Sunday, August 31, 2003
I'm back in moldy old Portland after feeling like a pinball that bounced up to Seattle, down to LA, up again to Seattle, and finally hitting TILT in this splendiferously livable micro-metropolis which has always embraced me and made me feel part of a thriving, productive, progressive, compost-friendly community.
I'm sad to report that there are lesbians in Seattle, too, but on the plus side, I didn't see any in LA. At least none who bore the telltale Northwestern George Gobel look.
Bumbershoot (I can't bring myself to say that word—I cringe even TYPING it) was an explosion of cotton candy, dayglo posters, face-painting, "spirit dolls," juggling sticks, annoying "street performers" who spray-paint themselves silver and stand absolutely still, and a feel-good, hidey-ho, near-nausea-inducing sense that maybe we all CAN get along and that the world won't soon swallow us whole and spit us out like watermelon seeds.
To a small crowd of zine-a-rinos, many of whom have yet to discover the glories of masking their animal musk with deodorant, I read several of my "Notes from Undergoad" entries and sang an a cappella version of George Jones's "Open Pit Mine."
There is potential good news on several writerly fronts, yet I hesitate to say more for fear of jinxing myself. I have resolved to cease self-jinxing and have in fact jinxed the very act of jinxification.
Posted by jg @ 10:39 PM PST []
Saturday, August 30, 2003
The mighty jimgoad.net server is working again today. It blew up yesterday, undoubtedly sending cyber-shrapnel through the hearts and minds of my misguided minions.
Yesterday was the first day sans a diary entry since I started sharing daily morsels of myself with you more than three months ago. For this, I feel equal measures of shame, remorse, contempt, panache, chutzpah, and a newfound dash of you-go-grrrl sass.
I'm leaving LA this afternoon after two nights spent sleeping in Adam Parfrey's slave quarters, on a tiny bed where little ants crawled over my supple, inviting torso. I had two meetings with a British gent who discussed the possibility of turning Shit Magnet into a film.
From this distance, Portland appears to be the insignificant cow pie in a corn field I suspected it was before moving there in '94. And yet I keep going back to it like a battered wife who thinks it'll change.
Outside the window, a brook babbles, a wind whispers, and a jacaranda tree softly sways like a hooker offering a discount price for half-and-half. There is so much I'd like to share with you...even expose to you as if you were a dermatologist and I were showing you a skin rash...but for now I must draw the blinds and focus inwardly.
+++++++++
I'll be at Bumbershoot in Seattle tomorrow from 12:30-1PM on the "Starbucks Ink Spot Stage," or something like that.
+++++++++
The new Trucker Fags is here.
Posted by jg @ 01:24 PM PST []
Thursday, August 28, 2003
Around 10PM last night, I got some news that was potentially so good it felt like I'd taken a shot of speed in my ass. Packed my bags, hurtled downtown, bought a Greyhound ticket, and rode "The Dog" up to Seattle with a busful of mule-faced mutants.
Stood in the chilly Seattle pre-dawn for a bus to the airport along with an interracial homeless coalition. A mullet-headed Mexican was dipping nachos into an open can of tuna and inviting everyone to have a taste. An old skittish black woman was handing out Jehovah's Witness tracts. She asked a clownish little old white man if he liked tracts, and he pulled up his sleeves and said, "Look—I got tracks right here."
On the airport-bound bus, I overheard a black guy in work clothes say, "Ain't nothing wrong with dreaming." I agree, as long as you keep your eyes open. Later, a surly brutha thrashed the living shit out of the old trackmarked white man while everyone sat and watched. The busdriver finally stopped and dispassionately told him to knock it off. I wasn't going to get involved—not in a three-strikes state.
Arrived in LA around noon and a cabdriver zoomed me through the Flat Sunny Beast up to Silverlake. Up in the hills I survey the orange-roofed houses and conclude that Los Angeles can be a pretty place when you know you'll be leaving in two days.
There's a party tonight at Parfrey's Magic Castle. I'll know tomorrow whether the incantations worked.
Posted by jg @ 06:49 PM PST []
Wednesday, August 27, 2003
Encrusted within the velvety neon rainbow of human sexual lifestyle choices is a rarely acknowledged group I've labeled "bisexual by necessity." These are the ones who go either way—whatever way will have them. These are the fat, mottled, criminally uncomely specimens who advertise their freewheelin' sexual orientation within five minutes of meeting you—whether you've asked them or not. These are the genital pariahs who haunt swingers' clubs and wheelchair-accessible orgies—and still don't get laid.
Let's cut through the hippy-dippy jargon about "polyamorousness." It isn't because they're boldly experimenting. It isn't because they're free with their sexuality. It isn't because they truly enjoy eating pussy AND sucking cock. It's because they're ugly and lonely.
