underdogs

The Honkey: Coming Soon...

2006-09-13T07:48:00.000-07:00

I want to create something. I want to create something beautiful. A building? No. A great work of literature? Please. No, my friend, I want to design something far more significant. Something that will stand the test of time for countless millennia after I have passed away. I want to design my own athletic shoe, and I know what I will call it, the Honkey.

Yeah, that’s right. I’m gonna make a white boy shoe. Only it will transcend races, it will stretch across nations, continents, it will cross genders even. It will be little more than remarkable in its unparalleled existence. It will stop time.

So this is my dream. This is where the magic happens. This is Disneyworld and Shangri-La and Sherwood Forest all in one. And I am Robin Hood, I am the pan, I am the hyped-out, herb altered, eternally bliss giving Dalai Lama all in one. And I want to give the world what it needs most, another tactfully adorned garment to keep the feet of this great planet properly shod.

The Honkey, or el hombre Blanca, as my shoe will be affectionately known in countless Latin nations will be akin to no shoe the world has ever seen. Made entirely from antiquated bat guano, its Precambrian outsole will be able to endure anywhere from 50-10,000 miles before needing replacement. The Honkey will be neither high-top, low-top, nor cross-trainer. It will come with dual Velcro latches that hinge at the toe and secure the upper ankle regions. Lacing will be two inches thick and neon orange, allowing even the least athletic tub of gelatinous pork rinds to effectively lace the two holes on either side. The Honkey will come with speed holes precisely engendered by blind Cambodian laymen with their Neolithic stone chisels at some point during their 98 hour work weeks. It will come standard with a dual chamber sheep bladder pump located around the arch and lower toe regions to allow for optimal support when sitting, reading, or resting during a commercial break. Lastly, the Honkey will come in three distinct colors: puce, beige, and tan.

In order to succeed, I will have to undergo a marketing campaign that combines the ingenuity of Goebbels and the candor of Chappell. The Honkey will be marketed entirely by unemployed, obese, mid-western men between the ages of 49 and 90. It will not show them engaged in athletic activities, it will not show them endeavoring to even achieve a level of motion more accelerated than lifting their engorged hand from a bag of chips to their mouth.

The Honkey, in all respects, will be real. It will sell because it depicts life how it really is. The Honkey will not ask you to get out and run, to start a work out routine, to try out for the major leagues. It will come in a box made of coupons. Coupons to fast food restaurants and buffets. For each pair of Honkeys you buy, a free month's prescription of Tricor will thrown. As far as we’re concerned, Honkeys can never fit too well, and your cholesterol can never be too high.

I will run a single ad that says the following:

The Honkey accepts you how you are. It fits your life, it fits your foot.

With war and famine and pestilence and death, isn’t there enough to worry about in the world? Yes, yes there is. That’s why the Honkey will work. It’s an answer, an answer to a question, an answer to a need, an answer to a comfort so many of us take for granted, well-rested feet. In the end, buying the Honkey will be a no-brainer, and in this day and age, a no-brainer is what most people do best.

Manifest Destiny Compromised

2006-09-12T14:43:00.000-07:00

At a crucial point in the middle of the 20th century, Dwight D. Eisenhower warned an almost nubile superpower on the eve of his term in office that the United States must stay ever vigilant to guard itself against the entrapments of becoming a military industrial state.

In other words, Eisenhower, a five star general who for all accounts and purposes could definitely be pigeonholed as someone who gave a damn about this country, told us to watch out. He told us the same thing that Washington, another general who became el presidente told us so many years ago- beware of the standing army, it is not in the nation's best interest. Beware of the machinations of war, beware of becoming a superpower, beware of capitalism and the greedy hands that will be all over the shaping of this nation if we let them.

Usually, great men tell us things that we already know, they just say them in a way that allows us to realize the fear and dread in the back of our minds isn't based on nothing at all, it's real.

No country lasts forever. I've told myself this quite often in the last few years. I told myself this after 9/11, I told myself this in '91 when Bush went after Iraq, I've told myself in my dreams when I have recurring images of nuclear weapons blotting out the landscape that surrounds me, I told myself this in the car at the drive-thru window of Taco Bell last week. I don't like to believe it, I don't like to think about it, but no country lasts forever, and more and more often this is a thought I find myself dwelling on.

Given adequate leisure time, I like to read books. Given adequate leisure time I also like to sleep, play original NES, and drive back roads too, but the books stand out most to me now. For some reason, beit namely that I am a male raised in the world's lone superpower, I have a fixation on empires. Hannibal and Carthage vs the Romans, the Third Reich, Napoleon and the Russians and War and Peace, the philisophy of the Greeks, the city-state, etc. The history of all of these nations has been written, that of America has not.

As an American I take it for granted that I am naieve. I want to believe that I live in the greatest nation ever. I want to believe our democracy works. I want to believe the best interests of other nations is also in our best interests. I want to believe the man in the oval office is part Washington, part Jackson, part Lincoln, and part both Roosevelts all in one. I want to believe things get better and that our goverment is moving towards a state of existence that will be more enlightening and enabling to the average citizen than any that has ever existed before. I want to believe these things, but I do not.

Instead I know only that...

I do not kill people.
I do not make bombs.
I do not call for pre-emptive strikes.
I do not engage in pork-barrel legislature.
I do not fill coffers.

The Greek philospher, Plato, in his work the Phaedrus, states that all human beings are endowed with a soul that has at one time circled the realms above heaven. To the philosopher, he said, went the soul that had seen the most, and to the tyrant and the sophist (one who uses words to convince others of truth without scruples) went the weakest soul, the one that had seen the least of the wonders and truth of the heavens.

I want to believe George W. Bush, or Clinton, or Bush senior, or Reagan were philosophers, but the role of tyrant and sophist seem to suit them far better.

I would like to believe that our nation was formed by philosophers, but even then, their war found them in the end and they too were forced to fight.

I seldom turn on the tv anymore. I don't watch the news. Just this week, I asked my class of seventh grade students whom they would prefer to sit and eat lunch with, Michael Jackson or Bush, they chose Jackson, who in his own right they ridicule daily. I then asked them whom they would rather shadow for a week, our principal or George Bush; again, Bush was not the one selected. The figurehead at the top was not revered, but reviled.

I don't have answers. I've read the Republic, 1984, the Bible. Empires come and go, and we live in an empire.

Gears grind to a halt.
The tide of war turns.
Nothing lasts forever.

These are things I think about, more often than I'd like...

A Wombat in Every Home

2006-09-07T10:49:00.000-07:00

I want a pet. I want a pet that rocks. There I said it. I went there. Pets that suck, I say no, none for you. Domesticated pets, H*ll no. A cat, a dog, a bird, a fish, a lizard. Come on. I might as well by sea monkeys, pretend they're not a gaggle of freeze dried, underfed brine shrimp and just keep on chuggin. But something in me won’t let it happen. I can’t give in. I want a pet, a pet no one has. I want a wombat.

A wombat is like a rat and a squirrel and a beaver and a wolverine and a bat, yeah a bat, all in one. A wombat rocks. I mean think of it. Joey comes over with his cat, la la la la, cat runs around, scratches things, poos in the corner, then, BAM, this beast, this ball of brown furred death blitzes across the room, and in an instant, no more cat. Problem taken care of, the wombat way.

I know, I know, some of you are saying, “A wombat, come on, they’re illegal to own, you wouldn’t know how to feed it, you wouldn’t…” Blah, blah, blah, I say. Wombat, schmombat, they say. But then I unleash it. I take it to the park, it rides in my car, it eats the neighbor's smaller dogs, it reads to my kids at night, starts an egalitarian revolution, conquers Morocco, invents the electric plane, starts to run the block. It procreates, reproduces you may say, like rodents are prone to do. In a year I have five wombats. In two years maybe twenty, in three, an entire freakin’ battalion.

Would I keep ‘em? No. I only want one. I would set them free, unleash them, like a wooly plague on the unsuspecting naivete of suburbia. One wombat to bring them in, and in the darkness bind them, that would be my motto. The wombat would eat at my table, it would go shopping with me, I would put it on my son’s micro soccer team. But it would have a meaner side, an alter ego. My wombat would be like Batman, half light and half dark, tormenting other animals it deems as evil doers, saving the world, one disgruntled buck tooth at a time.

How big is a wombat, you ask. Well, have you ever seen an elephant? What about a jumbo jet? What about a T-Rex? Wombats are smaller. They are like rat-monkeys on steroids. Miniature horse-wolves with the face of an ox-dog. They may weigh 40pounds, they may weigh 600, depending on how many animals they devoured during the previous week. But beyond size and looks and intelligence lies the true aura of the wombat, its true ferocity.

So to those of you with simple pets, for shame. Step out of line once in a while. Tame a dingo, start a sasquatch farm, raise baboons for their delicate eggs, breed he-panthers to be used in the bi-annual Hungarian jousting tournaments known only to the Western world as Kung-jo-mupoyo. But do something, do something interesting. And always know that somewhere, lurking in the backyard of little Timmy America, is a 400 pound wombat with an attitude, licking his chops and waiting to give domesticated pets the terror they've long since forgotten.

Monsters = Cool

2006-09-07T07:34:00.000-07:00

I dare say I like monsters. But I know this is not the case. Monsters scare me, and as a child I crept beneath the covers many a night, tucking the cold sheet close around my neck, garlic and wooden stake clutched feverishly in my hand, and prayed for the dawn to come swiftly. But time passed and I got older. And black and white Draculas were replaced by werewolves, and leviathans, and Aliens, and the Predator, and the Thing, and the beast from the Relic that ate people’s hypothalamus, and Poltergeist, and, and, and…well, you get the picture.

But monsters, beings that induce bed wetting fear in the hearts of navy seals and American Gladiators alike, are in reality, the only true celebrities on earth.

What is fame? Fame is people knowing your name and also knowing something about you. I know of Paris Hilton. She is blond and skinny and worth a lot of money and shops a lot with a dog in her purse. But I do not really know her. Is she deep or shallow, is it all a façade she puts on. I know Clint Eastwood. I know how he shoots and squints his eyes and can hit things from really far without aiming, and how if you combined every movie he ever made he still says fewer words than I say daily. These people, these celebrities, they enjoy a kind of fame, but not true fame, not the core, not feared idolatry.

True fame is infamy. Fear and gawking hero worship at the same time. I am scared of Bigfoot, or rather yet, I am scared of even the idea of Bigfoot. Should some hairy half-human sub-ape, ramble his fetid carcass around the woods near my home, waiting, ever waiting to decapitate my feeble head from my torso, then truly I would be in awe at the moment of my very demise. I am scared of Nessie and the Chupacabra and the Abominable Snowman that is the Yankee to Bigfoots rebel soldier.

All of these beasts, fact or fiction, demand my fear, and humans yearn to know as much as they can about what they don’t understand, about what may inevitably destroy them without so much as flinching. We make movies about them, write books, draw comics, hold yearly festivals where we dress to represent the very beings that yearn to destroy us in unthinkable ways. And as the cycle proliferates itself and our posterity clings to the fears that entrapped us so effectively, we begin to turn these monsters into icons.

For in the end, who would you rather see before I died, Paris Hilton or a living breathing Yeti. A celebrity whos star will eventually plummet or a he-beast that has enthralled man’s inquisitive nature for as long as we can remember. I choose the monster. I choose fear. I choose the unknown and getting a glimpse behind the curtain of myth. I choose boyhood dreams and childish nightmares that never quite leave us though we pray sometimes they will.

