Down in the Park.

The cult is coming along pretty well.  We’re going to need a much bigger space, though.
Some of us went down to the park to spread the Word of Me and recruit new members of the family.  It was there, sitting on a bench, that I impossibly ran into Icon.  Icon was a pimp I encountered on the steps of a funeral home in Seattle several years ago.  “If it has tits or tires, you’re gonna have problems with it,” he had sagely cautioned me when we first met.  And now, how ever many years later, here he sits, on a park bench, his dreds significantly longer, and almost all of the business end of his pants completely blown out.
“Dude, things was fine until that Kim Kardashian bitch put out that pic of her ass.  It was everywhere…you couldn’t get away from it.  I just kept seein’ it urawhere…dat ass.  Finally, my dick just exploded.”
I know exactly how it is, Icon.
“Now I just sittin’ hur on this bench, hopin’ the damn thang grow back.”
“Listen, Icon…we go way back.  Let me just cut to the chase, here: I have started a cult.  I just appointed one of our members to be my personal physician.  He’s a surgeon.  Specializes in gun shot wounds.  I’m sure he would take a look at your exploded junk and come up with some sort of treatment plan to get you ‘back in the game’ as soon as possible.”
“Oh my god…what do I have to do?”
“Join the cult.”
“What kind of cult is it?”
“Doesn’t matter.  You in?”
“Yo doctor look at my dick?”
“I’ll text him right now.  We’ll set something up for tomorrow.”
“Aight.  I’m in.”
“Bless you, my son.  Now let’s get down to the mall and get you some pants.  One of our members works at Hot Topic part time.  She can hook us up.”
“Thank you so much, man.”
“You are welcome, Icon.  No more looking at any Kardashian ass, though, okay?”
“Deal.”
Icon

A Noble Effort.

Six days.  Six fucking days is how far I got into the year before violating every last one of my resolutions.
Here’s the list as it existed on New Year’s Eve:
1) I resolve to no longer engage in what my therapist calls “the edgy stuff” (fisting, sodomy, etc) before marriage. Or at least not on the first date.  Or at least not with the therapist.  Whatevs.  
2) This one also a direct request from the therapist: I resolve to stop eating animals solely with the intention of inheriting their strength and dreams and “life force.”  Because apparently it’s working and it’s really just a “point of diminishing returns” situation right now and probably just really screwing up my heart health so okay: from now on, it’s nothing but kale and soy. Which is really convenient: since I’ve eaten any animal silly enough to come near, the lawn has gotten out of pocket.  In 2015, I can just go out and graze on the lawn anything I get “snacky.”
3) And sobriety…yes! Oh hell yes.  2015 is going to be sobertastic. Sobriety and clarity and good, clean living. Yay!  I’m going to wake up early…15 minutes before sunrise, every morning.  And I’m going to exercise.  Yes.  Work out everyday day, dammit.  I am high on life, and I want this – All Of This –  to go on forever.  And if I can enjoy All Of This for an extra 10 years by eating roots and twigs and abstaining from fun and happiness then by God that is what I will do.  
4) I resolve to sincerely attempt to decrease the number of times I kick that ugly goddamn neighbor kid down the back stairway just because I am grumpy or out of whiskey.  I will go one Christian step further and resolve to not refer to his mother as “an anus-eyed skull face.” 
5)  I resolve to answer emails in the same year as received.  The same month would be even better.  Baby steps.
Well, so much for all that.  I boned every one of them.  Okay,  not #5, but that’s just a matter of time.  Alas.  Forsooth.  Phooey.  Balls.
boring

 

Fog.

I love the muffled sounds of these foggy midnight streets.  And all dawn’s promises whispered by the foghorn.

I want to tell you some of my secrets over the sound of angry waves breaking.  And then, I want to sit in silence and listen.

I haven’t slept in years.  And I’m tired of waiting.  Always looking.  Forever waiting.

Fog

Cult.

