INT. JOE AND SANDRA’S LIVING ROOM – NIGHT

JOE sits at the computer. SANDRA sits on the couch watching
TV.

                    JOE
          I have a deal for you.

                    SANDRA
          Okay.

                    JOE
          You stay out of my email and I’ll
          stay out of yours.

                    SANDRA
          Okay… why?

                    JOE
          Because I’ve done some christmas
          shopping online and I don’t want
          you snooping for reciepts.

                    SANDRA
          Okay. Deal.

                    JOE
          In fact, living inside my email is
          a ghost. A really mean ghost, who
          hates you. A lot.

                    SANDRA
          What?!

                    JOE
          Yep. And if you open my email he
          will jump out and get you.

                    SANDRA
          No way!!

                    JOE
          Yep. Also, there’s a leprechaun.
          And he’s drunk. And has a knife.
          And if you open my email he will
          stab you on the titties.

                    SANDRA
          Yeah, well, you know what’s in MY
          email?

                    JOE
          What?

                    SANDRA
          I big angry lesbian self defense
          instructor. And if you open my
          email she’ll do the twist-and-shout
          on you.

                    JOE
          ON MY BALLS?!

                    SANDRA
          Yep. Fucker.

The end.

Look at this fucking thing.

I don’t like it. I don’t. There’s something seriously uncool about this robot.

It’s like…

You ever seen a baby deer get… born… borned. Birthed. Shit out by it’s mom.

wait…

it’s like…

Have you ever seen the birth of a baby deer?

They plop out all sloppy and fucked up and gross looking and then they just hop up and start walking around. It’s fucking crazy.

Now, this thing reminds me a little of that… except instead of a deer, it’s some sort of fucking monster. Like we’re watching a baby monster getting it’s footing and figuring shit out… but really fast. Faster than you’d think a baby monster would be able to.

It’s scary to watch, if only because it’s both somehow familiar and alien at the same time. Like seeing that severed head sprout spider legs and scamper off in The Thing.

There’s something seriously unsettling about watching that robot run and climb and right itself after being kicked.

Maybe it’s because I’m not an engineer or robot building guy or whatever they’re called. I know what my brain considered the limitations of robots. Generally those amount to the robotic arms that put cars together and animatronic pirates at Disneyland. Those things I can wrap my brain around. The arms in the automobile assembly lines I see as extensions of human arms. The robots in Disneyland, while somewhat creepy in their own right, are hardly mistakable as human. They buzz and click and jerk and are clearly limited to a small range of motions, all of which are predetermined. There’s no way one can seriously imagine them stepping down and walking anywhere. They’re going to stay there, waving their arms and moving their robot lips and eyes until Disney decides to reimagine them into whatever the latest success movie happens to be.

But this thing… this robot… it’s something else entirely. Watching it, it appears to be thinking. That’s the scary thing. It looks like it’s assessing a situation and determining the best course of action. It adjusts it’s movements based on it’s surrounding.

A few years back there was that Honda robot, Asimo that could walk upright and up and down stairs and kick soccer balls and such. That was slightly weird to watch, but mostly it was just funny to watch. It was like "that robot thinks it’s people!". It was like a neat toy that made you clap your hands, amused. Then you forgot about it. I’m sure it was a feat of engineering. I know it was a big deal. But honestly, I couldn’t see it as anything more than an elaborate toy. There was nothing threatening to it. Maybe it was because it DID move so much like a human that my natural response was to look at it like a puppet.

But still… this thing…

People having been saying for years in cautionary sci-fi stories and insane conspiracy theories that we’re destined to be slaves to robots and computers eventually. That these machines will develop self awareness and the ability to think beyond what we allow it to think. That some network of Skynet computers is suddenly going to turn on us and try and take over the world.

I’ve always found this notion kind of retarded. Not because I don’t think it’s possible (I don’t really) but because I don’t believe it will have to happen. Computers and robots aren’t going to suddenly turn around and bite us like an angry dog because we WANT them to take over. People have been working as fast as they possibly can to make SURE robots and computers run the world. People are more than happen to turn the functionality of the world over to machines. We do it more and more every single day.

That’s because we ARE computers. We’re machines. People say that the human body is the perfect machine. I don’t know about "perfect" but we certainly are machines. We run on electricity. Our bodies are a series of pumps and pistons and wires with a CPU and oxygenated gasoline to boot. We process energy in order to run, we dump waste like car exhaust. We have background processes. We overload when forced to take in too much information. When we become damaged, warning lights go off and our bodies shut down in the appropriate places. Our brains are separated into two distinctly different processors. One for computing information and define our physical world, and one to make decisions and "think" and define our personalities. Our personalities and emotions, which we treasure so greatly and believe defines us as more than inanimate objects, are nothing more than a combination of chemicals flowing in and our of our brains. We can easily change the volume of these chemicals and completely change a our personality and emotions.

Look at how we drive our cars.

I know know about anyone else (I have to assume it’s the same for other people) but when I drive, I rarely actually think about the fact that I’m driving. The car becomes an extension of my body. My feet become the wheels and the wheels become my feet. When I want to slow down, without thinking about it, my feet press the pedal which pushes the break pads against the wheels and slows the car. If I need to turn, my hand automatically turns on the signal. I don’t think "Now I have to reach down and flip the turn signal lever, then I have to push slightly on the break, look to see if anyone is crossing the street or going to hit my car with theirs, and then I have to turn the wheel 120 degrees, press gently on the gas peddle with my foot, straighten the wheel out, maybe listen to the transmission change gears to make sure it sounds alright because it’s been a little clunky lately, then get back up to roughly eight or nine miles above the speed limit. I don’t think about any of these things when I make a turn, but it’s a lot of shit that I must be processing on some level. I’m probably thinking about a conversation I had at work or a movie I watched recently or (more likely) I’m just thinking "Then sent me away to teach me how to be sensible! Logical! Oh responsible! Practical! And then they showed me a world where I could be dependable! Oh clinical! Intellectual! Cynical!" and singing at the top of my lungs.

We don’t think about these things because they come naturally. Our brains are comfortable with extending the reaches of our bodies (machines) to the mechanics of a car. Because really, a car is essentially a simplified (but physically more powerful) version of a human body. It too runs on wires and pistons and oxygenated gasoline and a CPU. And more than ever, we’re building cars to do the majority of our thinking, so we can simply tune out the process that much further. We have cars that can parallel park themselves. Cars that can decide which turns to make and the best way to get to Jimmy’s house or Portland, Maine or wherever we tell it we want to go.

It’s also like typing. I can sit here (and often do) and type for hours on end. I sit here in the same position, rarely moving more than my fingers (and perhaps my arm to take a drink from a grape soda) and my eyes barely focused on the screen as it seemingly magically translate my thoughts into words and sentences for the great void to store and share. My fingers automatically find the correct keys. They automatically hit the delete key when I find that I misspelled a word (this happens frequently) and retypes. They automatically put in paragraph breaks and parenthesis and punctuation. None of this is anything I actually have to consciously think about it. I sit here for however long it takes for the screen to fill up with all of the thoughts I feel like putting there. Then I move the mouse and hit "post" and go smoke or watch TV or whatever sedentary thing I do when I’m not participating in the sedentary task of writing.

My fingers know which keys have which letters on them, but if you asked me to draw a diagram of which keys have which letters from memory, I couldn’t do it. I know that for a fact.

Our brains seem to be more comfortable using machines on autopilot than they do actually consciously trying to coordinate our bodies through the steps of doing… well, anything. We love sitting for hours and allowing thing things we’ve built for ourselves to do the work we used to have to do for ourselves. We sit and we read books. We drive cars. We even communicate with each other. We have sexual relationships. We get into fights. We kill imaginary people in imaginary worlds that exist solely in machines. We watch TV and movies. We essentially live through machines. Sure, occasionally we get a bug up our butt and go outside and walk around. Some of us (not very many I suspect, myself included) even enjoy these little outings away from machines. Some people make a conscious effort to distance themselves (at least in their own minds) from machines. But not very many. Even less actually achieve anything even close to independence from machines.

