A Different Kind Of Beautiful

Living Paycheck To Credit Card

2012-02-29T18:34:00.000-05:00

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those only of the author and may only coincidentally reflect those of Mystic Metals, its employees, or associates. All responses should be posted as comments here, or mailed directly to the author, A. Robert Basile, at ihatebasile@gmail.com.

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Living Paycheck To Credit Card

2.29.12

Stressful week, kids. I suppose those happen once in a while. You have a one in fifty two chance that your week is going to suck the festering blood from the rotting corpse of life. For those keeping score at home, that about a 2% chance. Which, when you put it in those terms, isn’t so bad. They happen. And when they do, I suppose we have to put our helmets on (or keep them on if you’re one of those kids) and trudge through it. The light at the end of the shitty week tunnel is that baseball starts soon. And then everything will be peachy keen jelly bean. Also, it’s Leap Day. That’s kind of cool. Double also, Davy Jones died today.

Every once in a while, and far too often I think, I write about the workforce and modification. It comes up frequently and tends to be an issue that is still without solution for those of us who participate in the culture. On the whole, I look at it this way: We chose to be modified. We didn’t wake up one day with two inch lobes and sleeves. We weren’t born with split tongues or scarification designs or sub-dermal implants. We bought them, and hopefully we made solid and smart decisions when we did. This is the chief element of my jobs and mod discussion. With that said, I do believe that most qualified modified people can achieve success in an occupation of his choosing. Modified people, on the whole, are no different than unmodified people, therefore we can likely do most jobs for which we’re qualified that unmodified folks can. Still, if any of you Mystic Mobsters (which is what I call fans of Mystic Metals Body Jewelry, my generous sponsor) think you’ll be an investment banker or state supreme judge with three inch lobes, a four gauge labret, a zero gauge septum, and pointed ears you’re probably a bit naive about what society at large accepts as aesthetic. We’re a little ways off from that, I think.

So we have to be smart about it. Especially women. The scrutiny of lady types is much more intense, I think, than that of man types. But this rant isn’t about that. Not entirely. No, this rant is about how, for the first time in a long while, I am in the position of trying to figure out what job I can do with this face. And as you know, I have another layer that I can’t do anything about. Let’s talk about it.

First off, if any of the guys in my band are reading this (which I think only Q reads these, and I appreciate that from him), no I’m not quitting the band. You kids know that I play bass in an above average cover band in the Philadelphia area. I think I’m good at it; I’m a solid bass player, an interesting stage performer, an affable team member, and can talk to strangers easily. I also don’t drink, so when my band members get embarrassingly drunk (which happens too frequently, in my humble opinion), I can get the truck loaded and drive home. I don’t hate my job, I hate all of the horseshit that accompanies it. Like any job, I suppose. Except ballpark greenskeeper. That job is probably perfect. But I’m broke. Because of money mismanagement and an agency that doesn’t seem to want to pay us, I am owed quite a bit of money for work I’ve already done. Sparing you kids the boring details, I’m broke and working my ass off. I need to supplement my income, since writing nets me zero dollars. (Please buy my Nook and Kindle books.)

So it’s time for me to reenter the normal people workforce. The jobs I had before the band were telemarketer and porn store clerk, so my mods weren’t much of a problem. Except from my boss Bill at the porn store who broke my balls about it incessantly. Little did he know, we mocked his horrendous eczema so bad that we started calling him eBill-a. Eat that, you leper prick. And no, Bill; not all British comedies are funny. Stop making me watch them all day. OK, enough about the leper porn king Bill. I need a job. We all know that the job market is shit right now. The way the president is running this country into the overly protected ground, it makes me wish for a second coming of Jimmy Carter. I can’t believe I just said that. Where are we now? 8%? 9%? Some states at 12%.

This isn’t political commentary, though if more companies had more lax modification standards, some of us in the mod community could be put to work and contribute to deficit reduction. But that’s a different rant. This rant is a boring one about how I need a job. Let’s get back to that.

The mod thing isn’t a huge problem for me. Most of my mods can be removed for working hours. I’m not scarred or implanted. My lobes will look pretty gross, but that’s not really my problem, is it. Also, I’m a pretty good charmer, so I may be able to use the force to let my boss let me keep them in. (And yes, nerds; I know force should be capitalized.) My bigger problem is my disability. Took me nine hundred words to get to the point; I probably should avoid jobs in writing.

Yeah, I know there are laws that protect the hiring of people who are crippled like me. But let’s invoke the words of Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes for a second: “Be for real.” There is a certain realism in the thinking of a disabled person trying to find a job. At least there ought to be. There are things I can’t do and applying to those jobs is dumb. Also, the competition I face is slightly greater. If I apply to the Apple store, for instance, and am equally qualified as an able person who requires less attention to special needs, I’d expect that job to go to the able person. Yeah, I know; Shut up, Andy and go find a job; it’s hard for everyone.

What would make my life easier is to have a wheelchair for work. The main symptom of my disability is pain. And standing for an extended period of time causes pain. A lot of it. A vomit causing, migraine making, doubled over for two days kind of pain. If I had a chair, I could do work more easily. I know, mom; you don’t want to hear that. I know that you (mom) have an aversion to my accepting a chair, and frankly, so do I. But if it increases my quality of life, and more importantly my probability to make money, then I think it’s a good idea. This is where all that back pay from my band comes in. If I had all of that right now, it would go into buying a chair (which are deceptively expensive) and making my life a little more tolerable. (That’s why I mentioned that band money shit earlier. Foreshadowing is a shadow that comes before.) If the guys in my band are reading this, which they’re probably not, I hope they can see why I’ve been a cunt about that back pay recently.

What am I talking about in this subpar, not at all entertaining blog? Well, we all have this concept of doing what you have to do to survive or better yet, succeed. We’re all trying to succeed, and if you’re an individual who would rather live paycheck to credit card, sitting on your couch covered in cheese doodle dust and bitching that the system is fuct up and doesn’t serve you specifically, then we’re not going to see eye to eye. I believe in hard work and no handouts. Or at least, very few handouts. (And if you think I am cashing disability checks, ask the state of New Jersey why I’ve been rejected three times.) I am a huge supporter of knowing yourself, loving yourself, being yourself, embracing your beauty, and sharing with others the positive personification of that. That is why I love modification so much, but in a situation where I have to choose which prescriptions to fill in a given month because the money isn’t there, then perhaps the mods have to take a break until I get back onto my feet. It upsets me to say that, trust me, but we all have to put ourselves in the best position to succeed, right? Now that I think of it, I bet my beard is a bigger problem than my lobes. That thing is scary and I think it has a mind of its own. A fly got stuck in it and couldn’t get out the other day! True story. But what do I do about my disability? I can’t really leave that at home in a jewelry box and put it back on when I get home from work. If I could do that, I’d drive up to the Meadowlands and bury it in one of those landfills where the mafia hides bodies. They know all the best hiding places. OK, I’ve completely lost control of this blog. I’m going to go home now. Don’t worry; next week’s blog will be much better. Stay beautiful, kids.

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A Place For A Crippled Freakshow

2012-02-22T13:42:00.001-05:00

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A Place For A Crippled Freakshow

2.22.12

Everyone at the bookstore is kind of a dick today. (Not the staff, of course; they’re always great.) I guess that’s what I get for leaving my house at eleven o’clock. Which I never do. Because mornings suck. Real badly. But I have a lot of projects I’m working on right now, and I needed the time to write. Like the blog (this is number 340), I’m writing a fairy tale, and a bass playing memoir about my experiences of being in bands. I’m also trying to find an agent to publish the three other novels I have finished, and trying to figure out how to market and sell the book I have available on the Nook and Kindle. Working at night blows because it makes working in the morning blow more. If you have a Nook, though, buy my short story book (http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/people-i-know-a-robert-basile/1108161234), and if you have a Kindle, get you can get it too (http://www.amazon.com/people-i-know-ebook/dp/B006VECZTI/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1329930840&sr=8-2).

A Facebook friend of mine had a birthday recently. I have never met this woman, but I believe that we can call each other friends. She’s one of the Rogers sisters who are blog fans of mine. I appreciate their readership. She is beautiful and interesting and unique. What came to my mind this week when I dropped the Facebook happy birthday was that many of my readers have become my internet friends. And even though I hate people and those stupid photos with the captions added to them and music videos by bands that are just absolutely lousy and photos of pregnant bellies and bemoaning posts about being single and misinformed political posts about single issue politics, I do maintain somewhat of a relationship with those collected in my Facebook and Twitter lists of friends. I am not terribly old (my birthday is next month, so send gifts), but sometimes things like Facebook and the relationships I’ve forged through it point to my age.

Before I was modified, I never thought that I would be a part of a community in which all of its members shared a common battle cry and interest. Before I was modified, I had dial up internet, no cell phone, no cable TV, and only the friends that I could hug and handshake in person. Then I was modified and everything changed. That’s not to say that the internet and Facebook were waiting for my labret to happen, but in my narcissism, I’d like to believe that is true. I was a new bass player then, and I got a labret because I liked the way it looked. Now I have hundreds of Facebook friends and thousands of reads a month on my blog. How the hell did that happen to an individual who would be much more content living in the woods eating ramen and drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, writing on a typewriter without a cell phone or internet and looking at trees for a couple hours a day. That’s me, by the way. And yes, Nanci, I’d take you with me. You’re pretty.

But that’s not the case, and I equal parts hate and love it. I hate it because I hate people as a rule (oh of course not you, reader who thinks I’m only talking about him). But I love it because we have a community. A support group of related interests made into a likeminded think tank sort of thing where we can vent frustrations that we all understand, express joys that may not read to those outside the community, or just share ideas that to others may seem a bit loony. Example. I recently got earweights to help stretch, and beforehand I asked of my modified friends (on the internet) their opinions. The response was supportive and informative. I made the same mention to my unmodified friends, and I had to explain what an earweight is.

What am I talking about, exactly. I’m not sure, and that makes me a shitty writer, I suppose. If anyone has a thesis lying around, forward it to me; I could use it. But thanks to my cousin Dave and his website (www.mysticmetalsbodyjewelry.com), I have been given the license to make these friends. And I’m glad for it. I owe him for giving me a place to be welcomed and familiar. You cats and kittens who read me frequently know that I have a disability from birth, so ‘fitting in,’ though I’m not a huge proponent of the importance of ‘fitting in,’ has been a challenge. Through modification I have found that hole for my peg. All unintentional sexual innuendo aside, that has been a mind saving godsend for me, and I believe that my speculating that finding a community for you has had the same effect.

Now, I’m not saying that any likeminded group of individuals ought to isolate into halls and rooms populated only with similar individuals. It is very important, if not vital, to the understanding of society as a whole to experiment in other groups; to see what others unlike you are doing, why they do it, what motivates them to do it, and what they get out of doing it. After all, we in the modified community expect that polite questioning respect from the unmodified, so oughtn’t we have a point of view similar to what we expect of those outside the community? It’s only fair and just, and it applies to any number of ideologies to which we subscribe. As a liberal, talk to a conservative. As a white, talk to a black. As a gay, talk to a straight. Educated and first hand opinions are more valuable than ignorant ones, aren’t they.

Often, though, with modification it is difficult to explain to others our own motivation in participating. What makes our culture and society unique is that we choose to be a part of it. I didn’t choose to be part of the Italian-American community, but I did choose to be a part of the mod community. That option, that ability to choose to subscribe is often a hurdle for those unfamiliar with mod. And since it is a choice, we probably oughtn’t approach their ignorance (in the literal sense of the word) with offense or malice. Of course there are those who intentionally say things to hurt us, like any group. There are those wordless stares too. Those get old very quickly, yet there’s a new one everyday. But in fairness to our community as a representative of the beauty that we exude through modification, a smile and polite hello speaks volumes to our attitude and maturity.

Some days that is more difficult than others, isn’t it, kids? That’s why we have our safety net, our community to which we may retreat for a time and realize that there are others who are stareless, judgeless, and open to the unique beauty we personify. I’m glad for our Mystic Metals community, the Mystic Mob I call it, in that I can go onto our Facebook page or onto my Twitter and I can say, “Hey, Jennete is on, and though I’ve never met her, I’m going to talk to her because we already have something in common. Our ice has already been broken.” It feels good. And some day, when I’m a famous writer (hold on a sec while I stop laughing at that), I’ll travel the country and hang out with all of the Mystic Mobsters. Don’t hold your breath on that; I’m broke as shit.

It’s strange. Because over ten years ago I decided to get a labret in my lip, I now play Xbox with a girl named Becks, I look at modeling photos from a girl named Emmy, I hear about Afghanistan from a soldier named Matt, I learn French from a girl named Marjorie, I send and receive birthday wishes from countless freaks across the country. From some stupid labret. And the residual effect of all of that is that I feel welcomed and loved and comfortable in a place that doesn’t care about how big my lobes are, doesn’t care about my septum ring, doesn’t care about my tattooed hand, and especially doesn’t care about my handicap. You cats and kittens have given a crippled freak a place to go when the legs get bad, the lobes get bigger, and the understanding seems slight. Thanks, kids. You do much more for me than I do for you. Let’s all virtual group hug. Aww. That was nice. I should say something metal so that people don’t think I’m a sissy. I’ll just throw on a SLAYER (always spelled in caps, of course) record and sway back and forth at the bookstore like a loon. There we go. I’m tough again. Grr. Stay beautiful, kids.

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The Women In Mod Article Has No Luster

2012-02-15T18:57:00.000-05:00

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The Women In Mod Article Has No Luster

2.15.12

Looking for something to write about today, I came across some responses to that Lisa Khoury article that we addressed a couple of weeks ago. I’m not going to address it any much more, but I have to say; you guys made mine the best article out there. Thanks, kids. It means a lot to me. Also, yesterday my beautiful lover Nanci and I went to the zoo, and I saw gorillas and it was awesome. Also, a baby orangutan tried to hug my girlfriend. If you’ve never seen a baby orangutan, image search it. Smile guaranteed.

So in searching for something to write about today, I came across yet another article about women and tattoos. I love women, I love tattoos; but I’m getting kind of irritated writing about this so much. What is going on with people just realizing that women are modified? Or does it just seem that way? Probably the latter. Let’s talk about it a little bit.

The article I read today was not really a commentary. It was more of a local news fluff thing about ‘hey, have you heard that women are getting tattooed? Really! Women!’ Which is what you ought to expect from local news, I suppose. Cat in a tree, top story at eleven kind of bullshit. But the tones of articles like this present a certain attitude that seems a little absurd to me. Most of these women in mod articles (most, not all; right Lisa Khoury?) have this ‘this is just great that these women people have decided to participate in this activity and we should all clap vigorously as if it were a kindergarden Sunday school passion play performance.’ Isn’t this a little insulting to women who modify?

Historically, yes; women have not been the ones who have partaken in the culture. Save, of course, the carnie attraction tattooed and bearded lady. Now, ladies growing beards as an increasing trend is news, but this isn’t about beards (though beards are awesome. See also; me). But if the awe and wonder of women modifying is leaning on history and the past for its credibility, then ought we also write these types of articles about women playing sports and getting CEO jobs and being lesbian and choosing not to marry and have kids? These activities (and being lesbian isn’t an activity, I know; save the hate mail) were just as unlikely in the era that women with modifications was unlikely. The past, and it is a growingly distant past, dictated that tattoo modification was reserved for sailors and bikers and carnies and the aboriginal tribes of wherever. If that is the same past we are going to reference for our outrageous attraction to the modern woman modifying, then I oughtn’t be modified. You probably oughtn’t be modified either. Those mod butchers with tattoo reality shows don’t fall into that category either. Not actors nor musicians nor business owners nor warriors nor athletes. So shouldn’t we be reading articles about all these types indulging in modification as well? Breaking news: Writer and bass player from New Jersey stretches lobes and tattoos arms. Story at 10:30. But that’s not news, is it. And that’s because men have embraced the art on a steeper rate than women have. And I get that, but shouldn’t we be in a mental position of ‘who gives a shit?’

Women in the man’s world. Blah, blah, fleergle, flingle. I’m not in that boat, don’t get me wrong. And yes, I’m not a women so I don’t know how it is and all of that happy horseshit. I know what I see, however. And I see women’s roles in society changing. It’s a fine thing. Women can do anything a man can; isn’t that the message? I believe that for the most part. I mean, I don’t think a woman can beat Lou Ferigno in a fist fight, but who can? I’m looking at you, Chuck Norris. And they do. I mean women do man things, not beat up Lou. And yes, I understand that the struggle of women in society has been a long and hard fought battle. I’d never discredit that. Trust me. Or else I’ll have to hear my hippie mother go on about marches and signs and ‘bringing the boys home’ with sit-ins and other crap that I in no way support as policy changing behavior. (I love you, mom.) But women breaching the tattoo barrier isn’t news to me. Women fighting closer to the front lines at war is news to me. (And that’s happening now; look it up, look it uppers.) That’s a much more social timber changing event than ‘women mod more.’ A woman president, news. A women with a chest piece, not news. A woman pro baseball player, news. A woman with a six gauge septum, not news.

We have an interesting protective attitude toward our women in this culture. And we probably ought. We should always be a little more protective of the women. They make the people, after all. Genocide lesson number 72: You want to destroy a society, kill the women so they can’t make more people. But we also protect them from things from which they need no protection. Like modification. After all, aren’t women the ones who paint their faces and wear the fancy clothes and paint the fingernails and pay much more attention to their aesthetic comfort than men? I’ve seen very few cats with foundation on their faces and fingernail paint. So wouldn’t it serve logic to say that women participating in the aesthetic beauty and comfort that modification brings should be more logical than a man getting modded?

I’m a pretty even guy. Black and white thinker, right and wrong, crime and punishment. I am a fan of allowing a someone to do a something without criticism. Then, if he fails, criticize. If he succeeds, praise. This goes for any person type. White, black; man, women; gay, straight. Let him do what he wants and screw the sociological backlash. That backlash will inevitably become frontlash (what?) over time. That’s how things change. Take a modified woman and send her back to 1954 and see the reaction. Take the same woman and send her to 2537 and see the reaction. Let people of different flavors do what they want to do and let them deal with the assholes of society who are tethered to rules that only still apply in the minds of people and not actually in the timber of the culture and society.

Should we be excited that women are more participatory in the culture of modification? Absolutely. But c’mon; let’s stop treating it as if it’s a ‘yay, you did it! Good for you! Yay!’ kind of thing. That’s how a lot of these articles read, and that’s what chafes my ass more than anything. I’m not a trophy for everyone kind of guy. I’m the kind of cat that says praise for success, tutor for failure, normalize for comfort. I don’t care much what shape or flavor you are, what your crotch looks like or what gets your sex juices flowing. You want to do something? You want to try something? Do it. Try it. I’m just not sure that the Icee-Pop after the Little League game win or lose response is all that appropriate. You’re a broad with three hundred hours of work? Awesome. I’d like to meet you and hang out with you. But let’s keep the ‘isn’t that strange and awkwardly wonderful’ golf clap for the two year old who took his first step. Is that when they start to walk? Two? I have no idea. Let’s keep the legitimate pride in our culture for the adults. I love modified women. I love unmodified women. I also love modified men and unmodified men. (Take that where you will, Dan.) Beauty doesn’t know a gender or a race or a whatever. Beauty knows only humanity, and that’s what we ought to be praising. Stay beautiful, kids.

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Roger Maris’ Least Favorite Glyph

2012-02-08T16:50:00.000-05:00

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Roger Maris’ Least Favorite Glyph
2.8.12
The bookstore is filled with a bunch of weirdos today. I am one of them, to be sure, but man. I have nursing students behind be talking about reproductive organs very loudly, some dude near the outlet who reacts as if he just woke up whenever I interact with him, a coffee girl (my friend Alana) who is trying to tell me that socialism is a good thing, some baby who keeps saying the same musical nonsense word over and over while his mother tries to figure out what it wants, and then myself who is sitting here listening to Hawkwind and looking up the benefits of having a partnership in a business in Sims 3 Pets. I should have stayed in bed and watched the snow from my window today.
Last week I wrote a blog called “Beauty With An Asterisk.” You cats and kittens seemed to like that one, and I appreciate all of the reads. If you didn’t read that one, shame. “Shame, shame, double shame” to quote the brilliant Stimpy of Ren and Stimpy fame. This rant isn’t a continuation of that, but I did like the title a lot. Asterisk. It’s a good word, and I think the title was very appropriate. Let’s all take a moment to reflect on how awesome I am. I want to talk more about that title today, and hopefully I can get another Red and Stimpy quote in there.
As a baseball fan, the asterisk is about as welcomed in my life as the ebola virus on my boy parts. You all should know why, and if you don’t, “shame, shame…” Damnit, I used that quote already. Anyway, it’s an interesting little nugget of attention. It draws eyes to more information. It draws focus to things additional, or limitations, or special cases. It tells us not to drive like a cocksucker in car commercials. It tells us that the thing we bought to do whatever job might actually not do the job. It tells us that the pills we’re taking may cause some insane side effect like priaprism or decapitation or (and I saw this one) vaginal discharge. It leads to more, and more is often good. It sends us places in the book we’ve not gotten to yet, like the index or the glossary. It further explains. It’s a powerful little thing, isn’t it.
But all of that isn’t terribly interesting. When used in the title of last week’s blog, “Beauty With An Asterisk,” it takes the brain into some different directions. Or at least, it was intended to. But that title jogged my crippled and feeble brain for the past week. Beauty with an asterisk. What is your asterisk? What footnote do you lead other towards when speaking of your own beauty? How heavy is that little mark to you and your beauty? Where does your asterisk send others?
My goal here in A Different Kind Of Beautiful is to talk about beauty. With no asterisks. It is to create looking glasses through which my readers can see things they may not have seen before. It doesn’t always work, I know, and that’s because I am a shitty writer. But I am not naive enough to think that those who have read me for all this time have suddenly accepted themselves in a glorious epiphany. That’s where the asterisks come in.
You are beautiful. And you know that. I know that. Others around you ought to know that as well. But I’m not that stupid; I know you have that thing. That one thing. That little thing that only you can see. You know that thing, that asterisk. That scar you always cover up with a scarf. The way your belly sits on your jeans. The bald spot (which for me is my entire head, but it’s still just a spot, damnit). Maybe it’s your nose or your eyes or some type of handicap you have that seems to be the biggest element of your aesthetic character when in fact it is much more subtle than you think. What is your asterisk. Think of it right now.
So we know we’re beautiful, and then we adorn that beauty word with the little mark that draws attention. When we see a word with an asterisk, how quickly do we gloss over the meaning of the actual word with the mark and search for the explanation to which the mark leads? We get tied up and wrapped up and other euphemisms with the word up in what the further explanation is and suddenly we forget what the word that had the mark actually meant in the context to begin with. That word was beauty. Remember that. None of us were born to the exact design that we would have preferred to be. I know I wasn’t. But in order for the beauty that we all have to be accentuated with the asterisks of what we dislike about ourselves, the beauty has to exist to start. You can’t put an asterisk on a word that isn’t there.
The asterisk can be a good thing in certain circumstances as well. It can motivate us to become healthier. It can get us to hit the gym or eat a salad. Those are good things. The interesting thing about the asterisks is that we put them there on our own. We’re not born with asterisks which means we are in control of them. Maybe your asterisk is that you have a great big scar on your face. You can’t control the scar’s being there, but you can control how much power you give the scar, and in turn, how much power you give to the asterisk that you’ve assigned to your beauty. Who is to say that the scar is beauty giving and not beauty robbing? Only you, really. When you feel beautiful, you exude beauty. In that, others will see the beauty before the asterisk and not the little mark before the beauty. My asterisk leads to a volume. It leads to a huge list of explanations that in themselves are tomes and tomes of information that dwarf the tiny little word to which the asterisk was attached. I have a scar on my spine that came from doctors cutting me open to take some shit out. That’s part of my asterisk. I have a spine that was never formed the way it was supposed to from the start. Asterisk. I have a giant nose, a bald head, bad legs, gnarled knuckles, a fat belly, a brain that doesn’t turn off, a dependency to psychotropic medication, nasty teeth, and a guilt that is crushing me in the way that the bad guy in RoboCop was crushed by the scrap metal after RoboCop stabbed him in the neck with the spike thing in his hand. Which was awesome. Best movie about a robot cop ever. Asterisks. But at the core, there is a beauty. There is an inherent being that cannot be corroded, like your own beauty. A stranger who sees me sees only my beauty until I direct him to where that asterisk leads; and that direction is my choice. Ought I send him to the footnotes, or ought I let him see the beauty of which I am proud?
We have a choice, kids. We can mark everything with an asterisk thereby telling others, ‘go here instead and ignore the important part,’ or we can slowly begin to unmark everything and tell others, ‘this is absolute without notation.’ Your beauty is absolute and deserves no notation. Yes, there are elements of you which you believe deserve notation with the little pointed thing. But your disdain for how you’re built or designed or how you’ve arrived to where you are now cannot deteriorate or demanufacture the beauty with which you’ve started. Yeah, my spine is shit, but I am still beautiful less to spite it, and more because of it. Our asterisks give us some perspective too sometimes, don’t they. Because I am a broken mess of biological material, my sense of beauty has been heightened; I am attuned to beauty because of the elements of myself that I find unbeautiful. Irony is a cruel mistress. If keeping your asterisk helps you see the word to which it is attached, keep it and know of its function to bring attention to the word itself. But if it is a weight which drags you beneath the waters of your dislike, erase it and just have the beauty word by itself and you’ll float above those waters and see the beautiful sky above you. Beauty is strong enough to survive on its own. Believe me. And really, are you going to let a little thing like an asterisk have that much power over you? At least pick something cooler, like the bracket with the point sticking out. That thing is awesome. Stay beautiful, kids.
*Here is the only Ren And Stimpy quote that came to mind: “This is a song about a whale. NO! This is a song about being happy.”

