embraced it, understood it, and made it a part of my musical self. No mean feat, especially how territorial we get about such things. Italy Jason was surprised, but understood. He knew all along, the fucker. 

Cut to a couple of years later, and I'm just north of Saint Paul, in a club that will soon feature the talents of Jason Mraz one night and Tesla soon after, nearly getting choked up when Opeth plays my favorite song off of Still Life, Serenity Painted Death. So excited by the announcement that I gave a mighty "YYYYYEEEEEEAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!!!" after hearing Akerfeldt mutter the first syllable of the first word of the title. 

Goddamn I love that band. And to make it all even better, their slower, proggier stuff makes this fall in a town I've wanted to be in for so long makes it all feel so damned RIGHT. 

I can never thank Italy Jason enough for that. Nor Cramer. It all seems silly and maudlin, but it's there. 

So. There you go Cramer.  A post. From me. Hope you think it doesn't suck. I gotta eat now.