And it’s happening fast. In the timeline of our human existence, we’ve become dependant on machines in a very, very short period of time. And it’s coming even faster by the minute.

So are machines going to take over the earth? Absolutely. But only because we beg them to. We desperately want them to. We want nothing more than to give all of our human experiences to machines so we can exist solely in our own minds. I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. The farther we get from our physical bodies the better in my mind. It’s not out of any dislike for my body (though I could certainly treat mine better) but because it’s our bodies that restrain us. Our machines.

Ironically, I believe that the more we give ourselves to machines, the farther we go to defining ourselves as more than machines. It is through our machines that we will become gods. The more we allow machines to do the tasks that we previously needed our bodies to do, the more we expand our consciousness and participate in the universal consciousness. It is through this process, this giving of our physical bodies to machines, that our minds become independent from our bodies.

Eventually, our personalities and awareness of self will exist solely in a network of energy. We’re not far off from that right now, as I type this, communicating to you via this trance like state that I sit here typing this. It’s only a hop skip and a jump to completely dislocating from our bodies and direct convergence of our consciousness. 

And when we are able to do that, we become immortal. We’re creating the great energy force that religions call God, and it is us. That universal energy force. We’re creating it and are desperately trying to dive into it. It’s not ready yet. Not all the way. There’s still work to be done. Right now all we can do is dump our thoughts and personality into it as much as possible. Filling it with US. We write here in these "blogs" because we want to make our mark on this universal consciousness. We want to mark our territory. Establish ourselves and our space. Our flavor. Our strand in the massive tapestry of the the universal consciousness. I’ve been defining mine for the last twelve or so years of my life. Constantly writing my thoughts down. Pouring my identity into it. The real me. The me that only I know.

We’re so defined by our bodies and our physical selves. It’s through this process that we’re able to let go of those self conscious limitations. Here, in the universal consciousness, we don’t have to worry about what our bodies look like. We’ll be able to hook ourselves up to vitamin supplements and IV drips of essential nutrients. We’ll be able to decide when we want to be happy or sad or angry or horny by simply adjusting the levels of chemicals that drip into our bodies. We’ll do all of this via computers. Babies will be created in test tubes by robots and incubated. When they’re "born" we’ll make facebook pages for them and hook them into the universal consciousness so that we can love them the same way we love everyone else. When our bodies fail us, machines will keep us alive and hooked into this network. When our bodies finally give out completely we will simply step into this "virtual" world entirely. Our semen and eggs will be stored forever in freezers and accessed by robots when we want children after we’re physically dead.

This is where our soul will go. This is the next step. And we’re building it right now.

Because that’s the one thing computers don’t have… the notion of a soul. Or whatever you want to call it. Our awareness of self. The thing inside of us (or, really, it could be anywhere) that says "I am ME and I want a fucking ice-cream sandwich!". That’s what we desperately want to connect with and with this network… the universal consciousness… we finally feel like we’re no longer alone. There are all of these other souls dumping themselves into the network. When we’re in our bodies, it’s hard, if not impossible, to really feel like you share this world with anyone. Sure, our bodies bump into each other and interact and give each other presents and punch each other in the face, but there’s always that question of whether or not there actually IS anyone else out there… or all of these other machines just props in some elaborate facade. Generally, these questions are made clearer with the assistance of LSD. But it’s still there, on some level. At least for me it is.

But here we are, throwing out these beacons in the universal consciousness that says "Hi! I’m here! Come taste my soul!" because it’s a lot easier to believe that there are real human souls here. Here in this machine.

We’re able to connect with people we haven’t seen in twenty years and would never come in contact with again in the "real" world. You just dip your consciousness into the network and poke them and there they are. There’s no barrier of space or matter. It’s just a matter of saying "Hey, it’s me" and you’re connected. Your minds are connected and you can communicate from chairs on opposite ends of the earth.

And you can do the same thing with complete strangers. Here I am in Canada and I know what’s going on with my family in California. I know what’s going on with menstrual cycles of a woman I know the UK. I know who’s on drugs. Who’s in rehab. Who’s cheating on their spouse. Who’s a virgin and who’s recently attempted suicide. I know had their kids taken away and who’s getting rich and who’s getting poor. I know these things because I tune into them with my mind, via this network. If I wanted to, I could tune in further. I could immerse myself almost entirely in this network, both learning about other people and defining myself further, as I’m doing now.

I don’t because, like most people, I’m still mostly defined by the limitations of my body. My physical cravings and needs.

And the more we develop it, the easier it will become.

I look forward to that. Hopefully it will happen in my lifetime. I don’t really believe it will. I think that I’ll probably catch the very beginning of it, but not quite early enough to completely exist in energy. I think that the children being conceived and born right now… they will be the ones who will actually detatch completely from their physical bodies and are able to exist entirely as energy.

As years and decades and centuries go by, and we’re further and further in our own minds, our bodies will elongate and become thinner. Our heads will get bigger. Our hair will fall out because we no longer need it. Our limbs will be long and fragile. Our organs will shrink and our breathing will become shallow. We will become physically indistinguishable from each other. Our bodies will remain contained in a stationary position. Perhaps we will be unknowingly carted around by robots who take our bodies to be refueled or fixed. But that will be of little concern to us.

Some of us will venture out into the physical world for necessary maintenance and study. Not very many, but some. These people will hop out, aided by robots (because their physical bodies will be beyond the old task of simply walking and moving) and they will travel to learn. They will learn how to even further increase our independence from our bodies. Part of this study will include traveling back in time (which will, eventually, become a function of the universal consciousness, since our souls will not be constrained by man’s invention, time) to study ourselves as we were. This will, at times, require direct contact with the ignorant versions of ourselves. Because the old versions of human beings ARE ignorant, they will assume that we are from another world. They will call us aliens. We will do our studies (which may or may not include anal probing. Unless that’s what we’re into at that point. I know it’s what I’M into) and then return to our own time and the comfort of our energy field.

For right now, we’re just testing the waters. And they’re oh so fine.

So over the course of my blogging career there have been many posts that have sat half written in draft form. Sometimes for months, sometimes never finished. Usually they end up forgotten and half written and never read. Here are three posts that I started writing at some point over the last year or so but never finished. I know that I’ll never get around to actually finishing whatever I was trying to say, so I may as well post what I’ve got for archival purposes.

In N’ Out Burger

I swear to Christ on his Jesus that if I don’t get some In N’ Out burger, like, really fucking soon, bad things are going to happen. There will be blood… oh yes, there will be blood.

I am sick… literally sick… of the lack of decent junk food in this god forsaken wasteland. It’s next to impossible to get a good fast food burger up here. They’ve got no middle ground. You’ve got A&W on one end of the spectrum, with their rectum flavored bullshit burgers and then on the other end you’ve got like, actual restaurant burgers like, Red Robin and Montanas and shit like that.

In between? Not much. There’s Wendys, but really, I don’t count Wendys. Wendys doesn’t count because who the fuck do they think they are making their hamburgers square? What kind of bullshit is that? Do they think they’re impressing people? Make that shit round!

Stupids. Besides, Wendys burgers taste homemade, and while it’s a refreshing change of pace, I can make a burger that tastes home made at home. And their fries taste like butt.

They’ve got ONE Burger King here and it honestly doesn’t taste like real Burger King. It’s somehow slimier and doesn’t taste right. And it doesn’t SMELL like Burger King, which sounds weird, but it makes a difference. I figured that out when we went to a BK in Washington and I was reminded of what it’s actually supposed to smell like. Like raw beef sizzling on a grill. That’s what Burger King smells like. The Burger King up here smells like a hamburger that someone dropped in a mop bucket… after someone just finished mopping the bathroom in a West Hollywood Popeyes Chicken.

Of course, there’s McDonalds. And there’s McDonalds and more McDonalds. There’s a McDonalds on every corner, just like in America.  And I frequent them more than I should. But I do so simply because there is no suitable alternative. I’m so fucking sick of McDonalds I fear I may go mad. McDonalds isn’t even really hamburgers. Yes, it’s fried ground beef in a bun with processed cheese… but it’s just… McDonalds. It’s like everything at McDonalds is made from the same McDonalds flavored paste like Soylent Green. I remember that we used to go to a Walmart that had a McDonalds in it that served Hot Dogs. Like, McWieners or something. I got one once. It tasted exactly like everything else at McDonalds.

