Cockaigne

This one goes out to Beast on his bed of pain._______________

I'd like to invite you to an absolutely typical grocery store in one small corner of the United States. Lets go! I call shotgun!

Here we are approaching the produce department:

Oranges. Just oranges. Only oranges. One display of oranges nearly large enough to merit it's own representative in the State Legislature. While we contemplate the oranges we turn left and are greeted with the next image:


The juice aisle. Just juice. Only Juice. Apple, grape, orange, strawberry, agave, peach, pear...pretty much anything that can be squoze and won't fight back. A vast vista of juice stretching off to a tiny point in the distance.
Ignore the damn beans on the endcap. Lalalalalala wooooooooooOOOOoalalalala.

Turning once again toward the vegetable department we bid a fond farewell to the juice aisle and leave the oranges behind to ponder the finer points of the state budget.
Here we see the Mexican section! You will note the distinct absence of Mexicans. Instead we have agave leaves, nopalitos, tomatillos, jicama, papayas, green things and things in a white container, and and lots of other stuff that Mexicans presumably are fond of chewing on.


Here we see the rest of the produce department stretching out like a vast expanse of expansive vastness...row after row of slave-plucked radicchio redolent of Peruvian pesticide; Zom-beans sprung from gel-filled plastic troughs of petroleum-derived nutrient solution, taking shape beneath an ersatz sun.
At least, that describes the affordable stuff. The rest is organic.


They might not make a Crayola in your tint but they know 'you folks' like to eat too! The finest products of the Ethnian countryside have been selected for your easily-tanned delectation!
And because y'all insist on eating this weird shit we've jacked up the price all high in order to train you to eat like normal folks. Fricken' water chestnuts my aunt Mary; geeze. Eat people food.


Here's what we mean. This is what we're talkin about.
Nearly one quarter of the entire store is devoted to this department...we're talking MEAT.
M.E.A.T.
FUCK YEAH. THIS IS THE DEAD FRICKEN ANIMAL DEPARTMENT BABY! GO GET ANOTHER CART BECAUSE THIS IS WHAT YOU CAME TO BUY!


Here is the dead chicken department! As you can see you can even choose the region of the nation you want your dead chicken to be from. Southern chickens sell for 50 cents less a pound on the main. Why? It's a SECRET.
You can get any part of a chicken here that you want, too. I am not playing. There is a man back there behind the dead chicken counter and you can knock on the window and say 'Dude, I need seventeen pounds of them weirdass doodly thingies from a chicken head' and he will give you a bag of them. No lie. They come frozen in a bigass chunk and the guy chips you off a piece (I guess they call it an 'Ice-bird'! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!)



This is the Pig Parts section. You can buy any part of a pig here that you want. Even dick. Of course they don't sell it under the name 'pig dick'; its all ground up in sausage. But really when you think about it, it's not like it would look particularly dickish lying there in the cooler anyway because pig dicks are all weird; they could name it something nice like 'natural sausage' and maybe they would sell a bunch.
Shit, they sell every other damn pig part and some of them are freakier than dick. Like ear. And Nose. Hell yeah. Gimme a fuckin pig nose right now; I'd like to stick that right in my mouth.



Then theres face. Yes, face.
'Yes, I'd like four pig faces; we're planning on a nice face dinner this evening my good man. Make sure they have a friendly expression.'
No. Just, no.
Who looked at this and thought 'Oh yeah; that'd be fucking tasty. "
It wouldn't have occurred to me. ( I'm waiting for them to go on sale; then I'll stock up.)


Here we have the tiny taco section of the Meat Department.

What? Your meat department does not have a tiny taco section? You mean to tell me that you cannot just whup on in to the local supermarket and buy yourself a scoop of frozen miniature tacos whenever the whim takes you? *sNERRRRRRRkkkk* Yeah, um, wow. That sucks pretty bad. *SNOOrrrkk*

Look what I found next to the tiny taco section!!

I love them REAL GOOD.

Here are the corndogs! It's nice to know that you no longer have to wait for a fair or a carnival in order to get this kind of fine cuisine. You can just heave a couple-three of these in the microwave and VOILA. ANY TIME YOU WANT. You don't have to beg and plead and whine anymore like when you were a kid at the fair and your parents were all 'no you can't have a dollar to buy one of those junky things it'll make you sick.' HA ON THEM.


Here we are looking down into HOTDOG PURGATORY. Not bad enough to be good, not good enough to be steak. You could even think of them as naked corndogs; they're long past caring. Buy some, won't you?



And here we are at our last stop on the way to the check-out stand; racks and racks and racks and racks of CANDY, all displayed in small transparent coffins; just like Lenin. Each according to their need.

The sweet thing with the shopping cart in the foreground is not a part of the display. I know! She should be, huh!


Well that was fun, wasn't it? I know I had fun. Maybe next time we'll go someplace else! Would you like that? Of course you would. Now go away.

Get forked

I've been pretty lucky when it comes to receiving gifts. I've received some dumb gifts, of course, and my share of useless and thoughtless ones, but nothing that ever tipped over into 'truly demented' territory.

Not until Party Girl came into my life.

