1974

November 5, 2004 / / 3 Comments

I’ll have more to say when I sober up, but for now, a blast from the past.
You f–kers.

For now, we should make every effort to look at the bright side of the Nixon Administration. It has been a failure of such monumental proportions that political apathy is no longer considered fashionable, or even safe, among millions of people who only two years ago thought that anybody who disagreed openly with “the Government” was either paranoid or subversive. Political candidates in 1974, at least, are going to have to deal with an angry, disillusioned electorate that is not likely to settle for flag-waving and pompous bullsh-t. The Watergate spectacle was a shock, but the fact of a millionaire President paying less income tax than most construction workers while gasoline costs a dollar in Brooklyn and the threat of mass unemployment by spring tends to personalize Mr. Nixon’s failures in a very visceral way.
[…]
When the cold eye of history looks back on Richard Nixon’s five years of unrestrained power in the White House, it will show that he had the same effect on conservative/Republican politics as Charles Manson and the Hells Angels had on hippies and flower power. . . and the ultimate damage, on both fronts, will prove out to be just about equal.
Or maybe not — at least not on the scale of sheer numbers of people affected. In retrospect, the grisly violence of the Manson/Angels trips affected very few people directly, while the greedy, fascistic incompetence of Richard Nixon’s Presidency will leave scars on the minds and lives of a whole generation — his supporters and political allies no less than his opponents.
Maybe that’s why the end of this incredible, frantic year feels so hollow. Looking back on the sixties, and even back to the fifties, the fact of President Nixon and everything that has happened to him — and to us — seem so queerly fated and inevitable that it is hard to reflect on those years and see them unfolding in any other way.
One of the strangest things about these five downhill years of the Nixon Presidency is that despite all the savage excesses committed by the people he chose to run the country, no real opposition or realistic alternative to Richard Nixon’s cheap and mean-hearted view of the American Dream has ever developed. It is almost as if that sour 1968 election rang down the curtain on career politicians.
This is the horror of American politics today — not that Richard Nixon and his fixers have been crippled, convicted, indicted, disgraced and even jailed — but that the only available alternatives are not much better; the same dim collection of burned-out hacks who have been fouling our air with their gibberish for the last twenty years.
How long, oh Lord, how long? And how much longer will we have to wait before some high-powered shark with a fistful of answers will finally bring us face-to-face with the ugly question that is already so close to the surface in this country, that sooner or later even politicians will have to cope with it?
Is the democracy worth all the risks and problems that necessarily go with it? Or, would we all be happier by admitting that the whole thing was a lark from the start and now that it hasn’t worked out, to hell with it.
– Hunter S Thompson, The New York Times, January 1, 1974

Image stolen from the SA Forums, and hosted by ImageShack.us

The Truth? You Can't Handle The Truth!

October 29, 2004 / / 7 Comments

I said this over there.
Hindsight will show how much this (and all the other American campaign related program activities on the internets) have made an impact on the vote for World Leader #1 this year, but I have no doubt that whatever happens next week (and probably in the weeks following, if it’s anything like 2000), that if the elections aren’t cancelled in 2008, the power of freed-up culture, rumours on the internets, the resurgence of an engaged wired citizenry and the decline of old media and yes, even the self-obsessed wankery of the blogotroposphere are going to kick some political ass.
Gives me hope.
For the moment, though, spread the word, link the link, and take those bastards in the White House down.
Update : When asked for his opinion about these rumours on the internets, Mr Bush had this response for the American people.

We Are All

October 26, 2004 / / 5 Comments

A few times in my life, I’ve felt the Fear. When terror — long drawn-out exhausting fear — works itself to such a pitch inside you that you end up punching right through it, and a calm resignation takes over. You understand at a time like that that there’s absolutely nothing you can think of doing that might change the flow, to alter events in any way, and you become an observer. Whether it’s the cornered herbivore going limp as the predator’s teeth close around its throat or a detached zen calm is a matter of debate. Either way, it’s an instructive place to sit, in the eye of the storm, wrapped in a mental silence, utterly still.
I feel that way at the moment with regard to the American election. As anyone who’s ever subjected themselves to the Comedy Ranting of the wonderchicken is amply aware, I’ve made clear my feelings about the criminal scum who’ve left their snail tracks of glistening goo all over the remnants of a once-great nation. Although I’ve been accused of trying to sway people with my screeds and polemics, that has never been the case, at least not consciously. I was just playing. Writing for me is a ludic thing. I don’t want to change your mind, I just enjoy speaking mine, and playing with words while I do it. Maybe even having a conversation.
The rage, of course, was always genuine. It still is. But the fire’s banked at the moment. Not a flame to be seen, even if the carbon-black belly of the stove is glowing fiercely. It’s not about me, though.
It’s about you, my American friends. Much as I’ve castigated you as collectively stupid, hopelessly parochial, misguided and misled, lazy, fat and terrifyingly unaware of the great evils wrought in your name all around the world, well, I still love you. In the particular, if not the abstract. I was just poking fun. Serious jokes. You always hurt the ones you love, right?
Just like Jon Stewart, I want it both ways, you see. I want to be the funny monkey, and I want to tell hard truths. Serious jokes. I do believe it’s possible to have it both ways, and dangerously simpleminded to expect otherwise.
But this time, I’m going to speak plainly, from this terrified pocket of calm, not because it will make a difference to what’s going to happen, but because I would be betraying myself if I remained silent. We’re begging you, our American friends, our American enemies, our American taskmasters and landlords, our American occupiers and our American pimps, our American sisters and brothers, to do the right thing next week. We’re depending on you, all of us out here in the Outlands. We know you don’t give a flying f–k about us, really, all us furriners. We know you want what’s best for your country, your people, your families. You don’t want to hear our opinions about your politics. We understand that.
But do you remember when the whole world wept along with you and averred ‘We are all Americans‘ after that terrible day 3 years ago? It was true, then. It is hard, my friends, to find many who feel that way today.
Many of us believe that what’s best for America need not also be what’s worst for the rest of the world.
So please. Please. Vote next week. Think, read, put aside your tribal affiliations, and vote. I don’t even care who you vote for, because, much as I’ve abused you all in fun, I trust that most of you are good people, and that if more than the customary 40% 55% [thanks, Dan] or so of you do your duty as citizens and go to the polls, nothing can result but a landslide for the Other Guy.
I’m begging you. We’re all begging you. Do the right thing.