When I first moved up here, one of the McDonalds here served pizza. Little individual pizzas. I knew I HAD to try that shit. And I did. And it tasted like McDonalds in a pizza shape. It was trippy.

I’m not just talking about a lack of burger places either. There’s no Taco Bell. No Carls Jr. No Bob’s Big Boy. No Jack In the Box. No Long John Silvers.

Yes, they have fish n’ chips here, and yes it’s delicious. It’s fantastic and I’m grateful for it. But you can’t eat fish n’ chips in the car on the way home from work. And I don’t always want to spend thirty bucks. Yes, it’s great, but it’s hardly convenient. And that’s what we’re talking about here. Convenience.

They’ve got some bullshit up here called White Spot. These people fucking LOVE White Spot. I don’t get it. White Spot is fucking weak. They serve burgers that taste like they were made in a school cafeteria for seven fucking bucks. The fries are bland and basic.

But these fuckers think White Spot is the best thing since Jesus rolled that rock back. I’d like to believe that they just don’t know any better, but I know they do. I don’t understand what’s wrong with these people. I really don’t. They’ve been to America. They know what they’re missing. They just CHOOSE not to get delicious food up here and are content to stick to their subpar Canadian bullshit.

Back to the issue at hand.

In N’ Out burger.

A few years ago, during my little emotional and mental breakdown that resulted in my living in California for three or four months, I ate at In N’ Out burger at least twice a week. It was a fortyfive minute drive home from work and In N’ Out was about fifteen minutes in the other direction, but I didn’t care. It was worth it. The drive through line was always at least ten minutes. I added almost a half an hour onto my drive home from work just to get those delicious burgers and fries. It was heaven.

In N’ Out Burger…

They’ve got the simplest menu you’re going to find at a fast food joint. It’s essentially “Burgers. Drinks. Shakes. Fries.” and that’s about it. That’s all you need to know. They’ve also got this crazy, cult like secret menu that was like, crafted by the Templar Knights or the Masons or some shit.

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My New Favorite Porn Star

I tend to rotate favorite porn stars on about a bi-yearly basis. For a while it was Rocco, but then he retired and then I think he’s back again, I don’t know. 

Either way, I got kind of tired of seeing pretty much the same movie over and over again. It started to get really routine and boring. I’ll certainly give Rocco the credit he’s due for reinventing porn, but I’ve outgrown him. Plus, I got tired of having to explain to people why my favorite porn star is a guy. I do still really respect him as a porn star. He was kind of one end of an  aspect of porn he helped popularize, and that dominates porn now. That kind of blatantly misogynistic, male superior porn. Rocco was on one end and Max Hardcore was on the other. Rocco had a way about him that was entirely contradictory to the style of porn that he was making, and that’s what made him interesting. He was very good at acting like he actually cared about the women that he was performing with, even when he was doing things that many people would consider incredibly degrading. There’s an air of “Hey, this is just the kinky stuff we’re into” about Rocco’s movies. Max Hardcore on the other hand does his best to make sure you know exactly what he thinks of the women he’s working with, to the degree that I don’t even watch his movies. Not because I’m offended, but because it goes beyond sexy and into some seriously dark shit that I’m not entirely comfortable exploring. Once a chick starts crying, the mood is pretty much killed for me. I just don’t need to see that. Especially if she’s crying because some gnarly, leathery old Hunter Thompson looking fuckhead in a cowboy hat is plowing her ass much more intensely than she expected. And the chicks pretending like they’re twelve is just… creepy.

But this post isn’t about Max Hardcore.

So yeah, I liked Rocco, but when I grew tired of him, I moved onto Belladonna.

I was way into Belladonna for a long while. She had a very different vibe to her than other porn stars I was familiar with. For one, she didn’t look like a porn star. She’s covered in tattoos, she has a big gap between her two front teeth (not like, missing teeth, just a space) and she wore her hair short. She was the total opposite of what the traditional porn star looked like. Best of all, she came across like she really enjoys what she does. There’s a part of me that still holds onto that myth that women in porn are these lonely girls who want to be “real” actresses and just got caught up in the dark and seedy world of porn. I don’t rationally believe that to be the case for mainstream porn, but on some level, I still feel kind of bad for female porn stars. On the surface I know that the porn industry doesn’t actually work that way. They don’t want anyone there who doesn’t want to be there. Porn is under way too much scrutiny to try and get away with exploiting anyone. And female porn stars are the ones who make the money. With the exception of a very select few, male porn stars don’t make shit. They’re a dime a dozen and can be replaced at the drop of a hat… and they rarely have to do anything except have a decent sized cock and the ability to cum on cue. It’s a thankless job, being a male porn star… unless you’re Rocco or Ron Jeremy or Peter North or John Stagliano or someone like that… and all of those guys make their real money behind the scenes. But a successful female porn star has it made, financially at least, provided they’re smart enough to manage their money correctly. Jenna Jameson is a multi-millionaire many, many times over. Marilyn Chambers is insanely rich, and she was only in like, five or six hardcore porno movies in the seventies and early eighties before retiring… and then her “come back” in the nineties. And those are just a couple of extreme examples. Porn can be an incredibly lucrative business for a woman if she’s got what it takes.

Anyway, back to Belladonna… aside from her interesting look and her apparent joy in her job, she also, surprisingly, fit quite well into this male dominant style of porn that’s been the trend. It was weird because she fit in on both sides of the equation. She was fully capable of being submissive for male dominated porn, but in the next scene, she played the male with another girl, and treated other female porn stars the same way that the guys were treating the women. And it worked incredibly well. It was hot. It worked so well that she went a good three or four years doing nothing but girl-girl porn, usually playing the dominant role.

Belladonna’s role in porn was almost like a feminist statement. It was like the old song “anything you can do I can do better” and it was true. Watching a Belladonna movie you’re struck with two very firm facts. Number one: she knows exactly what she’s doing and she enjoys it. And Number two: She’s in complete control of the situation she’s in. It isn’t a prima donna thing or a sense of entitlement… it was simply a matter of that she is was very good at what she does and she knew it, and everyone else knew it as well. She was respected by everyone involved. The people she was performing with, the people she working for and the people that worked for her. When Belladonna enters a porn set, you know that you’re about to be schooled on how to make a good porno movie. Every aspect of it. Which is, I’m sure, why she started her own production company and started writing and directing her own movies, sometimes not even appearing in them.

Unfortunately, she seems to have lost a grip on what she’s doing. At least, that’s how it seems to me. She had a baby and shaved her head and got married and things just seemed to change. I’d like to think it’s a good thing… that maybe she’s just settling down a bit, but I know that’s not true. She’s still making movies and still very active in the business, but I get the feeling that she’s lost the inspiration for it. Reading her Myspace blog, I kind of get the feeling that her husband doesn’t treat her very well, and I think that’s also part of my disillusionment with her. Of course, I could be completely wrong, but either way, the magic is gone from Belladonna in my eyes, and I’ve moved on.

So who’s my favorite now? I’ve auditioned a few potentials, but Joanna Angel has won by a landslide.

In many ways, she’s like a much more user friendly version of Belladonna. She’s like a cross between Belladonna and like… Lady Aberlin from Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. She’s got the tats and the penchant for making more “alternative” porn. Like Belladonna, she doesn’t look like someone that should be in porn, and like Belladonna, she seems to have an intense love for her job, and she’s very good at it. Unlike Belladonna though, she never comes across as intimidating or untouchable.  She’s got a very “girl next door” vibe to her, providing you live next door to a tattoo parlor/dildo shop. And unlike Belladonna, there isn’t a sense of a dark undercurrent. Watching Belladonna’s movies, I always got the impression that she probably has some serious issues brewing behind those intense eyes. She seemed like she has much darker fantasies than anything I could ever handle, and while that was hot, it was also kind of scary as well. With Joanna Angel, it’s like she’s doing exactly what she enjoys and wants to do, and that’s it.

