Fear of a Ghost Planet

The Priesthood

2010-06-23T22:11:00.000-07:00

Catholicism's a tricky subject for me. I've designated myself an ex-Catholic for two years now, and I still get uncomfortable when my mom refers to me as an atheist, mostly because of the disdain she has for the word. Mind you, I've actually been to church more than her in the past two years, but I think my faltering faith kind of hurt her because I was, to certain family members, destined to become a priest.

And it almost happened. From age six to sixteen, that was the goal. Church, the bible, the ritual mass--it mesmerized me. The two priests I grew up listening to every Sunday, Fr. Child and Fr. Don, were the two nicest men I'd ever met. They helped people. They were unafraid. I alter served for ten years, could recite Mass forward and backward, and chose to learn Latin when I was enrolled in Catholic grad school. On a good day, I can still recite a few prayers.

I think Catholic school is what killed my desire to be a priest. For years, I blindly wanted to do it, not really knowing what it'd entail. The Jesuit education I'd received encouraged hard questions. I began asking them. Were it not for my earning a scholarship (to a Catholic college), I probably would have gone to a seminary and learned the hard way. Instead, I went away to school, started going to Mass on my own, and felt a loss of connection. It just wasn't there anymore. I went without telling anybody for a year. My mom found out when she came to visit, we went to Mass, and I didn't take communion. Once, she told me that I'd come back, and I've heard her use the word "phase" to describe it, but we've never really had a discussion. If she asks what I believe in, I'll quote Whitman and tell her that if I follow that quote, I'll be doing pretty good for myself:

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants...have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.

This nickname is still relevant!

2010-03-04T15:10:00.000-08:00

My sister took this picture during a protest in San Francisco today. I'm just glad to see that some people are still using this somewhat outdated, soon-to-be-irrelevant nickname for the Greatest Actor Alive.

And this is just awesome...

2009-11-07T16:45:00.000-08:00

I wouldn't quite compare it to Republicans trying to co-opt Born in the USA...

2009-08-20T11:25:00.000-07:00

But Mastercard's new "Break in Your Jeans" commercials are somewhat brazen in their ability to, well, miss the freaking point.

In the span of 30 seconds, you see Marlon Brando, John Wayne, the Ramones, Maralyn Monroe, and, if I'm not mistaken, some clip from Woodstock, along with some rebelous text about how any article of clothing that aren't jeans are for big, rich douchebags, narrated by the familiar Mastercard narrator, who may as well be the voice of my generation (sorry, Kanye).

I understand that business is business, and that making yourselves look cool is often a way of ensuring business with my crowd, but at least three of the five clips used in this commercial, to speak nothing of David Bowie and his iconic 70's material, spoke against conformity. Mastercard: You are a credit card company. I hate to point that out, but it's the truth, plain and simple. You are the man you're so keen on rebelling against. Instead, you should have gone with this:

Jimmy Clanton - Venus in Blue Jeans

The Blue Collar Comedy Guys

Nickleback

This douche.

With that being said, I will now present myself as an awful hypocrite:

This Levi's ad, directed by Cary Fukunaga (Sin Nombre), is stunning, combining hipsters with two enduring figures of Americana: Jeans, and Walt Whitman. For one minute and two seconds, I was not annoyed that movie theaters have taken to playing unescapable, often terrible ads before their movies--I was overtaken by this most excelent reading of Walt Whitman's "Pioneers! O Pioneers!," a poem that is somewhat overlooked because we take Whitman for granted, especially if the poem isn't "Song of Myself" or about Lincoln.

The reading is from a 1957 album of recordings from Whitman's seminal Leaves of Grass, by a group called The University Players. It would be long out of print were it not for Smithsonian Folkways, a non-profit record label opporated by the Smithsonian Institute. It is, for my money, one of the unhearalded aspects of our government; that somewhere, someone is preserving our history of recorded sound. They do this with movies too, via the National Film Registry. Films as diverse as All About Eve and The Terminator will be around as long as there is a United States, ready to be chopped up and regurgitated into Levi's ads at a moment's notice. If they're as good as this one, and don't shill as hard as the Mastercard one, I'll allow it. Hell, I might even like it enough to not mind that it's standing between me and my movie.

Pioneers! O Pioneers!
by Walt Whitman

Come my tan-faced children,
Follow well in order, get your weapons ready,
Have you your pistols? have you your sharp-edged axes?
Pioneers! O pioneers!

For we cannot tarry here,
We must march my darlings, we must bear the brunt of danger,
We the youthful sinewy races, all the rest on us depend,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

O you youths, Western youths,
So impatient, full of action, full of manly pride and friendship,
Plain I see you Western youths, see you tramping with the foremost,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Have the elder races halted?
Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied over there beyond the seas?
We take up the task eternal, and the burden and the lesson,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

All the past we leave behind,
We debouch upon a newer mightier world, varied world,
Fresh and strong the world we seize, world of labor and the march,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

We detachments steady throwing,
Down the edges, through the passes, up the mountains steep,
Conquering, holding, daring, venturing as we go the unknown ways,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

We primeval forests felling,
We the rivers stemming, vexing we and piercing deep the mines within,
We the surface broad surveying, we the virgin soil upheaving,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Colorado men are we,
From the peaks gigantic, from the great sierras and the high plateaus,
From the mine and from the gully, from the hunting trail we come,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

From Nebraska, from Arkansas,
Central inland race are we, from Missouri, with the continental
blood intervein'd,
All the hands of comrades clasping, all the Southern, all the Northern,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

O resistless restless race!
O beloved race in all! O my breast aches with tender love for all!
O I mourn and yet exult, I am rapt with love for all,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Raise the mighty mother mistress,
Waving high the delicate mistress, over all the starry mistress,
(bend your heads all,)
Raise the fang'd and warlike mistress, stern, impassive, weapon'd mistress,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

See my children, resolute children,
By those swarms upon our rear we must never yield or falter,
Ages back in ghostly millions frowning there behind us urging,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

On and on the compact ranks,
With accessions ever waiting, with the places of the dead quickly fill'd,
Through the battle, through defeat, moving yet and never stopping,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

O to die advancing on!
Are there some of us to droop and die? has the hour come?
Then upon the march we fittest die, soon and sure the gap is fill'd.
Pioneers! O pioneers!

All the pulses of the world,
Falling in they beat for us, with the Western movement beat,
Holding single or together, steady moving to the front, all for us,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Life's involv'd and varied pageants,
All the forms and shows, all the workmen at their work,
All the seamen and the landsmen, all the masters with their slaves,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

All the hapless silent lovers,
All the prisoners in the prisons, all the righteous and the wicked,
All the joyous, all the sorrowing, all the living, all the dying,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

I too with my soul and body,
We, a curious trio, picking, wandering on our way,
Through these shores amid the shadows, with the apparitions pressing,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Lo, the darting bowling orb!
Lo, the brother orbs around, all the clustering suns and planets,
All the dazzling days, all the mystic nights with dreams,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

These are of us, they are with us,
All for primal needed work, while the followers there in embryo wait behind,
We to-day's procession heading, we the route for travel clearing,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

O you daughters of the West!
O you young and elder daughters! O you mothers and you wives!
Never must you be divided, in our ranks you move united,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Minstrels latent on the prairies!
(Shrouded bards of other lands, you may rest, you have done your work,)
Soon I hear you coming warbling, soon you rise and tramp amid us,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Not for delectations sweet,
Not the cushion and the slipper, not the peaceful and the studious,
Not the riches safe and palling, not for us the tame enjoyment,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Do the feasters gluttonous feast?
Do the corpulent sleepers sleep? have they lock'd and bolted doors?
Still be ours the diet hard, and the blanket on the ground,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Has the night descended?
Was the road of late so toilsome? did we stop discouraged nodding
on our way?
Yet a passing hour I yield you in your tracks to pause oblivious,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Till with sound of trumpet,
Far, far off the daybreak call--hark! how loud and clear I hear it wind,
Swift! to the head of the army!--swift! spring to your places,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

No wonder Asia stands to dominate us...

2009-08-16T09:27:00.000-07:00

Their kids hit puberty and start talking like clean versions of Notorious B.I.G. albums from the tender age of eight. We're lucky if kids ever escape that phase.

Hey guys, did you hear? Barack Obama's a natural-born American!

2009-08-13T13:30:00.000-07:00

Barack Obama has a serious problem...

2009-07-29T08:13:00.000-07:00

Common sense dictates that Barack Obama wouldn't hate white people, being half-white himself, but Glenn Beck hasn't proven that he has a lick of common sense; it's just the title of his new book.

How sad is it when the pushovers on Fox 'n Friends treat your theory like you just said the Hamburglar shot JFK?

A Completely Honest Review of Transformers, Filmed on the Third Floor at the College of Mount St. Joseph, Where I Live

2009-07-20T19:23:00.000-07:00

Perhaps he should take it up with the Hutts...

2009-07-14T15:33:00.000-07:00

Somebody has to get this one, right?

Wait, what?

2009-06-22T10:57:00.000-07:00

That is Che Guevara's granddaughter, nude except for a bandolier of carrots and a beret, striking a revolutionary pose for, of all things, PETA's new ad-campaign, featuring the slogan "Join the vegetarian revolution," which will target two key markets: South Americans longing to live in a Marxist state, and stoned college kids who skimmed through The Communist Manifesto, rented The Motorcycle Diaries, and bought a $15 dollar t-shirt with Che's face on it sometime around the last Rage Against the Machine concert.

Coupled with their response to Obama's killing a fly during an interview ("He isn't the Buddha," they said on their blog, promising to send Obama a fly catcher that is now among the most popular items on their web store), and the media's weird obsession with both that clip and PETA's "outrage," PETA is riding a wave of publicity unseen since the last time they trotted a naked Pamela Anderson out before the public in another bold attempt to convince red blooded 40-year-old middle-class men to stop buying their wives upscale fur coats.

On top of all that is peta2, which seeks to bring PETA to Gen Y via cuddly logos, cutesy shirts, People Magazine style "Sexiest Vegitarian" contests, and a member base that looks fresh from plundering Hot Topic's last accessories sale. Their summer reading list includes classics like Upton Sinclair's The Jungle and, well, no other classics. However, they did get famous "comedian" Andy Dick to join them in protesting that really cool looking McDonalds in Chicago - the huge one, a block from the Hard Rock Cafe. If you listen really hard, you can almost hear them from across the street!

What is the moral of this particular post? With Che Guevara a whopping two degrees of separation from Andy Dick, every iconic image of the late Marxist revolutionary simultaneously lost its meaning.

Thanks a lot, PETA.

What are the odds that we'll see "Jose Canseco's Punch-Out!!!" anytime soon?

2009-05-27T07:08:00.001-07:00

Hong Man Choi Jose Canseco Fight Video

Jose Canseco, famous for pointing fingers at pro baseball players for profit after a career that he spent eating cheesburgers, taking steroids, and hitting home runs, decided to enter the MMA game for reasons beyond any sane, logical person's mode of thought.

The results are hilarious.

While Jose does pretty good considering that he's largely untrained and looks like Little Mac going against Yao Ming, the fact that he hurts his knee by running away from his opponent is pretty incredible. I also like his weak Mortal Kombat kicks.

As a baseball fan, my only wish is that the referee would have allowed the match to continue.

Jose Canseco's MMA Career: 77 seconds.

Single-cell organisms lead more fufilling lives.

