Lead Paint Blues

Short and Uninteresting on Its Face, but an Intriguing Idea Nonetheless

2012-01-05T20:09:00.000-05:00

So I haven't posted anything in quite a long time, because I very well may be the laziest person alive.

It's not for a lack of imagination. As Mike D once said "I got a million ideas that I ain't even rocked yet." Tis true. Sometimes so much crap gets filed in my nugget that I don't really know where to begin. So I don't begin with any of it. I probably oughta change that. That change is going to begin now.

I have an idea for a story that I've been mulling over for a couple weeks now, and I need to sit down and outline it and then start writing it. And I'm going to post what I write, bits and pieces at a time, so y'all can follow along at home and tell what blows about it. I'll do the outline now, then start writing the damn thing this weekend. This endeavour also involves research. Fun.

2011-11-05T15:37:00.000-04:00

Here's the link to my screenplay, that I done did wrote like 4 years ago and did nothin' wit. Actually, a real live college professor and professional screenwriter named Denis Paoli read it, made notes, and overall liked it. He said I probably over-reached a tad with the physical scope of it. Most first time screenwriters only get their films made in the low budget realm, and since mine has some big 'splosions and a a car crash or four, plus a helicopter climax, well, the chances are slim....

And as real as I tried to make the characters sound, there's some speechifying to be had.

Here's the link

http://bit.ly/tkKkCN

Fire it up!

Can't We All Just Get Along? or Please Don't Make Me Neckpunch You

2011-10-12T19:00:00.000-04:00

Holy crap am I really this lazy? Yes I am. And it's a shame, since I never seem to have a dearth of unbridled self-righteous fury spouting forth. It's a bitch and a half that I can't make audio posts of my conversations with myself from behind the wheel of my car. I've talked to myself for years, and there aren't any bodies in the basement, so piss off if you think I'm a wacko.

What has my unbridled fury been directed at lately? The usual suspects of course--recalcitrant Republicans, the ass-fakery of the Tea Party(seriously, does anyone STILL think this is a "peoples" movement, and not some corporate shill masquerade?), big business that seems to get away with murder, figuratively, and most likely literally. And don't get me started on the lack of civility in public discourse.

Listen, we can talk if we don't agree. Hell, we don't even have to like each other. And the likelihood of changing one another's minds is just this side of nil. But I will calmly and graciously, without interruption, let you say whatever dumbass shit you believe in, let you make your case, and you will do the same for me. I will walk away muttering under my breath that you are a fucking moron, but I would rather know exactly where you stand and maintain a level of mutual if begrudging respect for each other's opinions. I may attack your belief systems point by point, but I won't ever attack you.

Unless you attack me first. Then I will probably call you a retard.

I digress. What really bothers me, and I'm way late to the game in this, since there is something new to be outraged about every 15 minutes nowadays, is the blind reactionary vitriol that a good portion of numbskulls want to engage in when confronted with truths they don't like.

And this has never been more evident than the Republican debates. Seriously, cheering the death of someone because they can't afford healthcare, because "government is too damn big," whatever the fuck that means? My sincerest hope isn't that any of those people loses their job and their healthcare benefits of that job and then gets hit by a bus on the way home from the unemployment office, bleeding out in the gutter while onlookers point and laugh at the asshole without healthcare. Because that would just be cruel. No, I only wish that one day, may a camel shit in your hat, because that seems like a reasonable price to pay for being an asshole. No matter how much I despise you, the worst I can wish for you is that you have a really shitty day, just once in a while. Camel crap in your chapeau ain't so bad compared to choosing between your diabetes medicine and dinner for your kids.

Point 2. Booing the gay soldier? Really, fucksticks? They guy joined the military to serve his country, or at bare minimum worst, find a way to help pay for college, and you give him shit for wanting to share his feelings about who he loves? I've got news for you, Slick, there have been TONS of gay people in the military going back forever, because, guess what, there have been TONS of gay people going back forever. They aren't there for the unlimited cock buffet that surely must be going on during the mountains of free time they have all through basic and specialist training, not to mention the HUGE WWI trench orgies we always read about in our history books. They're there for the same reason people run for Congress--to avoid getting a real job. Just kidding. The military is a real job. Congress, I'm not so sure about. You know how McDonald's uses picture menus now since they have a hard time hiring literate applicants? I'm pretty sure Congress has picture pieces of legislation. Explains the popularity of PowerPoint....

(And as a minor sidenote, let women serve in active duty on the front. I've gotten punched by more than one woman in my life, and believe you me, they hit harder than guys, and are unrelentingly vicious when angry. I've had to pry a cable remote out of the drywall twice in my life. I'm pretty sure they can handle insurgents.)

Remember, these guys are physically defending the country some of you chuckleheads seem so intent on wrecking.

Some jackoffs like Rick Santorum have moral objections to gays in the military, because it "goes against nature." Because nerve gas, drone attacks, shooting other people in the face, and setting villages full of women and children on fire don't go against nature at all.

You know how there are pharmacists who are evangelical Christians who refuse to fill birth control prescriptions, based on their religious beliefs? I think it's time people like Rick Santorum stood tall and backed up their rhetoric with some belief in action. My proposal--if Rick Santorum or any of the other gay bashers ever has a heart attack or is hit by a bus and is bleeding out in the gutter, he should first assess whether his EMT is straight or gay. And if he is gay, Santorum should, out of principle, refuse care and die. And not because I want to see him dead. But because it would be the first truly principled thing I would've seen him do.

My apologies for this making no sense whatsoever--it's clearly been awhile since I've written anything.

I'll be back sooner than later, pinky swear.

The Riddle of Mystery Island

2011-07-08T08:33:00.000-04:00

I've been reading Simon Pegg's NERD DO WELL lately, and I've seen a couple of movies as of late that all sort of correlate to my life as a moviegoing chump, and how I'm getting older, what all these notions and things mean, bleh bleh bleh, and so on. What it means is I'm going to write cranky shite about the "good old days."

You know, the good old days? Having to wait til your mom could drive you to the video store to rent DOCTOR BUTCHER MD, which meant you waited WEEKS to see it, and when you finally did, it wasn't even remotely as awesome and disgusting as the box art made it out to be(VHS manufacturers had the "bait and switch" down better than any two-bit carny I ever ran into). Getting punched in the head and called "fag" by hulking jocks for dressing like a faggoty faggot. Said homo-wear usually consisted of jeans, Vans, and a Black Flag t-shirt--did I ever tell you I was supergay? Like, I would prance around and WHAM's CARELESS WHISPER would come swelling up and I would make rainbow unicorn laserbeams fly from my perfectly manicured fingertips. Cuz gays have superpowers, like the ability to convert strapping young straight football lumberjacks into mincing French poetry spouting sissies(you're welcome, Michelle Bachman). Such is the power of Black Flag t-shirts. I kid. WHAM may have included one active homosexual, but POISON was definitely gayer. I would be way more afraid of George Michael in a street fight than CC DeVille. At least he could grow facial hair and was smart enough to know that only Chachi Arcola could rock a bandanna around the thigh and look tough--probably because his bandanna wasn't hot pink. What was the point of this, beyond overstating how bad I had it in high school, and getting in a few cheap analogies about gays? And for the record, sorry gay people, I ain't trying to offend--in fact, I think gays are way cooler than straight people. You're way more accepting of straights' wickedly horrible fashion sense and inability to refrain from destroying that which they fear, than they are of your desire to love someone, whomever it may be. Here's your pulpit back, thanks.

So, really Rob, what does this have to do with Simon Pegg, TOXIC AVENGER, SUPER 8, and HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN? Well, fucker, everything.

See, Simon Pegg and I are of contemporaneous ages. That's a really snooty way of saying we're around the same age. I think. I'm not entirely sure I used contemporaneous in the right way, but it sounded good at the time, so I'm sticking with it. So, here's this famous British guy and I, growing up in the same era roughly, both living parallel nerd lives. Due to his natural charisma and unflinching desire to "do stuff," he distilled his love for zombie movies, STAR WARS, comedy and music into a pretty lucrative and artistically interesting career. I, on the other hand, due to my natural ability to offend people just by my mere existence and wearing of t-shirts, watched and loved the same things as Pegg, became an expert at masturbation at an early age.

Which brings me back to DOCTOR BUTCHER MD, after a fashion. See, nowadays, I would NEVER rent DOCTOR BUTCHER MD of my own volition. I'd look it up on IMDB, see that the box art is one grand lie, and I'd move on to something hopefully better. But whereas most would see this as a boon to my movie watching love, I see it as the utmost detriment. See, watching endless hours of similar cinematic horseshit made finding EVIL DEAD and other incredible feats of movieosity seem like getting to kiss the smart, funny, pretty girl in a room full of ignorant hags. Yes, I just equated a gory horror movie with smooching a cutie. I decided a couple years back that women fell into two categories--women who know EVIL DEAD is pure genius, and women I will never give the pleasure of my prodigious and long lasting lovemaking skills. Remember, I spent my teens(and 20s and 30s) masturbating, so I got pretty good at the stamina thing. Again, off topic, and I've said far more than necessary.

Short story long, I watched a lot of really crappy movies, which made the good ones legendary in my mind. It's what elevated TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, HORROR OF DRACULA, THEM! et al to capital A Art. And a key part of this equation, from the truly awful to the massively genius, was an undeniable element of mystery--as consumers, we only knew so much about these movies, from the small 1/8 page ads in the local paper to surreptitious glimpses in the FANGORIA at the newsstand(no way mom was gonna let me buy that). The proof really WAS in the proverbial pudding, or red-dyed Karo syrup, to be more thematically specific.

Nowadays, absolutely everything, from script notes to production still to storyboards to the catering menu for movies is all available online way before the movie ever makes it to the local megamallmultiplex-o-rama in 9 D XXXTRA Dimensional Sight Sound Smell and TasteVision. It's a consumer product that has all the life drained from it before you ever get to enjoy it. Not to say that there aren't great movies being made, because there are shit-tons out there that are. But we never need to type or utter the phrase "spoiler alert" ever again, since everything around a movie's production and distribution is one big spoiler alert. Regardless of the fact the "spoiler alert" ranks up there with "TMI" and "talk to the hand" in the pantheon of completely obnoxious cultural catchphrases. People who use them should be shot in the face with a shotgun.

I try to remain as culturally unaware of new movies as I possibly can be, to maintain that mystery from my youth. And sometimes it actually works, and most of the times the movies are worth it. Case in point? HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN and SUPER 8. One whose title plainly states the entirety of its cosmology in 4 words, the other as enigmatic as its publicity campaign. Guess which one is which. Here's where those simple math skills come in handy. Who says public schools are dysfunctional?

I wanted to watch HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN as soon as I heard the title. I didn't care what it was about, because I already knew two key elements. A hobo. A shotgun. Throw in a boob shot, and I'm there.

I ain't gonna go into much plot detail, since I don't want to include any spoiler alerts(see what I did right there? Ha!). Suffice it to say that HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN is probably the most self-explanatory movie title since another movie with a self-explanatory movie title. A hobo has a shotgun. He's the nominal hero of the film. There's also a hooker with a heart of gold, a pedophilic Santa, gang thugs who look like Tom Cruise in RISKY BUSINESS, a vicious ice skate stabbing(stabbing someone with an ice skate, not an ice skate getting stabbed, dumbass--damn public schools!), and a beheading that involves a manhole cover and barbed wire. This ain't KINDERGARTEN COP. It almost makes TOXIC AVENGER look like a Merchant-Ivory period melodrama. Almost. Toxie will always hold a special place in my heart.

On the other hand we have SUPER 8, as enigmatic a title as you can get. Not to mention extremely self-reflexive. It's a movie about making movies. Meta, yo! It's set in the late 70s/early 80s of my youth, and involves preteen boys' love of movies, monsters, models, and preteen girls(sorry, I failed on the continuation of the alliteration. Although I DID swing a little rhyme into that apology--see what I did right there? Ha!) It takes various elements of ALIEN, JAWS, ET, RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, GREMLINS, and every other PG/PG-13 movie we marveled at as kids and evokes the era with heart, but without resorting to nostalgia or sentiment. That's all I'll say.

That is about as much as I knew about it, because they kept the marketing campaign very limited and enigmatic, because the director understood that part of the reason so many of us love movies is the magic they inspire in our hearts. Watch it and be amazed at how you feel like a kid again, because you weren't spoonfed everything beforehand. And stay off the IMDB. There's something to be said for not being a know-it-all, "so hip I was over it before it was even made" jackass. Get wide-eyed and just enjoy the shit out of it!

Got my mop and my tutu--Toxie, I'm comin'!

You Ain't Funny

2011-04-06T13:29:00.001-04:00

I've been working at stand-up comedy for just shy of a year now, off and on, since I am many things. Above all, I'm a dad, albeit a relatively part time one. Still every other weekend is solely dedicated to the pursuit of fun with the boy, so that trims out a goodly chunk of time for jokes. Secondly, I gotta a woman and she likes to enjoy some of my time on occasion, at least the times I am not strapped to the toilet seat with a horror movie magazine in my lap. What can I say, I like fiber and bacon in equal amounts.

Also, there's that little hiccup we all call a job. Now mind you, my job isn't really difficult, but it does require copious amounts of driving on large swaths of open road, which really ain't conducive to writing jokes down. I do record some bits on my phone, but my brain is usually more occupied with attempting to steer clear of tractor trailers and stupid women who can't seem to grasp that if they woke up 5 minutes earlier, they would have time to apply makeup at home, rather than behind the wheel of their Hyundai Elantra, the one they are about the wrap around a guardrail.

So I don't hit a lot of open mics, and I don't do it as frequently as I probably should if I want to get better at it at a faster rate. And I started a little late in the game--I'm 39, close in age to many successful "people of humor" that I've admired for years--Louis CK, Janeane Garafolo, Patton Oswalt, the folks from THE STATE, et al. It's one of those things I've contemplated for years, thinking, "yeah, that's probably the thing I would be good at, if I could get off my ass and try it."

And that is also part of the problem. Comedy in the 90s, to me, was how rock music appeared to the punks of the 70s. It looked like a hell of a lot of fun, and shit, that is something I could do, but where do you start? They all seem so, well, PROFESSIONAL. For more details on that feeling, read Michael Azerrad's OUR BAND COULD BE YOUR LIFE. Guys like Mike Watt and Ian MacKaye say they had the same feeling at concerts--rock music was awesome to listen to, it seemed like a fun and powerful way to express oneself, but how the hell do you break into it? Instruments ain't cheap, you need talent, a place to practice, etc. Now, they had the fortitude and willpower to say "Fuck that" and jumped in feet first and created their own damn thing. And supportive parents probably helped a tad bit in that department too....

My parents encouraged very linear thinking, and I don't blame them for that--my mom grew up dirt poor at the tail end of the Depression, with a Dad who liked booze more than his family. My dad grew up exceedingly middle class in the mid-50s/early-60s, when parents started expecting their kids to be more successful than themselves. So I had a mom who sought security in having everything mapped out and planned ahead, and a dad who actually did have everything mapped out and planned ahead. Circuitous routes of thinking and behaviour would have to be learned and actively pursued.

Admittedly, I am a hellish amalgamation of linear and circuitous thinking. I tend to use one when the other would be more appropriate. I manage my money through ATM receipts. Why take one trip to the hardware store when you can make 4? I love playing music, and would love to whip out some hot funk bass licks, throw down some crazy 7/4 time changes into a song, but always seem to rewrite Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap or the bass intro to For Whom the Bell Tolls. I'm like an eternal foal--knowing full well I have these great legs that will take me far, if I could just figure out how to get them the hell under me. It's carrying a garbage bag full of packing peanuts in a windstorm. Without the bag.

Post-puberty, my scattershot ability to focus on any one thing, combined with a slightly pathological need to have people pay attention to me, led me down many a dead end path. I chased after unattainable females, entangled myself with attainable females that were attainable to me for a reason, and generally wasting a lot of my energy and time trying to fit in to a niche where I could feel comfortable. But I never really felt comfortable in those niches. Which is where your typical comic resides--digging your dirty finger into the discomfort--yours and others'--onstage.

And the stupid thing is, I would watch countless hours of comedy in college. MTV's HALF HOUR COMEDY HOUR. HBO specials. THE STATE. KIDS IN THE HALL. Obsessing endlessly over my old George Carlin, Bill Cosby, and Robin Williams cassettes. Yes, cassettes. I had the routines MEMORIZED, and would recite them to people in an effort to seem witty and urbane. Usually, they just elicited blank stares uncomfortable glances around the room for someone, anyone that they knew to get them away from this frenetic wackjob harshing their buzz. It just never dawned on me that I could write my own shit, get on a stage, and people would listen and laugh, maybe just a little. If I woulda figured out a way in, who knows, maybe I'd be famous and doing the voice of a cartoon wombat for a multinational corporation?

About a year and a half ago, I finally got the guts to say "Fuck this. I'm funny. I can do this." And so I did. I got in touch with a guy who was running a "night of confessional comedy" at a local art gallery. People read from their childhood journals, people recounted endless heartbreak, they poured their guts out to varying comedic and cathartic effect. I talked about the two times in my adult life that I shit my pants. Click this to refresh your memory.

http://leadpaintblues.blogspot.com/2009/04/two-times-in-my-adult-life-that-i-shit.html

One of the other folks was a pro comic, Mike Storck. Check him out, he's way funnier than me and a whole lot of other people. Especially the TweetyBird tramp stamp joke. Well, Mike said to me after, "Hey, you're funny. You've got good timing. If you can write jokes the way you tell stories, you could do standup." Fuck, seriously? THAT is all I need to tell jokes? A guy on a street corner, in the cold? No secret handshake, backroom deals, massive purchase of equipment, promotional materials, or the need to collaborate with four other marginally functional humans to make it happen(being in a band is like being in an abusive relationship with 4 other emotional toddlers--I'm not entirely sure why I keep coming back to it. I love it. However, sometimes capital murder shouldn't be considered a crime but an unlauded benefit to the society at large.)

So it only took me 4 months after that essentially pretty good review from a guy who does it for a living to actually get my ass to an open mic night in Baltimore. And I sucked horribly. And I gave up for two weeks. And I sucked horribly again. Then I performed at a comedy contest and didn't quite suck as bad. I've had good sets, OK sets, sets where I forgot every last one of my jokes, and sets where I remembered all of my jokes and no one laughed anyway. I've had one heckler that I successfully handled. I've had one woman walk out due to a fairly tasteless rape joke--sorry. I've had depressive spells when I haven't gone to an open mic night for a month at a time. I've gone nuts and written 5 pretty good bits in one day. I've nearly given up because friends of mine who have done it slightly longer have already gotten some paid gigs, while I still get stuck in last call slots on open mics at seafood restaurants. But they worked at it, hitting open mics two nights or more a week, every week for months on end. I was thinking just last night that I might quit, but then I got an idea for a joke that just won't quit. That was what this blog post was supposed to be originally. Me hashing out the idea. It turned into this. Damn circuitous thinking.

VHX-stacy Update

2011-04-06T11:05:00.000-04:00

Dude, I'm gonna get back to it. It's hard--I didn't realize how many VHS tapes I had were SLP, the video quality is desperately poor, and makes me feel like I've got cataracts. Plus, a lot of the movies are so interminably bad that I watch them, fall asleep halfway through, and wake up at the end credits, which means I have to RE-WATCH them. Once is enough, my friends. Plus, with awesome movies like INSIDIOUS--highly recommended, especially since I'm usually not that into supernatural horror--and the almighty RUBBER. It's definitely Spring in the air--so many good bad movies! HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN starring the one and only Rutger Hauer tonight! With that title and Senor Hauer as the title character, I don't even care if it actually does suck on an empirical level, because it won't.

MidEvil Times Two!

2011-03-23T09:22:00.001-04:00

So the other movie that I watched wasn't on VHS. Hell, it wasn't even on DVD. Gotta love me some Video OnDemand. And this one had some perfect timing--BLACK DEATH, a new movie about the Black Plague in medieval England. This one just came out in limited theatrical release, but it wasn't playing anywhere in the Baltimore-DC region, which seems to be the way of independent horror films--they play NYC, and Philly occasionally, but never down this way. I guess they assume that since Baltimoreans are essentially LARPing episodes of THE WIRE on a daily basis, we don't need filmic horrificness.... If you don't know what LARPing is, Google it. I ain't got time for handholding, kiddies!

This here BLACK DEATH is starring Sean Bean, Boromir from the LORD OF THE RINGS movies. I think I spelled Boromir right--if I didn't, don't jump all over my ass, you Tolkien loving freaks. Go LARP, or maybe shut off the XBox and take a shower, or listen to the Led Zeppelin, who were HUGE Hobbit lovers(not in that way, I'm pretty sure)--please, nerds, use them as a template for your nerdiness instead of wearing a trenchcoat and drinking Coke straight out of two liter bottles and spilling Cheetos crumbs on your airbrushed blacklight lone wolf t-shirt. The Led Zeppelin got laid, A LOT. And getting laid a lot usually requires engaging another breathing human being with conversation about the world, and by the world I mean the actual one we live in, not the one where you are Chaotic Good and have a satchel full of healing rune stones and a broad sword.

Listen, I'm a nerd, obviously. I get more than my share of blank stares when I talk about bands that maybe 14 people have ever heard of. And my girlfriend, the one who thinks a hot date involves bag of UTZ and EVIL DEAD(why do you think I love her so?), even she can occasionally glaze over at the thought of watching a movie about a possessed tire bent on killing--yes it exists, and it is also currently on the Video OnDemand. I will watch it, with or without her. Crap, I just accidentally paraphrased U2. I hate U2. Almost as much as I despise Sting. I'd rather have hours of rough tantric sex with Sting than listen to any of the twaddle that pompous wang has recorded in the last 30 years. Eck. Not to say that I like rough tantric gay sex--just that, given a choice between that and listening to Zenyatta Mendatta or the Soul Cages, I'll take grabbing my ankles and chanting in Hindi.

All I'm saying is, compromise people. Don't be so geeked out that you can't relate to anyone. I used to do it, and it sucks. Being in a club of one ain't fun, so share yourself, and don't act like a fucking douche when you do it. Unless you like Sting and U2. Then seriously, staying alone is your only option.

Fuck, I think I was writing about a movie, right? Yeah, BLACK DEATH. It's about a band of knights employed by the king to go around and hunt out witches and sorcerors in medieval England. They are tasked with going to this one remote village where the plague hasn't affected the populace, because supposedly a witch made a deal with the devil to keep the village safe. Boromir is the head knight, and he drafts this young monk to help lead the way, since he is familiar with the terrain.

Now, this young monk is having a crisis of faith, since he also has a girlfriend. Pretty sure that was against the rules back then, as it is now. If you believe in those rules, anyway. I remember reading that the Pope back in the day even had a wife, and some kids. Uh, again, I think that is a dealbreaker for G-O-D, last time I checked. And since you're sort of the referee in this game, you probably already knew that. Gee, I wonder why I don't have any faith to speak of, in God or man....

So the kid has a boo, and he sends her off to the woods so they can meet in a couple of days while he shows the knights how to get to the village. He spends a couple days hanging with the knights and getting to know them while they make their way to the village. And they are the usual mixed bag of soldiers--some are doing it out of a sense of service to their God and church, others are in it for the loot so they can take care of their families, others are just sociopathic goons who like to inflict pain, and get an officially sanctioned way to do it.

After a couple days' trek, the monk happens upon a bloodied strip of clothing where he was supposed to meet his young lady love, realizing she has been attacked and most likely killed. Then he and the knights get attacked by a band of thieves. This is where the movie is really stunning.

The battle sequence is the first in a long time that is staged well. The editing is kinetic without devolving into sub-MATRIX trickery, and their are minimal macrozoom shots of the warriors' pores on their left cheek as they stab the bad guys to death. You actually get to see the fighting itself, and it's pretty goddamn brutal, which probably pretty well exemplifies how life and death were back then, and still probably are today, at least when it comes to war.

So they make it to this village by crossing this huge swamp, and the village appears free of the plague. It turns out that the head maiden of the village did make a pact with the devil to spare the village, and so all hell breaks loose(not literally--they actually avoid any and all supernatural intervention, which I was thankful for). Basically the knights and the villagers slaughter each other, with only the witch, the monk, and one knight surviving the battle. Apparently it never dawned on anyone that maybe God didn't have it out for the citizenry of England, or that the devil couldn't protect them from God's wrath, but that the plague was a disease, and that the reason no one in the village got sick is because, who the fuck is gonna cross a big ass swamp in medieval England to hang out with a bunch of filthy European rednecks? Again, there comes that whole faith in humanity thing....

Have to say, BLACK DEATH was incredible. It played the premise deadly seriously, never taking camp shortcuts like SEASON OF THE WITCH, and thankfully didn't resort to supernatural copouts like the end of THE LAST EXORCISM. It uses a horror movie plot, but uses it to tell a pretty thoughtful and engaging story, and it's a damn shame that more people won't see it, since it is too grim and bloody for "cinemaphiles," and too smart for the teen audience most horror movies aim for these days. Good shit. Rent it. I plan on owning this one. Better than Sting!

MidEvil Times! YAH!

2011-03-21T14:34:00.000-04:00

Ch-ch-check it out! This is gonna be a cross-pollinated, new/old, analog/digital hybrid, and I couldn't have done it any better if I had planned it!

In my quest to ruin my ability to have normal human thought patterns and not pee my own pants(as opposed to peeing someone else's pants), I decided to watch a bunch of VHS tapes I had stashed in the basement. Most of them are horrible, and will put me well on the way to drooling and giggling at tin foil. But somehow I got lucky the other day, and happened across a newer copy of THE CONQUEROR WORM, a slightly edited version of Michael Reeve's 60s fright film WITCHFINDER GENERAL, with a definitely inferior to the original and sometimes thoroughly inappropriate musical score. I can understand editing something for content for different foreign markets, like editing shots of a woman's hands and cheekbones out for devout Muslim markets, but the musical score?! Unless the score involves this

or a 5 minute bassoon solo, then leave the damn music alone! Truth be told, I kinda like the Rebecca Black song. It really makes no less sense than anything else in pop music coming out these days--have you ACTUALLY listened to Lil Wayne's lyrics? Aside from being a homophobic midget with bad Sharpie marker prison tattoos who can talk fast, what really separates him from your average unmedicated homeless person? To me, Rebecca Black travels in the same universe of avant garde-ness as Butthole Surfers. I'd buy tickets to that tour!

Back to the task at hand. Here's the cover for the VHS. See you on the other side. Literally. Ha!

In the interests of full disclosure, this is the first major studio VHS that I've watched in years, and only one of a handful in my collection. This one is from 2000AD, and actually has an MGM ad for their website! Yes, Virginia, the internet existed way back in the Y2K. I still have jugs of water and AA batteries in the basement to prove it. Glad they're all dated through 2012. Just in case.

So yeah, the tape quality is wholly unlike EATEN ALIVE or THE SPOOKIES. Thankfully. I thought I mighta had cataracts or something, those looked so bad. This one is a good print, and includes the original super over the top theatrical trailer. Guess they felt like they had to throw in a "special feature" to compete with the then-new DVDs coming out. Impending obsolescence anyone? Sidenote tidbit--David Cronenberg's A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE was the last major market VHS release, although VHS promo copies of the 2009 movie HOUSE OF THE DEVIL were made. Both are highly recommended, by the by, HOUSE OF THE DEVIL being a total awesome throwback to late 70s/early 80s horror movies!

Again, back to the flick. It's awesome. I mean, fuck, it's got Vincent Price. That alone means it's better than pretty much every movie ever made that didn't feature Vincent Price. I'm looking at you, THE KING'S SPEECH. What other man could rock a pageboy haircut and still be a total badass? That's right motherfucker, no one. Except maybe RuPaul, and I'm disqualifying RuPaul, because I can. My pool, my rules.

I always find it funny that people say Vincent Price was a hammy actor, but I think he just took a lot of larger than life roles that benefited from a slightly arch, more theatrical style. Sure, his roles in movies like THE ABOMINABLE DR. PHIBES and HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL were pretty campy, but I think his characterizations in HOUSE OF WAX and MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH were pretty understated and nuanced, more than Price got credit for.

He certainly isn't Johnny Depp--Mr. Depp either non-acts, like in DEAD MAN(I still kinda can't stand Jim Jarmusch--his movies are all "cool," and in the interviews I've seen/read, he seems kinda like a artsy douche. Fuck him. Although he gets points for putting Iggy Pop in DEAD MAN--only woulda been better if he chose Vincent Price. Still, eat a bag of dicks, Jim.) or he Jack Sparrows the fuck out of a role. I've only seen part of one of the Pirates of the Carribean movies, and ridden the ride when I was 6, but I'm pretty sure I enjoyed robot Abe Lincoln more than both combined.

Most people would classify CONQUEROR WORM as a horror movie, but I think that might turn some people off of it, because I think it has way more depth than your average guy-in-a-monster-suit flick(though don't discount them, either). I think of it more as a horrific movie--there's no supernatural element, no scary boogeymen, psycho rednecks. Just craven bureaucrats with underhanded agendas who wreak havoc on innocent people, and make bystanders implicit in their nefarious bargains. It definintely has resonance in this political climate. Like this one is any different than those of the past. I think you can draw a direct line of toxic political discourse going all the way back to the time Og vetoed Thog by bashing him over the head with a rock. Humans are awesome.

It's a beautifully shot film, good characters portrayed pretty well by most of the cast, and decent pacing all the way through. And the ending is pretty bleak. Yeah, no CONQUEROR WORM 2: THE SUCKENING.

Again, this got longer than I anticipated when I started, so the rest is gonna be another blog post later today or tomorrow. I gotta go buy those little furniture feet cups so the couch doesn't scoot along the floor anymore. I know. Party fuckin' animal. And since I've given no indication as to how this is a two pronged attack of awesomeness, I'll leave it as a cliffhanger. But don't just sit here hitting REFRESH. I might be at the store awhile.

Twosday!

2011-03-17T12:57:00.001-04:00

Yep, two for the price of one today. I was gonna go for "Twofer Thursday," but that pun made no sense at all, and I didn't want anyone to bitch at me. Although, of the four or so of you that read this, only Saresse calls me out. And that is only ever due to misspellings, punctuation, and poor typing skills(and even shittier proofreading skills) on my part. And Saresse, you're welcome. Your name is now on the Internets. You'll be as famous as Snooki any day now. Really, you're welcome.

So, things moviewise have improved in the catacombs of Castle Rob. I watched another two that I've never seen before, but were both familiar to me over the course of my horror-movie lovin' past.

First up, EATEN ALIVE, by none other than Leatherface's daddy hisself, Tobe Hooper. Now, Tobe Hooper never really seemed to live up to the potential he showed in TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE. His recent output has been less than stellar--FUNHOUSE, made for TV crap, remakes of shitty movies to begin with, etc. Yeah, he also directed POLTERGEIST, but it's pretty readily apparent that producer Steven Pedo-berg--er, Spielberg--probably just told him what to do.

Back in the mid-1980s, I remember Fangoria magazine ranting and raving about how his movie LIFEFORCE was gonna be a major comeback for him. And I really did believe the hype--I mean, a Tobe Hooper movie about space vampires coming to Earth, written by the guy who helped spawn ALIEN and RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD, starring the guy who played Manson in HELTER SKELTER?! Fuck yeah, I'm fucking down for that! But endless delays, incredibly horrid overacting, totally unconvincing special effects and an edited print in the US lead to it stinking on ice.

In the intervening years of his creative dropoff, he did manage to make EATEN ALIVE, which according to the box art, stars old Freddy Kreuger himself, Robert Englund. This VHS tape was obviously released in the late 80s, at the height of Freddymanai, since Englund really only has a bit part in EATEN ALIVE as a rape-minded bayou redneck. Are there any other kind? Now go read the box and gawk at the superlative postering skills of some unnamed hack. That's quality shit right there. You can't Photoshop pure gold like that, kids....

I'm going to write this assuming y'all have seen the original TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE. If you haven't, stop being a fucking dummy and go watch it. Like, right now.

That was an amazing movie, right? And did you notice, Dan Fielding of TV's NIGHT COURT did the narration? No shit, John Laroquette. Talk about your auspicious career beginnings. Either way, TCM is one of the best movies ever. Take that, TITANIC. Your mom sucks cocks in bus stop bathrooms.

EATEN ALIVE has a shit ton in common with TCM thematically, plotwise, and aesthetically. Both are extremely grimy looking, like you're watching it while sitting in a tub full of dirty bath water in a third world country's Burger King men's room, and you've got a bleeding hangnail. Yeah, dirty. They both concern backwoods psychos who have REALLY motherfucking unwieldy ways of disposing of interlopers. Leatherface and Co. used a chainsaw, Neville Brand's sleazy war-addled innkeeper uses a pet crocodile. Yep, a crocodile, not an alligator, which actually would be native to the bayous of the South. He even goes so far as to point out that fact to one of his victims! Discovery Channel has nothing on this movie, as far as the scientific tidbits go.

The nominal heroine of TCM is played by Marilyn Burns, who is seemingly endlessly tortured by Leatherface and his family. The "dinner" scene alone is only about 4 minutes, but goddamn if it doesn't feel like 45 hours. She doesn't display any courage or fighting spirit. In fact, she ends up a blood-covered, brain-fried ranting lunatic at the climax. She really only survives due to a base will to live and bucketloads of dumb luck.

Guess what? She kinda gets to reprise the role in this movie. Her character's story arc is almost identical to the one in TCM. She even jumps out a window after a harrowing torture, and is rescued by a guy driving by in a car. Uncanny. Upon further reflection, I think Tobe Hooper mighta kinda hated Ms. Burns, and just cast her in these movies so he could passively-aggressively beat the crap outta her. Poor girl.

I forgot to mention one thing about all this. The VHS tape in question is an SLP tape. For SuperLongPlay. Back in the days before 1's and 0's, you could record in 3 different formats--SP, LP, and SLP. SP gives you better quality, but you can only cram about 2 hours of stuff onto a tape. LP was slightly lower quality, but you got 4 hours o' playtime. And SLP? Well, you could get 6 WHOLE HOURS on a tape, but everything looked like you have filmed 6 hours of a bowl of Campbell's Tomato Vegetable Alphabet soup. Shadier VHS companies would release stuff on SLP, so they could save money by fobbing absolute horseshit quality videotapes off on an unsuspecting public. And boy, lemme tell you what, EATEN ALIVE totally qualifies.

I actually really liked the movie. What I could see of it, anyway. The colors were so muddy and muddled, any scenes that took place in the dark, the screen was totally blank. And I seriously could see so little of the background, I couldn't tell if the movie was filmed on location or on sets. Once you get literally no more than 10 feet behind the focus of a scene, it looked like a blood and mudsoaked sheet hanging on a clothesline in a tornado, played at 1/4 speed. How's that for a colorful metaphor? Fuck yeah, I gots an English degree!

EATEN ALIVE is horribly overacted by pretty much everyone involved, including the lady who played Morticia Addams in the ADDAMS FAMILY TV show, as the world's frumpiest, most matronly madame ever. But honestly, it totally adds to the movie's nightmare carnival feel. Disconcerting in the best possible way.

The only real drawback? The crocodile. It was obviously a miniature golf leftover, with a spring loaded jaw that would snap shut during the attacks. It didn't even have articulated limbs. I think the effects guy literally stood off camera and shoved the thing at the victims, and they had to wedge themselves into its gaping maw. Wow.

