It's been a while since I've written one of these.

~

Why can't this day be happily undone?
And gone the ambiguity it's wrought:
All there is to do is bear the pain, or not,
And I cannot commit to either one.
To be a stronger woman does not appeal
To stand up boldly, proudly in the rain,
And face the burning breaches once again,
And again, and again, and again till I keel.
And so I am drawn to a simpler fate,
And some easy blood and a final breath,
Yet this life has made me so fear death.
I've thought of my answer an hour too late--
That the sun could rise and days be no more:
This day, here, or the day that I was born.

~

Comments?

On with it.

Correction-- The Guest Page will feature Ben's Manifesto tomorrow. My FTP server seems to be having problems right now and, as it is now close to three AM, I am not going to fix them tonight. Still, everybody keep your interest piqued for the next twelve hours or so, or else you may just choose to read the post (Called "Conclusive Proof of t-the Stupidity of Mankind: Part One!" on Ben's Site. Till then, please amuse yourself with Andy Milonakis, because, let's face it-- with ducky whores, you can't go wrong.

On with it.

So lately I've been having some problems resolving myself to update this site...or rather, no problems at all resolving myself to do it, just problems with the follow through, rather like my yearly resolutions to lose ten pounds, or to stop hitting my sister's kids when they try to hug me. You know the drill. The problem, as I perceive it, is that I've recently bought an advertisement on Fark, a twenty-five dollar investment which brought me over a thousand hits. While this may seem like incentive to update, for me it's more of an incentive to climb into bed naked and curl up into a little ball...but then, what isn't it? Truly, the shock of the traffic and the potential to gain so many readers scared me as much as "The Italian Job" scared all of Detroit-- not only was the movie was a two-hour long advertisement for an increasingly popular foreign car, but Ed Norton played a surprisingly convincing bad guy, despite his winning smile.

Thusly, I will force myself back into the game, not for me, not for the Farkers, but for the dignity of the internet itself. (Warning: While the preceding link will, in fact, take you to the very soul of the internet, I warn you not to explore the site too deeply, or you may well run into a picture of a fat woman bending over to show off her fat vagina, which strangely resembles that Droopy-faced dog on the Looney Tunes.) So, in the spirit of getting my act together, pulling out of the stops and giving you, my beloved readers, what you're here for, I will divert your attention to my new Guest Writer's section, now with a manifesto by my dear friend Ben as previously featured on his site, The Ben Way.

Also, it is with my most sincere commendations that I refer you to AngryNakedPat.com, where you can sample some lyrical genius directly proportional to the size and shape of the artist, former "Man Show" Boy Andy Milonakis. This pudgy prodigy is making it big with such hits like "BINGO has AIDS" and "Crispy New Freestyle", wherein Andy belts out such heart-stoppingly beautiful lyrics as "Meet me, meet me, meet me, don't beat me, just meet me at the waffle house/ I'm a mouse from Ecuador/ You're a duck/And you're a ducky whore/You like to suck duck dick all day/I like to suck mouse dick, too/That's okay, that don't mean I'm a Jew." Yes, this fine young man is ripping through the music world like Roseanne through a bag of Dorritos, and the rest of us are powerless to stop it. He's sneaking into our lives like a Mini Cooper through a sewage drainpipe, getting into our heads like the deceptive smile of an secretly evil Hollywood actor.

And still, Detroit knows nothing. Damn those cute little dimples, damn them!

Until next time, when I will resume relative normalcy...which, on this site, will probably involve an article about a man surgically attaching the genitals of a dog to his body. The anticipation just makes me want to climb into bed naked and curl up into a little ball; what about you?


On with it.

It's been ten years since Rashmilla Shakya lost her job. Since then, she has been living with the aid of her family, and her meager forty dollar per month pension. Since she previously worked almost all of her life in the same area of expertise, her sudden lay-off was devastating to her, as she possessed almost no marketable skills-- she knew only one life, could do only one job, and that was suddenly, wrongly denied to her. Hundreds of thousands of victims of age discrimination know this same pain. The different thing about Rashmilla Shakya-- she was twelve years old. And worshiped by all Nepalis as a living Goddess, the source of all divine power.

