Thursday, August 19, 2004 :::
Chance Encounter: Fatty McFatterson meets Dances with Chocolate Cake.
By my nature I have a tendency to be cruel. We all have that tendency to be hyper-critical, even if we don’t trot it out regularly. We learned it when we were kids. We learned at a very young age that while sticks and stones could in fact break bones, words would burrow themselves into the psyche and cause atrocious damage resulting in a fucked up sense of self and expensive life-long therapy.
I was at the mall the other day and I had to hit the restroom. On the way in I passed a kid in the long, white titled hallway. This kid was a train wreck by all standards of pretty. Probably 10 or 11 years old, maybe about 40 pounds overweight and his face (and shirt) smeared with the sticky residue of an ice cream bar that couldn’t get away. He smiled at me with a happy that comes from a place too unaware and stupid to be on guard. I passed him and I heard myself say (on the inside of course) “Hey slow down there on the choco-sandwiches my tubby little friend…Fatty McFatterson…Dances with Chocolate Cake. Why don’t you jog down to the JC Penny where your mom is buying you some “husky” clothes?” Immediately I felt ashamed.
You see, I didn’t say it out loud. And it is not as if I pitched his belly and called him “Big’Un”. But in my moment of childish hyper-criticality I forgot something very important. I was a fat kid. Maybe not a Two Ton Timmy like we have roaming the malls of modern-day America, but I was certainly a candidate for husky apparel at times in my life. Even now, 30 yrs old, massive reduction in both sugar-laced products and fried foods, I am nowhere near the Collin Ferrell-GQ version of fit and attractive. But my heritage is being the big kid and that day I let myself become one of the snickering mall-herd that thoughtlessly trashes some poor fat kid.
When I came out of the restroom the kid was gone. I walked back to the store where my wife was shopping and on the way I tired not to look at my own reflection in the store windows. I was afraid that in my reflection I would see my own child-self stained with residue and dancing with chocolate cake.
::: posted by Mike at 12:38 PM
Wednesday, July 28, 2004 :::
Tied To The Ass Kicking Machine...
I have so much to post I can hardly stand it. I have significant progress with my book, Bleak Zero, I have recently been offered and turned down a very lucrative job with a top 3 global consulting firm, I am fast approaching the end of my college career, and my wife is pregnant with our first child. Eighty hours work weeks… traveling back and forth to New York, Business Computer Information Classes, refining my needs for a literary agent, a child on the way… I have a full to overflowing plate.
It is hard because I have stories to share, pet peeves to write about, poetry to post, updates about the book to give, rants to rave about, and I cannot seem to get it all done.
I leave for NYC Saturday for a week so I hope to get some of this worked through while I am away.
::: posted by Mike at 10:23 AM
Sunday, June 27, 2004 :::
Nobody Goes To The Dildo Shop Anymore…
I am a child of the 1970/80s which means I entered the professional and adult world (sometime called the “real” world) in the 1990s. I don’t remember a specific rite of passage and I didn’t get a certificate in the mail or anything, but apparently I am an established member of the Real fending for myself and making my own way. Anyway, I have come to see views and language change into and way beyond the realm of politically correct. In fact, I would be willing to bet that at the most advanced and progressive point in the development of our culture we have the weakest and most passive language than at any time of our history. So that having been said, let me get to my point.
The other day I was driving and heard an ad on the radio for a dildo shop. Now don’t all square on me or get uncomfortable when I throw the word dildo out there. It’s what they sell at these kinds of shops. It’s not a porn shop, they don’t sell skin flicks. It’s a sex toy shop. And what’s the biggest sex toy? A dildo! It’s like a hamburger joint that sells chicken and salads. They might carry a diverse selection of merchandise, but their bread and butter is dildos… or hamburgers…whichever, you get the idea.
