..:S...P...I...D...E...R...B...I...T...E...S:..

Wednesday, August 23, 2006

"Let's drink to our legs."
- "Jaws"

come on. is tickling really abuse? there was a movie on the other day (or maybe it was a dream i had) and one of the messages seemed to be that tickling is a very aggressive thing to do. and people have been saying that forever, almost as much as that "rape is power" nonsense that started in the 80s. when you tickle someone, or their kids, they get all mad and sternly explain that it's a form of abuse. you know what? anyone who thinks that tickling is abuse has never been punched in the fucking face. that's what you get at my house for spilling paint on the garage floor! did i stutter?! just kidding.

i got tickled when i was a kid and it didn't traumatize me. flashback noise! what childhood scars DID i pick up? let's start in the garage with Bender. nope, actually, the only violence that i can remember ever happening in my dad's garage was when my brother and i were being chased home from the mudpit (where we went fishing for bluegill every day) and these guys in this pickup truck were tearing after us on our bicycles after one of us made some smartass comment to them, and i got to the house first, started pulling down the garage door and my brouther comes flying up the driveway at Mach 3 and POW! the garage door catches him in the head and scrapes him right off his bike. his bike rolls in without him and falls over, wheels still spinning. he's stunned and laying in the driveway, and those guys in the truck were like, "oh shit, he's dead!" and they took off. Floyd (yep, his name's Floyd) woke up after a couple seconds and ran in the house screaming his head off. i think i got in trouble for that. i don't remember.

hmm, lets sidetrack a bit. how else did i accidentally injure my older, more athletic brother? oh yeah! chipped his front tooth twice. once on an Etch-A-Sketch. he was laying on the bed playing with the Etch-A-Sketch and i threw a Nerf football at him and the Etch-A-Sketch bashed him in the mouth. after a couple seconds he went screaming down the stairs. i think i got in trouble for that. then, after his tooth got fixed, we were skating on the frozen field of water (it wasn't even the beloved mudpit, it was just this neighbor's field that would flood over and then freeze) and he wiped out and broke that same tooth. actually, now that i think about it, i don't think i had anything to do with his broken tooth that second time.

what else happened to him? i remember when he sliced his hand open on a weight bench and his middle finger was hanging off. my aunt was babysitting and she violently yanked me off the toilet to take him to the hospital. now THAT was traumatizing. and i think he broke his arm (or was it his elbow?) i broke my arm worse, though. and he broke his nose. but we both broke our noses. couple times each. my nose breaking was much more dramatic. his nose got squashed when he slipped during a basketball game, but mine got knocked around my head like Daffy Duck after a shotgun blast after i got the ever living shit beat out of me over this stupid girl back in 11th grade. that was the first and last time i ever got my ass kicked. i quickly learned the art of the cheap shot. that's a long post for another time. too many injuries to dwell on just one of them. my nose is still very crooked though. maybe i'll try to find a straight-on picture to illustrate this later. okay, enough about Floyd's scars! what else did i do to myself?

-i broke a finger by punching a guy in the helmet during a football game. that wasn't very smart of me, but i was trying to enjoy every second they left me on the field. and that fucker had stepped on my hand when i was on the ground. i don't blame him for this swollen, peanut-looking finger i'm still sporting though. that injury was obviously just the result of my frustration of being stuck on the JV squad. of course, Floyd was quarterback on the Varsity team. but that's fine. because he was having so much fun back then, he doesn't remember any of this like i do. and therefore, my reward is getting to write it down.

-i wrecked my car and my hand went through the windshield. i milked that injury for all it was worth as it happened on the way to school. i left the smashed car (a Pontiac Fiero, which, on impact, reveals that it's fashioned out of Legos) and walked to this house, but the buses all filed by my smoking car and people at school were saying i was dead by lunch time. my high school girlfriend had to leave her math class when she heard the news. can you imagine the attention i got from her after that? i've never been so happy about someone else's misery in all my life. i think i already talked about this (like the last episode of Seinfeld), but i even went back to school that day just to bask in the glory. she was all sniffling at my locker. i had my hand barely wrapped up, and like 2 stitches at the most, but i was acting like i'd just got back from storming the beach at Normandy.

but then these other two other kids got hit by a goddamn train the next day, and one of them broke their leg when the train dragged them about a mile, and no one gave a shit about my hand anymore.

-oh, here's a good one. i was sitting on the edge of one of those above-ground pools and i fell backwards and my leg hit this row of exposed screws where it wasn't quite finished being put together and it punched three big holes in my leg down to the bone. they had trouble with the stitches on that one because they were more like puncture wounds.

-oh! here's a real good one! i had this golf ball, and i was standing on our porch and whipping at the ground over and over to see how many time i could get it to rebound off the roof and floor of the porch (you can see where this is going) and i threw it as hard as i could and SMACK right in my fucking mouth. i think it actually hit the roof, hit my mouth, hit the ground, then hit me in the face one last time for the road. put my top teeth through my bottom lip. it took forever for that to heal. that was last Thursday. just kidding. i think i was nine.

-once, i was running with a stick over these big, broken slabs of highway and i tripped and stuck it through the palm of my hand. another round hole like the ones in my leg.

-i ruptured a disc in my spine by exercising too much and moving boxes at work. ended up having surgery and a month of rehab in a pool. the woman in charge of my rehab developed a severe case of Dave fever. she didn't want to see me get better and kept trying to injure me again so i'd keep coming back. i think she had the crush because all the other people there with back injuries never did anything but wander around like the undead. i would strap all the weights on my body, turn on a Billy Squier CASSETTE and jump in the pool and pretend i was running on the moon. i think they thought i was a mental patient.