Monsters are like rock stars, except their music never falls off, their creative genius never wanes, because their song, their lure, their attractiveness goes hand in hand with their very existence. The simple fact that they may exist makes them cool.
So, carry on you teeming denizens of the nether regions of the soul, and should I happenstance across your foul path one frightful night, don’t begrudge me an autograph or at least a passing conversation and I promise to provide you with another willing victim to notch onto your ghoulish bedpost...

The Inherent Flaw of Fandom

2006-09-06T13:22:00.000-07:00

I am a fan.
And I live by the fan's creed.
Cheer for something. Cheer for some person. Cheer for some event. Just cheer. Just believe. Competition must be cared about, because if it isn't then it decreases in quality, and no one wants sports to do that.

I see competition everywhere. David vs. Goliath, loved it. Rudy, I shed tears. Hoosiers, basketball became God. Etc., Etc., Etc....

But it didn't stop there. You see fandom, the state of being a living, breathing, functioning fan, is not a passive thing. Be it Gamecocks, Greenwaves, Salukis, or a Dixie Youth Shoney's U-12 baseball team, fandom sucks you in.

Life was normal at one point for me. I woke up. Went to a place. Heard others refer to it as school. Remained unfazed. Got in fights. Played in cat poo. Tried to catch rats. And any other mundane event that graced the path of the single digit aged youth. But one day all that changed, one day I played a sport, and my innocence was lost forever.

Fandom did not ensnare me from the beginning. Namely because I was the self-motivated type. Team, what team, I played for me. I sat the bench for me. I scored on the wrong goal for me. Fame or flop, it didn't matter, I was too absorbed in the performance of numero uno to realize a far more diabolical situation was engulfing me.

But it did. I was eight. It was an uneven grass field. No lines. Torn nets. A soccer ball that must have been rubber, and maybe eighteen kids. Use only feet, no hands. Score more than the other guys and you win. Winners talk trash. Losers cry. Winners make friends. Loser lose them. I was eight, it was my first time, but I was in.

Years go by. I played sports. More years, more sports. The video game industry proliferates. Nintendo, Sega, Play-Station. I'm 11, I'm 18, I'm 26. Too many years have passed. Too many names etched into my memory. Too many games played, or watched, or simulated. Too much stimuli, just enough fan.

There is nothing wrong with being a fan of something. In the back of my mind, when I am honest with myself. When I realize as a human I am vulnerable, it is ok to cry. On those days I'll watch an entire match. On those days I'll scrutinize the stance, and jaunt, and delivery of whatever athlete on whatever team and I'll feel a little more alive.

Once, sports, competition, existed only for my sake. But time changes things. Dreams go unfulfilled and years take away our youth. Somewhere between accountability and seniority a level of fan is formed within us. An outward search for team mascots or physical phenoms that can infuse the wonder of the first match back into our blood one more time.

All of my emotions are pent up inside of me sometimes and I have trouble expressing myself. Communication between humans can break down. Words can be put the wrong way. Hearts can be broken. But a break away lay-up, a 50yd completion, or an overtime goal. They are direct. Nothing is lost in their existence. But rather something is gained. Some experience. Some delirium. Some opiate for the masses that allows us to stay outwardly focused just a little longer.

So on Timmy and Tammy
and Dolphin and Tiger
on second string guard
and yellow-striped Liger

On Bearcat and Bruin
And outside midfield
on Army Black Knights
with giant bronze shield

On person and team
on organization
on psychotic fan
in competition crazed nation

On zebra on ref
On linesman and judge
while athletes get faster
I'll inhale more fudge

Keep cheering and ranting
and watching and screaming
and pray that life as a fan
will always have meaning.

The World is not all Clean Air

2006-08-29T06:29:00.000-07:00

I am what I see.
I am what I eat.
I am what I read.
I am what I dream.

I am all the things I choose to input and how I act accordingly.

I was in the doctor's office yesterday, reading about a freelance journalist who left NYC for the Pacific Northwest, for skiing, and coffee, and mountains, and air, air like we don't have here, real air, air that won't be around forever. And I thought about air, the most simple intake element, what we consume most. On the next page of the magazine was an article lamenting the state of major Pharma companies recently, and their immersion into commercialism and marketing. Why would a doctor, or a group of doctors really, care so much about peddling their wares. These are the people we count on to save our lives getting jacked up to make a buck, and now we're lambasted with Cialis, and Tricor, and Prevacid, and all the rest.

I am what I see.
I am what I read.

Words get into my head. But it's not just the words that make an impact, it's how they're presented. Why market the business of saving lives, why market the business of saving souls. Doctors used to travel the countryside healing their constituents, Jesus walked the earth and spoke the word. The treatment was the thing, the message was the thing. Not the delivery, not the marketing campaign. Does an advertisement make a drug any more effective, does ceremony and flair make what we say any moreso either. No, it doesn't.

Now more than often, if I turn on the tv, or watch commercials, or watch the news, or listen to people who do the aforementioned things too much, I don't feel well. I don't feel like I'm inputting the clean air, the real air, instead I feel like everything is recycled and not fresh.

I recently took my soccer team to a weekend tournament. We went out to eat and I listened to 13 year old girls talk, and I realized you do not control 13 year old girls, you do not control people, you guide them to an extent, and you make sure you try to teach them work ethics and discernment, but there is a limit. Only good air matters. I wonder if the doctors represented by the marketing execs at the Pharma companies watch their commercials. I wonder if they see one, and sit back, and think about all the good air they're distributing, or if there's a twinge somewhere inside and they feel slick and like a politician in a bad way.

The world exists.
The world is not all clean air.
Clean air will run out.
We should do our best to make more.

I am what I see, what I eat, and what I read. I am everything I input. I am not only myself. Air does not stand alone, it all mixes together and we become the atmosphere, collectiveness. I can purify or contaminate, but either way I affect and am affected.

The world is not all clean air.
We should do our best to make more.

A Homecoming of Sorts...

2006-08-25T13:14:00.000-07:00

Since the dawn of time, man has yearned to destroy the sun.
-Montgomery Burns-

I gave this up bc I never wanted to type anything serious, but then the Simpsons never said anything serious, ever, really, and yet I believe it says more than any pop-culture produced phenomena that I have ever devoted countless worship hours.

Man never yearned to destroy the sun, but the basic ethos was always there, the need for things not to make so much sense, and the need to express frivolity with enough candor to make it mean something.

I gave up, have given up, will continue to give up on society, but that does not mean I will ever have the satisfaction of standing objectively outside of it, so it seems a more fitting duty to respond than stay silent and watch. The latter would tarnish me with having a God complex and being inept.

I thought about death recently, namely bc it happened to thrust the notion of its existence upon me, and I realized I would rather be ruthlessly hunted down by some obscure branch of the FBI for sharing thoughts not meant to be spread, than to die and never have caused the faintest ripple.

1984 was not about the world being any different than it was 500 years ago, just about time evaporating and the ultimate fallability of communication on a mass scale once the means to create such technology was discovered.

So, here goes...

ps. Thanks to Bish for nagging me, with his persistence, I would have slunk off behind the barn to die. ;)

Chuck Norris my Arse

2006-03-13T21:20:00.000-08:00

It seems everywhere you turn these days the name, Chuck Norris, is on the tip of some guy's tongue! Chuck's tears cure cancer, Chuck giveth and taketh away, Chuck this, Chuck that, oh my gah, have you read the newest facts about Chuck....well, I say bollocks to Chuck Norris and this namby pamby idol worship that is choking mainstream America. Put the man in a cage with a teenage wookie and he'd be ripped limb from limb like a cracked out gremlin in a microwave. Yeah, I said it, Chuck ain't no deity, and he never was, but all this far fetched hogwash has gone too far to simply refute the man's eternally omnipotent prowess with a single backhanded barb from me, so I decided to do some down to earth, downright facetious, dumbfounded investigation of my own, and I think the following facts (by facts I actually mean lies, but a lie about a pre-existing lie might as well be a fact, right?) will show once and for all that dear old "Chick" Norris is not all he's cracked up to be.

I started off by interviewing a very select list of film villains, namely those that Chuck declined to face in any of his films, ever, based on the sheer terror he experienced when imagining the possibility of facing a creature/humanoid/alien that may have in fact appeared more disgruntled and unkempt than the weathered muff-crust of hair he calls his "beard". Among those whose responses were civil enough to be printed in a magazine that is not considered Indo-European Gutter Smut, were over the hill pulp villains, Darth Vader and Megatron, whose megalomaniac views may finally shed some authentic light on the bloated ego that is Chuck!

Vader, whom I must say has aged gracefully after his near death by immolation aboard the second death star, seemed kind in his deprecation of the the aforementioned ninja coward, stating that Chuck seemed to be a gentle, spineless, whelp of man, that could have in no way withstood the awesome power of the force. When asked how high Chuck might have risen in the ranks of the Galactic Empire due to his martial arts ability, Vader's belaboured breathing offered only the following answer, " whuhhhhhh...pahhhhhhh....whuhhhhh....pahhhhh, so, Chuck, I see you have mastered the art of jumping around and kicking like a girl, perhaps you are ready to be one of Jabba's slave mistresses, chained to a giant slug for the duration of your meaningless life.."

Megatron on the other hand seemed less than gracious when asked to offer any postive thoughts on Chuck's abilities. "A human, able to defeat me, the mighty megatron? The fool, does he not know that I could reduce him to a heap of smoldering Cybertronion energon ash with one blast from my ion death canon! Did Optimus Prime put you up to this pathetic interview?"

Things took a turn for the worse for Chuck as we delved even deeper into his fragile psyche. Choosing to avoid world dominating mechano tyrants like Vader and Megatron may be considered strong, yet confusingly cowardly, career moves for any bearded humanoid like Norris, but it was the crippling fear of facing almost any non-asian-looking, non-illiterate, non-AK47 toting third world inhabitant that pushed the Norris legend we have come to so manipulate and manifest completely out of the picture. For surely had Norris only avoided the most dastardly of the world's villains in his buffoonish bicep flexing epics, the world may have been none the wiser to his ill-fated scheme, but he dodged everyone, he shied away from Alph in '87 citing a lower Bulgarian stomach ulcer, then Ralph Machio in '89 claiming that Machio's steroids induced rages may prove to ungainly when placed next to Norris' countless Oscar worthy performances. And were this it, were these the least of the villains Norris had dodged like so many blanks fired by one of his dimwitted Asian antagonists, we may be able to walk away now, and even still chuckle once in awhile when the name Norris crossed our minds. But alas there was one final low that Norris was prepared to stoop to, one climactic and deafening note that this middle aged mushmonger still felt the need to play.

Chuck Norris was scheduled to make one final "Missing in Action" movie. Like all the movies before it, it was widely known that Norris would survive the harrowing perils of a steamy Asiatic jungle only to end up playing Sally Sissy Pants in front of a gaggle of uninterested bureaucrats who disregarded his advice as if were merely the baying of a snaggle-toothed Latvian ox hound sounding out his final breaths. And in this film Norris was asked little that had not been asked of him before, bite off a rat's head, crouch behind barely concealing bushes, fire innumerable rounds with complete accuracy at countless well-hidden opponents, rescue apathetic POWs that only serve to encumber your already precarious mission, and hook up with a chick that would, in the real world, not look at you twice unless it were to slap the aforementioned grossly outdated beard off of your withered face.

Yet even as filming was set to commence, it was leaked to the press that the mastermind behind the diabolical communist death regime that would be seeking to eradicate Norris once and for all would be none other than the hugely popular overweight comedic pundit, Chris Farley, himself!

