Score

Years ago, I was tending a little comic shop, cheerful as can be ,when in walks an underbathed hippie kid. Patchouli and armpits.
He walks up to the counter.
"Hey man, what's up?"
Do I know this guy? I wonder if he's going to try to sell me drugs? I hope so-wonder if he'll take comics in trade?
"Uh, hey."

"Can I have my job back?"

Huh? There's only three jobs in the whole store-the absentee owner, the 'manager' (me) ,and the kid who works weekends. Who is this guy?

"Your job?"

"Yeah, I had it before you did."

I remember asking the owner what happened to the first manager.
" Simon?I had to fire him. He was robbing me blind. I let him stay in my apartment and my TV and VCR got stolen. I had to change the locks on the store because of him."
This stinky kid is that guy?

"Simon?"

"Yeah, that's me."

"Mario says he fired you for stealing. "

Hippie dishes out what would have been a pretty good death-gaze if it had come from unglazed eyes. Instead, he just looks stoned and confused.

"Nah, man. That wasn't me. He's lying. Besides, I was here first."

"Here first? This isn't the line for Star Wars!
You got fired, I got hired. You know they're aren't any jobs here."

"Can I borrow five bucks from the store?"

"Only if you promise to buy soap."

"Huh? Oh. Well, fuck you."

Exit hippie kid.


I hadn't thought about this for years, in fact I probably never would have thought of it at all, if not for seeing 'Simon's' name on the management list at the station.
The same managers who just had a closed-door meeting.
The same managers who decided that if I wanted a DJ spot, it would have to be 3 am-6am, Thursdays.
The same managers who decided that they had too many techs in-house, so I would be placed on 'on-call'. Which means 'don't call'.

Karma? Bullshit. I was in the right.
Maybe I should have given him that five bucks, you say.
No way. If you give a bum money from a store register he'll camp on your porch. I know this. It happened. I had just started at the shop and didn't know any better-
I gave this older guy a couple bucks to pick-up the trash and sweep the sidewalk. Once. Twice.
Third time, he brought a buddy. Fourth time, he brought the whole Under-the Bridge crowd.
A gaggle of winos does not encourage shoppers to visit.
They wouldn't leave.
(My 'pal' left, but his buddies didn't)
"It's public property."
I called campus police.
"There's a bunch of winos loitering on my sidewalk."
"Sorry. Your store is off-campus. It's public property anyway."
So I called City police.
"Sorry. Your store is on-campus. It's public property anyway."

I went next door and bought a six-pack of cheap beer. I gave one to each derelict on my sidewalk. Suddenly, they all liked me.

I went inside and called campus police.
"There's a bunch of students drinking beer in front of my store."

The campus cops were there in two minutes, chasing away the homeless guys.

Yeah, that was kinda rotten, but it was worth it. Can we call it even now?

In Defense of Bloggers

Note: I first posted this 8/20/2003, but somehow it seemed relevant, if not prescient.


It doesn't exactly shock me that many in the mainstream media consider bloggers to be "exhibitionists" , uninformed, "self-absorbed" etcetera, but it's hard to take their criticism seriously after watching CNN's breathless coverage of Paris Hilton's missing dog or Fox News' lurid and downright embarrassing speculation about a Kerry/Edwards homosexual relationship.These people call bloggers ignorant blowhards and then proceed to get 'talking points' from the Drudge Report and Wonkette.
Hmm...maybe they do have a point.

I will respond to some of these charges.

Exhibitionists: I spent over a decade playing music for audiences- any audiences I could scrounge up, anywhere, anytime. Of course I'm an exhibitionist! So fucking what? (At least I'm not posting nude photos on the web or flashing old ladies at the nursing home). I'm also painfully shy in real life (unless I'm drunk) , so music and blogging let me express myself with considerably less restraint than water-cooler chats and awkward dinners with near-strangers (read:relatives) allow.
I can only speak to my own motives, but I wager I'm not alone in this.

Uninformed: After a week of watching cable news I learned a lot. I learned that if an attractive ,middle-class white woman gets murdered by her husband, or raped by a celebrity, it's 'Breaking News' over-and-over again , but if the same thing happens to a poor black woman it's fine print in the crime log on page 13 of section B in the local newspaper. I learned that a drunken bear warranted ninety seconds of precious airtime, which is fifty-five seconds more than Afghanistan, Haiti, Sudan and Venezuela combined received.
Flood the airwaves with trivial bullshit and then call your viewers ignorant? Gotta admit, it's crafty strategy .

