I am sometimes awed by the gradualness with which life reveals its fullness. I was about eleven minutes into a Seinfeld last night before recognizing it as a rerun. I imagine that any error in my timing would have to be on the side of late recognition, and a significant portion of those eleven minutes was commercials; however, that’s still a big chunk of new-to-you Seinfeld to see after so many years in syndication (and with me being such a fan of the show). It’s like the final piece of a puzzle that fell into place...or could there be more?
Yes, this delicious tension of wondering is life’s mysterious melody. Any shoe might be the last to drop, the final beat of existence’s unfathomable rhythm. It was the one where they were on the subway: George is going to a job interview but gets robbed after agreeing to be the sub in some bondage with a beautiful stranger, Kramer gets a hot tip and wins big on a long shot at the racetrack, Elaine never makes it to the lesbian wedding in which she’s to be the best man, and Jerry goes to Coney Island and talks baseball with an avuncular fellow who’s inexplicably naked. That episode has always seemed strange to me, disjointed, but now I realize that the whole point is that the gang separates on the subway and so they must each go on their own respective adventure. The individual plot threads are not supposed to mesh well.
Life’s seeming imperfections, the incompletenesses that can haunt and nag us for years, might eventually all snap harmoniously together. Someday the contours of human consciousness may be illuminated, and all experience will be taken in at a single reckoning. In the meantime, complete seasons of most shows are available on netflix, but you’ll have to sift through all the stuff you’ve already seen before.
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Monday, December 7, 2009
Harboring Old Grudges, Brokering New Deals
I was already pissed off as I woke up this morning. Vicious shards of daylight came jagging through my window, hitting me in the face as I opened my eyes. I rose nauseated, with a dull ache in my back and a sharp headache. By mid-morning the pain in my temples was virtually audible, buzzing and crackling mercilessly into my ears. The day seemed to throb, alive with an infamy all its own, and I suffered an agony of shame and regret for merely existing, for simply being a human being on so wretched a day as today.
For lunch, I met my friend at the Bongo Burger. I was picking the mealy tomato slices out of my falafel and muttering about how I didn’t like the cashier’s face and how it’d be funny if the fry cook burned himself when my friend asked me why I was being such a dick. I said that I thought FDR had been right, that December 7th truly had been a day that has lived in infamy, and that the seventh had certainly always sucked in my personal experience. I acknowledged the possibility that Roosevelt’s Pearl Harbor speech may have become some sort of self-fulfilling prophecy for me, but I also argued that other explanations, ones involving astrological and/or karmic principles, could account for why December 7th had always been such a rotten day for me for as far back as I could remember. My friend told me that it wasn’t the anniversary of Pearl Harbor that lived in infamy but, rather, only the day of the bombing itself. I asked how could a day that ended 68 years ago “live” in infamy – or, for that matter, in any other condition? How could that possibly make any sense? My friend said that she didn’t know but that FDR had specified in his speech that he was only talking about December 7th of the year 1941, that it was only that particular date, the day when Japanese forces actually carried out their treacherous attack, that would live in infamy.
After lunch, I wikipediaed it. My friend had been right: “…December 7th, 1941, a day that will….” I suddenly felt much better. My headache dissipated, and I immediately began to feel a lot more optimistic about both myself and others.
For lunch, I met my friend at the Bongo Burger. I was picking the mealy tomato slices out of my falafel and muttering about how I didn’t like the cashier’s face and how it’d be funny if the fry cook burned himself when my friend asked me why I was being such a dick. I said that I thought FDR had been right, that December 7th truly had been a day that has lived in infamy, and that the seventh had certainly always sucked in my personal experience. I acknowledged the possibility that Roosevelt’s Pearl Harbor speech may have become some sort of self-fulfilling prophecy for me, but I also argued that other explanations, ones involving astrological and/or karmic principles, could account for why December 7th had always been such a rotten day for me for as far back as I could remember. My friend told me that it wasn’t the anniversary of Pearl Harbor that lived in infamy but, rather, only the day of the bombing itself. I asked how could a day that ended 68 years ago “live” in infamy – or, for that matter, in any other condition? How could that possibly make any sense? My friend said that she didn’t know but that FDR had specified in his speech that he was only talking about December 7th of the year 1941, that it was only that particular date, the day when Japanese forces actually carried out their treacherous attack, that would live in infamy.
After lunch, I wikipediaed it. My friend had been right: “…December 7th, 1941, a day that will….” I suddenly felt much better. My headache dissipated, and I immediately began to feel a lot more optimistic about both myself and others.
Friday, November 6, 2009
Blah, Blahg, Blog
This language is steps removed collapsing in on themselves, redundancies doubled over, contradictions worn smooth by the normative force of fact. The automated teller is the automated teller machine is the ATM machine as iteration becomes reiteration and/or vice versa. Figments of imagination are merely figments, and to peruse is to pore over and to gloss over. The alphabet comprises the letters, although the letters comprise the alphabet. Sanction is authorization but punishment, the same word its homonym and its antonym and itself. That which is nauseous, both sickening and sickened, makes it all seem blather, so/yet TWM continues revealing the obscurity of all its answers and reveling in the clarity of all its mysteries.
Western characters from the East, Grasshopper walks the desert clay and Hop Sing cooks but does not hop or sing (or does he when no one looks?). And if there is singing and hopping but the TV is not on, did it ever really happen? It did so long as the DVR can archive it all, but who programs the DVR? The potential viewer programs the DVR, but her inability to view is the DVR’s very raison d’etre. Albert Einstein claimed that time is what keeps events from all occurring at once; however, two simultaneously aired documentaries on relativity can be enjoyed consecutively using a DVR even though the DVR must operate according to a timer that is presumably synchronized with broadcasting schedules.
God is omniscient yet He knows no limits and so He could only get full value at an all-u-can-eat restaurant by spending an eternity at the buffet, but time is money and so it would still be a rip-off for Him to patronize such a restaurant. Kentucky Fried Chicken is incorporated in Delaware for tax purposes and now specializes in grilled chickens, serving wings without bones that masquerade as boned wings. The submarine and the torpedo are fungible in the context of sandwiches but not in terms of naval materiel. It’s a navel orange but they are banana boats, and so orange you glad I didn’t say banana?
Western characters from the East, Grasshopper walks the desert clay and Hop Sing cooks but does not hop or sing (or does he when no one looks?). And if there is singing and hopping but the TV is not on, did it ever really happen? It did so long as the DVR can archive it all, but who programs the DVR? The potential viewer programs the DVR, but her inability to view is the DVR’s very raison d’etre. Albert Einstein claimed that time is what keeps events from all occurring at once; however, two simultaneously aired documentaries on relativity can be enjoyed consecutively using a DVR even though the DVR must operate according to a timer that is presumably synchronized with broadcasting schedules.
God is omniscient yet He knows no limits and so He could only get full value at an all-u-can-eat restaurant by spending an eternity at the buffet, but time is money and so it would still be a rip-off for Him to patronize such a restaurant. Kentucky Fried Chicken is incorporated in Delaware for tax purposes and now specializes in grilled chickens, serving wings without bones that masquerade as boned wings. The submarine and the torpedo are fungible in the context of sandwiches but not in terms of naval materiel. It’s a navel orange but they are banana boats, and so orange you glad I didn’t say banana?
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Liquid Radio Carbonics: Hydro-Mechanical Reactivity and the Science of Betrayal
Mind control, as a modern technique, began quite accidentally with the discovery that stereo-transfer waves could create irregularities rendered for utilization in high frequency, with the circuitry of liquids serving as both the conduit and the pitch. Louis Pasteur was the first to work it out successfully using ordinary milk. Then they started with the children’s juice boxes. Equipped with today’s precision satellites and moisture-recognition software, they can now beam the signals directly and inexpensively onto the wet fillings in people's teeth, and from there the isotopes electrolyze their way into the bloodstream, eventually moving on into the neural pathways. Make no mistake about it...they are smart, they are determined, and they are out to make slaves of us all. It starts off with the "organic effervescence" and the "free ranges", and it ends up with everybody caged or in cubicles. It’s not just chicken broth, per se, and it’s not the pharmaceutical companies either. They put it in the juice! It’s been in the juice all along, for decades, and it’s not communists or jihadis or the military. It’s not the Chinese. Masonically trained technocrats, with their chemists and engineers in pocket, have long pervaded our universities, and now they’ve infiltrated entire beverage industries as well – quietly, methodically, irresistibly peddling their elixirs of controlled death. They concoct these so-called refreshments in the same laboratories and employing the same formulae as have been designed to further the global war on terrorism, a circumstance of supreme irony and ultimate treachery, bottling our basest fears and using our noblest instincts as a marketing tool. Poison-mongers, all of them, ruthless, they foist on us their fortified slurpees and their energy-burst smoothies, enforcing their vile mandate with Rosicrucian muscle (so as not to get their “hands dirty”). They’re in the orchards, they’re in the carbonization plants, they’re everywhere; the streams of commerce have been infected, and our sodas have never been less safe. And if they should make it into the local water supplies, well then the show’s pretty much over because people, given adequate levels of dehydration, will invariably behave like sheep bound for slaughter. The enemy is an army of technicians and vending machine resupplymen, shrouded in secrecy and driven by hubris, the cowardice of its tactics matched only by the ambition of its strategy. Their weapon is our unquenched thirst, their battle cry proclaims a sly toast to our health. Drink up and be merry, we are told, for tomorrow we may die. But the witches’ hour, black midnight, advances swiftly, as does their darkest brew, and the morrow has all but arrived.
Monday, October 12, 2009
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Old Vietnamese People
In Vietnam and in Vietnamese communities elsewhere, except in very formal or official contexts, when speaking of age one states a person’s age as the number of years since her birth plus one. The Vietnamese apparently consider a person’s gestation period as a part of that person’s life. (I cannot help but assume that such a perspective impacts Vietnamese opinions when it comes to the debate surrounding abortion.) Of course, the Vietnamese are aware that the typical pregnancy lasts only nine months, and so I presume that it is for the sake of convenience alone that when calculating age they add a full year to account for time spent in the womb. The logic of this way of speaking, even if born of a desire for arithmetic simplicity, makes it entirely possible for an individual to exist well before her parents have ever even met each other. This is especially true in the case of preemies. The potential for such a scenario, it seems to me, greatly undermines the significance of ancestors.
“Deathdays” are, perhaps, Vietnamese culture’s way of counterbalancing Vietnamese parents’ lack of importance. Vietnamese people have traditionally treated birthdays with little or no fanfare and have, instead, celebrated deathdays – that is, the anniversaries of the day when a beloved ancestor passed away. Family, friends, and neighbors all gather at the household where the dead honoree used to live, and they have a big party. Unlike a birthday party, however, no gifts are given. A place for the dead person is set at the table, though, and a bowl of food is served for the dead person’s ghost. Someone, usually the household’s matriarch, is assigned the job of emptying the dead person’s bowl of food when no one is looking. Then everyone pretends that the ghost came and ate dinner.
“Deathdays” are, perhaps, Vietnamese culture’s way of counterbalancing Vietnamese parents’ lack of importance. Vietnamese people have traditionally treated birthdays with little or no fanfare and have, instead, celebrated deathdays – that is, the anniversaries of the day when a beloved ancestor passed away. Family, friends, and neighbors all gather at the household where the dead honoree used to live, and they have a big party. Unlike a birthday party, however, no gifts are given. A place for the dead person is set at the table, though, and a bowl of food is served for the dead person’s ghost. Someone, usually the household’s matriarch, is assigned the job of emptying the dead person’s bowl of food when no one is looking. Then everyone pretends that the ghost came and ate dinner.
Friday, September 25, 2009
Vous Me Completez
Hoity Totsy and Hotsy Toity had walked into the bar that evening as total strangers, but by the night’s end they had bared their souls, made passionate love, and swapped first names. The next day, as the train pulled out of the Paris station and disappeared forever into the morning mist, they waved goodbye and fought to hold back their tears. Both felt as though they would never again know such joy, and yet they each knew that the other had somehow made them whole.
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
Deep In This Pear
Several weeks ago I was at a barbeque eating my veggie burger. I was sitting sort of by myself, but I was only a few feet from my friend who, in turn, was sitting on the periphery of a circle of conversing people. I ate and absent-mindedly spied on my friend who was eating and inadvertently eavesdropping on the coterie next to him. The conversation turned to food, and the subject of nuts was raised. I overheard my friend mutter, out loud but softly to himself, “These nuts.” I saw my friend smile to himself, and I smiled to myself too because I thought that what I’d heard him say was the punch line to a joke that I’d heard as a teenager. It soon occurred to me that I couldn’t remember the joke from which I thought the punch line came. But I seemed to remember that as an adolescent I had enjoyed the forgotten joke very much. I considered asking my friend about the joke, but it would have been a little bit awkward to admit to my spying (despite its innocuousness and its lack of deliberateness). Most of all, though, I wanted to recall the joke on my own. But I couldn’t, and I spent the rest of the afternoon in frustration, reaching into my memory every few minutes and coming up empty handed each time.
That evening I gave up on trying to remember the joke without help, and I googled the punch line. I instinctively knew to type “deez nutz.” What I immediately learned was that “deez nutz” was the punch line to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of jokes. Indeed, “deez nutz” was not so much a punch line as it was a genre of humor. There was website after website after website devoted solely to deez nutz jokes…cataloging them, rating them, analyzing them. Readers were emailing in to these deez nutz sites to lovingly and extensively discuss their favorite deez nutz jokes.
[Basically, a deez nutz joke is any exchange of words whose final two syllables are “deez nutz.” (And I suppose that a good deez nutz joke is simply any deez nutz joke that makes you laugh.) For example, your friend is a med student, so you ask her if she has any patients with Grabdy’s. She says, “What’s Grabdy’s?” and you say, “Grab deez nutz!” Or, for instance, your friend is a baseball fan, and you ask him if in the 1999 series he was rooting for the Expos or the Yankees. You hope that he says the Expos so that you can say, “Expos deez nutz!” but if he preferred the Yankees then you say, “Yank deez nutz!” Or, perhaps, you know that your friend banks at Bank of America, and so you ask her if she has an account with Wells Fargo or with BofA. When she answers that she has an account with BofA, you say, “BofA deez nutz!” And so on.]
