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"Rick Moody Is the Worst Writer of His Generation."--Dale Peck, Book Critic for The New Republic
Will I ever catch the proverbial break and experience the exquisite pleasure of some big-city critic proverbially tearing apart my proverbial life's work? Or should I accustom myself to spending the rest of my life as a proverbial swimmer in the proverbial small pond, where I can enjoy my obscurity and entertain my fans with fiction about cranky solipsists incapable of exchanging their proverbial one-way tickets to Palookaville for the proverbial one-way tickets to paradise?
Obscurity does have its advantages--1) no pressure from book companies urging you to write the next heartwarming novel about a raped and murdered teenage girl who ends up in a Hallmarkish heaven of playgrounds and sundaes and cute polyester fashions; 2) no chance in hell of dating a fashion model, thus giving you time to hone what you consider your craft sans the model's insistence upon watching that exfoliation DVD together now, dammit, some people need companionship, you know, if you haven't noticed there at your computer, allegedly writing your eviscerate-all-liberals book but instead playing that on-line videogame, Gnaughty Gned Gnome, in which you have the tumescent title character chase after, catch, and (as your spiritual advisor would say) fuck the shit out of bodacious female gnomes (all the gnomes wear cute pointy hats and nothing else); 3) plenty of time to savor the erudite wordplay of the greatest newspaper feature in human history, Jumble.
November 15, 2005
Ebay and Cyberscaaares (and Nothing, Absolutely Nothing, Except in This Headline, about Whether or Not Vince Vaughn Has Ejaculated Inside, Onto, or Near Jennifer Aniston)
One drawback to eBay: no shopping cart feature, so you can buy more than one item from a single seller and not worry about that seller charging $4.50 or whatever in postage for each item, instead of charging something less for each additional item. I ordered three DVDs on-line from someone else yesterday and paid $2.38 more instead of risking much more in postage from an eBay seller. The eBayer in question promised to calculate the postage on orders of more than one, but I didn't trust such a set-up; computers can screw you over in so many scaaary ways. Indeed, later that day I received a scam eBay e-mail threatening to eliminate my account unless I clicked onto the accompanying button and entered my account information. I could spot the e-mail's phoniness because the e-mail's official-looking links were frozen and thus did not work. (Yes, I reported the e-mail to eBay.)
I have some Ludditic qualities; I still have no idea what a BlackBerry is, or what wifi is, nor have I ever listened to anything on iPod or whacked the mole in a banner ad.
October 5, 2005
Scattershot Entry
--Last night I had the quintessential Freudian dream. I dreamed (my P.O.V.) that while sitting up in bed, I furtively stuck a long brown cigar into my mouth, lit the cigar, and smoked it in very brief drags; I could feel the oneiric cigar smoke manifest itself physically as I lay sleeping, the inside of my lungs feeling gritty. The dream concluded with a close-up of my hand stubbing out the partly-smoked cigar into a circular black ashtray on my bed.
--This morning I suddenly figured out how to improve "Gee That's Swell!": make Thea, a.k.a. "you", a solo musician. Thus I've removed her bandmates Melanie Wu and Jade Bethel and posted the revised version of my in-progress epic. My apologies to anyone who'd grown attached to those two lovely, young, polite, intelligent, affable, bohemian, articulate, trim (in Melanie's case�Jade's a little shapelier), crepitation-related-humor-eschewing ladies, but I couldn't think of any way to fit them into the plot, and yes, my stories do have plots.
--Fun fact: I like the interjection "Feh!"
September 23, 2005
Three Actual Quotes about Days Gone By
"History is carried like a pathology, a cyclical melodrama immersed in artifice and unable to function without it." --Kara Walker, quoted in Gwendolyn Brooks Shaw, Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker
"We feel affinities not only with the past, but also with the futures that didn't materialise, and with the other variations of the present that we suspect run parallel to the one we have agreed to live in."--Brian Eno, from his liner notes to his album Ambient 4: On Land (British spelling of "materialize" in original text)
"The one charm of the past is that it is the past."--Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
September 22, 2005--fiction
Cutey-Pie� Meets Lovey the Magical Unicorn�
"So you're a magical unicorn, huh?"
"Most correct!"
"You have the power to perform any magical feat, huh?"
"Just name it, and I'll do it!"
"Okay--scrub my shower stall. Make it nice and shiny."
"Uh..."
"I'm waiting, Lovey."
"But that's so minor! How 'bout something more amazing? Wouldn't you rather take a trip to the Land of the Pink Pixies?"
"Hell no. They're all Ayn Rand groupies there. All I want is a clean shower stall."
"..."
"What's the matter? Can't clean a little mold and mildew?"
"Of course I can! But that [points to shower stall]--that's just gross!"
"Okay, then unclog my toilet."
"I gotta be honest, Cutey-Pie. My magical powers only apply to fairy-tale crap. They don't cover housework. You want housework, hire an illegal immigrant."
"Loser."
Cutey-Pie forms an L with her right thumb and right forefinger and moves the L up to her forehead, gestures she saw once in a movie starring blonde, teenage, Southern Californian pop music performers.
September 21, 2005--fiction (see September 19, 2005, for part one of this saga)
Gee That's Swell!
Revised, expanded, and moved here by DVM on September 27, 2005.
September 19, 2005--fiction
Sassy Black Beautician
Retitled, revised, expanded, and moved here by DVM on September 27, 2005.
September 16, 2005--fiction (I do not share the views of my narrator.--DVM)
X-Treem Epigrams!!!!!
Love is like that Steeler game you missed because you attended your immigration reform meeting, but that you watched on tape the next day--important things first, but important things eventually....What the fuck? That makes no fucking sense. Why would anyone schedule a meeting the same time as a Steeler game?
The difference between Republicans and Democrats is the difference between a cold glass of champagne in your hand..and a one-way ticket to Guant�namo Bay, you hippie bastard.
My boss is a Jewish carpenter...and we might let him join our, shall we say, restricted country club, but only on a trial basis, no promises. He'd have to cut his hair, though, and get rid of that beard; the hippie look went out with paying attention to poor people.
I can resist everything except temptation, or a good Bill O'Reilly attack against the ACLU, same difference. Say, you know what the initials ACLU stand for, don't you?...All Criminals Love Us!...What's the matter, you some sort of hippie bastard? [Sings remotely like Jimi Hendrix:] 'Scuse me while I kick your ass!
