Category Archives: Lucubrations

March 17, 2024

Dear Mgmt,
How dare you darken the doorway of my inbox with your ignorant bullshit on a) the Lord’s day, and b) St. Goddamn Patrick’s Day!  How dare you.  And at 7:30 in the morning.  This is outrageous!  Egregious.  Not to mention completely uncalled for.  When was the last time I missed one of your deadlines?
Don’t answer that.  You have your schedule, and I have mine, and on most days, never the twain shall meet.  But that is neither my problem nor yours…it is clearly simply due to both of us being part of the same Big Weird Machine.  And that is no more your fault than mine.  Still, you will be punished with bad jokes before this letter ends.
Speaking of bad jokes, I think your vodcast/YouTube idea could actually work.  I have the exact people in mind, and will approach them if you want to firm up the entire idea.  I’ve started making some notes on ideas and possibilities.  I have no idea if it will have any kind of audience or not, but it will be fun as hell to do, so I’m in.  If it does see the light of day, and we do actually find an audience, I’m guessing we’ll immediately be sued eight ways to Sunday.  So if you agree to provide legal cover, I can easily handle all the creative.  You people are aware of my unsustainable and unrealistic schedule for the rest of ’24, but perhaps we can get a “pilot” and the first couple of episodes recorded and edited by next fall.
Conversely, your ideas for the travel stuff, while generally good, are all a no-go, at least for the rest of ’24.  We can revisit on approach to the new year, but I’ve cancelled all travel for the remainder of this year, so unless you want a series of articles about life in Fecal Creek, CA, you might as well forget this for the time being.
Okay…time for the punishment.  You’ve earned this…I know for a fact you don’t have a drop of Irish blood in you, and for you to interrupt a card-carrying Irishman on St. Patrick’s Day with your nonsense is just short of a declaration of war.  So here we go:

What’s the difference between Wuhan and Vegas?  What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.
What’s the difference between a hormone and a vitamis?  You can’t here a vitamin.
What do you call a Chinese guy with a camera?  Phil Ming.
Why do I cry during sex?  The pepper spray.
What do you call a gay dinosaur?  Mega-Sore-Ass.
Why do astronomers put meat in their shower?  So they can have a meatier shower.
Did you hear about the dead guy who had his ashes put in the salsa?  He wanted to tear his wife’s ass up one more time.
What type of doctor treats transgender men?  A guy-now-cologist.

Okay…that should do it.  Email me tomorrow before noon, you can expect more of the same.
Leave me alone,
Jayson

N.P.: “Ready or Not” – Lou Gramm

It’s About Time

After the revolution, on my first day in office as President, or Sexy and Benevolent Leader, or Illustrious Potentate, or whatever of the United States, I will outlaw the observance of Daylight Saving Time.
A recent poll of random adults at the bar waiting for a table at Red Lobster in northern California revealed that 90% of all Americans think daylight saving time is an outdated and pointless exercise in arbitrary adherence to tradition.  The other 10% are idiotic twats.
I have never understood how so many allegedly intelligent, free-thinking people could be so-easily convinced to do something so fundamentally silly.  For four decades now, I’ve been listening to people embarrass themselves trying to explain their adherence to this absurdity, patiently enduring their assaults on logic and reason as they slowly reveal that they themselves don’t really understand this nonsense either.
There seem to be three basic arguments these pedants of chronology employ.  to wit:
  1. Benjamin Goddamit Franklin, may God rest his sweet, patriotic soul, invented daylight saving time just like he invented electricity and he was obviously a genius and how dare you or any other non-genius fuck with Uncle Ben’s ideas.   They didn’t put your ugly ass on the hundred dollar bill now, did they?  Alright, look…you need to remember a couple of things.  Absolutely, Ben Franklin was a genius.  A great many of his inventions propelled America and mankind into the future that we enjoy today.  However, Ben Franklin lived in a world without electric light and climate control.  His nights were lit solely by candles and oil lamps, and even though his idea of shifting the clock around was pretty clearly meant as a joke, and he had likely been into his cups when he wrote this letter, it did make some bit of sense then to suggest that opening business an hour earlier during certain months of the year would reduce candle usage. American businesses haven’t relied on candlelight or oil lamps in more than a century.  Even candle shops now use electric light and computers.  The position of the sun no longer has anything to do with when we can and cannot work, play, cook, read, et cetera.   If B.F. were alive today, I suspect he would want to pimp-slap all those who have mindlessly remained allegiant to daylight saving time.  He invented his stove to more efficiently heat houses: he would certainly acknowledge that central heating and air is a vastly more safe and effective method of climate control, and would likely insist on having it in his house.
  2. It will save energy and money.  Poppycock.  Patently untrue.  In fact, the exact opposite holds true: hundreds of millions of dollars are lost every year due to employees arriving late for work, conference calls and meeting missed, and overall productivity lost.  Doctors tell us that dicking around with the clock and one’s sleep schedule increases the chances of heart attack significantly, leading to hundreds of millions of more dollars lost in medical expenses.  Sleep loss, the disruption of the Circadian rhythm, greater susceptibility to illness…all of things lead to lost productivity, lost money, and ultimately increased energy resources. And having citizens in the work force arrive home at the hottest part of the day ends up using significantly more energy than would be used otherwise.  Just ask Arizona.  They ignore DST (as does Hawaii) and they do just fine.  In fact, neither of those states have nearly the same number of rolling blackouts during the summer as California does.  We have them regularly throughout the summer, during DSL.  There has never been a rolling blackout during Standard Time.
  3. The farmers need daylight saving time to order to harvest their crops and get all their work done during the summer.  I can’t even begin to understand this one.  And I think that’s because this one falls in to the very strange category of many of the other lines of rationale I’ve heard to justify the menace of DST: people seem to actually think that DST adds an hour of time to the day.  Like we ACTUALLY get an extra hour of daylight or the days are ACTUALLY an hour longer than they would be during Standard Time.  To these poor souls I can say only that I will include you in my nightly prayers and hope that you aren’t a registered voter.  Farmers go to work when the sun comes up, and they don’t spend the day watching the clock, waiting for 5 o’clock so they can knock off.  Hell no.  They quit work when it’s so dark they can’t see what they’re doing.  They don’t give the slightest of damns if you insist it’s 5:00pm or midnight: just stay out of their way.
The practice of hourly timekeeping only began in the United States once train travel began: people needed to know when the hell they needed to be at the station to catch their train.  Fair enough.  And today’s world is governed by the clock.  Fine.  But let’s just settle on what time it is and then leave it that way.
Uncle Ben's Wild Ride
N.P.: “I Know What I Am” – Band of Skulls

