Taking a whizz

July 23, 2002 / / 4 Comments

I thought I’d seen it all, here in my reeking little trash-heap slum of a neighbourhood.
I was, as people who employ such phrases usually are, wrong. Walking back from the subway station this afternoon along the main street, I saw a young mother squatting with her girl-child (who was perhaps 3 or 4 years old, and thus past the age where using her as a meat animal is a viable option† any more) in the middle of the sidewalk.
The little girl’s panties were around her ankles, and she was pissing. Like a little pink-clad racehorse.
Now, Koreans tend to be less prissy and self-conscious about the functions of elimination than us western folk (which is perhaps odd in light of all the other faux-christian pruderies they’ve saddled themselves with), and their earthiness is always refreshing to me, but it’s a little beyond the f–king pale to encourage your children to drop their drawers and let fly all over the goddamned sidewalk, isn’t it? Well, isn’t it?
† No, I’m not suggesting they cook and eat infants here — once in a while I just like to see if you’re paying attention out there…

Damn Right

July 9, 2002 / / 4 Comments

Re : this and this and this and other comments around the blogs –

angry.jpg

Feel free to borrow and proudly display my little pseudo-blogsticker, if you’re so inclined. Pissed-off people unite! The meek will inherit nothing!

Never one to give offense, me.

June 15, 2002 / / 15 Comments

There’s praise a’plenty. And some canny marketing too, methinks. Oh, yes. But I’ll weigh in as well, since that’s what it’s all about, right? Here… We. Go!
How tedious is this, how perfunctory and lacking of any sense of the mad, wild spirit of creativity that is tearing through the souls of (fill in the names or pseudonyms of your favorite bloggers here)? Sorry, Meg, but this piece strikes me as soulless, by-the-numbers, and regrettably keen to dumb things down as much as possible, custom-designed for Big Media to understand and quote it. Calculated to be Just what the Market Wants. My ungracious guess is that it’s just what the publishing industry would like to read, before the Blogroots -related book comes out. Antithetical to the spirit of what so many of us, you included, I thought, were doing…
(And almost as uninspiring as the radio appearance recently of another blog luminary, which, I’ve got to say, was one of the things that resulted in my lament a while back about how deeply I’m being disappointed of late by some people in the blogosphere for whom I’ve developed a sort of lame-o superheroesque respect.)
Take a breath.
If you people, you A-listers, you pioneers (and I bow in respect to the Old Blog Guard, but some just don’t seem to get the New, in much the same way, ironically enough, that Old Media don’t seem to get La Kottke or whatever archetypical high-traffic blogger that they happen to pick out of their very small grab-bag when a url is necessary for street-cred in their latest in-depth analysis), if you can’t muster the juice to sing a soul-stirring song about this beautiful web of voices we’re collectively weaving, then I suggest you step the hell back, and point your fingers to those of us who can summon the muse and weave the hymns that will bind the New Tribes together.
[Edit : I’ve just suddenly become aware that this piece was written for a Techo Journal, and that my guns-blazing attack may be Quixotacular. Nonetheless, I’ll fight to the f–king death arguing that the defining aspects of my writing here (or Golby’s or AKMA’s or Shelley’s or Jonathon’s or Eeksy’s or that of multitudes of others) are not Time Stamps or Permalinks. Lead, damn it, or get out of the way.]

Worth it?

June 12, 2002 / / 3 Comments

I’ll think I’ll stick to the Fart Jokes and Wacky Tales henceforth. Might be best to leave the Big Thinkin’ to the Big Thinkers, yeah?
My tragic flaw is that I’m not clever enough to figure out if I’m being made fun of or not. And I hate like hell to be made fun of, ya know?
Edit : Like the big drunken boor that I pretend to be but secretly am (Mossman is really made of Moss, how boring is that?), I’ve sent abusive and angry messages to someone (psst..that’d be AKMA) because I thought I was being made fun of. My outrageous and pathetically demonstrative response arose in its entirety out of my sad and deeply personal unresolved childhood hurts. I apologize, sincerely, a thing I’ve been doing in response to blood I’ve drawn or hurt I’ve inflicted since I was a young man.
How many times can an apology be offered before it becomes a mantra? And how f–king sad is that?
I’m sorry, AKMA.

Parse this, if you can

June 5, 2002 / / 1 Comment

“Some worry that it is somehow undiplomatic or impolite to speak the language of right and wrong. I disagree. Different circumstances require different methods, but not different moralities.”