From last night’s reading:

Following a profound new experience, providing a new illumination of the world, the founder, a highly charismatic person, begins enlisting disciples.  These followers become an informally but closely knit association, bound together by the new experience , whose nature the founder has revealed and interpreted.  The association might be called a circle, indicating that it is oriented toward a central figure with whom each of the followers is in intimate contact.  The followers may be regarded as the founder’s companions, bound to him by personal devotion, friendship, and loyalty.  A growing sense of solidarity both binds the members together and differentiates them from any other form of social organization.  Membership in the circle requires a complete break with the ordinary pursuits of life and a radical change in social relationships.  Ties of family and kinship and loyalties of various kinds were at least temporarily relaxed or severed.  The hardships, suffering, and persecution that loomed for those who cast their lot with the group were counterbalanced by their high hopes and firm expectations.

Of the founder himself, he has visions, dreams, trances, frequent ecstasies, unusual sensitiveness and an intense emotional life, and is ready to interpret manifestations of the divine.  There is something elemental about him: an uncompromising attitude and an archaic manner and language.  He appears as a renewer of lost contracts with the hidden powers of life.  He does not usually come from the aristocracy, the learned, or the refined; frequently he emerges from simpler folk and remains true to his origin even in a changed environment.  He speaks cryptically, with words, signs, gestures, many metaphors. and symbolic acts of a diverse nature, illuminating and interpreting the past and anticipating the future in terms of the circle.

~ Joachim Wach

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TBT: Understanding Phone Sex.

Phone sex is a multimillion dollar a year industry — I just don’t get it. Phone sex just doesn’t do much for me.

I’ve tried — God knows I’ve tried. Inevitably I start laughing. The absurd mechanics of trying to remove my pants and deal with God-knows-what while holding a phone is enough to kill the mood for me right off. But hey, that’s just me, and I’m obviously in the minority.

Since I couldn’t figure out the allure of phone fucking on my own, I thought perhaps I should enlist the help of a friend of mine, Divina, who has worked in the phone sex industry for many years. I figured I could spend some time with her, interview her a bit, listen to some calls, study her habits, and then document all of my findings in an essay of extreme sociological importance.

I hadn’t seen her in quite a while, so I called her up, told her what I was doing, that I’d like to hang out with her while she worked the phones for a day so that I might lift the veil from the face of this secret world, exposing the truth of whatever lay beneath, and tell the story to the world.

“Yeah, whatever … you got any booze?” was her reply.

I affirmed the presence of liquor in my cupboards, and she said she was on her way.

Here’s the way a basic phone sex system works: Customers thumb through ads in publications that range from glossy porno mags to local neighborhood papers. They come across a small advertisement, usually in the back of the publication featuring a very alluring male or female, with a phone number to call for “some real hot talk.” In the past, the number would typically begin with a 900 prefix. This meant that the caller’s next phone bill would contain a pirate-like gouge, probably something around $3 a minute, just for dialing the digits.

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TBT: !DMViva!

All I ever needed to know about the system, I learned in Spanish-language traffic school.

The letter arrived on my desk Saturday afternoon, but I didn’t get around to opening it until after midnight. It was from the Santa Clara County Municipal Court District. Although the actual text has been lost, the general tone of it went something like this:

Dear Shitbag:

The date for completion of traffic school has passed. In truth, we don’t give a fuck about the points on your record or the increase in your insurance. To us, you’re just another zit on the ass of decent society. But in a Christ-like gesture of mercy, we’re giving you one last chance. If evidence of completion of the course is not firmly in our claws by noon Monday, your fees will be forfeited, the case will be closed, the DMV will be notified of the conviction, and the next time you come to Santa Clara County, we will throw your insubordinate little ass in the cooler until you rot. Do you understand? Rot!

Fuck you,

The System

Hmmm. Traffic school on Sunday. I immediately began to work the phones and the Web for a traffic school offering driver’s improvement courses on the Lord’s Day. Once on the Net, I quickly found such a course — in Juneau, Alaska.

Shit.

Perhaps, I thought, I should stick to the local yellow pages. And after more than 23 unsuccessful calls, I finally found a course being offered down in the Mission District here in San Francisco. After I spoke with the woman on the phone, two things stuck out about the course. First, it was being held in the back room of a bar called El Gordo Loco. Second, it was going to be taught in Spanish.

Now I’m as Anglo as they come. But what the hell? I had a couple of semesters of high school Espanol under my belt, and besides, I didn’t really need to understand what was being taught. All that was required by the Santa Clara authorities was that my reckless ass sit in a state-approved seat for at least eight hours, and that I get at least 60 percent correct on a multiple-guess test. No problema. I signed up.

