Hey. What’s up?

You know…

I don’t care what anyone says. Sometimes… not very often, but sometimes… I put this song on… and like, it’s still pretty good. I mean, I’m not going to start menstruating or gonna get all Lillith Fair or anything, but like… it’s kind of a fun song. Cheesy as fuck, but fun. It’s like… Closer to Fine by the Indigo Girls. Maybe I just like lesbian music. Just kind of like makes me nod my head back and forth. And think of He-Man.

Speaking of He-Man…

Ya know, I got on a small He-Man kick a while back (after finding those redesign concept drawings) and I still haven’t quite scratched my He-Man itch. I even own double DVD set of the best episodes of Masters of the Universe (someone traded it in to the store a few months back, it went out used for 7 bucks. I was like SNAG) and I haven’t watched it yet. I think I want to get completely baked before I put those DVDs in.

Anyway, my point is that I haven’t seen the Masters of the Universe movie since I saw it at the Victorville Drive-In (double featured with Dragnet, staring Tom Hanks and Dan Aykroyd REPRESENT) and I happened upon a clip of the climatic final batter between He-Man and Skeletor.

Was this movie really THIS bad? I remember it being somewhat awesome. I guess being nine years old puts a different perspective on things.

I like how in the middle of their sword fight it occasionally cuts to a shot of The Dolf just swinging his sword around for no apparent reason.

Hey… did you know that you can put &fmt=18 at the end of any youtube URL and get a higher quality version of the video? It doesn’t always work (if the video was originally shitty quality before it was uploaded) but it can make a pretty sizable difference sometimes.

Hey, speaking of gay shit (like that song and He-Man in general) I’ve been thinking about my usage of the word "gay" and whether or not it’s appropriate. I mean, I have gay friends. And when I’m around said gay friends, I generally automatically say things are "gay" far less. It’s not so much self censorship as it is just avoiding any conflicts or misinterpretations of my intentions. I think that, for the most part, people who know me know that I’m fairly pro-gayness in the literal sense. I mean, like, pro-homos and such. I don’t party at gay pride parades or hang out in gay bars, but that’s mostly because I don’t go to any parades or any bars.

I think the issue at hand is what has become the definition of this particular usage of the word "gay". I don’t know exactly how it started, or if it was ever really intended to be disparaging towards homosexuals, but there is definitely a meaning to the word that I don’t really know another word that works in the same way.

It’s not like that weird four of five years when people were saying that things were "jewish". I never really got that. It was interchangeable with "lame" and seemed to happen exclusively as a means to be controversial and un-PC. I always found it to be kind of a pathetic thing to say. Not because it was offensive (shit, I’m not Jewish, so whatever) but because it was such a childish thing to do. It was like "Yeah, I just said that! What’re you gonna do about it?!". My brother used to say it a lot, and I don’t think he even knew what being Jewish actually was.

But saying something is "gay" isn’t really the same thing.

Okay, here’s an example.

He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, the cartoon I watched as a kid, is not "gay" in the way that we’re discussing. That being said, it IS gay, if you mean "gay" literally. That is, it’s incredibly homoerotic.

Pokemon is totally gay, in the context we’re discussing, while not actually having any particular homosexual overtones (that I’m aware of. I can’t watch it because it’s so gay).

I can’t really tell you WHY Pokemon is gay, because, well, gay is the only word I can think of to describe it. That’s why I still use the word "gay" even though there’s potential to offend people or give people the impression that I have a problem with gay people.