Away Team

October 24, 2004 / / 1 Comment

We spent the last couple of days AWOL from the Corporate Disneyland where we live, and ventured out into the Real Korea for the first time in a while. Jesus tapdancing popsicle-stick Christ, it’s scary out there! Everything’s dilapidated, dirty or broken, and that’s just the stuff they bother to slap a new coat of paint on every decade or two.
On the upside, I’d forgotten about all the attractive young females — not many of those around here in Chaebol City, Arizona. She Who Must Be Obeyed did notice my noticing, but by the time I regained consciousness, the wounds had already been stitched up, so it’s all good.
A couple of chapters from the Modernization for Stupid People™ handbook that exemplify for me — this weekend at least — the Timeless Wisdom of The Korean People:
1) Build condos in one of the most beautiful places in the country, nestled deep in fragrant woods that in October begin to assume such a magnificent symphony of colour as to take the breath away, beside a lake, in the mountains. Then proceed to allow those condos to become filthy, dim animal caves, poorly lined with stained, grafitti’d wallpaper, reeking and unkempt. Ensure that nothing works, and that the cigarette burns in the cheap plastic bog-standard yellow floor-covering are unconcealed by any furniture, other than the lumpy bed in one corner. Make certain that the rooms, while being as depressingly drab and horrible and dirty as possible, cost more than US$100 per night, because you know the f–kin’ proles got nowhere else to go. Laugh and laugh until you piss yourself, as the lucre rolls in.
2) Build tawdry eyesore asphalt chancres on the most attractive bits of coastline, buttress them with kiloton sprinklings of concrete tetrapods, and festoon the pleasure palaces gaily with buzzing, flickering neon and bellowing signage. Make sure there is plenty of opportunity for the whores to earn their trade, and make sure that tinny speakers howl out 24/7 the cookie-cutter ’80s K-pop that gets the housewives a-rockin’ while they’re getting drunk and trying to forget what their husbands are doing. Because this is the coast, and the view is spectacular, build a raw fish restaurant underground, and make of the walls vast aquarium tanks, into whose murky depths you can peer, hoping to spy the algaed, parasite-riddled beast that will become your lunch.
A moveable feast, Korea, a moveable feast.

Ship Of Fools

October 21, 2004 / / 5 Comments

I don’t know what the f–k. I think my brain has been frozen by monetarization, and my heart as well, not to mention my goddamn lilypad-fat keyboard-strokin’ fingertips. Sorry about that am I, faithful friends and supporters. Sorry, and silent, and scattered.
Fleeing from the money, I’ve scarpered around the curve of the globe over and over again over the years, running from the in-the-end unwelcome wealth thrust upon me, and now, since I’m paying for this site to be hosted, I have an urge to spit on it and walk away. I’ve finally found a way to pay to my host the last of the Paypal-imprisoned dollars I owe — the dollars you, my friends, gifted me with months ago — which is good news of a kind, perhaps, but it’s all a swampy money-tainted sh-tswirl in my mind now. Big red bar sinister ‘Keep out!’ as the favicon.
How f–ked up is that when you’re disgusted by the idea of posting to your own weblog? Pretty kinda ish, I guess.
So maybe that’s it. I don’t f–king know. I’ve had a few, and I’m talking sh-t again. So here’s a song. Rock over London, motherbasters!

Went to see the captain,
strangest I could find,
Laid my proposition down,
laid it on the line.
I won’t slave for beggar’s pay,
likewise gold and jewels,
But I would slave to learn the way to sink your ship of fools.
Ship of fools on a cruel sea,
ship of fools sail away from me.
It was later than I thought when I first believed you,
Now I cannot share your laughter, ship of fools.
Saw your first ship sink and drown from rockin’ of the boat,
And all that could not sink or swim was just left there to float.
I won’t leave you drifting down, but it makes me wild,
With thirty years upon my head to have you call me child.
Ship of fools on a cruel sea,
ship of fools sail away from me.
It was later than I thought when I first believed you,
Now I cannot share your laughter, ship of fools.
The bottles stand as empty, as they were filled before.
Time there was and plenty, but from that cup no more.
Though I could not caution all, I still might warn a few:
Don’t lend your hand to raise no flag atop no ship of fools.
Ship of fools on a cruel sea,
ship of fools sail away from me.
It was later than I thought,
when I first believed you,
Now I cannot share your laughter,
ship of fools.
It was later than I thought when I first believed you,
Now I cannot share your laughter,
ship of fools.

PS: I’m comin’ after you ‘making money from blogging’ f–knozzles, if it’s the last thing I do in this textosphere. And I’m gonna talk about your magic underwear.
[Update : Note to self when posting drunk – in future, delete 3 out of 4 uses of all variants of the word ‘f–k’. Except f–knozzle. That’s always a keeper.]