Another poor, celebrity inspired photoshop image

2009-05-11T22:00:00.001-07:00

Am I the only one totally nonplussed that Hulk Hogan said that he understood OJ Simpson's motivation for becoming a total fuck up ten years ago? Maybe it's because I spent a good part of my childhood adoring Hulk Hogan, or maybe its because he seems to require surgery just to get out of bed in the morning, but I can't imagine the Immortal Hulk Hogan, small gloves, and a white Ford Bronco being one of this decade's defining moments.

My terrible Photoshop skills come back from the dead to comment upon another current event!

2009-02-14T21:36:00.001-08:00

OH NO, ABERCROMBIE WON'T DISCOUNT MY MUSCLE SHIRT

2008-12-09T21:02:00.001-08:00

I mean, I understand not wanting to look cheap, but some rich kids can't afford the prestige that comes from banging techno music and homoerotic posters on the wall.

Now that people can't wear expensive as hell cut off polos (collar popped) to go with their frosted hair and forest rape fantasies, what will the disconnected, B.M.W. driving youth of America wear out to the club with their boys?

According to the Wall Street Journal...

[T]he store's image isn't enough to lure Megan Tysoe, 20, who says she and her friends skip Abercrombie for cheaper chains like Forever 21 and H&M. "Some of my roommates' parents have decreased their allowances," causing less spending, she says.

Wait, 20 year old college kids still get an allowance? And despite the free money from the money tree back home, they're complaining about the recession?

Look, the kid who works at the Orange Julius across from A&F can't afford to shop at Hot Topic, let alone look around at your precious Abercrombie. Toughen up, rich youth of America, or you'll start to look like the rest of us. Then who will you make fun of?

Dominic Raiola - A Fucking Moron

2008-12-09T19:27:00.001-08:00

Dominic Raiola, who is best known for being the worst center in NFL history, reportedly flipped off a bunch of fans at a Detroit Lions home game for booing the team that they paid to see. They don't keep stats for individual offensive linemen like they do in Madden video games, but Raiola, simply put, cannot block. To make matters worse, he pretty much hates the people who enable the Ford family to pay his salary.

You know, if you're not happy, why are you coming to the game? I understand that they haven't seen a winner in eight years, so don't come. Don't come until we turn it around.

He also said that he would like to fight fans who picked on him, but couldn't because people don't fight with fists, "they pack metal."

As a life long Detroit Lions fan who gets to attend one game a year, I go out to the games because I love my team. They break my heart, every year. No matter how well the team seems to be doing (last year, we seemed to be awesome. Ah, 6-2 starts), something comes along and fucks it up. This happens at both macro and micro levels.

Macro: Matt Millen may actually still be with the team, calling shots.

Micro: Putting together a decent drive, getting into scoring range, and having it taken all back because the offensive line likes to hold jerseys instead of block. Or hey, settling for a field goal because, with the game on the line, Dominic Raiola "forgot how to win."

At the Macro level, you get things like the Millen Man March, Fire Millen chants at Detroit Pistons games, and Keep Millen signs in Green Bay.

At the Micro level, if a player fucks up on the field and there's a crowd there to see it, they're going to boo. Not only are they going to boo, but if they realize who is at fault, they're going to boo specifically at you.

Now, I don't know if Dominic has been paying attention. Enough people have been following his advise that the Lions haven't been on local TV in three weeks. When a stadium empties out and there's less than 10,000 people in a space designed to admit 73,000, you're going to hear people in the stands. Words carry in open air. Angry words shouted at high volume carry faster.

Dominic Raiola insinuated that the group of people who he flipped off called him out and insulted his family. I highly doubt that. At this point, after eight years of failure and futility, we don't give a flying fuck about your personal life, Dominic. At 0-13, we want a fucking win.

So go ahead, please...give out your personal address. Nobody is going to show up to your house, and nobody who sees you on the street will be packing any heat. You practice in Allen Park, you hang out in Dearborn, and you're treated with the utmost respect because you're a private resident, a paying customer, and the fat fuck from the Fairlane Ford ads.

On the football field? You're doing a job. You're getting paid to do a job. And the money that the Ford family pays you with comes from us, the people who show up to watch you play. In a competent franchise, we'd pretty much act as your boss. As it stands, that $7,500 fine the Lions levied will probably be the last of it.

My hope is this: When whoever the coach is and whoever the GM is are evaluating tape and looking at who wants to play football next year, I hope they notice all the sacks the line gives up, all the holes you fail to open, and the few goal line attempts we've had fail, because then you're out of a job, Dominic, and the reality is this: You're not good enough to make most of the league's practice squads.

"Walks like a woman and talks like a man."
- Chris Berman

Diesel Jeans are fucked up...

2008-12-07T16:09:00.000-08:00

I think I'll be subscribing to the New Yorker...

2008-12-06T21:00:00.001-08:00

The Perfect Gifts for the iPod Owner in Your Life...

2008-12-05T22:05:00.001-08:00

OhMiBod Boditalk Escort ($59.00)

For the hipster/sex pervert in your life, the Boditalk Escort is perfect for planes, trains, and automobiles. Ultra discreet - you'll be having so much fun that you won't notice that others have noticed the wire running down your blouse!

Bluetooth isn't just for business executive assholes and Star Trek wannabes anymore, oh no. This thing detects calls and vibrates in one of seven pre-programmed patterns. Long distance phone calls to your mom will never be the same again!

"Bullet vibe" is an awesome phrase.

Gameboy Case for iPod Nano

I can't tell what is more impractical, making a case for something so small using something so big, or making a case for a first generation Nano. In any event, the video game owner in your life will be pleased with this gift, and will likely have hours of glee using the Gameboy's buttons to control the iPod. And imagine the conversations on the streets:

"Hey man, is that a dot matrix display with stereo sound in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?"

"No bitch, it's my first generation iPod Nano."

"Old school, man. Mad respect."

Yes parents, your children speak like 80's hip hop albums.

Pray for a restock!

Mike Huckabee is not welcome north of the Mason-Dixon line

2008-12-04T23:12:00.001-08:00

Mike Huckabee was in Michigan on Wednesday, and some dude was badass enough to ask the man about Huck saying that gay rights were not civil rights. Huckabee's responses were essentially the following:

1. Gays oppress Christians.
2. It's different when Christians oppress gays.
3. Stomping on a cross is an equal offense to beating a man in the street.

Mind you, this is the kind of man who finds the Confederate Flag to be a patriotic symbol, thought that Chuck Norris was going to motivate the base during primary season, and suggested a simple solution to AIDS: Quarantining those who had it.

The GOP was in dire straits with Bush at the helm, but now that the party is being handed off to a pitiable group of media hungry governors and former governors, it's safe to say that the party of Lincoln has officially been sodomized by the religious right.

This tremendous douchebag was once hailed as the rising star of the Republican party. Thanks Mike, for showing us how much worse things could have been if you would have been the Republican Party's Hail Mary. I'm sure your eventual run in 2012 will be as eventful and unintentionally hilarious as it'll be flawed.

Christian Skateboarding

2008-12-04T22:47:00.000-08:00

This is Christian skateboarding crew "The Uprising." Apparently they try to convert the youth of America (and the crew of ABC's Nightline) by doing their sweet tricks and preaching The Word.

The trio are featured in a reality show about their activities, meant to counteract the influences of "risque" shows like A Shot at Love, where lesbians and frat boys battle to date a space alien.

I guess crazy Christians are out to de-smut one of the smuttiest segments of American life, which begs the question: Why no Christian porn?

As if a show about Christian skateboarding wasn't boring enough, the Gospel Music Channel has a show about a Christian rock festival! Oh boy! Here's what ABCnews.com says about it:

During one episode, Courtney Clark Cleveland and Sean Kelly get into an argument over who's supposed to be manning the tent. But, as usual, the conflict ends with a calm, reasoned conversation.

Praise Jesus, I'm saved!

Really though, I just wanted to point out that every time the guy in the middle grinds his skateboard, he does so on the Lord's face.

A radical idea!

2008-11-20T00:27:00.001-08:00

In two years, California voters should put heterosexual marriage to a vote. It's only fair.

A sudden realization strikes!

2008-11-17T23:00:00.000-08:00

If I had a chance, I'd make sweet love to Fran Drescher.

Don't lie, you'd endure the laugh, too.

Why the lack of pro-choice clubs?

2008-10-23T21:12:00.000-07:00

(Note: This originally appeared as an op-ed piece in my college newspaper. In a completely unrelated event, I hear that cars on campus are being solicited with pictures of dead babies. That should give you an idea of the conservative nature of my neighborhood. I was made to feel supercool today when the New York Times, in it's endorsement of Obama, cited the moment from the third presidential debate that I used as the centerpiece for my argument as a reason to not vote McCain.)

At the third and final presidential debate of the 2008 election season, moderator Bob Schieffer, CBS News anchor, turned the discussion to the Supreme Court. He asked if either candidate would nominate a Justice to the bench that disagreed with them on Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 case that legalized abortion.

Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee, said that he believed that the case was decided correctly in 1973 and that Roe v. Wade probably hung in the balance this election. He took a middle-of-the-road approach to the subject, saying that he would “look for those judges who have an outstanding judicial record, who have the intellect, and who hopefully have a sense of what real-world folks are going through.”

John McCain, the Republican who many pundits claimed was finished if he didn’t score a knockout victory with undecided voters in the debate, answered the question with the kind of muddied doublespeak that served no purpose besides energizing his base.

“I would consider anyone in their qualifications,” he said. “I do not believe that someone who has supported Roe v. Wade that would be part of those qualifications. But I certainly would not impose any litmus test.”

I am no pundit, and I cannot claim any insight as to Senator McCain’s standards for an appointee to the Supreme Court, but I do think that his statement implies a very clear litmus test: Either you’re against Roe v. Wade, or you’re not fit to serve as a Justice.

As a left-leaning, independent, pro-choice voter, McCain’s words are worrisome to me, but not quite as worrisome as his stance against the “pro-abortion” movement.

“We have to change the culture of America,” he said. “Those of us who are proudly pro-life understand that.”

Senator Obama, whose policy on abortion was attacked as being out of touch with the American mainstream, said that he supported a ban on late-term abortion so long as exceptions were made in cases where the mother’s health was at stake.

“Just again, the example of the eloquence of Senator Obama,” McCain responded. “He's ‘health for the mother.’ You know, that's been stretched by the pro-abortion movement in America to mean almost anything. That's the extreme pro-abortion position’s quote: ‘health.’”

My question is this: Since when does pro-choice mean pro-abortion? Why is a candidate for the most important political office in America claiming that those who are not pro-life are not part of the mainstream? Why isn’t a mother’s health of concern, and how has the word “health” been stretched this way and that by a supposedly extremist faction of Americans that, in 1973, included seven of nine Supreme Court Justices?

I don’t like my views being concisely distorted as those of the fictional pro-abortion voter, and I think that the reason that they are being distorted as such is simple: Those of us who are pro-choice are not often asked much more than the justify the taking of a human life.

I’d like to see the dialog extend a bit further than that, and I’d like it to start here, on this campus.

On the night of the third debate, there was a meeting of Lions for Life, the College of Mount St. Joseph’s pro-life club. In this paper, there is an article which features comments from the club’s president, Samantha Gaier.

“In my view,” she said, “the College of Mount St. Joseph should have a pro-life club as a Catholic college, as a liberal arts college, and just as a college in general. There is no reason why there should not be such a club on campus.”