The ad on the radio said to come on down to the “Lifestyle Accessory” store for all of your adult needs. Now as I noted, I am a child of this age of word softening. Most of the time we do it so that we can manipulate an image of what we are really talking about, but in this case they are giving the dildo shop a euphemistic name to keep the religious types off their backs. It’s like when you want to insult your boss in front of the kids so instead of cursing a blue streak about your boss you SPELL that you boss is a L-I-M-P-D-I-C-K-P-I-G-F-U-C-K-E-R. It’s the same concept, the renaming of a simple yet harsh thing (Dildo shop) with a more grandiose, harder to decipher (Lifestyle Accessory Store) name.
I guess it’s a little sad and it typifies the laughable hypocrisy of our false-innocent national self-image. Our nation makes the most in the world from the creation, packaging, and distribution of pornography. We consume more pornography than any other country (per capita or whatever other measure you break it down to). Yet at the same time we have DVDs of Little Red Riding Whore and Anal MILFS part 47 hidden in our sock drawer, in our nightstands we have the Bible so we have to pretend this chaste and righteous collective identity.
As a result consenting adults have to pull the brims of their hats down to their sunglasses and sneak into the Adult Lifestyle Store instead of the way is used to be when people strolled into the dildo shop before they went home and fucked. Call me crude, but you get the point. By changing the language of the locations you change the feelings and ideas associated with the act.
DILDO = SEX TOY = ADULT LIFESTYLE ACCESSORY= BULLSHIT.
::: posted by Mike at 4:37 PM
Friday, June 11, 2004 :::
Ironic Flowers
I guess you can call it can end to an era when the icon of that era falls into eternal slumber. And though it’s not as if we were in regular contact or even given glimpses of the man behind the illness, we still sort of knew he was out there. Even while his absence or condition was mourned, his life still ticked on… well into new eras, past time of need, into a relevance found only in allegory or soundbyte. But the fact remains he is now dead and with him dies the lingering vestiges of a world we don’t inhabit anymore.
Enough will be spoken of the man, his accomplishments, feats over adversity or controversy or archaic social doctrine. Flags are flying at half-staff. Mourners gathered roadside to watch a steely black stallion trot with forlorn purpose, boots turned backwards in its stirrups. The Cowboy would never ride again… not on this frontier at least. An internet that wasn’t even in existence when the man lived his life will be filled with photographs, and eulogies, and fond remembrances of that life.
We can have ceremonies and death marches down the main Main St. of America. We can write poems or give speeches. We can share tales or show footage of a warrior doing battle in the Cold with enemies dark and uncertain. We can laugh at the jokes that never go out of style. And we celebrate as we mourn. We can have a day of national remembrance where banks will close, business will cease, and commerce will come to a screeching halt. And in the end it is the best we can do. As a token of our love, of our pride, of our loss, our hero worship… we scatter at the grave marker our ironic flowers: cease our markets in tribute of a great capitalist; cry as we lower into the earth the remains of a man who on more than one occasion made us laugh. As feeble as it is, this what we do.
The above photo of Ronald Reagan was drawn by politcal cartoonist Jim East. He was the father of a friend of mine. He died of Lukemia in the early 1990's. I never met him but had the chance to look through his sketch book once. I made scans of a few pictures never knowing what I would do with them. This was always my favorite.
::: posted by Mike at 3:45 AM
Monday, May 24, 2004 :::
Cunt...Not The New Bitch.
The reality of our modern vernacular is that we all fall prey to fashionable phrasings. Fortunately, I won’t have to back this up with paragraph after paragraph of quotations from social science journals and noted linguists. I have only to point out a few trends in our past social speak.
Remember the Valley Girl phase when things were “to the max”; people were “gagged with spoons” and other random objects; “like” was the utterance of choice when pausing mid-sentence, sometimes inserted after every other word; and “totally” was used to express more ranges of condition and emotion than the Eskimos have words for snow?
How about when things were Radical (“rad” for short)? Or how about when Cats went with Chicks unless they were squares? Can you dig it daddy-o? Is it all groovy for ya?
