The endless miles of prairie slithered by in numbing brown and gold waves outside the bus window.

Time to settle in and relax.

By now the police would have found the bodies. Tomorrow she would be in the City safely anonymous in her new career as a the world's tallest midget porn star - there to disappear under a pile of pawing groping little hands and sweaty little bodies till she could re-emerge under an assumed name.

In the meantime it was work and Dorothy, raised on a farm, was used to that.

She looked down at the ridiculously garish red shoes on her feet and cackled like a loon. Some farm girl she was. What a laugh.

Miss Almira Gulch, spinster busybody of the trailer court learned different. Poor wet Almira. She drowned the old bitch in her kitchen sink. The old crone's last words burbled out around the Sunday dishes were, "Wicked little girl. Oh what a world, what a world!" 

What a world and wicked little girl indeed. If only she knew.

After rifling through old witch's meager possessions she shoved the body into the crawl space under the dilapidated trailer. Thirty seven dollars and twenty eight cents was all she got for her troubles. That barely paid for the bus ticket.

Nothing seemed to be working out for Dorothy Gale. She couldn't even get the skinny bitch to fit under the trailer in one piece - even with the help of a chainsaw. Almira's long stocking feet ended up protruding from underneath the trailer for all the world to see. As an after thought, Dorothy snatched the ruby slippers off the old bird's cold dead feet, the only other thing the old bitch had that was worth stealing.

Well why not? she thought. She didn't need them any more and she wasn't just merely dead, she was really quite sincerely dead.

She clicked her heels together for luck.

Dorothy stared out the window at the endless cornfields rolling by. The sun peaked through the low hanging storm clouds bathing the landscape in an eerie yellowish glow making the cracked highway appear to be paved in dull gold bricks. Tornado weather probably but who gave a shit?

Bored, she carved another swastika into her forearm. The feel of the penknife cutting into her skin made her tingle. Anything to feel - something - about anything or anyone.

"Fuckers," she thought as she recalled what the school psychiatrist Dr. Baum said about her once. Tests, tests and more tests and then the bullshit concern. The words borderline personality disorder hovered in the air of his musty office as he excused himself.

Shadows moving across the opaque milky glass of the office door. She heard him consulting with the principal in an agitated whisper outside. More words floating in the stale air seeping into the dingy wallpaper.

Deep seated psychosis coupled with narcissistic tendencies. A text book sociopath. 

Dangerous.  Involuntary commitment.

She'd show them all.

Fuckers.

She had the postcard in her pocket from the Wizard. Another alias no doubt cause she'd heard him called many things:  Professor Marvel, Doorman, Cabbie, Guard...  now he was calling himself the Wizard. The knucklehead was operating under the delusion that he could fool the authorities by donning new clothes and slapping on a fake beard or mustache.

Wonderful. 

Dorothy knew him as Bob, the man that had first turned her to hard drugs and prostitution. He ran a gentleman's club in a dodgy neighborhood on the eastside of the City. His real money came from the hookers and the cheap porno films he made with and for midgets. She looked down at the crumpled card in her hands - a grainy photo of midgets in an obscene daisey-chain spelling out the name EMERALD LOUNGE. The club's address was on the back.

She sighed. Hooking for Bob would pay for the drugs at least. Moral quandaries were not Dorothy's thing.  A BJ here and a BJ there and a couple of Hot Carl jobs, that's how she'd pass the day away in the merry whorehouse of Bobs.

Dorothy sang out loud on the bus, a nervous habit she'd developed on her first trip to rehab. Her bubble-headed counselor Glinda would get annoyed whenever Dorothy burst into one of her inane songs during tense therapy sessions.

♫ Someday I'll wish upon a star
  And wake up where the clouds are far behind Meeeeee!
Where troubles melt like lemon drops,
 Away above the chimney tops,
That's where  - you'll  - find  - meeeeeee! ♫

And if one of the new fish laughed at her singing she'd beat the fucking shit out of them in the showers later.

Dorothy finished her song and reached for another cigarette. The old woman in the seat opposite her ignored the wild-eyed pig-tailed girl bellowing off key, possibly sensing the very real danger hiding behind the empty blue eyes. Dorothy thought she had a nice voice though the rot gut whiskey and unfiltered Camels were beginning to take their toll.

The bus hit a bump and she rubbed absently at her crotch.  The clap was a parting gift from the last guy she was with, the empty headed farmer who looked like a gangly scarecrow. Sweet guy really. Simple in his puppy-like devotion to her. He always remembered to buy her nice things. Sometimes he'd come around the trailer with his two friends, Hickory, an emotionless robot of a man who performed mechanically and Zeke, his hair-lipped bashful buddy too afraid to strip in front of her.

She had killed them of course.  But of all of them, she thought she'd miss Scarecrow most of all.  If he'd only had a brain he would have noticed the axe in her hand at the end.

She squirmed uncomfortably in the cramped seat. Just thinking about the crotch rot seemed to make her gingham thong ride up her ass crack as punishment.


Her pocket book moaned. Toto, her mangy cairn terrier wheezed and gacked inside the pocket book on the seat next to her. Toto was the only thing she'd taken from the home of Aunt Em and Uncle Henry -- besides her bloody trophies.  She'd sell the mutt for some rock when she hit the city.

---

Aunt Em & Uncle Henry. Uncle Henry was just the latest in a succession of "uncles" Auntie Em brought home from the truck stop bar. Drunken pawing uncles. There's no place like home. Yeah right! Thank god for that. She mused that she should have off'd them years ago. Especially that royal perv Uncle Henry.

Dorothy had come home early one day and found old Henry parading around in one of her old dresses.  It was kind of funny really; to find out that this grizzled old farmer was a closet transvestite. But that was nothing. The real shocker came the night she followed old Henry down to the bar where he hung out hoping to lift some cash off his drunk ass.

Turns out it was a tranny bar - which would explain the name Les Poopy Feeledz in eight-foot tall glittering sequined letters on the outside. But the real shock was still waiting for her inside. She watched in mildly perplexed horror as her uncle Henry and then a dozen other old geezers came out to sing on stage dressed as... her! Dorothy.

She found out later that it had become a real cross-dresser's trend - dressing as her. She could only hope that this fad would die out soon.


---



The tab of acid went on her tongue washed down with a swig from a warm forty of Colt 45 wrapped in a paper bag. She belched up a blast of stale beer and the Bar-B-Q flavored pork rinds she'd eaten for breakfast. That coupled with the metallic taste of the LSD brought up the contents of her stomach. She pulled her bag closer and barfed loudly into it. Too late she remembered that Toto was still in there, asleep.

Oh well.

Fuck him.

Fuck Toto.

She settled back and waited for her trip to really begin. Swirling colors and kaleidoscopic images played under her eyelids as she slipped further from reality. Bloody corpses and flying monkeys: the happy dreams of a young soulless serial killer.


Dorothy was too far gone to notice when the bus passed over the bridge to the Missouri side of the river and it would be hours yet before she was sober enough to realize that she wasn't in Kansas anymore.