To this day, die hard fans claim Norris backed out due to his refusal to stoop to the level of a Bruce Willis, Mel Gibson, or Eddie Murphy, and add a comedic foil to his films. But those who know, those who were there, on set, will never forget the image of a whimpering Chuck Norris, wedged between a broom closet and a mop bucket somewhere in the bowels of backlot #45, weeping like a child at the notion of facing a single, fat, caucasian male in a fair fight. Some say the legend of Chuck Norris died that day, swept away in a flood of ridicule and delirium that would never be the same. But then here we are today, chortling to ourselves behind our office desks as we read off facts about a man that in my eyes never truly existed.

You may laugh when you read that Chuck Norris did this, or Chuck Norris did that, and you may believe that his roundhouse kicks truly are powerful, and that people somewhere really do fear and worship Chuck Norris. But as for me, I know different, I know that somewhere out there is the true Norris, afraid of a teenager and a hand puppet and even an obese jokel in a van down by the river. Norris is out there, alright, cowering helplessly somewhere in a dim lit room, and waiting, waiting like a crippled African Wombu rat in a mongoose den, for a villain, any villain, to come along and send him back to the diaper ridden daycare where he belongs!

Chuck Norris fact #1 - Chuck Norris is a wuss! Put that in your pipe and smoke it!

Conglomo-Foods

2006-02-13T07:02:00.000-08:00

Like all men that have ever trodden this dusty planet, I either live in or wish I lived in America. And so my constant craving for the democratic pavings of this once proud and now despondently opulent nation gnaw at my insides at all hours of the day.

I remember the notion of manifest destiny and the pride once imbued in the crescendo of song that echoed throughout many a major league ballpark as countless fans echoed the lyrics, "from sea to shining sea". But those days have passed, slaughtered by non-range fed, mad cow infested 8,000 pound quasi-bovine creatures that no true cow could be ever be realistically compared to.

For you see, America has a problem.

If the chief export of Chuck Norris is pain, then the chief export of the US is fat; fat kids, fat women, fat men, fat old people, fat dogs, fatback, fat cats, and fat babies. It's fat, it's all fat and we don't even care anymore. There's so much grease lodged between the ever narrowing circumferences of our overburdened aortas that we can scant pause to breath without wheezing like a red-faced lardass on a stairclimber.

And all this fatness, this tub of goo that was bottled and sold to the general public for nothing short of their souls, led me to a startling conclusion last night.

I happened to dine at a restaurant that goes by the name of O'Charleys. There is nothing Irish, or jovial, or even in the remotest degree entertaining enough about this den of density to merit an O' before its name, but those faults in themselves cannot destroy its blubbered existence. And as I dined it occured to me that there was no difference, NO DIFFERENCE, none mind you, between this restaurant and say Applebees, or Ruby Tuesdays, or Chile's, or others of their kind. And for the discerning critic who believes that one restaurant of this ilk stands head and shoulders above the rest because of the savory nature of its chicken crusted salad or black bean and chives dip or hot buttered rolls, I have naught to say but that you are a fool, you are an American in the worst sense of the word, and by and large the grease has you. For like Toyota and Nissan, Nike and Adidas, Tommy and Nautica, Playstation and X-Box and all the other consumer products that we base the majority of our waking hours debating over, there exists no quantitatively discernable difference, no life altering redeemable quality that would allow one to posit themselves amongst the intellectually elite based on the specificity of their choice alone. But rather there is only the diabolical ensnarement of capitalism, ever beckoning us to mull over our choice a little longer.

But these restaurants, these food troughs, these fatmongers of useless, consumable wares, they know. They know I tell you, and even as we stuff our collective faces, they plan an assault so well-timed and ill-fated that the cholesterol level of the nation may very well be in peril.

For what if one day these beasts united and called themselves by one name, one evil moniker, one calorie to rule them all, and in the darkness bind them.

They may perchance term their enterprise - CONGLOMO-FOODS - and the following quips and slogans would in due time find themselves plastered on every bare wall and billboard in the land:

Conglomo-Foods - You don't have another choice

Conglomo-Foods - We don't have a soul to sell.

Conglomo-Foods - Fat kids are our specialty.

Conglomo-Foods - Eat! Eat! Eat! Eat! Eat! Eat!!!!!

Conglomo-Foods - Fat, it's what's for dinner.

Conglomo-Foods - Yes, that's it tubby, stuff your hoglike craw you cloven dogbeast of the West.

And we'd go there, we'd buy their food, we'd sup from their bosom of grease like it was the teat of mother nature herself. And somewhere deep down inside of us something will have died. Something innate and strong and verile, something that made men hunters once, that led to evolution of the spear and the bow. But all we'll have is plush seats, and menus, and choices, always choices, controlling the free will we yearned so longingly to possess...
------------------------------------------------

On a more serious note, Somewhere out there Jimmy McFatso is reading these words, eyes glued to the screen, fists clenched and teeth gritted. And he's thinking of tummy tucks and diet plans and lo carb foods and everything else that may one day save him from a worn recliner, a six pack, and a pacemaker. Currently 33% of all Americans are overweight, and one study predicts that number to reach 100% by the year 2040, this is the only realistic statistic I have ever bothered to publish on this blog. So eat up Jimmy, and keep your mind right, and screw the restaurants and the choices and consumerism and the rest of the western world's wares. Don't feed franchises, don't feed your face, read a book, go outside, go fishing, plant something, hunt something, consume some edible product that you didn't purchase within four walls constructed by a company that doesn't care if you live to see your grandkids or die at 41. Live a little, and you might just lose a little too.

The Rangor Gets His Due

2006-02-05T09:28:00.000-08:00

Star Wars is a farcical collection of films in which individuals possess far more powers and intellect than the mere mortals we are surrounded with in our present jaunt on the planet earth. And in these films it is always the most unsuspecting of characters that eventually end up trumping some supreme evil in an eternal game of one upsmanship. From Nerf herders to slave boys, from Ewok janitorial staff to wookie misfits, from forgotten swamp dwelling jedi masters to delusional desert death worms, Star Wars is the tale of the outcast, the saga of the man forgotten, the plight of the underdog against near invincible and at times unthinkable odds, and hence my desire to write about it.

So many of these beings are etched into our memory for all times, we will forever shudder at the belaboured breathing of an aging Vader, cringe at the wickedly charming grin of Emperor Palpatine as he electrocutes yet another hapless victim, and feel the defiant ruffian in all of us when Luke utters the words, "I'll never turn to the dark side!"

But behind the glitz, behind the comeback kids, behind the big names that kept this franchise in the spotlight for nearly three decades, one character has stoicly stood its ground as perhaps the most underappreciated and overlooked beast in the galaxy.

All men yearn to overcome some obstacle in their life, no matter how great, but few succeed, the Rangor monster is one of those few.

Ask some men and they will tell you Star Wars is about a father and a son, about an empirical state versus a free state, or about how absolute power corrupts absolutely.

But I think Star Wars is about the plight of the noble Rangor, the last of his breed, gentle behemoth of Jabba's lair, fanged knight of the subterranean caverns of Tattooine. His is a story seldom told, a plot almost forgotten amidst the glitz and glamor of the Luke and Leias of the world, but it is a life that cannot be silenced.

The Rangor was born into an upper middle class family on the outer realm moon of Gasnokdost sometime during the fourth year of Han Solo's imprisonment in carbonite. He showed great promise as a youth in the areas of general slaughter of helpless victims, consumption of life on a mass scale, and avoidance of hurled projectiles by natives. But all this would come to naught on the fateful day that Jabba's bounty hunters chanced to intervene in his otherwise blissfully murderous existence.

Forced to watch the demise of his own species by a band of heavily armed Jawas, the Rangor seethed in his iron cage as he was transported back to the land that would become his tomb. Somewhere inside he promised himself that one day he would enact his revenge, one day, when the time was right, he would rise up against the strongest of all bipedal adversaries and once and for all set right the atrocities of his youth.

And so began a tale of redemption that would warm the hearts of any lad. Stuck in Jabba's palace, the Rangor instantly became a hit with his spot on interpretations of Mos Eisley street urchins and his uncanny ability to recant Shakespearian sonnets off the cuff. He was truly the debonair devil beast of the desert for a number of years. Rumored to have had flings with countless of Jabba's prized belly dancers, it was only as his popularity rose that his fate began to be cemented. It started when he opted to run for secretary of state during his fifth year of incarceration, promising a blaster pistol to every able bodied man and a desert skiff in every garage, promises of freedoms and privileges that threatened to undermine the very totalitarian regime Jabba had spent years to corrupt. And so almost overnight a ban was put on the Rangor, a law imposing that he must never again see the light of day, and that in order to surivive he would be locked in a pit and slated to do battle against any opponent Jabba deemed worthy.

For years this punishment seemed futile. Time and time again the Rangor won, and with each win his popularity increased, and like Samson or Maximus in Gladiator his power became known throughout the entire galaxy. "Who can defeat the Rangor?" men would cry, who dare challenge the beast. Who indeed, but another young pup with a sob story all his own, Luke Skywalker.

The Rangor received little word from the outside world due to his slavelike state, but surely had he known that he was to face not merely a jedi knight, but one rumored to be the son of Vader himself, he would have known that the time was at hand. Or perhaps it was due to the request of Jabba, that the Rangor's aging trainer be replaced with an overweight sack of man flesh named Daryl, that the beast was simply unfit for the fight.

To this day, many viewers still believe Luke traveled back to his home planet of Tatooine to rescue Han and Leia, but Star Wars is not a love story, it is a tale of the underling, of the thing trampled underfoot that strives to regain its stature. Luke made that trek for one reason, to kill the Rangor, because in the end he knew, Jedi savior or not, it was the individual with the greatest comeback story who would eventually be the star of the film.

I can only imagine the look on the Rangor's face when young Skywalker first tumbled into his humble abode, the shock at realizing his underpreparedness due to the lacksadaisical training of the buffoonish Daryl, and the seething anger at finally realizing Jabba's ploy to bring about his demise. Surely he had never faced a biped who could make rocks levitate, or throw 300 pound stones with accuracy over half the length of a football field. And in the seconds before this garrulous giant drew his last gasps, I have to believe he uttered something poignant to Luke as the now solidified star basked in his ill-earned glory, warning him to beware the subtle trappings of fame.

The world has chosen to ignore the Rangor, as it does with most things it finds unattractive or complex, but I wonder if we would not somehow be better off with a trilogy chronicling the life a murderous beast imprisoned against his will, ever yearning to avenge the family he lost so many light years away.

Hats off to you, Luke Skywalker, you Beowulf for the modern age, but in the end Grendel got his book also, and all the kids read it too, because if Star Wars taught us nothing, it taught us that all the world loves an underdog, chosen one and voracious alien alike.

Ode to an Oompa Loompa

2006-01-30T19:30:00.000-08:00

Death is a street corner I don't like to frequent. And like so many slushies gulped down too quickly, the brain freeze it induces when given any amount of rational thought is enough to make any man beg for mercy.

I do not play with death and I do not call it brother, and I do not write poems about it stopping for me or rapping gently against my window in the coldness of the witching hour.

Yea, nary a night will pass that you will hear me refer to death as my bedfellow.

But there are those who do.

There are those who spit in the face of danger, those who exist on a ledge so precarious it makes the tortured flight of the yellow crested rhino hawk over the lower Patagonion peaks look like a teenage joyride.

Man was not meant to taunt death, but then, the Oompa Loompa is no man.