-one time i fell about a hundred feet out of this tree at our old house. this huge willow tree had this broken branch at the top that went straight across that we called "The Bridge." and i would climb up there and stand and look at everyone's rooftops. and, of course, it finally collapsed when i was on it, and it dropped me down through about 50 limbs like a pinball. i ended up tangled in a bottom branch, hanging upside down, trying to cry with the wind knocked out of me, with a layer of skin sheered of my left forearm.

-speaking of pinball! we had this pinball machine our dad got us for Christmas, and i was reaching up into it to get the metal balls out and my brother hit the buttons and something in there sliced the top off one of my knuckles. i still have this white line across the bone. i used to lie and tell people it was from someone's tooth who i punched. i still have a picture of that pinball machine in my wallet. right now. ask anyone. and a picture of a cat from three cats ago. and a lizard from five lizards ago. you know why? because every one of them bit me.

you know, if this was the movie "Jaws" or "Chasing Amy" or "Mountains of the Moon," i would have to end my display of scars with a thumb pointing at my chest and the old standby:

"see this right here, she broke my heart!"

instead, however, as a tribute of sorts to my last breakup, here's a camping photo from the last photographic proof of me in a happy relationship (was this a year ago? has it been a year yet?) you'd be better off trying to get a picture of the Yeti than this kind of shot.

and here's a better camping photo for the road 'cause now i want to go camping again. this one's all symbolic.

and, of course, i will tie everything together with a final prelude to my last decent, story-worthy injury...

::: david - 2:37 AM [+] :::
...

"Essentially I'm an animal. So just what do I do with all the aggression?"
- Gnarls Barkley "Just A Thought"

-the problem with people who have a problem with rap music:

they always say "make your own music!" as if they've caught them (gasp!) stealing because they're using samples. what they don't understand is that, just like with white folk music, this was a form of music that emerged for one simple reason...anybody could do it! you didn't need to buy or learn an instrument, you just took the part of someone else's song that you thought was cool, found a way to make it repeat indefinitely, and then talked about your day or threatened people over top of it. this is a completely valid form of expression. however...

-the problem with rap music:

these days it's nothing but samples and no expression. the least interesting thing about this kind of music (with the exception of Outkast) should be the beat you're using, i mean stealing. and your lyrics should completely overshadow what you've stolen because you were in such a hurry for your words to be heard, you barely had time to check the label on that record, and you certainly didn't bother to learn how to program a keyboard. of course, with Outkast they've got both great, insane lyrics, and an equally insane production, but they're the one exception. the vast majority are who i'm talking about, and they are using the lyrics as filler or repetitive bullshit about bitches and money and, instead, only concentrating on making increasingly elaborate keyboard noises to imitate what used to be space-filling breakbeat samples. And it's hard to think of anything else that's a more massive waste of time and energy than immitating what was only there as a stepping stone to letting your voice be heard. there's probably only about three variations of any beat anyway, just like there's supposedly only two variations of any story (man goes on a journey, stranger comes to town) and that's where all the millions of dollars are going today instead of investing in the WORDS. so, if you put this much money into the production, maybe it IS time to buy or learn an instrument, just like the people that missed the point up there were saying all along.

-now, it's not exactly rap, but it's close enough, and i'm here to say that the Gnarls Barkley cd "St. Elsewhere" actually lives up to the hype. at least i think so. in spite of a berzerk production that sometimes overshadows the songs, i think it's great. and it's got those words i was talking about. the song "Just A Thought" is the best on there. haunting lyrics, schizo beat. vocals like a 70s Elton John falsetto, a bass line that i swear came from the song "Seasons in the Sun." good, good shit. and songs 13 and 14, both excellent. and even though you are, i'm STILL not sick of "Crazy." my one gripe, it's way too short to be a project that the Danger Mouse claims he's been working on for three years. AND i would have stripped the sound effects down even further on the rest of the album like they did on "Just a Thought" and "Crazy." 'cause that singer's got the pipes to carry the whole thing comfortably on his back. there's definitely a Marvin/Prince/Outkast thing going on there with him that i had no idea he was capable of when he was rapping back in Goodie Mob. but the best reason to own this cd? because it's actually got artwork on the cover instead of a photo!!! true story! this is getting very rare these days.

-i've been listening to Strapping Young Lad's "The New Black." sounds like the old black to me.

-someone around here must keep having birthdays, as they keep throwing away helium balloons outside this building, so i brought another one up to my apartment for my cats to play with. i figured it would be perfect since the strings hang down where they could chase them around the room, and it would be like someone who never got tired of bobbing strings in front of them nonstop. i had found the perfect toy to channel their midnight feline fury! however, the first balloon got sucked into my ceiling fan when i wasn't looking and the pandemonium that resulted caused my cats to swell up like hairy little puffer fish and slink under the couch. and they've still not recovered. now they consider these balloons the eqivalent of me bringing in running lawnmovers for them to play with.

now that i've blatantly attempted to establish my street credibility with banter about urban beats and the 70s AM radio staple "Season In The Sun," (if you tune in Wednesday night at midnight, i promise to play it sans irony) i am now able to post a favorite image to lighten up the depressingly serious funeral mood around this joint lately with all my rambling about cemetary visits.

this particular photograph of me is the only good to come out of my doomed James Dean's grave rubbing, get-rich-quick scheme road trip.

everyone that was in the car that day is still angry with me.

some more than others.

::: david - 3:05 PM [+] :::
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