A friendly suggestion : How about you take your ‘moral clarity’ and shove it up your ass, you simpleminded sack of sh-t? How’s that for clarity? Might be immoral to use such words, might even be wrong to call the Most Powerful Man In The World a simpleminded sack of sh-t, but I’ve got to call a spade a spade, you know?
I realize of course that overwhelming evidence would indicate that the Resident couldn’t string together a foreign policy more complicated than ‘George not like, George hate, George kill’, and that it would seem that most of the time (‘Do you have blacks there too?’) he’s not even sure whether that’s a horseshoe, a handgrenade or a crucifix he has jammed up his fundament, and further that the words he was reading in the passage quoted above were written by someone else.
Almost certainly that someone is not quite so simpleminded as Our Hero, and painfully aware that simple parables of White Hats and Black Hats will make Georgie clap his hands in glee and stop touching his penis quite so often, frantic as he is to reassure himself that it’s actually there. That speechwriter, whether he believes the words he writes or not, dutifully churns out on demand these slightly-veiled calls for Blood! Murder! (and this year’s top of the monkeykiller hit parade) Vengeance! that get the crowds on their feet.
You hasten the end of us all, and guarantee by raising the stakes the deaths of uncounted thousands, soon or later, when you put words like that in the mouth of the beady-eyed, murderous commander-in-thief, you speechwriting scum. People, simple common f–king people listen to that drivel, and believe it, and take up arms and kill after they hear it. God damn you to hell.
[Excised : A wish for the painful death of the speechwriter in question. I get carried away sometimes.]
Does that make me a bad person? Not to a utilitarian, perhaps.
(Edit : Even the Please Tell Me What To Do, Daddy brigades at MeFi are unimpressed, or silent. Rusty dreams a beautiful, optimistic, doomed dream, though, which is worth hoping for, at least.)

Beer Consummation

June 3, 2002 / / No Comments

From an MSNBC handwringer about some trailerpark-special TV craptacular called “Beer Games” :

“Glorifying beer drinking is just another example of irresponsible marketing and promotion of beer consummation,” says George A. Hacker, director of the Alcohol Project at the Center for Science in the Public Interest in Washington, D.C.

You reckon he meant to say that?
From the same article :

If you are kid in a classroom with 10 other children and need the teacher’s attention you raised your hand,” says Prof. Robert Thompson, director for the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University. “But if you are in the classroom with 500 other children you may have to jump up on the table, drop your pants and say a naughty word.”

Does anyone edit these things? Who are these halfwits they’re dredging up for quotes? What the hell is happening out there? Thank crikey I’m not a journalist, say I.

Recycling

May 29, 2002 / / 6 Comments

I swear by all that’s holy, by the sweet unsucked nipples of the mother of jesus, by the small but nonetheless annoyingly itchy watery little bumpy things on the sides of my fingers, by the lords of the underworld and Timmy too, by gum, by gemorrah, by sodom and moloch, by the dirty diapers of the baby jesus, by Aunt Jemima and her god-blessed pancakes, by all the prime numbers up to and including 29, by land (one) by sea (two), by the funniest number that exists (fourteen), in the name of the whiskey and the beers and the holy smokes, by the SUVs and the Naderites, by chimptacular presidents and semi-masticated pretzels, by the barney and the rubble and the smoking crater, by the inescapable haiku and the inevitable goatsex, by the fat guy and the troll, by the pedant and the pederast, by the vegetarians, the vegans the omnicores the omnivores the omniwhores the carnivores and the single cry in the dark of a lone drunken chicken begging to be eaten, just a f–king nibble you bastards, by the Portuguese scribblers, the Australian nutjobs, the Yankee heroes and the dismemberment of thousand-headed Purusha, by the subtle, supersensuous spiritual essence which pervades all space, by the mythical tortoise which upholds the earth, by the shrimplike scent of my swinging dad-balls, by the sacred and inextinguishable fires of the Magi which alone remain to illumine the horizon, by the dirty little chuckle, the self-referential injoke, by the ineluctable modality of the f–king boneheaded, by the end of this post it’ll be time for another beer, by the oft-licked nuts of Cerberus, the three-headed watchdog at the gates of Hell, by good intentions, bad intentions, simple misdirection, sleight-of-hand and honest-to-goodness magic, by the great big ball of thread beside the chest of drawers, by the time I figure it out I’ll be dead, by the sweet sweet liquor, by the weed and the hash, by the speed and the coke, by the dimethyl goddamn tryptamine, by the wind and the waves, by the quiet talks on the beach and the naked dancing on the rooftop, by the unreachable goal and the short-term workaround, by the self-obsession and the reaching out to a friend, by the pastoral idyll and the urban hubbub, by the purple steaming mess that spills out onto the pavement as I die, by the husker and the du, by the #006699 and the #CCCC00, by the Math and the Owie, by the wife, the horse and the moustache, by all that’s holy :
I’ve been here before. Archiving. Yeah. That’s it.