I waded through dozens and dozens of deez nutz jokes. There were a few gems, it’s true, but most were either uninspired or tortuously contrived or just plain incoherent. After half an hour, I’m pretty sure that the stupider the joke was, the harder I laughed. Why were people posting these dumb jokes? Why was I still reading them? I tried to come up with some original deez nutz jokes of my own, and this exercise much increased my appreciation for a good deez nutz joke. In the end, all I had was a firm commitment to myself that I would always say, “Mickey deez nutz!” whenever I heard someone refer to McDonald’s as Mickey D.’s (this was my best stab at it). What I decidedly didn’t have was any answer to the question of what was that joke that had amused me so much as a youngster.
A couple of days later I remembered the joke that had been eluding me:
Somebody is throwing an emotions party (i.e., a party for which guests are supposed to dress up as emotions), and the hostess has included two Jamaican guys on her invitation list. The doorbell rings, the hostess answers the door, and it’s a guest in a green devil outfit. The guest says, “I’m envy,” and enters. The doorbell rings, the hostess answers the door, and it’s a guest dressed in a red suit who’s wearing horns on his head and a ring through his nose and who’s stomping his foot as would a raging bull. “I’m anger,” says the guest as he enters. Then the doorbell rings, the hostess answers the door, and it’s her two Jamaican friends. They are both buck naked, except that the one has his penis in a bowl of pudding that he’s holding and the other has his penis in a hollowed out pear that he is holding. “What the hell are you two doing?!” asks the hostess. “I’m fucking dis custard,” says the one Jamaican, “and my friend here is deep in dis pear.”
Well, I guess the joke hadn’t been quite as funny as I'd remembered it to have been, but still I was relieved to have caged my chimera. However, this “Eureka!” moment was largely spoiled by my disappointment that my mind could be so long preoccupied by two guys with their dicks in food, by my fear that puns based on stereotypical foreign accents were as close as I could come to epiphany.
And today – that is, right now, as I write this very entry – I am still plagued by a sense of aesthetic dissatisfaction with the lore upon which I dwell. The preponderance of my blog entries deals with cannibalism, feces, incest, zombies, or bestiality. Am I but a literate bug, a worm that writhes and wallows in the putrid fruits of a soiled and limited imagination? There has to be something bigger and better to ponder, something nobler. I’m tired of posting silly blurbs, obscene anecdotes, and blunt potty humor. I’m sick of the filth and the smut and the gore. I want to write sophisticated pieces, complex and nuanced material for mature and thoughtful adults, and so I’ve decided to become a serious artist. My next entry will be poignant and powerful, a work of bona fide genius to make its readers both think and feel deeply. I've already made an appointment with my haberdasher for tomorrow to be fitted for an ascot because, seriously, this is gonna be some fuckin' highbrow shit.
That evening I gave up on trying to remember the joke without help, and I googled the punch line. I instinctively knew to type “deez nutz.” What I immediately learned was that “deez nutz” was the punch line to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of jokes. Indeed, “deez nutz” was not so much a punch line as it was a genre of humor. There was website after website after website devoted solely to deez nutz jokes…cataloging them, rating them, analyzing them. Readers were emailing in to these deez nutz sites to lovingly and extensively discuss their favorite deez nutz jokes.
[Basically, a deez nutz joke is any exchange of words whose final two syllables are “deez nutz.” (And I suppose that a good deez nutz joke is simply any deez nutz joke that makes you laugh.) For example, your friend is a med student, so you ask her if she has any patients with Grabdy’s. She says, “What’s Grabdy’s?” and you say, “Grab deez nutz!” Or, for instance, your friend is a baseball fan, and you ask him if in the 1999 series he was rooting for the Expos or the Yankees. You hope that he says the Expos so that you can say, “Expos deez nutz!” but if he preferred the Yankees then you say, “Yank deez nutz!” Or, perhaps, you know that your friend banks at Bank of America, and so you ask her if she has an account with Wells Fargo or with BofA. When she answers that she has an account with BofA, you say, “BofA deez nutz!” And so on.]
I waded through dozens and dozens of deez nutz jokes. There were a few gems, it’s true, but most were either uninspired or tortuously contrived or just plain incoherent. After half an hour, I’m pretty sure that the stupider the joke was, the harder I laughed. Why were people posting these dumb jokes? Why was I still reading them? I tried to come up with some original deez nutz jokes of my own, and this exercise much increased my appreciation for a good deez nutz joke. In the end, all I had was a firm commitment to myself that I would always say, “Mickey deez nutz!” whenever I heard someone refer to McDonald’s as Mickey D.’s (this was my best stab at it). What I decidedly didn’t have was any answer to the question of what was that joke that had amused me so much as a youngster.
A couple of days later I remembered the joke that had been eluding me:
Somebody is throwing an emotions party (i.e., a party for which guests are supposed to dress up as emotions), and the hostess has included two Jamaican guys on her invitation list. The doorbell rings, the hostess answers the door, and it’s a guest in a green devil outfit. The guest says, “I’m envy,” and enters. The doorbell rings, the hostess answers the door, and it’s a guest dressed in a red suit who’s wearing horns on his head and a ring through his nose and who’s stomping his foot as would a raging bull. “I’m anger,” says the guest as he enters. Then the doorbell rings, the hostess answers the door, and it’s her two Jamaican friends. They are both buck naked, except that the one has his penis in a bowl of pudding that he’s holding and the other has his penis in a hollowed out pear that he is holding. “What the hell are you two doing?!” asks the hostess. “I’m fucking dis custard,” says the one Jamaican, “and my friend here is deep in dis pear.”
Well, I guess the joke hadn’t been quite as funny as I'd remembered it to have been, but still I was relieved to have caged my chimera. However, this “Eureka!” moment was largely spoiled by my disappointment that my mind could be so long preoccupied by two guys with their dicks in food, by my fear that puns based on stereotypical foreign accents were as close as I could come to epiphany.
And today – that is, right now, as I write this very entry – I am still plagued by a sense of aesthetic dissatisfaction with the lore upon which I dwell. The preponderance of my blog entries deals with cannibalism, feces, incest, zombies, or bestiality. Am I but a literate bug, a worm that writhes and wallows in the putrid fruits of a soiled and limited imagination? There has to be something bigger and better to ponder, something nobler. I’m tired of posting silly blurbs, obscene anecdotes, and blunt potty humor. I’m sick of the filth and the smut and the gore. I want to write sophisticated pieces, complex and nuanced material for mature and thoughtful adults, and so I’ve decided to become a serious artist. My next entry will be poignant and powerful, a work of bona fide genius to make its readers both think and feel deeply. I've already made an appointment with my haberdasher for tomorrow to be fitted for an ascot because, seriously, this is gonna be some fuckin' highbrow shit.
Saturday, September 5, 2009
Friday, August 21, 2009
Monday, August 17, 2009
Million-Dollar Idea #2
Leprechaun VII: The Green, The Bad, and The Ugly. A spaghetti-western spoof as the next installment of the Leprechaun series. The leprechaun, some Chinese-American mobsters who kidnapped but then lost it, the Irish whiskey priest who's come to America to recapture it, a Confederate general trying to fund a Southern last push, and a Mexican bandit-revolutionary named Quisto (short for Conquistador Guerrero) all vie for the pot of gold. Gunplay, supernatural horror effects, jinks both high and low (well, mostly low). "Where's me gold?" you ask? It's at the box office, baby!
Million-Dollar Idea #1
An adult-sized Big Wheel (or Green Machine). It would cost only pennies more to manufacture than a regular Big Wheel, yet you could charge several hundred dollars for it. Every forty-something with a garage will want one.
Sunday, August 16, 2009
The Most Horrible Thing
So many things upset me. Indeed, one of the reasons that TWM and its readership are so very dear to me is that blogging is a means by which I am able to get the issues that bother me off of my chest. I find it quite cathartic to air my grievances, which are numerous and varied.
For example, it drives me up the wall when people mistakenly use phony words such as “beastiality” or “conversate” when they mean to say, respectively, “bestiality” or “converse.” I wish oral conversations had a spellchecker so that folks could see the gibberish they spew underlined in red as it leaves their ignorant pie-holes. When I hear such bogus words bandied about, it takes everything I’ve got to resist the urge to correct people, to tell them that the things they are saying are not words and that they are blathering. Also, I can’t stand it when people use the phrase “begs the question” to mean raises or poses a certain question. To beg the question means to take for granted the matter in dispute, to use a restatement of an argument’s conclusion as a premise leading toward that very conclusion. Over the last decade I’ve heard the term “begs the question” misused so often that I’m worried that the term will soon start to actually mean what these fools think it means. I’ve even heard Conan O’Brien say it, and he went to Harvard. It’s maddening how the language can be hijacked by those who care so little for good diction.
While the bastardization of our lexicon is certainly one of my pet peeves, there are plenty of other things that irritate me, things that have nothing to do with language. For instance, I hate it when people put the toilet paper in so that it spins back and under rather than up and over. It’s so awkward. I realize that the former method helps prevent cats from making a mess, but why would anyone without cats do it? It’s insane. And it’s extremely frustrating when record stores sell used cds in shrink-wrap but they nevertheless put the price stickers directly onto the cd jewel cases rather than onto the shrink-wrap. Those damn stickers leave a gooey residue that takes at least 20 minutes to get completely off the jewel case.
But the most horrible thing, the absolute worst, is when your supposed friend who’s hanging out surfing the web casually asks, “Hey, you wanna see a horse-fuck video?” and you say, “Sure,” not realizing what you’re getting yourself into. A minute and a half later your psyche has been permanently scarred, and you realize that you will never recover from the depravity you’ve witnessed. It's as though you'll forever be trapped in that dark barn, watching appalled as that thousand-pound beast with a penis the size of a man’s leg pounds into that sorry-ass pervert. It's totally fucking mind-boggling. And then you find out that, unsurprisingly, the dude ended up dying a few hours later from internal injuries, so you’ve essentially been watching a snuff film (although no one was ever prosecuted because in Washington state there are no laws against bestiality). You think about the guy holding the camera, recklessly encouraging the victim to go through with it, and how utterly evil he must have been to facilitate such atrocious business. But mostly you think about the victim. You can see from his face that he is on the verge of some sort of sexual ecstasy, and this makes him seem unfathomable and inhuman. But you can also see from his face that he is terrified and that his trepidation is interfering with his twisted sense of erotic gratification, and you can understand his fear so thoroughly and so intensely that it connects you to him and it makes it impossible for you to deny his humanity.
Oh, God, this scary, profoundly filthy clip is truly the most disgusting thing I've ever seen. I often claim to be a staunch opponent of censorship, and yet I find myself thinking that this footage ought to be banned from the internet. It's a terrible and disturbing testament to the wretched depths to which the human spirit can sink, and it just gets weirder and more sickening every time I watch it.
For example, it drives me up the wall when people mistakenly use phony words such as “beastiality” or “conversate” when they mean to say, respectively, “bestiality” or “converse.” I wish oral conversations had a spellchecker so that folks could see the gibberish they spew underlined in red as it leaves their ignorant pie-holes. When I hear such bogus words bandied about, it takes everything I’ve got to resist the urge to correct people, to tell them that the things they are saying are not words and that they are blathering. Also, I can’t stand it when people use the phrase “begs the question” to mean raises or poses a certain question. To beg the question means to take for granted the matter in dispute, to use a restatement of an argument’s conclusion as a premise leading toward that very conclusion. Over the last decade I’ve heard the term “begs the question” misused so often that I’m worried that the term will soon start to actually mean what these fools think it means. I’ve even heard Conan O’Brien say it, and he went to Harvard. It’s maddening how the language can be hijacked by those who care so little for good diction.
While the bastardization of our lexicon is certainly one of my pet peeves, there are plenty of other things that irritate me, things that have nothing to do with language. For instance, I hate it when people put the toilet paper in so that it spins back and under rather than up and over. It’s so awkward. I realize that the former method helps prevent cats from making a mess, but why would anyone without cats do it? It’s insane. And it’s extremely frustrating when record stores sell used cds in shrink-wrap but they nevertheless put the price stickers directly onto the cd jewel cases rather than onto the shrink-wrap. Those damn stickers leave a gooey residue that takes at least 20 minutes to get completely off the jewel case.
But the most horrible thing, the absolute worst, is when your supposed friend who’s hanging out surfing the web casually asks, “Hey, you wanna see a horse-fuck video?” and you say, “Sure,” not realizing what you’re getting yourself into. A minute and a half later your psyche has been permanently scarred, and you realize that you will never recover from the depravity you’ve witnessed. It's as though you'll forever be trapped in that dark barn, watching appalled as that thousand-pound beast with a penis the size of a man’s leg pounds into that sorry-ass pervert. It's totally fucking mind-boggling. And then you find out that, unsurprisingly, the dude ended up dying a few hours later from internal injuries, so you’ve essentially been watching a snuff film (although no one was ever prosecuted because in Washington state there are no laws against bestiality). You think about the guy holding the camera, recklessly encouraging the victim to go through with it, and how utterly evil he must have been to facilitate such atrocious business. But mostly you think about the victim. You can see from his face that he is on the verge of some sort of sexual ecstasy, and this makes him seem unfathomable and inhuman. But you can also see from his face that he is terrified and that his trepidation is interfering with his twisted sense of erotic gratification, and you can understand his fear so thoroughly and so intensely that it connects you to him and it makes it impossible for you to deny his humanity.
Oh, God, this scary, profoundly filthy clip is truly the most disgusting thing I've ever seen. I often claim to be a staunch opponent of censorship, and yet I find myself thinking that this footage ought to be banned from the internet. It's a terrible and disturbing testament to the wretched depths to which the human spirit can sink, and it just gets weirder and more sickening every time I watch it.
Saturday, August 15, 2009
...out of the worm-hole, into the fire!
Hey Worm,
What qualifies you to offer people advice? If you have any credentials as a therapist or counselor (which I seriously doubt), you might want to post them. You’re a worm. You crawl around in holes. What would you know about anything?