While some of our adoption of new phrases come from our professions (shop talk), most of the new phrases we pull into our societal lexicon come from popular media like movies, television, or music. Right now across America as I write this millions of people (some of them teenagers, most of them white, and all of them of questionable intelligence) are telling someone about Fashizzoling their Nizzels!?! And why? Because a rap guy told one of his boys “Hey, watch as I make all the white kids sound like Stutterers having epileptic fits…”
Fact is we learn from what we seen in the popular media and we are inundated with popular media.
I have heard a new word being thrown about lately in movies and in interviews I’ve read with media types. It’s not a new word. In fact, I would say the word predates my life. And this word also has been used often enough to earn it the label by most women as being “the dirtiest word EVER!”. I don’t know why, no one has ever explained it to me, but most woman after hearing it shrink into this horrible ball of anger and disgust. Yes, I am talking about the word Cunt... capitalized for effect.
David Carradine pulls it off well in his line for Kill Bill Vol. 2. The stand-up comics have made it seem humorous in the context of their acts. But I don’t know. The word’s damaged goods. It has too much baggage. Too many guys like me have stashed it in our reserve file of only the most heinous words...filed in the "C"s appearing before both "K" for Kike and "N" for Nigger. It is a dirty word only to be used, if ever, in the most extreme of circumstances when hurt and shock need to be delivered with equal and unmitigated force. We can’t just start throwing it around willy-nilly. We can’t use it to the point where it starts to develop alternate meanings and usages. We can’t ruin it like we ruined Bitch.
Bitch used to be a good word, an all-encompassing word for when the female went haywire. But then it became a badge of honor. “I’m a bitch and proud of it” the t-shirts and bumper stickers used to read. And the current uses of Cunt... what are they using it for… AS A STAND-IN FOR THE WORD BITCH!
So, if you can control it folks I ask you to resist to temptation to adopt this one into your verbal rotations. Leave it alone. Let it sit in the Reprehensible Sub-dictionary of guys like me waiting for some Cunt to cut me off in traffic!
::: posted by Mike at 9:27 PM
Thursday, May 20, 2004 :::
Pretty in Pink… But Only A Little.
The city is awash in pink. From Park Ave. in the high fifties all the way down to the Village, there are solids and patterns, stripes, polka-dots, and plaids. All pink. The society women with the cash for real fashion, the hippie chicks in SoHo, the little tourist girls in the big city from Middle America: they are dressed from the tops of their knit Kangols all the way down to their Prada pumps. Even some men on Wall St. wear it in their power ties. Pink. Tons of it.
It was the other day I found out that pink was in. I don’t think that it was ever out… being “in” is more than emerging from the “outs”. My wife was turning through the pages of one of those celebrity mags and almost everyone was in pink. I asked why and she said- in that “where have you been you knuckle dragging moron” tone- pink’s in.
There is such a thing as too much of a good thing. Especially if it's a pink thing. Pink is supposed to be an accent. Pink is supposed to be subtle, an extra on the scene of fashion.
I was walking across 55th today over to Broadway and the world was pink. I didn’t enjoy it as much as I should have. Things looked softer and more clean, sure, but there was a falseness to it that screamed fashion mag imitation.
I can’t wait until pink is out again.
::: posted by Mike at 5:24 PM
Monday, April 26, 2004 :::
My Eatin’ Teeth: The State of Senior Dental Care In America
The other day I was enjoying some lunch at my favorite Whataburger. I was studying for a test about the variability of exchange rates between foreign currencies as they relate to the relative annual changes in the consumer price indices of the respective countries. So, as you could imagine, my mind began wandering and I looked out the window at the world passing me by, car by car, burger by burger.
Not long after my wandering attention starting searching for topics more entertaining than Purchasing Power Parity I saw a woman approaching the door. She was a tall glass of Texas WT, White Trash that is, Hillbilly. She was High Mileage, a few hundred odometer flips past her warranty date. Her shabby clothes were a mix of different trends gone by, a collage of roughly pasted Cosmo pages wrapped around a frame built for Whataburger consumption. She made for interesting people watching so I studied her as she approached the door.