Well it’s summertime and the reading is fine.

This was partially inspired by Dew(ed) and her TOP 15 Books list. Thanks for the idea Dew(ed)!

Though these are not my favorite books (the mere titles of my actual favorites would get this blog flagged for deletion by Tom… let alone the cover art) they are important books that should be read. I have included an in depth analysis of each to help you to decide which one you want to get to first.

In no particular order…

Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer  – It all started here. Credited as the first great work in the English language even though it was not actually written in English but Middle English - it is the tale of a group of pilgrim on their way to Canterbury to visit the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket.

Each chapter is told from the point of view of a different pilgrim including; The Knight, The Pardoner, The Wife of Bath, The Spam Loving Viking, Miss Anne Elk (not AN elk), Two Men in a Tiger Suit, and Arthur, King of the Britons.

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway - You shouldn’t talk about a fish like you want to fuck it. It’s just a fucking fish. They sell them in the supermarket.

Player Piano, The Sirens of Titan, Mother Night, Cat's Cradle, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater; or, Pearls before Swine, Slaughterhouse-Five; or, The Children's Crusade,  Breakfast of Champions; or, Goodbye Blue Monday, Slapstick; or, Lonesome No More, Welcome to the Monkey House and,  Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons  by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. –  “So it goes.”

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway - You shouldn’t talk about bulls like you want to fuck them either.

Let’s get this out of the way once and for all. Two legs good, four legs (or fins) bad. Animals are for: petting, riding, wearing or eating. If you think about them in a sexual way there is something wrong with you. No wonder you guys were the lost generation.

Oh yeah. Getting your dick shot off is a bad thing. But at least no animals were harmed as a result.

The Dubliners by James Joyce - Whiskey and the Catholic Church fuck people up, especially Irish people.

Irish people don’t need no stinking periods in their sentences either because basically they never shut up.

Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon -  Tarot cards and German V-2 rockets? What. The. Fuck?

Oh wait.

NOW I get it.

Not.

Pynchon has got to be an Irish surname.

The Lord of The Rings by JRR Tolkien – It takes 1600 pages to walk into Mordor. Gandalf Rawks!

We have short swarthy mythical people with hairy feet in ....New Jersey.... too.

They’re called Greeks.

Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie - Fuck you, Mohamed. Fuck y…

Feets don't fail me now!

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen: Blah, blah, blah, blah. What you talk about at balls when your legs are shut together tighter than Fort fucking Knox. Famous for its "Defence of the Novel" digression which sadly did not include ninjas cutting a bloody swath through Northanger Abby.

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens - It’s London and  Paris.

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov -  Dude. She’s like twelve! Seriously uncool.

The Snows of Kilimanjaro by Ernest Hemingway – Getting gangrene sucks. Double suckage if you’re looking for someplace that takes your HMO in the middle of Africa.

Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner  - ”Oh I wish I was in the land of cotton, incest there is not forgotten!”

The Bell Jar  by Sylvia Plath

War & Peace by Leo Tolstoy: The key to understanding this novel is memorizing the names of all the main characters.

Marya Dmitriyevna Akhrosimova, Tsar Alexander I of Russia, Joseph Alexeevich,Yakov Alpatych, Count Arakcheyev, Bagovut, Prince Bagration, Barclay de Tolly, Theodoric of York, Barthélemy, Doogie Hauser, MD, Osip Alexeyevich Bazdeyev, Count Bennigsen, Lieutenant Berg, Berthier, Count Kirill Bezukhov, Pierre Bezukhov, Bilibin, Bolhovitinov, Prince Andrey Nikolayevich Bolkonsky, Skip the Wonder Dog, Princess Elisabeta "Lisa" Karlovna Bolkonskaya, Andrey Bolkonsky(aka Liza Meinena), Princess Marya Bolkonskaya (aka Maria), Prince Nikolay Bolkonsky, Napoléon Bonaparte, Mademoiselle Bourienne, Broussier, General Campan, Caulaincourt, Prince Adam Czartoryski, Danilo, Moe, Larry & Curly, General Davoust, Vassily Denisov, Amelia Earhart, Monsieur Dessalles, Prince Dolgorukov, Dokhturov, Dolokhov, Dron, Princess Anna Mikhaylovna Drubetskaya, Boris Drubetskoy, I'm a Little Teapot Short and Stout, Princess Anna, Mikhaylovna Drubetskaya, Dunyasha, Archduke Ferdinand of Austria, Maria Feodorovna, Emperor Francis I of Austria, Gerasim, Gervais, Major-General Grekov, Ilyin, Mihail Ivanich, Julie Karagina, Platon Karataev, Archduke Karl of Austria, Piotr Petrovich Konovnitsyn, Prince Kozlovsky, Anatole Kuragin, Helene Kuragina, Hippolyte Kuragin, Vasili Kuragin, Mikhail Illarionovich Kutuzov, Mavra Kuzminishna, Langeron, Lauriston, Lavrushka, Lazarev, General Mack, Magnitsky, Anna Ignatyevna Malvintsev, Michaud, Miloradovich, Mitenka, Mitka, Mortemart, General Mouton, Joachim Murat, Nastasya Ivanovna, Prince Nesvitsky, Michel Ney, Count Orlov-Denisov, The Solid Gold Dancers, Count Osterman-Tolstoy, Maria Ignatyevna Peronsky, Katerina Petrovna, Pfuhl, Platov, Raevsky, Count Rostopchin, Count Ilya Rostov, Count Basie, Down for the Count, The Count of Monte Cristo, Monte Cristo Sammich, Countess Natalya Rostova, Natasha Rostova, Nikolai Rostov, Sonya Rostova, Petya Rostov, Vera Rostova, Anna Pavlovna Scherer, Schmidt, Shapovalov, Shcherbinin, Shinshin, Countess Natalya Rostova, Smolyaninov, Speranski, Stolypin, John Jacob Jingleheimer-Schmidt, Semeon Tchekmar, Lieutenant Telyanin, Tikhon, Timohin, Toll, Casey Kasem, Captain Tushin, Tutolmin, Uncle, Vereshchagin, Sergei Kuzmich Vyazmitinov, Weierother.... Willarski, General Wintzingerode, Big Gay Al, Wolzogen, Hans Jerkovski, Captain Yakovlev, Yermolov, Ivanna Fuckalot, Zdrzhinsky, Zherkov and Count Zhilinsky

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain – With two main characters named Niger Jim and Huckleberry Finn it’s pretty obvious that Twain liked fucking with people.  It might be why he changed his name to Twain from Samuel Dickbreath Crackerass Clemens.

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor M Dostoyevsky – Family rivalry, God, faith, doubt, murder, jealousy, suffering, moral responsibility and the nature of man are explored in this lighthearted 19^th century Russian novel.

The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri – If this is an advertisement for Christianity

 

From the people who popularized Betamax and “New” Coke

they need to switch agencies.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson

TRIVIA: Did you know that this was not intended to be read as a “How To” book?