Guess what? I lied. It's gonna be a Onesday! It's sunny out, and I have a new skateboard ramp in my driveway. Maybe later....

The Edge of the Axe? Probably. The Edge of Your Seat? Most Likely Not.

2011-03-15T09:46:00.001-04:00

Yeah, one a day every day til I beg for mercy. Two days in and I seemingly bailed on it. Well, guess what fuckers, I didn't! Other shit happens.

The other day, during one of our Noah style deluges, I watched THE EDGE OF THE AXE, filmed by Spaniards in California in the late 1980s, which was not so long ago, except for those of you yet to have hair on your chests. Exceptions made for the ladies, of course, barring any medical issues.

Check out the box art and read the synopsis, and then follow me down the lovely garden path. Don't worry, I left my chloroform and chainsaw in the garage--or did I?

OK, so it looks like we're firmly in FRIDAY THE THIRTEENTH and HALLOWEEN territory, based on the cover art and the blurb on the back--the killer has a featureless mask and everything, and AXE is right there in the title! And for the most part we are, except for the distinct lack of suspense, gore, naked teens doin' it, and some semblance of a reasonable motive for the killer.

EDGE OF THE AXE is populated by wholly unlikeable characters and absolutely abysmal dialogue delivered by actors, most of whom unsurprisingly did not further their "careers" in said field after this little gem. This is the kind of movie wherein two characters who have an adversarial relationship bicker at each other. One hurls a particularly harsh zinger at the other, whose reaction is a winsome smile and a chuckle under it all, like he's reading a Hallmark card from his grandson. Oh yeah, and said character promptly exits the film, never to be seen again. And this is all in the first two minutes.

And the zinger-deliverer is ostensibly the main character, so our nominal protagonist has already proven himself to be an unlikeable asshole who has no problem being mean to his Keenan Wynn-esque nice old fisherman landlord. It is a cinematic law that if Keenan Wynn or any Keenan Wynn-like actor is in a movie, everyone is required to pay the old guy heed and at least be nice to him and not prank his old ass. Cuz Keenan Wynn has paid his dues as an actor and as a character--the only time the old guy can be fucked with is when he is dealt a bad hand by the immutable forces of nature, like in PIRANHA(the original one from the 70s, still a classic by any measure--DANCES WITH WOLVES can go fuck itself).

Oh, and the main character is named Gerald. Unless the character is 6 years old or in a wheelchair or a 6 year old in a wheelchair, the name Gerald doesn't exactly scream "HERO!" In these kind of movies, a guy named Gerald is the panty-sniffing weirdo red herring that everyone figures is the killer til the real killer chops off his kneecaps, or he actually IS the killer, and we know it from the get-go. Naming the guy Gerald and then not having him be either rubs two bits of my gray matter the wrong way, and I already end up hating the movie. Which, by the way, I do.

Plus the guy who plays Gerald looks and acts like an autistic Timothy Olyphant(the awesome dude from DEADWOOD and the one really shitty DIE HARD movie and THE CRAZIES remake), who himself is the non-midget version of Steven Dorff(the squirrely guy from CECIL B DEMENTED and THE GATE, that awful preteen PG13 "horror" movie). Sorry, midgets, he's yours, you own him, and that is why we all laugh and point, NOT because you are short and look insanely menacing holding butcher knives.

The filmmakers spend so much time trying to be cagey and build "mystery" that the 95 plot threads they all have going never gel into a coherent narrative. They're like waves in a kiddie pool--they surge, crest, and go PISH! against the sides, never amounting to anything. EVERYONE is a suspect in the movie, which other directors and writers have wrung immense suspense from countless times, but here, they let all the suspects off the hook. Even the creepy priest who directs the teen church choir(adults who choose to minister to teens ALWAYS creep me out--most adults can't stand teenagers, and you want to actively engage them? If that isn't a panty-sniffing weirdo scenario, I don't know what is). The main female character is a teen girl who's in love with Gerald, and she is a member of the church choir. Her dad calls the church in one scene to say he won't be able to pick her up, and the priest says he'll handle it. I'm sitting there thinking, "Right on! Now we get to see the preacher man tried to corner the girl in his car on a lonely road, and then BAM! the killer jumps out and beheads him with a garden hoe and then chases the girl through the woods!" But no, even though preacher man delivers his "Oh I'll take her home" line with a nice hint of menace, he just finds her another ride home with someone else's parents. Guh! As Poison once said "Gimme somethin' to believe in!" And if it wasn't Poison, it was probably definitely some other horseshit hair rock band(not hair metal--don't even drag metal down in your hairspray induced lackluster fantasy reality TV show downward spiral. The lot of you--Cinderella, Firehouse, Warrant, et al., can join Herr Costner in the self-fucking party). I've never liked Poison, even ironically. And I am a card-carrying member of the irony generation. We took not taking anything seriously, very seriously.

Did I mention that the dad's dialogue is all dubbed in for some reason? It appears that any time you see him talking, his lips match the dialogue perfectly, so it obviously isn't like they had a Estonian actor mouthing the lines and they looped in the dialogue later. And in scenes he shares with other actors, their dialogue is crisp and clear, so it isn't like they had mic issues. The only reason I bring it up as so obvious, is that his dialogue is turned way the hell up in the mix and it sounds like he's shouting into a trashcan the entire time. Weird.

And the "twist" at the end is visible from a billion miles away. Still, it takes a solid two minute speech from one character to neatly tie it all up in a bow and hand it to us, just in case we were balancing our checkbooks or comatose. Which is silly--I NEVER balance my checkbook. It's funny, because the ending comes out of nowhere. Since we are never given any actual clues about the killer's identity, the climax isn't shocking, but totally incomprehensible without the detailed explanation.

The sole saving grace to EDGE OF THE AXE is the film's look. It was made in 1989, and with the exception of a couple of scrunchies and slouch socks, it looks like it was filmed in the 70s. Which I dug. Horror movies of the 70s had a much grainier, grungier look to them, which I prefer to the antiseptic filmwork of the 80s, which I attribute to videotape and poor fashion choices, and Hair Cuttery.

Actaully two saving graces. The other being the pit beef and gravy platter from Pioneer Pit Beef that I inhaled whilst watching this claptrap. Peep this, yo!

Get yo' self some Pioneer next time you're in the Bmore area. And call me! I'll join you, and we can eat some meat and talk about how shittty EDGE OF THE AXE was. YEs, I know about the extra T. Not a typo. It's like the extra X's in XXX for porno, signifying ultra nasty sexxx. The extra T is for exxtra shittty movies like this one.

VHXcrement! VHXstacy part Duh. SPOOKIES. Yeah, Not So Much.

2011-03-08T19:39:00.000-05:00

Well shee-it, I've made it to day 2 and survived, and more importantly, have created a 2 day writing streak. Hell yeah, I am officially a machine....

To recap--I watch a VHS tape, I write about it, this goes on ad infinitum until I run outta VHS tapes, the VCR dies from exhaustion, or I pluck my eyes out screaming. Place your bets, ladies and gents....

I'm adding another element to this, for the denouement of my little experiment. Since I really have no interest in holding on to these tapes after this is all said and done(I will probably die under a mountain of media when either the DVD shelves or bookcases loose from their moorings and crush me to death--my dad hoards old bent nails, I hoard books and movies), I am going to line them up on a shelf in the back of the basement, in order of how goddamn bad they are, left being the worstest. So far, WAR OF THE ROBOTS is clearly the worstestester of them all. Cuz it's the first one I watched, and worse than SPOOKIES by at least 3 orders of magnitude.

This was definitely made in the EVIL DEAD vein, with a group of folks trapped by an evil spirit in a remote location. It looks as cheap as EVIL DEAD, but whereas both were filmed for a $1.50, EVIL DEAD is miles ahead by comparison. SPOOKIES direction is static, the scenes are framed poorly, the people portraying the characters aren't actors. Or at least not good ones.

EVIL DEAD only had 5 people trapped, and they were all mostly sympathetic. This one has TWO carloads of people, none of whom seem to belong in the same social circle. One car is filled with nominal "teens who like to party," the ringleader of which, Duke, might possibly have been played by the Situation's uncle. The other car following them has two middle aged couples. Yes, they are all together, Duke alluding early on that he was going to help them "party." It is never once explained WHY they are all together to party--is Duke their dealer, a paid guide, their son whom they have way too close a relationship with? I realize this is low budget horror, but damn, yo, throw a brother a narrative bone, boo!

And did I mention how badly I wanted to see all of them die in the first five minutes? I mean, they do all eventually die, but I seriously hoped they would all die in the actual first five minutes, making this a really bad short film instead of a really bad feature.

So they get stranded at this mansion which is conveniently located in the middle of a cemetery in the middle of nowhere. In said mansion lives an old, haggard dude who uses black magic to preserve his long lost love from 70 years ago, and uses his evil undead minions, and a weird Ouija board looking thing, to procure the lifeforce of the living to help bring her back to life. He does lots of menacing voiceovers to help us follow the plot, but sounds like Henry Kissinger yelling into an empty coffee tin. And by minions, I mean minion. A pasty guy with plastic vampire fangs, a fake leather pirate vest and puffy shirt, in addition to a Party City pirate hookhand shoved into his shirt sleeve.

Go ahead, read the box--all the eponymous spookies? All plural on the box, but singular in the movie. Reapers? One reaper. Spiderwomen? Ein spiderfrau. Muck men? Uno hombre el mucko. And so on. There is only one hellish lizard that I saw, although there may be multiple demons--I fell asleep for about 5 minutes, so I may be an unreliable demon counter. There were however multiple zombies at the climax, which I will hand to the director, was not horrible. It wasn't great, but I could see how one might enjoy it if one were of the right mind to enjoy it. See, not horrible.

And by zombies I mean lots of bug-eyed extras in dark makeup and flannel shirts who slowly stalk and overwhelm the reanimated bride. She actually did an OK job; it's a shame she didn't do more acting. I looked her up on IMDB afterward, and aside from occasional low budget movies and a role in what appears to be a Lifetime Lesbian Women in Prison movie from the early 90s, she might just have fallen off the face of the earth.

The humans in this movie might get outwitted by a bale of peat moss. When evil strikes, run OUT of the house, not further INTO it. When one of your party gets injured by a grim reaper statue come to life, make haste, don't say "I guess we should go in here" like you're going into the men's room at Macy's, then open the nearest door and casually walk in. Either throw the injured lass over your shoulder and haul ass, or leave her there for zombie food. Dummy.

And seriously, it shouldn't be hard to escape. How do they get trapped in the rooms? Well, the hook handed minion stands on the other side of the door and HOLDS THE DOORKNOB REALLY HARD so you can't get out. Yeah, he uses the same ploy that a sixth grader would use on his younger sister. Fuck dude, he's only got one good hand, and he's short and pasty! My kid could take him!

All that said, the special effects were pretty nifty considering the budgetary constraints and general overall lack of talent involved in this. It is ironic, I must note, that some of the cast and crew(including at least one of the special effects people) went on to work on STREET TRASH, a film I will hold dear to my heart til my last dying day. THAT movie meets and exceeds the grimy standard set by TOXIC AVENGER. Seek it out, it will edify you and provide a clear map by which to guide your life.

SPOOKIES, however, will not. When I pulled this out of the drawer, I was surprised that I had never heard of it. Then I watched it. I am no longer surprised I never heard of it. It's pretty crappy. Not as bad as WAR OF THE ROBOTS, but still pretty bad. At least this wasn't Italian dubbed into English. Altough I coulda used my FROMMER'S NEW JERSEY TO ENGLISH TOURIST TRANSLATION GUIDE whenever Duke spoke. Whatta mook.

PS. If any of the 8 of you that read this have old VHS tapes you want me to watch and write about, email me and we'll make arrangements. But not like PRETTY WOMAN or any of that claptrap--only the good crappy shit, like YOUNG DOCTORS IN LOVE, NIGHT PATROL, VICE SQUAD, MANIAC COP, etc.

And while we're at it, tell your goddamn friend to read this junk, and tell me if it sucks or is awesome. Cuz I like writing, but if people aren't reading it, it's like a tree in the forest. Or a lonely boy alone in his room, yearning for the gentle touch of a young maiden. Yearning, my ass--he's probably wackin' it.

VHXtacy Begins! Commence the WAR OF THE ROBOTS! Let Slip the Dogs of Utter Goddamn Garbage, to Paraphrase a Famous Quote....

2011-03-07T14:52:00.004-05:00

All right, so I bet the devil with this thing, and hopefully I didn't lose, cuz, if WAR OF THE ROBOTS is any indication of things to come, I really fucked up making this bargain wherein I watch all my VHS tapes and review them, one a day until seemingly the end of time.

I have even gone so far as to photograph the box art, so you all can suffer right along with me. And also, it saves me a lot of time having to write a synopsis, since I assume you chuckleheads all can read. But if you can't, oh well fuck, I guess this is all just pointless. Make like Helen Keller, and have someone read it to you. Or not like Helen Keller, since she couldn't hear either. So, if you ARE like Helen Keller, have someone touch your face repeatedly til you understand it. And I don't mean let someone slap the shit outta you--I'm not that cruel. Unless you like that sorta shit. At which point, have at it, you kinky deaf dumb and blind kid!

So I have decided to set up some simple ground rules regarding the viewing of these cinematic treats. I'll watch and review one a day, extenuating circumstances notwithstanding--I have my kid every other weekend, so there will be a 2-3 day lull round them times, since this might actually be regarded as child abuse. Also, I REALLY MOTHERFUCKING LOVE MOVIES, so I tend to read a lot of books about movies, and spend my free time following the neverending rabbit hole that is IMDB, jumping from actor to movie to trivia to goofs to etc. For this however, I am going to refrain from any "research" before I watch or review the movie. I will only go on box art, the synopsis on said box, and any previously gleaned knowledge I already have of some of these atrocities. I want to maintain the mystery, for lack of a better term. Plus, if I read all the IMBD trivia and the "goofs," I tend to focus on that crap instead of watching the movie. Enough of this horseshit already.

WAR OF THE ROBOTS. Obviously Italian filmed in the late 70s/early 80s, judging by the haircuts, bad synth soundtrack, wretched dubbing, and sheer volume of silver lame jumpsuits(not lame, like bad, lame, but LUH-MAY with the little ding over the "e," so it sounds like "ay" in hay, not "ee" in Eagad this movie is fucking horrible).

Now take a break and read the box back to get a rough idea of the plot, since I don't want to spend a week typing it out, and I'm honestly not completely sure I understand it. SOLARIS and EL TOPO were easily less impenetrable than this slab of horseshit.

The robots all sport the aforementioned silvery jumpsuits, in addition to gold facepaint and bleach blonde Ramones wigs. They are the lackeys of the ancient, dying race referred to on the box, who in the movie are all represented by ONE guy who looks suspiciously like Emperor Palpatine. Somebody oughta sue George Lucas, cuz the shit is uncanny. But I didn't even realize they were all robots--all 20 of them, each actor continually recycled after being killed, even within the same goddamned scene! You wanna know why I didn't realize this? Everytime one gets shot, or rather flashlight-gunned to death(actually the guns all looked like electric toothbrushes with flashlights mounted to the head instead of bristles), they grab their chests, where the HEART would be, rather than the wires or CPU. I guess they had to be robots, or the title would have made NO sense at all, and it was cheaper than blood squibs if they had been human.

About 2/3 of the way in, during the totally epic ground battle(as opposed to the totally epic space battle that operates as the nominal climax to the movie), the good guys cut some of the robots in half with their light swords(like a saber made of light! Heeeeyyyyy, NOW I get it!) I realized right then that they were robots, since the mannequin they used(repeatedly, for the deaths of at least 5 different robots, all within 1-2 minutes of each other--I tend to notice these things) had wires hanging out from under its shirt after the sword severed its torso. Plus, when the sword cut into them, there was a quick cut to a superzoomy closeup of a circuit board. These Italians, they know how to make the fuck out of a movie!

Ah yes, lest we forget the epic space battle, or to put it more succinctly, the dragging of Revell UFO models toward the poorly rendered and lit oil painting of a planet leaning in the corner of the producer's guest bathroom. Occasionally intercut with footage of someone's TV screen while they play Asteroids on an Atari 2600. Footage inside the cockpits utilized back-projected footage of the epic space battle, I guess to achieve verisimilitude, but someone forgot to tell the projectionist not to move the projector, so that the footage ends up panning ACROSS the actors' faces in the cockpit. I'm amazed none of the actors portraying the pilots went blind--projector bulbs are fucking bright! Maybe they weren't human, but robots. That would explain the lack of discernible acting talent, but not the lack of wires sticking out of their shirts....hmmmm....interesting.

And since this was filmed in Italian and dubbed into English, nobody's voice matches the actor, and they probably used the same 4 people to voice all the characters. Cuz all the women have the EXACT SAME VOICE, and the guys all sound like they have testicles the size of oil drums, except the guy who has the weirdest inbred southern drawl this side of Mayberry. This subtle characterization is hammered home with footage of him putting on cowboy boots, just in case we didn't get it. I DIDN'T get it, even with that help, but thanks anyway. Everybody else is wearing Members Only jackets that look like they were made out of liquid latex, with matching pants, and black moonboots. Which make sense, since WAR OF THE ROBOTS is set in space.

And the soundtrack consists of the exact same 4 note MOOG bassline over and over again, and all the fight scenes are backed by what sounds like a marching band drumline being run through a delay pedal. And they must have run out of money halfway through the movie, since the flashlight guns, which early in the movie made "pyoo pyoo!" raygun sounds, suddenly stop making noises, so people are literally being flashlight semaphored to death by the end of the movie.

It's always funny watching these foreign made films that were produced in order to cash in on American trends. NO ONE involved in the making of WAR OF THE ROBOTS was American, yet they all had names that are way more American than any American I've ever met. They're all like porno names, but without the sense of wonder, excitement and raw sensuality that goes into a porno name.

The takeaway from this? Two things.

1) The star, Antonio Sabato, I am assuming is the father of Antonio Sabato Jr, which explains where son got all his acting talent from. I don't even know who Jr is, but I've heard the name connected with much made-for-TV twaddle, so I assume the shitty fruit hasn't fallen far from the tree.

and

2)Never trust a movie featuring someone named Mickey Pilgrim. It sounds like the title to a Pixies song, and I fucking hate the Pixies. They are the WAR OF THE ROBOTS of rock music.

COMING SOON! PROJECT: VHX-STACY!

2011-02-16T19:00:00.000-05:00

OK, so here's the deal. I haven't written anything in two months. Because I'm mentally lazy. Actually, I spend my days doing mental calesthenics, but it rarely translates into writing, because i'm fairly physically lazy. Plus, my brother died in January and we just bought a house. Boo! Yay! No energy or time for writing.

Well, fuckers, I'm back. Starting sometime within the next two weeks, I launch PROJECT: VHX-STACY.

Here's the deal. Whilst packing all our sundry shit into various boxes, I happened upon multiple dozens of VHS tapes stashed in drawers on the entertainment center. A goodly chunk of these I bought at Goodwill about a year ago. They had a big storage box with about 50 tapes, mostly horror and sci-fi, and I scored the lot for 5 bones. YA! And we still have a functioning(I hope) VCR, that once we are settled in, I will fire up and watch one movie in the VHS format a day, and write something about it that same day. So that's like something like 2-9 months of viewing and writing. And this is everything from 1931's DRACULA(both the Bela Lugosi and Spanish language/casted versions, which were actually filmed on the same sets, concurrently--they filmed the Spanish one at night) to MASOLEUM to GIRL'S SCHOOL SCREAMERS. I'm so excited, I just drooled on the keyboard. Actually, that wasn't excitement, but a regular, daily event.

This is gonna be analog-awesome!

Stay tuned, punk.

On a sidenote, as I proofread this, I noticed I typed DARCULA the first time. Which would be a great blaxploitation version, DARKULA. Except they already did it and it's called Blackula--too bad that's not in the crate. Gotta rewatch that one anyway....

The Physics of Flying Roundhouse Kicks and Their Effect on Western US Manifest Destiny

2010-12-22T10:35:00.002-05:00

I'm old enough(38) to remember watching Black Belt Theater on Channel 29 in Philly, back when it was still UHF and not a Fox station. BANANA SPLITS and WACKY RACES reruns were commonplace, and Bart Simpson was still in his dad's sac. Hell, Homer probably hadn't even contemplated 2nd base with Marge yet. Crap, I need to go scrub my brain--I now have the image of teen cartoon character sex in my head. Some people get turned on by that shit. I am not one of those people. Those people have crawlspaces and have their full middle name, not just the initial for it, on the evening news.

Black Belt Theater was awesome.  Four hours of kung fu and karate movies every Saturday afternoon. Four hours not spent in the sun. Now, where did I put that vitamin D?

In the 1970s there were only two types of martial arts, kung fu and karate. That's all the world's badasses needed. I guess in the 80s, thugs and villains got tired of crying in their Cheeri-o's about getting their asses handed to them by Bruce Lee, Chuck Norris, and Jim Kelly.

Check it out! A veritable UN of ass-kickers! Fuck We Are the World, that's the real shit right there. They could roundhouse kick famine right the fuck outta Ethiopia or any place where there's hungy kids, like the parking lot of a Chik-Fil-A. But the parking lot before Mom takes them in, not after. Cuz they wouldn't be hungry. Unless they hate chicken. Or baby seals. Cuz the same people who hate baby seals hate Chik-Fil-A, e.g. bad guys and real jerks.

So the bad guys probably said "Fuck this. We need our own karate.  Let's make some." So they went into the kitchen and whipped up a couple of batches of tae kwon do, muay thai, krav maga, and a dash o' jujitsu. Ancient fighting arts my ass--Black Belt Theater taught me that everything else was a pale imitation of karate and kung fu. It was like distance learning, but without tuition, or grades. Or accreditation.

But if you don't believe me, go look it up on Wikipedia. Under "karate" it says "the ancientest and bestest martial art everer.  Because Chuck Norris said so. Do you really want to fuck with Chuck? See also: kung fu." And if there is anything I have learned in 38 years on this planet, it is that if it is on the Internets, it must be true. Case closed.

The only problem I have with Black Belt Theater is its depiction of Asian culture in general and Asian guys specifically. Whaddaya mean, China and Japan aren't still feudal states where wizened old Asian men sell apples off old school apple carts and the world is still cobble-stoned? Everybody doesn't walk down the street in pajama pants and karate slippers carrying their life's belongings in a bundle on a bamboo pole? Need I remind you, that pole doubles as a pretty badass weapon, because when you remove the bundle, the pole becomes a staff, one of the ultimate fightin' weapons of Asian migrants everywhere! Other terrific Asian weapons of mass destuction include throwing stars, chains with daggers on the ends, and the flying guillotine--a wire birdcage on a chain that you throw onto a distant foe's head, and it has blades in it that when you yank the chain the blades close and lop off said foe's nugget. Of course the Asians invented this amazing labor-saving device--these are the same folks who purchased America in the 1980s using the bags of loot they made selling us VCRs, and cars that would run for more than a block and a half on a tank of gas. And don't forget the almighty numbchucks. It's actually "nunchaku", but numbchuck is the preferred American spelling, because we are assholes who can't get anything right if we didn't invent it. Which is probably why we are so good at oil spills and bank bailouts.

And in Black Belt Theater, all men had one of two hairstyles. There's the shaven headed Shaolin monk, with the long black ponytail wrapped around their necks like a noose, favored by noble heroes of few words and much action. And the other style, hair pulled back tight in a bun, with the best widow's peak this side of Bela Lugosi, with sideburns that would make Las Vegas Elvis flush with jealousy. Apparently, awesomeness of hair is directly proportional to level of martial arts mastery. There are no mullets in kung fu. Except maybe Chuck Norris. I'll let you tell him though. I like my face right where it is, thank you.

And lastly, there is no god, no nature, no physics. Only feats of martial arts derring-do that make no rational sense whatsoever. Men with arms so strong that when they hit someone with said meathooks, it sounds like swords clashing. Dudes and sometimes ladies who can leap 20 feet straight up and then fly straight forward at approximately 40 miles an hour. Then stick to a wall. With just their feet. And don't even get me started on the low-rent James Cagney gangster voices they all have. And how do they make their lips look like they are saying something else?

Why, you ask? Why? Because I went and saw THE WARRIOR'S WAY, that's why.

There's this guy who's an Asian assassin. Not sure what variety of Asian, sorry. And I don't feel like doing my due diligence(Wikipedia/IMDB). But since there's ninjas, a serious fuckload of ninjas, I'm going with Japan. Because I'm over 50% sure(57% to be exact) that ninjas are grown in Japan. So we have this Japanese assassin who's mighty deft with a sword, and his clan and another clan have vowed to have a Hatfield and McCoy type fight to the death. The war will not end until one clan is completely eliminated. Except the last member of the rival clan is a baby girl. And AssassinMan is a killer, but he ain't no animal. So he scoops up BabyGirl and heads off to the USA circa the early 20th century. He gets to America and gives up the assassin life, because that's no life for the baby girl you stole after you massacred her entire family. He welds his sword shut, so its cry can't be heard by his clan, who has still sworn to wipe out the baby, and him now too, since he's aiding and abetting the existence of the most dangerous member of their rival clan. A baby. Cuz babies are kryptonite to trained killers. Them and cats playing piano. Just check YouTube. That puddle at your feet? That's your heart. Melted like butter in a microwave.

So AssassinMan heads into the Old West, because one of his old assassin buddies headed there once. Not sure if he brought a stolen baby too, but he did run a laundry service in this weird green screen circus town, before he up and died. AssassinMan learns all this from the assorted circus folk and the dissipated Wild Bill Hickock style sharpshooter, played with meth-mouthed greasiness by Geoffrey Rush, looking even more gnar than when he was a pirate in DragQueen Keith Richards and the Black Pearl.

Turns out this town, which looks like a retirement commmunity planned by Frederico Fellini, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Sergio Leone, had been menaced by rogue Confederate soldiers years past. Maybe they were Union soldiers, I don't know. I'm not a fucking military historian, Jack, so deal.   They killed the family of this one local lady, and she is a bitter and lonely young lady who wants revenge. She's a young actress-y actress, and she's pretty good in it too. Right balance of vulnerability and toughiness. Her name? No idea. It wasn't Halle Barry, I'm sure of that. Mighta been Winononono Ryder. Probably not. Anyway.

So AssassinMan re-opens the laundry at the behest of the young vengeful broad, who teaches him how to run a laundry business in exchange for sword-killin' lessons. He learns to appreciate life, planting flowers, listening to opera, all the boring horseshit he missed whiling away his youth hacking the living shit out of everything in sight. And it even looks like he might find love with Lady Vengeance. Sweet. Until the Confederate/Union Axis of Really Bad Dirty Smelly Soldiers show back up for some more action at the expense of the townsfolk.

So AssassinMan has to break open his sword, because he's a true hero, reluctant, but prepared to defend the purity of this town and the innocence of the baby he stole after slaughtering her family. And of course his mentor hears it all the way over in Asia. So they hop on a muthafuckin' boat, but without T-Pain, and head for the Old West. An actual boatload of ninjas. Fuck yeah.

Of course AssassinMan and Pirate Geoff arm the town to the teeth, and a massive battle ensues, with circus folk vs. soldiers vs. ninjas. And that is one of the most amazing parts o' the film. The 80 bazillion ninjas drop on to the rooftops of the town like a plague of sword-swingin' locusts. That trumps cowboys on horses everytime. Cuz Black Belt Theater physics always wins. Paper covers rock, grasshopper.

There's a melee where the lady gets to kill the colonel who sundered her family, and that is awesomeness defined. I love revenge. Probably because I got picked on a lot in high school. I'd never want to see my tormentors run through with a sword, but it would be cool if they peed themselves, just a little. I'm 38, so what?  A boy can dream....

And AssassinMan has to face his master, whom he kills. All is well, right? Nope, he can't stay and find true love with the ladyfriend. He leaves the baby with her, because the assassin-on-the-run is no life for the baby you stole, after you wiped out every last relative she had. So now ladyfriend is like an Old West Angelina Jolie, with her very own Asian trophy baby.

Epilogue--AssassinMan has to stay on the move, because godammit, ninjas are relentless motherfuckers.

I liked this movie. A lot. It looked like 300, since the sets were all CGI'd up. I didn't like that movie. Too much talking. And did anyone else notice the highly conflicted homoerotic undertones of what is supposedly a massive chunk of right wing propoganda wet dream boner candy? Don't Ask Don't Tell, indeed! But THE WARRIOR's WAY is way much more betterer than that. Because the action is over the top, but not gonzo. And I actually cared a little bit about the characters. AssassinMan is a sympathetic dude. He grows as a person, without resorting to crying or writing bad poetry. Not an espresso in sight!

There wasn't a fuckton of dialogue at all. It relied on the story to tell itself. It doesn't suffer from Tarantino-ism. The soundtrack wasn't cranked up to Slayer-esque levels. For being an action movie, it is remarkably quiet. Thanks, my hearing appreciates that. And I could actually pay attention to the plot. Which is helpful, since I like stories. And recounting the plot helps me write this horseshit.

My only beef? AssassinMan is the Asian Clint Eastwood, the Man with No Name. Few words, much action. But his words match his lips. And he didn't sound like Jimmy Cagney. And no Shaolin ponytail. Just regular guy hair. C'mon, yr AssassinMan! Get a goddamn awesome cut, yo!

Go see it. Fuck Rotten Tomatoes. Critics are stupid. Watch good movies.

Man, Fuck This Junk. I'm Catching Up.

2010-12-11T14:08:00.000-05:00

OK, so over a month ago, I promised 4 movie reviews in rapid succession. Well, it didn't happen in so rapid. Well, guess what? I'm gonna do it now and wrap this fucker up, me-style. And on the geologic time scale, a month and a half is tres rapide, so go pound sand if you want to get didactic, jerk.

I saw THE LAST EXORCISM. It was good, sorta. The plot concerns a Southern preacher who does exorcisms. Homeboy has been a preacher since he was a wee tot, following in the footsteps of his pops. He gets paid some sweet cash for whupping some demon booty. The only problem is, he now suffers a crisis of faith. See, the exorcism thing is a racket. He just rigs the game so it LOOKS like he's chasing a demon out of people who just believe they are possessed, using hidden tape recorders and parlor tricks. He understands that the "possessed" are just people who have some severe psychological issues, and since they feel it is demons and not psychoses, he works with them on their terms, helping them shed their "demons." He's providing them much needed relief, and all for CA$H money, y'all!

Plus his son has some congenital defect or something or other, so his faith is shaken since his kid ain't perfect--I saw this back in summer, when my balls were covered in sweat, rather than being retracted into my small intestine trying to hide from Jack Frost's Magik Tingler Fingers o' Death. So yeah, plot details=fuzzy at best. So God's Minion ain't so sure that this ree-ligion thing is working out for him anymore. So this one is gonna be last exorcism. Hence the title. Go get 'em, Hollowood! Freakin' marketing geniuses!

He and a two person film crew head to a small town in Florida/Mississippi/Alabama/waythefuckdownsouth because this farmer thinks his teenage daughter is possessed. CA$H MONEY Y'all! Because backwoods farmers are gullible rubes who believe in Jeebus and the devil. How come no one ever gets possessed in the city, THE EXORCIST notwithstanding?

An aside--I love horror movies. I hate THE EXORCIST. Admittedly, the sound design and some of the subliminal visuals(the demon face on the range hood) were pretty rad, but c'mon, that movie was the perfect reactionary pacifier for conservative middle class parents freaking out about why Johnny grew his hair long and smoked plants, and Judy burned her bra and made out with other girls. The only people it really scared were mom and dad. And a priest made everything all better at the end. Order restored, Nixon in the White House, and lil honey stopped fucking herself bloody with a crucifix and being mean to mommy. Effective horror is universal and strikes at peoples' primal fears, not just the primal fears of Rotary Club members.

OK I'm back. So yeah, possessed teenage girl. Religious nut dad. And did I mention the kinda/really creepy teenage brother? He seems more interested in the exorcist getting the fuck out of town than in helping his sister. Sis has led an incredibly sheltered life since her mom died of cancer and dad dropped the bourbon and picked up a bible and started home schooling the kids. She's a lot like Carrie from, uh, CARRIE. Even kinda looks like Sissy Spacek. But she can't knock little kids off bikes with her brain. She can however do a crazy wacko backbend in a Holly Hobby dress in the barn at 3AM while a barncat cat hisses at her. So maybe she IS possessed. Preacher Man goes to the farmer's former pastor, a kindly portly old dude with his kindly homely old wife/secretary to discuss what's going on. They don't get much info, other than the dad pulled his kids outta the church group because it wasn't religious wacko enough for his tastes.

So he exorcises the girl, she has some sort of panic attack/freak out/seriousmedicalcondition that warrants taking her to the hospital. They find out she's pregnant. Oh, so THAT'S why she turned into a fucking maniac! Teen hormones+pregnancy=crazy devil bitch! The girl admits she sneaked out to a church party a couple months back and banged some boy that worked at the local diner, since her hormones were raging and well, shee-it, kids these days.... Perfect! So Preacher Man and his film crew pack their bags, turn tail and head outta town. They see the diner where Baby Daddy works, so they decide to pay him a visit and let him know about impending fatherhood. Much to their surprise, he says he never touched her, that he's gay. So they freak out, thinking "Fuck. This being the deep south, Dad must have banged his daughter. So we have to run back to the farmhouse and get her outta there before she gives birth to a drooling, one-eyed moonshiner." They get back to the farmhouse, hearing screams in the woods. Dad must be torturing/raping/committing some sort of backwoods nastiness on his daughter. Only they run straight into a big clearing in the woods where a massive bonfire/pep rally/satanic mass is going on, dad is tied to a tree and being beaten, and daughter is strapped to an altar, and the homely secretary from the church is yes, delivering a demon baby from her womb. She then chucks said spawn into the fire, where it explodes into HUGE fuck-all horned demonbeast, and the pastor sees Preacher Man and his crew, and sets his flock upon them, including the creepy farmer son. The satanists kill them all. The end.

And remember, this is all done in the CLOVERFIELD/BLAIR WITCH "verite" style with the shaky-cam, first person fake documentary style. Guys, that shit is getting old. It's a trope now. Notice how it happens almost exclusively in horror movies, since it eliminates the distanciation of the "fourth wall," thereby putting the viewer clearly in midst of all the violence? It works, because it is so forcibly confrontational. But now it's just a gimmick. There's only so much you can do with it. It's like 3D without the cheezy RayBan's.

I actually liked this movie up until the "big reveal." Finally, a possession movie that isn't supernatural! Yes! As a nominal atheist(honestly, I hesitate to classify myself in that regard. If you call me anything, call me an apatheist---I don't care if there's a god. Actively not believing in a god takes as much energy as believing in a god. I'd rather expend that energy eating pizza or masturbating. So, Fred Phelps, you are a douche. As are you Christopher Hitchens. Stay the fuck outta my house, the both of ya's.). I'll go ahead and re-type the beginning of my previous clause, so what I am about to write makes some semblance of sense. As a nominal atheist, I get really tired of supernatural horror at times, since it usually boils down to black and white depictions of good and evil. Which is fine, but it's not necessarily where my head is at. I enjoy the "everyday horror" of zombies, pathogens that eat people alive, nature run amok, and clown- masked lunatics with big knives. Cuz clowns are FUCKING scary.