Signed,
an anonymous seeker of competent, professional advice
The Worm sez: Sticks and stones can’t break The Worm’s bones (it has none), but your cruel words can make it cry and feel ashamed of itself. Is that what you want? The Worm does not think that that is what you really want. Perhaps if you try then you can learn to love The Worm and to be loved by The Worm. Perhaps there’s nothing wrong with you that you can’t fix yourself; maybe you do not need the help of any trained therapist. The Worm recommends that you discontinue your search for professional advice, that you isolate yourself at home, and that you derive your psychological and emotional wellness from a steadfast refusal to communicate with anyone, especially The Worm, by means of the internet or otherwise. As Doctors Freud and Jung both said, “In silence lies the power to heal all wounds,” and as Dr. Phil once said, “Be your own physician, and in silence heal yourself." The Buddha taught us that our happiness falls softly as does a pin. The Worm suggests that you sit quietly and listen for it to drop. Sshhh.
********************
So sayeth The Worm.
What qualifies you to offer people advice? If you have any credentials as a therapist or counselor (which I seriously doubt), you might want to post them. You’re a worm. You crawl around in holes. What would you know about anything?
Signed,
an anonymous seeker of competent, professional advice
The Worm sez: Sticks and stones can’t break The Worm’s bones (it has none), but your cruel words can make it cry and feel ashamed of itself. Is that what you want? The Worm does not think that that is what you really want. Perhaps if you try then you can learn to love The Worm and to be loved by The Worm. Perhaps there’s nothing wrong with you that you can’t fix yourself; maybe you do not need the help of any trained therapist. The Worm recommends that you discontinue your search for professional advice, that you isolate yourself at home, and that you derive your psychological and emotional wellness from a steadfast refusal to communicate with anyone, especially The Worm, by means of the internet or otherwise. As Doctors Freud and Jung both said, “In silence lies the power to heal all wounds,” and as Dr. Phil once said, “Be your own physician, and in silence heal yourself." The Buddha taught us that our happiness falls softly as does a pin. The Worm suggests that you sit quietly and listen for it to drop. Sshhh.
********************
So sayeth The Worm.
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Sunday, August 9, 2009
Lightweight and Hardcore
Grandpa had come over for dinner, and I asked him what was the most amazing thing he’d ever experienced in all his life. He proceeded to tell me about the time he’d seen Lightweight Larry and Hardcore Harry fight.
For those of you unfamiliar with America’s mid-century wrestling scene, Lightweight and Hardcore, as they were known, were a famous tag-team duo throughout the forties and into the very early fifties. After they split up, Lightweight, going by the name Evan Vanderpick, was on the verge of a successful transition to Hollywood stardom when he got caught up in a McCarthy-era scandal involving some Lithuanian prostitutes with alleged ties to a shadowy anarchist group supposedly popular at the time among people of eastern European descent. He was black-balled, never worked again, and died in 1968 of a heart attack while playing roulette at an Atlantic City casino (he reportedly keeled over as the wheel spun on what would have been the biggest winning bet in both his and the casino’s history). Meanwhile, Hardcore (whose real name was Arnold Fournbach) spent the fifties and most of the sixties drinking himself to death in obscurity.
Anyway, Grandpa told me that when he was twelve his Uncle Gerard had taken him to New York City for the weekend. Grandpa’s dad had died when Grandpa was just an infant, and Uncle Gerard had been the steadiest father figure in Grandpa’s life growing up. They were going to have a porterhouse steak at Kelly’s, they were going to stay at a Manhattan hotel, and, most significantly, they had tickets to see Lightweight and Hardcore match forces with El Bombardo and Punchy, tag-team wrestling’s most reviled villains du jour.
It was early 1942, and professional wrestling’s villains would shortly be almost exclusively portrayed as being German or Japanese, the industry’s nod to the war effort. But for the moment, even with Pearl Harbor less than six months fresh in the public’s mind, the heavies that everyone loved to hate were El Bombardo and Punchy. Of course, nationalism and xenophobia -- albeit in less focused, less passionate forms than those that would soon come -- were definitely key ingredients in the audience’s distaste for this swarthy duo of ambiguously foreign grapplers. In real life, El Bombardo was a second generation Greek-American (and the son, incidentally, of a rather well-respected archaeology professor from Cornell), and Punchy was a Palestinian émigré. However, despite the “El” in Bombardo’s name, which would seem to indicate Spanish or Latin American roots, both he and Punchy were characterized by wrestling’s promoters as being vaguely Italian, sort of commedia dell’arte-esque, maybe with a dash of gypsy thrown in for extra mysteriousness. At any rate, they were clearly the bad guys.
And Lightweight and Hardcore, Grandpa told me with an affectionate gleam in his eye, were as good as El Bombardo and Punchy were bad. They were billed as solid Yankee types, both from New England, both respectable but working class. Hardcore had been a whaler as a youngster, and Lightweight, a renowned ladies’ man, had been a dancer before enlisting in the rough and tumble world of wrestling. The press liked to say that, while Lightweight was clearly too tough to be a dancer, maybe he was too pretty to be a wrestler. That was the thing about Lightweight and Hardcore, Grandpa explained, they were everybody’s darlings, everyone’s favorite team, but they somehow managed to remain perpetual underdogs. The commentators always predicted that they would lose badly. And, in fact, they would always be losing very badly when, just at the end of the match, they would manage to pull a victory out of nowhere, much to the crowds’ delight. They were the lovable losers who always seemed to win.
Grandpa described the action of the match for me, round by round. It was the usual shtick. Bombardo and Punchy came out smoking cigars and ignoring the audience with casual boredom and mild disdain. Hardcore, who took his craft quite seriously, came out stretching and hopping, warming up for battle. And Lightweight, always the dandy, came out in a resplendent white robe, his name embroidered in gold across the back, strutting and preening for the crowd. Before the match had even begun, Bombardo (who, like Hardcore, was his team’s big man) managed to ash his cigar all over Lightweight’s beautiful robe, thus establishing Bombardo as a bully and setting the bout up as a grudge-match straight from the get-go.
Most of the fighting was between the two heavyweights. When Bombardo had the upper hand then Punchy would dance and cheer, egging him on from the corner of the ring. If Bombardo was on the ropes but not quite in need of tagging out, then Punchy would boo and hiss at the crowd and make mock punching gestures at those people who were constantly insulting him from their seats (there was an abundance of such spectators). Over in his corner, Lightweight would comb his hair lovingly with his oversized mother-of-pearl comb and gaze at himself in his silver-handled mirror, his signature props, featured at every fight. Lightweight would get so immersed in his grooming that he wouldn’t notice that his friend and teammate was getting mercilessly hammered and desperately needed to tag out. But always, just in the nick of time, Lightweight would dive in to relieve Hardcore. While Hardcore recuperated in the corner, Lightweight would dance around the ring, evading Bombardo’s blows while constantly fixing at his hair and winking at any women who might be seated up front. Lightweight did have a few crushing (and very acrobatic) moves, but he always saved these for the end of the bout; much to his opponents’ frustration, he invariably spent the early rounds clowning for the ladies and doing a great job at avoiding any actual combat.
Grandpa told me that as thrilled as he was to see Lightweight and Hardcore in action (they were, after all, his heroes; he spent most of his allowance on wrestling tabloids so as to follow their exploits, and he listened to their matches no matter what else might be on the radio), it was really the entire ambience of the event that made this his most treasured memory. It was the biggest, most raucous crowd he’d ever seen. There were peanut shells and overturned chairs everywhere, the cheers were deafening. Gorgeous women in bathing suits introduced every new round by carrying numbered placards back and forth across the ring. Uncle Gerard had even let him drink a beer. It was absolutely overwhelming, Grandpa said, and when Lightweight and Hardcore, hopelessly down points-wise, managed to pull it out in the twelfth round, it made it seem like anything was possible. It was as though everyone in the auditorium was triumphing along with them. Even as a twelve-year-old boy and a devoted fan of wrestling, Grandpa understood that Lightweight and Hardcore were merely entertaining athletes (or, perhaps, athletic entertainers), but it felt that night as though they were holy men, prophets of a gospel so promising, so full of energy and hope, that it inspired one’s heart not only with a joy at being American but with a pride at simply being alive. Indeed, when Grandpa had finished talking, he had tears in his eyes. He sat there holding his fork absent-mindedly, lost in nostalgic contemplation.
“Jesus Christ, Grandpa!” I screamed in Grandpa’s face, pounding my fists on the table in front of him. “That’s it? That’s what you’ve got?! What are you, fuckin’ 80…79? 79 years old, and the greatest thing you’ve ever seen is a couple of pansy-ass wrestlers in New York City? Some peanut shells and shit?! Jesus fuck, Grandpa!”
“I don’t see what is so pansy-ass about two men fighting,” Grandpa replied.
“Well, I don’t know,” I said. “The tights, maybe, Lightweight’s preening. It just seems gay. And it was four men fighting, not two…kinda makes it seem gayer somehow.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Grandpa said dismissively. “Superman wears tights; is Superman gay? And Lightweight was a ladies’ man, I told you.”
“Okay, Grandpa, whatever; that’s not the point,” I explained. “My point is that you’re 80 years old and you’re telling me that the most exciting thing you’ve been through is some stupid wrestling match? Come on! What about V-J Day or the Cuban missile crisis, you know? How about the fuckin’ moon landing? You weren’t impressed with the goddamned moon landing?! What if they’d wrestled on the moon, would that’ve done it for you? For Christ’s sake, Grandpa! You’ve lived through so much, my God! What about the moon? What about the fucking moon, Grandpa?!"
Grandpa shrugged his shoulders and gave me a look as if to say that he wasn’t particularly upset by the fact that his answer had been disappointing for me. He went back to his mashed potatoes. I sat finishing my coffee and wondering why we even bothered inviting Grandpa over.
For those of you unfamiliar with America’s mid-century wrestling scene, Lightweight and Hardcore, as they were known, were a famous tag-team duo throughout the forties and into the very early fifties. After they split up, Lightweight, going by the name Evan Vanderpick, was on the verge of a successful transition to Hollywood stardom when he got caught up in a McCarthy-era scandal involving some Lithuanian prostitutes with alleged ties to a shadowy anarchist group supposedly popular at the time among people of eastern European descent. He was black-balled, never worked again, and died in 1968 of a heart attack while playing roulette at an Atlantic City casino (he reportedly keeled over as the wheel spun on what would have been the biggest winning bet in both his and the casino’s history). Meanwhile, Hardcore (whose real name was Arnold Fournbach) spent the fifties and most of the sixties drinking himself to death in obscurity.
Anyway, Grandpa told me that when he was twelve his Uncle Gerard had taken him to New York City for the weekend. Grandpa’s dad had died when Grandpa was just an infant, and Uncle Gerard had been the steadiest father figure in Grandpa’s life growing up. They were going to have a porterhouse steak at Kelly’s, they were going to stay at a Manhattan hotel, and, most significantly, they had tickets to see Lightweight and Hardcore match forces with El Bombardo and Punchy, tag-team wrestling’s most reviled villains du jour.
It was early 1942, and professional wrestling’s villains would shortly be almost exclusively portrayed as being German or Japanese, the industry’s nod to the war effort. But for the moment, even with Pearl Harbor less than six months fresh in the public’s mind, the heavies that everyone loved to hate were El Bombardo and Punchy. Of course, nationalism and xenophobia -- albeit in less focused, less passionate forms than those that would soon come -- were definitely key ingredients in the audience’s distaste for this swarthy duo of ambiguously foreign grapplers. In real life, El Bombardo was a second generation Greek-American (and the son, incidentally, of a rather well-respected archaeology professor from Cornell), and Punchy was a Palestinian émigré. However, despite the “El” in Bombardo’s name, which would seem to indicate Spanish or Latin American roots, both he and Punchy were characterized by wrestling’s promoters as being vaguely Italian, sort of commedia dell’arte-esque, maybe with a dash of gypsy thrown in for extra mysteriousness. At any rate, they were clearly the bad guys.
And Lightweight and Hardcore, Grandpa told me with an affectionate gleam in his eye, were as good as El Bombardo and Punchy were bad. They were billed as solid Yankee types, both from New England, both respectable but working class. Hardcore had been a whaler as a youngster, and Lightweight, a renowned ladies’ man, had been a dancer before enlisting in the rough and tumble world of wrestling. The press liked to say that, while Lightweight was clearly too tough to be a dancer, maybe he was too pretty to be a wrestler. That was the thing about Lightweight and Hardcore, Grandpa explained, they were everybody’s darlings, everyone’s favorite team, but they somehow managed to remain perpetual underdogs. The commentators always predicted that they would lose badly. And, in fact, they would always be losing very badly when, just at the end of the match, they would manage to pull a victory out of nowhere, much to the crowds’ delight. They were the lovable losers who always seemed to win.
Grandpa described the action of the match for me, round by round. It was the usual shtick. Bombardo and Punchy came out smoking cigars and ignoring the audience with casual boredom and mild disdain. Hardcore, who took his craft quite seriously, came out stretching and hopping, warming up for battle. And Lightweight, always the dandy, came out in a resplendent white robe, his name embroidered in gold across the back, strutting and preening for the crowd. Before the match had even begun, Bombardo (who, like Hardcore, was his team’s big man) managed to ash his cigar all over Lightweight’s beautiful robe, thus establishing Bombardo as a bully and setting the bout up as a grudge-match straight from the get-go.
Most of the fighting was between the two heavyweights. When Bombardo had the upper hand then Punchy would dance and cheer, egging him on from the corner of the ring. If Bombardo was on the ropes but not quite in need of tagging out, then Punchy would boo and hiss at the crowd and make mock punching gestures at those people who were constantly insulting him from their seats (there was an abundance of such spectators). Over in his corner, Lightweight would comb his hair lovingly with his oversized mother-of-pearl comb and gaze at himself in his silver-handled mirror, his signature props, featured at every fight. Lightweight would get so immersed in his grooming that he wouldn’t notice that his friend and teammate was getting mercilessly hammered and desperately needed to tag out. But always, just in the nick of time, Lightweight would dive in to relieve Hardcore. While Hardcore recuperated in the corner, Lightweight would dance around the ring, evading Bombardo’s blows while constantly fixing at his hair and winking at any women who might be seated up front. Lightweight did have a few crushing (and very acrobatic) moves, but he always saved these for the end of the bout; much to his opponents’ frustration, he invariably spent the early rounds clowning for the ladies and doing a great job at avoiding any actual combat.