"I can't understand why more people aren't bisexual," Woody Allen once said. "It would double your chances for a date on Saturday night." Sho 'nuff. Same goes for fucking your aging girlfriend's adopted kid.
Posted by jg @ 04:01 PM PST []
Tuesday, August 26, 2003
GAZA STRIP—It was a typical night at The Falafel House, the most beloved comedy club in the war-ravaged Israeli-occupied Palestinian settlement of Gaza. Arab comedian Amir "Chuckles" Faisal [pictured, far left], an outspoken critic of Israeli policies, was beginning his second set in front of a packed house of Muslim comedy fans.
"Two Jews, an Arab, and a midget walk into a bar," began his joke, but before he could finish, an Israeli-launched missile whizzed into the club, killing two Arabs, injuring several others, and leaving The Falafel House in shambles.
"This was a preemptive strike against anti-Semitic humor in all its forms," said an Israeli spokesman. "You let them get away with one Jew joke, they'll tell six million."
The missile grazed Faisal but did not injure him. "I was spared by the grace of Allah," the comedian quipped. "A couple inches closer, and I would've been circumcised!"
Posted by jg @ 03:31 PM PST []
Monday, August 25, 2003
It has been said that if God didn’t exist, we’d have to invent Him. It is likewise true that where no knives exist, we are forced to make shanks.
Throughout the Oregon penal system in which I enjoyed a twenty-nine-month Writer's Sabbatical, the accepted term for a homemade stabbing implement was "shank." The word is both a noun and a verb: You use a shank to shank someone, preferably under his armpit with the hope of popping a lung. Other cons in other systems refer to these charmingly DIY flesh-rippers as "shivs," "bangers," "irons," and "burners." Because I am unabashedly Americentric, I wasted no time researching what Limey inmates call them—you lost the war, you look it up yourself. And get the hell out of Ireland while you’re at it.
The overseers of Oregon’s county jails seemed more concerned about shanks—and the pricey lawsuits that might arise from rampant jailhouse shanking—than did state penitentiary officials. This concern was manifest in the fact that any vaguely shanklike jailhouse supplies—pencils, toothbrushes, etc.—were provided to us in lengths not exceeding the average Asian penis. Once you wrapped your paw around a tiny jailhouse pencil or toothbrush, only a centimeter or so’s worth of shanking material timidly protruded from your grip, enough to pierce someone’s skin and not much else.
By contrast, Oregon State Penitentiary was the Land of a Thousand Shanks, each one a sparkling testament to Yankee ingenuity. The most durable shanks were fashioned out of metal devices spirited from the machine shop through the time-honored tradition of "keistering," i.e., smuggling contraband in one’s rectum, a process which rendered it imperative to sharpen one’s shank only AFTER keistering it. Common items purchased from the prison canteen—pens, hair picks, toothbrushes, disposable razors, et al—were also used to make a right good shank. After the occasional pork-chop dinner, the nighttime air would hum with the sound of convicts filing pork-chop bones down to ice-pick sharpness on their concrete cell floors. I once heard of a shank made from a humble sheet of paper rolled into a pointy conical shape and coated with toothpaste in an elaborate curing process.
"The trick to shanking someone isn’t in the sticking, homes," a Mexican gangsta who punctuated every sentence with a superfluous "homes" or "eh?" once told me. "The trick is in the ripping, eh?" he said, a teardrop tattooed beneath one eye. "You stick it in him, you just gonna hurt him, homes. You stick it in him, then you rip it sideways, eh? That way, you KILL him, homes."
He said he once stuck-and-ripped two inmates in a California pen while serving a seven-year-set for a botched LA drive-by shooting. "They was giving me static, homes," he said, "so I killed them, eh?"
Most shankings at Oregon State Penitentiary occurred while Yard Line was being called in and a thousand or so convicts huddled together near the gated entrance leading back to the cellblocks, making it easy to stick someone like a pig and disappear in the crowd. I only heard of one shanking—a non-fatal one—during my stint there. Guards were able to find the victim by following the trail of bright-red splotches leading back to his cell.
I once stood next to an AIDS-ravaged con, a dried-out strip of human beef jerky strung tightly across a thin jumble of bones, as Yard Line was being called in. He told me that when he served time in Utah, another inmate used his own long, unclipped fingernail as a shank and was able to impale someone’s eyeball with it. As I grew increasingly anxious for the gate to open, AIDS Boy vowed vengeance against an inmate who’d refused to pay him for a drug debt. He opened his jacket and flashed me a six-inch rusty nail shoved snugly within a pen’s plastic sheath. "I’ll get him," he spat. "I’ll get him if it’s the last thing I do." I made a mental note to never do anything that might remotely offend this fellow.