She's the Yummy Bikers mom. Now, Party Girl is a nice woman. She also happens to be a lifelong, hardcore alcoholic. I have never seen a human being put away the vodka like this woman can, and I mean from the time she wakes up in the morning, brothers and sisters. That first cup of coffee in the morning is half Smirnoff. No fricken lie. If you happen to be up at the same hour she'll pour you one too; and then sit there and laugh at you while your eyebrows singe and your nipples shoot off the end of your tits. It WILL wake your ass up.

She isn't a horrible drunk. Sloppy, yes, but not evil. At her worst she likes to wander around in a flannel nightgown, overflowing with love for all mankind, and give big friendly hugs. Nothing wrong with that.

The wrong part is when her giant braless boobs come swinging down like two Smithfield hams and nail you right in the face.

You can't really put your hands up either. I mean....yeah. You get the picture.

And let's say you're sitting down low, like on the sofa or something? Come the actual hug you get an added bonus: 25 pounds of big old blubbery mother-in-law boobage laying right on your lap.

It's......warm.

What are you going to do? I mean, here's this sentimental woman who is still overjoyed after 22 years that her baby boy found someone without a prison record to marry; and she's just plowed enough to where she loves the whole world, so really, what CAN you do? Pretty much just sit there. "Ok....I love you too...Ok. Boy, those are really just, you know, sitting right on my lap there. Yes indeed" ...and sigh and pat her on the back while she sniffles and tells you how much she loves you.

Bear this in mind as well: The Yummy Biker got his physique from HER side of the family. This is a woman who tours on the amateur champion golf circuit, ok? She's 73 and she's got biceps like wrecking balls. The last thing I want is the possibility of her pissed off at me.

Come the official winter Holiday season she shops, wraps, cooks and writes Christmas cards to the tune of a 5th of vodka every other day. (And remember, that's just vodka. Their neighborhood becomes a 24-hour floating cocktail party during November and December.) In a good year the card will be legible and there'll be money or a check. On a bad year?

We got a giant box-a huge monster box just tore all to shit by the post office. Inside the box was probably a months' worth of Sunday newspapers all wadded up tight into little balls. Three small boxed presents floating around in the middle of all that.

By this point in the unpacking process there is literally newspaper filling my front room. As it accumulates, once freed of the compression, the level is rising too; we sat on the couch and watched it gradually unfold itself and swallow the television and roll out through the divider into the kitchen. Ever see The Blob? We were laughing so hard we had tears rolling down our faces.

The biker opens his present; fine. My daughter opens hers; fine.

I open mine.

First I unroll a tube of tissue paper.

What to my wondering eyes does appear?

Three picnic forks.

Three yellow picnic forks.

........Ok.

Well, forks. Ok. Forks are.....useful.

But wait! Theres another flat package jammed beneath the first! Whatever could it be?

It's soft; maybe it's a t-shirt! That'd be cool; I can always use a t-shirt.


It is not a t-shirt.

It is underwear.

Big underwear. Big, big underwear.


Briefies.


Laundered briefies.



Five pairs. Of briefies.


My mother-in laws old, used, wore-out briefies.





This is the same woman who will roll up in a car that cost more than my house and announce cheerfully 'I have presents for you!" and mean it sincerely; in a voice that means she's expecting you to jump up and down with anticipation.

It also means that the trunk of her Cadillac is loaded with boxes and bags filled with the partially used contents of her refrigerator. Half-heads of lettuce and limp cukes with creepy sunken-in places on them and packages with like 2 pieces of bologna left.

She and her husband go hunting up in Alaska every year. Everything they kill goes straight into the freezer where it sits until someone decides it's old enough to pass down to me. I get frequent bequests of 5 year old freezer-burnt moose and ancient halibut, all of it portioned up and wrapped by a woman who's spent the last 40 years of her life pickled. I've opened a package marked HULBOTT to find only the tail of the fish inside; admittedly a huge impressive finny tail the size of a newspaper, but still...just a tail. Not even with any butt attached to it. Now, yes, it's kind of cool to mess with for a couple of minutes. Chase the dog around maybe. But after the novelty value has worn off you still have this fish tail. And its all huge and everything. Just...kind of....there.
Yup. There it is. A tail.
Yup.

Her creative side comes to the fore after a few C&V's too. The labelling on anything frozen is always always highly suspect. Waiting for something to thaw is like that part in 'Jaws' where the music starts, and that naked broad goes running out in the water in the dark and meanwhile you're all going "JESUS YOU STUPID BITCH GET OUT OF THE FUCKING WATER THERES A SHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAND THEN SUDDENLY THE MUSIC STOPS AND

Have you ever seen a moose tongue?

It is very tonguelike.

And here's a little-known fact: Even without the rest of the moose attached the tongue of the moose continues to exude buckets and buckets of viscous freaky alien DROOL. You'd think absence of a moose hanging off the other end of the tongue would tend to put an end to the whole drool production thing but boy would you be wrong.

I make her son deal with that that shit now. I don't even look at it. If I hear the seagulls going nuts out in the field next door a few hours later I can pretty well resign myself to the fact that I've been living with an antique bag full of frozen moose foreskins or something.

Silver Vervet Hypnotic With A Thousand Army!

Ok now this crap has got to stop. Who stole my piggy pig?
Ok fine not really my piggy pig; Pinks' piggy pig.