Grandpa told me that as thrilled as he was to see Lightweight and Hardcore in action (they were, after all, his heroes; he spent most of his allowance on wrestling tabloids so as to follow their exploits, and he listened to their matches no matter what else might be on the radio), it was really the entire ambience of the event that made this his most treasured memory. It was the biggest, most raucous crowd he’d ever seen. There were peanut shells and overturned chairs everywhere, the cheers were deafening. Gorgeous women in bathing suits introduced every new round by carrying numbered placards back and forth across the ring. Uncle Gerard had even let him drink a beer. It was absolutely overwhelming, Grandpa said, and when Lightweight and Hardcore, hopelessly down points-wise, managed to pull it out in the twelfth round, it made it seem like anything was possible. It was as though everyone in the auditorium was triumphing along with them. Even as a twelve-year-old boy and a devoted fan of wrestling, Grandpa understood that Lightweight and Hardcore were merely entertaining athletes (or, perhaps, athletic entertainers), but it felt that night as though they were holy men, prophets of a gospel so promising, so full of energy and hope, that it inspired one’s heart not only with a joy at being American but with a pride at simply being alive. Indeed, when Grandpa had finished talking, he had tears in his eyes. He sat there holding his fork absent-mindedly, lost in nostalgic contemplation.
“Jesus Christ, Grandpa!” I screamed in Grandpa’s face, pounding my fists on the table in front of him. “That’s it? That’s what you’ve got?! What are you, fuckin’ 80…79? 79 years old, and the greatest thing you’ve ever seen is a couple of pansy-ass wrestlers in New York City? Some peanut shells and shit?! Jesus fuck, Grandpa!”
“I don’t see what is so pansy-ass about two men fighting,” Grandpa replied.
“Well, I don’t know,” I said. “The tights, maybe, Lightweight’s preening. It just seems gay. And it was four men fighting, not two…kinda makes it seem gayer somehow.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Grandpa said dismissively. “Superman wears tights; is Superman gay? And Lightweight was a ladies’ man, I told you.”
“Okay, Grandpa, whatever; that’s not the point,” I explained. “My point is that you’re 80 years old and you’re telling me that the most exciting thing you’ve been through is some stupid wrestling match? Come on! What about V-J Day or the Cuban missile crisis, you know? How about the fuckin’ moon landing? You weren’t impressed with the goddamned moon landing?! What if they’d wrestled on the moon, would that’ve done it for you? For Christ’s sake, Grandpa! You’ve lived through so much, my God! What about the moon? What about the fucking moon, Grandpa?!"
Grandpa shrugged his shoulders and gave me a look as if to say that he wasn’t particularly upset by the fact that his answer had been disappointing for me. He went back to his mashed potatoes. I sat finishing my coffee and wondering why we even bothered inviting Grandpa over.
Friday, August 7, 2009
Rubrics: Cubes Without Depths and FILE Under FILLS-In-The-Box
ACROSS: /// DOWN:
1. – Eliot /// 1. Drudges
3. Ready /// 2. NBC comedy
7. Ratio /// 3. Tivoli attractions
9. Atop /// 4. Perfect
11. Thirteenth or fifteenth /// 5. Bombarder
12. Mr. Pufnstuf /// 6. Medium’s acronymic medium
13. “17. ACROSS”, to Washington /// 7. Takes
16. – Duce /// 8. Levin or Gershwin
17. Capital /// 9. Cheerful
18. – Dorado /// 10. Goliath’s company
19. Holly /// 14. -- I Lay Dying
21. Frame on runners /// 15. Masculine subject
23. – Yeah /// 19. Condition
25. Walking gets you there /// 22. Govt. lawyer
27. Homonym of “36. DOWN” /// 24. This place
29. Mr. Himmler’s unit /// 26. Spelling or Amos
30. Decide /// 28. Namesakes of Simpson’s judge
33. Crag /// 31. Emergency
34. Breakfast -- Tiffany’s /// 32. Until
35. Sugarloaf Mount site /// 34. Upon
36. Riata /// 36. Antonym of “27. ACROSS”
37. Habitual contraction /// 38. Grant
39. Successful politician /// 42. Lush
40. Clinker /// 44. With it
41. Five’s change, oftentimes /// 45. Freddy’s street
43. At the house of /// 47. ETO commander
46. Unorganized repository of needs /// 49. Letters of afterthought
48. Von Aschenbach or Humbert
50. Mr. --
51. Circles
52. Gladstone, e.g.
53. Teenage novelist, -- Hinton
...out of the worm-hole, into the fire!
Wormmeister,
I'm in need of advice on the etiquette of tipping the man who does my hair. My hair-dresser owns the salon. He gives me cut & color at 70 beans per service -- that's 140 bucks for the whole shebang. He does a spectacular job. Now, my father taught me that you should never tip the owner of an establishment: after all, he's pocketing 100% of the profit. But, when it's time to pay up, the gal at the register always asks me if I want to add a tip for Tony. In the past, I've done so, but then I feel a little resentful -- I mean, I just gave the guy $140! Isn't that enough?! So yesterday, for the first time, I did NOT tip him. Then I felt guilty -- I mean, he's a great guy and he actually charges me LESS than he charges a lot of his other clients, because he knows I'm comparatively poor (he does the hair of some wealthy Beverly Hills businessmen and Hollywood types.) So -- what's the RIGHT thing to do in this situation? (Oh, I'd like to add that I always tip his assistant, who puts the color in my hair and shampoos it out. Yesterday I gave her $15.)
Thanks!
Troubled Tresses
The Worm sez: Your father’s doctrine against tipping proprietors initially rubbed The Worm as it apparently does you – that is, in all the right intuitive places. However, your father’s precept, if scrutinized closely, might turn out to be cheapness masquerading as some more noble principle. It would seem that the rationale behind the dictum is that a service business’ owner enjoys the cream of the enterprise’s crop and so, unlike an employee, does not need his/her income augmented with gratuities. But 100% of a business’ profits might equal nothing, and it is entirely conceivable that a business owner might pay his/her employees so generously that it causes the owner severe economic hardship even while his/her employees live quite comfortably. Surely, in such a case, the rationale underlying your father’s rule has evaporated, and so the rule itself ought to vanish in such case as well. Of course, the consumer of services is not often privy to a business’ books and, even if she/he were, performing accountings with every transaction in order to determine a business’ financial health (or lack thereof) and/or how well the employees are paid (or how poorly) would be a huge inconvenience, and so your father’s position might be that his assumption(s) that the business is profitable and/or that the owner is not overpaying her/his employees is/are the wisest fall-back(s). Again, perhaps your dad is a cheapskate. But let’s not approach this issue as an inquiry into what’s right for Tony, the hairdresser (or other service providers who own their own businesses). Let us instead analyze this question with an eye toward what is best and right for you, the consumer. The Worm assumes that the primary reason that one tips a service provider is not altruism but, rather, to provide an incentive for them to do a great job. You say that your guy has been doing a spectacular job, and so your past practice of always tipping him seems to have been performing its function. Also, although you say you feel resentful when you tip, you also make it clear that not tipping made you feel guilty (and understandably so…after all, you say Tony is a great guy and that he’s giving you a discount because he knows of your comparative poverty). Guilt doesn’t sound any more pleasant than resentment in The Worm’s book. The Worm suggests that you think long and hard about how much a color and cut by Tony is worth to you considering the prices of other salons of comparable quality, and if Tony still seems like a good deal even with the tip you’ve traditionally given him then you might consider going back to the status quo ante. (By the way, it sounds a bit like the assistant, rather than Tony, might be the one actually coloring your hair (The Worm cannot imagine what a colorist’s job description might be other than “puts the color in [the] hair and shampoos it out”); however, if the assistant’s job requires little or no finesse then you might consider stiffing her and giving Tony that 15 bucks.) Most importantly, The Worm recommends that in the future you ask funnier questions that call for advice of a more humorous nature. Ideally, your questions should be amusing in and of themselves and they should also set The Worm up for further laughs. Your joke-proof question about tipping etiquette is so dry it makes The Worm thirsty. A question like this doesn’t do anybody any good except you (and, The Worm supposes, people with problems almost identical to yours). TWM is here for everyone; The Worm is not your personal answers machine. You may look fabulous, but you’re being selfish, and The Worm is not at all surprised that you’re trying to get it to help you as you attempt to rationalize shortchanging poor Tony.
********************
So sayeth The Worm.
I'm in need of advice on the etiquette of tipping the man who does my hair. My hair-dresser owns the salon. He gives me cut & color at 70 beans per service -- that's 140 bucks for the whole shebang. He does a spectacular job. Now, my father taught me that you should never tip the owner of an establishment: after all, he's pocketing 100% of the profit. But, when it's time to pay up, the gal at the register always asks me if I want to add a tip for Tony. In the past, I've done so, but then I feel a little resentful -- I mean, I just gave the guy $140! Isn't that enough?! So yesterday, for the first time, I did NOT tip him. Then I felt guilty -- I mean, he's a great guy and he actually charges me LESS than he charges a lot of his other clients, because he knows I'm comparatively poor (he does the hair of some wealthy Beverly Hills businessmen and Hollywood types.) So -- what's the RIGHT thing to do in this situation? (Oh, I'd like to add that I always tip his assistant, who puts the color in my hair and shampoos it out. Yesterday I gave her $15.)
Thanks!
Troubled Tresses
The Worm sez: Your father’s doctrine against tipping proprietors initially rubbed The Worm as it apparently does you – that is, in all the right intuitive places. However, your father’s precept, if scrutinized closely, might turn out to be cheapness masquerading as some more noble principle. It would seem that the rationale behind the dictum is that a service business’ owner enjoys the cream of the enterprise’s crop and so, unlike an employee, does not need his/her income augmented with gratuities. But 100% of a business’ profits might equal nothing, and it is entirely conceivable that a business owner might pay his/her employees so generously that it causes the owner severe economic hardship even while his/her employees live quite comfortably. Surely, in such a case, the rationale underlying your father’s rule has evaporated, and so the rule itself ought to vanish in such case as well. Of course, the consumer of services is not often privy to a business’ books and, even if she/he were, performing accountings with every transaction in order to determine a business’ financial health (or lack thereof) and/or how well the employees are paid (or how poorly) would be a huge inconvenience, and so your father’s position might be that his assumption(s) that the business is profitable and/or that the owner is not overpaying her/his employees is/are the wisest fall-back(s). Again, perhaps your dad is a cheapskate. But let’s not approach this issue as an inquiry into what’s right for Tony, the hairdresser (or other service providers who own their own businesses). Let us instead analyze this question with an eye toward what is best and right for you, the consumer. The Worm assumes that the primary reason that one tips a service provider is not altruism but, rather, to provide an incentive for them to do a great job. You say that your guy has been doing a spectacular job, and so your past practice of always tipping him seems to have been performing its function. Also, although you say you feel resentful when you tip, you also make it clear that not tipping made you feel guilty (and understandably so…after all, you say Tony is a great guy and that he’s giving you a discount because he knows of your comparative poverty). Guilt doesn’t sound any more pleasant than resentment in The Worm’s book. The Worm suggests that you think long and hard about how much a color and cut by Tony is worth to you considering the prices of other salons of comparable quality, and if Tony still seems like a good deal even with the tip you’ve traditionally given him then you might consider going back to the status quo ante. (By the way, it sounds a bit like the assistant, rather than Tony, might be the one actually coloring your hair (The Worm cannot imagine what a colorist’s job description might be other than “puts the color in [the] hair and shampoos it out”); however, if the assistant’s job requires little or no finesse then you might consider stiffing her and giving Tony that 15 bucks.) Most importantly, The Worm recommends that in the future you ask funnier questions that call for advice of a more humorous nature. Ideally, your questions should be amusing in and of themselves and they should also set The Worm up for further laughs. Your joke-proof question about tipping etiquette is so dry it makes The Worm thirsty. A question like this doesn’t do anybody any good except you (and, The Worm supposes, people with problems almost identical to yours). TWM is here for everyone; The Worm is not your personal answers machine. You may look fabulous, but you’re being selfish, and The Worm is not at all surprised that you’re trying to get it to help you as you attempt to rationalize shortchanging poor Tony.
********************
So sayeth The Worm.
Monday, August 3, 2009
Saturday, August 1, 2009
Reverse Dictionary
About a year ago I learned -- or, at least, I thought I’d learned -- this word the definition for which was “smeared with porridge.” It was such a great word. I forget the context in which I came across it, but I remember being so happy, thinking about what might qualify as porridge (oatmeal, grits, cream of wheat) and planning to use the word as often as I could. Anyway, now I can’t remember the word (which is absolutely maddening!), and so I guess I never truly learned the word at all (or, at least, to the extent that one thinks of knowledge as a lasting thing, I guess I never really learned the word at all).
Damn! Seriously...it’s totally driving me crazy; it was such a wonderful word! It didn’t have the word “porridge” built into it (nor “gruel” nor “soup” nor anything like that), and so you’d have never guessed what it meant to have simply heard it out of context (although, once you had learned it, it really did sound like a big, sloppy mess all over you; I suppose this would make it onamanopaeic, I guess…but I could be imagining this part (and, besides, maybe onamanopaeic words have to sound like what they mean before one knows what they mean)).
At any rate, it really is making me nuts, honestly. I swear, just hearing this word was funny. I don’t think that I read it in the context of orphans, but I remember that after I'd looked it up it made me think of orphans – grimy, little alley urchins, all covered in muck...raggedy, Oliver Twisty little bastards moving back and forth from the filthy streets to the bleak, cruel institutions (for the free porridge dinners, I suppose). Nasty, grubby little fuckers (and malicious, too…vicious little bastards, every last one) but with smiles on their greasy faces and joy in their rascally hearts ‘cause they knew how to turn dire circumstances into good times. It was a very picaresque word.