She comes across as totally approachable and cool. With Belladonna, I could never imagine sitting down and having a conversation with her. Not because I think she’s super important, but because she seems to live in a completely different world than I do. With Joanna Angel, it’s surprisingly easy to imagine getting coffee and talking about whatever movie we just saw or whatever book we recently read. There aren’t many porn stars I can say that about.

I think there are a couple of reasons for this. The first is that she’s Jewish, which is surprisingly incredibly rare in porn. At least in female performers. There are tons of Jews behind the scenes, but only a handful in front of the camera. Especially women. There are a few, and most of them are incredibly successful. Ron Jeremy is the obvious success story.  Randy West and Adam Glasser (Seymour Butts) are Jewish. But you could count the number of popular female Jewish porn stars on one hand. Jenna Jameson is apparently Jewish, though I’d have never guessed it. That goes to show that in the porn business, like in mainstream Hollywood, Jews seem to know what they’re doing.

It seems that the most successful people in the porn business are Jewish. It also should be mentioned that the most successful people in the porn business are people who had a good grasp on what they were selling and how to sell it. These are people who understand that porn is one of the biggest markets on earth, and that it will never, ever dry up.

Look at Ron Jeremy.

Well… maybe don’t look directly at him… but look at his career. Here’s a guy who dedicates his entire life to marketing  himself. He’s barely in porn movies anymore, but works behind the scenes and in other aspects of media. He’s a guy who spends almost all of his time selling himself as a product, and he’s been extremely successful because of it.

The same goes for Jenna Jameson. She’s arguably the most popular porn star in history. That’s not because she’s particularly attractive or amazing in her films. It’s because she understood very early in her career that she was a product and that she needed to market herself as such. She got in very early with her website and production company. She understood that if she wanted to be successful in this industry, she had to market herself the same way you would market a Corvette or a candy bar. She reached out beyond the porn world and garnered attention anywhere she could get it.

And she, like Ron Jeremy, looked at porn and then looked ahead in porn. She anticipated trends and was sure to be the first to ride them. She was smart about her career, and it worked out for her.

Now, does this have anything to do with the fact that she’s Jewish? The knee-jerk PC part of me that still hasn’t quite died yet wants to think no, but realistically, I think it does. It might come across as anti-Semitic to assume that someone is a good business person because they are Jewish, but I think that there is something to it. Some people, because of their culture, history and possibly even their genetic make up are sometimes inherently better at something than others. Is it racist to suggest that black people are better dancers than white people? Or better basketball players? I don’t think so. Yes, there are plenty of good white dancers and basketball players, but some things seem to come more naturally to some people than others. It’s just worked out that way.

Now, before I paint myself any further into the corner with the Jewish thing, I should probably get back to Joanna Angel.

Joanna anticipated a trend that has become particularly popular now, and she got in on the ground floor. That’s what’s being called “alt porn.” It’s porn with a kind of punk rock, almost pretentious sensibility, made extremely popular by the website Suicidegirls.com.  Belladonna really kind of got the ball rolling on that one, because she looks so drastically different from your typical porn star. She has a kind of punky vibe to her with the tattoos and the the spikey hair. But the attention on Belladonna seemed to focus a lot more on “what kind of crazy shit is she going to put in her ass this time?” rather than the style of porn she was making. It became about trying to top the extremity of whatever she’d done last.

With Joanna Angel, she seems to be comfortable letting other porn stars like Belladonna and Sasha Gray and Taylor Rain work out the extreme submissive aspect of porn and has focused her attention on creating a sort of middle ground between “extreme” porn, traditional porn and this “alt porn” style. For one thing, she’s taken the Suicide Girls format (which is essentially modern pinup and a Playboy-on-a-budget style photoshoots, with that punk style mixed in) and applied it to hardcore pornography. She’s very invested in the internet and blogging and keeping herself approachable and relatable. Fans of Joanna Angel know what kind of music she likes and what kind of movies she watches and books she reads. She doesn’t build herself up to be a fuckable Barbie doll or a porn celebrity. She keeps herself totally on the level with her fans. And her fans seem to be people who share a basic interest in the things she’s interested in outside of porn. Metal heads and movie geeks and book nerds. That’s on top of people who just like to watch her fuck.

Watching porn got to be pretty monotonous after a while. It was all just these interchangeable plastic women with big poofy blonde hair and the same goofy fuck faces. These are women who I don’t know anything about, nor do I care to know anything about them. I don’t know their names or where they’re from or what they’re interested in, because they don’t give any of that information up.

With Joanna Angel, I knew all of that stuff before I ever even watched one of her movies. I stumbled upon some pictures of her and thought she was interesting looking and started looking into who she was. By the time I actually watched one of her movies, I knew what music she liked and what she read and where she was from and what exactly she does in the porn industry. It was completely refreshing. It helps that we have a lot of shared interests. I mean, hell, one of her many tattoos is of a Kurt Vonnegut quote. It’s the line “So it goes” which was the line Kurt Vonnegut used repeatedly in Slaughter House 5 when someone died. How could I not get into that?

And she’s obviously got good taste in movies because of the parody porn movies she’s made. Rather than going with the obvious stuff like Edward Penishands and Forest Hump, she’s made movies like The XXXorcist and The Re-Penetrator (a parody of the movie The Re-Animator, which was based on an HP Lovecraft story.) That says it all right there. One of the things she’s tried to do is make “horror porn” which is an incredibly odd experience. I mean, watching a porno movie based on The Exorcist is just… weird. It’s weird and fun. It’s weird because, well… I’m not used to seeing people fuck while wearing Linda Blair Exorcist make up and puking pea-soup all over the place. I’m also not used to seeing priests performing “sexorcisms” and watching characters that are mother and daughter eat each other out. I might not be used to it, but damn if it’s not entertaining.

So aside from the tattoos and the style she brings to porn, the real draw is the personal level she interacts with her fans. That’s what really sells her. Watching a Joanna Angel movie is like watching a really hot friend getting fucked.

—————————-END OF POST———————————-

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon

So I finished one of the few Stephen King books that I never got around to reading the other day. It was called The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. I never read it because it came out in that wave of really REALLY shitty Stephen King books in the late nineties. That wave of estrogen filled female centric books that I’m about 95% sure Tabatha wrote for him. Books like Gerald’s Game and Rose Madder, Bag of Bones and the incredibly girly forth Dark Tower book, where a story that was carrying on just fine as a killer post apocalyptic western and then abruptly changed into a crybaby fruity love story and a completely ridiculous Wizard of Oz thing that made absolutely no sense.

So yeah, when, around that time, he put out the book The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, I didn’t even bother. A story about a little girl lost in the woods? Pfft. Whatever.

But after reading Blaze and getting borderline obsessed with The Shining again (which I seem to do once a year or so) I was looking for something to read and picked it up.

It was surprisingly much better than I expected. It certainly wasn’t his best work, or even close to his best work, but it was halfway decent at least.

Something I hadn’t considered when I first rejected reading it, was that two of King’s strengths are writing about kids and his non-supernatural stories. And this book fit into both of those categories.

The story itself is incredibly simple. It really is a story about a girl lost in the woods, and pretty much just that. We follow around one character (a nine year old girl named Trisha McFarland as she veers off the path she’s walking with her mother and brother in the woods to take a leak, and then gets progressively more lost for the duration of the novel. There’s very little more than Trisha’s internal monologue through the whole thing. That’s the novels real strength.

Like most of King’s stories that focus on kids (The Body and It stand out as the best examples. The Body, of course, was the basis of the film Stand By Me) The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is a fantastic example of a writer treating a child as a fully realized character. Rather than using kids as a prop or plot point, King actually treats them as real people with their own strengths and weaknesses. Trisha is both smart for her age and incredibly naive in the way a real child can be. She isn’t a miniature adult posing as a kid or a smart aleck know it all punk. She’s just a regular little girl desperately trying to deal with an incredibly difficult situation. She infuses her surroundings with the kind of imagination and semi-magical perception that only a child can do.