I agree, and I am glad that she and others have taken it upon themselves to create such a group. I’d also like for there to be a club for the other side of the room.

The concept of a pro-choice group isn’t new or even rare, but those efforts aren’t nearly as successful as the efforts of pro-life students seeking to create a club. Perhaps there’s a sort of stigma involved, as being pro-choice implies, at least by the look of things, not being pro-life. That’s a stigma that needs to be reversed if there is to be any end to the so-called American culture war, and I fear that it’s a stigma that will continue if there is no dialog between the two views.

So what I’m proposing is the creation of a pro-choice group at the College of Mount St. Joseph.

I agree with Samantha that it’s important for a pro-life club to exist, but, in some ways, it’s more important that the dissenting voice also be present in the discussion. The simple creation of a group doesn’t violate the mission of the college, and the creation of such a forum for debate and discussion would reflect well on the Mount as a liberal arts institution.

In a year where a 35 year old case stands to be overturned on the basis of 270 electoral votes, the issue of abortion is much too important for a presidential nominee to call those who disagree with him extreme and out of touch with the mainstream. When it comes to the great pro-choice/pro-life debate, there is no mainstream. There is only debate.

As a pro-choice student at the College of Mount St. Joseph, I’d like the same opportunity to discuss my views as has been afforded to my pro-life peers.

And now a word from our sponsors...

2008-10-17T21:41:00.001-07:00

I saw this ad extremely late at night about a week ago, I think during a rerun of Homicide: Life on the Street, and I'm incredibly taken with this ad for its willingness to pander to the old for their Social Security checks.

Maybe I'm a bit of an asshole, but it's hilarious to see a commercial where the old people are doing boring things, because that's what they do. Bingo, walking slowly, eavesdropping, playing cards with other old people, listening to pins drop from across the room - this tiny thing does it all.

If you're old and unconvinced that Loud 'n Clear is the product for you, remember two things: First, it's on the magic box that you used to watch Jack Benny on, so what it says to buy, you must buy. Second, it's what all the cool kids are buying! Seriously! Look on as the Lothario spies on some decently hot girls! Listen to the sounds of Munchkinland at the public park! You can even hear an entire group of people singing in an echo-y church!

Perhaps what's most telling of this amazing piece of technology is that the old woman playing cards has to ask for clarification on what the trump card is because she didn't hear it mere seconds ago. Did she forget to turn the devise on? Did she have the volume on low? For the low price of $14.95, you can find out!

Order today!

Praise Jesus, I'm published.

2008-10-02T19:16:00.001-07:00

That is the cover of Cincinnati's City Beat magazine. 23 pages after that is a Q&A piece that I did with three students at my college. Needless to say, I'm damn excited. The job fell into my hands randomly, I jumped on it, and now I can call myself a writer, if we're being loose with definitions. Hell, since I'm being loose with definitions, I'll go ahead and call it my first cover story! Hurray!

You can check it out here, but mostly, I'm just bragging.

I shouldn't: They spelled my name incorrectly.

I can't tell if I should be aroused or afraid...

2008-09-24T11:39:00.001-07:00

(From here. Just a quick filler image.)

Paine's The Age of Reason

2008-09-23T16:45:00.001-07:00

In America, Thomas Paine’s ideas were highly respected. Common Sense gave him the title of “Father of the American Revolution,” and General George Washington read The American Crisis to his troops as they endured weather, hunger, and disease.

The Age of Reason was written for a French audience (Paine was displeased with revolutionary France’s turning to atheism), but it was dedicated to the citizens of America. The pamphlet became a bestseller and caused a small Deist revival.

The Age of Reason was revolutionary – part manifesto, part criticism – it decried Christianity in a way not often seen in the western world and went a step further: Paine declared his doubts about the divinity of Jesus Christ. The pamphlet expressed a belief thought to have been held by other American leaders, a belief that led to the Constitution’s protecting the freedom of religion, but its influence is felt even now.

While America retains much of its Puritan heritage, the writings of Paine and the responses of his contemporaries offer a counterpoint to the common argument that the nation was founded on Christian ideals.

The publishing of The Age of Reason and its resultant success and standing as a classic serve to show how far American thought had come since the Mayflower Compact. What would have been banned 100 years before as blasphemy and sedition was instead a success. The Age of Reason stands today as it did then; not as a scary declaration of war against religion, but as an expression of the importance of individual thought, belief, and good works.

A trio of Generic Heel screenplays

2008-09-10T20:27:00.000-07:00

The three of you who actually enjoyed Generic Heel's YouTube videos will be glad to know that I have not abandoned the concept. Quite the contrary, the Heel is alive and thriving, capturing the Sin Wrestling World Title after a highly pitched battle that I don't feel like describing because it'll make me look like a nerd.

Why no videos? Because I've been messing around with Final Draft, a screenwriting program, and writing short scripts seemed like the way to learn.

I know, these are bad and mostly tasteless. For those of you not in the know (all of you), Generic Heel was sucked into a black hole at the end of a show at the beginning of summer, and these scripts deal with the effects of his time in space.

Each page is about a minute of film.

Smash cuts are intentional. Think of the transition to the credits of Venture Bros., and you've got the idea.

#1
#2
#3

An incredibly short essay on the 125 years between France's Revolution and the World's First War

2008-09-01T21:23:00.003-07:00

World War I was a conflict that few Europeans believed possible. Under the auspices of the long 19th century, it isn’t hard to see why.

Europe, in the wake of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, rallied around its monarchs, who sought to solidify their power to prevent the further spread of Liberalism.

Prince Klemens von Metternich created a system of treaties whereby the monarchs of Europe had incentive to align: their power. He decried revolutionaries and socialists. The Church and the rich supported his endeavors: not only was it to their monetary benefit, but it was better than the alternative.

The philosophy of Marx and Engels was, at the time, a rather small wrench in the larger gears of European prosperity, but that, combined with Napoleonic liberalism, created a small but growing number of disaffected workers who wanted fair pay for the back breaking labor they were subject to. Their strikes and protests were quashed in favor of the riches provided by colonization.

This led to a swell of national pride amongst those who weren’t struggling to survive, with the citizens of each country believing that their fatherland was infallible. Many were willing to die for their nation, and fate would provide them with ample opportunity: it was only a matter of time before two nations butted heads.

What was considered endless peace was really a long maneuvering of pieces. The gears of war and revolution had been turning with those of prosperity all along.

The Fantastic Forefathers (A Comic Book Idea)

2008-07-30T08:13:00.000-07:00

Finally, the true story of the Cold War can be told!

Join Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Abe Lincoln, Teddy and Franklin D. Roosevelt as they battle for their country against the combined forces of D.O.M.I.N.O. - Lenin, Stalin, Castro, Ho Chi Minh, and Chairman Mao, not to mention their Grand Army of the Glorious People's Movement of Communisim as they try to take over one country leading to another country leading to another country...until all the countries are theirs.

A secret task force created by President Richard Nixon, the Forefathers will need all the courage, cunning, and guile they can muster as they battle the pinkos across Russia, the United States, and even the far reaches of space.

It's a new world and a new kinds of arms race, as the reanimated, genetically altered corpses of our greatest leaders take it to the communist menace, proving once and for all that the only way is the American Way.

Bring on the Bat-Tards

2008-07-18T17:04:00.001-07:00

The Dark Knight - AMC 20 @ Newport on the Levee, 12:01 P.M.

I took a camera with me to The Dark Knight last night in anticipation of cosplay type people, whose gumption and willingness to throw money away I only wish I had. Thankfully, there were plenty of people dressed up. Sadly, I couldn't snap pictures of the girls dressed up as Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy. I also missed the Riddler. I did snap a picture of some asshole dressed as the Hulk.

BEHOLD!

A few things about last night's screening without delving into full blown review mode...

1. About a 50/50 split between nerds like myself and these costumed freaks and fratboys/normaltons. I was shocked, having been part of many a midnight debut of a movie where about 75% of the audience had lightsabers. Perhaps this explains why Dark Knight beat out Revenge of the Sith's midnight showing record by a cool $2 million. Batman has mass appeal.

2. Only the 2ed movie I've seen that got applause at the end. Fahrenheit 911 was the other, but that was a weird crowd.

3. Heath Ledger's Joker is the Joker. I saw not one classic-looking Joker in the bunch. Harley Quinn was (being the classic Joker's moll and all that) there, but with a Huntress looking chick and the Riddler, so I guess the Clown Prince of Crime as we knew him is dead. This one vibes well with the Hot Topic crowd anyhow.

(Note: I am a self-professed "Bat-Tard." Just about anything Batman related really gets me going. A buddy of mine last night turned over to me at some point in time during the movie and told me, very seriously, not to bust a nut. It was hard not to."

I lost my Flesh of Christ crayon...

2008-06-26T22:31:00.001-07:00

The Coming Apocalypse

2008-06-24T10:12:00.000-07:00

Apparently, the Dutch are preparing for the coming apocalypse, which is a subject that human beings have flirted with for centuries. Every civilization, and I mean every civilization, is obsessed with The End, from Ragnarok to the Mayan calendar to the Book of Revelation to that string of movies in the 1990's that asked "Hey, what'll we do when a giant meteor comes a-callin' for Earth," which answered with CGI, Bruce Willis, and sending Tommy Lee Jones off to die.

I don't get the apocalypse, for two reasons:

1. Studying (and really, it isn't "studying" so much as it's wild, fruitless speculation) the end of the world is, in my mind at least, a kind of giving up. Hell, we landed on the Moon and discovered ice on Mars and made Pluto the runt of the solar system, what else is there to do? Finding that embryo thing from 2001, for one.

2. WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT THE END OF THE FUCKING WORLD?

No, really, I want to know. This isn't The Day After Tomorrow where, well, there's a day after tomorrow, and nobody is Hugo Drax, so I don't expect anybody to build a giant moonraker (whatever the hell a moonraker is) either. X-Men? We don't have any stinking X-Men. We don't even have a team of X-Men frogs.

This is THE APOCALYPSE we're talking about, and while I'm as curious as anybody else as to what's going to happen when the veil is lifted, I'm sure as hell not going to be stocking up on bottled water and Slim Jims in case of my survival. No, there is no surviving the end, because the end is the end, and that's essentially the end of the fucking discussion.

Oh, but it isn't! There's got to be somebody left, because there's no way that everything on the planet could die, short of heat death, but that's at least six billion years from now. Alright, fine...let's look at some of the potential causes of the end of the world.

God-Created Natural Disaster: This would make God a liar, which would negate God's existence. Still though, say He gets pissed off enough that He breaks His Word and floods the Earth again or turns us all into pillars of salt. The clear path to beating God is to kiss His ass. If He tells you to build a boat, you'd better by God do it. If He wants you to sacrifice your son though, He's just kidding. If He chooses you and your family to live, on the condition that you don't look back on the destruction, I hope you're ready to fuck your daughters for the foreseeable future (someone has to repopulate the globe), because your wife is going to be stupid enough to look back. It's not her fault: she has a vagina, and God hates women for their good taste in fruit. Odds of Survival: 3,720 to 1 (or the odds of successfully navigating an asteroid field).

Robot Uprising: Come on now, there's no way that this qualifies as a proper "apocalypse." The movie was Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Even the new one is Terminator Salvation: The Future Begins Now, because as long as there's some man-made thing rebelling against man, there'll be men pissed off enough about it to not die. Also, most robots are harmless. If we're overrun by ASIMO, we deserve to die. Odds of Survival: 1 to 1.

