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Coco Corpse?
I might discontinue my Coconut Orangutan Writer's Club meetings. No one other that yours truly attended this month's meeting on December 2. What exactly did you wordsmiths do that night--meet up with your mates and have passionate sex for hours on end (and/or in end), reaching orgasmic heights greater than even those in that episode of Grey's Anatomy where Dr. Grey takes her relationship with her newest boyfriend, Dr. McStiffy, to the next level, as in they fuck in slow motion while that John Mayer song plays?
November 29, 2006
Dave in Dutch
From the blogsite WordPress, posted by someone named zement on June 12, 2006:
Toevallig een wat vreemd kortverhaal (?!?) ontdekt van ene David V. Matthews, getiteld My Actual David Foster Wallace Dreams, in 2002 gepubliceerd in het online-magazine Inkburns. Mensen met rare gedachten.
Dutch-to-English translation, courtesy of WorldLingo:
Accidentally what strange kortverhaal (?!?) discovered of one David V. Matthews, entitled My Actual David Foster Wallace Dreams, published in 2002, in online-magazine the Inkburns. People with strange ideas.
Kortverhaal = short story.
July 14, 2006
My Ideal Woman (Attention, Women Reading This):
--Finds bespectacled endomorphic gentlemen appealing.
June 23, 2006
The Quintessentially Freudian Dream I Actually Had Last Night
My P.O.V.: I walk the busy sidewalks of downtown Pittsburgh, specifically those of Smithfield Street (a slightly run-down thoroughfare best known among the bohemian demographic for sporting one of those unmedicated-style street mosaics about Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey). In the dream, I realize something is amiss. I look down at my crotch. Close-up: a certain appendage of mine hangs out of my open zipper. I cup the appendage with my right hand. My P.O.V. again as a black guy in what looks like a sports sweatshirt walks toward me and stares. I walk past him, a little embarrassed but not saying anything because I have to reach some destination.
In 1989, I worked for six tedious months as a telemarketer for a Smithfield Street company called Koolvent. I'd cold-call (well, kool-kall) local householders; praise the company's home-improvement products (including those wondrous items, soffit and fascia); and attempt to set up visits from the company's salesmen.
I did get away with making unauthorized calls, particularly to the local filthy-joke line, some sleazy-sounding guy with a thick Pittsburgh accent that somehow made those junior-high level jokes sound funny.
June 8, 2006 (revised June 21, 2006)
Your Official Internet Chain Letter
E-mail this letter to five people within the next 8.405 minutes, or your nose will detach itself from your face, grow arms and legs, and do the Electric Slide all over your set of vintage 1986 hillbilly music trading cards, which you'd dropped a bundle on buying them as an ironic, hipster-style joke at the local collectibles store.
Press control-alt-2-{-Flimwiddie-bex-####### (hyphens included) within the next .00000586457483 of a millisecond, or you'll spend your old age hanging out at the back at Denny's with those old men who always dare each other to expose themselves to the waitress but never do, despite plenty of self-avowals as to their length and girth and non-Viagra-induced potency.
Stand up, grab your buttocks, and sing "Tubthumping" in Scooby-Doo's voice ("Ri ret rocked rown, rut Ri ret rup ruh-ren....") before July 6, 586304599, or Rupert Murdoch will buy every newspaper, magazine, TV station, radio station, record company, videogame company, website, blog, zine, comic book, fortune-cookie maker, and giant we're-number-one foam hand manufacturer in the world, then use them to spread the rumor that you have masturbation fantasies about tonguing the back of Pope Benedict's knees.
May 27, 2006
My Actual Dream Last Night: Celebrity Edition
I'm in my college dorm room. I realize the fall semester starts the next day but that I haven't registered for any classes. A typical avoiding-my-college duties dream of mine. Then my three male roommates enter the room: young Caucasian beach hunks, one shirtless with a spiky tattoo around his bicep. (The dorm overlooks a California beach.) Then the actor R. Lee Ermey enters the room, dressed as his drill sergeant from Full Metal Jacket, and shouts "I'm raising funds for the N-double A-CP--the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People."