Reading this book you actually root for Trisha not only to make it out of the woods alive, but to do it by the strength of her character. She’s resourceful enough to keep barely scraping by, but she’s naive enough to make huge but understandable mistakes. As things get more and more intense for Trisha, she delves into reserves of strength that I believe most adults wouldn’t expect kids to have. People tend to forget that kids deal with a LOT of intense shit, and more often than not, they persevere. This story is in part a tribute to the resilience of childhood.

Huh…

Somewhat unrelated…

I just spent about two hours reading a shitload of Wikipedia entries about various Stephen King stories (which linked to entries about HP Lovecraft stories, movies based on King books, George Romero, EC Comics, Lord of the Flies and Edger Alan Poe among many other things… I get distracted so easily) and I just finished the entry about Creepshow. Remember how I posted about Joe Hill, Stephen King’s son who is now a successful writer himself?

Well, I just found out that he played the little kid in the wrap around story in Creepshow.

Neat.

Anyway…

Uh…

Oh yeah. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon.

The book is also a pretty blatant religious story. Religion is a fairly common thread in most of King’s work. This time it’s almost a little TOO blatant. Trisha is obsessed (the way many little girls are) with her celebrity crush, Boston Red Sox closing pitcher Tom Gordon.

Trisha has issues with her faith in God. Her father believes in something he calls The Subaudible, which is basically a cold, unfeeling, indifferent force that encompasses everything. Trisha doesn’t really buy this, but as things start to get dicey for her, she tries various forms of praying to get out alive. None of this comforts her, but as she progresses through the story, her faith in her hero, Tom Gordon. As she starts to somewhat lose her mind in the woods, Tom Gordon begins to appear to her and keeps her company and guides her at crucial points. This is all well and good, I guess. It’s an interesting idea at least, that God shows up in whatever form you put your faith in. The choice of Tom Gordon is perfect for this both because of his (very real) signature move of pointing up at the sky after he saves a game, as well as the letters in his last name. By the end of the story, Trisha accepts Tom Gordon as her saviour, and subsequently, I guess, her faith in God in general.

If this aspect of the story had been slightly more subtle, I’d probably dig it a little more. It doesn’t feel like preaching or Christian Rock in novel form, but I think it could have been a little less obvious.

But whatever. It still worked alright.

I imagine that someone that doesn’t know or care anything about baseball (or even more specifically, the Red Sox, King’s favourite sports obsession) might get slightly bored by the reoccurring baseball theme. Being a Red Sox fan myself, it didn’t bother me at all, but I could see where someone who didn’t give a shit might not be able to relate.

One thing that did bother me was King’s need to insert the supernatural into a story that really didn’t need it. He tends to do that. Anyone who has read The Body can, I’m sure, remember scratching their heads when the boys are about to find the dead corpse of Ray Bowers and suddenly a massive fireball flies over their heads for no reason whatsoever and then is never mentioned again. I was like, twelve, when I read that story the first time and even then I was like “WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS SHIT?!”

In The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, in the last half of the story, she’s being stalked by some kind of beast in the woods. It’s very Lord of the Flies, and like Lord of the Flies, the beast turns out to be the evil within us all or some sort of silly bullshit like that. Either way, this thing is essentially The Devil and there’s a very forced confrontation at the end of the book. Again, like with most King books, the story is fine until the last five percent or so, when everything falls apart. Steve seems to have a real problem ending his books. It’s almost like he gets tired of writing and he just goes “And then… uh… like… God comes down and blows up Las Vegas and kills Randall Flagg and all the bad guys die and like, yeah, that’s it. The end.” or “

So I went to the dentist this morning. It was the first time I’ve been in about five years.

The last time I went they pulled out all of my wisdom teeth.

The experience wasn’t so much horribly traumatic as it was a huge pain in the ass, and the mouth for that matter. I managed to get some awesome drugs out of it (dilaudid… w00t!) but it was plenty enough dentist for me for a while.

Unfortunately, the paradox here is that I put off going to the dentist for regular check ups and cleaning because I’m afraid of the pain and embarrassment, but the longer I put it off, the more pain and embarrassment there is when I finally end up going.

In this case, five years is apparently a lot of time for pain and embarrassment to accumulate. What was supposed to be a routine cleaning has now ballooned into an in depth cleaning over two appointments as well as three fillings.

I got lucky in the cavity department. I never seem to have too many cavities. I never had any until I was in my late teens and that was only two. Both of which I had filled without Novocain. At the time (I was about sixteen or seventeen I think) I was more afraid of the shot than I was of the drill, which is completely bass ackwards. So I told them to try it without numbing me, which they did. I got through it alright. It hurt like a motherfucker, probably more than the shot would have, but it wasn’t as bad as I imagine it probably should have been. They were small cavities.

I think my teeth are pretty sturdy buggers.

That was then.

Today they jumped right in with the X-Rays. Fair enough, they gots to get paid. One of the benefits of the fact that Sandra works for The Man is that I don’t have pay for this shit. I pay 10% (which, today worked out to about 30 bucks) and so I let them do whatever they want to do without question. If they wanna x-ray my teeth before I even open my mouth, go for it.

They did and they saw some decay in a couple of my back molars. That’s what needs to be filled in a couple months.

That was the easy part. The X-Rays.

I always feel kind of weird when they put those little pieces of film in my mouth. Mostly because I can feel her fingers poking around in there, and you have to bite down right as she’s pulling her fingers out. I’d be lying if I didn’t have the urge to chomp down on her finger. Not because I wanted to her her, but because it’s not too often that a stranger has their fingers in my mouth. Plus, those x-ray films kind of dig into my cheek and it pisses me off.

The lady who did my teeth was nice. I wish that Dr. Foo had been there. Dr. Foo is our dentist. Has been for a long ass time. Of course, I hadn’t seen her in years, but Sandra has been in and I’ve seen her sporadically. Dr. Foo is fucking hot. She’s this little Asian number and she’s super cool. The fact that she’s a professional but wears hooker boots helps as well.

I don’t have a picture of Dr. Foo, but I have these:

She doesn’t actually look like this. She’s possibly hotter, but it should give you an idea of the level of hotness we’re talking about here. I’m generally not really into Asian chicks (nothing against them, it’s just not my thing) as far as hotness goes, but damn.

Anyway…

Dr. Foo is away until January and I had Dr. Not Foo. Some dude who came in with a pokey thing and a mirror and looked at my teeth for two minutes and then left so that the torture lady could start her deal.

Dr. Foo will be doing my fillings. I will not hit on her, because that’s rude. But I’ll want to. Not that it means anything, because I’m married, and more importantly, she’s way out of my league.

Actually, not that I think about it, it’s probably better that Dr. Foo wasn’t there. I would be embarrassed of the shape my teeth are in. It’s better that I don’t see her until after my cleaning.

So this chick comes in to clean my teeth. She’s got on a mask so I don’t see much of her face. Just her eyes. Her dark, foreboding eyes. She does a quick once over in my mouth and I start to feel like it might not be as bad as I’ve built it up to be in my head. When she’s done with the initial look, I ask her how bad it is. She says that it’s pretty bad. There’s a lot of plaque and tartar all up under my gum lines. She asks me how much I floss and I lie and say that it’s about once a week. It’s maybe once a month, and that’s pretty much only if I’ve got a stubborn hunk of steak in my teeth or a piece of popcorn kernel lodge in my gum line. I can see in her eyes that she doesn’t believe my lies for a second. She suggests that I might want to brush and floss more. I agree that I should.

Then we get to the cleaning. It wasn’t so much a cleaning as it was a scraping. There was way too much crunching and cracking to be a simple cleaning. Cleanings involve soft scratchy noises and then spinning electric brushes and rinsing and spiting and fluoride and such. This was strictly metal hooks. Metal hooks inserted under my gums and against my roots, where there was apparently far more crap built up than I had any idea of.

That hurt. It hurt a lot. A lot more than I expected.

They say that dentists have the highest suicide rate of any profession, with air traffic controllers coming in a close second.