Sudden Weather Change: If there's something The Day After Tomorrow taught me besides the fact that there's a day after tomorrow, it's that some asshole weatherman will successfully predict the end of the world a scant day before it actually happens. This won't prepare anybody though, because his grand discovery will come, as I said, a day before the event. Of course this event will effect America and America alone (because of how much energy we waste. Karma is a bitch), which means that it ain't much of an apocalypse to begin with. However, there is no better time to steal the Gutenberg Bible, so if you happen to be in the Library of Congress at the time, you're in luck. Odds of Survival (America): Are-you-related-to-the-main-character-of-the-movie-if-so-you're-in-luck to 1.

Zombie Uprising: This depends entirely on what kind of zombie it is. If we're talking pre-Romero, everybody is pretty much safe. If we're talking post-Romero, it depends on how cool you are with pulling a trigger and/or beating the brains out of somebody. Me? I'll probably be able to tell that my mom isn't my mom the first time she tries to bite me because, by all accounts, I taste awful. I figure I'd start with my baseball bat and work my way up to something a bit quicker until I was exhausted (which would happen pretty fast. I'm fat), which would either happen in a safe house (the attic of Highland Coffeehouse) or would result in my becoming bitten, which wouldn't be that bad, because I'd finally be part of the crowd, and I'd be able to wrap my head around Thus Spoke Zarathustra. What part of that isn't awesome? Odds of Survival: If you die, you come back...so pretty damn good.

A Happening: You're teaching a science class when word comes from the principal that a happening just happened. Quick: What do you do? Observe the phenomena, collect the data, and completely ignore it, because it's an inexplicable ~~event~~happening! Your only chance is to run. Start off in a bigger group, then figure out that it's trees blowing in the wind, then OUTRUN THE WIND. This will work, provided that you come across an old slave hiding house from the War of Northern Aggression, but then you've got to wait it out. Happenings typically hit a crest and recede, making everything alright. Sure, you'll be hungry for a bit, and if you're separated from the closest woman, you may become unbearably horny and seek to join with it even if it means certain death, but, just like how the happening inexplicably happened, it will also inexplicably stop happening, and you'll be just fine. Then you can go home, where it seems as though absolutely nothing happened at all. The worst part of this kind of apocalypse comes when your woman tells you that you knocked her up, which may result in the purchase of many superfluous bottles of cough syrup and the occasional torrid dessert session. I mean dessert, too…that’s not a clever euphemism for sex. Odds of Survival: Wait...the city magically repopulated itself at the end of the happening! It's a miracle!

As you can tell, either the apocalypse is coming and we're all fucked (nobody is Han Solo, so don't give me any of your "Never tell me the odds!" guff), or the apocalypse is really just a segue into a viable, successful, popular franchise rife with story opportunity and excitement. I imagine that life would be a bit like the movie Crank, only you wouldn't get to fuck a chick in front of a group of people on the street, because that group of people would likely be zombies, and they go for all the dangly bits first.

If the end of the world is nigh though, take comfort from the words of my man Petra Faile: "You know, maybe it's really not that bad that the ~~Netherlands~~Earth will be destroyed. I don't like it here anymore. Take ~~immigration~~live birth, for example. They keep letting people in. And then we have to build more houses, which makes the ~~Netherlands~~Earth even heavier. The ~~country~~ground will sink even lower, which will make the flooding worse."

Then? We're gonna need a bigger boat.

Re: Last Night

2008-06-05T18:48:00.001-07:00

A fantastic series, no question, but it could have ended no other way. Congratulations to Pittsburgh: beating anybody else would have been pointless.

Generic Heel Poetry Reading #1

2008-05-18T21:00:00.000-07:00

Generic Heel is (for some reason) on MySpace.

The Golden Age of 8 & 16 Bits

2008-05-16T21:39:00.001-07:00

I am working on some stuff. In the meantime, here are two video game related clips that have distracted me. Both are long. The first is Mario, synced to some bad music, but flying around like a pinball, Sonic the Hedgehog style. Apparently, this is possible via some crazy program called Lunar Magic.

The second I dig for two reasons. First, I've soured on Boston sports, and it's nice to relive their failures. Second, I remember buying sports games that promised you the ability to recreate the greatest moments of all time, and then you'd wind up playing a totally different, bullshit, often boring game. The moments that make sports fantastic, when taken away, tend to strip a game of their class. RBI Baseball, a game released two decades ago, is pretty much the only game I've ever seen that's properly emulated real sports, right on down to the "blahblahblahblah" on the sports page the next day.

Oh the good old days.

The Random Bag...(Pt. 2)

2008-05-11T16:42:00.001-07:00

Here is the rest of the shit...

A Battery Powered Alarm Clock: I already have three alarm clocks, and this one doesn't have a radio or any buttons minus SLEEP/SNOOZE. I put batteries in, just to see if it worked. It didn't.

Donate.

A VHS Recording of The Bone Collector: This movie stars Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie and still managed to pull down an inspiring 28% on Rotten Tomatoes. However, Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat of Spirituality and Practice say that it's "a thriller that also manages to focus on the art of mentoring," so the next time I'm looking to show a parent or a kid or something how to guide others, I'll be sure to pop this in.

Donate.

Life on the Edge (Book by Dr. James Dobson): This book is about as shiny as a 90's X-Men cover. Worse, it's a book of advise by some guy with a group called "Focus on the Family." With sound tidbits such as "marriage is a risky enterprise: it can result in lifetime companionship or some of the most bitter experiences in your life," why wouldn't you add it to your bookshelf? The author is also the father of "two grown children," so he has vast amounts of knowledge when it comes to life, living, and reading the Bible.

Donate.

NFL's Greatest: San Francisco vs. Dallas 1978-1993 (Video Game; Sega CD): Apparently, this is a video game where you can pick two teams, the San Francisco 49ers and the Dallas Cowboys, pick a roster from any of the players in both franchises history from '78-'93 and see what happens. Even better? YOU CANNOT PLAY THE GAME. You pick the plays and then watch footage of games to see how it went against the other team's play. It's like a very early version of NFL Coach which sucked, so I can only imagine how bad this is going to be.

The victory puts the 49ers on the path to the Super Bowl...BUT YOU CAN'T FUCKING PLAY IT. This may be the most poorly executed game concept of all time, but it's a Sega CD game, and I have one of those.

Keep.

Vince Gill - Let There Be Peace on Earth (Cassette): I have no use for Christmas music. I have less use for Christmas music by country singers.

Donate.

The Adventures of Batman and Robin (video game, Sega CD): The usual beat-em-up style of the older Batman games is replaced with a more beatable driving move. At the same time, because it's Sega CD, the cast of the show does voices, and there's about 16 minutes of footage made especially for the game on here.

Keep.

Wheel of Fortune (video game; Sega CD): There's no actual box, so I hope this has FMV Pat and Vana action.

Keep.

Sol-Feace (video game; Sega CD): The title tells me nothing. The box has no graphics. The box has no fucking words to tell me what I'm doing. It only has an X-Wing looking thing shooting lasers at a big, robotic snake that is shooting green fireballs. I guess it came with the system, explaining the cheap ass box. A space shoot up type game. How inspiring.

Looks awful.

Keep.

Sherlock Homes: Consulting Detective & Sega Classics Arcade Collection (video game; Sega CD): The Homes game is only worth it if Sherlock shoots heroin like in the book. The other? It has Streets of Rage, Revenge of Shinobi, Columns, and Golden Axe, which would probably make it the best game, so far. Fucking fantastic.

Keep.

American Pastoral (a novel by Philip Roth): I was worried when I saw the title. Based on the rest of the books in this bag, I could have safely assumed that this was a book about the priesthood or something stupid, but luckily, there was a big, gold "WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE" blurb on the front cover. It's about a man who lives the American Dream until his daughter commits an act of political terrorism. The novel has been included on the TIME 100 Greatest Novels list and was a runner up in the New York Times Book Review's poll for the greatest novel of the past 25 years. Finally, a book that isn't Job this, Deuteronomy that.

Keep.

Rose-tinted glasses: I'm not fucking kidding, either.

Donate.

The Silver Warriors (a novel by Michael Moorcock):

Keep.

Supreme Warrior (video game; Sega CD): A FMV fighting game that seems like the cutscenes in Die Hard Arcade or Resident Evil 4, where you must HIT THIS BUTTON RIGHT FUCKING NOW, or something bad happens. It's about a mask that has been split in two and your quest to get the other half. Back in the day, GamePro gave it 4/5, but I'm pretty sure that GamePro was as retarded (if not more) then as they are now.

HOLY SHIT, IT'S LIKE WARIOWARE PLUS KUNG-FU

Keep.

Marky Mark: Make My Video (video game; Sega CD): Holy fuck. There's almost nothing to say about this. When PC World came up with a list of the worst games ever, a list that included ET, Atari Pac Man, Elf Bowling for the DS, and Custer's Revenge, this came in at #8. About the only good thing about having this is that I don't have the fucking box.

Otherwise?

This is fucking history.

Keep.

That's it. The Random Bag. Considering how hard it is to find a Sega CD and games for it, there's absolutely no way you can tell me that having a Hefty bag full of religious books in the corner of my room for two weeks was a bad idea. I want to go up north, steal my Sega and all its miscellany back from my dad, get drunk, and chill with the Funky Bunch.

Hanging out with the Biasman will have to suffice. I hope his Sega CD works.

The Random Bag...(Pt. 2)

2008-05-11T16:42:00.000-07:00

Hardaway...WITH HATE

2008-05-09T15:42:00.001-07:00

I just noticed this, but I used to think Tim Hardaway was a badass, so whatever.

Let it be known that Tim Hardaway went from being the coolest guy in basketball (for his two-step dribble thing and a name that sounds like he takes it in the ass) to being a hopeless case, lost in time, lost in space. It's 2008, Tim. You can't just go on the fucking radio and declare that queering doesn't make the world work.

Unless you're the Ultimate Warrior.

Luckily, George Takei understands Hardaway and forgives him, nay, likes him.

And THAT is how the game is played.

Basketball with HATE

2008-05-04T20:19:00.001-07:00

I don't usually watch basketball...the occasional Piston's game. The reason for this is because it isn't as grinding and physical as the other sports I love (minus baseball). The Brawl at the Palace was about the closest thing to euphoria I've ever felt watching basketball, until this year.

The Boston Celtics are supposed to be a powerhouse. They're #1 in the East, built from the ground up, hall of famer here, hall of famer there. Beasts. They go up against the lowly Atlanta Hawks, who were probably glad to be in the Playoffs after years of being basement dwellers...and the Hawks played like men possessed. 300 Spartans against the thousand nations of the Persian Army, etc. EVERYBODY was shocked that the Hawks weren't swept, were more shocked when they made it to game seven, then the Celtics blew them away.

My theory: The Celtics weren't ready to be faced with such stiff hatred by a sub-.500 team. Check this shit out:

I remember when the Pistons were facing the Pacers and Tayshaun Prince did that...but blocked the shot. In either case, it should be impossible...but to just RAIL somebody like that on their home court takes massive, massive stones.

Then...

After a series where KG and Zaza were at it plenty of times.

This is basketball with hate. This is basketball like I've never seen before. I'm hoping beyond hope that there's a Boston-Pistons series. Boston is crazy. Detroit is crazy. Panic in the Boston Commons. Riots in the Palace of Auburn Hills. Gang motherfucking warfare.