I had a whole bit that I was planning on doing with this word. Really, it was that funny, laugh-out-loud funny. But I guess time and unfaithful brain cells have robbed me of my fun (and you, dear TWM reader, of yours). It would’ve been truly delightful, I’m totally sure of it. There was absolutely no way that one could use this word without being entertaining. It was just the greatest fucking word.
Damn! Seriously...it’s totally driving me crazy; it was such a wonderful word! It didn’t have the word “porridge” built into it (nor “gruel” nor “soup” nor anything like that), and so you’d have never guessed what it meant to have simply heard it out of context (although, once you had learned it, it really did sound like a big, sloppy mess all over you; I suppose this would make it onamanopaeic, I guess…but I could be imagining this part (and, besides, maybe onamanopaeic words have to sound like what they mean before one knows what they mean)).
At any rate, it really is making me nuts, honestly. I swear, just hearing this word was funny. I don’t think that I read it in the context of orphans, but I remember that after I'd looked it up it made me think of orphans – grimy, little alley urchins, all covered in muck...raggedy, Oliver Twisty little bastards moving back and forth from the filthy streets to the bleak, cruel institutions (for the free porridge dinners, I suppose). Nasty, grubby little fuckers (and malicious, too…vicious little bastards, every last one) but with smiles on their greasy faces and joy in their rascally hearts ‘cause they knew how to turn dire circumstances into good times. It was a very picaresque word.
I had a whole bit that I was planning on doing with this word. Really, it was that funny, laugh-out-loud funny. But I guess time and unfaithful brain cells have robbed me of my fun (and you, dear TWM reader, of yours). It would’ve been truly delightful, I’m totally sure of it. There was absolutely no way that one could use this word without being entertaining. It was just the greatest fucking word.
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What Makes A Subaru?
“Love. It’s what makes a Subaru a Subaru.” That’s the Japanese automaker’s current motto. “The ultimate driving machine” has long been BMW’s perennial slogan, but a few years back the Bavarian giant was going with “BMW: it doesn’t just satisfy your need for motion, it satisfies your need for emotion.”
There’s a VW ad in which a couple, maybe with their kid in the backseat, drive their new VW whatever into a picture-perfect suburban neighborhood, almost Twilight Zone-ish in its calm serenity. They are apparently lost. (The man driving asks, “Where are we?” The woman in the passenger’s seat might be looking at a map, and maybe the kid in the back, if there is a kid, is anxiously looking from side to side out the windows of the surprisingly roomy VW’s rear interior). The couple is driving past a small park amid the well-kept houses and yards. There are pedestrians walking dogs or pushing strollers in the park, all with beatific smiles on their faces, and they’re waving idyllically at each other and at the drivers of the many cars that are driving slowly past them up and down the streets that surround the park. The drivers wave back pleasantly, but the weird thing is that all of the cars (except for the VW that the couple is driving) are cardboard boxes. They all look the same, the cars: generic, automobile-sized cardboard boxes on wheels.
Our driving couple and the kid in the back, if there is a kid in the back, drop their jaws and crane their necks as they drive along so as to better stare at all the slowly passing cardboard-box cars. But their confusion and disbelief quickly turn into bemusement that people would be willing to actually drive around in cardboard boxes, that an entire little community could fail to realize how bizarre and ridiculous it was to drive these nonsensical cars, so odd and yet simultaneously so dull. They (the couple, that is) shake their heads to dispell their wonder, shrugging their shoulders condescendingly to show their live-and-let-live sense of tolerance for those who drive tasteless cars; then they hit their accelerator and speed away down the block. Meanwhile, all the pedestrians and cardboard-box drivers have stopped in their tracks, and they watch the VW as it drives off. They’re taken aback by how great and stylish the VW looked, and their happy smiles all dissolve, replaced by horrified expressions of crushing disappointment with their own boring car choices, tragic dissatisfaction with the bland automobiles for which they’ve allowed themselves to settle. Their peaceful complacency has been utterly shattered. The commercial’s narrator comes on and says something to the effect of “why drive a generic box when you could drive the distinctive new VW whatever?”
(I suppose it’s important to note that in the commercial there’s nothing functionally wrong with the cardboard-box cars. They operate perfectly fine, they don’t fall apart. There’s no suggestion that they break down or get bad mileage or spew pollution or can’t go fast enough or anything like that. Also, the cardboard cars are all very clean and new looking. Their only defect is their supposed aesthetic shortcoming – namely, that they all look like plain cardboard boxes.)
This VW commercial is supposed to be funny, I guess, but I find it extremely disturbing. The ad presents the neighborhood’s residents as very happy, physically healthy, sociable people. They are clearly comfortable, affluent even, and they are obviously enjoying a very high standard of living. They are well fed, they have leisure time, and they live in nice homes on beautiful, sunny green streets. Their lives are peachy-keen, and they know it. Or, rather, they thought that they knew it, thought so until they realized that the cars they were driving were all pieces of shit. (By the way, the whole premise is a bit confusing to me because, personally, I’d love to drive around in a cardboard-box car -- or, for that matter, any car of great novelty.) Anyway, I find the commercial disgusting not so much in how it openly encourages us to keep on keeping up with the Joneses as in the way that it insidiously tells us to not assume that we’re successfully keeping up simply because we feel satisfied with our lot and good about ourselves. It’s a sick and twisted ad that teaches us to distrust our own happiness.
Roberto M. Unger, a social theorist and law professor at Harvard (where, incidentally, during the 1980s he once served as Barack Obama’s teacher), places the objects of all human desires into two categories, that of “comfort” and that of “glory”. Comfort comprises both needs (e.g., food, blankets) and wants (e.g., stereos, yachts), and glory includes our natural tendency to seek respect and admiration, to be loved as individual personalities. Modern consumer culture, of course and without doubt, is a terrible thing in the way that it exploits those that toil on its periphery (the sweatshop workers, the coffee bean pickers, etc.), but it is also a terrible thing in the way that it warps the values of those who dwell at its center and enjoy its fruits. For so many Americans (and other “westerners”, I presume) the longing for comfort and the longing for glory have been entirely conflated. We so often seek honor from our peers based on the products we purchase and on the reputations of those products’ brand names. The esteem in which we are held by both strangers and acquaintances can be so heavily influenced by the choices we make as consumers, the merits of our choices frequently judged in direct relation to the status attached to the things we’ve bought. We are encouraged to identify so strongly with our material possessions; we are measured (and we measure ourselves) in terms of the quality and quantity of the stuff we can afford and do afford. Our ambitions become our Christmas lists and vise versa. Identity and possessions have merged to the point where many people seemingly express themselves and perceive each other largely through the cars they drive, the clothes they wear, the trappings and luxuries they have acquired.
I’ve never fully subscribed to Unger’s clean distinction between comfort and glory, never really believed that the one category could be completely divorced from the other. I think that, irrespective of whatever socio-economic or cultural models that society might adopt, the quantity and quality of the stuff to which one has access and the level of respect at which one is held by oneself and others will always be, to some extent, interrelated. Moreover, I am as apt to glorify comfort as many. A Timex keeps near perfect time, but, were I to win big at lotto tomorrow, I would likely be sporting an extremely expensive wristwatch the day after tomorrow. If given vast resources, I would almost certainly eventually get around to investing my capital in some sort of project to further the general welfare or to promote social justice, to somehow make the world a better place for humanity, but certainly not until after I’d fully tired of showing off my shiny new watch. And I’d probably also buy a motorcycle or two before I ever got around to sending out any philanthropic checks. Indeed, I find that my excitement and lust for material niceties have compromised my integrity in the past and continue to do so on a fairly regular basis. However, I have fortunately not yet reached the sorry point at which I derive my spiritual and emotional wellness primarily from the nice things that I have or could afford to have. Once comfort and glory have become entirely indistinguishable, then we've lost our souls to bourgeois commercialism and brain rot, the gospel of the mundane. When the dichotomy between comfort and glory is totally abolished, that is when we become our Subarus.
There’s a VW ad in which a couple, maybe with their kid in the backseat, drive their new VW whatever into a picture-perfect suburban neighborhood, almost Twilight Zone-ish in its calm serenity. They are apparently lost. (The man driving asks, “Where are we?” The woman in the passenger’s seat might be looking at a map, and maybe the kid in the back, if there is a kid, is anxiously looking from side to side out the windows of the surprisingly roomy VW’s rear interior). The couple is driving past a small park amid the well-kept houses and yards. There are pedestrians walking dogs or pushing strollers in the park, all with beatific smiles on their faces, and they’re waving idyllically at each other and at the drivers of the many cars that are driving slowly past them up and down the streets that surround the park. The drivers wave back pleasantly, but the weird thing is that all of the cars (except for the VW that the couple is driving) are cardboard boxes. They all look the same, the cars: generic, automobile-sized cardboard boxes on wheels.
Our driving couple and the kid in the back, if there is a kid in the back, drop their jaws and crane their necks as they drive along so as to better stare at all the slowly passing cardboard-box cars. But their confusion and disbelief quickly turn into bemusement that people would be willing to actually drive around in cardboard boxes, that an entire little community could fail to realize how bizarre and ridiculous it was to drive these nonsensical cars, so odd and yet simultaneously so dull. They (the couple, that is) shake their heads to dispell their wonder, shrugging their shoulders condescendingly to show their live-and-let-live sense of tolerance for those who drive tasteless cars; then they hit their accelerator and speed away down the block. Meanwhile, all the pedestrians and cardboard-box drivers have stopped in their tracks, and they watch the VW as it drives off. They’re taken aback by how great and stylish the VW looked, and their happy smiles all dissolve, replaced by horrified expressions of crushing disappointment with their own boring car choices, tragic dissatisfaction with the bland automobiles for which they’ve allowed themselves to settle. Their peaceful complacency has been utterly shattered. The commercial’s narrator comes on and says something to the effect of “why drive a generic box when you could drive the distinctive new VW whatever?”
(I suppose it’s important to note that in the commercial there’s nothing functionally wrong with the cardboard-box cars. They operate perfectly fine, they don’t fall apart. There’s no suggestion that they break down or get bad mileage or spew pollution or can’t go fast enough or anything like that. Also, the cardboard cars are all very clean and new looking. Their only defect is their supposed aesthetic shortcoming – namely, that they all look like plain cardboard boxes.)
This VW commercial is supposed to be funny, I guess, but I find it extremely disturbing. The ad presents the neighborhood’s residents as very happy, physically healthy, sociable people. They are clearly comfortable, affluent even, and they are obviously enjoying a very high standard of living. They are well fed, they have leisure time, and they live in nice homes on beautiful, sunny green streets. Their lives are peachy-keen, and they know it. Or, rather, they thought that they knew it, thought so until they realized that the cars they were driving were all pieces of shit. (By the way, the whole premise is a bit confusing to me because, personally, I’d love to drive around in a cardboard-box car -- or, for that matter, any car of great novelty.) Anyway, I find the commercial disgusting not so much in how it openly encourages us to keep on keeping up with the Joneses as in the way that it insidiously tells us to not assume that we’re successfully keeping up simply because we feel satisfied with our lot and good about ourselves. It’s a sick and twisted ad that teaches us to distrust our own happiness.
Roberto M. Unger, a social theorist and law professor at Harvard (where, incidentally, during the 1980s he once served as Barack Obama’s teacher), places the objects of all human desires into two categories, that of “comfort” and that of “glory”. Comfort comprises both needs (e.g., food, blankets) and wants (e.g., stereos, yachts), and glory includes our natural tendency to seek respect and admiration, to be loved as individual personalities. Modern consumer culture, of course and without doubt, is a terrible thing in the way that it exploits those that toil on its periphery (the sweatshop workers, the coffee bean pickers, etc.), but it is also a terrible thing in the way that it warps the values of those who dwell at its center and enjoy its fruits. For so many Americans (and other “westerners”, I presume) the longing for comfort and the longing for glory have been entirely conflated. We so often seek honor from our peers based on the products we purchase and on the reputations of those products’ brand names. The esteem in which we are held by both strangers and acquaintances can be so heavily influenced by the choices we make as consumers, the merits of our choices frequently judged in direct relation to the status attached to the things we’ve bought. We are encouraged to identify so strongly with our material possessions; we are measured (and we measure ourselves) in terms of the quality and quantity of the stuff we can afford and do afford. Our ambitions become our Christmas lists and vise versa. Identity and possessions have merged to the point where many people seemingly express themselves and perceive each other largely through the cars they drive, the clothes they wear, the trappings and luxuries they have acquired.
I’ve never fully subscribed to Unger’s clean distinction between comfort and glory, never really believed that the one category could be completely divorced from the other. I think that, irrespective of whatever socio-economic or cultural models that society might adopt, the quantity and quality of the stuff to which one has access and the level of respect at which one is held by oneself and others will always be, to some extent, interrelated. Moreover, I am as apt to glorify comfort as many. A Timex keeps near perfect time, but, were I to win big at lotto tomorrow, I would likely be sporting an extremely expensive wristwatch the day after tomorrow. If given vast resources, I would almost certainly eventually get around to investing my capital in some sort of project to further the general welfare or to promote social justice, to somehow make the world a better place for humanity, but certainly not until after I’d fully tired of showing off my shiny new watch. And I’d probably also buy a motorcycle or two before I ever got around to sending out any philanthropic checks. Indeed, I find that my excitement and lust for material niceties have compromised my integrity in the past and continue to do so on a fairly regular basis. However, I have fortunately not yet reached the sorry point at which I derive my spiritual and emotional wellness primarily from the nice things that I have or could afford to have. Once comfort and glory have become entirely indistinguishable, then we've lost our souls to bourgeois commercialism and brain rot, the gospel of the mundane. When the dichotomy between comfort and glory is totally abolished, that is when we become our Subarus.
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
...out of the worm-hole, into the fire!