So the movie nearly had me, until it ripped off the endings of both ROSEMARY'S BABY(even cribbing some of the key lines of dialogue during the "birth") and BLAIR WITCH PROJECT by smashing them together with a battering ram lined with duct tape, spit, and good intentions. Then I just facepalmed, burped, and felt that empty spot in my pocket where 8 bucks had been. Dammit.

As for RESIDENT EVIL:WHO CARES. Watch the first ten minutes and the last twenty. Those are the good parts. Lots of action, shooting, mayhem, carnage. And no having to sit through Milla Jovovovovovovovich acting.

Thanks! Maybe I'll write something sooner than every two months.

Oh, yeah. Come to Sully's Comedy Cellar next Wednesday, December 15. I'm telling jokes. Check the details, yo!

http://www.sullyscomedycellar.com/

A Movie Review. And Something Else Not Entirely Unrelated.

2010-10-13T19:20:00.000-04:00

I'm writing this while watching a documentary about evangelical Christians, so this may turn out really weird. We'll see what happens....

So I saw LET ME IN yesterday. Yeah, I know, it's a remake/reimagining/reboot/regurgitation, and I'm usually pretty prepared to be thoroughly disappointed. And it irritates me to no end that movie studios think that Americans are too stupid or lazy to watch foreign films because they don't want to have to read while they watch, so they take an already awesome movie, in this case LET THE RIGHT ONE IN, and remake it so they can cash in. I had my reservations that this would be dumbed down, with unnecessary action scenes, and a movie star ringer to get butts into the seats. Well, I was wrong on all counts.

First of all, this is the first new wide-release film in decades from Hammer Studios, the British stalwart that ushered in a new and more salacious era of horror from the late 50s through the 70s. So it had a good pedigree so far. The young leads in the movie are played by Chloe Grace Moretz, HitGirl from KICK-ASS, and Cody Smit-McPhee, the kid from THE ROAD.  The only two major adult roles are portrayed by Elias Koteas, the punk rock guy from SOME KIND OF WONDERFUL, and Richard Jenkins, the dad from SIX FEET UNDER.  And the movie never panders at all, and actually, I think the fact that the dialogue is in American(not English--there is a difference) helped me relate and immerse myself in the story moreso than the original. I could emotionally invest myself more deeply precisely because I didn't have to concentrate on reading the dialogue. If you see this, but not the original, it would be your loss, but I don't think a truly great one.

The movie set in winter 1983 Los Alamos, New Mexico, involves outcast 12 year old Oliver, played by McPhee. He and his mother live in a blank, dimly lit apartment complex.   His intellectual and slightly effeminate demeanor singles him out for some pretty severe emotional abuse at the hands of a bully and his two hangers-on. They push him around, refer to him as "she," make him urinate himself, and at one point the bully strikes him across the face with what looks like a car antenna, gouging into his cheek. The adults in his life are at best benevolent but ineffectual in the case of his gym teacher, and at worst, physically present but emotionally checked out in the case of his mother. In a brilliant bit of camerawork, during the couple of shots that Oliver shares with his mother, her face is either cropped out of the shot or obscured. And his father is only ever heard, on the other end of a couple phone calls. Almost the entirety of the movie takes place at night, dusk, or just as dawn is breaking, heightening the desolation and bleakness of the interior of the characters.

Soon enough, Oliver sees a new girl move into the complex. He notices that she's barefoot walking through the snow in the middle of the night as she and her apparent father move in. They slowly forge a tentative bond over being "others," with him revealing his outcast status at school. When he tells her he feels powerless against the bullies in his school, she tells him to fight back. He asks her "What if they hit back harder?" she replies "You hit back even harder than them." Initially she doesn't reveal why she feels so solitary. Her reasons, though, will be revealed to Owen as the movie progresses.

It turns out that the man with Abby is not her father, but a sort of minder for her. Richard Jenkins does an incredibly admirable job as the person charged with Abby's nominal wellbeing, for lack of a better term. He obviously cares deeply for Abby, but their relationship has taken a harsh toll on his psyche and humanity.

His relationship to her isn't clear at first. At first we assume, like Owen, that he is her father, but as the movie goes on it becomes apparent that their relationship is much deeper and more complex than that. I won't spoil what their relationship is, because if you figure it out, the end of the movie has the effect of waking from a bad dream into a more hopeful reality, but one that is built upon its inevitable decay.

As I said before, Owen's and Abby's nascent connection is built on their mutual disconnection from other kids. They bond not because they are like each other, but because they are so unlike their peers. Yet they are very similar to each other, owing to a deep and abiding sensitivity that for Owen singles him out for ridicule in school. He is clearly more connected to his emotions than the boys who taunt him, preferring Shakespeare to gym class. He longs for connections, and wants to share himself with others, but they are either oblivious to it, as is the case with his mother; or like the bully, exploit this as a sign of weakness. He senses an affinity in Abby, and tries to share it with her, to which she replies she cannot. He misreads this as some inferiority in himself, because it is what he is used to hearing from others. But it stems from Abby's understanding of who she is--a vampire. As much as she longs for the life of a normal teen, she will never really know it.

I won't say much more about the plot of the movie, becuase it gets too "nuts and bolts"-y, and much of the joy from good horror movies is not know what to expect of it. It's an incredibly powerful movie, with an ambiguous ending that isn't ambiguous because it leaves the door open for a sequel, but because that's how life is--things aren't always neatly wrapped up nicely with a bow on them. That only increases the power of the emotions it elicits.

I will say this, that it handles a good deal of interesting subtexts rather deftly. As a sidenote, I hate when people say "It was good--for a horror movie." Fuck off, dicks. Horror, whether in art, writing, cinema or music, is as valid a vehicle for expressing and exploring myriad facets of human existence. And LET ME IN is a very illustrative case in point.

I won't get into any plot detail, because again, I think that will ruin a goodly deal of the pleasure of watching the movie, and parsing out the bits and pieces for yourself. There is clearly some sort of budding sexuality between Abby and Owen, though it is never explored explicitly, and she at first deflects his advances because she's not "like" regular girls. Owen, and by extension the viewer, wonders, is she a lesbian? Transgender? We KNOW that she is a vampire, and THAT is what she means, but it raises interesting points about most peoples' assumptions in that regard.

The movie right now has a very particular resonance in light of the media attention given to bullying, and specifically the bullying of kids with different sexual or gender orientations. Owen is continually referred to as "she" by the bullies because of his introspective demeanor and seeming powerlessness. They threaten to kill him on numerous occasions, or make his life so hellish he would wish to be dead. While it is in service to the story, it clearly has pretty pertinent roots in today's reality.

Now for a seemingly big digression that actually ties well into the previous paragraphery.

I'll be honest. I wasn't exactly a popular kid in school. I didn't really fit into neatly defined niches, and so made it pretty easy for other kids to single me out. I got beat up, and they usually let me know it was because I didn't fit in. But the phsyical abuse was nothing compared to the psychological terror that was wielded against me at times. Girls would call my house and pretend to be some mystery girl who liked me, only to hang up suddenly, laughing in my face when I started to fall for it. People started some fairly shitty rumors about me, that I will flatly state, made me want to kill myself, and in 9th and 10th grade, I tried to on more than a couple of occasions. Whether it was recklessly endangering myself with drugs, or actively trying to slit my wrists, I felt like no one valued me, and in fact would have preferred I didn't exist. So I tried not to. I felt like I had no options--the school staff and my parents were either oblivious, or didn't seem to think it was a severe enough problem to step in and stop. And it never really occurred to me to strike back.

It breaks my heart every time I hear that any kid, gay/straight/transgender/whatever, kills themselves because some other person is determined to prove that their existence wasn't valid. I understand full well that most bullies feel powerless somewhere else in their lives, and that is why they choose to wield that same power as mercilessly as they can. It still doesn't excuse their behavior, or the ignorance that adults claim they suffer from when it is abundantly clear that something is completely off the charts wrong.

It really struck me when Abby tells Owen to hit back. We're always told not to, that it is stooping to their level. I don't advocate violence, but I do advocate defending yourself. And by that I mean your SELF. As a person. I honestly wish I had felt powerful enough to hit back, if only to reclaim some of what was taken from me. To let them know that in no way shape or form would I accept being told that I wasn't worth my existence. To end that kind of abuse before it starts.  Maybe it would've escalated. But maybe it would've taught some people that at minimum I was not to be fucked with and at best that I valued my worth enough to defend it.

You can tell kids "It does getter better, if you hold on." And maybe it does. But it doesn't have to get any worse.

Shut bullies down before they do real damage to someone. And if you are an authority figure--parent, teacher, cop, whatever--you owe it to the victim and the bully to find out WHY. Because you'll help the victim, and maybe realize the bully is a victim too. Nobody has to lose in order for them both to win.

Here. You can have your soapbox back. Thanks. I'll review some other stuff tomorrow. With little to no pontificating.

2010-10-07T00:18:00.000-04:00

OK, this is gonna be brief, since I'm sitting in my car, have a beer in me, an I'm thumbtyping on my phone. I owe you a review of MACHETE. Here it goes.

Go see it. It's awesome. There's an abundance of plot threads. They're all good. There's actually some serious subtext. Lots of boobs and violence. And finally, CGI blood that doesn't look like total horseshit. The only beef I have? Hey Robert Rodriguez, if you're gonna have a huge showdown shootout at the end, spend a couple G's on a shitload of extras. If you have a lot of extras shooting and getting shot, it won't look like a community theater version of GLADIATOR. Otherwise, you did no wrong RE the casting of Danny Trejo, who could make a lite beer commercial awesome. And I hereby decree that all movies henceforth will have Danny Trejo rappeling down a building via another man's small intestine. Verily the epitome of cinematic excellence, against which I will measure all other movies.

That's it. Go see it. And fuck you if you tell me I spelled rappelling wrong. I'm tipsy, and this is being done with thumbs on a phone.

I Hate You Diablo Cody

2010-10-02T16:08:00.000-04:00

Hey Universe,

Can I have the last hour and a half of my life back? I just finished "watching" JENNIFER'S BODY, written by Hollowood's favorite grrl, Diablo Cody. I put quotation marks around that, since I only actually watch actual movies. I only ironically watch massive piles of steaming horseshit that purport to be movies.

The plot, such as it is, involves best friends Jennifer and Needy(short for Anita, get it? She's Needy? Ha! Diablo, you're a nut! And a genius of linguistic depth too). I refuse to use the the term "besties." Shoot me in the face if you ever hear me utter that word, because it means I've been possessed by a fucking moron.

The besties go to a shitty rock club and see a shitty band who of course seem evil, because well, that's what the soundbed and long glances between bandmates says they are. Well as evil as scrawny indie rock dorks playing neuter-rock can be. The club catches fire in a really shitty homage to the prom scene from CARRIE, the girls make it out alive. The lead singer of the band cons Jennifer into the band van, they take off, and Jennifer shows up later at Needy's house covered in blood and vomiting up weird black blood.

Guess what? The band made a pact with the devil so they could get some famous. They thought Jennifer was a virgin, but she wasn't. She had buttsex with some dude, so instead, she got brought back as a succubus and now has to feast on flesh throughout the rest of the movie. Yeah, it makes no sense to me either, and I've seen EL TOPO.

And of course Needy has to stop her. But not before they lezzbo make out. And Jennifer seduces and kills Needy's boyfriend.

So Needy has to kill Jennifer, which she does, and of course dead Jennifer the succubus ends up turning back into dead Jennifer the normal dead chick, so nobody believes Needy when she is caught sitting on top of Jennifer's corpse with a box cutter. So she gets sent away to a mental asylum, where she has plenty of time to record the shitty voiceover for the movie.

It got mostly shitcanned at the box office, and most reviewers said it was an uncomfortable blend of black comedy and horror. Fuck, dude, they CAN coexist, just watch DR. STRANGELOVE or SALO. Or even HUMAN CENTIPEDE for that matter. But not here. It's just a bunch of 25 year old looking teens whose parents have apparently checked out entirely. Seriously, not one of the main characters' parents appear in the movie until the very end, when it becomes narratively convenient. I know modern parents totally fucking blow, because you know, we have Oxycodone and Facebook, but shit, man....

As black comedy, it sucks. Not one uncomfortable laugh. As horror, it sucks. I've taken more terrifying shits. Christ, even the lesbian makeout scene was clearly orchestrated to keep the audience awake as our attention spans waned. It didn't work--I fell asleep at some point, and had to Wikipedia the plot of the movie to fill in the blanks. If that offends you, sorry. If I mangled some of the plot details, oh well. It ain't exactly like I'm claiming that Charles Foster Kane was actually a space alien or that FORREST GUMP was a good movie.

Every iota of this movie, Diablo Cody tried to calculate to be cool/hip/edgy. The dialogue, the lesbian undercurrents, the gorey horror sequences. This time it doesn't add up. This time 1+1+1=0.

Want to watch a significant movie that actually has something genuine to say about being a teenager, and is a good movie to boot? Watch FAST TIMES or HEATHERS or CARRIE. Don't watch JENNIFER'S BODY.

Hey, Diablo Cody. Did you get the "pact with the devil" idea from your own life experience? Cuz that's the only way I can explain your inexplicable and ridiculous rise to famousosity.

Cheeky Monkey

2010-10-02T09:56:00.000-04:00

So, for the first time in a long time, I have writer's block. And I can only attribute that to how fucking awesome MACHETE is. Words can't begin to describe how I feel about it. I'd marry it if I could. So I got an idea in my head, and manipulated this picture. Immature? Yes. Funny? Absolutely.

MOVIE MOVIE MOVIE MOVIE. 4 MOVIES.

2010-09-29T15:06:00.000-04:00

Go ahead and complain if you wish about my lack of activity here. You'll have to stand in line behind me though. Not because I need to complain at myself, because that would be weird, and I already talk to myself enough as it is, without resorting to raising my voice and wagging a finger, and possibly trying to shove myself in an effort to be physically intimidating to myself. Wow, two sentences in and it's already off the rails(apparently I can do it to my own internal monologue, in addition to FB comment threads--it's not just you Saresse).

I haven't been lazy, at least not in the classic sense. I still have a ridiculous job that requires little if any of my actual attention or time(don't tell my bosses--they think I actually do shit). But I've also started doing standup comedy on a more regular basis, which means I spend more time on writing short stupid shit and less time on writing long stupid shit. Plus, I'm artistically bankrupt enough that I don't wanna give up all my good bon mots and one liners and even a couple of quips here on the internets. Because it may never actually get read, whereas I am guaranteed an actual live audience of at least 4 other comics who don't laugh at my jokes on a Wednesday night in Baltimore on a regular basis. Strictly analogue, baby! Which is the polite way of saying I am getting to be an old fuck.

I enjoy the movies. The act of buying a ticket, spending my son's college fund on diabetes and heart disease at the snack bar, finding the sweet spot seat, preferably dead center in the theater, middle of the row. Aisle seats are for pussies with small bladders--listen dumbshit, did you come here to piss or watch a goddamn movie? Nothing beats the anticipation of planning the next fiscal quarter of moviegoing based on watching the trailers. Until you go online two days later to read leaked synopses of said flicks and realize they put all the good parts in the trailer--stupid internet, killer of mysteries and dreams. Can't you see, you're snuffing the childlike wonder out of me? Fuck, who am I kidding? Show me the Machete trailer 25 times in an endless loop and I will have to change my underpants(if I actually wore 'em--yep, COMMANDO, 15 years strong) 25 times from busting a nut and shitting myself giddy. They didn't have to make the movie, but I am sure glad they did.

Which brings me to my summer movie review. The aforementioned Machete, Piranha 3D, the Last Exorcism, and Resident Evil:Overstaying Your Welcome. With the exception of Resident Evil, they are all pretty much done playing in theaters, so think of this as less a review, and more like a trailer-style critique of the DVD releases. Fuck, most of the 5 of you who read this are old like me, and might have kids, so you're lucky to leave the house without the "aid" of Social Services showing up because you left Billy strapped in his carseat while you binged on meth and deep-fried Twinkies. I understand your plight--we all need "Mommy" or "Daddy" time. Remind the selfish little brats, it's not all about them all the time....

So here we go, in what I recall is a chronological breakdown. I'm too lazy to open another browser window, so ya get what ya get and ya don't get upset.

Piranha 3D. A remake, nominally speaking, of a Roger Corman movie from the 70s. If you've read what I've said about remakes in the past, you know I ain't especially fond of 'em. Especially ones I really like in the first place. Roger Corman is infamous for making movies on a serious shoestring, and they are usually shot through with a lot of left-field black humor and occasionally some subversive social commentary, in addition to copious amounts of boobs and blood. I'd definitely be more likely to watch Remains of the Day if I knew Emma Thompson might show some skin, or if it were Anthony Perkins rather than Anthony Hopkins.

I think the unifying quality of Corman's films is that they had a lot of heart. Not necessarily a lot of brains, but a lot of heart. I get the sense that the people who work on Roger Corman movies really just love making movies, and he helps facilitate that on a much smaller level than working with a traditional studio, so everybody gets away with a lot more, with little interference. As long as it comes in on budget, and people like buying tickets to it, Roger'll greenlight it. His movies have the slapdash exuberance of Iggy and the Stooges. Hopped up, snotty, a little dangerous, and ready to have a good time.

I gotta say, the Piranha redux has heart. And it's bleeding all over the goddamn place. The premise? An underwater earthquake near Lake Havasu, Arizona causes the earth's crust to split under the lake, opening up a previously unknown prehistoric lake which houses some seriously cranky prehistoric piranha. If you, like me, know anything about prehistory, it was just like history, only bigger. So these are BIG piranha, not your garden variety regular flesh-eating fish. Which leads me to a digression. How fucking tall would a prehistoric Chewbacca be? I bet Leia wouldn't be so quick to call him a furball if she knew he might pimp slap her with the big furry skillets for hands he would have.

Anyway. So the rift in the lake opens at the same time as the massive Spring Break happenin's on the lake. Which means fresh meat for the fishies. Lots of it. Slathered in cocoa butter and sun-baked. Sorta like a McDonald's Deep Fried Titties Bikini Snak Wrap.

Lots of college kids+lots of big fucking piranha=easily 14 tanker truck loads of fake blood in the water. And you get Elizabeth Shue, Ving Rhames, and Adam Scott trying to stop this crazy thing. Liz Shue, you're an awesome actress who gets nominated for awards you should be proud of getting nominated for, and your husband is the guy who directed An Inconvenient Truth and Waiting for Superman, so you're all class. And you bring that class to this, and do it without looking embarrassed, which is awesome. Cuz you slummed, but you gave it your all. Because you probably just really like making movies. And with this one, you didn't have to be anywhere Nicholas Cage, or just stand there and be the prize for Ralph Macchio. Plus, you make a sheriff outfit look sexy, but not in a shitty Party City Slutty Cop costume kinda way. You just put it on, wear it like you own it, fuck shit up, and save people. Hell yeah.

Ving Rhames, you didn't get to do much. But what you did get to do, 4 stars, my friend. 4 stars. Indeed, a boat propeller can be a weapon. Like a hand weapon. The way most people would use a sword or a ninja star. Kudos for your character's ingenuity.

And the cameos from Dick Dreyfus and Doc Brown don't hurt either.

Yeah, there's gratuitous nudity, and a fuckload of the aforementioned violence, which is exactly why it is awesome. And it's in 3D. I had until recently sworn off 3D, because it doesn't look "real" or immersive. It looks like I'm watching a movie through a Viewmaster. Thanks, but I am immersed in real analog reality already, and movies are a way to break free of that. These high-falutin' types who say they use 3D as a storytelling aid are missing the point. Tell me a good story, one with heart, and gimme some thrills or goosebumps, or make me laugh or cry, and I don't care if it's a pop-up book. 3D ain't gonna hide the fact that Avatar is Ferngully with tall blue catpeople who ride their flying horses by fucking them into submission with their hair.

But Piranha's 3D works because they know it's a gimmick. Shit flyin' out at ya at high speed. Like coked-up Jerry O'Connell's severed penis getting chomped down by a piranha, which promptly burps it right back out at you onscreen. With the attendant bad burping sound. Now THAT is quality movietainment.

I'd say "GO SEE IT," but unless it's still at the ghetto dollar theater, you'll have to wait for it to see you. Add it to your Netflix queue, buy it at Target the day it comes out on DVD(what I plan on doin'), and watch the shit outta that motherfucker.

Wow, that ended up being longer than I expected. "That's what she said." Beat you to it, jerks!

Anyway, tune in tomorrow for more. My fingers ache. I need to get a keybaord tray....

Go See This Instead

2010-08-30T15:42:00.001-04:00

Piranha 3D. Definitely a fuckload more gore and blood than A Serbian Film, but actually fin to watch!

Get it? FIN to watch? HA!

A Serbian Film. Not Sure What to Say, If Anything, About This One.

2010-08-30T15:41:00.000-04:00

OK, I just watched A Serbian Film. If you are just a casual viewer/follower of horror movies, DO NOT BOTHER TO SEE THIS MOVIE. You will have a seriously revolted knee jerk reaction that will be impossible to control. You will not be able to wrap your head around it or its worldview. Let's just say that it is an extremely nihilistic, bleak worldview that involves nothing but a fuckton of suffering. It has no sense of humor whatsoever--not even the blackest kind. If you are a follower of horror movies, and have seen Martyrs, Irreversible, et al., then do your homework to prepare yourself. It is a deeply unsettling movie that leaves too little to the imagination when it comes to some of the more explicit gore. Which I am actually thankful for. The two most disturbing scenes, content/context-wise, are fortunately the least technically executed, so that it is obviously fake and the viewer can put some emotional distance between himself and the film. If these two scenes were done with more finesse and less fake blood, I might be putting bullets into a gun right now rather than typing this. The rest of the movie, however, is insanely well done technically, which makes it pretty unrelenting.

I've read other reviews from armchair critics, and some of them actually thought it was funny, solely because some of the visual effects weren't so realistic. I guess it's hard to relate to trauma, even fake trauma, if your sole experience with suffering is getting your ass kicked in Gears of War.

The director is Serbian, and claims that this is a metaphor for how fucked the Serbian mind is, in the wake of decades of civil war and ethnic cleansing. I believe it. I do however always have to wonder if some artists are just dilettantes who just use their supposed personal experiences as an excuse to poke at peoples' weak points to elicit a reaction. Did this guy witness firsthand real human atrocity? And if he did, would he be so willing to dramatize that atrocity in film? I don't know, but it's a valid question. I've seen plenty of artists go slumming "in the name of art," without actually experiencing the day to day truth of what they are exploiting. In this case, I probably won't ever know.

Does the story of Serbian atrocity and its effect on the Serbian mind need to be told? Yep. Does A Serbian Film do that? Maybe. If it does, is it an effective way of telling that story? I doubt it.

It is unequivocally powerful. But then again, so is a claw hammer to the back of the head.

You can appreciate this movie, but I don't think you can like it. If you remain unaffected by it, go see a therapist. If you enjoyed it, do the world a favor and kill yourself.

Really?! I Wouldn't Even Trust Me to Pick Up the Mail While You're Out of Town

2010-08-04T17:12:00.002-04:00

OK, if you are reading this, then you probably know me. And since I can count the number of my "followers" on one hand(I could even do it if I lost a digit or two in a bomb-defusing accident), there ain't a shit ton of you reading this on a regular basis. So let's get the unitiated up to speed.

I have a kid. A six-year old son, to be precise. And if you've seen his pictures or video of him, or my frequent FB status updates RE: the kid, then you know he is pretty awesome. Particularly coming from a chump like me. No, I am not fishing for compliments or trying to weasel sympathy for myself. If anything, I am trying to weasel sympathy for the kid. I'm his dad. He'll need all the help he can get.

It is safe to say that over the course of my adult life I have been petulant, selfish, lazy, and self-destructive. I generally, as guidance counselors are wont to say, make poor choices. I pick the wrong jobs, the wrong friends, the wrong restaurants, the wrong significant others. The last one is a bit of a misnomer. My significant others usually make the wrong choice in me.

Admittedly, I usually start pretty strong with a ladyfriend. I can hold my own in witty banter, I listen to NPR, I like music that isn't Nickelback, I can grow a shockingly ample beard. I generally attract women that have been burned/crushed/generally maligned by their lovelives in the past. Since I don't do drugs, hit women(or really, anyone) as a rule, gamble or drink heavily, or disappear for long stretches of time and come back with VD, I seem like a decent enough prospect. I like the generally positive attention I receive, and the women I've been with are for the most part pretty nice ladies to the last. So it works out well for all involved.

Except that I have had a tendency to fully invest myself in a relationship to the detriment of all else in my life, work excluded. Because in addition to my impressive beard growing skills, I like to work, so I try not to fuck that up too horribly. What ends up happening is that I spend all of my time working on the relationship, and spending all my free time with my ladyfriend(LF), that I forget that I have a life outside of it. I've quit bands that I really enjoyed playing with because I didn't want to give up that time with LF. I spent my 20s and most of my 30s thinking "I should do stand-up comedy, because I think I'd be really good at it," only to give up the notion when a LF started to pay me mind. And don't get me wrong--rarely was the pressure not to do comedy or play music external. It almost always came from me not wanting to jeopardize the relationship by doing something without the LF. Which is stupid--if I took a poll of my exes, I'm pretty sure none of them would have cared if I went and told jokes. They probably would have welcomed it, and been excited to see the person they cared about doing something they enjoyed. But I was lazy, and good at making assumptions, so I just curled up on the couch with beer and chips and we watched Seinfeld reruns and HGTV and I got fat along the way.

Whoa, cap. We are a LONG way from the kid, right? Yeah, I digress a bit. Don't put tin foil shiny side up near me, or I'm fucked for hours, oohing and aahing over it....

I wasn't lazy just emotionally. I wasn't so hot at birth control either. Amazingly enough, no one, to my knowledge, ever got knocked up by me, with the notable exception of BabyMama. Sidenote: if you are one of my exes and reading this and I have a supersecrety mystery child, we probably oughtta talk. And I need a second job....

Obviously my "pull and pray"method of prophylaxis wasn't foolproof. Especially since I am clearly a fool. I came home to a very emotional LF, who after some hemming and hawing, fessed up that she was pregnant. I felt a thousand metal overhead garage doors come slamming down all at once. You know the sound, that ratcheting chorus of sheet metal smashing against the concrete? Yeah. I think my heart stopped. After it was forcibly ripped backwards through my spine.

I had never fancied myself a dad. I could barely balance my checkbook or remember to change the oil in my car without the aid of that handy window sticker the dipstick jockeys at JiffyLube slap up during every visit. You really expect ME to be able to raise a kid?

Those first moments of recognition mingled with 20-20 hindsight. "Yeah, shoulda got that vasectomy back in my 20s, like I planned." Like I planned everything else in my 20s....

Next was a quick phase of denial, which led to some bargaining. "This apartment has no steps. I need to find steps, an alibi, and if the medical examiner can determine if a pregnant woman just fell or was pushed."

I was definitely not excited about the prospect of fatherhood at all. I could rarely fathom staying with any one person in a relationship for more than 2 years tops, and that had always been pushing it way past the "best by" date. Now I was going to be in a relationship with someone for at least the next 18 years?!

And by that, I meant the prospective kid, not the LF. I was pretty sure even then my relationship with her was not bound to last. Like I said, I've been pretty shitty at relationships(go back and read early entries of this here blog if you aren't convinced) and I was bound to fuck this one up too. But the kid was different. It wouldn't be its fault that I was its dad, so I at least had the mental wherewithal to realize I had to try not to fuck this kid up too badly once it plopped out into the disadvantageous position of being my progeny.

My back and shoulder still hurt from the bike accident three weeks ago, so I'm gonna take a breather here. Stupid pedestrians. Grow wheels on your feet. Jerks.

Ah, Fuck. Talking Heads. Just One Talking Head, Really. And It Ain't David Byrne.

2010-07-16T16:07:00.004-04:00

Here's a little something different. Video footage of me chatting you up about the new movie CYRUS. I know--my huge hairy head is half out of the frame, the lighting sucks on ice, I'm talking. On the upside, I am totally impressed with the audio capabilities of my trusty Olympus Stylus 1010 camera. Swanky.

CYRUS! Not Billy Ray, Yo.

Surviving Survival, Romero Style

2010-07-16T10:43:00.002-04:00

OK, so 5 days of movies and reviews didn't quite pan out the way I had hoped. Regular life gets in the way, and I crashed my bike into a pedestrian because she jumped INTO my path when I was trying to go around her. She of course is fine, while I have a sprained shoulder, wrist, and a fuckload of aches. And muscle relaxants. So I've been like an employed junkie the past couple days. Which means I watch TV til I pass out, and I can't poop. Great.

So I watched George Romero's latest foray into zombiedom, Survival of the Dead. Which makes this his fifth film to follow in the wake of 1968's Night of the Living Dead. 40 years, and he is still cranking 'em out.

I've pretty much loved, or at least like a whole lot, all of George Romero's zombie movies. NOTLD and Dawn of the Dead were instant classics for me. I had seen both before the age of 12--thank Jeebus for lax video store clerks and overnight stays at the houses of friends whose parents weren't nearly as diligent as mine. I got to watch Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, and Toxic Avenger unfettered by adult judgment. Which means somebody probably should have called Social Services at some point.

It's safe to say that Uncle George holds a special place in my heart, for the "....Dead" movies, not to mention the Crazies and Creepshow. He and his crew literally invented the modern zombie mythos, albeit lifting heavily from the plot of Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, an unqualified classic in horror writing. Zombies as we imagine them today are the direct descendants of the flesh-chomping weirdos from Pittsburgh.

And the film broke more ground, casting a black male as the dominant lead, making the white family man then heavy that you can't wait to see get eaten. Yet the black hero is only nominally a hero, since Romero made a pretty convincing case for humanity's sucking on a grand scale, as well as bearing witness to the extremely tense race relations of the time; and the frayed fabric of family being ripped to shreds, literally. Everyone in the farmhouse argues, gets into fistfights, purposely jeopardizes others' lives and safety. Posses charged with containing the threat are really nothing more than bands of yokels just looking for an excuse to use their superior firepower. And only because "organized" government and the scientific community prove wholly ineffectual at dealing with the outbreak.

Each movie that followed expanded on these themes, peered in on some new ones, and further cemented Romero's reputation for making bitter pills more palatable in the guise of zombie mayhem. Dawn of the Dead and consumerism. Dawn of the Dead and the battle between science, humanism, and the military. Land of the Dead and class war. Diary of the Dead and how new media can connect and isolate us at the exact time. And now Survival of the Dead.

This is George Romero's self-proclaimed zombie western, which was my first clue that this might not go well. Not well at all.

See, a band of rogue soldiers is making its way anywhere safe from the zombie plague, when they find out about an island off the coast of Delaware that should be inaccessible to zombies. Except that the zombies are already there, causing a longstanding feud between two farm families to get even worse. The patriarch of one family is convinced that the since the zombies were once their families and neighbors, they should be corralled and kept until a cure can be found. The father of the other family believes they are an immediate threat and should be exterminated at all costs. It's the Hatfields+the McCoys+zombies. Which should equal greatness. Uh, maybe not so much this time.

First of all, the acting stinks on ice. It's never been the strong suit of any Romero cast, except for maybe Land of the Dead, which had a mostly Hollywood cast. This time though, it borders on community theater. Remember, this is set in the "present day," and these families have supposedly been on this island OFF THE COAST OF DELAWARE for generations. Then why the fuck do they have wildly anachronistic heavy duty Irish accents, which come and go?

The non-zombie action scenes have almost NO ACTION in them. It feels like the actors weren't really sure if Romero yelled "Action!" or "Cut!", so scenes just kind of linger like a plumber who's just had his liver chewed out. The quick, non-linear film edits that heightened the sense of nightmare logic in NotLD are gone. The movie itself is one long, boring as fuck set-up for what could have been an epic shoot-out on the par of Gunfight at the OK Corral. Instead we are treated to 10 farmhands, a couple of shotgun blasts, and lots of really weak stunt-dives behind farm equipment, not to mention the single most anemic mass zombie attack I have ever seen.

Did I mention that this is nominally a zombie movie, made by the undisputed king of zombie movies? Then where the fuck are all the zombies? And why is one of them riding horseback throughout the entire movie?! There are seriously only about 3 zombie attacks in the entire movie, and while I kept reading about the "massively creative" kills in this one, I'm still waiting. And FX guys, use corn syrup blood. Because CGI blood spatter looks like, well, CGI blood spatter. Unless your digital FX budget is in the 6 figures, don't bother. Cuz it looks like it was made on a Commodore 64.

George Romero claims he wanted to make a spoofy, fun popcorn type western featuring zombies. And I guess he succeeded in a way. There's definitely not much to think about, like the A*Team. Unlike the A*Team, this was boring as a conference call.

I'm not sure if Romero is tired of zombies and hopes a shitty movie will ward investors off giving him money for more since a zombie movie is expected of him, or maybe he just flat out ran out of steam creatively. He had a good run of 40 years. Maybe it's time to hang up the entrails, George, and pick a new muse. Cuz Survival of the Dead seems about as lazy as all those "National Lampoon Presents" movies that end up on Comedy Central at 2pm on a Wednesday.

You wanna see a good new zombie movie? Dead Snow. Resurrected Nazi zombies. Yup. Awesome. Except for that damn CGI blood. Stupid fucking computers....

I Love It When I Enjoy a Movie.

2010-07-08T12:40:00.001-04:00

All right, so Day 2 of the Rob's Cinema Deathmatch to the Death. I went and saw A*Team. Even though I completely deplore remakes pretty much 100% of the time, with rare exceptions, this is the fucking A*Team we're talking about.

Whenever I hear that TV shows get remade into movies, a little part of me dies. Because TV and movies, even though they are both movin' pitchers, are products of two very different media. TV is meant to be viewed on the small screen; movies, you guessed it, are definitely big screen. And just like a square is a rectangle but a rectangle isn't a square, movies can downsize to TV, but rarely do TV shows make the transition to the cinema so easily. I've been racking my brain for the last 30 seconds, and not one good one really jumps to the fore, but plenty of shitty ones. Dragnet. The Flintstones. Car 54 Where Are You? SWAT. Somebody'll call me out on the Addams Family. To which I say "Eff you. It was a cartoon in athe New Yorker, so it don't count." Addams Family is admittedly a pretty good movie. Chalk one up for my haters. Of which there must be many, since I know at least 5 people read this horseshit whenever I post it.

The A*Team. I loved this show as a kid. I wanted to be as suave as Face, crazy as Murdoch, savvy and cocksure as Hannibal, and black as BA. Cuz he got the best lines, looked the meanest, and had a haircut that, in the 80s, only Mr. T could pull off. I'd get my ass kicked if I had that haircut, but BA would eat your face for lunch and floss his teeth with 90 pounds of gold chains if you even tried to make a mohawk joke.

How could you not love this show, especially as a dowtrodden geek who did get his ass kicked on a regular basis? Here was a bunch of badasses who were more than willing to seriously fuck shit up in the name of helping out the powerless. I don't know about you, but I did my fair share of emotional transference onto the Villain of the Week on the A*Team. Giving voice to the voiceless! Building a makeshift cabbage cannon to defend the rights of migrant workers! And who knew that a show that most would imagine had a serious right wing bent would actually take up the cause of the little guy most of the time. Sure, they did it with massive firepower and no backing of the State Department, but who is gonna split hairs?