I did not know this.

I tried it at home.

My results varied.

A Million Little Pieces by James Frey  – Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ah  oh…ack!

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance  by Robert Pirsig – It’s like… the story is about this dude who takes a motorcycle trip with his son but like it’s more than just a trip. It’s a journey man…

it’s a journey.

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra – Funny Spaniards. Nothing to see here. Move along.

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens – It’s the same old story. Boy meets escaped convicted on the lonely moors and everything works out just fine in the end.

Gulliver's Travels by  Jonathan Swift – True story. I once knew of a young man who upon waking up in a strange bed in Amsterdam found himself tied up just like Gulliver.

If the Lilliputians had also stolen Gulliver’s wallet and given him a venereal disease the picture would be complete.

Jesus, I’m getting sentimental in my old age.

[absentmindedly scratches crotch]

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess – The difference between Nadsat – the mixed Russian/British slang spoken by Alex and his friends Pete, Georgie and Dim – and the language used on the Internet today is that Nadsat is recognizable as a dialect of English. A prophetic novel in many ways.

The Ludvico technique used to rehabilitate Alex is only slightly less inhumane than being forced to watch a half hour of Dancing With The Stars.

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann – Well… um… it’s a bit goofy but it’s no Disney ride.

1984 by George Orwell –

   Timeline:

    1949 Published: Farfetched and improbable.

    1955  Hmm. Big Brother looks a bit like Stalin.

    1968 Huh. ..Oceania.., Eastasia, and ..Eurasia... Familiar.

    1971 Sometimes you have to destroy a village to save it? Where have I heard this shit before?

    1984 Gee. This Reagan guy sounds a bit like Big Brother

    1995 Internet = double-plus good!

    2009 Man, I wish I could afford a bottle of Victory Gin.

Nostromo by Joseph Conrad - It’s the name of the spaceship in Aliens which rocked way harder than this book.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton.... Wilder

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhh!

I, Claudius  by Robert Graves

You gggggggave mmmme pppppoison?. Ffffffuuuu…

Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust or in  FRENCH: À la Recherche du Temps Perdu which translates to In Search of Lost Time which makes about as much sense as calling a movie I Still know What You Did Last Summer instead of the more accurate I Haven’t Forgotten About What You Did the Summer Before Last or the still more accurate – Show Me Your Tits Right Before I Kill You.

I have no fucking idea what this book is about.....

Sons and Lovers by DH Lawrence Surprisingly, this book is not about a canoe trip into the Georgia wilderness before a river valley is flooded by the construction of a new dam.....

Deliverance by James Dickey: However, this book is.

Naked Lunch  by William S. Burroughs - Speaking of anal. This book has a talking asshole.

Thank god James Dickey didn’t think of this.

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner Grrr! Rawr! Squeal like a pig Beatty!

The Stranger by Albert Camus  Pronounced… no kidding… Al Bear Camooo!  It was too hard for me to concentrate on the book after discovering this.

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe - They really do.

(to be continued)

Pocket adventures. (THE FINAL UPDATE)

Or Pocket adventures (An Update Too Far)

   Or Pocket adventures (In a World without Updates!)

       Or Pocket adventures (Not without my Update!)

          Or Pocket adventures (Update: Ressurection)
                ...

Face News is no more. That’s right. I post one freaking blog to the site and it closes up shop.

*sigh*

I could tell you stories. Oh yes I could.

 - Like how I buy a car or a computer or you name it and suddenly there are no parts or service for it because it killed a family in Cucamonga.

 - Or how I go to work for a company and survive a hostile take-over, a merger, a spinoff, a bankruptcy, another hostile takeover, another spinoff and another bankruptcy all while keeping the exact same job only to have my office blown up into little tiny bits.

 - Or I go on vacation and end up in the middle of a volcanic eruption.

I could go on but you get where I’m going with this. I’m like some kind of Jonah, the herald of doom…

I do kid’s parties too.

Anyway, regardless, whatever. I’m reprinting the blog from Face News here. If you read it over there...





This blog is way more emo than the stuff I normally do on MySpace but hey I gotta show a bit more range on this kazoo. It can’t all be skittles and fart jokes.*

* Which reminds me I still owe you folks that MySpace killer blog I promised**

              ** I make a lot of promises.***

                                                               *** meh.

---


Pocket adventures


Water drips off the trees. Rills fill with rainwater to run down toward the cliff beyond. The mist and rain give away fleeting glimpses of the land on the other side of the Hudson.

Not Brigadoon but Yonkers and the northern tip of the Bronx.

Briefly.

In the forest, green carpets of moss cover a stone staircase. Ornamental ferns and the tiny white bells of Lily-of-the-valley surround the cracked stone of an overturned Victorian garden urn. English Ivy spills across walls and dead leaf covered pavement amid ornamentals like Century Plants and Hosta gone wild.  Native species like the tiny white and yellow blooms of Dicentra Cucullaria (Dutchman's breeches) and Sanguinaria canadensis (Bloodroot ) are pushed aside by these recent invaders. There is less human debris here than you might think, being within sight of the George Washington Bridge and Manhattan.

This is one of my spots, the remains of the old Zabriskie estate in the strip of woods at the top of the Palisades. It is only a few minutes drive from my house, strip malls to strip of woods.

Sorry, no strippers.

Not this time.

I’m a dad and a married man.

And I’m broke.

The walk takes me down under ragged cherry sparse with blooms and towering rhododendrons more stem than leaf under the dense canopy. Mixed old growth and second growth forest – old oak and younger beech that taper off into the air over the river. Up slope in the opposite direction I can hear the wet sound of cars whooshing by on the Palisades Interstate Parkway.

This only a few miles north of the grungy repeated pattern of diners, muffler shops and gas stations that characterizes the landscape of most of northern New Jersey. Heading north away from New York City, most of the exits go left.

On this particular stretch of highway, a right turn might afford a brief but spectacular view of the Hudson River from 500 ft. up.  It would be a good spot for anyone interested in recreating the final scene from Selma & Louise. The easier course is to pull off the highway and park on the verge.

That’s what I did.

What can I say? Thrill seeking youth has given way to the creeping caution of middle age. My driving off cliff days are mercifully behind me even though I now have insurance that might cover such an eventuality.

Oh bitter sweet irony!

I call these jaunts my pocket adventures, doable within an afternoon leaving time to get home for dinner. The responsibilities I’ve accumulated don’t allow me to go off hiking in the wilderness for days or weeks at a time as I once did. No more consorting with bears or nights doing battle with gypsies. High adventure into the unknown marked with neon cannabis trail blazers. Dead brain cells scattered behind me like Hansel or Gretel’s bread crumbs on the way to the witch’s house. Memory recollected imperfectly.

Back then I dated The Witch.

That’s not a metaphor.

I think about opposites today and crazy gone to seed.

Would I understand conformity if I didn’t first know rebellion?

