The following is a complete and unedited stream of consciousness a la Jack Kerouac, although I believe he was on benzedrine when he wrote On The Road and I just have a bad sinus infection and a roofie colada of uppers and Emergen-C and homeopathic remedies (no homo). Remember the first time I led off a blogpost with a video? No? That's because you just came to this site by googling "maury bus old navy store" (which, you are correct, is information available on this site) and you haven't read my other highly informative posts, which include the two most offensive ways to say "abortion", both of which are in American Sign Language. But now I've got another baby-related video for you that will have you re-evaluating "the miracle of childbirth."
Yeah. So, there's that. WAIT! Turn down the volume, that video is really loud! Too late? Sorry.
Next, Tyra Banks Tweets like my mom texts. My mother feels the need to sign "Love, Mom" like each text she sends me is a birthday card. SO DOES TYRA! Look:
stressed spelled backwards is desserts? THIS is why i should join twitter? kill me
Seriously, I'm just adding this to my unwritten list of reasons I do not like Tyra Banks. Of course, I know in the end that her signing tweets and being afraid of dolphins and saying all sorts of inane things on camera will never take away that she has done shows of people with strange eating habits, including the woman who uses cigarette ash as an ice cream topping and the one who eats toilet paper.
(Thank you Carlen for letting me use your the image you showed me.) Plus Tyra did a show that one time featured this hometown hottie:
talk about a woman after my heart
Of course, since I've found my way onto this the topic of bathroom reading material, AdAge recently published a story about people using cell phones in the bathroom, a practice that my brother all-too-well knows I approve of. Here's a pie chart (interesting graphical analysis) of its widespread use:
What else have I been thinking about today? Colloidal silver, an apparent natural antibiotic; beets and broccoli; olive leaf extract, grapefruit seed extract; and Afrin (which works pretty well, I must say). That's because I feel like crap. You wanted stream of consciousness, you got it. Oh, you didn't? Sorry.
Here's a photo of the winners from the pinball tournament I played in late last year.
pimps in they own rhyme
Do you like pinball? I did. At least, I did until I stood in a darkened bar in the middle of the day for the Brooklyn Pinball Championship. As testosterone perfumed the room like B.O. (actually it was mainly B.O.) I played pinball for FOUR HOURS which included about 45 minutes of actual game play and 3 hours and 15 minutes of waiting, of which 75 minutes were devoted to avoiding the guy who roid-raged when his machine tilted. I "finished" somewhere around 30th place, got a participant's medal and got the hell out of there. The true athletes were able to block out all the negative energy (and farts) and come out victorious; they are pictured above. Congrats guys, it was like being on an episode of StarWars Survivor where the only food available was a crate of beans, cabbage and Doritos Nacho Cheesier that washed ashore.
OK, I think I'm done. WAIT, no, you have to check out Max Capacity's Animated Gifs on Flickr. They are amazing. Choice cuts include Wil E. Coyote, Mike Tyson's Punchout, and White Noise (now in Technicolor)... on Flickr dey move 'n' stuff...
Without my sitemeter showing it, I think some of the Greenpoint street residents are catching onto the fact that I am not indeed lost, staring at Google Maps on my phone and wondering out loud "Where is Oak Street?" but, in fact, desperately trying to get my phone to autofocus so I can capture their soul in a photograph because I am a mean sour-turd who half-believes he can sell trading cards of homeless people and then donate that money to charity.
For example, one woman who was particularly insane yelled at me that "there are no trees in Hollywood", perhaps an allusion to the fact that I was wearing wayfarers at the time and my hair looks like a blind person styled James Dean with leftover grease from Jimmy Dean sausage.
she was once a famous southern californian arborist
Another woman must have sensed that I was paying some sort of attention to her and actually started talking to me as we waited for the light to change on the corner. Apparently she had been at the church all morning, because (and this is verbatim; I wrote it down immediately) she said:
I've been praying all morning for my leg to heal. It's no good. Might be broken. Praying not working today. I might change to Orthodox. Not Jewish. I mean Roman.
I was taken aback and struggled for the right words — and also a little weirded out how quickly she was to say she wasn't Jewish — which came out as "I hope your leg feels better" as I smiled and crossed the street. Anyway, it made me feel kind of crappy so I really want to get these things made. It's been so horrible outside and no one should have to sleep on the street. I figure 15 cards, maybe 12, will be enough for a pack. I'll probably have to sell them online with a FAQ page that looks like this:
Q: Do you have blood and/or a heart with which to pump blood?
A: Yes.
Q: How can I help (expedite your death)?
A: You can help by purchasing these cards, as all proceeds will benefit the Greenpoint homeless community.
Q: Where do you live, I want to burn your house down?
A: Please don't hurt me. I'm trying to help (in a funny way).