Honestly, if there is gonna be a movie version of a TV show, this one should have seemed like a no-brainer to producers, but then again, Car 54 Where Are You? came out over a decade ago, so that may tell you how intelligent most Hollywood producers are. A*Team, visually speaking, begged for the big screen treatment back in the 80s. But thankfully, they waited til the Y2K+10 to get it done. Because it's an overblown mess that makes little to no sense, goes on too long, and hops from one trainwreck to the next. Which means, I kinda liked it, because for once, it didn't spoil my memories of the original. It took the original and exploded it into a much larger scale, perfect for the large screen.

Nominally speaking the plot of the movie involves the A*Team circa 2003 in Iraq being set up for the death of a colleague and the disappearance of a shitload of counterfeit money printing plates. I think. There are so many hidden agendas and shadowy conspiracies that it begins to make the Bourne films look like Clue-The Movie. They all go to jail, a rogue CIA agent breaks them out to help get the plates back, a shitload of doublecrosses and fients happen, lots of shit blows up, and in the end we all love it when a plan comes together. I don't really know what happened per se, but the popcorn bucket and soda cup were empty when the lights came up, and I had to pee more than I needed to think about the plot.

The action setpieces are phenomenal. Who can't help but love watching Faceman gun down pursuing enemy fighter jets from the turret gun of a tank plummeting to earth? Only fucking idiots, that's who. There are A LOT of explosions. Probably are probably more conflagrations than dialogue. Awesome. You didn't show up to this for the character development or scathing commentary on modern warfare. Go watch PBS, jerk.

I do have some complaints though. Directors, when you are filming fight scenes, please stop doing them in low light and giving us imposing images of the fighters' shoulders and massive necks. I don't need to see every drop of sweat on the back of a dude's head while he kicks someone's ass. I actually want to see him kick someone's ass. So let me see it.

And the 20 minute prologue that sets the stage for the A*Team all coming together for the first time is totally unnecessary. I already sat through 27 minutes of previews. I know who the A*Team is and I want to watch them fuck shit up as a team, not as a bunch of guys who will soon fuck shit up as a team. Seriously, it's the A*Team--we already know who they are and what they do. So give it to us. We're not that stupid. And if we are, we don't care. Just have BA weld something, Murdoch drive it, and Face and Hannibal shoot from it.

The actors all do a pretty good job in their respective roles. Bradley Cooper hits the right note of Dean Martin ne'erdowell/Aryan god that does muscular justice to the original Faceman, Dirk Benedict. Sharlto Copley is PERFECT as Murdoch. Perfect. And even though his accent occasionally slips into Michael Collins territory, Liam Neeson does a grittier George Peppard as Hannibal. Rampage Jackson doesn't quite hit it just yet as BA, but he comes close. Filling Mr. T's jump boots ain't gonna be an easy job for anyone, so kudos to Rampage Jackson for making the most of what is already an iconic character.

And no cameos fromt he original cast! No Dirk Benedict, no Dwight Schultz, no Mr. T. Not even a little Melinda Cullea. Damn shame. I kept looking, and they denied me that little slice of joy. It would have been awesome to see Bradley Cooper do a double take as he crossed paths with the original Faceman. Just like that A*Team episode when Faceman does a doubletake when a Cylon walks past. Yeah, I am a dork with a LONG memory for stupid shit....

My biggest bitch? They literally only used the original opening theme for 10 seconds in the whole movie! Blasphemy! And no voice over. Seriously, fuck you.

No surprises, a nearly incomprehensible plot, lots of shit blowed up real good. Just like the original. Except that, unlike the show, when people get shot in the movie, they actually die. And no reverse angle shots of cars flipping over other cars after hitting poorly hidden ramps.

Up next. Movie 3. Survival of the Dead. Later today, probably tomorrow. I like to keep my audience riveted.

Marathon? Yeah, I'll Run a Marathon, Fuck Yeah! Or uh, Maybe I'll Sit Through One Instead, in the Dark, with Junk Food

2010-07-07T18:26:00.002-04:00

OK, so here we go on the 5 day/5 movie marathon, or more like 6 day/5 movie marathon, because a dumbass lunch meeting for work got in the way of today's movie reverie. Jerks, feed me breakfast next time. I like it better than lunch, and it keeps the rest of my day free to do fuck-all. Jobs. Fuck 'em.

So the first movie I went and saw was Toy Story 3, with Special Someone. Mind you, it took me until little less than a year ago to see the first two, and I only caught 2 in snippets. I have a habit of not seeing really fucking popular movies til way the hell after their "Best By" date. I still haven't seen the first Tim Burton Batman movie, Titanic, Brokeback Mountain, or Precious. I don't willfully try to avoid those movies(except maybe Titanic--DiCaprio is still gonna look 12 when he's 90); I just don't get around to seeing them since everyone and their mother makes the effort and then sucks all the life out of them before I have a chance. I actually try to avoid reading too much about movies before I see them, because it spoils all the wonder and the thrill of discovery of viewing it without any external bias. I find myself replaying critics' reviews or extraneous background information as I view movies, which distracts me from actually watching and enjoying a flick, which is why I'm there in the first place. I'd rather read the reviews afterward, so I can tell the critic to fuck off because their opinion stinks on ice rather than because that mental soundtrack fucks up my viewing pleasure.

Speaking of soundtracks, when the fuck did everyone go deaf? At least that seems to be the supposition made by sound designers/soundtrack honchos on most modern movies. Is this one of the manifold steps in the evolution of total sensory overload? I noticed this the first time when I was watching the Last House on the Left remake. Awesome movie by the way. See it. Awesome except for the fact that all the soundbeds/character themes/etc. were cranked way the fuck up. Having a chase theme blasting out over the thugs' pursuit of the nominal heroine, thereby obliterating any incidental noise from pesky nature or the character's breathing, makes the movie LESS suspenseful, not more. A band like Calla or Young Gods is way creepier than Slayer for the very reason that they trade in quietude. Mind you, I love me some Slayer, but Slayer ain't exactly suspenseful. There is no suspense in a hammer smashing you in the forehead, but a fuckload of suspense in the anticipation of a the possibility of a hammer smashing(or not smashing) you in the forehead. Horror movies(most movies, really) are way more effective when they are subtle. So, turn down the damn radio, you meddling kids!

Oh yeah, Toy Story. Once again, a nominal kids' movie from Pixar that doesn't treat kids in the audience like morons, and makes their parents cry because of its multi-faceted depiction of loss, death, change, and fear of all of the above. I'm not gonna rehash the plot, cuz you probably already know it even if you haven't seen it. And you should see it. Cuz it's serious, and it's seriousness is even weightier and more heartfelt because of its sly sense of humor keeps it from being preachy or morose. Barbie, I have a smidgen of respect for you now, and only because you get THE best line in the whole damn movie. And my kid even felt bad for the villain, because sometimes villains become so over time and are not just born; it's a distinction that kids don't often hear, and kudos to Pixar for handling it pretty deftly. It's good. Go see it.

Movie 1 down, 4 to go. I'll say this--I cheated a bit. Real life intruded on my quest for 5 movies in 5 days, so I only ended up at the actual real live movies twice last week. I did see 5 flicks, but 3 were on the On Demand. They're all current(or relatively so), so I don't feel so bad about it. Check back tomorrow for installment #2--the A*Team!

Splice, or a Plain Plea for Sensible Birth Control

2010-06-14T20:37:00.004-04:00

   Being a parent is a pretty fucking scary endeavor, especially when you consider who is actually raising most kids. Sorry folks, but most parents are flat out retards when it comes to parenting. Some of it is genetic--not everyone's intellectual bullpen has a whole shitload of depth, for those of you who trade in baseball metaphors.
   I prefer less colloquial terms--most people are pretty fucking stupid, and nature played a cruel joke on humanity. Making a kid should be at least as hard as raising one. Or at least as hard as building a table from IKEA. In that case, there would be a sum total of 15 people in the entirety of China. I'm not making a culturally insensitive remark about the ability of the Chinese people to assemble furniture with a screwdriver, Allen wrench and cuss words. I'm just saying, a lot less people would have kids if fucking were harder than two people repressing their mutual disgust for each other while drunkenly grappling in the dark for three minutes.
   But what happens when two folks who are, by all accounts, not just kinda not stupid but are actually pretty smart, so smart that they bypass the traditional 'tab a, slot b' method of procreation and literally build a "kid," gene by gene?
   Well, you end up with "Splice," a mostly decent new sci-fi/body horror movie with Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley. They play a couple , Clive and Elsa(sweet homage to Bride of Frankenstein!) who also work together as geneticists tasked with bio-engineering new organisms for a pharma company. A geek chic slacker power couple(their apartment is larded with uberhip Japanese toys, and Clive cranks death metal when it gets too uptight at the lab), they are snarky geniuses on the leading edge of genetics. When their experiment fails to yield the results they're looking for, Elsa decides to do a little rogue tinkering, injecting human cells into the cloning experiment. And whaddaya know, it actually works. Otherwise, of course, this movie would be very short and boring.
   Well, their new blob of cells begins replicating beyond their wildest dreams, and soon the test tube "births" Dren, a hybrid bird/cat/human/etc whatsis that ages at an incredibly rapid rate, communicates in insectile clicks and feline purring, has a stinger in her/its tail, and is apparently way too smart for its or anybody else's good.
   Because this is a horror movie, and again it would be incredibly boring and short if the main characters acted with a lick of sense, the scientists of course hide their secret "baby" in the lab, with Elsa taking an increasingly protective interest in Dren, treating her as if her own child. She reads to her, gives her art supplies, dresses her in girly clothes, and tucks her in at night. Dren quickly grows to adult size in a matter of weeks, and balks at being kept hidden away, and begins to sense that she doesn't necessarily fit in very well.    Clive at first resists any attachment to Dren, but in one of the movie's less believable moments in the final third, develops a quite unnatural attachment to her. I'll leave it at that, and you can let your mind fill in the blanks. Yeah, you're way sicker than you thought, if I'm right about what you just assumed.
    This "family" wasn't built to last. Mommy has issues from childhood that cause her to make shitty decisions as an adult; Baby grows to adolescence in a matter of weeks and her body is changing in ways she can't begin to fathom, including the aforementioned stinger tail that gets used in ways best left to actual viewing; and Daddy ends up making a tactical error when he starts thinking with his dick. Let's just say it doesn't really end well for anyone involved.
   Overall, what really saves this from slipping into exploitation land like Larry Cohen's classic "It's Alive" is the tone of relative seriousness cut with a knowing streak of black wit, coupled with fairly grounded performances from the two leads. For the most part, they act like you would expect people to act, given the fantastic subject matter. There are a couple minor instances when they do typical horror-movie dumb shit in service of keeping the plot humming along. But the underlying sly humor keeps it from taking itself too seriously.
   There are the usual commentaries on the obvious targets about tampering with nature and the repsonsibility of the scientist to act morally in the quest for scientific advancement. There are also plenty of more oblique critiques and interesting riffs on what constitutes the modern family, parenting, sexuality, and gender, none of which beat the viewer over the head. It reminds me of a throwback to the David Cronenberg movies from the 70s-late 90s, posing heady philosophical questions in the context of a vagina growing out of a man's abdomen. The perfect combination of "ick" and "hmmm."
   The only real quibble I had was the climax. The filmmakers had this great concept plowing along handily, but the ending seemed as if they were unsure what to do with it, and the ending becomes a fairly typical showdown. Honestly I can't fault them though--I sure as shit wouldn't have known where to take it either, so I am in no position to bitch. And ultimately, it did little to detract from the overall sense of dread and moral ambiguity. Which is just how I like my movies . People don't always act morally, the guy doesn't always get the girl, and sometimes the girl becomes the guy and shit just gets even more fucked up.
   So, next time you think you want just one more kid, remember the shitty job your parents did raising you. And thank the stars that you weren't conceived in a petri dish and have a stinger tail and crazy batwings. Yeah, fucking batwings.

Unifying a Theme, Redux

2010-06-01T09:48:00.001-04:00

A friend of mine just wrote a blog about a dream she had and wondering how to explain it. Go to How(Not)toWriteABook to read her original post, then come back here and read the rest of mine.

So, you're back. Yeah, I can't really respond about the dream, but I can relate a real life event maybe to offer some insight.

I had gotten out of a horrible, protracted, emotionally exhausting relationship with a woman that I had spent two years with, because I was too spent and cowardly just to leave. I kept from her the fact that I had received a substantial raise, saved enough to make the security deposit on a swanky walk-up downtown, and scheduled a UHaul and a friend to get me the fuck outta there.

I moved. I settled in. I sat around, watched TV, went to movies by myself, and ate out a lot. I got used to being alone and comfortable with that. Then I started getting bored, then lonely. But I had no idea how to date. I had never been very good at it in the first place, usually falling ass backwards into relationships that should never have been, and allowed them to go on far longer than the three days they should have lasted.

So I put a personal ad in the Baltimore City Paper. I got a bunch of responses, went on some dates, nothing really panned out. One lady struck my fancy a bit, but our initial phone call was cut short, so we arranged to go on a date, since she was babysitting her little sister and was preoccupied with running interference with her.

We met at the Mount Royal Tavern for beers. Her suggestion. Shoulda been my first sign that trouble lurked in them thar hills. Otherwise known as "the Dirt Church", the Tavern is plopped right in the center of the Maryland Institute College of Art, and thusly attracts lots of obnoxious art students, neighborhood drunks, and middle-aged hangers-on that used to be art students but became junkies instead. The Guns N Roses pinball is awesome, and the men's room is a great place to score heroin.

We met, drank, flirted, kissed, and ended up back at her place and had sex. It was just that exciting, too. I passed out there, and woke up the next morning when a small, probably 3 year old girl leapt on to the bed, gleefully yelling "Mommy!" Mind you, I was hungover and naked in a relative stranger's bed. Thankfully, I don't like sleeping without copious sheets pulled up to my neck.

I was hungover and even more stunned. I froze. "Mommy" awkwardly smiled at me and quickly scooped up the kid and rushed out of the room. The kid looked at me with a mixture of curiosity and familiarity. I had begun to suspect that this was a fairly regular occurrence. While Mommy got breakfast ready, I lurched out of bed and started to put my clothes on. Then another woman, roughly my age, walked by the door and stopped.

"You must be Rob."

"Uh, yeah. You're...?"

"The babysitter. Congratulations."

Yeah, I definitely wasn't the first. I hustled out into the foyer, fumbled in my pockets for my keys, and slinked out. Mommy caught me by the arm as I got the key into my car door.

"Uh, sorry. I guess I should have said something. I just figured that..."

"That you having a kid would send me packing? Maybe not, if you'da told me up front. Seriously? Pretending she's your sister? That's fucked, to put it politely."

She got indignant. "You don't know how hard it is as a single...."

"Parent? You're right, I don't. Good luck with that."

I got in my car and left. She tried calling me a couple times to apologize and offer me a "make-up" date, which I politely ignored.

So, Sarah, I have no idea what this has to do with your post, but if you know any single folks who have kids, tell 'em to be upfront about it. Lying in general in relationships sucks, but lying about having kids is creepy weird and kinda mean to your kid. And don't fuck a stranger when your kid is in the house! I'm amazed that even needs to be stated as advice. Apparently I'm more naive than I thought....

Where Do I Begin? I'm Not Even Sure I Could.

2010-05-11T15:01:00.003-04:00

So I went and saw "the Human Centipede: First Sequence" at a midnight show in DC, the only place other than NYC that is showing the movie on the eastern seaboard. It was limited to two midnight viewings for two weekends, and that was it. Which tells you how incredibly limited this movie's "appeal" will be, for a complete lack of an appropriate analog.

First, let me be an old fart and get this off my chest. I was one of only a handful of people over the age of 25 there. Fuck, it was a midnight show--9 out of 10 times, I'm in bed by 11 nowadays. By no means does that make me crotchety, but it was apparent that I was out of my supposed demographic that night.

I have nothing against people in their early 20s, and I understand that midnight movie audiences are prone, and usually encouraged, to interact with the flick on display. I've thrown plenty of toast and screamed "Dammit, Janet" and dressed like Divine(I did not however eat dog shit) enough times to know what goes on. But you gotta remember, everyone at those specific midnight movies was there for the experience, because we'd all seen these movies a billion times and knew them back and front, and the extraneous traditions attached to them as if they were an actual part of the original cut of the movie. I can't even begin to imagine watching Rocky Horror at home--it has to be boring as fuck, not to mention that the movie itself is pretty godawful. That said, Human Centipede is a NEW movie, as yet unseen by pretty much any self-respecting person who considers themselves even remotely normal. Which means almost NO ONE has seen this movie.

So, slobby geek who stopped playing World of Warcraft long enough to buy a ticket, shut the fuck up. Cuz I actually want to see the movie and pay attention. If I end up playing a drinking game to this movie, it'll be a long time down the road from now, when it has reached "cult" status. Because it will. Because this movie is, to use only the best term I can even fathom to find in my ill-equipped arsenal of word, unfuckingbelievable. And if I drink while watching this movie again, it won't be a game. It will be to flatten out the folds in my grey matter.

Long story short, it involves two American tourists(relatively attractive women in their mid-20s, of course) who get lost on a lonely German road in the rain. They get a flat tire and go stumbling through the woods only to find themselves on the doorstep of an extremely intense and weird doctor. He lets them in, drugs them, they wake up strapped to gurneys next to another unlucky soul in a well-appointed basement surgical theatre. Turns out the doctor is a specialist in separating conjoined twins(there is supremely creepy "Siamese twin" artwork all over his house--seriously unsettling) who has his unhinged mind set on doing it in reverse, with three people. Yep, he wants to stitch 'em together. And not by the hips, but butt to mouth. So they have "one" digestive tract. You guessed it, persons #2 and #3 get to "eat" what their predecessor already has. I'll leave it at that and let you fill in the blanks.

Apparently the writer/director met with a surgeon, who was able to hypothesize as medically accurate a surgery as could be performed in the movie. Accurate or not, it'll make your skin crawl to see the finished "centipede". He tries to train "it"(them? where does the old individual cease and the new creature begin? ech....) to work together, to walk in unison, to "eat"(again, ech....).

Eventually the cops coming investigating, wondering if the doctor has seen any evidence of two missing American tourists and the other guy. Being the total fucking oddball that he is, he arrogantly suggests they go get a warrant, which they take their leave to do. Meanwhile the "centipede" tries to escape. The "head" centipede stabs the doc in the ankle, and they nearly make their escape, only to have the doctor catch them . The "head" decides in a rambling monologue that this is his punishment for betraying his family and leading a dissolute life, and slashes his throat with broken glass.

The cops return. The doc gets the jump on one cop, shooting and killing him, while the other cop finds the "centipede" and almost loses his lunch. Welcome to the club. He hears the gunshots, rushes to find his partner dead, and he and the doc simultaneously shoot each other dead. In the meantime, the rear "partner" of the "centipede" dies from blood poisoning, leaving the "thorax" stitched ass to mouth with two corpse, crying. I think I would too. The end. But remember, it's titled "First Sequence". Apparently the writer/director had already envisioned this as a multi-part story. Sheesh.

I don't even know if anyone can look at this movie with a critical or moral eye. Yeah, it's gross. Does it have any social value? Perhaps. Is it any good as a movie, regardless of moral perspectives? Sorta. The American tourists are as annoying and dim as you would expect a European director to make American tourists. And the German doctor? Hello, Herr Mengele--he's pretty stereotypical as the arch weirdo German doctor. But damn if the actor portraying him just absolutely nail the character. He verily radiates megalomaniacal creepiness. Seriously intense.

Most lazy critics will lump it right in with the Saw series and Hostel, because it gives the APPEARANCE of crassness(and because most critics are fucking retards). But it doesn't pander to the audience. It is surprisingly not so gory for a horrific movie about diabolical surgery. It's gross, but not super bloody. It uses visceral scares to apply unflinchingly intense psychological pressure that feels like it will never relent--the ending makes sure of that. You start to wonder, how would you react in a similar situation? It gets under your skin. And it has babies--ugly, screeching babies that might never shut up.

I have a feeling, down the road a couple years, this will compare relatively favorably with "Salo" and "Un Chien Andalou". Maybe sooner, if y'all shut the hell up and let me watch the movie in peace....

New! From General Mills! Typ-O's!

2010-04-30T18:37:00.001-04:00

Hey, just a thought. If you see typos in my writing, email me so I can fix 'em. I HATE typos, and bad grammar/spelling/syntax/diction. Help me help you.

Thanks.

This Time I Might Know What I'm Talking About

2010-04-30T15:34:00.003-04:00

I've been tyring to wrap my brain around how to continue my last post in regard to movie adaptations of comics, and I can't. I clearly don't know fuck-all about comic books, so I probably won't finish it.

However, since I DO know fuck-all about horror movies, I will write about those now. Or one in particular. The new A Nightmare on Elm Street remake/reboot/rebarf/whatever.

Now, in general I have a problem with remakes. Most of them blow, with the notable exception of Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes, and parts of Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Rob Zombie, you were awesome in White Zombie. That's all I have to say about your takes on Halloween. Also, I think that most of the population, horror fans and horror filmmakers included, feel that horror movies are inherently worth less effort, time and consideration than your average film, by dint of their genre. This has led to endless sequelization, rip-off, and "re-imagining" by creatively bankrupt jerks who want to make a quick buck. They figure that the people who watch these movies are somehow not quite as discerning, and will watch whatever they throw at us. Which, admittedly, is probably the case.

We're the abused spouses of the movie world. Horror filmmakers really care. They luuvvvvvvv us. They hurt us again and again because, baby, they just love us TOO MUCH. And we always take them back, only to be disappointed, usually late at night, after they regained our trust, only to betray us yet again, and only to have us take them back, YET AGAIN.   There are endless numbers of fanzines dedicated to the ephemera of the vast wasteland of horror cinema, but none that cater to the lover of the rom-com.   None that I personally know of anyway, unless you count Cosmo readers in that demographic.... I like cheese as much as the next guy, but cheez, not so much. There is a far cry from triple-cream brie to Velveeta.

So horror fans are generally left gasping in the crypt when it comes to wide-release horror films, unless one of the low-budget auteurs manages to turn the studio a quick buck, generally by accident. Jason, Freddy and Michael Myers would never have gotten multi-picture deals if their first shots out of the gate had flopped. And honestly, I don't really get how Jason and Michael got as far as they did, with multiple sequels, and now remakes, between them. They always struck me as very "one note", and I pretty much lost interest in their attendant sequels. The originals were good, but what really did they have to go on beyond that, aside from just trying to find even more elaborate ways to kill stupid horny kids? The notable exception is Halloween III, which dropped the Michael Myers angle entirely. Admirable attempt to do something different, and not at all a bad flick.

Freddy on the other hand, started out as Fred Kreuger in the first film, a dark, misanthropic shadow in our dreams, becoming Freddy as he slowly took pop culture in his razor sharp embrace in the mid-80s, morphing into a psychopathic George Carlin in his later movies, board games, TV show and lunchboxes(!). Amazing to think that parents sent their kids to school with an undead child molester on their Thermos. At least he showed some sort of character development over time. The last couple of movies might have been the last wheezing breaths of a dying franchise, but studios weren't willing to kill off a cash cow until the returns diminished to unacceptable levels. And then they tried to force Freddy vs. Jason on us anyway. The less said, the better....

Oh yeah, I had a point. Remakes. A Nightmare on Elm Street. Generally, I feel like remakes should only happen if a director takes an original that was truly awful, and have something new to say about it. If Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright redid Hardbodies, it would probably be pretty damn good. Or if Robert Rodriguez put his twist on It's Complicated. Admit it, even though it had Alec Baldwin, Meryl Streep and Steve Martin, et al., it sucked. Rodriguez would at least add gunplay and Denny Trejo.

With the Hills Have Eyes and Last House on the Left remakes, I thought they took some pretty "meh" films at best and did something different with them. The original the Hills Have Eyes was adequate, and there were some good scares, but I don't see how it has become a cult classic. Same with the original Last House.... That movie is just flat out terrible. The acting stinks, the camera work is static, the characters are caricatures at best, and it looks more like a bunch of friends decided to make a movie at the cabin one weekend, and this turd popped out. It is by turns slapstick and deadly brutal, remarkably leaving me simultaneously disgusted and bored. No mean feat, considering some of the crap I've sat through.

The newer versions of both movies took the essential plots of both movies and did something different with them. I think the Last House.... remake far surpasses its antecedent just by virtue of having one distinct tone and sticking with it through the whole movie. You tend to care about the characters. However I can't really say the same for the Hills... remake--the protagonist family were kinda tools, and I wasn't necessarily rooting for them. It was more a gory action movie than genuinely scary or unsettling. But it was entertaining enough to warrant its existence. In Last House... , because even though there were definite "good" and "bad" guys, they all lived in shades of grey. The parents of the victim are alternately caring and unfalteringly vicious. They seemed like real parents confronted with entirely unreal events. It helped that there were no completely out of place comic interludes.

So back to Freddy. You were probably wondering when the hell I'd get back here, if you're still reading. A lot of the reviews I read, at least the negative ones, tended to dwell on the necessity of the remake. Judging a movie based on whether it should even exist is pretty naive, generally lazy, and kind of stupid. It's there, so review it, ass. Should it have been remade? Probably not. Is it better than the orginal?  Only by a couple of hairs, but yes.

Somebody is probably gonna yell at me, or at least type in all capital letters, that I am a dumb asshole for saying the original Nightmare isn't good. Well, Cap'n, it ain't. It ain't bad, but being well-loved by millions doesn't make it good either(hear that Celine Dion? Contrary to what album sales say, you suck.) There are some evocative set pieces(the dream sequence where you only see his silhouette and his arms grow all crazy long still scares the fuck outta me) and the backstory and concept are pretty awesome, but it's executed in a pretty ham-fisted fashion, aside from Robert Englund's portrayal of Freddy. The acting is on a par with your average soap opera. The characterizations are all pretty broad. Alcoholic mom? Check. Out of touch father? Check. Posse of kids who know the awful truth but can't stop it because NOBODY IN AUTHORITY WILL JUST LISTEN?! Check. You can pretty much see the kills coming from a mile away. But again, to its credit, it was at least a NEW idea, but in execution not great by a stretch. I personally prefer Nightmare 2 and Nightmare: the Dream Warriors. Cuz I'm a moron.

So back to the reviewers. It's gotten generally rotten reviews by everyone except people who review horror movies for a living. And the guy from TIME magazine. Some cried foul for its lack of an internal logic. Uh, it's a movie about a dead guy who kills people in their dreams? One, exactly where would the internal logic in that synopsis lie? And two, have you ever had a dream that made sense? To that critique I say, simply, duh.  The plot is far from incomprehensible.
Others are pissed that the movie conveniently explains Freddy's motivation. It was explained in the original too, and in a much less subtle fashion. It helps that the actors in this were slightly more accomplished than the original. And any movie with the mighty Clancy Brown, however brief his sojourn, always gets points--he's definitely the saving grace of many shite movies. He and Ron Perlman are the journeymen of the modern b-movie, without equal. Personally, I like the notion that we see Fred Kreuger as more than just the dream monster, and the fact that his reasons for stalking the kids are at first glance ambiguous. It's a little convoluted, and the resolution of it is a bit blah, but it works well enough.

Other reviewers have taken Samuel Bayer to task for being a shitty director. I wouldn't say he is bad, but the movie, for being such an over the top subject, is kind of listless. There's no real pulse to it, too little of Freddy's joie de mort. It's surprising that a director renowned for music videos made this. You expect more flash and style. It just gets dragged along slowly, just like one of Freddy's victims.

Ultimately, though, the movie will be immune to critique, and not because it's good, because it really isn't. I had my mind set on seeing it, regardless of what reviewers said. Because, well fuck, it's A Nightmare on Elm Street. I'm not gonna miss seeing that. I probably won't ever see it again. Because even though it's immune from critique, it still a failure. It comes preloaded with everything you expect, you REQUIRE of it precisely because it is A Nightmare on Elm Street. It's a remake--you know exactly what's going to happen. Maybe not moment by moment, but you know. And horror movies thrive on you not knowing what's going to happen. They're supposed to scare you. The good ones always will, no matter how many times you watch them. I enjoyed it, but it didn't scare me.

Find a new way to scare me, and I'll respect you in the morning. I'll take you back either way, stupid remake. Cuz you luvvvvvvv me. I know you'll hurt me, but I just can't say no.

Why Are These Pages All Stuck Together?

2010-04-17T10:04:00.000-04:00

I have never been a huge fan of comic books. I collected GI Joe comics as a kid, more because I loved GI Joe than a particular love of comics. And Watchmen blew my mind as a teenager. But that was about it. I was more of a Mad Magazine kinda kid. I still am. I read more non-fiction than stories(although I loves me some audiobooks--being on the road for a living, it is possible to get tired of podcasts and NPR). I like telling stories, but I don't necessarily like reading them. I like watching them though. If you know me, you know I spend an inordinate amount of time and money watching movies and reading about movies. Like, probably over a hundred bucks a month on magazines and movie tickets, not counting moviesnax. Then we'd be pushing the cool G envelope....

Allan Moore of Watchmen fame, for lack of a better term, said that he doesn't understand the need for filmmakers to constantly try and translate comics into movies. He felt that they are a completely different form of communication, and that pretty much any attempt to translate comics to film would fail. And I tend to agree with him. Maybe I'm an idiot who should keep his trap shut, since I don't read comics and don't reall care that much about them, but I see his point.

Comics are already a visual story, based on a simple economy of imagery and dialogue. Artists and writers of comics have a limited amount of physical space to get their point across, and cut out anything unnecessary to the story. A reader can polish off a comic book in a 20 minute sitting and come away with a pretty complete narrative, if the author did their job well. Yeah, most are serialized, and take several issues to grow from the genesis of the story to its completion. Still, I think that most individual issues of comics are still relatively complete narratives in their own right. I'm gonna make a leap here, and it may end in the death of my point, but sometimes you gotta leap.

Each issue is already a movie in and of itself, but with all the fat trimmed away. As products and instigators of imagination, their form lends itself to mental blank-filling. The reader can go from point A to B(or A to Q for that matter) between frames, without having it spelled out. Their brain fills in the gaps between pictures. They don't need to be fleshed out by a screenwriter. Because they don't need to be made into movies in the first place.

Movies, by their nature, are the exact opposite. They require 90 minutes or more of exposition in order to feel like completed narratives. Plenty of films keep some of the action and exposition offscreen, but not all of it. I think, in terms of mental exercise, movies are a lazier enterprise than written tales, including comics. In order to keep the brain engaged in the narrative, our eyes need to see some of the gaps. Not all of them, but some of them. I do think filmmakers have the idea that moviegoers' attention spans have shortened so much that we need to see everything. We don't, but it's a presumptuous laziness on the part of screenwriters and directors that the world needs 3 hours of Transformers or Avatar. A whole lot of pictures does not a great movie make.

In the case of Ghostbusters or Re-Animator, we want to see everything, because these require little thought if any. They're just fun. But by the same token, if filmmakers kept EVERYTHING offscreen to make us all flex our mental muscles, we suffer brain fatigue and disengage from the storytelling. Not to mention, most movies would end up shorter than a SuperBowl commercial. The thing that ruins the transition from comic page to movie screen for me is that the filmmaker, just by virtue of the architecture of cinema, HAS to impose too much mental gap-filling onto the story to justify its existence as a movie. Having to show too much ruins the telling, I think.

I'm not even sure what my point was when I started this, but I'm gonna mull it over, and I'll get back to you. I might even piss somebody off, because comic book geeks are even crankier and more obsessive than horror movie geeks, and that's saying something. Especially since, when it comes to comics, I really have not a fucking clue about what I'm talking about. I do know that I'm gonna approach it from a Batman?Superman/Spiderman angle though. Which really oughtta rile somebody up....

I Like Games

2010-04-16T12:33:00.003-04:00

Othello. Iago. Romeo. Juliet. Lear. Goneril. Matilda. Beowulf. PonyBoy. Butch. Sundance. Darth Vader. Yoda. Baby. Cornelius. Khan. Leatherface. Freddy. Jason. Dr Satan. Spiderman. Tony Montana. Scout. Boo Radley. Obadiah Elihue. Luke. Chewbacca. Michael Meyers. Murder Legendre. Hedwig. HAL. Ripley. Rocky Balboa. Cujo. Chin Ho. Napolean Dynamite. Flint Lockwood. BA Baracus. Faceman. Hannibal Lecter. Clarisse. Jigsaw. Shaun. Caliban. Dante. Sophie. Ishmael. Ahab. The Badger. Carol Anne. Babe. Johnny Suede. Pinhead. Mahogany. Prospero. Begby. Nick Rivers. Chocolate Mousse. Latrine. Deja Vu. Crow. Servo. Joel. Mike. Pearl. Dr Forrester. TVs Frank. Barbara. Herbert West. Stella. Stanley. Blanche DuBois. Willard. Ben. Norman. Samantha. Tabitha. Great Gazoo. Fred. Wilma. Mr Spacely. Mr Cogswell. Diaper Man. Hong Kong Fooey. Space Ghost. Brock Samson. Puddy. The Tick. Kramer. Norma Desmond. Stanley. Livingston. The Shadow. Green Hornet. Fat Albert. Perseus. Achilles. Frodo. Bilbo. Gandalf. Obi-wan Kenobi. Dumbledore. Cat Ballou. Leather Tuscadero. Pinky Tuscadero. Fonzie. Potsie. Ralph Malph. Laverne. Shirley. Lenny. Squiggy. Spongebob. Patrick. Mrs Dalloway. Renfield. Ash. Harry Callahan. Dr Bombay. James Bond. Jaws. Blofeld. Alvin. Simon. Theodore. Dave. Blackbeard. Nemo. Papa Smurf. John McClain. Homer. Bart. Marge. Lisa. Maggie. Toxie. Bub. Dr Tongue. Louis Cypher.

Figure it out, win a prize.

"Closure? We Don't Need No Stinking Closure!", or Hot Tub Hate Machine

2010-04-01T09:58:00.001-04:00

I am quite possibly the shittiest bloggerist in existence. Case in point? The roughly two months between this and the last post. Well, consider this a closening of said gap. Yep, closening. I grew up near the Amish, so I can get away with shit like that.

I kind of think I'm done writing about my lovelife for the time being. See, the point where we last left off comes dangerously close to where the relationship that begat my marriage, which begat my kid and my impending divorce, began. And those are waters I really don't feel like retreading again. So, I'll have to find a new way to debase myself for your amusement.

Which won't be hard. But I actually want to tell you a story that kind of links back to my old lovelife tales. Well, more than kind of. There is a direct link to it. But this time, it actually doesn't suck. So here it goes. Some of you know it, some of you don't.

Let me preface this by saying that I am most likely one of the unluckiest people known to man. As a kid, I had braces, picked my nose, and liked punk rock in the 1980s. Human target, anyone? Once, in my mid-20s, when I borrowed a company truck to move some personal stuff, I got into a car accident. Since I borrowed a company truck for personal business(with my boss's verbal approval, which he promptly "forgot" when his feet got put to the fire), I was on the hook for the damages, since NOBODY'S insurance was gonna cover it. Bye bye, 401k. Whenever I gamble, I lose. I could buy a scratch-off lottery ticket and end up owing the state 20 bucks. I could fall into a barrel of titties and come out sucking my thumb....