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Krampusnacht. Krampus Uber Alles.

Even when I still believed that Santa Claus was an actual dude with an actual mailing address inside the Arctic Circle, with an actual toy shop at the same address staffed mostly by elves, blah blah blah, I felt, deep down in that dark and vacant space where my soul should have been, that Things Weren’t Right.
Even as toddlers, children understand that there are scary monsters [see The Uses of Enchantment by Bruno Bettelheim and that study where children were given rewritten versions of fairy tales with the scary monsters taken out, and the kids got all pissed off and attacked their teachers’ kneecaps].  Rugrats know that evil lurks, and they resent the hell out of patronizing adults who tell them otherwise.  I certainly did.  Which is why the unipolar morality of the Santa story never really sat well with me: goodness is ostensibly rewarded, but evil goes completely unpunished.  All year long, the promise of every materialistic dream a child may have coming true on Christmas morning is dangled in front of the child’s beady eyes on the condition of “good” behavior during the rest of the year.
I always assumed there was some kind of sliding scale of goodness vs. toys spectrum: if your behavior was superlative and Christ-like all year long, then you get absolutely everything on your list, and perhaps even a few bonus toys.  If you were a minimally decent person for, say, 8 months out of the year, but a bit of a prick the rest of the time, then you might only get a third of the things on your list.  But what of little Adolf and Osama?  What about the little kid who is an absolute bastard every goddamn day of the year?  What of him?  According to the Santa story, nothing.  Not a damn thing. Hell, Santa will even still come by your house: he’ll just leave a piece of coal.  So what?  Who cares? This means that some little fucker can run around terrorizing the neighborhood, lowering property values and ruining everybody’s lives all year long, and the only thing he has to worry about is maybe not getting as many toys as the Goody Two-Shoes next door?  Alll little Adolf has to do is stroll over to Goody’s on the 26th, when the little angel is playing with all of his benevolently hard-earned toys, whack him over the head with a board, take whatever toys he wants, and swagger back home.

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TBT: Dancer in the Dark

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A couple of years ago I wandered into a bondage-themed nightclub looking for some good music and walked out with a job as a dancer. My descent into the weird world of fetish would provide many solid, pith-helmeted anthropological conclusions regarding the human condition.

To wit:

  • Everybody looks better in the dark.
  • Being onstage makes you really attractive, even if you are really not.
  • Females are very, very different from males.
  • There are some seriously disturbed people walking around free in our society.

Night #1

IT WAS A DARK and stormy night. Literally. I had just moved to the Bay Area and was dead broke. I knew some people who worked the door at the Trocadero Transfer in San Francisco who told me the music they played on Wednesday nights was right up my proverbial alley and never mind that it was a bondage club–there were really cute girls with complex hair and tight, plastic clothing there. And I could get in for free. Free is good. And so off I went into a night that would change my life forever.

My first impression of the club: lots of smoke, lasers and torches. A chain-link fence surrounds the dance floor on three sides. A glance to the right shows a girl removing her top and putting her arm around a statue of a crying angel. She poses this way while a guy with alarmingly greasy hair snaps her picture. She then nonchalantly replaces her top and the two head for the dance floor.

A very petite girl sidles up to the bar next to me, alone, forcing herself to appear like she is having the time of her life, although she obviously is not. I feel sorry for her, sort of, so I try to strike up a conversation, asking her name. This quickly gets far more complicated than it really ought to be. She doesn’t speak a hell of a lot of English. After much verbal wrangling and screaming at each other over what seems to be an ever-crescendoing level of noise, it is established to some degree of clarity that her name is Yvi and she is an exchange student from Hamburg, Germany. I try to bring the dialogue to a quick close, but she has fingered me as a nice guy and wants to talk more. Our intercourse is, needless to say, somewhat problematic.

“So how long have you been in America?” I yell.

“Vhat?”

“How long have you been in America?”

God only knows what she says in reply, but I nod at her encouragingly like I hear and comprehend. She starts talking about something and seems to like whatever it is she is talking about because she keeps nodding and smiling excitedly. The truth is I can’t hear a goddamn word she is saying. But I nod every few seconds and laugh when she does. She seems to get a lot of enjoyment out of the conversation.

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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