Self-Absorbed: I spend 40+ hours a week alone in a damncube where I'm not even allowed to read a book, despite having no work to do. Amazingly, it tends to make me a little introspective. But so what? I enjoy reading other people's "self-absorbed" postings. Maybe someone got a giggle out of watching rich kids frolic in her boyfriend's vomit-I can sit here,in utter isolation, and have a giggle too. Perhaps another person just had a normal day, but is feeling happy. It reminds me that such a thing is possible for me as well. Even when someone shares a truly sad tragedy, it makes me think about things that I normally try to avoid, things that I should think about. Sometimes I even get someone to laugh, which is one of the main reasons I blog. It's not such a selfish endeavor when you look at blogging this way.
Tip o' the glass to bloggers!

R.I.P

Just then we heard car doors slamming outside the trailer, a loud knocking on the front doorand a gruff voice shouting,"Open up! Police!"
Leach grabbed a snub-nosed .44 Magnum out of a shoulder holster inside his bathrobe and fired two shots through the front door. "You bitch ", he screamed. "I should have killed you years ago."
He fired two more shots,laughing calmly. Then he turned to face me and put the barrel of the gun in his mouth. He hesitated for a moment,staring directly into my eyes. Then he pulled the trigger and blew off the back of his head.

-Hunter S. Thompson,
Death of a Poet

Gorillas, Nipples and the Dreams of Birds

How do you take all the fun out Internet stories about gorillas and nipples? Add a backdrop of frivolous lawsuits/employer abuse. Hard to tell who's on the side of justice from the scant info in this brief article, but I feel bad for Koko, and as a contributor to the Foundation, I'm concerned about where my money's going.
No mention of the suit here.


Artist's impression of what really goes on at the Gorilla Foundation
------------------------------------------
I think it was Batman who said, "to catch a criminal, you must think like a criminal", if so, than Negroponte should be great at catching terrorists. But he won't be. At some point between the time Hell's Bowels shat forth this career blackguard, and the glory days of Iran/Contra, he decided the best way to fight terrorism was with more terrorism- with a bit of torture,drug-trafficking and nun-killing thrown in for variety. Personally, I think it's the wrong approach, but the Bush administration disagrees with me. As usual, my calls to the White House went unreturned.
"But I've got a Blog!", I exclaimed, immediately before the line went dead.

----------------------------------------------
This is pretty cool, but you don't wan't one within ten light-years of you. Really.

-----------------------------------------------

This makes perfect sense. So much so that you'd be tempted to wonder why this study was done in the first place. And how'd they prevent the subjects from sleeping? Threaten them with cats?

All In Fun

I'm watching one girl lick Jagermeister off of the writhing torso of another girl.
True, it's a turn-on, but it's also cheap, empty and embarrassing.
All in fun.
Wrong.
It wasn't fun for one girl. She's crying, and it's clear she's going to be scarred for life.
All in fun.
I'm tempted to care, but a pal's matchbox contains white powdered poisons of choice distraction.
Fun.
All in fun.
Cellphone arrives with a tear in the eye of a gun.
All in fun.
Survivors exchange shots of the blood leaking from the bodies on the bar.
All in fun.
All in fun.

Old Man Ranting

I went to the station yesterday and saw that it was good. Finally got to meet one of the 'bosses' (a right decent chap) , got my tech schedule (weds & thurs) and learned some New Things. I loves to learn me some New Things, tell ya what, so enraptured am I that perhaps eye will share:

1) We broadcast in mono. FM mono ,by choice. Why? Because FM transmitters split the signal into two channels, decreasing the net output, hence, the receiving range. Run them channels as one and you get a wider broadcast output/receiving range.

2) The 'Hum' is gone. The 60 cycle hum that lives in Mackie boards was cured by tossing out the Mackie. Kudos to Rasul. He didn't say it, but Mackie boards really and truly suck when used for broadcast and production-they're great for home use though. Oh geez, I tried a new one.Well, they just suck. Sorry. They used to be good. Never buy a mixing board that has DSP (FX) built into it.
You will regret it.

"How exciting", you exclaim with the zeal of a Valium-charged cheerleader. Too bad you passed out before I got around to making fun of people.