Wonka Bars can be bought at every 7-11 from here to Chicken Crotch, Iowa. And if you buy enough you might just find a golden ticket, or so the saying goes, but I live on a budget, and my chances of seeing Willy Wonka's wee world of wonderment lie somewhere between slim and bend over, so I gave up on that ghost long, long ago.

But for some reason I still can't get the idea of those d*#n midgets out of my head. You know, the ones with the green hair and overalls and freakishly devilish pyramid building ability that leads you to wonder if they weren't all on some middle school cheerleading team somewhere before Wonka got them all hyped up on his gobstobber crack balls and locked them away for ever.

Men work in crackhouses and some live to tell the tale. But these Oompa Loompas, they never got out. I mean their fatality rate was 100%. Remember that one scene in the movie, you know, the unedited version, where you can clearly make out the swastikas during the river boat ride and the one Oompa, Pierre I think it was, actually brandishes a Luger off to the side before being placated with a seven foot tootsie pop.

Imagine the lives of these poor beasts:

Wake up.
Sob for hours in soul consuming humiliation.
Put on happy face and dance and sing.
Take crack, I mean candy, break from 12 to 1.
Navigate labrythine network of sugar coated murder while under the influence.
Get whipped into unconsciousness by subhuman ape beastsfor missing handstand last week.
Amuse Wonka with trebuchet fights during supper.
Make sweet Loompa Nookie with wife slightly uglier and more manly than self.
Repeat cycle for 80 years until opportune death by self strangulation.

I salute the flag everyday in my classroom, because like all good Americans I know there is a camera somewhere, watching, always watching, waiting for me to slip up once, just once, and then bam, it'll be me in that ill-fitting, off color costume, dancing like a Bolivian scat monkey for my noonday treat.

But I salute the brave Oompa from the bottom of my heart, and I write this ode to support them:

You stand so small in trousers torn
and strange disfigured face
with mangled mind and shrunken frame
you dwarflike boorish race

Yet deep inside I feel for you
Ensnared within your tomb
Of cocaine pops and pyramids
And Wonka's vicious gloom

.................................................................

Conquering Crapulent Nations

2006-01-16T13:30:00.000-08:00

I have a friend who is going to a place.

A place he may not return from.

The place is far from the gold glittered coasts of Estados Unidos, and like so many drunken she-jackals, it is not tame. Civilization has not spread its greedy and corpulent hands out to strangulate the last remains of freedom that exist on this idyllic and untouched hamlet.

I type this letter as advice. Advice to those who wish to one day tyrannically rule over indiginous peoples due to a happenstance occurence like random air travel.

1.) If one is to rule, they must do so immediately. If it is in your demeanor to enter into a place and upon your subsequent arrival dominate it with an iron fist, you must start the instant you arrive. Begin with the children, the smaller the better. Candy is a good inroad, hand it out, distribute it, like the street legal crack that it is, kids will become addicted. You control the children, you control the economy. A hungry child is a willing child, and give that child a thrice-licked root beer flavored tootsie pop and he becomes a miniature gestapo in the flesh, give him another and he becomes an obedient death lackey, salivating at the chance to carry out your every whim.

2.) When you look at people, squint. You heard me, squint. If Clint Eastwood taught us nothing, and sadly we all know that he did not, he taught us that when facing an irascible and insurmountable gaggle of heavily armed hispanics, the trick is to look the beasts in the eyes, and then in the slowest and most excruciating way possibly, close your eyes to the point that those gazing at you see only a narrow slithole of slaughter staring back at them. Eyes are dangerous weapons, and to conquer a nation you must wield yours like duel lightsabers being manhandled by a slightly intoxicated wookie in western Latvian Ficus bar. You can tell a man by his eyes, and you can tell him to serve you like the rat he his, simply by squinting your own.

3.) Make promises. Promises are so often misused in modern society that I often wonder if man even remembers the origin of so great a word. A promise is an elaborate trick in which one individual endeavors to dupe another largely by offering a service or product that is in an of itself beholden to the other person. And so upon entering into this squalid and underpopulated den of gimpish tribesmen, you must promise them the world. A naked chimp rat on every porch, streets paved with rhino droppings, a free mackay alarm system to all who support you, and a half-gazelle half-wombat warrior on every curb. Your promises will be nothing but blustery blindsiding, but to these rhetorically deficient gauchos, your word is as good as Tomos, the giant black chicken of the east.

4.) Lastly, you must win the populace by insulting the very culture they have strived so many years to create. For is not your homeland, the self-ingesting estados unidos herself, the most self-critical culture of all. Start with their system of government and proceed to lambast them all the way down to the crapulent language they call their own. Begin razing their buildings and erecting crudely hewn and nutritiously insufficient fast-food venues throughout their burgeoning wasteland. A whopper for every child you will shout, and fries large enough to joust with. Destroy their local economic infrastructure through propogandist speeches and finally by airlifting 6 Wal-Marts and locating them within wambutu rock throwing distance of one another. Declare their official language null, and create an intricate system of hobo signs that can be used to navigate their derelict bamboo railroad and enunciate all but the most rudimentary sounds.

The advice I give is not sound, and those who are still reading this garbage would only be served justice to be fired from their jobs before the day is out, but mind me nonetheless, and stay alert if you happen to trod on foreign soil. For were you to somehow stumble across a leg to stand on in this vicious barbarian world that you are soon to inhabit, then sell it for a barrel of monkeys and a batman pez dispenser and placate the elderly with tales of lesser Decepticons, like rampage and thunderbolt, and their quest for energon cubes in Megatron's absence. But remember to squint your eyes as you spin your yarns, and to always have a sucker handy, for death is only a western ditch owl away when you travel the wilds of la terra grande!

Bishmethius - Bringer of Fire

2006-01-04T09:26:00.000-08:00

According to legend, thousands of years ago the gods bestowed the gift of fire to man by allowing a single being, Prometheus, to introduce it into the world. Many people do not know this story. Many do. Few really care. But last week something strange happened, something so odd and shocking that for a few minutes I actually thought about it, mulled it over, contemplated writing something and then forgot to do it.

Last week Prometheus came back.

I am not a man of many words, but the things I do say have grave meaning. They are impued with a sense of purpose and direction that was so lacking from aimless ramblings such as the Declaration, Plato's Republic, War and Peace, and that d$%n walkthrough for Super Mario 2 that never told you how to beat the final boss.

Sorry, I was rambling.

I have a friend who becomes very absorbed with things, and these things in turn take on magnified status in his eyes. In actuality there is no quality of greatness about them save that he thinks about them and thus they are given exalted status.

And so on a cold night in an otherwise listless city, the aforementioned friend had what I think can best be described as an out of body experience, or rather he transmogrified into something altogether different than what he really was. In short, he became Bishmethius.

Bish is not a real word, just like West Virginia and Kentucky are not real states, only partially inhabited wilds more fitted for dingo wranglers than civilized man. But on this night, the man with a fake name became something real.

Because as he stumbled about in his caffeine induced stupor, gathering wood and twigs like your garden variety rodent, a strange thing happened. At first I noticed only that he was gone, and then, that others within the house were gone, and slowly that I alone was left, suffering a blistering defeat to Can O' Corn in the home run derby of 1994's Ken Griffey Jr. Baseball. Left alone for the first time since birth, an alienation that haunts and befuddles me to this day, I strode outside to see where my fellow compatriots had gone, and it was then that I saw him.

Straddling a stone structure more massive than a bird bath, Bishmethius held a fiery twig emblazoned in his left palm, and with the grace and delicacy of a slightly intoxicated garbage monkey, he plunged the stick into the blazing pit of scorching death that burned beneath him. As my eyes became accustomed to the light, I saw the others, once respectable members of inbred southern society, apishly hulking about the embers as if in a trancelike state.

In that moment I realized why God made fire, and why a man like Bishmethius, in and of himself no extraordinary creature was allowed to deliver this sacred element to the teaming masses that were western civilization. Fire is warm, and it burns, and if you sit next to it, or hold it in your hand it will warm you for a while but eventually if you get too close, or get stupid and decide to play "lick the ember" or duck, duck, fire, then the flame will consume you and you will cease to be what you were.

Bishmethius was alive that night, he had purpose, he found something tangible to consume him, and it consumed us as well, and we huddled near, and somewhere in the distance a wolf howled and a badger hawk flew overhead and we heard the heavy tread of the ogre rat in the distance. And we were neanderthals again, Bishmethius our fearless leader igniting bottle rockets and barking out directions like the surest of generals, ever pausing to stoke the fire and resupply the ever waning supply of twigs that would eventually run out and cause us to go back inside.

And as I went back into the calculated warmth of the house I paused in the doorway to glance back, and there, alone in his still consumed state, was Bishmethius, no longer ruler, no longer conduit between deities and their creations, but a man again, lost in his thoughts, tending to a fire that could not last.

If I had a lighter, I would have a lit it. But I didn't, so I chunked the largest rock I could find at his head and ducked inside, smiling as I went!

Babies: When Will the Tyranny End?

2005-10-07T09:24:00.000-07:00

There is a baby at my door.
A baby from across the tracks that I do not know.
And it has a wicked look in its eye and its bottle is half cocked,
and as I cower in the closet with my uzi and pray for the safety of my family,
I wonder what went wrong,
What Barney really said in those damnable tunes of his,
and why babies on the Gerber food jars are smiling,
always smiling,
as their soft coos fill the night air with terror...

There is no law aimed directly at babies, and so in a world of rayon, vanilla flavored soy milk, and lip implants, these waste producing diaper fiends have subtly yet securely ascended the throne to power.

Years ago, babies knew their place. For what month old sack of man flesh, fresh from the incubational hell that is the womb, would ever dare raise its barely functioning paw against the daunting supremacy of its parental units? What child, weighed down by liquid quarts of its own filth would ever dream of world domination?

None.

And what creature, able to muster only the most inaudible blips of its own nonsensical language, could ever hope to stand before the masses of slime laden infants everywhere and declare itself master?

Something evil this way crawls, and its name is Tammy Poopy Pants. Revelling in her newfound ability to pass excrement, she raps at my door and expects entrance, expects love, expects servitude on an unparalleled scale. You see in her eyes, I am a giver, a product, a nutrient. And in the instant that soulless gaze fixates its calculatingly precise stare on my body I am petrified, I am impotent to resist, to fight it, I am sucked in and I succumb.

In the prisons, where the old ones are, men still talk of babies as they once were, suckling wads of love that existed only to please. But then the jailers come, and with them the screams and the blood and then all is silent and we forget, we forget how it was and how it should be, we forget that babies are not as they were.

A baby can never control my mind a friend once said, he can never own me he screamed, but he was wrong, wrong like when you fight Jaws with a whiffle bat, hunt lions with banana guns, or try to catch a dingo with a tissue. Because babies have ears and they hear things, and when you think they are slow, or they can't catch you, or if they crawled after you, you could just stomp them or jump over them and wait somewhere else while they ambled around like crippled sloths waiting to die, you're wrong. They are fast somehow and they get you and you say things, things you want to forget and can't and then there all around and smiling and you thought it was your world and not theirs, and you thought nacho cheese went better with fries and not ice cream but babies change you and they take over.

Goo, goo, goo, they say
and you respond that there is no sense in such drivel, but they continue
Gah, ahh, babada, they say
and you can feel yourself changing
Boo, na shuah ha
no, no, there inside you think, but then it's too late and your holding them, and somewhere in your head you remember that first baby, the one at the door, the one you thought would go away but it didn't, and you wan't to cry out and change things, you want to drive a car or watch Baywatch until you fall asleep, but you can't now.