Here’s a list of 20 things that are Gay without actually having anything to do with homosexuality:

1. Fairy Magic (especially if you spell it "Faery Magick")
2. Anime
3. Giant trucks that are jacked up fifteen feet off the ground without actually being a monster truck. IE, a jacked up Ford F150 with huge tires.
4. Being a huge Tori Amos fan
5. Horses
6. Fanny packs
7. Second Life
8. Having a house that smells like cat pee
9. Men with pony tails
10. Mini carrot sticks
11. Most things Canadian (a few notable exceptions are Wolverine, Michael Ironside, Neil Young and… that’s about all I can come up with right now)
12. Dogs wearing clothes
13. Tattoos of Chinese characters (or any other foreign language you don’t speak for that matter)
14. Cats (the musical, though the animals themselves can be kind of gay sometimes as well)
15. Speaking French
16. Telling people that you’re saving trees by using your own fabric shopping bags
17. Adults sucking on pacifiers. In fact, pretty much anything done by anyone at a Rave. Also, anything neon.
18. Smart cars
19. Dolphins. At least, people who like dolphins. Dolphins themselves aren’t exactly gay. They’re too capable of killing the shit out of you to actually be gay.
20. Curling.

I could go on forever, but I’m going to leave it at that. Fairy Magic is #1 on the list because, to me, it’s the epitome of "Gay". It’s gayness at it’s most ubergay. You don’t get gayer than Fairy Magic, unless you start adding other things from the list to the equation. For instance, a man with a pony tail and a dolphin shirt and a tattoo in Chinese that means "Strong Spirit" on his ankle carrying his dog wearing a sweater into a Fairy Magic circle while listening to Tori Amos and eating mini carrot sticks out of his fanny pack. That’s even gayer. But, you know, it’s cumulative.

Now, one could argue that I’m simply using "gay" as interchangeable with "lame" but that’s not entirely true. You see, if you’re playing basketball and you throw the ball and miss horribly, that could be called "lame" but not "gay" necessarily. My car (the Ford Tempo, not the Acura) is fairly lame, but not at all gay. It’s way too standard issue and boring to be gay. If it had lots of bumper stickers for radio stations and telling people to "Free Tibet" and to "kill your TV" then it would be gay. But for now, it’s just lame.

I’m sorry, but "gay" is here to stay. It’s just one of the many words in the English language that means too many things.

If there was another word that meant the same thing as "gay" in the context I mean it, then I’d use it instead. But there just isn’t.

Thought it was worth sharing here.

one time when I was a kid I felt the need to try and use window caulking as ear plugs. Basically I just stuck the clay like white stuff they were using to put the glass that we (my friend and I) broke back into the window in my ear.

Cut to six months later and I’ve got a massive ear infection and a hunk of hard white plaster lodged deep in my ear canal.

They had to try and flush it out or break it up with jets of water. Neither of which worked, so they went in with a little iron hook and broke it up and pulled it out.

That was the most painful thing that’s ever happened to me. It was kind of cool afterwards though because I could suddenly hear out of that ear again after months of being used to not hearing.

current music: Pink Floyd-Brain Damage

when I was a little kid, our family went to Universal Studios.

They had a Conan stunt show thing where a dude dressed up as Conan fought a big mechanical dragon thing that breathed fire.

After the show, the guy that played Conan was out and about talking to people, still in his Conan gear. I got to go up and talk to him.

I thought I’d just met Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The next day I went to school and I was talking to the other kids all like “Pfft. While you dipshits were jerking off to your Ataris, I was chilling with motherfucking ARNOLD BEEYOTCH!”

and they were like “No you weren’t you fucking liar.”

The end.

People often say “If I could go back and change things, I wouldn’t” and that they have no regrets.

Not me. I have TONS of regrets. Most of them are from my youth.

For instance: The time I split open my best friend’s little brother’s forehead with a piece of wood.

I was about thirteen or fourteen. Travis was my best friend and lived next door to me on George AFB in Southern California, just outside of Victorville. The base is now closed and a ghost town. I haven’t been back, though I hear it’s quite an interesting experience. They filmed the “abandoned base” scenes from Hulk there.

But at the time, it was quite a lovely place to live. A little oasis in the middle of the Mojave Desert. Townhouses all grouped together, each one containing a kid that you probably knew or would know soon enough. It was a very surreal and lovely way to live. Essentially a gated community with people of all races living together fairly pleasantly.

Travis lived next door to me on Massachusetts Court. He had a little brother, Garret, who was about 10 or so and a little sister, Shanda, who was maybe five. There was a park behind our house. We were on the edge of the base, right where it met the sand endless desert. It wasn’t really endless, but when you’re fourteen and you don’t really want to walk more than three miles or so out into it, it may as well have been.

