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Monday, December 26, 2005

"Let off some steam...from the uhhhh,
steam pipe that you are now impaled upon..."
"Cut! Stick to the script, Arnold."
- deleted pun-filled scene from "Raw Deal"


here we go again! the ultimate hangover cure. sorta like holding a cold wet toilet seat with both hands. similar to a Scientological "audit." the visual equivalent of a salt-water enema. why you ask? one reason, because i must watch this movie by midnight or i'll have to pay a late fee. what better way to force my eyes open "Clockwork Orange" style than to do another.....

REAL TIME REVIEW!!!


here's the way it's done: i watch this horrible movie and i actually review it at the same time??? madness! you know why? because it's "what i do!" i also fight fires. tonight's movie:

The Fantastic Four

starring not one single recognizable actor, maybe that asshole from "The Shield?" is that him? i don't know. and that chick was on the cover of Maxim or some other fake porn rag.

-i am pushing play on my Playstation because i just cleaned my DVD player and this rental disc looks like it was used to spread mayo on a ham sandwich.
-his name is "Von Doom," hmmm. wonder if he’s going to be the bad guy? "did your momma name you DJ Lethal?"
-that’s Reed Richards? looks too young.
-always “stretching!” get it!
-that IS the guy from "The Shield." i know this because i actually saw a teenager wearing his face on a pin. like he's Bob Dylan or Che or something.
-who’s that dumb bitch? eveyone in this flick looks way too young.
-there’s a girl at the CD exchange who thinks this squat bastard who plays Ben Grimm is hot. true story. just thought i’d share that.
-rivets on the statue. rivets on the elevator.
-this bad guy's got rivets on everything but his balls.
-shiny space tits! yeah, that spacesuit looks real practical.
-this has like "Armegeddon" science. that time period is this? that ship is nothing i’ve seen before but that holographic presentation looked like goofy "Final Fantasy" shit.
-i don’t understand how they can justify the mutations that are going to happen here. i mean, it’s not like they’re the four elements or anything or we’d have a water dude. so there’s rubber dude, fire dude, rock dude and invisible bitch. are they going to say it’s their personalities that give them their powers? 'cause he’s, like, always “stretching!” and that one? he’s "a hothead!” and when you fuck her it’s like she’s “not even there!”
-it’s probably smart to concentrate on the "Thing” character in this movie because that’s really all we want to see. i mean who cares about the other powers?
-like my friend Mark said yesterday. a movie about a guy who stretches? who cares?
-oh shit. his hair is stretching! no wait, it’s just gray. and? what the hell was the point of that scene?
-why is Jessica Alba orange? this is a mutation that no one in the film is talking about.
-pun check, round two. he’s “solid.” of course he has to say that because if you ask him how he is he can’t respond with, “feeling like a big orange turd today, thanks!”
-so Johnny fireboy has a fire decal on his snowboard? holy fuck what a coincidence! or would his powers be whatever was on his snowboard? is it the chicken or the egg? so if he had Marvin the Martian on his skateboard he'd get one of those "ultimatum" guns.
-check him out. he’s so...so...extreme!
-so when do they show their lame powers? why isn’t Uncle Fester a rock dude yet?
-i love this chemistry-free love triangle.
-finally they’re morphing into the weakest comic book heroes ever.
-wait, he’s turning into a rock “under a blanket?!?” now that’s fucking weak.
-so, if the’ve “altered their DNA” why are they altering the laws of physics too?
-Hulk smash! i mean, "Thing" smash!" "Thing's fingers have too much girth to use phone! Thing try to dial down the center!" shit, i thought he was going to smash the phone.
-this is a sorry way to reveal the Thing. he walks out of the bushes to scare his wife?
-man, she turned on him a little quick! he's like, “hi honey!" and she's like, "holy christ! don’t fucking touch me YOU FREAK!” little heavy-handed wasn’t it?
-The Thing doesn’t look very rock-like. he looks like rubber joke-vomit.
-good thing Vomit Man just killed twelve people who were on their way to a Sunday at their grandmas' house just to save that one suicidal jumper.
-you know what? all their powers require that they’re nude.
-what is the point of her stripping? to push through the crowd but to do it invisible? and then they're all waiting on the other side of the crowd anyway? that made no sense whatsoever.
-look at the fucking carnage they caused on that bridge. good rescue, boys! shit’s on fire. people hanging off firetrucks, kids stuck under tires. 101 dalmations running amok. good thing they weren’t trying to get a cat out of a tree or there would be hundreds dead.
-wait, what did the orange bitch just do? some force field thing? how come she gets two powers? three powers including the bizarre shiny orange tint to her face. that’s not fair.
-oh, and the wife just had to be on the bridge to be repulsed by her rock dude again. still wearing her pajamas. soooo stupid.
-"Hulk can’t pick up ring." "Hulk SMASH!" "Hulk ponder sanctity of marriage."
-pun check. “I’ll do everything in my powers.”
-that’s it, fireboy. make fun of his ears, fuck with the rock freak who just got divorced.
-the press are calling them “The Fantastic Four?” wouldn’t the press be calling them the “Suspension Bridge Demolition Murderous Quartet?”
-very Roman-looking board room. what is this, “Caligula?”
-”Victor, stop. I’m pulling out.” sounds like something I heard on Prom night.
-check out Stan Lee thinking he’s Hitchcock with the cameo. maybe, if Hitchcock made his cameos that obvious. like if his head was glued onto one of “The Birds” and stopped to talk directly to the audience.
-okay, we’re at the start of the second act. i will pause and go get some cat food because my cats are staring at me like i'm a chiken leg. when i come back the Second Act Crisis will be introduced in the next five minutes.
-why is she so orange??? seriously. was she that orange before the mutation???
-everyone in this movie is fucking orange. did they all eat an orange, and that's what gave them powers? maybe the colors on my TV are off. they should call this movie "The Fantastic Orange."
-meanwhile...back at Wayne Manor...
-ah yes, one of those noisy bleeping movie computers.
-i don’t remember Dr. Doom having superpowers in the comic book. he was just disfigured and had diabolical plans n’ shit.
-what the hell is up with this "Real World" music montage of pranks and hijinx?
-what's next? Johnny taking a picture of Reed jerking off? Johnny writing "exit only!" on his sister's ass while she's sleeping?
-"i don't feel safe! house meetin' y'all!"
-i’m so tired of these fake "extreme" athletes. fucking around on a bike or skateboard or with a Hackey Sack or driving a Big Wheel is NOT a sport. it’s fucking around with toys.
-i think i just saw Steve-O in the motorcross scene.
-pun check. “Johnny, you’re on fire!”
-when did the Human Torch have time to get a personalized license plate? that reminds me of the time my friend Rachel said about “Jeepers Creepers” personalized license plate, “yeah, it’s funny. but does that mean there was this gargoyle monster waiting in line at the DMV?”
-okay, this BMX shit is the third incarnation of Johnny’s “extreme” hobbies.
-pun check. “let’s see if we can get blood from a stone!”
-okay, if the blue suits morph with them (because they were wearing them during the storm) then why doesn’t the number "4" patch burn off or stretch or tear or whatever since it was added after they got back on earth?
-pun check “he’s always been a hothead!”
-"does the rest of him stretch like that?" tee hee. should have been called "The Fantastic Foreskin."
-Act 3 and i’m going to have to sleep for a while. i still feel sick. more water.
-morning! is there any chance i can finish this crap movie before i feed the cats and go to work. i'm going in...
-okay, if “The Thing” is eating, then that means he must take a shit at some point. and if he shits...it will look just like him and he can name it “Jr.”
-pun check. “bring it, burn-out!”
-”hyper” cooling unit? is that like an “extreme!” cooling unit.
-okay, if “The Thing” is drinking beer, that means he must piss. and if he can piss, that means he has an orange. stone. cock.
-wait a minute, when a blind person wants to do the tired old “touch-to-see-what-you-look-like” move, do they always start with the chest? what a coincidence that he was a bare-chested orange rock creature she was touching! i know that i've had many blind people come up to me and say, "let me see what you look like" then they tweak my nipples.
-what time is it? damn, this movie lasts forever. they should have called it "The Fantastic Four In The Morning."
-pun check. “while you’re playing Twister with your girlfriend!”
-hold on, my friend is telling me a story about how blind people get screwed up when it snows out because they can’t click their sticks against the seams in the sidewalks...
-i am not kidding. she gets more orange by the second.
-look at that stack of pancakes! "Hellboy" rip-off!
-The Thing’s mouth looks exactly like a stone vagina.
-pun check. “are you flexible enough to watch your own back?”
-uh oh, he’s going into the pod. here comes Brundlefly!
-i hate to say it but you know who The Thing looks like in this movie? motherfucker looks just like Joe Cabot from “Reservoir Dogs.”
-so they went to space for billions of dollars to get those conditions that they are now easily simulating with these pods and it took a whole two hours (5 minutes of screen time) to whip up?
-pun check. “why the long face?”
-so Doom shoots a bazooka out his window and is confident that he’s killed one of his enemies? kind cocky ain’t he? that’s like me spitting out the sunroof of my car and saying, “take that, Air Force One!”
-now that Dr. Doom has finally got into full costume mode, that voice does not fit at all.
-gee, The Thing is back. good thing he was able to step into that pod and perfectly recreate such a completely random space accident and look exactly the same!
-i’m not sure i understand Reed’s powers. is he super strong? he doesn’t seem to be, then all the sudden he’s throwing around mailboxes like they’re popcorn.
-he just turned into a giant diaphragm. as he stretches, wouldn't he be easy to tear him in half? his power make no sense at all.
-even if she’s invisible, shouldn’t there be a number “4” patch floating there?
-”this is going to be fun!” i assume that was supposed to be said in the trailer. glad i missed that. the only trailer i saw had a "Perfect Circle" (?) song in it. guess they needed the money.
-they totally fucked up his kneeling-to-propose gag. think about it. they did it backwards. they should have shown them both still face-to-face, then, when she looks down, she can see that he stretched his legs to kneel but his head wasn’t any lower. instead they fuck it up and show those things in the wrong order so there's no gag.
-it's like the "Pussy Wagon" keychain in "Kill Bill." they show the car first and therefore there's no gag when we see the keychain.
-like the wallet that said "Bad Motherfucker" in "Pulp Fiction."
-it's over. finally. i need more sleep. thank kee-rist that it's finally...wait. hold on. okay, why show him locked in one of a thousand crates for a “Raiders of the Lost Ark” rip-off ending? they didn't think past their theft. there's no irony like the end of "Raiders." they just stole the image. dumb.
-i keep hoping every movie ends with that Sha Na Na song like "American Werewolf in London" did. guess you can only do that once.