I don’t know. But I think it might be less painful. Or maybe it’s as G.K. Chesterton said, “a madman is not someone who has lost his reason, a madman is someone who has lost everything but his reason.” I’m missing a few verses of the vice versa chorus but so what?

I don’t know if Chesterton had an inside line on crazy (like me) but I’ll agree that reason can be painful. It makes outrageous actions seem the sane course when the bartender announces last call and that six foot tall gal with the Adam’s apple is winking at ya. Put it into the box of stories and triple padlock it not to be opened till three Christmas’ after I’m dead. Deal?

And I think about Soren Kierkegaard and repetition as I make my mini escape because it is as good a thing to think about as any - sitting on the edge of a cliff - because one has nothing to do with the other at the moment.

I have to pack a lot of thinking into a small space too.

Maybe it is weather related, thinking about Scandinavia and crazy Danes in the rain.

Maybe it’s because Kierkegaard talks a lot about irony and humor. Or maybe it’s because I have a copy of Kierkegaard for Dummies. Granted, he’s not sidesplitting funny. He’s no George Carlin – more of a Dane Kook.

That was an awful pun and I should be far more embarrassed than I actually am. I get Kierkegaard - sort of - Dane Cook not a bit. It has to be the sex appeal.  Not that talking about Kierkegaard ever got me laid. Quite the opposite in fact.

Kierkegaard wrote about repetition once. That’s right. Kierkegaard only wrote about repetition once. Ironic? I don’t know. It’s not exactly textbook but it’ll do in a pinch. It might make an interesting bit of dramatic irony in theater.

A bare stage, a lonely color gel spot, green, trained from above on the philosopher at his rosewood desk as he pens his treatise on repetition. Max Von Sydow dressed in a black body suit steps out from behind the curtain and sonorously intones, “Sadly, Soren died before he could repeat his theme of repetition.”

 - - with monkeys… and the Solid Gold Dancers.

You can’t do philosophy right without a big production budget.

You can’t.

Maybe it’s situational.

For example I might think about German philosophers when I’m sitting in a doctor’s office because German philosophers are more serious and are only unintentionally funny.

Funny as objects.

Emmanuel Kant told lousy jokes. He’s the one that said humor is a cognitive burp.  

Gastrointestinal expertise aside, I can find several objections to having a dead German philosopher define humor for me. But Q.E.D. bitch and whatever.

Kierkegaard on the other hand likened his informal style to singing while he worked. This makes him sound more like one of the seven dwarves than a great philosopher.

Mopey. He’s accessible.

That sense of whimsy is probably what sustained him when writing Fear and Trembling (Frygt og Bæven) or The Sickness Unto Death (Sygdommen til Døden).

Funny stuff. I love those fucking Danish ø’s.

Kierkegaard is anti-systematic and I like that. He’s not telling me how to live or what to believe, he’s demonstrating a way to think which is good because I think that he was wrong about a great many things and the job of giving me bad advice belongs to me alone.

Meh. It’s a living.

Kierkegaard also talks about “leaps of faith” in ways that makes it sound not at all metaphorical.

Uncomfortable thoughts this close to the edge of a really big freaking cliff I’ll tell you what. Humor and Irony and Repetition, oh my!

I store up all my philosophical thoughts for my walks in the wood to mark the trail. There’s something about me and philosophy and other humans that always ends in gun play. It’s safer to have these thoughts all by my lonesome and not have someone around that might actually call me out on my bull shit.

For some reason I always find underwear along the trail.

Nice fucking segue Joe.

Today it is a pair of formerly tidy whities hanging like a flag from a privet bush.

Sure, I find all sorts of odd things out hiking; cars, couches, refrigerators. I can even tell you where you can find the remains of a fighter jet, a World War I tank and an entire paddle wheel river boat all within 30 miles of Times Square.

Once when I was out in the New Jersey Pine Barrens I came across an entire house set up in the middle of the woods. Living room furniture set up just so. A stove and a refrigerator off in an adjacent clearing and a sink and a toilet bowl near a slow moving cedar brook. There was no trail or road for miles so they must have been carried in.

Weird.

My theory - and I have plenty of them - is that since there is no real wild left we need to pack in more weird per square inch around here to make the small spaces interesting.  There is weird in the woods in abundance.

I must be an underwear magnet. I find underwear every single time I go out on the trail.

It’s a mystery.

I have no decent theory and this upsets me. Did something scare the crap out of somebody at these spots?

Best not stick around to find out.

These relics I leave for future archeologists to ponder or spelunk.

This land I’m sitting on now was thrust upward 200 million years ago when two tectonic plates collided and hot magma met sandstone and shale. The river valley and cliffs were formed some time later as the advancing glaciers of the Wisconsin Ice Sheet clipped the softer strata away.

Fire and ice and underwear.

Early pantaloon wearing European settlers gave the Palisades their name because they look a bit like a wooden palisade fence. The russet striations of the grooved volcanic diabase rock thrusting up from the river give the appearance of a keep-out-do-not-cross barrier across the river from Manhattan.

We all know how that played out.

Years later wealthy New Yorkers with really tight corsets built their second homes atop these cliffs like girdled vultures or cliff dwelling swallows depending on how kinky you want to cast them.

Then in the 1930s about a dozen or so estates were bought out by a man who could afford to own a pair of underwear for every day of the year, John D. Rockefeller. He had the mansions demolished so that he could gift the area to the public in what is now Palisades Interstate Park.

Robber baron/ philanthropist John D. Rockefeller was a man of opposites and many under garments. I wish I could have met him and picked his pockets.

Who knows if Rockefeller’s gift was purely altruistic or whether he wanted a nicer view from his estate across the river at Pocantico Hills, NY. According to local lore he was a generous jerk off. Millionaire robber barons must have been much like Beta Fish in this respect, enjoying a good color display but attacking reflections in the glass.

As I said, opposites.

The shells of these green mansions are little better than planters for oak trees now. They make good places for middle aged men like me with sensible underwear to stop and eat cheese sandwiches and think about philosophy, on this rugged escarpment where the upper crust once met the Upper Crust.

In my head I’m listening to David Byrne looking for a dry ice factory to get some thinking done.

And old, old irony like my dusty Danish philosopher Soren come along with me for the walk.

Kierkegaard had one consuming love in his life, Regine Olsen, his once upon a time fiancé. For some unexplained reason his desire for her only made him sink deeper into despair even though by all account his affections were returned.

He broke off the engagement and she married another man.

Idiot.

I don’t know why I understand this but I do.

Imperfectly.

My active ingredient was labeled something illegible and 100 proof but you get the idea.

Kierkegaard never got over his love or his depression and everything he wrote from that moment on was colored by the fact that he let happiness slip away.

The rain trickling down my face feels suddenly hot and I’d rather think of irony or something cartoonish.

Funny how irony can feel hot even when it isn’t very fresh.

According to the British, Americans don’t understand irony. I’d argue that we do understand irony. We just can’t articulate it well. Also, we live it quite nicely.