The playoffs, how I love you.

The Random Bag...(Pt. 1)

2008-05-03T23:23:00.001-07:00

I just got back from a birthday party. Nothing happened at it gossipy or anything...CCR was played, Joe Kasper and I reminisced about Stone Temple Piolots and made fun of Korn for this:

The most important and exciting thing is that my friend Taylor Koo gave me a few records, a Sega CD (Matt, I have one, so this is yours), and a BAG FULL OF RANDOM THINGS. I'm not talking a plastic bag. I'm talking a fucking Hefty. One of those pleated ones that can hold a metric ton of elephant shit. And it's falling apart.

So this is pretty much a live post...think an AIM convo between me and this stuff that will be sitting in my dorm room until I figure out what to do with it. Will it stay? Will it go? Either way, I'm crazy excited--the possibilities are random and endless!

Thunderstrike (Video Game; Sega CD): The tagline? "DIVE DOWN THE DEVIL'S THROAT. I can't tell how good the game is, but based on box art, it looks like a first person version of that chopper game that was always in the Genesis at the 50's McDonalds. It's a flight sim that "doesn't spare you the grisly details." THE PANAMA CANAL HAS BECOME A WAR ZONE. This was an era where you could get a little tippsy, wonder what happened if you gave Aero the Acrobat a broadsword and had a motherfucking video game. The Panama Canal. Flight sim. Grisly horror. Deep throat from the Devil. VULCAN CANNONS. Oh God!

Keep.

The Mask (VHS; Starring Jim Carrey): I don't need to explain this. I will be putting it in the honors lounge where there's a bunch of other VHS tapes for no reason.

Donate.

Jeopardy! (Video Game; Sega CD): Holy fuck, holy fuck, holy fuck: SPECIAL FOOTAGE OF ALEX TREBEK SHOT ESPECIALLY FOR THIS GAME. Awful looking contestants! The only Jeopardy! game with glorious Full Motion Video! ONE TO THREE PLAYERS! There is no way this can be bad...you can even become a five-time champ and win admission into the Jeopardy! Hall of Fame. This is why Sega CD existed--game show games.

Keep.

Joe Montana's NFL Football (Video Game; Sega CD): Joe Montana football for the regular Genesis was badass because if you had Barry Sanders, you won the game. I didn't know that, before the switch to Deon Sander's Primetime Football and the ability to move teams, Sega made Madden '96 three years in advance. Choppy 3D box art, hype for revolutionary IN YOUR FACE graphics, and really bad FMV of Joe Montana, not to mention historical teams ('85 BEARS) and SEGA Helmet Cam replays are sure to delight.

Keep.

A Case Logic 10 CD holder for car visors: I had a 20 CD holding one of these, but never used it for fear of somebody breaking into my car and stealing my Led Zep or T.Rex. Also, I have over 200 CDs, and asking me to choose ten of those is like asking me to choose if I'd like to give up my right or left testicle, only probably a harder question.

Donate.

Cliffs Notes on: Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo (Test Aid): I've never seen an actual, paper copy of one of these before. Wow. There's a fucking mountain on the cover...yellow and black lines...I'd almost be embarrassed to buy it. Five dollars? Shit...a Signet Classic edition of the fucking book is five dollars. There's also a page for notes, in case you're the kind of student who takes notes on notes. I'll leave this on the "FREE BOOKS" table in the Humanities Hallway.

Donate.

Interactive CD Sampler Pack Vol. 3 (Video Game; Playstation 1): There was a time when I thought that these sampler packs were the shit. If I got tired of smoking cigarettes and hiding under boxes and getting shot by dudes with exclamation points over their heads in the Metal Gear Solid demo, I could kick and punch with Master Chop Chop Onion in Parappa the Rappa, all for the price of walking to K-Mart and grabbing it. This one has Tekken 2 (Have it), Crash Bandicoot (have it), Twisted Metal II (Have it) and NCAA football (Fuck that). Looking at the disc...holy fuck! It's Duke Nukem: Total Meltdown!

B-b-b-b-balls of steel. And the shitty sampler disk. Still.

Keep.

Surgical Strike (Video Game; Sega CD): Holy fuck! A surgery game! For Sega CD! A whole billion years before the DS, the Wii, or STARTING THE OPERATION. This is..."The future. War will be fought on an open battlefield (O RLY?). High-tech urgan guerrillas will attack out of nowhere (I always thought guerrillas fought like gentlemen) and then fade back into cities and villages to hide among the innocent population. To ferret out this invisible enemy without causing civilian casualties, the nations of the world have banded together to create an elite special forces unit, The Surgical Strike Team."

Oh.

It sounds like the Terminator, only shit. There's no actual graphics on the box, just clips from the sure to be awful video game. There's...HOVERCRAFT?!?

Holy shit, best game ever.

Keep.

Whoshot (sic) Johnny Rock? (Video Game; Sega CD): This video game has everything, right on the cover. Pinstripe suit, chick with a tommy gun, MA-17 rating.

On the back cover, it looks like the Incredible Hulk is shooting a tommy gun at me, which I think happened in the 80's, when Marvel decided that everybody needed a gun and Hulk was the only one badass enough to haul around a Chicago typewriter. It's MA-17, a private dick game, and "provides a high level of challange." I can only imagine that that means getting it on with the vacant chick on the cover.

Keep.

Mortal Kombat (Video Game; Sega CD): Holy shit, includes Mortal Kombat music video. It's either that badass song from the movie, or it's this...

Either way...fucking pimp.

Keep.

I Kissed Dating Goodbye (Book; Joshua Harris): Hmm...cool cover. Could be either a romance novel, or a hardboiled crime drama. The blurb, "A new attitude towards romance and relationships," turns me off a little...

"Tired of the game? Kiss dating goodbye."

Oh...an early 90's dating guide! Sweet.

"Dating. Isn't there a better way?"

You said it, smooth pimp.

"I Kissed Dating Goodbye suggests there is. Reorder your romantic life in the light of God's Word..."

Donate.

Boundaries in Dating (Book; Dr. Henry Cloud & Dr. John Townsend): It's a book by doctors. Worse, they're psychologists. They aren't supposed to help you find the love of your life. They're supposed to make you think. Yet, they offer "Rules for Romance." What do doctors know about dating? Based on the cover, that it's all sepia tones and walking barefooted in tuxedos and prom dresses. Fuck that.

Donate.

A protective rubber case for a Game Boy Color: I did not just make that up.

Donate.

Two copies of Pocahontas (VHS): Other than that song about digging and the insinuation that Pocahontas is a hot Asian chick in a Native American's clothes, circa 1983, there's not much to see. A pug falls in love with a raccoon. Whatever.

Dig and dig and diggity-dig (cue harpsichord).

Donate.

Soul Star (Video Game; Sega CD): Before Tomb Raider, Core Design made a video game that was pretty much a StarFox clone. Notable because the graphics are better, and because the money made from this game went directly into programming Laura Croft's tits.

Looks like the Gummi Ship from Kingdom Hearts.

Keep.

Cliffhanger (Video Game; Sega CD): A video game about Rocky climbing a mountain? Sign me the fuck up.

Keep.

Syrex Unofficial PlayStation Ultimate Strategy Guide Volume 2 (Video Game Strategy Guide): I remember buying one of these. It was for a wrestling video game. Remembering this fills me with shame, because I paid $15 to be lied to (Hulk Hogan does leg drops from the top turnbuckle!) and given false information about the fictional characters in the game. Remembering this fills me with shame.

Donate.

CLEP Study Guide (Test Aid): One of those things that The College Board sells to high school students in an effort to fuck them as many times as possible before actual colleges begin to fuck them.

Donate.

Syrex Unofficial PlayStation Ultimate Strategy Guide Volume 1 (Video Game Strategy Guide): I'm almost tempted to keep this one for the FFVII walkthrough...but they still won't help me get through the first fucking disc.

Donate.

Hook (Video Game; Sega CD): I don't have an actual box, but this had better have as much Dustin Hoffman as the movie, otherwise I'm expecting horrible, horrible things...like the shit with Robin Williams and the colony of underage boys.

YOU HAVE FULL MOTION VIDEO. USE IT.

"Let's hop in bed."

*They stand there*

LEGO PIRATE SHIP!

NO DUSTIN HOFFMAN!

BAD VOICE ACTING! WORSE GRAPHICS! OH LORD TAKE ME NOW!

Keep.

Sewer Shark (Video Game; Sega CD): I have it. Matt, it's yours.

Donate.

No More Baths! (VHS): A movie about...well...I don't know. It's a movie for white Christian families, but a black man is on the cover. Apparently a kid discusses the Montgomery Bus Boycotts with him. This goes on for 94 minutes.

Donate.

The ButterCream (sic) Gang (VHS): "Good kids, small-town fun & unconditional love for a struggling friend."

I'm guessing gay porn.
Donate.

An empty VHS box that reads "Dances With Wolves; Newsies:" The lack of shirtless Christian Bale is sad and kind of upsetting.

Donate.

I Gave Dating a Chance (Book; some fag): A biblical perspective to balance the extremes. Hmm...

Donate.

The New Math Made Simple (Test aid): Minus "The New Math" sounding like a totally badass band name, there's ven diagrams and a promise of something involving numbers and symbols being applied in a new way being simple, there is no reason for me to keep this.

And really, the band name is the only reason.

Donate.

Popular Science, April 2006 (Magazine): In competition for the most badass headline ever: "Mining the Moon. Step One: Bomb It." Also, the magazine is a subscription issue. It belonged to a Mrs. Paul Rackers. Other than seeing that it was a few letters away from belonging to me-with-a-vagina, it's awesome to know that we're still in an era where marriage means that women don't even get to keep their first name.

Donate.

Ballet of Leaves (Book; Elizabeth Campbell): Ohh, old poems. Ohh, it's inscribed! "To Olivia from Jay 2/6/54. On your departure from Chicago. Turn to page 56."

Oh man...I feel like I'm eavesdropping on some sexy, torrid affair in the style of a Choose Your Own Adventure novel.

Postscript to Good-by

And you will see the shadow,
And you will touch the shell,
And you will hear the heart ring
Clear as a Shepherd's bell.

And you will see my thinness,
And you will touch my pain,
And you will hear my new song
Beat rhythms in the rain.

And I shall not remember,
And I shall cease to care.
And I shall go on without you
A-wanderlusting there.

A-wanderlusting? A-wanderlusting?!?

The cover just fell off.

Donate.

fundamentals of Human Learning and Cognition (Book; Henry C. Ellis): It's 4 a.m. Explaining this will put me to sleep. The cover is blue and white and satanic. Otherwise...

Donate.

A video recording of the motion picture Urban Legend: Alicia Witt! Jarred Leto! Freddy Kruger! Welcome to 1998, where if you had a video camera, a script, and a studio, you could make millions of dollars by throwing tits and abs at growing teenagers. Best part about the movie? "Zoot Suit Riot" is on the soundtrack.

Donate.

Another rubber case for a Game Boy Color: Only this one has like...10 year old mud on it.

Donate.

Another 10 CD visor thing: Only this one isn't Case Logic (the standard brand, yo), and this one has a pocket for what I'm assuming is mixtapes. A bit more badass, but asking me to pick through my mixtapes is like asking me to choose between my right and left dick, and I'd prefer to keep both of them.

Donate.

