I feel conflicted.

Our next-door neighbor got foreclosed on.  All their stuff is gone, there is a notice in the windows stating that the property is now under the purvey of Wachovia Bank and there was a big yard sale this weekend, where everything had to go.  We lived next to them since the day we moved in, and he was an okay Joe.  Didn't complain about very infrequent noise or leaves from our side of the fence.

On the other hand... he was a pit bull farmer.  There were upwards of four full-grown examples of these carefully bred killing machines at any given time on his property, for the most part confined to kennels and causing even more conflict on our parts.  While we are not the greatest fans of this breed of dog in the world (I'd be just as happy if somebody quietly and tastefully hit the ERASE button that controls the universe, personally) we are also animal lovers to the core, and seeing dogs penned up most of the time strikes us as creatures being forced to essentially serve a life sentence in prison.  We checked the laws; what he was doing was legal, so there was nothing we could do.

Oh, and they also barked.  On weekend mornings.  Early.  Far earlier than I was ever comfortable with, leading me to scream the following things out the window on otherwise bucolic Sunday mornings:

"Does somebody want the hose?"

"Shut up, you fucking miserable animals!"

"Accept your fate and be quiet about it!"

And so on down the line.  This is what happens when you are exposed to this sort of low-class garbage for upwards of three years.

So yeah, I'm conflicted.  And I'm also loving the peace and quiet.

Our neighbors across the street suck.

I know, I know.  That's not being positive.  That's hurtful.  That's making a blanket statement about people who are all unique snowflakes, all of which are God's creatures and each brings something special to this world we live in.  It's a close-minded statement.

I repeat: our neighbors across the street suck.

Allow me to don my Superiority Hat for a moment and explain the situation.  I have already posted in the past about the general suckiness of our neighbors, and this is the third set that we have rubbed elbows with since buying our house.  To be brutally frank, there has been virtually no difference in the first awful collective and the current terrible one.  Neighbor Set Two was a nice woman who worked as a teacher, but was unfortunately forced to move all-too-soon due to cutbacks in the district she lived in making her unable to afford the rent.  Trust me when I say that it was a sad day when she moved out, because she opened the door for the current mob we are forced to deal with.

This is being posted because as I arrived home at just before 9 AM, there was a full-bore yelling match going on in the front yard where the lady of the house (nattily attired in a sports bra and cut-off sweatshorts that were not even remotely up to the desperately-needed task of covering her woefully substandard body) was stomping off down the street while her man took off in her car.  At least, I think it's her car.  I don't know.  Anyway, he took off in a squeal of tires, groaning of fan belts, clatter of gaskets and merry shouts of "BITCH!" while she walked two houses down, stood in somebody's front yard to yell about what an ass he was, and then went back inside the house across the street that I have christened The Crap Zone.

Now we start getting mean.  You've been warned.

( Not Too Late To Turn Back, You Know... )

So the King of Pop has passed on.  I liked Thriller very much, and thought he did some good material after that.  Having dispensed with the usual saccharine comments that as a society composed of allegedly civilized people we are required to regurgitate, I will now ask the real question: can a person moonwalk on a lake of fire?

If anybody is egregiously offended by this, I'm happy to listen to the "pro-kid-fuckers should lead long and rewarding lives" theory.  Don't think I'm going to hear a peep about this aspect, though.  I expect what will happen instead will be some very well-meaning but whiny remonstrations about how one should not speak ill of the dead, and that every life is sacred and--

PPPPPPHHHHHHBBBBBBBBTTTTTTTTT.  Please, don't.  If you don't want people to speak badly of you after you go to whatever awaits in the Great Hereafter, I have some very succinct advice for you.  Ready?  Here we go.  BE A BETTER PERSON WHILE YOU ARE ALIVE.  Period.

As Ron White famously said (and I hope he will forgive me while I paraphrase): "I understand that when the police searched Michael Jackson's Neverland ranch, they found one of those realistic sex dolls, in the form of a little kid and it was dressed as a Cub Scout, complete with uniform.  Now, if the police searched my house and they found a sex doll of a woman, everybody would assume I was fucking it... and they'd be right."

Farrah Fawcett I have sympathy for and good wishes.  She helped kids.  She didn't grope them after getting them liquored on "Jesus Juice."

I'm done with the night bus.  I pulled into the garage at just past eleven o'clock and said farewell for at least three weeks to the concept of coming home to find that the only person still awake in the house is one I don't really want to talk to.  I might even get back to working on Black Sunshine or dare I say it, Living After Midnight?  I dare, and I'm hoping the inspiration monkey strikes on that book soon.

We've also got a joint-jaunt for birthday celebrations for Lady Jade and my dad, which means delicious seafood for late lunch/early dinner followed by a screening of The Dark Knight.  I've only seen about two-thirds of this movie, because the night we went to see Hancock at the drive-in, the double feature movie we got was Wall-E (and I don't get that paring, either).  Or, we could swivel our heads fifteen degrees to the right and after some radio fiddling, watch The Dark Knight.  From what I saw, it looked pretty good.  Hancock, regretfully, was not.