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Beauty With An Asterisk

2012-02-02T19:27:00.000-05:00

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Beauty With An Asterisk

2.2.12

It’s nice and quiet at the bookstore today. Very few people, the music is very low, no one is getting steamed milk drinks. It’s nice. No one is really here to socialize. Everyone’s working quietly. Some are reading magazines that they have no intention of buying. Others studying whatever. Quiet is nice. There should be more of it around. Check that; some teen girls just showed up and are reading texts to each other from teen boys they know and demonstrating how “totally stupid” they are. Here’s a sigh and a mourning of the quiet. You will be missed. Also, happy Groundhog’s Day.

I had planned to write something totally different today, but it was whiney and bitchy about my shitty life and I think we’ve had enough personal blogs for a couple weeks. Sorry, Becks and Butters. Stay tuned for more bitchy and whiney blogs in the coming weeks! Isn’t that a great tease? Just makes you want to tune in to see how pitiful I can be. Yeah; I’d rather watch Dog The Bounty Hunter instead as well. Who wouldn’t? But I was forwarded a link from the beautiful Steph Vicious, and I will try to write about that now. Narration of what I’m actually doing is fascinating, isn’t it? Sips coffee, checks phone, moves chair, gives dirty look to shitty shoe on teen girl, smiles at a baby, respectfully nods to an elderly couple…

The link lead me to an article, albeit a brief one, that was called “Why Put A Bumper Sticker On A Ferrari?” It was written by a girl (I’m intentionally not saying woman because I think it’s a funny way to be snarky and assholish) named Lisa Khoury who is an assistant news editor for The Spectrum. I bet it isn’t a pyramid like prism that makes groovy colors on the wall with sunlight. I think it’s a website or a paper or something. The article in the opinion section that Lisa Khoury wrote was about women and tattoo modification. By the clever title (which I’ve heard before, by the way) I think you can assume her position. Let’s talk about it.

Little girl Lisa Khoury writes about the beauty of women, the desire of men to ogle that beauty, and the retaining of class while maintaining and enhancing that beauty. Without tattoo modification, of course. The first paragraph is that typical, unmodified point of view about “rebellion” and 21^st century and having a “point to prove.” To those in our community of modification, we’ve heard this so many times that it has no meaning anymore. It’s an ignorant point of view to assume that the basis of modification and the motivation that instigates us to modify is to be rebellious or to make some kind of ‘look at me, I’m different because of this thing I did’ kind of point. But we don’t have to get into that because when I read these types of things, I tend to not glean much from it; it’s all recycled material and very rarely does it contain an original thought. Like Lisa Khoury’s opening.

She moves into a point with which I can and do agree. That women “are -naturally- beautiful creatures.” For those of you who have read me for the last nearly four years every week (yes, I know some blogs are a day or two late), you’ll know that I share this point of view, this mantra, and I celebrate it very loudly. Save your ‘you’re a misogynist’ emails, because if you know me, you know I’m not. Now go make me a pie. (That’s a joke, kids.) Lisa Khoury continues into an interesting area at this point. She talks about doing things to augment that beauty found uniquely in women. The first awkward thing is that Lisa Khoury contends that women hold the world’s beauty. I don’t wholly disagree, but I also don’t entirely agree either. It assumes that men cannot be beautiful, which would be in a stark contradiction to the idea that I hold which is that each living human has an inherent beauty in himself, man or woman. We are all beautiful. And all means genders of all types. Lisa Khoury continues on to say, “So what's more attractive than a girl with a nice body? I'll tell you what: a girl with class. Looks may not last, but class does. And so do tattoos. An elegant woman does not vandalize the temple she has been blessed with as her body.” This is another statement with which, in parts, I can agree. The nice body thing is mindless and ignorant. You’re beautiful if you’re five hundred pounds or missing a limb or made of green goo like Slimer. We’ll get back to that in a second. I agree that class is a much more becoming quality than most others in which we as a society place stock. Class rises, but this statement by Lisa Khoury as it resolves with the association of tattoos with vandalism creates the assumption that one (particularly a woman) with tattoo modifications cannot also be classy. This statement is untrue. See also, my mother. See also, my sister. See also, millions of mothers and daughters and business owners and wives and girlfriends and partners and lovers and artists and teachers. To assume that tattoo modification erodes the class of the wearer is careless and uneducated.

Lisa Khoury submits that if a woman is unhappy with her aesthetic (which clearly is why we all modify), then her options are as follows: “She goes to the gym. She dresses it up in lavish, fun, trendy clothes, enjoying trips to the mall with her girlfriends. She accentuates her legs with high heels. She gets her nails done. She enjoys the finer things in life, all with the body she was blessed with. But marking it up with ink? That's just not necessary.” This is the statement, at this point in the article, with which I take the most umbrage. This speaks very simply to me this idea: As introduced in the exposition, which we all learned in English class ought to present a thesis for the entire work, Lisa Khoury takes a position against the idea that some women chose to be “cutting edge,” yet the alternative presented is to dress up in “trendy clothes” and go to the mall and get your fingernails painted. Yes, women like things like clothes and malls and fingernail paint and high heels. But couldn’t one argue that submitting to stereotypes of what a group ought to be or how that group ought to behave stunts that group from maturing and evolving into something else away from those stereotypes? It’s like saying (follow me on this one) that since I’m Italian, I shouldn’t be modified because my aesthetic options ought to be reserved for pin striped suits, slimy mustaches and VO5 Hot Oil in my hair. Oh memories of having my grandmother babysit me…

The last several paragraphs of this Lisa Khoury jaunt attempt to facilitate her point that tattoos are poo on lady types and that a woman’s time ought to be budgeted more for “effort into a gym membership, or yoga classes, or new clothes, or experimenting with different hairstyles if you're craving something new with your body, not a tattoo.” Yes, Lisa Khoury; you’re right. Women ought to be worried about their aesthetic in the yoga class and the gym and the clothing store and the salon but in no way ought a woman enhance her aesthetic by way of the beautiful art we call tattoo modification in the tattoo shop. That would just be silly.

This last bit, which is actually in the middle of her cute little rant, has the most venom to me. And yes, Lisa Khoury; I know you didn’t intend on the venom. Such are the results of ignorance I suppose. Anyway, here’s the quote: “But at the end of the day, are you really a happier person? Has this tattoo, for instance, caused you to learn something new about yourself? Has it challenged you? Has it led you to self-growth? Nothing comes out of getting a tattoo.” If I sigh any more I’m going to pass out. Like when you were little and you’d hold your breath until you passed out. Yes, Lisa Khoury; there are those of us who garner happiness from tattoo modification. Yes, it has challenged some of us in ways that you seem to be unable to see. Yes, we have grown in ways such as comfort and aesthetic peace, like your up-do or high heels or mall shopping with the gals does for you. Many things come from modification. My modifications have helped me deal with a robbed sense of self that is sitting in a biohazard can somewhere in Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Using the body to help the brain? Whaa? Yeah, that’s right, Lisa Khoury. Tattoo and piercing modifications are a far cry from electroshock therapy or lobotomies. My modifications have given me my body back. After years and years and years of having men in white coats and rubber gloves touch your private parts and run long and frightening needles into your spine, a change in hairdo or a pair of high heels aren’t going to cut it. Having your body taken away from you is a dreadful and lonely happening. How do you reclaim it? Spending money at the mall with your lady friends, wooing and guffawing and swinging shopping bags around like a whirling dervish while eyeing every penis wielding human type in the place and assuming that he’s looking at you because you just came from yoga or the gym and you think you’re looking fine doesn’t really sound like a reclaiming celebration of your beauty to me. It sounds like a costume party. It sounds like making a masquerade of life and hiding behind what Cosmopolitan says to do and not what your womanhood is telling you to do to be more comfortable and to feel like the unique and beautiful woman you are.

Yes, Lisa Khoury; women are the epitome of beauty, not to preclude men from any beauty. And if a woman is to fully embrace her own unique beauty, then she ought to pursue the aesthetic that best befits her. We all know, Lisa Khoury, that you have this Carrie Bradshaw thing going on, and that’s very cute; but if you want a society of women who are only striving for the aesthetic beauty that has been laid by Sex And The City, then you are castrating a variety of beauty that breeds a social acceptance for the different and the unique and the alternative point of view toward what beauty is and what beauty can be. You want a society of women in high heels and fingernail paint and hairdos who are clothes shopping after a good stretch at yoga so that you can flaunt around for the attention of men? That’s awesome. Go do that. But if I want to live in the reality of Jersey Shore or Baseball Wives or Housewives of Wherever, I’ll use Wonka’s TV devise to put me in that imaginary reality. That sounds like a horrible way to live, Lisa Khoury. I like my reality with variety and points of view and celebration of beauty in all ways, be it make up and shoes or tattoo modification or nudists or suspension or implants or natural girls. Aren’t we supposed to celebrate beauty and not beauty with an asterisk? Stay beautiful, kids.

Let Lisa Khoury know what you think, kids:

lisa.khoury@ubspectrum.com

source:

http://www.ubspectrum.com/mobile/opinion/why-put-a-bumper-sticker-on-a-ferrari-1.2755789

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This Is Me Complaining For 1500 Words

2012-01-25T17:46:00.000-05:00

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This Is Me Complaining For 1500 Words

1.25.12

I have this problem. I’m going to share it with you now because I trust you kids for some reason. It’s a big problem, and I should probably save it for therapy, but here we go. I am worried, kids. I am very worried. I am worried that my cat in Sims 3 Pets will not reach the top of the hunting stat. I know, I know; it’s a tragedy, and I’m working on communicating with him so that we can reach a resolution acceptable to us both. My Sims cat, Lecter, just learned how to catch lizards, and I’m afraid he will become complacent to just catching lizards when there is a world of things to catch. Hopefully when I see him tonight (for an unhealthy three or four hours), he’ll be more willing to catch more than lizards. Here’s hoping.
I want to talk about some things that affect your beauty. No, I’m not talking about spray tans and hair product and labret piercings and Whopper value meals. Though Whopper value meals are evidence that God loves us. I’m talking about goals and aspirations. These are tricky things. They are tricky because, if you’re like me (and God help you if you are) you tether firmly success and beauty. I have difficulty feeling beautiful when failing. The lynchpin is that I am failing. A lot. So let’s talk about it.
I watched the State of the Union Address last night, which I hope most of you did as well. This is an election year which means it was our president’s fourth address. I’m not a democrat. I didn’t vote for our president, and I won’t vote for him again, but listening to what he has to say is very important, and supporting our system is also important because if one is dissatisfied with the system, one can’t hope to change it from an uneducated point of view. In the address, the president let fall from his face a lot of bullshit. Democrat or republican, that is mostly to be expected. Politicians are professional bullshitters that we choose to bullshit on behalf of us, after all. But in the address, the president talked about the country and its greatness. He talked about taxes and economy and foreign policy. He talked about what it means to be a successful American. He talked about greatness through success and hard work. Agree or not with his policies, one can’t really argue with American cheerleading.
I looked at my own successes, especially my recent ones, and I realized I don’t have many. I feel less beautiful. I think success is very important to one’s own beauty because it provides a pride and a comfort, and with the pride and comfort comes a confidence. A belief in self. And isn’t that all that beauty is, a belief and comfort in self? So how do I achieve it? How do I find that element of comfort and beauty that is nestled in success? Simply, to be successful. And like the president said, hard work and sacrifice will germinate into success.
Then I look at my work ethic and how that ethic has changed since whenever date in the past. I think, much to the likely observational disagreement of my folks, my work ethic has gotten more rigid and more intense. My writing has gotten more intense in terms of how much I write. My bass playing has gotten tighter and more focused. I released a Nook and Kindle book, and have gotten some more rejection letters from publishers and agents. I’m working harder than I ever have, and I’ve been doing this hard work for a long time. But these personal successes have not materialized into the comfort and beauty I’ve hoped they would. And why is that? Because my failures are still greater, and most of those failures are beyond my control which, if you talk to my therapist, I am not at all OK with.
What are these failures. I’m not getting any healthier, and the list of things I can’t do is getting longer. I make shit money for the amount of work I put in and the bullshit I have to put up with. I’m not selling many books and publishers don’t want my shit even though I firmly believe it is quality work. These things fall into the life goal category, and though life goals are not in any way achieved quickly, I feel as if they are getting smaller and narrower in the perspective, down the road view. The frustration of the combination of working harder and arriving further from my goals is beauty damaging. Making money, of course we all want that regardless how much this administration would like to punish the hard working successful. My health, of course every one wants to be healthy and wants to have the freedom to do anything with his body, though we both know we’re not going to be picking up cars or saving Lois Lane from falling off a building any time soon. (And for the percentage of citizens that have actually fallen off of a skyscraper, she’s really beating the curve.) As a writer, all I can do is write and hope. Refine my craft, work hard, write better work. Which is what I’m doing. Then submit to publishers and wait for the rejections. I’m doing the hard part, right? The hard part ought to be creating the world and the people and the scenarios, right? If it were easy, everyone would do it; isn’t that what Tom Hanks says in “A League Of Their Own?” The hard part of achieving my life goal to have a book on a shelf in a bookstore (or in the hands of a cougar at the beach) is very much something I cannot manipulate or control. That is very frustrating.
So what’s the difference between my sharing how I feel with you cats and kittens, and my having a woe is me bitch fest? Not much, it seems. But that’s not the point of this rant. The point of this rant is that there are other things that erode our beauty, and we all need to be conscious of these things. We need to know that we have some power (albeit very little sometimes) over things that can aid in our perception of self. Success can breed beauty just as quickly as modifications to our aesthetics. Modification helps me, as I am sure it does all of you, to more firmly grasp a sense of beauty; but achievement and the reaping of rewards from time spent and hard work fulfills a beauty that tattoo and piercing and suspension and hair dye and fingernail paint and new outfits and high heeled shoes and beards and tans and sexy glasses and giant purses and those stupid rain boots the kids wear now cannot. And it isn’t so much that those things can’t provide a warmth and beauty to the self as it is a different warmth, a different beauty, a different pride, and a different solace. That’s the solace I am looking for right now, and it seems as if it is a long way off. That’s the frustration and the acid that erodes the beauty that I’ve worked hard to maintain, and it is also the demotivating processes through which we must galumph and trudge before we can rest on the grassy shore, away from the mud and mire of difficulty and frustration. That seems like a simple goal, one of perseverance and hard work and hope.
I’m going to stop bitching now. Go be successful, kids. Go work hard, work perfectly, and do. Go do and achieve and the beauty that you acquire from it will be one that cannot be robbed or destroyed. Go write a bestseller and forever you’ll have been the one who wrote a bestseller. Go write a gold record, and forever you’ll be the one who wrote a gold record. Go hit a game winning homerun, and forever you’ll be the one who won the game. Go get that promotion and the accolades at your job, but do it because you fished for it. You looked for it and hunted it with devotion and loyalty and hard work and the right attitude. Then, you’ll be the one with success that you garnered on your own by your own sweat and sacrifice. That beauty is teflon and unable to be demanufactured. Do it for your own beauty, kids. Go be successful. Stay beautiful, kids.

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Dumb Names A-Plenty

2012-01-19T18:17:00.000-05:00

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Dumb Names A-Plenty
1.19.12
A couple things to start here, kids. First, I’m very frustrated and aggravated at things beyond my control. So I may be a little cranky today. And tomorrow. And the next day. Another thing is that this blog is a little late, and I know that. See also; point one. Thirdly, I’m not going to talk about this internet censorship thing that is happening because it’s a little pointless for me to wax on it when we all know how I’d feel about it. Fourthly, I know that the website I talked about in the last blog was a satire site, but I think my point still reads. Fifthly, I’m sick of getting my ass kicked in Gears Of War 3 by teenagers on the network despite the entertaining conversation with Becks and her friend, both of whom are not racists nor anarchists. That’s important to note, I think. OK, let’s move on to something that I’ve talked about before, but seem to come across every couple of months.
Cobb County Georgia is the setting. No, the county is not named for great Georgian and the greatest ballplayer to ever live, Ty Cobb. Though it should be. There, though, a twelve year old named Malik was hit and killed by a driver. That in itself isn’t terribly interesting to me, though it is terribly terrible; but as Becks would say, it happens. Malik has (or had, I guess since he really doesn’t have anything right now except worms in his hair) a brother named Gaquan, whose name sounds like an island destination for James Bond. ‘Head to Gaquan, James, and stop Jowls McGillicutty before he drops the bomb from his secret submarine.’ Anyway, Gaquan is ten years old and asked his mother Chuntera Napier to get a tattoo memorializing his brother Malik after his tragic death. Ignoring the fact that Napier was the Joker’s last name in Tim Burton’s “Batman” film, Chuntera obliged, took young Gaquan to an artist, and the kid rolled up to school with a new tattoo featuring his brother’s name and basketball jersey number. At school, some ratfink jive turkey (my words, not the article’s I read) called the cops and the mom got locked up. The mom, Chuntera (these names are getting absurd to type) posted bail and talked to the news. The unnamed artist is under investigation and the fuzz hasn’t made a comment.
There are a couple things here to talk about. First off, I long for the days that people had names that didn’t spellcheck when I wrote them down. Also, did Chuntera do the right thing in allowing young Gaquan to memorialize his dead brother in body mod? How much should she be punished for her behavior, and what of the artist?
First and foremost, the rat at school should be wedgied. Secondly, yes; Chuntera should be locked up and fined. The crime is misdemeanor cruelty and being a party to a crime. The crime is also shining shit light on the modification community, but we’ll hit that later. Chuntera broke the law and should be punished. In the article I read, she talks about how just the law is and that she ought to preside over her child’s wellbeing as she sees fit. Though the libertarian in me (which is most of me) agrees with that, there are some flaws in that logic. With that train of thought, we could treat our kids as pets, and even still there are probably more laws that accurately protect our pets. That’s a different rant, though. But you can’t treat your kids however you’d like because we have lunatics in this country that beat kids, rape them, lock them in small rooms, don’t feed them, and other similarly horrible things. So the law has to come in and say, ‘look, you can’t break your kid’s arm for getting a D on his report card’ because we as a society are too stupid to realize that doing so is asshole behavior. We as a society have also decided that modification on minors is in the same category, and I agree.
Kids oughtn’t be modified for a number of reasons. One is that they’re kids and they will change their favorites daily, if not hourly, until they are adults. Also, physiologically, a kid really shouldn’t be pierced or tattooed because the kid is still changing. Sure, go get your twelve year old slut in training her dangling navel ring. When she hits her last growth spurt, you can explain to her why the piercing has migrated down passed her belt line. But when a kid is no longer a kid, when he becomes the magic number of eighteen, he can do whatever he wants in the eyes of the law; and he can be punished like a big kid now. No more juvenile hall for them. They can buy cigarettes, porn, go to war, pay taxes. All that fun adult stuff. Modification fits neatly into those privileges, and it’s important to have those gifts at certain ages. It gives you something to look forward to. I mean, shit; after I passed twenty-five (the age you’re allowed to rent a car), what new privilege do I have to look forward to? Senior citizen’s discount? Boo.
Back to the story, Chuntera Napier provides this argument: “What do I say to a child who wants to remember his brother? It’s not like he was asking me, ‘Can I get Sponge Bob?” Napier said. “He asked me [for] something that’s in remembrance of his brother. How can I say no?” That argument is dumb and I’ll tell you why. The law doesn’t care about what the tattoo looks like. The law cares about the process of tattooing. If there were laws against dumb tattoos or laws against getting something that the wearer may not be happy with in ten years, there would be a lot less tattooed people. It doesn’t matter if young Gaquan wants Sponge Bob or In Memory Of. It’s about getting the mod, not the mod itself.
And to address the “How can I say no?” thing. It’s easy. You say no, not yet. I’m not a parent and I don’t plan to be one, so all of you parent readers, save your hate mail about how I don’t know what I’m talking about. My parents were strict in certain circumstances, and in those circumstances when my mom said no, the answer was no. Why? Because she’s my mother, that’s why, and that’s the only reasoning that any kid should need. When young Gaquan is eighteen, his brother will still be dead and the mod can happen in all context of legality. You don’t get a special dispensation because you have a dead brother or son. Sorry. The law doesn’t care. I don’t either.
The artist who allowed the mod to happen ought to be fined and locked up too. It blows my mind that any artist who actually works in a shop (assuming this guy did; it could have been a hotel mod) would participate in this kind of behavior. He’s more of an enemy to the culture than a hero because it draws more of this careless attitude from within the culture that those who shun our society can fervently use to damn it. This isn’t good behavior from within the culture, is what I’m saying. And if the guy who modded the kid wants to talk about how his heart bled for the story or blah, blah, whatever then he needs to man up a bit. Say no. I’m not risking my business, my reputation, or the reputation of the modification community on this little boy who wants a modification. Sorry your brother’s dead, but there are bigger things here than what you want.
Man, I’m cranky today, huh. I think a lot of it has to do with my not wanting to go to work tonight. Also, I need a better job. Also, I need to get a book published. Also, I need to eat something. Also, I’m going to go now. Don’t forget, kids, that what we do is beautify. We augment our existing beauty with art and draw attention to ourselves in a beautiful and positive way. When someone draws negative attention to our otherwise beautiful culture, we’re all damned for it regardless of their reasons or excuses or invented loopholes. We have to remember that we participate willingly, and that willing participation means we have to take extra care in the representation of that culture in order to provide a positive personification to those outside the culture who may not be of the most positive mind about it. Also, I think there’s a rock in my shoe. Stay beautiful, kids.
source:
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2012/01/georgia-mom-arrested-for-allowing-10-year-old-to-get-tattoo/

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Hate-Christians Hate Hipsters

2012-01-11T16:40:00.000-05:00

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Hate-Christians Hate Hipsters