OK, and now for something really interesting else:
This is an amazing video from a couple of weeks ago. DO NOT BE DECEIVED! Even though this bunny is very young and cute, he has a rap sheet a mile long and is known by the street moniker "HawkEye", because of this:
oh, the things this eye has seen
My magically talented Jewish Female SoulBrotha Carlen does a great job of telling HawkEye the business, and I do a tremendous job of looking like a gay pirate and dropping in some sort of dim-witted reference to the Lionhead Breed Standard.
Also, what the hell does this mean?
We need to get lionheads recognized as a "real breed" by the American Rabbit Breeders Association, and there is discussion of Carlen and I leading the charge quite literally by driving to Ohio and whining and maybe getting a VHS camcorder and taping it.
i don't know how to act — in real or fake situations
The show is called "My Life As Liz" and is (I guess) a reality show(?) and this was undoubtedly the worst episode because it featured "real people" like me who weren't alerted that they wouldn't have a trailer, go to makeup and would have to brush their teeth/chest hair/wear a clean shirt/underwear/deodorant on their own the day of the shoot.
Surprisingly the crew and that girl Liz were very nice, sociable people. Usually production crews seem rife with incredible wastes of space possessing incomprehensible god complexes and feelings of superiority: People that were bullied enough in high school to become traffic cops but lacking the body type to pass a police physical exam. Not these guys though, they were alright.
Back to my fame/shame, I know that face I'm making: They made me turn off my music so that they could film the "dialogue" and so I had to sit in boredom and silence for about an hour. I was forced into Marlee Matlin moments. But there was some entertainment in the form of a drunk, dapper homeless Polish man who refused to get off the bench outside once he found out cameras would be rolling. This guy was hilarious, and I wish I had a photo of him. I'd still recognize him to this day and would love to make him a Homeless Trading Card, but I assume he's left Greenpoint and gone on to at least some stardom like that Ted Williams guy did before relapsing. This hobo hit on every production girl with a clipboard in drunken, slurred, but very charming Polish-English-Smirnoff dialect, a box of Hortex-brand beet juice and vodka in one hand and a plastic bag filled with various "possessions" in the other. (If you don't know, Hortex is this Polish brand of strange fruit juice combinations that are in every store in Greenpoint. Please visit the website if you are a fan of insanity, Joanna Newsom and bad MIDI rip-off instrumentation, because that is apparently what entices a bunch of blond people to mix plum-cabbage nectar and muskrat sweat with vodka.)
something creepy about the packaging
For the record, the Hortex "Leon" kids' juice boxes are pretty good; I like the one that's like banana, pineapple and orange liquid. Anywhooo, this guy was wearing a tan seersucker blazer, a fedora and had a lovely singing voice, which he showcased by stepping in front of the cameras and belting out some Polish showtune every time they started to film. And they filmed, A LOT, for a 2 minute clip. This show is less like the freeforall MTZ meme — which is feed people grain alcohol and see what happens, or, in the case of Teen Moms, see what happens after that happens — and more like a real, fake show. So it wasn't scripted, per se, but it wasn't exactly like following someone around with a camera.
Whatever. Everyone knows this already. I just wanted to tell the internet how grumpy I am, which is why I'm sitting inside in sweatpants, writing this and listening to '90s West Coast rap albums while the sun is shining outside on the nicest day in weeks. I gotztago get some vitamin D, for "DeezNutz", for sunshine, for NateDogg. R.I.P. N-A-T-E.
Some tributes:
Deez Nutz:
DJ E-Z DIK, One of my favorite songs of all time, and great hooks from NateDogg:
Some people have jobs that don't allow them to watch The Maury Show everyday. Other people don't have jobs and watch The Maury Show everyday. I'm somewhere in between. I record both episodes daily. If you want to know what you've been missing (sex for cheeseburgers, for example), I have created "Tuesdays With Maury", a horrible tumblr page with a tiled background and images that will give you nightmares, daymares, schizophrenia and irritable bowl syndrome.
For those of you who don't know, this title was inspired by "Tuesdays With Morrie", a (probably) depressing, sappy book by Mitch Albom, who I think sucks because he made me cry when I stupidly read "The Five People You Meet In Heaven" right after the death of a close friend, thinking it would make me feel better. Well, it didn't. I cried even more. For making me cry, Mitch Albom, I give you this tribute and hope that if you somehow find my crappy website, it will make you cry, too.
I once went to a Maury taping and it felt like being in a four-hour line for a new roller coaster at Six Flags, but without any ride at the end. Except for a horrible bus ride at the end. I'm convinced that some of the people at the taping took the hour-and-a-half long bus ride from the Old Navy near Port Authority to Stamford, CT, for no other reason than to be "discovered" by a producer and get on the show. Their bus conversations were worse than what actually happened on stage. The guy across the aisle from me on the bus was on his cell and told the person at the other end, "Hang up, call the cops, and call me back. She can't take the kids from you like that." I couldn't escape.