Incidentally, I may catch some heat from this but I don't really care:  Heath Ledger was not the wonderful ball of amazing that everybody seems to want to crown him in for this movie.  Got that?  He did a good job; nothing special.  Unless something really spectacular happened in the last hour or so of the flick, what I saw was a pretty decent portrayal of an intelligent guy gone batshit.  Comparing his performance to Sir Anthony Hopkins in The Silence Of The Lambs and crowing about how he should get an Oscar is, quite frankly, insulting.  Don't get me wrong; I liked his portrayal better than Jack Nicholson's--because if you're going to give me cinematic cheese, you damn well better serve it with a generous scoop of Bruce Campbell--but I honestly don't understand what all the fuss and bother is about.

Oh, wait.  Yes, I do.  It's just that it's mean.  Since I've been storing it up for a while, I'm going to let it roll.

Dead people always get lionized.  If you're a musician, you're a ground-breaking songwriter.  Writers are woefully unappreciated.  Actors and actresses suddenly advance four of five categories in their apparent ability.  Let me make this clear: this guy was decent, but Johnny Depp he was not.  Got that?  Heath Ledger was a perfectly serviceable middle-of-the-road good-looking chunk of man-candy that girls sighed over and to be totally fair had some decent acting chops that he often didn't get to show.  Decent, people, not stunning.  Good guy, but no Edward Norton.  I really liked him in 10 Things I Hate About You; did a pretty swell job in Monster's Ball and other than that, I am really hard-pressed to find another movie worth mentioning besides that God-awful A Knight's Tale, some solid supporting work in The Patriot and...

...oh, right.  The ghey cowboy movie.  This is when you get into a lot of other stuff that quite frankly makes my teeth hurt.  How brave he was for doing that role.  How courageous everyone was for working on the movie.  How the rest of the world just didn't get a movie about two emo cowboys who dug each other and was boring as hell.  I have seen quite a bit of real world and cyberspace ink spilled sobbing about how the world lost an great talent, and people, as goddamn mean as this sounds (and trust me, I know how it's coming across), we did not lose a great talent.  Last time I checked, Joe Satriani is still alive and so is Kate Winslet, so I think we're going to be okay.

Believe it or not, I am in a good mood tonight.  Happy soon-to-be birthday to my sweetie; she's turning 30, and it's making her a little peckish.

EDIT:  Upon further review, this post comes off like I'm throwing Heath Ledger under the bus, running him over, then backing up and doing it again.  I'm not.  He was a decent actor, but I don't even pretend to understand all these gushing, cooing fangirls (and boys, to be fair) who came out of the woodwork and deified him for what was essentially doing a decent job.  When I read things like, "The world has lost a brightly shining star" and "It's the nature of angels to want to go back to heaven," it makes me puke in my soup.  Hope that clarified somewhat.

Okay, not to sound all high and mighty over here (because as you well know, that's not how I roll), but after taking another extended series of looks at the Horror section of the National Novel Writing Month message boards, I am becoming increasingly disheartened with my fellow terror mavens.  I am thinking that any kind of book exchange program, like the one I participated in last year for the Science Fiction Department, will have to be done under heavy anaesthesia.

To be perfectly fucking crass:  when did the horror genre become such a pussfest?  When?  Was it when Wes Craven finally decided to sell what was left of his liver-spotted soul and crank out Scream 3?  Did it take place when people began to think that Army Of Darkness really did belong in the horror section rather than comedy, just because it features Deadites?  Sure, Shaun Of The Dead was funny, but damnit, people, why are you afraid to be afraid?

There are few things finer, my friends, than going to a really frightening movie and feeling that cold grasp of terror in your stomach.  You and a hundred other strangers, being afraid in the dark.  Horror in every shadow, fear riding your back and breathing nightmares into your ears.  Why, oh why, do some people feel the need to neuter this most excellent expression of our underlying humanity?

Don't do that, fellow writers.  Don't laugh!  Don't point out the zipper running up the back of the monster's suit!  Don't roll your eyes when the disposable cast member goes into the darkened room by themselves, surely never to leave the room alive (or, in some yucky cases, as something even human any more).

Sit down with a novel by James Herbert and feel what it's like to be so sucked into the story yet knowing something absolutely horrendous is about to happen that you end up putting the book down for three days and eyeing it warily, like a dog that may bite you.  Consider the possibility of a demon entering your soul, of the threat of damnation to a Hell that waits for you... waits eagerly, as a matter of fact.

Don't make it a joke.  Don't play the monsters for laughs, like Abbott and Costello did.  Treat this road seriously, these tales of darkness and damnation, and look upon the audience as prey.  Not a co-conspirator, not a "target demographic."  Cry havoc, and let slip the terror dogs of war.

Simply put?  Sure.  Either put the horror back in the horror genre, or stay the fuck out of my favorite sandbox.  Thank you, and good night.

*these musings brought to you by a full bottle of blackberry merlot wine and some really, really teeth-grinding comments.  As always, the Internet is still chock-full of stupid.  Thank you.

My dad called today and said yes, it's true... we will be getting four tickets to the annual Battle Of The Bay, where my beloved American league West champion Oakland Athletics will take on those purveyors of black and orange, the Halloween-themed but due to the presence of Barry Bonds currently unlikable San Francisco Giants.

For the non-sport types among you, being almost all of you:  it's baseball.