Under normal circumstances I'd have considered the kid with the broken socks just another hallucination but everyone saw him. Hell, they knew him. By name.
I'm gonna call him Timberland Spraypaint. He seemed to think that those are the two most important things in life. Life as expressed by a twenty-something that can't be trusted to dress himself before leaving the house, covered in corporate logos and the aerosol fumes of quiescent rebellion.

"One of my feet is cold. I've only got one sock."

"How do you only have ONE sock?"

"Well, one of 'em is broken ." He hoists a puddle of baggy denim and exposes his feet. Guess what? He's wearing Timberlands, and one of his socks is of the ballerina slipper variety.

"Dude, yer wearing a girl sock with yer Tims."

"Oh, yeah. That sucks."

So Tim whips out a cellphone and calls his 'girlfriend' to come pick him up. It's kinda cold outside (65 Fahrenheit) , so can she call him when she arrives, and he'll come downstairs to meet her?
This kid is wearing a small fortune in Timberland 'gear' and can't handle the mild weather long enough for some woman to rescue him?

I'm thinking it's probably his social worker, 'business associate' or NA sponsor on the other end of that call.

Dear Valentine...

Dear Valentine...twenty-two years ago... the card that followed ... and how we got... found with ...dossiers...allergic to poison ivy, but immune to outdoor fires...dotted line, unsigned...we kept asking...why so many questions...are we in trouble?
(DELETED CERTAIN COMMENTS FOR REASONS OF NATIONAL SECURITY-.ed)
Today was a good day.
That's as common and mundane as a sentence can be, but it's worth sharing.
Wherever you are.

The Visitor

It had been quiet since the day of the Feast, thought the visitor, before correcting himself.
True, the last several days had brought a silence that some would find disturbing, but for the visitor, himself a stoic and humourless fellow rarely given to outbursts of any nature, it was still too loud. With typically unsmiling resolve, he set upon himself the task of quieting the din generated by the settling dust.

"Quiet", he croaked at nothing.

The only response was his own surprise. How vulgar and intrusive this utterance seemed!
Had the visitor possessed the characteristic laughter of those persons whose company he once shunned, he would have smiled at being taken aback by such a small thing as a word.
Had he even the slightest insight within his self, he would know that it was they who shunned him, and not the reverse, despite his habit of lamenting the unworthiness of absent companions.

Instead, he decided that never again would a word pass forth from his lips.

The wind, gentle and uncaring, declined to sigh.

The Internet Is Full Of Perverts

As you can see, no one reads my blog. Until today. My Old Pal Jerky linked to me again. His writing is excellent, but he has grotesque porn on his site and I'm an uptight old prude. So I'm not going to put a link to it here. I'll put it over---------------> here instead.
Ha Ha!
No porno for you perverts on my blog!
Yet.

VISITS


Total
2,278
Average Per Day
16
Average Visit Length
2:26
Last Hour
11
Today
106 ( at 3 p.m)
This Week
111

From the domains I've seen, I think most of you sick fucks are at work. Are y'all hiring?

In Sanity's Defense

I can't sleep. It's five a.m. and I'm making a pot of coffee. It'll be daylight soon, and I've got a Herculean task ahead. I am compelled to write a letter of response to an Old Flame, defending my sanity and overall emotional state. It's gonna be an uphill write. Yeah, it's not even dawn yet, and I'm getting wired and trying to convince someone I haven't seen in two years that I'm not, as she put it, "going to do anything stupid...maybe you should find someone to talk to..." What disappointing cliches for her to use. Just say fucking 'commit suicide' or 'see a shrink', goddamnit.
And no, that's not in my plans.
I had sent Old Flame a link to my blog and she sent back a troubling letter, referring to my previous post. She thinks I'm gonna kill myself, and to make it worse, she thinks it's because of her. How freakin' vain.
Write, delete, repeat. This is going nowhere. I can't write this letter. This is phone-call stuff. Writing an RE: I am worried for you email is worse than useless, it's a recipe for disastrous misunderstanding.

Wait a sec. She's worried enough to write me an email? I'm touched.
I'm angry. I thought she knew me better than that. The darker and more hopeless the tone of my work, be it music, paper words or blog, the less likely I am to be wallowing in real-world despair.
If I was going to kill myself I wouldn't be writing about it. I wouldn't be trying to get a band together again. I wouldn't be putting in time at the station. I wouldn't have quit drinking.
I'd be fucking dead already.
I'd leave behind an ugly corpse and a really amusing suicide note.