Yeah, yeah, Dave. Where's that coprophagous lesbian paleontologists Viewmaster reel?
May 24, 2006
My Actual Dream Two Nights Ago: Celebrity Edition
The 1985-86 cast of Saturday Night Live reenacts the climax to the video for 'Til Tuesday's 1985 hit single "Voices Carry." Cast member Danitra Vance wears a black strapless gown as she stands up in the snooty theater audience and lip-syncs expressively ("He said 'Shut up!' / He said 'Shut up!'"), the other cast members watching her with surprise.
As a sophomore in college, I could take or leave SNL. However, I watched that season's original run rather obsessively for three reasons:
1. My contrary nature--almost everyone hated that season, which made me root for the underdog.
2. I thought the cast, made up of movie actors (Randy Quaid, Anthony Michael Hall) and less famous performers (Vance, Terry Sweeney, Nora Dunn, etc.) somehow had a hip cachet. Of course almost anything seemed hip in comparison to my rural college town.
3. I liked one of the women on that show.
May 23, 2006
A Batch of Actual Matth Facts
As a child, I used to sit alone in my bedroom and reenact episodes of Chico and the Man, using a small plastic garbage can formerly containing Garbage Can-dy (Topps' brand of garbage-shaped candy) to represent Scatman Crothers' garbageman character.
I read my first underground comic in 1986 or so, my sophomore year of college: Zap #4, at my artistic friends' off-campus apartment. I particularly noticed Gilbert Shelton's story where the costumed crimefighter Wonder Wart-Hog has intimate relations with Lois Lamebrain ("Well, I can still use my snout!"); and Robert Crumb's story where the guru Mr. Natural and Big Baby (an infantile 18-year-old female in diapers and bonnet) end up stranded in the desert, and he has no milk, so he feeds her another type of white fluid. And as for Crumb's "Joe Blow" piece, well...huh. Quite a comic book, considering I'd just recently quit reading DC Comics' "funny" superhero book Ambush Bug.
I watched Robot Chicken two days ago and didn't recognize most of the pop-cultural references.
April 17, 2006
Comics Tripped: B.C. by Johnny Hart, Week of April 2-8, 2006
Gut-bustin'--well, more like gut-emptyin'--humor by everyone's favorite caveman-drawin', Bible-thumpin' cartoonist:
4/2/06: Daylight Savings Time sure is confusing!
4/3/06: Sports interview, with cordless microphone (obviously someone's invented electronics, and electricity, and sports, and basball caps): "Some managers use a speed gun on their pitchers. What do you use?" Manager holds up hourglass. Okay, a little funny.
4/4/06: "Would you say comparing the Cute Chick and the Fat Broad is like comparing apples and oranges?" "Not really...apples and watermelons maybe..." What, no cantaloupes? (Cute Chick and the redundantly-named Fat Broad are the strip's only two human female characters and the only two characters named after their physical attributes. Women = appearance. Men = substance.)
4/5/06: From Wiley's Dictionary (printed on paper, in a bound book, in a stone-tablet world): "Science fiction: Any scientific acclaim that omits God." Yeah, reality-based thinking sucks! ("Acclaim"? Does Hart mean "finding" or "theory"?)
4/6/06: "Why do they bury people 6 feet under? Why not 5 feet or 7 feet?" "Cause [sic] then the union guy with the 6-foot pole would be out of a job." Why union guy? Is this union-bashing, as in unionist = lazy? And who uses a pole to bury bodies? Does Hart mean "shovel"? Or does he have the expression "I wouldn't touch him with a 10-foot pole" in mind, or in what passes for a mind?
4/7/06: Another book printed on paper: "See Puff stick her paw into the jalape�o dip. Oh, look, see Spot lick Puff's paw. Look, look, see Spot drain the toilet bowl." Toilet humor? From Holy Hart? And how many readers understand the Dick-and-Jane reference? At least Hart included the tilde in "jalape�o."