Look at her. Look at what you've done.





Don't play stupid. You know damn well which pig.
Calliou.



No not the ball-headed little slappy freaky kid in the cartoon.

Tell you what, I'm waiting for the episode called "Ball-headed freaky little Caillou sitting in the bathtub playing with a plugged-in toaster" because DAMN that is one annoying child. Or maybe "Caillou vs Baby Elmo Cagematch' Or "Caillou taunts a premenstrual weasel with a stick'. And speaking of annoying childrens' show characters, I'd pay money to watch "Baby Elmo takes a trip through the chipper because Baby Elmo won't quit referring to himself in the third damn person." Any one of you out there with preschool age kids knows exactly what I mean, too.

...you see what happens? look at this. Elmo ate a kid. now come on.

But back to my missing piggy buddy.
I have suspects, of course.

MJ:

....so mean she argues with her own tits.

Based on general predilection and a recent possible sighting. You have to bear in mind though that blaming theft of a farm animal on MJ is like....well, its like blaming the theft of a farm animal on MJ. So, yeah. I guess analogy doesn't even need to come into play does it. Ok, onward then.


Awa:

...guilty as hell. looks hungry, too.

Keeps changing her name. Sure sign of a guilty conscience. Also has proximity and motive (sammiches)

CB:

...resistance is futile, PIG.

Recently 'lost' two pets due to 'illness'. Present pet suspiciously unaccounted for. Complaints to campus security of 'barnyard noises' emanating from her rooms. UPDATE: as of this posting her whereabouts are unknown; South Africa is a possible destination.

Steve Neal:

Hairy fucker turns up missing right around pigskin season every year. Coincidence?

Gale:

...5 foot 2 and sealed for your protection

God only knows what her twisted motivations might be.

InnerVoices:

...please don't hurt me mr. crazy man

Please. This is the kind of person who steals breadsticks from Italian restaurants. A whole pig to someone like him means he can cancel XTube for a month!



Now y'all just sit back and muse upon that for a couple of days. I'm hoping someone has the strength of character to simply come forward and say "I made a mistake. I took Caillou. It was wrong and I'm sorry."

Will I be holding my breath? Depends on who I'm blowi We'll see.

The Secret Policemans' Other Blog

...that was very nearly the name of my top secret super pervo porn site. As it is, I'm not entirely happy with the name it has now and I'm thinking of changing it to something bluesy, like 'Stavin Chain' (extra points if you can tell me what that means, bonus triple megamonster points if you can give me BOTH definitions off the top of your head. For obvious reasons MJ is automatically disqualified from this competition.)

One of the things that I did change was the 'statement of purpose' on the sidebar. I think part of it bears repeating here. Remember; I'm not talking about this blog. I've had worse things than a guy in a Gumby suit here.

"This is a vanilla site. You won't run into anyone dressed like Gumby with sturgeon gaffs through their nipples. Although at some point I might provide the link to the 'Mr. Hands vs. the Enumclaw Horse' video because I feel everyone owes it to themselves to watch a man get ridden by a horse, and see firsthand why that's not such a good idea. I mean you'd think by the year 2006 that whole issue would have been settled but apparently one man missed that day in health class. Never skip health class, folks. You could get assraped by a horse and die with your abdominal cavity full of Mr. Ed's love guck. Would your mom be proud? "My son died hemorrhaging on a gurney in the emergency ward when the quarterhorse he was dating ruptured his bowel with it's dick." All because because you were mokin da doink and missed the class where they told everyone that something the approximate length and width of a sculling oar doesn't belong up your butt, particularly when its being propelled into that position by an animal used to DRAG BEER WAGONS...No.
No, she would not.
So, yeah."

Go read this NOW.

http://what-goes-up.blogspot.com/2006/11/stalemate.html






Of course you should be reading Sopwith Camel already. All of you.

ridgeway

When I was in my 20's I lived in Seattle, on Capitol Hill, with my baby daughter and a growing sense of disillusionment with the system.

The neiborhood was pretty typical for downtown; you had to be careful, but your next door neighbor might be a tech millionaire. It depended on the building you lived in and how willing you were to be a victim.

I was not willing to be a victim. I was newly done with that bullshit. Irregardless of which I realized that I was a perfect candidate-single, baby, poor, no family, few friends. I did what I could to remedy that...mainly, I got serious about making connections, who I knew and who I didn't allow in. Completely new experience for me, being choosy and careful. But as time went on, it proved itself and I felt pretty damn pleased with myself for finally getting the hang of the whole 'hear me roar' thing. Well that and the fact that the ill-intentioned in my life were pretty easy to spot.

With the exception of one.

This really starts back in Portland, and I'm riding on the #30 bus, reading the newspaper. The headline is 'Son of Sam Killer Claims Another'. Theres a conversation going on around me about 'these hippies' in regards to the article; I guess the association between them and anything 'far out' was being made. Meanwhile I'm reading the statement made by a police officer about how the Son of Sam seems to prefer pretty brunettes with long hair parted down the middle. We were crossing the bridge and the note coming from the tires changed; I looked out the window absently to see the river and instead caught my own reflection. A pretty brunette with long hair, parted down the middle. It was one of those quiet, odd moments that stay with you.