::: david - 9:25 AM [+] :::
...

"Eskimo!"
-Heathers

has anyone seen "The Song Remains The Same" lately? in case anyone has been wondering (and you should be) this is the complete list of activities that John Bonham apparantly does each and every day, all during the drum solo on "Moby Dick":

1.) he jogs
2.) he plays pool, l mean "snooker"
3.) he goes for a quiet country walk
4.) he, of course, plays the drums
5.) he detail his cars
6.) he drives very fast
7.) he rides on a motorcycle while standing up
8.) he drums with his hands
9.) he cruises at more reasonable speeds
10.) he drag races
11.) he works with his jackhammer
12.) he walks cows
13.) he plays bongos
14.) he goes on a carriage ride
15.) he teaches his son how to play the drums
16.) he drives his bulldozer (?)
17.) he saws lumber
18.) he welds something
19.) he drinks a large warm British beer

::: david - 10:39 PM [+] :::
...

“Sorry. I’m sorry...”
- “Waterworld” director’s commentary according to “The Simpsons”

as i watch another shit movie and drink by myself i realize something: a couple years ago when i first started this blog, there were about ten people from all over the country who stumbled onto each others blogs and read them every day. one by one these people either canceled or moved or just stopped writing on their blogs and one of the reasons given was that too many people that they knew were reading them now and it just wasn’t the same. i swore that would never happen with mine but you know what? that’s exactly what happened. i got excited about people reading my shit and told too many people in my life to read by shit and now it seems that i am censoring my shit! good news! not no more! if you know me and are afraid you’re going to read something upsetting, get the fuck out! this blog will be going back to the same angry ugly crap that i used to spew two years ago. for starters, my job. my job is a fucking joke. i work with a bunch of crazy fuckers who include me in dramas that are occurring only in their mind. yesterday i walked into the storeroom, listened to one of my co-workers let loose with a phlegm-rattling cough, the kind you always hear from a movie character right before they fucking die, and i said, “dude, you don’t want to be back here, do you?” i said this because 1.) he was coughing like he was an extra in the mini-series “The Stand” 2.) because he was telling me he didn’t want to be back there and 3.) because i would have rather done mindless bookstacking in the back instead of waiting on the Christmas mongoloids who wanted books (any book!) to put under the tree. an hour later my boss pulls me aside and asks why i’m trying to hurt her feelings. what?!? because i had no idea what they said to each other, i blamed Whooping Cough Boy but who knows what dots they connected in their feverish brains. both of them used to frequent this site so hey, open letter to ya, compare notes next time before you include me in stupid horseshit like that again. i had to explain to two people who were listening that “no, i wasn’t in trouble, but apparently those two managers just like to make each other feel bad no matter what they invent to do it. boggles the mind when you think about how many times they probably kept that stupid shit to themselves and just walked around all angry at you and you had no idea that you were “involved.” i swear to fucking Christ if i get “pulled aside” again, because of some fucking drama that any of those fuckers imagine in their heads I WILL WALK. this is what i keep saying so listen close...i am not involved in this drama that you people seem to think i am. just because you can keep bringing it up under the guise that i’m acting different guess what? i’m NOT. i have been completely consistent since day one. except for the fact that i toned down posts so as not to offend my new local readers, and now that’s back to normal! i act the same. but i’ve seen this before at many other jobs, the more someone gets to know me, the more assumptions they make about what i’m thinking and they are ALWAYS wrong. when i say to someone at work “i don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about” it is because i’ve spent the hours leading up to your nonsense thinking about everything i will be doing when i clock OUT. oh, while i'm burning bridges, one more thing. no one is allowed to get a pained look on their face when i come in 10 or 15 minutes late if management comes in a half hour late on the same day. new rule. i keep track of these things because you’d think i kicked a puppy to death in front of them when i have legitimate car problems. other people can miss TWICE the time i do and say whatever they want and there are smiles all around. don’t even try to tell me i’m wrong, I KEEP FUCKING TRACK OF THIS SHIT. i keep track of everything. i come in late after calling at least twice so there’s no misunderstanding and i’m hit with “don’t you feel bad?” what? WHAT? have you ever asked another employee that question? didn't think do. do i feel bad??? yeah, i feel bad that i have to drop another grand on this car, i feel bad about the shit that went wrong and all the people that i was rude and impatient to trying to get to work, but NO i don’t feel bad about some insane personal shit you made up in your head that makes you think i was doing anything to YOU. you tell me that your other managers say you’re being taken advantage of by me? let me get this straight. is this the manager who has been 15 minutes, 20 minutes, HALF HOUR late on at least five occasions that i and at least three other have witnessed? this person has the fucking balls to say anything about taking advantage? you have got to be fucking kidding me. sorry about the yelling but better here than at work, right? right right? fuck all of you. who the fuck do you think you’re talking to? someone rolls their eyes at me when i’m doing everything but pulling a Fred Flintstone and popping my feet out the bottom to walk to work. someone mutters “late again huh?” then watches one of the other fucking managers come in a half hour later and say she tripped and everyone smiles like she brought them candy. FUCK YOU! you bring me down with your hypocrisy and melodramatic bullshit. i won’t be around there much longer. maybe it’s kind of my fault. eventually at these jobs people get to know a little bit about you and then they think they can fill in the gaps with what they think they know. bad idea. you people don’t know shit. i wish i worked inside some sort of welding machine where the only human contact would be for someone to come by and change some bottle when i filled it with piss. now that would be the perfect job. no more guessing what someone has imagined they know about you. no more managers hiding in the back all day, then wandering out to sum up what you’re doing in five seconds. i’ll save part of this rant for when i’m more coherent (although spell-check works wonders with everything but the dyslexia) because i’m working on a thesis called “The Case Against Middle Management” which i hope to be shown someday in a motel room on Mexican cable. hey, while i’m thinking about it. you know what i really do feel bad about? we had a manager who had a Julius Caesar pulled on him by his crew and now works like three doors down. and i actually laughed and said, “why doesn’t he ever come in here?” thinking he might be embarrassed about something because of the way he left but now i understand. he just hates those people. there were managers who worked under him happily for years who decided to talk shit on him the minute new people showed up, being more two-faced than i’ve seen since about sixth grade. i look at them now and i think, where’s your fucking integrity? is this state so full of backwards morons that they’re used to doing things so obvious and never being called out on it? maybe so. anyway, like i said, don’t read anything here unless you want to feel bad. or good, if you’re a stranger! see how that works maybe now all those old readers will come back out of hiding. there used to be like 200 of you a day and now there’s like 20. let’s see if this is why. okay, i got to work on my grad school application now and i’m to drunk to do it without typos. see i just jinxed it, now i won’t get in and i’ll be among these crazy retail bastards for the rest of my life. if anyone is offended by this hey, remember the book "Harriet the Spy?" these things happen when you read someone's diary. and this is meant for my brothers and sisters all over the country that used to join me in saying all sort of hideous stuff about people in our lives. this is a necessary outlet and i already feel better like i took a long comfortable shit while eating a chicken leg and drinking a beer at the same time. and in case anyone is wondering, yes drinking and typing is a built-in excuse to talk shit with impunity. if i was really drunk, could i spell impunity?

::: david - 10:25 PM [+] :::
...

"C'mon and kiss me black."
-The Birthday Party

"Eight year-olds, dude."
-Walter


disclaimer (or spoiler alert or blatant attempt to get someone to read this):
by the end of this post i will somehow be defending pedophiles! how the hell does that happen?!? stick around!

well Halloween came and went. didn't get much candy or a chance to vandalize since KT sliced her finger open at work in the frame shop. she got seven stitches and it was just the inspiration i needed to finally carve one of the twenty pumpkins lying around the apartment. my friend Nate did a movie tribute (guess which movie!) on his and i gave the other side of the severed-finger pumpkin the tired but essential batsignal to shine on the wall. the cats chased the flickering light around for a while but i'm kinda glad i waited so long to carve them since they only lasted about three more days. tossed them in the river ("the Ohio River sir?") because they seemed to rot faster than i remembered. cooked up the seeds though. got a friggin' bucket of them left over even though i only ate like nine of them. did get to steal the pumpkins from the front of church however. so that's sort of in the spirit of things, i guess. serves them right, selling pumpkins for their fundraiser, then brainwashing the kids there that Halloween is evil. it's true, KT said "Happy Halloween!" to some little brat and the kid shook his head and said, "noooo, Halloween is bad!" poor little waterhead will grow up so confused he might stick his dick in a pumpkin and pray for forgiveness every time he smiles at the Charlie Brown Halloween Special.

the last radio show went real good. they get better every time (with the exception of the night of the transmitter crash aka "The Night of the Comet") and i tried to record the live feed off the internet but it crashed after three hours and now i have the show saved but chopped into these little ten-second clips that won't go back together without skips between them. the theme for the night was my thirtysome jobs i've had in my life and what i hated about every. single. one of them. i only got to something like job number seventeen and ran out of time because you can't really talk for more than a minute between songs without sounding like a complete tool. might do the last half of my job-hating next time around.

saw something last night on "Dateline" that angered me. they were setting up "online predators" by baiting them in online chatrooms then telling them to meet somewhere and then they ambush them with cameras and stern questioning in an empty house when they stumble in looking for the promise of 14 year-old sex. before i get to that though, let me preface my comments with too other examples of how you can fuck up a righteous cause by being a smug self-serving grand-standing asshole. a long time ago, like most people, i wanted to read everything i could about the Holocaust. and i get to this book called "Nazi Doctors" and there's this narrator relating a story about a Nazi "doctor" (they put the name in quotes every time to make sure the reader understood they weren't real "doctors." uh, we get it moron, thanks) who takes a baby and bashes it's head against a bed. i was reading that and, for some reason, it sounded false. now don't come at me with that "are you saying the Holocaust never happened!" or "see, the Holocaust never happened!" crap. this has nothing to do with that. i just got the feeling that the writer thought he had to keep topping himself with atrocities and that was his weak imagination doing the talking. his shitty writing and reporting made the rest of his book suspect. fast forward to Andrea Dworkin's book "Pornography." she's relating rape stories by these victims and i'm with her until she gets to this college girl talking about some fraternity rape and this girl's testimony starts to sound like those rash of laughable "my-satan-worshiping-family-made-me-drink-blood" hypnotherapy confession sessions that were popular about ten years ago. i started thinking "bullshit!" about two paragraphs into her story and BAM! the rest of the book was suspect. before you judge me, you have to picture the bad writing and shallow imagination at work in these testimonies. frat boys talking like James Bond villains. girls forced to dance and laugh and get drunk at gunpoint. diabolical plots to have her fuck every one of them over a period of three days where she feared for her life but told no one and ended up dating one of them for six more months. you'd think these frat house would be closed and they'd all be in jail right? but hmmmm, no one believed her. wonder why?