Two copies of Sonic CD (Video Game; Sega CD): His and hers copies. Obviously, when it comes to me and Matt, he is the bitch. He'll get the one that doesn't open as easy.

The Purpose of Driven Life: Passages of scripture for the child who is off to college for all the unprotected sex and kegstands $20,000 a year can buy.

Donate.

I'm assuming a license plate holder: It doesn't have any funny phrases, car dealership names, or anything. No flashing lights...no chains. Just a black piece of plastic with holes in it. Uhh...what the fuck?

Donate.

And to close...

Yes! I want to start my subscription to Popular Science! card: Must have fallen out of my free issue of Popular Science. Certainly nowhere near as badass as the copy of Duke Nukem stuck inside the sampler disc case stuck inside Cliff's Notes.

Donate.

And that's it for right now. I'll go through the rest later. Obviously, video games are awesome and epic and full of win. Obviously, random bags full of nostalgia are the same. And it was free. Envy me.

The Random Bag...(Pt. 1)

2008-05-03T23:23:00.000-07:00

This video will soothe and cleanse.

2008-04-28T20:37:00.001-07:00

Only the Japanese can bring together terrific facial expressions, peeping toms, and classical music. This is why they're a culturally advanced race.

The YouTube Generation

2008-04-27T20:09:00.001-07:00

I love that there are videos like this that make Generic Heel ranting about "The Skittles Touch" seem intelligent and cutting edge. At the same time, I hate that this is how America sees our generation: a bunch of attention-whoring bitches with cameras and internet access. This is less awful than the news story about the kid who got beaten down by a gang of kids whose intention was to post the video on the site, but still...it's pretty fucking awful. 800,000+ views.

What's your opinion on YouTube? I know it's necessary (George Clinton walking the dinosaur completes my life), but still...is enough z'nuff?

Andy Dick vs. Caleb Michael Lalinsky

2008-04-22T20:44:00.001-07:00

This...is a motherfucking WAR. A tale of the tape? Andy Dick is a "comedian" and is famously annoying. He has money, maybe, and has probably had sex with his fair share of D and C list Hollywood stars. Caleb Lalinsky is a "comedian" with red hair, a car that looks like a Hot Wheels...and really not all that much else. What would bring the two together in a war of Schwarzenegger-Steiner proportions?

THIS MAN:

Let's take a look at what each man has to offer...

Andy Dick:

CML; who likes to dance, sucks off a Dracula, and has gorgeous hair:

Who is better? I think Caleb takes it with the Weird Al voice and the cheesy music. Andy Dick mentions anal sex and can afford to sew exclamation points onto shit, so it might be close.

Let the comments fly.

Andy Dick vs. Caleb Michael Lalinsky

2008-04-22T20:44:00.000-07:00

Hell is the South III: Third Verse, Same as the First

2008-04-19T23:02:00.001-07:00

I'm a week removed from my third trip to the South, where "ATTRACTIONS" doesn't mean a goddamn thing. What did I do?

Spent 16 hours in a car with my mom. Topics of conversation: math class, biology class, math class, the Violent Femmes.

Ate two steaks, drank a milkshake, had some scotch and a decent cigar. Threw up.

Made a fail-proof bet with my mom: $20 Neil Young wasn't in America. Won.

Went to a book store in TN, Mr. K's Books, bought a ton of books. Seven or so, I think.

Went to another book store in TN, this one an old religious book store owned by a bible collector. Yeah, I know. A bible collector. A religious book store. Oh my.

However, that wound up being the best 2 hours of the trip, besides being away from the College and driving up and down the highways and byways with my mother.

A few reasons:

1. I bought The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 1 for $8.
2. I saw a treasure trove of Tom Swift books.
3. I learned about bible collecting.
4. I saw illuminated bibles bound with sheepskin ($75!)
5. The clerk.

Let me explain the fifth point. Here is a man, a hick if you will, at a religious book store, a used religious book store. It's his job to sit on this pile of unsellable bible commentaries and Chicken Soup for the Soul's. They just got in this order of old bibles or whatever, so he has to sort through that. He looks like Steve Buscemi, preparing for the role of a bushwhacker. Long, long, long hair. Gaunt, nasty face. Skinny. The best part? He has a voice that is dead on Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump, and he was a sarcastic, grumpy motherfucker.

Why is this awesome? Well, other than envisioning Fargo with Gump lines substituted in, my Aunt K.C. just so happens to be a terrible idiot. She's a master of 21 questions:

Her: Don't you find these books expensive?
Me: No. The one I've got is eight dollars. It's out of print. It listed for $13 when it came out.
Her: What book?
Me: The Diary of Virgina Woolf.
Her: Who?
Me: A famous English writer. She wrote Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and was the inspiration for The Hours.
Her: Was she anything like Edgar Allen Poe?
Me: No.
Her: Why do you want her diary?
Me: So I can learn how to go crazy, the proper English way.
Her: Oh. So you're an English major?
Me: Yes.
Her: What are you going to do with that?
Me: Drift.
Her: What?
Me: Drift. I'm going to graduate, then go to the train yard, hop on one, and ride the rails.
Her: So a hobo?
Me: No. A drifter.
Her: Oh. What will you do for money?
Me: Nothing. I don't plan on paying for stuff. That's the point of drifting. You drift.
Her: This is what you go to college for?
Me: That and the drugs.
Her: What?
Me: Yes. That is what I go to college for.

So you can imagine my excitement when she asked Forrest Buscemi a bunch of questions.

Her: So these books...they're pretty expensive. Why?
Him: Well, they're not really expensive. Most of them are under list price. Some of them are really rare.
Her: Do you sell many books?
Him: I hope. We are a book store.
Her: In store?
Him: Not really, which is why we offer discounts to people who buy things here.
Her: So how many do you sell?
Him: Sometimes a little, sometimes a lot.
Her: Here?
Him: Sometimes. That's why we have a discount.
Her: A discount? How do you stay in business with a discount?
Him: Well, we sell most of our stock online.
Her: Online?
Him: Yes. Online. There's this thing...the internet. It's terrific for things like...selling books.
Her: Really?
Him: Oh yes. What we've got here in the store isn't even a fraction of what's online. We must have something like 20,000 ~~Dr. Pepper's~~ books on places like ABEbooks and Barnes and Noble.
Her: You just sold 20,000 books?
Him: Shipped them to England before you got here.

Fuck. Yes.

Otherwise, there's still not much going on down there. A store where they sell Irish things is going out of business because being Irish is probably a crime. 21 is playing at the movie theater. Mountain Dew costs $1.39. My great aunt Peggy turned 90, hence the steaks and milkshakes.

I saw Rocky IV for the first time.

More on that later.

Honestly, part of me wishes I could be satisfied with a life akin to The Village Green Preservation Society, but a majority of me is bored taking 18 credit hours and stomping through Cincinnati.

Oh! The hotel started serving omelette au fromage at the breakfast bar.

They weren't very good.

Hell is the South III: Third Verse, Same as the First

2008-04-19T23:02:00.000-07:00

Words cannot really describe this...

2008-04-18T19:01:00.001-07:00

Needless to say, Aquaman's fatality will be the best.

Reason #31413 I want to leave Facebook (Again): not all guys are jerks

2008-04-14T01:09:00.001-07:00

To date, this is the worst thing I've ever seen posted on Facebook. The. Worst.

Girl: Slow down, Im scared.

Guy: No, this is fun.

Girl: No it's not! Please it's too scary!

Guy: Then tell me you love me.

Girl: Fine I love you. Now, slow down!

Guy: Okay but give me a BIG hug.

Girl : *hugs him*

Guy: Can you take my helmet off and put it on yourself? It's bugging me.

Girl: Alright, now slow down

Guy: I love you babe.

(in the paper the next day):
A motorcycle had crashed into a building because of brake failure. Two people were on it, but only 1 had survived. The truth was that halfway down the road, the guy realized that his brakes broke, but he didn't want to let the girl know. Instead, he had her say she loved him and felt her hug one last time, then he had her wear his helmet so that she would live even though it meant that he would die.

Share this with the people you love!

First, it was better when I thought the dude was raping the chick. Second, it's called taking your fucking hands off the fucking throttle and slowing the fucking fuck down. Third, buildings are easily avoidable. Fourth, people were "nearly crying" because of the note.

I'm going to be sick. Can I quit again?

Reason #31413 I want to leave Facebook (Again): not all guys are jerks

2008-04-14T01:09:00.000-07:00

Generic Heel Video Blog #10

2008-04-14T00:32:00.000-07:00

I do a better Daniel Plainview impersonation. I promise.

Tentacool Rape

2008-04-10T12:05:00.001-07:00

Based on the success of Blast Sheilds Down's post on Tentacle Rape, I've decided to create a new sub-genre of that black, black beast (from 20,000 leagues below the blackest of black lagoons even): Tentacool Rape.

Now I'll just sit back and watch all the hits rooooooooool in.

The Right Time

2008-04-07T12:49:00.002-07:00

(This seems incomplete to me, so I'll probably update it. If you want my sources (all three of them) leave a comment)

To be honest, I can’t think of one single reason why I’d be reading books by Virginia Woolf and Doris Lessing, let alone books with titles as inspired as To the Lighthouse and The Golden Notebook. I’m a lazy reader – my personal choices at the bookstore are dictated by sales (hence why I bought Night and Day before something like Orlando or Between the Acts) and recommendations, not to mention class syllabi. Sometime between my passing obsession with Star Wars novels and college, I read a grand total of zero books outside those assigned for class (and honestly, I read maybe a quarter of those), because novels held little interest if they weren’t exciting. To The Lighthouse and Golden Notebook are not exciting books in the slightest, at least not in the fashion of the novels I read in my early teenage years, but I devoured them. To the Lighthouse I’ve read three times, and The Golden Notebook was done in three sittings. Both stories are of a similar motif: a woman, an artist, suffers a creative block of some sort and works her way through it. The reader is given the process by which the artist returns to their art – Lily Briscoe’s thoughts and Anna Wulf’s five notebooks (not to mention the novel Free Women, which is a summary of the five). One year ago, even one semester ago, I would not have been ready for these books. I would have read them both, thought them very good, and moved on, but the circumstances surrounding my reading of the novel (that both were the result of being assigned for class) would have ensured that I’d read them outside of my right time. Of the four novels we have read in class, and more so than any novel I’ve previously read (baring maybe The Hours), these two novels; deep, rich psychological profiles of two artists disconnected from their art; spoke to me the most. They simply happened at the right time.

I am, from outside appearances, an atypical college student: healthy, young, bored, and constantly looking forward to the weekend. Until late January, when my aunt died, I was producing poems, non-fiction, and fiction at a fast clip – one or two things a day. If I didn’t write something for publication or for one of my three blogs, I kept a journal. All of that stopped with my aunt’s death – the first major one I’ve been through. At the time, we were reading Howard’s End, and the theme “Only Connect” was something that I brought up in the eulogy. Onalee Frost was not by aunt by blood, but through a relationship she’d built with my biological aunt and the rest of my family over a 40 year period. She’d connected with my family on such a level that my dad, divorced from the family some 15 years, showed up to the funeral. “I understood nothing of that kind of loss,” Margaret Atwood wrote in her 2005 collection Writing With Intent, “of the crumbling of the physical texture of lives lived, the way the meaning of a place could change because those who used to live in it were no longer there” (Atwood, 241).