Taking One For The Home Team

September 20, 2004 / / 7 Comments

So, I was at the bar on Friday night. This is a sentence that, in my dotage, is far less likely to pass my lips and fingertips than it once was, back when I was positively dripping with vim and vigour and fluids of a more bachelorly nature. But nonetheless, there I was, gazing somewhat blearily at myself in the mirror through the bottles, propping up the fake-mahogany with my buddy J. There was an impressively long line of empty bottles neatly lined up in front of us. I think the Korean guys like the empties left in front of them as a display of their alco-power, but that conspicuous consumption display tends to backfire when me and my equally thirsty drinking buddy, the livers who walk like men, come onto the scene. Shrug.
The gaggle of young women behind the bar are paid as much to be decorative as to actually sling piss, and station themselves right in front of you, whether you want them there or not. Orders. I tend to ignore them, after an initial smile to show I’m not entirely ogrish. It’s pretty clear, at least when it comes to old bastards like us, that getting pole position in front of the foreigners is pulling the short straw. The ladies do tend to make a valiant attempt to be hostessy with their few phrases of English, but the time is long, long past when I much enjoyed talking pidgin with bargirls, no matter how attractive they might be. Not to say that I wasn’t young and foolish, once. Thousands of young men around the world would be pouring over my seminal textbook, ‘Bargirl Bricolage and Soju Semiotics: The Ineluctable Modality of The Boozehound’ if I’d ever written the damn thing.
So we were tanking up, smoking, talking sh-t, enjoying the once-a-month concession to our younger selves our wives allow us. At the outer edge of my OB Lager-induced tunnelvision, I noticed a group of 4 guys sit down beside us at the bar, but J and I were deep in discussion about how cool it would be to be first on the ground when the Kimchi Wall comes down, as writers or otherwise, and I didn’t notice much other than that the guy beside me was Korean. He didn’t say anything to me, so I assumed, as one does, that he didn’t speak English, and ignored him after giving a terse nod.
Not long after, though, J announced that it was time to break the seal — I, as usual, had been peeing like a racehorse since the first friendly whissht! of escaping beer vapour — and wandered off to the toilets. Turning to me, the Korean guy said ‘How’s it goin’?’
In those few syllables, I knew not only that he spoke English, but that he fluent, and that he’d lived overseas for a time, or was maybe even a returnee. My English Radar is strong. Well, that and the fact that the three other guys sitting with him were all foreigners, and pretty clearly not the English teacher type.
So we started in to talking — and having a conversation in idiomatic, natural English with someone new is such a rarity for me that I was almost giddy with the strangeness of it (nutty expat syndrome ahoy!) — and I learned that he was the language liaison for the other three, who were Americans, a couple of soldiers and a contractor, and here at the deep water port in Sunshine City to expedite the transhipment of tons of US military equipment from Korea to Kuwait.
That may have been classified information, but we were all pretty drunk.
I was right, both about his English and his history. He’d lived in America and gone to both high school and university there. I asked him how he’d liked it, and he told me this : he went to high school in Illinois, university in Los Angeles, and he hated America. Those were the words he used. I suspect saying so wouldn’t have gone over too well with the guys he was with, but they were busy clumsily and loudly hitting on the waitresses, who, in the Way of The Korean Bargirl, tittered fetchingly while failing to hide the look of abject panic in their eyes.
I asked him why he would say such a thing, and he told me that while he was going to university, he worked to make extra money, in a relative’s liquor store. And that he’d been shot during the regular hold-ups. Twice.
This boggled my mind.
When he was in hospital, he said, he’d decided that he was leaving America as soon as he finished school, and not coming back. Not surprisingly. Now, I’ve been around the world a few times in the last 15 years. Been in war zones, been in all the worst places in dangerous cities all over the map. Even LA, one mad weekend on my way down to Mexico, when I heard gun shots in my friends’ Hollywood neighbourhood as we stumbled around, indestructible Canuck style, at 4 am. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone before who’s been shot. And this guy, this mild-mannered Korean whose parents sent him over to America to get out of having to do his military service, he’d taken a couple of bullets for the home team.
And now he was back home, getting paid to translate the crude pickup lines of his military colleagues to the girls behind the bar.
There’s a metaphor in there somewhere, a twisty-cruel just-so story, I imagine. I leave it to you to tease it out, if you’re so inclined.

Comedy Gold

September 6, 2004 / / 10 Comments

Man, I love them Americans. They feel so strongly about entertaining the rest of us with their comedic stylings, and we are all in their debt for keeping us laughing. The chutzpah, the testicular fortitude that they collectively show, out there on the world stage, walking the tightrope between hilarious self-parody and a collapse into a light-gobbling singularity whose gravitational gradient is so steep that even irony cannot escape. Bravo, I say!
The tension they so skillfully build in all the rest of us who hang on every faux-drunken swerve and stumble of their political machine is breathtaking. Those rapscallions. Teetering up there on the democracy highwire, introducing ramshackle, insecure electronic voting systems built on Microsoft™ Access© while they so nobly and selflessly impose American freedom and democracy on the Afghanis and Iraqis? Oh, eek, I can’t watch! Putting their dear leader up there on stage to praise the 10 million voters registered in Afghanistan, when only 9 million are eligible? The showmanship is breathtaking, and The Funny is debilitating.
Trotting out a frothing villain like Zell Miller to inflame the stupid, while retaining the option of distancing yourself (‘He’s not a Republican!’) should the spin from the assembled stenographers of the press turn ugly? Pure comedy gold! Did you see the look on that old bastard’s face when he felt the carpet being pulled out from under him? Classic, backslappin’ American pie hijinks!
Oh, you wacky yank bastards, how I love that you’d totter so close to the abyss to entertain us all. I wake up each morning frothing in my urgency to fire up my old PC and find out what new japery you might have unleashed.
The subtleties of the ways your leaders use words, my friends, while merely appearing to wield them like a simpleton’s club, claiming that they ‘don’t do nuance‘… simply magnificent. The way that you can collectively turn on an ironic dime, and allow a man whose family connections excused him from serving his country to shine the character assassination jocularity spotlight on a man who actually did. And the way that that fellow and his supporters let their foes just do it. Oh, it’s belly-laughin’ time, right there!
You Americans kill me. No really, you do. Not as dead as the 10,000 (30,000?) Iraqis, or the 3000 Afghanis, or the 1000 Americans, or the 100 ‘coalition of the willing’ (oh, dear, that’s a nugget of comedy pyrite there, too) members. (And never mind those 50,000 Komedy Korpses in the Darfur. They’re not dead from the hilarity apoplexy!)
A pretend cowboy President whose horses are rented? A constitutional amendment to protect the sanctity of marriage in a nation where half of all marriages end in divorce? An inner powerbroker circle of oil company gassholes and oil prices at all-time highs? A leader who claims to receive instructions from his god (or from ‘beyond the stars’, whatever that means), making offhand remarks about crusades? Invading a country that posed no threat, while the Norks built more nukes and threaten to turn Seoul into a lake of fire? Talking about corporate responsibility and pumping a few billion into your vice-president’s old company? Contracting out your warfare needs to the lowest (or best-connected) bidder? Running a gulag in Cuba, of all places? Torturing children in Iraq while proudly (if spuriously) proclaiming ‘no child left behind’ back home? Reducing the taxes of the richest, then making populist proclamations like ‘there’s no point taxing the rich because they just dodge their tax bill anyway‘? Osama bin who?
Your A-material kills, my friends. You rock.
You gotta take your show on the road.