so both these books did the seemingly impossible. They made me unsympathetic for no-brainer arguments. they weren't happy with rape and Nazis being bad enough, oh no. the authors had to let their lack of imagination submarine the cause.

so anyway, i'm watching them bait and sting these pedophiles and sure enough, my anger towards the "online predators" turns into an intense hatred for the posturing fuck who steps up to question these men with the unspoken understanding that he's some kind of cop. because of the smug attitude and questioning by this host and the crappy exploitative nature of the "news" show (notice the quotes? that means i DON'T think it's "real," ah ha!) because of these things, the impossible happens! i actually start sticking up for the pedophiles! imagine that, a TV host that comes across worse than a fucking pedophile. the other people in the room watching the show were, of course, disagreeing with me but when they tell the one sick bastard to strip down so he's naked when he walks into their ambush i'm about ready to shoot my fucking TV Elvis style. of course he does walk in there naked because he's lonely and insane and they let him because it's great TV! and the host comes around the corner all serious saying, "why are you doing this?" and i'm screaming "BECAUSE YOU TOLD HIM TO FUCKFACE." that's one step away from telling him to stick his thumb up his ass for a million dollars then jumping out of the bushes with a camera to say all self-righteous "what kind of man sticks his thumb up his ass? what's the matter with you?" and because this show was such a pile of exploitative shit (not to mention homophobic, most of the men were coming to hook up with boys. that's no accident since the show knows that Joe Blow loves to see dem faggots get what they deserve!) i started to look for more ways to sympathize with these men getting lured with the promise of 14 year-olds. and i'm thinking, notice they didn't use a fake 5 year-old? that's because the show knows, as well as anyone that sees ten seconds of ads on TV, that today a 14-year old boy or girl bears little or no resemblance to a 14 year-old from even 5 years ago. so fuck "Dateline." why couldn't this guy get shived like the host of "Cheaters?" it was like watching "Dog: The Pussy-Ass Bounty Hunter" when i'm rooting for the host to get a shotgun blast to the face right in the middle of his sermonizing. and what did that fucker do last night, huh? this "Dateline" host with the frown and his fake-cop attitude that keeps these men sitting there scared of him? what did he do last night? bang some high school groupie? kick his dog? jerk-off to a cheerleading magazine in the bathroom at a bookstore? fuck him and that show. i'd love to fake being a pedophile to go to their fake set-up so i could sit there naked wearing swimfins like they told me to and i'd be like "we'll get to my perversions in a second, first let's look at these..." and then i'd take some ominous black and white (photoshopped) pictures out of a sinister manilla envelope i was hiding in my ass and i'd reveal my fake action shots of the host fucking a chicken or his own microphone and ask him all serious "why do you feel the urge to do this kind of thing?"

::: david - 10:11 AM [+] :::
...

"Ain't no thing but a chicken wing..."
- Outkast


need to post something. kind of in a rut lately. job is dull as fuck. every time i'm there i can think of a hundred other things i need to be doing. tired of Pittsburg. saw an Escalade today with a handicap sticker in the window. now, i don't want to jump to conclusions but there are two possible ways that someone is taking advantage of something there. finally saw "History of Violence," thought it was decent. surprised by the stuff that Cronenberg decided to leave out. in the comic book the main character's brother isn't a mobster, he's being held hostage by the mobsters. for like twenty years. on a meat hook. with his arms cut off. very harsh and the kind of thing that Cronenberg usually goes for. this movie is too mainstream and for him it's just a jerk-off. good shot of a man choking on his own smashed nose though.

right now out my window is a little show i refer to as "Crack Head Theater." starring this dumb bitch that lives in my apartment building who is always running around the parking lot laughing and getting into various cars for drug deals or some such obvious crap. sometimes she'll come out in her professional disguise (sunglasses and a baseball cap) and lurk around the dumpster rubbing sun-tan oil on her shriveled white arms and scabby knees. i have some pictures of her hijinx (stumbling around with a bottle of vodka) i'll try to dig them up. right now the crack-head is standing by the road and every time someone pulls in the parking lot, she quickly acts as if she's walking up or down the stairs. what a fucking dunce. i love how drug-addled morons are convinced that they're so sly and they're actually the most obvious idiots on the planet.

ever notice on the newer videogames that, even though they've added expensive new effects and voice actors to some classic characters (Crash Bandicoot villians for example) it has somehow given them less personality?

been listening to a lot of Outkast lately. even though, like my friend steve said, without the skits their albums would be fifteen mintues long, i still think they're the best at what they do ("i fight fires! it's what i do!" - Backdraft) and i like the fact that the one dude has a shark tank in his garage. that reminds me. anyone see that book about the genius who thought he was some kind of Bear Whisperer? it's called "The Grizzly Maze" and it talks about this guy who thought it would be a good idea to run around on all fours and live with the bears. guess what happened to him? he got FUCKING EATEN. all that was left was his head. his girlfriend also got eaten, right after she recorded him getting eaten. then i think the videotape got eaten. point is, there was a lot of eating. that doesn't happen enough, you know? animals just suddenly eating someone? you'd think it would happen more. you always here about how dangerous these animals are but there's like ten shows with guys swimming with crocodiles and having all these scary "near misses" from some snapping jaws. they have to get lucky at some point, right? i keep hoping. it's like the host of the show "Cheater" where he gets all righteous and jams his microphone in the face of someone who was fucking around, or getting fucking around on. you know what happened to him? he got eaten. just kidding. no, he only got STABBED IN THE GUTS. how funny was that??? reality show host gets shanked! should have been more headlines with those words. he gets on this boat and gets in this dude's face and says something like "how can you do this to your - GLORP!" knife in the stomach. i laughed so hard when i saw that i scared the crack-head and she dove into the dumpster.

but i was thinking, if Grizzly Man can try to be the Bear Whisperer, I want to be the Shark Whisperer. i mean, that one guy was riding on a shark in the opening scene of "Deep Blue Sea" and that's a true story, right? my god! the sharks are using tools!

::: david - 10:04 PM [+] :::
...

"Into the fluid!"
"Right you are, Ken!"
- MXC


home sick today with some intestinal distress. thought i'd catch up on some electronic mail n' stuff. a friend of mine made me into a South Park character and emailed it. surprisingly accurate, except that the book hides the sleeveless shirt the creature is wearing. and what is that book? looks like Cantonese subtitles.

since i used the word "cunt" twice within two posts i decided not to use it here. at first i was thinking of a way to sneak it in but then decided that would be juvenile.

so last wednesday's/thursday's show at WYEP went great. best one yet. had a duel between songs about Intelligent Design and Evolution. had about 20 requests for songs that mentioned a monkey (Rolling Stones "Monkey Man" Elvis Costello "Monkey To Man" Pixies, Peter Gabriel etc.) so the definition of "evolution songs" got stretched kinda thin. like "I Come From the Water" by the Toadies i would say yes definitely. but songs with mermaids in 'em? i don't know. on the other side of the debate, the Intelligent Design song just turned into "god songs" (aka Johnny Cash) with one strange exception. wait, make that two exceptions. first some dude calls and says "play the theme to 2001!" because he figures it's a slam dunk for evolution (because i was baiting the viewers into thinking that the score was closer than it was) but after i confessed that i couldn't find the song, i explained on the air that, even though the movie shows monkeys becoming men, and yes this is evolution, it also shows them gaining the knowledge to brain other monkeys in the skull with bone-hammers because they touched the big black slab. in other words, the textbook definition of "intelligent design." sure it's aliens and not god doing the tampering but i had to take that point away from evolution. and if Ken would have been up at that hour, he would said, "hell yeah!" high-fived his new baby and stuck in his copy of "Mission To Mars" to cry with Gary Sinese and that computer-generated alien. oh yeah, the second exception was "Dear God" by XTC. i know everyone thinks that would go against intelligent design or god songs because the narrator is verbally spanking god for all the evils in the world HOWEVER that does mean that the narrator is acknowledging the existence of god and i can't give it to evolution just because the singer is being "snarky." now if there would have been more of a parody of divine-intervention being a ridiculous concept because of natural disasters n' shit, then maybe i could see giving a point to evolution. but this singer is clearly addressing his deity so it's a god song. right up there with Joan Osborne (another request that night) and there was some controversy about Devo. i didn't know this until a listener explained it but "Devo" is short for "devolution" which becomes a third argument. if "devolution" is the opposite of "evolution" then who gets the point for playing "Jocko Homo?" see how complicated things got? and in spite of the glut of requests for that Pearl Jam song, it's got too many swear words in it. at the end of the night the score was tallied and both sides had the same number of songs. i did a sudden death overtime and got a request for Jeff Buckley "Hallelujah" which only has a biblical sounding word in the title as near as i can tell (plus it's kind of a pussy Lilith Fair sounding tune) so i didn't want that to be the tie-breaker...then suddenly there was an eleventh-hour request for the song "Lump" which squeezed evolution back into the science text-books! there were so many calls i promised a rematch next wednesday so if anyone can think of some good suggestions leave them in the comment box. we thought there were no more evolution or intelligent design songs after the first mix cd i brought with me, but the callers thought of like ten more. so i know there's more out there. remember, for a good song, the definition will be stretched to accommodate. hey, that sounded like one of those sex-ed books didn't it?

hey! back to the bathroom! i think i'm going to write a short story today about a toilet since it is now my best friend. how many stories about toilets can there be out there? maybe i can fill that void and finally publish something! think about it, anyone ever flip open their "New Yorker" and read:

"...i stared into the eye of the tiny brown hurricane, wondering how many flushes would be necessary. i decided that, since there wasn't a flower nearby to destroy, an odd number of flushes would mean "she loved me" and an even number of flushes would mean "she loved me not..."

::: david - 11:11 AM [+] :::
...