Seattle in the 80's was not a good place to be a single woman down on her luck. We were being hunted and killed like any other prey species, one after another after another. The waysides and riverbanks and forests were graveyards.

In the beginning, it was pretty brunettes, with hair parted in the middle.

I cut my hair drastically, changed the style and still woke up in the night thinking about the possibility that someone out there was looking for a girl like me with a very specific purpose in mind. Meanwhile people murmured in the hallway outside my door all night long, slipped along the walls in the dark, climbed up the fire escape outside my window.

By the time Gary Ridgeway started taking a second look at the women he passed each day on his way to work Ted Bundy was spreading like a plague into other places, taking victims as the notion lead. Ridgeway took up where Bundy left off without a break in the flow of blood.

I carried my baby with me on the bus downtown, sat in the welfare office with her, surrounded with people as desperate as I was, used food stamps in that signalled to anyone who cared to look that I was someone with very limited resources and more than likely no backup to speak of. Every few days I'd pick up a copy of the newspaper and read that another woman had been discovered in the brush along the Green River.

I made a point of sitting through the televised sentencing. Ridgeway sat slouched in his chair, and if he was uncomfortable it was because he'd been sitting there for quite a number of hours by then. I listened to the statements made by the family members and friends. Their statements were delivered and simply fell into silence and dissipated. It was very disturbing to watch, and I turned it off after 45 minutes.

Last night I happened to look up and see Dave Reichert. Turned out to be a special, a rather regrettably arty one, about the Green River task force, as it was called, kind of an overview of that whole time.

There were long segments of footage cut from Ridgeways' interrogations.
At first I was struck by the mans' total ordinariness, as I've always been. This is the same not terribly bright face you see hundreds of times a day, share hundreds of fleeting, minor interactions with. The type of person who fills out a crowd, never has much to say, smiles uncertainly at jokes.

The only time I have ever seen Ridgeway present anything like a personality was during the course of these interviews. He sits in an armchair next to Reichert. Reichert is leaning toward him, of course, impinging on his space, and Ridgeway is settled back in his chair away from the man. But after the first question, something comes over him.
Hes not being questioned by the police, or at least not according to his demeanor.
He's being interviewed.
The guy is smiling. Pleasantly. Yes, you caught me. Yup, it was me.
I continued to watch this mans face, and I watched it minutely.
He blinks. He speaks softly, matter of factly. No, I really can't think of anything else that I've left out...I was busy selling Amway and going to church with my wife at the time you're talking about so I didn't have much time for killing.

All of that passed through this mans lips with the exact same effect.

I'd have never seen him coming.

Red Gerbil Fights In Cleveland Attack!

Put down the merlot, stick a bookmark in your copy of 'Love in the Time of Cholera'. The job is far from over, ladies.

What a lot of you are doing now and calling 'feminist' amounts to living in purdah...taking a 'Womens Studies' class in college, belonging to women-only webrings, writing scathing diatribes against the phallocracy which only other women will ever read...no. It's not time to sit back on your ass and wait for you fingernails to dry. Here's one good reason why:

http://www.bratz.com/

Let it load. Turn on your sound. Feel the magic.

Quit treating the movement like a student council meeting. As long as women continue to behave like children...as long as women TRAIN THEIR DAUGHTERS TO REMAIN CHILDREN...to fear standing out, to identify 'feminine' with 'trivial' and masculine with 'everything distasteful', to value appearance above content and safety to risk, our daughters do not stand a chance!
Men are not the enemy.
COMPLACENCY IS.

the sordid truth: MJ EXPOSED

We are human, and humanity is imperfect at the best of times.
Sometimes, we fall from grace.
Still, there are those who, in falling, seek to turn away the justifiable scorn of their fellow beings with lies, falsehood and deception. They veil the harsh light of TRUTH in such a way that the shadows of pity instead fall around them.

These persons would snatch the brie from a beggars teeth, would dash the very cheddar of lovingkindness from the lips of a starveling child. Their shameless subterfuge is a veritable Cleveland Steamer dropt upon the face of every good and kind impulse.

Such a person is MJ.

Oh yes....she seemed chastened. She appeared amongst us head bowed, wearing the sackcloth of humility.
This was a LIE.



Rehab? Nay!
MJ was reporting to her superiors at THE SECRET SCOTTISH RITE OF FREE AND ACCEPTED NAUGHTY LADIES!!!!!
IMPROVED ORDER OF HEPTOSOPHS AND ZUZIMITES, VEILED ILLINOIS GRAND PHARMACISTS MILITANT.








"Approach sister and give the sign!" is the greeting our initiate hears upon approaching the entrance of the secret lodge hidden deep in the malodorous Chiliwackian fenlands.

Yes Canada has fenland.


It does.









Once the secret sign is displayed the initiate may enter.

















At first she is permitted to retain her street clothes. But not for long...this wanton wastes no time; eagerly she drops her linen in anticipation of...



The shameless mysteries of 'The Ass of Ha-Nu-Shop-Vac'


Their wild incantations ring through the marbled temple halls! "I must not fear! Fear is the mind-killer! Fear is the freaky gnome with big warts that smells weird like onions! Barada! I call upon He who walks unseen and foul ! N'gai!"