And slowly the baby raises the bottle and you grasp it, shuddering and knowing that something is wrong, but you put it in your mouth regardless and you cry a little, and you cuddle up in your Teletubby blanket as the baby cracks open a six pack and heads out for another night on the town...

Narwhales: Beastish Buffoon or Mangled Mermaid

2005-09-23T13:53:00.000-07:00

I remember the stories my father would tell me when I was young. Tales of salivating, hulking, soul-sucking beasts that existed only to torture the corpulent youth of Meso-America. And somewhere in those rambling tales of debauchery and Cheez-It induced halucinations, he happened across a word that was forever lodged in my brain, mermaid.

A mermaid was a she-creature that dwelt in the nethermost regions of the wide expanse of churning oceans, appearing only in happenstance to lure some nameless wayfarer from his course with her opulent and at times deceiving beauty. And for the mermaid herself, the true origins of her existence were never understood, was she the descendent of the long excommunicated daughter of Triton, a comely Harper's seal, or merely a 1972 Hawain Tropic model far too waterlogged for sustainable nookie. Your guess my friend is as good as mine.

In the realm of the sea there are countless aquiferous entities that exist namely to stupify or decapitate mankind, and for years, being the half-crazed slightly inbred marsupial that I was, I left this question to those with more than two limbs. But a day arrived that changed all that. A time came that like Columbus as he drunkenly beached his doomed voyage on the shores of the lost world, I stumbled upon something.

As a man, I am able to see pictures.
Pictures are things that cannot be licked or eaten,
But in a way they still portray things that do exist.

As an aquifarious sea-creature, mermaids should exist in pictures.
But no pictures of mermaids have ever been seen, licked, or eaten,
And so in a way, I questioned if mermaids were a thing that actually existed.

As my half-man, half-yak face gazed upon page 1,283 of the N book in Encyclopedia Botswania, I happened across a beast referred to only as a narwhale. After laughing for a number of minutes, making over 300 copies of the sadly mangled blob of mammal and posting them throughout the school with only the words "Crap Sack 2000" posted at the bottom, I paused. And for a brief instant, a time no longer than it would take a yellow crested wood dingo to devour its own young, an idea flashed across my mind.

Narwhales live in water.
Mermaids live in water.
Narwhales are fat, spear beasts that eat orphaned plankton, and sell shrimp into slavery.
Mermaids are hot.
Narwhales mirror in an aquatic sense the sad and alarming trend of obesity in fat hippie kids.
Mermaids are freakin' hot.
Narwhales, much like Marlon Brando, never really panned out when God made them.
Mermaids usually don't go on second dates, being that most sailors die in the first 24 hours.

And so like all Americans that perceive themselves as being capable of understanding the intricate workings of the universe simply because they ate a sprinkle covered blueberry poptart for breakfast, I jumped to a conclusion.

What if narwhales were mermaids? What if, years ago, some evil sea God, furious at Triton's meteoric rise to power based on SEGA Genesis's 1992 release of the hugely underrated fighting game, Eternal Champions, cast a spell on mermaids that would never wear off. Or what if some drunken sea captain, foaming at the bit as his petroleum spewing death vessel collided with the calm harbor of a barrier reef, accidentally crushed the Tri Delta of Mermaid U. beyond recognition, rendering these gently waving succubuses to the freakisly deformed lard vessel that we now refer to simply as narwhale.

Did this happen? Is this the truth? Is nature's longest and most intriguing question this simply answered? Perhaps the world will never know. Or perhaps now it does. But regardless, as for me, sitting comfortably in my synthetic pleather couch gazing at maimed yard beavers as they struggle to escape the clutches of the yeti-like Lithuanian house moth, I sleep soundly at night, knowing that things that were once beautiful will always end up hideously ugly if given enough time, and that water in and of itself is not evil, as long as you don't look at it, or touch, or think about it in any way.

Siamese Cat or Lord of Darkness?

2005-09-16T09:41:00.000-07:00

I live a life of quiet solitude.
A cat lives a life of quiet solitude.
But we are not the same.

I dance maniacally to the rhythm of a song that exists only in my head.
Cats dance maniacally to the rhythm of a song that exists only in their head.
Be we are not alike.

No, my brother, the rift between man and feline goes far deeper than any translucent shared similarities that they may happenstance to have in common between them. I eat and I die and in the end my rotting corpse is no more than an abode for mealworms. And though a cat may eat and die and return to the dust from whence it sprung, a cat is not my brother. He is not flesh of my flesh, he is no friend of mine.

Rather a cat, foul beast of the quadruped world, ravager of worlds, soul-sucking shriek demon of the nether regions of beelzebulb's lair, is a demon in beasts clothing. A wolf among sheep. A killer, walking among us, waiting for the moment to strike, watching as we slowly let our guards down and accept it not as a threat, but as a pet.

All men yearn.
All cats do not.

All men dream. They dream of things they may never attain, like being a cockswain, or a line judge for an Iranian mullet festival, or a butler for the scores of homeless she-pigeons roaming the sparse regions of the Central Brazilian wastelands, but in turn these dreams from time to time spur them to lift the consciousness of the world to an ever heightened state, to invent world altering devices like the game genie, the spork, and to a lesser extent hydroelectricity.

But cats do not dream. They lay about, orally cleansing the putrescence left on the outer rim of their anal cavity with their sandpaperish tongues only to later produce slime coated hair cubicles that could cause even the staunchest Bavarian Yak Lemur to swoon from the stench, and they scheme of evil. Yes, evil I say. EVIL!!!!

Evil on a scale so unparalleled that Hitler himself would never dare allow the graven image of a cat to adorn the tainted banners that were the essential splendor of all Nazi regalia. Shrinking back into his bunker under the crumbling Reichstag, he must have shuddered at the premonition that perhaps it was not subhuman Russian monkey men advancing on the dreams of his ever diminishing thousand year reich, but cats. 13 inch tall, sure-footed hell creatures, intent on sitting around and doing nothing, or striking out at those in close proximity simply because they could. And sure their brains were no more than small wads of cardboard, a chewed stick of gum and some pencil lead, but what did that matter. What does anything matter when a creature exists only to steal souls, to smother sleeping grandmothers as children play, and to eat tweetie bird whenever given the chance.

I have never owned a cat, but I have never defeated one either. I have kicked and flung and chased and taped the soles of their feet with tape, but they came back. I have seen a cat's skull crushed by a garage door, but it's evil would not let it die, it's will to kill and maim kept it going. For what creature that kills mice, the rodent saint of the post-proterozoic era, can ever be loved by man. None I say. None at all.

Cat's may not be the devil, but their ilk is not far behind. Be it henchman or brothers in arms, there is surely some liason at play that I simply cannot fathom in its entirety. Some demonic pact that allows these purr-spewing demon spawn to infest our homes in numbers so rampant cockroaches would blush at the sheer magnitude. I have seen 300 cats live in a single box, I have seen 6 cats rip a bull elephant limb from limb, I have seen a yeti turn his massive paws on his own throat when confronted by a pack of wild tomcats.

Some men pet cats. And as they extend the chubby pink flesh that is their arm towards the shimmering fang filled mouth of nature's lone mistake, they must think somewhere in the deepest, most remote regions of their quivering minds that should they pull back nothing more than a tattered hunk of fetid man meat that perhaps they got what they deserved. There are ways a man can pet a cat, ways like a shotgun or a two by four, or the onrushing slaughter of a greyhound bus. And even as these hellish denizens of the living rooms and carpeted floors of suburbia continue to infiltrate our ever dumbening existence, I know still that they must be defeated. And as the sun sets and the men of America lumber gawkishly to their beds, I sit awake, bazooka at my side, and I watch. I watch the house across the street, the garbage pails out back, and that tree with low hanging limbs in the front yard. I watch because I know somewhere a cat lurks. Somewhere a child cries out in the night or an old woman struggles for breath. And I know behind every fear crouches the slowly gyrating tail of a cat, ever watchful, ever waiting to pounce should we close our eyes even for a moment.

That cat's are evil is a thing that I know and have known, and like all things that are passed down it changes, and I forget sometimes if it is cats that are evil or Gremlins, but in the end it makes no difference. Because in the end I am left to my own devices, nodding off slowly with a handful of rocket propelled grenades at my feet. And some nights when the air is crisp and I've downed one Irish car bomb too many, I tremble, but I hold on and I fight it, and I tell myself the sun will be up soon and a new day will dawn, and soon everything will be ok....

Should Men Fling Poo?

2005-09-13T09:36:00.000-07:00

Lard is a word.
Like all words it has a meaning.
I know the meaning of the word lard.
In no way do I find this impressive.

Poo is a word.
Like all words it has a meaning.
Good God do I know the meaning of the word poo, and in the vast cavernous regions of my ably firing brain I pray that all men throughout eternity will one day bow before its subtly stagnant stench, and know that yes, poo is merely feces, but in a way it is so much more!

Like all wantonly lost young males, I spent countless days wandering through the ramshackle zoos of America. Be it Billy Thompson's backyard that boasted a week old dead toad, a Funk and Wagnals animal encyclopedia, or the illustrious Riverbanks, zoos were in my blood. Animals, whether I was killing them or learning how they lived so that should I encounter them on a dimlit alley I might best them in a rogue game of Vietnamese roshambo, fascinated me. I was hooked. I knew of the woolly mammoth, the condor sloth, the Austrian Beaver Dingo, and the blind rat ox of upper Patagonia.

And in all my days I believed that I should never come across an animal that could wow me beyond comprehension. But I was wrong. You see I never reasoned that a simple ape, man's dimwitted yet ferocious cousin would unlock the key to societal woes that had plagued civilization since the rash and unfounded invention of running water some years ago. But then there he was in all his glory, nature's unicorn, an angel in course brown fur and rabies bitten madness, a creature of such non-composed selfish habits that mankind can only gape in wonder at why he was not elected supreme primate commander of our shiftless and for the most part tailless race eons ago.

It was a Colobus Monkey. And as I gazed longingly into his demonic, hate-filled, beady red eyes. Something miraculous happened... he began to defecate. But the poo that spewed forth from this wild creatures pulsating anus was not wasted by contaminated a rather large amount of perfectly good drinking water that flourished in a beatiful porcelain throne. For even as the ape demon went, his hand, knowingly and without pause, scooped a healthy gathering of primate fertilizer and flung it with alarming accuracy onto the face of a sixty year old woman. Not the horrified gasps of the crowd, nor the shock induced death of the woman could lead me to any conclusion but the following. Truly this beast has freedom, and freedom means to fling ones poo.

To date I have not flung poo, and so one could say that the following hypothesis is baseless and should be taken lightly, but each man is privy to his own ingorance induced decision and so this is mine.

Poo is a noble thing.
And all noble things should be treated well.

A man worships what he eats.
And when it leaves him, there should be cause for celebration.

I have stepped in poo and I have gotten poo all over the inside of my legs and diapers as a child, but never has the warm, oozing filth of a good poo oozed between my fingers life fresh mud after a spring rain. And never have I sat half clad atop a public building, screaming soulless obscenities at all who pass by, and projecting the glorious remains of my last meal on all who dared trod too close. But I think now that I should. I think now that men of all nations must see that the Colobus Monkey is no more an ape than a beacon. Were poo meant to splash idly into gentle waters then why the raucous jubilance of a fart that would bring a smile even to the blushing bride as she exchanged her vows.

Consider these facts:

Poo, in its natural state, is the most valuable natural resource since dung.
It takes the average man 13 years of his life to discard of poo in oblong water waste units.
Poo has only three letters which makes it easy to spell and remember.
Sometimes when you poo it is hard and you wonder if you should wait to poo again.
Poo, to this day, has never intentionally committed any crime in any nation.
In 1997 alone, 27 pieces of poo were named division I All-Americans at tailback.