I guess you could say that I've been "unlucky" in love.  Occasionally luck or lack thereof has something to do with it. Like, if you meet the girl of your dreams, but it turns out she is moving to Europe in a couple weeks, and you don't have a passport. Or it turns out that your loverboy is Scott Valentine of "Family Ties" fame. Yeah, rotten luck. But more often as not, "bad luck" in love is really emotional ineptitude, which, I can safely say, applies to me.

I think in the past, I settled for not quite right or even downright wrong partners because they paid me some mind. I spent fair amount of time either getting ignored by people whose attention I craved(mom and dad hated my tattoos when I started getting them in my early 20s, but hey, yelling at your kid is giving them some modicum of attention. Finally....), or getting the shit knocked out of me by people who I wished would ignore me(gee, I wonder why I love the show Bully Beatdown so much). So naturally I ended up dating somebody because they paid attention to me. Even when it was crappy attention, it was attention.

When I hit my mid-30s and yet another relationship took a dump because I was obviously not even remotely stellar at choosing and maintaining a good one, I realized I didn't want to be that guy.

Fuck, hold on a minute. I just realized that there is one more really awesomely shitty tale to be told before I get to my present life. And this one certainly does have "bad luck" written all over it. So here is a digression. Deal with it. Because it's fucking funny as hell, and it happened to me, not you. Trust me, be thankful for that.

So I was separated, hadn't been on a date in about 7 years, in my mid 30s, and totally clueless about how to go about meeting someone. So I did what any clueless, inept jerk does. I put an ad on Craigslist. Let me preface this by saying that Craigslist is a great place to sell a lawnmower, buy a truckload of firewood, or maybe find freelance writing work. It is, however, nowhere near a suitable spot to find a mate.

I put up as honest an ad as I could, making sure to include the bit about me having a kid. Some people don't like kids, and so we shouldn't waste each other's time. Also, all my likes/dislikes, religious lack of belief(I'm an apatheist--I don't care if there's a god), my tattoos, what I do, what I want, etc. I spent plenty of time not taking the time to spell it out to myself and others, and I didn't want to make the same mistakes again. Well....

So I got a bunch of responses, and some of the women seemed nice enough. Some lived too far away. I live in Baltimore, you live deep in Virginia. Hope you like driving, because I'm not getting on the Capitol Beltway unless I desperately need a new kidney, and the only one available is in Fairfax. Some apparently didn't read my ad. C'mon lady, do I really sound like the kind of guy who would like Kenny Chesney, beyond the joy of noticing that he looks suspiciously like a gay porn star in a cowboy hat? And ladies, at the time I was 35, not 55. Your 26 year old son with the newborn daughter isn't gonna like the stepdad who looks like his younger brother. And finally, A LOT of young single moms. Like a whole lot. Apparently no one under the age of 25 procreates with the intention of staying with their partner in zygote. Seriously, I had at least 5 young women between 21-25 reply, stating how, while we essentially had nothing in common except having unprotected sex, would be perfect for each other. I guess maybe because I was older, they assumed I was more mature. Seriously, they had NO idea...

One woman and I had developed enough of a rapport via email that it seemed like we could take it a step further and meet in the analog realm. So we set up a date at the local punk bar. I worked downtown, was getting off late(of work, jerk) one night, and her friend's band was playing, so it seemed like a good idea. It wasn't.

I arrived a little after 10pm. I should have turned and walked right back out the door. She had sent a picture, so I knew what she looked like, and she didn't try to snow me by sending me one of a carefullly cropped Victoria's Secret model. It was definitely her. And there she was, beer in hand, doing the drunk girl hug chorus line, one hand clutching a beer thrust high in the air, going "Whooooo!!!!!" with her friends. Like Girls Gone Wild, without the boobs and capricious making out. She was already snockered. Great.

Like I said, I should have turned tail, but I figured, "What the hell. I'm here. I'll have a beer, and see how long it takes her to break out of her reverie and notice that I'm here."  I snagged a stool at the bar and got a beer, watched the band for a while. When she plopped down next to me, breathing heavy, slurring like a stroke victim.

"Hey! You're my date! It's shhhoooo osssome thah yer herrr...."  She introduced me to whomever happened to be nearby. And hugged/leaned on me. And breathed whisky vapors all up in my face. We talked--rather I talked, she giggled, snorted, and name-dropped everyone in the bar and how great of a friend she was to them. I was totally impressed. With her ability to stay upright after plowing through 4 or 5 shots and at least parts of two beers while we sat there.

Remarkably, she managed to make it to last call. Mind you, I managed to make two beers last 3 hours. Approximately every 45 minutes she made two beers disappear like a Vegas magician. We sat there and talked to the bartenders for a bit after everyone cleared out, because of course she knew them too. Until finally, they had to kick us out so they could go do coke in the the bathroom at 230am. FUN!

So we make it out to the street, where Ms. Sociable, Queen of Fun, suddenly decided to have a whimpering weeping meltdown on the sidewalk of downtown Baltimore, yowling about how, even though she seemed to know everyone in the Baltimore indie rock scene, had absolutely no friends, and everyone liked her sister better, and it was so hard raising a kid alone...blah blah blah.... All this being said to me, on our first date. Wunderbar(I can't figure out how to do umlauts on here. Guess my lazy ass could Google how to do it. Then again, you could go fuck yourself too).

So here I was, stuck with a completely blitzed jackass using my shoulder as a tear tampon. She could barely keep her head up, so there was no way she was going to drive. And I had no idea where her car was, and she was fast becoming useless in the navigation department(I would shortly find out HOW useless....), and the friendly neighborhood bartenders were probably nose deep in LaLaLand and couldn't hear my desperate pounding on the door so I could pass the sodden sorry buck back to them. Fuck.

I knew she lived in Hampden, a neighborhood about 4 exits and 15 minutes up the freeway. If I could get her into the neighborhood and awake enough to tell me the address, I could plop her down on her couch and make a hasty getaway. She could figure out how the hell to get her car tomorrow.

I grappled with her, getting her into some sort of gimpy fireman's carry thing, and dragged her to my car, propping her between me and the back door while I pried open the front door and shoved Haggardy Ann in and buckled her up. I climbed into my side, fired up it up, and hopped onto the highway.

In the ensuing drive, I was slowly able to discern from her homeless ramblings what sounded reasonably like a street address. I made my way on to her street, started looking for the numbers. We were closing in, the sweet taste of freedom slowly overcoming the stale taste of beer. Until we ran out of street. Literally. The street stopped dead about 4 houses shy of what would have been her seeming address. Nothing but barren field in front of me. Miraculously she sat bolt upright.

"Wherr fffuck arrrree weh?"

"Um, I'm guessing this isn't your neighborhood."

"Fuccchhhno. I live at (address redacted to protect the witless--I mean, witness)."

Great. We were THIS CLOSE to He Who Walks the Rows(Children of the Corn reference, sorry) when Jackie Daniel's realized she wasn't a fool-proof GPS. So she mumbled another address, about 6 blocks away, and I whipped the car around, hoping this wasn't fast turning into Blind Date, featuring Bruce Willis and Kim Basinger. A boy can hope.

Minutes later we pulled up to a corner rowhouse. Amazingly enough, there was a parking spot right in front. I hopped out, Chinese firedrilled it around the front of the car, threw open her door, and dragged her once-again unconscious ass out, neglecting to notice that she didn't have her purse or keys in her hands. Because she was in the condition to carry them....

We bobbed and weaved across the street, up the sidewalk, and I started to steer her toward the front door. Her head snapped up like the seemingly dead killer as the last survivor goes to step over them in the double twist jump scare ending of every bad horror movie, except that she didn't grip my ankle and try to pin my foot to the floor with a carving knife. I was beginning to suspect that it might have been a better fate.

"Bagdoor."

"Huh?"

"Nahthefrundoor. Bagdoor." She flopped/waved her arm limply toward the backyard gate, and the back deck's sliding glass door.

Ah, BACK door. So Shuffles and I shambled over through the gate, up 3 steps, and to the back door, when I realized her keys weren't on her person. Great. So you just sit here, Slick, while I run back to the car, grab the keys, dash back to the porch and start fumbling with every confounded key on the ring, because of course there is no porch light. NONE of the keys worked. Seriously.

"Wherethefuggarewe?"

"Your house, remember?"

"Whuh? I don't live here."

You've got to be kidding me. She had led me to a stranger's porch, where I vainly tried every key on the darkened back porch lock, at 3am, in a neighborhood with a statistically high percentage of gun ownership. AND IT WASN'T HER FUCKING HOUSE.

"Jesus Fucking Christ. Get up, and get to my car. Now."

She grunted as I hauled her sorry ass up off the steps, dragged her into the street without looking, and back into the damn car. I had contemplated shoving her into traffic and fleeing the scene, but there wasn't any at 3am. Yay.

Once I got her incoherent ass into the seat and belted back in, I fumbled in the dark for her purse and driver's license, which would hopefully yield an address I could deposit her to. As per the norm for this story, my dome light was of course burnt out. Once I found the little sliver of ID, I again had to hop out of the car and read it by headlight.

TERRIFIC! I had an address. An address to her parents' house, easily 60 miles away in southern Maryland. For a fleeting, desperate second I contemplated it.  I was getting so effing tired that I was near tears. But I was a little old for the "high school football team dropping the hammered chick off on the front steps, ringing the doorbell and scurrying away like cockroaches by kitchen light" game. Maybe we could just sleep in the car....

By the way, I couldn't take her to my house. Or more correctly, the house of my ex-wife's and mine. See, although we were separated, we still lived in the same house. Since neither of us was exactly flush with cash, neither could afford to move out until the house was sold. Yeah, awkward, living with someone you're not so fond of for the sake of convenience. Wow, that sounds like my parents' marriage...hi mom, hi dad! Anyway, I wasn't in the mood to explain to my soon-to-be ex and young son why there was a drunk chick that they didn't know sleeping on the couch that was then my nominal bed. "See, we had this date, and she was wasted, and...." Yeah, no thanks.

But then I had a marginally eureka! moment. Not 20 minutes away up the highway was a cheap motel. Dear gentle reader, at this time, please do not assume I had any underhanded intent at this point. This wasn't about cheap thrills in a scurvy dump, but mere emotional survival, or even maintaining a scant bit of my ever dwindling patience and dignity.

So we alighted(yeah, I just dropped alighted into a sentence. Emily fucking Bronte, bitches. Again, no umlauts. Again, fuck you.) to said wonderland of carnal delights for only 69(how appropriate) bucks a night. She remained in a deep stupor the entire car ride, while I listened to NPR and the creaking of my grinding teeth.

I whipped the car into the parking lot of the motel, hopped out, sprinted to the front desk, woke up the attendant, who up until that moment was deeply inattentive, followed by deeply irritable.

"I need a room."

"Really? No kidding."

Did he realize just how close he had just come to being stuffed into the ice machine?

"You're in luck. One room left. The heart-shaped jacuzzi room."

Seriously?! Please tell me you are shitting me. Of all the nights, of all the dates, THIS is what it had come to. The last thing this girl would remember was talking at a bar to a nominal stranger, and she was going to wake up in the Los Pornos Hotel and Club, in the Hellfire SexyTime Suite? Maybe I would just sleep in the car....

"Fine. Here's my credit card. Gimme the key."

FINALLY. I shouldered my burden, hoisting her up the flight of steps to our nest. Of course it couldn't be on the first floor. We trudged down the walkway, I propped her in the doorjamb and unlocked the door to paradise. Using her to push open the door, I shoved in behind her, guiding her marginally gently to the bed and turned around to take in the splendor that was our digs for the evening. It was way worse than I could ever have imagined.

The room was a bare bones dumpy motel efficiency, with a tiny little wall demarcating where the "living area" ended and the bathroom began. No door. And no tub either. Because of the jacuzzi. On the other side of the king size bed outfitted with beige, burgundy and teal Miami Vice drug dealer sheets was IT. The heart-shaped hot tub, in all its red fiberglass glory. Not only was I looking at it, I was staring back at myself. Mirrors. Mirrors on every possible vertical surface imaginable. All I wanted was to forget who I was for a little bit, just half an hour maybe, sleep and forget this ever happened, but now everything that could happen would happen at least 16 times every time it happened, reflected and refracted. What better way to scrub out the shame and guilt than this? At least the mirrors were all sparkling clean. Big ups to the cleaning ladies. I have a feeling their jobs were probably tougher than WWI trench diggers.

I turned around to assess my date's situation. To make sure she had stayed on her stomach, because the last thing I needed to do in the morning was explain to the cops how the woman I barely knew had pulled a Jimi Hendrix in the seedy motel with the mirrored heart hot tub. She somehow got upright and spoke. Mostly.

"Wah-er."

"Huh?"

"Jhriiihhnkk. Firsty."

Ah, water. Alas, m'lady, that I can do. I went and turned on the tap.

She waved her finger in a "no-no" gesture at the wall, eyes closed. I was behind her.

Figuring this was probably meant for me, I turned off the tap.

"What's up?"

I duhhnn jhrinkkk tab wah. Uhhhnnly bodded."

"Huh?"

"Bodded. Agafina, Evvvonnn, Puhn Sring..."

"Bottled?"

"Yuh...."

Why not? I fucking hate city water, and the vending machines were only 40 yards away. What could happen?

A lot. I came back with two bottles of water, opened the door, and she was gone. Like, not in the room .
I dashed back outside, looked to the left and she wasn't there. Looked to the right, and there she was, stumbling along the second floor walkway, holding on to the rail for "guidance". Christ. Please don't stumble and flip over the railing. Or maybe....

I ran down to her, caught her arm, spun her around and walked her back to the room without protest. Because the half-load of vomit that smelled like it was still lingering in the upper reaches of her throat seemed to keep verbal protest to a bare minimum.

She literally belly-flopped onto the mattress, beginning to snore around 45 degrees in her descent to the bed. So Corpse-sicle was face down, fully clothed, and a chainsaw. I tried to wrestle one of the suede cowboy boots off her feet. The ones that she had somehow managed to stuff INTO skintight jeans. I fully expected half a can of Crisco or Pam to start running down her leg, IF I were actually able to wrestle her free of her footgear. How she retained feeling in her legs, I have no idea. I got the one boot off after about two minutes, and decided "Fuck it", she can sleep with one boot on, her dignity, or what remained of it, be damned.

I had also decided that in order to lessen the chances of a date rape accusation, just in case(always thinking), I would be a gentleman and sleep on the floor. But since she got the bed, I got the pillow and the Bananarama comforter. I probably could have rolled her onto the floor or into the jacuzzi and she would have had no idea, I decided not to risk waking her up for God knows what her hammered ass would have in store for me. I was certainly in no mood to chase a drunk moron up the double yellow line while she played drunk chicken with a Peterbilt.

I curled up on the floor and passed out, because I doubt falling asleep was an option.....

I was awoken approximately 5 hours later, surprisingly well rested(I think my body's decision to completely shut down due to extreme stress and shock may well have helped) by a faint, froggy sounding "Hey. Uh, Rob?" The "Rob?" sounded almost like a guess, like she wasn't entirely sure that was my name. Best. First. Date. Ever. Ah, dear scrapbook....

I turned over to see the One-Booted Wonder sitting upright, one eye Popeyed shut under severe morning crusties. Her hair, luxuriously swept and pinned up the night before, looked like a shadow puppet orgy gone mad. She was holding her one boot, looking at her single stocking foot with a mixture or confusion, like she was alternately wondering how she was only wearing one shoe and how the hell was she going to get the other one back on under those nerve-numbingly tight pants.

I sat up and asked, "Not feeling so hot? Wondering where the hell you are?"

"Yeah. I guess we met up last night?"

Wow. She didn't even remember meeting me. And now she woke up in a sleazy motel with me. What must have been running through her mind....

I recounted the whole sorry evening to her, during which her face sunk into an all-too-knowing look. Like this hadn't been the first time that something like this had happened. Boy, do I know how to pick 'em....

She started to fumble with her boot, quickly giving up and pulling it over her jeans. One boot in, one boot out. She had gone from pretty attractive indie rock chick to Jack Sparrow in less than 12 hours. I mean, I like pirates, but damn.

It remained pretty quiet the rest of our "date". I turned in the room key, we got in the car, I drove her back downtown to her car. We sat there in my car for a couple awkward minutes, like the end of any first date, but it wasn't because I was having the mental debate of whether to give her a hug or go for the furtive first kiss. That was less than never going to happen. It was now a matter of how to get the hungover lunatic sitting next to me out of my car, drive 3 states away, change my name, get plastic surgery, a new unlisted phone number, and have my mind erased so this period of time would be a dull and hazy recollection of a vague nightmare from my youth.

"I'm really sorry. This has never happened before." Really? Cuz it seems like this probably happened to her more times than she cared to remember. Well, maybe I'd give her the benefit on that one--it was probably physically impossible for her to remember nights like the previous one.

"It's cool."

She reached into her purse and pulled out a crumpled fistful of money and shoved it into my hand.

"Here. For the room."

Yeah, thanks. I wasn't gonna ask, but you owed me that at least.

"Maybe I could make it up to you. Dinner next week? I promise I won't drink."

"Um, sure." But I knew full well that there was no way in hell I was ever going to try actively to be in the same physical space as this person ever again. Seriously, you think I'm going to go on a SECOND date with you?! Yeah, it came to pass that dinner never materialized. We both saw fit to engage in some Ollie North style plausible denial about this particular evening. Although I think there are some cell phone pictures on my hard drive of the jacuzzi and its attendant mirrors. I'll dig. If I find 'em, of course I'll post 'em. Everyone loves a visual aid.

Whoa, was that a standard rearing its crazy little self-esteem driven head in my presence? Five years ago, I would've probably married this girl on the third date. Now, while I wasn't saying no to her face, I was saying no in my head. HUGE. Remember, if you've read all my previous entries regarding my romantic(and not so romantic) relationships, I was willing to date just about abybody who said "boo".

And for any of you ladies that I did date, and are reading this, it doesn't mean I had dated you just because--some of you were pretty damn rad, and I'm glad we did date. But sometimes, I did make colossally shitty choices based on my desire to be paid some modicum of attention and not feel like a total loser. At least we maybe made each other feel not so lonely for a little while. And that isn't always such a bad thing. Maybe our time together helped you learn what you wanted and didn't want, and you were able to find more of who you were and what you wanted, and found someone amazing to share it with. I could take some pride in that. That would be pretty sweet. And surprisingly, I think some of it sank in to me too.

Wow. I finally got where I am, mostly. It feels kind of good to have finished this, in a way. Although I do have one more tale up my sleeve. Stay tuned. It won't take two months. Pinky swear.

If a Tree Falls in the Forest, Pray That It Lands on Your Hippy Girlfriend

2010-01-24T19:04:00.001-05:00

OK, so where was I? Oh, right, involved with a diminutive neo-hippie with whom, aside from our shared humanity, I had little to nothing in common with. Which is why we dated for nearly two years. Or, more accurately, dated for a year and lived with for another year after we broke up. I may be smart, but I ain't real bright....

At this point in my late 20s, I became rather placid emotionally. Which is a lie. I just agreed to whatever path created the least resistance for me. So I was a pretty "good" boyfriend, in the sense that I didn't argue too much, and seemed agreeable to whatever hare-brained goofyosity lay in wait. And that is how I ended up in a tent in the rain in Vermont with a dreadlocked midget.

I hate camping. Why take time off from the things that frustrate the shit out of you, like work and bills and leaky toilets, only to PAY good money to go sit in the woods, where you have to live in a flimsy canvas house that YOU have to put up? And when I take a shit at home, it is inconvenient enough to have to get out of bed and walk 20 paces to the can to do it. Now that I'm "relaxing" I have to DRIVE a quarter mile to drop a deuce? No thanks. But Cherry Garcia liked the woods, so off we went, 6 hours in the car into the wilds of Vermont. Why Vermont? Cuz she said so, that's why. And guess who did all the driving, since I owned the truck, and her precious '72 Beetle would be lucky to make it to the local SevEv? I refuse to even get into the notion of eating while camping....

So away we went. And I will admit, it was pretty awesome, the weather and the picturesque beauty of Vermont. Pretty fuckin' nice place to visit. LOTS of fresh pressed apple cider(we went in the fall), farm stands, fresh pies, and generally fine cooking, which is always fine by me. But that was about it for "culture" there. The closest town was Brattleboro, which was a nice VERY FUCKING SMALL town. As in, not a friggin' thing to do there, unless you liked coffee(yes) and quilt crafts(not so much). But there were Ben & Jerry's shops everywhere--THAT, I could get used to. And the local outlet strip mall--because nothing says roughing it like looking at porcelain gravy boats at the MIKASA outlet and Levi's with a 32" inseam left leg and 30" inseam right leg, which I discovered once we got back to our refrigerator box on steroids--er, I mean tent. No returns or exchanges--dicks....What the fuck was I gonna do with a pair of 501s with one leg shorter than the other, aside from being an extra in a remake of Deliverance? Jeezus....

So we spent an evening making awkward small talk about how not completely horrible I found this situation, and reading books, and drinking increasingly warmer beer(the woods should have working, well-stocked refrigerators every half mile, in my opinion). Finally it was time to turn in--not because I was tired, but because Paula Bunyan forgot to check all the batteries in any of her camping-related electronics, including the flashlights. Yeah, I was learning to hate this really quickly....

Well, the learning curve flattened out pretty quickly at 2.30am, when a torrential downpour pulled its Mother Nature's Chinese Water Torture Act on my face. Cathy Camper forgot to pack the rainfly to her tent, so the rain just POURED straight through the mesh top of the tent and ALL OVER every last bit of clothing we had. I think I mighta tried to strangle her at that point, if I didn't think my sopping wet hands would've slid right off her slippery patchouli-scented neck. Instead, I grunted while she whined about being wet--ironic, coming from a granola-munching dirt farmer. Fortunately, my truck had one of those soft tonneau covers over the bed, so we scrambled to take our damp selves and clothes and shoved them in, and climbed in behind them, and "slept" the rest of the night in what felt like the worst makeshift MRI machine ever built. Good thing I wasn't completely claustrophobic, since there was approximately 4mm between my nose and the tonneau cover, and possibly less space horizontally for me and my "beloved" Deadhead.

The next morning, after approximately 23 minutes of sleep accompanied by holding a yoga pose for 5 hours in the bed of my truck, I awoke to an admittedly pretty gorgeous sunrise. You know the kind--sunlight fitlered through early fall trees, the musty earthy smell of woods after a good rain, the twinkle of morning dew on the leaves. It was that image that came with the picture frame your parents bought at K-Mart in the 70s. Glowy.

It made my newfound scoliosis slightly tolerable, but did nothing to help the fact that every article of clothing I brought, including the ones I was wearing, were totally soaked. I could hope to only have 2nd degree burns from being chapped by walking around all day in wet clothes. It was decided that we'd eat breakfast, then head into town to find a laundromat. So she poured soymilk all over her muesli and pretended to enjoy the fuck out of it. Me? A can of Coke and a donut. I'm a health nut.

We headed into town, sloshed into the nearest convenience store, and asked where the nearest laundromat is. Fortunately, right down the block, so we made our not-so-merry way. Shoved absolutely everything but what we're wearing into the dryer, pump it full of quarters and wait. I was at least smart enough to snag a magazine at the store, so I proceeded to engage my brain in finding out just who the sexiest man and woman on the entire planet for the next 12 months was going to be. Hemp Queen, on the other hand, was ill-prepared, and began to complain about not having anything to do. Well, it ain't my damn fault that you forgot to bring a book or fork over 75 cents for the Weekly World News, so go count the pinholes in that ceiling tile over there. I got some Seinfeld and Friends to catch up on.....

After about an hour, we pulled out our piping hot clothes, folded them up, stuffed 'em back into our bags, and headed out. We went and ate at some vegan restaurant, which wasn't too damn bad, I must confess. Except that the waitstaff was about as attentive as a blind and deaf mute at a NASCAR race. Not very.

We walked all over the town, looked at a bunch of stores, drank some coffee, and then the hippy said, "I'm bored. There's nothing to do here." Shit, I coulda told you that! I asked her if she did any research about what there was to do up there. Apparently due diligence wasn't in her lexicon, because aside from the camping guide, she had not one clue whatsoever about what there was to do in VT. We could have just booked passage to the nearest KKK rally and she would have had no idea.

"Well, the tent's still soaked. Do you want to get a hotel room or something?"

Well, no, I didn't. At this point, we would have lodged in a hotel on an ancient Indian burial ground, and a tree would attack our room, and the clown doll under the bed would try to strangle me, and a dwarf would have to get my little sister out of the TV set. That is how positive I was about not being in Vermont any longer.
So I suggested that I would be more than willing to hop back in the car and drive all the way back to Bmore, post-haste, so I could sleep in my own bed, and not get rained on, and not have to eat more uncooked food out of my lap in the woods.

Which is almost what actually happened....

The Days Are Too Short This Time of Year

2009-12-13T20:36:00.001-05:00

It's been over two months since I wrote anything here. Wow, I've been pretty fucking lazy....

If y'all are still looking for more of my sordid and stupid lovelife, you're probably gonna be waiting a while, since it was starting to creep dangerously close to the time period whence the relationship that begat my marriage, which begat my soon to be final(hopefully) divorce. A little closer to home than I really wanna get right now. Don't worry though, it'll be back--I just have other stuff I want to write about more.

Like, my sense of smell, which totally sucks right now, since I have a raging sinus infection that just won't quit. But that really isn't what this is about.

I've heard people talk before how they smell something, and it triggers something deep in their brain, recalling long-buried memories from their youth. I can't say I ever really had this feeling, til about two weeks ago.

I was brushing my teeth. With the new-fangled neon blue "Colgate Fortified with Tiny Little Breath Strips" toothpaste, because bad breath should be the least of my worries--especially since everyone considers me such a ray of sunshine anyway. So, I'm scrubbing my tombstones, and suddenly I feel the overwhelming urge to burst into tears. Like "a manhole cover was sitting on my chest, and I'd just finished running 5 miles flat out, and somebody knocked my double dip in a waffle cone out of my hand" crying.

The smell of that goddamn toothpaste reminded me of when I was a kid, and spent a good deal of time at my Aunt Madge and Uncle Woody's. They weren't related to me by blood, but they might as well have been. They were my mom's neighbors from her first marriage, and were around to watch my older sister and brother grow up, and they stayed friends with my mom even after she moved and married my dad and had me. In truth, they became my second set of parents. I spent lots of weekdays there playing while my parents worked. When my mom needed major surgery when I was about 7, I spent a week in Ocean City NJ with Madge and Woody so mom could recuperate and my dad could still go to work. I spent so much time bodysurfing with Uncle Woody, I came back darker than Lavar Burton.

So, the toothpaste. For a split second my bathroom felt just like brushing my teeth in their bathroom 30 years ago--just for a moment, and it was enough to turn me on my head, however briefly.

See, Uncled Woody died this past Spring. I hadn't seen the guy in nearly 20 years, and now I had to go look at him in a coffin, lifeless. The exact opposite of how I remembered him. And godammit if it didn't make my heart hurt.

Uncle Woody and Aunt Madge always managed to be there whenever my parents needed a safe, fun place for me to go when I was a kid, and I can't say as I didn't have a shitload of fun there. Aunt Madge(who is still around, ice skating with retarded kids from ARC, even though she's over 80) made the best goddamn bologna sandwiches ever, because, I am convinced, she used Miracle Whip and cut them vertically instead of diagonally. They were served with Charles Chips, right out of the big beige tin, and a 6 oz. returnable-bottle Coke. See, my mom was and still is a Pepsi fan--I'm really not sure how I am her kid sometimes... And dessert was invariably either Tastykake Krimpets when they still wrapped em in waxed paper, and the creme would stick to it, so you got to lick it off, or fresh made brownies which were the be-all end-all. See, Aunt Madge's secret was peanut butter--one dollop of Skippy in the batter really unlocks the chocolate flavor. Yeah, my mouth is watering too.

And on really special days, I got treated to the Woolworth's old school lunch counter grilled cheese in the red plastic basket and paper liner with french fries and a big glob of room temperature catsup(cold catsup is from the devil), again polished off with a fountain Coke in the special Coke goblet with the big fat wide mouth and skinny bottom.

Every time you were there it was like Christmas, even if you didn't get a present. But Uncle Woody would manage to out-Christmas Santa Claus if they had ever gone head to head. Because Uncle Woody had an awesome three-track train board, HO scale(those big ones they sell at Toys R Us? For punks and chumps.) that he let you have total control of, even if it meant he spent 5 minutes with his arm up to his elbow in the tunnel trying to fish the coal car out cuz I got a little Bo and Luke Duke around the final turn. And Aunt Madge had this awesome fireplace mantle that was lit from underneath, and she would break out 80 billion little figurines and candles and poly fill "snow", and we'd get Norman Rockwell on that piece and no matter how much I can't stand Christmas and all that it stands for now, my heart races, I wanna cry just a little, and a giggle escapes as I bounce in my chair at how I wish I had a trainboard and Uncle Woody again.

Uncle Woody was in the American Legion, and every year they had a Christmas party, and I'd go help out, which meant I got to run all over the legion hall and play in the real live old school wooden phone booth, just like the ones from the 3 Stooges. And I got to sit in Santa's lap and have my picture taken. Which I still have, and which, if it weren't for the tres chic 70s fashions, you might think it was my kid's picture with Santa.

Uncle Woody taught me the manifold joys of listening to Phillies games on a transistor radio while watching the game on TV with the volume all the way down. Because Richie Ashburn and Harry Kalas called the game better than anybody, and if you didn't have the TV on, they painted the game into your mind, just like you were sitting in the good seats on the left field foul line. And the one game I went to as a kid, Uncle Woody made sure that lefty pitcher Tug McGraw gave me an autographed photo, since I'm a lefty too. I still have it in a box somewhere, right next to my Topps baseball card of Tug leaping off the mound when the Phils won the World Series. If I weren't so tired, I'd go dig it out right now. I don't go to many ballgames now, maybe one every two years or so, but I will listen to them on the radio every chance I get.

There's a hell of a lot more about them--how Aunt Madge only answers the phone on the third ring, and the little steel-ball pen-thingy phone dialer she uses, and Uncle Woody's first computer back in 1979, from Radio Shack, where you had to load games and programs on everytime you turned it on, using a cassette player, and the modem you had to actually cradle the phone receiver into. Leaf pile jumping in fall. Green army men battles. Pretty sweet, by any standard.

My only regret? That I let my teens, 20s and 30s get in the way of going to visit Aunt Madge and Uncle Woody. They always sent me Christmas and birthday cards, til I was about 30. Maybe I got too old to send cards to, or maybe they just thought I had forgotten about them. I just wish I had gotten a chance to tell Uncle Woody thanks, shake his hand or give him a hug, and see him smile back at me. Because he would have. And we could have set up the trains maybe one more time.

Thanks, Aunt Madge. Thanks, Uncle Woody.

It's Really Only About 23 Minutes, Once You Take Out the Commercials

2009-10-07T18:56:00.000-04:00

I really like TV. A lot. Not like "watch it all day and ignore the world around me" like, but enough that I enjoy the shit out of some really good programming. And there is a lot of it these days.

I'm a big fan of comedy. I like dramas too--can't get enough of Jerry Orbach(RIP) on some old Law and Order episodes, especially the ones with Michael Moriarty. But good TV comedy is rare to come by, so when it's good, it really gets me going.

It seems like the last decade has been not so fecund for TV comedy. The TV realm got "cable-ized". I remember watching HBO so I could see Mr. Show, one of the funniest sketch shows ever--way funnier than SNL, and twice as absurd as the State and Kids in the Hall. One night I watched this new show called the Sopranos right before Mr. Show. Mr. Show didn't last much longer, but Tony et al. surely did. As soon as the Sopranos captured everyone's imagination, all we saw were hour-long festivals of people being anguished over something. And HBO had pretty much cornered the market on it too--Oz, the Wire, Carnivale, Deadwood. Add in Dexter and the Shield and you can pretty much have a premium cable wrist-slashing party. Mind you, these shows for the most part exhibited some modicum of humor, but of the pitch-black variety. And lest you think I'm being bitchy, I rather enjoy the shit out of the Wire, and Dexter Morgan, you are welcome for dinner anytime! But rarely were there really memorable shows in the last 10 years that made me laugh my ass off on purpose.

Seinfeld and Married...with Children were the last 2 comedies I watched on a regular basis. Everybody Loves Raymond and King of Queens were mildly amusing at times, but they still fell short of the absurd heights of Jerry and his friends and the Bundy family. Sure, we had South Park and the Simpsons, but neither has been nearly as funny as they once were. If Cartman were a real live human, I'd punch him in his fat little wheezy head.

But lately, in the last couple of years--basically since the Sopranos went off the air, and Law and Order has been pimped into at least two spinoff series--comedy of the half-hour variety has gotten awesome again. The (American) Office was disappointing at first, if only because they basically had American actors read the same exact script that Ricky Gervais had written for the original British version. It doesn't translate well at all, and the first episode looks stilted and stupid by comparison. But once the show found its own voice, it has become absolutely phenomenally hilarious. The fact that they have maintained, freshly, some story arcs over 6 seasons, amazes me. The characters are awesome, and aside from John Krasinski's overuse of the bemused smirk facial tic, I think it rivals Seinfeld for absurdist fun. Its little sister, Parks and Recreation, follows in its geeky footsteps; Amy Poehler's Leslie is as cluelessly ambitious as Steve Carrell's Michael is cluelessly phobic about responsibility.

We also have It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, which is essentially Seinfeld with characters even more ruthlessly self-centered. Nowhere else will you find Danny DeVito's character calling his illegitimate son's mother a slut, and two of the main characters get hooked on crack on purpose, in the hope that they can go on welfare. And they somehow remain likeable, even with crusty crackhead lips....

And returning to the Bundy brood, Ed O'Neill finally returned to TV after a long break from Al's shoes, as the patriarch in Modern Family. He has a Colombian wife half his age, and her 11 year old son, an aspiring romantic poet. He also has an adult daughter with a husband and 3 kids--her husband is a colossal idiot who tries to relate to his kids by texting and "speaking their language", much to their mortification. There was nothing funnier than seeing him sing and dance his way through a High School Musical song. Ed also has a gay son, with his gay life partner and adopted Veitnamese daughter. I've only seen the first two episodes, but if ABC is smart and lets it stick around, it could become the show Arrested Development never got to be, since the asshats at FOX cancelled it after two seasons.

There are a ton of other awesome shows like them--Party Down, How I Met Your Mother, and Big Bang Theory are among some of the other good'ns.

Good to see that comedy is back. And very little laugh track. Gotta love it.

Pure Comedy Gold

2009-09-05T19:27:00.000-04:00

Today, whilst searching for a parking spot at the local Target, I saw a woman sitting on a bench outside the store, rocking back and forth. My erstwhile companion was in the passenger seat of the car. We are each equally as likely to make snide comments about people. She, however, usually has the grace to steer clear of anything outright insensitive. Myself, usually not so much. But this this time, her observation about the person on the bench? "I was going to say something shitty about that person, but she is clearly a retard." Insensitively sensitive? All at the same time....

Oh yeah, the abridged history of my stupid lovelife to return soon....

Like a bad case of herpes, I just won't go away....

2009-08-21T08:04:00.001-04:00

OK, so it's been 3 months since I wrote about myself. How modest of me. Life is short, and I have a lot of shit to do, so don't get all uppity with me, pal. And since I'm pretty much essentially publicly flagellating myself vis a vis my wretched lovelife, you can forgive me for taking a break from said self-punchbaggery.