So on Sunday, May 20th, myself, Lady Jade, my dad and Mad Evil Chris, your local heartthrob nuclear technician bachelor (seriously), will be making the pilgrimage to AT&T Park, home of the never-won-a-World-Series Giants, decked out faithfully in green and gold to watch our boys do battle with the San Francisco crowd.  Oh, and best of all, it's going to be in San Francisco.

There is two reasons why this is tremendously cool.  Pardon me for a second while I become a dweeb.

1)  AT&T Park, despite usually being filled with Giants fans, is one of the most aesthetically beautiful parks in Major League Baseball or, for that matter, anywhere in professional sports.  It's true.  I love the Oakland/Alameda Coliseum, home to the A's and Raiders, but truth be told, it is a tremendously ugly piece of shit.  It was designed and built in the 1960's, where stadiums followed a cookie-cutter slab-of-concrete design that decades later made people coming into it look around and say, "Ugh.  What a tremendously ugly piece of shit."  While the Coliseum was built for concerts, football, baseball and anything else that will draw a crowd, AT&T Park was made for baseball, and baseball alone.  Sporting modern facilities including a supermassive high-definition scoreboard, gorgeous brick exterior, a lovely view of the San Francisco Bay and sweet Pacific breezes, it's the only thing I am jealous of our cross-bay rivals of.

2)  It's enemy territory, and by enemy I mean "not our team," which makes us the invaders.  You know how I love to play the heel, and it's even better to do so on a gloriously sunshiney summer day with several good dark ales in my stomach and my #43 Dennis Eckersley jersey on my back, enduring the taunts of outraged Giants supporters with a beatific smile and displaying my ZERO SPLASH HITS FOUR WORLD TITLES shirt beneath, occasionally remarking to Mad Evil Chris in a meant-to-be-overheard tone about how great the 1989 World Series was (A's swept the Giants four games to zero), and howling "Let's go Oakland!" with a third of the rest of the park as the home team crowd stares at us with a mixture of amusement, exasperation and in the end, camaraderie.  Because after all, it's only a baseball game, one of 162 over the season and if your team happens to lose, it's not the end of the world.

Oh, and the seats are absolutely awesome... seventeen rows from the front along the first-base side, which means that when the pitcher goes into his windup, you turn your back on the action at your own peril.

A day at the ballpark.  Ferris Bueller was right; doesn't get any better than this.

I think the only reason I am still a member of the Brutal Honesty community is because I intensely dislike some of the people in there, and I very much enjoy it when they post stories of terrible things that have happened to them.  When somebody on the shit list makes a post about how their life was wrecked for X amount of time and woe was them, I laugh heartily.  In fact, the more in depth and terrible the story is, the happier I am with their efforts.

My only complaint is that I don't get more Pain-Umms from these people on a regular basis.  Truly, it is a sad thing.  If it dried up entirely, I'd probably disenroll myself.

Sadistic?  Yes, thanks for asking.  Now, go ahead and drive through.

It's very strange how late night Net-surfing through the wonders of Wikipedia and a nice, crystal tumbler of Jameson's on the rocks can lead you to such strange posting material.

Let me explain: I started off on my late-night jaunt, having worked from 12:45 PM until 10:45 PM on a bus line that runs just north of being a royal pain in the ass.  I went home, spent a little time with my sleepyhead wife, and kissed her goodnight before going out to confront the horrors of the Internet head-on.  That, my devoted peeps, is when I ran head-first into Andrea Dworkin.

You're not familiar?  Oh, let me don the infamous Hat Of Snarkiness, then.  Andrea Dworkin is a seminal figure in the feminist movement (motto: "Women are real people too, duh!") and one of the most controversial--not to mention psycho--figures in in its ranks.  Until I read the Wiki article, I only knew three things about Dworkin, those being:

1)  She had the novel idea that all sexual intercourse, no matter how loving or how many candles were lit, amounted to rape.

2)  She had published literally scads of material on the subject, and while everyone seemed to know her name, very few people could be found who could actually tell the truth when saying, "Yes, I've read her material and no, I don't think she was at least partially unbalanced."

3)  She was an absolute whacko, and saying this is sort of like saying that Ted Bundy was a bad bet in the dating department.

I could also mention that she was the kind of ugly that Jabba the Hutt regularly wrote long, soulful sonnets about, but that would be unnecessarily mean and hey, I'm not that guy.  That's not how I do things around here.  It should also be noted for the record that I was woefully incorrect in regards to Thing #1; she merely argued that the point that only heterosexual sex had been lionized in film, print, theater and so on, and therefore society at large was a bunch of churlish, heelish brutes who probably thought women should be barefoot and pregnant at all times.  Like that's anything close to being realistic in the modern era of the two-income household, right?

Anyhow, with a plethora of time and a tasty tumbler of hard booze before me, I dived into the article.  Dworkin got her start when she went to the Netherlands to interview a bunch of anarchists and ended up married to one of them.  This guy was apparently a true prince of the land, and when I say this, I mean that he used to beat the shit of out her in the time-honored manner practiced by douchebags all over the globe.  It got so bad, in fact, that she was willing to smuggle a case of heroin through customs in exchange for a plane ticket out of the country, her rationale being that either way the trip ended, she'd certainly be fixed for life.