1.11.12

This is my not having a blah blah intro paragraph for this week’s blog. So I’m going to do two things. First is to let you know that my short story collection, “people i know,” is available on the Nook book-reading thingy and within the next twelve hours or so should be available for the Kindle thingy as well. So please go buy a copy and enjoy it. They’re each less than ten bucks, and they’re worth way more than that. And it’ll help me feed my dogs. Because I’m broke. (search A. Robert Basile or people i know) The other thing I’m going to use in this awful intro is the chorus to the Log song. (clear throat sound) “It’s log, it’s log; it’s big, it’s heavy, it’s wood. It’s log, it’s log; it’s better than bad. It’s good.” Let’s move on.
You kids who read me frequently know a bit about me. Especially if you read last week’s blog entitled “Wet.” For those who don’t know what my dominating characteristics are, they are as follows: I have strong opinions about women’s shoes. I hate more things than I like. People irritate me. I am a republican (closer to libertarian). I am a catholic. I like responsibility, hate entitlement, and am proud to be a modified person. I also respect people’s rights to be what they’d like to be, and I hate self inflicted persecution. Also, peanut butter is my favorite sandwich spread, my Xbox gamer tag is Zipperback, and my favorite bass guitar string is the B-string.
Another thing I hate is the torrent of video and photo posts on Facebook. I never look at them, I never post them, and they clog up my feed with ‘look how funny this guy is’ nonsense. Once in a while, however, someone will post a photo from somewhere else on the Internet that grabs my attention. This is about a photo a Facebook friend, Jessie, posted.
The photo is one of those parody inspirational posters that seem to have become an ironic trend with a dwindling humor. It has a broad on it, a modified broad, with big, thick rimmed glasses, those Betty Page bangs, and a ‘schmeh, whatever’ face. Beneath the photo, as par to the poster parody, is the word “Hipster,” and beneath that it reads, “I had a snappy remark, but I forgot…” Very funny. Be proud, guy who made the poster with a stolen photo and Photoshop. Now, we all know hipsters are irritating. We all know they are breeding and populating coffee shops and open mic nights everywhere with their big glasses, solid colored acrylic plugs, and affinity for things you’ve never heard of like independent movies and bands who are on labels with three bands and two employees. They are mostly harmless, I think. Preferring to be by proxy annoying, but not actually doing anything to cause annoyance. I have some hipster friends, and they seem to take ball breaking well. Rob is a good hipster, with his white belt and homemade t-shirts. He’s a good guy, despite the white belt.
The photo inspirational poster parody thing is a forgettable piece of internet dribble that bares little notice. What does bare notice is the site from which the photo was taken. The website is called www.Christwire.org, and at first I thought it was a parody in itself. I thought it was an ironic commentary on sites that promote a christian sensibility that is easy to mock. Then I realized that the site is legit, and the editors and writers for the site really believe what they are saying. Even reading it over and over, I’m having difficulty believing that these people are legit, but we’ll go with it.
The hipster photo is accompanied by a description in a poorly constructed group of paragraphs. I just read it again, and I am still confused if it’s legit or not, but in this guy’s description (a cat named Jake Newman), he warns parents of the hipster culture, saying, “Hipsters are bohemian, homosexuals who enjoy obscure music and the atmosphere of that permits gay sexual acts to occur.” He continues by insulting hipsters’ penis sizes, and contends that hipster dorm room tattoo parties spread Aids to the “general population of hipster gays.” He also says that hipsters will occasionally try to dupe the non-hipster public by “pretending to date short fat jews, but they really engage in massive gay orgies with each other.” Jake Newman concludes his hipster study by saying, “They represent a counterculture that is a threat to the Christian Youths that are the pride of our nation. If you see a hipster riding a bike on the street, do us all a favor and run his gay ass over with your car.”
I’m going to take a breath for a second because if this dude is serious in what he thinks, that is harder to swallow than “The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick.” Some book humor there for you, kids. Websites like these and ‘articles’ like the one ‘written’ by Jake Newman are the kind of propaganda that pigeonholes conservative christians like myself into this liberal idea that we are all Christ loving hate-mongers, which is counterintuitive in itself. It makes those who take my opinions at face value and apply these types of ignorant hate rants believe that we are all like this cat. We’re not, obviously. If you read my blog frequently, as it has been running strong for four years now, you’ll know the thesis of the three hundred plus blogs I’ve written is to celebrate beauty in all forms, and that the beauty that we each possess is inherent and inalienable. We here at A Different Kind Of Beautiful (and by we I mean me and my readers) don’t subscribe to slanderous our libelous accusations, assumptions and stereotypes. Yes, I use stereotypes frequently for comedic purpose, much to the chagrin of my beautiful girlfriend, but there is a demarkation that transforms a punchline with no ill intention to hate speech that is damaging to a culture. And yes, I am a proponent of all things free speech. I support this hipster hating website in that they are allowed to say what they say, but not necessarily what they say. Just as what I may write week after week may be offensive to some, they ought to support my right to say it whether they agree with what I say or not.
But this cat has taken aim at a number of cultures under the guise of following a deity that promotes a love and acceptance and coexistence. I love Jesus Christ. I love my Christian God. I speak to Him everyday, and I try to live within Christ’s footsteps as accurately as I can. As all christians know, it’s a lofty goal whose accomplishment has an air of near impossibility. And I’m Ok if you love something (or nothing) else. I’m not saying I know Christ better than Jake Newman, but I do have an impression with having read the Bible and studied the behavior of Jesus within my Catholicism to think that JC wouldn’t have the voracious hate for hipsters that Jake Newman has. I think that he wouldn’t have the irrational distain for gays, and knowing that he was jewish, I’d find it hard to believe that the correlation between hipsters and jews would be an opinion Jesus would share. I’m not theology major. I do major in common sense, however, and the damages that rants like this one administer to not only hipsters but the modified community, conservatives, christians, gays, and anyone with the semblance of a frontal lobe in his head do nothing to serve christianity, society, modification, free thought, or beauty. That is to say, fuck this guy for implicating someone like me in his ‘this is how christian conservatives’ think hate mantra because it’s largely untrue.
Don’t get me wrong, hipsters annoy the shit out of me. Liberals tend to annoy the shit out of me. Stupid people annoy the shit out of me. But most of all people who spread propaganda like September eleventh was a conspiracy, or gays spread Aids, or hipsters are damaging to Christ loving people, or the modified are against God, or anything of the sort that attempts to manufacture fact from misguided and unscientifically derived opinion are a more of a scourge to society than those they are attempting to demonize. Kid wants to dress like a douche and listen to some shit band no one else likes? Let him. God doesn’t care that the kid only goes to the Ritz theatre to see movies. Kid wants to stretch his lobes and wear white acrylic plugs and a v-neck undershirt? Let him. God doesn’t care what size his lobes are or which goodwill he gets his clothes from. God cares if he is treating people well. God cares that His people are sharing love and beauty with one another. God cares that we are respecting His creation. What’s funny is that the radical, and yes they are on the flange of the bell curve compared to the majority of those who follow Christ, preach this personification of Jesus Christ in their hateful propaganda as if they have never read the New Testament. You know; the book where JC is the main character? Yeah. That one.
I take a lot of shit for some of my opinions. I’ve had hate-christians come at me for my mods and my lifestyle. Strangers too, in the middle of a public place. I’ve had people tell me I was headed for Hell, I’ve had dirty looks when the perplexing combination of modifications and my knowledge of catholicism comes to light. I’ve also had atheists come at me for simply being a believer in God and Christ. They are all entitled to their opinions, as I am mine, and I’m glad that in this country we are allowed to propagate those opinions without being flogged and thrown in a cell for fifty years. But regardless of your theology, be it believer in some flavor of religion or atheist or agnostic, spreading wild and outlandish opinions such as hipsters are all gay and spread Aids while confusing strangers of their sexuality by dating jews is damaging to a number of cultures and societies on a number of different levels because there are those who are simple minded enough to read this type of filth and accept it as fact. I know some of my readers are atheist and some are faithful to a religion be it christian or otherwise, but on a plane of secular humanity and culture and sociology, regardless of God or Buddha or Allah or Satan or that mossy stone in the woods you may worship, the bottom line is that this type of blurb is bullshit. At least I think so. Check the link below for the whole article, and take notice of the titles of the other articles and the ads in the margin. I’d like to have a laugh about it, but shit man; people think this way and mean it. Scary isn’t it. I still hate Rob’s stupid white belt, but he’s my friend regardless of his hipsterness. Stay beautiful, kids.
source:
http://christwire.org/2011/07/hipsters/

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Wet

2012-01-04T19:56:00.000-05:00

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Wet

1.4.12

First blog of the new year. Let’s make it as close to not lousy as we can. That’s the kind of pep talk I give myself when I sit down to write. I should probably find a more motivating way of getting myself in the writing gear. Which reminds me (it really doesn’t, but I’m too lazy to write a segue), I have a reader from Latvia, according to the blog stat page that I look at obsessively. I think that’s the tops. I also think that’s super weird, and if you’re that Latvian reader, this is my hello and thank you to you. Those nine reads I got from France last week are pretty awesome too, and I’m not forgetting you, three reads from Russia. You guys are all great in whatever language you choose to say great in. I only know it in English because I’m American. And I really don’t have that much of a need to speak Latvian. Is that the language of Latvia? Let’s move on before I expose my ignorance even more.
I’m going to talk about a person thing here to start the year off. Some of my readers have been mailing me about how they more enjoy the more personal ones, so I will indulge them with the most personal story I can think of. Just a heads up; if this blog sucks, it’s not because the blog sucks, it’s because the stories of my personal life are super lame, which should tell me something, I suppose.
I gigged at a big club in Philadelphia on New Year’s Eve this year. A great club that treats us very well. The joint was filled with drunk woo girls, sexually frustrated bros, bad shoes, and some friends of mine. The ticket price was seventy-five beans, and not only came with my band (the best in the business, by the way), but with an open bar and a buffet. A good deal all around, and a petri dish for mad drinking. Which, I suppose, is what the new year thing is all about. We played well, I think, and everyone seemed to have a good time. It was a good way for me to end a pretty shitty week. We’ll get back to that, but for now, I want to tell you that I stood up for the entire show. And that’s a big deal.
You cats and kittens who read me frequently know that I have bad legs. Lots of pain, lots of gimping around on a cane. The guys in my band are cool with my sitting down every night at shows, and I do. But this gig was special. And not because it was New Year’s Eve. Well, that was a small part of it. What was special about it was that this is likely the last New Year’s gig that my singer and best friend Dan and I will have together. He’s moving away from the scene into real job land. We’ve been playing together for twelve years (not as long in this band), and I wanted it to be special. So I stood up for three fifty minute sets.
That was part of the reason. I wanted to have a special gig with Dan in the way that we used to play before my legs got bad. They were always achy and shitty, but over the years, they’ve gotten bad. Very bad. Throwing up from pain every night kind of bad. Not being able to do what I want to do kind of bad. Disappointing people with saying, ‘I can’t do that tonight,’ kind of bad. I have an entire photo album of Dan and my first band where you can see photos of me, shirtless, playing bass up on tables and jumping around like a loon. Those days are gone, but for this New Year’s gig, I wanted to recapture that a little bit. So I played standing up. We’ll get back to my leg history in a minute.
A super quick aside. I just now got this text from my sister: “Hey r u ok? Just wonderinf because I got a vm today from camden co correctional facility collect call WTF?! Lol” I’m not in prison, Nancy. I’m a free man. No worries.
Another reason why I wanted to stand up at the show is because of my band. I’m not a leader. I’m a doer. You tell me what to do, where to be, what to know; and I do it, know it, or am there. And I do it well. I expect nothing less from anyone else on any team I am a part of. Full or zero, that’s how I think of work. Because of my disability, this passed year has been made more difficult for the guys in my band. They have to move my amp. They have to make certain considerations that they’d normally not make were I able. I do as much as I can, and often times my guys tell me to stop and take it easy. I have a giant stone of guilt on my shoulders about that. They are considerate and kind. They are my friends. Jay, Q, Mike, sometimes Sam, and of course Dan. And whoever the horn guy is for that gig. We have two Chris’ so it’s safe to just say Chris and they’ll each think it is he. Easy win there. I wanted to show them they mean something to me, that I am willing to sell out, go all out, whatever euphemism plus out I can think of for them and the show. It is my way of showing appreciation for what they’ve done for me. It’s my thank you, my love for them for this year of difficulty to them. It’s my leading from the front by example. If Andy can do this, so can I. That’s my theory.
This all comes at great cost to me. The pain during, after, and still nearly a week later is unreasonable. But it’s worth it to have a slice of normal. It’s a taste of beauty the way beauty is unrecognizably enjoyed by those around me. I’ve taken a thousand words to set this up to make this point: I (and less I than some of those close to me) have gotten shit for this. The shittalkers have questioned the truth of my disability, the severity of it, and in turn, the legitimacy of it. Because of the way I play, the effort I put in, and the intensity and fortitude with which I handle the pain. I want to respond with anger, but I don’t. And this is why. (This is the very personal part mentioned earlier, and this blog is probably going to be longer than most. Top of the year, it’s OK, right?)

I can’t be angry because I guard how I really feel about my disability because I don’t want pity. Anyone who searches for pity in regard to anything is someone who will never suture the wound of their strife. Pity perpetuates the infection, and ever prevents it from healing. So I haven’t told most about the pain and I’ve tried to assimilate as strongly and actually as I can without drawing attention to the reality of it. It’s no one’s problem but my own, and I’d rather the elephant in the room be shrunken by jokes and off color humor than by analytical attention to the woe of it. Here is some of the analysis that has been missing. This’ll probably be the last time I talk about this, so I hope the naysayers are reading.
I have spina bifida. Admittedly, I have it as well as one can have it. My legs hurt. Bad. It’s like when you reach the top of a stretch when it begins to hurt. Theres a nice feeling while you’re stretching. That ‘ahh, that’s what I needed.’ Then, suddenly, ‘Jesus that’s awful. I ought to stop stretching before my body falls apart.’ That last part. That’s what my legs, spine, and hips feel like all the time. That’s not big news. That’s life. Life is pain and discomfort, and that’s no one’s problem but my own. Context, however, is an important ingredient in order to perfectly make the recipe of understanding. Here’s some context. When I was four or five, I wasn’t yet potty trained. I understood the concepts. I understood that this yellow nastiness comes out of this little thing between my legs that I seem to want to hold on to as if someone is going to come steal it, and that nastiness goes into that chair with a puddle in the middle. I got all that, but I still pissed while sleeping. I still pissed while playing. I still pissed while doing nothing. For no reason whatsoever. I still felt guilty and ashamed. I still do now thinking about it happening then. We started to see doctors who embarrassed and molested me with plastic hands and sharp tools. Bloody spine and penis, MRI’s and injections and plastic tubes shoved into out holes. They said spina bifida. And still, through my teens, I’d wake up wet with piss and shame in concert with legs that couldn’t hold me up while waiting five minutes in line for a cup of coffee or a high school lunchroom hot dog. And everyday, the legs get worse.
It had been a couple years (I’m thirty-one) since I’d woken up wet. Until last week. I haven’t told anyone, and now I’m telling you. Talk about trust, huh kids? You know before my therapist does. I woke up wet last week. It was a difficult week, to be fair, but I doubt that has much to do with it. I’ve been worried about money. My insurance dropped me for a payment that was three days late (don’t worry, mom; I took care of it), my best friend’s father has been in ill health, my grandmother is dying. Things like that. They take your mind into place that are very much not about you, and then your body becomes jealous of your mind and likes to remind you that you have a problem that most thirty-one year olds don’t have. Your body makes you wake up wet with piss and in pain. When you’re a thirty-one year old handicap in physical pain enough to prevent you from standing and you’re living with your parents who love you very much but likely don’t realize how severe the handicap is and you wake up soaked with piss, how do you react? What’s interesting about that question is twofold. One, no one has ever asked you that before. And two, you never have to consider the answer.
I’m ending the personal story time there. The point is this: I can’t be angry at the assumption that my handicap isn’t as severe as it actually is. I don’t share these types of stories with people. They don’t need to know them, and if certain naysayers wish to question the severity of my handicap, I can take a certain simple solace. This is the solace: they have to make assumptions because they have no idea what it’s like. And I am glad for that. That is a blessed ignorance. The Big Guy decided that my shoulders were broad enough to accept this, and not the other people around me. I’m glad they will never know about waking up wet or saying no to my girlfriend because of leg pain. I’m glad that people think I am a liar or a fake because that means they don’t understand how bad it is, and that means that I am doing a good job of protecting them from the nasty truth. If someone calls you a liar it is because what you’re saying seems unreasonable and illegitimate. It seems as if the truth must be opposite to what is being presented because what is being presented is contrary to the information the person is gathering. If I am being called a liar it means that my words cannot be believed as evidenced by my behavior. And that means I’m winning because the end goal is to protect those around me from what is actually true. Being called a liar is an interesting compliment. Still, it rubs me coarsely a little because I am a human being at my core and being understood is important to me. I suppose that contradicts everything I just said, but I think you cats and kittens are smart enough to follow my line.
There’s the personal story time that has been requested by some of you. (Happy Becks? I know you like the personal ones.) Yeah, I know; this one is very long, but it follows the logic because at the centre of the entire idea here is the sense of beauty and how we retain it despite the acids that try to corrode it away. Waking up wet, mortgaging two weeks of recovery for one night of standing while gigging, needing to sit down everywhere I go are all acids. But my beauty is still there, isn’t it kids. Especially if there are those shittalkers who think my handicap is more farce than reality. I’m going to stop now because, believe it or not, sharing that shit with you guys has been very emotionally exhausting. Stay beautiful, kids.

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End Of The Year Blogs Still Suck

2011-12-27T19:06:00.000-05:00

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End Of The Year Blogs Still Suck
12.27.11
End of the year, children. Another fine year of writing for you cats and kittens. Hopefully I didn’t disappoint every week. Just some weeks. They all can’t be winners, can they. This is blog number 330, and although I haven’t posted each one (some of them will live forever in mysterious obscurity on my hard drive), it still means that with three more blogs, I’ll be a third of the way to a thousand. There’s something exciting about that, isn’t there? No? Yeah, well, that’s the best I got. Let’s move on. This is how my year shaped up.
2011 was a bum year for super villains, wasn’t it. Yeah, the world lost some evil motherfuckers, and regardless of your political stance, we have to at least come close to agreeing that the world is a better place without them. We also (and by we I mean the world, I guess) lost some people whom the average, uneducated youth of America could probably more easily recognize than the terrorists and dictators who’ve met their grizzly ends. Jane Russell, Elizabeth Taylor, Nate Dogg (whoever that is), Randy Savage, Dr. Jack Kevorkian, Joe Frazier, Steve Jobs, Patrice O’Neal, and of course the Slovak football player (soccer) Jan Poplihar. Deaths of the year lists always make me feel old. They always include at least one or two people from my youth. Like, Randy Savage? Are you serious? I mean, that’s sad and tragic and all of that, but man, how old am I? OK, that’s pretty insensitive. Let’s get off the dead people.
There were a bunch of kick ass records that I’ve enjoyed this year. New records from Primus, Otep, Motorhead, Megadeth, Machine Head, Cavalera Conspiracy, Bootsy Collins, Amorphis, (figuring out how to sneak the new Adele in here without looking like a sissy), and Devildriver. My favorite record of this year, though, is probably “Last Night On Earth” by Elysian Fields. It’s a gorgeous jazz, indie, poetically dark New York scene vocal beauty. I’ve been a fan of them for a long time, and this record is really something special. Go check it out. The new Megadeth, “Th1rt3en” is fantastic too, and “Unto The Locust” by Machine Head oughtn’t be missed either.
You kids also know that I’m into movies, and I’ve watched an obscene amount of blu-rays this year too. I don’t go to the theatre for reasons I can’t explain. Mainly because I don’t know why I don’t go to the theatre. I think the last flick I saw in the theatre was “Tron: Legacy” with Dan. We were two of about eight people in the theatre. Dan was wearing his Olive Garden uniform, and I was trying to figure out how to wear the 3D glasses over my real glasses so that they wouldn’t dig into the bridge of my nose. All the while, like an asshole child, Dan was ducking during the trailers saying things like, “It’s like it’s really there!” and “It really is the third dimension!” just to be a dickhead. Some of the highlights of my movie watching this year included “The Perfect Host,” “I Saw The Devil,” “Captain America,” “Hobo With A Shotgun,” “X-Men: First Class” (despite what my friend Dee thinks. He doesn’t read this shit anyway, right asshole?), and “Monsters.” I did well with the blind buying this year. Of course, there were some regrettable blind buys like “Red Riding Hood,” which was nearly unwatchable. In case you’re keeping score, “The King’s Speech” won this year’s best picture (didn’t see it), Natalie Portman won for “Black Swan,” (didn’t see it), “Toy Story 3” won for best animated (saw it and cried like a girl), and “God Of Love” won for best live action short film (didn’t see it).
I got a Nook this year (and one of my books will be available on it as soon as Isz and Steph get my a cover photo; that’s right, I’m calling you out, my lovely little indecisive ladies), so I’ve read some great stuff. Red Dragon, Silence Of The Lambs, and Hannibal, all by Thomas Harris; Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs; A Scanner Darkly and Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick; John Dies At The End by David Wong; Children Of Men by P.D. James; and Cobb by Al Stump. I also started Imajica by Clive Barker, Hannibal Rising by Thomas Harris, Crooked Little Vein by Warren Ellis, and a reread of Lord Of The Flies by William Golding, and American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis. The Nook has been a great little technological addition to my life. Dan had to tell me to stop bringing it to gigs and reading in between sets. I’d have liked to read more this year, buy I only got the bookreader in May or June. I plan to read more this year. That’s one of those resolution things that everyone forgets they made when they wake up on January first at three in the afternoon after a night out celebrating the new year’s coming in a blaze of glorious drinking and promiscuity. Yay tradition!
The highlight of my year was actually two things. The first was the first date with my current girlfriend Nanci. Our first date was January fifteenth, and the fresh and beautiful getting-to-know-you bliss of meeting someone has very much yet to dissipate. She is beautiful and wonderful and the most perfect compliment to my quiet insanity. Without her, this year would have been one of the more difficult of my life. She’s taught me that I deserve happiness too, that I am allowed to be loved for who I am, that I am much more than a pair of broken legs, that sharing and knowing feelings and bothers and joys and miseries helps to share my Atlas stone. Her arms are great and wonderfully strong things to take from my shoulders my stone, and hopefully, I’ve done for her a third of what she’s done for me. This is going to be one of those long term things, so be prepared to hear about her a lot, kids. Also, she bellydances and knits, so I’ve learned a lot about those this year. She doesn’t do them at the same time, though. I bet she could. That would be a sight to see. That’s got Coney Island Freakshow written all over it.