Marriage has a ring to it--an engagement ring, a wedding ring, and suffering. You see, that's why I oppose gay marriage. I don't want gays to suffer. I'm a compassionate conservative....Don't give me that look, hippie! Pervert. Get out of way, pervert. The Steelers are on.
September 14, 2005
Some Lines That a Black Woman Might Consider Saying after Having Sex with a White Man for the First Time, if She Liked the Expericence
"Wow! Gosh! Wow! Gee! Fantastic! Wow! I thought I'd enjoy that, but...but...wow! That's all I can say, wow! Much better than reading that Emily Dickinson biography for my poetry class, and I like Emily Dickinson!...Wow again! Yeah!...Did you know I had a major crush on [name of obscure white male alt-singer] in high school? In fact, a few years ago, I even bid a hundred dollars on eBay for his high-school yearbook. I needed the money for my car insurance, but what the hell, I was in a nostalgic mood. I didn't get the yearbook, however. I was the only bidder until someone outbid me by fifty cents the last two seconds of the auction. Maybe I should hunt down this bidder and read my lit reports to him or her until he or she surrenders the yearbook. No one can endure my analyses of poststructuralist French fiction!"
Fun fact: Black women involved with white men include Thandie Newton, Iman, and Whoopi Goldberg. Also, tungsten has the highest melting point, 3422�C (6192�F), of all metals.
September 13, 2005
Some Pick-up Lines for Hipster Honeys to Use on Whimbogs (White Male Bohemian Geeks) in Vintage Record Stores
If a Pavement song is playing: "Man, Stephen Malkmus makes me swoon." Or "When I was in high school, I thought Stephen Malkmus was just dreamy," or any other line that contains Tiger Beat-style celebrity romantic drivel circa 1966. Whimbogs tend to eschew modern slang in favor of ironic, David Lynch/David Letterman-style cornball chatter, just as whimbogs tend to eschew anything else not pass�, as in too popular among melanin-free Alpha suburbanites who own cell phones that have what Star magazine calls "added bling." And speaking of African-American slang:
If a somewhat obscure R&B or funk song from the 1970s is playing: "Yeah! Get down, jive turkays"--said in a winking manner, indicating you know this slang passed its expiration date decades ago, and that (especially if you're white) you're satirizing Caucasians who cluelessly imitate black people. Note: most whimbogs have resigned themselves to square-white-boyishness; they consider as cool (or even kewl) any women of any race who pay more than one one-hundred-thousandth of a second's worth of attention to them.
If a heavy-metal song from the 1980s is playing: "This is all right, but I prefer the theme to Full House myself." As you probably do (as someome who probably grew up surrounded by inescapable cultural cheese), but at least you've provided the whimbog with the opportunity to convince you to abandon your abysmal musical taste in favor of his abysmal musical taste. Musical analysis is the whimbog equivalent of blowing away wild game or blowing away Iraqis or marking one's territory.
September 10, 2005--fiction
Video Fresh! and the Ache of Adolescent Loneliness
Even as a pimply teen with delusions of new-wave stardom (you used a can of hair mousse a week sculpting your curls into scattered peaks that ended up drooping at 32.7-degree angles within half an hour), you were quite the frotteur. You'd wear that baggy black raincoat you bought at that church rummage sale and ride the subway for hours after school, "accidentally" lunging into the buttocks of slender (bordering on bony) youngish female straphangers. The fact that you got away with your behavior for so long (the raincoat concealed your tumescence) filled you with guilt, though you did congratulate yourself for your open-mindedness in lunging into buttocks of all races and economic strata. At night, you'd watch that syndicated music-video program Video Fresh! on the TV in your bedroom, singing along inaudibly to the new-wave videos. You thought you were the only kid in school who liked new-wave music. You thought you were the only kid in school who wrote new-wavish lyrics about the oppressiveness of parents, the hypocrisy of Republican moralists, the stupidity of the rural lower class, and the devotion of girls in torn Day-Glo dresses who didn't believe in leading celibate lives.
Today you look upon those times with amused nostalgia. On coffeehouse dates with people you've met in swingers' chatrooms, you say you were once "just another generic messed-up teen who needed to get laid." Sometimes, after your first date's first anal sex session (but only if you've pitched, so to speak), you'll tell your partner about your "few occurrences of adolescent frottage," jovially praising yourself as "a young pioneer in the land of Eighties kink."
September 7-8, 2005--fiction
Soundtrack to Rita
"I Love a Rainy Night" by Eddie Rabbitt--playing at the Gap the time you walked up to Rita "Rita the Nut" Markson, that plump girl you wanted to fuck from your tenth-grade math class, and asked if she'd like to study with you some night, "and it doesn't have to be a rainy night, either." She looked at you, said "I'm bored. I think I'll shit myself," and did just that, loudly and odoriferously. "So does that mean yes?" you asked her in a goofy voice, looking past her head at the discount bell-bottom rack.
"Magic" by Olivia Newton-John--playing on Rita's stereo (she owned all of Olivia Newton-John's albums) the moment Rita, during your first and only alleged study session with her, in her bedroom, stopped making out with you, pulled off your jeans and underwear, and performed oral sex upon you, finishing you off before the song's end. Afterwards you felt peculiar, so you got dressed and went home. You started avoiding her and vice-versa, though a few days later you did buy the album that had played during your alleged study session: the soundtrack to Olivia Newton-John's movie Xanadu. You played the album once. A year later, you tossed it into that crabgrassy field outside of town where the burnouts in your school liked to drink beer.
"How Sweet It Is" by Michael Bubl�--playing on your chiropractor's CD player during your spinal readjustment last week at the same moment 2,200 miles away that Rita--whom you hadn't seen or thought of since graduating from high school 23 years earlier, in 1982--finished wiping off the top of her electric stove to the accompaniment of no music. She herself had thought of you only once since high school, for a few seconds during a development planning meeting at work six years ago; she couldn't remember your name.