As opposed to the sneak-attack shanking, a "strapdown" refers to a formal knife fight between two or more inmates, usually for the purpose of settling a power dispute. The term arose from the practice of using leather straps to secure shanks to both hands so they don’t come loose during battle. A legendary peckerwood inmate with a walrus mustache and a body carved from granite gained his reputation after a strapdown to determine which racial group would control the prison’s drug trade. He entered a small room along with a black, a Mexican, and a Native American. He emerged from the room as the only survivor.
To discourage shankings, Oregon corrections officials go beyond disciplinary sanctions and typically file new criminal weapons charges against the shankee, meaning extra years trapped in the Valley of Shanks. This policy acquired a tragicomic flavor in the case of a small, harmless, septuagenarian koala bear of a man I knew who had altered his disposable razor so he could cut paper for his insufferably gay pastel-tinged art projects. When guards searched the old bastard’s locker only months before he was due to be released, they determined that this innocent device was indeed a shank and whisked him away to county jail to face new weapons charges, adding further insult to his already shankless existence.
Posted by jg @ 10:06 PM PST []
Sunday, August 24, 2003
I awoke this morning with a foul, filmy taste in my mouth. It was the taste of your ass from last night. And I looked over at you, asleep and smiling from the ace rimjob I’d given you before we dozed off, and I felt resentful.
You never eat my ass anymore, and I’m getting upset about it.
In the early days, your tongue was like a plumber’s snake unclogging my colon. Back then, we savored each other’s intestinal effluvium like two lovers feeding each other black olives on a picnic blanket. We shared each other’s asses. We shared each other’s dreams.
These days, you wouldn’t go near my ass even if I stuffed a fried pork chop between my buttocks. When I ask you to eat my ass nowadays, you just shrug and say you’ll “think about it.” You avoid my mudflaps as if there were Yosemite Sam “BACK OFF!” insignia emblazoned on them. Truth be told, there is no “EXIT ONLY” sign affixed to my derriere. My ass’d welcome the gentle, probing presence of a caring, loving tongue. But all of a sudden, you have no appetite.
You’re very selfish, that’s what I think. If I had a nickel for every time I ate your ass and you didn’t eat mine, I could pay off the national debt. Relation-ships should be about sharing, but right now you’re only sharing your ass, and I’m only sharing my tongue. Love isn’t a one-way street; ass-eating shouldn’t be, either. There is no reciprocity in our ass-eating, no sense of fairness. Our relationship’s anal inequities push me to the brink of tears. My neglected rectum cries out for some cuddlin’.
Where I come from, when someone does you a favor, it’s a matter of courtesy to return it. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. You eat my ass, I’ll eat yours. It’s a matter of basic fairness and human dignity. But maybe I’m from the old school.
My parents didn’t have this problem. They licked each other’s asses like it was going out of style. Like ass-eating was on sale. Like they got a tax deduction for doing it.
People in the movies don’t have these problems, either. You see a happy couple up on the big screen, and you assume they’re licking each other’s asses, no questions asked.
I’ve looked at my ass in the mirror. It’s a nice ass. I’ve held a hand mirror right up to my bunghole, and frankly I don’t see what’s so horrifying that you’d avoid it like you do. What’s so disgusting about my ass that you won’t eat it out every once in a blue moon? I always use the scented lotions and male douches, so offensive tastes or odors shouldn’t be a problem. Would it kill you to eat my ass every once in a while? I mean, would it put that much of a crimp in your evening?
From now on, you can lick your own ass, you asshole! Believe me, your ass isn’t all that tasty sometimes. It ain’t always a cinnamon roll, ya hear me, honey? Your ass isn’t as great as you think it is, I’ll tell you that. I’ve seen better. I’ve licked better. So don’t go getting an attitude with me.
I’m just asking for a little consideration. Lick my ass every once in a while, alright? My ass doesn’t have teeth. It won’t bite your tongue off. The occasional anal 69 would really put the spark back in our love life.
Not everyone you meet out there’s gonna be as happy to munch on your fat ass as I am. And that’s what bugs me—your ass is flabby, and yet I graciously eat it, while my muscular ass is the very picture of a perfect posterior, yet it sits alone and uneaten.
You just watch—I’ll go out there and fall in love with the first person willing to lick my tushie. One day I’ll be rolling in clover, my new lover’s tongue gleefully lapping at my tuchis, while your stinky butt sits home alone, as lonely as my ass is now. My sphincter will be wet and happy, while yours languishes in limbo, unlicked and forlorn.
Posted by jg @ 11:03 PM PST []
Saturday, August 23, 2003
last night was pretty cool. we went over to justin and deena's house and they made some beans for me and jason. we watched some movies and got pretty drunk. i have a headache today. i think i'll enter those new numbers into my cell phone tomorrow. sometimes i feel all confused and don't know what to say.
what the FUCK is the problem with boys? i mean, i can never tell if they like me, and even if they tell me they like me, i still can't tell. jason was there sitting next to me eating his beans, and i'm like, "do you like me?" and he's like, "like, i like you a lot," and then he just kept eating his beans like i didn't even exist. GRRRRR....
so i was working at the coffee shop, and this man comes in and asks if we have any "regular" coffee, and i said, "we have the 'house' coffee," and he said, "ok, i'll take some of that." people are SO stupid sometimes.
i wanna die or get married.
mom's going to come over later and give me money for rent and then we're going to get some lunch. i think my cat's sick. then jason and me are going to go over to justin and deena's house and watch some more movies.