"I'm not going to smile today, I'm not going to laugh..."
-Cake


haven't been here in a while. had fires, hurricanes, floods, exploding busloads of senior citizens. sounds downright biblical, don't it? i was thinking, you know those rappers and athletes who are thanking god every time someone puts a microphone in their face? i was thinking that you couldn't possible have someone call these hurricanes God's Will this time, right? i mean there's no plus side to any of this that could be mistaken for devine intervention, right? right?! wrong! whenever a zealot is left hanging like that, they'll fill in the blanks with their own righteous cause. this is why we're hearing hateful shit like the refugees deserved what they got, that the newly homeless down there are doing better on a football field than living in a shack, that THEY should have left town so it's their fault they got killed, that they're spending their government-issued two thousand dollar credit cards on booze and drugs. see, this is the problem, every time there's a natural disaster it wipes out a bunch of non-whites and that makes it easy for the white people to say hey! there must be a good reason! god wouldn't kill any innocent people, right? the simple fact is you're less likely to be broke and a victim of the weather if you're white. so when there's a mudslide or something, the broke brown people in the world get killed real quick. even though this is Logic 101 you still get racist fucks like the former first lady hinting that the victims are exaggerating their plight. that the the hurricane is "working out well for them." then she says her comments were midunderstood. people like her, they disquise their racism in these little snickers and codewords. see, i'm a hateful fuck but i won't hide anything at all. i'll drop my dick right in her fucking bowl of cereal. here is exactly what i'm thinking right now, this will leave little room for misinterpretation, confusion or taking it out of context:

i would like to grab Barbara Bush by the face with a kind of "fish hook" wrestling move. i will hook her mouth and maybe a nostril and i will drag her to the nearest homeless person. on the way there she will probably let out a hideous bird-like squawk and her pearls will be flying everywhere and one of her pointy shoes will fall off as she claws at the air to keep her balance. she has probably never been touched in twenty-some years so having her face man-handled like a fucking bowling ball will be very traumatic for her. in her panic, she'll make strange animal-like noises and maybe piss herself. when i finally find a homeless person, i will politely ask them to point me to the last place they shat and i will rub that miserable dried-up cunt's face in homeless shit until she's forced to swallow some in order to breathe. then i will run away because everything is funnier when you run away after you do it.

on the lighter side of things, i think that show on Spike TV where they dub voices over that crazy Japanese game show is hysterical. or is it Chinese? see, i'm a racist too i guess.

::: david - 1:52 PM [+] :::
...

“I need to return some videotapes..."
- American Psycho



FICTION:



Swatter



-Where’d you go?

The drive starts off bad. Cars honking as I’m white-knuckling the wrong way up the last one-way street rather than driving all the way around the block like I’m supposed to. And I’m messing with the broken phone the whole time, still thinking that if enough of the pieces stay together when I open it, maybe it’ll work again. All I need is for the screen to come on so I can get those numbers out of it. I think about last summer when the phone died the first time and decided to delete all the numbers in the address book (90% of them were hers) and how she took out the phone that day, saw all her friends and family erased, and whispered all sad, almost to herself, ‘where’d I go?’ I didn’t understand her question until now. She’d thought I’d erased her on purpose. And I didn’t admit it then, but she was right. It did feel just like that.

-Where’d you go? I ask myself. That’s all I really want to know.

I drop the movies into the slot and stop to look at a sign on the wall in the vestibule.
It says ‘This Could Happen To You!’ and nailed under this warning is a melted videotape.
Bullshit, I think to myself. They did that with a blowtorch just to scare people.
I was walking back to my car with my head down when I saw it.

A huge praying mantis, almost a foot long, slowly marching towards that glowing white sign, a beacon so bright I saw it from my apartment across the river, a lighthouse cutting through a mile of river fog. I stare up at that sign and the mad collision of bugs buzzing around it and wonder what kind of creature would want to climb into that hurricane of webs and wings and stingers. I start to get nervous watching the mantis creep across the parking lot even though I swear the damn thing just looked both ways for oncoming traffic. I bend down, and its head spins all the way around to look up at me. You never see them around anymore, maybe because the female’s habit of eating her suitor’s head while he’s banging away on her shiny green ass doesn’t help improve their numbers.

God damn that thing moves like no other bug I’ve ever seen.
Maybe it’s the size of it that’s so strange. Maybe it’s because it’s the only bug I’ve ever seen with a neck. Maybe I’ve never really looked at one before. Or maybe it’s something else.

I get closer. I stare at its feet, watching the way it tests the concrete like a child dipping a toe into the deep end of the pool. Its body looks heavy, like a vegetable, so big I can actually hear it taking steps, big enough that I’m wondering if it can scream. Its torso moves independent of its legs, as if four bugs got broken in half and the wrong parts were glued back together. And those claws that gave it its religious name lend it more human movements than any insect should have. And that strange goddamn head? There’s more intelligence in those eyes than most cats. Especially that dumbass cat she left behind. And it looks like a cat, cleans its face like a cat. Good thing there’s no green cats in the world or somebody’d get confused, scream, and try to swat it. I stare at the tips of its antennae. They wave through the air toward me, like a baby’s feet treading water, smelling my breath or hearing my voice or whatever the hell it is they do. I suddenly realize what it looks like. What it is that makes those bugs such a shock to see.
It’s half-man, half-horse, half-cat, half-bug. A praying mantis is like a tiny green centaur.

* * *

-Where’d you go?

-Nowhere.

-Just tell me the truth.

-I swear.

I picked up the antenna and tried to bend it back into shape.
I tried to screw it back into the top of the phone, as if that was enough to make it work again even though the screen was shattered and the battery was bobbing in a nearby mud puddle. I sigh and hold out an open hand.

-Then just give me my fucking key back.

-No. Everything I own is in there.

-I don’t give a shit. If you’re leaving me, then really leave this time.

-I am, trust me.

-Fine. I don’t want you coming back when I’m not home.

-Why? You think I’m going to stick fingerprints on all your records?

-Now I do.

-Fuck off.

-Give me the key.

-Don’t hurt my cat.

-What? Where the hell did that come from? I would never hurt that stupid cat...

-I just thought that...because you’d never hurt me...you’d take it out on the cat instead.

-Like you just took it out on my phone?

She shook her head and turned away. I tried to think of everything I’d been meaning to say. Then her ride was there, and she was gone, and I was still sitting in the street trying to put my phone back together. I fished the battery out of the puddle and watched them drive off. Should have known it would be her ‘best friend’ coming to pick her up. That’s who she must have called on my phone before she broke it. The phone didn’t even have her name stored in there, just the words, ‘best friend.’ I wondered who else she called on my phone tonight. Guess I’ll never know. Guess that’s why she broke it. Unbelievable. Her best friend shows up to get her before the fight really picks up steam. Coincidence? And now the two of them are going to drive around all night and talk shit about me. Perfect. And what was that shit she said about hurting her cat? If she cared so much about her cat, why’d she leave it behind? She only said that crap about her cat because I ranted for about a week after her best friend got smacked in the face by that asshole. And even though I secretly thought that if any girl deserved to get hit, it was her, I was still ready to defend her.

Now the two of them were driving around judging me? Was this a joke? I mean, now when I think about my girlfriend’s best friend (fuck, that’s a mouthful) getting hit in the face I start to think, was it really that serious? Especially since it was that crazy bitch that got hit. I wasn’t there to see it, but they acted like it was this big, last-round uppercut. After the bell when the gloves were down. At first, anyway. They changed their tune later. But how bad was it compared to what she did to him? I didn’t see any bruises. It’s just skin against skin, right? Out loud I said the usual, of course, ‘Don’t let me ever see him around,’ and ‘I always knew he was a pussy,’ and ‘I’ll beat his ass when I see him, seriously I will.’

It was straight from the playbook, but I meant all of it. Honestly, what kind of gutless fuck hits a girl? I’d never do that. That’s what I said then, and that’s what I was saying now. Then, after all their crying and all my tough talk, this idiot, my girl’s best friend, she takes this guy back?! Starts saying it wasn’t really a punch. More of a backhand, she says. Almost an after-thought, she explains. Half-hearted. Didn’t even feel it. Precisely one-third as hard as she hit him since she was moving in the other direction. Who slowed down the videotape and watched it with a stopwatch and a slide rule to figure out all that math? My girlfriend stomped her foot and told me to stop worrying about it, said it had nothing at all to do with me.

-It was more like a ‘swat.’ That’s the word she used. That’s what they both told me.

-Rhymes with ‘twat,’ I said. No one laughed, so I stopped talking about it. But I didn’t stop worrying about it. I swore next time I saw him out in the wild I’d pretend that it was her best friend I was hitting.

-Please, I just don’t want to talk about it anymore, she pleaded.

And now they were driving around judging me after they forgave that fucker? Even though I proved my restraint tonight? Even after all this shit in the middle of the street? She smashes my cell phone at my feet so I can’t check the numbers she called and it’s my fault?

And still I stood there and did nothing except quietly reassemble it like it was a jigsaw puzzle I just got for my ninth birthday. Thanks for the challenge, honey! I didn’t get you nothin’! I was going to scream at you, but now I think I’ll just happily sit here in this mud puddle next to these mosquito eggs and floating candy wrappers and oil slicks of dog piss and see if I can solve this phone in six moves or less.

And why’d she say that about her cat? Let me get this straight. She thinks I suppress all my anger against her and her and him and everyone else in my life, then lose my temper direct it all at her stupid animal? Just because one time, six months ago, I smacked it on the nose with a fly swatter when it was licking my goddamn ravioli? She thinks about all this way too much.

* * *

After ten minutes, the praying mantis is safely across the parking lot and starting up the pole to the blinding white sign above. It taps at the smooth metal pole with a claw, and I’m thinking there’s no way it’s getting up there without a little grappling hook and some action-movie theme music. Then suddenly it’s climbing, holding onto nothing that I can see. I smile for the first time since she left.

I turn to go back to my car and almost run into about five people watching me watching that bug. Head down again, I walk quickly through them all, bumping into a woman with a bright green shirt. The kind of crazy green that means 'don't eat me' in the insect world. No wonder I bumped into her. All she needs are the big fake eye spots on her back like the caterpillars have to fool the birds into thinking they’re snakes and her camouflage would be complete. When my shoulder hits her elbow, she squawks like an animal and drops her copy of ‘Godzilla 1975’ to the concrete, almost tripping over it. One of her kids quickly retrieves it. I keep moving, waiting for her to make another noise. Once inside my car, I hear someone finally spot the mantis.