September 6-7, 2005
The Fabulists' Fifties: Part Two (Not Deux)
I grew up in the shadow of the Fifties, a shadow similar to the ones imprinted upon walls and sidewalks by the people we'd nuked into nothingness at Hiroshima. During my childhood, my parents owned a hardbound, maroon-colored medical book from 1950 that I spent countless hours poring over in admiration of the book's retro content--the comfortably authoritative authorial voice, the black-and-white illustrations of granite-skulled manly-men and of granite-haired girly-women. I especially liked the book's appropriate final chapter, "You Can Beat the Atomic Bomb." For a time, I believed the book's soothing assertions that standing in a "deeply recessed doorway" would protect you outdoors in a nuclear attack; that giving your children "a good scrubbing" in the bathtub would "remove radioactive particles" from their skin; that you'd actually have running water, or even uncontaminated water, for that "good scrubbing" after the bomb dropped; and that other people would die if Mr. A-Bomb fell, people who didn't live in the suburbs miles away from civilization. Considering the abominable way our government has provided relief to Hurricane Katrina's victims (not that the Bush regime thinks the predominantly poor, black, and petroleum-free victims count as legitimate life forms worthy of attention, of course), the confident 1950s promises of licking Armageddon with ease look more heartbreaking than humorous today.
And speaking of questionable life forms, George W. Bush said the following in Mobile, Alabama, on September 2 about the hurricane:
"We've got a lot of rebuilding to do. First, we're going to save lives and stabilize the situation. And then we're going to help these communities rebuild. The good news is--and it's hard for some to see it now--that out of this chaos is going to come a fantastic Gulf Coast, like it was before. Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott's house--he's lost his entire house--there's going to be a fantastic house. And I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch. (Laughter.)"
Yes, Trent "Rich White Guy" Lott. Trent "Segregation Was Fantastic" Lott. Bush deserves to live in "rubbles", not in the White House.
September 2, 2005
The Quotidian: Blog Deux
Because David V. Matthews is intelligent and talented and handsome and a great lover and owns a small koala doll with the head of Michael Dukakis.
September 1, 2005
George W. Bush Shows Leadership in the Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina�, the New 9/11�
Mr. Bush watches only four episodes from his Knight Rider DVD box set so he can take extra time to pray that the disaster results in extremely robust third-quarter profits for Mr. Cheney's associates at Halliburton.
Mr. Bush offers to give hurricane survivors in the 18-to-25-year-old range free food, shelter, and Bibles for two years in Iraq, maybe in Iran.
Mr. Bush sets up a government website telling consumers where they can find the closest stations selling three-fifty-a-gallon gasoline.
Mr. Bush holds a press conference where the reporters compliment his faith, his physical fitness, his resolve in letting the free market determine petroleum prices, and his decision to hold a press conference. He thanks the reporters in a slow voice.
Mr. Bush barbecues Cajun ribs at his Labor Day picnic at Camp David.
August 31, 2005
The Fabulists' Fifties: Part One
Last night I watched the 1956 MGM movie Tea and Sympathy on Turner Classic Movies. The Fifties--a carefree time of Fonzie and Pee-wee Herman hanging out at Jack Rabbit Slim's? Hah! You might consider yourself lucky if you didn't grow up back then, especially if you have a certain sexual preference that causes Rick Santorum, the quintessential Fifties revivalist, to foam at the mouth like a human carwash.
In the movie, based on the play of the same name, 18-year-old Tom Lee (John Kerr) endures harassment from the other students at his boarding school, and rejection from his father, because Tom exhibits certain unmasculine traits. Tom, you see, likes to...spend time by himself! And he knows how to...sew! And he, oh dear Lord, wants to become a...folksinger!
Not to worry--Tom's a nice, normal heterosexual, which makes him sympathetic to the nice, normal heterosexual moviegoers of the Fifties. He proves his niceness and normality by having sex with the headmaster's wife, Laura Reynolds (played in a creepy touch by John Kerr's mother, Deborah Kerr--the movies of that era loved Freudianism). Of course her adultery ruins her life, a development not in the original play; the movie production code forbade anyone from getting away with unorthodox, as in real-life, sexual behavior.
Thus, the moral: Be nice to gentle, artistic boys, because they might be straight. And also uphold the sanctity of marriage, as Tom does--he eventually gets married, clinching his nice, normal status.
August 30, 2005
The Quotidian: My Other Blog
A new entry today...becuase generations from now, fission-powered extraterrestrial android scholars will pore over my surviving writings for an undererstanding of Terran mores.
August 29, 2005
Few If Any Upper-Crusters Have Ever Said "Git-R-Done"
Few if any rednecks have ever looted corporate pension funds, consigning thousands of retirees to poverty.
Few if any hillbillies have ever fired tens of thousands of employees and moved operations to countries free of unions, livable wages, or job safety regulations.
Few if any proles have ever controlled immense media conglomerates that have rhapsodized over stripping money from the poor (depicted as lazy, degenerate and too dark-skinned) and giving it to the rich (depicted as smart enough to delegate hard work, knowledgable about the poor's moral failings, and sexily melanin-free).
Few if any white-trashers have ever started wars to search for nonexistent weapons but actually to establish a permanent presence in an oil-rich region while sending rednecks, hillbillies, proles, and white-trashers to lose their limbs or lives in battle. (On the other hand, many rednecks, hillbillies, proles, and white-trashers voted last year for the man who had started the current oil-snatching and poor-snuffing war.)
August 26, 2005
Bluh Bluh Bluh Bluh Bluh
Bluh bluh bluh trashing Republican fascists bluh bluh preaching to the choir. Bluh bluh bluh bluh cheesy pop-culture reference. Bluh bluh suburban blandness. Bluh bluh sex-crazed suburbanites bluh their horniness an ironic contrast to their sterile surroundings. Bluh bluh bluh alliteration. Bluh bluh bluh assonance. Bluh atheism rocks. Bluh bluh bluh my lower-middle-class coworkers say the darnedest things bluh. Bluh bluh stillborn neologisms bluh bluh bluh putrid puns bluh. Bluh bluh my smoldering sexuality. Bluh bluh bluh bluh putting the litter into alliteration, putting the ass into assonance, putting the jism into neologism bluuuhhh. Bluh bluh another pop-culture reference. Bluh.
August 25, 2005
"Take Him Out," as in Dinner at Applebee's?
Three days ago on The 700 Club, the pious, bloodthirsty idiot Pat Robertson said this about Venezuelan president Hugo Ch�vez: "You know, I don't know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it." Robertson urged the United States "to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with."