The Great Beast appears! Behold, he turns.....












Suddenly the mystic portal to the inner sanctum is revealed!!!
















MJ enters, and here she greets and joins her sister initiates in performing the Festivus Feats Of Strength!







Once their frenzied writhings have subsided their sacred Lodge Mother summons them to stand before her altar. Her gaze is merciless; keen and black as shattered obsidian! Or a tire! Or a mixture of obsidian AND a tire!










MJ performe the Ritual Canadian Inverted Obeisance!!!










"Lave your earholes with the Vasoline of truth! I bear strange messages via the kidneys of abnormality and the vesicles of remorse; yea, many and convolute are the colons of the blessed, flaccid, timeless and vaguely sonorous in the endless icy wastes! Ai! The goat with a thousand young!"

Thus begins her tale.

And SHE TELLS ALL.











In appreciation her lodge sisters grant her the Order of the Ethnic Necklace! They crown her with the mystic Lumpy Hat! Joyous, she bursts into extemporaneous song!

"La la la, I'm wearing a hat, yes, it's nice....this hat; I'm just standing here wearing it.....its lumpy...is this room cold or is it just me..."









They fete her with strange delicacies, curious cucurbits, unexpected tubers.

Ham features prominently on the menu.








Their obscene revels last until the dawn!!!!















But all things must end. Finally, she takes her leave. Crowned with the daybreak, foul with unnamed secretions, she disappears into the early morning...as anonymous and mysterious as she had first cameded.



One final ritual then ensues, one which her sisters reserve apart, a special rite only enacted upon MJ's departure from those sacred precincts...














"Oh God, you're kidding. Get it. Just get it."
"Ew, no, you get it. It's on you."
"Anybody got a comb? Or a lighter?"



note: MOST OF THE B/W PHOTOS HERE ARE FROM VINTAGE PULCHRITUDE. THIS IS A FANTASTIC SITE! I STRONGLY URGE YOU TO GO THERE AND (TRY NOT TO THINK ABOUT YOUR GRANDMOTHER) REVEL IN THE GLORIOUS FEMININITY OF IT ALL!

the talkies

Lately I've become fascinated with the classic movie channel. I don't think any of the producers or stars would be particularly flattered by my interest though; it's the quaintness of the form I find just as appealing as the performance. I feel a strange kind of pang realizing that all these beautiful faces are gone, yet I can still see them in the prime of their lives and the height of their powers, and still feel the impact of what they've made.

That impact is a strange phenomenon. You associate it with the living. To stand in the presence of a great piece of static art is like being a lone tree on a hill struck by lightning. It's over quickly although the impact remains for the rest of your life. To see a great film, to watch artifice moving and breathing and speaking is another kind of overwhelming because it feels exactly like life. It leaves a magic impression in the mind like something experienced as one goes under anaesthesia. At least in my mind, and we all know what kind of a place that is.

For that reason, the silent movies are just about too much for me to put myself through in one sitting. As full of machination as the form needs to be, when it works it nails me to the wall like nothing else does. Again, part of that impact is the poignancy of knowing that everyone involved is gone to their reward, the antique effect of the film technique, the long-gone styles in clothing and appearance. When all those elements are also perfectly executed? You watch a film like 'Metropolis' with all its glorious nightmares and wonders, and see it knowing that even the future being imagined there is now years past-that's delicious and eerie and absolutely wonderful.

In the early days when acting always meant stage performance, bland features didn't make much of an impact. Actors with open, readable expressions did. Further, their training was centered around projecting the action and the meaning to the very back walls of the auditorium. That Method transferred to the screen makes these people seem almost unbearably immediate. In many instances it makes them seem almost unbearably campy, too. But given the right kind of talent, it has the effect of carrying a very few actors directly into your presence, warm and breathing. Despite the fact that they are 'acting', despite the lack of color, despite the years that separate you. Irregardless of the truth, they are not dead.

When I was in grade school we were taken on a long drive to see a smokehouse storyteller performance. None of us really quite got what was going on; the culture was unfamiliar and the tales were about things we had no experience with, like ravens and killer whales. Add to that unfamiliarity the strange costumes and masks and the fact that the whole thing was presented in Salish... still, the method was strangely familiar. It felt familiar. So familiar, in fact, that the performance was embedded in my memory. I think there is a map of an underground river, of story, in every human mind that we are all following.

quaint vignettes from my charming rural idyll

I'm up at 4:00 this morning because my Goonybird had a bad dream. The poor kid was cursed with the vivid dreaming gene like I was, and so because I know what a waste of time trying to get back to sleep is going to be, we're up drinking coffee and watching the Disney Channel. I'm drinking the coffee. He's watching the movie.

Yesterday we fired up the DVD player and watched the movie grandma got for Christmas: The Transformers. Grandma really, really likes this movie. Grandma does not care that the critics passed it off as 'just another CGI movie with no discernible plot'. It is about robots and there are explosions and I think it is WICKED BAD. So does the Goonybird. We made so much noise watching it that it chased the Yummy Biker completely out of the house.