Dear The Worm,
I was recently laid off from my job at National Public Radio. I find I don't miss it one bit. I'm enjoying sleeping in, going to the beach, and watching back to back to back re-runs of NCIS, followed on especially lazy days by a block of House. I feel no burning need to be productive (rather, I am a burned out producer). My concern is that once the unemployment checks run out, I'll have to once again work for The Man (although, in the case of NPR, it was more like The Woman. I would elaborate, but I know this is a family blog). So I'm wondering if you have any advice on what kind of job I might get that won't require a lot of actual work, but might pay well. Flexibility to work beachside is a plus. To help you help me, here is a list of my skills:
-- Clinically obsessive
-- Obsessively clinical
-- No, not really, I'm quite warm with lovely interpersonal skills
-- Can erect a beach umbrella in dry sand so it doesn't blow over in a stiff off-shore breeze
-- Usually.
-- Can recite entirety of Back to the Future
Cheers and ciao,
funemployed
The Worm sez: There are many highly paid positions that require little or no work on the part of the person holding the position (although everybody around the dead weight must usually do their part and then some), and these types of jobs span the gamut of industry. However, The Worm is currently applying for these positions, and so it is loathe to offer you any specific, substantive tips on the subject. Were you a real go-getter, the following bit of general entrepreneurial wisdom might be of good use: when one has trouble getting a job one wants, then one’s job is to create one’s own job. Given your professional background and your interests, The Worm would recommend producing a blockbuster, semi-annual, half-hour reality show about beach bums who dream of traveling back through time to get all tangled up in their respective teenaged mothers’ sex lives. And by “reality”, The Worm means totally unscripted, set-the-mic-on-record-and-go-get-some-lunch. But this advice, The Worm fears, here falls on deaf ears (or, at least, on very sleepy and lazy ears). Thus, The Worm suggests that you try to continue relaxing and to simply enjoy the unemployment checks while they last, without worrying about the future. Bring your mind back from the future, as it were; bury your head in the sand along with your toes and your umbrella pole. The Worm also suggests that you rent the 1980s NBC sitcom Family Ties, in which Meredith Baxter-Birney plays Elyse Keaton, mother of college student and Young Republican, Alex P. Keaton (played by Michael J. Fox). The plots mostly revolve around the erotic tensions among Elyse, a middle-aged ex-hippie who can’t let go of her outdated ideas on free love, Alex, a Reagan-loving conservative who is mortified by his mother’s incestuous overtures, and Alex’ gay best friend, Irwin “Skippy” Handelman (played with bestial intensity by Marc Price). The sexual themes are handled quite subtly and tastefully and there’s no time travel involved, but, still, it’s pretty hot.
********************
So sayeth The Worm.
I was recently laid off from my job at National Public Radio. I find I don't miss it one bit. I'm enjoying sleeping in, going to the beach, and watching back to back to back re-runs of NCIS, followed on especially lazy days by a block of House. I feel no burning need to be productive (rather, I am a burned out producer). My concern is that once the unemployment checks run out, I'll have to once again work for The Man (although, in the case of NPR, it was more like The Woman. I would elaborate, but I know this is a family blog). So I'm wondering if you have any advice on what kind of job I might get that won't require a lot of actual work, but might pay well. Flexibility to work beachside is a plus. To help you help me, here is a list of my skills:
-- Clinically obsessive
-- Obsessively clinical
-- No, not really, I'm quite warm with lovely interpersonal skills
-- Can erect a beach umbrella in dry sand so it doesn't blow over in a stiff off-shore breeze
-- Usually.
-- Can recite entirety of Back to the Future
Cheers and ciao,
funemployed
The Worm sez: There are many highly paid positions that require little or no work on the part of the person holding the position (although everybody around the dead weight must usually do their part and then some), and these types of jobs span the gamut of industry. However, The Worm is currently applying for these positions, and so it is loathe to offer you any specific, substantive tips on the subject. Were you a real go-getter, the following bit of general entrepreneurial wisdom might be of good use: when one has trouble getting a job one wants, then one’s job is to create one’s own job. Given your professional background and your interests, The Worm would recommend producing a blockbuster, semi-annual, half-hour reality show about beach bums who dream of traveling back through time to get all tangled up in their respective teenaged mothers’ sex lives. And by “reality”, The Worm means totally unscripted, set-the-mic-on-record-and-go-get-some-lunch. But this advice, The Worm fears, here falls on deaf ears (or, at least, on very sleepy and lazy ears). Thus, The Worm suggests that you try to continue relaxing and to simply enjoy the unemployment checks while they last, without worrying about the future. Bring your mind back from the future, as it were; bury your head in the sand along with your toes and your umbrella pole. The Worm also suggests that you rent the 1980s NBC sitcom Family Ties, in which Meredith Baxter-Birney plays Elyse Keaton, mother of college student and Young Republican, Alex P. Keaton (played by Michael J. Fox). The plots mostly revolve around the erotic tensions among Elyse, a middle-aged ex-hippie who can’t let go of her outdated ideas on free love, Alex, a Reagan-loving conservative who is mortified by his mother’s incestuous overtures, and Alex’ gay best friend, Irwin “Skippy” Handelman (played with bestial intensity by Marc Price). The sexual themes are handled quite subtly and tastefully and there’s no time travel involved, but, still, it’s pretty hot.
********************
So sayeth The Worm.
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Monday, July 27, 2009
Slam/Poetry
Slammed into a wall made up of what’s wrong with me --
Its hard laid surface built to last, mortared with my bilious shit,
Chronicles of sordid failure graffitied ‘cross each brick.
How could I contrive to turn my back to it,
Hope it wouldn’t come looming long behind me?
Then, of course, still worse, she’d find me.
Thus, I faced it…to embrace it, to confess.
Cowering at the cold base of my daunting edifice,
I wept there, held its mean truths tightly to my breast.
(Knowing that they fit me made them softer when they hit me.)
Baiting, then abating,
Gathering, there, for her to see me…
As if to burst I crouched, daring her to flee me.
Wouldn’t I? And, so, I left.
It’s said music begins to atrophy
As it strays, turned way from the dance.
And, likewise, the fair rhyme of poesy dies
When torn from its song, dear romance.
But if memory’s vessels be heartstrings immortal,
Will serve as a vase to protect,
Pain’s veil won't diminish my love’s gorgeous image
Or rapt, sweetly cast spells’ effect.
Its hard laid surface built to last, mortared with my bilious shit,
Chronicles of sordid failure graffitied ‘cross each brick.
How could I contrive to turn my back to it,
Hope it wouldn’t come looming long behind me?
Then, of course, still worse, she’d find me.
Thus, I faced it…to embrace it, to confess.
Cowering at the cold base of my daunting edifice,
I wept there, held its mean truths tightly to my breast.
(Knowing that they fit me made them softer when they hit me.)
Baiting, then abating,
Gathering, there, for her to see me…
As if to burst I crouched, daring her to flee me.
Wouldn’t I? And, so, I left.
It’s said music begins to atrophy
As it strays, turned way from the dance.
And, likewise, the fair rhyme of poesy dies
When torn from its song, dear romance.
But if memory’s vessels be heartstrings immortal,
Will serve as a vase to protect,
Pain’s veil won't diminish my love’s gorgeous image
Or rapt, sweetly cast spells’ effect.
Sunday, July 26, 2009
...out of the worm-hole, into the fire!
Dear The Worm,
I have toiled in anonymity at my job for five years. A co-worker, who works on the same floor as I do, has introduced herself to me in the elevator over 10 times during my time here. Each time, she squeals with delight about the new young people working here. My question to you is this: how do I politely let her know she is most likely suffering from Alzheimer's?
--Concerned co-worker
The Worm sez: Alzheimer’s Disease – the degenerative and terminal illness so commonly referred to as “old-timers’ disease” despite the fact that it is well known to also afflict newer, younger, more delightful employees – is nasty business, indeed. According to Wikipedia, the average life expectancy of patients diagnosed with Alzheimer’s is approximately seven years (please seehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
********************
So sayeth The Worm.
Thursday, July 23, 2009
All Is Tautology
There is another that beareth witness of me; and I know that the witness which he witnesseth of me is true.”
-- Jesus of Nazareth, Book of John 5:31-32
The term “zombie” conjures up a variety of notions, many of them rooted more in prejudice and in superstition than in reality. For example, the stereotype is that the zombie craves brains, but the fact is that almost all zombies will feed on flesh and entrails as well. It has been well documented that many zombies, even when brains are readily available, will choose to dine first on a limb or on one of the intestines. A small but significant minority of zombies even prefers to go straight for bone marrow. Indeed, it is this variation of preference among zombies that allows them to work together so harmoniously and successfully as they swarm in to feed on the kill. Famous, after all, for their stubbornly antisocial tendencies, zombies are creatures rarely given to cooperative teamwork, and feeding frenzies would be forever devolving into outright brawls were each individual zombie always jockeying for access to the brains.
Another commonly held belief is that zombies, while capable of rudimentary reasoning, are emotionally bereft, incapable of such typical human sentiments as those which they all presumably experienced regularly prior to zombification. However, while it is true that zombies’ emotional responses are often dulled by all the senseless killing, it is also true that feelings (e.g., angry, wretched sadness, a burning but vague longing for vengeance) have frequently been observed as motivating factors in zombie behavior (to wit, Day of the Dead, the third installment of Professor Romero’s groundbreaking series of essays in zombie studies).
The sociological and psychological baggage that zombification carries is heavy, to be sure. Moreover, the cultural garb that goes into such baggage derives from many influences, and a comprehensive examination of societal attitudes toward zombies is far too vast and ambitious a project to enter into at present. Suffice it to say that the question of zombie identity and consciousness has as many answers as there are subjects being questioned on the matter.
However, while “zombie”’s connotations may be nebulous and/or complex, its denotation is uncomplicated and can be readily expressed with precision and clarity. From a scientific standpoint, the definition of a zombie is quite simple: a zombie is a human being that has died and whose corpse has been re-animated and whose death and re-animation both are the results of catastrophic human folly (instances of zombie-precipitating poor judgment on humanity’s part commonly include fallout from nuclear explosions and/or germ-warfare experiments gone awry). Of course, spiritual and ethical considerations will inform any thorough understanding of the world and its phenomena, but Jesus -- as a subject seen dispassionately and objectively, through the lens of pure science -- falls squarely within the ambit of “zombie”’s definition. And, scripture notwithstanding, where I come from we don’t worship and adore zombies. We shoot ‘em in the head with a fuckin’ shotgun so they don't start climbin’ in through all the goddamn windows.
The sociological and psychological baggage that zombification carries is heavy, to be sure. Moreover, the cultural garb that goes into such baggage derives from many influences, and a comprehensive examination of societal attitudes toward zombies is far too vast and ambitious a project to enter into at present. Suffice it to say that the question of zombie identity and consciousness has as many answers as there are subjects being questioned on the matter.
However, while “zombie”’s connotations may be nebulous and/or complex, its denotation is uncomplicated and can be readily expressed with precision and clarity. From a scientific standpoint, the definition of a zombie is quite simple: a zombie is a human being that has died and whose corpse has been re-animated and whose death and re-animation both are the results of catastrophic human folly (instances of zombie-precipitating poor judgment on humanity’s part commonly include fallout from nuclear explosions and/or germ-warfare experiments gone awry). Of course, spiritual and ethical considerations will inform any thorough understanding of the world and its phenomena, but Jesus -- as a subject seen dispassionately and objectively, through the lens of pure science -- falls squarely within the ambit of “zombie”’s definition. And, scripture notwithstanding, where I come from we don’t worship and adore zombies. We shoot ‘em in the head with a fuckin’ shotgun so they don't start climbin’ in through all the goddamn windows.
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
...out of the worm-hole, into the fire!
Dear The Worm:
I recently download an addictive game app for my iphone, "Vampires Live". After frittering away hours and hours, I have become extremely depressed, a state I attribute directly to this mindless game. My girlfriend suggested that television is analogous: it is temporarily diverting but ultimately one has nothing to show for it. I took offense; I love TV! Why not make the same complaint about a book? Help me respond to this vicious censure of one of my favorite activities. (I deleted the iPhone app.)
signed,
anonymous tv humper.
The Worm sez: Relationships – those of a romantic nature, most especially -- are temporarily diverting, but ultimately one has nothing to show for them. Television entertainment, on the other hand, is our lifeblood. When your girlfriend denigrates tv, she is engaging in what network psychologists refer to as “pastime vampirism.” Her offensive suggestions sap your recreational potentiality while simultaneously feeding her need to be amused. This pattern, if left unchecked, will eventually result in her spending countless hours on the couch watching you, enjoying microwaved snacks, and laughing uproariously while you sit slack-jawed, catatonic, and utterly without amusement, an empty shell of a man. My advice: lose the girlfriend and pick yourself up a TiVo.
********************
So sayeth The Worm.
I recently download an addictive game app for my iphone, "Vampires Live". After frittering away hours and hours, I have become extremely depressed, a state I attribute directly to this mindless game. My girlfriend suggested that television is analogous: it is temporarily diverting but ultimately one has nothing to show for it. I took offense; I love TV! Why not make the same complaint about a book? Help me respond to this vicious censure of one of my favorite activities. (I deleted the iPhone app.)
signed,
anonymous tv humper.
The Worm sez: Relationships – those of a romantic nature, most especially -- are temporarily diverting, but ultimately one has nothing to show for them. Television entertainment, on the other hand, is our lifeblood. When your girlfriend denigrates tv, she is engaging in what network psychologists refer to as “pastime vampirism.” Her offensive suggestions sap your recreational potentiality while simultaneously feeding her need to be amused. This pattern, if left unchecked, will eventually result in her spending countless hours on the couch watching you, enjoying microwaved snacks, and laughing uproariously while you sit slack-jawed, catatonic, and utterly without amusement, an empty shell of a man. My advice: lose the girlfriend and pick yourself up a TiVo.
********************
So sayeth The Worm.
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Doves Will Peck In Safeguard Of Their Brood (6gkapn8btr Redux)
That’s the shibboleth, motherfucker,
Word to the wise, my magic number.
This blog’ll flog ya: Worm be the humbler,
Shock ‘em like Hades froze over in summer.
For reals, y’all. Straight up howlin’, comin’ on wild like pitbulls with toothaches and shit, maybe some sparklers all jammed up they ass and whatnot. Fool, I be the predator. Yo, Satan be your creditor; I be like Hell’s attorney, crackin’ style-jackin’ motherfuckers in the head like they wish they was dead. I be all hootin’ and hollerin’ like, “Yo, where’s my check, bitch?!”, cappin’ and cuttin’ chickenheads up...aww shit.