Yesterday on that show, the pious, bloodthirsty, lying idiot Robertson denied having called for Ch�vez's assassination: "I didn't say 'assassination.' I said our special forces should 'take him out.' 'Take him out' could be a number of things including kidnapping." ("Robertson Apologizes for Ch�vez Remarks," Associated Press, 8/25/05)
Really, Robertson--we know what you really mean by "take him out." If our country kidnapped Ch�vez, do you think it would let him live, or release him so he could continue running Venezuela? The Bush administration hates Ch�vez for his refusal to let U.S. corporations run Venezuela (as they do with every other Latin American country) and for his interest in (gasp!) social programs for the poor. The Bush administration has ties to the failed 2002 coup against Ch�vez, in fact.
Imagine how Robertson would react if Ch�vez advocated assassinating Bush, then lied about it. Imagine how Robertson would react if Venezuela tried to topple our government.
August 24, 2005 (revised August 26, 2005)--fiction
The Boonies: Part One
You have your recurring dream in which you sit at work and purposely annoy your coworkers by drumming your pencil on your desktop to a rock song you loved in the dream as a child; however, you don't remember the title and can't remember it no matter how hard you try, causing you to grow more agitated as the dream progresses and more coworkers gather around you to complain about the noise. The ringing telephone by your bed wakes you up just before the dream's climax, where you decide in a panic to make up a title and you wake up anyway. It's 6:45 Sunday morning, and you've had just two hours' sleep. Your father has called, begging you to attend church with him at 8 AM. "I beg of you," he says in a serious manner, unlike the way you would use such a melodramatic clich�. He's never asked you to attend church with him until now. When you ask him why he needs your company, he says "I can't tell you over the phone."
You arrive at church just as the 8 AM service begins. You sit next to your father in the front row. He saved a seat for you. You hoped he would, so you could give him his belated Father's Day gift by expressing your gratitude and making him feel loved. "Thanks," you whisper to him. He nods while staring toward the front.
Seven years ago after his latest divorce, he joined a new evangelical church near the Internet-centric industrial park in the overdeveloped suburb that he and its other longtime residents still call "the boonies." You thought he'd joined just to pick up women. Instead, he immediately plunged himself into what he called "the new life, the true life, of serving God." Your father attends church at least twice a week; goes "witnessing" at least once a week--i.e., hands out religious tracts to passersby on the corner of Lord and Blessing Streets (actual location); participates in protest rallies in front of the goth store, the New Age store/crystal healing center, the only video store in the quad-county area that rents out adult releases (including a few gay ones), and other "stinkholes of sin"; and uses his own money (tax deductible) to buy a few hundred dollars' worth of "occultic" items for the church picnic bonfire every year, such as Harry Potter (Scholastic Books version) windbreakers or Lord of the Rings (New Line Cinema version) mousepads.
Your father's born-again religiosity surprised you. Your family was Episcopalian but attended church only at Christmas and Easter; around your teen years your family stopped attending altogether. Even those years when your family attended church, your father would make comments, apropos of nothing, about "Bible-thumpers" and "the pathetic fairy tales they want to shove down our throats."
"Yeah, but the polyester suits they wear have such impressive lapels," your mother would say.
August 23, 2005--bonus blog bit
The Quotidian: My Other Blog
Because only one blog can't handle my irrepressible digital gasbaggery!
August 23, 2005
You Can't Spell "Poisonous" without P-I-O-U-S
Yesterday, Pat Robertson suggested on his TV show The 700 Club that the United States assassinate Venezuelan president Hugo Ch�vez to stop the spread of "communist infiltration and Muslim extremism." Robertson thought having "covert operatives do the job" of murdering Ch�vez would help our country financially and economically: "It's a whole lot cheaper than starting a war...and I don't think any oil shipments would stop." ("Televangelist Calls for Assassination of Ch�vez," Associated Press, 8/23/05)
Pious, bloodthirsty idiots like Robertson (and his pious, bloodthirsty, idiot idol George W. Bush, whom Robertson thinks has received "the blessing of heaven"--see my October 24, 2004, blog entry) have thrived in America's more-poisonous-than-usual political atmosphere not just because so many pious, bloodthirsty idiots live here. The news media, for a variety of reasons (corporate control, laziness, fat paychecks, fear of government reprisal) have failed to alert more civilized citizens to the dangers American authoritarianism poses to lives and freedom worldwide. Less docile reporters would ask Robertson what he means by "communist infiltration and Muslim extremism", and what proof he has that Venezuela has spread them, and why he thinks those actions merit violating national and international laws against government-sponsored assassination, and if he would support assassinating the heads of pro-U.S. (i.e., pro-corporate) states who started showing insufficient loyalty to our country, and if he would care about Venezuela if it didn't have any oil, and how his ecstatic support for state slaughter meshes with the teachings of that guy named Jesus whom he says he worships.
August 22, 2005
Very Special Episodes: The Nerd and the Word
Family Matters (1989-1998) began as an African-American version of those diabetogenic white family sitcoms that clogged the airwaves during the Eighties. The show turned more interesting (though not necessarily better) midway through its first season with the addition of Jaleel White as TV's first black nerd, Steve Urkel, complete with floodpants and clunky glasses. (For years, kids in the neighborhood called me the white Urkel.) Of course the show ran its share of very special episodes, though Urkel's cartoonish presence did make those episodes about cheating in school, gang violence, teenagers who choose to remain virgins, etc., either more notable or more incongruous than the comparable VSEs on other sitcoms.
I used to catch snippets of Family Matters while flipping through the channels. One night during the mid-Nineties, I ran across that show and saw its teenage girl character, Laura Winslow, discover the N-word written in red paint inside the door of her school locker; a white opponent of the black history classes Laura wanted her school to teach had defaced the door. Obviously I'd run across a very special episode about racism. I told my friend Gert (who's half-black and half-white) that seeing the N-word on that sappy series was as shocking as "seeing Mr. Rogers inject heroin into his testicles." She replied that a more shocking plot would have been if a black person had written the word. However, such a plot about racial self-loathing, or about the appropriation of racial slurs by their intended victims, would have probably turned out embarrassing, considering TV's traditionally wimpy, smarmy, knuckleheaded, didactic, and melodramatic presentation of controversial subjects.
August 18, 2005
Just Half, Rush? You've Grown Soft-Hearted!