Though I may dream all the days of my life, I will never attain apen status, but that does not mean that in the corner of my mind, as my bowels converge amongst themselves to produce that special treat, there is not always present and sense of urging, an involuntary motion of the hand to reach back between the buttocks and scoop out a little freedom and give it to the world.

For if Braveheart taught us nothing, it taught that every man dies, but not every man really lives.

And if a Colobus Monkey teaches us nothing, doesn't it at least teach us that every man poos, but not every man really flings.

Traffic Lights - Clogging the Earth's Veins

2005-07-21T08:06:00.000-07:00

I have stared into the bright-shining eyes of the stagantly decrepit motor vehicle as its ability to careen dangerously around and amongst other metal demons of its ilk is hampered and eventually stopped.

I have flown on the wings of hellbent eagles, with naught but four tires, fake Japanese pleather, and a flimsy plasti-luminum carcass to save me from the menacing pavement below.

I have seen a car, and I have seen what it can do to a man. I have seen bodies wrapped around fenders like the gentle caress of a baby's hand on the face of a loving mother.

But in all the glory and hollow wonder that is the motor vehicle I have seen only one invention that with the subtlest of changes can render this megalomaniac of motorized mayhem stagnant, and this invisi-wand of change is none other than, the traffic light.

Man, in his boorish stumblings, has invented many things that serve no purpose save to further our rage and kindle within our softly palpitating bosom a hatred normally reserved for only the fiercest moth beavers of Rangoon. Among these are the tissue roof, the gyro-copter, the cloth slinky, and aluminum soap, and to the nincompoops who devised these devices of deviance I gladly raise my middlemost pointer unit and flaunt it in their general direction.

But then, amidst the ever-increasing death and general malaise that so personifies the burgeoning era of transportation that is the 20th century, man invented a device that would stop it all, a motionless silver bullet with the ruthless capacity simply to stop things that like to move.

I do not know much about physics or vulcanized rubber, but I do know this:

- Cars, more than any other animal, are hard and tough to cuddle with
-You can forget to feed your car for 10 years and it will still sit patiently and wait
for food
-A car will take a bullet for you and require little to no bandaging
- no car has ever cried while being spanked
- a car's only natural enemy is the southeastern blue-crested road-squirrel
- in 1997 the first man-car marriage was legalized in Ketchum, Idaho

For years, lights have served as mighty oppressors to all that humankind holds dear. For what man, cold and wet and yearning for the dark stankness of a pre-neolithic cave dwelling, does not strike out when the blinding whiteness of a 60 watt bulb cuts through his perceptory abilities like hot shrapnel.

Precariously placed only a scant few meters above the surface of the road, the traffic light is the scarecrow of travel. Seemingly warm and non-violent, it beckons all vehicles alike to cozy up to its emanating goodness and stay for awhile. But behind the soft click of electronics and pulsating energy lies the warped embodiment of a mind that yearned to stop the axis of the world. I have read Atlas Shrugged, and I know the secret ploy of John Galt, but the traffic light pushes him aside like a helpless old woman shoved by a girlscout into the speeding path of a semi.

Man was meant to move, that is why fat kids plummet helplessly to the pavement, why seals lose their wings when they fly too close to the sun, why toilets flush with a miraculous rapidity, and tilt-a-whirls adorn the royal courts of all but the poorest nations. We are in love the gravitational dance that is motion, but the traffic light has created a regime to crush man's dreams, to crush his deepest yearnings. Because what pock-marked Timmy Too Fast, drunk on speed and power and the midly retarded rhinocerous collie he disemboweled on Cobb St. only moments before, can stand up against the omnipotent power rays that spew forth from that silent beacon of oppression wavering before his face as he comes to yet another auto-infested intersection.

Traffic lights solve nothing, death comes and death goes, and for the most part it dresses in black and carries a blade of some sort, and who is a traffic light to stand in the way of a man's preordained time to depart this spherical orb.

An object in motion will tend to stay in motion.
This is physics.

And once, a car in motion would also tend to stay in motion.
And this was also physics.
But the traffic light changed this.
The traffic light changed everything.

I do not cuss much, but that does not change the fact that China is a country and that traffic lights suck, and should I happen upon one on a dark and dimlit stretch of road, and should I, upon this chance encounter, also happen to possess a fully automatic ballistic projectile device with exploding shells, well then, like an inbred hunter with a lame chicken bear in his sights, I think we all know the ending to this story...

John Elway - Man or 8-bit Deity

2005-07-20T05:52:00.000-07:00

I am a man.
And parts of my life will suck worse than others.
And one day, I will die.

John Elway is also a man.
And parts of his life have sucked worse than others.
But John Elway will never die.

Somewhere amidst the sprawling Denver pavement of one of his many used car dealerships the ever cheapening toothy grin of John Elway still belies the aging confidence of the once prominent pigskin passer. Lost amidst the neverending push of capitalist propaganda, this scrambling legend of the gridiron is now nothing more than a pawn, pushing his wares like the lowliest fishmonger pawning fried squid balls amidst the outskirts of the Pacific Rim. And as he lulls through his remaining days, selling hulking scraps of metal-oriented moving devices, I wonder if Elway himself ponders his own mortality, knowing that soon death will come for him too, like a cracked-up tooth fairy with dagger in hand.

Growing up I played a game known to the common man only as Super Tecmo Bowl. And as I devoted my waking, non-social hours to memorizing the running speed, rushing power, and maximum speed of some 30 odd players on over 30 teams, it became evident to me that there was one player who stood out above all others. It was not his stats, or the number of times I won with him, but something far deeper, some power embedded within the silicon-encrusted game chip that sat so precariously within my 8-bit worship box that allowed him to control an uncontrollable environment.

I have seen The Never Ending Story (a sin I am not proud of), and like all children I know when that wuss "I-read-books-in-the-attic-so-other-kids-don't-pound-me" kid summons Balcor he will inevitably come, with his furry, worm-like dogness and grinningly escort those he serves to safety. And I have played Tecmo Bowl and seen the power of John Elway as he influenced games that he was never a part of. When Bo Jackson fumbled after an 80yd jaunt downfield, I knew it was Elway. When Joe Montana faltered on a last minute drive and threw an untimely pick to the Colts lowly Mike Prior, I knew somewhere Elway was grinning. And when Mike Singletary was shrugged off by Mark Rypien six yards behind the line, I could faint but see Elway's hand slowly releasing its chokehold as the play was whistled dead.

And when a man can fling bodies, disrupt the flight of airborn objects, change statisitics in midgame, and cause white guys to be good at cornerback, is it not right to call that man a god.

Well I say it is, and I say I know that John Elway can never die, because like all children who grew up with a controller in one hand and 8 twinkies in the other, I have long ago sold my soul to Nintendo and Sega and all that they encompass. And as my ever worsening vision suffered night after night of red-eyes and cripplingly sore thumbs, I came to realize one thing:

John Elway had powers. He had powers that no man should possess. He was Moses, and Ted Turner, and the fat kid from Goonies all in one.

Super Tecmo Bowl is a game.
Like all games, it is not real.
And like all games it can be won or lost.

John Elway is a character in that game.
Like all characters, he is not real.
But John Elway transcends things.

There were nights when I wanted to shut the game off, nights when my life-threatening obesity and shortness of breath cried out like a mangled kitten for me to trudge outside and participate in multiple limb involving activities like other kids, but always there was the voice of Elway whispering in my ear, "one more game kid, don't you want to see what I can do, don't you want to keep going..." And I began to see the world in royal blue and orange, parents became referees and friends morphed into teammates or opponents. And should I happen to clothesline tackle little Janie Bookworm in my 8th grade Science class then so be it, because Elway deemed it so, and who was I to traipse around the power of a Titan.

John Elway won two Super Bowls and was an amazing quarterback at Stanford , but in the end those pathetic accomplishments meant nothing to me. I have learned that eels have four heads at birth and that a Botswanian giraffe can spell words like tuna and gelatin when it wants to, but animals are dumb and accomplishments are fleeting, and in the end only virtual existence remains.

John Elway the man will never be cool to me, just like 90210, in a way, was never really cool to anyone. But relagated to an 8-bit non-speaking virtuoso, Elway belies a belief in absolute power that no semi-conscious child could ever refute.

I was young once.
And in my youth I believed things.
And one of those things was that John Elway was a god.

John Elway was young once.
And in his youth he believed many things.
And though later he sucked and sold cars and I got pissed at him when San Fran and Washington freakin' whooped the Broncos sorry a** in the Super Bowl, in a way his puppet-master like ability to maniacally orchestrate every aspect of a confusingly simple video game allowed me to look past the ridiculous foibles of his ephemeral life and love him not as a man, but as the technological tyrant he truly was.

Live on John Elway, live on...

The Beach - La Playa or Gritty Death Hole

2005-07-19T08:56:00.000-07:00

Like all dumb, mindless animals, children love the beach.

They love the sand and the water and the fun and the undying assault of innumerable microscopic death rays that sear the chubby pink flesh off of their still-developing bones.

Children for the most part are slow and obese dimwitted creatures that follow their mothers around like Hungarian beggar rats, entranced by the sadly sweet tune of Melanesian Yak herders and led ultimately to their brutal deaths on the outskirts of the Lower Kindush-La peninsula.

And thus follows the age old proverb comparing the child to its bovine ancestor:

You can lead a cow to water,
but you can't make it drink.
And you can lead a child to water,
but you can't make him not die.

Yea, the beach is no bastion of safety and gentle waves ever lapping at the unsandled foot. No, it is rather the fetid hell pit of man's feverish quest to tame all that nature has offered him. Once (long before grottoes like Miami, Myrtle Beach, Cabo San Lucas, and to a lesser degree the Hamilton's pool over on Dogwood Street) men feared the beach and its ever present siren call to peruse the treacherous tidal waters that it so graciously set in motion to destroy us. But, as will happen, man became increasingly dumber and more populous at the same time, and so like the bumbling bipedal buffoon that he is, he forgot the warnings of his predecessors and came to dwell on the ever burning sands of Hades itself.

And so in the modern era of green paper money and a listening device in every home, the beach, the den of murder itself, has risen to prominence.

Did not God warn men of building their houses on sand, and did not little Johnny Momma's Boy, who built his sand castle too close to the incoming tide only to see it swept mercilessly away, teach us that a thing that moves and is big and is prone to get sand down your pants is evil and cannot be trusted.

Perhaps we have erred in our attempts at aggrandizement and manifest destiny, and in doing so we have neglected countless examples throughout history of the destructive power of beaches, such as:

- Beaches abduct over 6,000,000 blind children every weekend
- Beach sand is more a mixure of crystal meth, needles, and Chinese Crack than sand
- Beaches once rose up against the Roman Empire in 1270 AD
- Beaches actually killed the dinosaurs
- A beach once tricked Ronald Reagan into running for president
- Beaches are really hot and muggy and if you don't shower and walk around in your wet bathing
suit you will chafe and burn and curse under your breath while others laugh and tell you they
told you so

I have fought a whale shark with one leg behind my back, and boxed 6 drunken Colobus monkeys wearing naught but a monocle and a loincloth, but I fear the beast within the beach, and I know that on a hot summer day, when the winds of waste blow slowly across its flat, shifting surface, that somewhere beneath the oozing sand lies the cold heart of monster, a monster that devours men, and children, and civilizations alike. And though scared and unable to refrain from boisterous and cowardly flatulence, I know that the beach is no pristine bride, ever waiting to marry man and fun in a fruit filled union of bliss and romanticism. But rather she is the monolithic mass of murder that wakes all men from their dreams, she is the cry of every frightened child and the thing that makes dogs run with their tales behind their legs, or Wendy's stay open until 1.