The other highlight of my year (which is a dumb thing to say because one has to be higher light than the other, right?) is that my grandmother is still alive. Some time in 2010, my grandmother, the most beautiful woman alive, was discovered with stage four cancer of the lungs and other organs. Last Christmas (not last week, but in 2010) was one of the most emotionally difficult moments of my life, as with my family gathered around, we all cried as my grandmother poured about how that would be the last Christmas she’ll have and how she doesn’t want to die. She saw last week’s Christmas and she isn’t dead, and I’ve never been happier that someone I love was as wrong as can be. God blessed us with at least another year of her life, and though I am very much one of those people who say that if you want to be dead, you ought to let death come with his vapor breath and scythe and cloak and not delay the inevitable since the last years are ones that seem the least pleasant. That theory works fine for myself, I think, but I am glad my beautiful grandmother and family think my theory is absurd and wrong. I love her very much, and this year’s difficulty with chemotherapy and radiation and bad weeks and good weeks and tiredness and abandoning familiar life behaviors is very much outweighed by my grandmother at the dinner table saying, “Come talk to your grandmother. You have nothing to say? Well, think of something and then tell me.”
Also, with my grandmother’s decay and my own erosion into a further circle of handicap hell, my mother has been the most firm pillar of strength anyone has ever seen. My old man was forced into retirement as well, and my mother has taken the reigns of an out of control stagecoach and steered it into a normalcy and peaceful doing. She is the strongest person alive, taking on her shoulders the burdens of a thousand people. She methodically and quietly gets shit done. I can’t imagine her watching her own mother fight for life, her son fall to biological pieces further every day, manage her daughter’s wedding, succeed at her job, take over a new role in the household with my father’s retirement, and still remember a passing conversation with my girlfriend about a lost bracelet to where she buys one like it for her for Christmas. I’ve never seen my mom without a shirt on (which in thirty-one years of life, I’m glad about), but I am certain she has wings hidden because she is an angel.
So that’s my year in a nutshell, or more accurately, a boring blog. Hopefully you cats and kittens read some of my shit and looked at things differently for at least a moment or two. Hopefully you’ve seen some beauty you’d otherwise have not seen. Hopefully you have passed along to a stranger the gift of beauty that he didn’t realize that he had hidden beneath years of other corrosive shit. I’m no sage or prophet or even a relevant voice in the grand scheme. But I think I know what beauty is from years of thinking it didn’t exist in me, and I hope that this, another year of my shooting my face off about it helped you cats and kittens see that without having to have the doubt in it that I had. I’ll take care of the doubt if you guys take care of getting the word out that we are all beautiful. If I’ve convinced two people in all of this passed year, then we’ve had a good year.
Stay beautiful, kids. Stick to your resolutions if you make them, and try to make realistic ones. ‘Becoming King Of The Moon’ is not a very achievable resolution. Or maybe it is. Just remember that I can play music, so I’ll be a moon court minstrel in your moon kingdom. Don’t behead me when you take power. I’ll even wear the hat with bells on it and the funny shoes. I’m drawing the line at the tights, though. What a waste of a conclusion paragraph. See you all at the turn of the year. Stay beautiful, kids.

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A Cat Named Q, And I Still Hate Casinos

2011-12-22T17:25:00.000-05:00

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A Cat Named Q, And I Still Hate Casinos

12.22.11

Merry Christmas, kids. One more week left in the year, so we’ll save the year end bullshit for next week. This week we’ll try to talk about something that seems interrelated to the spirit of the holiday, or some such nonsense. Not to be left out, happy Hanukkah to my Jewish readers and friends. Festival of lights and the oil and the dreidel and all of that. For some reason, dreidel isn’t in my writing software’s dictionary. Oh wait, yeah it is. I spelled it wrong. I fixed it though. So you’ll never know how I first spelled it. Oh, science! OK, let’s continue.

I’m going to talk about what the season does to people. How it breeds out of character behavior, and hypersensitivity to things atypical to the other eleven months. For context, I’m going to tell you about my singer, Q.
Q, whose name is Marquis for those keeping an ‘Andy’s Cover Band Fantasy Team,’ sings in my band. Tall, thin, ostentatious black dude who has some quality pipes. For singing, you dirty children. He plays some keys too, and is a stellar gig riotstarter. He yells a lot to the audience. He can take a joke. He can go home with any girl there. He’s my friend, and he did something special the week.
He’s a special guy, Q is. Without revealing too much of his personal life, he’s seen some strife and tragedy. I tend to not hang out with those who haven’t, it seems. But he’s an interesting cat. Full of energy and opinion and talent. Recently, we gigged at a casino bar.
If you read me often, you’ll know how much I loathe casinos. I may hate gambling as much as I hate drinking, but I’ll have to do some more research before I reach that conclusion. This place we gigged last week isn’t the worst casino we play. Not nearly as depressing as some others, and for some reason, our crowd there is pretty receptive. Casino crowds are odd. You’re not really playing for a group of people who are interested in sitting and watching a band play. They are a transient crowd; they walk from one machine to the next, one table to the next, and when their throats get a little dry, they wander into the nearest booze slinger and sidle up next to another gambler on break (or prostitute, of which there are many) and drink to recharge while tossing a couple dollars into the video poker machines that are strategically built into the bar. The faces at most casino gigs are ever changing, but at this place, we seem to keep people. At least, all of the times I’ve played there. I’ll save you the details of the shitfaced woman at the front of the stage that we kept calling (on mic) kangaroo, or the details of the guy who looked like Michael McDonald, or the homeless guys who got kicked out, or Dan and Q both standing on a table while singing; a table that looked ready to collapse at any moment. I will tell you, though, that this bar is kind of shitty, and it is literally stuffed under an escalator that leads to the buffet. They have bowls of pretzels at the bar, though. That’s pretty cool.
So that’s the place. (A place that has ‘dolphin’ in the name, yet the giant sign has a tuna on it.) In between sets last week, of which we are required to play four at this gig (boo), Q went to play a casino game. He came back quickly before the next set, and this was our conversation:
Q (holding up a stack of chips): Check it out.
Dan: What’s that?
Q: I just won some money.
Dan: You’re kidding me.
Me: Doing what?
Q: Craps. Never played before. Put $20 down, and bam. $400.
Dan: Man, fuck you.
Me: Seriously, you asshole.
Then Q bought everybody drinks. Times I wish I drank. I’d have ordered one of those $75 martinis with the kind of shit in it that oughtn’t be in a martini. Like cumquats. We played our next two sets, which was fun and filled with on mic jokes about people watching us, and requested songs that we don’t usually play. I’m sure they sounded peachy. There was some good natured ballbreaking about the money Q won, and at the end of the night (after the bartender gave Dan a phone number left for him by a legitimate prostitute) we packed up and went home.
The next day we went to a holiday party at a club we play frequently. Q was there and he, Dan and I had a good time. (This is where the point comes in; ready?) Marquis and I had this conversation:
Q: Yo, you remember that money I won?
Me: Yeah. You going to give me some, you prick?
Q: No, man. Well, I went to PJ’s to have a drink.
Me: In Township?
Q: Yeah. They were having a toy drive for Christmas. I took the money and bought toys and brought them there.
Me: No shit? That’s incredible, bro.
Q: Yeah. I feel really good about it.
Ho, ho, ho. Therein lies the point. Q, who by a stranger’s eye always has his switch firmly in the on position; Q, who routinely talks (and walks) a huge game with the ladies and the fun; Q, who is always “shuffling” to those who know what that means (and I just learned myself because I’m an old metalhead) took a simple thing that I hate, gambling, and turned it into one of the things that I celebrate, bringing happiness and joy to strangers. Marquis is my friend, and I know of his goodness and gladness and open-heartedness, but those who only see him on stage singing and shouting and doing the aforementioned shuffling may not. You kids should know of his goodness.
The greater arc here too is not about charity so much as it is about bringing happiness and beauty to people you’ll never meet or with whom you have no intention of forming a lasting relationship. I suppose that is charity, but in my experience of being a lame (that’s biblically lame, not in reference to my love of crap that is super nerdy) charity can be a four lettered word. I have a problem with accepting help and handouts. I think most of us with an inkling of self pride will concur. Part of that is my difficulty in bisecting charity from pity, and this donation of Q’s time and money with the toy drive is neither. It is the right thing to do, and the right thing to do is never in concert with pity.
This is sizing up to be one of those ‘go do something nice for someone because it’s Christmas and Jesus will love you more and Santa will bring you less coal’ kind of things, but it really isn’t. It doesn’t matter that it is Christmas. Well, it does in terms of the birth of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, but I’ll keep that bit to myself so someone doesn’t call me a moron on the Mystic Facebook again. This is one of those examples of finding beauty in others and drawing it out to the light. I talk about this frequently, so you cats and kittens know that this isn’t Frosty the Snowman or Rudolph or Santa or that stupid dentist elf inspired. Not entirely, anyway. It is easier to remember around this year ending time. But giving a kid a toy something reminds him of his value, his beauty, and his worth. It’s not so much about the haves sharing with the have-nots, though that is a key component. It’s about saying to someone, ‘Hey, you’re beautiful and you have value beyond what you may think.’ What’s interesting about that is that if you walk up to a stranger and say, “Hey, you’re beautiful and you have value beyond what you may think,” you’re a creepshow to most. But if you buy a toy for a kid and silently hand it to him; if you hand a dollar to a homeless guy; if you give a cigarette to a guy asking for one; if you buy a round of drinks for strangers; if you hold the door at the Wawa; if you yield the parking spot you’ve been waiting for to the other person waiting; if you smile and say ‘thank you’ to a stressed holiday help cashier; if you pick up the bottle the baby in the carriage threw on the floor unbeknown to the mother; if you pay the toll at the bridge for the cat behind you who let you in ahead of him during rush hour; if you do these things, you’re actually saying to that person, ‘I recognize your beauty, and I appreciate that you are beautiful’ in a way they’ll not dismiss. That’s what Q did with the toys and the craps money. That’s Christmas. That’s what we see, isn’t it. In the modified community. We see beauty, and we see it everyday, don’t we. Not just Christmas time, but every time. Every other time of the year, there are gifts to give as well. Subtle and as important. Like playing bass for people who had a rough day at work, who just want to forget the day, drink a beer and listen to music and dance. That’s a gift to people that I give, and in my bass playing, I tell them, ‘Hey, it’s cool. Your day didn’t make you unbeautiful, you’ve just forgotten for a moment. This is my reminding you.’
So Merry Christmas, kids. Go enjoy your family and friends around a dead turkey stuffed with bread. Go smile at a stranger. Go look into the sky alone at night and smile at yourself. Go be beautiful as the year ends, and think more on the beautiful happenings of the year rather than the tragic happenings of the year. Go be beautiful. Man, that wasn’t so bad. I should have saved that for the year end blog. Damnit; now I have to come up with something better. Stay beautiful, kids.

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Humbug To Krumpets, And Other Nudie Nonsense

2011-12-13T15:33:00.001-05:00

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Humbug To Krumpets, And Other Nudie Nonsense

12.12.11

Christmas is coming, in case you didn’t notice. It’ll be here pretty soon, and you should have probably started shopping for the people for whom you’re going to buy crap. And just so you know, if you’d like to send me some wishes for the season, say ‘Merry Christmas.’ Because it’s Christmas Day not Holidayday. Whether you believe in Christ or not, just say Merry Christmas and don’t be a dick about it. Or if you’d like to be a dick about it, don’t celebrate SAINT Valentine’s Day or SAINT Patrick’s Day. This is me being a dick, by the way. Just say Merry Christmas. Santa will be happy that you did. And you don’t want to piss of Santa, do you. Do you? You do? Lunatic.

Speaking of Christmas (A. Robert Basile; King of All Segues), twenty five years ago in July we were all given a gift. A nationwide present that would give us endless joy and a perception of hope and gladness. Yes, we were all gifted with an extra Christmas Day on July 2^nd, 1986. A great day indeed. What was the gift that we received? The summertime Christmas gift? The blessing of all blessings? Lindsey Lohan.

Why would I ever want to talk about Lindsey Lohan? I ask myself that same question nearly everyday. Well, the days that I forget to take my pills, anyway. She’s a blessing to the world, and I’m not just talking about my love for “Machete,” the third greatest movie of all time. Ms. Lohan is a wonderful example of the American Dream. Except not very much at all. With the prison and shitty movies and the drugs… Well, maybe she is the American Dream. See also; [huge list of celebrities] But she is truly a grand Christmas gift to us.
And soonly, she’ll be unwrapped for us all. (And the segues keep coming) That’s right, as you’ve probably heard, she’s in this popular men’s magazine called Playboy Magazine. Have you heard of this periodical? Apparently, and don’t quote me on this, ladies (often of ill repute) remove their clothing and allow individuals with photo taking machines to commit to chemical science the women’s nudity for printing in the pages of this particular nationally circulated printed micro book. Wild stuff, man. They also have a sports section and a fiction section that’s actually really good. So our American sweetheart Lindsey is participating in this photo nudity thing that’s happening. That in itself isn’t interesting because honestly; who didn’t see that coming? I’m actually surprised it wasn’t Swank, and if you read Swank, you’re a dirty, dirty, dirty child. Shame on you. I’m looking at you, Dan and Matt.
Right, so this isn’t news. What is news is that her photos have been leaked. Well, that in itself isn’t news either, but the relevance is this: Playboy has airbrushed our her modifications. Took me five hundred words to get there, but that’s the point. Let’s talk about this.
I feel as if I mentioned this in another blog, which I know I have, but I forget about whom and my laziness and addiction to video games prevents me from taking the two seconds to look it up. But I can remember that it has happened, so that tells me that Playboy has a history of doing this. Is this a smart thing to do? Is it disingenuous? Or is it selling appropriately to their demographic? Also, is this blog fluff? That answer, a clear yes.
Everyone who has ever hid a Playboy between his mattress and box spring knows that Playboy likes the airbrush. It doesn’t take a cat with 20/20 vision (which, if the joke is right, he doesn’t have) to notice the inhuman textures and touchups. That’s fine, in a way. It’s OK because Playboy sells a certain product that its readers expect. Unrealistically beautiful women with tiny waists, breast sizes that defy the physics of said waist size, strange settings that occasionally feature horses, and answers to interview questions like, ‘I aspire to be a comparative dental morphologist or maybe a Coyote Ugly girl; whichever! [smiley face or heart].’ It’s Playboy. We know what we’re getting. Yet, there is an odd hypocrisy, or rather a counter-intuition that speaks through the no mod airbrushing.
Playboy has been an interesting American enterprise since December of 1953 when the greatest baseball wife of all time (that’s Marilyn Monroe), with a grand and playful smile and whimsical gesture of her left hand, graced the cover of the first issue. There has always been an interesting argument of whether the magazine is true pornography, or a celebration of contemporary women’s beauty. It seems as if there has never been an agenda by the publication to push a certain style or aesthetic of women, rather, the magazine has (literally) taken snapshots of contemporary women’s perception of aesthetic. Compare the 1974 Playmate of the Year’s pictorial of Cyndi Wood to that of 2008’s Playmate of the Year Jayde Nicole. The only thing they have in common is a stupid first name. The photos seem to capture the timber of contemporary beauty of that year, or that era of style and aesthetic. Playboy is an interesting chronicle of the evolution of women’s aesthetic and concepts of beauty.
Which is why there is a certain, oddly shaped hypocrisy in their airbrushing of tattoos. One could argue that body modification has become part of that feminine beauty evolution. Shit, find me a stripper without a navel ring and I will give you my stupid and incontinent dog. What a bargain there. With that contemporary evolution of the feminine aesthetic comes tattoo modification. We all know the history of women and modification, I’ve written about it. We all know the fifties perception of women and mods, into the sixties through the eighties and now today. Tattoo modification for many women have become another tool with which to display their own beauty. It’s a wonderful thing to see, the embracing of our mod culture in a distinct and clear personification of its own beauty. Mods on women is still a contemporary thing in terms of social acceptance, especially in celebrity. If you search tattoo on the internet, you’ll get many aghast gossip rag articles about a woman celebrity getting her nth tattoo, as if it were big news. But if my assumption is correct that Playboy Magazine commits to its pages the contemporary view of the beauty of women as it is today, at this moment, then would they not benefit from photographing the modified woman as part of its anthropological study of what we in 2011 or 1983 or 1954 find to be the archetype of nude beauty? Does that make any sense at all? I just reread that sentence six times.
The point is this: The tattooed woman is this generation’s Venus de Milo. With arms. That are tattooed. Contemporary media that aims to provide an accurate view of what we in this generation and social timber believe is the accurate representation of beauty ought to strive to produce photographic art that encapsulates this flavor of beauty. Playboy Magazine ought to recognize this as well. If it is supposed to be the magazine that pushes the edge of contemporary beauty and acceptance of the nude beauty of women, then proudly displaying the modifications of women seems to be very much congruent to that goal. I mean, shit; look at the vagina forests that are happening in some of those seventies and eighties back issues. That’s far from what is contemporary now, I think. Or maybe it’s coming back. Or maybe that’s a point that I thought I could make that fell flat on its muff. (This cheap joke brought to you by…)
I think women are the most perfect creation on earth, and I’m not just saying that because the majority of my readers are women. But that may have something to do with it. I also think that the accurate representation of what women are ought to be displayed proudly and without reservation. Playboy, albeit a magazine targeted at men yet still including a 17.3% women’s readership, ought to take this as an opportunity to proudly share with all of its readers the variety of beauty that we accept in our society. Modification is definitely one of those beauty elements that oughtn’t be ignored. As a photographic anthropology of women in our culture, Playboy may have (dare I say it) a responsibility to accurately represent the aesthetic of the time in their printings. Still, at the end of the day, the magazine is going to sell because crazy ol’ jailbird Lindsey Lohan is showing her chooch in print; I’m not entirely sure if the magazine’s subscribers care that her mods are painted out. I just hope she’s ready to go for “Machete Kills,” and “Machete Kills Again.” And if she isn’t? Humbug to that krumpet. Stay beautiful, kids.

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Beauty Corrosion And The Rare Weewee Root

2011-12-07T18:57:00.001-05:00

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Beauty Corrosion And The Rare Weewee Root

12.7.11

I saw someone at the bookstore today whom I’ve not seen in quite a while. It was a wonderful meeting, and a very holiday type of serendipity. You know those. It seems as if whichever store you go to to get that whatever bullshit thing that your whomever relative demands for whichever holiday you celebrate has crawling about it those you’ve not seen in months or years. Then you, obtrusively to the strangers waiting to pick up whatever useless item that the pair of you are obstructing, catch up on the major beats of whichever life events come to mind. Marriages and children and jobs and family you remember from that brief chapter of your life. It’s nice, and strange. It was great to see her and to catch up. This concludes my intro paragraph about whatever topic has come to mind that likely interests my readers very little.

Today, I would like to talk about a friend of mine. It’s not a biography or memoir of our relationship, but she is the context by which I’ll make my point. If I have one. I wouldn’t hold your breath about the ‘having a point’ thing.

To protect the innocent, I’ll call my friend Vee. Vee is a beautiful woman whom I’ve known for a little while. We’re not the ‘grab a cup of coffee at random’ type of friends, though we could be. An intelligent girl with a lighted laugh and sad but communicative eyes. Vee doesn’t love herself, and that corrodes her beauty.

She’s a comparative woman. Whatever it is that she believes she ought to be, she measures with an imaginary yardstick of her conception of what should, ought, or would rather be. It is an unfair and self-fulfilling melancholy. I would never begrudge anyone’s ability to perpetuate his own woe, but when that individual looks to break that shackle, which Vee clearly does, then it’s a problem.

I’m the last person to be preaching about perpetuating misery. That’s my game, and I am an All-Star at it. I am the Ty Cobb of woe. Well, technically, Ty Cobb was the Ty Cobb of woe. I never liked what I was, and I don’t like what I am. Does it affect me? Absolutely, but the affect can only exist in the confines of the effect. So what is the effect? Being born broken, being a slave to the whirling dervish of brain activity that seems to never slow, being a party to the concept of ‘not like the others.’ But we all have these things, don’t we.

None of us are the archetype of the perfectly built human. After all, Bruce Lee is dead. He was probably the closest. That cat was gorgeous. We are all machines that work only on the preconceived idea that we are breaking down constantly. I mean, sure; Lou Ferigno is built like people probably ought to be built, but he’s corroding too. I know that when I was made, I was made broken. If I were some sort of thing in a box that you bought at a crowded holiday mall store, you’d bring it back before you used it once. But you didn’t, and now were here, broken to start but finding a usefulness.

I suppose too finding a usefulness is a goal we all have, whether we are aware of it or not. I think we all want to be the cat that the other cats and kittens around us want to count on. Andy will get my back. That’s a great feeling. Don’t forget to call Andy; he should be there too. Andy will get it done; he always gets shit done. That’s a good feeling. And it’s a feeling that I think is directly tethered to our own beauty. See how I make everything make sense? The sense of not being good enough, not being pretty enough, not being smart or useful or talented or unique enough is a hydrochloric and sizzling chemical turning the beautiful bronze of ourselves into a wretched, phlegm colored green corrosion. They say that when that first idea happened is when we started to nurture and grow the ideas in the greenhouses of our minds. Is that true? I’m sure my therapist would think so. (Love you, Jana!) And what happens when we have many moments? I suppose each of those moments is an ingredient in the gruel that we see our lives as being. I’ll share one of mine, then you share one of yours. Deal? You don’t have to share it to me. As long as you share it with someone. Your cat counts.

I think I was nine or ten years old. I could have been younger. I was at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Dr. Brill was the main character’s name. An old man, likely dead now, with a five o’clock shadow which was better described as an eleven-thirty o’clock shadow, and a spiced cologne from a bottle with curves and (to take the words of Dr. Lecter) a boat on the bottle. His hands were cold, my folks were in the room, and the examining table was dressed in the finest linens of paper on a roll. I was asked to undress so he could examine my spine and penis and other things that ought to stay hidden by clothing. I wouldn’t take my shirt off, a button down thing with blue and white stripes. I tried to pull it down far enough to cover my penis, but it was well too short. He examined me, and I remember it frequently.

Now, why did I share that story? Because I am still beautiful. Right, Vee? I am still valuable. Right Vee? I am still in possession of myself and my shame and my glory and my beauty. Right Vee? I am still beautiful. I didn’t share this story for pity or any kind of reaction other than to have context. I did share it because sharing is more valuable than hiding or keeping. This story is one of a million (well, maybe a thousand) that frame my perceptions of self and self worth. Who can have value when an old, unshaven, stinky cologne man is running his ungloved fingers over your spine and unmentionable parts and into crevasses that aren’t designed to have things put into them? I can, and I do, simply by the virtue of my life. If one lives, one is beautiful, which by logic would tell me that you are beautiful because you’re reading this and dead things can’t read.

Finding value and worth and beauty. That’s what I was originally going to write about, but I think I missed the mark a bit. Still, I think you kids have read me enough to understand my mode of thinking. The point is that Vee has beauty and value whether she can see it our not. One of the steps to accepting that is trust. Trust is a difficult thing to acquire, especially when there are those in the past who have scientifically disproven the existence of it. But trust is the lynchpin. You kids, Vee included, ought to believe me when I say that you are beautiful. You must trust me because you’ve not a reason not to. What do I have to gain from your recognition of your own beauty? Nothing, really. It makes me feel good, I’ll give you that. But if you dismiss me when I tell you of your worth and beauty, then you are doing a disservice to us both. You are denying your inalienable quality of beauty, and you’re calling me a liar. I try not to lie. I did learn, though, that the same guy who invented Uggs took a cyanide pill after he was captured by the mountain monsters of Maya on an excursion to find the rare weewee root that can cure wind related eye watering. True story.

I think I’ve made my point, and so I’m going to work on the four other projects I have going whose windows are opened on my computer and are staring at me with ‘why are you neglecting me’ kind of hungry kitten eyes. You are beautiful, and so is Vee. Go tell someone. That person deserves to hear it. Stay beautiful, kids.

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Neck Mods And War And Donate A Book

2011-11-30T16:23:00.001-05:00

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Neck Mods And War And Donate A Book

11.30.11
I am at the bookstore writing for you cats and kittens. You guys know that. I’m here everyday. Writing and drinking coffee and making mundane conversation with bookstore acquaintances about things like weather and which records I’ve been listening to recently. What you guys may not know, however, is that Barnes & Noble is running a holiday book drive. No, they aren’t paying me. But I just thought I’d mention this because donating a book to the holiday book drive is a good thing to do, and you all should do it the next you’re at Barnes & Noble. Think of a book that you read when you were nine or ten. Now think of a toy that you had. Which had a greater impact on your life? I think you guys can see my point here. So go do it; I did. (I got “Don Quixote”) Reading is more important than you think.