At least until she reached puberty. It is against custom for a Rushari, or Virgin Goddess, to menstrate, so when Rashmilla began, she was taken home to her family and started all over again as a commoner, a life she had not known since she was four years old. Human rights activists have severe moral objections to this Nepali custom: When Rashmilla returned to her common life, she had no friends, no emotional ties to her family, no real world experience. She could neither read nor write.

Oh, cry me a river.

Here is a debate over the horrid mistreatment of a little girl worshiped on high by 23 million people, raised in a palace, granted her every wish, and kept in perfect health. Meanwhile, 27 million of her Chinese neighbors are taking root in sweatshop floors, also unable to read with the exception of a handful of words like "CAUTION", "HIGH VOLTAGE", and "KATHY LEE". According to Gauri Pradhan, head of the Child Workers Group in Nepal, human rights became an issue about twelve years ago: the 80's were over, Designing Women was about to get cancelled, activists had to seek out a new kind of cruelty to rebel against. Still, I think their aim was slightly askew: Rashmilla was offered everything needed to blossom into a fully-developed adult, including a tutor. Reportedly, the man was too scared to force Rashimilla to study, but if this is the objection the Human Rights Activists have, they might start with the Northern California public school system: haven't these people seen Dangerous Minds? At twenty-two, Rashmilla is now in college, working on her degree in information technology-- all evidence suggests that she's adjusted just fine, as opposed to the illiterate masses in our own backyard, drinking in streets, starving in allies, running the WB.

Despite the criticisms, the tradition, which dates back to the 18th century, continues, if slightly altered. The monthly pension has been raised, and the girl's families are now given limited visitation rights. The remaining concerns seem based around the fact that at the age a girl is chosen, they are too young to understand the reality of the decision to become divine. They cannot begin to imagine the psychological repercussions of reaching the most crucial part of their existence at such an early age, rather akin to NBC's "America's Most Talented Kid". (There's something I'd rally behind activism against. As if reality TV in general weren't already a screaming indignity, we've got parents forcing their children in the surreal, perverse contests by the thousands and the industry's leaders cackling like the devil with a fresh helping of human souls. They know, you see, that starting the exposure of these little prodigies early lines them up for decades worth of entertainment to the extreme: Today, it's "Most Talented Kid", tomorrow it's "Most Insecure Teenager", fifteen years from now it'll be "America's Most Moving Therapy". Picture it, if you will: some kid who's parents pushed him to build his entire system of self-esteem in his ability to due Jimmy Durante impressions, laying across a couch, telling the world Liz Taylor-style how he never felt beautiful, giving us all the details of his Freudian need to be accepted for who he is by Lance Bass and Mario Lopez. But I digress.)

If it's the mature ability to make a level-headed decision they want, here's my solution: TAKE ME! I'm more than willing to sacrifice my life of privilege for...a life of even more privilege. Sure, I menstruate, but I wouldn't if I didn't take my birth contol patch one week a month. And if I'm going to be an unwilling virgin for an indefinite amount of time, I might as well be the Virgin Goddess-- actually, at nineteen years old and still biblically untouched, I think I technically am the Virgin Goddess. Let's compare: Due to religious objections to leather, a newly civilianized Rashmilla "recoiled in horror" when forced to wear shoes to school. I, too, feel that horror, every time I see a price tag at Lady Foot Locker. The Kushari must always be clothed in red-- I have the MP3 of "Lady in Red" in my Kazaa shared folder. One ritual in the initiation for a Rushari is to spend the night in a dark room with the heads of slaughtered buffaloes. I work at Burger King! We're practically Twins!

Until my long-lost birthright comes to rescue me, however, I think we're all forgetting about the real victim here: Rashmilla's sister, Pramilla, who was interviewed on Rashmilla's behalf. We all have our sibling rivalries, but what kind of hell must this girl have known? Growing up in a house with walls covered in pictures and portraits of your goddess sister-- what kind of accomplishment could even come close? "Mommy, mommy! I got all A's on my report card!" "Your sister's a goddess, kid, keep trying." It's the ultimate Jan Brady complex. How must it have felt, even, just to do the interview. "Pramilla, honey, there's a reporter here who wants to speak to you--" And for a moment, her heart is all a flutter with hopes for the attention she never before received--- "about your sister."

And it all comes crashing down again.

