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.....

.. ..

.. ..

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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.

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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.

The terms of my court ordered community service were simple; report to Pastor Flynn down at the First Congregational Church and do whatever he needed done. No questions asked. Once I had done this, Pastor Flynn would in turn sign a note for me to take back to the judge saying I had completed my obligation to the State of Vermont. Considering all the wrongs I had perpetrated upon that poor state – legally documented and otherwise – I took this as a boon.


Pastor Flynn was a small man with the quick darting mannerism of a trapped rabbit. When I arrived at the church I found him nervously supervising a group of youths putting up a banner for the bi-annual Road Kill Potluck Supper and prayer meeting. He mumbled a quick hello then took the court paperwork from my hands and led me back to his office to explain the task he had for me.

My job was to take meals up to old Howard up past Benning Farm on the old Tunbridge road. Pastor Flynn pronounced it Hah-wahd and looked like he was glad he finally had someone to foist the task off on.

Oh boy. I knew old Howard casually from occasional encounters down at the Aubuchon Hardware Store. He was old, like one of the oldest people I'd ever seen still ambulatory. He was ninety-five if he was a day but he carried himself well. I'd always catch him in the middle of some story with Chester, the owner of the store. I say the middle because from what I overheard there was never an end to old Howard's stories. Chester would silently ring me up while Howard rattled on about this or that acknowledging me with a wink and not missing a beat in his tale.

I think I was the last of a group of youthful offenders sent to Pastor Flynn by the court. Being the only non-local of the group, it's possible that the other youths passed on the task of visiting Howard from experience. I can't really say.



Howard lived in a dilapidated farm house which in no way distinguished it from its neighbors, nor indeed from most of the old farms in that part of the Green Mountains. It's a definite look. Ramshackle add-on construction, rooms added as needed over the decades. Craptastic Yankee.

Howard met me at the door. Though bent with age you could still see evidence of a life spent outdoors; muscles corded under loose skin. His whip thin frame earned from years of barely subsistence dairy and sugar maple farming.




He invited me in. The inside was no better than the outside. Years of clutter and accumulated debris had piled like snowdrifts covering every piece of furniture and stackable surface. And books everywhere. All sorts of books. Everything from Plato's Republic to modern potboiler mysteries and years and years worth of Vermont Life magazine scattered about. It quickly became apparent to me that he had read every book he owned.

I found out that he had never owned a TV and his one radio had broken back in the 1950s never to be fixed or replaced. All of his current affairs information was picked up through gossip during his weekly trips down to the hardware store. He refused to read a newspaper having no interest in learning about the foolishness of people living "in the away" which is how he referred to the world beyond his beloved Green Mountain state.

I tried to drop off the food I had brought him quickly but he managed to snag me with one of his tales before I could make good my escape.  I fidgeted and looked around trying to indicate through body language how much I didn't want to be there. But even my rudeness didn't put old Howard off. He'd just start talking and assume I'd stay for the whole story. I made an excuse and split as quickly as I could.

And that's how it went with every visit, me being rude and Howard still rattling on, even offering me coffee or cookies and being kindly but still talking, talking, talking non stop.

But a funny thing happened. Something I barely noticed at first. I was staying longer and longer with each visit. Could it be that I was actually starting to enjoy Howard's stories?

Over time I got to know Howard who was as I've said, willing to talk about anything and everything.  Winter came and it was harder and harder to get out to see old Howard. I made the excuse to myself that it was the long arduous trip out to see him that made me stay longer. After all, I might as well have ONE cup of coffee for my troubles.

The cold is always the other person in the room on a Vermont winter evening. A sudden gust outside sends chilly fingers through the chinks of plastic draping the old farm house windows, always probing, looking for a way in. Many nights I'd stay late into the evening while Howard recounted his years on earth.

He was surprisingly worldly for a man who had only left his home state twice in his life. The first time back in 1916 as a doughboy with the American Expeditionary Force. I sat by his fire and learned about life and death in the hedge rows and trenches of France. His careworn face amber lit by the fireplace as he spoke about the young farm boy who traveled to places with names like the Meuse and Nancy, his garrulous voice finally faltering as he entered the bloody Argonne Forest.





I have to admit I was hooked. He told tales about characters he knew like "Black Jack" Pershing and the exploits of "Wild Bill" Donovan as if he and they were old friends.

I learned about his wife Mildred who died giving birth to his second son John and about the hard life raising two boys through the Great Depression in rural Vermont.

Both boys were gone now too, lost to the cold. The elder son Dylan on a snowy night of too much alcohol and turn taken too fast on a sudden patch of black ice, his younger son John lost somewhere on the windswept plains north of the Hwach'on Reservoir on the Korean Peninsula in a war few remember.