Just as she was about to enter I saw her REMOVE HER TEETH. With a quick flip of the wrist she was all gums as she pulled back the door and entered. She stopped at the first table and set down her purse. From the purse she withdrew a plastic case that looked similar to the thing people use to store their retainers or other dental appliances. I assumed she was going to put her teeth away in anticipation of denture unfriendly menu items, such as a thick shake. To my surprise, instead of opening an empty case to store her teeth for safe-keeping she actually pulled out a second pair of teeth. She swapped the ones from the case with the ones that had been in her mouth just moments ago.
By now she knew I had focused my attention on her and her late-afternoon tooth rotation. Once the new teeth were in she smiled at me showing off the new set. They seemed more savage, with sharper canines, beastly and vampiric. If she were a wild animal it would be like some sort of transformation had taken place as she readied herself for the anticipated kill.
Just before she turned to head to the counter to place her order her smile became even wider and she winked at me. With an unabashed enthusiasm she made a clicking sound with her mouth that was timed in unison with her winks. Then she said, “Got my eatin’ teeth in now!” and headed for the counter.
Aside from its gruesome nature, the display made me proud. You see pictures all the time of the elderly in foreign countries all trying to eat corn and stale bread with a single rotten tooth protruding from their blue-black gums. Say what you want about our health care system for the elderly in this country, but we have the whole teeth thing figured out. Sure we have millions of citizens probably suffering because they cannot get the prescriptions filled through Medicare because the profit-gouging pharmaceutical companies need to make 1000% profit per pill. And I am sure there are home-stricken folks who cannot afford rovers or motorized wheelchairs. But, providing you don’t need government subsidized medication or mobility enhancement, then there is some fine vittles down at the WB and all you need is a few bucks and your eatin’ teeth.
::: posted by Mike at 1:43 PM
Wednesday, April 21, 2004 :::
Heroes or Victims? I can never tell anymore.
Last night in Illinois a tornado killed 4 people.
In the photo you can see all the signs of crisis. You got firefighters, emergency workers, rubble: all the major ingredients of the shit hitting the proverbial fan.
So I wonder this: An unpredictable and subsequently fatal event was visited upon innocent folks who did not wake up that morning and tell themselves in the mirror that it was a good day to die. That is sort of the victim package. You get dead without warning and your relatives get a call. So by modern standards and measures are these people not Heroes? Sure they didn’t do anything heroic, but either did the people who went to work at the Pentagon one day in mid September a few years ago. Both got killed and both situations were (regardless of what a government commission might intimate) unpredictable. It confuses me because there doesn’t seem to be any standard when the label of “hero” is placed on a corpse. Does there have to be a certain number of casualties? Does the needle of patriotic fervor need to be buried in the red-white-&-blue zone before the unwitting dead get elevated to honored martyrs?
I hope when I die I can just be dead and not be hassled with prosaic titles that look good in the headlines. But then again I guess that will depend on the location and circumstances of my death, now won’t it?
::: posted by Mike at 10:40 AM
Monday, March 01, 2004 :::
Update...
Absence from my website comes as little suprise to most. In fact, it seems over the past year I have been gone more than I have been active and posting. This is just becasue I have bitten off more than I can chew in life lately. So far this year we have had 8 full weeks and I have been gone for about 5 of them... primarily in New York but I also did a conference in Vegas for a week. I was also in a car accident on Jan 20th where I did some major damage to my new car and a little to my body and brain. So I have been battling back from that. Then there is the whole school thing. I am nearing the end but I am taking these classes that rob as much joy from my life as they do time. So work, travel, school, wreck... and let's not forget the book. Yes, the book... All revisions and re-writes have been planned and I hope to be able to put it to bed soon. There will be some info about the book posted on the site there after. I finished the first draft in September and basically walked away from it. I have let 4 people read it with a fifth awaiting the revised copy to be available. It will still be in the neighborhood of 375 pages when all is done. I am proud of it but too smart to be optimistic that it will ever find its way to the printing presses of a larger publishing house.