I put forth into evidence the silent sufferings of one Wile E. Coyote, Super Genius and rest my case.

American cartoons understand irony.

For me the coyote also embodies the idea of redemption and resurrection. Because no matter how many times he falls off a cliff or gets flattened by a boulder or pastes himself into the side of a mesa he shows up in the next frame with his tail bandaged ready for another go at his inanely beeping nemesis the Roadrunner.

Oh Acme Metaphor Company Inc., may your well never run dry.

The rain comes down a bit harder now and the rocks are slick. My green mansions are getting treacherous.

Now I’m the pre-post-apocalypse primitive squatting amid decayed opulence getting wet as I eat my store-bought cheese sandwich. Post-philosophy and feeling fine sitting in a brokedown palace thinking about an American beauty that might be a type of wild rose here about or a fuzzy brown coyote.

One step sideways and I’m wearing white with spats playing croquette on an impossibly brilliant green lawn with Gatsby and Daisy and their dog Pluto. A misplayed ball goes flying through the topiary and careens over the cliff and Pluto, tail a wag, bounds after it. A receding dopplerized yelp accompanied by Gatsby/Daisy exclamations of dismay in precisely enunciated English and an American tragedy finds fresh manure in which to thrive.

So I finish up my cheese sandwich and put aside thoughts of oil barons, and 19th Century philosophers and coyotes going over a cliffs holding up a cardboard signs reading “HELP!” on a plummet through recollection forward.  Forward through repetitions that are not repetitions, but memories of feelings that might not have facts attached to them.

The rain dripping down and the wet stone I am sitting on turn my clothes into a water wick and I decide to leave before it meets in the middle. Before it reaches the precious underwear.

Kiergegaard died from a combination of melancholy and complications possibly arising from a fall he took from a tree when he was young. Not good. I feel a fever coming on. I’d better go home where it’s warm and dry and the cliffs are on the Cartoon Network.

It’s harder to get away these days. No time. I’m not ungrateful. I have it pretty good with a family and a roof over my head and all. And I have cheese sandwiches and my pocket adventures until the next big one comes along.

Thank god I don’t know what that is yet or it might drive me insane.

..............

And so
impressed was the king with the blog tale of Shahra-Joe that he did not delete
his account but instead showered him with many page views and kudos and granted
him yet another day to live and blog.....

.. ..

.. ..

ETERNAL
QUESTION OF THE DAY: WHY IT IS THAT D’U-SHE-BAGHS ALWAYS SEEM TO GET TH’OTWANS?....

.. ..

PONDER AND
RESPOND.....

.. ..

.. ..

-------------

In the beginning, Man created the Internet, the grand experiment of the Information Age.

Commissioned by the Department of Defense, the Net was at first intended as a means for nerds at UCLA to show how much smarter they were than nerds at MIT. The government meanwhile thought the nerds would turn this new Inter-Net they were funding into something, I don’t know, defense-y but they were too afraid to look stupid to ask the nerds what they were really doing with the money so unlike other government projects something got accomplished.

Within a short time more universities and government agencies joined and this new medium grew by leaps and bounds. Nerds rejoiced. Lofty ideas were exchange and many a hexadecimal taunt was flung across the ether in this rarefied and exclusive environment.

It was Nerdvana*


Sadly this pure nerdtopian* society could not last.


The first signs of trouble began when some seriously misguided individual, in the name of egalitarianism, threw the doors open for the state colleges to join the network.  Soon every Neanderthal that needed to complete 2 credit hours in a science logged on and began to trade misspelled insults with their betters, threatening to find out where they lived and come over and beat the crap out of them if they didn’t stop using big words that they didn’t understand but which their rudimentary and dull simian senses told them were insults.

The nerds went underground.

Some began sporting monkey avatars.

But there was no putting the genie back in the bottle. Companies like Delphi, Prodigy and CompuServe dog-piled on the Internet and began offering UNIX shell accounts to anyone who could manage to type out a  % ncftp ftp.dumdum.net  > get fartjokes.txt command string with their stubby paws.

In spite of UNIX things were looking dismal for nerds on the Internet. Until one day a lowly nerd touched by the divine inspiration of the Nerd Ghods and graced with mad skillz discovered that naughty pictures could be distributed over the Net via multipart MIME encoded messages.

And the Nerd Ghods saw that it was good.

Crazy days and sleepless nights drinking coke by the litre and scarfing entire bags of Cool Ranch Doritos whilst searching for the bottom half of Elle Macpherson followed.





Just as nerds were beginning to enjoy this new found thing called “women,” another wave of immigrants washed over the Net thanks to a company called America Online. America Online (AOL) became notorious for handing out free 50hr Internet access disks in trucks stops, trailer parks, VD clinics and asylums for the criminally insane. At one time I believe you could pay your AOL bill in either food stamps or picked scabs.

After AOL, a bunch of other stuff happened, none of it important and little of it good except for more porn delivered at ever faster speeds. OK. I guess that is pretty cool. But regardless, if there was ever such a thing as netiquette it died with AOL because there were so many people online now that nobody knew who or where anyone was anymore. The web became one big wild commercialized jungle populated by packs of feral netizens. A Disney ride for the deranged. It was survival of the dimmest.

We adapted.

Shouting in caps replaced beating the shit out of each other with clubs for this new breed of digital caveman and nerd muscles grew to incredible proportions behind the safety of japanime avatars and seven to nine proxy servers.

The Net became a Nerdnarök* of perpetual battle with gleaming valkyrie carrying off  fallen heroes to porn Valhalla.


 



Nobody told us what the rules were – there were none - so we made up our own. Left to our own devices we were free to follow our passions and sometimes to be ruled by them. Online communities grew like bacteria colonies only to be eradicated seemingly over night by the whims of the new web economics. Changing and devolving mercurially at the speed of an instant regret messenger to arrive… where?

Here.


A Really Brief History of the Internet

On the Net we think we live we exist we love we look we play but ultimately we have found that what we like to do best is to argue.

The end.

---

Many years ago I read a science fiction book called Ecotopia. It was that most awful sort of book, science fiction or other wise, a book with a moral agenda.

Now many books have a moral agenda. Some might say most good ones do. But Ecotopia was the kind of book that stated its moral agenda on page one, continued it on every succeeding page until the end and even managed to include a smarmy dedication and a preachy epilogue. The publisher saw fit to blurb a moral message on the dust jacket and I could imagine Ecotopia’s author going to various tofu soirées and telling anyone who would listen that he had written an important book with – now get this - a moral.

Pacifist that I am I would still like to meet that author someday to punch him in the face and then ask him what he was thinking - - in that order. But then again I have issues or so I’ve been told. Whatever. I’m a passionate reader.

Ecotopia is about the creation of a utopian society based upon the principles of environmentalism and pseudo Freudian psychology. Set in the future (1999) the Ecotopians break away from the US taking Oregon, Washington and Northern California with them.

OK. Not so far fetched.