Now, I can certainly understand the desire to get away from a psycho who will kill your soul, as evidenced by my experience with the Enemy Of Fun.  I get that, people.  I'll state for the record that I don't know anything about Dworkin prior to this period; meh, who knows?  Maybe she was a very happy woman, perhaps she was always perpetually waiting for that other shoe to drop... truth be told, I don't know.  It's possible that this unnamed Danish anarchist (the worst kind, in my opinion) was simple the straw that broke the camel's back, the last in a string of jackasses, sociopaths and shit-for-brains-alpha-males that systematically broke her down until she saw most men as the enemy, and not just The Enemy, but brothers and sisters, THE ENEMY!

Maybe.  Then I read an account of her life partner, the horrifically emasculated John Stoltenberg, whose wonderful essay "Why I Stopped Trying To Be A Real Man" is linked here for your convenience.  During their time together, he said he was gay (repeatedly and publically) and she said she was a lesbian (again, repeatedly and publically).  Then it comes out, after her death in 2005, that they got married in 1998.  However, nothing was ever disclosed about it because it was felt by these two median geniuses that people would be confused and interpret their commitment ceremony as some type of ownership.

It seems to me that this woman could spent much of her time doing something else... like, possibly being happy... if somebody had managed to explain to her that wanting to fuck somebody is not the same as wanting to repress them.  Is looking at somebody and reducing them to the "would I bang you" question not giving a person their total due as a human being?  No question that the answer to that question is yes.  Do we do this on what amount to a more-or-less constant basis every day or at the very least, once in a blue moon?  Yes, we certainly do.  Oh, and is this an unforgiveable crime?  No.  Goddamnit, this is biology in action and I'd say that I'm sorry that it doesn't correspond with what people think is actions that should be taken by "nice people," folks...  but I'm not.  I believe in honesty and integrity, and while it's a nice fantasy, this just isn't a valid representation of real life.

It also seems to me that for somebody who was soooo outspoken during her life, she certainly whiffed big-time when it came to the honesty card being played in terms of her own marriage.  You know, that soulful connection to another that you should be proud to trumpet to the heavens?  If you don't at least give that some sort of public due, you are a charlatan.

Thoughts are appreciated.

EDIT:  More random dribblings from a Starbucks somewhere not near you.  I think this had a point and a grand ending when I started, but fucked if I can remember it now.

I saw a very interesting story in the newspaper yesterday, and when I say “very interesting,” what I truly mean is “impossibly dense.”  After careful, exhaustive research, a group of scientists had come to the brilliant conclusion that articles which appeared in women’s magazines that dealt with dieting and weight loss were large contributors to such conditions as anorexia nervosa, bulimia and a host of other eating diseases that I can’t think of off the top of my head right now.  The unstated upshot of this research seemed to be that if we got rid of those pesky articles, a whole lot of young women might find better uses for their food than regurgitating it on command.

Now, it is not my intention here to make fun of any eating disorder, because when you get right down to it, the concept of something being so fucked in your head that it decides denying yourself nourishment is the only logical recourse in this cavalcade called life is the kind of awesomely frightening thing I usually have to pay nine bucks to see in the theater.  That’s some scary shit in the extreme.  I mean, seriously… looking in the mirror and instead of seeing you, seeing something gelatinous and ponderous, rather than the poorly-dressed stick figure with teeth decayed away by bile you have become?  That’s the sort of thing that nightmares are made of, kids.

However (and I cannot stress this enough, so I’ll go ahead and say it in capital letters), and I do mean HOWEVER, saying that a magazine article is in any way any more than peripherally to blame for this sort of neurosis is about as disingenuous as one can get without going into politics.  It is akin to saying that people who wear a great deal of silver and black clothing will eventually become fans of the Oakland Raiders, which is definitely gag-inducing in its own right these days.

Oops.  Sorry, couldn’t resist that one.  Forgive me?

Right, back to the point.  The sorry truth be fully told, I see these sorts of “studies” all the time, and it makes me wonder exactly how big of a dope you have to be in order to fork out money for conclusions that are not only plain as the nose on your face (chronic, morbid obesity can lead to a fuckload of medical bills for instance) but also sometimes ass-backwards in the extreme, like the magazine article study.  If they wanted to be accurate in their reporting, what they should have said was this:

“We, a blue-ribbon panel of scientific experts, have been looking at this problem from every direction we can think of and we have finally come to an inescapable conclusion.  Namely, you have to be one fucked-up poobah on several levels to engage in this sort of behavior to begin with, and you have to be lacking something extremely profound in your life to rationalize this behavior as trying to gain acceptance or control.  These magazine articles don’t really help in any way, but to tell the God’s honest truth, a great many of these women--and men, we should hasten to point out--are going to engage in this incredibly self-destructive behavior even if you marooned them on a deserted island with naught but a tidal pool to see themselves in.  Are they the cause of this behavior?  Nope.  However, if you see your young son or daughter obsessively poring over this type of literature, it may serve well as an early warning sign.  So concludes our study, and thanks for all the fish.”

In other words: this problem is much, much bigger than columns of typset words printed in New York City.  Ding, fries done!