There aren’t too many things that I like. My beautiful girlfriend, movies, some music, baseball, some family and friends. That’s about it. I like coffee too. And books. With that, I can safely say that I hate a lot of things. I think one thing that makes me hate more than some other things is lack of common sense and lack of responsibility. OK, so those are two things but I tethered them because I think it works better for what we’re going to talk about. So let’s talk about it.
Representative Ron Crimm, a republican from Kentucky, has filed a bill that would require, by law, tattoo shops to display a sign that explains that tattoos to the face, neck, calves and shins, and forearms prohibit the wearer from military service. Now, before you get on my ass about how I am a republican, let’s look into this. For those who are unaware, the majority of military branches won’t give you a gun if you’re modified on the neck or face, and if you have something offensive modded on you, like a hate mod or something disparaging toward women, you won’t get in either. There’s a cat who is in charge of recruiting, Major Fred W. Bates, whose job in part requires him to look at photos of mods of potential warriors. He then decides if the modifications preclude the candidate for service. (It reminds me of the line from “A League Of Their Own” when Tom Hank’s character describes how his knee is fuct up but he can still pull a trigger to kill Nazis.)
A couple of things come to mind here. The first is that if you’re headed into a shop to get your face modded, you should have enough sense in your dense and modified skull to know that your career choices have just been drastically limited. No lawyering for you, kid. We all know that, don’t we? If we don’t, I’m not sure what intellectual planet you’re living on. (Probably Uranus! Ho! I’ll be here all night…) Our common sense should also arrive us to the idea that military service is limited as well. That just makes sense to me. The military is about making men into warriors, machines who accept and follow orders without question for the greater good of the people they are defending. Yeah, yeah; women too. You go in, do your job, and leave. It’s noble work, and if the rules say no mods, I’m not getting in any five star general’s face about it. Or is it four stars? Clearly I’m not the warrior type; they don’t make guns that attach to wheelchairs.
But then I’m inclined to think about the responsibility thing. This cat, Rep. Crimm, wants to make sure everyone knows about mod and military service. That’s fine, and probably a smart thing to do. However, by making a law that demands the display of these signs in tattoo shops, he is passing the responsibility of the proliferation of this knowledge to the shop owners under penalty. I’m not too keen on that idea. We have laws in this country that require the display of signs such as ‘wash your hands’ and ‘you can eat here because there’s no bugs,’ and ‘when the shit goes down, here’s the way out.’ These kinds of signs are in the interest of public health and safety. Sad that we have to tell employees of a food place that they can’t go back to the fryer with poop on their hands, but hey; we’re pretty stupid ‘round here. These signs are good signs because they are in the interest of everyone. They are neither “blocking up the scenery” nor “breakin’ m’ mind.” To make a sign such as ‘by the way if you had an interest in the military, you should know that maybe this is a bad idea’ strikes a bad chord with me. Maybe that’s the libertarian in me coming out, but the way I see it, I’m not sure that I’m OK with the government placing signs or advertising into a business that has the chance of limiting that business’s sales. It’s like putting a sign in a bakery that says, ‘you know, cake makes you fat so maybe you should get a fruit oriented confection instead’ and then requiring all bakeries to display the sign or pay a penalty. And the penalties for not complying is likely what is rubbing me wrongly. If the sign hanging were a voluntary participation, then I’m sure that I’d be less inclined to have a libertarian knee jerk about it; and I’m sure that many shops would comply. But the idea of ‘you have to do this thing that could potentially limit your sales or become a lawbreaker’ sits uncomfortably with me.
There are tons of people, probably some right now as we speak (read?) who are getting modified with shit that they’ve not thought through completely. That’s no one’s responsibility but their own. How many artists have done how many name cover ups or how many people are walking around with black panther tattoos covering something they ought to have thought further about? It’s the nature of our business, and unfortunately, there are a vast number of people who go under the tattoo machine who haven’t thought about one consequence of the mod they are paying for. It’s the way it is. The eighteen year old kid who may or may not have a future in military service is likely not thinking about his life at thirty years old when he is sitting in the chair and getting ‘Playa’ tattooed in script on his throat. But the law says he’s an adult, doesn’t it. It says that he can make his own decisions. It says that he and he alone is responsible for any consequence that may manifest from the choices he makes. Do we need to place a legal responsibility onto a tattoo artist to say to his paying client, ‘by the way, if you want to join the military then blah, blah, blah no neck tattoos.’ A tattoo artist is payed to do what he is being asked to do. Of course, a good one will talk to his client and make sure he knows what he is getting and makes sure that the client knows that getting a tattoo of Santa with his penis hanging out stabbing the Easter Bunny’s head off with Hitler’s mustache may not be the wisest of choices. But the artist will likely do it after that conversation because that’s what he’s payed to do. The artist isn’t a life planner for his clients, nor is he a moral compass for his clients’ behavior and choices. At least, that’s the way I see it. I’m not a mod artist. I’m a broke writer.
So if you want to fight in the war, don’t get your neck modded. Of course, when North Korea or Iran drops a bomb on us and the government re-institutes the draft, I’m sure they’ll take you, modification and all. I’m not going to tell you to think before you mod because there are very few of us (especially in the current political climate) who are planning for birthday sixty while we’re stretching our lobes or getting tattooed at age twenty-two. But if you want to go into the military, be smart with your mods. That’s all that this law is trying to accomplish, which is a fine goal. I don’t think that the law needs to be involved, however. An ad campaign would probably be more effective, but I’ll always err on the side of less laws that govern the public’s decisions. Especially when those decisions have a very little effect on society at large. And if this sounds like me bitching about inconsequential shit, I’ll quote my brilliant dad in his response to my mother’s agreeing with the anti-smoking laws: “Wait until it’s one of your rights they take away.” That’s a drab way to end this week’s blog. Here’s a positive thing: Kettle chips are delicious! Stay beautiful, kids.
source:
http://www.katc.com/news/neck-tattoos-can-have-consequences/

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Mark, Jason, Meghan, And Alex

2011-11-25T17:44:00.001-05:00

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Mark, Jason, Meghan, And Alex

11.25.11

Happy Thanksgiving. Yeah, I know that this blog is late, and yes I know that Thanksgiving was earlier in the week, but let’s just go with it. It’s been a busy (ish) week. Let’s blame it on the turkey and the loud family and the cranberries and the stuffing with the pineapple in it. We’ll blame it on making sure all of my Facebook friends got a message (which I’m not sure I sent out any), and making sure I get the texts all responded and sent. We’ll also blame it on the only renewable natural resource in the world: laziness. I’m pretty lazy. Oh, and video games. We can definitely blame it on Skyrim, right Jim?

Time to be thankful and all of that bullshit. I try not to have holiday-centric blogs, which is kind of a lie because I always do these kind of things, but the idea of thankfulness is a valuable one. Thanksgiving is an odd holiday to me because, since I’m an Italian Catholic, I tend to believe that holidays have no value unless they have some sort of religious connection. Like some beheaded saint or the feast day of someone whose backstory I don’t know well enough. But Thanksgiving is different. Thanksgiving is a holiday in which every American can participate. Christmas and Halloween and Easter are different because some people don’t celebrate them because of faith or lake thereof. Thanksgiving is for every American, faithful or not. That makes it unique to me. Like Independence Day. Unless you’re one of those insane domestic anarchists who hate America but don’t leave the country. We won’t get into that.

So it’s important to tell people that you are thankful for them. Yeah, I know; it’s important to express your thankfulness toward things like health and knowledge and safety and other conceptual things. But knowledge doesn’t feel warm and fuzzy when you tell it you’re thankful for it. People do.
Who do you tell, then? Family, girlfriends, friends of course. People at jobs whom you see everyday. The coffee people, the guy at McDonald’s, the Wawa girl, the crossing guard, the bus driver. Of course we are thankful for these people, and of course our lives are enriched for their being. There are also those people in your reality that help you be you and that help you find comfort in you, and those people are to be thanked.
My mod artists are these people, and I’m thankful for them. Who else would I be talking about? Keep up, kids. Chiefly, with some errant exceptions, I’ve had four mod artists for whom I am very thankful. Jason Simmons, Meghan Patrick, Alex Feliciano, and Mark Raffensperger. Without these four people, I don’t think I’d have ever come to the closeness of the comfort I’ve found in my skin. Jason and Mark, master piercers both with similar qualities. Patient, calm, precise, and technically perfect. I can’t count how many times these cats have poked holes in my skin, but each time was a joy and an easily wonderful experience. Meghan and Alex, true modern painters of skin in the realm of the great Italian masters. Again, these two are the best tattoo artists with whom I have ever sat down and had a cup of coffee, real students of the game, and practitioners of technical and creative work.
Why am I thankful for these people? Well, of course because of the work that they do. It is beautiful and precise and perfect. But also because of what is within the ink and jewelry. There’s something in there that they put so gingerly and softly, and they don’t even know that they did it. It’s that which makes the thanks to them forever hallow and never good enough.
What is it within the ink, then. Freedom. How American is that to say on this American holiday, right? The freedom to understand myself aesthetically in a way from which I have been banned most of my life. Yeah, I know this is supposed to be a thing about these mod artists who changed my life, but I’m going to talk about myself for a second. Becks likes when I do that. The body is a thing that I hate with a vehemence indescribable. It’s a broken machine that has corroded exponentially since the first time I stepped into Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia back in 1986 or so. That’s right, ’86. Probably before some of you were born. I’m old, kids. My body has been a tool for woe and misery ever since. Pain, kids. It’s strange. I watch a lot of movies, and movies tend to stock a bevy of people whose bodies are the archetype of what all of our bodies should be. Maybe I should stop watching Bruce Lee movies; that cat was gorgeous. So I see these people with working bodies, the way they were designed to be, and I think to myself that mine is different and ruined. That sounds very teenaged girl of me, but looking onto like things often becomes looking into a looking glass of self. Here’s the work looking again.
So I find modification. Modification. Even the word is special. Changing. Things that change are interesting and mystic things, aren’t they? Yeah, OK; we’re not talking about Jame Gumb here. But changing, becoming something that you aren’t. A positive change. A worm into a moth. A fetus into a person. A dark and dripping ink into a wonderful story. Modification. Quite a fantastic thing. I found it, and I modified my body into something in which I can live and be closer to comfortable. These people, these artists of modification, gave me my comfort back; they gave me my freedom to enjoy myself back; they gave me a gift of confidence; and most of all, they gave me a gift of beauty that I had never had before. It is quite difficult to feel beautiful when you’re seven years old and naked on a metal x-ray table while an old man with spiced cologne (“the kind with a ship on the bottle” name that book) runs his latex gloved fingers and sharp metal tools over your spine and the places that you’re supposed to hide from everyone else. There’s no beauty there. There, you’re just a husk of biological material in which a soul lives and fuels your decaying engine.
And then, much later in life, I meet people who celebrate the body instead of examine it. They dance with color inside of it, rather than open it up with loud machines and sharp tools designed for dissection. I was introduced to people who don’t hate their bodies, but rather laud them and share them and decorate them because they love them. What a foreign idea to me. You mean, you don’t hate your machine? You mean, you want people to look at your body, you want to share it and smile and laugh and enjoy it? I didn’t think people did that.
Mark, Jason, Meghan, and Alex showed me that it was OK to enjoy my body, and for that, I am eternally grateful and thankful. And if they read this and think that this entire thing is a hyperbole, then two things are true. One is that they are humble and honest to what they do. The other is that they are wrong; there is no hyperbole. These artists gave me my life back just by doing what they are gifted to do. There is nothing I can do to repay them for it, and hopefully they will understand the gravity of what they do for some people. Not all people, of course. Some people just want a duck holding a pistol shooting Santa riding a horse off of a diving board on their shoulder. And that’s special too. In… Other ways.
So go tell your artists that you’re thankful for what they do. They are giving you things not easily acquired. Like individuality, greater sense of self, confidence, and an invitation into a culture and society that (ought to and often does) welcomes all shapes and conditions of bodies. Even if they are rusted and damaged machines like mine. Stay beautiful, kids.

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I Have A Nancy, A Nanci, And A Stuffed Eeyore Collection

2011-11-16T17:17:00.001-05:00

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I Have A Nancy, A Nanci, And A Stuffed Eeyore Collection
11.16.11
To begin with the air of serious. A friend lost her mother this week to a long contest against cancer. I have love for my friend and her husband, and though it ought to read without words, I send thoughts and feelings and prayers to them. Personally, this is always difficult even just to be a part of on the periphery because I have never lost a family member to death. Not one. No uncles or aunts or grandparents or parents. Very strange to be thirty-one with all of your family intact. I don’t know how to be the most supportive and I don’t know what it feels like. However, I know my friend is strong willed and headstrong and will survive on her path as God has intended her to do. So to her and her husband, my heart aches for you and I wish you a fortified strength.
How do I segue from there. I suppose I’ll just begin yelling about some inconsequential shit. That’s what I do, right? Oh, and make esoteric film references and complain about non-player characters in video games as if they were real people. What I’m going to do today is take the opportunity to talk about someone important to me. That seems appropriate, I think. And it’ll probably utilize less curse words. Let’s do that.
The two most important people in my life have the same name. I didn’t plan it that way, nor did I have any semblance of a say in it. And no, one of them is not you, Dan; you’re the third. No, one of the same named important people I’ve known for thirty-one years, the other I’ve known for one. And to be fair, they spell their names differently, but it is still the same name. So, not to neglect the importance of my girlfriend Nanci, I am going to talk about my sister Nancy.
I am a bad brother because I don’t visit my sister enough. Visit may be an overstated word there since she lives a couple of towns over within a fifteen minute drive. I can script any number of excuses, but I won’t do that here. My sister is the third most beautiful woman on the planet. That may sound like a backhanded compliment, but I think Nancy will concede my mother and my grandmother in that list. She is free with her aesthetic, brandishing a nostril piercing occasionally that matches her petit, Vidal nose. I got the giant Basile nose. Benefits of a first born, I suppose. Her wrist is tattooed with a pawprint, opening a stranger’s dialog and inquisition to her selfless work as an emergency vet tech. She is short, like all of the Mediterranean blooded clan of my family, and she has eyes and skin that are familiar and welcoming.
Nancy gave me my first drink, my first cigarette, shared through the walls of our bedroom my first music. She has always been the perfect and archetypal big sister. She didn’t so much as introduce me to modification, I more or less arrived at the great culture on my own, but she did take me to my first tattoo shop. She, our friend Ryan, and my sixteen or so year old self went to a joint whose name I can’t remember. It was a shithole; I do remember that. My sister had her shoulder modified by a cat whose name I also can’t remember. He was a rough dude, and to be completely fair, I wasn’t entirely cool with him touching my sister. The shop was dark and odd. TVs played a Discovery channel show about seals as the soundtrack was populated with the tattoo machine buzzing and latex gloves’ snapping. Ryan had his arm modified, and he bled like a stuck pig. In the dark, time worn shop, the blood was redder than changing leaves in the beginning of October. Nancy, girlishly excited, took her first mod well as I watched unaware that I would participate in the very same behavior later in life.
The first drink she gave me was a vodka and cranberry, and though I’d love to regale that night with her and Sean in my house playing cards, I can’t remember too well. Because of the vodka. And cranberry. I do remember riding on my bike to the Heritages grocery store to get a lime. Shitfaced. Absolutely unreasonably drunk, and I think I was driving my sister’s bike. Which had pink accents to the handlebars and seat. Jarrod was working there at the time, and I may or may not have payed for the lime.
The first cigarette Nancy gave me was an American Spirit. She was driving down Delaware Street in her 198something Oldsmobile. I think it was a delta 88, but whatever it was, it had a blue, velvety interior and it was a giant white tank. I sat in the backseat with Sean in the front passenger. She, with very little pressure (Nancy never pressured with anything), asked me if I’d like one. I said yes. I took the cigarette and had no idea what to do with it. “How do I do it?” I asked. Then, laughter among the three of us. I really didn’t understand the order of operations, and if you’ve ever tried to teach someone how to smoke, you’ll know how difficult it is to describe “just inhale it, idiot.” We drove to a Tower Records that day and I bought a Frank Zappa CD. We may or may not have rear ended someone too.
Years later, after I discovered piercing modification and a great shop in Dupont Circle in Washington, DC called Fatty’s Custom Tattoos, my sister and I would drive down in her little Volkswagen to get pierced by a guy named Jason Simmons, one of the best in the business. Sometimes we’d head down in the morning, get pierced, have lunch at a Cozi or some such hipster overpriced place, and then head home to go to work. We also would stop at the Christiana Mall in Delaware for some tax free shopping which often included Nancy buying me a stuffed Eeyore, of which I have many, thanks to her.
Of course in my thirty-one years of life, not all of the scenarios involving my sister were pleasant or life changing. (Just most.) We never fought, not that I can remember. I’ve heard a story about her giving me a concussion with a whiffle ball bat when I was four or five, but I don’t remember that so in my reality, it didn’t happen. But we never quarreled, we never bickered much, we never punched each other. We included each other in our lives. We shared friends and places. When I was in an original rock band, Nancy came to every show. Every one. Listened to the same, poorly played songs at the same, poorly kept bars and cheered as if she had never heard them before. But there were also times when a boyfriend besmirched her and I would grab a baseball bat with the intention of heading to the boyfriend’s place and explaining to him that his behavior was unacceptable. There were times when a girlfriend would break my heart with some kind of ‘I can’t deal with the way you deal with your leg problem,’ and I would go to Nancy in a tear faced emotional tornado of snot, sobs, and anger. And she’d be there. She was there when I woke up from my jaw surgery, when my face was so swollen I couldn’t turn my head, yellow and disgusting. Nancy was there in the hospital room with my at-the-time girlfriend who had to leave the room to throw up at the site of me. Nancy didn’t. Nancy made a joke about something. I was on morphine, so I don’t remember the joke. Nancy never liked that girlfriend anyway. After that particular surgery, Nancy took me to the mall for my first big day out. She didn’t care that I looked like Frankenstein’s Monster, my jaw wired shut and disgustingly filled with blood and metal. She didn’t care that I looked like my parachute didn’t open and I landed on my face. She cared that I got out of the house and spent some money. I bought two Frank Zappa CDs. That was a very important day to me, and still is.
Nancy is my best friend. I love her very much, and I wanted to take one of these blog weeks to tell everyone that. She is beautiful, supportive, high energy (another gene she got that I didn’t), and has a heart too big for her chest, as evidenced by the elevendy-teen dogs and cats she’s rescued which all seem to own her house. She and her (awesome) husband pay the mortgage and the wayward, reject pets live there. When you die, come back as one of Nancy’s pets; you won’t regret it. (Even though most of them are missing eyes and have weird problems.)
I know that some of my readers have siblings (my Rogers sisters come to mind), so I’d encourage you to tell those siblings that you love them. They are special. I know I have been blessed with a sister beyond compare, and I’d suggest that you all get a sister; they’re pretty awesome. And if you’re the big sister or brother, be a good one so that your little will have the same life changing experiences and stories I have. Thank you for being the perfect sister, Nancy. Stay beautiful, kids.

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Lesbian! or Lazy Blog Title!

2011-11-10T13:18:00.000-05:00

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Lesbian! or Lazy Blog Title!

11.10.11

For some reason I am at the bookstore writing at 11:00. I’m not entirely sure how this happened. The morning has a weird, misty glow to it that is unique and a little too foreign to me. I’m not sure I like it. The only time I see the morning is when I’m coming home from a gig somewhere out in Lancaster or Virginia. But today, I willingly woke up, got in my car, and drove to the bookstore to write. At 11:00. I’d check the sky for brimstone, the seas for boiling, and if you see a frog today, don’t listen to him.

In looking for something to write about for you cats and kittens today, I came upon a bunch of uninteresting nonsense. That, in itself, is uninteresting. But I read each article that I thought had potential, and found very little. I read one in particular that was tooling along with its boring narrative and poor syntax. It was another dumb commentary examining social norms from the lenses of alternative thinking. I’m not sure the idiot who wrote it would describe it that way, but that’s in part how I did. Calling the writer of the article an idiot isn’t nice. Just thought I’d throw that out there. But something dawned on me while I was reading this half news story, half interview, all nonsense article. And these are my impressions.
The article was on some trash fashion scene, celebrity ‘news’ bullshit site called radaronline.com. Some of you with a healthy celebrity addiction may be familiar with it. This waste of internet space reported about a woman by the name of Jenelle Hutcherson of Southern California, or SoCal, as the kids call it. I don’t think the kids call it that. She does hair. She has a nostril piercing and tiny little plugs. She has a stupid hairdo (like most stylists seem to). She’s also lesbian. This isn’t news, I don’t think. I would suspect, and I have no research to back this so take my assumption for what it’s worth, that there are many gay stylists in SoCal. Just an assumption there.
Anyway, the point of the article is that Jenelle is going to participate in the Miss Long Beach and Miss Southern California pageant this weekend. She’ll be the first open lesbian to ever participate in the sixty-plus year history of the show. Isn’t that neat. Yeah, I don’t think so either. She got involved by blah, blah, blah who cares. I’ll post the link so you can read the dribble yourself. That’s not what we’re going to talk about here.
We’re going to talk about an impression I got from one particular interview question in the article. Feel free to tell me how much my knee is jerking here. This was the question: “Jenelle, we’re so used to seeing women -- usually blonde, busty, thin and airbrushed -- looking picture perfect in magazines, setting a standard that is impossible to reach. So, like many little girls, did you grow up with a warped sense of what beauty is?” Man, I hate double dashes in sentences, but that’s not what grated me about this question.
I’m a terrible interviewer. I’ve done it before, and hopefully I can avoid it for the rest of my brief and poorly paying editorial career. I think a good interviewer is a special kind of beast, and depending on the subject and the direction that the piece is moving toward, there are many ways to get your story down on paper. One is to lead your interviewee toward the answers you’d like to write. Another is to pick her up and throw her in that direction. That’s how I read this question.
The interviewer here, Neil Woulfe, sets his premise by assuming that establishing a preconceived notion of those who participate in pageants and fashion modeling. He calls these women “picture perfect,” and calling their beauty “impossible to reach.” A strange position for a senior news director of a fashion gossip site. Well, no so much strange as maybe hypocritical. I think we can all agree, and maybe it is because I live in (and love) Dirty Jerz, that those women plastered on magazine covers and those who participate in pageants are not the same women that are waiting behind you in line at the coffee shop. What I argue is that just because their flavor of beauty is uncommon in everyday live doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. There are no wallabies hopping around the Wawa as I’m trying to buy cigarettes and Red Bull, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. The interviewer resolves his question by asking if this contributed to a “warped sense of beauty.” That, in itself, assumes that her, Jenelle’s, sense of beauty is indeed warped. How this reads to me, and tell me if I’m way off, is that the interviewer has set a premise that the conventional conception of magazine beauty is unattainable, yet because Jenelle’s own conception of beauty is not that, then therefore it is warped; and for something to be warped, does it not have to be the conventional thing first and then mutate into something different or unconventional, manifesting into something less recognizable than the thing it was, which was the thing that was indeed familiar and recognizable? How can Jenelle’s sense of beauty be warped if the interview question sets up as the magazine beauty being wrong? Isn’t that how it reads, or am I just picking fly shit out of pepper?
Secondly, that question assumes that the aesthetic and lifestyle at which Jenelle has arrived is a direct result of being negatively affected by magazine cover beauty. Maybe this is true, but there are a couple things here that sound dumb to me. First is that it puts an enormous amount of gravity on the affect of fashion and celebrity trash magazines on individuals. I’m not a woman; I never have been and I never will be, much to the delight of my girlfriend. I can’t speak to the difficulty of finding a beauty identity as a young girl. I imagine it is difficult. It’s difficult for everyone; believe it or not, I’ll never be the action movie stars with whom I vicariously grew up when I was little. If Arnold and Sly and Jean-Claude and Segal and Jack Burton were the manly standards, then my conception of aesthetic ought to be vastly warped. (Jack Burton was thrown in there for Jim and Steve.)
The other point in that point pair I mentioned is this, and again, tell me if I’m nuts. It assumes that Jenelle’s modification affinity and sexuality is governed by the affect that conventionally beautiful people had on her as a youth. Is there any science to back that? If there is, please forward it to me. I don’t know much about homosexuality, and I’m pretty sure it’s classless to ask my gay friends why they are gay because they probably don’t know either; but I would have to doubt that some slut on the cover of a Vogue that Jenelle saw when she was ten had the earth-shattering, tectonic sexuality shift in her that would later manifest as homosexuality and body mod. I’m no scientist, so I could be exactly wrong with that. At any rate, I don’t care.
The whole ‘first gay in a beauty pageant’ thing interests me very little. I don’t care if you’re openly gay. The point of the contest is to score well in the categories. If you can do that, then you win. It doesn’t matter. If you can do that with a scar on your face or missing a leg or busted teeth or with a moose on your head or looking like Kathy Ireland (a youthful crush of mine) then you win. Why is it a big deal that this dame is queer? Aren’t we supposed to not care about that kind of shit anymore? If this were 1954, then yeah; I could see the appeal to the story. But shit, man; in 2011, aren’t we over this? And please, fashion industry people with your stupid hair and space clothes and dumb and pretentious interests; please stop trying to explain modification as the result of some psychological trauma that happened when we were younger. All modification is, and stop me if you’ve heard this one, is a different kind of beautiful. You want to stop youthful girls from being negatively affected by this so called unattainable magazine cover beauty? Stop putting these people on magazine covers. I know many, many, many beautiful women who deserve that space. A lot of them are my readers (Becks, Emmy, my Rogers girls), and some of them are the women of my everyday life (Sam, Jenny, Nanci, Nancy, Laura, my mother, my grandmother, my coffee girls). Pick them if you want to be part of the solution to your invented problem, or stop making assumptions. Stay beautiful, kids.