From here I am off to Cancun for a trip I won from IBM for pretending to do a good job, then I am in L.A. for a week doing customer meetings, etc. Then will come the build up for finals at school... the short of it is, you had better have more websites than just this one to visit over the next few months if you want regualar updates.
Everything is temporary, whatever time we get is luck, and better days are always forever out of reach if you can't find better things about these days we are living. Ok... that is enough from me.
::: posted by Mike at 7:10 PM
Wednesday, January 14, 2004 :::
Learning The Things You Already Knew And Then Hating The Lesson
It’s possible that we know so much more than we give ourselves credit. We read a set of inputs from our environment, we draw a conclusion, and we operate based on that conclusion or inference. And, no matter how hard to we fight ourselves, how stubborn we are to fall in-step with our original impressions, eventually we surrender the things we wished for, or even prayed for, to what we knew all along.
But we don’t always trust ourselves, do we. We aren’t always the first and best believer of our own powers of perception. We tell ourselves little lies or willfully omit the details that will alter our end results. The reason we do it? We do it because sometimes we want to believe in something (or someone) that defies logic, experience, common sense; intelligence, instinct, and universal truths just so we can lay claim to some discovery left neglected by the chance or analytics of the rest of the world.
It’s a nice thought, but by the time we reach the end we find what we learned is what we already knew… what a fucking bummer!
::: posted by Mike at 2:56 PM
The Antidote to Erection
Man, how I hate to start off the year on Nosebleed with a subject like this… but it has proven too powerful a mental image to escape and, being driven to intrude and trample on the delicate scenery of your private mental space, I feel compelled to infect you with this image so that I can somehow purge the pain in the name of catharsis… got me, you know where this is going don’t you, I am going to talk about fat chicks that spank each other.
The new semester has begun at UNT. I like it when classes are in session because I never fail to see something on campus that teaches me something. Sometimes it will be a lesson in identity as I watch the freshman struggle to find a place in this new big world that is not really a big world at all. Sometimes I see budding intellectuals try to react the moments they heard when their parents talk about college in the late 60s, so they have their chalked slogans on the sidewalks, banners calling attention to some cause of insignificant social gravity. There are so many things to see on campus, especially when you have traveled the world to the point that most of what you see is simple.
Every once in a while, however, you sometimes see that thing that will haunt you. It happened to me yesterday on the way to class. I was walking the sidewalk when I saw approaching what I can only describe, and superficially so, as a herd of girls. They were not chubby, they were not ample, they were not big-boned… they were fat girls where the needle on the gauge hung trembling above the words “morbidly obese”. This was a fact that did little to interfere with their- well let’s call it what it is, as disgusting as it may sound- frolicking.
For 20 or 30 feet these girls somehow got infected with the “spank bug”. It started when one girl made apparently made a comment to another of the herd and the recipient of the comment responded with a spank on the ass and a giggle. That was the first bite of the spank bug. From there, the one who issued the comment and was spanked in retort, giggled and spanked back. That is when the flood gates of spank open… me downstream. They whole crew then began this grotesque ballet of spank-n-giggle down that 30 feet stretch of sidewalk. It was truly unsettling, something I have been trained by the media, with its army of beautiful, to think as more macabre and disturbing than anything ever penned by Edgar Allen Poe or Stephen King.
I knew at that moment, watching this bobbing and giggling ocean of spanking girls, that my ability to gain and maintain an erection might perhaps have suffered permanent, and if not permanent than at the very least long-term, damage. Every time my brain would send that impulse to rush blood to the proper places it would follow that message with the regrettable remembrance of four very fat girls lost from the world in their game of spank-n-giggle. The blood will not flow, the mail sail will not be hoisted, and I will be as useful to the productive cycle of the human race as gun control legislation in a republican controlled senate.
Higher education… it too has its costs.
::: posted by Mike at 12:04 PM