Rudy Can't Fail

August 31, 2004 / / 9 Comments

Rudy Giuliani. Rudy f–kin’ Giuliani. I caught the last 10 minutes or so of his horrifying public deep-throat of his paymasters in the Fellato-drome as I was shovelling down my lunchtime bibimbap this afternoon. In the way of a good journalist — which of course we know all bloggers aspire to be, with ‘blog is to journalism as waffle iron is to pita bread’ our battle cry — I’m going to pretend that I watched the whole thing with rapt attention, rather than with one eye while I mixed a big dollop of gochu-jang into my rice.

What kind of man could this unhinged bastard be? That he actually believes the kinds of things he said, up there with his naked face hanging out, boggles the mind. It would seem, unlike the president whose steaming sidewalk turds he unhinged his jaw to gobble up — whether in the name of tribal solidarity, or clean streets, or merely because we live in a world where public fabrication in the name of self-preservation trumps the lives of thousands, I don’t know — that he’s not merely a stupid man. How could he possibly justify the audacity of the warispeace platitudes and outright howlers he lobbed out over the heads of the assembled herd animals in the pit? Most of the assembled groundlings, interestingly, appeared to be a little bemused and confused as they milled and mooed that there was a distinct absence onstage of naked Iraqis chained to the pillars or homos cruficied and bloody in front of the stars-and-stripes. Is it possible that the fog of bullsh-t that was emanating from this opportunist f–k up on stage was choking them, too? Perhaps not, but I’m eternally the optimist.

“As I stood watching the towers fall, I turned to Bernie, and I said, ‘Thank God George Bush is our president’.”

Really? Did you really do that, Rudy? And how, for the rest of your life, will be you able to live it down, if you actually did?
To Giuliani’s credit, perhaps, was the look in his piggy little eyes as he limped his way through his clumsy litany of weasel-sh-t doubletalk. You could see it, if you looked closely: ‘Help me!’ his eyes seemed to be saying, while his mouth continued to force words out around the mechanically-reclaimed Republican meat that was occluding it. ‘Let me the hell out of here! I’ve sold my soul and made a foul, demonic joke of my integrity, and the price wasn’t high enough! There’s no way back from this, and I’m nuts-deep in the toothy maw of the beast!’
But f–k him. He made his choice. He’s a force for evil now, whether or not he ever was anything but. He’s on the side of America! The! Great! America! Mom and apple pie! America! Freedom and equality for some! America! Commerce is honour! America! Hurry up and get those ovens finished, so we can get this Final Solution thing underway! America the proud torturers! America! With us or against us!
I have mentioned before that I’m against you, right, America?
Just so we’re clear.

Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy

August 27, 2004 / / 11 Comments

In the footsteps of Hotblack Desiato, I’ve been taking a month off dead, for tax reasons. Well, OK, not really for tax reasons. The Korean government treats me relatively well when it comes to hoovering up the monetary crumbs in my fiscal wake, and I have long been out of the purview of the long arm of Revenue Canada.
But I certainly have been dead, at least from the neck up. Occasionally during the course of the last month or two, as the caffeine rush has hit me, I’ve had a Brilliant Idea flash up on the Times Square text-crawl on the inside of my forehead, then just as quickly disappear, before I actually worked up the energy to write it down.
I’m not entirely sure why this might be, other than the damp lassitude that comes with the ‘monsoon’ season here in Korea, when the rains come and the whole country starts to smell and feel like the inside of a fat man’s underpants. Not that I’ve spent a lot of time rummaging around such places, mind you, but I got me an active imagination.
And I do have some theories.
The most plausible is performance anxiety. Since it became as certain as these things ever are that some of my offhand screeds were going to be included in the upcoming ‘Best of Web Writing‘ book (which should be finalized and ready to get magically transformed from bits to atoms in the next 8 weeks, according to a recent email from the publisher), I’ve felt a little weird about writing. Back when I was posting something every day — being a realio trulio weblogger, half self-promotion, half self-regard and half community-cheerleader (I know that’s three halves. I am large, I contain multitudes) — and I was pushing the thousand uniques a day envelope, with a couple of times the number of daily readers I have now, oddly, I didn’t think much about it. Just had a coffee or a beer or something, and whacked out some brainfart that was temporarily stinking up the room, to clear the air a bit. I imagine that many of those people who once visited the site now read it through the newsfeeds, and I may well have more readers than I did back then, but they are invisible to me, basically, and off my Pay Attention To Me Waaaah! radar.
I’m not sure if that reticence to dance in the spotlight for fear that it’ll just suck is a good thing or bad. Probably bad, because if you don’t write, you’re not a f–king writer, right?
Right?
The other thing that made my weiner shrink in the glare, authorially speaking, was this Flickr testimonial from my blogfather, Rageboy.