Posted by jg @ 09:09 PM PST []
Friday, August 22, 2003
Bored with the usual suspects, I spent this late-summer afternoon looking for a new minority group to persecute. I settled on people with red noses.
I don't care if you try to excuse it as a skin condition called "rosacea" or an alcohol-induced capillary explosion known as "gin blossoms"—to me, having a red nose is a character flaw. I once knew a mulletheaded junkie whose honker looked like a red bicycle horn. His personality was so foul and overbearing, you felt as if your brains were being rubbed through a cheese grater just being in the same room with him. A friend of mine accurately dubbed him an "egotard."
The only worthwhile person ever to sport a crimson proboscis was W. C. Fields, and since his movies were in black and white, it hardly counts. But the rest of your ilk are hideous affronts to everything we NORMAL humans hold dear.
Better not let the sun set on you in MY 'hood, Rudolph.
Posted by jg @ 03:25 PM PST []
Thursday, August 21, 2003
From the expanding canon of Weird Sexual Facts You Kinda Wish Weren't True comes the revelation that some women have orgasms while giving birth.
Sex-positive, um, sex-positivist Suzie Bright claims to have climaxed as she delivered her li'l sex-positive munchkin. Ina May Gaskin, author of Spiritual Midwifery, once told an audience, "A woman can orgasm during childbirth, and most doctors don't want you to know it." I'm not sure why physicians would conceal such a fact...is there a danger that the infant-induced 'gasm is so intense, mothers would try to shoehorn their newborns back up their yoo-hoos whenever they're feeling bawdy? Granted, the smallest baby is larger than the hugest cock. I've heard large schlongs described as "big as a baby's arm," but never big as a whole baby. It makes sense...the proper angle, coupled with sufficient pushing and squeezing...FIREWORKS!
If you think this is another urban legend or yet another of my zany hoax entries, surf on over to here and read queasiness-inducing testimonies such as, "I had been told to expect a 'dogging pain,' but was unprepared for the sensation of sexual ecstasy, the voluptuous feeling of penetration," and "It was the ultimate climax."
Posted by jg @ 11:30 PM PST []
Wednesday, August 20, 2003
From the day she shat me out of her snatch until the moment she coughed up the death rattle, my mother didn't teach me a thing about the art of living. She walked this earth devoid of wisdom or taste. In fact, since her tastes were so askew that she thought Claude Akins was a sexy man and Shelley Long was a hip, sassy gal, I learned to hate the things she loved and cherish the things she despised. When she warned me that sex and drugs were bad, I knew they couldn't be as horrid as five minutes spent in her presence.
I've transferred this principle from my dear ol' dead mom to the professional ass-fleas called "critics." The things they snortingly dismiss as worthless usually wind up close to my heart. Whether it was punk rock, rap, or Howard Stern, I took their negative cues and investigated for myself. Their condemnation was all the endorsement I needed. And after a decade or two, the critics always come around, long after I've tired of what they were too dim to appreciate in the first place.
Posted by jg @ 09:07 PM PST []
Tuesday, August 19, 2003
A flyer is circulating through Portland that depicts LeVar Burton as slave-boy Kunta Kinte from ROOTS with a chain around his neck and the word REPARATIONS at the bottom.
First off: You won't get a nickel from me.
But since it can be proven that most white Americans are descended from slaves rather than slaveowners, can we, too, get on the gravy train?
Someone once described the idea of modern-day reparations for slavery as (I'm paraphrasing) "forcing people who AREN'T guilty of something to pay other people who DIDN'T have the crime happen to them."
The sticky wicket which bludgeons the whole "boo-hoo, gimme money" mantra is the fact that black Americans enjoy the HIGHEST standard of living of any black population on EARTH. So if you want things "repaired" back to how they were before you were enslaved, a one-way ticket to Africa would do the trick.
Oh, no, no, no, no—they'd instinctually resist THAT plan. Ninety-nine out of a hundred would rather be "kept down" here than frolic amid the splendor of Mother Africa.
So shut up, already. There's a limit to white guilt, and you're REALLY pushing it.
Posted by jg @ 01:32 PM PST []
Monday, August 18, 2003
With all the whiny, soapy-dishwater blather one hears about the near-retarded state of American education, it's noteworthy that the teachers always get blamed and never the students. It's presumed that if you give the little monsters enough new shiny books and cuddles, they'll all bloom into frickin' Einsteins.