-Ug!

One of her boys sees it first. It’s not an ‘ug,’ I almost tell him, it’s a ‘bug,’ stupid. She squawks, he grunts. Does this family use any words to communicate?

Then I start thinking. What if because I drew this crowd, one of them ends up killing it? How long will they watch it climb before someone takes off a shoe? Is it cold enough outside for someone to take off a shoe? I don’t need that kind of guilt right now. I stop at the parking lot exit and idle, watching even more people gather around the sign. Look at these clowns. I never should have stopped to look. It’s like Tom Sawyer white-washing that fence. People driving by are gonna think that ‘Used Movies For $9.95!’ is the best deal ever.

Finally everyone walks away except for that woman in green and her two little boys. I start to pull out into traffic, and that’s when I see a blur of motion in my rearview mirror. It’s the woman in green, swinging at the pole with her videotape. My heart jumps, and I’m so angry I punch the dashboard hard enough to crack something in the car or in my fist. You fucking bitch. Did you just kill it? Why the hell would you kill it? Was it climbing too slow for you? Was it looking right at you?

Wait, maybe she missed it. I’m at the bridge again, and I want to go back and look, but it’s all these fucking one-way streets in my way. In the corner of my eye, I think I see a cop. Then he’s gone. To get back, I’d have to cross the bridge, do a U-turn and then circle the block to get back there. I do it. I’ve got to see if it’s really dead.

I turn and turn and turn and turn and think the only thing that separates rats from cats is the fact that cats actually look into your eyes. They seem to know what eyes are for, and I think that bug did, too. Then I wonder why the hell every road in this town seems to anticipate the direction I need to go and place an arrow, red light, or dead-end in my way.

That’s when the cop pops back out of the glow of the fog to nail me for my illegal U-turn. His flashers fill my car with color and confusion like the smoke machines and lasers lighting up a stage when a musician reappears to surprise a weary crowd with an unwanted encore. He walks up and shines a flashlight in my eyes and asks what I’m doing, and through the glare I see that he’s really a she. I tell her I’m taking back some movies and I need to get there before midnight or they’ll be late again. For a second, she seems like she’s going to let me go. Then she says ‘show me the movies’ and, of course, I can’t. She stands there shaking her head and writing the ticket while I babble about one-way streets and bugs and bright green shirts and videotapes, not realizing what I must sound like. She interrupts me by ripping the ticket from the book five inches from my face.

-Right there’s the court date if you want to dispute anything, she says, and then she’s gone. I laugh, imagining myself explaining everything to a judge.

Now I definitely got to go back, I think to myself as I read the fine on the ticket. Now that bug’s life is worth a hundred and sixty bucks.

I’m finally back at the video store and running toward that sign. The praying mantis had made it about five feet up the pole. The top half of the bug, the human half, is intact but hanging onto nothing, a hooked claw still pulsing in the night air. The bottom half, the animal half, is detonated below, a green comet streak of gore and legs trailing down the pole behind it. I grind my teeth so hard I think they’ll explode in my mouth.

-You stupid fucking cunt, I whisper. It would make sense to no one but me, but I’d fucking punch you square in the face right now. Then I’d grab your eyes and mouth like a bowling ball and drag you back to the scene of your crime. If I did that kind of thing, I mean. Which I don’t. Something should be done though, I decide. I need to say something to her. How could I find her? I should never have left the parking lot in the first place.

Wait a minute. I remember. She rented ‘Godzilla 1975.’ Who the hell would ever pay to watch that movie? An ill-fated Japanese disco musical? Grown men roller-skating and fighting in monster suits? I laugh to myself as I drive straight to a 24-hour store and scrounge the sale bins for my own copy. Turns out it should be called ‘Godzilla $19.95’ because that’s how much that piece of shit costs. Now we’re up to one hundred eighty bucks and climbing for that bug.

The next day I park my car in direct sunlight, roll up my windows and place my new movie on my dusty, cracked dashboard. So this is how a dog feels, I think as sweat rolls down my nose. I stare at the videotape, wondering if it really will melt. As I look at it, I think I see green streaks from the mantis along the edge, then I remember that it isn’t the movie that killed it.

I’m shocked to find that it does melt. It takes almost eight hours. I swear I didn’t blink the entire time, so no one could have switched tapes or snuck in a blowtorch. Eight hours, and it actually melts as I watch. It could have been the heat stroke, but I swear I saw it happen. If I’d stared out the window instead, the world would have looked like one of those time-lapse movies.
I could have watched a traffic signal flashing like a strobe light, or a tree straining for the sun, or a bowl of fruit shrinking into mold while it’s being painted, or a swing-set being constructed around a child by its parents, or a bird’s nest being built from plastic bags and gas station receipts, or a flower closing around a dying, broken ant, or her dead cat curling into a rising boil of maggots under my bed, , or a drive-in screen slumping toward the cars on the ground during a thousand drive-in movies...

* * *

For three hours after the ravioli incident, I explained to her the physics of a fly swatter and why it wasn’t my fault that it hit her cat that hard. I looked it up online. I went to the library. I pulled out a tape measure and a bathroom scale. I reenacted the crime with a stuffed animal. I drew her a diagram in the tomato sauce. She wasn’t buying it.

Last night when she broke my phone and left me, I went back inside and sat in the dark with two rented videotapes that we never got around to watching carefully balanced on my knees. One box had a picture of a half-man, half-woman on it. The other one had a half-man, half-shark. Seventy-two hours ago, she was standing next to a bubblegum machine in the video store with me laughing and saying that those two movies would make a damn good theme night. The half-man, half-shark movie fell off my knee first. I heard her cat panic at the noise and crash headfirst into the closet door. I picked the movie up and read the receipt taped to it. Two days late already. I’d take them back right now, but I didn’t want to leave the apartment. Without my cell phone, I needed to be at home to get her call. I sat in the dark waiting for her to think I’d calmed down and call me so I could yell at her some more. Her cat creeped up to sniff my leg. Can they smell anger? Or is that dogs? I heard him licking his paw and picking at his claws. He licks himself like he’s injured every time I look at him wrong.

Look at that thing. He bashes his own head into the closet door and now I’m the enemy? You know, I’ve seen people hit their dogs with newspapers across the nose and the dog still lovingly looks up at them like they’d drag them out of a fire and twenty miles to the hospital. This cat gets a small nudge off my lunch last winter when I’m trying to eat my last can of ravioli, and it still licks its foot like it’s broken in ten places.

I’ve noticed that when her cat sleeps in sunbeams, it looks green in direct sunlight, but only if you stare at it too long. I told her this once and she asked me, ‘how do you know green to you is green to me?’ Then she said it didn’t matter, that ‘everything turns green when you stare at it too long.’ She had a point.

I sat in the dark, and I thought about all the things I had to do for her to take me back last time. Like tell her why I loved her. This seemed like such a simple question, but it was very important to her. I swore I already had a list of things written down somewhere, ready to be read to her in case of just such an emergency. It was a good list, I swear. It started at her feet and ended at the tips of her antennae, and it described everything I loved about everything in between. I just never got around to writing it. I mean reading it. She would scream that I could never tell her one thing that I loved about her, and I would swear that I had that list somewhere if she’d just give me a fucking minute to go look for it.

-I wished you’d make eye contact more, I joked. Then she was glaring at me and I changed my mind.

Okay. The top of your head always smells good, I offered.

-That’s it? She waited for more.

I just stood there, and at that moment she hated me. I deserved it.

I always suspected she had a different kind of list for me. And the fact that I never took movies back on time would be in the top five.

I sat in the dark and stared out the window, watching for her headlights to hit the trees at the end of our street. My neck hurt from staring at that one spot, and I turned to stretch and look across the river while my muscles relaxed. That’s when I saw the glowing sign of the video store cutting through the fog hanging on the water. It was the only thing I could see. On the other side of the bridge, down a bizarre series of pain-in-the-ass, one-way streets. Five more bucks in late fees if I didn’t get there by midnight.

Okay, screw it, I thought. I’d run the movies back right now and be back in ten minutes. She couldn’t call a broken phone anyway.

* * *

Eight hours in a car. Doesn’t sound crazy? Try it without driving anywhere.

I rub my eyes and get ready to open the car door. I hesitate, thinking about the time my VCR ate my favorite movie, and after I pulled out all the entrails out of the machine, I tried to fix it myself. I took all the crunchy sections and cut them out, then I spliced the undamaged parts of the tape back together. I figured, hell, whatever’s missing couldn’t be too important, right?

Then I was watching that movie with some friends and the hero was walking down the street when the picture skipped, flashed, jumped and suddenly that hero was walking in the other direction and sporting a black eye. Everyone was like, ‘what the fuck?’ and we laughed and tried to come up with our own scene to fill in the gap in the tape, our own reasons why his eye suddenly went black.

I check the rearview mirror. Even though my eye didn’t suddenly go black, I know I don’t come out of the car the same way I went in. I could have done anything with those eight hours, and instead I wasted all that time watching the sunlight twist a videotape into a lump over the course of an entire workday. The sign in the vestibule will read ‘It Happened To Me!’ and under it will be a picture of me, 10 pounds lighter, covered in sweat, grinning like a wrestler on the scale who just made weight. When I think about it all later, I’m guessing I probably just ended up squeezing that movie in my fists and smashing it into the dashboard anyway. I mean, who the hell would sit in a car for eight hours to watch a videotape melt?

The next day she still hasn’t come back. I treat her cat with more care than I ever did before, and she’s not even around to see it. I walk into the video store holding the fucked-up videotape, and I tell the twelve-year-old manager behind the counter that my girlfriend left this movie in my car, and could I pay for it, please? Some number is still visible on a twisted sticker and he looks it up in the computer.

-Nineteen ninety-five...plus tax, he says.

-Of course it is, I laugh.

He looks at me funny while I’m smiling.

Actually, it’s over two hundred bucks, I almost tell him. And climbing.

Instead, I tell him I’ll need a receipt. He sighs and prints one out, ripping it off the machine and throwing it at me even angrier than the cop did with the ticket. I study the paper and just like I’d prayed (something I never did before and haven’t done since) there’s the rental history of the masterpiece ‘Godzilla $19.95’ and a list of names and numbers. I match a name up with the night she left me. Wait. Who left me? I’m confused, did my girl really rent a Godzilla movie the night she broke my phone? She’d never watch that shit. Suddenly I see the name I’m looking for on the bottom left-hand corner of the page. That’s her name? Weird. I could have sworn I knew her.