Image Hosted by ImageShack.us

I even sent the bastard an email that could be summarized with “Dude? WTF?” to inquire if he was just yankin my crank. He replied in the negative. Proud — astonished, is more like it — am I that someone I’ve respected and sucked up to for so long thinks so well of my stuff, but I think it pushed me over the brink into the ‘crikey how can I live up to that?!’ swamp.
Not to say that I’ve spent more time revising or rewriting any of the infrequent posts I’ve made in the last month or two, of course. Hell no! But I did cringe when I hit the post button, which has to count for something.
And not to say that I don’t bask in the praise like a puppy with its ear being scratched. I do. Don’t stop now!
My other theory about why it is that I’ve if not gone dry, at least had a dam built upstream somewhere, is that I’m healthy, by god. Rude, animal health. All bulgy muscles and efficient oxygen exchange. Meaty, beaty, big and bouncy.
I started working out, you see, for the first time in my life, about 7 months back. About 4 1/2 hours a week, weights and treadmill and stationary bike. My 39th birthday came and went a couple of weeks back, and I’m in better shape than I have been in my life. It pleases me, especially considering that given the lifestyle I enjoyed during my 20s and early 30s, I’d figured I’d be dead by now.
But I’m kinda thinking that the life of the mind might suffer in some way when the meat is singing. Has there ever been a Real Writer who worked out at the gym? I’m not talking foofoo yuppie reactionaries like Brett Easton Ellis or someone like that, here. I mean mad bastards, one of whom I have always considered myself to be. Hell, I don’t know. But the persona, writerly and otherwise, that I’ve invested so much time grooming over the past few decades just doesn’t marry up with sleekness and throbbing muscley health.
It’s not that I feel that much dumber, per se, it’s just that, for the first time in a lifetime of flesh-hating, I’m feeling pretty comfortable inside my skin, and at the same time, the locus of Me has shifted downwards a couple of feet.
Balance is good, they say. Maybe it’s just that while the changes underway in the ways my mind and body work together are consolidated, I’m off balance, and it’ll all settle into a new pattern eventually. Hell, I dunno (redux).
But like I said, maybe it’s only the weather.
Either way, I apologize for not writing more to those who like to read the meandering mental travelogues of the wonderchicken. For now though, let it be known that I haven’t been on a half-assed hiatus because I’m unhappy. Just the opposite.

Fallout from the Blog Bomb

July 30, 2004 / / 17 Comments

Is it anti-communitarian of me to say that I’m wryly amused by all the ‘bloggers’ jostling like wee piggies for a nipple at the Democratic convention? That jockeying for pole position in the anecdote-race to be the first to fellate the rich and powerful is a teeny bit distasteful to me?
Will I get in trouble (again) with all those otherwise good and smart people who are all a-twitter about the fact that they really really matter now? Now that they’re inside the chalk borders of the pentagram? I mean, it’s cute, all right. Sure. Like the wallflower become belle of the ball. And having them tell themselves, and us, in public, how it’s a sign that the heavy elements of democracy are sinking through the clouds of the blogosphere, like the glittering dusty fallout from the Blog Bomb, back onto the heads of the Common People? That a change is a-comin? That’s precious, and may even have a kernel of truth to it. More power to ’em. But.
But I’m still waiting, and still looking, for one — just one! — who has the bravery and the cockeyed gonzo ballsiness to rip a few new assholes in the purveyors of all that sanctimonious ‘America The Great’ autowankery, and, say, fling an empty Royal Reserve bottle at the stage while Joe Lieberman does his coattail ride into obscurity. Metaphorically or otherwise. And then write about it. In realtime.
How I wish that there were a few writers there splashing their talent (and cocktails) all over the web. Not just permalink patriots and also-ran digerati, but mad bloggy bastards who’d give me some stank, some snark, a few laughs. How I wish Rageboy could’ve gone and kicked out the motherf–king jams, or dong_resin, or Golby the crazed. Whoever. Just somebody whose panties don’t go all damp at the idea of getting spattered with John Edwards’ sweat.
I don’t want to see digital snapshots of you posing with some other blogerati dildo or fawning over some Real Celebrity, framed with a bit of Commentary Lite, damn it. I want you to write something that will make me laugh and weep and want to go and break a bottle over someone’s head (or laugh and weep and give somebody an equally random big ol’ kiss on the lips), then dance like a tarantula-bitten gypsy. Something to fire me up a bit! I want a Hunter S Thompson, by god, a Mencken, somebody with a bit of rage and a bit of juice in ’em, with too many damn words and a talent for juggling them. Someone who sees the opening, seizes it, then drives a juggernaut of text right through the quivering greasy middle of it, while lesser mortals scatter in fear for their lives.
Hell, maybe there are bloggers out there doing that at this convention. If so, point me to them. If not, well, get me a plane ticket and a pass to the Republican Clusterf–k, and I’ll do the damn job myself.
Never send a blogger to do a wonderchicken’s job.
[Update : Well, OK, this is pretty damn cool. But I’m stickin’ to my knee-jerk contrarian guns, damn it!]
[Update 2: Well, besides the Mighty Fafblog, even if I do have my suspicions that Fafnir and Giblets aren’t actually there. Still: fafferrific or faffelicious? You decide!]
[Update 3: Oh, crap. Me and John Freakin’ Dvorak. I’m turning in my decoder ring.]
[Update 4: f–kin’ A, Tutor, my old nemesis.]

Am I Angry? Do I Hate? Can I Kill?

July 16, 2004 / / 20 Comments

Anal rape of children is bad. This is a sentence that, in the normal course of things, one would think that it would be unnecessary to write. I’m pretty sure — much as I loathe humanity, most of the damn time — that the majority of humans on this planet, obsessed as they tend to be with their progeny, would agree with me that raping children is a bad thing. One of the worst things that you can do, they’d probably say, short of maybe genocide.
Or rather, cleansing. Ethnic cleansing, to wash away those pesky ethnic underarm stains that are so embarrassing in polite society.
‘Rape’s a part of war, though, stav!’ I hear you cry, as I cup quivering-with-rage hand to shell-like ear. ‘To the victor the spoils, and the orifices. The plunder, the glory! It’s part of our common human heritage! It’s tradition, damn it!’
Well, sure. But butt-f–king kids while their mothers look on? While videotaping it? I’m not sure that’s really in line with the ‘rape, loot and pillage’ modus operandi so loved and respected throughout human history. Pushing the envelope a little, that. It may not be specifically forbidden by the letter of Geneva Convention, for example, but I’m pretty sure it goes against the spirit of it.
Which is why the Bush administration spent so much time and effort trying to ensure that their troops would not be bound by international law, of course.
Because that’s what the Americans were doing, it seems, at least until they got caught.
Raping children. With Soldiers Gone Wild spring-break videography.
I wrote an deliberately, egregiously offensive piece called ‘Neocon Allegory‘ many months back, in which Dick Cheney anally rapes and murders an Iraqi boy. It was the most over-the-top offensive thing I could come up with, that little piece, after the unwelcome images of that tableau had gotten their claws into me, and I knew I had to write it down to get it out of my head. I wrote it down alright, and I’ve thought about deleting it many times since. I’m glad now that I didn’t.
How horrifying is it that the central metaphors of that post — the rape of children by Dick and George, the rape of two nations, of the whole f–king planet — would seem to have come true, in as literal a way as one could imagine in the worst mescaline-driven nightmare? How awful that the worst metaphorical flight of nasty invention I could come up with is now a reality in fact, and it’s being hidden by the powerful and ignored by the hypnotized?
Pretty awful. And they ask why I seem to hate America so. They keep asking.