Seriously, bitch, I ain’t playin’. I do like OJ, yo, bum rushin’, decapitatin'. I be like straight for the throat, y'all, ninja-style till your head be danglin’ and bobbin’, all flappin’ around and shit. I slice off your feet with a Ginsu knife, fool, stuff your toes down your neck, drag you all ‘round the town servin’ li’l piggies up out your neckhole like knuckle-flavor Pez, yo. I be tossin’ your ass in a blender, motherfucker, makin’ bitch smoothies; I serve you like Kool-Aid at People’s Temple.
6gkapn8btr…for reals.
Word to the wise, my magic number.
This blog’ll flog ya: Worm be the humbler,
Shock ‘em like Hades froze over in summer.
For reals, y’all. Straight up howlin’, comin’ on wild like pitbulls with toothaches and shit, maybe some sparklers all jammed up they ass and whatnot. Fool, I be the predator. Yo, Satan be your creditor; I be like Hell’s attorney, crackin’ style-jackin’ motherfuckers in the head like they wish they was dead. I be all hootin’ and hollerin’ like, “Yo, where’s my check, bitch?!”, cappin’ and cuttin’ chickenheads up...aww shit.
Seriously, bitch, I ain’t playin’. I do like OJ, yo, bum rushin’, decapitatin'. I be like straight for the throat, y'all, ninja-style till your head be danglin’ and bobbin’, all flappin’ around and shit. I slice off your feet with a Ginsu knife, fool, stuff your toes down your neck, drag you all ‘round the town servin’ li’l piggies up out your neckhole like knuckle-flavor Pez, yo. I be tossin’ your ass in a blender, motherfucker, makin’ bitch smoothies; I serve you like Kool-Aid at People’s Temple.
6gkapn8btr…for reals.
Monday, July 20, 2009
...out of the worm-hole, into the fire!
Dear Worm,
The lying liberal media recently claimed that the Pope broke his wrist
in a fall.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8155372.stm
Obviously, God's right hand man couldn't break his own right hand, or
this would mean the end of all things. What really happened?
The Worm sez: You are correct to point out that God’s right-hand man could not break his own right hand as two such rights would make a wrong. His Holiness’ recent tumble was the result of his slipping in a puddle of Nivea moisturizing cream while performing his daily ablutions, which he has performed with great zeal and pious fervor ever since he reached puberty early while serving as a Hitler Youth during WWII. Incidentally, the Pope suffers from low vision and from acute carpal tunnel syndrome (in both wrists), and his favorite singer is Fergie from the Black-Eyed Peas. She is very lovely!
********************
I am wondering if it bothers you that people sign their emails with the following closings:
"Ciao!"
"Cheers!"
when no drinking is involved, no foreign language being spoken, and the individuals are not English or Italian?
The Worm sez: People who have not been drinking ought to be looking their best and, thus, they ought to be communicating via Skype; therefore, such people should not be signing any emails in any fashion. When The Worm hears/reads a language other than American being spoken/written, it assumes that the speakers/writers are cognitively impaired and that they are speaking/writing gibberish. Finally, The Worm’s policy is to refrain from making any distinctions among people based on their national origin or their fingerprints, dental records, or DNA.
********************
So sayeth The Worm.
The lying liberal media recently claimed that the Pope broke his wrist
in a fall.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8155372.stm
Obviously, God's right hand man couldn't break his own right hand, or
this would mean the end of all things. What really happened?
The Worm sez: You are correct to point out that God’s right-hand man could not break his own right hand as two such rights would make a wrong. His Holiness’ recent tumble was the result of his slipping in a puddle of Nivea moisturizing cream while performing his daily ablutions, which he has performed with great zeal and pious fervor ever since he reached puberty early while serving as a Hitler Youth during WWII. Incidentally, the Pope suffers from low vision and from acute carpal tunnel syndrome (in both wrists), and his favorite singer is Fergie from the Black-Eyed Peas. She is very lovely!
********************
I am wondering if it bothers you that people sign their emails with the following closings:
"Ciao!"
"Cheers!"
when no drinking is involved, no foreign language being spoken, and the individuals are not English or Italian?
The Worm sez: People who have not been drinking ought to be looking their best and, thus, they ought to be communicating via Skype; therefore, such people should not be signing any emails in any fashion. When The Worm hears/reads a language other than American being spoken/written, it assumes that the speakers/writers are cognitively impaired and that they are speaking/writing gibberish. Finally, The Worm’s policy is to refrain from making any distinctions among people based on their national origin or their fingerprints, dental records, or DNA.
********************
So sayeth The Worm.
Serotonin Reuptake
I have such fun sometimes with my friend Val. She’s a very life affirming person – and, as she’s eight months pregnant, I mean so literally as well as figuratively.
The other day we were driving to her house across the bay, where I was going to spend the weekend. I was complaining about having no ideas to contribute to TWM. On the freeway, at 70 plus mph, she asked, “What’s that bee doin’?” I looked over from my passenger’s seat to her driver’s side rear view mirror, where a bee was clumsily banging itself against the bottom right hand corner of the mirror, right where the glass was connected to the molding that encased it. I had misinterpreted her question as “how is that bee…?”, and I said something about the mirror holder blocking the oncoming wind and creating a pocket of calm in which the bee could hang out as it rode along. “No; what’s it doing? It’s humping the mirror,” she said. “It’s trying to mate with itself in the mirror,” she explained with a smile in her voice. I looked at it closely as it threw itself upon its image. I took into account how a leg or two were right where the plastic molding crimped against the glass, considering how it might be stuck and simply beating against this structure in order to free itself from the thing that was trapping it. But, no…it looked for all the world like it was trying to fuck itself. Hilarious, I thought. Bees flying along the freeway, jumping on their own reflections in the mirrors that drove by, athletic little narcissists. Tiny sex highwaymen, so silly and harmless. “That’s great!” I said, laughing. “That’s a blog entry, right there.” I was delighted; I thought my day was made.
On the other side of the bay, we stopped for lunch – Thai food, perhaps my favorite, and Val mentioned that lunch would be her treat. Before eating, we parked a half block away at the lot of a baby-stuff store, both for the free parking while we ate and because Val wanted to get some kid's things (for someone else’s baby shower, actually, rather than for the child she was carrying herself) before lunch. She went to look for t-shirts and jumpers and onesies or whatever, and I gravitated toward the kids’ furniture section (the store had lots of furniture, most of it child-scaled, some of it sized for adults). I went to a small wooden table, sat on one of the matching chairs that it came with, and it was fairly comfortable. Being a relatively small person, I could imagine eating an entire meal at this miniature table before tiring of the novelty. I noticed the price tag and how cheap the set was considering the quality of the wood and the build. I moved over to a child-sized easy chair, and when I sat in it I was surprised by how comfortable it was. I imagined whether I’d still be comfortable after sitting through, say, a two-hour movie, and I decided that I would be. I saw that the easy chair, like the table/chairs set, was both of good quality and very reasonably priced. It dawned on me that someone of my size, modest budget, and eccentric taste in interior decorations could outfit an entire apartment in children’s furniture. It would be inexpensive, whimsical, and somewhat practical (though I could already picture my guests complaining). This notion gave me quite a kick; it felt like an epiphany. I wasn’t planning to get any new furniture, but it was nice to know that this option was out there.
Val walked by holding a pile of tiny garments on tiny hangers. “Did you check out the gliders?”, she asked. “You mean, like model planes?” I asked, making a mock launching motion with my right hand, thinking of balsa flyers. “No,” she said, indicating with a nod over toward some chairs behind me, “rockers, rocking chairs.”
I went over to where the “gliders” were, noting from their tags that they were, in fact, called “gliders”. They were essentially rocking chairs but, instead of rocking on rocking-chair style runners or legs, the seats moved back and forth on bases that held moving parts but did not themselves move against the ground. I sat in one, discovering that these gliders, too, were quite comfortable. I tried out another glider, and it also felt great. I felt like Goldilocks but so much easier to please.
I sat gliding, enjoying my perfectly content mood, when it occurred to me that I had not brought my meds with me when I'd left the house that morning. Oh, shit, I thought, trying to remember myself packing my bag earlier, hoping to distinctly recall putting my pills in my bag. No…I had forgotten to pack them. I realized that insisting on going back was too much to ask, that I was going to have to go a couple of days without my Luvox. Damn, I thought, I am so fucking stupid. I rationalized that one’s medication levels build up and that they might remain stable even if one skipped a few days. I knew that I was thinking wishfully, but, still, this sounded like it might well be true. But, then again, not missing a day was certainly better than missing. And it would have been so easy to have just remembered to bring the pills. I felt my contentment, which had been building all morning, dissipate instantly, and I sighed with angry resignation at my sense of fun’s fragility.
The other day we were driving to her house across the bay, where I was going to spend the weekend. I was complaining about having no ideas to contribute to TWM. On the freeway, at 70 plus mph, she asked, “What’s that bee doin’?” I looked over from my passenger’s seat to her driver’s side rear view mirror, where a bee was clumsily banging itself against the bottom right hand corner of the mirror, right where the glass was connected to the molding that encased it. I had misinterpreted her question as “how is that bee…?”, and I said something about the mirror holder blocking the oncoming wind and creating a pocket of calm in which the bee could hang out as it rode along. “No; what’s it doing? It’s humping the mirror,” she said. “It’s trying to mate with itself in the mirror,” she explained with a smile in her voice. I looked at it closely as it threw itself upon its image. I took into account how a leg or two were right where the plastic molding crimped against the glass, considering how it might be stuck and simply beating against this structure in order to free itself from the thing that was trapping it. But, no…it looked for all the world like it was trying to fuck itself. Hilarious, I thought. Bees flying along the freeway, jumping on their own reflections in the mirrors that drove by, athletic little narcissists. Tiny sex highwaymen, so silly and harmless. “That’s great!” I said, laughing. “That’s a blog entry, right there.” I was delighted; I thought my day was made.
On the other side of the bay, we stopped for lunch – Thai food, perhaps my favorite, and Val mentioned that lunch would be her treat. Before eating, we parked a half block away at the lot of a baby-stuff store, both for the free parking while we ate and because Val wanted to get some kid's things (for someone else’s baby shower, actually, rather than for the child she was carrying herself) before lunch. She went to look for t-shirts and jumpers and onesies or whatever, and I gravitated toward the kids’ furniture section (the store had lots of furniture, most of it child-scaled, some of it sized for adults). I went to a small wooden table, sat on one of the matching chairs that it came with, and it was fairly comfortable. Being a relatively small person, I could imagine eating an entire meal at this miniature table before tiring of the novelty. I noticed the price tag and how cheap the set was considering the quality of the wood and the build. I moved over to a child-sized easy chair, and when I sat in it I was surprised by how comfortable it was. I imagined whether I’d still be comfortable after sitting through, say, a two-hour movie, and I decided that I would be. I saw that the easy chair, like the table/chairs set, was both of good quality and very reasonably priced. It dawned on me that someone of my size, modest budget, and eccentric taste in interior decorations could outfit an entire apartment in children’s furniture. It would be inexpensive, whimsical, and somewhat practical (though I could already picture my guests complaining). This notion gave me quite a kick; it felt like an epiphany. I wasn’t planning to get any new furniture, but it was nice to know that this option was out there.
Val walked by holding a pile of tiny garments on tiny hangers. “Did you check out the gliders?”, she asked. “You mean, like model planes?” I asked, making a mock launching motion with my right hand, thinking of balsa flyers. “No,” she said, indicating with a nod over toward some chairs behind me, “rockers, rocking chairs.”
I went over to where the “gliders” were, noting from their tags that they were, in fact, called “gliders”. They were essentially rocking chairs but, instead of rocking on rocking-chair style runners or legs, the seats moved back and forth on bases that held moving parts but did not themselves move against the ground. I sat in one, discovering that these gliders, too, were quite comfortable. I tried out another glider, and it also felt great. I felt like Goldilocks but so much easier to please.
I sat gliding, enjoying my perfectly content mood, when it occurred to me that I had not brought my meds with me when I'd left the house that morning. Oh, shit, I thought, trying to remember myself packing my bag earlier, hoping to distinctly recall putting my pills in my bag. No…I had forgotten to pack them. I realized that insisting on going back was too much to ask, that I was going to have to go a couple of days without my Luvox. Damn, I thought, I am so fucking stupid. I rationalized that one’s medication levels build up and that they might remain stable even if one skipped a few days. I knew that I was thinking wishfully, but, still, this sounded like it might well be true. But, then again, not missing a day was certainly better than missing. And it would have been so easy to have just remembered to bring the pills. I felt my contentment, which had been building all morning, dissipate instantly, and I sighed with angry resignation at my sense of fun’s fragility.
Friday, July 17, 2009
Vocational Surnames and Victorian Era Class Barriers in Education
If one having the patronymic MacGyver descended from jailers – and if those named Smith came from smiths and, likewise, Coopers from caskmakers, Potters from ceramists, etc. – then it stands to reason that the ancestors of people named Dolittle[1] were bums. In class-bound Victorian England, which I am assuming is when/where the film Doctor Dolittle is set (I have never seen the film as I loathe musicals), the opportunities were practically nil for those with idlers and hobos in their genealogy, even if many generations back, to penetrate a socio-economic stratum that enjoyed access to advanced academic training. Indeed, during the latter half of the 19th century the vast majority of the English population was illiterate and the middle school graduation rate among those of humble lineage never broke 20 percent[2]. And yet the title of the titular protagonist of this film, a favorite with both the public and the Academy[3], indicates that he is the recipient of a higher degree, presumably in veterinary medicine or zoological linguistics. Having never seen the film, I cannot claim with certainty that it fails to adequately explain this apparent anachronism, but I strongly suspect that Doctor Dolittle is but another of countless instances in which Hollywood has asked its viewers to blindly subscribe to a plot that is based on entirely unrealistic premises and egregiously inaccurate portrayals of history and culture.