That loss, the loss of his second son occasioned his second trip out of state to go down to Arlington National Cemetery to see an empty box being lowered into unfamiliar soft earth.

A life lived too long some might say, to have buried a wife and two children.

But no. Here at the end of his life not full of bitterness and regret but with a vitality born of the rugged individualist. The self taught savant living on his books and modest charity of neighbors.

Still inquisitive. Still living after nearly a century rooted to the earth.

What thoughts he might pass on to the world if he set them to paper?


 




In retrospect, I suppose I should not have been surprised when he made a grab for my balls.

The latest hot topic around Casa Joe is our little girl's eating habits or lack thereof. She just doesn't eat. We've tried everything without success. All she wants is milk. Gone are all my preconceived notions about providing my daughter with healthy food to eat. Now I just want her to eat, period.

I used to think, hey, just put fruits, veggies and good grains in front of kids and don't even let them know that crap food exists and they'll have no choice but to eat good things. Don't bring the bad things into the house. Limit the choices to healthy, right?

Right.

In fantasy world.

I wouldn't be so concerned if her milky dietary habits didn't also have such nasty gastro-intestinal consequences. Jaysus H! It's like watching a film of a python eating a chocolate elephant seal in reverse. From the sounds she makes, a LIVE elephant seal. The physics of it are simply baffling.

It's a case of awe tinged with a modicum of envy. I don't think I could manage something like that with a mountain of bran and the Sunday Times. I'll take a moment to be proud of her once I stop wincing in sympathy.

We're doing all the things we swore we'd never do with food like setting up a rewards based system. You know, take a bite and your favorite show goes on or don't and it goes off. The problem is leverage. There IS no leverage. She is completely immune to any form of persuasion.

Am I setting up a lifelong eating disorder by focusing so much on the way she eats? I don't know. I grew up in a household where food was not a big deal mainly because it tasted so awful. Veggies boiled into paste, meat burned beyond any chance of identification other than gas chromatography-mass spectrometry or trace DNA - - and potatoes of course. Food was something to be avoided if you were smart. Guess my nationality.

But it set up a basic philosophy about food with me and my siblings that said eating is a kind of necessary evil. You eat so you don't die. So suck it up and get it over with so you can get back to killing your brain cells with television. Hopefully with this attitude you survive into adolescence where you can start drinking seriously.

Not everyone can come up with this kind of winning formula, I know.

Maybe she's ahead of the curve. She's already self-medicating with milk; getting up in the middle of the night to pull it out of the refrigerator and then pour it into a cup. We know this because we find milk trails and drag marks the next morning leading to her den. When she's tall enough to reach the top shelf where we keep the Vodka we're in trouble. Should we put AA literature on the shelf in between? Then at least her choice will be informed.

The more you know and whatnot.

Anyone have a good suggestion for a board book that might cover this topic? Winkie the Barfing Bunny? The Cat in the Hat Thinks You're Too Fat? Karen Carpenter's Super Fun Finger Activity Book?



What?





Stop looking at me like that.



_________________________________________________
UPDATE: Saturday, 11-15-08, 2:30 AM Eastern Standard Time
_________________________________________________



Well apparently I have some really smart mommies, mom-like gurus and one or two not-completely-clueless dads reading my blog. I've been flooded with a ton of useful suggestions and helpful anecdotes that'll take awhile to process here. I'll get around to individually responding in the morning... if I make it through the night with my spawn of satan. :)

Yeah I'm sure I'm the father.

If I had known I could get this kind of practical advice I would have gotten into the whole Irma Bombeck channeling type blog months ago. Or maybe it's my cluelessness that brings out the mothering instinct in my female readers? That's quite possible. Do I give off that vibe? Someone who needs a strong hand? Hmm. Ya know I almost voted for the other team in this last election because of a fetish for strong  women who want to boss folks around.

Ah, Carribou Barbie, how I will miss your brand of sexy discipline!

Did I just cross over into icky territory?

Sorry.

So now maybe I should solicit advice about my toddlers fixation on hand guns and high explosives. I mean SURE... it fits in with our life style NOW but down the road?

Keep your thinking bonnets on.


_________________________________________________
UPDATE UPDATE: Sunday, 11-16-08, 9:30 PM Eastern Standard Time
_________________________________________________

---


These are terrible times for me. I don't like writing about things in the news but it's hard to avoid it these days. It poisons the air I breathe. With each passing day I feel a miasma of fear generated by the news rising up around me. It seeps under this blog door I thought I had double bolted against the real world, paralyzing me with its infectious angst.

In my desperate efforts to avoid being topical or relevant I have stopped writing all together. If you can't say something nice… ya know?

I kid about being relevant.