A Political Dream

July 9, 2004 / / 6 Comments

I had a dream last night. A glorious technicolour dream. A political dream.
In my dream, Candidates Kerry and Edwards realized that Dim George and Snarling Dick were going to pull Osama Bin Laden out of their asses at some opportune moment before the election, and crucify him on the White House lawn. Plant the cross in a pool of scented oil to keep the saudi cooties from spreading, invite the bloodclan and Fox News and Dad, and rouse the tribes to a tumescent, frantic headline-crawl apogee of Republican vote-lust. But in a tasteful way, with very little mention of anyone having to go and f–k themselves.
My dream-representation of the light dawning in the Johns’ minds was a tableau of them making cute anime ‘O’s with their mouths while rolling their eyes upwards toward a shared thought balloon in which Dick Cheney was holding the severed head of Osama up by its hair, letting the blood drip onto a Diebold voting machine. It was way cool.
So Franken-John and Pretty-John decided to go proactive. Winning, Kerry declared in his endearingly halting, tone-deaf way, is as much about kicking… some… mother…f–king ass as it is about proactively leveraging mission-critical paradigms in a time-sensitive fashion. Edwards popped up in front of him to declare that the only way to make America strong, to unite America again, and to preempt an October Suprise that would make America unstrong and disunited, was if the two of them were to hunt down that bastard OBL themselves, and beat the chickenhawks at their own game.
Yeah! said the crowd. Woo!
And so, enlisting the aid of a bionic monkey named Limbaugh (because robots and monkeys are funny, and a robot monkey wins by default (until the bionic monkey pirate shows up, at least)), the two boarded a Black Hawk helicopter and departed from an undisclosed location into the free and democratic mountains of America’s Newest Ally, Afghanistan. This wasn’t just any helicopter, mind you. This was way better than the Campaign Bus they figured on using off the get-go. Yes, this was a stealth chopper, and its shiny new Kerry/Edwards vinyl appliqués were replaced with other shiny new ones, ones shouting stuff like ‘Death To America!’ and ‘Jihad or Bust!’ (but with barely-legible disclaimers underneath in tiny little print, just in case somebody got the wrong idea). These guys were clever, canny combatants, and they had good media advisors!
With Lurch resplendant in Ramboriffic headband and shiny plastic nippleless muscley-torso, and co-John working his best assets and looking simply stunning in his floor-length silk gown, they combed the arid hills of the Afghan-Pakistan border in their OsamaChopper, setting down each evening as Allah’s sun sank into the dusty haze to lay traps for the Bad Guys. Candidate Breck Girl strutted his silky stuff while bandolero-strapped Candidate Kerry lurked in the shadows with Limbaugh and waited, guns akimbo, frowning for the film-school interns with the digital video cameras. Waiting for their quarry to strike the bait.
Waiting, and drinking whiskey, because that’s what men do when they’re hunting outlaws with a bionic monkey at their side.
That’s when I woke up with a start, all sweaty and disoriented. I hope I never have to see that look on my wife’s face again.

Surfacing

July 5, 2004 / / 4 Comments

*pokes head above the oily surface of the waves, all Sheen-y from Apocalypse Now*
I’ve been keeping my head down of late, snarfing up Warren Ellis‘s astonishingly cool Transmetropolitan during the afternoon, reading The Collected Philip K Dick at night before the sandman whacks me one in the medulla oblongata, filling in the spare moments with more bittorrented Takashi Miike movies and old episodes of Space Ghost and The Kids in The Hall. The things I gotta do to hotwire my brain now that I’m drug-free. It’s a damn shame.
Anyway, some strange and marvellous textual creature is soon to be born out of all this non-bloggerly activity (if not Athena-like parthenogenetically spoinged from my forehead, then perhaps appearing on the scene in a more, er… cloacally ichor-dripping kinda way (and then presumably slouching towards Bethlehem or something), which should be big fun for everyone involved), I hope, but then again, that might just be indigestion.
Stay tuned. Or not. I never know where the hell I’m going with this stuff.
*plays tape backwards, hoping that it’ll look like he’s re-submerging and that nobody’ll notice the ripples are going in the wrong direction*

Fahrenheit 452

June 21, 2004 / / 3 Comments

So, I’m writing this post. It is called Fahrenheit 452.
It is mostly about itself, although it’s about this too. And it’s about Ray, who has given me some of the most peaceful, pellucid, connected moments I’ve ever had while holding a book in my hands.
I read my first Bradbury in perhaps 1973, and revisited some of my favorites just in this past year and found their lustre undiminished. As middle age approaches, the kind of nostalgia for a time that never was is stronger than ever, and there are greater pleasures to be found in some of those stories than the ones a younger me was able to fathom.
But he’s still being a tool. In the spirit of…well, of sh-t-disturbing, I guess, I offer this humble suggestion: that anyone who feels similarly post something silly — even better, something silly in the Style of Ray — and title it ‘Fahrenheit 452’ or ‘Fahrenheit 911’ or whatever. Now that’d be some big blog hijinks!
Like Cory said

Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451, so we know he loved the First Amendment. I just wish he loved the First Amendment enough to share it with the rest of us.

Peace.