My daughter, the Stainless Steel Amazon, and her new husband the Lucky Bastard apparently spent the entire weekend shopping at boutiques, dining on gourmet tidbits and attempting to make me a granddaughter.
I REALLY REALLY REALLY HOPE it is a girl too. Why? Because then my revenge will be complete.


Today, after I drop the Goonybird off at her place (gaze carefully averted) and scuttle away I have to take the Playboy of the Western World off to a doctors appointment. Why? Because on top of everydamnthing else, the man has a hernia!

How on earth does someone who uses a walker get a hernia?

I may not know the answer to that, but I know how a person who uses a walker gets a bloody nose and ends up taken to the emergency room. Would you like to know how a person in a walker gets a bloody nose and ends up taken to the emergency room?

This is what happens when you get old. Men, take special note here.

One of the Playboy's dinner companions-no, not the Playboy- at the 'still sentient' table had been feeling lonely. Being a single gentleman of modest means, outcall was not in the budget; nor was pay per view. So he decided to take matters in hand.
As he was sitting on the edge of his bed, then, thinking about Lillian Gish, he missed a stroke and slipped. His fist was apparently whipping at such a high rate of speed that he struck himself on the bridge of the nose and broke it.
Blood, helped along by hefty doses of Coumadin, fountained everywhere.
He reached out for the call bell to summon a nurse. As he leaned forward, though, he began to feel faint. He simply continued to lean forward until he landed face first on the floor, the call cord still clutched in his grip. That is how the EMTs found him...passed out in a pool of blood, pants around his ankles, wang waving in the breeze, ass in the air and face in the carpet.

I think this is why my father in law has a hernia. When he told me this story I nearly got one too.


We are planning to go visit my son and his family in March. Having a son continues to be a surreal experience. I now own several pictures in which there is more than one person who is related to me by blood and that too is a surreal experience.
The guy has my sense of humor, God help him.
He is also a dirt nerd. After we had known each other for less than 4 hours we were already having a very frank and open discussion about root aphis.
We are the type of people who have taken pictures of our soil.
He has taken pictures of his soil. He apologized for not bringing them. However, when I visit I will view these pictures. We will use lots of botanical Latin. We will review current sustainable agricultural practices in the commercial nursery business. I will tour his nurseries and look upon his arborvitae and cupressus leylandii. He has promised to save me a stack of trade publications and I plan to spend an evening happily going through them with him. Because nothing says maternal bonding like pricing backpack sprayers, Kubota rootball diggers, and computerized temperature triggered greenhouse ventilation systems.

One thing I find endlessly strange is that the guy looks exactly like me back when I was in my twenties. I now know what I would have looked like as a boy. I would have been DROP DEAD GORGEOUS as a boy.

My son is DROP DEAD GORGEOUS.

...momma ain't lyin. click on it; it's worth it.

He also has three kids and he's still in his twenties; obviously he got the 'repopulate the earth' thing from me too.

The last time I saw this guy he was the size of a loaf of bread. 22 years later he comes back to visit with my attitudes, my values, my interests and my looks. I like him. Of course I love him...but I like him.
That makes two of my kids that I like.
I mean, dang.

Lest old resentments be forgot

Recently an old acquaintance from high school got in touch with me.
This is the first time this has happened. EVER. I was shocked.
Well no, more than shocked. In fact, I want to state for the record that I have never been more glad in my life that I wasn't a guy because both 'nads would have schlooped right up into my abdomen; I did not panic-I totally fucking panicked.

So the first thing I did was write porn.

The flesh having been satisfied, I set about dissecting why someone who had nothing at all invested in her high school memories should still be feeling any aftershocks at all, let alone one of this magnitude? That person being me; keep up here.

Why indeed. I may have mentioned that I did not enjoy high school. That would have been an understatement on my part and I apologize because actually it ranks closer to 'ludicrous bald faced lie' on the accuracy meter. High school was horrible. High school was a joke. An endless, excruciatingly unfunny joke told by a smelly drunken uncle who always copped a feel.

The thing was; I wasn't particularly unpopular by then; I wasn't being bullied. It was simply a matter of the daily fucking hopelessness. My parents had delivered an ultimatum: I had to maintain perfect attendance and get passing grades or I would be 'sent to a home'. They meant it. Academically speaking this was easy enough...classes were a joke. The football team was the only thing the district funded. Teachers ranted at us for entire periods about poor game attendance and 'school spirit' while I sat and watched the clock and knew I had to go home to people who referred to me as 'The Whore of Babylon'-and had to take it if I wanted to sleep in my own bed. I sat through the bullshit and turned in my assignments. I never went to the dances and I never ran for student body anything. I was sent home with 'attitude needs improvement' and 'not working up to her full potential' on my report cards.

Because I liked not being institutionalized, then, I continued to go to this place where people were genuinely concerned about volleyball tryouts. Cheerleaders snickered after me in the halls because I wore the wrong shoes and didn't shop at the Brass Plum. As far as boys were concerned I was too 'weird' to make a suitable peer trophy and so I was passed by again and again like something turning green in the reduced-to-sell meat cooler. The only person who showed anything like a personal interest in me was an English teacher in my Jr. year, the notorious Ms. T; and her interest was in getting a handful of tit.