I'm ready to admit defeat. Yes, the day's events have become the flatulent elephant in the room and I have to acknowledge what's going on around me. Horton has been hearing the Who for some time now, he just hoped it was the voices in his head passing gas. But there's too much going on to ignore it any longer. I have to say something about the looming worldwide economic crisis and the grave choice facing all Americans at the polls this November.*


OK, one more thing. This has got to be the LEAST funny election in recent memory. Here we have all this AWESOME material to work with but no. You people - and I'm looking at BOTH sides of the aisle now and you tinfoil hat folks running around the fringe arms outstretched making airplane noises [Brbrbrbrbrbrbrbbrbrrr!] -  are SOOOPER fucking thin skinned. Having a real sense of humor should include the ability to laugh at yourself (or your own politics) and that slice of the pie chart is getting thinner all the time. You make my giant lizard* cry.



Lighten up citizens of Rock Ridge. Welcome to Election 2008 or…




 

Or…





We find our hero toiling away in relative obscurity as a "community organizer."

 

"Hmmm."
 


When fate intervenes.



But wait.
 




And so our hero hits the campaign trail.
 


Which doesn't always play so well on the road.
 


And then there's the love interest.



"Baby please. You're making an Alaskan spectacle of yourself."
 
 "Three Moosenschnitzen is my limit."

[edited for time, content and a photobucket account that's about to go bust]

Lots of people shoot themselves in the foot and hop around howling. And then it all ends with a big brawl where everyone dukes it out. The fight spills over into the streets – Democrats versus Republicans, Cowboys versus Indians, Jews against gentiles, gays versus heterosexuals.

 

Right.

But in the end our hero prevails.

Or doesn't.

And the world goes on in its downward spiral down the crapper anyhow.

Because true life is way stranger and way scarier than any movie.

 

Or is it?

-----

Where I rip off the monkey mask to reveal the flawed monkey behind the monkey.

*sigh*

This surface pessimism you see is but a cheery cover. It is but a pretty disguise covering a bottomless well of disillusionment and existential despair only someone who works in the field of public education might understand. Yep. I'm an optimist that life has kicked in the nuts repeatedly.

And when life fails me I can always count on me to give myself a solid roundhouse to the sack. Like in this blog.

My theory is that if my nuts are pre-kicked the rest of you will leave me alone while I roll around on the floor hugging my knees to my chest.

So now here I am; a late comer to the revelation that I have nothing to say yet say it I will.

I should be a much better blogger.

 

Blogging is a shitty and lonely profession. But life plans go awry.  By this time I thought for sure I would have been living deep in the jungle worshiped like a white god surrounded by minions ready to do my bidding.


According to early aptitude tests that is the only work I am suited for.

Crap. All this bad news in the world has been giving me anxiety dreams.

The latest was a sex dream. Woo hoo! I was in bed with Dorothy Parker going at her like a crazed weasel and all the while she's haranguing me and belittling my efforts as I sweated away on top of her.

 

But it's ok on both counts since in the dream I'm married to her.

Of course she looked like Jennifer Jason Lee because of that movie where she played Dorothy Parker.

No problem. I really dug her in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.  
Really, she was the only watchable part of that crapfest besides Sean Penn as Jeff Spicoli and Ray Walston as Mr. Hand.


Thank god Spicoli and Mr. Hand didn't show up in the dream. I'd have to go back to sleep and have an anxiety dream with Kate Beckinsale to compensate and Kate getting tired of my nocturnal attentions.



Technically, this describes one of my straight forward sex dreams. It WOULD be an anxiety dream if I blabbed in my sleep about it - the anxiety coming afterwards in the form of a head snatched bald for flirting with strange leather clad women in my sleep.

It just ain't worth the risk I tell ya.

Sure, you're thinking, "what about Phoebe Cates, Joe?"

 

Yeah, but Phoebe Cates is married to Kevin Kline and I respect the guy's body of work too much to do that kind of thing to him.


Right. I don't really respect his work THAT much.

So I'm in bed with Dorothy/Jennifer and the insults are getting really personal. I wanted to tell Jennifer/Dorothy to drop that annoying accent. You know the one she affected in Mrs. Parker & the Vicious Circle. It's hard to describe unless you've seen the movie. The closest approximation I can think of would be Kate Hepburn doing a mumbling impersonation of Eartha Kitt on Quaaludes. But hey, I was doing it with Jennifer Jason Lee playing Dorothy Parker so I'm not complaining. I left the elocution commentary down by my pair of giant clown shoes underneath the bed and got busy with my favorite critic slash teenage crush.*

 

Trust me. I'm going through the Penny Saver right now to see if there are any clip-out coupons for psychotherapists in my area.

Meanwhile, I think I'll switch to decaf and turn off the HiDef for a few days and give Antonio Fargas Junior a rest.

Now give me a HARRUMPH!

 


Harrumph harrumph!