source:

http://www.radaronline.com/exclusives/2011/11/first-openly-gay-contestant-competing-california-beauty-pageant

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It Is Unbeautiful

2011-11-02T15:19:00.000-04:00

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It Is Unbeautiful

11.1.11

Happy Halloween, kids. Yeah, I know it’s All Saints Day; and yeah, I know this probably won’t be posted until the second or the third, but Happy Halloween anyway. I hope you all had a safe and candy mired costume super fun time. I did. On Saturday, my cover band did a costume thing at a great club in Philly called Finnigan’s Wake. The highlight of my night had to be when I saw a guy in a pimp costume, a guy in a chicken costume, a guy dressed like a beer pong cup, and a broad dressed like Super Mario get into a fist fight outside after the gig. A safe bet says I’ll never see that again.
Thanks to a forward by Dave, I read an interesting and moving story today. I’m going to share the meat of the story with you kids, then talk about some themes that came to mind while I was reading it. You should definitely read the article, however. It’s well written and very good. I’ll put the link at the bottom of the blog. I’m also going to eat this Twinkie. That was delicious. OK, here’s the story.
In a past life, a cat named Bryon Widner was a racist. And by past life, I mean most of his life. A racist. Do you really know what that means? Maybe you’re a little intolerant of how whites or blacks or middle easterns or asians behave. Maybe you make some jokes about the stereotypes that circulate around each group. Maybe you’re a white guy and you and your black friends make jokes about the tendencies and behaviors of each group. Maybe you let a bad word slip once or twice. Maybe you’re not a racist. Bryon Widner was vastly different than all of this. Widner was a full-on, no doubt about it, I-can’t-believe-there-are-people-like-that racist. A skinhead, a neo-Nazi. This guy started a racist gang. Started, not joined. Started. His wife was also an active member in the hate community as a member of the National Alliance, a West Virginia based hate group founded in 1974. Bryon had no diploma, had a wrap sheet, was a fighter and a beater and a convict and a hater. And then, an epiphany. They left the hate life, left the groups, left the violence and intolerance. They married, had children, and looked to start a family life whose focus was hate-free. The problem? Bryon Widner’s face was littered with thick black tattoos expressing his former beliefs in hate. His new goal of a hate-free family life was arrested by his modifications. Social settings, job opportunities, every interaction with those who were not of the same racist mind as his tattoos shared were draped in a counter hate for the display of his hate. Bryon Widner found a way to repair his body as he did his points of views toward other ethnic groups, and his story is very moving. I am not a good enough writer to regale the pathos of the tale with enough gravity. Go here and read his story; it’s worth it. (http://www.today.msnbc.msn.com/id/45095048/ns/today-today_health/t/reformed-skinhead-endures-agony-remove-tattoos/)
This isn’t a story telling blog. This is about where my mind went as I read the story. Hate. Let’s talk about it. How many times today did you say that you hate something? I know I’ve said it at least a dozen. I hate drunk people. I hate sluts. I hate that I have three full length novels on my hard drive and Stephanie Myer and Dan Brown aren’t over drafting their bank accounts like I am. I hate those rain boots that the kids wear now. I hate Maroon 5. I hate that I’ve done two months worth of gigs and haven’t been paid for any of them yet. I hate my disability, and my nose, and that I have a hangnail that keeps getting caught on the inside sleeve of my sweatshirt. But what is all of this? Is this hate in the same way that beating a gay or a black (or a white; let’s not forget those white hating groups too) into Campbell’s tomato soup on the side of the road is hate? Beating and rallying and carrying signs with hurtful words solely because the other person is different. I’m thinking it’s not. When we see real hate, the kind of hate that moves us to be violent or hurtful for the sake of hurting, how do we feel about that? Does it make you feel as disgusting as it makes me feel? I hope so.
My cover band is two fat guys, a good looking guy, a jewish girl, a black guy, and a cripple. We’re a ‘walks into a bar’ joke waiting to happen. On the mic, when Dan says, “No, Andy, don’t get up,” is that hate toward cripples? When I quote the New Testament and say, “Right Sam?” to my jewish singer, is that hate toward Jews? When my guitar player asks my black singer, Q, to grab a guitar case or a wire bag and Q says, “What do I look like, Jeffrey?” is that hate? No, I don’t think so. I think these things are funny. Real hate. Getting so much ink on your face in the shapes of hate words and hate symbols that I can’t tell what you actually look like. That’s real hate.
My saying that isn’t a justification of my ‘racist’ jokes that I think are funny. My bandmates are my friends and we have a relationship that lends to that kind of ball breaking. Can’t have thin skin in this band, I’ll tell you. It’s an acknowledging of differences. But it’s not hate. I know a bit about anger, and I think that anger can breed hate. Hate can be the hulked out version of anger, and having worked with my anger for several years in therapy, I know what it looks like. I also know what it is like to compartmentalize the anger, to deal with and dissipate it in a healthy way. I applaud those with the bravery to change.
Bryon Widner, and his wife Julie, changed and from a lifestyle such as the one in which they participated, that takes bravery in spades. Does it absolve the couple of everything they’ve done in the past? I don’t think so, but it does work toward that eventual absolution. It works toward forgiveness. It works toward becoming a better person. Erasing the hate modifications is a big step toward that becoming better.
What do we talk about here? What have we worked on for the past three plus years of blogs? We’ve worked on finding our own beauty, and we’ve celebrated modification in helping us discover that beauty. However, we are reminded that there are those using our beautiful practices and culture to express things not beautiful. Hate is not beautiful. Hate is an infection, it is a virus that mutates again and again to survive in whatever current environment in which it lives. It changes and adapts and will always exist because viruses are the perfect organisms of this planet. Hate is a virus. The antivirus is beauty. And that is an environment in which the virus cannot survive. Hate will always exist, and I’m not one of those ‘love everyone and the world’s problems are solved’ idiots. I am, however, one of those people who thinks that you are entitled to whatever mindset you choose to have whether I agree with the position or not. If you want to hate, go right ahead; I simply believe that there is more beauty than hate, and the virus that infects you will eventually be asphyxiated by the beauty around it and travel somewhere else. Once the virus leaves, as it did with Bryon Widner and his wife Julie, we are left with a reformation of self, and though that reformation can’t undo the hurt we’ve done in the past, we slowly become less infected and more beautiful. We ought to celebrate Bryon and Julie’s metamorphosis.
I didn’t use any foul words in this blog, but I’m about to. Hate is ugly. It’s ruinous. It’s condemning of those who look like the haters but don’t themselves hate. It is unbeautiful. But if the beautiful moth that is to come needs the pain of the cocoon to realize itself, then come the cocoon, and let us help that moth be born. Let us also continue to use our modifications as an outwardly positive expression of our comfort, our beauty, and our accepting humanity. Let’s be beautiful and leave the hate for those who will someday look onto it and think, ‘why did I ever do that.’ Stay beautiful, kids.

source:
http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/45095048/ns/today-today_health/t/reformed-skinhead-endures-agony-remove-tattoos/

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My Barbie Idea Is Better

2011-10-27T17:07:00.000-04:00

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My Barbie Idea Is Better
10.27.11
Here’s a gig story. You kids who know me well will appreciate this. We’re at a casino gig (you guys know how much I love those), and at the five minute warning before the next set was to begin, I’m sitting on my stool tuning my bass and filling my mouth with Double Bubble bubble gum. Can’t play without it, and in a three set night, I chew about forty pieces on stage. The stage was one of those behind the bar stages, and from within the bar, I hear one of my singers and friends Marquis (whom I call Q) call my name. I put my bass down and wind my way back stage to where he is standing, surrounded by attractive girls (as usual). He asks me, after gathering the attention of one of the drunk slut types, “Yo, what about these shoes?” The girl points her foot toward me. I look at the shoe, touch the shoe, look at the girl, look at Q giggling in anticipation and say, “These are fucking horrendous. What’s with the zipper? That’s awful. Five minutes, guys.” And then I walk away to a chorus of Q laughing. The girl and her companions didn’t stay for the next set. Oops.
So, I feel as if I’ve written this story before, and if I were a good journalist or writer or whatever the hell I claim to be, I’d go and look; but this is blog number 321. I’m not rereading all those blogs. But I’ve gotten some emails from you kids about this particular story, so we’re going to talk about it. Feel free to send me story ideas, by the way, and I’ll write for you. (ihatebasile@gmail.com) Put ‘blog idea’ in the subject line.
A person named Simone Lengo designed a Barbie. Ms. Lengo is an artist (who isn’t) and designer of a line of clothing called Tokidoki, which is inspired by Japanese art and style. And she designed a Barbie with these clothes. How… uninteresting. What is interesting is that the Barbie that Ms. Lengo slapped together is an alt culture, mod culture kind of thing. Pink hair, skull and crossbones clothes, leopard tights, and of course tattoos. The doll was intended for collectors with its limited production run and $50 price tag. Is that a lot for a Barbie? I’ll go check. I just checked. They’re somewhere between $20 and $40. Useless information.
Anyway, as to be expected, there are parent groups who think a Barbie with modifications is an outrage. One even came out to Mattel, maker of the Barbie, in saying that the doll is “sending out an inappropriate message.” Another great mother quote I found was, “Whatever will they bring out next? Drug-addict Barbie? Alcoholic Barbie?”
Let’s get into it. There are a couple of things here. First, there’s the idea that someone is cashing checks on our culture by knowingly utilizing a style that stirs the shit pot and garnering the attention that is to be expected. If Mattel didn’t think that a modded Barbie would get press then they are an idiotic company. That doesn’t so much grate me. There are all kinds of assholes cashing checks on the back of our beautiful culture. We should get over that because it’s not going away; isn’t that right, unmodded guy in an Ed Hardy sweatshirt?
Another idea is that the culture, through unmodded glasses, has a tendency to be tethered to elements of other cultures that in no way reflect the points of view of the modded culture at all. What do I mean by that. This modified Barbie has leopard skin tights. The knee-jerk response to clothing like that speaks to an attitude and a culture in which the modified community doesn’t necessarily participate. The skull and crossbones shirt. There’s an often clear unmodified view of those of us entrenched in the culture that we are preferential to the macabre. The skulls and darkness and evil boo creepy horror blargle bleegle. Not always true, unfortunately. We all know those very positive, very energetic, loving life individuals with beautiful sleeves and jewelry in their skins. Right, Alana? (Alana, if you don’t come to the gig on Saturday, we’re no longer friends, by the way.)
But those two examples are picking at knits, or some other sort of detail oriented behavior. The real issue is the insinuation of the characteristics that a child may acquire from playing with a doll who has tattooed sleeves. There are plenty of ways that a Barbie doll can corrupt a young girl (or boy, to be sociologically just, I suppose). Exposing the child to modification is not corruption. Exposing the child to modification at a young age normalizes the modifications as a choice that adults make. It is akin to exposing the child at an early age to other forms of culture and society that may be outside of the child’s everyday reality. Jewish culture, black culture, homosexual culture, even old world customs of people who enjoy their heritage such as Italian, Irish, Asian and Mexican customs and behaviors. Similarly to when I was very little and I’d watch the Saturday horror movie on Fox 29 after the Phillies’ game, my mother never abruptly stopped me. She never frightened me with the ‘what are you doing’ speech or the ‘you shouldn’t be doing this’ speech. She let me watch, and then later, we talked about what I saw. She never used it as a tool to scold or scare. She used it as a tool to teach that other people do different things. We in the modified community are those other people doing different things, but the lynchpin is that we are just like everyone else. Any parent or uptight individual with a ‘protect children in a steel box from all things I don’t like’ cause is neglecting the other attributes that makes diversity a beautiful thing.
Which brings us to the cunt that thinks the natural progression of a modified Barbie is drug and alcohol abuse. You left out a natural progression to a prostitution, terrorism, Republican (we Republicans are awful people, aren’t we), homeless, teen pregnant, starving actress, artist, bad dental hygiene, irritating accent, and neglector of feeding the pet goldfish Barbie. Let me give a special message to that parent who would rather put her kids in an iron mask than to expose them to alt behaviors: Firstly, you’re a cocksucker. Secondly, I have been clean and sober for over ten years. Yes, I smoke (Monster!), yes a eat like crap (Demon!), yes my caffeine intake is unreasonable (Heathen!); but I do not take street drugs, I do not drink alcohol, I do not break the law, save that $60 parking ticket I just payed to Philadelphia. I’ve never been arrested, I’ve never knocked a girl up, I’ve never participated in a fight I started. I bring my girlfriend flowers nearly every week. I hug my mother. I pick my friends up from places at four in the morning when they are in trouble. I pray. I read the Bible. I hold doors for people who are much more able than I am. I yield to pedestrians. Sometimes, very rarely though, I smile at babies. I’m a good man. My modifications do not encourage me to smoke junk, drink booze, fuck whores, punch hobos, worship Satan, or any other miscreant behavior that your little cunt mind has invented as part of our beautiful and varied culture. Your accusations that the natural progression of a modified Barbie to become a junkie or an alcoholic is unreasonable, misinformed, judgmental, and wrong. Were my thought pattern as myopic, narrow, and socially inebriated as yours, I’d jump more quickly to the impressions that the unrealistic proportioned Barbie are feeding your little girl. Anorexia is a much more difficult characteristic to deal with than body modifications. Trust me on that one.
My Barbie idea is this: Uptight Liberal Ban Everything Under The Guise Of Protecting Children Barbie. She wears high waisted Jordash jeans, a sweater with some sort of domesticated animal on it (or dolphin), Croc shoes, costume jewelry, and a giant purse in which she can fit her water bottle, cell phone she doesn’t pay for, wallet with credit cards under her husband’s name, and lip gloss. Can’t forget the lip gloss. She comes with a picket sign that is a dry erase board so that whatever conservative policy is happening, mom can instruct her kid to write a clever slogan that her kids don’t understand, and remember the days of sit-ins and jungle war and civil rights and dropping acid. She’ll also come with a Jefferson Airplane cassette tape and a ‘Hope and Change’ bumper sticker. That way, mom can put her bumper sticker on the van next to the stick figure family window cling, and pop in the Jefferson Airplane tape and remember sitting in the mud, filthy, unshaven and high on whatever her friends Meadow and Truth just passed her and remark about how it was a different time then. All the while, the child playing with the Barbie is happily watching a Disney Pixar DVD in the back seat, as ignorant as an oyster following a piping walrus to anything different than what is just beyond the tinted van window. That’s my Barbie idea. At least it’ll keep all those damned kids from exploring their bodies in a heathy and safe way. Because when mom’s little angel is in her freshman year of college at that first frat party, I’m sure she won’t drink too much shitty keg beer in a dingy basement, and I’m sure she’ll keep her pussy in her pants because of how well you’ve taught her about people who think differently than you do. Stay beautiful, kids.

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I Hate Casinos

2011-10-20T16:16:00.000-04:00

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I Hate Casinos

10.20.11

I think I know too many people. That’s not a bad thing so much as it is an irritating thing. I walked into the bookstore today and I’m shooting points, waves and goats in ninety different directions so that I don’t leave anyone out. Then when I sit down, I have the same conversation over and over again with different people. It’s not awful, but it is kind of irritating when I’m wearing headphones and writing and someone walks up to me and starts talking. I miss the first bit of what they’re saying and then I have to ask them to repeat it and it’s just pooptown. Pooptown is my new word, by the way. I’m going to try to use it as much as possible. Of course, if you my reader (whoever the you might be) wanted to chat, I’d love to talk to you.
I am lucky at my job that I can be pretty well modified and it doesn’t cause much of a problem. We all know that being heavily modded at most jobs (descent paying ones anyway) can be a trying argument with the people that sign our paychecks. On Saturday, I was gigging with my band at a casino. On the whole, I hate casinos and most of the people that go to them. Wretched places, they are, with a melancholy kind of dead skunk kind of depraved stink in the air. People sitting at video slot machines, bombarded with noises and flashing colors and lights hoping that the right little picture appears in the right little column so that the week’s pay that was fed into the machine can multiply. It makes me feel awkward. It makes me feel strange and curious that I am barely living gig to gig, busting my ass playing crappy pop and hip-hop music for drunk woo girls, and the folks at the slot machines being fed drinks and free rooms have the surplus to play games that cost money. Maybe it’s an awkward jealousy. Maybe I hate my job. Maybe I’m just a crabby asshole. Probably all of the above.
I bring this up because, even though the casino people and I have our similarities in our scumbagginess (I made that word up), there is a look about them that makes me uncomfortable, and I think it is directly related to my modifications. At this particular casino gig, we got food coupons. A nice little bonus since gigging at casinos blows like an overworked whore with outstanding bills and an over-drafted bank account. The coupon was good at this sandwich place across the game floor from the bar in which we were playing. Between sets, I walked across to get my well deserved sandwich.
This paragraph is about the sandwich: I ordered a roast beef and swiss hoagie with lettuce, tomato and mayonnaise. The place was designed like a Chipotle or a Moe’s where you talk to the one cat who puts some shit on a roll, then the next cat who puts more shit on top of the shit on the roll, then the last cat who guilts you into buying a soda and leaving a tip. This sandwich may have been the greatest sandwich I have ever eaten. The beef was rare and plentiful, the lettuce was crisp and cold, and the roll was soft and delicious. I was nearly late returning to the stage for the next set because I was in a hoagie induced acid trip of yumminess.
Enough about the sandwich. On my walk through the joint, the stares and points were uncanny. People dressed in sweatpants, stained shirts, and drinking brown liquor drinks with the same hand as their un-ashed, generic, 100 sized cigarettes as to not take their free hands off of the Wizard of Oz themed video slot machines. Staring accusingly. Pointing unabashedly. There were even a bunch of purse clutchers. (Those are my favorite. I sometimes want to bite the air at them as if I were Dr. Lecter.) Oddly, my first inclination is never ‘it must be my modifications.’ It’s usually, ‘stupid cane,’ or ‘stupid limp,’ or ‘stupid beard,’ or ‘stupid Dan making us wear suits at gigs.’ But after overhearing (read: eavesdropping) on some slot jockeys, it was my lobes and my septum that drew the silent inquisition. I even had a more brazen cat who clearly had already drunk his weight in happy hour booze tell me, “You ain’t gonna be no lawyer with that face, right?”
I don’t usually tell these stories because they serve very little purpose. We in the modded community will be confronted with whispers and stares and points and even some cutely colloquial questions. We know this, and we knew this going in so to bitch about it is absurd. But this casino thing stroked me a certain way. (No, not that way, you childish children.) And I know exactly what it is. That stroked me. At the casino. With stroking. Here’s the word stroke again.
I am judgmental. Somewhere in the cockles of my whatever (stop being childish), I think I am better than these gambling, drinking, social degenerates. And that’s not fair. Yes, at the core, their stares and points and whispers are irritating and probably wrong. But at my core, there is a judge who is pounding a gavel and screaming ‘guilty’ on all of these slot sitters. Each side is wrong. The difference is that I recognize the rudeness of my internal accusations, whereas I’m not entirely sure that these gambling folks do of their own. That in itself is another judgement, but I think it’s a fair inference.
Nearly everyone I know who still has a job works hard, makes his money, pays his bills, enjoys what is left over. I try not to associate with people who don’t put forth (or ‘poot forth’ for you Zappa fans) one hundred and thirty percent all the time. I know I do. Come to a gig some night, and while on stage, you’ll think that I love what I do. And I’ll play all my parts perfectly, because that’s my job and there is no job worth doing less than perfectly every time. When I look on excessive gamblers or drinkers or drug abusers, I don’t see one hundred and thirty percent. I see excuses and entitlement and blame. That’s a judgement, and that is wrong of me. Still, spend some time in the places where I make my money, and your opinion may gravitate toward the planet of mine.
I preach (well, I wouldn’t say preach so much as write incessantly) that we’re all beautiful creatures. And we are. Inherently, we are born beautiful, and when we are put in the pine box, we will be beautiful. It’s the in between that mars our beauty, and it chiefly comes in our behavior and our treatment of others. I don’t care that you drink sometimes. I care that the drink as your god corrodes your beauty. I don’t care that you gamble sometimes. I care that the gambling as your god corrodes your beauty. It eats away at it, destroys it slowly until there comes a time when the mirror reflects something completely differently than you remember to, and suddenly you long for the image that was there before the drinking, the gambling, the other things like cheating and drugs and anger and gluttony and impatience. I suppose that I judge because I have a hope and a belief that these people, all people around me, are better than that; whatever the ‘that’ may be, and I grow sad at the notion. Who am I to assess what the ‘that’ is? No one. I’m no better than anyone walking on the face of this decrepit and stifled planet. But perhaps my perception is, or at least it tends to be. I ought to strive to allow that perception to be purer than it has been, and that’s the point. Each of us has the capacity to be clear and beautiful watchers of everything around us. Our own dyes can sometimes swirl in that water of perception, and then when we have a green glass of perception, we quietly judge all of the strangers’ perceptions when they are not green. In fact, each of our perceptions ought to be clear and pure. It’s a lot to ask, and probably ought only be asked of those with the willingness to do it. Which is not the unconsciously drunk guy itemizing a bill to the bartender demanding that he didn’t drink this or that, or the five hundred dollar down slot machine enthusiast convinced that the next pull is the lucky one. What frustrates me is that asking for clear perception of a stranger ought to include these people too, and that is where my perception is not clear and pure. I ought to work on that; it corrodes my beauty. Stay beautiful, kids.