The problem I have with these kinds of studies is that they are saying that the symptom is actually the cause rather than simply being a warning sign.  For example, many studies have been done in recent years to say just how horrifically awful fast food is for you and how it should be avoid at all costs, and as Morgan Spurlock proved in Super Size Me, too much Mickey D’s leads to becoming one unhealthy large mammal.  What is left out of this equation is that there is generally a host of other things that come along with this picture that are left out when drawing up the blackboard equation of FAST FOOD = DEVIL’S NUMMIES.

Such as?  Well, usually any one of (or, more likely, several of) the following things also figure prominently in the life of our unhealthy mammal.  Lack of sleep.  Smoking.  Excessive consumption of carbonated beverages, particularly soda.  Lack of exercise.  Lack of exposure to sunlight.  Lack of social interaction.  Too much staring at a cathode-ray tube, also known as a television or a computer monitor.  Too much consumption of caffeinated beverages.  Poor self-esteem.  Excessive alcohol consumption--and if you just gasped in shock, trust me, as a former Chico State student I was surprised by this one as well.  Lack of sex…

I could go on and on (because there are literally dozens of more factors that I don’t have the space to fully draw out), but I think you get the image of our clearly not-so-hypothetical case study.  It is not simply one thing that produces such a bad health case study, because nothing exists in a vacuum.  Rather, it’s a daisy chain of events and decisions that result in the body’s temple being vandalized to such a degree.  By the same token, it is not a series of magazine articles that lead to anorexia nervosa and the other horrible mental maladies we as the highest form of life on this planet can gleefully subject ourselves to.  Rather, it is a symptom of the disease, not a causality of the schism itself.

Oh, and one last thing:  before I began a fan of those horrific Oakland Raiders (2-14 last year), my favorite color was red and I wore it all the time.

It should also be pointed out that I like cheese.

Word count as of today:  29,976 words.

Despite everything that has taken place, I may actually finish this project on time and under budget, which is certainly a whole hell of a lot more than can be said for our bathroom.  I've said it before a million times, and I'll say it again another ten million before I draw my last breath:  a lot of people are in the situations they are in for their lives due to their own fuckery.  It is usually not an accident that somebody's life is a total wreck, and expecting me to be sympathetic to your plight is a very bad idea.

While it is certainly true that I came very close to ruining my shit with the Enemy Of Fun, once I got the opportunity to get away, I did so and never looked back.  People who get out of horrific, abusive relationships and then go back... don't you dare try to cry on my shoulder, because I will hockey check you into the wall.*  I'm dead serious.

And... and...

Oh look!  A CUTE KITTEN!



*this venom brought to you by an upcoming post

ED:  Shocking though it may seem, here's an entry NOT related to NaNoWriMo!  However, by the time you finish reading this, you may wish it had dealt with that subject instead.  Onward!

So on election night Lady Jade and I walk down the street to the elementary school in order to do our civic duty and thereby gain our right to complain about the people in charge for another two years.  It turned out that the place was packed and we had to wait in order to cast our votes, something which we hadn't done since the salad days of Bill Clinton.

In every social situation, there is an appropriate and inappropriate thing that can be said.  When in doubt, people should just say nothing at all.

On Saturday, the NBA playoffs began and my hometown heroes, the Sacramento Kings, were belted by the defending world champion San Antonio Spurs by the disheartening score of 122-88.  I have to point out for the record, however, that this score in no way reflects how close the game actually was.  If you're scratching your head and wondering how a 34-point loss could be any worse, consider that at halftime the Spurs were leading 73-39.  That's right; things got better during the game, and we still lost by such an absurd margin that people in Las Vegas were leaping off of posh hotel balconies as the point spread disappeared.  To be brutally honest, haven't seen a beating that bad since Rodney King and at halftime I decided that my time would be much better spent by doing some chores around the house rather than cursing and watching pop-eyed as our boys got embarrassed.

Later that evening a couple friends came over and I went to the grocery store with one of them to get some wine to enjoy.  I was still wearing my purple-and-white Bobby Jackson #24 jersey because it hadn't occurred to me to take it off during the skunking, and we rolled into the local Bel Air chatting and in general having a fine time.  This lasted until we were waiting in line to pay for our purchases, whereupon the checker took a look at what I was wearing and said:

"Wow, you're sure brave to be wearing that after that beating this afternoon!  Did you see the game?"

To be fair, I should point out that he didn't mean to come off sounding like a complete jackass.  His tone of voice was surprised but also contained a little admiration, as though he couldn't understand how I managed to make my way down the liquor aisle with testicles so large.  His query was an honest one.  It deserved an honest answer.  My choices were:

1)  (in a been-there-done-that tone of voice)  "Yeah, things didn't go very well for our guys, did they?"

2)  (with a giant scowl)  "Ring up my goddamn purchases and save the editorial comments for the local talk radio shows, how about that?"

3)  (voice dripping in sarcasm)  "Yes, I sure did!  And thank you so much for bringing it up!"

I chose the third option, with gusto.  He immediately realized that he had somehow put his foot in it, but couldn't quite see his way to the clear from where he stood scratching his head.  There was a part of me that felt badly for him; he probably didn't have very much in the way of social skills and most of his sallies probably went about like this episode had.  He immediately stammered out, "Well, how did it happen?  Did they just not show up for the game or jack up a buch of threes of or what?"