March 9, 2024 – It’s About Time (Again)

Goddammit, dear reader…goddammit so much.  You know what happens tonight?

Tonight begins what is arguably the most insipid and blatantly stupid practice of our rotten society: daylight saving time.  I’ll post my usual screed on the subject tomorrow which heaps invective upon the folks who drunkenly thought up the idea and implemented it, but today, I want to bitch about the majority of Americans who for reasons unbeknownst to me just accept this horseshit unquestioningly.  The execrable Gen Z has an excuse (they always do):  they were taught neither history nor critical thinking.  Their entire historical perspective begins with the year they were born, and they seem to be dangerously committed to the idea that nothing of any significance happened before social media was invented.  They are like the pathetic slaves chained up in Plato’s cave: defiantly insisting “their” truth is actually The Truth, and becoming outraged at those who have actually been outside the cave, who are trying to open their eyes to the Really Real World and free them forever.  People get rather sensitive to anything that threatens their reality, even when (especially when) those threats are in the form of facts, data, and statistics.

Wait…I’m supposed to be bitching about stupid daylight saving time.

Fuck it, I need to get this Gen Z thing out of my system.  You see, dear reader, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and writing about this subject lately…too much, really.  So I won’t belabor anything here, I’ll just cut to the chase and give you a sneak preview of the conclusion.  To wit:

I’ve approached the problem of Gen Z from everything conceivable angle, and the only solutions to the Gen Z problem are these:

  1. Massive re-education camps where the ludicrous lies they’ve been fed about systemic racism, transgender ideology, the history of the United States, and the nature of life in general can be properly and permanently ablated.  Or
  2. Round them all up and drive them into the sea.

The few people I’ve shared these ideas with have reacted somewhat negatively, suggesting that either of these propositions could be viewed as “extreme.”  I reminded them that we live in extreme times, which, definitionally, can only be dealt with in extreme measures.  Broad strokes, I told them.  Still, they seemed dubious.  So I made my argument to an AI chatbot, and asked if there were any other solutions that maybe, somehow, against all probability, that I had not thought of.  It answered with two ideas.  The first involved time travel (which, goddammit, AI…I’m trying to be realistic, here), and the second was an absurd game show that ultimately resulted in terminating Gen Zers who lost the game (and they would all lose the game).  Which seemed silly to me.  That would take forever compared to my idea of simply driving them en masse into the sea.  The game show seems like something like ISIS would come up with.

Okay…that’s it…I’m good.  Back to the fucking “time change.”  Where were we?  Oh yeah….