A reporter goes to Ecotopia to do a feature on the doings of these strange folks and the story is mostly told from his POV which gives the book a faux documentary air.

At the time I was on a kick reading SF stories with a sociological bent. I had just read Hellstrom’s Hive and some moke reviewer had compared this piece of crap to Frank Herbert’s dark masterpiece about a future society organized like an insect colony. If I ever remember the name of reviewer guy who compared Ecotopia to Hellstrom’s Hive he’s gonna get a face punching visit from me in my imagination too.

It was a terribly written book but there was one aspect of the story that was minimally intriguing. In this utopian society they had this notion that Man (actually MEN) needed a safe release for aggression to prevent them from acting out on negative emotions. So these Ecotopians formed tribes to stage mock wars. Sort of a gladiatorial controlled release of pent up rage. No one was ever seriously injured since it wasn’t real warfare but everyone felt better for whacking the crap out of one another with nerf bats.

Ultimately, it was a completely unsatisfactory read for any fourteen year old boy with aggression issues and fantasies about punching granola smoking authors in the face.

What does this have to do with anything you may be asking yourself? Well I’m glad you’re asking you and not me because it beats the piss out of me what I’m talking about most days. But let me take a stab at explaining where I think the connection comes in.  First, I have to coin a new word. Vicuriosity. There’s probably a perfectly acceptable word in the OED for what I mean but where’s the sport in that?

Arguing on the Net, MySpace in particular, has become a ‘safe’ outlet for aggression for many. There is one school of thought that says that this ‘safe’ (sorry for all the words in quotes – it’s fucking “annoying” isn’t it? Almost as annoying as parentheticals that go on and on breaking the train of thought in a sentence) outlet for aggression might be acting like a safety valve for society at large.

That’s the school of thought with extra short bus parking spaces.

Take a look at Sister Scotchy’s excellent blog on the topic of masks and assuming net identities for a more intellectual treatment of this topic. Lord knows you deserved it if you’ve suffered my ramblings thus far.

So anyway that’s why I was thinking about Ecotopia and mock combat. I don’t think it works. We like places like MySpace because of vicuriosity. See, schadenfreude isn’t a satisfactory word here because we don’t merely take pleasure from the misfortune of others. No. We inflict it upon ourselves too.

But it’s far more complex than that. We enjoy the window in on those internal monologues (monoblogues?) going on around us. By comparison it reduces the prior history of the written word to etched immobility. Try arguing with Dickens or the New York Times archive. This back and forth we get from places like MySpace satisfies our curiosity and allows a certain level of vicarious thrill with only virtual participation required.

Vicuriosity.

Hey what do you know? I was just cleaning out my file system and I think I found the bottom half of Elle.


---


Next: I will rip MySpace a new one. No kidding this time. The MySpace Killer blog is in the hopper chute ready to slide into place once I poke it a couple of times with this stick.

Get ready for it folks.

This is not a running joke. I have too much respect for all of you to do that.

I mean it this time.

If I wasn’t sincere could I post this picture of Pierce Brosnan flashing his smirk of devilish Irish charm?



Or this picture of a man holding a fish?

 

Things to ponder.

Sorry.


This is actually a sad day. For today I come bearing the strange and awful gift of Truth; a concept heretofore alien to this blog. I’ll attempt to shoehorn in as much rumor, innuendo, wildly unfounded accusation and bullshit as I can to dilute the full on impact.

I apologize in advance for any trauma this may cause regular blog readers. Counselors are standing by to help get you through the next few paragraphs.

Tip: you might want to hold off on the counselors till after the cavity search. Two birds with one stone, yah know?

Yes it is TOO necessary.

Shut up.

It’s my blog.

Here. Take a therapy puppet and look at the italics again.


In the event of a water landing, the inflated egos located under your seats double as flotation devices.

Please take note of the exits located by your browser’s back arrow.



Here’s your chance to split. No hard feelings.

When I first started blogging on MySpace I made a conscious decision not to write about MySpace.  Blogging about blogging is the kind of self-indulgent crap that annoys the hell out of me as a reader. It’s only a web site after all. Reading about MySpace issues is like watching E! News and all the stories are about Tara Reid, Urkle or Screech.

I don’t know who those people are but I think I made a really cutting pop culture reference there.

Seriously. I don’t know who they are.

I watch documentaries about PBS documentaries.  I have the tote bag to prove…

Do I need to tell you people to shut up some more?

So my blogs have been an outlet for me to flush all the weird stuff out of my head. It acts as a poo relief valve plus I get some great comments from all the other MySpace weirdoes and malcontents for me to read. Then to entertain myself and fill in the gap between blog posts I do things like make up profiles for…

400 foot tall fire breathing lizards running for president.

I’ve got one and he has something like ten thousand friends.

Yeah.

I do and he does.

It started out as a running joke during last year’s campaign season and it took on a life of its own. Part joke part sociological experiment without any defined goals, it got weird fast is all I can say. The Big Guy deserves his own blog so I won’t give away too much.  But I will say that I found out a great deal about how people behave on MySpace when their guard is down. Celebrities included.

Though I never hid who I was if anyone asked, people wanted me to be that character. So for the most part I stayed in character.

It couldn’t last.

It made me wonder if I was doing the same thing in this blog (to a lesser degree obviously) without realizing it.

I don’t know.

He’s in storage for now, my giant lizard friend. Awaiting the day I can think up a use for his awesome powers. One last Futile and Stupid Gesture he might perform before his final exit-stage-right.

Think sewage treatment plant explosion. Something like that would be cool.

One of the things I and the giant lizard discovered along the way about online behavior was that it’s a bit like a Rorschach test. If you come here looking to flirt – to seek validation – to find love – look for sympathy – troll - that’s the lens you’ll see things through.

If you’ve come looking for intellectual stimulation good fucking luck but yeah, it’s here too. You have to work extra hard to get those kibbles.

And there are good people hiding out on MySpace. There used to be more.

No. I’m not bemoaning or berating. I’m just stating.

MySpace may have lost its way but so did I. The fault lies not in our stars but ourselves and yadda yadda as the Bard said between tokes. The Bard was a guy I went to school with and he knew some shit for true.

If you went by the way I write or the words I choose you might think I’m some weird over-analytical monkey. Maybe.  Look at the title I gave this motherfucker. If that doesn’t scream stay the fuck away I don’t know what does. But the truth I feel is that I’m far more often ruled by my heart than by my head - - if the police reports are to be believed.

I’m taking the fifth.

Of scotch.

It was comfortable blogging here. Writing is lonely business to begin with and I’ve never been all that confident in my ability to get the thoughts in my head out for others to grok. But here I got instant feedback which was like writers crack. Remember those group dates you went on in junior high? It was a nice transition leading up to later on when it was all on you. So in a way writing here became self-imposed infantilism. I was having fun and I didn’t feel particularly motivated to grow up.

To slip the surly bonds of MySpace.

If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there to blog it do I still have to give kudos?