I can see why.

This woman seemed nice enough. She was chatty and friendly and sensitive to my embarrassment and pain. But the whole time she was scraping my teeth, I was projecting some seriously hateful thoughts in her direction. It seemed, at the time, that she was punishing me for my lack of care in regard to my teeth. That each poke and scrap was like a kick in the ass, chastising me. I kept thinking that there MUST be a way to do what she’s doing without hurting me so much, she’s just choosing not to. She must really enjoy causing me this much pain, or else why would she do it? I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t stand over someone and stab them repeatedly in the mouth.

But, of course, this was all in response to the Hostel like torture I was going through. In retrospect, and, in fact, immediately after it was finished, I was well aware of the fact that she’s just doing her job… a job I hired her to do. And that she’s helping me, in a kind of twisted, painful way.

I don’t think I could do a job where people dread seeing me and are traumatized by the pain I inflict, even if it is a job that betters people’s lives.

Not long into the actual scraping and cleaning portion of my visit I began to feel spit pooling at the back of my throat. The way I was sitting in the chair, my feet were higher than my head. I was essentially leaning upside down in this diagonal black leather chair/bed thing. I could feel it pooling in my mouth and it was driving me nuts. I took an opportunity when she stopped to sharpen her hooks (using a little stone like people use to sharpen darts with) to swallow the accumulated spit. It was then that I realized, upon almost throwing up, that it wasn’t spit at all but blood. It was also then that I noticed that her gloves and my lips were covered in blood. She recommended that I not swallow anymore and should let her use the little sucky tube thing. I agreed.

I asked her if my teeth were the worst she’d ever seen and she laughed, saying that they aren’t even close to the worst. She said that I’m a surprisingly typical case. Apparently a LOT of people take worse care of their teeth than I do. That helped. It didn’t help the pain any, but I felt less ashamed.

I had no idea that my mouth would bleed like that. I knew that mouth wounds bled a lot, but this was ridiculous. Every time she used that sucky tube thing, I could see red flowing up through the clear part of the hose. At one point, when her back was turned, I reached up and touched one of the more sensitive places she had been poking and scraping and crunching and breaking. It was a place in my mouth that I was familiar with as a sensitive spot. A spot that tended to bleed on the rare occasions that I did floss. I pulled my finger away red with blood. The tip was black with clotted blood and hunks of plaque. It was disgusting. I think she picked up on my morbid fascination and started showing me the hunks of crap she was pulling up from under my gum line. I had no idea that there was black, nasty looking shit in my mouth. I spend a decent amount of time looking at my teeth in the mirror, and I’ve never seen anything black in them. This was all under the edges of my gums apparently. It was gross and fascinating at the same time. Somewhat liberating as well. I began to think of it as metaphorical in a way. Like the cleaning of anything can be I guess. I don’t know what specifically it represented, but it felt like I was taking a huge step in bettering myself. Getting rid of some of that black, stinky shit that I didn’t even know was there.

After 45 minutes it was over. At least, that session was over. She’d done half of my mouth. The right half. I have to come back in two days and get the left half done.

It’s weird, looking at my teeth now. They feel much smoother and there are little specks at seemingly random spots where they’re brilliantly white against the off white/light yellow. I’d like to think that my teeth will, eventually, become that brilliant white. Maybe I should pick up some kind of special tooth paste. Or maybe I should get porcelain veneers. I don’t think those are covered by my insurance though.

I’d also kind of like to get braces. I’ve got some gaps in my teeth and they’ve bothered me my whole adult life. I dunno. I’ll ask Dr. Foo when I see her.

Currently Listening: Tanya Tucker – Blood Red And Going Down

First things first.

We now have a bathtub. That is HUGE. We’ve been sans tub for the last like, eight years. We used to look forward to any trip where we could stay at a hotel simply because we could finally take baths. Up until now, we’ve only had a shower stall. It was weak.

The other side of the bathroom. The shitter is to the right. I think it’s some kind of low-flow toilet or something stupid like that, because every time I drop duke, it takes like, three flushes to get it all down, and usually the toilet clogs and I’ve gotta plung it.

The kitchen. Note the dishwasher. Another thing we haven’t had for the last eight years. It’s glorious. Our dishes finally don’t have spots on them. Fuckin’ A. The kitchen is slightly disarrayed because Sandra made a turkey dinner today. FANTASTIC!

Living room. That’s fat me playing Fight Night on the 360. I can finally have the surround sound hooked up.

Christmas tree. It went up today.

Fisheses.

Walk in closet. Sandra wanted me to point out that I have twice as much clothes as her. That’s only because she’s super picky about her clothes and I’m not.

It’s a detached suite rather than a basement suite (which is what we’ve lived in thus far) so that’s pretty sweet. It’s almost like we’ve got our own little cottage or something.

So I had no interest really in seeing Beowulf. I just didn’t care.

Then I found out it was in 3D. I got slightly interested. I dig 3D movies.

Then I found out that Angelina Jolie gets way naked in it. I suddenly HAD to see this movie. Absolutely HAD to see it. 3D naked Angelina Jolie? I mean, COME ON!

Sure, it’s a digitally enhanced 3D naked Angelina Jolie, but whatever. I didn’t even realize that it was a kind of cartoon until like, halfway through the trailer. And it’s not really a cartoon REALLY. They filmed it and then ran it through a computer and kind of like rotoscoped it, like they did with 300. So it’s still real people… just highly stylized real people.

So I made it my mission this week to go see Beowulf in 3D with naked 3D Angelina Jolie breasticles.

BUT IT’S NOT PLAYING IN 3D ANYWHERE IN THIS CRAPASS PILE OF CRAP TOWN!

Goddamn this place.

And I also just found out that it’s got Crispin Glover in it.

Goddamned this goddamned place.

So I didn’t go. I’m not gonna go watch some not-3D cartoon when I, as an American, am ENTITLED to the RIGHT to see it in 3D if it’s available in 3D.

PS
I don’t want to hear a bunch of you commenting with stuff like “OMG BEOWULF IS TEH SUX!!” I figure it probably DOES suck, but I don’t care. You might have thought it was crap, but I don’t give a fuck. It don’t matter to The Jesus!

Most 3D movies DO suck, but they’re awesome too because they’re in 3D so shutup.

Fucking Canada.

You know, I’ve always said that the song lyric that best describes me is “They say I’m lazy but it takes all my time” from Life’s Been Good to me So Far by Joe Walsh.

I think I’m going to change it to ”Did you exchange a walk-on part in a war for a lead role in a cage” because, well, here we are. In a cage. A cold ass, no 3D naked Angelina Jolie having Canadian cage.

PSS
It was just Thanksgiving. Apparently. I forgot because I usually know it’s Thanksgiving when my belly is full of delicious turkey. That didn’t happen so I didn’t know. Stupid Canada.

Dear Canada, eat a dick.

Later,

Joe

Cher Canada, Manger un pénis.

Plus tard,

Joe

Currently Listening: Pink Floyd - Wish You Were Here

Via everyone in the whole universe:

This google image search survey thing. I don’t know if you’re supposed to pick the first image that comes up when you google your answer or if you can pick the best one. I picked the best ones. I also had to change all of the spelling back from the queer European spelling (like “favourite”) to the proper American spelling without all those stupid U’s.

Oh, and your friends page can eat my Dong Johnson.

1.) age at next birthday:

2.) place you’d like to travel:

3.) one of your favorite places:

4.) favorite object:

5.) favorite food:

6.) favorite animal:

7.) favorite color:

8.) place you were born:

9.) place you live now:

10.) name of past pet:

11.) best friend’s nickname:

12.) your screen name:
 

13.) your nickname:

14.) your first name:

15.) your middle name:

16.) your last name:

17.) your first job:

18.) grandmother’s name:

19.) major in college:

20.) favorite holiday:

21.) your job:

22.) preferred hobby:

23.) plans for the night:

24.) make a wish:

25.) your weakness:

26.) your strength:

27.) relation ship with your mother:

28.) last thing you bought:

29.) the way you think people see you:

30.) one word to describe yourself:

PS
my nickname isn’t actually Bocephus. I just desperately wish it was. Please start calling me that from now on and I’ll act surprised and be like “you GUYS! You’re CRAZY!”Currently Listening: Pink Floyd – Shine On You Crazy Diamond 1-5

#1.

