I get distracted. "Distraction is Action?" In my case, maybe, but not necessarily productive.
I have been missing you zero weekly readers/many weekly visitors who mistakenly arrived here from google based upon this site's name and your sexual fetishism. Since this site is actually about life lessons (which are offered by someone who is in little position to give them), remember this: your sexual appetite can only get weirder/more fun for so long; then the day comes when "grandma put down the gun" is no longer a viable safe word and you end up naked in a closet acting out a suspicious episode of Kung Fu, so please stop searching for pooping videos. You'll be better for it, I promise.
That being said, I'm moving forward with some things, including the once-neglected but now resurrected Gremlins T-Shirt. Want one? Let me know in the comments section. Each will be made to order on a white vintage tee. Choose from sizes Small, Medium, Large, "Bulking Up For Winter"**, or "Jerry Springer, Cut Me Out of My House"**
** Limited quantities available, probably
Also, I made this today after discovering that some German guy already made the LOVE logo into the word LOST, which was a krautzenbummer. But this looks kinda cool, too, I think.
art is so easy!
Also, a little later today, my friend Sean and I are going to be getting down on some sacrilegious/offensive Easter eggs. I made some last year that were so good that my friend's mom wants to sell them out on the West Coast.
These were weird, but I think this year is going to be way better. I will leave no stone unturned!
(does anybody get that Jesus pushing the stone away joke? am I the only one who at least at one time attended Sunday School/faked reading the Bible?)
It feels good to know that even after all this time, this blog still sucks. YAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYY I haven't missed a step!
This is a mash-up of a bunch of songs from the 90s brought to my attention by a fellow wild child of those halcyon days—days that are just as bleak even veiled by nostalgia.
If somebody with ProTools was able to similarly condense my existence spanning the years this music was made, the resulting song would entail a machine-gun staccato of crying, masturbating and taking Accutane for my acne. It would sound akin to a Joanna Newsom live album.
This summer went by quickly. I know that sentence makes me sound like a schoolteacher lamenting the return to the classroom, but I am not a schoolteacher because: a) what if anyone found this treasure trove of closet skeletons? and b) I do not like children. All of a sudden it's fall in New York and the sun is setting earlier and I am getting crankier but also reorienting myself with some direction. The blurry summer passed, a shot of methadone focus is definitely in order. Primarily, I am resolving to eliminate negativity (and sources of negativity) and only fight for and with that which fulfills me. My first thought after writing that sentence is to sell all my belongings, quit working and eat cheeseburgers and fried pickles every day until my heart explodes with joy and hypertension. Although that's one path to a greasy form of enlightenment, and Buddha is always depicted as a chubby fellah, it isn't really what I meant. I aim to seek out good people who appreciate my talents, encouraging and inspiring me, and not waste any time with or for those who do not.
Two quotes from one story by the incomparable Southern writer Barry Hannah struck a chord today:
Wretched hesitation ... is what embalms our lives, and that was what age demanded of you more and more, to get less and less life.
I've seen peers accept "less and less life" for the past ten years and it's a been a terrible thing to witness. People who used to seem so full of life are both aging toward boredom and personifying it. Their unnatural progression makes me want to quit Facebook. Ten years ago we flung ourselves toward excitement both haphazardly and erroneously without care or regard for the consequences, only a yearning for escape from suburban drudgery. I only assumed that my partners in crime would just grow older and choose wiser ways to get our fun, our "adult" kicks; instead of sneaking past our parents with a flask of whiskey we'd be vaulting past the rubes trading years of fluorescent office imprisonment for a chance at eventual freedom—retirement at 65, provided they live that long—with a freewheeling jaunt toward success without boundaries. And it hasn't happened. And as much as I'd like to think that they're the only ones who've given up, I must admit to my own struggles with "wretched hesitation."
Another:
I was desperate and would have been throbbing in shame but I was still drunk enough to ignore it and was majoring on the theme Whim of Fortune, and I believe trying to attach myself to a woman of such low estate that the two of us would destroy ourselves in spontaneous combustion at an impossible diving speed.
Now this quote is not quite as introspective as its predecessor, but knowing Hannah's life I think it's more than semi-autobiographical. He's at the pulse of a feeling I've had once or twice or ten times in the past, and evoked with the dexterity of a F-15 fighter pilot, fingers flying Mach-1 over the keyboard. As a young writer, Hunter S. Thompson typed the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald to get the flow of his hero's writing. To get his rhythm. I only hope that typing Hannah's words can move me in similar ways.
So was that mash-up above the soundtrack to my most awkward years, or have the songs to that time in my life even been written yet? I don't know. But after surviving my first earthquake (yes, in Brooklyn) and a hurricane that shut down all public transportation in the city and called for evacuations in the same week, I biked down to Greenwood Cemetery for a few hours of wandering mental clarity.
And then I grilled cheeseburgers. Everyone deals with mortality differently.
I had everything planned out: Ohio hotel with lenient pet rabbit policies, cheap car rental, Spaghetti Warehouse banquet dinner tickets, everything. I had found a rental car online for only $18 per day if I just went and picked it up at JFK airport. And then the American economic system (in the form of an double-chinned, age-undetermined woman wearing some sort of pantsuit) almost ruined my trip. This curly-haired gremlin troll told me that although I had reserved the car online, and although I could (theoretically) pay for the cost of the car rental, she could not rent it to me because I have chosen not to have a credit card because I think they are stupid and a middle-class trap and I'm not sure I am enough of an adult to handle having money at my disposal whenever and wherever I want it. So I ended up having to rent a car from another rental agency for about 5 times that price because they would rent to a debit card, and all they had left were expensive SUVs. That being said, it all worked out but it was over my planned budget for the trip.
It got me thinking though: If I got a credit card, would I just buy everything I covet and it at home with my possessions and never leave the house and develop a vitamin D deficiency and lose all remaining scraps of social skills? If so, that actually just sounds like what I've been doing over the past 6 months in cold, dreary, horrible, the worst, New York City winter, except that I would have cooler stuff. Let the patriotism begin (with a crippling amount of debt)!
1) I want a yellow lamp. I don't know why but I need it.
2) I need an alarm clock because my rabbit chewed through the power cord of the one I've had since I was 4 years old, which also electrocuted both her and me one night at 4am.
from etsy ($85 plus shipping from a tiny Chinese man)
3) I need blue shoes (I do not need these at all but if I had good credit I would own them then not be able to pay for them and therefore have bad credit and live the American Dream).
Let's all be New American Patriots and get into credit card debt! Yayyy! (We killed Bin Laden! click link for an awkward celebration in my awkward neighborhood — thanks Jasper.)