Without ANY instruction, I was able to read and write and spell before I entered kindergarten. Still, although every American is forced to sit in a classroom from the ages of six until at least sixteen, a staggering FORTY-SEVEN PERCENT of U.S. adults score either "barely literate" or "functionally illiterate" on reading-comprehension tests.
Compare this to ZERO illiteracy in Denmark and Finland, or ONE PERCENT in Germany, France, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the UK. I won't mention the low literacy rates in other parts of the world, 'cos that would be mean.
Guess what? If you can't read after TEN YEARS of DAILY instruction—no matter HOW shoddy the books and teachers are—you're a fucking hopeless imbecile. And every one of you Cro-Magnons who enters adulthood with a dried peanut inside your skull has already cost taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars—for NOTHING. This doesn't count the untold sawbucks it'll cost to put you on welfare and educate the half-dozen seedlin's you spit out in your subhuman image.
It's a post-industrial world, and we no longer need these drooling mules to labor in the salt mines. So I propose the wholesale sterilization of anyone who can't pass a basic literacy test upon reaching the age of sixteen.
Is that cruel? To THEM it is. But no crueler than it currently is to force smart people to carry these beasts on our backs.
In one generation, the U.S.A. would be a brighter, better place.
BRIGHT POWER!
+++++++++
I've added articles about considerate felons and child-molesting nuns.
Posted by jg @ 10:50 PM PST []
Sunday, August 17, 2003
Hark! Can you hear the frapping sound of a thousand fart bubbles burbling through a brassy sphincter? Do you relish the herky-jerky dissonance of music so self-importantly complex that it murders essentials such as melody and rhythm? Does it make you feel classy to buy overpriced drinks and listen to meandering, four-hour spazzfests that are essentially the Grateful Dead in a suit and tie?
Since I have never felt like a ping-pong ball bouncing FOREVER in a locked room, I have never felt jazzy in my life. I'd rather drink jizz than listen to jazz. Hey, jazz—you can kiss my azz!
Doot-doot-doodle-a-doodle-a-doodle-a—STOP!
Worst of all is "jazz fusion," music tailor-made for two homos who've snorted too many poppers and have decided to shave each other's tushes.
If I only had five minutes to live, I'd dig up Miles Davis and strangle him.
Posted by jg @ 10:45 PM PST []
Saturday, August 16, 2003
My biggest fear—even greater than my dread of boredom, success, or being nibbled to death by rabbits—is of being underwater and encountering large aquatic creatures.
My fear isn't confined to being attacked by such sea-beasts. Rather, I'm terrified merely by the thought of sharing the same space with them. I'm scared of opening my eyes and seeing the gentle manatee and the noble dolphin. In fact, I'd involuntarily empty my bowels at the sight of anything bigger than a medium-sized trout.
I would rather be stranded on Pluto than plunged fifty feet beneath water. Dark, deep, horrible sea. Murky muted underworld from which our amphibian ancestors slithered millions of years ago. Lair of the hundred-foot Megalodon, the plesiosaur, Leviathan, and otherwordly organisms which scuttle the ocean floor and never see light.
Swimming underwater in a Vermont lake as a kid, I opened my eyes and looked beneath me. Down through the air bubbles and blurry greenish muck, I saw a dark blob the size of a tool shed. I thought I saw it move. Feeling the silent panic one only feels when submerged in water, I shot toward the surface and yanked myself up onto the dock.
Sweet terra firma. A landlubber I'll always be.
Posted by jg @ 10:36 PM PST []
Friday, August 15, 2003
A cold wind of remorse has blown down from the North. Standing naked, I hear it whistling through the tupelo trees. It beckons me. It hardens my nipples, shrinks my balls, chills my soul, and passes out my anus as a gaseous cloud of regrets.
I'm soooooo, sooo, so—SO!—sorry. Sorry for the bad words. Sorry for the bad things I've done. Sorry for the misunderstandings. Sorry for all the hurt I've caused. Sorry for being a weed instead of a blossom.
I'm sorry to everyone who has to read this and put up with my crap. I'm sorry to you up there, you down there, and you over there. Sorry to the little children, the little old ladies, and all the little minds. Sorry.
I hope this helps. And if it doesn't, I'm sorry for that, too.
WAAAHHH! I'm sorry! Ouch! I'm sorry! Yowww! Sorry! Me bad. You good. Me REAL bad. Me go now.
Posted by jg @ 10:51 PM PST []
Thursday, August 14, 2003
METUCHEN, NJ—You've seen "low-rise jeans" on women, accenting their bellies, hips, and upper regions of their tantalizing buttocks. You've seen saggy-panted men, their trousers hanging down to their pubic zone, flaunting their rebellious "gangsta chic" fashions. Now, thanks to New Jersey's own Baby Lowrider Company, infants nationwide can sport the latest "cool styles" while comfortably containing their waste products.