4/8/06: A Hart routine: a rock with SHOW ME printed on it. Caveman in front of rock: "Show me a wife who is active in 12 different volunteer groups..." Caveman behind rock: "And I'll show you a husband who is about to become a regular at a neighborhood bar." You can just feel the "joke" fizzle out as you read it.
Oh well, back to those plump, neckless Catholic kids in The Family Circus.
April 13, 2006--fiction
Happiness Spelled Backwards
When I was a boy, I liked when my mom let me accompany her to Towne's, a now-defunct department store. She'd treat me as a grown-up and let me explore the place by myself. I had two favorite departments: boys' clothes, with those compelling, for some reason, posters of teenage boy models in the latest Qiana shirts and tight suede pants; and greeting cards, endless racks of jolly cartoon androgynes making off-color remarks that would whoosh right over my head. One day when I was maybe 10, I was riffling through the greeting cards when one with a hot-pink cover caught my eye. WHY DO WOMEN LIKE DIAL SOAP? asked a nude bald androgyne whose nose, stomach, butt, and feet looked like bloated hams. I opened the card. BECAUSE DIAL SPELLED BACKWARDS IS HAPPINESS!
I laughed, the first time any of those cards had ever made me laugh. I finally understood grown-up humor. Not that I'd share my accomplishment with my mom. That would necessitate trekking to the other side of the store, in the house and garden department, where I would find her looking for just the right white plaster exophthalmic bunnies for our backyard flower bed, more like a weed bed strewn with the neighbor kids' Frisbees and superhero action figures. I thought about sharing that greeting-card witticism with the neighbor kids, my putative pals, but decided they wouldn't understand the sophisticated wordplay.
March 25-26, 2006--fiction
Ironic Winger Belt Buckle
That usual part of the third date, during the first session of prolonged making out on the couch, when I know one of us will suggest going into his bedroom, he mutters "Too bad Dwayne can't see this." Dwayne's his hyperactively homophobic older brother who writes for that white-wing website (lots of black- and brown-bashing) in that suburb of that suburb.
"Why? Would that turn you on?" I ask in a joking manner, wanting him, my date, to continue rubbing his (I hope) ironic Winger belt buckle against my shirt, right on my major erogenous zone, below my navel.
My date ceases his foreplay. "What are you saying? That I'm this weird exhibitionist or something?"
"Yes, bud, that's what I'm saying," I reply with a straight face, the only thing straight about me, heh heh, except for the organ straining inside my pants, to paraphrase the bodice-rippers my closet -case sister used to read as a teenager.
"I have no desire to perform for him, if that's what you're saying."
My organ had started to de-straighten. "Then why'd you bring up his name in the first place, bud?"
"It was a joke!"
"The lady doth protest too much, methinks." I'd known the date had ended, so why not say the only Shakespeare quote I remember from junior-high English?
The date then officially ended. He ordered me out of his apartment, I went home, got into bed, and flicked though the cable channels looking for the crappiest-looking infomercial to mock.
March 2, 2006
Truthiness and Goofiness
Three years ago, I started King David: The UNOFFICIAL David V. Matthews Website. Under the nom de Net of Subverterus, I intended to satirize cybercelebrityhood, to poke fun at the 15-milliseconds-of-fame idea. The site was a performance art project examining how the mass media influence us and how we perceive others; I'd once conducted a similar project by posting personal ad flyers of myself around Pittsburgh.
King David soon evolved (or devolved) into an archive for my late '80s-early '00s material--drawings, comics, zines, etc. I tried to disguise my writing style, but certain perceptive readers quickly figured out Sub's true identity.
After a while I lost interest in the fame's-a-bitch schtick, which explains why I hadn't updated the site since late 2003.
I transformed the site yesterday into Subverterus: A Darling Depository for David's Detritus.
By the way, I've never used the trendy word "truthiness" before, and I never plan to use it again.
February 27, 2006
Would I Have Killed Hitler?
This question popped into my head this morning for some reason. I know if anyone deserved killing, it was Hitler. However, would killing have been too good for him? Why kill anyone so unworthy of respect, so unworthy of anyone's attention?