A Few Words in Defense of Our Country by Randy Newman

Randy Newman is a fucking god in my book. Seriously.

Check out Randy on The Colbert Report:

View More Colbert Videos

And here’s an old video of Randy doing My Life is Good.

And last but not to be the least, here’s some chick named Dana Fuchs doing one of my favorite Randy Newman songs, God’s Song. I don’t know anything about this chick except that she did one of the most amazing versions of Helter Skelter I’ve ever heard. She sounds like Janis Joplin. It’s fucking great. She apparently did a lot of the singing on the soundtrack to Across the Universe.

Here’s a live version of that Helter Skelter cover she did.

She managed to do something that most people seem to miss when covering this song. She made it sound desperate and chaotic.

Anyway, another reason I started writing this post.

Check out our pumpkins:

Guess which one is mine!

Speaking of Freddy…

If there was a contest of “who has the best Xbox?” the winner would be mine. Unless your Xbox has Freddy on it, which I highly doubt it does.

So when I was a kid my dad used to tell me a lot of weird, demented stories. For all of my dad’s faults, this is definitely one of my better memories of him.

Anyway, so one of the stories he told me when I was still pretty little was one that he said he’d read as a kid and really liked. He told me a rough approximation of the story. Essentially, from what I can remember, it was about these kids that find this box of toys. The toys are all very weird and start changing the way they think. Their parents thought the kids were going crazy. The kids (a brother and sister) figure out that if they arrange the toys in a specific way in their room, that they can travel to other dimensions. So the kids end up actually doing this. The parents come in while they’re gone and collect the toys, wanting to take them away because they think it’s a bad influence. But by moving the toys they wrecked the doorway to the other dimension and the kids weren’t able to get back. The story ended with the parents figuring out that what had happened and desperately trying to put the toys back in their proper places. He also told me that the story was based on The Jaberwocky from Through the Looking Glass. This is what sparked a life long obsession with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland for me. I have at least forty different editions of the Alice books from various time periods, one from 1914.

I never read the original story or even knew what it was called. Then I saw a trailer for a movie that kind of sparked some sort of weird memory and I didn’t know what it was. The movie was called The Last Mimzy. I wasn’t sure what it was that it was triggering, but I knew it was something fairly profound in my past. So I started looking it up… it was actually based on the short story my dad was talking about. The story is called Mimsy Were The Borogoves and was written by Lewis Padgett and first published in 1943.

Now I have to find a copy of that story. Everywhere that I’ve been able to find online that had it at some point has been asked to remove it from the web by the estate of the writer. I might have to actually find it in a store and buy it. Anyway, that’s my story for the day.

Current music: Veruca Salt – All Hail Me

So fuck this shit right in the ear.

I’ve been 6′ 2″ for all of my adult life.

How tall are you, Joe?
Six-two.

Sandra decided that she needed to punch me in the nuts and say “I don’t think you’re ACTUALLY six foot two. I think you’re closer to six feet.”

and I was like “BULLSHIT! GET THE MEASURING TAPE!”

Then we couldn’t find the measuring tape, so we had to borrow it off of her brother in law, who is our landlord. So now HE’S down here participating in measuring me.

So I stand up against the wall and Sandra draws a line with a pencil.

SIX FOOT ONE!

WHAT THE FUCK!?!?!

WHAT THE FUCK?!?!

I SHRANK AN INCH!

Sandra’s all like “you can still tell people you’re six two if you want”

FUCK!

I’m barely a man now…

#1. If we’re watching TV and flipping through the channels, and we flip past the Discovery channel and happen to see any kind of animal fighting any other kind of animal underwater, we WILL stop and watch it. I don’t care what you were flipping through the channels to get to, it STOPS on aquatic animals fighting each other. Especially if one of the animals is a shark.

#2. I don’t want to go camping. I don’t want to go into the woods for any reason except maybe to look for Bigfoot or other such monsters. And only then if you have some serious evidence. I don’t want to go for a hike. I don’t want to go for a walk. In fact, I don’t want to go outside at all unless it’s to get to somewhere else that’s inside. Or unless it’s going not to far from inside to smoke, with the plan of immediately going back inside once the smoking is finished.

#3. I don’t want to hear about the environment. I don’t want to hear about recycling or greenhouse emissions or melting icecaps or rainforests. I don’t want to hear about vegetarianism or anti-fur debates. I don’t want to hear about pollution or how big SUVs are destroying the earth. I don’t care about the earth. I’m not worried about it in the slightest.

#4. If Save the Last Dance comes on TV one more time I’m going to punch someone in the face.

#5. Not making it to the next round of the On the Lot reality show has done almost the opposite of what I expected as far as my emotional reaction goes. Normally I would be devastated and probably have some of emotional breakdown, given the energy and hope I invested into it. But somehow it’s only made me more motivated to do it myself.

#6. If a female singer wants to get me to buy an album, she only has to put a song on there about masturbating. I wasted a good two or three years listening to Tori Amos just because I read that the song Icicle on the Under the Pink album was about masturbating while her family read the bible in the next room. Oh, she bops!

#7. If Pearl Jam plays a show within a few hundred miles of where I live, I will go to that show. There’s no negotiation. I don’t care if rent is due and bills need paying. Pearl Jam is more important.

#8. My sexual interest in woman was defined in the mid-eighties. One part Kathleen Turner in The Man With Two Brains and one part Annie Lennox in the Missionary Man music video. The Annie Lennox thing came slightly later and with a slightly bigger impact.

Now I sleep.

Current music: Cindy Lauper – She Bop

So last night I was plagued with horrible dreams. I went to sleep at around 2am. I conked right out. The next three hours or so were a series of intense, vivid, horrifying dreams.

Though they weren’t standard horrifying dreams. There were no monsters or killers. There were just really weird people and circumstances. I don’t exactly remember all of it, though I know that it all started out as a weird sex dream.

Like pretty much all of my sex dreams, this one was trumped before I actually got to any of the sex.

As a side note, another example of this was a dream I had the night before. I was invited to an a “slumber party” which translated to “orgy” once I actually got there. For some reason I brought Sandra along. We were wearing PJs. The other guests (mostly hot girls) were wearing skimpy lingerie. It was practically a Penthouse Forum letter… except that because Sandra was there, we ended up sitting on the top bunk in our PJs bored because I couldn’t really go participate in the hot girl orgy with my wife watching.

This is not an uncommon scenario in my dreams. Sandra tends to somehow trump hot dream sex. It’s hella lame.

Anyway, last night it wasn’t Sandra.

I was staying in some kind of weird plastic home with a bunch of “extended family members” that I didn’t recognize. It was almost like a massive motorhome with full rooms in it. In the next room were two sets of teenage twin girls, probably about sixteen or seventeen. I got up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and on my way out, one of the sets of twins were on their way to the bathroom to take a shower… together… and they wanted me to come and keep them company.

I felt somewhat weird and creepy about this because #1. They were fairly young, though certainly not like, pedophile young and #2. I wasn’t entirely sure HOW I was related to these girls, if at all. I know that it was some sort of extended family function, but I didn’t actually KNOW any of these people. All I know is that they weren’t in my immediate family, and after a brief second of contemplation, I decided to follow them to the shower.

Which is when my dad decided to show up outside the house and set someone’s car on fire and then drive away screaming and laughing. Of course, this woke everyone in the house up and the twins and I had to pretend we weren’t about to have hot threeway sex.

The dream went scary from there. I know that I ended up in a car with these people and we were driving down these mountain roads taking these insane corners ridiculously fast and it was terrifying. This is probably more of a personal fear of mine because of when I drove off that cliff that time.