It’s as if people believe that without the sacred biannual ritual of changing our clocks, crops will suddenly refuse to grow, cows will forget how to produce milk, and chickens will enter into some weird  existential crisis, questioning the very meaning of “laying eggs.” Newsflash: plants and animals do not give a flying fuck about what time it is. They operate on nature’s schedule, not Benjamin Franklin’s drunken musings or the whims of a society that can’t seem to remember whether they’re supposed to spring forward or fall back without consulting a dozen memes.

And let’s talk about the sheer lunacy of the adjustment period, shall we? For a week or so after the time change, society collectively walks around like zombies, chugging coffee like it’s the elixir of life, snapping at each other over trivialities because everyone is just too darn tired. A couple hundred of us will die from heart attacks or traffic accidents.

The fact that we still cling to this antiquated practice is a testament to human beings’ remarkable ability to complicate their lives for no good reason at all. Honestly, if daylight saving time were proposed today, it would be laughed out of Congress faster than you can say “sleep-deprived hallucination featuring a tap-dancing Benjamin Franklin.”  Which says a lot given the over-arching stupidity of our congress.
So, on my first day in office, after I’ve had my inaugural coffee and sworn to protect and serve this great nation of ours, I will sign an executive order abolishing daylight saving time. No more springing forward, no more falling back. Bullshit!  We will live in a perpetual state of temporal bliss, where the only thing we have to remember is whether we want our coffee black or with cream.

I can see it now: a nation united, free from the tyranny of the clock change. Productivity will soar, medical expenses will plummet, and no one will ever again have to endure the horror of realizing they’re an hour late to something because they forgot to change their moronic clocks. Or worse, an hour early, awkwardly waiting around, cursing Ben Franklin and his infernal time-tinkering ways.
Anyway, my fellow Americans, it’s high time (pun intended, but I could do better) we put an end to this daylight saving madness. Let us march boldly into a future where our biggest worry in November isn’t how to change the clock on the microwave, but rather, what we should do about the pumpkin spice addiction. Together, we can make this dream a reality. Vote for me, and let’s make America sane again.

Jayson for President: He’ll Get Things Done©.

N.P.: “Come Together” – Gary Clark, Jr., Junkie XL

February 13, 2024

Mgmt: Dude…it’s Tuesday.  You need to post something.
Me: I’m working on stuff.
Mgmt: Be that as it may, you need to post something.
Me: I got jokes.
Mgmt: Not jokes.
Me: Well, which is it: do I need to post something or not.
Mgmt: Something not jokes.
Me: Fuck yourself.  How do you stop a toddler from drowning in the summer.
Mgmt: We’re not doing this.
Me: You drown him in the spring.  When my best friend dies, he wants his ashes pressed into a record.
Mgmt:  ….
Me: That is his vinyl request.  What do you call getting gonorrhea from a handicapped person?
Mgmt: ….
Me: Slow clap.  Hello?
Mgmt:  I’m here.
Me:  What did Bruce Willis say when he got a vasectomy?
Mgmt:  Goddammit.
Me:  Snippy-kai-yay, motherfucker.
Mgmt:  That’s not even funny.
Me:  No argument there.  What do you call a pedophile pirate?
Mgmt:  Oh no.
Me:  Arrrrrr Kelly.
Mgmt:  [barely stifles a snicker]
Me:   Did you know you can’t laugh loudly in Hawaii?
Mgmt:  You are the worst client we’ve ever had.
Me:  It has to be “a low ha.”
Mgmt:  By far, the worst.
Me:  What’s the difference between a slice of pizza and a dead man?
Mgmt:  This qualifies as actual abuse.  You’ve put yourself in a very actionable position.
Me:  A slice of pizza can’t feed a whole family.
Mgmt:  Jesus.
Me:  What do you call a virgin from Oregon?
Mgmt:  I love Oregon.
Me:  An orphan.  Hashtag fuck Oregon.  What do you call a horny square?
Mgmt:  Okay, I’m going to go.  Post something.
Me:  An erect-angle.
Mgmt:  Promise me you’ll post something.
Me:  I promise.