It would be easy to try to reach for over arching or underlying motivations for my writing. I can only talk about my own needs. Your mileage may vary. I want to find a unified field theory but all I get are a few bits of thought that won’t flush. Like a desire to be liked and loneliness.

Analytical Monkey Man could get into that discussion about motivation. Do I write to give or to get or is it some disembodied ideal? You get the same sort of back and forth when discussing things like altruism. ie – we do good things not for the sake of good deeds but because doing good deeds makes us feel good and all our actions are therefore selfish. I write to entertain others but in doing so I entertain myself. A big circle.

Non Analytical Monkey Man wants to fling poo at Analytical Monkey Man and have fun.

All I know is that if I didn’t want people to read my writing I’d apply for a job at The Atlantic Monthly or writing sexual technique manuals for the Irish.

Ars gratia Artis, baby. Gonna git me sum beggorah!

Analytical monkey man must die for Jo Jo to get his mojo back.

 

Ker pow!

And MySpace blogging? Why should I care if it has gotten sucky to blog here? Just go someplace else if I don’t like it, right? If MySpace were a car, the blogs would be the extra cup holder in the trunk. They marginally increase the “stickiness” of the site for a tiny segment of the overall user population. That in turn slightly bumps the figures for logged on time thereby giving some of the low level advertisers here more time to bombard us with ads for shit no one needs thereby allowing Rupert Murdoch to charge them a nickel more for every time I blog.

It would be easier to shove the extra nickel I make for this site up Rupert’s ass myself.

I need to blog because… I never thought I’d say this but a guy can only look at so much Internet porn. After something like ten hours a day for the last twenty plus years I think it’s time I try my hand at something else.

I needed something to fill the porn hole.

Um….

Not everyone can or wants to be the next Mark Twain or Samuel Beckett. Beckett didn’t want to be an Irish post modernist playwright - finding himself leaping from life to life, putting things right that once went wrong, and hoping each time that his next leap will be the leap home…

 

And Twain wanted to be a Riverboat captain, or a gold miner or a successful investor.

We all want something different.



Some people could care less about blogging. They only want the social connection around here and that’s cool. I get that too.

But I wanted people to read the crap I wrote. What MySpace offered was ego stroking a web proletarian like me could afford. Free. It still does offer it but - DEAR GOD, WILL THE DOUBLE ENTENDRES NEVER STOP? - I don’t get the reach around anymore.

The truth is that people aren’t leaving MySpace because Facebook is better. They are leaving because MySpace got worse.

And it’s not the glitches or the breakdowns that are doing it. We’ve always had those. So what is it?

It’s the rising tide of commercialism that’s doing it. The new love interest could have been Facebook or any other pretty new site. Doesn’t matter. It’s not the reason people have become uneasy around here. Even when you can’t see it you can sense it. We’re being swamped. Look I know that this place needs to make cash to survive but it’s a balancing act. Too little push and you go broke. Too much and you drive folks off. Well they have definitely lost their balance and I don’t think it is entirely their fault. It was in their DNA to begin with. MySpace started out as an ultra-stealth spam delivery system.*


But in the immortal words of Leah Thompson’s character in the timeless classic Red Dawn, "Things are different now."

You need a little context to fully appreciate the poignancy of the above quote. She’s in the wilderness without food or shelter. Cuban paratroopers have just murdered her friends, her family, her Home Ec.teacher and she realizes that her life depends on the survival skills of Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen.

And then you read the script for Howard the Duck and think yeah, THAT’LL be my breakout role.

Some “Oh Shit” moments last a life time.

Thing are different now with blogging here.

Let’s face it. If you are a celebrity you don’t need a venue like MySpace to get traffic to your blog. You can set up your own site. If you have special ninja tech savvy you might be able to start a blog like BoingBoing. If you’re a bottom feeding gossip with no sense of shame you could be the next Perez Hilton. If you are a gozillionaire socialite, you and your fat cat friends could start your own site to compete with Huffington Post so that YOU could tell people who agree with you things that they already know.

For the rest of us there has been MySpace; where anyone with determination and a modicum of typing ability had a chance to write their way to the top of the shit heap. The prize was to be at the top of a shit heap but that’s not the point. Some were good writers; some generated a loyal following with endearing or annoying quirks depending on your view point, some auto-refreshed their way to the top or became notorious for having douche bag opinions that started firestorms - but it was all honest in its dishonest little way.

We had our home grown celebrities like Tila and a couple of others. But even they actually put in the work. Heck, regardless of what you think of her Tila Tequila had a part in making this web site popular. Early on she convinced about 30,000 of her closest friends on Friendster to come over to MySpace back when Tom’s extended network was still in the low five figures.

I don’t believe that MySpace set out to piss off us bloggers. That would be stupid because they DO want to be everything to everyone, too much so. They’re out to make money and there is nothing wrong with that. That’s why corporations exist. It’s almost analogous to a biological system and just as brainless. Fighting it has about as much chance of success as would a law banning mitosis*


At least we should be aware of how we are being moved like sheep into a pen or fish into a weir and frankly I don’t see that kind of awareness. The manipulation is subtle and there is more than a little misdirection involved.

But people sense it. The feeling of being observed that raises the hairs on the back of your neck.

Has anyone else noticed who is making it to the top blogs lately? Yeah. Funny how it’s almost exclusively bands who just happen to be selling their crappy music on MySpace. Two line blogs more than likely written by hired media flacks finding their way to the top of the blog ranks. Uh huh. There’s a name for that. It’s called ADVERTIZING. They put ads right on the opening MySpace page and there are links to their stupid blogs plaster all over these days driving up the views so that people will pay to download their songs.

But since MySpace is one BIG AD there’s no need to label the individual parts as advertising. Hey look! The Oil Minister of Nigerian wants to be my friend and cool, he says he has some money for me. Let’s take a look at his playlist!

Most bands have had blogs on MySpace since Day One but nobody cared to read what the illiterate fucks had to say.

I’m old so indulge me a moment here. Back in the Rolling Stone Age I listened to pop music too but it didn’t mean I cared what Keith Richards had to say about anything - -assuming anyone could understand what he was saying.


You’re supposed to listen to music, not musicians. Musicians are idiots.

Sorry.

I was looking at a picture of the Jonas Brothers in the top blogs again. There’s something about their faces that makes me want to smash my computer monitor.

----

Next: I really will blow the lid off of MySpace in my next blog.

Seriously.

I mean it this time.

The lid.

Off!

I swear it.

 

    This is the way the world ends
    This is the way the world ends
    This is the way the world ends







And so, a playdate is made for my daughter while sitting in on a toddler ballet class on the 14th day of the second month of the two thousand and ninth year of our Lord, praise T-Mobile and four to five bars of immaculate reception.

Something withers and dies.

Died.



Do I send along a webcam with a holographic representation of my daughter on this play date?

Will a real child survive a non-virtual encounter with another child?