Where we left off? Well, go read my previous blog posts, Cochise. You think I'm gonna hold your hand the entire way? OK, I'll play nice.

We left off with me just kind of dropping the ball with someone. She was sweet and nice and we got along just fine, but I was not really of the mindset at that point to actually man up and act like an adult. I had 26 years of stupidity under my belt and wasn't about to get over it in one fell swoop. So alas, I moved on. I kind of gave up on being outwardly angry about it. Yet again, I just internalized it. Anyone that tells you that shoving it down is the way to go is a douche. Cuz it vomits itself back up whether you know it or not.

I went to a party. It was one of those late night, after-hours house parties where all the furniture gets pushed to the edge of the room and 40 people drunk-dance ironically to Michael Jackson, old disco records, and Pavement. Obviously no one in this hipster morass is completely unaware of how hip they are, so there is no breakdancing, or drunken frat-boy lambada going on, just skinny-jeaned, white-belted swaying and a vague notion of "hip-shaking" to the beat. Into the midst of this I wandered, enough Jim Beam and Guinness in my blood stream to make me want to pass out on one of the chairs and couches ringing the room. See, I don't dance unless I'm totally blotto, which means I really haven't danced since I was about 23(not counting the times I was completely obliterated in my one band, but that doesn't count, because hey, I'm a professional, and it ain't professional to fall flat on your face passed out with vomit crust on your lips because you tried, unsuccessfully and frankly quite painfully, to do a James Brown split midsong--and I wasn't even the singer....) So if we're out and you wanna see me dance, be prepared to pony up your credit card, cuz it's gonna be a long night.

Where were we? Oh yeah, drunk at a party, 3am. So I flopped down on a couch next to a cluster of hipsters. Yeah, I'm probably what you'd categorize as somewhat hipsteresque, but this group had it down pat. The lone male in the group seriously looked like he belonged in Mortal Kombat--the video game, not the movie. Tight black pants, platform KISS boots, black shirt with Lord knows how many weird little straps and zippers, and Japanese manga hair. He seriously had, like, DragonBall Z hair--all spiky, and short in weird places. Strange. Oh yeah, he had extra shirt sleeves that weren't connected to his shirt. His shirt had long sleeves, that he had rolled up. But then he had these things that were legwarmers for your arms. Yeah, weird. I should have taken it as a sign that these were people, however nice they may be, were probably not people I would have long-lasting friendships with. When I get wacky, I MIGHT wear a t-shirt that isn't black.

So in this group is this one girl. She's short, has dreadlocks swooped up in a sort of Marge Simpson bun, and has somehow split the hair that divides hippie from hipster. Long skirt, some convoluted tanktop thing, but not grubby like a Deadhead. I usually made fun of white girls with dreadlocks, and I still do usually, but for whatever reason, I was attracted to her. So we talked for about a minute and a half, had absolutely nothing in common, and so obviously started making out for about 5 minutes. I was pretty sure I knew her name, but it was kind of loud and I was more than kind of drunk. It was Jenn--or maybe Ken. I hoped it was Jenn.... Another auspicious start to a "relationship".

So my life went on for a week, as it was wont to do. I ran into Jenn/Ken one night(it WAS Jenn--I told you I wasn't that drunk). We talked briefly, vaguely sneering and being smartassed with each other. At least we had the disdainful comic aside in common. We ended up exchanging numbers and made plans for the next week.

7 days later and it was next week. So my roommate accompanied me to the local bar to meet her and her friend. Not a double blind date(nothing like a doubleblind study--our friends did however become the control group that evening). So we met at the bar, ordered drinks and started talking, and "getting to know each other".

I recounted the tale of how, when I was 4, I got mauled by a German Shepherd at my parents' friends' house. It nearly ripped my left ear off. Like, it was hanging by a thread of skin and one big blood vessel, that if the dog had thrashed a little harder, would have ripped and caused me to bleed to death rather quickly. Luckily, it didn't. It did, however leave me with a wicked scar behind my ear and one across the back of my skull. When I have my head shaved, it looks as if I've been party to more than one serious brawl. Anyway, in addition to the physical scars, it left me with a bit of a complex about people touching the back of my head. Or rather, hitting me in the back of the head.

In all honesty, when someone smacks me on the back of the head, it creates in me a rage so intense that I can't speak to let you know that I am about to rip your arms off and make you castrate yourself with your own dismembered hands. Yeah, I get a little pissy when that happens. If you hit me once, I give you the benefit of the doubt--you didn't know I got attacked by a dog, so I'll tell you the tale, and you'll understand, and not fucking do it again. Except for one chucklehead in college who got slammed up against a wall and held there until the Exorcist look drained out of my eyes, nobody has ever pushed it further than that.

Not until my date with the hipster/hippie. I mentioned that she had gotten "sarcastic" pretty well down pat, right? Well, apparently she also had "shithouse rat crazy" down pat, because after I told my dog attack story, she proceeded to "playfully" and repeatedly slap the back of my head while giggling--like 10 times. I couldn't breathe, my skin felt like it was on fire, and my palms were bleeding because my tightly balled fists were digging into them. It was all I could do not to shove this dimunitive moron off her bar stool and into the next county. But I didn't, because the desire to punch her face in on itself was overwhelmed by the desire not to spend the rest of my night in Central Booking.

My roommate sensed the situation was going south quickly and ushered me expeditiously from the bar, whilst hippie/hipster and her friend sat there bewildered. We went home and drank beer on the couch. I got a phone call an hour later from the slap happy hippie. She apologized for being an asshole. Actually, her friend had to explain that maybe slapping the shit out of someone who has a primal rage issue with getting slapped in the head really wasn't all that funny. She apparently couldn't pick up on the subtle verbal and non-verbal clues that I really didn't enjoy getting clocked in the head--like me telling her I had a tendency to want to kill people when they pulled that shit.

So I accepted her apology, and because I was too tired emotionally and physically to try all that damn hard to maybe try and find someone who wasn't a total sociopath to spend my time with, it seemed reasonable enough to try dating this headcase.

Why, you ask? I have no idea to this day. I had given up. It didn't matter if she were Ann Coulter. It didn't matter if she stole my wallet and fucked my best friend right in front of me. It didn't matter if she were a reggae loving vegan who only wanted to see subtitled movies. That last one was actually true. She was actually a nice enough person at heart, but the fact that I would normally outright mock someone like that didn't stop me from dating someone like that. Or mocking her, either. While we were dating. Yeah, I think we all know where this is headed....

I'm BAAAAACK! Ya Miss Me and My Tale? Really? You Should Get Out More.

2009-05-19T20:05:00.000-04:00

Everything sounded all sweet and nice as punkin' pie last time we checked in, right? Right. Well, you musta eaten the whole pie, because I'm about to give you a stomachache.

So, everything last we chatted, it seemed to go really, really well. And it continued to, in its own fashion, for a time. Turns out this young lady and I had a preternatural attraction to each other that seemed borne of nowhere in particular, as far as I could tell(I found out later that she had a pretty big crush on me the entire time I had been dating her friend, but again, clueless fuck that I am, I had no idea). That's not to say I didn't like her. I actually really did. I can recall with crystal clarity each of the 3 dates we had after that first night. Date one, we spent the day in Ellicott City, checking out all the cool antique shops. I had been a bricks-and-2x4s kinda guy as far as home furnishings went, for a long time, until I started going to auctions with my parents. I didn't realize you could get AWESOME furniture cheap. Like the kingsize headboard I got for 5 bucks--lime green padded velveteen, straight porno style. I loved that thing, all $5 worth of it. Shockingly, I was the only bidder....

Anyway, so I liked poking around EC looking for cool old crap, and she seemed to enjoy it too. I had mentioned once in passing that I always wanted a copy of LIFE magazine, the one with Lee Harvey Oswald holding the carbine on it. What did said young lady whip out of the rack in one store? Yup. 5 bucks. This girl was from heaven. I remember to this day, the two of us standing outside at one store, looking at the display. She was bent a little at the waist, and I tentatively placed my palm on her back. She was wearing a pastel yellow tank top, dark green walking shorts and cute brown leather sandals. Yeah, etched in my brain. So, I gently fought with myself about what to do with my hand, finally setting it lightly on her back, and she didn't flinch. Just stood there smiling as we talked about the high priced crap we'd never be able to afford. And goddamn if it didn't feel absolutely incredible when she turned and smiled at me. It was one of the most genuine sweet smiles anyone had ever given me. Holding someone's hand never felt so ecstatic.

Our two other dates? Once, sitting in the second floor of her house, eating Italian hoagies(sorry, I'm from Philly--it'll always be a hoagie and not a sub) in her bed and talking about Henry Rollins as we stared out the window. The other date involved us eating at Fortunato's Pizza in Fell's Point on a Tuesday night, and we were the only people in the joint. This woman liked food, just like me. Junk food or high-falutin', my kinda gal. We were both playfully cranky, had similar senses of humor, and just generally felt comfortable with each other, moreso than two people who had been on exactly 3 real dates had any reason to be. Which is why I fucked it up entirely.

See, I had piled so much junk on myself in the previous 10 years, taken on so much guilt and shame and anger, that I couldn't tell when fate had dropped the right one in my ungrateful lap. I couldn't see being allowed to be happy for very long, and so rather than giving in to it and getting my shit together and enjoying the hell out of something so naturally comfortable and fulfilling, I acted like a fucking moron. Because when shit sucks for so long, uncomfortable becomes the new comfortable.

First, I told her I couldn't hang out one weekend, even though we had made plans. Said I had to go to my parents' house in PA for something. Except that she drove by me while I was pumping gas at a Baltimore gas station when I should have been eating cheesesteaks in Chester Springs. I bailed for no good reason either--no other plans, just dumb headgames. She never called me out on it until much later, and, amazingly enough, my recollection of this incident is vague at best. Who knew? But I took her word for it, because it fits with how much of a jackass I had become. Ain't it great, knowing that about yourself? Yeah, it's not. And that is about where, to her credit, she began to start writing me off. Good for her. Really.

I stopped calling her, and thankfully for her, she gave up on me.

I always find it amazing that someone finds me attractive. Even today--I don't feel ugly, just oddly put together. So when somebody would tell me that their friend/coworker/sister thought I was cute, I'd jump at the chance. Which is how I fucked up royally. See this little digression has a point. By this point in our tale, the nice young lady had decided to say eff it with me, and moved closer to DC, where she worked. Another perfectly legitimate excuse not to see her anymore, because I was a lazy bastard and hated driving. I really was a total fucking tool. In the meantime, a friend of mine had told me that his female friend thought I was cute and wanted to talk to me. So I checked the yes box on the note and passed it back to him. Yeah, I'd matured ALOT since high school. No note was involved, but it might as well have been.

I dated this woman for about two months, and it ended. Nothing exciting. No trauma. It was just over. And then I began to have the sneaking suspicion that I really fucked something up.

And boy, did my next experience in dating set remind me in spades, that yes indeed, I had kicked myself in the teeth on a grand scale.

A Slight Chance of Me Not Being a Damn Moron. A Slight Chance.....

2009-05-04T20:46:00.000-04:00

OK, so I'm back. 2 weeks to kind of wrap my head around some of this. So here it is.

I've spent my life for the most part being marginally OK at a shitload of things, only because I had wide-ranging tastes and the attention span of a gnat. It took me 20 years to get sort of OK at playing guitar, because I just never got around to it. I like skateboarding way more than I am good at it. But screwing up relationships? I blowed shit up real good.

I drove off into the sunset of the last entanglement I had engaged in. But it was obviously less than triumphant, and not exactly something I would consider myself proud of. I had taken the view that relationships were SUPPOSED to be adversarial, and if they weren't, I'd find a way to make 'em that way. Or I'd run like hell. What a friggin' dumbass. And that becomes way more apparent over the course of this next little tale.

I spent the next couple weeks just falling back into the usual routine of drinking myself silly, working, and doing some remodeling on a lovely little dump in the ghetto that I had purchased. Did I mention that the quiet friend of my newly coined ex had purchased tickets for all of us to go see the Beastie Boys in Madison Square Garden later that same summer? Fuck, now I wasn't gonna get to go, since the ex and her friend were probably going to, and seeing as how much of a tool I had been, that kinda got shot in the ass. Or so I thought, since the quiet one called and said the ex wouldn't be going. Did I still wanna go, since the ex wasn't going, and there's these tickets? Hell yeah! A Tribe Called Quest was opening, and it would be one of the last dates of their farewell tour, and I'd already seen the Beasties copious times, and I knew how they raged live. I figured this lady probably wasn't an axe murderer, and only weighed a buck-ten soaking wet in a parka, so I could probably take her if she got wacky.

We took the Amtrak to NYC, because driving to/in NYC sucks royally. Nice trainride up, good conversation, and Club Car snax. Sweet. And the train station doubles as Madison Square Garden. We never even had to go outside! So, we get there, take our seats for the show, and it was kickass, except for the fact that the Beasties didn't do Shadrach, one of their all-time best jams ever. That would quickly become the sole lowpoint in the evening. Because everything that would transpire over the next 12 hours threw me for an utter curve, and made the earlier part of the evening seem like karaoke at the corner dive bar.

See, the concert was packed, because Madison Square Garden ain't exactly tiny. So, here we are with a gabillion other people in a strange town, all trying to leave the rock show. So my companion for the evening takes my hand, ostensibly so we don't get separated in this mass of stoned teenagers in Murder City, USA. Which didn't really strike a chord with me, because 1)it was really fucking crowded, and 2)I'm really fucking dense. Cuz once the crowd thinned sufficiently to the point where I would still be able to see her from 20' away, she didn't let go of my hand. I took note of it, and it seemed kinda weird, I guess. Which she noted, and so loosened her grip. Except I didn't let go. So we continued holding hands, walking to the platform to catch the late train back to Bmore. And we continued not saying a word to each other. Even as we got on the nearly empty train, found our seats, and proceeded to curl up in each others' arms. What the hell? As we snuggled wordlessly together, her back to me, I could fell how easily my elbow fit in the crook of her hip. Our hands nested together. The backs of her thighs on mine, her knees, my knees, our feet intertwined. The slightly sweet, warm smell of her hair brushing my cheek. 2 hours on this train ride. Not one word between us.

The train ride ended at Penn Station in Baltimore. My car was parked in the garage. We went to the car silently. I unlocked her door, and went to my side of the car, got in. We sat for a second, dumbstruck. I looked at her, searching for something to say, but I had no idea what. I think I might have started to say something, but she cut me off. Leaned in and kissed me. The singlemost intense, passionate kiss I have ever had in my entire life. The guy in Scanners, the dude whom Michael Ironside makes his head explode? Yeah, that was me. But it was a GOOD explosion. I felt every breath I had ever taken in that kiss. It wasn't just a kiss I could feel, but one I could FEEL. My body felt like the high tension wires that hold up telephone poles, taut and strong. Holy fuck. The car wasn't even running, yet it blasted along at 1,000 miles an hour.

Once the car was moving, again there was pretty much silence. The car couldn't go fast enough back to my little ghetto abode.

The next morning was slightly sheepish, because she was my ex-girlfriend's best friend, and I was her best friend's ex-boyfriend. So we drove to Glen Burnie(a good 40 minute drive from the homestead) for breakfast and nervous giggles at Dunkin' Donuts, because it was highly unlikely that we would run into anyone we knew in Glen Burnie.

This was odd. Here was a woman with whom I had exchanged pleasantries and some small talk on a couple of occasions, that ostensibly speaking, I really didn't know very well. We had just spent the better part of 18 hours together non-stop, not talking much, except for occasionally gushing about the inimitable awesomeness of the Beastie Boys or the Diabolical Biz Markie. And here we sat, huddled around coffee and chocolate glazeds, kinda sorta looking at each other.

What I had learned in the past 18 hours? Madison Square Garden, if you're in the nosebleeds, makes Mike D and Company look like ants. Train snacks don't come cheap. Sleep is highly overrated, especially when you're in Glen Burnie with hot black coffee, one sugar. And the girl, the quiet one whom I never really got to know until she held my hand in a crowd, and curled up with me on a train at midnight, and whose kiss was passion made real? I learned volumes in that kiss, and the night that followed.

Wow, I AM a Dick. The Stark Realization That I Had Turned the Corner in Jackassitude.

2009-04-30T19:57:00.001-04:00

All right, so now I was ensconced in a new apartment, downtown, single, back on track to not being a fat fucking slob, and getting back on the scene, right? Hardly. I was acutely aware that dating was a massively bad idea for me. I'd look at a woman, and be like "Yep, female." and that was that. I was absolutely inured to them for the first time ever. Used to just be clueless. Now I was heartless. I hadn't cared in the past as a way of avoidance--can't get hurt if you don't give a damn. Now I couldn't have given a damn if you handed it to me in a box with a bow on it.

So I spent a lot of time walking around Mt. Vernon, reading books while I ate a relatively healthy dinner in solitude at one of the local restaurants, and enjoying a cold beer now and again on my roof while watching the Baltimore City night skyline come to life. And at rock shows. I saw so many amazing bands, big and small, it wasn't even funny. I've always been a massive fan of music, to the point of geekitude, but I spent the next year of my life living at the Ottobar, going to anything that looked remotely interesting. And imbibing in no small amount of alcohol, but no weed. Gave that up after the 4th time in as many months that I left my ATM card in the machine. Fucking pizza deliveries....

Because I spent so much time up late drinking, I spent many days not happy that I had drunk the night before. After 6 months, I think my internal organs literally ached from the inside out. Which meant I spent many mornings at work with my head on the desk, praying that they would take my office off the carousel it had apparently been built on.

On one such Saturday, I was holding my head in my hands, trying not to vomit into my lap, hoping no customers would need help, because there was a goodly chance I might vomit into their laps. No such luck. I didn't puke on anyone, but I did have to help a pair of customers. Over and over, because they kept coming back.

It was a pair of girls. Two friends who were getting their cars serviced. About my age, one aggressively cheerful and chatty, the other not so much. They literally came in to my department at least 5 times, probably out of sheer boredom, since sitting in a car dealership waiting room is about as exciting as it sounds. I was sweating bourbon like I just ran the Jim Beam 5K, but for some reason this girl and her friend persisted on trying to talk to the hungover idiot. Somehow in my hungover stupor, she wrangled my number out of me.

So she called me like a week later--see, she knew the rules. Totally good at being coy. What she didn't understand--I still didn't give a rat's furry ass about spending time with a woman. But she persisted, and we went on a date. It wasn't horrible. I just flat-out refused to put any effort into it. Nobody was getting in, and I intended to keep it that way. If she wanted to make the effort, then fine. Otherwise, I was content not to give a damn.

We went out a bunch, and it became readily apparent to me that she really wanted a boyfriend, and me and my fuck-all demeanor I think proved a challenge for her. And I admit, that I began to let my guard down just a little. So I actually admitted to sort of liking her. By then she had become disinterested. So I split--fuck that, you're all crazy. We stayed "friends". I kept up my hanging out, which involved a date or two with someone else. She called one day to see if I wanted to have lunch. I said I couldn't, was having a lunch date with someone. Maybe another day. She suggested the next day, and I think I detected a bit of a stammer there. Why oh why would someone actually like me? Could she not see how incredibly bad this would end up?

So we met for lunch the next day, and she launches into this "I think we should try again" speech, because she really thought I was something special, we really got along, blah blah blah. I had given up listening--I just went along with whatever would cause me the least amount of immediate grief. So I gave it another shot, knowing full well it wouldn't matter in a couple weeks, because it didn't even matter right then and there. It gave me something to occupy my time. Yep, mercenary.

So it finally came to a whimpering, fizzling head one day, at Target of all places. She was housesitting for a friend, and invited me along. Sure, why not? Different place to sleep, free food....So we hang out all day, her quiet friend shows up, and we all go to Target. Now, for whatever reason, her presense just annoyed the fuck out of me that day. So I walked a good royally acceptable 10 paces ahead or behind them the entire time. You would have had to be clueless to not sense the negativity in my body posture. Finally her friend comes up to say sheepishly(poor woman, dragged into the middle of this mess) "She thinks you're being 'poopy'." She seemed almost as annoyed at having to do this as I was at having to hear it. I was being poopy? Had I suddenly regressed to 3rd grade? I was an unmitigated prick, who could've cared less if she lived or died, and I was POOPY?! That was it. If you can't do better than that, I'm out. I'm looking for full-scale emotional warfare, tripwires and bodybombs, shivs to the spine, and you toss me a marshmallow Easter chick with all the sugar scraped off. Fuck you.

We got back from Target, I bid her goodbye, got my stuff and drove off into the dusk, leaving her standing there baffled with her friend, squinting into the sunset. Now, in reality, this girl was nice enough, but nice was not something I could fathom in the least. I was fully prepared for every relationship I would ever have to be a colossal shitfuck. And if it wasn't, I'd do my best to make it so.

This would be the moment when I had transformed from a lowly pupa, emerging a blindlingly vile butterfly, when I had given up all hope of ever being a remotely decent person. And over the course of the next 10 years, plenty of people would end up under the wheels of that particular car....

That Which Does Not Kill Me Only Makes Me Angry. And You Wouldn't Like Me When I'm Angry. The 13th(!) Post--How I Suck

2009-04-30T18:09:00.000-04:00

This cycle went on for the better part of a year, and I literally dealt with it behind gritted teeth. I was either gonna shove her out a window or throw myself out, but couldn't really decide which would be worse, or better, for that matter. So I developed coping skills. And by coping skills, I mean I just shoved everything down, and ate like a motherfucker to hold all the rage and helplessness and fear in my gut. I developed horrid constipation problems(which, if you've read some other of my posts, did not last). I gained weight like a goddamn horse with a thyroid problem, which actually made things worse. See, the woman I was with was reasonably physically attractive, but had self-esteem issues that made me look like Tony Robbins. She loved me getting fat, even if it meant I felt so fucking ugly I started wearing a t shirt to bed and refused to have sex. Because, if I was fat, then I would be undesirable to all the other women she felt she had to compete against. It was her way of keeping me. A fat fuck like me couldn't waddle off into the sunset with some tramp and abandon her to her loneliness. If I looked like I was losing weight, she would get nearly apoplectic and insist on eating at BK or whipping up huge batches of lasagna, which I would dutifully shovel down. I was gonna have to have a heart attack or physically explode into pieces to get out of this. Or get a promotion.

I got bumped up at work, and got a substantially better paycheck to go along with it. But I told her I just got moved around, and so I started socking the extra loot away in a savings account. I was such a coward I couldn't just tell her to fuck off. I ended up pulling a move akin to Bob Irsay spiriting the Colts away in the middle of the night. I went and found an apartment downtown. I told her about a week before I moved out. She was either gonna have to pony up the rent from here on out, or get the fuck out, because I was done. Again, shit was thrown, yells were yelled, but this time, I just walked out, got in my car and drove off with a barefoot screaming lunatic following me until I was too far away, and it was pointless to yell. I spent the next week packing my things, and avoiding her at all costs. Every time we encountered one another, same thing. Yelling. Flying objects. Me walking out. Until, finally, relative freedom, a new address and an unlisted phone number.

Good for you, Rob! You go, boy! Right? Wrong. See, this experience didn't create an uplift or epiphany in me. It became about some sort of base emotional survival. No one was ever going to make me feel like that ever again. See, the walls I had begun erecting around me a couple years previous, they were complete. And now they had razor wire rimming the top, and a minefield surrounding. I had officially become completely mercenary with my emotions. Go fuck yourself if you thought you had a chance of getting in, because I had given up.

So, Sunshine, how're you feeling? Ready for more fun and games? Cuz the ride ain't over yet.

Think I'm An Asshole Yet? GIve It Time....

2009-04-30T07:17:00.000-04:00

See, everything was pretty idyllic for a while. I worked full-time, she was "between jobs". Our schedules jibed pretty well, so we had a lot of time together in the evening. She started to spend the night a lot. Pretty much Thursday-Sunday within a month of us dating. And living together full-time by month 6. Which was kind of cool. I felt vaguely domestic. Nice. Until I began to realize what being domesticated meant in this case.

I did all of the minimal cooking that went on in our household. And 99% of the laundry. And the dishes. And vacuuming. And did I mention, I paid the full rent? Still, we had a lot of fun. Weekends off, so we took a lot of day trips around the area. In my car, with my gas. We stayed up late watching movies and gettin' it on. Until the night I had a really long bad day at work, and wanted to just eat and go to bed when I got home at 8pm.

I had been stuck at work for almost 12 hours that day, since someone had called out. I was fucking beat. Wanted a shower, and to be left alone. Well, dear darling was sitting on the porch when I got there, all steamed. Yeah, I'm late. From work. Not banging Thai hookers, but work--I got accused of cheating too. A lot. When I would have had time, I don't know. But since I worked with women, I must be fucking them. Because it was just a regular goddamn orgy at work.

I got an earful about how bored she was--I really wasn't in the mood for hearing how boring the unemployed chick's day was, considering I had just pulled 11 hours with a less than half-hour break. I just shoved my chin into my chest, grabbed a beer and headed upstairs to take a shower, crawl into bed, and attempt to forget the day had happened.

When I was done my shower, I got out, climbed into bed and promptly passed out. And not becuase I was a dick. Because I was exhausted. I slept. Hard and long. Til about 1am, when I had to let go of that beer from earlier. Went into the bathroom. Turned on the light. My torso was covered in Magic Marker. Scribblings and phrases.

"My boyfriend is boring."

"JERK."

"SO BORED."

"This is LAME. Should be having FUN."

What the fuck? I had never really gotten really angry before in my life, except that one time at the therapist's office, when I blew my dad's doors off. And that was a minor blow-up. This, though. My ears were hot, my chest tightening into coils of rage, and I could feel the blood seething into my eyes. I was tired, all I wanted was some sleep, and some ass thought it would be funny to write on me. I went back into the bedroom and yanked the sheets off the bed. She woke up, startled. We screamed and cried and accused, I walked in and out of the room, she threw things at my head, and it never seemed like it would end. It was easily 3am before I finally gave up and admitted defeat. Fine. We could work it out. You win. I give up.

This became a monthly pattern for the next year. Breakdown, breakup, make up. Like the Sunday she sat in the closet, crying because she didn't have anything to wear to Denny's. You don't have anything to wear to DENNY'S?! Fuck's sake, what the hell was I doing, having this discussion? Oh yeah, I had learned to hate being alone and actively feared it, and got used to drama being an active part of my relationship, and this twisted sense of duty to take care of someone, because they obviously had no idea how to take care of themselves. I resented the fuck out of her, but couldn't let her go either. Because we needed each other to maintain this totally fucked cycle. I just shut down and shut up and dealt with it. Until I couldn't.

How One Phone Call Changed My Life. Fuck you, Verizon.

2009-04-29T23:05:00.000-04:00

So this is really where my lovelife such as it was and would become, began to take a turn for the really fucking awful, for the most part. Through the machinations and neuroses of others, and sheer laziness and apathy on my part, shit just sucked. Let the games, as it were, commence.

So this cynical, cranky, and overly sarcastic turd known as Me had talked to his foil. A woman who seemed to resemble me, although hopefully not physically. Because that would be one ugly fucking broad. I didn't call her for about a week, and not because I had learned to be too cool for that, but because it had snowed something like 92 feet of snow in 24 hours. The Grand Blizzard of '96. My apartment complex's phone lines got trashed from the weight of all the ice hanging from them, so I had no phone service for 5 days. Had to walk to SevEv to let the rents know I was still alive, and not OD'd on crack in a snowbank somewhere.

After the phones were fixed, I called her. And again we talked for a couple hours, and busted each other's chops, and made fun of old people and the handicapped, and told inappropriate jokes about nuns. Finally, a woman who remotely "got" me, and better yet, wasn't deeply offended by me. Wonder of wonders.....

We finally met. Thankfully she didn't look like me. We essentially sat around and once again made fun of each other and ourselves, and everyone and thing around us. Could a romance be based on an unutterable disdain for humanity?

Yes it could. Could it be good? Probably definitely not.

See I had started erecting these emotional walls around myself, back in college. I totally fucked somebody over, and even though it wasn't entirely my fault, it was entirely my fault. And then later, somebody else came along, and I was so unaware of what was going on around me that I kind of coasted in a relationship that I knew was bound to go nowhere, yet stayed and rode it out anyway. My vision of an ideal relationship got skewed, to put it politely. I figured the best I could do was to meet someone who could put up with me, and whom I didn't actively want to kill on a regular basis. Boy, shoulda seen that one coming.

Well, we got along pretty well, as well as two people who seemed to hate everything but each other could. After we started dating we ate fast food and laid in bed watching Seinfeld, and drove through creepy-ass Ellicott City late at night, telling ghost stories to try and freak each other out. And I still worked a lot, and she didn't. Since she hated everyone, she couldn't keep a job, since pretty much the entire population of the world was "assholes. And I just can't work with assholes."

Really? Sitting in bed eating cheeseburgers and watching Seinfeld with a cute girl you don't wanna maim? What could be better? A lot, actually. A fuck of a lot.

Treading Water Before the Shitstorm.

2009-04-29T20:08:00.000-04:00

Ok, 1995, December 30th. Sitting in my friend Steve's house, drinking beer and eating an ungodly large amount of hot wings with him and his roommate Donnie. We were bored out of our goddamned minds, probably watching the State(awesome) and playing the original version of Trivial Pursuit, with all those up-to-date questions from 1983.

I'm gonna back up a little. Just a little. There used to be this record store(yeah, I'm old--they'll always be record stores) in Catonsville(Bmore suburb) called Planet Music. The place was amazing. It was the size of a Barnes&Noble, but with nothing but CDs. And they were dirt fucking cheap, and you could listen to anything before you bought it. So I would spend copious amounts of time listening to 20 or 30 records, and buying a good portion thereof. So, in addition to all the awesome crap they sold, they had a bulletin board for bands to put up flyers, etc. I'd usually stop and peruse it, usually finding nothing of interest. But one night I did see one for a show I would actually wanna go to, but dumbass me, I didn't grab the flyer.

So back to the hot wings and my friends. We're sitting there, giving ourselves a serious case of heartburn, when BING! the light goes off. Pretty sure the show I saw a flyer for was that night, and that would alleviate some of the attendant boredom of sitting around with two stoned dudes covered in wing grease. By then I had given up smoking pot entirely, because one vice at a time was enough, and beer was a lot cheaper. And I hate being the one non-stoned person in the room. Because then I am the one angry person in the room. And that stinks. Filthy hippies.

All right, I had these grand plans to go to this show, but had no idea where it was, and if I was even sure of the date. So, bright idea! I'm too lazy to drive to Planet Music to look at the flyer, but not too lazy to call and make one of their minimum wage peons go do it, so I called them up, and this girl answered the phone. I explained my dilemma, and amazingly enough, she humored me and went and looked, or at least said she did. Nope, no flyer. BUT, she was pretty sure she had one at home, and was about to get off work. So here's my number, call me with the info when you get home, so I can get away from the Patchouli Boyz. Ha! This was coming together nicely....

Miraculously, she actually called. My friends and I had even taken an informal wager about the odds. I won. Didn't get anything but moral superiority, which I already had, because I wasn't a goddamn treehugger, and refused to read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. She didn't have the flyer, so my evening was slightly fucked, and she made fun of me for being such a lazy dick. We ended up on the phone, trading barbs for the better part of an hour before it was determined that I would prove more useful driving the potheads to the store for more snax. So we exchanged numbers, since, while I spent most of my life at Steve's house, I didn't pay rent there, and so my entitlement to the phone was exceedingly limited.

I was intrigued. What of this mystery woman? She was sarcastic, a little witty, and was actually nice enough to call me back, then bust my balls. Sweet.

I'm gonna hang it up there for now. What, you say? A cliffhanger to a cliffhanger? WTF?! Yeah, well my shoulder is sore, and trust me, the "good stuff" is right around the corner. And by good, I mean colossally fucked....

Word to the Wise

2009-04-28T19:18:00.000-04:00

If by some happenstance you just started reading this little monologue, go back about 6 or so posts to the beginning, if you want the broad-spectrum picture of how the hell I ended up being a disaster on wheels when it comes to relationships.

It's All Downhill from Here! Which is Nice, Cuz You Don't Have to Pedal....

2009-04-28T18:53:00.000-04:00

So, I was firmly entrenched in my early 20s, vainly trying to finish school somewhere remotely near on time, that I really didn't date much my senior year. I was kind of back to not really worrying about it, and actually going to classes, which didn't do so much for my GPA--I got 3.0 both semesters. How had I managed a 3.8 my sophomore and junior years, writing term papers at 4am the day before they were due, books wedged in my lap as I polished off beer after beer, yet couldn't muster better than straight B's or a combination of A's and C's while for really real concentrating on school? Is this how Dubya got to be Prez? If so, I was so next in line for the job back then....

So I really seriously barely noticed girls again. And they barely noticed me, except one, whose story I will recount at a later date, cuz it doesn't really fit this, but is really fucking weird in its own right. Anyway, Mom and Dad were only willing to pay for 4 years of school, and I needed to cram as many classes into two semesters as I could stand. I would still have to take a summer gym class and a final upper level English class in Fall to graduate, but I could live with that. So I went on a couple of dates, did a lot of schoolwork, and then became ultra-paranoid about where the hell I was gonna go after school--no job, no place to live, great....so I signed up for a medical study. Two weekends at their facility, then every Friday night for a blood draw(15 minutes of my precious weekend, gone) for 6 weeks, and they paid my dopey ass 2100 bux. Suhweet. So that is what I did, and it gave me enough loot to move out on my own, and I found a job later that June. And that really seriously did consume most of the next year and a half, because I worked my ass off.

Like I said before, I worked at a car dealership, in the parts department. At first I was a minimum wage delivery driver, and so spent the entire day behind the wheel of a car, dropping parts off to garages, etc. It was easy but boring, so I started helping out in the department, looking up parts. Turns out I had a knack for it--I was fast, accurate and efficient, and without the added assist from cocaine! So I was on the fast track to big bux. But it meant I worked crazy long hours and wanted nothing more than to climb into bed or a beer glass when I got out at night. And that is where I stayed, roughly speaking, pretty much until I made one phone call the day before New Year's Eve 1995.

The Road to Hell is Paved with Valentine's Day Cards and Carnival Teddy Bears

2009-04-25T19:26:00.000-04:00

All right, so I took a little hiatus from this for a couple days, because constantly writing about how much of a douchebag you are can be draining. Upon further reflection, I may have gotten ahead of myself when I said earlier that I had turned into an unrepentant knob my junior year.

Actually, I had only started down the PATH to knobbery that year, and part of it was actually spent being a relatively sort of kind of nice person. Probably all the pot....

Fast forward a couple months, just before my 21st birthday. As part of the Residential Life Staff, as we were officially known, we would occasionally have refresher trainings on how to deal with certain college-specific issues, e.g. drug and alcohol overdoses, date rape, sexuality, lice. Yeah, lice. Apparently some people still didn't know how to bathe, even into (relative)adulthood. We were in diversity training once, and we had to identify ourselves based on outward attributes. I of course fell into the category of Really Stupid White Guy. A female RA suddenly decided right then and there to come out of the closet to the whole room. What should have been this Up With People! group hug moment was instead one of stunned and intensely awkward silence. Even the facilitator, a self-professed Latina feminist, was speechless. Those trainings were always interesting, to say the least.