"I'd like to import the ability that the Brits are doing to export and deport a bunch of hate-rhetoric filled mullahs and imams that are stoking anti-American sentiment. Wouldn't it be great if anybody who speaks out against this country, to kick them out of the country? Anybody that threatens this country, kick 'em out. We'd get rid of Michael Moore, we'd get rid of half the Democratic Party if we would just import that law. That would be fabulous. The Supreme Court ought to look into this. Absolutely brilliant idea out there."--Rush Limbaugh, from his radio show, August 11, 2005
Yes, Michael Moore's ballcaps have built-in shortwave radio transmitters that broadcast messages about American military operations to the Iraqi insurgents: "Camp Pre-Amputee will launch an attack on the Fallujah vegan co-op at oh-four-thirty tomorrow...Bring chips and Hawaiian Punch..."
Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, and many, many other right-wing freedom-haters (and bashers of the liberal media) now comprise the mainstream punditocracy. The American government can't slide into great, fabulous, brilliant authoritarianism too quickly for them. Re. yesterday's blog entry: what to do when the troglodytic area you live in has become the entire country--participate in left-wing political organizing (or blogging) and risk suffering government oppression (I know, don't flatter myself), or stay quiet and withdraw into your private aesthetic universe of narcotizing irony?
August 17, 2005
Conked Out
The Beaver County Times does not print any racist or anti-Semitic columns. It apparently has no problem with homophobia, though.
On August 13, the paper's From the Pulpit feature consisted of an anti-gay rant from the Reverend John Conkle, Sr., a local Baptist pastor.
He states that the god he worships, God, neither created nor likes homosexuality, lesbianism, or bisexuality: "People who commit such sinful acts and die in that twisted, crippled state of mind will not make it to heaven." Same-sex love "is a cancer" that "only one great and powerful physician", Dr. Jesus, can cure.
Never mind that Jesus never said anything about homosexuality, lesbianism, or bisexuality.
Instead, I have a few questions for Conkle and and the other Christian homophobes whose writing appears in the Times:
� Do you agree with the Biblical passage Leviticus 20:13, which calls for the death penalty for homosexuals?
� If you do agree with that passage, do you think the United States start executing gay people?
� If executing gay people were legal, would you personally kill any gays, lesbians, or bisexuals?
And I have a question for Christian gays, lesbians, and bisexuals:
Why do you belong to a religion that wants you dead?
The above piece first appeared, in slightly different form, as a letter in today's issue of the Beaver County Times. Reprinted by permission. Anti-gay letters from "Conkle and...other Christian homophobes" often appear in that newspaper, along with very few pro-gay letters. I just ask for some balance...and for a less troglodytic area in which to live.
August 16, 2005
Very Special Episodes
Ah, very special episodes--those "relevant" episodes that painfully average 1980s family TV sitcoms would run every so often, just to prove those sitcoms had some artistic merit, thay they could examine the hard-hitting issues of the day as thoroughly as, say, Parade magazine. In a typical family-sitcom VSE (or VerSE?), a character never seen before and never seen again, usually a classmate of one of the young main characters, will cheat in school, vandalize property, booze it up, abuse drugs (such as marijuana or diet pills), develop an eating disorder, suffer physical or sexual abuse, get raped, or do or experience something else contrary to that show's usual saccharine nature; the episode will then examine how the issue involved affects the main characters, culminating in a serious scene (no laugh track or canned applause) in which the expendable character admits to Having a Problem, then cries in the young main character's arms. Sometimes, near the end of a show's run, an aging young main character will face the issue du jour himself or herself, not just vicariously, in the show's effort to boost ratings and to keep the star from bolting out of boredom.
No one today takes very special episodes very seriously, except for maybe Wikipedia (which makes its straight-faced listing on them hilarious). A TV fanatic who grew up during the ketchup-as-a-vegetable decade has to laugh at those pseudocontroversial plots, to disguise the fact of having wasted so many hours watching them with sincere interest. Only, ugh, lowest-common-denominator rubes who don't frequent coffeehouses fall for televisual trash.
August 15-16, 2005
Stacks of Naked Arab Men: A New Reading
Decades from now--after the Christian right has completed its takeover of the American government and banned premarital sex, extramarital sex, interracial sex, teenage sex, homosexuality, lesbianism, bisexuality, transsexuality, transvestism, pornography, contraception, abortion, and divorce--young hipsters will look back on the 2000s, a time few of them will remember, as the golden age of American concupiscence, just as young hipsters today do with a time few of them remember, the 1970s. (Each generation of hipsters, bemoaning the puritanical gloom under which they've lived their lives, jealously tends to consider the preceding generation of allegedly much more na�ve Americans as the last to enjoy carefree carnality.)
This nostalgia for celebrity sex tapes, low-cut jeans, the Deuce Bigalow movies, and other transgressive artifacts of a bygone era will creep upward to, if not flow downward from, academia, as future students and instructors will shake up traditional historical studies by, for instance, reappraising the almost-forgotten Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal of 2004. The new field of Ghraibian studies will examine the scandal's unintended results: the government-sanctioned unleashing of sadomasochistic desire, the blurring of gender roles, the neomodern figurativeness of the photographs and video the soldiers shot, etc. Entire books from university presses will depict Lynndie England as an icon of active, liberated womanhood on a par with one of the most revered figures in American history, Laura Bush.
Of course, future Ghraibians will couch their more provocative conclusions in toned-down, coded language, to bypass government restrictions against indecent, insulting, immoral, offensive, obscene, blasphemous, un-American, and treasonous speech. Still, perceptive students, faculty members, government monitors, and covert government monitors will understand the Ghraibians' meaning.
August 11, 2005
The Hipster Hunk's Guide to Whifbogs
So what are whifbogs?
Whifbogs are white female bohemian geeks, the distaff version of whimbogs or white male bohemian geeks. (See the previous blog entry. DVM, as does every other talented writer, knows how to pound an idea right into the ground.) Whifbogs are the women you'll ejaculate inside and/or onto only if all the the hipster honeys in your favorite hump-hunting hangouts have rejected you, rejected you due to already having had sex with you, or left with eventual copulatory partners whose 401(k)s would put your retirement account (a Transformers bank filled with six seventy-five in quarters) to shame, making you want to shove a depleted uranium suppository up your anus sideways while gnawing your Thurston Moore bobblehead doll.
Who? Thurston Moore? Is that a joke? He's not even popular.
Uh...
Never mind. What do whifbogs look like? Not that I plan to screw one, or have ever screwed one.