N.P.: “Some People Call Me” – Jason Bieler and the Baron Von Bielski Orchestra

February 5, 2024

Fuckin’ Monday, dear reader.  Time for some bad jokes.  Here goes:
What’s the difference between a jeweler and a prison guard?  One watches cells, and one sells watches.  No?  K.
What’s the difference between an epileptic oyster fisherman and a prostitute with diarrhea?  One shucks between fits and one shits between fucks.  Okay, c’mon…that was funny.  No?  Fine.
What do you call a girl who’s tired of talking about the environment?  Regretta Thunberg.  Still no?  Fuck you.
What do tofu and dildoes have in common?  They’re both meat substitutes.
What do you call two AI systems that are in love with each other?  Members of the (Chat)LGBT community.
What do you call a sleep-walking nun?  A roaming Catholic.  Okay, I get it if you didn’t get that one.
How does a computer get drunk?  It takes screenshots.
That one kinda sucked.  Admittedly.
Who does Jesus ask if he wants to get a loan?  The profits.
Okay…that one was pure suck.
Just found out my grandpa is addicted to Viagra.  No one’s taking it harder than me.
I tried to start a dating service for chickens.  But I was struggling to make hens meet.
What’s green and smell’s like pork?  Kermit’s fingers.
How does The Rock pee?  He Dwayne’s his Johnson.
What do you get when you rub two oranges together?  Pulp Friction.
I made a website for orphans.  It doesn’t have a homepage.
Why is Dwayne Johnson the only guy that can turn lesbians (not true, btw)?  Because Rock beats scissors.
Why are gay dudes so rude?  Because they’re fucking assholes.
I told the cop, “You can’t write me a ticket…I have a marathon to run tomorrow.”  The cop said, “Sir, that’s not how you play the race card.”
What does a perverted frog say?  “Rub-It.”
How do you stop a toddler from drowning in the summer?  You drown it in the spring.

N.P.: “Bruce Lee – Rick’s 1st Dobro Mix” – Underworld

January 19, 2024

Today, on this cold, likely dreary day (depending on where you’re reading this), we commemorate the birth of  Edgar Allan Poe! Yes, the master of mystery and the macabre, the sultan of suspense, the ayatollah of rock-and-rolla, the king of…well, you get the idea.

Born on this day, January 19,  1809, Poe has left an indelible mark on the world of literature. From “The Tell-Tale Heart” to “The Raven”, his stories and poems have given us the terrors, made us think and become slightly paranoid, and have  inspired more than a few beautiful nightmares.

Now, you might be wondering, how does one properly celebrate the birthday of such a literary legend?  You could start by reading one of his works by candlelight, preferably during a thunderstorm for maximum effect. If reciting “Quoth the Raven ‘Nevermore'” to your unimpressed black cat isn’t quite your style, you could always do what the author himself would have done, and get toweringly drunk.  Drink whiskey in a candle-lit room, horribly alone, writing.  Fuck yes.

I do miss the Poe Toaster.  That was the sort of thing that used to make being a writer cool…the idea that strange people would visit your grave in tribute, 100 years after you died.  Alas.  Pour some out for the Toaster.

Anyway, happy 215th birthday, Edgar Allan Poe!

N.P.: “The Conqueror Worm” – Lou Reed

January 15, 2024

Welp, it’s Monday, and to be totally honest with you, dear reader, I haven’t been less excited about a Monday in a very long time.  The days are have begun their annual increase, the sky is the color of a tainted meringue, and somehow this day even smells funky.  Not sure what’s up, but we’re simply going to crack on, to hell with this new year’s stank.  First, perhaps some fine haiku:

No resolutions.
Just great writing and revenge.
Pens, swords, and shotguns.

Fuck yes…that felt great.  I need to do that more often.  It reminded me that I do write a mean haiku (usually while imbibing sake bombs at Beni Hana), and that I’ve amassed an admirable collection over the years.  I’ve been thinking about adding a haiku section to the site.  Different from “Doggerel,” though still just as terrible, even more so, since it’s just hacking away at what should be a beautiful, refined Japanese artform.


Anyway, how about some bad jokes?  I got you.  My favorite childhood memory was building sandcastles with my grandpa.  Until my mother took his ashes away.
What do you call a horny cow?  Beef jerky.  (I told you they’d be bad.)  What are the lion and the witch doing in my wardrobe?  It’s Narnia business.

I hate my job.  All I do is crush cans.  It’s soda-pressing.

Think that was bad?  I can do worse.

I saw a hot non-binary person the other day…I said, “Let me she/them titties!”

Get it?  Fine, I’ll stop.

Okay, one more.  I recently hired two Vietnamese sisters to help me with my production.  It was a Nguyen-Nguyen situation.

N.P.: “Ghost” – Slash, Ian Astbury

January 1, 2024

Happy New Years, vigorous reader.  Know that I am drinking whiskey toasts to you and yours.  Unless you’re one of the Three On The List, in which case I am, as always, wishing you ill and encourage you, for the sake of all concerned, to run far and fast if you haven’t already.  But fuck them…this is about you, dear reader…I do hope you have a happy new year.  My advice for 2024: Pay off any and all debts, procure more long guns and ammo, have cash on hand, invest in body armor, do not travel, and be ready to move fast.

But I’m sure everything’s going to be fine.

N.P.: “Nemesis” – Shriekback