I don’t entirely remember anything after that. Just flavors of memories. I know that at some point I ended up at this house that I apparently lived in many years ago (this is a scenario that pops up in my dreams a lot) and was full of a bunch of my old stuff that I’d lost track of. The house was all decrepit and disgusting, and there was a family of crazy religious fanatics squatting in it. It was an old woman, a gnarly old man, and a twenty something man and woman that were apparently the kids of the family. They were adults, but they talked and acted like kids. When I first arrived they were very friendly and let me look through my old stuff, but the house was so full of garbage and filth and human waste that I started getting really creeped out. I remember at one point what remained of the carpet was falling apart under my feet as I walked, and underneath was sticky and slimy with old urine and mold.

Interestingly, among my old stuff, I found the Jack the Ripper Diary book that I was looking for yesterday when I tore apart the back storage room but never found. It looked completely different than I remembered. When I was looking yesterday, I was looking for an offwhite manila colored book with old photographs on the front, but in my dream the book was black with bright red handwriting on the front. In retrospect, that is what the book actually looked like. I just spent a halfhour going through my boxes and still didn’t find it though.

Anyway…

I remember being chased by this family of religious fanatics who wanted to burn me alive for some reason or another. They had a big buss they rode around in. At one point they had managed to turn an entire town against me and I ended up hiding in a comic book store. I’m sure there’s no personal symbolism there.

At another point in the dream I was desperately trying to pitch a movie idea to these two producers, and they sent me off on some sort of weird arbitrary task in a mall and I fucked it up and they told me that I blew any chance I ever had of getting any movies made.

And at another point I was in some sort of California mountain town investigating a murder case where a politician was the prime suspect and I ended up somehow getting myself implemented in the crime and spent the rest of the dream trying to hide from the police and find evidence to prove my own innocence.

Somewhere in the night I woke up desperately needing to pee, probably because of the pitcher of iced tea I drank that evening. I was sleeping on the couch and I kind of rolled off and started bumbling to the bathroom. But as soon as I stood up I got that feeling you get (or, at least, I get) if I stand up too fast. I started feeling really dizzy and feverish and nauseous like when I’ve gotten way more drunk than I should have. I kind of stumbled to the bathroom and had to fight falling onto the floor. I peed and stumbled back to the couch and was almost immediately back in my terrible dreams.

When I woke up this morning around 9:30-10am, I still felt really nauseous and unsteady. I haven’t been able to shake it all day. I just feel really off.

I’m thinking that I’m going to go lay back down on the couch and try and get some more sleep. Maybe when I wake up I’ll feel better again. Sandra’s probably going to be pissed because I’m going to end up not doing the shit I was supposed to do today, but I don’t think I could if I wanted to.

Current music: Nirvana – Something In The Way

I wonder if my nauseousness and headache have anything to do with the fact that I drank, like, fifteen Mountain Dews today.

Nah.

So Sandra and I have taken to staying in Bellevue when we take trips to Seattle. It’s about 20 minutes or so out of Seattle and it’s a very pleasant little town. It’s a pretty rich town (lots of Microsoft people live there) and I saw more expensive cars in one place than I’ve ever seen before. The first time we stayed there I saw a Lamborghini Murcielago and TWO Lotus Elises cruising around town. I’ve only seen one other Lamborghini in my life, and I’d never seen a Lotus in person.

Anyway, so I was at the mall that they’ve got downtown and talking with the dude who worked at EB Games. He mentioned that he went to the Vancouver Film School. I asked him if he submitted anything to the Spielberg/Mark Burnet reality show. He got all high and mighty and was all “Not interested. I prefer to do my work independently. I don’t need any help from Hollywood.”

That’s obviously working out really well for him.

I told him that I prefer to have a million dollars and people actually watching my movies. But that’s just me.

Anyway…

In other news:

I worked a little on the John Locke portrait. It’s still going pretty well. Not a whole lot of difference from the last time I posted a work-in-progress, but what can you do? It’s more progress than you’ve made on YOUR John Locke portrait. Beeyotch.

In other other news:

Sandra and I made homemade pizza tonight. It didn’t turn out that great and now I feel like I’m going to vomit grease all over my living room. In a minute I think I’m going to go vomit grease from my bunshole. It’s going to be that kind of night.

I have to give Sandra her insulin in about fifteen minutes. Then I think I’ve got a date with Solid Snake.

It’s impossible for me to hear someone say “Step one” without my brain saying “Have lots of fun.”

If you think you can do a thing or think you can’t do a thing, you’re right. – Henry Ford

You know, I should really just cut it right down to the bone and admit it. I want to make porno movies. Seriously. I need to combine my two passions together. Film making and porn. I think I’d be a fantastic porno writer/director.

I’m 100% serious. I have no idea how one becomes a porno film maker, but I’m totally gonna find out.

So I need to reformat my computer. Reinstall Windows. I’ve already moved everything important from my C drive to my E drive. I’ll lose a pile of program, but those can always be redownloaded.

There’s nothing stopping me. I’m not chatting. I’m not getting any emails. All I’m doing is sitting here listening to music and looking at random shit on the internet. Really, there’s nothing stopping me from just doing it… except that I’m ever so lazy.

So after American Idol (or, the first half of it that I watched at least) tonight, Jewel is officially BACK on my list. Not because she’s any more or less hot than she was, but after watching her on American Idol I’ve come to realize that she is no longer famous for being a singer, but for being someone who does guest spots on TV shows. Her career has hit a slump, which, in my books, makes her more accessible than she once was. As I’ve explained in the past, my list is not only based on the hotness or my desire for the female celebrities in question, but also on the potential for actual doings of it. I’m not going to put Catherine Zeta Jones on the list because, well, even if I did meet her, there’s no WAY she’d ever sleep with me. Jewel might actually sleep with me, so she’s on the list.

Tom Petty fucking rules. He’s one of those guys who’s just always there, modestly, consistently making good music. I take Tom Petty for granted. He’s like the Christopher Walken of the music world. He’s been doing pretty much the same thing for thirty years. He’s rarely the center of attention. He’s just kind of there, off to the side, doing his thing. Even if the material he’s producing isn’t his best, it’s still enjoyable watching him work. When you see him, it’s like “Hey! It’s Tom Petty!” You don’t get all excited and camp out for tickets when he comes to town, but you’d certainly go see him if there were tickets still available. If you’ve got the night off of work and some extra cash. But you’d sure miss him if he was dead.

That would be a sad day… the day Tom Petty dies. It would be say because suddenly he’s not there anymore. Good old Tom Petty. Kind of like when Mr. Rogers died. I wasn’t exactly watching Mr. Rogers consistently when he died, but it was comforting to know that he was still there. That’s how I feel about Tom Petty. It’s nice just knowing that he’s there.

I go through phases. Maybe a few days a year, where I’ll listen to a shitload of great Tom Petty songs. The Waiting, American Girl, Don’t Come Around Here No More, Breakdown, I Won’t Back Down, Refugee, Running Down a Dream, Here Comes my Girl. Good shit.

But it only lasts a few days. Then it’ll be another year or so until I pop that greatest hits cd back in. It’s just one of those things.

anyway, I’m going to actually reinstall Windows soon. Just as soon as the Keeley Hazell sex tape finishes downloading. Until next time, enjoy this video!

Tom Hanks as James Bond. Very clever.

current music: Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers-Breakdown

So, you know how I posted yesterday about my burning ring of fire and the abomination that is flowing from my bunshole?

It’s still bad… but today I realized that the big package of TP that Sandra and I bought on Friday night is… still in the trunk of the car. And the car is at Sandra’s work and there is no more TP in the house. And it snowed last night so I don’t want to have to go and dig the car out of the snow just so I can drive to the store and buy more TP when we already have a million rolls, they just aren’t at the house!

GODDAMNIT!

So I’m gonna make due with like, tissues, until Sandra brings the car home.

You know how I feel today? I feel like this:

SITTING ON A PARK BENCH

DUN DA DUN DUN DUN

WATCHING LITTLE GIRLS WITH BAD INTENT!

FEELING LIKE A DEAD DUCK!!!

DUN DA DUN DUN DUN

SPITTING OUT PIECES OF HIS BROOOKEN LUUUCCK!!!

…

AQUALUNG!