And I felt that familiar prickling sensation just behind my ears that signals the imminent eruption of Mount Saint Jesse.  He knew he'd screwed up; where was my apology?  Even a half-hearted, insincere one?  And for fuck's sakes, what in the name of the bleeding baby Jesus was going on here?  I was the customer, was I not?  Why was the register jockey trying even good-naturedly to break my mammoth balls on the days' events?  Why was I feeling like the bad guy here?

"That's what happens when an eight seed plays a one seed and they happen to be the defending world champions," I responded, pitching my voice into a more normal and less of a  fuck-you-and-fuck-your-family tone.  "The 41-15 point second quarter didn't matters, either."

"I only saw the last three or four minutes of the game," he said, feeling--incorrectly--that the storm had passed, "but it seemed like they had given up."

Oh Dear God, sweet Jesus, meek and mild, please give me the strength to not tear his guy from his asshole to his forehead, provided I can even tell the difference between the two.  The team seemed like it had lost interest in the game from where he'd sat?  Yeah, being down by thirty-four points with no chance in hell of making it up barring a collective San Antonio brain embolism might do that.  At this point I realized that continuing this discussion would be like trying to teach Marcus the Backup Kitty how to play Checkers, so I took my bag of wine and left with a muttered "We'll see what happens on Tuesday" under my breath.

Outside, my friend said:  "You know, I think you handled that pretty well, especially considering it was you doing the handling."

*headdesk*

EDIT:  I know that what I did was not very nice.  I've been pissy in general lately.  I make no excuses for what I did, on any count.  So there.

Right now I'm home sick, so I've been going back and forth between doing housework and watching television.  On the most recent installment of the Dr. Phil Show, there was a story that had me slack-jawed in horror, so I thought I'd gleefully share it with you all.  Hey, I'm like that sometimes.  What can I say?

A quick disclaimer is in order: I don't really like Dr. Phil.  I don't watch his show on a regular basis, and I think his "folksy, down-home wisdom" packaging is simplistic claptrap designed to appeal to rubes.  If you're a fan of this show, that's perfectly fine.  After all, I like Slayer, so I'm hardly one to talk about what is quote good taste unquote.  I just think it's usually lame subjects about lame people with pretty simple solutions that I don't need to invest an hour of my life in watching.

That being said, any time I read a capsule blurb that says one of the subjects is going to be a hausfrau who strips online, you can bet your cottontail that I'm going to watch.  To my utter and abject horror/delight, though, the story had another element that was not mentioned in the DISH Guide... namely, the reason she was taking off her clothes and diddling herself at 2 AM while her kids and husband slept soundly.

Gambling.

I have to tell you, I damn near fell off the sofa when I heard this one.  Subsidizing one deadly sin by plunging headfirst into another?  How in the name of the walking, talking Jesus does this shit come to be?

Answer:  they're fucked up.  Simplistic, right?  Nah, I prefer to say "folksy."  It goes like this, so pop the top on your favorite beverage and guzzle it down while you read...

The husband works long hours.  Gets up early, stays late, comes home, eats dinner, falls asleep.  He's making money, money, money, because it seems like they've got a pretty nice house and so the upkeep on the place definitely costs.  Wifey is stuck home with a couple young kids, nobody to talk to, wants to rap with her hubby but he keeps passing out face-down in a pillow.  In other words, a typical American one-income household.  (hint: you all need another job-job-job!)

So wifey ends up down at the corner bar with one of the video poker games on it, at first there to have a cocktail and socialize, and as time goes on and Satan gets his meathooks deeper into her, she's there just for the demon poker.  Apparently having as much skills at gaming as she does at keeping her hubby awake, she turns tearfully to online stripping to subsidize her habit, thereby doubling up on hubby's wages and while she falls headfirst down the degenerate ladder of wagering, he hems and haws and says how much it bothers him.

And then, of course, they end up on Dr. Phil because that's what happens to people as colossally fucked up as these two whitebread dingbats.  The truly frightening thing to me is not how far things got before crying uncle, but that these two obviously defective human beings spawned before all this took place.  While Dr. Phil wrinkled his brow and tried to "get top the bottom of things," I only had four questions:

1)  Why didn't wifey just make some goddamn friends before becoming a case study for the Las Vegas version of CSI?  (she can't use the whole "I'm shy" routine for this one, obviously)

2)  How the hell does hubby not flip out, smash the computer and drag her ass to Gambler's Anonymous instead of just saying "Well, I'd like her to stop"?  (obviously not what her customers said, eh?)

3)  How exactly little to you have to care about your own own dignity before you would cop to something like this on national television?  (hee-hee, dunno, but I'm glad they don't give a rat's ass)

4)  Does the fact that I found all of this horribly engrossing in a let's-see-if-they-can-survive-the-car-crash way make me a horrible person?  (based on these snarky italicized comments, very probably)

Food for thought.

EDIT:  Oh, I almost forgot one of the most hilarious things about this story.  Dr. Phil's brilliant (and when I say "brilliant," what I really mean is "retarded") analysis of the situation focused mostly on the fact that she was doing this on the Internet, and therefore he extracted a promise from her that she would never ever go online ever again.  Because we all know that the dastardly Internet is the root of the problem, and the most important facet, right?  Has nothing to do with obsessive gambling or lack of communication, oh, fuck no.  Blame the Internet.