"When it comes to street fashion, babies have traditionally been left out of the loop," says César La Verga, the charming one-legged Puerto Rican ex-con whose line of "Urban Diapers" have revolutionized the infantile-incontinence industry. "It's ageist discrimination, plain and simple. Babies are our future, and if we discriminate against them, we discriminate against our future, which is a lotta discrimination, considering all the discrimination that has gone on in the past."
La Verga also plans to market hemp-paper baby wipes and 40-oz. baby bottles.
Posted by jg @ 10:01 PM PST []
Wednesday, August 13, 2003
When personal calamities pile up like crushed autos in a freeway disaster, sometimes a bitterness leaches through my bloodstream that I can almost taste.
Right now I'm sad. It's the same feeling I'd have when autumn would creep in and kill the summer, when night fell on a lonesome Sunday, or when I was saying goodbye to somewhere or someone I knew I'd never see again.
I wish I could cry, but men are weaned from crying to the point where they become incapable of it. I'm convinced that men live shorter lives primarily because we're not allowed to cry. Boys can do it, but it's eventually beaten out of you, often literally. Men just have to bite down and swallow and let it ravage their innards. Women, well, they bawl at everything. They cry at yellow lights and raindrops and misplaced shopping coupons. They're especially good at crying when you need to cry and can't.
Tomorrow I'll be angry or goofy again, but for now I'm just sad.
Posted by jg @ 11:14 PM PST []
Tuesday, August 12, 2003
The albino tarantulas crawl through Southeast Portland, using their trust funds to emulate poverty. Jah good. Jah love dem. Jah make dem feel irie. Jah know dat if dey walk two blocks out de tourist section of Kingston, dey get dey white brains blasted onto de cracked sidewalk.
Dreadlocks—the ugliest hair style ever known—look like clusters of dried dog poop. Reggae—the worst musical format ever invented—sounds like a rusty toilet which has trouble flushing. But if you're sitting in the squalor of Jamaica, at least these things have some resonance for you. On the other hand, if you're walking around the Pacific Northwest in a Vanilla Marley costume, you just look like a douche. Suicidal Caucasian insanity has reached the point where "authenticity" is only achieved by absurdly INAUTHENTIC fashion maneuvers.
There's a reason the Third World came in third.
Posted by jg @ 08:56 PM PST []
Monday, August 11, 2003
Someone caught me picking my nose on the street the other day, and for a moment time was suspended, and I was transported back to a childhood of booger-encrusted bedroom walls and shrill parental admonitions. The shame was born anew, and I felt like crawling inside my nose and hiding.
Unlike my younger days, which I spent walking around with fingers up my nostrils as if my head was a bowling ball, I hardly ever nose-pick in public anymore. But it was early in the morning, my breathing was impaired, and I figured no one was on the streets, anyway. I was tragically wrong.
Blowing my schnozz into a hankie never worked. A gummy blast of clear fluid will come out, but the prize—the Emerald Gem—clings to my nasal walls, requiring digital excavation. I'll usually grow one pinkie fingernail to "coke spoon" length in order to ease the rock-digging process.
"Pick it, stick it, lick it, and flick it" was the mantra as a kid, and I'm down with everything but the licking. I've picked enough boogies in my life to make a giant green medicine ball, but never ONCE have I tasted the fruit of my nostrils.
That's just disgusting.
Posted by jg @ 10:25 PM PST []
Sunday, August 10, 2003
As further evidence of the eternal principle that "the enemy always changes but the stupidity remains the same," I've noticed a rash of nudge-nudge wink-wink ironic communist-themed T-shirts being sported by Portland's tiresome alternative crowd. There's a goofball CCCP shirt here, a wacky Lenin shirt there, all incorporating the color red, which communists ostensibly used to signify the Olympic-sized swimming pools their regimes filled with blood.
A book called Death By Government estimates that Marxist nations were responsible for 125 million murders in the 20th Century.
Another book, The Black Book of Communism, pegged the total at easily over 100 million.
Sorta makes Hitler's 6 million seem puny by comparison, eh?
"But dude, at least those dudes weren't killed because of their race!"
SO FUCKING WHAT? Tell that to the survivors of the 125 million! A dead body is a dead body, no matter WHY it was killed. What kind of sick mind would justify killing someone because they THOUGHT differently? A communist mind, that's what kind. In all its manifestations, socialism has been sociopathic.
I saw some ponytailed doofus downtown wearing a Stalin shirt. "You know that Stalin killed 40 million people, don't you?" I asked him.
"Whoa, didn't know it upset you so much," was his smirking answer, obviously thinking I was some sort of buttplugged right-winger.
"I'm not upset at all—the more dead, the better, so long as it isn't me. I just think it's ironic. I'll bet you wouldn't be caught dead wearing a Hitler T-shirt."
He had no answer. No one ever has an answer when they try to argue with me.
Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Idi Amin—all serial killers. You dummies get caught up in the fashion differences and are blind to what's underneath.
Power is brutal, no matter what color T-shirt it chooses to wear.
Posted by jg @ 10:35 PM PST []
Saturday, August 9, 2003
When I was but a pubeless sapling in the 1960s, TV was filled with depictions of American Injuns, most of them proud, benign souls such as Tonto. Injuns were the other race, the ones against whom the dominant cowboy culture defined itself. Back then, you saw nary a Negro in prime time.
Nowadays, with all expressions of whiteness having been outlawed, American popular culture is black culture, and yet the Injuns have faded into the sagebrush. You hardly EVER see them on the tube, and when you do, it's some nauseating PBS documentary made by some self-hating paleface about honky-industry-contaminated corn meal on The Reservation.
And before you all plot yet ANOTHER boring hate crime against me for using words such as "Negro" and "Injun," I'm not sure what other words are more appropriate. Most blacks in the early 1960s were Negroes, with all the deferential politeness, nice sweaters, and Murray's Pomade that implies. And to call Injuns "Indians" is inaccurate, since they aren't from the land of curry, Bengal tigers, and one billion dotheads. Labeling them "Native Americans" is unfair to the 250+ million people such as me who were born in America, too. I guess "Indigenous Americans" is more on the mark, but it's just so faggy-sounding, I want to retch up the Krispy Kreme Doughnuts I ate last night. So "Injuns" they remain.
I know this isn't something that blacks want to hear, but Injuns are BY FAR the most beat-down, oppressed, demoralized, and nearly dang-genocided race in American history. Ever been to a reservation? They're sad, rusted, dead-end places, far worse than the gnarliest black-American slum (which also compare favorably to most places in Africa, but hoo-doggie, that's another can of worms, isn't it?).
Even so, there's no other race who remain so cruelly stereotyped. Atlanta Braves? Washington Redskins? The Cleveland Indians, with an insanely grinning mascot? There are no teams named the Detroit Darkies or Houston Hillbillies or New York Jews! What gives?
Back in the '70s, there were some radical Injuns, bustin' caps on federal agents in nationally televised standoffs. Now they're quiet ... almost invisible.
I don't get it.
Posted by jg @ 10:33 PM PST []
Friday, August 8, 2003
As difficult as it might be to believe, there are some people in this world who don't like me. Whether or not I take it to heart depends on the source and tenor of the criticism.
When critics steer clear of my personal life and give a thumbs-down to things I've written, I don't get upset and start hacking up hairballs. Instead, I feel a Christlike compassion for their aesthetic retardation. I know that time and the truth are on my side.
There's another sort of critic who focuses almost exclusively on my personal life, demanding that I be tortured or murdered for my ideological and/or physical transgressions. Predictably, these types have an entire dry-cleaner's rack worth of skeletons in their own closets, whether they be violent females, fascistic anti-fascists, or rapist buffalo soldiers. You know who you are, and there's a Karma Boomerang whizzing toward your head.
Then there are the wannabes who initially try to ingratiate themselves with me. When I ignore them, they become the harshest and most persistent critics of all. You all know who you are, too, and nothing you say or do will overcome the fact that I rejected you first.
Negative feedback only hurts when it comes from friends, because it's usually true and malice-free. If I spent half as much time listening to my homies' misgivings as I do worrying about catcalls from clowns in the nosebleed section, I'd be a thousand miles further down the Yellow Brick Road than I am now.
Posted by jg @ 05:32 PM PST []
Thursday, August 7, 2003
The human world can be neatly stratified into two types: those who create things and those who don't.
I call the former group gods because they are creators. Since the latter group does nothing but eat, shit, fuck, and die, I label them animals—but, lacking pure animal grace, they are even lower than animals.
Have you ever considered what you'll leave on this earth besides a rotted corpse and a mountain of feces?
If you are nothing beyond a creature of instinct—meaning, if you belong to the bloated veiny blob of humankind which has never generated an original thought, melody, or image—I consider you a separate species from me. I wouldn't mind seeing most of your ilk exterminated or, at the least, forced into slave labor. That's the sort of holocaust I could get behind. Forget all the shadow-boxing about race and gender—let's split the world into gods and animals, and let's be cruel to the animals.
Posted by jg @ 10:32 PM PST []
Wednesday, August 6, 2003
The things you do haven't made me doubt my opinions. In fact, you've strengthened my beliefs, because when I see how you act, I realize you're everything I don't want to be.
Nothing you could ever say to me is half as witty as anything I'd say to you.
No punch you could throw will ever make me as dumb as you.
I've faced hostile crowds and haven't cowered, while you don't go anywhere without backup.
I will never respect you like you respect me in your rare honest moments.
Hurts, doesn't it?