The Friday Five — Lazy Bastard Edition

June 18, 2004 / / No Comments

Because I am a bad person, I have not been scouring the permalinkosphere for nuggets of excellence with my usual steely-eyed vigor this week.
Despair not, though, gentle readers, for I have nonetheless come up with a Single Link of such Power and Glory that it will make up for the notable lack of the Other Four, and quite possibly melt your Snatch Hairs.
Smoke ’em if you got ’em.
And so [drum roll please] I give you… the Friday One! Do not operate heavy machinery while using this blog.

  • The Fafblog
    • ME: So I understand you made a lot of your fortune through the US fishing industry Rev Moon.
    REV. MOON: HA HA HA! It is no longer merely a fishing INDUSTRY! I have now dubbed it the Worldwide Unity Church of Fish, and through it I have married each and every fish in America!
    ME: Wow that is impressive!
    REV. MOON: Fish will no longer debase themselves in gross extramarital usage of the fish love organ! So declares Moon, Guardian Messiah-King of the Fish!
    ME: Guardian-King of the Fish?
    REV. MOON: Yes indeed! I was annointed such when I ascended bodily into Icthyon, the 19th realm of Heaven, and knighted by JaBudah, the Jesus-Buddah hybrid and holy avatar of the Fish Genome!
    ME: Oh wow! Not THE JaBudah?
    [more…]

    Gmail

    June 10, 2004 / / 43 Comments

    If you were one of the kind people who dropped some dollars into my (still locked, but I’m working on it) tipjar, and you’d like a Gmail account, drop a comment with a (properly obfuscated) email address and I’ll hook you up.
    I have two to give away. First come, first served.
    [Update : I have three more Gmail invites to give away. Priority is as before (folks who’ve helped me out with hosting to the front of the line), followed by people I ‘know’, virtually or otherwise. Random Internet Dudes need not apply. Thanks.]

    Blue Water Virgin

    June 6, 2004 / / 13 Comments

    It’s late December, 1992. I’ve been living a life of madness and booze, sex, drugs and slightly dodgy rock and roll for months now. La Passionata is the name of the boat, and Marina de La Paz, or, more accurately, the anchorages just off it between the mainland and the mangrove offshore sandbar called El Mogote, has been my new stomping grounds. La Paz, Baja Sur, Mexico.
    La Paz Clouds.jpg
    How I got into this life of drinking and sailing and drinking and sailing and drinking a whole lot more is a bit of a blur, but burned bronze and blonde-streaked, skinny and intent on squeezing as much random fun as possible out of every glorious day, I’m happier than I have been in a long time.
    But I can also feel my personality disintegrating, or at least that’s how I phrase it to myself in my saltwater- and beer-stained journal. Maybe the sun and the booze and the whippets and speed and the untrained scuba dives, the days out at Isla Espiritu Santo and Isla Partida hunting fish and lobster and cooking them for the women we’d picked up at the Barba Negra the night before, and the nights back at the bar again running up our tab with the long-suffering owner, Jose, have taken their toll, finally.
    Looking back on it now, I don’t know how I could have gotten tired of it — sometimes I’d give my left nut to be back there again, careless, happy, exalted and gloriously befuddled, swimming with whalesharks and flirting with vulpine German tourist girls, being lulled to sleep by gentle motion of the hull in the swell and the quiet slap of warm water against the fiberglass.
    I’m tired of waiting in port, looking at the charts of all that crinkled Pacific coast running down all the way to Panama, I’m feeling the effects of all that recreational chemistry, and I’ve been offered berth on a boat so much bigger than La Pass — 71 feet of waterline! my own cabin after sleeping in the salon and getting my head stepped on by whoever else crashed aboard on any given night! — that I’ve made the decision to jump ship and head across the blue water with Elmo’s Fire. And the boys on La Passionata will meet up with us down the coast, they promise. Probably in Vallarta, in a month or so. A little time away from the 24-hour party people will be good for me, I reckon, and so I move my single bag over to Elmo, and dance around a little in my own little two-bunk cabin, up under the bow, before I get to work.
    Gran Baja From El Mogote.jpg
    Elmo’s Fire’s been tied up at the pier in front of the Hotel Gran Baja for years. It is averred by most that Michael, the hard-boozing but indestructible Englishman who’s been living aboard since the owners disappeared — one dead, one in jail for trafficking, one lit out to parts unknown, it is said — is really the black sheep Viscount Ashley, and survives off a yearly stipend from the Good Family in exchange for a promise to stay the hell away. Whether that’s true or not I don’t care — I’ve heard enough tales tall and wide in the past months to last a lifetime, and I don’t care much whether they’re fiction or not, they are such glorious mythical water in which to swim. Michael is a good man, and kind, if scatterbrained in the boozer cruiser way, and universally acknowledged to be a fine sailor, veteran of several TransPac races.
    A few days later, less than a week before Christmas, and we’ve picked up a new crewmember at the Barba Negra, which, with Michael’s squirrely girlfriend, makes four of us to manage this Ocean ’71. The weather has come up — Chabasco weather in the Sea of Cortez is like hurricane weather over in the Gulf — and we’re riding anchor, tucked safely into the south-facing Bahia de Los Muertos south of La Paz, waiting with nine other boats to make our break for Mazatlan. Nobody’s moving. Michael’s getting itchy. I’m scared sh-tless. ‘Bay of the Dead’ is not an auspicious name for the departure point of my first bluewater sail, not when the wind’s howling down from the north at 40 to 60 knots.
    Finally, about 9pm, Michael snaps, calls the rest of the cruisers on the open channel cowards, and tells us we’re making sail.
    I’ve spent the last few hours working on the SatNav, and it seems to be working as it should (for the first time in months, apparently), and I tinkered with Iron Mike, the autopilot, earlier in the day. With only a few months experience on the boats, that’s about all I can do, other than follow orders, and cook dinner. We motor out past the headland, into the swell, Michael points the pointy end into the wind, and we do our deckmonkey thing and haul the mainsail up. The swell rolling down the Sea of Cortez is huge — it feels like 8 metres, but it can’t be more than 4 or 5, probably. That’s enough. I’m scared. The night is young, and very dark.
    Michael is standing behind the wheel grinning through his scraggly white beard now, and as he brings us around to the east, the mainsail catches the wind, and Elmo heels over, hard. The lee rail is buried in wake, and in a matter of seconds, we’re flying along east-southeast ahead of massive following seas. Dale and Lenore go below, and I sit with Michael in the open cockpit, and he teaches me some of what I’m going to need to know. My watch will be 4am to 8am, and the weather could get better or worse between now and then. I sneak the occasional look over my left shoulder at the waves towering over us, and it’s even more sphincter-tighteningly scary than the foam and black water coursing along the deck where the rail on the lee side of the boat is well and truly underwater. I concentrate on his lessons.
    It’s a few hours later — after midnight — and the weather has gotten heavier. The SatNav tells me that we’re well and truly out in the blue water now, but it’s the same dark, foamflecked and howling maelstrom of wind and wave it was when we were mere minutes offshore. The difference is that I know we’re many many nautical miles from land now. It’s the first time for me.
    I don’t think I’ve ever been this scared, but my sailing (and drinking) adventures in the last few months have gone some way towards acclimatizing me to functioning while terrified. I am taking some small pride in my impassive mien when particularly hard gusts push the boat over further, or rogue waves wash through the cockpit. This is going to be OK, I think to myself.
    This is when Michael, who’s been letting Iron Mike steer for the past hour, I find out, and just resting his hands on the wheel, decides he might as well have a drink. Michael never has just one drink. Neither do I, if truth be told, but then I’m not the f–king skipper on this little passage.
    There is one rule that my friends back at Marina de La Paz, most of whom are boozers of an intensity and dedication I’d rarely seen before — and this is saying a lot — have drilled into me. You drink in port or at anchor; you do not drink while under way. You do not do it.
    Michael cracks his first beer. My eyes go round, my sphincter goes loose, and tightly-wound escalates to underwear-staining. Brown Alert! It doesn’t take long to figure out that other than Michael, I’m the most experienced sailor on board. And I don’t know sh-t.
    By 3am he is pissed, semiconscious and prone, wrapped in a poncho on the downwind bench of the cockpit. Beer cans are rolling around, awash, in the cockpit. Our other two crew members are below, sleeping, presumably. I am behind the wheel, and the seas are getting heavier, to the extent that the autopilot whines and chatters in protest as it struggles to bring the bow around in the wake of maybe one in five of the huge waves that are sliding beneath us. I disengage it and take the wheel.
    For the next 3 hours, I steer that massive boat through the storm. My only time before this behind the wheel of Elmo’s Fire has been a couple of hours running before the wind from La Paz down to Bahia de Los Muertos, before the winds came up. Er, yesterday. I’m way out of my depth. What Michael told me before he passed out — that to jibe the sail in these winds would snap the boom — keeps running through my mind, and though I try to keep our course as easterly as possible, the crash and rattle of the sail when we come down off the peak of some of these waves hammers at my confidence.
    Still, although there are perhaps one or two gusts or monster waves per hour, enough to make me jump and struggle to keep the boat under control, I begin to get used to it. Michael snores away, through spray and hull-slam, and I try to keep the cigarettes I’ve been chainsmoking dry, and begin to understand that I have not failed, and that we probably won’t die. I realize that this night may have been the most important test of my mettle so far in my young life, where I had to rise to the challenge and master it, and that I was doing it, by god.
    The horizon begins to lighten before 6am. I’ve never been so happy to see the sun before, and as the skies begin to grow bright, the winds fall away, and the swell begins to recede. Or that’s what it feels like, at least. The monsters that loomed out of the dark shrink away, and in the light of day, fear seems silly and unworthy and unmanly. In instant retrospect (just add sunlight), terror gives way to adventure.
    By the time the full disc of the sun detaches itself from the eastern horizon, I can see land, a bumpy darker line above the dark water. Tempted by the memories of too many pirate movies as a kid, I shout, only a little maliciously, ‘Land ahoy!’ Michael starts into wakefulness, squints at me, nods, creakily limps over to the rail and pisses, then relieves me of my watch. I light us a couple of cigarettes, pass one to him, and move over.
    Soon there are sounds below, and the smell of coffee wafts up from the gangway.
    We’ll be in Mazatlan by sunset. And then we will sail south.