( I'm gonna make that call before I post this, just so you know I'm ok)

Great Gift Ideas

Christ, is it almost St. Valentine's day already? What a useless holiday. If you're in a happy relationship, you should be doing nice stuff for each other every fuckin' day without being forced to prove your affection by dropping Hallmark cards, chocolates and flowers on your lover's doorstep like a cat dragging home a dead mole to please the human.
Do any of you even know what Valentine's Day is about? Don't believe all that Catholic Claptrap about Romans and imprisoned martyrs and whatnot. As usual, count on the crackerjack Camelsback research staff for the real stories behind our false holidays.
Way back in ancient times, the evil American Sun Kings and Queens of Temperance declared that the rabble should sober up. This didn't sit well with the rabble, who quickly defected to more 'spirited' personality cults, led by charismatics like St. Bugs (Moran) and the legendary St. Alphonse (Capone). In the course of establishing the only religion honest enough to call itself Organized Crime, the two beatific bootleggers became fierce, bitter and violent rivals for the lucrative tithing of the parched and desperately sober masses.

Like any viable religion, Organized Crime soon sparked more than it's share of competition, internal conflict, warfare and corruption; and so, on Feb. 14, 1929, missionaries from the Capone Church, aided by Centurions on loan from the Chicago Police Legion , decided that the Bugs Boys needed some competition-stifling Reformation. They took a half-dozen or so Moran followers into a garage on Clark Street and nailed them to the wall with hundreds of .45 caliber Theses. We celebrate the gruesome deaths of these pioneering Mafia martyrs with roses and candlelight dinners. This makes poetic sense if your love life resembles mine; for your sake I hope that it doesn't.
If it does, I'm truly sorry. Maybe it'd help if I offered some priceless gift alternatives. By priceless, I mean worthless. Buy them for yourself, it's the only attention you'll get on the 14th. And no refunds.

THE CAMELSBACK SAINT VALENTINE'S DAY MASSACRE CATALOG FOR THE UNLOVED AND DEPRESSED:

EMOTIONAL TRAIN WRECK

No lights. No tunnel. Just derailment, gravity and inertia. You probably thought that you'd never need to wear a parachute on a train. You thought wrong.

A real bargain for only 76 cents!

>

EXPRESSIONS OF UNREQUITED LOVE

This could be that letter you wish that you'd torn up when you had the chance. Maybe it's that necklace you knew that she'd love-the one you purchased the day before she told you she wasn't looking for a relationship. Perhaps it's three weeks of unreturned phone calls. It might be a horribly embarrassing love poem or song that fell into the wrong hands.

Two lousy bucks.This item knows no limits , so don't be such a cheap-ass.

A LIFETIME TOGETHER

Well, you got what you wanted. Too bad it turned out to suck, but hey, there were some good times, weren't there? Weren't there? Live the same miserable day over and over for the rest of your pointless life while you brood about the way it could have been. Even your children will pity you.

If you have to ask, you can't afford it.

LONELY ALCOHOLIC MELANCHOLIA

He doesn't deserve you. Take another shot.

Buy yourself something nice. No one else will.

ENDLESS SEARCH FOR LOVE

Remember how your friends used to tell you that there was someone for everyone , and someday, somebody special will see you for the irresistibly sweet, kind and golden soul that you are?These days, they don't call you very often since they all got married and had kids. If they did , you'd call them liars.

Maybe throwing your money away will make you feel better.

BUY NOW!! TIME'S RUNNING OUT!!

To Protect And Invest

Who says good jobs are scarce? Look what I got in my email:



The thought that the next five years will bring a 29% increase in demand for criminal justice 'professionals' is not comforting or surprising. I wonder if this group has seen the following graphs? Twenty-nine percent sounds a little low, given the rapid increases in other key elements of this rapidly expanding Growth Industry:



Notice how much faster the number of people on probation appears to be growing than the incarcerated population? There's a number of reasons for this, one being that a lot of people get busted for mostly harmless crap that's not remotely worthy of imprisonment, like civil disobedience, minor drug possession and consensual sodomy. That's right. Sodomy.
Our enlightened Virginia General Assembly has once again left an archaic anti-sodomy law on the State's books-certain naughty things are illegal here, even if you are doing them with your spouse. An odd thing to keep illegal, considering what happens in prisons and behind those 'closed-door'
General Assembly sessions.
Another reason would be the already overcrowded prison system. As seen below, violent crime is way up, and those bastards do belong in jail. Where ya gonna put 'em? There's a lot of them, more every day, it seems.
The truth, of course, is that an increase from 250,000 prisoners in 1980 to almost 1,500,000 in 2004 is statistically more dramatic than a jump from one million to four million probationers in the same time span.
Of course, once the correctional industry is wholly privatized and turned into a for-profit enterprise, there will be more prisons than Motel 6's and plenty of cells for everyone. Everyone who isn't drafted or a cop, that is. Probation will be discouraged, as it's marginally profitable at best. Parole will remain flat-lined, or just abolished altogether. Can't send invoices for'em if ya ain't got 'em locked up.
(I'm sure they will,anyway).



Notice the disparity in Drug and Property rates until the late 1980's/early '90's- the heyday of the "War on Drugs". If you were around back then, you'll recall that marijuana became difficult to find and cocaine was everywhere. It's a lot easier to get busted for doing coke with strangers than it is for smoking a joint after work, hence the spike in drug convictions. (The idiocy of mandatory drug sentencing didn't help much either). Since then, the two offenses have dovetailed quite neatly, leading me to suspect that the person who stole my car stereo probably sold it for drugs. Maybe I should sign up for one of them there Crim Justice jobs. I like to read and I like to sleep. I'd be a great private security guard. They coined the term 'Napster' centuries before the first Univac set Armageddon's wheels in motion.

The pay must be pretty good. Look how much money the government spends protecting us from each other:



Holy shit! Corrections spending is up 529% in twenty years! That's like 25% a year. The last time a business sector sustained a growth rate like that was the porn industry after VCR's fell below $200 retail.
When Corrections Incorporated goes public , you'd better get in on that action right away.

What's Wrong With Kids These Days?

Went to the station yesterday to meet with Rasul, who's kinda the de facto tech guy-I was gonna show him my ideas for re-wiring everything, but he already had a plan, which was exactly what I'd thought up. That's pretty cool, I have a feeling we'll work well together.
Tomorrow I'm sitting in on a couple production sessions- looking forward to getting involved in something that doesn't suck. They already put me on the tech staff list, so I guess I'm part of the project now.
I'm pretty happy about that.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
But don't worry. I've still got plenty of outrage and a keen eye for obvious portents of doom.

Like, whoever says crap such as, "our children are our future", should read this and this and start planning for the inevitable nightmarish unquestioning, repressive ,nationalistic,consumer-based and ignorance-fueled society that our brainwashed kids and grandkids will force upon us while they spend what used to be our Social Security dollars on faith-based 'Freedom Camps' for liberals, gays, intellectuals and cotton-wearing vegetarians.
I guess we'll spend our Golden Years doing 'Liberty Labor', tending the slurry pits at Factory Farm MediCare MediCamps. Our only joy will be knowing that our oppressors actually eat and enjoy the collagen-encased, festering and hormonally poisoned animal by-products we will be forced to produce.
This elation , sadly, will be tempered by the reeking offal on our own meal trays and the useless placebos in our medicine cups.

Then there's the coming military draft. I remember being a kid during Vietnam. Of course I hate the idea of a fucking draft. Or at least I used to, but after reading about just how vacant, incurious and ignorant our youth is, I've reconsidered. If you cannot put away the iPods, text messages and Gameboys long enough to educate yourself about your basic civil rights, then perhaps you don't deserve those rights.
In fact, if you think the First Amendment is 'no big deal', I'd prefer it if you were off spreading full-metal-jacketed freedom in Iran, Syria, Iraq or even Uzebekistan. The farther away from America you get, the safer the Constitution will be.
It would be great if you just moved to Iraq. You'd like it-there's no First Amendment , but there's a hell of a lot of Second Amendment.
Soon, there will even be Killer Robots.
Hell, a Killer Robot may have even won the Iraqi "election." After all, the parties were represented by logos and numbers instead of names.

So you kids go ahead and forget about a bunch of stupid boring ol' history.
Forget and repeat.


Repeat until dead.

Bring out the dead.


Understand?