At 19, the same age Margaret Atwood had been forced to read To the Lighthouse, I cracked the book open and was nearly overwhelmed. In Mrs. Ramsay, I saw my aunt: polite, charming, silent, intellectual, and somewhat submissive to the domineering will of Kay, her roommate of 40 years. While Mrs. Ramsay went off to her garden in her floppy old hats, Onalee went to the computer room in an old pantsuit from her days as a college professor. The two-story brick house that she’d occupied for so long seemed incomplete without her. There was some hopelessness in our plight, not even that Onalee died, but in trying to capture Onalee’s life in such a way that it didn’t vanish completely. Her niece from Alaska, Julie, had come down upon hearing that Onalee was on the verge of dying and it quickly became apparent that she’d completely missed the essence of Onalee’s existence (the best example being her question as to the nature of the relationship between Onalee and Kay: “Are they…lesbians?”), but was persistent in seeking the approval of my family. She didn’t quote Tennyson or insist on a trip to the lighthouse, but rather stubbornly insisted that she’d visit Detroit again and, in a stunning display of oafishness, sat around reading letters from Onalee’s great grandmother to a pen pal as if it would some how connect us, The Monahan/Joyce/Rodgers clan, to her, Julie, fresh of the plane.

In keeping Onalee from vanishing altogether, we barely achieved. Julie took everything except for what Onalee had given to us freely: jazz records, old books of Japanese haiku, and 40 years. I was, understandably, distraught. And then I started reading To the Lighthouse. How odd it is that I would find parallels between my life and that of Lily Briscoe, but a few short months after reading Woolf’s book, there it is: life captured. If I were to split the last few months of my life up, I could probably do it in the same way Woolf devised To the Lighthouse: two large rooms with a small corridor connecting the two. The first block would be December, a month where I spent all but three days of my Christmas vacation with Onalee, watching her go about her new daily routines, writing about her (I can’t even open that notebook anymore, to be honest). December seemed like one long day between artist and subject – Lily and Mrs. Ramsay, myself and Onalee. The end of break brought about the thin corridor – time passed, and in a month, Onalee went from battling cancer to dead, eroding like the great house the Ramsay’s lived in. Then there was the week of the funeral, the lighthouse, where everything converged. How different everything seemed without one of the women who’d raised me! The situation was choking – I couldn’t write (which is death when you’re in a fiction workshop), and I couldn’t get Julie out of my head (her eulogy: “I didn’t know Onalee very well,” followed by the same plea for attention), and I was reading this novel where the silent matriarch of a family is killed off-handedly and away from the main protagonist, an artist who had left a painting of that woman unfinished.

So I devoured To the Lighthouse, and mostly through self-discovery (I barely read a third of the book as assigned in class and read it twice over a break). Eudora Welty, in her introduction to the novel, says that “it seems to expand and expand again ahead of us” (Welty, vii). To the Lighthouse is a novel that keeps growing on a reader with the addition of experience. Would I have appreciated the novel as much without having experienced the loss of somebody so integral to my life and the infiltration of my family by a drippy, nagging, attention wanting woman? It’s hard to say, but I’m willing to guess that the answer would be no, much like Margaret Atwood didn’t come to appreciate the novel until the drippy, nagging refrain “women can’t paint, women can’t write” became a reoccurring theme in critical analysis of her own work: “I didn’t realize what weight such pronouncements could have, even when uttered by fools, because of the many centuries of heavily respectable authority behind them” (Atwood, 241). After my third reading of To the Lighthouse, in February, I opened up the notebook that I’d started writing about Onalee in, picked up a pen, and wrote a ten line poem: it was the line that tied together an incomplete and insufficient portrait of a woman I’d come to love, the piece that finished the notebook.

Indirectly, my creative block prepared me for Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, about another artist with an inability to produce art (in her case, writing). Lessing, in her introduction, states that “the artist” (only a recent motif, adventurers and knights and heroes being preferred before this, the Age of Uncertainty, where it is the artist forging ahead and not the amiable general) must be hindered by a block, placed upon a “monstrously isolated, monstrously narcissistic, pedestalled paragon” (Lessing, xvii) that is the result of the disparity between the artist and her surroundings. She also states that the young “have abolished that isolated, creative, sensitive figure—by copying him in hundreds of thousands.” The creative catharsis of Anna Wulf would be seen as trivial to those on the outside, and her refusal to sell her work to be produced for television would be considered, by my generation, stupid. Creativity, on the whole, isn’t encouraged in the mainstream (can’t write; can’t paint), and to make matters worse, Anna is directionless; all of her stories and experiences feel empty and false, and they all turn in on her by the end of each notebook.

Before reading The Golden Notebook, I kept my own life parceled away in different notebooks, as did Anna Wulf. I had one for fiction, one for poetry, one for a novel I was writing that was more tightly based upon my own life than I’d like to admit, and, at one point, seven blogs that all tended to have the same theme – disjointedness. Around November (before my To the Lighthouse period), I had a nervous breakdown. That was the end of one notebook, several blogs, the novel I was writing, and poetry with the exception of two that I’ve written since December (both of which happen to end notebooks that talk about the subjects that caused me to break down). Onalee’s death saw a complete halt in my output: I’ve written less than nothing worthwhile in my own estimation, took long hiatuses from my blogs, started and stopped new stories and fragments of stories across a bunch of different notebooks, and then started reading The Golden Notebook.

Doris Lessing, just like Margaret Atwood, bemoans the forced reading of this novel. “Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty of thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty—and vice versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you” (Lessing, xxiv). If there was any concern about this book opening doors to me, then it was due to my ability to fake calm. I’ve been in psychoanalysis before (age 12), and since November, I’ve constantly felt waves of panic, disillusionment, and depression. On any given week, I just up and leave the dorm room five or six nights in a row and just drive, because driving seems more real than doing homework or writing thinly veiled biography. I don’t sleep well on account of the caffeine I drink late at night and the constant whistle of the wind against the bells outside my door. I’ve written plenty of stuff in this notebook and on that scrap of paper, but so much of it winds up in the garbage or forgotten about because I felt at the time that it didn’t convey whatever experience I was writing about. I’ve been drifting through my days this semester, silently panicking, afraid to think. To make matters somewhat worse, I recently declared myself an atheist, scant months before deciding to lead a Catholic retreat – the ex-Communist talking about matters specific to the party. If there was ever a point in my life to read The Golden Notebook, then it’d be now.

The novel, much like To the Lighthouse is a mirror for those of us who consider ourselves artists. There are some who don’t believe in writer’s block or a creative block or any kind of block, simply because they haven’t come across them (hence Atwood’s disbelief as a teenager that Tansley’s “women can’t paint, women can’t write” would actually be taken seriously). I was, and to an extent still am, working through my block, and scarily enough, my actions sometimes mirrored that of Anna Wulf (I started writing pastiche in one notebook, the one that had the pseudo-biography that I started in Contemporary Perspectives (which was written in the style of Woolf), which I abandoned, as it had failed to convey my experience). My life started coming full circle, like hers, through writing about it. The first thing I’d finished since a ten line poem in February wound up being a twelve page account of my life, from the incidents that put me in the chair to the last few months, which have me looking in the mirror on a constant basis, searching for something familiar but lost. Unlike Woolf, who concluded that To the Lighthouse had done for her what psychoanalysis does for its patients, I had to conclude that writing my history (titled Why Atheism: A Personal Manifesto), had simply resulted in my acknowledging that I had a problem that needed some sort of figuring out and, like Anna Wulf, I proposed to do that by shutting myself in.

The Sunday of Metanoia retreat, in my dorm room, something snapped, and I felt a need to escape. I started typing some of the pastiche that I’d written, posted it to my blog, locked the door, and went on a walk. When I got tired of that, I decided to drive. I went to my coffee shop, The Highland, and proceeded to finish The Golden Notebook, 200 pages in a marathon two-hour session, only looking up to request more coffee or to reach up and touch something real. It’s very hard to explain, but the novel had a profound effect on me. Walking around campus that night, I’d considered just walking away from school until I’d found some sort of purpose or identity. I felt shattered. The novel calmed me down, centered me, and, in a sense, encouraged me to go on. Here was this woman, this artist, Anna Wulf, struggling with her political beliefs, struggling with her inadequacies while the rest of the world was burning around her, going silently crazy, and then moving on. It’s not clear as to Anna’s final outcome – is she any better having gone through her breakdown? For that matter, is Lily any better having finished her portrait of Mrs. Ramsay?

I suppose that, if I were actually a fan of Victorian literature, I’d be upset at the lack of a clear cut ending (“Reader, I married him” would be preferred), but life is uncertain, and novels that are being written in an age that is consciously aware that nothing makes sense and that nothing has purpose the way it used to are similarly uncertain. Both novels act as mirrors because they delve so deeply into the psychological. Everybody has had their moments of panic, their episodes where they wish to run from life, their periods where everything seems so large as to make individual contributions (the arts especially) seem insignificant. In Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, the individual, the creative individual, struggles against the world. The isolated struggle against the hive mind. The sensitive struggle against change, which is insensitive. On the surface, both novels are about art and the inability of two women to produce it, but novels like this are rarely, if ever, about their surface. They are ever growing and expanding, enveloping, living things. To the Lighthouse and The Golden Notebook are about survival. In the world of “can’t write, can’t paint,” two women struggle and eventually triumph over that, creating something, even if only for themselves, in a world that is afraid to think. There is no better time than now to read fiction that says so much in such simple fashion.

The Right Time

2008-04-07T12:49:00.000-07:00

Undercutter's Pizza

2008-04-03T00:26:00.001-07:00

I have an unabashed love of The Tom Green Show. If there was any justification for MTV forgetting what the "M" stood for, this and a few of their "Liquid Animation" shows (Clone High, the initial run of Celebrity Deathmatch) are it.

I miss my MTV.

"He's got a hammer."

Lebron James - A Damn Dirty Ape

2008-03-27T01:19:00.001-07:00

Ugh...as if it wasn't enough that Vogue magazine has never ever ever had a black man on the cover before Lebron James, it appears as though people are offended at the thought of interracial relationships. Check this:

Some analysts say that Vogue, in finally having a person of color on their cover, are perpetuating racial stereotypes via their cover. People are comparing it to King Kong and Fay Wray, because Lebron looks INTENSE AND READY TO SWAT DOWN PLANES.

Magazine analyst (you've got to be fucking kidding) Samir Husni found time to become offended for all of us, saying that the cover "screams King Kong," and brings the stereotype of "black man wanting white woman" to the forefront. Never you mind that there's not a white woman on the cover, but a Brazilian.

I was a little lost as to how the image "screamed" King Kong, but then I fired up Photoshop.

Well obviously, King Kong is fucking racist. And talented. As is Lebron. Dancing and dribbling? Fuck "reinforcing the criminalization of the black man," he's upstaging us tubby white ones.

That's racist, Lebron.

It wuz u...

2008-03-24T21:36:00.001-07:00

Finally, a tampon commercial that doesn't creep me the fuck out.

2008-03-22T19:19:00.001-07:00

And yet, this is probably considered more offensive than a regular tampon ad, because showing a pitcher of water spilling onto a sheet of paper is empowering or something. And, we're uncomfortable with the word "beaver" in this context, though the beaver in question is about as cuddly and cute as the gopher from Caddyshack. People should get over the word "beaver."

Beaver. Beaver. Beaverbeaverbeaver.

Vagina.