All melodrama aside, this girl is no more a victim than Sharon Osbourne is a talk show host. If an entire nation needs an uneducated little girl with a painted third-eye to give their lives religious focus, then we aren't the people to judge, not when our religious beliefs are being guided by the future stars of "America's Most Pedophilic Priests". There are a lot more productive things that a human right's activist could be doing with their time--There's hunger, devastation, humiliation, disease. For god's sake, there are people children being abused out there, there are fathers raping daughters, and I have to go to work at seven AM tomorrow morning! Where are the protesters at Burger King's door, holding signs that say "FREE LINDA", huh? No where!

It's always Rashmilla, Rashmilla, Rashmilla.

On with it.

It seems that, at current, Blogger's "Would you like to save this post?" function does about as much good as Gary Coleman's run for Governor...the good people at Blogger have vowed, however, to correct this problem, and I trust them implicitly, as you should always believe everything you read on the internet-- I can make a fortune working part time in these three easy steps, I will have a bigger penis, the American dream has been realized. Despite all the little hiccups the system has had to wipe out my writing-- the most frustrating thing for a writer, I can tell you-- my patience for blogger endures, and for one good reason: They were recently purchased by Google, and Google gives it's employees free ice cream. If that's not the American dream, I'll be damned if I can tell you what is.

And so it is that I apologize for the relative lateness of this post: as I mentioned before, the original text was lost to that distant internet heaven, a happy hunting grounds for the blocked pop-ups, missing images, and about a third of everything I've ever written.

---------

The Greenwood Acres Full Baptist Church, of Shreveport Louisiana, is church dominated by black paritioners. Pastor Fred Caldwell, who heads up the church of about 4,000, finds himself tired of seeing the same black faces every Sunday and Thursday-- it's not a unique situation, reportedly. While we make strides to beat back racism in school, government, and the workplace, religion seems to be the one area that remains in a stagnant state of segregation. Churches all over the South are marked by one set of patrons or another. No, it's not a unique problem at all, but Fred Caldwell has come up with a unique solution (sic). Fred Caldwell's answer is simple: Pay 'em.

Five dollars an hour to attend mass on Sundays and Ten on Thursdays, specifically, for white people to attend the black church. Pastor Caldwell calls thinks of his idea as radical, and says "This isn't just a good idea. This is a God idea." The Pastor claims he is working to fulfill God's vision: A vision not of hatred, not of segregation, but of bribery.

So it seems Pastor Caldwell skipped the "Money is the root of all evil" part of the bible and skipped right to the part where Moses did the Egyptian's homework so they'd like him better. The craziest thing about the cock-eyed plan: Nobody seems to have a fucking problem with it. (At this point, I'd like to link to the article from USA Today that quoted supportive parishioners and even a religious official who agreed with the plan, but as the article was a few days old, it's either been moved or deleted. I can, however, point you in the direction of one article from the Los Angeles Times, currently featured or TheChronicle.com, which says it's "Not a bad idea" without a discernable hint of sarcasm-- which worries me. I can understand, almost forgive, the blind, ignorant approval of a bunch of backwoods sister-kissing Louisiana locals, but when a presumedly educated journalist from LA agrees with something like this, I have to take a step back and seriously assess the situation. The nation is going downhill, state by state, and when the whole state of California starts sinking into the Pacific, 30 million glossy-eyed, fake-breasted people are going to die with the words still coming off their lips: "Help us, Governor Coleman." But I digress.) Indeed, the officials think it's revolutionary, the black parishioners are offering their monetary support, and the white are suppressing their laughter. One new white member of the church, Forrest Hohman, is part of an anonymous cultural organization whose entire local chapter will be attending the Church. Hohman, too, is supportive, saying, "Well, if dem...want to pay us to go to their lil' black church, we'll take dat money, all right. Our...group, you know, we's got costs. We need funds to buy some things we've been needing-- sheets, lighter fluid, crosses, y'know. Plus, we been meaning to scout out the....place. Got ourselves a new project, ya know?"

One cannot help but marvel at the progress we've made as a society. We've made it through slavery, the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Civil Rights Movement, numerous race riots, and the reintroduction of Oprah's Book Club. Hundreds of years ago, white people forced Africans onto ships, taking them from their homes and forced them to work without payment and to worship the white God. Now, blacks are bringing white people from their homes via Volkswagens and paying them to worship...the god the white people gave them in the first place. It seems, after hundreds of years, we can finally begin to imagine a society where people are judged not by the color of their skin, but by their willingness to pay for our approval. Amen!