The more technology tries to connect me the more disconnected I feel. Social networking my ass. I swear I felt a greater degree of personal involvement watching the Mars Rover take soil samples than I do with the people around me anymore. In any case it’s a dog race to see who finds intelligent life first, me or Rover.

Yes. It is just me. I am the only one who feels this way and I am the first person to make these observations because I feel things deeply on a deep level.

If I bleed, am I not a prick? Or something like that. You know what I mean. Or not.

And no I didn’t really think SideKick lady in my daughter’s dance class was really hitting on me. It just got me thinking about MySpace again and what I think I want to get out of my online interactions.

The truth is awful. I like MySpace – conceptually if not in actuality.

No. It’s not something I like to talk about.

To quote one of my favorite MySpacey friends, the Buddha Mama:


O’ MySpace! Dysfunctional home away from dysfunctional home. I go away for a few months and all hell breaks loose.



Even the hardcore degenerates are leaving.

Way to go Tom & Company. You’ve started a veritable Mariel Boat Lift toward the blinding white beaches of Facebook.


 
So much for the join my mob app.


Guess what, MySpace riff-raff. Facebook, Inc. may want you over there but Facebook users don’t.

But that is a subject for another blog.


*sigh*


Some nights I walk outside and look up at the telephone line connecting me to these virtual worlds. Some nights I want to put an extension ladder up against the side of the house and climb up there with a pair of garden shears to snap that connection.

The only thing holding me back is that I’m not entirely sure if I’ve been looking at the telephone line or the power line.

50-50 is starting to sound like pretty good odds to me.

It’s the fat one with the crispy squirrel welded to it, right?

*snick* *snick*





Somehow my TV accidentally got tuned to PBS the other night. A lost remote plus a crippling lack of motivation kept me couch bound during the entire Charlie Rose show.

It was awful.

Charlie’s guests were none other than MySpace’s CEO Chris DeWolfe and its President/Pillsbury Poppin Fresh Pin Cushion Poster Boy, Tom Anderson.

Sweet living fuck! Who watches this shit? Do people think that boring TV somehow equates to intelligent TV? That would certainly explain the appeal of anything with Garrison Keillor in it I guess.

Chris’ hair was all mussed up and he looked kind of hung over. He did most of the talking while Tom sat fidgeting. The questions were slow pitched in typical Charlie Rose fashion.  Fuck.  They were T-Ball questions. Somehow Tom and Chris managed to catch air on every swing.

But they weren’t there to answer questions.

They were there to read from a script.

A bad one.

If I had to guess I’d say that two somebodies got an early morning call from a certain cranky old Aussie gent telling them to sober up and get their playboy asses on a plane to New York toot-sweet to spin spin spin after the last News Corp earnings call. If I had to guess.

According to Chris, Facebook ISN’T kicking ass and tons of big advertisers are flocking to MySpace so their precious brand can get placed on the pages of Satan worshiping cross-dressers and tweenaged singing hookers who say fuck a lot.*


Riiiiiiiiight.

Tom piped in about the plan to “monetize” this site with music and mobile apps. After 20 I lost count of the number of times Tom threw out the word “monetize.” Like a yappy little dog that somehow learned to speak a single nonsense word and then proceeds to bark it out trying to get the big dog’s attention. Monetize. Monetize. Monetize. Dancing between Charlie’s legs and piddling on the floor in monetizing excitement.

I’ve sat in on enough business meetings to know that when someone repeats the same buzzword over and over, they’re trying to hide the fact that they don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about and they hope YOU won’t catch on.

I’ve done it myself.


”Our aim is to create product density by putting a laser focus on our core competencies and leveraging mindshare to deliver mission-critical deliverables.”

English: “Yeah, we’re not sure what this thing does either. In fact, at this point we’re not entirely sure whether it’s a flaw or a feature and don’t ask us how we’ll ever make money with it unless there’s a sudden need to kill the ozone layer a little quicker.”

My Kung Fu is potent.

Back to Tom, Chris and Charlie.

You could practically see the molecules in the air around Tom coalescing into an impenetrable layer of bullshit.

To be fair, Charlie wasn’t asking any questions in Tom’s comfort zone like how his World of Warcraft character was doing etc.

What was clear to me from watching the interview, more by what wasn’t said, is that MySpace is in trouble.

Pfft. Join the club.

Not close your doors next week kind of trouble but trouble nonetheless.

It all has to do with making money off of this place or “monetizing” it.

What does this mean to the likes of you and me and why should we care? Allow me to illustrate with a long and convoluted analogy that will seem to go nowhere* and most likely wouldn’t survive the scrutiny a retarded chimp could give it.


Getting liquored up before proceeding might help you but I’m not going to wait for you to catch up.

Fair warning. I have a healthy lead.

Well it’s like this: Newscorp is the slum lord and we’re the rent controlled tenants. Maybe some of us pay token rent but most of us are leaches spending our days oogling naughty profile photos, drinking 40s and doing drive-bys on lamer blogs.

But then someone builds a brand new Marriot Courtyard across the road with fresh money.

Sure it’s a bit antiseptic but all our real life friends and family members are over there and they’re handing out crack flavored blowpops and you can make your own waffles.

The slum lord sees this and cartoon dollar signs flash in his eyes.

He decides to turn the shitty apartments into condos.

The problem for him now is the squatters who have really fucked the place up with graffiti and lol-cat excrement smeared on the walls. Classy folk don’t want to move in next to them. Who would?

So the slum lord decides to stop fixing the stuff the squatters like because the shit they like doesn’t pay the rent.

The HTML pipes bang a bit? Too bad. Shove a gym sock behind ‘em.

No heat in the blogs? Burn glitter graphics fuckers.

But the kicker is that they/we can’t make waves because they/we are pretending to be gay so that Mr. Furley will let them/us share our flat with two hot babes.


Sometimes Mr. Furley gets suspicious so we/I have our gay beard buddy Larry come over and pretend to hit on Chrissy and Janet while I/we pretend to check out Larry’s ass.

Insert a half hour of miscommunication and false assumptions based on preposterously wild coincidences --punctuate it with pratfalls where someone, typically me, gets kicked in the nuts a few times -- and hilarity ensues.*




…so who is the slumlord trying to move in here? Consumers of goods and services, that’s who. Mostly Eurotrash, metrosexuals and over forty suburban hipsters who either don’t know how or are too afraid of The Man to download music off of the Internet for free the way the good lord intended.

Well I for one am not going to take this lying down.*


In the coming days I will be asking for your support* in my war on the powers that be.



Stay tuned.

---

NEXT: I take you on a journey across continents and time to knock down the house of cards that is MySpace. From the fetid swamps of Southeast Asian where children labor 27 hours a day in News Corp kudos factories full of cyanide gas and biting snakes -- to the halls of power where back room deals are made to fix the blog rankings -- I will rip the lid off of MySpace and expose all the crawly wormy things inside in my blog titled Ripping the Lid Off MySpace and Exposing All the Crawly Wormy Things Inside (still a working title).

Aloha.