There was an amazing amount of cool shit to find out in that desert, both natural and man made. They did a lot of their war training (essentially playing paintball) out there and tended to leave all sorts of sweet crap for us to play with. They built REAL forts and fox holes and left blank M-16 cartridges for us to play with. It was also a fantastic place to light off illegal firecrackers that you spent your lunch money on, buying from the kid at school whose parents make regular trips to Mexico and he brings them back. Black Cats mostly.

There were all kinds of amazing things in the desert. I remember once walking with my friend Chris King to the Mojave River and coming across a burned down trailer park. That was pretty wild. It had obviously burned quite a while ago, but there was still all kinds of shit left over from whoever’s live had been destroyed in the fire.

There was strange shit out there. Like an ancient phone booth, with a phone in it like the ones on the Andy Griffith Show where you hold the bell shaped piece to your ear and talk into the little horn on the front of the box.

Another thing about the desert is that people tended to dump shit there… lots of garbage and unused building supplies. On this particular day, Travis and Garret and I believe my brother Josh and I found a pile of press board, like they use on roofs, under the shingles. They were little pieces, all cut to maybe seven by seven inches.

Those pieces flew like a motherfucker when you threw them like a Frisbee.

So that’s what we did. We started chucking them randomly into the desert. They were heavy enough that you could throw them over hand, whipping it to the side, and it would soar up into the sky and out of sight, leaving a tiny little billow of dust in the distance where it landed.

Eventually we got tired of that and decided to start throwing them at each other. We could go out three or four hundred feet and still throw them well over each other’s heads.

The goal was, of course, to hit each other, though I really don’t think any of us considered the actual ramifications of what that would do to our bodies.

We found out.

I threw a board with a particularly high arc. It sailed up high and started coming back to earth at a tremendous speed. At first I felt the surge of joy at such a spectacular throw. Then I realized that it wasn’t just going in Garret’s general direction, but flying directly at him and he didn’t see it coming. Up till that point we’d done a pretty good job of running out of the way of oncoming pieces of wood. They were pretty big and easy to see. This one took a drastically different flight pattern and he had no idea it was coming right at him.

It nailed him right in the head. At happened so fast that it pretty much went like this:

I threw the board.
The board arched almost straight up and down rather than gradual crest that they usually took.
I noticed that Garret didn’t see the board coming.
The board hit Garret in the head.
Garret screamed.
I yelled “HEY!!! LOOK OUT!!”
All hell broke loose.

Once we realized what had happened, Travis and I ran over to where Garret was. Josh (my brother) was already over there, because it had been Me and Travis against Garret and Josh, each on other ends of the park.

By the time Travis and I got over there Garret’s face was a mask of blood. One thing I didn’t know at the time is that head wounds bleed like a motherfucker. Wrestling on TV taught me that. A wrestler can apply the tiniest of cuts on his forehead and end up with a fountain of blood streaming down his face.

This was not one of those times. Garrets head was gashed open, right across his hairline. Blood was everywhere. We all helped him back to his house, where his dad had come out, hearing Garret screaming. Travis’ dad asked what the hell had happened. I told him that Garret got hit in the head with a piece of wood. He asked how he got hit in the head. I told him that we were throwing wood at each other. And he asked “Why the hell would you do that?!” and we said “Cause it was fun.” Travis’ dad never really understood what could have possibly been fun about that, but I guess you had to be there.

Garret ended up with a good whack of stitches in his head and I was a tortured soul for quite a while. I felt incredibly guilty about it. It was a stupid ass thing to do, and while we were ALL doing it, and it could have been any one of us, Travis and I were older and should have known better.

But, I guess it was one of those incredibly stupid things that kids do when they’re bored and unattended to. I know I’ve done TONS of shit that could have easily ended up with someone dead or severely hurt. I think Garret’s head was probably the worst casualty of my stupid antics in the desert.

So that would be on my list of regrets. One of MANY things from my childhood.