Posted by jg @ 09:29 PM PST []
Tuesday, August 5, 2003
FIRE ISLAND, NY—Homosexual males who want children have traditionally been faced with either childlessness or the unsavory prospect of intercourse with a female. But they are now rejoicing at the news of a breakthrough medical procedure whereby the rectal tract's mucosal lining can be fertilized with semen, enabling males to carry a fetus to term in their rectums.
"After the pain—UNBELIEVABLE pain—of delivery, I now have only joy," declared Lance Ebert (pictured at far right), the world's first man to give birth to a baby through his anus. Ebert and his "life partner," Bruce Nixon (pictured holding little "Lorenzo"), conceived the child during a raucous round of anal sex in their cabin during a "Gay Couples Reggae Cruise" off the shores of Long Island a year ago.
"It's a new day for gay men, it's a new day for gay babies—quite simply, it's a new gay day," enthused K. Y. Kudra, the proctologist who pioneered the controversial anal-impregnation procedure. "In one swift stroke and a few hearty thrusts, the vagina has been rendered obsolete. The butthole is now the life portal. I used to say, 'I'm so happy I could shit myself,' but now I can say, 'I'm so happy I could shit a baby!'"
Posted by jg @ 11:16 PM PST []
Monday, August 4, 2003
Since you are too stupid to ever realize how stupid you are, I want to tell you how stupid you are—not for your sake, since you're too stupid, but for mine, since I'm smart enough to see how stupid you are, and it would be stupid not to tell you.
You're as stupid as the aborigines who see a plane flying overhead and call it a giant silver bird. As stupid as the primitive cargo cults who find a bottlecap and believe it's a message from God. As stupid as all the cultures who were so backward, they never developed the technological weaponry to prevent their land from being overrun. As stupid as all the losers who blame "The Man" for their problems, not realizing that "The Man" became "The Man" because you were too stupid to become "The Man" yourself.
One day you'll fall from that wall, and your stupid eggshell head will crack open. And do you know what will ooze out?
Nothing.
+++++++++
Here's another kinda-translation of an interview with me originally written en Français. Favorite mistranslation: "I do not smell myself near to absolutely nothing French..."
Posted by jg @ 06:34 PM PST []
Sunday, August 3, 2003
"Life is slow suicide," quoth Ben Franklin. "Nine humans in ten are suicides."
Dr. Karl Menninger, author of Man Against Himself, coined the term "chronic suicide" to describe a lifelong path of self-destruction leading to a death which wouldn't have occurred from purely "natural causes."
Chronic suicide is distinguished from plain old suicide in that one doesn't just get the job done in one bloody blast. It is, to borrow Celine's term, "death on the installment plan." It is also different from regular suicide in that one's death wish isn't as clearly articulated. The chronically suicidal tend to deny that they want to die.
I once asked a friend why she smoked cigarettes. Without pausing, she exhaled smoke and said, "I really don't want to live that long." I started flashing back through all my HIGH-risk behavior, trying to sift the "bravery" and the "honesty" and the "libertinism" from the merely "self-destructive." Everything seemed to flutter down into the last category.
I knew someone who wanted to die until the moment the doctor uttered the word "tumor." And I've come a breath away from death once or twice, only to realize it was the last thing I want.
If I were to take all the energy I've devoted to chronic suicide and focus it elsewhere, I'd be the president.
Then I could destroy others, which would be a far nobler thing.
Posted by jg @ 04:59 PM PST []
Saturday, August 2, 2003
As one who has survived the atrocities of both state-sponsored matrimony and state-mandated incarceration, I feel I am qualified to compare the two.
Both marriage and prison imbue one with the primordial horror of being trapped with no safe way to escape.
Both leave one with the sense that nobody who hasn't suffered the same ordeal would have the faintest idea of what you've endured.
Both of them ensure reasonably efficient delivery of three meals a day, although the food is a little better in prison.
I suppose the main difference is that you don't get any pussy in prison.
Oh, wait—you don't get any pussy in marriage, either.
Posted by jg @ 09:53 PM PST []
Friday, August 1, 2003
I'm strong enough to lift a Volkswagen over my head and kick through a bank-vault door, but I can only come within six inches of touching my toes. I have the strength of a mighty oak. Sadly, I have the flexibility of a mighty oak, too.
I used to be able to touch my toes before going to prison, but I think my vertebrae must've fused together after 877 nights spent sleeping on a hard steel bunk. I now traverse the swamps and meadows of this fair land as a stronger, wiser, ossified parolee.
And surely there must be a spiritual lesson in there. My physical condition must have some metaphorical value. In my comings and goings, in my daily hoo-has with other humans, maybe I've relied too much on strength and not nearly enough on flexibility. Perhaps I should quit being a hardass and learn the fine art of compromise.
Eat a bowl of dicks. I'll stay stubborn until I die.
But I still want to touch my toes.
+++++++++
I toot my own horn yet again in a new interview.