The best part of the whole thing was watching to see if I would get on TV, which meant that I watched more Maury in those following months than ever in my life. But there was a payoff: My right arm, cocked in a "boo", was made famous by the producers when they chose it, along with some other peoples' "boo faces" (who I doubt received and compensation for the use of their likeness), for a pivotal crowd shot at a highly emotional moment of the show.
my 15 seconds of fame
There is so much I could tell about that taping, such as the line at the metal detector and the TSA-style security checkpoint (that didn't even bat an eye when they looked in Carlen's purse and, presumably, saw the water-filled fake boob she found at some bodega) but I think it will have to wait. I am exhausted just from uploading photos to the tumblr page. Maury is exhausting.
P.S. Here's a tasty Jimmy Dean Sausage link that's worth sharing, and a parenthetical explanation of how I found it lest you think I'm a crazy person:
- this site is like reading a Dr. Bronner's soap bottle about paranormal activity. I think a ghost groped or soaped me or both in the shower this morning. Even the sitemap makes me feel like an autistic tarot card reader in the West Village made it using Geocities, Microsoft Word 97 clip art and a surprising, almost otherworldly knowledge of SEO. (T-shirt design idea > Image search: "Rhyme of The Ancient Mariner Etchings" > spooky pentagram etching > this web paradise)
Test results are inconclusive. But Mario Lopez has aerobics instructor levels of spandex photos floating around on the internets, just waitin' to be downloaded by some retro, '80s-loving pervert/blogger with perpetual boredom/no social skills/insomnia/indigestion. I hate myself.
just another reason for self-loathing
The McDonald's in my neighborhood is open 24 hours on Friday and Saturday nights, which means two things: One, I have an even unhealthier option for late-night drunk snacks than going to the bodega for a bag of kettle chips, a beef patty (pictured above, except sliced open and stuffed with pepperjack cheese before being microwaved) and a large VitaCoco; and two, they must have some sort of policy in that vagrants are allowed to loiter overnight. Both of these scenarios — eating late-night QPCs and photographing hobos — are near and dear to my heart, but one is going to cause my heart to explode from joy, the other explode from cholesterol...
Behold number three, "Dream Team", in my ongoing series of Homeless People Trading Cards (and another), in which I capture the unsheltered citizens in my neighborhood in their natural environment, like a National Geographic special created by a mental patient with photoshop.
this was the happiest meal i've had in weeks...
For some reason, looking at this photo has me thinking about that song "Holidae Inn" by Chingy. (whatever happened to him? Is he working the front desk night shift at a Cleveland area Radisson?) I got to wondering just what his street cred was really like. What if Chingy was homeless when he wrote that song and it was sad and depressing, talking about trying to bathe at the McDonald's or like a (hot) Carl's Jr. or something on Friday and Saturday nights and dreaming of a hotel room, but then Snoop and Bishop Don "Magic" Juan wandered in for a McFlurry and Chingy recognized Snoop and spit a few rhymes for him, Bishop Don trying to preach to him about turning his life around but Snoop — ever the savvy businessman — knew that even though the current version was depressing and totally unmarketable, especially since homeless Chingy was using a window washer's squirt bottle as a "mic", he saw some real talent in that kid, thinking almost out loud "If this shizzle wasn't about some homeless nizzle, it'd be off the hizzle" (or something like that, I think his mouth was full of Butterfinger McFlurry at the time). I scoured the internet and found the "Lost Lyrics" to the original song, when his name was Squeegie, due to his famously streak-free skills washing car windows on Sunset.
But out of those humble beginnings, this star was born, so we must appreciate his unfortunate roots and poor penmanship/grammar/spelling and love Chingy for the man who produced this:
I need to go to bed, but before I do, single solitary reader-prisoner, I will announce that I am going straight up Nick Denton and expanding my publishing empire to two horrible blogs, the second of which I am hoping to launch maybe tomorrow but realistically more like later this week. It is called "Tuesdays With Maury", and the idea is to take the choicest screenshots from the two daily episodes of the Maury Povich Show and post them on a tumblr blog, and maybe even try to teach a life lesson or two in the process like Mitch Albom does in that book, allegedly. I have not, nor do I ever envision myself reading it. Here's another little teaser, a PR shot from the play that was made from the made-for-TV movie that was made from the book. Enjoy, or whathaveyooz.
there's so much maury can teach me if i just plug my nose and keep an open mind about the elderly
THIS IS TOP SECRET! MORE INFO COMING SOON!(maybe even as soon as tomorrow, as long as I don't get too drunk bowling Sunday and can actually function, which, judging by the people I am going bowling with, isn't likely to happen. So maybe Tuesday. Or Monday, depending on the hangover. Who cares? No one...)
TEASER MILEY CYRUS NIP SLIP PHOTO:
this is the extent of my abilities as a human being/adult — well, this and tying nooses, which i will be doing now for myself, after i get a slice of peperoni/sausage/homemade mozz from Italy Pizza, the best slice within 20 blocks of here, and then maybe take a nap. but then: much-deserved suicide.
I've already said too much (haven't said enough / that's me in the corner, crying alone to michael stipe lyrics)