If I traveled back in time to waste Adolf, I'd want to do so before his rise to power, before he could ruin even one life. That might mean killing the young-adult version of him, or even the teenage or childhood version. But what if I traveled back to his childhood and tried turning him into a human being through psychoanalysis, mind-altering drugs, a lobotomy, etc.? If I killed him or otherwise made him harmless, would someone even worse have ended up running Germany? Would I have to kill Hitler's entire family to prevent the risk of another tyrant or other tyrants? And would I have to kill everyone involved with planning and running the Holocaust before the Holocaust happened? Without Hitler and his genocide guide Mein Kampf, would the Holocaust have happened? Or would a worse Holocaust have happened?
I'll try writing a less depressing entry next time.
February 20, 2006--fiction
Son of the Daughter of the Father of the Niece of the Papuliferous Third Cousin of the First Sentences of Possibly Controversial Unwritten Stories
"Put more Astroglide on that socket wrench, mon ch�ri," Clyde said as he brushed the lint off his serge trousers.
It's all the goddamned philatelists' fault.
The dame walked into my office with a string of mucus hanging from her nose, and I couldn't help myself, I immediately lunged forward over my desk and engulfed her not exactly petite schnoz with my mouth, my lit cigarette still in my hand.
"Where the hell's my Melissa Etheridge tape?!" Condi screamed.
That prisoner in that Abu Ghraib photo has a nice ass.
When Admiral Flornboller's will was finally read and it turned out he'd bequeathed the college only one item, a copy of the August 1966 issue of Boys' Life with stuck-together pages, and with what looked like a few pubic hairs sticking out of the top edge, I knew we'd somehow displeased our dark lord and master Andy Rooney.
February 19, 2006--fiction
Opening Line-Up: First Sentences of Possibly Controversial Unwritten Stories
For a place named after vaginas, Beaver County lacks anything you could call a dating scene.
"The Shawshank Redemption sucks syphilitic donkeys, and if you like that movie, you suck syphilitic donkeys," Mr. Ebert said a second before pulling the trigger.
That closet-case Terri liked big boobs as much as she did whoring herself (metaphorically speaking) to middle-class cultural ideals such as supporting public radio and actually reading The New fucking Yorker from cover-to-cover.
I'd finally drawn the perfect blasphemous cartoon about President-for-Life Bush, but my chihuahua ate it, so I broke out my old Cuisinart and [redacted for excessive disgustingness--no, really, I showed this to the Pope, and even he vomited in tsunami-like waves].
Call me Britnee, with a little heart over the i.
February 9, 2006
My Actual Dream Last Night: Celebrity Edition
I'm visiting New York City. My first day there, I ride a dimly-lit subway car. Exterior close-up of car bottom (as seen from side) as train switches to elevated track. Back inside car. P.O.V.: I look to my right and see the rock musician John Cale, who looks dour, wears a black trenchcoat, and has a much younger female companion also wearing black. Still my P.O.V., I walk to them and ask "Are you John Cale?" He answers no, but I know he's lying. The two of them walk past me, walk out of the car, open a left-hand door, and walk up a staircase to an exclusive room where celebrities can have sex. (In the dream, I don't wonder how a subway car can have a staircase; I just feel jealous John Cale will have sex.)
The subway train pulls into a station. Suddenly two gangs face off into opposing groups, pulling out automatic weapons, causing the other riders, including me, to stampede out of the car. I realize I'll have quite a story to tell about this day.
January 31, 2006
Peter Griffin Nude! How Could You Dislike That?