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The Dangers Of A ‘Fuck This, I’m Me’ Attitude

2011-10-13T15:24:00.000-04:00

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The Dangers Of A ‘Fuck This, I’m Me’ Attitude
10.8.11
Man, I love sports. I really, really, really love sports. More than anything. (Oh, not more than you, my Dixie girl!) But as the Phillies have been prematurely bounced from the playoffs, (send flowers and video games to me for condolence) my attention has shifted to the great sport of hockey. Hockey is fantastic, and for those of you who think it’s the red-headed step child of the major sports, you’re sorely missing out. We’ll get together and watch a game and I’ll explain all the rules to you. In recent years, my love of hockey has gotten more fun as Dave, Marjorie and I all get on AOLIM and watch the Philadelphia/Montreal games together. It’s a great thing. You all should try it.
Speaking of sports (call me Captain Segue), I read an interesting article on the Fox News iPhone app. OK, OK, you people that think Fox News is the devil. Leave me alone, and I’ll leave your CNN (Communist Cable News) alone. Deal?
Soccer. Football. I dig on soccer. I watch it infrequently, but when I do, I like to watch it on the spanish language channel because the broadcasters are awesome. I think the enormity of the importance of soccer to the rest of the world is fascinating. I mean, we have a six month mob scene in this country during American football season, but it is in no way to the insane degree that international soccer is. It’s quite the phenomenon. And no, I won’t share who my team is because I don’t want any of my international readers to bomb my house if it’s their team’s rival.
A Columbian soccer player (that’s a player from Columbia) was held by Saudi Arabian police earlier this week for brandishing a Jesus tattoo while walking through a mall with his wife. Wearing a sleeveless shirt, his many tattoos were visible to the other shoppers, and the Jesus mod got some concerned attention. He was picked up by the Saudi moral police (which I don’t really know what they are) and held as they explained to the soccer player, Juan Pablo, that Shariah law dictates that tattoos must be covered. Juan Pablo apologized and they let him go after a PR guy from his team talked to the Saudi moral police.
This is a non-story to me. He got caught in a flash of ignorance in a very different society, held for a little bit, and let go after an apology. So why am I bringing it up? For a couple of reasons. And I’m going to talk about them. Right now. Here we go. Now. Right here. Yup.
First, foreign countries. I’ve never left the country. Well, I’ve been to Canada and that’s not that much of a stretch culture wise. (That’s not a dig, I swear, Marjorie) I’m talking about countries whose ways of life are drastically different to those you’re accustomed to. I’m talking about growing up in Jersey all your life, being entrenched in that culture and society, and then heading over to Tokyo and acting like the Situation and wondering why the locals are staring at you. What’s interesting about global society is that it is very much a thing that allows for the cultures and customs of its constituents to thrive as they were intended. We can all get a boner of this world society thing, but the people in Arab countries will still have their rules, Asian countries, European, and American. And that’s a good thing. Identity never hurt anyone, did it. And if you disagree, you probably ought to take those piercings out and peal those tattoos off. That each peoples of the world have different senses of sociological norms and rules makes humanity a beautiful thing, whether you agree with the rules or not.
Then there is your responsibility. Yes, you have a responsibility. I know that our generation and responsibility is like Superman and Kryptonite (or Venom and fire for you Marvel fans), but let’s talk about it for a sec anyway. When we travel or interact with people who culturally are very different from us, we have to understand the context in which we are participating. Especially when it comes to modification. Wha?! Yeah!
I know very few people who are world travelers. Yes, Dan; I know you’ve been to Italy and Ireland and you’re great and worldly. Please stop starting sentences with, “When I was in Ireland…” I bet even fewer of you plan to jaunt over to Saudi Arabia or Egypt or Africa or Thailand for a weekend of fun. So this may seem to not apply to you, but even in the context of our great and free country of the United States of America, there are vast cultural divides that we ought to consider in terms of our modifications.
I am very proud of my modifications and those who have done them. I like to show them when asked (not my nipple piercings; well, just ask nicely), and I like to talk about them. My reasons for modifying, my preferences of jewelry and tattoo art styles. But when we are dealing with people who are outside of our own accepted cultural aesthetic, we ought to be sensitive to their comfort and needs, especially when on their turf. If I’m a fan of Yakuza styled art, I should be wise to that on my trip to Japan. If I have a Christian tattoo, I ought to be wise to that when visiting a Muslim country.
It isn’t limited to travel exclusively, though my poor writing presents it that way. Everyday we are presented with at least a few people who don’t really get what we do. And I don’t punish them for that because what we do is still a thing easily misunderstood. Every day at the bookstore, I am a party to stares and questions. A lot of the questions are of the rude variety, but I have to understand that my aesthetic is one that is still swimming in the unconventional end of the pool. So when you’re heading to that traditional Greek wedding for an acquaintance co-worker, you may want to relinquish some of the stubborn gene and cover that tattoo on your arm of a zombie eating a nun’s face. (And if you have that tattoo, send me a photo please.)
This isn’t to say that we oughtn’t be ourselves and embrace who we are. I have no doubt in my mind that we each embrace who we are and accept freely who others are. But the danger lies in the idea that the other person, the stranger, the person who does not reside in the more freely accepting society aesthetic as we do, may read your mods completely differently. There is a time and a place. There is context, and so often in our society we have a ‘fuck it, I am who I am’ attitude. And though, on the whole, I subscribe to that philosophy, I also subscribe to a common sense and respect that dictates my responsibility to honor the customs and beliefs of others. At the end of the day the blind and patent ‘I don’t care what you think’ attitude can get you locked up in a Saudi prison, and I’m sure that is pretty high up on my ‘Places Not To Go’ list.
I would never ask anyone to mortgage his comfort and beauty for someone else, but in certain context, it is import to hold the door for others in order to exemplify to that other person that we in the modification community are tolerant, accepting, beautiful, and open to all flavors of people and beliefs; and we ought to do this as an invitation for that other person to do the same toward our culture. That’s how social tolerance happens. That’s how social change becomes a real and valuable thing. Marches and picket signs and sticking to your guns until someone locks you up and flogs you as an example breeds more hate than it does tolerance. The tolerance comes from reasonable compromise, and in our culture, that compromise will likely be birthed by common sense and the type of respect toward other cultures and aesthetics as we would like to see to ours. Stay beautiful, kids.

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Withdraw, Wal-Mart Ottomans, And Long Fingernails

2011-10-05T15:53:00.000-04:00

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Withdrawal, Wal-Mart Ottomans, And Long Fingernails

10.5.11

I have to cut my fingernails. That information is of no consequence to anyone, but I needed a place to start today. My brain is a bit scattered, and this blog will probably explore why and also possibly make no sense. Remember when I wrote angry stories about the mod community? I need to get back to that. But today is a scattered brain day, so we’ll probably just stick to the scattered brain thing. I’ll make it mod related. Or at least I’ll try. What a waste this opening paragraph is.

Let’s talk about who we are and who we aren’t. Let’s talk about what makes us the us that we think we are, and what makes us the us that we think other people think we are. Holy pronouns. Let’s talk about stress and jewelry and tattoos and makeup and drugs and motivations and disappointments. Sounds exciting, doesn’t it. What are we, and what makes that the we that we are. That’s what we’re talking about.

Here’s where all this comes from. I’m crazy. You cats and kittens know that. I have a longer list of diagnosis than OCD kids have of routines that need to be done before they can leave the house. I would like to believe that we all have a touch of the lunacy, but I know that isn’t entirely true. Sure, everyone has quirks, but there is this amorphous and imaginary line that can be crossed where one goes from quirky to crazy. Some of us cross that line more willingly than others. Or not so much willingly as freely. I have gone, in my thirty-one years, from quirkiness to insanity. Which is fine; we deal with it, work with it, go with it. The problems come when working with it becomes a difficult thing to do. Then you get pills.

Lots and lots of pills. Pills of all shapes and sizes. Capsules and tablets and liquids and suppositories for some of you adventurous types. My scattered brain thing is a result of the pill thing. Not suppositories. I don’t do those. Pills. Capsules of sanity encased by dead animal bone all designed to make me behave as society would better receive me. Which is fine. Some people need a bit of lab-created sanity and happiness. The problems come with the ensuing addiction tethered to the pill taking.

Due to a fuck up at the pharmacist and the shrink’s office, I was without my Effexor for five days. Effexor is an antidepressant. It is some hardcore shit too. For those who know about Effexor, you know that missing one dose can quickly and vividly start the withdrawal symptoms. That’s what happened to me this week without my drugs. If you’ve ever seen the movie “Ray,” there’s the bit where he’s detoxing from the junk he was taking. Shaking and sweating and hallucinating and hearing things and just a mess. That’s kind of what it is like. I don’t remember a lot from this week, but I do remember the coming down, and it’s not fun.

How this relates to anything is this. I’m addicted to a thing that is designed to help me. I think we all have those things, but the irony of addiction to a helpful thing is very true. Some of us are addicts of working out, of vitamins, of the History channel. Good things that are designed to help or edify become a demonic thing in their absence. Not that I’m comparing Effexor withdrawal to missing the awful “Ancient Aliens” conspiracy propaganda on History channel, but you get the idea. Some of us even use modification like this. How dangerous is this, if at all?

I tend to qualify and give free passes. Strange thing for me to do, since my sense of order and right and wrong tends to be very black and white. But I look onto a cat like The Enigma, and then I compare him to a cat like… well, that cat guy. I don’t know his name, but you’ve all seen him. He has sharpened teeth, silicone implants to provide a hare lip, whisker labrets, long fingernails, and cat oriented tattoos. In my unfair qualification of each, The Enigma gets a pass. He’s a performer, an intelligent man who has modified heavily. I don’t know him personally, but I’d like to. The cat guy who thinks he’s a cat strives to be a cat, and uses modification to more closely arrive at that goal. The qualification occurs in their mindsets. The cat guy may have a touch of the loony tunes, and that is not a judgement on his modification behavior so much as it is a commentary on his perception of what he is attempting to achieve. You kids know that I support any form of modification as it helps to realize the modified person’s comfort and serves his beauty. Therefore, I support the cat guy’s transformation from that point of view. However, what makes it seem like he’s had a bit too many of Mr. Graham’s crackers is his sense of self beyond the modifications. Dude thinks he’s a cat. The Enigma doesn’t think he’s a… umm… Puzzle? Better, the Lizardman doesn’t think he’s a lizard in the same full on way that the cat guy thinks he’s a (cheap joke alert) pussy. Cat. Perhaps, keeping with the addiction idea, the cat guy is addicted to the sense of transformation, that he must continue to modify his body and his behavior to feed this addiction to aspiration to become a feline man thing.

Part of the question is, as well, is the needlessly heady idea of the guy at the party alone. Everyone outside of the party knows that there is no party, but the guy inside the party dances with his paper cone hat and noise blowy thing all alone having a blast. Could everyone else be wrong? Is the majority idea the one that dictates real, or is it the idea that what is real is real regardless of how real the real is. Really. Here’s the word real again. Maybe he really is a cat and we all don’t know it, is what I’m saying. Maybe the addiction (here’s where it relates) is the real thing and the withdrawal is the imaginary. Maybe I’m not hearing women’s voices while coming off of Effexor. Or maybe there’s a woman standing in my blind spot all the time and she just decided to say something today after thirty-one years.

I’m muddying up the point, I know, but my right side is still kind of numb from not having my pills so there’s that. If I have a stroke, it’s been nice writing for you. Sense of self in terms of the positive things to which we are addicted which are designed to help us. That’s what I was talking about. Once we realize our addiction is a real thing, like when you start scratching and acting irritable from not having that pill or doing that thing that you think you need to do in order to have a good and productive day, then we see that we are a thing separate to the symptoms. We are not the addiction. We are not the shakes or the twitches. We are not the depression. We aren’t even the new thing we’ve created through modification. We are the thing that participates in these behaviors as a part of our selves. These things are the regalia, the rosetta, the extra flourish that makes what they are on a different thing. And we are different, aren’t we. At the end of the day, the ‘we’ who are addicted to the anything, the pills or the mods or the exercise or the whatever, are the ‘we’ first and the addicted we second. Addiction is an odd word with negative connotation, but to say that I’m not addicted to antidepressants is incorrect. And one of the clear symptoms of that addiction is this nonsense rant I put together for you kids today.

We should always serve the we within our we. And before we have a chance to make a wee wee joke, I’ll move on. The we beneath the person we think we are is beautiful and peaceful. He is silence and calm, interesting and intelligent, learned and eager to teach. We forget that he is there sometimes. Like the times you go to Wal-Mart to get an ottoman and just as you’re ready to pick it up, some twenty-something scene kid and his future abortion owner slut girlfriend swoop in and take it from you so you go to three other Wal-Marts in order to find the same ottoman but it’s actually a special item so none of them have it and you rage and hate over the ottoman that almost was. Or some such scenario. We forget the peaceful and beautiful person beneath that Wal-Mart Ottoman rage. But he’s there, and he comes back to hang out after you stop developing death scenarios for the ottoman thieves. I’m going to stop writing now because the right side of my face feels funny. I’ll write something more cohesive next week; I promise. Stay beautiful, kids.

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Stupidphobic

2011-09-28T17:13:00.000-04:00

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Stupidphobic

9.28.11

I think I have a cold. That oughtn’t be interesting news at all except I never get sick. Ever. Well, rarely. I suppose it is the consolation prize from God for… You know, everything else. So now I have a head that feels as if it is expanding, a glob of something that can’t decide whether to go down my throat or not, and a drippy right nostril. Only the right one. So if I’m cranky and inarticulate today, that’s why.
We’re going to talk about words today. Sound exciting? Well, we’ll try to make it as exciting as we can. First, let me express my love for the Philadelphia Flyers hockey team. I am a hockey fan, and you ought to be too. It’s a fantastic sport. And when you do become a fan, wrap your fandom around a quality team, like Philly. Or Montreal, right Marjorie? Just do me a favor; if you’re a Boston, New Jersey, or NY Rangers fan, let’s just agree to not talk hockey. But I am a Flyers’ fan. A ton of history with that team makes them fascinating, considering they are an expansion team and not an original six. The Flyers’ fans are just like any Philadelphia fan. Insanely passionate about wins and loses, respect, hard work. Eagles’ fans get the press, but I think Flyers’ fans take the rowdy to the utmost.
Why am I talking about the Flyers? Because something pissed me off and I’m going to talk about it now. No, it has nothing to do with modification, but go with me anyway. First, some context.
If you’re a hockey fan, then you know about a cat named Sean Avery. If you’re a Flyers’ fan, you know about a cunt named Sean Avery. He’s an enforcer, a cat whose skill is on the mid to shallow end of the talent pool. His job is to stir the pot, to go after guys, to protect his skill guys. It’s a role in hockey that is a bit unique from other sports. You hit our skill guy, we send our enforcer to crush your skill guy. It keeps the peace, and lets the players police themselves. It’s a system I can get after. In the dead ball era of baseball, teams would have pitchers who would come in to enforce, to drill a guy in the head with a pitch and get thrown out of the game. You don’t see a lot of that any more. Hockey, however, still has these self policing, on ice enforcers. Every team has them, and they are a useful commodity. Sean Avery is one of those guys who you know will come blind side you and take the ten minute game misconduct. It puts your head on a swivel, and keeps your tension high. That’s when you make mistakes. Psychological advantages.
Now to the story. A young cat on the Flyers whose name doesn’t matter took a run at a Rangers’ player. Boarded the shit out of him, got a five minute major penalty, a scrum ensued with Sean Avery in the middle of it. Keeping in mind that this was a televised preseason game, during the broadcast and clearly through the television, viewers could hear during the scrum Sean Avery threatening to go after and “kill” one of our skill players. Fine. No big. That’s hockey. The scrum settles, the game continues. Later in the period, a young right winger for Philadelphia named Wayne Simmonds gets into a tough guy shouting match with Sean Avery, most likely precipitated by Avery’s threat earlier in the period. With the referee restraining Simmonds (and Avery safely on his bench), Simmonds was accused of using what was later described as a “homophobic slur.” I assume it was ‘fag’ or ‘faggot’ or something of that nature. He definitely used the word ‘pussy’ though. That was clear. And awesome. Order is restored, the game continued, no more incidents manifested during the remaining two periods.
In the locker room, Simmonds was asked about the slur, which he denies saying. His response was a ‘heat of the moment’ type of thing. Hours later, who’s on the phone and in the papers making a statement? GLAAD.
This is where I kind of got pissed. GLAAD is demanding an apology from Simmonds for the alleged comment, as well as a statement of apology from the Philadelphia Flyers’ organization, calling Simmonds behavior “homophobic.” This is what we’re going to talk about today. Took me long enough to get there.
GLAAD (the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) is one of those organizations that reads all the news papers, watches every second of TV and reads every billboard bordering rt. 76 and I-95 to make sure that everyone is playing nice and fair with gays and lesbians. (www.glaad.org) They even have their own media awards to give out to those who are reflecting a positive view of the community. On the whole, their existence is a good thing, despite my disdain for interest groups. I don’t have to qualify to you cats and kittens that I have a lot of gay and lesbian friends who, realizing it or not, see the benefits of the work of GLAAD every day.
Just like any interest group, GLAAD is a fine thing until it does something stupid, and getting involved in the Avery/Simmonds word battle is something stupid. Why? Because there was nothing “homophobic” about the alleged slur that Simmonds tossed Avery’s way. Well, A. Robert, if he called him a fag, how is that not homophobic? I’ll tell you.
Assuming that is what Simmonds said, there is nothing homophobic about it. It’s an ill chosen word because of the watch dogs in our society. It is a word with concretely negative connotation. But it is not a commentary on the homosexual community, nor is it a degrading of the behavior of homosexuals. It’s a word that was intended to be hurtful and to incite incident. The sexual partner choices of those across the nation and world don’t enter into it at all. Homophobic is a more dangerous word than what was allegedly said. Homophobic is not two athletes trying to escalate an argument into a fistfight in order to gain an advantage in a contest. Homophobic is not patronizing gay owned businesses because they are gay owned. Homophobic is having ignorant opinions and assumptions about the gay community. Homophobic is hatred and ignorance toward the gay community. This wasn’t that. This was a hockey player saying something that another hockey player wouldn’t like.
Before you get on my ass about it, I’m not saying that people should run around saying fag. But a larger part of me thinks that a person ought to run around saying anything he wants. We are afforded that opportunity, and there are no laws against bad judgement. Saying fag to a gay person is hate. Saying fag to someone as hurtful speech is not hate. I would like to believe that GLAAD is more in the business of dispelling hate and cultural and sociological myth than it is in the business of policing what is said on the field of play in sport. Does saying fag perpetuate a social consciousness of negative connotation toward the gay community? It can, yes. But it is also a word that has manifested is secondary definition as an inflammatory remark toward someone without consideration for sexual orientation. Besides which, though the fag word is a pretty hardcore example, there are so many interest groups comprised of people who co-opt words in order to empower them with a positive interpretation of that group. These hateful people use the word nigger, so we’ll use it toward ourselves to prove that the word has little power. How is that a design to remove the word from the social lexicon? We’re here, we’re queer. How do you get a pass on the innocuous use of the queer word, but those who are not a part of the community are banned from using it? I have many queer friends. Is that hurtful or descriptive? But a gay person using that word to describe his friends is OK? that doesn’t sound like equality to me; it sounds like entitlement and special rules, which is in no way equality.
We in our community do it too, don’t we. We in whatever community do it. You’re a freak. But if an unmodified, 75 year old woman in line at the bookstore calls you a freak with hurtful connotation and context, that changes things. Context and connotation. Two very important things. Simmonds wasn’t saying hurtful things to provide hateful commentary on a community. He was trying to get an asshole to punch him so he can have a psychological advantage in a sporting event. Very, very different. Besides, I think what happens on the field of play in sports ought to stay there. Are you honestly going to look me in the modded mug and tell me that after a sack the big ol’ pile of football players on top of one another is a pleasant and friendly mass of humanity? Doubtful. Winning isn’t about being friendly or PC. It’s about advantage, and some times that advantage comes in calling some one a no-no word.
As a quick asterisk, Wayne Simmonds, a black hockey player by the way (did I forget to mention that?) was taking a penalty shot three days earlier in London, Ontario when a fan threw a banana on the ice. Do we need to even contrast the differences between these two events here? Do we even need to go into which is born from hate and which is born from competitive passion? I didn’t think so.
I don’t endorse using words to hurt people in the context of that other person’s race or sexual orientation. If someone hates gays and calls him a fag, that’s probably out of bounds. But what’s important is the context. The word is never going to disappear, and it would stand to reason to me that GLAAD has much more effective work to do down other avenues than to demand apologies from hockey players. Still, I’m a little sick and cranky so this rant probably made no sense. Or I’m some kind of -ist. Stay beautiful, kids.

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What A Vampire Ought To Look Like; No Sparkles

2011-09-21T18:56:00.000-04:00

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What A Vampire Ought To Look Like; No Sparkles

9.21.11

So I’ve gotten into this habit of sitting at the mall food court alone in the corner as far away from any living person as I can, eating Chinese food with chopsticks and reading horror literature on my Nook. I’m thinking that this behavior is one that I ought to talk to my therapist about. I’ve read some quality books, though. I’m scratching on the surface of “Majica” by Clive Barker, I finished “John Dies At The End” by David Wong, and I just broke into “Red Dragon” by Thomas Harris. Anyone with some good horror literature suggestions, please pass them along. This Nook thing is the greatest invention ever. Feel free to pay me, Nook.

So we all know the Vampire Woman, right? Maria Hose Cristerna? No? Well, visitors to the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! museums around the country will. Maria “The Vampire Woman” Hose Cristerna is being immortalized in wax and displayed (the wax sculpture, not her) in the museums for all to see and gawk. Maria, a tattoo artist in Mexico, has the vast majority of her skin tattooed, dental fanged teeth implants, and titanium protrusions in her scalp. Of course she has the more pedestrian piercings as well including very large gauge lobes, septum, labrets, and to complete the look, pale blue eyes and makeup the likes of which only the most vampirey vampires would vampire. Wear. I mean would wear. She is the woman version of the great celebrity mod artists such as Erik “The Lizardman” Sprauge and Paul “The Enigma” Lawrence. Not to belittle the role of women in body art, of course, but it seems a bit less frequent. And I’m not talking about that loon “Bombshell” McGee. I mean full on artistic performers. Katzen the Tiger Lady, the Enigma’s wife, is the only other one I can think of off the top of my bald and slightly unattractive head.

Back to the point. Maria “The Vampire Woman” Hose Cristerna will achieve that lost and impossible goal for all aspiring vampires: immortality. In wax, anyway. Which, I suppose can melt. So it doesn’t, you know. Last forever. Ask Vincent Price about immortality through wax. But I’ll save my praise and congratulations for later on in the blog. First, I ought to harsh the buzz by talking about some of the comments that were added to the article I read. Yeah, I know; I seem to do this a lot, but I never claimed to be motivated.

One comment on the article about the Mexican tattoo artist had a wit to it that I appreciated. Louise from London commented, “Now that's what you need to fight the Mexican drug cartels. Scary Mexican vampire women.” I had to laugh at that one. Imagine a drug lord trying to smuggle heroine across the border and Maria shows up and says something very innocuous like, ‘Hey guys.’ That one was a good comment. Let’s not get too, too serious. But, let me get too, too serious for a second. Within the article, Maria, in talking about more implants in her arms and having her floating ribs removed, was quoted as saying, “It’s a woman’s vanity to want to look better.” A fine and honest quote. A commenter, Karen whose location is listed as Lost In Space, replied, “This is better??” Let’s talk about this. Also, the Lost In Space location is dumb.

I am not going to mention how the article mentioned that Maria’s mods are a reaction to years of marital abuse. I’m also not going to mention the beautification idea. Well, I will later because that’s what I do, but what I will mention right now is the subjective judgement which is often patented as objective fact of what femininity is. Better is an interesting word. What is better? And more accurately, what is better in terms of one’s aesthetic? Is it better for you to be thinner? Have more hair? Be tanner or taller or have makeup done just so? Is it better to be fatter or bald or short or pale? Is it better to not shave your armpits, wear a one piece bathing suit, paint your fingernails, wear those plastic pants that are probably a size too small? What is better?

Maria introduces the idea as a part of a woman’s vanity. Are women vain? Well, vanity is kind of a four lettered word. We tend to think that vanity is a negative quality, and it does indeed have the propensity to be just that. But it is also a thing that makes us want to look a certain way, act in a certain way, behave in a way that we think is fitting to what we’d like to accomplish. What is the goal, then? Is the goal to be the prettiest dame walking down the road? Is the goal to belittle the people who do not meet your aesthetic requirements? Is it to be comfortable in the skin you live in? I don’t see how being vain to one’s own comfort is that bad of a thing. It is a difference between getting a nose job to look like [popular celebrity with nice nose] and getting the nose job because it will bolster your comfort, happiness, and confidence. I would like to believe that Maria “The Vampire Woman” Hose Cristerna lives more in the ladder. How is anyone outside of Maria’s own psyche (which is everyone) to define for her what her own individual femininity is?