I think this species is overdue for a good culling.

I've been nicotine-free since January 28th, 2006 and this has caused some changes in my life.  My sense of smell has returned with a vengeance, thereby causing me to step up the Battle Of Stench being waged against our dumb dogs... a war that I am winning, of course, due to my advantage of having opposable thumbs.  Food tastes much better, and I have become very sensitive to the scent of cigarettes.

It has also sparked something akin to 'roid rage from time to time, and with this in mind, I present The Ballad Of Dude With Sign.



And I used to be such a nice guy.  So yeah, quitting smoking has its downside.

I got a phone call from my mother yesterday while droned out on Vicodin due to pain in my back, and things got testy.  "How the hell do two people get pissy with somebody when one of them feels like their head is wrapped in cotton balls?" you may ask.

Easy.  It helps considerably if the two people in question are me and my mother.

Things started off fine; she was all a-flutter about Doctor Who coming to the Sci-Fi Network and myself being a long-time Whovian since the days of Tom Baker, was in agreement that this could be something big.  She asked if I could videotape it for her, at which point I tried to explain the concept of a DV-R machine and why this could not be done without a DVD burner, which we do not have and would be useless anyway as she only has a VHS player.  "Oh well," she said after I had stumbled through the nuts-and-bolts of next generation technology, "our apartment complex has a big-screen television downstairs and they have cable, so I'll watch it down there.  It was a nice thought, though."

Twitch.

From there we discussed the new Stephen King novel, Cell, that she had sent me in the mail and I said that although I was only about a hundred pages into it, so far I was enjoying it a great deal.  Not as much as The Shining, Misery or The Dead Zone, of course, but it was still a whole hell of a lot better than The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon.

"Glad you like it," she said brightly.  "Of course, it falls apart in the end, but up until then everything works nicely."

Twitch.  My mother used to have this terrible habit that drove me absolutely insane where she would be one of those people that read the ending of the book first.  I tried turning her on to Dean R. Koontz and she said she just couldn't get into the story knowing what she knew about those endings, which made me actually scream at her a few times.  I'm not sure if she still does this, but even if she doesn't, thanks for throwing cold water on the end, mother.

Then the Oscars came up, and things really fell apart.

Back in the first grade, our teachers asked all of us what we wanted to be when we grew up.  My good friend Shawn had one of the most interesting answers: he said he wanted to be a mercenary, because he really liked the idea of getting paid to shoot people.  I guess he got his wish because now he's a captain in the Airborne Rangers.  There's truly a place for everyone, I guess.

The teacher was probably more horrified by my answer.  "A dictator," I said proudly.  I was a precocious child and had been studying up on World War II; being a dictator sounded like a great job.  After all, you got to tell everybody what to do, although I glossed over the part at the end where they either swallow poision or geting dragged through the streets by their heels due to the unhappy populaces they mismanaged into oblivion.

So if the universe turned on its axis and I was suddenly catapulted into the position of ultimate power, what would I do?

( Putting The Dick Back In Dictator )

That's right; it's time to go to the archives.

Why You Should Read This:  given how intolerant America has become about what the kids in school write, this essay originally published in 1996 shows exactly how far we have backslid.  The events you're about to read would have, if done today, doubtlessly would have gotten me expelled and possibly had the cops called on me.  In fact, depending on where I lived, there's no doubt about that second bit.  I'll freely admit that what we did was not the best choice but as you read on, you'll see that I was made to pay an unfair price for our literary exercises.

It also serves well as an object lesson for picking one's subject matter; just because one can write about something does not necessary mean one should.  Enjoy.

( Back In 1985... )

Thank you, Spike TV.  It's absolutely wrong how much I love MXC.  This show, also variably called "Most Extreme Elimination Challenge" and "Oh My God, That Really Looked Like It Fucking Hurt," has shot into my personal top ten of shows that I love to watch. With a bullet.

Let me pause for a moment here and say that I don't like game shows, nor do I like reality television.  To me there's no thrill in watching people eat brains/bugs/whatever or sitting in a tub being filled with leeches.  Likewise, I don't understand the charge one gets by correctly guessing the actual retail price of a box of Clorox in order to get a game piece that gets you one step closer to... zzzzzz... whoa!  What the hell was I talking about?  Oh yeah, porn.  I love porn.  I--

Ooops, not quite.  MXC is based on a Japanese television show from the mid-80's called Takeshi's Castle, the object of which was for contests to prove themselves to General Takeshi that they were worthy to join his army and storm the castle occupied by two ding-dongs in outrageous Japanese garb.  They did this by competing and being injured (while laughing the entire time, leading me to believe that at least half of them are drunk) in a series of the most horrifyingly painful and hilarious game show events ever staged.  Some of my personal favorites include:

LOG DROP:  A series of giant rubber logs, arranged side-to-side like the rolling pins from Hell, must be crossed by jumping from one to the other while they spin around.  Contestants are routinely pinched between the rollers, have their heads jammed into the rollers, bounce off them like ping-pong balls and fall head-first into the murky swamp below.