Sunday night, two nights ago, I did something I'd done many times before: switched to my mainstream-diversion mode and watched new episodes of the Fox animated series The Simpsons, Family Guy, and American Dad. These episodes amused me a little (on the inside--I rarely laugh at anything), didn't offend me, and might be the last ones I watch. I felt like a geezer seeing The Simpsons' clueless Principal Skinner want to use Bart's moan of defeat as a ringtone for his, Skinner's, late-Eighties bulky beige "cell phone"; and Family Guy's baby bookie Stewie give Brian the dog not one but two prolonged beatings ("Where's my money, huh?"); and, uh...American Dad must have contained something amusing...oh yeah, that double-entendric "Come on Eileen" gag, I suppose (ha ha, Eileen). Maybe my interests no longer lie in entertainment like that. Maybe I've matured and should move on to Lawrence Welk reruns and stroking my turgid tool to Sean Hannity. Or maybe I've grown more, gasp, intelligent, sealing my doom.
January 9, 2006
Erections and Irradiated Iranian Ruins
This article speculating that the Bush administration might nuke Iran within the next several months gave me a boner. I mean, we normal Americans love war. War's the greatest video game, better than Grand Theft Auto--more explosions, more gore, lots of exotic women and testicular torture. And we normal American deserve the oil; you can't use chipmunk saliva to power your DVD player, especially when the government releases that must-see home video version of that Pentagon country-gospel concert supporting the troops, free red-white-and-blur ribbon magnet with each purchase. And American corporations will benefit from rebuilding Iran the right way, with fast-food places and the most modern megachurches. And we'll probably use tiny nuclear weapons anyway, so no big deal.
Enough sarcasm. (Yes, that was sarcasm, Fox News fans.) I don't want to know anyone demented enough to support preemptive nuclear strikes on non-nuclear countries. I don't care if that person has an attractive figure and likes Metal Machine Music. How can I shake this apocalyptic feeling without using drugs or alcohol?
January 7, 2006
My Actual Dream Last Night: Celebrity Edition
I'm in college home-ec, at my current age, grilling pancakes in a pan at the front of the class. I turn away to tell someone that my apparent girlfriend, Felicity Huffman, will have my baby soon. I turn to front of class and see someone has placed my pancakes in a large stack in a bowl of vegetable soup. I look at the empty, greasy pan (close-up of pan) and think "I hope she has a girl. If she has a girl I'll name her Thea. If she has a son, I don't know if I'll keep the baby." I also worry a crying baby will keep me up at night. Jump cut: I wander through halls looking for her. I run into her in hall. She's in her twenties, has darkish-brown hair, and wears a tight black goth-style dress cut above her knees. I can tell she looks nothing like the real-life Ms. Huffman. "Don't you want to talk about your boy?" the oneiric Huffman asks. I wonder how she can have such a great figure immediately after giving birth. She walks outside onto patio to talk. I walk out, then say I need to get my coat (my real-life Sgt. Pepperish beige topcoat with the epaulets), despite my knowing the waether's a little warm, despite the grayness and the flurries. Another jump cut: I'm wearing my coat but can't find her; I wander through the labyrinthine halls, disappointed with myself for keeping her waiting. Then I find myself outside walking though a part, my foot stepping into soggy grass in a close-up.
January 5-6, 2006
The Top Five Excuses for Everything George W. Bush Did in 2005
5. "In case you haven't noticed, we're at war, albeit an undeclared and hence illegal one--well, actually two illegal ones, as if legal ones slaughter fewer civilians and spread imperialism with a more convincing smiley face."--Pervert McLiberal
4. "He's no, ugh, intellectual. He goes with his gut and doesn't care how many buttholes he has to have rammed with blunt instruments at those secret CIA prisons, he'll do what he feels is right."--some vegetarian, you know the type, the type who won't--get this--who won't eat McNuggets because, ha ha, chickens deserve to live, too
3. "Hey, he just started drinking again. He needs time to get back into the booze groove."--your pal from college, after more that a little J�germeister but before vomiting more than a little upon you inside your Hummer when you drove him home from Nineties lounge night at the mall dance club, your good deed for the year
2. "I told him to."--Fenton Dippledweeb, everyone's favorite talking koala
1. "Stop throwing the Constitution in my face! It's just a goddamned piece of paper!"--George W. Bush, something he allegedly said in November 2005
You are special. No, really, you're very special. Very, very special. Very, very, very, very, very, very, very...you get the idea. Blog, Home.
� 2006 David V. Matthews