Grain of Salt

May 25, 2002 / / 3 Comments

Now, before I even begin, I must preface this little mousy-squeaky post, this whisper of uncertainty and doubt and anti-communitarianism that will hopefully go unnoticed and unremarked, this little strung-together line of characters drunkenly hunt-and-pecked out late in the evening on a day in which I found that for some reason my IQ unexpectedly and inexplicably dropped about 40 points or so, I must introduce this with the admission that I’ve had a drink or two. This should not be a surprise to you, dear reader.
But : lately, repeatedly, and consistently, I’ve found my InTarWeb HerOes, the men (and yes, most, well, OK, pretty much all of my real leftover-from-Spiderman-pajamas heroes, at least on this IntArWeB thing, are men) for whom in the last while, since I’ve become interested in what’s happening out amongst the Magesticallanic Clouds Of Bits, I have come to have respect and to like and perhaps wish to emulate, imitate, celebrate or alternately crush like bugs (being as it is the eternal and everlasting man-desire, no sh-t Dick Tracy, to destroy and supplant the alpha-male bing bang boom) –
…take a breath, wonderchicken…
those fine gentlemen have disappointed me, badly. You slack bastards. Icons, idols, they’re leaving me colder than an arctic char’s ass (and I don’t even know if fish have asses, but carry on my wayward son carry on) of late. Need I explain why? No! f–k that. I’m just venting here, and the fridge is calling.
I’m going to drink a few more beers, and watch Waking Life again. This post may well disappear when I wake up tomorrow.
Well, whatever. Nevermind.

If you build it, they will come…

May 17, 2002 / / 6 Comments

What the hell is this? I dunno..
I woke up several times during the night last night, and each and every time, as I swam up into semi-consciousness, a phrase was running unbidden through my head : “pepperoni zamboni“.
In some sort of Field-Of-Dreams-Close-Encounters-esque fit of compulsive behaviour, the first thing I did this morning was whip up this quick and dirty pic, which comes reasonably close to reproducing the mental image that accompanied the phrase.
I couldn’t make this stuff up, folks.

My Thinking Gland Is Borked

May 11, 2002 / / 6 Comments

This Metafilter thread has put me into an old well-worn groove wherein, despite many thoughts ignited and roman-candle launched across the night sky, I keep circling back inexorably to a conviction that people are evil, and that we are all circling the bowl waiting for that terminal clean-up flush, and so, before I get too terribly worked-up about it, I just move on.
Edit : Yes, I know :
“People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I am Con-tent

May 10, 2002 / / 5 Comments

Exhibit The First
Exhibit The Second
A Rant, in One-Part Harmony.
See me feel me touch me heal me. Wasn’t that what the Burning Sun God sang, all falsetto fakery? It’s really all in the way the words are said or sung or screamed, rather than the actual words you choose, isn’t it? I am content. I am content. See what I’m sayin’, there, folks? Not what you deliver, but the delivery itself!
Shuffling, whether off the mortal coil, or into the spotlight, it’s the motion, not the meat, mama. The medium ain’t worth a rat’s posterior. The eye is drawn to motion – ‘don’t move or he’ll see us‘ is whispered child’s-voice breathlessly in a technicolour dream of Monsters Under The Bed.
Shoot the messenger, or wait until the marathon man Phidippides collapses of his own accord, it’s all the same to me. Amp up that pure sweet white-noise signal. “These ones go to 11!” Don’t talk to me about Signal versus Noise – the noise is the signal. The carrier wave carrying itself. Not amplitude, but frequency modulation.
It’s not the Message, by golly, it’s the Carrier.
Go go gadget fugue state!
Comedy comma improv. The native indian aboriginal american whatever the hell we’re supposed to call those poor bastards these days (racist sacks of redneck dung, amongst drooling cadres of whom I spent my formative years, referred to them as ‘chugs’), anywaywhatevernevermind, the tribe that lived for a few thousand years in the area in which I grew up in Northern British Columbia before us white devils arrived, the Nikozliautin the Pintce and the Nakraztli, are collectively referred to as the ‘Carrier Tribe’. This name arose from their custom in which a widow was obliged to carry the cremated remains of her husband on her back for three years after his demise.
Just think of that. Three years of carrying that dust and those bones.
Exeunt omnes, with sackcloth and ashes for damn sure.
All that you see, all that you eat, all you excrete (sucker that I am for scatalogical humour, one of my favorite moments of the late lamented Family Guy is when the son, Chris (ain’t that a kicker), stares intently at a chocolate bar before gleefully declaiming in his oddly-timbred voice : “I’m going to turn you into poo!” and taking a bite), and so on a la U2 ripping off Pink Floyd : it’s content, baby. And we are all just containers : conduits, conductors, conspirators. In this I am content.
Now gimme that money, ‘fore I smack you up!