And there’s her address. They shouldn’t give this out to just anyone, I think to myself. What if some crazy bastard was stalking someone? Remind me to change my address to a fake one when I renew my video store membership.

Back in my car and I see that I’m low on gas. I’m not gonna make it to her house, and I still got five days of back and forth to work before I get paid again. I stop at my dad’s house, and he bounces a ten-dollar ball off my chest, not even taking the time to make a little green paper airplane out of it like he used to. He turns away before I can say thanks and mumbles something about how I need a sense of responsibility. Or does he say ‘sense of direction?’ I start to leave then stop in the doorway and turn around, the screen banging loudly against my foot. He looks up at the noise. I quietly explain to him that I’ve never been so motivated in my life. That actually I do have a sense of direction this time. That I know exactly where I’m going.

Running down his driveway, I remember my dad once telling me that it’s illegal to kill a praying mantis in this state. And I’m glad I wasn’t thinking about this fact when I got pulled over or that officer would have had to taser me when I excitedly explained to her that I was now her partner and this could be a goddamn buddy-cop film we were in.

On the way down the last one-way street, I see a car that reminds me of my girlfriend’s best friend, and I think about how this ‘best friend’ never referred to my girlfriend as her best friend. I always thought that shit had to be mutual. Isn’t that like saying you’re someone’s husband but they aren’t your wife? Like still referring to a girl as your girlfriend even after she’s gone?

I drive straight there. I’m there fast as fuck. No wrong-way trips down one-way streets. No bridges or rivers. No U-turns or cops. No crushed, steaming videotapes splintering and hissing and unspooling around my white and purple knuckles.

She comes to the door and stares at me. My eyes have trouble focusing on her face through the metal screen. I can’t seem to tell her why I’m there even though I had a whole speech ready. I was going to ask her if she thought those bugs could sting you. Ask her if that’s why she had to kill it. I was going to explain that it couldn’t have hurt her, that they actually devour much more harmful insects, things that can sting you, that she didn’t need to kill it just cause it was moving slow enough for her to catch, that it’s not okay to kill something just ‘cause it can’t make any noise, that she’s teaching her two boys not to respect life, that they’ll end up abusing women when they’re older if she continues to step on every creature slower than her. And I’d ask her if she noticed that it was looking right at her.

I say none of this. I ask her one question instead. And she’s as confused as I was when my girlfriend said the same words to an empty phone.

-Where’d you go?

She doesn’t answer. She doesn’t come out or let me inside. She’s standing on the other side of the screen door thinking about the question instead of the answer, and I’m looking at her through that screen door thinking about the ravioli incident with the cat and the physics of a fly swatter. I remember loudly reading something to my girlfriend about how a solid object like a hand can always be sensed and easily avoided by an insect. And how it’s that screen on the end of the stick that makes up the average flyswatter that does all the magic. It’s that screen that makes it possible for the fly not to see it coming.

And even though I’ve never hit a girl in my life, that’s when my arm shoots out and plows through her screen door, my fist disappearing halfway into her mouth, the heat of her breath on my knuckles loaded with the words she never got to use.

This is not something that I do, I think to myself. Never before and never again. And it’s not a swat, not a slap or that backhand that you always see in the movies. It’s a full-tilt right-cross to the teeth right at the end-of-the-round bell that sends her spinning around on one foot, her hands grabbing and ripping down the hole in the screen door to keep herself standing. I turn the knob and push her back, prying the door open with my foot. She struggles hard to keep me outside, so I step through the hole she tore in the door and start wiggling my way in. She runs away, and inside the house it’s dark and smells like warm laundry and candles. I turn and see her two boys coming around the corner, eyes wide in shock at the sight of me squeezing through the hole like a barnyard animal being born.

For some reason, they come running at me, and I get them both into headlocks and pick them up off the ground. The kids are choking, and the woman is screaming and fumbling with the phone while her mouth bleeds down her hand, streaming through the black curls of cord tangled around her arm. Do they still make phones like that? Does anyone still rent videotapes? I tighten my grip to quiet the boys, wondering if the woman will use words or grunts to describe the scene to the cops like she described that bug to the kids. I’m almost laughing as I picture myself in court, explaining my week to the judge.

I imagine myself pointing with a broken car antennae to a drawing of an insect, a big bug the way a child draws it, a huge cartoon creature with a smile on its face and shoes on all fifty of its feet and a telephone in its claws. I’d start at those fifty green shoes and work my way up, carefully listing everything that makes the praying mantis unique and everything I love about them. Or, at least, everything that makes a bug worth two hundred bucks and three days of my time. The jury would nod their understanding. I imagine my next exhibit, photographs of my orange-stained shirt from the ‘ravioli incident.’ And then my last piece of evidence before the defense rests. A detailed diagram of the scene of the crime, your honor. An impossible map of one-way turns and bridges and rivers. I point to this map and I ask everyone in the room:

How could I have possibly driven there? On an empty gas tank? Impossible, I’d say to them all. It wasn’t me. Before or since. I call my girlfriend as a witness. And not just to see her again, I swear.

The boys are biting me now. I feel their tiny fists on my arms, their sticky, candy-covered fingers pinching my skin. I lean down and I can smell their hair. I’m thinking to myself, if I was an insect, if I really did these kinds of things, I’d eat their fucking heads they smell so good.



© 2007 david james keaton

::: david - 10:25 PM [+] :::
...

"With a dying world below, and a microphone..."
-Live

here's a question for you:

what's a better invention? the "Cheese-us?" or Fish Jerky? these are two things i thought up recently and they didn't generate a tenth of the excitement i had when i thought of 'em. The "Cheese-us" would simply be a Jesus...made out of cheese!!! think about that! fucking genius. you could subsitute it for communion wafers. and my other invention is Fish Jerky. i had four bags of jerky at work and was thinking, why not Fish Jerky? just the name Fish Jerky sounds cool enough to start making it. who's with me? anyway, the "Cheese-us" almost inspired a call to the human resources complaint line at work. didn't happen though, probably because i was begging for them to call, cause that's just free publicity for my "Cheese-us!" never mind.

yes, The Devil's Rejects is a masterpiece. it is the nastiest movie i've seen in a looooong time. it's the movie you wanted when you saw "House of 1000 Corpses" and said, "goddammit, this is the same cutesy post-modern bullshit that Rob Zombie said he was tired of." notice the perfect 1970's credit sequence. i thought it was "The Wild Bunch" for a minute when the dude says "if they move kill 'em" then POW "directed by Sam Peckinpah" comes on the screen. except this time the dude goes, "you're not getting off that easy bitch" or something equally inspiring and POW "directed by Bobby Zombie" on the screen and these big monolithic letters for the title. so 70's i almost dug out my 45 of "Seasons in the Sun." and notice the only time "Freebird" has ever been cranked where it doesn't make you groan. that alone is a milestone. added bonuses, forced sodomy at gunpoint, taunting of Christians, unexplained multi-racial families, dude from "Dawn of the Dead," Zombie's wife's naked ass, the chick from "Tremors 2" naked and humiliated, and more dust and blood and highways than i could have hoped for. good shit. this is what a horror movie should be like. it should make you feel all wrong, like you're 9 and you sneaked into something you shouldn't have.

i still have no computer. i'm at the radio station trying to post and host at the same time. so there will be typos here and wrong songs played there. not yet though. some guy just requested an 8 minute Stone Roses song, and since requests have been scare tonight i'm going to play it. i'm trying to showcase Stereophonics with a song an hour by them since they got that new "Sex Violence Other" album out. i heard a couple songs off it and it sounded like the Doves to me. not sure how i feel about that.

lately i can't read anything about the Evolution Vs. Intelligent Design (aka Flat Earth Theory) without a vein in my balls throbbing in anger. i do recommend the article in the new issue of The New Republic for the last word on the subject. there's enough information in there to destroy any Creationist in zero point two seconds.

here's some more hate-mail i sent to hack reporters. this one going to a newspaper in my hometown of Toledo:

----------

i just read the Bob Frantz article about the potential 911 movie and i have to comment on what a worthless piece that was. never mind his right-wing slant, what a lousy bit of writing. he had no point when he started and none when he finished. it read like a zero draft, like a rambling high school paper. how do you employ someone with such a lack of skill? the disrespect for the craft of writing (even if it is just an editorial) is appalling.

but what i liked most about this man's article was the way he summed up the combination fetish/horror reaction to everything 911. he's exactly the same person that says "remove the Trade Center from the poster of the new Spiderman movie! we haven't healed yet!" then turns around and buys a 50 dollar commemorative 911 coin, made from metal found a ground zero. think about that? what's more offensive? maybe it's the person who collects that coin because he can't understand that he's the worst kind of rubbernecker and death junkie and tries to pass himself off as a patriot. meanwhile, no movie can EVER show the trade center and it must be erased from the current ones because this tragedy needs to be hijacked for some obvious grandstanding. i would love to take a roll of those 911 coins in my fist and punch every one of these people straight in the mouth.

-djk
pittsburgh

-----------

no response this time though. last time i sent something to him he fired back "thanks for reading!" which pretty much negated everything i had to say. i guess i didn't learn my lesson. listening to The Lemonheads now. these songs are too short, don't even give you time to juggle the cds. you know, it's so true about how you run out of favorite songs almost immediately when you're deejaying. i've come to rely on requests as my lifeline to fill the last two hours.

p.s. just noticed Mike Vernon from the Red Wings is talking trash in my comment box on the previous post down there. he should realize that the last time he actually won a fight was against our mutual friend Jerry. it wasn't pretty and, strangely enough, it was on TV...

::: david - 2:02 AM [+] :::
...

"What if half the things ever said turned out to be a lie?"
- Prince "The Truth"


first off, i'm on the air in an hour so go to the WYEP website. that's W Y E P dot O R G. request some songs and i'll play all that shit. i swear i will. do it dammit. it makes the time go faster.

so what's up with the cars lately with the loud mufflers? it's not that there's a big engine, it's just some bullshit where they got a hole in the exhaust and it's sounds loud so suddenly these assholes think they're the fast and the furious. it reminds me of little kids who put a card in the spokes of their tricycle to pretend it's a motorcycle. you sound like fools. stop it.

okay, since i got my songs ready early, here's a question to ponder while i kill this last hour. What irritates you more:

1.) people who get all excited to correct you when you're talking about an event after midnight and you say "night" and they're like "uhhh, actually, that's the morning" as they wipe the drip of snot from their nostril. does anyone really think it's morning until birds start chirping? of course not. but people jump on this technicality like they've spotted the yeti. or...