Beaches are evil places that I would not talk about unless I was paid. But if you go there, and you see one, and in your head you are tempted to stay and look at the pretty colors and rest your eyes for a while, remember that the beach is no friend of man, and that the sand has eyes, eyes that are always watching, waiting, looking for a way in.....

Looking for a way to, No, No, Nooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Lad of the Rings

2005-07-13T11:36:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I look out of windows.
And sometimes when I look out of windows it is hot.
And sometimes when the things I see are not there I make up words for them.

In the summer it is hot and I am prone to hallucinate.
And when a man creates things due to heat and the presence of window,
is not that man more like a taco than his dog.

Hallucinate is a word that can be looked up and understood, and were I a wiser more able bodied denizen of this great and opulent nation such looking and understanding may be characteristics one used to describe me.
But as I said before...
It is the summer and it is hot, and so as a man half engorged with the roach trodden crusts of cheap Winn-Dixie Happy Jack frozen waffles and somewhere between six and seven litres of what may or may not be 1987 Havoline brand motor oil (or more likely grapejuice), I am inclined to indulge the still firing synapses of my ever-depleting brain and write things on this soulless computer oriented machine-like window box.

Today I saw a boy (whether or not I actually saw this boy may be scientifically disproven were I a being existing in say a wookie run universe, but that not being the case, the following lie holds true), and upon first glance there was nothing special about this traipsing, barefoot, gawking doofus of a child save that he wore what appeared to be a cylindrical bonding device around one of his flesh covered grasping units. Then, in what can only be described as "hey...what the..", the aforementioned boy disappeared. After not thinking about the occurence for slightly less than 6 hours, it dawned on me that I had not seen a mere boy, but had in fact discovered the large, hair-footed beast known to the common man as a Hobbit, and not any Hobbit mind you, but Frodo himself.

Before jumping to conclusions, and making coutless profane, rash, and unfounded statements, I pieced together the last remaining crippled thoughts stumbling through my brain:

Saw boy.
Boy disappeared.
Boy wore ring.
Farted.
Saw movie with boy who wore ring.
Movie made me believe things.
Boy in movie could disappear.
Boy in yard disappeared (or simply moved around a corner and could no longer be seen).
Wondered if concrete was inherently evil.
Deduced that if movies are real, this boy was Frodo, though younger and black.
Began to formulate an intricate plan devised to capture this pseudo-frodo and encapsulate the power of the one true ring so that I could begin the initial phases of my tyrannical, yet sporadically boring reign.
Fell asleep on toilet.
Dreamed of birds and fully automatic nuclear photon devices created by mule deer.

Evidence is a thing men spend their entire life searching for and yet never learn to spell. And in a world of million dollar movies and man creatures with powers beyond the realm of comprehension, a hunch is sometimes worth more than 8 pounds of evidence.

I returned to the window many times in the days following my chance encounter with the vanishing african Frodo, and though I was never to set eyes on him again, in a way his disappearance was more proof of his existence than any discovery or questioning of him could have ever been, and, in another way it proved nothing save that I should probably wear my glasses when trying to see things afar off and that a lie is bad and dumb and can cause hate-filled yak monkeys to lash out and chase after you if not done well.

I may or may not have discovered a duo-dimensional gateway between the realm of film and man, a passage that is more important than all the years of society's collective knowledge. And some may say that I am a cornbread filled sack of crap that lounges on feces covered rental furniture and gawks at his own nasal hair for amusement, but to any man who has ever happened to pause for a fleet moment and gaze longingly out of the wondrously magical earth framing device known only as the "window", well he can count himself in the company of kings, for I have learned many things while looking out windows, many, many things....

In the end it is not what we see that defines us, but how elaborately and blatantly we decide to lie about it.

Ewoks vs Kong

2005-07-06T11:48:00.000-07:00

King Kong is a giant, merciless ape-like death beast.
Ewoks are small, merciless bear-like death beasts.

There is only one Kong.
There are approximately 8 Trillion Ewoks (7 of which are inbred, and 36 of which are actually confused and angry midgets from Iowa).

Kong met his fate on the Empire State Building.
Ewoks helped defeat the Galactice Empire.

And so arises the pentultimate question of civilized man, whom would you fear more, Kong or an Ewok? Did George Lucas happenstance to stumble across the denizens of the seventh tier of hell when he created the furry empire slaughtering death beasts, or are they merely spineless woodland creatures whose rock chunking abilities would do naught but deter the mighty Kong? And is Kong, lord of the Jungle, slayer of T-Rex's and numerous man operated flying machines, the heir apparant to the throne of world's most feared film creature, or is has his weakness for hot blondes and crack bananas reduced him to a role of steroid pumping circus monkey.

An Ewok is perhaps the most resourceful creature in film history. Imagine Vader's fury when informed by Grand Moff Tarkin that he must face the baby faced assassin of Endor on it's home planet. Not since Hannibal's victory over the Roman's at Cannae had so decisive a slaughter been enacted on so massive a scale. In the battle of Endor, if watched closely, it can be seen that only one Ewok actually dies, and that he was in turn so crippingly mentally retarded that his continued breathing itself is nothing short of a miracle.

Yet when Kong faces a ragtag crew of film hopefuls on his fortress of solitude Skull Island, he is done in by a mere handful of stun grenades and a girl in a dress.

Did you see any Ewoks stopping the battle to make a pass at Princess Leia? You're d**n right you didn't!

Kong is a joke, he's over the hill, Tyson without the punch, Mickey D's without the Arch Deluxe. In a fair fight, two Ewoks could rip Kong limb from limb. Why two you say? One for Kong to eat and use as a toothpick, and another to wear a blonde wig, get in good with Kong, then plant C-4 in his ears as he sleeps and send him back to to that great monkey heaven in the sky.

Consider the facts:

Ewoks
-In 2003, 276 Ewoks were enrolled in MIT
-7 European nations are actually run by Ewok-like creatures
-The first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong, was actually an Ewok
-Most Ewoks listen to Megadeth almost continually
-When asked what they feared most, 78% of Ewoks replied, "Cri-eee-aaaa!"

Kong
-In 2003, Kong flunked out of Skull Island prep for the 8th time in 9 years
-Most Europeans believe Kong to be a Chinese surname that means "billowy"
-Kong howls and beats his chest when the moon wakes him from sleep
-Kong considers the sound of his gas to be the only music worth remembering
-When asked what he feared most, Kong got choked up and ended the interview

There is no realm in which these two beasts will ever fight, and perhaps, for giant apes like Kong that is a good thing. Nature is a tricky and confusing word made up of letters that for the most part don't smell like anything. And in a world where size matters and galactic empires come and go, the assumption that Kong is king falters like a fat man on a morning jog. There is no creature to match the wit and ferocity of the Ewok, and should I one day find myself helplessly lost amidst the foliage and towering hardwoods of Endor it will not be the remnant of some imperial storm trooper squadron that drenches me in sweat, but rather the notion that somewhere, wearing a crudely sewn pouch and headdress and standing over 3 feet tall, the beady eyes of the Ewok following my every reluctant step. Waiting, biding his time, ever patient and stealthy with his trusty rock at his side. If fear is a word, then truly it means....Ewok.

-

The Squirrellish Armada

2005-06-21T12:01:00.000-07:00

There are many things in this world that can be killed.
Squirrels are not one of them.

You can kill a man, and he is no more.
But kill a squirrel, and it will become more powerful than you could ever imagine.

My roommate kills squirrels.

I remember a simpler time in my surburban life, when birds chirped, their young nestled close to their breasts as the first soft rays of daylight broke over the shade of the maple tree in the backyard. I remember walking to the mailbox on nice days, neglecting to mow the lawn, throwing uneaten food directly out the backdoor, and burning woodchuck holes with profuse amounts of lighter fluid. But those days are gone now, because my roommate aimed a gun at nature's assassin and pulled the trigger.

If you look up the word squirrel in the dictionary you will probably find a picture of a rodent accompanied by some words. These words are lies. Like all men, I once believed that squirrels were small tree-dwelling rodents that existed namely to fascinate mankind with their noisy chatter and to die mercilessly by being mashed into lifeless pulps of oozing flesh during their frequent forays onto paved roads. I was wrong.

U2 once sang, "You become a monster, so the monster will not break you..."

Squirrels are monsters. I have seen a squirrel eat a water buffalo whole. I have seen six squirrels take down a 747. I have seen squirrels take direct shots to the head with a pellet gun pumped 12 times and crawl away. I have never been to war, but late at night, in the icy solitude of my bed I have heard the lone cry of the alpha squirrel and wept like a child.

Consider these facts:

-87% of squirrels eat their young (preferrably with peanut butter).
-At 3 weeks old, squirrels possess the IQ of an average Canadien male.
-From 2002-2004, over 4,000 squirrel related deaths were reported in every major nation.
-It is widely believed that squirrels actually won World War 2.
-Squirrels are so feared by man that no movie making direct fun of them has even been made, ever.

Face it. Squirrels are the Keanu Reaves of nature. Though perceived as moronic, nearly skill-less creatures, they are in fact imbued with near epic powers. Squirrels stick together. After the backyard massacre induced by my roommate in the Fall of '03 there were over 873 squirrels residing in a single tree by weeks end. Sure, he killed over half with a single, pump-action pellet gun over the course of a slightly intoxicated afternoon, but they won. They overwhelmed him. One squirrel became ten squirrels and ten squirrels a thousand (or more simply, there seemed to be more of them).

I have not learned much since I was born, but that has not stopped me from pretending to know things I do not. This is one of those things. If squirrels do exist (and I am inclined to believe that they do), then they are very powerful and we should fear them. Because whenever you kill one thing, and two take its place, then eventually you will run out of bullets, and without bullets what man could ever hope to take down a squirrel.

Hogzilla: a Deeper Truth

2005-06-21T07:50:00.000-07:00

Dinosaurs are big lizards that existed millions of years ago.
Godzilla is a big, radioactive, cinema creature that exists in moving pictures.
Hogzilla was a giant wild hog that roamed the forests of Georgia.

God killed the dinosaurs ( somehow).
Better special effects killed Godzilla.
A redneck shot and killed Hogzilla.

Rednecks are people who dwell in unpopulated areas such as the "backwoods" or the "south".

People who dwell in areas referred to as "backwoods" are inherently stupid.

I mean this in its fullest sense.

These corn-cob eating, inbred, shotgun toting excuses for overalled human flesh are known throughout the world for their capacity to fabricate stories that boggle the human mind. For years they have pestered the average citizen with tales of bigfoot, the lizard man ( I saw him once, and he stole my twinkie), the jersey devil, chupacabras, jackelopes, "golden" retrievers (yeah right) and their ilk. But then, a few years ago, amidst the constant slaughter that is the backwoods way, a man embedded somewhere in the mountainous cornhole of Georgia stumbled across the single most important archeological find of the 20th century: the living, and then once he shot it, dead carcass of Hogzilla.

Since the dawn of time man has yearned to uncover the riddle of the dinosaur. How exactly did this noble beacon of strength and light simply cease to flourish in the twilight of the Jurassic era? For years, scientists ( and by scientists I mean any individual who has not actually seen Hogzilla) posited the theory that birds were the evolutionary descendents of dinosaurs. But now, amidst the evidence offered by the bloated corpse of a wild hog, I present a different, stranger, newer theory: dinosaurs did not evolve into birds, but into hogs (I could have said pigs here, but any farm hand knows that a hog can flat out kick a pig's a** any day).