They're either ectmorphic or endomorphic, unlike the shapely women in the porn that hipster hunks and whimbogs have their most satisfying relationships with--lifelong, serially-monogamous relationships. Whifbogs hate hip fashions, considering them unflattering and insulting, instead preferring aggressively femme, slightly parodic 1950s-style clothes that whifbogs up until the Reagan administration would have considered unflattering and insulting: flowery dresses overloaded with frills and lace, baggy skirts that scrape the floor, shiny plump cardigans in timid pastels. The whifbogs confident in their physical appearance (i.e., who have sex more than once a year) will sometimes wear what they consider alluring items, such as welfare-grandma-style ratty dresses cut just above the knee or prefaded T-shirts advertising cock-rock bands popular on the nostalgia circuit a few years before most whifbogs were born.
Can't whifbogs just hook up with whimbogs?
Whifbogs do tend to desire whimbogs in a nerds-of-a-feather kind of way. Whimbogs, however, will flock together with whifbogs only when the former group has no choice and/or no fresh porn, when the supply of hipster honeys and/or bosomy bourgeoise has vanished....You like whifbogs, don't you? Cat's-eye glasses give you a major boner, admit it.
Eat me.
August 8, 2005
The Hipster Honey's Guide to Whimbogs
So what are whimbogs?
Whimbogs are white male bohemian geeks. Whimbogs are the non-Alpha male heterosexuals of any age in your artsy urban neighborhood enclave, the guys you tend to ignore when you search for an opposite-sex copulatory partner (though, to be fair, copulation-minded whimbogs tend to ignore whifbogs--white female bohemian geeks; a lifetime of news and entertainment media deification of impossibly buff, beautiful, and boneheaded performers, models, and right-wing pundits can't help but influence most news and entertainment media consumers' ideas about physical beauty, even those consumers who consider themselves sophisticated for eschewing their parents' choices in news and entertainment media. By the way, I'll discuss whifbogs in another entry).
What do whimbogs look like?
They're usually ectomorphic, disdaining bodybuilding as the hobby of the athletes and/or future lower-level executives who would beat them up, give them wedgies, etc., from kindergarten through grad school. Some whimbogs may be overweight, but for the most part whimbogs prefer to create self-consciously obscure art, writing, or websites than to eat. Whimbogs hate hip fashions (and anything else current and popular, not to mention unaffordable on an arts-job salary), preferring retro clothing slightly parodic in its scrubbed-clean timelessness. Whimbogs dress like either the ultrasquare 1950s crooner Perry Como (cardigan sweaters, Oxford shirts, cuffed khaki trousers) or an ultravirginal 1970s working-class teenage boy who grew up listening to Perry Como records (floodpants, faded T-shirts advertising defunct local businesses, corduroy blazers).
Why should I even care about whimbogs?
Because they enjoy participating in relationships, too. And because whimbogs, unlike Alpha males, don't take carnal attention for granted; the more you have sex with wimbogs, the more they'll revere you and do your housework.
August 5, 2005
Gifted, Huh?
I had problems talking as a child, mainly that I wouldn't talk. As a result, my parents had me attend speech therapy at a learning center, the Laughlin Center. The therapy involved reading words aloud from slips of paper I'd shake from a pouch made from two paper plates, and (for some reason) walking on a wooden balancing beam at home. As my father recently put it, the center discovered I was "smart as a whip," that I thought at a high-school level.
During the fall of 1978, I entered my middle school's gifted program. (I'd worried so much that the school would reject my application for that exclusive program that I'd cried out of anxiety; I hadn't wanted anyone to consider me unintelligent, and I still don't.) The class had three students, including me. We'd meet maybe once or twice a week; the teacher would show us filmstrips about ancient Egypt and lead discussions about creative uses for plastic gallon jugs.
That spring I created an art project for the class: papier-m�ch� puppets based on the characters from Mad's Maddest Artist Don Martin's series of Captain Klutz paperbacks. The other gifted boy in the class, a third boy, and I then performed a puppet show (I think I'd written most or all of the script) for a sparse crowd at the local mall, the Beaver Valley Mall, the morning of Saturday, March 31, 1979; we'd even prerecorded our lines, the way professional puppeteers at amusement parks do. I guess the crowd liked our show, though considering the Three Mile Island disaster had started three days earlier, I can't imagine how much of an interest the crowd had in our wacky superhero saga. Still, I enjoyed the whole puppet project, one of the very few times I enjoyed anything during my adolescence.
August 2, 2005--fiction
The Worst Pick-up Lines for Guys to Use in Art Galleries
"I used to paint stuff like this in college, but then I grew up, stopped smoking pot, and got a real job." The proposed sexual partner looks at you with nervous nonchalance. "What--you're a pothead? Or do you smoke it just to alleviate your glaucoma, heh heh heh heh heh?...Just kidding."
"I knew [name of featured artist, if male] when he was blowing gallery owners just for them to accept his r�sum�. Hell, his r�sum� was that he swallowed. He once offered to suck me off, just for practice, but I told him [name of imperious local art critic, if male] was currently my hummer-buddy, heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh eh ehh heh heh....Just kidding."
Your proposed sexual partner stares admiringly at an abstract sculpture. You sneak up behind the proposed sexual partner and whisper "How much for me to fuck you? Heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh eh ehh ehh heh heh heh heh....Just kidding." The proposed sexual partner whacks you on the nose with a rolled-up gallery program (an eight-and-a-half by eleven sheet of paper folded in half), says "Down, boy," and walks away. You walk outside and hide, waiting for the proposed sexual partner to leave. Forty minutes later, the proposed sexual partner walks out of the gallery and toward the parking lot. You had the feeling the proposed sexual partner had driven here. The proposed sexual partner drives away as you write the proposed sexual partner's license number onto the front of your gallery program . You drive home alone. At home, you immediately tear the program into tiny pieces and drop them down your garbage disposal. You flip the switch. "Go ahead--miss out on my dick," you mutter as you watch the disposal grind away. You feel godlike. Two hours later when watching TV, you realize you don't how you would have used the license number to find the proposed sexual partner, if you'd had any interest in finding the proposed sexual partner.
August 1, 2005--fiction
The Worst Pick-up Lines to Use in Bars
"I like your philtrum. It looks like the one my uncle had, before he got drunk here and tried to French-kiss the bottom of his lawnmower."
"Heaven must be missing an angel, because I saw a guy with wings and a halo licking up the puddles of piss on the bathroom floor."
"I have the Department of Homeland Security's number on speed-dial on my cell phone. Go home or me, or I'll..." Proposed sexual partner walks away; you take out cell phone, open it and start talking to the space where your proposed partner once stood. "Hello? I'd like to report an al-Qaeda member in cheesy Gap clothing....Yes, I'll wait."