On the one hand I'm proud that I was able to say no to that kind of exploitation. On the other hand exploitation was all that was being offered to me. I hated myself for it, but there were times that all I wanted to was five minutes of contact from someone in my everyday life. Anyone.

The guy who got in touch with me after all these years was someone I remembered as one of the very few intelligent students in that school. Wonderful sense of humor. Filled out a pair of Brittania Jeans well too. He knew I was interested. I was interested even despite the fact that he often came to creative writing class so pathetically loaded that I literally had to help him find the door, or that once in class he'd sit at his desk and trip on his hand for 45 minutes. Of course, he was 17 too, and so, of course, he was interested in something that displayed well. That something wasn't me.
I wasn't cool enough.

I was shocked at how much this still hurts and how much it still matters to me. I can tell myself that we were all kids and none of us had a clue; that matters not one tiny bit. On top of all the other major and minor indignities, apart from the shit I lived in and what kind of things I had to pull out of myself just to make it through a day...to be judged and found wanting on my 'cool' quotient still just ices the absolute fuck out of me. The shame. The rage. I can't begin to describe it; and it's all still just as vivid and bloody as it was back in 1978.

At least he stuck with his convictions. He was one of the few boys that I didn't have to send packing, who, once graduation was safely in the past came flocking around now that the 'coast was clear'.

Ah, but recent events had landed him back in the old hometown, single and feeling horny retrospective, so he opened up the old yearbooks and got as far as 'M'. Oh yeah, her...

So he got in touch. We emailed a couple of times and spoke about old times.

He denied getting stoned.
Never dropped acid.
Had no idea what I was talking about.
Bemused but friendly...until he ascertained that I wasn't single.
The next email, when it came, was offhand and terse.

High school never ends. It never fucking ends.

pirate snakes

So many overwhelming things have happened to me lately that it's difficult to sort it all out...a daughter married, a son found, Playboys relocated and two households finally merged into something resembling order after two years...what a year it's been, and it's only January!
That is why I have decided to write about pirate snakes.

The great ninja vs pirate debate has pretty much been settled...if not to everyone satisfaction, then at least to a mutually agreed upon, scientifically provable set of data:
NINJAS: GOOD

• Black outfits
• stealthy
• silent
• can do all kinds of kung fu and leaps and shit
• cool weapons

NINJAS bad:

ABSOLUTE SILENCE. even if you get hurt you can't yell or anything.
Boring clothes
Anonymous IDENTITY
Can only eat rice and fish plus you have to use chopsticks
Cannot receive mail or any packages because
They don't live anywhere.
FACT: Nobody has found the home of any ninjas.









PIRATES good:


Extremely cool outfits with lace
Cool hats
Money +jewels
Treasure!!!!!!
Sailing ships
And cannons
Muskets
Flag with a skull on it
Pistols
Swords
Daggers
Rum
SHARKS





PIRATES bad:
Frequent amputation
High maintenance lifestyle
Parrots crap on you
Substance abuse common
Getting keelhauled is bad
Scurvy
Being cabin boy
They put you in a barrel sometimes and then all the other pirates stick their weenises in there. According to Frobisher.











Now the thing that could put pirates over the top here is if they were snakes, but also pirates.

...FEEL the extreme snakey awesomeness cascading out of the screen into your lap here. I mean oh my GOD.


SNAKES: always look cool. Even when they're dead.
...I will blow the first person who sends me a jug of this. I will. Really.


Snakes have FANGS, which are not only sharp and cool looking but are like a hypodermic syringe. They inject this heinous, heinous poison into stuff they bite and you swell up and turn black and your skin splits APART. I'm totally not kidding here. Plus snakes are stealthy, are silent, are really fast, have freaky looking tongues, AND can constrict stuff.... like animals, a cow or even people! They wrap around and SQUEEZE and you turn into a big pile of squashed up guts and bones and THEN their jaw like unhooks apart and they stretch out really huge and swallow you whole with your shoes and everything, although of course they barf out all that stuff later.
And remember, snakes are viviparous OR oviparous.



BAD: there is no bad.


Think about it. You piss a snake off, it doesn't fuck around doing a bunch of kung fu stances 'Oo, this is the Crane! Oo, this is the Monkey!' No, it bites the shit out of you and you fucking die.

That's why people don't generally dick around with snakes.


You piss a ninja off, he goes wigging around for ten minutes doing leaps and shit and just generally being annoying and meanwhile you're waiting to die. Then he gets around to chucking a shirikun at your head, or they do that touch of death thing where a week later you croak off in front of the television and everyone runs around freaking out and its all mysterious. Which is smooth, but lacks a certain je ne sais quoi.

When pirates get mad first of all one of them stabs a knife into a table and says ARRRRR! Then they all start breaking bottles and running around. Someone knocks over
a candle and shit catches on fire. Then finally they stab the crap out of you with their cutlass. This is a kind of hugeass sword. Or sometimes they torture you first, then they chunk you overboard to some sharks and they all watch while the sharks eat your head and blood goes shooting out all over the place. Which is excellent but time consuming.