I was at one of these once, and an RA friend of mine came up during the break. Did I remember fixing a stuck toilet on my floor a couple months ago? Um, no, cuz I NEVER dealt with stuck toilets in her dorm. Turns out she was talking about my underage friends that were playing drinking games, and the one I was kind of a dick to was a Poli Sci major who thought I was cute. Great. The almighty plumber's butt makes another Poli Sci major weak in the knees. Who knew? Her number was foisted upon me.

It still did pique(not peak, or peek. Another thing that makes me crazy. Use the right word for the right meaning, goddammit!) my interest, so in a couple of days, between bouts of watching too much TV late into the night, and hanging out at Lansdowne(I still hadn't gotten the "going to college" part of going to college down yet), I called. We talked. We went on a bunch of dates. We became a "couple". It was actually kind of fun. Nothing superheavy, but not just a quick toss-off either. Just kind of a decent place to be for a while. She was a freshman, so it took some convincing to have her understand that LEGEND was not the best record ever, but besides that, not so bad. We dated til the end of schoolyear, and it was kind of weird, since we were both kind of "Yeah, this year was awesome. Let's see what happens next year..."

I spent the summer being 21, which meant I was hammered when I wasn't working. On everything, and pretty much everywhere across the Baltimore metro area. And she spent the summer in LaPlata, working her butt off to have money for school. So we barely talked all summer long, and saw each other twice. Once I made the trip down there to see her for a day, and once she came up to see me for two days. We had fun. That was about it. And that is kind of how it was when school got back in session. Until she met her roommate's new boyfriend's roommate....got that? Took me a little bit to remember the chain of command too....

So they actually had real live stuff in common, and hit it off pretty well, and so we had "the talk". And it kind of hurt. Because as seemingly casual as it was, I had grown to kind of like her. Not really like her, enough to really work for it, but enough that I cried. And it made her feel bad. And she started to change her mind, but I just got up and left her room, because I didn't want to go back and forth for weeks on end to end up back in the same place. And that was the first time I started to feel bitter, like things just never worked out, despite your best efforts. The path just got a little bit shorter, and I felt myself caring just a little bit less about other people's feelings.

A Slight Respite From My Dickitude. Don't Worry, It's Only Slight....

2009-04-25T17:29:00.000-04:00

We have now established beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was utterly clueless back then, and at least on the road to becoming a colossal piece of shit. Really, I had to wonder, what the fuck was wrong with me? And you're all probably wondering whatever became of that girl. Did I chase after her, in the rain, apologizing, knowing full well it was our destiny to be together?

Nope. Cuz I ain't John Cusack, and this ain't a movie. I did the only thing I could. I hid from her for weeks, til school started back up. Couldn't look her in the eye to save my life. I could've tried to go back. She might have even said yes. Then again, she might not have. She probably hated me. She had every right to. I took comfort in the incredible discomfort of knowing I sucked. So I retreated there. Never told my friends, because it was bad enough to have to live with it inside me, let alone having the rest of the world own it too.

And then one day I got a call that the power was out in one of the on-campus apartments. So I had to go to the complex's front desk to get a utility room key. Guess who was working the front desk? It never occurred to me as I pulled that big glass door open that she could be sitting there. But she was. I stopped dead about halfway between the door and the desk. I tried to refrain from cringing. It didn't work. I thought about running. She looked up, with that same exact semi-certain smile. Too late. I was fully prepared for a officer of the law to have to pry her hands from my throat as she let out a Tourette's style tirade against me. Instead, she smiled. And said

"Relax. We should have talked first."

Huh? Like, seriously? Just like that?

Turns out I wasn't the only one who felt like a douche. We talked about it. She was afraid to tell me that she had started to like me, because she was afraid I might not be interested anymore. Go figure. Instead of saying anything, we just ignored it until it took a colossal shit. At least she came through it relatively unscathed. I still felt like a dick though. Hard to shake, that feeling.

That, and somebody's lights were out, and I had to go fix them.

I seemed to be the one maintenance guy who got all the "on duty" calls. We were on call once every two weeks, from 7pm-7am. If something needed fixing in the middle of the night, you were the go-to guy to get shit handled. And invariably, I got called at 1am to fix the dumbest crap.

We had just opened a new dorm for the fall semester. Totally state of the art for 1992. Computer lab, exercise room, the works. There were only two problems. One, the jerks who engineered the dump installed the sprinkler heads in the path of the room doors. So, if you swung your door open wide enough, you clipped the sprinkler. Boy, that was fun. You ever seen sprinkler water? It sits in a standpipe, sometimes for years. Not like it circulates out anywhere. When a sprinkler goes off, it sprays the blackest water you have ever seen in your entire life. Jed Clampett would crap himself, thinking he hit the motherlode. I got calls for that. The second worst engineering fault in the building was the toilets(of course). They were these crazy vacuum-pressurized toilets that would blast a terrier into the Chesapeake Bay if it were unlucky enough to be in the bowl(after spending time with the cheerleaders, it wouldn't have surprised me--what made you think it was a good idea to TRY and flush two hairbrushes at the same time?!). Problem was, these modern marvels had one serious design flaw. There was a tiny little brass pinhole valve inside, that if even a grain of sand got in, your toilet would flush non-stop. Til I came and took it apart, crammed a safety pin in there, and fixed it. Now, you'd think a flushing toilet wouldn't be a big deal, right? Wrong. These things sounded like 747s taking off. Can you sleep on a tarmac under a Southwest flight bound for Tampa? Me neither.

I got a toilet call one night at 10, around November. Grabbed my toolbelt and plunger, just in case. We had our own workshops, but I preferred keeping my tools in my apartment. Yes, a black rubber toilet plunger stood guard at my front door...

I went to the front desk of the dorm. Basement room, toilet problem. Terrific.

I knocked on the door, already able to hear the whoosh of finite natural resources literally being flushed down the tubes. One of the girls whose room it was let me in. There were about 6 people in the room, all sitting around a little table, playing quarters. Empties all over the place, and here is a person in a position of "authority" standing in their midst. This was a freshman dorm, and I didn't see anyone who appeared to be of continuing education age. They all looked crestfallen, white as a sheet, like they were about to appear before a firing squad. Now, I was a representative of the school, technically worked for the state, and had to sign an anti-drug/underage drinking clause as part and parcel of my employment. Which meant I had a solemn duty to report anything illegal going on. Including the half-pound of pot in my sock drawer.

Above the static din of the commode. "Chill out. I'm just here to fix the toilet."

I went about my business, as did they. Even offered me a beer. I declined. I was on-duty, and it wouldn't be appropriate. That, and I wasn't sure I could fix the toilet high AND drunk...

One of the not-readily-apparent pitfalls of my job? Groupies. Yeah, retarded. But apparently you become infinitely more interesting when you strap on a toolbelt and fix broken stuff. How many times I changed a FUCKING LIGHT BULB with some enraptured sorority girl standing there in awe. Ok, admittedly, it was a sorority girl....So anyway, one of the roommates wanted to watch me dismantle her shitter instead of getting plastered on cans of Busch Light.

Now, I'm no doctor, but I can imagine how annoying it would be to do brain surgery with some yobbo standing behind you going, "Whatcha doin'?!" Cuz that is what she did, and it annoyed the piss out of me, and my lack of response to her various questions and extremely negative body posture eventually clued her in. I mean, Christ, I'm hovering over a toilet with a damn pipewrench in my hand, and this fucking toolbelt is dragging my pants down, and...well, you get the idea. She eventually gave up her vain attempts at engaging me in conversation, and returned to her game of quarters, the Spin Doctors violating the late night noise level policy(and every last rule of good taste). I seriously needed to get into a new line of work....

I fixed the toilet, gave them the obligatory "Just call the desk if it happens again." speech, and let myself out. If that had been the end of it, I wouldn't have been surprised. But where's the fun in life without surprises?

What Part Are We Up To Now, Like 6? Who Knows? Let's Just Call This "Part One of When Rob Starts to Turn into a Total Fucking Tool"

2009-04-24T21:26:00.000-04:00

So yeah, the last installment of this here tale of woe wasn't so exciting. They always say the second act is the toughest, and where you tend to lose the reader. Well, let's just consider that the wind-up to the serious knuckleball that would be my 20s. Expect THRILLS! CHILLS! SPILLS! PILLS! and the beginnings of my descent into lower level and eventually higher order doucehbaggery. As endearing as my relative ineptitude with the ladies was in my teens was, my downright crass behavior at times in my 20s would probably repel even a used car salesman. And I would know--I worked for most of that decade at a car dealership. In the parts department, because car salesmen would pawn their mother's dialysis machine if it would close the deal. I harbor no empathy for car salesmen. Useless feckers.

Anyway, back to me becoming an unmitigated asshole. So as essentially dateless as I was my sophomore year was, my junior year became rife with romance, and the attendant inanity that came with it. And boy, was it ever inane.

Let's start with the summer before my junior year. I worked on campus as a resident maintenance guy. I'd change light bulbs, fix leaky faucets, replace busted microwaves, etc. in all the campus residences. I worked, they paid my room and board. Sweet deal. There was me, and about 5 other guys, who did this for the summer programs, and during the school year. During summer, there were professional conventions, academic conventions, and God help me, fucking cheerleader camps. The 20 or so cheerleaders in my high school annoyed the piss out of me to no end. Multiply that by 100 and stick them all in 3 dorms, and see how quickly you end up on the roof with a sniper rifle. If I had to deal with anymore cheerful, bouncy, perky, FUN! teen girls decked out in polychromatic, primary-colored, synthetic pleated skirts, I was gonna leap into a wood chipper. How many times was I awoken at 3 in the morning, only to have to go unclog a toilet because it was STUFFED to overflowing with "feminine" products? Did your fucking parents teach you how to flush?! Seriously, 4am, me, a bucket, and some dumbass's tampons. Great. This is not an equation you want the answer to. The calculus of disgust. Let's just say I wore out more than one pair of elbow length rubber gloves that summer....

So back to me being a fucking idiot. Part of the staff for summer included desk staff, to make sure everybody coming and going belonged in the dorm. I struck up many a nice conversation with one particular desk staffer, since she worked overnights mostly, and overnights is when dumbfucks love to break shit that I had to fix. So I just kind of hung out with her and got to know her a little bit. Pretty sure there was an affinity there, but I was getting the "you're a cool friend, and I don't want to ruin that by dating" vibe. I was pre-eminently familiar with said vibe, and kind of left it at that. Though I did drop hints. Not so much hints as "YouandIshouldgooutsometimeandseeifsomethingmighthappencuzyouseemprettycoolandIlikeyou."

And she politely declined. She had been in a pretty crappy relationship with a guy who was kind of manipulative, and was still trying to get past it. So we just hung out, and watched movies, and I would spend an hour and a half inching my hand 15mm closer to hers, and she'd notice, and spend an hour and half maintaining that "no touch" zone. This went on for the better part of a month, and our friendship got quieter and quieter. We just sat there, not speaking, watching HBO in the lobby. It got to a point where we didn't even talk at all. I would just show up at her shift, plop down next to her, and watch the TV.

"Hey."

One night I got a call about, you guessed it, an overflowing toilet. So I grabbed my toolbelt, and trudged off at midnight to the dorm, past the desk, and up to the room in question. Well, I got lucky. It wasn't a toilet, but the air conditioning unit drainpan was clogged, and it froze up the AC unit. There was a mushy puddle on the carpet, but no great mess. The AC was toast til the next day, since there was a good 2 inch layer of permafrost on the coils. I told the Day Glo moppets "no dice" on the AC for the night, which sucked for them, because it was August in Baltimore. Which meant at least 80 degrees at night, with 70% humidity. They started to whine, so I just walked out. NMP--not my problem, because there was no way in hell I was hoisting a 250 pound AC unit up two flights of steps at 1am for those spoiled nimrods. Go sleep on someone's floor....

So I ditched out, headed to the lobby, plopped in my usual spot.

"Hey."

Watched another movie for the 90th time with this girl. Said not a peep. Just sat there. Same movie, different day. The movie ended around 2am. Got up. "See ya." "Yup." I shuffled off into the dark, back to my room and climbed into bed and read a book. Nothing unusual, til I got a knock at my door. What the fuck now?! If those dumbass girls fucked something else up, I'm gonna stuff their happy little ponytailed heads in the toilet and they can fish out whatever the hell is in there with their teeth.....

I opened my door and there stood my desk friend. We just kind of stared at each other for a minute. Here I was, 3am, in my underwear and a t-shirt, just silently staring at this girl staring at me. I literally have no idea if there was a thought in my head. Just stood there. Til she stepped forward, put her arms around me, and just held me tight. I put my arms around her, and we just stood there for who knows how long. Finally we looked at each other again. She leaned forward and kissed me, very gently. I kissed back, totally unsure of what to do next. So we just stood there even longer. I started to feel like a total dope, not knowing what to say, or knowing if there WAS anything to say. Finally she said something.

"I'm off the next few days. Going to the beach with my mom. I'll be back Friday. You gonna be around?"

"Uh huh."

"Go to bed. You look tired."

"OK."

"See you."

"Bye."

She turned and left. I stood there, watching her. I might have even slept there, standing up, because I was flat-out dumbfounded by what had transpired.

Somehow I found myself waking up in bed the next day. Did that just happen? Who knew? So I checked the desk schedule on my way to breakfast. Sure enough, she was off til Friday. So I guessed I had to wait til Friday to decode whatever secret message she had sent me that night. And so it was.

Friday came. She was working day shift. I stopped by the desk. Didn't say anything, because I literally had no idea what to say. Here was this girl I had pined away for, fumbling to even touch her hand, and she politely declined on many an occasion. And she made a move on me. Which should have thrilled me to pieces. It should have been like having to choose between various bags overstuffed with money. Either way, you win. But I wasn't sure. I think I had started becoming reserved to us just treading in this weird, wordless terrain. And now THAT had gotten thrown into uncertainty. How could the timing seem to suck so badly?

She showed up after her shift. Came into my room. Sat on my bed. Smiled a small, semi-certain smile. I sat there, looking dumbly at her, because I had no notion whatsoever what to say. Because it felt like no matter what I said, it was going to be the wrong thing. So I just shut up. And then she finally spoke.

"I think I'd like to spend the night."

I still don't know exactly where I was right then. I had disappeared from myself for the first time ever in my life. And I didn't return until the next morning, when she was pressed up against me, asleep, and I knew that we had had sex. And I wanted to slip away, hide in the bathroom, and cry. Because at that very moment, I knew that whatever I had felt at the beginning of the summer had lapsed into the comfort of a friendship, and that I didn't feel the same way she had grown to feel about me, and that I had just ruined that friendship because I couldn't open my damn fool mouth and stop it.

Instead, I just lay there, limp. She woke up, nuzzled me, and slowly shifted her weight when she felt how "not there" my body felt. And she started to cry. Because she too knew I had fucked it up. She got up and got dressed, sobbing the whole time. I just lay there, staring at the ceiling. She let herself out. I rolled on to my side, and proceeded to bawl my eyes out. Because I officially sucked.

It's all fun and games til someone loses their sense of self and the ability to trust their own instincts, which just cripples their faith in humanity from the inside out. Fuck, dude, this was the start of my 20s? How does the decade end? Not sure I even want to find out, but what the hell, stick around, and maybe we'll learn a little bit more about what it takes to turn Rob into a total fuckstick vis a vis all things romance.

Champagne, Shannon Doherty, and A LOT of fucking weed. Not a celebrity sextape. Really. Just More Dumb Shit from Captain Clueless. Part IV

2009-04-24T17:09:00.000-04:00

All right, so to be quick about it, not a hell of a lot happened for me on the dating scene my sophomore year of college. Previously, when I said I managed to regress during my freshman year, I meant it. I started skateboarding pretty much constantly, to the detriment of my schooling. I would say schoolwork, but I did so little of that, it really didn't count. Absurdly enough, there was an inverse relationship from the amount of time I actually spent on school to the grades I got. The less I did, and the fewer classes I attended, the better I did. I figured out once that I skipped all but two class sessions in a month-and-a-half period(only went to take two tests) one semester. I got a 3.8 both semesters that year. Not exactly a good example to forge into my impressionable, and mostly stoned, mind.

I had once again discovered that elusive mistress who had haunted my dreams freshman year. Kali. Mary Jane. Buddha. Duh, marijuana, jackass....just call it what it is. So I once again smoked a lot of pot, and rode my skateboard for hours at a time(I actually picked UMBC, in suburban Baltimore, because 1)they offered my goofy ass lot$ of dough to go there and 2)more importantly, its close proximity to Lansdowne, one of the last old-school concrete skateboard parks in existence, even today--at least my young priorities were straight). Girls were once again relegated to second-class citizen status in Robylvania. Not that they cared, or were even looking for a green card. Let's just say Robylvania remained a sovereign nation due to lack of interest by invaders. I was kind of the Luxembourg of dating--nice enough, but really, what the fuck are you gonna do with Luxembourg?! Take over their cheesemaking industry? Hold a pogrom against the goats?

I certainly didn't look like a hot prospect. My roommates and I had a reputation for being drunk morons who liked skateboards and Bad Brains. Except my one roommate, who was straight edge, barring the few times he would take two hits, polish off a 4 pack of wine coolers(!), and then vomit like a technicolor waterfall. Another roommate even suffered from gynecomastia--he smoked so much pot as a teenager, he had a boob! Just one, and it was totally an A cup, but it was a boob....It didn't help that he was droll, and had Sideshow Bob-curly hair. Then again, he WAS the one with a steady girlfriend....

On Wednesdays, if I recall correctly, we had 90210 parties. We had a sleeper sofa that we would unfold, plop a case of beer in the middle of the bed, all pile in with a bunch of other folks, and watch 90210. On a very regular basis. While getting plowed on cheap beer and Andre Cold Duck. I had a thing for a while, all I drank was Cold Duck. I was P Diddy before he was even Puff Daddy....I became "that fuckin' weirdo who drinks champagne. What the hell?" Was nice though--nobody ever bogarted my booze. Some girls thought I was slightly urbane. Til I would just take a big swig straight from the bottle, then belch. Attractive. Why did women hate me so?! Champagne and Dylan and Brenda--couldn't they see the sensitive, painfully earnest young dipshit lurking underneath?

Then again, like I said, I was only vaguely interested in dating. If someone came along, sure; if not, oh well. And so my sophomore year was, generally speaking, a wash. And that was OK, because junior year was going to hellaciously complicated and weird and awesome and messy, pretty much all at the same time.

Part 3 in the Saga of How Damn Lame I Am RE: Women

2009-04-23T21:08:00.000-04:00

OK, so where were we? Yep, making out with a stranger at a punk rock show. So it went. Got each other's numbers, left the show, went home all aglow with my friends. They were all amazed, since they were about as adept with the ladies as I was. Not very. We marveled at my ass-backward luck over Taco Supremes and bottomless Cokes at the Taco Bell on High Street. Had I just won some sort of lottery? Was I actually NOT born under a bad sign after all? Oh, if only it were true...

So I had this phone number. What to do? Play it cool, wait a day or two, be casual? Nope, call the very next day after school and spend 4 hours getting to know each other. At least more than just each other's tonsils. Turns out we had a lot in common. We both had last names. Music is good. So are movies. She was a horny teenage girl who liked horny teenage boys. Who knew?! I was a horny teenage boy who liked horny teenage girls! Like peas in a pod. Or horny teens in the back of a car....sense a theme here?

We proceeded to spend every free moment together. If we weren't working or sleeping, we were together. And more likely than not, we spent it gettin' it on. In the car at the park, in the woods at the park, the movie theater(yep, classy), her room when her parents weren't home, my room. Notice I didn't include the phrase "when my parents weren't home"? Because I broke the cardinal rule--Don't fuck when your parents are home. Seems pretty obvious, until you are met by that onslaught of hormones telling your brain to go eff itself.

So, one time, we were all naked and sweaty and having a grand horny teen time in my bed one evening. My parents were out back by the pool, or they were at least supposed to be. And I quickly found out my assumptions about my mom's whereabouts were totally off-base. Apparently the tingling in my pelvis was not my Spidey Senses, because I looked up to see my dear mother staring at me. Naked. Behind my girlfriend. Glistening like a sad, scrawny and ultimately pathetic Greek god. Let me tell you, the LAST thing on earth your mom ever needs to witness is you doing it doggy style....it does not do wonders for your self-confidence.

Four words were said. "She leaves. We talk." The door was shut. My girlfriend was mortified. She was in a far better state than I. I didn't know what "Dead man walking" meant, but I think that is how I felt at the core of my being. She asked, "Should I apologize?" "No, she can smell the fear, among other things. Just go."

She left. We talked. Or rather, I listened. Was I a total moron? Probably. Did I want to ruin my life? Not actively so, no. Do I realize I could jeopardize my entire future doing this? Wow, Mom, that's a bit melodramat--ok, yeah, I'll just sit here and shut up. I was grounded for a week. Which meant my hormones were given a week to build to overflowing. It also gave my dear beloved a chance to go get on the pill, so we wouldn't have any little morons running around anytime soon.

We continued on our same horny trajectory all summer long, albeit much more cautiously, and my mom never did see the offending party ever again. As much as I luvvvved this girl, I thought it best for her own health and well-being(and by default, mine), that not engaging my mom in any contact whatsoever ever again in her entire life would be a good idea.

And everything was great grand wonderful til the last week before I moved to Baltimore to go to college. The slowly growing reality that we would be a full two hours away from each other started to set in. I wouldn't have a car, and she had a '74 Beetle. Yeah, we probably weren't going to see each other til Thanksgiving. But we'd talk everyday or so on the phone! Until I blew an entire roll of quarters. On one call. After being at school for 3 days. This was not quite working out to be the lifelong love affair we had bargained for. After 3 weeks of near-miss phone calls and letters mailed back and forth, it became readily apparent to both of us that this was not gonna work out the way we had longed for. So we decided to break up and see how things were at the holidays. My friends said she was devastated. Cried for a week. Never seen a girl in so much pain. Until day 8, when one friend found her having sex with her new boyfriend in his backyard at 6am. Absence makes the heart grow fonder for something....oh well. It sucked, but I consoled myself with my other newfound earthly pleasure--beer.

I never drank in high school. My dad had been a low level alcoholic(sober for 25 years now--go Dad!), and the people that picked on me in high school drank beer. Lots of bad mental and emotional connections to booze. So I smoked a lot of pot and popped pills instead. Til I got to college and had no drug connections to speak of. So I tried, and liked beer. Still do. So I started imbibing on a regular basis. Enough that I built up a a tolerance, and a chronic lower backache that I am sure was my liver punishing me for my malfeasance.

The cool thing about beer? It was social. Pot, I'd smoke it and hide in my room and do homework. Pills? I'd pop 'em and hide in my room and write term papers. But beer was a buddy drug. I became Mr. Friendly, hanging out, joking, playing rilly fun drinking games, and generally making an ass of myself. Which is where I learned that I could use humor to disarm and charm(as much as I could charm anyone). So I became the Funny Guy.

There was the Reggae Guy, who listened to Legend constantly(I still hate that fucking record--I like Mr. Marley, but that record can go fuck itself) and would talk soulfully about how revolutionary Bob Marley was. There was the Doors guy, who thought he was Jim Morrison, and at the tail end of the party, when "the End"would come on, he would stand up and drunkenly stumble around in his "best" Morrison impersonation and recite the whole soliloquy, like he fucking wrote it. Girls loved how dangerous he was, because he probably hated his dad as much as Jim Morrison did. And don't forget Acousti-guy. He would sit on a pillow under a blacklight, gently strumming the beginning to Stairway to Heaven over and over again until at least one drunk girl took note and dutifully sat at his side, her hands resting on his knees, staring at this cosmic genius as he slurred/crooned "And she's buying a stair...way...to....heav....unnnnn......." At which point, she would nearly have a tear in her eye, and then they would silently leave the room, hand in hand, and we all knew full well what that meant.

Me? I was the funny guy. I could recite whole George Carlin routines at length, or do funny monologues involving random dorm objects like pencils, napkins, and a tampon box. I was funny. Totally comedic. And so not even remotely attractive because of it. I had swapped sex for laughs. Great. Back to 7th grade, in one fell swoop.

Having fun yet? Hope so. We're not even halfway there yet, kiddies! And amazingly enough, it does get more absurd....

Part 2 of the Ongoing Saga of How Pathethic I am at Romance, Part II

2009-04-22T22:50:00.000-04:00

OK, so if you are reading this, read the previous post first, cuz this is part 2, and the previous one is part 1, and....oh fuck, you get the idea....

So, I plan on fast-forwarding and backtracking and glossing over, so this may or may not be chronological, and some things may get neglected. Either way, here I am with my stupid love life.

After my 10th grade debacle, I kind of muddled through the rest of my high school years just kind of casually dating, mostly because I was still preoccupied with skateboards and loud music(honestly, not much has changed. I still skate, but I don't get up nearly as fast, if at all, when I fall. As for loud music, well, yeah). That, and I was still relatively clueless about women. To me, at that point in my life, girls were literally guys with boobs.

On one occasion in 11th or 12th grade, we had to do a 5-person group project for English class(Ms. Shervais and Mr. Wall loved some group projects--easier to grade 5 people as one unit rather than 5 individual papers, I suppose). I was in a group of me and 4 girls. Sounds like the makings of an awesome porno, until you realize I was involved. So, we spent all day in the basement of one girl's house on a Sunday afternoon working on said project. One by one, everyone went home, except me, which made no sense, since I had a car. But for whatever reason, I stuck around to help clean up cookie crumbs and empty soda cups. In the midst of all this, she and I started goofing around, and ended up playfully wrestling, rolling around on the floor. It ended up with me on top of her, sitting on her chest. Sweet. Seems like the right time for a suave guy like me to make a move, right? Well, I farted instead. On her chest. On those precious, elusive teen boobs. This is the exact moment when I realized that girls are definitely not just guys with boobs. Because girls don't think it is funny when you fart on their chest. At all. I left soon thereafter. And our relationship took a turn for the cooled-down after that. I did see her with her boyfriend/fiance/hubby about 15 years later, arguing as they left the same Amtrak train I was on as I returned to Philly. I highly doubt they were fighting about the vagaries of farting on your spouse's sweater candy.

So, my middling career in luuuvvvv was moving along just about the way I figured it would. Not well indeed. My massive streak of luck, or lack thereof, continued on til the end of senior year. Although I did find out right after prom, that 4 or 5 different girls wanted to ask my sorry ass out to prom--why, I'll never begin to fathom. But none of 'em did, because I fairly unabashedly said there was no way in hell I would go to prom. Until, for no good reason, I asked a girl I hardly knew, pretty much out of the blue. She said sure, we made arrangements, and by the time prom rolled around, we didn't really care too much for each other, and so we, and about 4 other couples, played musical dates once we got there. Pretty sure we didn't even eat dinner together. So here I was, at yet another prom, with a completely different date than I had started with. And yet again, I spent the better part of the evening not really talking, and making out. Which culminated in us parking on a quiet back road in the middle of nowhere in the back of my dad's Buick. What kind of cliche had I become?! All we needed was a hook-handed psycho from the local loony bin, and the story would have come full-circle. I got all weirded out by the situation, dropped the girl off, and promptly attempted to never speak to her again. Cuz, again, I was a dick and a dumbfuck. But I was also a senior, about to head off to college, and become a full-fledged adult. Not bloody likely.

See, at the tail-end of the year, I went with a bunch of friends to the local VFW hall to see a local punk rock show, featuring Phoenixville's finest, Batman's Brother Ed. A fine rock and roll combo along the lines of oh, who fucking knows? I can't remember one song of theirs to save my life, but fuck if they weren't fun to watch. So, my friends and I are all there, pounding Cokes and Doritos, when this really tall, very cute girl stalks up to me. "My friend thinks you're cute. Go talk to her." She pointed back at a row of chairs lining the wall. There was one girl sitting there, smiling. Since Franken-friend was so fucking tall, and direct, I was scared shitless not to go talk to her friend. So I did. Sort of. Sat down next to her. She asked my name. Told me hers. Then we made out. For 3 hours. Seriously. I missed the entirety of the show because a girl whose name I could only vaguely recall and I had tried to eat each other's faces for 180 minutes. She wrote her number down, and I did the same.

My goddamn shoulder hurts, so this is it for tonight. I'm sure I'll be back for more self-abasement tomorrow.

What I Don't Know about Romance Could Fill a Book, and Very Well May One Day, Part 1

2009-04-21T19:42:00.000-04:00

Pretty much everything. Like seriously. Actually, that is kind of a lie. The romance part is fairly easy. The love part can be a real fecker, though. This is gonna be in installments, cuz I don't feel like giving myself carpal-tunnel this week....

I'll preface this by saying first of all, I didn't use anyone's real names, so do not go apeshit when you realize that part of this is about you. And chill out if I left our sad tale of doomed romance out. Doesn't mean I didn't like you. I'm just trying to be as concise as a blabbermouth like me can be. Just wanted to warn....

If it hasn't become readily apparent, I'm relatively socially inept. I've always run on the outskirts of crowds, more as a tangent to them than part of them. So, my interactions with people have usually been very limited. Particularly around the female of the species. None of this was made any easier by a relatively goofy homelife, what with parents who maintained a fairly passive-aggressive relationship with each other. It seems they've stayed together more from inertia than an actual sense of companionship. They like each other--I'm just not sure how much....let's just say I wasn't going to base any of my relationships on the spousal dynamic employed by my parents.....

My first "romantic" encounter was 2nd grade. A girl liked me. She told two of my friends. They held my arms on the playground while she tried to kiss me. Did I mention I watched a lot of Black Belt Theater as a kid? Well, I think I used Scorpion and Monkey style from "the Five Deadly Venoms" that day on the playground, because a couple folks had some seriously bruised shins. She probably had icepacks on her legs, but my lips were unsullied by girl germs--no givebacks! I shoulda let her kiss me, because it was going to be another 7 years before I'd get another chance....

So, I started going through puberty around 7th grade, pretty much like anyone else. Developed a crush on a girl who was one of my best friends, and even had the temerity to send her a secret Valentine that the student council sold as part of a fundraiser. My first furtive but bold move into the arena of romance. I even went so far as to tell her I sent it. And got my first rejection....see, apparently, I'm a great friend, but.... I should've gotten that tattooed on my forehead, backwards, so I could read it in the mirror, to remind myself how awesome a guy I was. Just not awesome enough to want to kiss....

By 9th grade, I made the colossal tactical error of really getting into skateboarding and punk rock. In 1986/7, this was akin to suicide. Take an already socially awkward kid with braces and glasses(my genes were not kind to me through my teen years--except for my skin--never had bad acne--small consolation, that), put him in a Dead Kennedys tshirt and New Order blasting in his headphones, and you might as well paint a target in the shape of a rainbow flag on his back. Remember, you had to order a Misfits tshirt FROM A PO BOX, IN THE MAIL. I might as well have worn lederhosen and a big feathery Mardi Gras hat. That is the kind of ridicule you got back in '87 for dressing like that. So all you Hot Topic "goth" kids, get over it. We had to walk 10 miles in the snow to have jocks terrorize us, when we were kids....whippersnappers..... To add injury to insult, some genius thought it would be hilarious to tell everyone he caught me jerking off in the boy's room.

Admittedly, I jerked off. A lot. Fuck, I was 14. Who didn't?! But the boys' bathroom? Fuck, dude, that is just gross. The stalls didn't even have doors. So, no, to put that story to rest, I did not jerk off in the boys' bathroom in 9th grade. Or ever, for that matter. Still, like Carl Lewis in'84, that rumor ran and became uncontrovertable fact in a matter of minutes. Any girls that showed even a marginal interest in me now viewed me as having nothing short of the plague. And one thing I didn't know, apparently jerking off in the boy's bathroom, or even the mere appearance of it, makes you gay. Cuz I got called a faggot a lot. Like, probably as much as Harvey Milk. I am in no way equating myself with Harvey Milk, because he was awesome, and impacted the world in a way I could only hope to. He's just the only supergay dude I could think of off the top of my head. Anyways, dating in 9th grade, like safely leaping from a speeding train, was not an option. Hiding in my room, and jerking off for real, however, were. Until the end of 9th grade.

All the German classes went on a field trip to a real live German restaurant in Lancaster County. Yeah, another reason I didn't get laid--I took 5 years of German in high school. Hard to sound sexy in German. You might be Barry White, but you'll always sound like you're about to invade Poland. So, on this field trip, I strike up a conversation with an "older" woman--she was in 11th grade. Totally out of my league. But we talked. It was close to prom time, and she said she wasn't going. I asked why. She said she and her old boyfriend had broken up. So, for some unknown reason, I asked her out. Pending my parents' approval of course. How fucking lame was I? I had to ask my mom if I could go to prom....lame. Mom and Dad said yes, so I got to go on a real live date with a girl. Maybe I wasn't gay after all....

Looking at those pictures now, good god, I must have looked ridiculous. I looked like a 10 year old maitre d, in my rented tux with the bright red satin cumberbund and tie. And her aunt had to drive us, since neither of us had a license. Which was sort of like having a chauffeur, if your chariot was a Plymouth Reliant K....admittedly, prom was actually fun, since I was one of the few freshmen boys there, and I got to French kiss a girl for real, a lot. Pretty much all we did, too, aside from eating and me following her around while she talked to her friends. And after prom was cool, since her older brother and his date drove us back to their parents' house. Mom and Dad weren't home, so it was time for the kids to play(read--have sex). Yep, the same night I had my first real kiss, I got laid. And all that wanking paid off--I apparently wasn't half bad at it. A great start to a hopefully long and illustrious career in doin' it!

That didn't last long. Neither of us had a car, and getting it on at school was out of the question. I guess we could have. Plenty of teachers did, but I wasn't a big sexual thrillseeker just yet. I was just happy to do it at all....It also didn't help that she was a pathological lunatic. One time, on the phone, I told her I wouldn't be able to come over that weekend, so she threatened to kill herself. Great. The one girl who deigns to look at me is a wackjob. Girl That Likes Rob=Mentally Unstable. So this is how it's gonna be? Shit. So, how bad IS being gay, cuz this straight business might not be cuttin' it....

So, having gotten my virginity and the crazy lady who took it(thanks for that by the way--however nutty you were, you were extremely patient and caring to this geeky virgin) out of the way, I proceeded to return to my old nerdy ways, buried in comic books and horror movies, working on the yearbook and Academic Team, and buying Cramps and Minor Threat records. That was part of the problem too. The punk girls liked boys who were into Bauhaus and the Mission UK. And I didn't like it at all. So I guess I wasn't sensitive enough....cheerleaders hated me, and I couldn't cry on demand for the black mascara crowd. Jeezus, what was I gonna have to do?

Go to gym class, apparently. Two friends both liked me from my apparent volleyball skills, I guess. One annoyed the crap out of me, cuz she tried so damn hard to be exactly the type of girl she thought I would like, and it drove me crazy. The other girl and I didn't seem to have much in common at first, but she was sweet(she bought me a rubber rat for my birthday--how kickass is that?!), so we started dating, right around the time of my 16th birthday, which happens to be almost two weeks before Valentine's Day. So, yeah, as teen romance typically goes, it got "serious" quick--I even let her wear one of the two Swatch watches I wore. Cuz in '88, you had at least two. So she got one. It was luuuuuvvvvv.....And everything was dandy, til she handed it back to me on the way to homeroom, the day of the VDay Dance. Dude, crushed. My day went down in flames. The rest of the day became a living nightmare. Her face was everywhere. I just stared at that damn watch. My. Life. Was. At. An. End. Until some friends convinced me to go to the dance anyway. Which she also happened to go to. And my female friends hung all over me and flirted and generally went over the top to make her feel like crap. Which she did. And she called me back that same night, asking if we could try again. And we did. For about 6 months. And I worked long hours in the sun all summer long, and was tired, and wanted to skateboard and not be bothered with a girl, so I dumped her. Because I was an idiot 16 year old boy. Advice to parents of teenage daughters--don't let them have "serious" relationships until you are no longer legally able to say a damn thing about it. Cuz teen boys are fucking morons.