2.) people who exaggerate the importance of their mailbox by saying "it's a federal offense" to mess with it. i'm so sick of hearing that. not just because i was involved in some random mailbox destruction but because people seem to think they're in the FBI because they heard that "federal offense" phrase about the mail. as if their mailbox is going to have a circle of men in black suits with earpieces trying to figure out exactly how i climbed up the pole to shit inside AND put up the flag.

so which is it? which is more annoying? at work they voted that it's actually me (even though i wasn't offered as a choice) because i waited long and hard to be able to send an Elvis book back to it's publisher just so i could sing "return to vendor!" while i taped the box shut.

ever hear of the Red King Syndrome? based on a character from Alice in Wonderland. it's when they didn't dare wake up the king because they thought they were all part of his dream and they would cease to exist if he opened his eyes. it's also the name of a great graphic novel about the lame-sounding but incredibly thought-provoking "Miracleman." anyway, i keep thinking about that. how maybe no one exists until i look at them. at work i kept doing that to people. i'd turn around and say "look, Jamie just got here!" and tell him how he better entertain me quick before i turn around and he disappears again. he blinked slowly and shook his head, not really worried about the danger of me looking away from him. still not sure if this theory is true. obviously, there's no way to ever prove it. it's kind of like a reverse of a classic Sisters of Mercy song title, changing it too:

"You Don't Exist Unless I See You"

::: david - 7:30 PM [+] :::
...

"He had a voice that would make a wolverine purr..."
-Anchorman

so here's a first-draft excerpt since i'm excited about being only FIVE pages from finishing my script "Spunkwater." the story this character is telling is 83% true. i'll tell you what wasn't true at the end of this post. sorry about the stupid names i'm forced to use. maybe it's just me but all names in fiction sound dumb. i wish i could just number the bastards and be done with it. George Foreman had the right idea when he named his kids. anyway, here we go. third act rambling:

---

Jacki sits down on the floor of the dark kitchen, head down, phone against her head.

RICK (V.O.)

...maybe you’re thinking that it’s too
much of a coincidence, all these things
I’m saying. I swear it’s true. This
kind of shit surrounds me. All my life
I’ve dealt with irony and coincidence
and synchronicity. You know those two
apartments that you saw? Here’s something
even stranger. One time I met this girl
and went to her apartment and we watched
some shitty movie and fucked around and,
as the sun was coming up and the alcohol
was wearing off, I looked around and
realized where I was. You know where I
was? In an apartment that I’d lived in
ten years before. How about that shit?
I knew I was in the same building when
we ended up there, I even said something
to her about it. But when I realized it
was the same place, the same corner of
the room I was sleeping in, the same
water tower that I was looking at out
the window, she wouldn’t believe me.
No one would believe me. I ended up
stealing one of her magazines from
behind her toilet to get the mailing
label off of it. Then I made a photocopy
of an old tax form and emailed them to
everyone who doubted me. Then I worried
she'd think I was stealing her mail and i
burned the magazine. Then I worried that
someone would know I was burning her
magazines so I lit a candle. And you know
what happened, after all that? Everyone started
saying that if I did live before, I must
be some kind of stalker. I would have to
be the luckiest stalker in the world I
said but people were freaking out. She
ended up breaking up with me because her
roommate thought that I was probably
stalking the apartment, waiting to hook
up with someone who lived there. Maybe
I had a stash under the radiator or some-
thing, she said. Maybe something horrible
happened there, she said. But all I ever
did was punch through a wall because an
ex-girlfriend put up a stupid Green Day
poster. I looked for the hole and they
must have filled it in with plaster because
I couldn't find it. I wasn’t stalking anyone
or anywhere. Of course now that she’s gone
I’m wondering who lives there. And maybe
it wouldn’t be too weird to figure out
a way to bump into them or get inside...

Jacki lays down on the floor and sets the phone down next to her. She closes her eyes, Rick’s fading voice still in her head.

---

here's a quick list of things that aren't true:

a.) my name isn't Rick
b.) i have no interest in who lives in the apartment now
c.) my friends didn't really doubt me, they just thought it was funny
d.) she didn't care much either. the only person who really thought it was creepy was her roommate
e.) i didn't punch through a "Green Day" poster, it was through a door and i covered up the hole with a "Mars Attacks" poster
f.) the magazine i took wasn't behind her toilet, it was on her kitchen counter
g.) i gave the magazine back the next day
h.) i kind of knew it might be my old place as soon as i stepped through the door
i.) i was hoping that it WAS my old apartment so i'd have something to talk about

p.s. as a bonus for anyone who actually read that excerpt, blogger just added this new feature so i thought i'd try it out:

here's a picture from my camping trip last Saturday. before this basketball exploded and knocked me on my ass (and sprayed my legs with little pieces of burnt rubber) i managed to get a few shots i find to be quite beautiful.

the wood wouldn't burn because it had just rained so me and Nate were like, "hmmm, what's in the trunk!" we started with a road flare, but you can't really sit around a road flare fire and stare too long.
it's kinda like looking at the sun through a telescope.
so after a minute we went back to the trunk and wondered:
"do basketballs burn?"

turns out everything burns.

just not for very long.

::: david - 9:29 PM [+] :::
...

"We don't think you're challenging him enough..."
-Office Space

that last exchange on my comments has to be expanded upon, just so i can make one last point. i need to attack this "rape isn't about sex, it's about power!" statement that's been passed off as truth for about 20 years. here's all the things wrong with this statement:

1.) it was repeated endlessly in the 80s, parrotted by people who watched shit movies like "Disclosure" thinking they were blowing the lid off something and not just quoting a Michael Douglas movie.
repetition + amateur sociologist = nonsense.

2.) it is almost always said to me as if the person saying it came up with it themselves. with the exception of my mom, of course.

3.) it suggests some sort of "battle of the sexes" mantra and this can EASILY be destroyed with one simple example:

imagine a woman standing in front of her eager young class of wide-eyed females saying, "rape is not about sex (annoying pause) it's about POWER. it is about a man controlling a female, it is about a man taking away the self, it is about a man purposely trying to control that which makes a woman an individual, it is about a man trying desperately to erase all the progress that women have made in society throughout history. it is about...

suddenly we cut to a slobbering half-wit with his cock in one hand and a pile of his own shit in the other, standing outside of a elementary school playground. i'm sorry, i meant nursing home.

you see what i'm saying? hard to imagine it as a political statement instead of the animal reflex it is.

epilogue:
another idea to be attacked later (sure to anger and hopefully generate some readers, which is all i really want): the idea that pedophiles are mentally ill and not just horny as shit.

okay. if you work with me you might want to change the station at this point. if you do read the following, remember, "what happens in the blog stays in the blog." because this thing is here to keep me from saying some of this shit out loud. anyhow, i am now going to complain about losing a promotion at work. so here's the chronology of events:

i fill out a "career path" form saying that there is a job there i'd be interested in. while i'm doing it, my co-worker who i'll refer to as MMM (because he's going to be "making more money" than me) who was drawing pentagrams and dragons on his career path worksheet to pass the time, is not really interested in filling his out correctly, i say, "hey dude, you should put THIS job (the one i want) because it's the only one here we'd probably excel at." he writes it down, me never thinking that i'd ever be in competition with him. fast forward a few weeks, the person with this job that i want is going on leave to have a baby. i request to be trained to take over while he's gone, even though i've done the job before (while his predecessor was on vacation) but i figure it will show that i have an interest in this position. MMM also requests to be trained because, what the hell? it's a nice break in the routine. when the man goes to have his baby, it turns out that my regular duties are in a constant state of chaos (like always) and no one even considers putting someone on my old job (because it is by far, THE HARDEST in the joint and people treat it like it's dipped in shit) so i have to stay back and do that crap and MMM takes over the coveted job while the baby is born. when the proud father comes back, MMM and him trade stories about "their" job and become friends. then the bomb drops. the new daddy has decided to stay home with his new baby for good and his job will be opening up. i'm thinking sweeeeet. what a stroke of luck. "career path" was shorter than i thought! then him and MMM spend a week talking about what HE (not me) will being doing when he takes over. i'm scratching my head in the corner. how can they decide who gets the job? i mean shit, don't they interview for that kind of thing? isn't it this looooooong process that involves interviews and phone calls and finally congradulations to me all around? i stay quiet because i have a tendency to overreact and wait to see what happens when the proud poppa finally leaves. then i'm called into the bosses office. i'm told that the job is going to MMM because the dude who was leaving gave HIM his recommendation??? wait a minute. i didn't realize that we got to pick who replaces us. when is that the procedure? if that's the case, things should be so much quick and easier on the companies every time i left a job. i'd just say "HIM!" and point at the guy i liked the most. maybe he's not the most qualified but hell, it's real quick and i talk to him the most! yeah, real quick. quick enough to make my head spin. the other times i saw people trying to get promoted there were open conversations, phone calls, interviews and a couple days of waiting. with this someone got "knighted" during some secret ceremony. so i'm left without this raise that was sorely needed while the guy who gets the job i SHOULD have had is:

a.) 13 years younger than me
b.) living at home with his parents
c.) driving a car that is paid for
d.) newer at this company
e.) coming off a MUCH easier position in the store
f.) going to be working all morning shifts with weekends off
g.) going to be paid more while working less than me

like i said, i can maybe see how someone could say to me that i'm not ready to be promoted to this new position (even though there's NO question that i'm qualified) maybe you need to be there longer? but i can NEVER accept the fact that this dude was a better choice than me. because the guy leaving decided? am i the only one confused by this decision. and you want to know why the dude with the baby gave this other guy his recommendation? seriously? this is 100% true. because their jobs are about 5 five apart and naturally they can talk more AND because the guy who was leaving was into Star Wars and MMM went and bought a bunch of Star Wars figures that he hadn't got yet. i'm not joking. he had a checklist. i saw it. and if someone bought me toys shit, i'd recommend them over anyone else. the point is, why does this recommendation mean everything? so maybe everyone's behavior isn't a surprise, but i am surprised that all it takes is the opinion of the person that is leaving to decide who gets what. what am i missing? time to maybe state the obvious here:

sometimes i can't help but think that a cloud still hangs over my head from beating the shit out of a former co-worker.