Obfuscation

April 28, 2002 / / 3 Comments

You know what pisses me off right at this particular moment? Using words to confuse the point, to play the goddamn shell game, to obfuscate rather than clarify.
There are a few around the neighbourhood who weave sky-piercing towers of words, intricately knitted and syntactically exciting, that leave me cold. I’m impressed by the erudition, by the verbal pyrotechics (and I used to blow sh-t up for a living, briefly, so I oughta know), but I learn nothing after reading what is said except how clever-clever the author of those words is.
If you can’t make a window onto something for yourself or for someone else by what you write you’re masturbating. My advice is that you do it in private, Big Shooter. Play with the language, sure, but keep your hands above the table.
So saith the wonderchicken.
(Edit : And if anyone should think this pronouncement has anything to do with the latest sh-tfight in MeTa, in the interests of practicing what I preach, I say clearly : it doesn’t.)

Kill

April 16, 2002 / / 5 Comments

KILL

KILL!

KILL!

You f–king primates. Kill each other until you’re all dead, grind each other’s bones to make your bread. Swing the infants by their heels and shatter their tiny skulls on the doorjambs of your hovels. Kill! Hate! Let it never end! Swear blood feuds, and carry on the senseless slaughter of your fathers’ fathers, and their thick-fingered simian fathers, too. Bathe in the blood of your enemies, before they have a chance to caper like children in arterial gouts of yours. Cleanse the world of your hated foes, yes, that’s it, ethnically cleanse. If there are any women left alive, don’t forget to rape them, and rape them hard. Slitting their throats after you’ve spilled your filthy warrior seed is optional, but recommended. Kill! Lay waste! Wreak havoc! Defend the honour of your people, sink your hands deep into the warm entrails of those you would destroy as they cough out their last curse! Kill!
Just hurry it up, already. I’m waiting to dance on your unmarked graves, you cheeseheads.

We're On The Road And We're Gunning For The Buddha

April 13, 2002 / / 2 Comments

I read Mike’s latest : well, OK, inebriated as I am at the moment, I skimmed Mike’s latest, and I f–king give up.
I know it’s not a competition, but I Live To Win (though I’ll deny that if you quote me), and to be honest, there’s simply no way I’m going to be able to kick Mike’s ass, bloggishly speaking. Through sheer quality, and undeniable volume, he’s winning the Blog Primaries.
This is a major setback for me, wonderchicken fans, and I recommend that if you have any love for me, if you’ve ever had any love for me or plan to have some love for me in the future, even if only a little guilty tingle down there under the kitchen table, if you have any desire whatsoever to see the Solid Family Values of The WonderChicken prevail, I ask to you to consider the removal, yea, the bloggy occupation of the territory of this South African bodhisattva – I implore you, I beg you, I COMMAND YOU, click your tight little inter-buns over to Mike’s blog and abuse him mercilessly! Talk some sh-t! Quote bad poetry! Make references to Things Semitic and suggest that he Doesn’t Like Them! Abuse the man until he resorts to linking to random Daypop Top 40 transients with a textual arched-eyebrow, with a hipster-goof mock-sarcastic word or two, until he winds up posting the results of the latest “Which Star Trek Voyager Character Are You?” quiz, until he abandons the long-form post forever and begins to exhibit all the outward symptoms of a terminal speed-freak, which is the behavioural lot of those approaching the terminal stages of webloggerdom.
Fly, my pretties, fly!

You Know Who You Are

April 13, 2002 / / No Comments

An aside to that annoying bastard (you know who you are) who made me nearly blow a gasket recently when he described Daddy Bush’s incursion in the Gulf a dozen years ago as a justified battle of Good Versus Evil, a righteous mobilization to displace “Saddam Hussein, who was, uhhh, like, a new Hitler” : read this, you clueless propaganda-lapping dipsh-t. And this too, if your attention span can manage it.
Thanks to OnePotMeal for the timely facts, some of which I’d forgotten. Non-dipsh-ts may wish to read his next post, which is marvellous in a completely different way.