More later. My fucking wrist already hurts. From TYPING, ass.....

The Two Times In My Adult Life That I Shit My Pants

2009-04-05T20:43:00.000-04:00

Yes, there have been exactly two times in my adult life when I shit my pants.

The first? 2.5 years ago. A friend of a friend hired me to build a backyard deck and put in an outside hosebib in Baltimore City. Which was awesome, because I lowballed the fuck out of everyone else, and still made $1500 after materials for 3 days' work. The downside? Day 1 of said job coincided with day 4 of a spectacularly bad stomach flu. It seemed to be on the wane, the materials were being delivered by the lumberyard that very morning, and I only had this 3-day window to demo the shitty little old stairs, build the new deck, clean up and get the fuck outta their way. So it was a gamble how successfully my sphincter would be able to hold out. Fortunately the family was out of town, so I had unfettered access to their latrine. I must have hit the head 10 times that first day, mostly false alarms. But it was nice to know I had it at my disposal, so to speak.

The work progressed along nicely. I demoed the old steps fast as hell--it was mostly rotten anyway. I got most of the framing done the first day, and had started putting down the decking when it started to get too dark to work. So I wrapped it up and headed home. No big issues, and better yet, I hadn't crapped my pants. Yet.

Day 2. Even better! I knocked out the decking fast as hell. Got all Pythagorean on the railings(if you've ever put in banister posts, you know there is this INSANELY long calculation you do to figure out the spacing for the posts between the main posts so it doesn't look all wonky--it can take me an hour to get it straight. Fuck, I can't even balance a checkbook.), busted those out, and was way ahead. So I decided that since I was in such good shape timewise and it was hot as fuck outside(Baltimore in July=way fucking hotter than Hell could possibly ever hope to be. Hell probably feels like the inside of a Good Humor truck by comparison), I would take the rest of the day and go to the pool. This, I deserved. I could even wake up late Day 3 and take my sweet-ass time wrapping up the job! And my belly, whilst grumbly, had eased up its downward attack on my colon. No sudden need to drop my tools and run for the can. Woo hoo, things were coming up roses! Boy, I shoulda known....

Day3. Rested, damn near finished making a fuckton of money with little effort, this was gonna be a cakewalk into the home stretch. So I didn't even get to the jobsite til 1pm. All I had left was to put the cap on the railing, wire in a motion detector for their floodlight, and put in the outside spigot. Suh-weet. Since I hate plumbing, I saved that til last. About 2.30pm, I headed to the basement to shut off the water supply. Which was old. And in the rafters. Over my head. I broke out the trusty pipewrench to break the seal on the coupling I had planned to tie into. Dialed 'er in, clambered up onto a milkcrate to get a better angle, and put the wrench in place. I bore down with all my might, because that's what it takes to bust open old pipes. It is, ironically enough, also what it takes to lose muscle control in your ass. I shat. Long. Hard. Hot. The virus had not yet had its fill of perverse pleasure at my expense.

So there I stood, on a milkcrate, holding a wrench, with a steaming mass of shit in my pants. In July. In someone's basement. Someone who had paid me good money to trust me to build them a nice deck. I doubt it crossed their minds that I might shit myself while doing so. My dilemma? How the fuck to get to my house, load in tow, so I could clean up and get back there to finish? Did I mention that I had freed up the pipe at the same time as I dumped in my shorts? So now I HAD to finish--they would be back the next morning, and would expect hot and cold running water....

So I pulled my pant legs tight against me, SLOWLY walked up the alley to my car, and climbed behind the wheel. Fortunately my house was only 10 or so blocks away. I parked in the alley behind our house, let myself in downstairs, and peeled off my shorts. The backs of my legs looked like I had been tanning in assless chaps. My ex-wife called down. No, the job wasn't finished, and could you please just get me a goddamn towel?! Which she did, perplexed, until she saw, or rather, smelled me, and saw the Jackson Pollack that was my ass. I told her, don't even ask. I gave a very brief explanation and informed her I was taking a quick shower so I could return and finish the job, and then get the fuck out of there. Which I did. It literally only took me another ten minutes to finish the job, even with the added encumbrance of extra underwear--just in case. I wasn't interested in Round 2.

Well, Round 2 presented itself some 2 years later. I had figured, an adult probably only shits his pants once in his adult life, unless there is something medically wrong. I miscalculated the fuck outta that one.

I had gone downtown to see a friend's band play on a weeknight. Not much traffic, club wasn't terribly full. Good times. There was an awesome Danish band that closed the night out. Very friendly fellows who reminded me what it is like to see a band who genuinely has fun doing what they do. Did I mention that earlier in the evening I had stopped at 7-11 for a Coke? I love Coca Cola--Pepsi can suck it. So I wanted a can of Coke--I don't like the plastic bottles of Coke so much, so I try to get the can as much as possible, which Sev-Ev has the good graces to stock on the regular. Well, Coke goes pretty well with those David brand pumpkin seeds. The white ones that are drenched in sodium. Salty and sweet go so well together, so I scored a bag of those, and polished the soda and seeds off on the way to the club. The night, as I said, was pretty awesome--saw my friend, who I hadn't seen in years, met some great Danes, drank a beer or three. Well, I made it to last call, which I can't recall the last time that happened. Somehow, in the intervening hours, downtown Baltimore had become party central, because when I went out into the night, there were cars EVERYWHERE. This should have clued me in to something amiss, especially when my stomach growled at me on the walk to the car. It crossed my mind to go back in to the bar and use the facilities briefly, but that would have meant another 75 yards up and back added to my travels. I'm a lazy fuck. So I kept on going. And my stomach growled again.

I got behind the wheel of the car, pulled out into traffic, and promptly sat through the same traffic signal 5 times. My stomach begged for relief. I forgot to warn--pumpkin seeds have a tendency to act as a purgative. Which is the polite way of saying, it can make you shit like a feces fire hydrant. Needless to say, the growl turned into a full-on roar within minutes. I clenched, I locked my knees together, I begged for the cars to get the hell out of my way, I contemplated flooring it into the intersection in the vain hope I could dodge all the traffic and make it to the highway, which would put me only minutes from my house. Nothing worked. No affirmations, denials, pleas to a God that I flatly denied the existence of up to this point. Nothing. I went through all the phases of mourning, only to arrive at acceptance. Acceptance of the fact that I was about to shit my pants for the second time in my adult life. And so it passed, literally.

The only difference being, this time I actually made a conscious choice to shit myself. I don't feel that I really had a choice in the matter, but I did know it was coming, and I couldn't stop the inevitable. And so I released my knees, let go of my ass muscles, and let forth with an interminably long, stinky shit in my pants while sitting in my car at a stoplight. You know how it feels at the beach to have wet sand sink in between your toes when you're standing in the surf? It was like that, only vile. And your ass and thighs, as opposed to your toes. But honestly, I was emotionless at this point. No shame, no horror or shock. Just the acceptance of the immutable load of crap in my pants. Again.

So I drove home. Again, I pulled my pants close to me, walked dolefully through my front door, and headed straight to the shower. I pulled off my shoes and shirt, climbed in, and hosed myself off. In my shit-filled pants. Which I slowly peeled off, then picked up to wash "the mess" out of. I stood there for at least 45 minutes, to be sure I was free of any lingering "debris". I balled the jeans up and tossed them in a bag, and put the bag on the back porch until morning. These were not pants I cared to remember. This was no memento.

So I cleaned up my shit-covered ass for a second time in my adult life. And hopefully the last. I am by far not a religious man, but I would contemplate the existence of a god if I could be guaranteed not to ever shit myself ever again. I don't want eternal life. I just want to make it home without a flaming bag of poo on my own backporch.

P.S. I'm not going to get into the one time in my adult life when I pissed myself. In bed.

Sometimes

2009-03-04T17:53:00.000-05:00

I used to have so much noise in my head. Like a radio stuck between two stations with really low signal strength, so you could never really get a handle on what either station was putting out there. Just phantom messages that never made sense. So, I spent years doing 95 different things but never really concentrating on any one of them. I dabbled constantly, dropping things for the next thing that piqued my interest.

I've been playing guitar for almost 20 years, but you would think I'd been doing it for 20 minutes if you ever heard me. Mind you, I'm exaggerating a bit. But I never stuck with it long enough to be adept at it. I've always enjoyed it though, even with a marked lack of proficiency. Same goes for writing. I started out as a film major in college--I didn't know fuck-all about making movies, but I knew I enjoyed watching them.

So, I get to school, take one film class, and bail. I was convinced they would just hand me a camera and let me have at it. My dreams were shattered when I sat down in a class of extremely "avant" types in black, wearing wool scarves in September. We watched Andy Warhol films. They sure as shit weren't movies. A fat guy smoking a cigar for and hour and a half? You have got to be fucking kidding. Where in the hell was His Girl Friday, or Five Easy Pieces, or Texas Chainsaw Massacre? Not for me. So I switched to English.

Why English? I didn't want to be a school teacher, which is STILL the first assumption people make when I tell them what my degree is in(stuck with THAT for 4 years, so maybe I'm not so flighty). I liked writing. I do actually feel like I might be marginally equipped to handle that. So I took playwriting classes, which were fun, but didn't grab me by the shirt and shake me. Poetry seemed interesting enough. And fuck if it wasn't.

My teacher looked like Kenny Rogers, but thankfully wasn't actually KR. He was well-connected in the poetry world, something I didn't even know existed. So Howard Nemerov and Derek Walcott both sat in on our classes over the course of many semesters, as well as some lesser lights in the literary world(for those of you that don't know, Nemerov was at one time the US poet laureate, and Walcott won the Nobel prize in 1992, the same year he sat in on our classes--yeah, heavyweights). I learned a lot about crafting poems, that it is as much work as it is inspiration. In reality, there are very few visionary writers in the classic sense. Most writers are blue collar in a way--they just use pens or typewriters instead of shovels.

But I finished college with little if any idea of what the hell I was going to do with this degree. So I got a regular job that became very lucrative after a time. I dropped writing like a hot rock for years. Most of my 20s and the earliest part of my 30s was literally spent being totally mindless. I worked, I played. I slept, I ate. I had a handful of sand at the age of 22, and the last grain hit the ground when I was 31. That is exactly what I had to show for 9 years of existence. It really never dawned on me that I really could or should try to accomplish anything.

Then I helped make a kid and got married, in that order. The wages of sin.... Whoa. Didn't see that coming at all. I was surprised, and clearly unprepared for it. It scared the hell out of me, that I would even be allowed to make a child, let alone take care of it. Did anyone think to check the dishes piled in my sink when this happened? But fuck it, sometimes you bootstrap your way through some things, including diaper changes and 3am colic. So it goes--he's 4 now, and doesn't seem the worse for wear. We'll see how I feel when he needs bail money.

Along the way to literally winging the first few years of childrearing, my marriage managed to come apart. As not completely inept as I was at being a dad, I was equally unqualified to be a husband. I had spent so much of my life traveling in the margins of peoples' lives, I never really had to connect with anyone, and by default became very selfish with myself and my time. Which, if you were my partner, sucked on a grand scale. As lame as it sounds, I was about as good at sharing as a 3 year old in a sandbox. Can you say destined for failure? So it came and went.

Well, that part all happened about a year and half ago. I started going to a therapist, because I was 36, had a job I hated, a failed marriage, and an inexorable fear of losing the one good thing I had ever created that was worth anything, my son. So I put all my eggs in his basket. Because whatever happened to me, he needed to know I would be there for him to depend on, and give him a fulfilling life.

Now, I think a lot of psychology is bunk. But I am also willing to admit that it helps a fuckton if you really feel stuck somewhere horrible. So I started going. I talked about my marriage, how divested I felt from pretty much everything I had ever done, my kid, my successes and failures, and how to take all these ill-fitting puzzle pieces, shove them in a box, shake them up and toss out a coherent picture.

So I learned some stuff. 1. I don't suck. 2. I've done plenty of shitty things that might make somebody think I suck. 3. I can't take any of it back. 4. I can apologize. 5. I can go forward.

It really boiled down to that. So I apologized to a bunch of folks. Some cared, some didn't, some didn't bother to respond. But I made an actual effort at something, and succeeded if only partially. That felt kind of OK for once. I made lists of things I wanted to accomplish on any given day. I started getting done even the minor things that would normally slip through the cracks. By the way, I kind of got fired from a job I had for 8 years--I totally got fucked by someone who just didn't like the way I ran my team--but honestly, once I got past the fact that 8 years of my identity got flushed in one fell swoop, I realized I damn near asked to get canned. And that felt like moving forward. I made another list, but this one included long-term stuff. Never thought really past the next week before. This was new.

So I have another job that is not stellar by any stretch of the imagination. But it pays the bills, and I can still do what I need to as a person to get done the things I want to.

I am writing. A lot. Emails, facebook notes, poems again(never thought I would ever do that again), music, a movie. Some of it sounds pointless, but I really take the time to craft something, even a damn posting on a blog, for instance.

The noise has died down. I play music everyday. I write everyday. I think everyday. It's quiet enough so I can hear an idea that wants out. So I write it down. And so here it is.

Thanks.

Y'know what I'm doin' right now? I mean, right fucking now?!

2009-02-01T19:50:00.000-05:00

I'm listening to Jack Webb doing the radio show version of Dragnet, before it hit the TV, way back when my dad was a kid. Every week on WAMU 88.5FM in DC, they have the Big Broadcast, where they play old school radio shows--Jack Benny, Thriller, Lights Out, Edward R Murrow, Burns and Allen, etc. And it is fucking awesome. Now, there usually ain't the best acting going on, and it's kinda stilted and telegraphed at times, but dammit if it isn't way more engaging than watching Heroes or Lost or Dexter(well, maybe not Dexter, cuz that show FUCKING RULES). You actually have to visualize what is going on, and it keeps the old synapses limber and lubed.

Now I love me some movies(I like them pretty much more than anything), but this stuff, even though I didn't grow up with it, will always get me fired up. I'm not a big fan of westerns, but damn if I don't love hearing the exploits of Marshall Matt Dillon on Gunsmoke, and Orson Welles' stentorian delivery of the Halloween War of the Worlds broadcast is nearly ecstatic. And the old news broadcasts from WWII damn near make me wanna cry when they play them. It is genuinely that heartbreaking to HEAR those stories.

And oddly enough, I really don't enjoy going to baseball games. My kid likes it, so I take him sometimes. But it really isn't my thing. I have no idea who any of the players are, and I could care less about the game itself. But whenever it is on the radio, I guarantee that is what I am listening . I don't know why--I think it is just so evocative. The idea that they can convey all this action with just words blows me away.

It's kind of surprising, that a guy who can talk a fuckton, actually likes listening. Have something to say? Gimme a shout!

Sometimes I feel inadequate.

2009-01-19T18:44:00.001-05:00

I talk. A lot. Some would say way too fucking much. I'm not so good at silence. It can seem like a neverending spew of thoughts, anecdotes, half-formed stand-up routines, rants, and diatribes. There is a seemingly constant stream of this STUFF that comes rolling off my tongue. It is as if there is an endless well of ideas coursing through me at pretty much every waking moment.

The truth is, I feel woefully unable to express myself most of the time. I use this logorrhea in order to mask that inability. I don't feel like I can translate what I am thinking and feeling into words--the fear that I will be misinterpreted. If I say so many things often enough and loudly enough, the things I truly want to express, but seem afraid to, will actually make it out into the world. Sometimes they get lost in the cacophony, and sometimes they hit their mark.

If you ever find me at a loss for words, you'll know that something has profoundly affected me. These moments are almost uniformly the ones you will find me blankly staring out, laughing my ass off, or driven to tears.

My friends always tell me that I express myself so well--I honestly feel like I haven't been able to express myself at all a lot of the time. This doesn't even go halfway toward making it any clearer to me, either.

Too much....time on my hands.....

2009-01-11T13:27:00.000-05:00

Apparently this is a real commercial that didn't get used, because it was "inappropriate." Uh, have you seen the Oozinator commercial?!

So this is what the fuck has been going on.

2009-01-09T20:39:00.000-05:00

Well, I haven't really been keeping up with this lately, but having a real live day job sure as fuck cramps your stee-lo. Not that I work that hard(pre-emptively calling myself out before Jo-Ann does....), but I have been doing some real live writing that involves paper and a pen, and occasionally a cockpit voice recorder--or a digital mini-recorder, which doesn't sound nearly as cool. I have been working on a zombie movie screenplay, and am super-excited that it is progressing well. I've stopped being a revision Nazi and am just trying to get it down on paper and go back later to revise it as I enter it into this digital box all you kids use these days(and that is part of the reason my apartment ain't spotless...) Some of you, should this damn thing ever actually get made into a movie, will recognize yourselves in it. And not because you are necessarily undead flesh-eating weirdos. Although the case COULD be made for some of you. I just have this tacit understanding in my brain that most of y'all have been pretty cool folks during some or all of the various stages of my life, and so this is a small tribute to you. I personally think the story itself is FUCKING awesome.

My big beef with most horror films, at least the ones that go largely unnoticed by the culture at large, is that they don't actually tell a compelling story. Ya gotta have a story, first and foremost. If not, you're fucked. It ends up being a bunch of assholes getting hacked to bits by another asshole. You gotta have characters to like, or at least root for. Like Laurie Strode in Halloween--Jamie Leigh Curtis is so likeable, that even though Michael Meyers is such a badass, it would be kinda cool if she got away. And the flipside of the coin is Freddy Kreuger--you're not supposed to think that an undead child-molesting psychopath is cool, but fuck if he ain't the raddest motherfucker out there--dream a little dream indeed, Mr. FK. And it is because John Carpenter and Wes Craven know how to put together a good story populated with characters who are, at the least, interesting.

I recently watched Flight of the Living Dead. Exactly. Snakes on a Plane, with zombies. Fuck-yeah! idea, shite movie. Because NONE of the actors or the characters they portrayed were likeable. I couldn't even finish watching it. And I normally LOVE THIS SHIT. That says a lot. You want the zombies to eat everyone, and not in a good way--I really wish the actors were suffering physical harm during production, because every last one of them was a total tool.

So yeah, I've had this idea for a long time. I finally said fuck it and am putting it down for real. And I think it is good. I'm even going to a horror movie convention in June, where they are hosting a "writing and selling your horror screenplay" seminar, and see if anyone bites--heh heh. I'll keep you posted, and if it happens, you're all invited to the premiere.

Brains or Necks, You Be the Judge....

2008-12-16T21:11:00.000-05:00

All right, so I have this mental debate with myself, and the zombies always win. Actually it isn't really a mental debate with myself, since the zombies ALWAYS win. But in my travels and travails, I have watched a lot of fucking horror movies. I mean, probably 80% or more of what I have watched has been horror-related. Which means lots of shit involving mad scientists, wolfmen, serial killers, vampires, disembowelment, zombies, decapitation, zombies, et al.

I have had this debate with other people, and it purely intellectual obviously. Zombies or vampires? Who wins? Who is cooler?

Popular consensus says it is the vampires. They are usually suave, sensual, get to wear capes, have awesome teeth, are vaguely sexual in the terror they cause. Zombies are definitely more proletarian--they shamble, they don't get to make quips, when they bite it's much more animalistic, they....rot. So why, in my mind, are zombies the bee's knees?

Well, it has a lot to do with immortality and the romanticization of said immortality. You're a vampire, you get to live forever. You get to seduce people of either sex and then, essentially, sexually assault them so you can live forever. Obviously, you have a shit-ton of time to ruminate on your life, or, uh, non-life. So you develop this defensive wit, to deflect the crushing reality that you are going to LIVE FOREVER. Which means you either find someone you can tolerate for eternity(highly unlikely--have you met my parents?!), or you have to find new victims and friends ALL THE FUCKING TIME. Lame. How romantic.

People, some of them I consider friends, say vampires are sexy. They get to be androgynous, and "take" whomever they want. The bite is like a fatal kiss. Great. It is still purely symbolic. You never see vampires having actual sex. Wow, it's like you get to spend eternity masturbating, or getting maybe to 2nd base. Awesome--undead blue balls! And the bastards still have to deal with mortality--don't hang out in the sun, don't get a stake in the heart, silver bullets, holy water, crosses. Fuck that.

Zombies, on the other hand, are pure mindless appetite. Your sole goal is to satiate desire. For brains. Or liver. Or intestines. Whatever your little black heart desires. And zombies are RELENTLESS. They DO NOT STOP. Unless you shoot them in the head--which is ironic, since zombies don't really have a need for thought. They just lumber onward, like a slow-motion wolfpack, looking for the next feast. And the entire time, they just ROT. They will eventually just fall apart. JUST LIKE REAL LIVE HUMANS.

I think ultimately that is the distinction that makes me appreciate zombies as monsters moreso than vampires. In the end, monsters exist solely as symbols, signposts for meaning for human beings to make sense of the world around them. Most people are afraid of death. Vampires offer a very sexy reassurance that death can be cheated, even if it is on some very limiting terms. You get to live forever IF you abide by these rules. Zombies, on the other hand, exist IN SPITE OF this desire. They are the ultimate in mortal, bodily terror, on many levels. They CONSUME the very flesh of our existence, at its most basic. They don't care if you are their sister, or father, or priest. They make very real our fear of losing our identity to a crowd. And in the end, they ROT. When all is said and done, they fall apart just like we do, no matter how many brains they eat. As insane as it sounds, they can end humanity ENTIRELY, with no ascertainable purpose. And that, motherfucker, is bleak. They are the consummate symbol of NON-MEANING. And that is humbling.

Maybe it is nihilistic of me to believe as much, but I don't have much faith in humanity. I have hope, but little faith. Vampires are so very catholic in their symbolic existence. Zombies are a much healthier personification of our fear of mortality, in my book. I mean. who REALLY wants to live forever? I'd much rather have a steaming plate of BRAAAAAINNNSSSSS!!!!

Hey Honey, I Wanna Get into Your.....Hat(that's where they keep the brains)

2008-12-08T16:34:00.000-05:00

Simply put, Sarah Vowell, I love you. Truly, madly, deeply, and alas, from afar. You're in New York. I'm in Baltimore. I know, it would never work. But I still love you.

The first time ever I heard your voice, it was earlier in this century, on This American Life. This was not the "In a world...." movie trailer voice I had grown up hearing on classic rock radio in 1980s suburban Philadelphia. Your voice, those sweet, nasal tones, recounting some genius story of how you just didn't fit in as a child, or as an adult for that matter. You sounded like the most sardonic 10 year old I had ever heard. I instantly sympathized--I'm 36, and I still get carded, and the bartender is NOT trying to be polite. Everyone thinks I'm maybe 25. I suppose my interest in horror movies, punk rock and fart jokes doesn't help.

I've had many an NPR Driveway Moment because of you. Your stories always have this, "There is no damn way this is happening to me. Yes, it IS happening to me. Oh well." Indignation and resignation in the same breath. Sort of Beckett and the Marx Brothers living in the same soul.

You were perfect as Violet in the Incredibles. When I finally did see you on the Daily Show, you were a vision. The adult embodiment of a total book nerd. Don't take offense--book nerds are THE intellectual centerfolds.

And your books. I've only read Take the Cannoli, the Partly Cloudy Patriot, and Assassination Vacation, but damn if I didn't put everything else aside to plow through each one in single, extended readings. And this is from me, a guy who can't concentrate on any less than 3-5 books at any given moment. You blend anecdotes, research and family history into these seamless narratives that really do clearly evoke whatever your subject is. Your love and interest in your subjects is amazing. I even contemplated taking Assassination Vacation as a "roadmap" for my next vacation, but alas, I'm going to England in May to All Tomorrow's Parties to see rock bands(hint hint).

Oh well, I know it is a longshot. You'll likely never even know I exist, and I refuse to be a stalker. And we really probably don't have that much in common, but a man can dream can't he? If it helps, I still make mixTAPES for people, and have an extensive collection of the complete works of Yo La Tengo.

Pining away for you,

Rob Nelson

I didn't mean to turn you on.

2008-11-20T10:54:00.000-05:00

So I was reading the City Paper this morning in the Fortress of Solitude(read:bathroom), and having read Savage Love, movie reviews and everything else I usually care to read in Baltimore's ONLY Alternative Weekly(this is a quantitative, not qualitative, statement--it certainly isn't compelling reading 90% of the time), I tossed it to the ground so I could, uh, finish my business. Well, it flopped down and opened up to the litany of porno come-ons, 900 numbers, and ads for strip clubs. One ad in particular caught my eye, for the Millstream near Security Square Mall. On Thanksgiving Eve(that qualifies as part of the holiday now?! No shit....), they are hosting Jello Wrestling. Really. Apparently naked writhing flesh isn't enough for your average boobie-bar patron--artificially fruit flavored, slimy naked writhing flesh is the order of the day. Uh, yum, I guess.

Now I have been known to frequent the booby-bars on rare occasion. I'm not opposed to them, but it ain't my regular hangout. I mean, I like lithe naked women getting all acrobatic and gravity-defying. I just don't like downing $5 cans of Bud just to catch a glimpse of some women's goodies, with nary a hope that she gives a damn about me beyond wanting a buck or two for her gstring. Let's be realistic about it, they don't want you, boys. They probably have a boy- or girlfriend at home who is gonna light the furnace if you get my drift. I mean, would you expect the waitress at a diner to want to come over and serve you dinner at home, just because she gave you a smile and called you hon? Nope, while waitresses and strippers, good service industry workers that they are, may be wonderful people outside of work, there is the equal chance that they are total assholes. The smile is for a better tip, not a plea for a date Friday night. Any expectation beyond that, and you are begging for disappointment. I dated a stripper(she preferred exotic dancer. Hell, I prefer saying I work in retail management--it beats the truth. I run a grocery store.), and she made good money, and attracted a fair amount of creeps, who would occasionally follow her home, to be met at the door by a tired, disgruntled boyfriend and his solid, wooden Louisville Slugger. Women have various and sundry reasons for stripping, yet I doubt that finding their soulmate or even a sex partner make the short list.

Anyway, Jello Wrestling. Does this really turn people on? I remember my first, and really only exposure to Jello Wrestling came in the movie Stripes, when I was about 12. There is a scene in it where the GIs are all on leave and go to a booby-bar where they are hosting some sort of "Half Naked Chicks Wrestling in Sloppy Suff"(I can't recall if it was Jello, but if memory serves me correctly, it was chocolate pudding). John Candy ends up in the muck going toe to toe with two women who essentially beat his ass silly. Now, I in no way found this titillating at all. And I don't think it has anything to do with seeing John Candy in his underwear. It just flat out isn't sexual, nor does it even approach sensual. It's just very WHATEVER. The same goes for me regarding anything really OUT THERE sexually--gas masks, poop, pee, rubber pants, chains, etc. If you are into it, great, but for me poop belongs in the terlet, not on my chest. I've never really talked to anyone into heavy bondage or coprophilia, etc., but I would ask them, why? Is regular sex not enough for you? How did you learn you like being peed on?

I had a girl ask me to do it once, said it turned her on. I tried, but ended up just laughing instead--that relationship didn't last long. How absurd is it to have someone sit in the tub while you try to pee on them? I mean, I HAVE peed on a girl in the shower, but because she thought it was gross, not because it got her all hot and bothered. I am still a juvenile turd at times.

Well, if you know anyone who enjoys stuff like that, get them in touch with me. I want to ask--and not to be a jerk. Because I really do want to know--and it's not like I can just roll up to someone at a party and say "Hey, so do you enjoy being tied up and pooped on?" I doubt I would have that karmic luck to ask the one S&M poopfreak in the room the question they are dying to hear. Who knows, you may be able to convince me that it is a worthwhile pursuit, and I will be begging for someone to kick me in the balls while dumping a can of baked beans on my head. Oh the glory....

Do not hurt yourself laughing

2008-11-12T00:19:00.001-05:00

Old Fat Bastard

2008-11-11T16:42:00.000-05:00

is not my WuTang name. But it is what I have been lately. I got a real live big boy job last week, and it has been mentally kicking my ass. The job itself is not too terribly difficult, but learning a whole new set of systems and procedures has taxed my brain beyond belief. Who the hell needs drugs when you feel like you are totally stoned out of your gourd from WORK?! Today is the first day that I feel kind of back to my steady old self, which is probably a debatable statement in the first place.

I like the gig though--it's pretty mellow, the people are good, and I can't complain in the least about my hours/wages at all. It ain't Whole Foods, that is for sure. You mean I still get to have a life outside of work? Whoa, Cochise, that is a rager. I dig, I dig....

Oh by the way, I am FUCKING AWESOME! Just saw that my first real

live paid writing gig has hit the interwebs.

Here's a link--it ain't Proust, but it is a damn start. Now if I could

just stop reading about zombies, and start writing about them, I

would be cooking with heat....

http://baltimore.metromix.com/music/photogallery/the-oranges-baltimore/763435/content

It's yer JOB, America.

2008-10-30T10:36:00.000-04:00

So Tuesday is election day. Yeah. So make sure you actually get your ass out and vote. It's one of the few rights that hasn't gotten sucked up in the Patriot Act vacuum, and even then, states and the feds have saw fit to try and make it hard as piss for a lot of us to get out and take care of business. Even if you have to jump through a shit-ton of hoops(c'mon, just go and get a photo ID ferchrissakes!), DO IT. And if we could actually get rid of the electoral college, our votes might REALLY count....but that is another issue unto itself. You still need to get out and vote.

And I forgot, remember, we are doing more than just electing a president. In Maryland we've got congresspeople to elect, and two ballot initiatives. One is to allow early voting, which I personally don't fucking get. Election day is Tuesday, end of story. This is the equivalent of Target putting out Christmas decorations at Labor Day. What if the golden boy you voted for two weeks ago turns out, a week before the actual election, to be a pedophilic coprophagist(or John McCain)? Guess what, nothing you can do--congratulations, you just elected a child-humping poop-eater! Way to go, America! So you have to stand in long lines waiting to vote--BFD, Geronimo, it's a small price to pay to hold on to a shred of freedom. So shut off the Xbox and get in line!

Ballot initiative 2 in MD is to allow video slot machines at various sites around the state. This I am seriously opposed to. This is just going to suck dry the already dwindling fortunes of the state's lower and middle class. If you want to bring gambling, don't literally nickel and dime the public with penny-ante bullshit. Bring the whole fucking hog, and let's cut it open and EAT! I'm talking the Full Vega$--slots, poker, craps, roulette, etc. If we are going to have to deal with all the social ills that gambling brings, then we might as well make the big bux off it; and slots AIN'T big bux. All those fancy hotels downtown would fill up with high rollers who spend CA$H money, the hookers would get paid better, and all the city's minimum wage slaves could bask in the glow of some serious neon retinal damage. Belly up to the table. I'm in.

So vote. If you don't, we may end up with a tie, and then W. declares Marcia Law, and names himself Decider for Life.

2008-10-27T19:59:00.001-04:00

So I had a really long but ultimately very cool weekend. I shot up to the suburban Philly 'hood where I grew up to have lunch with a friend from high school that I haven't seen since then. I am really good at keeping in touch. Whoops. And it isn't really a 'hood. More like former pasture land, except the barns have been replaced by 2- and 3-car garages, and Yuppies have replaced the cows. They smell better, but are much less useful than our bovine friends.

I never digress from the job at hand. So....Stephanie and I hung out at Kimberton Whole Foods(not affiliated with Whole Foods Market, who shall forever be the target of my scorn--jerks), which is an awesome locally owned natural foods store near my parents' house. In fact, I played little league baseball literally 300 yards from the store's location.

Yeah, yeah, I know, I'm back. So we hadn't seen each other in over half of our current lifespans. And it is interesting how well we get along now, considering the paths that our lives have led us. Although, maybe not. We both ended up in Baltimore for school, got married, worked, and got divorced--she already is, and I'm working on it. Ain't ya proud, Ma?! But anyway, we traveled in relatively the same social group in high school, but weren't close confidants. But through the wonders o' the interwebs(Facebook, yo!), we "found" each other and started a correspondence. She is now an extremely busy yoga instructor, in addition to adding various Eastern spiritual/medicinal/health practitioner titles to her name. I am at present an unemployed writer who gave the finger to Whole Foods.

Wondering where this is going? Me too. It just was surprising to me how little I kept in touch with people, even the people that were the most important to me during those high school years. I literally have not maintained contact with ANYONE from that period in my life, until just very recently. Did I outgrow that part of my life, or did I need to distance myself from it emotionally(high school was DEFINITELY not the highlight of my life thus far), or most likely, am I just a lazy bastard? Upon first reflection, I wanted to blame somebody for this seeming oversight. Myself, for being a lazy bastard and not picking up the phone; my friends, for essentially the same things; and the world, for separating us for extended periods while our lives unreeled before our eyes.

Then, thinking about it, there is no blame. Life just is. We make choices, things just happen to us, and we deal, and we move on. Talking to Steph, I realized how sad it was that we didn't hang out more and talk more in high school, because she is a pretty unique person(punk rock yoga teacher minister's daughter). But honestly, maybe right now is the right time for this friendship. Maybe what we have both become has made this friendship more likely this time around. I look at myself and I see essentially the same person as I was back then. I have changed--damn you, beer and your empty calories--but my outlook and spirit are still grounded in who I was back then.

But I know there are real changes going on in my being, just as there are in Steph and everyone we knew/know from that time. She stayed in touch with more of our social group than I did, which obviously wasn't hard. And a lot of them underwent some extremely huge transformations. The two guys who I could swear were as gay as the day is long, apparently are not. A lot of the crusty/goth punk rock girls we knew are now rightwing, God-driven babymaking machines. People that were fast friends are now archenemies. How did we all get here? Were we all always this way, and it just took time to bear us out, or did some of us really undergo major alterations of our being? Are the people I despised in high school still the same jackoffs? Am I?

Again, I bring this up because of the Facebook. People, some of whom I cannot recall at all but apparently graduated the same year as I did, want to be my "friend." So do I say yes, and take a chance on someone I don't even know, or do I stick to what I knew/know? Do the people I used to call friends, and would like to find, want to find me? Maybe it's a pointless guessing game, and most of them don't care and just want to pad their legions of "friends."

Fuck it. It is important. Where is Kendra Faust, the girl I had a crush on in 1st and 2nd grade, even though she was way tougher than any boy on the playground? I do want to know. I want to piece together the bits of my past by placing them in the context of my present, and to complement the present lives of those people that want me there. I know where some of you are, and I've started contacting some of you, and I will contact the rest in time. We may spend countless hours reacquainting ourselves with each other. Then again, we may have nothing to say to each other. Except maybe "Hi." and "How are you? What are you doing these days?" And that just may be enough.

The Coolest Fucking T Shirt. Ever.

2008-10-23T18:10:00.000-04:00

BAD BRAINS + BARACK OBAMA = FUCKING AWESOME!!!