okay, enough of that. i wasn't going to say anything because i have co-workers who read this site and i don't blame them. i just had a shitty day where i covered about 3 different positions while my nemesis (not MMM, i actually like him quite a bit) sat in the back all day drinking coffee talking about what she was going to do TOMMORROW. you know, this nemesis has talked shit about me for a long time (this is not paranoia because the people she says shit too always tell me about it and they gain nothing by lying) because when i first got there i called her out on about a half dozen LIES. not just exaggerations but outright lies. like she'd say "do this" and i'd do that and then her boss would ask about what i did and she's say "i never said that!" and i kind of got used to her nonsense thinking she must have Alzheimers, even joking (half joking) that i was going to start tape recording all our conversations, but now that i have this good news about my promotion i'm thinking about her again. is she poisoning the minds of any new people? i know that some people that have come and gone told me later that they were "warned" about me BY HER. how unprofessional is THAT fucking shit. they told me about it later because they were like, "don't know what the hell she was even talking about." well, i'll be paying more attention to her work habits because if someone effects my career path, i think i'd have to affect theirs. wait, i said i had said enough of all that. let me force...myself...to...move...on.

okay, the good news is that besides being broke as fuck i'm very excited to be finishing the climax of a script i've been working on. i was trying to make it 100 pages and STOP there because the last one i tried would have been over three hours. hold on, i have to watch this show...

sorry but godDAMN the end of the movie "28 Days Later" is good. they're playing the music and he's got his thumbs buried in that dude's eyes? what is that music?

anyway, i'll post the excerpt from my script separately so that i can bury this with another post. i feel like i've purged some resentment and i'm ready to talk about anything else.

::: david - 8:42 PM [+] :::
...

"When they said repent, I wonder what they meant."
- Leonard Cohen, "The Future"


Let me get this straight. This month Steven Spielberg made a creepier movie than George Romero? Welcome to crazy world. i saw "War of the Worlds" and, besides a lame ending that comes straight from the book, it's a pretty effective two hours of dread. you got aliens grinding up people and spraying blood across the country-side to help cultivate their sinister red weeds (although you tragically never get to see them smoke it), you got a death ray that detonates people like the Evil Dude's minions in "Time Bandits" (only not as funny), you got a cage on the backs of the pleasingly low-tech war machines that holds mobs of screaming people, waiting for their turn to get sucked into a pulsing alien sphincter.

and what does George give us? "sky flowers?" I mean, fireworks. and sympathetic zombies that only eat the bad guys. and an ending that has the hero laying down his rockets and letting the zombies go, muttering "they're not worth it" wait, that was the shitty ending to "Roadhouse!" remember, after Swayze KILLS like 10 bad guys, he gets to the main bad guy and says "nope, can't do it" the pile of corpses he left in his wake was probably like, "hey! wish your guilt would have stopped you from ripping my throat out earlier, yo!" anyway, that's what happens. the hero really does decide to "live and let live" at the end of what should have been the most apocalyptic disturbing zombie opus of all time. instead it's not as good as the new "Dawn of the Dead." hell, it's not even as good as "Shaun of the Dead." hell, i'm starting to wonder if Joe Piscipo's "Dead Heat" zombie cops-n-robbers shitfest actually gives George a run for his money. at least those movies all had the balls to actually disturb and kill main characters at will. i don't know what George was thinking. maybe it was because there's this appreciation for the zombie "Bub" in "Day of the Dead" and he mistook that for people wanting the zombies to spend a whole movie gazing at fireworks, or sloooowly trying to play with slot machines, or sloooowly trying to play a broken videogame, or sloooooowly trying to wipe their ass...slowly realizing they aren't done shitting....then sloooowly wiping their ass again. i know everyone loves to say, "look at his satire of SOCIETY, what a master of irony! that zombie is still carrying a baseball mitt! holy fuck, i get it!!! we're ALL zombies!" we got the joke years ago.

same with Spielburg's movie actually. his movie isn't perfect either. he has the little girl yell, "is it the terrorists?" (never mind that she must be home-schooled to be dumb enough to believe Bin Laden finally got his LASERS working) and suddenly all the critics are declaring they've cracked the secret of its timely anti-war message like they solved the math problem off the chalk board in "Good Will Hunting." uh, shit blows up...terrorists blew shit up...i get it! actually, if they think about it for five goddamn seconds they'd realize that the only parallel to real life is the fact that the "suicide bomber" in the movie was Tom Cruise. he's the only person to do any damage (before God steps down to wrap things up, of course) by doing something that could only be described as a desperate act of martydom against a huge overpowering enemy. so the message is...suicide bombers good? terrorists bad? no, the message is both obvious and meaningless. the only reason to enjoy this movie is to watch a man run around and try not to get killed by big monsters crashing through treetops. and how about that noise they were making? this might be the best Godzilla movie never made.

you know, "The Aviator," besides being rather dull and obvious and having DiCaprio's face on the box resemble a giant fetus, has much more effective anti-war statements in it. they accuse Hughes of being a "war-profiteer" and, unlike the Republican wannabes in our midst who think if they pretend they're rich, someday they might be rich, this label is considered a BAD thing.

anyway, it's depressing that you can't count on a zombie to be scary in a movie by George Romero. gotta go clean the cat box.

wait, one last thing. because of the London attacks, on the news they were talking about how they've increased security for this Air Show in Pittsburgh and how they've tripled the military around the show and blah fucking blah and i started thinking how eager people are to pretend they're important enough to be in danger. this sorry-ass Air Show is going to be a big terrorist target? they wish it was. next there will be a garrison of troops around one of these stupid plastic dinosaurs sculptures that are on every corner. the whole thing is kind of sad and it reminds me of an ugly girl carrying mace around like anyone would really try to rape her.

::: david - 1:21 PM [+] :::
...

"Today's forcast is hot. today's color is black."
- Senior Love Daddy - "Do The Right Thing"

i've taken to making cds for people, whether they want them or not. i made "Carmageddon Parts 1 and 2" which include things like "Fast Car" by Tracy Chapman and "Little Red Corvette" and "Black Sunshine" and "Ole' 55" and "Vanishing Point" and...you get the point. then i made a cd called "Sweet Sweet Relief" which is a combination of the "Sweet Relief" fundraiser albums (with "Summer of the Drug" and "Crazy Mary") with the 70's band Sweet ("Fox on the Run" etc.) then i got more inspired and did one called "(B)Ryan Adams" which is Ryan Adams and Bryan Adams alternating songs. you haven't heard a more awkward transition than "Answering Bell" into "Summer of 69." i started enjoying the alternating songs thing so i did one called "(The) Streets of Fire" which is "The Streets" ("just finished Gran Turismo on the hardest setting!") combined with the 80's "Streets of Fire" soundtrack. then i did one that has nothing but songs that attack Eminem, and there's a shitload if you type "Fuck Eminem" into a search engine. then i burned a "My...Bloody Valentine/Vitriol/Chemical Romance" cd. but my masterpiece of shitty combinations has to be, by far...

"Marilyn Hanson"

yep, Marilyn Manson and Hanson, together at last! two tastes that taste great together, just like that old commercial where the girl with the jar of peanut butter bumped into the guy with the chocolate bar. of course, where the fuck was she going with a jar of peanut butter on the subway? i actually couldn't tolerate entire Hanson songs and ended up doing snippets from the chorus of "MMM Bop" before, say, "Long Hard Road out of Hell" the best part of this compilation is a Hanson live song i found blended in with a song from a Manson concert. if you close your eyes you can imagine a bunch of 12 year-olds crying and their parental units recoiling in horror as Issac, Taylor and Zach stop MMM bopping and declare, "i don't love you but i'm going to fuck you until someone better comes along!" thank you Cleveland, goodnight! i haven't had this much fun editing things together since i used to tape porn for my friend Jerry and i'd start with a couple of modern day tanned hard-body types, then when it cut to close-ups of penetration, i'd edit in these grainy nasty hairy 70's clips from some ancient tapes i had. it's kind of like those Ren and Stimpy episodes where they'd zoom in on someone's nose and suddenly the cute cartoon creature looks like a full-color centerfold from the "Symptoms and Illnesses Guide"

speaking of mucus, "Land of the Dead" was weak, at least for a Romero movie. and every time they mentioned a Pittsbugh street name, the shitheads in the crowd cheered and high-fived each other, even though they didn't stick around long enough to read in the credits, "special thanks to the people of Toronto!" there was some decent gore (obscured by carefully placed zombie shadows and movements like the fucking in "Eyes Wide Shut") but the characters (HEY! they just said the word "zombie" on Rosanne! just now! freaky!) anyway, but the characters were all kept as safe and warm as a Spielburg movie. whatever happened to Romero happily offing his cast by Act 2? lame. plus there's a noble retard and Dennis Hopper actually doing his 3 scenes in the big hotel room where they must have put him up for his 3 days of filming. that night i bought "Ginger Snaps" for 10 bucks and was infinitly more entertained. and guess what? it's proud to be filmed in Canada. i was so confused i checked the credits to see if they thanked the citizens of Pittsburgh.

tonight my lizard died. i think it went into shock during it's molting. poor little critter. i'll be taking him down to the river for his Viking funeral as soon as it's cool enough outside. right now it's hot as balls in this apartment. i'm in the middle of a heat-wave triple-feature: "Do The Right Thing," "Lawrence of Arabia," and "The Hot Spot." right now between movies, while i work on my "Spunkwater" script (page 84, gonna wrap it up in 20 more) i'm listening to Johnny Cash's "Folsum Prison Blues." that album should be required listening for anyone who supports the death penalty. although i'm not sure that all those songs about death and murder were the best choices for that crowd. it's an odd vibe coming from that concert, i can't put my finger on it.

at work today i couldn't help but to leave a note taped to the bottle of a friend's strange-looking beverage. and as soon as i do, two people say, "ha! you're so predicitable! as soon as Justin tore the label off his drink and saw what it looked like, he said, "how long before Dave has to comment on this shit?" i shrug and then sheepishly leave the room, the note fluttering behind me as the door closes. it read:

"Attention! Please keep my jizz sample in a cool dry place until I drink it! Thanks, Justin"

who could resist? and what the hell was he drinking that looked like that anyway? coconut milk and sea monkeys?

::: david - 2:14 AM [+] :::
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