As should be obvious, if one were to combine pirates and snakes the result would be almost too rad for the human mind to contemplate.
PIRATE SNAKES WOULD BE:
Silent except they would hiss sometimes
Have poison fangs,
No stupid parrots crapping down the back of their clothes because they'd eat them ,plus they wouldn't have to wear clothes in the first place!
No amputation because no limbs! And the sweetest part is, if you cut one in half then that'd just make TWO snake pirates so they'd will all the sea battles!
They also have sailing ships (they'd hire ninjas to run it)


You see how this would all work out for the best here? We have the technology to grow a sheep in a jar, we have the technology to clone Christopher Reeve's spinal cord and and use it to power massive cybernetic tanks in the Antarctic, so why not use all this knowledge to update pirates so they wouldn't get their ass kicked by ninjas all the time? OK? Think of the pirates. At least think of their kids. All the ninja kids pick on the pirates' kids at school. For gods sake people, think of the children, OK?
THINK OF THE CHILDREN.

born to be tiny and spoiled

Who should come knocking on our door yesterday than our buddy Albert? Hey, Albert! Haven't seen you in awhile! Come on in!

Alberts' 2 year old Corvette is parked in our driveway. Alberts' 60 year old butt parks in one of my kitchen chairs. He's been up to a lot, and we catch up on it all at 98 mph.

Alberts one of those guys who just starts in, mid-sentence, and off he goes. This is not a man you ever, ever interrupt because it just throws his whole thing off. You have to wait for the breaks, slide in all your remarks and then heeeeee's OFFagainandherecomesanothermonologue.

During this he reached into his jacket and pulled out-what? Guess.

A brick of hash?

A flask of Jaegermeister?

A PEKINESE.

Yes, this bad man pulls out a tiny, tiny little freak dog, a scrunchy wunchie snuffly wuffly dog, and sets it on the floor.

It was wearing a pink sweater. With a hood.

He' s far from an anomaly, at least in this. You see a lot of guys, club guys, 1%ers, toting tiny ridiculous dogs around inside their coats, and its not rare to see those dogs in full outfits either. Years ago the president of the Vagos used to carry around a chihuahua named Suicide Killer. I've seen every toy breed you can imagine peeking out of a bad mans' leather jacket.

About the largest dog you can travel with comfortably on a motorcycle is a Staffie, and then it has to be on the smaller side of the breed standard. I've seen four or five Staffies in my time riding on the tank of a Harley, wearing goggles, jowls fluttering in the wind. Their owners usually glue a piece of carpet on there and the dog simply crouches down, digs in its nails and hangs on. This is, of course, illegal as hell. Imagine taking a Staffie upside the chops when his owner hits a big bump in the road. This would probably fuck up your entire outlook on the rest of the day.

Australian Sheepdogs and Border Collies will happily sit behind dad on the stock seat. But more often you see dogs poking their heads out of some kind of modified touring luggage. Beagles seem to like this. They sit in the container and poke their heads out the various holes and grin at you.
Anyone smaller than a beagle rides in dad's jacket, though. For hundreds of miles at a time. Happy as a little freak clam.

This fascinates the hell out of me. When we go to the ABATE swap this year I can guarantee you there'll be four or five guys wandering around with a buggy-eyed little freakdog sticking out of the front of their jackets like Cuato. They'll stand around in groups and talk to their buddies, just petting their doggies' head all the while. Most of these dogs will be wearing just about as much leather gear as their owners are wearing, and that gear is just about as expensive as Dads too.

When I lived in Portland there used to be this hippie guy that wore a top hat and rode around on an old Schwinn bicycle. Mounted to the front of the bike was a huge wire basket, and seated in the basket was a beagle-sized Champagne Poodle. Always. The guy was pretty nice; he was a busker and I saw him all over the place. The poodle, however, was NOT NICE. Not one little bit. That dog never left the bike, either. The guy would park his bike and that dog stayed right in the basket. Woe betide anyone who got too close or tried to pet the nice doggie. Nice doggie turned into fang faced slavering Hell Doggie. I never heard it bark. Attitude was all it needed. It simply became an eye rolling, snarling, keening monster in the blink of an eye while passers-by slowly backed away. You see, that's the kind of dog you'd think a biker would have, right? Not a bicycle riding vegetarian in a top hat.


I will never own a toy breed dog. I think it's unfair to the dog That dog's whole life is going to be spent looking stupid. Nothing you can do to it will make it anything other than stupid. Even if it's a mean little dog; nobody is going to take something the size of a guinea pig seriously, particularly when it's going yipyipyipyipyipyipyipyipyipyipyipyipyip. But of course, you know that every time Albert leaves the big, bad, heavily tattooed desperado I'm married to starts making remarks like 'Wasn't that a nice little dog? What'd you think of that dog, huh?'

Oh, he has one already picked out. He wants a pug. Yes, no mere toy breed horror for this bad man. You can pay up to 900.00 for a pedigreed pug. Oh yes. And what you get is broken! You have to spend an additional 800.00 just to make the thing work right! I personally would expect a little more value for my money in that case, you know? You get a pug; they can't breathe. Their hips are all messed up so they can't walk. Their jaws don't meet correctly. When they eat they get their food packed all up their noses and then they stop and snort it out all over the place. And then once you get it working right, what does it do? Sit there and look asinine. Why? You can get the same effect with a teenager. Plus you can make them yourself, for free.