It seems the pastor, who, surprise surprise, has the dark shadow of a suicidal junkie lurking in his past, has missed the point: If you are going to be a leader of men, you must first learn how to instill the right motives. You cannot inspire people with threats, of false promises, or with money. If you're going to lead people to brotherhood and compassion, if you're going to accomplish a greater good, you must do it the way god intended: With ice cream.





All the races of Breyers, together in peace.


May Google be with you. On with it.

Okay, there was this whole long post that I wrote earlier, and blogger ate it. But it ate it with the hopes that it may be saved, as it asked me if I wanted to save it BEFORE it ate it- interesting concept- and I said yes. The problem is, I have no idea where they saved it to, so I've contacted blogger and, since I am a paying customer, they immediately e-mailed me-- a reminder that told me I was a paying customer, and the implication that they may-- or may not-- get back to me soon. In the meantime, amuse yourself with this, which I swear to god is worth it.

Man.

On with it.

Earlier this week I was subjected to the following experience: My TV was broadcasting a woman's ass. It was a commercial ass, in tight Nike jogging pants, and it was ambling athletically across my screen-- right, left, right left. I sat there, staring at that ass, and I wondered whether or not I found that ass attractive. I couldn't decide-- it was packed tightly but bouncing nicely, and it was in that sexy slow-mo that people love in ass commercials. Still, there was something wrong with it, that I couldn't quite put my finger on.

As the camera begins to zoom out, you here an voice to match up with the ass. As you start to see the rest of the body, the voice explains "This is fifty years old." And it all clicks for you right there.

You get to see the jogging fifty-year-old as she talks about herself-- always using the word "this", by which you assume SHE means herself, but you know the script was kept purposely ambiguous. She's talking about the 5:08 mile she can run, and her ass is still doing it's AARP strut. And you're still looking at it.

I'm sure this made a very effective advertising campaign for a certain demographic. I'm sure the moment that Nike logo appeared on the screen, a hundred thousand 50-year-olds with more unmistakably...experienced asses got off of those flabby fannies and ran something akin to 5:08 mile to their local Lady Foot Locker. Meanwhile, the rest of us-- the devoted, younger generation that started wearing Nike so we wouldn't be shunned in seventh grade gym and continue to because we're brain-dead and don't know any better-- we feel all of a sudden betrayed by the TV, the way we did when we found for the first time that our parents were lying about Santa Clause. But, more prominently is this, this one disturbing, horrible thought: I was just contemplating a fifty-year-old's ass.



It is because of this commercial that I regard Little Danny Lee Robbins as a hero, despite everything. Little Danny, you see, is not getting along very well with his friends very well right now. Little Danny's parents are very mad at him. Little Danny is getting nuttin' for christmas, you see, and it's not because his parents are DECEITFUL BASTARDS. No, my hero, poor misunderstood Danny Lee Robbins' problem runs a little deeper than that...and it doesn't run quite fast enough. Danny is a 16-year-old boy from Montana, and he has all the typical teenaged problems: acne, homework, and the uncontrollable urge to deliberately hit joggers with his SUV in order to have sex with their corpse.

It was Thursday that the district court judge ruled to try Dan as an adult. Dan's defense lawyer was trying to get him tried as a minor so that he'd be able to obtain mental help outside of prison, and I think it's a tragedy that he wasn't able to maintain this goal. We all know, after all, that a sixteen-year-old couldn't possibly be to blame for this-- the real criminal is Nike. My thinking, you see, is that Danny, too, saw that commercial. Danny, too, saw that fifty-year-old ass, and while it hurt all of us, all of us, it was just too much for Danny.