    On board Pilgim in Marina De La Paz.

    sh1t Happens

    June 4, 2004 / / 4 Comments

    I really was going to tell a story of Terror on The High Seas, as promised, but I fell down and a couple of litres of beer somehow splashed into my mouth, and well, it all went to hell, basically, and all I could recall of my past while listening to AC/DC’s High Voltage was the unseemly enthusiasm with which my first girlfriend performed fellatio on me those several decades ago, thereby ruining me (in at least one sense) for most of the other women with whom I had sexual relationships in later years.
    But you don’t wanna hear about that stuff.
    Or maybe you do, I guess, but that’s not the story I wanted to tell tonight, so here’s an amusing image that I’ve stolen from one of the talented goons at the SA Forums, to make you forgive me for the notable lack of blowjob and/or saltydog stories this evening, instead.
    here.

    The Other Friday Five – Guilt-Plagued Edition

    June 4, 2004 / / 1 Comment

    Yes, it’s Friday again in Korea — the first time it’s been Friday in, like, a couple of months, thanks to new legislation outlawing Friday in Korea in favour of having Thursday twice to reduce alcohol consumption (you read it here first!) — and so time for the Other! Friday! Five! in which I provide precisely 5 hard-won links to some things that I quite enjoy, and you click on them, and everybody’s happy.
    Some of our lovely contestants you may know, some you may not. It’s all good.
    So without further ado, join me down in the government yard in Trenchtown, friends, and revel in the linky goodness.

    [Post postscript : I’ve been daydreaming about The Before Times (™DV Polymedia) lately, and if the delicious frosty beverages I plan to consume this evening treat me right, I may have a tale or two to tell of those times when I should have (in the immortal words of Moe Berg) ended up dead in a ditch somewhere with a mind full of chemicals like some cheese-eating highschool boy. But didn’t.
    What’s the point of doing stupid things unless you get at least a few amusing anecdotes out of it, right? Stay tuned to this channel!]