There is an old world idea of what femininity is. And though femininity is an irritating word to type, I’m going to weather that irritation for you kids. You’re welcome. Femininity is such an awkwardly amorphous idea. It has changed very much over time. There was an apron, dinner on the table, mother at PTA meeting femininity. Then a no bra, hairy pit, filthy hair, getting out to vote femininity. Then there was a no glass ceiling, pants suit, wife works and has a house husband femininity. She pays now, but still appreciates the opening of a car door. She marries later in life now, but still appreciates the romantic proposal. The femininity of women is an odd thing. Who is to say what the correct flavor is? The commenter who questions if Maria’s modification transformation is better or worse as a process by which to achieve her womanhood must have a specific sense of femininity. Which is it? The modern woman? The 1950s woman? The Spartan woman? The cave woman? Isn’t that an important point of reference before assessing better or worse? Maybe there’s a specific type of woman in Lost In Space, where the commenter is apparently from.

Maria “The Vampire Woman” Hose Christerna has an unconventional feminine aesthetic. No one is saying she doesn’t. At least, by no one, I mean me. What she also has is a concept of her own beauty, a goal of her own comfort, a big set of balls to strive after it, and a peace that she is doing things the way she wants to do them and not within the socially accepted rules as to how she is supposed to look or behave. Some of us just won’t get cast in a perfume commercial, and there is nothing wrong with that. The commenter who questions what is better or worse for Maria and her aesthetic ought to probably recognize that.

I celebrate Maria, congratulate her on her immortalization in wax, laud her self actualization, and support her quest toward beauty and comfort as defined by her own commandments and not society’s. You kids know I’m not one of those ‘schmeh, society is always wrong, blergle blah…’ assholes. Some sociological commandments are good things. Like we should wear pants in public. That’s a good one. But in terms of beauty, we ought to take a moment to realize that our beauty is as unique as the mind that devises it. We each have a small, quiet, and fragile egg that we keep and nurture. That is our beauty, and we must do what we feel is appropriate to nurture and raise it so that when it hatches, we can look at it and see its singularly unique beauty. And even though singularly unique is kind of redundant, I think you get the point. Maria “The Vampire Woman” Hose Christerna is a beautiful woman, and I celebrate her. Now, the real point is, what do I have to do to be committed to wax? Someone get Vincent Price on the phone. Stay beautiful, kids.

source:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2039985/Mexican-vampire-mother-horns-fangs-tattoos-set-scare-grave-waxwork.html?ITO=1490

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Fatly Disabled

2011-09-14T17:28:00.000-04:00

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Fatly Disabled
9.14.11
I just ordered and received a bunch of horror movies from Amazon, and I’m super excited to get my hands dirty with some torture movies tonight. You, know. Because I have some real problems. (Mike, you still should see “Funny Games.”) I also just watched a movie called “Black Death” starring that dreamboat Sean Bean. I dug it. I’ll have to check in with my friend and brilliant blogger the Fright Dyke to see what she thought about it. You should to; her blog is much better than mine. (http://frightdyke.com/) Especially if you like horror. Or even if you don’t. It’s a good read.
So, I know I’ve been talking about my disability a lot recently, and I’m going to again today. Why? Well, it’s my blog and I can do whatever I want with it, but also for a couple of other reasons. There’s the whole ‘my legs have gotten really bad’ thing, and the ‘I’ve been crankier than a kid who opens a toy he didn’t want on Christmas’ thing too. But also because it ties into a sense of entitlement and what we deserve and don’t deserve, and I seem to write a lot about that. Also, the political climate is heating up with the GOP nominations and debates getting very interesting and the president making campaign speeches under the guise of leading his people. This will all make sense in a second.
This country, my favorite country on the globe and admittedly only one of two I’ve been to (guess the other, eh), has a plethora of laws and acts and little watchdog nuggets of legislation that are designed to protect its people or benefit those who may not get their fair sociological shake. You know, things like hate crime laws, laws that govern women’s rights, laws that tell you how many of a certain shade of person you need to hire for your business. Things like that. As a quick aside, every day I wake is one day closer to conservative libertarianism, so there may be a slant here. It seems to work, on the whole, if you’re a person to whom these laws apply. If not, then well, you’re just going to have to work harder and sit in the corner feeling guilty for shit that happened three hundred years ago.
I learned about this story on Red Eye with Greg Gutfeld last night, my second favorite show on television. Some fat dude in Nanuet, New York is suing White Castle fast food restaurants. Nanuet, as we all know, is a five square mile town whose racial make up includes .08% Pacific Islander. Apparently, it also has a White Castle. But the fat guy, Martin Kessman, is suing the White Castle in Nanuet, New York. Why would he do that? Let’s get into it like a crappy little hamburger with holes in it, dripping with gristle and onions.
Mr. Kessman is a fat man. He’s sixty-four years old and two-hundred and ninety pounds. He went to the Nanuet White Castle, ordered his disgusting fare of typically-consumed-by-the-shitfaced-and-or-stoned, and went to sit down in a molded booth in the restaurant. As another side note, I laugh a little every time a fast food joint tethers the word ‘restaurant’ to itself. Yeah, it’s a restaurant, but it’s not Butcher and Singer; it’s White Castle. So Massive Martin puts his shit on the table, and tries to slide into the booth. He doesn’t fit. He’s too fat. You know, because he weighs two-hundred and ninety pounds. According to Kessman, “I’m not humongous… I’m a big guy,” and added that he wanted to “sit down like a normal person.” White Castle tried to give him coupons for more nasty hamburgers as consolation, but the self assessed not-humongous-just-big Martin Kessman scoffed at the gesture. Nope, instead, Mr. “Killer Kawalski” Kessman (I made that one up) is suing White Castle, demanding reparations for his not fitting in the booth in the form of money, probably hamburgers, and the burger joint expanding their booths. It’s been two years going with the lawsuit, and not much has been resolved. What’s Martin “The Krusher” Kessman (I made that one up too) using as his flag for the suit? The Americans with Disabilities Act.
And now we’re at the point. The ADA exists to ensure that “physical or mental disabilities in no way diminish a person’s right to fully participate in all aspects of society…” The ADA defines a disability as, “a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities of such individual…” where the act clarifies ‘major life activities’ as, “…caring for oneself, performing manual tasks, seeing, hearing, eating, sleeping, walking, standing, lifting, bending, speaking, breathing, learning, reading, concentrating, thinking, communicating, and working.” Of course there is more to the document than just this, but for the purposes of this rant, we’ll go with those. Also, there was nothing about White Castle in the ADA.
Now, I’m not saying that fat people don’t have it hard, and some of them are fat outside of their own behavior. There’s all that glandular bullshit and metabolism nonsense and all of that genetic hoopla. That’s all well and good, but I’d be very impressed if the percentage of people in this country who are classified as fat or obese who also fall into those specific medical categories number in the double digits. The vast majority of fat people in this country are likely that way because they don’t exercise and eat White Castle on the reg, as the kids say. Is that a judgement? Yup, but let’s get back to the point. Entitlement and what we are owed versus how our behavior dictates what we deserve.
I’ve said this many, many times, but in our community, the modified community, we aren’t owed anything. We aren’t owed a job, we aren’t owed respect from the unmodified society, we aren’t owed shit. We are not a species or a race or a creed or a religion. And if you’re one of those Church of Body Modification idiots, just stop; you’re just lazy assholes trying to exploit loopholes. Those of us with stretched lobes and face tattoos ought not conjure a faux outrage at not getting a job at Victoria’s Secret on account of our modifications, and I shouldn’t have to explain why.
The disability thing is a little different. I often see people parking in the spots who in no way seem as if they require the help the spot is designed to provide. And, yeah; most of these people are fat. I got it; some of these people have bad knees and hips and blargle, blaggle, bloogle. But when I see these fatly disabled people, I can’t help but compare their ‘disability’ with my own. This guy Martin and the White Castle Booth-gate (because thanks to Nixon every scandal needs -gate at the end) wasn’t born that large. He got that large, and I would have to imagine that White Castle had something to do with it. Not in a conspiratorial way; no one held a gun to his head and made him eat shitty tiny hamburgers, therefore they have no responsibility to his obesity. But in a self respect and responsibility kind of way. Seems like an easy plan; eat like shit, smoke and drink, spill scolding hot coffee on yourself and then sue everyone so that you can absolve yourself of all responsibility. (Also, it’s probably reason number 553 why universal healthcare won’t work.) This guy Mega Martin Kessman is fat and he doesn’t fit in the booth at White Castle. How is that White Castle’s fault, and how can someone be disabled for participating in a behavior that deliberately disables himself? If that’s the case, why don’t I go into my shed right now and cut my left leg off so I can reap all of the benefits of being disabled? What prevents me from doing that is that I have a garage not a shed. And also, it’s insane. How is growing to three-hundred pounds that different? Because it takes Monster Martin sixty years?
White Castle is in the business of making money, and part of that is to accommodate the mean of its demographic. If that means that R&D designed the tables specifically to accommodate those who are most likely to spend money in the store, then sorry fat people; you’re on the outside. It’s a society of ‘it’s someone else’s fault,’ and that is a wonderful way to stay in this recession. That and re-electing the president.
The president thing was cheap, OK, but here I am disabled from birth, likely just a few months away from accepting a wheelchair, and I’ve been denied disability more than once. Then we have this fat guy who can’t fit into a chair at a hamburger joint, and he’s flashing around a document designed to give people like me an even playing field in society. How is that just? Someone gets shot and we sue the gun maker. Someone gets burned and we sue the cup maker. Someone gets punched by a cop and we sue the police department. Someone gets a paper cut and we sue the library. Can’t we just say that shitty shit happens to shit on our shit at shitty times? Or better, ‘maybe it’s my fault.’ I don’t often get insulted or offended. I don’t often get much of anything, including but not limited to, getting ahead of my bills, any measure of success, a sense of fulfillment, hope for a creative future adorned in financial and intellectual achievement. But what does salt my ass is to see people using something that sounds like an easy excuse when the only acceptable excuse is to assume responsibility for their own actions. This fat guy who didn’t have a good hamburger experience is disabled? Tell a kid with spina bifida that, or ALS, or MS, or depression, or ADD (real ADD, not a clever way to describe your lack of focus), or someone born with a missing limb or sense like eyesight or hearing. Tell those people that the same document designed to protect them from collusion and prejudice is allowing Martin Kessman to sue a hamburger joint because he’s too fat to fit in a chair. I love America, but Jesus; we’re striving toward living like Romans where everything was taken care of by their government and emperor. Their emperor. Did we get that word there? Emperor. The point is, no one eats White Castle sober. Stay beautiful, kids.

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The Actual Are

2011-09-07T19:33:00.000-04:00

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The Actual Are
9.7.11
I am very tired. I couldn’t really tell you why. I suppose we’ve been gigging a lot, and for some reason, my pills seem to be hitting me pretty hard recently. I just feel as if I were a lazy shit when I wake up at ten, head to the couch and put on whatever is on in the morning on ESPN, and then pass out on the couch until two. Of course, with my job, I’m out until five o’clock every night (or morning), but still. I feel bad for wasting the day due to a chemically induced coma. Wow; that’s all unnecessarily melancholy. Here’s a funny word: Flerblegurble! OK, so it’s not a real word, but whatever. Let’s move on.
I was getting gas recently before a gig, and I was wearing my gig uniform. Yes, we have a uniform in my band. Blue shirt, black vest, black tie. I get to wear black cut off shorts, but I think that’s because I was an asshole about it. See, I only wear shorts. I’m that guy in the winter with a hooded sweatshirt, snow in his beard, smoking a cigarette outside of some establishment that has kicked people like me out for doing something perfectly legal, and shorts. Metal kid to the end, I suppose. I like to wear plugs that Dave made me (www.mysticmetalsbodyjewelry.com) which have a handicapped symbol in them. You know, the guy in the chair facing to the right. I’m sure you’ve cursed at him a thousand times when you went to pull into a spot that was a crippled spot but you didn’t realize when you started your turn in and you just thought it was a boss spot right next to the door of the mall department store on Christmas Eve. They match the shirt. The plugs I mean. And it gets some good attention between sets where Dan and I can make jokes about my physical state and hand out business cards for the band. Marketing, kids. So I’m wearing these plugs and I’m getting gas at a Wawa. The kid pumping my gas (because I live in Jerz and it is unlawful to pump your own gas here) had pumped my gas before, and we have a ‘hey how are you’ kind of relationship. He mentioned my plugs. I gave him a Mystic Metals card (because apparently all I do is hand out cards for various businesses that I like), and then we had a brief, $40 worth of gas pumping time conversation.
As a quick side note, I was just outside smoking a cigarette and this came to mind: If you have team gear made by Victoria’s Secret, I hate you and you don’t deserve to share the joy of winning a Commissioner’s Trophy. Especially if you don’t know what the Commissioner’s Trophy is. Extra especially if you have the Phillies’ shirt that says “Designated Kisser” on it. We’re an NL team; we don’t even have a designated hitter, idiot. Victoria’s Secret is that she’s a dumb woo girl and I hate her.
So I’m talking to the gas kid. He says he likes my plugs, and asks me if I’m really handicapped. I tell him that I am and explain what spina bifida is. (www.sbaa.org) He calls me an inspiration for having such a positive attitude about it, which to strangers I mostly do. And then I say this: “You have to own what you are, man.” Then my pump clicked, I payed him my $40, parked, went inside for my Red Bull, Fiji water (fuck you, Dan for getting me on Fiji water), and two packs of USA red 100’s. Then I sat in my car like a creep and read on my Nook for forty-five minutes.
You have to own what you are. That’s what I usually say to people about the handicapped thing. About many things in life, actually, not just the handicapped thing. I am not a huge fan of keeping elephants in small rooms. And things like a handicap can be elephants. I would much rather someone ask me straight out, often in ill chosen words, than have him dance around it ever so carefully as to not offend. When you are extra careful is when you most often knock shit over.
But the statement, you have to own what you are. It makes me think, and even though I say it very often to people whom I don’t know, I never really thought about all of the layers of it. Topographically, it’s exactly what I mean. What you are is what you are and you ought to have a happy marriage with it. And that marriage, like any marriage, isn’t always going to be of the happy variety. Thing is, divorcing yourself from what you are is either not an option or a great injustice to that thing, which demands respect and ought to be respected. That’s all well and good and pretty simple to understand, but there is another layer that I kick around a bit.
What you are. That’s the the important part of the statement. What are you? A doctor? A mother? A handicap, a minority, a woman, a man, a homosexual? This is often how we identify, isn’t it. If a stranger asked you right now, “What are you?” how quickly would you respond with your job? Or say you are a parent or wife or husband? But is that what we are? What are you? I am black. What are you? I am white. What are you? I am gay, I am strong, I am a writer, an actor, an office slave, an engineer. Are we these things, or are we a thing whose qualities include these other elements? You have to own what you are, but are we, in actuality, these things; or are these things the regalia of what we actually are? And if so, what is that actual thing? How do we describe it?
Beneath the jewelry, the plugs and labrets and captive beads, beneath the ink that lives quietly and obediently between the layers of our skin, is that actual are that is left to go undescribed so very often. What is the actual are? I have had in my youth neurologists of all flavors in a very eclectic manner of venues tell me that I am not my body. Especially at Children’s Hospital. That is all well and good (which is the second time I used that phrase in this blog because what I am is apparently a bad writer), but none of them ever told me what I actually am. Telling someone what isn’t is bereft of the information that person is looking for. If I gave you directions to the bookstore and told you what streets not to turn down, you’d still not know where the bookstore is. I know you are not your tattoos and jewelry. I know you are not your jobs and your hobbies. I know you aren’t even your relationships and likes and dislikes. But that that doesn’t answer the question of what you are, does it.
You have to own what you are. I suppose that my response to all of these strangers over the years has been a bullshit answer. It sounds good, for sure, but what does it mean? It doesn’t mean anything in that context, like so many pop rock lyrics to which woo girls like to sing along. (I’m looking at you, Train. Drops of Jupiter my ass. That doesn’t mean shit, man.) So at the end of the day, if you have to own what you are, I suppose you have to know what you are first. Our brains (and I’m sure my beautiful and brilliant primatologist girlfriend can more explain this) need a something tangible to attach its questioning fingers onto. What is it? It’s that thing that does that or makes that sound or hunts me or feeds me. But abstractly, what is it? What is that thing that happens to do all of that? What is that thing that is handicapped as well as being whatever it is? What is that thing that is a spouse or a president or a cobbler or a plumber or a heterosexual or a democrat or a republican? You’re born as a thing first, and then that thing adopts the other qualities, doesn’t it? I want to know what that thing is, and then I suppose that my response to strangers about my handicap will make more sense to me. Still, the bottom line is that my plugs are awesome and Dave is an artist and you should go by plugs at www.mysticmetalsbodyjewelry.com so that his son can have a lunchbox and a backpack for the new school year. You want Vinnie to succeed, right? And if you don’t, (to steal a quote from Greg Gutfeld) you’re worse than Hitler. Stay beautiful, kids.

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Placentphagy; A Thing I Can Never Unlearn

2011-08-31T18:04:00.001-04:00

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Placentphagy; A Thing I Can Never Unlearn

8.31.11

I completely forgot that I had a gig tonight. My plan was to play Dragon Age 2, which is much better than Origins, until my eyes began to water and hurt, and then fire up the four disc Donnie Darko blu-ray I just got. But these won’t happen because I’m stupid. Instead, an acoustic gig. I think I’m going to eat a meal on the tab, though. I don’t drink, so I should probably get something out of it, right? Also, my mother flashed me on a topic that she suggested I write about. I’m not sure if I can relate it to modification, but we’ll write about it anyway because it’s pretty wild stuff. So let’s do that. Even though I’d rather be slaying dragons.

Let me preface this by saying that, to me, everything associated with childbirth is grotesque and disgusting. It’s a violent maelstrom of blood and shit and crying and yelling and father helplessness. It’s amazing to me (and yes, Chris, I actually mean amazing) that people are born healthy and safe and this is how we’ve maintained our species for however thousands of years. Well, most of you come out healthy anyway. Shit, everything about making people is pretty gory, something out of the mind of a post recording career Rob Zombie, or 70’s vintage Wes Craven and Toby Hooper. I watch a ton of horror movies, nearly in a future psychopath kind of way, but in any movie where childbirth is featured, horror or romantic comedy or western or whatever, I have to look away because it’s way too intense for me. Thankfully, the way I have my shitty life planned anyway, I’ll never have to see it firsthand. If I have to deliver a stranger’s baby in a cab after the gig tonight, I’m going to kill you all. As a side note, I don’t really watch romantic comedies.

Just when I thought that childbirth couldn’t get any worse than Saw 4, I learned about placentophagy. Thanks, mom. I’ll be crawling in bed with you from nightmares very soon, probably tonight. Now, I know you cats and kittens are the smart brand, so I’m sure you can dig deep into your knowledge of word roots and etymologies to figure that word out. For those of you kids who are lazy or stupid, placentophagy is the eating of the placenta by mammals. And I take it we all know what the placenta is, right? A placenta is an organ that develops after the dame gets knocked up. It’s like a baby butler. It provides nutrients, takes away waste, exchanges gas between the host’s blood, and the symbiote’s blood. I like phrasing it that way because I like alien movies. It will also shovel your walk and do your laundry. That part’s not true. The thing is about nine inches long, weighs about a pound, looks like a gross, undercooked steak, and connects the tumor growing into a person to the moody and swollen greenhouse by the umbilical cord. When the little future disappointment comes out (only if he chooses a career in the arts or music), the placenta plops out in a gooey, bloody mess of discarded person. One last fun fact about the placenta, it’s etymology comes from Latin meaning ‘cake.’

This is the part where the doctor or whoever is pulling your baby out into this cruel, cruel world would take this thing and toss it wherever discarded body parts go. Delaware, maybe? But no, not for some people. Some people like to take this thing home, cook it up, and chow down on it.

Now before all of you natural mother types get up my ass about how ancient peoples have done this and all of that nonsense, let me say that yes; ancient peoples would eat placentas. Ancient peoples also believed that a man with a trident ruled the seas, killed Christians with lions, enslaved Africans, and attempted genocide on Jews. Also, they nailed my Christ to a tree. So I don’t think we should be taking too many lessons from ancient peoples. And yes, I know that many mammals eat their placentas. They also give birth in the woods and if a mean ol’ wolf catches a whiff of that, you can say goodbye to Bambi’s brothers and sisters.

So why would people, human people; the kind of people who think and use tools and interact socially with one another and invent things and create art and love and hate and do all of those things that intelligent anthropoids do, eat a placenta? Well, first it contains a chemical (and I’m not going to name the chemicals because no one cares) that helps mother return to normal size. It also helps to equalize hormone balance, reducing postpartum depression, as well as contracts the smooth muscles around the mammary cells (Boobius Cellus Tittius Maximus, in Latin) making milking a bit easier. Now, despite the numerous quotes from the cats at the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists to the uselessness of placentphagy, people still do it, the Chinese even using it in traditional medicines.

OK, that’s why. Sort of. Then there’s how. Thanks to the internet and a simple search that you never thought you’d ever have possibly wanted to enter into a search engine, you can arrive at several delectable and not at all wretched ways to prepare your baby’s port-a-potty. Don’t believe me? Here’s an example:

Roast Placenta

1-3lb fresh placenta (must be no more than 3 days old)
1 onion
1 green or red pepper (green will add colour)
1 cup tomato sauce
1 sleeve saltine crackers
1 tspn bay leaves
1 tspn black pepper
1 tspn white pepper
1 clove garlic (roasted and minced)

Method

(Preheat oven to 350 degrees)

1. Chop the onion and the pepper & crush the saltines into crumbs.
2. Combine the placenta, onion, pepper, saltines, bay leaves, white and black pepper, garlic and tomato sauce.
3. Place in a loaf pan, cover then bake for one and a half hours, occasionally pouring off excess liquid.
4. Serve and enjoy!

Want another?

Placenta Lasagna

Ingredients:

1 fresh, ground, or minced placenta, prepared as above
2 tblspns olive oil
2 sliced cloves garlic
1/2 tspn oregano
1/2 diced onion
2 tblspns tomato paste, or 1 whole tomato

Method: use a recipe for lasagna and substitute this mixture for one layer of cheese. Quickly saute all the ingredients in olive oil. Serve. Enjoy!

Or one that’ll make dead Jack LaLaine proud:

Placenta Cocktail

Ingredients:

1/4 cup fresh, raw placenta
8oz V-8 juice
2 ice cubes
1/2 cup carrot

Method: blend at high speed for 10 seconds. Serve. A tasty thirst quencher!

Why am I writing about this? Well, my mom suggested it and I love my mother and do what she says. Also, it provides an interesting context to those who liberally treat their bodies. It is an interesting ownership of oneself, isn’t it? Have you ever eaten anything that has come out of your body cavity? Did you ever want to? Yeah, I know; there’s all that hippie bullshit about getting close to the new child and the new life and the earth or universe or whatever pagan cosmic nonsense people who use lemons as deodorant and honey as hair gel invent. That’s all very nice. But aren’t you and I, we in the modified community, often criticized for our behavior toward our own bodies? The stretching and scarring and implants and suspension. Don’t we explore our bodies in unique ways, getting us closer to ourselves and what we are and how we are built. True, what we do in modification has no prolific medical benefit, but (depending on which studies you read) neither does eating your body’s waste. So if these two behaviors can find that parallel, the exploration of our own bodies, then why do we do it? Why do we choose to put marks and holes in ourselves, or dine on the uterus muck that we make?

Maybe because there are still mysteries in reality. It’s hard to believe, though, that there is nothing undiscovered. It’s difficult to believe that there are landmasses untouched by people, there are animals undissected, there are portions of our own bodies that we are completely ignorant to. Pretty wild stuff. It’s interesting to think that we suspend to learn things about ourselves and our pain, and that we make a meal of our own body parts in order to do whatever it is that these placenta eaters think they’re doing. At the end of the day, though, if you’re having a placenta party, lose my number. I’m pretty open minded to things, but I’m not eating any part of a thing that’s still alive. Unless it’s a plant. Stay beautiful, kids.

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