Television advertising has gone too far this time. Just beginning to get over our broken hearts when Steven, the Dell guy, was arrested for drug possession and still sequestered in mourning for the death Wendy's Dave Thomas, we are barraged by such horrifying commercial blunders as the new wave of Geico commercials ("Your parents are dead, your girlfriend has left you for a lifeguard who owns a porsche and, oh, you've got AIDS, but I *do* have good news- I just saved a bunch of money on my motherfucking car insurance.") and Kelly Ripa talking "candidly" about Pantene being a makeover for your hair; this thing that Nike has done just pushed Danny over the edge. He saw that middle-aged jogging behind, and he wanted some for himself-- hell, if TV could sell us yet another of Arby's sixty different sandwiches that are just fucking roast beef on bread or the Ford Focus, for god's sake, I guess it could sell just about anything to somebody.

And this, this was what Danny wanted.

So, once again, it's television that's to blame. It's the "Pearl Girl, she's a pearl girl" jingle, it's Robert Vaughn pretending to be Joe Bornsteirn, it's 10-10-666 and "In my own words, Adelphia is your lord and Master." It's the time you recognized your parents handwriting on that package from Santa. Bastards.



So, pop quiz to see if you were paying attention-- What was the most fundamentally wrong thing about this whole development?
A: A boy has been corrupted into this sickening moral state.
B: A woman is dead, or injured, due to a perverse attacker.
C: The article doesn't even say whether he fucking succeeded, what a fucking rip-off.

The correct answer? D: "I was just contemplating a fifty-year-old woman's ASS!"



On with it.

It's all been mixed up lately. I've been thinking so much about how to improve this thing, what to offer, how to be topical, how to design, and if there's a way to build up a following so that this can fulfill my need to be read, fill that hole in my life that's currently clogged with loose sesame seeds and the crust of old mayonaise. And now-- exactly now, not for twenty seconds now, not in ten minutes when I'll be regretting every word of this post as I go to publish-- now I don't care. I am listening to Damien Rice, and this CD is perhaps the most emotive of any I own, and this song (Older Chests) is perhaps the most motivational. So I will just write. Me.

I have been thinking about places, people. Mostly people. Zack a lot, about our past, our future, this weekend, the celebration of our one year, how long that is. But he is not what I want to write about right now. And right now is what I am living in forever, and right now will have all of my attention, for the moment.

Casey, the way the best thing for us would be if we could just have one of those brick walls like they do in the peanuts cartoons, where Charlie Brown will just be sitting there, with one tear-shaped arm supporting his head and the other bent underneath, and Linus will come by and ask what he's thinking about. They'll have casual conversation-- simple and philosophical, maybe every day, evidence of much deeper bond but never hinting at anything complicated. They never look right at each other, always forward, they never touch, it's all just this idle conversation. And comfortable silence. This, I have decided, is at the heart of male/male friendships. With women, it's crying and touching and hugging. It's more Luann or Rose is Rose. But with guys, no. That wall, those undramatic moments in the silent suburbs of the mind.

I want to expound infinitely on Casey, because he likes seeing his name in type, and because I feel I should have a lot more to say. But Casey is a concise person, in every way: his expression is concise, his emotions are concise, even our friendship seems that it would be concise, were it up to him. I never quite got the whole "brevity is the soul of wit" thing, but it seems an insult to him that I want to write pages of the details of what we do when we're together (a subject on which there are no details) or the moments where I look up at him and my thought just stops dead, and he knows what it is and so do I, but maybe this time we're too smart to acknowledge, or maybe it's just that we've gotten that far. It's a brand-new kind of (platonic) intimacy, and bittersweet seems the best way to describe it.

I wrote far too much on that last piece (a subject on which the details are imagined.) I've gone and insulted him, us, the world as I know it, again.

They never do look up at each other at that damn fence.

On with it.

Today, I received a piece of mail with a return address that said "Lisbon High School Promising Futures". I almost did not survive the laughter.

Inside there were several articles on the progress in the school that hopes to continue the long tradition of making it's graduates shine.

News like this just king sizes the value meal of my heart. (That's a metafor!)

On with it.

Somebody has unearthed a "Where's Waldo" book from the dregs of my childhood boredom, and it wanders freely around my house now, where, every now and then, it's picked up by Zack or I, who proceed to search the final page-- the one with all the Waldos-- for an unsettling amount of time. This action, I can state proudly without fear of error, makes me the foremost expert on Waldo, and, at long last, I, and I alone, can tell you exactly where he is:

Waldo is off dry-humping Carmen Sandiego.

And now you know what they wouldn't tell you when you were nine. Welcome to adulthood. On with it.