"I had planned to hook up with [name of your favorite porn star], but he [or she] wanted to finish reading that Henry Kissinger book, so..." Proposed sexual partner walks away; you toss your drink, glass included, at the back of the proposed sexual partner's head, then start punching the proposed sexual partner in the face. The proposed sexual partner files assault charges against you but drops them after accepting a sealed, out-of-court financial settlement from your rich parents, a settlement in which you admit to no wrongdoing. Two years later, George W. Bush appoints you to the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives.
July 30, 2005--fiction (see the July 27-28, 2005, entry below for part one of this epic)
The Foreplay to Foreplay: Club Cochlea, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Friday, May 6, 2005, 10:36 PM--Dramatis Personae
Lanny Sheinberg--age 35, owner and sole operator of Club Cochlea, a concert venue specializing in 1970s-1980s heavy-metal revivalism, sample-based spiritual European techno-Muzak, and synthesized upper-income hippiesque folk jams. Costume: black ballcap with HAPPYLAND XPRESS in white wispy letters on the front and a white drawing of an ovoid pill on the back (record label promotional item, free); oversized eyeglasses with padded bridge and dark brown frames (LensCrafters, $149.95); white sweatshirt with a thin yellow vertical stripe down the length of each sleeve, on top (Old Navy, $24.99); pair of baggy black jeans (Fashion City, an African-American clothing store in the concert venue's predominantly African-American neighborhood, $19.99); pair of black socks (Kohl's, $7.95); pair of puffy gray Adidas running shoes (Foot Locker, $59.95). He runs into Preston Cullen, a simulacral acquaintance of his, after the first set (which ended five minutes earlier) of that night's three-band neogrunge concert. (Neogrunge: a new musical movement Lanny has touted in his album reviews for the local weekly arts, entertainment, and sex-worker advertising vehicle, the Pittsburgh City Paper; he wants the distinction of being the first music-industry participant in Pittsburgh to embrace 1990s nostalgia.) "Hey Lanny, thanks for having the concert start on time!" Preston says jovially. (The first band--a Brookline, Massachusetts, group called Bumflap--had started playing at 9:55 PM, 55 minutes late, punctual by the club's standards.) "Don't blame me, buddy," Lanny says. "I just schedule the shows. Blame the band for being late. If you want professional bands that never start late, go to a fucking MTV concert during spring break. You like frat-rock, right? With bikinis?" "Thong bikinis," Preston says as he turns his head away at 10:37 PM, sees Jody Roberts for the first time 9.4 feet away from him, and walks toward her, his penis already slightly turgid.
July 27-28, 2005--fiction
The Foreplay to Foreplay: Carlow University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Saturday, May 7, 2005, 12:23 AM--Dramatis Personae
Jody Roberts--age 19, freshman at Carlow, women's studies major. Costume: pre-faded tight maroon FERRINTOWN HIGH--HOME OF THE BATTLING WOMBATS baseball jersey (Gap, $19.99--Ferrintown High does not exist); pair of tight blue jeans (Wal-Mart, $12.99); pair of green high-top sneakers, no socks (Wal-Mart, $9.95). She arrived at her dorm room eight minutes earlier with a flaxen-haired male (see below) she had met Friday, May 6, 2005, at 10:37 PM at Club Cochlea, a Pittsburgh concert venue (formerly an industrial waste storage facility). She had immediately looked at his forehead (as she does with all the males and females she meets) and found it appealing, as in flat, as in similar to her father's before his barbecuing accident. The flaxen-haired male and she are sitting on her the edge of her bed, discussing the habit certain Pittsburgh residents have of using folding chairs, traffic cones, etc., to reserve streetside parking spaces. "Why not a velvet rope?" she asks. "Then you can park your Caddy and the rust chips can fall off of it in style." He chuckles. She will commence foreplay at 12:29 AM through one of her favorite methods, by brushing the Liquid Paper-daubed fingernails of her right hand up the back of his right hand, a foreplay method (sans the daubed fingernails) she had learned four years earlier from watching a videotape of the direct-to-premium-cable motion picture Carnal Crime 2, an erotic thriller starring the shaggy-chested actor from the late-1980s syndicated television program Shorecop Hawaii: The New Recruits.
Preston Cullen--age 19, freshman at the Art Institute of Pitttsburgh, media arts and animation major, specializing in anime-style science fiction/fantasy. Costume: beige bowling shirt with pink elliptical patch reading WILBUR in cursive stitching above right nipple (Hot Topic, $19.99); pair of green carpenter's pants (Gap, $13.99); pair of white sweatsocks (Dollar General, $5 for six pairs); pair of early 1980s-style Nike brand running shoes (Famous Footwear, $24.99). He is the flaxen-haired male Jody Roberts has invited into her dorm room. He had run into her inside Club Cochlea, between the first and second sets of a three-band neogrunge rock concert. He had immediately looked at her breasts (as he does with all the females he meets, excluding most of the elderly ones) and found them appealing, as in medium-sized, as in similar to his first stepmother's. He has decided to commence foreplay in five to ten minutes through one of his favorite methods, by contending she has something stuck on her mouth and brushing his right thumb slowly between her lips, a foreplay method he had learned a year earler from watching a videotape of the direct-to-videotape videotaped motion picture Filthy and Fifty: Part 6. He hopes he looks interested in Jody's remarks, which he will refer to on his blog, two weeks after the breakup four weeks later of the relationship Jody and he will fall into following tonight's imminent copulation, as "banal conversation about the foibles of yinzers." (Yinzers: Western Pennsylvania slang, usually good-natured, for nonwealthy and/or poorly-educated Caucasian residents, after a common word of theirs, "yinz," the equivalent of "y'all.")
June 14, 2005
An Unanswered Question
"How do you get deodorant at the bottom of your fuckin' skirt?"
--Barbie (a coworker) re. her appearance, to Kathy (another coworker), today, 10:20 AM.
May 31, 2005
Another Example of Actual Good Piped-in Music at Work
A Cajun-style version (complete with accordion and horns) of the 1971 squish-rock hit "Don't Pull Your Love" by Hamilton, Joe Frank & Reynolds--9:32 AM. (I like the original version, too.)