For scientists throughout the world who are at this very moment ridiculing my brash postulation, I offer the following, irrefutable proof in the form of a single statement:

Dinosaurs did not evolve into birds.

That proven, we can move on. Imagine for a moment festering herds of massive, feral, bloodthirsty hogs, careening mercilessly throughout the dense underbrush of the deciduous forests and other temperate climates that they call home. Is there any doubt that this beast is none other than the hooved great-grandson of the once mighty sauropod. Sure, there were countless varieties of dinosaurs and all hogs look generally the same, and some would say that is why birds: which have claws, the same bone structure, and look almost similar to smaller dinosaurs, are obviously the rightful heir to throne of the thunder lizard. But think about this , please, how can any animal that could be crushed by a feeble seven year old child holding a tennis racket be a relative of a T-Rex! No I say, surely this is a lie.

"Never judge a book by it's cover," someone once said. Touche'!

Have we forgotten this maxim and its propensity to lend itself to whatever we want to prove at a given time? Well, I for one have not! So what if hogs look nothing like a brachiosaur, both are big and they run fast. And if I were in the woods and big, fasting moving thing ran at me and made horrible noises would I not be within my God given rights to call that beast a dinosaur. And if one day the name of that animal shifted from dinosaur to hog, would it not still be the same beast, forever lurking in the darkest woods, planning, plotting, sharpening it's teeth and claws and hooves and salivating at the thought of tearing my still warm flesh from my bones. And if Godzilla and Hogzilla have taught us nothing, haven't they at least taught that it doesn't matter what we call something that is big and pissed off as long as we find a way to kill it. Isn't that the backwoods way, kill or be killed, and if you can't kill something, give it a name that makes it sound scary. And isn't that why some redneck named a hog after a radioactive mutant lizard in the first place? Yeah, I think it is, and I think it's about time we did the same thing.

I don't like hogs.
And I don't like dinosaurs either.
But both are big and mean and could run at you.
And if a thing runs at you,
no matter what that thing is,
isn't it you're right to give that thing a name.

I say it is! So carry on Hogzilla, you fat, bloated pile of evolutionary brilliance.

Optimus is that you?

2005-06-13T13:41:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I hear voices in my head.
This is something I don't understand.

Sometimes I hear noises in my car.
This is also something I don't understand.

This simple yet mindnumbingly halfwitted comparison leads me to perhaps the most perplexing question that any male between the ages of 20-35 could ever posit, is Optimus Prime real? Does a supremely powerful and benevolent machine-based creature, one that masks himself in the clever guise of an 18-wheeler (the belabored workhorse of capitalist regimes), and one that wields the power of a nearly omnipotent glowing matrix deep within his bosom, exist in a corporeal sense on the planet earth?

Think about this:

Many people have seen extra-terrestrials.
Extra-Terrestrials come from another planet.
They can be both good and evil.

Even more people have watched Transformers.
Tranformers come from another planet.
They can be both good and evil.

Almost everyday I hear noises in my car. Most of the time, these noises are indecipherable in relation to the realm of comprehensible spoken language. But sometimes, on days where I am experiencing significant overloads of robotic sensory magnification, I imagine that perhaps this is machine language I am hearing. If the movie "The Matrix" did nothing else (save prove that hashed-out sequels will only break your heart), it illuminated the forward spiraling of mankind's capacity to believe in the concept of far superior inorganic based lifeforms dwelling among us.

But the Matrix was only a film, Prime could be real. Driving down the interstate, it becomes the obsession of Gen-Xers across the world to search out the tell-tale signs of living, transforming, world conquering robots existing under the hood of every mundane vehicle they see, autobots and decepticons alike, waiting for the opportune moment to spring into action with their fully automatic death rays and create societal disorder on an unparalleled scale .

If Prime did exist, here is what I think his day may consist of:

Wake up, pretend to be vehicle.
Drive from East St. Louis to lower Hoboken over the course of an entire day.
Get cut off by GMC Yukon at stoplight, mental note, incinerate owner and family later.
Keep on lookout for Megatron, guns are everywhere these days.
Use Matrix to make trucker's, Larry is his name I think, seat cushion fluffier.
Make intermittent communications to Cybertron that sound like beeps, honks, screeches, etc.
Park and remain in vehicle mode.

The sadness of Prime's now constrained existence is mirrored only by the futility of my Quixotic desire to find him. Were I a popular kid I would rally children everywhere to my cause, urging them to hang around truckstops and take rides with trucker's named Stabbin' Steve and Inmate 159834, and if times were desperate we could simply stand in the middle of interstate highways everywhere with signs that read, "Autobots, transform and roll out!" And if he saw us he would stop, and even if he didn't, the honk of the horn and screeched of the tires would be a sign of his communication, a sign that maybe we won't fully understand, but communication nonetheless.

Donkey Overlords Among Us

2005-06-13T11:08:00.000-07:00

Based upon the scant amount of time I have spent postulating the following hypothesis, I find it to be convincingly and almost irrevocably true, donkeys are our masters.

At first this theory may be met with widespread scoffing by the cultured elite that posit themselves so numerously throughout our great land (by elite I refer to those with a third grade education and who can invariably discern right from left at least half the time) But in God's hierarchy of thinking, acting, and feeling beings I think there are evident signs that point to the reign of stubborn, four-legged braying mammals over their militaristic bipedal cousin.

Picture for a moment the immediate change in the course of the nation of America if we were governed by say a gray coated, 7 year old mule named, Randy, rather than our current humanoid resembling leader, George Bush.

The donkey would be stubborn on almost all matters. Filibustering and Pork Barrel legislature would have almost no effect on its staunch support of more hay being used to cover the White House lawn and National Mall areas (though the rampant use of mankind's insufferably tonal and chirp-like language may drive this noble creature into an angered fit where it was forced to use it steel covered hoofs as "Reason Inducing Devices" to crush the skulls and other insufficiently armored parts of the human body).

Now imagine presidential speeches or public appearances. The donkey, welcoming the familiarity of it's presidential palace would be reluctant to travel or ever burden its adoring populace with the long and piercing bray, that should it be sounded, would surely cause fear and ultimately reverence and adoration among its constituents. Any attempts by humans to force the donkey away from its work desk would be met with the aforementioned reason inducing devices.

Arguing with the donkey would become a near impossibility. Nations across the globe would come to so dramatically fear (and ridicule) our mule led nation that our will could be imposed on them without the layered rigamortus of councils and meetings. Should we threaten to send in "the mule", feared leaders across the globe would cower at the thought of being isolated with so noble and powerful a leader. Truly the world would be ours. Though, a clear downfall that may ensue would be other nations using carnivorous creatures as their ambassadors and in effect defeating the mule by backhanded measures of natural selection.

I have never spoken with a mule.
Usually, upon seeing one, I am not inclined to fear or serve it.
But I keep my distance and I don't let it get to close.

I have never spoken with George Bush.
Usually, upon seeing him on tv, I am not inclined to fear or serve him.
But I keep my distance regardless, and I don't let him get to close.

LESSON - Those who lord over our nation (in a physical , confusingly militaristic sense only) are bipeds. But mule's are stubborn, quite powerful, and have four feet. Need I say more!

Vive la donkey!

TV - Sadly Impotent Nemesis?

2005-06-13T08:42:00.000-07:00

There is a tv in my home.
That tv gets around 27 channels.
Of the 27 channels, none offer me anything that even faintly resembles what could be described as my viewing pleasure.

A tv is roughly a box.
A cardboard box is roughly (though slightly moreso in a literal sense) a box.
If you put a monkey in a box and it danced, I would laugh.
If you put a monkey on tv and it danced, I would change the channel.

TV's, in a way, do not control their own destiny.
You can aim a scientifically advanced device at a tv and it will go dormant.
That device, in a way, could be referred to as a laser wand.
This relationship, in a way, could be said to be sad.

Likewise, ants, in a way, do not control their own destiny.
You can aim a scientifically advanced device at an ant and it will go dormant.
That device, in a way, could be referred to as a laser wand (or a magnifying glass).
This also, in a way, could be said to be sad, though in a more honest way, it could also be said to be cool.

These, short, almost sensical comparisons bring to light a shockingly important point, has the tv, apart from its from its lingering functionality as a video game projector screen (which I predict will end in the near future), ceased to function as an operational tool for evil?

Cable, where is thy sting? It seems like only yesteryear that parents across the nation clambered into the creaking pews of sanctuaries weekly to laboriously lament the slow moral rot oozing from the nearly comotose mind of little Johnny Eyes-on-Screen. But then, either subtly or so overtly I am only revealing myself to be far removed from any semblance of being mentally gifted, tv began to suck.

The beast that once promised to rot the minds of America ingested too much of its own crapulence much like the sadly misunderstood Pizza the Hut of Spaceballs lore. Gone over to a life of reality programming, producers forgot that reality could be had outdoors everyday, for free. Smut was taken over by the web, as was weather and the news. For the giant that was tv, all was lost, or, all is lost I should say.

Once last loose comparison:

Animal poo can be found almost anywhere.
It is nasty, revolting, and can in no way make my immediate life better.
Yet at times I am compelled to look at it and chuckle.

TVs can be found almost anywhere.
They are nasty, revolting, and can in no way make my immediate life better.
And less and less often do I feel compelled to look at them an chuckle.

The Inherent Suckness of Loops

2005-06-13T08:14:00.000-07:00

I-285 is a loop.
A loop is a form of roughly circular shape.
Circles lead nowhere.

It has recently come to my attention, via the nonsensical amount of time spent festering in a near rage state on I-285 around Atlants that loops, all loops, are inherently evil. There is a lack of sense in the creation of loop in the first place. Is not the purpose of a road to take you to a place, not around it? Do we as humans not yearn to reach a destination, our deeply ingrained nomadic yearnings running rampant as we grind our teeth in the halted traffic of man's greatest failure- the loop.

Before continuing, I think it only fair to provide a complete list of all the loops I deem effecient representations of man's yearning for speedy travel:

None.

Now a list of those that in effect, achieve a blissful, yet sadly concrete, state of suckness:

I-285, the loop around Athens, GA whatever it's called, the really stupid loop around DC, the bypass in Aiken, SC, some loop around Indianapolis that completely blew, etc., etc., etc.

In a sense, I think the loop can be held up as the quintessential example of stagnation, corruption, opulent decline, and ultimately failure. Why drive all about the place you simply want to arrive at. Imagine the implications of the "Loop Mentality" on some of man's greatest accomplishments. What if we had nuked China in 1945 and simply said, good enough, Japan will get the point. What if in the instance of a horrible fire, water was poured on all the buildings in the neighborhood as a preventative measure, and meanwhile little Hoju, the family dog, simmered to a bacon like crisp in his family's inferno of a home. What if instead of finally asking about Betty Sue, you proceeded to ask out her and every other girl in your high school out on the same day. Sound sensible? Thought not. Sound like the almost preordained epitomy of eternal suckness?

Yeah, I thought so.

LESSON - Being "In the Loop" - Worthless. Using the collective power of the free society of man as a whole to render the loop nothing more than a grass-covered, donkey trodden excuse for a wagon rut - Priceless.

Biko

2005-06-09T21:41:00.000-07:00

This song is a must for all who love songs that are great for no apparant reason save that they touch the deep inner recesses of the fact that you like things and that these things exist as tangible actualities.