ROTATING SURFBOARD OF DEATH:  A surfboard attached to a rotator (naturally) travels around a full arc.  Contestants must jump over a pink puffer fish, run across a platform where a ding-dong attempts to helpfully shove them over the side, then get back on the surfboard and jump over another puffer fish before making it back to dry land.  The surfboard is tremendously unstable and bounces like crazy, leading to many hilarious and painful falls at a variety of angles into... a muddy bog.

POLE RIDERS:  Not for the weak.  Pole-vaulting is hard enough, even more so when you have a twenty-foot long tool to work with (heh, I said tool) and even more so when the object is vault across the old muddy bog onto a platform and hold on.  Common disasters include slipping off the pole before making the leap, going too far and catapulting into the side of the platform, or almost making it and bouncing off the platform on one's head.

SINKERS AND FLOATERS:  Whoever thought this one up was a real sadist.  God bless them.  Half the rocks going across the muddy bog are stable, half of them disappear faster than a Republican's campaign promises after the votes are counted.  I have seen people run across at full speed (the best way to do it) only to encounter a sinker, lose their balance and ram their heads into a floater so hard their helmet flies off.  Hyperextension of the groin area and crushing one's ribs against a stable platform are common pitfalls as well.  This one is always great for a massive "Oh shit!" from the living room audience.

It goes without saying, of course, that this show would have never been produced in America.  This is a damned shame.  I think we've finally found a suitable occupation for past guests of The Maury Povich Show and their dullard offspring, but the lawsuits would be absolutely astronomical.  Oh, and what are these faceless, nameless, pain-wracked warriors of the rising sun competing for?  Not a new car, not being free and clear of their college debt, not even a weekend trip to Vegas.  No, usually the prizes were something lousy, like a new cutlery set or a set of dish towels.

Yeah.  I know.

MXC does overdubs on all the voices, usually with scandalous and scatalogical results.  At the end of the show is a segment called "Kenny Blankenship's Most Painful Eliminations," where the top ten gut-wrenching moments of the day's show are recapped, usually in slow-motion for added impact.

So why do I love this show?  Well, there's first the obvious fact that I have a sadistic streak in me a mile wide; as Homer Simpson once said, "It's funny because I don't know them."  The other is that this show is so wrong on so many levels that it's the ultimate in politcal incorrectness.  We are enocuraged to make merry of misfortune, to catcall at cataclysm and to groan along with Vic Romano and Kenny Blankenship's bordering-on-obscene jokes/commentary.  Sounds like a party to me.

Then again, what else do you expect from the cable network who brought you WWE Raw Is War?  Daffodils and Unicorns?

And always remember, kids... DON'T GET ELIMINATED!

Right now I'm drinking wine, trying to get sleepy and watching Style Network's newest reality-bites offering, Diary Of An Affair.  So far, it blows chunks.  Therefore, I will tell you my own story.

Back when I was dating my ex-from-Hell, we hit a rough patch and when I say "rough patch," what I really mean is "all the excitement vanished seemingly overnight."  In addition to all the other various maladies that made themselves known in the relationship (conversational topics drying up, not ever going out any more, spending lots of time in separate rooms), one of them that fell by the wayside was our sex life.  When somebody says, "I feel like having sex with you sometimes is a chore," the spark has gone out of the relationship big-time.  Thankfully, my wife does not share the opinion that a roll in the hay with me is akin to cleaning out the cat box or mowing the lawn.  Whew!

However, I persisted in our doomed waltz and so did she.  I think we were just in too deep and didn't know when to get out, perhaps we just didn't want to admit we were making a monstrous mistake by carrying on, but whatever the reasons, we stayed together.  And herein lies my tale of indfidelity.

I never actually slept with anybody else; instead, I began to fantasize just about the process of having an affair.  The secret phone calls, the sly looks, the hurried meetings, the duisposal of evidence.  It was one part Ron Jeremy and two parts Gil Grissom, sad but true.  My fantasies very soon were taken over by this theme, and when one of my then-co-workers at Earthlink was chosen to star in them, it took a quantum leap.  I found these very exciting, and soon began to look forward to the demon ex going to sleep for the evening so I could grab some private time. . . if you know what I mean.

Eventually the demon ex and I broke up, and thank God for that, because I was really tired of having to hide my "solo performances."

Sorry.  Couldn't resist that part.

As Jimmy Carter said during his Playboy interview, "Everyone is guilty of having committed adultery in their heart."  I suspect that not many have done their crime in such a manner, but what the heck?  If I'm ever gonna get into Heaven, I better start coming clean  ;)

Feeling kinda lazy tonight. . . it's been a long week at work and I don't have a great deal of energy.  Wanted to do a blast concerning "the truth" and how most people simply can't deal with it, but that'll have to wait.  No rest for the wicked.  Sigh.

In the meantime, however, here is an offering from the bowels of my hard drive.  I wrote this back in 1999 concerning a personal Waterloo that I experienced back during my misspent youth and although it was be published in the magazine I used to work for, this essay most definitely fit the structure of that weekly column I used to do.  Writing can get you in trouble, sometimes.  Heh-heh.

So here, for the first time in about six years, is a never-before-seen Lint Trap column.  Yes, I know you're excited.  I'll wait while you laugh.

Ready?  Here we go. . ..

( Waterloo )