April 4, 2005
My Actual Dream Last Night: Guest Dreamer
Barbie (a coworker): "I had a dream about you last night. You had a Dumpster filled with twelve humans soaking in acid. And you had another Dumpster filled with hissing cockroaches. I asked why you had the humans in acid, and you said 'I have to soak the bones for a few hours. I need the bones.'"
DVM: "I guess I'm flattered."
--conversation at work today, 10:06 AM; Barbie didn't say if I'd said in her dream why I'd needed the bones or bugs, and I didn't think to ask. (So much for the inquisitiveness of true writers.) At 1:57 PM, in the hall outside my office, I heard a piped-in, sax- and fuzz-guitar-laden instrumental version of the Replacements song "Can't Hardly Wait" that rocked harder than the original. When you have a repetitive job, you take comfort in unofficial fringe benefits such as noteworthy talk or music better than the lite-rock or slick country that blares on certain of your coworkers' radios.
March 8, 2005 (revised July 16, 2005)--bonus blog bit
Putting the War into Heartwarming
The Family Circus by Jeff and Bil Keane. A comic strip in a circular panel. A diabetogenic chronicle of a bespectacled, pupilless comic-strip artist named Bil Keane; his pneumatic, chinless (at least in profile) wife Thel; and their hydrocephalic, mono-nostrilled spawn Billy, Dolly, Jeffy and PJ. One of my favorite comic strips, due to its unique art (Jeff Keane draws the strip now in a workmanlike imitation of his father Bil's lumpy style) and to its unapologetic sappiness (lots of cute mispronunciations from the kids, along with lots about how Jesus wuvs us).
Anyway, in the 3/8/05 installment, we see two groups of boys. At the left stand Billy, Jeffy and a token black kid. At the right stand three nobodies. Billy points at the nobodies and says "We'll be the good guys and you're the insurgents!"
Propaganda One-Oh-One. The best kind of propaganda, entertaining in its hamhandedness, if you ignore the misery and death often involved with it--and we Americans do know how to ignore misery and death, especially when American soldiers we don't know and non-Caucasian foreigners suffer them.
March 8, 2005
My Actual Dream Last Night: Celebrity Edition
I crawl through dark, narrow tunnels and emerge into a New York City subway station, where I encounter Bruce Willis, who's patrolling the premises in some sort of legal capacity. He wants to gauge my status as a good, normal, decent American. "Pull down your pants to prove you're a man," he orders.
I worry about getting arrested for indecent exposure. "There must be some other way to prove I'm male," I say.
Why, yes, there is. "Perform a song from the country's hottest band."
"The country's hottest band. Okay." Medium shot: I turn around, and as the background changes to a grassy hill I turn back around and start singing as fast as I can, swinging my arms in front of me: "The devil went down to Georgia, he was looking for a soul to steal. Da da, da da da."
January 8, 2005--fiction
Senior Vice-Presidents to Watch at Nexworth Broadband Wireless in 2005:
Everette Browning, Age 41, Advertising and Promotion
Moved here, retitled "The Tam-o'-Shanter," revised, and expanded by DVM.
January 4, 2005--fiction
Senior Vice-Presidents to Watch at Nexworth Cable Television in 2005
Muriel Quintana, age 39, Customer Care and Information Technology--Laughs almost every time she hears fellow Senior Vice-President Weldon Britt (age 42, International Marketing) praise with deep sincerity the latest "profession of faith" from "our blessed president." "Who, Al Gore?" she asks every time. "Who, John Kerry?" she will start asking on January 20. She believes George W. Bush has stolen the last two presidential elections, an opinion she's shared with the jovial Mr. Britt countless times over gourmet crullers in the company cafeteria. She'll never know that Mr. Britt has made sure she receive a rather vigorous audit later this year from a man she'll never know is his cousin, Internal Revenue Service agent Geoffrey Case, age 38, who started compulsively collecting plastic straws the day his 74-year-old mother, a retired restaurant-supplies clerk, died from Alzheimer's disease in August 2003; he now owns 8,994 straws and records the size, color, and location of each find in a Pink Panther notebook he'd saved from his junior-high days.
Robert Paul Shivek, age 44, Broadband Development--Anglophilic virgin (born and raised in Traverse City, Michigan) who has never been to the United Kingdom (not even to Canada) and who, under the name Nigel Spottiswoode, publishes a bimonthly zine called Rosyglow International: The Journal of Erotic Dominance--53 subscribers, all American males, only seven of whom have had sex, two with just their fathers. The zine consists mostly of short stories from Mr. Spottiswoode in which buxom British dominatrices berate, slap, pinch, punch, scratch with sharpened fingernails, tie up with silk straps, shove used knickers into the mouths of, spank with hairbrushes, spank with riding crops, spank with cricket bats, whip with studded leather belts, whip with cats-o'-nine-tails, walk in spike-heeled shoes upon, walk in spike-heeled boots upon, spit upon, urinate upon, defecate upon and/or sodomize with currugated steel dildos waiflike schoolgirls and/or the occasional waiflike schoolboy.
Author's note, 8/1/05
On March 14, 2005, my old website Pixel Stupor disappeared after over four years of entertaining its tens of fans with amusing vignettes about lazy husbands, lazy housewives, lazy high-schoolers, lazy hippies, lazy hobos, lazy hillbillies, and Friedrich Nietzsche's upper intestinal tract. My service provider had terminated the site with no warning because I'd allegedly committed some still-unspecified violation of the Terms of Service.
Unfortunately, much of my original 2005 blog no longer exists because I'd neglected to copy those parts. (Some other content from my site has vanished forever, too, for the same reason.) Though those missing blog entries count as no great loss compared to, say, the Corey Feldman shoehorn fellatio scene cut from his 2002 blockbuster motion picture The Bikini Bandits Experience, I still feel as if my children have disappeared--awkward, solipsistic, sometimes barely-coherent children, but children nonetheless whom I spent countless hours raising, as in writing and rewriting and rewriting again in lieu of jitterbugging alone in my room in my boxer shorts while reminiscing about the last spicy Chinese tofu entree I've eaten.
I haven't sired any human offspring, by the way, a fact which might or might not elate you.
Anyway, I have reposted (and revised) the missing 2005 entries above and have included entries I would have posted between March 14 and Coconut Orangutan's birth on July 2, had I had a blog then.
What--you're still here? Quit dawdling and go to the main Blog page or go Home! You need to watch your six hours of television for the day! That Silver Spoons marathon won't watch itself, you know!
� 2005 David V. Matthews