___________________
[1] Sometimes spelled "Doolittle", an alternate form encountered most frequently in the United States and in various Commonwealth nations outside of the United Kingdom.
[2] Pedagogy, Politics, and Power in the Victorian Age, J. Alfred Poindexter, Simon & Schuster, 1978, p. 438.
[3] 1967 Academy Award for Best Song. Doctor Dolittle was also nominated for Oscars in several other categories, including Best Picture.
___________________
[1] Sometimes spelled "Doolittle", an alternate form encountered most frequently in the United States and in various Commonwealth nations outside of the United Kingdom.
[2] Pedagogy, Politics, and Power in the Victorian Age, J. Alfred Poindexter, Simon & Schuster, 1978, p. 438.
[3] 1967 Academy Award for Best Song. Doctor Dolittle was also nominated for Oscars in several other categories, including Best Picture.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Blogger's Block: Perfunctory Daily Musings
The Worm has informed me that I am to post an entry today on TWM, that its followers have expectations, and that I am to enlighten, amuse and inspire. I told The Worm that I’d nothing to say. It didn’t matter.
If you haven’t already seen it, I’d check out “Hitler Plans Burning Man” on youtube. And “Shoes”. Both are very funny.
Did you hear about that guy in Canada about a year ago who cut off the other guy’s head with a bowie knife on the Greyhound bus right in front of everybody? Crazy fuckin’ story, totally worth googling. I think the guy’s name is Vincent Li.
Armin Meiwes, a cannibal, is also worth googling.
Here’s a poem I wrote about six months ago:
Dumb, Impotent
I want to write some verse to show my love
My passions pure and durable, but damn!
Analysis alone, it's mute to prove
What sentiment has wrought inside a man.
In fantasy I dream my art pours out
Like music, sweet, articulate and so
Does banish from my love's mind any doubt.
My clumsy songs, half stiff, are yet sung true.
The poet's craft is honed and can express
Affection 'fore its object's manifest,
But doggerel of brutes can only stand
If vouched for by the muse that did command.
And, so, my love alone can validate
The words for her alone I do create.
My air's obscure, but if she breath it then
My song will flow despite my barren pen.
I would’ve also posted an old crossword puzzle that I made years ago (it was very clever and entertaining!), but it was on paper and I don’t have a scanner.
I had planned on writing a really good blog entry today about a recurring nightmare I have in which I shoot somebody, but I just don’t have any energy and can’t articulate it well enough. I’m at a shooting range that looks like the inside of a very large garage. My shooting lane is set up so that my target is just to the left of an open door, just like a door that might connect a garage to a kitchen in a house. But instead of a kitchen, through the open door is a huge lobby or atrium, like what might be at the center of a giant mall or hotel or museum but even more huge. And the lobby or whatever it is is extremely brightly lit, radiant, and white (the garage is lit dimly, like a typical garage). Far away, in the middle of what I can see of the lobby (I’m 30 plus feet away from the open door, and so my view of the lobby is limited to its center), are some tables, chairs and a couple of diners like it was a really fancy (and very sparsely crowded) food court. There is nothing between the doorway and the diners except the bright, white floor of the lobby, and the diners are so far away that I can just barely make out that they are, in fact, people dining. I think to myself, “This is the stupidest place ever to put a shooting lane…if I were to shoot a few degrees to the right, I’d be shooting through that doorway right at those people…why would they put a shooting range next to a museum…why’s the fucking door open, etc.?” I think to myself that I should switch lanes, but when I look back toward the counter behind me and to my left, where I got the gun and the ammo, the guy who gave me the stuff was gone. I look to my right: to the right of the open doorway are other lanes and other shooters, their backs and shoulders to me, wearing their ear-protecting headphones and loading or aiming, focused on their shooting. Nobody seems to think the open door is a problem. I think to myself that the open door really isn’t a problem so long as I don't shoot through it. I’m not the greatest shot, but I am confident that, even if I were to miss my target completely, I could manage to keep my fire within my own lane. I know for sure that I can avoid shooting through the open doorway. I think about the theoretical possibility that someone could bump into me suddenly or I could have a stroke, something could conceivably cause me to fuck up. But there’s no one around except the shooters to my right, and they couldn’t bump into me because I’d see them coming at me first. I’m not going to have a stroke. The risk is so small that I’d be a coward to not shoot for fear of accidentally shooting through the doorway. I put on my headphones and look down my lane at my target. The wall on which it’s mounted looks like every other wall in the garage/shooting range – that is, made of drywall and two-by-fours. Surely, I think to myself, there is some heavy-duty reinforcing barrier on the other side of that garage-wall looking wall. I don’t understand why the drywall and two-by-fours are even there if there’s concrete or steel or whatever behind the wall, but I look over toward the other shooters and the wall they’re shooting at looks the same as mine (indeed, our parallel lanes all terminate at different sections of the very same wall). I begin shooting and am carried away for a while in fun. I’m shooting well…I can see my bullets’ holes appearing in my target and I’m getting close to bulls-eyes. After a little while, I feel something is wrong and I take off my headphones. I notice that my fellow shooters are gone and that I'm alone in the garage. I see and hear distant commotion in the lobby. I vaguely see people bustling around one of the diners, who looks like he’s slumped over forward in his chair with his head and face on the table and an arm hanging limp. The commotion continues, and I realize that he’s been shot. Panic washes over me. I highly suspect that I have just shot him, and I know for sure that people will think that I just shot him. I look around, once again registering the fact that I’m alone. I think back to the guy at the counter who rented me the gun, where is he? I think back to what he looked like, I realize that I can’t remember his face. He wore a t-shirt, and I think he had longish hair. I look around for an office, any sign of activity, any exit through which people might have gone. Goddamn those morons, I think, I am not going to take the blame for this! Whatever happened, this is their fuck-up, not mine! Those fucking idiots should have never placed me here; I have to find them quickly, put this mess on them. It occurs to me that even when I find them I'm still going to be in a lot of shit. Then it occurs to me that finding them would be the best-case scenario, that right now there’s nobody with whom to even share the blame. My panic is fused with anger; I vibrate, burn with hatred for the range’s owners, employees, whoever was involved in this business, people I can’t punish or even identify. My rage begins to give way to helplessness, I don’t know what to do, and then I wake up.
If you haven’t already seen it, I’d check out “Hitler Plans Burning Man” on youtube. And “Shoes”. Both are very funny.
Did you hear about that guy in Canada about a year ago who cut off the other guy’s head with a bowie knife on the Greyhound bus right in front of everybody? Crazy fuckin’ story, totally worth googling. I think the guy’s name is Vincent Li.
Armin Meiwes, a cannibal, is also worth googling.
Here’s a poem I wrote about six months ago:
Dumb, Impotent
I want to write some verse to show my love
My passions pure and durable, but damn!
Analysis alone, it's mute to prove
What sentiment has wrought inside a man.
In fantasy I dream my art pours out
Like music, sweet, articulate and so
Does banish from my love's mind any doubt.
My clumsy songs, half stiff, are yet sung true.
The poet's craft is honed and can express
Affection 'fore its object's manifest,
But doggerel of brutes can only stand
If vouched for by the muse that did command.
And, so, my love alone can validate
The words for her alone I do create.
My air's obscure, but if she breath it then
My song will flow despite my barren pen.
I would’ve also posted an old crossword puzzle that I made years ago (it was very clever and entertaining!), but it was on paper and I don’t have a scanner.
I had planned on writing a really good blog entry today about a recurring nightmare I have in which I shoot somebody, but I just don’t have any energy and can’t articulate it well enough. I’m at a shooting range that looks like the inside of a very large garage. My shooting lane is set up so that my target is just to the left of an open door, just like a door that might connect a garage to a kitchen in a house. But instead of a kitchen, through the open door is a huge lobby or atrium, like what might be at the center of a giant mall or hotel or museum but even more huge. And the lobby or whatever it is is extremely brightly lit, radiant, and white (the garage is lit dimly, like a typical garage). Far away, in the middle of what I can see of the lobby (I’m 30 plus feet away from the open door, and so my view of the lobby is limited to its center), are some tables, chairs and a couple of diners like it was a really fancy (and very sparsely crowded) food court. There is nothing between the doorway and the diners except the bright, white floor of the lobby, and the diners are so far away that I can just barely make out that they are, in fact, people dining. I think to myself, “This is the stupidest place ever to put a shooting lane…if I were to shoot a few degrees to the right, I’d be shooting through that doorway right at those people…why would they put a shooting range next to a museum…why’s the fucking door open, etc.?” I think to myself that I should switch lanes, but when I look back toward the counter behind me and to my left, where I got the gun and the ammo, the guy who gave me the stuff was gone. I look to my right: to the right of the open doorway are other lanes and other shooters, their backs and shoulders to me, wearing their ear-protecting headphones and loading or aiming, focused on their shooting. Nobody seems to think the open door is a problem. I think to myself that the open door really isn’t a problem so long as I don't shoot through it. I’m not the greatest shot, but I am confident that, even if I were to miss my target completely, I could manage to keep my fire within my own lane. I know for sure that I can avoid shooting through the open doorway. I think about the theoretical possibility that someone could bump into me suddenly or I could have a stroke, something could conceivably cause me to fuck up. But there’s no one around except the shooters to my right, and they couldn’t bump into me because I’d see them coming at me first. I’m not going to have a stroke. The risk is so small that I’d be a coward to not shoot for fear of accidentally shooting through the doorway. I put on my headphones and look down my lane at my target. The wall on which it’s mounted looks like every other wall in the garage/shooting range – that is, made of drywall and two-by-fours. Surely, I think to myself, there is some heavy-duty reinforcing barrier on the other side of that garage-wall looking wall. I don’t understand why the drywall and two-by-fours are even there if there’s concrete or steel or whatever behind the wall, but I look over toward the other shooters and the wall they’re shooting at looks the same as mine (indeed, our parallel lanes all terminate at different sections of the very same wall). I begin shooting and am carried away for a while in fun. I’m shooting well…I can see my bullets’ holes appearing in my target and I’m getting close to bulls-eyes. After a little while, I feel something is wrong and I take off my headphones. I notice that my fellow shooters are gone and that I'm alone in the garage. I see and hear distant commotion in the lobby. I vaguely see people bustling around one of the diners, who looks like he’s slumped over forward in his chair with his head and face on the table and an arm hanging limp. The commotion continues, and I realize that he’s been shot. Panic washes over me. I highly suspect that I have just shot him, and I know for sure that people will think that I just shot him. I look around, once again registering the fact that I’m alone. I think back to the guy at the counter who rented me the gun, where is he? I think back to what he looked like, I realize that I can’t remember his face. He wore a t-shirt, and I think he had longish hair. I look around for an office, any sign of activity, any exit through which people might have gone. Goddamn those morons, I think, I am not going to take the blame for this! Whatever happened, this is their fuck-up, not mine! Those fucking idiots should have never placed me here; I have to find them quickly, put this mess on them. It occurs to me that even when I find them I'm still going to be in a lot of shit. Then it occurs to me that finding them would be the best-case scenario, that right now there’s nobody with whom to even share the blame. My panic is fused with anger; I vibrate, burn with hatred for the range’s owners, employees, whoever was involved in this business, people I can’t punish or even identify. My rage begins to give way to helplessness, I don’t know what to do, and then I wake up.
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Rainbows Are Stupid And Boring
I know a non-verbal, autistic boy named Bernie who signs "I'm sorry" right before he tries to hit you in the face. People make fun of Bernie; they claim that the unorthodox timing of his apologies reveals not only his confusion but also his lack of sincerity. But I always appreciate his silent expressions of empathy, and not merely because they're so useful in helping one to brace for/defend against the outburst to come. Indeed, to me it is post-trespass contrition that seems so facile.
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Mission Statement
Turning Worm Manifesto (hereafter, “TWM”) is a platform from which voices of uncommon wisdom and sobriety may critique artificial paradigms and collapse factitious distinctions. Although TWM respects the inherent validity of all opinions, it does not seek to dignify or perpetuate viewpoints involving bullshit, bilious humor or humbuggery of any sort. Such viewpoints may be published from time to time but only for the purpose of exposing them to public scorn and ridicule. TWM is strong like ox and smart like tractor but humbled by its own towering greatness. TWM is guided by the following principles:
First, for purposes of playing Reauchambeau (aka “rock/scissors/paper”), Chevy El Camino is to Ford Ranchero as Ford Ranchero is to GMC Caballero as GMC Caballero is to Chevy El Camino.
Second, lies are metaphors for the truth.
Third, when applying condiments to sandwich bread, it's worth the extra time and trouble to make sure that the condiment is spread evenly across the entire surface of the slice of bread (thus ensuring that the condiment’s flavor will be tasted in every bite of the sandwich).
Fourth, math is okay but science is total bullshit.
Fifth, there are six and only six categories of human faces: the bird face, the horse face, the muffin face, the bird/horse hybrid, the horse/muffin hybrid, and the muffin/bird hybrid.
Sixth, neither the Freemasons, the Illuminati, the Rosicrucians, the Gnomes of Zurich, the Rotarians, nor the Amish exist and so there's no point in blaming anything on them or inquiring into their activities any further.
Seventh, although the cliché inheres to its being said again and again, the proof is rarely in the pudding.
Eighth, the most bling-bling name is “RoLexus,” yo, and the most street name is “Dirty Dawgg.”
Ninth, delusions of adequacy can be every bit as pleasant as delusions of grandeur.
Tenth, while corporate entities should retain their economic speech rights, they should be denied the right to free political speech (and the concomitant right to contribute money to political causes and candidates); moreover, such an approach would be consistent with existing jurisprudence.
In sum, TWM is dedicated to calling the citizenry’s attention to this most stern and universal of judgments:
“Yea, as the worm turneth, so must shall ye reap!”,
a warning found not only in the Bible and the Koran but in the holy books of all peoples. Let humanity take note lest our fate become irrevocable, our hope irretrievable. Let us take heed before it’s too late.
-- posted by TWM editorial board (hereafter, “The Worm”), with the approval of both the Thomastic Committee and the Gregorian Council and the ratification of the Cyberpress Society of Rotenberg, on this twelfth day of July, 2009.
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