Jerry Springer @ WSU

2008-03-19T19:35:00.001-07:00

Jerry Springer - former Cincinnati mayor, talk show host, dancer, and judge of talent. For seventeen years, he's been on across America, starting from his humble roots as an anchorman for some channel in Cinci. While infamous for his exploits on TV, Springer is himself an extremely casual, laid back person who admits the show's failings. "Our show is very stupid." He has fourteen years (three years of the show were actually serious) to back this up.

"I wouldn't watch my show," Springer said, "and I wouldn't tell others to watch it." At the same time, he explained how his show, dumb though it is, was still somewhat important. Three words: Freedom of Speech. He also said that Springer was a bastion of free media: before him, the only view on television was white and upper-middle class. With his show and the dawning of the "Springer Generation" (and yeah, I've seen it referred to as that), more people were exposed to homosexuality, transvestitism, conjoined twins, midgets, and everything else. All stories on the show are outrageous...there's white people, black people, interracial people, fat people, skinny people, rednecks, gangbangers, and dudes who've cut off their own penis. Everything is represented.

I don't watch Springer, unless I'm getting my oil changed and that's what's on the mechanic's TV. I respect him though...the fact that he's been able to remain seriously active in politics while doing a show like Springer is no less than miraculous.

I was surprised at how good the Q&A session was. Sadly, I had to ruin it. A student asked Jerry who his favorite guest was, and he told a terrific story from the serious days about a Jewish woman who managed to fool the Nazis before becoming a housekeeper for a General in the army. She hid 12 Jewish children in his basement for two years. A really terrific story. I had the absolute last question...how would I top it?

Paul Rodgers: Hey Jerry...uhh...what are you doing tonight?

{Laughter from the crowd}

Jerry Springer: I'm flattered...but let me say this: If I were gay, you'd turn me straight!

Needless to say, I was destroyed.

Spring Break? It sucks less right now.

Just pointing this out...

2008-03-18T23:42:00.001-07:00

I love Star Wars as much as the next fan boy, and I love LEGO as much as any jaded, nostalgic college student, but there's no fucking way you could convince me to spend $300 dollars for the privilege of building a sphere.

It's a bigger crime than spending $100 on the pod racing set and not getting an Odi Mandrell.

Ch-ch-changes

2008-03-18T23:20:00.001-07:00

I am back home, at least until Sunday. This is a less than ideal situation for me, considering that I already considered my life to be moving at a pace akin to the glacier that ran into the Titanic. Now I feel like a woolly mammoth walking into a tar pit while the world slowly freezes around me. Or the mammoth.

Metaphors are hard.

In any event, the more time I spend here in Dearborn, the more I want to leave. Forever.

This sounds awful, true. But whatever...there's absolutely nothing for me to do here. Ever since I left this place, things have been changing. My neighborhood is going to shit (no offense, Matt).

It all started when the movie theater closed. Well, really, it probably started before that, when I decided to go to Cincinnati and...

This post is pathetic. I hate spring break. I should be reading books and writing books and drinking beer or something. I'm watching Family Guy instead. Since something like 8 P.M. It's 2:17 A.M.

Somebody. Somebody please. Save me.

I have a ton of shit to do. I was going to write a book. Fuck. I'm always going home "to write a book." It never happens. Then I decide that the idea sucks or whatever and go to sleep or watch more Family Guy, because there's nothing better to do.

I'm going to see Jerry Springer give a lecture at Wayne State University tomorrow. My mother keeps asking me if I want to go to Spanish class with her this week. I'm thinking about saying yes, just so that I can act like a child and have to have her leave like the Ultimate Adult Student.

Oh God I'm so pathetic.

Crosby - So Good, Others Score For Him

2008-03-10T14:36:00.001-07:00

I'm ashamed of you, Backstrom. Go back to the AHL.

An awesome thing

2008-03-09T14:41:00.000-07:00

I really am a fat redneck.

2008-03-07T12:52:00.002-08:00

I just got done hiking due to a snow day. Four miles. Six inches of snow. Uphill both ways (and down, and up, and down, and up). After going through this, I have a few comments:

1. Thank fuck somebody invented paved roads and cars to drive them on.
2. When I hear a phrase like "The Ridge," I expect to see some bad ass valley below, not U.S. 50, an atomic river, and Kentucky.
3. I'm a fucking pussy. I went the two miles to the Ridge no problem. On the way back, I had to keep stopping.
4. Wilderness is beautiful, but I prefer the kind of wilderness where there's really NO civilization around (Wolverine, MI, where you have to go 20 miles to the next city). Also, snowmobiles > walking.
5. Doc Martins are not good snow shoes.
6. I can walk four miles up and down and up and down an in snow faster than I could run a mile and a half in middle school.

Oh...and yesterday, it was 50 degrees.

I really am a fat redneck.

2008-03-07T12:52:00.000-08:00

Everybody is Fucking Everybody Else

2008-02-29T14:17:00.001-08:00

For the record, Seth Rogan is the sexiest of the three.

Generic Heel Video Blog #9

2008-02-25T21:11:00.000-08:00

Generic Heel Video Blog #8

2008-02-25T18:24:00.000-08:00

So...just how did Generic Heel get his mask?

Generic Heel - G.E.N.E.R.I.C. Heel

2008-02-24T18:17:00.000-08:00

Yes, a Generic Heel rap song. Feat. Wu-Tang Clan.

This is the dumbest shit ever.

2008-02-20T12:18:00.001-08:00

My God...Cincinnati is insane.

Generic Heel Video Blog #6

2008-02-11T21:08:00.000-08:00

Richard Zednik Is Lucky to Be Alive

2008-02-10T18:27:00.001-08:00

I've never seen such a thing before. Christ.

Generic Heel Video Blog #5

2008-02-09T22:14:00.000-08:00

Chris Berman: Total. Fucking. Bitch.

2008-02-06T07:24:00.001-08:00

SEGAL

2008-01-31T22:23:00.001-08:00

Best. Comeback. Ever.

Generic Heel Video Blog #4

2008-01-30T20:25:00.000-08:00

EDIT: I apologize in advance for a few of the lines in here. Seriously. If more people watched this, it'd probably be flagged or something by now.

Osaka Handsaw Massacre

2008-01-29T20:19:00.000-08:00

Moar Education, Plz: Milk Crisis!

2008-01-27T21:18:00.002-08:00

Moar Education, Plz: Milk Crisis!

2008-01-27T21:18:00.001-08:00

Last one

2008-01-27T20:56:00.001-08:00

This and the other two, I made. Yep, going to hell.

Just Awful

2008-01-27T20:54:00.001-08:00

Half-Man, Half-Lolbot

2008-01-27T20:53:00.001-08:00

Generic Heel Video Blog #3

2008-01-27T20:35:00.000-08:00

Generic Heel Video Blog #2

2008-01-27T20:34:00.000-08:00

Ch-ch-ch-changes

2008-01-25T14:09:00.001-08:00

More Best of 2007: Concerts

2008-01-25T13:47:00.001-08:00

Yep, January is almost over, but I never really had much time to reflect on my '07, which was a year dominated by music. I went to a ton of concerts, treked out to Bonnaroo (which I strangely never talked about), and saw my CD collection go from Led Zeppelin's discography to the random mess of stuff that it is now. Odds are, if I knew more people who were interested, I would have formed a band. In any case, I've got a few things for you all to download, and this is as good an excuse to post them as any.

Best Concert (non-festival): Of Montreal (Southgate House, Covington KY, 3/20/07)

There's really little I can do to sum up exactly how good this show was. I bought a shitty voice recorder specifically for the purpose of capturing what I knew was going to be a bad ass show. We missed the opener, or I don't remember the opener, or shit really wasn't all that important, but I went from liking Of Montreal to proclaiming them top five. Just about everything was fun, from the merch guy threatening to "hug the shit" out of me, Joe Kasper's awkward dancing, Aaron Hampel's even more awkward dancing, and the fact that Hampelman not only had to put up with a David Bowie cover, but probably enjoyed it, too. The set is made up of songs from Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?, Sunlandic Twins, and Satanic Panic in the Attic.

A tip for recording concerts: Don't stand next to short people. Also, everybody sonicly destroying stuff on "Gronlandic Edit" was a nice touch.

Download: Of Montreal (3/20/07) (Megaupload)

Honorable Mentions: Beirut (w/A Hawk and a Handsaw) @ Southgate House (technically 2006, but late) and Electric Six @ Mad Hatter (being punched in the dick only counts for so much)

Best Concert (festival): The White Stripes (Bonnaroo, Manchester TN, 6/17/07)

This really shouldn't surprise anybody, considering my unabashed love of the White Stripes, crush on Meg, and man-crush on Jack, but let me explain. It was a long, hot, dry as fuck weekend. Magically, the Pabst Blue Ribbon had managed to stay cold in the trunk of Ma Thompson's car. I ate a cookie the night before, and it didn't make The Police exciting. To top it all off, I was sunburnt as fuck, was late in buying a hat, was starting to peel, and had sat by the stage for an hour and a half between The Decemberist's set and the White Stripes. Oh, and I had to drive home afterwards (apparently, we nearly died, several times).

I've seen the White Stripes before, but this time, it was different: I hadn't heard virtually any of their new material, opting to buy it without listening. It paid off, because I don't think I've ever had more fun. Jack White, "of Nashville, TN," played in his usual face-melting way, while I tried (and failed) to protect small people from being crushed by crowd surfers...even to the extent that I was kicked in the face. Three days of great music, and I got to cap it off with my favorite band at the height of their live power, before Meg went crazy, before I learned that they hadn't announced a Detroit show, before Icky Thump dominated my CD player for the next few months. Absolutely awesome.

Download: White Stripes @ Bonnaroo

Honorable Mentions (really, the rest of the shit I saw at Bonnaroo, in order of awesomeneess): The Hold Steady, The Decemberists, Brazilian Girls, Regina Spektor, The Police, Lilly Allen, everyone I can't remember.

Edit: YouTube, ahoy!

Whopper Freakout

2008-01-23T18:07:00.001-08:00

Other YouTube people are so much better than me.

Generic Heel Video Blog #1

2008-01-23T17:22:00.000-08:00

All my life, I've wanted to be a professional wrestler. Now, with the help of YouTube and a camcorder, I get to pretend!

Hopefully he wins.

Negrobelia?

2008-01-11T09:59:00.001-08:00

Another Sweet Album Cover

2008-01-07T19:54:00.001-08:00

State Troopers Enjoy A Good Laugh

2007-12-25T07:32:00.001-08:00

Facebook I Love You, But You're Bringing Me Down

2007-12-14T21:49:00.000-08:00

I take back every bad thing I ever said about Jamie Foxx

2007-12-13T21:22:00.001-08:00

This dude got so owned. Jamie should have said "KAREEM~!" when he left the stage.

Well, don't you look happy to see me?

2007-12-12T12:28:00.001-08:00

Marian Gaborik is Lucky to Be Alive

2007-12-08T14:55:00.001-08:00

This is the next movie I plan on buying...

2007-12-03T13:52:00.001-08:00

It even features that mean, nasty D'urville Martin, as "the Deputy."

Best. Theme Song. Ever.

I Fashion Myself A Young Obi-Wan...

2007-11-28T18:05:00.001-08:00

This Logic is Unbeatable

2007-11-28T06:30:00.001-08:00

CROSSFIIIIIIIIIREEEEE~!

2007-11-23T15:09:00.002-08:00

A tithing to the man, woman, or baby who buys me this terrific game for Christmas. I'm caught up in it.